Star Force: Ghostblade (SF67)
Page 10
“I know. What about support personnel?”
“Got an army of techs for you and a scattering of Regulars. Paul and Jason will send more if you need them, but they figured you were going to be pulling mostly solo ops for a while.”
“Now that you’re here that’s not true, but I am looking at going after their shipping lanes if we can figure out a way to get the cargo transferred. I haven’t killed any lizards yet and I want to keep it that way for now.”
“Generous of you.”
“I’d rather trick and steal from the helpless rather than slaughter them.”
“If they’re traveling in convoy we can take two ships, swap one crew for the other’s cargo and let them go on their merry way while we take the other one off their hands.”
“That’s a lot of minds to freeze, and on two ships simultaneously. Until you got here that wasn’t an option.”
“And now?”
“How many drones you got?
“Six cutters, three corvettes, and a destroyer. But I thought you were thinking about taking them from the inside?”
“I can sneak onboard, if I’m lucky. You, not so much.”
“Piggyback ride?”
“My armor can’t expand coverage like that. Are any of those drones interceptors?”
“Three cutters are, but we’ve got some other mods onboard if you want to swap them out.”
“Good. If we’re going to be jumping convoys we’re going pirate, not sneak thief. What’s the timetable look like before we can start building our own drones?”
“Depends how much these babies are fed.”
“I’ve got a jumpship full of raw materials to start with.”
“The plan Paul sent along has us building a myriad of other ships, mostly duplicates, before we start trying to go for a mobile shipyard, but the plans for one are here and the segments break apart into individual ships…but we’ll need a secure location to set up in, and in theory the teardown time will be in the hours, not the minutes.”
“Ground or orbit?”
“I believe ground is preferred, but they’re also capable of orbital production.”
“Even for jumpship slips?”
“Haven’t got one of those out of design phase yet. Everything I’m referring to has been hastily built in prototype back home. What I’ve got here are the first and last of the production models. Everything else going forward stays with Clans Saber and Sangheili, while these were quietly misplaced in the construction logs. The crews that built them will be cycling out to us as they train others to replace themselves in the program, so we’re still ghosts in this, though the sooner these jumpships get back to normal operations the better, because we still have a trail until they do.”
“Paul really is worried about a computer hack, isn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t say worried, just playing things safe. This Clan is going to be our ace in the hole should something unexpected happen, V’kit’no’sat or otherwise, and he wants us to live up to our name as soon as possible. Nice choice by the way. Pays homage to both Saber and Sangheili.”
“This is a joint op, so it only seemed fitting.”
Lev raised an eyebrow. “This is way more than an op, unless Paul has been telling me tall tales?”
“Right now it’s an op. I have to build the actual Clan along the way.”
“Are we basing outside of Star Force territory or just visiting to grab goodies?”
“We’re staying outside and out of sight for now, though we do need to establish a line of communication back home. We can’t build relays of our own, so we’re going to have to have proxy ships within both Saber and Sangheili fleets come out to meet us for information downloads. If we access a relay directly there’s an electronic trail to follow, while a ship can give us full access to records without any system flags going up.”
“Now you are just being paranoid.”
“Being thorough. Very, very thorough.”
“How are we going to communicate with our own fleet once it gets large enough to be spread out?”
“That’s one of many problems yet to be solved, but since we don’t have a fleet yet we’ve got time to chew on it…along with a lot of other things. Paul and Jason have promised to work most of it out from their end, I’m here to put it into actual practice.”
“And hit the lizards to no end.”
Kara smiled. “Exactly.”
Lev crossed his arms over his chest. “Why do I get the feeling we’ll be going after more than cargo ships in the long run?”
“Star Force has gotten very good at recycling lizard tech. It may not be as convenient as stealing their cargo, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than mining it ourselves.”
“Yeah, I’m definitely going to enjoy being part of this Clan,” Lev said with a smile. “We need somewhere to ground these puppies. Do you have a site selected yet?”
“Yep. Two jumps from here and a nice, quiet little frozen ice ball with a lot of untouched ore fields.”
“Ice?” he said, losing his merriment.
“The rebels didn’t choose Hoth for the scenery,” Kara reminded him. “Clan Ghostblade has to be invisible, which means going to the fringes and avoiding all the obvious vacation spots.”
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