The enemy force they were facing right now was a part of the fleet of a minor pirate warlord operating out of Discord Station (he decided to ask Humility about it later) by the name of Joshua Gouin.
The fleet itself went by Red Vipers. Joshua Gouin had a nickname of Snakebite. In general, the snake theme was really common in the whole fleet (bonus points for a passable theme and sticking to it, in Revenant’s opinion).
Keywords of the last two sentences being ‘had’ and ‘was’.
He might have been a minor pirate lord, but Humility had him in its database. His fleet was nearly entirely annihilated during a failed attack against a merchant convoy twelve years ago, his flagship, heavy cruiser Anaconda’s Embrace, being hit by a lucky round from one of the escort ships.
Extremely lucky round.
The result of the impact was the inertia dampeners of the cruiser failing right in the middle of its acceleration. Before the appropriate electronic failsafe kicked in and terminated acceleration, the ship’s crew spent about seventeen seconds being pressed into the walls of their ship opposing their initial destination with an equivalent of Earth’s gravity… times 98.
You needed to mop the crew off the floors of the ship afterwards.
Following the review of the battle recordings, the kill was eventually attributed to Karlsruhe, a light cruiser of the Deutsche Marine, serving the now restored (except interstellar) German Federal Republic. One of the many ethnopolities out there.
With their warlord dead, the rest of the fleet was promptly scattered and downright massacred by the convoy’s escort. Anaconda’s Embrace was eventually repaired, renamed and sold by the Space Germans to some minor democratic ethnopolity (that wasn’t the Republic of New Springfield, Revenant asked), where it was serving as a flagship of the local Navy.
Humility’s database concerning even the most potential threats to its existence was of a rather intimidating level of detail. The fact that the AI preserved it while getting rid of most of its knowledge in the process of fitting into the robot said a lot about its priorities.
What they were facing was a part of the Snakebite’s fleet that never made it to the raid, due to disappearing a few months earlier. It was composed of frigates Boomslang and Black Mamba, and a transport ship Ball Python.
After being swallowed by the Visitor, they were dropped in relative proximity to each other. Allowing them to reestablish contact without much ado.
Boomslang and Black Mamba weren’t a problem. Frigates, according to Humility, were the smallest FTL-capable ships, each of them only about fifty meters long, with a crew of about a dozen to fifteen people.
The only way in which they could become a problem was if their crews acted suicidally stupid. Namely, if they fired their main guns to take the attackers with them. For that, however, they would have to hack all the hard-failsafes. The sort of failsafe that even the ship captains couldn’t just order lifted because doing that was a sign of someone being actively suicidal.
Firing weapons designed to destroy targets at a distance counted in tens of thousands of kilometres while being completely submerged in a megastructure required someone to be a special brand of stupid.
Ball Python, in the meantime, was approximately one kilometre long, and housed about two hundred pirates.
It acted as a bit of a mothership. It carried supplies (ammunition, fuel, spare parts, food, etc.). It was a place for the frigate crews to stretch their legs once they were a bit too tired of the companionship of their crewmates.
It also housed the main boarding party, engineers to help repair their own ships (or those that they captured) and, last but not least, people to act as ‘replacement crews’ for the captured ships, letting them crawl back to whatever port the pirates operated from while allowing the fleet itself to continue hunting.
Despite the massively differing sizes, the transport ship’s market worth was probably comparable to both frigates. Ball Python wasn’t built to withstand hits from spaceship-level weaponry, and with modern technology, actually making something that could withstand this required a completely different approach.
Multiple layers of armour, recoil dampeners and anti-laser reflective/absorptive surfaces. Redundancies upon redundancies. The hull structure itself was made from some of the most resistant (and valuable) materials known to Mankind. In short, everything you need to make Clockmaker absolutely wet.
Because she was drooling. Or, well, Revenant hopes that she was just drooling.
Compared to that, Ball Python was pretty much a flying metal can that would be annihilated with the first non-glancing hit (and even glancing one would probably kill most of the crew through impact alone).
Good to know.
