Tales from the Service: Alone In the Dark

2947-07-09 - Tales from the Service: Alone In the Dark

Hello, Cosmic Background audience. You might have noticed that your usual content editor Duncan Chaudhri is not the one posting this item to your ingestion feeds. 

That’s right! Since I’m working on contract with Cosmic Background for the short duration of this little war, I have all the powers that Duncan has over what appears for your entertainment and what doesn’t. I promise that power won’t go to my head... right away. 

As this goes live, I’ll probably watching Duncan bumble about in a vacsuit during his mandatory EVA training. Since I’m already EVA certified, that means I get to sit inside and drink food-processor coffee while he flails around and generally does his best to get himself killed despite the instructors’ best efforts. 

That's enough gossip, though. Before vanishing into his battery of certification training courses, Duncan helped me compose this interesting little story based on an oral account we were given earlier this week. He told me I could put anything I wanted in this forward section, so I did. 

After he left, I went back over it once more to try to make it as gripping as the teller’s original story, but the composition software won’t let me submit that version. It calls most of my changes “errors” that need to be resolved prior to publication. Something about all the proper rules of writing Duncan is so worried about can just suck the animal terror out of the whole thing. He did that to all my stories, too. Still, I did what I could. Like last week’s story, this one comes from a gunship pilot who got up close and personal with a Sagittarian criuser-analogue. Rather than keep using that silly long technical term “cruiser-analogue”, I’m going to call it what Navy Spacers do – they have given this ship-type the nickname “Tyrant” due to their tendency to pick on weak targets and avoid proper engagements. This is apparently a reference to a popular holovid drama which I have not seen.  

If this reference is important, I’m sure Duncan will explain it next week. 

Kwahja reflexively sucked in a breath as the Magpie’s cockpit disintegrated around him. Buffeted by gouts of escaping and flash-freezing atmosphere, he had only a moment to ponder the spectacular view before the ejection system completed its task, firing him far from the stricken attack boat. 

The deep breath helped little, of course. The emergency bubble helmet which formed around Kwahja’s head sealed in one atmosphere of pressure, and the eight-gee acceleration of ejection forced the hastily-obtained breath from his lungs in any case. When the gunship expldoed behind him, the only indication was the reflected light of the blast against the clearsynth of the helmet. Ejection did not give him any means of maneuver; it served only to preserve his life until a med-evac shuttle could scramble to pick him up. 

“Crew check-in. Iryna, Zalman, you guys make it out?” 

“Affirmative, Lieutenant.” Iryna’s voice was shaky. She was the greenest gunner in the whole squadron, and had never been forced to eject before. 

“I think that broke all my ribs.” Kwahja knew Zalman, a veteran whiner, was all right. If he was actually seriously injured, he would be all business. 

“Good to hear it. Don’t put your beacons on yet.” He didn’t need to explain why. Less than three klicks away, the sinister lines of the Tyrant which had crippled their Magpie cut across the stars. One sweep of the ship’s point defense beams could erase all three of them, if the aliens aboard were feeling particularly cruel. Kwahja had no reason to believe they wouldn’t do it, and every reason to play it safe. 

“Stars around.” The common exclamation likely slipped off Iryna’s tongue without any thought as to how true it was. “We’re just going to sit here and watch?” 

“Yup. Anyone bring any popcorn?” 

“Cut the chatter, Gunner Resnik.” Under normal circumstances, Kwahja tolerated Zalman’s joking and griping to an extreme degree, but the idle comms chatter did present a small risk that the Sagittarians would notice the three stranded human spacers. 

The line subsided into silence, and Kwahja watched without any magnification aid as the remaining four ships in the squadron made another strafing pass along the Tyrant’s hull. The big ship, maneuvering wildly to avoid long range railshot from Mijo Yankov and its two escorting frigates, likely suffered little damage from the light ships’ harassing attack, but the flashes of exploding ordinance still improved the stranded pilot’s mood. At least he hadn’t lost a boat for nothing. 

“Boss, there’s something over here. Moving fast. One of ours?” 

Iryna replied first, in her nervousness not realizing the observation was meant for Kwahja. “We'd see IFF if it was one of ours.” 

“Debris from Deadeye?” The Magpie gunship had earned its nickname from the many off-shift sessions its crew spent in the gunnery simulator. Now it was gone, and the next one would need a new nickname. Kwahja craned his head, but he couldn’t quite turn far enough to look toward where the ejection system had hurled Zalman. “I can’t see from here. Iryna, what about you?”  

