Tales from the Service: The Sagittarius Sniper, Revisited

2949-10-05 – Tales from the Service: The Sagittarius Sniper, Revisited 

At last, Naval Intelligence has cleared me to relay this account, though it is by now several months old. You may recall that very early in this text feed series we published a story called TTales from the Inbox: The Sagittarius Sniper, featuring an enterpreneur’s failed attempt to set up a depot at Sagittarius Gate. The accident that befell Martin Westland there remained unexplainable for a long time, but I believe the work of a squadron of Naval Survey Auxiliary pilots in mapping out the natural objects present in the Sagittarius Gate system has accidentally resolved this little mystery. 

One of the pilots involved, an occasional reader and viewer of Cosmic Background content, sent a duplicate of their report along with a lengthy account of their discovery, but as the report is under seal as a file of strategic importance to Seventh Fleet operations, it took Naval Intelligence a long time to go through it and provide me a list of the details I am and am not allowed to include in this feed item. 

Their censorious attention to detail has nevetheless given me a vast array of facts to work with. I cannot offer hard numbers, astrographic positions, or anything similar, but the general shape of the discovery is fair game, and it is that general shape which more than adequately explains Mr. Westland’s accident. 

Pacey Salo flipped a series of switches on the control panel the Navy techs back on Vigilance had just bolted to the left side of his console, frowning. The Navy’s fancy gravimetric sensors were supposed to pick out the ripples in the cosmic fabric caused by the passage of large masses such as asteroids and planetoids, but after working reasonably well for a few hours, the system had utterly failed, its readouts stuck at their maximum levels and warning lights blinking more or less at random. 

Nothing else aboard her little ship seemed to be affected, and she thanked whatever guardian angel looked over her for that. With the amount of power the gravimetrics required, a short could have fried her explorer’s navcomputer or arced through the whole system, leaving her dead in space. 

“Brick, Jolly, I just lost my gravimetric unit. Damn thing’s totally dead.” Pacey scowled out into the darkness ahead as she waited for the radio signal to cover the few light-seconds of distance to her compatriots. They were already behind timetable, and the Navy wouldn’t like another delay, even if it was their own damned fault this time. Falling back on radar and visual detection in her sector would quadruple the time necessary to mark all the hazards and bodies that tumbled through the planetless proto-system surrounding bloated blue Sagittarius Gate. The system, a cheerless place by any metric, had been no small amount of trouble to survey already, since the Navy had added battle wreckage to the array of troublesome objects circling the star. 

“Copy, Nitro.” This was Jolly’s gruff voice. “Do what you can with standard gear.” 

“On it.” Pacey yanked on the control column to drive her ship directly into the heart of her assigned sector, then set the ship’s twin visual-light telescopes to scan the starfield. She was hardly a fan of the slow-boating visual detection method, but could hardly claim it was anything other than what she’d signed up for. The computer would flag anything moving that wasn’t already on the charts or in the data streams from the other two surveyors, and she’d fly to each one to have a closer look. Most likely, she’d pass the bulk of the list off to the others when they finished gravimetric scans of their own swatches of space. 

Just as Pacey was telling the ship’s little food machine to make her a coffee, the gravimetric sensor panel’s warning lights winked out with a series of bright chirps, and the readouts had begun to fall back to their normal levels. 

“Creative Hells?” Pacey flicked the power switches on the new sensors several times, then watched as they started up to show relatively normal gravitational flux. “Boys, my gravimetrics just came back, but I’ve got no idea how long I’ll have them. Damned Navy-tech hackwork.” 

“Watch the chatter, Nitro.” Jolly’s barking reproach had less than the intended effect, since it arrived more than eight seconds after Pacey had finished talking. “Sweep back over the area you passed while it was out, then finish your sector.” 

Even before the squadron leader had finished reminding her of how to do her job, Pacey had already yanked the ship’s nose around to face the empty space she’d just vacated. Most likely, she hadn’t missed anything during the little hiccup, but Naval Survey Auxiliary didn’t deal in Most Likely. It dealt in absolute certainty. After all, there was little use in a navigational chart that only included most of the local hazards. 

