The Great Galactic Score!

21

21

Back in the storied history of humankind, before the Earth-That-Was became little more than a charred, blackened cinder, a blight upon the rest of the Solar System, where even Venus could cringe and say the planetary equivalent of "Ooh! That looks nasty! Have you got ointment for it?", great generational ships were constructed. Not willing to wait for physicists and engineers to realise they had got practically everything wrong about trans-luminal travel, humankind decided that the best way to go about seeing the wonders of the universe was to throw a few thousand people headlong out into the galaxy and see if they could hit something nice. Like a galactic version of Marbella, without the drunken foreigners and people selling cheap tat on the beaches.

Long did these ships travel, with populations increasing, air supplies becoming dangerously low and personal space becoming something that people remembered fondly. Most of these generational ships came to terrible, brutal ends. Flying into stars, crashing into moons that only wanted to spin around their parent planets in peace, becoming fodder for whichever large-eared scavenging aliens decided that the ships were salvage and the humans aboard little more than pests to be whipped into servitude. The usual.

One of the few ships to survive came into the orbit of, perhaps, the most violently anti-human planet the galaxy could have produced. Everything was either toxic, corrosive, unendingly hungry or all of the previous and worse. The air wanted to kill humans. The soil wanted to kill humans. The flora certainly wanted to kill humans and the fauna wanted to kill humans, eat them and use the remaining bones to pick their well-used teeth. To the humans aboard the generational ship, this was a problem, until they found the only intact structure remaining on the planet.

The Tether. Twenty-two thousand miles long, stretching from the surface of the planet, up beyond the atmosphere. Five miles wide, constructed of materials that the humans marvelled at, that could withstand practically any amount of stress and torsion. It was a triumph. A feat of engineering that the humans promptly invaded and turned into a dystopian nightmare. The humans lived there for hundreds of years, avoiding outside contact and developing new technologies that made it easier to watch cat videos in the comfort of their own minds.

Though these humans shied away from the outside galaxy, the galaxy did not ignore them. Not completely, at least. In the intervening years, the DWAIt Corporation found their first hyper-drive, stole the technology and used it to go around finding and stealing even more technology, whether the originators of that technology wanted them to or not. Once those dissenting aliens were vaporised, DWAIt Corp went on to patent, trademark, copyright and violently protect their acquisitions.

One of the things used to protect some of that technology was the aforementioned flora and fauna of the Tether planet. After many failed attempts, the loss of several teams of highly competent, well-trained, stalwart and easily consumed soldiers, scientists and engineers, DWAIt Corps had harvested themselves a large stock of plants and animals that could kill anything that tried to steal DWAIt Corp's stuff. They populated a small, little known planet with these creatures and plants and placed some of their most important and secret designs (stolen) within a vault that could only be opened by DWAIt Corp employees fitted with implant technology gained (stolen) from the Tether. The only place where anyone thought that kind of intrusive technology was 'cool'.

"And you want us to go to this planet?" After finding Friss and Lap, resting amid the corpses of a large number of formerly-protesting, formerly-alive revolutionaries and a fair few Crime Response Officers, Demi had asked what the hell they were doing there. The explanation was not simple. "Are you insane?"

"I'd like to think that I'm ... No. No, you're right." Friss acknowledged Lap's crinkling as the Planeian fluffed up the body they were using as a pillow. "Yes, I am insane. A little bit. But I can handle that. What I can't handle is this itch that I've had since last night."