Tales from the Service: Stranded in the Galbrandt

2954-08-26 – Tales from the Service: Stranded in the Galbrandt  

As promised last week, this is one of the accounts sent to us after Datasphere connectivity to Håkøya was restored. Interestingly, it claims to be the account of a prisoner of war taken on that world by a F.V.D.A. mopping-up patrol in a low-intensity sector, recorded and passed on by his jailors at a holding facility on Leopold Bay. At his own request, or so the message claims, his name and other names in the account have been altered by the submitter. 

As those of you familiar with Håkøyan landmarks probably already know, this facility is a repurposed resort complex, and I’m already seeing complaints from service personnel still on the world that housing Incarnation POWs there is overly soft behavior. 

Given the documented poor treatment of Confederated prisoners in Incarnation hands, I can sympathize with these grumblings, but still disagree. For one, ensuring prisoners are treated humanely is the right thing to do, and erring on the side of comfort when there is any doubt or possibility of scandal is a time-honored military tradition. For another, I doubt these prisoners will be at Leopold Bay very long; Håkøya is still very much a front-line system. As soon as a facility somewhere less hospitable and farther to the rear is available, they’ll probably be moved. 

When Guardian Vann Rudenko came to, he was slumped against the bole of a gnarled, ancient-looking tree. Everything hurt, but the stiff, tingling feeling of nanobandages on his leg and side indicated that he was among his comrades. That was a relief, at least. He tried to query his status and location, but his implants responded only with an error buzz. 

The last thing Vann remembered was the explosion; most of the squad had made it out of the stricken hover-transport all right as it wobbled six feet off the only bare hilltop for thirty klicks and sprinted for cover. He’d seen Exalt Bailey hop off the craft last – well, last except for its crew – and then stumble in the stony grass. Three of the others had turned back to help, and just at that moment, the smoking, clattering engine of the transport had failed, disintegrating into an oily fireball. 

Vann must have caught shrapnel, because he didn’t even remember the transport slamming down into the hillside. No doubt, when it had, its remaining fuel cells had ruptured in a spectacular secondary explosion. It was a wonder anyone was alive, really. 

Vann turned his head to look around and hissed an agonized breath as the side of his neck and head blazed with pain. Gingerly, he raised his hand in front of his eyes – it was whole, at least – and started to touch the offended area. 

“I wouldn’t.” A voice – Guardian Fisher’s, but slurred and unsteady – cautioned. “The nanobandages haven’t finished with your new skin.” 

“New skin?” Vann tried to say. His tongue felt thick and his lips cracked. “What-” 

“Flash-burns.” Fisher chuckled, though it trailed off into a cough. “You didn’t keep your head down.” After a few labored breaths, he continued. “Most didn’t. You’re lucky to be alive.” 

Vann winced, and then wished he hadn’t. “My implant isn’t working.” 

“Yeah, you’ve got nothing but red lights upstairs. We were worried your brains got scrambled with the circuits but without diagnostics there was no way to tell until you woke up. ” 

Who’s... Who’s left?” 

“Just us, Kaube, and Langer. Langer’s gone back to the hilltop to look for anything we can use.” Fisher coughed again. “Kaube hasn’t woken up. We’re not sure he will, but his implant says he’s still alive. Strong pulse. Nearly no neural activity.”  

Vann turned his head slowly this time, and found Fisher not far away, his shoulders propped up on a fallen log. His right leg was gone at the knee and wrapped in a messy tangle of rags. He was at least as draped in nanobandages as Vann himself. 

After identifying a vague lump in the shadows below another nearby tree as Kaube, Vann  closed his eyes again. What hope had four lay guardians, wounded and on foot – no Mender, no Exalt, no Speaker, no sat-nav – of getting back to friendly lines, lines that were moving away from them every day? 

Normally, this would be where the implants would detect the beginning of despair and remind him of the Cause, and of his duty to it no matter what happened. About the extinction that was coming, should he fail, and the untold trillions both living and not yet born who were counting on him. But it was silent, dead. Even the whispers of the Incarnate couldn’t reach him now. 

Langer returned a few minutes later, carrying a torn trail-pack over the shoulder which wasn’t supporting a sling for his injured arm. Other than the arm, though, he looked to have avoided serious injury. “How is he, Fisher?” He asked, upon seeing Vann’s eyes open and following him. 

“Seems okay.” Fisher shrugged weakly. “You ask him.” 

Vann stirred. “Implant’s dead, Comrade. Must have smashed it on something when I went down. But I don’t feel like I’ve been brain-fried, just regular fried.” 

Langer nodded wearily and dropped the pack. “Small mercies. And Kaube?” 

“No change.” 

“Sun’s getting low.” Langer leaned over Vann to poke at his nano-bandages. “I did find four camo-shelters and enough rations to last through tomorrow. Rudenko, if you can walk in the morning, we’ll do a last sweep at dawn, and then we need to move as soon as Kaube comes to.” 

