Amanda Wilson was dreaming about surfing a black hole when she was woken up.
"... Wilson.... Ambassador Wilson… get up now," said a dark figure above her bed urgently. It was Steve, one of the Marine guards at the embassy.
"Wha? Steve? What time is it?" Amanda asked groggily. Steve was cute, and some part of her mind thought-
"We have to go now!" Steve shouted, cutting straight through her fantasizing, roughly pulling her out of bed. He pulled a heavy vest over her chest and secured it tightly around her waist.
"Body armor? What's going on?" Amanda was fully awake now, all sleep being purged out of her mind with adrenaline as the training from her previous career kicked in, "are we under attack?"
"Let's go!" Four Marines flanked her into the garage. She noticed they had not answered her question. As the car rolled towards the front gates of the embassy estate, she saw that a small but growing crowd of angry aliens had gathered outside, throwing rocks and tree branches at their vehicle. "The front's blocked, go rear entrance!"
A homemade molotov cocktail hit the front car hood as they turned around, but slid off as it ignited. Out the back, their vehicle raced full speed towards the spaceport.
"You gonna tell me what's going on?" Amanda demanded.
"No idea. Orders came to pull everyone out immediately," Steve said, and then added almost chuckling, "and these ones did not sound particularly optional."
The Terra Two was already fueled and ready on the VIP launch pad. The entire team hurried on, strapped themselves in, and launched.
As they took off, Amanda could feel the force of her own body pushing her into the seat. This was a much higher launch acceleration than normal. At least three, maybe four Gs.
"Does literally no one know what's going on?" Amanda grunted, trying to reach her tablet to bring up something, anything, to get an idea of what's going on. Why were they being rushed off the planet without warning?
"You haven't heard?" The pilot replied into her sealed helmet, "one of ours shot down one of theirs a few hours ago. I guess they won't be too happy about it."
Ambassador Amanda Wilson looked back down on the receding planet of Ribb, and she felt only sadness for its people as her ship blinked out.
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Three Months Ago
Galactic Credit had, under pressure from several regulatory agencies, finally gone public. Despite increasingly sophisticated offshoring schemes that now involve creative accounting on multiple planets, its profits from the transactions being conducted on thousands of planets had become just too much to hide from the Securities and Exchange Commission.
On the first day it was listed on the NY Stock Exchange, XGC shares debuted at $150. Most good analysts took one look at the total market value of the company and howled, calling it severely underpriced.
This happens all the time. It is a well known market inefficiency that new public companies are generally underpriced. This is what an economic paper written in the 1970s about market information asymmetry called the lemon problem.
Economists theorize that in a market where investors are not well informed, eventually most of the goods sold on the market will be of poor quality, like lemon cars on the used car market. And therefore, most buyers would be willing to pay less even for high quality goods.
Applied to the stock market: because most investors are not well informed, and especially because many of GC's operations were offworld, the firms underwriting its value gave it a lower than fair market price.
By the end of day one trading, XGC shares had risen up to $500, and it kept rising. This was not so good for GC because it didn't end up getting as much funds as it should have if it had started prices at $500, but great for the people who bought in early.
"Is there a reason or endgame to this… crusade against the Trader Guild?" One of the participants asked in the first public shareholders meeting.
"Yes," Sarah replied professionally, "the Guild is a major thorn in the side for our business model and is incompatible with the values we hold as a company." Stearns sitting right next to her winced internally, hoping she'd talk more about the business model part than the latter to the stockholders.
"Our expert models project that the economies of several alien planets that rely heavily on offworld trading are severely hampered by the Ribbiths' collection of outrageously high and inconsistently applied protection fees. Planets on low volume trade routes where they generally do not target are actually experiencing higher growth rates."
"As a result, the number of GC transactions are not as high as we'd like, and we've had to invest more cash to get these economies…"
Today
"Ms. Miller, is there any truth to the Ribb authorities' allegations that the destruction of Shroggit's spacecraft was premeditated?" A reporter asked, several cameras and microphones shoved into Sarah's face as she exited her vehicle.
"Absolutely not, and we will not be commenting further at this time, thank you," Bryce said as she escorted Sarah into the building from her car.
Someone had posted the video of the shootdown incident over Earth on YouTube. It wasn't anyone from inside GC; the video was not from the perspective of the Terra Two. It was from an amateur sky watcher. The quality wasn't high but it had caught the fatal hit on the Ribbith spacecraft. The first video, that is. Then several others were posted of varying quality and sources.
