Tales from the Service: A Reacher’s Reward

2947-11-26 – Tales from the Service: A Reacher’s Reward 

One of the damndest thing about Reachers is that never has the same Reacher ship been encountered twice – each time one of their seashell-hulls appears, it has a different energy emission profile and a different, often vastly different, physical appearance. When a Reacher ship disappears into the dark, it’s never seen by human eyes or sensors again, as if the ships have a very short service life and are rapidly replaced. 

This final chapter of Mus’ad Balos’s account (which starts with Tales from the Service: A Reacher's Request) begins to explain this oddity. The Reacher ship completed its repairs and departed the system before his ship even reached planetary orbit, but telescopic spies on Botterhill noticed something odd – it had left behind an object of mass not much less than the asteroids it had collected, an object which shone as it tumbled, like a polished shell.  

Securing permission via Hypercast communication with his superiors at Maribel, Mus’ad took the squadron to investigate the Reachers’ refuse, in the hopes that something new might be learned about them. 

The object they approached was not like a polished shell, it was a polished shell – three quarters of the outer skin of the Reacher dreadnought, all in one piece and including the damaged areas, had been left behind as easily as an Earth lobster sheds its chitinous armor. This explains why each Reacher we run into looks different; their ships apparently shed their hulls and nanotechnologically grow new ones with available material to save the trouble of patching up holes. 

Much to the Navy’s dismay, this remnant proved to be of little use; though obviously nano-grown rather than manufactured, the ferrous material of the absurdly thick, inert hull the Reachers had left behind was little more than refined asteroid iron with a complex nano-scale crystal structure. The Navy poked it with everything they had, but in the end, they handed it over to the Botterdowns system authority, which is apparently planning to tow it into planetary orbit and build a unique orbital station in its conveniently massive interior. 

As the five destroyers scanned and prodded this titanic remnant, Mus’ad led an EVA team from Penelope Ott into the cavernous interior, in the faint hope that the Reachers had left other trinkets behind. He was in luck – they had. 

“Damn.” 

It was all Mus’ad could muster, and he was glad he had switched off his comms pickup. Four floodlight beams splayed out from the bow of Penelope Ott’s service launch, each painting a puddle of wan light on the fluted, arched wall on the far side of the hollowed-out Reacher hulk. Though spectroscopic analysis had suggested the shell was made of nothing but asteroid-harvested nickel-iron, the surface shimmered like polished gray mother-of-pearl. 

Even in this weak illumination, the cathedral-like beauty of the discarded shell was evident. Though it had no clear floor, it did seem to have an all-around Gothic arched ceiling. The vast, lens-shaped interior where the Reacher ship’s working innards and crew spaces had been seemed the domain of ancient ghosts, though the mechanical beast which had grown the shell and vacated it only weeks before. 

Mus’ad and his crew hadn’t come to the derelict shell to sight-see, of course. He switched back on his comm pickup. “All right, we’re jumping off. Perez, go check out the damage sites as soon as we’re clear.” 

“Aye, Skipper.” 

The launch pilot held the little craft perfectly still relative to the lazily tumbling hulk while Mus’ad detached the EVA support sled from its side and switched his safety tether to the hardy little drone. The other three members of the EVA team hanging onto the sides of the service launch each did the same, and the team kicked free of their ride. 

As the launch zipped away under the power of its maneuvering thrusters, Mus’ad switched his comms channel to exclude its pilot, who had other duties to attend to. “At least one person and the sled stay in line-of-sight to the ship at all times.” He pointed to the gaping “mouth” of the Reacher ship-shell, beyond which the well-lit length of Penelope Ott sat only a few kilometers away. He doubted it would be possible to get lost in the mere shell of a ship, but a drone survey of the interior prior to the EVA mission had revealed a number of hollows and tunnels sunk into the thick, ferrous shell, and he didn’t want to take chances. 

“We’re the first people to do anything like this, aren’t we, Skipper?” 

“Far as I know.” Mus’ad tried not to think about it. Historical opportunities like this one were usually something the cautious Reachers took pains to avoid giving to Terrans, and he’d already spent the last several days puzzling over their sudden change of tack. “Let’s check out those chambers the drone found.” 

Each of them reeled in their lines and grabbed onto the sled, and Mus’ad gave it the coordinates of the first and largest of the hollows carved seamlessly into the ship-shell. With gentle one-gee acceleration, the sled towed the team to its destination. At first, Mus’ad couldn’t see anything; the entrance to the hollow was hidden in the fluted folds of the inside wall until they were almost on top of it. 

Playing a wrist-beam into a circular hole barely two meters across, salvage tech Moyna Phan at the front of the sled keyed on her comm. “Not sure I like the look of this. Could be anything in there.” 

“If we’re lucky.” Mus’ad played out his line and reached for his side-arm, strapped to the thigh of his suit. He wasn’t asking for volunteers. “I’ll go first. If it’s empty, and it probably is, this should only take a moment.” 

