Editor's Loudspeaker: New Rheims Committee Final Report

2926-09-28 - Editor's Loudspeaker: New Rheims Committee Final Report

As many of you likely already know, staff leaks from Congressional staffers suggest we'll be seeing the preliminary report from the New Rheims Committee within the next few days. This feed was quite active in covering the first week of the committee's activities, and we were as disappointed as anyone when Sylja Nisi-Bonn took the remaining proceedings behind closed doors, but the decision was at least understandable. It had, by the first day of the second week, become a media circus, with most of the interstellar news operations picking apart every question and every answer to excessive detail. Admittedly, this feed participated in this over-focus, though I believe that the one significant feed item concerning the matter was reasonable and relevant to this audience's interests.

Full recordings of the testimony provided behind closed doors will probably be released shortly after the report. Of particular interest, Samuel Bosch's in-person testimony in the last week of the committee hearings is of interest; there are no major leaks of what was said during his appearance, and as far as can be determined, the captain was before the committee less than three hours (this is about half the total time the other major witnesses spent before the committee, and we don't yet know why Bosch, who was as close to an eyewitness to the disaster as can be found, was not questioned in greater detail).

As the cruiser Arrowhawk, Bosch's command, is currently in the Centauri Naval Yards undergoing a minor refit, I have reached out to the captain through a third party, asking whether he would like to provide his account to this publication once his testimony has become public. I do not think he will accept this offer, but I hope he does; I've noticed a concerning datasphere trend toward New Rheims conspiracy theories in the weeks of silence on the issue, and perhaps a direct eye-witness report of the incident that is not filtered through the Navy or Congress will help to quash some of the more unlikely theories.

When the committee report becomes available, I will go over it, and call attention to what I think is significant in its results. I caution this audience not to expect a bombshell; Congressional committee reports tend to be remarkably dry and maddeningly reluctant to prove definite, un-hedged conclusions.

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Tales from the Inbox: KR-179

2946-10-02: Tales from the Inbox: KR-179

“KR-179 calling station, please respond.”

The crackling voice erupting out of the operations deck speakers startled Fulton so completely that he nearly dropped his freshly-dispensed coffee, and was saved from making a shameful mess only by the fact that he’d thought to put a spill-proof lid on the beverage before returning to his terminal. Hurrying to take his seat, Fulton cursed the timing – he was the only one on duty, with all of Kistler Junction’s senior officers on their rest cycles. The quiet space around the refueling outpost had been empty and silent for the first three hours of his shift, as it almost always was, and the moment he had stolen away to the food processor banks, an incoming vessel had appeared.

Setting the hot coffee aside and pulling up the telemetry readouts, Fulton was surprised to find nothing on the display except an estimated position and the designation KR-179, which was included in the voice message. Normally, the moment an incoming crew got a comms laser fix on the station, the computers aboard their starship and on Kistler Junction exchanged a wealth of telemetry and statistics, and that information filtered up to operations for the duty crew. KR-179, apparently, had sent nothing. A quick review of the system logs revealed that the voice he’d heard had been delivered the old-fashioned way – an analog radio broadcast, rather than a high-bandwidth comms laser.

“Incoming vessel KR-179, this is station Kistler Junction.” Fulton sent, knowing the computer would automatically reply in the same manner. No ship voluntarily resorted to analog transmissions unless it had suffered a total loss of its standard comms equipment, so he assumed the distant voice was nursing a crippled ship into the nearest port after some sort of accident. “What’s your status?”

The signal took almost a minute to reach KR-179, so Fulton sat back and sipped his coffee while he waited. A little excitement was rare on his shift, but it wasn’t time to wake up his superiors yet. The interaction was being recorded, of course; if it proved non-emergency, Lieutenant Commander Alberts would be just as happy to review the logs in the morning.

“Status?” Despite significant static, Fulton thought he detected confusion in the response. Just as he was about to put down his coffee and send another reply, the voice continued. “We appear to be off-course,  Kistler Junction. We’re not picking up any navbeacon signals.”

