Upcoming Events: Planetfall Day Festival

2946-12-09 - Upcoming Events: Cosmic Background Team at Planetfall Day Festival

As a reminder, the entire Cosmic Background team is traveling to Yaxkin City for the Planetfall Day celebrations. No programming interruption is anticipated; the vidcast programs for the next few days were pre-recorded over the past few days. Duncan has also prepared a Tales from the Inbox post for audience ingestion at the usual weekly time.

We hope to see many of you at the Thompsett Tavern meet-up on that day.

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Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Stray

2946-12-04 - Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Stray

The identity file for the woman in cell number three was short on information, as was usual for the sorts of people who found themselves in secure solitary lockup in a constabulary annex. As Hugh Apperlo took inventory at the beginning of his shift, she stood out from the usual crowd of junkies, violent drunks, and street scum; most of the prisoners who woke up in the Temerity District annex holding cells were the same sorts, in a reassuring sort of way.

The district was, for lack of more charitable words, somewhat rough and run-down. The miracle of the Coreward Frontier which had lifted Maribel from obscurity to a growing and prosperous planet had passed over Temerity District and its sprawling unmanaged cityscape of slums. For all that, Hugh was fond of the place – it was his home, and though keeping order was an impossibility, he considered it his job to keep the disorder limited to the familiar, local sort.

“What’s her problem?” Hugh asked Aref, the night constable. The man was still hanging around as usual, to make sure his replacement found everything in order.

“Hell if I know.” The weary-looking officer threw up his hands. “Chief Sterling hauled her down here in here in the middle of the shift, and she hasn’t said a peep. She’d be nice to look at if she weren’t skinsculpted all to hell.”

Hubert shuddered at the thought, though a casual glance at the cell monitors hadn’t suggested anything amiss about the prisoner. Skinsculpt was illegal on most of the Confederated Worlds, but illegal or no, Maribel’s position as gateway to the frontier meant that it had a strong black market in depravity. Usually, such degenerate behavior and those who catered to it stuck close to the spaceport or to the centers of wealth and privilege; to find it in Temerity District was an unwelcome novelty. “Varinia Villa.” He read the name of the sparsely populated file. “Age, thirty. Native of Cardona’s Landing. Aref, where’s that?”

“Looked it up earlier. Turns out that it’s a drain-circler in the Treaty Zone.”

Hugh was never good at astrography, but he did know the Treaty Zone was on the border with the Hegemony, on the opposite side of Confederated Space. “Hell of a way to come, to end up in lockup here.”

Arif gave a snort of disdain. “Freak like her, she should’ve stayed put.” The night guardsman removed his duty badge. “See you tomorrow, Hugh.”

After seeing his associate off, Hugh started processing morning release forms. As usual for a Monday morning, most of the prisoners who he’d taken charge of would be released in the first third of the shift. The weekened “rush” of drunken brawls, domestic disputes, erratic junkies, and incompetent petty thieves would be set free to wander the streets once more, their records blackened with fresh but minor offenses. Some of the “regulars” spent so many nights in lockup that Hugh would greet them by their first name as they were led out; others would leave looking bewildered as to how they managed to find themselves in lockup in the first place. It was a sorry routine, shepherding Maribel’s dregs through the petty-crime system, but it was a comfortable one.

When he reached the entry for the woman prisoner, Hugh found no criminal charge or term of incarceration, only her name, home-world, and age. If Arif was to be believed, the Chief himself had hauled her in – yet, the arresting officer had put no details about how long she was to be held. That she was a skinsculpt wasn’t even listed in the records.

With a weary, bureaucratic sigh, Hugh punched in the guard-desk intercom code and hooked into the comms system in cell number three. “Sorry to bother you, miss. I can’t find your file. Did your arresting officer give you a reference number?” He could find her file, but its emptiness seemed sufficiently sinister that a white lie might worry her less.

