Tales from the Service: The Director’s Angels

2952-07-24 – Tales from the Service: The Director’s Angels

Ris Bleier struggled to restrain Captain Bermudez, while Giffards and Lund scrambled to divine the nature of the alarms from the flashing indicators and fitfully winking screens of Howard Helios Hughes’s cockpit. “Get ahold of yourself, spacer!” He tried to shake her, but despite her smaller stature, she was nearly as strong as he was; Ris was hardly young anymore, and he didn’t exactly frequent the gyms back on The Sprawl. “What is it?” 

“Power surge of some kind in the system.” Giffards seemed to think that the question was for her. “Can’t pin it down.” 

“They’ll kill us!” Bermudez got one arm free of Ris’s grasp and lashed out toward the controls, but she wasn’t close enough to touch anything. “We’ve got to run!” 

“Reactor readings are normal.” Art Lund hurriedly stood from the copilot’s chair to make room for Rahat Kuriega, who slid into the seat immediately, and helped get hold of Bermudez. “Let’s get her out of here, Boss.” 

Ris nodded and the pair manhandled Bermudez down the corridor toward the lounge. Though still breathing heavily, she slumped against Ris and allowed herself to be carried most of the way, limp and unresisting, eyes open but unfocused. They dropped her into one of the thickly padded chairs, and Ris stood guard over her while Lund went to fetch a cup of cool water from the food-fab.  

“Whatever it was, it’s settling down now.” Giffards’s voice filtered down from the sound system. “Damned dodgy conduit repairs, probably. We’re running a full system sweep.” 

“What about the thermal source?” Ris shuddered, remembering how close they were to a vast derelict more than likely full of alien dead. 

“Fading fast.” Kuriega made an uncertain sound in the back of his throat. “Whatever was there isn’t anymore. No sign of it.” 

“That thing’s hull is a metal forest.” Giffards broke in. “It could be some sort of hull-walking drone that scuttled off when we had that power surge, and we’d never find it again.” 

“External hull drones for repair makes sense, with hulls as thick as this.” Kuriega’s voice grew distant, as if he were imagining how such a device would be constructed. “Fairly autonomous, I’d guess. Maybe enough internal power to live a few weeks after the ship dies.” 

“No.” This whispered denial, Ris realized after a moment, was spoken by Bermudez. When he looked back at her, he saw that she had closed her eyes and lowered her head. “It’s a trap. We need to leave.” 

“A trap?” Ris bent down to look at Bermudez. She had been unhelpful the entire journey, so he wasn’t going to blindly accept her advice now, even if her words made the hairs on his neck stand on end. “For us? How do you know?” 

Bermudez shrugged, but did not respond, not even to raise her head. Lund returned with the water, and Ris left her to return to the cockpit, a frown settling into his face. Had she done more snooping with his agent’s information than was healthy before delivering it? If so, why had she seemed so pessimistic about their chances of finding anything? Or perhaps this was something she recognized from her past adventures? 

When he returned to the cockpit, Ris found the alarms silent and the displays once again working normally. Giffards turned around to give her boss an apologetic shrug. “No accounting for the quality of ships like this, I guess. Damned terrible timing.” 

“Bermudez thinks this is a trap.” Ris shook his head. “She wouldn’t say why.” 

“Reachers setting traps?” Kuriega tapped his chin with his fingers. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen them do anything like that. It doesn’t seem like them.” 

“No, it doesn’t.” Ris nodded. He’d re-read several of the most recent Reacher encounter reports in the hours it had taken to approach the derelict so it was fresh in his mind; nothing in human experience painted the Reachers as the sort to set snares for other sapients. “Are we clear to proceed?” 

“Around to the hull breach?” Giffards shook her head. “I don’t see why not. But if we’re at risk of another surge, I’m going to take us out to a healthy distance.” 

“Agreed.” Ris waved his hand. “See what we can get with the floodlight and the telescopes from a klick or two.” 

Giffards pulled back on the controls, and the shiny, fluted metal hull swept out of view. When it reappeared, it was already noticeably further away; they were viewing the Reacher derelict almost directly aft-on. From that vantage, they could see the full extent of the spines and protrusions jutting outward from the hull; they seemed longer and spindlier, seen against the smallest cross-section of the ship itself. 

