Tales from the Service: A Cloud in the Dark

2954-01-28 – Tales from the Service: A Cloud in the Dark 

Now that Nojus’s spate of text feed brigandage has run its course, it’s time for the submission I had initially intended to publish for the last episode of last year. Intervening weeks have given me a chance to check with Naval Intelligence in an attempt to verify the story further, but I regret that this has been rather inconclusive. One of my contacts thinks it’s ridiculous on its face, but another thinks it may be genuine. I am not able to access any official reports to back up or disprove the account, nor am I able to confirm the identity of the sender is in fact the helmsman of the vessel named (though as far as I can tell all names are those of personnel posted to the ship).

[N.T.B.] - One man’s brigandage is another’s livening the feed. Reader feedback suggests a rather positive reaction to Miss Swan’s account, in any case. 

As Georgi Rye went through the startup checklist for his little ship’s Himura drive, a flutter of the readout values on one side of the console caught his eye. He paused and watched that panel for a few seconds, but the fluctuation didn’t repeat. 

“Strange.” He muttered, resuming the procedure. 

The skipper stirred in her command chair. “Problem, Mr. Rye?” Lieutenant Anastasia Kato, Raywhite’s commander, rarely paid attention during mundane non-combat routines, preferring instead to work on her backlog of forms and approvals from the screen in her station’s arm-rest. Apparently this time, she was actually focused on the jump, though it was one of many deep-space point to point transits they’d need to make before they had any hope of finding enemy ships. 

“I don’t think so, Skipper.” Georgi turned around in his chair. “Thought we were going into gravitic flux for a minute, but that wouldn’t make any sense.” 

“It wouldn’t.” Kato nodded, but a frown creased her thin face. “Still, it’s not impossible. This area of Sagittarius isn’t charted, and we’re only two ly from the nearest star. Mr. Sokol, run an active sweep, just to be sure.” 

“Aye.” Will Sokol tapped a few buttons on the sensor control console. 

The chances of running into anything more than a few light-hours from a star were astronomically remote, even in uncharted space, but Georgi agreed with his skipper in not wanting to win the bad luck lottery. Any significant gravitic flux would drastically reduce the accuracy of their Himura jump, and if a little ship like Raywhite managed to get off course and suffer an equipment problem, they’d be dead for sure; the fleet would never be able to find them. 

While Sokol ran the sweep, Georgi continued his drive startup procedure, computing the jump in their mission plan as he’d previously started to. Most likely, the sensors would find nothing, and the ship would make another uneventful jump. If Sokol did find anything that would throw those computations into question, he’d have plenty of time to recalculate. 

“Sweep complete.” Sokol didn’t sound surprised. "There’s nothing- wait.” 

Five pairs of eyes fixed the sensor operator in an instant.  

The skipper’s scowl, which hadn’t faded in the intervening minute, deepened. “Please elaborate.” 

“Not sure, Skipper. Seeing some anomalous infrared readings. It’s almost like it started after the sweep. Whatever it is, it’s low grade, and big. It’s at least a hundred klicks out, and still covers about thirty degrees of arc to starboard.” 

Kato sat back in her chair, as if thinking. “Nothing on visual scopes?” 

“Nothing. Not even star occlusion. Got to be a gas cloud of some kind, something that absorbs radio bands.” 

“Ah, Skipper.” Georgi held up his hand. “If there’s a cloud out there that absorbs our active sensor signal, there could be nearly anything inside or behind it.” 

“But nothing blocks gravitic flux.” Sokol shook his head. “And that’s right at local baseline. Means if there is anything out there, it’s not heavy enough or close enough to interfere with the star drive.” 

“Still, it is prudent to gain some distance before we bring the Himura online.” The skipper turned to Georgi. “Bring the mains online. Come about to port and give us eight gees. And Mr. Sokol, keep our instruments aimed at this cloud, or whatever it is.” 

“Aye, Skipper. Eight gees.” Georgi switched his console over to maneuvering control and laid in a course away from the anomaly. Eight gees being less than half of the maximum acceleration of an assault cutter like Raywhite, there was no indication of the change except for the twirling of various holographic situation plots.  

“I wonder what it’s made of.” Sokol muttered as the distance to the cloud grew. “There aren’t many simple compounds that absorb radio that completely. Almost has to be organic. And nearly uniform.” 

“We aren’t here on a research trip.” Kato reminded him. “Mark its coordinates in the navcomputer. If Fleet is half as curious as you, they’ll send someone to have a look.” 

