Tales from the Inbox: Libbie's Gallery

2946-10-16 - Tales from the Inbox: Libbie's Gallery

Not every member of this audience is an interstellar professional.

This seemingly obvious fact often slips my mind, as the goal of Cosmic Background from the beginning has always been to provide variety entertainment for spacers, largely about spacers. However, it is quite true that there are a number of faithful viewers and readers of our content for whom the events described are impossibly distant from their everyday life, farther from their world than even fiction could be.

It is from this side of the audience that Libbie A. brings the story which encouraged her to sell her storefront art gallery in the growing market of Maribel and move back to the Core Worlds. Evidently, after encountering an eccentric denizen of that world and a macabre painting, she decided the Frontier was not sufficiently tamed for her liking.

I find it likely that this story is the result of a psychological warfare campaign by one of Libbie's business competitors, but she is convinced that the man she met was being honest with her. I have seen stills of the painting in question, and can find no records of creatures such as the one depicted on the canvas - I have placed the image Libbie provided on our datasphere hub, and have done my best to do it justice in simple text here, knowing that many of our readers can't access the Centauri datasphere or any of our major mirror hubs.

 "Odd.”

The word, spoken quietly, caused Libbie to jump in surprise. She had been reading an explorer’s unexpectedly gripping account of his escape from a burrowing predator on one of the many worlds of the Frontier, and hadn’t seen the customer enter her shabby little store-front.

Hurriedly stowing her slate reader, Libbie sat up and spied the old man standing in front of one of the larger pieces in the dusty old gallery. Like most of her other wares, the painting was done in the old style, with oil paints not too different from those used to paint the long-crumbled masterpieces of the Earthbound Age of Lights. The only thing different about the modern compositions was the pigments fixed to the canvas – the synthetic colors would not fade with age, not even after the canvas itself crumbled to dust.

As if noticing Libbie for the first time, the old man waved her closer. She marked him as unlikely to buy the piece; his clothing was even shabbier than the little store-front she passed off as a local artists’ gallery, and his white hair was wildly unkempt, sticking out from under the brim of a quaint sun-hat. He was, she suspected, one of Maribel’s old hands; a man who’d seen the colony in its hardscrabble youth as a young man. Most of the old hands, holding agricultural lands around the world’s original colonial settlement, had been hit hard by the relocation of the main spaceport halfway around the world to a more favorable location. Their holdings were still vast by most standards, but they were, other than the value gained from working the land, all but worthless.

“Can I help you, sir?” Libbie asked, sidling around the counter to approach the customer. She realized as she did that the man was examining her least favorite piece in the gallery, and suppressed a shudder. Penniless old hand or not, she hoped he would buy the painting, if only to ensure she never had to look at it again.

“Possibly not.” He looked up for the first time, his piercing crystal-blue eyes seeming at odds with his threadbare appearance. “What can you tell me about this painting?”

The gallery attendant shrugged. “Not much beyond what the placard says, I’m afraid. I’ve sold a few other paintings by the same artist, but this is probably his most… striking.” Libbie doubted her half-hearted sales pitch was having any effect; the old man could almost certainly tell she didn’t like the painting. It wasn’t that it was of poor quality – it was truthfully among the best paintings she’d ever hung in her gallery – it was that the horror depicted emerging from the rust-hued fog in the middle of the piece. Its slavering, toothy maw, three dead, hollow eye sockets set in a skull-like head, and bestial claws seemed all the more chilling on a very human-like frame, restrained by great chains. Libbie had dealt in macabre and even sadistic paintings before without letting any of them get to her, but this one piece had managed to break her usually professional treatment of the art she sold. 

“I would have liked to see the others by this artist.” The old man muttered. “They sold, you say?”

“Yes.” Libbie rallied. “There are images on our datasphere hub, if you are curious.”

“No, that’s all right.” The old man shrugged. “What can you tell me about where he lives?”

“The artist?” Libbie shook her head. “Not much, sorry.” The signature on the paintings was for one “Ciril O”, but the reclusive Ciril never came to Libbie’s gallery directly. He shipped the pieces directly, and received his sale proceeds by the quaint method of sending credit chits to an anonymous mail stop in one of Maribel’s more inhospitable regions. “He likes his anonymity; if I had to guess, he’s only a part-time artistic genius.” Genius he was, Libbie knew; but she also suspected he was a sinister one.

“Of course.” The old man agreed distantly. “But I didn’t mean the painter.” 

“Who then, sir?”

“The subject, who else?” The old man replied, as if this was obvious. "If he's back, it would do to steer clear of the place."

Libbie was silent for several seconds, processing this. The old man, seeming to understand her shock, offered a faint smile. “Nothing? Perhaps that’s for the best, miss.” He sighed, then turned and headed for the door. “Good day.”

 

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Events in Yaxkin City

2946-10-14 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout: Showdown at Congress

What just happened in front of the Congress building in Yaxkin City was nothing short of amazing. It’s the middle of the night here, but Sovanna, Ashton, and I have been in the studio since the end of our usual day, watching the goings-on at Congress from the beginning. Congress was not suspended, the Navy’s budget has been withheld pending a proper house-cleaning, and all three members of the Admiralty Council are said to be preparing letters of resignation. I suspect that the rest of the story is being swept, in order that the Confederated Worlds presents a united front.

