Tales from the Service: A Fiend in the Dark

2954-02-18 – Tales from the Service: A Fiend in the Dark 

Yes, I am aware of the rather terse announcement from Seventh Fleet headquarters last week about a fast raid on an enemy-held system here in Sagittarius. Rumors in the fleet are that it was a mixed bag, that things didn’t go to plan and the mission did not meet all of its objectives, but these are just rumors, and Admiral Abarca’s staff hasn’t responded to my queries on the topic. I’ve heard conflicting rumors about the name of the operation; there are at least two different names circulating, which is odd. Operational code-names are usually shared with everyone involved, even support staffs, so they commonly leak among service personnel before a force jumps off, even when the objectives remain secret. 

Obviously, as has been hinted at in several interviews with the admiral, offensive operations have been imminent and in-plan for some months. That the first probing raid met more than expected resistance is, honestly, no real surprise. The Incarnation propaganda makes it appear invincible and irresistible, and to keep this charade up for their own people, they can’t really afford to have millions watch Confederated raiders smash up orbital assets unopposed. 

I suspect we’ll have some clear details by this time next week. 

The telescopes found stellar occlusions after a few more minutes of idly toying with the net, and once Raywhite had something to point its sensors at, data began to trickle in. There was indeed a main body to the strange entity; it was a nearly spherical ellipsoid with one distended pole, a bit more than two thousand meters long and about fifteen hundred across which emitted nothing and reflected very nearly nothing, excepting of course the grav-flux pulses. As far as they could tell, its surface was entirely smooth and featureless, showing no indication of its nature. 

“It remains my intention to collect a sample.” Lieutenant Kato said, after analyzing the data on the main viewpanel for a long moment. “What are our options?” 

“I recommend a high-ex wrecker load from the forward tubes, Skipper.” Snyder, the weapons officer, sounded excited to finally have something to do. “That’s bound to blast something clear.” 

Kato nodded. “Can we get close enough for the axial cannon?” 

Georgi Rye winced. He had been afraid that would be the direction of the skipper’s thoughts. A little cutter like Raywhite had a very small missile magazine compared to a larger warship, and theoretically they had a mission to complete on this cruise they hadn’t even started. Using even one missile body on this unexpected complication would mean a greater chance of running out before they had their next rendezvous with a supply tender. 

“For an optimal strike with the axial plasma cannon we’d need to be within about five klicks.” Snyder shook his head. “I didn’t think that was wise.” 

“Concur.” Georgi quickly added. “That’s close enough that it might interfere with our main drive.” He felt bad immediately; technically, they didn’t even know if the object had that capability. 

“Shame.” Kato shrugged and stood. “Load tube one, wrecker load. Load remaining forward tubes with ship-to-ship cluster charge.” 

“Wrecker load aye.” Snyder nodded and turned to his station, to issue commands down to the weapons bay. On a larger ship, the missile systems were handled by auto-loaders, but on a cutter, single missiles were housed inside the pressure spaces and the weapons bay crew was responsible for pulling it down from storage, mating on the warhead, configuring its dynamic explosive payload, and wrestling it into one of the four launch tubes. This crude system was slow and prone to mishap, but it had the advantage of being small and incredibly easy to fit out. Seventh fleet had hundreds of cutters of various configurations, most of them churned out by the score at Philadelphia and Madurai. In any case, any target that could withstand a volley of four standard ship-to-ship missiles from the forward weapons bay and a follow-up two from the aft bay was probably too much for such a small ship to be tangling with at all. 

There was little doubt that the object out there in the dark would survive so many hits, of course, at least physically. If it was made mainly of metal, it was the same mass as one of the larger battleships in the fleet, and if it was made of any lesser and more flexible substance, the blast of a wrecker warhead, optimized as it was for demolishing fixed space installations, would probably have even less effect. Still, Georgi told himself, if it had anything more offensive in store than the net, it probably would have used it by now. 

“Tube one arming.” Snyder added the weapons indicator overlay to the main display. The first one blinked yellow, while the next three remained a dull red, and the final two flat grey. A moment later, the next indicator switched to a blinking orange, and the first stopped blinking. 

“Helm, get us into missile range.” Kato folded her hands. “Set condition one. All gunners stand by.” 

At her words, the ship’s computer sounded the alert klaxon. They’d been at heightened alert since the first evasive burn, so most of the crew had very little to do but switch their stations over to combat condition. The overhead lighting on the bridge dimmed and became redder. 

