Tales from the Inbox: An Alien Aurora

2947-02-05 - Tales from the Inbox: An Alien Aurora

I'll be more or less incommunicado for several weeks; this post was prepared in late January for publication. By now you all have probably read the reason for my unannounced disappearance so shortly after the holidays. The next time I dispatch Tales from the Inbox the day of publication, it will be from our new studio at Håkøya!

Ozias A. shares this account of an odd organism that has colonized the polar regions of Maribel. I have found some low-quality imagery of similar "floaters" drifting high in the planet's atmosphere, but his account - which comes with no supporting imagery except for a picture of a pebbly lake-shore covered in broken ice - is unique in the parts of the Datasphere searchable from Centauri. I don't have any reason to doubt him, but his failure to produce coordinates (citing good reasons such as poachers and tourists destroying the organisms' habitat) does make it impossible to verify the story.

The creatures involved seem to be largely flora, rather than fauna, and though they are occasionally spotted drifting as far north as the 45th parallel, one has never been seen on or near ground level before this account. If it's true, it makes them particularly curious specimens, and if their eruptions of this form can be predicted, they will quickly become an event that attracts tourist attention.

By the time Ozias felt that he was far enough from the frontier settlement to think, his arms were burning from the unfamiliar effort of rowing his little boat. There were only a few places on Maribel where true solitude could be achieved, and despite the colony’s youth, peace and quiet was becoming difficult to find. Even the southern polar sea’s confused jumble of broken ice and tiny, barren islands was an occasional tourist destination, but this inhospitable climate was still Ozias’s best chance for a few days of genuine peace and quiet.

Of course, he hadn’t planned to do any rowing. The tiny boat he’d brought along had come with an electric motor, but it had failed almost immediately. If it were not for the relatively short distance to his intended camp-sight and a favorable current, the retired spacer might well have turned back and riske pitching his thermo-tent on the picturesque but tourist-overrun clifftop at Cape Vingano.

As was true for polar summers on almost any world, Maribel’s orange solar primary refused to set, toying sullenly with the horizon. Ozias, at the direction of his navigation wrist-piece, steered directly toward it. The electronic guidance system informed him that the Gray Isle was near before he threaded through a narrow chasm between two great ice floes and first caught sight of it. The island’s flat, barren bulk might have been a dismal sight to some, but to Ozias, seeking as he did a few days of complete solitude, it was as welcome as the feeling of a warm shower after a year in space, forced to cope with a faulty shipboard acoustic cleanser.

Soon, the little boat’s prow scraped the pebbly beach, and Ozias, unafraid of the icy water because of his heated, waterproof attire, hopped out and pulled it onto shore. Because of the surrounding ice, the island’s beaches were totally becalmed, with only the slightest waves breaking the almost total silence. Sometimes the isle’s low hills were lashed by fierce polar winds, but it seemed perfectly calm – calm enough that Ozias could hear the crash of surf breaking against the great ice walls protecting the isle from the sea, four kilometers away.

After deploying the boat’s overland skids, Ozias towed it into the island’s interior, following the course of a small river of ice so clear he could count the bright pebbles over which it crawled. A kilometer from the shore, he found a patch of flat, dry ground sufficient for his thermo-tent, and began setting up camp. The place was everything he had hoped for – quiet in the extreme, both desolate and picturesque. Ozias had no intention of taking pictures, lest others befoul his hard-won refuge from society, but he knew he wouldn’t grow tired of the scenery in the week he had allotted to the expedition.

As soon as the domed tent was unpacked and staked into place, Ozias climbed the hill behind the campsite. To his surprise, on the other side, he found a small lake, its surface a sheet of ice so perfectly smooth he was certain that a stone kicked across its surface would slide all the way to the other side. After appreciating the view, Ozias returned to his campsite to prepare a meal, ravenously hungry from the exertion of rowing the last leg of the journey.

The sun dipped halfway past the horizon, bathing the Gray Isle in false twilight just dark enough for Maribel’s brightest stars to appear. It was a false twilight, Ozias knew, because it was also dawn – the solar disk would rise again shortly, without having completely set. The half-darkness would last, he estimated, less than an hour.

