2948-01-21 – Tales from the Service: A Casualty of War 

This week, I am going to publish a text-only message sent to our audience feedback mailbox unedited, uncredited, and without any direct commentary or analysis, as requested by the sender. 


Myranda Howe’s crew gave her a proper deep-space burial while en-route to Matusalemme on January 16. She died of her wounds after fighting a fire on the hangar deck of the fast carrier River Plate 

Normally, the wide datasphere would not remark on the passing of a single crew tech second class in a war zone, but Myranda, a twenty-two-year-old volunteer from Pericles at Herakles IV, deserves to be known by the public whom she took an oath to defend. She was the great-granddaughter of Antonio Howe, the most decorated non-officer of the Terran-Rattanai War 

In the action which earned him the third nebula pin for his Centaur Cross, Antonio Howe is credited with saving the crew of Filip Romilly from annihilation when, faced with the order to abandon ship, he encouraged his gun-deck crew to stay at their stations in order to fight off a wing of Rattanai strike ships intent on picking off the launches and escape-pods. Somehow, they drove off the attack, and he led his crew to an escape pod, losing only one of the seven-man gun crew in the quickly-disintegrating ship. Shortly after they got away, the dying ship broke apart completely – they had escaped by mere seconds. 

To Myranda, the many stories of her ancestor’s heroism might have seemed to be fantastic bedtime stories. He died when she was ten years old, too young to really understand why he never had the scars on his face reduced with nanomedicine, or why he always left the room when someone turned on a war holo-drama. 

Later, of course, Myranda did understand. When she enlisted at age seventeen with her parents’ blessing, she tried to get a posting as a point defense gunner, just like Antonio.  

Though she was a fair hand at the deadly dance of railshot versus incoming strike-ships and missiles, she proved far more skilled as a systems tech, and found herself assigned to her first posting’s atmospherics maintenance crew, with an alert posting to damage control.  

A lesser spacer might have grumbled or schemed to work her way onto a gun-battery crew, but not Myranda Howe. She threw herself into the work, cheerfully attacking each faulty carbon-scrubber and clogged nanofilter with the sort of bright enthusiasm which most people reserve for their favorite hobby. In damage control drills, she was tireless and decisive, putting the less energetic members of her damage-control team to shame. Only her closest confidants knew that she had such big shoes to fill – and that, in quiet moments, she was terrified she could never be the sort of hero that her great-grandfather was. 

Off-duty, Myranda was a member of River Plate’s chapel choir and the singer for the Tin-Can Surprise, the ship’s unauthorized neo-Centaurite musical quintet, whose practice and performances the senior officers did their best to pretend not to notice. In singing either the racy lyrics of Centaurite classic tunes or the solemn, grand hymns of the choirbook, she always stole the show. 

On the fifteenth of January of this year, a gunship re-entering the hangar just before a star-drive hop missed its docking cradle, tumbling onto one side and catching fire. Its three-person crew still trapped inside, damage control rushed to contain the blaze enough for them to escape alive. One of the first crew on-scene was Myranda Howe, who was not on duty but who had been walking a Tin-Can Surprise bandmate to the pilots’ ready-room. Armed with a thermo-foam sprayer and with a helmet completing her uniform’s emergency pressure-seal, she ran into the blaze with five others. 

Though the hangar techs began venting oxygen out of the damaged hangar cell, it was too late. The explosion tearing the strike launch’s starboard sponson off was probably the result of an overheated thruster-fuel reservoir, but even this was enough to toss the brave damage control personnel some distance. Though four of them were only bruised, one suffered a series of broken bones. Myranda, closest to the explosion, suffered nine shrapnel wounds to her torso and several more to her limbs. 

Myranda clung to life for seven hours after being pulled out of the hangar and rushed to the ship’s medical bay. Heavily sedated as the medical staff operated on her badly mangled body, she never regained consciousness, dying just after midnight ship-time on the sixteenth. In her final hours, she was surrounded by her closest compatriots. Her brief funeral ceremony was attended by almost the entire River Plate crew, with ship’s chaplain Father Sheeran, who knew Myranda quite well, delivering the eulogy.  

The crew of the gunship survived the crash. The thermo-foam sprayed onto the wrecked launch by the damage control team absorbed enough heat from the fires that they were able to free themselves with only minor injuries. The wrecked gunship was safely jettisoned without major damage to the hangar or further loss of life.  

