Tales from the Service: A Disheartened Hunter

2948-03-31 – Tales from the Service: A Disheartened Hunter 

The silence and darkness that surrounded Burbot in the interstellar void always unsettled Tonya Hristov. Her little ship, small enough to be mistaken for the overgrown launch of a proper warship, seemed too frail and cramped to survive in the endless abyss, but this was its natural habitat all the same – the void which so unsettled the skipper provided shelter for the craft and crew in equal measure to the distress it caused her skipper. 

Burbot, a warship despite her modest size, did not shelter in the void merely to evade the prying sensor-lenses and slicing pulse-beams of Incarnation hunters. Tonya knew her little ship was the hunter, and the sharp-beaked Incarnation cruisers, each outgunning Burbot forty times over and outweighing her by almost that amount, were her prey. In the interstellar void, with no solar primary to betray her presence and no planetary-disk dust to heat her hull through miniscule impacts, the ship’s EM-swallowing hull plates were perfect camouflage, and her over-sized eyes – huge sponsions studded with every kind of passive sensor imaginable – searched all directions for the behemoths she had come to hunt. 

Intelligence – she knew not from where – had given Tonya her hunting-grounds, but luck and skill would still be needed to pick up the scent. She paced back and forth on the tiny command deck, wondering whether it was time to make a jump to the next search area – Burbot was as alone in this one as a vessel could possibly be. Her command had so far struck out on all its patrols, intelligence or no – not a single enemy vessel had ever been sighted.  

In the shadow of her more famous sister Mahseer, morale aboard Burbot had steadily ticked downward, and Tonya was worried that if they did sight an enemy ship, the crew would not react in time to exploit the advantage. Most of them were only too happy to miss out on the fame and mortal peril of destroying a Tyrant – what they wanted was to do their part, to contribute to the war effort at least as much as the responsibility they had been given. On a little stealth-assault cutter, that responsibility was comfortably low; even to demolish an Incarnation salvage tug or repair ship would satisfy most of the crew’s hunger to do their part and raise morale. 

“Time to jump recharge?” Tonya asked idly, perhaps for the fifth time since her ship had burrowed through the cosmic fabric to its current position. 

“Seven minutes, thirty-one seconds.” The reply came from the ship’s voice-assistant computer rather than her two present subordinates, who both appeared to be ignoring their skipper completely.  

“Chart a jump to the next search sector.” Tonya paced back and forth a few more times, trying to focus on the morale problem as an alternative to dwelling on the perfect void just beyond the hull. At the extreme ends of her route, that emptiness was less than two meters from her – and only twenty centimeters of that distance was taken up by the pressure hull which cleanly divided her hemmed-in world from... 

Tonya shook her head and squeezed the bridge of her nose with her fingers, forcing that line of thinking out of her skull. The morale of her crew would not be easy to restore without success, but chances of success were increasingly compromised by low morale. It was a problem she was sure many skippers had tackled over centuries of interstellar warfare, but she had never seen a clear solution proposed in the Naval Academy. Any attempt she made to raise spirits would seem half-hearted without results – Burbot needed to face a challenge and overcome it, but not a challenge so great that its discouraged crew cracked under the strain. 

“Transition event!” Kennet MacLean nearly fell out of his crash-padded chair in alarm as he squeaked out the message. “Range is six lisec.” 

Tonya leapt to the chair reserved for her and pulled the air-display pillar down from its recessed overhead position. In front of her face, Burbot appeared as a tiny green arrowhead from which dashed axes projected out in six directions. The oscillating mote of the transition signature appeared near the edge of the display area. The incoming vessel was almost exactly behind her little ship – distant, but barely close enough to make an intercept possible. 

“Go to quarters.” Tonya tapped a few commands into her armrest keypad even as the lights dimmed and the general quarters alarm began buzzing. “Get me an ID on that ship. Helm, get us moving.” 

“Course?” Hugo Kang, on duty at the helm station, turned around in his chair. 