“I can see Zalman if I switch to infrared, but I can’t see what he’s talking about.” 

“Let me try that.” The gunner went quiet for a moment. “Yeah, that’s something. No IR signature at all. Whatever it is, it’s awfully small. Going to hit it with a wrist light.” 

Kwahja wasn’t an expert in deep space salvage, but he knew that things which had just finished exploding were supposed to be hot. “Not wreckage, then. Skip the light. Let it pass.” 

The order came too late. Already an inset came to life in the bubble-helmet around Kwahja’s head, showing Zalman’s wrist-mounted microcamera feed. The light came on a second later. The curved, nonreflective object pinned in the middle of the weak beam at first seemed to be an oddly shaped asteroid – a chance encounter in the void, nothing more. 

Then the object rolled, and its lines took on a deadly, sleek shape wreathed in puffs of thruster-gas. “Zalman, get that light off.” 

“Hells! Drone of some kind.” Zalman’s light went off, but the camera feed remained. The flippant tone in his voice was gone. “Think it’s from the Tyrant?” 

Kwahja glanced back at the evasive gyrations of the alien cruiser. The drone’s shape did have a vague aesthetic similarity to the Sagittarian ship. “Could be. Still see it?” 

“Yeah.” Zalman pointed the camera at a black patch of space. As he held it still, stars resolved themselves around a dark silhouette. “Right there. On vector with us.” 

“Should we switch on the beacons and tell them to speed up the evac?” Iryna was doing her best to remain calm, but the appearance of a strange drone was enough to unsettle even a veteran. Kwahja knew she was very close to panic. 

“Negative.” The drone was so close that no rushed evac could reach the trio in time. “Iryna, watch Zalman. Let me know if you see anything on visual or IR.” It galled the pilot that he couldn’t see either of his gunners; the ejection system did not equip a stranded pilot with attitude thrusters. 

“It’s moving again.” Zalman’s fear was almost palpable, and it was easy to guess why. Even an unarmed drone, directed by the inscrutable will of a Sagittarian, could kill a stranded pilot easily. 

“Still don’t see it.” Iryna muttered. 

“He’s getting closer. A hundred meters. Going to try my side-arm. I’m not going out like this.” 

“Zalman, stay calm. It’s probably-” 

“I see it!” Iryna called out. “I have a clear shot from here.” 

“Seventy meters. Damn thing’s coming right at me, but he’s coming slow.” Zalman’s teeth were gritted. “He passes forty, and I open fire. Iryna, you see me shooting, you shoot too.” 

Kwahja knew side-arms would do nearly nothing against even the thin skin of a utility drone. Still, he knew his gunners were right to prepare to shoot the thing – perhaps they would get a lucky shot, or confuse its programming and force it to back off. “Good luck, you two. Sorry I’m angled wrong to help.” 

“Thanks, boss.” Zalman adjusted his camera feed to point at the slowly growing silhouette. “Fifty-five.” 

“I think I see drive exhausts. Going to aim for those.” Iryna was as good a shot with her side-arm as she was with a gunship’s ordinance. If she could hit a weak spot, it might disable the drone. 

“Fifty meters.” 

Kwahja watched helplessly as the shape on the feed drew closer. Zalman, realizing stealth was pointless, flicked his wrist light back on, giving Iryna a better target and Kwahja a better look at the incoming. It was big for a drone, he decided; it reminded him of the skim-racers he’d seen competing in the orbital blood-sport common to some of the colonies of the Reach. Like those tiny ships, the drone had a fluted and fragile look, as if every gram of needless weight had been removed from its hull. The pair of recesses in the prow suggested the thing was armed, but until it opened fire there was no way to be sure. 

“Forty-five. Nice knowing you guys.” The blurry barrel of Zalman’s sidearm intruded on one side of the camera footage. 

“Give him hell, Zalman.” 

The only indication that the incoming drone crossed the forty-meter mark was Zalman’s gun spitting a cloud of red-hot slugs into its nose. A moment later, a second cloud of red motes slammed into its side from Iryna’s weapon. Each hit produced a shower of sparks, but Kwahja had no way of knowing if there was any damage. 

Zalman’s gun fell silent, though its magnetic barrel still glowed. “Dammit. That’s my mag. Going to try to re-” 

The camera feed flashed white, then vanished. At the same instant, Iryna started screaming. If there were words in her voice, Kwahja couldn’t pick them out. 

“Zalman. Zalman!” A quick check of the telemetry from the other two showed Kwahja what he already knew – Zalman Resnik was gone. “Iryna. What happened?” 

