Tales from the Inbox: At Vendetta’s End

2954-07-15 – Tales from the Inbox: At Vendetta’s End 

[N.T.B.] We have received several messages asking about the world of Braunweiss – evidently most of you have never heard of it, and the data available in most databases on the colony is quite sparse. As I’ve actually been there, I can provide a little color to this account. 

While it is not strictly the farthest Coreward extent of human habitation, it is near enough to it as makes no difference. The population of the planet is about thirty thousand, and it is a pleasant enough world, exporting mainly platinum and palladium which are found there in abundance.  

Before the War, its spaceport – the largest farther out on the Frontier than Adimari Valis - was a jumping-off point for survey and exploration efforts farther down the Orion Arm, and a trade hub for the dozen or so smaller colonies in its vicinity. 

It remains ignored by Incarnation forces, but I have no doubt traffic to the area is rather impacted by the existence of Incarnation-held space between it and Maribel. 

Anata Kearney smiled. Despite the changes to her coiffure and attire, it was the same pretty, innocent smile as always, and somehow, the black coat and mohawk didn’t do anything to detract from it. “That’s ancient history, Zeph. I swore off your mark after Blish Warren.” 

Even now, even knowing as he did that this smile had disarmed many a spacer to his grave, Zeph had to suppress a smirk of his own. “You’ve never sworn off a payout, Ana.” Zeph arched an eyebrow. “You’re too damned persistent.” 

The smile on the woman’s face faltered, and she looked down. “We’ve seen how well that’s been going, haven’t we?” 

She didn’t seem inclined to say anything more, so Zeph put his hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her away from the lift controls and selected his destination. Even if Anata wasn’t going to be an immediate problem, he had an appointment to keep.  

She looked up at his touch, and permitted herself to be moved – in such a confined space, there was little she could do to stop him short of drawing a weapon. 

"Well, if you’re not here for my valuable head, why are you out this far?” Zeph leaned against the back of the lift as it creaked to life, and glared at the woman suspiciously. “This isn’t exactly your preferred end of the Reach.” 

Anata shrugged, and a smile began to tug at her lips once more. “You know. Business. Had a line that someone out here was paying top dollar for people who solve problems without asking too many questions.” 

“What about your Hyadean friends?” 

Anata scowled. “The Triad can go to hellfire. Job went bad last year at Hesperus, and they hung me out in front of it. I barely got away with my skin.” 

“Ah.” Zeph nodded. “Hence the...” He waved one hand over his head, to indicate her radical change in hairstyle since last they’d run into each other. He realized she was probably using a false name, too – it wouldn’t exactly be the first time. He’d seen her smoothly switch between at least four legal identities when they’d been shipmates in the Strand. 

Anata grinned, but the nervousness behind it was obvious. “If I’m not careful, I might end up in the same sticky spot you’ve been in all these years.” 

“All the more reason to get back in their graces with a high profile mark?” 

Anata shook her head vigorously. “Everyone who goes after you ends up dead. Starfire, even standing too close to you is a health hazard.” She looked down her nose at her fingernails, which were painted in a shock-white enamel that matched her hair. “I’ve got ways back in, after the heat dies down. I just need to stay off the plot for a few months.” 

Zeph still wasn’t convinced, but the lift chimed and the doors opened before he could ask any more questions.  

“Got to run. Nice seeing you, big guy.” With a wink, Anata slipped out. 

When Zeph stepped out of the lift himself, Anata was nowhere to be seen. One wall of the upper level was mostly composed of angled viewpanels allowing pedestrians to look down onto the main concourse below, and a number of passages led away into the labyrinthine innards of the station that surrounded this open space. Checking the time on his wristcuff, Zeph looked around cautiously for threats, then headed for his appointment. If Ana was skulking around, it was a fair bet there were other syndicate-affiliated goons in Braunweiss. He didn’t buy her story about being burned by Triad for a second, even if she was telling the truth about swearing off his bounty. 

That last, at least, was a bit more believable. She’d sent him an audio message some time after he’d shot his way out of the ambush at Blish Warren saying something similar, but he had assumed this was part of the next setup at the time. That had been two years ago.  

