Tales from the Service: The Tabernacle at the Front

2950-12-06 – Tales from the Service: The Tabernacle at the Front

The Incarnation still has not made a major attack against Maribel. The last week has seen a small amount of skirmishing around mining colonies in nearby systems which primarily feed Maribel’s system economy, but it is my understanding that these were raid-scale actions, and that most featured only a single Tyrant-type heavy cruiser executing the sort of high-velocity, smash-and-dash mission which characterized the first phase of this war.

Though obviously these raids are intended to prevent raw materials from reaching refineries and slowing repairs to the numerous Fifth Fleet ships damaged in action throughout the latter half of the year, I see this as having little direct impact. Most of the parts and materiel used to repair Confederated Navy warships are shipped in directly from yards in the Core Worlds, and any parts common enough to be made locally probably exist in significant stockpile in Maribel and nearby systems.

Maribel is, after all, not properly besieged; no enemy effort has been made to interdict supply lines to the still-free part of the Frontier or into Farthing’s Chain toward the Core Worlds. Even the convoys heading for Sagittarius Gate remain largely untroubled.

I am still not sure why Admiral Venturi okayed this, but a most remarkable vessel arrived at Maribel today, diverting from its tour of the worlds of Farthing’s Chain. Holy Tabernacle, a starship built for and largely by the faithful of the technology-averse Holy Order of Penderites. Its stated purpose for coming here is to help relocate a significant number of Penderites evacuated from the small colony at MacNeil’s End, invaded by the Incarnation this past May. To that end Tabernacle arrived alongside a sizable hauler hastily refitted to transport refugees; between the two ships, the entire Penderite refugee community on Maribel can be transported.

Since we have seen Holy Tabernacle in this space before thanks to the contribution of its skipper, a Penderite-sympathetic spacer named Sandra Ibsen, I was hoping to see her contribute another account of mystery related to the plot to kill Grand Hierophant Uberto Toloni, the mortal leader of the Penderites. I was not disappointed in this hope. Captain Ibsen related a rather interesting incident that happened barely six hours after Toloni’s arrival on Maribel, which will require at least two weekly episodes to relate.

When Holy Tabernacle came to ponderous rest on Maribel soil, there was no eager throng waiting for its grand personnel ramp to descend, hoping to greet the Grand Hierophant of the Penderites with cheering acclamation. Other than two light aircraft swirling in for a landing nearby to deposit a gaggle of planetary officials and a couple of reporters, the salt pans outside the ship were empty for miles, gradually rising toward the Ueda Mountains which marched in pastel blue ranks to the south and east.

Beyond those mountains, Sandra knew, was Maribel City, the sprawling boom-town spaceport which boasted more citizens than almost every other planet on the Frontier, and more even than most of the worlds of the more settled Farthing’s Chain. She’d made landfall there once in her career as a merchant spacer, years ago, before the war, and even then it had been a freewheeling place, a city of vibrant commerce, but also of debauchery, where the fortunes of the Frontier were stripped away from their winners and relocated to more established interests.

“Not your usual sort of reception, Your Eminence.” Captain Sandra Ibsen shook her head, gesturing at the camera feeds. “Maribel’s no place for Penderites.”

“All the more reason why we must be here, Sister Ibsen.” Toloni clasped his hands together. “Fifteen thousand of our faithful doubtless care for the place no more than you do.”

Sandra bowed her head. “Of course. The ground team should already be unloading your caravan.” After five assassination attempts earlier in the year, she had quietly set the techs to modifying the Grand Hierophant’s huge ground-car, increasing its armor and adding an electronic warning system Toloni would protest, if he knew about it.

The Hierophant gestured to Sandra. “Join me. The crew doubtless needs you little while the ship is grounded.”

Sandra winced. “I’d… honestly rather not, sir. The last time I put my boots in this planet’s dirt, I regretted it.”

Toloni’s eyes twinkled over his characteristically enigmatic smile as he reached for his scepter of office, resting against the bulkhead. “Humor me.”

Sandra hesitated, then stood from her chair, pulled out her comms earpiece, and gestured to one of the other bridge officers to take over. Toloni was right; Holy Tabernacle didn’t need a skipper while it was resting on the salt pans.

