Tales from the Service: The Quickley Job

2951-10-25 – Tales from the Service: The Quickley Job

“You must be joking.” Avin Matveev folded his arms and leaned against the blast-scored wall of what had probably been built as a high-rise residence tower for the first wave of architects and technicians who would turn Quickley into a first-class colony. Now, it was the frowning massif looming over a forlorn ruin made all the more desolate by the fact that it had never been properly built before it was destroyed.

“Afraid not, Boss.” Leo Goranov, Avin’s chief architect, gestured down the arrow-straight street leading back the way they’d come. “Admiral Abarca’s rep says they have two brigades of fortress troops landing in thirty hours.”

“What in all hells am I supposed to do with thirty hours?” Avin threw his hands up. “We haven’t even been groundside for a whole shift! Has he seen what the grunts did to this place? We’re doing everything almost from scratch!”

Fortunately, Leo had worked with Avin long enough to know that these were rhetorical questions. He winced and pretended to make a note on his data slate, then soldiered on after a politely long silence. “The block tower will hold almost that many, if they don’t mind having room-mates and hot-bunking.”

Avin looked up at the twelve-story ferrocrete edifice. Most of its windows were dark, hollow sockets, and chunks of material had been blown out of its sides by wayward artillery fire. He’d already verified that its foundation was solid, but he’d expected that his crew had more than a week in which to complete their work. Leo was probably right, but even with most of the team working round the clock, there was no way they’d have that building ready. A new coat of paint wouldn’t even be dry in that time.

Avin dropped his shoulders. This was the part of being a military contractor that he’d never grown to like, no matter how big the payday. “Herb’s already on his way with the crane crawlers?”

“Soon as they’re unloaded.”

“Get back over and pull Lydia off the revetments. Bring her team this way as soon as you can.” Avin pointed toward the edge of the incomplete city, where one of his teams had already been bundled off to work on fortifications.

Leo nodded. “I’ll call ahead. The Marines won’t like losing their pet diggers.”

“The Marines don’t fill our bank account, Leo.” Avin shooed his associate away. “Go on, I’ve got to get the plan markers laid before Herb gets here.”

Leo scurried off, leaving Avin standing on the cracked walkway, staring up at the structure that would, in not much more than a standard day, be housing Confederated troops. They’d never have the whole inside ready by then, of course; running plumbing to sanitary stations on every floor alone would take most of the time he’d been given. It was time to do some of the famous Matveev improvising that his father and grandfather had built the company on. It didn’t have to be pretty; it just had to keep more than three thousand souls warm, dry, and mostly clean.

Walking across the street to the corner of a low building skeleton which had probably never had a complete roof, Avin reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of planning markers. Building a schematic in his head as he went, he set the markers down every ten meters or so as he circumnavigated the huge tower. The inside didn’t really need to house so many thousands of bunks; it just needed to have water, sanitary facilities, and somewhere to put the chow line. The fact that it was an ugly, over-engineered block of ferrocrete would also come in handy.

Just as Avin returned to his start point, he heard the rumble of polymer-coated treads on cracked pavement. Looking up, he saw the first crane crawler nose around a corner, a crimson Matveev Logistics insignia freshly painted on the front of the cab. Behind the telescoping crane mount, a flat bed held a towering pile of pre-fabricated metal beams.

Avin waved the vehicle over and hopped up onto its side while it was still moving. Inside the cab, behind a strung-out looking driver, Herb Armando was standing on the vibrating deck, scowling out at the ruined streets.

“This is impossible, Boss.” Herb handed Avin a disposable cup of coffee. “Did you hear we only have-”

“I heard.” Avin pointed to the tower. “We’re going to use that.”

“The whole crew working round the clock couldn’t make that ready in time.” Herb shook his head. “Prefab’s going to be faster, but still not fast enough.”

“Yeah.” Avin tapped his wristcuff to send Herb the locations of the planning markers. “Which is why we’re going to use that.”

Herb frowned. “I don’t get it, boss.”

“Start assembling support struts.” Avin looked out over the street, imagining a net of metal girders blossoming upward from the wreckage and converging on the top of the tower. Once the girders were secure, his imagination started dividing the intervening space with crossbeams, then flooring. Synth-canvas became walls, and a double layer covered the whole thing like a monstrous tent.

