Tales from the Inbox: Visitation in the Void

2947-06-11 – Tales from the Inbox: Visitation in the Void

An anonymous member of the audience sent me an interesting file-cache which purports to link Sagittarian activity with sightings of KR-type vessels operated by Ladeonist radicals. I don’t have any way of verifying this information from Håkøya, but I have passed it along to Ashton at Centauri; hopefully with the data-feed aggregation of the Core Worlds, he can see if there’s anything to this theory. Perhaps the Ladeonists see in the Sagittarians a force which has a hope of annoying the Confederated Worlds? It’s an interesting idea, but not one which we have any hard evidence for as of yet.

This week’s entry of Tales from the Inbox features a nightmare scenario for any spacer: After an accident aboard the mercenary squadron carrier Sergio Lando, Johan M. found himself alone on the silent ship, the rest of the crew having swarmed into the launches and limped from their dying transport to a nearby world.

His story is odd, as he freely admits his sanity was not quite intact during the ordeal or afterwards. Many marooned spacers facing death have claimed to be visited by spirits in the void, and perhaps this is nothing more than an extension of that legend brought to life by a stressed and sleep-deprived imagination.

Perhaps, on the other hand, something did visit Johan. He is happy to admit that he is such an inexperienced spacer that without what the “ghost” said about vacsuits, he’d never have thought of breaking into the EVA lockers, and it is exactly this tactic which saved his life for the five weeks which he remained marooned before his crew returned for their belongings. Though Lando was a total loss, I am told that the mercenaries have since acquired a new carrier (which for such people usually means a ninety-year-old, stripped-down cargo hull) and are refitting it.

Johan kicked the half-disassembled terminal in frustration, then became even more frustrated as the impact pushed him backward slowly across the compartment, rotating lazily until he managed to catch one of the handgrips which had protruded from the bulkhead panels with the loss of A-grav power. A better circuitry technician might have been able to coax the terminal to life with Sergio Lando’s emergency power network, but Johan was a bookkeeper, not an electrician.

Of course, he didn’t have the opportunity of calling for the help of one of the dozen-odd techs of the normal crew. They had left, along with the rest of the crew and the normally hard-bitten and unflappable combat squadron. Lando’s corridors had become as lifeless as its reactor.

Based on what he could glean from the fragment of ship’s datasphere still online, Johan knew he’d been unconscious for almost fifteen hours after the blast, and that thirty-one hours had elapsed since he’d come to. That the big ship’s pressure hull and rad-shielding had survived a reactor containment excursion had been something of a miracle; that the dazed crew had elected to abandon ship in the company’s flotilla of launches and assault craft likely seemed only too prudent at the time.

The only problem was that, in their frenzied rush to escape a dying starship, Johan’s compatriots had left him behind. Since he was separated from his comm at the time of the blast and had taken pains not to have his movements noticed, there had been little hope of being found in his unconsciousness before Boss McKay cut his losses and launched the last boats.

After he’d stopped shouting incoherently out a viewport at the empty space through which Sergio Lando would now likely drift forever, Johan had decided that the situation was not entirely hopeless. A hasty evacuation would mean that much of the company’s equipment and stores were left behind, and McKay had come up through the mercenary ranks after a short career with a dubiously-legal salvage crew. He wouldn’t leave a hundred k-creds of perfectly good kit sitting in a derelict forever. All Johan needed to do was survive until someone came back to strip the hulk, and he would be rescued.

The cold comfort of this likely rescue had faded quickly, of course. Without main power, Lando could not run its atmospherics, and even the best insulation would surrender precious warmth to the interstellar void without the reactor’s waste heat to replace it. With full larders stocked for a crew of fifty, Johan had no fear of starving, and the water reservoir would last more than a month even if he didn’t get the wastewater recycler working. Air and heat were the only two problems that he had to conquer.

