Tales from the Inbox: The Assassin Connection

2950-04-19 – Tales from the Inbox: The Assassin Connection 

Unfortunately, I have been unable to schedule an interview with anyone from Admiral Zahariev’s staff since the fleet’s departure from Håkøya. I can at least confirm that the fleet’s fast elements have finished their evacuation of the outlying settlements of the Håkøya system. 

I’m also told that there’s going to be an investigation into the outcome of the most recent battles. I doubt, however, that anything will come of it. Fifth Fleet did everything it could to thwart The Incarnation there as it did at Berkant, and the number of damaged and destroyed enemy cruisers speaks to the steep price they paid for this victory. 

This week's entry is a continuation of last week's (Tales from the Inbox: The Assassin Collector). Captain Ibsen's account goes on in great detail but this is as far as I intend to follow it for the moment. Perhaps in the future we will revisit it in further installments.

Grand Hierophant Toloni rested his scepter of office against the bulkhead and eased himself into a chair at one end of the long wardroom table. He had of course taken the chair at the head of the room, placing the huge blooming tree and crossbeam Penderite emblem on that wall directly behind him. “Now, Sister Ibsen. What is it you say you found?” 

Sandra Ibsen sent a command from her slate to the table’s central projector, glancing around the otherwise empty wardroom. “I think the assassination attempts are connected, Your Eminence.” 

“In that they have all failed?” Toloni rearranged his white robes and leaned forward, resting one elbow on the table. “Or that they are all perpetrated by young people with daemoniaical ideation?” 

Sandra shook her head. “Well, more than those things. Look at this.” She pressed a button, and five faces appeared on the screen – the five failed assassins who now occupied Holy Tabernacle’s brig. “The expensive weapon you got off the last one was a custom piece I could easily trace. Turns out it was bought secondhand on Maribel in December.” 

“Maribel? That’s nearly on the other side of the Reach. Mr. Neely told me he’s a Hopesway native.” Toloni frowned. The old pontiff had interviewed his would-be killer personally, of course; he always did. So far, Sandra knew, they’d never found any way in which the assassins had lied to Toloni. They might tell any other interrogator nearly anything, but to the Hierophant himself, they either told the truth or said nothing. 

“That checks out.” Sandra nodded and tapped the controls on her slate, and the header of an official dossier appeared next to one of the faces. “Turns out Neely is a small-time Annuska smuggler, a middleman with a supplier in the outer system. At least, that’s what he was. He went datasphere dark about ten months ago, and until he took a shot at you, local authorities thought he might be dead.” 

Toloni frowned. As the head of a religious sect which prided itself on its total indifference to technology, especially datasphere-connected technology, he prided himself on his technological illiteracy, but he still had to know that the average citizen of the Reach just didn’t go ten months without making even a ripple in the datasphere. 

Sandra, as the captain of Holy Tabernacle, of course couldn’t be so illiterate; she had to make sure the ship moved seamlessly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction without any physical or diplomatic incidents. She made sure the technology-avoiding Penderites aboard the ship were identifiable by each planetary administration on which they landed, and made arrangements for the Hierophant’s travel needs on visits to the Penderite communities of those worlds. 

Eventually, Toloni raised a finger. “If Mr. Neely was not seen in computer records for ten months, how do you have record of the purchase on Maribel?” 

Sandra nodded. Toloni, as usual, had noticed a key contradiction. “The weapon was purchased on Maribel in December by one Delilah Brahms-Walton, who has a very active datasphere footprint. She seems not to have ever left that world.” With a tap on her controls, Sandra added Brahms-Walton's image to the display, with a dotted line to Neely. “If this woman hasn’t left Maribel, though, how does she know the assassins from Vorkuta and Philadelphia?” 

Another tap displayed a series of images in which Brahms-Walton appeared highlighted in red, and two other men appeared in yellow. After a few seconds, Sandra sent the command to draw a solid line from the woman to the men appearing in those stills: Begum, the assassin from Philadephia, and Nyberg, the one from Vorkuta. 

“Are you sure these are the same men?” 

Sandra nodded. “Facial recognition is a perfect match. These pictures are stamped as having been recorded on October 25. I have a customs footprint for Begum entering the Maribel jurisdiction in October and departing in November. Nothing yet for Nyberg, but he was definitely back on Vorkuta in mid-November.” 

Toloni shook his head. “If three of the five are connected to this woman on Maribel. What of the other two?” 

