B20

The First and Second Baronial Guards Flotillas had jumped into Butte Hold at the Nadir Jump Point. There were just over six days from the Jump Point to the Planet in question, which was six days with which to fine-tune issues of command and control of the ad-hoc fleet, alongside figuring out whatever plan the two Commodores could put together. Commodore Clarke was a no-nonsense officer who traced her heritage back to St. John in the old Principality of Rasalhauge, a planet that had been settled by primarily British and Irish settlers from Old Terra, her family had been naval officers by preference, ever since the decades leading up to their jaunt into the far reaches of space. Accordingly, she was fond of Scotch and had a personal proclivity toward joviality. That clashed with Commodore Marko Niskanen and his depressive personality.

Commodore Niskanen traced his ancestry back to Vipaava, a world in the former Principality of Rasalhague that had largely been settled by Finns from Old Terra. He was possibly more fond of Brandy than Commodore Clarke was of Scotch, and he had a depressive personality and taciturness about him that had been won by hard experience over his six decades of life. His wealth of experience, first as a pirate raider in his youth who had transitioned to smuggling, then to honest work as an Escort Dropship commander before my Father had picked him up to command a section of Dropships had taught him to always wait for the other shoe to drop. He was cautious, and something of a downer during meetings and it rubbed Commodore Clarke the wrong way. I wound up having to take charge of meetings just to ensure that things got done.

Fortunately, over the six days, we'd managed to hammer out a plan and chain of command that would hopefully win us the battle in Orbit. Both flotillas contributed officers to a combined command staff with me breaking any tied vote between the commodore if they came to loggerheads on a decision. It wasn't a perfect solution, I'd have to remain on the bridge of the Pentagon-class DropShip Kullervo for the duration of combat operations, but it was the best we could come up with on short notice. I hadn't had any clue that such a personality clash would happen until the fleet was already underway, after all.

We figured it out not a moment too soon, either, as Redjack Ryan had his Flagship, the Summoner's Gale ready to fight. It led a flotilla of twenty DropShips and one Defense Station. Redjack Ryan's Flotilla was primarily made up of captured Intruders, Leopards, and Leopard CVs, but he also had four Achilles-clas Dropships and two Triumphs left over from when he had deserted Hendrik Grimm and the Oberon Confederation. We had the advantage in tonnage, armament, technology, and numbers, but it was a lot more even than any of the fleets we'd fought so far, at least in terms of numbers and armament. In terms of Aerospace Fighters, they had our hundred-ninety-two Vulcan Heavy Fighters outnumbered two to one, though their motley assortment of Sabres, Stukas, and Corsairs wasn't exactly a match one-on-one or even two-one-one.

As we closed in on Butte Hold, the battle began in earnest with the launch of Fighters, followed almost immediately by the expected launch of the jury-rigged bomb-pumped laser we'd been warned about from the ASF Hangar of the Summoner's Gale. Fortunately, we'd had warning, and the fleet scattered in advance of the makeshift weapon's firing. The Kullervo was forced to take evasive maneuvers as the nuclear warhead inside the missile detonated, focusing its blast into a makeshift apparatus that fired a beam of blue light that was so dark it verged on purple, the force of the nuclear explosion powering a beam that could swallow an entire Vulcan Heavy Aerospace Fighter whole within its width.

As the laser passed by the Kullervo, it erased two whole flights of Vulcan Heavies before proceeding to core and asteroid off in the distance. That would have been a kill shot for sure had it struck the Kullervo. I didn't want to speak ill of the dead, but honestly? Better those four Vulcan Pilots than the current Flagship of the Fleet. Now, however, the enemy had played their big trump card.

"Let's hit them hard and swiftly. Hopefully, the pirates will scatter and we can pick off divisions at will." Came Commodore Clarke's Voice over the Comms.

"Agreed. Hit their leopards with our full force and then turn to engage their Achilles-class ships. If we do it right, we'll have separated their Intruders from their carriers." Concurred Commodore Niskanen.

"Then by all means, attack." I ordered.

And with that, the battle began in earnest. . .

