Tales from the Service: The Restless Prisoner

2954-10-14 – Tales from the Service: The Restless Prisoner 

“If she was just after any man in a uniform, why did she bother with the new guy?” 

“That’s what I said.” Sorab Bokori took a sip of synthetic coffee from his insulated metal carafe. Though the  badly dented, he would not part with it for anything; after all, it had been a gift from his sister back home on Philadelphia, and the insignia of his favorite hiking park, Nova Adirondack, was still clearly visible on its surface.  

“Did it work?” Jaster McCallum, another camp guard who had the dubious honor of sharing a guard-tower shift with Sorab, glanced over his shoulder down at the camp enclosure for a moment. 

“She threw her drink in my face and stormed out of the club.” Sorab chuckled. “So I would say so.” 

McCallum rolled his eyes, probably doubting the veracity of the tale. Sorab didn’t mind. He was not above exaggerating a tale for entertainment value on a long, dull shift in a camp guard tower, where most forms of alleviating tedium were prohibited by regulation, but this time, the story happened to be as true as anything. His last posting, a prisoner camp on Maribel, had been close enough to the spaceport for leave cycles. Naturally, some of the local women of questionable reputation sought out the younger, more impressionable men, and just as naturally, Sorab generally found himself playing chaperone and fending them off. 

Now, of course, he was posted to a remote camp in a safe, rural sector of Håkøya, there was no settlement worthy of the name for a thousand kilometers. Technically, they could get leave and hitch an hour-long ride on the transport to Kinzinger Junction, where there was a skimmer ferry service across to the resort complex at La Meuse Meri, but they’d only have a few hours in the intact but almost deserted resort area before catching the dusk ferry and starting on their way back. Most guards only tried this once before deciding that nature was a sufficient companion on leave days. 

Most of Kinzinger Junction hadn’t left with the evacuation, so one could theoretically stop there and spend the day among the old hands and wizened woodsmen who had simply melted into Håkøya’s lush forests with their families when occupation troops showed up. A few of the camp’s personnel did this regularly, too. Sorab was one of them. As an avid hiker and occasional long-haul backpacker back home on Philadelphia, he shared the stubborn locals’ love of open skies and the quiet solitude of the wilderness. He had bought their unique form of trail pack and was working with them to master the posture required to use it correctly. Back home, he suspected, the innovation would prove quite popular. 

McCallum started telling a story about a fight he and a compatriot had gotten into on the transport into the Håkøya system. Normally, Sorab liked a good fight story, but almost as soon as it started, he caught sight of a figure in a dark gray tunic creeping between the barracks buildings in the camp below.  

Nodding absently as the story built toward its predictably explosive climax, Sorab watched the figure peering up at each of the guard towers in turn. He didn’t need to see a face to know it was Prisoner 5514043, the very one he’d marked as trouble a week earlier as her batch had marched into the enclosure. She was always skulking around, even though she had to know every spot in the camp was plainly visible to the occupants of at least one tower. She always seemed to be up to something. Planning her escape. 

McCallum noticed Sorab’s attention flagging, and gestured down behind himself. “Let me guess. Old ‘43 is nosing around again?” 

Sorab nodded. “She’s going to try a break.” He shrugged. “I’m just not sure when, or how.” 

McCallum looked over his shoulder just as the dark-haired woman looked up at their tower. She made no attempt to hide her contempt for the two men watching her as she slunk back into the grid of barracks buildings, and out of their sight. 

“Does she know there’s nothing but swamp and forest outside the wire for five hundred klicks?” McCallum chuckled. “Except that way, where it’s thirty klicks to the cliffs on the coast.” 

“I’m sure the orientation covered that.” Sorab nodded. “But sometimes they just have to try it. It’s like a compulsion. Maybe they think we’re lying about what’s beyond the cordon.” 

