Tales from the Service: Emissary of the Seventy-Three

2954-02-25 – Tales from the Service: Emissary of the Seventy-Three

Obviously, as I alluded to in last week’s entry, I am aware of the recent announcement by Seventh Fleet of the raid conducted on one of the Incarnation core worlds, an arid but well-populated planet known to its inhabitants as Prospero but identified by Navy planners as Target Karma. 

The official name of this operation seems to be Sledgehammer, though none of the fleet press releases named the offensive. As I indicated last week, at least two head-fake operations seem to have been tied to this to try to conceal the operation – some personnel seem to have been informed they were involved in operations “Ludendorff” and “Juno” with different operational parameters. 

This deception, however, had little to no effect. The raiding force for Sledgehammer ran into a formation of Incarnation cruisers which blocked it from doing much damage to orbital infrastructure, and several lesser warships were destroyed in the ensuing battle. In the grand scheme of things, such a skirmish would barely deserve a single press release from Seventh fleet headquarters, except that it took place over an enemy world. 

That’s all I can really say for the moment about Sledgehammer. Target Karma (I will use this term, for consistency with Navy releases and to avoid confusion) appears to have avoided significant damage, but there must be some effect on enemy morale to see Confederated warships over Incarnation worlds for the first, and certainly not the last, time. The raid, minor though it is, begins a new (and hopefully final) phase of this war. 

This week’s entry is, or claims to be, an account brought to us from the Kyaroh front. Due to the lack of HyperComm connectivity to Force 73, I have no means of verifying this, so I present it with the caution that, as the fog of war clears on the operations in that quarter, we may find that this is only a clever invention. I have made no alterations to names, as the submitter made clear it was already anonymized. 

At a signal from his guide, Lieutenant Vasili M. eased his rail carbine off his shoulder and sat down on the dust-strewn floor of the ruined structure, grateful for a chance to rest after nearly six hours of hiking through the most broken terrain imaginable. The trio of Marines who followed him picked out spots for themselves, though they showed no sign of fatigue. They never did. 

“How much farther?” Vasil asked, reaching into his pocket for a food bar. 

Bel’itec, their Kyaroh guide, peered through a jagged hole in the wall opposite they’d come through, his vast shoulders briefly blocking the stream of daylight which lit the space. “The perimeter approaches.” His rumbling voice formed clear Anglo-Terran words, though he had only started learning the language a few weeks prior. “Before dark, we will be with my kin.” 

“Good.” Vasili bit off a chunk of the meal bar, and chewed thoughtfully. He had volunteered for this duty, and he wasn’t sure he regretted it yet, but two days and nights of hiking and sleeping rough had been hard on him. He didn’t want to admit it, but three years in Navy service had begun to dull woodcraft honed among the rugged hills of Planet at Centauri. 

Woodcraft, of course, had precious little benefit, when one’s course took one through vast kilometers of ruined mega-city. From Bel’itec, he’d learned that the place had once been a grand place, a center of culture and the arts, as well as the main hub of the planet’s weapons industry. Some ten million Kyaroh had once called it home – but that had been before the Incarnation arrived. Now, it was a shattered jumble of broken artifice, a haven for renegades both human and Kyaroh, shallowly colonized these past two decades or so by weeds and vermin. 

So far, the little band had run into little trouble. They’d spotted a few Incarnation air patrols, but these perfunctory overflights, even with all the sensors that festooned Incarnation aircraft, could do little to penetrate the shambolic wilderness that had once been a grand city. The occupiers knew better than to commit troops to ground patrols; even if they never spotted a single Kyaroh, there were other dangers to contend with. 

The planet’s original inhabitants, of course, had never quite abandoned the city. The surface was a total loss, but according to Bel’itec, life of a sort still went on in the many tunnels bored below the surface, where many thousands of Kyaroh sheltered, out of reach of Incarnation captivity and enslavement. 

No doubt the Incarantion force suspected the presence of this redoubt; after all, it was one of many such on a planet they nominally controlled, and not even the largest. The surface and the day belonged to the occupier, but the depths and the darkness favored the Kyaroh who still dared to resist. They seemed to have little will to reduce it, however. Their occupation force controlled and operated what heavy industry had not been destroyed by their assault, with the dubious help of nearly a million enslaved Kyaroh. Why should they care if, in warrens, tunnels, and mountain caves, there were still many who called themselves free? It made little difference to their war machine. 

That, of course, was what Vasili and his little band were here to change. They had crept down to the surface in a stealth-equipped shuttle launch to avoid the lone enemy cruiser stationed in orbit with a message for the leaders of the subterranean resistance. Force 73 was on its way. The time to strike was at hand. 

