Tales from the Service: Alone In the Dark

2947-07-09 - Tales from the Service: Alone In the Dark

Hello, Cosmic Background audience. You might have noticed that your usual content editor Duncan Chaudhri is not the one posting this item to your ingestion feeds. 

That’s right! Since I’m working on contract with Cosmic Background for the short duration of this little war, I have all the powers that Duncan has over what appears for your entertainment and what doesn’t. I promise that power won’t go to my head... right away. 

As this goes live, I’ll probably watching Duncan bumble about in a vacsuit during his mandatory EVA training. Since I’m already EVA certified, that means I get to sit inside and drink food-processor coffee while he flails around and generally does his best to get himself killed despite the instructors’ best efforts. 

That's enough gossip, though. Before vanishing into his battery of certification training courses, Duncan helped me compose this interesting little story based on an oral account we were given earlier this week. He told me I could put anything I wanted in this forward section, so I did. 

After he left, I went back over it once more to try to make it as gripping as the teller’s original story, but the composition software won’t let me submit that version. It calls most of my changes “errors” that need to be resolved prior to publication. Something about all the proper rules of writing Duncan is so worried about can just suck the animal terror out of the whole thing. He did that to all my stories, too. Still, I did what I could. Like last week’s story, this one comes from a gunship pilot who got up close and personal with a Sagittarian criuser-analogue. Rather than keep using that silly long technical term “cruiser-analogue”, I’m going to call it what Navy Spacers do – they have given this ship-type the nickname “Tyrant” due to their tendency to pick on weak targets and avoid proper engagements. This is apparently a reference to a popular holovid drama which I have not seen.  

If this reference is important, I’m sure Duncan will explain it next week. 

Kwahja reflexively sucked in a breath as the Magpie’s cockpit disintegrated around him. Buffeted by gouts of escaping and flash-freezing atmosphere, he had only a moment to ponder the spectacular view before the ejection system completed its task, firing him far from the stricken attack boat. 

The deep breath helped little, of course. The emergency bubble helmet which formed around Kwahja’s head sealed in one atmosphere of pressure, and the eight-gee acceleration of ejection forced the hastily-obtained breath from his lungs in any case. When the gunship expldoed behind him, the only indication was the reflected light of the blast against the clearsynth of the helmet. Ejection did not give him any means of maneuver; it served only to preserve his life until a med-evac shuttle could scramble to pick him up. 

“Crew check-in. Iryna, Zalman, you guys make it out?” 

“Affirmative, Lieutenant.” Iryna’s voice was shaky. She was the greenest gunner in the whole squadron, and had never been forced to eject before. 

“I think that broke all my ribs.” Kwahja knew Zalman, a veteran whiner, was all right. If he was actually seriously injured, he would be all business. 

“Good to hear it. Don’t put your beacons on yet.” He didn’t need to explain why. Less than three klicks away, the sinister lines of the Tyrant which had crippled their Magpie cut across the stars. One sweep of the ship’s point defense beams could erase all three of them, if the aliens aboard were feeling particularly cruel. Kwahja had no reason to believe they wouldn’t do it, and every reason to play it safe. 

“Stars around.” The common exclamation likely slipped off Iryna’s tongue without any thought as to how true it was. “We’re just going to sit here and watch?” 

“Yup. Anyone bring any popcorn?” 

“Cut the chatter, Gunner Resnik.” Under normal circumstances, Kwahja tolerated Zalman’s joking and griping to an extreme degree, but the idle comms chatter did present a small risk that the Sagittarians would notice the three stranded human spacers. 

The line subsided into silence, and Kwahja watched without any magnification aid as the remaining four ships in the squadron made another strafing pass along the Tyrant’s hull. The big ship, maneuvering wildly to avoid long range railshot from Mijo Yankov and its two escorting frigates, likely suffered little damage from the light ships’ harassing attack, but the flashes of exploding ordinance still improved the stranded pilot’s mood. At least he hadn’t lost a boat for nothing. 

“Boss, there’s something over here. Moving fast. One of ours?” 

Iryna replied first, in her nervousness not realizing the observation was meant for Kwahja. “We'd see IFF if it was one of ours.” 

“Debris from Deadeye?” The Magpie gunship had earned its nickname from the many off-shift sessions its crew spent in the gunnery simulator. Now it was gone, and the next one would need a new nickname. Kwahja craned his head, but he couldn’t quite turn far enough to look toward where the ejection system had hurled Zalman. “I can’t see from here. Iryna, what about you?”  

