Tales from the Inbox: The Swindler’s Confrontation

2953-11-05– Tales from the Inbox: The Swindler’s Confrontation 

Albie Schmelling, as it turned out, was not particularly difficult to find, though he probably thought he was keeping a low profile. When they found him in the lounge abutting the passenger liner docks, the cup of cold coffee by his elbow and the subtle bags under his eyes suggested he’d been there far longer than he had any proper business to be. 

Though Schmelling noticed Mari Robertson as she came in and rose to scuttle out the opposite end of the lounge, he only ran into Eddy Rothbauer, who’d gone around to cover that exit.  

“Albie! Long time.” Eddy fixed the bigger man with a humorless grin and gestured toward a table in the corner. “You must tell me what you’ve been up to!” Eddy was, of course, heavily armed at all times. Schmelling, as a former co-conspirator in ill-fated money-making schemes, knew that perfectly well.  

Schmelling, glancing around to see Mari behind him with her arms folded, shrugged. “I would love to, but I don’t have much time-” 

“Then we won’t take much of it.” Eddy clapped a hand on Schmelling’s shoulder. “We’re busy today, too.” 

Schmelling permitted himself to be led to the table, and Mari sat down next to him while Eddy took the seat opposite. Almost the moment his rear touched the cushion, Eddy started talking. “It wasn’t me. Honest it wasn’t. I don’t care who-” 

“Woah, hold on.” Mari held up her hand. “Albie, we don’t care. There’s not going to be an official complaint, as long as you give back the money right now.” 

“The money?” Schmelling paled. “That’s all you’re here for?” 

Eddy leaned forward. “Well, what did you think we were after?” 

“Slander, as usual. You know only too well all the things people will say about me when-” 

“When they’ve had the misfortune of spending any time with you.” Mari shook her head. “Whose daughter was it this time?” 

“What? No, I would never!” Schmelling chuckled nervously. “What would give you an idea like that?” 

Eddy and Mari both shuddered; they’d seen his womanizing and preference for younger partners in far too great detail to believe his denials. Mari's previous arrangement with him had foundered on his repeated insistence on pursuing naive young women instead of attending to their business.  

“No, no, it’s nothing, really. Just a misunderstanding. Should be taken care of tomorrow.” 

“Sure, a lot of things will be settled for you when the Otto Bofors shoves off with you on it.” Mari grinned. “You really need to come up with some new aliases, you know. Transit tickets are public records.” 

Schmelling groaned. “Come on guys. You know how it is. If you’d made a score like this, you’d be-” 

“On the fastest hull out of the Sprawl, yeah.” Eddy waved his hand. “But we didn’t. The people you robbed hired us to get their money back. And that’s how we make our score. Sure, it's smaller, but we don’t have to run.” 

Mari, recalling the datapack sitting under the bench in Rennecker’s suppressed a wince, feeling that she was correctly placed on Schmelling’s side of the table. Captured by officialdom or no, Eddy was at least for the moment engaged in pure white-hattery, that is, jobs in the grey trades that required no moral compromise and whose wages were clean. In a way, she envied that; if the Glitters had mostly white-hat work for him, perhaps capture wasn’t so bad. 

“I worked so hard for this, Eddy.” Schmelling wrung his big hands. “Look, I’ll give you a cut to go interrogate someone else until I’m gone.” 

“Just give the money back.” Eddy rolled his eyes. “Or if you’ve got it in hard chits, give it to me, and I’ll take it back. Nobody would ever trace it to you.” 

“Come on...” Schmelling glanced between them. “We can work something out.” 

“What baffles me, though.” Mari leaned in. “Is how you of all people tricked the Glitters. You’ve got more tics than a chronometer for anyone who knows what to look for, and they pick up on those really fast.” 

“That’s, ah, not how it is.” Schmelling looked down at the table. “I didn’t have to fool them. I had... a sort of go-between, yeah?” 

Eddy scowled. “You got some girl to believe you. And to take your idea to the Glitters. Because she was so earnest, they never saw the scam.” 

“Err, basically.” Schmelling shrugged. “You gotta do what you gotta do.” 