“We should not linger.” Bel’itec gestured back out the door through which they had come, to a street choked with titanic chunks of what had once been a towering skyscraper. “We must not be detected so close to the redoubt.” 

Wearily, Vasili got to his feet, and his trio of Marine compatriots silently followed suit. “I hope there’s some hot food and a few soft beds waiting for us when we get there.” 

“You will see.” With that, Bel’itec crept outside, moving more stealthily than anything that big had any right to. 

With a sigh, Vasili hefted his carbine and followed. 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Fiend in the Dark

2954-02-18 – Tales from the Service: A Fiend in the Dark 

Yes, I am aware of the rather terse announcement from Seventh Fleet headquarters last week about a fast raid on an enemy-held system here in Sagittarius. Rumors in the fleet are that it was a mixed bag, that things didn’t go to plan and the mission did not meet all of its objectives, but these are just rumors, and Admiral Abarca’s staff hasn’t responded to my queries on the topic. I’ve heard conflicting rumors about the name of the operation; there are at least two different names circulating, which is odd. Operational code-names are usually shared with everyone involved, even support staffs, so they commonly leak among service personnel before a force jumps off, even when the objectives remain secret. 

Obviously, as has been hinted at in several interviews with the admiral, offensive operations have been imminent and in-plan for some months. That the first probing raid met more than expected resistance is, honestly, no real surprise. The Incarnation propaganda makes it appear invincible and irresistible, and to keep this charade up for their own people, they can’t really afford to have millions watch Confederated raiders smash up orbital assets unopposed. 

I suspect we’ll have some clear details by this time next week. 

The telescopes found stellar occlusions after a few more minutes of idly toying with the net, and once Raywhite had something to point its sensors at, data began to trickle in. There was indeed a main body to the strange entity; it was a nearly spherical ellipsoid with one distended pole, a bit more than two thousand meters long and about fifteen hundred across which emitted nothing and reflected very nearly nothing, excepting of course the grav-flux pulses. As far as they could tell, its surface was entirely smooth and featureless, showing no indication of its nature. 

“It remains my intention to collect a sample.” Lieutenant Kato said, after analyzing the data on the main viewpanel for a long moment. “What are our options?” 

“I recommend a high-ex wrecker load from the forward tubes, Skipper.” Snyder, the weapons officer, sounded excited to finally have something to do. “That’s bound to blast something clear.” 

Kato nodded. “Can we get close enough for the axial cannon?” 

Georgi Rye winced. He had been afraid that would be the direction of the skipper’s thoughts. A little cutter like Raywhite had a very small missile magazine compared to a larger warship, and theoretically they had a mission to complete on this cruise they hadn’t even started. Using even one missile body on this unexpected complication would mean a greater chance of running out before they had their next rendezvous with a supply tender. 

“For an optimal strike with the axial plasma cannon we’d need to be within about five klicks.” Snyder shook his head. “I didn’t think that was wise.” 

“Concur.” Georgi quickly added. “That’s close enough that it might interfere with our main drive.” He felt bad immediately; technically, they didn’t even know if the object had that capability. 

“Shame.” Kato shrugged and stood. “Load tube one, wrecker load. Load remaining forward tubes with ship-to-ship cluster charge.” 

“Wrecker load aye.” Snyder nodded and turned to his station, to issue commands down to the weapons bay. On a larger ship, the missile systems were handled by auto-loaders, but on a cutter, single missiles were housed inside the pressure spaces and the weapons bay crew was responsible for pulling it down from storage, mating on the warhead, configuring its dynamic explosive payload, and wrestling it into one of the four launch tubes. This crude system was slow and prone to mishap, but it had the advantage of being small and incredibly easy to fit out. Seventh fleet had hundreds of cutters of various configurations, most of them churned out by the score at Philadelphia and Madurai. In any case, any target that could withstand a volley of four standard ship-to-ship missiles from the forward weapons bay and a follow-up two from the aft bay was probably too much for such a small ship to be tangling with at all. 

There was little doubt that the object out there in the dark would survive so many hits, of course, at least physically. If it was made mainly of metal, it was the same mass as one of the larger battleships in the fleet, and if it was made of any lesser and more flexible substance, the blast of a wrecker warhead, optimized as it was for demolishing fixed space installations, would probably have even less effect. Still, Georgi told himself, if it had anything more offensive in store than the net, it probably would have used it by now. 

“Tube one arming.” Snyder added the weapons indicator overlay to the main display. The first one blinked yellow, while the next three remained a dull red, and the final two flat grey. A moment later, the next indicator switched to a blinking orange, and the first stopped blinking. 

