Tales from the Service: 11th Mechanized at Meyerfeld

2947-12-10 – Tales from the Service: 11th Mechanized at Meyerfeld 

This has been a more active week than any since the Battle of Berkant here on the Frontier. While Duncan still insists that it is beyond the purview of this feed to relay every detail of the war, skirmishes were fought at Matusalemme (this is at least the third major raid on the orbital infrastructure of Adimari Valis) and near Margaux. Lone Tyrants were driven off planetary raids in several other places, though in those cases the Incarnation vessels retreated even though the local forces were insufficient to seriously threaten those vessels. 

It is estimated by our friends in Naval Intelligence that Nate has between twenty and sixty Tyrant vessels (plus an unknown number of logistics hulls) in the Coreward Frontier at this point, based on the increasing regularity of their attacks. While this force still can’t stand up to the combined throw weight of the Fifth Fleet, they are making good use of the speed and range of their cruisers to keep the Navy on the defensive.  

Admiral Zahariev, however, is not one to cede the initiative entirely. Earlier this week, the press pool was informed that an Incarnation forward supply base at the spaceport of the abandoned colony of  Meyerfeld had been taken by ground assault by the 11th Heavy Mechanized Battalion of the Confederated Marines. While the single Tyrant-type heavy cruiser defending the station was drawn away into an inconclusive skirmish with Fifth Fleet destroyers, the 11th made a hot drop from its trio of assault transports to secure the site. Though Nate was apparently unprepared for the attack, the base personnel put up a stiff, if uncoordinated, defense. 

Carolina Durand provided Cosmic Background with a significant amount of battlefield telemetry from the operation. While an episode of the Vidcast series will be dedicated to showing selected scenes of the ground action, Duncan and I thought it would be good to focus on the experiences of one vehicle – the TA-39 “Lucky Penny” and its crew. 

Before we get any questions from those of you familiar with the habits of Marine ground-pounders, the vehicle is apparently named after a rather attractive armor technician on their transport crew, and while I doubt she posed as inspiration for the likeness on this TA-39’s glacis, if she looks anything like that rather skillfully painted pin-up, none of these ground-pounders have the faintest shot with her until they start earning some serious medals. 

[D.L.C. - Fear not, Cosmic Background fans with children. Ashton will never let shots of this vehicle’s rather arresting crew markings into the main vidcast program. Fortunately, the art, positioned as it is on the middle of the vehicle’s heavy bow armor, is not visible from the camera clusters aboard “Lucky Penny” itself.] 

Lucky Penny paused briefly just behind the last hilltop overlooking the target, and its commander opened his hatch and half-climed out to peer over the crest. On the plain below, a tumbledown ruin of a spaceport city which had once housed six thousand hopeful colonists was slowly being overtaken by a rippling sea of blue-grey foliage which extended to the horizon, as if a particularly slow tide was coming in and flooding its outskirts. Already, many of the half-ruined outer buildings sat as islands amid the false swells of the wind-blown xeno-grass. 

As the other five TA-39s in the column worked their way up to their starting points on either side of the lead vehicle, Lieutenant RansuWaters surveyed the ruins for a few seconds, then turned to watch the command vehicle’s antenna briefly shoot up to send a tight-beam transmission to one of the drone relays circling high above to indicate that his platoon had reached the jumping-off point and receive new orders. 

“Think they know we’re coming?” Bion Vlahovic, the vehicle gunner, asked over the intercom. 

“Would take a minor miracle for them to have missed us plowing into atmo and coming down so close.” Ransu ducked back into his hatch, grateful for the heavily insulated flex-armor issued to vehicle crews. Despite its abundant local life, Meyerfeld was a fairly cold place, with summer temperatures rarely exceeding ten degrees celsius, and it was nowhere near high local summer. “They know we’re coming.” 

“Gardener Actual to all Gardeners.” The platoon captain’s voice cut into the intercom. “Vehicles to line abreast. Apes, you walk from here.” 

Lucky Penny rocked as the four nine-hundred-pound armored assault troopers riding on her rear deck jumped off. “Walk? Hell.” The sergeant leading the infantry platoon assigned to Task Force Gardener shot back. “From here, the apes fly in.” 

On the infantry circuit, doubtless that braggadocio had encouraged a rowdy cheer, but on the tankers’ channel, the only response was the triple-beep signal to ready for the attack. 

Ransu reached up to pull the hatch shut over his head, then engaged the vehicle’s atmospherics and anti-nanite systems. Nate agents were loaded to the gills with nanotechnological dirty tricks, so their ground forces would undoubtedly use similar weaponry; he hopednanodefense systems deployed years before Nate’s appearance in Frontier space were up to the task. Being microscopically chewed into pink mush pooling in the bottom of the vehicle’s crew compartment was not the way Ransu wished to die. 

The two-beep signal for imminent attack sounded, and Lucky Penny’s driver Eddy Dawson began to throttle the fusion-bottle behind the crew compartment up to full combat power. The steady rumble of the fusion powerplant was reassuring, even as Ransu knew it stood a not-too-remote chance of going critical if the vehicle was hit badly by enemy fire. Speed was better than armor, and only a fusion powerplant could give a seventy-metric-ton smart-track vehicle anything resembling speed. 

“What do you think our odds are, Chief?” 

“Bion, they supposedly thing this base was secret. I don’t think we’ve got more than a one in ten chance of buying it here.” 

