Zakabaran System

Zoron was in love with her new Terra Two. Well, technically it was a lightly used one by one of Earth's corporations, but it was new to her. She had recently traded in her old Terra One and a sizable chunk of change from her bank account for this baby, and it was worth every credit.

It was fast, agile, and most importantly, the larger cargo space meant that she was making more credits every trip.

At first, she stuck to the large, popular routes. They required plenty of volume trucking, and the profits were steady and decent. The risk of a fruitless trip was nonexistent. The galaxy always needed goods from Earth, and Earth always had plenty of surplus.

Then, as she got more familiar with the more powerful trader apps and tools built right into her Terra Two dashboard, Zoron realized that she could use it to graph market listings on Traders Only right onto her routes and optimize her credits income. It would find many smaller ports that were willing to pay high prices for their less fulfilled demands.

One of those routes goes through Zakabara. It wasn't Zakabara Prime; it was one of their colonies. She had briefly read and then ignored the ship computer which gave her a warning that there's a Galactic Union travel advisory for that area, blinked into the system, and started steering her ship in the direction of the main spaceport on Second.

Less than five minutes into sublight, she was interrupted by a 200 kilometer warning on her radar about another ship merging into her path. The face of a large parrot appeared on her viewscreen, screeching:

"Unknown human ship! This area is off limits to all non-Zakabaran traders! Cease engines and get ready for bo-!"

He hadn't even finished his diatribe when she hit the blink engine to Ganymede.

"Back again so soon, Zoron?" A new voice, a human this time, came through her ship communication channel as her face loaded onto her screen, "which froghead was it this time?" The humans had kept a token reserve force here as a form of galactic community service.

They didn't need to commit many ships; just a few to let the pirates know they meant business. That's if there were still any left dumb enough to follow traders through blink now that everyone knew that human ships gathered here.

"Not the Ribbiths, it was the bird faces," Zoron made a face, "I was on my way to Zakabara Second, which had several postings on the market, but apparently their authorities really don't like outsiders today. Which explains the high prices of goods there, I guess."

"Ah," the human nodded sympathetically, "we've gotten a couple reports like that so far, and one even reported they saw a trader shipwreck from someone who must have tried to run their blockade. Be careful out there!"

Gophor, Gakrek

Rey woke up to the smell of potatoes. That was a first.

As she entered the dining room, she saw Grood standing around the new rice cooker that they hooked up to a battery for her, frowning and trying very hard to read the English instructions.

"Did they forget to translate it to Gak? I can help you with that," Rey volunteered and accepted the manual from Grood. She leaned over and saw that Grood had put rice on the bottom and potatoes on a small basket on top, and confused she asked, "they look cooked already. Grood, what's wrong?"

"I read the numbers, and I thought it said to put one cup of water for one cup of rice on the bottom, press the button, and wait after the light changes color to green," Grood complained.

"Yeah," Rey said, confirming the instructions in the booklet, "you got everything right."

"But it ruined the rice!"

"You mean it's not drenched in water like the way you normally cook it? This is what rice looks like whenever I cook it."

Frowning and completely ignoring what Rey said last, Grood said, "I guess I'll just put more water in next time."

That won't work, Rey realized. Like most rice cookers, this one detects the water remaining in the pot to tell when to stop cooking and change the color indicator. Putting more water in will just make it cook slightly longer.

Then again, this might buy them one more meal of not having to eat wet rice, so instead she said, "sure, Grood, that sounds like a plan!"

Gordorker's Farm

While waiting for employee training to start, Rey and Enrico decided to pay a visit to what they foresee as a vital component of their future supply chain.

A classic McDonald's hamburger has six ingredients: beef patty, ketchup, pickle slices, onions, mustard, and of course, the bun.

Ketchup and mustard were relatively easy to import by the barrel. They had few additional cargo requirements, and could store for a long time. Additionally, they require a lot of industrial processing and artificial ingredients that you don't want to think about too much when you eat them. Rey did not even consider these as possibilities for sourcing on Gakrek.

The hardest to import was the beef patty because it required a freezer in the spaceship. Unfortunately, there were no cows yet on Gakrek due to the immense water and startup food requirements of cattle farming. So, they dismissed it as a target for localizing early on as well.

Pickle slices and onions were raw produce and thus simple to make, but they were also relatively easy to import in bulk. Onions can last for months on a shelf and longer in a freezer, whereas pickles will basically last forever, especially the ones that have been treated by the chemicals they use. These were items considered for importation in the long term.

The last ingredient, the bun, was incredibly easy to make due to how much wheat had been grown on Gakrek with the semi-dwarf strains that have been imported from Earth. Furthermore, it was present on almost every single item on their menu. Which was why they're driving into Gordorker's farm to try and see if they could get him and his children to work with their restaurant as a supplier.

