2953-12-31 – Tales from the Inbox: The Unexpected Complication
[N.T.B] I hope you and yours have enjoyed the holiday week. Duncan is off-ship for a few days, doing some recording for the main vidcast, and he left me an interesting account to edit and put into the ingest. And I absolutely did not do that.
You see, the day before the Feast, an old friend of mine, who we’ll call Sara Swan, sent me something on the side. Sara used to be in the same sort of business as I was, before the war, or at least, almost. She used to arrange extreme tourism for the rich, famous, and stupid, and usually keep them alive through their ill-thought-out escapades on dangerous worlds. We met on Botched Ravi when I was there in ‘41, and no, she never showed her face for my feed drones.
Anyway, “Sara” has a different line of work now, and she gave me permission to tell this story, properly anonymized. I think she wanted it published partly as a brag, but really, she’s only demonstrating the fieldcraft of the greenest Confederated Marine. What I find interesting... well, I’ll save it for the next episode’s commentary. It will take two or three weeks to get the story out, but by the time Duncan is back this one will be out to you all and he won’t have a choice except to play along and let me edit the rest for the feed.
Sara Swan lowered her magnifier and cursed under her breath. What had been intended as a simple job, in and out in two or three hours, was officially turning into anything but.
It had, in retrospect, probably been an unhealthy excess of wishful thinking that had brought Sara to Harold’s Lawn. The dubiously named world, a place of inland meadows of springy green, lichen-like flora, of coastal crags lashed by violent storms, was theoretically uninhabited, earmarked as it was for a war-postponed colonial mission. That there was anything worth stealing there in the first place suggested that theory and practice were not precisely on speaking terms.
Still, her contact had spun a plausible story about Survey equipment being abandoned in a rush when the Sagittarius Frontier caved in during the first year of the War. Doubtless such materiel would be written off without comment when Survey finally returned to their mission of preparing the world for its first human inhabitants after the conflict finally wound down.
It was of course possible that Sara’s employer knew nothing about the cluster of ramshackle shelters built around the weathered Survey team habitat, or the motley handful of guards leaning on their arc rifles. Possible, but unlikely. Failures of intelligence never seemed to work that way, in her experience.
Fortunately, Sara was no novice. After seeing lights at the target site the previous night from orbit, she’d done her entry burn hundreds of kilometers away, out of sight of the place, then flown atmospheric at low altitude as close as she dared. Her ship’s skiff had gotten her within ten klicks, and then she’d hiked a bit over nine more, keeping off ridge-lines and sticking to the lower meadows between the area’s rolling hills. Now, she was lying flat on a hilltop a bit more than nine hundred meters from her goal, and wondering how she was going to cover that last distance undetected.
Fortunately, the laid-back demeanor of those guards suggested Sara’s cautious approach had so far paid off. They showed no sign of knowing they were being watched. With a shudder, she realized this was doubly lucky. Their weapons were certainly effective at her current range. If one was skilled enough to make the shot, they could have taken her out while she was surveying the scene with her meta-lens magnifier.
Sliding back a few meters until she was behind the rise, Sara sat up against a flat-sided boulder to think. The camp looked relatively crude, suggesting the ruffians at the Survey site hadn’t set out from home expecting to set up there. It looked like they’d made do with what a standard shipboard fabricator could spit out after they arrived and saw an opportunity. What that opportunity was, precisely, didn’t take much guessing. They were sitting on the very thing Sara had been hired to retrieve – the military-grade fusion reactor that powered that Survey installation. Even broken, it was worth several hundred thousand credits, and functional, it was easily worth ten million to the right person.
While cruder than the phased matter reactors that powered starships, fusion powerplants, being simpler and less reliant on complex phased matter condensers and fuel stored in elaborate containment bottles, were the backbone of most planetary power grids. A military-grade system like the one in that installation, functionally identical to the sort used by the Confederated Marines to power field bases, was designed to be durable and somewhat portable, while still providing incredible power. Had there been no war, this one might have provided power for the needs of ten or fifteen thousand settlers before a permanent power plant was needed. Its internal fuel was good for a decade without refueling, and it could be safely refueled in a few days, with the right equipment and expertise.
In the right hands, that power could be used to power an asteroid mining base, or a private colony habitat for an elite clientele. In the wrong hands, it could be used to power a dark harbor, or an illegal off-charts hideaway for those criminal fugitives who knew how to get there. Sara, as a rule didn’t ask whether her clients were the right hands or the wrong ones. But she had a hunch that those vagabonds with the arc rifles worked for the wrong sort.
Sara had not seen a starship at the camp, nor anything that looked capable of concealing anything bigger than a runabout. That suggested their ride had left them in place to safeguard the prize, intending to return, perhaps with better tools, or with specialized technicians who knew how to bring a running fusion reactor to idle safely. There was no telling when that would be, and she rather doubted that ship would come unarmed; Sara had to be done with them and out with the reactor before then, or her own ship would be detected and shot to pieces.
Fortunately, this was far from Sara’s first experience with unanticipated problems of this sort. When part of your business model was suppressing the urge to ask follow up questions, this sort of thing became a kind of routine. Sure, jobs really were simple sometimes – even most of the time, maybe – but she’d long ago surrendered to confirmation bias and decided to expect unpredictable trouble.
With a grim scowl, she slid several tubular components out of her pack and began to snap them together. There were weapons that could range from her hill to the camp back on the skiff, and even more on the ship, but she didn’t fancy a sniping duel with people who had the home field advantage. All she needed for the moment was something that could kill at a hundred meters, without making too much noise. The best way to get this party started, she thought, was to draw a few of them out to where their deaths wouldn’t be seen, so she’d have a few minutes to examine their bodies and their equipment.
