Tales from the Service: The Dirtiest Job

2948-06-16 - Tales from the Service: The Dirtiest Job

“Skipper, we’re almost through the door. Is this section of sealed off?” 

“Affirmative, Chief. Adjoining sections have been evacuated and atmosphere withdrawn.” 

“Stand by to open the locks in this section as well.” Chief Damage Control Technician Lucian Pohl-Androv glanced down at the life support monitor readouts on his wrist display as two of his subordinates cut into the hatch with suit-mounted arc-cutters. Both men inside were still alive, but he knew there wasn’t much time left. Even if the automatic life-support functions of their uniforms extended by atmospheric canisters in their multi-utility belt packs, the pair of unfortunates were in serious danger. 

“Ready at your call, Chief.” 

“Mr. Boone, Mr. Funar. Don’t know if you can hear us in there but we’re almost through the door. Hold on.” The request fell flat even to Lucian’s own ears. There was nothing the men could do but try not to think too hard about what they were marinating in. The raw, partly digested sewage runoff of the ship’s entire compliment was only the beginning of their distress – the varieties of bioengineered extremophile microbes which were used to digest this waste material and the various odd chemicals used to keep them operating at peak performance were far more dangerous. With the microbial colonies going haywire and filling the entire compartment, there was every chance that the sewage inflow and nutrient trips would be insufficient to satisfy the microbes – if that happened, they would start trying to digest somewhat less ideal foods, such as smart-cloth, artificial polymers, and human flesh. 

Even if the microbes didn’t digest the two men from the outside in, they would colonize the two technicians – first by anchoring forests of microbial strands to their skin, and then eventually by gaining lodgment in their digestive tracts. If left submerged in the noxious bath for for too long, the men might end up with sewage-digesting microbes replicating in their blood-streams – a recipe for almost inevitable, and agonizingly protracted, death. 

“Ten seconds, Chief.” One of the men ahead at the hatch called out. “Brace yourself.” 

The two men with the cutters, wearing heavy hazardous-environment suits as they were, were prepared for the explosive release of slimy liquid when the hatch was breached, but Lucian, wearing a far lighter suit variant, quickly latched two safety lines to tie-down points on the bulkhead to avoid being washed away. “I'm ready.” All three suits and the maintenance tunnel had been coated with antimicrobial sprays but everything touched by the errant sewage microbes would still be ejected into the void of space the moment they were removed – it was cheaper for the Navy to replace than to decontaminate its equipment. Unfortunately, clumsy repair technicians were another story. 

“Three. Two. One.” At the count of one, Lucian heard metal creaking and pinging. If the junior tech said “breach complete,” the words were drowned out by a crash as the severed hatch tore inwards and a gurgling roar as a wave of gray-brown sludge erupted through the opening, washing down the corridor. 

The wave hit Lucian hard, and if it had not been for the safety lines he would have tumbled backwards down the hallway. As it subsided, the filamentous goo rose to his knees. “Find them both and let’s get out of here.” 

The two technicians in the lumbering suits didn’t need the order; they were already wading into the fouled chamber. Around their shoulders, Lucian could see stringy brown biomass hanging from the bulkheads and overhead catwalks like a wet, shaggy rug. Shuddering, he unhooked his safety lines and waded forward himself. 

Within two steps, Lucian’s foot came down on something harder than the goo, but more yielding than the deck plating. Reaching into the opaque slime, he pulled up a shaggy, microbe-strand covered figure, limp and unresponsive. “Got one out here.” He pinged the unrecognizable form with his suit radio. “It’s Funar. Unconscious but the sensors say he’s still alive.” Hurriedly, Lucian pulled a sprayer from his utility belt and began to coat the unfortunate in antimicrobial chemicals. Immediately, the strands began to break up and fall away, revealing the flimsy dome of an emergency uniform pressure helmet. The uniform had gone hermetic at some point – there was some hope he’d avoided the worst effects of exposure. 

Unfortunately, the helmet bubble was itself filled with gray-brown slime. The man was still alive, but if the microbes were inside his hermetically sealed smart-fabric uniform and were attacking his body, he was in serious trouble. 

“I’ve got Boone. Looks like he got his helmet up in time.” 