The actions of the damage-control team of the fifteenth of January might never earn official commendation, but those who knew her are comforted by the fact that when a crisis loomed, Myranda Howe had been the same kind of hero as the man whose shadow she had walked. 

2948-01-13 – Tales from the Service: A Tyrant’s Downfall 

As most of you know, the Hypercast relay in Matusalemme went dark a little more than forty-eight hours ago following a major move by Incarnation forces in that system. Though the planet’s fate is far from certain, based on the movements reported in the last hours of the relay’s operation, it is very likely that at the time of this feed item’s ingestion, Incarnation ground forces have landed on Adimari Valis. The world’s citizens are not without hope – the largely mercenary fleet defending the system and the heavily, if hastily, fortified spaceport complex mean that the colony will almost certainly not be subjugated before Fifth Fleet elements arrive in strength. 

Though there were many predictions about the mercenary force in-system melting away before the engagement came, I’m happy to report that most of the ersatz warships and carrier conversions in the local flotilla remained in place until the loss of the relay. Even though they’re outgunned, a force of that size can certainly put the brakes on whatever the Incarnation has planned. 

Confederated civilians, mercenaries, and military personnel by the millions find themselves in Matusalemme during this period of crisis, and Confederated Congress has voted to recommend that tomorrow, 14th January on the standard calendar, is to be a day of solemnity and prayer for a positive resolution to the battles raging in the Matusalemme system and among the rugged hills of Adimari Valis. 

Jacob Borisov, along with a number of his mercenary company personnel, last checked in from the planet’s surface. As he is one of the most repeated names on this text feed and I have been happy to correspond with him in recent months, this embed team hopes he remains safe there until the Navy’s big guns arrive. 

This week’s Tales from the Service features the only confirmed Tyrant kill since the Battle of Berkant, claimed not by a cruiser or battleship, but by a specialized Navy cutter with a main battery of one plasma cannon and a crew of sixteen. That ship, the Mahseer, is commanded by Lt. Cdr. Ralph Zappa, who is currently being considered for a Centaur Cross. 

[N.T.B. - Screw safety. Mr. Borisov, if you’re down there with a bunch of ground-pounding grunts, hit those Nate bastards hard, paint your combat suit in their tech-tainted blood, and make them sorry they ever came to our side of the Gap. I wish I was down there with you, rather than cooped up doing can’t-say-exactly-what on a dreadnought that can’t seem to quite pass a post-repairs inspection.] 

 

Ralph Zappa held his breath as the Tyrant cruiser slid past in the darkness, so near to his own Mahseer that the gleam of its bluish hull-alloy would have been visible to the unaided eye. Unlike most starships, the bridge of Mahseer had no broad armor-glass viewpanels with which to test this, so he had to imagine the sinister enemy cruiser thrusting daggerlike toward the orange glow of Botterdowns. 

“Locked on, Skipper.” Kynthia Van Horn, the weapons officer aboard the small warship, switched the main three-dimensional display to a firing plot. “Optimal range for a shoot-and-scoot in fifty seconds.” 

“Where are their strike ships?” Ralph stared at the wireframe diagram of their prey, which could at any moment become their overpowering predator. Any strike craft the Tyrant launched would increase the danger of making a covert attack and getting away with it, but he worried more that the enemy ship wasn’t following its usual behavior. A Tyrant never went anywhere without sending out a few of its ubiquitous Coronachs to watch the flanks, and such ships were only too likely to blunder close enough to Mahseer to see through its ingeniously engineered impression of just another patch of void.  

Even if a swarm of Coronachs didn’t spot Mahseer right away, when it came to executing the “scoot” part of a shoot-and-scoot attack, the little ambush gunship would certainly be detected, and agile Coronachs would be very capable of chasing it down and carving its hull into new and interesting decorations for the beautification of the outer reaches of the Botterdowns system. The ship had, after all, no armor worth speaking of, and its screening systems were barely deserving of the name – its best defense was to remain unseen. True, it had a few ways of shooting back at such enemies, but none of them which Ralph wanted to bet his life on. 

Souad Stern, the navigation officer, clicked his tongue in the tense silence. “Too good to be true.” 

