Tales from the Inbox: Revenge of the Recycler

2947-05-21 - Tales from the Inbox: Revenge of the Recycler

Today’s entry of Tales from the Inbox is quite delayed. The reason for that will be explained in a later text feed item once an information embargo has been lifted. 

Obviously most of you will be aware that we have confirmed datastream proof of a Sagittarian cruiser being picked up on the outskirts of a system on the near side of the Gap. For the moment, this incursion has not resulted in any violent confrontations, but Cosmic Background – like every other news operation which operates on the Frontier – is following the situation closely.  

The Fifth Fleet’s lead battle elements arrived in Håkøya this week, and some of you will have seen the impressive assembly of warships now sharing orbit space with Argyris spaceport in footage shown in our week’s vidcast episodes. Since the only significant military presence in this system since its colonization was the lighter ships of the Arrowhawk squadron, the Håkøya system has never seen anything quite like this. 

What we’re seeing here isn’t even the main Fifth Fleet. The battle line itself has taken up station at Maribel due to that system’s better-developed interstellar infrastructure; most of what has come here has been the fleet’s “outer line” ships, mostly cruisers and fleet destroyers, along with the escort ships and logistics ships which service them. Even without the heavy battlewagons, Håkøyan space is now better armed than any system in Confederated Space other than Sol, Centauri, and the Strand border-posts. 

Today’s entry was relayed to me by Ulrik Kulkarni, a senior officer aboard the destroyer Rheanna Zhu, arrived as part of this force. I cannot verify it, but it is similar to other stories I have heard from far less reputable sources; I have every expectation that it is true, or at least mostly true.  

Ulrik studied the numbers rendered on the ensign’s data-slate for several seconds, concentrating very hard on not letting his reaction show in his face. “Thank you, Mr. Itamar.” He handed back the slate, then waved the junior officer away. “I’ll look into it.” 

Ensign Itamar scurried off without remembering to salute, but Ulrik had never been one to stand on formality among officers, and his thoughts had already moved on to what he should do about the information. Itamar’s numbers didn’t lie; Rheanna Zhu was, despite being a ship manned by twelve officers and twenty enlisted crew, exerting its atmospherics as if it had almost fifty people aboard.  

A quick dive into the maintenance logs of the atmospherics revealed no irregularities; just before the ship had left Centauri to join the fleet’s move out to the Frontier, most of the life support machinery had been replaced. Problems that could result in nearly fifty percent over-exertion of atmospherics would not have made it past port inspection teams, much less Zhu’s veteran maintenance personnel. No pressure loss events, even minor ones, had registered in Itamar’s analysis, so there was only one thing Ulrik could conclude. 

“Skipper, are you in your office?” Ulrik called out, knowing his earpiece comm would carry his words to the correct recipient. 

“Negative, Mr. Kulkarni.” The commander’s heavy breathing told Ulrik where she was before the explanation came. “If it’s urgent, I’m in fitness.” 

“Be right there.” Ulrik hurried past the lift to use one of the ladder-shafts, which brought him down to the correct deck as fast as was practical. Entering the fitness center, he spotted Commander Gajos straining against the elastic resistance of one of the multifunction aerobics harnesses. Other than her, the compartment was empty. 

“Something urgent, Lieutenant?” Gajos picked up on Ulrik’s haste and got out of the machine, mopping her face with a towel. 

“I think we have...” Ulrik lowered his voice. “Stowaways, Skipper. Ten, or even fifteen.” 

Gajos looked around to see what Ulrik already had; there was no-one to overhear. “How is that even possible?” She kept her voice as low as his, and to his relief appeared to be taking the claim seriously.” 

“The atmospherics are running at one hundred fifty percent, with no maintenance problems to explain the power draw. They’re designed to handle quite a few guests in an emergency of course, but...” He didn’t need to finish the sentence; ten to fifteen stowaways, properly armed and coordinated, could overpower the thirty-two officers and crew relatively easily. 

“Keep this quiet. Who else knows?” 

