(Aboard Destroyer Wolf’s
Fang, approaching pirate base Booty Bay)
Captain Loraine Savant was not pleased. The self-styled
Pirate Queen of this sector had lost several ships to this Black Star fleet
since they’d started showing up, always in sneak attacks where they lured her
(admittedly dumber) captains into attacking a bait ship and then pounced. It
was common knowledge in the whole sector that they’d been the ones who had
caused all those sudden victories in the Terran Empire just now.
She would have loved to attack and plunder that shipyard of
theirs while their fleet was out of the way, but there was just no way for them
to get the Confederate Navy out of the way. Civilian ships used to hitting from
surprise was one thing, but actual navy? Few pirates risked those odds. So she
had waited, having some of her people watching the yards to see if there was
any opportunity to attack.
Finally, when the ships came back, the Navy left them to
their own devices. Savant had made a study of the shipyard defenses. The
superdreadnought was being renovated into something new, so it wasn’t a threat.
The carrier and the little corvette taken from the Imperials might be a bit of
a threat, but training up crews for one of those things took time, time the
bastard owner hadn’t had, since they’d been busy with the war. And all those
ships that just came back went immediately into holding orbits or docking,
probably letting their crews go on shore leave. Those little patrol boat things
were unknowns, but what kind of weapons could they possibly keep on those
things? No way it was big enough to hold the slug throwers the ships were
famous for.
Basically, there had been no better time to attack than
right then. While they’re all celebrating and drunk, she planned to go in, grab
the ships she could, blow the rest, and escape. A couple bribes and the tarpits
had ensured that the Navy response would be slow, and her ships would get
‘chased off’ after that. It was a decent plan, until it all went wrong.
Now she was in her quarters on the Wolf’s Fang, pouring over
the tactical data. The patrol boats had been fitted with what the sensor
readings were saying was basically a battleship’s gun, running the length of
ship. Oh sure, it was just one gun, and not the twelve or so a superdreadnought
would turn into a broadside, but when you added in the missiles and other
weapons, it was more punch than any patrol boat should have.
Actually, it was way more punch than ANY civvie ship should
have. Sure, she knew the corvettes had those big railguns, but who puts a
battleship weapon on a ship barely big enough to hold it? What kind of madman
designs ships like that, where you literally have to point little ships
directly at their target to try and hit? And how does any company get away with
building dozens of the things? Where did they hide them? Her people had only
counted six of the little boats, so were had the others been hiding? And how
come none of her people had told her they had these weapons?
Well, that last part was easy enough to answer, at least.
The Owner of Black Star was pretty notorious for doing everything ‘in house’.
Most of the company were slaves he snapped up after Jagloth, or in other
dealings. Some were Nomads he probably had some hidden connection to. And the
others were usually vouched for by someone on the inside. Made getting a spy on
the inside to get details on their ships hard.
Hacking their systems was damn near impossible, too. Pretty
much anything worth getting into was on an internal, standalone network. And
hacking the ‘public’ nets was a pain as well. The stuff her hackers could get
into didn’t have much info, just some PR stuff and areas where people could
talk about orders and contracts. That led to a private server that was isolated
from their main servers, so you couldn’t worm your way in that way. The only
other servers they found that could be accessed from the outside were hidden by
hind some heavy encryption. Her hackers swore that it was at least military
grade, and probably had at least a couple layers to it, with different types of
encryption.
The public announcements to the Company and dependents they
could get into, which is why they knew that the Owner and a good portion of
their tactical teams would be on the planet, away from the fleet. The same
announcements also said that the fleet would be getting shore leave, after the
long job they’d been on. That should have meant that the ships were all on
skeleton crews, their men too drunk to do anything, certainly too drunk to
react so quickly! Hell, if she’d promised her crews leave after all that time
fighting, it would be half a day or more to round them all up, if she even
found them. And most merchant ships weren’t much better!
It just wasn’t fair!
Savant sighed. At least the ships they lost were mostly the
converted freighters and some of the more rowdy crews, who were basically
fodder anyways. When she got the spy’s report, she’d taken every ship available
at the time, but the most of the pirate ‘fleet’, including all of the best
ships (except the Fang, of course),
were still away, out raiding. Now their best shot for taking out that bastard
who had been screwing with their operations since Jagloth was gone, and with
it, their best shot at getting those stealth ships. They’d have to figure out
something new.
At least most of the dead came from the Pagella clan. They’d
been getting uppity with her in recent months. This raid basically reduced them
to a third-tier outfit, while not costing Savant too many of her own. She’d
need to replace the fighters and the pilots, but that wouldn’t be too hard. The
Pagellas, however, were down to two ships, and most of their clan would be
quiet now, or someone would take it into their heads that wiping them out would
get the pirate queen’s favor. Especially if she ‘accidentally’ put the rumor
out there herself. Yeah, she could spin this raid as an attempt on an old
enemy, while making sure any blowback happened mostly to her enemies.