As she joined him in the long spiral stairs that wound through the ship to obviate Penderites from using standard lift technology, Sandra snuck a look at the old man. “It’s about the assassins, isn’t it?” Everyone on board knew about the assassination attempts, of course, and most knew that all five of the would-be killers had been placed into the custody of Toloni’s honor guard, and held in Tabernacle’s small brig for months. Few knew that they had been offloaded into the dubious care of a Bureau of Counter-Intelligence task force which suspected Incarnation involvement in the attacks, and fewer still knew that the five men were all connected through a Maribel native, a datasphere fashionista named Delilah Brahms-Walton.

“I had hoped you’d guess.” Toloni nodded. “Yes, there has been a development. After we see to our displaced faithful, I have arranged a talk with our friend Miss Brahms-Walton.”

Given that Toloni used the ship’s comms only when he could not avoid it, Sandra assumed that his use of “arranged” here meant that the chief of his security detail had arranged it. “Is this talk going to be voluntary?”

Toloni shrugged, that playful look Sandra knew meant trouble appearing in his eyes. “I suppose we’ll see. It is a great opportunity for outreach to the masses.”

Sandra blinked. “You’re going to confront this woman in public? Your eminence, that’s suicide. I won’t let you-”

“Peace.” Toloni held up a gnarled hand. “It is already in motion.”

Sandra gritted her teeth and followed in silence; she wasn’t responsible for the Grand Hierophant’s personal safety on the ground, but she still would feel responsible if he were to come to harm.

At the bottom of the winding stair, a trio of garishly uniformed, rifle-toting honor-guards met Sandra and Toloni, snapping fine salutes before bracketing their master as he stepped out onto the landing and began the long descent to the ground. Already, the two aircraft had landed, and a knot of people were tromping across the salt pans toward the foot of the ramp, and already, a pair of honor guards waited there. Somewhere aft, the whirring of the vehicle lift told Sandra that the huge ground-car would be ready for its master soon.

At the foot of the ramp, Toloni thumped the foot of his scepter on the hard-packed dirt, then bowed his head in prayer for another safe landing. Sandra prayed as well, though hers was more of a fervent wish to return with Toloni to Holy Tabernacle as soon and as safely as possible.

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Tales from the Service: The Pack Leader’s Hunt

2950-11-29 – Tales from the Service: The Pack Leader’s Hunt

Pack Captain Ojathl Khedru found the first three intruders on deck two, where they were making a sorry mess of Howling Gale’s main wardroom, pulling the trophies of Khedru’s many years as skipper off the walls, prying up the deck paneling, and cutting into the electronics box below the long table. This proved, if nothing else did, that they had fought Rattanai before – they knew that the rightful spoils of warfare were inventoried and stored there, as a reminder to the officers and crew of the benefits of loyal service.

Khedru crept out of the maintenance crawlspaces out of view of the wardroom door, leveled his flechette-thrower, then ducked around the corner low. None of the three humans were looking in his direction in that crucial instant, and three quick sprays from the weapon sent them crumpling to the deck, each shredded by a tight cone of razor-sharp ceramic projectiles which shattered on impact with a hard obstacle. The weapon, designed by Rattanai mainly for use against their own kind, was massive overkill against the far softer flesh of humans.

Knowing that someone might have heard the weapon’s barking report, Khedru moved into the room and took cover behind the big table, leveling his gun on the door. A fourth human walked in with no urgency in his gait or face, and had only time for his eyes to go wide before another burst of flechettes reduced everything above his shoulders to a bloody mess of jumbled bone, hair, and brains. Gore and a few flechettes spattered against the opposite bulkhead and his body tottered weirdly on its feet for a long moment before falling forward.

Khedru waited another long moment, but no more intruders showed themselves. Still keeping his weapon pointed toward the door, he reached over and patted the corpse of the nearest human until he found the weapon holstered under one arm. Unlike the flesh which stuck to it in gobs, the rugged plasma-coil handgun had suffered no obvious damage from the flechette-thrower, and seemed not to have an electronic safety. It was almost too small for his large paws, but Khedru forced one thick finger into the trigger guard all the same, pointed it at the corpse in the doorway, and pulled the trigger.

