BUMN 交易所

2952-11-06 – Tales from the Service: The Plea of the Kyaroh, Pt. 1 

During the holidays last year, we were able to have a lengthy conversation with a Kyaroh representative, Lved of their delegation to the Seventh Fleet. Advisor Lved departed from Sagittarius Gate in January, but he and his associates reappeared in the system in September, and he wanted to sit down for another interview 

We did sit down the same day I talked to Lieutenant Reid, again with Commander Monaghan; though he is no longer the ASWO on the Sprawl as of August, the Kyaroh seemed to insist on her presence rather than that of her replacement. This time, however, I was there alone, while Nojus remained here. I would have run this interview when I published the other, but I was waiting for Naval Intelligence approval (as you will see, Lved predicted I might have this sort of a delay in publication). 

This interview was conducted in-person on 3 October, but for security reasons, the location of the interview is being withheld.

D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri is a junior editor and wartime head field reporter for Cosmic Background.     

S.A.L. – Senior Advisor Lved is a close associate of the chief of the Kyaroh delegation to the Sagittarius Gate system, and speaks in this interview as a private individual of his people, not as an official representative of his government. Lved’s grasp of Anglo-Terran is quite good, but not perfect; in this transcript his words will be presented verbatim, without correction. 

T.B.M. – Commander Tory B. Monaghan is the outgoing Alien Sapient Welfare Officer for Kyaroh on the Sprawl. She has learned the language of her charges and in this interview will act mainly as an interpreter to smooth over language and cultural differences. 

[D.L.C.] – Adviser Lved, I was surprised when you reached out to me so quickly after your return. 

[S.A.L.] – I very much cherished our last conversation, Journalist Chaudhri, and since I have returned from the scene of the crisis with much your people wish to know, I could envision no better venue to release this information. Where is your associate? 

[D.L.C.] – Mr. Brand is aboard Ashkelon with the rest of our team. He told me to ask you if you had read up on Orson Card. 

[S.A.L.] – I am gratified that the Brand recalls our conversation. His recommendation was welcome, and I collected several works of this author before my travels. Alas, I could make little of it until the computer on my ship read it aloud; I read your Anglo-Terran glyphs not well. By listening I was able to complete three stories. 

[T.B.M.] – Yes, the difference in our written languages is vast. That you can make any sense of our writing must take significant effort. 

[D.L.C.] – A lot of us listen to classic books anyway. The language is just different enough that it’s pretty slow for us to read too. 

[S.A.L.] – Your words are very kind, but I do not read this literature to humor the Brand or your species. It is entirely to the benefit of my mission and people to understand this mythology. 

[D.L.C.] – Candid as always, Mr. Lved. You mentioned you traveled to the scene of the crisis – would that be your home-world? 

[S.A.L.] – Yes. As you were told on our last meeting, our home world is occupied on the surface, but our government and many people still resist underground. 

[D.L.C.] – You also said this was a situation many years old, not a new crisis. 

[S.A.L.] – At the time, this was true. It has developed since that the Incarnation has launched a renewed attack on the remainder of our people, when they were content to merely trod the surface of our worlds before. 

[T.B.M.] – When did this start? 

[S.A.L.] – It had already begun before I returned, but it has grown in intensity. Our leadership’s pleas before were for your Seventh Admiral to push his offensive, but it is now more urgent. We have need of direct aid. 

[D.L.C.] – Direct aid? You want the Seventh Fleet to send ships and troops to Kyaroh space? 

[S.A.L.] – It is not a question of want. Our mutual foe has devoted vast numbers of troops to an assault on subterranean Kyaroh enclaves. If there is no assistance, entire cities will be wiped out. Perhaps entire worlds of cities. We understand that this will require the will of your Confederated populace, not merely the assent of the Seventh Admiral. 

[D.L.C.] – I am terrible at astrography, but I don’t think the Seventh Fleet has a secure lane along which to send this aid. 

[T.B.M.] – You are correct, Mr. Chaudhri. Individual long-range ships can travel there, but larger forces cannot be supplied for operations there. 

[S.A.L.] – Your concern for logistics is predicted. But we have heard of a formation which operated alone in Incarnation space for more than one of your years. A formation whose elements were incorporated into the Seventh Admiral’s forces. 

