Notice: Changing Schedule of the Tales from the Inbox Series

2951-01-03: Notice: Changing Schedule of the Tales from the Inbox Series

Starting with this week's entry, the Tales from the Inbox text feed feature will be published one day later (Mondays instead of Sundays at 17:15 standard planetary time, 2:1:15 standard ship time). This change in schedule is a result of the oversight and feed-ingestion logistics at the home office on Planet at Centauri; Duncan's contractual schedule will not be impacted.

We thank all our loyal readers for their understanding of this change, and hope that it will not cause any loss of your enjoyment of this series. Check this feed endpoint tomorrow at or after this time for a new Tales from the Inbox episode!

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Tales from the Service: The Hierophant’s Interview

2950-12-27 – Tales from the Service: The Hierophant’s Interview

Unfortunately, Naval Intelligence did not approve the holiday-appropriate story I intended for this week, so we will conclude with the previous account instead.

I have cut it off at a point where I thought it more useful for the audience to view the recording directly; the resulting short conversation took place for a live datasphere audience. We have copied it to our own Datasphere hub for your convenience.

Sandra Ibsen, standing in front of the studio doors and feigning interest in Delilah Brahms-Walton’s bubbly introduction for the cameras, tried to surreptitiously watch the technician fiddling with the studio’s recording instruments. To give Toloni the chance he wanted, she needed to signal the moment the tech left the room.

Unfortunately, the little man didn’t seem likely to leave any time soon. The cameras, though ostensibly autonomous, seemed to need a great deal of tweaking, and even when his harried dashes between them slowed, he seemed intent on staying for the whole show.

Brahms-Walton had been telling three mutually interrupting stories about the recent petty intrigues of her social circle for nearly twenty minutes when the technician sidled up to Sandra. “The show will go at least another hour. Would you like something to drink?”

“Oh!” Sandra, pretending not to have noticed him until he spoke, turned. “Yes, please. Sparkling water.”

As the technician eased the door open and crept out, Sandra once again tapped the comms unit in her dress’s wrist-cuffs to tell Toloni’s security detail to move. She could imagine them boiling out of the back of the huge groundcar, piling into the lobby past the surprised receptionist and the helpless security guard, and clearing a path directly to the stuido, using Sandra’s own position indicator as a guide. By the time the technician got back from his run to the staff break-room, he’d be met at the doors with a scowling Penderite guard in his scarlet and silver uniform.

Within two minutes of sending the signal, Sandra heard a gentle knock on the door behind her. Pretending to be surprised, she turned and peeked out. She was less than surprised to find herself face to face with the Hierophant’s grim-faced chief of security.

The man held up one finger – indicating, most likely, one minute – then pulled the door shut again. Sandra affected a shrug and turned back to what she was pretending to be far more interested in, only to discover that she hadn’t missed even a single detail of any of Brahms-Walton’s three overlapping stories. To reassure the presenter, Sandra mouthed “wrong room” and hooked a thumb back toward the door behind her.

If Brahms-Walton noticed any of this, she didn’t react to it; she seemed entirely absorbed in her storytelling, with her garishly-shadowed eyes flashing effortlessly between camera lenses as the studio system rotated between angles. The studio’s excellent sound-proofing kept out the inevitable tromp of booted feet, so there should be no way for her to know what was about to happen.

After nearly the whole minute indicated to her, Sandra heard another tentative knock at the door. She once again feigned surprise and turned to open it a crack. This time, Grand Hierophant Uberto Toloni, dressed in his finest robe of office and leaning on his seven-foot-tall, jeweled scepter of office, winked at her from the other side, flanked by a pair of guards.

No doubt, the receptionist would have summoned Maribel’s constabulary the moment Toloni’s men stormed in, but Toloni’s security detail always had high-level liaison with the planetary authorities wherever Holy Tabernacle landed. Most likely, Toloni’s people had also cleared his scheme with the Bureau of Counter-Intelligence, who would further slow the official reaction to this questionably legal invasion of a private business.

Squaring her shoulders, Sandra stepped aside, and Toloni flung open the door and stepped in. Though he was old by any measure, the Penderite pontiff’s tall, broad-shouldered build, confident stride, and regal attire made him seem full of energy. This was the aspect of Toloni which he affected when he strode down the ship’s boarding ramp to greet throngs of well-wishers, Penderite and otherwise, on every planet they’d visited.

Delilah Brahms-Walton’s storytelling tailed off mid-sentence as the Hierophant entered the studio. Too late, she realized that the technician who could suspend her live broadcast was gone, and that whatever she did about the interruption would be seen by her fans. Sandra belatedly realized how many places on the other woman’s own elaborate dress a weapon might be concealed, and that she was the only person in a position to stop Brahms-Walton from using such a weapon, if that was what she decided to do.