This echoed Ralph’s concern. Mahseer had been unlucky in its repeated attempts to kill the raiding Tyrants meandering through the Coreward Frontier seemingly at random, but no more unlucky than its half-dozen sister ships. The squadron of eight bureaucratically named Stealth Assault Cutters had made the long journey to the war-zone a few weeks after Fifth Fleet, but with the exception of Fierasfer making one unsuccessful attack on a Tyrant near Margaux in September, none of them had even so much as given the careful enemy a bad jump-scare. Nate was too careful to give a few over-armed cutters a chance at their precious cruisers, stealth fittings or otherwise. 

Of course, Ralph knew, it might be about to turn around. The efforts of the whole squadron and its service tender, a force of nearly two hundred officers and crew draining who-knew-how-many millions of credits from the Navy’s war chest, might be validated in an instant when Van Horn’s timer ran to zero. If Mahseer slagged a Tyrant and got away clean, its sixteen-person crew would be heroes back at Maribel, and perhaps in the Core Worlds as well. 

Still, something was bothering him. They had been on station first, and the Tyrant had appeared soon after, almost on top of them and on a path through can’t-miss range. That sort of chance didn’t appear every day. “Give me a passive visual light sweep.” 

“Thirty seconds.” 

One of the other bridge officers huddled at their stations sent the commands to the ship’s sensor clusters to pan across the starfield in all directions, looking for signs of trouble. The results came back in seconds. “Nothing - no, wait. I’ve got something. The Tyrant is venting debris, skipper. It’s already damaged.” 

Ralph sat up in his chair. “Debris?” 

“Aye. At least three gas vents from its hull, along with particulate.” 

“Drive to maximum stealthy acceleration. Keep the nose pointed at them, but widen the distance.” Ralph had seen a similar tactic used once to detect stealthy pirate ships. Smart-dust particles dispersed into local space could not be fooled by any sort of stealth rig. If the Tyrant was doing something similar, his crew would be dead If Mahseer’s hull picked up even one smart-dust mote. The enemy knew or suspected his ship was nearby, and was trying to smoke him out. 

Van Horn turned around in dismay at the order. “But optimal range will-” 

“Stand by to fire.” Ralph snapped at her. He didn’t like being harsh with his crew, but he suspected he knew what the Tyrant was up to, and didn’t want to be caught in it. The hum of the drive began to rattle the deck, and Ralph’s command chair with it. 

“Optimal firing distance in three... two... one...” Van Horn turned around again, finger on the button. “Now.” 

“Hold. We’ll fire a little outside optimum.” This was hardly ideal; the farther outside optimum range the target was, the more chance it had to evade what would be fired in its direction. “Helm, prepare to scoot as soon as we fire.” 

“Ready.” Stern had his hands on the controls, ready to perform evasive action; there was little else to do to be ready. Mahseer was still outside the system’s gravitational shadow; it could make a safe jump as soon as its capacitors were charged. Of course, the same capacitors used for the ship’s archaic Xiou-Edwards star drive were also needed to fire the ship’s laughably oversized centerline cannon, a nasty close-range plasma weapon of a sort usually not seen on ships smaller than a cruiser.  

The shot couldn’t be delayed any longer. “Fire.” Ralph slammed a fist on the armrest of his chair. 

Kynthia Van Horn pressed the final key on her console without even turning back toward it. The bridge lights dimmed and the entire ship bucked and shrieked as if a vengeful demon had taken hold of it, but it was over in a second, and the lights returned. As soon as they did, the navigator’s hands flew over his console, and the ship wheeled under full engine power. There was no point in stealth anymore. 

“On target in two seconds...” Van Horn trailed off, watching her display. “We have a hit. I’m seeing major debris expulsion on the target.” 

The bridge crew cheered, but only for a second before returning to their duties. They weren’t out of the woods yet. 

“Time to jump?” Ralph watched the tactical display. There were still no Coronachs speeding after his ship, but the freshly wounded cruiser might still have weapons capable of slagging the little cutter as it fled. 

“Ninety seconds.” 

“Update.” Van Horn sounded surprised. “Target’s hull is breaking up. Major reactor breach.” 

Ralph sat back, amazed. “We did it. Ladies and gentlemen, we actually killed a Tyrant.” 

