[dogscoff]

More of the same, although it definitely needs polish.

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sugarstorm
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Hey sweetheart, can I get you drink? Oh give me a chance here sweetheart, I got the perfect drink for ya. You ever tried a sugarstorm? It’s almost as sweet as you are.

Hey kid, you know how to mix a sugarstorm? Well let’s have two over here, and two beers for me. You know there’s a story behind this drink don’t you? It’s all about what happened a couple years ago on Ceres IIIa. Well, you’d probably know it as Opaque, but the official name is Panorama. Yeah I know, stupid name for a planet, but whatcha gonna do?

Thanks kid, put them on my tab. See what I mean about it being sweet? That’s the sugar in it. Where was I? Oh yeah, the story. Panorama’s actually a pretty barren little rock: Thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, no native life- Nothing much of anything really. That’s not unusual of course, except that they had this experimental terraforming project going on. The idea is they introduce all these special mosses and plants to prepare the soil for crops and turn the atmosphere into oxygen. All this takes centuries though, so in the meantime everyone has to live in pressurised transparent domes and underground levels.

They didn’t just build these domes anywhere though; they put them on this plateau, two kilometres above massive plain. It’s got a line-of-sight over hundreds of kilometres, with these craggy old red mountain ridges stretching away into the distance. Then you had all the introduced mosses and plants, you could see the various colours stretching away into the distance. That’s why they called it Panorama City, and then the planet took its name from there. As well as the terraforming they had all these other experimental technologies, they marketed it as the “city of the future.” With the amazing views as well it was meant to be a kind of tourist magnet for geeky scientific types. Boffins used to fly in from all over the galaxy to stay in these hotels with rooms that jutted out of the cliff-face and looked straight down half a K, or sit at the edge of the dome with a drink and watch the fields of moss slowly change the planet into another Earth.

You enjoying that? You have to sip the first one slowly, sweetheart, get yourself warmed up. Can I get another two beers here kid?

Now the other thing you have to know about this planet is the dust storms. They don’t happen very often, but when they do it’s all raging thousand kph winds and lumps of rock big as dyson-hockey pucks flying around like bullets. And of course that means there’s a risk of the city-domes getting damaged, so they had to come up with a way to protect them.

It’s pretty clever really. They use it all over the place now but this was the first planet to actually try it out. Another of their ‘city of the future’ technologies. It was a big development at the time- they invented this special clear, sticky slimy stuffthat they can pump out the top of each dome. It’s really thick, and it takes like a day or so to trickle all the way down the outside. They’re pumping it out all the time and collecting it at the bottom, so the dome is permanently covered in this layer of clear goop. It lets the light through, but when there’s a storm the goo traps all the dust and flying rocks. Of course then it gets all filled up with crap and after a storm the whole dome turns completely red from the dust, but there’s always clean goo from the top seeping down to replace the dirty stuff. Tourists counted themselves really lucky if they caught a storm, so they could spend a day watching it sweep up the plain toward toward them, blow itself around the dome until everything went red and then they day after they could sit back and watch while the fresh goo from the top slowly pushes the old stuff down like a red curtain, gradually revealing the view outside. Like I say, it used to be a real pretty place to be.

It was the first time I’d been there and I’d just made a nice little wedge on an in-system trip. Easy package, just some paperwork or something- what? Courier? Well I like to think of myself more of an adventurer, sweetheart, you know, like a free spirit.
Anyway, I’d made a good bit of cash out of it and I figured since I was in Ceres I’d stop at Plenty and have a little holiday- get me a tan, maybe find me some company, you know I mean?. Oh, no, I didn’t mean that… hey sweetheart, wait a minute, you haven’t finished your drink. I just meant I wanted to look up some old friends, that’s all.

So anyway, I’m in the spaceport in the morning looking for a ride back to Plenty when I get a call from this woman: Would I like to make some easy money doing a quick surface job? Now I realised then and there that something was wrong because no-one does surface jobs any more. If someone wants something important delivered to an address on the same planet, they do it themselves- even on big planets you can get from pole to pole in an hour, so who the hell is gonna pay the likes of me to run in-planet errands for them? Someone who’s got a good reason not to handle the package themselves, that’s who.

Now I’m no smuggler, I got a good reputation to maintain. There was definitely something dodgy about this deal and normally I wouldn’t it with a docking pylon but since my drop off had been in the spaceport I hadn’t actually seen the city. I gotta wait a whole day for my flight to Plenty and there’s a storm predicted for later in the day, so I figure a little paid sightseeing beats waiting around at the spaceport. The money was right and I’ve got a few ideas to cover my back.

