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Strategos (A Great Captain Roberts Tale!!) - Part 4 -
Chapter 6 - Donnybrook[]
To Arms![]
"Some of the new guys…
…got ambushed suiting up, Captain, we've got a boarding problem," Lori announced. "Near Small Craft Bay two."
Amanda swore, but then the gratifying sight of that Baron class Destroyer being rendered past-tense distracted part of her. The other part was already disconnecting her crash-straps. "HOLD this deck. Lori, I assume that naval gunfire came from friendlies, contact them!"
"Where are YOU going?"
Amanda floated to the CIC weapons locker and pulled out a cutlass and a Carbine, "I'm going to go repel boarders while you talk to the friendlies and see if they can loan us a couple squads of Marines, I'm useless up here."
“Friendly is broadcasting in the clear, calling for the Sons of Plunder Marines to surrender. If they fail to surrender they can walk home.”
"Then I'm going to make sure they don't emulate our tricks and try to steal my ship. Chester, armed guards on the hatches and set up a kill-box behind me. Saya, keep pressure on the enemy's fighters until they realize surrendering is the only way they're not going to be trying to swim in vacuum."
“Aye, Captain, but looks like we’re getting reinforcements on that front too.”
"Out-standing…" Amanda grabbed her helmet. "I'm on channel 43." And headed down into the ship.
((“Patching CO of Olivia Hazard Perry to you now.”))
<<“Hello, Captain Roberts. I understand you’d like to borrow some of my Marines. I’m dispatching some now.”>>
"Have them board forward of Frame 50, just ventral of shuttle bay two and aft of the main gun installation, I'll meet them in the bay soon-ish, and put a platoon or armor squad on my engineering deck near aux control, these guys are motivated to try and jack the ship now."
<<“Understood. ETA two minutes.”>> responded Olivia
Amanda let her velocity carry her forward down the central spine to the service hatch for the boat deck.
<Desmond, what does internal sensor net show?>
<Twenty Marines, no hard-suits, boarding weapons and charges. Here is their current disposition…> Desmond told her
Green and red outlines appeared right through the bulkhead.
<Take over my reflexes.> She relaxed. <Try not to get us killed… or too shot up, we loaned our chief corpsman to the prize crew last month.>
<Of course.>
Desmond didn't have to wait for the hatch to clear before it was opening, and took the opportunity, pumping a spray of pulse-laser fire into a very surprised boarding demolitionist.
The fight was close-quarters but the grounds were a pinch-point. Red outlines snapped gray, then black as Desmond moved her body through, chewing up enemy boarders almost casually.
It took a little over a minute to clear the section near the fighter bay, and secure landing spaces for the incoming reinforcements from the Olivia.
"Olivia, inform your Marine commander that boat deck two is cleared and ready to accept them."
The count of 25 hostiles was accounted for in the forward part of the ship.
“Understood. Docking now.”
Repel Boarders![]
---
Barnes…
…expected to be rescuing a short-handed crew facing Marine boarders. What greeted her eyes when the ramp dropped in bay two of the Evanescent was an abattoir made of dead men in SLDF standard, 2760's era pressure-suit/assault garb, and a woman in a skinsuit with her helmet closed who clearly was NOT part of the enemy force.
"Secure this deck Chief, and see to the wounded. I'll need a weapons team to follow me toward the power-plants aft," Captain Roberts instructed. "Those heavy needlers are going to be handy. Maintain spacing behind me of ten meters, these guys brought concussion grenades."
“Too bad for them… Second Squad brought Grey Death Scout armor.”
"I love that stuff!" she grinned behind her faceplate. "Very nice, comfortable suits, and the catheter arrangement is people scaled! Remember, ten meters until I wave your guys up."
“Understood.”
Roberts moved like one of the AI remotes, in a sense proving that what Her Ladyship said was true-the Remotes weren't THAT far from a human in armor, if the human paid attention to drill.
Okay, I drill Harder then! Barnes swore to herself. I train harder when we're done!!
They arrived at the rear of a firefight.
“Best kind. Sorry, thinking of an inappropriate joke…” Barnes took up position.
"There are no inappropriate jokes, just people with a less refined sense of humor." Captain Roberts informed her. "Don't shoot the guys in Nighthawk suits or the snipes, we need our engineers and the Aeries and Nighthawks are mine."
“Roger that. We’ll start on your signal, then ‘surprise’.”
Barnes saw something…weird. Her suit's HUD suddenly grew a series of outlines in red, yellow, and green, along with data that looked for all the world like a training sim for new Marines.
"What the-"
"Olivia, let me patch our battlenet," Roberts sounded clearer. "Shoot the red things."
