Tales from the Service – Cat and Mouse

2948-03-10 – Tales from the Service – Cat and Mouse 

Small-time sabotage has been going on for most of the conflict both in the Coreward Frontier and elsewhere, but no sabotage incident was more spectacular than the explosion of the hauler Dwight Schroder in Maribel orbit a week and a half ago. Though doing little in terms of material or human damage, the impressive blast was visible from the surface across half the planet, and equally visible from most orbital habitats. 

The Incarnation agent who accomplished this sabotage mission is still at large on Maribel. He has broken contact with Naval Intelligence and civilian counter-espionage agents several times. In this week’s entry, sent to us by Naval Intelligence, we get a rare view into the hospital-bed report of the most recent civilian-agency operative to be outwitted by this terrorist. 

The names in this story are obviously not the real names of these agents, and much of the non-public operational information has been scrubbed as the same tactics and tools are being used in operations throughout the Reach to counter the efforts of agents such as this one. 

Special Agent Zuleyha Marek held her breath as the target appeared around the street-corner right on schedule and passed right below the landing pad on which she had landed her aircar. The man looked nothing like he had thirty hours before, the last time Zuleyha had tracked him in her sector, but that came as no surprise. According to Liason Gorsky, the standard operating procedure of Incarnation agents was to change appearances at least every standard day. Where they couldn’t steal a useful identity, they could always create a random face, complexion, and posture combination which would fool Maribel’s street monitoring network. 

Zuleyha slowly rotated the bow camera of her aircar and got a good angle on the agent’s face.  Immediately, the recognition system came back negative. “Another dud ID. Hells, this Nate is patient.” 

When Danir responded, Zuleyha could hear that her partner hadn’t bothered to swallow the last bite of his pastry breakfast before pressing the comms key in his own aircar, six blocks away. “Do you think he knows we’re watching?” 

“He knows half the city is watching after Dwight Schroder blew up in orbit. The half that isn’t jumping at shadows is still covered in recording devices with immediate upload.” 

“You know what I mean, Zul.” Danir, watching the camera feeds in his own aircar cockpit, drew a red box over a freeze-frame of the man’s wrist. “That’s new. What is it?” 

Zuleyha zoomed in on the object, a chain of boxy, polished metal ornaments held together by links of chain. “Big metal bangle of some kind. System has it pegged as chrome-plated nano-steel. Probably from a curio shop.” 

“Looks heavy as all hells. I’ll figure out where it came from.” Danir got to work searching the planet’s datasphere, and lapsed into silence, his prior question forgotten. 

As the man ambled past and along the street, Zuleyha wondered how much the Incarnation agent did know about his pursuers. Surely he couldn’t believe that after planting the bomb that destroyed a hauler starship in orbit that he was still flowing through Maribel society un-noticed. He certainly walked past aircars and officers of the city constabulary (such as, at least apparently, Zuleyha’s own) as if he had no more to fear from the police than the other pedestrians, and in truth, he was right. The city police were too busy and poorly equipped to start chasing deadly counterhuman spies festooned in dangerous clouds of nanotechnology – which was why Zuleyha, Danir, and the rest of their small team had been called in. 

Just as the man reached the next intersection and started to cross the narrow street, he glanced over his shoulder, and seemed to stare right into the aircar’s cabin where Zuleyha was sitting. For an instant, her heart seemed to stop as the agent’s flat brown eyes and hers met from eighty meters away. 

That was silly, of course. The aircar’s viewpanels were all heavily privacy-glazed, and there was no way he could tell that the pilot was any different from the bored traffic-cops in the other constabulary aircars parked on similar landing-pads throughout the city. As he turned and continued on his way, Zuleyha took a deep breath. “Whew. For a minute there, I was sure he’d made me.” 

Danir, still searching, didn’t reply right away. “What?” 

“Nothing, just jumping at shadows.” She relaxed back into the pilot’s couch. “He should be coming your way in about thirty seconds.” 

“Got it. No hits on that bangle by the way. Nobody for a hundred klicks sells anything like it.” 

“Hmm. I’ll check if he stole it from someone.” 