Just as Ozias had finished warming up a meal of re-hydrated wilderness rations, a chiming, splintering sound tore the isle’s blissful silence and startled him severely enough to drop his meal to the ground. Cursing and suspecting that his solitude had been broken by another human tourist, Ozias hurried up the hill to have a look around, expecting to see the lights of another camp glowing not far away.

He saw light, but it was coming from beneath the little lake, whose pristine ice was now shattered and shoved on-shore by mad waves far larger than such a small body of water should be able to produce. The light, too, was odd – it was electric blue, fitfully waxing and waning in a pattern reminiscent of an erratic heartbeat. Ozias was immediately certain that it came from no object of human origin, though the source was still hidden below the lashing waves.

The source was not content to remain submerged, though. Rising to the surface, a great phosphorescent bubble reached the surface, its pulsing radiance bright enough to cast shadows behind every rock and hill. The bubble didn’t stop rising at the waves, though – it kept rising, drifting weightlessly into the air. In its center, a mass of pinkish tissue throbbed and twitched along with the light, and below this vast orb, several greenish roots or tendrils hung limply.

Ozias, suddenly aware of his exposed position, dove to the ground, seeking cover from the hillside though the thing had no obvious eyes to see him. The creature – for there was no doubt it was alive, not a machine – continued to float upward, buoyant on the frigid air, and soon dozens of smaller specimens broke free of the water and followed it up. The variable light from each creature joined together to produce a chaotic strobing difficult to look at, but also impossible to look away from. Ozias watched, motionless, as the flock of airborne drifters rose above the hills, until they finally caught the cross-winds roaring above the sheltered place, and were quickly ushered away over the horizon.

Not certain what he had seen, Ozias hurried down to the swiftly calming lake’s shore to peer into the dark water. Splinters of ice crunched under his feet, and by the time he had reached the water’s edge, it had already becalmed itself enough to begin freezing once more, leaving no trace of the grand light-show which it had disgorged.

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Editor’s Loudspeaker: Interview with Captain Samuel Bosch

2947-02-03 - Editor’s Loudspeaker: Interview with Captain Samuel Bosch

I was able to arrange a brief interview with Captain Samuel Bosch, current commander of CL187 Arrowhawk and recently famous for his role in the New Rheims Investigation. By the time this feed item is released to the datasphere, this audience should already know about the opportunity I have been given to travel to Håkøya aboard Arrowhawk - before we left, the two of us sat down to record this interchange for the Cosmic Background audience. Topics covered include his perspective on the New Rheims incident, his experiences in the Brushfire War, and his thoughts about the Navy's changing role in the societal fabric of the Confederated Worlds. Subjects of conversation, but not questions, were arranged beforehand.

The audio recording of this interaction will be available on our datasphere hub.

BEGIN_RECORDING; TIMESTAMP 29470131:1:02:03:31
RECORDED PERSONS: DUNCAN L. CHAUDHRI, SAMUEL A. BOSCH

Chaudhri: Captain Samuel Bosch, thank you for taking time out of your schedule to answer a few questions for our little media outlet. I know preparing a just-refitted Navy ship for departure has left you with a busy schedule.

Bosch: Duncan, thanks for having me.

Chaudhri: You certainly could have chosen to talk to much larger media outlets than Cosmic Background, but you turned down all interview requests, even from the other media personnel traveling aboard your ship. Why is that?

Bosch: I'll admit, the first I heard of your organization was during the New Rheims mess, when one of my officers showed me your text feed analysis of my recorded testimony. We were still out at New Rheims at the time, and low bandwidth media content was the only thing we could reliably get while on station. For an outlet that does not focus on news programming, Cosmic Background did a good job with New Rheims. Almost every other outlet lost accuracy in favor of sensationalism, and sadly, many of them seem to have profited from this decision.

Chaudhri: Why don't we start there. The public knows much of what happened there from committee testimony, but surely there are details that you think didn't get reported widely enough.

