Pete couldn't make this session, so Quin Feng was part of the ship watch for this part of the expedition. There's nothing to prevent her suddenly joining the dirtside party next week :)
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While they waited for the new system government to decide what it wanted them to do next, Nevada looked over some options for variant weapons for the Hoplite to carry. Whimsically, he got the engineering robots to cut him a sword and shield sized for the walker out of some of the broken hull metal left over from the bombardment of the McClellan ships, and asked Feng to program them with the design for the CWG logo for painting on the shield.
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Four days later an insystem shuttle pulled into the port, bringing a young man named Cary Walck who the government had assigned as their liaison. He brought with him, under guard by two of the cadet soldiers of the Kaldamar army, two rather wretched-looking civilians.
Apparently, during the purging of McClellan elements from the population, they'd come on something rather unexpected; a cell of four undercover agents for the pirates based on Gatmag in the outer system.
Two had died in a gunbattle with mercenaries from the Speargrinders, but the survivors were captured, and had made it very clear that they were prepared - nay, eager - to trade any and all information that they had for some sentence other than the summary execution normally meted out to pirates.
According to their documents, their names were Troy Hackoff and Porsha Droy; probably not true, but not an important detail. They'd been captured with an encrypted radio with which they'd transmitted details of shuttle flights and visiting traders within the system to the pirates, enabling the latter to pick off the lightly armed and incautious. As such, they were indirectly responsible for dozens of deaths and millions of credits of loss, normally a spacing offence, but the government was prepared to commute this to a lifetime of very hard labour in exchange for information that would clean out the pirate nest.
The Cats settled in to question the two bedraggled and still shocked spies. Though they'd never been to Gatmag, their dead cell leader Rufus Kellow had and his description provided a reasonable idea of the base layout.
... and allowed me to drop the battlemap onto the table rather than messing about with fog-of-war!
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The base was underground, consisting of seven roughly dome-shaped spaces linked with passages. There was a central area containing living quarters, the control room, storage, something marked "prisoner processing" and "interrogation" and, below the main level, the power plant. Then there was a dome for life support and hydroponics, another that was basically a huge fuel tank, another marked as security and prisoner cells, an armoury and a huge hangar attached to a workshop, flight control and suit store.
The hangar was big enough to hold two 'standard' 600-ton corsairs, which was the most expected, as well as the three variant 95-ton shuttles belonging to the base. These were armed and armoured and souped-up to make 5g of acceleration, reducing their cargo drastically but allowing them to catch any of the McClellan insystem shuttles or freighters and deliver 12 boarders to strip them of loot and captives. Some were ransomed back, but most were collected by the visiting pirates and taken away.
These pirates apparently belonged to an organization calling itself the Blue Razors.
The only parts of the base on the surface were four triple beam laser turrets, a large processing plant above the fuel tank that converted the planetoid's ice to fuel, a sensor and comms array and the domed access to the hangar shaft.
Around a month previously, the pirates had made the mistake of trying to tackle one of McClellan's more robust ships -a Seeker-class armoured merchant - and had lost a shuttle and its crew as a result. This reduced the likely base complement to around forty, and two shuttles.
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This seemed like very worthwhile information, and Nevada, appearing sympathetic to the rather pathetic prisoners, asked if - were they to go in with the assault and fight - their sentences might be further commuted. Walck considered this for a moment, and then replied, "Maybe; if you take them out-system with you afterwards. Keep them, leave them somewhere, anywhere. But there's no place for them in Kaldamar." The Cats were not keen on this as an idea, and the conversation dropped.
Six days of carefully planned trajectory later, the Long Walk curved out from behind the shadow of Elaril X, locally Orar, and into view of the pirate base on Gatmag. Two tiny balls of ice and rock swung around Orar in the icy dark, and their sensors picked up the exterior details as described.
Grinning evilly, they realized that the base's beam lasers were designed to operate at shorter ranges than the pulse lasers mounted in the Long Walk's turrets - and much shorter than her missiles. After some discussion, they decided to tackle the turrets first, and at 55,000 kilometres Lyssia duly started bombarding them with bolts of laser fire.
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A starship can evade, and usually has countermeasures to deflect incoming laser fire. This base had neither, and although beams of return fire were hurled back at the Long Walk, they were hopelessly inaccurate at the extreme range. The four turrets vanished in short order, followed by the sensor array.
A transmission was sent to the base, suggesting that the pirates might want to surrender, but no answer was receieved. It hadn't been expected, because in general, pirates did not surrender. Only death awaited captured corsairs, and generally, they fought to the death. A moment later, it occurred to the Cats that with the sensor and comms arrays in melted wreckage, the message was not going to get through.
Further laser fire stove in the domed doors over the hanger, releasing a plume of frozen air as the atmosphere inside was breached. Lyissa then sent a couple of missiles down the shaft to pulverise the two shuttles, and one to destroy the door into the base proper. This done, they waited an hour, just in case the pirates might signal surrender by some means. Then they kitted out to make a ground assault.
With drones leading the way to scout and Shadowcats flanking them, the three dropped from the Long Walk to the base of the hangar. Wales and Feng then took the ship back into orbit ... just in case.
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At the end of the large passageway leading from the hangar to the workshops was another sliding pressure door, obviously once part of an airlock with the destroyed one at the hangar end. The controls comprised a microphone for a voice sample, a handprint DNA scanner and some numbered keys. Five corpses were drifting in the hangar, caught by the decompression, and Nevada coolly seperated a right hand from one and brought it to the reader. The panel indicated no pressure on the other side, so he use the hand to open the door, which slid obediently open. Over his suit radio, he heard Feng's applause complementing his cynical use of severered human body parts - one of her specialties.
Securing the Workshop dome - which had been abandoned - and destroying its CCTV cameras, they jammed the hangar door to keep it depressurized and turned to the iris valve leading to the passage to the main dome. The panel showed no pressure beyond that either, so they huddled to either side and triggered the door. The iris cycled open and a fusillade of gauss rifle fire erupted through the opening.
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After a few moments it stopped, after which a flash and spray of debris indicated an explosion mid-way down the passage. The defenders had apparently tried to bounce grenades down the corridor and into the workshop, and failed to get them all the way. Nevada flicked off the safety catch, swung into the opening, and sent a bolt of fusing plasma down the corridor from his FGMP.
The pirates were wearing polycarapace armour and had rigged a barricade of metal tables and odd and ends, which were literally no defence at all against high energy weapons. A few fragments of men and equipment were discernable amidst the melted and smashed wreckage in the tunnel, and the crew advanced to the door. With exaggerated movements intended to be very obvious to the watching camera, Lyissa placed a shaped charge on a vibration fuse on the door, pointed to it while grinning (a little pointlessly) behind her visor and reached up to crush the camera in an armoured fist.
With that route blocked, they backtracked and gained access to the passage leading to the armoury. All went as before, and they spread out round the hatch ready to open fire when it opened as Nevada triggered the lock.
Explosions in space are silent, though the blast hitting armoured spacesuits was not. Everyone's vision was blanked out for a moment as their suit computers adjusted their visor tints to black in a nanosecond. Nevada and Wombat, at the door, were flung onto the decking, and Lyissa - who was lying in the next doorway back - was bombarded with bits of rubble.
Of the armoury, nothing remained; the dome was enlarged to a quarter again its size, and great heaps of melted rubble blocked most of the space. The iris valve through into the main dome was hopelessly buckled, its controls destroyed.
"Let's just wait for a bit," said Wombat. "If they think their bomb killed us all, they may come to look." This made some sense, so the crew settled down to wait, and to recover from the blast of the combination of the bomb and all the armoury's ammunition.