Almost as soon as she’d reversed course, the warning lights returned, and the readouts spiked up to their maximum levels and stayed there. 

“Guess that was too good to be true.” Pacey shook her head, her hand hovering over the comms control. Something about the failure bothered her, and she wanted to figure out what before she reported in once more. 

As she sat puzzling over the situation, a wrenching sensation pushed her back into her chair. The frame of her little ship groaned in protest. Several system alarms began to wail at once, but by the time they did, the sensation and the groaning of stressed structural members had already ceased. 

“Woah.” Pacey scanned the instruments, dismissing alarms as she went. The combination of warnings suggested she had sustained high acceleration – high enough to briefly overwhelm the inertial isolation system – but she’d been coasting without the main drive engaged. Strangely, both her position and bearing were off where they should have been, but the drive showed no indication of having been accidentally engaged. Most tantalizingly, the gravimetric sensor readouts were crawling back down toward normal once more. 

Pacey had an idea, and she knew it was a bad one. Even without doing the math directly, she could estimate what it would take to haul her ship off course and heading in an instant. Supposing she’d accidentally performed a gravitational slingshot around an unsighted object, there was only one material – theoretical material, really – dense enough to create so violent a slingshot. It would also cause the gravimetrics to go haywire when she pointed them in the right general direction. 

“Boys, I’ve, uh. Got something.” Pacey’s hands danced across the console, pinpointing the exact moment of her sudden course change and estimating the location of the object which had caused it. As yet, she had no proof anything was there, but proof wouldn’t be long in coming. “Something really weird.” 

“How weird is weird, Nitro?”  

Before Jolly’s cautious response had reached her, Pacey had already estimated the orbital path of the object she’d encountered and had a decent idea of where it was, and where it was going. “How weird exactly is a two meter ball of pure neutronium, boss?” 

The silence on the comms circuit lasted far longer than transmission delay could adequately explain. Jolly knew as well as Pacey did that neutronium didn’t exist, except theoretically at the hearts of neutron stars and other super-dense bodies. A chunk of the stuff small enough to do a flyby of should have burst into a spray of loose neutrons the moment it formed, yet Pacey was increasingly sure that’s exactly what she’d found. 

To test her theory, Pacey turned her ship toward where she thought the object was now. The moment she did, the gravimetric sensor system flashed warning lights and shot its indicators up to maximum once more. 

With a sigh, Pacey turned away from the object, entering its orbital ring as an area of extreme hazard in the database. “That explains that, at least. Why do answers always create more questions?” 

While the existence of (relatively) small, apparently natural, masses of neutronium density and nearly zero detectable emissions in the Sagittarius Gate system defies explanation in terms of our scientific understanding, it seems clear that one of these bodies (a smaller one than the one Pacey discovered) collided with Mr. Westland's ship at high relative speed. He's lucky things turned out how they did - a slower collision might have resulted with him and his ship being wrapped around the object like so much solar foil.

Given his adventures since, I'll say more broadly that Mr. Westland is a very lucky man, even if he thinks otherwise.

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Tales from the Service: Arrowhawk’s Raiders

2949-09-28 – Tales from the Service: Arrowhawk’s Raiders

Several weeks ago now, the light cruiser Arrowhawk limped into Maribel for a patch-up before heading back toward the Core Worlds. There seems little chance we see the ship on the front again – after the wear and tear put on it by the Lost Squadrons, it’s probably destined for demilitarization and scrapping. 

As far as I can tell, very few members of its skeleton crew were aboard during the Lost Squadrons, and those were only there because they were heading homeward or being reassigned to desk postings or academy rotations. While the ship was being worked on, I tried to get an interview with Lieutenant Commander Quinn Kensington, the ship’s head computer tech and a Lost Squadrons veteran, but he declined. He submitted a short on-the-record statement to the effect that he’s glad to have been a part of the Lost Squadrons but looks forward to his new and presumably less perilous posting in the Home Fleet headquarters. 

