Turn 12.2 - 2181 - The Dome
Winner said:
"It'll be the pirates," you declare, "I want Memphis and his squad on the dock in thirty minutes."
"Yes, sir!" Carpenter snaps a salute and leaves.
"Ken, you have until they're on board to check over the ship and overstock the Christmas trees."
"Will do," he, too, marches out with uncharacteristic haste.
"Hailey, get in contact with the NI embassy or Choi directly. Tell them we can't respond to their ship's signal and that they should scramble a rescue of their own."
She just nods, and then there were two.
"Lena, you'll have the worst job. Tell the expedition team that they'll need to double their rationing if they want any chance. Use both the usual frequencies as well as a whatever you think appropriate to overcome the redshift thing. We can at least give them a chance."
"Understood, sir," she doesn't salute, but it's a near thing.
Finally, you turn to Ragnar, "Erikson, see if we can't get a bead on the resort ship's comms. If we're going to them then I don't want to spook off the pirates by discussing strategy over open channels."
"Roger that."
For a brief moment, you're alone in your office, gazing down on the plaza. There's a group of people milling around the greenery, and although it's hard to tell with the distance, you think it's the Dreamers' meditation class, although the monks are nowhere to be seen. With a sigh, you dim the lights and lock the door before making your way over to the pyramid.
Some twenty minutes later, you've commandeered the port bio-scan waiting room for a briefing. Between the squad of ten people in power armor, Ragnar, Amanda and the pair of pilots, the place feels rather cramped and there's a nervous energy in the air as you address the room.
"Sergeant Memphis, Mr. Saqqat," you call out the two people who'll be in charge on the ground, so to speak. "You have three objectives. Priority number one is to minimize loss of life. Paramount is your own safety, then the safety of the crew of the barge, and finally the unidentified ship, as the situation allows for. Priority two is defusing the situation: whether that's merely your presence, rendering aid to those in need or acting to prevent further harm. I need not remind you that flying without a transponder broadcasting a flight path is illegal for any non-military ship, and can be considered an aggressive action. Lastly, when the first two directives have been fulfilled, you are looking for information. If possible, capture the pirate ship intact and arrest the crew on board; failing that, track their movements and gather data on the ship and its capabilities."
Both men nod as you continue, "You'll have two days of hard acceleration ahead of you. We'll keep you posted as the situation continues to develop. Best of luck, gentlemen."
(Roll, pre-contact info: 36)
The ship you're flying to the rescue of, a passenger craft rigged into a freighter called the Liberty, is a rickety thing with weak engines and weaker sensors, and loaded down with lots of delicate and heavy supplies, plus a contingent of passengers. They've shifted course to meet you by a little, but the effectiveness of such maneuvers is minuscule, their actual fuel capacity calculated since launching and apparently skirting the safety regulations. As for any additional info regarding the pursuing ship, they can do little but point you to the drive plume and shrug their shoulders. Even the sole message they've received amounts to little more than a text message telling them to slow down, or else.
While your own sensors are considerably better, space is still vast and cold. If you didn't know where to look, you wouldn't find the silent ship, and as best as you can tell, it's not a kilometers long dreadnought or an even bigger carrier class. That you're not facing a flying space station however, is something you wouldn't need data to confidently state. Thus, by the time the Excelsior starts their harsh breaking maneuver, you've yet to gain any actionable intel. Well, other than the fact that after some 40 hours since you received the distress signal, both ships are still moving closer to each other and towards you.
(Roll, making it on time: 50)
In fact, as the distances shrink and margins are clarified, the exactness of your timing becomes evident. The Liberty will be entering what you consider your absolute maximum engagement range, where the chance of hitting an enemy is greater than a catastrophic failure of the railgun, just kilometers before the pirates reach the barge. Unfortunately, that still leaves over half an hour of distance between you and them, your speed brought down to avoid simply breezing past the conflict as you're coming from the opposite direction. The simplest option to end the situation – reducing the offending ship to scrap metal and calling it a day – has fallen off the table. On the other hand, it also means that your enemy is committed and has lost the option to run away.
The other piece of bad news arrives mere minutes later, when the Liberty pulls on their proverbial handbrake, right after the two ships merge on your scanners. Moments after the light from engines firing towards Little Klondike reaches you, a message follows. The voice reading the text is the gravelly sound of the captain of the barge, but the undercurrent of tension you'd heard previously has transformed into a grim resignation.
