Tales from the Service: A Mercenary's Way

2947-10-08 – Tales from the Service: A Mercenary's Way

With this week’s loss of contact with the fleet’s forward outposts and scouting forces on the Sagittarius Frontier, I fear that Captain Samuel Bosch and his light squadron – deployed to that area several months ago – may be beyond the Navy’s ability to help. Last we heard on this side of the Gap, a string of Tyrant squadron raids on the poorly-defended and partially constructed outpost at Sagittarius Gate had been beaten back with heavy losses, and all the Navy forces in the region were being recalled to that system.

My sources indicate that the lack of contact is not due to the destruction of the Navy’s presence at Sagittarius Gate, but instead a raid on the chain of specially-designed Hypercast relays which connect the far side of the Gap with the rest of the Reach. By the time the Navy repairs the relays, however, I fear Sagittarius Gate – far too distant to be reinforced effectively – will have fallen.

Bosch’s ships are of course only one of the formations deployed to that region to protect the few civilian interests which set themselves up in Sagittarius before hostilities began. Many lives will be lost there – such is war, to be sure, but I do hope this audience keeps the officers and crews of those ships in their prayers in the coming weeks. The Navy’s light patrol and scout squadrons have a reputation for resourcefulness and pluck, but it will take more than that to withstand what is undoubtedly descending on them now.

This week’s entry comes to us from a person who has appeared in this space before – Jacob Borisov, captain of the mercenary carrier Taavi Bancroft. His command has, as with most mercenary companies in good standing with the Confederated Navy, relocated to the Coreward Frontier, chasing the safe paycheck and generous terms of a Navy patrol contract. Like other mercenaries we’ve seen in this space, the Bancroft company has been hit by saboteurs – Ladeonist or Incarnation, he couldn’t say – but has managed to prevent their doing any major damage to ship or crew. Unlike the other companies we've seen here, the Bancroft crew has yet to secure a proper Navy wartime contract.

Jacob sent in this story form the Matusalemme system. In case you don’t know the system by name, its only major inhabited world is Adimari Valis, well known for the extensive Xenarch ruins found deep underground not far from the main spaceport. Since over a dozen university networks from the rest of the Reach have missions on Adimari Valis, the Navy has hired several mercenary crews to keep the system well-patrolled, and several wealthy patrons have funded additional mercenary companies. Though the Navy does not have a permanent garrison of the system, Matusalemme is one of the better-protected systems on the Coreward Frontier.

Our source wishes to brag that he leveraged this situation into a more efficient – and profitable – use of his mercenaries, allowing his company to be paid twice for the same tour of duty. In the process, he provided an interesting look into the disadvantages of the Navy's heavy use of mercenaries in this conflict. To be sure, Captain Borisov does not appear to have done anything wrong, but like most mercenaries he has no motivation to do anything right either, unless he's paid.

My only curiosity (which he specifically left un-satisfied in his message) is what exactly the local government paid him with, other than credits. On a world known for its Xenarch ruins, I have to guess it was some piece of valuable hardware salvaged still-functional from an archaeological site. I'll admit I didn't know if private transfers of Xenarch relics was illegal - Nojus helpfully told me it is legal, but only barely so.

Jacob paced up and down the hallway outside his temporary groundside tenement, hand cupped to his right ear to drown out all sound from that direction that didn’t come from his comm earpiece. Though it felt like two hours, the signal-response delay to Taavi Bancroft was only twenty seconds – twenty seconds of a shooting war where anything, including the total loss of his ship with all hands, might happen.

The pinch-faced little man acting as his local guide stood mutely off to one side, but Jacob knew better than to expect the Adimari local to tune out his guest’s conversation. Fully sixteen mercenary ships prowled the star system, and none of them including Jacob’s own could be bothered to inform the system authority or the planetary government whenever something happened. Mercenaries, though only too happy to swap intelligence with co-belligerent outfits, usually only reported activity to their paymasters, which the locals weren’t. Adimari Valis’s ample archaeological treasures never had translated into actual treasure with which the system could buy its own protection.