The moment passed without violence, however, and Toloni tromped into the semi-circle of cameras, a broad grin splitting his face. “Would you mind terribly, Miss Brahms-Walton, if I joined you?”

Sandra expected the woman would pretend not to know who Toloni was, but Brahms-Walton flashed a sharp-edged grin. “Oh, what fun! Of course you may!”

Sandra spotted a second chair tucked away in one corner and hurried to bring it forward. As she passed under the burning gaze of the lenses, she felt her face redden under its thick layer of makeup. If it weren’t for the presence of Toloni, she would no doubt be a subject of extreme curiosity for the audience.

Toloni seated himself next to Brahms-Walton, pretending not to notice the cameras. Perhaps, since he avoided using such technology himself, he was less conscious of the hundreds of thousands of people whose gaze lay behind those devices than most people would be. “Perhaps I should introduce myself, Miss. My name is-”

“Uberto Toloni.” Brahms-Walton glanced to the center camera. “Grand Hierophant of the Holy Order of Penderites, and more importantly, now a guest on my lovely little show.”

Toloni bowed his head a moment. “Indeed. I am told you know everyone who is worth knowing among this world’s young, wealthy, exciting element. Though I am none of these things, it is gratifying to see that you know of me.”

Brahms-Walton waved her immaculately-manicured hand in the air. “How could I not know Maribel’s most interesting visitor since they bagged that spectacular bomb-thrower Horus?”

“Ah, but you knew of me before I came here.” Toloni smiled. “Tell me, why did you send so many of your poor little friends to kill me?”

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Tales from the Service: The Assassin Influencer

2950-12-20 – Tales from the Service: The Assassin Influencer

Captain Sandra Ibsen scowled down at herself as Toloni’s lumbering ground-car lurched back into motion. She looked up only in time to see the two crisply uniformed security men in the rear canopy gawk at her as the vehicle rounded a corner and vanished up the street. Their surprise told her that they didn’t know about the plan which required Holy Tabernacle’s skipper to dress like a desperate socialite. They had very little time to learn, if things went according to the Hierophant’s schedule.

Gritting her teeth, Sandra held one hand in front of her face, cuing holo-displays in the smart-fabric of her detached sleeves to wake and show her the controls. With one final cringe, Sandra switched everything on. The already gaudy blue and green evening dress lit up with shimmering holographic fire, and dancing accents spun around her body and above the tapered hat into which she’d bundled her hair.

Several pedestrians along the street who’d stopped and stared when Toloni’s huge groundcar had rumbled to a halt now stopped and stared again. Sandra hated being stared at, but for the moment, it was part of the plan; feeling the reassuring lines of her sidearm tucked into the ruffled pouch below one arm, she adopted the most vapid, impatient expression she could conjure up and flounced down the street.

Toloni had had his drivers drop Sandra off around the corner from the headquarters of Bertolini & Thatcher Group, a small Maribel datasphere media company which seemed mainly to work as production contractors for the Frontier’s motley array of independent media personalities. According to Toloni, their person of interest was inside, recording live on a studio set for her fashion-obsessed audience.

Delilah Brahms-Walton was, by the standards of the broader Reach, a niche personality with a modest datasphere footprint, but with nearly ten million fans, mostly young women from relatively well-to-do-families, she was probably BTG’s most prominent client. Sandra had surveyed Brahms-Walton’s datasphere hub a few months ago, when they’d first linked her to Toloni’s several would-be assassins, and had been far from impressed. Brahms-Walton seemed mainly to reach her audience through live broadcasts to Maribel followers, which were then transmitted as recordings outside the system. Vapid, tittering, excitable, and shallow, she was pretty in that vague, elfin way that didn’t threaten other women or make them feel jealous. Evidently, her manner and looks did little to attract a male audience; almost nineteen out of every twenty of her followers were women.

As to content, Sandra had detected almost none. Though branding herself as a fashionista, Brahms-Walton seemed to spend almost no time designing, trying, modeling, or critiquing fashion products. Most of her broadcasts were of her chattering amiably about nothing for the camera lenses, interrupting herself excitedly so many times that no bit of gossip ever seemed to be described in full. She occasionally brought on someone to chat with, or broadcast from exotic vacation destinations all over Maribel. This last sort of show usually featured Brahms-Walton baring all in a skimpy swimsuit, surrounded by equally vapid, pretty, scantily clad young people, and it was stills from this sort of recording that had first linked her to the attempted killers.

