Tales from the Service: The Spaceport Drill

2949-05-11 – Tales from the Service: The Spaceport Drill

While Navy releases about the third battle at Margaux have still been relatively limited, it seems the Fifth Fleet experienced only limited heavy-unit casualties before withdrawing from Margaux orbit. One Confederated light cruiser is confirmed destroyed (Fearcoast Diver) and two others damaged, but most of the casualties seem to have been the fleet screen - destroyers and fast frigates – which absorbed both the pounding of the new Jericho strike bombers and the close-range gunfire of the cruisers which rushed to exploit the resulting breakup of the Fifth Fleet formation.

While more than two dozen hulls lost can hardly be regarded as a small toll, keep in mind that a Navy destroyer or frigate has a crew of a few dozen or fifty at the most, where a cruiser, even a light cruiser, tends to take at least 150 souls with it when its reactor detonates. The human toll – and the degradation of Fifth Fleet’s offensive striking power – was quite limited, and will be easily made good. None of the seven battleships committed there suffered serious damage, and other than Diver, no major fleet units were lost.

The Navy claims to have destroyed two Tyrant cruisers and disabled two or perhaps three more in the process of the confused battle, with other enemy vessels present suffering minor damage. Unfortunately, the battle, like the last two, left the Incarnation’s fleet in possession of Margaux, and the battle did not permit supporting forces the time to significantly reinforce or to evacuate the Margaux groundside defenders.

A controversy appears to be brewing between the commandant of the Confederated Marines and the admiralty Triumvirate about Admiral Zahariev’s decision not to seek further battle, but I don’t have too many details about that. If it is about Margaux (and I cannot see how it could be otherwise) Frontier Defense Army supreme headquarters on Maribel is very likely to join this war of words on the Marines’ side, and most likely their reports, notoriously more free with information than either of the other services, will be where we in the datacast media hear most of the details.

This week, with Admiral Zahariev’s command staff still out at Margaux with the fleet, we cannot bring you another View from Headquarters interview, and Naval Intelligence has embargoed several interesting accounts sent our way from those who participated in the most recent battle. Instead, I have an account of the Incarnation defector known as Yianna (not her real name). Though not the first Immortal captured and persuaded to cooperate with Naval Intelligence, Yianna is the only one prepared for terroristic warfare, and also the only one who defected willingly. Evidently, with security on Maribel at an all-time high, she has been involved in security exercises with the spaceport city’s constabulary, testing their readiness for similar agents active on the world to sow chaos in the event of an invasion of the system.

According to Farrokh West, the head of spaceport security, it seems these law enforcement agencies are learning the that they have a long way to go. We can only hope they learn quickly.

The cold blade which pressed against Farrokh’s neck might have been as blunt as a gunstock, but he raised his hands off his console slowly anyway. Knowing the intrusion was an exercise didn’t stop his blood from running cold. “Yianna, I assume?”

The woman holding the knife spun Farrokh’s chair around and stood back, flipping the blunt blade over and offering it to him handle-first. Farrokh thought her attractive, in a severe sort of way, though her features were hopelessly marred by the intrusion of a gleaming sickle-curve of metal across her right temple and extending down toward her eye. “Good guess. Out of the chair.”

Farrokh got up and stood aside, taking the knife from the woman as she took his place. He was “dead” for the purposes of the security exercise, so he didn’t try to send any comms messages or alter his status. Even if the intrusion had been real and a sharper blade had slid between his ribs to perforate his heart, the sensors built into his identity badge would take two minutes to detect his death and alert anyone.

Yianna’s fingers flew across the console as she called up every command interface available under Farrokh’s access session and tried each one to see which required authentication she could not bypass. Most resisted, but a distressing number of functions surrendered to her will, and soon alarm indicators lit up the overhead status board as various parts of the spaceport security grid either shut down or started behaving in chaotic fashion.

As the turncoat enemy agent sowed her seeds of discord in the Maribel Spaceport’s usually tidy information systems, Farrokh watched her carefully. Though her hands moved over the console far more rapidly than an unmodified human could manage, and she clearly read the displays far faster than he ever could, she otherwise seemed relatively human. He’d been informed Yianna would participate in some of the week’s exercises, but he hadn’t expected to ever come face-to-face with her.