Fulton frowned. Stray civilian vessels did occasionally stumble into the Kistler system, but he’d never heard of one doing it by accident. Kistler A was a small, reddish star, but its companion was an uncommonly large neutron mass with a gravity shadow some stellar clusters would be envious of. The monthly Navy resupply ship spent almost a week and a half slow-boating in-system from the jump limit. A civilian vessel with lower acceleration happening to fix a jump on Kistler by mistake would realize its error as soon as it arrived so far out from the barren, planet-less binary.

What was more, the voice had mentioned navbeacons. Most of the old Terran Sphere navbeacon relays were still active, of course, but they had never been built this far out on the Coreward Frontier in any case. Only the oldest starships still relied on them; the spatial flux pulses they transmitted were a notoriously inaccurate way to calculate a star drive jump. Any self-respecting spacer had long since retrofitted his ship with more modern systems.

Fulton stared hard at the lack of information on his terminal for several seconds before punching the button to wake the station commander. “KR-179, there are no navbeacons within twenty ly of this star system.” He replied cautiously. “Do you need assistance?”

“Junction, we appear to have suffered a nav breakdown.” As the voice’s two minutes’ delayed response crackled into the compartment, the doors behind Fulton hissed open, and the heavy tread of boots told him that the big, square-jawed master of Kistler Junction had arrived. “Requesting permission to dock and attempt repairs.”

“Hell of a breakdown. Any idea what sort of ship it is?” Commander Alberts’s rough voice muttered over Fulton’s shoulder.

“Negative. The designation KR-179 does not appear in our registration database, and I have no telemetry. I didn’t even have her on the plot until she started broadcasting.”

“I sure don’t buy it.” The big man muttered, pacing away across the deck and past the other dozen-odd consoles, all unmanned and idle. “Stall him."

Fulton shrugged and keyed the transmit-reply button. “KR-179, this station has limited berth facilities. If you can’t get telemetry online, please transmit technical statistics of your vessel.” It was true, of course. Kistler Junction was only a naval research outpost, and it didn’t even have a full-sized, universal docking umbilical. If KR-179 was old enough to need the navbeacons, it almost certainly couldn’t establish an atmosphere seal with the station.

Somewhere behind Fulton, Commander Alberts grunted approval as he signed onto another console. The silence as the transmission winged its way across the void seemed all the more uncomfortably lengthy now that he had company.

“Station, main communications gear is not functional. Our emergency backup has very limited power and is not able to connect at this range.”

“I am sorry, as per Naval traffic policy, I must instruct you not to come within thirty lisecs until telemetry has been exchanged. Please bleed velocity to preserve this distance if you need time to make repairs.” Technically, that policy was waived for ships in distress, Fulton knew, but KR-179 had not explicitly said it was in distress; the voice of its commander had seemed only confused.

“Naval traffic policy?” The voice from KR-179 replied, redoubling its apparent confusion. “What sort of navy?”

Fulton turned around to share a confused look with his commander before replying. “Kistler junction is a research station operated by the Confederated Navy, KR-179. There are no hospitality facilities aboard.” Except, of course, the brig, Fulton knew; as far as he knew, none of its three cells had ever been used as anything but a drunk tank.

“Got him on scopes.” Alberts crowed, sending a fuzzy image to the main display.

Unfortunately, visual light and infrared telescopes didn’t provide much; the vessel was the size and shape of a large yacht, being long and thin with a pair of bulbous pods protruding amidships which probably housed drive projector nodes. In visual light, its hull had an odd bluish color. Other than possessing high levels of reactor heat bleed for its size, the ship was unremarkable. Though the image was grainy and poor, Fulton saw no signs of external damage.

“Kistler Junction, our apologies, we did not know this was a military outpost.” The voice returned, suddenly sounding rushed and conciliatory. Something about the ship commander’s voice struck Fulton as odd, but he couldn’t place exactly what it was. “If you could calculate a nav solution for the nearest civilian port for us, we can make our repairs there.”