Tonya scowled at him, trying not to look as nervous as she felt. She hated to be brusque with the man, but he should have known what course to plot without asking. He was, after all, on the command deck of a state-of-the-art Confederated Navy stealth-assault cutter, not a pleasure yacht. 

Fortunately, the helmsman got over his uncertainty upon seeing her expression. “Intercept course, aye. Maximum stealth.” He jabbed at his controls, and the pulsing mote in the display swung around the unmoving arrowhead in the display until it was almost directly ahead. A dotted arc showed Burbot’s intended path, and a fuzzy cone showed the possible courses of the unknown ship, slowly narrowing as more data filtered in through the cutter’s many sensors. 

Tonya watched the mysterious mote carefully. She had been assured there would be no friendly traffic through the search area, and that it was likely Incarnation ships would pass through. Perhaps by analyzing the timing of raids, Naval Intelligence had been tight-lipped on exactly how they had learned to expect enemy ships in this specific patch of void, but for once, the tip had paid off. “What’s our best guess on Nate drive recharge time?” 

“Intelligence database says at least fifty minutes for a Tyrant, a bit less for the big haulers.” MacLean caused a timer to appear on the forward display counting seconds since the vessel had appeared. “Still only one signature.” 

Tonya nodded, though neither of her subordinates was looking in her direction. “We stay quiet until we know what it is.” Implied, of course, was the freedom to use the ship’s decidedly un-stealthy maximum acceleration rating to intercept a soft target. Incarnation haulers were not entirely helpless, but their defensive laser armament was only proof against strike-ship attacks. Such weapons could cause enough damage to send Burbot limping back to port, but they were no existential threat to even a cutter. 

“Could it be a trap, Skipper?” Kang asked, his voice high and uncertain. 

“Sure could.” Tonya replied. “But I’d bet my life it’s not.” 

While this was meant to be a joke, Kang clearly did not see the humor in the quip. “The Incarnation is too smart to drop a lone ship right into our kill-box like that. It’s a trap. It’s gotta be a trap.” 

Tonya keyed in a comm channel on the keypad. “Ensign Nowell to the bridge.” Nowell was one of the ship’s other helm-capable officers, junior to Kang but likely far less rattled by this sudden onset of danger. “Lieutenant Kang, you are relieved of duty immediately. I’ll take over the helm.” 

“But-” 

“You are relieved.” With a heavy heart, Tonya keyed in a command override, disabling her subordinate’s system access. His terminal blanked, and a display-screen unfolded to Tonya’s left to let her supervise the ship’s course until the ensign arrived to take Kang’s place. She studiously avoided looking at the harried man until, head downcast, he scurried off the command deck and slid down the ladder into the rest of the ship. 

MacLean kept his silence until Kang was gone. “Was that necessary, Skipper?” 

“Hells, I wish it wasn’t.” She kept her tone and face calm. Kang’s fear and shame would dissipate in time – or they would boil over and he would do something incredibly stupid. Either way, the problem would keep until after the enemy ship was dealt with, and perhaps a successful attack would solve the morale problem for everyone else. 

MacLean looked like he was about to stand up for his associate – Tonya knew the two were quite friendly – but the arrival of Ensign Nowell stilled any further protest. Without a word or question, the young man took Kang’s place at the third station, and Tonya ceded the helm controls. To his credit, he didn’t ask if the attack was just another simulation drill; he treated it like it was the real thing. That was good because, as MacLean and Kang had seen, it was no drill. For the first time, the target was real. 

“Time to weapons range, thirty-eight minutes.” Nowell announced.  

“We’re going to have one shot at this bastard.” Tonya glancing up at the displayed time since first detection, which showed barely four and a half minutes had elapsed. They could shave a little more time off at full speed, but she didn’t want to use that until she was certain the enemy couldn’t escape and couldn’t fight. “Gunnery, warm up the prow cannon.”  

The message, computer-directed to the gunnery control room two decks below, received an immediate double-beep acknowledgement from the scrambling weapon crew. 

