Tales from the Inbox: The Assassin Collector

2950-04-12 – Tales from the Inbox: The Assassin Collector 

I regret to inform the audience that, as of this feed item’s appearance, Fifth Fleet should be back in the Maribel system. 

With three battleships badly damaged enough to be out of the fight and heavy losses among the fleet’s anti-strike escorts, Admiral Zahariev elected to evacuate Confederated ground forces and all willing civilians from Håkøya and surrender the planet itself. A small number of civilians dwelling in remote areas of the planet and a small number of planetary officials elected to remain. The total number who refused evacuation is less than two thousand, but fleet staff has not released a list of those who stayed behind. 

Fast fleet elements were dispatched through the outer system to evacuate all civilian and military outposts. Some of those ships may still be in Håkøya as of this writing collecting the denizens of a few of the most remote habitats, but those chosen for this duty were selected because they are fast enough to avoid any Incarnation ships that choose to pursue them. 

Though most of the datasphere is describing the evacuation of Håkøya as a triumph of Confederated flexibility, this conceals the fact that the Navy could not protect one of the most populous and prosperous worlds of the inner Frontier from capture. The human cost of the loss of the system is very small, and little relevant military infrastructure has been lost by abandoning the system (though some was lost during the initial attack), so there’s no doubt that Zahariev made a cold-bloodedly good call in his withdrawal, but I still can’t shake the sense that if The Incarnation couldn’t be stopped at Håkøya, there’s no particular reason to expect we’ll stop them anywhere else. 

I’m trying to set up an interview with someone on Admiral Zahariev’s staff to discuss the situation once the fleet has finished forming up in Maribel orbit. In the meantime, this week I’ve found an account in the inbox of the movements of the ship Holy Tabernacle, whose odd origins have graced this feed before. 

[N.T.B. - Duncan’s concern is one all of us aboard Saint-Lô share. Håkøya is an open door from the Frontier into Farthing’s Chain, and from there, to Galactic West and even the Outer Core. The Navy can’t keep retreating forever and hoping for a better tactical position. Sure, the bastards got one hell of a bloody nose at Håkøya, but so did we.] 

As the boarding ramp descended toward the ochre Hopesway soil, Sandra Ibsen watched Grand Hierophoant Toloni rather than the crowd of thousands who had come to the salt flats to greet Holy Tabernacle. As the murmur of the crowd rose over the sounds of the ship’s mechanisms, the old man seemed to stand taller and lean less heavily on his towering scepter of office. In the seconds before he raised his hand to bless the assembled faithful, he seemed to shed two decades of his advanced age. 

At the sight of the pontiff, the crowd’s murmur bubbled over into a raucous cheer, and the front ranks, still standing at a safe distance from the just-landed starship, surged forward, as if to mob the gangway.  

The Tabernacle’s guards in their scarlet and silver livery didn’t wait for their leader’s permission to sweep past Toloni and Sandra to meet the crowd at the foot of the ramp. The first few times Holy Tabernacle had alighted near a large Penderite enclave, the well-wishers had overwhelmed the ship’s guardians, but they’d learned from the experience of dozens of planetfalls how to politely and safely screen the Grand Hierophant from being crushed by the faithful.  

Toloni lowered his hand slowly, then knelt at the top of the ramp, bowing his head in prayer. Sandra knelt alongside him, though she found it difficult to pray while being watched by so many thousands. Instead, her mind was on her plans to use the stop on populous Hopesway to restock the ship’s stocks of spare parts and various other necessities. There seemed no reason to trouble the Grand Hierophant with these worldly needs. 

Toloni’s prayers, whispered as always, were inaudible to anyone but God, but the crowd quieted and grew reverent. Sandra always wondered what a pious man like him still needed to pray for; Toloni never seemed alarmed or disturbed by anything, and everything he set in motion always seemed to succeed. 

When Toloni stood up, he started down the ramp. Sandra, master of the ship but stranger to the soil, stayed where she was.  

