Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Exchange

2949-03-08 – Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Exchange

[Note from the C.B. main office on Planet at Centauri: While there remains no hypercomm connection with Fifth Fleet, the fleet’s Maribel office has passed on a report from Duncan and the embed team. Everyone is alive, but Duncan and Koloman were injured when Saint-Lô took a bad hit during battle with the Incarnation fleet. Neither of their injuries are life-threatening. 

While Nojus and the remainder of the team are preparing stories for this feed, the limited communication back here to Centauri has prevented them from sending us any of that content yet. Hopefully by next week the situation will improve.] 

Looks like we didn’t get a story into the feed system before ingest time this week. That probably means our embed team aboard Saint-Lô has not been near a hypercast relay for at least eight days.   

This is an expected consequence of wartime maneuvers and operations, and as such your Cosmic Background Embed Team has prepared a number of interesting accounts to publish in advance should the vagaries of war cause a lapse in communication with the greater interstellar datasphere.   

Most likely, last week’s entry warned that this might be the case; if not, Duncan or Nojus will give an account of what’s been happening on the battle front in weeks to come.   

The names used in this account are all pseudonymous, and it is a continuation of a series of stories we set aside for this eventuality. If you haven’t seen them, prior portions of this account can be found in Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Ruination and Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Tempest. 

Ramiro eyed the puddle at the bottom of Jen Daley’s windswept boarding ramp warily. The sporadic flashes of lightning skittering across the horizon and the rasping hiss of rain sheeting off the ship’s flanks on all sides turned everything beyond the ship’s protective overhanging bulk into dark, distorted shadows and silhouettes, but he already knew trouble lay out there. Somehow, the prospect of plunging his only pair of dirt-rated boots into the remote world’s mud nearly made him forget Livia Farran’s already dubious scheme, seal his ship back up, and climb for orbit as fast as possible. 

“Pleasant.”  

Livia’s voice carrying over the distant thunder startled Ramiro into losing his balance and grabbing for one of the hydraulic pistons attached to the end of the ramp to avoid falling headlong into the puddle. When he recovered and turned around, he blinked in confusion. The con artist had changed out of the drab, relaxed attire with which she’d lounged around his vessel for the past few weeks and into a sheer, gauzy outfit that revealed more than it concealed. 

Livia smiled when she saw Ramiro’s reaction. “Maybe not the most practical thing for this weather, but it’s not the weather I’m worried about. Are we all set?” 

Ramiro nodded and turned around to point down the length of Daley’s hull to the broad space between the rear landing skids. “If you’re sure you put their goods in the right place, we're ready to make the... Exchange.” What they were doing still didn’t sit right with him, but he was more concerned with surviving the encounter than with expressing his unease with the idea of swindling a bunch of murderous would-be revolutionaries. 

“It's all set, and just in time. On your left, coming out from those rocks.” 

Ramiro looked out into the sheeting rain to see a cluster of greenish lights furtively working their way across the field toward Jen Daley. As the lights approached, Ramiro saw that they were attached to a cluster of figures wearing black, face-concealing helmets and bristling with weapons. 

As the lead figure stepped through the waterfall fringing the ship’s hull and into the shelter beneath, Ramiro resisted letting his hand move toward the handgun hanging from his hip. He considered himself a crack shot in range conditions, but he’d never needed to shoot at anything any more lively than a pop-up target. 

“You’re late, boys.” Livia, turning on her characteristic charm, pranced down the ramp to join Ramiro where Daley’s textured metal and Bettendorf’s mud met. “Ten more minutes and we would have given up on you.” 

Though none of the figures spoke as they filed into the dry space under his ship, Ramiro saw that several of the featureless black masks were pointed squarely at Livia and her provocative attire. Even though he knew the Ladeonists were probably communicating with each other via some sort of silent comms circuit, their silence and the uniformity of their smooth black masks set Ramiro’s teeth on edge. 