[D.L.C.] – Hold on. You are talking about the Lost Squadrons. That wasn’t an intentional tactic, it was desperation. Most of the vessels involved were written off even if they survived. 

[S.A.L.] – It was desperation, and it is desperation now. My government's proposal was submitted to the Seventh Admiral only a few days ago. We do not wish for secrecy in this, from our foes or our allies. It would not be so dire a condition for your ships as the first time. This formation would not be fully without supply; our colonies would provide them any available resources. 

[T.B.M.] – You didn’t forward this request through the ASWO’s office. 

[S.A.L.] –  We did not. Your replacement is polite but his way is not toward urgency. 

[D.L.C.] – Even if your people did supply those ships, they’d be away from proper maintenance facilities for months at minimum. They’d be out of line for months afterward just undoing all the emergency patching the crews would have to do. 

[S.A.L.] – We do not ask this ignorant of these facts. We do have something to offer which the Seventh Admiral lacks. Our people can supplement your ground forces for the invasion of the Incarnation worlds. 

[T.B.M.] – Infantry, Lved? When you were here last your government insisted it had nothing to spare for ground operations. 

[D.L.C.] – Infantry? Kyaroh ground troops? I hadn’t thought of this as something Seventh Fleet needs. 

[S.A.L.] – I have verified this is open information with your intelligence service. The main infantry formation used on your side of the Gap cannot be deployed to this side; the infrastructure to house and supply it does not exist. Only the fleet infantry formations are available until this is rectified. Your admiral requested Kyaroh troops for planetary assault as a price for direct aid, and this was refused. 

[D.L.C.] – Right. The FVDA is a regional force. Its troops didn’t sign up for offensives in enemy space, and they probably don’t have ships capable of moving useful formations this direction either. 

[S.A.L.] – There is much risk, but this why I was sent to make this need public to your people. We would not accept this arrangement if extermination were not a present danger. 

[D.L.C.] – I am honored you would bring this through our media company, and we will see what we can do to release this information to the public, but publication is subject to Naval Intelligence approval. 

[S.A.L.] – They will approve, Journalist Chaudhri, but it may be after some delay for negotiations to progress. 

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PENTA LOGIN

2952-10-30 – Tales from the Service: The Beauty of the Nebula 

Stefan Giunta swept his Cavalier’s directional sensor cluster across the thick mass of nebula gasses as he and Clemens circled around it. Based on the strange readings he was getting, the cloud had to have a high phased matter concentration, but he lacked the equipment to determine quite what kind. Flying through a phased-matter soup would put a lot of wear and tear on their rigs, but compared to the damage it could do to their mothership, they would be expected to take that risk. 

Beyond that, of course, it was nearly impossible to get any clear picture of the inside of the cloud. There was some chaotic radar reflection from some angles, but no infrared readings, nothing on gravimetrics, and nothing on the visible light scopes. 

“Think maybe there’s some debris in there, Giunta?” Clemens asked. 

“Could be.” Stefan panned the directional array back and forth, looking at the raw-data readout to try to get some better sense of what he was looking at, since the modeling computer had spat a series of errors and given up on the problem several minutes beforehand. “I think it’s all contiguous, but I can't get a good picture of the structure.” 

“Denser sub-layer of gas?” 

“Don’t think so.” Stefan fiddled with the frequency settings on his radio emitter. “The radar profile has hard edges from some angles.” 

“Let’s just call it in as a possible pirate harbor.” Clemens sighed. “The skipper will either have us light it up or route us around, and either way it won’t be a problem anymore.” 

“That’s probably safest.” Stefan knew only too well that Brushfire pirates did love to build forward bases in outriding clouds of the nebula, making it easier to raid nearby systems and get back into hiding, without leaving an easy trail back to the main hideout deeper in. “But I think we should get a visual.” 

“Bad idea.” Clemens’s voice had gone from lackadaisical to sharp in an instant. “Our rigs will be in maintenance for a week while the techs figure out what that cloud has done to them. And Commander Jansson will have us scrubbing deck plating and recycler tanks the whole time for risking a couple of brand-new Cavaliers just to satisfy our curiosity.” 

