Tales from the Service: The First Test of Force 73

2953-01-01 – Tales from the Service: The First Test of Force 73 

While nobody with this embed team (or any other I am aware of) was assigned to the ships of Force 73, we nevertheless do get some datasphere traffic leaking back to us from this squadron. They seem to have arrived in Kyaroh space in mid-December, but specifics are unclear; their mission is far removed from any active HyperComm relay. I’m not even sure how their message traffic is getting relayed back to us; most likely the fleet has a courier route set up to provide slow communication with this force. 

Naval Intelligence has been holding up several of the accounts from this force for further analysis, but we have one which they permitted, which corresponds with the public announcement of the twenty-ninth that Force 73 has fought an engagement against an Incarnation flotilla over one of the Kyaroh colonies and gained control of the orbit-space as a result. Casualties of this battle on either side were not announced. 

Our source for this story claims to be the first mate of a relatively modern fleet destroyer operating with Force 73 that took part in this battle; while he did proide the name of his ship, Naval Intelligence required us to alter or conceal both his name and the name of his ship as a condition of publication. 

Rashid Winton held his breath as a spread of red spearpoints indicating enemy missiles hurtled toward the center of the tactical display. Fountains of yellow mist indicating railshot and countermeasures leapt out to meet them, and missile after missile winked out.  

It was almost enough. There was a moment of wrenching acceleration that threatened to pull his insides out his mouth as the automatic helm controls threw Muskins into an emerency random-walk evasive maneuver and overpowered even the inertial isolation, then a roar louder than any thunder and a shriek of distant tearing metal. The lights on the bridge flickered, then went out completely, taking with them the tactical plot. 

“All stations, damage report!”  

If it weren’t for the earpiece in Rashid’s ear, he never would have heard the skipper’s order. Shaking his head, he swallowed hard against a spinning head and sudden urge to vomit and looked around the bridge. There was no obvious sign of damage to the compartment, but the other five people at the command stations were all slumped insensate against their consoles or just recovering from the effects of a few tenths of a second of extreme acceleration.  Fortunately they’d all been strapped into the crash-padded chairs, so the worst injury in the compartment would be on the order of cracked ribs. 

“Outer hull breached from frame 38 to frame 72.” Lieutenant Sendai, the damage control officer, was the first to respond. “We’ve got several compartments decompressed on decks four and five. plot We’re on batteries ship-wide, and the gravitic drive is offline. Central weapons control and most of the batteries are unresponsive.” 

“We lose the reactor?” 

Even as the skipper asked this, the lights flickered back on one by one, and consoles all across the bridge went from dim low-power mode to full power holographic displays. The tactical plot came back on a second later. 

“Automatic control cut reactor power and tried to start a scram.” MacGowan, the ship’s engineer, sounded shaky on the comms. “But we managed to abort. Reactor power at fifty percent and climbing.” 

“Missile systems operational.” The voice on the comms wasn’t the usual officer for that station, but was nevertheless cool and professional. “Reload ongoing for all launch cells.” 

“Looks like we lost a ventral shear-screen emitter.” Sorian, sitting directly ahead of Rashid, finally announced. As she did, she turned toward the skipper, and Rashid saw an ugly discoloration spreading across her right cheekbone. “I’ll reconfigure the emitter net to cover the gap.” 

“Axial cannon online, but the auto-loader's knocked out. We are prepping for manual reload.” 

“Hellfire, that was close.” Rashid muttered, already scanning the tactical plot. Since their ship had briefly lost drive power, it had fallen back and out of formation; the rest of the squadron was still charging ahead toward the planet and the cluster of enemy ships trying to block their way. Muskins was, for the moment, forgotten. A crippled destroyer could always be recovered or finished off later, at the victor’s leisure. 

“Sendai, get us central fire control and railguns. Forget the engines.” The skipper made a growling sound in the back of his throat. “How’s our sensor coverage?” 