None of the others protested, not wanting to be the first to crawl into the tight confines of the smooth-walled tunnel even though the safety line back to the sled would prevent any loss of contact. Perhaps if he had been a proper captain with a whole cruiser and attending ships to command, someone might have been honor-bound to hold him back and go themselves, but a destroyer skipper was hardly irreplaceable. 

The lip around the opening protruded slightly out into the cavernous hollow of the ship-shell, its edge wrinkled slightly as if the heavy nano-grown metal was an orifice that could widen or close at will. Suppressing a shudder at the thought, Mus’ad switched his suit-lights to maximum power and pushed off down the curving, tubular shaft. 

According to the drone’s survey, the tunnel should have been only six meters long, but Mus’ad thought it seemed more like twenty before it terminated in an enclosed, globular chamber. The drone data said the space was about ten meters across on its widest axis, but again a trick of the smooth, gleaming walls made it seem at least twice that big. Tiny holes riddled the opposite wall like worm-tunnels burrowing through a rotten tree, but the opening of each was as smooth and seamless as every other surface – the holes were original to the shell, and they had a purpose. 

Mus’ad drifted into the middle of the space and tried to imagine what it was for. For the barest instant, he pictured a lone three-limbed Reacher drifting there instead of himself, surrounded by and entangled in a cocoon of sensory equipment, with its multivariate grip-tendrils grasping the controls that steered the ship, each of its three eyes fixed on a display of what could be seen outside the ship in one direction or another. It was a fantastic thought to be sure – Reacher ships were probably so fully automated that they did not need pilots or even helmsmen like Terran ships. He doubted any human would ever see the inside of a Reacher vessel to test his imaginative speculation. 

“Skipper, you’d better come out here.”  

Tech Phan’s voice startled him out of his over-imaginative reverie. Mus’ad triggered the safety-line spindle on his belt and guided himself back up the tunnel as it dragged him toward the sled. 

The moment he appeared in the opening, the tech turned and pointed with one heavy-gloved hand at something the other two members of the EVA team were already staring at intently with their meta-lens helmet magnifiers. Switching his own on, he pulled the bearing and zoom settings from their units. 

The object they were looking at drifted without tumbling a few dozen meters out into the empty center of the ship-shell, its gleaming grey material matching that of the shadowed walls beyond. One of the other EVA personnel had fixed the sled’s lights on the object, and Mus’ad could see subtle fluting along its spindle-like profile. The suit’s computer estimated the object’s length at barely forty centimeters. “That wasn’t there a minute ago.” 

Phan shook her head inside her helmet, since they were close enough for the gesture to be visible. “Negative, sir. The sled’s sensors flagged it while you were down there.” 

“Thermal?” 

“Same temperature profile as the hulk.” 

One of the other techs gestured wildly. “Hey! There’s writing on that thing.” 

Mus’ad set his tether line to play out once more, then kicked out from the iron orifice toward the offending object. The possibility that it was a booby-trap occurred to him – was the whole hulk left as a test to the curiosity of Terrans, and would an excess of that urge be considered a failure? 

Slowing his forward motion with suit attitude jets, Mus’ad crept up on the spindle. The lights from the sled and his own suit lights brought out its mother-of-pearl shimmer to an impressive degree, and he might have paused for several seconds to appreciate the play of light along its fluted ridges if he had not spotted the inscription.  

Reacher glyphs had been found on some of the trinkets which their kind had traded to Terrans over the centuries, but no headway had ever been made in translating them. Evidently, the Reachers had no similar trouble with the written language of humans. Etched precisely as if by electro-pencil along the top of one of the ribbed protrusions, Mus’ad picked out Terran block-letters. 

The others, picking up the feed from Mus’ad’s helmet camera, had identified out and read the inscription before he did. Though all three made noises of surprise which the comms circuit elected to transmit, Phan recovered first. “Skipper, is there something you aren’t telling us?” 

Phan’s gasp preceded Mus’ad’s further shock by less than a second, as he read the inscription himself. 

CONTENTS PROPERTY OF LT CDR MUS’AD BALOS, DD-641 PENELOPE OTT 

“I wish there was.” Mus’ad reached out for the container – for container it must be, to have contents. He half-expected his gloved hand to pass through it, revealing it to be only a product of his imagination, but his fingers found unyielding metal. Perhaps the Reachers had discovered the cost of the license he’d bought them – both in credits and in the chewing-out he’d received from the civilian administration – and decided not to accept Terran charity. Perhaps they – the always mercantile Reachers - had merely elected to leave a gift for unrelated reasons. Perhaps – and Mus’ad thought this most likely - this was yet another step in a scheme brewed in a wholly alien mind, which his own neural structure could not begin to process. 

