Tales from the Service: The Meraud Enigma

2951-07-19 – Tales from the Service: The Meraud Enigma 

Miss McGuiness’s account does not include any indication of the cruel and creative torture which many rumors and survivor accounts attribute to Meraud prison facilities. True, she did not report all of what she saw – or even most of it – but her account goes on to indicate that what she observed on day seventeen was far from an anomaly.  

Perhaps, as she would later go on to suggest in her post-script, the guards too are prisoners of a sort; perhaps even the Incarnation has lost the purpose of its efforts on Meraud, and it continues them now only because ceasing them and shifting personnel elsewhere would be an unnecessary logistical burden.  

Hadley McGuiness had been watching the compound in the valley for nearly an hour when the alarms blared, echoing mournfully off the frozen hillsides on all sides. Few of the figures shuffling about within the outer wall even paused what they were doing, but the figures in each of the guard towers jumped to attention, pointing their laser rifles down into the prison.  

This panicked reaction lasted only a moment. As one, the perimeter guards, responding to new directives reaching their mind-chips, turned their attention outside the camp boundaries. Those on the side nearer Hadley’s hiding-place briefly scanned the treeline, then returned their attention warily inwards. Those on the other side of the prison started firing, apparently at random, into the trees. Their lasers were silent, but the cracking sound of frost-shrouded tree-trunks exploding into splinters found its way up to her, after a momentary delay. 

The shooting stopped even before smoke from the small, sullen fires the lasers had set to rise into the powder-blue sky. The guards, as one, turned their attention back to the enclosure and the ragged prisoners shuffling about therein. The alarm tailed off a moment later. 

Hadley tapped the control on her wristband to mark the time-code. She had not seen anything like this yet in her long vigil, and could not help but speculate what the Incarnation intended by this action. Was this a surprise drill to test the readiness of the prison-guards? If so, it seemed a pathetic sort of drill, which would prepare those men for attack only by a hapless mob. Any real force of attackers would stay far back in the trees, targeting the guard towers with indirect-fire weapons, like infantry missiles, and picking off sentries with long-range sharpshooters, assuming that force didn’t have armored vehicles capable of bulling through the cordon and into the camp in defiance of all the guards and their weapons. 

At the sound of a shrill whistle some minutes later, the prisoners dropped their various morning tasks and staggered into a triple-row line-up. That they did this without the direction of a single guard had been strange to Hadley on her first day of watching this prison, but a few days later she’d seen the consequences of the inmates failing to fall into lineup quickly. Four days later, she’d seen the consequences of two prisoners not being in their places when the guard-barracks door banged open. They had been beaten and tied to a post, blindfolded, in the middle of the enclosure, where they were left in even the killing cold of night. 

They hadn’t died, of course; the guards seemed loath to kill their charges. Just before Hadley had given up her vigil and gone back to her camp, the guards had crept up and placed a tiny electric heater at their feet, just enough, probably, to keep the exposure from becoming fatal. The next day, after line-up, the guards had cut them down and set other prisoners to dragging them into one of the huts. 

What made watching this camp so maddening for Hadley was that there were no individuals down there, not even in the eye of her meta-lens magnifier. All the guards wore the same thick, insulated uniforms, the same black gloves, and the same face-obscuring arctic-temperature helmets. The officers were distinguishable by colored shoulder-tabs, but they rarely appeared, except at line-up and other special occasions anyway. 

The prisoners were, despite Hadley’s sympathy, no better. They were all clad in a mixture of dully mismatched rags which, from all appearances, were heaped in a pile within each of the huts at sundown and donned more or less at random by different people the next day. Differences in height, build, and even sex were swallowed up in the lumpen bulk of these head-to-toe coverings, and she never saw the guards peeling back hats, cowls, or scarves to check the identity of particular prisoners. They were, apparently, entirely interchangeable. 

Everything Hadley had been told pointed to this camp as a one-way destination; anyone sent there was, according to prisoners rescued from other facilities on the world, never seen again. Despite this, she had, in her seventeen days of vigil, not seen a single prisoner killed, nor a single body pulled limp from the huts. Furthermore, though tracked crawlers arrived every two days with crated supplies, no new prisoners had arrived to be added to the lineup. In seventeen days, this supposedly hellish prison to which the doomed were sent had neither gained nor lost a single inmate. 

