Liberty Forces Message dump

[Manticore]

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TARGET ID: Liberty Navy High Command
SUBJECT: Patrol Report #OED-2862: California Encounters
ENCRYPTION: High
PRIORITY: High

Tonight I was on patrol in the California system when long range scans picked up a name I recognized moving into Cortez. This was [color=#FF6666]Heavy.Metal.Queen, a Pilgrim-class liner that I had encountered the previous day in Manhattan orbit. She wasn't doing anything illegal at the time but some of the things she said and implied raised some alarms. In fact, I had specifically warned her captain, Kaisha, not to smuggle in Liberty space, promising to catch her if she did. I decided it would be worth a trip to the Cortez jumphole in California to see if the ship might be trying to enter Liberty with ulterior motives.

I had only been at the jumphole for a moment when the Heavy Metal Queen emerged... with two escorts. One was Sanguis, a freelancer-tagged Hathor gunboat, captained by Felicia Ariss. The other one was a Hackers-tagged Sabre, Inexorable.Night, who had engaged me at Manhattan yesterday and destroyed my ship.

Not to mention, the Heavy Metal Queen had a hold chock full of Cardamine.

<File Attachment 1: HMQ Scan 1>
<File Attachment 2: HMQ Scan 2>
<File Attachment 3: Escorts>

Both escorts locked me up and looked ready to shoot, however the Queen wanted to talk first. After tossing out a few crude insults, Kaisha, the captain, offered me the sum of five million credits to buy my silence on the matter. Of course I refused, and informed her that attempting to bribe or extort the Liberty authorities was also a crime.

Considering the situation, I quickly judged that I wasn't going to be able to stop these ships from continuing on their way, however the proof I had gathered of their crimes was more valuable than any futile attempt to stop them. I decided to beat a hasty retreat that seemed to surprise them, as they didn't engage me on my way out of the field.

I elected to drop this message off at the routing station at Los Angeles, due to its urgency.

I would strongly suggest that all three ships be banned from Liberty space altogether, due to their collusion with the smuggling effort which I suspect has been going on for some time now. The cardamine problem is a visibly growing concern in New York, and we need to start cracking down on these known smugglers and their associates at all times, not just when we can catch them drug-running.

Lambert out.

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