“Move?” Vann shook his head. “What if someone comes for us?” 

Langer nodded, glancing up toward the sky visible between the trees. “Exactly my concern. I didn’t get a good look at whatever strafed us, but we’ve got to assume the skies in this region aren’t friendly.” 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Homecoming Duplicity

2954-08-19 – Tales from the Inbox: The Homecoming Duplicity 

The account we have been relaying these past weeks is of some interest, but Nojus and I are thinking that we will not publish its remaining two entries, at least not now. It is most certainly time to go to the Håkøya backlog, which continues to flow in. 

Obviously, other events on either front or interesting events from the civilian spacer world which reach our inbox will be interleaved as we decide is most entertaining. 

Margaret's message was, as usual for Lydia Fernandez's experience of her older sister, brief. It explained that Margaret was on the way back from her business trip unexpectedly early, and had received the message of regret just as the ship she was on had started its in-system run. It expressed hope – sincere or otherwise, it was impossible to say – that Lydia was still in the system and could redirect to meet at the spaceport. 

Of course, the bit about returning unexpectedly early from an interstellar business trip was bunk, Lydia knew that. The cost of moving a return-trip booking up on short notice would have far outweighed the cost of simply staying on location the few extra days, and Margaret's employer - some interstellar minerals firm or other – would almost certainly never pay a steep premium for her convenience.  

What Margaret was hiding, though, wasn't Lydia's problem. Perhaps she involved in some sort of corporate skullduggery, or covering for an affair. Lydia had always considered herself the more honest of the Fernandez women, since Margaret took after their mother in almost everything. It made no difference, at least to Lydia, that she was a solo operator in the gray markets, and her sister was married and held a legitimate salaried middle-management job with a stable corporation. 

Margaret having uncomfortable secrets of her own might be some help, at least this time. The only times Lydia could remember ever keeping secrets from her sister had been when Margaret was more interested in her own schemes. 

With a grin borne of knowing she was about give both her employer's agent and her pursuers fits, Lydia changed course, then sent a message requesting docking permission at the Terre Weigand spaceport. She didn't give any reason for the request, but then, as a small-time spacer, she rarely needed to, except at ports where docking slips were at a premium. 

With that done, she pulled up the list of all the other spacecraft in-system once more. It didn't take too long to narrow Margaret's ship down to two candidates: an old, creaky passenger mover running the line from Terre Weigand to Tours, and a small hauler operating a mixed passenger and freight service to Cardona's Landing, the mercantile hub of the coreward side of the Silver Strand. Lydia had a hunch her sister was on the latter, but they were set to arrive at the port within ten hours of each other so it didn't matter much if she was right. 

Knowing approximately when her sister would arrive at the station, Lydia quickly booked a suite on the station for three days, making sure to include her sister's name on the booking as well as her own, and forwarding the details to her sister's inbox. With that done, she went aft for a cup of coffee, then returned to send a message herself. If she did this right, her sister would have half an hour or so to stew over the meaning of the booking and to worry whether Lydia was onto her own schemes, and would interpret everything in that light. 

As soon as the recording started, Lydia beamed into the camera. "I was so afraid I'd missed you, Margaret!" She gestured around herself. "One of the perks of flying my own ship is that I set my own course. I was just on my way out of the system to pick up my next job when I got your message. And I would love the opportunity to catch up, Sis. It's been a long time, and I've heard so much about all you've been doing from Cousin Trent." 

After a pause to take a long and loaded sip of her coffee, Lydia continued. "I'll be there at the gangway on Weigand's Roost to welcome you home. And don't worry about the booking. I figure, if your trip ended early, you've got a few days to kick your heels up like old times. My treat." 

With an exaggerated blown kiss, Lydia stopped recording, shuddered, and drained the rest of her coffee before confirming and transmitting. With a deep sigh, she got up once more to figure out whether she had a valise aboard that was the right shape and size to carry her cargo aboard the station, where she could keep an eye on it. No doubt the authorities – at least, those who wanted to covertly reclaim that cargo – would be searching the Minotaur while she was trading jabs with Margaret. She had about a half-day to make sure this took them a long time – but she still didn't want them to find anything. 

 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Homecoming Deception

2954-08-05 – Tales from the Inbox: The Homecoming Deception 

It was some hours before Lydia Fernandez got any hints of trouble, but since any hints were unexpected, it put her on alert right away.  

Most of the time, a system traffic control station request to re-verify flight plan and destination was an irritation only, the product of a desire to clear space ahead of some particularly important or high-security vessel such as a prison transport. Lydia, however, had been working the grey areas of the Reach's spacelanes too long to believe anything inoccuous about it. She hurried up to the cockpit and, after replying politely, set about looking for the ship that was going to make the intercept. 

