(Aboard Destroyer Wolf’s Fang, approaching pirate base Booty Bay)
Captain Loraine Savant was not pleased. The self-styled Pirate Queen of this sector had lost several ships to this Black Star fleet since they’d started showing up, always in sneak attacks where they lured her (admittedly dumber) captains into attacking a bait ship and then pounced. It was common knowledge in the whole sector that they’d been the ones who had caused all those sudden victories in the Terran Empire just now.
She would have loved to attack and plunder that shipyard of theirs while their fleet was out of the way, but there was just no way for them to get the Confederate Navy out of the way. Civilian ships used to hitting from surprise was one thing, but actual navy? Few pirates risked those odds. So she had waited, having some of her people watching the yards to see if there was any opportunity to attack.
Finally, when the ships came back, the Navy left them to their own devices. Savant had made a study of the shipyard defenses. The superdreadnought was being renovated into something new, so it wasn’t a threat. The carrier and the little corvette taken from the Imperials might be a bit of a threat, but training up crews for one of those things took time, time the bastard owner hadn’t had, since they’d been busy with the war. And all those ships that just came back went immediately into holding orbits or docking, probably letting their crews go on shore leave. Those little patrol boat things were unknowns, but what kind of weapons could they possibly keep on those things? No way it was big enough to hold the slug throwers the ships were famous for.
Basically, there had been no better time to attack than right then. While they’re all celebrating and drunk, she planned to go in, grab the ships she could, blow the rest, and escape. A couple bribes and the tarpits had ensured that the Navy response would be slow, and her ships would get ‘chased off’ after that. It was a decent plan, until it all went wrong.
Now she was in her quarters on the Wolf’s Fang, pouring over the tactical data. The patrol boats had been fitted with what the sensor readings were saying was basically a battleship’s gun, running the length of ship. Oh sure, it was just one gun, and not the twelve or so a superdreadnought would turn into a broadside, but when you added in the missiles and other weapons, it was more punch than any patrol boat should have.
Actually, it was way more punch than ANY civvie ship should have. Sure, she knew the corvettes had those big railguns, but who puts a battleship weapon on a ship barely big enough to hold it? What kind of madman designs ships like that, where you literally have to point little ships directly at their target to try and hit? And how does any company get away with building dozens of the things? Where did they hide them? Her people had only counted six of the little boats, so were had the others been hiding? And how come none of her people had told her they had these weapons?
Well, that last part was easy enough to answer, at least. The Owner of Black Star was pretty notorious for doing everything ‘in house’. Most of the company were slaves he snapped up after Jagloth, or in other dealings. Some were Nomads he probably had some hidden connection to. And the others were usually vouched for by someone on the inside. Made getting a spy on the inside to get details on their ships hard.
Hacking their systems was damn near impossible, too. Pretty much anything worth getting into was on an internal, standalone network. And hacking the ‘public’ nets was a pain as well. The stuff her hackers could get into didn’t have much info, just some PR stuff and areas where people could talk about orders and contracts. That led to a private server that was isolated from their main servers, so you couldn’t worm your way in that way. The only other servers they found that could be accessed from the outside were hidden by hind some heavy encryption. Her hackers swore that it was at least military grade, and probably had at least a couple layers to it, with different types of encryption.
The public announcements to the Company and dependents they could get into, which is why they knew that the Owner and a good portion of their tactical teams would be on the planet, away from the fleet. The same announcements also said that the fleet would be getting shore leave, after the long job they’d been on. That should have meant that the ships were all on skeleton crews, their men too drunk to do anything, certainly too drunk to react so quickly! Hell, if she’d promised her crews leave after all that time fighting, it would be half a day or more to round them all up, if she even found them. And most merchant ships weren’t much better!
It just wasn’t fair!
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Savant sighed. At least the ships they lost were mostly the converted freighters and some of the more rowdy crews, who were basically fodder anyways. When she got the spy’s report, she’d taken every ship available at the time, but the most of the pirate ‘fleet’, including all of the best ships (except the Fang, of course), were still away, out raiding. Now their best shot for taking out that bastard who had been screwing with their operations since Jagloth was gone, and with it, their best shot at getting those stealth ships. They’d have to figure out something new.
At least most of the dead came from the Pagella clan. They’d been getting uppity with her in recent months. This raid basically reduced them to a third-tier outfit, while not costing Savant too many of her own. She’d need to replace the fighters and the pilots, but that wouldn’t be too hard. The Pagellas, however, were down to two ships, and most of their clan would be quiet now, or someone would take it into their heads that wiping them out would get the pirate queen’s favor. Especially if she ‘accidentally’ put the rumor out there herself. Yeah, she could spin this raid as an attempt on an old enemy, while making sure any blowback happened mostly to her enemies.