<<“Oh none of these bastards are going to walk right for the rest of their lives, assuming any survive.”>>
"PURIFIER, Left, Down-deck!!"
The outline was all Barnes could actually see as her weapons team got the same information and opened fire.
The guy in the Blakist stealth suit didn't stay invisible for long under the pattering of heavy needlers. That gave Roberts the moment needed to crank up output on her carbine and pulse half the charge-stack into him in a single high-intensity burst, punching through the war-era suit's helmet.
A second one a few meters behind, peeking out past the number three fusion toroid assembly.
"We knew they had some kind of ties to the men in white…" Barnes heard Roberts telling… nobody? As the woman bounded in a complex pattern, cutlass flashing to reveal a third, and a fourth for weapons teams.
Severed body parts drifted on clouds of blood droplets in her wake. "Let's get ‘em!!" Chief Barnes growled.
The reality augmentation from the ship's network helped there quite a lot.
The rest of the fight to clear the powerplant section and relieve the defenders at auxiliary control only lasted seconds.
Search and Rescue[]
Olivia monitored the engagement…
…with the active cooperation of Evanescent's executive officer patching her through the internal monitor network of Evanescent and relaying data to her boarding team.
But that wasn't the whole of her attention. Another area of concern was handling the enemy's disabled fighters and small craft, some of whom were sending out distress or surrender signals.
“Send out the teams, but have them take every possible precaution for these to be tricks. I don’t want dead SAR teams because the enemy got cute.” Olivia commanded.
She began figuring out brig arrangements. While the count wasn’t complete, she knew she’d need more space than was allotted in the standard design of her hull.
The best answer was immediately obvious.
“Ready cargo bay 3 for large numbers of prisoners. It is the most readily secured and already mostly empty. Transfer what’s left to other storage.”
Fortunately the enemy seemed smart enough to not do anything overly cute with the SAR crews and ships over the next few hours.
41 people were recovered and placed in the converted cargo bay.
Dressing Down[]
"We can't just…
…put them in a beach-ball and out the airlock, Captain Roberts. Believe me, I’m tempted too." Olivia's remote was on the CIC deck of Evanescent. "The Enemy has to know they can surrender!"
Amanda was Amanda again. It was as obvious as someone changing a shirt to the AI of the Olivia Hazard Perry that her Desmond unit was in standby again.
"Fine, you take them." Amanda said. "I'm short personnel, food, ammunition…"
“They are being brought aboard my ship as we speak. I can do the math. There are too many for your ship and crew in its current state. Given the situation, it would seem best I accompany you back to Port Orphan.”
"Backup is good…" the young woman nodded. "We were going to chart through another couple enemy systems before we crossed over into friendly territory…" She subconsciously prodded her AI, which unlocked a datafile of navigation information. "We'll be charged in another seven hours now that we can, but I expect they'll either send another ship like that Baron to investigate. Or send in something bigger to follow up when they don't report back."
“Then our best bet is to not be here. We should have your seven hours, but we best remain vigilant.”
Olivia re-ran the fighting on the decks of Evanescent again as she spoke. "You didn't accept surrenders," she stated.
"Not used to being able to accommodate prisoners, we're a long way from home." Amanda deflected. "Besides, they're Slavers."
“I’m a realist, Captain Roberts, but you need to at least think about how to find ways for the future.”
"I know you've been waiting to come into this war, Perry, but I've been in this from the start. I saw what these…." She twisted her lip in disdain, "...these…PEOPLE…do to the people they get their hands on. Dig up the files on Devil's Breath, Trespass, Joan's Post, and Michtal."
“I know. But if we want to truly break their will, they need to know there is something other than death waiting for them. We do need to break their will.” Olivia told her counterpart
"Noted." It didn't sound sincere, and Olivia felt a twinge of recognition. Some of the AIs had been perilously close to a mindset that comes from staring too long into the abyss.
“Look, I said I was a realist and I mean it. I can’t expect you to put yourself in a bad position and neither can Helena. You do only have a Corvette, but do try and find ways, okay?” she asked
"I don't suppose you have a few tons of LBX cluster and solid shot, LRM mark thirty nine, and machine gun ammo you can spot me? I can pay when we get back." asked Amanda
“No LB ammo in my arsenal. LRMs I have for my fighters, and that should work for your launchers. Closest I have for machine guns are my AMS bins.”
"Which you need… and your bins are SLDF standard, right? Twenty three millimeter belted?" asked Amanda.
“FedSuns issue purchased off the mercenary market, actually.” Olivia admitted to Roberts
"Well shit, we were updated with Clanner standard twenty five mike-mike." Amanda shook her head, "I'll buy all the LRM rounds you can sell me, and I guess we just hope the enemy's slow."
“I should have more than enough to fill your bins.”, Olivia told Amanda.