Fortunately, Terre Weigand space was fairly quiet; there were only a few dozen drive signatures on the plot, and most of them were local runabouts and merchant haulers on supply runs in and out of the spaceport. The system's two-destroyer, five-frigate defense flotilla, mostly sitting idle in parking orbits, was also not the threat. She'd grown up on that world, and had never seen those gerietric ships sortie, except for parading around the spaceport to entertain prominent visitors. It was doubtful if any of them could make more than four or five gees of thrust without a total drive overhaul. 

That left three independent hulls and a quartet of customs cutters, and only one of the independents and two of the customs ships were in position to affect any kind of intercept. None of them were on an intercept course, not yet. Whoever her pursuers were, they would want to make their intentions clear only when Lydia couldn't do anything to avoid them. 

The re-verification request was of course part of that. If they'd gotten an automatic reply from the nav computer or no reply at all, they would have taken that to mean Lydia was asleep and her ship on autopilot, and moved in quicky. A manual reply meant she was at the controls, of course, and could react instantly. 

Lydia debated simply playing dumb and letting them board her. Theoretically, there was no contraband on board her ship. The cargo she'd picked up from the dead drop was, technically, entirely legal, and well within the limits of legal personal acquisitions not requiring tariffs and declaration. 

The technicalities wouldn't matter, of course, if her pursuers knew what they were looking for, and who it was who hadn't intended that cargo to ever leave Terre Weigand. If some system had just flagged her as suspicious and sent a customs crew out to give her a hard time, on the other hand, there was nothing wrong with being searched. And running guaranteed there would be problems, technically legal cargo or otherwise. 

Lydia pushed her chair back and cracked her knuckles, thinking. She needed more data to make a decision. Fortunately, she needn't decide right away, and the longer she gave indications of being awake, attentive, and at the controls, the longer she could make her adversaries wait to commit. 

With that in mind, Lydia went aft to the food-fab to prepare a meal and a cup of coffee. If something had gone wrong, it had to have just done so – she'd gotten the all-clear from her contact less than ninety minutes before. Whoever was selected to intercept her would be whoever just so happened to be close enough to her egress route. 

Idly, she wondered if there was a way to divert those ships away on other errands. Probably not; she could try to tip them off to fictitious activity of interest, but if one of those hulls was already instructed to prepare to intercept her, its skipper would disregard that. She'd need a third party to set up some apparent disaster or crime-in-progress of higher priority than she was, and she had nothing of that sort set up beforehand. 

Briefly, she debated trying a tagged cargo dump. Theoretically, if she made it look like a routine garbage jettison, long before they had any idea she was on alert, nobody would think twice about that. That would, of course, create the additional problem of recovering the cargo after the fact, which would require a course change the system authorities could see. If she had backup for this job, someone else who could pick up the cargo without drawing attention, that would probably have been the best approach, but again, she didn't have that. 

Perhaps, even if she was boarded by people who knew what they were looking for and what significance it held, she could still brass it out by making enough noise about legal technicalities and her rights. That did work sometimes. Higher-ups might be willing to sacrifice the reputations of a few lower level goons on the scene to get their way, but those goons didn't always go to the slaughter willingly. System security and customs enforcers often had families who relied on their income. Still, it was a gamble that would require the right sort of boarding party to work. 

Fighting her way out, of course, was no option. The Minotaur was more than she looked like, both in its offense and defense, but it was still a big old strike gunship which the massed railguns of even a decrepit customs cutter would cut to pieces without much trouble. 

That left running. On principle, Lydia didn't like running; it usually put the initiative in the hands of her pursuers and proved to all and sundry that she had something to hide.  

As she finished off her meal, Lydia heard the bright ping of an incoming personal message on the intercom. Shoving the tray into the food-fab's return slot, she returned to the controls. The moment her eyes fell on the comms display and read the name of the recipient, her eyes widened. "Margaret." 

Apparently her cousin had been incorrect about her sister's whereabouts. If she'd really been out of system on a business trip, there was no way Lydia should be getting a message already. 

Already, the beginnings of an idea were forming in the back of Lydia's mind. She settled down into the chair and brought up Margaret's message - a flat-capture video recording - on the main display. 

Though I reported poor connectivity to the Håkøya system last week, I am happy to report this is apparently corrected in part. Some dozens of accounts have reached this embed team in the last two days from service personnel and civilians in that system, telling of events to which they claim to be eyewitnesses. It seems that a datasphere backlog some weeks long is being worked through by limited hardware in-system, and I have no doubt there will be more to come. 

I do not expect we will publish all these accounts, though I have seen several so far that, had we gotten them closer to the events described, would likely have been published immediately. We will however select two or three which we find interesting, and get them into this feed in coming months. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Homecoming Front

2954-08-05 – Tales from the Inbox: The Homecoming Front 

As of this posting, most of you have probably already seen that Fifth Fleet has announced operations on Håkøya have progressed to the mopping-up stage, and that organized enemy resistance at anything above a small-unit level there has ended. 

