I submitted the following to the writing contest that ended yesterday. I intended to post but never got around to it because well.... I wanted to actually go and play the game for a bit. 
In the altogether likely case it never sees the light of day again (I've seen the talent on this board) I thought I'd give it a go here.
Insurance... We've all seen the screen come up and we've all had to hit that rebuy button at least once, right? I get that its a game mechanic but how would something like that actually work? If some company were going to shell out tens (hundreds?) of millions of credits to replace a lost ship, they'd at least want someone to look into the loss first, right?
So this is my attempt to answer that question while still keeping it as much within lore as I can. Because I like mysteries, it's also my attempt to write a "Holmes in space" type character. Let me know what y'all think.
In the altogether likely case it never sees the light of day again (I've seen the talent on this board) I thought I'd give it a go here. Insurance... We've all seen the screen come up and we've all had to hit that rebuy button at least once, right? I get that its a game mechanic but how would something like that actually work? If some company were going to shell out tens (hundreds?) of millions of credits to replace a lost ship, they'd at least want someone to look into the loss first, right?
So this is my attempt to answer that question while still keeping it as much within lore as I can. Because I like mysteries, it's also my attempt to write a "Holmes in space" type character. Let me know what y'all think.
The Investigator rose to meet his guest. “Mr. Carlos Gallardo?” he asked. When the man nodded, the Investigator extended his hand. “Eamon Valeran. I’m a claims investigator with Zaonce Mutual Insurance. Thank you for joining me.”
“Fancy place,” Carlos said as a shook Eamon’s hand.
Eamon shrugged and looked around the restaurant. “We are talking about paying you for a 108 million credit spacecraft,” he said. “I think we can afford a few benefits. Besides, I have a few final questions for you and I want this to be as painless as possible.” The Naiad’s Repose was one of the more exclusive establishments on New California and the waiting list for evening dining was usually months long. It had a menu that conspicuously lacked prices and a view of a tropical shore that could awe some of the most jaded. However, it’s late afternoon “happy hour” was a little more flexible and sometimes made allowances for a less desirable clientele. “Can I order you a drink?” Eamon asked.
Carlos was definitely not one of the desirable. His body was just a shade plump compared to the gene sculpted physiques around him. His purple suit, though well made, was just a touch too loud. What truly made him an undesirable was his gait. He had the shambling walk of someone unused to gravity, a Spacer. He sat uneasily. “Uh, yeah… Is there a, uh, whiskey?”
“Actually, this world has an excellent distillery.” Eamon looked up at the waiter who had silently stepped up to the table. “Two of the 35 year if you please,” he said.
“Is that, umm… expensive?”
Eamon waved the question away. “I can expense it,” he replied. He reached into his coat pocket and placed a small holofac terminal on the table. “As I said, I just have a few small questions.” The holofac activated and the image of a Python class starship appeared in the air above the table. “This is your ship, the Travelling Circus?” he asked.
Carlos nodded.
Eamon continued, “And two weeks ago, your ship was illegally attacked and destroyed by this one,” the view in the holofac shifted to the flat, wedge shape of a Viper Mk IV, “the Damnable Intentions, piloted by Commander Lucian Boyess?”
Again, Carlos nodded. Only this time his face reddened with anger.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Eamon said, “what happened?”
Carlos’ lips tightened into a thin line. “He was a nimble little SOB. Nailed my thrusters and powerplant with railgun shots and had me blown before the cops arrived.”
“Did he make any threats or demands for your cargo?”
The waiter returned and placed two glasses containing an amber colored liquid on the table. Carlos picked his up and threw back his 130 credit drink in one shot. Eamon motioned for the waiter to get another. “Naw,” Carlos said with a grim look on his face. “The son of a ... just grabbed me and burned me down.”
Eamon sipped at his drink and nodded. “Well, I reviewed the flight recordings recovered with your escape pod and they are mostly consistent with your written statement.”
“Mostly?” Carlos asked.
Eamon made another indication for empty drink to be refilled and then tapped a control on the holofac. “Just some discrepancies,” he said. The holofac view shifted to a star map with a bright blue line linking several of the stars. “Here is the record of the Travelling Circus’ last flight. It shows that you departed Al Qaum and made 4 jumps before arriving here in Epsilon Eridani. You were then attacked approximately 10 minutes after arriving.”
