There was no reason for stealth, with the ambush rumbled, so the Long Walk went active straight away and lit up the Dendra's Curse with her sensors. The A Class merchant was flat out, fleeing for the Jump point, and Nevada grinned evilly at the idea of her trying to outrun the Walk with her 5g drives.
He pushed the sliders all the way up, burning hard in pursuit of their quarry, as Wombat pulled the sensor controls to his panel and Feng and Jesse Wales settled into the gunnery couches.
Aimo was back from Australia this week, so Lyssia got to do more stuff!
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Over the next ten minutes, the distance between the two ships of space dwindled, until finally the target acquisition systems flipped up a green flag, and Jesse Wales and Lyssia released two turrets' worth of missiles. Wombat's screens bleeped as they tagged missile separation from the Curse; only three, which probably indicated their other turret carried lasers. He took the returning sensor information and slapped a sensor lock on the fleeing vessel.
Lyssia and Jesse opened up with their own turrets; the range was extreme, but their systems, skills and sensor lock gave them a good chance of success, and a cloud of coagulating hydrygon vapour announced a hole punched in the fuel tank. The Curse stopped burning for unreachable safety and started to skew wildly around in an evasive pattern; the Long Walk closed rapidly.
The robot gunners released another salvo of missiles, and Lyssia and Jesse opened fire again, driving laser bolts into the other ship's hull. Missiles were launched in return, but only two this time; one of their attacks had damaged the Curse's missile turret. Nevada kicked in a random evasion pattern as the pirate ship opened up with lasers, and then the first missile salvos arrived.
Wombat timed his EW pulse to perfection, and the enemy missiles vanished from the plot. At the same time, so did the Dendra's Curse, and at first they thought she had been vaporized. However, she had simply been riddled from stem to stern by the missile strike, and her power had gone down. Drifting helplessly in space, she showed no lights, and Lyssia tapped the key to abort the rest of their missiles.
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Meanwhile, Quin Feng had been dealing with her two prisoners on Kitono. One turned out to be the ship's medic, a woman called Connie Weslaw, and Feng concentrated on her. The merest sniff of an offer of survival was enough to get her talking, and she filled in some blanks. At least 1,100 unfortunate crewmen from the battle had been shipped away, on a route that took the Curse across the Rift closing off the Reach via the cache the Cats had destroyed - as well as others - to 985-373, referred to by the pirates as Tortuga. There, they were triaged and those considered worth turning to a life of piracy were 'recruited'. The rest were shipped to another empty region of space, another base, referred to as The Block. Weslaw had never been there, but she knew that they were shipped out for sale from there.
She stashed the prisoners in two of the portable Low Berths for future reference, and radioed to the Long Walk that sufficient information had been gleaned that it didn't matter whether the Dendra's Curse was lost or destroyed.
Wombat broadcast a message to the Dendra's Curse, recommending that any surviving crew might like to surrender. The answer, when it came, was obviously from a suit radio. "Why should we, when you're gonna kill us anyway? Get on with it!" Nevada adopted what he hoped was a winningly reasonable, persuasive voice, and attempted to change the pirates' point of view. However, he seemed to aggravate them; "Our lives are forfeit =- we'll spend them how we choose!" and the connection was cut.
Nevada's skills are almost entirely concerned with barking orders at people, shooting them or controlling machinery. In a complete absence of what he called "soft skills", Allan's dismal roll here was entirely thematic!
Sensor scans of the ship showed only a low power signature from the air/raft - trapped in its hangar - and slight heat signs from suits. Nevada, Wombat and Lyssia suited up, selected an assortment of fairly punitive weapons, and drifted from ship to ship. Close to, the Curse was a ruin. Her whole hull was pierced with scorched and twisted holes, leaving little difficulty gaining access. Slowly the Cats worked forward towards the bridge and lounge where the suit traces were coming from.
Manually cranking the hatch open to the lounge, the Cats ducked back from the gunfire that greeted them, then headed through. Bursts of gauss fire left and right cleared the foes they could see, but a grenade came bouncing merrily towards them from the open bridge hatch. All three dived into cover, and were morely bounced around by the blast.
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Lyssia had dived sideways into the Captain's cabin - not entirely by accident - and after making sure of the armoured thug lurking in there she quietly breached the ship's safe, adding a small but worthwhile sum to her objective funds. She also recovered some fake IDs; some for Collacan, Imperial and Trexalonian services, and two blank IDs for the Blue Razors. This replicated what Feng had found in her prisoners' effects; the Blue Razors seemed to regard themselves as much a nation as a pirate band. Once more, it seemed they had been underestimated.
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Wombat and Nevada engaged the defenders of the bridge, and once Lyssia rejoined them pressed on inside, where they were buffetted by futile gunfire before slaughtering the final members of the Curse's crew. One was outfitted in actual battledress and carrying a souped-up gauss weapon designed for increased damage in close quarters, to which Lyssia took a fancy.
Carefully they located the Curse's data core and extracted it.
Towing the wreckage, the Long Walk took a comparitively long time to make the return trip to Collace from the outer system. The return of nearly three hundred missing personell hit Collace like a bomb; footage of happy families welcoming home sons and husbands given up for dead went viral for weeks.
One of the rescuees was a man of significance; Captain Gavin Sterling of the Trenchant, an 80kt cruiser, was of an influential family, a Founder, and his formidable wife Dame Marjorie was fulsome in her gratitude for the return of her husband, both verbally and monetarily. It was made clear that should they need a favour from the Sterlings, it would be forthcoming.
The armoured leader - Yvan Gollant - and the Curse's pilot Dirk Hake both had significant open bounties, even dead, and this helped further defray expenses. Rather to Nevada's surprise, Admiral Khundrak did even more by restocking their expended missiles.
The data core yielded some more information on the trade routes followed by the illegal slave trade into the Trojan Reach, as far as the Curse had travelled in any case. This confirmed the interrogation of Connie Weslaw and Brindal Thane.
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As the fuss of their return settled, the Cats with Guns considered their next move....
This marks a pause in this campaign, for the moment, though the CWG will return!
Session Date: 22nd May 2025
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