Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Supplemental Report

2946-10-22 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Supplemental Report

Sylja Nisi-Bonn’s committee in Congress released an expanded report earlier today which reflects her staff gaining access to the records of the Navy’s research projects, secret and otherwise. I found it sufficiently interesting to summarize here, but I encourage our readers to locate and look it up themselves.

According to this report, Block A50, the project which resulted in a rogue prototype and the destruction of New Rheims was run by one Colonel Papke, of whom I can find no public news record or profile on the Centauran datasphere. The project was initiated in 2931 with two ships otherwise fit only for surplus: a light cruiser and a frigate whose hull numbers I cannot find.

The objective was at first to produce a full-scale warship which could be operated at full capability, including combat, with only the bridge and command deck crews. Repair and maintenance automation were the focus of the project until early 2940, at which point it seems that there was a change in focus, and the project began to experiment with a fully automated design with, at first, only a lone crew member – the commander. Later, even this onboard control measure was made optional; the ships were configured for full autonomy. It was these 2942 changes which began to violate the Treaty of Scherer, and it seems the Block A50 staff were aware of the illegality of their efforts, and increased their secrecy.

The vessel which caused the catastrophe at New Rheims was evidently the project’s cruiser prototype, which suffered some sort of technical fault while being moved under its own power to the Navy’s Cajetan evaluation range, charged its star drive, and disappeared. This was four days before it appeared off New Rheims, for its ultimately fatal confrontation with a Naval Survey Auxiliary training unit and Samuel Bosch’s patrol squadron. For four days, large portions of the Navy hierarchy knew that they had lost a fully-armed, AI-controlled warship, and no attempt to raise the alarm was made.

It was to prevent exactly this sort of accident for which the automation provisions of the Treaty of Scherer were drafted; as such, Colonel Papke and anyone else who can be linked to the project’s later phase could legitimately be called war criminals, if this were not a peacetime incident.

The Treaty has, until now, largely had no effect on the Navy; the ability of well-trained human personnel to repeatedly change the terms of engagement in order to fool the most optimally configured automated weapon has been a universally acknowledged fact at least since the Corona Wars of the 26th century. Early 2942 would be shortly after the end of the Brushfire War; I can only conclude that the actions of the automated flotilla of Cold Refuge (who obviously are not signatories to the treaty) during the final battles of that conflict might have suggested to some military minds that fully automated warships had a place in the Navy’s line of battle.

I did some independent research on the Navy’s interactions with the Cold Refuge flotilla, and discovered a familiar name – Samuel Bosch. Evidently, Bosch, who served in the Brushfire War, wrote a very favorable report on the military usefulness of the Cold Refuge flotilla, and recommended research into adopting some of their methods in Navy service. He did acknowledge the limitations of the Treaty, of course; his recommendations were carefully written to fall within treaty restrictions.

I now wonder whether my analysis on the fourteenth (Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Events in Yaxkin City) regarding Bosch’s role in the whole scandal was not accurate; it’s likely his report was part of the reason for the change in focus for the Block A50 effort.

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout, Admiralty Council Resignations

2946-10-17 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: New Rheims Fallout: Admiralty Council Resignations

This morning it was announced that all three members of the Navy’s Admiralty Council have announced their resignations following recent revelations about the New Rheims Disaster. Whether this is a tacit admission that they knew all along about the project in violation of the weapons-autonomy provisions of the Treaty of Scherer, acceptance of the fact that the Navy went too far in attempting to cover up the fiasco, or the victory of one faction in the Navy over another, we may never know.

Several other high-ranking officers, including Madara Kruse, the director of the War College who happens to be the last veteran of the Terran-Rattanai War to remain in Navy service, have also announced their resignations. It is being speculated that not all the resignations are of the perpetrators and enablers of the illegal project which destroyed New Rheims; faced with the prospect of a move for Congressional oversight of more of the Navy’s activities in the wake of this scandal, this is probably seen as a good time for senior officers nearing retirement to bow out of the service.

The Naval Survey Auxiliary, reasonably kept completely in the dark about the Navy’s black projects (after all, you don’t even have to be a citizen of one of the Confederated Worlds to join the Auxiliary), has been exempted from the Congressional military funding freeze, as of a measure passed this morning, and its normal activities are resuming. This is a good thing (there are many members of the Naval Survey Auxiliary among this audience, and they provide plenty of content for both Sovanna’s Feedback Loop shows and my own Tales from the Inbox), as it means that the process of opening new Frontier worlds for colonization does not need to wait for the rest of the political process here on Planet to work itself out.

As I mentioned a few days ago, it seems likely that a minority faction within the Navy broke with their chiefs to side with the civilian government over this issue; the coming weeks will show us whether the faction responsible for the whole fiasco retains sufficient power to retaliate against the officers who defied them.

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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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