M.J. Markgraf
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BSE Chapter 3-23
🕑 Added 2024-12-13 13:00:10 +0000 UTCLOCATION: BA’EED STATION
SYSTEM: ZORFON’S GAP
DATE: 2400
Sienna would be damned if she lost this station to a handful of frigates and an old assault ship. “Fire up the station defenses!” she ordered as she ran into the command room.
“But-,” that was the only word the man got out before she shot him.
“Does anyone else feel like second-guessing my orders?” She knew what the man was going to say, ‘What about the fleet?’ She didn’t give a rat's ass about the fleet. She only cared about the station and the ships under construction that had been entrusted to her. Arkonis would forgive her for losing the other ships, but he wouldn’t forgive her if she lost the two cruisers and two destroyers that were nearly complete.
The other pirates dutifully turned back to their consoles and started activating the guns. Another man ran in and dragged the corpse away, while someone else took his place.
The large railguns had come at a great cost, but she would make sure they paid for themselves by spilling the blood of these interlopers. Sienna didn’t know what faction of pirates or possibly corporation these ships belonged to and she didn’t care. They had to die.
Maybe she would keep a few alive to find out how they found this place. Even the few corporations she dealt with over the years had been kept at arm's length. Only Arkonis’s most loyal people were allowed to know of this facility's existence.
The station shuddered as the large guns fired. Going by how quickly the battle was devolving for the defenders, she wasn’t sure she had any need to worry about friendly fire. Most of the rounds had been sent toward the center of the enemy ship’s formation. She hoped to disable that big bastard. It was clearly a troop carrier of some sort, and she did not have the manpower to fight off a boarding action.
Her plan was foiled when the ship adjusted its course. She did smile slightly when one of the frigates was struck by the station guns, but her smile was short-lived when the ship seemed to shrug it off and keep coming.
“Uh… Captain Blackspire, I think that laser frigate is the Headhunter.”
“What?!” she demanded as she strode over to the man’s console and pushed him out of the way.
She looked at the sensor logs and the blurry image from the optical feeds. The blood in her body turned to ice as she looked at the information. She knew every line of her paramour's ship and while some things were off, the shape was there. “That’s impossible,” she whispered. She wanted to deny it but there was no doubt in her mind that one of the ships was the Headhunter.
If these people had Arkonis’s ship, it meant he was dead. It also meant they had the activation crystals. She jerked up from the console. “Keep firing!” she ordered as she stormed out of the room.
“Where are you going?” one of the people demanded.
Normally, she would have turned around and shot the insolent man, but she needed to hurry. “I said keep fucking firing!”
These bastards may have killed her lover, but she would not let them have her ships. She would rather blow this entire facility before allowing that to happen.
It was too bad she didn’t have access to a nuke, that would have made this much easier. Instead, she hurried to the first cruiser, passing the workers and slave engineers without a word as she headed to the ship’s reactor room.
If she couldn’t blow up the station and everything attached to it, she would set the ship reactors to overload.
“Get out!” she ordered as she entered the reactor room. Three technicians and two slaves jumped at her command, but quickly exited the room as she pulled her weapon out.
The station shook as she made her way to the reactor terminal and she stumbled, she caught herself but dropped her gun. The weapon slid beneath some pipes and she cursed her luck but turned back to the terminal. She could retrieve her gun after she set the reactor. Sienna couldn’t engage the reactors normally since she didn’t have the activation crystal. What she could do was flood it with power from the station as well as fuel. With the right mixture, she could force an ignition in the chamber. Without the normal safeties turned on, all it would need was a steady supply of additional fuel to overload it.
Sienna managed to kick-start the reactor and was halfway through setting up the sequence that would eventually lead to an overload when someone spoke up behind her.
“Stop what you’re doing.”
Her hands froze over the console and she turned to see another slave. He was covered in grease and dirt. The man must have been working deeper inside the room and hadn’t been able to extricate himself until just now. The problem was, he had her weapon shakily trained on her.
“Put that down, and we will only punish you and not your family,” she said.
“You were planning on overloading the reactor, weren’t you? The station shaking means it’s under attack. Someone’s finally come to rescue us, and you’re afraid.”
Sienna snorted. “Don’t count on these new arrivals being your friends.”
The man’s grip tightened on the weapon and his shaking stilled. Sienna realized her mistake of not denying the accusations. She lunged for the man. There was a hiss as the weapon fired and pain quickly followed, but she rammed into the man, knocking him over and wrestling the weapon out of his grasp.
She got up drunkenly and aimed the weapon at the prone individual. “You should have shot me in the back when you had the chance.”
Sienna didn’t get the opportunity to fire her weapon as something hard slammed into the back of her skull. Her world went white and she fell to the floor, a large gash on the back of her head. A terrified woman with a large metal tool stood there in shock.
***
Vitor and the rest of his battered fleet approached the station. It had taken time to pick off the guns on the large structure, but they had done so after finally mopping up the final remnants of the pirate fleet. The few other ships in the system had bolted, not coming to the aid of their fellow pirates, or sticking around to become the next targets.
In total, six people died aboard the BSE ships during the fight. Most were from impact injuries or broken necks. There was only so much the vac-suits could do to stabilize a person’s spine during combat, and the large rounds from the station had shaken each and every ship in the fleet, minus the two gunships. The two small ships had weathered the fight without significant damage.
He wished he could say that about the BSE frigates or the Talon. The Resolve and Might were both leaking air from hull cracks while the Fury was experiencing intermittent power loss issues. The Talon had weathered the storm, but its thick frontal armor was deeply pitted from multiple impacts.
