Welcome to Letters From the Knot, a regular newsletter and an extended exercise in worldbuilding. Once a month, I post a piece of fiction that takes place in the Knot, a tangle of debris turned space-bound city. My aim with this project is to gradually populate this fictional city over time, creating and discovering new parts of it as I go. Each piece will be different: a story, a dream, a character sketch, a slice of life, a fragment. This week, an official expresses concerns to her boss.
I’ve recently gathered together my sci-fi stories into an e-book for those who like to prefer to read in that way. You can download it here and, if you’re looking for some other e-books, you can download a bunch by following this link.
Incident Report
From - Pelen R Berg SISO
To - Bbe Hanne Thulin SIPG
I wanted to bring to your attention a small matter that I’d appreciate your advice on. I’ll acknowledge, of course, that you have more pressing matters to attend to, but I think you’ll agree, after reading this that, while it may seem a small thing, it’s a thread worthy of some attention. It’s a part of all this going on. I wouldn’t usually involve you in disciplinary matters, but this feels somewhat out of my wheelhouse. You know I’m honest and, while I have a good tactical mind, this matter feels like a broader strategic threat and, if you’ll excuse my worrying, potentially an existential one. The attached text is an incident report from a Cpt Kasse, who was dispatched to the Trap this week. As you’ll doubtless know, captain’s are required to fill out an incident report after every physical encounter - this one is taken from the third night of the current upset in Arin Square. I need to stress to you that Kasse has always been solid. A good Selman lifer. You’ll soon understand why I’m at pains to contextualise this, and hopefully you’ll also understand why I’m up in the middle of the spin writing this message. I’ve attached the bodycam recording of the shift for context but, well, the report is included below in full - Pelen
[Incident report: Tidsplan 800 - 09:00 2nd Spin. Cpt Kaase, Proj. Litehouse, first squad]
We rallied top of second spin for a touchpoint with other squads. We were forced to speak in the tunnels because the square itself had already been declared active. The situation, in brief, was that that protesting trappers had barraksed the cafes and bars on Arin Square, and were using the coreward tunnels to resupply and confound the local detail. We’ve wasted two nights now just trying to plug up the vents and holes and ways the trappers have been using to get behind our lines. We’re lucky in a sense, that they’ve been using these ratways to steal weapons and supplies, as opposed to launching attacks. There have been scuffles, however, and last night one of our guards nearly killed a kid who slunk through to pick up a crate of something. Took three of us to pull them apart and the sorry soul hadn’t pinched anything more than a few boxes of falskaf. She can’t have been fourteen years old, the thief. This is the problem with these new guards they’re sending down here. Half of them aren’t prepared. Earthborn and radical. You call them guards but you’re sending them to me spin-sick and gurning for trouble. If we wanna keep a lid on this we’ll want calmer minds and hands than this, I assure you.
I agreed to take a group of 21 guards to move into the square, take as much ground as we could passively, and then assess. We breached Arin at 01:00 2nd spin but it was all we could do to cover ten metres or so and hunker down behind the bags, faces to the cobbles. The trappers pelted us with anything they could get their hands on. Coffee cups and rocks, sharp metal scraps, plant pots, shoes and glides and all manner of things. The gravs a little higher here and even these trivial missiles carry heft. Among the garbage were chunks seeming ripped from walls, splintered table legs and metal plating. This is a taste of what’s at stake here. Here’s a people’ll rip the ground from beneath their own feet to shove it down your throat, destroy their own homes to defend them. Even suited up, each impact is a subtle thing that slips into your soul and pins you. It’s not the weight that drains your spirit but the intention. Family photographs in silver frames, gilded metal lockets, candlesticks, and bits of oak. Generational treasures. Unthinkable treasures to these people.
The noise an ululating madness of tongues and hatred and I look at the guards I’ve got and I can see the blood rising in these hotheads, borne now from a world of dim pictures and horrid words to a world of breathing desperate people who’ll match in feeling whatever force you put in front of them. I clocked one girl with a gloaming look in her eye named Liss and thought there’s a person as likely to kill as pacify and I ordered her up to my position so I could put a brake on the violence when it came. A stray punch could set the Knot alight, I thought, in the face of all that noise and rebellion.
Worth noting that Arin Square isn’t square at all but a kind of irregular oval shape, a kidneyed mess of street furniture and hatches. A tactical nightmare, put another way. We’d long dampened the implant signals so I had to send someone back to signal them to start piping in the smoke and shutting down the vents. No fire no guns is a mantra at the very least seems mutually agreed upon though here maybe its an issue of supply and not demand. I saw tonight the flashes in the trappers’ eyes and I think they’d have turned the whole Knot inside out given the kit and the chance, such is the strength of their notions.
Before the chamber was even half smoked, this kid Liss was masked up and jumping over the bags and I’d no choice then but to order the whole squad over and I was on her shoulder but then of a sudden the trappers were bursting from the barricades in numbers I couldn’t have imagined and masks on themselves, and great clubs and homemade weapons and there was a moment I almost bottled it myself. Our line soon clashed with theirs and we were brawling on the flagstones then. A sight not seen in the Knot for some two hundred years and it was like everyone could feel the history sloshing around them. Selmans and trappers all with a look of disbelief on their faces even as they were taking chunks out of one another. All that ideology condensed into the journey of a fist.
Ultimately their weapons couldn’t do much against our overcooked Selman gear but in weight of sheer numbers they were pressing us and we couldn’t get an inch further. My concern a this point wasn’t the trappers, but the damage the guards might do to them and sure enough there was Liss letting rip and arcs of blood and gristle flying from the mouths of the protesters and Liss’ violence was like a lightning rod and they were all over her, pulling at the amour and scratching at her and she soon went over in a wash of bodies and we lost sight of her and the falling people revealed wave and wave behind them. It’s the best I could do to get the rest of the squad tumbling back across the square in a rain of launched clubs and curses. We got back out and fell each onto the floor and each into our own private thoughts of the new world we’ve arrived in.
I’ve never seen anything like what I saw out there. What I saw was belief and it's a force like light in a dark room, making impossible what came before it and finding out all the things we hadn’t known were scattered there.
I trust you’ll understand, and likely share, my many concerns. I spoke to you at dinner a few spins ago about this way of talking, of thinking, that seems to be spreading among the guards. I must say, I share Cpt Kaase’s worries about the temperament of some of the newer recruits, but I’m far more scared by the tone in this report. something is taking root, I think. Please come back to me soon - Pelen.