As Toloni reached the foot of the ramp, a ragged young man wriggled through to the front of the crowd and tried to shove his way past the guards. Sandra saw the flash of metal and instinctively reached for her sidearm. The brightly-attired guards, however, were faster. Before the gun could be brought to bear, one of their long, bayonet-tipped ceremonial rifles crashed down on his back, toppling him forward into the salty dust. The gun bounced several times, landing directly at the Grand Hierophant’s feet. 

In the sudden shocked silence, Sandra could hear the would-be assassin scrabbling backwards on his hands and knees even from forty meters away, but it was too late for him to avoid the guards, who hauled him to his feet. The cordon of crimson-cloaked men closed around Toloni, gleaming bayonets facing outwards toward the crowd in case another assassin might make an attempt, while two of their number hauled the unfortunate man up the ramp. 

Sandra relaxed and rolled her eyes as the guards dragged the struggling man past her. “What’s this, the fourth one?” 

“Fifth, Captain.” One of the guards replied without breaking stride. 

At the foot of the ramp, the guards had begun to relax, and Toloni stooped to pick up the weapon that had almost been used on him. With a deft flick Sandra had taught him, the old man ejected its magazine, cleared its chamber, and held it up, receiving a relieved cheer from the crowd. 

Sandra flicked on her comms earpiece, hoping that the Hierophant’s guardian angel – or his excessive good fortune – never deserted him. “Bridge, we’ve had another incident, but it’s under control. Attacker is in custody aboard.” 

“Understood, Skipper. I’ll notify the planetary authorities.” 

On the ground, Toloni was already addressing the crowd. Micorphones in the collar of his robe picked up his voice to be echoed by speakers built into Tabernacle’s massive hull. Sandra had heard the same speech on every world they landed on and had long since bothered to listen to each variation of the theme of gratitude for the welcome and a desire for the faithful to focus not on his presence, but on the unfailing presence of God, who did not need to board a star cruiser to visit them. His voice never quavered or broke; it was as if the attempt on his life had never happened. 

As the speech came to an end, Toloni led the assembly in a brief prayer before promising to visit each Penderite town on the planet. As he ambled back up the ramp flanked by two guards, the crowd began to disperse. 

Sandra met Toloni at the hatchway, holding out a hand to take the assassin’s gun. “Your Eminence, you really must stop collecting assassins.” 

Toloni placed the disarmed weapon into her hands carefully, as if it were a relic instead of a murderer’s implement. “They have no power to do what God does not permit them.” 

Sandra nodded, looking the weapon over. She found it to be a beautiful old-model HKR civilian rail-pistol that looked more suited for a wealthy collector’s wall than the hands of a pontiff’s would-be killer. “This is a nice piece.” 

Toloni smiled knowingly. “I will tell our guest that you approve of his taste when I talk to him.” 

Sandra shrugged and stood aside, twirling the disarmed gun as she watched the crowd dissolve. Toloni might not be worried about assassins, but she couldn’t quite manage to be as disinterested as he. 

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Tales from the Service: The Angel of Physics

2950-04-05 – Tales from the Service: The Angel of Physics 

Since last week’s entry, there has been more action here in the Håkøya system. While again, Fifth Fleet seems to have done as much damage as it took, the ongoing field repairs to Tours meant that only seven of our eight battleships moved into action when the Incarnation force moved in force toward the planet Håkøya. 

Unfortunately, already-damaged Saint-Lô took another bad hit early on in the battle and Captain Liao was forced to pull us back. As it turned out, this made us lucky, even if we did lose dozens of good spacers. Though we were out of it, Fifth Fleet seemed to be doing quite well for itself, until Marseille, got it even worse than we did. She suffered at least four major hits through overloaded shear screens and lost all power. Venting atmosphere and unable to maneuver, the ship quickly became the target of opportunity for most of the Incarnation’s strike force and for several sections of cruisers. 

