Operation Werewolf Falls — Everybody Came Home

Every dispatch in this log about an Ironclad on the ground has, until now, been about one we were not sent to. This one we were. It begins, the way freight does, with paperwork.

Recovered

Raven Unit · Evidence

Believe Nation Logistics

// Cargo Manifest & Crew Declaration //

TO:

New Babbage, microTech — Commercial Receiving

FROM:

Believe Nation Logistics — Stanton Operations Group, Area18 · Bay 14

RE:

Cargo Manifest & Crew Declaration · DOC BN-7741-K · Rev 02

HULL: Drake Interplanetary Ironclad · Registry BN-IC-0419 · Routing: published cargo corridor · no escort assigned · Filed 04:12 SET · departure expedited.

DECLARED LOAD: Processed food, palletised — 144 SCU. Agricultural supplies, containerised — 96 SCU. Recycled material composite, hab fit-out — 120 SCU. Medical supplies, general issue — 32 SCU. CONSIGNMENT — SEALED, contents not declared, ref BN-CS-2207 — secure hold. Vehicle load: RSI Ursa Medivac, one unit, secured.

PILOT OF RECORD: OJORE.

CREW SUBSTITUTION: FILED — ref BN-CX-8830 · replacement name not transmitted.

SUPERNUMERARY LIST: NOT TRANSMITTED AT ORIGIN.

SOULS ABOARD: NOT CONFIRMED. This document is not a headcount and must not be relied upon as one.

R. Vashti

Cargo Agent · Area18 · Signed at Lodgement

Pilot of Record — Signature Not Captured · Departure Expedited

Seal · BLVN Logistics

⌁ End of Manifest ⌁

BELIEVE NATION LOGISTICS · DOC BN-7741-K · REV 02 · CHK 4F-2C-91-08 · RECOVERED FROM WRECK — RAVEN UNIT EVIDENCE COPY

Souls aboard: not confirmed. Read that line twice. Everyone at the wreck was going to.

The loop

The distress call never reached a tower. What Believe Nation HQ received was pulled off a relay afterwards, degraded past the point where a number survives, and it repeated:

…BELIEVE NATION [static], we are down and we are [static], and somebody here is… [static] …took fire from [static]. They came out of [static] on top of us and they… [static] souls aboard, [static] of them [static]… relay is [static]. If you are [static] this, the [static]

— Casualty hull distress loop · relay capture · numerals unrecoverable at this integrity

Four Raven Unit candidates had been named to hold at Ready 1 in New Babbage for exactly this. Not members. Applicants, flying their own hulls, with every unit asset deployed elsewhere and no senior operator on the channel to make the hard call on their behalf. That was not a shortfall. That was the test. Raven Actual was on the net — monitoring, not helping — and its entire contribution to the night was a radio check and the loop repeating underneath it. That is a distinction the candidates would come to appreciate.

Two of the four could not answer the call. One of the empty seats was taken by a reservist who was not on the launch order that morning and had never applied for the patch. He flew anyway. The other seat stayed empty, and this log will leave it that way.

The frigate

Doctrine, when they have had time to learn it, will tell them that a recovery is a small thing done quietly. What lifted out of New Babbage at 1915 was an Idris.

Understand the logic before you smile at it. The three had no orders about each other, no element leader, and no idea what they were flying into — and a frigate is the honest answer to "I do not know what I will need." They carried an Anvil Centurion in the vehicle bay for a roof over the landing zone, and enough ship around them to survive a very bad first minute. It was not the Raven answer. It was the answer of three people who had decided, without being told to, that they were going as one element. Command noted both halves of that.

The forest

Ghost Hollow is not a landing pad. The Ironclad had come down into a sea of microTech forest, and trees that had swallowed a hundred-and-fifteen-metre hauler were not going to part for a frigate. The Idris set down where an Idris could, and the distance between that and the wreck became the first tax the candidates paid on their choice of ship.

The second was paid on the way in. Crimson Leviathan was already on the ground — not patrolling, not searching, holding the ground between the wreck and the sky the way you hold something you were paid to hold — and the frigate took ground-to-air fire on the approach. It landed anyway. Then the vehicle deck refused to cooperate: the Centurion made it down to hold the sky over the frigate; the rest did not, and after a stretch of arguing with a ramp the element made the right call and went in on foot.

What followed was a long walk through the trees under a contact that never quite became a fight. Leviathan would show itself on a rise, take a shot, and fall back. Show, shoot, fall back. Never chase. Never close. Every file this unit holds on Crimson Leviathan says the same thing — they do not chase, they make you come to them — and the candidates were watching that doctrine perform in real time without yet knowing what it was for. It cost them minutes. It was designed to.