Sandra shook her head. “The other two were both off their homeworlds in October but that’s all I’ve got so far. Could be they got to Maribel the same way Nyberg did to be in those images.” 

The Hierophant sat back in his chair, saying nothing for several seconds. Sandra suspected he was praying and asking God for guidance, and wondered not for the first time what sort of response he was getting. 

Toloni finally spoke, his voice slow and deliberate. “Have you sent this to the system authorities?” 

“Yes, and forwarded it to Maribel and the other four systems where you were attacked. But I think we should enhance security all the same.” She pointed to the most recent of the group photos. “There are eight other men and two other women in that picture with Brahms-Walton and two of your assassins. One of them is going to get lucky, or they’ll start teaming up. Your guards are very capable, but without advanced technology-” 

“My sister, if we must bow to the ways of the world, what does that say of our faith?” Toloni stood and reached for his staff. “If it is God’s will that one of them succeed, then we cannot stop them. The Order has always done without these tools, and I will not change that.” 

Sandra sighed and nodded. She’d expected this response even though she had hoped and prayed for another. “I understand, Your Eminence. But I do wish you’d be careful all the same.” 

Toloni smiled distantly. “We all take risks, Sister Ibsen. Do continue to investigate as long as you feel it helpful, and let me know if you learn who is behind these difficulties.” 

“I will.” Standing as well, Sandra led the way to the door, beyond which the Grand Hierophant’s guards were waiting. “Perhaps I may even ask our guests about their friend on Maribel.” 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Assassin Collector

2950-04-12 – Tales from the Inbox: The Assassin Collector 

I regret to inform the audience that, as of this feed item’s appearance, Fifth Fleet should be back in the Maribel system. 

With three battleships badly damaged enough to be out of the fight and heavy losses among the fleet’s anti-strike escorts, Admiral Zahariev elected to evacuate Confederated ground forces and all willing civilians from Håkøya and surrender the planet itself. A small number of civilians dwelling in remote areas of the planet and a small number of planetary officials elected to remain. The total number who refused evacuation is less than two thousand, but fleet staff has not released a list of those who stayed behind. 

Fast fleet elements were dispatched through the outer system to evacuate all civilian and military outposts. Some of those ships may still be in Håkøya as of this writing collecting the denizens of a few of the most remote habitats, but those chosen for this duty were selected because they are fast enough to avoid any Incarnation ships that choose to pursue them. 

Though most of the datasphere is describing the evacuation of Håkøya as a triumph of Confederated flexibility, this conceals the fact that the Navy could not protect one of the most populous and prosperous worlds of the inner Frontier from capture. The human cost of the loss of the system is very small, and little relevant military infrastructure has been lost by abandoning the system (though some was lost during the initial attack), so there’s no doubt that Zahariev made a cold-bloodedly good call in his withdrawal, but I still can’t shake the sense that if The Incarnation couldn’t be stopped at Håkøya, there’s no particular reason to expect we’ll stop them anywhere else. 

I’m trying to set up an interview with someone on Admiral Zahariev’s staff to discuss the situation once the fleet has finished forming up in Maribel orbit. In the meantime, this week I’ve found an account in the inbox of the movements of the ship Holy Tabernacle, whose odd origins have graced this feed before. 

[N.T.B. - Duncan’s concern is one all of us aboard Saint-Lô share. Håkøya is an open door from the Frontier into Farthing’s Chain, and from there, to Galactic West and even the Outer Core. The Navy can’t keep retreating forever and hoping for a better tactical position. Sure, the bastards got one hell of a bloody nose at Håkøya, but so did we.] 

As the boarding ramp descended toward the ochre Hopesway soil, Sandra Ibsen watched Grand Hierophoant Toloni rather than the crowd of thousands who had come to the salt flats to greet Holy Tabernacle. As the murmur of the crowd rose over the sounds of the ship’s mechanisms, the old man seemed to stand taller and lean less heavily on his towering scepter of office. In the seconds before he raised his hand to bless the assembled faithful, he seemed to shed two decades of his advanced age. 

At the sight of the pontiff, the crowd’s murmur bubbled over into a raucous cheer, and the front ranks, still standing at a safe distance from the just-landed starship, surged forward, as if to mob the gangway.  