Eventually, the leader approached Ramiro and Livia, stopping barely there meters away. “Our merchandise?” He was a big man, bigger than the others, with broad shoulders and a thick barrel chest crisscrossed by a pair of bandoliers carrying railgun slug magazines and batteries for the big weapon hanging under his arm. 

Livia giggled. “Not so fast, big guy. You’ve got something for us too.” 

The towering Ladeonist took another step forward. “Show me the goods.” 

Ramiro glanced over to Livia, who nodded her agreement. Taking a deep breath, he pressed the first button on the remote hidden in his coat sleeve. Near the other end of his ship, the big cargo elevator unlatched from its resting position with a deep clang and began lowering toward the muddy ground. On its upper surface, a stack of white polymer crates tied down with cargo netting descended into view. 

“There now.” Livia stepped forward, seeming to ignore how deeply her heeled shoes sank into the mud when she stepped off the ramp. “Now you show me the goods.” 

Ramiro hated watching Livia approach the Ladeonist so closely, but he had agreed to let her do what she did best, and he didn’t intend to get between the con artist and her newest mark if things went poorly. The crates really did contain a small fortune in weapons and electronics – given the Ladeonists’ predilection for advanced technology and implants, the pair had assumed it was too dangerous to try to swindle them with anything but genuine supplies. 

After several seconds, the big man nodded and waved one of his companions forward. This figure carried a bulging backpack, which he took off and set at the leader’s feet before withdrawing to the rest of the group. 

Livia stared at the bag for a moment. “You could put a hundred thousand worth of cred-sticks in your pocket. What’s with the sack?” 

“More than twice your asking price, value in jewelry.” The big man picked up the backpack and reached in, withdrawing a handful of glittering chains, and held them up. The stones caged into the links of each chain caught Daley’s running lights and reflected them back in a different color. 

“Where are we going to offload stolen jewels?” Livia shook her head. “The deal was for credits.” 

After staring at Livia for a long moment, the figure dropped the bag and produced a ring of credit chits. Even from a few meters away, Ramiro recognized the distinctive opalescent markings of the ten-thousand-credit denomination on each one. He’d only seen a ten-thousand-credit hard-currency stick once before, but everyone knew what they looked like from the holo-dramas. 

“There, that wasn’t so hard.” Livia took a step forward, her feet sinking into the mud up to her ankles, to accept the ring of chits. As her fingers touched it, the other Ladeonists started moving toward the cargo elevator. “It was thoughtful of you to bring options, though.” 

At that moment, the beams of several searchlights appearing from all directions turned the gloom into a painful radiance. “Don’t move and put your hands in the air, every one of you.” The loudspeaker-amplified voice carried easily over the increasingly distant thunder. “Attempts to escape will be opposed with deadly force.” 

Details

Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Tempest

2949-03-01 – Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Tempest

[Note from the C.B. main office on Planet at Centauri: Fifth Fleet’s representatives at Maribel say they’re able to confirm that a major fleet action has taken place in the Håkøya system. Saint-Lô was involved but is not destroyed, and they assured us that all of our personnel survived the battle. How they know this for certain was not explained. According to analysis by experts here on Centauri, the most likely explanation is that a long-range, low-bandwidth hypercast relay was set up at the outskirts of the system for limited communication on military channels.] 

Looks like we didn’t get a story into the feed system before ingest time this week. That probably means our embed team aboard Saint-Lô has not been near a hypercast relay for at least eight days.   

This is an expected consequence of wartime maneuvers and operations, and as such your Cosmic Background Embed Team has prepared a number of interesting accounts to publish in advance should the vagaries of war cause a lapse in communication with the greater interstellar datasphere.   

Most likely, last week’s entry warned that this might be the case; if not, Duncan or Nojus will give an account of what’s been happening on the battle front in weeks to come.   

The names used in this account are all pseudonymous, and it is a continuation of another item we set aside for this eventuality which you should have already seen (Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Ruination).

“This is not going to work, Liv.” 

“Come on, Ramie, you’re going to let a little w- Augh!” 

