Tales from the Service: The Occupiers’ Trap

2953-12-17 – Tales from the Service: The Occupiers’ Trap 

The ten-minute ride across the city was, for Arthur Klimek, surreal an experience as sitting on the administration steps. Most of the places he remembered were intact, albeit most of the businesses looked like they’d been abandoned for years. There was almost no damage to the buildings, and the superficial Incarnation iconography was limited to banners, posters, and painted murals. Homecoming to a ghost town, he decided, had to be the worst form, even if it was also a triumphant return as a liberator. There was nobody to liberate. 

The whole affair gave Arthur the distinct impression that the city, and Metzali as a whole, didn’t really want to be rescued. The Incarnation occupation of the planet had been a worthless diversion of resources better spent elsewhere, and it almost seemed like the planet knew that better than the F.V.D.A. generals who’d planned to retake it. If the empty streets could speak, they might be shouting at the convoy of personnel transports, telling them to go back, to let Metzali swallow its own intruders, until they were so enervated that a few hundred partisans from the hills could liberate their own spaceport. 

That was ridiculous, of course. Metzali, remote as it was, was rich in mineral resources, resources that the Incarnation might be able to extract and use to fuel its war machine on this side of the Gap. Every such world they held represented an opportunity to reduce their dependence on running supply ships across the Gap, and they needed to be deprived of as many of those opportunities as possible. That was, anyway, the official line. No doubt after the war the armchair historians would have the final say. 

When Arthur started seeing smoke up ahead, he knew they were close. Sure enough, the transport ahead of his slewed to the side and nosed into an alley to disgorge its troopers under cover. His own ride did the same with the next alley down, and the doors ground open. F.V.D.A. infantry transports weren’t designed to withstand heavy fire – they were little more than civilian wheeled movers with infantry-carrying boxes where their cargo beds had once been. They were armored against small arms fire, but nothing else. 

Arthur’s squad piled out into the alley, where they found a dust-covered trooper wearing the insignia of the 851st waiting for them in the hollow socket of a vacant doorway. Arthur waved his soldiers into that doorway, and once everyone was inside, he clapped the guide on the shoulder and pulled him in as well. The transport would need to pull back out of the alley and head back for the landing area, and he didn’t want anyone out there if its driver miscalculated the maneuver. 

“Glad to see you lot, Sergeant.” The 851st trooper shouted in Arthur’s ear over the roar of the transport’s engine. “We ran into heavy laser fire three blocks up. There’s a concrete building overlooking the whole area, and they’re holed up there and in all the surrounding buildings.” 

Arthur nodded. “Heavy weapons?” 

“We’ve had two transports knocked outby some sort of heavy emplaced laser, probably set up on the roof.” 

Lasers, of course, were invisible between emitter and target, unless the atmosphere was thick with smoke and dust. They were also quieter than almost any other weapon. Unless someone was looking right at the weapon, and could see its meta-lenses flashing as they tuned the beam, such weapons could be notoriously stealthy. 

“Upstairs wants your company to sidle left and advance along...” The man checked the text on a battered digital screen on his wrist. “Imogen Street.” 

Arthur started. “Eh?” 

“Imogen Street.” The man pointed to the left. “Two streets that way. Most of the signs are still-” 

“Big concrete building?” 

“Yeah, weren’t you listening?” 

“They’re holed up in the Rawlins Agriculture compound?” Arthur put his hand on the man’s arm. “You must be joking, trooper.” 

“Er... yeah, it does say Rawlins on the building. Why-” 

“Tell your captain that place is a trap.” 

“Trap?” The dusty trooper looked at Arthur as if he were mad. 

“Didn’t anyone stop to think of why a farm supply company needs concrete walls more than a meter thick?” 

The dusty trooper shook his head mutely. Behind him, the transport rolled out of the alley and the sound of its engine dwindled into the distance. 

“It’s a fertilizer factory. Synthetic fertilizer is basically just granulated explosives mixed with bad smells. They’re going to draw us in, then blow the place.” 

The other man’s eyes widened, and Arthur belatedly noticed some of his own men were listening in.  

