Tales from the Service: A Devourer of Scars

2950-10-11 – Tales from the Service: A Devourer of Scars 

As Ruby Nichols cut away another section of tainted paneling and tossed it toward the collection point at the middle of the space, she kept her suit cameras swiveling. Every time her or Chief Logan’s lights swept across one of the twisting traceries that loose phased matter particles had taken out of the ship, she half-imagined the glittering patina on the metal was a mass of tiny eyes.  

Ever since she’d spotted the yellowish, skittering thing, she’d been on edge, and couldn’t quite explain why. Less than fifteen centimeters long, it almost certainly couldn’t chew through her heavy hazard suit. It had been unpleasant to look at, but it didn’t even place in the top five in terms of ugliness among shipboard pest species. 

It was, Ruby eventually decided, the simple mystery of the critter that had her on edge. She didn’t know what it was, and the lack of response to Chief Logan’s queries suggested nobody else did either. Unknowns, especially unknown organisms picked up from who-knows-where, simply could not be fit into a comfortable, safe model of her environment. With such a mystery being apparently contentedly skittering about in the diffuse argon atmosphere pumped into the damaged section, her overworked, under-rested brain wanted to assume that everything was up for grabs, and anything was possible. 

Whether her mind was right or wrong to jump to panicky conclusions, though, Ruby had a job to do, and the better part of a shift left to do it. Chief Logan, a far better shot than she was, had taken up her station closer to where the bug was hiding, no doubt training cameras in that direction. Ruby almost wished she hadn’t traded places with him; being closer to the unknown, and thus being more likely to notice its movements, promised to make it seem less unknown, and thus more manageable. 

“Still no movement.” Logan, as if sensing Ruby’s unease, spoke on their shared comms channel. “It probably went off somewhere quieter.” 

“Maybe it’ll come out again to bother Yuan next shift.” Ruby twisted another piece of metal free, and growled in frustration as the brittle material shattered, scattering a fountain of tiny flakes that settled slowly in the weak atmosphere. Tossing the largest pieces aside, she extended her suit’s particle collector and scooped up the glittering pieces. 

Movement in one of her camera displays caught Ruby’s attention as she collected the debris. The yellowish critter – or perhaps another one of identical appearance – was slinking across the shattered remains of a compartment’s deck plating to her left, its many-faced eyes glinting. 

“Ugh, it got past you.” Ruby retracted her collector and reached for the coil-pistol clipped to her hip. The pistol’s plasma charge would not be as effective in the thin atmosphere as it would in human-friendly conditions, but it would still cook any bug. The creature, as if sensing that it had been spotted, froze in place as if hoping to be forgotten, not realizing how starkly its odd coloration stood out against the textured grey of shipboard decking. 

“Nothing for it but to fry the little bastard.” Logan, not wanting to make any sudden moves and thus spoil Ruby’s shot, stood perfectly still. “We’ve got too much work to do to keep an eye on it.” 

“Yeah.” Ruby slowly raised her gun, watching its reticle move across her heads-up display. “Gives me the creeps anyway.” 

As the reticle drifted across the critter’s body, an idea occurred to Ruby. Each time it had appeared, she had been doing the same thing; when they’d stopped chipping away at the irradiated metal for long enough to study it, the bug had scuttled away. Perhaps something they were doing was attracting it? If so, she knew there could be only one cause. 

“Chief, I think this thing likes phase-contamination. It’s showing up when we’re chipping away.” 

“That stuff kills everything alive.” Logan’s disdain for the idea was obvious. 

“Then why is it not dead? What’s it even breathing or eating down here anyway?” Ruby kept her gun on the bug, but eased her finger away from the trigger. “Before I blast it, I’m going to try something.” 

Logan sighed. “Make it quick, Nichols.” 

Still moving slowly, Ruby re-extended her suit’s particulate sweeper and opened the collection tray. From it, she eased out a small shard of glittering phased-particle-contaminated metal, holding it up next to her gun. She imagined she saw those three faceted eyes following the movement. 

Gingerly, Ruby dropped the fragment to land between her boots, then took two steps backward. For good measure, she turned her suit lights until they only indirectly lit that spot, hoping to leave the impression her attention was elsewhere.  

After a few moments of uncanny stillness, the yellowish creature crept forward once more, now headed for the spot Ruby had just vacated. As she watched, gun still leveled, the many-legged thing crept up to the discarded shard of compromised metal. It explored the fragment with its forelimbs, then, as Ruby watched in amazement, its head seemed to fold back over itself and a beak-like arrangement of stubby mouthparts protruded. 

