Tales from the Service: Source Gabriel

2947-09-10 – Tales from the Service: Source Gabriel 

As some of you may know from my personal datasphere hub, a cousin of mine (the very cousin who first introduced me to Cosmic Background when I was still a student) was a crew tech aboard Reiter’s Kite, which went missing during a Silver Strand border patrol two weeks ago, and is as of yesterday presumed lost with all hands. 

Reiter’s Kite is the largest of several ships damaged or lost in the last month, as most of you well know, and my mourning is hardly unique or special. The Ladeonist insurgents attacking Navy patrols in the Strand sector have claimed the lives of almost one thousand Navy service personnel, though the Navy is giving at least as good as it’s getting in what many see as a secondary theater of the Frontier War. Unfortunately, this is not the case; Ladeonist terrorists, pirates, Rattanai imperialists, and other dangerous elements keep elements of two fleets almost constantly busy on the borders of the Reach, even in peace-time. Likely the Hegemony has a comparable amount of its navy assigned to this sort of duty on its own borders. 

I remind you all of this only to remind this audience that my extended family’s grief is neither special nor unique. I will not be taking time off covering the conflict to travel back to the Core Worlds for the memorial service, and do not wish this feed or its social media presence to focus on my (or any) personal tragedy. 

This week, we have another account provided by a semi-cooperative prisoner of war, this one housed here at Maribel in the prison ship Vibiana Kobe. While no Cosmic Background staff have talked with him, Nojus followed up with the source, a Naval Intelligence junior officer whose name we must unfortunately redact from this feed, who provided audio recordings of the interview from which it is drawn. The prisoner in question is known in Intelligence records only as Source Gabriel, and we will use his code-name here rather than his real name. Source Gabriel was captured by a mercenary outfit which engaged the enemy at Bitterweald, and he has given the Navy a large body of useful intelligence, including data about the capabilities of the Coronach strike interceptor used heavily by the Incarnation. 

The Coronach is the same interceptor which has been in this feed repeatedly misidentified as a drone; these tiny one-seat war-launches are far more maneuverable than the Navy’s workhorse Magpie gunship, but they are exceedingly fragile and carry only short-range energy cannons. 

His revelations about the hierarchy of the Incarnation’s military and their use of counterhuman tech to enhance their warfighting abilities, though general, has also been most helpful. For my part, I’m just happy he provided their names for some of their machines and systems; it makes my job a lot easier. 

He also gave some insight into the mindset of the foe; I must say it bears considerable resemblance to the beliefs of Ladeonism, at least as it first appeared shortly before the Terran-Rattanai War. 

Gabriel stood at attention next to his Coronach as Flight Leader Yasin conferred with the woman in red. According to the briefing-pulse, two pathetic strike carriers – converted haulers, really – were the only enemy force in the system, and the captain intended to wipe out both carriers while his own squadrons tore the defenders to pieces. 

Something had changed, however, and a new briefing-pulse had not been issued. As the eleven pilots watched Yasin stand motionless in the middle of the flight deck with the newcomer’s silver-traceried hand resting lightly on his temple, uneasy messages flickered invisibly on laser-link between one and the next. They had all seen the woman in red at least once before, and all found themselves unable to learn anything about her on the ship’s datasphere. The cruiser’s computer told them all that she did not exist, but she appeared with the captain often enough that her presence was certainly authorized. Even now, she stood in the launch hangar, in full view of perhaps a hundred security data monitors, without fear. 

Among the laser-linked messages crossing the hangar-deck, one meant for Gabriel struck his implants’ photosensors. “She’s an Immortal.” Tashi’s voice, synthesized from a text-only missive, trickled into his auditory nerves. “Did you see those traces just appear on her hand?” 

“So is the security chief. So what?” Gabriel sent back. The Incarnation’s chosen few had once seemed a sinister rarity, but their presence aboard ship had become a constant and even comforting reality since the war had begun. A few of them supposedly even mounted up with the Coronach squadrons, though none of Gabriel’s squadron-mates could be counted among the Most Fortunate Children. 

