LG| Information

[Petitioner]

Covering All the Bases

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— ...et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Sarita stood up from her small altar and put her rosary away in her pocket, bowing her head gently and crossing herself before turning to her second altar, to the left. Again, she bowed her head before kneeling and saying a prayer, this time not to Jesus or Mary.

— O Santa Muerte, en mis empeños y viajes próximos, dame seguridad y éxito…

A few words of gratitude and devotion followed, and Sarita again stood. This time, she picked up a match and held it up for just a moment, looking into the flame before picking out and lighting two large candles; one gold, one black. Lighting two was unusual, but a lot was riding on this, and she would spare no effort to make sure things went right. And she had a lot of flying to do.

It was only a few hours from Ruiz to Malta, but the in-atmo flight in the unwieldy, decidedly non-aerodynamic Rapier was a challenge for Sarita; she wasn't even used to being on a planet at all, much less flying on one in something never designed to stand up to the ever-buffeting winds and restrictive friction of a terrestrial atmosphere. Nevertheless, another hour or two later, her chunky black and silver fighter rested on one of only two landing pads at Enma Loyola's personal estate nestled snugly among the mountain peaks of the Vasconia del Sur range.

The mercenary's hair was extremely ruffled as she pulled her flight helmet off and climbed down from her ship to the one-foot-thick steel plate below. A servant came to greet her, and, much to Sarita's relief, did so in perfect Spanish. He had a bit of a Tau anglo accent; maybe he was a Zoner before? It made sense, though, that Enma would employ hispanohablantes; she was traditional like that. Ever since the rise of the Contari several years ago, Italian had been quite chic, but Sarita struggled with the doubled consonants and muddy-sounding words of the language of Malta's snobbiest aristocrats. A few pleasantries later and he led her inside.

Eleven hours after she had originally set out, Sarita returned to Ruiz. She wasn't here to rest; she would be pulling a long distance burn all the way to Delta once she refueled. Six shots of espresso and a quick stop at the base's library later, and she was off. She flew the first hours manually, but once she was in Sigma, she let autopilot take over.

With over two relativistic days' flight ahead of her, she needed to conserve fuel, and turned off both comms and shields entirely. Then, she leaned her seat back, propped her feet up on the console, and began paging through the musty paperback copy of Hands-On Quantum Multiplexor Maintenance, Quantum Entanglement, And You! as the shipboard computer guided her from jumphole to jumphole, directly through hostile space.

The server box hummed softly as it powered up. Several cables, each thick as Sarita's arm, ran out of the back and off to outlets unseen, or to the Freeport's quantum entanglement device that made possible faster-than-light communication with the neural net, or to the massive, multi-petabyte solid-state drives that backed up all the critical data on the station. Sarita plugged her PDA into the tiny, 1.3cm port on the front of the server, and spent about an hour checking and double-checking and triple-checking every little setting, every automated maintenance script, every software indicator that she had set up the hardware right.

Her neurotic perfectionism satisfied, she opened the command line.

sudo ./home/ims/servinit

She unplugged her PDA and opened the corporate IMS, and sent a test message.

Sarita Ybañes at 8:27
ping
@here anybody can read this? sry for @-ing

It wasn't long before she received Felicia's terse reply, annoyed at the unexplained notification.

Lovery at 08:29
@Sarita Ybañes yes

Sarita smiled. All was working, and her job was done. If anyone wanted to disrupt the Loyola Group's operations in the Omicrons, they would have to go through Freeport 11 first. As she made her way to the room she had rented, exhausted from several days of hard travel, she fingered the rosary in her pocket and whispered an Ave Maria.