Tales from the Service – Cat and Mouse

2948-03-10 – Tales from the Service – Cat and Mouse 

Small-time sabotage has been going on for most of the conflict both in the Coreward Frontier and elsewhere, but no sabotage incident was more spectacular than the explosion of the hauler Dwight Schroder in Maribel orbit a week and a half ago. Though doing little in terms of material or human damage, the impressive blast was visible from the surface across half the planet, and equally visible from most orbital habitats. 

The Incarnation agent who accomplished this sabotage mission is still at large on Maribel. He has broken contact with Naval Intelligence and civilian counter-espionage agents several times. In this week’s entry, sent to us by Naval Intelligence, we get a rare view into the hospital-bed report of the most recent civilian-agency operative to be outwitted by this terrorist. 

The names in this story are obviously not the real names of these agents, and much of the non-public operational information has been scrubbed as the same tactics and tools are being used in operations throughout the Reach to counter the efforts of agents such as this one. 

Special Agent Zuleyha Marek held her breath as the target appeared around the street-corner right on schedule and passed right below the landing pad on which she had landed her aircar. The man looked nothing like he had thirty hours before, the last time Zuleyha had tracked him in her sector, but that came as no surprise. According to Liason Gorsky, the standard operating procedure of Incarnation agents was to change appearances at least every standard day. Where they couldn’t steal a useful identity, they could always create a random face, complexion, and posture combination which would fool Maribel’s street monitoring network. 

Zuleyha slowly rotated the bow camera of her aircar and got a good angle on the agent’s face.  Immediately, the recognition system came back negative. “Another dud ID. Hells, this Nate is patient.” 

When Danir responded, Zuleyha could hear that her partner hadn’t bothered to swallow the last bite of his pastry breakfast before pressing the comms key in his own aircar, six blocks away. “Do you think he knows we’re watching?” 

“He knows half the city is watching after Dwight Schroder blew up in orbit. The half that isn’t jumping at shadows is still covered in recording devices with immediate upload.” 

“You know what I mean, Zul.” Danir, watching the camera feeds in his own aircar cockpit, drew a red box over a freeze-frame of the man’s wrist. “That’s new. What is it?” 

Zuleyha zoomed in on the object, a chain of boxy, polished metal ornaments held together by links of chain. “Big metal bangle of some kind. System has it pegged as chrome-plated nano-steel. Probably from a curio shop.” 

“Looks heavy as all hells. I’ll figure out where it came from.” Danir got to work searching the planet’s datasphere, and lapsed into silence, his prior question forgotten. 

As the man ambled past and along the street, Zuleyha wondered how much the Incarnation agent did know about his pursuers. Surely he couldn’t believe that after planting the bomb that destroyed a hauler starship in orbit that he was still flowing through Maribel society un-noticed. He certainly walked past aircars and officers of the city constabulary (such as, at least apparently, Zuleyha’s own) as if he had no more to fear from the police than the other pedestrians, and in truth, he was right. The city police were too busy and poorly equipped to start chasing deadly counterhuman spies festooned in dangerous clouds of nanotechnology – which was why Zuleyha, Danir, and the rest of their small team had been called in. 

Just as the man reached the next intersection and started to cross the narrow street, he glanced over his shoulder, and seemed to stare right into the aircar’s cabin where Zuleyha was sitting. For an instant, her heart seemed to stop as the agent’s flat brown eyes and hers met from eighty meters away. 

That was silly, of course. The aircar’s viewpanels were all heavily privacy-glazed, and there was no way he could tell that the pilot was any different from the bored traffic-cops in the other constabulary aircars parked on similar landing-pads throughout the city. As he turned and continued on his way, Zuleyha took a deep breath. “Whew. For a minute there, I was sure he’d made me.” 

Danir, still searching, didn’t reply right away. “What?” 

“Nothing, just jumping at shadows.” She relaxed back into the pilot’s couch. “He should be coming your way in about thirty seconds.” 

“Got it. No hits on that bangle by the way. Nobody for a hundred klicks sells anything like it.” 

“Hmm. I’ll check if he stole it from someone.” 

Zuleyha bent over the aircar’s center console to perform a stolen valuables query. She guessed at the item’s weight and value, but wasn’t surprised to come up empty. The bracelet had looked like a worthless knickknack rather than a proper heirloom. On anyone else she would have paid its gaudy and impractical presence no mind, but Incarnation agents did nothing by accident. 

