Tales from the Service: A Creeping Pest

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.” 

Details

Tales from the Service: Matusalemme's Crowded Sky

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. 

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Tales from the Service: An Immortal's Contrition

2947-12-24 – Tales from the Service: An Immortal's Contrition

Due to the growth of this audience in recent months, all of you may not know that while most Way-adjacent religious sects mark the Advent anniversary on 25 December in the standard Terran (Ivanov) calendar, the Navy Chapel and the broader Spacers’ Chapel hold their Advent holiday, the Emmanuel Feast, on the 25th as measured on the old Gregorian Calendar, which has not been in common use since the mid 24th century. This is a tradition they share with the Byzantine Orthodox sect. 

This year, the Ivanov calendar date of Chapel Advent celebrations was 20-21 December, so most of the service personnel here in the Coreward Frontier with the Navy and mercenary auxiliaries have already celebrated their holiday, while most of the rest of the people of the Reach celebrate the holiday tonight and tomorrow.  

With permission from his commanding officer, Nojus and I have arranged to have a recording of Chaplain Thomas Nyilvas’s holiday service on Xavior Vitali made available on our datasphere hub. 

This week’s Tales from the Service features a snippet sent in by Ayaka Rowlins via Nyilvas. Her back-and-forth with the Padre was featured here a few weeks ago, but several days after the Vitali failed to explode spectacularly, she began to open up with her interrogators about how she became an agent of the Incarnation – not just that, one of their elite, trusted with the most powerful counterhuman augmentation and a solitary mission far afield. Today, though, on the eve of the I want to focus on what it is like for such a person to return to the fold, and to the faith of her forefathers. 

Padre Nyilvas wanted me to mention that while it is a joy to see the prodigal daughter to return, it will be another thing entirely to reconcile the Incarnation’s counterhuman idea-space with the ancient values protected by the Confederated Worlds. There are zealots by the billion (at least!) out there who will not simply stand down and take benediction a Spacers’ Chapel altar. 

[N.T.B. - Take note of the fact that Rowlins is aware that Incarnation scouts made covert contact with Confederated Worlds Ladeonists as early as her disappearance in 2945. If they had almost two years before we found them to figure out how to deal with us, none of the border incidents were misunderstandings. The Incarnation planned this war, and something tells me that this odd raid-and-counterstrike stalemate situation is part of that plan. Mark my words, things here will get worse before they get better.] 

[D.L.C. - This piece was composed several days in advance but may be delayed due to a scheduled upgrade to the Maribel Hypercast relay, which has been operating near its maximum capacity since Fifth Fleet moved in. Apologies for the inconvenience.] 

  

Ayaka Rowlins glanced at the guard standing beside her as the crew of Xavior Vitali filed into the chapel, which she had long since realized was the crew mess retrofitted with synthsilk curtains hung over the chow line and the bank of food processors. She had seen more than a few such setups aboard the cramped passenger liners, giving ease to the castoffs of a hundred worlds as they sought a new life on the Frontier.  

The Incarnation, of course, used a different arrangement. Most ceremonies honoring the foresight of the Incarnate and reciting the Denials were conducted virtually via implant feeds, not that Ayaka had participated in many. The time between being passed from a Maribelan Ladeonist cell to Incarnation forward observers and receiving her first pulse-band mission briefing had passed in a blur, but she suspected she had passed many tests of loyalty, intelligence, bravery, and determination in order to earn her augments.  

Governed by a cause and guided by implant-gathered data, the Incarnation had made a weapon out of a misfit Frontier radical, giving her purpose in the form of a list of targets whose continued existence threatened the continuation of humanity and of life itself. She had infiltrated the now-foreign colonies of the Frontier, slipping through the cracks of society with ease and slipping aboard a supply launch to steal aboard a Confederated patrol cruiser, whose lax security proved no obstacle to her implants’ electronic countermeasures. 

It had all gone wrong, though, and Ayaka was glad it had. She had been captured planting the first set of demolition charges – charges which would have painted her hands with the blood of dozens of spacers. even if she had finished her work and escaped in a launch, the deed would have caught up with her sooner or later. 

“Miss Rowlins.” Captain Callahan’s stooped, dour shadow suddenly fell on the prisoner. The ship’s commander had been skeptical of her contrition from the minute she had confessed the full extent of her sabotage, and she didn’t blame him – she had after all nano-fabbed a dart out of the canteen spoon that had come with her rations and barely missed sticking him with it during her first interrogation. “Glad you could join us for the occasion.” 

His voice indicated that he was anything but glad, of course. The ship’s chaplain had likely used every shred of his pull with the officers and crew to allow her a furlough to attend the service. 

