Tales from the Service: Duncan’s Misadventure

2950-03-22 – Tales from the Service: Duncan’s Misadventure 

Rumors of our death have been somewhat exaggerated. 

Nojus here. Duncan is alive and mostly intact. We got thrown around a bit when Saint-Lô took a bad hit in action on the third of this month, but both the ship and the team did pull through in the end. Sadly, the battle ended up as yet another inconclusive action between Fifth Fleet and the bulk of the Incarnation ships in the Coreward Frontier. We didn’t really lose, but neither did we win. Duncan will bring a full breakdown to the feed when he’s up and walking again. 

With the restoration of long-range communications back to Maribel (though not as long as the people there would prefer to believe), we’ve been buried under several mountains of datasphere messages and alerts that were sent before the Navy could move one of its portable hypercast relays into the Håkøya system safely. If you sent us anything and expect a reply, be patient, especially if you expect it from Duncan. 

Some of you may be asking how only one of us managed to be injured. Well, during action the five of us tend to spread out across the ship to observe the battle from wherever we can get a good sense of things without getting in the way. We’re trained to do basic damage control if we need to, but Captain Liao told us not to get involved unless the situation was really bad. Most probably, Cosmic Background asked the Navy not to risk the lives of four of its employees and one contingent contractor needlessly, but that’s none of my business.  

Anyway, Duncan should have been the safest of us; he was in the command citadel with Captain Liao during the battle. Having talked to him as much as the medics would permit, and viewed some of the system data from the battle, may I present to you the account of how Cosmic Background’s star text feed editor nearly got his arm blown off. 

“Ah, not again.” Captain Liao kicked the display projector housing with the toe of his boot. As if responding to the kick, the cloud of fuzzy static in the display area briefly coalesced into a swarm of brightly colored icons before fading away again. 

“It’s no good, sir. Something’s wrong with the hard-wire data feed. I’m switching to wireless backups.” 

Duncan sat at the inactive terminal assigned to him in the corner of the compartment, his recording unit perched on the top edge of the adaptive screen. He had made little sense of the battle so far, but he usually didn’t understand things as they were happening anyway. After things were over, he always re-played the recording a few times, then asked Liao or another senior officer about anything that still seemed strange. So far, the battle in Håkøya had been no different than the large-scale engagements over Margaux. With multiple fast groups of Incarnation ships moving in tight formations trying to outmaneuver the slower but more powerful Fifth Fleet battle line, it took a trained command officer’s eye to watch the whirling swarm of symbols in the display all at once and make any sense out of it. 

A few seconds later, the display reset, but Duncan could tell from the back that the data being displayed was of far lesser quality. The symbols were larger and more diffuse, indicating inexact coordinate data, and the various rectangular insets appearing and disappearing around the margins for Captain Liao and the other four officers pacing around the display seemed far less choked with information.  

Most of the orders Liao and his subordinates were sending out were muttered quickly over their comms headsets, so Duncan, unable to overhear most of it, focused on the display, picking out the solitary bright blue symbol which represented their own ship, Saint-Lô. The venerable battleship, currently occupying the tail endf of Fifth Fleet’s eight-battleship central line, was currently maneuvering away from the thick of the fighting, where cruisers and destroyers in various shades of green flung themselves like waves against tight knots of red Incarnation warships. There could be no telling who was winning, not yet, perhaps not even for Captain Liao or even Admiral Zahariev. 

Duncan jumped as the big armored hatch behind him emitted a dull clanking noise followed by a hiss. Captain Liao had summoned a crew rating wearing a damage control patch and was pointing toward the exit. The captain occasionally punctuated his orders to the damage control tech with a gesture that seemed to be in Duncan’s direction. 

The tech saluted and hurried away from the battleship’s captain, waving Duncan to his feet. “Come on.” 

Duncan, for the first time in months remembering that he had been ostensibly trained in damage control when he’d come aboard, stood awkwardly. “Me? What for?” 

“Going to need a second pair of hands to check the wire trunking. Don’t worry, I’ll show you what I need.” 

