Leeds was quiet today, which was good because there was a literal ton to do shipping goods off Leeds with the Puddle Jumper, transferring them to the Vow, and hauling them out of the system. The only interaction was a brief one with a Lane Hacker. The Hackers are technically enemies of the crown. Like so many other aspects of life as a Privateer, you get a lot of mileage out of the word "technically." They shoot the French corporations trying to ship through Leeds and there isn't any friendly tonnage heading through the system nowadays anyway. Truth be told, they do a better job enforcing the embargo than we can, so why not let them have their fun?
It's not like we can stop them. A passenger liner may be the size of a cruiser, but she is not armed like one.
She seemed intrigued by the privateer ID before pronouncing me no better than a lap dog for the corporations. Seems they are still nursing a serious anti-corporate kick, I wonder if they'll team up with the Mollys, Hessians, or even the Coalition. They'd find ample pamphlets and propaganda explaining the workers struggle to keep them going. In any even, she wasn't terribly impressed with the Puddle Jumper and sent me on my merry way. Bigger fish to fry, I suppose.
Part of me wants to take it as an insult that I wasn't even worth making a piracy demand of, but good relations with the Hackers is in our long term interests. We ship a LOT of supplies via anomaly through Magellan, so keeping on the Hackers goodside is a top priority. Maybe even an informal partnership could be worked out. I hear rumors that they make a lot of black market light arms on their base, only a single jump hole away with no pesky 5th fleet in the way to spoil the fun...
Sidenote: shipping out refugees is going to be slightly harder than I anticipated. They want to take their meager possessions with them which doesn't cost a lot of cargo space but does take up weight. Essentially, my capacity is cut in half to get them off planet safely. This means that every trip down to the surface, I can offload 630 units from the Vow using PJ, but can ferry only half as much back up. Eventually, I'm doing empty runs one way or the other, and if my pops taught me anything, it's that a good freighter NEVER runs empty.
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