|
The witchwyrd then adds "And this is my compatriot, Cassius."
At that moment, Cassius's familiar concentric orbogram flickers into a life from another of the multiple holoprojectors in the room.
"Hello, it is a pleasure to meet you. I am Cassius, an advanced neural network." the avatar of nonsensical data-points finishes after the Doctor's leadup, every word causing ripples from the center outwards.
The lashunta steps forward, head up shoulders square. "Amaryst Geil, champion of democracy."
Emily was practically glued to the window the moment the mining station came into view. The strange mix of rock and machine was strangely beautiful in its own way, and was transfixed right up until the hologram appeared. Diesel was just like the station -- strange and beautiful, colors and lights. She was practically gawking; then completely awestruck when Cross appeared like a stained-glass mosaic. "Wow..." she mumbled, while other introduced themselves.
"Em-emily. I, um... Hi." She looked back and forth between the two holograms. "You're both so pretty..."
Emily reached out with her power almost instinctively, trying to get a read on Diesel, then Cross. She felt a pang of regret afterwards, but curiosity had gotten the better of her.
Rollo, K-Van and Korvan introduce themselves as well.
Diesel isn't actually physically present, so Emily is unable to get a read on him. Cross is just in the other room in the pilot's chair, so she can certainly read him.
Diesel ignores Emily's comment, looking around at the assemblage of people. "So, none of y'all's in charge?"
Cross's holographic avatar spared a glance toward Emily and the browline quirked lightly at her comment before turning his attention back to Diesel. "Despite my objections, yes. Like I said, democracy."
He pulled his legs up to sit crosslegged in mid air, resting his hands on his knees and studied the other core. "We're not exactly crack pirate hunters but we're not helpless either. Why don't you give us a run down?"
"Well," begins the hologram, "It's been a couple weeks that we've been having trouble with the pirates. We're not so sure about where they're headquartered or anything, but we did run a trace on their last Drift exit, so we can point you in a direction if you want."
"They've visited us three times so far. They pack pretty advanced EMP tech, and since none of our drone defenses are shielded, they pretty much get shut down pretty fast. We don't want to send out any manned craft, because, well... if we get EMP'd, we basically die."
"Each time, they've demanded a big cut of our weekly mining output, loaded it onto a big freighter craft and then taken off. Of course, if it comes up during our performance reviews that we're as far behind production as we are, we'll get in... trouble. So we need some help. And the authorities over in Khal seem to be too busy to help us."
Amaryst nods, "Khal has substantial problems right now. You can't expect any help from them.
"Tell us more about the pirates. How many ships? What classes? How are they armed? How much warning do we have between them drifting in and their arrival? When do you expect them next?"
"There were" "of them. Just the one cargo hauler and its escort, a light freighter." he responds, pulling up imagery. Both ships appear larger than the Argintum, although the cargo hauler is a pretty standard lightly-armed truck and the light freighter doesn't appear to be a warship. There would be between five and forty pirates capable of living on these two ships. What's unusual about these ships is that the truck appears to have a large cannon mounted on "top" of it. "That's the EMP cannon," adds Diesel. "They claimed it has enough power to shut down the station, and I'd rather not take the chance."
"The cargo hauler just had a turreted cannon. The light freighter was more-heavily armed, with a coilgun, a missile launcher, and two EMP cannons."
The core's avatar shrugs. "If they stick to the same pattern, they'll come back this week."
"You do any refining on site or do you guys ship out unprocessed ore?" Cross asked, not wasting time with being angry. It was good to deal with another core again. His fellows tended to be very goal oriented and quick to come to consensuses. Anything else might spell disaster out in deep space.
"There's another facility we ship it to in the same belt that does the refining," he says. "We've asked, they haven't been hit."
"They independent contractors or owned by someone?"
"Independent. Tau Ceti Resources. Subsidiary of Imperial Solar Mining."
"Is the refinery run only by cores, or is there a conventional manned crew too? Is it more heavily defended? I guess I'm wondering why the pirates wouldn't hit them too? Refined metal would be more valuable."
"It's a conventional crew that wouldn't be totally killed off by an EMP blast."
"Right," Cross said, the shards that made up his form bristling as he thought the problem through.
"Here's what I'm thinking. They know what they're doing. Return on investment for mass quantities of raw ore is minuscule so they've either got their own refinery set up somewhere or have a contract with an independent in this belt. They find a core operation, shake it down until that operation's home office gets cranky over the lack of product and puts the cores on ice. They move on to the next target. They know indentured cores can't really move against them and the local authorities are unlikely to step in."
