Tales from the Inbox: The Swan’s Ultimatum

2954-01-14 – Tales from the Service: The Swan’s Ultimatum 

Sara Swan saw right away, watching the camp after her little ambush, that she was experiencing a bit of luck. Shortly after the skulking fellow returned to their campsite to report what he had seen, she watched through her magnifier as a loud argument broke out between two of the largest, most brutish of their number. The young, wiry skulker, who seemed every moment to be wiser than most of his fellows, sat scowling nearby as his two self-styled betters roared at each other. 

Sara couldn’t hear what was being said, but it hardly mattered. The dispute, as they often did among such ruffians, came to blows before too long, and the loser of the brief row retreated to grumble with a pair of his closest comrades. Soon, the trio scattered, and Sara watched them slip around to each of the guard-posts within her view, speaking to those on duty. 

It wasn’t long before half of the ruffians, following the brute who’d lost the scuffle for dominance, were hoisting packs onto their backs and heading down from the hilltop where the old Survey facility was situated, in the opposite direction from where the bodies of their two comrades lay. The self-styled leader but no, caught off-guard, didn’t seem to notice the exodus until they were already all out of the camp. He shouted at them to return, but this had no effect. 

The wiry youth went with them at first, talking to their leader, but not long after they were out of sight, he came creeping back. 

Sara watched until nightfall, but there was no sign of the departing group. She could only speculate what they thought leaving the site would do. Perhaps they had guessed that the deaths of the two unfortunate scouts were all too related to the treasure up there on the hill. Perhaps – and this seemed more likely – they thought their leader somehow responsible for the deaths, or did not like his response to the crisis. 

Flipping the magnifier into night-vision mode once the last vestiges of color bled from the western horizon, Sara counted the remaining figures in the camp as they moved around. There were somewhere between twelve and twenty remaining – still a concern, but not so many that Sara was worried about exterminating them. 

She retreated to set up a spartan camp-site after observing the first change of guard. If those brigands had any sense, they would sleep ill that night, but Sara intended to sleep soundly herself. Better to let them fight their imaginations before she made her next move. 

Making camp on the reverse slope of a hill more than two kilometers from her prey, Sara lit no fire, ate only a cold ration-bar, and drank only sparingly from her canteen. There were many small streams in the area that were drinkable after treated with a sanitization tablet, but that was an opportunity to be spotted out in the open. She pulled her camo-netting over a slight hollow in the ground, then unrolled a thermal blanket from her pack and wormed underneath. 

Sara was already up when the first splash of pink light appeared over the eastern hills, and before the stellar primary peeked over the horizon, her gear was all back in her pack. She briefly debated whether it was worthwhile to pursue and investigate the departing group, but with an unknown amount of time left before the scavengers’ ship returned, that probably wasn’t worthwhile. She had to clear the ones guarding her prize, call in her ship, pull the reactor, and get out fast, ideally without putting herself in too much danger. 

When she put eyes on the camp again, she found the guards warily scanning the horizon from their posts while others put the finishing toch on a simple breastwork of pre-fab panels between their flimsy shelters to form a crude wall around the hilltop. This was a surprisingly wise and industrious development; even though the paneling wouldn’t stop any serious incoming fire, it would give them something to hide behind in a firefight. If they continued to dig into their position, it would prolong the struggle considerably. 

It was time to accelerate the timetable. Sara retreated to a safe distance and called up her hoverskiff, which carried far more gear than her pack. Using its tiny onboard fabricator, she loaded the carry bay of a multipurpose drone with polypaper strips weighted with little metal plumbs, then sent it on a looping course out to approach the encampment at high altitude from the other side for a bombing run. She hoped they wouldn’t be able to shoot it down, but wanted them to see it all the same as it dropped its leaflets. 

Sara was back on her hilltop observation post long before the drone reached the drop point of its flight plan. Sure enough, the sentries spotted it, and a few arc rifle shots crackled uselessly up into the sky, most hopelessly wide. The carry-bay opened just where it had been programmed, and the drone, now on an automatic evasive routine, made a jerky retreat. 