Given that the Home Fleet is considered something of a dead end posting by many, I wonder how much Kensington is really looking forward to it. There seems to be no indication he performed poorly under Captain Bosch – indeed, he was publicly commended for his ability to adapt to the situation – so I can only assume that the new posting was at his own request. Perhaps being so close to death for so long encouraged him to remember the merits of a desk posting in Earth orbit. 

Fortunately, one of the other Lost Squadrons veterans aboard, one Marine Sergeant Cornell Santiago, was far more willing to deal with us, and Naval Intelligence has finally cleared his story for publication. True, the events in question took place fourteen months ago, but the adventures of the Lost Squadrons still garner a good deal of interest.

Sergeant Santiago heard his squad already talking on the comms channel as he slipped his helmet on and engaged its seals. The topic of conversation seemed to be guesswork about the reason they were being sent planetside on yet another Sagittarian world, and as usual the men offered a curious mix of extreme pessimism and almost childlike optimism about what they’d see when their dropship ramp came down. 

Santiago had long since stopped guessing, but he let the men chatter away in the privacy of their helmets while they filed out of the ready room and out onto Arrowhawk’s flight deck. The dropship was already waiting, its flight crew already aboard preparing for launch, and he was more concerned with whether the craft would get them down and back again without any major problems. In the last three weeks, several of the cruiser’s launches had finally succumbed to the long list of overdue parts replacements and maintenance tasks credited against them, and he didn’t want to be aboard something that was about to hit its definitive end of service life. 

“What about you, Sarge?” Buckland, the closest thing to a rookie Marine aboard, drew Santiago’s attention back to the conversation. 

“Don’t matter to me what’s down there. Whatever it is Captain wants, we get it, and we leave. No sightseeing.” 

The squad hardly needed the pep talk, but Santiago thought it useful for their morale to keep a sense of continuity even though things were going from bad to worse. Their equipment were long past their maintenance need-by dates, and only a few of the big armor-suits they wriggled into before every deployment came online with more green lights than yellow on their status boards. It was only by the grace of a compassionate God and Vasilev overengineering that Santiago and his men could still jump out of their dropship protected by anything sturdier than a flexvest. 

As usual, the briefing data payload appeared in their suit computers only once the dropship had dusted off and was headed toward the pockmarked surface of the planet below. The place looked as inhospitable in the data payload as it did in the dropship’s bow camera feed, but apparently there was a tiny Nate outpost perched on the rim of a volcanic caldera down there which was about to be liberated of its supplies. Whatever guards the enemy had left over its scientists would need to be cleaned up, then the marines would load everything not nailed down back into their dropship. With any luck, they’d be orbital again in two hours. 

As the others read their briefing data and grumbled about once again being sent down to a place without any sunny beaches, cool green hills, or nubile alien females, Santiago focused on images of the facility itself. It squatted on one side of a rocky ridge, spreading white tendrils of prefabricated building along the ground like a parasite colonizing the hide of a huge beast. Whatever the Incarnation wanted out of this volcanic hellscape, their plans were about to experience a setback, Marine style. He made a mental note to “forget” at least one of the fist-sized smart grenades on his belt before he re-boarded as the first wisps of atmosphere began to rattle and groan against the hull. When one of the big Nate cruisers came to see what had happened, all he wanted them to find was a newly scorched crater on an already crater-pocked sphere. 

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Tales from the Inbox: Monte Crow’s Host

2949-09-21 – Tales from the Inbox: Monte Crow’s Host 

As soon as they were inside, Leopold Mendel gestured with his gun for David Montero to sit in one of the wickerwork chairs in the big house’s anteroom. David eased himself slowly down, not wanting to make any sudden moves. He had never been in the Mendel house before, and he had to admit that what he could see so far impressed him. Though the place was built to nowhere near the level of precision which had been the norm in his own recently-destroyed house, the sprawling compound oozed a feeling of homey security. 