The two wretches tied to the post overnight, however, were far from the only residents of this little satellite facility who had suffered as Hadley watched. Every one of those ragged figures huddling in ranks had to earn his or her meager ration through physical labor of the most menial sort. From the moment line-up was dismissed until the next sounding of the whistle nine hours later, each of them had to devote themselves to whatever task the guards directed for them. Sometimes these tasks had some purpose – cutting timber to repair the perimeter wall or the structures within, for example, but more often, there was no purpose whatsoever.  

Even now, as the big man with the red shoulder-tabs marched up and down the lineup wagging his gloved finger in the faces of a few prisoners at random, a handful of blue-tabbed guards were clustered near their barracks, heads together in a discussion of what tasks they might put the prisoners to for the next nine standard hours. No doubt, a team would be taken out beyond the gatehouse to fill in the trench the prior day’s work team had painstakingly carved out of the half-frozen soil next to the road. Much of the pointless make-work involved digging or moving soil from one place to another, often only for it to be moved back a day or two later. 

That pointlessness was what made Hadley’s vigil all the more frustrating. By her own rough estimation, at the rate of work being performed below, the camp could have rebuilt itself anew once every two or three standard months, excepting the prefabricated staff barracks where the guards lived. The prisoners, forced to work as they were, could have cut a new road to another camp through Meraud’s rugged hills in six months, or cleared a landing field for spacecraft in nine months. She had come to see whether the prisoners were being tormented in ways other than their work, but so far, all there was to see was work – rigorous work that was, wherever possible, without any sort of goal or accomplishment. 

Perhaps the place was the result of some misfiring dictum within the Incarnation’s master plan for Meraud, which no higher authority had noticed. It certainly didn’t bear much resemblance to the fevered stories she’d been briefed on, but it also didn’t bear resemblance to the supposedly hyper-rational, planned cruelty elsewhere on this world of prisons. The facility seemed to be coasting forward in time, its staff and prisoners having long since forgotten why they were there. 

As the guards divided their charges into work teams and marched them to whatever tasks had been agreed on, Hadley wondered what was going on in the chip-corrupted minds of those laser-rifle toting brutes. Did they realize how pointless it all was? Did they have blind faith that someone at a higher level understood? Or did they perhaps see clearly a purpose in all this that she did not? 

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2951-07-12 – Tales from the Service: The Meraud Ghost

2951-07-05 – Tales from the Service: The Meraud Ghost

Hadley McGuiness pushed the fresh-fallen snow to one side as she emerged from her shelter bubble and blinked half-blind in a brilliant Meraud dawn. Though the world was far from its weak stellar primary, but in the wake of the night’s storm, every surface was coated in glittering ice crystals that reflected that pale light. 

Hadley had situated her camp far enough from the nearest stand of heat-chasing crawl-vine to prevent the plant from detecting her or her equipment while she slept, but still she spent a few minutes digging out the snow around the shelter and the site of the buried generator to make sure that no tendrils had found their way under the snow. Crawl-vine moved faster during the day than it did at night, and she didn’t want to return to the camp after another twelve-hour vigil only to spend another hour cutting away a few hundred pounds of enterprising biomass before she could get inside and warm up.  

When she was satisfied, she activated the camo-canopy that would make the camp look like just another half-frozen thicket and hefted her day pack. “Log day seventeen.” 

Though the glittering hillside swallowed up her words as if no other human had ever lived on Meraud, Hadley’s mission-log cartridge beeped twice, and a red light appeared at the bottom of her helmet’s faceplate. Everything she saw, heard, and said would be recorded faithfully. The device could save nearly two T-years worth of logs, but Hadley hoped that she wouldn’t need to stick around more than another two weeks. If the reports she was investigating were true, she’d have found some indication by then; if she hadn’t, her minders would be satisfied to conclude that those horror stories had been embellishments or outright forgeries. 

