Tales from the Inbox: The Secrets of the Zenith Treader

2954-05-20 – Tales from the Inbox: The Secrets of the Zenith Treader 

The Zenith Treader is, as some of you seem to have deduced, a real vessel; no attempt to anonymize its identity, that of its captain, or that of its pilot has been made. This is by request of the submitters, which we have verified are those two individuals. They do not think this account puts their vessel or its reputation at risk, and I tend to agree with them. 

Obviously, the opinion of military officers is that of the submitters, not of this embed team. 

Zenith Treader was on course for the parking orbit for nearly two shifts before either Ellia Kossner or Gareth Glass, taking terms on the command deck and bombarding everyone who was responding to them with questions, could get any sort of a useful answer. It came from of the military station that was closest, the one from which the officer had given them instructions. 

The message, though phrased as a refusal to provide information, helpfully cited a section and subsection of the military code under which refusal was required, and explained that everything would be explained by the commander of the cutter that would meet them at the rendezvous.  

Doubtless they intended this as a less than subtle hint to stop asking, but Gareth and his skipper gratefully copied the reference and pulled up a copy of the code. It was, as Gareth had suspected all along, the section related to smuggling contraband. The denial of information to the suspected crew was part of the section on dangerous contraband in particular. 

“So they think we’re moving illegal weapons.” Ellia sighed. “This is going to blow our timetable worse than I thought.” 

Gareth nodded. Timetables were her domain, not his, but he didn’t relish the idea of a team of Navy techs giving their life and livelihood a days-long vivisection. “You’d think they’d see our contract history and realize we had too much at stake to run contraband.” 

“If they could do economic calculus, they wouldn’t be in the military.” Ellia crossed her arms. “I’m going to go talk to Sung. Maybe if we leave everything open for them, we can speed this up.” 

A few minutes after the skipper left the command deck, the door opened again. This time, it was Patricia Lowell, one of the new techs. She took one look at Gareth’s grim face and hesitated. “Something wrong?” 

Gareth hesitated. “Nah. Some customs trouble might make us late on our turn-around.” He hated to lie to another member of the crew, but Lowell and her fellow tech Leon Estrada were the only new element to this voyage, and so the most likely reason for the contraband search they were headed for, after a simple mistake. 

Lowell nodded. “How long until we dock?” 

“Assuming we got immediate clearance and good inbound geometry, we could be docked at the Sprawl three days after jump resolution.” Gareth glanced at the nav display. “We didn’t get immediate clearance. We’ll be at our wait-point by the end of second shift tomorrow, and then another half-day or so to dock when they clear us. As to the customs problem...” He shrugged. “That’s not my department.” 

Lowell looked disappointed; no doubt she would like the company of anyone besides her fellow Zenith Treader crew after weeks of isolation in the Gap. “How long will we be docked?” 

“Skipper wants a fast turn around here, but I don’t know what her departure plan looks like.” To Gareth, an excuse to think past the contraband search was only too welcome. “Don’t worry though. She’ll tell us how long we’ll be here before we disembark.” 

“Sure.” Lowell looked around. “You know, it’s sort of bothering me. You and the Skipper are the only people who are ever on duty up here. Why are there four stations?” 

Gareth pointed to the two auxiliary consoles ahead of his, canted against the bulkheads. “When the ship was new, there was a comms station and a weapons station. But Treader doesn’t do high-threat routes anymore, so we stripped the weapons down to the two auto-turrets we’ve got now. With modern comms equipment, though, the Skipper and I can manage all of that ourselves too.” 

“I guess that explains why there are ten cabins.” 

“Yeah.” Gareth hadn’t been aboard long enough to see the ship at its full original crew compliment, but he’d been around when the last of the weapon removals had taken place, and they’d parted ways with Zack Macleod, the ship’s last weapons technician. “Running it as we do now, four or five is plenty.” 

Lowell nodded and looked out ahead. She looked as if she was working her way up to saying something more, but her comm buzzed. Tapping her earpiece, she listened for a moment, then hurried away to attend to something. 

