Tales from the Inbox: Junker's Landfall

2946-11-13 - Tales from the Inbox: Junker's Landfall

In Tales from the Inbox: Jewel from a Junker and Tales from the Inbox: A Junker's Journey, we saw how Jacob Borisov's mercenary crew, in the employ of the businessman Kenneth Lorenz, was tasked with following up on leads derived from an ancient data core. These leads led to a rogue planet, drifting without a stellar parent through the void. Though Mr. Borisov couldn't possibly imagine a more inhospitable and unlikely place to go looking for his client's family secrets, he secured himself a position on the landing party, and rode down to the surface of the unexplored body in a tiny, antiquated scout ship.

Despite misgivings, Mr. Borsov and his team reached the surface without incident, ready to help their client unearth his family secrets.

When at last the scout’s landing skids scraped against a hard surface and the whole vessel came to a stop, Jacob Borisov unlatched his acceleration harness and got to his feet. The landing had been uneventful, despite the popping and groaning of the Hawkbat’s ancient hull as it adjusted to the pull of gravity on the way down from orbit. Though the rogue world had an atmosphere, it had proven too weak to provide either significant friction braking or severe turbulence, resulting in an unexpectedly smooth ride.

Kirstin Sharma, the attack boat pilot Lorenz had chosen for his team, had handled the landing expertly; Jacob didn’t feel nearly as terrified as he usually did riding a spacecraft of unproven serviceability down to the surface of an unexplored and potentially hazardous planetoid. As the mercenary commander began opening supply crates and handing out pressure suits, he wondered when he’d started treating such hazardous landfalls as routine. It was, he decided, probably around the time he left his lucrative first career as a mining prospector.

Shortly after landing, Kenneth Lorenz appeared in the doorway leading into the multipurpose central compartment. “Suit-“ He interrupted himself, seeing that the mercenaries were already shrugging on the tough, airtight garments. “Ah.”

“What’s it look like out there?” Jacob asked, handing the little man another suit, identical to the rest. The smart-fabric would of course adjust itself to fit securely on any stature or body shape, coiling up any excess material in out of the way places. Jacob was glad that full hazard suits were unnecessary on the cold, starless world; six of those ten-foot-tall, powered monstrosities would never have fit in the Hawkbat’s limited crew space.

“We had to put down about six klicks from the target.” Lorenz replied apologetically. “Your pilot wouldn’t land on the ridge closer to the entrance. Something about ice sublimation.”

“She’s right not to.” Landing on a surface of water ice wouldn’t be a problem over the space of a few hours, but Jacob had seen the sensor reports. The rogue’s icy surface was crusted with crystallized methane, carbon dioxide, and even nitrogen. The heat radiating from the Hawkbat’s belly would cause such ice to boil away, digging the ship into a hole of its own making relatively quickly. For anything but a very brief touchdown, the little scout could sink too deeply to be safely launched again. “Wait, entrance?”

“You’d think they’d design ships like this so they could land on ice.” Lorenz grumbled, pointedly ignoring the query. Jacob suppressed his frustration that his client was so deficient in the knowledge that kept most spacers alive, remembering that the man had, until recently, done nothing even remotely like what he had now set out to do. “Anyway, we’ll have to walk there.”

“That’s not a problem.” Six kilometers across a lifeless, icy landscape was nothing he or his crew couldn’t handle. What lay beyond Lorenz’s entrance was another matter entirely.

As soon as Jacob had checked the suits of his three compatriots and Lorenz, and had allowed his own to be checked in turn, they each hefted a sidearm and a pack of supplemental life support and heating elements, then took a turn cycling through the ship’s old-fashioned inflatable airlock. As Lorenz deployed the grav sled on which most of the equipment was already tied, each of the mercenaries checked their weapons by firing into an icy outcrop, verifying that the extreme cold was not affecting the electromagnets or battery components. Lorenz didn’t seem to expect trouble, and it didn’t seem likely in such an aggressively lifeless place, but nobody was taking any chances.

The six-kilometer hike turned out to be almost insultingly easy, as Lorenz led the way down from the outcropping on which the ship was parked and across a broad basin toward the ridge on the opposite side. The ice underfoot boiled into clouds of vapor under the heat of the team’s boot soles, but the surface was neither slick nor rugged. The thin atmosphere, kicked up into a gentle wind by some unknown quirk of the local cryosphere, whistled mournfully against the fittings of Jacob’s helmet. Despite his uneasiness with Lorenz’s secretive mission, the mercenary captain found the rogue world’s eternal night almost peaceful.

