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? 

Details

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. 

Details

Tales from the Service: 11th Mechanized at Meyerfeld

2947-12-10 – Tales from the Service: 11th Mechanized at Meyerfeld 

This has been a more active week than any since the Battle of Berkant here on the Frontier. While Duncan still insists that it is beyond the purview of this feed to relay every detail of the war, skirmishes were fought at Matusalemme (this is at least the third major raid on the orbital infrastructure of Adimari Valis) and near Margaux. Lone Tyrants were driven off planetary raids in several other places, though in those cases the Incarnation vessels retreated even though the local forces were insufficient to seriously threaten those vessels. 

It is estimated by our friends in Naval Intelligence that Nate has between twenty and sixty Tyrant vessels (plus an unknown number of logistics hulls) in the Coreward Frontier at this point, based on the increasing regularity of their attacks. While this force still can’t stand up to the combined throw weight of the Fifth Fleet, they are making good use of the speed and range of their cruisers to keep the Navy on the defensive.  

Admiral Zahariev, however, is not one to cede the initiative entirely. Earlier this week, the press pool was informed that an Incarnation forward supply base at the spaceport of the abandoned colony of  Meyerfeld had been taken by ground assault by the 11th Heavy Mechanized Battalion of the Confederated Marines. While the single Tyrant-type heavy cruiser defending the station was drawn away into an inconclusive skirmish with Fifth Fleet destroyers, the 11th made a hot drop from its trio of assault transports to secure the site. Though Nate was apparently unprepared for the attack, the base personnel put up a stiff, if uncoordinated, defense. 

Carolina Durand provided Cosmic Background with a significant amount of battlefield telemetry from the operation. While an episode of the Vidcast series will be dedicated to showing selected scenes of the ground action, Duncan and I thought it would be good to focus on the experiences of one vehicle – the TA-39 “Lucky Penny” and its crew. 

Before we get any questions from those of you familiar with the habits of Marine ground-pounders, the vehicle is apparently named after a rather attractive armor technician on their transport crew, and while I doubt she posed as inspiration for the likeness on this TA-39’s glacis, if she looks anything like that rather skillfully painted pin-up, none of these ground-pounders have the faintest shot with her until they start earning some serious medals. 

[D.L.C. - Fear not, Cosmic Background fans with children. Ashton will never let shots of this vehicle’s rather arresting crew markings into the main vidcast program. Fortunately, the art, positioned as it is on the middle of the vehicle’s heavy bow armor, is not visible from the camera clusters aboard “Lucky Penny” itself.] 

Lucky Penny paused briefly just behind the last hilltop overlooking the target, and its commander opened his hatch and half-climed out to peer over the crest. On the plain below, a tumbledown ruin of a spaceport city which had once housed six thousand hopeful colonists was slowly being overtaken by a rippling sea of blue-grey foliage which extended to the horizon, as if a particularly slow tide was coming in and flooding its outskirts. Already, many of the half-ruined outer buildings sat as islands amid the false swells of the wind-blown xeno-grass. 

As the other five TA-39s in the column worked their way up to their starting points on either side of the lead vehicle, Lieutenant RansuWaters surveyed the ruins for a few seconds, then turned to watch the command vehicle’s antenna briefly shoot up to send a tight-beam transmission to one of the drone relays circling high above to indicate that his platoon had reached the jumping-off point and receive new orders. 

“Think they know we’re coming?” Bion Vlahovic, the vehicle gunner, asked over the intercom. 

“Would take a minor miracle for them to have missed us plowing into atmo and coming down so close.” Ransu ducked back into his hatch, grateful for the heavily insulated flex-armor issued to vehicle crews. Despite its abundant local life, Meyerfeld was a fairly cold place, with summer temperatures rarely exceeding ten degrees celsius, and it was nowhere near high local summer. “They know we’re coming.” 

“Gardener Actual to all Gardeners.” The platoon captain’s voice cut into the intercom. “Vehicles to line abreast. Apes, you walk from here.” 