Carefully, Mus’ad wrestled the object into a sample container and sealed it. He doubted the item was dangerous now, but he would have Phan and several other techs work it over, just to be sure. 

Unfortunately, Naval Intelligence drew the line here on this story. They wouldn’t let Lieutenant Commander Balos talk to me about the canister further, except to say that his crew did eventually get it open. Whatever was inside, I hope the skipper does eventually get it back from the spooks; seems to me the Reachers might be offended if he didn’t. 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Reacher’s Repairs

2947-11-19 – Tales from the Service: A Reacher’s Repairs 

In this continuation of the account from last week’s Tales from the Service: A Reacher's Request, Lieutenant Commander Mus’ad Balos arranged for his ship to loiter near the titanic Reacher ship which had appeared damaged in the Botterdowns system right in front of his patrol, hoping to learn something more about the enigmatic xenosapients than humans had ever been permitted to learn before. 

He didn’t need to go far for his excuse. The system administration on Botterhill, despite having almost no infrastructure for the mining of asteroid materials, refused to sanction the Reachers’ use of unused asteroids to repair their ship. As the rest of his squadron continued on to planetary orbit, Mus’ad kept his ship near the wounded giant while he tried to figure out how he could make the local authorities adopt a more reasonable tone. 

In the end, he didn’t make them see sense – but their automated datasphere bureaucratic network proved far more amenable to the Reachers’ needs. 

“You have got to be kidding me.” Mus’ad Balos tossed the hand-display across his desk, and the comms tech barely saved it from clattering to the deck. The fall wouldn’t have damaged the light-weight device, of course, but Mus’ad appreciated the man’s reflexes all the same. 

“Sorry, sir. Someone down there must take all those vidcast drama stories about lost Reacher treasure-worlds seriously.” 

“Seriously enough to extort the captain of a ship that’s shot all to hell.” Mus’ad folded his arms. Unfortunately, the asteroids were the sovereign property of the system authority. Stealing several – or allowing the Reachers to do the same – would be theft. Even simple minerals poaching carried hefty fines, and to be charged with it while on duty would be a black mark Mus’ad could never escape from. 

“They have a point, skipper.” The tech set the discarded hand-display on the corner of the desk. “Never in human history has a Reacher ever given us anything for free. Why did they have to come here, anyway? There are four empty systems within six ly, and they’ve all got to have asteroids. It’s not like being here protects them. Even if every hull in Botterdowns was in just the right spot, we couldn’t make any real difference if their Grand Journey impostors showed up again.” 

Mus’ad shrugged. The agenda of the Reacher captain had been on his mind as well. Reachers had never given anything to Terrans for free, but they had also never asked for anything before. True, they had waited for Mus’ad to offer assistance before asking their favor, but they had asked it, and it had not been until several hours afterward that he’d realized how unusual it was. Terran xenosociology had never made much headway into the study of Reacher culture from the beautiful but mysterious trinkets they usually included when bartering, but he’d heard once the theory that in the zero-sum game of their interstellar nomadic travels, the Reachers had likely adopted a philosophy of neither giving nor expecting anything for free. 

Seeing that the conversation was over, the comms tech hurried out, leaving Mus’ad to his thoughts. If the Botterdowns system wouldn’t donate a few asteroids to the cause of Terran-Reacher relations, he would have no choice but to hail the titanic ship and forward the civilian bureaucrat’s demands.  

The Reachers did not have a reputation for temper, so he doubted the ship would vaporize his little destroyer for bearing such bad news, but still the prospect left him uneasy. He’d offered to help, and the next thing they heard of his voice, he would be asking for his kind to be paid for that help. There was no way of knowing how that would be interpreted. 

After wrestling with the distasteful task he’d been handed for several minutes, Mus’ad got up and headed out of his duty office, calling the lift that would take him up to the bridge. The Reachers would understand – they had to. Commerce had led them to break the silence of Earth’s Second Dark Age all those centuries before, and commerce had marked all their appearances since. Surely they had expected there might be a price for the resources they needed. 

Arriving on the bridge, Mus’ad stepped into the center. Since he was on duty, no duty-officer stepped out of his way; he preferred to command from the command center three decks below. He could have hailed the Reachers from that station, too, but he wanted to deliver the bad news in full view of the bridge crew, in case the inevitable inquiry needed corroborating witnesses. “Hail the Reacher ship.” 

“Transmitting.” The young woman at the comms terminal bent to the task of negotiating a two-way channel with the alien systems on the bigger ship. Everyone shifted in their seats; they seemed to recognize Mus’ad’s tone and recognize that something had gone wrong. 

“Of course the ground-rats would make trouble over fifty credits of asteroid rock.” 

Mus’ad whirled on his heel. “Who said that?” 

Nobody would admit to it; the voice had been a man’s, but of the seven officers and crew on the bridge other than Mus’ad himself, all but the ensign sitting at the comms station were men. 