“Hell of a place to hide family secrets.” Somebody grumbled into the radio link. Jacob turned his head to glare back at his three compatriots, but Lorenz, still leading the way, pretended not to notice.

The last half-kilometer of the march, ascending the rise on the far side of the valley, was only slightly more strenuous than the first five and a half. The hilly upland was jagged and angular, with vast, angular blocks of blue-white ice seeming to protrude out of the hill like the fallen remains of cyclopean masonry. With every surface spewing icy mist at the slightest touch, Jacob quietly applauded Pilot Sharma’s decision not to risk even a brief touchdown closer to whatever it was Lorenz was trying to reach.

At the top of the ridge, Lorenz took control of the sled, sending it high up into the air to get his bearings. As he did, Jacob examined the horizon in all directions, unable to see any reason why Lorenz was interested in the place. Irregular ridges of ice-sheathed rock functionally identical to the one he was standing on marched in all directions to the horizon. The ice-wreathed planet hid its secrets well – if it had any to hide.

“This way.” Lorenz radioed, gesturing around a towering, blocky ice formation on the very top of the ridge. Without waiting for the others, the businessman darted off around the formation, and Jacob lost sight of him.

“Follow him.” Jacob instructed, not bothering to suggest that his employer slow down. Gathering up the other mercenaries, he led the way around the formation, following the still-steaming footprints left by the over-eager businessman.

At the other side of the formation, Jacob saw that the hillside, shattered by some ancient seismic event, lay in tumbledown pieces in the valley below, leaving an almost vertical drop. The mercenary stopped short, holding up his hand to bring the other three to a similar halt.

Kenneth Lorenz was nowhere to be seen. His footprints ended at the precipice, as if he’d simply run right over the side.

Details

Tales from the Inbox: A Junker's Journey

2946-11-06 - Tales from the Inbox: A Junker's Journey

Today's Tales from the Inbox continues the four part account which began with last week's Tales from the Inbox: Jewel from a Junker, which relates the events leading up to the discoveries on Vinteri.

Having recovered an old data core from an antiquated starship, Kenneth Lorenz hired the mercenary company commanded by Jacob Borisov again, this time to visit several locations indicated by the data on the device, and to see what could be found there.

Jacob paced up and down the central aisle of Taavi Bancroft, cradling a cup of acrid-tasting coffee substitute in one hand and and massaging a growing headache with the other. Though his crew lived more luxuriously than most mercenaries due to their vessel being a converted merchantman rather than a proper warship, proper coffee was still only carried in small amounts and brewed on special occasions. Despite its objectionable taste, a cup of the liquid misery dispensed by the even the worst-maintained refreshments synthesizer contained enough caffeine to wake a Terran grizzly bear from its hibernation, and Jacob hoped the stimulant would ease the throbbing in his temples for a few more hours, at least until his people came back from yet another patch of empty space designated by the crew’s eccentric client.

“What’s taking them so long?” Kenneth Lorenz asked, not for the first time, twirling his odd pendant around his fingers. Ever since Bancroft had left port, Jacob had not seen the man leave his quarters without it.

“They’re only overdue by five minutes.” Jacob had waived his usual rule against a client coming along for the operation, given the vast sums of money Lorenz was throwing around, and he’d regretted that lapse of judgement ever since. Lorenz was, the mercenary suspected, most of the reason for his headache. “I don’t usually bother getting concerned until they’re overdue by hours, Mr. Lorenz.” Really, he rarely bothered to worry about the safety of his launch pilots in general. FTL systems small enough to fit on combat launches were notoriously temperamental, and the obsolescent military-surplus units that dragged his command’s two attack boats through the cosmic fabric were if anything more troublesome than average.

“They weren’t late in coming back before.” The businessman got up from the spare console he’d claimed for himself and headed for the same beverage dispenser which had produced Jacob’s coffee.