"Nine g burn to a stop towards us, maintain distance. No one has to get hurt. We'll fly away and vent atmosphere. You can start approaching when we leave. You can save them all."
It's Saqqat who sends the response. "Can't do nine, we'll pass out from being under heavy break too long. Instead, I'll stop the thrust flat, we'll blow past you in some ten minutes. Going to hit the brakes as we're passing you by. Best I can do, we're not going to commit suicide here."
According to your numbers, your troops could easily comply with the demand, and braking later means a longer flight back to the stopped ship afterwards. However, while you doubt that the Liberty's crew is happy to hear the reply, you can see some key upsides to the plan. First, it'll buy you more time – for what, you don't yet know, but you'd rather have it than not. Second, it'll mean that the Excelsior will be doing a flyby of the pair at less than Mach 3 relative speed and barely a kilometer apart, easily within optical sensor range. Finally, it means that the pirates' most obvious escape path is directly towards your colony, and if they try to break your bead on them with erratic flying and going dark, any little bit might count.
(Pirate professionalism: 11)
The pirates plan is, you surmise, equivalent to leaving hostages in a burning building while they make their escape. They'll hide the crew in various quarters, either in spacesuits or just airtight rooms, then slice every wall open. Between the rescuers needing to reach the wreck, dock and carefully search the ship for survivors – a task made harder by having to avoid depressurizing the rest of the compartments – the criminals will have a several hours long head-start, and if they cut the fuel-based flight after gathering sufficient momentum and use cold gas to change trajectory, then finding them again is akin to winning a lottery.
As if that wasn't enough, there's the final trap to deal with. Rigging a small IED to the fuel tank of a ship is trivially easy, and a radio signal travels faster than any kinetic missile. Thus, you can't shoot the fleeing ship lest they trigger said device in a final spiteful MAD protocol. Provided, at least, that the boobytrap isn't just on a timer, aimed at taking out a docking rescue ship in the explosion. It's going to be a careful game of bluff and risk: how much do the pirates want to escalate versus how successful they expect to be.
At least for that, your clearly-not-a-warship class vessel is to your benefit. If the enemy expects to get away, then limiting casualties to minimize the response is in their best interest. A heist of a few million worth of material isn't enough to justify a military response from Earth. But push too hard, and you will need to be made into an example. On the flipside, if all you have to look forwards to is dying in space, then… well, humans tend to be spiteful.
(The plan: 93)
Back in Little Klondike, you're just about resigned to this being a rescue operation at best – a small part of you chafes at that, but you remind yourself of your own orders: saving lives is the goal. Still, you're brooding if you're honest with yourself, staring at the various data feeds as the two ships pull closer and closer. The Excelsior starts her braking sooner than the pirates are probably happy with, but at this stage it's a moot point. Switching to the outer cameras more out of idle curiosity than real usefulness – the actual analysis will need computing power behind it – you feel your breath catch.
A trio of dark shapes launches out of an open airlock.
Mashing the controls, you pull up the in-suit cameras. Several of the squad are looking out into the void, their stance akin to some cheerleader formation. Finding the leverage to perform a shot put perpendicular to the apparent gravity of a breaking ship can't have been easy, but that's exactly what they've done, clamped to the wall with magnetic soles and held upright by the power armor servos.
Three of the screens display darkness around a tiny dot rapidly getting closer. The men are clustered around a leaking pressure container, helping them slow down on their way to the ships, but they'll still hit the metal exterior at car crash speeds. To be honest, you're not sure whether to curse their hubris or ego, whichever drove them to the suicidal plan. At least there's no activity on the radio waves or otherwise to indicate that the pirates are aware of the boarding party meteoring towards them.
It's a minutes long unassisted, uncalculated flight, so you have time to vent your frustration, tapping open a phone call, "Carpenter, please explain what I'm looking at."
"If they make it back, you're looking at the volunteers for every course and lecture on protocol, starting with the dullest. If they don't, posthumously decorated brave men who died in the line of duty. They knew damn well I wouldn't have authorized something like this."
'Fair enough,' you lapse into tense silence as the Liberty and the other ship grow on the feed.
