#5 (Ossory) [https://i.imgur.com/SYmOc51.png]

There, that should about do it. Short, professional – she’d been so restrained, so to-the-point. No “wish you were here… you’d really belong here on the sewage ship.” No “plenty of space for you since the trash holds are empty.” Not even a “we’ve got some primitive beings on board so you’d fit right in.” Technically against traditional form to end on an ellipsis but she doubted Laila was trained in the literary arts in any case.

She dropped her hands back to the control console, triggering the augments built into her fingers to encrypt the message and enter it into the ship’s send queue.

The bodies of ascenters were typically built with a suite of encryption keys inside the fingers, which worked in concert to identify the individual and ensure personal data sovereignty in interactions with most automated systems (that is to say, most systems). Due to their redundant design, the keys would continue to function after an injury so long as at least two fingers survived. In the rare cases where accidents left an ascenter with only one finger, they suffered an effective total loss of personhood and usually committed suicide. As another feature of the augment suite, suicide could be accomplished with only one finger remaining. Those left with no fingers at all were generally considered to be shit out of luck.

Naomi’s message was transferred to one of the ship’s slipstream transmitters on number three auxiliary nacelle, where engines laboured miserably to push the enormous vessel up to cruising speed. The design target of the engines was actually “labouring appallingly”, but since most of the ship was empty at that moment they were having an easier time of it than was usual.

Still effective while the vessel was so relatively close to civilization, the slipstream transmitter packaged Naomi’s message and dumped it into a carrier signal in a tiny column of rolled-up space-time moving with tremendous speed in what most observers, viewing the ship out of perhaps a panoramic window on the canteen deck of a gas-mining rig in the system’s outer reaches, would have considered to be backwards.

After a stunningly short amount of time, the signal slammed into a receiver array on an orbital comms station above the planet Esper, a short distance away from the spacedock the ship had so recently departed. The comms station was operated by Unbound Starlines (To Infinity at No Extra Cost!), a firm from whom WASTE rented bandwidth for their remote operations. The tiny WASTE controller module plugged into the US server capsule flagged Naomi’s message as “telemetry data” and sent it for out-system transmission.

The controller module’s mis-labelling wasn’t a result of Naomi’s encryption protocol, rather it was standard procedure for 19.9% of all messages sent by WASTE vessels to be labelled as telemetry regardless of their actual content. WASTE had secured discounted bandwidth charges for telemetry data and their accounts strategy team believed that only purported telemetry fractions above 20% were likely to be investigated. Had Naomi known this, she would have labelled the message herself as one of the two most expensive classes of data: “dissenting political opinion” and “secret family cookie recipe”.

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After a short delay, the “telemetry data” was inserted into the comms station’s uplink to Esper’s Network node, where it promptly vanished and reappeared somewhere else.

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The Network is the basis of all modern interstellar communications, commerce, travel, and to a lesser extent warfare. It has been argued extensively that without it, no effective galactic scale economic activity or interstellar governments could exist. Unlike with a slow bulk freighter transiting between the stars by slip drive, where even sending messages back to civilization might take several years, the Network guarantees instantaneous communications and matter transference. Although of course, since the energy cost of transferring material increases with both size and mass, it has been necessary to retain a limited number of traditional freighter craft for transporting certain low value, high bulk materials. An unappealing task, operating such vessels is generally restricted to Meitagenan outcasts…

Excerpt from teaching materials prepared for the technological uplift of primitive species occupying the moon Enfer.Shasherrack.3. Retained by the Enfer National Library and free for use as an expositional quotation in works of fiction.

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Naomi’s message unvanished (this is the technical Networking term, see INEEG 84004:3) at a Network node attached to an asteroid habitat in a region of the galaxy controlled by the Eiteric Stellar Combine. While technically a regular corporation under Meitagenan law, the ESC had for many decades specialised in the extremely useful and incredibly lucrative practice of numerical modelling of stellar structure and evolution, particularly with respect to unstable giant stars, and thus had accumulated staggering amounts of wealth. So much wealth in fact that they owned outright nearly one hundred and thirty star systems in a contiguous region of space and operated effectively as a small nation state.

In most ESC habitats, the most prestigious addresses in gleaming arcologies set between beautiful parks, stunning holo-vistas and truly disgustingly decadent artificial water features, were occupied by the offices of the stellar astrophysicists, who formed the top echelon of their society. Naomi’s message was not destined for these places.

Behind the astro starscrapers, in merely extremely nice buildings set within only very pleasant parks and just highly satisfying artificial scenery, lay the premises of multistellar technology corporations, investment banks, antique weapons dealers and other moderately lucrative businesses. Naomi’s message was not destined for these places either.

Below, beneath, and otherwise under the pleasant offices of productive enterprises, there lay another set of decks. A noisier, less salubrious and less well-lit area, where the scenery was, it was generally agreed, alright. Here, dietary supplement marketers vied for space with fin-tech companies and political think-tanks. It was to a building in this part of town that Naomi’s message was shuttled, winding its way along an only moderately well organised cluster of cables that were dyed in brash primary colours instead of the tasteful pastels preferred by the higher grade of network technician. Here the message arrived.

A small red icon appeared on a screen, and a tiny message accompanying it read “You’ve got clandestine communications!”

Shortly afterwards, another icon appeared indicating that a driver for loading remote starship telemetry formats was being installed.