“One in ten.” The gunner repeated slowly. “And what do you think the odds are of me getting into Penny’s-” 

The long, low single-beep of the charge order sounded, and Eddy dumped power to the electric drive, hurling his two crew-mates back into their padded restraints. On his camera feeds, Ransu watched the other five vehicles of the platoon surge down the broken, scrub-strewn hill in a ragged line. The infantry, clearing the hilltop amid a cloud of dust and sand, sprinted forward only a few steps before their suits leapt into the air and sailed over the rapidly accelerating armored tracks. At the tops of their rocket-assisted jumps, each one fired suppressive bursts of railshot down into the ruined buildings ahead, and each angled in to land just ahead of the heavy armor.Ransu knew their projected landing sites were painted on the driver’s forward view for Eddy to avoid. 

Swiveling his cameras, Ransu picked out a sturdy but dilapidated building which appeared to have been reinforced by struts of newer metal. In the ancient methods armored vehicle crews had been using since antiquity, he kicked his gunner lightly in the shoulder as he put a mark on the building. “Bian, this house offends me.” 

The turret slewed toward the target, and a sizzling dart of plasma belched forth as Bian twisted his trigger-lever. The camera facing the building went white for a moment, then cleared to reveal only foundations and the torn remnants of what looked like a Nate inflatable weather-shelter. 

As if the shot was the signal, the ruins ahead erupted with plasma and laser fire. Eddy threw the vehicle to one side and then the other as energy weapons seared the scrub-brush and rocks on either side. On his console, Ransu could tell most of the incoming was relatively light fare – man-portable and crew-served equipment of the sort they had expected to run into, which would take far too long to eat through Lucky Penny’s armor to stop them from breaching the perimeter. He left these defenders to the infantry – their rapid-firing railguns would either shred these lighter defenses or force the Nate soldiers crewing them to take cover. Instead, he switched to thermal imaging and looked for the bad news. 

The bad news announced itself when the vehicles were halfway down the slope, in the form of a huge energy blast spewing forth from the mouth of a half-ruined alley and coming within a few meters of the captain’s vehicle. Whatever had fired was remarkably well concealed, even in infrared – still, Ransu had seen where it had fired from, and he kicked Bian again, marking the spot. 

Lucky Penny fired again, but two other crews had fired first. Between the three plasma cannons and at least two converging streams offerroceramic railshot, the two buildings shielding the hidden emplacement were blown to pieces so completely that Ransu couldn’t even see any remains of the weapon the defenders had hidden there. 

The infantry started their second leap just as the armored vehicles plowed past – and one, directly through – a cluster of outlying buildings. A trio of Incarnation ground personnel scrambled out of the way of the assault, and Ransu targeted them with the remote railgun mounted on the turret roof. The weapon rattled overhead, perforating all three with red-hot slugs within seconds. The infantry could clean up any stragglers later, but he didn’t like the idea of leaving three Nate soldiers behind his vehicle. 

Because the city was abandoned, and most of its buildings were in any case lightly built and crumbling, the formation of TA-39s plowed directly into the outer ring of structures. Lucky Penny bucked and jumped as it crushed an already half-collapsed one-story structure, smart treads automatically projecting cleat-like spikes into the rubble to achieve traction. This, apparently, was not what the defenders had expected – on the far side of the structure, Ransu saw a pair of wide-eyed Incarnation officers and a small air-skimmer in one camera angle just in time for the entire scene to vanish under the vehicle’s nose as Eddy pushed through the second structure. Most of the cameras blanked out, covered in dust and debris, and only cleared when the vehicle rolled into the open space of a wider street and the camera-lenses flushed themselves of the offending substances. 

“Gardener has penetrated the perimeter.” The captain’s announcement was for the benefit of higher officers, but it carried to Ransu’sheadset as well. “Defenses are brisk, but mostly light. Proceeding to objective Bravo.” 

Bravo, Ransu knew, was the two-pad spaceport the Incarnation detachment had cleared and restored to working order. Why they had decided to install their forward supply dump on a planet rather than setting up on an asteroid or simply parking a fleet of logistics ships in the interstellar darkness somewhere, Ransu didn’t try to understand – Nate was as unintelligible as any alien foe. 

Just as Eddy got the vehicle rolling roughly along the road toward the spaceport grounds, the TA-39 to Lucky Penny’s left shuddered to a halt and began smoking furiously. Ransu didn’t need to see the incoming fire to know the assault vehicle had been hit. “Eddy, get us out of here!” 

As the vehicle wheeled and charged for the cover of an alley nearby, Ransu watched the stricken vehicle. After several seconds, a hatch in the turret roof eruped open and two figures in black tankers’ flex-armor spilled out. A moment later, a second hatch in the roof of the armored bow popped open, but before the driver could get clear, the vehicle erupted in a pillar of fusion-fire, briefly washing out the camera’s digital capture-chips and causing Lucky Penny to rock almost off one of its tracks. The fusion-bottle's safety systems directed most of the blast upward, and the flex-armor of the two fleeing crewmen insulated them from the briefly searing heat and flood of harsh radiation, but even so the blast threw them both across the street and slammed them against a nearby building. 

“Ten percent, Chief?” 

“Shut up and find him, Bian.” Ransu wheeled his cameras around, looking for the armor-killing weapon in visual and infrared wavelengths. A gun capable of coring a TA-39 in one shot had to be very big, and was probably very close. 