For the final approach, the three push off the tank, its mass leaving it unwieldy for last second course correction, the suits venting their internal thrusters to bring your soldiers crashing into the Liberty. They're aiming for one of the clearly visible rends, or rather right next to one. As they slam into the metal, crumpling it as a final shock absorber in absolute silence you realize why they chose that point of entry. With no medium to carry the sound, there's a decent chance that the pirates are still unaware that someone made it to their prey. You hold your breath as the darkness of space is traded for the darkness of a vented ship cargo hold. The brief glimpse of violence as the outer hull, already cut, warped under the human missiles was nothing more than a blink, the absolute silence of the maneuver leaving you feeling hollow, as if you were witnessing the aftermath of some terrible accident.
One by one, all three troopers clamber out of a wreckage of storage lockers and you nearly leap to your feet with a cheer.
"Yes!" from the still active call, Amanda reacts much the same and you hear the excited shouts of the other soldiers left home.
As much as the release of tension makes you feel invincible, you remind yourself that this was just the start. Now there's three people stuck in an unknown ship with an unknown number of hostiles and unknown equipment. While you're not about to risk breaking their cover, the latter you can at least get something for.
"Weissmeier, Erikson, tell me we have some data on the enemy ship."
"It's a coffin, sir. Strapped to thrusters with welded steel bands," your scientist chimes in before Ragnar takes over.
"On this, I'd be willing to bet against even Hailey: there's nothing that can get through the armor."
Meanwhile, said armor has grouped up, ghosting towards not the bridge of the Liberty but the docking harpoon connecting the ships. They've abandoned caution for speed, floating past open doors and intersections, the way now occasionally lit by red emergency lights and flashing stroboscopes indicating vacuum.
The first contact they make is a single pirate in a standard space suit threatening another figure with a plasma cutter. The shot happens faster than you can follow, barely registering the presence before he suddenly stops waving the weapon around. A spray of black in red light bursts out of the hole as air escapes the space suit, followed by round droplets floating out as the body rotates about.
The soldiers reach the crew member seconds later. Through the feed of your sergeant's helm, you're greeted by a deathly pale face of a young woman barely older than a teenager. Even with the leagues separating you, you've taken the same first aid classes as everybody in your colony and the symptoms of shock are clear. Carefully, the corpse is nudged out of sight and the girl is led to the nearest handrail. She remains unresponsive, but there's little your men can do for her at the moment, merely shifting her to a loose fetal position and making sure she has a grip on the bar before moving on.
(The fight: 76)
Finally, they reach a closed airlock leading to the main cargo hall. The door cycles open and closes behind them before starting the pressurization, for which apparently your troops don't have time. A mechanically empowered fist slams into the inner door, easily braking through metal with a hiss of air, overpowering the locking system and sliding it open just wide enough to see through. To the credit of the four pirates in the cavernous room, only two are staring openmouthed, the freight container they were pushing floating towards a tunnel to their ship. The other two pull themselves behind cover and open fire.
The sudden explosion of sound and violence shakes you for a second, but it seems Ragnar's prediction holds true. One of the bullets actually slams off the forearm of the man wrenching the doors open, but other than a slight startling, he seems perfectly fine. As soon as there's enough space to push a gun barrel out, he pulls back and your soldiers return the favor.
The two caught in the open are still scrambling for a handhold to get themselves moving when they're removed from the fight in a permanent fashion. Equipped with little more than standard spacewalk engineering suits, they never stood a chance. The other two hide between the few remaining cargo containers as the door gap becomes wider and wider. In short order, the trio slips out, standing confidently in the open. The suits are equipped with loudspeakers, and there is a preprogrammed message still saved in the memory banks.
"You are under arrest, comply with the security officers."
The content of the message might not be exactly correct – you lack any jurisdiction – but the loud robotic voice, alongside the near instantaneous flipping of numerical superiority, not to mention staring down a set of three impenetrable walking tanks, is enough to get the point across. Slowly, a gun floats up from behind one of the crates, followed by raised hands.