“I can see Zalman if I switch to infrared, but I can’t see what he’s talking about.” 

“Let me try that.” The gunner went quiet for a moment. “Yeah, that’s something. No IR signature at all. Whatever it is, it’s awfully small. Going to hit it with a wrist light.” 

Kwahja wasn’t an expert in deep space salvage, but he knew that things which had just finished exploding were supposed to be hot. “Not wreckage, then. Skip the light. Let it pass.” 

The order came too late. Already an inset came to life in the bubble-helmet around Kwahja’s head, showing Zalman’s wrist-mounted microcamera feed. The light came on a second later. The curved, nonreflective object pinned in the middle of the weak beam at first seemed to be an oddly shaped asteroid – a chance encounter in the void, nothing more. 

Then the object rolled, and its lines took on a deadly, sleek shape wreathed in puffs of thruster-gas. “Zalman, get that light off.” 

“Hells! Drone of some kind.” Zalman’s light went off, but the camera feed remained. The flippant tone in his voice was gone. “Think it’s from the Tyrant?” 

Kwahja glanced back at the evasive gyrations of the alien cruiser. The drone’s shape did have a vague aesthetic similarity to the Sagittarian ship. “Could be. Still see it?” 

“Yeah.” Zalman pointed the camera at a black patch of space. As he held it still, stars resolved themselves around a dark silhouette. “Right there. On vector with us.” 

“Should we switch on the beacons and tell them to speed up the evac?” Iryna was doing her best to remain calm, but the appearance of a strange drone was enough to unsettle even a veteran. Kwahja knew she was very close to panic. 

“Negative.” The drone was so close that no rushed evac could reach the trio in time. “Iryna, watch Zalman. Let me know if you see anything on visual or IR.” It galled the pilot that he couldn’t see either of his gunners; the ejection system did not equip a stranded pilot with attitude thrusters. 

“It’s moving again.” Zalman’s fear was almost palpable, and it was easy to guess why. Even an unarmed drone, directed by the inscrutable will of a Sagittarian, could kill a stranded pilot easily. 

“Still don’t see it.” Iryna muttered. 

“He’s getting closer. A hundred meters. Going to try my side-arm. I’m not going out like this.” 

“Zalman, stay calm. It’s probably-” 

“I see it!” Iryna called out. “I have a clear shot from here.” 

“Seventy meters. Damn thing’s coming right at me, but he’s coming slow.” Zalman’s teeth were gritted. “He passes forty, and I open fire. Iryna, you see me shooting, you shoot too.” 

Kwahja knew side-arms would do nearly nothing against even the thin skin of a utility drone. Still, he knew his gunners were right to prepare to shoot the thing – perhaps they would get a lucky shot, or confuse its programming and force it to back off. “Good luck, you two. Sorry I’m angled wrong to help.” 

“Thanks, boss.” Zalman adjusted his camera feed to point at the slowly growing silhouette. “Fifty-five.” 

“I think I see drive exhausts. Going to aim for those.” Iryna was as good a shot with her side-arm as she was with a gunship’s ordinance. If she could hit a weak spot, it might disable the drone. 

“Fifty meters.” 

Kwahja watched helplessly as the shape on the feed drew closer. Zalman, realizing stealth was pointless, flicked his wrist light back on, giving Iryna a better target and Kwahja a better look at the incoming. It was big for a drone, he decided; it reminded him of the skim-racers he’d seen competing in the orbital blood-sport common to some of the colonies of the Reach. Like those tiny ships, the drone had a fluted and fragile look, as if every gram of needless weight had been removed from its hull. The pair of recesses in the prow suggested the thing was armed, but until it opened fire there was no way to be sure. 

“Forty-five. Nice knowing you guys.” The blurry barrel of Zalman’s sidearm intruded on one side of the camera footage. 

“Give him hell, Zalman.” 

The only indication that the incoming drone crossed the forty-meter mark was Zalman’s gun spitting a cloud of red-hot slugs into its nose. A moment later, a second cloud of red motes slammed into its side from Iryna’s weapon. Each hit produced a shower of sparks, but Kwahja had no way of knowing if there was any damage. 

