Tales from the Service: A Creeping Pest

2948-01-06 – Tales from the Service: A Creeping Pest 

I am afraid I am prevented by information security protocols from describing the developing situation in Matusalemme in any detail at this time. All I can say is that the Navy still expects to hold Adimari Valis against the Incarnation force threatening the colony, and that action is expected there very soon. Since the system Hypercast relay is still active at this time, the whole Colonial Reach will probably know when things start happening there whatever this feed contains. 

On the recommendation of Admiral Zahariev, several of the larger colonies on the Frontier began collecting volunteers for a defensive garrison force this week. In theory, using this force to shore up threatened worlds will free the Marines for offensive action against Incarnation bases on this side of the Gap as they are discovered, such as the action on Meyerfeld. The Confederated Parliament is currently debating a bill allocating pay for soldiers in this new Frontier Defense Army, and I think it will pass without much fuss. Perhaps this new force will also receive an influx of Core Worlds troops and weapons. With all the panic at Maribel and other highly populated Frontier worlds since the Incarnation showed up at Matusalemme, I think at the very least garrison reinforcements would soothe the nerves of many civilians. 

Instead of focusing on the imminent battle for Adimari Valis, this week we have a story which comes from the bowels of Saint-Lô, the dreadnought which Nojus and I are assigned to for the duration of our reporting assignment. After the ship was damaged at the Battle of Berkant, the Navy saw fit to upgrade as well as repair it. A team of civilian techs working on some of the upgrades in an unpressurized area of the ship reportedly ran into a bit of trouble – while this story comes to us secondhand, I did verify the incident was reported to Captain Liao more or less in the same manner it was told to us. A full interstitial decontamination was ordered, but the teams who performed it found nothing resembling the reported pest, or anything capable of causing trouble with power systems.

Zahra Guillory scowled at her compatriots through the mirrored face-plate of her vacsuit helmet. In the dim confines of the damaged dreadnought, the reflective feature was hardly necessary, but she would need power to clear it, and the suit was operating on passive power only. With inoperative comms, she grabbed each of her compatriots by the wrist to use their suits’ passive audio conductivity. “Don’t just stand there, find a hookup and call the shift boss. He’ll have someone come down here with spare power packs.” 

Gillis, the hapless machine tech who’d accidentally shorted a terrifying amount of electrical power through his supposedly nonconductive Reed-Soares multitool, stood shaking in his fried suit in defiance of Zahra’s instructions, while Yakov, the nanoinspectionguru sent along to verify his work, scrambled away in search of undamaged plug access to the warship’s computer network. The short had produced an electric arc bright enough to trip the automatic mirroring of all three techs’ visors before it had fried their powerpacks with an electromagnetic burst, and while Zahra was not quite blind and Yakov apparently could see well enough Gillis probably saw nothing but the lightless inside of an opaque visor. 

She sighed and tugged him away from the now-ruined relay bank which had produced the short. “Gillis, say something so I know you didn’t cook your damned brain on that arc.” 

“S-suit’s dead, Zahra.” Gillis mumbled. “I’m a dead man, aren’t I? Atmospherics need power.” 

“After that stupid move, I wish.” Zahra clapped the side of his helmet. “There’s a passive backup. Good for about five hours of work. Our suits are dead too.” 

“Hells, I’m sorry.” Gillis reached up and tapped on the outside of his helmet. “Bet it’s dark out there.” 

“The lights are still on.” Zahra honestly didn’t know why; perhaps the simple circuitry of the portable work-lights they’d brought with them into the tight compartment had simply proved too hardy for the EM surge. “Yakov’s going to have someone bring us some fresh powerpacks so we can finish this.” 

“Finish?” Gillis repeated uncertainly. “I don’t know what happened there. That conduit shouldn’t have power unless the ship is powering engines on the auxiliary circuit. Are you sure this is the right place?” 

Zahra would have consulted her virtual schematics, but they were as dead as the rest of her suit. “Schematics aren’t that hard to read. It’s the right place.” 

“But...” Gillis grabbed Zahra’s helmet and pulled it into contact with his own, so she could hear him whispering. “Something must be very wrong.” 

