Dusts of Avalon - Beastwithin.org

that most people would take for granted. No, it definitely didn't say in the regulationsthat it was okay for all of the crew manning the scanners to take a lunbreak at the same time. Perhaps, General Pyrehill thought, it was a high time thatsu regulations would be put to their place. is sort of screwups were nothingunheard of from the scanner and communications crew of the Suez Camel; Justlast year, they had taken part in a electronic warfare exercise and were supposedto be monitoring a deep space region for any anomalies. It should have been commonsense that the ships went to passive electromagnetic use only, and streamingmusic over ansible carrier was exactly the opposite of what that was supposed tobe all about.e Suez Camel's bumbling was just one of the problems. Yamamoto, an otherwiseupstanding vessel General Pyrehill had nothing bad to say about, had experienceda rather strange communications relay failure; they had been right behindUranus at the time the Planner cra came to the view, and obviously all of thecomm repeaters in the region were in the shadow side at the time. Of course theless expensive comm repeaters had to be solar powered and not have any cellpower le for emergency use. No one wanted to call from behind Uranus, andwhile Yamamoto's crew were smart and mature enough to ignore ancient jokes,the fact that the relay wasn't operational was damning enough.e Suez Camel had a protocol failure. e Yamamoto had a tenical failure.But nothing could quite top the failure of Bismar: e Planner cra had simplypassed over it directly from rear. Bismar's barely had the time to say “dammit,it's coming from behind”. at was followed by a comment along the lines of“dammit, well, it's now ahead of us. And already out of torp range. Oh bugger.”And now, Pyrehill was expecting even worse news from the near-Earth scannercrews.“What the hell do you mean you didn't see where it went?” Pyrehill said, hispalm firmly planted on his face.“It is not quite as bad as it sounds, sir”, scanner crew overseer, Mayor BartholomewFoxley said. “We have some data. We know where it went. Sort of. Within, uh,a fan paern kilometers long, give or take.”“Oh, good, I thought you lost it for good.”“We at least have a sear area, sir. e problem is, it appears the cra deliberatelydited in open ocean.”“What makes you think that?”Foxley pushed a few buons. e orbit appeared on the screen; it had a sharpturn, followed by something unusual: A doed line that ended in a fan-like patterninstead of a single cross indicating where the cra would have landed normally.“It appears to have taken a normal orbit, but diverted sooner than usual to alanding course. It could be a planned descent, if a bit rough ride at that. And it