Herb, of course, couldn’t see Avin’s designs. He sighed and pointed to Herb’s wristcuff. “I need support beams to go from those points, up to the top.”

Herb glanced at the screen, then out at the building. “What good’s that?”

“Just do it, Herb.” Avin popped the top off the coffee, drained it in two gulps, then handed it back. “We don’t have time for the big picture presentation this time.”

Herb looked at Avin strangely, then smiled. “That almost sounded like your father, Boss.”

“Yeah, well.” Avin opened the door and started back out. He would need to head into the tower to set markers to give the other teams their marching orders before they arrived. “If we pull this off, even that grouch will be impressed.”

Though the fighting has been over on Quickley for some time, Nojus is still on that world and still talking to the combat troops and support personnel who were part of its capture.

Quickley is an interesting case; this was no hit and run raid. Seventh Fleet is apparently fortifying the world to resist attack long enough that the main fleet can depart from Sagittarius Gate to relieve it.

Among those who arrived on that world within hours of its capture was Avin Matveev, the chief executive of Matveev Logistics, a mid-sized civilian contracting company that has been building ground-side bases and facilities for the Confederated Navy for nearly seventy years. Nojus apparently knows Mr. Matveev from way back, and seems to have had little difficulty extracting this particular story of engineering exploits from him.

It should be noted that though the account included pictures of the odd circus-tent hab structure Mateev built to house the incoming troops, the strange building has already been largely disassembled. It was only needed for a few weeks, until Mateev Logistics could build more permanent barracks facilities.

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Tales from the Service: A Vertical Envelopment

2951-10-18 – Tales from the Service: A Vertical Envelopment

Though the concept of vertical envelopment has existed in combat doctrines since before the First Space Age, I doubt most of our readers are familiar with the concept as it is conducted by Confederated Marines in this conflict. In brief, it is the act of attacking an enemy from an unexpected direction through the air while that enemy is already engaged in battle. We’ve covered unorthodox uses of the jump rockets on Rico suits many times in this text feed, but this tactic is one of the most orthodox uses of this equipment.

Video recordings of this tactic are quite spectacular; though there are no good videos available on the datasphere of its use in combat, there are a number of videos of Marines performing vertical envelopment in training exercises which can be found with a few searches, and I highly recommend doing so. Such video would make an excellent visual reference for this account of the tactic from the now-concluded assault on Quickley in the Lee-Hosha system.

As soon as he had checked that Singh was all right, Sergeant Myron Vergossen consulted the drone’s overhead view of the situation. The rocket swarm had cleared most of the concealing brush from in front of the enemy bunker, but had done little real damage. The squad couldn’t go too much farther in the drainage ditch before it turned and became exposed to enemy fire, and the crashing of fallen trees behind him was sufficient proof that there would be little benefit in pulling back into the woods. The bunker’s lasers would scythe through the trees for hundreds of yards.

In the privacy of his helmet, Myron winced. As usual, the enemy had set up their defenses well; there was no way to draw sustained fire from the fortification without giving them something to shoot at. Singh’s armor had withstood a few hits from a small-wattage pulsebeam, but there was at least one heavy emitter in there capable of severing thick, ancient tree-trunks in an instant; their armor probably wouldn’t be able to shrug that off so easily.

“Listen up, boys.” Myron kept up his gruff, hard-as-armor-plate tone as best he could, even though this was the part of being a non-com that hated the most. “On my signal, get up there and give it to ‘em with your primary, then get back down. And keep doing it again until I call a halt. Watch for friendly transponders in your fire arc.”

A series of acknowledging clicks and chirps indicated that everyone had heard. While the Marines scrambled into ready positions, Myron switched channels. “Columbera, start your V-E when you hear shooting again. Lead with rockets on the way in. We’ll keep them distracted.”

“Aye, Sarge.” Columbera sounded eager, and Myron couldn’t blame him; there was little more thrilling in the life of a Marine than an offensive jump-rocket maneuver. There was also little more dangerous, especially if the rest of the squad couldn’t keep those lasers occupied. Mid-jump, Columbera and his fellows would be totally exposed, out in the open in every sense of the word.

