The Galactic Trader Guild is a mistranslation.

Guilds generally imply exclusivity. Non guild members would be barred from working in areas where the guild controls. In human medieval times, they would be given legal authority to make you stop, or maybe something bad might happen to your business over which the guild claims no responsibility for, wink.

The Galactic Trader Guild was more like an association of beings who have a gentlebeing's agreement not to be dicks to each other. This agreement was loosely followed. Anyone who had a spaceship is automatically considered by others to be part of this "guild".

Since this association was loose, there were no regular guild fees or union dues. Instead, the leaders of the association went around in armed spacecrafts and demanded goods from random hardworking traders they found across the galaxy. They were supposed to collect these to fund the operations of the Trader Guild. In practice, they just fed themselves with most of it.

Since there was little revenue, the Guild had few responsibilities. Most of the duties that they had were ceremonial.

Their most vital, non-ceremonial responsibilities were to welcome new worlds into the galactic community and to set standards and define protocols.

They also had a list of guidelines for traders: don't kill each other, don't hurt each other, don't cheat each other. These guidelines were somewhat followed. It was in their best interests to be civil. Spacecraft owners were rich, after all. Ships were incredibly expensive to build and the accumulation of generations of wealth; throwing them away for some nasty dispute just seemed wasteful to any sensible being.

The Guild's work and traditions were mostly maintained by leaders of a species of humanoids with green scaly heads and two eyes on top called the Ribbiths, who were the first to mount guns on their spacecraft and made sure nobody else did. Earthers call them frogheads. They met once every roughly 13 days, or 1 Ribb cycle, for the sacred duty of reminding the galaxy how utterly worthless they were as an organization.

In today's meeting, they expressed their utmost sympathy to the People of Gakrek, and wished them the best in fixing their problem. That is, that millions of Gaks were dying by the day to starvation.

A resolution was introduced by a member world, the representative from Gak, to force traders to ferry food from planets with food surplus to Gak. Vetoed.

A resolution was introduced by a member world, the representative from Earth, to call for levy of a "tax" from member worlds to relieve the Great Famine of Gak. Vetoed.

A resolution was introduced by a member world, the representative from Earth, to call for food aid donations from member worlds to relieve the Great Famine of Gak. Vetoed.

A resolution was introduced by a member world, the representative from Earth, to call fo-

"Seriously?" Bellowed the big froghead who took his pointless job a bit too seriously, "the Galactic Trader Guild has no authority to call for anything from member worlds! Would the representative from the planet Dirt please sit down!"

He pounded his gavel.

"This resolution is vetoed!"

"That was stupid," Sarah fumed, "another useless institution we have to fix."

Now that she had more virtual wealth and actual power than some if not most governments on Earth, Stearns had been making her read books on economics and government. One of the big themes is the importance of strong institutions.

They didn't have to be governmental or even have a strong enforcement arm, but there must be clear and fair rules to the way people do things.

Obviously, the rest of the galaxy didn't get the memo.

"If you ignore their bi-weekly group therapy session on Galactic-SPAN, they do have some important work," moderated Jen, "for example, they gave us the blueprints for how to build standard spaceports and all that."

"That is true, but I can't imagine the other alien worlds thinking much better of them than Sarah right now. When the time comes, we would probably advocate the creation of a stronger institution with far more teeth than they do, and fold their responsibilities into that new organization," says Stearns, drawing on examples from Earth's past.

"Ok, but for now, we've got a gazillion hungry Gaks to feed."

When the aliens had first landed, the first thing Earth's governments did was to buy their spaceships from them.

It wasn't exactly hard once they figured out the truth about the galaxy. These governments simply offered them a middle class lifestyle in a developed country, an unimaginable improvement on the destitution and poverty of the average galactic species. Most of them were skeptical, thinking they were being shown something along the lines of Potemkin villages.

A few did sell their ships, and got to see the truth for themselves.

NASA, in collaboration with other space agencies, had made several improvements to their new generation spacecraft based off of alien designs. Within a year, what they created was already mostly equivalent in performance specs to the average alien trader craft, but far more comfortable. It had luxuries like entertainment systems, digital controls, and reclining seats, things that were only found in high end government laboratories on other advanced planets.

Countries that previously didn't make investments into space were now building spaceports. Most major cities were building new spaceports dedicated to suborbital space travel. And humanity was spreading out into the stars.

Through a little bit of special interest lobbying and a large chest of money, Galactic Credit had managed to procure a small fleet of NASA's new galactic ranged spacecrafts. Most were still under construction, but one early prototype had made its way into GC's storage in Livermore Spaceport.

