Once again, I paused for a few seconds to make sure I had their attention before I continued, “I agree with him; I would much rather we bring this entire crew home safely with all the pirates either dead, or in the brig. Capturing them is fine, but do not put yourself at undue risk to do it. Our job is to keep them from capturing FNS Destiny and to bring her home safe.”
By the time I finished speaking, the crew around me were either looking thoughtful, or they were smiling at me. I didn’t want them to be thinking about dying, I wanted them thinking about winning the upcoming fight. It was soon after I’d finished my little speech when Shasi came over to me to tell me the Captain wanted a quick word. She then admitted to me my little speech had been broadcast over the entire ship and heard by the Captain. She had recorded it before transmitting it to the bridge. When they heard it they decided to broadcast it to the rest of the ship. I felt a little embarrassed by this but realised why it was done. I excused myself from my companions before heading off with Shasi and Ani in tow to see the Captain.
When I arrived to see the Captain, I half expected I would be in trouble again but in fact, the exact opposite was true. I walked onto the bridge to a round of applause and praise from all the people who were there. Apparently, my admittedly borrowed speech changed a lot of perceptions among the crew about what was about to happen. The bridge crew told me it stiffened their resolve to stop these pirates and remove the threat they posed once and for all. The Captain jokingly accused me of trying to steal his command from under him. I just blushed again. Still, when all the teasing was over, he thanked me.
Apparently, morale in the crew was suffering from all the waiting and the resultant build-up of tension. This isn’t unusual, the waiting allows people far too much time to think. No one thought they would just fold, but the way they were feeling, the crew could not have been operating anywhere near peak efficiency. This would most likely have resulted in higher casualties than we could really afford or were willing to accept. While I was there, the Captain, his senior officers and I discussed some minor adjustments to our dispositions to fill a few gaps in our defences. After the meeting was over, I returned to the crew I’d been with previously, thinking along the way about Winston Churchill’s famous speech, the one he made soon after the fall of France. The team I was assigned to seemed happy to see me back. There were smiles all around. When I looked at their faces, I could see they understood my point and were now ready for what was to come.
Eventually, after the pirates caught up to FNS Destiny, they flew around the ship as expected for nearly an hour, looking for the best place to put down onto the hull. After they did this for a while, it became clear they’d finally chosen a place to land. It was clear they’d decided to concentrate their forces near one of the holes left in the hull by the mine blasts.
We’d previously stationed observers near all the hull breaches. Those observers also set up some of our improvised mines near those same breaches. Other than this the observers were only there to observe and report. Out there in vacuum, blast damage from the mines would be minimal but we’d loaded each of those mines with significantly increased shrapnel charges. We hoped and expected the shrapnel to cause the pirates some additional problems, damaging their vacuum suits and other equipment, perhaps even injuring or killing at least some of them. We’d also positioned some Troopers with hand held lasers and rail guns to try and draw the pirates in the direction we wanted them to go. Our hope was for our Troopers to be able to inflict even more casualties on the pirates when they went into action. We wanted to entice the pirates to push towards the nearest entry point into the ship, to make their way into a pressurised area as quickly as possible. As soon as we realised the pirate’s intentions, we pulled our observers back, ordering them not to engage, not yet anyway.
We had very carefully locked, barricaded and even disguised all the other entry points in an attempt to deny the pirates entry into the core of the ship. At least, we only wanted them to follow the path we had chosen for them. On the other hand, we wanted them to think they were forcing us back, we wanted them to chase us into the ship. When we had them where we wanted them, we planned to cut off their line of retreat. Once that was done, we hoped to defeat them.
Finally, one of the pirate shuttles secured itself to our hull before disgorging its cargo of pirates. They quickly spread out, guarding the approaches to their position, clearly working to establish a beachhead. A large group assaulted the hole in the outer hull that was their planned point of entry into the ship. Of course, we’d already pulled our people away from this location so they found almost no resistance, at least no resistance beyond a few shots from our Troopers to let them know which way to go. Once the pirates secured the immediate bridgehead the second shuttle landed. As soon as it became clear to us the second shuttle intended to land, the bridge signaled the crew of our shuttle to make their attack run. We later estimated the second shuttle had unloaded nearly half its cargo of pirates when a missile from our shuttle entered through its open troop hatch, exploded inside and destroyed it. The shock-wave from the explosion killed some of the pirate troops who were nearby and blew others away from the hull into space. Some shrapnel from the exploding shuttle impacted the other pirate shuttle but did not seem to do any major damage to it. FNS Destiny sustained a little extra damage to her outer hull but that area already needed extensive repairs anyway.
