Tales from the Service: The Ridge on Ayama

2952-05-15 – Tales from the Service: The Ridge on Ayama 

Helen Keir crossed her arms and shook her head. “That can’t be done, sir.” She pointed to the frowning brow of Ortberg Ridge, named for the poor sod who’d been the first to die in an attempt to take it. “They’ve hauled at least a couple heavy AFVs up there overnight. If we tried what HQ is asking, they’d shred us before we got fifty paces.” 

Lieutenant Barden nodded. “I understand, sergeant.” He turned as if to retreat into the half-buried tent that was serving as the company command post. “They’ll just order it anyway, unless we come up with an alternative.” His shoulders drooped; Barden had been in command in close combat for more than two weeks, and the burden was beginning to show on his lean frame. “I’ve been looking at the maps. There isn’t one. Or if there is, it’s one we can’t see unless we’re halfway up the ridge already.” 

Helen sighed. “Last patrol before dawn made it up almost that far before taking fire, but going up in daylight would be suicide. They can’t spare us a survey swarm?” 

“I asked. Command says the drones would be blown out of the sky before they could gather any data.” Barden looked over his shoulder, staring up at the ridge. “They’re probably right. If there are AFVs up there, that means at least a dozen sky sweepers.” 

As if in answer to this guess, a high-pitched screeching noise rose from the ridgeline, and soon it was joined by several more screeches. Helen knew this to signify invisible lasers stabbing out across the afternoon sky, chasing an unseen target high above, probably a reconnaissance Puma flying above the optimal range of the Incarnation weapons below. After building to an almost ear-splitting crescendo, the whining of those rapidly-cycling capacitors began to tail off, as one by one the lasers gave up their attempts to hit the departing craft. 

Helen shuddered; sky sweepers were best at targeting low-flying aircraft, but they could be leveled against ground troops just as easily, though without pinpoint accuracy. She’d seen a squad cut to ribbons in an instant those weapons. Unless Barden found a way to bypass the ridge, that might be the fate of her own squad and others at dawn, slaughtered in pushing home an attack against the strongest point on the whole line. 

“I still might find something.” Barden turned once again toward his tent headquarters. “Or you might.” 

“A patrol up the ridge in broad daylight?” Helen shook her head. “We’d be-” 

“No more slaughtered than you will be if we carry out the attack.” Barden coughed. “But I won’t order it, and neither should you.” 

Helen saluted. “Yes, sir. I’ll look for some volunteers.” 

Hurrying through the scraggly trees around the company command post, Helen reached her own squad’s part of the front line, just after the terrain began to rise toward the knees of the ridge. There, behind a stand of boulders, lay the camp-site that was temporary home to Helen and her fifteen subordinates. Two days ago, there had been seventeen of them, but Helen preferred not to dwell on the names and faces of those who’d fallen. 

“What’s the word, Sarge?” Reyer looked up from field-stripping his rail carbine.  

Several others glanced up from their own busywork. Helen could feel the tension in the air; they had heard, somehow, about the attack. The rank and file always somehow managed to catch wind of bad news before the normal channels could catch up. 

“Command wants an all-out attack at sunrise.” Helen gestured up at Ortberg Ridge. “We’re going up.” 

Strangely, this pronouncement seemed to relieve the tension in the air. It was almost as if it was a relief to the squad that the bad news had been confirmed. Helen knew this to be a sign of their weariness as much as anything; certain death was, at least, certain. 

“We won’t make it fifty paces.” Danielsen shrugged. “Unless there’s enough air support to reshape the damned ridge, anyway.” 

“Or we find a route up that’s under cover until almost the very top.” Helen held out her hands. “I’m going up there to have a look. It would be best if I had two or three volunteers with me, in case...” She shrugged. “In case the likely thing were to happen. If we do find a way to get within small arms range of the top without being seen, the attack has a chance.” 

“Still not much of one." Reyer spat into the dust and cleared his throat. “I’ll go, Sarge. No harm buying the plot twelve hours sooner.” 

“I will also." Tuominen, the slight, almost elfin Hyadean sharpshooter, reached for her rifle. “If we do get close, someone will need to stay to mark the path for everyone else.” 