Zuleyha bent over the aircar’s center console to perform a stolen valuables query. She guessed at the item’s weight and value, but wasn’t surprised to come up empty. The bracelet had looked like a worthless knickknack rather than a proper heirloom. On anyone else she would have paid its gaudy and impractical presence no mind, but Incarnation agents did nothing by accident. 

“You sure he came this way, Zul? I’m not seeing him.” 

“Yes, Dan. Same as every other day we’ve watched him on this route.” 

“Not again.... I’ll find him again on the metatracker.” 

Zuleyha rolled her eyes at his reluctance. The metatracker was only supposed to be used in emergencies, but tracking a bomb-happy enemy agent qualified as that. Headquarters would grumble about every use, but they would not argue too loudly with results. 

At a tap on the window next to her, Zuleyha turned to see a middle-aged man in a rumpled business-suit rapping on the privacy-mirrored glass and waving with his other hand. 

Cautiously, Zuleyha collapsed the window panel just enough for the man to see her face and hear her voice. She was, after all, driving the aircar and wearing the uniform of a local patrol officer. “Can I help you, sir?” 

“I... I was looking out my window just now and just saw shove something under the loading dock behind the next building, officer.” The man stammered a little, stepping back from the car. “Could be nothing, but after that ship blew up...” 

“Did you get a good look at them?” 

“Not really. Flat sort of face, dark hair. Sorry.” 

Zuleyha nodded. The description was vague, but it could be the agent who her partner was looking for on the metatracker. Waving him to take another step back, she grabbed her comm from its cradle, opened the vehicle’s side door, and stepped out. “Show me where and I’ll have a look.” 

The rumpled man nodded quickly and led the way off the landing pad toward a side of the roof facing an alley. Sure enough, there was a small, obviously little used loading dock attached to the next building at street level, and he pointed to it. “There.” 

After glancing both ways and verifying that nobody was in sight in the alley, Zuleyha pulled out a pocket magnifier to examine the dock. “I’ll check it out as soon as my partner gets here. The Constabulary appreciates your vigilance, citizen.” 

When he didn’t scurry away, she turned toward the tipster, only to step back in alarm. The disheveled man, now grinning wickedly, held a small gun trained on her. “Just as gullible as the last batch.” He held out a hand. In an instant, she realized the sort of ruse which she had fallen for. “Comm unit.” 

Zuleyha didn’t move to give the item to him, but his hand darted out inhumanly fast and wrenched the item from her fingers. “That will be all, Special Agent Marek.” 

He knew her name – Zuleyha’s head spun trying to catch up with all the things that meant he already knew. “Kill me or don’t, you can’t escape.” 

The man shrugged and held up Zuleyha’s comm, now bearing a few spiderweb-traceries of shining silver metal that hadn’t been there a moment before. When he pressed the transmit control, it responded to his finger as if it was her own. “Scratch the metatracker search, Danir. I’ve got him doubling back over here.” She stepped back almost to the raised lip of the roof in alarm – when the spy had spoken, it had been with her voice, not his own. 

“Figures.” Danir’s voice echoed back. “What’s he up to?” 

“Hells if I know.” The Incarnation agent, still smiling, replied in the stolen voice, before disengaging and pocketing Zuleyha’s comm unit. When he spoke again, it was in his previous voice – the voice of the nervous, middle-aged businessman. “Now then, Agent Marek. Let’s go for a little drive.” 

Zuleyha snarled helplessly for an instant, then, acting on desperation, did the only thing available to her. With her back to the raised guard-wall around the roof, she jumped backwards over the rail. Evidently, the man didn’t expect this – even with his mechanically-augmented reflexes, he wasn’t fast enough to stop her from plummeting twelve meters to the cracked pavement of the alley below. 

Oddly, hitting the ground didn’t hurt much even though it made a lot of crunching noises. Zuleyha found that she couldn’t move, but neither did she black out right away. Laying sprawled on her back in the middle of the alley, she had a perfect view of the naked surprise on the wily enemy agent’s face as he looked down over the ledge. 