“No sense for us both to go in, then.” Stefan disengaged his autopilot and put his hands back on the stick. “Continue your orbit. I’ll catch you on the other side.” 

Clemens’s sigh was cut off by the other pilot muting the comms channel, probably in order to call in the uncertain sighting as a possible pirate installation. Stefan chose a course across the slightly narrowed middle of the cloud, then accelerated to a speed that would take him through in about two minutes and pointed all of his sensors forward. Running right into some object was incredibly unlikely, because even at the thickest part the cloud’s gasses would not reduce his visibility below a dozen kilometers, but he was interested in surviving this gamble, even if it did mean scrubbing recycler tanks. On the off-chance there was something to see, he’d be the one to see it. He’d heard stories of strange things people thought they’d seen in the Brushfire Nebula, and thought most of them just spacers’ tall tales, but perhaps today he’d have a story of his own. 

A few moments later, Stefan’s Cavalier entered the outer part of the gas cloud. There was no sudden transition from open space to misty pink and grey, only a gradual transition from the usual infinite crowding of background stars, to a black sky with fewer and fewer stars, then to no stars at all except the hazy orb of the putative local primary. Only when he was deep into the gas did the Cavalier’s lights start to light up the colors and striations that had been visible from a distance.  

“Still got you on sensors, Giunta.” Clemens had apparently gotten over his distaste for the idea, probably because he would get to be the one to tell Janssen “I told him so” if things went wrong. “See anything?” 

“Nothing yet.” Stefan gave his rig some reverse thrust, further extending his time inside the cloud. “Visibility is about fifteen or twenty klicks.” 

“You’ll be coming up on the largest area of radar artifacts in about ten seconds... Make that twelve.” 

Stefan put hi counted down in his head as his craft hurtled through the darkness. What was he expecting to see? Pirates building a new outpost? The shattered wreck of a hauler which had blundered into exotic phased matter and had its reactor go critical? Some strange nightmare shape uncoiling in the gloom like the cantina tall tales? 

The Cavalier’s lights glinted on something ahead. Stefan leaned forward against his restraints and stared hard, even though he would have plenty of time to review the recordings from all his cameras later. Whatever it was, it reflected the lights back into his eyes as it gently tumbled through the nebula pocket, but he got a glimpse of a jagged but somehow regular profile. 

In an instant, he was past the object, but just as quickly another one, this one far larger but obviously of the same kind, loomed up on the starboard side, each of its pillar-like protrusions as long as a space station’s docking gantry, each a different thickness, and each faceted like it was cut by a jeweler with hands the size of moons. 

“Woah.” Stefan made a few small corrections to his course. What he was looking at was so beautiful it could only be natural formations, but he hadn’t the faintest idea how such things could form out here. “No pirates, Clemens.” He paused to appreciate a smaller object, about the size of his Cavalier, that was particularly intricately formed. “Just some of the prettiest rocks you’ll ever see.”  

The position of this anomalous formation is, obviously, withheld, presumably to protect the objects from tampering until a Hegemony scientific expedition can study them in greater detail. Unfortunately, no images are provided with this account; most likely the intelligence officer aboard Flit Diver put them under seal to reduce the chances of someone guessing the location of the anomaly. 

I will spare you all Mr. Giunta’s longer description of the objects; it would nearly double the length of this feed item. He seems to regard seeing them as a life-changing event, though he is certain they are natural crystalline minerals. 

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PPL 交易所

2952-10-23 – Tales from the Service: The Anomaly in the Clouds

Though I recorded some other interviews while I was away, I don’t want to overload the feed with this relatively dry, informative material.

While we have been out in Sagittarius, a few interesting things have happened back in the Coreward Frontier worthy of mention. The raid at Adimari Valis has been well covered in other media outlets, obviously, but the arrival of Flit Diver at Maribel the day before the raid was announced in the media seems to have been largely overlooked.

For those of you who do not know, the Flit Diver is a carrier of the Rahl Hegemony Navy. While no formal pact appears to exist between the Confederated Worlds and the Hegemony stabilizing the border region until this conflict is ended, even a token force sent to the Maribel defense zone seems a gesture of goodwill indicative that such negotiations are ongoing. We at Cosmic Background get very little message traffic out of Hegemony space, though we are certain we have many readers and viewers there.