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING EARTH

This was a sign at the security gates right outside Livermore Spaceport. It was mostly supposed to be humorous, but it took on a different meaning for some people today.

Sarah, Dr. Stearns, Benny Jr, a civilian expert by the name of Gideon, and a couple of space-rated Special Forces guardians strapped themselves to their seats in preparation for launch.

"These look quite different from what I remembered from watching live Space Shuttle launches back in the day," Stearns remarked.

"Hah, you're not that old, are you?" Benny Jr asked incredulously, "no way, you are. When did the Space Shuttles retire? The 2000s?" He put on his best "wow I'm talking to someone out of a history book" impression.

"Thanks for that," Stearns chuckled, "I hear space removes a few years from your life."

"No sir, the stress on your body actually adds years," it was one of the guardians, whose name tag said Jackson. He added casually, "and don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

"Aww don’t ruin our fantasies," Sarah chided mockingly, "you been to space a few times... Jackson?"

"3 tours of 2 months each, not counting Dagobah," he replied, grinning thinly, referencing the nickname of the famous Space Force training base on Ceres that looked absolutely nothing like the sci-fi swamp planet it was named for.

"Seen any action?" Benny Jr asked, eager to hear war stories.

"Only Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia," Jackson replied, and then pointing at another guardian across from him, "Reese there was in charge of crowd control on our embassy on Olgix a couple months back at the start of the Gakrek Famine."

There was a relatively large Gak refugee community on Olgix due to its proximity, one where the Gak community blamed both the humans and the Olgs for the devastating famine on Gakrek.

An angry crowd had broken through the gates, and guardians narrowly avoided having to fire on the crowd when the Olgix police arrived, who proceeded to do exactly that with their rifles.

"Yeah that was ugly," Reese grunted, "the Olg police just went wild. We had to park an armored carrier in front of them to get them to stop shooting."

"What ended up happening?"

"To the Olgs or the Gaks? Every other week, one of them shoots up a school or bombs a police station on the other side of town. There's only so many ways you can make people you hate go splat or boom, and the aliens... turns out they're exactly like us."

The takeoff was gentle. 1.5 Gs of acceleration. No special training was needed. You could technically sit up if you wanted to, though it wasn't recommended.

Once in orbit, the pilot's voice came over the intercom "we are blinking in 3… 2… 1..."

Nothing happened from the perspective of the passengers, other than the external view monitors now showing an entirely different planet where Earth was a second ago.

Gakrek looks like a massive disaster zone even from space. It reminded Sarah of a satellite photo of an out of control Australian wildfire.

"What a shitshow," Benny Jr stared in wonder and disgust.

"Yeah, that's one of the less mentioned things that happens in a famine. Everything stops working and starts going up in flames," said the disaster management expert, Gideon, "nobody has time to fight fires or keep the dams working when they're starving."

"Look at that," he pointed at a patch of brown continent on the monitor, "that used to all be green fields worked by subsistence Gak farmers. And that," he said pointing at what looked like a large inland lake, "lowlands where levees built thousands of years ago were supposed to keep all that water out, those are supposed to be farmland too. This planet used to look like Earth."

"They wouldn't be like that if there were any harvestable food remaining. I think it's safe to say our models were right. They aren't rebuilding all those farms within one or two years. We'll have to see them for ourselves on the ground, but my takeaway right now is that the only chance they have is food from offworld."

There were no hungry mobs to greet them when they landed. They had landed in the diplomatic and VIP section of the spaceport, where guards had kept the hungry Gaks out. Sarah watched as the cargo of their spacecraft unloaded bags of high calorie density food bars.

No empty space in the cargo hold was left unoccupied.

"Gak adults can survive on less than 300 calories a day. Two of these bars will last them a week," Gideon remarked looking at the nut bars being unloaded and glancing at the mob of hungry Gaks being kept out by the guards, "if these are distributed evenly, this is enough for 2,500 Gaks to survive a year. But they won't be."

"Yup. If we're lucky, the security guards will take a couple bags out front, toss them into the crowd," Stearns sighed, "and the remaining ten tons or so will be disappeared into their own caches of food, which if we're even more lucky, they'll trade some on the side to the hungry crowds for more valuables and heirlooms."

"Why don't we distribute it ourselves?" Sarah asked.

"We wouldn't be able to guarantee your safety-" said Jackson, alarmed.

"Don't tell me you're afraid of the teddy bears," Sarah pointed, "they look like twigs. They can barely stand. Come help me operate the forklift."

They weren't rushed by the mob. The hungry Gaks were too tired to be rushing anyone, and many of them had seen what happened to the stampede the other day.

They lined up, were given a handful of food bars, and fed themselves.