Anata was smart enough to know when a mark just wasn’t worth her life, which put her head and shoulders over most of the syndicate hangers-on, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t sell him out to someone else who was stupid enough to have a go. 

Reaching the entrance to the office complex where he was to meet his new employer, Zeph waved his wristcuff in front of the console, and tried to put Anata out of his mind for the moment. Once he had his contract, he could worry about how best to keep her out of it.

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Tales from the Inbox: At Reach’s End

2954-07-08 – Tales from the Inbox: At Reach’s End 

Zeph Tsiklauri looked around the spaceport concourse warily as he stepped out of the lift. There wasn’t much to see, and he counted that fortunate. Braunweiss was little more than an outpost at the far outer edge of the Coreward Frontier, exactly the sort of place he wasn’t likely to run into trouble, but he had discovered over the prior six months that he had an uncanny knack for trouble. 

Or maybe it was that trouble had a knack for finding him. Zeph wasn’t quite sure. All he knew was that no matter how out of the way a spaceport was, he seemed to end up running into someone who knew who he was, and that usually meant someone who wanted a piece of him. 

That was the problem with having a reputation, especially one built on the perforated bodies of other notoriously dangerous spacers.  

Zeph hadn’t precisely set out to be known as the bounty hunting  scourge of the underworld’s hired guns, but growing up on Botched Ravi had made him tough and stubborn. When he’d had a barroom altercation with a roaring-drunk belligerent as a young spacer just starting out, he had held his ground. Naturally, that tattooed hooligan had reached for a gun, but being stone-cold sober, Zeph pinned him to a bulkhead with flechettes before his assailant could get even one shot off. 

He’d been cleared of wrongdoing in the incident, and the local authorities even paid out the fixer’s modest bounty even though Zeph hadn’t even known the man’s name. 

The Syndicate had of course marked Zeph for a more personal sort of collection, but two attempted assassinations had gone little better than the drunk’s fumbling attempt. Zeph couldn’t really claim this was due to his own skill or precautions; the first reprisal killer had missed a clean shot at Zeph’s back at twenty meters, and he’d been tipped off about the identity of the second and had turned hunter himself, preparing an ambush in a disused spaceport corridor where weapons fire wasn’t going to hurt any bystanders. 

After that, Zeph had cleared out, crossed half the Reach, and tried his luck signing onto a crew out of Valkyrie. This hadn’t lasted long; that crew found his presence rather deleterious to their efforts to avoid the ire of the powerful syndicates of the Silver Strand. After a random and rather farcical encounter with a low-level goon trying to earn himself a quick promotion, Zeph and his shipmates had parted ways.  

From there, he’d bought a scrapyard Albatross explorer and spent a few months getting it fixed up. Zeph’s Old Mule was hardly the prettiest spacecraft in the Reach, but it was everything a solo operator could want in an all-purpose runabout – roomy, comfortable, nimble, and well armed, with plenty of stores for long voyages. 

Old Mule had served him in good stead on his meandering way back across the Reach toward home, taking odd jobs where he could find them to keep his bank account from going dry. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost count of the various incidents resulting in the death of someone who tried to kill him or take his things – it was at least fifteen, but probably above twenty-five, depending on how you counted it, and how many of the various “upwardly mobile” underworld hooligans who’d crept away from a gunfight wounded had later died of their injuries. 

Zeph tried not to worry about any of them, when his own skin needed plenty of worrying about. Several of the surprise pistol duels foisted upon him had been caught on security monitors, and some of those recordings had made their way onto the datasphere, which only compounded the problem. For the Reach’s underworld, causing death had become a point of institutional pride. He was a mildly famous example of someone who’d slighted them repeatedly, and he was still very much alive. 

He’d heard there was need for independent pilots at Braunweiss. Since the system was nearly cut off from most of the Reach by Incarnation incursion into the Frontier, it had taken nearly a month of Himura jumps to work his way around the conflict zone. On the way into the system, he’d set up an interview with a local grandee who seemed to be hiring, and now, all he had to do to secure a cushy asteroid-watching contract was not die on his way to the meeting. 