“We’re done here. Skipper, open the locks.” Lucian sighed as he hooked in his safety lines once more and attached Funar’s lines as well. If Mikhail Funar died, Boone would probably wish he had as well. The Navy would do everything possible to make an example of Boone for his lethal mistake. 

As officers on the bridge opened the airlocks, the sea of microbial soup bubbled, then rushed greedily out toward the void of space along with the fouled atmosphere. The strands too firmly anchored to surfaces to be pulled out withered and turned to powder almost as soon as their moisture had finished boiling off. 

“Situation under control, Skipper. Get that medical team in here.” 

Last week, in Tales from the Service: A Dropped Spanner, the consequences of Technician Ronan Boone's simple mistake began to take shape. In this second installment of the same story, told from the perspective of a damage control specialist on the same ship, we see the lengths the crew went to to recover Boone and his assistant, Technician Funar. The bill for the equipment contaminated beyond recovery in this rescue effort appears to have been quite extensive, but the Navy shouldered the financial cost without hesitation.

 After the two men were recovered, however, an inquiry into the cause of this expensive mishap was initiated, and to my knowledge it is still ongoing. Tech Funar did not survive (and perhaps mercifully remained unconscious until he passed), and the human toll combined with the fact that a warship was taken out of service for repairs during wartime seem to weigh more heavily on the Navy officers involved than the material cost of equipment damaged or destroyed.

I do not know whether it is just for Boone to be cashiered or incarcerated for his mistake - that is up to board of inquiry. Unfortunately, no matter what the verdict, there will probably be a family that thinks it horribly unjust.

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Tales from the Service: A Dropped Spanner

2948-06-09 - Tales from the Service: A Dropped Spanner

In a previous entry (Tales from the Inbox: Revenge of the Recycler), we discovered one of the many ways a starship's life support systems can break in unpleasant ways. Most members of the interstellar community know this only too well - after all, anyone who has plied the spacelanes for a lifetime has had to clean up after one or other of these systems when they fail in transit.

Apparently, some Navy ships designed for long cruises have been using a new human waste processing system which is just as efficient but far more light-weight. While this type of system centering around a tank of bio-engineered microbes is nothing new, the light-weight systems use a far more aggressive strain in a smaller tank, and use passive unpowered methods to limit the biomass rather than moderation drips and sensors. 

In at least four cases, these newer systems have failed under the strain of combat, but such failures are nothing new (and nothing the Navy can't handle - these new systems are designed to be simply dumped into space and replaced wholesale if they fail). The inquiry surrounding Technician Ronan Boone, however, is notable because the vessel in question was not exposed to damage in combat - instead, the sewage plant went awry during a maintenance operation in which the upper lid of the tank was open. Evidently, there is little room for a repair tech to maneuver while performing such repairs, and no room for them to make mistakes. Boone did make a mistake - and it looks likely to cost him his career, even though the design of the system seems (at least to me) to be partly to blame.

Even if the Navy comes to this conclusion and discontinues this new type of waste processor, there are dozens of ships - mainly cruisers - in Fifth Fleet with this machinery; they will be with us for the duration of this conflict.

Technician Ronan Boone dropped his spanner. 

Normally, even in the tight confines of a warship’s maintenance spaces, dropping a tool would be only an irritating mistake. Unfortunately, he did it while performing the least normal duty he could possibly be assigned. 

As the tool plummeted toward the boiling biomass below the catwalk, Ronan felt time slow down, as he realized the consequences. Eighteen inches of synthfoam grip and titanium bar-stock seemed to float lazily down through the air, giving him plenty of time to calculate that he didn’t have time to scramble for cover. Perched on the extended catwalk and securely fastened to the safety rail by his harness line, there was no way to get clear before the spanner splashed down in the bubbling surface of the sewage-processing biomass tank. 

The moment stretched out further, and Ronan’s eyes darted to his assistant, eyes looking as big as saucers in the yellow-white light of the growth lamps providing heat and light to the engineered microbes in the tank. He was already moving, turning away and running for the hatch leading back into the crawlspace, but Ronan knew he wouldn’t make it there in time either. 

The problem, he knew, was not the initial splash of noxious nutrient slurry, partly processed sewage, and biomass which would erupt from the tank. Contact with that would result in merely an hour’s decontamination and a few precautionary inoculations. The greater concern, he knew, was the tool itself. 