Georgi was about to turn away from the console, but once again the gravitic flux readings fluttered up above nominal for just a moment. This time, he was looking at it, and saw the maximum reading before it subsided – Point nine Mahans. It wasn’t much – enough to cause minor jump error, perhaps – but it was a hundred times higher than should have been possible, in the current environs. 

“Flux reading came back for a moment.” Georgi turned to the Lieutenant. “I think... I think there’s something out there.” 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Swan’s Compassion

2954-01-21 – Tales from the Inbox: The Swan’s Compassion 

Sara Swan threw back her camouflage net just as the wiry figure ambled past her. He heard the whisper of the material, but by the time he turned, reaching for the gun hanging from his belt, Sara’s scatter pistol was already aimed right at his heart, at a range that made it nearly impossible to miss. 

“Toss the gun over there.” Sara smirked.  

The man scowled as he unhooked his gun-belt. “You work for the Swan, right?” 

“Always.” Sara winked. The man was younger than she’d thought on first watching him – probably not more than twenty-two or twenty-three T-years – but he had that hard, suspicious look of someone who’d been running with a bad crowd since childhood. Sara knew that look only too well; it had once been her mask, too. God, had she ever been that young? It seemed like lifetimes ago. “Play nice, and I’ll let you live to tell your boss what happened here.” 

“All right.” The man flipped his gun-belt off to one side – not as far as Sara would have liked, though. “What do you want?” 

She gestured with her free hand for him to step away from it, and once he had, she lowered the gun a bit. “Tell me about your boss.” 

A dark look passed over the youth’s face. “That scumsucker Mardh?” He gestured back the way he had come. “Not worth your time or mine.” 

“Well, he is stopping me from doing my job.” Sara arched one eyebrow. “But I wasn’t talking about him. Who put you lot here, and when is he coming back?” 

There was a moment of wide-eyed terror on the other’s face, but only a moment. Sara could almost read his mind; how did she know they had a greater master who was coming back? What sort of lie would be the most useful? “Um. Well...” He looked around, then lowered his voice. You really don’t want to mess with Captain Shinoda, lady.” 

Sara arched one eyebrow, saying nothing. 

“The way I hear it, he got over here on a merc contract with the Navy, but went rogue with his ship, dropped most of his crew on some mining station, and has been running on his own ever since. Big ship, well-equipped. Capital-grade weapons, strike squadron, nearly a thousand of us toughs for ground-side work.” 

Sara still waited silently. Getting information from renegades was always more haggling than interrogation; they opened with a big, bold lie, and it was up to her to persuade them to get close enough to the truth for her purposes. Torture, always a temptation, was worse than useless; the natural environment of men like him was a sea of lies, and into that sea he’d flee at the slightest provocation. 

“He, ah.” The young man seemed to sense Sara wasn’t buying his explanation. “Said he’d be back tomorrow. Maybe sooner if he could manage it.” 

Sara made a show of checking that the safety on her scatter pistol was disengaged. “He’s not coming back for a long time, then?” 

“That’s not what I-” The young man cringed as Sara suddenly raised her gun to point at him again. “I said he’s coming back tomorrow.” 

“So this Shinoda is such an idiot that he executes anyone who brings him bad news?” Sara shrugged. “I suppose if he does, then me shooting you for lying isn’t much of a punishment.” 

“Lady, believe what you want to believe. I’m just telling you what I been told. Mardh always says the Captain is coming back tomorrow.” 

Sara smiled coldly. “I see. How many days has he been saying this?” 

The man’s shoulders slumped. “Three weeks or so. Since a couple days after Shinoda left.” 

“So even that red-faced lunker up on the hill doesn’t know.” Sara nodded. “What about the clods who cleared out yesterday?” 

“They’re following Kulikov, who isn’t any smarter than Mardh.” The youth’s face again grew hard and dark; he clearly had a rather negative relationship with everyone who was his self-appointed better. “But he did insist on taking a week’s worth of supplies. He’ll come slinking back when those run low and he remembers there’s nearly nothing you can eat on this rock.” 

“He’s smarter than you.” Sara knew this barb wasn’t necessary, but she couldn’t help it. “After all, he left at the first sign of trouble. He’s not going to die. At least, I’m not going to kill him as long as he’s off camping somewhere.” 

“And I decided I wasn’t going to die for Mardh either.” The young man balled his fists. “Damn them all. Brainless clods.” 

Sara felt, despite everything, a pang of sympathy for the young man. Once upon a time, when the galaxy had been much younger, she’d been not too different from him. She’d learned some hard lessons, and got straight – well, straight-er – and found a way out of the scum-tier of society, because someone had given her a chance. “You hate them, eh? Damned lot of good that’s doing you. What’s your name?” 