“Well that’s something in your favor.” Yianna paused her rapid-fire commands to show Farrokh the pumping-station readouts, overlaid with a prominent error message. “I can’t blow the whole complex into orbit from here, can I?”

“I would hope not.” Farrokh rarely touched the pumping systems which moved volatile fuels around the spaceport, so he generally didn’t maintain an active session to those systems. While most larger craft used gravitic engines to reach orbit, smaller and older vessels often used liquid-fuel boosters to supplement their main drive in the scramble for orbital velocity to match the numerous stations and habitats orbiting Maribel. If Yianna had access to those systems, she could very well destroy most of the spaceport, and probably significant parts of the surrounding city.

“I’ll have to do it another way, then.” Yianna stood. “You can trigger your death indicator. Keep the souvenir.”

Farrokh looked down at the curio she’d handed him for the first time. It looked a bit like a miniature of the Marines’ combat knife, with a broad, straight-backed blade and a prominent crossguard. On a sharp example, the clipped point would probably be wickedly harp, but on this one, it came only to a rounded nub. It was a useless trinket, but given how easily it might have been the weapon that killed him under slightly different circumstances, he appreciated its harmlessness more than he might have valued a functional cutting edge.

When Farrokh looked up once more, Yianna was gone. He spun in place, but found no sign of her except the open security door leading into the corridor. She hadn’t made a sound entering, and had been equally silent in departure. He did as instructed, triggering the control on his wrist computer that would simulate an identity-badge death-alert in the security system, not doubting that if there was a way to destroy the entire spaceport – even in simulation only – Yianna would find it.

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Tales from the Service: The Jericho Spearhead

2949-05-04 –Tales from the Service: The Jericho Spearhead  

As we mentioned here last week, the Fifth Fleet engaged Incarnation forces in a third – and, I suspect, final – time in the Margaux system eleven calendar days before this feed item is dispatched. This Third Battle of Margaux was only slightly more successful than the first two.

With most of the ground-side weaponry overrun or depleted of ammunition in the months since the first battle, Admiral Zahariev elected for a simple frontal assault in a manner almost reminiscent of battles from the Terran-Rattanai War, with a cruiser screen far ahead supported by the long-range fire of the seven battlewagons of the Fifth Fleet to prevent Tyrant cruisers from closing to their preferred engagement range. Several cruiser captains sent us rather polemical complaints about this method, but it seems to have gotten the fleet into Margaux orbit with only light casualties.

Unfortunately, that’s where things seem to have gone wrong. In theory, an over-the-horizon missile and strike-squadron duel seemed to favor Fifth Fleet since Incarnation ships carry few missiles. In actuality, the Fifth Fleet’s strike assets, previously equal to the more numerous but less durable Coronach interceptors, critically failed to adjust to a change in enemy equipment and tactics. While these Coronachs could chew up strike squadrons and harass larger vessels, they could not previously pose a threat to heavy warships (their plasma weaponry, specialized for anti-strike combat, is not effective against thick armor-hulls). In this third battle at Margaux, the enemy deployed several squadrons of a larger attack craft capable of carrying ship-killing munitions, catching Fifth Fleet totally off-guard.

While the official Incarnation name for these bomber-analogues is not yet known, the datasphere has given them one – Jericho. Rumor has it that the name was coined by none other than Admiral Zahariev’s favorite adviser, Boszi Kirke-Moore.

Regardless of the truth of this rumor, the fleet was forced to take evasive action when this first attack by “Jericho” bombers, heavily escorted by Coronachs, penetrated the Confederated fleet screen simutaneous to a probing attack by at least a dozen Tyrant cruisers. Badly disrupted, the Confederated fleet was forced to withdraw only thirty hours after entering Margaux orbit.

This week's entry describes the experience of Sergeant Lada Hoekstra, a Magpie section commander who happened to be on fleet-guard patrol when this new form of attack first appeared. Though Hoekstra's daring attempt to break up the formation of the new Jerichos had little effect, her flight captured the day's best sensor recordings of the new type, and I'm sure her data is being scrutinized by Naval Intelligence.