“Glad I could make the time, Captain.” Ayaka nodded. The guard behind her carried a number of high-tech tools which could immobilize her at the press of a button, and several other security officers were likely filing in among the crew armed with backup devices and weapons. She had no intention of making trouble, but they couldn’t possibly know that. 

As Callahan took his seat in the front of the temporarily hallowed canteen, other members of the crew stole suspicious or furious glances at the enemy agent standing at the back of the space, but most either didn’t notice Ayaka or did not recognize that the recent crisis aboard Vitali had been caused by someone so apparently harmless.  

As the final stragglers crept in, Chaplain Nyilvas, decked out in his shining-white cassock, stepped up to the synth-sheet lectern which did a poor job of pretending to be made of real wood. He seemed to make eye contact with everyone, but no-one for too long, as the lights dimmed and traditional music skirled out of unseen audio hookups behind him. 

The guard motioned Ayaka to a seat in the all-but-unoccupied last row before standing behind the chair so close that she could hear his breathing down her neck even without the enhanced sensory abilities of her implants. Being behind her didn’t make him any less visible on her wide array of extrasensory information, but it probably made him feel better to be out of her line of sight. 

“Friends and comrades, officers and crew of the Xavior Vitali...” The padre’s usually quiet voice carried through the compartment without the aid of any voice amplification, settling quickly into a comfortable routine. Ayaka leaned back and let the sermon’s tone, if not its contents, seep into her brain, worming its way around the foreign inclusions still resting there. He talked of redemption, and every time he said the word, he seemed to be looking at her – could it be possible that redemption might also extend to a traitor such as herself? 

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Tales from the Service: The Fell Rider of Meyerfeld

2947-12-17 – Tales from the Service: The Fell Rider of Meyerfeld 

The successful storming of a forward Incarnation base at the abandoned Meyerfeld colony last week has given Naval Intelligence plenty of physical intelligence as well as a number of captured Nate personnel to interrogate. The Incarnation apparently abandoned the site as a lost cause; the Fifth Fleet was able to ship all the spoils of the raid, as well as the entirety of the 11th Mechanized, back to Maribel without enemy disruption. 

Talking to the returning heroes of the raid, I found many of them repeating a curious story which made its rounds through the Marine ranks on the six-day return trip. I managed to track down the person who told it first, and while it may be a bit exaggerated, I think our hero is telling the truth about his “Fell Rider” as far as he knows it. 

[D.L.C. - Battlefield legends exist from all periods of history; beautiful female warriors riding flying mounts dominated imaginations in the First Dark Age, ghostly bow-men were reported to stalk battlefields in the age of mechanized warfare, and emerald-winged seraphs with ancient muskets and fixed bayonets were reported standing over the bodies of slain Rattanai warriors on the scorched battlefields of the Terran-Rattanai War. The tendency to imagine fantastic warriors sharing the perils of war seems to be intrinsic to the human psyche; unlike Nojus, I think this story is largely the product of the teller’s imagination struggling to cope with the dangers of combat.  

No recording of what is described below survives, because the recording devices were disposable units abandoned on site as the witnesses fell back. The suit telemetry of the one Marine who directly observed the scene does not contain any corroborating data, though he too swears he saw all of this take place.] 

Gunnery Sergeant Wyn Dickson stood in the attic of a ruined house south of the ruins of Meyerfeld, listening to the wind whistle through the naked rafters over his head. He was glad of the sturdy fabcrete construction of the standard-issue rapid-fab houses which the colonization authority had set up for the failed colony; the structure, even abandoned for more than a decade, endured the considerable weight of his entire armor-suited combat team without so much as a creak. The walls, almost ten centimeters thick even on the topmost level, would probably stop light railshot.  

The homestead, ruined as it was, made a perfect sentry post for the fire-team to keep watch over Route Hera. The blue-grey xeno-grass stretching to the horizon in two directions gave any Incarnation force caught outside the perimeter little cover for a counter-attack. With the supply base in the hands of the 11th, intelligence reports of dozens of heavily armed patrols ranging many kilometers out into the empty planet’s hinterlands seemed a ridiculous thing for the brass to be worried about; piecemeal attacks from company-strength elements wouldn’t pose the defensive perimeter set up by the 11th any serious trouble, with or without a few minutes’ warning. 

Dangerous though forward sentry duty was, it represented the first opportunity since landfall for his fireteam to take a break. In the breathable but chilly atmosphere of the former colony, Wyn and Hasek, the two not currently watching the feeds of the all-round microcamera cluster stuck at the crumbling roof’s apex, quickly shed their helmets to wolf down cold rations. They had spent most of the battle running and leaping around the outskirts of the ruined city to cut off enemy retreat down Route Hera, only for Nate’s ground-staff to hold their ground until overrun. Wyn still had a full magazine of railgun slugs, and the other three members of the fireteam had fired only a few bursts between them at suspicious movement ahead of their line of advance.  

