Tales from the Service: Cowardice in Mourning

2953-06-04 – Tales from the Service: Cowardice in Mourning 

As several commentors have pointed out, I absolutely have toned down the profanity in this account before publishing it. As a Marine sergeant, our contributor is an artist with profanity, but this colorful and evocative language would not meet the Cosmic Background editorial standards. You will have to re-introduce it in your imagination, if you are familiar with the standard issue vocabulary of a Marine non-com. 

Sergeant Cole Morita scowled at the two men blocking his way. According to the regs, and according to the spirit of the Marines, what they were telling him didn’t change a thing, but in the world outside, people would expect a man in mourning to be given some lenity for an act which had, in the grand scheme of things, done little damage.  

The spirit of the Corps had, as was inevitable, been eroded somewhat as the Marines had expanded for wartime service. Physical and psychological standards for entry were theoretically as strong as ever, and Cole didn’t doubt that they remained high, but the wartime recruits were missing something else – the willingness to submit to the honored traditions of a service with a contiguous history going back almost a thousand years.  

Allscher and Stepanov, like most of the men in the unit, were wartime recruits. They weren’t devoting their lives to the Corps, they were doing a few years to protect the government and Admiralty which had existed for a fraction of the history of the Confederated Marines in a time of need.  

No doubt, this was a challenge the Marines had weathered before, and would again. Certainly Cole would have to put the Mark into the files of all three no matter what happened today. The existence of the Mark was no secret, even to recruits, and it served to tell the Corps who among the wartime surge was not fit to carry the traditions of the service into the conditions of peacetime. From a civilian perspective, what the men were doing to protect their comrade was admirable, so it would only make sense to send them out into the civilian world as soon as practical after the war ended. 

Allscher and Stepanov seemed to take Cole’s hesitation for a reconsideration of his anger based on this new data, and relaxed their posture somewhat. “Now that we’ve cleared the air, Sarge, we won’t keep you.” Allscher saluted once more and sidled away from the hatch. Stepanov followed suit a moment later. 

Cole nodded to both of them, then went in. Olivers was there, sitting on his bunk with his head in his hands, with a few other men standing protectively around him. Everyone saluted their sergeant, as they were expected to, but the tension was as thick as nutrient paste. Cole sized them up, noting their names off in his head. They would all need the Mark. 

After several seconds of tense silence, Cole cleared his throat. “Private Olivers, I am putting you in for emergency discharge.” He fixed his eyes on several of those standing between himself and the bereaved man. “Gather your things and report to the passenger berths on the double. The Fleet will get you home as soon as it can.” 

For a long moment, nobody moved, then Olivers himself shot upright as if yanked by invisible strings and saluted. “Yes, Sergeant.” His red-rimmed eyes met Cole’s, and he seemed to think this an act of mercy. From a civilian perspective, it certainly was, but Cole was only getting started.  

The man tottered around for a moment, gathering his slate and his kit bag, then he trotted out past Allscher and Stepanov. Nobody said another word until the hatch had closed behind him. 

Several Marines started to talk at that moment, but Cole held up a hand, and they all returned to attention in an instant. 

“As for the rest of you.” Cole turned on Olivers’s friends. “I could have you all court martialed and thrown out of the Corps.” He leveled a finger at Stepanov. “If you lot knew he was too damaged to have his hindquarters busted the same way he always did without blowing a valve, it was sheer cowardice to let him stay on duty. He needed to be on leave the minute after that damned message came in.” Cole turned to make eye contact with everyone, one by one. “Heaven help us if we’d had a combat op today. Or do I need to send you all to scrubbing plating until you remember your basic training?” 

“A unit is only as strong as its weakest component, Sarge.” There was a note in Allscher’s voice that might have been resignation, or even sorrow. “A company’s components are its troopers. And I am that weakest component.” 

“So you’re not all utterly irredeemable.” Cole turned to Allscher. “Today, you all thought Olivers was the weakest link. But he might have been the damned strongest one. Because he did something. You all just sat on your hands and waited to see what would happen.” 