“You sure he came this way, Zul? I’m not seeing him.” 

“Yes, Dan. Same as every other day we’ve watched him on this route.” 

“Not again.... I’ll find him again on the metatracker.” 

Zuleyha rolled her eyes at his reluctance. The metatracker was only supposed to be used in emergencies, but tracking a bomb-happy enemy agent qualified as that. Headquarters would grumble about every use, but they would not argue too loudly with results. 

At a tap on the window next to her, Zuleyha turned to see a middle-aged man in a rumpled business-suit rapping on the privacy-mirrored glass and waving with his other hand. 

Cautiously, Zuleyha collapsed the window panel just enough for the man to see her face and hear her voice. She was, after all, driving the aircar and wearing the uniform of a local patrol officer. “Can I help you, sir?” 

“I... I was looking out my window just now and just saw shove something under the loading dock behind the next building, officer.” The man stammered a little, stepping back from the car. “Could be nothing, but after that ship blew up...” 

“Did you get a good look at them?” 

“Not really. Flat sort of face, dark hair. Sorry.” 

Zuleyha nodded. The description was vague, but it could be the agent who her partner was looking for on the metatracker. Waving him to take another step back, she grabbed her comm from its cradle, opened the vehicle’s side door, and stepped out. “Show me where and I’ll have a look.” 

The rumpled man nodded quickly and led the way off the landing pad toward a side of the roof facing an alley. Sure enough, there was a small, obviously little used loading dock attached to the next building at street level, and he pointed to it. “There.” 

After glancing both ways and verifying that nobody was in sight in the alley, Zuleyha pulled out a pocket magnifier to examine the dock. “I’ll check it out as soon as my partner gets here. The Constabulary appreciates your vigilance, citizen.” 

When he didn’t scurry away, she turned toward the tipster, only to step back in alarm. The disheveled man, now grinning wickedly, held a small gun trained on her. “Just as gullible as the last batch.” He held out a hand. In an instant, she realized the sort of ruse which she had fallen for. “Comm unit.” 

Zuleyha didn’t move to give the item to him, but his hand darted out inhumanly fast and wrenched the item from her fingers. “That will be all, Special Agent Marek.” 

He knew her name – Zuleyha’s head spun trying to catch up with all the things that meant he already knew. “Kill me or don’t, you can’t escape.” 

The man shrugged and held up Zuleyha’s comm, now bearing a few spiderweb-traceries of shining silver metal that hadn’t been there a moment before. When he pressed the transmit control, it responded to his finger as if it was her own. “Scratch the metatracker search, Danir. I’ve got him doubling back over here.” She stepped back almost to the raised lip of the roof in alarm – when the spy had spoken, it had been with her voice, not his own. 

“Figures.” Danir’s voice echoed back. “What’s he up to?” 

“Hells if I know.” The Incarnation agent, still smiling, replied in the stolen voice, before disengaging and pocketing Zuleyha’s comm unit. When he spoke again, it was in his previous voice – the voice of the nervous, middle-aged businessman. “Now then, Agent Marek. Let’s go for a little drive.” 

Zuleyha snarled helplessly for an instant, then, acting on desperation, did the only thing available to her. With her back to the raised guard-wall around the roof, she jumped backwards over the rail. Evidently, the man didn’t expect this – even with his mechanically-augmented reflexes, he wasn’t fast enough to stop her from plummeting twelve meters to the cracked pavement of the alley below. 

Oddly, hitting the ground didn’t hurt much even though it made a lot of crunching noises. Zuleyha found that she couldn’t move, but neither did she black out right away. Laying sprawled on her back in the middle of the alley, she had a perfect view of the naked surprise on the wily enemy agent’s face as he looked down over the ledge. 

That surprise didn’t last long, though. In an instant, it was gone, replaced by another sly grin. An instant later, the face around the grin changed, too – it became thinner, less lined, and far more familiar. Twelve meters up on the roof, a perfect mirror image of Zuleyha stared down at the broken ragdoll Zuleyha in the alley. 

With a little wave, the agent – now wearing her face – vanished from sight. The whine of aircar engines powering up told her where he had gone – a discomforting thought that she dwelled on for the uncomfortable minutes it took her for the pain to catch up and chase away consciousness. 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Glitch in the Gap

2948-03-03 – Tales from the Service: A Glitch In the Gap 

The Navy techs and cleaning crew had done their best to put the off-duty lounge compartment back into factory-fresh condition, but no amount of cleaning could purge the smell of space from the bulkheads and fixtures. 

