I may definitely be communicating the idea incorrectly, but chip damage kills. Being able to actually focus on the major threats instead of also dealing with piles of minor ones appeals. Mook guns may not be the Elite cannons, but they still shoot bullets all the same.
I don't think we can resolve the issues with Mari by keeping her out of the battle, as likely as that is to get more people killed.
[X] The station's inner defences are less of a threat than you were worried they would be
This feels to me like it's going to be the most expensive option, but also the one with the highest chance of victory. The positioning option might let us get a few sucker punches in, but maybe too late in the game to be able to actually pull off a meaningful victory.
The station's inner defences are less of a threat than you were worried they would be:10
The position of the False Verdant means it will be late join the battle: 9
The enemy prototype mecha will not be able to immediately launch: 6
"What does this have to do with anything? I thought we were here to talk about captured mecha tech. ... fine. It's not that complicated, really. Take a kid — just out of school, maybe even younger — and you just drown them in dogma and propaganda, all of it with this threat behind it all: step out of line and die, and anyone you care about pays as well. Then you put a gun in her hand, you tell her where to go, who to shoot... What else is she going to do but pull the trigger? What's right and wrong stops mattering. Morality stops mattering. Everything narrows down to just... staying alive for a little longer. So... yeah. There's a lot of damage a terrified teenager can do, if you put her in a giant warmachine."
— Excerpt taken from interview with Mosi North, classified
"There's good news," Lieutenant Amani North explains from her place at the notional front of the compartment. She zooms in on the station where it's cradled inside the protective range of the defence array. "The station's interior defences are slight. Once we get through the array, we'll only have the enemy ship and mecha to seriously contend with."
We, she says. You know damn-well whose job it's going to be to deal with the defence array. It's certainly not going to be Lieutenant Priss, here. At the thought, you actually experience an odd stab of guilt, looking at her injuries. It's not as though she hasn't put herself out on the line for what you're trying to accomplish here. And it's not like you've ever managed to weather the kind of losses her team took without some serious drinking involved somewhere. North has been working non-stop since medical cleared her for it, by all evidence. Like if she just keeps working, the trauma of the situation will somehow be gone by the time she allows herself time to process it.
Still, you can't help but frown as you look at the projected firing arcs of the array's guns, noting the degree of overlap, the number of platforms you'll need to disable in order for the operation to carry out. They encircle the station in a loose sphere formation, too small to be manned, each one little more than some weapons, a comm/scan suite, and a set of emergency thrusters for course correction. Not a cheap setup, for a civilian operation, even one in deep with the HSE administration.
"There are civilians on this station," Captain Leski puts in. "They are not our target. We will be careful in this operation."
Careful is all well and good, but... war in space is never clean like that, even compared to old-fashioned dirt wars. Shoot at something and miss, and that round won't stop, or slow down. It will go on and on forever, preserving all its momentum until it hits something or someone years or seconds later. Artificial habitats are fragile little shells surrounded by death on all sides. One stray round can spell death for hundreds as easily as it can for one. Maybe Nazaret has a little bit of a point, when you stop to think about it — a ship grade railgun round hitting a planet's surface is merely catastrophic for part of the world in question, rather than the entire thing.
Still, before you can think of the lives of a bunch of strangers, you need to consider your own."Breaking through that array is going to be dangerous," you whisper to yourself.
Azara hears, though, and scoffs theatrically, twisting around in her seat to look back at you. "Please, Pirate. Here in Squad B, 'Danger' is our middle name!"
You raise your eyebrows. "Yours, maybe. 'Himegami Danger Kana' would probably be a little much."
Unfortunately, Azara's single eye lights up. "Danger-Kana... I like it! It's like 'danger close', a little."
You groan, waving her off. "No, no, I have enough absurd nicknames from you already," you tell her.
"Agreed," mutters Kitty. "Now both of you shut up and pay attention."