Most of the troopers started studying the deck plating below their feet, wondering perhaps how long they’d be scrubbing it before they regained their sergeant’s trust. 

Cole let the silence drive the point into their heads for almost a minute before he continued, tapping the bandage on his arm. “If he’d gotten incredibly lucky and killed me or put me out of action, the Lieutenant would be well within his rights to throw you all out an airlock. As it is, I might still recommend it. If you can’t do the right thing for the unit when it’s damned uncomfortable, how can you call yourselves Marines?” 

With that question drifting in the air, Cole waved them all to at-ease and strode out of the barracks, still seething. As soon as he got to the lift, he sent a quick a message to the Navy accommodations liaison explaining Olivers’s situation, then pulled up the personnel files for the unit and started adding Marks. 

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Tales from the Service: Bloodshed in Mourning

2953-05-28 – Tales from the Service: Bloodshed in Mourning 

There are risks to being in the service beyond those of enemy fire and operational accidents, though we do not think of them most of the time. So many millions of our men and women in the combat area are leaving behind loved ones and missing moments with them, and there may never be a time to make up for what was lost. 

Sergeant Cole Morita scowled at the medtech working on his arm, in hopes of spurring the mousy little man into finishing faster. As a twelve-year veteran of the Confederated Marines, he was no stranger to the inside of a medbay, of course, but the longer he was stuck sitting on the slab having his arm sewed up, the longer justice was delayed. 

“Is this going to take much longer?” Cole growled, after an interminable period where the medtech didn’t seem to be doing anything. He was under local anaesthetic, of course, so he couldn’t feel exactly what was being done, nor could he quite see the spot where he’d been cut. 

“Almost done, Sergeant.” The tech’s high-pitched, wheedling voice matched his appearance all too well. “Hold still.” 

Cole grunted. In the line of duty, he’d been blown up twice, badly burnt once, shot four times with projectiles and once with a laser, and broken five bones, but this was the first of his many scars that he could not accept with the usual magnanimity of a Marine losing a few pints of blood in the line of duty. This time, he’d been cut up by one of his own, with the Marines’ own signature weapon of last resort. 

Knife-fighting was a specialty of his service since before the days of powered armor, back when the Colonial Marines were as much enforcers of the Terran Sphere’s dominion over the outlying colonies as they were protectors of those colonies from marauders and alien threats. A Marine learned to fight with the titanium combat knife known as the Nine before he learned anything about suits or guns, and each of them well understood that a knife fight was a desperate struggle to the death where a simple brawl was not. 

This meant that in the Marines, to even brandish a knife at a comrade was understood as intent to kill. Not even guns, which could be rendered safe for simulated firefights, were treated quite the same way. The only safety on a Marine’s Nine was the Marine himself. 

The Marine who’d taken his Nine to Cole was the eternal troublemaker Ambrose Olivers, which would come as a surprise to almost any sergeant in the Corps. The unit troublemaker or joker issued to every company by ancient tradition was constantly getting disciplinary duty for some idiotic prank or other, but violence against a superior was nothing to joke about, and even a prankster knew not to cross the line between disciplinary and seditious. 

At last, the med-tech set down his gadgets and cleared his throat. “All right, Sergeant. You’re free to go, but you’re off the duty roster. Try not to put weight on this arm for about two days while the nanites stitch up your muscle.” 

Cole grunted. The medtech’s warning, as usual, was filed with other suggestions made by support personnel in his mental trash receptacle. He had business with Olivers that might require the use of the injured arm, and if that landed him back in the medbay, so be it. 

As soon as he was off the slab and heading out the door, Cole pulled up the company roster on his wristcuff and checked for Olivers’s location. He expected to find the murderous Marine in the brig on deck four, but the ship’s computer reported that he was with the rest of the company in their barracks suite on deck six. The altercation had happened just outside the mess hall, also on deck six, and several of their comrades had dragged them apart and hustled Olivers out of Cole’s sight while others delivered their sergeant to the medbay. Why had the other Marines not delivered Olivers into custody? 