Another vehicle’s commander highlighted the gaping storefront-windows of a building several blocks down the wide street, and in infrared Ransu saw the wash of hot air billowing out of this opening. “Got it.” He locked the point for Bian, and the turret swiveled. A weapon inside didn’t have line of sight on any of the other vehicles after they’d all scurried for cover, but none of the TA-39s could train their main guns onto that target without exposing themselves. 

“Where are the damned apes?” Eddy griped over the intercom. The question was barely worth asking; the clatter of automatic railguns and the sizzle of plasma cannons a few blocks away suggested that most of the infantry had found their own problems.  

Fortunately, the infantry charging into the teeth of the high-powered weapon hidden inside the structure proved unnecessary. With a rumble which jolted Ransu even through Lucky Penny’s ample suspension, the vehicle toting the gun which had cored the unfortunate vehicle rumbled forward, the shell of its covering building collapsing around it. The Incarnation ground vehicle was easily twice as large as a TA-39, and it had clearly not been designed as an assault weapon – heavy strakes of ablative armor had been haphazardly bolted to the framework gun-shield protecting a massive barrel covered in a forest of cooling vanes. Most likely, the supply base’s defenders had used spare parts available in their stockpile to turn one of their ground-transports into a last-ditch armored monster. A more skilled crew could have sniped at Task Force Gardener for many blocks, and probably claimed several more vehicles before it was cornered – the operators were obviously overconfident novices. 

“Hold.” The captain’s voice urged. 

Across the street, Ransu watched the two surviving crew of the stricken vehicle stagger to their feet and limp toward the shelter of a nearby ruin. Until the ersatz Incarnation tank had been dealt with, they were on their own. 

The overloaded, haphazardly-built monster lumbered closer. Eddy nudged Lucky Penny back into the alley a few meters, forcing Ransu to deploy one of his two camera-drones above the rooftops to watch its plodding progress. 

“Hold!” 

The vehicle was barely a hundred meters away now. Ransu knew if the Nate crew spotted any of the vehicles, it could probably fire through the flimsy buildings and knock out another TA-39 with ease. 

Without warning, the single long, harsh beep of the charge signal sounded. Reflexively, Eddy engaged the drive, and Lucky Penny surged forward into the open, along with the other five remaining vehicles. As soon as the turret was clear of the alley, Bian swung it to the side and fired, knowing that speed, not accuracy, was their only hope of a quick and clean victory. 

Ransu didn’t see which of the five plasma-bursts killed the huge vehicle, but its front plates erupted into a fountain of molten metal, and its huge barrel, blown clean off its mounting, smashed the framework casemate to pieces as it tumbled to the street. Though it kept rolling ponderously forward for several seconds, the command channel erupted with war-whoops and shouts. 

The captain put a stop to the celebration quickly. “None of that. Let's move. Leave survivors to the apes.” 

As the five remaining vehicles formed up and started rolling, Ransu saw an assault-suited infantryman with a medic’s red-and-white markings on his chest-plate leap into the street from two blocks away and head for the two stranded tankers. Of their driver, who had not made it out before the vehicle’s fusion-bottle had blown, he knew nothing would ever be found. 

Details

Tales from the Service: A Pastor and a Prodigal

2947-12-03 – Tales from the Service: A Pastor and a Prodigal

We have received some interesting audience feedback about this text feed recently which I think it’s time to address. Most of this, I think, is coming from people who otherwise are not Cosmic Background datasphere content consumers, who have begun to subscribe to this feed due to the fact that it is curated by an embed team assigned to the Fifth Fleet for the duration of hostilities. 

The first category of feedback seems to come from non-spacers, and it generally expresses a wish for our Tales from the Service episodes to explain more of the background which our usual audience of interstellar professionals and enthusiasts take for granted. It’s easy for us to forget that since most people do not trust their lives daily to shipboard atmospherics, inertial control, and A-grav, most of the sapients of the Reach know little about these machines. Evidently, some of these new non-spacer readers think that knowing more about these technologies might improve their reading experience. 

The second category of feedback seems to come from our new readers inside the Navy itself. They wish for us to cover more of the war directly, as apparently in some cases the vidcast episodes which do this are of sufficient size that they exceed a crew rating’s daily data-payload limits. A regular textual summary of the war’s progress (as much as can be gleaned from open sources, at any rate) would apparently be welcome to many. 

In both cases, I don’t think the weekly “Tales from the Service” episodes are the right place to do these things – after all, our primary responsibility is to the permanent audience, for whom these requests would be unnecessary and perhaps unwelcome. That being said, these requests have come in with sufficient numbers that Nojus and I are working on ways to satisfy them without compromising the usual episodes. 

“You sure about this, Tommy?” The guard at the brig checkpoint passed his security wand over Thomas Nyilvas's shipboard fatigues and the bundle under his arm several times, though Thomas knew the device only needed one sweep. “The captain was in there for four hours and didn’t get anything out of that witch except epithets and a near-miss from a nano-fabbed dart.” 

Thomas nodded. “This is something I need to do, Sergeant. I’ll be safe.” 

“Your business, padre.” The guard stowed his wand. “Cell ten.” 