Lucky Penny rocked as the four nine-hundred-pound armored assault troopers riding on her rear deck jumped off. “Walk? Hell.” The sergeant leading the infantry platoon assigned to Task Force Gardener shot back. “From here, the apes fly in.” 

On the infantry circuit, doubtless that braggadocio had encouraged a rowdy cheer, but on the tankers’ channel, the only response was the triple-beep signal to ready for the attack. 

Ransu reached up to pull the hatch shut over his head, then engaged the vehicle’s atmospherics and anti-nanite systems. Nate agents were loaded to the gills with nanotechnological dirty tricks, so their ground forces would undoubtedly use similar weaponry; he hopednanodefense systems deployed years before Nate’s appearance in Frontier space were up to the task. Being microscopically chewed into pink mush pooling in the bottom of the vehicle’s crew compartment was not the way Ransu wished to die. 

The two-beep signal for imminent attack sounded, and Lucky Penny’s driver Eddy Dawson began to throttle the fusion-bottle behind the crew compartment up to full combat power. The steady rumble of the fusion powerplant was reassuring, even as Ransu knew it stood a not-too-remote chance of going critical if the vehicle was hit badly by enemy fire. Speed was better than armor, and only a fusion powerplant could give a seventy-metric-ton smart-track vehicle anything resembling speed. 

“What do you think our odds are, Chief?” 

“Bion, they supposedly thing this base was secret. I don’t think we’ve got more than a one in ten chance of buying it here.” 

“One in ten.” The gunner repeated slowly. “And what do you think the odds are of me getting into Penny’s-” 

The long, low single-beep of the charge order sounded, and Eddy dumped power to the electric drive, hurling his two crew-mates back into their padded restraints. On his camera feeds, Ransu watched the other five vehicles of the platoon surge down the broken, scrub-strewn hill in a ragged line. The infantry, clearing the hilltop amid a cloud of dust and sand, sprinted forward only a few steps before their suits leapt into the air and sailed over the rapidly accelerating armored tracks. At the tops of their rocket-assisted jumps, each one fired suppressive bursts of railshot down into the ruined buildings ahead, and each angled in to land just ahead of the heavy armor.Ransu knew their projected landing sites were painted on the driver’s forward view for Eddy to avoid. 

Swiveling his cameras, Ransu picked out a sturdy but dilapidated building which appeared to have been reinforced by struts of newer metal. In the ancient methods armored vehicle crews had been using since antiquity, he kicked his gunner lightly in the shoulder as he put a mark on the building. “Bian, this house offends me.” 

The turret slewed toward the target, and a sizzling dart of plasma belched forth as Bian twisted his trigger-lever. The camera facing the building went white for a moment, then cleared to reveal only foundations and the torn remnants of what looked like a Nate inflatable weather-shelter. 

As if the shot was the signal, the ruins ahead erupted with plasma and laser fire. Eddy threw the vehicle to one side and then the other as energy weapons seared the scrub-brush and rocks on either side. On his console, Ransu could tell most of the incoming was relatively light fare – man-portable and crew-served equipment of the sort they had expected to run into, which would take far too long to eat through Lucky Penny’s armor to stop them from breaching the perimeter. He left these defenders to the infantry – their rapid-firing railguns would either shred these lighter defenses or force the Nate soldiers crewing them to take cover. Instead, he switched to thermal imaging and looked for the bad news. 

The bad news announced itself when the vehicles were halfway down the slope, in the form of a huge energy blast spewing forth from the mouth of a half-ruined alley and coming within a few meters of the captain’s vehicle. Whatever had fired was remarkably well concealed, even in infrared – still, Ransu had seen where it had fired from, and he kicked Bian again, marking the spot. 

Lucky Penny fired again, but two other crews had fired first. Between the three plasma cannons and at least two converging streams offerroceramic railshot, the two buildings shielding the hidden emplacement were blown to pieces so completely that Ransu couldn’t even see any remains of the weapon the defenders had hidden there. 

