2953-07-30 – Tales from the Service: A View From Headquarters, Part 14 

This is another excerpt of the interview conducted in-person aboard the battleship Philadelphia in the Sagittarius Gate system on 19 July. 

D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri is a junior editor and wartime head field reporter for Cosmic Background.       

N.T.B. - Nojus Brand is a long-time explorer, datasphere personality, and wartime field reporter for Cosmic Background.      

K.T.K. - Captain Kenneth Kempf is the Naval Intelligence attaché to Seventh Fleet commander Admiral Shun Abarca.    

S.R.A. - Admiral Shun R. Abarca is the commander of Seventh Fleet. 

[D.L.C.] - Late last year we discussed what is known about the Incarnation home front with one of your staff analysts. Do you think the condition on their worlds is appreciably changing because of Force 73’s achievements? 

[S.R.A.] - Yes, I do recall your interview with Lieutenant Reid. She would be a better person to ask, and of course she is free to meet with your team if you would like to have regular briefings on the subject, but I can share a few things we hope are being achieved. 

[K.T.K.] - Whether they are being achieved, we generally do not know yet. Our best intelligence about Incarnation home worlds comes from prisoner interrogations, and we have not taken any significant groups of prisoners in recent months. 

[N.T.B.] - What about Fifth Fleet’s victory on Montani? Surely many prisoners were taken there. 

[K.T.K.] - Fifth Fleet shares intelligence with us when possible, but I am not aware of anything useful they have learned along that line. Most likely, the personnel devoted to the Montani operation by our foes had not been back to the Incarnation home region in more than a year, excepting a few senior officers perhaps. 

[D.L.C.] - You said you can speak about what you hope to achieve? 

[S.R.A.] - Obviously, the most ideal outcome is a collapse of the Incarnation regime and its replacement by some less fanatical government that is willing to end this conflict. It should be noted that they initiated it, and it cannot end until they say so, whatever we want. 

[N.T.B.] - Not much chance of that, given how cybernetics and monitoring software is used to enforce orthodoxy. 

[K.T.K.] - That is widely discussed in civilian channels, but we are still unsure how widespread that system is. It certainly is used within military chains of command, and it does wonders for the combat cohesion of Incarnation formations, but there is no reason to assume it is as widely used in civilian administration, given how expensive it must be for each person who gets the implants. 

[S.R.A.] - We have to assume the fanaticism of their highest policy makers is mostly genuine. It is only too likely that such zealotry is sought out and rewarded. 

[D.L.C.] - If we are not likely to see a government change bringing them to the negotiating table, what are some more realistic things you hope Bosch will achieve? 

[S.R.A.] - We already discussed reducing their supply of interstellar haulers. This has immediate strategic implications, but it also will likely have an impact on their civilian economy, such as it is. As best we can tell, their inter-system cargo routes are operated by semi-militarized transport services that use the same types of equipment as the military resupply system, with the same supply chain. 

[D.L.C.] - I see. You are hoping the transport shortage will make their economy feel the pain, too. 

[K.T.K.] - Their supply runs across the Gap can’t be slowed down without abandoning entire systems they took from Fifth Fleet in the opening years of this war. The only obvious place to take those haulers from, if they can’t make enough, is the civilian economy.  

[N.T.B.] - All the same, you have to feel bad for the poor people whose livelihoods are going to go to ash over all this. 

[S.R.A.] - I feel badly enough for all the Confederated businessmen and colonists who staked their lives and fortunes on the Sagittarius Frontier and had it all taken away from them in the opening weeks of this conflict. Their machines, raw materials, and even ships are unfortunately part of our foes’ war machine. Increasingly I am convinced that the goal of our foe was to entice Confederated interests to move resources to this side of the Gap for them to be easily mopped up in the opening phase of the conflict. 

[D.L.C.] - I had almost forgotten about all of that. Most people probably think Bosch saved or destroyed anything useful during his Lost Squadrons campaign, but that can’t possibly be true. 

[S.R.A.] - Unfortunately, less than a quarter of the heavy industrial equipment that had been moved to this side of the Gap before the initial attack is accounted for by the work of Bosch and others. It could have been much worse, of course; they could have waited longer and captured more. 

[N.T.B.] - Surely much of that will be burnt out now, if they’ve been using it non-stop for years, without the proper parts replacement chain. 

[K.T.K.] - Some of it, yes. But given how much was captured, including the machinery and tooling to fabricate new production machines, they could well have set up an entire factory complex building things our way, if they had spare manpower. 

[N.T.B.] - Why don’t we see that stuff on the battlefield, then?  

[S.R.A.] - We aren’t sure. Lieutenant Reid’s theory, which is the best so far, is that the product of this manufacturing, if any, has been focused on their civilian economic needs, freeing up their normal production capability for war materiel. Still, we’d have expected minor things like uniforms and rations made with our machinery to appear on some battlefields by now, and they have not. 

[D.L.C.] - It’s strange to think their civilians might be subsisting on wartime rations created by some of our own food-fab machines. 

[S.R.A.] - At least in part, they probably are, but we can’t know for sure until we’ve got boots on the ground of one of those worlds. 

[D.L.C.] - Do you think it affects morale? 

[S.R.A.] - It must, if for no other reason than these people have lived for generations on their own supplies, food, clothing, and materials. Having things that are different – and probably, in the eyes of the average person, inferior because it isn’t what is familiar – must be an indication that the war isn’t going very well. 

[N.T.B.] - Unless they’re told all that stuff is a stream of war booty from conquered worlds. 

[K.T.K.] - Yes, we’d considered that possibility as well, but that charade would be hard to keep up for long, and they would have to keep making things exactly the way we would, just for the charade. 

[D.L.C.] - Do you think the quality of life of the average Incarnation citizen is suffering from the conflict yet? 

[S.R.A.] - Probably not, at least, not much. They don’t seem to do much trading we can interdict, and they don’t seem to harvest many resources outside their home region either. Really, until our forces start putting pressure on their core worlds, and cutting them off from the outlying systems they need for resource harvesting, I don’t think their average family man is going to have much sense the war is going badly. 

[N.T.B.] - I suppose he could hear it on the newsfeeds, or whatever a cybernetic counter-human uses for media sources. 

[S.R.A.] - Captured soldiers we interview have shockingly low understanding of the war situation. We have to assume their civilians are kept even more in the dark than their troops. Most likely, they know there’s a war on, and most of them think their forces are winning, or at least not slowly losing. 

[N.T.B.] - They’re in for a rude awakening soon, then. 

[S.R.A.] - Inevitably, yes. 

While the interview we conducted with Admiral Abarca is longer than these two excerpts, we will return this text feed to stories sent in by our readers next week, rather than continue to post transcript excerpts. This embed team once again thanks Seventh Fleet staff for being open with the media and being willing to sit down with us in person as often as they do.