That surprise didn’t last long, though. In an instant, it was gone, replaced by another sly grin. An instant later, the face around the grin changed, too – it became thinner, less lined, and far more familiar. Twelve meters up on the roof, a perfect mirror image of Zuleyha stared down at the broken ragdoll Zuleyha in the alley. 

With a little wave, the agent – now wearing her face – vanished from sight. The whine of aircar engines powering up told her where he had gone – a discomforting thought that she dwelled on for the uncomfortable minutes it took her for the pain to catch up and chase away consciousness. 

Details

Tales from the Service: Ladeonist Roundup

2948-03-17 – Tales from the Service: Ladeonist Roundup

Three days ago, the Navy finally abandoned the final effort to relieve Adimari Valis. While records are still being compiled, the estimate is that the battles in the Matusalemme system cost the lives of almost ten thousand Navy spacers and mercenary auxiliaries – and that’s just a count of the spacers engaged. Of the twenty percent of Adimari Valis’s population which could not or would not evacuate and the unclear number of local groundside defenders (including Jacob Borisov), no casualty figures are known, and it is possible none ever will be. 

Matusalemme’s relatively advanced orbital infrastructure (for its colonial population) fell into enemy hands almost intact and were not demolished in the last Navy surveillance recordings of the system. Perhaps the world will be relatively unscathed when it is retaken. 

This week’s entry was submitted in response to last week’s entry about local efforts on Maribel to catch Incarnation agents behind the lines. Evidently, there are counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence task forces assigned to this task on almost every major world in the Reach – including, if some of the messages I’ve received are correct, the Hegemony core worlds, which are about as far from the action as one can get. 

Because of their counterhuman augmentations and the support of many radical domestic Ladeonists, rooting out these saboteurs and spies has proven at least as challenging as forcing the enemy’s slippery Tyrant cruisers into an engagement on the Navy’s terms. Other than the Yaxkin City explosion some months ago (which still has not been confirmed as related to any Ladeonist activity or Incarnation agents), these agents, when operating far from the front lines, seem to mainly focus on soft targets with low security, which has maximized the lifespan of each agent or cell, but also limited the casualties and damage caused by their efforts. 

[N.T.B - For all that Duncan’s optimism has thicker armor than a dreadnought, there’s no path to retaking that world right now. As much of a nightmare as losing a colonial outpost like Adimari Valis is, that place is going to stay in Nate’s hands for a while. Any holdout pockets of mercenary or local militia forces on the ground are on their own – the Navy’s big guns aren’t riding to the rescue before they’re overwhelmed or starved out.] 

Commander Tal Vieth glowered at the line of grav-shackled prisoners in the security annex’s single basement cell. Of the eleven men and women his outfit had rounded up in connection with a local Ladeonist cell, he would have bet his entire retirement savings that one knew something that would lead his force to the capture of Agent Horus. 

Yejide Blum, Tal’s second-in-command, strode up and down the line of prisoners, twirling her joltwand and snarling so ferociously that he was beginning to think she might bite one of them. The other members of the counterinsurgency force stood their guard silently around the cell’s gravitic-shear door, helmet faceplates blanked, though Tal knew them well enough to suspect there was a betting pool being organized on a private comms channel. They knew to leave interrogations to the experts. 

“Let’s not play games.” Yejide hissed, turning around to pace the line once more. “Your lives were over the day you sheltered an agent of an enemy power. You’ll spend the rest of your lives in the worst damned military prison the Confederated Navy can find.” 

Tal discovered which of the prisoners was the leader, and which two were most likely to flip on Horus, before his subordinate had finished her dire pronouncement. As with most Ladeonist cells, these eleven were mostly the idiot children of local middle-managers, petty potentates, and bureaucrats, whose upwardly-mobile parents had failed their children. 

In three cases, their descent into the underworld of counterhuman revolutionaries might have been checked in adolescence, except for the intervention of protective parents calling in favors to shield them from the consequences for minor vandalism and such petty crimes. Now, he wondered if those same parents were proud of the monsters they had created – chip-headed freaks who tweaked their bodies and minds in the name of overthrowing the comfortable order that had created them. 