Admiral Zahariev was faced with an impossible choice when it seemed Marseille would be lost. He could either pull his forces back to rally around the wounded ship, or he could continue pressing forward toward the huddled mass of Incarnation troop-ships at the center of the enemy formation. He chose the former, and the Incarnation ground force was able to deploy almost unmolested (except for strike-craft harassment).  

In the end, Marseille was saved, though it took a bloody, close-range melee between the remainder of the Fifth Fleet battle-line and several squadrons of Incarnation heavy cruisers to accomplish the task. Our strike-screen frigates were all but wiped out, and the strike-craft losses on both sides were horrific. A decent number of enemy cruisers were badly damaged or destroyed as well, but I don’t know the exact numbers. The fleet is calling this action the Battle of Veslemøy after the name of the Håkøyan moon which loomed large over the battle space, to avoid confusion with the previous battle. 

With enemy troops on the planet’s surface, I’ve noticed a distinct loss of morale here. The enemy had to suffer horribly to achieve a major landing, but the landing, in the end, succeeded. Even with the bulk of the population already evacuated, and a garrison of significant size to oppose the invasion, popular sentiment among Navy spacers is that the beautiful world of Håkøya will be lost to the Incarnation within weeks. 

This week, I have a brief description of what it's like to fight a battle from inside a battleship's gunnery stations from a gun-turret commander aboard Argonne. Don Symons reports that his gun turret has two confirmed cruiser kills and hits on three more, but I cannot verify his kill claims. If true, they make his gun crew the most effective in the whole fleet, at least in the battles here in Håkøya.

Lieutenant Don Symons shook his head as the ringing in his ears faded. He hadn’t heard the shot hit the armor this time; he had only felt the shock through his restraints and felt the ship’s frame twist back and forth as the smart-alloy girders tried to absorb the shock of a ten-gigawatt plasma charge vaporizing centimeters of plating.  

Since he could not hear the alarms, Don scanned his board for any new alert indicators. Argonne had weathered the hit as well as could be expected, deafening effects on its gunners notwithstanding. The ship had meters of thick armor-alloy plating protecting the belly now turned to face the four enemy cruisers with which it was trading fire. As long as it could maneuver to take each hit on relatively thick parts of the armor not already glowing cherry-red from previous impacts, it could expect to win the four-on-one mid-range duel fairly handily. 

As Don watched the capacitor indicators for his turret systems crawl toward the full mark, the targeting information from the main fire control system suddenly changed. Frowning, he switched his display to a tactical plot, and found that the commander of the main battery had given him, and presumably every other turret commander aboard, the fire control solution for a target not among the four cruisers currently cratering their ship’s armor. 

“J Turret to central control.” Don could barely even hear his own voice, so abused were his eardrums, so he cranked up his headset’s volume far past safe levels to compensate. “Confirming target change.” 

“Confirm target change, J Turret. Captain’s orders. Turrets firing at will.” 

Don shrugged and waved to the men seated at nearby consoles, giving them the hand-gesture indicative of a target change. Once he had received several nods, he engaged the turret’s automatic training system. Everything around him vibrated violently as the triple two-hundred-fifty milimeter rail cannon gun mount bolted to a hull sponson barely twenty meters away spun on its titanic gimbals to face the new target. 

Just as J turret was finishing its huge sweep, one of the other turrets aboard fired its salvo. Don always tried to guess which turret was firing when he felt the familiar rumbling shock reverberate through the ship, and decided that this was B Turret, near the bow. In his tactical plot, he saw the dotted lines showing the training angles of each of the eight turrets turning around the wireframe of Argonne to pin the new target. 

The rumbling of the turret’s motion ceased, leaving only the silence and the ringing in Don’s ears. “All capacitors ready. Gunnery solution locked in?” 

“Ready and tracking, Lieutenant.” 

“Fire.” 