“Helm, get us into missile range.” Kato folded her hands. “Set condition one. All gunners stand by.” 

At her words, the ship’s computer sounded the alert klaxon. They’d been at heightened alert since the first evasive burn, so most of the crew had very little to do but switch their stations over to combat condition. The overhead lighting on the bridge dimmed and became redder. 

“Coming about. Mr. Sokol, keep tabs on that net for me.” Georgi switched the controls to manual and placed his hands on the control pads, which swelled into a pair of textured haptic bulges under his hand. Gentle pressure flipped Raywhite’s nose around to face the target, then he brought the drive up to twelve gees.  

“I have a targeting beam lock.” Snyder announced.  

“You may fire when we reach optimal range, Mr. Snyder.” 

“Aye, Skipper.” 

“The net has changed course to follow us. Estimate four minutes until we need to maneuver again.” 

“Time to weapon range?” 

“One minute, fifty seconds. The weapon will be in beam-riding mode, Skipper.” 

“Proceed. Helm, maintain course after launch to ensure optimal tracking. Ready a full-power evasive run on my command.” 

Georgi winced. “Aye, Skipper.” Locking the manual controls for a moment, he keyed in a random-evasive maneuver and a full fifteen-gee burn, ready at the push of a button. “Evasive course prepared at your command.” 

The seconds ticked by. Though the terms of this encounter should have become predictable by now, Georgi’s skin crawled at the idea that he was piloting the ship right toward the object. His left hand itched to slide over to the button to engage evasive. 

“Ten seconds.” Snyder called out. “Secondary missile arm. Five seconds. Four.” 

“Net is still safely behind.” Sokol called out. Georgi appreciated this, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary. 

“Two. One. Optimal range.” Snyder’s words were punctuated by a dull thump reverberating through Raywhite’s structure. “Tube one discharged.” 

There was a brief flash from the bridge’s tiny armor-glass viewports as the missile’s solid fuel starter charge kicked it free of the ship, which quickly vanished as its main gravitic motor took over outside the disruption radius of Raywhite’s own drive. The missile appeared on the tactical plot as a speeding yellow dart, wavering slightly in its course as it acquired the targeting beam and then straightening out into a hurtling straight-line trajectory right toward the bulbous side of the mystery object. 

“Give me visual on the main display.” Kato steepled her fingers. 

Sokol put the feed from one of the forward telescope cameras on the main display. There was nothing to see; the missile’s gravitic drive was invisible, and the camera could pick out only the brightest few stars. By the displayed magnification, the invisible entity should have filled the middle third of the screen, but nothing could be seen but a blank expanse of void. 

“Impact in three. Two. One.” The dart on the plot disappeared into the foggy indistinct area marked out as being occupied by the object. A moment later, the display blinked a white sphere over the area. “Detonation.” 

A bright flash of light fading into an orange halo filled the camera feed. 

On Georgi’s console, the grav-flux indicator spiked up to three, five, then, to his alarm, ten Mahans. It finally halted at eleven, then began to creep back downward. 

As he was watching it, Georgi noticed that the eyes of Sokol and Snyder were directed forward. He looked up, only to see with his horror that the tactical plot had gone quite mad – now the ship’s sensors could see the target well enough, as a glowing red shell on infrared bands with a bright wound in its side, but all around it, space boiled with faint traceries of coiling red substance, as if more of the net-substance was issuing out from the object on all sides. 

“Evasive, Mr. Rye.” Even Kato sounded shaken at the sight.  

Georgi slapped the control, and once again, Raywhite wheeled and shot outward, away from the strange entity. 

“Very good.” Kato took a deep breath. “Mr. Sokol, that had to have blown something clear. Find it for me.”

Details

Tales from the Service: A Snare in the Dark

2954-02-11 – Tales from the Service: A Snare in the Dark 

As Raywhite weaved around, its sensors blaring every frequency into the dark, a better picture of what they had discovered remained elusive. Georgi Rye found at least that the cloud, or web, or whatever it was struggled to turn and accelerated slowly, which given its extent was not a real surprise. As long as he changed the ship’s heading every few minutes, its dogged pursuit was no real threat. 

“Whatever it is, it isn’t very smart.” Lieutenant Kato muttered, after yet another hairpin turn left the cloud far behind. 

“Must be automated, Skipper. Or a lower-order lifeform.” Sokol shrugged. “I’m not seeing any sort of main body. Maybe the net is all it is. A mass of thread organs with simple senses, chasing our thermal signature.” 

Georgi, not liking that mental image any better than his own, nevertheless shook his head. “I think it could have caught us when we jumped in if that’s all it was.” 