Hadley personally hoped they were forgeries. She had only seen two of the many recorded prisoner debriefings Naval Intelligence had conducted, and both of them had made her skin crawl. True, neither of the liberated former inmates of the camps on Meraud had personally witnessed the things they’d testified to, but they certainly believed those things they’d heard secondhand. Perhaps the banal brutality of their guards and the prison scheme itself had made them easy prey for bunk-house charlatans telling stories of worse fates, but Intelligence was taking the tales seriously enough to send Hadley to freeze her posterior looking for more conclusive information. 

As soon as the campsite was reasonably well camouflaged, Hadley set off through the snow toward the best of her vantage points over the prison-camp in the valley. She kept close to the still-sluggish stands of crawl-vine so she didn’t have to worry about her footprints being discovered. The plants would sense her passage and send out questing tendrils to cover her tracks; by the time the first wave of monitor drones left the facility, there would be no trace she’d been there.  

The monitor drones weren’t looking for Hadley, of course. They were looking for escapees, whose tracks would originate from the facility’s perimiter and radiate out into the hills. Even if they found part of Hadley’s trail, they would dismiss it as the spoor of one of Meraud’s many small and midsized native animals, since she was moving neither directly toward nor directly away from the prison. 

The vantage point was just as Hadley had left it the previous day: a cluster of conically-trunked trees clinging to a narrow ledge of flat ground jutting from the side of an otherwise steep hill. She could approach it behind a stand of thorny shrubs, and be out of direct site of the many cameras below while having a nearly perfect view into the compound itself. 

Most of the cameras weren’t pointed up and out, of course; in all probability only a few were. Still, it paid to be careful. Hadley settled into the comfortable crook between two of the frost-rimmed boles and pulled out her meta-lens magnifier to watch another day of confusingly meaningless drudgery.  

As we have seen before in this space, Meraud is a harsh place not well suited to human habitation; its colonists were a hardy sort. That it is being used to house civilian prisoners from warmer climates, usually without the advanced cold-weather gear available to Hadley, is a sign of how little thought The Incarnation gives to the welfare of the Confederated citizens it has conquered.  

Extermination would have been simpler, more economical, and possibly kinder, and that’s assuming the stories are not true. Why they keep our people alive to hope for possible liberation, I cannot determine. 

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Tales from the Service: The Meraud Snooper

2951-07-05 – Tales from the Service: The Meraud Snooper 

Operation Landsman was two years ago, but evidently this remarkable success of Confederated arms did not end the use of Meraud as a prison world by our foes. 

Most of this account from a special intelligence agent who has returned from that world in recent weeks cannot be published for security reasons, but I wanted to bring you the parts of it that I could, because I do not think the horrors of the Hellship transports or the penal facilities on Meraud should be forgotten. The prisoners freed by Landsman have long since returned to their lives such as they can, but the Incarnation has many millions of our compatriots under its control. 

I am seeing rumors that the poor conditions of the Meraud labor camps are not the worst fate a Confederated citizen can find under Incarnation control, but I do not have any direct accounts or official reports to bring you about this, only rumors. Evidently the Navy is taking them seriously enough to send special intelligence agents to investigate, but for everyone’s sake I hope that what I’ve heard is nothing more than fanciful exaggeration.  

[N.T.B. - I've been around The Sprawl a bit more than Duncan, and I’ve talked to quite a few people, human and otherwise, who’ve had personal interactions with Nate authority. I don’t think the rumors we’ve been seeing are fanciful. You’ll hear far worse from the Cutters who reside in Sagittarius Gate; evidently their home-world has been under Nate control on and off for decades, so they have plenty of experience with how brutal our enemy can be.] 

As the wind began to shriek past Hadley McGuiness’s bubble shelter, she sealed the entrance flap and shivered reflexively, though the inside of the shelter was above twenty Celsius. With night approaching fast and a storm blowing down from the Olmo Plateau, she wasn’t going to get anything else done out there until dawn. 

After setting the shelter’s sensor perimeter alarm and altering the camouflage scheme used by its smart-canvas outer shroud to match fresh-fallen snow, Hadley removed her helmet and peeled off her sealed environment suit. Meraud had a breathable atmosphere, so the suit wasn’t really sealed; there was no atmo cartridge in the socket at the small of her back, only a small filter block. The suit’s excellent insulation and electric heating elements, on the other hand, were indispensable; even without a storm, night temperatures outside her little shelter could plummet to minus forty-five, and only the sunniest days climbed above minus ten. 

