Tales from the Inbox: The Discarded Diadem

2948-04-21 - Tales from the Inbox: The Discarded Diadem

 

“Welcome to Brett’s Antiques.” Though he had been thirty seconds from locking the doors and going home for the day, Risko Brett turned on the charm the moment the door chime announced the entrance of a lone customer. 

“Yes, hello.” The newcomer, a young man whose street clothes in the local style failed to disguise a Navy spacer on shore leave, glanced around at the half-lit storefront. One hand clutched a wrapped bundle to his chest while the other absently raked his close-cropped hair. “Are you closing?” 

Risko shrugged, reaching under the counter to turn the display-case lights back on. “I was about to.” It had been a quiet day – the young spacer was only his fifth patron in ten hours, and only three had bought anything. He could tell immediately that this junior enlisted spacer would not be making any major purchases, but it would be bad salesmanship to rush him. “Take your time, look around.”  

“Actually...” The young man stepped further into the shop. “I was wondering if you buy.” 

Risko nodded. Brett’s Antiques was only too happy to buy items from walk-ins, but he doubted the young man could possibly have anything worth his time. “Depends on what you have.”  

Hesitantly, the spacer approached the counter and set his paper-wrapped bundle down carefully, then stepped back as if worried it might explode.  

Risko eyed his customer for a few seconds before touching the bundle, but he didn’t see any indication that he was being subjected to some sort of practical joke. Gingerly, he unfolded the crumpled paper, taking it slow even after he caught his first glimpse of silvery metal within. “Can you tell me what it is?” 

“Well...” The young man looked over his shoulder, then stepped in close and lowered his voice. “My cousin dug it up on Adimari Valis. He sent it to me a few weeks before Nate took the place.”  

Wincing, Risko picked up the item. He didn’t like dealing in Xenarch artifacts, since they tended to attract the wrong kind of customers. Despite his apprehensions, the item didn’t look ancient enough to have been buried in Adimari dirt for five thousand years - its bright, untarnished metal looked new, and it was clearly shaped like it was meant for a human to wear. “It looks like a crown.”  

Nodding eagerly, the young man reached out to point at a line of symbols just below the peaked crest at the front. “That’s Xenarch script, there.”  

Risko scrutinized the text. He couldn’t tell if the symbols were a forgery – perhaps no-one could, since not even the experts could read the extinct aliens’ writing. “It could be. I’d need to have a xenoarchaeologist look at it.”  

“I, uh...” The young man clearly didn’t want Risko to know what he’d already guessed. He’d not given his name; he wanted the transaction to be anonymous. The antiques dealer wondered if the story about a cousin on Adimari Valis was a sham – perhaps the young spacer had stolen the crown or won it in one of Maribel’s disreputable gambling-houses, his presence in which would violate Navy regulations. “I was hoping to sell it today.”  

“Sorry, kid.” Risko pushed the crown back across the counter. “I can’t buy what I can’t verify. It might be what you say it is, but it looks like a-”  

“A damned holo-drama prop, I know.” The youth ran his fingers over the fluted decorations on the face of the artifact. “I thought so too...”  

Risko waited expectantly, but no words followed. He turned away to begin shutting down the shop, supposing that the conversation was over. When he had done so, he turned back to see that his customer had not moved. “Come on, I’ll see you out.”  

Roused from staring down at the gleaming metal bauble, the young man turned and allowed himself to be led from the store but lingered nearby as Risko turned off his shop’s holo-signs and locked the door. 

“Hey, Mr. Brett, do me a favor.”  

Risko turned around in time to see a silvery-white object flashing through the air in his direction. 

“Catch!” 

 Reflexively, he caught the crown, which had been lobbed in a harmless underhand arc. By the time he looked up to its owner, all he saw of the spacer was his heels disappearing around the corner at the end of the block.  

Chuckling and presuming he’d just inadvertently foiled a half-baked swindle, Risko tucked the flashy item under his arm inside his jacket and walked home to his flat a few blocks away. The crown was pretty – even if it was worthless enough to be discarded as soon as its shifty owner couldn’t get any credits for it, he considered it fair compensation for his wasted time. He wondered which of the many bespoke souvenir-fab shops in the city had manufactured such an attractive piece. 