Hasek and Chen had grumbled about the lack of opportunity to shoot at a defending force primarily composed of dragooned Nate logistics workers, but Wyn personally didn’t mind. Given that the greasy black smoke-columns of at least three Marine armored vehicles smudged the sky over the ruins, more than a few Marines of the 11th had bought a patch of peaceful, grassy field back in the Core Worlds. 

“Dust cloud on Hera.” 

Wyn dropped his ration and slammed his helmet back into place to check the feeds. Baines was right – a hazy cloud of grey dust colored the sky above Route Hera. The rangefinder estimated the vehicle or vehicles causing it were still at least five klicks away but closing fast; the flat terrain of the xeno-grass “sea” and the clear weather gave his team plenty of advance warning. “Anything on our tacnet?” 

“Nothing.” 

On an abandoned planet, that could only mean the incoming force belonged to Nate. “Set up to engage.” On his suit controls, he sent off the perimeter alarm signal, then started feeding his team’s tactical data to the main operational network. 

Baines and Hasek set aside their rail-rifles and unlimbered the heavy plasma cannons attached to the backs of their armor-suits, while Wyn and Franjic removed the face-plates from their shoulder-mounted rocket pods. Route Hera approached to within two hundred meters of the ruined homestead, but the ideal engagement range for their weapons was nearly twice that. If they did their jobs, the Nate force would discover the fireteam’s presence only when their lead vehicle, struck by a pair of heavy plasma lances, exploded spectacularly. As soon as it had, the fireteam would jump out of their ambush position and fall back toward the defense perimeter under the cover of two full spreads of infantry rockets. 

“Got something else on the road, Sergeant.” Baines announced as Wyn was running a start-up diagnostic on his shoulder pod.  

Hasek was quicker to look at the feed than Wyn, and quicker to react. “What the hell?” 

Wyn dismissed the diagnostic and checked the video feeds. Near the point where the abandoned road made its closest approach, something had appeared, motionless as a statue, which had not been there before. After staring at it a moment in confusion, he recognized what it was – a four-legged beast with the spindly legs and long head of a Terran horse, but with a fluted carapace of gleaming obsidian.  

The apparition was more than the equine, though. On its back, with a barbed lance resting butt-first on the ground at his feet, sat a motionless rider, erect in his saddle, armored in the same black substance as his mount. 

What Wyn couldn’t help but notice, however, was the helmet. The rest of the armored figure was fluted and sculpted like the shell of a Centauran cathedral conch, but the helmet was a smooth, glassy spheroid, with no visor or any allowance for breath or vision. Though the rider faced down the road toward the onrushing Nate force, Wyn felt deathly certain it was looking right back at him at the same time. 

Though clearly unsettled, Baines hefted his plasma cannon. “I’ll target the bogie and blast it if it moves. Hasek, you go for the lead vehicle.” 

“No.” Wyn countermanded the suggestion. “Nate will stop and try to figure out what that is. Hold and let them deal with it. Did anyone see where it came from?” 

“Wasn't there when I was looking, Sarge.” 

Wyn turend to pin Baines with a withering glare that he was certain could be felt even through two helmet visors, but said nothing. Baines was a good Marine – he couldn’t possibly have missed the approach of the black rider. It had appeared only when the entire fire-team had diverted its attention to prepping their weapons. 

“Nate vehicles at three klicks.” Franjic switched his ready-indicator to green. His shoulder-pod full of missiles was ready to go. 

“When will they see that thing?” Wyn finished his own diagnostic and went green shortly before Baines and Hasek finished their somewhat more involved preparation. 

“At the top of that rise, there. Maybe eighty seconds.” 

Wyn didn’t see a rise, but that was the optical illusion of the xeno-grass ocean. The terrain rolled so slightly that the even tops of the plant-carpet appeared to smooth it out completely.  “Let’s see what they make of it.” 

The mount and rider remained statue-still until the dust cloud in the distance resolved into a convoy of three boxy vehicles trundling up the crumbling road. They slowed, but did not stop, when they caught sight of the object in their path. Wyn and his fire-team kept their heads down, watching through their all-around surveillance rig. 

The three vehicles approached the rider slowly, and the lead rig, a huge wheeled personnel carrier with a pair of remote laser-turrets on its roof, finally ground to a halt barely two hundred meters beyond it. The system told Wyn that they were within plasma cannon range, but he held Baines and Hasek down. He wanted to see what they did, and whether they recognized the figure. Perhaps Nate, having occupied Meyerfeld for several months, had encountererd this strange creature – he couldn’t bring himself to think it was a human underneath that armor. There was something unnatural about it. 

