Tales from the Service: The Cripple of Force 73

2953-01-01 – Tales from the Service: The Cripple of Force 73 

The first sign of trouble almost went unnoticed; a few gray pips briefly appeared at the edge of the bridge tactical display, then vanished within a few seconds. Had Muskins’s bridge crew not been on alert, they might have missed this entirely, or perhaps regarded it as a sensor artifact caused by damage to one of the ship’s many outer eyes. 

The Skipper, of course, was not so optimistic. The moment someone pointed out the phantoms, Rashid Winton saw all the muscles tighten in his commander’s face, and he didn’t see them relax.  

“They’re probing.” Rashid used his sensor controls to sweep one of the active-beam radars over that arc of the local sky, and just barely caught one of the phantoms disappearing out of range. “Trying to see how badly we’re hurt.” 

“Powered radar means powered gun mounts. They know we’re not toothless.” The Skipper stood up from his chair and rolled his shoulders. “They’ll be cautious. Wait until they can gather overwhelming numbers.” 

The best thing to ward off a slashing attack by Coronachs would of course be the support of friendly Magpies, but Rashid knew enough about the situation not to expect this. Force 73 had at least one small carrier among its hulls, but this ship and its squadrons would be sticking close to and supporting the big cruises. There simply weren’t enough strike units around to send some to guard one crippled destroyer while a battle was still going on. 

After a moment of grim silence, the Skipper turned to Lieutenant Sendai. “How long until we have central fire control?” 

“Too long.” Sendai shook his head sadly. “We’ve lost too many sensor points for the automatics. We’re trying to reconfigure some of the sensors as backups for the director but it’s slow going. Maynard wants to go out on the hull to rig some new sensor points and I think-” 

“No.” The skipper waved a hand dismissively. “He’d still be at it when they made their run even if he finished. No sense throwing away lives.” 

“But won’t we all be killed if-” 

“Possibly.” 

This, it seemed, was the end of the discussion; after a moment of blank staring, Sendai realized he wasn’t going to get any more explanation and lowered his head back down toward his console. 

Rashid winced and returned his attention to his sensor controls. If the Skipper was right, and active sensors were likely to make the enemy cautious, liberal and regular active sensor probing might suggest Muskins was not so badly hurt after all. If the battle were going badly enough to force Incarnation ships to retreat, it would also cause their strike assets to be recalled – at least in theory. He’d heard that sometimes a flight of strike craft would be left to deal with a cripped foe even in retreat, abandoning a dozen pilots to assure a warship would never trouble Incarnation forces ever again. Hopefully, they wouldn’t do this for a mere destroyer. 

“Shear-screen net is reconfigured.” Sorian shrugged. “Efficiency is only ninety points, but there are no gaps.” 

“See what you can do to optimize.” The Skipper paced in front of his chair a few times, then sat back down. “You probably have five minutes. Ten at the most.” 

“Aye.” Sorian, with a haunted look, returned to her work. “What do you think our chances are, Skipper?” 

“Hard to say.” The Skipper was silent for a moment as he shrugged on the crash-padding restraints. “One in ten, maybe two in ten, unless we get a lucky break.” His face, though still hard and tense, was neutral; the odds didn’t seem to worry him. 

Rashid set his jaw; he couldn’t let the odds worry him either. Already another hazy grey pip was showing itself at the edge of the display, this time almost dead astern. He swiveled another radar emitter toward it, and almost instantly it faded away. The longer he kept at it, the more time Sorian and Sendai had to get the defenses ready. It might not matter, but if the ship needed a lucky break, every minute it held out was another minute that break might appear. 

 

Lieutenant Winton (that is not his real name) and the crew of his ship did not have to fight their desperate last stand, as it turned out. The battle turned against the Incarnation, and the strike units closing in to complete their destruction were recalled to fight another day.  

Whether other Force 73 units were lost in this battle, Winton did not say, nor would Naval Intelligence permit us to report it if he had. Most likely, if the enemy force retreated early in the battle, losses on both sides were light. 

As to the fate of Muskins (which is not the ship’s real name), we also have no information, but I would hazard a guess (and this is only a guess) that it was stripped for parts and abandoned, if its drive was badly damaged. Force 73 supposedly has at least one repair and service vessel, but a crippled destroyer might be beyond this craft’s ability to restore. 

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Tales from the Service: The First Test of Force 73

2953-01-01 – Tales from the Service: The First Test of Force 73 

While nobody with this embed team (or any other I am aware of) was assigned to the ships of Force 73, we nevertheless do get some datasphere traffic leaking back to us from this squadron. They seem to have arrived in Kyaroh space in mid-December, but specifics are unclear; their mission is far removed from any active HyperComm relay. I’m not even sure how their message traffic is getting relayed back to us; most likely the fleet has a courier route set up to provide slow communication with this force. 