Sergeant Lada Hoekstra watched the new set of icons appear on her display two and three at a time, and quickly lost count as more enemy strike units rose out of the pinkish cloudbank covering the planet below. “Never fails. Warm up the guns, we’ve got at least four full squadrons of air-breathers heading up.”

Swinging her Magpie gunship into a helical turn which would give her a visual on the enemy formation, she soon spotted the parallel lines of contrails left by the enemy strike units’ air-breathing engines. Before Margaux, Incarnation strike units hadn’t carried aero-engines of any kind, but the new breed of Coronach had demonstrated the enemy’s ability to learn on the job. Disposable airfoils and electric engine pods slowed the little one-man craft down considerably, but made them reasonably stable in atmospheric operation. Once these parts were no longer needed, they could be jettisoned as the Coronach broke free of the atmosphere and engaged its main gravitic drive.

Sure enough, as Lada watched, the contrails began to end abruptly as the rising swarm of vessels reached sufficiently rarefied air to switch to gravitic propulsion.

On the board in front of her, the indicators for the Magpie’s twin gunnery stations lit up as Silver and Kita ran their rapid-tracking multi-barrel railgun turrets through their pre-battle paces, verifying that the weapons were ready to give the incoming enemy a hostile reception. On the other three Magpies in her flight, six more gunners were probably doing the same thing while the other three pilots kept station behind Lada’s own rig.

Switching her console mode, Lada woke up the ungainly module mounted in the munition bay below her cockpit. Soon, the three-dimensional display gained a new set of symbols, indicating that the device was tracking targets and preparing a nasty surprise for the intruders. Orders were to shadow any attackers at a distance and harass with long-range railgun fire, but with such a large attack wave, she knew her flight would be chased off the main body in short order. Even with ten times more Magpies, she wouldn’t want to risk a close-quarters melee.

“Sarge, what are they doing?” Uberti, Lada’s wingman, sent over direct comms channel. “This isn’t like the other raids. Look at their trajectory. They must be entirely mad.”

Though Lada generally considered anyone who lived every day with a chip feeding Incarnation propaganda into their nervous system must be at least a little crazy, she saw what Uberti was referring to. Waves of Coronachs had staged raids on the Fifth Fleet almost every hour since it arrived in Margaux orbit with varying levels of success, but this group was different. It had come up out of the atmosphere far from any concentration of light warships which their weaponry could effectively damage, but it was one of the largest groups yet spotted.

Lada quickly plotted the raid group’s course, and shook her head in amazement. If they continued on their current course, the group would approach the heart of the Fifth Fleet battle line, a zone of space swarming with Magpies and thick with watchful fire support frigates designed to shred strike formations with their banks of railguns and laser phasebeams. “They’re suicidal. This has to be a diversion.”

Uberti made a grunt sound, unwilling to contradict his superior directly. “Burning a hundred strike rigs on a diversion? Even for Nate, that’s a bit crazy. Maybe they’re drones on autopilot?”

Lada glared at the pinpricks in her display. Their pre-flight briefing had mentioned that command expected the Incarnation to move in with its cruisers for a close-range engagement, but no glinting, dagger-point prows had yet appeared over the planet’s horizon. “Maybe they know something we don’t know.”

As the incoming formation approached, Lada brought her Magpie onto a parallel course at a safe distance where any pursuit would give her flight plenty of time to escape. The module under her rig’s nose announced that it was ready, and she flipped the safety cover off the center switch on her munitions board. The other three Magpies didn’t have the new weapon for this patrol mission, so hopefully the first one worked as advertised. “Recorders on. Let’s try R&D’s new toy.”

After counting to five to allow the other Magpie pilots to ready every recording device onboard, Lada flipped the switch. The Magpie lurched as explosive bolts fired, kicking the weapon out of its cradle and jolting the nose of the gunship in the opposite direction. Just as Lada reversed this movement, the weapon fired a short burst of its chemical thruster and sped away. In theory, it had locked onto most of the enemy strike craft, and would shortly make its presence known.

Evidently, the launch hadn’t gone unnoticed. A group of eight Coronachs peeled off the main formation and headed towards Lana and her compatriots. Lana highlighted them on her display. “Weapons free. Give these guys reasons to be somewhere else.”