Hadley didn’t mind the cold much, but she did wonder how the world had attracted a population of almost one million colonists before the war. Its elliptical orbit did permit brief, balmy summers, but ninety percent of any local year was some flavor of winter. 

That the world had seen more than its share of action during the last few years was less surprising. Meraud had been occupied by the Incarnation several years ago, and that implacable foe had constructed large, well-defended prisoner pens on its forbidding surface. No doubt the cold climate had been calculated to reduce the risk of escapes and degrade effective resistance from anyone who did escape. 

Confederated scout detachments had discovered the camps after tracking prisoner transports to the world, and a surprise raid in force had liberated the bulk of the prisoners on Meraud and whisked them away, back to friendly lines and warmer climes. That remarkable operation had been two T-years ago. With the intervening occupations of Håkøya and several other worlds, no doubt the Incarnation had re-built its prison facilities and filled those pens with a fresh draft of civilian and military prisoners.  

Given the defenses Hadley had seen in orbit, Nate certainly still had something on Meraud to protect, but none of those orbital installations had detected her tiny ship as it had crept past. They were expecting another Operation Landsman, not an unarmed single-seater with radar-absorbing paint and a tiny ion-thrust engine. After all, what could one woman do to disrupt a penal system spanning a whole world? 

Hadley hadn’t come to Meraud to cut shackles and start prisoner riots, however. She had come to investigate concerning reports made by the liberated prisoners of two years prior – reports that Meraud was more than a brutal storage point for Confederated prisoners kept busy with meaningless work. 

With a storm blowing outside, though, Hadley’s investigatory work was thoroughly on hold. Visibility in Meraud’s chill atmosphere during the day could be several kilometers, but the cameras built into the security perimeter showed her a visibility radius quickly dwindling into the tens of meters. Even if the prison facility in a nearby valley was still doing something worth observing during the storm, she’d just about have to climb over its perimeter wall to see it. 

Hadley had brought a few diversions for just such an occasion, but she was in no mood for a holo-drama or an adventure novel on her slate. Something about being so close to several hundred prisoners housed in terrible conditions and forced to labor in the cold for no purpose made escapist fiction seem hollow. Instead, she stretched out on the sleep-pad that occupied half of the shelter’s floor space and listened to the wind howl outside. Would the Navy arrange another mass rescue of all those people she’d been surveiling these last few days? Could they even if they wanted to, now that Meraud was reinforced? 

The wind, of course, had no answers. 

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Tales from the Service: The Prime August Fiasco

2951-06-28 – Tales from the Service: The Prime August Fiasco

As I hinted last week, the attack on Prime August was a bit of a minor disaster, despite its success. In addition to stronger than expected defenses and a large-scale comms breakdown that was at least partially caused by innovative enemy signals equipment, the attacking force encountered sophisticated enemy deception tactics that split the Marine landing force and isolated each split component of it from the others for many hours after the landing. 

Fortunately, the defenders of Prime August were too few in number to exploit this success. The attack took far longer than planned, but it was concluded successfully, with the Incarnation listening post on the world destroyed.  

My understanding is that the trick used by the enemy at Prime August to degrade Confederated communications technology would not work again, but the precise details were not provided to me either in this account or in any official report I have access to. 

As the last Marines tromped off after their lieutenant toward the perimeter, Kanako Dunai unbuckled his restraints, grabbed the sidearm strapped below his chair, and headed aft to follow them outside. The normal diagnostic routines hadn’t been able to restore the comms system to normal operation, but that was fine; he had been a damage control tech before he’d certified as a pilot, and there was nothing on a strike-rig comms array he didn’t know how to fix. 

The cool night air wafting up through the dropship brought Kanako an eye-watering smell of burnt metal and sweet spices while he rummaged around in one of the lockers for a toolkit. Prime August was a world well suited to human life, but he could tell that whatever vegetation surrounded the landing site would be unbearable as a neighbor, at least for him. Alien pollens and other airborne biomass usually didn’t cause too much trouble for human settlers for the first few generations, but clearly this was one place where first-generation colonists would suffer from hay fever. 