Soon, the damage swum into view for the first time in some hours. Viewed with the naked eye, the gash in the ship’s belly was all the grimmer, and there was no doubt that the bent streamers trailing from this rent were torn pieces of the interior, the once-functional parts of this Reacher ship. Ris could only shudder as he imagined the soft-bodied Reachers themselves bursting like blisters when they were sucked out into the void. How many of these rare sapients had perished? What had happened to cause such devastation? 

“Still no activity.” Giffards took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “Going alongside.” 

“Look there!” Kuriega pointed ahead. “Did you see it?” 

Ris tried to follow the gesture, but saw nothing. “What did you see?” 

“Something moving among the spines.” Kuriega leaned forward. “Small and shiny.” 

“Another drone?” Giffards gestured to Kuriega’s console. “Can you get it on the ‘scope?” 

Kuriega bent to his work, and Giffards cut Hughes’s drive to make his task easier. 

Ris, though he hadn’t seen anything, was beginning to wonder if there was something to Bermudez’s trap theory. A band of pirates hide dozens of strike-craft among those hull spines – and Hughes was, aside from a small laser point-defense turret on the dorsal hull, unarmed. Who was setting the trap, though? And who was their intended prey? Surely it wasn’t a little private-chartered runabout, but what would happen to them if the theoretical ambushers thought themselves discovered? 

“There’s another one.” Giffards’s pointed finger dragged Ris out of his thoughts just in time for him to see something bright disappear into the thickest tangle of spines. Whatever it was, it was quick, and it certainly wasn’t attached to the hull. “Free flying. There goes your hull drone theory, Mr. Kuriega.” 

“Strike craft analogues?” Giffards shook her head. “We’ve never seen the Reachers use anything that small.” 

“Someone must have beat us here.” Ris lowered his voice, though there was no way of being overheard by whoever was flying that small craft. “Someone who is trying to keep a low profile.” 

“Bermudez managed to sell the coordinates twice after all!” Giffards scowled. “There’s no telling what those scavengers have-” 

“Not scavengers, I think.” Ris turned away. “But she knows something.” 

Bermudez hadn’t moved in the time Ris was forward; the cup of water sat on the chair-arm next to her hand, untouched, and Lund was sitting opposite her, glancing nervously up at the cabinet where the first-aid supplies were kept.  

“She’s scared, Art, not hurt.” Ris took a chair and pulled it close to Bermudez. “Scared of whoever beat us to this wreck. Which means she knows something.” 

“Pirates? Syndicate scavengers?” Lund shook his head. “I’ve seen her dossier. She’s not tangled with any of them, at least, not that left a trail.” 

“No. I think this is something in our department.” Ris stared hard at the spacer. “Xenos of some kind she’s run into out here.” 

Lund nodded. “Kyaroh, maybe? They’d be happy to pounce on a wreck like this.” 

Ris shook his head. “No. Bermudez, you should have told us.” 

Lund leaned forward. “What is it, Boss?” 

Bermudez looked up, her dark eyes wide. “They’re here. Angels. We can’t-” 

Once again, the lights went out, but this time, they stayed out, and not even the emergency lighting strips came on. In the dead silence that followed, Ris could distinctly hear the thump of something latching onto Howard Helios Hughes’s hull. 

What relations there are between the Reachers and the Angels is unclear, but it seems likely that these two sojourner peoples in the Reach have some dealings with each other, as they have with us. 

Ris’s account is the first hard evidence of their interaction; not only were Angels the first responders to a wrecked Reacher ship, but they were clearly guarding it from scavengers of all outside species. 

Nobody onboard Hughes that day has given a clear account of what happened when they were boarded by at least one (possibly more than one) Angel, but they were permitted to go home in peace. Certainly, the Angels were not likely to explain their business to these intruders, but Ris’s after-action report does indicate obliquely that the Angels assured him that there were no living Reachers aboard the derelict, and that only few perished when it was damaged. Whether other Reachers rescued them, or the Angels did themselves, we may never know. 

Ris’s report theorizes that the Angels were using the Reacher derelict as a honeypot trap for something or someone they hoped to ensnare, but what exactly their prey was, even he could not guess. 