“Fifty credits indeed. Cancel that hail.” The bitter gripe had given him an idea. “How much does a mining license cost in this damned system?” 

The voice-assistant software beat the human crew to the answer. “Botterdowns authority uses the standard Frontier rates for mining contracts – five hundred credits per year for a private-use license, two thousand five hundred per year for a transferrable commercial license with no tonnage limit. Datasphere registration is available.” 

Mus’ad smiled, calling up the terminal at the captain’s station. Two thousand five hundred credits was two months’ worth of savings, but he was sure it would be worth every penny. 

The ship’s computer brought up the cached mining license registration form, and it took Mus’ad only a few minutes to fill it out and dispatch it for transmission to the system’s Hypercast relay node. In an hour, the request would pass into the fully automated registry on Botterhill. Ten minutes after that, it would be in the backup records at Maribel and in the Core Worlds, and his personal account would shrink by an appreciable but survivable sum. 

“The Reachers are hailing, sir.” 

“Probably going to ask what the delay is. Tell them the locals made us do some paperwork.” Mus’ad turned and headed back to his office to wait the two hours it would take for the license identifier to reach his ship. The automated licensing system came with the usual colonial care package; he doubted anyone on the planet monitored such things. 

Mus’ad spent the next two hours in his duty office seeing to the routine forms and approval requests that came with his job as the destroyer’s commander. Though Penelope Ott was a small ship by Confederated Navy standards, its thirty-odd officers and crew still generated a staggering amount of reading for their commanding officer. He could only imagine how much time a dreadnought captain spent on the same chore. 

The chirp of a datasphere alert announced the arrival of the registration code, one half of a unique cryptographic key-pair which would match with an equally unique value stored in the registrar system. The registration would allow Mus’ad to mine all the asteroids he wanted within the Botterdowns system – but he didn’t intend on using it. “Bridge, hail the Reachers, and send the line down here.” This time, he didn’t want witnesses. It was the right thing to do, but he didn’t want to make anyone else complicit in case the locals complained. 

Besides wanting to shield his officers, Mus’ad knew that any second a furious message from a diligent system authority bureaucrat might arrive, ordering him not to transmit. As an officer of the Confederated Worlds, he would have to obey such an order from a rightful civilian authority, unless the Incarnation arrived to give him the excuse of imminent military necessity. 

“Channel open, skipper.” 

“Reacher vessel. Sorry for the delay.” Mus’ad hurriedly filled out the license transfer contract, then transmitted its digital signature. “You are free to proceed. If anyone challenges your harvesting activity, present them this cryptographic data token.” 

“Challenge, this vessel, Terrans, not.” The deadpan synthetic voice replied almost immediately, and Mus’ad thought he detected a hint of humor in it. “Thanks, this vessel, Terran vessel, legal procedure, completion.” 

“Don’t mention it.” Mus’ad thought of the twenty-five hundred credits, but only briefly. “That token is good for one Terran year, and I’m sure the local government would be happy to see you return.” 

“Duration, repairs, low. Execute, Terran vessel, duties military, free?” 

“That’s right. We’ll get underway and rejoin our squadron immediately, but we’ll be in-system another twelve T-days if you need any other assistance.” Mus’ad was hesitant to leave the big Reacher ship just in time to miss its repair procedure, but he somehow knew Penelope Ott’s continued presence near the titanic vessel would be unwelcome. The Reachers would not want Terran sensors gazing into their ship’s every orifice while it restored its damaged areas. 

“Understanding, assistance, value, sacrifice. Completion, transaction, equal value. Farewells, Terran commander, most cordial.” 

Mus’ad started as he parsed the Reacher’s jumbled thought. “What sacrifice?” 

The Reacher ship had already broken contact, and no voice replied to his question from the enigmatic ship. He hadn’t told them about the credit cost of the license, nor had he heard the terms of a transaction in their exchange. 

“Helm, we’re done here. Let’s get back to the squadron.” 

“Aye, skipper. Course solution to Botterhill orbit.” 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Reacher's Request

2947-11-12 – Tales from the Service: A Reacher’s Request 

With the recently announced changes to Navy policy in the Coreward theater of war, there has been a lot of movement of the fleet here at Maribel lately, but unfortunately Saint-Lô is still being repaired after the fiasco at Berkant, so Duncan and I are not going anywhere at least until mid-December. I thought we should request a transfer to Razorwing before it and several other light elements from the broken Saint-Lô battle group depart on a patrol circuit next week, but Duncan flatly refused – he gets along pretty well with our quiet, academic-minded Captain Liao here, and probably isn’t too keen on risking another battle without a dreadnought’s heavy armor between him and Incarnation plasma salvos. 