As the chase took place over several minutes, many amateur astronomers were notified and pointed their telescopes at the two ships. Then, several governments and militaries, heavily interested in the outcome, also pointed their high powered cameras at both ships. The only reason CNN didn't broadcast the entire battle live was because they found a stream source too late.
"So does anyone on Earth not know about this yet," Sarah asked, almost to no one in particular.
"There's no covering this up. But this is a slam dunk classic self defense case as long as you don't say anything stupid to get people mad at you," Bryce assured her, "Shroggit shot at you first, several times. And she's not exactly what you call a popular gal around here. That's if that supposed daughter of hers even has any standing to sue you on Earth."
"Good."
"In other news, our stocks have gone up 6% to break through $1,000 in after hours trading. I'm thinking about getting a couple of those new luxury Terra Threes," Bryce said, trying to lighten the mood a little.
"Oh nice, for the company fleet?"
"For me."
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You can divide economic and political institutions into two categories, some economic theorists posited: inclusive ones and extractive ones.
Inclusive institutions protect a large majority if not all of the people they cover. Their purposes are generally to facilitate free and fair economic and political activity. They allow decisions to be made that benefit the majority of the people in the system.
On the other hand, extractive institutions are designed specifically to benefit very few people: they allow a very small percentage of the population to exclusively extract benefits from everyone else.
The Galactic Trader Guild was very clearly an extractive one, and a particularly malignant one at that. Its entire existence was based around allowing one very small group of armed spacecraft owners, all Ribbiths, to extort protection fees from space traders, which with the introduction of credits, also meant it rippled down very precisely and predictably through galactic economies by raising prices on all traded goods.
Extractive institutions are generally considered inherently less stable, which is why many human economists were so surprised to learn that the Guild had operated the same way for as long as any species could remember.
Maybe their models were wrong. Oh well. Wouldn't be the first time.
Under intensive lobbying from human and sentient rights groups as well as corporations that were now losing money to Ribbith "protectors", the UN General Assembly unanimously resolved to stop recognizing the legitimacy of the Guild, and several nations on Earth designated it as a "state sponsor of terrorism".
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Traders Only
New Thread: Know Your Rights! How to deal with frogheads, a legal guide by GC.
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A spacecraft shootdown was an unprecedented event in Ribbith history. It had literally never happened before. In the millions of years they'd been top frogs in the galaxy, nobody had seriously mounted an objection to their bullying backed up by the legal veneer of the Trader Guild. Not to mention actually taking up arms against them.
Sure, there were examples of violent species here and there. They were rare, but a couple of the crazier ones had somehow developed and built primitive FTL spacecrafts. The Ribbiths just asked some volunteer ships to use them for target practice and actually do their jobs as "protectors''.
Without currency, and thus economy, and thus mass production, it's not like those species were going to ever pose a threat to their established advantage. They probably just nuked themselves to extinction on their own planet after the Ribbiths left.
This case, however, was different. In this case, a primitive but blink capable species had risen into the galactic community. There, they not only fundamentally changed the way everyone has been trading, they also secretly built several armed spacecrafts, one of which shot down a 34th generation Ribbith-class spacecraft seemingly effortlessly.
The Ribbith government was in an uproar. This event was so outside their normal frame of reference they did not know how to respond.
"We need to teach them a lesson!" One Ribbith "protector" had shouted.
"We can't! They could shoot us all down. We'd lose everything," another claimed fearfully.
There was no consensus. The Ribbith Guild representatives were a community of perpetual bureaucrats and bullies, not problem solvers. When their instinct to snuff out any deviations to the status quo had finally met a real existential threat that could fight back, they continued to waste time with debate, delay, and petty squabbles.
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Meanwhile, the board of GC was talking about how to get rid of them.
In all of Earth's history, there have been many fallen institutions of power.
When many people think about one big power replacing another, they often imagine large set piece battles: one empire decisively conquering another with force of arms, like Rome did to Greece, or the British Empire to the Spanish Empire. And these do happen, but just as often, powers fail not because they were beaten into submission, but because people simply stopped caring about them.
One of the most known of these was the League of Nations, which became known in history for being the UN precursor that failed to stop World War Two. The virtual leaders of humanity at GC quickly became invested in that model of replacement; the infrastructure was in place, the right experts were consulted, and they were all just waiting.
What GC knew, from all the intelligence it had done in the past years and all the legwork it had done to get to this point, was that the Trader Guild was already a fatally wounded animal. Shroggit's death was an opportunity, one that struck that last blow. Now they just needed to wait at a safe distance until it bled out and hope nobody does anything stupid...
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
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Eschewing respect, the Guild governed on fear.
Fear of death.
