SSB CORP TRAP TALK
From Create Your Own Story
This is taking way too long, something must have come up on their scan. You pull up your system diagnostics and type some commands on the holo-keyboard. As you do so you follow the comm channel back to the source, easily overcoming the station's state of the art firewalls with a little ingenuity and old fashioned hacking. Before long, you have a cam feed of the station control tower Burgess is calling you from. After a few more commands the audio starts coming through as well. Burgess stands next to an ugly old woman who is throwing her hands up in frustration. "How many times do I have to say it, Wolcott? She's not in the fucking system! Tell her she can't land here."
Burgess shakes his head. "Martha stop being a dumbass. What unaffiliated pilot hasn't landed at a Sym station before?" You're surprised to here a Symbiosis employee refer to their company by the slang name. Maybe Burgess is a little less uptight than you thought. "We'll let her dock and rescan her."
Great, just what you need. More time wasted. Your contact is waiting for you on the station, and knowing him he's probably already distracted by all the pretty lights and prettier boys in the entertainment module. Any delay is more of a chance that the station police will figure out what's really in your cargo bay.
Martha points a spindly finger at Burgess, and says, "What if she's one of those Rapers?"
Burgess sighs, "Reapers, Martha, not rapers."
With a wave of her hand Martha demonstrates how few fucks she gives about semantics and the finer points of anarchist pilots. "If you let her on the station and she does something, I'm blaming you! Your ass will be blasted out the nearest airlock while mine gets the spit shine from the higher ups!" She cackles at this, and says "Good ol' deep tongue fucking from Tamsen in my asshole!" Her howling is so loud you consider turning off the link, and you think you see Burgess gag at the thought of Martha getting a rimjob.
Burgess sits back down with a grin, ignoring Martha's shrill laughter. "And if you turn her away, I'll let you tell Tamsen why we turned away a prospective customer." Martha stops laughing and glares at him. She opens her mouth to say something but thinks twice and glowers at her keyboard. "That's what I thought." You see Burgess reopen the comms channel before you hear him on your end. "Sorry about that, Captain. There's something wrong with our system, it says you've never docked-" You assume this is when Burgess notes he can hear his own voice coming from your ship. You quickly power down the audio link and wait for Burgess to continue. "Sorry, are you getting a weird echo on your end?"
"No, nothing here."
You hear Burgess grunt to himself and whisper something about a "piece of shit link." His voice maintains it's same bored monotony, but his language becomes more official as he says, "Captain Vera Travis, you are cleared for landing. Proceed to dock four-three."
"Thanks, Captain Travis on route."
You expect the comms to cut out, but Burgess goes on just the same. "Captain, be advised that a Symbiosis Enterprise's technician will be waiting for you on the landing pad." He waits for you to object, but as you already knew about this you wait for him to finish. "You don't show up in our systems, which shouldn't happen if you've docked with us before. The technician will get you back in."
"Is that really necessary? I am in a bit of a rush here."
Burgess sighs and says, "well if you don't want to fill out information now you could do it the next time you land, but they'll drag you into a technician's office and the whole procedure will take hours. This way you can be done in less than 15 minutes."
What a pain in the ass. You wonder if it would be better to just get it out of the way now, though you'd rather not keep your contact waiting any longer than you need to. Still, it seems like Burgess is doing you a favor here, but could it really take the whole day?
"It's your choice, Captain Travis."