He scowled at them and waved them back in the other direction; they all had work to do, securing the building, establishing contact with any other friendly forces within earshot, and getting their comms gear locally synced with the 851st's tac-net. Most of the squad shrugged and ambled off, at least pretending to take the hint. 

“I’ll, uh.” The dusty 851st trooper stammered. “I’ll pass that intel along, Sarge.” 

“Damned right you will.” Arthur shook his head and stalked away to find a quiet spot to report up to his own superiors as well. They might send his squad in anyway, but they’d damned well better do it only after they knew the score. 

The recapture of Metzali is, in the grand scheme of this conflict, a very minor event, with very small forces contributed by both sides. That being said, I thought it important for the account which will take us up to the Feast to be one that demonstrates the competence and grit of Confederated forces. 

As we go into this holiday week, I wish to assure all of you at home, be it in the Core Worlds or in the still-free systems of the Coreward Frontier, that your safety is in good hands. The Navy, Marines, F.V.D.A., and other services waging this war on two fronts are working tirelessly to end the threat of Incarnation aggression, and in the meantime to keep that threat as far away from as many of you as possible. 

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Tales from the Service: Homecoming on Metzali

2953-12-10 – Tales from the Service: Homecoming on Metzali

Feast season is upon us once again. We are no strangers to celebrating this most hallowed time of year on a war footing, obviously, but this year, this Cosmic Background embed team is celebrating it farther than ever from our homes and our loved ones. While we wouldn’t miss this experience for all the worlds in the Reach, it is still a difficult time of year to be a war correspondent. 

It is no less difficult of course for us than it is for the many hundreds of thousands of military spacers and ground forces personnel here on the Seventh Fleet front. Most of the veterans of the fleet have not been home for five years, and a few were already near the end of a tour when war broke out. These, unfortunately, haven’t been home for longer – some eight to ten years. 

Admiral Abarca wanted us to tell all of you out there that he’s trying to fast-track a wave of personnel rotations before the end of the year, so some who’ve been serving for the longest will be going home soon, some to academy tours, some to rear area duty and postings in the fleet formations not on a war footing, and some, if they choose, are going home, their tours of duty complete. While they won’t be getting home before Emmanuel Feast, most of those who are being rotated should be getting the news by that date. 

Though it was almost unheralded due to the fact that the attack was of small scale and barely opposed, Fifth Fleet and associated FVDA formations retook the minor outpost on Metzali in the closing days of November. Incarnation forces landed on the world without warning or opposition in 2950, and their forces deported all the civilians who didn’t disappear into the hills to their other holdings on the Coreward Frontier. Fortunately, estimates are that more than two thirds of the small population successfully evaded capture, owing to the relative youth of the colony and the small size of the occuation force. We recieved one account from a trooper who participated in this rather uneventful liberation. 

Arthur Klimek sat on the steps of the central colony administration building, his rail carbine across his knees. It was good to be home. 

Arthur had been a clerk in that very building before the war. He’d often sat on those very steps on pleasant days, eating his lunch, chatting with the other low-grade admin personnel and watching the trickle of Metzali colonists going into and out of the building, registering births and deaths, updating land holdings records, recording construction submitting survey data, and so on. Life had been good in those days; his salary was good enough even as a young professional just starting out to pay for a row-house in the spaceport town, an aircar, and a prefab cabin on fifty acres in the hills. Land on a new colony was cheap, especially when it was land that had been found to contain no particularly valuable minerals, and he’d hoped to find someone looking to settle down and have kids in a few years. 

Then the war had come, and FVDA recruiters had set up their booth in front of those very steps, showing holos of what had happened to Adimari Valis and other worlds that had fallen to Incarnation attack. They’d promised recruits a chance to make a difference, and to come home – if they survived – with stories to tell their grandchildren. Arthur, and many of the other young clerks working for central administration, had signed up. 

Metzali had been conquered while Arthur and his unit were still in training. It had been an afterthought on the newsfeeds; the world was small, inconsequential, its population largely taken to the hills or evacuated offworld in the face of a small occupation force. There were bigger crises then, and such tragedies were simply too numerous and too small for the public to worry about. 