No further fleet actions in that system have interfered with the ground operations, and initial reports suggest that damage to the ecosystem and infrastructure on the contested world are a bit lighter than expected. Incarnation defenders seem to have preferred to try to hold out in remote fortifications built by the F.V.D.A. prior to the occupation, which their own personnel expanded and reinforced.  

If it is true that only those areas have seen extensive damage, the evacuated civilians of Håkøya can probably expect to be returning to their world soon. Unfortunately, there is still no permanent civilian datasphere connectivity to the system; Incarnation forces destroyed the HyperCast relay there, and the limited bandwidth of the Navy's portable relays is still being prioritized for military data transfers. 

Lydia Fernandez flipped the arming switches on the right-hand control panel. Behind her, the steady idle-hum of the Consolidated Industries KR-99 phased-matter reactor built into an insistent whine. When two indicators above those switches changed to yellow, and then green, she gently pulled back the main control yoke.  

There was a jerking sensation as her Carpathian Systems Minotaur lifted off. The dusty gray-green landscape in front of her disappeared, leaving only a featureless mauve sky. 

After a few seconds of free flight to gain altitude, Lydia switched on the autopilot and sat back. Homecoming hadn't been precisely what she'd expected, but then, she hadn't spent much time over the last five years picturing what it would be like to finally put her boots back on the parched dirt of Terre Weigand. 

Certainly, the return hadn't been under anything like the sort of circumstances she might have imagined. Lydia could hardly claim to have "made it" as a spacer, not yet, for one; she was still flying an old Minotaur gunship she'd bought from a junker and retrofitted into something like a proper all-purpose rig. The machine was more than it appeared, but that was mainly because at first glance the ship resembled a jumbled collection of scrap metal that had decided to fly in roughly the same direction for a while. 

She'd had to come unannounced, mostly for the safety of her relatives on that world, and to leave just as unexpectedly. Her sister, who she'd hoped to see, had been off-planet on a business trip, so she had spent an afternoon catching up with Cousin Trent and meeting his two young children. They'd offered her the use of the guesthouse on their property for as long as she was staying, but she had declined; she couldn't tell Trent and his wife Nadia that she was going to be gone in less than forty-eight hours. 

For his part, Trent had listened with interest to some of her stories of light adventure on the border between Memoire de Paix and the Silver Strand. Her life probably seemed so fast-paced to someone who'd only left the world of his birth three or four times in his thirty-three years. Still, he'd shown no sign of envy; perhaps that was because he'd seen her ship before he heard her stories. 

The Minotaur wasn't quite the pile of rusting scrap she appeared, of course. Lydia had found the ship's rather homely appearance an advantage more than once in her travels, and so had passed up the opportunity to make any real cosmetic improvements. She wasn't the most maneuverable ship, but she had a big, modern reactor feeding a totally rebuilt main drive. The cabin, which would have been a cramped abode for the intended crew of four, was spacious enough for one, while still affording space and privacy to host a couple of passengers for short-hop ferry runs. Seeing the skepticism on her cousin's face as she'd bid his family goodbye and boarded it had hurt a little. 

She'd gone on with the job, of course, as soon as she'd dispensed with the cover story that her visit had been a spur-of-the-moment social call. The dead drop had been just where her employer had said, out in the high scrublands. According to her flight plan registered with the spaceport authorities, she was spending the night leisure-camping on the world of her birth, and then departing directly from her campsite. Evidently, the story was mundane enough that nobody had asked any follow-up questions. 

Now, the cargo was on board, and Lydia was approaching orbit once more, her home-world disappearing behind her again. She'd left her sister a message and a souvenir, in care of Trent, but that was all – she didn't dare leave a datasphere message. Margaret would find a way to be offended by even the most polite recorded message, and somehow, as usual, would go from this irrational response to divining the real reason for Lydia's visit. 

Trent would get a message to Margaret, of course, but he would mention the gift, and how nice it had been to see Lydia after so many years, and if Margaret got offended it would be at Trent first. This would, hopefully, put her uncanny association skills off the scent, at least until it was too late to cause any problems.  

As soon as the pale sky darkened to black, Lydia turned to her comms console and dashed off a quick message to her employer's local contact. Though it was innocuous, appearing to any snoopers to be a query regarding an equipment sale posting, it was the prearranged code indicating her success and departure. 

A few minutes later, the prearranged acknowledge code came back – a polite apology stating that the equipment which she was asking about had already been sold. Had there been any reason to abort the operation, Lydia would have gotten a request to set up a time and place to meet and complete the apparent requested sale. 

With a shrug, Lydia put her family out of her mind, at least for the moment, and headed back into the cabin for an acoustic shower and a meal.

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