This log was much delayed by narrowboat shenanigans, so will probably be abbreviated and slightly inaccurate as my already poor memory fades...
No Pete again this week, so Feng very plausibly stayed aboard the LW.
|
It occurred to someone that some of the pirates might be trying to escape by reaching the surface though the destroyed turrets. Responding to spoken instructions, the three Shadowcats left on the surface bounded off to investigate. They found two of the four shafts were blocked by rubble, and two were not.
Meanwhile, they stared down the two corridors leading to the rest of the base, waiting to see if the pirates would assume the bomb had finished them off and emerge to investigate. Only gradually did it dawn on them that one of those hatches was welded shut by the bomb, and the other had Lyssia's bomb set up as a booby trap. The pirates couldn't get out to investigate.
Deciding to stop waiting, they triggered the bomb, blowing their way into the next area, identified by the turncoats as Prisoner Interrogation. Once again, Nevada guided one of his drones through the splintered remains of the hatch - and started as its' monitor window went black. It had been shot by a group of pirates tucked behind another barricade. Lyssia and Nevada responded with fusion bolts and their fire went quiet. The group moved into Interrogation.
Here was where the most graphic evidence of why pirates were summarily executed could be seen. Prisoners of no value either for ransom or slavery, or who were suspected of knowing things that could assist in planning an operation, were brought here for torture. Implements of excruciation ranging from the medieval to the neural were on hand, and despite regular cleaning by harried robots, the place stank of death and fear. It turned out later that no few of the pirates would vie for the chance to slowly dismantle ‘useless’ prisoners for their own sick pleasure.
A computer terminal was here, but despite sophisticated hacking equipment it was unable to bring up any information. It had been disconnected from the network, as had the hand panel on the next iris valve; Nevada's severed hand produced a red panel from the lock.
 |
Turning right, they headed down towards the Security office, on the theory that systems could probably be controlled from there. When this hatch was opened, however, a different challenge was encountered - wall-mounted autoturrets on either side of the corridor. A hail of heavy gauss fire hammered up the passage towards them, and they ducked back again.
These were mounted in armoured pods, and it took armour-piercing RAM grenades to deal with them. Moving past them, the Cats blew into the Security office - to find it empty of pirates. After much suspicious searching, their attention turned to the access shaft for one of the destroyed surface turrets. Sure enough, the shadowcat above confirmed there were five people in the shaft. A charge collapsed the lower end, leaving the pirates with a choice between staying in the shaft and confronting Gromit above; not a good set of options.
The security systems, once hacked, gave them access to most of the door and camera controls, allowing them to locate most of the remaining pirates. However, master control was in the central control room, where it appeared Captain Rackham was holed up, and they could get no vison or access to that.
 |
Adjacent to the security office was the loot store; a block of cells held prisoners for slavery or ransom, while three heavy vaults were provided for the material loot taken by the pirates. These resisted any lock-picking the Cats could bring to bear.
 |
In the cells, they found four prisoners. Approaching them with extreme care, they eventually freed three men and one woman. The woman, Patience Deon, having clearly been brutalized, was hysterical and unable to understand she was rescued, so in the end they tranquilized her. "Any McClellan here?" shouted Lyssia. One of the men, a bit better dressed than the others, clearly saw preferential treatment on the horizon, and bustled forward. "Me; I'm a Company man," he stated importantly. He was utterly dumbfounded to be told he was now a prisoner again and that the Company was no longer in charge. "But... I'm Trego Hildegaard..." he protested as he was handcuffed.
The other two were an Barry Clonth, an engineer off one of the shuttles, young and strong and probably destined for slavery, and Miles Arrete, a director from ComTech, one of the local Kaldamar companies, being held for ransom. All of them were given vacc suits and left in place, assured that the cells were probably the safest place for them until the shooting stopped.
Moving back, they opened the doors to the main recreation area. This was defended by a rather more robust barricade welded to the floor in the far corner. Heavy gunfire greeted the intruders, but once more fusion bolts proved more than a match for the defenders' shelter and armour.
The rec area contained a gym, sports facilities, a bar, holovision players, game tables, a study area and library, a meeting hall which doubled as a briefing room... and four very seedy bedrooms. Three young women were cowering in these, dressed in rather grubby skimpy clothes. Each turned out to have explosive collars around their necks, to prevent them leaving the brothel. As it turned out, the collars triggered an alarm in Security, presenting an option for the guards to trigger detonation. Wombat disabled it, and the women - all shuttle stewardesses - joined the other survivors.
 |
Finally, all that was left was the control room. With the cameras hacked, they could see four officers and Rackham himself, forted up among the consoles, ready to make a fight of it. Triggering the intercom, Lyssia spoke. "I'm not talking to you, Captain," she said in a very reasonable but firm voice, "but you other four. If we get him, you 'escape'. How about it?"
There was a brief pause - and then the control room exploded into a total hairball. It was not at all clear who was shooting at whom for a moment, and then one of the officers riddled the Captain despite his battledress before going down himself. Ten seconds later there was no-one standing in the control room.
 |
Once they hacked the door open, the Cats managed to stabilize the 'sensible' pirate and the Captain, who was barely alive. The other two were goners, and with the base under control, Jesse Wales brought the Long Walk down into the hangar.
The two pirates, the Company Man and the traumatized woman went into the low berths, and the others into the empty passenger staterooms. The captain had two electronic keys on him, which opened the stewardesses' collars and the loot vaults. The latter contained only a very modest haul - as the Blue Razors had already been to collect their take recently.
He also had a second personal hand computer, deeply encrypted. Nevada set his hacking computer to work on it and was startled to discover that it would take eleven hours to crack.
The Cats then made a thourough search, loading up anything that looked useful - especially the surviving weapons and ammo, which the Kaldamar government were very eager to buy from them for their army-in-training. Finally, they put a missile warhead next to the fuel and decamped to orbit, from where they watched the explosion gut the pirate base beyond repair.
As they headed back to the mainworld, they were cheerfully calculating the bounties on the pirates and the reward for the rescued director.