Prying herself free, Zahra turned around to glance in the direction Yakov had gone. “How very wrong?” 

“A lot of things have to go wrong for the auxiliary net to be powered at all.” He flailed blindly toward the exposed conduits and ductwork he’d been in the process of clamping aside when the short had happened. Their job didn’t relate to the auxiliary power system at all – they had come to replace a simple structural integrity hardpoint that lay behind the splayed guts of the ship with a more powerful, newer module. “For it to be powered at the same time as the mains, Zahra. That’s-” 

“Not good, yeah, I get it. No safety margin, no place to dump a power surge.” 

The tech nodded his mirrored helmet. “There’s no way the whole backup power system is charged. It has to be a local fault. Is there anything damaged?” 

“Short of what you just fried?” Nevertheless, Zahra grabbed one of the work lights and played it across the exposed innards of the ship all around them. “This all looks fine to – wait.” She had spotted something in garish magenta winking back at her from among the ship’s interstices. 

“What is it?” 

Zahra stooped closer to the brightly-colored anomaly, unwilling to touch it. The object squatted in between a pair of thick power conduit bundles, though thin, cable-like extensions of the same material were thrown out in several directions. “I have no idea, Gillis. It’s colorful and lumpy. Almost looks like a fungus.” 

“In hard vacuum?” 

Zahra tapped one of the ducts hanging low over the object. "No heat or air here, so probably electronic. It’s got itself plugged into the auxiliary power line and half a dozen other things.” 

The blind tech made a despairing noise. “Don’t touch it.” 

A hand roughly grabbed Zahra’s shoulder and spun her around. She found herself staring into Yakov’s nearly mirrored helmet visor. “Shift boss is sending Taube down with a bag of powerpacks. She’ll be here in-” 

“Never mind that!” Gillis shook Yakov. “Zahra, show him what you found.” 

“Hmm?” 

“There’s power where it shouldn’t be, so Gillis had me look around. I found this.” She pointed behind herself toward the magenta mass nestled in the conduits. “Seen anything like it before?” 

“Like what?” 

Zahra turned around, wondering how nearly blind Yakov was behind his visor. “Like that big lump of...”  

The foreign object was, of course, no longer there. 

“Ain’t seeing anything, Zahra.” Yakov grabbed the work-light and peered into the space near where she had been pointing. 

Despite herself, Zahra shuddered. She had no doubt it had been there – and that whatever it was, it had moved when her back was turned. “I... think we need to call up for a full decontamination.” 

Details

Tales from the Service: Matusalemme's Crowded Sky

2947-12-31 – Tales from the Service: Matusalemme's Crowded Sky 

This week’s entry comes from the tip of the spear – theirs, not ours. A fleet of at least a dozen (reports differ as to the exact number) Tyrant cruisers entered the Matusalemme system during the first shift on the 27th local time, escorting a handful of ships of an unknown (but apparently rather crude) model to a parking orbit around the fifth planet, a gas giant known locally as Bodrogi, which is currently on the opposite side of the stellar primary from the third planet, Adimari Valis. 

They’ve been there ever since, surrounded by a veritable storm of Coronachs. As previously discussed in this space, the system’s local defense force and a series of mercenary auxiliaries make the system rather well defended for its colony size, but even two dozen mercenary outfits, a few second-line warships, and a swarm of short-range patrol boats won’t stand up to the concerted attack of that many fleet cruisers. Almost the same force had plenty of trouble with a single raiding Tyrant a few weeks ago (Tales from the Service: A Mercenary’s Trade). 

Fifth Fleet is scrambling a reinforcement squadron, but it won’t reach the system for some time. For security reasons, I cannot access any information about what ships are being dispatched, or be too specific about their timetable. After the Battle of Berkant, however, I can only imagine the force being sent will represent overwhelming firepower against the Incarnation fleet in Matusalemme. 

In the meantime, the Hypercast Relay in the system is still functional, and ships are able to come and go freely as long as they give the encamped enemy a wide berth. I reached out to a friend of this feed, Jacob Borisov, and he was only too happy to give us some recordings and data streams with which to portray the grim situation in the half-besieged system. I hope this audience will be joining me in praying for a clean and victorious outcome in any battle at Matusalemme; after all, this time it seems the Incarnation has come to stay. 