The wind put most of Sara’s leaflets outside their defensive perimeter, but enough landed that the message was not lost. On each polypaper slip, she’d had the fabricator print a simple message: 

LEAVE NOW OR DIE. 

WITH LOVE,  
THE SWAN 

It was probable these frontier ruffians didn’t know what a swan was, so she’d had the fabricator emboss a simple stipple-shaded image of a swan next to the words, to give them a bit of a mental image. It was, in her view, the little touches like this that were most effective in sowing terror. 

Sure enough, several of the brigands ran to show their leader the leaflets, and another boisterous argument broke out to whose specifics Sara was not party. 

Oddly, though, not everyone in the camp was paying attention to the argument. While their leader was waving his fist and rallying his men in defiance of this message from the air, a slim figure crept over the breastworks, apparently unobserved from within, and crept down the hillside. 

Obviously, Nojus has told us little of the history of this Sara Swan character, but from the specifics of this account, she is a canny operator whose bushcraft is far above the civilian average. He did say that perhaps she is over-hyping her own abilities in this account – and I can see hints of that even myself, not being at all experienced in such arts – but taking on a force of dozens of armed men solo is still a feat of great courage if nothing else. 

[N.T.B.] - It’s also a feat of great foolhardiness, even for Miss Swan here, and even if done in such a slinking fashion as she prefers when dealing with direct opposition. Had her opposition had even two people near her equal in fieldcraft and well motivated to repel her assault, she would have been in great danger. 

Fortunately, the one person approaching this ability present did not have the initiative to try to hunt her in the field as she slept unguarded. If he’d found her, the story would have ended there. 

Details

Tales from the Inbox: The Expected Ambush

2954-01-07 – Tales from the Inbox: The Expected Ambush 

As Sara Swan finished setting up her ambush in a narrow hollow hidden from the brigands’ camp by the low shoulder of a nearby hill, she wondered whether someone with a knack for being persuasive might have resolved the day’s complications without bloodshed. This was of course only an idle thought; Sara had never been accused of being particularly eloquent. 

The plan was simple – coax a group of two or three of the squatters out from their camp, trick them into investigating something down where they wouldn’t be visible to their fellows, then delete them. It wasn’t too hard to create a curious scene for them; she merely scorched a small teardrop-shaped swath of springy turf with her hand laser, then set up a few pieces of bent reflective polymer sheeting there in the middle. To anyone who saw it from a distance, it would look like the wreckage of a de-orbited satellite – and on a world where there weren’t supposed to be any satellites in the sky, that would be something to investigate indeed. 

As to getting them out from their camp, the same ruse provided the simple answer for that as well. A chemical smoke-pot would give the scene a short-lived puff of black smoke, which the onlooker, after investigating, would conclude was that of the burning plants from the impact.  

Most probably, the setup would only work once; when the first group sent to investigate failed to return or to report back over comms, their compatriots would know something was wrong, but not precisely what. Sara could probably do the deed without letting any of them know they were in danger, but that wasn’t her style, and it robbed her of the advantages of fear, which were always useful when one was outnumbered. 

When all was ready, Sara retreated from the fake crash site, and remotely set off the smoke-pot when she got back to her pack and her rifle. In a few seconds, a pillar of oily black smoke curled into the air, slanting into the wind. If the brigands sitting on her Survey site weren’t blind, some of them would be along shortly. She lay down behind her already set-up phasebeam rifle and pulled a camo-net over herself to await them. 

They weren’t, as it turned out, blind. Two black figures appeared at the top of the rise hiding the site from the camp. Sara sized them up with her magnifier; both grizzled-looking men held their arc rifles warily as they peered at her ruse, then began working their way down the reverse slope. 

Sara set down the magnifier and flicked off the safety of her rifle. At a hundred yards, the short pulses of high-energy photons it emitted would punch right through most body armor, but she intended to aim for the head for her first shot. She brought the sights onto the trailing figure, then waited for the distance between them to grow. Even a few meters apart, the leader would take several seconds to realize his associate was dead. 