The gunner continued screaming. Perhaps she was firing her side-arm and reloading it as fast as she could, or perhaps she was curled into a fetal position in her ejection rig, there was no way to tell. She barely even stopped screaming to take a breath. 

“Iryna. Get a grip. Tell me what happened!” 

It was useless. After another few seconds of screaming, Iryna’s voice rose in an almost pathetic squeak, then the line went dead, along with all her indicators. 

“Iryna. Report!” Even as he sent the message, Kwahja knew that he was alone with the sleek, murderous drone. 

As the seconds ticked by, Kwahja craned his neck around in his bubble helmet, wishing he could rotate enough to see in the direction from which danger was coming. He estimated that it would reach him in less than a minute, and began counting, already checking the battery and magazine of his own pistol.  

At a count of seventy seconds without instant death or the appearance of the drone, Kwahja frowned, but kept counting. Perhaps it was slower than he had anticipated. Sweat trickled down his neck, but there was no way to wipe it away. 

At ninety seconds, he checked the suit’s mission timer to verify that he wasn’t counting too fast. The drone should have found him already. In the distance, the Sagittarian ship had given up its course and was burning an escape course toward the edge of the stellar grav shadow. Perhaps the drone had been recalled? He kept counting. 

At five hundred ninety-one seconds, an all-clear broadcast from Mijo Yankov told him it was safe to switch on his beacon. He kept counting, pistol ready, until the rescue ship arrived. 

Details

Tales from the Service: To Strafe a Sagittarian

2947-07-02 – Tales from the Service: To Strafe a Sagittarian 

Welcome to the first entry in Tales from the Service, the replacement feature for Tales from the Inbox for the duration of Sagittarian hostilities. 

Nojus and Koloman joined Sadie, Toal, and myself here at Håkøya yesterday, and we began our Naval Media Corps certification course. Interestingly enough, Toal told me that he went through this certification in order to embed during the Brushfire War, but hostilities ended before he could reach the conflict zone. Obviously, NMC needs to put him through the certification all over again; press rules for Brushfire were different than they are here. 

After our day of training today, we caught a shuttle to the cruiser Olek Mihaylov, where we were allowed to observe a battle drill to know what we were getting into. The efficiency of Navy professionals was quite impressive. After the drill, we ate in the officers’ mess, and Commander Cristian Gray of the ship’s attached gunship squadron proved quite a source of stories. Though Mihaylov has yet to encounter Sagittarians, Cdr. Gray’s five-boat squadron has only recently transferred onboard from the garrison station at Palmisano, where a Sagittarian cruiser-analogue made a rather spectacular raid on the orbital infrastructure, destroying a refinery station and killing thirty. Gray’s squadron suffered no losses, but he also assures me they did no real damage to the attacker.

His story (backed up by a formal report and a recording which I have since seen parts of) is interesting because it gives his personal account of what it is like to go head to head with the Sagittarians. His observation that their point defense weapons are not very effective against Navy strike ships is interesting, but so is his equal insistence that Navy strike weapons are totally ineffective against Sagittarian ships of the most well-known type.

The pre-launch ready klaxon wailed in Cristian’s ears, and he scanned the readouts in front of him for the final time. The ready indicators for Tamara’s and Angelos’s gunnery stations held steady and green; everything was as ready as it could be. 

Cristian flipped the last safety switch, and the hangar launch system took over, lifting the three spacers and Foxhound, their eighty-ton AG-36 Magpie gunship, to the catapult deck. One of the advantages of garrison duty was that a Naval field station always carried magnetic catapults for its squadrons; being fired from an over-sized missile launch rail was far more exhilarating than wobbling out of a too-small hangar with a tense set of thruster burns.  

As the lead ship of the squadron, Cristian always launched first. The readiness klaxon went silent, and was followed by the thud of the catapult clamps latching onto his boat and the steady tone of the launch warning. He put his head back in the crash-padded cockpit seat just in time to be crushed into the padding by eight gees of acceleration. In front of him, the square of empty space outside the hangar’s mouth yawned wide, then swallowed the Magpie. As soon as it had started, the acceleration was gone. 

“Launch complete.” Cristian engaged manual control and engaged the drive’s lesser acceleration. Behind him, the other four Magpies of his squadron launched one after another and formed up on his flanks. 

“Foxhound, target heading remains unchanged.” The young strike controller on the station sounded nervous, and Cristian didn’t blame her. It wasn’t every day a cruiser-sized alien ship blazed into a Frontier system on a high-speed pass. “Still heading for the refinery.” 