Zalman’s gun fell silent, though its magnetic barrel still glowed. “Dammit. That’s my mag. Going to try to re-” 

The camera feed flashed white, then vanished. At the same instant, Iryna started screaming. If there were words in her voice, Kwahja couldn’t pick them out. 

“Zalman. Zalman!” A quick check of the telemetry from the other two showed Kwahja what he already knew – Zalman Resnik was gone. “Iryna. What happened?” 

The gunner continued screaming. Perhaps she was firing her side-arm and reloading it as fast as she could, or perhaps she was curled into a fetal position in her ejection rig, there was no way to tell. She barely even stopped screaming to take a breath. 

“Iryna. Get a grip. Tell me what happened!” 

It was useless. After another few seconds of screaming, Iryna’s voice rose in an almost pathetic squeak, then the line went dead, along with all her indicators. 

“Iryna. Report!” Even as he sent the message, Kwahja knew that he was alone with the sleek, murderous drone. 

As the seconds ticked by, Kwahja craned his neck around in his bubble helmet, wishing he could rotate enough to see in the direction from which danger was coming. He estimated that it would reach him in less than a minute, and began counting, already checking the battery and magazine of his own pistol.  

At a count of seventy seconds without instant death or the appearance of the drone, Kwahja frowned, but kept counting. Perhaps it was slower than he had anticipated. Sweat trickled down his neck, but there was no way to wipe it away. 

At ninety seconds, he checked the suit’s mission timer to verify that he wasn’t counting too fast. The drone should have found him already. In the distance, the Sagittarian ship had given up its course and was burning an escape course toward the edge of the stellar grav shadow. Perhaps the drone had been recalled? He kept counting. 

At five hundred ninety-one seconds, an all-clear broadcast from Mijo Yankov told him it was safe to switch on his beacon. He kept counting, pistol ready, until the rescue ship arrived. 

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Tales from the Service: To Strafe a Sagittarian

2947-07-02 – Tales from the Service: To Strafe a Sagittarian 

Welcome to the first entry in Tales from the Service, the replacement feature for Tales from the Inbox for the duration of Sagittarian hostilities. 

Nojus and Koloman joined Sadie, Toal, and myself here at Håkøya yesterday, and we began our Naval Media Corps certification course. Interestingly enough, Toal told me that he went through this certification in order to embed during the Brushfire War, but hostilities ended before he could reach the conflict zone. Obviously, NMC needs to put him through the certification all over again; press rules for Brushfire were different than they are here. 

After our day of training today, we caught a shuttle to the cruiser Olek Mihaylov, where we were allowed to observe a battle drill to know what we were getting into. The efficiency of Navy professionals was quite impressive. After the drill, we ate in the officers’ mess, and Commander Cristian Gray of the ship’s attached gunship squadron proved quite a source of stories. Though Mihaylov has yet to encounter Sagittarians, Cdr. Gray’s five-boat squadron has only recently transferred onboard from the garrison station at Palmisano, where a Sagittarian cruiser-analogue made a rather spectacular raid on the orbital infrastructure, destroying a refinery station and killing thirty. Gray’s squadron suffered no losses, but he also assures me they did no real damage to the attacker.

His story (backed up by a formal report and a recording which I have since seen parts of) is interesting because it gives his personal account of what it is like to go head to head with the Sagittarians. His observation that their point defense weapons are not very effective against Navy strike ships is interesting, but so is his equal insistence that Navy strike weapons are totally ineffective against Sagittarian ships of the most well-known type.

The pre-launch ready klaxon wailed in Cristian’s ears, and he scanned the readouts in front of him for the final time. The ready indicators for Tamara’s and Angelos’s gunnery stations held steady and green; everything was as ready as it could be. 

Cristian flipped the last safety switch, and the hangar launch system took over, lifting the three spacers and Foxhound, their eighty-ton AG-36 Magpie gunship, to the catapult deck. One of the advantages of garrison duty was that a Naval field station always carried magnetic catapults for its squadrons; being fired from an over-sized missile launch rail was far more exhilarating than wobbling out of a too-small hangar with a tense set of thruster burns.  

As the lead ship of the squadron, Cristian always launched first. The readiness klaxon went silent, and was followed by the thud of the catapult clamps latching onto his boat and the steady tone of the launch warning. He put his head back in the crash-padded cockpit seat just in time to be crushed into the padding by eight gees of acceleration. In front of him, the square of empty space outside the hangar’s mouth yawned wide, then swallowed the Magpie. As soon as it had started, the acceleration was gone. 