The moment came, and Sara squeezed the trigger. With the snap-hiss of beam slicing air and the rifle’s cooling system venting heat, the man collapsed in a silent heap. She turned her rifle on the other, just as he turned to see what the noise behind him had been. He made it two steps back along the path before the second shot ended his miserable life like the first. 

Sara remained motionless below her camo-net for almost a minute, then slithered out, replaced the net, and dashed forward. After taking both the heavy arc rifles, she rifled through the brigands’ pockets. Other than silver-wrapped ration bars, a canteen full of something foul-smelling, and a password-locked data-slate, they weren’t carrying anything of note. Their clothing wasn't marked with any obvious signs of allegiance, either. Either their boss had stripped them of identifying marks before parking them on the reactor site, or this group really was just a motley band of independent opportunists in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Sara next examined their weapons in detail. They were standard, if battered, PPM Model 99s – ubiquitous, cheap, and overshadowed by newer and more expensive models. The Model 99, though, didn’t have any sort of smart-locking mechanism. Sara flipped off the safety on one of them and charged its capacitors. After taking everything she had a use for off both corpses, she blasted them both with the arc rifle a few times, which burnt the skin and set their clothing alight. This would hopefully conceal what she’d taken, and how she’d killed them. 

Sara retreated to her camo-net again to watch once more. She waited for almost an hour, but no more brigands arrived to investigate what had happened to their fellows in that time. 

Just as she was beginning to wonder whether it was safe to move, she spied movement on the ridge. Something – someone – was moving up there, slinking along the ridge-top. Sara grinned; her third victim had some sense. He was staying in sight of his fellows, and staying low, trying not to present much of a target. She lined up the phasebeam on him, using its scope magnification to get a better look. 

The third brigand was younger and slimmer than the first two, though dressed similarly. He was armed only with a handgun and a knife, both tucked into his belt, and he clearly was no stranger to bushcraft. If he was any good, and left unmolested with the area, he might even be able to follow her trail across the springy turf, as little of an impression as each footfall made. 

Fortunately for him, he never came down the concealed side of the hill to investigate closer. He spotted the two corpses on the slope, and watched them for a minute or two, probably having a chat with his buddies back at the camp on the comm. He slipped back as carefully as he came, and Sara decided as he did to make the coming night interesting. That one would be the last to die. 

While this is not the story I had planned to release today, Nojus’s bit of digital brigandry has forced my hand. We are, it seems, in this account for the duration, which seems to be at least one more weekly episode after this one.  

Never fear, I take this sort of help in good humor. If we didn’t want Nojus’s help on the feed, he wouldn’t be part of this embed team. 

[N.T.B.] Damned right. Besides, this is going somewhere, and to make it interesting, I haven’t even told Duncan where that is. 

Details

Tales from the Inbox: The Unexpected Complication

2953-12-31 – Tales from the Inbox: The Unexpected Complication 

[N.T.B] I hope you and yours have enjoyed the holiday week. Duncan is off-ship for a few days, doing some recording for the main vidcast, and he left me an interesting account to edit and put into the ingest. And I absolutely did not do that. 

You see, the day before the Feast, an old friend of mine, who we’ll call Sara Swan, sent me something on the side. Sara used to be in the same sort of business as I was, before the war, or at least, almost. She used to arrange extreme tourism for the rich, famous, and stupid, and usually keep them alive through their ill-thought-out escapades on dangerous worlds. We met on Botched Ravi when I was there in ‘41, and no, she never showed her face for my feed drones. 

Anyway, “Sara” has a different line of work now, and she gave me permission to tell this story, properly anonymized. I think she wanted it published partly as a brag, but really, she’s only demonstrating the fieldcraft of the greenest Confederated Marine. What I find interesting... well, I’ll save it for the next episode’s commentary. It will take two or three weeks to get the story out, but by the time Duncan is back this one will be out to you all and he won’t have a choice except to play along and let me edit the rest for the feed. 

Sara Swan lowered her magnifier and cursed under her breath. What had been intended as a simple job, in and out in two or three hours, was officially turning into anything but. 