“Thank you both.” She pointed to another. “Corporal Hartley, you are in charge until I get back.” 

Hartley saluted. “Got it, Sarge. I’ll make sure nobody plugs you on your way back down, eh?” 

Helen smiled. “Please do.” She rummaged through her pack for anything that might prove useful on such a perilous patrol, then stood, stuffing a few things into her pockets. “Let’s get this over with.” 

This week’s account also comes to us from the in-progress fighting on Ayama, which is proceeding slower than it seems Seventh Fleet had planned. Evidently the enemy garrison on the world was better equipped with heavy weaponry and armored vehicles than initially expected, and these armaments have slowed the liberation of the world. 

Fortunately, it seems that casualties on Ayama remain comparably light, despite the dour outlook of those on the ground, as evidenced here by Sergent Keir’s pronouncements of disaster and concerns about her under-strength unit. Most likely, one or both of the F.V.D.A. troopers her squad has lost were wounded, not killed, and the attack on such a strong point was (apparently without any prior notice to her or her commander) heavily supported by Confederated Marines, including a squad equipped with super-heavy Kodiak suits. 

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Tales from the Service: The Listening Post on the Ridge

2952-05-21 – Tales from the Service: The Listening Post on the Ridge 

Though the attack on Ortberg Ridge was far better supported than most of the participants realized even while it was ongoing, the heroism of the volunteer troops fighting far from home cannot be understated. Ayama has, at this point, fallen to Confederated forces, pushing the Incarnation one step further away from Sagittarius Gate. No doubt, there are many thousands of enemy holdouts still on that world, but it is no longer a resource depot for the enemy. 

[D.L.C. 05-23: Apologies for any delays in distributing this item to your feeds; the same day it was prepared for ingest, an Incarnation raid broke the Hypercast relay chain across the Gap. I have been informed that connectivity back to the Core Worlds has been restored; those of you on my side of the Gap should not have noticed any interruptions.] 

Sergeant Helen Keir sat with her back to a brown boulder and listened, barely daring to breathe. Reyer and Tuominen, a few meters down-slope, hugged the ground and clutched their weapons, trusting in what meager cover the uneven ground afforded them. 

After a long moment, Helen heard it again: the sound of metal scraping against stony soil. It was close, perhaps ten meters from her up the slope. 

Helen glanced at her comrades and pursed her lips. Exposing themselves to the multitude of electronic eyes on the ridgetop would be suicide. Still, Helen knew she needed to learn what the sound meant. Her squad, along with the rest of the company, was going to attack the hill the next day at dawn, and if victory were possible at all, it hinged on the attackers having all the surprises. 

Things didn’t seem quite so hopeless as they had a few hours earlier, at least. Tuominen had led the way from their bivouac to a dry gulley in the hillside, which had let them climb up a fair distance unobserved. At the upper end of the gulley, a stand of boulders had given them cover to advance a little further, but they hadn’t even gotten to the edge of this before the scraping noises had stopped them short. 

Helen was, as usual, carrying a pocket-full of micro-drones, but those would be slagged a soon as they rose into the air, and alert the enemy to the presence of Helen and her patrol. So near to Incarnation lines, even sending a tight-beam radio signal might raise the alarm. If they were going to do anything, it would need to be something low-tech – in other words, something dirty. 

Moving slowly, Helen lifted her carbine’s carry-strap over her head and set the weapon down on the ground. Motioning the others to stay still, she drew her side-arm, an antiquated VT-31 chemical-cartridge gun she’d bought secondhand before joining the FVDA, and dropped flat against the pebbly dirt. 

Were it not for the thick fibers of her laser-vest, Helen probably couldn’t have crawled any distance on her belly without being shredded by the sharp-edged rocks. As it was, her hands and knees, despite being protected by thick gloves and pants, screamed in pain every time she pushed herself a few inches forward.  

After what seemed like an hour, Helen poked her head around the side of a boulder, then ducked back a moment later. No laser drilled out her brains, and no near-misses charred the soil nearby, so she was still not exposing herself to the guns on the hilltop. Slowly, she pushed forward once more, and peered out toward the intermittent scraping noises. 