The first shuttle immediately released itself from the hull and started to pull away when a second missile from our shuttle hit it. This opened its interior to space, destroyed its engines and sent it tumbling off into the distance. By our estimation we’d rid ourselves of over a quarter of the pirates. Our shuttle then began picking off any pirate foolish enough to raise his or her head from cover. Eventually, our shuttle started to track and kill the pirates who were left adrift in space. A small number were located who had thruster suits. These suits would have allowed them to eventually stabilize their tumbling and move back towards Destiny. The suits may have also allowed them to rescue some of their comrades. We couldn’t allow that, we needed to make sure that none of them were left to cause us future problems. Our shuttle methodically searched for and found all of the pirates with thruster suits before killing them with her lasers. While the loss of life was terrible for the pirates, we all felt it was better them than us. As for the rest, the setback seemed to confuse them for only a short time. Our action with the shuttles removed their easy access to supplies and a secure fall-back position. But they still had what they carried, or been able to salvage from the wreckage of the second shuttle. Still, we expected they would soon be wanting to capture our supplies.
Now we knew their direction of attack, our crew were moving everything we could that we thought they might be able to gain access to. We moved it all to other locations, locations we thought would be more secure. In order to delay and confuse them a little more, we detonated a number of the mines we had concealed around their initial point of entry. The mines could not inflect much blast damage on the pirates but we had an especially large payload of shrapnel in them. This shrapnel caused a considerable amount of damage to any of the pirates within range when it hit. Now they had their first casualties. Our Troopers also began sniping at them, causing additional casualties and beginning the process of whittling their strength down. We’d already concluded we had neither the numbers, nor the weaponry to defeat them head on. Our only hope lay in trying to divide and conquer. We needed to fight them on our terms, we could not let them take the initiative, even for a second. Our people continued to withdraw into the ship, taking shots at them whenever they could. During this stage of the action, our people even managed to inflict the occasional casualty, trying to encourage them into the kill zones we’d already set up.
During this initial phase of the operation we suffered our first casualty. A young, unarmed naval rating, one of our observers, found himself trapped with no way to reach his escape route. He tried to hide but the pirates still found
him. They put a hole in his vacuum suit. The automatic self-healing system of course sealed the suit, but not before he lost a little of the enclosed air. Then they pierced it a second time, followed by a third. We could hear him screaming and begging for mercy but of course they showed none. As I listened to the signals from his transmitter, an all-consuming rage began to build in me. I started to head for the door, my earlier fear forgotten when first Shasi, then Ani grabbed me and held me back. They kept telling me I couldn’t do anything for him now, they told me the people who did this would pay in the end and they would help me make that happen.
Shasi said, “He is dead, or soon will be. Then they will not be able to hurt him anymore. Our time will come soon enough. Soon they will learn to regret ever seeing FNS Destiny. Soon they will begin to die. Soon their blood will stain the decks and bulkheads of this ship and they will learn what utter folly it is to attack a deep space explorer or any ship belonging to the Federation Navy”.
Gradually, I subsided. Of course, intellectually, I knew both Shasi and Ani were correct, still, emotionally I wanted to go out there and tear those pirates, limb from limb. I told myself my time would come, I will kill the ones who tortured that young rating, or someone else will, it didn’t matter, not really. By the time I calmed down enough to think rationally, the screams had stopped. We assumed he’d finally died either from his wounds, or from loss of air.
I asked Ani, “What was his name?”
She simply replied, “Karath”.
I burned his name into my memory. I will live with it, and his screams for the rest of my life. When we eventually found his body, we found one hundred and twenty-six puncture points in his suit. Many of the punctures had also wounded his body. The look on his face was horrific. When I saw the body, I threw up, unable to handle the sight.
Now the pirates had made their way past our initial traps, they quickly headed towards the pressurised sections of the hull. Our people continued to put up some desultory resistance, just enough to draw them along the path we wanted them to follow, slow them down and of course inflict the occasional casualty. We had the advantage that we knew our ship intimately, they didn’t. We also had cameras we’d hidden in strategic locations so we could watch their movements as they progressed towards their goal. They of course, couldn’t and didn’t see what we were doing. We’d also set up places where we could cut groups of pirates off from each other with blast doors. We had hidden ways we could follow to get in behind the pirates and hit them in the rear. We also closed and disguised blast doors so they looked like bulkheads. We effectively turned the entire ship into a maze, a maze intended to lead the pirates where we wanted them to go, and confuse them, all the while keeping our people out of their way till we were finally ready to confront them. At that point, our intention was to try and cut small groups of pirates off from the main body, then destroy or capture the small group. If we were successful at that, we would be gradually whittling away at their strength. We did have some minor successes here, wounding a pirate here or there, slowing them down wherever we could. In general we did our best to make their lives as miserable as possible. In all, we captured or killed fifteen pirates during this phase of the operation. We also wounded a few, further decreasing the effectiveness or their forces. From our perspective, we now had at least fifteen pirates less for us to fight later. Of course, we also took some casualties as well but these were all minor and we still had our medical staff and a place to treat our people, at least on a rudimentary level.
Unfortunately, we knew our serious casualties would need to go into stasis pods till we could reactivate the main medical bay. The main medical facility on the ship lost power at the same time we lost our propulsion and directional thrusters. Of course, we were hoping we would not have too many serious casualties. FNS Destiny carried thirty stasis pods in all. This was the standard number for a cruiser class ship which, except for weaponry and some relatively minor changes to re-purpose the hull, FNS Destiny was. This was yet another one of those cases where the roots of the ships design worked in our favour.