The wreck

The Ironclad was on its belly with its ramp down and its bay open to the sky. Cargo had gone everywhere — food and composite thrown across the deck, containers on their sides, one or two split. The sealed consignment in the secure hold had not moved and had not been touched. The Ursa had come off the garage clamps but remained inside the wreck, which is the reason anyone at Ghost Hollow was still breathing, and its medical stores were very nearly gone.

And there were the survivors. A pilot with a head injury who could not hold a thread of conversation and would not surrender the one fact he was certain of. A cargo hand with a ringing ear and a grievance. A ship's engineer who knew the hull better than the people in it. A turret gunner who kept saying a number. A crew thrown together for a run that was supposed to carry no risk at all — they knew Leviathan had worked the corridor once, and they knew the reports that said Leviathan had been pulling out of Stanton since Greycat. They had been introduced at flight time. They could not have picked each other out of a line before the crash, let alone after it.

They had done what strangers do when the alternative is dying alone in the snow: they had pulled together. And when a woman came out of the treeline before the candidates arrived — another traveller down, on her own, asking for help — they had argued about it, and then taken her in. Five people at the wreck, waiting for a rescue that had been sent for one.

Who do you believe

The candidates walked into that bay and discovered their tasking had stopped being useful the moment they read it aloud. Find the pilot. Which one? More than one person at that wreck had a claim on the seat, everybody had a reason, and nobody was volunteering the truth. The gunner's count — everyone who went up, plus one standing here — sat in the middle of the argument like a stone nobody wanted to pick up.

They searched the wreck. That is the first thing they did right, and it is worth writing down because a hastier element would not have. Out of the bay came manifest BN-7741-K, and the manifest said OJORE.

The pilot was not Ojore. He said he was, at first, because he already knew how "I am the pilot, but I am not on the manifest" sounds to three strangers with rifles — and then he stopped saying it, because it was not true. Here is where a document built to make an honest person look like a liar turned on whoever filed it. Somebody read the whole page. A crew substitution filed with no replacement name. A pilot's signature block that read NOT CAPTURED — DEPARTURE EXPEDITED. A form that says in its own footnote that it is not a headcount and must not be relied upon as one. Paper that could not confirm the pilot could not deny him either.

So they asked the questions paper cannot answer. Which panel brings the power plant up before the drives will answer. How she handles loaded. The last thing done in that seat, and what the hit sounded like from the cockpit. One person at that wreck could answer all of it without hesitating, and the ship's engineer — when asked directly, and only when asked directly — confirmed every word. The pilot had a name that was not on the manifest, a head injury, and the truth. The candidates believed him. They were right.

A problem for later

They had what they came for. They ran for the Idris.

The Idris was gone.

Let the record be exact about this, because it is the single most expensive lesson of the night and we intend to get full value from it. A frigate was set down in contested ground with a known hostile element in the trees, and the element that landed it walked away from it. No watch. No security posture. A capital ship left the way you leave a vehicle in your own driveway. Crimson Leviathan — three contractors, on foot — walked aboard and took it.

Read that again. Leviathan took the frigate and left the way home open. They had every opportunity to close the exit for real, and they did not. This log does not yet know what to do with that. Hold the thought.

The candidates, standing in the trees with no ride and a casualty to move, did the only thing the moment allowed. They filed the frigate as a problem for later, turned around, and went back to the crew.

Personnel

The orders named one person. That was never an oversight. Raven Unit exists because Believe Nation does not write off its own, and the name of this division has two words in it. Nobody told the candidates which word mattered. Nobody was going to.

The cargo hand asked it for them. The pilot claim had died the moment somebody asked how you turn an Ironclad on, and instead of crumbling the cargo hand came straight back at the three of them:

Fine. I'm not the pilot. I'm Believe Nation. I load your freight, I fly your supplies, and I went down in the same crash they did. So — am I worth a seat, or did you only come for the one with the licence?

— Cargo hand, BN-IC-0419 — to the recovery element

Then silence, and three candidates with no senior operator to hide behind. There were five people at that wreck. Four of them were Believe Nation — members, on the books, not passengers, every one of them able to say so and mean it. The orders said pilot. The candidates looked at a cargo hand, an engineer and a gunner and answered the question out loud: nobody was staying on that rock. No one left behind is a doctrine this unit has not finished writing. They wrote a line of it for us.

Which left a hauler that would not fly, a frigate that had been stolen, and a cordon in the trees. So they worked the problem.

The power plant

The ship's engineer had already found it. The Ironclad's drives had not been shot out — the housings were intact, and a hull that has been shot down does not sit that still with its engines in one piece. The drives had lost the thing they cannot turn without. The power plant, aft, behind a door, was ruined in its slot.