“What do you think is going to happen to her when you get off-station?” Eddy growled. “Even for you, letting a girl take the fall is low.” 

“I wouldn’t-” Schmelling looked up, brow furrowed, but at that moment, Mari noticed someone coming across the lounge toward them, and gestured for the men to be quiet. It was a woman, youngish, slim to the point of looking underfed. She was dressed in a simple overcoat draped over a modest smart-fabric jumpsuit, with a heavy layer of inexpertly-applied makeup on her face doing its best to hide her extreme stress and fatigue. 

“Herman, who are your friends?” The girl – Mari couldn’t think of her as anything else after hearing her quavering, falsetto voice – approached the table and put a hand on Schmelling’s arm. “Is everything all right?” 

“Former business partners, my dear.” Schmelling held up a hand. “Just finalizing a few loose ends before we depart.” 

The girl looked at Eddy, then at Mari, and with a nervous smile, retreated back toward the food-fabs at the other end of the lounge. 

“She still doesn’t know it was a scam, does she?” Eddy nudged Schmelling. 

“No, she hasn’t a clue.” Schmelling sighed. “She’s booked for the Bofors with me. I figured we could live it up for a few months until the money ran dry, and then...” 

“And then you’d be bored with her anyway, and vanish. On to bigger swindles.” Mari hissed. 

“Maybe not!” Schmelling shook his head unconvincingly. 

“I'm going to watch you give her the money and tell her the truth, Albie.” Eddy drummed the fingers of his left hand on the table while his right hand slid down toward one of his pistol holsters. “Then I’m going to watch you get on that ship. And I’m not going to watch you come back, do you understand?” 

Schmelling winced, face pale. “I can’t-” 

“Trust me. You can.” 

Eddy Rothbauer and Mari Robertson are, most likely, pseudonyms. I was surprised to find un-anonymized names in this account, as you likely have been; these are even the names of people who really are Sprawl residents, but likely they are people unrelated to this business. These names seem to have been picked because they are common: as of this posting there are three Edward Rothbauers on the station and no less than four residents with some variant of the name Maria Robertson. 

The name Albie Schmelling, however, seems to be the real name of a real con-artist who was a Sprawl resident until very recently. He departed the station under unknown circumstances in mid-September and has not been recorded aboard since. One of the motivations for submitting this account seems to be warning people of Schmelling’s predations, though if he has as many aliases as our submitter suggests, I’m not sure how much good this warning is going to do. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Criminal’s Preoccupation

2953-10-29 – Tales from the Inbox: The Criminal’s Preoccupation 

Mari Robertson arrived at the front of the Songbird’s Roost before her friend Eddy Rothbauer. Despite its whimsical name, the Songbird was one of the roughest bars in the entire Sprawl complex; the sign depicted not one of Earth’s many colorful singing avians, but a flightless xeno-specimen with a jagged beak and a predatory gleam in its eyes. No doubt the proprietor thought this amusing, but Mari had always thought the place would be more intimidating still if its advertisement was as whimsical as its name. 

Mari had of course already sent out the queries she’d promised Eddy. She knew most of the people on the station who supplied questionably moral but not officially illegal demand to the many visitors coming through Sagittarius Gate. Surely if one of them had vanished with a large sum of money, one of the others would have heard of it, and besides, anyone who didn’t respond within a few minutes to a vague query about high value business was probably a suspect anyway. 

As she loitered across from the Songbird’s door, Mari was thinking, however, of the datapack, not of Eddy, his friends, and their missing money. If she could bury herself in this problem, it would give her an excellent alibi for the theft whenever it was discovered, and in the mean time it was, while not precisely safe, stashed somewhere that didn’t trace back to her. If it were found by someone else, she’d be out a massive payout in a few weeks or months, but at least the chance of trouble was looking remote. 

Eddy appeared from the direction of the nearest public lift well, and Mari waited until he was about to enter the Songbird before darting across the concourse and sliding her arm into his. As they went in, the murmur of pedestrian traffic was drowned out by the crashing music that always filled the bar, making it impossible for anyone to overhear anyone even at the next table.  