The previously-identified leader snorted derisively as Yejide passed him, and she whirled and raised the joltwand to his face before he could say anything. After a brief pause, surprised at the reflexes of his captor, he smiled. “You think you scare us? If we are useful to the cause, Horus will free us. If we are not, then you can only hold us until our final victory.” 

Tal thought back to the records he’d gone over. This leader, Sirius Twickley, was a gangly scarecrow with the bright eyes of a true believer, even though his body lacked most of the traditional counterhuman modifications. He believed in his cause, but apparently, he didn’t believe it enough to risk his parents noticing the changes and kicking him out of their opulent four-bedroom condominium near the city center. Other than spend two nights in a small-town drunk tank after an act of minor political vandalism, he’d never sacrificed anything for his cause – but he seemed only too happy to throw away the lives of his friends. 

“Horus is a coward.” Yejide’s snarl vanished, to be replaced by a sickly-sweet, condescending smile. When she smiled genuinely, Tal found the woman somewhat attractive, but when her mind was on business, she became like the rest of his unit – blankly stone-faced, expressing emotional responses only when they were useful. As effective as this was, it didn’t look good on anyone. “He won’t go after a high-security prison to rescue a few failed academics and worthless chip-heads. He used you and expended you when he needed to throw us off.” 

“We’ll be out of prison within a week of the war being over.” Twickley countered, and his voice carried no hint of doubt. “And the Navy won’t send us anywhere we actually risk dying before then.” 

He was more right than Tal liked, of course. As non-violent dissidents, even ones with nominal treason charges against them, the Navy brass wouldn’t risk the trouble their relatively affluent families would make if they were dealt with as harshly as they deserved. 

Yejide knew it, too. Tal saw the calculation working its way through her mind in the minute changes of her stern expression shortly before she flipped the joltwand over her hand and drove it into Sirius Twickley’s solar plexus. She must have used a low setting, because he screamed as he fell to the rough nanocrete floor – a high joltwand setting would lock up the muscles required to scream. Twickley was a lost cause. With a wave, Tal gestured for two of the masked men behind him to enter the cell and take the ringleader away. 

As Twickley, still screaming and struggling feebly, was dragged out, the eyes of the other ten flicked between Tal and Yejide. Several were nervous – they knew how much more agonizing a joltwand’s touch could be to a person with unorthodox electronics hooked to their nervous systems, even on low settings. They couldn’t know their leader was only being taken away to be held somewhere he couldn’t influence them – for his part, the gangly ideologue seemed to believe he was going to be executed. Tal hoped the fear of death might scare some sense into him, but he doubted that would happen. 

Before the grav-shear barrier reasserted itself, Tal stepped into the cell and laid a hand on Yejide’s shoulder. It was time to present them another path. “Your damned fool of a leader might be right.” He announced quietly, before Twickley’s screams had quite faded out into the distance. “If we send you to the tribunal, you might be out after the war is over. For your sake, I hope you aren’t. You’d be safer behind bars.” 

One of the younger Ladeonists, a girl of perhaps twenty years’ age, frowned. “Safer?” 

Tal turned to her and nodded. “Tonight there are six grieving families thanks to Horus. By tomorrow, it might be thirty. Treason proceedings are datasphere-searchable records by law.” 

Several of the imprisoned Ladeonists gulped or glanced at their fellows. They weren’t afraid of vengeful families of Horus’s victims, he knew – they were afraid of something far closer to home, and far more immediate. Their parents could not be lied to or spun into believing that they had been unjustly treated. 

“Now then.” Yejide shook Tal’s hand off her shoulder. “Let’s play a little game. The one of you chip-heads who leads us to Horus goes free, no questions asked. The rest go to the tribunal.” 

Tal nodded his assent and folded his arms behind his back. As he looked up and down the line of prisoners one more time, he wondered who would break first. 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Rock In the Way

2948-03-24 – Tales from the Service: A Rock In the Way 

While the Incarnation consolidates at Matusalemme, speculation has been running wild here at Maribel as to where they will strike next. No clear answer has been reached at higher levels of command that we are aware of, but multiple worlds are being given extra resources and FDA manpower to prepare. 