Fear of getting grounded for life.
Fear of losing everything your family ever worked for.
Rational creatures with very limited economy and opportunity could not challenge those. It would be like asking rabbits why they didn't just fight wolves; it wouldn't happen in a million years.
But now, as opportunity became more plentiful, and as risk takers were rewarded with great gains in the new galactic economy, they started to ask themselves: what are we really afraid of?
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"I do not recognize your authority," Zarko said with a calm, loud voice, though calm was not anywhere close to the emotion he was feeling right now, "this is Zakabaran territory and they have permitted me to conduct trade here."
What? Zarko? The notoriously by-the-book food trader? Of the risk averse species from Zeep-zep? That Zarko?
Vrammoth the Ribbith protector was confused. She'd recalled collecting protection from Zarko once before, a few years ago. He had ejected one and a half ton of fruit straight towards her open cargo hold with admirable precision. That entire conversation had taken five minutes and she was out of there in ten.
Her anger mounting, she thumbed her microphone transmitter as she activated the two weapon turrets that were deploying out of her ventral bay, "you are in violation, Zarko! Lock yourself in the cargo bay and prepare for inspec-"
She was shouting at empty space. He was gone. The bad egg had blinked!
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Vrammoth's drive was linked to his, and as she activated it to follow, she noticed that the new planet outside her windows was not any she'd ever seen before. A quick beacon scan proved that it didn't even boast a single spaceport.
It was a gas giant, with swirling red, white, orange, and brown gases painting its milky surface, and a faint but visible ring surrounding it.
Why would he escape here? Vrammoth put that thought out of her mind as her radar quickly reacquired Zarko's spacecraft.
"Come on, Zarko, be reasonable," she almost pleaded with him as her weapons tracked him flying towards one of the larger moons, "this doesn't have to end this way. You know my fees are fair and I never take more than I'm entitled to."
He ignored her. She didn't really want to kill him, but knew in her mind that was where this chase was leading up to. Vrammoth hadn't killed anyone before, but she had to disable a small trader craft that tried to run once. The incident was not pretty on the other ship: it never flew again.
Maybe she could put a low energy shot through one of his engines without hitting the reactor or pilot module-
A voice, not Zarko's she realized, came through her radio. It sounded very serious and very official.
"Unauthorized armed spacecraft. This is the Royal Australian Space Force, operating at Ganymede Station under UN Mandate 2674. You are in a restricted area. We have you weapons locked and your drive signature linked. Power down your weapons and cease your engines for boarding immediately, or you will be fired upon."
All at once, she saw her radar light up with six more vessels, all human in origin. Her sensor panels showed them all armed and burning in her direction: one with what was obviously a very large railgun, two with lower caliber cannon mounts bristling on their turrets, and three screening them with several much smaller weapons she could not identify on the hull.
Knowing when to fold a bad hand, Vrammoth complied.
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Zikzik had become very rich too.
He participated in the Gak Spacelift as a trucker, and he liked doing it so much, he continued to do it even after the spacelift was over.
Zikzik became a contracted deliverer for Earth firms. At first, it was some lucrative contracts for GC and some other big firms that wanted custom technology imports from other planets. Then, he became a little bit of an entrepreneur.
With the help of some advice from his friends at GC, he started his own space cargo transport corporation, a first for aliens. He combined ships with two other friends, and that formed their delivery fleet. When Earth opened its doors for migrant workers from alien planets and needed lots of ships to carry passengers, they struck gold.
Figuratively speaking; gold was not worth very much on Earth these days.
After building up capital, the creatively named Offworld Transport Company started to scale. Adapting several concepts from Earth's shipping practice, like using standard sized cargo containers, made them far more efficient compared to lone space truckers.
Then, they had the bright new idea of building trading outposts in orbit for several major trading planets.
Working with Earth based spaceship manufacturers like Terra Corp, OTC was able to build cheap spacecraft without FTL engines. These delivered goods from planetary surfaces to orbital outposts, where goods could be held until they were delivered by larger, non-atmospheric rated FTL ships.
The orbital outposts could charge a slightly higher fee to compensate for the journey from surface to space. Specialization created value, and Zikzik was there to collect it. The fees made OTC so rich that they started contracting most of their trucking out to other delivery companies and just focused on maintaining orbital outposts.
In a way, Zikzik had mastered the art of selling prospecting equipment to gold miners too.
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Next to Woggrot's ship were the spacecrafts of his friends Shakkut, Weggut, and Mirrot, all of who were also 150th or more generation representatives of the Guild. Working in a whole squad had been an effective strategy on some bigger routes, and today, this was going to be no different.