Apparently, the Flit Diver’s pilots had a bit of an interesting experience on the way across the Reach; their course took them close to the edge of the Brushfire Nebula, where they claim to have seen something quite spectacular.

[N.T.B. – This gesture of supposed goodwill is also an excuse to rotate Hegemony squadrons through a combat zone; trust the Hegemon to never let an opportunity to season his forces go to waste.]

Stefan Giunta adjusted the settings of his interceptor’s onboard radar, trying to find a combination where the artifacts along the left margins of the display disappeared. The Cavalier was a relatively new machine, having just been introduced the year before, and he still hadn’t flown one with a properly automated radar rig. He didn’t mind; the techs would work out the bugs eventually, and in the meantime, it was the fastest and most nimble strike rig in the Hegemony fleet, with enough firepower to make quick work of anything it managed to run down.

“Lead, I’m having sensor trouble. Anyone else picking up anything in that cloud?” Stefan bit back the word “again” automatically; he didn’t want the squadron comms log to suggest he was dissatisfied with the quality of his machine, and thus risk being reassigned to a squadron flying the older, far less glamorous Cuirassier. Stefan had flown Cuirassiers for the first four years of his service career, and while they were a capable machine, they would feel slow and cumbersome next to the Cavalier.

“Nothing on my plot.” Commander Daniel Jansson, the squadron leader, replied in an instant. “Anyone else?”

“Just some radar artifacts.” Elliott Clemens’s voice was full of grumpy exasperation that fortunately the transcript would be unable to record. “The radar is so sensitive it picks up denser areas of the nebula.”

“Probably nothing, but why don’t you both go check it out anyway.”

“Aye, Commander.” Stefan switched to a direct channel with the other pilot. “Clemens, you’re ahead of me, so why don’t you lead.”

“Acknowledged.” Clemens split from the formation and banked toward the extending arm of the nebula, and Stefan followed. The purple and orange haze of a nearby active area of the Brushfire Nebula soon filled his forward view, hiding all but the brightest stars. Few people lived in or around the nebula, partly because the area was not suitable for planet formation, and partly because high concentrations of phased-Epsilon and phased-Rho particles posed a risk to starships with standard phased-matter condensing reactors. Dense nebula clouds could even interfere with strike craft operations.

Fortunately, their squadron’s forward patrol, and their mothership’s course generally, were not intending to go into the Brushfire; they merely needed to skirt it until they reached the edge of Memoire de Paix. A more direct route to their destination through the Silver Strand was of course quite out of the question; it would violate treaties if Hegemony military forces passed openly through that region, and no-one had been able to arrange it even on a solidarity mission.

Though they didn’t intend to go through the nebula, its many far-spreading and poorly mapped arms moved, in astronomical terms, relatively fast. Theoretically, a pirate band – this was one sort of inhabitant the Brushfire always seemed to have plenty of – could use its greater knowledge of this shifting condition to set up ambushes on passing ships, thus requiring the Diver to send out forward patrols to clear each jump zone. Pirates attacking a fully escorted light carrier seemed farfetched to Stefan, even if brigands from that very nebula had battled Confederated cruiser squadrons on almost equal terms not yet fifteen years before. The Confederated military was soft and risk-averse; pirates knew that the same wasn’t true of the Hegemony Navy.

Oddly, as he came out of his turn on Clemens’s tail, Stefan saw that the radar artifacts in the nearest section of nebula hadn’t gone away. Normally, this sort of interference was resolved when the more capable forward-facing sensors were brought to bear on the problem.

“Still seeing it.” Clemens made a small course adjustment, and Stefan mirrored it. “You think maybe there is something in there?”

“Several somethings is more likely.” Stefan again tried to adjust his radar to clarify the plot, again without result. “But that’s a dense gas pocket, probably holding together under its own gravity. Visual sighting in there is going to be impossible.”

“No reactor signatures, nothing on infrared.” Clemens sent a proposed course to Stefan’s display. “Let’s do a close circuit. If we don’t pick anything up on thermal, there’s nothing to see.”