By this stage, it was becoming clear the pirates were becoming increasingly angry at us. We could tell this because they were shouting insults at us, firing at any movement at all and generally becoming increasingly aggressive. Our people would pop up, fire off a couple of shots at them, maybe lob the occasional grenade in their direction, then disappear. Of course, try as they might, the pirates couldn’t work out where our people were going to. We were very successful in keeping them off balance to the point where they were beginning to make silly mistakes. Eventually, they reached a junction in one of the access ways into the ship. One direction led to the bridge, the other towards engineering. When they reached this point, they split into three groups, one headed towards the bridge, one towards engineering and the third stuck to the junction. I think this third group was intended to act as the pirate rear-guard for the other two groups and to provide reinforcements if they were needed. All the while, our teams continued harassing the pirates as they moved towards their final positions, not the final positions they wanted, but the final positions we’d set up for them.
Finally, our teams reached their goals, one team stopped at the pre-positioned barriers we had erected just before the bridge, the other at similar barriers on the path the pirates needed to follow into engineering. All of our unarmoured personnel kept going till they were well outside the areas where they were likely to incur injury from the pirate weapons. Our barriers offered our troops good solid protection from pirate weapons as well as a good field of fire allowing us to hammer the pirates as they attacked. We also had a significant amount of segmentation as well as ballistic padding behind these barriers so if one of the pirates managed to get a grenade through one of our firing slots, casualties would, we hoped, be limited.
This phase was where we expected to take a few more casualties. We were in fixed positions, with our backs to the wall and our troops were significantly outnumbered. This was not really a good position for us to be in but we didn’t have much choice, not then. We were fully aware that any fortification can be breached by a smart enemy, particularly if he has the numbers and doesn’t mind taking a few casualties. We had simply not been able to come up with any kind of viable alternative however. We needed these barriers to buy us time and to give us the opportunity to reduce the numbers of the pirates who were opposing us. We watched and waited as they approached our ambush positions, ready to spring our trap when the time was right.
The group heading for the bridge reached the ambush waiting for them first. This, their first attack was always going to be the most dangerous for us because we needed to leave a part of the barrier open to allow our retreating troops to pass through. We’d not yet been able to close the barrier completely when the pirates came charging around the corner. They were met with a withering hail of fire from the defenders at the barrier. I was not in the party defending either of these two barriers but even in my remote location, the sound of gunfire was almost deafening. I found out later, at least ten of the pirate forces went down almost immediately. Of course, they quickly rallied, returning fire. We took two casualties then, one quite serious, the other only very minor, little more than a scratch really. We’d effectively lost our first combatant. I don’t count Karath as a combatant simply because he was unarmed and only an observer, he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,
We quickly moved our casualties to the rear for medical treatment. The serious one went straight into a stasis pod to be treated later when the medical bay was available. The other had his wounds patched up and voluntarily came back to the line only a few hours later. Our firing didn’t relent so the pirates were pummeled as they were forced to retreat around a corner, taking their dead and wounded with them. That was exactly what we hoped they would do and right where we wanted them, all bunched up and in one of our kill zones.
We kept a wary eye on this group of pirates but otherwise left them unmolested for
the present while we completed the task of closing our barrier. We had a couple of mines placed near their location that when detonated, would we hoped, decimate their ranks. We needed to achieve the same result with the pirates who were still heading towards engineering and didn’t want to tip our hand about mines in the walls just yet so we waited. We were watching them via our hidden cameras as they treated their wounded. One of them tried firing a couple of grenades down towards our defenders but it was a blind shot and did our people no further harm, especially being protected by the barriers as they were. Our people returned the favour, firing the occasional grenade up towards them in return, just to keep things interesting for them and forcing them to retreat a little further along the passage they were in.
Meanwhile, the group heading for engineering were nearing their goal but much more warily. Looking back, it is clear their comrades had been able to warn them about what happened near the bridge. They dealt with it by sending a small group ahead till it met resistance then they would try attacking with overwhelming force. Of course, this is a fairly standard tactic and we allowed for it in our planning. Our troops carried out a fighting withdrawal till they reached the sticking point at the barriers. This time, the pirates were much more cautious in their approach. This gave us enough time to close up our barriers properly before they could attack. Once more, when the pirates tried to rush our positions, they were met with a withering hail of fire from the people manning the barricade and took significant casualties.
Now, we had our backs to the wall. We could not afford to retreat any further, but on the plus side, we already had good medical staff who could care for our wounded as well as safe, secure lines of communication to allow us to move our people and material back and forth as needed. Once again the pirates lost some of their people, either wounded or killed. It looked to our observers like they had about five wounded and two killed. We preferred to wound them because that only left them with four choices, kill their own wounded, leave them where they fell, drag them back to somewhere and leave them till they had time to deal with the injuries or tie people up looking after them. We wondered which it would be. We didn’t much care because the first two options would surely damage the morale in their ranks and the last would tie up some of the people they needed to defeat our forces. Whatever course of action they chose, we gained an advantage. Once again, the pirates retreated back around the corner to a location they thought to be safe. This time, they just left their wounded where they’d fallen.
Star Man 1: Star Bourne Page 17