“Probable ID, Incarnation hauler. Smaller than the usual model, but it’s got a similar drive signature.” MacLean seemed somewhat relieved, and Tonya didn’t blame him. Even she didn’t relish the thought of shoving a cannon up a Tyrant’s thrust-bells. 

“All stations, this is not a drill. We are closing in on a lone ship, likely a Nate supply hauler.” Tonya announced. “Naval Intelligence handed us a live one for once.” 

As the time to intercept ticked down, Tonya wished she could get up and roam the ship, listening quietly at every doorway and snooping on every station. Of course, her place was on the command deck, firmly strapped into the crash-padded chair. She couldn’t wander around to gauge how quickly or sluggishly her other thirteen subordinates were reacting to the alert. The lone enemy hauler’s hope for survival hinged on the proportion of Kangs to Nowells and MacLeans on Burbot.  

If such an easy prize did get away after months of failure of the vessel to spot anything, Tonya knew she would lose her command, and they might all spend the rest of the war shuffling cargo as logistics officers in the fleet’s long supply chain. Perhaps that would suit Kang and a few others, but it would absolutely crush the rest, herself included. For all the unease the interstellar void caused her, Tonya knew she couldn’t go home to the comfortable open skies of the Core Worlds until she had done her duty. 

“Still no additional jumps.” MacLean interrupted Tonya’s thoughts. 

“Shame.” She heard herself replying. “We’re not going to beat Zappa’s record today, but this one is a good start.” 

Like Mahseer, whose exploits we covered previously in this space (Tales from the Service: A Tyrant’s Downfall ), Burbot is one of the few Navy ships, most of them Stealth Assault Cutters, which have tangled one-on-one with Incarnation ships of any description and emerged victorious. Though her kill (a small cargo vessel likely ferrying parts and supplies to a raiding Tyrant squadron) was not nearly as spectacular as that described previously, the frankness with which Burbot’s skipper describes the low morale and uncertain bravery of her crew prior to their stroke of good fortune ensured that I found this story compelling from a human perspective.  

It is very easy for me – and probably for most other non-spacer readers of this text feed – to identify with the unease and fear of Burbot’s skipper and crew. If they had been cornered in the void, there would have been no record of their loss or their struggle – their little vessel would have simply failed to return from patrol, and seventeen markers would have been planted in their various home-worlds' memorial gardens for those claimed by the vast void. 

[N.T.B. - It takes nerves of titanium alloy to run a flimsy can like those cutters up close to a big Incarnation warship, stealth systems or no. It’s no surprise that not everyone who ends up in that service isn’t made of the right stuff. Personally, I would never do it .Give me open skies and a deadly xenopredator over that sort of tension any day.] 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Rock In the Way

2948-03-24 – Tales from the Service: A Rock In the Way 

While the Incarnation consolidates at Matusalemme, speculation has been running wild here at Maribel as to where they will strike next. No clear answer has been reached at higher levels of command that we are aware of, but multiple worlds are being given extra resources and FDA manpower to prepare. 

Naval Intelligence has received many reports from Navy, FDA, and mercenary auxiliary sources who claim to know with some certainty what the enemy’s next target will be. Obviously, all these contradictory leads can’t be correct at once, and Intelligence is pursuing the most likely leads and feeding the results of their investigations to Fifth Fleet. 

One of our readers, who could not reveal her location on security grounds, is convinced that she has been deployed to their next target. Based on information from her account, there are several worlds which she might be posted to – all of them near the direct line between Maribel and Matusalemme. If this is indeed the enemy’s axis of advance, that actually gives me hope – the closer the enemy comes to Maribel, the easier it will be for Fifth Fleet to force a favorable engagement. 

For FDA units, this speculation is not an idle way to pass time. These units are mainly composed of light infantry – they are only a few weeks of training removed from local militias, and though they have standardized weapons and uniforms, they have no significant numbers of personnel trained to operate armor-suits, heavy fighting vehicles, or heavy weapons. Without the fleet, FDA has only fortifications and man-portable weaponry with which to take on the Incarnation. 