The mercenary captain didn’t bother to point out that mechanical problems were random and unpredictable, or that the mysterious searches Lorenz was setting the pilots to perform were so vague that any object within the search area would need to be excessively and stealthily scrutinized. Even now, six weeks into working with Jacob’s crew, Lorenz didn’t trust any of the mercenaries with his “family secrets.” Other than that he was drawing coordinates from a hundred-thirty-year-old military data core which the Bancroft crew had helped to recover, along with the equally ancient ship in which it was installed, nobody knew anything except the little man’s next instruction.

If his money wasn’t plentiful and reliable, Jacob would have offloaded him with his secrets at their first port stop. As it was, Lorenz promised large sums of money and paid those sums without complaint or delay, and that made him an excellent client for a mercenary crew.

“Contact.” One of the officers announced crisply. “Two light gravitic signatures.”

“That will be them.” Jacob surmised. “Range?”

“Forty-three lisecs.”

“Then we’ll have their report in a moment.” Less than fifty light-seconds was extremely close – given the ambient conditions, the two launches could have expected to pass through their star drive hops and find themselves ten times that far from their mothership. “Send it to Mr. Lorenz’s console.” Jacob sipped his coffee and meandered across the open bridge deck to join his client there, content to merely be nearby when the slight, secretive businessman reviewed the patrol’s findings.

The console lit up less than a minute later, its projectors tracing a translucent spherical object in the air above the glassy surface. Jacob had expected his pilots to find only more empty space, so he leaned over his client’s shoulder. “What’s that?”

“A rogue planet, Captain Borisov. A cold, silent world.”

The numbers displayed near the image backed up this description. Most rogue planets were gaseous and warmed themselves somewhat above the ambient temperature of the interstellar space, but this one was, according to his pilots’ sensor data, a body of rock sheathed in the nitrogen ice that was all that remained of an atmosphere. In time immemorial, the world had probably been ejected from the system which had birthed it, damned to an eternal journey through the interstellar night. “Is this what we’re looking for?” Jacob asked.

“Probably.” Lorenz skimmed through the data. “I wasn’t expecting to find it so soon.”

Jacob wondered if merely finding the world was all Lorenz had in mind. Probably, given the hazard pay clauses in the contract, the businessman meant to get a little bit closer to the rogue world – and if Lorenz expected their exploration would be uneventful, he wouldn’t have hired mercenaries. “We’re going there.” It wasn’t a question; he already knew it.

“Once your pilots are aboard, we’ll approach the planet.” Lorenz instructed. “I’ll be taking the Hawkbat down to the surface.”

“Alone?”

“That would be crazy, Captain.” Lorenz held up a small data-reader for Jacob. “I’ll need these.”

Taking the reader, Jacob reviewed the list on the screen. It contained five names, and a long list of equipment from the ship’s stores. “Six bodies and all that gear aboard that little scout is going to be a tight fit. Why not take the personnel shuttle?”

“It won’t fit where I need to go. I would take a larger crew if I could.”

Jacob didn’t bother to ask why. Lorenz was obviously not ready to reveal his family secrets, and mercenaries were not paid to be curious. “What sort of trouble are you expecting?”

“Depends on what I find down there.” For once, the businessman looked somewhat uneasy. “Anything is possible here, Captain.”

“We’ll go in on ready alert, with the assault boats on standby.” Jacob suggested. One of the boats’ pilots would have to be replaced by a crew backup, but that was the least of the mercenary’s concerns. “You’ll keep your comms link open at all times down there. If we lose contact, they launch. If something moves, we run for it.” The scout was equipped with a star drive, of course, but Jacob doubted even Lorenz was willing to trust his life to such an old system.

“Understood.” Lorenz stood. “Send the personnel and supplies on that list to the hangar.”

Jacob acknowledged the order with a nod, and his employer turned and disappeared into the lift. If Lorenz was going down himself, he doubted there was real risk to the team that would be crammed into the old Hawkbat scout. “Calculate a course to the object identified by the patrol.” He instructed the bridge crew as soon as Lorenz was gone. “We’ll approach on a ballistic course, no acceleration.”

The slow, stealthy ballistic course would of course irritate Lorenz, but Jacob had his reasons. If the place really was dead and harmless, a half-day of drifting approach wouldn’t make a difference to the schemes of the wealthy man, and if it wasn’t all that it seemed, the cautious course would give his crew a better chance to spot the danger.

“Any unknown we run into in the vicinity of the rogue is to be assumed hostile.” Jacob added. “We take no chances.”

