Tales from the Service: A Pirate’s Gamble

2948-06-02 – Tales from the Service: A Pirate’s Gamble 

Our friend Captain Kirke-Moore has caused quite a few minor and major stirs since being brought onto Admiral Zahariev’s staff, but perhaps this is the most spectacular. Though the Navy has redacted both the date and location, it has confirmed that Kirke-Moore masterminded a successful raid on an Incarnation logistics base in the Coreward Frontier some time in the last two weeks. 

The senior officer in charge of this raid was authorized by Naval Intelligence to give her account, even though it was far from praising Kirke-Moore. Though successful in causing (if reports are to be believed) massive damage to supply and refit installations at the target system, the raiding force suffered significant casualties in the process. According to the accounts we have been allowed to see, Kirke-Moore underestimated the strength of defending forces considerably – still, surprise and speed seem to have carried the day. 

 

Captain Angelica Haydee scowled at the tactical display the way she couldn’t scowl at the old man standing behind her. He almost certainly recognized her displeasure, but to express it to his face would be insubordinate, and she didn’t want insubordination to mark what might be the last minutes of her career and her life. 

“Any change in aspect on those cruisers?” Bozsi Kirke-Moore, cool and detached as always, seemed all the more deliberately provocative for his refusal to acknowledge the distress his orders had caused his subordinate. Officially, the shriveled old pirate was only an adviser, but every officer aboard Katrina Mehrab knew the sortie was his mission, and the squadron was effectively under his command the moment it left Maribel. 

“Negative, Mr. Kirke-Moore.” Lieutenant Nyazik replied, salving his captain’s ego slightly by refusing to give the pirate an un-earned title. “Still no course changes or launches, and their screens are still at minimum.” 

“Just as I thought.” Though her back was turned to him, Angelica could hear the smug satisfaction on Kirke-Moore's face. “Let them pass. We’re not here for blood.” 

The trio of Incarnation cruisers slid across the display at an unhurried pace, though most of the command center staff had ceased holding their breath. It would be hours before they passed out of the star’s grav shadow and activated their star drives, but if Kirke-Moore and Naval Intelligence were correct about their acceleration profiles, they would be out of range to intervene in less than fifteen minutes. 

It made Angelica feel only marginally better about the pirate’s insane scheme that Kirke-Moore let the enemy ships widen the gap almost ten minutes after the estimated safety range. Long after the command center’s own timer had hit zero, and according to a timing known only to him, Kirke-Moore cleared his throat to still the murmured conversations all around him. “Initiate the maneuver, Captain Haydee.” 

The maneuver was insanity, but Angelica knew it was her duty. “Drive to maximum. Helm, assume pre-computed course.” 

The murmur of Mehrab’s drive rose in pitch and intensity as the ship wheeled about in space, shedding the carefully crafted shroud of asteroid-mimicking smart-cloth which had been carefully spun around a potato-shaped section of hard vaccuum and starship hulls. The squadron’s trio of fast destroyers and half-dozen assault frigates burst through the disintegrating cowl a moment later, their higher acceleration carrying them forward into a loose vee-formation, ends extended toward the planet ahead. Though uninhabitable, the nameless, metal-rich planet had become an Incarnation forward base, and three sprawling, frail orbital structures lit up its lifeless, airless sky. 

Mehrab and its attendants, though bristling with weapons, were thin-skinned, long-legged designs, no match for three Tyrant heavy cruisers in a fair fight. Fortunately for them and unfortunately for the hastily-maneuvering enemy ships, there would be no such fair fight. The operation had been envisioned by a pirate, and it was a work of craven piracy as well as open lunacy. The squadron would rush in, smash everything it could reach in a single slingshot orbit, then erupt out of the inner system in a different direction with a velocity advantage that even three swift Tyrants could not overcome. 

“They’ve seen us. Cruisers have redlined their drives.” Nyazik sounded concerned, and Angelica felt perverse hope that the pirate’s estimates and intelligence were wrong. Fortunately for everyone involved, a quick glance at the display dispelled her of this notion. 

“They’re too late.” Kirke-Moore strode forward and pointed into the display. “We’re only concerned with the local-space defenses.” 

“Light launches from one of the platforms. Looks like a few wings of Coronachs.” 

Angelica counted the symbols, and then doubled the count. “Nothing we can’t handle there. Vector in Commander Ibrahim’s gunships and warm up the light railguns. Any sign of heavy emplacements?” 

“Negative, Captain, but we won’t know for sure until we get closer.” 