Also, the enemy force was currently commandeered by Commodore Noor Veenstra of Ball Python. The commanding officer of the whole raiding mini-fleet. The name sounded like something out of strange science fiction but was, actually, Dutch.
The more you know.
Revenant terrified the two pirates to the point where they told him everything they knew about her. Which, apparently, included the fact that she was previously getting shagged by Joshua ‘Snakebite’ Gouin himself.
If she got the commanding seat out of being very good in bed, it was going to be easier than he thought. But, in the meantime, he was going to assume that she was at least fairly competent.
Still, after learning a few things about her behaviour, he had everything he needed for the plan to work. She apparently had temper issues. And, well, in a band like this one (especially while stranded on a foreign shore), the last thing she wanted was to be seen as weak.
It’d be lethal. She had a lot of nasty people under her, kept in line in big part thanks to her appearing threatening. And with her temper issues, she probably had at least a few that secretly hated her.
So, he let one of the pirates go!
“Tell your Commodore that I’m here to take over her ships… and more,” Revenant said while holding an utterly terrified pirate by his shoulders, right in front of him. “I’m going to take everything she has, and she can’t do anything about this. But since it’d be boringly easy otherwise, especially with someone who earned their position with their holes rather than limbs or brain, I’m going to let your Commodore take the first shot.” He grins slightly. “We won’t even move from this place for the next, say, eight hours. Tell her that she better make it count.”
He lets the - still terrified - pirate run away.
Then he immediately orders their loot (and the rescued teenager) to be moved to a safe place, all while preparing their trap.
Not even two hours later, they are visited by about twenty pirates. Unlike the more ragtag initial patrol, those are decently armed and equipped. Rifles, light body armour. Varied and colourful, but at least it’s there.
They hear the voice of the second pirate - the one that was still alive when the ‘messenger’ was allowed to go yet in captivity of their enemies - shout at them to help him from the room where the interrogation happened.
They acted reasonably, spreading themselves around the corridor in front of it, making sure that they could respond to any attack from any direction before opening the door to the interrogation room.
Revenant let four of them enter before pushing the button and detonating the bomb they placed in the interrogation room. In a way that made the captive blissfully unaware that there was a bomb. They were good enough to do that.
See? Revenant knew that making explosives out of the Vermillion Gamma corpses would come useful.
Also, those pirates were dumbasses. Or, more like, they were just so outclassed that it came out as them looking as if they were dumbasses. Besides, most of their regular fights were probably against the lawful types, who weren’t ready to steep so low as to pull the old ‘use captured enemies and their shouts for help to draw enemies into an ambush’ trick.
He is pretty sure that if he was facing some metropolitan police unit from his world, this trick wouldn’t work. He isn’t even mentioning SWAT teams or the charming fucknuggets from the FBI’s Metahuman Suppression Unit. Since against them, this was pretty much guaranteed to not work.
His pleasant memories shoved aside, Revenant leans from beyond the edge of the wall and opens fire. Two of the nearest pirates, thrown to the ground by the blast behind their backs, get shot by him and Clockmaker, her position mirroring his own on the other side of the corridor.
Behind the temporary smoke cloud, Virtue slices a few of the survivors, while making sure that one of them - completely terrified, his willingness to fight broken completely - runs away.
She did the ‘conceal entrance to the side corridor’ trick one more time. Once again, it works. Regretfully, it’s the sort of trick that only works once against a single enemy, for as long as they have something resembling a command structure and time to realize what they were dealing with.
They’d bring motion detectors with them the next time. Or some other sensors. Virtue’s illusions can fool eyesight perfectly, but… there are a lot of ways of looking past them.
Superhero Hellflame saw through them due to something as simple as noticing an odd flow of heated air while using his individuality. Then he almost melted Virtue’s face off. A lesson for the future.
Onslaught rushes after the sole surviving pirate and pins him to the ground. The man screams in horror when he sees her face up close. The whole ‘coated in black and with glowing red eyes’ really gives her demon-like looks when she’s in this mood.
“Tell your boss…” She then says. “... to send more people. Because it’s boring when it’s this easy.”