XXXX

Karen Gander was the Captain of the Summoner's Gale and had, in the absence of other good choices, been promoted to the Admiral in charge of this ramshackle fleet of captured ships, new purchases, and old corsairs. Ryan trusted her to get the job done, to make these guys pay for what they did to Maria in blood, and to defend Butte Hold. Ryan himself was organizing the Ground defenses from behind the cockpit of his Quickdraw, and since the other captains were all new, locals, green, opportunistic, or some combination of the four, Ryan didn't trust them to get the job done. He'd put Karen in charge instead and given her their one, precious, bomb-pumped laser to use.

That's why it was so galling to her that she'd failed. Somehow, the attackers knew what to look for and to evade when they saw it coming. A jury-rigged weapon like that was only useful if you could use it in a manner that guaranteed a hit. After all, to turn the nuke into a big-ass laser, they'd had to strip the guidance system from the missile and replace it with part of the focusing array. It was a dumb-fire weapon, so the only way it would work was if the enemy couldn't evade. If that wasn't bad enough, the enemy Aerospace Fighters seemingly had targeting systems and weapons that could accurately erase her own fighters from extreme range. The clash was quick and not at all favorable to her side.

As she watched the clash between her Aerospace Fighters and the Enemy's, Karen knew that she wasn't going to win this one. The enemy's guns barked and dozens of her own fighters were wiped from existence, only those fighters who'd immediately begun going into evasive maneuvers the second they'd heard the enemy had target lock had survived. A second volley and a third reduced those further, and as her fighters lost their numerical superiority, what remained finally getting into range to hit back, they found their opponents were also well suited to dogfights.

Hits from lasers that ordinarily would have killed an enemy fighter instead merely ablated away armor. More powerful engines and handling gears provided enough thrust and maneuverability to dodge attacks and turn sure kills into glancing hits. Sure, her fighters had killed a couple of enemies, but they'd paid dearly for that, her pilots being shredded. Eventually, the locals broke and ran for the planet, while the Corsairs scrambled for their Leopard CVs or the Defensive Station, leaving only Ryan's Rebels to fight on. The enemy fighters annihilated them.

Then the enemy dropships hit her line of battle and all hell broke loose. Within moments, she'd lost two Leopards, the Davy Jones' Locker and the Rumfustian, destroyed utterly while a third, the Bloody Cutlass was struck multiple times by PPC and Missile hits and had lost primary power. Within five minutes, the Leopard-class ship Gangplank Gallows had also been destroyed, which left the local Leopard-class ship, the Urt Pinewithdrawing under heavy fire to the defense station. The Achilles class ships turned to plug the gap in the line and managed to deal enough damage to two of the enemy's Achilles-class ships and one of their Leopard CVs to force them to pull back out of the engagement zone, but then the Ryan Corsair and Rebel Moon were bracketed by those two pocket WarShips and utterly demolished.

Within fifteen minutes of the Dropships closing to fight, Karen Gander had lost six ships, had two crippled, and one damaged and forced to pull back to the station. In return, she'd damaged three enemy ships and forced them to pull back out of the engagement zone. It wasn't a great ratio of losses versus the enemy. And now, her Intruders and the Gale were separated from the Carriers as the enemy forced a wedge between them.

"Order the Carriers to pull back to the Station! Shelter under their guns!" Ordered Karen.

"What about the rest of us?" Questioned her First Officer, Commander, now Captain, Potsdorf.

Captain Potsdorf was a Lyran who had done a stint with the LCAF serving aboard a succession of Lyran Dropships and making it to the Rank of Leutnant-Kaptain serving aboard a Leopard CV before mutinying due to being passed over for promotion in favor of a Graf's son, and subsequently having been locked in the brig when his mutiny had failed. Only Redjack Ryan raiding a colony he'd been imprisoned on had saved him from the firing squad. He'd been with them ever since and together, they'd never tasted defeat. At least not until now. Unfortunately, Karen only had one answer for him.

"You know exactly what happens to us." Frowned Karen.