“Keep looking. We have safe abort for the next twenty minutes.” Every fiber of her tactical sense told Angelica that the “raid” was running into a trap. Any Confederated outpost so large and expensive would be defended far too heavily to be threatened by a reinforced scouting squadron.  

“We won’t need it, Captain.” Kirke-Moore's confidence remained infuriating. He had won the approval of Admiral Zahariev for the gamble mostly by promising to participate himself – Angelica hated for the ruffian to be right, even if it meant going home in one piece. “After all, we aren’t where we are supposed to be.” 

"That’s exactly why this has to be suicide, Bozsi.” Angelica pointed to one of the station platforms, trying to keep her voice calm. “That installation alone looks like it can refit three of their cruisers at once. This is a hell of a lot of hardware to leave undefended.” 

“Exactly, Captain Haydee. Exactly.” 

Angelica frowned, but fell silent as the time to weapons range plummeted. There was nothing more to say – Kirke-Moore would not call an abort. Either the platforms were armed to the teeth, or they weren’t - and in a little more than half an hour, the squadron would find out. 

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Tales from the Service: A Dropped Spanner

2948-06-09 - Tales from the Service: A Dropped Spanner

In a previous entry (Tales from the Inbox: Revenge of the Recycler), we discovered one of the many ways a starship's life support systems can break in unpleasant ways. Most members of the interstellar community know this only too well - after all, anyone who has plied the spacelanes for a lifetime has had to clean up after one or other of these systems when they fail in transit.

Apparently, some Navy ships designed for long cruises have been using a new human waste processing system which is just as efficient but far more light-weight. While this type of system centering around a tank of bio-engineered microbes is nothing new, the light-weight systems use a far more aggressive strain in a smaller tank, and use passive unpowered methods to limit the biomass rather than moderation drips and sensors. 

In at least four cases, these newer systems have failed under the strain of combat, but such failures are nothing new (and nothing the Navy can't handle - these new systems are designed to be simply dumped into space and replaced wholesale if they fail). The inquiry surrounding Technician Ronan Boone, however, is notable because the vessel in question was not exposed to damage in combat - instead, the sewage plant went awry during a maintenance operation in which the upper lid of the tank was open. Evidently, there is little room for a repair tech to maneuver while performing such repairs, and no room for them to make mistakes. Boone did make a mistake - and it looks likely to cost him his career, even though the design of the system seems (at least to me) to be partly to blame.

Even if the Navy comes to this conclusion and discontinues this new type of waste processor, there are dozens of ships - mainly cruisers - in Fifth Fleet with this machinery; they will be with us for the duration of this conflict.

Technician Ronan Boone dropped his spanner. 

Normally, even in the tight confines of a warship’s maintenance spaces, dropping a tool would be only an irritating mistake. Unfortunately, he did it while performing the least normal duty he could possibly be assigned. 

As the tool plummeted toward the boiling biomass below the catwalk, Ronan felt time slow down, as he realized the consequences. Eighteen inches of synthfoam grip and titanium bar-stock seemed to float lazily down through the air, giving him plenty of time to calculate that he didn’t have time to scramble for cover. Perched on the extended catwalk and securely fastened to the safety rail by his harness line, there was no way to get clear before the spanner splashed down in the bubbling surface of the sewage-processing biomass tank. 

The moment stretched out further, and Ronan’s eyes darted to his assistant, eyes looking as big as saucers in the yellow-white light of the growth lamps providing heat and light to the engineered microbes in the tank. He was already moving, turning away and running for the hatch leading back into the crawlspace, but Ronan knew he wouldn’t make it there in time either. 

The problem, he knew, was not the initial splash of noxious nutrient slurry, partly processed sewage, and biomass which would erupt from the tank. Contact with that would result in merely an hour’s decontamination and a few precautionary inoculations. The greater concern, he knew, was the tool itself. 

The biomass in the tank, Ronan knew, grew in long, snaky strands which needed to anchor themselves to surfaces to prevent them from being sucked into the exit pump and re-digested into nutrient slurry to feed the better-anchored colonies. The tank, specifically designed to allow strands to form only on about ten percent of its inner surface, perfectly moderated the amount of biomass inside to match its size – that is, moderated it until a foreign object not treated with super-slick anti-microbial nanoceramic landed inside. 

As the spanner struck the surface, it threw up globs of gray-brown biomass, which arced high up above the sides of the tank in shipboard half-gee. Ronan watched in detached helplessness as one of them arced up to impact with the jumpsuit on his shoulder, and despite the best efforts of his breathing filter, the stink of sewage seeped into his nostrils. 