“Itamar.” 

“Ensign Itamar, report to my duty office immediately.” Commander Gajos barked, knowing her own comm unit would whisk the order to the young officer immediately. “Lieutenant, get me a map of the places we could have that many stowaways without noticing. I’ll be in my office. Do it personally.” 

“Aye, Skipper.” 

Gajos was already in motion, striding past Ulrik toward the corridor. He followed after a few seconds, snatching a data-slate out of a dispenser chute near the lift and calling up the ship’s schematics on his way back to the ladder shaft. The pressure hull of a destroyer was not known for containing a large number of hiding-places; assuming none of the official crew were involved in the stowaways’ designs, it would not take long to fulfill the skipper’s request. Crew cabins and the engine room were easily excluded, as were the command deck, lounge, fitness center, sanitary compartments, and other high-traffic areas.  

Turning these areas green on the schematic, Ulrik had only the cargo areas, low traffic maintenance crawlspaces, and a few other areas left to search. There were so few, in fact, that he knew he could peek his head into most of them before Commander Gajos had finished swearing the young ensign to secrecy. Dropping down to the bottom-most deck in the pressure hull, he quickly walked through the twin pressurized cargo compartments, then peeked into the auxiliary life support spaces to verify that the cold, silent machinery contained there had not sheltered any stowaways.  

Searching on his own, without even a side-arm in case of trouble, was a risk, but Ulrik knew that he was checking the lowest-probability areas. If he did happen on any hostile stowaways, he could raise the alarm with his comm earpiece. 

One by one, Ulrik excluded some of the larger areas on his schematic, narrowing down the search area. Once he was down to four of the most likely locations for a number of stowaways to hide, he headed up toward the skipper’s duty office to report 

On the way up, however, he paused at a closed hatch leading off the ladder shaft. According to the schematic, the space on the other side of the sealed doorway was a maintenance space for the primary bio-recycling system, where the ship’s organic waste was dehydrated and then fed to specially gene-edited bacteria. The space needed air pressure and oxygen, but the foul smell of the sewage digestion process ensured that it was sealed off behind airlocks, with its atmospheric ductwork isolated from the main network. The compartment was large enough to house a dozen stowaways, to be sure – but Ulrik chuckled at the idea that anyone would subject themselves to its noxious conditions voluntarily. 

Entering an access override into the bio-recycling compartment airlock, Ulrik took several deep breaths and hopped inside, taking several deep breaths as the outer door sealed. The pressure inside was the same, of course, and the foul smell was not dangerous, but there was a good reason why cleaning this particular compartment was the worst punishment the skipper could mete out. 

The inner hatch clicked and hissed as its seal broke, and Ulrik held his breath. He planned only to look, then close the door and head up to see the skipper and Itamar. If there was anything out of place, a single glance would be enough to spot it. 

The hatch whined in distress, opening far slower than usual, and Ulrik stepped up to look for the source of the mechanical problem. Just as he did, the hatch shuddered and shot into its recess too quickly, as if relieved of a great weight – and perhaps it was. The lieutenant had only a fraction of a second to wonder why the inside of the compartment was dark before the darkness extruded itself into the small airlock with a noxious sucking noise, and a wet, sticky wall of black goo pressed him gently but firmly back against the outer lock. Even though he was holding his breath, the odor of the stuff – to say nothing of the stuff itself – invaded Ulrik’s nostrils. 

Gagging and trying to get a hand over his mouth to prevent the spongy ooze from getting inside while he spoke, Ulrik eventually managed to rasp out an override code for the lock, in the hopes that his comm would pick it up. 

After several desperate seconds, Ulrik felt the lock bump and hiss behind his back, and it slid with familiar reluctance to one side. Pushed slowly by the wall of sludge into the ladder shaft, he grabbed for the rungs and clawed his way upwards, ignoring the heavy plopping as gibbets of ooze fell several decks to the bottom of the shaft. 

