Update 2: The big reveal
We trade our Food for Crystals at the marketplace...
...and after we're done, we have 2 Crystals but no Food. I hope we've got Booze, at least. Unlisted, naturally. Not for trade.
Alright, let's keep going now. The game wants us to leave Moiran and travel to Wellmet, another planet, next.
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You know that before the Boundary was built, the planet Wellmet was the main center of all exploring activity. You wonder if this is still true. Since you need to get as much information as possible about the galaxy, you decide to make Wellmet your next stop.
BYVBR-end turn-OB is the way to go! (I hope you follow.) Getting to and landing on Wellmet costs us two weeks. We've even borrowed two phases from the current turn.
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As your drives cycle back and you slide out of hyperspace, Wellmet's sun is already lined up in the center of your viewscreen. Like the first planet you visited, Wellmet is one of the few worlds outside the Boundary whose positions are clearly documented on standard star maps. Thus, among the multitudes of stars and planets that sift through the fringe of the galaxy's spiral arm, Wellmet is easy to find. Your ship, now powered by conventional thrusters, begins to decelerate in a carefully calculated curve that will bring you to the planet at a velocity suitable for making a landing approach.
"We'll be in orbit in six point seven three hours, Boss."
The idea of the computer speaking out loud never ceases to amaze you. It is newly equipped with what it calls a "three-sigma intelligence emulation package", which allows it not only to understand and answer questions in plain Earth Standard dialog, but to volunteer information as well, at what it thinks are appropriate times. Unfortunately, its idea of appropriate times isn't always in agreement with yours.
Six point seven three hours later, you are in orbit around Wellmet. From orbit, the planet looks just like Earth. It has oceans and green vegetation, though there is no evidence of any native animal life. If Wellmet had been the first planet you visited outside the Boundary, you might think that someone was out there prefabricating Earth-like worlds. In fact, Wellmet's remarkable resemblance to Earth is the chief reason it became the focal point of early space exploration and, later, a thriving nexus of interplanetary trade. Even today, after three centuries of isolation outside the Boundary, the name Wellmet is familiar to the people of the Nine Worlds.
Judging from the amount of construction, the human population of Wellmet is about fifty million. Most of the construction is concentrated in a single sprawling city on the north coast of one continent. The city covers a thousand square kilometers, and it teems with activity and traffic, but it's not a city of high towers and electrified streets. You see clusters of dwellings, factory buildings, transmission towers, and landing pads mixed indiscriminately with animal pens, cultivated fields, open rivers, and power plants. There is no single large spaceport, but instead a variety of private landing and docking facilities scattered across the town, ranging from gleaming automated cargo ports to bare concrete pads. Each facility broadcasts its own instructions and signals on different channels, leaving you in some doubt as to where you should land.
"Can you sort out that babble?" you ask the computer.
"Certainly, Boss. All of the privately owned spaceports are broadcasting their own traffic control instructions, along with conflicting claims as to which of them offers the best location and lowest rates for berthing fees. Some pads are set aside exclusively for ships in the employ of various 'Families', or trading concerns. These are located on the safest and most efficient approach lanes, of course, and they're warning us to keep off their private property. Finally, there is a public spaceport of sorts, which charges no fees but requires that we force our way through all the other traffic to reach it."
"Forget about the private docks. Whatever they cost, we can't afford it. Can you plot an approach for the public 'port?"
"No problem. Most of the traffic is old hulks, twice our mass and half our thrust. We can maneuver through it." You do, finding a path in the sky to the spaceport below, cruising past massive cargo ships, big slow converted liners, sleek fast smuggling rigs, and radiation-scarred prospector vessels that bristle with guns like wary old porcupines. You get clearance from the ground to land at one of the empty pads, and with help from the computer, you make a smooth landing.
On the ground, a delegation of spaceport officials meets you as you disembark. They are not unfriendly, and their speech is Earth Standard that is no more heavily accented than your own. They are required to search your ship for contraband cargo. As far as you know, any cargo carried across the Boundary is contraband cargo, but the officials tell you that they care only about certain drugs, weapons, and luxury items that are subject to import duties on Wellmet. You have none of those things on board, so you relax a little. When the officials realize that you've just come through the Boundary, they quickly conclude their inspection and spend some time pointing out the better hotels and trading agents in the area. They reassure you that the security of your ship is guaranteed in the public port, and they offer you any assistance you may require in adjusting to life outside the Nine Worlds.
You spend three days exploring the city (which is also named Wellmet), learning as much as you can about the planet and the people. What you find seems a series of contradictions. The people are unfailingly gracious and polite, yet a majority carry sidearms of one sort or another. Most people care more about experience and skills than titles and rank, yet whole sections of streets are off-limits to anyone who is not a member of one of the Families. Almost everyone expresses scorn or contempt for the Nine Worlds and the Boundary, but they admit that without the Boundary and the smuggling trade it generates, Wellmet would not be as prosperous a trading center as it is. The people of the Nine Worlds are referred to as "worms"—except for you, who in choosing to break out of the Boundary have earned their respect. Wellmet, you learn in the end, is a place that lives by its own rules, a gigantic frontier town where one spacer crew might gun down another for short-weighing a cargo load of Fiber, but would turn around and loan the Crystals out of their drives to a hard-luck case who needed them.
Through careful observation and conversation you identify the following options for further action on Wellmet:
- OFFII7 (2 phases) Find out what the best deals are on Wellmet for trading commodity cargo.