Personally, I’d prefer to be out there at the tip of the spear. If there’s got to be a war – and at this point I don’t see how we can stop this one short of knuckling under and letting these chip-headed bastards run everything on our side of the Gap – I'd rather be part of the solution, rather than sitting back and letting someone else fight in my stead. 

Duncan’s no spacer, and he doesn’t get that – rather, he doesn’t yet. I have hope he will someday. If he’s supremely lucky, he’ll figure it out before the Incarnation or some other nasty business out in the dark takes something important from him. 

Today’s story is one I’ve been researching for more than two weeks while Duncan amused you all with the Jacob Borisov account. While Jacob’s story came with all the supporting evidence we could ever want, the first tip which led me to this story was vague and anonymous – Duncan wouldn’t let me run it until I had more. Any story likely to attract as much public interest as the Reachers, he said, needs some corroboration. Maybe that’s how Duncan does things, but I say, as long as Naval Intelligence doesn’t shoot us out of the sky, a good story is a good story, and we can always throw a qualifying sentence in this introduction. 

Fortunately, the spooks were only too happy to approve this story to a point, and even got me in touch with Lieutenant Commander Mus’ad Balos, the destroyer skipper involved in its events. I do appreciate how helpful they can be, when they’re not trying to shut a story down. 

[No, I don’t understand wanting to be in the line of fire when all we could do was get killed or get in the way. We’ve already been through one battle with this ship and crew; I don’t see why a couple of datacast embedded journalists should seek out more action than the brave compliment of Saint-Lô. --D.L.C.] 

The Reacher ship appeared as they always did – without warning, farther inside the gravitic shadow of the local star than any proper star drive should have been able to carry it. This time, it appeared nearly within the formation of a patrol group of Confederated Navy ships en route to Botterhill planetary orbit. 

Alarms aboard the lead ship Penelope Ott wailed, and the helmsman punched in emergency acceleration before the computer worked out the ship’s identity. Mus’ad Balos couldn’t decide whether the stomach-churning maneuver or the icepick-to-the-ear screech of the alarm woke him – surely either on its own would have done the trick.  

Snatching his comm earpiece off its magnetic charging port above the bunk, Mus’ad called up to the bridge just as the panicked shriek of the combat alarm faded into the concerned buzz of the readiness alarm.  “Report.” 

“Came out of nowhere, skipper.” The young third-shift duty officer, Lieutenant Burke, seemed almost too shaken to speak. “Twenty-five hundred klicks ahead. Damn, I thought it was Nate at first.” 

“Who came out of nowhere?” 

“Reacher ship, sir. They’re not hailing. You’re going to want to look at this.” 

Mus’ad pulled on his uniform tunic and hurried up to the little ship’s bridge. He didn’t have far to go; the skipper’s cabin was two decks below the bridge, with both a lift and an access ladder connecting the two decks. This time, he used the ladder; in shipboard half-gee, it would be marginally faster. He could have called up the video feeds from his cabin console, but a Reacher ship appearing in remote Botterdowns certainly meant his sleep-shift had ended early. 

As soon as he entered the bridge compartment and laid eyes on the smart-glass magnified view forward, he understood his subordinate’s shaken state. The Reacher ship, vaguely disk-shaped with the slightest suggesting of tapering aft, clearly outweighed most Confederated Navy dreadnoughts. The fluted, inward-curling spines which projected out from its bow ensured that it was longer than those warships as well – it was probably the largest Reacher vessel anyone had ever seen. The iridescent shell-like hull gleamed in the red-orange light of the Botterdowns primary, almost too ornamental to be a real starship. 

It took Mus’ad several seconds to notice the glittering trail of crystallized atmosphere trailing the Reacher ship, and the tattered black wounds gaping in its hull. The ship was hurt – he found it impossible to think of such a vessel in machine terms – perhaps mortally so. 

“Hail them and offer assistance.” Mus’ad was the senior commander in the flotilla, and the other three destroyers and one frigate would defer to his judgement rather than hailing the ship without his permission. 

The officer at the comms station bent to his task while Mus’ad took control of the smart-glass controls and zoomed in on the damaged area. “What did they tangle with?” He knew that Reachers, easy-going with other species despite their secretive society, had never been seen to instigate a fight. They could – and did – defend themselves, but they apparently preferred to avoid situations likely to lead to conflict. 

The sensor tech had evidently anticipated this request. “Some sort of energy weapon. Without knowing the properties of their hull material, it’s impossible to say more. I’m not seeing any sign of railshot or shrapnel damage."  

Mus’ad nodded silently, more to the display than the sensor tech. The Confederated Navy went out of its way not to antagonize Reacher ships passing through the colonial reach, of course, but a lack of railshot scarring suggested that no warship built in the Reach, Navy or no, had been involved. He didn’t want to be the skipper who had to explain to a furious Reacher the difference between foolhardy human pirates and the Navy. 

“I’ve got a channel, skipper. Audio only.” 