With that, he headed for his office. It was time to do some research into the personnel Lorenz had requested; perhaps in their dossiers, some clue to the businessman’s purpose might be found.

- - - - - - - - - -

Two shifts later, as Taavi Bancroft eased into orbit around the frozen, starless planet, Jacob watched the three-dimensional plot with growing agitation. For a lifeless rogue, the object had a remarkably lively orbital space, with dozens of minor, asteroid-like satellites large enough to have been detected by stellar occlusion alone. Jacob could only speculate as to the number of much smaller objects which an active sensor sweep might find. Even if there was no active trouble to be found, he knew an orbital zone with that many unknowns was a dangerous place to park a ship as large as Bancroft.

As soon as the helmsman declared that the ship was in as safe and stable an orbit as it was likely to find, Jacob left the command deck and headed down toward the ship’s cavernous hangar, where his client was preparing his antiquated scout ship for departure. Kenneth Lorenz’s money was good, and that was the only reason that he had not called off the whole affair. The derelict seemed to be a perfect place for an ambush.

As their captain approached, most of the personnel milling curiously around Lorenz’s Hawkbat melted away to their duties, unconsciously wanting to look busy while Jacob could see them. He hadn’t come to enforce crew discipline, but they couldn’t possibly know that.

“Captain Borisov.” The wealthy middle-aged man showed no trace of the frustration he’d vented at Jacob’s decision to approach the rogue world stealthily and slowly; his mind was, by all indications, on what lay ahead. “What brings you down here?”

“We’re orbital, and the crew is on alert.” Jacob threaded his way through the dissolving group of onlookers. It was time to give Lorenz the second piece of what would be regarded as bad news. “My job on the bridge is done, so I’ll be standing in for Oliver Gunnarsen on your landing party.”

“What?” Lorenz glared back. “I chose these people very carefully from your crew. Every one of them has-”

“You picked Gunnarsen because of his experience with mining explosives.” At the mention of his name, the square-jawed security officer poked his head out of the Hawkbat’s personnel hatch, and Jacob beckoned for him to come out. “Oliver, tell Mr. Lorenz who on the crew you’d pick for a dangerous mining job.”

“You mean, down there on that rogue?” Gunnarsen was clearly confused, but he played along, turning to address the businessman. “Well, Farmer and Uzun would be good choices, but everyone knows the captain here spent years as a prospector on Thirty Below. If he’s not needed on the bridge, you want him.”

“Not you?” The businessman was taken aback.

“Me? Mr. Lorenz, I was an asteroid miner. If you want something blown up in anything but zero-zero conditions, you’d better pick someone else.”

Jacob held up his hands. “I don’t care about your secrets, Mr. Lorenz, but the safety of my crew is at stake if you plan on blowing anything up down there.” Even Lorenz, who’d never been within a hundred kilometers of any sort of active mine, would be able to imagine how mining explosives would behave very differently when atmospheric pressure and gravity could not be ignored. Add to that the volatile nature of the nitrogen and methane ices that covered the starless planet’s surface, and it was clear that trusting Gunnarsen’s limited experience to set mining charges down there was likely to lead to disaster. Jacob was glad he’d spent half a shift determining the likely reasons for each of Lorenz’s personnel decisions, and also quietly glad he had such a convenient excuse to join the landing party. “Either I go down with you, or the explosives stay up here.”

“Fine.” Exasperated, Lorenz shooed Gunnarsen away. “Get on board, Captain. We’ll be leaving as soon as your hangar crew gives us clearance.”

Jacob picked up one of the remaining crates sitting on the periphery of the landing pad and did as he was instructed. One way or another, he was committed to uncovering Kenneth Lorenz’s family secrets, if they indeed were hidden in such a forsaken place.

Details

Tales from the Inbox: Jewel from a Junker

2946-10-30 - Tales from the Inbox: Jewel from a Junker

Earlier this year, one of the most important xenoarchaeological finds of our lifetime was made under an exceedingly odd set of circumstances. Many of those of you among our audience have already heard part of the story of the discovery of the first site on Vinteri, as protecting the remote world's undisturbed treasures has been an effort largely policed by a number of mercenary companies hired by the Sagan Institute of Centauri.

