SPACE15

UEG ARCHIVE TERMINAL — UNIT 42B
 
PRIMARY MEMORY CHECK ....... OK
TAPE TRANSPORT ............. OK
RECOVERED VOLUMES .......... 3 ON FILE
 
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Somewhere in a sealed archive there are tapes of a war that was lost. This is the machine that plays them back.

You take the chair for one deployment. Six jumps, five decisions, one objective at the far end of the chart. Fifteen minutes, boot to end report — and then you find out who didn't come home.

Then you do it again, with the survivors.

FIFTEEN MINUTES IS THE WHOLE RUN

The star chart is redrawn every time. Sectors come up marked SURVEY, DERELICT, NEBULA, PATROL, MINEFIELD or GRAVEYARD, and each one draws its own kind of trouble — so plotting a course is choosing a risk, not choosing a shape.

One node per chart is a DEPOT. It is the only place that gives anything back: a repair charge, a fighter wing, a permanent refit. Reaching it costs you jumps.

And every jump raises pursuit. Arrive quiet and the enemy commander might take your terms. Arrive hunted and they fire before you finish the hail.

The safe route and the strong route are never the same route.

THREE WAYS IT ENDS

INTERDICTION — they hail you, and then you fight.

ENVOY — three beats of negotiation on your own bridge, where one wrong word starts the battle on their terms.

SALVAGE — down into a derelict, with an ambush waiting on the odds you brought with you.

Combat is not a reward here. It is what happens when the other two go wrong. Played well on STANDARD, the single commonest way a deployment ends is a settlement rather than a kill.

THE BRIDGE WILL PUNISH A LAZY CAPTAIN

Hold the trigger down and the main battery cooks itself. Buy power and your shields pay for it — and when the shields are gone, the crew pays instead. Repairs run out.

Every hull carries the same seven orders plus one of its own, so the ship you were given is a hand you were dealt rather than a skin.

Morale is not flavour. It is your damage, your reflexes, your odds at the negotiating table, and your casualty list on the way home.

Every order is a trade. There is no order that isn't.

AND THE ORDER CAN BE REFUSED

An officer who has lost faith in you will say so before carrying out something dangerous — and, at the far end, decline it outright.

QUAYE — PILOT
  YOU ARE ASKING ME. YOU ARE NOT ASKING ANYBODY ELSE.
 
  [1] I AM ASKING YOU
  [2] STAND DOWN

It takes two things at once: an order that genuinely costs something, and a relationship you have let get that bad. Nobody argues about the filing. There is no obedience stat, no loyalty bar and no way to buy your way out of it — the only thing that moves it is how you have been commanding.

Backing down costs nothing you had already spent. It is also not the optimal play: orders given per deployment do not move, so you take a different risk from the same beat rather than skipping the beat.

YOU WILL GET ATTACHED. THAT IS THE TRAP.

Five to ten scenes a deployment, overheard rather than performed. They cost nothing and change nothing, which is exactly why they land.

ENGINE ROOM
  PATEL — ENGINEER      COFFEE MACHINE FAILED AGAIN.
  KESTREL — PILOT       YOU CAN REPAIR A FUSION REACTOR.
  PATEL — ENGINEER      PRIORITIES.

Underneath, the crew keep track of each other. Two people who have been through something come out FRIENDS, or RIVALS, or STRAINED — and about a third of any crew stay strangers, which is the point. None of it is ever a number on screen. It shows up in who argues, who covers for whom, and what the ship feels like after a funeral.

Then you select a name on the roster, and read the file.

  DR. TETSUO
  MEDICAL OFFICER
 
  TRAITS             RECKLESS
  KNOWN FOR          "I CAN MAKE THAT SHOT."
  CARRIES            SOMEBODY ELSE'S COMMENDATION, KEPT
 
  BONDS
    LINDQVIST — ENGINEER            FAMILIAR
    HOLM — SCIENCE OFFICER          TRUSTED
    CAPTAIN LOMAX                   STRAINED
      DOUBTS YOUR JUDGEMENT AND SAYS LITTLE.
 
  STATUS             ON STATION

Lose someone you shared a scene with and it shakes you. Lose a second and it scars you. A clean deployment brings people back from shaken. Nothing brings them back from scarred — that is the word, and it is meant.

The death lands twice. The register prints the name in red, and the room answers it once. Then, some quiet leg later, the empty chair gets a scene of its own: the mug nobody has moved, the panel somebody else quietly finished.

WHAT SERVICE MAKES OF THEM

Nobody starts good at this. On a first deployment your captain and two of the crew bring something to the job. The other five bring nothing at all, and their file says so.

Survive a crossing and somebody earns a slot. You are told what they got, in full, at the moment they get it — never a title on its own.

BRINGS                                     NEW
MOVES WHEN NOBODY ELSE WILL
BAD AT WEIGHING THINGS. VERY GOOD AT THE
HOUR WHEN WEIGHING IS OVER.
 