Setting the item on a shelf just inside his front door, Risko busied himself with a meal and his favorite holo-drama, then turned on a vidcast news service. The war and its many minor disasters dominated the news yet again, and he watched with interest but no real concern. Business would continue as usual, and the conflict did bring plenty of new customers to his store, even if some of them were disreputable.   

When he retired for the night, Risko was still chuckling at the hapless spacer’s panicked flight and the glittering souvenir left behind. He’d met with forgery before, but no attempt nearly so crude. 

With a general lull in the action here on the Frontier since the final withdrawal from Matusalemme, and Saint-Lô scheduled to be away from HyperCast relays for a few weeks on a routine post-refit shakedown patrol, I asked for and received permission to post items from the (increasingly lengthy) backlog of interesting stories sent in by the audience which have very little or nothing to do with the war effort.

The story I chose to pull from this fertile mass of potential with approval of the rest of the team here on Saint-Lô is that of Risko Brett, a small-time antiques and curio dealer on Maribel. Mr. Brett had a run-in with a Navy crewman who he thought at first had tried to swindle him. As he would learn (and this audience will discover next week), it wasn't the Brett or a petty-crime arrest that the spacer was fleeing.

Details

Tales from the Service: An Icebound Refuge

2948-04-14 – Tales from the Service: An Icebound Refuge 

The disappearance of the destroyer Carondelet might have gone un-noticed for months, save that the admiralty vectored a Navy logistics hauler to intercept her on patrol with new orders and the supplies to carry them out. A quick search discovered the crew marooned on a frozen world after an encounter with enemy warships had ruined their ship. 

Though they were rescued in three weeks instead of the months they had planned for, the Carondelet crew, what might have been a dull, mind-numbing time of flared tempers and misery turned out to be anything but – indeed, the thirty-odd spacers who survived the stricken warship were recovered in high spirits as if they had been retrieved from a wilderness vacation. This account, taken from the debriefing of Carondelet’s young skipper, is a perfect example of the spirit that drives spacers everywhere – military and otherwise. For interstellar professionals, of whom I cannot claim to be one, the hardships and discouragements of the lifestyle are all undone by the rare moments where something new and intriguing appears. 

Carondelet was finished, and Yann Okafor, its first and last skipper, knew it. 

The ship had been through the fire before - a victim, some of the enlisted crew said, of a cursed name, she had been battered badly at both Berkant and Bodrogi, streaming atmosphere and debris as she limped out of formation early in the engagement, destined for a stay in the Maribel naval yards.  

Yann sat alone in his duty chair on the crippled destroyer’s command deck. The other officers had departed minutes before to supervise an orderly evacuation, leaving their skipper alone with his dying ship. Carondelet, newest destroyer in the Fifth Fleet, had been his first command, and he was finding it hard to let her go. 

Though there had been only one dead and four injured in the brief, one-sided battle, Carondelet had been deprived of the aft one-fifth of her hull structure by a slicing hit by a Nate pulse-beam. Though this section contained no pressurized crew compartments, it had contained the primary drive unit and critical components of the auxiliary system, leaving the ship helpless on a looping trajectory that hurled her into the local star. There was plenty of time to get everyone off – five standard days according to the navcomputer – but the nameless system had only one planet, a frozen sphere tracing a cometlike orbit. With no HyperComm relay in range, Yann couldn’t even call for rescue – it might be months before someone came looking for the missing Carondelet and her crew. 

“Bridge, the pinnace has begun its sweep.” Lieutenant Catalano’s voice pierced Yann’s heavy thoughts, and he glanced at the tactical display to see the pinnace’s mote tracing a faint path only a few dozen kilometers up. “Deploying drones. We should be seeing ground-side data shortly.” 

“Understood.” The ship’s pinnace and two logistics shuttles could carry the whole crew at once with room to spare, but the first flight carried mostly equipment on its nine-hour round trip. Three spacers would unload the vessels on the ground and start setting up some sort of hab complex for the rest. There, the crew could survive for perhaps two or three months – longer if the frozen world provided any organic matter with which to feed emergency bioreactors and food synthesizers. 

While Catalano remained optimistic about their chances, Yann expected them all to die on the frozen rock before the harried Navy came to rescue them. It might be better, he thought, to remain aboard Carondelet for its burning dive into the heart of a star like an ancient water-navy captain going down with his ship. His second-in-command, a native of rugged Margaux, would be better placed to supervise the survival effort in any case – Yann, a spacer from birth, would be little more than another mouth to feed. 

