To: A/)-Mixtec c/o FP14 Bartender | Subject: Case Studies of Outstanding Rogues

[Grumblesaur]

[ HANDWRITTEN INJUNCTION ]

Mixtec,

My apologies, I don't think I actually caught your given name, or perhaps Mixtec is your given name and I didn't catch your surname. The bartender seemed to know who I was talking about, so I didn't press the matter. As a bit of radio humor, I've provided my entry for your "Rogues Gallery" in an analog format—a bit of radio humor, if you'll forgive me the inconvenience, but I figure most folks aren't walking around with equipment for reading or writing magnetic tape in their pockets, so it doubles as a bit of security through obscurity (or obtuseness, if you like).

You'd think the technology obsolete, and it is, but it keeps getting made for two reasons—it's incredibly information-dense for how cheap it is, and, more importantly for my ilk, it's covert and reusable. You can communicate asynchronously with a simple dead drop somewhere and reuse it over and over again, never transmitting and never leaving a comms trail more than one message long. Let the Lane Hackers fight the encryption arms race, I say; nobody's going to bother with a small-time spacefaring cavewoman luddite.

Anyway, you and your companions seemed technologically inclined, so perhaps you'll also find the ritual of rigging physical hardware for playback amusing. The carrying case is magnetically shielded, so you don't need to worry about the tape getting zapped by walking through the wrong elevator or machine shop on your way to wherever it is you intend to listen to it.

I'll send other recordings along in time. For as much bravado as many Rogues present with, a lot of them clam up as soon as you press record. My Liberty Pirate Radio colleagues are more at ease in front of a microphone, although their schedules are less cooperative. I believe the second on your list was DJ Double Lunch; I'll wrangle him before long. Otherwise, send back any questions you have and I'll see if I can't dig up some answers for you.

Yours in space,

Seahawk

[ AUDIO RECORDING ]

“

The defense lawyers who tried in vain to dig me out of trouble in my youth would have primly entered in their client records the name Cassandra Hawkins alongside charges of theft, vandalism, and, most importantly, unauthorized photography of restricted areas. I'm not a journalist in an official capacity, but I got my start in life curating a badly-designed NeuralNet page that depicted interesting goings-on in the mining town where I grew up on Pittsburgh.

I earned my a nickel in a real prison—not some silly local jail like my lesser charges had called for—by trespassing in a "mine". It was, in fact, an undeclared explosive munitions test site. Normal mines, in my experience, do more drilling than blasting, so when the all-day all-night explosions continued on for more than a week, I got suspicious and snuck in under cover of night—the fences were badly maintained, and it wasn't like I was getting any sleep anyway. My photographs of the mine were on the page for a few days before an LPI squad arrested me. Now they've either been deleted or locked up in some government vault.

A few other women in my cell block were repeat offenders, in for sentences much longer than my own, but they had ties to the Rogues and told me who to contact when I got out. At the time it seemed more like a matter of if I would get out, but I did, though not before extending my sentence for an extra month for spitting in a warden's eye.

You can forgive the attitude, I hope; I was still a teenager when I was locked up and I'm in my much mellower forties now. I won't bore you with the specifics of my age and parentage; drunkenness and apathy were so central to my family life that my date of birth has actually been recorded three or four different ways—whatever was convenient at the time, I expect. You might not know how old I am, but neither do I.

My task upon release was to seek a woman named Scarlette on Fort McMurray, which is now just a dead pile of rock and metal amid the roiling dark matter storm in Alberta. She was a gang boss, evidently with no surname, who I was told ran a louder, but altogether cleaner sort of operation than most of her peers, but I didn't have the specifics at the time. After meeting her, I learned that her self-styled title was Station Manager, and I was hired to blow the dust out of equipment and replace broken antennas, dials, transistors, and the like.

I burned myself a lot with the soldering iron until I eventually had the sense to spend a bit of my paycheck on gloves. Then I crewed on the Broadcast Tower Folsom for a while. Scarlette's flagship, Scylla-class. Half the reactor core on that thing is dedicated to the broadcast equipment. She prefers a heard-but-not-seen approach to flying it, though, so while it's armed to the teeth, it rarely sees combat. It surprises me sometimes that there aren't other gangs banging down her door to borrow it, but it spends so much time skating the edges of systems that I suppose there isn't much opportunity for them to do so.

This life is not so much a ladder to climb as it is a hunt for new opportunities.

The thing about LPR more broadly is that we're not just a pile of disgraced journalists, radio techs, and pirates. Every now and then a few planets and stars align just the right way and more than three or four Rogues put together a plan for a raid or a special smuggling operation—the kind of thing that invovles dozens of ships. We send a ship along to handle the comms and host the leader of the endeavor. At least, when we have the equipment available—our group's not huge. We handle logistics like that, and we move goods and equipment around too.

You've seen the Repeater now. It's not my ship exactly, but I get to fly it and, more importantly, broadcast from it. "Donation drives" are my specialty, really. I play better music on my show than you'll ever get from a corporate station. They play music that competes with silence; I play music that competes with other music, and people are willing to support that with their credits. I like a variety, though. A bit of news, with whatever anti-authority spin can conceivably be applied, some talk radio, the occasional advertisement. I've read a few Drax ads and I'm not ashamed of it.

Really, patch anyone in. "Radio for the People," we like to say, and the people are sometimes kindly enough to wire money to us. Fewer hurt feelings and more repeat donors that way, compared to the typical trade lane stick-up.

The shooting is better as a last resort anyway. Having more friends pays better, if only in a healthy selection of talk show guests and not money. If I'm going to be shooting, I'll do it from my Wolfhound, but directing the crew of something like Terre Haute Repeater is not my idea of a productive engagement. The fewer fights I pick, the longer I'll live.

[A clicking noise is heard, followed by an indistinct, short, and slightly argumentative conversation.]

Sorry about that. Mikey swung by and saw I was recording. He wants you to say "Hi" to Witch for him. I'm running low on time before my next broadcast, so I think I'll wrap up this recording here. I'll check in at Freeport 14 regularly for your reply, if any. If you prefer a live interview, just let me know and we can arrange that.

This is Seahawk signing off.

”

[ END OF RECORDING ]

---

A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.