by Kal Spriggs
“It seems the War Dogs have returned... no doubt begging for scraps,” Lucretta ignored the laughter at her comment. Her prisoner had told her how “Stavros” had faked the deaths of Azure Wing, so she wasn't surprised to see them present. “Hail them. Tell them that this planet is under my control.” She didn't give the order to bring her ships fully online, not yet. She didn't want to show her ships positions and total strength until it gave her the greatest advantage.
Her communications officer did so. A moment later he looked up, “Ma'am, they're putting out a broadcast, all frequencies.”
“Put it on my screen,” she said. She had made the mistake with Lucius of putting his broadcast on the bridge screens and her crew had panicked because of his threats. It was better that she limit knowledge a bit more. “Order all ships to disregard transmissions from them.”
She felt a bit of surprise at the face that appeared on the screen. It wasn't Commodore Frank Pierce, it was Harris Penwaithe. She would have figured that the boy would have gone back to his father after his escape. Spencer Penwaithe, despite his differences of opinion with Marius Giovanni, at least knew when to cut his losses. It seemed his elder son didn't have that good sense. “Attention to the pirate scum occupying Halcyon. I am Harris Penwaithe, the Secretary of State for Halcyon. I am here with our loyal forces and allies to remove you from the system. The War Dogs and our other allies have graciously agreed to allow you thirty minutes to remove yourselves from Halcyon orbit. Any ship which remains will be destroyed or seized.”
Lucretta's lips twisted in a wry smile at his words. The War Dogs, while sizable for a legitimate mercenary company, were far out of their league. Their dreadnought was a relic, it should have been a museum ship. While it had size and armor to its advantage, it was pathetically outgunned and had almost no missile armament. The Hammers were nasty, but vulnerable to long range fire and interception by her fighters. The pair of destroyers they had scraped up would do little or nothing beyond providing her forces with more targets. Besides that, their current formation had the Hammer's out front as a screen, no doubt with the hopes of intercepting her fighters as they came in, but in the process they blocked the destroyers’ fire.
She had more than sufficient forces to meet them. The Helot-class carrier was the pride of her fleet and her current flagship. She would have felt confident commanding it alone against the force that approached. She could launch seventy two heavy fighters in twelve squadrons. Besides that she had her custom-built Ravager-class cruiser, House of Kail, her Enforcer-class destroyer, Mako, and three more Colonial Republic built destroyers: Ironheart, Ice Queen, and Amazon.
The pirates and privateers who had signed on with her more than swung the fight in her favor. Altogether they brought five cruisers in a mix of light and heavy, nine destroyers, twelve frigates, and three carriers, two of them merchant converts with only a squadron each, but one of them a Liberator-class carrier which held another three squadrons of fighters.
While she didn't have much respect for their fighting abilities, she did value them as ablative defenses for her own ships and crew. She would feed them into the War Dogs' guns while her core forces destroyed the mercenaries.
If she truly needed more firepower, she could have put skeleton crews on the interned ships at Heinlein Base, but she would rather keep those ships for later for sale or use. In fact, the only ship in orbit that she didn't control was the Kraken.
Come to think of it, she thought, I might at that. She brought up her comms, “Tell that bitch on the Kraken that it is time for her to prove her mettle,” she said, “have her unlock the ship's systems or space her.” Reese had bought Lauren the time she'd had, possibly from some residual guilt over her injuries. He'd gone all weak in the knees when he saw an injured woman, which was typical of a man, in Lucretta’s opinion.
Lucretta switched to her tactical net. “Orders to the picket ships, intensify scanning. The War Dogs know they're outnumbered, they might just try to be sneaky and slip someone in on our flanks. If one of you miss something, I'll have your balls.”
She sat back and felt a pleased smile grow on her lips. Lucretta loved the opportunity to eliminate an enemy, once and for all.
***
Captain Garret Penwaithe grimaced as he eyed his formation. “Squadron Five, tighten it up, a couple of you are drifting out of position.”
