Star Traders (Corporate Marines Book 3)

by Tom Germann

  The pirate has been well trained and moves out of line of sight before reaching for the suit patch kit, which most would not have thought to do. His partner stops next to him and assists in pulling the patch out, applying it and sealing it over the suit. It only takes a second to patch and then over-pressurize the suit to clear the toxic human atmosphere. By that time, they are the second-last team and start moving slowly on. Every pirate crewmember is needed, but none could be carried during an assault. Everyone has to make their own way.

  It is lucky for that fire team that the damage was minor. It is also lucky for them that they were as far back as they were. When the anti-personnel charge goes off in the corridor ahead, it takes out the two teams farther back from the point.

  Large quantities of high explosives are never used on star ships as that tends to do severe damage to the ship and may result in everyone dying in another star system. In fact, small quantities of explosives are also discouraged as ship systems do not need explosions going off in small enclosed spaces. The Corporate tacticians realized that in a straight fight, a pirate crew had an advantage in arms, armor and training over a star-ship crew. The answer to gaining the advantage had been simple.

  There are regular sections of corridor and other ambush points where no primary, secondary or even tertiary systems are running through. In fact, while the intersection looks like every other one on the ship, they are in fact built-up armored boxes that could have special demolition charges installed that will create a kill zone over almost the entire intersection but leave the surrounding area undamaged. All conduits, if important, are always heavily armored, and smaller splinters won’t have the penetration capability to cause any damage.

  Every alien race that humans have met to date have been in space longer. Several of them have nastier weapons and every one of those races has a different perspective on how everything within their universe works. One of the bigger differences between humans and the alien races out there now is their home world’s geography.

  The planet Earth has been split into different continents with separated groups of humans. Every group has evolved codes of conduct in warfare. Humans have the most flexible codes that are sometimes just thrown into the garbage, as in the case of the mined intersections. No other race would plant high explosives on their own ship, as no alien race would ever willingly destroy a star ship, given their cost to manufacture and maintain.

  The Corporation had done a lot of research before investing in star ship-building past some small scout ships. Every nasty trick that they could come up with had been put into the ship designs to ensure that personnel in light armor would not be able to take over the ship without suffering heavy casualties.

  The pirate crew is now learning just how nasty humans can be.

  “Assault commander!”

  “Yes commander?”

  “How goes the clearing of the human vessel? Are you on schedule and succeeding?”

  “Commander, I am aware that you are tracking all of the assault teams from the command bridge and likely have a clearer picture of what is occurring than I do. The AI can also evaluate statistically much more accurately what is going to occur than I can, being in the middle of combat with the fog of war. My digestive tract tells me that we may win, but it will be close, and if the humans continue to act counter to how we were briefed, they may well win.”

  “Assault commander, you are correct that I have much more information than you do. The AI can give statistically relevant data, yet a single soldier in the right spot can turn the effects sideways and win the war. I am looking for your digestive tract evaluation as an experienced assaulter who knows more than just numbers. The AI seems to be more positive than you do, but I am not preparing to celebrate yet. We will begin to prepare the failure option now.”

  “Yes, commander. We will do everything we can to win for the clan.”

  “Of course you will, assault commander. If you are not successful, make sure you are back on board the ship as we will need experienced warriors if we are to survive the fallout of the failure.”

  “Yes, commander.”

  “Assault commander?”

  “Yes, commander?”

  “In future, no matter how direct our race is, if you wish to be more than just a successful assault commander of a platoon, you will need to learn to be less direct with superiors. Fight well and win.”

  “Yes, commander.”

  A SPACE WALK

  On the outside of the ship there are two human figures moving toward the alien ship docked against the Mama Pig. They are moving slowly and carefully, trying to stay under cover and unobserved. They are manhandling a large box full of “goodies” for the unwanted visitors. To decrease the chance of being noticed, they are operating in shutdown mode. No electronics or powered systems are active.

  Moving in a space suit is not difficult if you have practice. Walking across the outside of a huge spaceship while moving a large box of destructive toys while trying to not be seen and staying in cover becomes rather more difficult.

  But this team had been moving since the original saboteurs had taken engineering. They had prepped and departed right after hearing the discussions with Two, Eight and the security chief. With communications being tied up, there had been no way to let anyone know that they were leaving. So on the outside of the ship, slowly moving toward what had to be the obvious docking point for pirates, Elise and a fast-acting crewmember called Sue, a member of the environmental team, were preparing to ambush the enemy star ship.

  When a pirate crew boards a ship, they have two options. They can take the ship by force and have it as their own, or they can fail and have to run away. In both cases, it is important that they have their mother ship to operate from as a base.