Then she lets him go, and jumps back, letting him vanish behind the curve in the corridor before her legs give in. All according to the plan.
Nice.
“Alright, people!” Revenant announces once the fight dies down. “Decay and Virtue, make sure that they are all dead. Once you’re done, we’re moving out.”
Humility looks at him. Probably ‘questioningly’, but… In the background, Decay puts a bullet in the head of a pirate injured in the explosion that was trying to crawl away.
“Didn’t you say that you were going to wait for them here for eight hours?” The AI asks.
“I lied.” Revenant replies without batting an eye.
***
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The problem, in the end, isn’t defeating the pirates in the field. They can do that - it’d be bloody, it’d be time-consuming but with some guerilla warfare it could be done. Especially if they manage to pull the pirates away from the area that they were at least remotely familiar with.
But if Revenant tried to do it, the chances were high that Commodore Veenstra would order a full retreat and barricade herself in the Ball Python. And that? Yeah, they aren’t exactly in a state for a prolonged siege.
And if they tried to storm it? They would either have to risk damaging big chunks of the ship with their individualities to carve themselves a way in or brave whatever fortified positions the pirates would establish in a chokepoint of the ‘official’ entrances to the ship.
Painful, risky. What’s the point of doing something risky?
There were about 230 pirates at the beginning of this brief war. First patrol? Four pirates, down by three if you included the one that was blown up as a part of the trap. 227 pirates left. Twenty of them were sent as an initial response unit, and nineteen of them died in the resulting skirmish.
208 remaining pirates. Forty of them were placed as guards around the prison camp, a force that couldn’t be moved or the people they imprisoned would take that advantage to flee. It also couldn’t be partially depleted, or the remaining pirates would be at risk of being overwhelmed by the prisoners… which would also get themselves some weapons in the process.
168 remaining pirates. Thirty of them were stationed as garrisons of both Black Mamba and Boomslang. While the frigates’ main weapons were way too powerful to fire in such a cramped environment, the ship’s reactors were online. This made it possible to use them to power up heavier (but still ‘conventional’) weaponry and shield generators, establishing conveniently placed fortified positions defending approaches to Ball Python.
138 remaining pirates. Commodore Veenstra was furious enough to send a hundred of them to confront the mysterious attacking force. While sending messengers to the prison camp and the two frigates to be on high alert. The remaining 35 pirates were ordered to dig in the Ball Python and fortify it properly.
Now, Commodore Veenstra’s decisions were perfectly logical. One hundred pirates - this time advancing slowly and carefully, carrying heavy weaponry and much more detection equipment - were going to be a pain in the ass to deal with, especially as they were reasonably disciplined and stuck close to each other, ready to respond to an attack on any of their squads.
The fact that the pirates were thoroughly outmatched didn’t mean that they were stupid. They just weren’t smart, more like perfectly average on that field. Which wasn’t enough. Besides, even if Commodore Veenstra was a brilliant tactician (let’s ignore the fact that she was a fleet officer commanding a force on the ground), she couldn’t plan for things that she didn’t know about.
Such as the fact that Virtue’s platforms together with Singularity’s gravity manipulation and the local guide (Revenant didn’t bother learning the kid’s name) offered them utterly unmatched mobility.
Especially when pitched against the pirate force. That was advancing on foot while being wary of ambushes. They could fly with a speed of up to 50km/h if those two really put their back into it.
Revenant, in the end, only feared two types of enemies. Those, like Mindscape, Mastermind or Spyglass, could legitimately engage him in the battle of wits and tactics. And those who were too stupid or plain insane for him to be able to predict their behaviour.
Predicting a person's reaction to something perfectly simply wasn’t possible. Humans were just like that. Something minor could influence their behaviour, something that was utterly impossible to foresee. Thus throwing the whole plan off.
He still remembers one of Archvile’s minor operations failing because the guy - a known alcohol addict - that was supposed to drink poisoned wine swore alcohol off the day earlier due to drinking too much and vomiting over the old picture of his wife (whose death drove him into alcoholism, to begin with).
Trying to pull some sort of anime-style ‘I’ve predicted that you would predict my prediction of your prediction’ moment was just asking to get shot in the face.