The loud music was, Mari suspected, an anti-brawling measure more than anything else; if people couldn’t hear each other, they couldn’t take umbrage at snide comments made in nearby conversations. It certainly made the place convenient for any conversation one wanted to guarantee was held off the record; most recording technology simply couldn’t filter out the discordant music enough to make speech intelligible later. 

Mari slid into a booth along the left wall, and Eddy sat down next to her, leaving the seat opposite vacant. They’d be able to converse in low tones better this way, and it would make her being approached by libidinous patrons somewhat less likely.  

“Do we know who the Glitters were dealing with?” Mari poked the hard-button table interface to order a pair of drinks. 

“They gave me a name, but it’s an alias.” Eddy shook his head. “No records in the station system of a person by that name. It’s not one I’ve seen any of the usual suspects use either.” 

Mari nodded. “Someone scammed them. Aren’t they supposed to be nearly telepathic? Who scams a telepath anyway?” 

“They can't read minds.” Eddy shrugged. “They’re just really observant. At least that’s what they say.” 

“Even if they aren’t.” Mari waved her hand, suppressing a shudder at how close to home this conversation was. “Still sounds like a death wish.” 

“Sounds like a good way to be at their mercy.” Eddy nodded. “That might be worse than being dead. They’re basically all diplomats, and diplomat is just another word for politician.” 

He didn’t need to explain this; they had both escaped the mesh-network of interwoven petty dictatorships that was the Silver Strand. It was a fine line to walk, doing odd black work for the rich and influential, without being dragged into their orbit, and one scam gone bad would send the perpetrator spiraling down into such a gravity well from which there was rarely any escape. 

Mari opened her mouth to mention that her queries were still not conclusive, but a hard set to Eddy’s jaw gave her pause. She realized with a start that he’d spoken from far too personal experience – he was on that spiraling course already, prioritizing the needs of the Gilhedat councilors for a quick turnaround because the alternative was them letting the station authorities know about something they had caught him doing. In that moment, she soured on the idea of ever going back for that datapack. She felt bad for Eddy, but she couldn’t help him, she could only help herself. 

“I had worried it was you, actually.” Eddy looked hard at Mari. “You looked like you had seen a ghost when those Gilhedat followed me into Rennecker’s.” 

“Me?” Mari smiled. “If it was, I’d have cut you in already, and we’d both be on a transport to somewhere anonymous and remote.” She couldn’t help but wince; if Eddy was already snared, he couldn’t have accepted such generosity, but she couldn’t let on that she’d guessed his predicament. 

“Sure.” Eddy smiled back doubtfully. “We’ve got to move fast to make sure whoever did it, isn’t doing that right now. Who do you reckon we start with?” 

“My queries aren’t done, but based on the responses I’ve got and I haven’t got, I say we pay Schmelling a visit. This is something he’s dumb enough to try.” 

Eddy rolled his eyes. Albie Schmelling was a big, bluff Philadelphian who managed somehow to be one of the station’s most effective con-men. Neither of them liked him very much. “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” 

Their drink bottles arrived from the delivery chute, and Eddy reached over to drop a few chits into the payment receptacle. “Drink up. I’ll look to see if he has any outbound bookings.” 

Mari’s fear of being pulled out of the grey trades and into being a semi-official agent for some flavor of officialdom is strange to most of us; it would seem this is an easy path to legitimacy for such a person who wanted out of their high risk lifestyle while still using all their existing skills. One should keep in mind however that personal autonomy (if only for the purposes of misusing one’s talents and time) is highly prized by those who find themselves drawn to this sort of lifestyle; they resent anything that smells like having a permanent boss. 

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Tales from the Inbox: Criminally Inconvenient Timing

2953-10-22 – Tales from the Inbox: Criminally Inconvenient Timing 

Eddy Rothbauer scanned the lightly populated Rennecker’s dining space. Mari Robertson ducked her head down as if reading something on her wristcuff in her lap, but it was no use; he noticed her in moments, waved, and headed for her corner booth. 

Cursing under her breath, Mari set down her sandwich and waved back tepidly. Eddy couldn’t avoid noticing something was up if he stayed long enough. Mari’s only hope was that he knew to keep his trap shut in front of his unfortunate choice in friends. 

