With Timo retired, the party have met up with an old acquaintance, Lyssia Baudet, an Army tanker whose career came to an unfortunate end after a mutual deployment, due to the criminal activities of That Officer - Stanton Seckinger - with whom many of the other PCs also have a bone to pick....
Lyssia Baudet
One of the Shadowcats had taken minor damage during the reduction of the Porisal base, and - with mild trepidation - Wombat and Feng set about repairs. Both had a good working knowledge of Robotics, but the structure and systems inside the sleek feline shell were enormously complex, and it was a slow and ticklish process. However, in the end they succeeded, removing one ongoing worry about ranging afield with such sophisticated equipment.
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The next day, Colonel Dorsey came to see them, accompanied by two fairly green-looking civvies from the emerging Kaldamar government.
She thanked the Cats for their assistance with the liberation of Kaldamar, and delivered their standard mercenary pay for a month's operation of a unit their size; an amount rather small by the standards of the rewards from their other activities. The government reps then explained that there was one other assignment they would like the Cats to take on, to whit settling some of the other McClellan installations in the Kaldamar system at large.
There were many inhabited secondary worlds, most of them simply living quarters or storage depots for the Company. Those had shuttles at most and were not an urgent matter for the Speargrinders to subdue as and when they were ready. There were four that might need more urgent attention;
Of these, Dagnal was the most urgent. The locals needed as much time to establish their independence as possible, and the Speargrinders were contracted for cadre work training resistance fighters and terrorists into a local military force. All that could be jeopardized if one of the starships managed to jump out and raise the alarm. The 'grinders had managed to stall them by sending faked transmissions asserting that all was well, but that wouldn't work forever. The mission was for the Long Walk and her crew to get out there and secure the starport.
Joint planning showed that this objective - unlikely on paper - was pretty achievable. A looped trajectory in the shadow of the gas giant Lothav and the large world Fate Tran that Dagnal orbited could probably get the Long Walk there undetected. Her drives were far faster than those listed for the Brevis class tubs in the McClellan data, so if the ships made a run for jump point, they could be caught; and the listings for the vessels showed only four of the possible ten turrets were fitted, making them tackleable.
The design of the Rugelka class didn't specify stealth shielding on the EM emissions, but given she managed to surprise the Short Walk by lurking in a gas giant, it seems logical that she does have such things.
Jesse plotted them a course and they headed out towards the outer system.
Three days later, having cancelled most of her burn behind the shadow of the huge planet Fate Tran, the Long Walk swung tightly round the tiny worldlet Dagnal and came over the horizon onto the orbital facility. This was quite small for its type, with only three docking slips, two occupied by the large cylindrical shapes of the Brevis class ships. Surprise was total, and the Long Walk dived 'under' the station before unloading a full salvo from all four turrets spread between the two vessels. A second was fired as they passed under and away.
We were also surprised; not having really used the ship combat rules, I'd no clear idea of how they worked. We'd rather expected the well-populated turrets of the Long Walk to make mincemeat of the freighters, but in fact the damage seems to slowly mount over time rather than being a Star Wars-y pew pew pew boom kinda thing. However, never discount the morale-sapping effects of a surprise attack!
The Long Walk
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Laser bolts and missiles tore through the helplessly docked ships, mostly making holes in empty cargo spaces, but the life support of one was wiped out and a great gout of frozen hydrogen fuel from the other showed a tank hit. As the Long Walk looped back, ready for another shot, both ships radioed their surrender, their crews fleeing to (comparative) safety through the docking tubes.
Looming terrifyingly a couple of kilometres away, the Long Walk radioed a demand for surrender to the base as a whole, while the Cats boarded the hulking freighters and took control. Using her skill as a negotiator and terrifyingly casual approach to offering mayhem at a moment's notice, Feng persuaded the base crew to surrender and directed them to gather in the largest single room.
Cautiously they docked at the spare interface and, entering through the hatch they'd requested to be opened, took control of the secondary bridge. Ominously, there were no further responses from the base crew or security, and they readied themselves for resistance. From there, they compromised the base computers with Nevada's little electric hacker and the codes harvested from the mainworld computers. Accessing the security cameras, they discovered the reason for the silence; the entire base crew, security detail and surviving ship crews were jammed into the rec room and there was no-one manning the comm station in the control room...
From there it was reasonably straightforward to secure the prisoners and lock them in barracks in small numbers.
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Two days later, a standard shuttle docked at the spaceport, bearing two government agents, five Speargrinders and a squad of ten new-minted Kaldamar Army soldiers, green as grass. These took charge of the prisoners, and loaded them into the least knackered of the two freighters for transport to the mainworld and internment.
It dawned on the Cats that the cost of the missiles they'd expended in this operation exceeded their fees; although it was true they'd been hired as a dirtside specialist unit, not a naval asset, the government reps were quite happy to turn over any missiles discovered on the Brevises in recompense. These were only low-tech missiles, and in direct ship combat would be hard-pressed to overcome ship defences; but against ground targets or stationary vessels they would do just fine.