Duncan picked up the tool satchel he’d still not used except in refresher training, then followed the young man out into the corridor. Never had Saint-Lô seemed to be so big and so silent. With the crew at its combat stations, the vast central corridors were blocked every few meters with a translucent pressure-seal curtains. He and his guide were the only people moving in any direction. The dimmed Condition One battle alert lighting gave the long, curtain-divided corridors an eerie feeling, and Duncan immediately wished he was back in the command citadel with Captain Liao. 

Pushing aside the first pressure curtain, the tech pointed to a panel in the bulkhead. “The trunking is behind that.” 

Working quickly, the pair released the screw bolts holding the panel in place and levered it off to one side. The tech stuck a scanner probe into a coiling tangle of ducts and cables, and Duncan tried and failed to discover how the man knew which one was the data line to the command citadel before he withdrew his arm once more, shaking his head. 

“Damage is further back, right?" Duncan began lifting the panel back into place, glad that the heavy panel was attached to swinging lever-arms that took most of the weight. 

“You got it.” The tech holstered his probe and helped bolt the panel back down. “Let’s try the next one down.” 

Five panels later, the battle alert klaxon sounded. Looking over his shoulder, Duncan saw the command center’s heavy hatch begin to swing closed once more. “We’d better get back before that’s sealed off.”  

“Captain didn’t recall us.” The tech shook his head. “We’ll finish up and head for the damage control annex at the aft end of this deck.” 

Duncan wanted to push through the pressure curtains and get back inside before it finished closing, but the tech didn’t seem terribly concerned, so he stuck with his temporary associate, helping seal up the sixth panel and move on to the seventh. He wasn’t technically a Navy spacer and was under no obligation to follow Captain Liao’s orders, but he didn’t want to leave the young man next to him to finish the task alone either. The faster they both finished, the faster they could both retreat to the relative safety of the damage control station. 

The pair had just opened up the ninth panel when the lights flickered and a low boom echoed through the battlewagon’s massive hull frames. Duncan knew this to mean that the ship had suffered a hit through its defensive systems, but probably not very badly; after all, Saint-Lô had heavy armor to absorb such punishment, and nothing else seemed to be going wrong. 

A moment later, as the tech was once again reaching into the panel to stick his sensor probe into a tangle of wiring, the ship took another hit, this time much closer to the pair of techs. There was a bright flash down the corridor to accompany the usual boom of a strike, and the deck below Duncan’s feet seemed to twist and leap a meter upward, throwing him across the corridor away from his partner. Shrill alarms began to wail and the pressure curtains inflated to firmly seal the corridor in both directions. 

Just as Duncan, shaking spots out of his eyes, was getting to his feet to help his associate disentangle himself from the wiring, there was another boom, this time seeming to come from just above Duncan’s head, and reverberating in a lasting rumble that seemed to be getting closer and closer. 

The tech, at last pulling free, seemed to recognize a danger that Duncan did not, and dived to the deck. 

Before Duncan could mimic the action, a gout of flames exploded out of the open bulkhead panel he was standing beside. Thrown across the corridor yet again, he struck his head on the hard metal opposite, and everything went dark. 

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Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Contingency

2950-03-15 – Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Contingency

[Note from the C.B. main office on Planet at Centauri: We are receiving word that normal contact with Fifth Fleet will be restored by next week. As a result, we expect this to be the last of the pieces from the automated backlog before Nojus (as Duncan reportedly remains in sickbay) brings some news on the battle. 

Specifics on the outcome of the fleet action reported in the Håkøya system nearly two weeks ago have not been released, but since we have hard evidence that both fleets are still in system, it seems to have been another stalemate with neither fleet giving ground.]  

Looks like we didn’t get a story into the feed system before ingest time this week. That probably means our embed team aboard Saint-Lô has not been near a hypercast relay for at least eight days.    

This is an expected consequence of wartime maneuvers and operations, and as such your Cosmic Background Embed Team has prepared a number of interesting accounts to publish in advance should the vagaries of war cause a lapse in communication with the greater interstellar datasphere.    

The names used in this account are all pseudonymous, and it is a continuation of a series of stories we set aside for this eventuality. If you haven’t seen them, prior portions of this account can be found in Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Ruination, Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Tempest, and Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Exchange. 