If the enemy was neither brilliant nor stupid, you could expect them to make rational but also predictable choices. It was something especially dangerous for groups like the army and the police, who had more or less uniform training and procedures, meaning that the element of human randomness was partially taken out of the equation.
The pirates, according to Humility, might have been outlaws. But a lot of them were deserters or disgracefully discharged members of regular militaries. And, if you wanted to have a shot at fighting off the forces of the local ethnopolity that cornered you, you needed to have something resembling military discipline and training.
Revenant dealt with a lot of people with military discipline and training in his life as a supervillain.
The rest was all a matter of predicting the timetable of enemy deployment and making sure that they went around their advancing forces (while keeping the resurrection tubes in a safe place - namely, with them).
It all culminated in this moment. In Virtue announcing her existence by deactivating her Invisibility Cloak and skewering two pirates that were busy erecting a barricade, right before melting the face of another one that was busy setting up what looked like a heavy machine gun.
Right in the middle of the entrance to the Ball Python.
Revenant guns down another pirate before stepping over his corpse and blowing the kiss towards what looks like a security camera on the ceiling. Whoever’s on the other side, they’ll be with them shortly.
***
In the pirates’ defence, they actually managed to put up a reasonably fierce resistance, aided by the electronic security of the ship. It might have worked much better if even the thickest reinforced doors could do anything more than slow Decay or Virtue down.
And if they weren’t completely surprised by the attack. While they were all armed and equipped, they were also scattered throughout the ship, most of them busy hauling the materials needed to erect proper defences at the entrance to the ship.
They didn’t know Ball Python’s exact outline, but according to Humility, most transport ships were designed according to similar principles. They trusted the AI.
Despite the heavy resistance from the pirates, it was still a blitz. They didn’t have much of an option, not with the results of the pirates reorganizing themselves and actually swarming them from all sides at the same time being potentially bad.
They were capable of utterly trouncing the enemy units in front of them, but they weren’t perfectly bulletproof. Even Onslaught and Virtue would struggle if the enemy managed to set up some heavy weapons.
But in the meantime, it worked.
“Where is Veenstra?” Revenant asks, keeping the last of the pirates alive in the Ball Python’s bridge at gunpoint. He seems to be someone important, his outfit looking like some variation on the Navy uniforms of his times.
“She’s with the assault group.” The man replies calmly (mostly, he is still sweating bullets), his hands raised. “Don’t kill me. I’m her second in command, if you let me join you, I can…”
Revenant pulls the trigger, the bullets cutting through the man where he stood. A moment later, the officer slides down some computer panel smearing his blood over it, with a look of complete shock on his face. That soon freezes completely as the man dies.
“We’ll consider it,” Revenant says while glancing towards Humility that entered the bridge right after him. “Hack into their systems, I need to know how many of them are left aboard.”
Once Humility does that, the few remaining pirates discover that the ship’s security systems were turned against them.
It’s not a long fight. 35 pirates down for the count.
100 remaining pirates in Commodore Veenstra’s assault group. 32 in Black Mamba and Boomslang, and 41 at the prison camp (they added the messengers sent to the three last locations to the numbers). The enemy was losing their numerical superiority very quickly.
Unfortunately, at this point, most of Revenant’s group was beginning to get tired. Both physically and mentally (aside from Singularity and Decay, there are only so many people you can kill in short succession before you’ll start being fed up with bloodshed). Then again, they eliminated close to 60 enemies by now and captured their command post.
He had Humility put the part of the ship where the few ‘special captives’ were captive in lockdown. He isn’t interested in dealing with a bunch of traumatized people right now, he has other things to focus on.
He also finds out how long ago Commodore Veenstra’s group moved out exactly. That lets him more or less calculate how far they could have gone - all while confirming that they were outside of comms range, meaning that they were still blissfully unaware of the Ball Python failing to their enemy.
That’s giving them options. In the meantime, he lets his side rest a little. Well, most of it.