Enrico noted that his farm had grown a lot since he last visited. When the famine hit this valley, many families didn't make it. There was no shortage of land for Gordorker to work, and the only real bottleneck for him at the time was that he couldn't farm that much land alone to begin with.

With the investments he made early on in farming equipment and the increasing number of free laborers he had as his children grew older, his growing areas increased in size every time Enrico came.

As they drove up to the house with their two imported Toyota trucks, a number of Gordorker's curious children gathered around them. They tried to peek under the canvas that Enrico had put over the back of his truck to see what he was bringing, but he shushed them away.

Following them out of the house were Gordorker and two of his daughters they recognized, Ghili and Garns.

"Hey Enrico," Gordorker called out, "and is that your new girlfriend my daughters keep talking about?"

"Haha, Gordorker, nice to see you again," Enrico nodded in greeting, "this is Rey, my boss. Rey, Gordorker."

"Nice to meet you too," Rey nodded as well climbing out of her truck, "I've heard a lot of nice things about you too."

"Good, come into the house and tell us why you drove all the way out here!"

After a bit of small talk and his daughter left to go back to work, Enrico got right on to business. "Gordorker, you probably have heard about the food store we built on the spaceport. We expect to sell a lot of hamburgers, and we want to make them with bread buns from your farm."

"Bread buns? Is that very different from the bread that Ghili and Garns make?" Gordorker asked. After all, he was a farmer, not a baker.

"No, they're actually very similar. The base ingredient is grounded wheat flour, which you produce in your farm," Rey answered, "and the yeast, butter, and other ingredients that Gakrek already cheaply imports in bulk from Earth."

"I see," Gordorker replied, and then after a while he asked, "so why can't my daughters just make those for you right now?"

"They already can. Bun bread is a little harder to sell to other Gaks who are used to other kinds of bread," Rey said, "but the bigger problem is that we want to make sure that our bread tastes the same for all of our hamburgers, which means we have to have enough of your buns to start with."

"Ah so we don't make enough?" Gordorker asked, understanding the problem right away. He had been dealing with scaling issues himself on his farm, so he has become more astute in that aspect. Then, he proposed, "that is no issue, I can get more of my kids making bread. We will deliver you more bun breads, no problem, as long as there is a good price for them."

Enrico smiled and said, "that's great Gordorker, and we appreciate that, but based on what I heard talking to Garns, your wood fired oven would never bake enough bread for us, even if all your children were sitting around it waiting for the bread to finish all day."

"So what are you proposing?" asked the frowning Gordorker.

"We want to help you upgrade your baking operation until your daughters can bake so much bread they run out of flour," Rey said, "and then we're going to help you upgrade your grain mill, so you can get more flour faster. And then we're going to help you upgrade your farm, so you produce enough wheat for enough buns to support not only our restaurant but every future McDonald's store that gets built for hundreds of miles around."

They brought Gordorker back out to Enrico's truck, where they unloaded a small industrial oven they'd strap onto the back of the truck. It ran on electricity, and one of the Bhak batteries that Enrico had acquired could power it.

"Ah, I see," Gordorker smiled and said, finally getting it, "you're here to sell me this oven so we can bake more bread buns to sell you."

"Got it in one," Enrico beamed, "this model here, including the battery and shipping, is 2,500 credits. Our partners in Chicago have generously decided to subsidize a lot of your upgrades with a grant, so it will only cost you 500."

Then, pointing at the five electric-powered mills connected to a single power strip also connected to a battery, he introduced, "and these are electric mills for grinding wheat down into flour. They cost 500 credits each, and so these five will cost you 500 after we help you pay for some of it."

"I see," Gordorker said, running the numbers in his brain. Knowing how honest Enrico is, he believed that the prices and the discounts were real, so he could in theory take these and turn around and sell them for much higher prices at the market… but that would be wrong, and he would be killing off a major business opportunity here. "I am very interested in this. How much bread would you be buying from us?"

Rey chuckled kindly and said, "you've almost got it, Gordorker, but not quite. This whole operation isn't about how much bread we can buy; it's about how much bread you can make. We'll buy every single one."

Some more explanation took place regarding the price of each bun, and incentives for hitting quality and quantity targets. Because Rey was basically gifting him most of the machinery, she could basically set his profits, but she didn't want to squeeze every cent of profit she could out of Gordorker.

The point here was to give him enough room to get started, and to allow him to make enough profit to keep growing year after year. And whatever reasonable price she set, it was going to be cheaper than transporting it from Earth.

