Spoiler:
"So you let him go?" Leraje asks.
"Yeah, what was he going to do, leak coolant on me? Thing would probably take two or three weeks just to put back together, and then we still have to rotate the butt-lasers forward."
Leraje smirks. "Heh. Never really understood the point of mounting weapons on the back of a mech. Never stops me from trying to get behind one."
Xwraith shrugs. "Not going to hear an argument from me about it."
So that's that. The Ostsol is an ok ground-bound mech, but has no jump jets and we'd have to do some work on it to get it serviceable. And that particular model didn't have any fancy Star League toys on it or anything that'd make it worth breaking from our usual pattern.
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The next couple of weeks pass without further incident on the ground. We turn over captured prisoners to the militia for interrogation, except for one mechwarrior who asked to join us instead (not surprising, we salvaged his Phoenix Hawk). According to him the current set of bandits is actually mercenaries, hired by some guy called "Mr. Johnson" who basically asked them to raid convoys and facilities from a list of mining concerns and avoid convoys from a list of others. No surprise there.
The militia declares that bandit hunt done, and we go back to R&R and amateur archaelogy. And uh, standing around watching mining vehicles and industrial mechs scuttle back and forth while occasionally running training exercises with corporate militia guys. Scrub's Warhammer takes almost two weeks to fix and we have to replace a couple of the double heat sinks, which eats into our reserve, but at least they're not completely unavailable nowadays.
The excavation process goes pretty slowly - the particular facility we're digging up is heavily reinforced and the rocks are pretty tough. And our digging crews manning the industrial mechs have superstitions about automated defenses and ancient bioweapons, so they also tend to dig pretty carefully to avoid breaching the facility itself. Which is fine, we don't *really* want to wreck anything. Surprisingly enough, despite the slow going, we uncover some intact data storage units from some of the rooms that we've excavated (apparently, one of the mech hangars that have already been dug up had a locked maintenance office and one of the techs was able to "creatively bypass" the mechanical lock using a pair of magnets and a low-powered laser). They data is encrypted, so we'll need to break said encryption. Unfortunately, it's Star League encryption, which means that it triples the required storage space and processing power, but is twice as secure as the kind of encryption the successor states use. "Just like that Star League toilet paper." remarks the Moonraker's captain. Scrub just rolls her eyes, recalling how we acquired the Moonraker in the first place.
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Larry calls us up and requests that we send up an aerospace escort with one of the dropships he's sending up. A converted Intruder, loaded up with 800 tons of processed ore, heading for the nadir jump point to rendezvous with a scheduled jumpship. He's got a few fighters going up with it, but the shipment is particularly valuable, so... more.
We commit two flights of mediums and heavies, one from Alpha company, one from Gamma. The flight is uneventful, until almost twenty blips show up on long-range sensors and close rapidly. This is going to be a furball. Even worse, they basically caught us with our pants down so it'll take almost thirty seconds for the rest of our fighters to join in - initially, it'll just be Alpha-Strike.
Round 1:
Spoiler:
Round 2:
Spoiler:
Our Shilone manages to make the pickup on the ejected pilot, but gets a little shot up. Our Lightning "goes evasive", but it doesn't help much against the volume of fire, and the fighter loses a bunch of equipment, including a laser and a heat sink.
Round 3:
Spoiler:
Round 4:
Spoiler:
The good part is that we bought time for the Intruder to pour on the acceleration, so only a few fighters will be able to catch up to it, and those won't have much of a window to engage before they run out of fuel. We exchange fire with the now-scattered hostile spacecraft, a few of them peeling off from the engagements from battle damage. Our main objective at this point is to pick up our stray pilot - the dropship is basically free and clear.
Round 5:
[camera feed lost]
One of the hostile blips winks out completely as the Intruder vaporizes a light fighter still trailing it. Our Stingray makes the pickup on the Lightning's pilot.
Round 6:
Spoiler:
Kinda. While thrusting to rendezvous with Gamma-Strike on their return planet-side, the Shilone that made the pickup on the Lucifer's pilot gets caught up with by a bunch of light fighters and taken apart. No way we can deal with that hornet swarm with what we've got, so we return to base, tails between our legs. At least we got the Intruder through, but it cost us an entire aerospace flight and two missing pilots.
We're going to have to reconstitute the entirety of Alpha-Strike from scratch. We only have enough pilots for two fighters though. We can either use those double heat sink Shilones we bought a while back (they came in on a shipment from the last dropship), or see if we can get something a little sturdier, like that Lucifer LCF-R20 (a flying brick with lasers) that's gone up for sale from a merc company liquidation on the planet next door.
[] Use the Shilones - we already have them, but they're a little fragile and have tech we'd like to put to use elsewhere
[] Buy a Lucifer - 2.3M C-Bills, but pretty sturdy (not sturdy enough to take fire from about ten fighters at the same time, but...)
Also, we'll need to decide how to handle the encrypted data we recovered.
[] Try to decrypt it ourselves. Could take a few months or years.
[] Let the ComStar guy know about it.