The infantry started their second leap just as the armored vehicles plowed past – and one, directly through – a cluster of outlying buildings. A trio of Incarnation ground personnel scrambled out of the way of the assault, and Ransu targeted them with the remote railgun mounted on the turret roof. The weapon rattled overhead, perforating all three with red-hot slugs within seconds. The infantry could clean up any stragglers later, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving three Nate soldiers behind his vehicle. 

Because the city was abandoned, and most of its buildings were in any case lightly built and crumbling, the formation of TA-39s plowed directly into the outer ring of structures. Lucky Penny bucked and jumped as it crushed an already half-collapsed one-story structure, smart treads automatically projecting cleat-like spikes into the rubble to achieve traction. This, apparently, was not what the defenders had expected – on the far side of the structure, Ransu saw a pair of wide-eyed Incarnation officers and a small air-skimmer in one camera angle just in time for the entire scene to vanish under the vehicle’s nose as Eddy pushed through the second structure. Most of the cameras blanked out, covered in dust and debris, and only cleared when the vehicle rolled into the open space of a wider street and the camera-lenses flushed themselves of the offending substances. 

“Gardener has penetrated the perimeter.” The captain’s announcement was for the benefit of higher officers, but it carried to Ransu’sheadset as well. “Defenses are brisk, but mostly light. Proceeding to objective Bravo.” 

Bravo, Ransu knew, was the two-pad spaceport the Incarnation detachment had cleared and restored to working order. Why they had decided to install their forward supply dump on a planet rather than setting up on an asteroid or simply parking a fleet of logistics ships in the interstellar darkness somewhere, Ransu didn’t try to understand – Nate was as unintelligible as any alien foe. 

Just as Eddy got the vehicle rolling roughly along the road toward the spaceport grounds, the TA-39 to Lucky Penny’s left shuddered to a halt and began smoking furiously. Ransu didn’t need to see the incoming fire to know the assault vehicle had been hit. “Eddy, get us out of here!” 

As the vehicle wheeled and charged for the cover of an alley nearby, Ransu watched the stricken vehicle. After several seconds, a hatch in the turret roof eruped open and two figures in black tankers’ flex-armor spilled out. A moment later, a second hatch in the roof of the armored bow popped open, but before the driver could get clear, the vehicle erupted in a pillar of fusion-fire, briefly washing out the camera’s digital capture-chips and causing Lucky Penny to rock almost off one of its tracks. The fusion-bottle's safety systems directed most of the blast upward, and the flex-armor of the two fleeing crewmen insulated them from the briefly searing heat and flood of harsh radiation, but even so the blast threw them both across the street and slammed them against a nearby building. 

“Ten percent, Chief?” 

“Shut up and find him, Bian.” Ransu wheeled his cameras around, looking for the armor-killing weapon in visual and infrared wavelengths. A gun capable of coring a TA-39 in one shot had to be very big, and was probably very close. 

Another vehicle’s commander highlighted the gaping storefront-windows of a building several blocks down the wide street, and in infrared Ransu saw the wash of hot air billowing out of this opening. “Got it.” He locked the point for Bian, and the turret swiveled. A weapon inside didn’t have line of sight on any of the other vehicles after they’d all scurried for cover, but none of the TA-39s could train their main guns onto that target without exposing themselves. 

“Where are the damned apes?” Eddy griped over the intercom. The question was barely worth asking; the clatter of automatic railguns and the sizzle of plasma cannons a few blocks away suggested that most of the infantry had found their own problems.  

Fortunately, the infantry charging into the teeth of the high-powered weapon hidden inside the structure proved unnecessary. With a rumble which jolted Ransu even through Lucky Penny’s ample suspension, the vehicle toting the gun which had cored the unfortunate vehicle rumbled forward, the shell of its covering building collapsing around it. The Incarnation ground vehicle was easily twice as large as a TA-39, and it had clearly not been designed as an assault weapon – heavy strakes of ablative armor had been haphazardly bolted to the framework gun-shield protecting a massive barrel covered in a forest of cooling vanes. Most likely, the supply base’s defenders had used spare parts available in their stockpile to turn one of their ground-transports into a last-ditch armored monster. A more skilled crew could have sniped at Task Force Gardener for many blocks, and probably claimed several more vehicles before it was cornered – the operators were obviously overconfident novices. 