Zeph did his best to look nonchalant and busy as he walked briskly along the concourse. A few heads turned to look at him, of course – he was after all a big, bluff Ravi-born newcomer – but most returned their attention to their own doings just as quickly. 

One or two seedier-looking characters watched him more openly. Zeph met their eyes evenly, but didn’t break stride. If anyone wanted to have a go at him now, and was stupid enough to do it in the wide open of the concourse, so be it. Anyone that foolish was not a real threat. 

What Zeph hadn’t accounted for, was a very different kind of trouble. A familiar, crystalline laugh echoed off the bulkheads. He turned to look for its source, a picture forming in his head already – a cascade of curly red hair framing a pale face, green eyes peering out lazily between long eyelashes, full red lips twisted just slightly upward into a sly smile. He would know that laugh anywhere, but he’d last heard it on the other side of the Reach. 

Not seeing the person it belonged to, Zeph quickened his pace as much as he could without breaking into a run. Anata Kearney, here, meant he needed to get his business done, and get back to his ship. 

His meeting was in a private office on the level above the concourse, and he soon reached the lift that would take him there. As he got into its car, however, a slight figure in a black coat with a jagged white mohawk darted out of a doorway and slipped in just before the doors closed. 

Zeph’s hand crept toward his gun. 

“I’ve missed you, Zeph.” The figure looked up, and two vibrantly green eyes met Zeph’s gaze. Anata’s mane of red hair was gone – she had taken such pride in that, once – but there was no mistaking her. 

“Twice now. Or is it three times?” Zeph scowled. “Come to have another go, Ana?” 

Mr. Tsiklauri is probably known by reputation to some members of this audience. His rather star-crossed career is remarkable mainly for not yet being cut tragically short. 

He could of course be protected from his criminal enemies if he ceased to travel as an independent spacer and settled down on one of the Core Worlds, where Syndicate influence is very small, but this seems to have not occurred to him. Like many spacers, he seems at peace with the risks of the trade, however amplified they may be in his case.

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Tales from the Service: Scouts in the Trap

2954-07-01 – Tales from the Service: Scouts in the Trap 

While up to this point, the properties, strengths, and limitations of the ubiquitous Incarnation “Tyrant-Type” heavy cruiser are well known both in Naval circles and in this audience, this account is interesting because it shows an enounter with a variant of the type. Though its gravitic drive is of the same variety and power output, making initial detection of any differences challenging, what I am told Seventh Fleet is calling a “Type B” Tyrant sacrifices some of its firepower for extreme durability, perhaps using some sort of sophisticated multi-layered shear-screen defense system. 

This variant seems to still possess the hyperbolic shear-screen projectors of the normal “Type A” Tyrant, so it can still operate in the four-hull mutually supporting defense formations our enemies rely on extensively, and of course the main battery of heavy phasebeams these ships use in mid-range gunnery duels is, while possibly reduced, still present.  

Captain Van Daal’s encounter with a group of these Type B ships is, I am told, one of several nearly simultaneous rude surprises which scouting and raiding forces encountered around the same time. Evidently some number of these hulls were held back and deployed simultaneously, putting Confederated forces at an unexpected disadvantage in encounters that would have been rather formulaic had they been facing a uniform enemy cruiser force. 

Within seconds, as sensor and telescope data flowed in, it was clear that the devastating missile volley had failed to seriously harm the enemy cruiser. Its acceleration on a course outward toward the edge of the system’s jump shadow hadn’t reduced, and while there was lots of particulate reflection suggestive of debris clouds, nothing indicated critical damage. 

Most commanders would have asked why, and tried to get more information, but Captain Adele Von Daal knew better. Her command was dangling out on a forward patrol; if this lone ship wasn’t the target of opportunity it seemed to be, then it was time to leave. “All units, break pursuit.” She traced a course in the display that most directly took her ships toward a place from which to activate their star drives. “Emergency acceleration. Retain formation.” 

