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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Tales from the Service: The Scouts Ahead

2954-06-17 – Tales from the Service: The Scouts Ahead 

Offensive movement appears to be ongoing on the Sagittarius Frontier, but this embed team is not read into the plans that are now in motion. I have left multiple entries of this account of forward scouting operations in the queue at Sagittarius Gate in the event that this action takes us out of Hypercast relay range for more than a week (as it very likely will). 

The events described took place early this year, in January or early February, though it landed in my inbox only lately. Likely this is due to operational security concerns, though obviously enemy intelligence knows our ships were poking their noses into an enemy-held system at the time already. 

Captian Adele Van Daal gripped one wrist tightly with the other hand behind her back as the display in front of her began to light up with pips. All of them were orange, of course, since they weren’t definite hostiles, but she already knew. That knowledge was one of the few luxuries afforded to a scout group commader. She had complete certainty throughout her patrol that everything but the tight cluster of green indicators in the center of the display was an enemy ship. 

Most of them, of course, were bound to be haulers and transports, not warships. System 33 on their patrol route, G5623770, was far off on the left of the front line and significantly behind the enemy frontier, but not so far that anyone could hope it lay on the other side of Incarnation home space. Still, even if one ship in ten visible from that mass was a combat unit, her command was outnumbered three to one. 

“Well Captain, we found it.” Lieutenant Manuel Rio, Adele’s assistant in the ship’s combat information center, stared awed at the screen. “The proper hornet’s nest.” 

“Seems so, Mr. Rio.” Adele remained motionless, and said nothing else. There was nothing else to do, for the moment. Their arrival could not be unnoticed, but until they had some indication of which ships were the greatest threats, there was no point in setting a course.  No, they would sit still until the enemy made the first move, then, as usual, evade at the system margin until the star-drives on the destroyers and frigates in her squadron had recharged, then random-walk a few jumps out and regroup at the pre-arranged fallback point. 

In the meantime, every sensor on every hull was trained in-system, marking the orbits of planets, the murmur of comms traffic, the courses of ships, and the heat-signatures of industrial installations. As long as any ship in the squadron made it home, that data would go into Seventh Fleet’s intelligence database, which would be used to press the war toward its inevitable end. 

The waiting had been the hardest part when Adele had commanded her first forward war patrol, but that had been nearly three years ago. This was her thirteenth patrol, and spacers’ superstitions about that number aside, she counted each one luckier than the last, as long as it ended back at Sagittarius Gate. There had been close calls where enemy forces had nearly trapped her squadron, like the one the year before, when she’d lost the frigate Zehra MacReady, but that was the risk of scouting patrols. 

Her own ship, the crown jewel of the squadron, was a potent fighting ship, but it was one that rarely fired its weapons except in gunnery practice and in its own frantic defense. The offensive firepower of a light cruiser like Krisbeak, though considerable especially when it was supported by smaller ships, was wielded by higher command as a threat, not as a direct weapons platform. Like the cavalry of Old Earth, light cruiser-based formations searched for enemy strong points, and exploitable enemy weaknesses, forcing considerable defense at every point and harassing unprotected supply lines. 

That was the theory, anyway. Incarnation supply convoys were rarely discovered. They had some early warning mechanism which Naval Intelligence had not yet countered; even when a route was discovered, most of the expected convoys simply never appeared to be attacked. That left light-cruiser commanders in the scavenger role, roaming the outer reaches of the front, probing defenses, and picking off stragglers withdrawing from larger engagements. 

Adele had heard that it had been different in the old days. When she’d been a cadet, in the peace-time navy of the early 2940s, everyone wanted to be in fleet scouting formations, as they were seen as the units which got to do the most daring deeds, to take the most risks, and earn the most glory. Even before the war, however, something had changed. The independent, far-roaming, autonomous light-cruiser squadrons of the fleets were reined in, given timetables, narrow rules of engagement, and strict policy checklists. Those who complained, were banished to commands on the frontiers, far from the glamorous demilitarized-zone patrols on the Hegemony border. 

Of course, it had been these disgraced and disgruntled frontier units which had borne the first blows of the war. Many of the hotheaded commanders who’d made a name for themselves in the pirate-hunts and the Brushfire War in the thirties and early forties had vanished into the maelstrom, their ships and lives consumed by the tide of an unlooked-for conflict. Many of them had been Adele’s adolescent heroes. 

