Grind their bones for Phlebotinum!

The Timur changed everything.

The ship limped to Leo station under tug power. Its engines were dead. So was half the crew. So was its shaman.

Which was impossible. A ship without a shaman could not pass through hyperspace. The Timur should have been stranded at Shaman System, a hundred light-years from Earth.

The ship should be stranded, the shaman delegation on Earth insisted. If the ship’s hyperspace drive had been made to work without a living shaman, this could only mean the crew of the Timur was guilty of the most profane form of corpse desecration.

To which several human experts had replied, “desecrated…how, exactly?”

We still need shamans to pass through hyperspace, but now it seemed those shamans don’t need to actually be alive at the time.

The Timur destroyed everything.

Thanks to Exxon-von-Steamboldt for helping me put this idea together.

A while back I wrote a novella about resource-extraction and aliens with petroleum for blood. It’s a very nice story, but it had to be set within the solar system in the near future. Set a story like that outside the solar system and if humans got there in the first place, we probably have a better way to find or manufacture Phlebotinum than by ripping it out of the crust of a habitable planet.

But! What about stable transplutonian elements? Say a civilization, at great expense, produces some sort of magical phlebotinum and incorporates it into their biology. Their civilization falls (or at least they lose the ability to make phlebotinum), but their descendants still carry the stuff around in their bodies (how the stuff gets from mommy alien to baby alien is an interesting question. Coprophagy? Cannibalism?) Humans COULD assemble the equipment and energy to synthesize phlebotinum, but it’s far cheaper to just process the bodies of the aliens. Yay! Something awful!