And on the deck at the foot of the plant, beside an open access panel, were drink containers. Coffee. One on its side. Somebody had been in a compartment they had no business in, carrying something they should not have been carrying, and it had gone somewhere it should never have gone. The plant had surged over the following hour until it could no longer carry the drives, the drives had failed, and a crippled hauler on a published route is a findable hauler. Leviathan had not put that hull down. Leviathan had finished it. The Ironclad's most critical systems sit behind a panel a tired crewman can open one-handed, and one did.

Believe Nation's own records make it worse. Defect notes on that power plant had been filed twice on prior runs by the ship's engineer. Both came back NO ACTION — NO PARTS AVAILABLE. The engineer had spent the crash and everything after it afraid that this was on them. It was not. It was on a cup, and on a logistics desk that closed two tickets. Who left the cup is a matter for a board of inquiry, and this log is not one.

Then Leviathan came aboard. While the element was working the exterior and the crew was working the plant, a contractor slipped into the wreck and left with fuses and components a ship needs to fly. Consider what that was for. Not to keep the Ironclad on the ground — they had just stolen one exit and left the other standing. Pressure, then. Every fuse they pulled was a minute the element spent fixing instead of asking. Which questions did not get asked, this log will come back to.

The candidates and the crew fixed it anyway. The engineer worked without stopping. The candidates fetched, held, carried and covered. The pilot was not treated by the element — no one in it had the training, and the Ursa was nearly dry — and this log records that plainly, because the standard for a recovery unit is not best efforts. But the record also shows that everyone at that wreck did what they could for him with what they had, and that a concussed man who is spoken to, sat down and given water gets clearer. This one did.

Airworthy

Airworthy is a generous word for it. A hauler that had bellied into a forest with a ruined power plant, a stripped fuse panel and an engineer working by torchlight was declared fit to fly by the people standing inside it, and then it very nearly was not. The Ironclad came up out of the trees on power that would not hold. The engines browned out and caught, browned out and caught. The quantum drive spooled, failed, spooled again and failed again, with the cordon still somewhere below and every soul at Ghost Hollow strapped into a hull that was arguing with itself about whether to stay in the sky.

It held. On an attempt nobody aboard was counting any more, the drive took, and BN-IC-0419 left microTech's atmosphere for the second time in its life, with the crew aboard, the candidates aboard, and the engineer's hands still inside a panel.

It landed at New Babbage. Everybody came home.

The count

Four people went up on BN-IC-0419. The gunner had done the count before wheels up and never once wavered on it. Five people came down the ramp at Believe Nation HQ.

The candidates never resolved it. They verified the one person their orders named and stopped verifying. They had a ship to fix, a cordon on the treeline and a rule they had just written for themselves, and somewhere in that hour "who is she?" became a question nobody had time to finish asking. So a woman who walked out of the forest asking for help walked into Believe Nation headquarters as a rescued survivor — carried in by our own people, processed as one, and thanked for surviving.

This log does not know who she is. It records that the count was never reconciled, that the gunner's arithmetic has not changed, and that Leviathan left the way home open. It puts those three facts next to each other and leaves them there.

The grade

Command's assessment of the execution: D.

That is not a kindness and it is not a cruelty. It is an inventory.

• Late on scene. The choice of hull cost the element the approach, and the forest collected the rest.
• A capital ship left unsecured in contested ground, and lost to three contractors on foot.
• The casualty never received proper medical treatment from the recovery element.
• Identity verification stopped at the person the orders named. The gunner said the count out loud, more than once, and it was never reconciled.

Every line of that is a thing a unit fixes with doctrine, drills and time. None of it is a thing you fix with character. Now the other column.

• Not one round on a non-combatant. In a bay full of frightened people and a treeline full of contractors, nothing went where it should not have.
• They searched before they believed. They read the whole manifest. They asked the questions only a pilot could answer, and they used the engineer to check the answers.
• They committed. Three candidates with no leader, no ride, and no orders about anybody but one person decided together that nobody was staying on that rock — and then did the work to make it true.
• They brought a ship back from the dead and flew it home with every Believe Nation life aboard.

There is a version of this night where a sharper element verifies all five before anyone boards, keeps its frigate, and flies home clean. We would have graded that higher. We would also have learned less about who they are. An element that spends the hour collecting information and never commits has already answered the question we were asking. These three answered it the other way.

Welcome

Werewolf Falls sets standing, not admission. Nobody washes out of this unit for choosing wrong under pressure with bad information, and nobody is admitted to it for a clean landing. The candidates were told this before they launched. They did not fly like people who believed it, which is to their credit.

On the night of 4 September, at the close of the first initiation this unit has ever run, Raven Unit received Excalibur-1, MacTaggert and JamesReilly as operators. One of them had not applied for the patch when he launched. He has now. The tradition starts with these three, and the standard they have been handed is the one printed on the manifest they recovered. Souls aboard: not confirmed. Go and confirm them.

They came for one and brought back everyone. We will teach them to count.

— Raven Actual — for the record // ZH-1