The splash had barely subsided when the biomass, already greedily seeding the spanner’s surface as it sunk, began to replicate. Before Ronan’s assistant had made it five steps, the tank boiled over, and a wave of half-digested sewage overtook him before his gloved hand hit the hatch controls. Sliding, he went down just in time to be buried by a second wave of noxious slime. 

As the nutrient sludge and sewage hit the bulkheads and deck, the process accelerated, and the level began to rise quickly.  

Lazily, Ronan keyed in his comm. Things were far worse than an hour’s decontamination could cure. “Damage control to the waste processing unit.” He suggested. “We seem to be in deep shit.” 

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Tales from the Service: The Dirtiest Job

2948-06-16 - Tales from the Service: The Dirtiest Job

“Skipper, we’re almost through the door. Is this section of sealed off?” 

“Affirmative, Chief. Adjoining sections have been evacuated and atmosphere withdrawn.” 

“Stand by to open the locks in this section as well.” Chief Damage Control Technician Lucian Pohl-Androv glanced down at the life support monitor readouts on his wrist display as two of his subordinates cut into the hatch with suit-mounted arc-cutters. Both men inside were still alive, but he knew there wasn’t much time left. Even if the automatic life-support functions of their uniforms extended by atmospheric canisters in their multi-utility belt packs, the pair of unfortunates were in serious danger. 

“Ready at your call, Chief.” 

“Mr. Boone, Mr. Funar. Don’t know if you can hear us in there but we’re almost through the door. Hold on.” The request fell flat even to Lucian’s own ears. There was nothing the men could do but try not to think too hard about what they were marinating in. The raw, partly digested sewage runoff of the ship’s entire compliment was only the beginning of their distress – the varieties of bioengineered extremophile microbes which were used to digest this waste material and the various odd chemicals used to keep them operating at peak performance were far more dangerous. With the microbial colonies going haywire and filling the entire compartment, there was every chance that the sewage inflow and nutrient trips would be insufficient to satisfy the microbes – if that happened, they would start trying to digest somewhat less ideal foods, such as smart-cloth, artificial polymers, and human flesh. 

Even if the microbes didn’t digest the two men from the outside in, they would colonize the two technicians – first by anchoring forests of microbial strands to their skin, and then eventually by gaining lodgment in their digestive tracts. If left submerged in the noxious bath for for too long, the men might end up with sewage-digesting microbes replicating in their blood-streams – a recipe for almost inevitable, and agonizingly protracted, death. 

“Ten seconds, Chief.” One of the men ahead at the hatch called out. “Brace yourself.” 

The two men with the cutters, wearing heavy hazardous-environment suits as they were, were prepared for the explosive release of slimy liquid when the hatch was breached, but Lucian, wearing a far lighter suit variant, quickly latched two safety lines to tie-down points on the bulkhead to avoid being washed away. “I'm ready.” All three suits and the maintenance tunnel had been coated with antimicrobial sprays but everything touched by the errant sewage microbes would still be ejected into the void of space the moment they were removed – it was cheaper for the Navy to replace than to decontaminate its equipment. Unfortunately, clumsy repair technicians were another story. 

“Three. Two. One.” At the count of one, Lucian heard metal creaking and pinging. If the junior tech said “breach complete,” the words were drowned out by a crash as the severed hatch tore inwards and a gurgling roar as a wave of gray-brown sludge erupted through the opening, washing down the corridor. 

The wave hit Lucian hard, and if it had not been for the safety lines he would have tumbled backwards down the hallway. As it subsided, the filamentous goo rose to his knees. “Find them both and let’s get out of here.” 

The two technicians in the lumbering suits didn’t need the order; they were already wading into the fouled chamber. Around their shoulders, Lucian could see stringy brown biomass hanging from the bulkheads and overhead catwalks like a wet, shaggy rug. Shuddering, he unhooked his safety lines and waded forward himself. 

Within two steps, Lucian’s foot came down on something harder than the goo, but more yielding than the deck plating. Reaching into the opaque slime, he pulled up a shaggy, microbe-strand covered figure, limp and unresponsive. “Got one out here.” He pinged the unrecognizable form with his suit radio. “It’s Funar. Unconscious but the sensors say he’s still alive.” Hurriedly, Lucian pulled a sprayer from his utility belt and began to coat the unfortunate in antimicrobial chemicals. Immediately, the strands began to break up and fall away, revealing the flimsy dome of an emergency uniform pressure helmet. The uniform had gone hermetic at some point – there was some hope he’d avoided the worst effects of exposure. 