 

As the last light of the day faded and the blue-black curtain of darkness crossed the sky, Glorinda Eccleston sat in the doorway of her rapid-fab shelter and watched the stars come out. 

The glare of work-lights illuminated the construction project behind her ensured that only the brightest stars would appear, but the stars she wanted to see were the local primary’s nearest neighbors. Matusalemme, around which Adimari Valis lay in durance, appeared low over the southern horizon. The bright binary system of Mal Xanthe, one of the great natural lighthouses of the Frontier, peeked over the hills a little while after sunset, both stars clearly visible. Maribel, farther away than Matusalemme, was barely visible over the lights’ glare, but with the help of a pocket smart-optic, Glorinda picked it out anyway, low in the northern sky. 

Maribel seemed so far away, and Glorinda shuddered. When the Incarnation came to the world her unit had been sent to – and it would soon, she suspected – they could only draw things out and hope that the battle-fleet orbiting that distant pinprick would sweep in to the rescue, scattering the Incarnation fleet with overwhelming firepower. 

That this plan hadn’t worked out for Adimari Valis didn’t sit easy with Glorinda, but she had to put a brave face on for her company. When – really, if – the Navy rode to the rescue, she was the only person in the unit with high-powered, navy-spec comms gear. She could call some of that firepower onto Nate forces on the ground when it arrived – and until then, the FDA’s only heavy weapons not built into surface fortifications would a the hundred-odd disposable mass-driver satellites, each carrying only fifty shots. There was no way that would be enough firepower to defend a planet for long. 

“Eccleston, do you have a moment?” 

Glorinda jumped. “What-” Captain Moravec had once again snuck up on her – his quiet footfalls and usually quiet voice ensured that the spectacled officer was rarely noticed moving about the chaos of the camp and construction site unless he wanted to be, especially at night. He always seemed to be everywhere when it suited him, and nowhere when it didn’t.  “Sorry sir. What do you need?” 

“Walk with me.” Moravec, mag-lenses of his glasses glinting in the indirect glow of the work-lights, was otherwise only a slim shadow in the night. Glorinda hopped to her feet and followed him along the main path through the camp, downhill and away from the construction site. 

Only after they’d passed the outer perimeter of sentry-posts did he speak again. “How do you know they’re coming here next?” 

“Captain, I...” Glorinda hadn’t spoken to anyone about her suspicions. She hadn’t even noted them in her personal log. How had Moravec known? 

“You stargaze at dusk every day as if you’re expecting to see something up there change.” Moravec didn’t break his stride, and his quiet voice remained devoid of emotion. “I’m not the only one who knows what you’re thinking. Who told you?” 

“Sir, no, it’s nothing like that. Nobody in the fleet tells me anything, and there’s nobody in-system talking on Navy frequencies even if they did. I just have... I guess it’s a hunch.” 

Captain Moravec processed this for several seconds, leading her unerringly along one of the winding paths leading down the hill to the heavy-lift landing pad in the valley below. “It’s a hunch that’s got you scared half to death, Eccleston. Lay it out for me.” 

“I got to thinking a while back, what does the Incarnation want in the Frontier?” She pointed up to the sky, though her commanding officer probably couldn’t see it. “They don’t want empty worlds, there are plenty of those, and nicer ones than Adimari Valis. They could have had Berkant, for example.” 

“Perhaps their leaders want the Xenarch digs. If so, they would never come here.” 

“We’ve all seen the psych-briefing on Incarnation ideology. They don’t value things, remember? Best guess I have is that they want people – people as a group, plugged into their head-wire net and obedient to their crusade.” 

“Human capital.” Moravec said the phrase with such distaste that he clearly meant it to mean slaves. “Adimari Valis was evacuated before they got it, thank God. But there’s not much population here, either.” 

“No.” Glorinda shook her head. “But if they want people, there are only a few places on the Frontier to get them – and from Matusalemme, sir, it seems to me the rock we are standing on is in the way.” 