The first local Gakrek bun breads would be delivered to the Golden Arches a couple of weeks after their opening.

"Oh yeah, and one more thing," Enrico said. He tossed his truck keys to a surprised Ghili watching the discussion, "get in the driver's seat. I'm going to teach you how to drive."

Outskirts of Gophor Spaceport

If Goha could mark her fortunes on a chart, it would be divided straight into two parts: before the humans arrived, and after. Things didn't go well before.

Her parents were farmers, as their parents were. They had noticed the dropping yields of their crops for decades due to soil-damaging dry farming practices that ended up eroding the soil of its nutrients and water, but they hadn't understood why things were that bad at the time.

Then, the drought and the dust storms hit.

At first, they had just enough family heirlooms and other high-value supplies to trade for food at the spaceport. Then, as the famine started, fewer and fewer traders came in with food at the market, until none came. They began to starve. Goha's parents made the choice that their children should live instead of them, so they fed Goha and her siblings with all the food they had remaining. Until they ran out of strength and dropped.

That didn't save her siblings, who also starved to death shortly after.

Goha survived on hunting, foraging, and then eventually eating tree bark to sustain herself in the wild until she was captured by rogue Gaks turned cannibals by the famine. They were getting ready to roast her when everything changed.

The humans saved her from them, and drove her to a nearby village that they supplied with plenty of food.

From there and from her visits to the spaceport, she learned from the alien volunteers from Earth. She was fed. She was taught to read and write. And when she went back to her parents' farm to cremate the dead bodies of her family, two of them went with her to help her grieve her loss.

James and Charlotte, two elderly retired farmers from Idaho, came with her to help her start a new life.

At first, Goha thought they just wanted to take over her farm and start growing food for themselves there. Which was fine by her. She wasn't sure she wanted to continue the family business, and the humans saved her life. She wasn't going to say no to them if they wanted to just grow some crops on the farm.

Then, they insisted on including her in the process, teaching her everything from proper soil management, to irrigation, to using the new tools that were starting to be sold by the vendors at the spaceport.

They grew potatoes. Of all the major crops the humans grew, it was the one that needed the least water, which suited the now dry climate of Gakrek just fine. They imported a breed from James and Charlotte's home, one that required a bit more care and fertilizer than other potato breeds, but produced big beautiful tubers.

The first harvest was great. They had enough potatoes to feed the entire village if they had to. Pretty soon, her neighbors started coming by to learn potato techniques from her human friends who were now living with her. They, too, started to grow potatoes.

Charlotte taught them how to avoid problems, like allowing a disease called blight to wipe out everyone's crop all at once. She wasn't sure this was going to become a problem on Gakrek given how dry it was. But as she would often say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. They left spaces between the different farmlands to isolate potentially bad crops if they popped up.

When the relief volunteers and her human friends left, every farmer in the entire northern outskirts of Gophor were planting one strain of Idaho potatoes or another. They formed a farmer's association, where they shared information on market prices, new techniques, and took turns selling at the spaceport.

Goha settled into a routine. Things were going great. The humans made things better.

"The rice is ruined again!" Grood whined.

She had put more water into the rice pot as she said she would, to predictable results. Because the rice cooker cooked longer than it should have, some rice around the edges had even gotten crispy brown.

"Mmmm," Enrico said happily as he dug out some of the slightly burnt rice straight into his chewing mouth, "this is delicious, Grood. I don't know what you're talking about!"

Grood ignored him. She was busy reading the instruction manual to see if there were any hidden insights on it that she missed at first reading.

Gophor Spaceport

Goha was carrying a big wheelbarrow of potato crops to sell at the spaceport when she noticed the large new permanent structure next to the food tents with its golden arches on the outside.

She slowly read the sign in front of the store. It said, "GRAND OPENING NEXT WEEK" in Gak.

Curious, Goha walked into the store, where she noticed a lot of activity going on in the back of the store. A short plump Gak came out and approached her yelling, "we're not open yet! Come back next week!"

"What is opening next week?" Goha asked, recognizing him from somewhere. Ah, the food tent.

"Our restaurant!" he replied, "I'm Goripli by the way!"

"Yeah, you're the soda farmer," Goha recalled, "I'm Goha."

"Ah, of course, the potato vendor!" he said, smiling. He'd recognized her too and said, "I'm helping train some of our other employees in the kitchen, and we're going to have a great big opening next week and start selling food!"

"Oh, that's very interesting," Goha said politely. Then, what she read on the menu they were putting up piqued her actual interest. She asked, a little afraid of the answer, "fried potatoes? You're going to sell potatoes here too?"