The Ladeonists, though caught unprepared, flashed into motion when the floodlights came on, diving for cover behind Jen Daley’s landing struts or going flat against the muddy ground. The leader’s masked face revealed no emotion, but his arm lashed out and caught Livia’s outstretched arm, yanking her towards himself and turning toward the lights with her in front of himself. 

“Drop your weapons or you will be fired upon.” The loudspeaker-amplified voice repeated, once it was clear the initial order had been utterly disregarded. “This is your final warning.” 

Ramiro, knowing that becoming a human shield wasn’t part of Livia’s plans, scowled and backed a step up the railing, blinking into the lights. If the radicals decided to have a shoot-out with the encircling authorities – or at least what they thought were the authorities – he didn’t fancy his or Livia’s chances of surviving the crossfire. Captain Boleslav and his mercenaries might not be the actual Bettendorf system authorities, but they were probably better armed than the real thing, and only too happy to shoot back if the Ladeonists started it. Suddenly, Livia’s carefully laid plans were in tatters, and she probably knew it more than anyone else. 

The cell’s leader took a step toward the floodlights, one arm around Livia’s throat and another twisting her arm behind her back. “Let us go, or the lady dies.” His voice left no doubt that he was both capable and willing to carry out this threat, if he was pressed. 

“Don’t be an idiot. We can get you out of this!” Livia wriggled against the big man’s grasp, but she couldn’t loosen his grip. “Get your men into the ship, we can-” 

Ramiro gritted his teeth. He knew Livia couldn’t talk her way out of this one. Quietly, he tapped the small button on the underside of the remote in his hand three times. He’d talked to Boleslav privately after Livia had laid out her plan, and set up the three-tap panic signal with the mercenary to indicate that the plan had gone irrevocably wrong and it was time to fall back to a far less elaborate scheme. Most likely, the con artist would have been furious had she knew her co-conspirators had conspired behind her back, but at this point, she’d either live to thank them, or she wouldn’t live to learn of it at all. 

The floodlights flickered three times, and Ramiro understood this to mean that the mercenaries had heard his signal. Quietly, he unhooked his pistol from his belt and loosened it in its holster. He’d never fired the weapon, a Dragan chemical-cartridge weapon, in anger at anyone, but he’d spent many hours target-shooting in spaceport shooting galleries and outdoor practice ranges on the various remote worlds he’d visited. Now, it was time to do a distasteful thing to prevent several more distasteful things from happening all at once. 

“You are all under arrest on the authority of the governor of Bettendorf.” The mercenaries’ loudspeaker operator continued, most likely told simply to keep the Ladeonists busy for a few seconds. “Smuggling and arms-dealing on this world is prohibited by law.” 

The insurgent leader took another step forward. “Leave us alone, or this woman’s blood will be on your hands. If-” 

He never got a chance to finish his dire threats. Ramiro drew his Dragan in one fluid motion, lined its sights up on the back of the big man’s head, and pulled the trigger. The muzzle-flash briefly overwhelmed the floodlights, and the crack of its supersonic projectile echoed back and forth between Daley’s hull and the muddy ground. The Ladeonist staggered forward, twitched once, then went limp and fell to one side, the contents of his skull thoroughly scrambled by the weapon’s self-fragmenting projectile. 

Before the other would-be revolutionaries could figure out what was happening, Ramiro leapt forward and tackled Livia flat to the muddy ground. As they splashed down, the air above them filled with the tearing sound of hypersonic railgun slugs and the hailstone clatter of the same projectiles shattering against the landing struts and underside of his ship. He’d gambled small arms couldn’t do much harm to Daley, but he’d accept a little damage to his ship if it meant getting out alive. 

The firefight, though sharp, was short. No doubt the Ladeonists had targeting implants in their heads to help them shoot accurately in the driving rain, but Boleslav’s armor-suited platoon had far more weapons, and at least as much technology helping them figure out where each of their foes was. Within a minute, the cracking of pulse-beams and the tearing of automatic railgun fire fell silent, and Ramiro rolled off Livia and began scraping the mud off his face. 

Before even wiping mud off her face, the con artist dove for the dead Ladeonist’s body and rummaged around until she found the ring of cred-chits. She counted each of the ten-thousand-credit tokens by touch alone before pocketing the ring and finally wiping her eyes clear. 