If only he was a born spacer like the rest of the company, there would have been no problems, but Johan had none of the skills of his starfaring coworkers. He had been hired because of his ability to balance the books to keep everyone (especially the strike-jocks) in the dark about the company’s financial situation, either good or ill. Boss McKay found his riotous crew far easier to manage if there was not daily drama regarding the outfit’s bottom line. Johan spent most of his shifts making weeks of both extreme profit and extreme loss seem to be average, unremarkable times, even though such times were all but impossible to find in the mercenary business. He’d never so much as popped the access panels on a terminal before, and now he needed to wire the emergency batteries into a number of systems designed to work only on the main reactor-power circuit if he was going to survive.

Smacking the bulkhead with one palm, Johan glared at the terminal across the compartment again. Without A-grav, cabling bobbed free in the open air, resembling the tentacle-arms of an Earthly anemone. Before he touched the atmospherics, he’d wanted to get enough of the datasphere online to retrieve walkthrough instructions on what he was about to do, but even this simple task had failed in a serpent’s nest of color-coded cabling. After all, Johan had never even learned what a red cable with black rings meant. A task carefully designed to be easy for a systems tech had defeated him completely.

As the marooned book-keeper considered whether to stake his life on a fifty-fifty chance of frying his only hope of getting instructions, or to bed down and hope that a few hours’ delay wouldn’t result in a slow death by asphyxiation, the whole ship shuddered slightly. Normally such tremors and vibrations would have failed to even rise to his attention, but Johan looked around wild-eyed, knowing that no system or person capable of causing it remained on board. Was it a precursor to further outbursts by the damaged reactor? Was he about to be blasted into a smear of unrecognizable goo by a cataclysm of strange-matter emissions?

The shudder repeated itself, and this time Johan realized the source was forward, away from the simmering wreck of the reactor. Somehow, this did not comfort him. Stewing in his own fear, he picked his way from handhold to handhold, heading for the access tunnel which would let him pursue the sound. It seemed to repeat every thirty seconds, and as he followed it Johan wondered whether some piece of heavy equipment had come loose and was bouncing about in a compartment.

The tremors led Johan to the cruise bridge, a wide compartment with a horseshoe belt of smart-glass allowing the crew within to see the empty vastness through which they flew. With only the weak emergency lights on, some of the stars beyond the glass glowed pitilessly into the empty command deck. There was nothing loose on the bridge large enough to make such a racket.

Just as Johan turned to leave and check the compartments one deck below, the tremor occurred again. He could hear more this time; a scraping of metal against metal carried through the structure of the ship rather than through the air. Nervously, he turned back to the armor-glass, peering out into the void around the ship’s blunt prow, and waited.

“Knock knock.”

At the sound of a voice behind him, Johan screamed and spun in place, body unable to leap as violently as his heart only because his feet did not touch the deck in zero-gee. Behind him, drifting calmly in the middle of the bridge, was a pale-skinned woman in an unfamiliar type of space-suit, helmet missing.

“No need for that.” The pale woman kicked off one of the crash-padded bridge chairs toward him. “What happened to your ship?”

“I…” Johan pressed his back against the cool armor-glass. The woman wasn’t armed, but he had every certainty that she could kill him. There was an insubstantial quality to her voice and ivory-pale skin which suggested more death than life, even as living mirth danced in her eyes and twisted her thin lips into a wry grin. “Reactor… problem. Don’t know much more.”

“Interesting.” This answer seemed to be a confirmation for the intruder. “Mind if I have a look at the problem?”

“You can… fix it?”

She laughed, and the sound carried enough of that same combination of lifeless cold and boundless life that Johan almost kicked off the window and bolted. “Nope. I just want to look and see how it failed.”

“I…” Johan knew he should ask why, but the question died before he formed it. “I suppose.”

“Excellent.” The woman put a hand on the glass next to Johan’s head to stop her forward drift, and for an instant her face was inches from his. “I’ll leave you to your repairs, then.” She pushed off and headed for the doorway at the back of the bridge. “Bye now!”