Naval Intelligence has received many reports from Navy, FDA, and mercenary auxiliary sources who claim to know with some certainty what the enemy’s next target will be. Obviously, all these contradictory leads can’t be correct at once, and Intelligence is pursuing the most likely leads and feeding the results of their investigations to Fifth Fleet. 

One of our readers, who could not reveal her location on security grounds, is convinced that she has been deployed to their next target. Based on information from her account, there are several worlds which she might be posted to – all of them near the direct line between Maribel and Matusalemme. If this is indeed the enemy’s axis of advance, that actually gives me hope – the closer the enemy comes to Maribel, the easier it will be for Fifth Fleet to force a favorable engagement. 

For FDA units, this speculation is not an idle way to pass time. These units are mainly composed of light infantry – they are only a few weeks of training removed from local militias, and though they have standardized weapons and uniforms, they have no significant numbers of personnel trained to operate armor-suits, heavy fighting vehicles, or heavy weapons. Without the fleet, FDA has only fortifications and man-portable weaponry with which to take on the Incarnation. 

 

As the last light of the day faded and the blue-black curtain of darkness crossed the sky, Glorinda Eccleston sat in the doorway of her rapid-fab shelter and watched the stars come out. 

The glare of work-lights illuminated the construction project behind her ensured that only the brightest stars would appear, but the stars she wanted to see were the local primary’s nearest neighbors. Matusalemme, around which Adimari Valis lay in durance, appeared low over the southern horizon. The bright binary system of Mal Xanthe, one of the great natural lighthouses of the Frontier, peeked over the hills a little while after sunset, both stars clearly visible. Maribel, farther away than Matusalemme, was barely visible over the lights’ glare, but with the help of a pocket smart-optic, Glorinda picked it out anyway, low in the northern sky. 

Maribel seemed so far away, and Glorinda shuddered. When the Incarnation came to the world her unit had been sent to – and it would soon, she suspected – they could only draw things out and hope that the battle-fleet orbiting that distant pinprick would sweep in to the rescue, scattering the Incarnation fleet with overwhelming firepower. 

That this plan hadn’t worked out for Adimari Valis didn’t sit easy with Glorinda, but she had to put a brave face on for her company. When – really, if – the Navy rode to the rescue, she was the only person in the unit with high-powered, navy-spec comms gear. She could call some of that firepower onto Nate forces on the ground when it arrived – and until then, the FDA’s only heavy weapons not built into surface fortifications would a the hundred-odd disposable mass-driver satellites, each carrying only fifty shots. There was no way that would be enough firepower to defend a planet for long. 

“Eccleston, do you have a moment?” 

Glorinda jumped. “What-” Captain Moravec had once again snuck up on her – his quiet footfalls and usually quiet voice ensured that the spectacled officer was rarely noticed moving about the chaos of the camp and construction site unless he wanted to be, especially at night. He always seemed to be everywhere when it suited him, and nowhere when it didn’t.  “Sorry sir. What do you need?” 

“Walk with me.” Moravec, mag-lenses of his glasses glinting in the indirect glow of the work-lights, was otherwise only a slim shadow in the night. Glorinda hopped to her feet and followed him along the main path through the camp, downhill and away from the construction site. 

Only after they’d passed the outer perimeter of sentry-posts did he speak again. “How do you know they’re coming here next?” 

“Captain, I...” Glorinda hadn’t spoken to anyone about her suspicions. She hadn’t even noted them in her personal log. How had Moravec known? 

“You stargaze at dusk every day as if you’re expecting to see something up there change.” Moravec didn’t break his stride, and his quiet voice remained devoid of emotion. “I’m not the only one who knows what you’re thinking. Who told you?” 

“Sir, no, it’s nothing like that. Nobody in the fleet tells me anything, and there’s nobody in-system talking on Navy frequencies even if they did. I just have... I guess it’s a hunch.” 