The Hawks hadn’t suffered any deaths thanks to their additional tonnage making it harder for the station guns to knock them around.
All things considered, this had been a resounding victory, but it wasn’t over yet. They were nearing the station and the Talon was already disgorging drop ships full of mercenaries to storm the structure. He had faith that the mercenaries could do their job. Galloway had also transferred over there during their reload. He would not deny the Marine a chance at a boarding action of this scale.
There had been a moment of worry when Vitor’s people detected energy buildup in one of the cruisers. Powering up the reactor should not have been possible without the activation crystal. Thankfully the energy quickly bled off soon after and he breathed a sigh of relief. They would need to keep an eye on those ships.
***
Galloway had joined the same team as before. Jallen was a competent individual and he already got along with Zorina so it seemed like an easy fit.
Like any good team, they razzed the new guy as their ship sped toward the station. “So newbie, you managed to get one boarding mission under your belt and now you think you’re good enough to be on our team?” Zorina asked.
Galloway snorted. “I probably have more experience than all of you combined.”
“We’ll see about that, rookie,” Jallen said with a smirk. “Seals shut, landing in thirty seconds. Watch your fire once we’re aboard the station. We don’t know who’s a hostile or a civilian.”
Galloway sealed his visor which activated his HUD. He checked his gun again and waited. There was a clunk as the ship connected to the docking collar and then people started rushing out.
Weapon’s fire greeted them immediately, but a withering hail of flechettes tore through the unarmored pirates with little effort. More drop ships docked, disgorging more mercenaries while the first few established a beachhead at the docking arm’s entrance.
A few more pirates tried their luck but were quickly killed or driven off.
When enough mercenaries had made it aboard, groups split off and moved deeper into the space station. The last to arrive were set to guard the rear. Thankfully, that was not the group Galloway was a part of.
Jallen and his team moved swiftly but checked every room as they passed. He was impressed by their training but there were a few things they could improve upon. He would bring that up after the mission was over.
As they were getting ready to check another room, a pirate popped his head around the end of the corridor. Galloway’s gun had already been pointing that way and he let off a stream of flechettes before he even got halfway through yelling, “Contact Front!”
The man went down and an explosion rocked the end of the corridor as the grenade the man had been readying to throw exploded.
“Eyes up, people!” Jallen reminded them before turning to Galloway. “Good job, rookie.”
Galloway snorted but kept his eyes trained on the corridor.
The uncoordinated pirates quickly fell to the much better-trained and coordinated teams of the Hawks. The only time there was an issue was when one of the pirates took some families hostage. After some back-and-forth negotiations, the family members beat the pirate to death. A medic managed to stabilize the people who were wounded in that fight and rush them to the drop ships and then back to the Talon.
It took more time to gather the civilians together and free the rest of the prisoners from the ships than it had taken to clear the pirates. They also found a room filled with people who were in stasis pods. A tablet showed a log of pending sales.
The whole thing made Galloway sick and he was glad he was part of this operation. This operation may only be a small part of ridding the universe of pirates, but at least he felt like he was doing something instead of the senseless bullshit he had been forced to do when he was in the STO. Marines should never be used to quell civil unrest.
The few pirates who surrendered were able to provide a much clearer picture of what was going on with this station. It wasn’t just Arkonis Anazi’s personal shipyard. It was also where the man moved all his most valuable merchandise, which turned out to be a swift trade of skilled slaves and the occasional ransom.
Galloway watched from the background as Jallen spoke with the rescued civilians. They were overjoyed to see them and wondered when they would be taken home. Jallen artfully redirected the conversation.
From what he knew, the main objective of this mission was to secure the ships and bring those back to Eden’s End. The secondary objective was to save anyone trapped out here. The Hawks engineers were already pouring over the ships to see what needed to be finished before the vessels could launch.
That wasn’t lost on the survivors and a few asked about it. Jallen told them. A few seemed upset by this, while others looked confused.
“Weren’t you sent out here by the STO to rescue us?” one woman covered in grease and dirt asked.
“Not exactly,” Jallen admitted. “First off, we are not part of the STO. We are a mercenary company under contract from Blue Star Enterprises.”
“Who?” one man asked.
“What mercenary company?” another demanded to know.
Galloway tuned out the questions, glad he wasn’t responsible for answering them. Heck, he might not even be required to do an after-action report unless Captain Krieger asked for one. He smirked slightly, maybe being a rookie wasn’t so bad after all. His mirth must have shown because the dark-haired and severe-looking Zorina gave him an odd look. “I’ll tell you about it later,” he replied in a low voice.
Comments
John Baran
"He smirked slightly, maybe being a rookie wasn’t so bad after. " should be "He smirked slightly, maybe being a rookie wasn’t so bad after all. " dont forget to add the all.
Nexis
I think the engeneers will be happy that it was not the STO who came to safe them.
Merlin's Fan
If the frigates could man 50+ before Alex got to it, a cruiser will probably require at least several hundred, if not a thousand. Destroyers are technically smaller than cruisers, they can pack as much of a punch as them. The main reason is because cruisers are usually command and control, where Destroyers are what their name implies, geared for combat.
underdog121
I just realized I don't know how big these ships are. Are there ships from other sci-fi series that you could conpare their size to so we could get an idea of their size? Or are they similar in size to modern day warships and their designations. I was just thinking about that since you mentioned the tonnage of the Talon.
Shmooggie
“he replied in a how voice.” how —> low.
mmarkgraf212
Have you seen my stapler?
Zachary Patterson
Thank you for the chapter! No tps reports yes!