/////PoCS\\\\
Dzomo Station
Harbourmaster's office
"Repairs are very nearly complete, Commander," Harbourmaster Johns says. His smile is forced as always, and oily enough to make Kron want to take a shower. She wonders if his use of her actual rank — rather than the courtesy title of 'captain' in the context of her command of the ship they're discussing — is a calculated insult, or simple ignorance on his part. Looking into the beedy little eyes looking back at her from out of a face both thin and nervous, she decides it's the latter.
Commander Edith Kron, captain of the experimental concealed Divine Navy transport HDMS Sunspot, takes a sip of coffee from the zero-gravity mug she holds. It's shockingly good — sharp, rounded, and with floral notes that hit at the back of her palette. On some level, she resents that. She hates this grubby little office with its too-loud air exchange fan, its fading paint, and its flickering display showing a headshot of the Harbourmaster's florid-faced husband hanging on the wall behind Johns' workstation, whose still image always seems to stare at her the whole time she's here. There being a silver lining in the form of the coffee complicates what could just be a perfectly straight forward hate-affair with this place and everything in it. "Time estimate?" she asks.
"Well, the important parts are taken care of," Johns assures her. "We should be finished by tomorrow."
"Good," Kron says. "I appreciate the efficiency of your work." She glances out the view port — the actual, glass view port — at the shipyard beyond. Ridiculous structural weak point or not, it affords her the rare sight of her own ship's exterior seen with her own eyes. Truth be told, the repair work isn't anything she can really complain about. Coming to this place was the right decision, whatever petty aggravations she's had to deal with.
Something chimes on John's workstation. A soft, pleasant noise that nonetheless persists to the point of insistence. He frowns, fingers gliding across his workstation's interface to check the source of the notification. "What is it?" Kron asks.
"Well," Johns says, speaking slowly enough to be annoying, "Our long scans have detected an approaching vessel, which is refusing our attempts at communication. It could just be nothing!"
"... what kind of vessel?" Kron asks, a chill going down her spine.
"Well, it looks like it might be a transp—" Johns cuts off as a point of light blossoms in space, bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. Another unconvincingly cheerful alarm sounds, overlaid atop the first. A dire warning delivered through a forced smile. "... One of our defence array platforms just blew," Johns says, stunned.
With a curse, Kron shoves herself toward the hatch as fast as she can. She fumbles out her comm unit from a pocket. "This is Kron," she says, brusquely. She's pushing herself down the narrow shaft so fast that several station residents dive out of the way. "Cast off, we're under attack!" She catches herself on a handhold, heaving her body expertly to the side in order to round a corner. "It's the rebels from before. They just blew a defence platform. Cast off. If I don't make it, I don't make it, but we can't let the Sunspot still be at dock when they start shooting at us instead of unmanned platforms!"
She means that. There's a real chance that Kron's about to get left behind on this miserable little station right before a battle that could well see it destroyed. As long as her ship and crew survive, she can live with that. Still, Kron finds herself muttering a quick prayer as she goes.
/////PoCS\\\\
Space, near Dzomo Station
Dzomo Station is a standard little ring-and-spindle affair somewhere under all that. In addition to several extra habitation rings whirling their way around the spindle, the place is a mess of defensive and industrial modifications. The shipyard module bulges out prominently from the original spaceport. You can even see where the enemy ship, the warship made to look like a Verdant class light transport, is docked for repairs.
The Esther Strova's main gun slams the nearest of the defence array platforms, and you watch on your scans as well as your main camera as its shields flare and die. You and Azara open up on it with heavy cannon fire, tearing the gun turret apart even as the platform rotates to open up on your ship. That's one down, but not enough to allow the Esther through. The nearby platforms are already reorienting themselves to fire on you.
