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Strategos (A Great Captain Roberts Tale!!)
Chapter 30 - Oh Stars and Arcs![]
Boarding Assaults…
…are among the more dangerous missions a Marine can undertake. Especially against an opponent committed to repelling them.
There are, of course, ways to deal with some of the obvious dangers-like body armor. Body Armor is fantastic to have when you're clawing your way into a pressurized can full of armed people who don't want to be captured or killed.
It doesn't even have to be the best, most advanced sort of body armor either-the weapons most crews have to repel a boarding team are optimized NOT to put holes in critical equipment or the hull itself. After all, if you're in space, it's a LONG walk back to anywhere with fresh air.
Needlers, low-output IR lasers, and low velocity guns mixed with melee weapons are kind of de-rigueur for most boarding defenses, Shotguns are popular in more robust areas of a ship or station, though most militarizes in the last eight hundred years or so prefer weapons like the humble Needler, which sends a cloud of decidedly non-conductive, rigid, plastic shavings at wounding and killing velocities in a cone.
These plastic fragments tend NOT to penetrate armor, but they also tend not to penetrate things you need to stay alive after-like bulkheads, coolant lines, electronic panels…
Of course, for that to matter, you have to force a docking posture on the target itself, or at least match velocity and vector long enough for your boarding teams to actually board the enemy ship.
The fighter escorts taking out their detection grid, long and short range sensors, and anything that emits either light or radio helps immensely. The SLS Lynnwood is effectively blind, and her main transit drives are damaged heavily enough they can't emit thrust, leaving only the RCS thrusters, which have become secondary targets for the NL-46s and Aerospace Fighters from two corvettes.
In pre-industrial eras, the equivalent is taking out the masts, rigging, and rudder of a ship. Then systematically dismantling the gun-decks at range.
Render the ship helpless and blind, it can still fire, but it can't fire accurately.
"We're going to need a tug." Captain Roberts observed.
Seron chuckled, "Aff. Do you think the core structure is still sound, quiaff?"
"Yeah. Everything we did is surface level. There no venting except from the bay doors that were torn open. No cloud of crystals, no bodies, and no fire damage except at the bay entries and the engine pods… meaning that with a yard. She can be fixed."
The Captain had come along, once again leaving Mister Nichols in command of Evanescent.
She had her false eye out, leaving the bare socket behind her faceplate this time, because there was no guarantee the entry would leave full atmospheric pressure.
It was a risk that Seron didn't like his Captain taking, but she'd made a point he could not out-logic regarding the enemy vessel's computer systems and the likelihood that they could lose expensively trained specialists overcoming those systems, while she was extensively modified and altered to do exactly this sort of work.
The red light in the shuttle's infantry bay turned green, and they stepped out into the void on EMUs. "I still think you should have waited for us to secure the target, Captain!"
"And miss all the fun?" she scoffed. "I'm still crediting you the capture, Seron! With that, they'll be begging to let you join their bloodname games!"
This made him laugh. "And why would I desire that at MY age?"
"So they'll let you have your own ship." Their boots contacted the hull and magnetized. "I'm thinking…an Essex class is about right for a Trueborn warrior… but then, I'm crazy, and nobody smart listens to crazy people except other crazy people."
"Foster listens."
"HE is nuts like me, only not as bad." she countered. "He's also smarter than I am-even with the Desmond. Note which of us volunteered to storm the enemy Warship?"
She forced open a service plate next to the dorsal service airlock, plugged in, and opened the way for the assault team to enter…
"Yo-ho-ho."
Lights flickered…
…and the displays were either off, or flickering static. They were blind, and on the engineering monitor, the transit drives were off-line.
That wasn't the worst of it-the RCS thrusters were also showing damage faults.
"What are they waiting for?" Bart wondered aloud. "We're dead in the water and they have to know it!"
Everything in training said the enemy would finish them off-he couldn't even surrender in this condition, someone blew the comm antennas off.
"Damage report?" was unnecessary, really, "progress report" on repairs would make more sense. It wasn't a skill he'd learned, it wasn't considered important except for specifically trained personnel-mostly free men from the Enlisted classes, or talented 'draftees' like Winston traded in.
Breach alarms at four airlocks told him what they were doing.
"To Arms! The ship is being boarded!!" he ordered.
CIC's displays shifted from failed external views that were no longer relevant, to the internal security monitors.
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Power Armor during the crossing to the Lynnwood.
The boarders were wearing powered armor suits, of a design he wasn't familiar with, except that it shared some elements with Nighthawks fitted with a more advanced EMU and a more rigid form of head protection.
Needlers weren't going to pop those suits, and he had doubts about ship-tuned laser pistols or low-powered shotgun blasts.