Thomas nodded and went through the checkpoint, turning into the higher-security cell block where he knew he would find the ship’s lone prisoner. As soon as he was around the corner, he unfurled the bundle under his arm and shrugged on his white synth-silk cassock. The ship’s imposing chief of marines had failed to make an impression on the prisoner, and the skipper’s very different method of persuasion had similarly elicited only a few arrogant jabs. Thomas prayed he would have better results. 

The cell’s gravitic-shear door barrier hummed invisibly as Thomas approached, and the prisoner lounging inside on the narrow wall-mounted cot barely glanced at him. Physically, Ayaka Rowlins looked like the last thing that might threaten the ship – forty kilos of bony, awkward frame topped by a plain moon-face and a shock of haphazardly-cut black hair should not have been able to harm a Navy patrol cruiser. Still, Thomas knew she was more than she seemed; the crescent of blinking LEDs on her left temple hinted at the massive body-modifications she had undergone in an Incarnation med-lab. 

According to the datasphere bio her genetic print had called up, Rowlins was one of the Reach’s hordes of economically homeless young people, who’d come of age with unmarketable skills, if any at all. Following promises of a better future, most of them struck out for the Frontiers alone, or in groups. The file on this particular case went cold in 2945, shortly after she had become associated with a known Ladeonist radical on Maribel. She had vanished without a trace – until someone had caught her setting demolition charges around vital parts of Xavior Vitali’s phased-matter condenser, flesh and mind corrupted by Incarnation hardware. 

Thomas took a breath. Short of riding Vitali into a full-scale battle it wasn’t designed for, there was little a patrol-cruiser chaplain could do that would be more perilous than what he was about to. “Mind if I come in?” 

The prisoner looked up at him again, then looked away, staring through her puffy, sleep-deprived eyes at a spot on the bulkhead. The nanosuppressor suspended in the cell’s overhead panel blinked its lights cheerily. Thomas squared his shoulders and stepped into the invisible shear-barrier, which opened up only millimeters ahead of his nose and closed again millimeters behind his back, allowing the captive no opportunity to escape. 

“Good morning.” Thomas tapped a control on the wall near the entrance and a pillar-shaped chair rose out of the floor. “I’m Father Nyilvas, the ship’s chaplain. I thought you might appreciate some company that wasn’t trying to interrogate you.” 

Ayaka Rowlins didn’t even look his way. She made a noise which might have been a derisive snort, then fell silent once more. 

Thomas shrugged and unfolded the screen of his wrist unit. “I hope you don’t mind me doing a little bit of work. It’s Saturday by the standard calendar. I have to lead service tomorrow morning, if we haven’t exploded by then.” 

“And if we have?” 

Thomas looked up. She still hadn’t turned to face her visitor. “If we have, then I’ll get to see who was listening last week, and who wasn’t.” 

Rowlins reacted in what might have been a quickly-suppressed smile. “Believing in Chapel voodoo won’t save anyone if the ship goes up.” 

“Depends on what you mean by save. We’ll all be dead, sure, but eventually, that does tend to happen to everyone.” He tried not to focus on the fact that the prisoner was talking to him so easily, hostile or no – Captain Callahan had glared and imprecated Rowlins for the better part of an hour before she’d even acknowledged his presence. 

Thomas keyed in a link to the Chapel software which monitored the ship’s datasphere and chose the most fitting passage to teach for the week, and almost laughed out loud. “Psalm thirty-nine?” He didn’t always take recommendations from the software, though it was the end product of nearly three centuries of Chapel clergy refinement. This time, however, it had struck a winner. “Perfect.” 

Rawlins looked up, sneering. “Does it talk about being weak and soft, and being defeated by the chosen agents of human survival?” 

Thomas met her gaze. “Your faith in the Incarnation is understandable, Miss Rawlins, but quite misplaced.” 

“Faith?” She sat up, leaning toward him, dark eyes burning. “My cause is fact. Yours is stone-age mysticism with a chrome finish.” 

“Being restricted to material concerns does not make something factual. Some day when that chip in your head isn’t telling you what to do, you’ll think that’s obvious.” Thomas returned to his outline. Ayaka Rowlins was a true believer, but he could tell her belief had little depth or substance. Most likely, the Incarnation’s brand of apocalyptic transhumanism had been the first thing she’d really been offered in her short life with which to believe, and she’d grabbed onto it just for the novelty of having something to call her own. He’d seen it before with other young people – their comfortable Core Worlds and Inner Reach upbringings had left them comfortable but unmoored, uncertain, and without ideas. They drifted toward the Frontiers in listless droves, searching for something without any idea of what it might be. A few found their way into the community of spacers and the Navy – those were the lucky ones. 

“You think I’m controlled by these?” She tapped her head implant. “They make me smarter and freer than you will ever be, even when I’m locked up in this cell.” 

“Being always connected to the flow of data makes you feel important, and the chips let you consume it efficiently. That doesn’t make you smarter. That idea all but wrecked humanity in the Second Dark Age.” 

“That’s big talk for someone selling ideas the species hasn’t taken seriously since the first one.” 

Before speaking again, Thomas made a note to emphasize his chosen psalm’s repeated observations about human mortality, and the mortality of the species as a whole. Four thousand years old though it was, he knew the text would strike a chord with people who were expecting their ship to explode as a result of Rawlins’s undiscovered sabotage at any moment. He’d long since ceased to be amazed that scripture was like that – even caught up in a war so far away from Sol that light emitted by that star during Christ’s life hadn’t yet reached the front lines, the ancient book still had something to say.  