 

2948-01-06 – Tales from the Service: A Creeping Pest 

I am afraid I am prevented by information security protocols from describing the developing situation in Matusalemme in any detail at this time. All I can say is that the Navy still expects to hold Adimari Valis against the Incarnation force threatening the colony, and that action is expected there very soon. Since the system Hypercast relay is still active at this time, the whole Colonial Reach will probably know when things start happening there whatever this feed contains. 

On the recommendation of Admiral Zahariev, several of the larger colonies on the Frontier began collecting volunteers for a defensive garrison force this week. In theory, using this force to shore up threatened worlds will free the Marines for offensive action against Incarnation bases on this side of the Gap as they are discovered, such as the action on Meyerfeld. The Confederated Parliament is currently debating a bill allocating pay for soldiers in this new Frontier Defense Army, and I think it will pass without much fuss. Perhaps this new force will also receive an influx of Core Worlds troops and weapons. With all the panic at Maribel and other highly populated Frontier worlds since the Incarnation showed up at Matusalemme, I think at the very least garrison reinforcements would soothe the nerves of many civilians. 

Instead of focusing on the imminent battle for Adimari Valis, this week we have a story which comes from the bowels of Saint-Lô, the dreadnought which Nojus and I are assigned to for the duration of our reporting assignment. After the ship was damaged at the Battle of Berkant, the Navy saw fit to upgrade as well as repair it. A team of civilian techs working on some of the upgrades in an unpressurized area of the ship reportedly ran into a bit of trouble – while this story comes to us secondhand, I did verify the incident was reported to Captain Liao more or less in the same manner it was told to us. A full interstitial decontamination was ordered, but the teams who performed it found nothing resembling the reported pest, or anything capable of causing trouble with power systems.


Zahra Guillory scowled at her compatriots through the mirrored face-plate of her vacsuit helmet. In the dim confines of the damaged dreadnought, the reflective feature was hardly necessary, but she would need power to clear it, and the suit was operating on passive power only. With inoperative comms, she grabbed each of her compatriots by the wrist to use their suits’ passive audio conductivity. “Don’t just stand there, find a hookup and call the shift boss. He’ll have someone come down here with spare power packs.” 

Gillis, the hapless machine tech who’d accidentally shorted a terrifying amount of electrical power through his supposedly nonconductive Reed-Soares multitool, stood shaking in his fried suit in defiance of Zahra’s instructions, while Yakov, the nanoinspectionguru sent along to verify his work, scrambled away in search of undamaged plug access to the warship’s computer network. The short had produced an electric arc bright enough to trip the automatic mirroring of all three techs’ visors before it had fried their powerpacks with an electromagnetic burst, and while Zahra was not quite blind and Yakov apparently could see well enough Gillis probably saw nothing but the lightless inside of an opaque visor. 

She sighed and tugged him away from the now-ruined relay bank which had produced the short. “Gillis, say something so I know you didn’t cook your damned brain on that arc.” 

“S-suit’s dead, Zahra.” Gillis mumbled. “I’m a dead man, aren’t I? Atmospherics need power.” 

“After that stupid move, I wish.” Zahra clapped the side of his helmet. “There’s a passive backup. Good for about five hours of work. Our suits are dead too.” 

“Hells, I’m sorry.” Gillis reached up and tapped on the outside of his helmet. “Bet it’s dark out there.” 

“The lights are still on.” Zahra honestly didn’t know why; perhaps the simple circuitry of the portable work-lights they’d brought with them into the tight compartment had simply proved too hardy for the EM surge. “Yakov’s going to have someone bring us some fresh powerpacks so we can finish this.” 

“Finish?” Gillis repeated uncertainly. “I don’t know what happened there. That conduit shouldn’t have power unless the ship is powering engines on the auxiliary circuit. Are you sure this is the right place?” 

Zahra would have consulted her virtual schematics, but they were as dead as the rest of her suit. “Schematics aren’t that hard to read. It’s the right place.” 

“But...” Gillis grabbed Zahra’s helmet and pulled it into contact with his own, so she could hear him whispering. “Something must be very wrong.” 

Prying herself free, Zahra turned around to glance in the direction Yakov had gone. “How very wrong?” 

