The Rim: Lights in the Dark

"No, I heard you, Lieutenant sir. And you'll address me as Master Chief Vincent Guntali. Now space your ego and sit your prissy academy ass back in that chair, Lieutenant, sir. I’ll answer your damned questions, but I’m going to say what I have to say first.

You'll hear a lot of stories from the "Rim". For the most part it’s a pile of horseshit some officer like you on his first tour spouts try and impress some girl on their first port stop out of Scapa Flow. Close to home people eat that sort of thing up and don't have the sense to know better. I suppose I can't knock the whole adventuring in the great unknown bit, but the truth of it is most ships going out that way don't go far off the beaten path. There's a reason. Politicians don’t like it when ships go missing. Reporters, inquiries, it raises all kind of hell. And you know what? Maybe it's right of them to ask why so many people have to die poking around out there where they shouldn't be.

Still. Every now and then someone’s got the balls to send a ship somewhere we really haven’t been before, or maybe we have been before but it’s been so long nobody remembers what’s there. On my first tour all I would’ve said about the Rim was that it was a whole lot of…nothing. A giant, empty blackness past the end of civilization. I thought it was lonely when we couldn’t pick up system chatter on the long range antenna any more. Not even a miner on some asteroid calling home. But nothing made you feel like there was nobody else in the universe when the captain came on the squawk and announced that we’d passed the last hypercomm beacon and we were in the black from here on out. Being an ‘adventurer’ then didn’t make that feeling in the pit of my stomach go away, knowing that if something happened to us, we could scream as loud as we could and nobody would hear. And if something happened…anything at all, it’d be days, maybe weeks before anyone even thought to go looking for us.

I don’t think that way any more. Maybe I should've listened to my granddaddy when he used to tell me about Eridanus. The Rim is still a great big gaping abyss past the end of civilization. But it’s a big, gaping abyss that every postie-reject wackjob, tinpot war criminal and sociopathic roomba got thrown into in hopes they’d get lost and never find their way back out.

It’s been a long time since the rogue drones came out in numbers, but that still makes the Rim dangerous. The smart ones, anyway. That’s why nobody took it serious on the Manhattan. That was my tenth tour, just so you know. The newer ships are too fast and too well armed for the drones ‘stupid enough to attack us.’ Raids these days are pretty rare, particularly against a warship, but when they do happen they’re treated like a turkey shoot. Most of the time they are.

But something about that particular trip had been bugging me. There were more drones around than before, even if they were leaving us alone. The captain didn’t like it either, but what do you think the admirals would’ve said if he’d turned that ship around because it ‘didn’t feel right’? The spacey's got more guts than that. We thought we were just being paranoid.

But when we jumped into PRISM-995, that’s when things all just went into the shitter. Instant we were in the system, wham. They were all over us. Things got bad real fast, and the captain used all the juice we had left to hop us into an asteroid belt. Killed all the power, the lights, everything. Just hunkered there in the dark until the drive was charged back up, watching the EM spikes on the passive array where they were roaming around looking for us. The ship wasn’t hurt bad, but she was plenty banged up. Captain Howell saved all our asses that day. Don't let anyone tell you different.

Once we had the juice we got the hell out of there. The drones though…they came after us. We played duck and run with them through two systems, and they just weren’t giving up. We were making a run back towards this mining post we’d come across a couple weeks before, but we didn’t make it. I don’t even remember what the miserable place was called where they finally caught up to us. I was down in the base of the belly of the sensor dome trying to find a short when it happened. Didn’t have a clue we were redballed until the first hit struck about five meters aft of me, popped the sensor dome like a pimple. Whoooooooosh. Compartment was open to space.

I had my helmet on, so my eyeballs didn’t explode when it lost pressure. Only thing that kept me from being blown out was getting my arm hung up on something. The airtight doors to the next compartment were closed before I even knew what happened, and I know for a fact that fancy-ass hull-sealing forcefield didn’t do shit. Wulffe was with me, but he got stuck on the other side of the doors. I don't know what happened to him.

Anyway. I patched into the internal comms with my suit, although I could only receive. I thought we'd seen bad, but this was worse. The first hit knocked out the MAX. I don't know how, but somehow the little buggers figured out that's what coordinated the point defense guns. Optical tracking just wasn't cutting it with so much crap flying around out there. I didn't need the ship comms for that, I could see it.

I gotta be honest with you here. Unless you're in gunnery or on the bridge, you never know what's going on. Guy like me, I'd never put eyes on the enemy before, especially not through a gaping hole in the ship. Bits of the drones and bits of us flying everywhere. Bits of us. The internal comms were in a panic. We were going down, and...I lost it. I tried to get the emergency doors open and get back into the ship. Didn't work. Probably a good thing.

I snapped back out of it when I heard the evacuation tone. I thought the captain was nuts. Ironic, right? Still. Abandon ship and go where? Out there in the black? For some reason I looked back out through the hole. It was still a shitstorm of fire, but it wasn't all coming at us any more. There was something else out there, another ship. Maybe a bunch of ships. It was a bit hard to make out, but I saw this big one in the middle of it. A MacArthur, no mistake, like it'd come right out of freaking '32, guns blazing. It was a pile of junk from the wrong half of the century and there was some wacko over there in it, coming to try and save our asses. And I swear to all that's holy, it was flying a flag off its radio mast. It was the most glorious thing I'd ever seen.

They even managed to save a few of us before the Manhattan went up. Some stayed behind to keep the generators going and guns firing, like Captain Howell. I'm almost ashamed to say I wasn't one of them. But it's worth it if only for one thing. My granddaddy came back from the Rim and said there was nothing worth finding out there. I'm here to say there is.

Now is there anything else, lieutenant, sir?

- Log #442256: Testimony of Master Chief Vincent Guntali to the general inquiry convened May 27, 2192 concerning the loss of the UNCS Manhattan.