The hands of a surprised and then horrified crew tech helped Ulrik onto the floor of the next deck above, but the crew tech barely stayed to ensure the unrecognizably soiled officer was alive before dashing off to clean his own hands and arms. Coughing and gasping for air, Ulrik lay on the formerly pristine deck for nearly a minute. 

“Skipper.” He eventually remembered to croak, for the benefit of his comm unit. “I think I found our problem.” 

This sort of malfunction with the new type of bio-recycling systems used by the Navy may be uncommon, but I don’t think we can deny that it takes place. The bacterial colony used to break down waste needs to be kept to a certain population, but if the system intended for regulating its growth malfunctions, it often expands well outside the bounds which it is meant to occupy. The result is an entire compartment filled with sewage-fed bacterial mat, which is just spongy and porous enough not to block inflow and outflow of air. 

Ulrik is lucky; in other variants of this sort of story that I’ve heard, crewmen entering the compartment unawares have been badly injured or killed by this phenomenon. 

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: Datacast Blackouts in Håkøya

2947-05-25 - Editor’s Loudspeaker: Datacast Blackouts in Håkøya 

You may have noticed that our last Tales from the Inbox feed item was delayed by almost twenty-four hours. This was not because of human error or a technological fault. Naval Intelligence has asserted control over the HyperCast relay station in the system and several others, and it reserves the right to impose total or partial datacast blackouts for reasons of “military security.”

Such a blackout was ordered during the time when Tales from the Inbox was meant to be ingested, leading to the delay. The reasons for this blackout were never explained to civilians here in-system, but it probably has something to do with a security alert on all orbital stations that began shortly before the blackout.

I can’t verify this information, but it has been hinted to me that one of the so-called KR-ships (crewed by Ladeonist insurgents as with other examples of the type) was spotted stealthily approaching one of the cruisers of the Fifth Fleet’s van. This unverified story bears the ring of truth, because Navy gunship patrols and local defense force activity have both stepped up since.

All of this leads me to conclude that rumors of Captain Bosch’s force tangling with Sagittarians and suffering badly may not be as outlandish as first thought. Bosch has yet to reply to personal messages on the subject, but the Navy’s datasphere dispatch system continues to accept them, suggesting that, in their records at least, he is still alive.

I have discussed this situation with Ashton and the other members of Cosmic Background’s Centauri staff, and have come up with a few measures to prevent the loss of feed items in the future. In addition to preparing several stopgap Tales from the Inbox episodes in case of another blackout, I will begin duplicating all my feed activity across to Centauri thirty-six hours or more before the scheduled time of publication. Hopefully this will prevent more such mishaps in the future.

Again, this is not a military news feed. If that is what you wish to find, you will find several good ones recommended by other fans in the social-link datahub for this feed. I only bring up the situation because it is affecting my ability to deliver content for your entertainment on schedule.

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Tales from the Inbox: The Siren Stone

2947-05-28 – Tales from the Inbox: The Siren Stone

Apologies for the late delivery; the system we have developed to ensure reliable delivery of Tales from the Inbox and other text feed items is online, but a few hours to propagate the data across the HyperCast network from multiple distant sources are required. In the future, Tales from the Inbox will continue to arrive a few hours later than its previous ingestion timestamp, but we are working to tighten that gap somewhat.

Today’s entry was sent in by none other than Nojus Brand, back in action after his run-in with a chitinous predator on the arid world of Barsamia a few months ago. Evidently he lost all the footage of his most recent brief, dangerous expedition to a solar flare – but he wanted to make sure to let everyone in both of our audiences know that he’s back with new dangers in mind.

Nojus paused to glance out the tiny, radiation-proof window in the side of his landing craft several times before he finished suiting up and checking the seals. The world outside was nothing like the tropical hothouses, frigid crags, and baked deserts he usually frequented on his little expeditions, and for once, he felt a little bit uneasy.