The front doors to the BTG studio were smaller than Delilah expected, but once inside, the broad lobby with its tastefully abstract furnishings, tastefully-dressed, blank-faced receptionist, and tastefully unobtrusive security guard were far more in line with expectations. Sandra pretended not to see the receptionist for several seconds, until the woman waved slightly, and then pretended to be surprised, as if the woman had jumped up out of the floor.

“Love the look. Trying to book a studio, Miss?” The receptionist smiled.

“No, no, no. Delilah said to meet her here.” Sandra deliberately raised her voice’s pitch and lowered it’s volume. “She’s here, isn’t she?”

The receptionist brightened. “Oh, you’re going on with Miss Brahms-Walton? I love her so much. She’s going to love that outfit. Studio number three.”

Sandra looked around, staring down the two hallways disappearing into the building. “Three…” She easily spotted signage that would guide her there, but pretended not to. “Where’s that?”

“That way.” The woman pointed to the hallway on the left of her desk. “Take a left at the big arrow, then it’s on your right.”

“Thanks!” Sandra immediately turned to the hallway, then hesitated at its threshold. “Right at what?”

“Rob, can you show her?” Sandra could almost hear defeat in the receptionist’s voice.

The security guard peeled away from his spot in an out of the way corner and hurried up to Sandra’s elbow. “Follow me, Miss.”

Sandra followed the man, and as she did, she pretended to fidget with the cuff of one of her sleeves. In reality, she was transmitting a double-click signal to the head of Toloni’s security detachment. The groundcar, and Toloni, would arrive outside in a moment, but first Sandra had to pin down their quarry. Brahms-Walton couldn’t know she was about to meet Grand Hierophant Uberto Toloni until the last possible instant.

At the studio door, the guard stopped Sandra, then peeked his head in. “She hasn’t started her show yet.” He smiled at Sandra, looking her up and down. Though her attire was far from revealing, Sandra didn’t like the feeling of being inspected like that; it was something unknown among spacers, partly because they almost never dressed to draw the eye. “Do you need anything else?”

“Oh, you’ve been so helpful.” Sandra grasped his hand and lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “This is going to be my big break.”

The guard chucked and extracted himself. “You’ll do great.”

Sandra sent her double-click signal again as the man ambled back toward the lobby, then turned and went into the studio. Beyond a semicircle of recording equipment, Delilah Brahms-Walton lounged at a desk in front of a pastel-patterned backdrop, inspecting her intricate makeup. Her attire was no less gaudy than Sandra’s, a riot of gold and violet with a constellation of starburst holograms chasing each other around her thin frame. A lone tech scuttled between the various fixtures, clutching a slate.

Brahms-Walton glanced over to the door the moment Sandra came in, though given the elaborate outfit Toloni had given Sandra, noticing her was hardly a feat of observation.

Sandra waggled her fingers in a wave. “Hi!”

Brahms-Walton stood, a confused look crossing her face. She was taller than Sandra had expected. “Do I know you?”

“You don’t recognize me?” Sandra blinked and pretended to look hurt for an instant. “I suppose there were a lot of people. It’s me, Sissy! Sissy Ibsen? From Sioda Sands!”

Brahms-Walton made an exaggerated show of thinking back. “You do look a little familiar. Did-”

Sandra clapped her hands. “I knew you’d remember. We only talked a little, but you and Conrad-”

“You know Conrad?” A look of alarm crossed Brahms-Walton’s face. No doubt she knew that Conrad Nyquist had been captured on Vorkuta attempting to assassinate the highest-ranking Penderite.

“Know him! I was in primary-ed with him! Oh I could tell you all kinds of-” Sandra stopped short, as if remembering something, mimicking Brahms-Walton’s own style of delivery. “Anyway, he told me, after we met at Sioda, he said: Sis, Delilah said, if you’re ever in the city, drop by her studio. I was going to a party, but then I thought-”

“Conrad told you I wanted you to stop in?” Brahms-Walton frowned. “I didn’t tell you myself?”

Sandra, improvising, looked away. “Er, I kinda… had too much. Those blue drinks with the paper umbrellas, what were they called?” Sandra knew it was a universal constant that any tropical resort built by humans always served some sort of blue alcoholic drink with a little paper umbrella.

Brahms-Walton nodded; she clearly didn’t remember the trip in question entirely clearly either. “I love to have friends on the show, Sissy dear, but you’ve come on a bad night for it. Are you still going to be in town the day after tomorrow?”