Sighing, Ramiro got to his feet, shook his pistol clear of mud, and cleared its chamber. “Pay your mercs, and let's get out of here.” He looked down at the dead Ladeonist, shivering at the thought of their widely dispersed order putting a price on his head. “And next time, we’re doing this my way.” 

Looking up at him at the mention of “next time,” Livia smiled. Ramiro didn’t like the look of that too-clever smile, but he decided that unless he was willing to lift off and leave her on Bettendorf, that he was going to have to get used to it. 

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Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Exchange

2949-03-08 – Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Exchange

[Note from the C.B. main office on Planet at Centauri: While there remains no hypercomm connection with Fifth Fleet, the fleet’s Maribel office has passed on a report from Duncan and the embed team. Everyone is alive, but Duncan and Koloman were injured when Saint-Lô took a bad hit during battle with the Incarnation fleet. Neither of their injuries are life-threatening. 

While Nojus and the remainder of the team are preparing stories for this feed, the limited communication back here to Centauri has prevented them from sending us any of that content yet. Hopefully by next week the situation will improve.] 

Looks like we didn’t get a story into the feed system before ingest time this week. That probably means our embed team aboard Saint-Lô has not been near a hypercast relay for at least eight days.   

This is an expected consequence of wartime maneuvers and operations, and as such your Cosmic Background Embed Team has prepared a number of interesting accounts to publish in advance should the vagaries of war cause a lapse in communication with the greater interstellar datasphere.   

Most likely, last week’s entry warned that this might be the case; if not, Duncan or Nojus will give an account of what’s been happening on the battle front in weeks to come.   

The names used in this account are all pseudonymous, and it is a continuation of a series of stories we set aside for this eventuality. If you haven’t seen them, prior portions of this account can be found in Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Ruination and Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Tempest. 

Ramiro eyed the puddle at the bottom of Jen Daley’s windswept boarding ramp warily. The sporadic flashes of lightning skittering across the horizon and the rasping hiss of rain sheeting off the ship’s flanks on all sides turned everything beyond the ship’s protective overhanging bulk into dark, distorted shadows and silhouettes, but he already knew trouble lay out there. Somehow, the prospect of plunging his only pair of dirt-rated boots into the remote world’s mud nearly made him forget Livia Farran’s already dubious scheme, seal his ship back up, and climb for orbit as fast as possible. 

“Pleasant.”  

Livia’s voice carrying over the distant thunder startled Ramiro into losing his balance and grabbing for one of the hydraulic pistons attached to the end of the ramp to avoid falling headlong into the puddle. When he recovered and turned around, he blinked in confusion. The con artist had changed out of the drab, relaxed attire with which she’d lounged around his vessel for the past few weeks and into a sheer, gauzy outfit that revealed more than it concealed. 

Livia smiled when she saw Ramiro’s reaction. “Maybe not the most practical thing for this weather, but it’s not the weather I’m worried about. Are we all set?” 

Ramiro nodded and turned around to point down the length of Daley’s hull to the broad space between the rear landing skids. “If you’re sure you put their goods in the right place, we're ready to make the... Exchange.” What they were doing still didn’t sit right with him, but he was more concerned with surviving the encounter than with expressing his unease with the idea of swindling a bunch of murderous would-be revolutionaries. 

“It's all set, and just in time. On your left, coming out from those rocks.” 

Ramiro looked out into the sheeting rain to see a cluster of greenish lights furtively working their way across the field toward Jen Daley. As the lights approached, Ramiro saw that they were attached to a cluster of figures wearing black, face-concealing helmets and bristling with weapons. 

As the lead figure stepped through the waterfall fringing the ship’s hull and into the shelter beneath, Ramiro resisted letting his hand move toward the handgun hanging from his hip. He considered himself a crack shot in range conditions, but he’d never needed to shoot at anything any more lively than a pop-up target. 

“You’re late, boys.” Livia, turning on her characteristic charm, pranced down the ramp to join Ramiro where Daley’s textured metal and Bettendorf’s mud met. “Ten more minutes and we would have given up on you.” 

Though none of the figures spoke as they filed into the dry space under his ship, Ramiro saw that several of the featureless black masks were pointed squarely at Livia and her provocative attire. Even though he knew the Ladeonists were probably communicating with each other via some sort of silent comms circuit, their silence and the uniformity of their smooth black masks set Ramiro’s teeth on edge. 