“Whatever it is, we’ve got nothing on visual scopes.” Sokol threw up his hands. "It’s got almost no reflection on any wavelength. It doesn’t occlude. It’s probably not much denser than the gas cloud we thought it was at first.” 

“Then if there was a main body somewhere, we could go right by it and not notice. What made me think that was-” Georgi stopped, his eyes flitting over to the gravitic flux reading on his console. “Skipper, how invested in finding out what this is are we?” 

Kato was silent for several seconds before replying. “I’m listening, Mr. Rye.” 

“As we got closer to whatever it was, the gravitic flux spiked higher, and perhaps a bit more often. We can use that as sort of a warmer-colder indicator.” 

“Interesting. Can you plot the grav-flux readings against our position?” 

“Position readings this far from any points of reference are inaccurate.” Georgi shook his head. “But I’ll see what I can do.” 

A few minutes later, Georgi had something to show. After looking at it from a few angles, he sent it as an overlay to the main tactical plot. 

“What am I looking at, Mr. Rye?” Kato asked, after a moment. 

Georgi queued up the next few evasive turns, then stood up and approached the tactical plot. “Color is the flux spike amplitude – redder is larger. Radius around the center is duration, each one set at approximate location at peak intensity.” He pointed to the two reddest pips off to one side of the display. “These were just before and after our first evasive run. If I’m right, that’s the closest we’ve gotten to the main mass.” 

Sokol shook his head. “That’s not much data. We could blunder right into it if we try to go fishing for more of your flux spikes.” 

“How close do you think we got?” Kato asked. 

“Well.” Georgi held out his hands. “As Mr. Sokol said, position data out here in the interstellar is pretty inaccurate, but gravitic flux is an inverse square function. You can use these data points to estimate a position.” He tapped a control on his wristcuff to add the second overlay, which painted a hazy gold bubble in the extreme margin of the plot. “With the position error factored in, the main body is somewhere in this area.” 

“And the same math can estimate how big it is.” Sokol nodded. 

“Correct. But gravitic flux shouldn’t spike at all, it should be a uniform field. So whatever this thing is, it’s not going to be significantly massive. My bet is, it’s folding space somehow, intermittently. In any case, the number that computation provides is insane.” 

“Technological, not biological. All the more reason to get a piece.” Kato nodded. “But what was the mass?” 

Georgi winced. “Point zero five to point one seven Ter.” 

Kato’s eyes widened, and for good reason. An object that big would classify as a small moon, and there was no way they could possibly have missed it from any practical range. 

“But if it’s a point source, like a star drive, it’s operating at about thirty Mahans of flux. That’s comparable to the disruption we’d see from a small cruiser's Himura drive, only it’s cycling far faster, and it’s obviously not going anywhere fast.” 

“Some sort of rudimentary star drive jammer, probably.” Sokol’s voice was low, as if he was mostly talking to himself. “Once you get close, you can’t just jump away.” 

“Possible.” Georgi nodded. “If it can pulse faster it may also impede our normal gravitic drive at close range. Which would-” 

“Would let the net catch us, assuming there are no other surprises.” Kato nodded. “Mr. Sokol, get our visual-light scopes on Mr. Rye’s target area. Something with enough power to put out cruiser-drive level gravitic flux is definitely going to occlude the background stars.” 

Astute readers have already asked why a single cutter, not even one of the stealthy assault cutters designed for long-range independent operations, was out so far on its own. This is one of the elements of this story which made me doubt it at first, but it turns out Raywhite is in fact a former Survey Auxiliary vessel which has been subsumed into Seventh Fleet as a long range scout. What it was doing that cruise I still don’t quite know, but it is a vessel equipped for solo operations. 

One shudders to think what might have happened to a vessel without advanced Survey-grade sensors encountering what this crew did (again, assuming this story is true, as it seems to be). 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Net in the Dark

2954-02-04 – Tales from the Service: A Net in the Dark 

The silence on Raywhite’s bridge lasted several long seconds. Presumably the rest of the crew was waiting for Georgi Rye to explain his vague pronouncement, but he didn’t really know himself what made him so uneasy. Gravitic flux anomalies, usually as a result of high phased matter concentrations, weren’t an unheard of phenomenon, but they were generally benign as long as one steered clear. 

As he struggled to put his concern into words, the flux reading came back again, this time climbing to two point two Mahans for an instant before falling back to zero. The ship was getting farther from the cloud. Why would the reading spikes be getting stronger? 

“Speak your mind, Mr. Rye.” Lieutenant Kato prompted. 

