The dereggers owed him a lot of money. But they didn't want to pay. However, he knew a way to get what he wanted and get back at them at the same time. He wrote a contract, iron clad, and had both deregger and galactic witnesses to sign as well as the leadership, smilingly, signed over a solar system that was at the edge of their space in between their space and galactic space. And in the signing, he grinned.
It was a trash planet. Polluted, filthy, air unfit, water unclean, barely anything living.
It had been a trash planet, covered in centuries of detritus the dereggers ditched there, garbage they now just shot into their solar system's sun because it was cheaper than sending it here.
He had a dream, he had a vision, and a planet to turn from a pariah into paradise.
When the DeReggers saw the verdant, green, healthy planet that was a havenworld-like paradise, well, let's just say they regretted signing that contract. -- TrashToTreasure
The difference between garbage and treasure is all in who values what. Dereggers are famous for routinely throwing out anything they don't like but is valued by others. Lots of them devalue the weirdest stuff. Like half the population. Or, in this case, lots of biomass. Food waste is definitely a thing for a lot of Dereggers and for a solid century or so, it was more profitable for them to just chuck everything they didn't want onto one garbage planet on the edge of their territorial claim. Food, defunct technology. Honestly, Humans get very wasteful when they have entire solar systems of resources at their disposal. They drained off the chemistry of an entire gas giant to fertilise their crops. Then they went shopping for a system full of gas giants.
You wouldn't believe it if it wasn't so real for so long and in so many places. Heck, some of it's still going. So. Long story short, this mob of Dereggers was defaulting on their bills so hard that the combined forces of the Alliance were breathing down their necks. It wasn't until the CRC decided to withhold "additional genetic information" - translated, more gene patterns for their gengineered women - that they finally relented and began to negotiate.
Small shock that this Deregger colony, like every other Deregger colony ever, had vastly inflated their holdings and couldn't actually hand across the value they initially promised. I know. I shouldn't have believed them. But here's the trick. This was exactly what I was aiming for. In exchange for a public apology across all of their networks for one week, I would be willing to settle for a trash system they had bordering agreed Alliance shipping lanes. They thought I was a born sucker.
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