Just as the squadron began to maneuver to obey her instructions, warning klaxons began to blare. New pips – first gray, then orange, then red, as the vessels they represented lit star drives and powered weapons – appeared quite close by. 

“More Tyrants.” Lieutenant Rio called out, entirely unnecessarily.  

“This is new.” Adele scowled, a chill running down her spine. Incarnation forces were known to employed sensor-trickery to conceal small craft, of course, but hiding a force of a half-dozen large cruisers so perfectly was supposed to be impossible. It was hard enough for a Confederated Navy cutter to keep off enemy sensors at several times these ranges. “Hold formation. We’re going right past target number four, so focus fire on it. Most of the others won’t have time to do much.” 

Her squadron could break and scatter, of course, but with large enemy warships in multiple directions, that was likely to result in the loss of several ships. Since scattering and running was standard scouting-force doctrine when confronted by superior forces, this was probably what the enemy had planned on her doing. 

It was always safer, in Adele’s experience, to not do what was expected. Hopefully, if her squadron stayed in formation, their mutually supporting point defense and sensors could keep most ships from taking any serious hits while they blitzed past the only hostile on their course out, saturating it with concentrated fire in the process. She had a terrible feeling the cruiser in their way would prove as impossibly resilient as the bait ship. She had to hope, though, that the warship’s combat performance would degrade when surrounded by an ordinance fireworks show, ineffectual or otherwise. 

“Taking fire from multiple angles.” Commander Firth announced. “Screen strikes. Helm, evasive action.” 

Even a tight formation of spacecraft, fortunately, spanned many hundreds of kilometers of open space, so every ship in the formation had plenty of room to juke and weave within its formation slot. There was no way to detect or depict phasebeams and other directed energy weapons slashing through the formation from several angles, but Adele’s imagination supplied more than enough of an image to replace it, based on the brief pinging and blinking indicating her ships’ shear-screens absorbing the occasional hit. 

“I want a missile volley on four timed to strike just as we’re making our closest pass.” Adele clenched her fist. “Mix in some scramblers. Fire when optimal.” 

“Aye.” Commander Vishin still didn’t seem rattled. “Computing targeting solution.” 

Scramblers, a form of thermonuclear warhead intended to maximize the burst of electromagnetic radiation produced by the detonation, could fry strike-launches and the exterior sensors of even the largest warship, if they got through the shear-screens, at the cost of being omnidirectional blasts, not shaped-charge warheads which could focus their blast to bore through thick hull plating. 

“We’re hit!” Commander Pakulski of the frigate Kamilla Horak barked. 

Adele had just long enough to relive the loss of Macready a few months before, and then Pakulski continued his report. “Propulsion and screens unaffected. Missile launch system degraded. Remaining in formation.” 

Adele tried not to visibly breathe a sigh of relief. They weren’t out of this yet – and there were very likely casualties aboard Horak – but all her ships were still moving. They just had to break the cordon, and then it would be a stern chase that favored them. 

Just then, Krisbeak shuddered. The lights flickered, and more alarms began to wail. “Hit aft of hab section, hull frame 33, deck four.” Firth shouted into his comms pickup. “Damage control, assess.” 

“Rerouting power through circuit K.” A technician called out on another channel. “Recyclers four and five offline. Rail battery nineteen offline.” 

“Final ramp-up on the Himura capacitors.” The officer at Krisbeak’s helm called out. “Precomputed fallback point locked in.” 

Adele nodded. “Time to initiation?” 

“We’re out of the shadow in six minutes, thirty-two seconds. Star drive will be ready immediately.” 

“All ships, jump when ready. Proceed to rendezvous if separated.” Adele took a deep breath. The noose was tightening, but it looked like it would be just too late. Had she not ordered the change of course when she had – had her ships chased the bait ship just a little further –  

“Targeting systems locked in. Firing in three. Two. One.” Vishin didn’t actually say “launch” but he hardly needed to – another bloom of yellow tracery appeared in the display, as another volley of missiles erupted forth to converge on target number four. The range was slightly longer this time, but the closing rate of the engagement was very high, so the missiles had far less travel time. 