Moravec stopped and looked toward the northern horizon. Glorinda couldn’t see his face, but she could see her logic had made an impression on him.  

“I see.” The captain eventually replied. “Thank you, Eccleston. Have you shared this with anyone else?” 

“No sir.” 

“Keep it that way.” He turned on one heel and began leading back toward the camp outskirts. “And just for now, if you’re going to stargaze, at least be cheery about it.” 

Glorinda hurried to catch up with her commander. She knew how important her putting a brave face on for the rest of the company was. “I’ll try, Captain.” 

Details

Tales from the Service: Ladeonist Roundup

2948-03-17 – Tales from the Service: Ladeonist Roundup

Three days ago, the Navy finally abandoned the final effort to relieve Adimari Valis. While records are still being compiled, the estimate is that the battles in the Matusalemme system cost the lives of almost ten thousand Navy spacers and mercenary auxiliaries – and that’s just a count of the spacers engaged. Of the twenty percent of Adimari Valis’s population which could not or would not evacuate and the unclear number of local groundside defenders (including Jacob Borisov), no casualty figures are known, and it is possible none ever will be. 

Matusalemme’s relatively advanced orbital infrastructure (for its colonial population) fell into enemy hands almost intact and were not demolished in the last Navy surveillance recordings of the system. Perhaps the world will be relatively unscathed when it is retaken. 

This week’s entry was submitted in response to last week’s entry about local efforts on Maribel to catch Incarnation agents behind the lines. Evidently, there are counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence task forces assigned to this task on almost every major world in the Reach – including, if some of the messages I’ve received are correct, the Hegemony core worlds, which are about as far from the action as one can get. 

Because of their counterhuman augmentations and the support of many radical domestic Ladeonists, rooting out these saboteurs and spies has proven at least as challenging as forcing the enemy’s slippery Tyrant cruisers into an engagement on the Navy’s terms. Other than the Yaxkin City explosion some months ago (which still has not been confirmed as related to any Ladeonist activity or Incarnation agents), these agents, when operating far from the front lines, seem to mainly focus on soft targets with low security, which has maximized the lifespan of each agent or cell, but also limited the casualties and damage caused by their efforts. 

[N.T.B - For all that Duncan’s optimism has thicker armor than a dreadnought, there’s no path to retaking that world right now. As much of a nightmare as losing a colonial outpost like Adimari Valis is, that place is going to stay in Nate’s hands for a while. Any holdout pockets of mercenary or local militia forces on the ground are on their own – the Navy’s big guns aren’t riding to the rescue before they’re overwhelmed or starved out.] 

Commander Tal Vieth glowered at the line of grav-shackled prisoners in the security annex’s single basement cell. Of the eleven men and women his outfit had rounded up in connection with a local Ladeonist cell, he would have bet his entire retirement savings that one knew something that would lead his force to the capture of Agent Horus. 

Yejide Blum, Tal’s second-in-command, strode up and down the line of prisoners, twirling her joltwand and snarling so ferociously that he was beginning to think she might bite one of them. The other members of the counterinsurgency force stood their guard silently around the cell’s gravitic-shear door, helmet faceplates blanked, though Tal knew them well enough to suspect there was a betting pool being organized on a private comms channel. They knew to leave interrogations to the experts. 

“Let’s not play games.” Yejide hissed, turning around to pace the line once more. “Your lives were over the day you sheltered an agent of an enemy power. You’ll spend the rest of your lives in the worst damned military prison the Confederated Navy can find.” 

Tal discovered which of the prisoners was the leader, and which two were most likely to flip on Horus, before his subordinate had finished her dire pronouncement. As with most Ladeonist cells, these eleven were mostly the idiot children of local middle-managers, petty potentates, and bureaucrats, whose upwardly-mobile parents had failed their children. 

In three cases, their descent into the underworld of counterhuman revolutionaries might have been checked in adolescence, except for the intervention of protective parents calling in favors to shield them from the consequences for minor vandalism and such petty crimes. Now, he wondered if those same parents were proud of the monsters they had created – chip-headed freaks who tweaked their bodies and minds in the name of overthrowing the comfortable order that had created them. 