The resulting gout of yellow-white plasma ignited the air in a satisfying holocaust of fire, burning the corpse badly and leaving its uniform aflame. The weapon would probably not kill a Rattanai or even a human outright, but it could easily blind or, in tight spaces, asphyxiate by consuming all the oxygen faster than the atmospherics could replace it.

Searching the corpses for comms equipment and spare batteries for the coilgun, Khedru filled a pouch on his utility belt with both before ducking back into the crawlspace and pulling the hinged panel back into place, Khedru headed to the narrow ladder leading up to deck one, where it terminated in the tiny comms hub, a compartment which none of his crew ever needed to enter unless the comms equipment needed maintenance. As he eased open the panel and peeked into the closet-sized space, he found it empty; the intruders had predictably found it unworthy of their time.

After standing and massaging the soreness of muscles unaccustomed to squeezing and crawling, Khedru signed in on the comms hub console and disabled both the comms mediator and bridge control of the ship’s comms antenna. After dashing off a quick text-only message for Governor Trumbull detailing what he knew of the situation, Khedru turned the antenna off altogether. If he survived and retook his ship, there would be much glory and even, perhaps, spoils of battle; if he did not, Trumbull could tell the Confederated Navy what had happened, and they would pay someone else to avenge him.

Listening at the door for a full three minutes, Khedru heard nothing. Pulling the emergency catch to disengage the hatch’s electric drive, he slid it open manually a few inches and peeked out. The short corridor leading along the ship’s dorsal ridge from the astrogation dome forward to the bridge was empty and silent, and both those spaces were hidden behind sealed blast doors. The doors of the lift well, across from the comms hub, stood propped open by some sort of mechanical device, and the lift sat on this level. Its safety interlocks would prevent it from moving as long as the doors remained open.

With a gun in each hand, Khedru crept forward to the bridge blast doors. If the intruders had already gained access to the surveillance system, they’d see him and his stealth would all be for nothing, but he doubted they’d penetrated the ship’s systems that quickly. The slow and steady drop in atmosphere pressure suggested that they’d fiddled with the central atmospherics unit manually; systems control would have permitted them to evacuate individual compartments one at a time, suffocating his crew in a moment.

Of course, lack of control hadn’t stopped them from sealing the blast door, and neither a flechette thrower nor a human plasma-coil gun would do anything against that. A simple datasphere command to open the door returned an immediate error-code.

Khedru, however, was not going to be defeated by a simple door. He fished around for one of the comms devices he’d picked up in the wardroom. It would never fit in his narrow ear-hole, of course, but it didn’t need to. He didn’t need to hear, only to speak. Gingerly, he held it in front of his mouth and pressed one broad fingertip against the activation switch.

In perfect Anglo-Terran, Khedru parroted a near-perfect imitation of Governor Trumbull. “Er, I say, hello?” He rapped lightly on the blast door for emphasis. “My name is Trumbull. Your boys gave me this link and told me to crawl up here to tell you that they found us. Damned nonsense crawling up that little ladder if you ask me.”

After a short period, no doubt with the humans on the bridge calling over their comms to check the story and not getting as many responses as they would have liked, the little earpiece squawked a response.

Khedru couldn’t hear the tinny words without the device being in his ear canal, of course. He made his best guess as to what the question was. “The girls were being awfully friendly with them. Dear me, we’ve all been so frightened, I hardly blame them. We can’t thank you enough for-”

The blast door clanked as its mechanism began to release. Khedru, unsurprised that the way past a human’s brain was still through his reproductive organs, dropped the comms earpiece, crushed it underfoot, and pointed his guns in the direction of his command chair and the helm station, respectively. Most probably, there were more than two, but that would only make this hunt worth its glory and spoils.

While Pack Captain Khedru’s account continues in some detail, we will not be continuing it after this excerpt. After retaking his ship from the small boarding party of pirates, he and his surviving crew chased the foiled raiders away from their station, and returned to accolades and awards from the local governor and his people. Though these rewards were no doubt meager in terms of their value, the crew of Howling Gale probably valued them higher than the payout for their mercenary contract; after all, in most traditional Rattanai cultures, the spoils of a battle against a worthy opponent have greater value than the wages of more mundane service.

