Fair Exchange

by MattMacBride

"Approaching the asteroid now, Captain."

"Right. Put it on screen."

"There it is, our baby. But ... Captain, there's a marker on it!"

"What? There can't be! Increase the zoom. You must be seeing things."

#

Even at her advanced age, there was nothing wrong with Vega's eyesight, and she was still the best navigator in the business. She'd plotted our course faultlessly via traversable wormholes to this hunk of rock in a godforsaken arm of the Andromeda Galaxy. Only, this baby was no ordinary hunk of rock. It was the size of the Empire State Building and refraction analysis had shown it contained huge deposits of pure tellurium ore, worth a king's ransom back on Earth.

Now our five-month outward journey had been for nothing. A marker meant another space scavenger had claimed it first.

"Whose marker is it?' I asked Cassian, my first mate. He swiped through several pages on his microdatabase before identifying the flag.

"Gagdor Krelg."

"That Cronustian shyster!"

Stamping around the flight deck cursing loudly for several seconds did nothing to pacify me. Anybody but Krelg. He had beaten me to rich pickings before. Cronustian technology was way ahead of ours and Krelg used autonomous scout drones to scour the galaxies seeking out valuable metals. Krelg's drones planted their damn markers on every likely looking rock then his scavengers came out and scooped them up at their leisure. The Cronustian markers emitted an encrypted homing signal only their own ships could detect. We never knew they had staked a claim until we had visual. It was infuriating.

I was stumped. A ten-month round trip with nothing to show for it would bankrupt me, and my crew knew the score. Vega and Cassian were both staring at me. They knew I wouldn't be able to pay them unless I sold the ship, and most of the proceeds from that would go to cover my debts. If the word reached the rest of the boys I could have a mutiny on my hands. Then Vega spoke up.

"Captain, there's a similar size asteroid in the same orbit just a few minutes away."

I looked at her worry lined face. I knew that, like me, she had financial problems.

"You think it might be worth towing home?"

"No Captain, I think this one is worth towing home."

She gazed at me steadily until I realized what she was proposing. Cassian twigged at the same moment.

"If Krelg finds out, it could start a war," he warned.

"He won't find out," I said with more confidence than I felt. "I'll get suited up. And don't breathe a word to the rest of the crew ... ever."

#

It only took me a couple of hours to zip across to the asteroid, remove Krelg's marker flag and get back to the ship. The other asteroid was so close I didn't bother desuiting. I stayed in the airlock while Vega drove us to it. Another hour and I'd transplanted the marker, and only the three of us knew anything about our illicit deception.

As soon as we were back in position I let the boys on the workdeck know we'd arrived at our target and told them to lock the tractor beams onto the asteroid. Then we began the long pull back to Earth. It took a week to accelerate the ship close to light speed. Vega reckoned the asteroid had a mass of around half a million tons.

Towing that thing was tricky, the biggest lump by far I'd ever scavenged. We had to start slowing down when we were still weeks out from Earth. The folks back home could never grasp how something could be weightless but still have mass. Still, the long journey gave us plenty of time to work out what the tellurium would be worth on the open market.

#

We nudged the asteroid into geostationary orbit around the moon right above the breaking station. I hired a private shuttle to collect the boys and take them over to Earth with a promise to credit their accounts as soon as I'd auctioned off our prize. Then Vega, Cassian and I went down to Moonbase in the ship's low gravity lander.

The first shock came when we looked at the price boards in the auction hall. Tellurium prices were rock bottom. Gone through the floor. Hardly more than common iron ore.

"What the freakin' hell's happened to tellurium?' I demanded of one of the dealers.

"Massive deposit discovered on Mars," he told me. "You been away?"

I was stunned. I had half a million tons of scrap parked that I might not be able to get rid of.

"Jesus Christ!" I said to my two anxious shipmates. "I need a stiff drink while I take this in. Let's get to the bar."

#

There were quite a few faces I recognized in the crowded Moonbase Bar but I jostled my way through them like a bear with a sore head. I'm a big guy so no one complained, which was just as well. I was in a foul mood and it was about to get a whole lot worse.

Vega and Cassian followed me through the breach I forged until we reached the bar and ordered triples with double chasers on the side. I chugged the first one in a single gulp just as a grizzled prospector I knew from somewhere and didn't particularly like opened his mouth.

"Hey! Y'all heard about Gagdor Krelg?" he yelled at full volume to the crowd in general. That name raised my hackles.

"What about Krelg?" I snarled.

"One of his tugs got back to Cronus with a rock and when they split it open they found it was one giant diamond, size of a goddam skyscraper! The lucky bastard was only expecting to find tellurium inside it. Now he reckons it's worth enough to buy hisself a private planet!"

I glared at the big ape, hoping against hope that what I suspected wasn't true.

"Do you know where his boys picked up the rock?" I asked as calmly as I could.

"Sure do!" he flashed me a gap toothed grin. "The ass-end of Andromeda. Say ... ain't that where you just came from with that hunk of landfill?"

I didn't even realize I'd slugged the bozo 'till Cassian grabbed my arm and I saw him sprawled out on the floor.

"Leave it, Boss! It's not his fault."

The prospector leapt up, swore, and pointed a grimy finger at me. Cassian let me go, probably expecting him to pull a blade.

"You all saw that!" he spat blood. "Unprovoked attack! I'm gonna sue yer for every last cent you got!"

"Good luck with that one, pal," I muttered ... and downed my chaser.