A chime indicated the beginning of the pinnace data-stream, and Yann sat up, dismissing his morose thoughts in order to supervise the ship’s computer as it analyzed the flood of information. Carondelet’s state-of-the-art computing core might be doomed to annihilation, but it would solve one last big problem – deciphering the geology of this nameless iceball in order to flag hazards and highlight resources for the crew preparing to abandon her. 

Calling up the console controls in his chair’s armrests, Yann called up the topographic map and watched as the pinnace and its surface-skimming drones chart the sun-side hemisphere. Vast, glittering ice-plains covered almost two thirds of the surface, with rocky massifs rising out of it into rolling plateaus and sharp-edged mountain ranges. If not for its sterile grey-and-white palette, it might have been a comely place – the sort of world which encouraged a spacer in orbit to linger by a viewpanel. As it was, Yann, who had never liked going planet-side anywhere, shivered at the thought of setting foot on its surface. He would rather burn up with the ship than freeze to death there. 

The computer bracketed an anomaly which it could not reconcile with its geologic model, and Yann called up the details. A blocky formation of what appeared to be silicate stone jutted out from the ice in a narrow valley where a mountain range tumbled down to the ice plains. Yann glanced at a few stills taken by the drone swarm – blocky boulders crowding each other on the gradual slope below a precipitous mountain - and marked the anomaly as a probable avalanche. So assured, the computer continued its work. 

After several other such interruptions, Yann returned to images of the dramatic valley and avalanche. Though as cold as the rest of the world, it might have been a scene out of a fantastic holo-drama – ridges on the slopes almost looked like terraced farm-fields dusted with midwinter snow, and the blocky boulders of the rockslide occupied the spot Yann would place an ancient city’s winding alleys if the ice-plain were a liquid ocean. The place would be well-protected against land armies and armadas of sail-galleons – it was a shame none of the holo-drama producers would ever be inspired by such a place. 

Yann was about to dismiss the view and start looking for a likely landing site when he spotted the citadel. Perched on a rocky cliff fifty meters over the ice below, the decaying fortress, unmistakably artificial, frowned down upon both the valley and the plain beyond. Though its corner towers had collapsed into hollow sockets, the central structure remained largely intact, with an arched gateway opening out to a switch-back road climbing the steep valley wall. 

“Catalano, I’ve got ruins on the surface.” Yann immediately sent an override to one of the drones, sending it toward the ruins. It would take several minutes for both transmissions to arrive, so he hopped up to order a coffee from the commissary dispenser, pacing nervously as the machine gurgled and hummed. Had a planet he had just written off as worse than death once housed life – sapient life capable of devising fortress architecture? 

Eventually, the lieutenant’s reply reached Carondelet. “Ruins? Hell, that changes things. Do you think we can land there?” 

Yann stared at the images in the display for some time before replying. Now that he was looking for intelligent design, the blocky stones of the avalanche looked more and more like the dense-clustered dwellings of a primitive city, and the contours of the hillsides which suggested terracing might indeed be just that. Fortunately, the ice-plain “bay” would make a perfect landing site even for an ungainly cargo shuttle. “Looks possible. I’ve got drone thirty-seven following up. Do you think it’s a good place to make camp?” 

Again, there was a long, tense wait for Catalano’s reply - longer this time, as if Catalano was choosing his words carefully. “I’ll check it out Skipper, I’m more worried about morale than resources. Any place that gives us something to do besides sit in our habs has my vote.” 

Yann, knowing whose morale his second-in-command had in mind, winced as he retrieved his acrid synthetic coffee. All thought of going down with his doomed ship had vanished from his mind – even if he was going to die on the frozen planet, he wanted to climb the switch-backed road up to the fortress and step inside the hall of some doomed xenosapient monarch before he did. “Understood, Lieutenant. A little mystery might keep us all sane down there.” 

Details

Tales from the Service: Plucked from the Ranks

2948-04-07 – Tales from the Service: Plucked from the Ranks 

General Albert Bell didn’t even look up as Glorinda Eccleston entered his office. She stood stiffly at attention for a full ninety seconds while he finished scrutinizing a report of some kind. Though the volumetric air display built into the top of his desk privacy-hazed the contents from her angle, Glorinda saw topographic maps and charts appear and disappear, each one changing the color of the light glinting off General Bell’s fatigue-rimmed eyes.  