Rashid sat up and quickly scanned his console. “Warning and search sensors are operational. We seem to have lost a few target acquisition emitters.” 

“Keep those active sensors pinging and all the railguns we have warm. If a flight of Coronachs catches us now, we’re on our own.” 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Surveyor’s Monument

2952-12-25 – Tales from the Inbox: The Surveyor’s Monument 

Marta K. took a deep breath as she stepped off the lander’s ramp and onto the gravelly dirt of Theobald’s Rest. The wind that whipped her short black hair bore an acrid and salty taste, but she knew well that the place was eminently habitable, with no serious atmosphere toxins.  

In fact, it had already been successfully climate-formed in preparation for colonists, and those settlers had been on their way when nearby Adimari Valis had been invaded. The colonists had, probably wisely, turned their little flotilla around and returned to Maribel rather than try to set up their new home under the nose of a hostile fleet.  

Marta walked around her lander once, looking for any sign of loose dirt, damage to the craft, or anything else that might render it unable to lift off. She had learned, mostly from the experience of her hapless peers, not to leave anything to chance when she was the only sapient on a whole planet. Anyone who did might end up being that planet’s permanent inhabitant. 

She had come to Theobald’s Rest to investigate whether the Incarnation had put its talons into the world’s stony soil, but that mission didn’t really require landing. Indeed, she had finished that task in a few dozen orbits; there was nothing to see on the ground, and no artificial objects orbited the world except the satellites Naval Survey had left to monitor the ecological and climatological conditions. Landing was in service of a personal objective. 

The lander had come down to a computer-selected landing site, the flat top of a low, stony hill overlooking a broad plain. Behind it, rugged slopes marched upwards toward a tremendous, white-capped mountain peak, the southernmost end of a long line of mountains. As Marta worked her way down the hillside, tiny, lizardlike animals skittered away from her feet and into any convenient hiding place. She paid them no mind, except to verify that they didn’t resemble any of the five dangerous species known on this world. 

Long ago, Marta had lost count of the number of worlds she’d put boots down on somewhere north of five hundred. Most of them were just catalog numbers and file entries; habitable perhaps, but situated in poor locations or with undesirable conditions that saw them passed by for colonization. A dozen or so had been on the colonization track at one point or another, but only three had actually been picked up by the Colonial Initiative and assigned colonists. Of those three “babies,” only the eldest – 87216531c, now known as Theobald's Rest – had actually had colonists dispatched.  

Marta had been a frontier surveyor for most of her life, and it was, in most respects, a solitary and damned thankless life. She always traveled the stars alone, except for a brief period when, love-struck, she’d married a colleague and tried to merge their affairs. That had ended as soon as it had started, as most frontier romances tended to, and she’s learned her lesson. The only lasting result of her forty odd years charting, exploring, and cataloging habitable worlds along the Coreward Frontier was the addition of three worlds to the Initiative’s roster. It was not much, but it could bear much fruit in generations to come. 

Knowing that as soon as the war was over, thousands of eager settlers and vast quantities of machinery would be making long-delayed planetfall down there on the plain, Marta wanted to leave them a message. She had hoped to be there looking on when they landed, or at least to visit within the first few months to see their early successes, but years of war had brought colonization no closer and retirement was creeping up on her. Marta was still sharp as ever, but it wouldn’t be long before she was too old for solitary wandering and survey missions. Perhaps by the time the colonists arrived, she would no longer be able to visit. 

At last, halfway down the slope, Marta found a spot ideal for her purpose, a relatively smooth vertical cliff formed by a freshly broken slab of hard granite. Sizing up the rock face, she unslung the plasma cutter off her shoulder, warmed it up, and aimed it up at the top. She would have to do things freehand of course, but this was far from her first pass at cutter graffiti. 