“They’re conditioned to accept nothing we say. Even when we spike the implants...” McCallum tapped his temple, where the cranial implant of an Incarnation soldier would be. “Some of that conditioning gets baked in.” 

“Yeah.” Sorab glanced back down to where the woman had disappeared. “And sometimes someone’s got to shoot them. Just hope it isn’t me.” 

Sorab hadn’t yet been required to fire his service weapon in anger, in his two and a half years on prison guard duty. Sure, he’d practiced every week as the regulations indicated, and he knew he could do the needful if it came down to it, but it seemed so pointless at this particular camp. As far as he was concerned, let them run for a few days. They’d be more obliging when they were hauled in after sleeping rough and shivering in the trackless woods. 

“If she goes for it this shift, I’ll do the shooting.” McCallum sighed. “I won’t have any second thoughts. My cousin and her husband were on Margaux. They never got out.” 

Sorab winced. He’d heard only horror stories about the extended fighting on Margaux. It seemed impossible that any of the civilians who hadn’t fled could have survived, and those who did, could find little mercy in that world’s toxic biosphere. 

Obviously, being too eager to fire on prisoners because of a personal grudge is hardly a flattering portrait for our submitter to paint of his compatriots. Perhaps this is only bluster. Obviously, I have altered the name of the guard who is shown in this light, though the story as we recieved it used real names that I was able to verify. 

Because our submitter here freely acknowledges his having no problem embellishing a story for entertainment effect, I rather suspect many elements, from the prisoner’s shifty attitude to the fellow guard’s grudge, have been somewhat amplified. Still, as far as I can tell from public records, this story is a legitimate account of events that actually took place.

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Tales from the Service: The Prisoner Enclosure

2954-10-07 – Tales from the Service: The Prisoner Enclosure 

While we have erred on the side of combat duty personnel in Tales from the Service episodes up to this point, this account from a prisoner guard in one of the transfer camps on Håkøya is an exception. 

We should not forget that for every person at the tip of the spear, there are dozens of others in support roles, making that combat possible and removing problems from the responsibility space of those frontline troops and crews. Their service may not wear the glory of those at greatest risk, but it is nonetheless essential to the war effort and should not be forgotten. 

The prisoners shuffled past Sorab Bokori's guardhouse in plodding ranks, their worn and in some cases torn silver uniforms hanging off their slouching frames. He watched them with little interest; he'd seen five groups march into the encampment so far, and every soldier had looked essentially the same. 

He'd read his briefing material, of course. Incarnation field personnel carried no visible rank insignia; their implants identified who was an officer, and settled seniority concerns instantly. The equivalent of a colonel would, save for age and service weapon – confiscated long before they boarded a prisoner transport of course – all enemy troops were visually indistinguishable. 

That silvery uniform, so impractical looking at first glance, was almost a weapon in its own right. It could slow or halt bleeding from all but the worst wounds, and it was somewhat resistant to laser and plasma weaponry. It reduced the thermal signature of the wearer to nearly nothing, when combined with the standard issue helmet with its drop-down face-mask. When configured by Incarnation officers, it even had a limited ability for adaptive camouflage. 

Inside the enclosure, each trooper would be issued new clothing, of course. Their uniforms and any other items deemed a potential security risk would be packed away in personal effects tubes, to be returned at the end of hostilities. The prisoner-of-war uniform, which was made of standard Reach spacers' smart-fabric, could be programmed to numerous trim configurations, and accept an infinite array of decoration patches without recourse to a needle and thread. Within a few days, those prisoners would be wearing a riot of colors and styles. 

Their slumped and slouching posture was, at least according to the briefing, because each one was still feeling the loss of the peer-network communication system mediated by their implants. Incarnation military personnel spent their days with a reassuring hum of voices in their heads, which vanished in stages after their capture, both because of Incarnation security routines and Confederated electronic disruption. As with the loss of the uniforms, these disruptions were theoretically temporary, subject to restoration at the end of the conflict. 