Naval Intelligence has been holding up several of the accounts from this force for further analysis, but we have one which they permitted, which corresponds with the public announcement of the twenty-ninth that Force 73 has fought an engagement against an Incarnation flotilla over one of the Kyaroh colonies and gained control of the orbit-space as a result. Casualties of this battle on either side were not announced. 

Our source for this story claims to be the first mate of a relatively modern fleet destroyer operating with Force 73 that took part in this battle; while he did proide the name of his ship, Naval Intelligence required us to alter or conceal both his name and the name of his ship as a condition of publication. 

Rashid Winton held his breath as a spread of red spearpoints indicating enemy missiles hurtled toward the center of the tactical display. Fountains of yellow mist indicating railshot and countermeasures leapt out to meet them, and missile after missile winked out.  

It was almost enough. There was a moment of wrenching acceleration that threatened to pull his insides out his mouth as the automatic helm controls threw Muskins into an emerency random-walk evasive maneuver and overpowered even the inertial isolation, then a roar louder than any thunder and a shriek of distant tearing metal. The lights on the bridge flickered, then went out completely, taking with them the tactical plot. 

“All stations, damage report!”  

If it weren’t for the earpiece in Rashid’s ear, he never would have heard the skipper’s order. Shaking his head, he swallowed hard against a spinning head and sudden urge to vomit and looked around the bridge. There was no obvious sign of damage to the compartment, but the other five people at the command stations were all slumped insensate against their consoles or just recovering from the effects of a few tenths of a second of extreme acceleration.  Fortunately they’d all been strapped into the crash-padded chairs, so the worst injury in the compartment would be on the order of cracked ribs. 

“Outer hull breached from frame 38 to frame 72.” Lieutenant Sendai, the damage control officer, was the first to respond. “We’ve got several compartments decompressed on decks four and five. plot We’re on batteries ship-wide, and the gravitic drive is offline. Central weapons control and most of the batteries are unresponsive.” 

“We lose the reactor?” 

Even as the skipper asked this, the lights flickered back on one by one, and consoles all across the bridge went from dim low-power mode to full power holographic displays. The tactical plot came back on a second later. 

“Automatic control cut reactor power and tried to start a scram.” MacGowan, the ship’s engineer, sounded shaky on the comms. “But we managed to abort. Reactor power at fifty percent and climbing.” 

“Missile systems operational.” The voice on the comms wasn’t the usual officer for that station, but was nevertheless cool and professional. “Reload ongoing for all launch cells.” 

“Looks like we lost a ventral shear-screen emitter.” Sorian, sitting directly ahead of Rashid, finally announced. As she did, she turned toward the skipper, and Rashid saw an ugly discoloration spreading across her right cheekbone. “I’ll reconfigure the emitter net to cover the gap.” 

“Axial cannon online, but the auto-loader's knocked out. We are prepping for manual reload.” 

“Hellfire, that was close.” Rashid muttered, already scanning the tactical plot. Since their ship had briefly lost drive power, it had fallen back and out of formation; the rest of the squadron was still charging ahead toward the planet and the cluster of enemy ships trying to block their way. Muskins was, for the moment, forgotten. A crippled destroyer could always be recovered or finished off later, at the victor’s leisure. 

“Sendai, get us central fire control and railguns. Forget the engines.” The skipper made a growling sound in the back of his throat. “How’s our sensor coverage?” 

Rashid sat up and quickly scanned his console. “Warning and search sensors are operational. We seem to have lost a few target acquisition emitters.” 

“Keep those active sensors pinging and all the railguns we have warm. If a flight of Coronachs catches us now, we’re on our own.” 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Surveyor’s Monument

2952-12-25 – Tales from the Inbox: The Surveyor’s Monument 

Marta K. took a deep breath as she stepped off the lander’s ramp and onto the gravelly dirt of Theobald’s Rest. The wind that whipped her short black hair bore an acrid and salty taste, but she knew well that the place was eminently habitable, with no serious atmosphere toxins.  

In fact, it had already been successfully climate-formed in preparation for colonists, and those settlers had been on their way when nearby Adimari Valis had been invaded. The colonists had, probably wisely, turned their little flotilla around and returned to Maribel rather than try to set up their new home under the nose of a hostile fleet.  

Marta walked around her lander once, looking for any sign of loose dirt, damage to the craft, or anything else that might render it unable to lift off. She had learned, mostly from the experience of her hapless peers, not to leave anything to chance when she was the only sapient on a whole planet. Anyone who did might end up being that planet’s permanent inhabitant. 

