[b]--=Telasis City Spaceport, Durand, Commonwealth Colonial World.[/b]

For the first time since he had set foot on this dustball Mattias was thankful, thankful twofold. Thankful he'd been on board the [i]Agni[/i] at the right moment and thankful he could give up this god-awful wild goose chase - because he had something that would do much, much better. He'd come here because he had been saddled with the task of good old basic journalism, which for the Chief back at [i]OuterNews[/i] often meant sending people like him to places no-one really wanted to go on the trail of corporate tax evasion that probably never happened - at least, they never found enough evidence about it 90% of the time. It was what happened when you worked for a low-tier news outlet that was part of some greater media behemoth, Mattias supposed.

And it had of course, meant he'd been here at the right time. He had originally gone back to the [i]Agni[/i] - a basic but reasonable courier ship - to file a run of the mill report for expenses and, he had hoped, be convincing enough for them to recall him for something else. After all, when anything lead you out of the Federation things became a little bit more difficult, and accounts buried on some fringe commonwealth world were certainly as much of a dead-end as them not existing at all.

Then it had happened. He had laid low when he'd heard the commotion, and used the [i]Agni[/i] to tune into the local newsnet, to see if there'd been some kind of accident or the like. It hadn't taken long for the newsnet to go offline, and that had piqued his interest. A few hours after all that he had risked popping his head out, a few people had been eager to talk - he guessed being Human and a foreigner helped and hindered. He had been eager to listen.

Now he was back here, compiling it all into a basic draft that the office back home could spin into something using all his background notes and information from Federal sources on Durand. Hostages? What seemed like open rebellion? Definitely enough for a couple of news cycles, even if it went nowhere - particularly with Durand being what it was. He imagined that rights to the story would probably net a pretty penny for the company, not that it did him much good.

There was, in theory, a small problem - the local communications channels were either down or effectively useless, and there was little to no way he'd be able to quietly bounce anything through PsiNet - but there had been foresight. Most news couriers had small, but powerful conventional transmitters for long-range communication, albeit mostly text based data, though he'd managed to squeeze in a few reasonable quality photos of people and things who'd been willing. It was important to humanise a story, after all! The Commonwealth either didn't know or hadn't thought to fill that frequency with junk data, so he was good to go. All the same, it would take a few days for it to ping off the nearest FedNat deep-space transmitter, but it would speed up immensely from there. Within a week or two he'd get his payday, and his name would be accredited to a notable breaking story that no doubt even the major newsnets would buy up, rewrite and republish. He also made sure to have Home Office poke the government, he didn't want to be stuck here in lockdown forever, after all.

-----

[b]Some Time Later[/b]

[i]"..nued lockdown of the system makes further information difficult to come by, whilst the Voice of Chiron has reached out to the Commonwealth Government via its Embassy for comment, there has been no official statement at this time. In other news, Pilot David Marshall won the Grand Betelgeuse rally today in a stu--"[/i] The Holographic image of the news Anchor faded out as Minister Adler waved it away.

What a mess. Now he had another mess to deal with. The Federation couldn't much have its citizens exit travel restricted due to civil disturbances, now, could it. It could very well put them in further danger. No, that wouldn't do at all.

He began to type into his pad, carefully, considering. Letters of protest were, sometimes, an art.