Sorab doubted the war would ever end, personally. There seemed no way the foe would surrender; it was certain to devolve into a permanent insurgency, such as the Rahl Hegemony dealt with in the portions of its territory which had once been the Rattanai Imperium. Even five generations after that empire's cataclysmic collapse, bands of holdouts deprived of a central authority waged war for their doomed cause. No doubt Incarnation bandits would be prowling the Sagittarius Frontier for at least as long, and these prisoners faced a dubious and uncertain future. 

Whether they guessed this too or no, Sorab didn't know, nor did he particularly care. He was a prison guard, not a counselor. His job was to keep them in, and to keep anything hostile to them out. Anything else was another person's problem. 

As he shifted in his guard-post chair, Sorab saw one of the prisoners in the nearest file peering through the windows at him. He sat up and met that gaze reflexively, sizing up the prisoner who was examining the guard-post as if checking for weaknesses in security. 

It was a woman, perhaps thirty years old, dark, clever eyes, hawk's-bill nose, and black hair cropped close in unisex Nate trooper fashion. She wasn't attractive, but it was the sort of face you could remember easily. Sorab decided to remember it. He was fairly sure it would be the face of trouble. 

He watched the woman until she was out of sight in the ranks filing into the camp's mess hall, then settled back down to the rest of the day's tedium, sending off a quick message to his compatriots about a possible troublemaker in the new prisoner group, just to be on the safe side. 

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Tales from the Service: The Siren of the Galbrandt

2954-09-23 – Tales from the Service: The Siren of the Galbrandt 

Vann Rudenko found himself awake in the pitch darkness of a Galbrandt night. The downpour had ceased, and the only sound in its place was the slow, infrequent thud of heavy drops falling from the overhead branches onto the shelter over his head. 

He had the impression that he'd awakened from a pleasant, leisurely dream, but the details of the dream fled from scrutiny. With a sigh, he sat up, wondering what time it was. 

Then he remembered. It must be at least midnight. Had the pale woman come and gone already? 

Scrambling out of his bedroll, Vann felt his way to the side-panel which had the exit blister on the inside. Though in hospitable climates he could use any seam as a simple tent flap, the blister was quieter to open, and would be less likely to let in a shower of droplets. 

Outside the shelter was nearly as dark as inside it. Directly overhead, between the treetops, a few stars winked between the scudding fingers of the retreating clouds. All else was indistinct shadow. The wind had vanished, and no animals had yet come out of their holes to croon into the night. 

Vann, being effectively blind, turned around once, not really knowing what he was looking for. Each of his gloves had a small flashlight built into it, but activating those would probably wake his fellows, and he wasn't going to do that until he had something to show them, or at least something to tell them. 

Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, he wondered whether he should go back to his bedroll. He had no doubt about what he'd seen earlier that day, but it was only too likely he'd missed the rendezvous, and they'd all been asleep when she passed by. That might be for the best; he shuddered to think of what his compatriots might do, with the advise of their implant computers. Without his damaged implant, he doubted he'd have been so ready to lower his gun, when he'd first seen the creature himself. 

Just as he was about to give up, Vann spied a pale, gray light behind a nearby tree-trunk. He crept in that direction, still not daring to use his lights. 

"Gather your fellows." A voice so quiet Vann wasn't sure he'd even heard it at first whispered. Despite its volume, the voice's words were perfectly clear. "There is much ground to cover before light returns to the world." 

Vann frowned. "What about our shelter?" 

There was no answer, only an impatient-sounding rustling. A strand of something like a cobweb brushed against his face. 

Vann sighed, flicked on his lights, and headed back for the shelter. As he had suspected, the light waked Langer, who poked his head out of a detached corner of the temporary structure to investigate it. "Problem, Rudenko?" 

"We need to move. Now. Pack up what you can." Vann gestured behind him. "We don't have to die out here. There's another way, if we hurry." 

