by M. D. Cooper
Rika clenched her fist.
A genuine laugh came from Tanis, and she felt the warm glow of the admiral’s appreciation.
Tanis’s presence left Rika’s mind, but she felt as though a tenuous connection was still present.
She pulled up the targets Tanis had sent on her visual overlays and examined the details. Two were cruisers, one was a destroyer, and the other two were supply ships. Each claimed to have over a hundred hostages, and was demanding an undamaged ship to leave the system on.
Rika agreed, nodding absently as she summoned her four ship commanders for a virtual meeting. A half-minute later, they were all before her, reviewing the data packet she had passed around.
Rika said.
Rika wasn’t surprised to hear that from Gunnery Sergeant Tex. If ever there was a Marauder who embraced the life of a mercenary, it was him. She was about to reply when Lieutenant Scarcliff beat her to it.
‘Rika’s Fleet’. The words hung in her mind. Was she effectively the Old Woman now? Were Rika’s Marauders really the Marauders now? She knew it was unlikely; General Mill had a large command structure. Someone would have taken over.
She shook her head. That’s a question for another day. For now, they had work to do.
Tex grunted in acknowledgement.
Rika nodded.
Rika had heard of the tactic, but had never participated in one. Apparently neither had anyone else.
Crudge snorted.
Crudge snorted and cocked an eyebrow on the holodisplay.
LIBERATING LIBERTY
STELLAR DATE: 08.28.8949 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Fury Lance
REGION: Pyra, Albany System, Thebes, Septhian Alliance
The Fury Lance’s target was named the Liberty. An incongruous Nietzschean ship name if ever there was one.
“They must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel at the shipyards when they set her keel,” Heather muttered as they drew close to the disabled cruiser, its name writ large and illuminated in Howe’s warm, yellow light.
“Maybe it was made at a Genevian shipyard, and the workers were sending a message,” Chief Garth suggested. “You know, ‘We want liberty!’ ”
“Well, we’ll take it off their hands and solve that little problem for them,” Rika said as she stood. “Leslie, you have the conn…and the whole ship, for that matter.”
“Wait, what?” Leslie turned in her seat. “I thought I was going! Heather’s the pilot.”
Heather rose and stretched out her physical and mechanical joints. “I’m no smooth talker, though, Cat Girl, and this is a hostage sitch. Don’t worry, worst come to worst, you can just sing to them. Croon your way to victory…or would that be ‘yowl’?”
Leslie rolled her eyes as she rose from the comm console and walked to the pilot’s station. “Careful, Smalls, this cat has claws.”
Lieutenant Heather chuckled. “I’ll tussle with you any day, Cat Girl.”
Leslie opened her mouth to reply, but Rika interrupted.
“Enough chatter, folks, we have a mission, and everyone else is already out on the hull. Heather, let’s get moving. This goes down on time, or it turns into one hell of a fuckaduck.”
“What’s a fuckaduck?” Heather asked as she followed Rika off the bridge.
“Beats me, I just hate the term ‘clusterfuck’, was trying out something new.”
“What? How can you hate CF? It’s such a great term!”
Rika shook her head as she gave Heather a sidelong glance. “Because it sounds like an orgy. And a lot of people think that orgies are good, which makes it an ambiguous term.”
Heather barked a laugh as they stepped into the nearest lift. “And ‘fuckaduck’ is better somehow?”
“Well, I did say that I was just trying it out. But it’s definitely bad. Even people who want to clusterfuck aren’t going to want to fuckaduck.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Heather cautioned.
“Well, it’s gotta be a smaller number of people.”
“Sure. Yeah. If you want to be an optimistic quack.”
Rika only groaned in response.
Five minutes later, they were exiting an airlock on the Fury Lance’s hull, not far from where the forward squads had breached the ship back at Armens. The three squads of First Platoon aboard the ship were already out there, crouched behind sensor arrays and point defense cannons.
The Liberty was still seven kilometers away, but slowly growing larger as Leslie eased the Fury Lance closer, assisted by Niki and the helm NSAIs.
Leslie said to Rika.
Rika laughed in the confines of her helmet as she took up a position behind a cooling vane ridge.
Rika wanted to reach through the Link and smack Leslie on the back of the head. It was rare for her to be so punchy. Maybe it was just that so much stuff was happening over such a short period of time. They all had a lot to absorb.
The ships drew near, and Rika paid half a mind as Leslie began to speak with the Nietzscheans—telling them they needed to link up and show the hostages on verifiable live feeds before they’d be allowed to come aboard the Fury Lance.
The Nietzscheans were skittish and defensive, demanding access to review fuel status and FTL transition systems. They also wanted to bring some of the hostages across, promising that they would release said hostages in escape pods before the ship dumped to FTL at the system’s edge.
Leslie handled them with aplomb, and Rika couldn’t help but be impressed. She hoped all the teams were doing as well, though she couldn’t reach out to ask without risking the operation.
The Liberty drew closer, hanging above the Marauders mechs that were crouched on the Fury Lance’s hull like a dark cloud, blotting out the stars.