Jacob Borisov stared out the viewpanel at the artificially-dimmed corona of Matusalemme which washed out the cloud of tactical position-markers which would otherwise have appeared behind it. The situation was far more comprehensible when viewed in the tactical display tank, but things were static enough that he’d moved up to the cruise bridge, where the reassuring buzz of a dozen officers and half a dozen ratings performing the minutiae required to keep Bancroft running smoothly helped him relax. 

The situation was bad, but it was not yet critical. The enemy fleet in system, encamped as it was at nearly the farthest large body from Adimari Valis, had chosen neither to cut off the planet nor to move up in preparation for a blockade. As such, two days after their arrival, traffic out to the edge of the star’s gravitic shadow and inward from it to the planet continued in a mockery of normalcy. Every captain on every ship was waiting for the situation to change, as it could only change for the worse, and to give the orders which would in every case come as a relief. When Nate moved, the civilian skippers would order emergency speed out of the system carrying whatever and whoever they had aboard, and the ragtag defending fleet would move to meet the attackers in order to buy time for the exodus. 

Reinforcements, the Navy had assured Adimari Valis, were already on their way. Jacob believed they were – after all, the fleet had sent a vast number of its own eager boys into the shooting gallery at Berkant without hesitation. This time, however, he knew Nate wasn’t waiting for the fleet. He could feel it in his bones – this time, the Incarnation was not playing with its food. It was biting off a system, which it meant to swallow. The fleet would arrive too late to save the defending force – including his ship. If it was lucky, it might arrive in time to save the colony, but even that seemed unlikely. 

“They’re just sitting there.” Jacob muttered, resting his palm on the armor-glass panel at the forward end of the bridge. 

“Strike patrols out to ten lisec, enough active sensor activity to map the orbital sphere every ten seconds. They’re hardly sitting. They seem to think we’re not either.” 

Jacob turned toward his second in command and marveled at the man’s unruffled appearance. He knew even his signs of worry were hidden deep, but he had always been able to identify his subordinates’ tells before Lestat Pain had hired on. Even for a former Navy man, he was an exceedingly reserved officer. “They’re waiting for something. Another formation of theirs, probably.” 

“You think there will be more Tyrants?” Lestat’s incredulity was obvious. The Incarnation didn’t need even half the force they’d already sent to subdue Matusalemme. 

“No.” Jacob tapped on his wrist control to call up a best-guess wireframe of the new variety of ship the Incarnation had brought to the system. They were blocky, squat things, as ugly as Tyrants were wickedly graceful. A spacer’s eye for design recoiled from the idea of serving on such a ship, which looked like little more than a fabcrete tenement block sheathed in hull plating with two Himura-style star drive spindles bolted port and starboard. “More of these, or something new.” Even the most hideous of all the ugly extruder-hull chimeras operating as haulers on backwater freight runs couldn’t compare to the repelling appearance of the new Nate ships. 

“More?” Even Lestat struggled to conceal his alarm at the idea that more of the repulsive vessels existed. 

“Analysts groundside think these things are meant to be reentry-capable.” Jacob tapped the markers on the wireframe where hull fixtures that might have been landing gear protruded. “Troop carriers.” 

The executive officer squared his shoulders, and Jacob guessed he was wondering where the Incarnation had found a few tens of thousands of infantry brave enough to ride down to a planet’s surface in such an uninspiring vessel. If they were brave enough to make the landing, they were brave enough to charge into the teeth of any defense the planetary governor could throw up before they did. “Have you put the groundside teams on recall notice?” 

Jacob sighed. “No, I haven’t. It’ll be at least another two weeks before our contract is up. I’m going down there to see the operation through personally, since I got them into this mess.” 

“Captain, you can’t be-” 

“Commander Pain, you will be in charge up here in case communications with the ground team are lost.” This was of course a near certainty; the Incarnation would slag every comms satellite in Adimari Valis orbit and wreck the Hypercomm relay the moment they were ready to storm the planet. “Do you understand what that means?” 

“Going down there is-” 

Jacob cut off his protest with a wave. “Do you understand?” 