“Coming about. Mr. Sokol, keep tabs on that net for me.” Georgi switched the controls to manual and placed his hands on the control pads, which swelled into a pair of textured haptic bulges under his hand. Gentle pressure flipped Raywhite’s nose around to face the target, then he brought the drive up to twelve gees.  

“I have a targeting beam lock.” Snyder announced.  

“You may fire when we reach optimal range, Mr. Snyder.” 

“Aye, Skipper.” 

“The net has changed course to follow us. Estimate four minutes until we need to maneuver again.” 

“Time to weapon range?” 

“One minute, fifty seconds. The weapon will be in beam-riding mode, Skipper.” 

“Proceed. Helm, maintain course after launch to ensure optimal tracking. Ready a full-power evasive run on my command.” 

Georgi winced. “Aye, Skipper.” Locking the manual controls for a moment, he keyed in a random-evasive maneuver and a full fifteen-gee burn, ready at the push of a button. “Evasive course prepared at your command.” 

The seconds ticked by. Though the terms of this encounter should have become predictable by now, Georgi’s skin crawled at the idea that he was piloting the ship right toward the object. His left hand itched to slide over to the button to engage evasive. 

“Ten seconds.” Snyder called out. “Secondary missile arm. Five seconds. Four.” 

“Net is still safely behind.” Sokol called out. Georgi appreciated this, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary. 

“Two. One. Optimal range.” Snyder’s words were punctuated by a dull thump reverberating through Raywhite’s structure. “Tube one discharged.” 

There was a brief flash from the bridge’s tiny armor-glass viewports as the missile’s solid fuel starter charge kicked it free of the ship, which quickly vanished as its main gravitic motor took over outside the disruption radius of Raywhite’s own drive. The missile appeared on the tactical plot as a speeding yellow dart, wavering slightly in its course as it acquired the targeting beam and then straightening out into a hurtling straight-line trajectory right toward the bulbous side of the mystery object. 

“Give me visual on the main display.” Kato steepled her fingers. 

Sokol put the feed from one of the forward telescope cameras on the main display. There was nothing to see; the missile’s gravitic drive was invisible, and the camera could pick out only the brightest few stars. By the displayed magnification, the invisible entity should have filled the middle third of the screen, but nothing could be seen but a blank expanse of void. 

“Impact in three. Two. One.” The dart on the plot disappeared into the foggy indistinct area marked out as being occupied by the object. A moment later, the display blinked a white sphere over the area. “Detonation.” 

A bright flash of light fading into an orange halo filled the camera feed. 

On Georgi’s console, the grav-flux indicator spiked up to three, five, then, to his alarm, ten Mahans. It finally halted at eleven, then began to creep back downward. 

As he was watching it, Georgi noticed that the eyes of Sokol and Snyder were directed forward. He looked up, only to see with his horror that the tactical plot had gone quite mad – now the ship’s sensors could see the target well enough, as a glowing red shell on infrared bands with a bright wound in its side, but all around it, space boiled with faint traceries of coiling red substance, as if more of the net-substance was issuing out from the object on all sides. 

“Evasive, Mr. Rye.” Even Kato sounded shaken at the sight.  

Georgi slapped the control, and once again, Raywhite wheeled and shot outward, away from the strange entity. 

“Very good.” Kato took a deep breath. “Mr. Sokol, that had to have blown something clear. Find it for me.”

Details

Tales from the Service: A Snare in the Dark

2954-02-11 – Tales from the Service: A Snare in the Dark 

As Raywhite weaved around, its sensors blaring every frequency into the dark, a better picture of what they had discovered remained elusive. Georgi Rye found at least that the cloud, or web, or whatever it was struggled to turn and accelerated slowly, which given its extent was not a real surprise. As long as he changed the ship’s heading every few minutes, its dogged pursuit was no real threat. 

“Whatever it is, it isn’t very smart.” Lieutenant Kato muttered, after yet another hairpin turn left the cloud far behind. 

“Must be automated, Skipper. Or a lower-order lifeform.” Sokol shrugged. “I’m not seeing any sort of main body. Maybe the net is all it is. A mass of thread organs with simple senses, chasing our thermal signature.” 

Georgi, not liking that mental image any better than his own, nevertheless shook his head. “I think it could have caught us when we jumped in if that’s all it was.” 

“Whatever it is, we’ve got nothing on visual scopes.” Sokol threw up his hands. "It’s got almost no reflection on any wavelength. It doesn’t occlude. It’s probably not much denser than the gas cloud we thought it was at first.” 