“What if she’s a Harmonizer?” Tashi’s voice carried no particular tone when synthesized from text, but Gabriel knew his friend was worried. Where Harmonizers struck, cancers were cut out of the Incarnation’s great body, and sometimes healthy tissue around the cancer also needed to be excised. “What if there’s a traitor aboard?” 

“A traitor? On this ship?” Gabriel remained still and stony-faced, but the idea was almost humorous. Who would be so catastrophically mad as to betray the cause of preserving humanity for all time, after taking an oath to carry that cause to the ends of the very universe? And if madness so wildly aberrant manifested itself among the personnel aboard a warship, how could it go undetected by security systems? 

Tashi didn’t respond before Flight Leader Yasin, released by the woman in red, staggered backward, then saluted smartly. A second later, a supplemental briefing-pulse unpacked itself into Gabriel’s memory systems. The mission had changed, but only slightly; the flight leader would mount up in a Coronach modified by the woman in red, in which he would pursue and capture particular target among the ramshackle combat launches currently attempting to intercept the ship. The rest of the flight would need to tackle the remaining enemy ships without their leader. 

“Flight, mount up.” Yasin barked the order out loud, as was traditional, and with a barked shout as one, the other eleven pilots in the flight turned on their heels and leapt into the waiting embrace of their tiny, deadly ships. Just before the Coronach’s pressure-cabin closed around him, Gabriel caught Tashi’s eye across the flight deck, and received one final message on laser-link. “Looks like you’re the Section One lead now.” 

As the clamshell cabin sealed itself, Gabriel received another briefing-pulse, opening wide the command signaling systems for a flight leader. Normally, he wouldn’t be field-promoted to flight leader unless Yasin was dead; this was a unique situation and a big responsibility. He had to make sure Tashi and Azurra made it out alive, because he would be answerable to Yasin if he lost any of them. It would be better, he knew, not to return at all, than to return without Tashi and Azurra. 

As the interceptor powered up, its hardlink connectors fixed themselves to his neckline implant jacks. In an instant, the pure darkness and silence of the cockpit suddenly vanished, replaced by the lights and sounds of the hangar outside. Instead of hands and feet, Gabriel felt the steady hum of the drive and the reassuring strength of the twin plasma lances. 

All around him, the other Coronachs, each clearly labeled in his camera-vision with its pilot, warmed up and tested their control interfaces. The last few tech-rigs trundled away, and Gabriel saw the modified Coronach just being hauled out of its enclosure. Its twin plasma lances were gone, replaced by the ill-fitting apparatus of a gravitic net. At a nod from the woman in red, Flight Leader Yasin climbed inside. 

“There are sixteen enemy strike ships, and eleven of us." Azurra observed over the Section One combat interlink. “What do you think about those odds?” 

Gabriel smiled, the sensations of tensing cheek-muscles clashing strangely with the feedback sensations of the Coronach’s systems. “These hired mercenaries are always weak. Make it fifty, then maybe we should worry.” 

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2947-09-16 – Editor's Loudspeaker: The Situation Develops

2947-09-16 – Editor's Loudspeaker: The Situation Develops 

Saint-Lô and its dozen-odd supporting frigates, destroyers, and light cruisers left Maribel space last night. I dispatched this news feed item several hours before departure from planetary orbit, setting it to go public after we’d reached the jump limit. Our destination is still secret, but I have heard rumors about a big raid under way in the Frontier. The Incarnation’s one to three ship raiding attacks on the Coreward Frontier have stretched the more mobile elements of the fleet, but such strikes can’t really do more than damage orbital infrastructure; most of the population and economic activity of the Frontier takes place on planetary surfaces. 

The Incarnation’s problem is simple: they seem to lack the heavy fleet units to field against the Fifth Fleet’s battlewagons, but they can’t stay long enough in any Confederated system to occupy or raze a colony without having heavy elements to at least delay the fleet. If they have committed a larger squadron to a single system, it’s likely that Saint-Lô appearing in-system with its supporting elements will be enough to scare them off. 

Still, I’ll admit I am not ready to experience this war from the tip of the spear. If you are of any of the faiths, keep this squadron in your prayers over the next few days. I have a feeling that we’ll need more than a few prayers before this mess works itself out. 