Not far uphill from where she was hiding, Helen saw a trio of Incarnation soldiers, their silver-grey fatigues stained brown with dirt, digging into the hillside. They had that absent, glazed-eyes look that Nate personnel usually did while performing manual labor; thanks to the implants interfacing with their brains, the mind of each of the laborers was elsewhere, tapped into an entertainment broadcast or interacting with his fellows on the implant network. Their position was invisible from Confederated positions at the hill’s feet, and they trusted in their comrades on the hilltop for protection against any patrol that might interrupt their work. 

Helen watched the digging for nearly a minute before creeping back to Reyer and Tuominen, as slowly and painfully as she had departed.  

Only when her back was resting against the big boulder where she had started again did she speak. “Three Nate soldiers digging on the hillside right in front of us.” She gestured back toward the sound. The trio wouldn’t hear her over the sounds of their labor, as long as she kept her voice low. “Setting up a sensor picket, probably.” 

Tuominen shook her head. “Doesn’t make any sense. That spot doesn’t have eyes on any of the approaches.” 

“It does block the top of our gulley.” Reyer gestured behind himself. “They must have noticed it was a weakness.” 

Helen nodded. She too had considered the laborers’ proximity to the defile unlikely to be a coincidence. “By dawn they could have a squad entrenched there with sensors and crew-served weapons.” She didn’t need to say what that would do to their chances of taking the ridge in a frontal attack; the others knew well enough. 

Tuominen unslung her rifle. “Dead bodies don’t dig.” 

Reyer held up a hand. “If they know we’ve been up this far they’ll be on alert in the morning.” 

Helen sighed. “Reyer’s right. We need to make it look like an accident. Tuominen, get a position fix on that dig.” 

Tuoiminen nodded and started to crawl away toward the edge of the boulder field. 

“Reyer, get back down to the bivouac and tell Barden what we’ve got up here.” Helen pointed back the way they’d come. “Tuominen and I will be staying until nightfall.” 

“Sarge, Nate patrols will come out when the sun goes down.” Reyer shook his head. “We’ve run into them way down-slope.” 

“I know.” Helen shook her head. “Tell the Lieutenant that we’ll want a bombardment on our target some time after nightfall, but to send a bunch of rounds long, to make it look like a ranging walk up the ridge.” 

“Ah.” Reyer flashed a lop-sided smile. “I get it, Sarge. Ranging walk after dark is bound to catch a few people outside the lines.” 

“Get moving. If the Lieutenant has any better ideas, he might send you back up.” Helen angled her head up and back to indicate the ridge-top. “Remember, no radio up here.” 

Reyer nodded and began creeping backwards toward the gulley. As soon as he was gone, Helen dropped her shoulders and sighed. Maybe Lieutenant Barden would have a better idea; even if they did get the whole company up this far undetected, and past the listening post site without raising the alarm, the morning’s attack still seemed hopeless. 

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Tales from the Service: The Advance on the Ridge

2952-05-21 – Tales from the Service: The Advance on the Ridge 

The attack proceeded just before dawn, precisely as command had instructed, but the sun was already poking its limb above the horizon before the enemy had any inkling of it. With the whole company crawling up the ridge using the gulch in Sergeant Helen Keir’s squad sector, it was something of a miracle that nobody forgot themselves, stood up, and tripped the sensors on the ridgetop.  

Fortunately, Nate had not sent another team to finish the sensor post which an overnight artillery shot masked by a ranging pattern had destroyed. Probably, their commander had sent the replacement work team to another spot along the line to avoid letting his enemies learn of their “accidental” good fortune. 

When the whole company was lurking among the boulders, and Lieutenant Barden had returned from crawling forward as far as he dared on personal reconnaissance, the word was whispered down the line: prepare to attack. The last hundred meters to the top of Ortberg Ridge was a bitter no-man's-land of broken stone in which nobody could move without being noticed, so the element of surprise would be quickly lost the moment the company started its final advance. Weapons trained on positions far below would take a few moments to re-aim against closer targets, but those few moments would have to be enough. 

Helen, her back pressed to the same boulder she’d used for cover the previous afternoon, felt all the tension of the last twelve hours weighing on this moment. She had done all she could to provide Barden’s attack with some faint hope of success. She could do no more but lead her squad from the front, and trust that someone would take her place when she went down. 