The command deck of Terence Morey didn’t have enough space to pace properly, so Marty had relocated his daily regimen to the leisure deck as soon as that had been repaired sufficiently that one no longer needed a vacsuit to visit it. The place was still as haunted as any part of a ship could be, and it reeked of the interstellar void so strongly that he was mystified that none of the Navy crewmen sent aboard to help him return to Maribel seemed to notice. 

Those four men and two women, all younger than him by at least ten years, didn’t understand why Marty paced the ship in his off-duty hours, now that the treadmill – and indeed the entire onboard exercise space – was in working order. They didn’t want to understand, and he didn’t really want them to, either. Perhaps the accusations in their sidelong looks whenever he passed by were correct – perhaps he was crazy, part of his mind cracked from the long months of isolation aboard a ruined ship. 

More likely, he thought, they would understand when they were older and wiser themselves, or perhaps it would take an experience like his to make them see why he did what he did. He paced the ship in his off-duty hours, even sometimes when he was supposed to be asleep in the makeshift cabin he’d set up in the bridge-deck parts storage compartment, because it gave him just the slightest chance to notice something going wrong with Morey before it became a serious problem. 

Marty was no tech, but he had gotten a feel for the ship in his months aboard even before the incident which had killed its more technically gifted crew. He could feel and hear when things were running smoothly, and if they weren’t, he could usually detect that, too. Diagnosing and repairing such a fault was another matter, but the more time he had to do it, the less chance there was that the mangled ship would suffer a catastrophic failure. 

That was the idea, anyway – at least, before the ship had been patched up by a civilian maintenance vessel dragooned into the Arrowhawk squadron. Theoretically, Morey was in as good a shape as she had ever been – good enough shape to cross the Gap, the Navy men had said. Theoretically, there was no more need to pace, to feel, and to listen, and the six new members of the crew never failed to remind him of the apparent futility of his diligence. 

For a while, the techs seemed to be right. The automated monitors, now patched up, detected every problem long before Marty’s pacing and listening could. When they told him the ship was ready to cross the Gap, he had believed them. For weeks after creeping out of the comparative shelter of the Sagittarius Arm, Morey had bounced from one empty-space jump resolution to another, guiding itself only by minute stellar parallax effects measured by computer. Everything was working – if not as perfectly as when the poor ship had left Maribel for the outward voyage, then at least as well as it had just prior to the attack by the tiny, swarming strike-launches which the Navy men called Railsplitters or Coronachs. One of the two terms was the proper name for the machines, but Marty hadn’t bothered to learn which. He was leaving Sagittarius for a region of the galaxy devoid of such cruelties and would never see a swarm of the tiny, murderous vessels again. 

So intent was Marty on relishing the fact that he would never tangle with that particular foe again that he almost missed the feeling that something was wrong somewhere between bulkhead fifteen and seventeen on the leisure-deck. He had to cover the stretch several times to pinpoint the spot where the sense was strongest, and even then, the exact nature of the disturbance eluded him. 

“Hey, who’s on duty in command?” The novelty of having extra pairs of hands and eyes to watch the controls while he was off duty was still fresh, and he regularly called up there to check, just to make sure. 

“It’s Rapallino, Mr. Westland. Do you need something?” The voice in his earpiece told him more about which of his Navy-donated assistants was on duty than the name. This was the easily bored female junior tech with the pretty face and the long, gangly limbs not quite filled out by adulthood. 

“Something’s off down here.” This was not the first time he had made such a report. Usually, he noticed something wrong only after the techs had started to fix it. Despite himself, he always hoped he was the first to pick up on a potential issue. 

“The board is clear, Mr. Westland. There’s nothing wrong with the ship.” 

Marty almost jumped for joy. He had beaten the techs to a problem – not for a moment did he entertain the possibility that his finely-tuned sense of rightness on Morey might be wrong. “Wrong, kiddo. Something’s about to go wrong. Something big. Bleed the capacitors and start a full diagnostic.” 

The young tech, probably groaning with her comms pickup muted, didn’t reply right away. Technically, the ship was Marty’s, so he was in command. Marty had been there when Captain Bosch had ordered the detachment to listen to him, and for a moment, he wondered if this was as far as they would be willing to do it. They thought he was deranged, after all. 