Sandra looked downcast, but nodded. “Until next Thursday.” She turned to go, then stopped. “Er, have you heard from Conrad? He sent me some messages after he left on his business trip, but they… It doesn’t sound like him. Something about a priest?”

“He sent you messages?” Brahms-Walton was between Sandra and the door in an instant, her vapid, over-exaggerated mannerisms gone in an instant. “When? What did they say?”

Sandra shrugged, smiling wistfully. “Silly stuff. He rambled on for so long. It was nice to hear his voice.”

“Ninety seconds, Miss Brahms-Walton.” The tech, adjusting the controls of one of the bigger cameras, called out.

Brahms-Walton put her hands on Sandra’s shoulders. “Stay and watch the show. After, let’s have drink and catch up, and talk about bringing you on for the next show, okay?”

“Really?” Sandra bounced on the balls of her feet as much as her ridiculous platform heels would allow.

Delilah Brahms-Walton smiled reassuringly, but there was steel behind that smile. Sandra, still fairly certain her cover was intact, nevertheless shivered at the idea of pretending to be duped. “Anyone so special to Conrad is a friend of mine.”

Before our words once again grace this feed, the Emmanuel Feast (Christmas for Roman Catholics) will have passed. From all of us here at Maribel, both within this embed team and in service to the Navy which guards this world, we pray that this occasion is a time of joy for all of you back home. For the two thousand nine hundred fiftieth year, and for the third time of this war, we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, though peace yet remains a rare commodity.

There are many more fitting accounts for the season in my inbox, and we may diverge from Captain Ibsen’s account next week to tell one of these, if time and Naval Intelligence censors permit.

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Tales from the Service: The Socialite’s Ambush

2950-12-13 – Tales from the Service: The Socialite’s Ambush

As Grand Hierophant Toloni’s hulking groundcar finally lumbered out of the rapid-fabbed tenement complex erected for the Penderite refugees, Captain Sandra Ibsen turned in her seat to watch the crowd’s somber waving. The lack of hope on their faces haunted her; these people had lost their homes on MacNeil’s End, and now the good news that their greatest pontiff had arrived to help them find a new place to live seemed not to have registered with most.

“They have been promised much since their world was lost.” Toloni, as usual, seemed to read Sandra’s thoughts. “Promises which were not delivered. When we embark them aboard Tabernacle and De Angelis, they will begin to smile again.”

Sandra nodded, still watching the crowd. A thin cordon of guards from the Maribel planetary authority held them back, as if worried they might stampede after Toloni’s groundcar, but that seemed the least likely thing in the Reach. “It’s just… They’re Penderites. Why don’t they trust you to do what you say?”

Toloni chuckled. “Sister Ibsen, where in our doctrines is absolute faith in men commanded? It is no sin to be wary.”

Sandra shook her head and turned reluctantly toward the view ahead. As the groundcar crested a low rise, the distant spires of the financial district of Maribel’s sprawling spaceport metropolis rose into view; the land closer at hand was a haphazard, imperfect grid of streets dividing low-rise buildings of all kinds, built seemingly at random wherever space was available. Above it all, a swarm of lighters, aircars, airtrams, lifters, patrol craft, and other aircraft flitted across a city-scape thirty-five miles across on its narrowest axis. The Penderites were lucky; the administration had put them at the outskirts of this miserable warren of humanity’s worst excesses.

“It is almost time for our next appointment.” Toloni flicked down a meta-lens mirror from the overhead paneling and playfully checked the intricate folds of his robe of office. “I confess I have not yet told you what your part to play in it is.”

“No, Your Eminence.” Sandra frowned. “Again, I must protest-”

“We will be entirely safe.” Toloni waved his hand toward the door at the front of their bubble-canopied passenger compartment, which Sandra knew led to the lower level of the groundcar’s interior. The vehicle, nearly the size of an airtram, contained a galley, a lavatory, and ample stowage for cargo. The forward canopy housing the driver and co-driver, and the rear canopy housing the security command post, could also access the lower deck via steep ladders. “You aren’t dressed properly for our meeting with Miss Brahms-Walton. The steward has something more fitting.”

At first, Sandra wanted to protest that Toloni had practically designed the Holy Tabernacle officer’s dress uniform which she was now wearing, and that if this was not sufficient attire for high-class company, that he should see to replacing it, but that familiar sly twinkle in the old man’s eye made her think better of it. Toloni wasn’t referring to more formal clothes – he was talking about a disguise.

Sandra stood and bowed slightly to the pontiff. “This is still a bad idea.” Steadying herself against the vehicle’s rolling motion, she headed down below, where she indeed found the white-clad steward holding a long black garment bag.