“Still no response?” Cristian put himself on an intercept course, watching the displays to make sure the other four gunships copied the maneuver. The garrison had been hailing the intruder for some time, without result, and could only interpret its behavior as hostile. 

“No response. Command authorization to fire if fired upon.” 

“Roger, Control.” Cristian flipped the levers to power Foxhound’s weapons. Behind him, the pilots of the other four gunships powered their own weapons. 

That the ship was of a kind with the aggressive wanderers seen across the Sagittarius Gap was only too clear from its hull profile and drive signature. There was no telling what sort of weaponry or defensive systems the ship employed; his flight might run into a curtain of fire at any moment. Even if they didn’t, five gunships wasn’t much of a threat to anything of cruiser size; all the weapons of all five Magpies would probably do little more than annoy the aggressor while it slagged local installations. They were, unfortunately, almost all the Navy had in Palmisano. 

As the distance closed, Cristian pulled up a wire-frame of the intruder. Ops on the station had done its best to highlight probable weapons emplacements and other identifiable features, but its sleek design was so alien that their notations remained little but guesswork. No Confederated Worlds vessel had yet exchanged fire with a Sagittarian cruiser-analogue and survived the ordeal. “Let’s do this at high rel-V.” He traced a line up one side of the wire-frame, following a cranny between two titanic plates of what were probably an armored outer hull. “Close to the hull as we can.” Flying close to the big ship was dangerous, but if the alien’s point defenses were anything like Terran systems, it would be less effective  

“They’ll shoot at us for sure if we get that close.” Lyuben, Cristian’s second in command, observed. 

“Then shoot back. They don’t pay us extra to bring ordinance back to the station.” The more annoying the squadron was, the better; they might even be sufficiently nettlesome to save most of the civilian orbital industry. 

“Aye, Commander.” 

“Foxhound, be advised.” The controller’s excitable voice returned as the big, blue-grey hull of the intruder began to loom large ahead. “Thermal signature suggests possible weapons fire. No scatter cone.” 

“Understood, Control.” Cristian immediately adjusted his heading, and the rest of the squadron followed, avoiding whatever might have been fired into their path. No scatter cone meant that whatever the ship had done, it hadn’t fired railguns, as a Terran ship would do to dissuade incoming strike launches. “Let me know if you can confirm that.” 

Confirmation came moments later when one of the orbital tugs around the refinery exploded, its death-fire blooming silently over the limb of the planet below. “They’re shooting.” Cristian knew most of the tugs were remotely operated, but they were still expensive machines. “That got on target fast.” 

“Some sort of energy beam.” The strike controller confirmed. “Light speed time to target, but it probably took several seconds to punch through the hull.” 

“Time to target, forty seconds. Watch your hull sensors.” There was no hope of dodging an energy weapon at such close ranges, but if it took even half a second to burn through a hull, the agile gunships could roll out of the beam before suffering serious damage. 

The Sagittarian filled the forward viewscreen now, and Cristian picked out the canyon-like hollow which he meant to follow on his run. No lights glowed out from the shadowed parts of the ship, and the part of its hull in the light seemed to glow with elfin light, as if it was a construct of magic rather than engineering. 
 
“Beam just grazed me, lead.” Blondie, one of the other pilots, sounded shaken as her Magpie spiraled briefly out of formation, then slowly worked its way back into position. “Minor damage.” 

Cristian opened his comms to reply, but a shrieking sensor alert encouraged him to pull out of the path of another beam before it could fry Foxhound. A salvo of blue-white projectiles erupted from the invader’s hull, fired toward the refinery. He did his best not to focus on the lives of the refinery crew. “Twenty seconds. Guns free.” 

Behind him, Cristian felt more than heard the gun emplacements on the gunship’s port and starboard flanks spin into position, facing toward where the Sagittarian’s hull would shortly be. Tamara and Angelos would be disciplined and shoot only at things that looked vulnerable, but the greenhorn gunners on Blondie’s and Elcin’s rigs would probably unload their ordinance more randomly. 

“Ten seconds.” Again, he wheeled out of an energy beam, watching the squadron briefly scatter in all directions on the monitors. 

He’d meant to do a five-second countdown to weapons range, but a series of chasing beams kept him busy until he dove into the canyon between the titanic armor sections on the Sagittarian ship’s hull. The chatter of railshot and the bass thunder of plasma cannon from the gunners’ positions competed for the right to deafen Cristian first, with the intermittent shriek of hull sensor alarms indicating where various beam emplacements briefly found him. 