Bosch: Sure. People forget that we didn't know what we were dealing with. Block A50 was secret from us, too, and that cruiser was so heavily modified that it didn't match any class profile in our database. Its control system had even disabled its identity transponder. The situation was so confused that at one point I sent an alert which classified the ongoing crisis as a hostile first contact. We only verified the ship's human origin a few hours before it fired on the planet.

Chaudhri: Why did it fire on the planet? I don't think any good explanation for that was ever provided.

Bosch: I can only guess. The digital forensics experts are still picking through the wreckage.

Chaudhri: Your best guess carries a lot of weight, Captain. You were there.

Bosch: Well... To be honest, I suspect that may be partially my fault. Orders came in to capture the ship intact if practical, so I tried to encircle it. Its control AI turned its guns on the planet to force us to decide whether to pursue it or rescue the population.

Chaudhri: Your fault? I don't follow.

Bosch: We could have destroyed that ship before it got within weapons range of New Rheims, Duncan. I should have unloaded every launcher rail on my ships as soon as we had the range, but I didn't.

Chaudhri: The Navy cleared you of all wrongdoing.

Bosch: Correct.

Chaudhri: When I researched Block A50, your name came up, you know. There are some who say you knew what the hostile cruiser was doing the whole time. What do you say to that?

Bosch: I didn't know about Block A50. The Navy has been improving onboard automation for as long as I've served, so most of its work wasn't even unusual. Ever since the battle of Cold Refuge, there have been rumors of the Navy experimenting with automation technology bought from that system's Wardens, but we always assumed it would be used to free up personnel from logistics and supply roles. It's easy to forget, but the Navy operates almost twice as many haulers as cruisers, and it has more mobile repair platforms than battleships. Every one of those ships could be automated without violating the Treaty of Scherer.

Chaudhri: True, but that's not what Block A50 was meant to do.

Bosch: The idea of replacing combat-ship commanders with AIs was more unpopular among the captaincy than in the civilian public, you know. Most of the people who lost their roles in the Great Purge were chased out by the captains, colonels, and lieutenants on their own staffs. By the time the political trophy-hunting started, they were already on their way out. The Navy spends a great deal of time and effort training its officers to exercise snap judgement on rapidly changing situations; a computer can make those decisions much faster, but we all know it can't make them correctly. Even if it could, Navy personnel would never stand for letting an algorithm take responsibility for the management of something as serious as warfighting.

Chaudhri: After the Brushfire War, you were one of the voices observing the effectiveness of Cold Refuge's automated flotilla and discussing the possibility of learning something from them. Do you think you were wrong five years ago?

Bosch: I certainly think we have things to learn from the way the Wardens of Cold Refuge defend their system, but the intent of that report was to suggest examination of their tools, not of their ideas. I had no intention for it to be taken as a request to re-examine the way we've protected human space ever since the Corona Wars. The Navy's methods work, and they are morally defensible.

Chaudhri: After New Rheims, are they? Morally defensible, I mean.

Bosch: A50 and New Rheims were betrayal of the Navy's moral core, not an expressions of it. Inside the service, Naval culture is seen as the moral backbone of the Confederated Worlds, the backstop against another slide into Ladeonite madness or some other innovative degeneracy. I don't think we've lost that role, but we will have to work hard to regain some lost trust, and rightfully so.

Chaudhri: And do you think this new focus on the success of the Survey Auxiliary is part of that?

Bosch: That was planned long before New Rheims, but it can only help. My crew and I are fortunate; we'll be there when the new Sagittarius Frontier is opened. There's no grumbling on Arrowhawk about a backwater assignment, you know. Everyone knows that there is a lot of public attention on our mission across the Gap. I've been reading reports provided by independent explorers who've been to the new territory, and they suggest that we will have more than enough to do there in support of Survey and the first few colonial projects.

Chaudhri: Do you think the assignment is related to your actions in Yaxkin City a few months ago?

Bosch: I don't know, and won't speculate about that matter.

Chaudhri: I understand entirely. Thank you for your time, Captain Bosch.