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Tales from the Service: The Siege of Berkant

2947-09-17 – Tales from the Service: The Siege of Berkant 

I was expecting Saint-Lô to travel for many days before emerging at the edge of a destination system, but we made only three jumps – twenty-two hours total travel time. This being the case, and seeing that we were within only a few light-minutes of the local HyperCast relay station, I hurriedly cancelled the automatic-post story I’d prepared for our time in the dark. With the captain’s permission, I spent some time sitting as an observer in the Combat Information Center. 

The fact that the relay is still active is strange, but I’m not about to miss the opportunity to do what I came aboard this ship to do – namely, cover the war effort. You would think that an aggressor planning to stay in-system for a sustained assault would slag the thing to prevent Fifth Fleet high command from gaining intelligence about their actions in the clear, but the Incarnation left it alone for at least two full days. 

As the title of this feed item implies, our short trip took us to Berkant, a rather underpopulated but biologically fertile Frontier world which has graced this feed before, most notably as the site of several stories about Faye and Junia (not real names) and their odd xenosapient friend Sapphire. 

Captain Liao watched as the system resolved in his combat information center’s room-scale holo-display. In the middle, directly above the floor projector lens, the system’s white-dwarf primary shone brighter than the overhead lighting, with the faint dotted lines of the three planets’ orbits extending halfway to the outer walls of the vast compartment. The first planet of the system was a “hot Jupiter” hell-sphere of tortured clouds and burning cyclones, and the third a frozen ice-ball in a steeply elliptical orbit, but the second – the world Berkant from which the system derived its name – carried life, including two million citizens of the Confederated Worlds. 

Reports were still coming in from the situation around the life-bearing world, but Liao already could see the outlines of the situation. Sparkling shards of debris in three distinct rings had been identified around the planet, and he knew better than to hope that even one of them was the result of disaster befalling one of the five Tyrant cruisers which had been reported in the system. Other than a single aging destroyer and a mercenary strike carrier, Berkant had been defenseless when the Incarnation had showed up with plans to stay. 

“We are in contact with groundside system authority.” The comms chief’s voice carried into CIC though she was two hundred meters away at the forward communications annex. “Transmission delay, twenty-nine minutes one way. They confirm that Olvir Zdrakov was destroyed in orbit after a short exchange. The merc carrier launched its birds and then left orbit. They lost tracking on its drive signature a few hours later.” 

“Thank you, Commander.” Liao watched the hashed-blue “unknown” symbols on the asset board to his left switch to black. The two garrison ships were of dubious value to his force in any case, but the loss of perhaps one hundred twenty brave spacers still stung. “Sensors, where is Nate?” 

The sensor-systems chief had no answers, but he did his best. “Still putting the pieces together, Captain. Wherever they are, their drives are not burning.” 

Five cruisers – Nate's biggest attack force to date – didn't just vanish, and Liao knew they hadn’t had time since last being spotted in planetary orbit to reach the hyper limit. “Probably hiding in those debris rings. Any idea what those were?” 

“Planetside data payload reports them as Zdrakov, their main orbital station, and a hauler who had a very bad day. Most of the lesser infrastructure is still intact.” 

One hundred twenty was likely an underestimate as to the losses, then. Liao shook his head; the hauler and station had been defenseless. There had been no reason for the Incarnation cruisers to fire on them. “Time to planetary orbit?” 

“Fifty hours at full acceleration.” The navigator’s course already glowed on the display. 

Liao set his jaw and stared at the board, wondering where he’d put his ships, if he were in command of five fast, well-armed but poorly protected heavy cruisers. Without the sensor arrays on the station, the groundside spaceport couldn’t track the invaders – the enemy had almost thirty hours of free maneuver time during which the colonists on Berkant could detect their drive signatures, but not pinpoint their locations. Thirty hours was a long time; time enough for Nate to pick off every piece of orbital hardware, if destruction was their objective. 

“Re-entry fires on the planet.” The sensors station reported crisply. “Big chunks of the station, most likely.” 