***
The three messengers are back during the next hour. They arrive separately. Singularity tricks them by wearing an outfit scavenged from one of the female pirates and pretending to work at the barricade, with her head facing the other side.
When they approach, she gets them under her individuality and tosses them towards hidden Decay, who quickly and quietly kills them with his End.
All of that before they managed to notice the only barely covered blood scattered around the entrance to the transport ships.
173 pirates - 3 dead messengers = 170 pirates still waiting for their scheduled meeting with God.
Less than an hour later, he decides to execute the next stage of the plan. Or so he says. He actually got the idea right now, but it’s always nice to make yourself more intimidating in the eyes of the people around you by making them think that you can think more steps ahead than you actually can.
He learned how to convincingly pretend that everything’s a part of his grand plan from Archvile.
It probably won’t work as well as he hopes it will, but… with how furious Veenstra will be, he might score a surprising success. Worth a try, right?
***
He has Virtue move out according to what was the most likely route of Veenstra’s party (according to whatever intel Humility managed to find out in the pirate network). Decay, Singularity and Revenant are with them.
Clockmaker, Thorn, Humility and Onslaught stayed behind to make sure that they don’t lose Ball Python over, say, one of the remaining enemy groups acting against his predictions and coming to check out on their mothership.
Virtue appears from behind the corridor long enough to toss the corpse of Veenstra's second-in-command at the enemy rearguard, disappearing before the enemy can fire at her.
The pirates promptly panic and call for Veenstra and some bomb experts, while fleeing away from the corridor. Probably afraid of the corpse exploding after what Revenant did to their initial response unit.
The bomb experts (in much thicker and more intimidating but also probably uncomfortable armour) scan the area first and confirm that there are no explosives on the body, before letting Veenstra with some of her praetorians show up.
Looks like they found the enemy elite mooks. Those guys look actually intimidating. Five of them. Three of them walk past the corpse, two of those kneeling while deploying ballistic shields and putting their rifles on the upper edge of those, the third one standing behind them with what looks like a tactical rifle. All three stared down the corridor, the direction the corpse was thrown from.
Only then Veenstra emerges from behind the turn of the corridor, and approaches the corpse, with two more praetorians. Some more ‘normal’ pirates are following her.
She is apparently 72 years old. She looks barely thirty, wearing some sort of light-powered armor. Looks more like an exoskeleton harness with some strategically placed metal plates, leaving some holes in it. Odd design choice, but really gives her the Sci-Fi Mad Max Warlord vibes.
There is a letter attached to a short chain, hanging off the second-in-command’s neck. It’s a short one. All that it says is ‘Your gift is accepted, that’s a very comfortable ship. Sincerely, Revenant’.
Veenstra misses the fact that the letter appears aged, almost unnaturally. Then again, why would she notice it? She never read the comic.
Then the vestiges of Decay’s individuality attached to the letter (attuned only to organic matter) kick in. The time that passed since they were applied makes them much weaker, but they are still there.
Commodore Noor Veenstra dies of old age twenty seconds later. Revenant is actually pleasantly surprised that his plan worked so well since he didn’t expect her to touch the letter with naked fingers. At best he expected one of her sidekicks to be hit.
They take advantage of the chaos in front of them to attack. However, they are repelled following a fierce gunfight.
They can’t hope to charge through a lengthy corridor against a tactical rifle, and the amount of additional equipment on the helmets of the praetorians practically screams of detection equipment.
They are eventually forced to retreat once the panicked pirates get their shit together despite the death of their leader. With pirates about to flank them, they dash out of there.
“Virtue, Decay.” Revenant announces a moment later, once the gunfire and shouts die in the distance. “They know that if they don’t retake their mothership, they’ll be stranded in the middle of nowhere without food or ammunition. Delay them for as long as you can.” The two nod back. “Singularity, we’re rushing back to Python.”
His first plan worked pretty well. The enemy lost their base, a significant chunk of their forces and their commanding officer. It was time to figure out how to finish it. And he already had something of a rough framework of a plan.
***
Commodore Veenstra according to AI
The whole exoskeleton harness probably comes on top of personal body armor, seen here.
RIP, we hardly knew 'ye
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