The stench was awful. It was like the poor creatures were literally rotting away.

Luckily, there was enough for everyone at the port that day. At the end of the day, they left the surplus to the guards.

As they handed out the food bars, they occasionally glanced over at the empty landing pads a short distance away.

Not a single trader had come in that day.

"Gak has a short term problem and a long term problem," Sarah reported over FTL video comms to Livermore HQ. Gakrek has a 28 hour cycle, and today, night at the main spaceport was the middle of the day in California, "the short term problem is emergency aid and provisions. They need to get food now. This isn't an economic or academic problem. It's a simple logistics problem. We just need to send them food and our own people to set up distribution channels. As we expected, this isn't an expensive problem to solve, and their government has finally agreed to allow us to bring in our people and food."

"The longer term problem is that their agriculture is, in one word, screwed. They won't be able to build back up in time for the next two harvests. Until that happens, aid will need to constantly be provided. And even if that aid continues, they'll just get back to where they were before, until another bad harvest year comes along and we get the Great Famine two point oh. In the long term, we should be thinking about how to send them money rather than food forever."

"But we'll discuss how to solve the long term problem later. For now, just coordinate with industry and NGOs to get relief packages and volunteer aid workers sent to their closest spaceports. Join the Red Cross, see the galaxy, feed the aliens. Something like that."

"Our own spacelift capabilities are limited, but we can pay traders to deliver our people and the food to Gakrek. Set a price above cost and don't haggle. Call every spaceport, prioritize relief deliveries until the crisis is over. The guys trying to peddle space fridges can wait in orbit a few days longer."

"Let's show these aliens what humanitarianism looks like."

Hatches open. The air of Gakrek rushed into the hulls of the spaceship and the noses of their crews. The entire planet smelled like rotting, dead-

"UNLOAD YOUR CARGO AND STEP AWAY FROM THE ROCKETS! TWO MINUTES!"

Men and women rushed out of their spacecraft, dragging pallets of food supplies. There were everything from boxes of MREs and nutrient bars to sacks of potatoes or rice.

"NINETY SECONDS!"

One of the spacecraft had already finished unloading. Its crew of four sprinted over to the next rocket, helping their workers toss bags of rice out the front into the back of a waiting Toyota pickup that was sent in a previous delivery.

"SIXTY SECONDS GO GO GO!"

Ramps were withdrawn. Hatches were sealed. A line of a dozen rocket fumes appeared in the sky above them. It was the next shift coming in to land.

"THIRTY SECONDS GET TO A SAFE DISTANCE!"

The trucks sped away from the rockets towards the marked safe distance red line, with the aid workers sitting in the back or hanging onto the side. On their way to the hastily setup briefing tent, they passed by 4 empty trucks driving full speed towards the launchpad, cheering them as they went.

Without pomp or ceremony, the outgoing spacecraft lifted off. They vectored away from the incoming ones, which immediately started their final stages of descent. The next crew landed on the concrete pads, no more than three minutes after the previous one had.

The space traffic control crew chief looked around. If any of her people were tiring, they didn't show it. She let out a sigh of relief, and then refilled her lungs:

"UNLOAD YOUR CARGO AND STEP AWAY FROM THE ROCKETS! TWO MINUTES!"

Gordorker woke up to a loud rhythmic almost-buzzing noise outside.

It was a helicopter. He'd seen one at the spaceport before, years ago.

"Attention! Attention!"

He knew it could fly, but he hadn't seen it fly. And he certainly didn't know it could make voices come out of it.

"All heads of household: report to the nearest town center, school, or market as soon as possible for food distribution."

It was the voice of an old authoritative Gak, one who commands respect.

"Attention! Attention!"

Gak volunteers efficiently handed out information packets to each of the 50 or so human newcomers to the planet.

Gideon had been briefing for so long he could do the entire thing in his sleep. He wanted to just record the spiel, but he knew from experience that having people hear a real authority speak in person with confidence was important for morale, even if his voice was beginning to crack.

"Your area of responsibility is marked on your satellite map. Town centers, schools, local markets are marked. We've set up a temporary GPS constellation over the planet and we should have full coverage in our entire service area. If you get lost, call it in."

"We've appropriated a small number of indigenous motorized vehicles combined with the ones we brought in. Collect your vehicle at the makeshift parking lot marked on the map."

"I see some of you brought your own universal translators. Each crew needs one. There are spares on the table right outside."

"Read your local customs guide pamphlet on the way."

"Once you get to your destination, unload your cargo. We've estimated the remaining population of each village and town based on the satellite images we took last night. Ask the local officials how many people they are responsible for. They will exaggerate. They may lie to you. Give them the supplies they ask for anyway and move on. If you run out of supplies, call it in. We will send a new convoy after you."