Finally, the comm circuit came to life with a reply from Lestat Pain, the newly-promoted Bancroft executive officer. “I confirm previous report, skipper. Two Tyrant cruisers on planetary intercept course.”

“Damn.” Jacob keyed the reply control. “As we discussed at the conference, Lestat. Captain Accorsi on Dervish has theater control. Keep your tac-feed open to my ship.”

Jacob doubted even a swarm of sixteen mercenary ships could pose a threat against two heavy cruisers. Most of the mercs in the system operated strike squadrons out of the converted cargo bays of lumbering hauler-carriers, and while that many carrier elements could give Nate strike squadrons heartburn, they lacked the munitions to do serious damage to the Tyrant cruisers themselves. The two antiquated frigates and one obsolescent destroyer of Accorsi’s formation theoretically could do more, but these fragile vessels would never survive a close-range slugging match with the raiders long enough to do so.

“Mr. Borisov, would you prefer to postpone your meeting? The governor will be waiting.”

Jacob whirled on the guide, fixing him with a glare capable of melting green recruits into quivering sludge, but which the dour local seemed immune to. “Postpone?” The attack had come at the worst possible time, with Jacob and a platoon of muscle ground-side in hopes of negotiating a side-contract with the planetary government. The troopers would be little use in a fleet action, even a haphazard mercenary fleet action, but Jacob hated being sidelined while most of his employees went into battle. “I’m not doing anything else. Let’s go.”

To be sure, Bancroft was probably the least likely ship to suffer serious damage, but Jacob’s squadrons would go into the fray with the rest – squadrons he couldn’t replace, since Bancroft didn’t have a sweetheart contract with the Navy like some of the other crews. On a Navy contract, operational losses would be replaced by newer and more capable tech from the fleet’s ample logistics train; Jacob’s employer was a civilian research consortium which had no such resources.

Following the guide to his small aircar, Jacob listened to the occasional status report from Bancroft on the brief flight to the planet’s modest administrative complex. The city below him, though extensive, was a ragtag and mismatched affair which still reminded him of the dusty colonial outposts on newly-settled worlds. Adimari Valis was a treasure-hunter’s wet dream; a whole poorly-explored planet of unclaimed terrain, on which at least one massive Xenarch ruin had been unearthed. The possibilities lurking below its pebbly soil and beyond thickets of spine-throwing pincushion trees had drawn in many of the Frontier’s most reckless fortune-seekers even before the war, though few had yet made more than a modest fortune prospecting for unclaimed Xenarch artifacts.

After landing on the administrative center’s roof, Jacob allowed the guide to lead him below, into the air-conditioned bustle at whose heart lurked Governor Yamaguchi. The brooding, overworked and under-paid administrator had reached out to Jacob almost as soon as his ship had nosed up to the orbital refueling docks, and it was only too consistent with Jacob’s luck that his careful nursing of this connection over five weeks in-system would be jeopardized by a Nate attack.

The guide stopped in front of a door and ushered Jacob inside, and he stomped in without delay. The governor’s office was smaller than he expected, but clean and well-appointed. Yamaguchi stood and offered a quick bow and handshake, sealed the door, and pointed Jacob to a seat.

“Good to finally meet you, Governor.” Jacob said, turning the gain on his earpiece down as far as he dared while he settled into the offered chair.

Yamaguchi, in no mood to talk around matters, leaned forward in his oversized chair. “Is it true? The foe attacks us now?”

Jacob shrugged. He was in no mood to give away intelligence for free, even as agitated as he was. “I heard some rumors on the way over.”

The governor scowled, resistant to the idea of paying for information a Navy garrison might have given him for free. “If the Incarnation has come to Matusalemma at last, I may need to act quickly to save lives.”

“That’s true.” A corner of Jacob’s mind processed a status report from his executive officer, twenty seconds delayed, and knew that the opposing forces above had not yet clashed. He had plenty of time to spar with this new potential client. “As it turns out, my company has experience with groundside disaster relief and-”

“Mr. Borisov.” Yamaguchi’s interruption, though quiet, was iron-firm. “Even with lives at stake, you play the salesman?”