We still have not been invaded at Maribel, though the atmosphere here is such that an attack is expected any day.

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Tales from the Service: The Pack’s Intruders

2950-11-22 – Tales from the Service: The Pack’s Intruders

Pack Captain Ojathl Khedru woke with the sense that something was wrong – very wrong in fact – though this instinctual impression at first did not resolve itself into any factual concerns. His cabin remained dimly lit as it had when he’d retired for a few hours of sleep before his shift, and the reassuring hum of Howling Gale’s reactor still carried up from the deck through the curved lattice supports of his sturdy sleeping-frame as it had before. 

Opening his eyes, he saw no blinking lights on the comms headband he’d left hanging in its usual spot, nor any flickering of the dim sleep-cycle lights overhead. Still, however, the sense that something had gone poorly tugged at his mind. 

No matter how well he knew not to solve problems without a sufficiency of data, Khedru replayed the last few hours prior to sleep in his mind, looking for anything that might have catalyzed into such a pernicious feeling of danger. He’d retired to his cabin, drafted a diplomatic message to his clan’s elders stating that his crew would not be returning before the end of the pairing season, then listened to a few scenes of his favorite Rattanai-language audio drama to prepare his mind for sleep. Only a few messages from the bridge had interrupted, and none of them could be classified as anything more than status updates. 

Finally levering himself up off the sleeping-frame, raising the lights, and grabbing the comms headband, Khedru stretched his arms and stepped in front of the mirror. One by one, he checked his quill-spines for any that had become loose or showed signs of being ready to fall out. Only when he was satisfied did he return his attention to the unknown which had woken him. 

“Watch Captain, any updates?” Khedru knew that Watch Captain Lrinah would have surrendered his station to Watch Captain Ralgahar by this point, but the two would have discussed the situation sufficiently during the change-over that it made no difference who answered. 

A few seconds passed, however, without any answer at all. Annoyed and expecting that his subordinate was merely preoccupied, Khedru tried again. “Watch Captain, report.” 

Still, he heard nothing. Dragging the headband off his head, Khedru checked its status lights, only to find most of them dark. Only the power indicator remained consistently lit, with the light for main system connection blinking intermittently next to it.  

With a low, frustrated growl in the back of his throat, Khedru woke the hard-wired console in the corner of his cabin and called up system diagnostics. In theory, a ship’s comms system was heavily fault tolerant, but Howling Gale had experienced several brief wireless comms outages after clan technicians had installed a set of Rattanai language and dialect interpretation package on their last visit home. It would hardly be the first time someone at a duty station had crashed the system by using some obscure, archaic profanity that the system had tried to add to the transcript log, and it couldn’t come at a worse time. 

For a moment, Khedru was heartened to see that the comms mediator already showed as disconnected on the main diagnostic, suggesting that the ship’s techs were already working on the problem. Nothing else on the board seemed amiss, except that the air pressure was a few percent lower than standard, as it might be if the airlocks cycled a few times while techs worked on comms components outside the pressurized spaces. 

The sense that something was wrong eased for a moment, then spiked again when Khedru saw the atmospheric pressure drop a little further. A pressure-hull breach would have sounded alarms all over the ship even as the automatic systems worked to seal it off, but an alarm-free pressure loss could only mean failure of the atmospherics – which came with its own kind of alarms – or intentional malice. Given how often Khedru, fearing death by suffocation over all others, had Howling Gale’s atmospherics checked, and the simultaneous loss of comms connectivity, malice seemed more likely. 

Scrambling for the flechette-thrower stashed in a bag under his sleep-frame, Khedru checked the weapon, then tossed a bandolier laden with spare magazines over one huge shoulder. There was still a possibility that the failure was simply unfortunate timing, but he’d lived to long and fought too many underhanded humans to take that possibility very seriously. 

The corridor outside Khedru’s cabin was empty, but he could smell the sour, musty reek of humans. They’d been there – perhaps standing just outside the cabin – and had not tried to enter. That was wise of them, since Khedru’s cabin contained no less than three booby-traps which automatically engaged whenever he was absent or asleep.  