Johan almost watched dumbstruck as she disappeared, but his survival instinct kicked in just in time. “Wait!”

She spun around, but kept drifting away. “I can’t stay long, Skipper.”

“I can’t fix the ship. I’m going to die.”

The woman laughed again. “Probably not any time soon, with all those fully charged vacsuits in the EVA bay.”

“Suits..?” Johan hadn’t considered this. The atmosphere in the ship would soon grow cold and stale, but each suit battery and atmosphere canister would last several days.

“Good talk, but I really can’t stay.” The woman kicked off the door-frame as she left the room. Johan heard her kick off one more bulkhead outside. A strange sizzling sound followed, then silence reigned. Once again, Johan was alone.

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Tales from the Inbox: Seeker's Symbiosis

2947-06-04 – Tales from the Inbox: Seeker's Symbiosis

I didn’t think it worth a standalone text feed item, but Captain Bosch finally responded to my datasphere messages. He cannot give any news as to the condition or disposition of his squadron at this time, but he did suggest that he expected to return to Håkøya soon. Though he could not be specific, he definitely implied there was some yet-unresolved danger to his ships which needed to be overcome before the squadron could return to the near side of the Gap. 

If you are a congregant of the United Spacers’ Chapel, and I know there are many in this audience of that faith, consider offering up a prayer for his command. In the message I received, he asked specifically for this audience to remain in prayer for his command and for the whole Confederated Navy. Security concerns prevented his saying more, but the tone of the message was somewhat grim, suggesting some sort of trouble. Could administrative fallout from the Great Purge be affecting the Navy’s ability to supply his ships so far from a primary naval base? 

On a lighter note, recordings of Sagittarian ships nosing around on the near side of the Gap appear to have come to nothing. I have seen no reports of further sightings after the first wave, and while reports from the Sagittarius Frontier continue to come in, most of them are months old. Today I want to focus on another tale sent in by Jaska N., a Hegemony-bred spacer whose alliance with a unique xenosapient named Ina has graced this feed before. After some curiosity was expressed on our audience engagement hub about what happened next, he decided to send in more of his story. I have lifted only a portion of the new account which answers some of the most often-heard questions from the community hub. 

While Jaska himself does not specifically describe the events of his service with the Hegemony Navy which wrack him with guilt and terror to this day, many veterans of the Confederated Navy bear similar psychic scars, and the kind of event likely to cause such trauma can be easily imagined. A military spacer’s life on the Rimward side of the treaty zone would be all too familiar to our own Navy veterans. 

Jaska woke in near-perfect darkness, warm except where cool, hard-tipped fingers rested on his chest and where an arc of blank glassy enigma lay on his shoulder. He had bedded down for the night shift alone, but as was increasingly usual, he had not remained so through the whole night. 

“Ina.” Jaska gently but firmly pushed the xenosapient’s head off his shoulder, and a flicker of indistinct light woke behind her featureless mask. “We’ve talked about this. You have your own bunk.” 

Ina lifted herself up enough that the thin thermal blanket fell aside, and the cool air of the little ship’s crew cabin invaded Jaska’s comfortable warmth. A series of indecipherable symbols flitted across her face too quickly for him to read, then she lay back down and pressed the side of her head against his ear. “You should not be alone.” Her purring voice, the product of scale-like constituents rubbing against each other like crickets’ legs, nevertheless managed to sound like a human woman’s voice. 

“Look, we both know I’m over the rad-sickness.” Jaska wanted to get up and stand apart from her, but he couldn’t do so and still expect an answer more complex than the three letters at a time she could display on her face. “The excuse that you’re concerned about my health expired a week ago.” 

“I said that you should not be alone, not that I am worried you continue to be ill.” Ina had of course nursed Jaska back to health after helping her find a radioactive xenoflora specimen nearly killed him. She seemed to have known beforehand of the negative effects the radiation would have on human tissue, and to have experienced something like guilt for some time afterwards, but he tried to keep in mind how little the lithe, feminine humanoid guise reflected Ina’s true nature. “What haunts your sleep, Jaska?” 