Captain Moravec processed this for several seconds, leading her unerringly along one of the winding paths leading down the hill to the heavy-lift landing pad in the valley below. “It’s a hunch that’s got you scared half to death, Eccleston. Lay it out for me.” 

“I got to thinking a while back, what does the Incarnation want in the Frontier?” She pointed up to the sky, though her commanding officer probably couldn’t see it. “They don’t want empty worlds, there are plenty of those, and nicer ones than Adimari Valis. They could have had Berkant, for example.” 

“Perhaps their leaders want the Xenarch digs. If so, they would never come here.” 

“We’ve all seen the psych-briefing on Incarnation ideology. They don’t value things, remember? Best guess I have is that they want people – people as a group, plugged into their head-wire net and obedient to their crusade.” 

“Human capital.” Moravec said the phrase with such distaste that he clearly meant it to mean slaves. “Adimari Valis was evacuated before they got it, thank God. But there’s not much population here, either.” 

“No.” Glorinda shook her head. “But if they want people, there are only a few places on the Frontier to get them – and from Matusalemme, sir, it seems to me the rock we are standing on is in the way.” 

Moravec stopped and looked toward the northern horizon. Glorinda couldn’t see his face, but she could see her logic had made an impression on him.  

“I see.” The captain eventually replied. “Thank you, Eccleston. Have you shared this with anyone else?” 

“No sir.” 

“Keep it that way.” He turned on one heel and began leading back toward the camp outskirts. “And just for now, if you’re going to stargaze, at least be cheery about it.” 

Glorinda hurried to catch up with her commander. She knew how important her putting a brave face on for the rest of the company was. “I’ll try, Captain.” 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Disheartened Hunter

2948-03-31 – Tales from the Service: A Disheartened Hunter 

The silence and darkness that surrounded Burbot in the interstellar void always unsettled Tonya Hristov. Her little ship, small enough to be mistaken for the overgrown launch of a proper warship, seemed too frail and cramped to survive in the endless abyss, but this was its natural habitat all the same – the void which so unsettled the skipper provided shelter for the craft and crew in equal measure to the distress it caused her skipper. 

Burbot, a warship despite her modest size, did not shelter in the void merely to evade the prying sensor-lenses and slicing pulse-beams of Incarnation hunters. Tonya knew her little ship was the hunter, and the sharp-beaked Incarnation cruisers, each outgunning Burbot forty times over and outweighing her by almost that amount, were her prey. In the interstellar void, with no solar primary to betray her presence and no planetary-disk dust to heat her hull through miniscule impacts, the ship’s EM-swallowing hull plates were perfect camouflage, and her over-sized eyes – huge sponsions studded with every kind of passive sensor imaginable – searched all directions for the behemoths she had come to hunt. 

Intelligence – she knew not from where – had given Tonya her hunting-grounds, but luck and skill would still be needed to pick up the scent. She paced back and forth on the tiny command deck, wondering whether it was time to make a jump to the next search area – Burbot was as alone in this one as a vessel could possibly be. Her command had so far struck out on all its patrols, intelligence or no – not a single enemy vessel had ever been sighted.  

In the shadow of her more famous sister Mahseer, morale aboard Burbot had steadily ticked downward, and Tonya was worried that if they did sight an enemy ship, the crew would not react in time to exploit the advantage. Most of them were only too happy to miss out on the fame and mortal peril of destroying a Tyrant – what they wanted was to do their part, to contribute to the war effort at least as much as the responsibility they had been given. On a little stealth-assault cutter, that responsibility was comfortably low; even to demolish an Incarnation salvage tug or repair ship would satisfy most of the crew’s hunger to do their part and raise morale. 

“Time to jump recharge?” Tonya asked idly, perhaps for the fifth time since her ship had burrowed through the cosmic fabric to its current position. 

“Seven minutes, thirty-one seconds.” The reply came from the ship’s voice-assistant computer rather than her two present subordinates, who both appeared to be ignoring their skipper completely.  

“Chart a jump to the next search sector.” Tonya paced back and forth a few more times, trying to focus on the morale problem as an alternative to dwelling on the perfect void just beyond the hull. At the extreme ends of her route, that emptiness was less than two meters from her – and only twenty centimeters of that distance was taken up by the pressure hull which cleanly divided her hemmed-in world from... 