That had been three years ago. Now, Arthur was home, albeit still in uniform, now a senior sergeant. He was the only native of Metzali in his battalion, and so had been called upon to help with the pre-drop briefing. They’d expected a sharp but brief fight with the garrison, but none had materialized; the spaceport they captured was a ghost town, its infrastructure partially and shallowly adapted as an Incarnation base. The detritus of a hastily abandoned occupation lay everywhere, but there was no sign of serious fighting. 

“How’s it feel to be home, Sarge?” 

Arthur looked up to see one of his newest squadmates, Private Vandek, picking his way across the littered plaza from the squad’s temporary shelter, an abandoned cafe. 

“It’s like a bad dream, Vandek.” Arthur gestured up to the building behind him. “Can you believe I used to work at a desk in there?” 

“You? At a desk, sir?” Vandek chuckled. “I can’t picture it.” 

Arthur smiled sadly. Three years in uniform and fighting on four different worlds had changed him far more than his world had been changed by the vandalism of its occupiers. “I suppose not. Did new orders come down?” 

“Just a minute ago.” Vandek hooked a thumb back toward the storefront where the rest of the squad was waiting. “There’s a transport on the way to pick us up. Word is there’s a fair bit of shooting down at the southeast end of town. Someone in the eight-five-one finally found where the bastards are holed up.” 

“I figured they hadn’t gone far.” Arthur stood up, hefting his carbine. 851th independent battalion, one of their sister units, was responsible for clearing most of the southern outskirts; if the bulk of the occupiers were concentrated in one area, it could be a real fight. “We'd better not keep them waiting, then.” 

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Tales from the Service: A Personnel Maneuver

2953-11-26 – Tales from the Service: A Personnel Maneuver 

The silence in Captain Sven Danielssen’s duty office dragged on for some seconds after the lieutenant’s departure. For his part, Sven sifted through the files on the desk’s holo-display, as if searching for a form that he would need for what came next. He had no intention of ever finding that form, of course, but the two spacers didn’t know that. 

“Are we really getting transferred, Captain?” Halloran finally asked, his voice trembling. The poor spacer looked really terrified, though Sven didn’t see why. It wasn’t like a transfer was a death sentence. He was terrified enough, at least, to forget himself and speak to someone several ranks up the chain of command without being spoken to. 

For his part, the second spacer – Sung – nudged his fellow and shook his head curtly, evidently remembering protocol better. 

“That’s Lieutenant Ahmetov’s recommendation.” Sven shrugged. “But spacer, we’re out on a patrol. You’re not going anywhere for at least a month, and you’ll get plenty of notice to pack your things before you're transferred off the ship.” 

Halloran shook his head. “Is there some... form of appeal, sir? I like this ship. This crew.” 

Sven arched one eyebrow. “I suppose if you have something you’d like to add to the lieutenant’s report about the incident, that might alter things.” Sven, as the skipper, of course had to approve any transfer request, and his approval was all but guaranteed to be decisive with the Replacement Bureau. These green spacers were unlikely to know this, however. 

“Sir? Add to...” Halloran frowned and looked down at his boots. 

“No, sir.” Sung saluted. “I’m sure Lieutenant Ahmetov’s report is exhaustive.” 

“That’s sort of the problem.” Halloran muttered. 

Sven fixed the spacer with one of his signature wilting glares. “Pardon?” 

“That’s, ah, the bulk of the problem, sir.” Halloran looked up. “If the lieutenant writes his reports like he dresses us down, he'll find no shortage of things to color our dossiers with. It’s going to make it hard for me to land another field posting.” He hesitated, then continued. “You see, it’s, well. This will be my third transfer in less than a year.” 

“Ah.” Sven nodded. He knew only too well how, even if nothing else made it into a spacer’s personnel file, three transfers in a short span would mark him as a liability. This wasn’t precisely fair, of course, but since a skipper couldn’t usually see the full personnel file of a spacer he was being offered as a replacement, such arbitrary metrics were important. No combat commander wanted to take a risk on a potential liability. Sometimes the Bureau wouldn’t even send them out anymore; they’d relegate such spacers to duty on logistics haulers or depot stations. 

“Neither of us did anything to earn that second transfer, Captain.” Sung shook his head sadly. “The XO was just making room to try to get his nephew aboard.” 