Cross folded his arms. "Had a few bands try to run this scheme on my posting. We were out on the edge and not as closely scrutinized. The pirates got the picture after we hacked one of their ship's systems and spaced a crew."
"So, what do we do?" asks Rollo. "I'm not exactly equipped for taking on pirate spaceships."
"If I can get on-board their ship, I can do some hacking nonsense," says Korvan, "It'd be hard to get onto a moving ship in just a suit, though. Maybe I can sneak on with the goods they steal?"
Rollo says, "I say we follow 'em. If we fight here, some of the cores could get caught in the crossfire. We don't know what kind of operation they're running, and following them could give us that info."
"They're too strong for us too engage in ship to ship combat. It sounds like the light freighter alone is more than a match for us. So we have to either follow them,or hit them while they are loading. What happens while they load, Diesel?"
"Or..., the one week schedule suggests that they're in system, or very close. Is it even possible to hide a refinery? Are they sailing into a legitimate refinery and pretended that they mined the ore themselves?"
Emily watched the conversation go back and forth between Diesel and Cross as if it were a ping-pong match. The weaponry the pirates had, not to mention how big their ships were, worried her...but the way the others talked made it sound like a challenge they could handle. She didn't want to ask any ridiculous questions, and knew enough not to talk about any of their abilities while Diesel was there -- but she still wanted to help with the planning if she could.
"What happens if those EMP guns hit a ship?" she asked. "I mean, what if we could make their ships fire on each other or something? I dunno how, but it would disable all their guns at once...if that even works."
"Back in the day, yeah, a hit with an EMP could reliably fry a good part of a ship's systems. Hardening, shielding, and countermeasures have gotten better. We'd be lucky to take the weapons systems entirely offline. We'd need to hijack one of the ships and hammer the other with the EMP cannon before they bring the shields online all before they responded."
"EMPs can't penetrate a ship's shields. We'd have to get their shields down first."
"A few solid hits from a light cannon on an unshielded ship should take down a lot of their most important systems," says Rollo. "It's a bit of a grab-bag with each hit but if you hit consecutively then you can really disable a ship."
Responding to Amaryst's question, Diesel adds, "Well, they link up with us, we haul over the ore into their hold and then they take off."
"How long before the home office loses patience with you all and starts icing people?"
"Where does the exchange happen? Is it in vacuum? Do they come out of the ship?"
Maldor is even more lost than Emily. He was taught small unit tactics - how to move and engage a target with fire teams of 5 individuals, and some TTPs for 3 to 5 fire teams operating as a larger company. But space flight and ship battles were so far beyond him that he just listened...
The avatar symbolizing the core nods. "Aye, it's in vacuum, but we've never seen them come out. They open up their hold and we put the ores in. Last time, there was a guy in the hold, watching."
"They do audits every two months," he responds to Cross. "So... we've got a couple weeks. We're looking at being 25% behind, which isn't so bad, but it'll get worse if those thugs aren't driven off."
Emily furrowed her brow in thought as the conversation continued. "Is there any way we can find out how many pirates there actually are?" she asked, even though if there was, the cores probably would have done so already. "It sounds like there may not be that many."
"A couple of ways. We could try and hide a transmitter in the next batch of ore but that might be noticed by a security sweep. We could try to trail them after their next pick-up but if we have them on our sensors, they can probably see us too." The front of Cross's face wrinkled in such a way as to suggest he was frowning in thought.
"Or we could split the difference and I could take another risk."
|
|
”Not to be negative. But we are in a travel ship with only a single gun on it. If we are intending to deal with these pirates then the safe move would be to come back with better firepower. After all you say you have... what.. two months plus a couple of weeks in theory?” The Witchwyrd addresses his concerns aloud first to Cross, then Diesel, as he crosses his upper arms across his chest ”In practice shorter, but regardless as we stand now we don’t really stand much of a chance against them by my measure. The only hope I could see would be infiltrating their cargo ship and trying to dismantle them quietly from inside, but the odds of that succeeding are nearly as poor as the odds of a direct space battle I should think.”
K-Van watches the exchange between all of the adults rapaciously, absorbing as much information as he's capable of doing without speaking up. It isn't his place, and he has even less information than Maldor or MLE about such matters.
Rollo, on the other hand, speaks up. "Well," he says, "The odds of us getting our hands on a warship are basically none, unless we want to sell this ship or something."
"Maybe we could buy a missile launcher big enough to hurt a starship that we could handle personally."
In answer to Emily, he says, "No, no real way to tell exactly how many there are. Hell, there could be a base or more ships with more pirates, though that would mean a pretty serious operation. I doubt there's more than twenty or twenty-five, nobody likes to be crowded."