You keep your breathing steady, hands only shaking a little on your Pennant's controls as you and Azara approach the next flagged defence platform. It launches a series of anti-mecha missiles — they blow up under a hail of gunfire from Kitty. You break your thrust, riddling the shields with more cannon fire, drawing the attention of its automated countermeasures. This lets Azara swoop in, hull-cracker bombs blowing the little platform apart.
You hear Azara cackle over squad comm. "It is so good to be back!"
"Try not to get carried away," you caution her, not letting any anxiety enter your voice, despite the abundance of it twisting in your gut.
"You worry too much, Pirate. They tried to kill me already, and that just made me look cooler!"
It had half-blinded her, and she's damn-lucky to have gotten off that lightly. Kitty cuts you off before you can remind her of these things. "Cut the chatter, ladies. Stay focused."
"Right, right," Azara says.
"Sure, Squad," you tell her, privately very grateful for the intervention. There's only so much of Azara tempting fate you can handle.
"We have our targets," Kitty reminds you anyway. "The others are counting on us to do this right." Yeah, thanks, boss. No pressure at all!
Nazaret's voice of warning cuts in. You know them well enough to hear the cracks in the calm they try to maintain during combat. Somehow, that's more reassuring to you than some consummate professional putting on their best robot impression. "We've got a mecha launching from the false Verdant, moving toward you at speed. Its scan signature matches the prototype from last time." Well, here comes the monster. Unseen in the darkened confines of your cockpit, you tense up.
"Intercepting," says Jay. The dot representing his mecha takes off like a shot, trailed by Cam and Ryan, as your squad keeps working on the next platform.
Despite how good you know he is — the fact that he was bent to being that good through cybernetics, mad science and general child abuse — you can't help but feel a pang of true dread as you watch Jay go. There's a chance you won't see him again. That that horrifying, zealot pilot might kill him the way they had Sunny and the others. And, if that's what's going to happen... you can't stop it. You have your own job to do, no less vital or dangerous, but apart from Squad C's. Your job, at the moment, is to blow this shit up. Theirs is to be a wall between that monster and the rest of you.
The blue dot that is Jay's Hecate collides with the red one representing that enemy prototype. They clash and come together several times, Jay refusing to just buckle under the enemy unit's overwhelming speed and precision, swarming drones no doubt harrying the monster and keeping it at bay. Assuming you don't all die later, you'll have to ask for the camera footage, it's probably going to be exciting.
The enemy ship isn't off the shipyard's docking arms yet. If you can do your part, things can still go to plan with getting the drop on it. Or, mostly. You know the old cliche about plans and contact with the enemy. Something, inevitably, has to go wrong.
So, what is it first?
Article:
What goes wrong? Pick one.
[ ] The enemy mecha shows features you didn't see last time
[ ] The enemy mecha has reinforcements you don't expect
[ ] There is a surprise complication in compromising the defence array
[X] The enemy mecha shows features you didn't see last time
What can one frightened little girl do exactly?
One hero cannot win the war, no matter how talented.
[X] The enemy mecha shows features you didn't see last time
Let's be real, mecha pilot discovering the yet unused features of their ace prototype is the very kind of cliche we need to promote here in order to keep our company afloat and our sales in the green during coronavirus.
And for the real reasons, I fully expect these features won't magically disappear if we don't pick this option, so someone is going to be unpleasantly surprised sooner or later.
As it is, Jay is someone I actually expect to survive, since he's another ace.
[X] There is a surprise complication in compromising the defence array
Strangely I kind of like the idea of things going wrong on our end. You know, just after we were informed our job was supposed to be easier.
Our little enemy ace didn't go to the Coop school of mecha piloting after all.
[X] The enemy mecha shows features you didn't see last time
This might also be on the vague hopes and dreams that eventually the power of friendship will win us the light of day and those features will be put to good use getting systematically dismantled the instant we manage to get that prototype fighting our enemies instead of us.
Oh well, at least hyper concentrating the enemy's forces should make containment and control of that force a little easier, even if it could potentially do really terrible things to the final casualty reports.
