The capsules’ virtual necomm interface pulsed. The subject of the incoming massage read “It’s done.” The body contained another two words. “Your turn.”
The taciturn message lacked River’s usually mindful honorifics. What could that mean Snowflake wondered? The Adukal techniques she habitually relied upon to empathise with those who would communicate with her did not work so well when floating in ectoplasm and beset by an array of bio-mechanical sensory inputs, she found.
“It’s done” undoubtedly referred to the evacuation of the CONCORD Assembly Plant where River had planted her industrial flag for the longest time. It must have been a wrench to physically transport all the ships, goods and manufacturing materials and yet she had done it without question or complaint. She would not have used the light fast transport she favoured in her interstellar jaunts to see her research partners. It would likely have been the heavy hauler with a large fleet bay that she used to move the office’s valuable material to less secured space.
Snowflake mentally pictured the repeated lifts of large unwieldy objects and the painfully slow turning arcs of the higgs anchored Occator River had available to her and nodded. Exhaustion then, that explained the brevity of the communique.
And now it it my turn to remove the ships docked in that station that are registered to me. The office was already closed, quietly, without incident. All that remained was the unspoken edict that echoed wordlessly in her own mind; leave no trace.
She deftly concluded the remaining Dodixie market order transactions she was engaged in. The fruits of the planetary bodies she oversaw went from very real cargo in her hold to line items on a ledger.
She would stop off at headquarters and switch to a frigate more suited to slipping through the gates she would need to in order to complete the evacuation for herself.
It was an inconvenience, the Olide office had not been her first choice for The Order’s quiet operations hub but it had blended the needs of both River and Geana quite nicely. Geana had started her capsuleer career frequenting the low security systems neighbouring Fasse, it had been evident that she longed for the thrill and freedom low security space afforded and she had to do everything in her power to bring Geana fully into the ‘family’ fold, where as River craved the supreme security CONCORD provided for her mechanised construction lines. Olide struck this delicate balance, but there was one more thing she, Snowflake, was loath to abandon: The gate to Adeel’s treasure chest.
As Aura had said early in her assumed capsuleer experience; “There are hundereds-of-thousands of pilots in the world, and they all crave one thing: ISK. Although she herself had never developed a taste for piracy, capitalism sung in her veins.
Right now agents of the underworld were reaching out to Empyreans like her progenitor, and they would be hard pressed to resist taking a side. She herself had done much to eschew any connection with criminality but nothing to inhibit smooth operation with the authorities. Yet we must remain neutral right up to the point where there is no more grey space to occupy. That was why the evacuation of the CONCORD station had become necessary. It is the price to pay in order to occupy the thin grey margin she would lead The Order down right to the inevitable and bitter end of the line. Then, when the conditions were right, the tyrants treasure-box would be opened.