At last, the general blanked the display and turned his attention to the visitor. “You must be Sergeant Eccleston.” He nodded stiffly, then motioned to a metal-frame chair on the opposite side of his desk. “Please sit.” 

Glorinda did so, still disoriented that the general in command of the planet’s entire garrison had summoned her by name. Bell looked nothing like she expected – in her imagination, a general was tall, broad-shouldered, clean-shaven and square-jawed. Bell, on the other hand, stooped and chubby, with surplus chins providing a comfortable margin for error in case he lost the unimpressive primary unit. Combined with his sloping forehead, thinning brown hair, and blearily bulging eyes, the man seemed more suited to the role of an eccentric professor than a military leader expecting to command fifty thousand men and women in hard, bloody fighting. 

Bell sized up Glorinda as she did him, then flicked the controls on his desk display. A few blocks of text appeared there, this time oriented for her to read and free of any privacy-blurring effect. Reading quickly, she saw that it was a report submitted by Captain Moravec, her company’s commanding officer. It referred to a conversation he’d had with Glorinda several weeks prior, while their position was still under construction. Her heart sinking into her stomach, she saw that the report went on to describe how a faithful description of that same conversation had appeared on a popular datasphere spacers’ entertainment platform, and how though the press account used falsified names, the origin had quickly spread through the company rumor mill once an avid reader of the publication circulated the story through the ranks. 

“General, I can explain. This-” 

Bell held up a hand, silencing her protest before she could describe how Naval Intelligence had contacted her and insisted on a thorough investigation of the story before clearing it for publication. Wincing, Glorinda sat back, waiting for the inevitable dressing-down. As uncomfortable as she knew it would be, she tried to make herself ready for the dressing-down she probably deserved. 

“Sergeant, is this report accurate to your knowledge?” 

Glorinda scanned it again. "I suppose it is, General.” Everyone knew, but nobody had told her they’d figured it out? It seemed impossible. 

“You submitted this account to a civilian media organ on your own initiative, yes?” 

Glorinda shook her head. “Not exactly, sir. I sent it to Fifth Fleet Intelligence recommending they send it on to that media outfit. They apparently agreed with me.” 

“Do you wish to contest any of the information provided by this civilian journalist? Do you think he misrepresented anything in his version?” 

“No sir. He presented the story accurately, after changing all the names.” 

Bell nodded gravely. “Who in my command did you discuss this decision with?” 

Glorinda winced. That was the point of contention, then – she had run the story through the usual Navy process, without considering what the local FDA command – her proper superior officers – would think. She had forgotten that as a Naval liaison, she was seconded to the FDA, which probably wanted its own say in what was published about its defensive preparations. “No-one, General. I acted without approval from anyone else.” 

Bell blanked the display and leaned over the desk. “It’s a shame you did. Captain Moravec stood up for you, said he couldn’t spare you in his command. But this leaves me with very little choice.” 

Glorinda nodded numbly. “I understand, General.” 

Bell looked at her strangely, and Glorinda thought she saw an impish sparkle in his puffy-lidded eyes. “I don’t think you do, Sergeant Eccleston. The decision is entirely out of my hands. You are relieved of your duties in Moravec’s company effective immediately.” With that, the general slid a data-slate across his desk toward her. 

Glorinda picked up the slate, which woke at her touch to display orders headed with the venerable crest of the Confederated Navy and the intricate, youthful emblem of the Frontier Defense Army. Below the header with her name and service identification number, she saw instructions to report to - 

“Report to the Twelfth Marines, General?” 

The impish look Glorinda had thought she’d seen earlier was back, this time unmistakable. “You report directly to Colonel Louis Pokorni, who will make planetfall at the end of the second shift tomorrow. He’ll be expecting you to meet him at the pad.” 

Glorinda, having expected censure, demotion, or relegation to punishment duty, said something which she knew to be inane before she had even finished. “The Marines already have their own Naval liaisons.” 

“The job they’re giving you is Intelligence Liaison. Why Marine colonels get them and I can’t get more than one for the whole damned garrison is anyone’s guess.” By his tone, he had a pet favorite reason for this disparity, and it was one he disliked helplessly. 

“General, sir, I can’t be intelligence liaison to anybody.” 

