Personal Log, 26 September 3303
26 Sep 2017User78245
It's story time.Once upon a time there was a man, little more than a boy really. And I was little more than a girl, naive and a little selfish. But I loved him dearly and we were set to be wed in May 3299. He was a spacer, I was to manage the small plot of land set aside by my family as my bridegift. Two dumb kids versus the galaxy.
One day he was flying cargo somewhere, one last haul for credits to make our ceremony extra special. Legal in Alliance space, illegal in the Federation. His original flight plan kept him inside the Alliance, but along the way he was rerouted into a system of independent jurisdiction. It would have been fine though, all he needed to do was replot when he arrived and immediately jump out. We never found out why traffic control rerouted him.
Turns out that was his last jump. There was a Federation task force camped out around the Nav Beacon in that indy system. Some sort of friendly war game with the locals, "showing the flag and building rapport" or some nonsense. My love jumped right into the middle of it. He was immediately ordered to heave to for boarding and inspection. He complied, as illegal as the order was. The boarding team questioned him about his cargo, and made noises about having him in for smuggling. When my love protested, the response was "anywhere a Federal task force is, that's Federal space". Utter nonsense. We don't know if a warning about the war game ever showed up on his HUD before he jumped in; my fiance's co-pilot said he was sure he never saw one.
My love reached into his flight suit pocket to produce his bill of lading and original flight plan, and that was the last thing he ever did. Some trigger happy Federal Marine shot him right between the eyes. Dead instantly. They impounded his ship and repatriated his co-pilot back to Lave after his day in kangaroo court. We pressed charges through the Alliance embassy seeking to have that Marine tried for murder and to have the ship returned. The Federal Navy assured us the Marine had been executed, and the chain of command put to a board of inquiry and court-martialed.
Feds lie as easily as they breathe. One of my never-to-be in-laws spotted that Marine on station leave at Iota Bootis a few weeks later. You can guess from there what never happened to the chain of command of that task force as well. I enlisted in the Lave Self-Defence Forces flight school that same weekend after we found out. I was going to learn to fly and find that bastard myself.
Six months before I was due to re-enlist in the ADF, one of my cousins forwarded me word that he and that same Federal task force had been seen in Eravate. Refitting for a deployment in the Pleiades. It was an easy decision I made that day.
I never did track him down. Turns out he died in a bar scuffle with some locals at Artume. Galaxy's well rid of that rotten bastard. Also, I wasn't completely truthful when I said I was horrified seeing that wrecked convoy near The Oracle a few days ago. A little bit of satisfaction, and a little bit of guilt were mixed in as well. Because, you see, ships from that task force that killed my fiance those years ago were part of the escort flotilla for the battlecruiser that got ripped apart. My fiance's co-pilot had stripped the scan data before they were boarded, "just in case". That's how we knew the registration numbers. Maybe trigger-happiness runs rampant in that command's culture. Some times, the universe has a way of falling into place as it should though.