The previously-identified leader snorted derisively as Yejide passed him, and she whirled and raised the joltwand to his face before he could say anything. After a brief pause, surprised at the reflexes of his captor, he smiled. “You think you scare us? If we are useful to the cause, Horus will free us. If we are not, then you can only hold us until our final victory.” 

Tal thought back to the records he’d gone over. This leader, Sirius Twickley, was a gangly scarecrow with the bright eyes of a true believer, even though his body lacked most of the traditional counterhuman modifications. He believed in his cause, but apparently, he didn’t believe it enough to risk his parents noticing the changes and kicking him out of their opulent four-bedroom condominium near the city center. Other than spend two nights in a small-town drunk tank after an act of minor political vandalism, he’d never sacrificed anything for his cause – but he seemed only too happy to throw away the lives of his friends. 

“Horus is a coward.” Yejide’s snarl vanished, to be replaced by a sickly-sweet, condescending smile. When she smiled genuinely, Tal found the woman somewhat attractive, but when her mind was on business, she became like the rest of his unit – blankly stone-faced, expressing emotional responses only when they were useful. As effective as this was, it didn’t look good on anyone. “He won’t go after a high-security prison to rescue a few failed academics and worthless chip-heads. He used you and expended you when he needed to throw us off.” 

“We’ll be out of prison within a week of the war being over.” Twickley countered, and his voice carried no hint of doubt. “And the Navy won’t send us anywhere we actually risk dying before then.” 

He was more right than Tal liked, of course. As non-violent dissidents, even ones with nominal treason charges against them, the Navy brass wouldn’t risk the trouble their relatively affluent families would make if they were dealt with as harshly as they deserved. 

Yejide knew it, too. Tal saw the calculation working its way through her mind in the minute changes of her stern expression shortly before she flipped the joltwand over her hand and drove it into Sirius Twickley’s solar plexus. She must have used a low setting, because he screamed as he fell to the rough nanocrete floor – a high joltwand setting would lock up the muscles required to scream. Twickley was a lost cause. With a wave, Tal gestured for two of the masked men behind him to enter the cell and take the ringleader away. 

As Twickley, still screaming and struggling feebly, was dragged out, the eyes of the other ten flicked between Tal and Yejide. Several were nervous – they knew how much more agonizing a joltwand’s touch could be to a person with unorthodox electronics hooked to their nervous systems, even on low settings. They couldn’t know their leader was only being taken away to be held somewhere he couldn’t influence them – for his part, the gangly ideologue seemed to believe he was going to be executed. Tal hoped the fear of death might scare some sense into him, but he doubted that would happen. 

Before the grav-shear barrier reasserted itself, Tal stepped into the cell and laid a hand on Yejide’s shoulder. It was time to present them another path. “Your damned fool of a leader might be right.” He announced quietly, before Twickley’s screams had quite faded out into the distance. “If we send you to the tribunal, you might be out after the war is over. For your sake, I hope you aren’t. You’d be safer behind bars.” 

One of the younger Ladeonists, a girl of perhaps twenty years’ age, frowned. “Safer?” 

Tal turned to her and nodded. “Tonight there are six grieving families thanks to Horus. By tomorrow, it might be thirty. Treason proceedings are datasphere-searchable records by law.” 

Several of the imprisoned Ladeonists gulped or glanced at their fellows. They weren’t afraid of vengeful families of Horus’s victims, he knew – they were afraid of something far closer to home, and far more immediate. Their parents could not be lied to or spun into believing that they had been unjustly treated. 

“Now then.” Yejide shook Tal’s hand off her shoulder. “Let’s play a little game. The one of you chip-heads who leads us to Horus goes free, no questions asked. The rest go to the tribunal.” 