The danger would only last a few seconds. Whoever was going to get hurt or killed would probably not even realize it until it was all over. “Make ready.” Myron found a spot from which he could execute his own orders. After all, if someone was going to buy the plot today, he was at least as good a candidate as anyone else. “Go, go!”

As one, the Marines in the gully rose up head and shoulders above the lip and started firing. Railguns rattled, autocannons thumped, and plasma lances blazed away toward the enemy bunker.

Return fire was instantaneous. Myron’s suit flashed warnings as he took two low-wattage laser hits to his chestplate, and another to the far lighter armor on the suit’s forearm, far beyond where his own fingertips were. The hits did little real damage, but he dropped back down, moved to the side, and popped up again in another place.

When the sensors in the suit’s low mechanical head once again cleared the ditch’s rim, Myron saw a quartet of smoke-trails arcing through the sky above the bunker. He swept his railgun across the target at random as a flurry of white-hot motes zipped down from the sky to explode on the bunker’s flat roof.

Even before the explosions had faded into smoke, four Rico suits, their feet enveloped in fire, slammed down in their epicenter. Columbera and his three associates plunged right through the synthcrete roof, weakened as it was by the blasts, and vanished inside the bunker.

“Fall back!” Myron, already heeding his own recommendation, dropped back down, then turned to survey the damage.

As he’d expected, there had been casualties. Most of the Marines had scorched or still-glowing spots on their armor, but only two suits showed internal damage to systems and Marine – Kinneman was down with his chest armor melted nearly through and still red-hot, and Jedynak’s right arm hung lifeless, the machinery within spitting black smoke and occasional spurts of hydraulic oil.

Myron pointed toward Kinneman. “Get him out before he cooks. He’s still got a pulse but his suit’s a loss.”

Two Marines immediately flipped Kinneman over and began prying apart the suit’s interleaving rear plates. When they broke the atmo seal, hot, steamy air billowed out, followed shortly afterward by a red-faced and gasping Private Kinneman. Despite bearing a garish burn across the left side of his face, Kinneman got to his feet quickly, then dove briefly back into his suit to retreive his side-arm and Nine.

“Bunker is clear, Sarge.” Columbera was almost cheering his report. “Heavy weapons spiked and reactor scrammed. No casualties.”

Myron breathed a sigh of relief. Once Marines were inside a tight space like the bunker, Incarnation infantry were largely powerless and they knew it, but that didn’t mean there was no danger to the marines who’d penetrated the fortification. “Good work, Corporal. We’ll come up to you.

Switching channels, Myron raised his robotic fist. “Columbera’s cleared the bunker. Move up.” While the other Marines hurried up the slope, he turned to the other casualty. “Jedynak, are you stable?”

“Suit arm’s toast, Sarge. Mine’s pretty cooked too.” Jedynak’s voice was an octave higher than usual. “I’ll live. God bless painkillers, eh?”

Myron sighed and dropped a med-evac beacon. “Might be an hour or two before the lifter gets here and we have to keep pushing. Keep your heads down, both of you.”

“Aye, Sarge.” Jedynak waved in the direction of the bunker with his remaining arm. “Should we take cover in there?”

“Negative.” Myron stopped half-way up the slope and turned back toward the wounded pair. “Do not occupy the bunker. Take the beacon back along this gulley a little way.” He pointed skyward. “You know our artillery and air cover.”

Jedynak chuckled nervously. “That I do, Sarge.”

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Tales from the Service: The Quickley Fortification

2951-10-04 – Tales from the Service: The Quickley Fortification

“In position Sarge.” Corporal Columbera sounded out of breath; on a world with more or less Terran gravity, like Quickley, that probably meant he and his detachment had been forcing themselves through thick underbrush for most of the last fifteen minutes. “I think so, anyway.”

“Understood.” Sergeant Myron Vergossen took one last look at the terrain map, then dismissed it and called up the targeting display instead. A haloed cross-hair appeared in the center of his helmet’s face-plate, then slid off the lower edge of the armor-glass screen as the display detected which way the railgun attached to his right arm was pointing. Just to be safe, he raised his arm and pointed the weapon toward the underbrush beside the road, and watched the cross-hair reappear.

Around him, most of his squad of Confederated Marines had probably already tested their targeting systems and warmed up their various weapons. The unit’s Rico suits were tough, but something always seemed to break in one of them after several hours of tramping about in the dirt and dust of an alien world; being caught by surprise by a failed targeting optic after the shooting started was not an option.