Once again, she saw the hesitation in his face, the calculation of whether a lie would be beneficial. “Moon. Hector Moon.” 

Tell you what, Moon.” It probably wasn’t his real name, but then, Sara nearly never gave anyone her own legal name either. “You tell me exactly how many there are and what surprises they have for me, and you’ve got a berth on my ship when it’s all over, and a visit with a friend of mine who can make your name clean, or at least make a new clean name stick to you.” 

He frowned, likely trying to find out how this could be a trick to his disadvantage. “Why would you do that?” 

“Because you’re right. You’re a little cleverer than the lot you’re stuck with here.” Sara smirked. “Maybe even clever enough to have a future. That part’s up to you, though.” 

Moon was silent for half a minute, and Sara had just about given up on him, when at last he spoke again. “Mardh has thirteen with him still, and plenty of guns. Most of them are decent shots, but they’re not military trained. Demolition explosives too, but I don’t know how he thinks he’ll use them.” 

Sara smiled broadly, reaching into her pocket for a tracker-token, one of the magnetic ones she usually attached to aircars to track their occupants “Grenades? Personnel mines? Heavy weapons?” 

“Never saw any. Don’t think Shinoda would trust Mardh with any of that anyway.” 

“Anything else you want to tell me to earn that ride out of here?” Sara held up the tracker in her left hand. 

“I’d bet a few thousand credits that most of the rest would scatter if Mardh were out of the picture.” Moon shook his head. “They aren’t cowards, but this was supposed to be a boring watch-job, not a last stand.” 

Sara flicked the tracker into the air. Moon caught it neatly, then looked at it carefully. “What’s this?” 

“Keep it on you and go that way.” Sara pointed away from the hill. “I’ll pick you up when the messy business is done. Get going, I’ve got work to do.” 

Moon turned to follow her finger, then stopped. “Wait a tick. You don’t have a team, do you? You’re doing this all by your lonesome.” 

Sara smiled, side-stepping until she was standing over Moon’s gun. “Things are usually faster that way. If you come within a klick of that hill before I’m done, by the way, you’re dead.” She nudged his weapon with her toe. “And I’ll keep this safe for you.” 

Moon winced, then shuddered, then, oddly, smiled. With a sloppy mock-salute, he ambled off in the direction she’d pointed, rounding a low rise and vanishing from sight. 

Sara waited for a minute after he’d gone before stooping to grab his holstered pistol, then turned back toward the hill with its valuable Survey installation. Fourteen goons would probably only take her a few hours at the longest, and there was plenty of daylight left for the task. 

[N.T.B.] Sara Swan sent this story in as a boast, but I find her snap decision to try to lift one of her erstwhile foes out of his situation very telling. Sara is a hard sort of person who has lived a hard sort of life, but still has compassion for those who have been dealt a bad hand. For all her faults – even she would admit there are many – it is only too like her to always be trying to rescue good talent from a bad life and a worse death. 

I am not saying she is unique in this regard, but it is in this she earned my respect years ago. Well, in this and in her ability to take down a charging Ravi Songbird in its full mating-season fury. That’s pretty respectable too. But in a different way. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Swan’s Ultimatum

2954-01-14 – Tales from the Service: The Swan’s Ultimatum 

Sara Swan saw right away, watching the camp after her little ambush, that she was experiencing a bit of luck. Shortly after the skulking fellow returned to their campsite to report what he had seen, she watched through her magnifier as a loud argument broke out between two of the largest, most brutish of their number. The young, wiry skulker, who seemed every moment to be wiser than most of his fellows, sat scowling nearby as his two self-styled betters roared at each other. 

Sara couldn’t hear what was being said, but it hardly mattered. The dispute, as they often did among such ruffians, came to blows before too long, and the loser of the brief row retreated to grumble with a pair of his closest comrades. Soon, the trio scattered, and Sara watched them slip around to each of the guard-posts within her view, speaking to those on duty. 

It wasn’t long before half of the ruffians, following the brute who’d lost the scuffle for dominance, were hoisting packs onto their backs and heading down from the hilltop where the old Survey facility was situated, in the opposite direction from where the bodies of their two comrades lay. The self-styled leader but no, caught off-guard, didn’t seem to notice the exodus until they were already all out of the camp. He shouted at them to return, but this had no effect. 

The wiry youth went with them at first, talking to their leader, but not long after they were out of sight, he came creeping back. 

Sara watched until nightfall, but there was no sign of the departing group. She could only speculate what they thought leaving the site would do. Perhaps they had guessed that the deaths of the two unfortunate scouts were all too related to the treasure up there on the hill. Perhaps – and this seemed more likely – they thought their leader somehow responsible for the deaths, or did not like his response to the crisis. 