Tal nodded his assent and folded his arms behind his back. As he looked up and down the line of prisoners one more time, he wondered who would break first. 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Glitch in the Gap

2948-03-03 – Tales from the Service: A Glitch In the Gap 

The Navy techs and cleaning crew had done their best to put the off-duty lounge compartment back into factory-fresh condition, but no amount of cleaning could purge the smell of space from the bulkheads and fixtures. 

The command deck of Terence Morey didn’t have enough space to pace properly, so Marty had relocated his daily regimen to the leisure deck as soon as that had been repaired sufficiently that one no longer needed a vacsuit to visit it. The place was still as haunted as any part of a ship could be, and it reeked of the interstellar void so strongly that he was mystified that none of the Navy crewmen sent aboard to help him return to Maribel seemed to notice. 

Those four men and two women, all younger than him by at least ten years, didn’t understand why Marty paced the ship in his off-duty hours, now that the treadmill – and indeed the entire onboard exercise space – was in working order. They didn’t want to understand, and he didn’t really want them to, either. Perhaps the accusations in their sidelong looks whenever he passed by were correct – perhaps he was crazy, part of his mind cracked from the long months of isolation aboard a ruined ship. 

More likely, he thought, they would understand when they were older and wiser themselves, or perhaps it would take an experience like his to make them see why he did what he did. He paced the ship in his off-duty hours, even sometimes when he was supposed to be asleep in the makeshift cabin he’d set up in the bridge-deck parts storage compartment, because it gave him just the slightest chance to notice something going wrong with Morey before it became a serious problem. 

Marty was no tech, but he had gotten a feel for the ship in his months aboard even before the incident which had killed its more technically gifted crew. He could feel and hear when things were running smoothly, and if they weren’t, he could usually detect that, too. Diagnosing and repairing such a fault was another matter, but the more time he had to do it, the less chance there was that the mangled ship would suffer a catastrophic failure. 

That was the idea, anyway – at least, before the ship had been patched up by a civilian maintenance vessel dragooned into the Arrowhawk squadron. Theoretically, Morey was in as good a shape as she had ever been – good enough shape to cross the Gap, the Navy men had said. Theoretically, there was no more need to pace, to feel, and to listen, and the six new members of the crew never failed to remind him of the apparent futility of his diligence. 

For a while, the techs seemed to be right. The automated monitors, now patched up, detected every problem long before Marty’s pacing and listening could. When they told him the ship was ready to cross the Gap, he had believed them. For weeks after creeping out of the comparative shelter of the Sagittarius Arm, Morey had bounced from one empty-space jump resolution to another, guiding itself only by minute stellar parallax effects measured by computer. Everything was working – if not as perfectly as when the poor ship had left Maribel for the outward voyage, then at least as well as it had just prior to the attack by the tiny, swarming strike-launches which the Navy men called Railsplitters or Coronachs. One of the two terms was the proper name for the machines, but Marty hadn’t bothered to learn which. He was leaving Sagittarius for a region of the galaxy devoid of such cruelties and would never see a swarm of the tiny, murderous vessels again. 

So intent was Marty on relishing the fact that he would never tangle with that particular foe again that he almost missed the feeling that something was wrong somewhere between bulkhead fifteen and seventeen on the leisure-deck. He had to cover the stretch several times to pinpoint the spot where the sense was strongest, and even then, the exact nature of the disturbance eluded him. 

“Hey, who’s on duty in command?” The novelty of having extra pairs of hands and eyes to watch the controls while he was off duty was still fresh, and he regularly called up there to check, just to make sure. 

“It’s Rapallino, Mr. Westland. Do you need something?” The voice in his earpiece told him more about which of his Navy-donated assistants was on duty than the name. This was the easily bored female junior tech with the pretty face and the long, gangly limbs not quite filled out by adulthood. 

“Something’s off down here.” This was not the first time he had made such a report. Usually, he noticed something wrong only after the techs had started to fix it. Despite himself, he always hoped he was the first to pick up on a potential issue. 

“The board is clear, Mr. Westland. There’s nothing wrong with the ship.” 