The uneasiness, he told himself, had nothing to do with the nearly fatal outcome of his most recent outing, or with the long shadows cast by the dead, corroded hulls of two much larger landing craft which he had chosen to set down beside. No, it was something else. The picturesque, untamed wildness that marked most of his destinations had become a familiar and even comforting factor in Nojus’s travels, and now that he had found an entirely new type of peril, the sense of danger lost long ago had made a creeping return. This time, he would have to tackle an environment without his Reed-Soares Personal Survival Utility.

“Warning.” The lander’s comm, still tuned to the frequency of the beacon installed beside the two dead landers, spoke in the recorded voice of a previous visitor to the system. “The surface of Golgotha A is a Class 2 hazardous environment. Do not land without proper precautions. Warning…”

Tromping over to the control panel, Nojus switched off the volume. The beacon would repeat five times, then go silent for ten more minutes, as it had been doing for at least fifty years. Most Class 2 hazards needed no beacons, of course; the hostility of such places was usually detectable from orbit. The first of three planets in the Golgotha star system, however, hid its horrors well; all that the first explorers had seen was a barren orb with a nitrogen atmosphere, crust studded with valuable mineral formations.

Later expeditions, seeing the hulks of abandoned landing-ships studding the surface near the most promising mineral fields, must have proceeded with greater caution. This caution had done them no good; for two whole centuries, nothing that landed on Golgotha A ever rose to orbit again.

The Elliway Expedition, first to return from a ground survey of the aptly named Place of the Skull, had survived thanks more to luck than to Captain Elliway’s incorrect theories about the fates of all who had come before. One of the junior researchers had stumbled on the vacsuited corpse of one of her predecessors and discovered that every electronic component - shielded or otherwise - in the dead explorer’s possession was hopelessly fried. After a bit of exploratory simulation, she had warned her compatriots, and Elliway had lifted off only hours after arriving.

Armed with the data brought back by Elliway’s crew, Nojus would not be the first to safely spend time exploring Golgotha A, but he suspected he was its first tourist. His equipment had all been modified to minimize risk, with the replacement of all ferrous and conductive parts with composite and ceramic. With luck, that would stave off the fate which had befallen many explorers before him.

Camera drones would of course carry the same risks as any other equipment, so when Nojus activated his cameras, they extended off the roof of his landing craft on a pair of long, articulated booms. Panning them in opposite directions, he recorded several seconds’ footage of the gray desolation and the corroded landers. Introductory voice-over work could wait until he was back in the relative safety of orbit.

“Day one on Golgotha A.” The suit microphone picked up the words as usual. “I’m about to open up and take a step outside.”

Taking a deep breath, Nojus stepped into the airlock. His suit-gloved hands were empty, and his right hand hung uselessly at his side, missing the presence of a survival multitool. It couldn’t be helped; Reed-Soares’s smart-metal construction used a large amount of iron, and just like the rest of his kit, all iron had been left in orbit. A few “dumb” composite tools housed in an external compartment would have to do on Golgotha A.

The magnificent desolation outside the lander was something Nojus suspected only the first humans to have landed on Earth’s moon would have found familiar. Grey, powder-fine dust covered the flat plain of the landing site, which stretched to the horizon in all directions except where craggy mineral formations rose into sheer bluffs. The thin atmosphere bore enough wind to scatter footprints, but the ruined remnants of partially-unpacked research equipment lay scattered around the wrecks of long-dead explorers’ landers. Most of the expeditions seemed to have wandered about the landing area for several hours before meeting their doom.

“Beautiful scenery.” Nojus remotely pointed one of the boom cameras at the nearest stand of mineral formations, so the viewers could see how the massive formation glittered and threw off tiny rainbows when the ruddy Golgotha sunlight struck it. “I recommend a visit.” This, he punctuated with a laugh; his viewers would know better. He hoped they would, anyway. Only he was crazy enough to go for a hike on such a perilous planet.

The laugh seemed hollow and empty, like the landers’ hulks in the foreground. “Right. Let’s go take a walk to that formation.”