“A lot of things have to go wrong for the auxiliary net to be powered at all.” He flailed blindly toward the exposed conduits and ductwork he’d been in the process of clamping aside when the short had happened. Their job didn’t relate to the auxiliary power system at all – they had come to replace a simple structural integrity hardpoint that lay behind the splayed guts of the ship with a more powerful, newer module. “For it to be powered at the same time as the mains, Zahra. That’s-” 

“Not good, yeah, I get it. No safety margin, no place to dump a power surge.” 

The tech nodded his mirrored helmet. “There’s no way the whole backup power system is charged. It has to be a local fault. Is there anything damaged?” 

“Short of what you just fried?” Nevertheless, Zahra grabbed one of the work lights and played it across the exposed innards of the ship all around them. “This all looks fine to – wait.” She had spotted something in garish magenta winking back at her from among the ship’s interstices. 

“What is it?” 

Zahra stooped closer to the brightly-colored anomaly, unwilling to touch it. The object squatted in between a pair of thick power conduit bundles, though thin, cable-like extensions of the same material were thrown out in several directions. “I have no idea, Gillis. It’s colorful and lumpy. Almost looks like a fungus.” 

“In hard vacuum?” 

Zahra tapped one of the ducts hanging low over the object. "No heat or air here, so probably electronic. It’s got itself plugged into the auxiliary power line and half a dozen other things.” 

The blind tech made a despairing noise. “Don’t touch it.” 

A hand roughly grabbed Zahra’s shoulder and spun her around. She found herself staring into Yakov’s nearly mirrored helmet visor. “Shift boss is sending Taube down with a bag of powerpacks. She’ll be here in-” 

“Never mind that!” Gillis shook Yakov. “Zahra, show him what you found.” 

“Hmm?” 

“There’s power where it shouldn’t be, so Gillis had me look around. I found this.” She pointed behind herself toward the magenta mass nestled in the conduits. “Seen anything like it before?” 

“Like what?” 

Zahra turned around, wondering how nearly blind Yakov was behind his visor. “Like that big lump of...”  

The foreign object was, of course, no longer there. 

Ain’t seeing anything, Zahra.” Yakov grabbed the work-light and peered into the space near where she had been pointing. 

Despite herself, Zahra shuddered. She had no doubt it had been there – and that whatever it was, it had moved when her back was turned. “I... think we need to call up for a full decontamination.” 

2947-12-31 – Tales from the Service: Matusalemme's Crowded Sky 

This week’s entry comes from the tip of the spear – theirs, not ours. A fleet of at least a dozen (reports differ as to the exact number) Tyrant cruisers entered the Matusalemme system during the first shift on the 27th local time, escorting a handful of ships of an unknown (but apparently rather crude) model to a parking orbit around the fifth planet, a gas giant known locally as Bodrogi, which is currently on the opposite side of the stellar primary from the third planet, Adimari Valis. 

They’ve been there ever since, surrounded by a veritable storm of Coronachs. As previously discussed in this space, the system’s local defense force and a series of mercenary auxiliaries make the system rather well defended for its colony size, but even two dozen mercenary outfits, a few second-line warships, and a swarm of short-range patrol boats won’t stand up to the concerted attack of that many fleet cruisers. Almost the same force had plenty of trouble with a single raiding Tyrant a few weeks ago (Tales from the Service: A Mercenary’s Trade). 

Fifth Fleet is scrambling a reinforcement squadron, but it won’t reach the system for some time. For security reasons, I cannot access any information about what ships are being dispatched, or be too specific about their timetable. After the Battle of Berkant, however, I can only imagine the force being sent will represent overwhelming firepower against the Incarnation fleet in Matusalemme. 

In the meantime, the Hypercast Relay in the system is still functional, and ships are able to come and go freely as long as they give the encamped enemy a wide berth. I reached out to a friend of this feed, Jacob Borisov, and he was only too happy to give us some recordings and data streams with which to portray the grim situation in the half-besieged system. I hope this audience will be joining me in praying for a clean and victorious outcome in any battle at Matusalemme; after all, this time it seems the Incarnation has come to stay. 


Jacob Borisov stared out the viewpanel at the artificially-dimmed corona of Matusalemme which washed out the cloud of tactical position-markers which would otherwise have appeared behind it. The situation was far more comprehensible when viewed in the tactical display tank, but things were static enough that he’d moved up to the cruise bridge, where the reassuring buzz of a dozen officers and half a dozen ratings performing the minutiae required to keep Bancroft running smoothly helped him relax. 