By the time Adele had earned command rank herself and posted for a transfer to the Seventh, that old guard was gone. Even Bosch, the light-cruiser hero of the Brushfire and miraculous survivor of the early onslaught, had been promoted up to a heavy cruiser, a ship designed to operate in the fleet’s main body with the battlewagons. The forward commands were filled mainly by junior captains now, ambitious risk-takers all, but not of the same caliber as the previous generation. The glamor of light cruisers had vanished into the void between the stars. It was the battle-line, now, the plodding titans, and their grim, silver-haired captains, that the eyes of the Reach rested on. 

Adele’s eye fell on a quartet of pips which had already begun to change course since her squadron’s arrival. “We’ve got at least one formation of Tyrants.” The big Incarnation warships, something like heavy cruisers, tended to operate in squadrons of four, which maximized the benefits of their distributed screening arrangement. 

“Aye. Marking it.” Rio nodded, his hands dancing on the console in front of him. In a moment, the quartet began to blink red. Somewhere on the hull, one of Krisbeak’s electronic eyes would be wheeling around to get a visual of that group, looking for the long arrowhead-shape of the enemy warships. “That group is too far in-system to get to us before we can jump again.” 

“Likely so.” Adele nodded, then tapped a control on her wristcuff. “Squadron, prepare evasive scatter. Initiate on my command.” 

It didn’t even gall her anymore that her main job was to order retreats. She knew the math; the enemy had to post enough strength in any system it controlled to repel an unexpected scouting squadron, otherwise, her squadron could quite easily wreck the system’s infrastructure before a nearby garrison could scramble to respond. If Nate was prepared, there wasn’t much to gain in fighting him. 

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Tales from the Inbox: A Deal For the Zenith Treader

2954-06-10 – Tales from the Inbox: A Deal For the Zenith Treader 

This is the end of the account provided. The participants are promising that they will never speak of the events again, yet it was submitted to this embed team, and has no obvious textual indications of being altered for privacy (changing the nature of the cargo or its resulting security breach, for example).  

None of my contacts could come up with anything that it might refer to in the Navy’s records, but of course, if it is true, the Navy would have locked any records behind every layer of secrecy clearance it has. 

The Navy officer that appeared in the main display wasn’t doing a good job of hiding his fury. “Zenith Treader, desist from communicating with the station at once, except for regular traffic.” He leaned forward, glowering. “Our inspection party is assembling now.” 

Ellia Kossner sniffed dismissively. “There is no section of the Law of the Spacelanes that prevents personal comms traffic during an inspection stop, and that cutter’s not carrying enough gear to jam us anyway.” She arched one eyebrow. “My crew and I have nothing to hide, Lieutenant. Do you? Send them over without delay.” 

“In times of war, comms discipline-” 

“Are you accusing us of espionage, sir?” Ellia absently tapped a few controls on the side of her command chair. “I will inform the station constabulary of the need for a tribunal. My legal counsel can be reached-” 

The man’s eyes flashed. This interaction clearly wasn’t going the way he’d intended. “I am not accusing you or your crew of anything yet.” He said slowly. “But you are acting quite suspiciously.” 

“By communicating with my business partners on the Sprawl?” Ellia shrugged. “It would be more suspicious if I did not explain the delay. Do send your inspection team.” 

In a flash, Gareth Glass realized what all the obfuscation, the refusal to explain, and the needless delay were about. Hurriedly, he tapped out a text message to send over to the skipper’s display. He didn’t dare glance over his shoulder to see if she noticed it. 

“These things take time.” The lieutenant growled. “Your schedule is not my concern.” 

“But yours is.” Ellia chuckled. “I can afford the wait.” 

Gareth winced; they couldn’t, not really. Sure, Ellia’s credit reserves were robust, but they weren’t robust enough to time out a whole contract delivery and miss out on the return cargo as well, especially if the station inspectors found something on Treader that needed overhauling before they went back across the Gap. That, of course, was the least of their problems right now. 

“You are making your situation worse.” The Lieutenant gestured to someone out of view. “You will be lucky to still have a single hull panel still attached to that miserable hulk when we’re through with it.” 

Ellia nodded, tapping on her controls again. “My panic would make your job that much easier, would it? If you actually did any of that, right under the nose of the Sprawl, you’d be scrubbing the heads on a prisoner transport by next weekend. Sure, I’d be dead, but you’d wish we’d swapped places before long.” She tapped the side of her nose. “I know what’s got you so twitchy, bud. What you really, really don’t want on the record. I wonder how many of your ship’s crew know?” 