Lestat Pain backed down and nodded with no sign of agitation, though Jacob knew he was, at some level far below the surface, agitated. “I understand, boss. The company’s name is its most valuable asset. Until it’s hopeless or the battlewagons get here, we stick in the fight.” 

“Good.” Jacob walked past his subordinate toward the lift. He didn’t say anything more, but he hoped his expression communicated the rest, which he couldn’t say in front of the bridge crew – the certainty that the other mercenary outfits in the ragtag defense fleet, being not so protective of their reputations, would flee the moment the enemy made their move. When the time came to stand and buy time, Pain and Bancroft might well find themselves doing it alone. 

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Tales from the Service: An Immortal's Contrition

2947-12-24 – Tales from the Service: An Immortal's Contrition

Due to the growth of this audience in recent months, all of you may not know that while most Way-adjacent religious sects mark the Advent anniversary on 25 December in the standard Terran (Ivanov) calendar, the Navy Chapel and the broader Spacers’ Chapel hold their Advent holiday, the Emmanuel Feast, on the 25th as measured on the old Gregorian Calendar, which has not been in common use since the mid 24th century. This is a tradition they share with the Byzantine Orthodox sect. 

This year, the Ivanov calendar date of Chapel Advent celebrations was 20-21 December, so most of the service personnel here in the Coreward Frontier with the Navy and mercenary auxiliaries have already celebrated their holiday, while most of the rest of the people of the Reach celebrate the holiday tonight and tomorrow.  

With permission from his commanding officer, Nojus and I have arranged to have a recording of Chaplain Thomas Nyilvas’s holiday service on Xavior Vitali made available on our datasphere hub. 

This week’s Tales from the Service features a snippet sent in by Ayaka Rowlins via Nyilvas. Her back-and-forth with the Padre was featured here a few weeks ago, but several days after the Vitali failed to explode spectacularly, she began to open up with her interrogators about how she became an agent of the Incarnation – not just that, one of their elite, trusted with the most powerful counterhuman augmentation and a solitary mission far afield. Today, though, on the eve of the I want to focus on what it is like for such a person to return to the fold, and to the faith of her forefathers. 

Padre Nyilvas wanted me to mention that while it is a joy to see the prodigal daughter to return, it will be another thing entirely to reconcile the Incarnation’s counterhuman idea-space with the ancient values protected by the Confederated Worlds. There are zealots by the billion (at least!) out there who will not simply stand down and take benediction a Spacers’ Chapel altar. 

[N.T.B. - Take note of the fact that Rowlins is aware that Incarnation scouts made covert contact with Confederated Worlds Ladeonists as early as her disappearance in 2945. If they had almost two years before we found them to figure out how to deal with us, none of the border incidents were misunderstandings. The Incarnation planned this war, and something tells me that this odd raid-and-counterstrike stalemate situation is part of that plan. Mark my words, things here will get worse before they get better.] 

[D.L.C. - This piece was composed several days in advance but may be delayed due to a scheduled upgrade to the Maribel Hypercast relay, which has been operating near its maximum capacity since Fifth Fleet moved in. Apologies for the inconvenience.] 

  

Ayaka Rowlins glanced at the guard standing beside her as the crew of Xavior Vitali filed into the chapel, which she had long since realized was the crew mess retrofitted with synthsilk curtains hung over the chow line and the bank of food processors. She had seen more than a few such setups aboard the cramped passenger liners, giving ease to the castoffs of a hundred worlds as they sought a new life on the Frontier.  

The Incarnation, of course, used a different arrangement. Most ceremonies honoring the foresight of the Incarnate and reciting the Denials were conducted virtually via implant feeds, not that Ayaka had participated in many. The time between being passed from a Maribelan Ladeonist cell to Incarnation forward observers and receiving her first pulse-band mission briefing had passed in a blur, but she suspected she had passed many tests of loyalty, intelligence, bravery, and determination in order to earn her augments.  