“Sure as hell I’m not letting these joyriders dock unless they give us some telemetry.” Alberts grumbled. The big officer made no secret how suspicious he was of the incoming vessel, despite its small size. “Plot them their solution, then send them packing.”

“Gladly.” Fulton agreed, already looking up a nearby port to send the suspicious ship to. “Not that I think they’ll go where we send them, sir.”

“They won’t.” Alberts agreed. “But that’s not our problem.”

One of the first accounts featured on Tales from the Inbox was Tales from the Inbox: KR-122, an account of a small civilian vessel in a frontier-bound convoy having an odd interaction with a stray vessel that disappeared from its sensors shortly thereafter. Shortly after that account was published, a number of members of the audience sent in accounts of what they believed to be the same ship, or similar ships. Most of these accounts were frankly a bit dubious, and a few others were quite credible but did not feature vessels which simply disappeared; most of these were probably pirates hunting convoy stragglers.

Today, however, we have an account of another suspicious vessel using the odd "KR" numbered designation, and it comes along with a reader's research into this designation. Fulton B. was until recently a junior officer aboard the naval research outpost in the remote frontier system of Kistler, which is notable only because Kistler B is one of the largest neutron bodies in explored space. Apparently, this account describes events which took place in mid-2941, when he had only been on the station about six months. Since he is now posted to the Home Fleet in Sol, Fulton found a little time to do some investigation, attempting to find out what KR-179 was doing when it blundered into Kistler.

The files Fulton sent along with his account indicate that KR-XXX was a designation scheme which was used between 2803 and 2831 by the Kresmir Rally, an odd public-private hybrid organization of the sort the waning yeard of the Terran Sphere regime were notorious for. This organization was essentially an attempt to build a spacers' club for young adults who might otherwise be unable to break into the interstellar industry, and Fulton also uncovered some period news articles suggesting it was active in the highly factional political environment of the period. Vessels chartered with KR numbers were vessels owned by the organization directly; it also assisted young adults with financing their own purchases, and those ships would have names rather than KR numbers.

This connection might be a coincidence, of course. Fulton has established no direct proof that links KR-122 and KR-179 to the Kresmir Rally; he hasn't even found documents that establish that the Rally owned ships with those hull numbers.

If any in this audience have additional information about this topic, feel free to send it in. Do be aware that I will clear with Naval Intelligence every submission that, like Fulton's account, refers to events that took place during naval service; only if our representative Simona Durand has no objections with your story will it make the text feed.

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Tales from the Inbox: Mandy's Bangle

2946-10-09 - Tales from the Inbox: Mandy's Bangle

Mandy stared uncomprehending at the display for several seconds. The sleek, flattened-teardrop outline of the tiny derelict she had stumbled on had been naggingly familiar from the moment it had appeared on the readout, but now that her suspicion had been confirmed by the Survey Auxiliary’s high-quality recognition algorithm, she found it oddly impossible to process the fact that she was a few dozen kilometers away from Survey’s holy grail: an abandoned Angel starship.

The Angel ship was no bigger than her own Sirius M67 survey ship, and as cold and dead as the interplanetary void in which she had found it drifting, but Mandy still felt terribly alone and unprepared. She’d graduated from the Academy fifth from the bottom of her class, and as a result had been put on the roster of the Naval Survey Auxiliary’s valuable but unglamorous internal survey arm, which sent its pilots into uninhabited systems within the traditional boundaries of Confederated Worlds territory rather than sending out crews to push out the farthest extent of the Frontier.