While the spacer community based at Centauri has largely familiarized itself with parts of this story, when Jacob Borisov asked if we would like to run the story here, I was only too happy to arrange it. Captain Borisov was at first intending to write his account into a holofilm script, but he decided that the effort would be far more dull and far less lucrative than continuing his primary means of employment - that is, as a mercenary commander. He provided his notes, as well as shipboard surveillance recordings and comm logs which catalog the events leading to the Vinteri discovery. I have assembled them into a text account in four parts, which will be published sequentially.

The story begins in an unlikely way, as most great tales do - with Mr. Borisov and his client, Kenneth Lorenz, inspecting a recently captured pirate's vessel.

“She’s beautiful.”

The old military scout ship was anything but. Significant areas of its original yellow and grey-green paint had long ago surrendered their hold on the hull, leaving uneven patches of dull alloy exposed. Its sleek, raked prow and narrow forward viewpanels were marred by the ill effects of generations of microscopic impacts, and battered by the scars of a few larger ones. A pair of magnetic funnels flared on either side of the hull, outward hints that the small vessel was powered by a type of reactor that had gone out of favor almost two centuries before. Dented weapon sponsons scavenged from a wholly different sort of vessel had been mounted outboard of the scoops in order to attach a pair of heavy autocannon to what had even in its long-ago military service been an unarmed craft. Even these relatively recent additions were pitted and scarred with age and hard use.

Jacob waved to the guards, and they stood aside to let Lorenz approach the battered ship. He didn’t understand why the old man had wanted it so badly, but the sizable up-front retainer that had secured his services had been sufficient to prevent any speculation. For the cost of outfitting two top-of-the-line assault gunships, the eccentric businessman had contracted Jacob’s crew to obtain the ship of a particular outlaw, intact.

Jacob had expected to find the target flying a Kosseler Gryphon or some other high-end, performance vessel, and discovering him at the controls of a hundred-thirty year old U6R Hawkbat had been somewhat anticlimactic. It had been child’s play for Jacob’s veteran combat pilots to disable the antiquated ship in open space and tow it back to the waiting hangar of Taavi Bancroft for delivery. The sullen pirate was still sitting in the ship’s brig, as yet unwilling to discuss the reason his decrepit ship was worth almost a million credits to a Core Worlds banker. Jacob doubted the pirate even knew what had brought ruin down upon him.

Even as he made delivery, Jacob still didn’t know why the Hawkbat was worth what he was being paid for it. His crew had gone over every inch of the corroded junker on their return trip, and found nothing that might explain Kenneth Lorenz’s keen interest. A copy of the ancient computer system’s data core had been dissected by the crew’s best computer tech, and still nothing had been found. The wealthy man had not once asked about the fate of the ship’s former owner, and hadn’t even batted an eye when Jacob had hinted that his crew had inspected the vessel. The mercenary commander was almost ready to conclude that the battered old scout was some sort of obscure collector’s item.

As if telepathic, Jacob’s middle-aged client turned around, a sly grin on his usually-humorless face. “Captain Borisov, I’ll bet you are curious what this vessel is to me.”

Jacob shrugged, a gesture meant to acknowledge the question but not answer it. “Your money is good, Mr. Lorenz.”

“Indeed it is.” Lorenz beckoned to Jacob. “Come, Captain. Let’s have a look inside.”

“Of course.” Jacob had worked with far more paranoid clients than Lorenz, so stepping up to the ancient scout-ship’s unlocked hatch and leading the way was no trouble. The inside, only minimally cleaned after its owner had been removed, was as safe as a ship that had been flying for more than a century could be, but Jacob preferred to take every opportunity to keep a good customer from suspecting foul play.

The lights flickered on as the pair climbed inside. The crew space of the scout ship was divided into three small compartments, and the pirate’s heavy alterations to his craft had filled the largest of these almost completely with added equipment. Jacob led the way through the narrow passage between banks of machinery and up the ladder to the ship’s formerly two-seat cockpit, where now only a single acceleration chair and a U-shaped ring of slightly less antiquated machinery had replaced the side by side configuration.

Lorenz leaned over the controls, shaking his head. “I was afraid of this.” He muttered. “Replacement ferrosillicate displays fetch a high price on the market.”

“You mean to strip it?” Jacob hazarded, trying to keep his tone neutral. Seeing the old scout as a source of valuable, scarce parts would perhaps explain Lorenz’s interest.

“No.” The businessman straightened and looked out the viewpanels at the inside of Bancroft’s hangar. “I’ll be restoring it as something of a… family heirloom.”