Korvan speaks up as well - "I gotta agree with Jin," he says. "This sounds pretty dangerous. Maybe it would be best if we went our own way."
Once again, Amaryst finds herself agreeing with Rollo, "Even if we sell Argintum I doubt we'd be able to buy a ship with sufficient firepower to handle both of these at once. I was hoping a well planned ambush would earn us control of the big freighter, but that seems unlikely."
"So why fight at all? Diesel, can you relocate? Just strap on a couple thrusters and push everything sideways. Then lie low when it's time for them to come back. With a couple weeks of thrust you could be thousands of clicks from here.
"Or ship out your ore early? Tell the pirates that corporate moved up their delivery time table.
"Or could you negotiate a better long term rate? If corporate shuts you down, the pirates would have nothing. That would buy us time."
Proposing the ancient 'protection' racket is repugnant to Amaryst, but it seems better than the immediate alternative.
Maldor has a slowly building look of frustration on his face. Finally, he blurts out, "We shouldn't just leave these poor miners to their fate. Why don't we sneak aboard while they are loading the ore and overpower the pirates from inside the ship. That takes their big guns out of the fight straightaway. I doubt they have any heavier firepower inside than we do, and we probably won't face all of them at once. Then, if we're lucky, we can use that ship to disable the other one. I don't know much about starship flying or fighting, but I do know about ambushes and clearing tight compartments with a group of armed combatants. That's what we were trained to do. Surprise is on our side. Let's exploit it."
When he is done, the young man seems awfully grown up and has a hard edge to him that you hadn't seen before - except maybe in the warehouse back when you first met.
"Because they've got two ships and an unknown number of buddies. We hit one, they open up with the other and maybe fire on the cores for good measure. You know about small-unit tactics and operations with support," Cross said, "I know about thinking like a bastard. Put me in with the next shipment of ore."
"Not going to be just one person. If I can pull some light sabotage to keep their ships helpless while I transmit their location to you guys. You come to save me before they crack me open and decorate the prow of their ships with my guts. Simple."
"Cross, it's bold to the point of suicide. You're only going to be able to sabotage both ships if they land somewhere. And presumably they'll have friends or at least business partners where they land. "
"Then Maldor's got something like the best plan but we need to keep the Argintum out of sensor range and hit them when they're well away from the mining facility. If we hijack their hauler and focus both the hauler and Argintum on the gunship, we might stand a chance."
Diesel nods. "We've got a few mining vessels outfitted with a little better weaponry. We could fight, if the EMP cannon was taken out of the picture."
"So we need an assault party, and a ship party. I'm best suited for the assault party - to heal anyone who might need it if nothing else. Cross, you're the best choice for the ship, I think. K-van, you should probably stay on the ship - sorry, buddy, but I don't think Cross is gonna let you get into the dance quite yet...I can't speak for the rest of you, so who is going where?"
|
|
”I’ve got a jammer I built to knock out their comms, but it will need to be on their ship unless we park the Argintum really close. It might be for the best if I come as well, to help solve any less sentient obstacles you might encounter. I’ve practically got a whole toolbox worth of augments.” the Witchwyrd explains
"Taking out their comms is good. Jin, is there any way we could rig shielding for the core ships? Or for the cores personally? "
"I'm not saying we should split up, but if we did, I'm not sure where I would be of most use. The assault could use someone in heavy armor, but I'm probably the best ship's gunner."
"You're also the only other pilot we have as far as I know," Cross noted.
Emily came up beside Mal and stood at attention, as she always had during group training exercises. "I should be part of the assault party," she volunteered. She looked quietly from Jin to Amaryst in particular. "You know what I can do in close quarters." She added, and hoped to avoid any protests.
Amaryst looks coolly at the psychics, and nods. "If this is what you want to do.... "
"I think the assault team is still a little thin. You should take another member."
A second later Amaryst frowns. "Jin, if you're jamming comms we'll need some other way to communicate.
Cross's avatar visibly bristled in agitation, the tiny shards the made up his virtual form shifting to point sharp edges out. He did not like what he was about to suggest.
"We have tele-whatsits, right? We can bring one along, I'll even let them into my head."
"Our range is too short, Cross. Unless Emily is stronger …." Amaryst lets the comment trail off, hoping that her human friend will surprise her once again.
"Even a simple optical beacon would suffice to start the engagement. We could use color codes for simple communication. But it will be difficult to maintain line of sight while maneuvering."
"You mean between ships? We can turn the scrambler off once we have pacified our target or if something goes wrong enough that we need to contact you."