[▲] Caminha Waypoint
From the cockpit of the SIF lurking near the bow of the Anansi, Nim watched the distorted ring of space twist the background stars into something of a streaked pool orbiting a void large enough for the nearby Agamemnon to shift through. The Anansi had picked up the gravity well as they were doing forward reconnaissance, almost a hundred thousand kilometers in front and above where most of the Tiaha fleet was floating stationary. It took a little under three minutes for all four ships to scramble everything relevant into play to greet whatever was slowly emerging from the gate.
It was taking far too long for anything to show up.
"Gravity profile matches up against a Strix-class destroyer," came Calli's voice over the comex. With the Heinlein in the battlesphere but still lacking a full bridge crew, the balance of which was now scheduled to meet them at Lalande with the rest of their fighter wings, she had taken up her not-that-official post in the crow's nest of their home ship's CIC rather than deploy in her Athena marauder. They hadn't exactly been thrilled with the decision, as it left them without their best close-quarters fighter in what would definitely turn into close-quarters combat, but given that they were outnumbered a hundred ships to one the Captain had decided Calli would be sitting out the boarding party to play com pong on the bridge.
"No one's fabricated one of those since before my grandparents were born," commented Damien. "They didn't even have jump drives that'd work on something of that mass back then. But that's definitely a stable EinRosen bridge.”
"Jury rigged Casimir rails, maybe?" proposed Vic. "I mean, I've heard of it being done and sort of not getting the entire crew killed. Could be why they're so slow off the bridge. This wait is ridiculous.”
"That's a lot of work to re-use a POS boat like that thing,” said the leader of Flight Errant. His name was Peter Shalimov, but no one called him that, just like no one had ever really called Nava 'Major Navarro.' Most just referred to him by his callsign, Shanks, even his subordinates. He wasn't as particular on ranks and surnames as Keiji was though it was pretty clear everyone knew he was the guy in charge of the flight.
Jenni Holt, the cowboy-hat-wearing Abrams pilot everyone in Errant called Boltdown, spoke up in agreement with Shanks. "Their mitigation was barely enough to qualify as safe for extrasolar patrols. They got dumped off on the Vanguard since they usually never leave system, and the Vanguard sold them off to the Colonies when they came out with the Draco-class, what, seventy years ago?"
"Stripping the hull plating nets a pretty good profit since it's so close to durability specs for Alkonst-classes," ventured Karda. "Uh... so I've heard. From people that play the recycling market. Maybe it's just wearing another ship's skin?”
"Recycling market my ass, kid," laughed Errant's XO, Eric Halskar. The man had a curly head of red hair in an even brighter shade than Nim's, so it wasn't really much of a guess as to where he'd gotten his callsign. Everyone called him 'Eric the Red' so often he had a viking hammer painted on the hull of his Proteus.
The leader of Lyall's fighter wing, Towers, along with the thirteen other members of his two flights, dropped into the comex as his marauders hit the black. She watched them streak out of the Agamemnon's hangar bay in scattered formation, then branch off and head towards opposite ends of the engagement sphere, noting the new symbols painted on the fighters signaling that there were a couple new pilots in the wing since their last joint exercise. "Agamemnon Wing to Heinlein Wing. We're in sphere and heading to position with perimeter objective on Z's."
"Clear read, Agamemnon Wing," confirmed Keiji. "Heinlein Wing prepare to engage. Flight Methuselah will land and secure with go-ahead. Flight Errant has covering objective."
"Clear read Methuselah Lead," said Shanks. Despite not liking the fact he was subordinate to someone almost a decade younger he didn't seem to have much of a problem following orders. Lyall would have called him one of the 'good marines.'
Nim turned her attention to her VTI and double-checked her maneuvering thrusters and engine. There was half as many as she had slotted in her Stuka, but the thrusters on the SIF were omni-directional and rotated within sockets crafted into the ship's frame so technically having more wasn't necessary. She still absolutely hated the things—the more moving parts something had the more opportunities there were for it to fail. The entire conversation she'd had with Cooper regarding the lack of redundancy in the design seemed to have gone entirely over his head, though. The only plus she'd seen to the SIF so far was its powerhouse engine assembly; it easily doubled her potential momentum and put the top speed of her Stuka to shame, even with the acceleration gimped due to Cooper's insistence on following some arbitrary safety protocol he had pulled out of his ass when she declared she wanted to see how the fighter maneuvered at top velocity.
