The regulator holds steady, but the decrypted log keeps peeling open. A corporate tag blooms across the screen, clean and expensive in the middle of this scrap-bay mess.
Serafina
I did not buy this from a dockside broker. It moved through three hands before it reached us, and one of them was wearing corporate seals.
Ranuko
That is the part I wanted to know. The cradle seals are fine, but this hardware might be a leash.
The maintenance branch finishes opening. A warning line flashes, tied to remote service access and a locked kernel path that can be triggered by the wrong handshake.
Nahuli
The lock is tied to the regulator firmware, not the bay itself.
Serafina
If that line gets called, it can throttle the whole generation stack. Or worse, flag the ship as stolen stock.
The bay lights brighten another notch, washing over the cracked sleeve and the waiting console. The choice is plain now, trust the illicit regulator, or strip its brain before the ship depends on it.
✓ Quest Accepted
Deal with the regulator’s corporate tracking risk
“Corp tech is good, but dirty, always. Full analysis and quarantine the part.”
SUCCESS (Legendary Engineering, rolled +4)
Nahuli runs the full scan through the open kernel branch. The hidden checksum line resolves into a corporate service chain, then forks into a dormant beacon routine tagged to the regulator sleeve.
He isolates the tracking calls, wraps them in a quarantine cage, and seals the package before they can phone home. The red warning collapses into a clean amber block, safe for the ship to keep online.
A second file falls out of the trace, a dead-dock location packet cached beneath the leash code, old coordinates stamped with access timing and a transit window.
Serafina
That is better than clean. That is useful.
Ranuko
The beacon is cut, then. Good. I hate machines that snitch.
The cradle hum steadies. On the console, the quarantined firmware sits in a sealed pane, while the dead-dock data waits for Nahuli's next call.
Quest Complete
Deal with the regulator’s corporate tracking risk