The bow to stern run lasted only three seconds, and Cristian wheeled Foxhound around for a second in time to see the refinery station, spouting fire and debris, break in half. The Sagittarian hadn’t slowed to enter orbit; its velocity was already carrying it away from the planet. There was no sign of damage from the ordinance his squadron had unloaded. “Dammit.” 

“Foxhound, it’s control. They’re leaving. Break off pursuit and perform search and rescue.” 

“Control-” 

“Priority order, Commander.” This time, it wasn’t the nervous strike controller’s voice, but the stern bark of the garrison commander. “Civilian lives are at stake. Pick up survivors from the refinery.” 

Cristian ground his teeth. He knew his squadron hadn’t done any real damage to the cruiser with only one pass – but he also knew there was little chance of doing more with a second. “Roger, control. Search and rescue.” 

Details

Tales from the Inbox: Red Carpet for Reachers

2947-06-25 – Tales from the Inbox: Red Carpet for Reachers

I am told that a decision about Cosmic Background’s War Correspondent role has been made and that an announcement is expected in the next few days. That is all the information I have; evidently the techs have already prepped a text feed announcement and a segment to insert into one of the vidcast episodes that will be released in the next few days. 

Despite the electrifying news last week, there is no news on the war situation worth remarking on here. As far as I’m concerned, that’s good; leave the war-reporting job to the professionals. 

Today’s entry features an alleged sighting of a rare sapient indeed; though I have been sent several accounts of this species since the beginning of this text feed series, none of them have been credible enough or specific enough to publish. This account is well documented, though oddly enough none of the documentation sent my way has been published anywhere else on the datasphere. 

As usual for their kind, the visit was peaceful, but my source redacted all information relating to their appearance on the ground and about what they actually wanted out of a visit to a remote Terran colony. He would not say why. Perhaps at a later date this information will become available.

Raju blinked his eyes and stared at the screen. The orbital telsat network had finally locked onto the ship just entering orbit after inexplicable amounts of trouble doing so, and now he had a clear picture of the company to expect. He knew exactly what he was looking at; he didn’t know how it was possible. The glittering curves and fluted spines of the ship, more at home in a primordial sea than in the interplanetary firmament, could only be one thing. 

“Sohvi!” Raju’s shout echoed oddly in the underground spaceport control room. On a colony barely one T-year old, the term “spaceport” remained aspirational at best, but a full orbital telemetry network had been installed before the first human had set foot on Harvey’s Penury. “I’ve got ID on the visitor. Call the boss down here.” 

“Trouble?” Sohvi emerged from the alcove housing the control room’s beverage synthesizer machine and hurried to one of the other two consoles to place a call. 

“Could be.” Raju could have done it himself, but that would require taking his eyes off the intruder. He had been hoping for a quiet shift on spaceport watch duty as a break from endless days of tending gene-tweaked crops and repairing an endless series of minor equipment failures. This was, in fact, the planet’s first unscheduled visitor in its colonial history. 

As his associate hurriedly sent a high-priority alert to the colony’s leader, Raju got more of the telsats to focus on the ship to improve the quality of the image, as if expecting the distinctive, organic shape of its hull to be replaced by the boxy outline of a light hauler with enough imaging resolution. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Sohvi what it was; if he said it out loud, or even thought it too forcefully, it might break the spell. 

“Stars around. Reachers!” Sohvi’s voice over Raju’s shoulder made him jump and dispelled the magic of the moment all at once. Still, after he settled back down into his chair, the ship was still there. She had said it, and it was true. The vessel now settling into orbit was undoubtedly of Reacher design. 

The automated satellites had been hailing the incoming ship without reply since it had been detected hours before, but suddenly the board lit up. “They’re responding to traffic control.” Raju stared dumbly at the display, afraid to touch anything. 

Sohvi reached past him to engage the console’s speakers. “...Request permission, one lander, spaceport facility designated Harvey’s Penury, use of.” The monotone voice of the Reachers’ translation equipment sent a chill down Raju’s spine. He knew that perhaps two hundred Terrans in all of explored space had ever spoken to a Reacher. “Settlement response, Terran, awaiting.” 

“They want to land.” Raju summarized. The words their translator used made perfect sense individually, but organizing them into the structure of a human thought took some effort. “When the boss gets here, he-” 

“Finally get the bogie to respond to hail?” Dr. Shahrivar clomped into the command center, still wearing mud-caked boots and overalls. Tall, broad-shouldered, and silver-haired, the colony’s manager never hesitated to get his hands dirty on days when there wasn’t much managing to do. “Damn well better not be the-” The big man stopped short as soon as he got close enough to see Raju’s screen. “It can’t be.” 