After almost a full half-minute, probably just enough time to consult her associates, the tech complied. “Capacitors bleeding. Can you be more specific about what’s wrong?” 

“I can try. Will you tell everyone to stay quiet and still?” 

“We’ll be quiet.” No attempt to hide the exasperation in the girl’s voice was made. 

Marty muted his comms, then paced in a small circle around where the sense of wrongness originated. Doubtless what of the crew was awake was running various diagnostics to try to beat him to the problem, but this time, his methods had them beat. They didn’t know what to look for. Marty didn’t either, but that put him in his comfort zone. 

Five times, he paced his little circle clockwise, then five more counterclockwise. For good measure, he stood in the center of the corridor just aft of bulkhead sixteen, where the off feeling was strongest, and spun in a slow circle, trying to put a sense of direction to the sensation. 

At last, he settled on a likely direction, then called up the ship’s diagnostics on his wrist computer. Tracing that direction from his position, he digitally passed through the pressure-hull, a mass of ductwork for the auxiliary atmospherics, a primary power conduit, and then... 

“Aha!” Marty unmuted his comms. “I know what’s wrong.” 

“Do you?” The girl on the bridge sounded characteristically bored. “All the diagnostics I can run from up here come up clean.” 

“Something’s loose in the...” Marty looked up the official name for the module he had long ago nicknamed the Mechanical Mother-In-Law for its girth, complexity, and the long sequence of apparently malicious failures it had demonstrated early in his solitude. “...The primary phased matter condenser.” 

“The PMC?” Though Marty didn’t know the significance of the device, the tech’s bored tone was instantly gone. All he knew was that it was connected to the main reactor, but either could run without the other. The ship certainly issued dire warnings if the condenser was ever inoperable, even if the backup successfully took over. “I’ll do a targeted diagnostic and send Mulryan out for a look.” 

“I’ll go.” Marty volunteered. He’d spent enough time inside the Mechanical Mother-in-Law comparing its state to the schematics that he could almost certainly spot the issue in an instant. It would take the other techs several minutes, if they spotted it at all. “I’ve fixed that damn thing enough times already.” 

“I’m sorry, what? Mr. Westland, are you telling me you have laid your untrained hands on the ship’s PMC?” 

It was Marty’s turn to delay his response. Her tone indicated that such an action was sinful, even criminal. A machine was a machine to him – make it look like the computer’s schematics, then restart it. Repeat, if necessary. “Seven or eight times, the damn thing. Wasn’t even damaged in the attack, but it kept failing anyway. Why?” 

“Stars around, Westland, I knew you were crazy, but tinkering with your PMC?” The girl shook her head. “I suppose it hasn’t exploded or poisoned the reactor yet.” 

“I was careful. It’s not like – wait.” He frowned, finally interpreting her words completely. “Exploded? Why didn’t anyone tell me it could do that?” 

We of course know from last week’s Tales from the Service that Martin Westland and his small replacement crew made it back to Maribel alive. I’ll put all you ship-techs at ease by mentioning that when Morey was overhauled there on its return, the Phased Matter Condenser was replaced wholesale, along with several other sensitive items which Mr. Westland had tinkered with, but which Bosch’s repair men had not been able to replace. 

He was right about something being off, of course – something that was, at least this time, easily repaired. A more severe problem might have reduced Morey to backup phased-matter collection for the remaining portion of its return journey. Transit of the Gap is dangerous for this reason – there's a lot of time for things to go wrong, and all of that time is spent unimaginably far from any chance of rescue or assistance. 

Details

Tales from the Service: Sagittarian Silence Broken

2948-02-25 – Tales from the Service: Sagittarian Silence Broken

Marty wasn’t alone.

For several exultant seconds, this simple fact, demonstrated on every functional display on the bridge, paralyzed him with both joy and horror. He had been alone ever since Terence Morey had been attacked by a swarm of mysterious strike-craft analogues deep in the Sagittarius Frontier, killing the other ten members of its crew – the chronometric system insisted that it had been a year, though Marty still suspected this was in error.