“I thought I might find you here.” Eddy slid into the booth across from Mari, while the two figures in the brown cloaks remained standing, arms folded and heads down. “This lot’s hiring, and it’s going to be more than I can handle on my own. You want in?” 

Normally, of course, Mari would have leapt at the prospect of a high-budget, semi-official gig funded by the deep pockets of alien diplomats. Today, however, she wanted nothing more than to beg off. She opened her mouth to offer the first excuse that came to mind, but hesitated. Would denying such an offer be considered suspicious, when the investigation over the missing data-pack started? “I’d sure consider it, Eddy, but I don't really want to talk business while my food gets cold. Have them send over the terms and I’ll let you know by the end of the shift, okay?” 

“Sure, sure.” Eddy looked up to one of the robed figures, who nodded without looking up. “This is, uh. Time sensitive.” 

Mari took a bite of her sandwich to make hiding a scowl less noticeable. “It... usually is.” She pointedly spoke with her mouth full, to remind him that she was supposed to be eating. The ersatz beef in the sandwich tasted fine, but as usual, she found herself wishing it was the real thing. The added need to eat as casually as possible when she was on edge didn’t help the experience, of course. 

Eddy, overly observant oaf that he was, noticed right away that something wasn’t to Mari’s liking. “Something wrong?” He gestured to the food. 

“Eh.” Mari shrugged and set the sandwich down. What could she do to give Eddy the hint without raising suspicions from his new friends? “How uh. How time sensitive are we talking?” 

“I was hoping to have an answer already. These guys want something moving right away.” Eddy shrugged apologetically. “It’s all right if you’d rather not. I can probably get Orrie to -” 

Mari winced. Orrie was competent, but she was also Eddy’s recently separated ex, and she knew he hadn’t recovered from that mess. But how could she go right to work for the Glitters while she was still carrying something she’d lifted from them? She’d have to stash it. “Okay, fine. What’s the job?” 

“It’s, ah. Apparently pretty delicate.” Eddy glanced up at the two figures standing over them, “These guys have some... let’s call it grey-market business they’ve been doing, and their partners up and vanished with a lot of money. They want us to find out what happened, and to try to get anything back we can.” 

Mari ate as Eddy talked, trying to ignore the two figures and attend only to him. She nodded along, then let the silence hang in the air when he finished for several seconds. “And they need this done fast?” 

“By this time tomorrow, more or less.” 

Mari sighed. She couldn’t really be herself if she let this pass her by, especially if it meant sending Eddy back into the clutches of the woman who’d only recently jilted him. It wouldn’t pay as much as the datapack, but it would pay out far more quickly. “Can you give me half an hour? I’ll run some queries and meet you over at the Songbird.” 

Eddy glanced up at his associates, one of whom nodded imperceptibly. “Okay.” He slid out of the booth. “Thanks, Mari.” 

The two aliens followed Eddy out of Rennecker’s, and only when they were gone did Mari breathe a sigh of relief. Half an hour wasn’t much time, but she knew plenty of places on the station to drop something like a datapack where it would still be there the next day.  

The easiest, of course, was right where she was sitting. The benches used in Rennecker’s booth seating were hollow rectangles of extruded metal tubing with a thin veneer of textured wood-grain polymer applied for decoration. It was a matter of only a moment to slip the datapack out of her pocket once more and into the gap where the bench had been pushed against the subtly curved bulkhead at the back of the diner compartment. 

The little device made a clunking noise as it landed inside the bench, but nobody nearby paid this any mind. Mari breathed a sigh of relief, then turned her attention to the rest of her meal. If Eddy was right about the time pressure, it might be the better part of a full day before she had time to sit down and eat again. 

For the same reason Strand spacers are regarded as disreputable, they are also often sought out for particular tasks, for which their (on average) relative willingness to do jobs of questionable legality. This is at least as true on the Sprawl station as anywhere else, despite the vast distance between this location and the nearest part of the Silver Strand. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Perfect Crime

2953-10-15 – Tales from the Inbox: The Perfect Crime 

Obviously, the position of this embed team and Cosmic Background generally is anti-crime; that is, if you are so stupid as to victimize your fellow sapients, there should be a penalty for these actions. 