Flipping the magnifier into night-vision mode once the last vestiges of color bled from the western horizon, Sara counted the remaining figures in the camp as they moved around. There were somewhere between twelve and twenty remaining – still a concern, but not so many that Sara was worried about exterminating them. 

She retreated to set up a spartan camp-site after observing the first change of guard. If those brigands had any sense, they would sleep ill that night, but Sara intended to sleep soundly herself. Better to let them fight their imaginations before she made her next move. 

Making camp on the reverse slope of a hill more than two kilometers from her prey, Sara lit no fire, ate only a cold ration-bar, and drank only sparingly from her canteen. There were many small streams in the area that were drinkable after treated with a sanitization tablet, but that was an opportunity to be spotted out in the open. She pulled her camo-netting over a slight hollow in the ground, then unrolled a thermal blanket from her pack and wormed underneath. 

Sara was already up when the first splash of pink light appeared over the eastern hills, and before the stellar primary peeked over the horizon, her gear was all back in her pack. She briefly debated whether it was worthwhile to pursue and investigate the departing group, but with an unknown amount of time left before the scavengers’ ship returned, that probably wasn’t worthwhile. She had to clear the ones guarding her prize, call in her ship, pull the reactor, and get out fast, ideally without putting herself in too much danger. 

When she put eyes on the camp again, she found the guards warily scanning the horizon from their posts while others put the finishing toch on a simple breastwork of pre-fab panels between their flimsy shelters to form a crude wall around the hilltop. This was a surprisingly wise and industrious development; even though the paneling wouldn’t stop any serious incoming fire, it would give them something to hide behind in a firefight. If they continued to dig into their position, it would prolong the struggle considerably. 

It was time to accelerate the timetable. Sara retreated to a safe distance and called up her hoverskiff, which carried far more gear than her pack. Using its tiny onboard fabricator, she loaded the carry bay of a multipurpose drone with polypaper strips weighted with little metal plumbs, then sent it on a looping course out to approach the encampment at high altitude from the other side for a bombing run. She hoped they wouldn’t be able to shoot it down, but wanted them to see it all the same as it dropped its leaflets. 

Sara was back on her hilltop observation post long before the drone reached the drop point of its flight plan. Sure enough, the sentries spotted it, and a few arc rifle shots crackled uselessly up into the sky, most hopelessly wide. The carry-bay opened just where it had been programmed, and the drone, now on an automatic evasive routine, made a jerky retreat. 

The wind put most of Sara’s leaflets outside their defensive perimeter, but enough landed that the message was not lost. On each polypaper slip, she’d had the fabricator print a simple message: 

LEAVE NOW OR DIE. 

WITH LOVE,  
THE SWAN 

It was probable these frontier ruffians didn’t know what a swan was, so she’d had the fabricator emboss a simple stipple-shaded image of a swan next to the words, to give them a bit of a mental image. It was, in her view, the little touches like this that were most effective in sowing terror. 

Sure enough, several of the brigands ran to show their leader the leaflets, and another boisterous argument broke out to whose specifics Sara was not party. 

Oddly, though, not everyone in the camp was paying attention to the argument. While their leader was waving his fist and rallying his men in defiance of this message from the air, a slim figure crept over the breastworks, apparently unobserved from within, and crept down the hillside. 

Obviously, Nojus has told us little of the history of this Sara Swan character, but from the specifics of this account, she is a canny operator whose bushcraft is far above the civilian average. He did say that perhaps she is over-hyping her own abilities in this account – and I can see hints of that even myself, not being at all experienced in such arts – but taking on a force of dozens of armed men solo is still a feat of great courage if nothing else. 

[N.T.B.] - It’s also a feat of great foolhardiness, even for Miss Swan here, and even if done in such a slinking fashion as she prefers when dealing with direct opposition. Had her opposition had even two people near her equal in fieldcraft and well motivated to repel her assault, she would have been in great danger. 

Fortunately, the one person approaching this ability present did not have the initiative to try to hunt her in the field as she slept unguarded. If he’d found her, the story would have ended there. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Expected Ambush

2954-01-07 – Tales from the Inbox: The Expected Ambush 

As Sara Swan finished setting up her ambush in a narrow hollow hidden from the brigands’ camp by the low shoulder of a nearby hill, she wondered whether someone with a knack for being persuasive might have resolved the day’s complications without bloodshed. This was of course only an idle thought; Sara had never been accused of being particularly eloquent. 