- 8FHIA7 (4 phases) Spend a few days talking with spacers' supply merchants to find out what sorts of personal armaments you can obtain here.
- OVFKIV (3 phases) Learn what you can about the history of Wellmet from the records in the Wellmet Public Archives.
- 8VHKAV (1 phase) Stop off at the Slippery Silver Tavern and hear the latest news and gossip from the spacers who frequent the place.
- KFVIK7 (4 phases) Speak to experienced space traders around the port to learn what you can about navigation, exploration, and the hazards of space.
(OP updated with the list of Wellmet action codes.) And now the game wants us to go to the Slippery Silver Tavern...
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You take a good look around you before you decide what actions you wish to take. You are bright enough to recognize that one of the best places to get reliable info is at a local watering hole. The Slippery Silver Tavern seems to fit that description, so you decide to check it out—and quench your thirst at the same time! Then you will visit the space traders and learn what you can from them.
...so we input the action code
8VHKAV.
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The Slippery Silver Tavern is a pleasant sort of place. The management keeps it that way by placing pleasant high strong partitions between the tables and bolting the table pleasantly to the floor. You seat yourself at the only table that is unoccupied, preparing to spend a pleasant evening sipping Boundary Breakers and inhaling the pleasant low-level soothing gas that the management provides free of charge via the air conditioning system.
After a short distraction caused by a crewman in an adjacent booth somehow managing, despite the generally relaxed atmosphere of the place, to heave another man clear over one of the partitions, you find yourself joined at your table by a tall slim man who looks like he grew up in low gravity. He declines to identify himself, even after you have given your name. This puts a bit of a damper on the conversation, but after a few more drinks the talk becomes freer and you decide that your companion is all right.
During the course of the conversation the tall man asks you an interesting question.
"Do you really want to know what's out here beyond the Boundary?"
Your reply is, "Sure. What?"
"Empty space," he answers. "More empty space than you can imagine. And here and there, just often enough to keep it from being totally empty, a star. Now, some of these stars have planets. Maybe one in eighty. More, if you count worthless silica asteroids. Less, if you leave out worthless gas giants. Of course, the stars with planets look the same through a scanner as the ones without. You can only tell by going there, unless you want to observe the same star from a stationary point for a year or so. It's faster to go there: takes maybe two weeks there and back on a careful course. That means a good explorer finds a planet about every three years. Of course, only about one planet in twenty has anything interesting on it, unless you're a geologist or a weatherman. The odds are worse if you're looking for anything that can make a profit in trade. That's why there aren't many explorers these days. Work it out: with a billion stars in the galaxy, there may be millions of good planets—but how are you going to find them?"
"So what's the point?" you inquire. "Are you going to tell me I should work for you instead, hauling Iron through the Boundary?"
The tall man smiles. "Not at all," he says. "And you couldn't run the Boundary if your life depended on it. I'm just pointing out that you'll need help. Like these, for example." He drops six objects on the table: small squares two centimeters on a side that scatter light like laser armor.
You look at the sparkling chips and ask, "Computer software?"
"Star maps," says the tall man. "Six of them, each covering one sixth of the region of the galaxy once known as the Fringe. Star maps that any other person in this bar would kill for."
"They'd kill you for trying to swindle them," you growl. "I suppose you're going to tell me that these are the lost maps of Vanessa Chang?"
Vanessa Chang: (2435-2505 A.D.) Last of the great space explorers, and perhaps the most famous of all. In her expeditions, Chang discovered more than forty inhabited planets, and was the first human being to travel in the Galactic Arm. She returned from space during the years of the Space Plague and helped set up the Boundary to protect humanity from the dangers of unrestricted exploration. Thus, ironically, she helped bring the age of the Great Expansion, in which she played such an important role, to an end. A tragic but strangely fitting afternote is that in the political and social chaos of the time, her maps were somehow lost. Despite the efforts of three centuries of historians, they have never been found.
"Of course."
"And expect me to buy them from you?"
"Not at all. They are yours."
You look the man over to see if he is joking with you, then respond angrily, "Don't talk stupid. If those were Vanessa Chang's maps, you wouldn't be giving them away."
"On the contrary. I have to give them away. Who could possibly afford to buy them?" The tall man leaves the table and walks out of the Slippery Silver.
You remain seated for a heartbeat, then quickly head for your ship with your set of shiny wafers. You load them into your computer and request a decryption analysis.
"Most ingenious," says the computer. "Each chip seems to contain the same basic information, but coded in such a way that no one chip can be decoded without cross-keys from each of the other five."
"You mean, without all six chips you couldn't read any of them?"
"I believe I just said that."
"Okay, so what's on it? A message reading 'Fooled you, Sucker'?"
The computer, for an answer, displays a picture on your main viewscreen. It is a star map, showing the locations of forty planets, with detailed coordinates for each.
"Well, gag me with a Warp Core! Is it real?"
"I have no way to ascertain that. It has the necessary information that a star map incorporates, including orbital motion data for predicting the current locations of planets based on their positions when the map was made."
"When was that?"
"Three hundred seven years ago."
If you haven't already done so, break the seal on the document marked "Document Two" and open it. Spread it out on a table or other surface where you can clearly see it.
You may select this option again.
Break the seal, you say? Hmm, I wonder what--
WHOA.
The galaxy seems to be
somewhat bigger than we thought... Well, all of us except
Erebus.