Ramiro wrestled with the controls as Jen Daley bucked in the eddying wind and the flat ground approaching dead ahead suddenly lurched into a vertical cliff. He’d landed his ship on open ground without the benefit of a spaceport’s guidance systems and sensors before, but Bettendorf’s notoriously unpredictable weather was far beyond his comfort zone. Punching up maximum thrust, he hauled the nose up and held it there until blue-white light from the planet’s primary broke through the clouds. 

Livia Farran, strapped into one of the secondary consoles, pushed her loose, straight black hair out of her face. “Well, that was interesting.” 

Ramiro scowled. He hated interesting, and his life since he’d let Livia fund the repairs to his ship had been all kinds of interesting. “We’re going back up to orbit until this storm clears. Call your contact and tell him we’ll be late.” 

“I’ll try, but you know how these guys are.” 

“Let me guess.” Ramiro set the ship’s autopilot to an orbital trajectory. “Twitchy?” 

“A little.” Livia giggled in that way she probably hoped was disarming. Ramiro had long ago learned to ignore the con-artist's affectations, knowing that her mannerisms were as carefully selected as her wardrobe. “They tend to treat everything like a test of loyalty.” 

“So they’ll think, if we don’t risk our lives flying into those thunderheads to land, we aren’t loyal enough to do business with?” 

“You know, you catch onto all this stuff way too fast to be an honest spacer. Honestly I think they still suspect we might be with BCI or something." 

Ramiro massaged his forehead with one palm for a moment before cancelling the autopilot and returning the ship to manual control. “Looks like I’m going to try that approach again.” While he and his erstwhile partner were hardly working for the Confederated government’s Bureau of Counter-Intelligence, the fact that they were planning to steal from Livia’s contacts made reinforcing such suspicions incredibly unhealthy. 

“Probably a good idea.” Livia tapped away at her console for a moment. “No beacons to fix a comms beam on anyway, and they’ll probably shoot us if we start broadcasting.” 

Ramiro pointed Jen Daley’s nose back at the boiling cloud-tops, and the cheery daylight soon vanished behind swirling gray fog which quickly faded almost to black. Though no motion could be felt from inside the ship’s inertial isolation, Ramiro could tell from his instruments that his trusty ship was being pushed almost onto its side by the wind, and he made a few corrections. If Daley came down on any part of herself besides the landing skids, it would never leave Bettendorf again, and the best case scenario would see the pair of them stranded. 

Fighting wind shears that seemed to change to a new direction for every thousand meters of altitude, Ramiro pointed the ship down at the location where his instruments told him there was a clear field to land on. In such poor weather, the autopilot’s self-landing system probably wouldn’t work, so he prepared to take the ship all the way in by hand. 

Since the only thing visible outside the cockpit was clouds and rain until the last few hundred meters, Livia probably had no idea how dangerous what they were doing was until they broke through the cloud ceiling and once again laid eyes on the landing site. Almost immediately, an updraft nearly flipped Daley over on her back, and Ramiro hauled on the controls to right it. 

"So, uh.” Livia’s tone remained overly conversational, as it always did when she was concealing extreme worry or stress. “How likely is this to kill us, Ramie?” 

“Going to have to land on manual. Say, fifteen or twenty percent.” 

“Ah.” The woman watched the ground, occasionally rolling or pitching out of view, grew steadily closer. “Next time, maybe you should, ah... pick the place.” 

“Liv, I don’t care what you offer me. One way or another...” Ramiro’s fingers ached from how tightly he was squeezing the controls, but he dared not relax. Passing a hundred meters of altitude, he deployed the landing skids, and prayed they’d be on the side of the ship that came down first. “There’s not going to be a next time.” 

One last eddy of wind threatened to push Jen Daley back into the sky, and then, with a heavy thump that reverberated through the ship despite the best efforts of the inertial isolation system, the skids sank into the wet Bettendorf soil. As the ship settled into place, Ramiro slowly took his hands off the controls and took a few long, slow breaths, watching rain streak across the forward viewpanel. 

“You keep saying that, and I still don’t believe you.” Livia, near-death experience apparently already forgotten, unbuckled her restraints and stood from her station. “I’ll go check the cargo. Our friends should be here soon.” 