Until the smooth, metallic object had shown up on her Sirius’s sensor plot, the system Mandy had been surveying had been only an unremarkable binary with no name and only a chart index number, first explored sometime in the twenty-fifth century. Her week-long drift through the system had been only another step in a dull routine of filling in the gaps in four hundred year old data, each flight a means of working her way up to the Survey Auxiliary’s frontier exploration effort. The moment the text “ORIGIN: ANGELS” had appeared on the display, all of that had changed. The unremarkable binary’s chart number, she knew, might be memorized by students of future generations as the place humanity’s steady technological progress took a sudden leap not seen since first contact with the nomadic Reachers kicked off the Second Space Age. In the derelict, she saw her own rather unremarkable surname being spoken in the same category as Columbus, Armstrong, Edwards, Blazek, or Himura.

The ship’s autopilot, ever cautious when dealing with unknown derelicts, crept closer far too slowly for Mandy’s liking, but she didn’t trust her own manual control with a discovery of such enormity. The derelict was in unknown condition, and might in theory crumble if subjected to even the faintest gust of thruster propellant. Somehow she doubted it would; if stories from the War were to be believed, Angel ships of war no bigger than the one she was now approaching were fairly evenly matched in one-on-one combat with the six-hundred-meter-long Rattanai star cruisers of the Earth occupation fleet.

With visions of immortality dancing in her head, Mandy double checked the status indicators of the ship’s recording devices. She didn’t want to miss anything; the techs back at Saunders’ Hoard could wring all the useful data out of everything she brought back. Every detail of the slow, gradual tumbling motion with which the Angel derelict slowly orbited the distant binary stars was of potential value in learning how it had come to be where it was, and when. Mandy wondered idly if it had been there all along, a lost member of the silent swarm which had saved humanity in its interstellar infancy, or if it had arrived since the star system had been first explored. Perhaps it was merely a hollowed-out shell left as a marker by the inscrutiable, secretive Angels, or perhaps it was proof of the old legend that the Angels buried their dead the old Norse way, by packing them into the ships of war that had served them so well in life, and setting them adrift on the currents of the stellar sea.

Mandy was still imagining the sorts of stories her find might reveal when an alarm squealed somewhere inside her cockpit. Startled, she hunted for its origin, and a dagger of icy dread pierced her guts when she found warning lights on the powerplant status board. Before she could do anything to divine the meaning of the half-dozen warning lights, a jolt rippled through the tiny ship. The cockpit lights dimmed, and the familiar vibration of the gravitic drive faded into eerie silence as most of the cockpit sensor readouts shut down. All the warning indicators winked out save one – the ship’s reactor had, in her moment of supreme triumph, shut itself down to prevent a somewhat more inconvenient explosion.

Mandy cursed her luck, manually issuing a gentle burst of thruster power to push her ship’s now unpowered trajectory safely away from the valuable derelict. Though very new and modern, the M67 was still not reliable enough for Frontier service. Reactor panics like the one Mandy had just experienced, along with a host of other teething problems, were why the model was being issued only for internal survey flights, though it was a decade newer than anything else the Auxiliary had in its inventory. If she couldn’t get the reactor back online herself, another Survey ship would come along to investigate her failure to return. While there was more than enough reserve power and provisions for her to survive until rescued by another Auxiliary pilot, her dreams of becoming a legend were already being torn away from her. Another flight would mean someone else to share the glory with – someone just as likely to want to claim all the credit.

Just as Mandy turned her attention to attempting to coax her ship’s temperamental reactor back to life, another alarm sounded – this time, she recognized the insistent shriek of the collision alarm. The autopilot didn’t wait for instructions, quickly shoving the ship sideways violently enough that its pilot felt the maneuver even through the compensators. Though the readout had gone dark moments before, Mandy remembered from the plot that there was nothing out there to collide with – nothing, that is, except for the derelict. Chill dread returned as Mandy, all but blind with the active sensors too energy-intensive to operate on auxiliary power, brought one of the ship’s visual-light telescopes to bear on the orbital track of the Angel relic. It was just as she feared – the enigmatic vessel was not where it had been when her systems had gone dark. Without active sensors, she had no way of knowing if she had simply miscalculated its relative position, or if the dead ship had suddenly come to life.