"What?" Langer frowned. 

Vann passed him, went to the next seam, and got inside the shelter, where he hurriedly stowed his bedroll and other gear. Fisher was sitting up and cradling an electric lantern. 

"Another way?" The crippled Guardian asked at length. "You will need to explain, Rudenko." 

"Better if I don't." Vann shook his head. "Grab what you can and follow me." 

"If we don't?" 

Vann hoisted his pack onto his back. "Then I'm going alone. And you'll die out here." 

He could almost feel the flickering of silent radio messages between the others as he went back out into the night. When he killed his lights, he could just see the ghostly silhouette of the creature ahead, leaning lazily on a tree with twisted, drooping branches. He headed in that direction, using his carbine to brush aside foliage. 

The pale figure disappeared as he approached, but again he heard the almost-inaudible voice. "What did you tell them?"  

"As little as possible." Vann muttered. "They'll follow even if it's because they think I'm crazy." 

Sure enough, he heard Langer calling out behind him, and Fisher stumbling along somewhere farther back. He turned to wait for them. 

"Another way means getting turned around in the darkness and losing the shelter?" Langer held up his hands. "What's going on?" 

"Forget the shelter." Vann shook his head. "Follow me. I've got a lead on a way out of here." 

"How? You've got no nav overlay. No compass. Your implant is dead." Langer massaged his head with one hand. "This is madness." 

"Maybe." Vann shrugged. "I'll try to go slow enough that you can help Fisher along." With that, he turned away, just in time to see the gray, faintly luminous form darting between two trees far ahead. 

After he'd taken only a few more steps, Vann realized that he was no longer crashing through underbrush. He was on a sort of a path, gently meandering between the trees. Hard earth underfoot, occasionally broken up by an upturned root, made the going easy. 

Once again, he turned back to his follows. "Look at this." He shone his glove-lights at the ground. "A footpath." 

Langer and Fisher frowned at the obvious path. "Could be an animal track." Fisher said doubtfully. They all knew there wasn't supposed to be any animal on this planet big enough to make paths a human could use. 

"If there's a path that means human settlers." Langer nodded. "Okay, Rudenko. I don't know how you found this, or why at night, but let's see where it goes. I've got a nav marker on the shelter for when this plays out." 

Vann turned once more to lead, and he set off along the path at an easy pace. The night-time noises they'd heard their first night were still absent, and with Fisher and Langer continuing their silent conversation, the silence was nearly total. Every so often, when Vann was doubting the way, or when the path seemed to split, Vann killed his lights and looked around, and he always spied a gray glow or a flitting, luminous figure ahead of him. If the others spied her at any of these points, they gave no indication. 

With no implant chronometer, Vann quickly lost track of time. The march seemed to have no beginning and no end. The forest seemed not to change; they could have been walking in circles, on a path looping back on itself, and he'd have no way of knowing until dawn. 

Just as the horizon began to lighten into the creamy lavender of a Håkøya dawn, Vann saw the pale woman one last time. This time, he came around the bole of a particularly sickly-looking tree of great size, and found her there, laid out among the roots as if they were a comfortable divan. 

"What now?" He asked quietly, aware that the others were only a few dozen paces behind. 

An enigmatic smile and a gesture of one long, slender arm were the only reply. Vann looked in the direction indicated, and he saw nothing except a faint yellow glow down at the bottom of a gentle slope, shining between the trees, and a thin, hazy curl of smoke rising into the dawn sky. 

"Settlers!" He gasped, turning to thank the pale woman. When he returned his eyes to the place she had been sitting, however, he found it empty, except for a few loose strands of silky thread like cobwebs, dangling from the overhanging branches. 

The account does not mention how Mr. Rudenko convinced his fellows to surrender rather than to attempt to pillage the settlers' supplies, but evidently he did. Perhaps he simply ditched his weapon and went in before they could stop him, and forced their hands. 