“Yeah, I scooped the star for fuel and then I was coming in to sell off my load,” Carlos replied. His second drink arrived and was thrown back as quickly as the first.
“That’s where I wanted to start,” Eamon said. “The record shows that before arriving here, you stopped in Kapteyn’s Star for 47 minutes. My first thought was that you were scooping the star there, but the record said you didn’t, you merely loitered. What were you doing?”
Carlos shifted slightly in his seat. “Well, uh… I was just taking in the sights,” he said. His third whisky arrived and sat untouched.
“What sights?” Eamon asked. “It’s nothing but ice worlds and a red dwarf. It’s also an Anarchy system. Why take the risk?”
Carlos swallowed hard. “Umm… I also had to hit the head,” He stammered. “You know… zero G and all that.”
“You strapped yourself in the head for 47 minutes in Anarchy space?” Eamon asked, a skeptical tone creeping into his voice. “That seems like an awfully cavalier attitude for such an experienced spacer.”
Carlos swallowed hard. “When you gotta go…” he said.
Eamon leaned back in his chair. “You must understand, Mr. Gallardo, this made me curious enough to go out and look at the wreckage of your ship.”
Carlos’ eyes widened. “You did what?”
Eamon took a sip of his drink. “Went and looked at your ship,” he replied. “That 47 minutes, combined with something else I noticed in your log made me think that something was missing.”
“What something else?”
“I’ll get to that,” Eamon said. He tapped the controls on the holofac and the view shifted to piece of wreckage floating in space. “This is the piece of your ship containing the frame shift drive. As luck would have it, it was mostly intact.”
Carlos’ eyes narrowed and his fingers played nervously over the rim of his glass. “Why is that important?”
“As an experience spacer, you know that modern ship systems are nothing more than a series of linked computers, each with their own logs of input and output. The flight data recorder, the black box, is supposed to be final repository of this information after it’s been used by the subsystems,” Eamon said. “This is to make it easy for an investigator such as myself to determine what happened in the event of an emergency. However, if someone wished to hide something, it is the recorder that is most likely to be altered.”
Carlos leaned forward in his chair. “Are you accusing me…”
“Please,” Eamon said, “I’m only making observations. I want to resolve this and get you your money.” He tapped the holofac and the view shifted to rows of numbers. “This is the raw input data from your Frame Shift Initiation Control Module,” Eamon began. “This information includes the time and duration of each initiation, the precise status of the ship at initiation, whether it was an interstellar jump or an intra-system supercruise, and any gravo-metric effects on the ship.”
The color in Carlos’ face began to shift from the red of anger towards a pale pink.
Eamon continued, “These numbers relate to one another in ways that make them very difficult to change without it being noticeable and they must be precise. Without that precision, why you might fly right through a star or bounce into a super nova. That would end your trip in spectacular fashion, would it not?”
Carlos said nothing.
Eamon took a sip of his drink and shifted the holofac view again. “I used this information to run simulation of your trip. It agreed with your data recorder right up until you arrived in Kapteyn’s Star.” The holofac shifted again to show an area of space around a red dwarf star. “This shows you doing quite a bit more than just loitering in the system.”
Carlos’ complexion shifted from pale pink to white.
“Here we see you dropping from supercruise into normal space twice,” Eamon said. “The first time it was for approximately 8 minutes, about 50 light-seconds from the star. When you reentered supercruise, the gravo-metric input recorded a nearby mass of 296 tons.” Eamon shifted his gaze to Carlos. “Why, I believe that is the mass of combat loaded Viper Mk IV, is it not?” he asked.
Carlos said nothing, but his hands clutched the table hard enough for his finger tips to turn white.
“The second time you dropped into normal space it was for 21 minutes,” Eamon said as he shifted the view to another set of numbers. “From here, you made the interstellar jump to Epsilon Eridani. The gravo-metric input shows a lot of mass nearby but it’s somewhat diffuse. What’s really interesting is your ships mass has magically increased by 55 tons.”
The paleness in Carlos’ face faded and began to be replaced with a splotchy red. His third whisky remained untouched.
