1.04
After our business in Eriadu was concluded the KSS Doughnut, my headcanon for the ship's official name, left behind the Hydian Way and entered the Rimma Trade Route. Our cargo holds loaded with newly produced electronic components, we ignored any intermediate stops and headed straight for Sullust. A volcanic world with a highly toxic, barely breathable atmosphere, that hostile, slightly-smaller-than Earth, a near-barren rock was also one of the galaxy's greatest star-drive and navicomputer manufacturers. Having evolved in the slightly more hospitable underground cave system, much of the Sullustan species naturally sought to escape their dismal world as soon as hyperdrive technology became available to them. That drive and their many travels since had created a tradition of trade and naval exploration that resembled that of the ancient Phoenicians back on Earth. The more traditional clans that chose to remain on their homeworld used the discoveries and expertise their spacefaring cousins brought back to continually improve upon stellar and hyperspace navigation. While the initial creation of molecular and quantum circuitry was harder on a planet with such hostile environment, that did not prevent the Sullustans from using a vast network of contacts to import high-quality electronic components from places such as Eriadu and then assemble and program them into full computer cores, hyperspace generators, and engines with all their experience and technology in the field. The resulting trade, helped along by Sullust's position on one of the major hyperspace lanes and relative closeness to other industrial worlds, made Sullust one of the wealthier planets in the galaxy - quite unusual for an Outer Rim world. As Shu Mai, president of the Commerce Guild had once said; "Sullust shines like a nova of capitalism."
The existence of the main Hyperspace Lanes, I was beginning to discover, was the most important factor in the existence of any sort of galaxy-spanning civilization. Modern hyperdrives did not necessarily need hyperlanes to work and could travel at speeds approaching ten thousand light-years per day for the fastest of them. Unfortunately, while Hyperspace was another dimension, gravity extended into it from the real world and could affect ships traveling there. A ship trying to move through a mass shadow of any size either collapsed back into the real world - if it was lucky - or was crushed into a pinhole singularity and then collapsed into the real world. This was officially termed a "hyperspace accident", but I preferred the label "UdumbtitwhyUdrivethroughplanet?" In theory, all ships had sensors that could detect mass shadows in hyperspace and return the ship to realspace before an accident happened. In reality, even navicomputers had trouble reacting to obstacles approaching at thousands of times the speed of light. And as most star systems had an Oort Cloud, a bubble of stellar debris surrounding their primary star at distances of the half to one and a half light-years, moving from star system to star system blindly was a bad idea.
Enter the Hyperspace lanes: areas of the galaxy where the tidal forces among millions of systems had cleared narrow lanes of space from debris. Those lanes allowed ships to move at full speeds without having to worry about obstacles or having to stop in every system in their path. Discovered through blind luck thinly disguised as really advanced math 'tested' by crazy pilots and slowly shifting as the galaxy rotated and stars were born or died, they were the arteries through which the vast majority of interstellar trade went through. They could be as wide as several light-years in places, or as narrow as a few light-seconds in chokepoints going through systems with loads of debris. Where a hyperspace lane was known, one could go from one side of the galaxy to the other in a couple of weeks. Where it wasn't, going to the neighboring star system was a dangerous trip that risked the whole ship being lost before anyone could react.
Gah, discovering how a new galaxy worked was hard. Fortunately, being young, having a dedicated tutor, and access to learning programs and enhancement devices costing as much as a small starship made a difference.
xxxx xxxx xxxx
We had left Sullust behind, continuing our trip up the Rimma Trade Route. Our hold was now full of high tech goodies, mostly environmental and life support systems normally used for starships and space stations. These, however, were meant for another use. Our next destination was Thyferra, a terrestrial planet that was sixty-five percent swampland. Not forested swampland like Dagobah but a foul saltwater swamp that had mostly replaced the planet's oceans, limiting open water areas to about seven percent of the planet's surface. It was an old planet, billions of years older than Earth according to local geologists, and due to its proximity to the system's primary star and resulting in higher temperature, it had a much more rapid and energetic water cycle. After billions of years, the water had worn down most of the planet's continents, filled the oceanic basins with mud, and generally turned it into a tropical hellhole by Earth standards.
