The big freighters are corporate-owned and totally automated, which as far as Opal's concerned makes it entirely victimless. The freighters are designed to fit, tolerance-pushingly exactly, through standard crunchspace ring gates, routes pre-programmed, shuttling cargo around the galaxy in big heterogenous wodges.
If you're handy with your timing and not scared of a little EVA, you can jump off a ship transiting a ring gate, jet over and hang onto the gate itself, wait for a cargo hauler, jump onto it, hack its back end while it's still threading its entire front through, and Just-In-Time rewrite its flightpath, inserting an extra stop. Pop the whole thing out of one of the rings sitting out nowhere — abandoned network expansion branches, failed colony service endpoints, obsoleted multi-hop route midpoints — pull its manifest, sort by black market cash value and portability, punch an offload request into its loading systems, yoink the stuff and reverse it back through the ring into crunchspace and on with its life.
And that's been a fine and lucrative and hard-to-stamp-out gig for about two years, and today marks the first time it's gone anything like seriously wrong. And Opal, staring at a scrolling terminal window as the ship brakes to a halt for its unofficial cargo offload stop, thinks seriously wrong is exactly the word.
Because some kind of failsafe system has compared this stop to an airgapped redundant copy of its itinerary, and thrown a red alert she can't shut off. And part of the response involves flash-thawing a deep-suspension cryopod with a corporate troubleshooter in it.
These fucking flying piggy banks are supposed to be unmanned.
On their own ship, Jean hits the comm. "Abort," she says roughly. "Jam it straight in reverse, kick on over here, we'll bug out and call it a wash."
"Send them through the crunch ring half-thawed?" Opal says. "You want them to get to the other end as a puddle of goo?"
"I don't fucking care."
"Well, care that that's a murder charge, then." Opal stares at the scrolling diagnostics. "They're wise to our entire MO, Jean. There's some kind of isolated system onboard, it's logged the jump and this location and god knows what kind of sensor data on us."
"Then we run. Now."
"Or," Opal says, "we get on top of this. Get the drop on the corprolite before they thaw, stick a bag over their head, rubber-hose the new system spec out of them. Wipe the incriminating data it's logged on us. Then reverse it through the ring and run, and make our next move informed."
"Get over here," Jean says.
"Running out of time, the cryo's defrosting already," Opal says, not jetting over to their ship, hand-over-handing across the hull for a service lock instead. "C'mon. A little risk up front, sure, but it keeps us off Wanted posters."
"Get over here," Jean repeats angrily, with the saw-toothed frustration that means she knows Opal isn't going to.
"It's fine!" Opal says. "Forty minutes, tops! Beat up a corporate nerd a little! What can possibly go wrong?"