“Impact in five seconds.” Vishin called out, as the range shrunk, both for the missiles and for the formation. “Two. One.” 

Again, a red pip in the plot disappeared into a maelstrom of white and blue flashes. This time, though, while it was hidden, Krisbeak and her attendants roared past, still firing every weapon they had at the target at a range so small that it was rather hard for most of it to miss. 

This time, too, Adele was neither surprised nor particularly dismayed when the flashes faded, and that red indicator remained, the ship it represented turning smoothly to pursue as if it had not just been plastered by more than a hundred missile warheads. 

“All weapons, keep fire on number four as long as you can.” Adele sighed. They were outside the net, now. “Divert power to aft screens. Maintain evasive.” 

Details

Tales from the Service: Scouts and their Prey

2954-06-24 – Tales from the Service: Scouts and their Prey 

“We’re getting some diffuse signal scatter, Captain.” Manuel Rio announced behind Captain Adele Van Daal. “Looks like tight beam reflection fragments.” 

That, of course, was the proverbial other shoe. If Krisbeak was picking up the scatter of tight beam signals traffic bouncing off hulls, the recipient was close indeed, and if they hadn’t detected that recipient yet by other means... Adele winced. “All commands, all stations, go to condition one. Get the screens up and warm your point defense. We’ve got company and it’s close.” 

The lights dimmed a bit, as every third illumination panel aboard the ship switched to red-orange condition one lighting. The tense but calm chatter on the ship’s comms channels switched over in an instant to the frenetic, clipped callouts of battle stations being brought online. Fortunately, everyone was already near their battle-stations; everything was ready in seconds. 

“Mr. Rio, Get me a fix on that scatter if you can.” Adele scanned the display, wondering where she’d put ambushers, if she had advance knowledge of the arrival and loose insertion point of an enemy squadron.  With the pointer on her wristcuff, she drew a loose oval in the display roughly behind her force. “Get every active sensor we have sweeping this sector.” 

“Aye.” Rio bent to his task. A moment later, the eyes of nearly twenty warships of varying sizes were fixed on an area of space thought previously to be empty. Sure enough, within seconds, gray pips began to appear there, designating objects picked up on normal sensors, which had no drive signatures. 

“Get me IDs.” Adele highlighted the closest, which was well inside the range of most shipboard weapons. “Gunnery, put railshot on this one.” Though the least impactful of the ship’s long-range weapons, the massed railguns on its flanks had the greatest magazine depth, and if the object was really an enemy ship, firing them would goad it into activating its screens and drive to evade, making identification easier. 

“Batteries three and six locking on.” Commander Vishin, the weapons officer, remarked, his voice carried halfway along the ship from his post to the combat information center by the comms system. “Fire.” 

Adele felt the distant rattling hum of sixteen quad-railgun mounts each discharging hundreds of slugs per second through the soles of her feet. After two seconds, the sound stopped. The target would see the telltale flash of the white-hot ferroceramic projectiles in a moment, and then... 

“Drive signature.” Rio called out, just as the gray pip turned orange. “Military-grade acceleration profile. It’s a Tyrant all right. Moving away.” 

“All ships, engage.” Adele hesitated. “Pursue but remain in wide support formation. Watch for strike-scale raiders. Reserve missiles for now, he’s well within cannon range.” 

As her ship turned gracefully to pursue, she watched its holographic likeness do the same, lips pursed. Why was it alone? Even if several of the other objects sensors had detected were also enemy cruisers just like it, they were a lot farther away, and still had not revealed their nature in an attempt to reach their isolated comrade. Her squaron was more than a match for one of the type, especially if they were already at close range before the shooting started. 

For Nate to set a trap like this and then to bungle it, though, didn’t seem right. The Incarnation made mistakes, sure, but they were usually calculated gambles, not simple miscommunications. They knew well enough that a scouting squadron wouldn’t pass up a chance to take a lone Tyrant apart. 

Perhaps they had been given no clear idea where Krisbeak was going to appear at the system jump-limit, and had spread their ambushing forces too thin, but even that explanation suggested uncharacteristic incompetence. 