“Then if there was a main body somewhere, we could go right by it and not notice. What made me think that was-” Georgi stopped, his eyes flitting over to the gravitic flux reading on his console. “Skipper, how invested in finding out what this is are we?” 

Kato was silent for several seconds before replying. “I’m listening, Mr. Rye.” 

“As we got closer to whatever it was, the gravitic flux spiked higher, and perhaps a bit more often. We can use that as sort of a warmer-colder indicator.” 

“Interesting. Can you plot the grav-flux readings against our position?” 

“Position readings this far from any points of reference are inaccurate.” Georgi shook his head. “But I’ll see what I can do.” 

A few minutes later, Georgi had something to show. After looking at it from a few angles, he sent it as an overlay to the main tactical plot. 

“What am I looking at, Mr. Rye?” Kato asked, after a moment. 

Georgi queued up the next few evasive turns, then stood up and approached the tactical plot. “Color is the flux spike amplitude – redder is larger. Radius around the center is duration, each one set at approximate location at peak intensity.” He pointed to the two reddest pips off to one side of the display. “These were just before and after our first evasive run. If I’m right, that’s the closest we’ve gotten to the main mass.” 

Sokol shook his head. “That’s not much data. We could blunder right into it if we try to go fishing for more of your flux spikes.” 

“How close do you think we got?” Kato asked. 

“Well.” Georgi held out his hands. “As Mr. Sokol said, position data out here in the interstellar is pretty inaccurate, but gravitic flux is an inverse square function. You can use these data points to estimate a position.” He tapped a control on his wristcuff to add the second overlay, which painted a hazy gold bubble in the extreme margin of the plot. “With the position error factored in, the main body is somewhere in this area.” 

“And the same math can estimate how big it is.” Sokol nodded. 

“Correct. But gravitic flux shouldn’t spike at all, it should be a uniform field. So whatever this thing is, it’s not going to be significantly massive. My bet is, it’s folding space somehow, intermittently. In any case, the number that computation provides is insane.” 

“Technological, not biological. All the more reason to get a piece.” Kato nodded. “But what was the mass?” 

Georgi winced. “Point zero five to point one seven Ter.” 

Kato’s eyes widened, and for good reason. An object that big would classify as a small moon, and there was no way they could possibly have missed it from any practical range. 

“But if it’s a point source, like a star drive, it’s operating at about thirty Mahans of flux. That’s comparable to the disruption we’d see from a small cruiser's Himura drive, only it’s cycling far faster, and it’s obviously not going anywhere fast.” 

“Some sort of rudimentary star drive jammer, probably.” Sokol’s voice was low, as if he was mostly talking to himself. “Once you get close, you can’t just jump away.” 

“Possible.” Georgi nodded. “If it can pulse faster it may also impede our normal gravitic drive at close range. Which would-” 

“Would let the net catch us, assuming there are no other surprises.” Kato nodded. “Mr. Sokol, get our visual-light scopes on Mr. Rye’s target area. Something with enough power to put out cruiser-drive level gravitic flux is definitely going to occlude the background stars.” 

Astute readers have already asked why a single cutter, not even one of the stealthy assault cutters designed for long-range independent operations, was out so far on its own. This is one of the elements of this story which made me doubt it at first, but it turns out Raywhite is in fact a former Survey Auxiliary vessel which has been subsumed into Seventh Fleet as a long range scout. What it was doing that cruise I still don’t quite know, but it is a vessel equipped for solo operations. 

One shudders to think what might have happened to a vessel without advanced Survey-grade sensors encountering what this crew did (again, assuming this story is true, as it seems to be). 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Net in the Dark

2954-02-04 – Tales from the Service: A Net in the Dark 

The silence on Raywhite’s bridge lasted several long seconds. Presumably the rest of the crew was waiting for Georgi Rye to explain his vague pronouncement, but he didn’t really know himself what made him so uneasy. Gravitic flux anomalies, usually as a result of high phased matter concentrations, weren’t an unheard of phenomenon, but they were generally benign as long as one steered clear. 

As he struggled to put his concern into words, the flux reading came back again, this time climbing to two point two Mahans for an instant before falling back to zero. The ship was getting farther from the cloud. Why would the reading spikes be getting stronger? 

“Speak your mind, Mr. Rye.” Lieutenant Kato prompted. 

“Skipper, the last reading was stronger, and definitely lasted longer. We’re moving away from the cloud. That shouldn’t be possible, unless-” 

“Unless we’re going toward the anomaly, not away from it.” Will Sokol punched new commands into the sensor station. “Recommend full stop on the engines.” 