The biomass in the tank, Ronan knew, grew in long, snaky strands which needed to anchor themselves to surfaces to prevent them from being sucked into the exit pump and re-digested into nutrient slurry to feed the better-anchored colonies. The tank, specifically designed to allow strands to form only on about ten percent of its inner surface, perfectly moderated the amount of biomass inside to match its size – that is, moderated it until a foreign object not treated with super-slick anti-microbial nanoceramic landed inside. 

As the spanner struck the surface, it threw up globs of gray-brown biomass, which arced high up above the sides of the tank in shipboard half-gee. Ronan watched in detached helplessness as one of them arced up to impact with the jumpsuit on his shoulder, and despite the best efforts of his breathing filter, the stink of sewage seeped into his nostrils. 

The splash had barely subsided when the biomass, already greedily seeding the spanner’s surface as it sunk, began to replicate. Before Ronan’s assistant had made it five steps, the tank boiled over, and a wave of half-digested sewage overtook him before his gloved hand hit the hatch controls. Sliding, he went down just in time to be buried by a second wave of noxious slime. 

As the nutrient sludge and sewage hit the bulkheads and deck, the process accelerated, and the level began to rise quickly.  

Lazily, Ronan keyed in his comm. Things were far worse than an hour’s decontamination could cure. “Damage control to the waste processing unit.” He suggested. “We seem to be in deep shit.” 

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Tales from the Service: A Pirate’s Gamble

2948-06-02 – Tales from the Service: A Pirate’s Gamble 

Our friend Captain Kirke-Moore has caused quite a few minor and major stirs since being brought onto Admiral Zahariev’s staff, but perhaps this is the most spectacular. Though the Navy has redacted both the date and location, it has confirmed that Kirke-Moore masterminded a successful raid on an Incarnation logistics base in the Coreward Frontier some time in the last two weeks. 

The senior officer in charge of this raid was authorized by Naval Intelligence to give her account, even though it was far from praising Kirke-Moore. Though successful in causing (if reports are to be believed) massive damage to supply and refit installations at the target system, the raiding force suffered significant casualties in the process. According to the accounts we have been allowed to see, Kirke-Moore underestimated the strength of defending forces considerably – still, surprise and speed seem to have carried the day. 

 

Captain Angelica Haydee scowled at the tactical display the way she couldn’t scowl at the old man standing behind her. He almost certainly recognized her displeasure, but to express it to his face would be insubordinate, and she didn’t want insubordination to mark what might be the last minutes of her career and her life. 

“Any change in aspect on those cruisers?” Bozsi Kirke-Moore, cool and detached as always, seemed all the more deliberately provocative for his refusal to acknowledge the distress his orders had caused his subordinate. Officially, the shriveled old pirate was only an adviser, but every officer aboard Katrina Mehrab knew the sortie was his mission, and the squadron was effectively under his command the moment it left Maribel. 

“Negative, Mr. Kirke-Moore.” Lieutenant Nyazik replied, salving his captain’s ego slightly by refusing to give the pirate an un-earned title. “Still no course changes or launches, and their screens are still at minimum.” 

“Just as I thought.” Though her back was turned to him, Angelica could hear the smug satisfaction on Kirke-Moore's face. “Let them pass. We’re not here for blood.” 

The trio of Incarnation cruisers slid across the display at an unhurried pace, though most of the command center staff had ceased holding their breath. It would be hours before they passed out of the star’s grav shadow and activated their star drives, but if Kirke-Moore and Naval Intelligence were correct about their acceleration profiles, they would be out of range to intervene in less than fifteen minutes. 

It made Angelica feel only marginally better about the pirate’s insane scheme that Kirke-Moore let the enemy ships widen the gap almost ten minutes after the estimated safety range. Long after the command center’s own timer had hit zero, and according to a timing known only to him, Kirke-Moore cleared his throat to still the murmured conversations all around him. “Initiate the maneuver, Captain Haydee.” 

The maneuver was insanity, but Angelica knew it was her duty. “Drive to maximum. Helm, assume pre-computed course.” 