The delay seemed to infuriate Rawlins, who stood up to loom over Thomas. “You think this is funny, padre?” Intellectually, he knew her machine-enhanced musculature could tear him limb from limb with ease, and even with the auto-stun and nanosuppressor systems built into the cell, she could probably put him in a geltank for weeks before she went down herself – but her small stature made the threat hard to take seriously. 

“No.” He finished the bullet-point with a flourish and looked up. “I’ll be honest, you’re making a mistake that’s so basic I have no way of answering it politely. Are you really the best the Incarnation has?” 

Rawlins was silent, but her balled fists and gritted teeth made it clear she was calculating how much she could pulp him before the cell’s systems knocked her out. Thomas knew the best thing to do was to stay silent and let her decide it wasn’t worth it, that beating the ship’s chaplain to a pulp was a good way of getting the crew to vent her out an airlock and take their chances with any additional demolition charges, but he knew he wasn’t going to do that. 

Standing to his full height – nearly a foot taller than the prisoner even though he was hardly a tall man – Thomas clasped his hands behind his back. “You should know this, child, you grew up in the Confederacy. Even if all I offer is an ancient idea, an idea is a tool. If you find an old implement still in use, then you can conclude it must still do something useful.” 

“It lets the masses pretend that they are content with their gradual extinction.” The woman replied through gritted teeth. “An opiate for the dying.” 

“We are all dying someday. Why so concerned about extinction? The ship’s going to go nova before I lead service tomorrow anyway. If I were you, I’d be more concerned about that.” 

“Go to hell, Padre.” Rawlins looked away, and Thomas could tell in that brief look all he needed to do about the engineering staff’s round-the-clock search for more explosives.

“I'd really rather not.” Sitting back down, he tapped words into his outline for a few seconds until she turned to return to the bunk, then quickly flashed a message to Captain Callahan to share what he’d learned: there were no other bombs, because Rawlins had been caught too early to complete any part of her mission. She had been given one charge by the cause on whose altar she had sacrificed her heart, mind, and very humanity, and she had failed to complete it.

As he continued to work on his sermon in silence, Thomas prayed silently for the soul of the prodigal daughter sulking across the cell, wondering if there would ever be any way to bridge the span between them. It seemed impossible that her soul and humanity could be salvaged - fortunately, he was a firm believer in miracles.

Some day, this war will come to an end, and we will have to learn to live as neighbors with whatever remains of the Incarnation. When that happens - and I hope it is soon - the work of the men with guns will be over, and the work of men like Chaplain Thomas Nyilvas of Xavior Vitali can truly begin. I fear, however, that like the Rattanai imperialists and the Ladeonists which survive from the last great interstellar war, it will take many generations to overcome the hostility of our modern foes.

Details

Tales from the Service: A Reacher’s Reward

2947-11-26 – Tales from the Service: A Reacher’s Reward 

One of the damndest thing about Reachers is that never has the same Reacher ship been encountered twice – each time one of their seashell-hulls appears, it has a different energy emission profile and a different, often vastly different, physical appearance. When a Reacher ship disappears into the dark, it’s never seen by human eyes or sensors again, as if the ships have a very short service life and are rapidly replaced. 

This final chapter of Mus’ad Balos’s account (which starts with Tales from the Service: A Reacher's Request) begins to explain this oddity. The Reacher ship completed its repairs and departed the system before his ship even reached planetary orbit, but telescopic spies on Botterhill noticed something odd – it had left behind an object of mass not much less than the asteroids it had collected, an object which shone as it tumbled, like a polished shell.  

Securing permission via Hypercast communication with his superiors at Maribel, Mus’ad took the squadron to investigate the Reachers’ refuse, in the hopes that something new might be learned about them. 

The object they approached was not like a polished shell, it was a polished shell – three quarters of the outer skin of the Reacher dreadnought, all in one piece and including the damaged areas, had been left behind as easily as an Earth lobster sheds its chitinous armor. This explains why each Reacher we run into looks different; their ships apparently shed their hulls and nanotechnologically grow new ones with available material to save the trouble of patching up holes. 

Much to the Navy’s dismay, this remnant proved to be of little use; though obviously nano-grown rather than manufactured, the ferrous material of the absurdly thick, inert hull the Reachers had left behind was little more than refined asteroid iron with a complex nano-scale crystal structure. The Navy poked it with everything they had, but in the end, they handed it over to the Botterdowns system authority, which is apparently planning to tow it into planetary orbit and build a unique orbital station in its conveniently massive interior. 

As the five destroyers scanned and prodded this titanic remnant, Mus’ad led an EVA team from Penelope Ott into the cavernous interior, in the faint hope that the Reachers had left other trinkets behind. He was in luck – they had. 

“Damn.” 

It was all Mus’ad could muster, and he was glad he had switched off his comms pickup. Four floodlight beams splayed out from the bow of Penelope Ott’s service launch, each painting a puddle of wan light on the fluted, arched wall on the far side of the hollowed-out Reacher hulk. Though spectroscopic analysis had suggested the shell was made of nothing but asteroid-harvested nickel-iron, the surface shimmered like polished gray mother-of-pearl. 