“The information I pulled from your frameshift drive allowed me to plot where exactly in the Kapteyn’s Star system this happened. So, of course my curiosity got the better of me and I just had to go take a look,” Eamon said as Carlos stared hard at him. “You know what? I found the wreckage there of a Type 7 transporter. I was able to recover its data recorder and it showed that the ship was interdicted by a Viper Mk IV that was then joined by a Python, your Python, in a coordinated attack.”
“You son of...,” Carlos whispered.
“And do you know what caused me to consider all of this?” Eamon asked. “Every ship made is equipped with a system that alerts the police in the event of an attack. Your data recorder indicated that this system was turned off until 67 seconds before you were interdicted. That was too short a time for it be prescience and too long for it to be a panicked response to interdiction.
“It is long enough for you to tell your partner that you were double crossing him though,” Eamon said. He could now see uniformed police, led be a plain clothes detective, entering the restaurant behind Carlos’ back. “Did you turn the alert system on in case you couldn’t escape the interdiction. Were you hoping System Security would solve your partner problem for you?”
Carlos gave a savage smile. “You can’t take me down for this,” he said, “We did that attack in a system outside the law. Everything after that was all legal.”
“True,” Eamon admitted, “except that it does prove you were carrying stolen goods in this system. The police approaching you now are going to want to ask you about that.”
Carlos gave a sudden start as he noticed the approaching officers. He then relaxed. “Smuggling? That’s small time,” he said.
“Again true,” Eamon said, “But I don’t care about the law. I only care about the insurance claim.”
“Whaddya mean?” Carlos asked suspiciously.
“Did you know that your policy has a fraud clause?” Eamon asked. “Once I was able to identify all the things that were changed in your data recorder, I was able to isolate the program you used to make the alterations. That proves that you submitted a fraudulent log in support of your claim.”
“I don’t get it.”
It was now Eamon’s turn to smile. “Mr. Gallardo, your attempts to hide your illicit activities from them,” Eamon pointed to the detective approaching their table, “nullified your insurance policy with us. You will not be receiving an insurance payment for your ship.”
Carlos’ face turned red and his hand flashed instinctively towards his waist.
“Don’t you remember the stern looking man checking your weapon at the door?” Eamon said calmly. “That’s why I chose this restaurant. I wanted to ensure that our discussion ended pleasantly.”
The detectives meaty hand came down on the back of Carlos’ head and slammed his face down onto the table. “Carlos Gallardo,” he intoned, “You are under arrest for the abetting of piracy, smuggling of stolen goods, filing of a false report…”
When the police left with their prisoner, the rest of the patrons in the restaurant dropped their pretense of ignoring Eamon’s table. They were all now openly staring at him.
“Sir?” It was now the Maitre D’ and not the waiter standing beside him.
Eamon smiled up ruefully. “I believe I’ll be dining alone tonight,” he said.
“Fancy place,” Carlos said as a shook Eamon’s hand.
Eamon shrugged and looked around the restaurant. “We are talking about paying you for a 108 million credit spacecraft,” he said. “I think we can afford a few benefits. Besides, I have a few final questions for you and I want this to be as painless as possible.” The Naiad’s Repose was one of the more exclusive establishments on New California and the waiting list for evening dining was usually months long. It had a menu that conspicuously lacked prices and a view of a tropical shore that could awe some of the most jaded. However, it’s late afternoon “happy hour” was a little more flexible and sometimes made allowances for a less desirable clientele. “Can I order you a drink?” Eamon asked.
Carlos was definitely not one of the desirable. His body was just a shade plump compared to the gene sculpted physiques around him. His purple suit, though well made, was just a touch too loud. What truly made him an undesirable was his gait. He had the shambling walk of someone unused to gravity, a Spacer. He sat uneasily. “Uh, yeah… Is there a, uh, whiskey?”
“Actually, this world has an excellent distillery.” Eamon looked up at the waiter who had silently stepped up to the table. “Two of the 35 year if you please,” he said.
“Is that, umm… expensive?”
Eamon waved the question away. “I can expense it,” he replied. He reached into his coat pocket and placed a small holofac terminal on the table. “As I said, I just have a few small questions.” The holofac activated and the image of a Python class starship appeared in the air above the table. “This is your ship, the Travelling Circus?” he asked.