The situation was bad, but it was not yet critical. The enemy fleet in system, encamped as it was at nearly the farthest large body from Adimari Valis, had chosen neither to cut off the planet nor to move up in preparation for a blockade. As such, two days after their arrival, traffic out to the edge of the star’s gravitic shadow and inward from it to the planet continued in a mockery of normalcy. Every captain on every ship was waiting for the situation to change, as it could only change for the worse, and to give the orders which would in every case come as a relief. When Nate moved, the civilian skippers would order emergency speed out of the system carrying whatever and whoever they had aboard, and the ragtag defending fleet would move to meet the attackers in order to buy time for the exodus. 

Reinforcements, the Navy had assured Adimari Valis, were already on their way. Jacob believed they were – after all, the fleet had sent a vast number of its own eager boys into the shooting gallery at Berkant without hesitation. This time, however, he knew Nate wasn’t waiting for the fleet. He could feel it in his bones – this time, the Incarnation was not playing with its food. It was biting off a system, which it meant to swallow. The fleet would arrive too late to save the defending force – including his ship. If it was lucky, it might arrive in time to save the colony, but even that seemed unlikely. 

“They’re just sitting there.” Jacob muttered, resting his palm on the armor-glass panel at the forward end of the bridge. 

“Strike patrols out to ten lisec, enough active sensor activity to map the orbital sphere every ten seconds. They’re hardly sitting. They seem to think we’re not either.” 

Jacob turned toward his second in command and marveled at the man’s unruffled appearance. He knew even his signs of worry were hidden deep, but he had always been able to identify his subordinates’ tells before Lestat Pain had hired on. Even for a former Navy man, he was an exceedingly reserved officer. “They’re waiting for something. Another formation of theirs, probably.” 

“You think there will be more Tyrants?” Lestat’s incredulity was obvious. The Incarnation didn’t need even half the force they’d already sent to subdue Matusalemme. 

“No.” Jacob tapped on his wrist control to call up a best-guess wireframe of the new variety of ship the Incarnation had brought to the system. They were blocky, squat things, as ugly as Tyrants were wickedly graceful. A spacer’s eye for design recoiled from the idea of serving on such a ship, which looked like little more than a fabcrete tenement block sheathed in hull plating with two Himura-style star drive spindles bolted port and starboard. “More of these, or something new.” Even the most hideous of all the ugly extruder-hull chimeras operating as haulers on backwater freight runs couldn’t compare to the repelling appearance of the new Nate ships. 

“More?” Even Lestat struggled to conceal his alarm at the idea that more of the repulsive vessels existed. 

“Analysts groundside think these things are meant to be reentry-capable.” Jacob tapped the markers on the wireframe where hull fixtures that might have been landing gear protruded. “Troop carriers.” 

The executive officer squared his shoulders, and Jacob guessed he was wondering where the Incarnation had found a few tens of thousands of infantry brave enough to ride down to a planet’s surface in such an uninspiring vessel. If they were brave enough to make the landing, they were brave enough to charge into the teeth of any defense the planetary governor could throw up before they did. “Have you put the groundside teams on recall notice?” 

Jacob sighed. “No, I haven’t. It’ll be at least another two weeks before our contract is up. I’m going down there to see the operation through personally, since I got them into this mess.” 

“Captain, you can’t be-” 

“Commander Pain, you will be in charge up here in case communications with the ground team are lost.” This was of course a near certainty; the Incarnation would slag every comms satellite in Adimari Valis orbit and wreck the Hypercomm relay the moment they were ready to storm the planet. “Do you understand what that means?” 

“Going down there is-” 

Jacob cut off his protest with a wave. “Do you understand?” 

Lestat Pain backed down and nodded with no sign of agitation, though Jacob knew he was, at some level far below the surface, agitated. “I understand, boss. The company’s name is its most valuable asset. Until it’s hopeless or the battlewagons get here, we stick in the fight.” 

“Good.” Jacob walked past his subordinate toward the lift. He didn’t say anything more, but he hoped his expression communicated the rest, which he couldn’t say in front of the bridge crew – the certainty that the other mercenary outfits in the ragtag defense fleet, being not so protective of their reputations, would flee the moment the enemy made their move. When the time came to stand and buy time, Pain and Bancroft might well find themselves doing it alone.