“Hold.” The captain’s voice urged. 

Across the street, Ransu watched the two surviving crew of the stricken vehicle stagger to their feet and limp toward the shelter of a nearby ruin. Until the ersatz Incarnation tank had been dealt with, they were on their own. 

The overloaded, haphazardly-built monster lumbered closer. Eddy nudged Lucky Penny back into the alley a few meters, forcing Ransu to deploy one of his two camera-drones above the rooftops to watch its plodding progress. 

“Hold!” 

The vehicle was barely a hundred meters away now. Ransu knew if the Nate crew spotted any of the vehicles, it could probably fire through the flimsy buildings and knock out another TA-39 with ease. 

Without warning, the single long, harsh beep of the charge signal sounded. Reflexively, Eddy engaged the drive, and Lucky Penny surged forward into the open, along with the other five remaining vehicles. As soon as the turret was clear of the alley, Bian swung it to the side and fired, knowing that speed, not accuracy, was their only hope of a quick and clean victory. 

Ransu didn’t see which of the five plasma-bursts killed the huge vehicle, but its front plates erupted into a fountain of molten metal, and its huge barrel, blown clean off its mounting, smashed the framework casemate to pieces as it tumbled to the street. Though it kept rolling ponderously forward for several seconds, the command channel erupted with war-whoops and shouts. 

The captain put a stop to the celebration quickly. “None of that. Let's move. Leave survivors to the apes.” 

As the five remaining vehicles formed up and started rolling, Ransu saw an assault-suited infantryman with a medic’s red-and-white markings on his chest-plate leap into the street from two blocks away and head for the two stranded tankers. Of their driver, who had not made it out before the vehicle’s fusion-bottle had blown, he knew nothing would ever be found. 

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Tales from the Service: A Pastor and a Prodigal

2947-12-03 – Tales from the Service: A Pastor and a Prodigal

We have received some interesting audience feedback about this text feed recently which I think it’s time to address. Most of this, I think, is coming from people who otherwise are not Cosmic Background datasphere content consumers, who have begun to subscribe to this feed due to the fact that it is curated by an embed team assigned to the Fifth Fleet for the duration of hostilities. 

The first category of feedback seems to come from non-spacers, and it generally expresses a wish for our Tales from the Service episodes to explain more of the background which our usual audience of interstellar professionals and enthusiasts take for granted. It’s easy for us to forget that since most people do not trust their lives daily to shipboard atmospherics, inertial control, and A-grav, most of the sapients of the Reach know little about these machines. Evidently, some of these new non-spacer readers think that knowing more about these technologies might improve their reading experience. 

The second category of feedback seems to come from our new readers inside the Navy itself. They wish for us to cover more of the war directly, as apparently in some cases the vidcast episodes which do this are of sufficient size that they exceed a crew rating’s daily data-payload limits. A regular textual summary of the war’s progress (as much as can be gleaned from open sources, at any rate) would apparently be welcome to many. 

In both cases, I don’t think the weekly “Tales from the Service” episodes are the right place to do these things – after all, our primary responsibility is to the permanent audience, for whom these requests would be unnecessary and perhaps unwelcome. That being said, these requests have come in with sufficient numbers that Nojus and I are working on ways to satisfy them without compromising the usual episodes. 

“You sure about this, Tommy?” The guard at the brig checkpoint passed his security wand over Thomas Nyilvas's shipboard fatigues and the bundle under his arm several times, though Thomas knew the device only needed one sweep. “The captain was in there for four hours and didn’t get anything out of that witch except epithets and a near-miss from a nano-fabbed dart.” 

Thomas nodded. “This is something I need to do, Sergeant. I’ll be safe.” 

“Your business, padre.” The guard stowed his wand. “Cell ten.” 