Directly ahead, just beyond the nameless system’s jump limit, a host of vessels – broadcasting proper, verified Confederated Navy FFI codes – maneuvered to recover whatever formation they had been in prior to their star drive jump. Almost all the vessels were warships that dwarfed a little colonial pathfinder like Morey, but smaller vessels swarmed protectively around the big cruisers and destroyers, preparing for an attack at any moment.

“Good.” Marty glanced at the status board, where vast sections of Morey were shown only as dim grey outlines. Out there, in the evacuated crew cabins, the builder-drone hangar, the mess, and the recreation module, the corpses of his ten crewmates bore silent testimony to the suddenness with which the seeming peace of the Sagittarius Frontier could be broken.

All at once, alarms began wailing all across the bridge. Marty poked at the command station’s small control panel and dismissed several of them, but the ship – designed for a bridge crew of four – seemed to mock its lone operator with a cascade of information no single man could make sense of.

Marty hopped out of the chair at the command console and darted between the other three stations, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with the crippled ship this time. He found that the loudest two seemed to come from the helm station, and specifically from the navcomputer, which Marty – hired on as the assistant builder-drone technician – had never been trained to use.

Fortunately, at least one of the alarms – the collision alarm – was rather self-explanatory. One of the ships in the just-arrived armada evidently had set a collision course with Terence Morey. That, Marty knew, was something the navcomputer would fix on its own, it just preferred very much for a human member of the crew to choose a new course. The other was something called a noncombatant exclusion zone alert – Marty had never seen that one before, and didn’t see any easy way to fix it.

Hopping to the comms board, Marty noticed that the next alarm was for an incoming comms channel. It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that the big fleet cruisers or their attendants had noticed him. The thought of talking to someone after so long threatened to paralyze him once more, but Marty screwed the board’s earpiece into his ear before he could second-guess this decision.

“Repeat, you have thirty seconds to comply.” A gruff voice was barking impatiently. “Spike your drive immediately or be fired upon.”

Fired upon? Marty clawed the earpiece out of his ear in alarm. He hadn’t considered the possibility that the Navy would be hostile. It had been almost eighteen months since Morey had left Maribel on its mission – what could have happened in that time for Navy squadrons to start firing on civilian contractors? Should he turn the ship around and make a run for the in-system and try to escape, or spike his drive as they suggested? They were people after all – people Marty didn’t know, each of them with their fingers poised over an unbelievable array of weapons controls. If he did as they said, anything might happen.

Another channel lit up on the comms board. Hesitantly, Marty picked up the earpiece again and switched to the new channel.

“Terence Morey, power down your drive.” This voice, though demanding the same thing, did it in a far calmer way. “We see your damaged condition and are equipped to affect repairs.”

Marty’s heart soared at the kindly tone and promised assistance. Would they really repair Morey? “Powering down engines.” Marty replied before tearing out the earpiece and diving toward the helm console. Only after he was halfway through the command entry did he realize he hadn’t transmitted his reply.

At last, he finished entering the commands to power down the gravitic drive, and Morey entered a ballistic drift. As soon as he had confirmation, Marty hurried back to the comms station. This time, he remembered to select a channel and press the “transmit” button.

“Drive is spiked.” Marty had often talked to himself in the past year, but now that he was talking to someone, he was horrified at how cracked and high-pitched his voice sounded.

The calm-voice returned a moment later. “Morey, we confirm. Slave your helm to our coordinator, and we’ll bring you in to dock with Arrowhawk for repairs.”

Marty frowned. He wasn’t sure how to do that, and would need to consult the manuals in the archive. “Give me a moment to do that. You see, we’re a bit short-staffed over here…”

Terence Morey returned from the Sagittarius Frontier a few days ago, limping into Maribel orbit with five people aboard. Martin Westland, her only surviving original crewman, brought the ship in with the help of four crewmen from the Arrowhawk scouting force, which commandeered the ship after repairing it in order to bring reports and data streams related to this scout squadron’s situation in Sagittarius. In addition to Arrowhawk’s original squadron, Captain Bosch seems to have gathered together a number of civilian vessels found in the region, and managed to keep his ships going by pillaging the supply reserves of a few incomplete orbital habitats.

Evidently, there are enough Tyrants in the region that Bosch was avoiding combat; his ships have only limited missile stocks, and his reports state that he wanted to reserve them for an engagement that would be meaningful to the final war effort.

Of course, Morey departed the lost squadron only six weeks after contact with Sagittarius was finally lost – Bosch’s reports do state that he has no confidence in the long-term survivability of his force. There is some hope the squadron survives today, but I think that this possibility is remote at best.