She had come to Theobald’s Rest to investigate whether the Incarnation had put its talons into the world’s stony soil, but that mission didn’t really require landing. Indeed, she had finished that task in a few dozen orbits; there was nothing to see on the ground, and no artificial objects orbited the world except the satellites Naval Survey had left to monitor the ecological and climatological conditions. Landing was in service of a personal objective. 

The lander had come down to a computer-selected landing site, the flat top of a low, stony hill overlooking a broad plain. Behind it, rugged slopes marched upwards toward a tremendous, white-capped mountain peak, the southernmost end of a long line of mountains. As Marta worked her way down the hillside, tiny, lizardlike animals skittered away from her feet and into any convenient hiding place. She paid them no mind, except to verify that they didn’t resemble any of the five dangerous species known on this world. 

Long ago, Marta had lost count of the number of worlds she’d put boots down on somewhere north of five hundred. Most of them were just catalog numbers and file entries; habitable perhaps, but situated in poor locations or with undesirable conditions that saw them passed by for colonization. A dozen or so had been on the colonization track at one point or another, but only three had actually been picked up by the Colonial Initiative and assigned colonists. Of those three “babies,” only the eldest – 87216531c, now known as Theobald's Rest – had actually had colonists dispatched.  

Marta had been a frontier surveyor for most of her life, and it was, in most respects, a solitary and damned thankless life. She always traveled the stars alone, except for a brief period when, love-struck, she’d married a colleague and tried to merge their affairs. That had ended as soon as it had started, as most frontier romances tended to, and she’s learned her lesson. The only lasting result of her forty odd years charting, exploring, and cataloging habitable worlds along the Coreward Frontier was the addition of three worlds to the Initiative’s roster. It was not much, but it could bear much fruit in generations to come. 

Knowing that as soon as the war was over, thousands of eager settlers and vast quantities of machinery would be making long-delayed planetfall down there on the plain, Marta wanted to leave them a message. She had hoped to be there looking on when they landed, or at least to visit within the first few months to see their early successes, but years of war had brought colonization no closer and retirement was creeping up on her. Marta was still sharp as ever, but it wouldn’t be long before she was too old for solitary wandering and survey missions. Perhaps by the time the colonists arrived, she would no longer be able to visit. 

At last, halfway down the slope, Marta found a spot ideal for her purpose, a relatively smooth vertical cliff formed by a freshly broken slab of hard granite. Sizing up the rock face, she unslung the plasma cutter off her shoulder, warmed it up, and aimed it up at the top. She would have to do things freehand of course, but this was far from her first pass at cutter graffiti. 

After a moment’s thought, Marta pressed the trigger, adjusted the cutter’s beam length, and carved her message into the rock: 

BLESS ALL WHO SETTLE 
 ON THIS GOOD WORLD 
AND THOSE BORN TO 
CALL IT HOME 

M.B.K., SURVEYOR, AD 2952 

With that, she lowered the cutter, surveyed her work, and started back up the slope with a wistful smile on her face.  

Though Marta has not been in many of our episodes, you may recall that when we launched the text feed series, one of her adventures was the first Tale from the Inbox presented here. Now apparently nearing retirement, she responded with this brief story when I reached out to her to check in on her current situation, and I could think of nothing better to schedule for our Dec. 25th entry. Obviously we will be enjoying the Feast day here at Sagittarius Gate in the traditional Navy way, with service, food, good company, and singing. 2952 is drawing to a close, and we have many hopes for the new year, perhaps the last of this sorry conflict. 

Marta, even now, is looking forward to peace, and the restarting of such joyful activities as colonization of new Frontier worlds to be lived on for generations to come. Perhaps Theobald’s Rest will become a great metropolis like Maribel some day, or perhaps it will be an insignificant and peaceful place, but whatever becomes of it will be a blessing to many millions spanning the centuries. 

Nojus and the rest of the team wish you all a happy Emmanuel Feast, or Christ Mass, or whatever variation of the holiday your family celebrates. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The Dirtside Job

2952-12-18 – Tales from the Inbox: The Dirtside Job 

The last we heard of captain Svetlana Cremonesi of the Tycho Spike, she was trying to save Nestor Palazzo from ferrying a group of Gilhedat on their diplomatic mission. Though she was not entirely successful in this effort, Mr. Palazzo does seem to have benefitted from her intervention all the same. 

When I reached out to see if she had any new accounts of her travels as a light-duty spacer here in Sagittarius, her first response was a rather colorful refusal, which I am not permitted to publish because of our editorial rules on profanity. 

Evidently she changed her mind, because a few days later this story found its way into my inbox. It reveals tantalizingly little about her current activities, but much about her current fears, which still revolve around unwelcome life-forms getting aboard her ship. 