After a moment’s thought, Marta pressed the trigger, adjusted the cutter’s beam length, and carved her message into the rock: 

BLESS ALL WHO SETTLE 
 ON THIS GOOD WORLD 
AND THOSE BORN TO 
CALL IT HOME 

M.B.K., SURVEYOR, AD 2952 

With that, she lowered the cutter, surveyed her work, and started back up the slope with a wistful smile on her face.  

Though Marta has not been in many of our episodes, you may recall that when we launched the text feed series, one of her adventures was the first Tale from the Inbox presented here. Now apparently nearing retirement, she responded with this brief story when I reached out to her to check in on her current situation, and I could think of nothing better to schedule for our Dec. 25th entry. Obviously we will be enjoying the Feast day here at Sagittarius Gate in the traditional Navy way, with service, food, good company, and singing. 2952 is drawing to a close, and we have many hopes for the new year, perhaps the last of this sorry conflict. 

Marta, even now, is looking forward to peace, and the restarting of such joyful activities as colonization of new Frontier worlds to be lived on for generations to come. Perhaps Theobald’s Rest will become a great metropolis like Maribel some day, or perhaps it will be an insignificant and peaceful place, but whatever becomes of it will be a blessing to many millions spanning the centuries. 

Nojus and the rest of the team wish you all a happy Emmanuel Feast, or Christ Mass, or whatever variation of the holiday your family celebrates. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Dirtside Job

2952-12-18 – Tales from the Inbox: The Dirtside Job 

The last we heard of captain Svetlana Cremonesi of the Tycho Spike, she was trying to save Nestor Palazzo from ferrying a group of Gilhedat on their diplomatic mission. Though she was not entirely successful in this effort, Mr. Palazzo does seem to have benefitted from her intervention all the same. 

When I reached out to see if she had any new accounts of her travels as a light-duty spacer here in Sagittarius, her first response was a rather colorful refusal, which I am not permitted to publish because of our editorial rules on profanity. 

Evidently she changed her mind, because a few days later this story found its way into my inbox. It reveals tantalizingly little about her current activities, but much about her current fears, which still revolve around unwelcome life-forms getting aboard her ship. 

An unfamiliar alarm woke Svetlana from troubled sleep. As usual, she was vertical and pulling on her trousers before she was even fully awake to marvel at the fact that she had never heard this particular alarm sound before, in her decade of operating Tycho Spike. 

“Hells, what now.” Svetlana hopped over to the desk console and smacked the surface to wake the display. As she wrestled with the catches that fastened a standard set of spacer’s smart-fabric fatigues, her eyes roved across the ship status panel that appeared there. At first, the board looked normal - nothing was on fire, nothing important was unpowered that should be, and nothing was powered that shouldn’t be. 

It was the outside temperature reading – thirty Celsius – that snapped Svetlana back to her senses. Her ship wasn’t on an automated course between station and system jump limit, or vice versa. Nor was it docked to the side of one of Confederated Sagittarius’s many stations, awaiting cargo.  

No, she had landed on a planet – a habitable planet at that – and that explained the unfamiliarity of the alarm. She hadn’t actually landed Tycho Spike since the first year she’d owned it, after all. It must be related to external conditions, not to the ship’s internal status. 

Sure enough, when Svetlana called up the detailed alert list, it was full of “PERIMETER BREACH SENSED” - a clear enough phrase, though even in its clarity she was confused. She hadn’t realized her ship had a ground perimeter sensor system installed.  

A few more commands called up the external camera feeds, and soon she was looking out four digital windows onto the rolling, mauve-colored grassland that went on for miles around her landing site. She’d gotten a decent look at the place from orbit, but had landed after dark, so this was her first real look at the world she’d landed on.  

Svetlana had to admit it was beautiful, even though normally she didn’t go in for any place that threatened to get her boots dirty. Supposedly the place was on the Survey colonization list for after the war, and she hoped whichever ship-full of clod-shovelers landed here first were wise enough to respect what they had been given. 

She had only a moment to appreciate the aesthetics of the world, though. At least two dark shapes were weaving through the tall grassy plants toward the ship. When visible light offered no clue as to what they were, she switched to thermal, but that was no good either, showing only bright, hot ellipses. 