“Roger,” Abigail said, and a moment later Garret heard her snap out directions to her squadron. They came back into position, but Garret still worried that it had taken them too long.
This entire maneuver struck him as both extremely risky and dangerous. As if she could read his mind, Heller spoke up from behind him, “I like this plan,” she said, her voice loud against the thumping music that Garret could hear from her earbuds, “it is fun.”
“Of course you would,” Garret muttered. Then again, it wasn't a bad plan... he just still wasn't certain why the United Colonies couldn't send their entire fleet. The massive ships he had seen in orbit around Faraday beggared the imagination, bigger by an order of magnitude than even the Warwagon.
Although, he thought, everyone on the planet spoke about a coup of some kind, I wonder if the ships were damaged or sabotaged or something? That might explain why their Baron didn't use them here.
He glanced at his sensor feed again and at the ships that accompanied the Warwagon. Those ships didn't seem like much to balance this fight, not compared to what they faced, yet they weren't all the help that the Baron had given them.
His lips quirked up as he thought about the look on Lucretta Mannetti's face when they revealed those particular surprises.
***
“Are you sure this thing is safe?” The engineer asked for what seemed like the fifth or sixth thousandth time.
Gunnery Sergeant Tam Chen didn't even look up from where he studied the alien base's floor plans. “Yes. Perfectly safe.” Why, oh, why, he thought, did my platoon get selected for this “honor” and how do I avoid further such duties? To think that he had actually felt excited when the Baron had personally briefed him and his men.
“Good,” Rory said nervously. “Because the data I read suggested these things weren't really even fully tested.”
Tam rolled his eyes, but he didn't argue. The conspirators had heavily modified the five Molnir-class shuttles with what the techs said were prototype stealth systems. Just what they had planned to use them for, Tam had no clue, but the five craft had been among some of the random equipment that they had found squirreled away once they started physical searches of ships and facilities. Tam's guess was that they had intended to use them to either abduct or assassinate the Baron, which made it all the better that he got to use them against the Baron's other enemies.
Admiral Mannetti, he thought darkly, has something of a personal debt to me for Lopez and Staff Sergeant Holdt. Both of his former squad mates had been on duty at the prison on Faraday when she made her escape, and neither had survived. It was only random chance that Tam hadn't been present, Lopez had asked him to trade shifts since he planned to see his girlfriend that night. Tam still felt choked up as he remembered her face as he had to break the news to her.
“You're certain these things are safe?” Rory asked again.
“Absolutely,” Tam said as he rotated his shoulders in his power armor. He cocked his head, “Although, if the stealth system were to fail...” he trailed off and looked over at his new Lieutenant. “Lieutenant Humbolt, how long, do you think, for their acquisition systems to engage?”
The Lieutenant was new to the squad, but he had combat hashes on his powered armor and Tam hadn't missed the blemishes across his chest carapace, a sure sign of repairs and patches. He was a veteran, “Depends on whether they're set to automated fire, Gunny, or if they have some kind of human interface. Three seconds to acquire, maybe five more before they engage for an automated system, I'd guess five to fifteen seconds for a trained gunner.” It was a good estimate, Tam knew, though he would bet a well-t
rained gunner could engage them in as little as four seconds with some warning. Granted, most people would be slowed by surprise as a combat shuttle appeared on their sensors without warning and they were fighting pirates, so he wouldn't put any serious money on anything shorter than thirty seconds from contact to engagement. With the hotshot pilots they had, that might be enough to get them to the ground.
Then again, the engineer didn't need to know that. “There you go,” Tam said to Rory, who stared back at him with a look of horror. “If something goes wrong with the stealth system, we wouldn't even know it. They'd shoot us out of the air before you even knew something was wrong, maybe even before the pilot knew.”
Rory made a fish out of water look, his mouth opening and closing several times. He swung his head around, as if searching for his normal companion. The other engineer was with second platoon, Tam knew, in the other shuttle assigned to this mission. Third platoon with their heavy weapons was split between the two shuttles.