The Magpie vibrated as four railgun barrels began spewing glowing slugs into the path of the still-distant interceptors. A moment later, the tooth-rattling buzz of the big belly-mount railgun added its voice and its own stream of orange motes. A flight of four Magpies couldn’t keep up sustained suppressive fire for very long, but as long as the ammunition held out, the little launches keep a nearly impenetrable cloud of relativistic-speed projectiles between themselves and any opponent.

Just as the guns fell silent to cool off and load more ferromagnetic slugs, Lada’s console pinged. The weapon she’d fired off had reached its effective range. A moment later, two quick flashes lit up the sky in the direction of the enemy formation, and two blips vanished from the board.

“Well that was a bit underwhelming.” Lada quickly delegated the suppressive fire task to Silver so she could focus on the new weapon’s effect. “Only two?”

As if to answer her, three additional Coronachs went dark, and most of the rest of the formation began to break up and take evasive action. It wouldn’t help them; the weapon Lada had fired was still tracking its targets. A sixth Coronach flashed into cinders in the void as a low-power laser pulsed outward from the tumbling weapon module, cutting through the thin skin of the Incarnation interceptor.

Lada switched one of her console panes to the camera feed from the weapon’s targeting system. Though the little camera, swiveling rapidly to follow targets, rarely stopped on anything long enough for the human eye to focus, Lada liked to think the constant blur of motion from the weapon reflected the confusion it was causing in the enemy group.

This sense of satisfaction lasted only long enough for the first of the arrowhead shapes to flit across the screen, however. Lada paused the video, rolled it back, then played it again slowly. The vessel that rolled into view was clearly no Coronach, but neither was it any form of Confederated strike craft. Unconcerned with this, the weapon’s simple targeting system fired its phasebeam at the squat, angular vehicle, registered a hit, and moved on, assuming that a hit meant a kill even though nothing had vanished from the display. Whatever the shape was, it was too durable to be bothered by the overcharged point defense laser in the experimental weapon.

“See that central group? They didn’t go evasive.” Uberti, Lada realized, hadn’t been tapped into the weapon’s visual feed. “They haven’t lost one either.”

Lada glanced in the direction the enemy was heading – right for the heart of the battle line. She suspected she knew now what the game was. “Kita, get on the comms and tell anyone who will listen that we’re not just dealing with Coronachs out here. These are something new.”

“What do you mean-”

Lada cut away from the comms channel before Kita could finish his inane question; she knew he’d heard her. “We’re going in for that central group.”

“Going in, Sarge? Are you nuts? There are at least a hundred-”

Lada cut Uberti’s comm with a swift jab at her override controls. In theory, a flight of a few dozen of some new strike variant shouldn’t pose a threat to the battle line, but if they didn’t, the Incarnation using them that way didn’t make much sense. Pulling on the controls, she lined up her Magpie on an intercept course with the odd enemy formation. “One pass at high speed to break them up, then we’re out for home. Keep your lenses and guns rolling and don’t stop for anything.”

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Tales from the Service: A Spacer’s Intervention

2949-04-27 – Tales from the Service: A Spacer’s Intervention 

Thank you all for your kind messages of well-wishing during my illness. Fortunately the infection I came down with was never life-threatening, and I have now made (according to the medics) a full recovery.)

We’ve covered the fighting on Margaux and the Fifth Fleet’s attempts to break the orbital blockade around the planet extensively on this feed. In the last few days, the Fifth Fleet battle line made another attempt to scatter the Incarnation fleet in the system.

While reports are still coming in about the results of the battle, I believe it safe to use the word “attempt” here. Throughout the battle we’ve maintained HyperComm contact with the planet via the secondary relay station set up by the Navy in the outer system, and groundside reports filtering back to us at Maribel along this line of communication indicate no flood of reinforcements or orbital bombardment of enemy positions has taken place on the Causey Plana battlefield, even as the Navy has reported a limited success there.

When Admiral Zahariev’s staff releases additional information on the action in Margaux, we’ll cover it here. I suspect that means you can expect additional details next week.

This week by popular request we’ll continue with another section from the account sent in by Steffen McTaggart, skipper of the heavy salvage tug Aram Sangster. They did manage to get their charge back to Maribel on time to get paid, but to do it, Mr. McTaggart needed to take certain drastic measures.