It will surprise those who are familiar with the legend of the Gossamers that the "path" which these castaways were following was not there when they  tried to find it the next day to satisfy their hosts, who knew quite well there were no paths through the Galbrandt forests. 

When Mr. Rudenko mentioned the pale woman who had guided them to his hosts some days later, they treated this as an entirely satisfying explanation. I wonder what their own history with the Gossamers was. 

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Tales from the Service: A Trek Across the Galbrandt

2954-09-23 – Tales from the Service: A Trek Across the Galbrandt 

The utter isolation of a group of three Incarnation troopers on Håkøya would have been incredible, but I can in particular imagine the peculiar position of our narrator of this account. For the first time in his adult life, he would have been alone inside his own head, while also alone in an external wilderness foreign to him. 

Into this void, a Gossamer seems to have crept. They always seem to slip into convenient gaps like this – it's rather uncanny behavior which has made accounts of their existence so doubtful for so long. 

Vann Rudenko trudged back up the slope to the crash site. For some reason, it didn't seem as hard going up as it had going down, but he didn't notice that for some time. He was at every step terrified that with the next he would realize that what he had just seen and heard was a hallucination, or a trick of his mostly-dead implant. 

He reached the loose rock crown of the hill without having any such revelation, however. The pale woman – not human, certainly, but beyond that he couldn't guess – refused to fade into the haze of a dream. 

Guardian Langer poked his head over the crumpled tail assembly as Vann was making his way up the scree. "Where did you go?" His brow was furrowed in obvious concern. 

Vann pointed behind him. "Though I saw something watching us. Or someone. Went to check it out." He meant to continue to explain what he'd seen, but the thought died unvoiced. How could he explain, precisely? Wouldn't Langer think he was hallucinating? 

"Right." The answer did not entirely satisfy the other man, that much was obvious. "I'm done on my side. Let's see what we can do on yours." 

Twenty minutes later, their packs bulging with everything they thought might be useful, the pair worked their way down the hill to the place they'd spent the night. It was still barely mid-morning, and the morning's wind had risen to roaring gusts that tossed the treetops and showered the pair with broken bits of foliage as they walked. 

The shelter was mostly disassembled when they reached the little hollow, with rocks and logs set on top of various pieces to keep them from being disturbed by the wind. Fisher was sitting in the middle of the disarray, calmly winding one of the tie-lines around his arm.  

Kaube's body was still there, too, covered by a single thin blanket. Vann tried not to look at it as he set his bulging pack down and started to unpack it. 

"Don't pull everything out." Langer set his pack down, too, then went over to inspect Kaube. "Did you get everything off him?" 

"Everything worth taking, plus his implant's memory chip and everything he had in his pockets that looked personal." Fisher held up a little polymer bag. 

"Good." Langer started gathering up the various components of the shelter and packing them into the bag next to Fisher's knee. "Rudenko, configure one of those nano-tools as a crutch for Fisher. We're moving as soon as this is packed up." 

Vann started. "Where are we going to go? From the top of the hill you can see it's just this forest in every direction." 

"The transport was moving south-southwest when it took that hit." Langer shrugged. "Best guess, friendly lines are that way." 

Vann glanced over at Fisher, who avoided his gaze. Apparently, the other two had already decided this over the aether. 

Direction hardly mattered, and Vann knew it only too well. With the two of them carrying heavy packs and helping Fisher limp along on one leg and a stick, they would be lucky to cover a klick of broken woodland in every hour of toil. They'd need to stop for regular rest and food. Nanobandages weren't magic, after all; they accelerated natural healing and helped it along, but the energy for this had to come from the subject's own body reserves. There was nowhere else to draw it from. 

An hour later, they were in motion, with Langer leading the way and Vann helping Fisher through the uneven footing, which was most of their route. There were no paths through this endless wood; they were following the digital compass in Langer's implants HUD. Presumably, it worked, or at least, it agreed with Fisher's. 

