Document ID: LOG-CRG-505. They tell you hauling freight is boring. They lie. You spend months hauling refined ore, and then a manifest comes down with a black classification code. We haul missiles, men, and things we find out in the deep drift. Some crews come back with cargo that never hits the official ledger.
Loading ordnance is a zero-mistake game. We pack anti-ship torpedoes in active shock-gel cradles.
A single frigate carries enough firepower to crack a small moon. The loaders have to manually secure the magnetic clamps on every warhead. If a clamp fails during a high-G burn, the missile slips. A loose warhead bouncing around the magazine will not detonate immediately. The safety interlocks usually hold. The resulting dent just voids the warranty, and Command docks your pay for the entire cycle.
"Clamp four is showing amber."
"Kick it."
"I am not kicking a tactical nuke."
He kicked it. The light turned green. We locked the bay doors and prayed.
We move people just like we move titanium. Sometimes it is colonists in deep cryo. Sometimes it is penal battalions heading to the outer mining belts.
Cryo is quiet. You just check the power draw and monitor the frost lines on the pods. Awake cargo is a nightmare. A hold full of terrified conscripts generates too much heat and burns through the life support scrubbers twice as fast. We keep the hold temperatures low to keep them docile. The smell of three hundred unwashed bodies in a sealed deck never really washes out of the bulkheads.
Scavenger crews go off the grid. They dive into the ruins of the First Expansion ships and drag things back.
I inspected a freighter from the Perseus arm last month. The manifest claimed they hauled scrap metal. I opened the tertiary hold and found three solid blocks of black ice. Something inside the ice pulsed with a faint blue light. It interfered with my datapad. My screen filled with static, and I heard a low whisper in my headset.
WARNING: Never log unidentifiable biological or xenotech cargo on the official manifest. The quarantine protocols will lock your ship down for six months. Dump it, or sell it quietly on Station Chicago.