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Tales from the Inbox: A Mercenary’s Charity

2950-02-22 – Tales from the Inbox: A Mercenary’s Charity 

[Note from the C.B. main office on Planet at Centauri: We have reached out to the Fifth Fleet press office to ask about restoration of contact with embed teams with the fleet, which is rumored to be engaged with the enemy at Håkøya. Fifth Fleet’s representatives at Maribel say they’re working on it, and not to worry in the meantime, but they would not confirm a]ny communication with Admiral Zahariev or the fleet in the past seventeen days since we lost contact with our embed team on their departure from the Berkant system.]  

Looks like we didn’t get a story into the feed system before ingest time this week. That probably means our embed team aboard Saint-Lô has not been near a hypercast relay for at least eight days.  

This is an expected consequence of wartime maneuvers and operations, and as such your Cosmic Background Embed Team has prepared a number of interesting accounts to publish in advance should the vagaries of war cause a lapse in communication with the greater interstellar datasphere.  

Most likely, last week’s entry warned that this might be the case; if not, Duncan or Nojus will give an account of what’s been happening on the battle front in weeks to come.  

The names used in this account are all pseudonymous. 

“Come on, Neza.” On the screen, Anders Gioconda’s wide, humorless grin revealed several gaps in his dentistry. “You really going to do this? You know there’ll be trouble.” 

Sabine Neza gritted her teeth. “Might have kept paying if you hadn’t raised your take.” Her voice faltered as she switched on a parallel comms channel, making sure to leave the link to Gioconda open. “Commander Evans, consider any approach within fifteen thousand klicks as a hostile act.” 

“Understood, Boss.” Milo Evans, the leader of the mercenary squadron Sabine had hired, didn’t sound scared. Though technically Gioconda’s band of brigands had just as many strike rigs as answered Evans’s command, most likely the pirates’ ships were in poorer repair, and Evans probably thought his pilots better flyers in any case. 

“Move on, Gioconda. Find another route to squeeze.” Sabine shrugged. “This one’s getting too hot.” 

“This isn’t over, Neza.” Gioconda’s grin vanished. “A small-time outfit like yours can’t afford to keep hiring muscle forever. We’ll be back.” 

Sabine shrugged. “We’ll be waiting.” With a wave, she cut the comms channel, and Gioconda vanished. 

“The pirates are breaking off, Skipper.” Sid Borivoi, Sabine’s second in command, breathed a sigh of relief. 

“I believe him about coming back, though.” Sabine stood from her command chair. “Thank you for your assistance, Commander. Once we’re past them, you can bring your flyers back aboard. Helm, resume previous course.” 

With the eyes of her compatriots on her the whole way, Sabine left the freighter’s command deck and headed down toward her cabin on deck five. She managed to keep the trembling at bay until the door was shut and privacy-locked behind her. Collapsing onto her bunk, she let the shaking overcome her. Scaring off Gioconda was the right thing to do, but she knew the pirate would leave no good deed unpunished. She’d acquiesced to the brigand’s pillaging and extortion for years. Sure, it’d hurt her profit margins, but the man and his goons had never hurt anyone. When he came back, she knew he would not be so easy to deal with.  

Sabine’s door chimed. She ignored it, but after ten seconds, it chimed again. 

“What is it?” Sabine tried to project a weary, disgruntled voice to hide her condition. 

“Can I come in, Boss? Got some figures to run past you.” 

Sabine recognized the clipped accent of the leader of the mercenaries she’d hired. hurriedly standing, she took a few breaths to try to calm herself and smoothed her uniform. She hadn’t expected them back aboard for at least an hour, so either she’d lost track of time, or the pirates had cleared out faster than expected. "Come in.” 

Evidently her attempts to conceal her distress hadn’t worked. Milo Evans looked her up and down and a worried frown briefly escaped his usual professionally neutral expression. “I can come back later if it’s a bad time.” 

“No, it’s all right.” Sabine shrugged. “You had something for me, Mr. Evans?” 