The officer’s face darkened. “Know what?” 

“I know what you think we have. What you Navy dolts let slip this far. And if I were worried about going down for it, I’d be shaking in my little boots, but lucky me, I’m not your smuggler.” Ellia leaned back and held up a finger. “One button press, and all of Sagittarius knows. Unencrypted, emergency band broadcast. It’s all set up, all I have to do is hit this little red button, unless...” 

Gareth hunched his shoulders, half expecting a cloud of railshot to cross from the cutter to Zenith Treader and perforate its unprotected hull in that instant. No hail of death came, however. 

“I’m listening.” The officer scowled. “Make it quick.” 

“Smuggling is bad business.” Ellia held her hands up, away from the controls. “Especially smuggling of the sort you’re looking for. I’ve got a neat little package for you, as well as a full set of our datalogs so you can try to back-trace it in Maribel. Turning over criminals, that’s free. Transparency is our policy. But secrecy? That’s expensive.” 

The lieutenant considered this for a long moment. “Is that so.” His jaw tightened. “Hold one.” 

With that, the screen blanked. Again, Gareth expected weapons fire, but once again, he was disappointed. Ellia cracked her neck and stood up, pacing back and forth in front of her station. 

“Is this going the way we want?” Sung sounded little less nervous than Gareth. 

“Hells if I know.” Ellia chuckled nervously. “Got to bank on them not committing an atrocity in full view of the station. In any case, I’ve changed our emergency broadcast, in case we’re fired on, so he loses if he shoots.” 

“Assuming secrecy really is this important.” Gareth shuddered. 

“We have to assume that too.” The skipper nodded. 

Less than a minute later, Sung announced that the cutter was hailing again. Ellia took her seat, propping one leg up on the arm of the big command chair, and waved for the transmission to be put on the main display. 

“What does your silence cost?” The lieutenant asked. He’d apparently calmed down a little; his face was far less red than it had been. 

“We dock at the station and hand over what you want, plus a convenient culprit and all the data we have. The Navy makes good the late-fees we are currently building up.” Ellia held up a finger. “After that, we will never speak of any of this again as long as we never hear of it.” 

“You expect me to take your word for this?” 

Ellia shrugged. “Yes. I’m sure you’ve seen my psych-profile. Do you really think I’m in the business of breaking contracts?” 

The lieutenant clenched his jaw. “And what’s to stop me refusing?” 

“We will cooperate fully with your search, of course.” Ellia spread her hands. “But its object will be announced to station officials, and its progress transmitted to legal counsel, as is my right.” 

The officer nodded stiffly. “We can do it your way, Zenith Treader. We will send you a course and a docking berth shortly.” 

Gareth released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding when the screen blanked again. Ellia, too, slumped into her chair. 

“Good show, Skipper.” Sung got up and went to a locker at the rear of the command deck, and produced two handguns. “Come on, Glass. We need to get your little girlfriend ready for her big show.” 

Gareth looked at Ellia, who waved toward Sung wearily. With a sympathetic nod, he took a gun from his shipmate and followed her down to his cabin. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Treasure of the Zenith Treader

2954-06-03 – Tales from the Inbox: The Treasure of the Zenith Treader 

Gareth Glass slipped out of the bed as quietly as he could and hunted for his uniform tunic, glad for the sound camouflage afforded by the Tranquility Wave music warbling in the overhead speakers. 

Patricial Lowell, still asleep, groaned contentedly as she rolled over into the space he had just vacated. 

Gareth winced as he found his trousers and snuck into the sanitary cubby, sliding the door shut before he turned on the light. He ran the cleanser only briefly, then dressed and killed the light. He didn’t open the door until his eyes had adjusted to the dark, and then he peeked out to make sure the woman was still where he’d left her before he snuck out. 

There was no way to kill the corridor lighting, and the harsh glare falling on Patricia’s face would certainly wake her. Gareth wished he’d thought about this eight hours earlier, and it took a few moments to devise a solution. He withdrew a spare blanket from the cabinets and held it out in front of himself, backing up into the door alcove, and hooked it into the tie-points for the decorative bead-curtains some spacers preferred to use in their cabins. After feeling to verify it covered most of the opening, he hurriedly palmed the control, hopped out, and activated the hard-lock. 

“How are we doing, Ellia?” He asked into his comms earpiece, hurrying along the corridor. 