“Launch complete.” Cristian engaged manual control and engaged the drive’s lesser acceleration. Behind him, the other four Magpies of his squadron launched one after another and formed up on his flanks. 

“Foxhound, target heading remains unchanged.” The young strike controller on the station sounded nervous, and Cristian didn’t blame her. It wasn’t every day a cruiser-sized alien ship blazed into a Frontier system on a high-speed pass. “Still heading for the refinery.” 

“Still no response?” Cristian put himself on an intercept course, watching the displays to make sure the other four gunships copied the maneuver. The garrison had been hailing the intruder for some time, without result, and could only interpret its behavior as hostile. 

“No response. Command authorization to fire if fired upon.” 

“Roger, Control.” Cristian flipped the levers to power Foxhound’s weapons. Behind him, the pilots of the other four gunships powered their own weapons. 

That the ship was of a kind with the aggressive wanderers seen across the Sagittarius Gap was only too clear from its hull profile and drive signature. There was no telling what sort of weaponry or defensive systems the ship employed; his flight might run into a curtain of fire at any moment. Even if they didn’t, five gunships wasn’t much of a threat to anything of cruiser size; all the weapons of all five Magpies would probably do little more than annoy the aggressor while it slagged local installations. They were, unfortunately, almost all the Navy had in Palmisano. 

As the distance closed, Cristian pulled up a wire-frame of the intruder. Ops on the station had done its best to highlight probable weapons emplacements and other identifiable features, but its sleek design was so alien that their notations remained little but guesswork. No Confederated Worlds vessel had yet exchanged fire with a Sagittarian cruiser-analogue and survived the ordeal. “Let’s do this at high rel-V.” He traced a line up one side of the wire-frame, following a cranny between two titanic plates of what were probably an armored outer hull. “Close to the hull as we can.” Flying close to the big ship was dangerous, but if the alien’s point defenses were anything like Terran systems, it would be less effective  

“They’ll shoot at us for sure if we get that close.” Lyuben, Cristian’s second in command, observed. 

“Then shoot back. They don’t pay us extra to bring ordinance back to the station.” The more annoying the squadron was, the better; they might even be sufficiently nettlesome to save most of the civilian orbital industry. 

“Aye, Commander.” 

“Foxhound, be advised.” The controller’s excitable voice returned as the big, blue-grey hull of the intruder began to loom large ahead. “Thermal signature suggests possible weapons fire. No scatter cone.” 

“Understood, Control.” Cristian immediately adjusted his heading, and the rest of the squadron followed, avoiding whatever might have been fired into their path. No scatter cone meant that whatever the ship had done, it hadn’t fired railguns, as a Terran ship would do to dissuade incoming strike launches. “Let me know if you can confirm that.” 

Confirmation came moments later when one of the orbital tugs around the refinery exploded, its death-fire blooming silently over the limb of the planet below. “They’re shooting.” Cristian knew most of the tugs were remotely operated, but they were still expensive machines. “That got on target fast.” 

“Some sort of energy beam.” The strike controller confirmed. “Light speed time to target, but it probably took several seconds to punch through the hull.” 

“Time to target, forty seconds. Watch your hull sensors.” There was no hope of dodging an energy weapon at such close ranges, but if it took even half a second to burn through a hull, the agile gunships could roll out of the beam before suffering serious damage. 

The Sagittarian filled the forward viewscreen now, and Cristian picked out the canyon-like hollow which he meant to follow on his run. No lights glowed out from the shadowed parts of the ship, and the part of its hull in the light seemed to glow with elfin light, as if it was a construct of magic rather than engineering. 
 
“Beam just grazed me, lead.” Blondie, one of the other pilots, sounded shaken as her Magpie spiraled briefly out of formation, then slowly worked its way back into position. “Minor damage.” 

Cristian opened his comms to reply, but a shrieking sensor alert encouraged him to pull out of the path of another beam before it could fry Foxhound. A salvo of blue-white projectiles erupted from the invader’s hull, fired toward the refinery. He did his best not to focus on the lives of the refinery crew. “Twenty seconds. Guns free.” 