They slowed their armed ships to a halt relative to Bohor Orbital. He'd been noticing it building bigger every time he came by. He'd also heard from a trader that thousands of sentient beings now lived and worked on it.
In other words, a big, fat, juicy sitting duck.
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Zikzik was working space traffic control on Bohor when he got the call.
"This is Woggrot, representative of the Trader Guild, I would like to speak to your pilot."
Zikzik picked up the radio and replied, "this is Zikzik, I'm the manager of Bohor Orbital. Please state your business here."
Manager, not pilot? Ok then, thought Woggrot. He was not picky. As long as he got his goods, he didn't care what the other guy called himself, "I am here to inspect the quality of your goods. Please reserve 10% of your total goods value in the docking area, and boost them over to the direction of my ship."
Zikzik muted the receiver, and hissed to his aide, "call the humans. Tell them we've got a Ribbith ship at our door!"
Then he got back on the phone, "yes, yes, of course. We have a lot of goods, please give us some time to gather them all."
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"They've been at it for a while," murmured Mirrot across the radio. She hadn't gotten any protection fees for a while. The last few traders she'd intercepted had just gone running into human restricted zones, and she absolutely didn't want to find out whether the rumors about their new weapons were true. This score was going to make them rich and allow them to keep flying.
"Yeah, they must have a lot of goods," said Shakkut excitedly. He, too, hadn't been having any luck with traders either. Hitting this stationary orbital station was a stroke of genius.
"I'm a little concerned about that," Woggrot said, "I'm not noticing that much activity in the docking mod-"
That's when their radars each picked up the human ship closing in on them, from a hundred kilometers behind them. Where did they even come from?!
"Incoming human vessel, armed! We gotta get out of here!" Shakkut croaked. He was already getting his blink drive ready. No way was he gonna risk it all with the kind of ship that went toe to toe with the infamous Shroggit!
"Son of a bad egg, they tricked us!" Woggrot said angrily. He looked through his long range scope at where his turret was already locked: the most prominent part of the orbital station, a tower of reinforced steel and glass, where he could see a smug… whatever that species was called… looking right back at him! Furious, he squeezed off a short burst of incendiary autocannon shells.
Without waiting for them to hit, he gave the order, "scatter! There's only one of them, it can't chase all of us down," and then blinked out.
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Zikzik was luckily not in the tower when the shells hit: they blew out the entire tower structure into vacuum and knocked everyone on the station off their feet. The traffic control crew of twenty four beings perished instantly.
Detecting a dramatically decreasing atmospheric pressure, the vacuum doors closed, but not fast enough. Several chemical fires got out of the control room and into the hallways, and there, they spread fast, everywhere. Well trained fire crews in the market finally managed to manually disconnect the hallway connecting them to the blaze in the Command Sector of the orbital station as the thousands of beings began to make their way to the hangar to evacuate.
The Command Sector of the station was where critical reactor, propulsion, life support, and automation modules were housed. The sensors failed first, burnt to a crisp by the conflagration. Thinking that the station was drifting out of orbit away from Bohor, the maneuvering rockets on the station began to fire automatically to send it closer.
Bohor Orbital started to boost towards the atmosphere. It was doomed.
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The multinational UN task force at Ganymede got the call, "one Ribbith aggressor reported at Bohor Orbital." They sent two ships. More than enough to take care of some pirate scum.
Major Riku's ship arrived first. His active radar sensed all four Ribbith ships, not one as expected, and as he burned towards them, he cursed as he saw all four ready their blink drives to jump. He linked his drive to one of the ships, and readied his missiles.
That's when he saw the control tower at the Orbital explode.
Without hesitation, he locked all four ships, and fired.
Capitaine Laurent arrived next. She didn't see what happened, but her long range cameras could see the burning orbital station, and she gathered what had happened from the four missiles racing out from Riku on her tactical map.
In accordance with her training, she linked her blink drive to one of the pirate ships, and released one missile for each of them as well.
On her screen, as the first four missiles got within ten klicks of the Ribbiths, the pirates completed their blinks. All eight missiles suddenly lost their radar targets, and went inert.
A second later, Major Riku sent her a message, "split and chase," and blinked.
"Avec plaisir."
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Zikzik made his way to the hangar, where he helped cram as many beings on board into the cargo ships as he could. Technically, the station was supposed to have enough emergency lifeboats as it had beings, but many of those were in the now inaccessible Command Sector.
Cargo ships from the planet started to head towards the orbital outpost. As other traders heard the call on social media, trader ships from other planets began to flock to Bohor to try to get as many beings out as they could.