The short lift ride down to deck six provided enough time for Cole’s rage to extend to every Marine who had seen the attack. Every one of them was complicit if they were protecting Olivers. Every one would be busted back down to base rank and would be scrubbing deck plating until Judgement Day if he had anything to say in the matter, which of course he did. 

Two Marines were standing in front of the barracks when Cole arrived. Both of them should have stood aside when they saw the dark look in his face, but they squared their shoulders and barred his way. 

“Let me past.” Cole leveled his gaze on Corporal Allscher, the more senior of the pair. “That is an order, Marine.” 

“Once you know the score, Sarge.” Allscher met Cole’s eyes, though he flinched in evident discomfort. “We want you to go easy on Olivers, sir.” 

“The man pulled a knife on his sergeant.” Cole took another step forward, until he was almost chest to chest with the other man. “That’s the only score that matters, Corporal.” 

It was the other man, Stepanov, who answered. “He just got a message from home, sir. His wife and son died in an aircar accident last week. When you busted his behind at chow, we all knew he was going to lose it.” 

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Tales from the Service: An Infested Recycler

2953-05-21 – Tales from the Service: An Infested Recycler 

Sylvia Elmer turned the vial of gray-green slime over and over in her gloved hands. It hadn’t come through inflow – none of the sanitary facilities would work as long as the recycler compartment was in maintenance mode. It hadn’t come from the culture on the screens either; taken as a whole, the microbiome of even an unhealthy screen produced very little insoluble waste, and an excess would have set off caution indicators long before enough to clog a pump could accumulate. The slime being largely nonliving, aside from a smattering of the same microbes on the screens, ruled out the introduction of hostile microbes to the system. Where else could it have come from? 

A small but searingly furious part of Sylvia’s brain didn’t care. If she wrote a report stating that the recycler of Brychan Mazza was unreliable due to unknown interactions – a fairly standard phrase technicians used when they meant “we couldn’t figure out why it broke in the first place” – Seventh Fleet headquarters would send down orders for the people with cutting torches to carve out the compartment and swap in one of the four identical units of Sierra Nevada. That would mean plenty of time to fix it, of course, but if the problem spread to the other three units before they did, one of the very few mobile service platforms in Sagittarius would be forced back to base for repairs itself. The fleet would demand a scalp for an incident of that scale – most likely Sylvia’s. 

There was always the possibility that someone on Mazza’s crew had gotten wise to the monitoring system on the sewage inflow and snuck into the recycler compartment itself to dump contraband into the vats directly. That would explain why the first vat in the chain was unaffected, at least for now. The pumping system never flowed anything into the first vat from the other three during normal operation; this could be done, but only by manual command, which would be logged. 

Of course, so would any command to open the vats. A quick scan of the logs revealed no legitimate access operations for the compartment or any of the vats between the last maintenance cycle and Mazza’s arrival alongside Sierra Nevada. This didn’t entirely rule out the theory, though. Only the newest recycler models were entirely tamper proof, and the fleet tended to use older, cheaper recycler fittings on smaller warships like destroyers. 

Sylvia got up and circled the compartment, threading between pairs of technicians slaving over the second set of new screen plates in as many days, and checked the three access hatches that stood open. None of them showed any sign of forced entry, but all three had the oldest model of access panels, which could be disconnected from the outside by anyone with basic electrical tools and a schematic hologram.  

Next she checked vat number two. It was open and its screen plates were out, of course. The lid’s electronic lock did have a manual override, but it looked like this would also trigger access logging. Unlike on the hatches, though, there was some odd superficial scratching around the hinges and latch, as if someone had been working at it with improperly configured tools. Sylvia winced, wondering why nobody had seen that yet. It looked like someone had disassembled the vat’s lid to covertly dispose of something without leaving an electronic trace. But what had it been? 

The compartment was in total disorder; it had been the center of so much frenzied activity in the last few shifts that there was no way to know what was the result of the intruder’s visit and what the result of the maintenance crew’s efforts. Even without more evidence, though, there were only so many things that it could have been. Whoever had done this knew a little bit about recyclers, so it would be something they thought the system could digest without a fuss. That meant something organic – contraband narcotics, unauthorized foodstuffs, perhaps even the corpse of a pet kept secretly in a cabin that had died unexpectedly.  