Colonel Proscia had the other three shuttles on the other assignment. Some part of Tam really wished he could be there... yet as the shuttle began to buck as they struck atmosphere, he felt a tremble of excitement. Take on an entire base full of pirates with just a single company, he thought, this will be a hard one for any Marine to top.
The engineer seemed paralyzed and Tam wondered if he had gone a little too far in scaring him. “Don't worry,” he said, “there's no way this could be harder than boarding a Balor dreadnought.”
“Of course it wouldn't...” Rory trailed off. “Wait, you were one of the Marines that boarded the Balor ships?”
“Just the dreadnought,” Tam said in a tight voice.
“Do you have any idea how much damage you did?” Rory demanded. Apparently anger overcame his fear, though his voice had climbed to an angry whine rather than a frightened one. “It has taken me weeks of work to fix some of the damage to just a couple of those ships, and the dreadnought is the worst of the lot!”
Tam turned cold eyes on the man. “It took us three weeks to clear the Balor dreadnought. Three weeks of searching through endless black corridors, fighting an enemy that can sense you coming with its mind, an enemy that can move faster than you, think faster than you, and takes more killing than a Marine in power armor.” He saw Rory's mouth snap shut and for a moment, something like actual thought passed behind his eyes. Tam didn't know if that thought was that he had just insulted the man charged with his protection or if he had only now considered the difficulty in boarding a Balor ship. “So you'll pardon me if we did a little bit of damage along the way.”
“Oh,” Rory said. “Well... I'm sorry. I hadn't really thought about that.” He sat silent for a long while. “You know. I have actually encountered a Balor, once. It scared the crap out of me.”
“Did you kill it?” Tam asked, suddenly interested.
“Ah, no,” Rory shook his head, his gaze distant, focused on something only he could see. “I had a pistol, fired the entire magazine, and missed it entirely. Shaden Mira killed it about half a second before it would have got me. That was at Drago Three, when they overran our asteroid base.” He chuckled somewhat hysterically, “I... well, Feliks and I were the only engineering staff to make it out alive.”
Tam moved his estimation of the engineer up a tiny notch. He might not be competent in a fight, but at least he would try.
The shuttle bucked again and Rory looked around in a sudden panic, his eyes wide as his mind snapped back to the present, “Are you sure this thing is safe?”
Tam wondered if Second Platoon wanted to trade engineers
***
“The aerofoils on this shuttle are very interesting,” Feliks said. “They are designed to actually decrease stability in atmospheric conditions, which allows for increase maneuverability at the cost of increased difficulty for the pilot to maintain control.”
Gunnery Sergeant Victor Ramirez grimaced as his assigned engineer continued to speak. Victor hated combat drops. Not because he was afraid, but just because he had no control over whether or not he lived or died. Victor was something of a control freak. Since he wasn't an engineer, he had mostly ignored the man's chatter, right up until his brain translated some of that.
“Wait...” Victor said. “You're saying this thing is unstable or something?”
Next to him his Lieutenant shook his head in warning. Victor remembered before they boarded the shuttles the LT had been stuck in conversation with the man for a while, but he just figured that was details about the mission.
“Oh, yes, inherently so,” Feliks said, his Eastern European accent thick as he grew excited. “You see, these combat shuttles are designed for high speed evasive maneuvers. Those become increasingly difficult if a craft is stable. Granted, I'm not familiar with this particular model, but I would be very surprised if it has any inherent stability at all.”
“What do you mean by that?” Victor asked with narrow eyes. He should, he knew, review the mission or the floor plans or something like that, but just now the thought that even the pilot barely had control over their future made him very upset.
“Well,” Feliks said, “you see, if anything were to happen to the pilot, I would be very surprised if the copilot or autopilot would even have time to react before the vessel went completely out of control. At the speeds we're traveling, even slowed to assist the stealth systems, we would spin out of control at extremely high G-forces, high enough to black us out if not kill us outright. The atmospheric friction would probably rip the aerofoils right off at those speeds and shred the entire craft.” He shook his head, “Really, if there were any kind of a glitch at all, the pilot wouldn't even have a chance to react. Of course, it is a fair trade to allow the shuttle some ability to evade inbound fire.”