The murmur of Mehrab’s drive rose in pitch and intensity as the ship wheeled about in space, shedding the carefully crafted shroud of asteroid-mimicking smart-cloth which had been carefully spun around a potato-shaped section of hard vaccuum and starship hulls. The squadron’s trio of fast destroyers and half-dozen assault frigates burst through the disintegrating cowl a moment later, their higher acceleration carrying them forward into a loose vee-formation, ends extended toward the planet ahead. Though uninhabitable, the nameless, metal-rich planet had become an Incarnation forward base, and three sprawling, frail orbital structures lit up its lifeless, airless sky. 

Mehrab and its attendants, though bristling with weapons, were thin-skinned, long-legged designs, no match for three Tyrant heavy cruisers in a fair fight. Fortunately for them and unfortunately for the hastily-maneuvering enemy ships, there would be no such fair fight. The operation had been envisioned by a pirate, and it was a work of craven piracy as well as open lunacy. The squadron would rush in, smash everything it could reach in a single slingshot orbit, then erupt out of the inner system in a different direction with a velocity advantage that even three swift Tyrants could not overcome. 

“They’ve seen us. Cruisers have redlined their drives.” Nyazik sounded concerned, and Angelica felt perverse hope that the pirate’s estimates and intelligence were wrong. Fortunately for everyone involved, a quick glance at the display dispelled her of this notion. 

“They’re too late.” Kirke-Moore strode forward and pointed into the display. “We’re only concerned with the local-space defenses.” 

“Light launches from one of the platforms. Looks like a few wings of Coronachs.” 

Angelica counted the symbols, and then doubled the count. “Nothing we can’t handle there. Vector in Commander Ibrahim’s gunships and warm up the light railguns. Any sign of heavy emplacements?” 

“Negative, Captain, but we won’t know for sure until we get closer.” 

“Keep looking. We have safe abort for the next twenty minutes.” Every fiber of her tactical sense told Angelica that the “raid” was running into a trap. Any Confederated outpost so large and expensive would be defended far too heavily to be threatened by a reinforced scouting squadron.  

“We won’t need it, Captain.” Kirke-Moore's confidence remained infuriating. He had won the approval of Admiral Zahariev for the gamble mostly by promising to participate himself – Angelica hated for the ruffian to be right, even if it meant going home in one piece. “After all, we aren’t where we are supposed to be.” 

"That’s exactly why this has to be suicide, Bozsi.” Angelica pointed to one of the station platforms, trying to keep her voice calm. “That installation alone looks like it can refit three of their cruisers at once. This is a hell of a lot of hardware to leave undefended.” 

“Exactly, Captain Haydee. Exactly.” 

Angelica frowned, but fell silent as the time to weapons range plummeted. There was nothing more to say – Kirke-Moore would not call an abort. Either the platforms were armed to the teeth, or they weren’t - and in a little more than half an hour, the squadron would find out. 

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Tales from the Service: The Gossamer Patron

2948-05-26 – Tales from the Service: The Gossamer Patron

It has been some time since the story Tales from the Inbox: A Gossamer Guardian appeared on Tales from the Inbox. That story’s strange encounter with a xenosapient on Håkøya was drawn from a single first-hand account and no official records, and I was inclined to be skeptical.

This week, I was surprised to find a very similar creature (probably not the same one, given that this one was encountered three thousand kilometers away from the first encounter) referred to in official dispatches. This “Gossamer Håkøyan” is described by witnesses in the same manner as the first, and it was encountered by a FDA garrison at Hamlinson bay, far from the well-settled areas of the planet. This time also, there is more than eyewitness testimony; low-resolution imagery of the specimen and an official censure of the garrison personnel involved were included in the commander’s report.

After seeing the report, I reached out to the civilian investigator whose name was referenced in the report. She was happy to provide a recording of her interview with the base commander - evidently, none of this information is deemed militarily sensitive. This may still be an elaborate hoax - stories of this kind have circulated among Håkøyan colonists for decades, and it's doubtlessly set the local datasphere on fire - but if so, I can't find any obvious faults with it.

Amber Holiday reported to the garrison C.O.’s office and stood at attention outside the soundproof door until it opened to emit a pair of chastened lieutenants wearing expressions usually only seen on the faces of puppies. Whatever their crime, Amber knew it was less serious than Colonel Bennington had let on; after all, the smart-cloth rank insignias on their shoulders remained intact.

Seeing Amber in the waiting-room, the colonel waved her inside as soon as the lieutenants had gone. “I hope you have good news for me, Holiday.”