“Your dossier says you were a Naval Intelligence analyst for three years. Sure, they probably had you pushing charts and tables, but it’s enough that you’re the best choice on the whole damned planet.” This time, the stern look cracked a bit, with a smile tugging at the edges of General Bell’s mouth. “Maybe if you hadn’t caught brought yourself to the attention of the spooks, you would still be reporting to Captain Moravec.” 

“I don’t know what to say, General. I’m not ready for this.” 

Bell sighed and nodded. “I know you aren’t. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret, kid.” He leaned over his desk conspiratorially. 

“What is it?” Despite herself, Glorinda leaned forward too. 

“Nobody’s ready, Eccleston. Not a damned one of us, right up to the stiff-collar admirals. Nobody’s ever ready for a war like this. Welcome to the club.” 

Glorinda, remembering her first impression of General Bell, nodded numbly. Perhaps he had been little more than an administrator or a professor before the FDA had been called forth from the population of the Coreward Frontier only months prior. 

“Get your kit out of Moravec’s barracks and be on that pad to meet Pokorni tomorrow. Not being ready won’t stop you, me, or anyone.” 

Sensing that this was the end of the interview, Glorinda stood and saluted, clutching the slate under her arm. Bell waved away the salute, then gestured for her to leave, already calling up more charts and maps on his desk display. 

This story demonstrates something I would not have expected – that this text feed is apparently widely read among the infantry of the Frontier Defense Army as well as among the spacers of the Navy. Despite the work of both this team and Naval Intelligence, the data stripped out of a previous entry (Tales from the Service: A Rock In the Way) was guessed at by comrades of the person who we call Glorinda Eccleston (at Naval Intelligence’s behest). 

That Naval Intelligence would swoop in to reassign this contact is more related to her past experience as an Intelligence analyst than the datasphere interest in the story from two weeks ago. Perhaps the general’s assertion that it might not have happened if she had not used Naval Intelligence channels to forward the story to Cosmic Background is correct, but I somehow doubt that “Glorinda” was entirely unknown to Fifth Fleet Intelligence until she wished to have the helpless certainty of approaching doom communicated to the public back home. Her rationale for guessing where next the Incarnation will strike (not replicated in detail in the previous installment for obvious reasons) is quite thorough, suggesting that she is a natural interpreter of military situations. 

Unlike other names displayed in this story, those of Colonel Louis Pokorni and his Twelfth Marine Regiment are those of the proper officer and unit. Their location is not public information – that they will be assigned to one of the most likely sites of the next Incarnation attack, however, is no secret at all. 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Disheartened Hunter

2948-03-31 – Tales from the Service: A Disheartened Hunter 

The silence and darkness that surrounded Burbot in the interstellar void always unsettled Tonya Hristov. Her little ship, small enough to be mistaken for the overgrown launch of a proper warship, seemed too frail and cramped to survive in the endless abyss, but this was its natural habitat all the same – the void which so unsettled the skipper provided shelter for the craft and crew in equal measure to the distress it caused her skipper. 

Burbot, a warship despite her modest size, did not shelter in the void merely to evade the prying sensor-lenses and slicing pulse-beams of Incarnation hunters. Tonya knew her little ship was the hunter, and the sharp-beaked Incarnation cruisers, each outgunning Burbot forty times over and outweighing her by almost that amount, were her prey. In the interstellar void, with no solar primary to betray her presence and no planetary-disk dust to heat her hull through miniscule impacts, the ship’s EM-swallowing hull plates were perfect camouflage, and her over-sized eyes – huge sponsions studded with every kind of passive sensor imaginable – searched all directions for the behemoths she had come to hunt. 

Intelligence – she knew not from where – had given Tonya her hunting-grounds, but luck and skill would still be needed to pick up the scent. She paced back and forth on the tiny command deck, wondering whether it was time to make a jump to the next search area – Burbot was as alone in this one as a vessel could possibly be. Her command had so far struck out on all its patrols, intelligence or no – not a single enemy vessel had ever been sighted.  

In the shadow of her more famous sister Mahseer, morale aboard Burbot had steadily ticked downward, and Tonya was worried that if they did sight an enemy ship, the crew would not react in time to exploit the advantage. Most of them were only too happy to miss out on the fame and mortal peril of destroying a Tyrant – what they wanted was to do their part, to contribute to the war effort at least as much as the responsibility they had been given. On a little stealth-assault cutter, that responsibility was comfortably low; even to demolish an Incarnation salvage tug or repair ship would satisfy most of the crew’s hunger to do their part and raise morale. 