Carlos nodded.
Eamon continued, “And two weeks ago, your ship was illegally attacked and destroyed by this one,” the view in the holofac shifted to the flat, wedge shape of a Viper Mk IV, “the Damnable Intentions, piloted by Commander Lucian Boyess?”
Again, Carlos nodded. Only this time his face reddened with anger.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” Eamon said, “what happened?”
Carlos’ lips tightened into a thin line. “He was a nimble little SOB. Nailed my thrusters and powerplant with railgun shots and had me blown before the cops arrived.”
“Did he make any threats or demands for your cargo?”
The waiter returned and placed two glasses containing an amber colored liquid on the table. Carlos picked his up and threw back his 130 credit drink in one shot. Eamon motioned for the waiter to get another. “Naw,” Carlos said with a grim look on his face. “The son of a ... just grabbed me and burned me down.”
Eamon sipped at his drink and nodded. “Well, I reviewed the flight recordings recovered with your escape pod and they are mostly consistent with your written statement.”
“Mostly?” Carlos asked.
Eamon made another indication for empty drink to be refilled and then tapped a control on the holofac. “Just some discrepancies,” he said. The holofac view shifted to a star map with a bright blue line linking several of the stars. “Here is the record of the Travelling Circus’ last flight. It shows that you departed Al Qaum and made 4 jumps before arriving here in Epsilon Eridani. You were then attacked approximately 10 minutes after arriving.”
“Yeah, I scooped the star for fuel and then I was coming in to sell off my load,” Carlos replied. His second drink arrived and was thrown back as quickly as the first.
“That’s where I wanted to start,” Eamon said. “The record shows that before arriving here, you stopped in Kapteyn’s Star for 47 minutes. My first thought was that you were scooping the star there, but the record said you didn’t, you merely loitered. What were you doing?”
Carlos shifted slightly in his seat. “Well, uh… I was just taking in the sights,” he said. His third whisky arrived and sat untouched.
“What sights?” Eamon asked. “It’s nothing but ice worlds and a red dwarf. It’s also an Anarchy system. Why take the risk?”
Carlos swallowed hard. “Umm… I also had to hit the head,” He stammered. “You know… zero G and all that.”
“You strapped yourself in the head for 47 minutes in Anarchy space?” Eamon asked, a skeptical tone creeping into his voice. “That seems like an awfully cavalier attitude for such an experienced spacer.”
Carlos swallowed hard. “When you gotta go…” he said.
Eamon leaned back in his chair. “You must understand, Mr. Gallardo, this made me curious enough to go out and look at the wreckage of your ship.”
Carlos’ eyes widened. “You did what?”
Eamon took a sip of his drink. “Went and looked at your ship,” he replied. “That 47 minutes, combined with something else I noticed in your log made me think that something was missing.”
“What something else?”
“I’ll get to that,” Eamon said. He tapped the controls on the holofac and the view shifted to piece of wreckage floating in space. “This is the piece of your ship containing the frame shift drive. As luck would have it, it was mostly intact.”
Carlos’ eyes narrowed and his fingers played nervously over the rim of his glass. “Why is that important?”
“As an experience spacer, you know that modern ship systems are nothing more than a series of linked computers, each with their own logs of input and output. The flight data recorder, the black box, is supposed to be final repository of this information after it’s been used by the subsystems,” Eamon said. “This is to make it easy for an investigator such as myself to determine what happened in the event of an emergency. However, if someone wished to hide something, it is the recorder that is most likely to be altered.”
Carlos leaned forward in his chair. “Are you accusing me…”
“Please,” Eamon said, “I’m only making observations. I want to resolve this and get you your money.” He tapped the holofac and the view shifted to rows of numbers. “This is the raw input data from your Frame Shift Initiation Control Module,” Eamon began. “This information includes the time and duration of each initiation, the precise status of the ship at initiation, whether it was an interstellar jump or an intra-system supercruise, and any gravo-metric effects on the ship.”
The color in Carlos’ face began to shift from the red of anger towards a pale pink.
Eamon continued, “These numbers relate to one another in ways that make them very difficult to change without it being noticeable and they must be precise. Without that precision, why you might fly right through a star or bounce into a super nova. That would end your trip in spectacular fashion, would it not?”