“Well I’ll be damned.” Logan chuckled as the creature began to scrape the many-colored crystalline patina off the metal shard. “I’m calling this in. Ugly or not, that thing’s gotta be useful.” 

This week we continue the account of Ruby Nichols, a hazardous environment tech working on one of the Navy space docks here in the Maribel system. 

Apparently the creature they discovered (and a few others also discovered aboard Marseille) were hurried off to a xenobiology research facility somewhere in the Core Worlds. No doubt the scientists there are tending a happy little colony of these rather unpleasant looking creatures, trying to figure out how they extract biological energy from materials contaminated by phased-matter radiation. 

It might be years before we hear about them again, but as Miss Nichols’s boss suggested, these things could have uses – for example, they might be coaxed into doing Miss Nichols’s own job, at less risk to human life and health than sending people in to do the same. 

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Tales from the Service: Pests among Scars

2950-10-11 – Tales from the Service: Pests among Scars 

This week we continue the account of Ruby Nichols, a hazardous environment tech working on one of the Navy space docks here in the Maribel system. 

As I mentioned in last week’s posting, I have verified what I can about this account, which did come with a few limited images. A particularly good shot of the critter she describes here can be found on our datasphere hub. Though there are several creatures in the catalog which resemble it closely, none of them are known starship pests, and all of them breathe either air or water. Apparently, Ruby’s find needed neither. 

As Ruby Nichols played her lights and sensors over the ruins of a maintenance crawlspace, the most contaminated bits of metal were glaringly obvious to both her eyes and sensors. The coruscating oil-slick sheen of phased-particle contaminated metal seemed to be everywhere, as if the escaping stream of reactor-fuel had forked a dozen ways just prior to slicing through the space, with each path meandering off in a different direction as it dissipated. 

Ruby had long since given up trying to understand the reasons why phased particles chose the paths they did; in three weeks of carving out damaged metal from the belly of Marseille, her team had long since stopped trying to understand the ways of the strange matter which fueled starship reactors. Normally, such a job was fairly straightforward, with one or perhaps two nearly straight escape paths chosen by the particles as they escaped the magnetic containment. Only Marseille in any of their experience had suffered a much more complicated entanglement with its unmanaged phased matter. 

As she got to work carving an oval section out of the crawl-space's bulkhead, Ruby heard Chief Logan swear on the open comms line. Rather than turn her head, she swiveled a suit camera to fix on him. The Chief had carved a section out of a bracing girder, and was struggling to pry the excised area free. 

“It should just shatter if you hit it.” Ruby returned her attention to her own work. Phased-matter corruption tended to render metal as brittle as glass, a fact which often made their job immeasurably easier. 

“Oh, I know.” Logan grunted. “I just hate chasing after the damned pieces.” 

The sound of the section slipping free didn’t carry well in the thin argon atmosphere pumped into the work area, but Ruby saw the Chief stagger back under its weight, even with the assistance of the hazardous-environment suit’s servo-powered joints. Carefully, he lowered it down to the deck at his feet. No doubt his rad-meter was clicking alarmingly as he stepped down a level to haul the component to the drone cart at the middle of the work area. 

Ruby finished cutting, then extended her suit’s pneumatic hammer and delivered a sharp strike to the middle of the cut-out piece. The panel shattered, and a dozen angular shards fell at her feet, some still attached to each other by stringy remnants of less-contaminated metal. 

As she collected the shards into a bag and listened to the steady tone of her rad-meter, Ruby thought she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Again, rather than stop her work, she spun one of her suit cameras in that direction, expecting to find that a reflective surface had brought her an indirect look at the Chief’s movement. There was nothing reflective in that direction, however; the camera inset pointed down the length of the splayed-open crawlspace tunnel as far as the pressure-dam at the end of the contaminated area, twenty meters distant. 

Frowning, Ruby kept the inset in view as she collected the last few pieces of compromised paneling and cinched her carry-bag shut. Behind the panel, a pair of spring-frames used to give the interior of the ship some degree of flexibility under strong gee-forces also appeared compromised. One of them was already cracked. Once again, she set to cutting the damaged pieces free. 

This time, when something moved in the crawlspace, Ruby was watching. Something yellowish and shiny darted along the wall, vanishing into the shadows. 

“Well I’ll be damned. Chief, Yuan might not be a total idiot after all.” Ruby switched off her cutting torch and turned two suit lights down the crawlspace, but saw nothing more. “Movement at about ten meters.” 

“Sparticks?” 

“Not unless they decided to learn to breathe pure argon at one percent standard atmo.” Ruby had seen plenty of sparticks, and knew that in addition to being air-breathing organisms, that they were usually a dull grey or black in color. “Something else. Fifteen centimeters long at the most.” 