Even in this weak illumination, the cathedral-like beauty of the discarded shell was evident. Though it had no clear floor, it did seem to have an all-around Gothic arched ceiling. The vast, lens-shaped interior where the Reacher ship’s working innards and crew spaces had been seemed the domain of ancient ghosts, though the mechanical beast which had grown the shell and vacated it only weeks before. 

Mus’ad and his crew hadn’t come to the derelict shell to sight-see, of course. He switched back on his comm pickup. “All right, we’re jumping off. Perez, go check out the damage sites as soon as we’re clear.” 

“Aye, Skipper.” 

The launch pilot held the little craft perfectly still relative to the lazily tumbling hulk while Mus’ad detached the EVA support sled from its side and switched his safety tether to the hardy little drone. The other three members of the EVA team hanging onto the sides of the service launch each did the same, and the team kicked free of their ride. 

As the launch zipped away under the power of its maneuvering thrusters, Mus’ad switched his comms channel to exclude its pilot, who had other duties to attend to. “At least one person and the sled stay in line-of-sight to the ship at all times.” He pointed to the gaping “mouth” of the Reacher ship-shell, beyond which the well-lit length of Penelope Ott sat only a few kilometers away. He doubted it would be possible to get lost in the mere shell of a ship, but a drone survey of the interior prior to the EVA mission had revealed a number of hollows and tunnels sunk into the thick, ferrous shell, and he didn’t want to take chances. 

“We’re the first people to do anything like this, aren’t we, Skipper?” 

“Far as I know.” Mus’ad tried not to think about it. Historical opportunities like this one were usually something the cautious Reachers took pains to avoid giving to Terrans, and he’d already spent the last several days puzzling over their sudden change of tack. “Let’s check out those chambers the drone found.” 

Each of them reeled in their lines and grabbed onto the sled, and Mus’ad gave it the coordinates of the first and largest of the hollows carved seamlessly into the ship-shell. With gentle one-gee acceleration, the sled towed the team to its destination. At first, Mus’ad couldn’t see anything; the entrance to the hollow was hidden in the fluted folds of the inside wall until they were almost on top of it. 

Playing a wrist-beam into a circular hole barely two meters across, salvage tech Moyna Phan at the front of the sled keyed on her comm. “Not sure I like the look of this. Could be anything in there.” 

“If we’re lucky.” Mus’ad played out his line and reached for his side-arm, strapped to the thigh of his suit. He wasn’t asking for volunteers. “I’ll go first. If it’s empty, and it probably is, this should only take a moment.” 

None of the others protested, not wanting to be the first to crawl into the tight confines of the smooth-walled tunnel even though the safety line back to the sled would prevent any loss of contact. Perhaps if he had been a proper captain with a whole cruiser and attending ships to command, someone might have been honor-bound to hold him back and go themselves, but a destroyer skipper was hardly irreplaceable. 

The lip around the opening protruded slightly out into the cavernous hollow of the ship-shell, its edge wrinkled slightly as if the heavy nano-grown metal was an orifice that could widen or close at will. Suppressing a shudder at the thought, Mus’ad switched his suit-lights to maximum power and pushed off down the curving, tubular shaft. 

According to the drone’s survey, the tunnel should have been only six meters long, but Mus’ad thought it seemed more like twenty before it terminated in an enclosed, globular chamber. The drone data said the space was about ten meters across on its widest axis, but again a trick of the smooth, gleaming walls made it seem at least twice that big. Tiny holes riddled the opposite wall like worm-tunnels burrowing through a rotten tree, but the opening of each was as smooth and seamless as every other surface – the holes were original to the shell, and they had a purpose. 

Mus’ad drifted into the middle of the space and tried to imagine what it was for. For the barest instant, he pictured a lone three-limbed Reacher drifting there instead of himself, surrounded by and entangled in a cocoon of sensory equipment, with its multivariate grip-tendrils grasping the controls that steered the ship, each of its three eyes fixed on a display of what could be seen outside the ship in one direction or another. It was a fantastic thought to be sure – Reacher ships were probably so fully automated that they did not need pilots or even helmsmen like Terran ships. He doubted any human would ever see the inside of a Reacher vessel to test his imaginative speculation. 

“Skipper, you’d better come out here.”  

Tech Phan’s voice startled him out of his over-imaginative reverie. Mus’ad triggered the safety-line spindle on his belt and guided himself back up the tunnel as it dragged him toward the sled. 

The moment he appeared in the opening, the tech turned and pointed with one heavy-gloved hand at something the other two members of the EVA team were already staring at intently with their meta-lens helmet magnifiers. Switching his own on, he pulled the bearing and zoom settings from their units. 

The object they were looking at drifted without tumbling a few dozen meters out into the empty center of the ship-shell, its gleaming grey material matching that of the shadowed walls beyond. One of the other EVA personnel had fixed the sled’s lights on the object, and Mus’ad could see subtle fluting along its spindle-like profile. The suit’s computer estimated the object’s length at barely forty centimeters. “That wasn’t there a minute ago.” 

Phan shook her head inside her helmet, since they were close enough for the gesture to be visible. “Negative, sir. The sled’s sensors flagged it while you were down there.” 

“Thermal?” 

“Same temperature profile as the hulk.” 

One of the other techs gestured wildly. “Hey! There’s writing on that thing.” 