“I ran the rates for an extended contract.” The mercenary unfolded a small tablet display. 

“Thank you, but Gioconda was right. I can’t afford to renew your contract past the terms we’ve already agreed.” Sabine shook her head. “Hopefully by the time he realizes you’re gone, he’ll have found a better take than he had here.” 

Evans offered the tablet again. “I think you can afford us, Captain Neza.” He smiled in an odd way that suggested he knew something Sabine didn’t.  

Frowning, Sabine took the tablet. Her eyes widened as she read the figure at the bottom of the screen. “There’s got to be an error. Your company can’t possibly stay flying if we only pay this.” 

“There is no error. Your pirate sounded familiar, so I ran a voiceprint and ran it past our records. Turns out Anders Gioconda’s real name is Anders Thu, and there’s a price on his head in Farthing’s Chain to the tune of thirty thousand credits. I doubt it’ll take more than a month to find him and put him out of business for good.” 

Sabine looked at the various line items listed on the tablet. “Put him out of business? How- Oh, this isn’t a close escort contract.” 

Evans nodded. “The way we see it, the cheapest way to guard against pirates is to go out and kill the bastards where they live. Since there’s a bounty involved...” 

“You’re cutting me a discount.” Sabine closed the folding display and looked up to the mercenary. “Thank you, Commander. I know you didn’t have to do this.” 

Evans shrugged. “Way I see it, Boss, I did.” He turned and left Sabine’s cabin without another word. 

Details

Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Ruination

2950-02-15 – Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Ruination 

Looks like we didn’t get a story into the feed system before ingest time this week. That probably means our embed team aboard Saint- Lô has not been near a hypercast relay for at least eight days. 
 
This is an expected consequence of wartime maneuvers and operations, and as such your Cosmic Background Embed Team has prepared a number of interesting accounts to publish in advance should the vagaries of war cause a lapse in communication with the greater interstellar datasphere. 

Most likely, last week’s entry warned that this might be the case; if not, Duncan or Nojus will give an account of what’s been happening on the battle front in weeks to come. 

The names used in this account are all pseudonymous (for reasons you will shortly discover), and the events described took place many months ago. 

Ramiro W. slumped against the bulkhead near the airlock, letting the data slate in his hands fall to the pitted deck plating. He had been pacing the length of his tiny ship for hours, trying to come up with a way of escaping the fate he and his ship had fallen into. Even if he drained his savings, went as far into debt as his credit line would allow, and sold every unnecessary item aboard, he still couldn’t pay what it would cost to get Jen Daley spaceworthy again. 

Selling off his poor vessel to the shipbreakers would earn Ramiro enough money to get home and get his feet under him, but he hated the idea of returning to Madurai in defeat. He’d left that world five years prior, hoping never to see the planet of his birth ever again. The Galactic West small-colony cargo circuit had for a time proved lucrative enough to keep his little ship running and even to turn a small profit, but as more and more independent outfits moved in from the war-torn Coreward Frontier, Ramiro had found himself struggling to stay competitive.  

For a while, he’d simply reduced his profits, and then operated on a break-even basis in order to keep his routes. After all, he’d reasoned, the war couldn’t go on forever, and the ships and spacers displaced by the conflict would leave again when it was over. His profits from prior years had given him a comfortable buffer of savings in case something went catastrophically wrong. 

Something had indeed gone wrong. Jen Daley’s ancient, reliable fusion reactor had begun to fail on the return trip from remote Holst’s Run, finally scramming for the last time just after the final jump into the outer Philadelphia system. Limping into port on only the power provided by the auxiliary solar panel arrays, he’d been forced to pay out to replace the old, destroyed machinery after four different starship mechanics had failed to wake the fusion plant. His savings had covered the new reactor core, but only barely. 

Three runs later, Jen Daley’s heat sequestration systems had gone out, threatening alternately to boil and then freeze Ramio as the ship approached and then withdrew from the stars which gave life to Galactic West’s many habitable planets. 