Wiping away tears and slinging the tool-kit over one shoulder, Kanako finally disembarked. Not a single Marine remained in sight, though he couldn’t see very far owing to the near-complete darkness split only by the roving spotlight beams on three dropships. Overhead, a fourth dropship, its lower hull still glowing from re-entry, circled downward toward the field. 

He was halfway up the ladder on the side of his ship when the shooting started. At first, only a few Marine railguns buzzed in the darkness, but soon, almost everyone seemed to be shooting, in almost every direction. Streams of glowing slugs sprayed across the sky, and a few volleys passed dangerously close overhead. 

Cursing, Kanako hugged as close to the hull of his ship as he could. The briefing had not suggested any significant danger at the Alpha landing site. He still had no comms, no way of knowing what was going on; his earpiece was slaved to the ship’s malfunctioning system. Overhead, the circling dropship kicked its engine into overdrive and climbed back for the safety of the open sky. 

After a tense few seconds, the shooting began to tail off, and orange streams no longer stitched the darkness. Kanako wondered what they’d all been shooting at. Prime August was supposed to be a milk-run, at least as far as the landing went; now that panicky voice on his comms on the way down was sounding more and more prescient. Maybe Alpha really was a trap; maybe the Marines would come running back at any moment, a horde of Nate infantry on their tails. 

“Dunai!” 

Kanako turned and looked behind him at a tall, wiry figure waving a hand-lamp. “Sorry Commander. My comms-” 

“Yeah, mine too.” Commander Mesut pointed his lamp back toward one of the other landed dropships. “It’s not the hardware. Some sort of jamming, I think.” 

“That’s impossible.” Kanako started climbing down. “The signal modulator-”  

“Should cycle between frequencies too fast to be totally jammed. I know.” Mesut sighed. “But that woman on the comms-” 

“You heard her too, Commander?” Kanako dropped the last few feet to the ground and adjusted the strap of his toolkit. “I thought-” 

“I heard her. Jensley heard her, and you heard her.” Mesut pointed upward at the fourth dropship once again cautiously spiraling downward. “I think that means he heard her, and everyone who for some damned fool reason went to Beta or Gamma heard her.” 

Kanako frowned. Had every pilot thought the comms outage was their own? That would explain the hodgepodge scattering of the formation just before they’d hit the atmosphere; everyone was either making their best guess as to what was expected of them, or following someone else in hopes that they knew what was going on. “Quite the mess, sir.” 

“Indeed. And now-” Mesut was interrupted by another short volley of railgun fire, this time mostly sprayed into a copse of tree-analogues near the landing zone. “Now the Marines are landed in at least three places, they can’t talk to us, and we can’t talk to them. Which is even worse since we’re supposed to be their long-range relay.” 

Kanako pointed skyward. “The Pumas can relay them. Their circuits are totally different than ours.” 

“Yeah, but the moment they’re clear to come down here, they’re going to be busy blasting whoever the Marines are shooting at.” Mesut waved a hand. "No, I think we’re on our own. We can’t dust off and leave the grunts here, and we can’t just let them wander off in the direction of the objective with no comms, can we?" 

Kanako shook his head. “Not sure we’ve got much of an alternative.” A handful of pilots with sidearms and no comms could hardly expect to make much of a difference in this mess, after all. Even if they dusted off and hovered over the Marines while they pushed forward dropping messages- 

Kanako held up a hand. “Commander, can Michaelis see our spotlights from orbit? 

“On a night like this? Sure. Does that help us?” Somewhere beyond Mesut’s dropship, the fourth ship finally touched down and began to disgorge its  

“Can’t jam visible light.” Kanako shrugged. “If we get all those lamps pointing skyward, I’ll bet there’s a morse-code translator program in the standard software.” 

“And Michaelis would be able to read the signal with their scopes. That only fixes things one way.” 

“Sure.” Kanako hefted his toolbag. “But it’s a clear night. Once I pull my rig’s forward ‘scope and get it aligned, Michaelis or another ship can do the same trick to talk to us. It’ll work until dawn, at least. Hopefully we'll find something better by then.” 

Mesut clapped his hands. “I like it, Dunai. Get started with the scope. Jensley and I will fill in number four over there and work on the lights.” 

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