Mus’ad set his tether line to play out once more, then kicked out from the iron orifice toward the offending object. The possibility that it was a booby-trap occurred to him – was the whole hulk left as a test to the curiosity of Terrans, and would an excess of that urge be considered a failure? 

Slowing his forward motion with suit attitude jets, Mus’ad crept up on the spindle. The lights from the sled and his own suit lights brought out its mother-of-pearl shimmer to an impressive degree, and he might have paused for several seconds to appreciate the play of light along its fluted ridges if he had not spotted the inscription.  

Reacher glyphs had been found on some of the trinkets which their kind had traded to Terrans over the centuries, but no headway had ever been made in translating them. Evidently, the Reachers had no similar trouble with the written language of humans. Etched precisely as if by electro-pencil along the top of one of the ribbed protrusions, Mus’ad picked out Terran block-letters. 

The others, picking up the feed from Mus’ad’s helmet camera, had identified out and read the inscription before he did. Though all three made noises of surprise which the comms circuit elected to transmit, Phan recovered first. “Skipper, is there something you aren’t telling us?” 

Phan’s gasp preceded Mus’ad’s further shock by less than a second, as he read the inscription himself. 

CONTENTS PROPERTY OF LT CDR MUS’AD BALOS, DD-641 PENELOPE OTT 

“I wish there was.” Mus’ad reached out for the container – for container it must be, to have contents. He half-expected his gloved hand to pass through it, revealing it to be only a product of his imagination, but his fingers found unyielding metal. Perhaps the Reachers had discovered the cost of the license he’d bought them – both in credits and in the chewing-out he’d received from the civilian administration – and decided not to accept Terran charity. Perhaps they – the always mercantile Reachers - had merely elected to leave a gift for unrelated reasons. Perhaps – and Mus’ad thought this most likely - this was yet another step in a scheme brewed in a wholly alien mind, which his own neural structure could not begin to process. 

Carefully, Mus’ad wrestled the object into a sample container and sealed it. He doubted the item was dangerous now, but he would have Phan and several other techs work it over, just to be sure. 

Unfortunately, Naval Intelligence drew the line here on this story. They wouldn’t let Lieutenant Commander Balos talk to me about the canister further, except to say that his crew did eventually get it open. Whatever was inside, I hope the skipper does eventually get it back from the spooks; seems to me the Reachers might be offended if he didn’t. 

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Tales from the Service: A Reacher’s Repairs

2947-11-19 – Tales from the Service: A Reacher’s Repairs 

In this continuation of the account from last week’s Tales from the Service: A Reacher's Request, Lieutenant Commander Mus’ad Balos arranged for his ship to loiter near the titanic Reacher ship which had appeared damaged in the Botterdowns system right in front of his patrol, hoping to learn something more about the enigmatic xenosapients than humans had ever been permitted to learn before. 

He didn’t need to go far for his excuse. The system administration on Botterhill, despite having almost no infrastructure for the mining of asteroid materials, refused to sanction the Reachers’ use of unused asteroids to repair their ship. As the rest of his squadron continued on to planetary orbit, Mus’ad kept his ship near the wounded giant while he tried to figure out how he could make the local authorities adopt a more reasonable tone. 

In the end, he didn’t make them see sense – but their automated datasphere bureaucratic network proved far more amenable to the Reachers’ needs. 

“You have got to be kidding me.” Mus’ad Balos tossed the hand-display across his desk, and the comms tech barely saved it from clattering to the deck. The fall wouldn’t have damaged the light-weight device, of course, but Mus’ad appreciated the man’s reflexes all the same. 

“Sorry, sir. Someone down there must take all those vidcast drama stories about lost Reacher treasure-worlds seriously.” 

“Seriously enough to extort the captain of a ship that’s shot all to hell.” Mus’ad folded his arms. Unfortunately, the asteroids were the sovereign property of the system authority. Stealing several – or allowing the Reachers to do the same – would be theft. Even simple minerals poaching carried hefty fines, and to be charged with it while on duty would be a black mark Mus’ad could never escape from. 

“They have a point, skipper.” The tech set the discarded hand-display on the corner of the desk. “Never in human history has a Reacher ever given us anything for free. Why did they have to come here, anyway? There are four empty systems within six ly, and they’ve all got to have asteroids. It’s not like being here protects them. Even if every hull in Botterdowns was in just the right spot, we couldn’t make any real difference if their Grand Journey impostors showed up again.” 

Mus’ad shrugged. The agenda of the Reacher captain had been on his mind as well. Reachers had never given anything to Terrans for free, but they had also never asked for anything before. True, they had waited for Mus’ad to offer assistance before asking their favor, but they had asked it, and it had not been until several hours afterward that he’d realized how unusual it was. Terran xenosociology had never made much headway into the study of Reacher culture from the beautiful but mysterious trinkets they usually included when bartering, but he’d heard once the theory that in the zero-sum game of their interstellar nomadic travels, the Reachers had likely adopted a philosophy of neither giving nor expecting anything for free. 

Seeing that the conversation was over, the comms tech hurried out, leaving Mus’ad to his thoughts. If the Botterdowns system wouldn’t donate a few asteroids to the cause of Terran-Reacher relations, he would have no choice but to hail the titanic ship and forward the civilian bureaucrat’s demands.  

The Reachers did not have a reputation for temper, so he doubted the ship would vaporize his little destroyer for bearing such bad news, but still the prospect left him uneasy. He’d offered to help, and the next thing they heard of his voice, he would be asking for his kind to be paid for that help. There was no way of knowing how that would be interpreted. 