Eventually, the leader approached Ramiro and Livia, stopping barely there meters away. “Our merchandise?” He was a big man, bigger than the others, with broad shoulders and a thick barrel chest crisscrossed by a pair of bandoliers carrying railgun slug magazines and batteries for the big weapon hanging under his arm. 

Livia giggled. “Not so fast, big guy. You’ve got something for us too.” 

The towering Ladeonist took another step forward. “Show me the goods.” 

Ramiro glanced over to Livia, who nodded her agreement. Taking a deep breath, he pressed the first button on the remote hidden in his coat sleeve. Near the other end of his ship, the big cargo elevator unlatched from its resting position with a deep clang and began lowering toward the muddy ground. On its upper surface, a stack of white polymer crates tied down with cargo netting descended into view. 

“There now.” Livia stepped forward, seeming to ignore how deeply her heeled shoes sank into the mud when she stepped off the ramp. “Now you show me the goods.” 

Ramiro hated watching Livia approach the Ladeonist so closely, but he had agreed to let her do what she did best, and he didn’t intend to get between the con artist and her newest mark if things went poorly. The crates really did contain a small fortune in weapons and electronics – given the Ladeonists’ predilection for advanced technology and implants, the pair had assumed it was too dangerous to try to swindle them with anything but genuine supplies. 

After several seconds, the big man nodded and waved one of his companions forward. This figure carried a bulging backpack, which he took off and set at the leader’s feet before withdrawing to the rest of the group. 

Livia stared at the bag for a moment. “You could put a hundred thousand worth of cred-sticks in your pocket. What’s with the sack?” 

“More than twice your asking price, value in jewelry.” The big man picked up the backpack and reached in, withdrawing a handful of glittering chains, and held them up. The stones caged into the links of each chain caught Daley’s running lights and reflected them back in a different color. 

“Where are we going to offload stolen jewels?” Livia shook her head. “The deal was for credits.” 

After staring at Livia for a long moment, the figure dropped the bag and produced a ring of credit chits. Even from a few meters away, Ramiro recognized the distinctive opalescent markings of the ten-thousand-credit denomination on each one. He’d only seen a ten-thousand-credit hard-currency stick once before, but everyone knew what they looked like from the holo-dramas. 

“There, that wasn’t so hard.” Livia took a step forward, her feet sinking into the mud up to her ankles, to accept the ring of chits. As her fingers touched it, the other Ladeonists started moving toward the cargo elevator. “It was thoughtful of you to bring options, though.” 

At that moment, the beams of several searchlights appearing from all directions turned the gloom into a painful radiance. “Don’t move and put your hands in the air, every one of you.” The loudspeaker-amplified voice carried easily over the increasingly distant thunder. “Attempts to escape will be opposed with deadly force.” 

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Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Tempest

2949-03-01 – Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Tempest

[Note from the C.B. main office on Planet at Centauri: Fifth Fleet’s representatives at Maribel say they’re able to confirm that a major fleet action has taken place in the Håkøya system. Saint-Lô was involved but is not destroyed, and they assured us that all of our personnel survived the battle. How they know this for certain was not explained. According to analysis by experts here on Centauri, the most likely explanation is that a long-range, low-bandwidth hypercast relay was set up at the outskirts of the system for limited communication on military channels.] 

Looks like we didn’t get a story into the feed system before ingest time this week. That probably means our embed team aboard Saint-Lô has not been near a hypercast relay for at least eight days.   

This is an expected consequence of wartime maneuvers and operations, and as such your Cosmic Background Embed Team has prepared a number of interesting accounts to publish in advance should the vagaries of war cause a lapse in communication with the greater interstellar datasphere.   

Most likely, last week’s entry warned that this might be the case; if not, Duncan or Nojus will give an account of what’s been happening on the battle front in weeks to come.   

The names used in this account are all pseudonymous, and it is a continuation of another item we set aside for this eventuality which you should have already seen (Tales from the Inbox: A Spacer’s Ruination).

“This is not going to work, Liv.” 

“Come on, Ramie, you’re going to let a little w- Augh!” 