On the video feed, the woman half-hidden by shadow stood up fluidly and moved into the light leaking through the view-glass in the armored door. As she did, Hugh could see what Arif had been referring to; the left side of her body had been heavily skinsculpted, with her flesh seeming to be stretched taut over angular, geometric skeletal extensions. Embedded in this tissue were hundreds of odd, crystalline structures; even in the faint light in the cell, these glittered darkly, as if wrapping the tattered grey light around themselves. A simple, sheer dress of smart-fabric, cut around the modifications which could not be hidden by mere technological cloth, did little to accentuate her slim and relatively curveless frame, but her angular face was quite unmodified and, Hugh decided in agreement with his compatriot Arif, fairly attractive.

“The guard has changed.” She stared into the lens, pointedly not addressing Hugh’s question. “Who are you?”

“Constable Apperlo. First shift lockup guard.” He replied. This was all he was usually comfortable telling prisoners, except the ones he had begun to know from their regular visits.

“Apperlo.” She echoed. “You don’t mind if I call you Hugh, do you?”

Hugh, blood suddenly running cold, didn’t reply for several seconds. Eventually, he decided on his response. He’d never seen the degraded woman before in his life; she couldn’t possibly have known his name unless Arif had let it slip. “I would prefer you did not.”

Her wordless sound of reply was noncommittal, almost whimsical, but the expression on her angular face – angular by nature, not by sculpt, Hugh guessed – was neutral and solemn. “My file won’t be of any use to you.” She eventually came back to the question. “I wouldn’t be here except by choice, and you can be rid of me whenever you want.”

“This is the precinct lockup, Miss Villa.” Hugh reminded her. “You don’t-”

“Varinia, please.”

Hugh soldiered on as best he could. “You don’t have a say in your period of incarceration. We’ll have a time of release as soon as your file is located, and you will be leaving at that time.”

“Will I, Hugh?” Varinia Villa stretched her arms lopsidedly, demonstrating the reduced flexibility of the artificially-shaped and decorated limb over the natural one. “And when I do leave, what will stop some street thugs for tearing a skinsculpt freak like me apart?” The dead tone in which she delivered the phrase was almost more awful than the reality of her appearance.

“Skinsculpt is illegal.” Hugh replied automatically, though it didn’t answer the question.

“A practice for degenerates who have embraced the darkness and tried to erase their humanity.” The deliberately lifeless continued; she was only echoing rote what was law on so many worlds. As if all the animating force had left her, the woman’s shoulders and head drooped, and she turned away from the camera. “I couldn’t agree more.”

Hugh winced; he realized the blunder he’d made. The Treaty Zone was unmanaged, barbarous, and chaotic, and those who lived there were pirates, fanatics, chattel traffickers, and worse. If she was truly a native of that place, it was entirely possible that her alterations had not been her own choice. “I’m sorry.” He said, without pressing the button to carry his voice into the cell. Reversing an elaborate skinsculpt was often much more expensive than procuring it, whether or not it was done legally; nobody who ended up in Temerity had that sort of money.

“You probably can’t find a file because I asked your Chief to arrest me.” The prisoner sat back down on the cot, where she’d been sitting solemnly when Hugh had done his visual inspection of the cells upon arrival. After shifting so the half-light hid her alterations under a coat of shadows, she looked back up at the camera. “He’s a decent man. He brought me in here. Gave me a few names of officers I could trust. One of those names was yours.”

Hugh didn’t know what to say. Chief Sterling was among the district’s most respected persons, and though he was getting near retirement, his firm hand on the law enforcement tiller had probably slowed Temerity District’s long decline. To be considered someone trustworthy by the Chief was something Hugh didn’t think he deserved.

As he struggled to figure out how to ask how this unfortunate woman had managed to wander into Temerity on her own, Hugh looked down at the desk display and noticed that Villa’s file had changed. There was still no information about the crime for which she had been arrested, but she was now scheduled for release along with most of the others. In a little while, Hugh would have to send her out with the rest, and what they'd do to her once they were outside the building was obvious.

