Part 2: The Second Obsession
It wasn't long before the costs of the somewhat daft Betelgeuse policies were forcefully driven home to their leadership: While the "Mrrshans" were overextending themselves for their fourth colony, the Darloks they had briefly encountered not far away had snuck into and stolen no less than six star systems. Whether the people of Betelgeuse could have beaten them to that benchmark remains an open question, but it is certain that failing to claim any worlds beyond Tyr in a timely fashion - having commited all their resources to speeding Tyr's development instead - would have severe consequences not far down the line.
The first hint appeared just as the first wave of transports was finally hitting Tyr: A lone Scout arriving in the Denubius system was driven away by a series of misile launches from the planet's surface, a motley collection of starships - some of which appeared to be old salvage jobs, apparently taking the place of various hulls that had been stolen right out of the shipyards by daredevil Darlok spies - and most devastaing of all, a broadcast from the planet's surface of a noise so unspeakably foul and loathesome that the scout pilot, cutting in the emergency hyperspace circuits that would take her and her starship directly home, covered both of her ears and screamed in her cockpit until the automated hyperspace jump allowed her to escape. Four more years would pass before the "Mrrshans" at large understood the true nature of the horror perpetrated against their pilot, who was still screaming after the hyperspace jump carried her safely away from the broadcast:
The governor of Denubius, reading poetry.
Two years after that horrible encounter, while the pilot was still in hyperspace - and still screaming - a Betelgeuse trading scout passing through the Horsehead nebula arrived for the first time at one of the stars in a perfect binary system: The twin suns of Soulianis and Rahm. Though it had departed at the same time, and from the same world, as a second scout bound for the other star, with the same theoretical arrival time, the vagaries of nebula travel had delayed the second ship by most of a year, so that Mynxlin Snapgriddle became the first pilot to witness the twin suns for herself - and the first to learn what lay in wait above the world there.
As it turned out, what lay in wait was a pair of Alkari scout ships, which retreated immediately, allowing Mynxlin to send home a full scouting report of the planet Trax, far out in the nebula surrounding the Rahm-Soulianis binary system. The planet's surface, barren of life, was nevertheless littered with every useful element imaginable - or at least every element more stable than lashburnium crystals - raw dotomite formations overlooking reajax seas, with clutches of neutronium and zrbite and technophilium everywhere Mynxlin turned her scanners. The planet wasn't large, but it seemed to be built from all the rarest and most valuable raw materials in the galaxy - the rawest, that is, that could be handled with anything remotely resembling safety. As word reached Betelgeuse itself, a new directive was broadcast all across local space, to all the trading scouts still in the field: Another high-priority target had been identified, eclipsing even Tyr. Like the last one, it would require help from researchers as well as starship engineers - but at least this time, no tax would be established once a ship was en route; this time, the crippling problem would be in the design of the ship itself - and in a critical failure later on to redeploy the fleet.
Making these kinds of silly mistakes had worked so well for the trade council before - depending on what "well" is supposed to mean - that they saw no reason to change anything noticeably.
The following year, when their second scout to arrive in the Rahm-Soulianis system encountered heavier resistance above a completely different planet, well-hidden by the nebula itself, the process had become almost routine: True, the trading scout itself had to hastily retreat from the enormous automated defense ship squatting massively in orbit over what could only be the legendary planet Magrathea, but the plan for taking control of that most-important world - in broad strokes at least - was the same as it had been for Trax and earlier Tyr 2: Research the special technology needed. The one unimportant difference was the nature of the techs: Hydrogen fuel eventually allowed access to Tyr's richest world, and environmental controls would make it possible to live on the barren but incalculably rich planet Trax, and Magrathea merely required the development of numerous combat technologies several generations ahead of anything anyone on Betelgeuse - or indeed anyone still active in interplanetary travel anywhere else in the galaxy - had ever remotely conceived. The ancient Magratheans hadn't been kidding about their automated defenses, and they had been very, very advanced indeed.
By comparison, the people first encountered at Denubius were downright primitive. Of course, the same would have been just about equally true of anyone and everyone else, and the Betelgeuse trading council was hardly in a position to say anything on the subject, with their relatively tiny clutch of technology. Besides, what the green things from Denubius and Vogsphere lacked in technology - those horrifying masters of militarized verse - they more than made up in sheer bloody-mindedness. For these horrible green aliens, in their horrible yellow ships - plus a few recommisioned from an old scrapyard to replace ships the Darloks had stolen - were in fact the bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious, callous Vogons themselves, and their leader Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz.
At least, his name had been Jeltz originally, back when he was merely captain of a ship in the Vogon construction fleet. Since then, he had decided to write a poem about his single most-favorite subject - himself - and partly for the sheer chaos of paperwork it would create, partly to confuse his presumably numerous enemies and rivals, and mostly in order to make it rhyme with "Oozing their phlebmigok dreebirs from their jeebleweltzn," he had officially added an n to the end of his legal name.
The aggressive stance Jeltzn took with other races when conducting diplomacy was hardly a surprise anyone in or outside of the Betelgeuse trading scouts organization. In fact, few among them would have been surprised to learn that he and his people had redirected their efforts from galactic conquest to merely destroying planet after planet to make room for apocryphal hyperspace bypasses that would never actually be built, nor needed, nor even especially wanted by anybody. The Vogons did still win their share of surprise and horror among the people of Betelgeuse when Jeltzn sent trasmissions of his bluster across the stars, but only because the advanced diplomatic trade vessels carrying the transmissions were apparently powered by refined Dotomite fuel cells: The very latest in Vogon technology. To the great relief of the trade council, he did not see fit to declare war on them right away, and even acceded to their proposal of extremely minimal trade relations - and to their much-greater relief, he refrained, for the moment at least, from sharing any poetry with them.
Nearly a decade later, the mismanaged trade empire of Betelgeuse - still losing money on their only trade partnership - finally had a breakthrough of their own. After years of lively discussions among university professors about the philosophical underpinnings of survival on an utterly dead world, enthusiastically led by Dr. Dellian Snooglefritz, a graduate student had the temerity to suggest, "Isn't space totally dead anyway already? And aren't we sending transports and colony ships on multi-year journeys through space anyway? Why don't we just build big old domes out of spaceship window plexiglass over spaceship-hull foundations and clmate-control the inside like a ship?"
Her idea was dismissed out of hand by her professors, and her lab-cleaning assignments were tripled, keeping her as far as possible away from any real work while her professors competed to be the first to write up her proposal in more flowery language, with more misleading and exaggerated titles, and padded with philosophical maunderings, as their own. Within three years, the first ship designed to build a colony exactly along those lines was ready to set out for Trax from Tyr, accompanieed by zero of the starfighters Tyr had coincidentally produced for what turned out to be unnecessary emergency defensive purposes in the same year as the breakthrough, although those fighters also did not precede the colony ship there. This was because, as the chair of the trading council explained, "Hurrrrr durrrrrrr. Buhhhhhh uhhhh buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhh durrrrrrrrrr."
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NEXT: Interlude with Aliens