Behind him, Cristian felt more than heard the gun emplacements on the gunship’s port and starboard flanks spin into position, facing toward where the Sagittarian’s hull would shortly be. Tamara and Angelos would be disciplined and shoot only at things that looked vulnerable, but the greenhorn gunners on Blondie’s and Elcin’s rigs would probably unload their ordinance more randomly. 

“Ten seconds.” Again, he wheeled out of an energy beam, watching the squadron briefly scatter in all directions on the monitors. 

He’d meant to do a five-second countdown to weapons range, but a series of chasing beams kept him busy until he dove into the canyon between the titanic armor sections on the Sagittarian ship’s hull. The chatter of railshot and the bass thunder of plasma cannon from the gunners’ positions competed for the right to deafen Cristian first, with the intermittent shriek of hull sensor alarms indicating where various beam emplacements briefly found him. 

The bow to stern run lasted only three seconds, and Cristian wheeled Foxhound around for a second in time to see the refinery station, spouting fire and debris, break in half. The Sagittarian hadn’t slowed to enter orbit; its velocity was already carrying it away from the planet. There was no sign of damage from the ordinance his squadron had unloaded. “Dammit.” 

“Foxhound, it’s control. They’re leaving. Break off pursuit and perform search and rescue.” 

“Control-” 

“Priority order, Commander.” This time, it wasn’t the nervous strike controller’s voice, but the stern bark of the garrison commander. “Civilian lives are at stake. Pick up survivors from the refinery.” 

Cristian ground his teeth. He knew his squadron hadn’t done any real damage to the cruiser with only one pass – but he also knew there was little chance of doing more with a second. “Roger, control. Search and rescue.” 

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Editor's Loudspeaker: Well, Then.

2947-06-26 - Editor's Loudspeaker: Well, Then.

Today's announcement surprised even me.

I never even put in a request to participate in the embed coverage. I sent a message back to Centauri to check if there was a mistake, and they assured me there wasn't. They also told me that Nojus Brand will arrive here at Håkøya by the end of the week, and we'll proceed together to Maribel to report to the Fifth Fleet's headquarters.

I would say something about it, but I'm still in shock. Of all the people the studio could pick to send out with the fleet, they picked me? To go to war?

I'm not a member of the faith myself, but any of you who are, start praying for Nojus, myself, and the rest of the team. Even nestled in the heart of the fleet, even though the Fifth Fleet will probably be overwhelming firepower against these Sagittarian raiders, we won't be entirely out of danger.

I can only say I'm a bit terrified, but I'll do my best. I hope that's enough.

--Duncan

 

(NOTE: I know Nojus will do his best too, but I doubt he's scared of any of this. Compared to his average week, this little Naval dust-up is probably more like a vacation.)

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Notice: Cosmic Background Coverage of the Sagittarius War

2947-06-26 - Notice: Cosmic Background Coverage of the Sagittarius War

With Admiral Tosi's announcement that the Navy considers the Sagittarius Frontier to be a theatre of war and a declaration of war aims working its way through Confederated Parliament, Cosmic Background Studios has decided to accept an Admiralty offer of embedded reporting with the Fifth Fleet.

The obvious choice to lead the embed is our own Sovanna Rostami, but she has recently experienced a medical scare which makes us all hesitant to ship her off with the Navy into a war zone. Other notable personalities both inside and outside our organization have come forward to volunteer for this role, making our final decision a very challenging one.

While we will continue to provide variety entertainment on our vidcast episodes, we will be replacing some of our content with war coverage for the duration of hostilities. On the vidcast episodes, we will be replacing the Mercenary Logs and Accidental Legend feature segments with update segments recorded by our team with the Fifth Fleet. The weekly Tales from the Inbox text feed series will be on hold for the duration of hostilities, to be replaced with a compelling story culled from the fleet's records. Obviously, we will be working with Naval Intelligence to make sure no secret information is released.

As the loss of Tales from the Inbox might indicate to most of you, we have decided that Duncan Chaudhri will lead the embed team, as he is nearer to the Fifth Fleet's current headquarters than any of our other leading personalities. He won't, of course, be handling this big job alone - datasphere legend and veteran explorer Nojus Brand has agreed to work on contract as Duncan's partner for the duration of the embed assignment. Their support team behind the scenes will be composed of Sadie Leclerc, Koloman Gotti, and Toal Yoxall, three experienced multimedia techs who have been working with us in various behind the scenes roles for some time.

We're excited to see the reporting this team can bring to Cosmic Background.

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