Tales From Tewanta

Ludwig's Deposit, HIP 75862 3 C - 3308-08-04 08:21 GST Maria drove the settlement's Scorpion light assault vehicle north away from Ludwig's Deposit towards an area of badlands. Thomas was in the gunner's seat behind her studying something on his data terminal, probably custom software he was working on for his little e-breach side project. Maria was a little grumpy. Thompson had interrupted breakfast to get the two of them to checkout some flaky perimeter sensors. Their employers, HIP 74286 Stakeholders, often didn't send the highest quality supplies: short term economies that lead to more work for them in the long term. Without Thomas repairing, patching, and developing clever hacks, the settlement would have had a catastrophic infrastructure failure ages ago. It was going to be his job to figure out what was wrong. It was her job, as scout, to look after him. This was an anarchy system controlled by a c...

Ludwig's Deposit, HIP 75862 3 C - 3308-08-03 19:44 GST Yuri Burke sat back from the neutron imager view finder and took a deep breath. His hunch was correct. This wasn't an ordinary fossil. Others would consider it extraordinary anyways, given that it was a fossil of an ancient, alien, and previous unknown insect or arachnid species. But in a galaxy of wonders, where an alien species menaced human space regularly, the fossil would have just been a curiosity, something for a rich family's private collection or an exhibit in a museum in some backwater system in the Empire with pretensions of being cultured. Yuri suspected that this fossil was special due to its unusual asymmetry. He would have loved to study the true form fossils, of course, as biochemistry was his original field of study, but this fossil was slightly deformed compared to the others. The asymmetry looked like an impact trauma, perhaps even a punctu...

Ludwig's Deposit, HIP 75862 3 C - 3308-08-02 17:57 GST Maria Gonzales Matsui was coming towards the end of her last patrol of Ludwig's Deposit extraction settlement. She'd just finished inspecting the container stacks and smaller structures on the far side of landing pad two, and was now walking the perimeter of the pad on the way to storage warehouse. Her pace was brisk but she was taking care to walk lightly. Even after a year working and living on this little moon, HIP 75862 3 C, she still wasn't used to the lower gravity of under 0.1g, and still occasionally took embarrassingly high bounding steps. Her childhood on a high gravity colony world had given her a strong physique. She was short and slim, but probably was the strongest guard at the settlement. The year in the lower gravity hadn't weakened her yet, in part, due to the gruelling training schedule that the security chief, Charles Thompson, insi...

COL 285 Sector DS-I C10-8 - 3308-08-02 11:15 GST Frederich Pohl eased back on the throttle and angled The Argus' trajectory away from the system's only star. The ship's fuel scoop deployed automatically and Frederich guided the ship on a safe course through the upper reaches of the stellar atmosphere, balancing heat build up in the ship against refueling time. There was no hurry with this mission, a routine reconnaissance patrol, and therefore no point in putting the ship in any danger. When the ship was fuelled he pulled away from the K Class star and, at about fifty light seconds away from the star, slowed the ship down to the minimum supercruise speed. He opened a comms channel to Brandi Chen, the ship's engineer and signal analyst. "Hey, Brandi! We're in position for the system scan." "Okey dokey! Beginning a full spectrum scan. Bets that we find that this system is as empty an...