Though the plank floorboards were covered by Ravi dust blown in underneath the door and between the joints of the stiff metal panels of the outer siding, the wickerwork furniture and cloth wall-coverings gave the anteroom a cozy, quiet atmosphere entirely at odds with the winds which at that moment had just begun to rush down into the basin outside. The storm blowing in was as multi-edged as the dust particles it carried - it would blind whatever security system Mendel had, but it would also prevent David’s would-be killers from following his trail. 

“I’ll let you call the Sheriff as soon as the storm lets up.” Mendel shouldered his rifle and turned a crank on the door, which pushed a set of heavy deadbolts into place. “Transmitter sure as all hells won’t work in that mess.” 

“Will your crops be all right?” 

“Crops?” Mendel frowned as he sat down in a chair opposite. “Oh, the garden. Yeah, I think so. That’s Phyllis’s project. Not sure how she can get anything to grow at all." 

David frowned. True, the greenery around the Mendel homestead was unusual, but it was hardly the only green patch on Botched Ravi. The settlers of the world had engineered a few types of food crop that grew well enough, given water and some shelter from the storms. “Botch Peas? Wyrmroot?” 

“Probably those.” Mendel shrugged. “Why don’t you tell me about those off-worlders who wrecked your house?” 

David glanced toward the door, though the wind howling outside would flay him in thirty seconds if he decided to use it to escape the conversation. “Hells if I know, Mendel. They showed up pretending they were locals, and started shooting when I didn’t buy the ruse. I think they were at Palumbo’s before me.” 

“And they demolished your house for shooting back?” 

“For shooting back too well, I reckon. Bagged at least two of the bastards.” 

Mendel nodded casually and glanced down at the gun resting on his knees. David knew immediately that his fellow homesteader didn’t buy the story. “How many were there?” 

“Six at least, including the ones I holed. Could have been more hanging back.” 

“At least four still after you, then.” Mendel frowned. “As soon as the storm lifts, they’ll follow you here.” 

David shrugged. “I lost them, but other than Palumbo you’re the closest place I could have run, and they’ll be able to figure that out. Shouldn’t be too much trouble for the two of us, at least until Deering catches up, and I’ll help you see to anything that gets shot up.” 

Mendel scowled. “My house is not a fortress, Montero, and I am not a gunman for hire. Whatever intrigue you’ve gotten mixed up in, you go out there and face it when this storm is over.” 

David sighed. He could easily overpower Mendel and fight off Grif’s gang from within the house, but he hadn’t come to Botched Ravi to keep living a brigand’s life. “I’ll go out after I’ve called Deering. If they come here, tell them I’m headed for town.” 

Mendel nodded, then looked up as a strong gust shook the house. “You’ve got at least two hours before that squall lets up. I’m going to go get some coffee.” 

As Mendel exited the anteroom through an inner door, David scanned the space he’d been left in. Though a gun rack protruded between the tapestries near the door, it held nothing but an empty cartridge box. A few crates along the opposite wall looked to be full of foodstuffs. There was, in short, nothing worth stealing, at least not in his current situation. He wouldn’t steal from Mendel unless his life depended on it, of course, but old pirate habits died hard. 

If it had been anyone but Grif, he might have tried hiding in the expansive Mendel homestead, but Griffon Baum never forgot a grievance, and he never gave up once he smelled blood. He’d tear the Mendels’ house to pieces and torture them for weeks on the slightest chance of finding his old adversary. Without Mendel’s help and without Deering’s posse, David would have to face the pirates alone in the open – a sure death wish – or watch them turn Csorba Basin into a charnel pit looking for him. 

The door clicked, then opened to admit Leopold Mendel once more. He still held the gun, but it pointed at the floor, which told David that there was some sort of surveillance system in the anteroom which told Mendel he hadn’t moved. His other arm cradled two insulated carafes, and he tossed one across the room. 
 
“Thanks.” David popped the seal and smelled the steam wafting out. “When this is over, I owe you a drink down at Talleyrand’s.” 