“Get good vids. We can have someone upstairs tell us what it is.” Chief Logan picked his way across the work area to Ruby’s side, gun already drawn.  

Ruby turned her lights off, but kept her cameras trained on the place she’d spotted the offending critter. The moment she saw movement in the gloom, she switched them back on. This time, she got a good look at it – a many-segmented body that looked like an unholy cross between a beetle and a starfish sat pinned in the center of her for several seconds, its three faceted eyes glittering. After a moment of dazed motionlessness, the critter scurried up the wall to vanish into a hole. 

“That’s no spartick.” Ruby sent a still shot to Logan, in case he’d missed it himself.  

“Nothing I’ve seen before.” Logan agreed. “Give it a wide berth for now. I’ll send the image upstairs and ask if anyone knows what it is.” 

Shuddering in her suit, Ruby stepped around Logan and headed up to the area he’d been working. “No argument there, Chief. Ugly little thing, whatever it is.” 

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Tales from the Service: Excising the Scars

2950-10-04 – Tales from the Service: Excising the Scars 

Chief Logan shook Ruby Nichols awake, startling her into dropping her slate. As she dove to pick up the wayward device, she hurriedly glanced around the spartan wardroom assigned to her work team as a break room aboard the battleship Marseille to see if anyone else was around. The ship, its innards splayed out within the sheltering arc of the orbital dock, had been so badly battered at Håkøya that only the sheer stubbornness of its nearly eighty-year-old systems had brought it home in one piece.  

Perhaps a yard team at Vorkuta or among the sprawling service stations above Tranquility, the wounded battleship might have been back in service in a month. In Maribel, however, the biggest yard job ever attempted outside the Core Worlds was taking somewhat longer. 

“Break’s over, Nichols.” Logan hooked a thumb toward the hatchway on one side of the compartment which led to the officer’s cabin being used as a suit-up room, and to the collapsible airlock barrier beyond. “Let’s get back in there.” 

“Aye, Chief.” Securing her slate, Ruby stood, glad that only Logan had caught her dozing off. Their team of six had been working long hours for nearly a month, most of those hours in the confines of bulky hazardous-environment vacsuits, but showing the strain to the rest of the team, especially Vipond and Yuan, would result in a week of endless ridicule. 

After a quick cup of coffee from a recently-replaced food-fab machine in the wardroom, Ruby exchanged nods with Yuan and Maddison, returning bleary-eyed from another shift, then followed Chief Logan into the suit room, where she grabbed a fresh rad-meter from the crate before starting to assemble her suit. The meter beeped and showed a friendly green light before synching with her helmet computer and providing a more detailed data breakdown. 

“Yuan said he thinks he saw sparticks down near the conduit.” Chief Logan, suited except for his helmet, hooked a holstered coilgun into his suit’s webbing and held another out to Ruby. 

“Yuan is-” Ruby stopped short of calling the other technician an idiot in front of their mutual superior. “He’s wrong. Sparticks are air breathers.” The aggravating xenoinsects had hitched rides on ships fleeing the Sagittarius Frontier in the early phases of the war, and now seemed to have made colonies on most ships in Fifth Fleet as well. Small sparticks were a nuisance, but they grew nearly as quickly as they bred, and big ones, though skittish, could chew holes in a vacsuit.  

“Still.” Logan shook the gun. “We go in armed or not at all.” 

Sighing, Ruby took the gun and hooked it to the back of her toolbelt.  

Chief Logan pressed his helmet into its seals, then waited as the suit built up internal pressure to check for leaks. Ruby hurriedly finished assembling her suit, then did the same.  

Logan went into the translucent clamshell dome of the temporary airlock first. As it suddenly went slack in depressurization on the other side, he stepped out. Ruby waited for the indicator panel to go green before following, and soon they were clumping down a depressurized corridor.  

As they approached the heart of the damage, the sweeping, branching scars left by high-density phased-matter when it passed began to encircle them on all sides. Where other high-energy particles might scorch or discolor metal, phased matter left the material shimmering in all colors under the harsh glare of the work lights, as if splashed with an oil slick. Only one particle in ten million had collided directly with an atom of metal, but the energy dumped there was still sufficient to crystallize durable alloy into brittle, radioactive slag. 