The Tabernacle’s guards in their scarlet and silver livery didn’t wait for their leader’s permission to sweep past Toloni and Sandra to meet the crowd at the foot of the ramp. The first few times Holy Tabernacle had alighted near a large Penderite enclave, the well-wishers had overwhelmed the ship’s guardians, but they’d learned from the experience of dozens of planetfalls how to politely and safely screen the Grand Hierophant from being crushed by the faithful.  

Toloni lowered his hand slowly, then knelt at the top of the ramp, bowing his head in prayer. Sandra knelt alongside him, though she found it difficult to pray while being watched by so many thousands. Instead, her mind was on her plans to use the stop on populous Hopesway to restock the ship’s stocks of spare parts and various other necessities. There seemed no reason to trouble the Grand Hierophant with these worldly needs. 

Toloni’s prayers, whispered as always, were inaudible to anyone but God, but the crowd quieted and grew reverent. Sandra always wondered what a pious man like him still needed to pray for; Toloni never seemed alarmed or disturbed by anything, and everything he set in motion always seemed to succeed. 

When Toloni stood up, he started down the ramp. Sandra, master of the ship but stranger to the soil, stayed where she was.  

As Toloni reached the foot of the ramp, a ragged young man wriggled through to the front of the crowd and tried to shove his way past the guards. Sandra saw the flash of metal and instinctively reached for her sidearm. The brightly-attired guards, however, were faster. Before the gun could be brought to bear, one of their long, bayonet-tipped ceremonial rifles crashed down on his back, toppling him forward into the salty dust. The gun bounced several times, landing directly at the Grand Hierophant’s feet. 

In the sudden shocked silence, Sandra could hear the would-be assassin scrabbling backwards on his hands and knees even from forty meters away, but it was too late for him to avoid the guards, who hauled him to his feet. The cordon of crimson-cloaked men closed around Toloni, gleaming bayonets facing outwards toward the crowd in case another assassin might make an attempt, while two of their number hauled the unfortunate man up the ramp. 

Sandra relaxed and rolled her eyes as the guards dragged the struggling man past her. “What’s this, the fourth one?” 

“Fifth, Captain.” One of the guards replied without breaking stride. 

At the foot of the ramp, the guards had begun to relax, and Toloni stooped to pick up the weapon that had almost been used on him. With a deft flick Sandra had taught him, the old man ejected its magazine, cleared its chamber, and held it up, receiving a relieved cheer from the crowd. 

Sandra flicked on her comms earpiece, hoping that the Hierophant’s guardian angel – or his excessive good fortune – never deserted him. “Bridge, we’ve had another incident, but it’s under control. Attacker is in custody aboard.” 

“Understood, Skipper. I’ll notify the planetary authorities.” 

On the ground, Toloni was already addressing the crowd. Micorphones in the collar of his robe picked up his voice to be echoed by speakers built into Tabernacle’s massive hull. Sandra had heard the same speech on every world they landed on and had long since bothered to listen to each variation of the theme of gratitude for the welcome and a desire for the faithful to focus not on his presence, but on the unfailing presence of God, who did not need to board a star cruiser to visit them. His voice never quavered or broke; it was as if the attempt on his life had never happened. 

As the speech came to an end, Toloni led the assembly in a brief prayer before promising to visit each Penderite town on the planet. As he ambled back up the ramp flanked by two guards, the crowd began to disperse. 

Sandra met Toloni at the hatchway, holding out a hand to take the assassin’s gun. “Your Eminence, you really must stop collecting assassins.” 

Toloni placed the disarmed weapon into her hands carefully, as if it were a relic instead of a murderer’s implement. “They have no power to do what God does not permit them.” 

Sandra nodded, looking the weapon over. She found it to be a beautiful old-model HKR civilian rail-pistol that looked more suited for a wealthy collector’s wall than the hands of a pontiff’s would-be killer. “This is a nice piece.” 

Toloni smiled knowingly. “I will tell our guest that you approve of his taste when I talk to him.” 

Sandra shrugged and stood aside, twirling the disarmed gun as she watched the crowd dissolve. Toloni might not be worried about assassins, but she couldn’t quite manage to be as disinterested as he. 

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Tales from the Service: The Angel of Physics

2950-04-05 – Tales from the Service: The Angel of Physics 

Since last week’s entry, there has been more action here in the Håkøya system. While again, Fifth Fleet seems to have done as much damage as it took, the ongoing field repairs to Tours meant that only seven of our eight battleships moved into action when the Incarnation force moved in force toward the planet Håkøya. 

