Bargaining Position

Deep space manned flight is a long-established reality. When governments failed to live up to their own hype, and in fact refused to get of the way, a hardcore group of dedicated people set out on their own. They were immediately followed by the damned, the desperate, the hopeful, and the curious; each have their own own motivations and methods, but generally speaking they are out to make a living. They have largely left Earth to muddle its way out of its own centuries worth of troubles. But there's two catches. Beyond an environment near-instantly lethal to the careless, beyond back-breakingly hard work, beyond distances that can be computed but are more difficult to imagine, beyond all that is catch number one: Unscrupulous operators were among those motivated to head out. Catch number two? Someone else got there first. What begins as a purely speculative prospecting venture quickly escalates into a multi-sided battle for the ultimate prize for a people still learning to live in space. Then it becomes an alien first contact scenario. Only not exactly.