Side quest: The Sparrow's Last Flight

Your scanners catch a distress beacon on a frequency old pilots still carry. A Sparrow-class — entry-level, one-seat, hull reads like it's held together with tape — drifts on emergency power. Comms cut in. The voice is younger than you expected, and tired. 'Unknown pilot. Don't dock. My oxygen is compromised and my cargo is... complicated. But I'd like a witness before I go dark. Will you stay on the line?'

'Thanks. Name's Reyes. I'm a courier. Two weeks ago I took a job from a woman who said her sister was on a Tribunal ledger and would I please, please, move a data wafer to a Freehold contact at Kova Rim. I said yes because she paid double and because I'd been flying hungry. Tribunal scouts found me near Midha. Their Eye-class put one shot through my engine room. I made three warps on emergency power. This is as far as I get.' A pause. 'The wafer is in my safe. If I were a better pilot I'd have delivered it. If I were a worse pilot I'd have sold it. I'm just a pilot. So I'm calling a stranger.'

You ignore the mayday's warning and hard-mate to the Sparrow. The airlock is dim. Reyes is belted in the pilot seat, alive but shallow. They don't have the breath to argue. They point at the cargo safe. They mouth the word sorry. Then they say, clearly, the only full sentence they'll say to you: 'the wafer is yours now. do the right thing. any right thing.' They close their eyes.

You fly the wafer to the Freehold contact at Kova Rim — a woman who opens the door, takes the wafer in both hands, and cries without sound for a minute. She reads the name on the wafer, says 'that's my sister's name,' and pays you the full courier fee out of a private safe. She asks your name. You give it. She says, 'I'll remember it. Next time the Tribunal marks you, Kova Rim will have your back.'

The Tribunal pays well for returned ledgers. Eye-class meets you at a neutral hex and takes the wafer with formal silence. The credits hit your account before you warp. A week later, you hear — through the kind of channel you don't quote — that the sister whose name was on the wafer was sentenced in absentia. You did not pull that trigger. You sold the weapon that did.

You eject the wafer into deep vacuum on a heading no Tribunal scanner frequents. Whatever names it carried die with the pilot who carried it first. You cover Reyes's eyes with a courier's cloth — old tradition, nobody does it anymore — and detach. The Sparrow drifts on. You do, too.

You spool the warp and go. The Sparrow's beacon pulses behind you until it doesn't. You fly a clean lane the rest of the day. Your hands, though, are lighter than they should be on the stick, which you recognize as the physical sensation of having left someone.