Anything even vaguely human-digestible wouldn’t give the system much trouble, and a dead cat or the equivalent would leave telltale bones after the flesh was digested. That left the usual suspect – drugs. Illicit substances could have any number of strange effects on the system, and the chemical sensors might not necessarily pick them up. They might even bond with polymer components, making it all but impossible to purge them. 

Sylvia switched on her helmet comms and turned on the all-team channel as she peered into the murky liquid half-filling the vat. It was time to let everyone know what they were dealing with. “Someone pried this one open and dumped something.” She grabbed a sample vial from her belt, hooked it to the end of a multitool standing nearby, and lowered it into the muck. “We might have to swap out the entire vat.” 

Several helmeted heads looked up from their work, but the only response on the comms came from Carlson, one of the most senior members of the team, “They always find new ways to break our toys.” He didn’t even seem to know his microphone was hot. 

As Sylvia’s sample vial dipped into the liquid, odd ripples shimmered across the surface. She frowned; it almost looked like the ripples a school of tiny fish would make in the lakeside shallows at Trieste Vert, where she’d spent many holidays as a child. Partially digested sewage did have all sorts of odd properties, but she’d never seen that before. Even the idea that anything larger than a microbe could live in the vats sent a shiver down her spine, but of course that was ridiculous. 

At least, it should have been ridiculous. When she withdrew the vial, the rippling motion appeared in reverse, as if a swarm of tiny somethings was returning to the spot it had departed. Of course, the contents of the vat were too murky to see anything below the surface. 

“That’s something you don’t see every day.” Carlson had appeared at Sylvia’s shoulder. “What in the blazes lives in a recycler vat?” 

“Hells if I know.” Sylvia shuddered. “Forget the sample vials. Someone get me a fine-mesh net.” 

The many new xenobiomes encountered by spacers on the Sagittarius Frontier obviously pose many strange challenges to the smooth operation of space flight. Recycler runaways were not unknown previously – usually due to a prolonged excess of one nutrient over the others in the sewage – but no species from any world was ever known to colonize recyclers before Sylvia’s team discovered this one. 

The actual anatomy and behavior of the organism has not yet been released, but Sylvia’s description suggests that it is very small, somewhat fishlike, and invertebrate. Perhaps the Navy wishes the details to remain little known until they can deploy a countermeasure, lest the Incarnation somehow discover how to weaponize this organism, though I find this quite unlikely. 

[N.T.B. - I am less skeptical than Duncan. Someone’s exotic fishtank specimens sidelined a whole destroyer for many days. If these things have nearly microscopic eggs, and those eggs get introduced into the nutrient slurry supply chain by an Incarnation agent – a thing they seem quite capable of doing – it could restrict vast portions of Seventh Fleet to near-port operations for weeks.  Better to keep the identity of this pest quiet for a while.]

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Tales from the Service: A Compromised Recycler

2953-05-14 – Tales from the Service: A Compromised Recycler 

Cermytes are not the only troublesome organism Reach spacers have discovered on the far side of the Sagittarius Gap. Indeed, I spoke to a researcher who is observing Cermyte activity in captivity, and he named several other species I had not heard of beforehand, all of which seem oddly adapted to infesting spacecraft. 

The hypothesis of the researcher is that space travel has been in heavy use in Sagittarius far longer than it has been in the Orion arm, perhaps several thousand years. Obviously there is no direct proof of this – no xenoarchaeological work of any significance has been done in Sagittarius. The claims of the Grand Journey to be an ancient confederation, if true, certainly are given credence by this theory, but other factors shed some doubt on it. 

The idea that Sagittarius is a region of ancient spacefaring cultures, older perhaps even than the Angels, Reachers, and extinct Xenarchs that predate human and Rattanai expansion, is certainly an evocative one. It certainly puts a romantic spin on the pests which inhabit the region; after all, these things might be the animal survivors of long-departed spacefaring empires. 

