The battle of the shuttle platform was finished, but like any other battle, there were casualties. From the dramatic (the Kzinti falling from the shuttle wing and then committing seppuku), to the mundane (Becky’s boyfriend taking several shotgun blasts to the torso), the mercs had three dead, one grievously wounded.
Interrogations revealed the Ursae plans, such as they were:
Kykbandirz had set several ships looking or the G&T into various systems, on he off chance they’d gone to ground somewhere close.
But general opinion was that the G&T had gone back to Mirabilis, to regroup with their employers at the Spofulam Corporation and deliver (from the Ursae pov) any intel they’d managed to acquire regarding the Ursae Jumpspace Project (UJP).
LaMonte and the Penny Dreadful had (ostensibly), chased the G&T to Mirabilis, and were making the jumps there. ETA: 3-4 weeks.
Kyk, on the other hand, was headed to Greenpernt. Three weeks jump travel would put the Ursae commander at Greenpernt arriving about ten days after the Ursae warfleet, about which Bill Scaramouche had alerted them.
Final decisions:
Becky: Dr. Wagner filled her full of anti-shock drugs and packed her into the Slice. She would survive.
Captives: between blows from the Tewfikers, they were also taken aboard the Slice for transport to the G&T.
The dead: later determined that the Tewfikers had spirited them off, presumable for proper burial.
The Slice lifted off and began the trek back to her mothership. But about three hours into the four hour voyage, Djinn alerted bishop that the opposing vessel had shifted from passive broadband scanning to directed, graviton-bent direct scanning, indicating the vessel had likely detected the G&T (at least obliquely) . Next step would be a flurry of microdrones to get visual on the G&T, confirming it’s identity. But so far as Djinn could tell, those microdrones had not yet been launched.
Once the Slice had been taken aboard, several efforts began to convince the captives to give them a week to escape, in exchange for their lives, their injured friend and a couple cases of Tewfikan scotch. In the end, they accepted the deal.
Meanwhile, Bishop designed a virus program that would piggyback on neutrino comms transmissions from the two merc shuttles. Once inside the merc ship’s AI (named BD154, after the ship itself) it would render inert both comms, fusion drive, and jump drive. Life support and ancilliary functions would remain intact. Further, the virus was designed to self-destruct after a week’s time, which would greatly expand the area into which the G&T might have escaped.
Inner green ring is jump 1; the outer green ring is jump 2.
Tamm shuttled the mercs down to the pad and released them into their shuttles; the Ursae took the wounded Becky, while the other human flew the second shuttle.
Once out of Tewfik’s gravity well, and into comms range, the shuttle mercs immediately radioed in that the G&T was here – a complete betrayal of the pre-arranged deal. They told their comrades that the G&T crew had killed their comrades, and they were planning to escape. BD154 acknowledged this, activated its fusion drives and began steaming toward the shuttles, in order to lessen the time needed to retrieve them.
At that moment Bishop’s virus engaged BD154‘s ai and shut down the ship.
Comms indicated the shuttle pilots, still moving toward BD154, were confused and wondering why the ship wasn’t responding.
Djinn calculated that BD154‘s current vector would cause it to strike Tewfik’s atmosphere in a few hours, mostly bouncing off but likely shearing off some sections of the ship and delivering these to Tewfik’s surface in the form of meteorites. Djinn estimated the total payload at 20-40 meteorites in the 100-500 kg range. Due to Tewfik’s low population, the likelihood of significant damage was low, but not 0%.
Captain Black gave the order: prepare the ship’s weapons. The G&T emerged from behind Tewfik and bore down on the stricken vessel. Long-range cameras showed crewmembers at the primary viewport, waving a white cloth and mouthing entries of mercy and silent declarations of surrender. Black ignored them.
The first shots stripped away BD154‘s shields, and the second volley tore through the aft of the ship, ventilating the atmosphere in a huge guff, and causing catastrophic damage to both the fusion reactors and the jump drive. Both detonated, almost simultaneously, ripping apart the ship and creating a rapidly expanding debris cloud that overtook one of the advancing shuttles and destroyed it.
Djinn advised that the ejecta still moving (now much faster) toward Tewfik was not of sufficient size to reach the ground, and would burn up in the atmosphere. Black asked Tamm to radio the surface and advise them that there would be a significant lightshow in the evenings for the next few days.
The G&T maneuvered to overtake the remaining shuttle, which it easily did. A short burst from the ship’s lasers rendered the last of the mercenaries into rapidly expanding vapor.
The issue of preventing information about the presence of the G&T and her crew in Tewfik system resolved, the business of emptying the ship’s holds and delivering the remaining cargo planetside began once again.
