Chapter Two: The Path to Earth

As you would expect, the choice of where to go involved tradeoffs. Should the Embarkation head somewhere well on the way to being a fully settled planet, where we would be a comfortable but unimportant school of fish in a big sea? Or to a hostile planet yet unsettled, where we would spend a lot more to develop the world but own all the results of our hard labor, and perhaps find undiscovered riches? Or seek a distant world unknown to Bleevit, perhaps the virgin planet of popular fiction that had yet to be found in reality?—with a hospitable climate, filled with low-tech inhabitants against whom we would land as conquistadors, commandeering the fruits of their labor and the favors of their women, who would prove both adoring of their new masters and anatomically compatible with us to an amazing degree.

Yes, I know that your Solar System has produced similar fiction. I have several lurid examples in my personal Conquerors’ Library.

Being young and arrogant, but also cautious, we opted for Door Number Two and selected a destination ripe for rapid Bleeviforming—a process distinguishable from Terraforming mostly in second significant figures. But I won’t bore you with the well-planned details, because five months after we departed they became irrelevant. A gamma ray burst streamed past the Embarkation.

No, we weren’t badly damaged and forced to land in your Solar System. Only a single low-budget virty ever compressed the story that much! That one even followed the silly virgin planet scenario; it was unintentionally hilarious.

Rather, we knew what the burst signaled: A live HX close to our starship! Bleevit had been an HX have-not, with no live HX in practicable range. We were now a have, and there was absolutely no doubt about where the Embarkation should go!

As we headed full bore for the HX, the atmosphere on board changed. One reason we had settled on a Bleeviformable world was that on a settled planet, the “colonists”—the ex-POWs in our hold—would have likely had to be immediately sold into some form of slavery, and had little to do with us afterward. But as partners in Bleeviformation, they would be close to the ship for many years. At first they would work from the ship to develop suitable habitation and industry, then move on planet, still working for us to pay off their indenture. And over the long run, that was much more profitable for Elder Brother and me.

But with the appearance of the HX, our colonists changed from well-treated serfs to partners in piracy. If we succeeded in extracting HX loot, every one of us would be rich beyond the dreams of financial advisors! And every one could contribute to this success.

On our new trajectory, we all researched and trained to extract wealth from the HX and from the swarm of ships that would be surrounding it. Not as an Earth tiger hunts down a deer, but—like your own HX adventurers—as mosquitoes extracting blood from a human. We would find an unguarded approach into the HX, grab a little as quickly as we could, and fly away even as the breach was discovered, doing our best not to get slapped on our escape. We would also scavenge what we could from those in the ship swarm around the HX who were less fortunate than we were, or rather, those more fortunate but weaker and slower.

Our old distinctions by rank, among prisoners, marines, and professionals, were replaced by distinctions of function. Tenders would stay on the mother ship, hovering distant from the HX on the edge of the ship swarm. Explorers and Extractors would use smaller, faster ships to loot and scavenge, with Sergeants deciding when to fight and, more often, when to flee. Stewards and Stevedores would move people and goods to and from the HX. Observers would monitor the swarm so we didn’t become a fortunate but too weak and slow casualty ourselves.

The more we trained, the faster and better we got. My own job adjustment was as gratifying as unexpected, from commanding a prison ship to running a troop transport that felt more like a traveling hotel, using the skills my Elders had poured into me.

We were at the HX for several Earth-standard years. During most of that time we had to simply be patient. The HX would not give us loot willingly, nor would the dangerous swarm around it. If we rushed in like bank robbers or pirates, we would die. We had to wait for others to falter and take advantage with all the speed we could muster, then flee just as quickly. This was the modus operandi for most of the swarm. But the riches were worth it! Imagine Earth without tomatoes, meaning life without pizza sauce. We knew that the treasures of an HX could affect a planet’s life even more than tomatoes.

Of course I like pizza; I love it! Nearly all the books and more than a third of the articles about me mention it. More than a tenth make it their lead paragraph; it humanizes me!

When we finally left, we had put a respectable amount of loot in our hold and become hardened veterans who knew the swarm well. But our experience and toughness hadn’t stopped us from faltering for a moment, and a quarter of us perished in a quarter hour’s fight against a superior adversary. A thousand good people … pffft! We escaped without being plundered, but we all knew it was the God of Battles’s way of saying we had had our share, and it was time to move on. Ship’s Priestess didn’t even bother to cast the God’s Holy Decahedrons.

To this day, I curse that we had not left a month earlier, a day earlier! Or insisted on a casting the week before … but that’s the risk one takes when one deals with an HX.