A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

could mean a large increase in Organization income through the next decade.
    "All this you could read in the Threats news group. But there is another item, something I ask you to keep secret for now: Five days ago, a ship from the Transcend entered our region. It claims to be directly controlled by a Power." The wall behind him became a window upon the visitor. The craft was an irregular collection of spines and limps. A scale bar claimed the thing was only five meters across.
    Ravna felt the hair on her neck prickling. Here in the Middle Beyond they should be relatively safe from the caprice of the Powers. Still ... the visit was an unnerving thing. "What does it want?"
    "Information about the Straumli perversion. In particular, it is very interested in your race. It would give a great deal to take back a living human...."
    Ravna's response was abrupt. "I'm not interested."
    Grondr spread his pale hands. The light glittered from the chitin on the back of his fingers. "It would be an enormous opportunity. A 'prenticeship with the gods. This one has promised to establish an oracle here in return."
    "No!" Ravna half rose from her chair. She was one human, more than twenty thousand light-years from home. That had been a frightening thing in the first days of her 'prenticeship. Since then she had made friends, had learned more of Organization ethics, had come to trust these folk almost as much as people at Sjandra Kei. But ... there was only one halfway trustable oracle on the Net these days, and it was almost ten years old. This Power was tempting Vrinimi Org with fabulous treasure.
    Grondr clicked embarrassment. He waved her back to her chair. "It was only a suggestion. We do not abuse our employees. If you will simply serve as our local expert...."
    Ravna nodded.
    "Good. Frankly, I had not expected you to accept the offer. We have a much more likely volunteer, but one who needs coaching."
    "A human? Here?" Ravna had a standing query in the local directory for other humans. During the last two years she had seen three, and they had just been passing through. "How long has she -- he? -- been here?"
    Grondr said something halfway between a smile and a laugh. "A bit more than a century, though we didn't realize it until a few days ago." The pictures around him shifted. Ravna recognized Relay's "attic," the junkyard of abandoned ships and freight devices that floated just a thousand light-seconds from the archives. "We receive a lot of one-way freight, items shipped in the hope we'll buy or sell on consignment." The view closed on a decrepit vessel, perhaps two hundred meters long, wasp-waisted to support a ramscoop drive. Its ultradrive spines were scarcely more than stubs.
    "A bottom-lugger?" said Ravna.
    Grondr clicked negation. "A dredge. The ship is about thirty thousand years old. Most of that time was spent in a deep penetration of the Slow Zone, plus ten thousand years in the Unthinking Depths."
    Up close now, she could see the hull was finely pitted, the result of millennia of relativistic erosion. Even unpiloted, such expeditions were rare: a deep penetration could not return to the Beyond within the lifetime of its builders. Some would not return within the lifetime of the builders' race . People who launched such missions were just a little weird; People who recovered them could make a solid profit.
    "This one came from very far away, even if it's not quite a jackpot mission. It didn't see anything interesting in the Unthinking Depths -- not surprising given that even simple automation fails there. We sold most of the cargo immediately. The rest we cataloged and forgot ... till the Straumli affair." The starscape vanished. They were looking at a medical display, random limbs and body parts. They looked very human. "In a solar system at the bottom of the Slowness, the dredge found a derelict. The wreck had no ultradrive capability; it was truly a Slow Zone design. The solar system was uninhabited. We speculate the ship