You see, this planet has just the one little city and the spaceport. There are a few little outPosts here and there but really, there’s just the two inhabited areas, right? Now, although all spaceflight is controlled and monitored by the spaceport, it would be pretty easy for a smuggler to make a dirt-landing somewhere, then carry contraband up to the city overland. That’s why at most of these minor domed planets, you find the customs scans at the city gates rather than the spaceport. So that was my problem, and why this lady wanted me to shift her dodgy package around on-planet: Getting it onto the planet wasn’t the problem, getting it into the city was.

Doesn’t matter though, because I had a plan. I was at the spaceport on the equator and Panorama City is about a thousand kilometres north. If I fly in I’ll get dropped straight at the city gates with no way to avoid customs. But, it just so happens I’d been talking about this planet with an old friend a while ago, and he’d told me about another route.

Apparently they run this scenic overland maglev train for the tourists from the spaceport to the city. From the maglev station you can hire an atmosphere suit and take an outdoor tour of the domes before customs. This is the clever bit- You remember that goo I was telling you about? They collect it all back in for recycling, but the recycling facility is actually inside the city-dome, underground. That means all I have to do to get my package past customs is drop it into the goo collection moat at the base of one of the domes. Then I walk into the city, pick up the package from the recycling filters and deliver it. All that’s left then is to pick up my payment, spend a couple hours’ watching the storm from some bar, catch a flight back to the spaceport and I’m off to spend my earnings on the beach back on Plenty.

Well, to start with it all goes more or less to plan. I mean I got sick on the maglev ‘cos I hate travelling overland, and then I had trouble getting away from the outdoor tour group and found there was a 5 metre high fence around the dome. Luckily it’s only a small moon and the gravity was low, so I threw the package over the fence and into the moat pretty easily. I walked through customs and into Panorama City clean and easy. All I had to do was get to the recycling filters.

Like I say this whole goo-process was kind of new at the time, so interested scientific-types could get guided tours around the recycling facility and pumping stations. I booked myself onto one of these, and I knew my package was big enough to get stopped at the first filter so again I snuck away from the tour and headed right there. I rolled up my troUsers and waded in, with all the slime squishing around my legs before getting sucked through the filter under my feet. It wasn’t there yet, so I waited. And I waited. And waited some more.

It gets to the point where I’m running out of time to make the delivery and still get to the spaceport on time. I can tell the storm has already come over because the goo pouring into the filter is getting redder and redder. I’m thinking maybe when I threw the package over the fence it didn’t go all the way into the moat somehow, or maybe it got stuck to the side of the dome and wouldn’t come through for hours, or maybe the cops had found it somehow and were searching for me right now. All these possibilities are going round in my head, and I’m starting to panic.

Eventually I decide to just cut my losses and get the hell out of there. I still had the money from my original delivery, I could just get back to the spaceport, chalk it all up to experience and take off for Plenty. All I’d have lost was the price of the city transfers and the two tours.

I knew something was wrong even before I got up to the surface. People were huddled up everywhere in the underground levels, all scared and panicked. Took me nearly an hour to find out what was wrong. The protective goo had failed somehow, and everyone had been moved underground for safety until the storm passed. The dome hadn’t actually been damaged, but the goo- it had gone brittle. Turns out the woman who gave me the package, she was one of these environmental activist types and gt arrested a week later. She wanted to destroy the terraforming project, so she got this bacteria to wipe out the introduced plants. She wanted to get it into the city to install it into a planet-wide delivery device.

I mean I had no way to know, I just thought it was a package, but it must have split open when I threw it over the fence. Like I say the bacteria was designed for the plants, not the slime, but as it happens the goo was sugar-based and the bacteria just ate it up, crystallised it, fused it to the domes and turned them completely opaque.

You finished that one? OK, you have to drink the second one quickly, but first you swirl it round so it goes from clear to cloudy. You see now how it got the name?
With the domes suddenly opaque in Panorama City, all the amazing views were suddenly gone. These days most people call it Caramel City, or sometimes just Snowball.

The failure of the famous new goo just about finished tourism in the “city of the future.” They’ve been trying to fix the domes ever since but some of the bacteria made it into the environment and with the cost of fighting that they haven’t really had the funds. I was screwed as well, because I missed my flight and with every tourist on the planet was competing for passage out it took me nearly a week to get off-world. By then I’d spent all my money on overpriced hotels so I never did get my holiday on Plenty.

So there you go, you want another one? Or maybe it’s your turn to give me a little sugar, eh? What? Don’t look at me like that sweetheart, it wasn’t my fault. Hey, you can’t just walk out, I just bought you a drink. Two drinks! Hey!