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Tales from the Service: The Director's Adventure

2952-07-17 – Tales from the Service: The Director's Adventure 

Everyone, even Captain Bermudez, was crowded in the cockpit as Howard Helios Hughes crept toward the behemoth Reacher ship. Up close, as the light of the local star glinted off its shining, fluted hull, they could not mistake it for anything else. No other species did, and possibly no other species ever could, imitate Reacher starship design, either in its scale, its distinctly organic appearance, or its ethereal beauty.  

Director Ris Bleier had heard Reacher ships compared to polished shells, or to ornately jointed crustaceans, but this one seemed to him to be more beetle-like, with a loosely ellipsoidal profile from which ridges, crests, spines, and many other protrusions sprouted. Her whole starboard side was torn open, with blackened streamers of the inner world hanging out into the void, but the ship had certainly not been quite symmetrical before it had been stricken, though it had a clear centerline ridge running down the middle of the hull from prow to stern, like the seam between the two halves of a beetle’s armored wing-cover. 

“Still nothing on normal comms bands.” Art Lund, sitting in the copilot’s chair, shook his head. “And it’s not one of those empty husks, either. I was sort of hoping it was.” 

“What about on other frequencies?” Rahat Kuriega, leaning over Lund’s chair, glanced over at Ris. “Do we know what they normally use when they’re not talking to us?” 

“I don’t think so.” Lund sighed, then tapped at the controls. “They may not even use radio except for our benefit.” 

“What alternative is there?” Giffards shook her head without looking away from the view in front of them. “Visible light?” 

“Nah, we’d have noticed that by now.” Lund clicked his tongue. “For all we know they’ve got a proper ansible setup.” 

A thrill ran down Ris’s spine. The proper ansible – an instantaneous two-way, starship-portable communication system that functioned at interstellar distances, had been theorized a thousand years before by Earthbound futurists of the First Space Age, but not even space-folding technology could accomplish it. If they could pry such a machine from the bowels of a dead Reacher ship, their names would never be forgotten – they would be spoken with the same reverence as names like Neil Armstrong, Lin Xiou, and Alexander Edwards. 

A Reacher ship wasn’t just a ship, of course. It was some hybrid of space habitat and starship, divorced from almost every need for planet-bound resources. Taking anything from it would be like looting the home of a just-murdered neighbor. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be known as history’s most famous burglar. 

“Bring us alongside the damaged section.” Ris pointed to where the shattered hull was opened wide enough for Hughes to enter like a docking bay. “We can look for signs of repair work.” 

“For the record, I don’t like this.” Bermudez’s voice was quiet and hollow. “If there are survivors, there could be thousands. This is a job for the fleet, not for my ship.” 

“Other Reachers could take a large rescue force as an attempt to secure the hulk for themselves.” Lund shook his head. “They might think us scavengers too, to be fair.” 

“Keep trying hails on all bands.” Ris glanced over at Bermudez. “The Reachers never ask us for help, or accept help offered. But it would be rude of us not to try.” 

The spacer winced. “I just hope they see it that way.” She glanced nervously between the controls in Giffards’s hands and the view ahead. “Look, for the record, I-” 

“I’ve got something.” Lund leaned over the controls. A moment later, the holo-display in the center of the console projected a miniature of the Reacher ship, with a pulsing white indicator near the stern. “Low-grade thermal anomaly.” 

“Compartment full of survivors?”  

“Nah.” Kuriega pointed to the damaged sections. “See how thick that is? At least ten meters of solid ferrous nickel. If we’re seeing a point thermal source, it’s outside the hull.” 

“Telescopes?” Ris turned to Giffards. 

The pilot shook her head. “Light levels are too low to pick up anything against that hull.” She gestured to the graceful spines protruding along the port-side aft quarter of the ship. 

“Then we go in close and put every light we’ve got on that area. Lund, try to get a telescope lock on that signature.” Ris winced; their running lights were on, of course, but if they turned on the more powerful lights most starships carried in the bow, they were announcing their presence even for anyone who wasn’t looking. “And if there’s nothing, we proceed to the damaged section.” 

