The General Quarters alarms are still annoying. I let the flowstraps do their thing. We're a lot closer to the fringes of the big silk tent growing around the broken remnants of Mars than we ought to be. It looks less like a cocoon and more like a living, bloated maggot. One with multiple heads. Like the one we seem to be heading towards. Sunlight glints off of the armored casing of a perimeter sat. The thing spins halfway over and shoots off into the blackness. It doesn't want anything to do with us. There's a rattling noise that vibrates through the entire transport. I'm locked out of the comms and other systems. Security. Need to know. I let it ride. They know what they're doing. A tether shoots out past us. Another. No. One of them is spooling out from our ship. It's a parcel swap. They're dropping some sort of packet while simultaneously picking one up, without stopping, and with only a minor, unrecorded deviation. This Skipper is good. Too good to be stuck on a milk-run like this...