He’d put up with the discomfort without repairing the system for nearly a month before finally giving in and having it worked on. For one glorious week everything aboard Jen Daley had seemed to be in perfect working order, and then everything had gone to Hell. 

Most likely, the heat sequestration had been broken by an electrical fault in the main power system routing power from the ship’s brand-new, high-performance core transformers through critical sensor components. Ramiro only knew this now, since the same fault had eventually recurred, this time subjecting the star drive to the electrical might of a miniature artificial sun. The folder nodes along the sides of the bow had melted, and droplets of molten metal had flowed down inside their housings, connecting things in unholy and unplanned ways until the whole hull was part of one gigantic high-voltage circuit, ruining every sensor, thruster, gyro, antenna, and other small outward-facing apparatus aboard. 

Fortunately for Ramiro, this time the fault happened when he was only a few hundred kilometers out the grand Amadei Philadelphia transfer station. Unfortunately for him, repairing his ship this time would cost nearly double what he could manage to pay, and no repair team on the station would allow an independent spacer to pay in installments. 

Sighing, Ramiro stooped to pick up the data slate, undamaged by its collision with the deck. He had been offered one alternative to consigning his ship to the breakers, but it was an alternative he couldn’t possibly accept. Better to return to Madurai for another decade of credit-pinching than to sell his soul and future to her. 

Ramiro he keyed open the airlock and headed into the station to find a shipbreaker’s representative. A moment later his comm pinged. Scowling, he shoved the earpiece into his ear. “Answer.” 

“Ramie, don’t do it. You know I can help you.” 

“No, Liv, you can’t.” He didn’t bother wondering how she knew what he’d decided – perhaps it was as simple as having a camera watching his ship’s airlock. “I’d rather go back to the dirt than fly on your terms.” 

“I find that hard to believe.” Livia Farran’s silky voice carried a note of mock concern. Ramiro and Galactic West’s most innovative con artist had plenty of run-ins over the years, most of them unfriendly. “You’d rather keep flying, even if it means compromising a little bit.” 

“A little bit?” Ramiro’s hands balled into fists. “I won’t help you swindle colonists.”  

“Any more colonists, you mean. You’ve already done it once.” 

Ramiro winced. He’d taken on Livia Farran as a passenger early on in his career as an independent spacer thinking her a mining expert and only learned her credentials and results were a total sham after she’d been paid nearly a million credits by three hardscrabble colonies to give them the locations of nonexistent formations of rare minerals. 

“Anyway, Ramie, I’m on to something new. Something I think won't bruise your precious scruples very much at all. No more stealing sweets from the babies.” 

Ramiro sighed. Could it hurt to listen? “You have sixty seconds, then you’re blocked again.” He’d comms-blocked Liv more times than he could count, but she had more official identities and datasphere footprints than he could easily find. Even if he did it again, all she’d need to do was use one he hadn’t seen before. 

“Well, I was thinking. You know who’s got a lot of money these days and who won’t go crying to the authorities if they’re idiots who get that money stolen? The Ladeonists.” 

Ramiro stopped in the middle of the corridor, traffic pushing past him on both sides. “You’re insane. Authorities? They’d send a kill team.” 

“Probably not, especially if we did it in a way that would make them look too much like idiots. Hey, look at it this way, you’d be doing your part in the war effort. You know those guys are getting money from the other side.” 

Ramiro’s shoulders slumped. He wanted very much to tell Liv off, to continue on his way to the shipbreakers’ office, but he couldn’t do it. Swindling Ladeonists was bad news, but he had very little issue with the idea morally. “Anyone going along with you has got to have a death wish.” 

“So you’re in, then.” Liv’s smile was audible through the comms circuit. “I’ll wire you just enough to get that rusty tub fixed up. I’ll be along in a few days, then we can talk details.” 

Ramiro sighed. “I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?” 

“Oh, certainly. But I promise we’re only going to steal from people who totally have it coming.” 

Ramiro cut the channel. He knew just how little to trust Livia Farran’s promises, but he knew he had to take that chance. 

 

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