The final member of the crew was a gangly-looking waif-girl named
Estrid.  She had stowed away on board the ship 4 years ago at the
tender age of 9.  Dirty, scrawny and looking decidedly brutalised by
the realities of a harsh childhood, Danes had found her, three days
out from Havana, cowering in a far corner of the engine room under a
filthy rag of a blanket.  It took 5 hours of gentle coaxing in Danes'
much less than perfect Spanish to finally get her to come out and
accept a hot meal and shower.  Her slow emergence from that primal
state of fear and reaction to a semblance of normality took many
months of slowly building trust.  Danes tried to find out about where
she came from and why she ran away, but the sheer number of forsaken
orphan children scratching out a miserable existence in the Caribbean
at that time made it an impossible task.  The only thing he ever
managed to get out of Es (as the crew had come to call her) was that
there had been a terrible place where she had seen and experienced
terrible things and one day when she was big and strong, she would go
back to that place, if she could find it, and burn it to the
motherfucking (insert equivalent spanish explative here) ground.  As
the years past she became a more or less ``normal'' kid.  Well as
normal as one can be whilst growing up on a pirate cocaine smuggling
ship!  The wretch she left behind, seemingly vanished into the aether,
replaced with a happy, energetic young girl, ready to take on anything
and everything.  She was the resident monkey of the crew, always
willing to have a climb up the rigging when anything needed fixing, or
just for the view.  She quickly soaked up any and all information
anyone was willing to give her, and worked hard to master anything
anyone was willing to teach her.  In this way she has become an
integral part of the kill-9 crew and like the daughter Danes never
had.

The kill-9 also had some hidden talents due to it's usage as a
smuggling vessel.  Hidden compartments and the like, for storage of
its illicit cargos.  Smuggling was all good and well when the bils
needed to be paid, however this was not the primary purpose of the
ship.  Danes was at heart, a hacker and information freedom activist.
As an anarchist he resented all forms of centralised power as the main
causes of oppression and suffering in this world.  Back in the early
days of the 'nets, governments were blisfully unaware of the magnitude
of posibillities that this new communications tool opened up to the
world.

Here was for the first time a truely decentralised and free way for
all people (well those with computers and 'net connections that is) to
communicate, without interference or an agenda being pushed by central
powers.  Those were the good old days, the wild west of the '90s and
'00s.  Once governments the world over began to realise exactly what
had been unleashed under their noses they began to fight tooth and
nail to put the cat back in the bag.  Some governments had more
success than others.  Oppressive dictatorships were the first to stamp
out 'subversive' communications on the 'tubes.  North Korea being the
most successful by proxy, one could say, as the vast majority of their
people never even got a first whiff of that glorious flow of free
information.  Other shining examples were China and Iran, who got
website blocking and usage monitoring down to a fine art.

This sort of thing was all fine and dandy in these countries where
freedom had never really gotten a foothold to begin with, but in
western countries, things had to be done a bit differently.  There one
must preserve the illusion of freedom, even if the reality is quite
the opposite.  So western countries started pushing legislation like
the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which seemed so outrageous to
internet denizens as to never pass into law, and which went largely
unnoticed by the general public.  The first few rounds of anti
internet freedom laws were indeed struck down, but through sheer
persistence, governments of the world slowly chipped away at what was
permissable online that by within 10 years or so the internet was
reduced to a glorified cable TV service.  Delivering 100's of
sanitised, crippled, but approved sites, whilst everything else was
labled 'subversive', or bastions of child pornography (think of the
children!) and subsequently declared illegal.  All new devices would
be jam-packed with 'security features' to make us safer online and
blocked all those nasty sites, to monitor our web usage, and of course
made it extremely difficult to access anything deemed not appropriate
for the general public.  Oh there was some outcry, at first.  But the
milennium generation, who had grown up with restricted tablet PCs
instead of having to hack together what they could our of spare parts.
Who had never experienced the fun of playing with the IRQ settings to
get a sound-card to work under DOS, etc, etc.  They never even noticed
as long as facebook and youtube were still up.  It just became the way
things were and memories of the way things used to be were confined to
the minds of old, greying, oldschool hackers, anarchists, and the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This conveniently meant that all sites discussing anti-government
themes, or any sort of alternative to the status quo were illegal and
ostensibly wiped out.  In reality they were just pushed underground.
Down to the seedy underbelly of the internet which had always been
there, erstwhile haunts of the über-paranoid, the drug dealers, the
criminals, and the paedophiles.  Darknets and TOR, protected by heavy
encryption, anonymizers, private VPNs, etc.  This worked for a while,
until the public internet became so locked down and traffic so
restricted that encrypted packets were banned outright, to protect the
public from themselves, of course.  Companies could apply for a
special licence to use encryption for their VPNs, internet banking,
etc, but they had to supply the government with a key so they could
decrypt whatever they wanted to.

If an unauthorized encrypted packet was detected, the originating IP
address was looked up in the governmental database that all ISPs were
required to supply with customer information, and the offending party
would have their internet privileges revoked.  This usually resulted
in the individual being socially shunned by their community as
facebook was now the primary form of communication by all people.

The underground, however, adapted as it always does.  There were still
those who desired freedom, and they would have it no matter what.

The ship was a node in a vast wireless mesh network, the free
internet.  Born in darkness, at first only a few individuals
experimenting with ad-hoc, anonymous, secure mesh networks.  With the
tightening restrictions on the public internet came a growing interest
in open alternatives to the walled-garden it had become.  Soon
hundreds of like-minded hackers were tinkering away with devices and
software to create free networks wherever they went.  Nodes were set
up anywhere they could be, on roof-tops, cable-tied to lamp posts,
bolted into the sides of buildings.  After a few generations of
designs it was easy.  A node could be created out of any old hardware
that could run linux (a lot) and had a wireless transmitter.  Just
plug in an USB stick with the right software on it, and boom, free
internet node.  It had to be easy though, since they were forever
being discovered and destroyed.  As quickly as they were found and
taken offline, three more were put up elsewhere.  Data stored on the
network was encrypted and replicated across multiple nodes for
redundancy, so something stored on the free internet was actually more
likely to persist than on the original internet.

As well as this system worked on a smaller geographical scale, there
was a limit to the range that the consumer-grade wifi transmitters
could be coaxed into broadcasting.  Thus, permanent, long range nodes
were required if the free internet was to have the same national and
global reach as the original internet.  That's where the kill-9 comes
in.  It was one of many ships operating as nodes in the free internet.
Equipped with powerful radio transmitters, sensitive receivers, and
high-speed satellite uplinks, they formed a bridge between localised
clusters of free internet nodes and the rest of the world.  Of course
a long-range node didn't necessarily have to be on board a ship, it
just conveniently put it beyond the reach of government authorities,
safely in international waters, like the pirate radio stations of old.