2954-08-05 – Tales from the Inbox: The Homecoming Deception 

It was some hours before Lydia Fernandez got any hints of trouble, but since any hints were unexpected, it put her on alert right away.  

Most of the time, a system traffic control station request to re-verify flight plan and destination was an irritation only, the product of a desire to clear space ahead of some particularly important or high-security vessel such as a prison transport. Lydia, however, had been working the grey areas of the Reach's spacelanes too long to believe anything inoccuous about it. She hurried up to the cockpit and, after replying politely, set about looking for the ship that was going to make the intercept. 

Fortunately, Terre Weigand space was fairly quiet; there were only a few dozen drive signatures on the plot, and most of them were local runabouts and merchant haulers on supply runs in and out of the spaceport. The system's two-destroyer, five-frigate defense flotilla, mostly sitting idle in parking orbits, was also not the threat. She'd grown up on that world, and had never seen those gerietric ships sortie, except for parading around the spaceport to entertain prominent visitors. It was doubtful if any of them could make more than four or five gees of thrust without a total drive overhaul. 

That left three independent hulls and a quartet of customs cutters, and only one of the independents and two of the customs ships were in position to affect any kind of intercept. None of them were on an intercept course, not yet. Whoever her pursuers were, they would want to make their intentions clear only when Lydia couldn't do anything to avoid them. 

The re-verification request was of course part of that. If they'd gotten an automatic reply from the nav computer or no reply at all, they would have taken that to mean Lydia was asleep and her ship on autopilot, and moved in quicky. A manual reply meant she was at the controls, of course, and could react instantly. 

Lydia debated simply playing dumb and letting them board her. Theoretically, there was no contraband on board her ship. The cargo she'd picked up from the dead drop was, technically, entirely legal, and well within the limits of legal personal acquisitions not requiring tariffs and declaration. 

The technicalities wouldn't matter, of course, if her pursuers knew what they were looking for, and who it was who hadn't intended that cargo to ever leave Terre Weigand. If some system had just flagged her as suspicious and sent a customs crew out to give her a hard time, on the other hand, there was nothing wrong with being searched. And running guaranteed there would be problems, technically legal cargo or otherwise. 

Lydia pushed her chair back and cracked her knuckles, thinking. She needed more data to make a decision. Fortunately, she needn't decide right away, and the longer she gave indications of being awake, attentive, and at the controls, the longer she could make her adversaries wait to commit. 

With that in mind, Lydia went aft to the food-fab to prepare a meal and a cup of coffee. If something had gone wrong, it had to have just done so – she'd gotten the all-clear from her contact less than ninety minutes before. Whoever was selected to intercept her would be whoever just so happened to be close enough to her egress route. 

Idly, she wondered if there was a way to divert those ships away on other errands. Probably not; she could try to tip them off to fictitious activity of interest, but if one of those hulls was already instructed to prepare to intercept her, its skipper would disregard that. She'd need a third party to set up some apparent disaster or crime-in-progress of higher priority than she was, and she had nothing of that sort set up beforehand. 

Briefly, she debated trying a tagged cargo dump. Theoretically, if she made it look like a routine garbage jettison, long before they had any idea she was on alert, nobody would think twice about that. That would, of course, create the additional problem of recovering the cargo after the fact, which would require a course change the system authorities could see. If she had backup for this job, someone else who could pick up the cargo without drawing attention, that would probably have been the best approach, but again, she didn't have that. 

Perhaps, even if she was boarded by people who knew what they were looking for and what significance it held, she could still brass it out by making enough noise about legal technicalities and her rights. That did work sometimes. Higher-ups might be willing to sacrifice the reputations of a few lower level goons on the scene to get their way, but those goons didn't always go to the slaughter willingly. System security and customs enforcers often had families who relied on their income. Still, it was a gamble that would require the right sort of boarding party to work. 

Fighting her way out, of course, was no option. The Minotaur was more than she looked like, both in its offense and defense, but it was still a big old strike gunship which the massed railguns of even a decrepit customs cutter would cut to pieces without much trouble. 

That left running. On principle, Lydia didn't like running; it usually put the initiative in the hands of her pursuers and proved to all and sundry that she had something to hide.  

As she finished off her meal, Lydia heard the bright ping of an incoming personal message on the intercom. Shoving the tray into the food-fab's return slot, she returned to the controls. The moment her eyes fell on the comms display and read the name of the recipient, her eyes widened. "Margaret." 

Apparently her cousin had been incorrect about her sister's whereabouts. If she'd really been out of system on a business trip, there was no way Lydia should be getting a message already. 

Already, the beginnings of an idea were forming in the back of Lydia's mind. She settled down into the chair and brought up Margaret's message - a flat-capture video recording - on the main display. 

Though I reported poor connectivity to the Håkøya system last week, I am happy to report this is apparently corrected in part. Some dozens of accounts have reached this embed team in the last two days from service personnel and civilians in that system, telling of events to which they claim to be eyewitnesses. It seems that a datasphere backlog some weeks long is being worked through by limited hardware in-system, and I have no doubt there will be more to come. 

I do not expect we will publish all these accounts, though I have seen several so far that, had we gotten them closer to the events described, would likely have been published immediately. We will however select two or three which we find interesting, and get them into this feed in coming months.