Bosch: Thanks for having me, Duncan. I'm interested to see what you and Cosmic Background can do in Håkøya. I'd be happy to sit down with your organization again once you've gotten your footing there.

Chaudhri: I'm sure the audience would appreciate that.

END_RECORDING;
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Notice: Cosmic Background Opens Håkøya Studio

2947-02-02: Notice: Cosmic Background Opens Håkøya Studio

There have been rumors circling for some weeks in the community about a potential downsizing here at Cosmic Background, partly due to the fact that this astute audience discovered the emigration form-files Duncan submitted early last month. We kept quiet about this controversy until now, partly to protect Duncan's privacy as he makes this transition, and partly because we were required by arrangements made with some of our partners not to publicize our effort until today.

Cosmic Background has not downsized, nor has Duncan been laid off. In fact, quite the opposite. Duncan's role as editor of Tales from the Inbox on this text feed has not been eliminated, and this feature of our content, which has acquired a modest but quite vocal following, will not be phased out. Duncan is relocating off Planet at Centauri, but he is doing so in order to take charge of a new studio which has been completed aboard Håkøya's Argyris spaceport.

The purpose of this new facility is to take advantage of the expanding Naval Survey Auxiliary presence in Håkøya, and to put some of our staff close to the effort to open a new Frontier across the Sagittarius Gap. Cosmic Background's studio, centrally located in Centauri, has placed us increasingly farther from what we consider our core audience - those of you out there pushing out the edges of the Coreward and Rimward Frontiers. For some time we've been looking for a good way to establish a presence closer to the Frontiers, and when the Naval Survey Auxiliary approached us and several other interstellar-community media outlets with the proposal that we build out our presence in Håkøya simultaneous with Survey's own expansion there.

Most of you know that Duncan is the youngest member of our publicly visible staff, but he is also the one with the fewest local family connections, who is most able to take responsibility of a branch facility at this time. When this effort began, we were expecting Sovanna to relocate as well and to take charge of the operation of this new studio, but she has had a change in personal circumstances which prevents her joining the Håkøya team at this time.

Duncan and the other members of the new studio team departed for the Frontier this morning, and the next few issues of Tales from the Inbox have been prepared ahead of his travel. He will likely dispatch at least one text feed item while en route, which we will of course publish whenever his content arrives here in the flagship studio. His departure the same day as the very public departure of the Arrowhawk squadron for the same destination is not accidental; Duncan's team and staff from three other datacast media outlets have been allowed to make the journey aboard Arrowhawk. While we have no doubt that this is part of the ongoing public relations effort to undo the Navy's loss of face following New Rheims and The Great Purge, traveling aboard a Naval cruiser has allowed our staff to cut its transit time to Håkøya by nearly half.

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Tales From the Inbox: Arson for the Archives

2947-01-29 - Tales From the Inbox: Arson for the Archives

The loss of the Vatican Archives during the occupation of Earth is one of the greatest tragedies of human knowledge, perhaps even rivaling the burning of the fabled Library of Alexandria. The ambiguous nature of this loss has led many to believe that the archive, like many other things lost during the Terran-Rattanai War, might one day be re-discovered, just as the twin Dawnglider battleships were. Many of the ancient documents in the Archive were supposedly never committed to digital form.

This belief has in turn spawned a large number of efforts to find the lost archives, based on the belief that the Holy See spirited them away to safety as the Rattanai battle-fleet closed in on Earth. The archive is certainly valuable; even if the Church paid half the commonly-dispensed thirty-five billion credits figure for the return of its long-lost archives, its finder would be rich beyond all measure.

I personally suspect that if the archives were hidden, they were hidden on Earth; expeditions to remote areas of the former Terran Sphere to search for the lost Vatican Archives inevitably return empty-handed, for good reason.

Kieron T. does not agree with my assertion, and his belief in the correct way to find the Archives - if they still exist - resulted not in a large payment from the Church, but in a massive debt to it. While he does not provide any information about how he is paying the Holy See back for his sins (spiritually or temporally), I can only imagine that what he sent in is not the end of the story. He ensured me that when events have run their course, he will submit more of his story for this audience's enjoyment.

