"Acknowledged.  We are all kinds of happy to stay in touch, if you're really Air Traffic Control."

A lot of Exception Handling had already been quite busy, or paying attention to other things, at this exact particular moment, for reasons which will become clear.

But it doesn't take a lot of brains to guess wildly what probably just happened.

Some people at Air Traffic Control, if in on this loop, must have already guessed what happened--or at least, massively updated probabilities based on a guess that two strange events are relevant to each other at all.

Exception Handling makes a blind guess, a snap decision, and orders Air Traffic Control that everyone who knows about a Flight 43 anomaly is to stay inside the same room and not communicate outside of it, except with Flight 43 itself or Exception Handling, for the next ten minutes.

Those ten minutes are putting safety margin along how long it should take to somehow verify that blind guess, bring the Chief Executive of Civilization and the rest of Civilization's C-level suite up to speed...

And then, order a general planetwide market trading halt, on all nonessential markets.

(Civilization does not do this every day.  Not even every decade.)

"Hello, customers!  Despite the recent spate of excitement, we are reminded once more that aviation is in fact remarkably safe all things considered, as we are now descending toward what is hopefully our runway, having successfully contacted what appears to be air traffic control, and apparently arranged to land.  I'm sure you're excited to update those market odds!  Well, you've got one more minute for any last-minute trades like that, but then return to your seats and fasten your seat's safety-apparatus about yourself to prepare for landing.  We have no specific reason to expect this landing to be in any way difficult, but you know as well as I do how many exceptions have been thrown on this flight already, so check those connections thrice!"

"After landing, we'll be taxiing into left field and then disembarking immediately and without retrieving cargo, after which we will walk to a holding area inside the Exception Handling station.  Please note that cellular towers around this area will have been shut down to prevent you from making or receiving any texts.  I'm told that everyone at Exception Handling is very confused, and concerned about possibly adversarial strategies in force, and it was an act of less than total caution that this plane is being allowed to just land and everyone is being allowed to depart it immediately."

"As always, do not detach your seat safety apparatus until the plane has rolled into its destination gate, or in this case field, and come to a complete halt.  Now, of course we all know, and you don't need to tell me, that Relativity prohibits there being any such thing as a privileged frame of reference in which to declare that something has halted.  What I mean, simply, is a halt relative to the ground, as seen through the windows, which should appear stationary relative to yourself, and you should also notice subjectively an absence of any apparent acceleration in any direction, except for a completely constant force pointing downward, corresponding to gravity.  If you're not sure, don't unbuckle yourself.  If you need to argue over the definition of what exactly constitutes a halt, it means the plane is not, for our purposes, at a halt, and you should continue sitting down... you know, actually, on this special occasion, let's just wait for the cockpit to announce that we're fully landed.  I know you're worried that they'll be too conservative in deciding whether or not we've landed, but please, for the sake of Coordination, trust them this once.  They don't want to stay on this plane any more than you do."

"After we've come to a complete halt, we will follow our usual efficient deboarding algorithm.  Left aisle seats where individuals are individually seated and ready to deplane with minimal effort, rise first and remove any carryons with local storage.  The governing principle is that at most one deboarding seat should be attempting to occupy any aisle space, and should then try to occupy that space only if it is ready to move forward in unison with all other persons in the aisle to deboard the plane once the exit has opened.  Do not attempt to recalculate clever individual strategies corresponding to this governing principle!  Just follow the rules already in place, which may not perhaps result in literally optimal deboarding results, but should result in good-enough results without any further coordination being required..."

...and the airplane descends through the clouds.

They were low clouds, but not so near ground-level that, having descended below, they cannot see the clear runway laid out before them.

And a bit ahead of that runway, a field with green and purple flashing lights set into a vehicle there.

They don't trust their instruments, even so.

They check by instrument and by vision whether the aircraft seems to be doing what they have told it to do.

And the plane lands safely.

Most planes do.

The passengers disembark.  There isn't any attempted nonsense about leaving carryons behind.  Somebody might have something important in there, and nobody wants to make a show of discipline by forcing them to abandon it.

(Even if people grab carryons, it's not that slow to disembark by Civilization's usual deboarding algorithm, which is actually quite fast; there is never any crowded aisle, and most passengers have disembarked through clear aisles walking forwards in unison before anybody with an even slightly complicated deboarding procedure tries to deboard.

If you showed them an airplane from a planet where people deboard much more slowly and with large empty spaces often appearing in the aisle, as those closest to exiting all try to exit first as soon as a not-completely-fully space appears in the aisle that they can lunge into, even at the cost of blocking all the other people behind them... pushing through crowded aisles to grab carryons from five spaces behind them, because carryon space was not efficiently allocated to carryons... they would not actually guess how bad things had gotten, on that planet.  But they would instantly and correctly guess that this planet's civilization was less well-coordinated than dath ilanis would imagine people would spontaneously organize among themselves.  It's how dath ilanis would imagine seven-year-old boys trying to get off a plane, if no boy among the seven-year-olds had any leadership aptitude.)

"So," Thellim says, from where they're now all waiting in a large indoor waiting area and, apparently, not using their cellular texters.

"So!"

"I figure you're gonna owe me one unskilled-labor-hour at the end of this.  But if you still think this didn't have a mundane cause, I'd consider tupling down on the bet."

"You're that confident it was mundane?  This sure seems like we're being kept in downright causal isolation."

"There's basically always a mundane explanation.  The causal isolation is because... one of us is a supercriminal, say.  Or they're uncertain if one of us is."

"You want to bet otherwise?"

"Oh, one always wants to bet.  The question is just, at what odds."

"Mm... I'll post my thousand against your hundred, that it's all still mundane.  Or maybe my thousand against your ten, if we talk first about how narrowly 'nonmundanity' is being defined."

"That's a shift from the odds you offered me earlier, back when this all started."

"It's been a very weird day, I'm in a causally isolated room instead of my nice apartment, and I want to know exactly what you mean by 'mundane' if I'm going to extreme odds about it..."

Keltham's voice trails off as he notices the number of faces turning to stare out the room's huge windows--no, it's not that causally isolated, but Exception Handling Station 91 was not really expecting to need much causal isolation--and his eyes follow where other people's gazes are looking.

"Thaaaat is a lot of Keeper aircraft for this having a totally mundane explanation."

"They're going to come in and read us to see if one of us is the criminal.  Just in case the criminal actually put theirself on board our aircraft."

"This hypothetical criminal would need to have done something much more concerning than diverting one plane, to rate that many Keepers showing up to pursue remote odds of catching them."

"Obviously this was never the whole plan."

"Oh hey, you know who's in there besides Keepers?  Because I am seeing aircraft in the colors of the Supervisors of Economic Conduct."

Thellim looks, and feels a brief twinge of instinctive fear despite knowing very well that she has not done anything wrong, that with Keepers around as a last resort it's probably a lot harder to frame innocent people for genuinely serious crimes than mystery-fiction authors and readers usually take on faith as an allowed plot premise, and that there really isn't any reason for any criminals to focus on her unless her mere awareness of her own existence indicates that she is the main character in some sort of generalized story where the more prominent characters get more consciousness.

The Supervisors of Economic Conduct have... a reputation, in dath ilan.

They don't very often ban anyone from trading in any asset markets for the rest of their life.  But the thing is, they can.

"Wow," Keltham says, after observing for slightly longer.  "They say there's shenanigans that get the SEC showing up at your house, and there's shenanigans that get the SEC showing up at your house in helicopters, but this is the first time I've heard about shenanigans that cause the SEC to show up in power armor."