2954-02-04 – Tales from the Service: A Net in the Dark
The silence on Raywhite’s bridge lasted several long seconds. Presumably the rest of the crew was waiting for Georgi Rye to explain his vague pronouncement, but he didn’t really know himself what made him so uneasy. Gravitic flux anomalies, usually as a result of high phased matter concentrations, weren’t an unheard of phenomenon, but they were generally benign as long as one steered clear.
As he struggled to put his concern into words, the flux reading came back again, this time climbing to two point two Mahans for an instant before falling back to zero. The ship was getting farther from the cloud. Why would the reading spikes be getting stronger?
“Speak your mind, Mr. Rye.” Lieutenant Kato prompted.
“Skipper, the last reading was stronger, and definitely lasted longer. We’re moving away from the cloud. That shouldn’t be possible, unless-”
“Unless we’re going toward the anomaly, not away from it.” Will Sokol punched new commands into the sensor station. “Recommend full stop on the engines.”
“Agreed.” The skipper waved her hand. “Get me a new range to the cloud, then put all of our active sensors on maximum.”
“Aye.” Georgi and Sokol responded simultaneously, each attending to the controls in front of him.
Georgi brought the cutter’s engines to idle, but they’d been going at eight gees for some minutes; the ship’s velocity was well over a hundred thousand kilometers per hour. “Should I reverse our course, Lieutenant?”
Kato shook her head. “Plot in a random orthogonal course, but don’t execute it yet. We need more information.”
Setting that up took only a few seconds. Georgi gave this operation maximum drive power, capable of fifteen gravities. That couldn’t be sustained long, but it would get them on the new course as fast as possible, and he could dial back once they were clear. Meanwhile, the main tactical plot remained dark and empty, save Raywhite’s pip in the center of the display.
“Strange.” Sokol muttered, then looked up. “Infrared scatter from the cloud suggests it’s still only about a hundred kilometers away.”
Georgi shivered. Something was not right. “The new course, Skipper?”
“Wait.” Kato stood up. “Are you sure, Mr. Sokol? It’s the same distance? Like it’s shadowing us?”
“That’s what it looks like, Lieutenant.” The sensor operator sent the data to the tactical plot, and sure enough, the diffuse cloud formed a vague thirty degree arc directly aft, about a hundred klicks out.
The gravitic flux indicator spiked again, this time to about three Mahans. Georgi started up in his chair. “Shadowing us... Or herding us.”
Sokol turned around. “You think it’s some sort of defense, pushing us away from something?”
“Or toward...” Georgi shook his head once, then slammed his hand down on the button that would execute the change of course. “Toward something we don’t want to meet.”
Lieutenant Kato opened her mouth to object, but at that moment, the diffuse red glow in the tactical plot flashed into momentary stark clarity. It was not a cloud; it was a vast web of ropy structures, densest in the middle and branching out into the darkness until the thinnest extremities faded out into invisibility.
Even as the flash faded, the cloud twisted, its edge curling inwards where Raywhite’s new course passed closest. This attempt to block the ship’s retreat was, however, too slow by far; the net closed only on the void well aft. Had they been running on anything less than full power, Georgi realized, they might not have been so lucky. Perhaps the web, seeing the ship moving initially at eight gees, had assumed this their maximum speed.
Face white, Lieutenant Kato returned to her command chair. “Toward, indeed.” She muttered. “What do you think? Brigands? Astrofauna?”
“If that was a life-form, it’s an order of magnitude bigger than anything in the database.” Sokol’s voice trembled. “Incarnation secret weapon?”
“We’re out in the middle of nowhere.” Kato shook her head. “There are no life-bearing systems for thirty ly. Why put your secret weapon here?”
“Shall we come around and warm the tubes, Skipper?” Osman Snyder at the weapons terminal spoke up. “We’d know a lot more about this thing if we blew off a few samples.”
Georgi prayed silently for the skipper to refuse this suggestion. They did have a mission to complete, and tangling with the perils of the void wasn’t really pertinent to it.
“You know, Mr. Snyder, that’s not a bad idea.” Kato chuckled. “Sokol, can you get us a long range firing solution?”
“On the net? Maybe.” Sokol shrugged. “It’s pretty diffuse. If we use a big enough payload, though, we’re sure to punch a hole in it. But I think Mr. Rye is right. It was herding us toward something, and I think we’re better off sampling that.”
“Agreed. Mr. Rye, reduce acceleration to ten gees.” Kato waved her hand, her face already recovering some of its color. “Work with Mr. Sokol to set up a search pattern that keeps us out of harm’s way. When we find the main body, we’re going to give it – or them – some fresh regrets.”
While there are several documented space-based macrofauna in the Reach, whether these species also live in Sagittarius has not been studied. The hypothesis that this phenomenon might be a sort of drifting predator is, despite its size, not too farfetched, albeit it does presuppose a much higher density of astrofauna in Sagittarius than in Orion.
This hypothesis, as it turns out, was not correct. Neither was this a strange new Incarnation weapon Raywhite was unlucky enough to encounter first, nor the mad invention of enterprising outlaws. This is something stranger indeed than any of the crew’s first three guesses, as next week’s entry will demonstrate. I still don't have any external indications of this story's direct truth or falsity, but every indication is that the submitter knows the ship and its crew well, as all personnel details still match official records.