Kieron looked around the old monastery’s library one more time before setting the timer on his incendiary bomb. The documents he needed were already tucked under one of his arms, and while it was a shame to destroy so many priceless books – many of them antiques brought to Villar all the way from Earth – it was the only way to hide the importance of what he had taken.

As soon as the timer was ticking down, he keyed in the remote that would summon his ship. Somewhere in the handful of books he’d collected, there was a clue – a clue to the whereabouts of one of the most famous undiscovered treasure hoards. When Earth had been invaded by the Rattanai, the Holy See had moved its archives and its most priceless relics off the planet, but in the chaos of that revolutionary era, the few who knew where the treasure had been had perished without revealing their secret. Three thousand years of Vatican archives and wealth had vanished, and even the successor pontiffs of the great old church had not possessed the knowledge to recover it. 

Kieron didn’t wish any particular ill on the Villarian Monastery or its greater church, but the value of what the Church had lost was incalculable. It would be enough to pay off all Kieron’s debts and let him retire to an estate on the Frontier, and more. If he was right, notes written by hand into one of the old books would shed light on the hiding-place for the legendary treasure. He didn’t want to think about what might happen if he was wrong.

Just as Kieron was approaching the library door, footsteps outside brought him to a halt. Pressed to the wall and trying not to think about the incendiary bomb slowly ticking toward ignition, surrounded by stacks of synthetic parchment and even antique paper, he waited for the patrolling monk beyond to walk past the door before gently inching it open.

At that moment, the bomb went off. Knocked through the door and onto the floor, with ,bits and pieces of flaming books raining down on his back, Kieron scrambled back to his feet immediately, shielding his prize with his body. The courtyard wasn’t far away, and his ship could pick him up there. The burns on his back and shoulders would need medical attention, but they could wait until he was in orbit.

Shoving past two monks rushing toward the blaze, Kieron burst out into the courtyard in time to see his little ship appear over the crest of the hills, the thunderous rumble of its drive causing almost as much alarm from the monks as the explosive fire in the library. With the remote, he instructed it to fly low and let out the cable-winch he’d installed specifically for the task.

As the ship swung low to drop the cable into the courtyard, however, a mirage shimmer appeared in the air above Kieron’s head. Too late, he tried to order the ship to climb away, even as the cable fell into the chaotic spatial shear of a protective screening field. The ship’s drive reversed, but too late; its momentum carried it into the shear zone, and Kieron was forced to watch as his ship, the last thing his debtholders had not taken from him as collateral, was torn into small, glowing pieces above his head.

“This is a fine way to repay our hospitality.”

Kieron whirled to see the abbot, flanked by two monks holding antique rifles, approaching. There was no point trying to bluff his way out – he was still clutching priceless antique books.

“I’ll admit you had me fooled, Kieron Nazaretian. Is that is truly your name?” With a dismissive gesture, the abbott sent his armed subordinates forward to separate Kieron from the books which had meant everything. One of them kept a weapon trained on Kieran, while the other returned the books to the venerable priest, who patiently examined each, ignoring the chaos within the building as the other monks tried in vain to extinguish the blaze.

“I didn’t have a choice.” Kieran knew even as he said it that it was a lie. He’d had plenty of choices; all of the choices he’d made had led him to where he was. By the time it came to searching for the lost treasure of the Holy See, he’d made a lot of wrong ones.

The abbot finished examining the documents, a frown on his weathered face. “Son, you aren’t the first to come here chasing what was lost in the war.” He had evidently guessed the purpose of Kieran’s vandalism. “But I suppose you will be the last.” The reason for this was evident; the inferno that had been the library would surely dissuade the next would-be treasure-hunter.

“I am sorry.” Kieran realized that he was. It was just business, but business was no excuse to the monks whose priceless books, works of many periods of the ancient church’s history, had been destroyed.

“Perhaps you are.” The abbot clutched the books to his body, the last remnant of his once-grand library. “Take him inside. Let us see what he really knows of the See’s lost archive.” 

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