Governed by a cause and guided by implant-gathered data, the Incarnation had made a weapon out of a misfit Frontier radical, giving her purpose in the form of a list of targets whose continued existence threatened the continuation of humanity and of life itself. She had infiltrated the now-foreign colonies of the Frontier, slipping through the cracks of society with ease and slipping aboard a supply launch to steal aboard a Confederated patrol cruiser, whose lax security proved no obstacle to her implants’ electronic countermeasures. 

It had all gone wrong, though, and Ayaka was glad it had. She had been captured planting the first set of demolition charges – charges which would have painted her hands with the blood of dozens of spacers. even if she had finished her work and escaped in a launch, the deed would have caught up with her sooner or later. 

“Miss Rowlins.” Captain Callahan’s stooped, dour shadow suddenly fell on the prisoner. The ship’s commander had been skeptical of her contrition from the minute she had confessed the full extent of her sabotage, and she didn’t blame him – she had after all nano-fabbed a dart out of the canteen spoon that had come with her rations and barely missed sticking him with it during her first interrogation. “Glad you could join us for the occasion.” 

His voice indicated that he was anything but glad, of course. The ship’s chaplain had likely used every shred of his pull with the officers and crew to allow her a furlough to attend the service. 

“Glad I could make the time, Captain.” Ayaka nodded. The guard behind her carried a number of high-tech tools which could immobilize her at the press of a button, and several other security officers were likely filing in among the crew armed with backup devices and weapons. She had no intention of making trouble, but they couldn’t possibly know that. 

As Callahan took his seat in the front of the temporarily hallowed canteen, other members of the crew stole suspicious or furious glances at the enemy agent standing at the back of the space, but most either didn’t notice Ayaka or did not recognize that the recent crisis aboard Vitali had been caused by someone so apparently harmless.  

As the final stragglers crept in, Chaplain Nyilvas, decked out in his shining-white cassock, stepped up to the synth-sheet lectern which did a poor job of pretending to be made of real wood. He seemed to make eye contact with everyone, but no-one for too long, as the lights dimmed and traditional music skirled out of unseen audio hookups behind him. 

The guard motioned Ayaka to a seat in the all-but-unoccupied last row before standing behind the chair so close that she could hear his breathing down her neck even without the enhanced sensory abilities of her implants. Being behind her didn’t make him any less visible on her wide array of extrasensory information, but it probably made him feel better to be out of her line of sight. 

“Friends and comrades, officers and crew of the Xavior Vitali...” The padre’s usually quiet voice carried through the compartment without the aid of any voice amplification, settling quickly into a comfortable routine. Ayaka leaned back and let the sermon’s tone, if not its contents, seep into her brain, worming its way around the foreign inclusions still resting there. He talked of redemption, and every time he said the word, he seemed to be looking at her – could it be possible that redemption might also extend to a traitor such as herself? 

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Tales from the Service: 11th Mechanized at Meyerfeld

2947-12-10 – Tales from the Service: 11th Mechanized at Meyerfeld 

This has been a more active week than any since the Battle of Berkant here on the Frontier. While Duncan still insists that it is beyond the purview of this feed to relay every detail of the war, skirmishes were fought at Matusalemme (this is at least the third major raid on the orbital infrastructure of Adimari Valis) and near Margaux. Lone Tyrants were driven off planetary raids in several other places, though in those cases the Incarnation vessels retreated even though the local forces were insufficient to seriously threaten those vessels. 

It is estimated by our friends in Naval Intelligence that Nate has between twenty and sixty Tyrant vessels (plus an unknown number of logistics hulls) in the Coreward Frontier at this point, based on the increasing regularity of their attacks. While this force still can’t stand up to the combined throw weight of the Fifth Fleet, they are making good use of the speed and range of their cruisers to keep the Navy on the defensive.  

Admiral Zahariev, however, is not one to cede the initiative entirely. Earlier this week, the press pool was informed that an Incarnation forward supply base at the spaceport of the abandoned colony of  Meyerfeld had been taken by ground assault by the 11th Heavy Mechanized Battalion of the Confederated Marines. While the single Tyrant-type heavy cruiser defending the station was drawn away into an inconclusive skirmish with Fifth Fleet destroyers, the 11th made a hot drop from its trio of assault transports to secure the site. Though Nate was apparently unprepared for the attack, the base personnel put up a stiff, if uncoordinated, defense. 