"When you have completed your route, come back here and receive another map."

Goha was starving and alone.

She had been staying alive on tree bark for weeks. She remembered being a little Gak and her grandparents telling her the story of how they survived on grass, soil, and bark for survival one bad year. This year, the grass had withered because of the drought, and the soil became dust. That left the bark.

Some trees were also starting to die off too, but for the ones left, their bark contained a small amount of calories, just enough to keep her limbs going. She would scrape them off with a small dagger, cut them into small pieces, and cook them in water. After a while, they would be soft enough to almost not hurt her teeth when she chewed. She tried to ignore the grumbling in her stomach as it tried to digest the unappetizing chunks.

She had just finished her unsatisfying meal of cooked bark soup when she heard a sharp, distinct snap of a twig in the forest.

"Who's there," she asked feebly into the wind, pulling her dagger in front of her for protection. She didn't have many possessions, just a few makeshift tools she was using to cook with and a sheet of tarp, generously speaking, that she slept on at night to keep her back warm, but in the great hunger, people have been killed for less.

There was no reply. Just the dry howl of the wind.

She waited. Still nothing.

She pulled her tattered clothes closer to herself and settled down next to her campfire, alert, scared. There should be no animals left in the area; the last one she saw had starved to death months ago.

After a while though, she got tired. It was all just very tiring, and she hadn't had much to eat. Her eyelids drooped, and she fell asleep.

On his way to the town center, Gordorker finally had the courage to check on his neighbors.

He didn't need to step into their house to know what had happened to them. He could smell it from outside their property.

As is custom, he stripped the corpses of Gyuotin and Gyuovin, and burnt their rotting corpses in a makeshift pyre.

It was almost noon. Gordorker ate the last piece of carrot he had packed for the journey, and started heading towards the town center.

The broadcast had said there might be food at the town center but given what he'd seen at the markets, he was not sure how they could be right.

As a Gak farmer, it was healthy not to have high expectations.

When Goha came to, the sun was already up. She must have slept for a while. As she groggily woke from her sleep, she heard voices right next to her.

That woke her up in a hurry. She stood up, looking for her knife, and then immediately tripped and fell onto the ground. Looking down at her legs, there were rope bindings secured around her ankles.

"Ah, you've finally woken up," a voice said over her as she whimpered.

She looked up. There were two big male Gaks standing over her. One of them was inspecting her dagger, "looking for this?"

"Please… I don't have any food," she begged, hoping they'd at least let her keep the only thing that was keeping her alive.

"Now, now, that's just clearly not true," the one who had her knife said, with a scary glint in his eye.

She noticed that one of his eyelids was twitching. She tried to recall why that was important but her brain was not cooperating. It chose today of all days to go on strike without the nutrition it had needed.

They tied her up to a tree. She struggled, but not very much. She was so very tired of... everything.

Then they started a fire. She wondered why. It was not very cold, and they did not seem to have any food either. In her fatigue, Goha managed to stay conscious and moaned out, "what are you doing? Did you find some food?"

As they started boiling a pot of water, it barely registered to Goha that they were using one of her pots. Over her campfire. One of them said, "sure thing, darling. We've got some right here, just wait a little."

She looked around more and her nose twitched. The promise of food overrode all of her other priorities. What did they mean? They clearly had nothing on them other than what they had taken from her as she slept.

That was when it hit her.

She was the food.

Out of fight and struggle, she closed her eyes and waited to die.

The roads were bad.

They've been built to last, but they were first built thousands of years ago, at least.

The satellite map doesn't quite show how terrible the conditions of what can charitably be called mud paths were. Their Gak driver, Grob, was used to these paths, and he seemed to need full concentration to navigate them, so they left him mostly alone.

Gary and Louisa sat on the back of a local equivalent of an old pickup. If it had a functioning suspension system, it didn't show. Luckily the bags of filled rice they were both sitting on dulled the jolt of pain they felt every time it hit a bump or a fallen tree branch.

Gary brought his own translator, but it was unnecessary to communicate with Louisa, who could speak English with barely an accent.

Louisa was 19, from Munich, Germany. She was studying xenomorphology and wanted to become an alien doctor.

Bump.

Gary was 21, from Seattle. This wasn't the first time he's been out of the US. He'd been to Canada. Twice.

Bump.

Louisa loves the great outdoors too and wanted to see the Kheton mountains of Yis'meh one day.

Bump

Gary goes backpack camping near North Bend on weekends. He loves eating dried apricots around a campfire.

Bump.