If they suspected this, Khedru knew, the intruders had tangled with Rattanai before. Though he was not nearly as fast or agile as he had once been, he crept up the corridor toward one of the maintenance crawlspaces which humans would probably expect to be too small for him to navigate. If any of his crew were still alive, he didn’t intend on leaving any of the available glory to them. 

Maribel had its biggest invasion scare of the war so far this week. The entire operational Fifth Fleet battle line sortied for combat, but was only under power for about an hour before the all-clear was given. 

The cause of the false alarm remains unclear; either headquarters doesn’t itself know yet, or, more likely, Naval Intelligence figured it out and kept it quiet. I’ve heard rumors from various sources that Admiral Venturi is expecting an attack on this system in the next forty days, but none of my contacts seem to have any idea why this is expected nor have they heard it from any primary sources. Based on the jumpiness of most senior officers, the rumor might be true. 

No word on our parent company’s efforts to have us transferred to Seventh Fleet. Most likely, if it does happen, it won’t be until after the expected attack, rumored or real. 

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Tales from the Service: A Pack’s Alarm

2950-11-01 – Tales from the Service: A Pack’s Alarm

With few exceptions, the war on the Coreward Frontier is being fought mostly by the humans of the Confederated Worlds. There are a small number of Atro’me in the Navy and other services, but of the most common species of non-human sapient in the Reach, there are almost none involved in the fighting.

The reasons that Rattanai are excluded from the Confederated Marines and the Frontier Defense Army are numerous, but mainly they focus on the difficulty of procuring special uniforms, environmental gear, and other equipment for a small number of volunteers. The Navy theoretically permits their enlistment as spacers, but not as officers, and as a result Rattanai participation in the Navy remains quite low.

Mercenary outfits, on the other hand, are usually happy to recruit skilled Rattanai in various roles; most have at least a few in their pay. Even among mercenaries, however, it’s rare for a Rattanai to be the head of the outfit.

Captain Ojathl Khedru, the head of a small, all-Rattanai mercenary outfit chartered out of Sinteria, sent in a highly detailed account of his company’s efforts in the inner Nye Norge. These events took place while his company was on Navy contract patrolling a small system not far from Håkøya. Though his opinions of the locals are far from flattering, we should keep in mind how different Rattanai psychology is from our own, and how little culture our societies share with of the old clans of their kind.

“Pack Captain, we have detected an issue. It may cause moderate vexation.”

Ojathl Khedru paused the hologram in the center of his wardroom table. The three miniature dancers capering around each other paused mid-stride, and the pounding music fell silent. Despite the euphemistic, circling language characteristic of a Rattanai subordinate’s proper deference to his superior, Watch Captain Lrinah would never have interrupted the commander’s mealtime solitude with something of only moderate importance.

“Send it to this station.” Khedru swished one wide, paw-like hand through the hologram, and it changed to a basic ship-status display grid. He’d barely touched his meal in several minutes, and it would have been stone cold except for the electric prep-plate keeping the artificially grown meat perfectly warm. The holographic dancers, comely females of his kind, had occupied his entire attention.

A moment later, the status grid winked out and a tactical map appeared. At the center was Howling Gale, the large mercenary frigate of which he was both skipper and part-owner. Gale was an ungainly, boxy vessel whose lines betrayed the hands of her human makers, but her eyes were keen, her claws sharp, and her soul thoroughly Rattanai.

Gale, both in the display and in the tangible world beyond Khedru’s wardroom, drifted above a planet of little value save for the few thousands of humans who clung to its lichenous rocks. In the display, while the ship’s image remained a constant size, the planet appeared only to shrink rapidly as the scale expanded. Soon, the red-dwarf stellar primary appeared, and also began to shrink, until the whole system was represented in a display less than one Terran meter across.

At the far edge of the display area, a yellow pip appeared, then another, and a third. Khedru’s eyes narrowed. He knew all too well the might of the enemy he’d been contracted to repel. Why the Incarnation would bother with such a pathetic star system was beyond him, but so was much of human thinking, and it was right to let such things remain inscrutable.

“Pack Captain, these drive signatures are much too small to be Incarnation warships of the usual kind.” Lrinah, trying to sound nonchalant, nonetheless let a bit of alarm creep into his voice. “They also do not match any records in our databanks.”