Unfortunately, already-damaged Saint-Lô took another bad hit early on in the battle and Captain Liao was forced to pull us back. As it turned out, this made us lucky, even if we did lose dozens of good spacers. Though we were out of it, Fifth Fleet seemed to be doing quite well for itself, until Marseille, got it even worse than we did. She suffered at least four major hits through overloaded shear screens and lost all power. Venting atmosphere and unable to maneuver, the ship quickly became the target of opportunity for most of the Incarnation’s strike force and for several sections of cruisers. 

Admiral Zahariev was faced with an impossible choice when it seemed Marseille would be lost. He could either pull his forces back to rally around the wounded ship, or he could continue pressing forward toward the huddled mass of Incarnation troop-ships at the center of the enemy formation. He chose the former, and the Incarnation ground force was able to deploy almost unmolested (except for strike-craft harassment).  

In the end, Marseille was saved, though it took a bloody, close-range melee between the remainder of the Fifth Fleet battle-line and several squadrons of Incarnation heavy cruisers to accomplish the task. Our strike-screen frigates were all but wiped out, and the strike-craft losses on both sides were horrific. A decent number of enemy cruisers were badly damaged or destroyed as well, but I don’t know the exact numbers. The fleet is calling this action the Battle of Veslemøy after the name of the Håkøyan moon which loomed large over the battle space, to avoid confusion with the previous battle. 

With enemy troops on the planet’s surface, I’ve noticed a distinct loss of morale here. The enemy had to suffer horribly to achieve a major landing, but the landing, in the end, succeeded. Even with the bulk of the population already evacuated, and a garrison of significant size to oppose the invasion, popular sentiment among Navy spacers is that the beautiful world of Håkøya will be lost to the Incarnation within weeks. 

This week, I have a brief description of what it's like to fight a battle from inside a battleship's gunnery stations from a gun-turret commander aboard Argonne. Don Symons reports that his gun turret has two confirmed cruiser kills and hits on three more, but I cannot verify his kill claims. If true, they make his gun crew the most effective in the whole fleet, at least in the battles here in Håkøya.

Lieutenant Don Symons shook his head as the ringing in his ears faded. He hadn’t heard the shot hit the armor this time; he had only felt the shock through his restraints and felt the ship’s frame twist back and forth as the smart-alloy girders tried to absorb the shock of a ten-gigawatt plasma charge vaporizing centimeters of plating.  

Since he could not hear the alarms, Don scanned his board for any new alert indicators. Argonne had weathered the hit as well as could be expected, deafening effects on its gunners notwithstanding. The ship had meters of thick armor-alloy plating protecting the belly now turned to face the four enemy cruisers with which it was trading fire. As long as it could maneuver to take each hit on relatively thick parts of the armor not already glowing cherry-red from previous impacts, it could expect to win the four-on-one mid-range duel fairly handily. 

As Don watched the capacitor indicators for his turret systems crawl toward the full mark, the targeting information from the main fire control system suddenly changed. Frowning, he switched his display to a tactical plot, and found that the commander of the main battery had given him, and presumably every other turret commander aboard, the fire control solution for a target not among the four cruisers currently cratering their ship’s armor. 

“J Turret to central control.” Don could barely even hear his own voice, so abused were his eardrums, so he cranked up his headset’s volume far past safe levels to compensate. “Confirming target change.” 

“Confirm target change, J Turret. Captain’s orders. Turrets firing at will.” 

Don shrugged and waved to the men seated at nearby consoles, giving them the hand-gesture indicative of a target change. Once he had received several nods, he engaged the turret’s automatic training system. Everything around him vibrated violently as the triple two-hundred-fifty milimeter rail cannon gun mount bolted to a hull sponson barely twenty meters away spun on its titanic gimbals to face the new target. 

Just as J turret was finishing its huge sweep, one of the other turrets aboard fired its salvo. Don always tried to guess which turret was firing when he felt the familiar rumbling shock reverberate through the ship, and decided that this was B Turret, near the bow. In his tactical plot, he saw the dotted lines showing the training angles of each of the eight turrets turning around the wireframe of Argonne to pin the new target. 

The rumbling of the turret’s motion ceased, leaving only the silence and the ringing in Don’s ears. “All capacitors ready. Gunnery solution locked in?” 

“Ready and tracking, Lieutenant.” 

“Fire.” 

