Chapter 12
My Comm.D chimed and I hit the accept button “ go for Miles “ a voice came through “ Captain this is Crewman James I’m on gangway watch we have seven people here sir they say that they're expected.” I thought to myself that it must be the Warrant and the six “security Consultants”. “ Thank you Crewman, please call Private Moore and have him show them to the main deck briefing room.”,”Copy that Captain” the Comm.D disconnected and I Put it away and left my office.
The walk to the briefing room passed quickly and without incident I entered the room to find eight people. One was private Moore, I waved at him and he tossed me a salute and left to go do something more important than stand around and look cool. The others were five men and two women. Six were in civilian clothes with large duffle bags, the last one was a surprise. She was young for her rank and wore a large military hat and the gray blue uniform of the League Intellegencia “ good afternoon...” I quickly checked her uniform for details. “ Captain Malcona, I wasn’t expecting the Intellegencia to visit our merchant vessel today.”
The Captain gave a faint smile and said just under her breath “ nobody expects the Intellegencia.” She then cleared her throat and spoke up. “ warrant Green was only halfway correct, these six individuals do work as special security consultants on their leave. What he didn’t know is that they have a regular client” I sighed, putting the pieces together was not jump physics. “ The Intellegencia?” she nodded vigorously causing her hat to slip slightly but said “ of course not, the League would never engage in any operations of a clandestine nature with simi plausibly deniable asset in unaligned space.”
I rolled my eyes hard “ of course Ma’am my mistake. So what brings you here today?” The troops in the group just sat and watched, some with small smirks, some quietly chatting. “The Intellegencia has no reason to be here but I was in the area and Just thought I would introduce the seven members of team five.” she introduced the six marines, “and of course” she gestured to the empty space next to her. “ And of course their pilot, she needs to take a quick trip after this meeting and should be back in an hour, and upon further review the team has decided to take on this job Pro Bono.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on, the Intellegencia had decided to take our ad hoc rescue mission and decided to at least unofficially endorse it. She continued “ if this is acceptable to you we also have surplus equipment that we have decided we probably no longer need we could part with.” It wasn’t a hard choice, it wasn't like I minded having a few professionals around and the fact we were not League members made it less problematic for our daily lives to do some work for them. “ that should work just fine Ma’am.”
The next hour was spent planning and we came to a plan, after we secured the local space team five would launch in a shuttle that would happen to be available for rent at a surprisingly cheap price. It was theoretically the civilian model of the marine assault shuttle but it seemed just as heavily armored and fitted out like an assault shuttle and in every way just seemed like a repainted assault shuttle.
Team five plus fourteen of our best trained Militia led by Ashley. Lt. Johnson and I would escort it in until they had docked. Most stations including pirate stations were not armed; they didn't have enough surplus power to run major weapons installations. Also it was an unspoken rule that only stations directly around a jump gate were heavily armed. Stations being unable to move were extremely vulnerable to kinetic strike from beyond the effective range of most weapons systems. Stations were expensive and hard to build so most times they were surrendered if the locals lacked mobile forces to counter attack.
Once the first shuttle had landed I would return and launch our shuttle with another 21 of our crew to back up the first team and help secure the station. We departed less than an hour later and the extra shuttle left the station and quickly caught up with us. The only reason shuttles and fighters were effective were their Allerium drive system’s. Allerium was a type of liquid fuel that allowed a more aggressive acceleration and braking system than the reactors on larger ships. The problem with Allerium is it was always reacting with itself without a stabilizing agent that needed to be filtered out before use rendering it impractical for most larger vessels.
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The fighters ran a dual system with maneuvering jets and weapons running on the reactor and the main engines running on Allerium. Military shuttles like ours and I’m the one quickly gaining on us had a similar system. They all only carried enough fuel for two hours of continuous use, but with the reactor on board even if they ran out of fuel they could still navigate so most fighters only used Allerium when in direct combat.
The shuttle landed on the elevator and was pulled down. I headed to the flight deck and got there just as the platform locked into place. Besides the flight crew, team five was also there waiting. I nodded to the team leader who politely returned it as we waited for the shut down procedures. The ramp dropped and the team went aboard towing out six black cases carrying the armor.
There were still 6 more crates Captain Malcona waved me over she pointed at the first three crate“ 15 FRL-39s plus four magazines each” then the next two “twenty flashes and frags per crate” then she pointed at the last one “ twenty sets Caranco light body armor.” I opened that crate and looked. I was slightly disappointed. Captain Malcona noticed “what's wrong Captain?” I shrugged, opening the rifle case and checking one really quickly. “The rifles and grenades are awesome, but I think my people's light armor is probably just as good if not better.” She looked interested. I only wore my flight suit on days we were expecting contact or on the fringe and I was wearing lighter clothes while in a friendly port. so we locked the shuttle up and headed down to the armory where the few spare sets were kept.
We got down to the armory and went over to the armor section. She raised her eyebrows at our four sets of old battle armor and four sets of brand new armor but didn’t comment. I walked past those to our racks of spare Paladin light armor. “ We had a set of marine light armor from back during the war and it got us thinking we made some adjustments to the plates to fit them into a daily use uniform. They should provide better protection than modern light armors. They cost slightly more than the light armors but should be able to take more hits.” .” should?” she asked me and I shrugged.
“We haven’t tested them out yet to be honest other than the one boarding operation but we kept them behind the battle armored marines.” grabbing a spare set as well as one in my size. our armor we headed back to the hanger grabbing a set of the regular light armor. We stopped by engineering to grab a few chunks of metal to set up the armor on. I used the shuttle to swap into the Light battle armor and brought the helmet from the Captain's flight suit to her. We checked our own seals then each others.
I called the bridge “ Captain plus one going extravehicular to test some equipment on the hull got our signals?” a moment passed “ got both beacons captain stand by for comms check.” a few checks later and we were seated riding an empty platform to the outer hull. A quick check of our magnetic boots and we were good to go. We walked along the hull and found a spot to set up the two pieces of armor.
We started with pistols each of us emptying a magazine into one of the armor sets, we checked on them and they were fine. So we grabbed rifles six shots in and one of the tracers could be seen leaving the body armor. Captain Malcona’s voice came through the comms” that's expected they are rated for three most can handle 4-5 so seeing the sixth round penetrate is pretty normal.” It was between the fifteenth and eighteenth round that our redesigned armor failed.
“ Interesting Capitan have you thought about marketing these?” Malcona asked me. “Not really, maybe there would be a market on Palades, but don’t most league planets outlaw body armor for the average citizen?” Some politicians long ago had decided that in order to stop criminals from wearing armor they would just outlaw armor for everyone, it worked about as well as you would guess it would. “Yes but it's not technically a league law so the ship crew may be a client, just an option.” We returned inside and I showed Captain Malcona to her room before heading back to mine. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.