During the next five years, the activity around the Sphere never abated. One statistical analysis showed that it actually increased, though there were standard variation problems with it that—but I can see your eyes glazing over, Jerzy. You apparently don’t share my enthusiasm for stats.
We cheered when there were ship chases with shots and/or rays fired. When a combatant started drifting we watched whether the winner boarded it.
If they did, we closed on the loser when they left. And there was always something valuable for us to find. Despite what our predecessors had thought was wealth, we were actually so tech poor that anything, anything! alien was more valuable than yttrium. Even from one of the scavenger races, more especially if it was HX.
But if the winner didn’t loot the loser, we had to be very cautious. The loser might be all dead or only partly dead, able to hurt us before or after we boarded. Of course that was what most of us preferred; going up against an enemy trying to kill you wasn’t skulking! Many times the loser would repair itself, fight us off, and head to its mother ship. But whenever we could finish off a wounded, unlooted ship, the haul was usually even better. Personally, I never liked doing that. It reminded me too much of massacre stories, the kind that got Injun Fightin’ pulled before its third episode.
Sometimes we got chased, and twice our ships were caught; we rescued several dozen crew from the disabled Astrolabio but the Yuri Gagarin exploded with all hands. On the whole, we were luckier than not, and three years after the Jonas left we’d amassed such a respectable collection of loot that we put it all on the Vito Capitanich and kept her well away from the HX. Two years after that the Gauss became our second treasury ship. After five years we were ready to head home, and we did. With the propulsion improvements we were able to make even without planetfall, it took only 17 more years planetary time before the Solar System enjoyed the first fruits of our exploration. I don’t count Jonas’ battery because, regardless of what he says, it came from somewhere else. … But that’s just me talking.
And up until now, I haven’t talked to anybody who mattered, while everybody listened to Jonas and Czernak kill Osmore’s reputation. They badmouthed “Coward” Osmore for two and a half years before the other eight ships got back, and Jonas’s own original crew were too loyal to contradict them. I think there were two other reasons they and the rest of us returnees were so quiet. Firstly, nobody much wants to go up against a certified hero, which Jonas quickly became. But besides that, none of us really liked Osmore. I think I told you he was bright, tough, and no-nonsense. He was all that. But with it he could be prickly, condescending, and slow to admit the few times he was wrong.
I suppose resenting someone being right nearly all the time is a character flaw, but most of us have it.
And those of us who came back later had another motivation. None of us wanted to tell people what lowlife corpse-pickers we’d been back at the HX. Except for the few who just couldn’t bring themselves to ever do that duty, and they didn’t wanted to make themselves exceptional.
We did bring back a lot of tech, and it soon made a huge difference! The fleets that went out next could travel at .5G, and what leaves these days can maintain a full 1G. (We’re up over 3G for in-Solar System travel when G-loading the cargo won’t hurt it, and there’s no reason to think that’s a cap.) And in Osmore’s analogy, those fleets had BB guns to bring to the gunfight, not just big rocks. They also had a new idea, ironically the idea “Crazy Czernak” first proposed: Perhaps the humans could talk to these other races and trade? The Trading Post program—which is now the most profitable thing humans do at HX sites—was fleshed out after the first expedition came back and talked about what they saw.
So we owe more to “Coward Osmore”, a lot more. He’s the man who insisted the expedition hunt down information when all those around him wanted to hunt for tangible loot. He’s the one who came up with a winning strategy to get tangible loot from what looked like a lose, lose, lose situation, how to make plundering HX sites pay off even when you couldn’t get close to one.
Yeah, talk to Henry Osmore, and then erect a statue of him next to Jonas’s. I guess Jonas deserves one, but Osmore deserves it even more.