After wrestling with the distasteful task he’d been handed for several minutes, Mus’ad got up and headed out of his duty office, calling the lift that would take him up to the bridge. The Reachers would understand – they had to. Commerce had led them to break the silence of Earth’s Second Dark Age all those centuries before, and commerce had marked all their appearances since. Surely they had expected there might be a price for the resources they needed. 

Arriving on the bridge, Mus’ad stepped into the center. Since he was on duty, no duty-officer stepped out of his way; he preferred to command from the command center three decks below. He could have hailed the Reachers from that station, too, but he wanted to deliver the bad news in full view of the bridge crew, in case the inevitable inquiry needed corroborating witnesses. “Hail the Reacher ship.” 

“Transmitting.” The young woman at the comms terminal bent to the task of negotiating a two-way channel with the alien systems on the bigger ship. Everyone shifted in their seats; they seemed to recognize Mus’ad’s tone and recognize that something had gone wrong. 

“Of course the ground-rats would make trouble over fifty credits of asteroid rock.” 

Mus’ad whirled on his heel. “Who said that?” 

Nobody would admit to it; the voice had been a man’s, but of the seven officers and crew on the bridge other than Mus’ad himself, all but the ensign sitting at the comms station were men. 

“Fifty credits indeed. Cancel that hail.” The bitter gripe had given him an idea. “How much does a mining license cost in this damned system?” 

The voice-assistant software beat the human crew to the answer. “Botterdowns authority uses the standard Frontier rates for mining contracts – five hundred credits per year for a private-use license, two thousand five hundred per year for a transferrable commercial license with no tonnage limit. Datasphere registration is available.” 

Mus’ad smiled, calling up the terminal at the captain’s station. Two thousand five hundred credits was two months’ worth of savings, but he was sure it would be worth every penny. 

The ship’s computer brought up the cached mining license registration form, and it took Mus’ad only a few minutes to fill it out and dispatch it for transmission to the system’s Hypercast relay node. In an hour, the request would pass into the fully automated registry on Botterhill. Ten minutes after that, it would be in the backup records at Maribel and in the Core Worlds, and his personal account would shrink by an appreciable but survivable sum. 

“The Reachers are hailing, sir.” 

“Probably going to ask what the delay is. Tell them the locals made us do some paperwork.” Mus’ad turned and headed back to his office to wait the two hours it would take for the license identifier to reach his ship. The automated licensing system came with the usual colonial care package; he doubted anyone on the planet monitored such things. 

Mus’ad spent the next two hours in his duty office seeing to the routine forms and approval requests that came with his job as the destroyer’s commander. Though Penelope Ott was a small ship by Confederated Navy standards, its thirty-odd officers and crew still generated a staggering amount of reading for their commanding officer. He could only imagine how much time a dreadnought captain spent on the same chore. 

The chirp of a datasphere alert announced the arrival of the registration code, one half of a unique cryptographic key-pair which would match with an equally unique value stored in the registrar system. The registration would allow Mus’ad to mine all the asteroids he wanted within the Botterdowns system – but he didn’t intend on using it. “Bridge, hail the Reachers, and send the line down here.” This time, he didn’t want witnesses. It was the right thing to do, but he didn’t want to make anyone else complicit in case the locals complained. 

Besides wanting to shield his officers, Mus’ad knew that any second a furious message from a diligent system authority bureaucrat might arrive, ordering him not to transmit. As an officer of the Confederated Worlds, he would have to obey such an order from a rightful civilian authority, unless the Incarnation arrived to give him the excuse of imminent military necessity. 

“Channel open, skipper.” 

“Reacher vessel. Sorry for the delay.” Mus’ad hurriedly filled out the license transfer contract, then transmitted its digital signature. “You are free to proceed. If anyone challenges your harvesting activity, present them this cryptographic data token.” 

“Challenge, this vessel, Terrans, not.” The deadpan synthetic voice replied almost immediately, and Mus’ad thought he detected a hint of humor in it. “Thanks, this vessel, Terran vessel, legal procedure, completion.” 

“Don’t mention it.” Mus’ad thought of the twenty-five hundred credits, but only briefly. “That token is good for one Terran year, and I’m sure the local government would be happy to see you return.” 

“Duration, repairs, low. Execute, Terran vessel, duties military, free?” 

“That’s right. We’ll get underway and rejoin our squadron immediately, but we’ll be in-system another twelve T-days if you need any other assistance.” Mus’ad was hesitant to leave the big Reacher ship just in time to miss its repair procedure, but he somehow knew Penelope Ott’s continued presence near the titanic vessel would be unwelcome. The Reachers would not want Terran sensors gazing into their ship’s every orifice while it restored its damaged areas. 

“Understanding, assistance, value, sacrifice. Completion, transaction, equal value. Farewells, Terran commander, most cordial.” 

Mus’ad started as he parsed the Reacher’s jumbled thought. “What sacrifice?” 

The Reacher ship had already broken contact, and no voice replied to his question from the enigmatic ship. He hadn’t told them about the credit cost of the license, nor had he heard the terms of a transaction in their exchange. 

“Helm, we’re done here. Let’s get back to the squadron.” 

“Aye, skipper. Course solution to Botterhill orbit.” 

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