As far as planetary governments went, Thyferra was a banana republic. Comprising eighty-four percent of the hundred-million plus of the planet's total population, the local sapient species of bugs knew little of technology and used it even less in its everyday life compared to the extreme tool use of more advanced cultures. The remaining sixteen percent of the planet's residents were some twenty million humanoid colonists - mostly humans - from the Republic. Well, not actually the Republic; they were mostly employees and subsidiaries of several megacorporations that controlled the planet's production of various biochemicals, primarily bacterial-based medicine.
It was those twenty million non-natives that were in dire need of environmental and life support systems. Air conditioning was a must for practically any visitor that didn't want to suffer severe heatstrokes as much of the planet's surface was hotter than Earth's tropical forests. Dehumidifiers were also required for anyone that wanted to breathe the air instead of drinking it. But the planet's greatest native threat was also its greatest resource; the countless, ever-evolving species of bacteria and viral strains that called it home. Inoculation didn't work; most of them were more adaptable than the common cold, as deadly as the worst types of flu, and there were literally millions of varieties for any would-be doctor to struggle against. Fortunately, the planet providing the disease also contained the cure; bacta.
Bacta was a blend of two specially prepared bacterial strains in an underlying feeding medium. Those two micro-organisms had adapted to their competitive environment not via rapid changes to counter new antagonists but by vastly sped up growth cycles and a chemical warfare suite that destroyed a very broad spectrum of other microorganisms. When properly combined, the resulting mixed bacterial colony chemically reacted to the presence of damaged non-bacterial cells by producing regeneration and reproduction-promoting cocktail, and to the presence of any sort of infection by producing an absolutely lethal bioweapon. Their response seemed to be tailored to the type of cells needing regeneration and to the type of the infection, much like any animal's immune system, except an order of magnitude faster. While medical technology could produce treatments more effective than Bacta for a single subrace of a given species, as well as treatments genetically tailored to specific individuals, they had yet to invent a general treatment of both equal efficiency and equal adaptability to the galaxy's vast number of sapient beings. As such, Bacta had largely replaced conventional medicine for any wound less than total limb or organ loss, or customized antidotes to bioweapons.
It was those near-miraculous properties and an inability to synthesize or reproduce Bacta outside Thyferra to any significant extent that made it such a critical (and expensive) trade-able commodity. Personally, I suspected that because Bacta was biological and displayed near-sapience in recognizing diseases, Force shenanigans were involved with the two species used in its creation. It was only the involvement of the Force that gave living beings abilities inexplicable and non-replicable by science.
While I spent two more weeks continuing my lessons and slowly improving in the live-fire combat exercises, Daddy Andrim negotiated fiercely with the Bacta-producing corporations for the best deals possible. Not all Bacta recipes were the same, and since this universal medicine was used in such delicate procedures as neural regeneration in replaced limbs, anti-aging and rejuvenation treatments, or synapse reformation after heavy concussions and other brain trauma, rich patients in the Core Worlds would pay a fortune for highly concentrated, more effective versions. The most effective Bacta types were more expensive pound-for-pound than cutting-edge quantum computers, expensive enough that Captain Andrim had to use special discretionary funds from the main Kuat family to pay for the full cargo we would transport to the Core Worlds.
Millennia of technological advancement and an entirely different galaxy and the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies were all the same.
xxxx xxxx xxxx
Two days out of Thyferra, halfway down the Corellian Trade Spine and only a few hours from Duro, I leaped out of bed and nearly hit my head in the ceiling. Sixteen hours a day under artificial hypergravity coupled with considerable training and a fairly aggressive high-protein diet was finally burning off the softness in Astra's teenage body. Unfortunately, I wasn't sure how all that would help in the current situation. The Doughnut had dropped out of Hyperspace out of schedule, but that wasn't what had woken me up.
No, that had been the repeated explosions shaking the giant trade vessel's frame...