  WHEN   WHILE THE HULL IS NEARLY GONE
  DOES   A DANGEROUS ORDER GOES BETTER FOR
         WHOEVER IS SENT
  ONLY   WHEREVER THEY ARE STANDING

243 of these are written. There is not a number in any of them and there is no ability screen to go shopping in — you find out what your crew are worth by flying them. A veteran bridge is measurably better than a green one. A green one still comes home, which is the part that took longest to get right.

ONE TAPE. EVERY DEPLOYMENT YOU SURVIVE.

Fly the same crew until you can't. Survivors carry their scars, their friendships and their reputations onto the next chart. Replacements fill the empty stations and are strangers until they aren't.

The war remembers you too. Planets look the way you left them. Commanders you destroyed never come back — commanders you spared do, and they remember which one you were.

BACK AT MARROW RIDGE. THE CHARTS WERE ALREADY IN THE COMPUTER FROM LAST TIME.

Lose the ship and the tape is stamped LOST WITH ALL HANDS. It does not delete. It becomes a memorial you can still read.

Behind all of it the KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE keeps what the company has learned across every crew that ever flew — the people, the factions, the hulls, the worlds. It only ever records what you were actually shown. A deployment that never met the enemy files no enemy.

THEN THE CAPTAIN WRITES IT DOWN

Every deployment ends in a first-person account of what actually happened — the orders, the places crossed, every choice, the fight or the parley, and who did not come home. It is built from your run, not from a template.

PERSONAL LOG, CAPTAIN LOMAX COMMANDING. OPERATION ARDENT
ANTHEM TOOK US INTO GREY STAIR ALONE, DARK, AND WITHOUT A
SECOND CHANCE.
 
KESTREL IS GONE. THE PART I WILL CARRY IS THAT THEY DID NOT
ARGUE. THEY NEVER ONCE ARGUED.
 
THE OBJECTIVE IS SECURED AND THE SECTOR IS QUIET. IT WILL
NOT STAY QUIET, AND I WILL NOT BE HERE WHEN IT BREAKS.

Print any run as a 1200x1200 dossier plate — verdict, numbers, hull bar, and the names of everyone you lost, drawn to look like the tube it came out of. Made to be saved. Made to be posted.

SIX ENEMIES. SIX COMPLETELY DIFFERENT VOICES.

An empire that arrives like weather. Mourners who count their dead into every sentence. Duelists who salute you and mean it. A garrison filing the paperwork of an atrocity. Accountants who will price your crew to your face. And a religion of sound that counts to seven and stops.

I SALUTE THE {SHIP}, AND I WILL BURN HER. BOTH ARE OWED. CHOOSE YOUR RANGE.

YOUR HULL IS ENTERED AT SCRAP VALUE, CAPTAIN. TALK ME UP, OR SIGN.

SEVEN NOTES. YOU HAVE HEARD SIX. DO NOT MAKE ME SING THE LAST.

Even the refusal is theirs. When a hail is turned down the reason comes back in their own voice, and it names the thing that actually went wrong — how hard they are hunting you, how your crew are holding up, or the empty chair at your own comms station.

HARD, AND HONEST ABOUT IT

                        LIGHT   STANDARD    HARD
NEAR-OPTIMAL PLAY       92.9%     82.1%    57.3%
CARELESS                81.1%     55.9%    18.6%
MAIN GUN, NOTHING ELSE  75.9%     49.0%    28.4%
 
CREW LOST PER RUN        0.70      1.54     3.49
HULL LEFT AT THE END    77.1%     59.1%    38.7%

Those are not estimates. They come out of a harness that plays the shipped game against the shipped rules, eight thousand runs a cell.

Read the second and third rows again. Hammering the main gun and nothing else does worse on STANDARD than playing at random, because the battery cooks itself, and a ship that is overheating is a ship that has stopped shooting.

NO TWO PLAYBACKS ARE ALIKE

Thousands of sector and planet names. Thirty-six hundred human crew across thirty-two traits and ninety-two faces, plus seventy-two machine and alien designators. 576 operations. Forty ships in sixteen classes. Six factions, each with its own bank of dialogue for every beat it appears in.

7,812 authored lines, every one of them put through a tone linter before it ships.

And because the archive is corrupted, the names, the service records and the file photos do not always line up.

CONTROLS

Arrow keys or number keys, Enter to commit, Space for the named control that actually starts things. The mouse works. So does a touchscreen — the whole interface scales to the window, down to tablet size.

H opens the ship handbook from the bridge, from the archive, or from the middle of a fight. The cog in the corner holds the mixer, the motion and scanline toggles, and the way out of a deployment.

Green phosphor, scanlines, flicker, tape hiss. Nothing to install and no account — it runs in the browser, and your lineage is kept there between visits. A tape can also be written out to a file and carried to another machine.

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