The possibility that this was a trap occurred to her, of course, Nate spent a lot of time and energy trying to trap Seventh Fleet’s scouting squadrons. Even if they annihilated half the squadron and sent the survivors limping back to Sagittarius Gate in disarray, the loss of a baited capital ship in exchange seemed a poor trade. 

As the railgun rattle began again, joined a moment later by the dull rhythmic thump of smart-cannons and the occasional snap-whine of Krisbeak’s powerful axial phasebeam discharging, Adele tried to put all of that out of her mind. The target was going out into the black anyway, closer to the point of safe jump initiation, so pursuing couldn’t be risky, but that itself made her more suspicious than anything. Bait would always need to seem safe, otherwise it would never get bitten. 

Rio seemed to recognize his superior’s concern. “You think there’s more to this, Skipper?” He had to rais his voice a little over the distant sound of weapons fire on the ship’s exterior. 

“He’s returning fire. High-power beams.” Commander Firth, on the bridge, called out. “All helms, evade.” 

“Screen intercept, port bow!” Someone called out. “High-wattage beam. Defenses holding.” 

“Nice shot, Poliparkov, you just tagged him with your axial. Looks like his screens took it.” 

How could this be a trap? Krisbeak and its supporting destroyers were at their most dangerous in a stern chase, where they could bring their axial weaponry to bear on the enemy, and the short-burst acceleration advantage afforded to them by being smaller, lighter vessels was at its greatest. If this was a trap, it would have to spring soon, or there wouldn’t be anything left of that Tyrant before it closed, and Adele’s flotilla could still scatter and run. 

“Hull strike.” Someone called out. “Someone just hit him aft starboard.” 

“Confirmed.” Vishin, despite the excitement of the moment, was calm and reserved, as always. “Captain Van Daal, if his screens are already failing to intercept-” 

“I hear you, Commander.” Adele nodded. If this was a trap, there was still time to eat the bait. “Prepare a volley from all launch cells. Let’s finish this quickly.” 

Within seconds, every green symbol in the display flashed blue, then back to green, indicating that they had missiles armed in the cells and slaved to Krisbeak’s targeting data. A volley from every hull was nearly two hundred missiles, most of them the lighter standard fast missiles, but almost twenty of the heavier, devastating Navy ship-killers. With its screens already being saturated by cannon, railshot, and beam, the Tyrant would need to rely on its laser point-defense systems to intercept them – and there was no way it could handle so many, all at once. 

“Launch. Arm and reserve.” Adele clenched her fists behind her back.  

A blossom of yellow traces appeared in the display, all arcing toward the target on various courses intended to converge at the same moment. They didn’t have far to go; the range was incredibly short for missile combat. 

Adele frowned as the deadly yellow blossom began to fold in on itself, converging on the single blood-red pip. “Why haven’t they launched anything?” She asked, mostly to herself. Tyrants had missile launch systems, too, though intelligence reports suggested they didn’t have many reloads for each launcher. Still, in a life or death situation like this, why wasn’t it putting out everything it had? 

The missiles converged. A rapid series of little white sparks flashed in the display to indicate the loss of contact with each one as it was intercepted by point defense, electronically disabled, or otherwise destroyed. A very few of the sparks flashed blue, indicating the missile reporting itself going into the final plunge, the microseconds of hard burn toward the target hull. The red pip vanished in this sea of white and blue fire. Few starships of any size could survive a volley like that, at this range. Certainly none could endure it unscathed. 

The flashes vanished. The red indicator was still there, glaring at Adele like an accusing, vengeful eye. 

Obviously, the wisdom of attacking an enemy ship sent to dangle alone as bait is debatable, but Captain Van Daal can be forgiven for aggression, given what the portion of her account published last week suggests about her role models in fleet service. Caution is the doctrinal watchword of the modern scout formation, but she seems to style herself as attempting to prove herself worthy of the mantle laid down by the old guard of the fleet’s cruiser forces, figures known for their aggression in almost any circumstance. 

That this aggression got most of those commanders and a good number of their subordinates killed does not seem to faze her, though it certainly fazed the Admiralty. 

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