“Aye.” Giffards tapped a few controls to activate the bow lights. Even from a distance, they could see the white beams reflected in tiny pinpricks of light by a thousand reflective surfaces along the Reacher ship’s hull, like a candle held aloft in a cavern of gemstones. 

All five of them held their breath as Hughes inched forward, and those reflections grew fewer and brighter. To reach a point directly above the thermal signature, they had to pass quite close by one of the longest spines, and Ris watched a distorted reflection of the little ship swim along the fluted lines of that protrusion for a few seconds before it passed out of sight. 

“I’ve got something.” Lund announced as they approached the spot. “Bubble-like structure on the surface.” Reflective almost like the hull, but not part of it.” He put the image on one of the secondary screens. It was still indistinct, but Ris could just make out the teardrop-like structure attached to the graceful fluted Reacher hull.  

Ris leaned forward to examine the image. It struck him as familiar. “How big?” 

“Ten, maybe fifteen meters in diameter.” He shrugged. “Hard to be exact when we don’t have anything to compare it to.” 

“Damnation.” Bermudez shoved forward. “Don’t you see? You fools are going to get us killed. We need to leave. Now. We never should have come here.” 

Ris turned to the spacer. “What is it?” 

“Don’t you see?” Bermudez grabbed the back of Giffard’s chair, but before she could try to force her way to the controls, several alarms began blaring at once, and the overhead lighting flickered alarmingly. The cockpit displays all winked out one by one, and when they came back a few seconds later, the teardrop-shaped bubble was gone. 

We have one more entry from Director Bleier’s account next week, and then we will probably have a few items from Operation HELLESPONT to share with you. Perhaps you know why we are sticking with this story so long by now, but if you do not, you will next week. 

 

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Tales from the Service: The Courier’s Coordinates

2952-07-10 – Tales from the Service: The Courier’s Coordinates 

Yes, we are delaying coverage of other stories to continue with Director Bleier’s account.  This is partly because it is about a Reacher encounter, and partially because this is one of the most high profile things the Alien Sapience Welfare Authority has done in recent memory. 

I am of course aware of the highly publicized details of Operation HELLESPONT, which concluded last month but which was kept secret for several weeks. I think this is being covered relatively well already by other outlets, but we may discuss it here, if the stories I want to publish get Naval Intelligence approval. 

Director Ris Bleier was glad when Howard Helios Hughes finally departed the Tanner-Wyatt waystation and was cruising for the tiny system’s jump limit again. Though the stop at Tanner-Wyatt was necessary both for intelligence and for supplies, every hour spent there seemed like one wasted. 

Unfortunately, the informant Ris had been hoping to meet on that station was nowhere to be found. His most productive agent in all of Sagittarius had, despite all covert messages sent ahead of Ris’s arrival, failed to make the rendezvous. While inconvenient, that was not too uncommon; Ris knew enough about the agent’s outward line of work to know that he couldn’t always appear on command. 

Supplies, of course, could be had at Tanner-Wyatt in abundance, if one didn’t look too hard at package expiration dates. Hughes had a food-fab, of course, but this needed nutrient slurry to work on. No doubt a quarter-tank of slurry would have served Captain Bermudez for several more journeys, but on this outing, consumption had understandably quintupled. Just to be on the safe side, Ris had ordered his crew to buy up a month’s supply of ration bars and shelf-stable packaged food as well as a full tank of nutrient slurry. There was no telling how long this outing would take. 

Bermudez, of course, remained sulking in her cabin throughout most of her ship’s time docked. She emerged only once, only to scowl as crates of reserve food were wheeled aboard and stowed away. Bee retreated back into her quarters once more, she muttered something about not paying for any of that. Ris had begun to disregard her presence aboard; after all, he only wanted her along as a form of de-facto incarceration. She had no expertise relevant to locating and investigating a Reacher wreck. 

Ris, eager to be off, joined Giffards in the cockpit for the departure from Tanner-Wyatt, sitting in the copilot’s chair and careful not to touch any of the controls. It was good to put the boxy station behind them, and go on to the mission proper – besides, he was almost through with his backlog of reports. 

“Are we really going to be out here long enough to need those damned food-bars when we have coordinates?” Bermudez, poking her head into the cockpit, sighed. “I hope I’m getting paid by the hour.” 