They walked in silence, both to try to preserve some semblance of stealth, and because the two Guardians with working implants were able to chat without breath or sound via short-range radio.  

Vann didn't mind. He was thinking about the woman-creature from the hollow. She said she'd be coming at night to guide them. What could he say to the others to ensure they wouldn't just start shooting?  

Should he trust the pale creature? What would happen if they did follow it? 

It wasn't long before they had to stop for a rest. Langer passed around a water-flask, and they all sat against trees for a few minutes, breathing hard. 

"We're..." Fisher coughed and waved for the water bottle. "We're probably just as dead as everyone else. We're just dragging it out." 

"That's our job, Guardian." Langer nodded. They were having this conversation in the open, so that meant Vann was supposed to hear it. "All the Incarnate's efforts may only be delaying the inevitable." 

Vann sighed. "I don't need you to do the job of my implants, comrades." He tapped the defunct device in his forehead. "I'll be fine without it for a couple days." 

 The other two exchanged a glance, but said nothing more. After a few minutes, they got up to toil onward again. 

They moved on fitfully all day, sheltered from the blustery wind by the thick trees. It started to grow dark, and the wind took on a shrill note. Though it never really got cold anywhere on Håkøya Vann had been, he didn't relish the thought of being out in the open all night with only a thin gentle-environ modular shelter between his body and that wind. 

Fat, heavy raindrops began to patter into the canopy above their heads. Langer stopped and turned around. "No point going on in the rain. Vann, get the shelter up. I'm going to go look around." 

With Fisher's help, Vann had barely stretched the roof sections overhead and tied them to two nearby trees when the downpour began in earnest. Fisher started activating a few lights while Vann wrestled the side-panels into place and bonded the seams to make the entire thing mostly waterproof. 

Langer hurried back just as Vann finished the setup and crawled inside. Fisher, already underneath, was already starting the warmers on a handful of ration packs. 

After they ate, Vann cleared his throat. "I've got a feeling we're not alone out here." He almost had to shout over the drumming of the rain over their heads. 

"You think there are patrols?" Langer shook his head. "Maybe a few left-behind civvies. I rather hope they are. We could wring supplies and directions out of them." 

"No." Vann shook his head. "I think if anyone lives way out here, we're wiser to be afraid of them." 

Fisher laughed. "Why? They're civilians. What's more, if they're out this far, they're backsliders into some noble-savage nonsense." 

"This is their home turf." Vann held up a hand. "We don't know the biosphere, the terrain, the weather patterns... We don't know whether they're there, but they probably know we're here." 

"If they're out there." Langer broke in. 

Vann nodded. "And they don't want us here. I haven't heard of a single civilian on this whole accursed planet who saw us as the liberators we were claiming to be." 

This, he realized in retrospect, was a bit of a prohibited thought, one that would have doomed him to a bombardment of gentle, whispered reminders of Incarnation righteousness and the inevitable doom which awaited humanity if it should fail. No doubt that's what it triggered for his two compatriots; they both fell silent for some seconds. 

Eventually, Langer spoke again. "Supposing you're right. What do you propose we do?" 

Vann shrugged. "Make a deal with them. They're not who we're here to fight." 

Again, seconds of silence, but this time, Vann could just about hear the conversation going on silently past him.  

"What did you think you saw up on the hill this morning, Vann?" Langer finally asked. 

"A face." Vann looked down at the dirt. "Looking out at me from the trees. That's what I went chasing." 

"But you didn't find anything." Langer frowned. 

Vann shrugged. How could he explain? 

Though the other two no doubt continued their private conversation in silence, the rain soon lulled all three Guardians to sleep. They set no watch; the rain would have made such an effort futile in any case. Even if one of them were standing outside, they could see only a few meters in any direction, and could hear nothing. An entire armored column could pass within twenty meters of their shelter and they'd never know it until the morning. 

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