Goha generally didn't mind competition from the other farmers; the Gaks had plenty of appetite for potatoes, and she sold more than enough to pad her growing credit balance. But she counted more than ten Gaks in the back and the colorful signs they were putting up looked like they were going to start selling A LOT of potatoes.

"Yeah! We import them from Earth," Goripli replied enthusiastically, "they come to us in frozen bags, and all we have to do is cook them!"

Goha was conflicted. On one hand, her potatoes were originally from Earth too, and she loved the humans. On the other hand, these guys weren't part of her farmer's association, and she didn't want to be put out of business by a bunch of new vendors from the spaceport.

"How much are you selling fried potatoes for?" she asked, stalling so she could get a handle on her thoughts.

"Well they're usually sold as part of a meal, but alone, they would be a little over 2 credits in our boxes," Goripli replied, pointing to a stack of small red boxes on a shelf in the back of the restaurant.

Goha internally breathed a sigh of relief. Two credits for that small container! That was at least twenty times the price of her potatoes. There's no way that other Gaks were going to buy their fried potatoes over hers in the food tent. She cautiously said, "that seems a bit pricey."

"Yeah, we have to import them all the way from Earth," he replied, "but I've heard Enrico say we're looking for suppliers for bread." His brain whirred while he connected some dots in there, and then added, "Goha, you sell potatoes! You should talk to Rey and Enrico, maybe they'll buy potatoes from you?"

"Buy potatoes from me? Why would they buy potatoes from me here and then sell them for so much more money right next doors? Who would buy that?" she asked. She'd never heard of this kind of business before, but she knew Enrico. If he was behind an idea, it was probably not a bad one.

"We cut and cook them for customers!" Goripli said. He was used to answering questions like these for the locals, "and expensive as the prices are, the traders from outer space have a lot of credits, and they will buy from us!"

"Anyway, wait here. I'm going to go get Enrico upstairs. Maybe he would be interested in your potatoes."

Enrico was showing two Gaks how to properly clean the nozzles on their soda fountain machines when Goripli came up, yelling at him from the stairs, "hey Enrico, there's a potato farmer downstairs."

"A potato farmer?" he asked, confused.

"Yeah," Goripli replied, "didn't you say last week the imported fried potatoes were costing us many credits because they need to be frozen in the spaceship? She's a local farmer, and she sells for much less."

Okay, that is a frightening amount of initiative for a soda merchant turned fast food worker, Enrico thought to himself. Then he said, "alright, I'm coming."

Upon seeing Goha, Enrico's eyes lit up, "ah, it's Goha, isn't it? Nice to see you again."

"Hi Enrico," she blushed. She didn't expect the human to remember her name. "Goripli said you're going to start selling potatoes here too?"

Sensing her trepidation, he quickly replied, "fried potatoes. We're not selling potatoes like you. We're going to sell fried ones to traders already cooked so they can just grab lunch here."

"Ah," she replied, her fears mildly assuaged and sensing opportunity, "Goripli said you might be interested in buying my potatoes to cook, I think?"

"Hmmm, we need a lot of potatoes, yes, but we buy them in bulk from Earth. We don't do small volume. So unless you have a lot more potatoes to sell and we get a machine to cut them…" Enrico trailed off, hoping she'd get the message.

"I see," Goha said, "how much is bulk?"

North Gophor Farmers Association Meeting

"… and so I did some math on the number of potatoes we grow," Goha concluded, "and we have enough that they would buy from us if we pooled all of our harvests together and sold it to them together."

The concept of wholesaling was new to many of the dozens of farmers at the meeting. Most of the time, the way they did business was they just brought a big sack of potatoes to the food tents at the spaceport, sold it all one by one, and then went home.

The idea that they wouldn't have to wait all day at the vendor tents, that they could just dump it all to a single willing buyer… it was an attractive one. Even if it would mean giving up their opportunity to haggle for a higher price with every customer.

"How much are they offering us?" one farmer asked.

"It's not a fixed set price for each bag of potatoes. Enrico said they would set the price at a point where we would make a profit," Goha replied honestly, echoing his words from earlier.

There was a murmur through the crowd. This was crazy. Let the buyers set the price? Even if it was Enrico, which many of them knew… There's no way that this is a legitimate enterprise, some thought.

"This sounds like a scam," a farmer said, "they'll just pay us the least amount of money possible!"

"Yeah! How are we supposed to run a business without knowing how much money they're going to pay us?" another farmer asked the question that was on everyone's minds.

"It's called an open-book contract," Goha repeated. She wasn't entirely sold on the idea at first, but came around to it when Enrico explained more of how it worked, "we tell them how much it cost us to grow potatoes, and they pay us twice that amount when we hand them the goods."

