15 Pirate Hunting by Stuart Grosse

Author:Stuart Grosse
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

(Pirate Vessel Death’s Shadow, Tietera System)

Naturally, one could not simply park a battlecruiser in orbit over an inhabited planet, even a border area like Tietera, and not have someone notice it. Even with space being huge, having a warship in orbit is going to be noticed. Which is why the former captain of the Death’s Shadow had taken a shuttle to Zanchul Station. The battlecruiser had been left in orbit of the sixth planet of the system, a gas giant that was unremarkable save for a few automated gas mining stations in the upper atmosphere.

The Death’s Shadow had put up a decent fight, considering that the ship had been running in a low-power state, trying to be as stealthy as she could. They had, however, been running with the shields charged and up. Normally, that kind of thing from a ship would ruin their stealth profile, but the atmosphere of the gas giant provided enough background radiation that their shields would have been lost in the mix, if we didn’t know exactly where to look. Still, when my ships dropped in right on top of the battlecruiser, all opening fire simultaneously, the pirates didn’t have a chance.

Once the ship was disabled, the Marines got their chance to play. The fighting was fast, furious, and both easier and harder than fighting the Imperial Marines or Deus’s forces that my guys had faced before. It was easier because the pirates were no Marines. They had no discipline, barely any training, and they were certainly not armed and armored like Marines. But ask anyone with experience, and they would rather face ten men with real training than one untrained idiot in a real fight. Untrained idiots are unpredictable. You don’t know when they’ll do something completely stupid that will get you all killed. Case in point, the dumbass who brought out a rocket launcher in an enclosed space, or the one who actually used white phosphorous on a starship.

Once the surviving crew was properly incapacitated, collared, and corralled like their captain was, I had my engineers start going over the ship, preparing it for what was to come. See, the not-so-good Captain Shaxidor had proven a literal wealth of information about the defenses of the pirate base. And, frankly, they were enough that it was easy to see why the local Navy didn’t try and take out this group.

Before you ever got to the base, you had to deal with the asteroid field. This was a particularly dense one, leaving only a few paths through the field unless you were in a ship as nimble (and small) as the Starlight Raven. Fighters would have a field day there, but warships would be limited to only a couple paths. Worse, there was the remains of an old minefield littering the asteroid field, making navigation even more hazardous.

Then you had the defense platforms. The pirates knew the best ways for any big ships to get through, so they had automated defenses set up in the asteroid field, ready to open up on ships that didn’t have the right passcodes.

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