At approximately 20:00 today, Thursday May 21, Orbital Spa and Cruise made contact with the missing luxury liner Martinique. I established contact with her captain in my personal shuttle alongside the Orbital carrier OS&C|TE-Cloud-9. Having negotiated a ransom with the Unioners who took it hostage under the command of Aktivist Yannick Starck, we were expecting a clean hand-off of the vessel and its remaining passengers in the orbit of planet New Berlin.

The vessel approached under impulse power and the captain noted that his passengers were violently ill. He also noted that the Unioners had done something to the ship. The vessel's IFF showed it as some hostile unknown entity instead of the expected OS&C transponder signals. A scan of the vessel revealed the presence of alien artifacts whose origin the captain could not account for. Taken collectively, I viewed this as sufficient reason to suspect that the vessel had come under infestation, an eventuality we at Orbital had been planning for since we first heard that the liner went missing in the Omegas.

After independent assessment by third party experts, we concluded that allowing the vessel to land on New Berlin would constitute a public health risk.
At approximately 20:30, we open fired on the vessel with the intent of destroying it in space along with the infected passengers. The vessel made a break for New Berlin, crashing into its atmosphere before our weapons were able to destroy it. The last transmission from the vessel was "For the Kanzler," which I believe to be a battlecry relating to the Chancellor of Rhineland during the Nomad War. I believe this confirms our suspicions about the infected nature of the vessel.

Cloud-9 and I remained onsite to supervise the destruction of life pods in the upper atmosphere of New Berlin. We believe that all pods were destroyed, but we urge law enforcement on New Berlin's surface to be vigillent for any possible contamination.

From a legal standpoint, I ordered the ship to be destroyed, and my weapons were the ones that opened fire on the vessel and mine were the guns that destroyed the pods we could reach. I accept full responsibility for the loss of the liner and the lives aboard. How this responsibility manifests will be the decision of the Orbital board of directors and the Government of Rheinland.