  Even if they win, a large spaceship will have too much atmosphere that the aliens cannot breathe. Either the aliens will vacate the current atmosphere and use tanks with compressed atmosphere that the aliens can breathe, or they will operate in a near-vacuum in their spacesuits.

  Look at how complex technology has gotten today. It takes a crew of several to run the environmental systems on a ship, including engineers. Any larger ship always has a “greenhouse” section that allows for natural replenishment of atmosphere and some fresh food.

  Capturing an alien ship is very difficult because, outside of a spacedock which you could use to change the scrubbing system used by the current owners, there is almost no way to change out a shipboard atmosphere. The easiest answer by far that does not take an engineering section days or weeks of working on half-understood internal systems is to simply operate in ship suits for the whole voyage back to their home base.

  The mother ship will have its atmosphere and be able to replenish the ship suits regularly, or even set up a small atmosphere station inside a sealed compartment so that the prized crew is not in ship suits for weeks to months.

  Given this, what happens if the pirate ship is severely damaged or destroyed?

  The invaders will have no long-term atmosphere supply and will likely face a slow, painful death. Knowing ship suits can last a maximum of twenty-four hours without resupply motivates pirates to fight that much harder. Any pirate would have a spare tank in case, but that will only take them to thirty-six hours. In the event that the pirate ship is destroyed, there is no hope.

  In past recorded instances, pirates usually become suicidal, attempting to take the ship crew with them. Only once in recorded instances has a pirate crew ever become passive.

  Every alien race, when they send pirates out, tends to pick a certain type of fanatically loyal member of their race. Better no survivors and no witnesses, and no embarrassment to the race.

  If the pirate ship is not destroyed but is severely damaged, it is much more common for contact to be broken and the pirates to leave and attempt to fix the extremely expensive star ship. No alien race wants
to lose a star ship that costs a portion of their star systems production to create just because they refuse to retreat. In fact, there have been past instances where pirate boarders have been abandoned when the pirate ship has had to detach and carry out repairs.

  Those boarders have no real hope left at that point and in the one recorded incident the boarders ran through the ship in a suicidal rage until the last one was taken down quickly. Hopefully before they have carried out so much damage that the ship cannot be salvaged by the crew.

  The trick for crew members trying to damage a pirate ship is to do enough that the ship captain must flee. Too little damage and the ship stays anchored and the attackers will be destroyed. Do too much damage and the pirate ship could blow up or the crew may join the boarders in a desperate attempt to take over the functional ship.

  Elise and Sue have to get into a location where they can get a good shot on the alien ship and do that damage. They have a light missile launcher, laser pistols which will do nothing to the ship, and one medium laser rifle. They also have several tools that are used around the ship and for search-and-rescue, including the mag-locking bolo gun and assorted torches.

  Torches can be used for improvised explosive devices, given their fuel cells.

  The bolo gun is an interesting take on the ancient harpoon gun. It fires a bolo made of a three-metre wire with two heavy metal end pieces. The centre has a thin line that is used to pull in what has been caught. This is an advanced variant that has computer chips in each end piece, and small thrusters. Aim, input your target, and fire. The end pieces will lasso the target, and will fire thrusters so that the item is not damaged. When the two ends come together, they mag-lock so the item cannot slip free. The three-metre length between the bolo ends can be extended out to ten metres. The line connecting the bolo runs out to a maximum length of five hundred metres. It’s an effective device that is rarely used.

  While the two space-walkers struggle their load across the hull to a spot close enough where they can have an impact on the pirate ship, the crew is inside fighting for their lives.

  PIRATE ADVANCE

  The pirates have six dead and two that have damaged ship suits. From seventeen personnel down to eleven is a big hit, but only to the first assault team. The pirates are moving down the main passage and have just hit one of the main intersections. At that point, four split off and move down the passage toward the environmental area, which includes hydroponics. They each carry several incendiary devices. The other seven turn toward Engineering and advance down the passage. The largest of that party carries an industrial laser torch.

  The assault team heading for the environmental area plans to destroy the ship’s capability to replenish its atmosphere. Even if the mother ship had to wait for a few weeks, the ship would be dead if the engineering assault team could take out or damage the engines. At normal speed, the ship would not make it any real distance before everyone died.

  As well briefed as they were, the boarders were not prepared for another nasty surprise that the humans had waiting for them down the passage toward Environmental. As the first fire team moved at a run, they tripped a sensor, which triggered another booby trap.

  Enclosed in the walls on both sides of the passage were gravity generators. A well-understood technology, the gravity generators allowed space travel in ships at approximately .8 Earth gravity. Before the theories on its operation had been worked out and then practical models developed, all in-system travel had been with no real gravity. The only way to generate some gravity was to have the living accommodation areas spin to create the gravity that humans needed if they wanted to travel in space.