Though she had no way of knowing what was happening outside her hull, Mandy wheeled the telescope around on its bearings, looking for any sign of the derelict’s sleek profile against the distant stars. All at once, it seemed that the stern, alien eyes of a lone Angel, its mysterious vigil disturbed, were upon her, piercing the hull of the Sirius as if they were a thin shell of brittle glass rather than sturdy titanium alloy. The odd, reclusive sapients had, for their own reasons, interceded to save humanity from extinction twice in its history as a spacefaring species, but she knew that was no guarantee of safety in such an encounter. The Angels were suspicious creatures, their impossible technologies always kept out of human hands, by lethal force if necessary.

Though she saw nothing against the starfield, Mandy found the controls for the broadcast radio and turned its power up as far as the auxiliaries could support. “Is someone out there? This is Naval Survey Auxiliary Flight 406-T-77. I’ve encountered a minor reactor malfunction, and any assistance would be appreciated.” The words seemed lost in the void, even within the confines of the cockpit.

There was, of course, no reply but the gentle background hiss of the binary system’s tangled magnetic field. Mandy shook her head, trying not to focus on visions of silent Angelic wrath fixed on her intrusion, and set about issuing reactor restart instructions.

To her relief, the temperamental Sirius power plant staggered to life on the second attempt. Immediately, Mandy swept local space for any sign of the derelict Angel ship, and was less than surprised when she failed to find it, either at its predicted location, or anywhere else. What did surprise her was that there was something out there – a highly reflective object no more than ten centimeters across. The ship’s computer helpfully modeled its trajectory and demonstrated that this small anomaly, not the missing derelict, had caused the collision alarm and emergency maneuver.

Gingerly, Mandy brought the ship around to scoop up the tiny object which had caused her so much terror. Once it was safely aboard and hoisted into the analysis tank, Mandy put the ship back on its original course and went down to have a look at it. She found herself looking at a polished plate of bronze-colored metal, triangular with two of its corners curled inwards. On the outer surface, a handsome pattern of etching crisscrossed the smooth finish. It looked, she decided, like a piece of simple jewelery; holes on the two curved corners might once have been the places where a clasp fitted to attach the item to a human-sized wrist or forearm.

Using the grippers in the analysis tank, Mandy turned the object over to examine the inside surface, and found a different pattern of etching there. Small blocks of complex etching marched in ordered rows, almost like letters, though she saw no place the pattern used a repeated shape. Mandy found it hard to focus on the etching; the nearly writing-like quality made her imagine letters and words appearing out of the background, but each time, they vanished as soon as she thought they appeared. It was, she decided, nothing that would be drifting in space by accident. The object was undoubtedly related to the Angel derelict; perhaps a piece that had fallen off and been forgotten when it had departed.

As she considered the possible meaning of the object, Mandy’s eyes drifted across the writing-like pattern once more, and she recoiled from the analysis tank in alarm, falling heavily against the opposite bulkhead. For a moment, another odd set of letters had seemed to rise from the complex pattern, bolder and clearer than all the suggestions her imagination had already supplied.

“Mandy, you’re losing it.” She muttered, standing once more and returning to the tank, sure that what she had seen would be only a figment of her overly active imagination. Picking up the metal object with the tank’s grippers once more, Mandy turned it over and once again looked upon the etching on the inside surface.

Despite all her expectations, the words that had so unnerved her were still there. Mandy stared uncomprehending at the thing in the analysis tank, torn between wonder and sheer panic. Etched into the ordered patterns on its inside face, very near the center and impossible to mistake, was her own name.

I'm genuinely shocked this story cleared Naval Intelligence, but it did.

Mandy G. sends us the account of the most eventful flight of her brief career in the Naval Survey Auxiliary. In her account, she claims to have stumbled on an apparently derelict Angel starship. The Auxiliary has never confirmed this incident, but their representative here on Planet refused to categorically deny her account. The usually very open service denied having any data recordings to back up the story, so I can't say I believe it all happened exactly as Mandy claims, but the physical proof of the story - the "bangle" she returned with - is a well documented fact.

