Cerebrus was a classic tale of what was wrong with the 21st Century. It was the saga of greed and rebellion, scoundrels and saints, and a lot of people in the middle just trying to keep the rajyx from the door.
Cerebrus was so close to earth that it had been discovered in the early 1900s by astronomers using telescopes. A small planet with no redeeming scientific oddities, it was cataloged with a number, labeled as a "dead" planet and forgotten. There it remained, in the dustbin of astronomical archives for almost one hundred years. Then it reappeared for the basest of reasons: greed.
And the greed factor was not that deeply hidden. In the intervening century, the population of the world had more than doubled. The strong, centralized governments of the Soviet Union and China had vanished leaving in their wakes thousands of provinces and quasi-independent countries that had tried to buy their way into the future. Selling what natural resources they had, they stripped their land bare for a handful of dollars while their priceless natural resources flooded into Japan, the United States and the European Community. By 2025, the Fourth World, as it was called, was populated with nothing more than agricultural peons, while the first three worlds had a standard of living that would have boggled the mind of their grandparents.
But with the increase standard of living came two insurmountable problems. First, the breadth and depth of technological advance was so great that shortages of strategic minerals were commonplace. In fact, shortages were so pronounced that recycling became such a high profit industry that bands of mercenaries would tunnel into landfills on which cities had been built searching for whatever metal they could find. But still the demand for the metals rose and thus the price.
Second, the population explosion, coupled with the turning of millions of square miles into agricultural belts, changed the weather patterns of earth and condemned thousands of species of animals to extinction. With food shortages looming, there came a colossal standoff between the forces of industry and those of environmentalism. Industry needed the natural resources and agricultural products to sustain economic growth and jobs. The environmentalists saw the business community of the world as being so greedy it would fill its pockets this decade without regard for what would happen in the next.
A compromise of sorts was reached when it was agreed that the spread of agricultural development would be stopped. This would stop the decimation of what natural environment was left. In exchange, any industry wishing to supplement its stockpile of natural resources from planets other than earth would be allowed to operate that portion of their portfolio tax-free for 50 years. No company could claim any planet, no matter how small, but the company was free to exploit the environs as it saw fit as long as it was not inhabited by any life forms.
The success of the compromise stunned even the most seasoned of diplomats. Within a matter of months, space exploration had exploded into a high-tech boom industry. Like the gold rushes of a century before, every means of transportation was employed to get mineral and petroleum exploration people onto planets to rape-and-run on a scale unknown in human history. Ancient space ships in junk yards were salvaged and refitted for passenger service. Launching pads and communication complexes virtually erupted from vacant land and so many geostationary satellite appeared overhead that the United Nations had to meet in special session to restrict the further launching of satellite and dole out the use of the ports of those already in orbit.
Far and away the leader in the race to rape-and-run was the European Community's giant English Petroleum, a privately-owned company that was interested in anything that would make a profit. Petroleum was its primary interest on earth but no one knew what opportunities would arise when their mineral people landed on an unknown planet. For the purposes of their tax status, English Petroleum listed itself as a petroleum company so it could cling some of its earth-bound expenses to the tax-free status of its space exploration deductions. In space exploration, English Petroleum found an accounting nirvana. It could slough billions of its earth-related profits into the tax-free space-related category, even if it never found a drop of oil. All it had to do to receive the tax-free status was to sustain a colony.
So the accountants and engineers plumbed the archives for suitable planets to keep its tax-free status. They had to be close enough to earth to be easy to supply and far away enough to avoid the meddling of the United Nations. Thus was Cerebrus rediscovered and a colony established. Then the unexpected happened: after an initial visit, the English Petroleum geologist predicted that there was a good chance there was oil in quantities great enough to be economic, even considering the oil was 18 months travel from earth.
But the bad news was that there were life forms on Cerebrus.
And there were Basin Riders.