At first, Svetlana thought these might be emissaries of her employer – this was no pleasure trip, after all – but something in the way they moved suggested wild animals, not people. Normally, those would be no threat to her or the ship, but this was an unfamiliar world, one for which Survey had never published a biosphere report. What was out there could be almost anything. 

Svetlana grabbed her gun-belt and fastened it around her hips. She’d heard all the usual watering-hole stories of alien peril: acid-spitting horrors that could eat holes in a small ship’s hull, titanic megafauna which could tear metal like tissue paper, hive-mind drones kamikaze-diving into air-vents and access ports by the thousands, and of course the ever-popular monsters composed largely of phased matter, capable of sidling through solid bulkheads to rend the unsuspecting crew within. No doubt such fears were misplaced on such a pleasant world as this, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared. 

As Svetlana configured the hull loudspeakers to shriek an alarm every time the proximity alert went off, one of the creatures briefly revealed itself in a clearing. It was long of body and low to the ground, slinking forward with its narrow muzzle lowered as if smelling its way. She saw no eyes, nor ears, nor fur; the body seemed almost a sculpture of liquid obsidian, rippling with the motion of every tendon and muscle. She shuddered at the idea of running into something like that unawares. Hopefully her employer’s goons knew the local hazards better than she. 

Even as she thought this, the chime of incoming comms sounded. Svetlana brought up the lights, rubbed the remaining sleep out of her eyes, then hurried forward to the cockpit to take it from there, in case a video transmission was requested. 

Sure enough, the incoming request was from Piers Jerome, her current employer. His ship, the Leyla Robbins, was entering orbit, and had presumably spotted her transmitter.  

Jerome’s chubby face and insincere grin filled the center viewpanel as soon as Svetlana slapped the “accept” control. “I’m surprised you beat us here, Captain Cremonesi.” 

“It wasn’t hard to find.” Svetlana shrugged. “I got here day before yesterday and didn’t see you for three shifts, so I decided to land.” 

“Shame you don’t have high-end gravimetric sensors. We were already in-system by then.” Jerome clapped his hands together. “We will be planetside in about two hours.” 

“I’ll be waiting.” Svetlana hesitated. “Going to be all kinds of fun transferring cargo in normal-gee. Plus there’s a good bit of local wildlife skulking around down here.”  

Jerome waved one pudgy hand. “Xenolife shouldn’t give us much trouble. Nothing on this world is classified as sapient.” 

“I’m more concerned about it being classified as hungry.” Svetlana started as another perimeter alarm sounded. “But we’ll figure that out when you get here. Tycho Spike out.” 

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Tales from the Inbox: Ramiro’s Golden Cage

2952-12-11 – Tales from the Inbox: Ramiro’s Golden Cage 

Of all the characters who have appeared many times in this space in recent years, none has gotten more attention from the audience – and more queries for messages to be forwarded – than Ramiro W. Obviously this isn’t his real name, nor is Jen Daley really the name of his little ship, but going by a pseudonym in this space is his own choice. 

When last Ramiro graced this space, he was on contract with Survey ferrying Gilhedat diplomats from Maribel to the Core. At the time, Gilhedat encounters were still very much a novelty, and the ease with which one member of this group saw through him was still mysterious. It has not yet been two years since then, and those encounters now seem so mundane, at least to this embed team, who regularly encounters these golden-skinned diplomats on The Sprawl. 

It is unknown what Ramiro has been doing since the end of the diplomatic contract (which must have been a month or so after his last appearance in this text feed at the very latest), but when I reached out last month to see if he was willing to share anything about his current status, I did get a response, cryptic though it was. 

What happened to Livia he did not say, unfortunately, but the subject’s total absence from the message suggests he knows more than he’s saying. Perhaps Livia’s new friends have the official backing they assured him they had, and perhaps they didn’t; it’s impossible to say. 