Jaska shook his head, pried Ina off himself, and rolled out of the bunk, blinking as the cabin automatically brightened. For an alien who had spent more time as a prisoner and curiosity of Rattanai pirates than a traveling-companion of Terrans, she was far too perceptive. “Things that are twenty T-years old. Don’t worry about it.” 

Ina, unable to use her voice without pressing some part of herself against Jaska’s ear, sat up on his bunk and let her long legs dangle off the side. Though composed of a few thousands of scale-like individuals working in concert, she didn’t seem to know how to take the shape of anything but an attractive, slim human female. Most likely, her form was reactive to whoever she was around – Jaska’s tendency was obviously to respond best to a human female, so that was what she looked like. It was most likely a simple reflex. 

“THA-TLO-NG?” Ina, displaying three letters at a time on her faceplate, queried. 

“Just about.” Jaska wandered across the tiny cabin to the controls to check the little ship’s autopilot. They were still on course, with plenty of fuel, atmospherics, and nutrient reserves to make it back to civilization. “I’m all right.” 

Before Jaska realized that she had left the bunk rack, Ina’s arms and serpentine, barb-tipped tail were already wrapped around him, and her head was already buried into his shoulder. “I can help.” Her purring voice sent a shiver down Jaska’s spine, and he tried to remind himself that she had almost killed him in pursuit of a radioactive plant whose purpose had never been explained in detail, and that all her pseudo-sexual affection was aimed toward a very different sort of intimacy. If she said she could help, she probably could – but he dreaded learning how. 

“Don’t.” Jaska pried her arms off himself. She was far less dense than a human, and under normal circumstances far weaker. She could of course flow her components around his intervening hands if she chose, but that rarely happened. “This isn’t something you can fix so easily.” 

The letters “YES” appeared on Ina’s otherwise blank face. “ICA-NTA-KEA-WAY-” 

“Nothing.” Jaska finished the sentence being patiently spelled out. “You have permission to take nothing from me. Not even the nightmares.” 

“BUT-” 

“I know in your own way you’re trying to help.” Jaska turned away and keyed the forward display to open its shutters. With bright lights in the cabin, no stars were visible beyond, but he stared out into the void anyway. “We humans help each other by sharing loads, not taking them away.” 

Ina remained silent for several seconds. When Jaska turned around, he saw that she had fallen into the pilot’s acceleration couch, one leg slung lazily over the arm-rest. Though she could make no normal expression, he could tell she was waiting for him to say more. To tell the story which spawned his nightmares. 

Jaska sighed. He had, after all, suggested it. He wasn’t ready to tell the story, but it would do him more good than to have Ina try to take away the trauma. “I suppose.” Walking past her, he leaned on the back of the chair, looking down at the blank-faced creature which had volunteered to hear his confession.  

Ina craned her head to look at him curiously, contorting in an unconscious attempt to look more appealing to his eye. Would she understand why the memory hurt so much? Would it matter if she didn’t? 

Jaska took a deep breath, then began. “It all began when I was in the service. We were answering a colonial distress call on the Rimward Frontier...” 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Siren Stone

2947-05-28 – Tales from the Inbox: The Siren Stone

Apologies for the late delivery; the system we have developed to ensure reliable delivery of Tales from the Inbox and other text feed items is online, but a few hours to propagate the data across the HyperCast network from multiple distant sources are required. In the future, Tales from the Inbox will continue to arrive a few hours later than its previous ingestion timestamp, but we are working to tighten that gap somewhat.

Today’s entry was sent in by none other than Nojus Brand, back in action after his run-in with a chitinous predator on the arid world of Barsamia a few months ago. Evidently he lost all the footage of his most recent brief, dangerous expedition to a solar flare – but he wanted to make sure to let everyone in both of our audiences know that he’s back with new dangers in mind.