Jacob did his best to look hurt. He knew how valuable the face-saving game of shaming mercenaries for needing to be paid shortly before negotiating the terms of employment was to the social orders which got themselves into enough trouble to need mercenaries in the first place. “Governor, I sympathize with your plight, but you know I have investors and creditors. We run tight margins, as I’m sure you know. If I took a pro-bono contract and it went bad, Taavi Bancroft would be bankrupt.”

Jacob wished this last was farther from true than it was. For several months his outfit had shambled along on small, dull contracts while he tried to arrange a big score with the Navy like so many other companies, and the bottom line showed it.

“I see.” Yamaguchi nodded slowly. “I can hardly ask you to risk bankruptcy.”

The acid tone in which these words lashed out across the governor’s desk might have demoralized a less experienced mercenary, but Jacob knew he had the governor hooked. The other outfits in orbit didn’t have sizable ground teams aboard their ships, and Jacob, after a little bit of digging, had guessed what Yamaguchi wanted, other than intelligence. He was the only company commander in the system with the ability to solve the governor’s groundside problem. He could nearly name his price, and the local administration would pay it. “My company’s standard operation pricing is easily available on the datasphere. Since this is an emergency, I’m sure your government has an emergency fund capable of absorbing our expenses.”

Yamaguchi nodded vaguely. “Do you consider… non-monetary payment?”

On a one-trick economy world like Adimari Valis, Jacob had expected this tactic, too. “You’ll have to be more specific, but usually no.”

The governor slid a data-slate across his desk. “Is this sufficiently specific?”

Jacob reached for the device, and his eyebrows went up as he read it and zoomed in on the rotating full-capture imagery. He had expected offers of the planet’s only valuable export, but nothing like what was being dangled in front of him. “I think…” It was a risk, to be sure, but as long as he took at least half the fee in hard credits… “I think we can work something out, Governor.”

For the first time, the man smiled. He thought he was in control of the negotiations – and Jacob would let him think that right up until a strategic walk-away would increase his company’s share of the local treasury. “Are you prepared to discuss terms with the… rumored trouble in the sky yet unresolved?”

Negotiating anything with the situation in orbit unresolved was a risk, but he was a mercenary – he always played the risks. “I don’t see why not.” He replied with a disinterested shrug.

At that instant, Jacob heard Pain announce the launch of his company’s entire operational strike wing against the raiders, simultaneous with launches from every other mercenary outfit in the ragged flotilla above.

Details

Tales from the Service: Gabriel's Dutchman

2947-10-01 – Tales from the Service: Gabriel’s Dutchman

The war is getting really interesting, and Duncan has agreed to let me directly publish more stories to this feed (though he still insists on mangling my text in the service of his too-dry editorial standards). He told me not to spend much time discussing the events elsewhere on the Coreward and Sagittarius Frontiers since Saint-Lô left Maribel, but the two attacks at Margaux and the loss of contact with remote Kistler Junction do not seem to be raids, just as the attack at Berkant was not a proper raid.

The Incarnation thinks it has the advantage – I personally don’t think so, but it’s possible – and Captain Liao thinks they’re hoping to make the Fifth Fleet look like a bunch of fools until some political nincompoop up and gives them what they want.

Trouble is, hell if anyone knows what they want – the prisoners taken by the Navy think they’re fighting to save humanity from extinction, the damned fools. Hardly a position that can be distilled into actionable demands – far as they see it, we’re either with them and surrender without any more fighting, or against them and due for destruction to preserve the species.

This week’s entry is another anecdote told by Source Gabriel, (as before, identified in this piece only as such) a captured Incarnation strike pilot who has been at least partly cooperative with Naval Intelligence interrogators. Evidently, the chip-brains in Nate command had at one point the utterly mad idea of snatching as worthless and boring a place as Deana’s Rock – the very hind end of the Frontier – and it’s apparently all it took was an apparent Dutchman sighting to scare them away from the misfortune of holding it.

We haven't seen Dutchmen in the Reach (credibly, anyway) in nearly 200 years - maybe they're more common in Sagittarius?