“Sorry, Boss, I don’t know what happened.”

As Steffen stared out the command deck’s forward viewpanel at the two halves of the wrecked Ravi Songbird, gripping the back of his command chair hard enough to pop the seams on the upholstery, he took three slow, deliberate breaths. At least Freddy Tyson had the good sense to sound convincing about his apology.

Despite the torch ops specialist’s protest, they both knew why the wreck had split in two. Freddy Tyson had made a mistake in his calculations and instructions to his torch-jockeys, and in their attempt to shore up the sundered ship’s remaining structural integrity, Sangster’s swarm of plasma-welder-armed launches had touched off a catastrophic failure of the last few components holding the smashed cruiser together.

Sober, Tyson could out-perform any other torch ops expert in the Reach. He could even, Steffen was certain, direct the torch-jocks through the complex dance required to reattach the two tumbling halves of the vessel into one reasonably stable unit. If he did, Sangster could still tow the wreck through several star drive hops back to Maribel within the Navy’s time constraints and get paid.

Unfortunately, a drunk Freddy Tyson invariably made mistakes, and the current two-piece status of Songbird told Steffen that the drunk version of his torch operations officer was the one currently aboard. “Call the torches back, Freddy.”

“Call them back? I can still-”

“No, you can’t.” Steffen felt the last few stitches holding the padded headrest of his chair fail under his white-knuckled grip. “Go off-shift and get some sleep. We’ll try again at the top of third shift.”

Jeanette Vang, face pale, pretended not to notice her boss’s quiet fury, and Steffen appreciated her tact. She knew as well as Steffen that nobody else aboard had a chance of directing the salvage effort in time; if they couldn’t guarantee the Freddy Tyson who woke nine hours later was the sober one, they would be missing the contract deadline and most of the Navy’s credit bounty for the Ravi Songbird’s recovery.

Steffen knew what he had to do, but he knew that the moment he did it, he would earn the enmity of every spacer aboard his overworked ship. “Make sure those launches get back aboard.” He pointed to Vang, and judging by the wide-eyed nod that constituted her only response, he knee she would.

Hobbling into the lift, Steffen directed it to take him to the crew berth deck, his jaw clenched. Freddy Tyson’s hand-made still squatted in one of the unused cabins, producing noxious moonshine at a prodigious rate thanks to the automation features some of the engineers had helped Tyson build into the rig. No doubt dozens of liters of its output sat in stashes in each crew-member’s private effects, but Steffen didn’t care about most of that; it would be consumed gradually and safely.

Approaching the still cabin, Steffen stared down a crew tech emerging from the door with two newly-filled flasks until the young spacer scrambled out of the way and rushed down the corridor.

When he entered, he found the machinery bubbling and muttering contentedly, unaware of its doom. In another state of mind, Steffen might have switched off the power, disassembled the rig, and made off with critical components to use as leverage. In his current state, however, he reached into his pocket for the tiny shredder grenade he always carried, a holdover habit from his Navy days. Though small and designed to minimize damage to shipboard pressure-seals, the device could still turn a room full of people into a neatly homogenized mass of lightly browned hamburger.

It wouldn’t have quite the same effect on distilling equipment, but he knew it would destroy the still utterly until Sangster returned to port, where Tyson could buy, beg, and steal enough equipment to rebuild  it. Scowling, Steffen armed the weapon, rolled it underneath the machinery, and backed out, overriding the door controls to seal the cabin behind him.

By the time the crump of an explosion and a shrieking alarm indicated that Tyson’s still was no more, Steffen was already halfway down the corridor once more, headed for the torch operations officer’s own cabin. Before damage control had responded to the blast, Steffen had already overridden Tyson’s cabin door and marched inside.

The first few stashes of moonshine proved fairly easy to locate – Freddy Tyson had never been terribly creative. Dumping the acrid liquid into the food-processor’s return receptacle one flask, jug, or bottle at a time, Steffen felt the dull thump of a secondary explosion down the hall through his boots. He hoped he hadn’t done Sangster any lasting damage, and that pouring such a vast amount of ethanol into the food-reclamation piping would not lead to a sanitation system failure, but either of those would be an acceptable loss to have his torch operations expert sober.