Nojus paused to glance out the tiny, radiation-proof window in the side of his landing craft several times before he finished suiting up and checking the seals. The world outside was nothing like the tropical hothouses, frigid crags, and baked deserts he usually frequented on his little expeditions, and for once, he felt a little bit uneasy.

The uneasiness, he told himself, had nothing to do with the nearly fatal outcome of his most recent outing, or with the long shadows cast by the dead, corroded hulls of two much larger landing craft which he had chosen to set down beside. No, it was something else. The picturesque, untamed wildness that marked most of his destinations had become a familiar and even comforting factor in Nojus’s travels, and now that he had found an entirely new type of peril, the sense of danger lost long ago had made a creeping return. This time, he would have to tackle an environment without his Reed-Soares Personal Survival Utility.

“Warning.” The lander’s comm, still tuned to the frequency of the beacon installed beside the two dead landers, spoke in the recorded voice of a previous visitor to the system. “The surface of Golgotha A is a Class 2 hazardous environment. Do not land without proper precautions. Warning…”

Tromping over to the control panel, Nojus switched off the volume. The beacon would repeat five times, then go silent for ten more minutes, as it had been doing for at least fifty years. Most Class 2 hazards needed no beacons, of course; the hostility of such places was usually detectable from orbit. The first of three planets in the Golgotha star system, however, hid its horrors well; all that the first explorers had seen was a barren orb with a nitrogen atmosphere, crust studded with valuable mineral formations.

Later expeditions, seeing the hulks of abandoned landing-ships studding the surface near the most promising mineral fields, must have proceeded with greater caution. This caution had done them no good; for two whole centuries, nothing that landed on Golgotha A ever rose to orbit again.

The Elliway Expedition, first to return from a ground survey of the aptly named Place of the Skull, had survived thanks more to luck than to Captain Elliway’s incorrect theories about the fates of all who had come before. One of the junior researchers had stumbled on the vacsuited corpse of one of her predecessors and discovered that every electronic component - shielded or otherwise - in the dead explorer’s possession was hopelessly fried. After a bit of exploratory simulation, she had warned her compatriots, and Elliway had lifted off only hours after arriving.

Armed with the data brought back by Elliway’s crew, Nojus would not be the first to safely spend time exploring Golgotha A, but he suspected he was its first tourist. His equipment had all been modified to minimize risk, with the replacement of all ferrous and conductive parts with composite and ceramic. With luck, that would stave off the fate which had befallen many explorers before him.

Camera drones would of course carry the same risks as any other equipment, so when Nojus activated his cameras, they extended off the roof of his landing craft on a pair of long, articulated booms. Panning them in opposite directions, he recorded several seconds’ footage of the gray desolation and the corroded landers. Introductory voice-over work could wait until he was back in the relative safety of orbit.

“Day one on Golgotha A.” The suit microphone picked up the words as usual. “I’m about to open up and take a step outside.”

Taking a deep breath, Nojus stepped into the airlock. His suit-gloved hands were empty, and his right hand hung uselessly at his side, missing the presence of a survival multitool. It couldn’t be helped; Reed-Soares’s smart-metal construction used a large amount of iron, and just like the rest of his kit, all iron had been left in orbit. A few “dumb” composite tools housed in an external compartment would have to do on Golgotha A.

The magnificent desolation outside the lander was something Nojus suspected only the first humans to have landed on Earth’s moon would have found familiar. Grey, powder-fine dust covered the flat plain of the landing site, which stretched to the horizon in all directions except where craggy mineral formations rose into sheer bluffs. The thin atmosphere bore enough wind to scatter footprints, but the ruined remnants of partially-unpacked research equipment lay scattered around the wrecks of long-dead explorers’ landers. Most of the expeditions seemed to have wandered about the landing area for several hours before meeting their doom.