“What about this one?” Sven leaned back in his chair.  

“Well...” Sung glanced at his compatriot. “We don’t think so. But the lieutenant is correct. We weren’t at our post in time at the start of the second shift drill.” 

“It was my fault, not Sung’s.” Halloran shook his head. “I, ah. When the alarm sounded, I jumped, and I dropped my datapad into the maintenance panel we’d been working on when the alarm sounded. Sung should have gone ahead without me, but he stayed to help me fish it out.” 

“That seems like a relatively minor infraction.” Sven turned to Sung. “But the report I read indicates a string of incidents leading up to this one.” 

“Well.” Sung swallowed. “We were also the lowest scoring gun crew team in three of the four drills prior. Not by much, you understand. Ten percent or so. If I may be so frank, sir, I think he was looking for any reason to write us up because of that.” 

Sven knew that ten percent was indeed a large value to be worse than the other gunners, but given that the pair were the most inexperienced members of the entire crew, it was a perfectly reasonable value. What they needed was better mentorship and more practice, not a transfer. “He assigned you together as a team?” 

“He said he didn’t want to break up any of the veteran teams, sir.” Sung nodded. 

Sven hid his displeasure. It did no good to show the ratings any dissention in their chain of command. Still, Ahmetov had gone too far this time. “Do you think you could meet his standards if you had more practice?” 

“Er.” Sung looked over at his companion, who shook his head. “N-no. I think the lieutenant has already made up his mind about us.” 

“I mean, spacer, if you had the opportunity to practice for a few weeks, could you consistently score within two or three percent of the other gun crews?” 

This time it was Halloran who answered. “I don’t see any reason why not. It’ll take some time, and some pointers from the other gunners.” 

Sven nodded. “Then I will suspend this transfer request for one week.” Melirose Diver wouldn’t have any way to transmit signals back to Sagittarius Gate for that long anyway, but they didn’t need to know that. “Consider yourselves on punishment duty. Until further notice, you are off the department duty rotation. You have no duties except the gunnery-sims for the next week. I’ll see if Ahmetov can spare a veteran gun team to come down and see what they can do to help you out.” 

“T-thank you, sir!” Halloran saluted. 

“But.” Sven held up one hand. “If those performance scores don’t improve by at least two or three percent, I am going to approve Ahmetov’s recommendation. And if there’s any action in that time, you’re both on damage support duties. Stay away from the gunnery stations.”  

“We understand.” Sung nodded. “We’ll get started right away.” 

Not every captain or every ship has the luxury of bringing up the marginal performers to the high degree of excellence which is important in combat. It seems Melirose Diver was not expecting much action when it took aboard the replacements its gunnery chief so disliked, but if the ship was expecting to go into combat the next shift, I think Captain Danielssen might have treated them very differently. Not everyone has the head to be a good gunner for any of the weapon systems aboard a ship of war, and those who simply can't get it right away are unlikely to grasp it over time.

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Tales from the Service: A Personnel Matter

2953-11-19 – Tales from the Service: A Personnel Matter 

Replacing spacers and officers on veteran crews has always been a tricky prospect. No navy has ever been able to solve the problem completely; any system that tries to do a full psych-match for each replacement inevitably neglects sending any replacements to the most experienced and thus most culturally unique crews, and any system that focuses on filling rosters first inevitably places new personnel on crews they are not well suited to join. 

Thankfully, recruitment has ensured that the number of personnel available for both replacments and filling out the crews of new vessels is more than adequate in both the Fifth Fleet and the Seventh Fleet, so the easy patch for the problem is for skippers to send back poor fitting personnel and replace them again. This, unfortunately, leads to certain crews always cycling five or ten percent of their complement without ever really initiating any of the newcomers to the community. It also ensures that a certain percentage of replacement spacers who have been cycled in and out of warship crews several times and thus, often through no fault of their own, have personnel files that make skippers unwilling to take a chance on them, thus increasing the chance they’re cycled back again the next time. 

These spacers, though eager to do their part, are perennially drifting from ship to ship, outpost to outpost, without even the dignity of a rear-echelon posting. 