That being said, crime and fraud has become a way of life in some systems, especially those of the Silver Strand region. Spacers who hail from the Strand are notorious for having checkered backgrounds, and those from elsewhere who ply those lanes for too long often pick up a similar reputation. Culturally, crime just seems to be seen as another way of life in that region, one that needs to be guarded against, but whose participants one can hardly blame. 

Obviously, this reputation makes Strand-native spacers rather unpopular in some circles, but so many of them have made their way to this side of the Gap looking for wealth or meaning that it has led to a number of interesting altercations on the Sprawl and other habitats. 

Mari Robertson crept into Rennecker’s Diner, passed her usual table, and slid into a corner booth at the back, near the kitchen doors. The Sprawl had become a big place in recent years, but today, it felt small, cramped, and intimate. Anywhere she went, she could run into someone, but going somewhere she normally avoided would be no better; it would be obvious for anyone actually looking for her that something was up. 

Normally, Mari summoned one of the wait-staff using the call button and asked about specials before ordering, but this time, she punched in an unassuming order for the chef’s “famous” prime “rib” sandwich. Real beef was of course not an ingredient in this dish; the meat was actually that of a fish-like creature from one of the colonial target worlds nearby, prepared to mostly resemble tender beef. The creature had taken well to growing in captivity, and nearly a square kilometer of Sprawl deck had been converted over to producing this ready source of protein for both locals and spacers. Mari didn’t particularly like it. She’d actually had real Earth beef once, and nothing really compared to it. It was better than meat-textured food-fab slurry, but only a little bit. 

Because it was one of the most commonly ordered items on the menu, one of the kitchen staff darted out with the food and a bottle of cheap synthetic beer barely three minutes after she’d ordered. It was still so hot she couldn’t eat right away, so she cracked open the beer and took a drink, eyeing the trickle of patrons in and out of Rennecker’s main entrance. Fortunately, it was the slump in the middle of a shift; less than a third of the seats were occupied, and those mainly by people hunched over slates, distractedly sipping coffee or nibbling at fried finger-food. 

When none of the staff were in view, Mari slipped a hand into her pocket and pulled out the datapack she’d lifted a few hours before, looking down at it. She’d sworn off pickpocketing years ago when she’d been on the run out of Cardona’s, but when an alien diplomat left a datapack unattended for so long, it was simply impossible to pass up.  

She didn’t try to access it. Most likely it was encrypted, and even if it wasn’t, it might have read-logging. No, there was no point trying to get the data until she was ready to destroy the original immediately. It was the only way to be sure the theft was untraceable. 

There was of course some possibility the security feeds had seen her brush against the bag which the xeno diplomat had so casually tossed the datapack into, but she knew how to make sure there’d be nothing concrete from any angle. As long as nobody caught her before she’d destroyed the original, she’d get away clean, but she also needed to avoid doing any suspicious computer activity for a few hours. That way, anyone else who did any bulk data copying would be the first suspects, while she was on the feeds going out for an unassuming lunch, drinking a beer, and generally doing nothing indicative of a big score. 

Acting casual was, of course, nerve-wracking, and any of her associates would be able to tell something was up if they talked to her too long.  

She’d considered taking her little runabout out for a run to one of the mining installations, but this too might draw suspicion. No, the best thing would be to brazenly go about her business, but to avoid her usual crowd. Most of them would understand, if they knew. 

Fortunately, the datapack itself was a standard unit, nearly identical to two others she owned. She could hold up one of those if at any point someone did have her on record holding a datapack shortly after the theft – as long as the questions didn’t reach her before she’d actually stashed or destroyed this one. 

The food finally cooled enough for Mari to start eating. As she raised the ersatz beef sandwich to her mouth, though, she hesitated. The trio who’d just entered Rennecker’s made her blood run cold. One of them was Eddy Rothbauer, a fellow fugitive from the Strand region who she’d done a lot of work with on the Sprawl. The other two were slim, elfin figures in brown cloaks and hoods. The long-boned hands that showed at the cuffs of those robes were a distinct golden color. If these weren’t the diplomats she’d just stolen from, they were more of the same kind. 

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