Unfortunately, the helmet bubble was itself filled with gray-brown slime. The man was still alive, but if the microbes were inside his hermetically sealed smart-fabric uniform and were attacking his body, he was in serious trouble. 

“I’ve got Boone. Looks like he got his helmet up in time.” 

“We’re done here. Skipper, open the locks.” Lucian sighed as he hooked in his safety lines once more and attached Funar’s lines as well. If Mikhail Funar died, Boone would probably wish he had as well. The Navy would do everything possible to make an example of Boone for his lethal mistake. 

As officers on the bridge opened the airlocks, the sea of microbial soup bubbled, then rushed greedily out toward the void of space along with the fouled atmosphere. The strands too firmly anchored to surfaces to be pulled out withered and turned to powder almost as soon as their moisture had finished boiling off. 

“Situation under control, Skipper. Get that medical team in here.” 

Last week, in Tales from the Service: A Dropped Spanner, the consequences of Technician Ronan Boone's simple mistake began to take shape. In this second installment of the same story, told from the perspective of a damage control specialist on the same ship, we see the lengths the crew went to to recover Boone and his assistant, Technician Funar. The bill for the equipment contaminated beyond recovery in this rescue effort appears to have been quite extensive, but the Navy shouldered the financial cost without hesitation.

 After the two men were recovered, however, an inquiry into the cause of this expensive mishap was initiated, and to my knowledge it is still ongoing. Tech Funar did not survive (and perhaps mercifully remained unconscious until he passed), and the human toll combined with the fact that a warship was taken out of service for repairs during wartime seem to weigh more heavily on the Navy officers involved than the material cost of equipment damaged or destroyed.

I do not know whether it is just for Boone to be cashiered or incarcerated for his mistake - that is up to board of inquiry. Unfortunately, no matter what the verdict, there will probably be a family that thinks it horribly unjust.

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Tales from the Service: Mereena Besieged

2948-06-23 – Tales from the Service: Mereena Besieged

A while ago on this space, we featured the properly anonymized account of a feeling of dread felt by one person on one of the many FDA garrisons along the Frontier (Tales from the Service: A Rock In the Way), and the consequences for the original source for its publication (Tales from the Service: Plucked from the Ranks). While these feelings of approaching doom were hardly unique to the original source (Here known pseudonymously as Glorinda Eccleston) at the time or afterwards, Eccleston’s perspective was the one which Naval Intelligence made available to this publication.

Eccleston is also lucky in that she was incorrect in her certainty that her location was the next target for Incarnation occupation forces. She was not, however, very far off. When Incarnation ships arrived in force in the Mereena system, the unit she was attached to – the Twelfth Marines – was garrisoned on “The Rock in the Way” – within ten light-years of the suddenly-embattled system.

Rushed to Mereena in their assault transports by a scratch cruiser squadron (liberally salted with mercenary auxiliaries which happened to be at The Rock), the Twelfth made planetfall on the small Mereena III colony barely hours before the Incarnation vanguard, securing the spaceport to allow for evacuations. Unlike at Adimari Valis, the Incarnation force was far from overwhelming – reports trickling back this far indicate that there are only six to eight enemy cruisers in the system, opposed at rough parity by five Fifth Fleet ships of equivalent size and dozens of smaller warships. Neither force could contest the other’s landing, but the Marines could use the landing pads at the garrisoned spaceport.

Though this report is days old, it is one of the more detailed available of the fighting on Mereena III. Snippets of full-capture audiovisual material will be shown, where Naval Intelligence permits, on episdoes of the vidcast series in coming days.

Colonel Louis Pokorni surveyed the horizon with his combat suit’s metalens magnifier. Though she could only see the stiff back of the towering machine and none of the man inside, Lieutenant Glorinda Eccleston could tell he was tense – that meant the unexpected quiet along the perimeter wouldn’t last. 

“Hairclipper Charlie is late today.” Pokorni grumbled into his command team’s private circuit, as if explaining his unease. “First day since we landed he hasn’t given us Hell before mid-day.” 

Glorinda glanced down at her own suit’s chronometer. She had hoped Hairclipper Charlie – a heavily-shielded Incarnation aircraft armed with a brace of plasma lances with which to strafe the perimeter defenses – had run into maintenance problems after three sorties in as many days. Perhaps some fragment of the ordinance hurled up at the lumbering flying-wing menace had connected with something useful – but more likely the Colonel was right once again. Intelligence Liaison to the Twelfth Marines though she was, Glorinda found herself often playing catch-up to Pokorni’s analytical abilities. All she could really do for the grizzled colonel was sift through low-level Naval Intelligence databanks. 