Captain Sven Danielssen massaged his temples and closed the report he’d been reading on his desk holo-display. The smart thing to do was to approve the attached transfer request from his gunnery chief and not ask too many more questions. The pair of ratings had after all only been aboard for about three weeks, like most of the crew replacements Melirose Diver had taken on after the bad hit she had taken at Elmore’s End. It would be no surprise to anyone that some percentage of them – largely green spacer recruits from the Core Worlds – had proven a bad cultural fit for the veteran crew of a blooded Seventh Fleet light cruiser. 

Of course, as one of the older cruiser captains in the Seventh and still commanding the same light cruiser he’d had at the war’s outbreak, Sven knew he was rarely accused of doing the smart thing. The mauling his Diver had suffered recently was largely due to his own command decisions, and he had been over the names of the thirty-four spacers maimed and fifteen killed in that action many times since. The smart thing to do was always to stay out of unnecessary trouble, but he had a bad habit of inserting himself into it. 

After a few seconds’ consideration, Sven tapped his comms earpiece. “Lieutenant Ahmetov, I’ve just finished your report on the incident of yesterday, second shift. Bring the two ratings you named up here to my office.” 

The response was, as usual of the precise, hard-driving gunnery chief, immediate. “Aye, Skipper. We’ll be there in five.” 

Sven sidelined the channel and shook his head. No doubt, since it was now nearing the end of the first shift of the next day, the pair was already awake and grudgingly preparing for whatever punishment duty Ahmetov had assigned them to until he could get them off the ship. Had he made this request at another time, the gunnery chief would have relished the opportunity to barge into each one’s bunkroom and shake them out of bed unprepared for a meeting with the captain. Anyone who Lieutenant Ahmetov judged competent was treated extremely gently by their chief, but he was a terror to anyone who he thought incapable of performing to an acceptable level. 

The problem, as always, was that Ahmetov, though he possessed a near-savant level understanding of relativistic gunnery and knew more than most engineers how to get the most out of Melirose Diver’s various weapons, was a poor mentor. He demanded too much out of his subordinates, all the way down to the most junior tech and the greenest gunner, with little interest in training the poor performers. In the peacetime Navy, this was fine; the crew could cycle through under-performing junior ratings every week or so until they had a few that passed his initial muster and were deemed adequate.  

Wartime service, however, had proven this system brittle. The cruiser’s gunnery department had been ten ratings under strength going into Elmore’s End. If Ahmetov kept going as he was, it might be fifteen the next time they got into the thick of a proper fight. How many empty berths would it take before the ship’s ability to defend itself was meaningfully degraded? 

Bad gunners and bad techs, of course, would definitely degrade the ship’s ability to fight. Lieutenant Ahmetov was right about that. The problem was that he didn’t seem to know the difference between moderately capaple and incapable. Anyone who wasn’t already approaching the ninetieth percentile was, in his view, a gross incompetent. 

The office door opened to admit the Lieutenant, leading a pair of young men in the unmarked gray tunics, with only the ship’s insignia and their surnames displayed on each shoulder patch. The pair each snuck a look at Sven, saluted crisply, then folded their hands behind their backs, their eyes firmly fixed on the deck at the foot of his desk. 

Ahmetov saluted, too, his salute as sharp as theirs, if briefer. “Captain, as requested, Spacer Halloran and Spacer Sung.” He gestured to each in turn. “I take it this is about the transfer recommendation?” 

“It is.” Sven steepled his fingers and looked hard at each of the young men. Neither of them could be over twenty T-years old, but they both had the look of lifelong spacers about them. They’d probably been from merchant spacer families before enlisting, as many of the ratings were. “Our current orders will have us out here for at least another month. Do you wish me to reassign them to another department until then?” 

Ahmetov scowled over his shoulder at the pair. “I can find a use for them for a little while, as long as there are no more... incidents.” 

“Understood.” Sven nodded. “I’m sure you have better things to do than this personnel matter, Lieutenant. I’ll take it from here with your spacers.” 

Ahmetov frowned in confusion, but with a little shake of his head, saluted again. “Understood, Captain.” He spun on one heel and exited the office without another look at his under-performing charges. 

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