According to Mandy, the physical proof she brought back was subjected to a number of analyses at the research station on Saunders’ Hoard, and the technicians there determined the item to have been manufactured by a human mass fabricator of a type mainly used in the early 2700s. How such an item came to have Mandy's name etched on it, none of them could understand, but they let her keep it all the same, finding no evidence it was of Angel origin. Mandy transferred from the Auxiliary to the true Navy shortly after this allegedly happened in early 2944; evidently she has been serving as a launch pilot on a Navy tender for almost a year, and she claims that she keeps the "bangle" on her person every time she straps into a cockpit.

I am interested in the teething problems Mandy reports with the Sirius M67 type - this ship class is sometimes considered the closest competitor to several of our loyal sponsor's offerings, since it is purportedly going to be available to the general public sometime early next year, at a similar price point to analogous Kosseler products. The Sirius model was built to the Survey Auxiliary's specifications, and supposedly in second-line Survey service they've worked most of the kinks out of the type, but I can't find any proof they've been cleared for Frontier service yet, even eighteen months after Mandy's reported bad experience. Is Sirius going to start selling these ships to the public before they're even ready for the purpose for which they were originally designed?

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: Leaked New Rheims Committee Report

2946-10-12 – Editor’s Loudspeaker: Leaked New Rheims Committee Report

For those of you following the investigation into the disaster at New Rheims, the appearance of a supposed leaked copy of the New Rheims Committee final report is not news; here on Centauri it has been available for almost two full days. I did not wish to report on it until some attempt to verify it had been made, and have been in contact with Agent Durand, our favorite Naval Intelligence representative, the office of committee chair Sylja Nisi-Bonn, and other sources friendly to Cosmic Background. While no source was willing or able to verify that this was in fact the committee’s so far unpublished report, some of my sources did confirm that the report contains some accurate details about the closed-door sessions of the committee, and that the committee’s report had been completed more than a week ago.

Unfortunately, that is where my information ends. The supposed leaked report does apparently reflect the actual testimony before the committee, but it could be the product of anyone with knowledge of the proceedings and familiarity with the usual congressional report structure, and its conclusions and findings are not necessarily those of the committee.

In full honesty, I do hope that the wild conclusion the available report reaches is not the genuine conclusion of the proceedings of the previous months. The idea that the disaster was caused inadvertently by a weapons project initiated by the Confederated Navy in violation of the Treaty of Scherer is more horrifying than the most sinister of the conspiracy theories I’ve seen bouncing around the datasphere, but I find it quite unlikely.

This conclusion draws heavily on a combination of the closed-door testimony of Captain Samuel Bosch and two un-named whistleblowers who submitted textual testimony only. Apparently, the Naval Survey Auxiliary training squadron operating at the system’s edge was attacked by an unknown vessel of approximately cruiser size, but the fortunate arrival of Bosch’s patrol squadron interrupted their destruction. The vessel fled toward New Rheims and, when cornered in planetary orbit, performed a Carthage Strike on the planet in its last moments before being destroyed. None of this was in Bosch’s initial recorded testimony, further suggesting an attempted Navy cover-up.

How the committee got from this act of terrorism to a violation of the Treaty of Scherer is not clear; testimony from confidential witnesses is referred to but not included. It is possible that this is a convenient way to further a forged conclusion; New Rheims might just as easily be the victim of a terror plot by Rattanai Imperialists or Ladeonists, though I can’t see the benefit in any of this for either ideology.

Even if this report’s conclusion is not accurate, and the real report is forthcoming in the next few days, this will fuel the conspiracy theories; if it is a fake report, some testimony has been omitted from it, and there will inevitably be datasphere sources who insist that the facts and testimony of the later report not found in this one are hasty fabrications.

If this is in fact the committee’s understanding of the truth of the situation, we are in for an interesting few weeks. Legally speaking, Congress can’t remove the admirals responsible, but expect a move to cut all military funding until those persons are removed.

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