Tales from the Service: An Infested Recycler

2953-05-21 – Tales from the Service: An Infested Recycler 

Sylvia Elmer turned the vial of gray-green slime over and over in her gloved hands. It hadn’t come through inflow – none of the sanitary facilities would work as long as the recycler compartment was in maintenance mode. It hadn’t come from the culture on the screens either; taken as a whole, the microbiome of even an unhealthy screen produced very little insoluble waste, and an excess would have set off caution indicators long before enough to clog a pump could accumulate. The slime being largely nonliving, aside from a smattering of the same microbes on the screens, ruled out the introduction of hostile microbes to the system. Where else could it have come from? 

A small but searingly furious part of Sylvia’s brain didn’t care. If she wrote a report stating that the recycler of Brychan Mazza was unreliable due to unknown interactions – a fairly standard phrase technicians used when they meant “we couldn’t figure out why it broke in the first place” – Seventh Fleet headquarters would send down orders for the people with cutting torches to carve out the compartment and swap in one of the four identical units of Sierra Nevada. That would mean plenty of time to fix it, of course, but if the problem spread to the other three units before they did, one of the very few mobile service platforms in Sagittarius would be forced back to base for repairs itself. The fleet would demand a scalp for an incident of that scale – most likely Sylvia’s. 

There was always the possibility that someone on Mazza’s crew had gotten wise to the monitoring system on the sewage inflow and snuck into the recycler compartment itself to dump contraband into the vats directly. That would explain why the first vat in the chain was unaffected, at least for now. The pumping system never flowed anything into the first vat from the other three during normal operation; this could be done, but only by manual command, which would be logged. 

Of course, so would any command to open the vats. A quick scan of the logs revealed no legitimate access operations for the compartment or any of the vats between the last maintenance cycle and Mazza’s arrival alongside Sierra Nevada. This didn’t entirely rule out the theory, though. Only the newest recycler models were entirely tamper proof, and the fleet tended to use older, cheaper recycler fittings on smaller warships like destroyers. 

Sylvia got up and circled the compartment, threading between pairs of technicians slaving over the second set of new screen plates in as many days, and checked the three access hatches that stood open. None of them showed any sign of forced entry, but all three had the oldest model of access panels, which could be disconnected from the outside by anyone with basic electrical tools and a schematic hologram.  

Next she checked vat number two. It was open and its screen plates were out, of course. The lid’s electronic lock did have a manual override, but it looked like this would also trigger access logging. Unlike on the hatches, though, there was some odd superficial scratching around the hinges and latch, as if someone had been working at it with improperly configured tools. Sylvia winced, wondering why nobody had seen that yet. It looked like someone had disassembled the vat’s lid to covertly dispose of something without leaving an electronic trace. But what had it been? 

The compartment was in total disorder; it had been the center of so much frenzied activity in the last few shifts that there was no way to know what was the result of the intruder’s visit and what the result of the maintenance crew’s efforts. Even without more evidence, though, there were only so many things that it could have been. Whoever had done this knew a little bit about recyclers, so it would be something they thought the system could digest without a fuss. That meant something organic – contraband narcotics, unauthorized foodstuffs, perhaps even the corpse of a pet kept secretly in a cabin that had died unexpectedly.  

Anything even vaguely human-digestible wouldn’t give the system much trouble, and a dead cat or the equivalent would leave telltale bones after the flesh was digested. That left the usual suspect – drugs. Illicit substances could have any number of strange effects on the system, and the chemical sensors might not necessarily pick them up. They might even bond with polymer components, making it all but impossible to purge them. 

Sylvia switched on her helmet comms and turned on the all-team channel as she peered into the murky liquid half-filling the vat. It was time to let everyone know what they were dealing with. “Someone pried this one open and dumped something.” She grabbed a sample vial from her belt, hooked it to the end of a multitool standing nearby, and lowered it into the muck. “We might have to swap out the entire vat.” 

Several helmeted heads looked up from their work, but the only response on the comms came from Carlson, one of the most senior members of the team, “They always find new ways to break our toys.” He didn’t even seem to know his microphone was hot. 