“They want to land.” Sohvi stepped aside to let him take her place behind Raju’s chair. “They didn’t say what for.” 

Shahrivar’s short beard didn’t hide the way he clenched his jaw in thought as he stared at the feed. “How big is that ship?” 

Raju tapped the controls to retrieve an answer. “Eight hundred meters on the long axis.” The ship being somewhat platter-shaped, it probably outweighed most Confederated Navy cruisers. Nobody had ever exchanged weapons-fire with a Reacher and lived to tell about it, but the rare and retiring sapients possessed a reputation for superior technology. Even if they were lightly armed for their size, they could probably glass the colony site quite easily. “I think they said they wanted to land a launch.” 

“Nice of them to ask forgiveness, but we can hardly stop them, can we?” Shahrivar shook his head. “Sohvi, get back to the compound and get everyone into shelter.” 

Without a word, the young woman clattered up to ground level at a dead run. Raju turned his head to look at his boss, waiting for a similar instruction. 

“Don’t just sit there, son.” Shahrivar hurried into the sanitation stall adjoining the control room. “Get them a de-orbit track.” 

Raju blinked several times before returning his attention to the console, finger hovering over the key which would transmit a reply. Taking a deep breath, he pressed it. “Reacher vessel, this is control. Landing permission granted. Stand by for course telemetry.” 

As soon as he’d sent it, Raju winced; none of them had remembered the standard procedure of asking a visitor’s purpose. As he set up a de-orbit vector and course toward the grass-covered spaceport field, he wondered whether any answer they would have given would have meant anything to Terrans anyhow. 

Dr. Shahrivar emerged from the sanitary stall in only his smart-fabric jumpsuit, cleaned up and reconfigured for a somewhat more formal but less practical cut. “How long until they land?” 

A quick check back to the board revealed that the Reachers, after asking permission to land, had neither waited for Raju’s course data nor made any attempt to follow it once it had been sent. Their launch was already thundering into the upper atmosphere, spinning at so high a rate that it seemed intent not on landing but on drilling its way deep into the planet. It seemed impossible that the sapients inside could survive such gee forces, but there was a terrifying regularity to its plummet which suggested the craft was functioning perfectly. “If they bleed velocity to land safely, five minutes.” If they didn’t, the impact would obliterate the landing field entirely, and shower the rest of the colonial outpost with finely ground debris. Raju hoped they would land. If they didn’t, he had about forty seconds to make his peace with the universe. 

“Come on, then.” Dr. Shahrivar beckoned. “Let’s go meet them.” 

Raju stood and followed his superior up into the hard-edged afternoon sun, immediately picking up the fireball and smoke-trail of the incoming Reacher launch. Sure enough, its arrow-straight smoke-trail became a helix, then vanished altogether, leaving only a red-hot mote spinning toward the ground. “Hell of a ride that must be.” 

Shahrivar’s thoughtful grunt suggested his mind was elsewhere, so they watched the craft’s remaining descent in silence. The closer to the ground the ship got, the slower it fell, and the slower it spun. It was bigger than Raju had expected – thirty meters long at least – and the seashell aesthetics of its mothership were repeated in miniature on the lander, though without the spines or fluting. 

At last, the ship’s belly came to a gentle rest on the field a hundred meters away, still hot enough to set the nearest plant-life ablaze. 

As the seconds ticked past without any movement from the ship, Raju cleared his throat. “Have you ever met a Reacher before, boss?” 

“No.” Dr. Shahrivar turned toward Raju with a distant smile. “If they’re anything like what you see in the the archive footage, this is bound to be interesting.” 

Details

Tales from the Inbox: Marta's Second Castaway

2947-06-18 - Tales from the Inbox: Marta's Second Castaway

I am sure that by the time this article hits ingest queues, yesterday’s news broadcast from Admiralty Headquarters and clips of Admiral Tosi’s formal address to the Confederated parliament this morning will have already reached most everyone. The wave of Ladeonist-linked sabotage that followed the announcement throughout Confederated space is likely old news by the time Tales from the Inbox appears on your media-screen. It seems hard to believe, even for those of us out here close to the tip of the spear, that the Confederated Worlds are at war.