Victor's eyes went large and he glanced at the Lieutenant. Lieutenant Danners had an engineering degree, he knew. Yet the LT didn't meet his gaze... which told him that Feliks was right. I did not want to know that, he thought, please don't tell me anymore.
“Even better,” Feliks said, pointing at some of the added equipment that Victor knew wasn't standard to a Moljnir-class assault shuttle. “The stealth system there is a prototype, I think. From what I've read, it hasn't even been tested yet, just installed and your flight crews didn't even have maintenance manuals to properly look it over before the mission. If it has some sort of electrical short or even just a software glitch, it could short out the pilot's flight systems and then...” Feliks trailed off and then made an explosion gesture with his fingers.
I really wonder if first platoon would trade engineers, Victor thought.
***
Captain Jenny Bole sighed as she sipped coffee and looked at her tiny command screen and wished she were somewhere else. The other three crew on the Ranger's bridge looked equally bored and inattentive, not that she could blame them.
The elderly frigate, the extent of her command, lay on the 'dark' side of Halcyon's moon. She had hoped that coming to Halcyon would change her fortunes, somewhat. With the Ranger, Jenny had worked as a mercenary, a privateer, and even occasionally as a pirate. She had never raised enough money to do any more than keep the elderly ship going.
Halcyon's privateers had been awash with loot, or so she had heard. Yet by the time she had arrived, delayed by a series of mechanical failures, the system was under the control of Admiral Lucretta Mannetti... who didn't seem particularly impressed by Jenny's resume.
Not that I blame her, Jenny thought absently, farm girl from the back-ass of nowhere with a ship her great-grandfather captained... I'm lucky she didn't just blast us out of space for target practice. Still, the Admiral had offered to pay her for picket duties, which might cover the cost of the repairs they needed to make on the shadow space drive.
Pay for not moving was something that she fully appreciated. The dark side of Halcyon's moon was quiet and the large moon cast a large emissions shadow, which meant that other pirate captains couldn't call her up to jeer at her about th
e state of her ship. She patted the arm of her command chair, this old girl is still a work horse… she just needs some attention now and then.
Jenny frowned as she noticed the Yarris shift position. Captain Mesalle had seemed far too excited about the chance to scout around, almost as if he wanted to find someone out here and so justify his existence. Jenny knew that the Yarris was a bit newer and had more recent upgrades, mostly since Captain Mesalle had taken the time to rub her nose in those facts.
It didn't look as if he had begun to move his ship to check in with Admiral Mannetti's forces. It almost looked as if he'd noticed something and he had ordered his ship to investigate. Why would he do that, she wondered, without telling me to go into position to relay?
The obvious answer was that he didn't trust her, but that still shouldn't prevent him from doing that. If he had found something, the best way to make certain it didn't kill him would be to have someone passing along the message and hollering for help, she knew. It wasn't as if their two frigates were here to fight after all.
Her sensor's officer looked up, “Yarris just went to active sensors in sector... uh, three, I think.”
“I see,” Jenny said. Surely he's not stupid enough to go looking for trouble in his rust bucket of a ship, she thought, it might be in better shape than my Ranger, but not by much. “Unless he tells us otherwise, assume it's a drill to keep his people busy.”
He had done several of those over the past few weeks, Jenny knew. Normally he would call over to let her know... or possibly brag, Jenny wasn't certain which. She didn't really care, either. The Ranger was short on crew, they ran drills and put everyone at their stations on occasion, but Jenny wasn't about to exhaust her handful of people for constant readiness.
She watched as the Yarris swept further and further away. Jenny sipped at her coffee again and then wrinkled her nose at the taste. Definitely need the money for more coffee, she thought, this is basically brown water with some coffee grounds that slipped through because we reused the filter too many times.