“Transmit the arranged challenge.” Khedru’s eyes flicked from one end of the display to the other, estimating the range and rate of approach. In such a small star system, the unknown ships would arrive before one full Urazd day had elapsed. Even if the incoming ships were no more than frigates themselves, Howling Gale could hardly contest them for control of the system. “Then alert the planetary governor.”

Khedru disconnected the comms channel, then switched his display back to the holographic dancers. It had been nearly an Urazd year since he’d last seen a female of his kind in the flesh, comely or no, and he paid close attention to the way their supple muscles slid beneath firm grey-brown skin. The easy agility of youth combined in them with the precision and grace of long practice, and colorful ribbons streaming from the ends of their polished arm-quills produced an alluring mist of fluttering cloth around each figure. They wore no other clothes, but this was in no way titillating – Rattanai had never grasped the human concept of modesty. The purpose of the dance was to prove each young female’s eligibility as a mate in any case; too much clothing would impede a suitor’s careful inspection.

Khedru, unfortunately, already knew that he would be suitor to none of these three. Neither would any of his officers, who would customarily be allowed to choose among those their leader felt unsatisfactory. The clan had transmitted the recording as well as information about the pedigree of each prospective mate, but Howling Gale would not be returning to Urazd before the end of the pairing season to consummate any such arrangements.

Grudgingly, Khedru flicked off the holographic display and tore into his meal. He’d long since gotten used to the flabby, greasy character of the artificially grown meat his ship produced, even though on Urzad such food would not even be fed to the lowest of the low. It was much better than the livestock slop churned out by human food-fab machinery, even if it was far from the real thing he could expect on his table back home. Howling Gale was his clan’s greatest triumph, and unsatisfying food was a small price to pay for the glory of a warship command.

It had been many minutes since Lrinah had made his report; plenty of time to transmit the challenge and alert Governor Trumbull. Lack of a follow-up message told Khedru that something had not gone well in one of these two tasks, and only one of them could possibly have caused complications.

Sighing, Khedru flicked back on his comms headband. “Watch Captain, you may connect the Governor with this station.”

“It will be done, Pack Captain.”

The holographic display soon reactivated, and this time it showed the globular head and sloping shoulders of a human. Chubby, red-faced, and nervously defensive, Governor Jarvis Trumbull was an unlikely leader even among his vexatious species, but all the same Khedru found him endearing. In another era, he might have had a comfortable life entertaining a Rattanai clan-lord with his antics under the illusion that he was a diplomatic envoy.

“...Captain Khedru!” Trumbull drew back and straightened. “Your subordinates said you were busy.”

“I was able to spare time for a person of your eminence.” Khedru twisted his mouth into the uncomfortable contortion best resembling a human smile for just a moment.

Though the expression unnerved most humans, Trumbull, as usual, seemed reassured. “Thank you, Captain. What do you know?”

“We know sadly little about these visitors, but alas, I fear we should plan for the worst.” Khedru spread his broad hands, making sure to keep his claws sheathed. “They do not seem large enough to carry a serious invasion force, but your people should seek shelter.”

“I’ll sound the alarm and call up the militia.” Trumbull puffed up his chest. “Even if they’re too much for you, do you think you can slow them down?”

Khedru had no intention of sacrificing his ship, the pride and joy of his clan, in the service of this worthless little planet, even if the Navy would compensate their next of kin richly if he did. Still, he pressed his hands onto the table and leaned forward. “If they should prove hostile, Governor, we will do what we can to slow them down. We’ll stream everything to the Hypercast relay as long as we can.”

Trumbull nodded solemnly, doubtless taking this to be the self-sacrificial promise which Khedru had deliberately not made explicit. “Let us hope it does not come to that, Captain.”

“Indeed. I will let you return to preparing your militia.” Khedru nodded, struggling to keep the amusement out of his eyes and body language. Trumbull probably couldn’t pick up such things, but it paid to be tactful.

“Of course. Do send along any updates.” Trumbull slapped the edge of one hand to his forehead in what was probably supposed to be a salute.

Khedru held up one big hand in a similar gesture, then cut the feed, stood up, and headed for the bridge.

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