This is of course little consolation to the spacers who have to clean up after them, such as Sylvia Elmer, a recycler technician aboard the mobile service platform Sierra Nevada. The first part of her account details the sorts of trouble that foreign organism infiltration can cause in a shipboard recycler system, though obviously she did not know this to be the root cause until some time later. 

Normally, a field refit of a mere destroyer like Brychan Mazza would be a matter of a few days. Seventh Fleet had been running its fast units ragged of late, so most of that time would be in engine and reactor service, possibly extending as far as a full reactor replacement. This was normal duty for Sierra Nevada, a fleet service platform as big as a dreadnought, and for its crew of nearly two thousand of the Confederated Navy’s best technicians. 

As a mere organics tech, Sylvia Elmer was used to being a relative side-show in the frenzied activity aboard Sierra Nevada. Being the reason a destroyer was late to being returned to duty was a new and terrifying experience. 

Of course, it wasn’t really Sylvia’s fault, not exactly. Nobody had known how damaged Mazza’s recycler system was until she and her team had cracked open the compartment to have a look, and few outside her specialty could really understand the trouble repairing a hybrid biological-technological system could be. To most spacers, even most techs, the recycler was just something that worked; it was ancient technology like the A-grav axis or the self-sealing pressure hull that hadn’t changed too much in more than a hundred years and nobody touched outside of the drydock. 

Unfortunately for Mazza, what the crew had reported as a few minor warning indicators and slow cycle performance had been the precursors to an imminent total biological breakdown in the vats, a condition which had taken nearly two days to simply stabilize. Some sort of toxic foreign material had gotten into the system and poisoned the bio-engineered microcultures on the screen-plates in all the vats except, oddly enough, for the first one. Several severe leaks in the plumbing had sprung up while the team had worked long hours to replace the dead screens with freshly seeded new ones and work up the carefully tuned biosphere necessary for the system to operate correctly, making the task both dirtier and more complicated. By the end of their second day’s work, the whole team had been in environment suits, when normally this sort of work needed only an air filtration mask. 

Being in suits had slowed the work further, but still by the end of the second day’s work they had the new screen-plates responding well. Then, after the whole team had gone to get some rest, something had gone wrong  with the circulation pumps and starved out the microbes at the bottom of two of the tanks. This would have been self-correcting once the pumps were fixed had the colonies been mature, but of course they weren’t quite. Now, at the beginning of the third day, it looked like most of the screens would have to be seeded all over again. 

Sylvia reported the setback to her superiors as soon as she was aware of it, before anyone had even cracked open the pump housings to see what was the matter. They still hadn’t quite figured out what had poisoned the vats in the first place, and how it had bypassed the first one in the chain. Normally, when someone disposed of illict drugs by putting them down the sanitary head, that was the vat which bore the brunt of it. 

Of course, someone way up the chain called down mere minutes after Sylvia’s report to ask whether there was any way to speed up the process. Sylvia had long ago learned not to explain these things; a simple no, even in the face of the dreaded “are you sure it wouldn’t be faster if you enriched the starter nutrient solution” that every junior officer always suggested, was all she would say over voice comms. This particular organizational genius – who never even gave his name – even asked whether the destroyer could be fielded safely with only one operational recycler tank out of four. Sylvia replied that she could call up Mazza’s skipper and ask if he would like to wait a few days or be one bad flush away from having no recycler for the rest of his cruise, and that seemed to be answer enough. 

The anonymous superior officer exited the conversation muttering something about consequences if there were any more delays. Sylvia wondered if this was meant to refer to her, or to himself, and didn’t want to find out. 

Once Sylvia’s team had the pumps working – there was some sort of foul slime built up in them which the analysis tools could only identify as “non-living organic matter” - they got to work on yet another set of screen plates. Sylvia herself, stuck in her isolation suit, sat down in one corner with a sample of that slime in a phial, staring at it thoughtfully. It clearly hadn’t been in the system the previous day, which meant something had created it or introduced it since then. It wasn’t the recycler’s cultures, nor were Mazza’s heads sending down any waste. Where else could it have come from? 

 

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