2952-10-23 – Tales from the Service: The Anomaly in the Clouds

Though I recorded some other interviews while I was away, I don’t want to overload the feed with this relatively dry, informative material.

While we have been out in Sagittarius, a few interesting things have happened back in the Coreward Frontier worthy of mention. The raid at Adimari Valis has been well covered in other media outlets, obviously, but the arrival of Flit Diver at Maribel the day before the raid was announced in the media seems to have been largely overlooked.

For those of you who do not know, the Flit Diver is a carrier of the Rahl Hegemony Navy. While no formal pact appears to exist between the Confederated Worlds and the Hegemony stabilizing the border region until this conflict is ended, even a token force sent to the Maribel defense zone seems a gesture of goodwill indicative that such negotiations are ongoing. We at Cosmic Background get very little message traffic out of Hegemony space, though we are certain we have many readers and viewers there.

Apparently, the Flit Diver’s pilots had a bit of an interesting experience on the way across the Reach; their course took them close to the edge of the Brushfire Nebula, where they claim to have seen something quite spectacular.

[N.T.B. – This gesture of supposed goodwill is also an excuse to rotate Hegemony squadrons through a combat zone; trust the Hegemon to never let an opportunity to season his forces go to waste.]

Stefan Giunta adjusted the settings of his interceptor’s onboard radar, trying to find a combination where the artifacts along the left margins of the display disappeared. The Cavalier was a relatively new machine, having just been introduced the year before, and he still hadn’t flown one with a properly automated radar rig. He didn’t mind; the techs would work out the bugs eventually, and in the meantime, it was the fastest and most nimble strike rig in the Hegemony fleet, with enough firepower to make quick work of anything it managed to run down.

“Lead, I’m having sensor trouble. Anyone else picking up anything in that cloud?” Stefan bit back the word “again” automatically; he didn’t want the squadron comms log to suggest he was dissatisfied with the quality of his machine, and thus risk being reassigned to a squadron flying the older, far less glamorous Cuirassier. Stefan had flown Cuirassiers for the first four years of his service career, and while they were a capable machine, they would feel slow and cumbersome next to the Cavalier.

“Nothing on my plot.” Commander Daniel Jansson, the squadron leader, replied in an instant. “Anyone else?”

“Just some radar artifacts.” Elliott Clemens’s voice was full of grumpy exasperation that fortunately the transcript would be unable to record. “The radar is so sensitive it picks up denser areas of the nebula.”

“Probably nothing, but why don’t you both go check it out anyway.”

“Aye, Commander.” Stefan switched to a direct channel with the other pilot. “Clemens, you’re ahead of me, so why don’t you lead.”

“Acknowledged.” Clemens split from the formation and banked toward the extending arm of the nebula, and Stefan followed. The purple and orange haze of a nearby active area of the Brushfire Nebula soon filled his forward view, hiding all but the brightest stars. Few people lived in or around the nebula, partly because the area was not suitable for planet formation, and partly because high concentrations of phased-Epsilon and phased-Rho particles posed a risk to starships with standard phased-matter condensing reactors. Dense nebula clouds could even interfere with strike craft operations.

Fortunately, their squadron’s forward patrol, and their mothership’s course generally, were not intending to go into the Brushfire; they merely needed to skirt it until they reached the edge of Memoire de Paix. A more direct route to their destination through the Silver Strand was of course quite out of the question; it would violate treaties if Hegemony military forces passed openly through that region, and no-one had been able to arrange it even on a solidarity mission.

Though they didn’t intend to go through the nebula, its many far-spreading and poorly mapped arms moved, in astronomical terms, relatively fast. Theoretically, a pirate band – this was one sort of inhabitant the Brushfire always seemed to have plenty of – could use its greater knowledge of this shifting condition to set up ambushes on passing ships, thus requiring the Diver to send out forward patrols to clear each jump zone. Pirates attacking a fully escorted light carrier seemed farfetched to Stefan, even if brigands from that very nebula had battled Confederated cruiser squadrons on almost equal terms not yet fifteen years before. The Confederated military was soft and risk-averse; pirates knew that the same wasn’t true of the Hegemony Navy.

Oddly, as he came out of his turn on Clemens’s tail, Stefan saw that the radar artifacts in the nearest section of nebula hadn’t gone away. Normally, this sort of interference was resolved when the more capable forward-facing sensors were brought to bear on the problem.

“Still seeing it.” Clemens made a small course adjustment, and Stefan mirrored it. “You think maybe there is something in there?”

“Several somethings is more likely.” Stefan again tried to adjust his radar to clarify the plot, again without result. “But that’s a dense gas pocket, probably holding together under its own gravity. Visual sighting in there is going to be impossible.”

“No reactor signatures, nothing on infrared.” Clemens sent a proposed course to Stefan’s display. “Let’s do a close circuit. If we don’t pick anything up on thermal, there’s nothing to see.”

“Lead on.” Stefan moved the course from his display to his autopilot, then turned to the sensor controls. Even with the unreliable hardware on the Cavalier, if there were pirates hiding in there, he was about to know it.