When the pair reached the ovoid cavity carved around the damaged section of conduit, Ruby played her suit lights over the place where all these trails converged, on a blackened tube running through the heart of the olf battleship big enough to park an interceptor in. When the ship had been hit by Incarnation plasma cannons in the skies over Håkøya, one of the shots had damaged a magnetic phased-matter containment conduit between the main condenser near the bow and the main cluster of reactor cells amidships. Sprays of phased-matter particles had gushed out of the magnetic field, scything through flesh and metal and leaving both irrevocably contaminated. Officer’s Country, through which her team had been burrowing for several days, had been all but deserted during the battle, but huge swaths of the framing of the pressure-decks had to be cut away along the paths of the escaping phased matter. A follow-on team would cut away more and replace the damaged area once most of the damaged metal had been safely removed. 

“Where did Yuan say he saw bugs?” Ruby turned her lights on the jagged fringes of the cut-open space, where their work had carved at odd angles through the bulkheads of dozens of compartments and machinery interstices beyond the pressure decks. If Marseille did have an infestation of sparticks, the only ones that would be in their work area would be dead or dormant due to the cold and vaccuum that made their work easier. 

“He was working over there.” Chief Logan gestured with his hand and suit light toward a maintenance access tunnel that lay open along nearly ten meters of its length. “Maddison was with him, but she didn’t see it.” 

Ruby checked her rad-meter, then pulled a material probe and arc cutter from her toolbelt. Most likely, Yuan had claimed his sighting only for a reason to stop working and talk for a few minutes. The man was intelligent, but his work ethic and attitude were somewhat less than inspiring. “I’ll start there, then.” 

This account, though posted now, is at least two months old, and probably more like four; Marseille has left the service dock and has returned to limited duty with Fifth Fleet with some work on her remaining issues still ongoing. The limitations remaining to the ship’s capabilities are, however, not to be revealed. Naval Intelligence was most clear in this matter. 

I have verified the identity of our submitter in this case and exchanged messages with her to ask questions and clarify this account. I even tried to look into the science of phased matter emissions and their interaction with null-phase matter (that is, with ordinary matter) to try to check her brief explanation, and found nothing but a tangle of strident scientific bickering on the mechanism of interaction. The effect on structural alloys which she describes is well known to many spacers, of course. 

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Tales from the Service: An Officer’s Confidance

2950-09-27 – Tales from the Service: An Officer’s Confidance 

Sergeant Hassan Russel rolled his shoulders as the can-opener rig finished disassembling the outer plates of his armored Rico suit. He waited until the inner framing split along carefully fitted seams, then hopped down nearly a meter to the deck plating below. After nearly a full twenty-four hours of operating almost continuously in the suit, he knew he reeked, with his smart-fabric bodysuit’s evaporative wicking never quite able to keep up with the perspiration of combat, even simulated combat. 

Fortunately, the cycle of post-op debriefings was usually not held for a few hours after the Marines re-embarked, allowing everyone the opportunity to wash themselves, grab a bite to eat, and even catch a nap. Hassan doubted he would be able to do more than one of those things, however; as one of his unit’s two sergeants, he knew a vast array of administrative and logistical forms would be waiting on his slate when he returned to his bunk in the onboard barracks. 

As soon as he took headcount and made sure that all twenty of his men – Beaumont and Szarvas, downed by simulated enemy fire, had been re-embarked separately – had been successfully extracted from their Rico suits, Hassan dismissed them to whatever recuperative activities they thought best. Most headed for the lift that would take them up to the mess deck, as that was where they knew to find the simulated-killed members of the unit. 

Hassan headed instead for the bank of acoustic scrubber stalls next to the arsenal and can-opener compartment. Normally, Sergeant Escarro and Lieutenant Yeung would have done the same, but Escarro had been downed in the exercise, and Lieutenant Yeung’s temporary replacement was nowhere to be seen. That was just as well; at the moment, Hassan wanted to see neither of them. 

Finding none of the eight stalls occupied, Hassan set one to its maximum settings, then stripped off his sweat-soiled bodysuit and tossed it into the chute. Since there was no need to wait for an acoustic scrubber to warm up, he stepped in, wincing as the emitters bombarded his skin with high-intensity ultrasonic waves, inexorably stripping off the dust and grime. 

“I told you he’d try something.” 

Hassan turned around and found Lieutenant Coughlan standing in the doorway, her arms folded. Though she was also dressed only in her own bodysuit, she looked far less grimy and bedraggled than he would have expected. Hassan felt self-conscious for not having pulled the privacy screen for his stall into place, even though he usually didn’t bother. Even so, he saluted as smartly as was possible stark naked. 

Coughlan rolled her eyes and waved her hand, seeming not to notice his nakedness. Probably, she didn’t; after all, she had to be a graduate of Camp Cactus, just like every other Marine. The few women who volunteered for service as Marines were given no special considerations save a slightly altered diet and one or two extra issues of sanitary products. 