“ASWA will pay fairly for your time.” Ris barely glanced up at the spacer. “We have the coordinates you provided, yes, but no velocity or timestamp for that data. And if the vessel my agent sighted is not entirely dead, it might have regained partial drive power in the interim. We must plan for the worst case.” 

“The worst is right.” Bermudez turned as if to leave, but stopped. “What do you plan on doing if you really do find a dead Reacher ship all the way out here?” 

Ris shook his head. “There are standard protocols, but this situation has many variables. We will investigate as appropriate.” 

“That's bureaucrat-speak for ‘hells if I know,’ isn’t it?” Bermudez arched one eyebrow. 

Giffards, still at the controls, kept her gaze straight ahead, suppressing a smile by the thinnest of margins. 

Ris stood. “It is bureaucrat-speak for ‘we’ll find out when we get there,’ Miss Bermudez. If you would like a report on the most likely workflows, Mr. Lund can provide it.” 

“I might just. If it’s written like you talk, Bleier, it might work better than sleep-meds.” Bermudez stood aside to let Ris pass. “Supposing we don’t find anything?” 

“That is the worst case which we plan for.” Ris shrugged. “It is probable we will find something.” With that, he brushed past the ship’s captain and headed back to his closet-sized cabin. 

As it turned out, the reserve food wasn’t necessary. A metallic debris cloud was easily visible on sensors from the coordinates Bermudez had carried to Ris’s office on The Sprawl. A few days of scanner sweeps later, and Hughes’s sensors were able to pick out the derelict from the other asteroid-like objects drifting on erratic orbits through the system.  

The ship’s computer was hardly state of the art, but it was able to model based on the velocities of the wreck and the debris cloud what had happened – the Reacher ship had been decelerating on a course to meet, and probably consume, a large metallic asteroid, when something had exploded either on the hull’s surface or just within. What exactly had caused that six or seven kiloton explosion, only closer investigation could determine, but it had disabled the big ship’s drive, apparently for good. 

“Still no response to hails?” Ris, studying the computer models on the large holo-display in the lounge, turned to Art Lund. 

“None.” Lund shook his head. “But it would take power to reply at this range, and if there’s power in that thing, it’s reserve batteries and backups at best.” 

The existence of backup generators and reserve batteries on Reacher ships being at best a hypothesis, Ris decided this was a far from hopeful sign. “Then we need to get closer. Do you concur?” 

Lund sighed. “We’d better. But carefully. If they were attacked, and there are still some of them alive, they might not realize we’re friendly.” 

Ris nodded. “Work with Kuriega to dump our data suite to a sensor drone and launch it. We’ll run a data-stream as we approach, so whoever comes looking for us has all the data we can give them.” 

Lund winced and left the room without a word. Ris almost regretted bringing him along; Art Lund was married and had three children. Risking his life was an unfortunate necessity; the Sagittarius ASWA had only a handful of people who had studied the Reachers, and he was the only one of them available on short notice. 

Ris was risking his own life, too, but that was, if not exactly bureaucratically standard, at least less unfortunate. If there were survivors, having someone of his rank involved from the beginning would hopefully make the recovery effort go smoothly, and if a broken fire-control system or a panicked, oxygen-starved Reacher gunner managed to blast Hughes, then he’d at least get a nice silver plaque in the ASWA headquarters back on Centauri for a memorial. 

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Tales from the Service: The Courier’s Departure

2952-06-26 – Tales from the Service: The Courier’s Departure

Departure clearance, unsurprisingly, took only moments to acquire once Ris Bleier and his hand-picked team were aboard ship. He disliked Howard Helios Hughes from the moment he stepped aboard, but the ship was, unfortunately, ideal for his purpose – fast, anonymous, and unlikely to be associated with a government bureau in any Confederated port on the Sagittarius Frontier. The fact that commandeering it also kept its skipper from selling any secrets a second time was of course critical as well. 