Amber shook her head sadly. Colonel Bennington’s office was spacious and spartan, its main ornament being the wide window behind his desk which looked out over Hamlinson Bay’s sparkling waves, as if to remind all visitors what Bennington was tasked with protecting. Though half a world away from Håkøya’s main population centers, the bay and the rocky island at its mouth were one of the strongest natural defensive positions on the planet. With no nearby location for large orbital vessels to land, any invading force would have to stretch its logistics train across the entire planet to threaten Hamlinson Bay’s self-sufficient garrison.

“Holiday, last week you said you were close. If you can’t do the job-”

“Colonel, it’s not like that. I nailed your little cabal’s meeting last night. Positive IDs on more than half of the members.” Amber held up a slate computer holding a copy of her results. She preferred not to acknowledge the colonel’s implication that she was incapable of getting results; he had paid her well to come all the way to Hamlinson under a false name because she was, at least on short notice, the best available. He would have to hire someone all the way from Maribel or the Inner Reach if he wanted better.

“How in all hells is that not good news? Give me the list and I’ll have them out of here tomorrow morning.”

Amber didn’t relinquish the slate. “I’ll give you the list after I tell you the bad news.”

Colonel Bennington stood, his palms flat on the top of his desk. “If that list isn’t on my desk in twenty seconds-”

“You have a bigger problem than a dozen skulkers in your command, Colonel.”

The FDA officer glared for a few seconds in silence, then sat back down. He didn’t like a civilian investigator telling him what was or wasn’t a problem with his garrison, but he was too aware of his duties and the consequences for failing in them to ignore a warning like that. “Make it quick.”

“At first, I thought this cabal was just a case of some idiots finding an outlet for their bad morale.” Amber gestured out the window. “Benefits of the scenery aside, this damned outpost seems to be where the FDA sends its most motivated officers and its most worthless waste-of-air enlisted men. Odds are that’s what you thought, too.”

Bennington nodded cautiously. “If it’s not that, what is it? Ladeonists?”

Amber shook her head. She had jumped to that worst-case too, but what she had seen the previous night had ruled it out. “Close to the mark, but not quite. They’re definitely wrapped up in cultic ideation, but it isn’t Ladeonist in nature. It’s not anything off the Sunfire Assembly idea chain, either.”

“Cultic practices, but not Sunfire or Ladeonists.” The colonel shook his head. “Someone must have brought a folk cult from their home settlement. That’s bad, but I can-”

Amber tossed a portable holo-player onto the officer’s desk. When it landed, it automatically righted itself. Above its lens cluster, the air glowed and a silent image of a small circle of hooded figures appeared around a stunted, twisted local tree-analogue barely seven feet tall. The miniature figures swayed in tandem to music not captured in the recording, but stamped into Amber Holiday’s memory. “This isn’t the usual sort of homespun Frontier voodoo, Colonel.”

“How do you know?”

“Just watch.”

Intrigued, Bennington stared at the image as the figures’ ritualistic movements became more and more cohesive, and more and more elaborate. Some of them also began to move jerkily, as if being rapidly shouted directions to a dance they didn’t know – but Amber knew too well that no such instructions had been shouted. Other than the haunting, thrumming music played by an unseen performer or device, the cabal’s gathering had been silent; none of them had spoken.

As the dancers reached a crescendo of elaborate limb-flailing, the image wavered and blurred, then vanished altogether. The devices recording the gathering had been momentarily blinded by a bizarre mix of electromagnetic emissions lasting a few seconds. Amber, watching with her own eyes, had seen the flash, but it had done little to dazzle her eyes – she had seen what the cameras had not; the way the gnarled old tree had bent over upon itself, its limbs curling inward and twisting inward around something that had not been there a moment before.

The image in the recorder returned, but not in time to capture the alien tree righting itself. The figure standing beside its bole, however, showed up clearly. Pale, feminine, and dressed only in a tangle of gossamer veils, the humanoid figure held out its hands, and the cabal’s hooded dancers fell utterly still, then dropped to their knees a moment later.

As the gossamer figure – humanoid, but quite obviously not human – went around the circle laying a hand on each hooded figure’s head, Bennington looked up. “What is it?”

Amber shrugged. “I would say you are looking at the bigger problem, Colonel.”

 

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