“Everyone ready?” Myron turned a half-circle to look at each of the men in turn. Less Columbera’s quartet, he had fourteen Marines for the frontal assault. Most of their weapons would do little against the walls of a hardened Incarnation bunker, but that was all right; knocking the position out was Columbera’s job.

Nobody answered vocally over the radio channel, but within two seconds, a series of blue status indicators in Myron’s HUD winked out and returned green.

“Follow me. Heads down.” Myron had already set the position and rough size of the enemy fortification, so it was a matter of two commands to call its virtual likeness up on everyone’s HUD. With as thick as the local underbrush was, the position would probably be invisible in visible-light optics if the Marines didn’t already know where it was.

A drainage ditch with several inches of slimy mud at the bottom provided cover for most of the approach, and within two minutes Myron had his suit’s back pressed to the root-choked slope facing the enemy. He waited as the other Marines, their suits hunched over and almost crawling on their hands and knees, took up positions on either side. No doubt the enemy knew they were coming and already had their guns pointed at the ditch; Incarnation sensor-nets were notoriously good.

“Let’s ring the doorbell, boys.” Myron turned around until it was his suit’s hardened chest-plate, not the weaker back-plate, that was facing the enemy. He reached down to the infantry micro-missiles racked along the sides of his leg, pulled two free, and held them in one huge alloy palm. The missiles, being on the tac-net, had already acquired the target, and now as each Marine readied his own, the weapons automatically established a saturation targeting pattern. A lucky missile could possibly sneak through a firing port, but Myron wasn’t counting on that. He wanted the smoke and debris cloud the salvo would throw up.

“Now.” Myron flicked the two missiles into the air. On either side of him, a swarm of gleaming tubes rose into the sunlight as thirteen other Marines did the same. Infantry missiles were more precise if fired out of launchers, but at close range, against a static target, it didn’t matter. Each one oriented itself with a puff of compressed gas, then zipped away as its solid-fuel rocket kicked in. The thunder and hail of dirt-clods that followed gave no indication of how many the bunker’s point defense had shot down, but Myron didn’t care.

Without needing orders, the Marines around Myron popped their heads and shoulders out of the ditch, leveled their weapons, and let loose. Most of them, armed like Myron himself, sprayed the target with high-velocity ferroceramic projectiles. Aliev and Kinneman pierced the explosion-thrown dust with yellow tongues of flame from their plasma lances, and Singh let loose a four-round burst from his armor-piercing autocannon.

Only a few seconds after the Marines started shooting, Myron sent a fall-back signal, and his Marines ducked back under cover just as the dust plume began to disperse. Most likely, they’d done nothing but rattle the defenders, but rattling was more than sufficient; even as Myron verified that everyone had pulled out of the firing line cleanly, lasers began to slash through the underbrush over their heads.

“Drone shows no obvious damage.” Private Morello, still in control of the tiny scout-drone circling a thousand meters above their heads, sent updated imagery to Myron’s HUD. “But we definitely got their attention, Sarge.”

“You don’t say, Private.” Myron heard a tree, cut in half by high-wattage laser fire, crash down behind them. ‘They’re not saving power, so they’ve got a reactor in there.” This wasn’t too surprising, but it did make their task a bit more dangerous; it meant their enemy could keep up continuous fire forever.

“Sounds like the party’s started, Sarge. Ready for V-E?”

Myron winced as Singh clambered back up to fire a few more cannon rounds and fell back almost immediately with a pair of glowing spots on his chestplate. “Not yet, Columbera. But get ready.”

“Aye, Sarge.”

It sounds like the bulk of the fighting in the Lee-Hosha system is over, but this account from the first day of the battle will take at least one more week to relay in this space.

Our own Nojus Brand, who went groundside with the Marines, reported back that he and the other civilian correspondents have entered the spaceport site at Q-S1, which was incomplete at the time the Incarnation occupied the world, and which they finished to use the place as a depot. Unfortunately for Seventh Fleet, the garrison slagged most of the infrastructure when it became clear that they were doomed, and the place needs almost as much work as it did to begin with before the world will be good for anything.