Rika took up a position with first squad, while Heather moved off to aid third squad, which was down a few mechs after the breach operation on the Fury Lance a week prior.
Just a week? Rika wondered. Feels like a lifetime.
Each squad selected their breach points, and when the two ships reached zero delta-v at a distance of a hundred and fifty meters, the squads pushed off the hull.
Rika clenched her jaw as she sailed through the black, doing her best to keep her vision fixed on the Liberty and not the vast expanse of nothing all around her.
It was amazing that with stations, planets, and a hundred thousand starships all around, space was still, by and large, empty.
So very empty.
Then the Liberty was rushing toward her, and Rika carefully turned, setting her boots to repulse, and slowing to hit the hull as lightly as possible.
Within seconds, Sergeant Aaron had sent fireteam one/one to the airlock, where they set to breaching it with plasma torches.
Thirty seconds later, they were in the airlock, setting up a grav shield before breaching the second door.
Once the door was breached, one/one moved into the passage, securing the first intersection as the other three fireteams moved into the ship.
There were several locations in the cruiser where the hostages could be held: cargo bays, hangars, and the main enlisted mess.
Rika’s money was on the mess or the cargo bay closest to it. They had to feed the hostages and get them to the head with some regularity.
The teams would stay EM silent until they met resistance, and then it would be a full-force push to the targets.
The corridor around one/one was dark. No lights, no EM. With any luck, the Nietzscheans would have no idea they had visitors. So far, the chatter between Leslie and the enemy sounded normal—as much as a hostage negotiation could.
Leslie had agreed to move the Fury Lance closer so that an umbilical could be stretched between the vessels, and a team could be sent over from the Liberty.
Rika hoped the fiction wouldn’t have to last that long, but the Fury Lance was a big ship; even if a couple Niets got aboard, they would be easy to contain.
Ahead, one-one led the squad onward, sending drones down each cross corridor before moving to the next. It was slow going, and Rika considered directing the squad to rush ahead, but knew that other breach teams could be in more precarious positions. The more time everyone had before the alarms started sounding, the better.
Just as she resolved not to rush ahead, a call came in from Barne.
One/one took off at a brisk pace, with fireteams two and three close behind. Rika moved up from the rear, settling in beside Corporal Crunch as they loped down empty corridor after empty corridor.
Suddenly Sergeant Aaron stopped, the AM-3 unslinging his JE-88 while spinning up the chaingun mounted to his other arm. He fired down a side corridor while calling out for Ben to lead the fireteam on to the galley.
Rika reached Aaron’s location as his chaingun spun down.
“Two heavies down there,” he said. “Think I got one, the other ran off.”
“Send a fireteam,” Rika said as she took off once more, hearing Aaron direct Kerry down the side passage.
It was risky to keep advancing with a potential enemy to their flank, but they had little choice. Rika didn’t want Tanis’s first impression of the mechs to be one where they lost hostages.
The concourse the squad sergeant referred to was a ten-meter-wide passage that ran through the ship. It served a similar purpose to the one in the Fury Lance: a passage for maglevs, lifts, and cargo transfers.
It was also the last easily defensible location before the galley.
Ahead, Rika saw one/one stack up at the entrance to the concourse, Ben and Whispers readying their chainguns before leaping out into the open, spraying what Rika assumed must be enemy locations with bullets, before falling prone while Kim and Harris took more careful shots.
Rika pulled their feeds and saw that they were facing at least a dozen enemies who had taken up positions behind a stalled-out maglev, forty-five meters down the concourse.
Rika came up behind Kim and took aim with her GNR, firing an electron beam at the rear of the maglev train, tearing through it and exposing a group of Niets, which fireteam one laid into.
She realized that half the enemies they were facing weren’t even wearing armor. Rika signaled for one-two to cross the concourse and take a side passage to move into flanking position.
Crunch gave her a sharp nod before leading his fireteam across the concourse, most clearing the passage in a single leap before disappearing int
o the passages on the far side.
Rika was about to move to a new position, when weapons fire came from further down the concourse and tore into the enemy.
A minute later, Rika was at the main entrance to the galley, fireteams from first and second squads at the other entrances, while Aaron led a small group toward another cargo bay to ensure it was clear.
A few seconds later, the teams at each door signaled that they were ready, and Rika gave a count.
Ben kicked the door in, and Rika fired her GNR, blowing the head off an unarmored Nietzschean solider, then she selected a new target and fired a round at him as well. That enemy was armored, and Rika traced a series of rounds down his torso. She considered firing a DPU, but there were too many hostages around. All it took was one small shard of uranium to make this day someone’s last.
The armored Niet had fallen back under Rika’s barrage, and she thought he was going to return fire, but instead the man grabbed a hostage by the neck—a slim woman in a long robe that the Pyrans favored—and lifted her into the air.
“One more move and this bitch dies,” the man shouted.
The woman screamed in fear, but the Nietzschean clenched his hand, closing off his captive’s air supply.