Marty almost jumped for joy. He had beaten the techs to a problem – not for a moment did he entertain the possibility that his finely-tuned sense of rightness on Morey might be wrong. “Wrong, kiddo. Something’s about to go wrong. Something big. Bleed the capacitors and start a full diagnostic.” 

The young tech, probably groaning with her comms pickup muted, didn’t reply right away. Technically, the ship was Marty’s, so he was in command. Marty had been there when Captain Bosch had ordered the detachment to listen to him, and for a moment, he wondered if this was as far as they would be willing to do it. They thought he was deranged, after all. 

After almost a full half-minute, probably just enough time to consult her associates, the tech complied. “Capacitors bleeding. Can you be more specific about what’s wrong?” 

“I can try. Will you tell everyone to stay quiet and still?” 

“We’ll be quiet.” No attempt to hide the exasperation in the girl’s voice was made. 

Marty muted his comms, then paced in a small circle around where the sense of wrongness originated. Doubtless what of the crew was awake was running various diagnostics to try to beat him to the problem, but this time, his methods had them beat. They didn’t know what to look for. Marty didn’t either, but that put him in his comfort zone. 

Five times, he paced his little circle clockwise, then five more counterclockwise. For good measure, he stood in the center of the corridor just aft of bulkhead sixteen, where the off feeling was strongest, and spun in a slow circle, trying to put a sense of direction to the sensation. 

At last, he settled on a likely direction, then called up the ship’s diagnostics on his wrist computer. Tracing that direction from his position, he digitally passed through the pressure-hull, a mass of ductwork for the auxiliary atmospherics, a primary power conduit, and then... 

“Aha!” Marty unmuted his comms. “I know what’s wrong.” 

“Do you?” The girl on the bridge sounded characteristically bored. “All the diagnostics I can run from up here come up clean.” 

“Something’s loose in the...” Marty looked up the official name for the module he had long ago nicknamed the Mechanical Mother-In-Law for its girth, complexity, and the long sequence of apparently malicious failures it had demonstrated early in his solitude. “...The primary phased matter condenser.” 

“The PMC?” Though Marty didn’t know the significance of the device, the tech’s bored tone was instantly gone. All he knew was that it was connected to the main reactor, but either could run without the other. The ship certainly issued dire warnings if the condenser was ever inoperable, even if the backup successfully took over. “I’ll do a targeted diagnostic and send Mulryan out for a look.” 

“I’ll go.” Marty volunteered. He’d spent enough time inside the Mechanical Mother-in-Law comparing its state to the schematics that he could almost certainly spot the issue in an instant. It would take the other techs several minutes, if they spotted it at all. “I’ve fixed that damn thing enough times already.” 

“I’m sorry, what? Mr. Westland, are you telling me you have laid your untrained hands on the ship’s PMC?” 

It was Marty’s turn to delay his response. Her tone indicated that such an action was sinful, even criminal. A machine was a machine to him – make it look like the computer’s schematics, then restart it. Repeat, if necessary. “Seven or eight times, the damn thing. Wasn’t even damaged in the attack, but it kept failing anyway. Why?” 

“Stars around, Westland, I knew you were crazy, but tinkering with your PMC?” The girl shook her head. “I suppose it hasn’t exploded or poisoned the reactor yet.” 

“I was careful. It’s not like – wait.” He frowned, finally interpreting her words completely. “Exploded? Why didn’t anyone tell me it could do that?” 

We of course know from last week’s Tales from the Service that Martin Westland and his small replacement crew made it back to Maribel alive. I’ll put all you ship-techs at ease by mentioning that when Morey was overhauled there on its return, the Phased Matter Condenser was replaced wholesale, along with several other sensitive items which Mr. Westland had tinkered with, but which Bosch’s repair men had not been able to replace. 

He was right about something being off, of course – something that was, at least this time, easily repaired. A more severe problem might have reduced Morey to backup phased-matter collection for the remaining portion of its return journey. Transit of the Gap is dangerous for this reason – there's a lot of time for things to go wrong, and all of that time is spent unimaginably far from any chance of rescue or assistance. 

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