As Sylvia’s sample vial dipped into the liquid, odd ripples shimmered across the surface. She frowned; it almost looked like the ripples a school of tiny fish would make in the lakeside shallows at Trieste Vert, where she’d spent many holidays as a child. Partially digested sewage did have all sorts of odd properties, but she’d never seen that before. Even the idea that anything larger than a microbe could live in the vats sent a shiver down her spine, but of course that was ridiculous. 

At least, it should have been ridiculous. When she withdrew the vial, the rippling motion appeared in reverse, as if a swarm of tiny somethings was returning to the spot it had departed. Of course, the contents of the vat were too murky to see anything below the surface. 

“That’s something you don’t see every day.” Carlson had appeared at Sylvia’s shoulder. “What in the blazes lives in a recycler vat?” 

“Hells if I know.” Sylvia shuddered. “Forget the sample vials. Someone get me a fine-mesh net.” 

The many new xenobiomes encountered by spacers on the Sagittarius Frontier obviously pose many strange challenges to the smooth operation of space flight. Recycler runaways were not unknown previously – usually due to a prolonged excess of one nutrient over the others in the sewage – but no species from any world was ever known to colonize recyclers before Sylvia’s team discovered this one. 

The actual anatomy and behavior of the organism has not yet been released, but Sylvia’s description suggests that it is very small, somewhat fishlike, and invertebrate. Perhaps the Navy wishes the details to remain little known until they can deploy a countermeasure, lest the Incarnation somehow discover how to weaponize this organism, though I find this quite unlikely. 

[N.T.B. - I am less skeptical than Duncan. Someone’s exotic fishtank specimens sidelined a whole destroyer for many days. If these things have nearly microscopic eggs, and those eggs get introduced into the nutrient slurry supply chain by an Incarnation agent – a thing they seem quite capable of doing – it could restrict vast portions of Seventh Fleet to near-port operations for weeks.  Better to keep the identity of this pest quiet for a while.]

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Tales from the Service: A Compromised Recycler

2953-05-14 – Tales from the Service: A Compromised Recycler 

Cermytes are not the only troublesome organism Reach spacers have discovered on the far side of the Sagittarius Gap. Indeed, I spoke to a researcher who is observing Cermyte activity in captivity, and he named several other species I had not heard of beforehand, all of which seem oddly adapted to infesting spacecraft. 

The hypothesis of the researcher is that space travel has been in heavy use in Sagittarius far longer than it has been in the Orion arm, perhaps several thousand years. Obviously there is no direct proof of this – no xenoarchaeological work of any significance has been done in Sagittarius. The claims of the Grand Journey to be an ancient confederation, if true, certainly are given credence by this theory, but other factors shed some doubt on it. 

The idea that Sagittarius is a region of ancient spacefaring cultures, older perhaps even than the Angels, Reachers, and extinct Xenarchs that predate human and Rattanai expansion, is certainly an evocative one. It certainly puts a romantic spin on the pests which inhabit the region; after all, these things might be the animal survivors of long-departed spacefaring empires. 

This is of course little consolation to the spacers who have to clean up after them, such as Sylvia Elmer, a recycler technician aboard the mobile service platform Sierra Nevada. The first part of her account details the sorts of trouble that foreign organism infiltration can cause in a shipboard recycler system, though obviously she did not know this to be the root cause until some time later. 

Normally, a field refit of a mere destroyer like Brychan Mazza would be a matter of a few days. Seventh Fleet had been running its fast units ragged of late, so most of that time would be in engine and reactor service, possibly extending as far as a full reactor replacement. This was normal duty for Sierra Nevada, a fleet service platform as big as a dreadnought, and for its crew of nearly two thousand of the Confederated Navy’s best technicians. 

As a mere organics tech, Sylvia Elmer was used to being a relative side-show in the frenzied activity aboard Sierra Nevada. Being the reason a destroyer was late to being returned to duty was a new and terrifying experience. 