Liao got the sense he was being watched, and not by the odd little datacast reporter shadowing him for the Berkant operation. “All ships, fit gunships for a system sweep and launch when ready.” Using the force’s fifty-odd strike gunships – a mix of Magpies and older Jackdaws – to sweep the system would reduce his offensive power, but he preferred to find the enemy before they got in close. Anyone who’d seen the intelligence reports about Incanration Tyrant cruisers knew they were apparently kittens in long-range slugfests, but fearsome combatants if their shorter-ranged energy weapons could be used up close. 

“Contact!” The defense-gunnery officer’s voice accompanied a new symbol on the board. “A flight of Coronachs just hot-started two thousand klicks ahead of Safira Sharma.” 

In the vastness of even a small planetary system like Berkant, two thousand kilometers was far closer than Liao was comfortable with. If the Tyrants had appeared at that range, the lead cruiser probably would never have known what hit it. 

“They knew we’d be coming from Maribel. Probably set them across all the probable inbound vectors in case we tried a cold approach.” Liao watched the symbols boost away on a perpendicular vector. Their pilots knew only too well that the vast force would never detach a fast warship to chase four little strike interceptors, and that Magpie gunships had no hope of catching them. “With any luck, Nate has his strike elements scattered all over the system.” Even as he said it, he knew better. Incarnation ships carried vast quantities of the tiny, agile Coronachs, each piloted by a cybernetically-tweaked counterhuman literally optimized for the job. Their commander would never disperse a significant percentage of that force on picket duty just before a battle. 

“Telescopes just made one Tyrant on station at the planetary L3.” The sensors officer almost crowed his success as the red symbol appeared on the board. 

Liao frowned. He’d just concluded that the enemy would be crazy to disperse his force. Why would one of the five cruisers operate by itself? “Just one?” 

“Confirmed, Captain. One Tyrant at Berkant Lagrange Three.” 

Captain Liao frowned. The lone cruiser was one of two things – it was either bait for a trap, or it was a challenge. Of the two, his bet was on it being a challenge. “Ignore the ship at L3. Course to planetary orbit.” 

Challenge or bait, Saint-Lô and her squadron would not be able to accept either for at least thirty hours. “Maintain alert status, but rotate crews every four hours. This is going to be a long haul.” 

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2947-09-24 – Tales from the Service: A Rendezvous Reconnoitered

Naval dispatches indicate that the HyperCast relay in Berkant orbit was destroyed during the battle, but information about the action in that system has yet to be released. Given that Duncan and Nojus are outside the reach of the Hypercast network, this week’s entry is one of the pieces Duncan prepared some time ago but could not post. 

His notes indicate that this story was sent in as a response to Tales from the Service: A Stowaway Saboteur some time ago. The submitter, Loretta B., is a mercenary pilot operating off the ersatz carrier Shammuramat, on contract with the Navy to patrol the outer Nye Norge systems. She found evidence there that the Incarnation is using civilian Confederated Worlds ships (crewed either by their own or by native Ladeonists) to covertly surveil the Frontier. These ships may also be the vehicle for agents like the Paz of the Stowaway Saboteur account; her nanotechnological weaponry seems beyond the capability of native Ladeonist insurgents. 

This story would have been posted immediately to the text feed, but Naval Intelligence held it up for several weeks, whereupon it went into Duncan’s steadily growing backlog of ready-to-use entries. The attack on Håkøya forecast by Loretta in her attached message never materialized, but that should not be a strike against her credibility – the enemy likely saw the arrival of the huge cruiser force based there and decided to raid softer targets in the Nye Norge. 

Loretta keyed the gunship’s personnel hatch as soon as the hangar pressurization alarm chimed, and unhooked her restraints from her flight suit. Normally, she would wait for the ship’s three gunners to squeeze out of their swivel-stabilized turret stations aft of the cockpit before she disembarked, but the flight she’d just completed had been a rare solo run. Already, the cameras and sensors that had been mounted in place of most of the Kosseler Gryphon’s armament had begun downloading their sizable recordings to the carrier’s datasphere for analysis, but she had seen plenty herself, and would need a few stiff drinks to soothe her nerves. 

“Clean run, boss.” One of the mechanics hurrying up to the ship on the hangar deck gave Loretta a friendly slap on the shoulder as she walked by.  