Something nagged at Gareth for a long time after she left. Why had she asked about the ten cabins? Obviously they were on the schematics visible to anyone, but from the corridors, the extra cabins were blank, unlabeled doors on the main hall. They weren’t even all in the same place; the builders had intermixed them with the pressurized storage rooms, washrooms, duty stations, and other compartments across both of the main decks. The fact that they had five unused crew cabins was far from obvious unless you were looking for it. And why would she be looking for it? 

Gareth checked for new comms traffic, then got up and went to find the skipper. Perhaps there was something worth finding aboard after all, and he now knew where to look for it.

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Tales from the Inbox: The Search of the Zenith Treader

2954-05-13 – Tales from the Inbox: The Search of the Zenith Treader

Lightspeed signal delay ensured that the port controller on The Sprawl didn’t receive Zenith Treader’s request for a docking berth for nearly an hour, and of course the reply signal took nearly as long to work its way back. By the time Gareth Glass saw the indicator that they’d gotten signals from the station, Patricia Lowell was long gone, and the command deck was awash with the light of Sagittarius and Gareth’s favorite music.

He’d chatted with Lowell for some time, mostly about their favorite music, holo-dramas, novels, and vidcasts. This was the sort of thing that most people learned about their shipmates within a few days, but people kept to themselves on Zenith Treader. Perhaps, Gareth mused, that wasn’t as good a thing as he once had thought.

The data stream from the station was highly irregular. It denied immediate docking clearance, which was unusual, instead prescribing a parking orbit right under the guns of one of the system’s military stations. That was a quarantine directive, used for ships returning from forays into the deep Sagittarius Frontier.

There had been mixups before, of course, and they had the better part of four shifts of back-and-forth to sort it out before Treader needed to alter its course one way or another. Gareth fired back a polite request for confirmation, copying the ship’s transponder ident into the message and providing a few other helpful hints to the port controller. The docks at Sagittarius Gate were always busy, so he didn’t grudge the overworked control personnel a few mistakes now and again.

He forwarded the response to the skipper, who gave no response. She was probably composing personal messages in her cabin, and if she saw the update, she probably didn’t think much of it either.

It wasn’t until a half-hour after he’d sent off the confirmation request, when signals started to arrive on military channels, that Gareth began to get concerned. They could handle low-grade military encryption, of course – they’d done contracts with the Navy plenty of times back on the other side of the Gap – but any time they had to, it meant something was up.

Gareth had hardly finished decrypting the messages when Ellia Kossner appeared on deck. “Trouble?” She asked, without preamble.

“Let’s find out.” Gareth turned down his music and put the first transmission on the main display, just ahead of his station. A flickering image of a Navy officer appeared, his uniform crisp and a severe look on his face.

“Starship Zenith Traveler. When you have finished your in-system transit, you will be boarded and searched. If you make any attempt to deviate from the directives of the port controller, you will be fired upon.”

“Damnation.” Kossner sighed. “What now? This is going to mess with our schedule. I was hoping to turn around and start back the other way in four days.”

“Searched.” Gareth repeated, staring at the now-paused recording. “For what? We’ve got nothing on board that wasn’t in our manifest when we left Maribel.”

“And the more they don’t find what some fool thinks we have got, the more they’ll tear my ship apart looking.” The skipper fell heavily into her chair. “But Sagittarius is the military’s game. So we’d better do as they say. Do try to see what they think they’ll find, Gareth.”

Gareth responded to the officer’s video message with a politely worded text query about the nature of the problem, which carried two separate assurances that Zenith Treader had nothing to hide and would cooperate fully. There would be another long delay, of course, before they got any answers.

“There.” He said, sitting back in his chair. “I’ll put the helm on auto for whatever the port sends us, then I’m going to go tidy up my cabin.”

“Why?” Kossner frowned.

“Think they’ll stop at the hold and the storage lockers when they don’t find anything?” Gareth rolled his eyes. “They’ll be in our cabins eventually.”

“Right.” Ellia winced. “I’ll hold things down here. Think I should I announce to everyone else?”

Gareth nodded, then hesitated and shook his head. “I’d send a quiet comm to Sung. The only thing we’ve done differently lately is hire those two techs… Odds are it’s nothing, but if one of them really is moving something, better they don’t know they’re busted until it’s too late.”

The skipper shrugged, saying nothing. Gareth left it at that. It was her ship, after all; if she wanted to make an announcement on the intercom, that was her affair.

I have no news for this audience related to the Håkøya campaign. Offensive action elsewhere seems also to be at a standstill, as if all the forces of both fleets are holding their breath, waiting for the liberation of the jewel of the Coreward Frontier.

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Tales from the Inbox: The Arrival of the Zenith Treader

2954-05-06 – Tales from the Inbox: The Arrival of the Zenith Treader 

Gareth Glass sighed as Zenith Treader’s Himura drive wound down and the familiar, if harsh, blue glow of Sagittarius Gate slanted in through the viewpanels. It had been nearly three weeks since he or anyone else aboard had seen natural starlight of any kind, and though this was far from the ship’s first Gap passage, it was always a relief to reach the end of the run. 

“Gareth, get the controller on comms and get us a berth.” Ellia Kossner, Treader’s skipper, stood up from her station and stretched. “I’ll be in my cabin.”  

“Gladly.” On such a small crew, and a civilian-chartered one at that, they didn’t bother much with the formalities of command. Besides the two of them, Treader only had three other spacers on the crew – there was Kim Sung, the engineer, and techs Estrada and Lowell, both just hired on at Maribel at the beginning of the current run. Their old tech, Susan Atwood, had unexpectedly resigned her position and left the ship, and the skipper, not wanting to take a chance on a single new hire for a Gap crossing, had signed on two likely candidates just in time to make their scheduled departure. 

Gareth soon found himself alone on the command deck. While routine status and intention reports sped away on tight beams toward port control, he turned on the compartment’s overhead speakers and fed them some of his favorite music. The jangling, melodic, often haunting tones of the Tranquility Wave moved through him. Even though he’d never been to Tranquility or to the lesser worlds in its orbit, Gareth had loved the musical styles born there since he was very young. 

Nobody else on the ship shared his enthusiasm, of course, so Gareth had to listen on his own, or in his earpiece. Sung in particular, a Hyadean through and through, despised anything that “had the reek of Ori about it.” Gareth didn’t want her to think him a partisan in the ancient feud between Hyades and Orionis. 

Some minutes later, the first signals directed at Zenith Treader from the outlying watch-posts began to trickle in. The computer automatically responded to the various challenges with appropriate responses. Most likely, these were only a formality, since the ship had visited this place half a dozen times in the last two years and its jump signature should have been in the database. 

A tap on the bulkhead drew Gareth’s attention to the rear of the compartment. There, he saw Patricia Lowell, one of the new techs, frowning up at the speakers. “Sorry to bother you. I heard we made Sagittarius, and wanted to have a look.” 

“Never been across the gap before, eh?” Gareth shrugged and turned down the music. “Have a seat if you’d like, but there’s not much to look at.” 

Lowell sat in the auxiliary station ahead of Gareth’s console, closest to the viewpanels. He’d had plenty of time to chat with the two new hires on the crew on the transit, but of course he hadn’t. The only person on the crew who shared his duty spaces was the skipper, and off duty he’d mostly stayed out of the common spaces, preferring the company of his music and a good book in his cabin. 

“This is your first Gap transit, eh?” 

“Hmm?” Lowell turned around, then shrugged. “Oh, yes. I’ve been on long-haul runs, but the last few weeks have been...” 

“The Gap is pretty hard on most spacers.” Gareth shrugged. “It gets a little easier. If you blank your cabin viewpanels and put on a little music, you can forget the dark for a while.” 

“Music like...” Here Lowell gestured up at the speakers. “Whatever that was you were playing when I came in?” 

Gareth chuckled and turned the music back up a little. “Tranq-Wave can be a bit of an acquired taste. Annoys the Skipper and Sung to no end.” 

“Really?” Lowell paused for a long moment, looking back out at the blue-white orb of Sagittarius Gate ahead of the ship. “It isn’t what I’d pick, but I’m not sure I’d call it annoying. It’s sort of like... as if space travel had an official score, like the holo-dramas do.” 

Gareth sat up suddenly. “Exactly!” He grinned. “See, I thought it was just me.” 

“I think if I listened to that for too long, sitting down on duty, I’d fall asleep.” Lowell shook her head. “Fortunately this ship keeps us busy. There’s about ten things hitting service-by date every shift.” 

“Treader is hardly new.” Gareth sighed. “But she’s adaptable, and we keep her up to date with all the new toys we can afford. Makes us more flexible than most of our competitors on the Gap run.” 

“It’s certainly one of the nicer hulls I’ve berthed in.” 

Gareth nodded his agreement, but Lowell wasn’t looking at him. She was staring out forward again, as if lost in a memory. He shrugged and went back to monitoring comms traffic. 

Though the planet itself remains in enemy hands, it seems that Fifth Fleet has won at Håkøya. Enemy garrison strength dirtside remains unknown, but with no fleet to support these troops, the outcome of a ground campaign is hardly in doubt. 

There is some concern about a counter-attack in the media, but I find this rather unlikely; the defending force in a system with so many planetary bodies holds numerous advantages. Rather than post stories of the various skirmishes and engagements of the weeks-long naval campaign in Håkøya, we’ve elected to move on to some of the other accounts that have been trickling in. Stories worth telling from the fighting there can always be inserted into this feed later. 

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Tales from the Service: The Strike at Håkøya

2954-04-29 – Tales from the Service: The Strike at Håkøya 

There can be no doubt at this stage that the result of the Second Battle of Håkøya has had a favorable outcome. Moderate fighting in that system continues as of the time of this posting, but reports from Fifth Fleet indicate that the main body of enemy forces was confronted and routed in the orbital space above the planet on the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth.  

Though few enemy heavy vessels appear to have actually been destroyed, battle damage forced enough of them to withdraw that the remainder was placed at too great a disadvantage to continue the defense of the system.  

This is probably not news to most of you, being as it is some days old as of this posting. The imminent recovery of Håkøya is excellent news, of course, but many war observers are expressing concern at the rather inconclusive nature of the battle, and the apparently large number of enemy fleet assets which were able to withdraw to fight another day. 

A warning chime sounded in Ansa Harper’s ears, pulling her out of her light catnap. Sleeping any way in a Puma cockpit took a small frame little bit of skill, but Ansa, having both, and trusting her autopilot, always tried to catch a few minutes on long time-on-target approaches. The computer or the comm would wake her if there was anything to pay attention to, but there never was. 

Naps in the approach and return to base autopilot runs weren’t uncommon; they weren’t even against regulations as long as one was prepared for rude awakening at any moment. Lead could always pump his volume in any pilot’s ears if he wasn’t getting the answers he needed, but the Puma’s sensors and helm were operating as an extension of Commander Ghadavi’s rig for those parts of a mission anyway. Ansa, and the rest of the squadron, were effectively passengers, until contact with the enemy anyway. 

Now, of course, the target was coming up, and it was time to get her bearings once more. The squadron formation hadn’t changed in the last hour, and the comms channels were silent, even the direct line to Six; most likely, he’d been reading something, since he regularly complained about the cramped cockpit not letting him stretch his legs out. 

Ahead, the gas giant occupied a third of Ansa’s view, and the target moon was already visible. The squadron had begun its deceleration from cruise, so it could do more than slash past the body at incredible speed.  

As their briefing before launch had suggested, the place ahead was a hornet’s nest of frenzied activity, most of it seeming focused on escape. Small craft were darting away in all directions in ones and twos, and a pair of lumbering haulers were struggling to break orbit, their predicted courses suggesting flight toward the inner system. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of organized defense, but that didn’t mean much. Incarnation forces caught at a disadvantage had a nasty habit of pretending to be weaker than they actually were, hoping to goad their Confederated opponents into making a costly mistake. 

“Would you look at that target rich environment.” Six muttered. “We’ll be out here all day cleaning all that up.” 

“Probably.” Ansa ran a quick systems check; everything was operating at peak efficiency. She could still see the light scorch-mark left on her wing by a laser strike from the picket if she craned her head to the left, but that seemed only cosmetic. “We’ll do this by the book. Nothing fancy, Six. We’ll both have plenty to claim when we’re done.” 

“I know, I know.” 

“All units, be advised. Command has placed priority on those haulers.” Lead’s gravelly voice broke in. “Three and I will take the first one. Five and Seven, target the second. All weapons free. Target their engines. Nine, Eleven, try to cut off that lead group of shuttles heading in-system.” 

“Juicy.” Six remarked dryly. “Been a while since we’ve gotten to fire ship-killers.” 

“Let’s make them count.” Ansa sighed; each Puma only had room for a single ship-killer torpedo in its weapons bay, as well as a much smaller smart-seeker for use against other strike craft. The bulky ship-killers were devastating, but unwieldly; it was very easy to waste them, if one was not careful. 

A chirp announced that Lead had released Ansa’s helm control back to her, and she quickly punched in an intercept course for the second hauler, helpfully identified for her as a blinking red crosshair on the holo-plot, matched by another such symbol on her HUD, though the vessel was still too far away to see. The ship was a blocky, ungainly thing, in the usual style of Incarnation logistics assets. According to the intelligence briefings on the type, they’d stolen the design, and even the shipyards, from the Kyaroh on the far side of Incarnation space, and devoted all their own shipyards to warship production. They were, simply speaking, lumbering, fragile vessels, but they required only small crews and were cheap to operate. 

“This should only take one good hit.” Ansa glanced at the tactical plot, guessing what other units might be in position to protect the hauler by the time they reached it. “Keep your helm slaved and focus on getting a clean lock-on. I’ll do the fancy flying.” 

“Aye.” This was a fairly routine procedure, when it wasn’t likely to come to a close-in fight with the Pumas’ prow cannons on the way to the target. Ansa would have liked to deal the blow herself, but it was Six’s turn to get the first shot in, and in any case, she’d get an assist on anything he bagged. As an added bonus, focusing on the temperamental ship-killer's lock on system would keep Six quiet, and permit Ansa to devote her attention to watching for potential surprises. There always seemed to be surprises. 

A moment after the squadron broke formation to pursue its various targets, the first surprise arrived. “Be advised.” Lead announced. “The computer just positively identified at least one Coronach escorting the lead shuttles. Expect them to hide around soft targets and jump you as you make your attack runs.” 

“You worry about the weapon launch, Six. Let me worry about the opfor.” Ansa switched her sensors to directional-identify mode, sending waves of radar pulses ahead. So far, the computer identified the handful of small craft around her target as repair tenders. This was not entirely comforting; the Incarnation’s rare, heavily armed Jericho strike bomber was about the same size as such vessels, and she didn’t want to fly into a surprise fan of phase-beams. Coronachs too, being tiny, could easily be hiding behind the hauler, waiting to strike. 

“We’ll come in from behind.” Ansa altered their course to sweep around to the aft quarter of the hauler. “Expect some fancy dodging as we get close. You’re free to launch when you’ve got a good lock.” 

“Aye, Five.” Six replied nervously. Going in slaved might be routine, but Ansa needn’t imagine the apprehension he felt; his life was in her hands now. For all the advantages of sharing the workload, that wasn’t something Puma pilots were ever comfortable with. “Warming up my torpedo now.” 

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