[Editor’s Note: Deana’s Rock is a touchy subject for Nojus – I tried to get him to tone down his scorn, but he wouldn’t budge, and we all know nobody on this ship can budge him if he digs his heels in. I’ll try to tease the story out of him later. Also keep in mind that this occurred at least a few weeks before Source Gabriel’s final mission (Tales from the Service: Source Gabriel) -D.L.C.]

The order to change course fed directly into Gabriel’s brain through his implants, and the sleek Coronach moved to follow the new heading even before he had registered the change, staying in pristine but rapidly-flowing formation behind the flight leader. Precision formation flying in tiny, nimble ships with nearly identical drive signatures was the Coronach’s best defense; like a school of fish, a squadron of the little interceptors made it difficult for attackers to identify single targets.

Of course, a course change not on the flight plan indicated trouble, and Gabriel immediately began to parse the flow of network traffic through which any pilot’s mind tumbled. The squadron leader had received an encrypted update from the mothership’s flight control system, and though Gabriel himself couldn’t decode it, he knew how to query its contents.

“Lead, what is the nature of our new orders?” Gabriel sent over the radio, though his mouth never moved inside his helmet.

In his augmented vision, the lead Coronach blinked to indicate successful reception. A moment later, Flight Leader Yasin’s reply arrived, read out for Gabriel’s auditory nerves. “Strange mass detected on our new heading. We’re checking it out.” Yasin, unlike many squadron commanders, did not lord his position over his subordinates. His squadron was the best – Immortal-only units excepted, if such things were more than rumor – and he knew any of his pilots were qualified to be flight leader of any lesser squadron.

The other pilots on the circuit blinked their silent acknowledgement in the augmented vision of Coronach flying, and shortly a spherical search area appeared ahead. The stars usually didn’t show from the cockpit, but inside the circular area ahead, the system let them show, in case the target object occluded any stars. Gabriel didn’t see anything, and as far as his light ship’s sensors and external cameras knew, the search area was just another patch of hard vaccuum.

As the squadron’s three sections separated to fly their parts of the helical search pattern prescribed by the computer, Tashi’s Coronach blinked to Gabriel’s left. “What do you think about the news from the home sector this morning?”

Gabriel could almost hear Yasin roll his eyes. Tashi had, as usual, waited until the section was alone on the short-range chatter circuit before bringing up uncomfortable topics. “It’s a rumor, Tashi. Nothing more.”

“Nobody would dare lie about matters the Inner Presence. What if there’s something to it? What if His visage really did react to news of our successes?” She trusted Yasin, Gabriel, and Azurra – trusted them more than Gabriel thought was healthy. He’d heard hushed rumors of people, co-opted by security systems, unwillingly turning in their own lovers, siblings, and children.

“If it’s true, it is proof we are the destined agents of humanity, and these weaklings must fall.” Azurra, always the most orthodox pilot in the section, might have been quoting out of the old, tattered texts preserved through the Schism.

“Of course they’ll fall. Half their systems are defended only by pathetic mercenaries. What I mean is-”

“Heads up!” Yasin put an end to the chatter. “On my datastream.”

Gabriel saw it instantly as the flight leader’s data gushed into his systems on a tight-beam transmission. The instruments usually used to track drive-wakes in the void had picked up a tiny ripple in the cosmic fabric – weak, but wide and constant, like ripples emanating outward from a tiny waterfall.

Gabriel, whose implants had somewhat better technical analysis algorithms, drank in the data, and let his implants digest it. “Not a drive-wake. Central source, low system-relative velocity, no visual. I have no ID, lead, but it’s small.”

“Keep processing. We’re going in close.”

The four Coronachs turned in unison as Flight Leader Yasin set a new course to fly closely past the ripple’s source. The other two flights, only labeled pinpricks in the distance, continued their search patterns; a tiny object didn’t match what the strike-director system had reported.