“They’re still mucking around over there. The idiots probably think they’re making us sweat.” Ellia Kossner, skipper of the Zenith Treader, replied. “How’s our suspect?” 

“Secure.” Gareth tried to keep his tone professional. Obviously, his boss hadn’t asked him to do anything like what he’d done, nor even asked what he was doing, but she was certainly not ignorant. “Have you killed her systems access?” 

“Hours ago. Then Sung and I got a look into cabin number nine.” 

Gareth stopped and scowled. “That was not a good idea.” 

“I disagree. Come on up to command.” 

The ship not being particularly large, Gareth stepped through the doorway onto Treader’s command deck ninety seconds later to find Kim Sung and Ellia Kossner both seated there at the auxiliary consoles. The view forward and up, relative to the A-grav axis, showed only the bright blue orb of Sagittarius Gate, but most of the screens showed feeds from the ventral cameras, all locked onto the blocky, weapon-studded silhouette of a Confederated Navy corvette. 

Kossner gestured to Gareth’s usual seat at the helm station. “Sit down, Gareth. Sung, show him precisely how his new girlfriend has shafted us.” 

Sung snorted and tapped a few controls. The screen above her switched to show a recording apparently taken from the door of cabin number nine.  

Gareth was relieved that his shipmates hadn’t gone any farther than that, but his relief ended as soon as he saw the polymer habitat enclosure, and the chitinois, oblong creature within it. “Oh, hellfire.” He’d been expecting narcotics, or illegal weapons, or even maybe exotic, hard to find foodstuffs. “Is that a shardspinner? How did it get on board? That cage would barely fit through the hatch!” 

“She had to have connections in the Maribel the service yard.” The skipper sighed. “That means a syndicate. Why they want one of those things on this side of the Gap, who knows, but this thing is an inter-empire incident waiting to happen.” 

Sung changed the display to show a clear still-shot of the animal. “Shardspinners are a protected species native only to-” 

“Jack-of-Clubs. Yes, I know.” Gareth waved the screen away. “Closely guarded Hegemony monopoly. Illegal to take them off world.” As a teenager, he’d worked for his uncle, a jeweler. The exorbitant prices assigned to spinner stones, and the reason for the cost, was only too well known to him. “And here we are on the other side of the Reach with one aboard.” 

Sung changed the screen again, showing the vast distances between Jack-of-Clubs and Sagittarius Gate. “Tensions on the Strand border aren’t particularly high right now, with the Navy fighting out here on the other side of space. Somebody relaxed too much, and something slipped through.” 

“And we need to figure out how we’re not going to pay for it.” Ellia shook her head grimly. “The Hegemony is going to demand heads. More than one lone smuggler. And here we are-” 

“Conveniently holding the bag.” Gareth nodded. “As witnesses and independent contractors, entirely expendable to settle the situation without need for an in-depth investigation.” 

A long moment of silence fell. Gareth wondered whether they could kill the thing and destroy all evidence of its presence before the cutter’s boarding crew got its act together. Probably not. “What’s the call, Skipper?” 

Ellia Kossner reached across her terminal and tapped a control. “I’m not going down quiet.” Her voice was cold and hard in a way Gareth hadn’t heard before. “They want to make a mess go away? They need our cooperation.” 

Gareth glanced at his controls and saw the comms antenna active, as it would be during an exchange of routine traffic with the local datasphere. “Did you just-” 

Another indicator lit up. Sung turned to her console. “Cutter is hailing. Priority comms.” 

Ellia took her seat at the command station at the center of the command deck. “Main display, Ms. Sung.” She set her jaw. “Both of you keep quiet and look as confused and frightened as you can. If this doesn’t work, you might be able to plead out individually.” 

Gareth shook his head. “Ellia-” 

“Shut up, Gareth.” Kossner gestured to Sung to continue. “Look nervously busy.” 

This is the part that gives me pause about this story. Obviously, there hasn’t been any indication of such a sensational scandal in the media. Perhaps the identity of the cargo has been altered, but given that I can find nothing else about this story that has been changed to salve the egos or the reputations of the participants, that’s a little bit hard to believe. 

A shardspinner escaping tight Hegemony reputation this catastrophically, syndicate involvement or no, would be, as the account suggests, a vast controversy. Even if the government were hushing it up, I find it hard to believe we wouldn’t hear rumors – or that Naval Intelligence would simply permit me to publish it in this way, if it were true. 

If someone has the answer to this puzzle, send it our way. 

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