"Your kangaroo burnt down half the planet," he said.
"It's not my kangaroo," Liana replied.
"We find our first new planet, and you put a pyromaniac mammal on it."
"Marsupial. I didn't want the kangaroo killed. It was going to be shot."
"For starting fires."
She almost laughed and forgot she was being interrogated by the Terran Exploration and Research Agency. The kangaroo had learnt how to rub wood, stones, and sometimes metal together to create a spark, setting Western Australia ablaze. They had even caught the three meter boomer focusing the sun rays on dead leaves with an aluminum can.
Fucking kangaroos, she thought. Getting me locked up by TERA.
"What do you call your kangaroo?"
"Not my kangaroo."
"What do you call the kangaroo?" he asked again, removing the possessive.
"Skippy. Like the TV show."
"I don't have a TV," he said. Liana noticed he rubbed his wrist, looking it up.
"Who does?"
"Skippy the Bush Kangaroo?" he said. "Is that where it comes from?"
She paused.
"We call him Skippy the Bushfire Kangaroo."
*
"Dibblewinks, can you tell us again, how you came to Anderson?" the moderator said.
"Dibbsy mate. Told you before. Call me Dibbsy. So I was packaging up a vineyard. A new one. Big. Real big. We were gonna locate it in Argentina so we packed it up, hey. There was plants, robots, stamps, jumps, wire, irrigation, the whole hop."
Once you get him talking about himself that man will not shut up, Nihar thought, we are going to get a mad lib from his brain that will only end when his last neuron is exhausted.
"It was in containers, in orbit," Dibblewinks continued, "it was gonna be four days up in orbit from congestion, no biggie, we have plenty of air, heat, power, hey. Used to have to ship it by sea which would take months but now straight up into orbit and back down a couple of days later. Anyway, then I get a scratch, a tweaky strong scratch."
Nihar and most of the crowd couldn't help themselves, they rubbed their wrists as if they felt the heat from an incoming scratch.
"Who was it?" the moderator asked.
"Galah. It was Galah."
"Your nickname for the richest man on earth."
"Galaxy, he reckons."
There was a light chuckle from the crowd. They were in an open barn that looked over the soft grass plains of Anderson. The first new world humanity had discovered and populated. They were facing the direction with the nicest view for the cameras. Behind them were houses, agricultural equipment and factories, including the very first human artifact on the planet, a vineyard called "Cocka-wank".
"Anyway, he says to me, he says, have you got that vineyard ready? I goes yeh, up in orbit. He says I'm coming to hook your containers up, got the best place for your new vineyard. I am hungover and don't fight hard, it is Galah. Likes to think every decision he makes is a good one. The vineyard containers are airtight and powered so they're good. In orbit you have all these protections, meaning they have to be good for twenty one days, you sing, otherwise they don't go up planet. So Galah says get up in orbit, I'll pick you up."
Sing? Nihar thought, that is a new one. Nihar assumed it was slang he had not heard for "do you hear" or something similar. Traveling to Anderson was seven days with a gravity drive but popular culture on earth accelerated faster when you were cut off from it by a week-long voyage on a spaceship. People and material might move at the speed of compressed space-time but data did not.
The gravity drive was one of those transformational technologies. It went from theory, to large and expensive, to small, cheap and everywhere within a decade. While it was replacing solar panels and batteries, the technology was also making its way into spaceships.
Adventurers quickly found they could get past the solar system and back before their air, water and food ran out. Suddenly anyone with a spaceship was taking a weekend trip to the stars.
The first person to find a habitable planet was Gun Gaard, or GG as he liked to call himself, the same Galah as in Dibblewinks' story. Before telling the world about a beautiful pristine planet he had found, his first action was to make money selling interstellar wine.
"Gaard say why?" Nihar said, getting a glare from Dibblewinks.
"Nothing to do with him. I was on the piss, neutral dial, you know. By the time I thought about it we was locked in like a methane surfer on Titan and the sun a pimple behind us."
"Did you ask where you were going?" the moderator asked.
"Yeh, the containers were in the hangar bay of the ship, so I knew they were safe, ten of them there were, hey. When he showed me how far from earth we were I said to him where we going? Galah says I found a new planet for your grapes."
"And now you are exporting the first interplanetary wine," the moderator said.
"Inter-galactic," Dibblewinks corrected, incorrectly.
"Why did you choose to put your vineyard here?" the moderator asked to keep the story going.
"Galah picked it out. Said he had a river location. We hovered down to the planet with the containers. They hum really bad, rattled my teeth. The river plain was sandy loam with that weird ankle-height grass that is everywhere. No volcanoes which was good, I hate wine made from vines in volcanic soil. Tastes like smoky concrete cleaner, hey.
"So we are admiring the view, and our new," Dibblewinks rolled his eyes for the crowd, "business partnership when we hear this banging from one of the containers. The robots are already out, digging holes, putting in fences, stuff like that so we know it wasn't them. Galah goes, there are eleven containers, thought you said there were ten. I go, yeh ten. He goes you got eleven and that is the one the noise is coming from. I say there must be a rational reason for it. So I open the door of the container and,"
Dibblewinks paused. The crowd tensed in excitement even though they had heard the story a million times by now.
"A fucking massive kangaroo is staring at me like I had taken the last snag from the barbie. The boomer reaches out and grabs my head, he didn't have to lift his arms much as I was staring at his chest anyway. Huge, he was huge.
"So he gets me in a headlock, stands up on his tail, and kicks me in the guts. I go flying. Galah is pissing himself laughing, a mob of kangaroos skips out of the container, and takes off."
"The big kangaroo was our famous Skippy the Bushfire Kangaroo?" the moderator asked.
"Yeh, about a week later that mob of roo arsonists was setting the grass plains on fire. My vineyard wasn't damaged, the bots had got all the firefighting stuff in place before then."
"The impact we have now will be long lasting. There are things we can't undo." Nihar interjected. He could feel the crowd reject his statement. You sound like a scold, he thought, they are enjoying the story.
"The kangaroo wasn't new to arson, was he?" the moderator asked.
"He was already in strife for starting bushfires in Western Australia." Dibblewinks was losing interest now that he wasn't the center of the story.
"And how did they end up in a container?"
"Scientist I employed ages ago, put them in the shipment so they would go to Argentina. Sandgropers were going to shoot him."
"Who was the scientist?"
"Liana. I think."
"She is coming on the ship tomorrow that you will be leaving on."
"Why?" Nihar asked, frowning. First I have heard of it, he thought, the planetary administrator is always the last find out.
"To capture Skippy and return him to earth!"