Tonya shook her head and squeezed the bridge of her nose with her fingers, forcing that line of thinking out of her skull. The morale of her crew would not be easy to restore without success, but chances of success were increasingly compromised by low morale. It was a problem she was sure many skippers had tackled over centuries of interstellar warfare, but she had never seen a clear solution proposed in the Naval Academy. Any attempt she made to raise spirits would seem half-hearted without results – Burbot needed to face a challenge and overcome it, but not a challenge so great that its discouraged crew cracked under the strain. 

“Transition event!” Kennet MacLean nearly fell out of his crash-padded chair in alarm as he squeaked out the message. “Range is six lisec.” 

Tonya leapt to the chair reserved for her and pulled the air-display pillar down from its recessed overhead position. In front of her face, Burbot appeared as a tiny green arrowhead from which dashed axes projected out in six directions. The oscillating mote of the transition signature appeared near the edge of the display area. The incoming vessel was almost exactly behind her little ship – distant, but barely close enough to make an intercept possible. 

“Go to quarters.” Tonya tapped a few commands into her armrest keypad even as the lights dimmed and the general quarters alarm began buzzing. “Get me an ID on that ship. Helm, get us moving.” 

“Course?” Hugo Kang, on duty at the helm station, turned around in his chair. 

Tonya scowled at him, trying not to look as nervous as she felt. She hated to be brusque with the man, but he should have known what course to plot without asking. He was, after all, on the command deck of a state-of-the-art Confederated Navy stealth-assault cutter, not a pleasure yacht. 

Fortunately, the helmsman got over his uncertainty upon seeing her expression. “Intercept course, aye. Maximum stealth.” He jabbed at his controls, and the pulsing mote in the display swung around the unmoving arrowhead in the display until it was almost directly ahead. A dotted arc showed Burbot’s intended path, and a fuzzy cone showed the possible courses of the unknown ship, slowly narrowing as more data filtered in through the cutter’s many sensors. 

Tonya watched the mysterious mote carefully. She had been assured there would be no friendly traffic through the search area, and that it was likely Incarnation ships would pass through. Perhaps by analyzing the timing of raids, Naval Intelligence had been tight-lipped on exactly how they had learned to expect enemy ships in this specific patch of void, but for once, the tip had paid off. “What’s our best guess on Nate drive recharge time?” 

“Intelligence database says at least fifty minutes for a Tyrant, a bit less for the big haulers.” MacLean caused a timer to appear on the forward display counting seconds since the vessel had appeared. “Still only one signature.” 

Tonya nodded, though neither of her subordinates was looking in her direction. “We stay quiet until we know what it is.” Implied, of course, was the freedom to use the ship’s decidedly un-stealthy maximum acceleration rating to intercept a soft target. Incarnation haulers were not entirely helpless, but their defensive laser armament was only proof against strike-ship attacks. Such weapons could cause enough damage to send Burbot limping back to port, but they were no existential threat to even a cutter. 

“Could it be a trap, Skipper?” Kang asked, his voice high and uncertain. 

“Sure could.” Tonya replied. “But I’d bet my life it’s not.” 

While this was meant to be a joke, Kang clearly did not see the humor in the quip. “The Incarnation is too smart to drop a lone ship right into our kill-box like that. It’s a trap. It’s gotta be a trap.” 

Tonya keyed in a comm channel on the keypad. “Ensign Nowell to the bridge.” Nowell was one of the ship’s other helm-capable officers, junior to Kang but likely far less rattled by this sudden onset of danger. “Lieutenant Kang, you are relieved of duty immediately. I’ll take over the helm.” 

“But-” 

“You are relieved.” With a heavy heart, Tonya keyed in a command override, disabling her subordinate’s system access. His terminal blanked, and a display-screen unfolded to Tonya’s left to let her supervise the ship’s course until the ensign arrived to take Kang’s place. She studiously avoided looking at the harried man until, head downcast, he scurried off the command deck and slid down the ladder into the rest of the ship. 