Barden held up his hand from his position behind a rock-pile near Helen. He couldn’t send radio transmissions until after the attack started, but he’d carried his high-power comms pack all the same. The company’s tiny battery of rocket artillery carriers was already instructed to counter-fire any heavy weapons that revealed themselves, and hopefully the swarm of recon drones the company was prepared to release into the sky would draw the fire of most of the lighter emplacements.  

Despite these precautions, Helen knew her own chances of survival, and those of any other member of the unit, were slim. She’d known the low odds of ever seeing Berkant again when she’d signed up for a unit deploying into Sagittarius, but now that those odds were compressed into a single moment, she was terrified. Not terrified of dying, not quite – she was afraid that when everyone else rose to the attack, she would remain there, catatonic. She’d seen it happen to better troopers than herself more than once. The psych-warfare squints claimed that their screening and mental health schemes prevented nine out of ten psychological casualties, but that was no consolation to anyone who’d seen the other one. 

Barden’s hand fell to his side – the signal to begin the attack. As one, nearly two hundred volunteers hefted their weapons and ran out from their concealed positions, while scores of drones buzzed into the air over their heads. 

Something roared overhead and collided with the ridgetop, blasting dirt a plume of dirt and rocks high into the sky. It was only then that Helen realized that she had stood with the others, and was several paces up-hill from her hiding place. That was encouraging, especially since she wasn’t dead. 

Helen now keyed on her radio; stealth was long gone. “Take that impact crater. The dust will cover our advance.” She was surprised at how calm her voice sounded. Even now, the crack and hiss of laser fire scoring the rocks was all around. 

Helen nearly tripped over a trio of troopers who had taken cover and were firing blindly up at the ridge-line. Smacking one on the helmet, she got them to their feet and led them onward. They weren’t from her squad, but the other sergeants would understand, in such a mixed-up situation. 

Another object roared into impact with the ridge-top just as one of the men beside Helen staggered and crumpled to the dirt. She left him where he lay and kept going. The only hope any of them had was to silence the guns on Ortberg Ridge, now only a few dozen meters away. 

Sergeant Keir survived the assault on the ridge uninjured, and was notable for commanding a squad with more troopers in it after the fighting than before. The extras proved to be stragglers from another squad, and her people did suffer two wounded and one killed, but her leadership was, by all accounts, commendable. 

As her honesty regarding her mental state just prior to the attack probably indicates, Keir requested transfer to a rear-area unit shortly after the planet was declared secure.  

According to FVDA analysis, a non-commissioned officer is only capable of perhaps two to four weeks of total sustained combat in a six-month period before they become a breakdown risk. Some might find this figure incredible, but I have read five of these stories for every one that is published, and I find it only too realistic. Unfortunately, there is rarely a good way of cycling out NCOs every month during an extended operation, and most of them would refuse these rotations even if offered. 

A note on last week’s outage: the raid on the Hypercast relay chain was apparently conducted by a small Incarnation force moving fast. Confederated first response forces never sighted the fleeing raiders. Seventh Fleet has taken measures to harden the relay network against this sort of attack in the future, but we can expect additional attempts to disrupt connectivity across the Gap. 

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Tales from the Service: The Tablet from 779C

2952-06-05 – Tales from the Service: The Tablet from 779C 

After the hard-won victory on Ayama, it seems Seventh Fleet is preparing to establish a series of forward bases in star systems deeper into the Sagittarius Frontier. To that end, the Naval Survey Auxiliary has been cataloging likely candidates for such a base. 

One survey pilot brought back a very interesting object from the habitable world in such a system – a stone tablet of great age, carved with indecipherable writing. Images of this artifact circulated widely in the Sagittarius Gate datasphere, but the item itself was apparently confiscated by Naval Intelligence. Shortly after he was debriefed, the finder sent us his account of the tablet’s finding. 

As a note, the catalog number I am using to identify the system is not the correct one; even in the account we were sent, the system’s catalog number was redacted. 

The first thing that Reade Marinou noticed when he cracked open the hatch of his PCS Tern suvey-ship was the smell. The ship’s sensors had declared the atmosphere on planet 4531779c to be well within breathable norms, but the rotten, sulphurous stench made Reade’s head swim. This made it an unlikely forward base for Confederated troops, but his job wasn’t to decide where to put bases, it was just to catalog the options. Decisions were best left for people with gray hair on their temples and holographic stars hovering over their shoulders. 