The plan was simple – coax a group of two or three of the squatters out from their camp, trick them into investigating something down where they wouldn’t be visible to their fellows, then delete them. It wasn’t too hard to create a curious scene for them; she merely scorched a small teardrop-shaped swath of springy turf with her hand laser, then set up a few pieces of bent reflective polymer sheeting there in the middle. To anyone who saw it from a distance, it would look like the wreckage of a de-orbited satellite – and on a world where there weren’t supposed to be any satellites in the sky, that would be something to investigate indeed. 

As to getting them out from their camp, the same ruse provided the simple answer for that as well. A chemical smoke-pot would give the scene a short-lived puff of black smoke, which the onlooker, after investigating, would conclude was that of the burning plants from the impact.  

Most probably, the setup would only work once; when the first group sent to investigate failed to return or to report back over comms, their compatriots would know something was wrong, but not precisely what. Sara could probably do the deed without letting any of them know they were in danger, but that wasn’t her style, and it robbed her of the advantages of fear, which were always useful when one was outnumbered. 

When all was ready, Sara retreated from the fake crash site, and remotely set off the smoke-pot when she got back to her pack and her rifle. In a few seconds, a pillar of oily black smoke curled into the air, slanting into the wind. If the brigands sitting on her Survey site weren’t blind, some of them would be along shortly. She lay down behind her already set-up phasebeam rifle and pulled a camo-net over herself to await them. 

They weren’t, as it turned out, blind. Two black figures appeared at the top of the rise hiding the site from the camp. Sara sized them up with her magnifier; both grizzled-looking men held their arc rifles warily as they peered at her ruse, then began working their way down the reverse slope. 

Sara set down the magnifier and flicked off the safety of her rifle. At a hundred yards, the short pulses of high-energy photons it emitted would punch right through most body armor, but she intended to aim for the head for her first shot. She brought the sights onto the trailing figure, then waited for the distance between them to grow. Even a few meters apart, the leader would take several seconds to realize his associate was dead. 

The moment came, and Sara squeezed the trigger. With the snap-hiss of beam slicing air and the rifle’s cooling system venting heat, the man collapsed in a silent heap. She turned her rifle on the other, just as he turned to see what the noise behind him had been. He made it two steps back along the path before the second shot ended his miserable life like the first. 

Sara remained motionless below her camo-net for almost a minute, then slithered out, replaced the net, and dashed forward. After taking both the heavy arc rifles, she rifled through the brigands’ pockets. Other than silver-wrapped ration bars, a canteen full of something foul-smelling, and a password-locked data-slate, they weren’t carrying anything of note. Their clothing wasn't marked with any obvious signs of allegiance, either. Either their boss had stripped them of identifying marks before parking them on the reactor site, or this group really was just a motley band of independent opportunists in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Sara next examined their weapons in detail. They were standard, if battered, PPM Model 99s – ubiquitous, cheap, and overshadowed by newer and more expensive models. The Model 99, though, didn’t have any sort of smart-locking mechanism. Sara flipped off the safety on one of them and charged its capacitors. After taking everything she had a use for off both corpses, she blasted them both with the arc rifle a few times, which burnt the skin and set their clothing alight. This would hopefully conceal what she’d taken, and how she’d killed them. 

Sara retreated to her camo-net again to watch once more. She waited for almost an hour, but no more brigands arrived to investigate what had happened to their fellows in that time. 

Just as she was beginning to wonder whether it was safe to move, she spied movement on the ridge. Something – someone – was moving up there, slinking along the ridge-top. Sara grinned; her third victim had some sense. He was staying in sight of his fellows, and staying low, trying not to present much of a target. She lined up the phasebeam on him, using its scope magnification to get a better look. 

The third brigand was younger and slimmer than the first two, though dressed similarly. He was armed only with a handgun and a knife, both tucked into his belt, and he clearly was no stranger to bushcraft. If he was any good, and left unmolested with the area, he might even be able to follow her trail across the springy turf, as little of an impression as each footfall made. 

Fortunately for him, he never came down the concealed side of the hill to investigate closer. He spotted the two corpses on the slope, and watched them for a minute or two, probably having a chat with his buddies back at the camp on the comm. He slipped back as carefully as he came, and Sara decided as he did to make the coming night interesting. That one would be the last to die. 

While this is not the story I had planned to release today, Nojus’s bit of digital brigandry has forced my hand. We are, it seems, in this account for the duration, which seems to be at least one more weekly episode after this one.  

Never fear, I take this sort of help in good humor. If we didn’t want Nojus’s help on the feed, he wouldn’t be part of this embed team. 

[N.T.B.] Damned right. Besides, this is going somewhere, and to make it interesting, I haven’t even told Duncan where that is. 

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