Thomas nodded and went through the checkpoint, turning into the higher-security cell block where he knew he would find the ship’s lone prisoner. As soon as he was around the corner, he unfurled the bundle under his arm and shrugged on his white synth-silk cassock. The ship’s imposing chief of marines had failed to make an impression on the prisoner, and the skipper’s very different method of persuasion had similarly elicited only a few arrogant jabs. Thomas prayed he would have better results. 

The cell’s gravitic-shear door barrier hummed invisibly as Thomas approached, and the prisoner lounging inside on the narrow wall-mounted cot barely glanced at him. Physically, Ayaka Rowlins looked like the last thing that might threaten the ship – forty kilos of bony, awkward frame topped by a plain moon-face and a shock of haphazardly-cut black hair should not have been able to harm a Navy patrol cruiser. Still, Thomas knew she was more than she seemed; the crescent of blinking LEDs on her left temple hinted at the massive body-modifications she had undergone in an Incarnation med-lab. 

According to the datasphere bio her genetic print had called up, Rowlins was one of the Reach’s hordes of economically homeless young people, who’d come of age with unmarketable skills, if any at all. Following promises of a better future, most of them struck out for the Frontiers alone, or in groups. The file on this particular case went cold in 2945, shortly after she had become associated with a known Ladeonist radical on Maribel. She had vanished without a trace – until someone had caught her setting demolition charges around vital parts of Xavior Vitali’s phased-matter condenser, flesh and mind corrupted by Incarnation hardware. 

Thomas took a breath. Short of riding Vitali into a full-scale battle it wasn’t designed for, there was little a patrol-cruiser chaplain could do that would be more perilous than what he was about to. “Mind if I come in?” 

The prisoner looked up at him again, then looked away, staring through her puffy, sleep-deprived eyes at a spot on the bulkhead. The nanosuppressor suspended in the cell’s overhead panel blinked its lights cheerily. Thomas squared his shoulders and stepped into the invisible shear-barrier, which opened up only millimeters ahead of his nose and closed again millimeters behind his back, allowing the captive no opportunity to escape. 

“Good morning.” Thomas tapped a control on the wall near the entrance and a pillar-shaped chair rose out of the floor. “I’m Father Nyilvas, the ship’s chaplain. I thought you might appreciate some company that wasn’t trying to interrogate you.” 

Ayaka Rowlins didn’t even look his way. She made a noise which might have been a derisive snort, then fell silent once more. 

Thomas shrugged and unfolded the screen of his wrist unit. “I hope you don’t mind me doing a little bit of work. It’s Saturday by the standard calendar. I have to lead service tomorrow morning, if we haven’t exploded by then.” 

“And if we have?” 

Thomas looked up. She still hadn’t turned to face her visitor. “If we have, then I’ll get to see who was listening last week, and who wasn’t.” 

Rowlins reacted in what might have been a quickly-suppressed smile. “Believing in Chapel voodoo won’t save anyone if the ship goes up.” 

“Depends on what you mean by save. We’ll all be dead, sure, but eventually, that does tend to happen to everyone.” He tried not to focus on the fact that the prisoner was talking to him so easily, hostile or no – Captain Callahan had glared and imprecated Rowlins for the better part of an hour before she’d even acknowledged his presence. 

Thomas keyed in a link to the Chapel software which monitored the ship’s datasphere and chose the most fitting passage to teach for the week, and almost laughed out loud. “Psalm thirty-nine?” He didn’t always take recommendations from the software, though it was the end product of nearly three centuries of Chapel clergy refinement. This time, however, it had struck a winner. “Perfect.” 

Rawlins looked up, sneering. “Does it talk about being weak and soft, and being defeated by the chosen agents of human survival?” 

Thomas met her gaze. “Your faith in the Incarnation is understandable, Miss Rawlins, but quite misplaced.” 

“Faith?” She sat up, leaning toward him, dark eyes burning. “My cause is fact. Yours is stone-age mysticism with a chrome finish.” 

