2952-12-11 – Tales from the Inbox: Ramiro’s Golden Cage
Of all the characters who have appeared many times in this space in recent years, none has gotten more attention from the audience – and more queries for messages to be forwarded – than Ramiro W. Obviously this isn’t his real name, nor is Jen Daley really the name of his little ship, but going by a pseudonym in this space is his own choice.
When last Ramiro graced this space, he was on contract with Survey ferrying Gilhedat diplomats from Maribel to the Core. At the time, Gilhedat encounters were still very much a novelty, and the ease with which one member of this group saw through him was still mysterious. It has not yet been two years since then, and those encounters now seem so mundane, at least to this embed team, who regularly encounters these golden-skinned diplomats on The Sprawl.
It is unknown what Ramiro has been doing since the end of the diplomatic contract (which must have been a month or so after his last appearance in this text feed at the very latest), but when I reached out last month to see if he was willing to share anything about his current status, I did get a response, cryptic though it was.
What happened to Livia he did not say, unfortunately, but the subject’s total absence from the message suggests he knows more than he’s saying. Perhaps Livia’s new friends have the official backing they assured him they had, and perhaps they didn’t; it’s impossible to say.
He also did not provide any idea of when the following took place, except that it is relatively recently.
Ramiro paused at the airlock to put Jen Daley into maximum security mode, and listened to the gratifying series of serve hums and mechanical thumps of a half-dozen internal hardened doors closing. When he stepped away from it, the outer airlock, too, slid shut with a definitive clank and a series of clicking noises as its locks engaged. He’d had the ship’s intruder defenses upgraded back in the Core Worlds not because there was anything aboard worth stealing, but because too many times recently it had been host to people who might attract unwanted attention.
As his datapack and earpiece cycled over to station-side configuration, Ramiro heard the triple chime of message delivery. Most datasphere communication had been forwarded to him hours before he’d docked, of course; anything he was getting now had been sent specifically to his local comms handle, and had not been captured by any of the system filters that would either discard it as unwanted or forward it to his general datasphere presence associated with Jen Daley.
Ramiro frowned. He’d set things up to avoid that happening; it was bad business to miss messages to any of his local contact points. He pulled up the message data on his wristcuff, but learned nothing; the message was untitled and lacked any of the metadata tags indicative of being a business query. The name of the sender, one Scott Vacovich, was entirely unfamiliar. Fortunately, though Ramiro had been out of Maribel for many weeks, the message was only three days old.
After checking that his sidearm was secured correctly to be in compliance with station regulations, he queued up this mystery message for audio playback and crossed the short boarding tunnel to the docking ring. He’d arrived in the middle of the local night shift, so traffic was rather light, with only a few spacers and local technicians hurrying about on various errands.
“Hello there.” The smooth, silky voice on the recording was familiar, but it was no comfort to Ramiro. “Whatever you’re doing back in Maribel, it can wait. I’ve got-”
Ramiro paused the recording, his frown deepening into a scowl. He was tired of being an errand boy for official agencies. It paid well, but he would prefer lower pay if it meant getting his freedom back. He’d thought after his last run, six or seven months before, that he was no longer of any use to Naval Intelligence or to the other military-offshoot outfits which Intelligence had sold his services to. Apparently he’d been wrong. Otherwise, there was no reason for “Sera” to be bothering him again.
“I’ve got another job for you. No passengers this time, so I’m sure you won’t mind. A mutual friend has something very important that needs to be run over to Botched Ravi. Don’t worry about fetching it, the cargo system already has the loading request queued up.”
Ramiro, passing one of the many viewpanels on the docking ring, looked out toward the boxy Jen Daley. Sure enough, a cargo crane was already moving a cylindrical M40 cargo container toward one of the ship’s pair of external container sockets. Short of putting the ship’s own crane in the way, there was nothing that could stop that damned cargo from being aboard his ship.
“As usual, we’ll pay you on delivery. There’s no rush, dear, but do try to avoid attracting any unwanted attention.”
The message ended there. There was no mention of what Ramiro would be paid; no matter the number, it was not worth the lack of control over his own destiny. He couldn’t refuse or even reply, of course; the Scott Vacovich profile was probably a burner account, like several others “Sera” had used to give him his assignments lately.
Ramiro watched the crane line up the cargo pod with the socket on his ship, then turned away and took a moment to deactivate his local Maribel datasphere profile. It wouldn’t stop “Sera” from contacting him, but it would make it harder for her to ambush him like this again. Perhaps it was time to quit the Coreward Frontier and try his luck back in Gal-West, a backwater which none of the military or intelligence institutions cared much for. He had plenty of savings and a much better equipped ship now than he had when he’d left there the first time; perhaps he could even try his luck in the more affluent Memoire de Paix.
Before he could do any of that, though, Ramiro had to be rid of the cargo. And to do that without attracting attention he’d need to spend a reasonable amount of time on the station and make some pretense of looking for passengers going into Farthing’s Chain. With a sigh, he headed for the lifts which would take him down to the commercial section.