She throttled up and headed out with the rest of her wing, sticking close to Karda's blind Z as they approached the safe limit of the bridge. Remarkably late to its own party, the boxed nose of the ancient destroyer model breached the event horizon, followed up by a long cylindrical midsection capped off by a quad of bulky engines that did not exactly look like they were in working order. There was no visible ship designation, though given the hull scarring it was just as likely to have been shot off as to have never been there in the first place. The ship had seen better days, that was certain. Nim was impressed the thing had managed to clear its jump gate without being crushed into something the size of a basketball.
"Unidentified vessel this is the INS Agamemnon," echoed Lyall's voice over the broad-frequency feed Calli had routed to all of their fighters. "You have entered quarantined Alliance space with no friend-or-foe signal. Cut your engines and declare your intentions or you will be boarded and seized. This is your only warning."
Seconds ticked by as everyone in the sphere waited for an appropriate response from the encroaching ship. When the legally stipulated time elapsed, and a few seconds extra probably because Lyall was feeling nice, her sister called back over the comex, “Minuteman is GO for neutralization of hostile target areas. Heinlein the call to board is yours."
"Clear read Agamemnon," said Captain Michael. "Flight Methuselah, boarding drone is inbound. You are GO for hostile capture operations. Maintain environmental isolation. Objective is to secure the bridge for remote download and maneuver."
"Clear read, Taurus," said Keiji. His icon dropped into the private channel between all members of their flight. "Methuselah get ready to dock and load."
Nim watched as the Agamemnon, Anansi and Cusith selectively and silently obliterated everything that looked like it could have been a railgun, missile tube, or particle cannon according to their sensors. Their strikes were laser-like in precision, damaging very little else and likely causing minimal hull breaches as they stripped the lone ship of every means of defense. That it was failing to fire back wasn't entirely unexpected; the ship was an antique, and creating a stable jump gate for something of its size required a massive amount of power, likely more than it could generate without blowing quite a few critical systems. But even with those systems blown it should have had an IFF transponder running as a completely isolated system to identify themselves so things like they were about to do wouldn't happen. A near-field radio broadcast didn't take up ridiculous amounts of power and if a person knew their stuff they could run it off of a computer battery and use the ship hull as an antenna.
Sane people always broadcast a 'do not shoot me' signal no matter the circumstances, even if they were just pirates likely to be shot down anyway. The list of things wrong with the situation she was ticking off in her head practically doubled.
Ordinarily they would have boarded the derelict using an armed shuttle launched from the Heinlein during the artillery barrage from Battle Group Minuteman, but their departure date had been pushed up a week and they wouldn't actually be getting said boarding shuttles until they hit the last leg of their jump route. There was more than one way to breach an enemy ship, however, and the second method was by boarding drone: a hollow torpedo of ballistic armor launched from a carrier which blasted its own airlock through the hull of its target. It was dangerous, tactically, since boarding required them to secure their fighters to the enemy ship and load in on foot, but the operation was practiced more heavily than regular ship-to-ship boarding via shuttle for that very reason.
The third method involved locating a ship's hangar bay, or a hollow area large enough in the ship, having one of the destroyers blow it open to space, and landing their own fighters inside. This was even less frequently done than boarding drones, since it required them to dismount in an area without cover which was very likely to be re-fortified by enemy forces before they could set down. Odds were they would be killed before they could hit the deck. At the very least they would get their fighters shot up to the point where they could be disabled and stranded in enemy territory.
People generally balked at firing heavy weaponry at minuscule heat signatures on the hulls of their own vessels and with the advances in exosuit technology even if a person happened to be knocked clear of the ship's hull they could survive for hours drifting in space waiting for a rescue—unless, of course, the ship itself blew up and hit them with shrapnel. In the last century the "blow it open and land" tactic had been all but canned and boarding drones had become the standard Plan Bravo—save in vids, where blasting a hole in a ship and landing inside never ever resulted in the lead character's inglorious evisceration by the armed-and-waiting enemy the second they popped the cockpit.
Nim locked on to the signal of the boarding drone and followed it in, marking the spot where she was going to set her fighter down to avoid confusion with the rest of the flight. Once everyone else had done the same, they sent a ready signal to Calli, who triggered the drone to full power and sent it spiraling into the hull of the enemy ship. It slammed rather spectacularly through the speckled gray hull and cut its engines almost immediately once it hit an interior corridor. Its aft section extended, a green light on the doors indicating that whatever it had hit was indeed pressurized with a breathable atmosphere—no definitive way of telling if that atmosphere was carrying unclassified pathogens without a biohazard suite, however, which was why the Captain had ordered them to maintain environmental isolation.