Prior to the vote, a few dozen Navy troopers, fully armed and armored, arrived in Yaxkin City and took up defensive positions. Flipping between camera drone feeds, we determined from the unit patches on the troopers’ armor that they were the Marine compliment of Samuel Bosch’s Arrowhawk. Some time later, as the motion to cut funding was being read out in Congress, a much larger force of similarly equipped Navy troopers entered the city, bearing the unit insignias of the battleships Mercia and Koresh. They were halted by the Arrowhawk Marines and met by Bosch himself. After a long and obviously tense conversation which seemed at times almost to devolve into fratricidal gunfire, the new troops fanned out to form a second defensive ring around the city center until the Congressional session ended several hours later.

The official story is that, because of the risk of unrest, Confederated Navy troopers were dispatched from several of the warships in the yards and in orbit to keep the peace around the capitol complex, and it seems that most of the news feeds that are going out along the HyperCast Relay network have adopted this narrative. For those of us on Planet who were watching live, however, it’s clear that this story is not a complete description of what happened.

Nobody in the Navy will ever corroborate this, but what I suspect we witnessed was nothing less than an attempted Naval coup (using the excuse of the Navy’s Article 6 powers) foiled not by civilian officials, but by a faction inside the Navy, represented by, though probably not led by, Captain Bosch.

Ashton is trying to get an interview with Bosch, but I don’t expect him to be successful; it’s only too apparent that it would be career suicide for the man to go to the media with his version of recent events.

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: Leaked Report Verified

2946-10-13 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: Leaked Report Verified

Yesterday I posted a highly skeptical breakdown of the leaked New Rheims Investigation report, expecting that before long we would be seeing the complete report and hearing about the committee staffer who, with an axe to grind, had fabricated the wild conclusions of the leaked document.

I was quite wrong. Since I called attention to its existence on this feed, several waves of takedown orders attempted to destroy all datasphere access to the report, but this had only limited success, and it convinced many that the leaked document was genuine.

Earlier today, Delegate Nisi-Bonn, chair of the New Rheims Committee, came out and verified the leaked report and its conclusion. She said that she had been attempting to clear the document with Naval Intelligence through several drafts, and that they had rejected each one, citing the likelihood of civil unrest. While she didn’t say so, I can only conclude that her staff leaked the report at her direction, and I salute her leadership in this matter.

An emergency motion to cut all Navy funding from the Confederated treasury is on the Congressional schedule for tomorrow’s session, which starts about six hours from the publication of this feed item (remember that our studio is on the other side of the world from Congress). It’s being widely whispered here on Planet at Centauri that the Admiralty Council might attempt to invoke their wartime power to suspend Confederated Congress (Article 6, Sections 3-4) to prevent this action.

I am aware that current events and political content is not the purpose for which many of you ingest this text feed. Feel free to filter out Editor’s Loudspeaker feed items; we have an excellent Tales from the Inbox ready to go live on the 16th, on schedule.

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: Leaked New Rheims Committee Report

2946-10-12 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: Leaked New Rheims Committee Report

For those of you following the investigation into the disaster at New Rheims, the appearance of a supposed leaked copy of the New Rheims Committee final report is not news; here on Centauri it has been available for almost two full days. I did not wish to report on it until some attempt to verify it had been made, and have been in contact with Agent Durand, our favorite Naval Intelligence representative, the office of committee chair Sylja Nisi-Bonn, and other sources friendly to Cosmic Background. While no source was willing or able to verify that this was in fact the committee’s so far unpublished report, some of my sources did confirm that the report contains some accurate details about the closed-door sessions of the committee, and that the committee’s report had been completed more than a week ago.

Unfortunately, that is where my information ends. The supposed leaked report does apparently reflect the actual testimony before the committee, but it could be the product of anyone with knowledge of the proceedings and familiarity with the usual congressional report structure, and its conclusions and findings are not necessarily those of the committee.

In full honesty, I do hope that the wild conclusion the available report reaches is not the genuine conclusion of the proceedings of the previous months. The idea that the disaster was caused inadvertently by a weapons project initiated by the Confederated Navy in violation of the Treaty of Scherer is more horrifying than the most sinister of the conspiracy theories I’ve seen bouncing around the datasphere, but I find it quite unlikely.

This conclusion draws heavily on a combination of the closed-door testimony of Captain Samuel Bosch and two un-named whistleblowers who submitted textual testimony only. Apparently, the Naval Survey Auxiliary training squadron operating at the system’s edge was attacked by an unknown vessel of approximately cruiser size, but the fortunate arrival of Bosch’s patrol squadron interrupted their destruction. The vessel fled toward New Rheims and, when cornered in planetary orbit, performed a Carthage Strike on the planet in its last moments before being destroyed. None of this was in Bosch’s initial recorded testimony, further suggesting an attempted Navy cover-up.

How the committee got from this act of terrorism to a violation of the Treaty of Scherer is not clear; testimony from confidential witnesses is referred to but not included. It is possible that this is a convenient way to further a forged conclusion; New Rheims might just as easily be the victim of a terror plot by Rattanai Imperialists or Ladeonists, though I can’t see the benefit in any of this for either ideology.

Even if this report’s conclusion is not accurate, and the real report is forthcoming in the next few days, this will fuel the conspiracy theories; if it is a fake report, some testimony has been omitted from it, and there will inevitably be datasphere sources who insist that the facts and testimony of the later report not found in this one are hasty fabrications.

If this is in fact the committee’s understanding of the truth of the situation, we are in for an interesting few weeks. Legally speaking, Congress can’t remove the admirals responsible, but expect a move to cut all military funding until those persons are removed.

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