Nojus took only a few steps before his boot turned over a fist-sized chunk of crystal underneath the dust. Stooping, he picked it up, fingers tingling in knowledge of what he was holding. The grayish crystal formations studding the planet were beautiful and would serve as an ore of several valuable metals, but like the sirens of legend, they enticed with one hand and slew with the other. The crystals had doomed every expedition to Golgotha A, manned or automated.

“See this?” Nojus held up the crystal for the boom camera he knew was following his progress. “If I were wearing a standard suit, I’d be dead right now.” He hurled the crystal off into the distance, away from the pieces of corroded equipment at the landing site. “But I’ve come prepared for this place. No iron in any of my equipment.”

The crystals were deadly because of their odd interaction with iron, of course. Baked by their red-dwarf primary’s eons of irradiating solar flares, the unique mineral had a high-energy crystalline lattice which, though quite stable, would break down quite violently with the right reactant.

Metallic iron was, of course, exactly the reactant the crystals desired. The electromagnetic emissions of this breakdown were violent enough to fry electronics of all kinds and stun the human nervous system, especially since the reaction ate away at the ferrous alloys of standard shielding. Even the tiny crystal chips blown by Golgotha A’s wind, blown against the side of a landing craft, were enough to wipe out an entire expedition, and this was likely the fate of the first explorers to set foot on the world.

“Nobody knows if there’s life on Golgotha A.” Nojus continued, for the benefit of the audience. “Soil testing has proved inconclusive. If there is, it’s probably underground.”

He turned then to stare at the camera. “And if there are predators here, I mean to find them.”

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Tales from the Inbox: Seeker's Symbiosis

2947-06-04 – Tales from the Inbox: Seeker's Symbiosis

I didn’t think it worth a standalone text feed item, but Captain Bosch finally responded to my datasphere messages. He cannot give any news as to the condition or disposition of his squadron at this time, but he did suggest that he expected to return to Håkøya soon. Though he could not be specific, he definitely implied there was some yet-unresolved danger to his ships which needed to be overcome before the squadron could return to the near side of the Gap. 

If you are a congregant of the United Spacers’ Chapel, and I know there are many in this audience of that faith, consider offering up a prayer for his command. In the message I received, he asked specifically for this audience to remain in prayer for his command and for the whole Confederated Navy. Security concerns prevented his saying more, but the tone of the message was somewhat grim, suggesting some sort of trouble. Could administrative fallout from the Great Purge be affecting the Navy’s ability to supply his ships so far from a primary naval base? 

On a lighter note, recordings of Sagittarian ships nosing around on the near side of the Gap appear to have come to nothing. I have seen no reports of further sightings after the first wave, and while reports from the Sagittarius Frontier continue to come in, most of them are months old. Today I want to focus on another tale sent in by Jaska N., a Hegemony-bred spacer whose alliance with a unique xenosapient named Ina has graced this feed before. After some curiosity was expressed on our audience engagement hub about what happened next, he decided to send in more of his story. I have lifted only a portion of the new account which answers some of the most often-heard questions from the community hub. 

While Jaska himself does not specifically describe the events of his service with the Hegemony Navy which wrack him with guilt and terror to this day, many veterans of the Confederated Navy bear similar psychic scars, and the kind of event likely to cause such trauma can be easily imagined. A military spacer’s life on the Rimward side of the treaty zone would be all too familiar to our own Navy veterans. 

Jaska woke in near-perfect darkness, warm except where cool, hard-tipped fingers rested on his chest and where an arc of blank glassy enigma lay on his shoulder. He had bedded down for the night shift alone, but as was increasingly usual, he had not remained so through the whole night. 

“Ina.” Jaska gently but firmly pushed the xenosapient’s head off his shoulder, and a flicker of indistinct light woke behind her featureless mask. “We’ve talked about this. You have your own bunk.” 