The triple bass rumble of the rail-cannons throwing titanic projectiles at relativistic speed seemed to push the whole battleship to one side. Though not loud by comparison to the sound of the weapons being aimed, the report of the cannons had an apocalyptic finality that Don had never grown tired of in nearly two years of war aboard Argonne. In a few seconds, those slugs would arrive on target, and anything they contacted would cease to exist. As his old battery sergeant had once remarked, the avenging Angel of Physics took no prisoners. 

“Time on target... eight seconds. Seven.” Don doubted most of the gun crew could hear him, but he counted down anyway. 

When the timer reached two seconds, everything in the compartment lurched violently to one side. This time, Don heard the impact on the armor as Argonne once more rang like a bell. Something about this impact set his teeth on edge, and this time, several warning indicators began to blink on his board, indicating minor damage to the weapon system under his jurisdiction. 

Don tried to say “impact” when the timer reached zero, but he couldn’t hear himself or anything else. On the tactical plot, the red-orange symbol at the intersection of all Argonne’s dotted line gun-aiming indicators, already blinking to indicate damage, faded into a dull brown. 

“Tracking multiple hits on target.” Don shouted, his own voice sounding a whisper in his ears. “Target is down.” 

Unfortunately, there was no time to celebrate; already, the capacitors were beginning to charge once more, and already, the fire control director was sending new target information. Don waved the “change target” signal over his head once more, sent one of his damage control techs to check on the worst of the damage indicators, then set the big gimbals turning once more. 

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Tales from the Inbox: The War for Minds

2950-03-29 – Tales from the Inbox: The War for Minds

While the medics still haven’t cleared me, I’m well enough to work, at least, to work enough to prepare an item for this week’s entry and run it by Admiral Zahariev’s Naval Intelligence liaison. 

While I was for reasons mentioned last week not able to observe the whole engagement, I think it’s fair to describe what happened on 03 March as bloody but inconclusive. Fifth Fleet gave as good as it got, if not better; three of the eight battleships in the main line took bad hits, including our own Saint-Lô. Tours got it the worst, having had a close-range exchange with one of the Incarnation cruisers, but the cruiser that riddled that ship’s hull with beam and plasma cannon fire took at least four hits from Tours’s two-fifty millimeter rail cannons, which at that range nearly ripped it in half lengthwise. I was able to secure good video recordings of this spectacular wreck and others taken by post-battle scouts, and have sent them back to Planet at Centauri for use on the main vidcast.

We lost four cruisers, quite a few destroyers, and numerous smaller units, but at least six of the big Tyrant cruisers were drifting wrecks by the end of the battle, and probably eight or nine more were damaged badly enough to no longer be capable of fighting, though I can’t get good numbers on that. Strike squadron losses on both sides were fairly heavy as well. 

Unfortunately, the major loss here has been the fleet service platforms left in the Håkøya system to service Fifth Fleet’s fast cruisers and scouting squadrons. Capture of these slow-moving vessels delayed the Incarnation invasion of the planet until Fifth Fleet arrived in force, but most of the service platforms in the system were either captured or scuttled by their crews. 

For the last few weeks, we’ve been in a stare-down similar to the one at Berkant, though under somewhat less favorable circumstances. Both fleets have brought up a number of large, slow hauler-type ships loaded with troops and weapons for a ground-side engagement, but neither can get that force to the planet without putting it under threat of the faster combat ships of the other side. In addition to the one battle, we’ve had a few smaller skirmishes and feints over this standoff, and if I had to guess we’ll probably have at least one more large-scale battle before Nate quits the field. 

While communications outside the Håkøya system were down for weeks, I’ve been in regular contact with persons in the F.D.A. garrison on the planet’s surface, and with some of the few civilians not evacuated as a precaution when the enemy fleet arrived in-system in the last days of February. 

This week, our brief account comes from one of the civilians planetside. Yaw Johnson, a retired spacer from Tranquility and an old friend of our own Nojus Brand, has elected not to evacuate his remote cottage on the planet, and doubts the Incarnation will bother him much. He let us know that the local datasphere has been awash with Incarnation propaganda lately, probably as a result of small parties of Nate scouts sent covertly ahead of the main force still waiting in the transports. 