“Beautiful scenery.” Nojus remotely pointed one of the boom cameras at the nearest stand of mineral formations, so the viewers could see how the massive formation glittered and threw off tiny rainbows when the ruddy Golgotha sunlight struck it. “I recommend a visit.” This, he punctuated with a laugh; his viewers would know better. He hoped they would, anyway. Only he was crazy enough to go for a hike on such a perilous planet.

The laugh seemed hollow and empty, like the landers’ hulks in the foreground. “Right. Let’s go take a walk to that formation.”

Nojus took only a few steps before his boot turned over a fist-sized chunk of crystal underneath the dust. Stooping, he picked it up, fingers tingling in knowledge of what he was holding. The grayish crystal formations studding the planet were beautiful and would serve as an ore of several valuable metals, but like the sirens of legend, they enticed with one hand and slew with the other. The crystals had doomed every expedition to Golgotha A, manned or automated.

“See this?” Nojus held up the crystal for the boom camera he knew was following his progress. “If I were wearing a standard suit, I’d be dead right now.” He hurled the crystal off into the distance, away from the pieces of corroded equipment at the landing site. “But I’ve come prepared for this place. No iron in any of my equipment.”

The crystals were deadly because of their odd interaction with iron, of course. Baked by their red-dwarf primary’s eons of irradiating solar flares, the unique mineral had a high-energy crystalline lattice which, though quite stable, would break down quite violently with the right reactant.

Metallic iron was, of course, exactly the reactant the crystals desired. The electromagnetic emissions of this breakdown were violent enough to fry electronics of all kinds and stun the human nervous system, especially since the reaction ate away at the ferrous alloys of standard shielding. Even the tiny crystal chips blown by Golgotha A’s wind, blown against the side of a landing craft, were enough to wipe out an entire expedition, and this was likely the fate of the first explorers to set foot on the world.

“Nobody knows if there’s life on Golgotha A.” Nojus continued, for the benefit of the audience. “Soil testing has proved inconclusive. If there is, it’s probably underground.”

He turned then to stare at the camera. “And if there are predators here, I mean to find them.”

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: Datacast Blackouts in Håkøya

2947-05-25 - Editor’s Loudspeaker: Datacast Blackouts in Håkøya 

You may have noticed that our last Tales from the Inbox feed item was delayed by almost twenty-four hours. This was not because of human error or a technological fault. Naval Intelligence has asserted control over the HyperCast relay station in the system and several others, and it reserves the right to impose total or partial datacast blackouts for reasons of “military security.”

Such a blackout was ordered during the time when Tales from the Inbox was meant to be ingested, leading to the delay. The reasons for this blackout were never explained to civilians here in-system, but it probably has something to do with a security alert on all orbital stations that began shortly before the blackout.

I can’t verify this information, but it has been hinted to me that one of the so-called KR-ships (crewed by Ladeonist insurgents as with other examples of the type) was spotted stealthily approaching one of the cruisers of the Fifth Fleet’s van. This unverified story bears the ring of truth, because Navy gunship patrols and local defense force activity have both stepped up since.

All of this leads me to conclude that rumors of Captain Bosch’s force tangling with Sagittarians and suffering badly may not be as outlandish as first thought. Bosch has yet to reply to personal messages on the subject, but the Navy’s datasphere dispatch system continues to accept them, suggesting that, in their records at least, he is still alive.

I have discussed this situation with Ashton and the other members of Cosmic Background’s Centauri staff, and have come up with a few measures to prevent the loss of feed items in the future. In addition to preparing several stopgap Tales from the Inbox episodes in case of another blackout, I will begin duplicating all my feed activity across to Centauri thirty-six hours or more before the scheduled time of publication. Hopefully this will prevent more such mishaps in the future.

Again, this is not a military news feed. If that is what you wish to find, you will find several good ones recommended by other fans in the social-link datahub for this feed. I only bring up the situation because it is affecting my ability to deliver content for your entertainment on schedule.

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