“What are you-”

Steffen turned away from the return receptacle in time to see Freddy Tyson charging across the small cabin at him, face ashen. Rather than fight over the bottles, Steffen dropped them and turned to wrap the younger, smaller man in an inelegant but inescapable bear hug, slowly pushing him away from the still-intact moonshine bottles. “You’ve lost it, Freddy.”

“Don’t do this, Steffen.” Freddy struggled and squirmed to free himself. “Don’t. I’m begging you.”

Tyson had never been a military man and had never been in a proper fight as long as he’d been aboard Sangster, so it took Steffen, even in his advanced age, only a few moments to push Freddy bodily out of the cabin.

“Seal door. Command override.”

As Tyson struggled shakily to his feet, the computer obeyed Steffen’s instructions, interposing the metal panel between them.

Ignoring furious pounding on the other side and the muffled screaming and begging of his subordinate, Steffen returned to his task, emptying the bottles one at a time, then searching the cabin for more hidden stashes. Freddy Tyson would be sober when it came time to re-attach the two halves of Ravi Songbird and tow her back to Maribel. If that meant this would be Freddy Tyson’s last cruise aboard Sangster, that was a price Steffen and his remaining crew would just have to pay.

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Tales from the Service: The Last Straggler

2949-04-20 – Tales from the Service: The Last Straggler

Rumor has it that some time this week the Fifth Fleet is going to try to break through to Margaux one more time. The battle on the ground there has taken several turns for the worse, and we’ve got a flood of reports reaching us here that the Confederated garrison is being pushed further back into a shrinking pocket of the Causey Plana.

With our own ship Saint-Lô not quite ready for action since its last tangle with the Incarnation, Duncan and I are still stuck on the sidelines, waiting for news like everyone else. Even though he’s still very much ill, I have to respect the man’s work ethic – he spent hours these last few days combing the inbox, then helping prepare this story for publication. The ship’s doctor has told him to take it easy, but apparently that’s not likely.

Nyah Kamal, a F.D.A. private on Margaux, sent in our story this week. She was the only survivor of a forward outpost at a place called Small Comfort which came under attack by the Incarnation and was evacuated. Though most of the troops tried to filter through enemy lines in small groups, only Private Kamal made it back to friendly lines.

At this point, victory on the ground seems an impossibility unless the fleet can break through and open sustained supply lines to the Causey troops. Unless that happens, all their fighting does is delay the inevitable.

Nyah Kamal crouched under the meager shade of a whetleaf tree, prying open the plastic seal of her last field ration. She had left the aptly-named town of Small Comfort with fifteen of the canisters in her pack, the same number allotted to each member of her squad, but the path behind her was littered with the broken shells of both rations and soldiers expended along the way, and once she gulped down the last ration, she would be truly alone, beyond the dwindling resources of the shrinking Causey redoubt.

Scooping some of the gritty, cursorily-flavored nutrient paste inside the canister out with her fingers would be the quickest way to quiet her stomach, but Nyah knew better. With most of Margaux’s biomatter containing heavy metals and compounds toxic to human life, her gloved hands couldn’t be trusted anywhere near her mouth. Instead, she used the maneuver most of the planet’s F.D.A garrison had long since mastered – she poured just enough water from her canteen into the canister to loosen the paste, shook it together, then sucked the soupy mixture down as rapidly as possible.

As soon as the canister was dry, Nyah tossed it into the sun-baked rocks and turned to the figure slumped against the trunk of the tree behind her. “Ugh. Why did it have to be sarkey hash… The taste of that stuff makes starving sound pretty good.”

The figure didn’t answer, of course. Corporal Gregor Rose, Nyah’s last squad-mate, had been wounded the previous day when they’d been jumped by an Incarnation air-skiff, and though she’d bound up his wounds as best as their meager supplies would allow, Rose had died during the night.

Nyah had already collected the batteries and slug-magazines from the dead man’s rail carbine and checked his pack for ration canisters. His ident-tag, along with the tags of six others, was already in her pocket. She had no more reasons to linger, and as the late morning heat turned the canyons into rock ovens, she certainly didn’t want to be near Rose’s body as the local decomposing microbes began to work in his flesh.