“Maybe someone tipped him off about the heavy stuff we unloaded yesterday.” Captain Alexis Low, second-in-command of the Twelfth Marines, gestured back toward the spaceport pads just as a lumbering orbital ferry rumbled off the tarmac and wheezed skyward toward the Confederate side of the tense standoff beyond the atmosphere. On the way up, it would be packed full of local evacuees and wounded Marines, but it would return with more ordinance from the fleet supply ships.  

“Charlie runs the risk we find his number every time he lifts off.” Pokorni replied. “His whole job is testing to see if we have it yet.” Unfortunately, Glorinda was fairly sure none of the heavy weapons available were capable of cracking Hairclipper Charlie’s shear screens. Unlike the fragile, nimble Coronacht strike fighters the Incarnation fleet deployed in fleet engagements, their atmospheric ground attack hardware tended toward the big and tough – a blunt instrument for battering aside fixed defenses rather than a precision instrument for outmaneuvering mobile foes. 

“We’d lower our guard if he came over that hill just like yesterday and did the same thing all over again.” Low pointed down to the ruins of what had the previous morning been a thick-walled blockhouse just beyond city limits – one of only two local prisons, long since converted into a Marine bunker before Hairclipper Charlie turned his eye on it. Though only two Marines had been injured in the building’s overthrow, its loss had resulted in a night-time adjustment of the perimeter, with only a three-Marine scout picket left in the ruins. 

“It would relax our guard in one direction.” Pokorni pointed up with one massive armor-suit hand. “They want us looking up today. Waiting for Charlie. That way we’re not looking anywhere else.” 

“You think they’ll try it on the ground already? It’s only been four days.” ” Captain Low seemed dumbfounded, and Glorinda didn’t blame him. She’d walked most of the line with the Colonel – it was strong, with almost two full divisions of FDA stiffened by the Twelfth Marines. Pokorni and the local FDA general both held generous reserves behind the lines for just such a situation, and the enemy force wasn’t very much bigger than their own. 

“It'll be on the ground.” Pokorni pointed to the perimeter just west of the destroyed blockhouse, directly in front of the empty office tower whose roof they stood on. “Charlie hasn’t hit this sector once, so it’ll happen right in front of us.” 

“Nate ground forces avoid frontal attacks, Colonel.” Glorinda knew Pokorni didn’t need to be reminded – this was for Low and the rest of the command team. “Their infantry units aren’t really equipped for it. They move light.” 

“Then it won’t be a frontal assault. Captain Low, what are the two advantages a suitless grunt has over a Marine?” 

“He can go through doorways without widening them, and he can be damned quiet.” 

“Infiltration?” Glorinda looked around, though their perch was twelve stories in the air and more than a kilometer from the perimeter, as if the Incanration’s shock troops would erupt from every shadow. “In broad daylight?” 

“We’d expect it at night, and these green FDA grunts in the line might have their infrared switched off during the day. Besides, if it doesn’t work, they probably only take a few hundred casualties, and if it does-” 

Pokorni was interrupted by a flash of light ahead as something exploded. Darts of energy skittered along the perimeter ahead, and the belated rattle and buzz of railguns operating at maximum cyclic echoed to their perch a moment later. 

“Damn. Earlier than I thought.” Pokorni switched the group to the local ad-hoc network, where the confused barking of non-coms and the nervous replies of privates bounced back and forth in one chaotic snarl. “They’ve infiltrated the front line. Damned provincials are still shit sentries. Break’s over, we’re going in.” 

Bowing his knees slightly, Pokorni activated the jets built into the back of his huge suit. With a roar, nearly a ton of metal and meat lifted into the air and arced toward the melee ahead and below. Captain Low and the others followed a moment later, leaving Glorinda, still hesitant with the unfamiliar suit’s flight controls, briefly alone. Unlike the grizzled raised-from-the-ranks Marine officers, she had never gone to war in an armored combat suit before her current posting. 

Wondering if other Naval Intelligence liasons to Marine commanders were also regularly expected to rocket into close combat, Glorinda checked the status indicators on the railguns slung below each of her own suit’s forearms, took a deep breath, and activated her own jets. With a roar, the suit hurtled into the air, course a dotted arc plotted on her visor. 

Pokorni and the other marines might dismiss the quality of the FDA’s soldiers, but Glorinda had been among them before falling in with the Marines – they were inexperienced, but eager and motivated. Given reliable gear and a chance to learn, they would prove to be at least as good man for man as the too-few Confederated Marines – as long as they lived long enough to gather that experience. 

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