This is the first part of an account sent to me by a Maribel native who is a new member of our wide interstellar community. Hugh A. was happy for me to share his full name and his story. He also provided a more complete account of what his friensd Varinia V. suffered at the hands of the degenerate wretches of the Silver Strand, but I don't think that such a tale is appropriate for this audience. It is sufficient to say that the Strand is not a nice place, and that we all look forward to a time when the treaty-demilitarization of the region is lifted and it can be brought back into the fold of proper civilization. The fact that skinsculpting and other forms of dehumanizing nano-procedure are commonplace there is well-known, but the fact that many are put through such twisting without their own consent is less widely publicized.

The second half of Hugh's account will be featured in next week's Tales from the Inbox: Sculptor's Second Chance.

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Tales from the Inbox: The Prisoner of Vincennes

2946-11-27 - Tales from the Inbox: The Prisoner of Vincennes

The armored door simply refused to submit to the will of its new master. Even industrial cutting torches, of the same kind used by shipbreaking crews to slice through the armored hulls of scrapped warships, failed to do more than etch its surface. For the two weeks it had taken to navigate Lyla Vincennes from the auctioneer’s yard at Nova Paris to her center of operations at Herakles, Petia had on more than one occasion wandered down to the sealed portal to wonder at its mystery contents.

Now, of course, Petia had the upper hand over the vexing barrier. Under her supervision, two technicians prepared a nano-demolition charge, configuring the payload carefully with a sample of the durable door’s alloy. She tapped her foot impatiently, but it didn’t seem to hurry them; that was probably for the best. Petia knew well enough what happened when nano-demolition went wrong.

At last, the two techs pressed the charge against the door and stepped back. “Boss?” One of them asked.

“Whenever you’re ready, Zenais.” Petia tried not to hate him for making her tell him once again to remove the obstacle, and didn’t entirely succeed. She’d made quite clear that she wanted the door gone, so she could see what was behind it.

The tech jabbed a control on his wrist unit, and the lumpen charge flattened out and seemed to vanish. Petia hadn’t expected a climactic explosion, but she couldn’t help but pace back and forth as the nanomachines worked their way into the armored alloy of the door and undid its durable structure. The techs fidgeted nervously, glancing at their status monitors to view the progress of the demolition.

All at once, the heavy, impossibly strong barrier crumbled in on itself, as if transmuted instantly into a pile of loose gravel. Petia stepped backwards as loose pieces of crumbled armor bounced down the corridor toward her boots, and let the technicians go first, sending the deactivation signal to the nanomachines and setting out collectors to retrieve the expensive demolition swarm.

Petia couldn’t wait for them to finish; she strode past them and peered into the darkness beyond. “Lights.” She instructed, but venerable Lyla Vincennes’s computer did not respond, and no lights came on. With a long-suffering sigh, she activated the emergency light function of her wrist unit and swept its wan beam through the compartment that the ship’s former owners had gone through so much effort to seal.

The only thing in the room was a single metal crate two meters across, bolted securely to the deck. Based on the thick layer of dust covering everything, Petia guessed it hadn’t been touched for years – perhaps for most of Vincennes’s career. Visions of long-hidden treasures dancing in her mind, she wasted no time undoing the three latches holding the hinged front of the container closed. Visions of the lost Ladeon Hoard danced in her mind as she yanked the crate open, its aged hinges shrieking in protest.

Inside, she found no treasure. Huddled in the corner of the two-meter-long cargo crate, there was only the hunched and pitiable figure of a man, cuffed and shackled with chains of the same durable alloy as the door. His face was gaunt and unshaven, his skin pale, and his dark eyes stared into Petia’s faint flashlight beam with a level and unperturbed expression, as if he had expected her at exactly that moment.

It took Petia a few moments to realize what was so wrong about the prisoner’s situation. Though it was obvious he’d been there a long time, there was no trace of food or water in his makeshift cell. How long had he gone without food or water? It was, she realized, a month at minimum. He should have been only a dessicated corpse.