  Then the breakthrough had come and been rapidly expanded on, thanks to alien knowledge.

  This booby trap was quite simple in concept. A small battery pack expended all its energy through specialized gravity generators that were set in the walls. Gravity would actually be pulling in three directions at the same time within a localised space.

  When the first fire team triggered the sensor, the batteries pushed all their power through to the gravity generators. Gravity in the centre of the hall was compressed and pulled with such force that at a distance, if anyone had been looking, a shimmering would have appeared like heat lightning. The entire system only had power for seconds, then the breakers popped before they were expended.

  But for a second, tremendous gravitational pressures were pulling in different directions and anything caught in that field was literally torn to pieces.

  The lead fire team is ripped apart. Behind them one of the other two pirates has his upper appendages torn from his body, and he stands there for a second before collapsing.

  The generators are already off and there is a cloud of smoke from one side of the hall.

  The last pirate stumbles to a halt and stares at what is left of its team. Then, checking its sensors to ensure that the trap is dead, it picks up some of the incendiary devices and weapons and starts moving forward again.

  The other team is moving toward Engineering at an equally fast pace. They come upon another booby trap but their sensors detect it before they are in range. Three lasers fire and destroy the trigger mechanism, removing the threat, and they continue on.

  At another intersection, a human crew member fires from cover but misses. The pirates throw a small fragmentation device and blow her to bits while moving on.

  When the pirate team comes to the engineering door, they quickly set up a defensive perimeter and set up the industrial laser torch. Within seconds the torch is powered up and slowly cutting through the door into the engineering control room.

  The sentries set up small sensors to watch down the passages and wait for the door to be cut open.

  Back at the airlock, the heavy armor and pirates waiting have been busy.

  The crew had made one fast attempt to rush the pirates but the armor acted as a hard point and AI-controlled weapons cut the three crewmen to pieces before they had moved fully into the corridor.

  After that the few crewmembers in the area tried to come up with a plan, and failed.

  Unknown to everyone there are mice in the ducts.

  The communication system being down means that no one is aware that the two boys had moved into the ductwork to set up their own ambush. Armed with the explosives that the marines had given them and laser pistols from a hidden arms locker, the boys knew that they needed to act but were not sure what would be most effective.

  They used their basic implants to plug into the hard-wired cameras and had checked out the location of all the pirates by the airlock. They quietly discussed how to handle the ambush, but were not sure when to strike as there were too many pirates in the area and no one else was aware that they were in this location.

  A mistake at this point meant that they would lose the benefit of surprise and would likely end up dead. They settled in to wait and kept an eye on the area through the cameras.

  The few crewmembers left unsecured are trying to figure out what to do. The Captain had directed them to hold their armored positions and wait for the pirates to attack them, but nothing had happened. What little communication existed indicated that other crewmembers had ambushed the pirates and had success, while others had attacked and all been killed.

  The crewmembers crouch down behind their armored bulkheads and wait for direction from higher while hoping that others are successfully assaulting the enemy.

  Patroe was in his office watching the limited feeds he had from hard wired cameras across the ship and trying to regain communications and control with different sections. So far three crew members had been able to override the door locking them in and escaped. They were currently working on the main shuttle over rides to free more crew.

  It doesn’t look good as so many crew members are locked up that no really organized effective defence could be set. The counterattack that has been cut down show
s exactly how powerful the blocking force is and the overall speed of the invasion means that most of the ambush points that were set up as traps have not been activated. If the safeties had been off, then none of the pirates should have been able to make it as far as they have.

  But those safeties have to physically be deactivated, and only three personnel on board the ship know how.

  Patroe flicks through views, desperately looking for a way to counter the invaders with a bare handful of crew members, none of whom are security-trained.

  The last pirate in the environmental raiding group is just outside the greenhouse hatch. He had dropped sensors in the intersection behind to give himself an early warning and has a separate Heads-up Display showing video footage. He quickly checks over the incendiary devices, setting timers for as short a time as possible. Walk in, throw hard, device mag-locks to wall, and when the last one locks, the timer activates. Jump out of the humans’ vegetation room and run. Get back to the main party and help take over the ship. That is a long passage and he is a good shot, so he feels that as long as no humans are waiting to ambush him in the huge room ahead, this will be easy.

  There is motion coming toward the intersection.

  The pirates have excellent technology, but it is not state-of-the-art, so in the event that they fail in an attack against another race, that race will not gain any technological benefit from whatever they capture. At least not in assault gear.