MacLean kept his silence until Kang was gone. “Was that necessary, Skipper?” 

“Hells, I wish it wasn’t.” She kept her tone and face calm. Kang’s fear and shame would dissipate in time – or they would boil over and he would do something incredibly stupid. Either way, the problem would keep until after the enemy ship was dealt with, and perhaps a successful attack would solve the morale problem for everyone else. 

MacLean looked like he was about to stand up for his associate – Tonya knew the two were quite friendly – but the arrival of Ensign Nowell stilled any further protest. Without a word or question, the young man took Kang’s place at the third station, and Tonya ceded the helm controls. To his credit, he didn’t ask if the attack was just another simulation drill; he treated it like it was the real thing. That was good because, as MacLean and Kang had seen, it was no drill. For the first time, the target was real. 

“Time to weapons range, thirty-eight minutes.” Nowell announced.  

“We’re going to have one shot at this bastard.” Tonya glancing up at the displayed time since first detection, which showed barely four and a half minutes had elapsed. They could shave a little more time off at full speed, but she didn’t want to use that until she was certain the enemy couldn’t escape and couldn’t fight. “Gunnery, warm up the prow cannon.”  

The message, computer-directed to the gunnery control room two decks below, received an immediate double-beep acknowledgement from the scrambling weapon crew. 

“Probable ID, Incarnation hauler. Smaller than the usual model, but it’s got a similar drive signature.” MacLean seemed somewhat relieved, and Tonya didn’t blame him. Even she didn’t relish the thought of shoving a cannon up a Tyrant’s thrust-bells. 

“All stations, this is not a drill. We are closing in on a lone ship, likely a Nate supply hauler.” Tonya announced. “Naval Intelligence handed us a live one for once.” 

As the time to intercept ticked down, Tonya wished she could get up and roam the ship, listening quietly at every doorway and snooping on every station. Of course, her place was on the command deck, firmly strapped into the crash-padded chair. She couldn’t wander around to gauge how quickly or sluggishly her other thirteen subordinates were reacting to the alert. The lone enemy hauler’s hope for survival hinged on the proportion of Kangs to Nowells and MacLeans on Burbot.  

If such an easy prize did get away after months of failure of the vessel to spot anything, Tonya knew she would lose her command, and they might all spend the rest of the war shuffling cargo as logistics officers in the fleet’s long supply chain. Perhaps that would suit Kang and a few others, but it would absolutely crush the rest, herself included. For all the unease the interstellar void caused her, Tonya knew she couldn’t go home to the comfortable open skies of the Core Worlds until she had done her duty. 

“Still no additional jumps.” MacLean interrupted Tonya’s thoughts. 

“Shame.” She heard herself replying. “We’re not going to beat Zappa’s record today, but this one is a good start.” 

Like Mahseer, whose exploits we covered previously in this space (Tales from the Service: A Tyrant’s Downfall ), Burbot is one of the few Navy ships, most of them Stealth Assault Cutters, which have tangled one-on-one with Incarnation ships of any description and emerged victorious. Though her kill (a small cargo vessel likely ferrying parts and supplies to a raiding Tyrant squadron) was not nearly as spectacular as that described previously, the frankness with which Burbot’s skipper describes the low morale and uncertain bravery of her crew prior to their stroke of good fortune ensured that I found this story compelling from a human perspective.  

It is very easy for me – and probably for most other non-spacer readers of this text feed – to identify with the unease and fear of Burbot’s skipper and crew. If they had been cornered in the void, there would have been no record of their loss or their struggle – their little vessel would have simply failed to return from patrol, and seventeen markers would have been planted in their various home-worlds' memorial gardens for those claimed by the vast void. 

[N.T.B. - It takes nerves of titanium alloy to run a flimsy can like those cutters up close to a big Incarnation warship, stealth systems or no. It’s no surprise that not everyone who ends up in that service isn’t made of the right stuff. Personally, I would never do it .Give me open skies and a deadly xenopredator over that sort of tension any day.] 

Details
  • You are here:  
  • Home
  • Beginning of Text Feed