“Who are you?” She managed to ask weakly. Perhaps, she thought, “what” was a more appropriate question. No human should have been still alive after so long. Under the light of her flashlight beam, his face seemed vaguely familiar.

After staring blankly back at her for two full seconds, the prisoner dropped his eyes to the floor, saying nothing. Whether that was because he did not wish to give his identity, or because he no longer remembered, Petia couldn’t be sure – he didn’t seem insane, and he didn’t have the subtly uncanny stillness associated with the horror of an automaton designed to appear human.

“Who are you?” She repeated, more forcefully.

Still, the prisoner offered no answer. He merely raised his head once more, looking her straight in the eyes, as if demanding that she either free him of his bonds, or depart and seal the door once more. Though he still didn’t speak, she sensed that he was merely holding his voice until she decided whether to free him.

Though surprised at how tempting it was to seal him in until he talked, Petia hurried back to her demolition team for tools and assistance. Though taken aback at the sight, they hurried to help, and soon the man was freed of the durable shackles. Despite his drawn and weak appearance, he was too heavy for Petia to move alone – with Zenais, she managed to haul him upright, and carry him out of the sealed compartment into the well-lit corridor.

“Thank you.” The man whispered, shutting his eyes against the light.

“Don’t mention it.” Petia, straining to hold him up. As she had suspected, he could speak without trouble. “How did you get in there?”

The man took his time answering, raising his head to look around as his eyes adjusted. “Treachery, as usual.” He eventually offered, just as quietly as before.

“As-” Petia was interrupted from asking what he meant by “as usual” when, with a sudden surge of unexpected strength, the man swept both Zenais and her aside, knocking them to the deck. “Thank you, Petia.” Just as she realized that she hadn’t given the prisoner her name, he was gone, moving so fast that he almost seemed to disappear.

By the time Petia was getting to her feet and helping demolitions tech Zenais up, an alarm had begun to sound. She knew before reports started flooding into her comm that the prisoner was gone without a trace; she just hoped he hadn’t done any major damage on his way out.

The account submitted by Petia S. is engaging and mysterious, but unfortunately, we only have her word that things took place as she described. Assuming she is telling the truth of things as best as she is able, I can only assume that she found the place where a past crew of her ship hid some sort of human-mimicking automaton. By its behavior and state in which she found it, it seems that whatever purpose they bought the illicit machine for, it had gone rogue and they had decided to deal with it by locking it away, perhaps hoping someday to find some means to repair their expensive and horrific purchase.

The line the entity is reported to have delivered just before tossing its rescuers to the ground and escaping is far too convenient and clever to be accurate; I suspect Petia misheard "treachery, the fools" or something similar, as she describes it, or him, as having a very soft voice.

Unfortunately, as this account lacked any surveillance recordings to back it up, I can't verify any of it, except that a Petia S. is actually the owner of the ship mentioned in the account, and that it was indeed recently purchased at a public auction.

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Tales from the Inbox: Junker's Justification

2946-11-20 - Tales from the Inbox: Junker's Justification

Today, we see the end of Jacob Borisov's four-part account of his role in the discovery of the xenoarchaeological sites on Vinteri. After making landfall on an icy rogue world and trekking six kilometers across its inhospitable surface at the direction of the businessman Kenneth Lorenz, Mr. Borisov suddenly found himself at the edge of an icy cliff, over which his eccentric client had apparently run headlong.

Obviously, since Mr. Lorenz is still alive, this is not what happened. Indeed, standing on that precipice, Borisov was very near to the goal of the entire adventure. Soon, he would set eyes on the first of what we now know are at least seven xenoarchaological sites buried on the rogue world we now call Vinteri - a site which was apparently discovered by a scout pilot and covered up for more than a century by a family which dreamed of plundering the riches within.

“Lorenz, where are you?” Jacob radioed.

“Checking on something.” Came the reply. “I’ll be back in a moment. The target is down the cliff face about twenty meters.”