(BSN Breath of Hades)
Captain Dasyra Enlen was proud of her ship. The Breath of Hades was the second of the
Black Star Navy’s two cruisers, alongside her sister the Shinokage. Now that they had more hulls in the fleet, they’d
started dividing into Groups. Her Hades was
the flagship of Second Group. First Group, of course, was led by Shinokage, and included most of the
ships involved in the Imperial Civil War. Of the warships that went to that,
only Thunderfury was outside First
Group, being on its own so it could attach wherever the Black Star Marines were
needed.
Second Group was designated the ‘home defense’ group, but
that mainly meant that they went on jobs in and around Dimiya, where they could
be recalled quickly if need be. In addition to Breath of Hades, there were her four Assassins (Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Dragunov, Vendetta, and Black Mesa),
ten gunboats, and the pocket carriers Providence
and Destiny. That was in addition
to the static defenses the shipyards and residential stations had in place.
Between the yards and the carriers, she could also field three squadrons of
Thunderbirds, one of Raptors, and one of Dragons.
Well, she could when she was on station. At the moment,
there was just her ship, as they’d been ordered to quietly follow the pirate
scum that had tried to attack their home, and find out where they lived so that
the Master could personally explain to them why they should never have done
such a thing. The fact that the pirates were surprised by the extra ships defending
the stations said that the practice of lying in stealth whenever possible had
paid off, since even if the Navy knew they were there, the pirates were clueless
as to their strength. Hell, the gunboats alone could probably have taken out
everything but the fighters, though they would have taken losses. Being able to
bring the lesson home to the pirates was almost worth being ordered to keep
quiet during the battle and simply let the pirates fly away. Almost.
The ship had performed brilliantly. Using the latest
generation stealth systems, as well as the special hull material and null-paint
like all other Black Star ships, the pirates had a better chance of detecting
light from the center of a black hole than they did of spotting her ship unless
she went and flashed her engines at them. They had followed the pirate ships
into warp as soon as the last one had cleared the tarpit, minimizing the chance
that one of the pirates would detect the energy of their jump.
For the last week, they had followed the pirates, until they
reached this system. Technically called the Chathor system, it was uninhabited,
officially. The system was a collection of gas giants and asteroid fields. Sometime
in the distant past, the rocky planets in this system had all broken apart, and
had formed several large asteroid fields. The system was too remote and too
much of a navigational hazard to support mining efforts, so it was left uninhabited.
Unofficially, the system was known as the Badlands, and had
long been a pirate and smuggler haven. So long as the pirates operated within
certain limits, the Confederates had decided that it was not worth the cost to go
hunting through the briar patch for rabbits. It wasn’t just pirates, of course.
There were smugglers, crime syndicates, people fleeing prosecution, and more.
The various asteroid habitats in this ‘uninhabited’ system turned into fiefdoms,
but ones with connections that made a full-scale cleansing of the system
impossible. The few times it had almost gotten to that point, the locals usually
ended up turning on the one bringing the heat down on all of them, and the
problem soon resolved itself.
Breath of Hades
was following the ragtag flotilla to a large asteroid, roughly twice the size
of Ceres in Sol, which had been hollowed out and turned into a shipyard and pirate
haven. The pirates were not too trusting of their neighbors, but that was
normal for these kinds of places. Dasyra could see minefields, weapon
platforms, and a small group of patrol boats flitting around the asteroid base.
From intercepted communications, they found that the base was called Booty Bay,
as it had apparently been used by pirates for a long time now.
Looking up from the tactical readouts, she said, “Launch
probes. Standard set of eight, box formation. Have them set up above and below
the ecliptic, so we can launch tarpits and keep the rats from scurrying away. Comms,
lock on to that beacon the Yakuza station is using for FTL comms, and let the
Master know we’ve tracked the rats, full encryption. Send a second message to
the yaks, and quietly let them know that what is coming is not aimed their way,
unless they intervene. No sense getting additional players involved. Their ships
are weak, but one can’t underestimate them. After all our ships are weak
compared to those Imperial ships, and we all know how that turned out.”
Turning back to look at the tactical screen, she considered,
and then said, “Launch another probe, full stealth. Try and get it as close as
possible without being detected. Let’s see what kind of sensor readings we can
get off them. Their comms leak like crazy, so have our people work on intel
gathering and quietly subverting the systems if they can, without alerting the
enemy to our presence. I want as much data as possible about that station and
its layout ready for the Master when he arrives. Let us show him what the Breath of Hades can do.”
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Be sure to read my published works!
Frozen Soul series (Sci-Fi Supervillain story):
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Tales of the Void Traveler https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06ZZ52G37
Rules-Free VRMMO Life (Dark Fantasy GameLit):
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Omnibus 1 - Volumes 1-4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0774T354X
Into the Black (Sci-Fi GameLit):
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Omnibus I - Books 1-4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077X2KR7Y
City of Champions Online (Superhero GameLit):
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Lewd Dungeon (Dungeon Core GameLit):
Book 1 - Welcome to the Apocalypse https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BB34DHF
The Kalipshae Affair (A First Contact Short Story): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0739V6R6T
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