The image lasted until one of the boarders who wasn't wearing the advanced model, but instead a modified Nighthawk suit under a gaudy tarpaulin-like duster stretched their hand out, and did something to the security feed.
He grabbed a carbine, "All hands! Repel boarders!!"
He had few doubts here, the loss of internal monitoring was fatal and he knew it-but so would the result of surrender.
This wasn't…
…a battle, it was more of an execution. A drawn out, violent, execution. The crew of the Lynnwood, at least tried to put up a fight with Needlers, vibroblades and flashbangs, even a couple of clearly-contraband Mauser 960s Assault Rifles.
But even the eight man security element with the Mausers was only kitted with SLDF standard Marine gear, and not that well kitted at that.
Amanda strode up the central shaft, boots keeping her anchored to the deck, occasionally slashing with her cutlass, leaving a dead man floating in pieces each time.
Well, not REALLY Amanda. This was Desmond-it/he was just piloting the body.
Crouch, unlock, jump, slash-catch-stab-step and on to the next attempted holdout.
Compartment, corridor, lift.
Chop-slash-stab.
Her world was red with floating blood.
Movement-hop-step-chop, red, and screaming.
Seron was….
…never going to quite get used to seeing what Amanda Roberts became in combat. Even with the impaired movements in a suit in null-gee, she seemed to sidestep fire, and stroll up, and behind her were butchered men with shattered weapons.
Butchered men, and opened doors.
It was the other side of the holovid, glory reduced to gory butchery. It reminded him that this young woman had been turned into the avatar of a killing machine, point-at-enemy and watch it go.
The analytical side of his mind studied her movements themselves, and saw in them a pure economy of motion-never too much, always just enough.
What it wasn't, was glorious in the way the instructors at sibko claimed battle should be. Those combat reflexes might have been dreamed up by some accountant somewhere, almost a pure numerical brutality to her fighting style, leaving butchered men in her wake on the path to the ship's CIC.
The hatch securing the command…
…deck has a status indicator. This went from red, to green, and did so without Bart's access code.
He brought up the carbine, and let loose a burst of fire. "I won't surrender!!" he shouted.
"I don't remember that being on the table." she stepped into his CIC, the ridiculous tarp-like overcoat torn to shreds, her armor covered in blood. "I don't remember offering that after our last conversation, did I?"
He thumbed in the selector, and let loose a spray-and some of them hit her faceplate, starring it.
"Oh bother!" She took the helmet off-and he was busy changing magazines in his carbine, but it was her. Auburn, wavy hair, the nose, the…the illusion of facing the Basilius was destroyed by both youth, and the hollow gaping socket of a missing eye.
He dropped the empty carbine, and drew a magazine for his pistol.
'So that's how it is to be." She came at him, he brought the pistol up..
His body was on fire in an insta-no, his body was over there… he stared and gaped. Unable to draw breath from lungs severed by her cut, he felt his hair caught, and he was brought up, eye-to-eye with her.
"No quarter asked or given, Jolie Rouge rules." she said. "Yo ho ho." There was an abyss in that lone natural eye.
And darkness claimed him.
"Did any of them surrender…
…Captain Roberts?" Dave Foster asked.
"A few in the engineering sections and a couple of the lower ranked gunners." She reported to him in person. "We secured the ship's data-center intact. There's a LOT of data, but Desmond and I managed to stop the purge-worms before they were started, and reset access permissions to factory." She reached into her soiled jacket, laying two data-chit drives on his sea-cabin's desk. "The enemy commander did not offer surrender," she added.
"I kind of doubted he would, to be honest. How BAD is the ship?"
"SLS Lynnwood needs yard time, but base structure and KF drive are intact, most of the pressure volume, aside from damages we did, is also intact-their late Engineering officer speculated somewhere around six to nine months for the battle damage at a yard, but they almost had the Transit drives patched up enough to make a three-quarter-gee run for the nearest jump point. Patch in spares for the navigation sensors and finish the work and she can be ferried to Quatre Belle for refit and auction or service."
"Not what you thought it would be, was it?" Foster asked.
"Eh," Amanda said. "Other than the nightmares I'm already living with after Devil's Breath? Not so horrifying anymore. I think I might be getting used to it."
"That is, to be honest not healthy, Captain." he told her.
"Sir," she nodded. "How long until our relief?"
"OWS Erinyes is bringing Kappa in four hours, that handles the shipyard part of the exercise, though I think Erin might have some issues…how are YOUR issues?"
"Still wrestling with directives in the implant. Desmond and I have them contained for now, Sir," she said. "But it IS a strain."