Of course, it wasn’t really Sylvia’s fault, not exactly. Nobody had known how damaged Mazza’s recycler system was until she and her team had cracked open the compartment to have a look, and few outside her specialty could really understand the trouble repairing a hybrid biological-technological system could be. To most spacers, even most techs, the recycler was just something that worked; it was ancient technology like the A-grav axis or the self-sealing pressure hull that hadn’t changed too much in more than a hundred years and nobody touched outside of the drydock. 

Unfortunately for Mazza, what the crew had reported as a few minor warning indicators and slow cycle performance had been the precursors to an imminent total biological breakdown in the vats, a condition which had taken nearly two days to simply stabilize. Some sort of toxic foreign material had gotten into the system and poisoned the bio-engineered microcultures on the screen-plates in all the vats except, oddly enough, for the first one. Several severe leaks in the plumbing had sprung up while the team had worked long hours to replace the dead screens with freshly seeded new ones and work up the carefully tuned biosphere necessary for the system to operate correctly, making the task both dirtier and more complicated. By the end of their second day’s work, the whole team had been in environment suits, when normally this sort of work needed only an air filtration mask. 

Being in suits had slowed the work further, but still by the end of the second day’s work they had the new screen-plates responding well. Then, after the whole team had gone to get some rest, something had gone wrong  with the circulation pumps and starved out the microbes at the bottom of two of the tanks. This would have been self-correcting once the pumps were fixed had the colonies been mature, but of course they weren’t quite. Now, at the beginning of the third day, it looked like most of the screens would have to be seeded all over again. 

Sylvia reported the setback to her superiors as soon as she was aware of it, before anyone had even cracked open the pump housings to see what was the matter. They still hadn’t quite figured out what had poisoned the vats in the first place, and how it had bypassed the first one in the chain. Normally, when someone disposed of illict drugs by putting them down the sanitary head, that was the vat which bore the brunt of it. 

Of course, someone way up the chain called down mere minutes after Sylvia’s report to ask whether there was any way to speed up the process. Sylvia had long ago learned not to explain these things; a simple no, even in the face of the dreaded “are you sure it wouldn’t be faster if you enriched the starter nutrient solution” that every junior officer always suggested, was all she would say over voice comms. This particular organizational genius – who never even gave his name – even asked whether the destroyer could be fielded safely with only one operational recycler tank out of four. Sylvia replied that she could call up Mazza’s skipper and ask if he would like to wait a few days or be one bad flush away from having no recycler for the rest of his cruise, and that seemed to be answer enough. 

The anonymous superior officer exited the conversation muttering something about consequences if there were any more delays. Sylvia wondered if this was meant to refer to her, or to himself, and didn’t want to find out. 

Once Sylvia’s team had the pumps working – there was some sort of foul slime built up in them which the analysis tools could only identify as “non-living organic matter” - they got to work on yet another set of screen plates. Sylvia herself, stuck in her isolation suit, sat down in one corner with a sample of that slime in a phial, staring at it thoughtfully. It clearly hadn’t been in the system the previous day, which meant something had created it or introduced it since then. It wasn’t the recycler’s cultures, nor were Mazza’s heads sending down any waste. Where else could it have come from? 

 

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Tales from the Service: A Trail of Cermytes

2953-05-07 – Tales from the Service: A Trail of Cermytes 

Clara Liang had begun to hope they’d finish their sector sweep and report all clear when they found their first sign of Cermyte activity. If they weren’t looking for it, they might have dismissed the pockmarks as mere age weathering on a section of the polymer cladding of the high voltage weapon-power conduits. 

Janda Dunewhite, of course, was not a particularly old vessel, having commissioned into the fleet barely two T-years before the opening of hostilities. The insulation simply hadn’t had time to degrade like it sometimes did in vessels that were in and out of mothballs and lengthy refits for two or three decades.  

Clara’s previous posting had been to just such a ship, and she examined the pockmarks closely for nearly a minute while Ruslan Boyko scanned the area for more definite signs of the pests. It certainly looked like superficial age deterioration to her eye. Either some supplier had skimped out on the quality of the insulation for this section, or there were small cermytes in the area. The xeno-pests had compound jaws that worked on polymer something like a power sander. None of the briefings Clara had seen had explained what those jaws were intended to devour in the cermytes’ natural habitat; surely no universe created by a loving God would contain a creature specifically adapted to devouring high-tech materials. 