At more than two thousand klicks, the delay on direct comms traffic would be barely noticeable. “Warm greetings, this vessel, Terran commander, assistance offer, appreciation and thanks.” The monotonous synthetic voice of a Reacher translator device sent a shiver down Mus’ad’s spine. “Assist, this vessel, Terran command, one item only.” 

Mus’ad wrapped his head around the message only with difficulty. Reachers could translate their words into human speech, but the structure of their thoughts was still very far from human. “Reacher ship, you say you need only one thing? I’ll do what I can.” 

There was no response for several seconds as the Reacher commander passed Mus’ad’s words through a translator, then composed his own reply in the same manner. “Requires, this vessel, ferrous material from local stockpile, sixteen million Terran metric tons, massing.” 

“Local stockpile?” Mus’ad turned to the navigation station. “I didn’t think Botterhill had that much orbital industry.” 

“I think they mean the system’s inner asteroid belt, sir. There are dozens in there at least that big.” 

“Call up Botterhill control on another line and tell them what the Reachers need.” Mus’ad didn’t see why such a small colony would refuse to part with a single modest-sized mining-grade asteroid. “Reacher vessel, we’ll get you your asteroid, but it might take a few hours. If you don’t mind me asking, what happened?” 

“Extends, this vessel, sincere thanks, Terran assistance. Explain, this vessel, condition of, events surrounding, cannot. Belligerent party, provide only, satisfactory?” 

“By all means. Who attacked you?” The more he conversed with the Reacher, the more quickly Mus’ad parsed their oddly structured messages. 

“Was, this vessel, war-vessels of the Grand Journey, attacked by.” The reacher seemed to understand that this answer was not satisfactory. “Were, Grand Journey war-vessels, Terran sapients, crewed by. Destoyed, this vessel, hostile vessels, all. fatality, vessel damage, negative.” 

“I don’t understand. What is the Grand Journey?” 

“Contains, the Grand Journey, Terran sapients, none. Fear, this vessel, the Grand Journey, Terrans, destroyed by.” 

Mus’ad shuddered. What would the Reachers do to his squadron if their friends really were attacked by humans? “I can assure you, Reacher vessel, the Confederated Navy has not had any war with non-Terran powers in over a hundred years. We haven’t destroyed your Grand Journey.” 

“Carry, other Terrans, responsibility, theoretical.” 

Mus’ad didn’t understand the meaning of this at first; the third-shift duty officer, still loitering in the wings, parsed it quicker. “Damned Nate got to their friends.” 

Mus’ad didn’t know why the Incarnation would engage in such a ruse to ambush a Reacher ship. No matter how much of the history of the colonial reach they’d missed, they had to know the Reachers were experts at armed neutrality – armed well enough as to make attacking them suicidal. Evidently, someone in Nate high command had just learned this age-old state of affairs the hard way. 

“We’ll ask the Incarnation’s leaders about your Grand Journey after we’ve beaten them, Reacher Vessel. For the moment, we can escort you as far as the belt, but my orders are to proceed to planetary orbit.” 

“Applaud, this vessel, Terran commander, bravado, his.” The translator voice remained monotonous, but Mus’ad imagined the alien chuckling at his response, as an uncle might chuckle at the antics of his nephew. “Finds, this vessel, escorting arrangement, reasonability, high.” 

The line went dead, and the comms tech looked up. “They’ve cut the channel, skipper.” 

“Send that recording to the rest of the squadron and forward it to planetary control.” Mus’ad stared hard at the wounded behemoth coasting in-system a mere few thousand klicks ahead. The easy cordiality of the Reachers had concealed the historical rarity of the encounter – and he wondered why the sapients, despite their reclusive nature, had chosen to limp into a Confederated system to find material for their repairs, when asteroids in a hundred nearby empty systems might have served just as well. 

Sighing, Mus’ad stepped out of the center of the bridge and waved duty-officer Burke back into place to finish his shift. “They’ve got something up their sleeves.” He muttered, more to himself than to anyone else. 

“Or they’ve got something big they’re setting up to sell us, sir.” 

Mus’ad looked up at the lieutenant, realizing how right the young officer probably was. Reachers always came to the Reach to barter – he doubted this time was any different. 

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Tales from the Service: A Mercenary’s Trade

2947-11-05 – Tales from the Service: A Mercenary’s Trade

This will be the final section of Jacob Borisov’s account of his activities groundside at Adimari Valis. Taking another contract from the planetary governor even after the last (Tales from the Service: A Mercenary’s Milk-Run) descended into mercenary fratricide, Jacob led the groundside contingent of the Taavi Bancroft mercenaries in a joint operation with Cassandra’s Hoplites, the sister unit which had been worsted in its mistaken attack on Jacob’s convoy previously.

