The dereggers owed him a lot of money. But they didn't want to pay. However, he knew a way to get what he wanted and get back at them at the same time. He wrote a contract, iron clad, and had both deregger and galactic witnesses to sign as well as the leadership, smilingly, signed over a solar system that was at the edge of their space in between their space and galactic space. And in the signing, he grinned.
It was a trash planet. Polluted, filthy, air unfit, water unclean, barely anything living.
It had been a trash planet, covered in centuries of detritus the dereggers ditched there, garbage they now just shot into their solar system's sun because it was cheaper than sending it here.
He had a dream, he had a vision, and a planet to turn from a pariah into paradise.
When the DeReggers saw the verdant, green, healthy planet that was a havenworld-like paradise, well, let's just say they regretted signing that contract. -- TrashToTreasure
The difference between garbage and treasure is all in who values what. Dereggers are famous for routinely throwing out anything they don't like but is valued by others. Lots of them devalue the weirdest stuff. Like half the population. Or, in this case, lots of biomass. Food waste is definitely a thing for a lot of Dereggers and for a solid century or so, it was more profitable for them to just chuck everything they didn't want onto one garbage planet on the edge of their territorial claim. Food, defunct technology. Honestly, Humans get very wasteful when they have entire solar systems of resources at their disposal. They drained off the chemistry of an entire gas giant to fertilise their crops. Then they went shopping for a system full of gas giants.
You wouldn't believe it if it wasn't so real for so long and in so many places. Heck, some of it's still going. So. Long story short, this mob of Dereggers was defaulting on their bills so hard that the combined forces of the Alliance were breathing down their necks. It wasn't until the CRC decided to withhold "additional genetic information" - translated, more gene patterns for their gengineered women - that they finally relented and began to negotiate.
Small shock that this Deregger colony, like every other Deregger colony ever, had vastly inflated their holdings and couldn't actually hand across the value they initially promised. I know. I shouldn't have believed them. But here's the trick. This was exactly what I was aiming for. In exchange for a public apology across all of their networks for one week, I would be willing to settle for a trash system they had bordering agreed Alliance shipping lanes. They thought I was a born sucker.
Let me tell you about trash systems. Alongside being fabulously rich sargassos loaded with old tech and metals. Then there's the stuff they dump on planets Including the occasional old hulk, but mostly the organic stuff they didn't want to shove anywhere else. You'd think it was all worthless, right? Wrong. The trick with getting a profit out of Dereggers is to know how to glean for tosheroons.
You know what tosheroons are, right? No? They're an aggregate of heavy objects and -let's call it 'mud'- that accretes in eddies of badly-made sanitation systems or - just wastewater runoff. Sometimes, but not often, a tosheroon will conceal very valuable things. The odds of that go up -metaphorically speaking- when you have a very wasteful society. So yeah. My first move was to extract all the gold from their shit.
Selling sargasso rights to itinerant salvagers covered the cost of some of the elementary machinery I needed for the next step. Separating and categorising all the microflora and microfauna, selling the information to the Archivaas and the actual beasties to whomever found them the most useful. That set the stage for going through all the planetside tech and selling the functional stuff to those who were still catching up with GalStand tech.
You'd be amazed how big the market is for that stuff. People need something acceptable to hold them over while the higher-ups decide which next step forward goes against tradition, holy writ, or moral standards. It's a thing. In my case, it's a profitable thing. And in the case of the non-functional tech, there's always someone, somewhere, willing to restore that stuff. Some of them do it just to flex. I also get a tidy set of donations from the people watching my live-streams of the assorted finds.
Dereggers. They don't know shit about making a profit. On the other hand, if they had a modicum of wit, then they wouldn't be Dereggers. Good for me, I guess. On with the lesson.
I got a lot of Time out of the finds, and that paid for the equipment for the next step. Terraforming. True, a lot of the biomass could be profitably ploughed into the soil and create something wild and wonderful, but I wasn't after a Deathworld. I was going hardcore.
I was making this place into a Havenworld. And more than that. So I had to remove all the toxins. Fortunately, there's a market for that and no, I was not selling Dereggers their own nonsense. They'd already thrown that noise out. One being's hazardous chemical compound is another's elusive gourmet ingredient. Just look at chocolate. And no matter what you have on your hands, someone is always willing to pay shipping and handling.
As a great author once said: no matter what it is, sooner or later, something will eat it.
Replace "eat" with "use" and you're laughing all the way to the bank. If you have it, someone will beat your door down to get it.
It didn't take long to turn a toxic shithole into a benevolent paradise. Idyllic islands, sweet, freshwater rivers, beautiful rolling hills. You get the idea. The last step was printed habitats with ambient energy systems and ready connections to the infonets. Baby stuff.
Then I advertised it as a relax-in-between-stops Havenworlder friendly resort and crowed as the Time rolled in. I have years of experience in tosheroons.
After all. My grandma was thrown out by a bunch of Dereggers. Straight into the arms of a family who loved her, cherished her, and taught her every trick they could about sticking it to those selfish assholes.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Olhunia]
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