Nyah had at least thirty kilometers still to go before she rejoined the shrinking Causey perimeter, and in the treacherous, winding canyons of the inner Causey, she knew she wouldn’t make the whole trip in a single day. More likely, it would be three or even four local days before she could next pull rations from a Confederated supply dump; the road ahead would be unpleasant, but as long as she found water, stayed out of trouble, and didn’t buy a plot like the others, she knew she could make it.

Extending her helmet’s tinted visor over her face, Nyah clambered out from under the whetleaf’s sprawling leaves, careful not to touch them. Her light scout armor wasn’t quite hermetically sealed anymore, but that at least she’d been prepared for, with a whole bottle of antidote tablets which could neutralize low doses of most of the toxins found in the planet’s environment. The visor’s heads-up display also gave her a compass and database of terrain maps to work with.

Unfortunately, without the suite of sensors fitted to the more advanced and expensive armor varieties used by the Confederated Marines, Nyah had one problem ahead of her which she couldn’t predict or plan around – the enemy. The terrain ahead of her was as lousy with Incarnation troops as the terrain behind, and the canyons and crags funneled both sides into a small number of narrow channels where clashes were inevitable and the terrain favored whoever was already dug in.

In the first few days out from Small Comfort, Nyah’s squad had been able to blast its way through the hastily-prepared Incarnation pickets blocking their path, but as their numbers and larger munitions had dwindled, they’d been forced to sneak through or even scale the precipitous canyon walls to bypass their foes, opening themselves up to being spotted and attacked by increasingly numerous enemy air-skiffs and ground-attack aircraft. Now that she was alone, Nyah could move either on the surface or in the canyons with only minimal threat of being spotted from the air, but if she was spotted by even a small group of Incarnation troops, she couldn’t possibly hope to shoot her way out.

Before Nyah had gotten very far from Corporal Rose’s final resting place, she heard the sounds of boots crunching on gravel behind her. Diving down onto a ledge overhanging into a nearby canyon, she carefully lifted her head to look in the direction of the sound. Three Incarnation conscripts, laser rifles leveled at the corpse, advanced cautiously into the shade of the whetleaf tree – no doubt this was a patrol whose sharp, implant-aided senses had spotted the pair’s trail. Had Nyah tarried much longer, she might have been set upon herself.

As the soldiers prodded the dead F.D.A. infantryman, Nyah’s eyes fell on their bulging packs. No doubt the trio had set off from their camp with less than fifteen days of rations. F.D.A. barracks scuttlebutt suggested that captured Incarnation rations were somewhat better-tasting than what the Frontier Defense Army supplied, but her main concern was not being slowed down by hunger. Slowly, she brought her carbine up and set it for accurate burst-fire.

With a rippling crack, Nyah’s carbine spat a half-dozen ferroceramic slugs, and one of the soldiers stumbled and fell. Before the sensor implants of the others could pinpoint her, she adjusted her aim and fired again, and the second man dropped. The third enemy soldier raised his rifle and fired once, but managed only to scorch the rock ledge near Nyah’s shoulder before her third burst cut him down as well.

Nyah counted ten seconds to make sure no other Nate soldiers appeared, then scrambled back to the whetstone tree. Corporal Rose’s corpse, undisturbed by the firefight, still sat slumped against the trunk, now with three enemy dead at his feet.

“Thanks for the assist, Corporal. Couldn’t have done it without you.” Nyah knew the sound might attract other enemy troops, so she simply cut each man’s pack open with her knife and spilled the contents into the gritty dirt.

 After determining that the triangular foil-coated blocks in their packs were rations, she stuffed several of these into her own pack. Most of the other equipment the enemy soldiers carried was unfamiliar – a folding frame-device with holographic display lenses was probably intended for servicing and calibrating Incarnation laser rifles, but she couldn’t begin to guess at the purpose of the rest.

Other than a half-empty water canteen from one dead man’s belt, she left the rest of their gear where it lay. “Help yourself to the rest, Rose.” Nyah stood, saluted the dead man, then checked her heads-up display and loped off toward friendly lines once more, feeling unreasonably optimistic. For all that she was probably going to die before she saw dawn again, at least she could be sure she would do it well fed.

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