“When this is over, I don’t want to see you for three T-years, Montero.” Mendel scowled. “Phyllis and I didn’t come here to get dropped into some hoodlum’s shooting gallery.” 

David shrugged; if he went out to face Grif’s gang alone, Mendel would most probably get his wish and then some. “You want to know what this is really all about, Mendel?” 

“Not in the slightest, unless it’ll get you off my property sooner.” Mendel broke the seal on his own carafe and sipped lightly. 

“Smart play.” David smiled; though newcomers to Csorba, Mendel had seemingly internalized the madness that passed for local wisdom. “What’ll get me off sooner is a stormcloak, some goggles, and a decent rifle that’ll handle the dust for at least ten shots.” 

Mendel narrowed his eyes. “You’re out of your mind.” 

“Offer’s on the table. I’ll try to bring the stuff back, if I don’t get shot.” 

Mendel sat wearing a silent scowl of deliberation for several seconds, then turned back for the door. “Out of your damned mind, Montero. I’ll be right back.” 

This week’s entry concludes the publishable section of David’s account. Though he does announce that he was able to get the drop on Grif’s gang as the storm lifted, he does not provide details, most likely to avoid revealing anything incriminating about what part of the badlands the bodies are buried in. 

I doubt he needs to worry about such things; from what I hear the Botched Ravi badlands make short work of any human remains committed to them. 

David does say that the local police helped him hush up the cause of his house’s destruction, so searching for Botched Ravi houses that exploded (as I’m sure many of you did) won’t give you any clues as to his real identity. 

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Tales from the Inbox: Monty Crow’s Neighbors

2949-09-14 - Tales from the Inbox: Monty Crow’s Neighbors 

This week we continue to draw from the submission by David M. (yes, this is a pseudonym) about his experience having unwelcome visitors come to his home on Botched Ravi. 

Next week we’re hoping to finally release some of the stories Naval Intelligence has been sitting on for some time – the first batch of them got through the censors two days ago, and we’re working on sifting through and figuring out which ones are still immediately relevant. 

David Montero adjusted the makeshift veil shielding his face from the brutal Botched Ravi sun as he emerged from the escape tunnel. He’d left home with only the clothes on his back and the guns he’d been carrying, with not even a canteen to help him on the open badlands. Grif would want proof of David’s death and would find the tunnel looking for his body, but the gang would be sifting through the collapsed ruin of his house for hours before they found the trapdoor. Hopefully, that would be enough of a head start for Botched Ravi to erase his tracks. 

Fortunately, even without a canteen, David had preparations of another kind. The tunnel he’d dug years before emerged in a stand of corpse trees clustered in a blind defile a few hundred meters behind his house. The trees’ leathery flesh, revolting to the eye, concealed a mass of spongy, water-storing flesh which a human could suck on to obtain moisture, even if the alkaline taste would make any but a local gag. He drank from the trees until he couldn’t swallow any more, then used his belt knife to cut a six-foot length of one tree's stiffening rib to use as a walking-stick. Anyone foolish enough to brave the Ravi badlands without a walking-stick was as damned as if they were without a veil and a canteen. 

David’s would-be assassins hadn’t been lying when they’d claimed a storm was coming as a reason to be let into his homestead; every gust and eddy of fickle wind told him that his stretch of the wastes was about to suffer a big one. Botched Ravi’s furious storms drove swirling clouds of razor-dust which could strip human flesh from bone, and he’d been dressed for the stifling heat of the morning, not these late afternoon premonitions of a howling night. He would be reduced to a well-armed skeleton in mere minutes if he couldn’t find shelter before it hit. The tunnel mouth and gorge offered some protection from a storm, but Grif and his men were still too close for comfort. 

Though he briefly considered making an aboveground dash for his homestead to retake the freshly blasted ruins, David abandoned this mad scheme. He’d called Sherriff Deering when the pirates appeared and would need to leave clearing his destroyed home of the ruffians to the ragtag posse that passed for local law enforcement. He didn’t envy the outsiders their inevitable gun-battle with Deering and whoever else the lawman could scare up in short order, especially with a storm blowing in; most of his neighbors were reformed upstanding citizens like himself. They would relish the excitement offered by a firefight with a gaggle of overconfident space pirates. 