One of the two laser mounts on the big vehicle swung around and opened fire, setting the air between its barrel and the black rider ablaze. There was a flash as coherent light bounced off the rider’s fluted chestpiece, but when the video rig’s exposure chips recovered, horse and rider were still there. 

“That stuff’s at least as good as our armor, Sarge.” Hasek, seeming near hysteria, pointed out. “What if-” 

“Shut up!” Wyn quietly marked the lead vehicle. “Get ready to take out that troop carrier.” 

As he spoke, he saw a hatch on the vehicle’s side hiss open, and a lone figure jumped out. Tall, broad-shouldered, and dressed in a red uniform Wyn hadn’t seen in any of the pre-drop identification images, the figure strode slowly out ahead of his column. A side-arm gleamed at his hip, untouched. 

“What is he doing?” 

“Quiet.” Wyn saw the rider stir for the first time as the lone Nate officer approached – that featureless helmet gave the barest hint of a nod.  

Without warning, horse and rider were in motion. The lance, resting previously butt-first on the ground, swung into position to charge, and the figure’s black-armored legs kicked the flanks of his mount to encourage it into motion. Bearing down along the arrow-straight road, the black rider aimed his lance at the lone man striding out to meet him on foot.  

The incarnation man continued to walk forward at the same pace, as if to allow the apparition to impale him. Enemy though he was, Wyn marveled at the man’s steady nerves. Something about the idea of being killed by the black rider unsettled him, as if he would somehow be more dead with that wicked lance spearing his heart than he would be cooked by a Nate personnel laser or riddled with railshot.  

“Get out of the way, you idiot.” Baines, seeming to sense the same peril as Wyn, muttered on the open comms line. 

Just before the lance buried itself in his chest, the red-clad officer moved. He was so fast that Wyn’s eyes couldn’t follow his movement – one moment he was walking serenely forward and the next he was five meters to one side, arm extended in the follow-through motion of an expert throw. Whatever it was he hurled at the back of the rider flashed darkly in the cold sunlight before sticking deeply into the rider’s back. Only after this had been done did Wyn see that the long, wicked lance was now missing its barbed head. 

“That’s got to be an Immortal, and he’s showing off. He doesn’t know we’re here, boss. I say we blast him.” 

“Not yet.” Baines was right, but Wyn didn’t want to take on an Immortal alone. The Incarnation’s elite soldiers, nanotechnological cyborgs who flaunted their counterhumanity with profane abandon, were individually quite capable of taking on a fire-team of heavily armor-suited Marines in the right circumstances. 

The rider, unperturbed by his own lance-head buried halfway into his back, slowed and turned his mount around right in front of the personnel carrier’s armored nose, as if unaware it was there. As he did, the remains of the lance dissolved into black dust.  

The Immortal, now wearing a cocksure grin, held out a beckoning hand to the grim figure, urging it to try again. Though both the laser-mounts fixed on the horror’s back, neither fired; the gunners inside likely did not want to attract attention. 

The rider spurred into a charge again. Though now deprived of his lance, a long, curved blade appeared in his hand, gleaming like a shard of glass. Once more, the Incarnation officer strolled casually forward as it charged. 

Wyn saw his opportunity. His team didn’t need to tangle with the Immortal – they just needed to distract him at a critical moment. "Hasek, the troop carrier. Now!” 

The Marine jumped up to rest his huge weapon on the edge of the crumbling wall, suit servos screaming. He’d already plotted the angle, and the suit systems locked his joints at the precise positions necessary for the shot. As the rider bore down once more, he fired, and a white-hot blast of plasma leapt across the intervening distance and plowed into the side of the big vehicle. 

A second later, the vehicle exploded spectacularly, flaming pieces of its structure scattering across the xeno-grass fields on either side. The explosion washed out all the video feeds, and for a Wyn’s view of the Immortal and the rider vanished into over-exposed glare at the exact instant the rider reached its Incarnation challenger. 

When the feeds returned a half-second later, the mount and rider were gone. The Immortal stood where he had been for a moment longer, then slowly crumpled limply to the ground. 

Wyn didn’t have time to verify what he knew – the man was dead. “Franjic. Fire away.” 

As he and his subordinate loosed a salvo of tiny homing missiles in the direction of the remaining two vehicles, Baines and Hasek jumped high into the air, heading back toward the main perimeter.  

As soon as his shoulder-pod was empty, Wyn cut it loose and followed them, already counting down the days until the 11th could leave Meyerfeld and the dark rider behind for good. 

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