“Lead on.” Stefan moved the course from his display to his autopilot, then turned to the sensor controls. Even with the unreliable hardware on the Cavalier, if there were pirates hiding in there, he was about to know it.

Details

INVESTOR WALLET

2952-10-16 – Tales from the Service: The Incarnation Home Front, Part 2 

This is the remainder of the interview with Naval Intelligence lieutenant Kirsten Reid, whose first portion was posted last week. I have no further comment on this, except to speculate in hindsight that the names of the two worlds we discussed are very similar. Perhaps they are neighboring worlds, or even two planets in the same star system – that would explain the seemingly strange practice of shipping raw materials and food between them. I did not ask this at the time, unfortunately. 

D.L.C. - Duncan Chaudhri – Junior editor and wartime field reporter for Cosmic Background.

K.R.R. - Lieutenant Kirsten R. Reid is a Naval Intelligence senior analyst assigned to Seventh Fleet. Recently, she has been at Hausen’s World, the site of Operation HELLESPONT, examining the wealth of Incarnation intelligence left in the supply depot captured there. 

[D.L.C.] What about their planets? You say we have some idea of what life is like on them? 

[K.R.R.] Some of them, yes. There is one world that seems to be the home of many of troops in the garrison of Hausen’s World which we know most about; its name seems to be Prospero. It is most likely the closest of the Incarnation worlds to Sagittarius Gate but that distinction may be largely academic, a matter of a few tens of light years difference. 

[D.L.C.] Let me guess: it has a large, urban population? Heavily urbanized settlements have traditionally been the main source of Ladeonist sentiment in the Reach. 

[K.R.R.] We thought so too, and there is at least one major city on the planet’s surface, a fairly sizable metropolis called Kannagh’s Prospect. Strangely, though, analysis of the mail we intercepted suggested the garrison troops were drawn mainly from smaller settlements in the hinterland, not from the city itself. The only mail sender or receiver we can positively say had relations in the city was the second in command of the base. 

[D.L.C.] Strange. That would suggest that most of the population- 

[K.R.R.] Is distributed throughout the smaller settlements? Possibly, but more likely this garrison was selected specifically from the small communities. We aren’t sure why. 

[D.L.C.] Well, at least we must know a lot about life in these smaller towns on the planet. 

[K.R.R.] What we know is extensive but leaves gaps. We know that the average size of one of these communities seems to be about three hundred, and that they are by and large young places, with few elderly citizens, for example, and family structure is, despite Ladeonist tendencies in Reach cells, fairly strong. 

[D.L.C.] Well, perhaps the Incarnation centralizes elderly citizens in the cities, leading to the disparity. 

[K.R.R.]  We considered that but it doesn’t really fit the other facts. None of the garrison or the fleet in the system seemed to be sending anything to elderly parents or grandparents in the city for example. 

[D.L.C.] What about day to day life in these communities? 

[K.R.R.] Civilians in these communities are generally tradesmen focused on the agricultural industry. It seems strange that the industry needs so much labor – after all, references to agricultural automation equipment are fairly common in letters from Prospero to the troops here – so we have to assume this planet is a food exporter to the rest of Incarnation space; it’s the only thing that makes sense for that much of an investment in agriculture. Most likely, that means the city is a concentration of packing facilities intended for turning these products into long-shelf-life items that can be shipped to other worlds, but even this does not make sense. Where are the people sending messages to their relatives who work in factories? Why not also draw troops from these people? 

[D.L.C.] Perhaps the factory workers are implanted with specialized equipment that disagrees with the military implants. That doesn’t explain the lack of message traffic between the groups though. 

[K.R.R.] That... Almost works, actually. Not quite, but almost. I hadn’t thought of that. 

[D.L.C.] What’s the climate of this Prospero like? 

[K.R.R.] Prospero seems to swing wildly between long, hot, arid summers, and shorter, brutally cold seasons. That indicates a highly elliptical orbit. Most likely the rainy seasons that make the place such a good farming world are in the narrow “spring” and “fall” between hot and cold, but we don’t have direct sources for this yet. What we do know is that keeping most crops alive requires careful consideration for irrigation and careful management of planting and harvest dates; the farmers of this world often have harvests planned out to the day and hour, a level of precision we’d never need on any world in the Reach. They also seem to use far more genetically altered crops than we use, which probably leads to increasing need for precise harvesting; that sort of artificial organism can be pretty unstable. 