An unfamiliar alarm woke Svetlana from troubled sleep. As usual, she was vertical and pulling on her trousers before she was even fully awake to marvel at the fact that she had never heard this particular alarm sound before, in her decade of operating Tycho Spike. 

“Hells, what now.” Svetlana hopped over to the desk console and smacked the surface to wake the display. As she wrestled with the catches that fastened a standard set of spacer’s smart-fabric fatigues, her eyes roved across the ship status panel that appeared there. At first, the board looked normal - nothing was on fire, nothing important was unpowered that should be, and nothing was powered that shouldn’t be. 

It was the outside temperature reading – thirty Celsius – that snapped Svetlana back to her senses. Her ship wasn’t on an automated course between station and system jump limit, or vice versa. Nor was it docked to the side of one of Confederated Sagittarius’s many stations, awaiting cargo.  

No, she had landed on a planet – a habitable planet at that – and that explained the unfamiliarity of the alarm. She hadn’t actually landed Tycho Spike since the first year she’d owned it, after all. It must be related to external conditions, not to the ship’s internal status. 

Sure enough, when Svetlana called up the detailed alert list, it was full of “PERIMETER BREACH SENSED” - a clear enough phrase, though even in its clarity she was confused. She hadn’t realized her ship had a ground perimeter sensor system installed.  

A few more commands called up the external camera feeds, and soon she was looking out four digital windows onto the rolling, mauve-colored grassland that went on for miles around her landing site. She’d gotten a decent look at the place from orbit, but had landed after dark, so this was her first real look at the world she’d landed on.  

Svetlana had to admit it was beautiful, even though normally she didn’t go in for any place that threatened to get her boots dirty. Supposedly the place was on the Survey colonization list for after the war, and she hoped whichever ship-full of clod-shovelers landed here first were wise enough to respect what they had been given. 

She had only a moment to appreciate the aesthetics of the world, though. At least two dark shapes were weaving through the tall grassy plants toward the ship. When visible light offered no clue as to what they were, she switched to thermal, but that was no good either, showing only bright, hot ellipses. 

At first, Svetlana thought these might be emissaries of her employer – this was no pleasure trip, after all – but something in the way they moved suggested wild animals, not people. Normally, those would be no threat to her or the ship, but this was an unfamiliar world, one for which Survey had never published a biosphere report. What was out there could be almost anything. 

Svetlana grabbed her gun-belt and fastened it around her hips. She’d heard all the usual watering-hole stories of alien peril: acid-spitting horrors that could eat holes in a small ship’s hull, titanic megafauna which could tear metal like tissue paper, hive-mind drones kamikaze-diving into air-vents and access ports by the thousands, and of course the ever-popular monsters composed largely of phased matter, capable of sidling through solid bulkheads to rend the unsuspecting crew within. No doubt such fears were misplaced on such a pleasant world as this, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared. 

As Svetlana configured the hull loudspeakers to shriek an alarm every time the proximity alert went off, one of the creatures briefly revealed itself in a clearing. It was long of body and low to the ground, slinking forward with its narrow muzzle lowered as if smelling its way. She saw no eyes, nor ears, nor fur; the body seemed almost a sculpture of liquid obsidian, rippling with the motion of every tendon and muscle. She shuddered at the idea of running into something like that unawares. Hopefully her employer’s goons knew the local hazards better than she. 

Even as she thought this, the chime of incoming comms sounded. Svetlana brought up the lights, rubbed the remaining sleep out of her eyes, then hurried forward to the cockpit to take it from there, in case a video transmission was requested. 

Sure enough, the incoming request was from Piers Jerome, her current employer. His ship, the Leyla Robbins, was entering orbit, and had presumably spotted her transmitter.  

Jerome’s chubby face and insincere grin filled the center viewpanel as soon as Svetlana slapped the “accept” control. “I’m surprised you beat us here, Captain Cremonesi.” 

“It wasn’t hard to find.” Svetlana shrugged. “I got here day before yesterday and didn’t see you for three shifts, so I decided to land.” 

“Shame you don’t have high-end gravimetric sensors. We were already in-system by then.” Jerome clapped his hands together. “We will be planetside in about two hours.” 

“I’ll be waiting.” Svetlana hesitated. “Going to be all kinds of fun transferring cargo in normal-gee. Plus there’s a good bit of local wildlife skulking around down here.”  

Jerome waved one pudgy hand. “Xenolife shouldn’t give us much trouble. Nothing on this world is classified as sapient.” 

“I’m more concerned about it being classified as hungry.” Svetlana started as another perimeter alarm sounded. “But we’ll figure that out when you get here. Tycho Spike out.” 

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