(BSN Breath of Hades)
Captain Dasyra Enlen was proud of her ship. The Breath of Hades was the second of the Black Star Navy’s two cruisers, alongside her sister the Shinokage. Now that they had more hulls in the fleet, they’d started dividing into Groups. Her Hades was the flagship of Second Group. First Group, of course, was led by Shinokage, and included most of the ships involved in the Imperial Civil War. Of the warships that went to that, only Thunderfury was outside First Group, being on its own so it could attach wherever the Black Star Marines were needed.
Second Group was designated the ‘home defense’ group, but that mainly meant that they went on jobs in and around Dimiya, where they could be recalled quickly if need be. In addition to Breath of Hades, there were her four Assassins (Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Dragunov, Vendetta, and Black Mesa), ten gunboats, and the pocket carriers Providence and Destiny. That was in addition to the static defenses the shipyards and residential stations had in place. Between the yards and the carriers, she could also field three squadrons of Thunderbirds, one of Raptors, and one of Dragons.
Well, she could when she was on station. At the moment, there was just her ship, as they’d been ordered to quietly follow the pirate scum that had tried to attack their home, and find out where they lived so that the Master could personally explain to them why they should never have done such a thing. The fact that the pirates were surprised by the extra ships defending the stations said that the practice of lying in stealth whenever possible had paid off, since even if the Navy knew they were there, the pirates were clueless as to their strength. Hell, the gunboats alone could probably have taken out everything but the fighters, though they would have taken losses. Being able to bring the lesson home to the pirates was almost worth being ordered to keep quiet during the battle and simply let the pirates fly away. Almost.
The ship had performed brilliantly. Using the latest generation stealth systems, as well as the special hull material and null-paint like all other Black Star ships, the pirates had a better chance of detecting light from the center of a black hole than they did of spotting her ship unless she went and flashed her engines at them. They had followed the pirate ships into warp as soon as the last one had cleared the tarpit, minimizing the chance that one of the pirates would detect the energy of their jump.
For the last week, they had followed the pirates, until they reached this system. Technically called the Chathor system, it was uninhabited, officially. The system was a collection of gas giants and asteroid fields. Sometime in the distant past, the rocky planets in this system had all broken apart, and had formed several large asteroid fields. The system was too remote and too much of a navigational hazard to support mining efforts, so it was left uninhabited.
Unofficially, the system was known as the Badlands, and had long been a pirate and smuggler haven. So long as the pirates operated within certain limits, the Confederates had decided that it was not worth the cost to go hunting through the briar patch for rabbits. It wasn’t just pirates, of course. There were smugglers, crime syndicates, people fleeing prosecution, and more. The various asteroid habitats in this ‘uninhabited’ system turned into fiefdoms, but ones with connections that made a full-scale cleansing of the system impossible. The few times it had almost gotten to that point, the locals usually ended up turning on the one bringing the heat down on all of them, and the problem soon resolved itself.
Breath of Hades was following the ragtag flotilla to a large asteroid, roughly twice the size of Ceres in Sol, which had been hollowed out and turned into a shipyard and pirate haven. The pirates were not too trusting of their neighbors, but that was normal for these kinds of places. Dasyra could see minefields, weapon platforms, and a small group of patrol boats flitting around the asteroid base. From intercepted communications, they found that the base was called Booty Bay, as it had apparently been used by pirates for a long time now.
Looking up from the tactical readouts, she said, “Launch probes. Standard set of eight, box formation. Have them set up above and below the ecliptic, so we can launch tarpits and keep the rats from scurrying away. Comms, lock on to that beacon the Yakuza station is using for FTL comms, and let the Master know we’ve tracked the rats, full encryption. Send a second message to the yaks, and quietly let them know that what is coming is not aimed their way, unless they intervene. No sense getting additional players involved. Their ships are weak, but one can’t underestimate them. After all our ships are weak compared to those Imperial ships, and we all know how that turned out.”
Turning back to look at the tactical screen, she considered, and then said, “Launch another probe, full stealth. Try and get it as close as possible without being detected. Let’s see what kind of sensor readings we can get off them. Their comms leak like crazy, so have our people work on intel gathering and quietly subverting the systems if they can, without alerting the enemy to our presence. I want as much data as possible about that station and its layout ready for the Master when he arrives. Let us show him what the Breath of Hades can do.”