“Time to jump recharge?” Tonya asked idly, perhaps for the fifth time since her ship had burrowed through the cosmic fabric to its current position. 

“Seven minutes, thirty-one seconds.” The reply came from the ship’s voice-assistant computer rather than her two present subordinates, who both appeared to be ignoring their skipper completely.  

“Chart a jump to the next search sector.” Tonya paced back and forth a few more times, trying to focus on the morale problem as an alternative to dwelling on the perfect void just beyond the hull. At the extreme ends of her route, that emptiness was less than two meters from her – and only twenty centimeters of that distance was taken up by the pressure hull which cleanly divided her hemmed-in world from... 

Tonya shook her head and squeezed the bridge of her nose with her fingers, forcing that line of thinking out of her skull. The morale of her crew would not be easy to restore without success, but chances of success were increasingly compromised by low morale. It was a problem she was sure many skippers had tackled over centuries of interstellar warfare, but she had never seen a clear solution proposed in the Naval Academy. Any attempt she made to raise spirits would seem half-hearted without results – Burbot needed to face a challenge and overcome it, but not a challenge so great that its discouraged crew cracked under the strain. 

“Transition event!” Kennet MacLean nearly fell out of his crash-padded chair in alarm as he squeaked out the message. “Range is six lisec.” 

Tonya leapt to the chair reserved for her and pulled the air-display pillar down from its recessed overhead position. In front of her face, Burbot appeared as a tiny green arrowhead from which dashed axes projected out in six directions. The oscillating mote of the transition signature appeared near the edge of the display area. The incoming vessel was almost exactly behind her little ship – distant, but barely close enough to make an intercept possible. 

“Go to quarters.” Tonya tapped a few commands into her armrest keypad even as the lights dimmed and the general quarters alarm began buzzing. “Get me an ID on that ship. Helm, get us moving.” 

“Course?” Hugo Kang, on duty at the helm station, turned around in his chair. 

Tonya scowled at him, trying not to look as nervous as she felt. She hated to be brusque with the man, but he should have known what course to plot without asking. He was, after all, on the command deck of a state-of-the-art Confederated Navy stealth-assault cutter, not a pleasure yacht. 

Fortunately, the helmsman got over his uncertainty upon seeing her expression. “Intercept course, aye. Maximum stealth.” He jabbed at his controls, and the pulsing mote in the display swung around the unmoving arrowhead in the display until it was almost directly ahead. A dotted arc showed Burbot’s intended path, and a fuzzy cone showed the possible courses of the unknown ship, slowly narrowing as more data filtered in through the cutter’s many sensors. 

Tonya watched the mysterious mote carefully. She had been assured there would be no friendly traffic through the search area, and that it was likely Incarnation ships would pass through. Perhaps by analyzing the timing of raids, Naval Intelligence had been tight-lipped on exactly how they had learned to expect enemy ships in this specific patch of void, but for once, the tip had paid off. “What’s our best guess on Nate drive recharge time?” 

“Intelligence database says at least fifty minutes for a Tyrant, a bit less for the big haulers.” MacLean caused a timer to appear on the forward display counting seconds since the vessel had appeared. “Still only one signature.” 

Tonya nodded, though neither of her subordinates was looking in her direction. “We stay quiet until we know what it is.” Implied, of course, was the freedom to use the ship’s decidedly un-stealthy maximum acceleration rating to intercept a soft target. Incarnation haulers were not entirely helpless, but their defensive laser armament was only proof against strike-ship attacks. Such weapons could cause enough damage to send Burbot limping back to port, but they were no existential threat to even a cutter. 

“Could it be a trap, Skipper?” Kang asked, his voice high and uncertain. 

“Sure could.” Tonya replied. “But I’d bet my life it’s not.” 

While this was meant to be a joke, Kang clearly did not see the humor in the quip. “The Incarnation is too smart to drop a lone ship right into our kill-box like that. It’s a trap. It’s gotta be a trap.” 

Tonya keyed in a comm channel on the keypad. “Ensign Nowell to the bridge.” Nowell was one of the ship’s other helm-capable officers, junior to Kang but likely far less rattled by this sudden onset of danger. “Lieutenant Kang, you are relieved of duty immediately. I’ll take over the helm.” 