“I see.” Jacob nodded cautiously, though he didn’t. Even wealthiest and most spendthrift dilettantes he had met wouldn’t spend nearly a million credits to acquire a family heirloom, only to spend yet more reconstructing it to some original state.

Lorenz turned and headed back toward the ladder. “Everything seems in order here.” Jacob detected no trace of sentimentality in his client’s voice or bearing. A family heirloom the Hawkbat might be, but something told him Lorenz expected to recoup every credit he sunk into the battered old relic.

Lorenz squeezed past the machinery once more and keyed open the bunk compartment situated in the hull between the two external ramscoop funnels, and Jacob followed silently. The walls of the small room bowed inward to make room for the vast magnetic coils within the scoops; the mercenary suspected that the bunkroom was deafeningly loud when they were active, dragging charged particles out of local stellar wind and sequestering them in a pair of high-pressure fuel tanks. A far more elegant solution for the collection and storage of reactor fuel had been available even when the scout-ship had been built, but Hawkbats had been built to be cheap, plentiful, repairable, and expendable, not elegant.

Lorenz spent only an instant taking in the cramped compartment before turning back and busying himself with a panel on the bulkhead next to the doorway. “Now, Captain, let’s see if it’s still here.”

“What is?”

“The auxiliary data core, of course.” Lorenz grunted with exertion, and a half-meter-wide plate of bulkhead paneling popped free. He set the thin sheet of metal on the floor, then peered inside.

Jacob, having never heard of such a small ship having an auxiliary computer data core, approached and looked over the businessman’s shoulder. Sure enough, behind a tangle of unsecured cabling, he spotted the familiar flattened-cylinder outline of an old-model data core, mounted in a trio of brackets against the opposite panel. Based on the extensive corrosion on the brackets, the device was probably undisturbed since the vessel was surplussed. Someone had, at some point, scratched a curious symbol on its stamped metal case – it appeared to be two triangles, one set into the other, with the edges of the inner shape not quire in line with the edges of the outer.

“Just as I hoped.” Lorenz announced, after examining the scratched symbol. “You’ve earned every credit of your fee, Captain Borisov.”

“What do you think is on that core, that’s so valuable?” Jacob didn’t bother trying to disguise his interest now.

“Family secrets, Captain.” Lorenz smiled. It was the winning smile of a man who had a business proposition to offer, Jacob recognized. Reaching into the collar of his brilliantly white shirt, Lorenz withdrew an odd pendant bearing a symbol like the one scratched on the data core, and compared them side by side for Jacob to see. “Are you and your crew free to take on another contract?”

Remembering the lucrative fee Lorenz had already paid for a relatively easy job, Jacob knew he’d never justify a negative answer to his officers and crew. “I think we can work something out.”

Details

Tales from the Inbox: Nojus's Near Miss

2946-10-23 - Tales from the Inbox: Brand's Badlands

Nojus would have paused at the ridgeline to catch his breath and admire the view, but under the watchful eyes of his camera-drones, he thought better of it. Beneath his feet, the dark basalt hills sloped down to meet the golden sands of the desert beyond. The unnamed world was arid to the extreme, but not quite as hot as he had been hoping when he had seen pictures of the place; in fact, the temperature since he’d landed had never exceeded thirty Celsius. Not even a reasonable amount of exaggerated exertion had drawn enough sweat from his brow to compensate for the unexpectedly mild temperature; there was no concealing from the watchful eyes of the drones that his hike from the landing site had been only slightly more strenuous than a tourist’s hike through the Bradagan Foothills on Planet at Centauri.

The view that Nojus wasn’t able to stop to appreciate was spectacular from horizon to horizon, but not because of the brilliant golden luster of the local desert sand, or the stark contrast it made with the deep, chocolate-brown volcanic rock that made up most of the hills. It wasn’t worth admiring because of the brilliant scarlet pinpricks of bulbous local flora which populated the margins where the hills vanished into the sand, or the pair of moons visible in the hazy slate sky. The detail that tempted the veteran explorer to stop and stare was the very detail that, when he’d seen it in still images, had convinced him to come to an unnamed, unknown world, where no dangerous life had ever been encountered.