Yaw heard the house intercom chirp to let him know he had new messages but didn’t set down his gardening trowel right away. The freedom not to jump to the rhythms of computers and digital clocks being the best part of being retired from a spacer’s life, he fought down the vestigial urge to check the message while he finished setting a row of seedlings into the vegetable plot.  

Most Earth produce grew reasonably well on Håkøya with a little fertilizer, but in the past three years he’d learned that this did not extend to the genetically tweaked varieties common to his somewhat more harsh home-world of Tranquility. Getting seeds shipped in had been easy, but the first local year’s plantings had been an almost total failure; the plants had all gone immediately to seed or wilted for mysterious reasons. He’d done a bit of research, and hopefully the second season would bear the fruits and vegetables he remembered so fondly from his childhood. 

Only when each plant’s root ball had been carefully lowered into a hole and its stem heaped around with black earth did Yaw straighten, stretch his creaky back, and head inside. Though Håkøya’s warm spring-anologues were rarely hot enough to dehydrate or burn a human, least of all one adapted to the harsher extremes of Tranquility, he headed for the beverage unit in one corner and called for a tall glass of tart citruspine soda. While the dispenser mixed concentrated flavors, trace nutrients, and cold carbonated water, he noticed the blinking indicator on the comms unit and remembered the chirping. 

Given that only four people on the planet knew Yaw by name, and that the hypercast network allowing anyone to anyone further away to send him unwanted messages had been down for more than a week, he wondered who it could be. Most likely, it would be his old associate and one-time business partner Nojus Brand, who was apparently in-system riding along on a Navy ship. Yaw had ignored Nojus’s first two messages and replied to the third with a terse but marginally polite answer, hoping the damn fool would take a hint.  

Retired, after all, meant that Yaw no longer cared what went on outside his property; he hadn’t even read or watched a scrap of news in nearly twenty months. After a few weeks, he’d found the feeling of being disconnected from the Reach’s endless parade of near-crises, panics, and dramas liberating, and had restricted his datasphere usage to acquiring the various fiction and history material which he read to fill the time when he was cooped up inside by rain or other inclement weather. 

Retrieving his completed drink from the unit and taking a sip, Yaw sighed and commanded the house’s intercom to play back the recorded message. 

The message opened with a strain of shrill, martial music that caught the retired spacer by surprise. “Citizen of the planet Håkøya, greetings from a better world.” The breathy, feminine voice carried an odd accent Yaw had never heard before.  

“What in all hells?” In all his seventy years, Yaw had never gotten a cold-call advertisement on a private Datasphere message. The system was supposed to have safeguards in place to prevent such things. 

“Perhaps you think you live in paradise already. That no better world than this one is possible.” The woman speaker continued, her voice dropping into a low tone in an attempt to sound conspiratorial. “You would be forgiven for so thinking. But we can make a better world here, together.” 

“Sounds like utopian sewage to me.” Yaw knew he was talking back at a pre-recorded message that couldn’t answer him, but he didn’t care. He’d heard all manner of crackpot revolutionaries and religious fanatics in his travels, and none of them had ever been able to deliver on their soaring promises. 

“The Incarnation has come at last to your world, and invites you to join us in a new stage of human evolution. Together, we can boldly march into-” 

Yaw snarled and slapped the control to end message playback. To his surprise and growing alarm, the voice continued to blabber on about a brighter future and other utopian platitudes. He tried turning down the volume, and found that, too, unresponsive. Setting his drink down, Yaw picked up the comms unit and yanked its power connector free, finally interrupting the message.  

When silence finally returned to his home, the old spacer recovered his drink and decamped to the rocking-chair on the porch to think. Nursing the sour beverage, he wondered how many people had gotten the message, and tried to guess what percentage of the population of the planet was stupid enough to think anything of it. On Tranquility, someone peddling ideological cure-alls would have been shunned, mocked, and, if they persisted, probably shot, but the world of his childhood, colonized centuries earlier by misfits and fierce individualists, taught everyone from a young age about the poison dripping from demagogues’ tongues. Most of the other inhabitants of Håkøya would have less stringent anti-insanity educations, especially the youngest. 