From there it's a simple matter of binding the men to cargo netting, getting a number for their crew – eight – and leaving one to wait for the surrender of the final boarder while the other two move up to take control of the last space capable ship. The pirate working to secure the stolen loot on the other end capitulates readily enough, but the pilot on the bridge doesn't seem to have gotten the memo, the doors leading inside the cockpit locked. It's a matter of seconds to force them open, only to be greeted by entirely ineffectual gunfire. While the risk of actual injury is minimal, it's also not quite zero should a stray bullet strike some critical location, so you'll lose no sleep over the fact that your sergeant has no patience left for idiots; four prisoners is more than enough, the final member of the band slinking into the cargo hold, escorted by the captain himself.
(The capitulation: 21)
The few hours to wait for the Excelsior to finish turning around pass calmly enough, a repurposed freight container serving as a jail cell while the crew of the Liberty is retrieved and initial damage assessment takes place. The captain's decision to surrender without a fight pays off when a headcount reveals no casualties amongst his crew or passengers. Much more disgusting is the fact that half of those people you retrieve from the pirate ship, the implications not lost on anyone.
As for the ship itself, it's quickly deemed a lost cause, at best fit to keep the cargo intact while towing it to the nearest port, after which it's electronic recycling and scrap metal. The pirate ship fared much better, if you wanted to call it a ship. The model is quite similar in function to the Deckard dinghies that deliver your habitat modules, only better supplied. A rough calculation puts their operational range at about two months, give or take a week depending on how great of a haul they have to take to… where ever they would go and barring another ship meeting them halfway.
Annoyingly, you don't get the answer to the last bit. There's no documentation on the rudimentary logs and the bandits remain tight-lipped throughout the week-long towing process to get the wreck back to your asteroid, only claiming that they submit to the European criminal courts nominally in charge of the sector. While frustrating, since you're not about to stoop to violence against helpless people, there's little you can do to get their cooperation, but at least you have the time to weigh your options.
In broad strokes, it comes down to whether you choose to claim responsibility yourself or accede to the most common interpretation of international law. Usual pirates get caught after the fact on one of Earth's countless satellites, after which it's a coinflip whether the station extradites the criminal or, in the case of bigger habitats, does their own sentencing. The process is influenced by countless factors ranging from who the leader of the satellite is to who their sponsors are to which overarching body they subscribe to, to which corporations are involved, to who was the victim. All told, a headache of epic proportions.
Out in space, the laws are largely untested. What few pirates are captured alive have so far been caught by the ships of the global powers in their respective spheres of influence, who all have their own treaties and criminal codes for whether to trade prisoners or do the sentencing themselves. The stations who claim independence either haven't had contact with pirates or shoot the offending vessels to slag. Either way, you're setting a precedent.
That's not even accounting for your own unique circumstance, nor the public perception of events, nor the standoff political tensions where either side is salivating at the chance to paint their opponent in the worst colors possible. Would the EU make a big deal of a successful capture or downplay the existence of any threat in their space? Would the US do the opposite, should they get involved? If you took the reins yourself, would you be lauded as an efficient operator or would the perceived slight suddenly make you the bad guy? Would the Europeans work with you to find the base or funnel info into their own established embassy, locking you out? Or would your own efforts get you anything actionable? How would you sentence the incoming bandits anyway? The questions keep piling and piling with no clear-cut answers in sight. Thankfully, your years of veritable leadership have left you entirely immune to decision paralysis.
[ ] The blue marble justice
Technically the four men you captured are thieves caught in open space. While you're not an expert on maritime law, you imagine the situation is analogous to the headache of capturing people in international waters. Except these waters aren't so much international as they are treaty bound to the European Union. Extradite the criminals.
[ ] The frontier justice
-[ ] Write-in sentence
You'll see this through to the end by yourself. Whatever the consequences, at least you'll have an active hand in things.
[ ] Write-in
You have something else in mind.
-.-
There's still more to come of the chapter, including but not limited to various reactions pending your decision and the rumor mill, plus the choice block itself, but I thought that was a good point to stop and get the snippet out to keep the story going.
On the rolls for clarification because I myself am annoyed if I can't follow their logic: high numbers are always better for you, low are always worse, so the pirates are really quite professional with a roll of 11. As for the boarding plan, it would have only gone through on a roll of 10 or less or 90+. I'll leave it to your imagination what would have happened if they went for it on the other number.
Also, thanks for pointing out the previous typos; will fix.