Carolina Durand provided Cosmic Background with a significant amount of battlefield telemetry from the operation. While an episode of the Vidcast series will be dedicated to showing selected scenes of the ground action, Duncan and I thought it would be good to focus on the experiences of one vehicle – the TA-39 “Lucky Penny” and its crew. 

Before we get any questions from those of you familiar with the habits of Marine ground-pounders, the vehicle is apparently named after a rather attractive armor technician on their transport crew, and while I doubt she posed as inspiration for the likeness on this TA-39’s glacis, if she looks anything like that rather skillfully painted pin-up, none of these ground-pounders have the faintest shot with her until they start earning some serious medals. 

[D.L.C. - Fear not, Cosmic Background fans with children. Ashton will never let shots of this vehicle’s rather arresting crew markings into the main vidcast program. Fortunately, the art, positioned as it is on the middle of the vehicle’s heavy bow armor, is not visible from the camera clusters aboard “Lucky Penny” itself.] 

Lucky Penny paused briefly just behind the last hilltop overlooking the target, and its commander opened his hatch and half-climed out to peer over the crest. On the plain below, a tumbledown ruin of a spaceport city which had once housed six thousand hopeful colonists was slowly being overtaken by a rippling sea of blue-grey foliage which extended to the horizon, as if a particularly slow tide was coming in and flooding its outskirts. Already, many of the half-ruined outer buildings sat as islands amid the false swells of the wind-blown xeno-grass. 

As the other five TA-39s in the column worked their way up to their starting points on either side of the lead vehicle, Lieutenant RansuWaters surveyed the ruins for a few seconds, then turned to watch the command vehicle’s antenna briefly shoot up to send a tight-beam transmission to one of the drone relays circling high above to indicate that his platoon had reached the jumping-off point and receive new orders. 

“Think they know we’re coming?” Bion Vlahovic, the vehicle gunner, asked over the intercom. 

“Would take a minor miracle for them to have missed us plowing into atmo and coming down so close.” Ransu ducked back into his hatch, grateful for the heavily insulated flex-armor issued to vehicle crews. Despite its abundant local life, Meyerfeld was a fairly cold place, with summer temperatures rarely exceeding ten degrees celsius, and it was nowhere near high local summer. “They know we’re coming.” 

“Gardener Actual to all Gardeners.” The platoon captain’s voice cut into the intercom. “Vehicles to line abreast. Apes, you walk from here.” 

Lucky Penny rocked as the four nine-hundred-pound armored assault troopers riding on her rear deck jumped off. “Walk? Hell.” The sergeant leading the infantry platoon assigned to Task Force Gardener shot back. “From here, the apes fly in.” 

On the infantry circuit, doubtless that braggadocio had encouraged a rowdy cheer, but on the tankers’ channel, the only response was the triple-beep signal to ready for the attack. 

Ransu reached up to pull the hatch shut over his head, then engaged the vehicle’s atmospherics and anti-nanite systems. Nate agents were loaded to the gills with nanotechnological dirty tricks, so their ground forces would undoubtedly use similar weaponry; he hopednanodefense systems deployed years before Nate’s appearance in Frontier space were up to the task. Being microscopically chewed into pink mush pooling in the bottom of the vehicle’s crew compartment was not the way Ransu wished to die. 

The two-beep signal for imminent attack sounded, and Lucky Penny’s driver Eddy Dawson began to throttle the fusion-bottle behind the crew compartment up to full combat power. The steady rumble of the fusion powerplant was reassuring, even as Ransu knew it stood a not-too-remote chance of going critical if the vehicle was hit badly by enemy fire. Speed was better than armor, and only a fusion powerplant could give a seventy-metric-ton smart-track vehicle anything resembling speed. 

“What do you think our odds are, Chief?” 

“Bion, they supposedly thing this base was secret. I don’t think we’ve got more than a one in ten chance of buying it here.” 