“Down?” Jacob replied, getting on his hands and knees to peer over the edge. About the indicated distance below him, there was an opening in the vertical rock wall. A quick reconnoiter with the grav sled revealed it to be the entrance of a wide cavern, opened to the sky by the same cataclysm which had sundered the hill itself. Visible within under the sled’s lights, the cavern was blocked by a cave-in, but the space between mouth and cave-in was an impressively broad gallery with a sturdy-looking, arched ceiling. “Looks empty to me, boss.”

“Why do you think I needed explosives?” Lorenz shot back. “Get down there and clear that cave-in.”

Jacob grumbled into his helmet, then brought up the demolitions heads-up display and routed it through the sled’s camera feed. The small charges secured to the grav sled might be just enough to clear the collapse, but he would need to be careful not to make the situation even worse. If there was a secondary collapse, there might not be enough mining-grade demolitions equipment in Bancroft’s armory to dig out Lorenz’s secrets.

Jacob sent the other mercenaries to look for their vanished employer and make sure nothing unfortunate happened to him, then secured a grapnel into the hilltop and, assisted by the grav sled, lowered himself down to the mouth of the broken cavern. He could do what Lorenz wanted, of course – compared to some of the tricky cave-ins he’d had to move on Thirty Below, this one looked like child’s play. The mystery of where his employer had wandered off to was someone else’s problem, at least for the moment. If the businessman was in radio contact, he hadn’t gone far, and probably wasn’t in immediate danger.

Examining the cave-in, Jacob found it to be mostly ice, rather than rock. Oddly, it seemed to be the same sort of ice as found on the hillside above, and it showed some signs of melting and re-freezing. According to his suit’s acoustic probe, the cave-in was only a few meters thick – the trick would be to push the debris outwards, rather than down into whatever lay beyond.

As Joseph busied himself setting the charges, he turned his helmet radio into the channel created by the other mercenaries as they searched for Lorenz. He was less surprised than they were that no trace of the business magnate was found.

When the charges were in place, Jacob called his subordinates and suggested they retire to the lee side of the hill, then hooked himself back to the line and climbed up above the roof of the cavern mouth. “Lorenz, I’m ready to blow the cave-in.”

Jacob hadn’t expected a response, but he got one anyway. “I am clear, Captain.” He replied. “Continue when you are ready.”

Jacob moved the grav sled clear, then, after a brief countdown, triggered the charges remotely. Below him, a shower of broken ice erupted from the cave mouth and plummeted to the shattered rubble below. The sound of the blast was muffled by the thinness of the atmosphere, resulting in a sound more like that of a pane of glass being shattered than an explosion.

Within seconds of the sounds of falling material fading, Jacob saw three helmets peeking over the edge to look down. He spared them a nod of confidence, then began to descend once more. It was time to see what his employer was after. If it was anything like the valuables which brought prospectors to a world like Thirty Below, it would be veins of rare mineral substances, but Jacob wondered if instead it was a treasure-trove of ill-gotten wealth, hidden by a long-dead space pirate.

Walking through the pale mist left over by the explosion’s rapid vaporization of a small portion of the ice, the mercenary stopped short when he saw a pillar of undoubtedly artificial origin, just beyond where the cave-in had been. As the mist cleared, he saw it was one of a pair, capped with a broad, sturdy arch. Beyond the pillars, walls of carved stone extended into the darkness.

Though there was no mistaking artifice, there was no sign of ornamentation, except at the capstone of the arch. There, Jacob saw a curious symbol half-covered by an ice formation. Shaped something like a pair of concentric triangles, one slightly crooked with respect to the other, the sigil was immediately familiar, as it was identical to the marking on Kenneth Lorenz’s pendant, which had also been scratched on the Hawkbat’s auxiliary data core.

“Call your pilot, Captain Borisov.” Lorenz radioed, but Jacob heard the man’s voice through the thin atmosphere as well. He turned around to find the businessman picking his way across the cavern floor towards the archway. How he’d gotten there so quickly after the blast, Jacob couldn’t begin to guess. “The ship should fit quite easily here, if we clear the ice your explosives didn’t deal with.