Two small colonies on the Coreward Frontier have gone dark in the past five days – their orbital installations perhaps victims of Ladeonist attacks or Sagittarian raids, it’s too early to say for sure – and Håkøya is on high alert. The Admiralty asserts that at least four Sagittarian cruiser-analogues have crossed the Gap and are now running amok in the Frontier. We are likely in no more danger than the citizens of Maribel, but there has been some unrest here as well – Håkøya has no history of Ladeonist ideological infection, but its relatively wealthy population with a large percentage of retirees from the Colonial Reach never expected to be on the front lines of a proper shooting war. Even if this conflict is, as it seems to be, little more than a second Brushfire War, the risk to life and property is understandably making some here quite upset.

As you can imagine, spacers of every stripe have been flooding the Confederated Navy recruiting offices here in Håkøya and elsewhere, hoping for easy commissions and a chance to see action against the Sagittarians. My understanding is that the only recruiting drive currently active is for the Naval Marines; the situation is obviously not so dire that civilian spacers are being given shoulder-boards and frigate captaincies just for signing up. The Sagittarians are a threat to the Frontier’s widely scattered population, not to the Confederated Worlds.

Tales from the Inbox will not become a forum for front-lines reporting, so do not expect to see this sort of update in the preamble to every week’s entry. Ashton is working with one of the local behind-the-scenes techs on hiring a dedicated war correspondent for Cosmic Background, someone with the connections to actually leave port with the Fifth Fleet, and an announcement as to the person chosen will be made as soon as possible. Most likely, that reporting will be available on our vidcast episodes rather than in the text feed, but details have not been confirmed yet.

This week’s entry is unrelated to the war news, and that may come as a relief to most of you. Marta K., the submitter of the first piece featured on this forum (Tales from the Inbox: One Violet Acre), is back – or rather, she was back a month ago when the message which became this entry arrived in my inbox. She reports encountering yet another stranded spacer (apparently she has a knack for that sort of thing) on a routine Frontier colonization-survey run. This time, things didn't go quite as well.

The lack of traffic in orbit around K2893074 B had convinced Marta that she was the only outfit in the entire system long before she entered orbit. The rugged planet destined to bear the name “Austberg” as soon as the Aust Colonial Trust’s first wave of colony-building ships arrived remained as empty and silent as it always had.

The Trust had paid Marta handsomely to make one final sweep of the system and the world before their investment was committed. A pirates’ base in a hollowed-out asteroid or the presence of dangerous xenofauna not noticed by the first survey would convince them to take their ships and colonists to another system. As one of the most experienced surveyors on the Frontier – indeed, Marta’s career as a surveyor spanned the bulk of the Frontier’s history – the organization trusted her to find any last-minute risks to the timetable.

“Marc, give me a full sweep of the surface. Highlight anything that doesn’t match the original survey.” It had been nearly fifteen years since the planet had been visited by another surveyor, but Marta didn’t expect many problems. An uninhabited planet generally didn’t change in that short a time.

“Order acknowledged.” The shipboard computer’s smooth, cultured voice put Marta’s hoarse, crass Frontier drawl to shame, but she liked its chocolate baritone all the same. In the viewport, the planet twisted and then crept to one side as the ship adjusted its orbit. Knowing the scans would take more than five shifts to finish, Marta unbuckled her crash harness and got up, intending to re-watch a season of her favorite vidcast drama while Marcus Ferdinand circled the little world, drinking in data through every instrument.

Just as she reached the hatch behind the control consoles, Marta heard a pinging noise behind her. She expected dozens of minor anomalies, the results of small asteroid impacts, volcanic activity, and similar; a smart surveyor usually took a shift’s worth of leisure before even looking at a list of sensor anomalies. Only amateurs sat at the controls, jumping on every weird result as it came in. There was no rush, after all.

Even knowing this, Marta turned around and sat back down, calling up the oddity which had caused the survey software to emit a pinging noise. Most likely, it was a recent lava flow, or the torn landscape caused by a violent quake. Anything big enough to be caught so quickly was bound to be natural.

The console’s center screen blanked, then showed a charred scar cutting through the pseudo-trees populating a wide, steep-sided valley. Forest fires, too, could confuse the software, and this one appeared quite recent, perhaps less than a year. Marta was about to classify the finding as natural surface evolution when she saw a bright spot at the center in the false-color imagery – something at the epicenter of the fire bore the high albedo of artificially worked metal.

“Stars around.” Marta canceled the search pattern and focused the sensor array on the spot. Sure enough, the reflective object resolved itself into a ship lying broken on the surface. If her sensors were correct, the ship was about the size of a small cargo hauler, and clearly not designed to make planetfall.