Carlos said nothing.
Eamon took a sip of his drink and shifted the holofac view again. “I used this information to run simulation of your trip. It agreed with your data recorder right up until you arrived in Kapteyn’s Star.” The holofac shifted again to show an area of space around a red dwarf star. “This shows you doing quite a bit more than just loitering in the system.”
Carlos’ complexion shifted from pale pink to white.
“Here we see you dropping from supercruise into normal space twice,” Eamon said. “The first time it was for approximately 8 minutes, about 50 light-seconds from the star. When you reentered supercruise, the gravo-metric input recorded a nearby mass of 296 tons.” Eamon shifted his gaze to Carlos. “Why, I believe that is the mass of combat loaded Viper Mk IV, is it not?” he asked.
Carlos said nothing, but his hands clutched the table hard enough for his finger tips to turn white.
“The second time you dropped into normal space it was for 21 minutes,” Eamon said as he shifted the view to another set of numbers. “From here, you made the interstellar jump to Epsilon Eridani. The gravo-metric input shows a lot of mass nearby but it’s somewhat diffuse. What’s really interesting is your ships mass has magically increased by 55 tons.”
The paleness in Carlos’ face faded and began to be replaced with a splotchy red. His third whisky remained untouched.
“The information I pulled from your frameshift drive allowed me to plot where exactly in the Kapteyn’s Star system this happened. So, of course my curiosity got the better of me and I just had to go take a look,” Eamon said as Carlos stared hard at him. “You know what? I found the wreckage there of a Type 7 transporter. I was able to recover its data recorder and it showed that the ship was interdicted by a Viper Mk IV that was then joined by a Python, your Python, in a coordinated attack.”
“You son of...,” Carlos whispered.
“And do you know what caused me to consider all of this?” Eamon asked. “Every ship made is equipped with a system that alerts the police in the event of an attack. Your data recorder indicated that this system was turned off until 67 seconds before you were interdicted. That was too short a time for it be prescience and too long for it to be a panicked response to interdiction.
“It is long enough for you to tell your partner that you were double crossing him though,” Eamon said. He could now see uniformed police, led be a plain clothes detective, entering the restaurant behind Carlos’ back. “Did you turn the alert system on in case you couldn’t escape the interdiction. Were you hoping System Security would solve your partner problem for you?”
Carlos gave a savage smile. “You can’t take me down for this,” he said, “We did that attack in a system outside the law. Everything after that was all legal.”
“True,” Eamon admitted, “except that it does prove you were carrying stolen goods in this system. The police approaching you now are going to want to ask you about that.”
Carlos gave a sudden start as he noticed the approaching officers. He then relaxed. “Smuggling? That’s small time,” he said.
“Again true,” Eamon said, “But I don’t care about the law. I only care about the insurance claim.”
“Whaddya mean?” Carlos asked suspiciously.
“Did you know that your policy has a fraud clause?” Eamon asked. “Once I was able to identify all the things that were changed in your data recorder, I was able to isolate the program you used to make the alterations. That proves that you submitted a fraudulent log in support of your claim.”
“I don’t get it.”
It was now Eamon’s turn to smile. “Mr. Gallardo, your attempts to hide your illicit activities from them,” Eamon pointed to the detective approaching their table, “nullified your insurance policy with us. You will not be receiving an insurance payment for your ship.”
Carlos’ face turned red and his hand flashed instinctively towards his waist.
“Don’t you remember the stern looking man checking your weapon at the door?” Eamon said calmly. “That’s why I chose this restaurant. I wanted to ensure that our discussion ended pleasantly.”
The detectives meaty hand came down on the back of Carlos’ head and slammed his face down onto the table. “Carlos Gallardo,” he intoned, “You are under arrest for the abetting of piracy, smuggling of stolen goods, filing of a false report…”
When the police left with their prisoner, the rest of the patrons in the restaurant dropped their pretense of ignoring Eamon’s table. They were all now openly staring at him.
“Sir?” It was now the Maitre D’ and not the waiter standing beside him.
Eamon smiled up ruefully. “I believe I’ll be dining alone tonight,” he said.