[D.L.C.] That probably explains the Bitter- 

[K.R.R.] The Bitter Harvest story? Yes, I remember that one. How someone back in Farthing’s Chain got ahold of Incarnation farming equipment, I’m still not quite sure, but what that story portrays is consistent with what we know, if you factor in increased instability due to a strange environment. I’m still not sure why plants would explode, but that could always be an exaggeration to help hide your source’s real identity. 

[D.L.C.] What is the standard of living like there? 

[K.R.R.] It’s not too far off what a colonist on one of the outer Coreward Frontier worlds might expect. It’s spartan, but with all the basic comforts met; the central authority maintains very standardized schools and vocational programs in all the communities, so most of these conscripts had plenty of shared experiences even if they grew up scattered across a whole planet. All the communities had shops and meeting houses, but we don’t see many references to taverns or to any sort of hospitality business, suggesting that travel over long distances might be restricted. The government probably maintains checkpoints on the major roads to track movement, but again we have no direct source for that. 

[D.L.C.] This isn’t a fresh colony, though – this is a relatively high population planet. Why would people be living like first- or second-generation colonists when obviously they aren’t? 

[K.R.R.] I don’t know. None of them seemed to question it; that’s just the lives they lived before they were assigned to military training. And it certainly does not seem to have been a bad upbringing, in the whole. Perhaps by forcing them to live in a simulated colonization environment, the Incarnation is trying to raise them to be tough and not too reliant on creature comforts, which would be good traits for military conscripts needed for garrison and second line duty. 

[D.L.C.] Horrific to think that someone might engineer an entire planet to have standardized early life experiences so they are useful for particular tasks. But I will admit the idea sounds very Ladeonist. 

[K.R.R.] Unfortunately so. We have much less about other worlds, but this engineering does seem to be a consistent policy. There's one called Paradiso, for example, which seems to be a super-habitable environment like Makaharwa or Håkøya, where we see shared experiences of very different sorts mentioned in their message traffic. Paradiso natives – of which we have only a few examples in the captured traffic – seem to have outdoorsy upbringings, with very small houses but communities spread out through large, jungle-like areas, and forestry being a dominant industry. 

[D.L.C.] Forestry? You think they have a planet exporting wood in bulk? What for? 

[K.R.R.] No idea. Perhaps it is to build the houses on other worlds like Prospero. After all, we have no indication that Prospero has any trees to speak of, at least not anything native. 

[D.L.C.] Shipping building materials and food between planets sounds horrendously inefficient. How does their economy work? 

[K.R.R.] We aren’t completely sure, but if they are shipping such raw materials around, it suggests that manufacturing facilities are distributed relatively equally across their worlds, at least across a group of worlds. As to efficiency... Well, we’ve done some simulations, and can’t see how it would be anything but morbidly wasteful. 

[D.L.C.] And yet, they field hundreds, of highly advanced warships that put most Reach shipbuilders to shame. They have to have a smaller population than the Confederated Worlds, and with an economy that backwards, it seems impossible. 

[K.R.R.] The full economics of the situation are not yet clear. Surely we are missing components of their economic plan that would make it all make sense. 

[D.L.C.] Perhaps their warships are stolen? 

[K.R.R.] They seem to use similar technology to Grand Journey vessels, but there’s no indication they simply stole the ships, and every indication they’re building them. We do see new ships show up in engagements fairly regularly, as an example. You can always tell the smooth gravitic signature of a ship that’s fresh out of the yards within the last few months from one that’s just been reassigned from elsewhere. 

[D.L.C.] Pity. If they were working off a stolen stockpile that would suggest the war would end quickly in our favor. 

[K.R.R.] Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. And I am also afraid I’m running out of time for this discussion. 

[D.L.C.] I appreciate your coming to discuss this for the audience, Kirsten. Hopefully when you have those missing pieces that explain the strange oddities of Incarnation life, we can sit down and talk about it again. How our foes live is very interesting to me, and I think also to my audience. 

[K.R.R.] Duncan, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you. And if I am cleared to discuss further developments with the media, I assure you I will be in touch. 

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