His best chance to make it through the day alive would be to make it to the home of one of his neighbors - Old Man Palumbo was the closest, but the pirates had been there already, so instead he set a course for the Mendel home three klicks in the opposite direction. Leopold and Phyllis Mendel were the newest settlers on the badlands, and he’d only met them twice, but they would probably let him call Deering to check in and ride out the storm in their parlor. David might do the same for them, if he was in an obliging mood. 

Peeking out of the gully and seeing no sign of his pursuers, David scrambled topside and set off toward a brilliantly white speck on the eastern horizon. With the nearness of the dusk and its promised storm, his feet itched to run, but he moved with deliberation, tapping the ground in front of his feet firmly with the end of his cut walking-stick. The Csorba Basin where he’d made his home was one of the flattest places on the planet, but flat and open did not make it safe. If he put his foot into the mouth of a ringbiter he’d never get it loose before the storm overtook him, and ringbiters were among the least deadly of the creatures which prowled the area. If he happened to cross into a tunnel cat’s stalking-ground or a songbird run in his haste, neither Grif nor anybody else would ever find his remains. 

Moving as fast as he dared, David watched the speck on the horizon grow into the top of a white stone monolith jutting into the sky. Despite having a squared-off shape and resisting even the patient teeth of the wind, the structure was a natural outcrop. Its base lay in the bottom of a broad canyon at the intersection of several of the defiles and gullies which channeled the basin’s seasonal rains. Despite being warned that their chosen spot would turn into a lake once every thirteen T-years, the Mendels had raised their home at the base of the monolith. 

In three more T-years when the rains returned, David meant to deliver a long-awaited told-you-so to the flooded-out homesteaders. For the moment, though, their ill-advised choice of building site didn’t bother him. He only needed shelter for a few hours. 

Reaching the edge of the Mendels’ dry lakebed just in front of the storm, David didn’t have time to appreciate the lush greenery which carpeted the bottom. Even in the interminable dry season, the water table lay close to the surface at the bottom of the white-stone pillar, and Leopold Mendel had built piping to irrigate an extensive garden of exotic plants. True, he could only plant crops that could resist the wind-whipped razor-dust, but even that bit with far less force on the lakebed. Between the couple’s sprawling house and the numerous outbuildings around it which sheltered the pumps and farming equipment, the Mendel homestead had enough roofs to look like a whole town, rather than a single house. 

David started down the switchbacked trail to the bottom, but stopped after only a few steps when he heard the rasp and click of a cartridge-rifle’s bolt sliding home somewhere nearby. Raising his hands and walking-stick, David turned around. “Mendel, is that you?” 

“Montero.” The gruff settler’s voice echoed crazily among the rocks, and David couldn’t figure out where he was. “Go home.” 

“Wish I could. With this storm. I’d never make it back.” Already the horizon to the south had darkened, and the sky above had turned the killing coppery color every Botched Ravi settler knew meant it was time to seek shelter. “I don’t want any trouble. Just shelter and to drop a line to Deering.” 

After a long, tense moment, Mendel emerged from behind the rocks, raising the barrel of a long hunting rifle to point skyward. “Damnation, Montero, you should have called ahead. I could have shot you at fifteen hundred meters. Haven’t you heard? There’s a mess of outworlders about, and they’re baying for blood.” 

David looked up at the monolith, realizing that the peak would be a perfect place to put a ring of surveillance cameras; with good optics, the Mendels could keep an eye on their neighbors even from many kilometers away on a clear day. “Yeah, I heard.” How closely he was affiliated with those outworlders would be a story best kept to himself. “They attacked my house. Blew the place to all hells. Birds know what for.” 

Mendel looked up at the approaching clouds, then beckoned down into the lakebed valley. “Come on, let’s get under cover. This is going to be a rough one.” 

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