He also did not provide any idea of when the following took place, except that it is relatively recently. 

Ramiro paused at the airlock to put Jen Daley into maximum security mode, and listened to the gratifying series of serve hums and mechanical thumps of a half-dozen internal  hardened doors closing. When he stepped away from it, the outer airlock, too, slid shut with a definitive clank and a series of clicking noises as its locks engaged. He’d had the ship’s intruder defenses upgraded back in the Core Worlds not because there was anything aboard worth stealing, but because too many times recently it had been host to people who might attract unwanted attention. 

As his datapack and earpiece cycled over to station-side configuration, Ramiro heard the triple chime of message delivery. Most datasphere communication had been forwarded to him hours before he’d docked, of course; anything he was getting now had been sent specifically to his local comms handle, and had not been captured by any of the system filters that would either discard it as unwanted or forward it to his general datasphere presence associated with Jen Daley. 

Ramiro frowned. He’d set things up to avoid that happening; it was bad business to miss messages to any of his local contact points. He pulled up the message data on his wristcuff, but learned nothing; the message was untitled and lacked any of the metadata tags indicative of being a business query. The name of the sender, one Scott Vacovich, was entirely unfamiliar. Fortunately, though Ramiro had been out of Maribel for many weeks, the message was only three days old. 

After checking that his sidearm was secured correctly to be in compliance with station regulations, he queued up this mystery message for audio playback and crossed the short boarding tunnel to the docking ring. He’d arrived in the middle of the local night shift, so traffic was rather light, with only a few spacers and local technicians hurrying about on various errands. 

“Hello there.” The smooth, silky voice on the recording was familiar, but it was no comfort to Ramiro. “Whatever you’re doing back in Maribel, it can wait. I’ve got-” 

Ramiro paused the recording, his frown deepening into a scowl. He was tired of being an errand boy for official agencies. It paid well, but he would prefer lower pay if it meant getting his freedom back. He’d thought after his last run, six or seven months before, that he was no longer of any use to Naval Intelligence or to the other military-offshoot outfits which Intelligence had sold his services to. Apparently he’d been wrong. Otherwise, there was no reason for “Sera” to be bothering him again. 

“I’ve got another job for you. No passengers this time, so I’m sure you won’t mind. A mutual friend has something very important that needs to be run over to Botched Ravi. Don’t worry about fetching it, the cargo system already has the loading request queued up.” 

Ramiro, passing one of the many viewpanels on the docking ring, looked out toward the boxy Jen Daley. Sure enough, a cargo crane was already moving a cylindrical M40 cargo container toward one of the ship’s pair of external container sockets. Short of putting the ship’s own crane in the way, there was nothing that could stop that damned cargo from being aboard his ship. 

“As usual, we’ll pay you on delivery. There’s no rush, dear, but do try to avoid attracting any unwanted attention.” 

The message ended there. There was no mention of what Ramiro would be paid; no matter the number, it was not worth the lack of control over his own destiny. He couldn’t refuse or even reply, of course; the Scott Vacovich profile was probably a burner account, like several others “Sera” had used to give him his assignments lately. 

Ramiro watched the crane line up the cargo pod with the socket on his ship, then turned away and took a moment to deactivate his local Maribel datasphere profile. It wouldn’t stop “Sera” from contacting him, but it would make it harder for her to ambush him like this again. Perhaps it was time to quit the Coreward Frontier and try his luck back in Gal-West, a backwater which none of the military or intelligence institutions cared much for. He had plenty of savings and a much better equipped ship now than he had when he’d left there the first time; perhaps he could even try his luck in the more affluent Memoire de Paix. 

Before he could do any of that, though, Ramiro had to be rid of the cargo. And to do that without attracting attention he’d need to spend a reasonable amount of time on the station and make some pretense of looking for passengers going into Farthing’s Chain. With a sigh, he headed for the lifts which would take him down to the commercial section. 

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