Despite the likelihood that Bosch is dead or captured at this point, Naval Intelligence has published large sections of the report data to the datasphere. It seems Bosch is trying to do in Sagittarius what Incarnation ships in the Coreward Frontier have been so successfully doing – disrupting supply routes and industry. Incarnation bases seem to have sprung up on several worlds previously surveyed for Confederated colonization, and Bosch had by the date of his dispatch already struck one of these outposts, and had plans to attack more. While probably not having the same impact on their war effort as their attacks have on ours, Bosch is almost certainly diverting forces which otherwise would make the job of defending the Frontier settlements even harder.

Details

Tales from the Service: A Spacer's Hell

2948-02-18 – Tales from the Service: A Spacer's Hell

Though the skirmishing in Matusalemme continues this week, and there are many stories of action and close scrapes with the enemy in that system, the Cosmic Background embed team always try to bring something interesting to the audience with Tales from the Service, something they wouldn’t necessarily see in the usual vidcast programming our organization and others provide. Others will cover the moves and countermoves as the Navy tries to wrest control of the system back from the Incarnation – in the meantime, the team here aboard Saint-Lô has been busy verifying a few other stories sent to us since the fighting there kicked off.

This week, all throughout the Frontier, colonies have been beefing up their ground-side defenses while the Navy installs orbital systems on the most likely targets. With the Frontier Defense Army shipping its first troops – mainly construction units, with combat troops still being trained – to the worlds nearest Adimari Valis, preparing to make the Incarnation’s next move far easier to counter. Many of these advanced detachments have been sent to the Frontier’s most valuable worlds, but some find themselves in the strangest of places. Raya Frank’s engineering team found its way to Mudiwa, the closest inhabited system to Matusalemme. The fertile world is beautiful and, unfortunately for Raya, its ecology is not completely explored even by the few thousand settlers who live there. To a born and raised spacer like her, used to the clean, sterile corridors of stations and starships, Mudiwa is perhaps among most unpleasant places imaginable, and though what she experienced would be no serious hardship to Nojus, it resulted in her resigning from the FDA as soon as the mission was over.

“Something’s coming!” Raya shook Gulbrind’s shoulder urgently – at least, she tried to. His huge, heavy arm didn’t move at all.

“Raya, go back to sleep.” It was Ishita, across the shell-tent, who she had awakened. “You remember the ecology brief.”

Raya did, and that knowledge did not comfort her in the least. Mudiwa’s large, slow-moving grazers shook the earth as they plodded through the arboreal nightmare beyond the tent’s sealed door, oblivious to the presence of humans. One might step on the shelter at any moment, crushing the three FDA engineers inside quite easily. Perhaps Gulbrind’s iron bones and sturdy quills might inconvenience such a behemoth, but only briefly.

Raya had been born in a can-city orbiting Jupiter, and had not seen the surface of any living world except heavily populated Earth until she was twenty. In a moment of what she later regarded as temporary insanity, she had stepped away from a comfortable job overseeing the construction of orbital spaceports for new colonies to join the Frontier Defense Infantry, and in another moment of spectacularly bad luck, she had pulled an assignment to the shrieking, fetid hellscape of Mudiwa, a planet she hadn’t even heard of until that assignment. Close to fallen Adimari Valis, the world

Her two team-members, of course, thought very differently. Gulbrind thought the world’s complex ecology merely interesting, but Ishita somehow managed against all odds to fall in love with many of the hideous specimens that thundered, scurried, darted, and fluttered among the huge trees. They seemed to treat the week-long trek to mark the best sites for defensive anti-orbital batteries around the muddy little colony outpost as a bucolic vacation rather than an unpleasant but necessary part of the war effort.

Of course, the war wasn’t personal for either of them, not yet. Raya’s uncle had been working on a Xenarch dig-site on Adimari Valis, and had not made it off-planet before the invading counterhumans had stopped the evacuation. She didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. Would he would return at the next family holiday, grinning and telling a new story of Frontier close-scrapes, or would his corpse never be found, laser-charred and left to rot among the sun-baked rocks of the Adimarian uplands?

Another thundering footfall, like the one which had awakened Raya, shook the shell-tent. The treetrunk-legged beast was, Raya decided, no more than ten meters away, and getting closer. Again, she tried to shake Gulbrind awake.

