Captan Paul Anka 2011

Seven years, time flies when you're bored out of your mind, things have changed since the early days. There's more demand, and more things that have to be moved, more people, more life and more planets. Ships got larger and cheaper, and now I owned one. It wasn't the faciest tinkertech ship, the anti gravity worked, the air worked and the ship spun in such a way that I had gravity to keep myself and my crew from suffering the bad effects of a lack of gravity. We had captured another rock and now had to decide where to haul it.

I looked at my crew, I had a crew of 20 and this was the inner circle, my first mate and my chief engineer.

"Ok Bob, we have a rock, iron, titanium, gold, silver, and of course rare earths of various types, the question is where do we put it?"

Leda was out, it was illegal and sucidal to try to land on a moon zoned to be terraformed. I looked at the map. Bob nodded, he was my first mate for a reason."

"Ok our choices are Mars, Ganymede, Io, Europa or Callisto, we have a rock and it needs to be moved."

I nodded my head.

"Why not Titan? Or Rhea?"

I looked at the star map.

"Rhea's pretty much agricultural and the French just get their stuff from one of the european World trees. It's a waste of time Paul."

I looked up the stats.

"Titan's the most energy rich planet in the system, we could make money lunging that around."

Bob shrugged.

"That's true, natural gas, oil of every grade, methane, if you're looking to haul energy Titan's where it's at. Unfortunately, to really make a profit you need to be a dedicated container ship, we would make a profit hauling barrels but the margins would suck balls, plus the brits simply don't have the industrial heft to really pay us for the rock."

I crossed that off the list and looked at our other options.

Europa, lots of World trees, the food was decent, but the taxes for outsiders were too fucking high. If you weren't flagged european it wasn't worth the docking fees. Io, the indians, and that would be the only real customers, paid you shit money and I didn't want to deal with the small army of beggers and pickpockets that were going to be near the World tree. Mars, desolate but better then is used to be, I was going to pay taxes no matter what, but I wanted to look forward to shore leave and I had done Mars.

"We did Mars last time, Europa's out, Io's out so Callisto or Ganymede?"

Bob opened up a tablet and looked through the numbers.

"Callisto's got plenty of demand decent food if you like fish..."

No more fish, every planet had plenty of fish, the problem with terraforming is that getting wild life with eggs was doable, but apparently mammals were too complex or some shit, so that meant that the price of beef was sky rocketing...

"Ganymede has beef, and the Korean and Japanese companies are screaming for more rare earth metals. We sell the rock there, go to some ranch pick up some cows get them to the slaughterhouse, cut a deal and then transport the beef to Mars. Run the numbers."

I waited and got a thumbs up.

"So where too boss?"

I moved until I looked at a map, Masaru or Heui-mang, money was going to be about the same either way.

"Korean or Japanese what do you guys feel like eating?"

Nobody here had ever eaten Korean before so Japan ended up winning. We used our thrusters and forced our way to Ganyemede, the food was still bland and boring but it was better then the shit we had during the early days, I made sure of that. Maybe we would pick up some ramen on Masaru, I'm sure they sold it in Neo Tokyo. With that done we waited for our ship to get there, when we got to Ganymede, I turned on my radio.

"This is the Falcon, we have goods to sell, sending the manifest."

I waited and then looked at the emails, a couple of tech companies were interested in the rock. I went to the one with the best offer, landed and then let their people break it down. The money was just ok, it wasn't like the early days where you could make a years wages with just one run. It was good money of course but there were more spacers, there were more points of access to Earth, Supply had gone up and even with the war burning through resources like tissue paper there was only so much demand.

I looked at my check, the japanese gave me a physical copy but it was already sent to the bank, Bob took a seat next to me.

"Remember when we used to get 5 times more money for gold?"

"Yeah, the only reason it's doing as well as it's doing is because the chinese and the indians are buying up as much as they can."

Well them and the remaining gold bugs who didn't understand that no, the price of gold isn't going to go back up to it's old level. Not with a growing army of spacers like me combing the belt, or mining on moons or any number of things. I opened up my laptop and used the translating software.

"What yah doing?"

"I used to hang around the 2chan boards."

He stared at me.

"It was a way to get around my parents porn filter, anyway I picked up some very craptacular reading comprehension, and I might have a lean on a guy. Well unless he's lying and still lives on Japan."

I looked through the local internet and smiled.

"The ranch isn't that far from here, let's go."

With that my men complained as we left Neo Tokyo and slowly flew around, most of Masaru was empty and devoid of life, you saw small settlements, trees, but only sporadically this was after all the frontier. When I got to our destination I landed my ship and waited, he would come to me out of boredom if nothing else. I opened up my ship and waited. Eventually a man with a youthful face road in on a horse. He looked tired, he had the look of someone who used to be obese and was slowly sluffing off the fat.

"Hiro."

He stopped.

"Yankee?"

"Yeah, I want to buy your cattle."

He sighed.

"Come with me to the house, can your men stay here? My wife gets nervous when there's too many people."

"That's fine."

I got up and walked next to his horse, he looked tired.

"So what made you got into, um ranching?"

Small talk, but he seemed happy, I could smell the cows.

"Government grant, I failed my entrance exam and... I didn't handle it well. I was offered a plot of land, some cattle and told to make it work."

"Oh and how's that going?"

"It's a hard life, but it beats my old life, Japan's too crowded, to many people in your business. Masaru gives you enough space to grow."

I nodded my head, there was a story there, but I was just here to buy some cows, turn them into meat and then sell them at a mark up, if listing to him talk would get me a better price then it would be worth it.