The Rich Man’s Daughter

Dead Man's Hammer

Imagine, if you will:

A bright yellow star lit the darkness somewhere in deep space, accompanied by its rather dysfunctional family of nine deceptively ordinary-looking planets. During its enormously long lifetime many beings had named it from the far ends of distant telescopes, including it into numerous star clusters and constellations as they were perceived from their vantage points. Once, or maybe twice, creatures simply looked up into their own skies to name it from their own now long dead and deserted worlds. In more recent times, beings from a world that orbited a different sun far away gave it a name too – creatures that called themselves Human, who travelled here and settled on one of its inner planets. The planet they chose to make a new home on? They called that Deanna. They called the star Ramalama.

The reason for the peculiar name could be found in the whimsical sense of humor of the early colonists who arrived on Deanna several decades in the past and found very little at all there to laugh at. Obsidian Crows might seem funny at first, unless you just happened to ride over one with your Jeepo five miles out of town and didn't have a spare tire. Although there was a reasonable expectation of hitting one of these diminutive brutes on the roads, this did not happen nearly as often as you might think.

Deanna was pretty much as boring a lump of rock as could be expected, which had promised the colonists nothing but hardship and lean years at first, until they could get things going properly – and delivered on that promise. And so, with the stoicism and determination of frontiersmen in all manner of times and places, they simply got on with the business at hand – making a life here in the outback, where at first, everything had to come from the supply ships. There was little in the way of entertainment, aside from everyday life – so they looked up into the night sky, saw the two mad little moons in orbit around the planet – and named them Ding and Dong.

Dong had been described most often as 'a huge lump of nothing much, about one kilometer in diameter' while Ding is only about fifty feet around, consists entirely of titanium and is a known navigational hazard to approaching ships. (This is where the popular term 'you've got a Ding in your fender' comes from.) On average, it would usually take about four heavy-duty space tugs to get the spherical lump out of its crater and put it back in orbit where it belonged. There would be the usual administrative delays as the Tourist Office had it polished up again first. Ding had become such a popular feature of Deanna that it had a whole page devoted to it in the Online Galactic Tourist Guide.

By now, half a century or so later, Deanna was still just another third rate colony in the Terran Empire. It was average-sized, with a land-sea ratio of only 35 percent, and with such small moons, hardly any tides or waves to speak of at all – which means that if you're a tourist looking for a great place to surf – then dude, this isn't it. Deanna had only one ocean, the Landlocked Ocean – which was fresh, shallow and – as you could probably tell by its name, landlocked. As a result, there was plenty of arable land which was just as good for farming and building as it was for mining (and in certain cases, snorting).

Which explains where all these people came from. Deanna was a good place to farm, either with crops or livestock, and there was enough Lantillium to last a lifetime or two. Lantillium was a kind of nonferrous, nonmagnetic (apolar) metal used to line warp cores in stardrive engines – and also the inside of blaster emitter barrels. It was a rather valuable commodity.

Seeing as there were no intelligent native species living on the planet, (i.e. any other flags already flying there) the Terran Empire planted its flag on it. Over the following decades, the population grew impressively with the help of new settlers, adding their expertise and skills to the workforce and economy. There were miners, farmers, businessmen, administrative staff and generally, just people. There were generations of them now, using schools, hospitals and shopping malls as if they had always been there. Amazingly enough, for those who may be interested, Deanna was already home to over two million citizens of the Empire.

The passenger liner Ossifar Distana was one of the most luxurious of its kind in space anywhere. It ferried the cream of society across the void in opulence and style. Only the wealthiest could afford an apartment on this ship for a trip of any duration, even a short one around the proverbial block. Even the crew was obliged to pay rent.

On any given day, Ossifar Distana carried around 5000 passengers, the actual figure varying slightly depending on where she was on the vast elliptical cruise that took her around the Terran Empire. When she entered the system she carried 4984 passengers, 500 crew, one dead body and one very puzzled Captain.

Captain Harald Biscay rubbed his graying temples, staring deep in thought at the vast star field showing on the large navigation display on the bridge. It had been a pretty rough few days for him. Of all the things he'd seen in his travels through the universe, not many rated worthy of being remembered. Of the few examples of items Captain Biscay rated that highly, when he was a young man, his uncle would often play the bagpipes at strange hours of the night – shortly before being put in a 'home'. That rated a mention.