“One in ten.” The gunner repeated slowly. “And what do you think the odds are of me getting into Penny’s-” 

The long, low single-beep of the charge order sounded, and Eddy dumped power to the electric drive, hurling his two crew-mates back into their padded restraints. On his camera feeds, Ransu watched the other five vehicles of the platoon surge down the broken, scrub-strewn hill in a ragged line. The infantry, clearing the hilltop amid a cloud of dust and sand, sprinted forward only a few steps before their suits leapt into the air and sailed over the rapidly accelerating armored tracks. At the tops of their rocket-assisted jumps, each one fired suppressive bursts of railshot down into the ruined buildings ahead, and each angled in to land just ahead of the heavy armor.Ransu knew their projected landing sites were painted on the driver’s forward view for Eddy to avoid. 

Swiveling his cameras, Ransu picked out a sturdy but dilapidated building which appeared to have been reinforced by struts of newer metal. In the ancient methods armored vehicle crews had been using since antiquity, he kicked his gunner lightly in the shoulder as he put a mark on the building. “Bian, this house offends me.” 

The turret slewed toward the target, and a sizzling dart of plasma belched forth as Bian twisted his trigger-lever. The camera facing the building went white for a moment, then cleared to reveal only foundations and the torn remnants of what looked like a Nate inflatable weather-shelter. 

As if the shot was the signal, the ruins ahead erupted with plasma and laser fire. Eddy threw the vehicle to one side and then the other as energy weapons seared the scrub-brush and rocks on either side. On his console, Ransu could tell most of the incoming was relatively light fare – man-portable and crew-served equipment of the sort they had expected to run into, which would take far too long to eat through Lucky Penny’s armor to stop them from breaching the perimeter. He left these defenders to the infantry – their rapid-firing railguns would either shred these lighter defenses or force the Nate soldiers crewing them to take cover. Instead, he switched to thermal imaging and looked for the bad news. 

The bad news announced itself when the vehicles were halfway down the slope, in the form of a huge energy blast spewing forth from the mouth of a half-ruined alley and coming within a few meters of the captain’s vehicle. Whatever had fired was remarkably well concealed, even in infrared – still, Ransu had seen where it had fired from, and he kicked Bian again, marking the spot. 

Lucky Penny fired again, but two other crews had fired first. Between the three plasma cannons and at least two converging streams offerroceramic railshot, the two buildings shielding the hidden emplacement were blown to pieces so completely that Ransu couldn’t even see any remains of the weapon the defenders had hidden there. 

The infantry started their second leap just as the armored vehicles plowed past – and one, directly through – a cluster of outlying buildings. A trio of Incarnation ground personnel scrambled out of the way of the assault, and Ransu targeted them with the remote railgun mounted on the turret roof. The weapon rattled overhead, perforating all three with red-hot slugs within seconds. The infantry could clean up any stragglers later, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving three Nate soldiers behind his vehicle. 

Because the city was abandoned, and most of its buildings were in any case lightly built and crumbling, the formation of TA-39s plowed directly into the outer ring of structures. Lucky Penny bucked and jumped as it crushed an already half-collapsed one-story structure, smart treads automatically projecting cleat-like spikes into the rubble to achieve traction. This, apparently, was not what the defenders had expected – on the far side of the structure, Ransu saw a pair of wide-eyed Incarnation officers and a small air-skimmer in one camera angle just in time for the entire scene to vanish under the vehicle’s nose as Eddy pushed through the second structure. Most of the cameras blanked out, covered in dust and debris, and only cleared when the vehicle rolled into the open space of a wider street and the camera-lenses flushed themselves of the offending substances. 

“Gardener has penetrated the perimeter.” The captain’s announcement was for the benefit of higher officers, but it carried to Ransu’sheadset as well. “Defenses are brisk, but mostly light. Proceeding to objective Bravo.” 

Bravo, Ransu knew, was the two-pad spaceport the Incarnation detachment had cleared and restored to working order. Why they had decided to install their forward supply dump on a planet rather than setting up on an asteroid or simply parking a fleet of logistics ships in the interstellar darkness somewhere, Ransu didn’t try to understand – Nate was as unintelligible as any alien foe. 

Just as Eddy got the vehicle rolling roughly along the road toward the spaceport grounds, the TA-39 to Lucky Penny’s left shuddered to a halt and began smoking furiously. Ransu didn’t need to see the incoming fire to know the assault vehicle had been hit. “Eddy, get us out of here!” 