After a few slow, deliberate breaths, Reade began to grow used to the smell, so he decided against retreating into the ship for a filtration mask. He would only be staying long enough to gather a few samples anyway, and he’d certainly breathed far worse atmospheres in his time with Survey. 

Except for the smell, Reade had to admit, ‘779c was an interesting planet. Active volcanic activity and vigorous tectonic movements had given the world a rugged, jagged-edged landscape, most of which was thoroughly colonized by colorful flora. Only the snow-capped peaks of the highest ranges were not teeming with life. Biodiversity seemed greatest in the narrow coastal strips between mountain and sea, so that was where Reade had landed – on a rocky hill from which one could easily see both the white-gold beach and the sharp, ice-wreathed peaks of the nearest mountains. Four-winged avians wheeled overhead, and below the hill the treetops were alive with the flitting movement of flocks of colorful creatures, some bright blue, others yellow, yet more bone white. 

As Reade stepped off the ramp and onto the rocky soil, the two survey drones he’d set to chart the area cast free of the Tern’s upper hull and rose into the air with a whine of their vector-thrust turbofans. He barely glanced up at them; the automatons did their jobs without much input from him. He could review their data when he was back in orbit. 

Reade got two steps away from the ship before something struck him as odd, and it took him a moment to figure out what it was – it was the arrangement of the boulders scattered across the hilltop. They looked like the broken-off stumps of cyclopean pillars set in two concentric rings, albeit imperfectly round rings with plenty of gaps. The arrangement, probably a result of natural erosion patterns, was just regular enough to suggest the work of intelligent hands. 

With a shrug and a cough, Reade instructed the ship’s sensors to construct a 3D capture of the hilltop, then picked his way down on the gentler slope facing the sea. He soon lost sight of the shore as the trees rose above his head. Most of them seemed to be a tall, stately species with smooth gray trunks and a splayed crown of branches at the very top, but a few other species were also evident. 

There were boulders inside the forest as well, usually gathered into clusters, their dark, pitted surfaces free of all but the hardiest lichen-analogues. Passing one of these stands, Reade again got the uncanny sense that they were the remains of some ruined structure, but closer examination proved no clear pattern to their placement. He scraped lichen samples off the nearest one, then continued on his way toward the shore, confident that his ship’s homing beacon would lead him back. Though there were theoretically a few species on this world large enough to harm a human, he thought the risk of any attack to be low. On most unpopulated worlds, humans didn’t smell like prey to the local wildlife; only the most desperate predator would investigate him as a potential food source. 

By the time he reached the beach, the largest thing that had bothered Reade was an insect-like creature with a finger-length proboscis that leapt onto him from an overhanging branch and extended a proboscis as long as his finger. After a few futile attempts to push its impressive mouthparts through the thick material of Reade’s environment suit, the pest had hopped off him and vanished into the leaf litter. From that point on, he’d been careful not to let overhanging branches get anywhere near his face.  

The beach’s sand seemed yellower up close than it had from the hilltop. After pausing to make a note in his log about the insectile creature, he collected a sample of sand, then trudged across the beach toward the surf. Of all the samples he could get, water samples were probably the most important. 

Halfway to the water, Reade stumbled on something buried in the sand. He frowned and bent down to examine what it was he’d tripped on – it was the protruding corner of a smooth, flattened rock of the same variety as all the boulders. Though weathered, this one was not pitted or coated in lichen. 

Something about this rock struck him as odd, so Reade worked the toe of his boot underneath the edge and lifted it up out of the sand. It was roughly triangular, with two edges being uneven as if broken, and a third smooth and arrow-straight. The curved corners along the straight edge looked for all the world like a fine stone counter-top of the sort popular on his home-world of Tours. 

Reade bent down to lift the stone, running his gloved fingers over the smoothed edge. What were the chances of natural erosion creating such a perfect bevel? 

He received the shock of his life when he turned the stone over, looking for grooves or other definitive signs of artificial shaping. There, in six neat rows that vanished off the broken edges, were carved the letters of some forgotten language. 

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