Nojus has taken many stills and many hours of footage of the battle’s aftermath, most of which should be available on our corporate datasphere hub within a few days of this posting. Obviously, any imagery that shows Confederated casualties will not be shown, out of consideration for the families of those wounded and killed.

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Tales from the Inbox: The Computational Dilemma

2951-09-13 – Tales from the Inbox: The Computational Dilemma 

This week, we continue Nestor Palazzo’s account. Obviously, his claim of being involved in secret Kyaroh dealings is dubious to be sure, and is perhaps embellished, but it seems that he needed this embellishment to explain something about his changing relationship with his associate, the Gilehdat envoy Drase. 

“You negotiated work? Just now?” Nestor Palazzo frowned across the table at his cloaked companion. “That can’t have taken more than a minute.” 

Drase shrugged, her slight frame still not quite used to the gesture. “Hoyr and I spoke while you were seeing to your other business. I told him that I had no right to commit you or your ship until you granted me that right.” She flicked a long, golden finger into the menu, requesting a beverage. “He will pay very well.” 

Nestor set down his spoon and pushed aside his still only half-eaten stew. “Okay. What’s the catch?” He didn’t have any real problem with the idea of working for a Cutter – other than Hoyr, he had never really spoken to one – but the ease with which Drase had found him work was more than a little suspicious. 

“His time table is short, as he said.” Drase’s drink slid out onto the table, and she picked it up. “Also, the destination coordinates are quite secret. It is demanded by the leaders of the Kyaroh that no human may know the location.” 

Nestor frowned. “If I can’t know where-” 

Drase spun the token she’d been given like a coin. “The Kyaroh trust a Councilor to protect their secrets.” She peeled the film off the rim of the drink and took a long sip. “The only missing piece is your cooperation.” 

Nestor held up his hand. “How am I going to program the Himura drive if I don’t have a destination?” 

“You won’t program it.” Drase stopped the spinning disk with one golden finger. “You will teach me to enter coordinates into the star drive, and to purge its memory core.” 

“Woah, woah.” Nestor shook his head. “Back up. It’s not that simple.” He held up a finger. “Firstly, it’s not as simple as entering coordinates. The navcomputer needs to compute the fold radials and transit points, and send those over to the Himura prior to a jump. The navcomputer records are protected information, you can’t wipe that without getting-” 

“It is possible to directly configure the star drive.” Drase arched one eyebrow. “I have read of human spacers doing this in emergencies.” 

Nestor thought back to the last time he’d done the computations for a jump by hand. That had been as part of an examination when he’d updated his solo-operator certification, nearly six years prior; he’d never done it for real, and very no spacer he knew had either. How did Drase expect to learn all that math fast enough to be within Hoyr’s timetable? If she screwed up even one step, it could badly damage Macie Kurtz’s Himura Transitor, or simply deposit the ship at some random nearby location in several glowing pieces. 

Drase leaned closer. “This is a misunderstanding?” Still, her ruby eyes did not betray any hint of concern. Nestor resented how closed her thoughts were; even if she did know the enormity of what she was asking, she probably wouldn’t show it to him or to anyone else unless she wanted to. Every being was an open book to her, but her thoughts were her own. 

Probably sensing Nestor’s annoyance, Drase drew back. “Even now, you think my arts work to my advantage, Nestor?” She looked away, and this time, he could read the hurt feelings in her bearing. “If you do not trust me to act as your agent, I need not do so.” 

“Wait.” Nestor put one big hand on her shoulder as she moved to exit the booth. “I’m not sure you know what you’re asking.” 

Drase looked genuinely startled, though Nestor could not guess exactly why. “How so?” 

“You will have to do the computations by hand to keep their location secret. That takes weeks or months for most humans to learn. Even assuming you picked it up in a few shifts, I couldn’t check your work without access to the original coordinates.” Nestor shook his head. “If you do it wrong, it could kill us, or strand us to die in a wrecked ship.” He had only just begun to come to terms with Drase’s presence in his life and wasn’t terribly interested in having that process violently cut short.  

Drase nodded slowly. “I see. This is not a problem I had anticipated.” 

“Go and talk to Hoyr again.” Nestor dropped his hand. “Tell him that if time is critical, he needs to start trusting at least one human with the coordinates.” 

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