“Agreed.” The skipper waved her hand. “Get me a new range to the cloud, then put all of our active sensors on maximum.” 

“Aye.” Georgi and Sokol responded simultaneously, each attending to the controls in front of him.  

Georgi brought the cutter’s engines to idle, but they’d been going at eight gees for some minutes; the ship’s velocity was well over a hundred thousand kilometers per hour. “Should I reverse our course, Lieutenant?” 

Kato shook her head. “Plot in a random orthogonal course, but don’t execute it yet. We need more information.” 

Setting that up took only a few seconds. Georgi gave this operation maximum drive power, capable of fifteen gravities. That couldn’t be sustained long, but it would get them on the new course as fast as possible, and he could dial back once they were clear. Meanwhile, the main tactical plot remained dark and empty, save Raywhite’s pip in the center of the display. 

“Strange.” Sokol muttered, then looked up. “Infrared scatter from the cloud suggests it’s still only about a hundred kilometers away.” 

Georgi shivered. Something was not right. “The new course, Skipper?” 

“Wait.” Kato stood up. “Are you sure, Mr. Sokol? It’s the same distance? Like it’s shadowing us?” 

“That’s what it looks like, Lieutenant.” The sensor operator sent the data to the tactical plot, and sure enough, the diffuse cloud formed a vague thirty degree arc directly aft, about a hundred klicks out. 

The gravitic flux indicator spiked again, this time to about three Mahans. Georgi started up in his chair. “Shadowing us... Or herding us.” 

Sokol turned around. “You think it’s some sort of defense, pushing us away from something?” 

“Or toward...” Georgi shook his head once, then slammed his hand down on the button that would execute the change of course. “Toward something we don’t want to meet.” 

Lieutenant Kato opened her mouth to object, but at that moment, the diffuse red glow in the tactical plot flashed into momentary stark clarity. It was not a cloud; it was a vast web of ropy structures, densest in the middle and branching out into the darkness until the thinnest extremities faded out into invisibility. 

Even as the flash faded, the cloud twisted, its edge curling inwards where Raywhite’s new course passed closest. This attempt to block the ship’s retreat was, however, too slow by far; the net closed only on the void well aft. Had they been running on anything less than full power, Georgi realized, they might not have been so lucky. Perhaps the web, seeing the ship moving initially at eight gees, had assumed this their maximum speed. 

Face white, Lieutenant Kato returned to her command chair. “Toward, indeed.” She muttered. “What do you think? Brigands? Astrofauna?” 

“If that was a life-form, it’s an order of magnitude bigger than anything in the database.” Sokol’s voice trembled. “Incarnation secret weapon?” 

“We’re out in the middle of nowhere.” Kato shook her head. “There are no life-bearing systems for thirty ly. Why put your secret weapon here?” 

“Shall we come around and warm the tubes, Skipper?” Osman Snyder at the weapons terminal spoke up. “We’d know a lot more about this thing if we blew off a few samples.” 

Georgi prayed silently for the skipper to refuse this suggestion. They did have a mission to complete, and tangling with the perils of the void wasn’t really pertinent to it. 

“You know, Mr. Snyder, that’s not a bad idea.” Kato chuckled. “Sokol, can you get us a long range firing solution?” 

“On the net? Maybe.” Sokol shrugged. “It’s pretty diffuse. If we use a big enough payload, though, we’re sure to punch a hole in it. But I think Mr. Rye is right. It was herding us toward something, and I think we’re better off sampling that.” 

“Agreed. Mr. Rye, reduce acceleration to ten gees.” Kato waved her hand, her face already recovering some of its color. “Work with Mr. Sokol to set up a search pattern that keeps us out of harm’s way. When we find the main body, we’re going to give it – or them – some fresh regrets.” 

While there are several documented space-based macrofauna in the Reach, whether these species also live in Sagittarius has not been studied. The hypothesis that this phenomenon might be a sort of drifting predator is, despite its size, not too farfetched, albeit it does presuppose a much higher density of astrofauna in Sagittarius than in Orion. 

This hypothesis, as it turns out, was not correct. Neither was this a strange new Incarnation weapon Raywhite was unlucky enough to encounter first, nor the mad invention of enterprising outlaws. This is something stranger indeed than any of the crew’s first three guesses, as next week’s entry will demonstrate. I still don't have any external indications of this story's direct truth or falsity, but every indication is that the submitter knows the ship and its crew well, as all personnel details still match official records.

Details

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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