“How-“ Jacob realized the answer before he finished asking the question, spying light-colored scuff-marks on the stone. Clearly, the Hawkbat had been here before. If he had to guess, one of Lorenz’s ancestors had been a pilot in the Terran Navy, had stumbled on the structure while out on a routine patrol, and kept it secret, hoping someday to return and “discover” it for himself. Perhaps the pilot had even caused the minor cave-in, to hide it from any other explorer who might happen to land on the rogue world. Lorenz, knowing the story, had needed only the flight logs on the old data core. “Family secrets, Mr. Lorenz?”

“Not for much longer.” The man put out a gloved hand to touch the ancient stonework. “Most of my family didn’t believe great-grandad’s stories. But I did. He was here all those years ago.”

“What’s inside?” Jacob hurried into the archway, heedless of the danger inherent in such an ancient structure.

“We have about an hour to find out, so get your people down here and that ship moving.”

“Captain, it’s Sharma.” The cool, matter-of-fact voice of the pilot back at the Hawkbat cut in. “Bancroft just called down to say that a half-dozen grav signatures just lit up in orbit, and they’re maneuvering under power. No idea what they are, but they’re moving fast.”

“Moving to where?” Jacob asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Looks like they’re coming to pay us a visit down here, Captain. Or at least to get orbital over our heads. Bancroft says they’re bugging out.”

“Bring that junker over here, Sharma.” Jacob instructed. “We’ve got a landing site for you, if you can do a little tricky flying. We’ll be orbital before they get near us.” After cutting the link to the pilot, he turned back to his employer. “You think they’ll just let us take off with whatever we can carry, Lorenz?”

“The last person to find this place got away with this.” Lorenz held up his pendant, with its symbol matching the archway. “But we won’t chance it. Take pictures, but leave everything. We’ll be back.” With a flourish, the businessman withdrew a prospector’s beacon from his equipment harness and spiked it into the floor in front of the archway. Jacob knew the device would squawk at anyone who approached that the site was claimed, and provide contact information for the person who placed it. It wouldn’t stop smugglers or pirates, but it would at least give legitimate explorers pause.

“You came all the way here just to look at it?” Jacob shook his head inside his helmet. The idea of walking through an alien structure preserved under the ice and rock of such a place, and not taking any of the treasures one might find within, was simply beyond him.

“It’s worth more the less we touch.” Lorenz insisted. “Clock’s ticking, Captain. Would you like to be the third person to see what’s beyond that doorway?”

Kenneth Lorenz did indeed make his money back tenfold on the effort to find his great-grandfather's secrets; several institutes of xenoarchaeology competed to buy out his claim for the site, and the winning bid by the Sagan Institute here on Centauri was enough for Lorenz to retire. Instead, he bought majority stakes in several mercenary companies, including the Bancroft crew's firm, and steered the institute toward these companies when it was faced with the need to protect a whole planet from the possibility of illicit scavengers damaging its archaeological wealth.

Despite early speculation, it is clear now that Vinteri was never a truly inhabited world. The grand, stone-carved structures on and beneath its surface were not colonies or cities; they were tombs or perhaps, as no remains have yet been discovered, memorials. Two and a half thousand years before humanity's first space age, an interstellar civilization of which we know nothing else decided to memorialize its fallen greats with eternal tombs preserved in the ice of starless Vinteri. They guarded these tombs with a fleet of automated sentries; fortunately for the exploration effort, by the time Lorenz and his hired help arrived there, only a handful of these machines remained operational.

Examination of one of the captured sentry automatons by both the Confederated Navy and the Sagan Institute demonstrates that this mystery people vanished before they reached our own level of technological sophistication, leaving only the tombs on Vinteri behind.

Discoveries will undoubtedly continue to be made on this remarkable world for many lifetimes, and perhaps similar monuments exist elsewhere, waiting to be discovered.

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