Baggage ….
OK then ….
My wife and the rest of our friends have gone ahead as tourists … the bare minumum mentioned, and nothing unlawful carried … I get to be the mule for the stuff the blue-helmet assholes would wet their pants over … fine. the fewer people involved, the less chances there are for a screw up.
The buggered transponder is working correctly … if a flight line inspector sees this, he is going to freak. I will be long gone by then, hopefully. At least 4 felonies here, not including the weapons, of course. Screw them. Inquiries will also be made when I fail to take off from a controlled field … about a week from now … heh.
All the stuff is loaded, survival gear, vacc suit, scuba gear, mechanics tool set, chainsaw, climbing rope, explosives, and hand tools … I wonder if anyone else considered bringing a pick and shovel? My container also has a transponder and cargo chute … paranoid, I guess.
And of course, the usual collection of “Conneticut Yankee” library data cells … everyone and his uncle was making noises about reference libaries … in fact, I’ll bet that net traffic probably prompted this clusterfuck. That Loompanics retrospective I downloaded probably put me on twenty different watch lists as well. I also downloaded 10 times as much entertainment … if someone wants to watch something other than “Basic Blacksmithing”, they can bloody well pay me for the privilege.
Getting to the spacecraft was surprisingly uneventful … heave to at the deliveries dock in a rented cargo lifter, wear a grey coverall, hang a correct looking badge from your pocket, and push around a massive shipboard container marked “Sanitation/Life Support”, and no one even sees you.
One wandering guard actually looked at my badge … and apparently didn’t look at the photograph … that, or I look a lot like Mickey Mouse.
Lots of empty space on the cargo deck … yea, it looks like planning went right out hte bloody airlock here … just keep acting like I belong here and am doing my job, and everyone else will look right through me … pick a place inside the liner where I can see the boarding gate … sit down, get out my iTablet, and look busy … make sure the Super Redhawk ( love that antique ) is loaded and reachable inside the tablet’s case.
And just wait to see if this shindig gets started without the federales inviting themselves.