If it isn't pirates, its police. And if it isn't police, its dockside tariffs, fuel costs, stationmasters. Political upheaval is a good one, too. Not one you can give to your insurer or backers, but a pretty good explanation for why you should have ducked out of the business years back, why the Zoners had it right, and why Liberty is such a hellhole; because the rules change, and they keep changing.
A ship with guns isn't any safer than a ship without guns, its just one with the satisfaction of costing the pirates some money, and maybe a life or two before they board you, rape you, and run off with your cargo, fuel, and rations. There's a whole roll of cyanide capsules, tucked right beside the bandages and the antibiotics in the emergency kit for a reason: Taking just one or ten might not kill someone augmented and cleared for Leeds atmosphere.
That's what Sam kept telling herself, anyway. What she was really wishing for was a whole set of Dulzians, packed for broadside, or a standard array of CRI Transport Turret 4s, instead of a crummy pack of splitters and the hope that an orange paint job and a low emissions cruise pack would keep her hidden against the backdrop of orange clouds.
Course, pirates and police weren't the only worry out in the clouds. There's the risk of tragic space dementia, which could quite easily compound the paranoia already naturally associated with drifting cold over a dieing star while holding a sealed tablet to be delivered to an encrypted name, waiting for a go code. She'd bought the man's credentials when he flashed them to her, accepted that there was a war on and she could be drafted, but this was...highly irregular.
So she sat, and she watched the console faithfully fail to bleep, blare, or otherwise interrupt her tightly condensed hours.
Well, until the tubes dumped artificial adrenaline, flash heated blood, and twitchy electric impulses down across her spine: Bringing her back up to speed, and into patently illegal accelerated reactions as proximity alarms blared.
Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe were masters of the arguably legal practice of alternating counsel: A judge would call recess, jury would leave for lunch, and counsel would withdraw. Upon return, they'd be greeted not by the familiar face of the endearingly provocative strumpet of an interrogator, but a the chiseled visage of a graying aristocrat, who would launch into closing statements carefully calculated to just achieve the grandfatherly, without straying into the patronizing.
"My Esteemed Colleague," he would say, "Prosecutor Matthews, will demand justice here. Demand, with great intensity and a righteous fervor, that someone be brought to justice. Someone? That anyone be brought to justice. Because, for the prosecution, Justice means blood, means pain, and suffering, returned upon the world. For if there is to be Justice in the world, then, things must be even." He'd punctuate that last word, leaning hard on his cane, bent toward the jury's bench, and pause a moment, straighten himself out, and resume: "Matthews, in his diatribe, is bent on a world of exchange, eye for an eye, hand for a hand, for his is a world of Justice, and in a world of Justice, someone, anyone, must pay. Yes, my client pays. But so do you, peers of the jury. You, who have at your disposal an innocent man, Matthews would have pay the price for such.." and here he would blanch, and nearly spit.."Such Justice"
As the jury deliberates, Howe would exit the room, to be replaced by what appeared to be a child. Short cropped curls and exaggerated eyes over a trembling lip, Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe's Dolls had been known to persuade a favorable declaration of verdict...forcing a mistrial.
Later, a girl would be released from Constabulary holding, and gray man would pass a briefcase into a car's window, a car registered to Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe.