Tales from the Inbox - Cosmic Background

2952-10-16 – Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front, Part 2

This is the remainder of the interview with Naval Intelligence lieutenant Kirsten Reid, whose first portion was posted last week. I have no further comment on this, except to speculate in hindsight that the names of the two worlds we discussed are very similar. Perhaps they are neighboring worlds, or even two planets in the same star system – that would explain the seemingly strange practice of shipping raw materials and food between them. I did not ask this at the time, unfortunately.

D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri – Junior editor and wartime field reporter for Cosmic Background.

K.R.R. - Lieutenant Kirsten R. Reid is a Naval Intelligence senior analyst assigned to Seventh Fleet. Recently, she has been at Hausen’s World, the site of Operation HELLESPONT, examining the wealth of Incarnation intelligence left in the supply depot captured there.

[D.L.C.] What about their planets? You say we have some idea of what life is like on them?

[K.R.R.] Some of them, yes. There is one world that seems to be the home of many of troops in the garrison of Hausen’s World which we know most about; its name seems to be Prospero. It is most likely the closest of the Incarnation worlds to Sagittarius Gate but that distinction may be largely academic, a matter of a few tens of light years difference.

[D.L.C.] Let me guess: it has a large, urban population? Heavily urbanized settlements have traditionally been the main source of Ladeonist sentiment in the Reach.

[K.R.R.] We thought so too, and there is at least one major city on the planet’s surface, a fairly sizable metropolis called Kannagh’s Prospect. Strangely, though, analysis of the mail we intercepted suggested the garrison troops were drawn mainly from smaller settlements in the hinterland, not from the city itself. The only mail sender or receiver we can positively say had relations in the city was the second in command of the base.

[D.L.C.] Strange. That would suggest that most of the population-

[K.R.R.] Is distributed throughout the smaller settlements? Possibly, but more likely this garrison was selected specifically from the small communities. We aren’t sure why.

[D.L.C.] Well, at least we must know a lot about life in these smaller towns on the planet.

[K.R.R.] What we know is extensive but leaves gaps. We know that the average size of one of these communities seems to be about three hundred, and that they are by and large young places, with few elderly citizens, for example, and family structure is, despite Ladeonist tendencies in Reach cells, fairly strong.

[D.L.C.] Well, perhaps the Incarnation centralizes elderly citizens in the cities, leading to the disparity.

[K.R.R.] We considered that but it doesn’t really fit the other facts. None of the garrison or the fleet in the system seemed to be sending anything to elderly parents or grandparents in the city for example.

[D.L.C.] What about day to day life in these communities?

[K.R.R.] Civilians in these communities are generally tradesmen focused on the agricultural industry. It seems strange that the industry needs so much labor – after all, references to agricultural automation equipment are fairly common in letters from Prospero to the troops here – so we have to assume this planet is a food exporter to the rest of Incarnation space; it’s the only thing that makes sense for that much of an investment in agriculture. Most likely, that means the city is a concentration of packing facilities intended for turning these products into long-shelf-life items that can be shipped to other worlds, but even this does not make sense. Where are the people sending messages to their relatives who work in factories? Why not also draw troops from these people?

[D.L.C.] Perhaps the factory workers are implanted with specialized equipment that disagrees with the military implants. That doesn’t explain the lack of message traffic between the groups though.

[K.R.R.] That... Almost works, actually. Not quite, but almost. I hadn’t thought of that.

[D.L.C.] What’s the climate of this Prospero like?

[K.R.R.] Prospero seems to swing wildly between long, hot, arid summers, and shorter, brutally cold seasons. That indicates a highly elliptical orbit. Most likely the rainy seasons that make the place such a good farming world are in the narrow “spring” and “fall” between hot and cold, but we don’t have direct sources for this yet. What we do know is that keeping most crops alive requires careful consideration for irrigation and careful management of planting and harvest dates; the farmers of this world often have harvests planned out to the day and hour, a level of precision we’d never need on any world in the Reach. They also seem to use far more genetically altered crops than we use, which probably leads to increasing need for precise harvesting; that sort of artificial organism can be pretty unstable.

[D.L.C.] That probably explains the Bitter-

[K.R.R.] The Bitter Harvest story? Yes, I remember that one. How someone back in Farthing’s Chain got ahold of Incarnation farming equipment, I’m still not quite sure, but what that story portrays is consistent with what we know, if you factor in increased instability due to a strange environment. I’m still not sure why plants would explode, but that could always be an exaggeration to help hide your source’s real identity.

[D.L.C.] What is the standard of living like there?

[K.R.R.] It’s not too far off what a colonist on one of the outer Coreward Frontier worlds might expect. It’s spartan, but with all the basic comforts met; the central authority maintains very standardized schools and vocational programs in all the communities, so most of these conscripts had plenty of shared experiences even if they grew up scattered across a whole planet. All the communities had shops and meeting houses, but we don’t see many references to taverns or to any sort of hospitality business, suggesting that travel over long distances might be restricted. The government probably maintains checkpoints on the major roads to track movement, but again we have no direct source for that.

[D.L.C.] This isn’t a fresh colony, though – this is a relatively high population planet. Why would people be living like first- or second-generation colonists when obviously they aren’t?

[K.R.R.] I don’t know. None of them seemed to question it; that’s just the lives they lived before they were assigned to military training. And it certainly does not seem to have been a bad upbringing, in the whole. Perhaps by forcing them to live in a simulated colonization environment, the Incarnation is trying to raise them to be tough and not too reliant on creature comforts, which would be good traits for military conscripts needed for garrison and second line duty.

[D.L.C.] Horrific to think that someone might engineer an entire planet to have standardized early life experiences so they are useful for particular tasks. But I will admit the idea sounds very Ladeonist.

[K.R.R.] Unfortunately so. We have much less about other worlds, but this engineering does seem to be a consistent policy. There's one called Paradiso, for example, which seems to be a super-habitable environment like Makaharwa or Håkøya, where we see shared experiences of very different sorts mentioned in their message traffic. Paradiso natives – of which we have only a few examples in the captured traffic – seem to have outdoorsy upbringings, with very small houses but communities spread out through large, jungle-like areas, and forestry being a dominant industry.

[D.L.C.] Forestry? You think they have a planet exporting wood in bulk? What for?

[K.R.R.] No idea. Perhaps it is to build the houses on other worlds like Prospero. After all, we have no indication that Prospero has any trees to speak of, at least not anything native.

[D.L.C.] Shipping building materials and food between planets sounds horrendously inefficient. How does their economy work?

[K.R.R.] We aren’t completely sure, but if they are shipping such raw materials around, it suggests that manufacturing facilities are distributed relatively equally across their worlds, at least across a group of worlds. As to efficiency... Well, we’ve done some simulations, and can’t see how it would be anything but morbidly wasteful.

[D.L.C.] And yet, they field hundreds, of highly advanced warships that put most Reach shipbuilders to shame. They have to have a smaller population than the Confederated Worlds, and with an economy that backwards, it seems impossible.

[K.R.R.] The full economics of the situation are not yet clear. Surely we are missing components of their economic plan that would make it all make sense.

[D.L.C.] Perhaps their warships are stolen?

[K.R.R.] They seem to use similar technology to Grand Journey vessels, but there’s no indication they simply stole the ships, and every indication they’re building them. We do see new ships show up in engagements fairly regularly, as an example. You can always tell the smooth gravitic signature of a ship that’s fresh out of the yards within the last few months from one that’s just been reassigned from elsewhere.

[D.L.C.] Pity. If they were working off a stolen stockpile that would suggest the war would end quickly in our favor.

[K.R.R.] Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. And I am also afraid I’m running out of time for this discussion.

[D.L.C.] I appreciate your coming to discuss this for the audience, Kirsten. Hopefully when you have those missing pieces that explain the strange oddities of Incarnation life, we can sit down and talk about it again. How our foes live is very interesting to me, and I think also to my audience.

[K.R.R.] Duncan, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. And if I am cleared to discuss further developments with the media, I assure you I will be in touch.

Details: Written by Duncan L. Chaudhri

2952-10-09 – Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front

Duncan here. I am back to Ashkelon after having conducted a few interviews. One of them, with Captain Samuel Bosch of the heavy cruiser Raymond Spruance (who needs no introduction in this space) you either have already seen by time of posting or will shortly see on the main vidcast program, so I will not discuss it here except to note that this embed team expected Bosch to ride out the rest of the war in a desk posting, and are pleasantly surprised to see him back in action commanding a Seventh Fleet capital warship.

The interview relevant to today’s feed item is the one I did with Naval Intelligence lieutenant Kirsten Reid, lately come from investigating what was left of the Incarnation depot on Hausen’s World. Colonel Reid sat down with me for a rare one-on-one interview to discuss what we know of Incarnation civilian life based on the findings at Hausen’s and elsewhere. Nojus, obviously, was back on Ashkelon maintaining the feed item, as I did not know initially when I would be back.

Because of its length, I will be splitting this interview across two weeks’ text feed items.

D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri – Junior editor and wartime field reporter for Cosmic Background

[D.L.C.] Lieutenant Reid, it is a pleasure. I don’t think we’ve met before.

[K.R.R.] We have not met, though I already feel like I know you, Mr. Chaudhri. I have been reading your text feed for nearly four years. I saw you at one of Admiral Abarca’s press events late last year, but I did not get a chance to speak to you then.

[D.L.C.] Lieutenant, I am flattered. Surely in your line of work there’s far more interesting reading material to keep you busy than our feed.

[K.R.R.] I think you have a rather romantic idea of what we do in Naval Intelligence. Most of what we work with really is terrifyingly dull reading, and the stories you publish are anything but.

[D.L.C.] Thank you again, but I must say I am not here for an endorsement to use in our advertising, Lieutenant. I’m here-

[K.R.R.] Call me Kirsten, please. I was a civilian analyst before the war, and those stuffy titles don’t fit me very well.

[D.L.C.] Kirsten. We had planned to talk about some of what data from Hausen’s World has revealed about life on the Incarnation home worlds.

[K.R.R.] That is what we discussed, and I brought a few documents that I am cleared to share with your publication that will expand on what we talk about here.

[D.L.C.] It is good that this was cleared for release. I’ve had something of a variable experiences with the Naval Intelligence clearance process, as you probably know if you’re a regular reader.

[K.R.R.] Of course. Fortunately, this is a collection that has no bearing on the military situation but which I think your readers will find quite interesting. We have collected a little bit of data on what the Nate home worlds are like from devices captured on other worlds, including a few rare video recordings, but the Hausen’s depot seems to have been a mail stop for messages and packages being taken back from the Incarnation fleet to their home worlds. Unfortunately, they are careful to conceal the coordinates of the worlds themselves, even from their own rank and file, but we know quite a bit now about those worlds.

[D.L.C.] I suppose if we’re reading mail sent by their service personnel back to their loved ones at home, that would make sense. They don’t use a Hypercast relay chain to send data to and from their fleet, of course, otherwise we would have found some of their Hypercast nodes already.

[K.R.R.] That is correct. Incarnation technology is very capable of creating a Hypercast relay network, but they do not do so. They seem to consider the network a vulnerability, and employ a system of what amounts to high-capacity mail courier vessels to move data and small parcels around their space in a relatively regular manner. We have never captured one of these courier ships, but they seem to be a civilian government rather than a military institution, with the fleet having no control over their movements.

[D.L.C.] That is strange to hear, but I suppose I’m used to the fleet mail system and Hypercast relay network, both run and maintained by the military.

[K.R.R.] Yes, it is strange how weak their Naval institution seems to be. We are used to the Confederated government being somewhat subsidiary to the Naval authorities, and the Rahl Hegemony’s leaders being military leaders first and civil leaders second, but that was not the way of governments before the Terran-Rattanai War. The Incarnation, being descended from a Ladeonist schismatic group from that period, seems to have organized itself more along the lines of a civil government with a military arm. As far as we can tell, not even the Immortals program or the Inquisition, both of which have featured in your text feed, are military institutions. They’re initiatives of the civil government, created to infiltrate and control the Naval forces at a relatively low level.

[D.L.C.] They don’t trust their own fleet?

[K.R.R.] Their leaders keep the fleet on a very tight leash. They trust them to fight the war, but grand strategy is coming all the way from the top.

[D.L.C.] Very interesting. Who is at the top?

[K.R.R.] A single dictator with the title The Incarnate. They don’t ever use his or her name directly, but supposedly everything comes down from a single person, probably a person whose brain is implanted extensively to take some of the load, like they do to their senior officers.

[D.L.C.] I shudder to think of what horrors such a leader might do to himself to maintain power.

[K.R.R.] At least as much as he’s doing to the Immortals. Fortunately, it seems that the universal implantation thing we see in their military forces does not extend to the civil population – based on stills and video we captured on Hausen’s, it's only overseers, law enforcement, and government officials who get implants, mostly. The bulk of the population is unmodified, or at least, is not visibly modified with that characteristic temple implant you see on captured Incarnation personnel. The lower on the totem pole one is, the less they are implanted.

[D.L.C.] Interesting. I suppose that makes sense. Implanting tens of billions would be hideously expensive.

[K.R.R.] To say nothing of the percentage that would die from unforeseen complications of the procedure. Perhaps one in five hundred by our analysis of the technology. Even with as many as they do implant, the death toll must be grim.

[D.L.C.] I can imagine, not that I want to. And all those people live in fear of implanted and augmented law enforcement?

[K.R.R.] Their system is not really based on fear, as far as we can tell. Military personnel seem unafraid to speak their minds to their families back home, and if there is any censorship of their negative opinions of the progress of the war, it is done back there, and in a way that the personnel censored do not suffer for it. There is some rule by force – we have hints that the Inquisition is also responsible for hunting down any opposition to the Incarnation’s program – but most people are on board with the ideas, if not precisely the individual steps, of the regime.

[D.L.C.] They’re all Ladeonists, then? Not just the leaders and the military?

[K.R.R.] Incarnation civilians have been educated by Ladeonist ideologues for at least four generations. It is the culture, and there seem to be few dissidents. They see themselves, as Ladeonist cells in the Reach do, as doomed to do their part as part of a great collective effort to save the human race from extinction, and though they do not always agree with the steps being taken, they generally trust that those at the top know better what is needed than they do.

[D.L.C.] That is not particularly encouraging to think about, when it comes to what happens after the war.

[K.R.R.] We have thought of that, yes. I can’t speak to any optimistic conclusions of that thought.

[D.L.C.] What about their planets? You say we have some idea of what life is like on them?

Details: Written by Duncan L. Chaudhri

2952-10-02 – Tales from the Service: A Titan’s Downfall

Nojus here. Those of you who have already read last week’s entry, which is most of you, know where this ends. A lone enemy warship, crippled in Sagittarius Gate, destroyed by overwhelming swarming attacks by Confederated strike craft and small warships.

Even this routine inevitability, though, risked the lives of thirty-something strike crew in each squadron. True, Commander Tennford’s group all seem to have made it home alive, but dozens of Magpie crews didn’t in the same day’s fighting. Rescue launches had about a fifty percent crew recovery rate, and that’s in uncontested friendly space after a battle lasting only a few hours.

True, these losses are nothing compared to the number of crew on a heavy cruiser, but we should not forget that even in these small victorious actions, Confederated spacers are losing their lives.

As the squadron formed up around him, Yoel Tennford studied the latest battle reports on the datastream from their home base. The wounded Tyrant cruiser was apparently still limping outward toward the jump limit, harried by strike craft and the occasional long-range missile volley from the few frigates which had been in range to participate. None of these could really expect to deal a killing blow to a ship that large and powerful, but they could knock out its weapons and even hamper its ability to make repairs to its drive, if they were persistent.

Yoel’s squadron, along with several others, would hopefully provide the necessary deathblow. If even a handful of their ship-killer missiles struck home, the straggling enemy cruiser would be destroyed. Short of a miracle or a surrender broadcast, the enemy ship was doomed, but an Incarnation crew never surrendered and probably didn’t believe much in miracles.

“Uriel actual, your attack vector is portside amidships.” The voice of the designated strike ops director was hoarse, as if he had been talking and shouting all day; he probably had. “Fenrir and Hermes squadrons will lead you in and keep the guns busy.”

“Acknowledged. Portside amidships.” Yoel smiled; this was a choice duty, with a high chance of scoring devastating hits. True, it was somewhat more dangerous than an end-on run, but with so many Magpies and other strike assets filling the space around the crippled ship, the danger was manageable.

Yoel would still have preferred to have let the kill go to someone else, but he could never bring himself to say that to the gunners and pilots under his command. They would take that as critical lack of aggression for a squadron commander, even if it did increase all their chances of surviving, and even if there was no real difference in the fortunes of war that would result from heroics on this particular day. The Incarnation ship was, for all intents and purposes, already dead; it was only a matter of who would deliver the coup de grace. Yoel didn’t want to have to send a message of condolences to someone’s family over a coup de grace.

As the distance to target began to decrease at an alarming rate, Yoel laid in a course that would bring his squadron around to their designated attack vector. Already the space around the Tyrant was abuzz with Confederated strike craft, and he could see two other squadrons maneuvering to start their attack runs at the margins of the sensor plot.

“Would you look at that.” Quinn Graves, the pilot of Uriel Six, whistled into his microphone. “Right amidships. Reactor-cracking territory.”

“Clear comms.” Yoel instantly regretted the snappy tension in his voice. This was as near to a routine attack run as one could get in live-fire combat, after all. He had been given plenty of reason to be nervous in the day’s first sortie, but that hadn’t rattled him near as much as this one was already doing.

Taking a few deep breaths to settle his nerves, Yoel keyed his comms again. “All right. We’ll be starting our run in about two minutes. Make your final checks, and report your status. No heroics on this one; if you’ve got any problems, take your rig home.”

Ten green wireframes on Yoel’s display winked blue and then went back to green; nobody was reporting any problems. On a second launch in the same day, this seemed farfetched; something always broke, somewhere. Yoel checked his own diagnostics, then returned his eyes to the turn timer. “Stay in formation. Gunners, keep your eyes and barrels rearward and call out any tails we pick up. There are still Coronachs out here.”

Thirty seconds later, Yoel brought his Magpie around to an intercept course with the wounded Tyrant, and the squadron maneuvered around him without a hitch. They’d never done this sort of synchronized run in a live fire situation, but they’d done it in the sims and on exercises many times, and so far they remained unmolested by the enemy. So far, they were too far out to draw fire, and by the time that changed, they would be most of the way to their launch point.

Yoel switched his comms to the operations broadcast channel. “Fenrir, Hermes, this is Uriel. we are starting our intercept run. What’s your status?”

“Right behind you, Uriel.” The sharp tenor of the Fenrir squadron commander was the first to respond. “Lose about one gee of accel and we’ll pass in front of you to clear the way.”

“One gee down, aye.” Yoel pulled his throttle back and signaled for his compatriots to do the same.

“We’re coming in from the target’s stern.” The scratchy voice must have been the Hermes commander; Yoel had never met him. Hermes was from another hangar outpost. “We’ll come around and do a diving run on your target area just after Fenrir.”

“Understood.” Yoel hoped the Hermes squadron Magpies were clear in time; he didn’t like performing hard-burn maneuvers with his rigs intermixed with another squadron. Collision chances in the black were so small as to be insignificant, but it was just another way people could die unnecessarily on this sortie.

The attack run, being at the Magpies’ maximum acceleration given their current loading, only took about ninety seconds, but those ninety seconds seemed to crawl by. Enemy light laser fire and plasma barrages started to flash through the squadron with twenty seconds to go, but the guns were inaccurate, and too few of them were devoted to dissuading the attack.

At twelve seconds until weapons launch, one of the Uriel gunships took a glancing hit and had to break off its run, but Yoel didn’t have time to pay it any mind. Its pilot and gunners were on their own for the moment. His eyes were fixed on the timer, and his finger rested on the little button that would launch both of his ship-killers. He barely even watched the view ahead; there was nothing he could do about it anyway. Doctrine was to fly as straight as possible and to maneuver as little as possible in the seconds leading up to launch, to achieve an optimal effect. How much this actually mattered for targeting accuracy of the self-guided munitions was the subject of much briefing room speculation.

Whatever the other two squadrons were doing to draw fire and suppress the surviving guns, Yoel couldn’t see any indication it was working, but now, that wasn’t his problem. They were lost in the flashing swirl of strike craft dead ahead.

The timer hit zero, and Yoel pressed the button to fire his weapons. The Magpie jerked to one side, then to the other, as both huge weapons kicked free, spun up their own miniature gravitic drives, and hurtled away. As soon as they were clear, Yoel pulled back hard on his stick, twisting his Magpie away from the target. All around him, the rest of the squadron was doing the same, but he couldn’t see anything of this but the disappearance of munitions indicators from the status panel.

“Uriel actual breaking off. Report twenty launches.” Yoel breathed a sigh of relief, then switched channels back to his compatriots. “Scatter until you’re clear of the point defense, then regroup. Call it out if you catch a tail; Fenrir and Hermes are still in the area.”

So drained was he that Yoel didn’t even remember to watch the rear cameras for impact. Whooping and cheering on the squadron channel reminded him, and he switched on the cameras just in time to see four bright yellow fireballs already fading into the darkness. Four hits was probably enough to put that monster out of commission for good.

Details: Written by Nojus T. Brand

2952-09-25 – Tales from the Service: A Maimed Titan

Yoel Tennford led his pilots and gunners down the narrow corridor from the ready room to the armored hangar hatch. Every face was grim, but determined; their Magpie gunships were all freshly rearmed and loaded with all the biggest and most potent ship-killing munitions. They had been out on six sorties in less than five standard days, but this one was the big one. They were going to kill a Tyrant.

The target, an unlucky straggler from a recent raid, was limping its way out toward the jump limit, and in a few hours it would be in a position to make good its escape. Normally, Incarnation cruisers who came to raid Sagittarius Gate were careful not to put themselves in danger of damage that would compromise their mobility; even heavily damaged raiders retired at full speed and escaped alive.

Eventually, though, one of the bastards had to get unlucky. In trading fire with the outer line of defensive installations, one of the quartet of cruisers had taken a heavy torpedo amidships on the starboard side. Even with the formation’s overlapping shear-screens, the torpedo had blasted a hole nearly eighty meters long and twenty deep in the cruiser’s hull. Something that had gone out with the debris had been important to the big warship’s gravitic drive, and it had fallen out of formation, drive operating at barely half of its normal acceleration.

Strike formations from the various fortress installations had been harrying the cripple for hours, but most of them had done little damage; they had all been launched before the situation developed, as patrols and harassers, not as ship killers. They had been carrying smaller munitions for general work. Yoel and his squadron had been out there earlier that day, trying to keep the raiders’ swarm of Coronachs from hitting anything important. Now, they were going out once more, to take care of business.

Command had selected eight squadrons from the various fortresses and vessels in the Sagittarius Gate system to go for the kill, and another dozen-odd squadrons would keep the Coronachs off them and suppress the cruiser’s still-formidable suite of point defense weapons. Two frigates and a light carrier from Seventh Fleet which had happened to be in the right place at the right time were also going to get involved, but if things went to plan, they’d mostly be there to sift through the debris and vaporize anything that was still trying to fight back. Under normal circumstances, this wasn’t a force that would be able to destroy any heavy cruiser, much less the capable Incarnation Tyrant type, but the sluggish speed of their foe and the fact that it had been abandoned by its formation all but ensured its death.

The armored hatch hissed open, and Yoel led the way onto the hangar deck. Eleven Magpies waited there on the pads for eleven crews, each one with a pair of oversized cigar-shaped payloads slung under its stubby wings. They had trained to carry and use ship-killers, of course, but had never actually used them in combat.

In most of the raids, skirmishes, and battles in the defense of Sagittarius Gate, it had been up to Seventh Fleet ships to deal the killing blow to those few enemy ships that had met their end. This time, though, most of Seventh Fleet was away; the fortress units had repelled the raid more or less alone, and so the glory of the kill was theirs.

Personally, Yoel would have preferred to let the glory and the danger go to others, but he knew his crews would be dismayed if they learned they had been passed over for the opportunity to complete such a high-profile mission. He could only hope that all eleven Magpies would make it back to the hangar in a few hours.

As the crews approached, the hangar techs hurriedly removed their leads and hoses from each rig and hung a ladder on the brackets beside the hatch. Yoel’s Magpie, a command model with an expanded computer and comms suite, was parked nearest the entrance, but he lingered at the top of the ladder for a long time after his gunners were aboard, watching the other crews board their rigs. Farther off, he spotted the base’s pair of recovery shuttles warming up, but these would not be launching with his squadron.

Flashing a thumbs-up gesture toward the hangar controller’s station, Yoel ducked inside and clambered to the cockpit at the nose. Already the reactor hummed with latent power, and most of the flight systems were online, but he did a few quick checks as he buckled himself in.

When his restraints were secured, Yoel pulled on his helmet and extended the microphone. “Uriel Actual showing a green board. Requesting launch clearance.”

“Green board up here, Uriel.” The controller replied. “Clearance granted. You are first in line for the launch run.” With a series of clicks and thumps, the clamps holding the Magpie’s landing skids released.

“Clearance acknowledged.” Yoel flicked the switch to change over to the squadron comms-net, and his status board filled with green wire-frames for the other ten Magpies. “Uriel squadron, launch when ready.”

With that, Yoel activated the thrusters to gently lift the craft from its landing pad, then maneuvered it into line with the launch tube at one end of the hangar. A strike craft’s best defense was raw velocity, and the base’s hangar was equipped to send its compliment into battle well defended indeed, with a launch rail nearly two kilometers long.

Twin arms from the launch system latched into the Magpie’s hull and pulled it gently into the cradle whose inertial isolation supplemented its onboard gravitics. Without the cradle, Yoel and his gunners would be turned to pink jelly with the force of acceleration, to say nothing of the damage to the Magpie itself. Despite having launched this way nearly a hundred times, Yoel gripped his seat and squeezed his eyes.

It was over in just a few seconds, of course, with only the barest whisper of acceleration tugging Yoel backwards into his seat. The Magpie erupted out of the launcher at a terrifying velocity, already hurtling toward its target.

“Launch successful.” Yoel grabbed the controls and flicked the switches to arm the rig’s weapons, knowing that a few straggling enemy Coronachs were probably still prowling around. “Proceeding to target. We’ll form up en route.”

Nojus here. Duncan is out for the next week or so doing interviews, so you’re stuck with me through next episode.

Though a raid at Sagittarius Gate last week was hardly big news, the fact that it claimed an enemy cruiser destroyed and at least one damaged without Seventh Fleet capital units being engaged is unusual. Normally, the enemy tries to raid when the fleet is out on operations (training or otherwise), and though they’re not always successful in this, they know not to press their luck when they find the battlewagons are home.

The defenses are growing so sophisticated, however, that only the largest raid forces now have much of a chance of doing real damage, and a raid in such force is a big risk to an enemy fleet that’s replacing its losses slower than ours.

Details: Written by Nojus T. Brand

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Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front, Part 2

Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front

Tales from the Service: A Titan’s Downfall

Tales from the Service: A Maimed Titan

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