Governor Yamaguchi’s ruse was part of a long-running attempt to convince the outlaw treasure-hunting community on Adimari Valis that his administration was preparing to move the fruits of the Xenarch digs off-planet to keep the valuable artifacts out of Incarnation hands. With all attention focused on the few roads between the main dig-site and the spaceport, the governor’s plan was to clear and hold a remote valley which, though supposedly empty, had apparently yielded up a few genuine finds to the planet’s thriving black market for Xenarch relics.

The site proved better defended than they expected – but the governor’s generous contract had plenty of margin for Jacob to anticipate such surprises.

Jacob could not include what his team found at the site in this message due to a nine-week confidentiality clause in the contract. He promised to send more after that expired. Even without that part of the conclusion, his account is an interesting look into the unglamorous work of ground-assault troopers. He was even able to include the tactical network replay, albeit with identifiable information scrubbed; for those of you with the means and interest to view this datastream, it will be available for retrieval on the Cosmic Background datasphere hub.

“Bancroft actual, we are in position.” The deceptively soft voice of Lori Cassandra startled Jacob out of the intense concentration with which he fixed the target area below his perch. “What’s your situation?”

“In position.” Jacob switched off his magnification meta-lens and called up his helmet’s tactical display. The blue pips marking the position of Cassandra’s Hoplites clustered on the far side of the narrow fissure barely worthy of the word “valley”, while his own somewhat more mobile troopers’ green pips glowed along a wide arc of ridgeline around him.

According to every sensor and visual sweep of the nameless little valley, the valley was empty save for the overgrown tangle of local tree-analogues which covered its floor. Unlike the rocky uplands, valleys and lowlands on Adimari Valis invariably teemed with native wildlife, with the deeper basins the most fertile. Though narrow, the target area was deep enough to host an impressive garden of blue-green and florid pink flora which could swallow an entire battalion of enemy combatants.

Of course, the local outlaw cooperatives which had wrested artifacts from the valley didn’t have a battallion of troops of any caliber, and hopefully Yamaguchi’s ruse had convinced them to move most of their fighting force closer to the city in hopes of easy pickings from a lightly-defended transport crawler. If things went according to plan, they wouldn’t expect the better part of two veteran mercenary companies to descend on their secret treasure digs so far from their logistics base in the spaceport.

A ninety-second timer appeared in Jacob’s helmet, and he knew it had appeared similarly in the visors of all his mercenaries. “Prepare for operation start.” This time, Lori’s voice was broadcast to every mercenary in the area. She was a ground-pounder by preference and experience, and Jacob, given his more generalist skills, had left her in overall command, even though her force was numerically smaller than his. Even after the shameful friendly-fire shootout two weeks prior, he trusted her to sell the lives of his toughs dearly, if she had to sell them at all. “You know the op, and you know your business. Let’s get this done without any mistakes.”

Jacob smiled in the glow of his helmet tactical map. Lori’s curt pre-battle pep talk struck him as a very military formality, far out of step with how he usually handled his force. Doubtless several of his troopers were grumbling into their helmet visors, comm receivers safely switched off.

“Boss, that’s a lot of biomass down there.” Felix’s voice found Jacob’s ears courtesy of a line-of-sight private circuit. “Bastard governor’s done us raw before. What do you think the chances are this is another double-deal?”

Jacob didn’t trust the governor either. The smug, superior Yamaguchi had more in mind than checking on the source of a few crusty Xenarch trinkets hauled in by grubby prospectors. Fortunately, so did the Bancroft mercenaries. “Do it by the numbers, Felix. Let Captain Cassandra worry about the big picture.”

“Got it, boss.”

The timer ticked down toward zero. “Five seconds.” Lori began the countdown, and Jacob tensed in his heavy suit. “Four. Three.” Jacob switched his armored combat suit out of low-power mode, and heard servos whine to life all around him. “Two. One.” Jacob stood from his low-profile crouch and disengaged the command weapons-lock on his troopers’ heavy armaments, then switched off the safety on his own suit’s weaponry. “Bancroft, go.”

Jacob jumped, the suit’s powered joints turning a very normal human motion into a titan’s thirty-meter leap. Halfway up, he switched on the suit’s gravitic thrusters to extend his arc. On the tactical map, he the whole line of green pips arc off the ridgeline almost simultaneously, each hurtling down toward a pre-selected landing point in the valley. This easy near-flight, one of the advantages of fielding comparably light trooper hardware, was something he knew the Hoplites on the opposite ridge would be watching with envy. Their heavier, better-armed suits were slower, and could barely clear treetops even with their gravitics.

Jacob passed through the treetops and landed among the Adimarian foliage with a heavy crash, the suit’s servos and gravitic thrusters turning a ground-shaking impact into a mere sharp jolt in his knees. Visibility in the forested valley was poor, but already he could see signs of human presence – a narrow but arrow-straight path had been carved through the underbrush wide enough for small vehicles to travel in complete concealment from the air. The tactical display updated to include this avenue and several other features identified by the other Bancroft troopers below the trees.

