Tyr was a good six parsecs from Betelgeuse, and the new fuel base at Toranor hadn't helped matters any, established as it was even closer to the galactic rim, but when an arid system - smaller, but not quite as dry as Tyr's - was discovered the following year by one of the newer curiosity-driven Betelgeuse trading scouts, plans for a relay fuel base were immediately put in motion, beginning with somebody trying to figure out some way or other to store the kind of fuel they'd need to complete either leg of the journey with an actual colony. Fortunately, some cool cats in the suddenly-heavily-funded Betelgeuse propulsion labs had a theory about hydrogen fuel that promised to be just enough to do the job. Other cats, not quite as cool, piped up with something daft about deuterium eventually allowing ships with longer range, but as the Chair of the Trade Council opined, if those strags didn't understand that moving on to the planet they really wanted to get to sooner was better than maybe getting to see some extra planets someday, they obviously didn't know where their towels were!
This was exactly the kind of short-term thinking that had supported the chaircat's meteoric rise to the top of her field - meteoric in the sense of a swift, bright streak of light, and meteoric in the sense of vaporizing so quickly, you might have missed it if you blinked. The trade council did see fit to continue her hydrogen fuel policies after she was formally sacked, but only because the policies actually made sense to anyone obsessed - as the entire council still was - with Tyr.
First contact - after a fashion - came in the cold skies of Ryoun 5, where the pilot of one of the trading scouts, holding orbit, was startled to find a little space capsule belonging to the Darlok people jumping in from hyperspace. Consulting her handy Guide, the pilot quickly made herself acquainted with the species:
The Darloks are a shifty people who love spying, cloaks, glowing energy swords, anything that makes mysterious clouds of billowing mist, and long walks on the beach. Their sign is "No Admittance," and was probably stolen on the way out of somebody's royal vault once they already had the crown jewels. Their semi-corporeal forms can assume any shape they desire, which makes them fantastic guests at costume parties as long as all your valuables are in a safe deposit box on the opposite side of the galaxy. When relaxing among friends, or as Darloks call them, "future victims," they often fall back on their natural form: A pair of glowing red eyes in the middle of just a whole lot of darkness. Their original homeworld is at a yellow star just rimward of the Horsehead Nebula, but they're really most at home inside other people's maximum-security top-secret facilities.
"Huh," the scout pilot remarked as the Darlok ship flew away, escaping back into hyperspace. "Shape-shifters. I guess that explains why that thing they're flying around in looked like somebody else's ship."
The trading scouts would spend the next five years watching for alien activity and slowly mapping out their own sector of space, while research continued - mostly on Toranor, while Betelgeuse 5 continued indulging a craze for building actual factories - and thanks to endless experimentation on various atolls and coral reefs out of sight of the better resorts, a breakthrough was finally achieved.
With the toxicity of the terraformer grass finally reduced to levels that would be harmless for Betelgeuse-based sentients, and no particular concern expressed among resort-goers for the health of Toranor's smaller native forms of life, land reclamation projects were ready to begin, and the Betelgeuse biologists were all ready with a new project idea. Asked to come up with a way for colonists to survive on frigid worlds like those in the Endoria and especially Drakka systems, where temperatures regularly approached the freezing point at midday in the summer on the inside of the scouting probes' high-powered electrochemical ovens, project lead Dellian Snooblefritz said, "Why don't they just make themselves a good, hot cup of tea? Give me an interesting challenge, like a way to live on some purely-theoretical kind of world that's so dead it's pretty much at absolute zero all the time, with nothing resembling an atmosphere and barely any microgravity."
As one, the members of the trade council groaned and muttered the likes of, "Sure, whatever, okay."
"We'll get back to you on that," one of the councilors suggested when she asked for funding. "In probably about a dozen years."
When she pleaded for some kind of interim funding - "How can I afford to raise my beautiful baby Bugblatter Beast?" - the coucil only relented so far as to approve a minimal budget for a one-year pilot project in construction engineering, and when Snooblefritz came back with nothing to show for the funding than some long-term speculation about reducing factory waste, they tabled that project too and told her to get to work in her colleagues' propulsion laboratories. "I will have my revenge!" she declared as she stormed out of the conference room - a somewhat unorthodox line to take for someone whose pet projects were still in need of funding.
Ten years later, after steadily-rising breakthrough probabilities claimed by the science teams on an annual basis, the hydrogen fuel cell prototypes assembled by Betelgeuse labs were still all going Hindenburg right off of the launchpad. Though no one could think of an enemy of the state close enough to the project to make it possible, whispers were even beginning to spread abroad about possible sabotage. With the lead scientists insisting their chances of success on the next year's test head risen above fifty percent - though only barely - the mood among members of the trade council was pensive at best.
"We really need to get this finished, so we can start concentrating our research efforts on planetology again," one councilor told another in near-despair. Happening to pass nearby, research specialist Dellian Snooblefritz overheard and froze, her jaw dropping open unheeded. She listened just long enough to hear the other councilor's morose agreement, then took off at a run for the nearest propulsion laboratory.
"Why didn't they tell me they'd restore planetology funding once their hydrogen cells started working?" she demanded of the uncaring air. "If only I'd known, I'd never have..." but she had reached the lab, and said no more, merely displaying her top-level credentials as she raced in. Within a year, the long-awaited fuel cells finally passed all their safety tests, including the one where they didn't explode immediately upon launch, with no more corners cut than were absolutely necessary for the convenience and vacation scheduling of the laboratory heads. Soon, the new cells were ready for installation across the entire trading scout fleet - including the giant green flying saucer whose crew had been waiting patiently at Betelgeuse for the past three years for a chance to depart toward the Moro system and establish a new colony.
Eventually, the ruling council would also remember to throw together a couple more trading scouts, and that their new fuel cells enabled more scouting generally. It must be admitted however that the whole thing was not their best showing.
It was about to get worse.
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NEXT: It Gets Worse