The triple bass rumble of the rail-cannons throwing titanic projectiles at relativistic speed seemed to push the whole battleship to one side. Though not loud by comparison to the sound of the weapons being aimed, the report of the cannons had an apocalyptic finality that Don had never grown tired of in nearly two years of war aboard Argonne. In a few seconds, those slugs would arrive on target, and anything they contacted would cease to exist. As his old battery sergeant had once remarked, the avenging Angel of Physics took no prisoners. 

“Time on target... eight seconds. Seven.” Don doubted most of the gun crew could hear him, but he counted down anyway. 

When the timer reached two seconds, everything in the compartment lurched violently to one side. This time, Don heard the impact on the armor as Argonne once more rang like a bell. Something about this impact set his teeth on edge, and this time, several warning indicators began to blink on his board, indicating minor damage to the weapon system under his jurisdiction. 

Don tried to say “impact” when the timer reached zero, but he couldn’t hear himself or anything else. On the tactical plot, the red-orange symbol at the intersection of all Argonne’s dotted line gun-aiming indicators, already blinking to indicate damage, faded into a dull brown. 

“Tracking multiple hits on target.” Don shouted, his own voice sounding a whisper in his ears. “Target is down.” 

Unfortunately, there was no time to celebrate; already, the capacitors were beginning to charge once more, and already, the fire control director was sending new target information. Don waved the “change target” signal over his head once more, sent one of his damage control techs to check on the worst of the damage indicators, then set the big gimbals turning once more. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The War for Minds

2950-03-29 – Tales from the Inbox: The War for Minds

While the medics still haven’t cleared me, I’m well enough to work, at least, to work enough to prepare an item for this week’s entry and run it by Admiral Zahariev’s Naval Intelligence liaison. 

While I was for reasons mentioned last week not able to observe the whole engagement, I think it’s fair to describe what happened on 03 March as bloody but inconclusive. Fifth Fleet gave as good as it got, if not better; three of the eight battleships in the main line took bad hits, including our own Saint-Lô. Tours got it the worst, having had a close-range exchange with one of the Incarnation cruisers, but the cruiser that riddled that ship’s hull with beam and plasma cannon fire took at least four hits from Tours’s two-fifty millimeter rail cannons, which at that range nearly ripped it in half lengthwise. I was able to secure good video recordings of this spectacular wreck and others taken by post-battle scouts, and have sent them back to Planet at Centauri for use on the main vidcast.

We lost four cruisers, quite a few destroyers, and numerous smaller units, but at least six of the big Tyrant cruisers were drifting wrecks by the end of the battle, and probably eight or nine more were damaged badly enough to no longer be capable of fighting, though I can’t get good numbers on that. Strike squadron losses on both sides were fairly heavy as well. 

Unfortunately, the major loss here has been the fleet service platforms left in the Håkøya system to service Fifth Fleet’s fast cruisers and scouting squadrons. Capture of these slow-moving vessels delayed the Incarnation invasion of the planet until Fifth Fleet arrived in force, but most of the service platforms in the system were either captured or scuttled by their crews. 

For the last few weeks, we’ve been in a stare-down similar to the one at Berkant, though under somewhat less favorable circumstances. Both fleets have brought up a number of large, slow hauler-type ships loaded with troops and weapons for a ground-side engagement, but neither can get that force to the planet without putting it under threat of the faster combat ships of the other side. In addition to the one battle, we’ve had a few smaller skirmishes and feints over this standoff, and if I had to guess we’ll probably have at least one more large-scale battle before Nate quits the field. 

While communications outside the Håkøya system were down for weeks, I’ve been in regular contact with persons in the F.D.A. garrison on the planet’s surface, and with some of the few civilians not evacuated as a precaution when the enemy fleet arrived in-system in the last days of February. 

This week, our brief account comes from one of the civilians planetside. Yaw Johnson, a retired spacer from Tranquility and an old friend of our own Nojus Brand, has elected not to evacuate his remote cottage on the planet, and doubts the Incarnation will bother him much. He let us know that the local datasphere has been awash with Incarnation propaganda lately, probably as a result of small parties of Nate scouts sent covertly ahead of the main force still waiting in the transports. 

Yaw heard the house intercom chirp to let him know he had new messages but didn’t set down his gardening trowel right away. The freedom not to jump to the rhythms of computers and digital clocks being the best part of being retired from a spacer’s life, he fought down the vestigial urge to check the message while he finished setting a row of seedlings into the vegetable plot.  