When the view ahead changed, filling with a red-shaded bulk, it did so in an instant. Gabriel’s head was filled with the screeching of a collision alarm designed specifically to trigger a response even in an unconscious pilot. Reflexively, he took manual control, flicked the Coronach end-over-end, and kicked the drive to maximum. If Azurra’s formation-holding was off by even two meters, this maneuver would cause his ship and hers to collide head-on, but he knew his section’s formation-holding was impeccable, even if they were forced to do it without the implant-driven automatic.

The automatic interlock kicked back in and Gabriel returned to a position beside Yasin, who’d picked a new course skimming along the length of the object which had appeared. Azurra and Tashi soon returned to formation as well.

Azurra broke the section’s silence first. “Son of Sapience, look at that.”

On the augmented-reality seen through his ship’s sensors, the object he’d nearly run into was a titanic unknown – bigger than a cruiser by half, obviously artificial but equally obviously not the work of the pathetic Confederated Navy. It lacked a spatial drive signature or emissions indicative of any large powerplant, but up close, what had seemed to be a ripple in the cosmic fabric now showed its true nature – not a mere ripple, the ship was entirely wrapped in a twist of space-time, so only the tiniest ripple showed outside. The tight flyby course set by Yasin had apparently found the tiny aperture of the spatial fold.

“Still no identification.” Gabriel started calculating the power requirements of that system, but even a conservative estimate put it far beyond the powerplant output of an entire squadron of Incarnation cruisers. That the object – the ship – had no measurable heat or particle emissions was more sinister than a ship lit from stem to stern, all viewports blazing – the fold in which the ship was tucked was proof it had power, and probably a crew which didn’t appreciate being spied on.

“Lost our mothership transponder signal.” Tashi observed, apparently not understanding what she was seeing. “Did they leave us behind?”

“Negative.” Gabriel sent her a copy of his in-progress mathematics, hoping she had enough software to interpret it. In case she didn’t, he struggled to come up with an analogy for the situation. “They’re sewing a pocket in space-time.”

Yasin highlighted a feature on the hull ahead, and though Gabriel couldn’t be sure, it looked a lot like a weapon emplacement. It was far bigger than the prow-mounted bombardment laser on their own mothership. As he looked, he began to pick out other features indicative that he was looking at a warship.

Yasin, evidently, had seen enough. He charted a new course for a broad sweep out from the hull and back on the vector which they had come in on.

“Wait.” Tashi called out, highlighting something on the hull ahead. “Visual-spectrum light source.”

Just as she pointed out the spot, a network of blazing blue-white lines burst forth from it, spidering across the whole hull of the hidden ship. The sensors automatically prevented any of the pilots from being blinded, and the light let the Coronachs’ telescopes see better the shadowy hull they’d been overflying. Stepped structures protruded at odd angles from the hull like grown crystals, some of them pocked and scarred by decades – maybe centuries – of superficial impacts. A pair of jutting, jawlike structures at the bow could only be weapons – weapons big enough, Gabriel thought distractedly, to vaporize entire capital ships. Nothing about the ship’s design could have been devised by human minds, but to the human sense of aesthetics, it was a beautiful ship, an apex predator lurking in ambush.

Gabriel watched the datastreams in awe. “Power to the fold pocket is falling. They’re coming out!”

“We’re getting out.” Yasin engaged the new course, and the four-ship formation flipped end-over-end in unison and scurried away from the hull toward their point of entry just as the pocket collapsed. Space seemed to wheel around the confused Coronach’s sensors, and Gabriel knew that if he had been able to see the stars, they would have spun madly as they reverted to their proper places.

“What is that light?” Azurra, little else to do but hope the four strike-ships were beneath notice, turned her attention back toward the great ship.

Gabriel spun his view backwards as well, drinking in the datastreams from all four Coronachs. “They’re folding the fabric again.”

Yasin made a few adjustments to the course, and sent out orders to the other two sections, which had reasonably panicked when the towering ship appeared. “Is it going to vanish again?”

“I think it’s a drive, but it’s-“

Gabriel never finished the thought, even though his thoughts were being transmitted directly. The spiderwebbed network of light along the ship’s vast hull pulsed once, then it went out from bow to stern – and where it went out, the ship vanished along with it.