The titanic skull half-submerged in the brilliant sand was easily ninety meters long and thirty high. Where the dry air and unobstructed daylight would have bleached Earthly bones white, the skeletal deposits of local fauna oxidized in air, forming a deep blue patina. It was, Nojus thought, a most perfect emblem for the desolate world: a darkly lustrous sapphire set on the edge of a vast golden wasteland.

Without delay, Nojus configured his Reed-Soares Portable Survival Utility into a hiking pole and started the descent toward the long-dead titan’s remains. The Naval Survey Auxiliary pilot who’d given him coordinates and still images of the world had been disappointingly certain that the towering remains dotting the desert were those of an extinct species, perhaps the giant cousins of a scaled, amphibious apex predator living in the world’s few scattered oases and wetlands, itself already a beast of unusual size and ferocity. While he intended to take his camera-drones into the marshy habitats of such monsters before he left the planet, Nojus had decided to follow up on a very different detail of the Survey pilot’s account first.

Picking his way down the rocky hillside, surrounded by his modest flotilla of automatons, Nojus saw little wildlife. A sort of scuttling, chitinous creature lived in abundance among the rocks, but their skittish nature defied his best attempts to sneak up on them with his drones. A fast-moving flier, the same slate color as the sky, darted down in pursuit of the skittering things, but its speed was such that Nojus doubted that his drones were getting a good recording of its hunt. He fervently hoped that the pilot’s story was true; otherwise, one of his three days on the wild planet’s surface would be wasted.

As the rock below his feet gave way to the bright sand, Nojus began to see more wildlife. A small herd of bumbling, portly grazers meandered among the scarlet succulents at the desert’s edge, carefully nibbling the soft, blood-red flesh between scabrous upwellings of acrid-smelling, toxic sap. Both the herbivores and the slinking, feline shape which shadowed them paid the explorer and his drones no mind, but they did provide Nojus with some footage and an excuse to emphasize how a human would be killed by the toxins the desert herbivores ingested in a single bite. Most of the plant life on such an arid world was forced to guard its hard-earned biomass carefully, just as Earthly cacti shielded their soft flesh with a hedge of spines.

Passing beyond the stand of crimson growths and into the open sand, Nojus headed directly for the huge skull. The darkness inside its cavernous eye sockets loomed menacingly, and though he had no feeling of apprehension, Nojus knew that his audience, seeing his destination, would be more invested if he did. As he approached, he wove a few subtle hints of unease into his demeanor, for their benefit.

When at last he stood in the long shadow of the great fossilized skull, Nojus sent his drones up for wide-angle shots while he reconfigured his survival multitool into a spearlike weapon. Having no means to direct their movements personally, he had to trust in algorithmic photography to adequately capture the scene, as usual. For once, he doubted that even the best automation software would be up to the task.

When the drones returned, Nojus counted them, and noticed that one was missing. For the first time since he had set off from his landing site, he smiled. It was evidence that the Survey pilot had been telling the truth. The leviathans of the planet’s ancient past were dead, but their weathered bones had come to shelter those horrors that yet lived.

“I wonder who lives here.” Nojus muttered for the benefit of the cameras, feigning ignorance. What he’d been told about the creeping ambushers who hid from daylight was precious little, but if even half of it was accurate, his audience was in for a treat.

For those of you who follow both this text feed and Mr. Brand's vidcast episodes, you will probably recognize today's account as being the prelude to his most recent installation. You will probably also know that Mr. Brand barely survived his first day on this recently-surveyed Frontier world; he fared badly in an encounter with with some sort of furred, serpent-like predator, and nearly became extinct along with the titanic creatures that once roamed that world.

Obviously, Mr. Brand survived, or we wouldn't have his account or the video episode he published. Badly injured, it took him almost two whole days to drag himself back to his landing craft, and though he is recovering well from his injuries, it is my understanding that this is the closest that he has come to losing his life since his infamous 2939 run-in with a hive of blade scarabs on Barsamia.

Mr. Brand tried to persuade me to also run a Tales from the Inbox episode describing his agonizing return trip, but I will spare this audience the excruciatingly detailed account of how Nojus covered twenty-four kilometers of alien badlands after being partially disemboweled by a predator that fortunately disliked the taste of his foreign biology. It is sufficient to say that he is in good spirits about the incident, and plans to return to work as soon as his medical team allows.

Details
  • You are here:  
  • Home
  • Tales from the Inbox