“But-” 

“You are relieved.” With a heavy heart, Tonya keyed in a command override, disabling her subordinate’s system access. His terminal blanked, and a display-screen unfolded to Tonya’s left to let her supervise the ship’s course until the ensign arrived to take Kang’s place. She studiously avoided looking at the harried man until, head downcast, he scurried off the command deck and slid down the ladder into the rest of the ship. 

MacLean kept his silence until Kang was gone. “Was that necessary, Skipper?” 

“Hells, I wish it wasn’t.” She kept her tone and face calm. Kang’s fear and shame would dissipate in time – or they would boil over and he would do something incredibly stupid. Either way, the problem would keep until after the enemy ship was dealt with, and perhaps a successful attack would solve the morale problem for everyone else. 

MacLean looked like he was about to stand up for his associate – Tonya knew the two were quite friendly – but the arrival of Ensign Nowell stilled any further protest. Without a word or question, the young man took Kang’s place at the third station, and Tonya ceded the helm controls. To his credit, he didn’t ask if the attack was just another simulation drill; he treated it like it was the real thing. That was good because, as MacLean and Kang had seen, it was no drill. For the first time, the target was real. 

“Time to weapons range, thirty-eight minutes.” Nowell announced.  

“We’re going to have one shot at this bastard.” Tonya glancing up at the displayed time since first detection, which showed barely four and a half minutes had elapsed. They could shave a little more time off at full speed, but she didn’t want to use that until she was certain the enemy couldn’t escape and couldn’t fight. “Gunnery, warm up the prow cannon.”  

The message, computer-directed to the gunnery control room two decks below, received an immediate double-beep acknowledgement from the scrambling weapon crew. 

“Probable ID, Incarnation hauler. Smaller than the usual model, but it’s got a similar drive signature.” MacLean seemed somewhat relieved, and Tonya didn’t blame him. Even she didn’t relish the thought of shoving a cannon up a Tyrant’s thrust-bells. 

“All stations, this is not a drill. We are closing in on a lone ship, likely a Nate supply hauler.” Tonya announced. “Naval Intelligence handed us a live one for once.” 

As the time to intercept ticked down, Tonya wished she could get up and roam the ship, listening quietly at every doorway and snooping on every station. Of course, her place was on the command deck, firmly strapped into the crash-padded chair. She couldn’t wander around to gauge how quickly or sluggishly her other thirteen subordinates were reacting to the alert. The lone enemy hauler’s hope for survival hinged on the proportion of Kangs to Nowells and MacLeans on Burbot.  

If such an easy prize did get away after months of failure of the vessel to spot anything, Tonya knew she would lose her command, and they might all spend the rest of the war shuffling cargo as logistics officers in the fleet’s long supply chain. Perhaps that would suit Kang and a few others, but it would absolutely crush the rest, herself included. For all the unease the interstellar void caused her, Tonya knew she couldn’t go home to the comfortable open skies of the Core Worlds until she had done her duty. 

“Still no additional jumps.” MacLean interrupted Tonya’s thoughts. 

“Shame.” She heard herself replying. “We’re not going to beat Zappa’s record today, but this one is a good start.” 

Like Mahseer, whose exploits we covered previously in this space (Tales from the Service: A Tyrant’s Downfall ), Burbot is one of the few Navy ships, most of them Stealth Assault Cutters, which have tangled one-on-one with Incarnation ships of any description and emerged victorious. Though her kill (a small cargo vessel likely ferrying parts and supplies to a raiding Tyrant squadron) was not nearly as spectacular as that described previously, the frankness with which Burbot’s skipper describes the low morale and uncertain bravery of her crew prior to their stroke of good fortune ensured that I found this story compelling from a human perspective.  

It is very easy for me – and probably for most other non-spacer readers of this text feed – to identify with the unease and fear of Burbot’s skipper and crew. If they had been cornered in the void, there would have been no record of their loss or their struggle – their little vessel would have simply failed to return from patrol, and seventeen markers would have been planted in their various home-worlds' memorial gardens for those claimed by the vast void. 

[N.T.B. - It takes nerves of titanium alloy to run a flimsy can like those cutters up close to a big Incarnation warship, stealth systems or no. It’s no surprise that not everyone who ends up in that service isn’t made of the right stuff. Personally, I would never do it .Give me open skies and a deadly xenopredator over that sort of tension any day.] 

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