Captain Bermudez, of course, took Ris’s obvious distaste as a personal victory. The more he scowled at the dented paneling, the scuffed, stained deck plating, and the signs of shoddy repair work evident in almost every compartment, the more smug she became. She offered no tour, so Rahat Kuriega, an engineer Ris had picked up from his own cutter’s maintenance crew, led Ris and the other two ASWA men around the vessel with the help of its decade-old registration schematics. This proved mercifully short – on one end was the cockpit, with two chairs facing an arc of outdated control interfaces, and on the other was a closet-sized engine-room. Between these, filling a flattened tube, one could find three cabins, a decrepit lounge, a food-fab, and a filthy sanitary compartment, all accessed from a single fifteen-meter strip of corridor. The small cargo compartments, though capable of being pressurized, were not attached to the pressurized crew space. 

Brianne Giffard, a pilot normally in charge of the ASWA courtesy shuttles, was at the controls when Hughes took off. Ris, standing behind her, did his best to ignore the presence of Captain Bermudez in the copilot’s chair, arms crossed over her chest. Clearing the mad tangle of docks and cranes that was the outer works of The Sprawl proved no trouble for Giffard, and soon, their course was laid in, and the ship was on automatic guidance. 

As soon as the pilot’s hands fell from the controls, Bermudez cleared her throat. “Thanks for not smashing my ship.” She stood and stretched her arms. “I’ll be in my cabin.” 

Ris met Giffard’s eyes as the skipper of the commandeered vessel flounced out of the cockpit. He knew what the pilot was thinking – they could have just as easily gone after this rumor of a crippled or derelict Reacher ship in his cutter, or in one of the less obtrusive courtesy shuttles. Why the trouble of using this unkempt ship and its unwilling owner? 

Ris was, however, not in the business of explaining his decisions to his subordinates. He merely shrugged and left to see to his own berth. Of the two cabins not claimed by Bermudez, he had elected for the smaller one, leaving the larger to his trio of subordinates. How two men and one woman elected to divide that space was, of course, not his business; he had no intention of ever entering their cabin. 

Ris’s cabin, barely large enough for his bags to fit between the bunk and opposite wall, proved as uninspiring as when he’d first seen it. The dingy metal walls lacked even a viewpanel to break up their monotony. A chronometer glowed from the center of a corner desk no more than half a meter across, providing the only illumination until Kuriega came by to replace the overhead light-panels. 

Ris, however, refused to let these drab conditions bring down his mood. All he really needed was a place to sleep, and some solitude to catch up on a backlog of low-priority Welfare Officer reports from the outlying stations; this cabin would serve well enough for a few days. 

Before he opened any of his bags, though, Ris stripped the bunk down to its rectangular polyfoam block mattress, rolled everything up, and kicked it into the corridor. He would not be trusting Bermudez’s laundry under any circumstances. One of the bags contained a set of smart-fabric bedclothes that would fit to any size of bunk, and he soon had these laid out and constricting themselves around the mattress. 

A knock on the door-frame drew Ris’s attention, and when he turned he saw Art Lund, one of his department’s most experienced linguists, standing over the pile of cloth. “I’m pretty sure you’d have more space in the big cabin if you swapped with Giffard, Director.” 

“This is acceptable.” Ris shrugged. “This expedition is not a vacation.” 

“Oh, aye.” Lund arched one eyebrow. “Which is why I’m wondering what makes a regional bureau director take up field work. You could have sent someone else.” 

Ris smiled. Sometimes, to someone with so long a service record as Lund, he might reveal his purposes, but this was not the time. “I could have, Art. But I did not.” 

“Fair enough.” Lund held up his hands. “I guess the promise of Reachers cuts to even the coldest bureaucratic heart, eh?” He turned to leave. “Want me to take care of this trip hazard?” 

“I would appreciate it.” Ris gestured to the bundle. “Find somewhere to store them. Perhaps on the other side of the airlock, just to be safe.” 

The fact that a bureau chief like Bleier would personally see to such an errand perhaps should have tipped off his subordinates that what they were doing had a real chance of being very, very important, but it seems that none of the four people who accompanied him on this voyage had any inkling this might be the case. This, despite all of them knowing, in general, what they were looking for – a wrecked or possibly very badly damaged Racher ship, as opposed to an empty shell like the ones we have described encounters with on previous occasions. 

The importance of locating such a tragic scene, in Sagittarius no less, seems to have been lost upon most of the people attempting it, at least until they had it in front of their eyes. 

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