As the vehicle wheeled and charged for the cover of an alley nearby, Ransu watched the stricken vehicle. After several seconds, a hatch in the turret roof eruped open and two figures in black tankers’ flex-armor spilled out. A moment later, a second hatch in the roof of the armored bow popped open, but before the driver could get clear, the vehicle erupted in a pillar of fusion-fire, briefly washing out the camera’s digital capture-chips and causing Lucky Penny to rock almost off one of its tracks. The fusion-bottle's safety systems directed most of the blast upward, and the flex-armor of the two fleeing crewmen insulated them from the briefly searing heat and flood of harsh radiation, but even so the blast threw them both across the street and slammed them against a nearby building. 

“Ten percent, Chief?” 

“Shut up and find him, Bian.” Ransu wheeled his cameras around, looking for the armor-killing weapon in visual and infrared wavelengths. A gun capable of coring a TA-39 in one shot had to be very big, and was probably very close. 

Another vehicle’s commander highlighted the gaping storefront-windows of a building several blocks down the wide street, and in infrared Ransu saw the wash of hot air billowing out of this opening. “Got it.” He locked the point for Bian, and the turret swiveled. A weapon inside didn’t have line of sight on any of the other vehicles after they’d all scurried for cover, but none of the TA-39s could train their main guns onto that target without exposing themselves. 

“Where are the damned apes?” Eddy griped over the intercom. The question was barely worth asking; the clatter of automatic railguns and the sizzle of plasma cannons a few blocks away suggested that most of the infantry had found their own problems.  

Fortunately, the infantry charging into the teeth of the high-powered weapon hidden inside the structure proved unnecessary. With a rumble which jolted Ransu even through Lucky Penny’s ample suspension, the vehicle toting the gun which had cored the unfortunate vehicle rumbled forward, the shell of its covering building collapsing around it. The Incarnation ground vehicle was easily twice as large as a TA-39, and it had clearly not been designed as an assault weapon – heavy strakes of ablative armor had been haphazardly bolted to the framework gun-shield protecting a massive barrel covered in a forest of cooling vanes. Most likely, the supply base’s defenders had used spare parts available in their stockpile to turn one of their ground-transports into a last-ditch armored monster. A more skilled crew could have sniped at Task Force Gardener for many blocks, and probably claimed several more vehicles before it was cornered – the operators were obviously overconfident novices. 

“Hold.” The captain’s voice urged. 

Across the street, Ransu watched the two surviving crew of the stricken vehicle stagger to their feet and limp toward the shelter of a nearby ruin. Until the ersatz Incarnation tank had been dealt with, they were on their own. 

The overloaded, haphazardly-built monster lumbered closer. Eddy nudged Lucky Penny back into the alley a few meters, forcing Ransu to deploy one of his two camera-drones above the rooftops to watch its plodding progress. 

“Hold!” 

The vehicle was barely a hundred meters away now. Ransu knew if the Nate crew spotted any of the vehicles, it could probably fire through the flimsy buildings and knock out another TA-39 with ease. 

Without warning, the single long, harsh beep of the charge signal sounded. Reflexively, Eddy engaged the drive, and Lucky Penny surged forward into the open, along with the other five remaining vehicles. As soon as the turret was clear of the alley, Bian swung it to the side and fired, knowing that speed, not accuracy, was their only hope of a quick and clean victory. 

Ransu didn’t see which of the five plasma-bursts killed the huge vehicle, but its front plates erupted into a fountain of molten metal, and its huge barrel, blown clean off its mounting, smashed the framework casemate to pieces as it tumbled to the street. Though it kept rolling ponderously forward for several seconds, the command channel erupted with war-whoops and shouts. 

The captain put a stop to the celebration quickly. “None of that. Let's move. Leave survivors to the apes.” 

As the five remaining vehicles formed up and started rolling, Ransu saw an assault-suited infantryman with a medic’s red-and-white markings on his chest-plate leap into the street from two blocks away and head for the two stranded tankers. Of their driver, who had not made it out before the vehicle’s fusion-bottle had blown, he knew nothing would ever be found. 

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