This is Captain Maddy Speaking Please Pay Attention

[aliaspseudonym]

 [INCOMING TRANSMISSION FROM STARSHIP INFRARED VELOCITY]

[TRANSMISSION BEGINS]

Um, hello I guess. I'm Maddy. Maddy - x√2, technically. You say that Maddy minus-x-root-two. Nobody ever knows how to say it, but I told you now so try to get it right. I'm the captain of the Infrared Velocity. It's a small Monarch class freighter, but with some heavy modifications. My engineer tells me I shouldn't publish the nature of most of the modifications to avoid giving away our ship specs to our competitors. He thinks I don't know most of the stuff he's put on is illegal in most ports. I know, of course; I'm a lot cleverer than he thinks. I just don't care enough to bring it up. Maybe if we were operating mostly out of a particular port, I'd follow its rules, but we're drifters. Deep space is our home port, and the only law in deep space is the Spacer Code. Anyway, everyone has illegal modifications. It's the only way you can compete with the Corp ships. You want something done by the rules, you hire one of them. You want something done faster for cheaper, you hire us and you don't ask too closely about exactly how we did it

Ok, crew, I guess. I'm the captain, obviously. There's four others. They're not the crew I'd have chosen, but they're ok. Better than I expected. They haven't let me down yet, at least, and nobody's tried to kill anyone else very seriously.

Cherish is the communications office (who is pretty much the BEST EVER) officially, and technically she does do that job, but she's really a hacker. She comes from some isolationist society of crystal nutters with tech that looks like magic to most of us. She's wanted back there for reasons I don't fully understand or care about, but it doesn't matter because hardly anyone ever leaves. Apparently she was a Witch back there, with like a capital 'w', which was an actual job of some sort. Her whole floating tthing is part of that, as is her ability to dance around encryption that would take years for the best codebreaker AIs years to break. Unfortunately, she's also a loose cannon, and her unparallelled ability to find out things she shouldn't makes her a very dangerous loose cannon. Her heart's in the right place, I guess, but she just doesn't think ahead, and sometimes not even her exception abilities can deal with the trouble she causes.

Oh, apparently Ozz needs my help with something down in hydroponics. Sigh. Alright, I guess I'll get to the rest of the crew some other time. Let me know if you have any questions for me, or for Cherish I guess. In fact, I might just get her to write the rest of these. She is communication's officer and all.  Actually never mind I think I will do ALL the boring pointless writing chores MYSELF and stop trying to sucker crew members into them!

Captain Maddy, signing off.

[TRANSMISSION ENDS]