Normally, she was all smiles after a successful field operation, but this time, the stressful stealth run had left her wrung out in a way lethal combat never could. For six hours, she’d drifted powerless through the weapons range of three titanic Incarnation cruisers, protected only by the hope – accurate as it turned out – that their sensor technology was not much more capable than that of the Confederated Navy. 

Even so, an active sensor sweep by a paranoid officer on any of the three ships would have found her out immediately, and no amount of fancy flying would have saved her from concentrated point defense fire from three cruisers. Her ship had been outfitted to evade detection by civilian sensor suites, not military-grade systems. Loretta had sweated through every second of the flyby, not knowing whether it would be her last. 

Loretta staggered into the lift and punched the deck level of the pilots’ lounge. When the miners at the Axelson Industries outpost had tipped her crew off to the suspicious activities of a small-time freight hauler, she had been as eager as the other pilots to snoop on the ship as it meandered through the outer system. Everyone had hoped to find opportunistic pirates a long way from home, or a smuggler laden with contraband to earn the crew a prize-taking bonus from the Navy.  

Loretta’s ship had been hastily modified for a surveillance mission, and she had left the hangar in good spirits, chasing the suspicious hauler into the shadow of a moon only to find three towering enemy cruisers lurking there once it was too late to back out of the silent flyby. 

The lift doors opened, and Loretta all but rushed to the bar in the lounge, punching in an order for imitation rum even before she sat down. Two of the other people in the compartment – one of her own gunners and another pilot – tried to start a round of applause, but one look at her face was enough to still this good cheer. 

The rum arrived and Loretta downed it in one gulp, despite a metallic odor suggesting that the lounge’s beverage synthesizer machine was on the fritz again.  

As soon as she’d clapped the empty cup back onto the table and had begun to consider a second, one of the other pilots got up from one of the gaming tables and took the stool to her right. “Hell of a run, Loretta.” 

“That’s damned right, Jem. Hell of a run.” Loretta told the bar to send her another drink, then turned to look at her fellow pilot. Jem Williams flew an antiquated Kestrel interceptor which would have been a better choice for the mission, had it not been for the age of its computer systems. The passive surveillance modules had overloaded the dodgy, thirty-year-old datasystems of the single-seat Kestrel, so  the hangar crew had mounted it in the gun mounts of her Gryphon instead – and nobody flew Loretta’s ship except Loretta herself. “Next one’s all yours.” 

The second drink arrived, and Jem snatched it from Loretta. “You’re not trained for scout work, but you did good work out there today.” He might have downed it himself, but he seemed to think better of it once he caught a whiff of its metallic broken-synthesizer odor.  

The instant of hesitation was enough for Loretta to take it back, though not without sloshing almost a third of the precious alcohol out of the cup. Unlike him, she didn’t hesitate. How could he understand how powerless she’d been for all those hours? He was used to flying in something that had been custom modified to outrun most purpose-built racers. He would never understand how many times she had died in her mind, watching the glittering laser-lenses on three Tyrants for the first glow of a shot which would vaporize her ship. 

“Odd they’re hiding. Shammuramat is no threat to even one of them.” Jem, who had obviously heard Loretta’s trembling radio report on her return flight, seemed oblivious to how shaken his associate still was. “Must not be anything in this system worth blowing up.” 

“There isn't.” Loretta shrugged. The Navy didn’t think the outer Nye Norge systems were worth seriously protecting, so the enemy passing through the area silently was no surprise. “They’ve got bigger targets and don’t want to raise the alarm.” 

“Somewhere that hauler just visited.” Jem agreed, punching in his own drink. 

“The Axelson station boss told us where the hauler had just come from, Jem.” She turned to face the other pilot for the first time. “It was in the briefing, remember?” 

“Was it?” Jem, like most mercenary pilots, took pride in his ability to tune out briefings and still get the job done. 

“Sure was. Their last stop was the planet you want to retire to, after this is over.” 

“Damn.” Jem’s drink arrived, and this time he downed it without noticing the odor. “Now I remember. They’d come from Håkøya.”

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