Most Earth produce grew reasonably well on Håkøya with a little fertilizer, but in the past three years he’d learned that this did not extend to the genetically tweaked varieties common to his somewhat more harsh home-world of Tranquility. Getting seeds shipped in had been easy, but the first local year’s plantings had been an almost total failure; the plants had all gone immediately to seed or wilted for mysterious reasons. He’d done a bit of research, and hopefully the second season would bear the fruits and vegetables he remembered so fondly from his childhood. 

Only when each plant’s root ball had been carefully lowered into a hole and its stem heaped around with black earth did Yaw straighten, stretch his creaky back, and head inside. Though Håkøya’s warm spring-anologues were rarely hot enough to dehydrate or burn a human, least of all one adapted to the harsher extremes of Tranquility, he headed for the beverage unit in one corner and called for a tall glass of tart citruspine soda. While the dispenser mixed concentrated flavors, trace nutrients, and cold carbonated water, he noticed the blinking indicator on the comms unit and remembered the chirping. 

Given that only four people on the planet knew Yaw by name, and that the hypercast network allowing anyone to anyone further away to send him unwanted messages had been down for more than a week, he wondered who it could be. Most likely, it would be his old associate and one-time business partner Nojus Brand, who was apparently in-system riding along on a Navy ship. Yaw had ignored Nojus’s first two messages and replied to the third with a terse but marginally polite answer, hoping the damn fool would take a hint.  

Retired, after all, meant that Yaw no longer cared what went on outside his property; he hadn’t even read or watched a scrap of news in nearly twenty months. After a few weeks, he’d found the feeling of being disconnected from the Reach’s endless parade of near-crises, panics, and dramas liberating, and had restricted his datasphere usage to acquiring the various fiction and history material which he read to fill the time when he was cooped up inside by rain or other inclement weather. 

Retrieving his completed drink from the unit and taking a sip, Yaw sighed and commanded the house’s intercom to play back the recorded message. 

The message opened with a strain of shrill, martial music that caught the retired spacer by surprise. “Citizen of the planet Håkøya, greetings from a better world.” The breathy, feminine voice carried an odd accent Yaw had never heard before.  

“What in all hells?” In all his seventy years, Yaw had never gotten a cold-call advertisement on a private Datasphere message. The system was supposed to have safeguards in place to prevent such things. 

“Perhaps you think you live in paradise already. That no better world than this one is possible.” The woman speaker continued, her voice dropping into a low tone in an attempt to sound conspiratorial. “You would be forgiven for so thinking. But we can make a better world here, together.” 

“Sounds like utopian sewage to me.” Yaw knew he was talking back at a pre-recorded message that couldn’t answer him, but he didn’t care. He’d heard all manner of crackpot revolutionaries and religious fanatics in his travels, and none of them had ever been able to deliver on their soaring promises. 

“The Incarnation has come at last to your world, and invites you to join us in a new stage of human evolution. Together, we can boldly march into-” 

Yaw snarled and slapped the control to end message playback. To his surprise and growing alarm, the voice continued to blabber on about a brighter future and other utopian platitudes. He tried turning down the volume, and found that, too, unresponsive. Setting his drink down, Yaw picked up the comms unit and yanked its power connector free, finally interrupting the message.  

When silence finally returned to his home, the old spacer recovered his drink and decamped to the rocking-chair on the porch to think. Nursing the sour beverage, he wondered how many people had gotten the message, and tried to guess what percentage of the population of the planet was stupid enough to think anything of it. On Tranquility, someone peddling ideological cure-alls would have been shunned, mocked, and, if they persisted, probably shot, but the world of his childhood, colonized centuries earlier by misfits and fierce individualists, taught everyone from a young age about the poison dripping from demagogues’ tongues. Most of the other inhabitants of Håkøya would have less stringent anti-insanity educations, especially the youngest. 

When his drink was empty, Yaw stared into the glass forlornly. He had heard about the conflict with the so-called Incarnation in passing a few times at the tiny trade-post where he bought his supplies, but had always assumed nobody would bother to invade a world populated by retirees and beachfront resorts. Retired or no, he didn’t think he’d be able to ignore this one, not entirely. 

Creakily standing, Yaw set about reconnecting the comms unit and setting it up to record an outgoing message. Maybe it was time to have a chat with Nojus after all. The man always seemed to have a good nose for danger, even if he did use it for all the wrong purposes. 

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