Freelance On The Galactic Tunnel Network, E. Foner [the unexpected everything txt] 📗

of folding chairs. John intentionally picked a table with just one open seat to maximize his number of fellow diners, and someone soon remarked on his yellow candidate ribbon.

“They asked me to stand for a seat,” the young woman across from him said. “I told them that I’m against the council on principle. I mean, I get that Guild dues help make Rendezvous possible and pay the rental for this tent and such,” she added, pointing overhead with her fork, “but for me, it’s less about whether the Traders Guild joins the Conference of Sovereign Communities than about the price of ships.”

“Did you say somebody tried recruiting you to run?” John asked.

“A representative for the finance company that holds the mortgage on my Sharf trader suggested it. I finished my apprenticeship eight months ago, and I had enough saved for a down payment on a second-hand trader, but it turned out the Sharf are running out of them. The price is up more than twenty percent in just the last year. I had to partner up to get the deal done.”

“The Sharf are running out of used two-man traders?”

“That’s what the dealer in Earth orbit said,” a young man two spots to John’s left contributed. “I guess that after seventy or eighty years of demand, we’ve soaked up all of their excess inventory.”

“I actually looked at a new model, but it costs five times as much, and the Sharf say we don’t live long enough to qualify for a mortgage,” the young woman across from John continued. “When the MORE reps approached me at Echo Station and asked me to run for the council, I told them I was too busy keeping up with my mortgage payments to spend my week at Rendezvous running for election. I got the feeling they might have offered me some kind of deal if we hadn’t been on my ship where the controller was recording everything, but after my experience with Advantage, I don’t trust anything those people say.”

“Advantage sucks,” a different woman at the table commented. “It starts you off with some solid trade suggestions that are probably stolen from the Verlock’s Raider/Trader platform, but as soon as you’re willing to commit serious creds, it puts you into losing situations.” As the woman spoke, she held up a tab in one hand, swiping her way through the candidate selection until she matched John’s image with his face. “So what are you going to do about it, Mr. EarthCent Intelligence?”

“Just so everybody understands, I’m running for the council because I want to see the Guild join CoSHC,” John replied. “But I can tell you that one of the main functions of EarthCent Intelligence is maintaining a database of businesses and services for our subscribers, and we’ve committed significant resources to investigate reports of shady refi deals and the factors contributing to a recent rise in mortgage defaults. In recent decades, the percentage of new traders failing their first year in business was below three percent, but in the past twelve months it’s spiked above sixteen percent. That’s not the sort of thing that goes unnoticed.”

“So why haven’t you gotten to the bottom of it yet?”

“Traders make up less than a tenth of a percent of Earth expatriates and we have to focus our limited resources where they’ll have the most impact,” John said. “We’re just getting a handle on the crooked labor contractors whose activities impact hundreds of millions of people, and our current focus is on sketchy operators in the space mining industry.”

“Yeah, I pity the poor souls who go into asteroid prospecting,” an older man at the table interjected, and then he launched into a long story about a palladium find in the Hargreaves system that became more improbable by the minute.

“Is that your story for the contest?” a young man interrupted the raconteur, who had paused for breath after explaining how he sealed a hull breach with a can of baked beans in heavy tomato sauce.

“This really happened to me,” the storyteller replied, but he failed to maintain a straight face. “Or maybe it happened to my brother, it’s getting hard to remember with all the new details.”

“Is that a synonym for embellishments?”

“Hey, if the contest was about telling the truth, a robot would win every year.”

“Attention all candidates,” a voice rang out from the speakers positioned high on every tent pole. “If you wish to take the stage tonight, it’s time to come up to the event desk and put your name in a hat. And will the owner of the Tyrellian gryphon with a sweet tooth please report to the event desk as well. Bring your programmable cred.”

“That’s me,” John said, getting up from his spot. “I hope when it comes time to vote, you’ll remember my face.”

“I’ll remember the expression on it when the announcer said, ‘Bring your programmable cred,’” the storyteller replied. “Your gryphon?”

“Long story,” John said. “Don’t worry, I won’t be entering the Tall Tales contest.”

A woman wearing a hat branded “Myka’s Chocolate Chip Cookies” was waiting at the desk with Semmi, who had a plastic bucket on her head.

“Whoever stuck the bucket on my gryphon’s head better start running now,” John growled.

“She already tried that once, but she ran into my table and dumped six trays of cookies on the ground,” the baker shot back. “Your gryphon put the bucket on all by herself.”

“Oh, sorry about that. Are they salvageable?”

“The cookies? They were individually wrapped so they’re fine.”

“Then what do I owe you for? The bucket of—molasses?” he asked, reading the upside-down label.

“No, the bucket was almost empty. She got into that fix licking it out.”

“Then why the programmable cred?”

“I was just trying to scare you off. If nobody claimed the gryphon, I would have kept her. She seems like a sweetheart.”

“Then why didn’t you take