It had, in retrospect, probably been an unhealthy excess of wishful thinking that had brought Sara to Harold’s Lawn. The dubiously named world, a place of inland meadows of springy green, lichen-like flora, of coastal crags lashed by violent storms, was theoretically uninhabited, earmarked as it was for a war-postponed colonial mission. That there was anything worth stealing there in the first place suggested that theory and practice were not precisely on speaking terms. 

Still, her contact had spun a plausible story about Survey equipment being abandoned in a rush when the Sagittarius Frontier caved in during the first year of the War. Doubtless such materiel would be written off without comment when Survey finally returned to their mission of preparing the world for its first human inhabitants after the conflict finally wound down. 

It was of course possible that Sara’s employer knew nothing about the cluster of ramshackle shelters built around the weathered Survey team habitat, or the motley handful of guards leaning on their arc rifles. Possible, but unlikely. Failures of intelligence never seemed to work that way, in her experience. 

Fortunately, Sara was no novice. After seeing lights at the target site the previous night from orbit, she’d done her entry burn hundreds of kilometers away, out of sight of the place, then flown atmospheric at low altitude as close as she dared. Her ship’s skiff had gotten her within ten klicks, and then she’d hiked a bit over nine more, keeping off ridge-lines and sticking to the lower meadows between the area’s rolling hills. Now, she was lying flat on a hilltop a bit more than nine hundred meters from her goal, and wondering how she was going to cover that last distance undetected. 

Fortunately, the laid-back demeanor of those guards suggested Sara’s cautious approach had so far paid off. They showed no sign of knowing they were being watched. With a shudder, she realized this was doubly lucky. Their weapons were certainly effective at her current range. If one was skilled enough to make the shot, they could have taken her out while she was surveying the scene with her meta-lens magnifier. 

Sliding back a few meters until she was behind the rise, Sara sat up against a flat-sided boulder to think. The camp looked relatively crude, suggesting the ruffians at the Survey site hadn’t set out from home expecting to set up there. It looked like they’d made do with what a standard shipboard fabricator could spit out after they arrived and saw an opportunity. What that opportunity was, precisely, didn’t take much guessing. They were sitting on the very thing Sara had been hired to retrieve – the military-grade fusion reactor that powered that Survey installation. Even broken, it was worth several hundred thousand credits, and functional, it was easily worth ten million to the right person. 

While cruder than the phased matter reactors that powered starships, fusion powerplants, being simpler and less reliant on complex phased matter condensers and fuel stored in elaborate containment bottles, were the backbone of most planetary power grids. A military-grade system like the one in that installation, functionally identical to the sort used by the Confederated Marines to power field bases, was designed to be durable and somewhat portable, while still providing incredible power. Had there been no war, this one might have provided power for the needs of ten or fifteen thousand settlers before a permanent power plant was needed. Its internal fuel was good for a decade without refueling, and it could be safely refueled in a few days, with the right equipment and expertise. 

In the right hands, that power could be used to power an asteroid mining base, or a private colony habitat for an elite clientele. In the wrong hands, it could be used to power a dark harbor, or an illegal off-charts hideaway for those criminal fugitives who knew how to get there. Sara, as a rule didn’t ask whether her clients were the right hands or the wrong ones. But she had a hunch that those vagabonds with the arc rifles worked for the wrong sort. 

Sara had not seen a starship at the camp, nor anything that looked capable of concealing anything bigger than a runabout. That suggested their ride had left them in place to safeguard the prize, intending to return, perhaps with better tools, or with specialized technicians who knew how to bring a running fusion reactor to idle safely. There was no telling when that would be, and she rather doubted that ship would come unarmed; Sara had to be done with them and out with the reactor before then, or her own ship would be detected and shot to pieces. 

Fortunately, this was far from Sara’s first experience with unanticipated problems of this sort. When part of your business model was suppressing the urge to ask follow up questions, this sort of thing became a kind of routine. Sure, jobs really were simple sometimes – even most of the time, maybe – but she’d long ago surrendered to confirmation bias and decided to expect unpredictable trouble. 