Ramiro wrestled with the controls as Jen Daley bucked in the eddying wind and the flat ground approaching dead ahead suddenly lurched into a vertical cliff. He’d landed his ship on open ground without the benefit of a spaceport’s guidance systems and sensors before, but Bettendorf’s notoriously unpredictable weather was far beyond his comfort zone. Punching up maximum thrust, he hauled the nose up and held it there until blue-white light from the planet’s primary broke through the clouds. 

Livia Farran, strapped into one of the secondary consoles, pushed her loose, straight black hair out of her face. “Well, that was interesting.” 

Ramiro scowled. He hated interesting, and his life since he’d let Livia fund the repairs to his ship had been all kinds of interesting. “We’re going back up to orbit until this storm clears. Call your contact and tell him we’ll be late.” 

“I’ll try, but you know how these guys are.” 

“Let me guess.” Ramiro set the ship’s autopilot to an orbital trajectory. “Twitchy?” 

“A little.” Livia giggled in that way she probably hoped was disarming. Ramiro had long ago learned to ignore the con-artist's affectations, knowing that her mannerisms were as carefully selected as her wardrobe. “They tend to treat everything like a test of loyalty.” 

“So they’ll think, if we don’t risk our lives flying into those thunderheads to land, we aren’t loyal enough to do business with?” 

“You know, you catch onto all this stuff way too fast to be an honest spacer. Honestly I think they still suspect we might be with BCI or something." 

Ramiro massaged his forehead with one palm for a moment before cancelling the autopilot and returning the ship to manual control. “Looks like I’m going to try that approach again.” While he and his erstwhile partner were hardly working for the Confederated government’s Bureau of Counter-Intelligence, the fact that they were planning to steal from Livia’s contacts made reinforcing such suspicions incredibly unhealthy. 

“Probably a good idea.” Livia tapped away at her console for a moment. “No beacons to fix a comms beam on anyway, and they’ll probably shoot us if we start broadcasting.” 

Ramiro pointed Jen Daley’s nose back at the boiling cloud-tops, and the cheery daylight soon vanished behind swirling gray fog which quickly faded almost to black. Though no motion could be felt from inside the ship’s inertial isolation, Ramiro could tell from his instruments that his trusty ship was being pushed almost onto its side by the wind, and he made a few corrections. If Daley came down on any part of herself besides the landing skids, it would never leave Bettendorf again, and the best case scenario would see the pair of them stranded. 

Fighting wind shears that seemed to change to a new direction for every thousand meters of altitude, Ramiro pointed the ship down at the location where his instruments told him there was a clear field to land on. In such poor weather, the autopilot’s self-landing system probably wouldn’t work, so he prepared to take the ship all the way in by hand. 

Since the only thing visible outside the cockpit was clouds and rain until the last few hundred meters, Livia probably had no idea how dangerous what they were doing was until they broke through the cloud ceiling and once again laid eyes on the landing site. Almost immediately, an updraft nearly flipped Daley over on her back, and Ramiro hauled on the controls to right it. 

"So, uh.” Livia’s tone remained overly conversational, as it always did when she was concealing extreme worry or stress. “How likely is this to kill us, Ramie?” 

“Going to have to land on manual. Say, fifteen or twenty percent.” 

“Ah.” The woman watched the ground, occasionally rolling or pitching out of view, grew steadily closer. “Next time, maybe you should, ah... pick the place.” 

“Liv, I don’t care what you offer me. One way or another...” Ramiro’s fingers ached from how tightly he was squeezing the controls, but he dared not relax. Passing a hundred meters of altitude, he deployed the landing skids, and prayed they’d be on the side of the ship that came down first. “There’s not going to be a next time.” 

One last eddy of wind threatened to push Jen Daley back into the sky, and then, with a heavy thump that reverberated through the ship despite the best efforts of the inertial isolation system, the skids sank into the wet Bettendorf soil. As the ship settled into place, Ramiro slowly took his hands off the controls and took a few long, slow breaths, watching rain streak across the forward viewpanel. 

“You keep saying that, and I still don’t believe you.” Livia, near-death experience apparently already forgotten, unbuckled her restraints and stood from her station. “I’ll go check the cargo. Our friends should be here soon.” 

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