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She scrolled through the logs, found the relevant slot, played it
Medina here Conferme Traffic Control’s usual calm
The responding voice had a little interference An artifact of the gates This is the freighter Savage Landing out of Castila on approach, Medina Transferring our status now
A ne popped up The ship status of a light freighter Martian design Old, but not antiquated It took a few seconds for Traffic to come back
Visé bien, Savage Landing You are clear to transit Control code is—fuck! Abort, Savage Landing! Do not transit!
A sudden spike on the safety curve and the alarnature appeared on Medina’s control board, the pluh the starless dark of the slow zone
It was done All of it over with hours ago, but Dru for the new ship to identify itself, the rail-gun emplacements clicked to active If they’d fired, everyone on the unauthorized ship was dead already
The safety curve decayed, the disruption created byuntil it passed the threshold The intruding ship spun, burning hard, and zipped through a different gate, kicking the curve back up again as it escaped
Traffic cursed in several languages, sending stand-bywas quiet, but the feed froly hard burn as they peeled away, breaking off the approach to the Castila gate
She rolled back, the near cala itself The reckless asshole had come in from Freehold and passed out into Auberon Because of course it had The leaking radiation froate showed that the ship had one dutchh as scheduled, one or both ships could have vanished into wherever ships hen their transits failed
In the short ter in later There’d be a bunch of pushbacks Maybe dozens of ships that had to change their burns and coordinate new transits Not a threat, but a pain in the ass
And not a good precedent
“Should I respond,” Vaughn asked, “or would you rather deal with this personally, ma’am?”
It was an excellent question Policy was a ratchet If she pulled the trigger, gave the order that the next unauthorized ship through was going to be turned into scrapshe could pull back froht her to be very careful doing so if she wasn’t ready to do it every time from then on
But, Christ, it was te