Unfortunately, the hangar was limited in size, and its airlock could only cycle as fast as it did. At least two thousand were still on the orbital station.
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Woggrot radar scanned the space around him. There was no one; they must have linked their blink drives to another ship. He breathed a sigh of relief, retracted his weapons, and tried not to think about what must be happening to two of his friends.
Six short seconds later, a SIM-9X from a Japanese Space Self-Defense Force Stealth Destroyer ended his protection career permanently.
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As Zikzik sprinted through the mostly empty hallways of the doomed orbital, he found a Gak child dragging an injured Olg friend towards the hangar. He picked them both up, one in each paw, and sprinted towards the hangar shouting into his radio, "wait I've got two more!"
He helped them onto the waiting evac ships, then stepped out of the hangar as the doors closed and the filled ships vented into space.
Another squadron of evac ships came in and the hangar pressurized. There were still hundreds onboard the station, and the planet outside was getting awfully big...
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Shakkut had blinked behind one of Ribb's moons.
What happened next was highly disputed and controversial:
Radio operators at the mine on the moon claimed that they heard Shakkut surrender his ship when the French spacecraft blinked in.
Laurent and her crew later all testified under oath that they saw him start to turn his turrets towards them when they sent four Fox Twos up his tailpipe in quick succession. With pirates, you could never be too sure.
Conveniently, their battle recorder malfunctioned for the entire duration of the short twenty five second engagement.
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Zikzik and a skeleton crew directed the chaos until the orbital station hit the outer edges of the atmosphere. Then, evacuation ships could no longer come in.
"Last ship out!"
The evacuation crew fitted every possible being they could into the last four waiting cargo ships. No space was wasted. All their cargo goods had been vented into space trips ago. No one was carrying anything.
It was not enough.
Zikzik stepped out of the hangar for the last time as he and the remainder of his crew silently watched them leave.
They were still onboard when the station was incinerated by the Bohor atmosphere.
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Weggut blinked to Ribb too. He managed to put his spacecraft down on Ribb before Laurent had time to burn in his direction. He promptly sold his ship at a steep discount to a delighted Dlaiva who was visiting the spaceport.
Weggut never left the ground again.
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Mirrot surrendered herself at the human embassy on Bhak. She was transported to Earth and eventually tried at the Hague for Crimes against Sentiency and several dozen lesser charges of Conspiracy to Murder.
Despite having her accounts frozen, an alien rights group loaned her a very good criminal defense lawyer who got her first charge dismissed and convinced her to make a guilty plea deal with prosecutors, in exchange for testimony at the UN against the Trader Guild and its criminal operations.
She was sentenced to twenty years in a minimum security prison, with the possibility of parole after seven. The sentencing judges looked favorably upon her for fully cooperating in the Bohor Orbital investigations.
The trial was broadcast across the entire galaxy. Mirrot became known as the first Ribbith to ever face justice for crimes against another species in a courtroom.
Not the last.
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The existence of the Guild continued for a few more months, until no Ribbith protectors remained. Some of them, like Vrammoth, reformed and became productive members of the galactic community. Others, having lost their revenue stream, were grounded after running out of fuel and credits. A few kept trying their luck, and eventually met their fates at the hands of the enforcement arm of the newly formed Galactic Union headquartered on Earth.
Ambassador Amanda Wilson, former envoy to Ribb, became its first Secretary General. Her first task was to establish rule of law in the galaxy. They were enforced by voluntary participation from member worlds. At first, they were mostly Earth funded ships and human crews, but some other species were starting to work alongside humans and getting various citizenships on Earth with service.
After Bohor Orbital, Sarah and her friends lobbied the Union to establish a Medal for Extraordinary Service to Sentiency. It was named after the first creature it was given to, Zikzik. The rebuilt station named itself after him, as well as several other spaceports.
One of the organizations to eventually be funded under the Galatic Union mandate was the Galactic Red Cross, which absorbed a lot of the offworld activities from Earth's International Red Cross.
After a three-year long relief mission, Gakrek was finally declared food secure. No species would ever experience total planetary famine ever again.
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"So, what now?" Jen asked.
Sarah and her friends, Jen, Jackson, Reese, Benny Jr, Zarko, and Stearns were gathered around a warm fire in a campsite a few miles from Tahoe.
"Get rich, build the largest company ever, and save the galaxy, what else is there to do?" Sarah smiled.
"Oh there's plenty more to life, and more to money than we've ever considered," said Stearns as he roasted a marshmallow.
"For example, have you guys ever heard of an idea called the bancor?"
"NO! Not this again!"