“Skipper, the last reading was stronger, and definitely lasted longer. We’re moving away from the cloud. That shouldn’t be possible, unless-” 

“Unless we’re going toward the anomaly, not away from it.” Will Sokol punched new commands into the sensor station. “Recommend full stop on the engines.” 

“Agreed.” The skipper waved her hand. “Get me a new range to the cloud, then put all of our active sensors on maximum.” 

“Aye.” Georgi and Sokol responded simultaneously, each attending to the controls in front of him.  

Georgi brought the cutter’s engines to idle, but they’d been going at eight gees for some minutes; the ship’s velocity was well over a hundred thousand kilometers per hour. “Should I reverse our course, Lieutenant?” 

Kato shook her head. “Plot in a random orthogonal course, but don’t execute it yet. We need more information.” 

Setting that up took only a few seconds. Georgi gave this operation maximum drive power, capable of fifteen gravities. That couldn’t be sustained long, but it would get them on the new course as fast as possible, and he could dial back once they were clear. Meanwhile, the main tactical plot remained dark and empty, save Raywhite’s pip in the center of the display. 

“Strange.” Sokol muttered, then looked up. “Infrared scatter from the cloud suggests it’s still only about a hundred kilometers away.” 

Georgi shivered. Something was not right. “The new course, Skipper?” 

“Wait.” Kato stood up. “Are you sure, Mr. Sokol? It’s the same distance? Like it’s shadowing us?” 

“That’s what it looks like, Lieutenant.” The sensor operator sent the data to the tactical plot, and sure enough, the diffuse cloud formed a vague thirty degree arc directly aft, about a hundred klicks out. 

The gravitic flux indicator spiked again, this time to about three Mahans. Georgi started up in his chair. “Shadowing us... Or herding us.” 

Sokol turned around. “You think it’s some sort of defense, pushing us away from something?” 

“Or toward...” Georgi shook his head once, then slammed his hand down on the button that would execute the change of course. “Toward something we don’t want to meet.” 

Lieutenant Kato opened her mouth to object, but at that moment, the diffuse red glow in the tactical plot flashed into momentary stark clarity. It was not a cloud; it was a vast web of ropy structures, densest in the middle and branching out into the darkness until the thinnest extremities faded out into invisibility. 

Even as the flash faded, the cloud twisted, its edge curling inwards where Raywhite’s new course passed closest. This attempt to block the ship’s retreat was, however, too slow by far; the net closed only on the void well aft. Had they been running on anything less than full power, Georgi realized, they might not have been so lucky. Perhaps the web, seeing the ship moving initially at eight gees, had assumed this their maximum speed. 

Face white, Lieutenant Kato returned to her command chair. “Toward, indeed.” She muttered. “What do you think? Brigands? Astrofauna?” 

“If that was a life-form, it’s an order of magnitude bigger than anything in the database.” Sokol’s voice trembled. “Incarnation secret weapon?” 

“We’re out in the middle of nowhere.” Kato shook her head. “There are no life-bearing systems for thirty ly. Why put your secret weapon here?” 

“Shall we come around and warm the tubes, Skipper?” Osman Snyder at the weapons terminal spoke up. “We’d know a lot more about this thing if we blew off a few samples.” 

Georgi prayed silently for the skipper to refuse this suggestion. They did have a mission to complete, and tangling with the perils of the void wasn’t really pertinent to it. 

“You know, Mr. Snyder, that’s not a bad idea.” Kato chuckled. “Sokol, can you get us a long range firing solution?” 

“On the net? Maybe.” Sokol shrugged. “It’s pretty diffuse. If we use a big enough payload, though, we’re sure to punch a hole in it. But I think Mr. Rye is right. It was herding us toward something, and I think we’re better off sampling that.” 

“Agreed. Mr. Rye, reduce acceleration to ten gees.” Kato waved her hand, her face already recovering some of its color. “Work with Mr. Sokol to set up a search pattern that keeps us out of harm’s way. When we find the main body, we’re going to give it – or them – some fresh regrets.” 

While there are several documented space-based macrofauna in the Reach, whether these species also live in Sagittarius has not been studied. The hypothesis that this phenomenon might be a sort of drifting predator is, despite its size, not too farfetched, albeit it does presuppose a much higher density of astrofauna in Sagittarius than in Orion. 

This hypothesis, as it turns out, was not correct. Neither was this a strange new Incarnation weapon Raywhite was unlucky enough to encounter first, nor the mad invention of enterprising outlaws. This is something stranger indeed than any of the crew’s first three guesses, as next week’s entry will demonstrate. I still don't have any external indications of this story's direct truth or falsity, but every indication is that the submitter knows the ship and its crew well, as all personnel details still match official records.

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