Hassan relaxed and returned to his shower, turning around to let the acoustics scrape grime off his chest. As he did, he heard the adjacent stall activate. Though she had as much a right to shower in the grunt section as Lieutenant Yeung, it struck him as deliberately out of place. 

“Acoustics are just as good as privacy jammers.” Coughlan was barely audible over the humming of the scrubber machines. “So let’s talk off the record.” 

Hassan froze for several seconds. After he’d thrown Escarro into the path of simulated enemy fire, he’d had plenty of time to consider the possibility that Coughlan had entrapped both of them; they could both be busted down for brawling during a combat operation. “I have nothing to say off the record or on it.” 

“Commendable. So maybe I’ll talk first, then maybe you’ll have something to say.” Coughlan paused for several seconds, perhaps focusing on the task of cleaning herself. “Escarro has nothing to say either. He said you and him miscalculated a quick peek over the hill and only you got back to cover in time. Unless you have a different story, my plan is to mock you both in the debrief for trying to get yourselves killed in the stupidest way possible and leave it at that.” 

Hassan frowned, but said nothing. He’d started the operation thinking Coughlan was just trying not to have her boat rocked in an overly cautious way, and he’d spent most of it wondering whether she’d bring the hammer down on him for doing what she’d suggested but never ordered. Now, he suspected he’d misjudged her on both accounts. 

“Since on the record, I’m going to have to call you an idiot, I’m going to expect you and Escarro to act appropriately humiliated. Make it good, Russel.” 

“I think I can do that... on the record.” Hassan winced. He thought he knew what the Lieutenant was getting at. 

“Good man.” Coughlan chuckled. “Off the record, Escarro and I both owe you a drink, but something tells me I’ll be paying for both of them.” 

A moment later, she shut off her stall’s acoustics. Hassan couldn’t help himself; he turned around and snuck a look at her as she walked out past him to the dispenser filled with fresh, auto-fitting shipboard fatigues. He immediately wished he hadn’t; Marine training taught every cadet to de-sexualize nudity as much as possible, and he knew he was looking at Lieutenant Coughlan in a way he had never seen another Marine. He quickly turned away, knowing that opening the door to biological pressures would only cause him trouble, and that he had plenty of that already. 

“Don’t worry.” Hassan almost jumped from the sound of Coughlan’s voice, and turned to find her standing right in front of his stall, matter-of-factly pulling on fresh fatigues. A day and a night of suit operations followed by the scrubbers had stripped off her characteristic makeup, and the only thing its absence revealed was the deep bags under her lively eyes. “If I’ve judged him right, Escarro will think better next time.” 

Despite himself, Hassan chuckled. “God, I hope he thinks at all next time, Lieutenant. He’s a good Marine mostly.”  

“One of the best, by all reports. Off the record, he’s right, in a way.” Coughlan shrugged, fitting her tunic over her shoulders. A moment later, twin holographic rank insignias appeared over her shoulders. “I’m a piss-poor replacement for someone like Yeung.” 

Hassan suppressed an instinct to disagree; even in the context of an informal, off-the-record chat, he knew it unwise to contradict his superior. As far as he’d seen, Coughlan had done all right on the ground, but her opinion was law, and his was meaningless. He grunted noncommittally and focused on playing the scrubbers over his lower back, which always seemed to become a lake of sweat during extended suit ops. 

Coughlan stood there and said nothing for several seconds before finally turning and marching away. Hassan counted the paces of her bare feet on the deck. Just as she reached the doorway, she stopped once more. “Better wrap up, Russel. Briefing in one-ten.” 

“Aye, Lieutenant.” Hassan replied, turning to snap another salute. By the time he did, however, Lieutenant Coughlan was gone. 

 

This concludes the account sent in by Lieutenant Coughlan and Sergeant Russell,

t least, the parts we deemed interesting to this audience. There are elements of it which seem strange for an account presented jointly by these two people, but I will not pry into the meaning of the inclusion of these details here, as it does not impact my impression of the truth of the story. 

Naval Intelligence has vetted this story and signed off on it, and I can confirm that a Marine exercise was conducted within the date range covered in their supporting paperwork. Obviously, the story demonizes one Sergeant Escarro, but I can find no record of this person existing, and the public service records of the two submitters do not allow an easy identification of this person. Most likely the account has been anonymized sufficiently to protect a man they consider to be a “good Marine” despite obvious flaws in his character. 

[N.T.B. - I hope they cleared this with the real person who Escarro is based on before sending it to us; given what we are told of Lieutenant Coughlan, I suspect this would be something she would have thought of, if this story did prove to be mostly true.] 

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