Shuddering, Clara pulled an electrical probe out of her tool-belt and ran it along the back side of the conduit. Nothing skittered out, but she could feel the unevenness of a surface even more chewed-on than what she could see. The thick cladding was still safely insulating the conduit, but if the infestation had gone a few more weeks unnoticed, the next combat alarm could have shorted the whole system. 

“They’ve gone elsewhere.” Clara turned toward Boyko. “But they’ve been here.” 

“Cermytes don’t move very far unless the food runs out.” Boyko shook his head. “Maybe we startled them.” 

Clara pulled a maintenance beacon-tag from her bag and stuck it to the bulkhead at the forward edge of the damaged area of the conduit, then put another at the aftward end. A quick tap set them to synchronize so the maintenance computer system would understand them to identify the diameter of an affected area, which would show up on Chief Belluomo’s status board. She set this as a “yellow” indicator, which was the agreed upon means of advising damage without visible cermytes. 

No doubt this was not the only such area being flagged at this point. It was up to the Chief to guess the location of the main body of cermytes from the various damage indicators deployed by his team throughout the ship. It was a job Clara didn’t envy; no doubt it would remain undone at the end of their shift, and the hotshot first shift crew chief would be tearing out his hair at the dithering of the two “lesser” shifts who had spent the previous sixteen hours gathering information on the problem, and would try to raise Belluomo’s “incompetence” to the skipper. 

Fortunately, that wasn’t Clara’s problem. While her chief was getting raked over the coals, she’d be in the mess compartment downing five more coffees and trying to stay alert long enough to catch up with her friend Kir Connely, a second-shift engine tech, before staggering back to her bunk for eight to ten more hours of staring into the darkness. If she was lucky, she’d doze off a few times and catch more two whole hours of sleep. 

Unfortunately, the end of the shift was still more than six hours away. Clara stood, scanned the conduit one more time, then gestured in the direction they’d been going. “Let’s finish the sweep. If there’s going to be more, I’ve got a hunch it’ll be where this line goes through the forward firewall.” 

A few dozen meters down the narrow maintenance passage, Clara was proven right. The thickened cladding where the conduit passed through the heavy bulkhead and the hull frame behind it was covered in a network of shallow dimples, most no bigger than a fingernail. This could not be simple weathering. 

“The ones at work here were bigger.” Boyko ran his wrist lights all around the visible pars of the conduit terminus. “Maybe three or four centimeters. Small adults.” 

Adults meant egg-laying, of course; cermytes bred at a prodigious rate. “There’s hard vacuum past this bulkhead.” Clara tapped the firewall. “No way they went forward.” 

“They didn’t go to port, and this is the last tunnel to starboard.” Boyko nodded. “That leaves two directions.” 

“I was afraid of that.” Clara shuddered as she scanned her lights along the wiring-netted overhead paneling. Less than half a meter above that was the floor paneling of habitation deck five. A similar distance below her feet was the overheads of habitation deck six. Those were both crew accommodations decks, in addition to housing duty compartments. “They’re sheltering in the hab areas.” 

Boyko sighed. “We’re going to have to vac-cleanse half the ship, aren’t we?” 

Clara pulled out another handful of beacon tags. “That’s not our department.” Maybe it wasn’t so bad to leave the decision to the first shift chief after all. She couldn’t imagine any good coming of rousting the crew out of their bunks and venting their cabins on the order of an enlisted chief while the skipper was sleeping. 

The problem with cermytes is not that they are devious, or particularly stealthy, it’s that once they get aboard a ship, they are almost impossible to fully exterminate in the field. A crew struggling to keep them in check will have its battle readiness degraded even if no systems are affected. 

Janda Dunewhite has since been pulled into the yards at Sagittarius Gate for a minor refit, and it can be assumed that if the vessel was still struggling to exterminate its cermytes at this point, that a full decontamination was completed before the refit began. 