As soon as the map had collected everything it could from his location, Jacob picked a new location just out of sight along the line of the road, and jumped again, smashing up through the flabby growths which passed for leaves on Adimari Valis and arcing over the treetops. Several of his other troopers did the same in their sectors, while others decided to make progress on the ground. The skirmish line swept down the valley diagonally toward the Hoplites, hoping to either find and fix the enemy’s position or chase them right into the sights of Captain Cassandra’s heavy troopers.

“Contact.” Jahoda’s barking into the comm circuit accompanied an update on the map; Jacob noted a new arc of hashed red uncertainty in front of the trooper. “Looks like a patrol. Four, maybe five of them.”

In the distance to his left, Jacob heard the rattling buzz of automatic railgun fire, and the more sporadic bark of hunting rifles as the outlaws returned fire. He knew Jahoda wouldn’t get pinned down there; he would get the patrol fleeing in the right direction, then keep moving.

As Jacob crashed down again into the trees and found himself almost standing on the narrow road, markers appeared and disappeared all along his ragged skirmish line as his troopers encountered small knots of outlaws and sent them flying back down the valley. Perhaps they would concentrate at a strong-point, or perhaps they would keep retreating until they entered the Hoplites’ kill-zone. Things were going according to plan, and that made him suspicious.

Jacob decided to continue on the ground, following the treasure-hunters' road to see where it went. All around him, the alien forest echoed with the sounds of sporadic skirmishes between Bancroft toughs and lightly-armed patrols of scavengers.

In the heart of the valley, the road below Jacob’s feet ran into a heavy armor-alloy gate burrowed into the side of a blocky, tree-covered hummock. The gate was barely big enough for three troopers to walk through abreast, but the moment it came into view, the value of whatever lay beyond was proved by the rattle and clatter of automatic railshot from at least two hidden guns tearing through the foliage and glancing off his suit.

Jacob jumped up and used his gravitics to arc to one side. “I’ve got some sort of bunker.” The burrowed structure had already been highlighted on the map. Whatever its purpose, it was ingeniously concealed; the governor’s survey flights had seen no sign of such elaborate installations.

A bunker and several emplaced railguns wouldn’t be going anywhere, of course. He hurried to dress the skirmish line and proceeded forward, noting the growing number of harried scavengers driven ahead of the toughs. There were more of the enemy than intelligence had suggested, but they were fortunately lightly armed and disorganized. With any luck, they’d caught the enemy with their pants down enough that most of the force was outside their fortified hideout.

“Bancroft actual, be advised, unknown air assets inbound.”

As soon as Lori had finished her alert, Jacob began to hear the distant-thunder rumble of high velocity gravitic drives roaring through the atmosphere. “The governor failed to mention that.” Even one or two close-support attack ships could pin down the troopers with ease. Local outlaws weren’t supposed to have access to anything like that, according to Yamaguchi’s intelligence. So far from the spaceport, the two mercenary companies were at the mercy of whatever air power the treasure-hunting gangs had at their disposal.

Or rather, Jacob knew, they would be at the mercy of the local gangs, if he had stuck to the governor’s plan. The margins on the job were so ridiculously generous that he’d decided to send two of his strike squadron’s fastest interceptors down from orbit. They had been loitering into the shadow of a nearby mountain range since his troopers had started their overland march to the target area. “All Bancroft units, break contact and take cover.” Jacob switched his suit’s comm circuit to the long-range broadcast option afforded by the command operations module on his back, then opened the channel. “Quail, you are go for air sweep.”

“Copy, Bancroft Actual.” Sela “Quail” Huffman replied immediately, a touch of anticipation in her voice. “Sit tight, boss.”

Jacob watched a trio of fast-moving enemy aircraft roar over the valley. One of them plastered the locations of two of his troopers with a heavy autocannon while the other two launched salvos of impressive but less devastating rockets. The valley quaked and bits of trees and undergrowth hurtled through the air, falling back with a sound not much like that of rain. Jacob hugged the ground and grinned into his helmet, knowing that the enemy pilots would not have time for a second pass.

Sure enough, two bright-green streaks lanced across the tactical map seconds later, and the rumble of gravitic drives rose into the banshee-scream of craft pushed beyond their limits as the enemy ships tried to evade the pair of Bancroft interceptors. It was no use, of course; one of them exploded immediately, and the other two, weaving tangled patterns of contrails in the air, prolonged their lives for a few minutes longer against the pair of high-performance strike craft.

“Air assets handled.” Jacob sent on the command circuit, unable to keep the tone of triumph out of his voice.

“Aren’t you full of surprises today, Bancroft Actual.” Lori Cassandra’s grin was equally audible. “Proceed with the operation.”

Jacob stood and sent the all-clear, and his troopers moved forward once again.

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