“Hells and sunfire, Raya.” Ishita threw back her thin bedroll covers and sat up in the dimly lit shelter. “We’re not going to get stepped on.”

She had been assured this many times during the previous few days, but still didn’t believe it. “You don’t know that for sure. Those things have braincases smaller than my palm. The tent probably looks like a boulder to them.”

“Go out and look if you want.” Ishita picked up the team’s lone bolt rifle, checked its safety and battery, and handed it to Raya. “But if you let any of those damn stirgerays into the tent-”

“I know, I know.” Raya shrugged the weapon’s strap over her shoulder, then carefully unlatched the door, which rolled up under its own spring tension. Hopping over the lip, she quickly pressed it back into place until the latch clicked once more, certain that none of the hated nocturnal bloodsuckers had gotten inside the shelter.

Another footfall crashed through the underbrush, and though it didn’t sound quite so close this time, Raya still spun around and brought the bolt rifle up. The weapon made a bright flash and would at least sting and scare the big native herbivores. Standard ferroceramic railgun slugs from their usual sidearms would hurt them more – enough to make the beasts angry, but unfortunately not quite enough to kill them.

Something moved in the shadows, something large enough for its silhouette to pass behind several trees. Raya stepped forward, not willing to risk a light, but also not able to see which end of the beast was the head. If it was heading away, she knew, it was best to leave it alone – but if it was coming closer, the bolt rifle could dissuade it from blundering into the team’s shelter.

Raya was convinced the stupid brutes had just enough neurons to be malicious. They had not gone a night yet without having several of them wander nearby, shaking the ground and making sleep difficult. It was as if they knew that the team’s mission would mean an invasion of their grazing range by large machines constructing hardened weapons installations and roads connecting them to the landing pads outside the colony town. Only by accidentally crushing the surveyors into the leaf-litter could they postpone this rendezvous with Terran industry.

The glint of beady eyes in a thick-necked, beak-mouthed head peeked out of the shadows, and Raya drew a bead with the bolt rifle. The big beast was facing toward her, though it was no longer moving. Its dull gaze seemed locked on the engineer and her weapon.

“Go away, you stupid animal.” Raya whispered over the stock of the energy gun. She didn’t want to shoot it, though that was more because she didn’t know which way it would flee from the flash and stinging pain of an artificial bolt of lightning.

The moment dragged on, and Raya realized at length that the big herbivore, frozen and wary, wasn’t actually staring at her. With a sinking feeling of dread, she lowered the rifle and turned slowly around.

Looming over the shelter, Raya saw a pair of eyes, much larger and gleaming dull yellow in the pale starlight, rise above the stiff but only too thin walls of the tent. The beast’s head rose further, until a long maw filled with intermeshing teeth, slightly open and dripping with whitish saliva, also came into view. The beast was smaller than the big herbivore, but not by very much, and certainly far larger than the trio’s quadwalker.

The ecological briefing had mentioned that the big herbivores had predators of course, but the specimens they had warned about were carnivorous flora, not ambulatory hunters. Whatever the toothy head belonged to, Raya knew, would not be any more injured by the beam rifle than its prey. Her only hope of survival was the fact that tastier prey stood only thirty meters away.

The predator and the herbivore stared at each other in silence for many long seconds, each ignoring the human completely. Raya dared not move, lest that call the predator’s attention or spook the prey – neither would bode well for her own survival.

“Raya, what are you doing out there?” Ishita fumbled at the door latch inside the shell-tent. “This is ridiculous.”

“Shut up, Ish.” Raya hissed, glancing at the tent. “There’s something…”

When she looked up, the yellow-eyed predator’s head had vanished. Whirling, Raya looked at the herbivore – its dark eyes stared warily at, and past, the shelter, but it was clear that it, too had lost track of its hunter.

Raya darted to the door and forced her way inside, nearly knocking Ishita to the ground. Closing the latch with trembling hands, she dove into her own bedroll, hugging the bolt rifle. Neither the tent nor the bed would protect her if the local predator returned, and she knew it – but she knew something else. She was safe from the big, toothy predator simply because she was insignificant - too small for it to waste energy on.

“What’s wrong, Raya?” Ishita tried and failed to pry the weapon from Raya.

Raya shook her head and hugged the gun tighter. “I hate this place. I hate it so much.”

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