Since their landing zone was near the bridge she didn't expect much of a trek to get to where they needed to be, but just in case she pulled two extra magazines from the locker beneath her seat and locked them to her belt. With the VTI taking care of the landing and magnetic locking, she checked her pistol on her right side and then removed her assault rifle from its dock behind her headrest. Inactive the thing was a weighty matte black brick the length of her forearm, but once she released the safety it doubled in size to a respectable weapon capable of shredding enemies with three-round bursts of magnetically-accelerated slugs of metal or crushing skulls by the tactical maneuver known as stock-to-face. Her pistol functioned on the same principle, but it fired larger, slower slugs and wasn't quite as effective for knocking someone senseless. Barring guns, there were always the tactical knives at the small of her back and fixed to her inside left boot.
As soon as she felt her fighter lock into place on the hull she popped her cockpit and launched herself onto the wing of her fighter, then slid over and made sure her boots stayed properly rooted to the ship's skin before letting go of her fighter completely. They grouped up around the docking drone and piled inside quickly, everyone double-checking their weapons and triggering their exosuits to switch from flight to fight mode. Fight mode deactivated most of the suit's marauder interface systems, redirecting the power into reinforcing the liquid kinetic armoring of vital sections as well as activating the damage mitigation systems which supplied adrenaline, pain dampening, or emergency tourniquet functions useful during prolonged sieges or fubared assaults. The only sign that modes had been swapped over, however, was that the suit above and below the joints tightened up as reserve fluids were pumped through the matrix to thicken the armor shell; it felt like she had suddenly wrapped her arms, legs and torso in compression tape.
Even with everyone in identical exosuits it was still easy to tell who was who. Leo carried a pair of fix-bladed steel knives secured by antique velcro to his torso whereas Karda had opted to arm himself with a belt of color-coded grenades whose functions only he remembered. Damien carried a heavy gauge shotgun instead of a pistol and aside from Calli was the shortest person in their flight. Vic had two pairs of shaped charges on each thigh, useful if they encountered a locked bulkhead, and Keiji carried an extra pistol plus the dull blue command stripe running down the right arm of his exosuit.
As for herself, she had control of the squad's EMP ordinance, which looked almost like Vic's shaped charges but were launched from a supplementary rail on her rifle that could chuck them far enough downrange not to be bothersome to the boarding party. It was also handy for launching them through internal bulkheads into computer equipment; she used the tactic quite often in simulations to disable mobile artillery and surface personnel carriers. Shotguns and knives like Leo's fared better against enemies in powered armor, although getting that close required a good deal of luck or a really unobservant person inside the shell.
"Bridge is three bulkheads forward of breach compartment," came Calli's voice through their suit coms. "Heat is high forward of your area, but looks like only engine residuals aft. Expect entrenched resistance on the bridge."
"Mantis, Riptide on point," ordered Keiji. "Wildcard, Ifrit rear guard. Hardcover eyes overhead. Shoot whatever has a gun or doesn't hit the deck. Read clear?"
"Clear read," nodded Damien, bracing himself across from Nim to set up a crossfire for whatever happened to be on the outside of their loading zone.
The flight split neatly down the middle and pressed themselves against the side of the boarding pod. Reaching up over his head, Keiji punched the red strobe light and shut the entrance hatch. A few seconds before it shut the boarding hatch spiraled open like a metal iris, sending lighter debris from the hull breach flying in a small tornado through the drone as the escaping air pulled everything except them towards the vacuum of space. The sudden threat of being sucked into the black was usually enough to startle anyone waiting on the other side.
Nim jumped out of the pod with Damien close behind, entering the silent ship it had tunneled into without having to fire a single shot. The corridor was eerily vacant, at least of anything still breathing, and the scanners filtering through frequencies both audible and not picked up nothing but the ambient groans and pops of cooling metals after Minuteman's assault and the pod's blasting through the hull. A sparing few green emergency LEDs were still active, putting out enough light for their exosuits to amplify and give them a clear view of what lay ahead in the cramped canted-ceiling corridor. Crouched in the darkness with Damien nearer to the pod she waited with her rifle trained down the direction they had to move, fully expecting a mass of raving lunatics to break screaming through the bulkhead a dozen meters down the way.
Then again, there were enough dead people in the corridor for it to be entirely possible there weren't the numbers left on the ship to form a horde.
"Oh my God," muttered Vic, his tone hovering somewhere between hysteria and disgust. "Oh. My. God."
"Keep it together, Hardcover," warned Keiji tersely, though his voice wavered slightly as he too caught sight of what they had boarded into. "Mantis, Riptide, on your move.”
Without glancing at what lay behind them, knowing it would probably be significantly worse, both Nim and Damien carefully picked their way through long-cold and mutilated human corpses down the corridor towards the section of the ship marked "bridge."