When his drink was empty, Yaw stared into the glass forlornly. He had heard about the conflict with the so-called Incarnation in passing a few times at the tiny trade-post where he bought his supplies, but had always assumed nobody would bother to invade a world populated by retirees and beachfront resorts. Retired or no, he didn’t think he’d be able to ignore this one, not entirely. 

Creakily standing, Yaw set about reconnecting the comms unit and setting it up to record an outgoing message. Maybe it was time to have a chat with Nojus after all. The man always seemed to have a good nose for danger, even if he did use it for all the wrong purposes. 

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Tales from the Service: Duncan’s Misadventure

2950-03-22 – Tales from the Service: Duncan’s Misadventure 

Rumors of our death have been somewhat exaggerated. 

Nojus here. Duncan is alive and mostly intact. We got thrown around a bit when Saint-Lô took a bad hit in action on the third of this month, but both the ship and the team did pull through in the end. Sadly, the battle ended up as yet another inconclusive action between Fifth Fleet and the bulk of the Incarnation ships in the Coreward Frontier. We didn’t really lose, but neither did we win. Duncan will bring a full breakdown to the feed when he’s up and walking again. 

With the restoration of long-range communications back to Maribel (though not as long as the people there would prefer to believe), we’ve been buried under several mountains of datasphere messages and alerts that were sent before the Navy could move one of its portable hypercast relays into the Håkøya system safely. If you sent us anything and expect a reply, be patient, especially if you expect it from Duncan. 

Some of you may be asking how only one of us managed to be injured. Well, during action the five of us tend to spread out across the ship to observe the battle from wherever we can get a good sense of things without getting in the way. We’re trained to do basic damage control if we need to, but Captain Liao told us not to get involved unless the situation was really bad. Most probably, Cosmic Background asked the Navy not to risk the lives of four of its employees and one contingent contractor needlessly, but that’s none of my business.  

Anyway, Duncan should have been the safest of us; he was in the command citadel with Captain Liao during the battle. Having talked to him as much as the medics would permit, and viewed some of the system data from the battle, may I present to you the account of how Cosmic Background’s star text feed editor nearly got his arm blown off. 

“Ah, not again.” Captain Liao kicked the display projector housing with the toe of his boot. As if responding to the kick, the cloud of fuzzy static in the display area briefly coalesced into a swarm of brightly colored icons before fading away again. 

“It’s no good, sir. Something’s wrong with the hard-wire data feed. I’m switching to wireless backups.” 

Duncan sat at the inactive terminal assigned to him in the corner of the compartment, his recording unit perched on the top edge of the adaptive screen. He had made little sense of the battle so far, but he usually didn’t understand things as they were happening anyway. After things were over, he always re-played the recording a few times, then asked Liao or another senior officer about anything that still seemed strange. So far, the battle in Håkøya had been no different than the large-scale engagements over Margaux. With multiple fast groups of Incarnation ships moving in tight formations trying to outmaneuver the slower but more powerful Fifth Fleet battle line, it took a trained command officer’s eye to watch the whirling swarm of symbols in the display all at once and make any sense out of it. 

A few seconds later, the display reset, but Duncan could tell from the back that the data being displayed was of far lesser quality. The symbols were larger and more diffuse, indicating inexact coordinate data, and the various rectangular insets appearing and disappearing around the margins for Captain Liao and the other four officers pacing around the display seemed far less choked with information.  

Most of the orders Liao and his subordinates were sending out were muttered quickly over their comms headsets, so Duncan, unable to overhear most of it, focused on the display, picking out the solitary bright blue symbol which represented their own ship, Saint-Lô. The venerable battleship, currently occupying the tail endf of Fifth Fleet’s eight-battleship central line, was currently maneuvering away from the thick of the fighting, where cruisers and destroyers in various shades of green flung themselves like waves against tight knots of red Incarnation warships. There could be no telling who was winning, not yet, perhaps not even for Captain Liao or even Admiral Zahariev. 