Some of the objections died down as the farmers started calculating their costs and normal pricing strategies. They could double their initial investment! Every harvest possibly. Many farmers got more serious about the offer. It meant that as long as Enrico's restaurant bought from them, it was unlikely that they wouldn't make a larger profit, even in a below average year. Especially in a below average year.

"And you say they'll buy all our potatoes?" one hesitant farmer asked.

"They have a rule that all the potatoes have to be longer than your paws because they want to cut long strips out of them," Goha gestured with an open paw, "but other than that, Enrico said he would take as many potatoes as we can grow."

"How would they know whether we're telling the truth about how much it cost us to grow the potatoes?" one particularly devious farmer asked slyly, oblivious to the disapproving glares some of his fellow farmers were throwing his way.

"Gomin!" one of his neighbors called out, "If you try to cheat the humans and drive away our business, we're going to be the first to come burn down your farm!"

And so, it was decided for most of them. There were more negotiations with the restaurant regarding the logistics of when and how the potatoes were to be delivered, and they had to import a cutting machine to quickly cut strips of fries out of the potatoes, but they had gotten the supply chain replacement approved in Chicago.

The first local Gakrek potatoes would be delivered to the Golden Arches a couple of months after their opening.

"Aha, I figured it out," Grood claimed triumphantly.

Rey looked over at her dinner. It was, as expected, wet rice. She wasn't sure how that was possible with the foolproof rice cooker that Enrico had gotten Grood. It had specifically been a model that vented the steam in a way that made wet rice impossible. They were both tired of porridge. She asked warily, "how'd you manage it, Grood?"

"It's simple. I figured out how this machine works! It keeps cooking until all the water is gone, so it always comes out too dry," Grood explained, waving her spatula around like a teacher, "all you have to do is put in twice the amount of water it says to. And then, you wait until it's half done cooking off all the water, and you lift the lid…"

Rey saw Enrico repeatedly slap his palm up into his forehead right next to her.

It must be a law of nature, she realized. It is physically impossible to create a cooking device that prevents a Gak from making rice the way they wanted to.

"The potatoes will arrive in a couple of months," Enrico said as he laid down on his straw mat, "the farmers are gonna sell us all that they can grow."

"Good," Rey replied, "and they can keep the small ones for themselves to sell to other Gaks."

"Right, they've got enough of those that there won't be another famine if there's a bad harvest year again. And we gotta find a way to boost their production because what they have is barely enough for our restaurant, not to mention the other franchises headquarters mentioned they were looking at."

After a bit of silent pondering in her head, Rey said, "I can't sleep," turning on her side to face Enrico, "what if nobody shows up when we open tomorrow?"

"We did everything we possibly could, right?" he asked.

"Yeah, I think so," she said, still fretting, "all our preparations should be in place but what if only fifty people showed up-"

"Then it's out of our hands," Enrico said sleepily and yawned hard. It had been a long day of negotiations and training the employees for him.

"Hold my hand," Rey said as she snaked her arm out of her sleeping bag and extended it towards him. Enrico took it in his warm palms, and threaded his fingers into hers. They both laid like that for a while.

A few minutes of staring at the ceiling, Rey asked, "Enrico, when all this calms down, do you think-" She looked over at him shyly, trying to decide what to say next.

He was already asleep.

Langley, Earth

"Isn't this kind of what we want to see?" Cathy asked, frowning at the report in front of her. There was a map of hundreds of armed Zakabaran ships dotted throughout their system and subsequent pages detailing coordinates and general specifications of every single ship they had. "If they're preparing for war with someone, wouldn't there be more ships staging outside the system? Many of these don't even appear to have FTL drives…"

"Look closer at where their deployments are in their system," Mark said.

She took another look. There were a few ships loitering around Prime, whereas the remaining of them are clustered around…

"Their colony! They're getting ready to start a war with their own colony?" Cathy asked, astonished.

"Well, it wouldn't be a war. The guys on the colony don't have military ships," Mark said, "this is looking more like it'll be an occupation for the Primers to ensure that their colony doesn't just keep funneling their goods and credits out of the system into the rest of the galaxy."

"And we can't exactly intervene now after we explicitly promised not to do so at the Galactic Union," Cathy summed up in a disappointed tone, "not that we would have done much anyway given that it is their colony still. When do we expect the siege to start?"

"If what we're hearing from the traders is accurate, they're already blockading the space above Zakabara Second," Mark sighed, "that's why they even bothered to disclose their deployments."

"Isn't blockading another planet considered an act of war explicitly banned by the Galactic Union? How does this even work if they're the same species?"

"That," Mark said ominously, "is the million credit question…"