“Weak reading from earlier is gone.” Yasin confirmed.

When the recall order arrived from the strike coordinator a moment later, it surprised none of the pilots. The cruiser’s command crew had seen the ship, and they knew any territory such behemoths lurked in was no place for the Incarnation to tread – not yet.

Details

Editor's Loudspeaker: Berkant Action Report

2947-09-29 – Editor's Loudspeaker: Berkant Action Report 

We are all alive, and we have little but the heavy armor-hull of Saint-Lô to thank for that. The Incarnation force must have rigged the system’s HyperCast Relay with explosives; as soon as we’d committed to the fight, it exploded spectacularly, cutting us off from Fifth Fleet headquarters and causing quite a stir there. Saint-Lô’s logistics train fortunately included a relay constructor ship, and after the battle, it hurried forward to restore our connection (and that of the rest of the system) to the HyperCast network. 

Nojus and I spoke with Captain Liao shortly after the Incarnation force retreated toward the jump limit. I’ll admit I was still quite shaken by what occurred, and Nojus took the lead in this conference, at which the ship’s Naval Intelligence representative was also present. The pair of Navy officers were clear – they wanted us to make sure that we had a message for our audience ready the moment we were reconnected to the rest of the Reach, and they wanted to make sure that message was direct and did not try to conceal the outcome. 

The Battle of Berkant – Overview 

Note: I am not a military writer. Nojus sat with two volunteers from the junior command staff on Saint-Lô to draft this account; I merely edited it to meet Cosmic Background’s editorial standards. 

As Captain Liao suspected (see Tales from the Service: The Siege of Berkant), the Incarnation ships in the system had set up a trap for the superior Saint-Lô squadron. One of their Tyrant cruisers sat in the open at the planet’s Lagrange 3 with its drive idling, while the other four stealthily moved to get between us and that ship, invisible to our SDD instruments and too far from the solar primary to reflect much light. Several strike wings deployed on our probable approach vectors, though the analysts are still not quite sure why; they played no part in the action. 

As the squadron accelerated toward the bait ship, it maneuvered to flee, encouraging the fast destroyers and light cruisers in the Navy van to race ahead of the main formation. The distance between them and Saint-Lô had become so wide by the time these ships passed the ambushers that when the other four Tyrants opened fire on the passing van at close range, the battleship’s big guns were too far away to be much help. By the time Liao’s first shots thundered past the four ships, two destroyers (Elioud Jackson and Roswitha Van Barle) and the light cruiser Notaro Sentinel were already lost. 

As the remaining light ships scattered to escape the close-range fire of the Tyrants, Saint-Lô formed up in close order with the heavy cruisers Razorwing and Ellistown Kite. One battleship and two heavy cruisers still outgunning the four heavy cruisers in the enemy force, Captain Liao maneuvered to bring the Tyrants into ideal heavy-gunnery and missile salvo range. 

The Incarnation ships formed up, too. The four ships adopted a close-order tetrahedral formation and moved toward us, shrugging off several accurate salvos from the kinetic batteries of the Navy heavies to make a close-range, high delta-V pass. Previous encounters with this type of warship have (as mentioned in his space) revealed comparatively ineffective screening systems, but in this case their screening fields shrugged off heavy weapons with ease, allowing them to approach the Navy core formation without suffering any major damage. 

The Tyrants’ relatively light long-range fire did little to the Navy’s big warships, but their numerous short-range energy weapons quickly overwhelmed the screening fields on Ellistown Kite when they came into range. The cruiser faltered and fell out of the action, bleeding atmosphere from a hundred hull breaches, and the Incarnation ships switched their fire to Saint-Lô as they came within two thousand kilometers of the battlewagon. Though the remaining Navy ships managed to punch their concentrated fire trough the lead Tyrant’s screens and land shred its armored hull with point-blank gunnery, Saint-Lô endured a full minute under murderous beam and plasma fire from the other three. Screens overwhelmed, the battleship lost most of its sensor clusters, fire control instruments, and comms antenna spines, making it all but impossible to fire accurately at the departing Incarnation cruisers.  

