The End of All Things: The First Instalment Read Free

Department ship as a personal taxi, I’m afraid. As I understand it the Chandler lets out a couple of staterooms for passengers. I and Vera here,” he nodded toward his assistant, “have taken them. How are they?”
    “The staterooms?” I asked. Ocampo nodded. “I’m not sure.”
    “Rafe has just been hired as of about an hour ago,” Hart said. “He hasn’t even been on the ship yet. He’s taking a shuttle over in about an hour.”
    “That’s the same shuttle you’ll be on, sir,” Vera said to Ocampo.
    “So we’ll experience it for the first time together,” the secretary said, to me.
    “I suppose that’s true,” I said. “If you would like I would be happy to escort you and your assistant to the shuttle gate, when you’re ready to depart.”
    “Thank you, I’d appreciate that,” Ocampo said. “I’ll have Vera tell you when we’re ready. Until then, gentlemen.” He nodded and wandered off with his punch, Vera following behind.
    “Very diplomatic,” Wilson said to me, once he was gone.
    “You jumped out of an exploding space station?” I said to him, changing the subject.
    “It wasn’t exploding that much when I jumped,” Wilson said.
    “And you got out in an escape pod just in time,” I said to Hart. “I’m clearly in the wrong line of space travel for excitement.”
    “Trust me,” Wilson said. “You don’t want that much excitement.”
    * * *
    The Chandler, as advertised, was not exciting.
    But it’s not supposed to be. I said before that the Chandler had blocked out a triangle run. That means that you have three destinations, all of which want something that’s made and exported on the previous planet. So, for example, Huckleberry is a colony that’s largely agrarian—a large percentage of the land mass there is in a temperate zone that’s great for human crops. We take things like wheat, corn, and gaalfruit and a few other crops and take them to Erie. Erie colonists pay a premium for Huckleberry agricultural products, because, I don’t know, I think they think they’re healthier or something. Whatever reason, they want ’em so we take them there. In return we load up on all sorts of rare earth metals, which Erie has lots of.
    We take those to Phoenix, which is the center of high-technology manufacturing for the Colonial Union. And from there, we get things like medical scanners and PDAs and everything else it’s cheaper to mass produce and ship than try to put together yourselves in a home printer, and take those to Huckleberry, whose technology manufacturing base is pretty small. Wash, rinse, repeat. As long as you’re working the triangle in the right direction, you’ll get rich.
    But it’s not exciting, for whatever definition of “exciting” you want to have. These three colonies are well established and protected; Huckleberry’s the youngest and it’s nearly a century old at this point, and Phoenix is the oldest and best defended of any of the Colonial Union planets. So you’re not exploring new worlds by trading there. You’re unlikely to run into pirates or other bad people. You’re not meeting strange new aliens, or really any aliens at all. You’re shipping food, ore, and gadgets. This isn’t the romance of space. This is you and space in a nice, comfortable rut.
    But again, I didn’t give a crap about any of that. I’d seen enough of space and had the occasional bit of excitement; when I was on the Baikal, we were pursued for four days by pirates and eventually had to ditch our cargo. They don’t chase you anymore when you do that because then you have nothing they want. Usually. Sometimes when you ditch your cargo they get pissed off and then try to send a missile into your engines to register their displeasure.
    So, yeah. As Harry Wilson suggested, excitement can be overrated.
    Anyway, right now I didn’t want exciting. What I wanted was to work. If that meant babysitting the Chandler ’s navigational system while it crunched data for a run