Duncan jumped as the big armored hatch behind him emitted a dull clanking noise followed by a hiss. Captain Liao had summoned a crew rating wearing a damage control patch and was pointing toward the exit. The captain occasionally punctuated his orders to the damage control tech with a gesture that seemed to be in Duncan’s direction. 

The tech saluted and hurried away from the battleship’s captain, waving Duncan to his feet. “Come on.” 

Duncan, for the first time in months remembering that he had been ostensibly trained in damage control when he’d come aboard, stood awkwardly. “Me? What for?” 

“Going to need a second pair of hands to check the wire trunking. Don’t worry, I’ll show you what I need.” 

Duncan picked up the tool satchel he’d still not used except in refresher training, then followed the young man out into the corridor. Never had Saint-Lô seemed to be so big and so silent. With the crew at its combat stations, the vast central corridors were blocked every few meters with a translucent pressure-seal curtains. He and his guide were the only people moving in any direction. The dimmed Condition One battle alert lighting gave the long, curtain-divided corridors an eerie feeling, and Duncan immediately wished he was back in the command citadel with Captain Liao. 

Pushing aside the first pressure curtain, the tech pointed to a panel in the bulkhead. “The trunking is behind that.” 

Working quickly, the pair released the screw bolts holding the panel in place and levered it off to one side. The tech stuck a scanner probe into a coiling tangle of ducts and cables, and Duncan tried and failed to discover how the man knew which one was the data line to the command citadel before he withdrew his arm once more, shaking his head. 

“Damage is further back, right?" Duncan began lifting the panel back into place, glad that the heavy panel was attached to swinging lever-arms that took most of the weight. 

“You got it.” The tech holstered his probe and helped bolt the panel back down. “Let’s try the next one down.” 

Five panels later, the battle alert klaxon sounded. Looking over his shoulder, Duncan saw the command center’s heavy hatch begin to swing closed once more. “We’d better get back before that’s sealed off.”  

“Captain didn’t recall us.” The tech shook his head. “We’ll finish up and head for the damage control annex at the aft end of this deck.” 

Duncan wanted to push through the pressure curtains and get back inside before it finished closing, but the tech didn’t seem terribly concerned, so he stuck with his temporary associate, helping seal up the sixth panel and move on to the seventh. He wasn’t technically a Navy spacer and was under no obligation to follow Captain Liao’s orders, but he didn’t want to leave the young man next to him to finish the task alone either. The faster they both finished, the faster they could both retreat to the relative safety of the damage control station. 

The pair had just opened up the ninth panel when the lights flickered and a low boom echoed through the battlewagon’s massive hull frames. Duncan knew this to mean that the ship had suffered a hit through its defensive systems, but probably not very badly; after all, Saint-Lô had heavy armor to absorb such punishment, and nothing else seemed to be going wrong. 

A moment later, as the tech was once again reaching into the panel to stick his sensor probe into a tangle of wiring, the ship took another hit, this time much closer to the pair of techs. There was a bright flash down the corridor to accompany the usual boom of a strike, and the deck below Duncan’s feet seemed to twist and leap a meter upward, throwing him across the corridor away from his partner. Shrill alarms began to wail and the pressure curtains inflated to firmly seal the corridor in both directions. 

Just as Duncan, shaking spots out of his eyes, was getting to his feet to help his associate disentangle himself from the wiring, there was another boom, this time seeming to come from just above Duncan’s head, and reverberating in a lasting rumble that seemed to be getting closer and closer. 

The tech, at last pulling free, seemed to recognize a danger that Duncan did not, and dived to the deck. 

Before Duncan could mimic the action, a gout of flames exploded out of the open bulkhead panel he was standing beside. Thrown across the corridor yet again, he struck his head on the hard metal opposite, and everything went dark. 

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