The three undamaged ships and the bait ship made for the jump limit at full speed, leaving their one damaged compatriot to fend for itself. The crippled Tyrant focused its fire on the crippled Ellistown Kite, carving the helpless ship to pieces even as Razorwing and the surviving lighter ships did the same to it. 

Results 

The battle in this system was an unmitigated disaster. For the loss of one heavy-cruiser analogue, a relatively modest Incarnation force that came to Berkant destroyed a heavy cruiser, a light cruiser and two destroyers, in addition to causing severe but not fatal damage to Saint-Lô and another destroyer. Two fire support frigates and the heavy cruiser Razorwing suffered light damage. All told, Confederated Navy fatalities exceed 450, with nearly a thousand non-fatal injuries.

The behavior of the screening fields of the Incarnation ships is still being analyzed, but Captain Liao thinks this is the tactic for which their parabolic, outward-facing screening projectors were designed; the tight equidistant formation essentially allowed each of the four Tyrants to be screened heavily by the other three ships. Operating in groups, Tyrant-type cruisers have demonstrated the ability to close with Confederated Navy battlewagons and engage these much bigger ships effectively. 

Incarnation Coronach strike-craft played little part in the battle, but the Navy's Magpies were almost equally irrelevant; some enemy strike ships were used as pickets and a few small strike engagements took place as Fifth Fleet gunships tried to break through to the Tyrants as they closed with Saint-Lô, but the Incarnation force largely won a battle against a superior force using only eighty percent of its heavy ships and none of its highly capable - indeed, probably far superior - strike assets. Captian Liao is convinced this is because the enemy commander was toying with him, but the other analysts I’ve asked suggest that the enemy commander had more practical reasons for this decision. 

To be sure, the Confederated Worlds retains control of the Berkant system, but the Incarnation didn’t bring support forces to hold the system. They attacked Berkant – a system barely twelve ly from Maribel - to draw Fifth Fleet ships into a battle. They got the battle they were looking for on their own terms, and the result should be sobering to anyone on the Coreward Frontier. 

Details

2947-09-24 – Tales from the Service: A Rendezvous Reconnoitered

Naval dispatches indicate that the HyperCast relay in Berkant orbit was destroyed during the battle, but information about the action in that system has yet to be released. Given that Duncan and Nojus are outside the reach of the Hypercast network, this week’s entry is one of the pieces Duncan prepared some time ago but could not post. 

His notes indicate that this story was sent in as a response to Tales from the Service: A Stowaway Saboteur some time ago. The submitter, Loretta B., is a mercenary pilot operating off the ersatz carrier Shammuramat, on contract with the Navy to patrol the outer Nye Norge systems. She found evidence there that the Incarnation is using civilian Confederated Worlds ships (crewed either by their own or by native Ladeonists) to covertly surveil the Frontier. These ships may also be the vehicle for agents like the Paz of the Stowaway Saboteur account; her nanotechnological weaponry seems beyond the capability of native Ladeonist insurgents. 

This story would have been posted immediately to the text feed, but Naval Intelligence held it up for several weeks, whereupon it went into Duncan’s steadily growing backlog of ready-to-use entries. The attack on Håkøya forecast by Loretta in her attached message never materialized, but that should not be a strike against her credibility – the enemy likely saw the arrival of the huge cruiser force based there and decided to raid softer targets in the Nye Norge. 

Loretta keyed the gunship’s personnel hatch as soon as the hangar pressurization alarm chimed, and unhooked her restraints from her flight suit. Normally, she would wait for the ship’s three gunners to squeeze out of their swivel-stabilized turret stations aft of the cockpit before she disembarked, but the flight she’d just completed had been a rare solo run. Already, the cameras and sensors that had been mounted in place of most of the Kosseler Gryphon’s armament had begun downloading their sizable recordings to the carrier’s datasphere for analysis, but she had seen plenty herself, and would need a few stiff drinks to soothe her nerves. 

“Clean run, boss.” One of the mechanics hurrying up to the ship on the hangar deck gave Loretta a friendly slap on the shoulder as she walked by.  