“I know.” Sandra waved the man away before he could speak. “Give it to me.”

The man handed over the bag, then scuttled out of the way as Sandra dragged it into the groundcar’s onboard lavatory to change. Designed for Toloni’s broad-shouldered frame, the lavatory was more than large enough for her to open the garment bag and stand back to get a good look at what she was going to wear.

“Of course. Of course.” Sandra spun on her heel, but paused with her hand resting on the door-latch, fuming, but knowing that no amount of storming upstairs to protest would do any good. Where Toloni, a widower of more than twenty years whose staff was almost entirely men – Penderite men at that – had found an outfit like that would be a mystery for the ages. Certainly no Penderite woman would ever wear such a gaudy, tech-flouting monstrosity. Sandra, of course, wasn’t technically a Penderite. She’d been raised by faithful of the Order, true, but no career spacer could ever hope to keep the tenets of Penderite faith.

Scowling the whole time, Sandra stripped off her dress-uniform boots, tunic, breeches, and undergarments. Shivering slightly, she knew she would feel no less exposed once she donned Toloni’s ridiculous concept of a disguise.

Assembling the outfit around her frame, Sandra was doubly annoyed by the fact that everything fit perfectly. Of course it would – it was smart-fabric which had been programmed with the very same parameters as her onboard uniform. The shimmering beetle-blue skirt hugged her hips all the way down to her knees without a single crease. The ridiculously gaudy three-part top, no part of which adequately covered her on its own, flattered her figure when assembled, and did more hinting at the presence of skin below than showing any of it directly. The detached sleeves, a pointless accoutrement so loved by high fashion back in the Core Worlds, seated snugly against her forearms like an aquamarine-studded second skin, and the various bangles, which she hoped were only gold-plated, threw off showers of light whenever she moved. She could feel the presence of tiny holo-projectors sewn into the get-up at several places, but they remained, for the moment, blissfully inactive.

At least, Sandra grudgingly acknowledged, the outfit had been designed for the rich heiress with some sense. Well concealed pockets in the ruffles below both her arms were more than large enough for her sidearm, and when she put her gun into one, it disappeared entirely.

Picking up the shoes – fiendishly tall platform heels which Sandra didn’t dare wear while walking inside a moving vehicle – and leaving the lavatory, Sandra shot a dagger-sharp glare at the steward, who was waiting outside. His mouth, open to say something already, clamped shut, and his eyes dove to the deck, where they stayed until she was past him and climbing back to the huge bubble-canopy.

“This is your idea of a disguise, Your Eminence?” Sandra gestured down at herself. “I look like an overgrown Centauri wood-scarab.”

“You look nothing like a Penderite, and yet the disguise is not complete.” Toloni, concealing his mirth very badly, gestured to one of the storage cabinets along the sides of the compartment. “There is some sort of cosmetics device in there.”

Sandra found a rapid makeup applicator, already loaded and programmed, waiting in the cabinet. “Do you know how much I hate these things?”

“They do seem the tool of the vain and technologically dependant.” Toloni shrugged. “If you would prefer to do it manually, the steward might have-”

“No, no.” Sandra sighed, then closed her eyes and pressed the curved surface of the applicator to her face. There was a brief sensation of heat and bright light as the device misted its pre-programmed makeup pattern onto her features, then a bright, cheery all-clear beep when it was done.

Flipping down one of the metalens mirrors, Sandra was unsurprised to see a thick, gaudy, layer of makeup as well as metallic blue eye shadow and lip-color. “Why do I need to be a harlequin?”

Toloni shrugged. “I am told this is the pinnacle of fashion here.”

Sandra shuddered, remembering that Toloni was trying to bushwhack a datasphere fashionista who would generally try to avoid a direct confrontation with the pontiff or any of his subordinates. “There’s no way I can pretend to be stupid enough for this to work.”

Toloni leaned across from his seat and lowered his voice, clearly enjoying himself immensely. “We’ll let you out a block away. Here’s what you need to do…”

Captain Ibsen’s account will continue next week. Having been to several high-society parties on Maribel, I can verify that outfits like the one described would fit right in.

The more devious side of Grand Hierophant Toloni is quite interesting here; in particular, it seems that he might be a bit less technology averse than he would prefer people to believe. True, he has plenty of henchmen who could help him arrange such an elaborate disguise, but most of them, as Captain Ibsen pointed out, are Penderites too.

Perhaps since the Penderites, unlike the Roman Catholics, have no doctrine of the limited infallibility of their head pontiff, he feels free to be flexible with the order’s strictures. The existence of Tabernacle itself seems to suggest this as the most likely explanation.

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