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Tales from the Service: A Search for Cermytes

2953-04-23 – Tales from the Service: A Search for Cermytes 

A reader noted in response to last week’s episode that we are far more likely to learn about Cermyte prevention from the Kyaroh or the Grand Journey than from the Incarnation. This is, while entirely sensible, probably untrue. Confederated Navy prison facilities hold tens of thousands of Incarnation prisoners of almost every rank, about ten percent of which are actively cooperative in intelligence gathering projects. Surely the mechanism used is something some of the numerous IN technicians are trained for, and their technology stack is, though adapted to the trade networks of Sagittarius, far more comprehensible to a Reach spacer than those of the Kyaroh or the Journey. 

There was little briefing after the last shift had finally filed out. Belluomo divided his team into four pairs for the search, and Clara Liang found herself partnered up with the grim, taciturn Ruslan Boyko, a waste disposal tech who’d been aboard Janda Dunewhite longer than herself.  

This was perhaps the optimal partner for the day’s drudgery, given that Clara, sleep deprived as she was, was in no mood for small talk even before learning that they’d spend the next eight hours prowling around in tight spaces looking for alien bugs. Most of the rest of the crew had an annoying habit of talking while they worked. Clara wondered if, back when sleep had been easier to source, she might have been the same. 

They all knew the procedure for diagnosing and containing a cermyte infestation well enough. Cermytes tended to cluster around a food source – that is, an untended polymer mass – in a dark and relatively warm pressurized space, so once they were detected, the center of their colonization needed to be located, isolated, and evacuated. This wouldn’t kill them – Cermytes could live without air for more than a month – but it would slow them down. Without air, they would be dormant and all but immobile, and a crew in vacsuits could exterminate them in relative leisure. 

Most of the time, one extermination wasn’t enough; there always seemed to be a few individuals which escaped to form the nucleus of a new colony a few weeks later. A crew could struggle for months to finally be rid of the pests. 

The sector Clara and her associate were assigned to cover was the grid of maintenance passages between decks five and six, where high-voltage conduits ran from the reactor aft of the hab spaces to the various weapons systems at the bow. The walk and climb toward this area gave Clara time to finish her coffee.  

Boyko glanced over at Clara as she noisily crushed the disposable cup and crammed it into her pocket, a scowl on his lips. “Must you?” 

“I don’t think cermytes hear like we do.” Clara shrugged. “At least there’s no indication they do in the breifing materials I’ve seen.” 

“But we can hear them.” Boyko gestured up to the overhead paneling barely ten centimeters above his dark hair. “Eyes can’t look everywhere at once.” 

“If they’ve big enough to hear, we’re in serious trouble.” Clara shuddered. She’d heard stories of individual cermytes almost a meter long, even though the maximum size listed in the data breifs was only about thirty centimeters. Even that was bigger than any bug had any right to be. Oddly, the fact that these creatures didn’t seem to have any way to harm humans made them even more unsettling to her imagination. No matter how big they were, the only danger they posed was the danger inherent in damage to Janda Dunewhite. 

“Still. Quiet.” Boyko switched on both his wristlights and swept the beams down the first corridor. The right-hand wall was dominated by a trio of huge power conduits, and numerous smaller power and communication cables interlocked along the right wall like a complex trellis of many-colored vines. There were about a dozen of these main passages, with several cross-corridors connecting them. “Watch left and down. I’ll handle right and up.” 

Clara activated her own wristlights and played them down the high-voltage conduits as the pair proceeded forward. She knew this area relatively well; she’d spent many shifts tracing a faulty cable through that seemingly unorganized tangle on the right, which Boyko was busy scrutinizing. If there were cermytes in this area, that whole network would need to be stripped out, inspected for cladding damage, and re-installed. Critical pathways would probably need to be taken apart even if no pest had ever entered the sector, just to be on the safe side.  

As they reached the solid bulkhead at the forward end of the habitation area and turned right to work their way over to the next passage, Clara thought she saw something moving at the edge of her light-beam. She snapped both of her lights onto the spot in an instant, but there was nothing there, cermyte or otherwise. 

Boyko paused and raised one eyebrow as Clara slowly lowered her lights. 

“Coffee must be making me jumpy.” Clara gestured toward the darkness ahead. “Come on. Let’s get this done.” 

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