Normally, she was all smiles after a successful field operation, but this time, the stressful stealth run had left her wrung out in a way lethal combat never could. For six hours, she’d drifted powerless through the weapons range of three titanic Incarnation cruisers, protected only by the hope – accurate as it turned out – that their sensor technology was not much more capable than that of the Confederated Navy. 

Even so, an active sensor sweep by a paranoid officer on any of the three ships would have found her out immediately, and no amount of fancy flying would have saved her from concentrated point defense fire from three cruisers. Her ship had been outfitted to evade detection by civilian sensor suites, not military-grade systems. Loretta had sweated through every second of the flyby, not knowing whether it would be her last. 

Loretta staggered into the lift and punched the deck level of the pilots’ lounge. When the miners at the Axelson Industries outpost had tipped her crew off to the suspicious activities of a small-time freight hauler, she had been as eager as the other pilots to snoop on the ship as it meandered through the outer system. Everyone had hoped to find opportunistic pirates a long way from home, or a smuggler laden with contraband to earn the crew a prize-taking bonus from the Navy.  

Loretta’s ship had been hastily modified for a surveillance mission, and she had left the hangar in good spirits, chasing the suspicious hauler into the shadow of a moon only to find three towering enemy cruisers lurking there once it was too late to back out of the silent flyby. 

The lift doors opened, and Loretta all but rushed to the bar in the lounge, punching in an order for imitation rum even before she sat down. Two of the other people in the compartment – one of her own gunners and another pilot – tried to start a round of applause, but one look at her face was enough to still this good cheer. 

The rum arrived and Loretta downed it in one gulp, despite a metallic odor suggesting that the lounge’s beverage synthesizer machine was on the fritz again.  

As soon as she’d clapped the empty cup back onto the table and had begun to consider a second, one of the other pilots got up from one of the gaming tables and took the stool to her right. “Hell of a run, Loretta.” 

“That’s damned right, Jem. Hell of a run.” Loretta told the bar to send her another drink, then turned to look at her fellow pilot. Jem Williams flew an antiquated Kestrel interceptor which would have been a better choice for the mission, had it not been for the age of its computer systems. The passive surveillance modules had overloaded the dodgy, thirty-year-old datasystems of the single-seat Kestrel, so  the hangar crew had mounted it in the gun mounts of her Gryphon instead – and nobody flew Loretta’s ship except Loretta herself. “Next one’s all yours.” 

The second drink arrived, and Jem snatched it from Loretta. “You’re not trained for scout work, but you did good work out there today.” He might have downed it himself, but he seemed to think better of it once he caught a whiff of its metallic broken-synthesizer odor.  

The instant of hesitation was enough for Loretta to take it back, though not without sloshing almost a third of the precious alcohol out of the cup. Unlike him, she didn’t hesitate. How could he understand how powerless she’d been for all those hours? He was used to flying in something that had been custom modified to outrun most purpose-built racers. He would never understand how many times she had died in her mind, watching the glittering laser-lenses on three Tyrants for the first glow of a shot which would vaporize her ship. 

“Odd they’re hiding. Shammuramat is no threat to even one of them.” Jem, who had obviously heard Loretta’s trembling radio report on her return flight, seemed oblivious to how shaken his associate still was. “Must not be anything in this system worth blowing up.” 

“There isn't.” Loretta shrugged. The Navy didn’t think the outer Nye Norge systems were worth seriously protecting, so the enemy passing through the area silently was no surprise. “They’ve got bigger targets and don’t want to raise the alarm.” 

“Somewhere that hauler just visited.” Jem agreed, punching in his own drink. 

“The Axelson station boss told us where the hauler had just come from, Jem.” She turned to face the other pilot for the first time. “It was in the briefing, remember?” 

“Was it?” Jem, like most mercenary pilots, took pride in his ability to tune out briefings and still get the job done. 

“Sure was. Their last stop was the planet you want to retire to, after this is over.” 

“Damn.” Jem’s drink arrived, and this time he downed it without noticing the odor. “Now I remember. They’d come from Håkøya.”

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