Ina lifted herself up enough that the thin thermal blanket fell aside, and the cool air of the little ship’s crew cabin invaded Jaska’s comfortable warmth. A series of indecipherable symbols flitted across her face too quickly for him to read, then she lay back down and pressed the side of her head against his ear. “You should not be alone.” Her purring voice, the product of scale-like constituents rubbing against each other like crickets’ legs, nevertheless managed to sound like a human woman’s voice. 

“Look, we both know I’m over the rad-sickness.” Jaska wanted to get up and stand apart from her, but he couldn’t do so and still expect an answer more complex than the three letters at a time she could display on her face. “The excuse that you’re concerned about my health expired a week ago.” 

“I said that you should not be alone, not that I am worried you continue to be ill.” Ina had of course nursed Jaska back to health after helping her find a radioactive xenoflora specimen nearly killed him. She seemed to have known beforehand of the negative effects the radiation would have on human tissue, and to have experienced something like guilt for some time afterwards, but he tried to keep in mind how little the lithe, feminine humanoid guise reflected Ina’s true nature. “What haunts your sleep, Jaska?” 

Jaska shook his head, pried Ina off himself, and rolled out of the bunk, blinking as the cabin automatically brightened. For an alien who had spent more time as a prisoner and curiosity of Rattanai pirates than a traveling-companion of Terrans, she was far too perceptive. “Things that are twenty T-years old. Don’t worry about it.” 

Ina, unable to use her voice without pressing some part of herself against Jaska’s ear, sat up on his bunk and let her long legs dangle off the side. Though composed of a few thousands of scale-like individuals working in concert, she didn’t seem to know how to take the shape of anything but an attractive, slim human female. Most likely, her form was reactive to whoever she was around – Jaska’s tendency was obviously to respond best to a human female, so that was what she looked like. It was most likely a simple reflex. 

“THA-TLO-NG?” Ina, displaying three letters at a time on her faceplate, queried. 

“Just about.” Jaska wandered across the tiny cabin to the controls to check the little ship’s autopilot. They were still on course, with plenty of fuel, atmospherics, and nutrient reserves to make it back to civilization. “I’m all right.” 

Before Jaska realized that she had left the bunk rack, Ina’s arms and serpentine, barb-tipped tail were already wrapped around him, and her head was already buried into his shoulder. “I can help.” Her purring voice sent a shiver down Jaska’s spine, and he tried to remind himself that she had almost killed him in pursuit of a radioactive plant whose purpose had never been explained in detail, and that all her pseudo-sexual affection was aimed toward a very different sort of intimacy. If she said she could help, she probably could – but he dreaded learning how. 

“Don’t.” Jaska pried her arms off himself. She was far less dense than a human, and under normal circumstances far weaker. She could of course flow her components around his intervening hands if she chose, but that rarely happened. “This isn’t something you can fix so easily.” 

The letters “YES” appeared on Ina’s otherwise blank face. “ICA-NTA-KEA-WAY-” 

“Nothing.” Jaska finished the sentence being patiently spelled out. “You have permission to take nothing from me. Not even the nightmares.” 

“BUT-” 

“I know in your own way you’re trying to help.” Jaska turned away and keyed the forward display to open its shutters. With bright lights in the cabin, no stars were visible beyond, but he stared out into the void anyway. “We humans help each other by sharing loads, not taking them away.” 

Ina remained silent for several seconds. When Jaska turned around, he saw that she had fallen into the pilot’s acceleration couch, one leg slung lazily over the arm-rest. Though she could make no normal expression, he could tell she was waiting for him to say more. To tell the story which spawned his nightmares. 

Jaska sighed. He had, after all, suggested it. He wasn’t ready to tell the story, but it would do him more good than to have Ina try to take away the trauma. “I suppose.” Walking past her, he leaned on the back of the chair, looking down at the blank-faced creature which had volunteered to hear his confession.  

Ina craned her head to look at him curiously, contorting in an unconscious attempt to look more appealing to his eye. Would she understand why the memory hurt so much? Would it matter if she didn’t? 

Jaska took a deep breath, then began. “It all began when I was in the service. We were answering a colonial distress call on the Rimward Frontier...” 

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