Louisa was single and-

"Wait a second. Stop the car!" Gary called out to the driver. Louisa was mortified for a second until she saw what he was pointing at.

There was a single trail of smoke in the distance. Following it, they saw a clearing through some trees and there were some figures moving around it.

"Do we have any distribution centers in this area?" Louisa asked.

"Not on my map," Gary replied, "nor are any of our teams coming this way. Let's go check it out."

Gary, Louisa, and Grob approached the clearing with a small bag of potatoes. There were two Gaks, and they were heating up a pot of water.

At least they've had some food to eat, thought Louisa, maybe these guys hunted themselves some local equivalent of a deer or something.

"Hey friends, is there a village nearby?" Gary asked, "we've got some food to give out."

At the sound of his words, they looked up at him pitifully but seemed dumbfounded. As the trio approached the campfire from the other side, they noticed that there was nothing in their pots. Puzzled, Gary started to form a question.

That was when they heard a whimper from across the hearing behind a tree. It was a high pitched female Gak voice, far away enough that even Grob's sensitive ears couldn't make out what she was saying, so he started to walk over and see what was going on.

On the other hand, Gary's translator got more than enough to pick words out of the noise and blurted out in loud, robotic monotone into his left ear, "help… me…"

Gary figured it out a second before Louisa did. The male Gak wielding the knife in front of him saw his expression change, alien as it was to him, and knew the jig was up. He clutched his dagger and approached Gary.

Gary did not have much on him. The Red Cross volunteers weren't sent out with guns, just radios and food. However, unlike the Gaks, he had been fed a healthy human diet of two thousand calories every day for the past 21 years.

Neither of the cannibal Gaks had eaten anything for weeks. There was a reason they waited until Goha was asleep to tie her up.

Louisa screamed. With that distraction, Gary swung the potato bag he had in his left hand, and slugged the menacing alien scum right in the head.

The alien saw the potato bag come for his head, attempted to raise his knife arm, and then he saw nothing and dropped unconscious to the ground.

The other cannibal did not resist. Grob watched the pair very carefully, brandishing Goha's captured dagger at them as Gary untied its owner from the tree and Louisa checked her vitals. Thankfully, she was still alive, drifting in and out of consciousness deliriously.

They cooked potato soup, and fed her back to life. They made sure not to go too fast, as they'd learn in their training to prevent re-feeding.

Gary called the incident in over the radio. The reply was professional and practiced, "there have been many reports of cannibalism all over the planet. Our job here is not to enforce the local laws. You can recognize many of them by a neurodegenerative twitch in their eyelids. Stay safe, and feed everyone you can within reason."

After a bit of discussion, they decided that meant the cannibals were to be fed too. The pair weren't sure why they were left alive, but they speechlessly took the two standard sized ration bags that Louisa offered them, and then slipped off into the woods as soon as Grob allowed them to leave. The humans didn't have the tools and time to keep them tied up anyway.

Goha wasn't nearly as strong and didn't seem to have anywhere else to go. They wrapped up her belongings in her tarp, and carried her with them onto the next stop on the back of the truck. Goha started to thank them, but couldn't seem to find the right words. Louisa nodded knowingly, kindly even, if not pitifully and patted her on the head. There was nothing that needed to be said.

The next stop turned out to be a school building with a couple dozen young Gaks, some even as old as them. After Louisa and Gary handed out the relief aid to the incredulous Gaks who had been wasting away at the schoolhouse, they took Goha in too. Maybe charity was contagious after all.

At this point, it was too dark to move on to their next map location, so the locals offered them a nice flat spot where the volunteers could put up their tents and start a fire. Two of them even offered to stand guard over them, in case there were any other rogue Gaks in the area.

Fifty plus light years away, a digital map on the conference room screen showed the coverage of aid distribution. Gakrek was divided into sectors:

Red meant no aid coverage.

Purple meant some aid has been distributed and efforts are ongoing.

Blue meant aid has been distributed completely.

There was a smattering but growing amount of blue. Most of the map was purple. There was almost no red left on the map, mostly concentrated in the heavily flooded and rural areas.

There was another map on the screen: Earth was divided into areas around each spaceport.

Red meant they were out of relief aid for delivery.

Purple meant they were expected to run out in short order and needed to ask for more donations.

Blue meant there was plenty left to send.

This map was all blue.

It stayed blue.

Louisa liked Gary, and she thought he might feel the same way she did too.

Feelings were running wild and raw after the "skirmish" with the cannibals. At first, she'd told herself, a famine relief mission was not the best place to look for these kinds of relationships.

And that was what she kept telling herself until Louisa found herself clutching his hand next to a crackling campfire, while they both gazed up into the unfamiliar constellations of an alien night sky.