With a grim scowl, she slid several tubular components out of her pack and began to snap them together. There were weapons that could range from her hill to the camp back on the skiff, and even more on the ship, but she didn’t fancy a sniping duel with people who had the home field advantage. All she needed for the moment was something that could kill at a hundred meters, without making too much noise. The best way to get this party started, she thought, was to draw a few of them out to where their deaths wouldn’t be seen, so she’d have a few minutes to examine their bodies and their equipment. 

Details

Tales from the Service: Abarca’s Feast Day Message

2953-12-24 – Tales from the Service: Abarca’s Feast Day Message 

This week, the feed ingest falls on the day before Emmanuel Feast. Obviously, Nojus and I are celebrating with the officers and crew of Ashkelon according to the old routine of the Spacers’ Chapel. The sight and smell of actual candles burning aboard a vessel of war has, at least for me, been a strange experience every year of this war, but a welcome one, its value in comfort far in excess of the costs of extra load on the atmospherics and small risk of fires aboard. 

Traditions like the candles that glitter throughout the ship on Feast week are fragments of peace that can still be seen in time of war. I pray that peace will return to us soon, but in the interim, may this holiday find you and your family well, be you together or a thousand light-years apart. 

This is a portion of Admiral Abarca’s Feast-day message, which is to be pushed out fleet-wide on the twenty-third but as of time of writing has not yet been released. With his permission and encouragement, we have transcribed a small portion of the recording for the benefit of those in other formations and outside the service. 

It has been nearly three thousand years since the birth of the Christ, the event which we celebrate with the Emmanuel Feast, which some faiths call Christmas. There is no doubt that more perilous times than these have darkened the solemn waning hours of our ancient calendar, but certainly not in the lifetime of any living today. 

This conflict, the bitter shape of whose end which we only now begin to see, has been raging for more than half a decade. With bright spots and dark days, vast heroism and great tragedy, it has marked all our lives and the lives of all of those whose fate hangs in the balance. And it is, without doubt, a conflict for the human soul as much as it is for planets and for stars. Our foes, or at least their leaders, style themselves supermen, beings who will, by combined force of will, wrest control of destiny from the universe and to defeat death. Humanity has seen this idea before. Each time it appears, its victory means a departure from humanity, and each time this departure has been rejected. 

The force that moves through history and defeats this idea is that death does not need to be defeated, because it already has been overcome, and not by any act of the willpower of mere men. This is the message we remember in part on this holiday – that all things mortality and material were invaded by the infinite Divine, and that the very power of death was a casualty of this surprise assault.  

When we go into battle, we do so, at least in the main, certain that favor awaits us, either on the physical beachhead, or on the next shore beyond the last veil. For our foes, the sacrifices of war are in a sense far greater, because they sacrifice body and spirit, where we sacrifice only our flesh. We should respect them in this – they know it better than we do – but we should also pity them in our certainty that what they hope to gain is not worth what they stand to lose. 

I do not doubt that we will win this war. I do not worry that the crews and troops I order into battle will fail to do their duty to the end, if that is required of them. I fear only that in winning it, some of you may lose perspective, may start thinking like our foes, and imagining that a material victory requires spiritual defeat. As we go forward to the end, my comrades, I fear for your souls, and yes, for the reputation of this command. As the Incarnation’s grip fails, it will seek to break us with horrors beyond our current imagination. I am sure of this, not because of any specific intelligence, but because this is what every other adventure into supposed superhumanity has done in its death throes.  

When you see great and small evidence of the horrors of a society that has decided to make gods of its leaders, you will be tempted to become calloused, and to think that the virtue of your own actions matters little. Giving in would not materially affect the progress of the war, but it represents a small moral and spiritual victory for our enemy. 

I would rob them of even this Pyrrhic triumph, however. In such small victories, they plant the seeds of conflicts our children and grandchildren will face. When we defeat the Incarnation, I would, if possible, see the idea of humanity defeating death and controlling fate itself buried for a thousand T-years. 

As you gather with your comrades for the Feast, and listen to your chaplains give the traditional holiday message, hold the truth of this hallowed occasion in your heart. And when the orders come down, and we all go forward toward victory, remember that we only seek small, material triumph. The greater triumph has already been won for us, if we will trust in it and walk in it. 

Details
  • You are here:  
  • Home