It had been only eighteen months before that she’d found her ex-husband’s sorry excuse for a survey craft in a parking orbit and landed to rescue him from his failures to perform proper equipment maintenance; for whoever had crewed the starship below, there would be no good-natured rescue.

Ten minutes later, Marta had her environmental suit on and was almost ready to detach Banshee from its parasite berth beneath Ferdinand’s main hull. The hardy surface-exploration launch would let her overfly the crash site and look for survivors, though she held out little hope of finding any. A starship didn’t just crash-land; someone had maneuvered it into the planet’s atmosphere, knowing their vessel had no fittings to make a planetary landing, and knowing its hull plating was not designed to function as a heat-shield for re-entry. That the wreck was mostly intact was a testament to its crew’s skill and desperation, but any who survived the crash probably perished in the fire, or starved in the alien wilderness afterwards.

Banshee clattered free of its anchor points, and Marta pointed its nose toward the ground, settling in for the stupendous roar of re-entry fire wreathing a craft designed to fall from orbit safely. As soon as the little launch had slowed enough that the atmosphere around its nose no longer burned spontaneously, she deployed its aerofoils and banked toward the crash site.

From three miles overhead, little was visible that wasn’t visible from a hundred. Marta circled lower, observing the way the ship had come down. Its nose and forward comms array were intact, suggesting the helmsman had pulled up just before impact, sacrificing most of the cargo holds to save the hab and communication modules at the bow. Marta, aware of how difficult that must have been, felt sorry she’d never meet the spacer who’d pulled it off.

Circling the wreck even at low altitude revealed no signs of life. The land around the ship had been burned to cinders, and nothing moved against the ashen gray soil or between the jagged stumps of burnt xeno-flora. Offering a spacer’s prayer for the souls who had been lost with the ship, she spotted a clear spot to land in the shadow of the comms array jutting from the hauler’s prow, and keyed in an approach sequence. Veteran surveyor or no, she trusted the computer to land the launch far more than her own hands.

Stepping out of Banshee and into the ashen hellscape where once a quiet forest of alien trees had stood, An honorable spacer did their best to salvage the ship’s logs from any wreck, and Marta meant to do just that. Perhaps the reason for the disaster was revealed by the computer records of the vessel’s final hours, and the families of those lost would want some closure for their missing relatives.

As she trudged forward, Marta spotted movement out of the corner of her eye. Whirling, she drew her sidearm out of sheer reflex, wondering what sorts of scavengers the local ecosystem might have bred. Seeing nothing amiss, she continued forward warily. Her desire to bring lost spacers’ souls to rest was not worth being eaten by a predator that didn’t even have a scientific classification yet.

When she rounded the last clump of charcoal stumps and saw the tattered square of solar-tarp hanging off the side of the ship, Marta didn’t at first register its meaning. Only several steps later did she recognize that a survivor would have had to hang it up, and to string the wires that hung from its voltage studs and coiled around in the ashen dirt below. Someone had survived, after all.

“Hello?” Marta turned in place, keying her enviro-suit’s external loudspeaker. “Is anyone here?”

There was no answer, but again Marta spotted movement at the edge of her vision.

Turning to face the movement again, she debated holstering her gun as a show of good faith, but only for a moment. Suddenly, she wanted to forget her mission of mercy and make a run for Banshee. She didn’t believe in ghosts, but horror stories of stranded spacers losing their minds on uninhabited planets was another matter. “Come on out.”

Again, her voice was swallowed by the place without answer.

Taking a step toward the last place she’d heard the sound, Marta’s booted foot fell on something that crunched. Looking down, she saw that she had stepped on a bone – a brittle human femur, dry with age and long since stripped of all flesh. Its entire length was stippled with gnaw-marks, probably caused by a scavenger bold enough to explore the crash site.

Something darted through the ash-choked landscape, and this time Marta got a better look at it. The scuttling thing was alien indeed – hunched and bent, it scrabbled from cover to cover on leathery, hairless limbs. A mane of scraggly, dark hair hung in clumps over its head, back, and neck. A scavenger, she decided. The survivors were truly long gone.

The creature peered out from behind cover, its hooded eyes boring into Marta’s own. Siezed with fear she could not immediately explain, she fired her pistol wildly toward the spot and ran for Banshee at full speed.

Only when she was airborne did she realize what it was that had so unnerved her. The face which had peered ash-streaked out at her had not been that of an animal. Worse still, she knew that the tooth-marks on the femur were too big to be those of a small, scavenging animal. The teeth that had made them were somewhat larger, rounded and very even.

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