“Being restricted to material concerns does not make something factual. Some day when that chip in your head isn’t telling you what to do, you’ll think that’s obvious.” Thomas returned to his outline. Ayaka Rowlins was a true believer, but he could tell her belief had little depth or substance. Most likely, the Incarnation’s brand of apocalyptic transhumanism had been the first thing she’d really been offered in her short life with which to believe, and she’d grabbed onto it just for the novelty of having something to call her own. He’d seen it before with other young people – their comfortable Core Worlds and Inner Reach upbringings had left them comfortable but unmoored, uncertain, and without ideas. They drifted toward the Frontiers in listless droves, searching for something without any idea of what it might be. A few found their way into the community of spacers and the Navy – those were the lucky ones. 

“You think I’m controlled by these?” She tapped her head implant. “They make me smarter and freer than you will ever be, even when I’m locked up in this cell.” 

“Being always connected to the flow of data makes you feel important, and the chips let you consume it efficiently. That doesn’t make you smarter. That idea all but wrecked humanity in the Second Dark Age.” 

“That’s big talk for someone selling ideas the species hasn’t taken seriously since the first one.” 

Before speaking again, Thomas made a note to emphasize his chosen psalm’s repeated observations about human mortality, and the mortality of the species as a whole. Four thousand years old though it was, he knew the text would strike a chord with people who were expecting their ship to explode as a result of Rawlins’s undiscovered sabotage at any moment. He’d long since ceased to be amazed that scripture was like that – even caught up in a war so far away from Sol that light emitted by that star during Christ’s life hadn’t yet reached the front lines, the ancient book still had something to say.  

The delay seemed to infuriate Rawlins, who stood up to loom over Thomas. “You think this is funny, padre?” Intellectually, he knew her machine-enhanced musculature could tear him limb from limb with ease, and even with the auto-stun and nanosuppressor systems built into the cell, she could probably put him in a geltank for weeks before she went down herself – but her small stature made the threat hard to take seriously. 

“No.” He finished the bullet-point with a flourish and looked up. “I’ll be honest, you’re making a mistake that’s so basic I have no way of answering it politely. Are you really the best the Incarnation has?” 

Rawlins was silent, but her balled fists and gritted teeth made it clear she was calculating how much she could pulp him before the cell’s systems knocked her out. Thomas knew the best thing to do was to stay silent and let her decide it wasn’t worth it, that beating the ship’s chaplain to a pulp was a good way of getting the crew to vent her out an airlock and take their chances with any additional demolition charges, but he knew he wasn’t going to do that. 

Standing to his full height – nearly a foot taller than the prisoner even though he was hardly a tall man – Thomas clasped his hands behind his back. “You should know this, child, you grew up in the Confederacy. Even if all I offer is an ancient idea, an idea is a tool. If you find an old implement still in use, then you can conclude it must still do something useful.” 

“It lets the masses pretend that they are content with their gradual extinction.” The woman replied through gritted teeth. “An opiate for the dying.” 

“We are all dying someday. Why so concerned about extinction? The ship’s going to go nova before I lead service tomorrow anyway. If I were you, I’d be more concerned about that.” 

“Go to hell, Padre.” Rawlins looked away, and Thomas could tell in that brief look all he needed to do about the engineering staff’s round-the-clock search for more explosives.

“I'd really rather not.” Sitting back down, he tapped words into his outline for a few seconds until she turned to return to the bunk, then quickly flashed a message to Captain Callahan to share what he’d learned: there were no other bombs, because Rawlins had been caught too early to complete any part of her mission. She had been given one charge by the cause on whose altar she had sacrificed her heart, mind, and very humanity, and she had failed to complete it.

As he continued to work on his sermon in silence, Thomas prayed silently for the soul of the prodigal daughter sulking across the cell, wondering if there would ever be any way to bridge the span between them. It seemed impossible that her soul and humanity could be salvaged - fortunately, he was a firm believer in miracles.

Some day, this war will come to an end, and we will have to learn to live as neighbors with whatever remains of the Incarnation. When that happens - and I hope it is soon - the work of the men with guns will be over, and the work of men like Chaplain Thomas Nyilvas of Xavior Vitali can truly begin. I fear, however, that like the Rattanai imperialists and the Ladeonists which survive from the last great interstellar war, it will take many generations to overcome the hostility of our modern foes.

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