"Right. Well, no one said the life of a pirate was particularly long." Sighed Potsdorf.

With a nod, Karen turned back to her screen, grimly determined to see this through. . .

XXXX

Fifteen minutes after clashing with the enemy's line of battle, we'd managed to absolutely steamroll their Leopards and Achilles-class ships with only three ships, the Czernobog's Curse, Vanamoinen, and Gungnir damaged enough to request withdrawing out of the engagement zone. Twenty-five minutes after that, they were joined by the Fragarach withdrawing at the cost of three enemy Intruders destroyed and the enemy Flagship, the Summoner's Gale taking enough damage to knock out her propulsion, leaving her crippled. Fifteen minutes later, the last two Intruders had had enough, though they'd evaded most of the hits expertly, they offered surrender terms, as they were locals, not pirates.

"Accept the surrender, then move on the Carriers." I ordered.

"Won't be easy. The carriers are sheltering under the cover of the Fortress Guns." Frowned Commodore Niskanen.

"What if we offered them surrender?" Proposed Commodore Clarke.

"Do you think they'll go for it?" I queried.

"Think about it, we know at least some of their ships are crewed and captained by locals rather than Pirates. What are the odds that the Station is that way too?" Pressed Commodore Clarke.

"It would be a reasonable assumption that locals would prefer to crew something closer to home than ships that would be sent out raiding for the greater glory of a group of pirates. Assuming that a Pirate like Redjack Ryan cares overmuch about what the people of Butte Hold want, which he likely doesn't. He wouldn't be a pirate if he was particularly benevolent, after all." Pointed out Commodore Niskanen.

"We need to still try it. At the very least, it might cause infighting among the enemy between groups who want to surrender and groups who don't." I commanded.

With that, the tiebreaking vote was cast and soon enough, terms for surrender and treatment of prisoners according to the rules set down in the Ares Conventions were transmitted to the station and remaining ships over an open frequency. All they had to do was power down their weapons and present themselves for inspection. Surprisingly, the two Leopard CVs and the remaining Leopard seemed to burn hard for us, powering down weapons and sending out their intent to surrender. The fortress gave no response, but the two Triumphs started firing on the disarmed and surrendering Leopards, forcing out intervention as we descended on them with nineteen dropships and blew them out of space, though not before one of the Leopard CVs was crippled for their trouble, drifting in space.

I set the Ahlspeiss, Taczanka, and Atgeir to start rescue operations and take surrenders while the rest of the fleet moved in toward the station. We still received no message for fifteen long minutes as we prepared boarding shuttles before finally, an hour and a half after the battle began, we received a transmission from the station accepting our terms for their surrender. We still went through with the boarding parties, of course, if for no other reason than to take control of the station and the quartet of docked JumpShips there, all four of them modified Tramp-Class JumpShips. As it turned out, the local crews on the Station had mutinied against their Pirate Comrades when the commander of the Station, a Pirate by the name of Rachel Cooper, refused to allow anyone to accept the surrender and ordered the Triumphs to fire on any Dropship that did.

Our Boarding Teams had to help the Locals put down the last three Pirate Strongpoints, as two were holed up in armories and one in the command center. Fortunately, our marines were more than up to the task, using their Jump Infantry Armor, grenades, and laser weaponry to storm each hardpoint in succession, backed by Local Troops. It took another half an hour from when we received the comms signal from what turned out to be Main Engineering, to the death of the last Pirate Holdout, but we managed it. Rachel Cooper opted to shoot herself rather than surrender or die with her men, though.

All told, the Battle in Orbit only lasted two hours. We'd lost four Dropships damaged enough to require yard time, thirty-two Aerospace Fighters destroyed or damaged, and around twenty-six marines killed or wounded. In return, we had destroyed eleven enemy dropships and captured ten, three-hundred-twenty-two aerospace fighters destroyed and sixty-two captured, captured four Enemy JumpShips, and seized control of a medium-sized defense station with around a battalion's worth of Local Marines surrendering to us along with the station. Not too shabby, considering the number of forces on each side. Now all that was left was the ground war. We would begin landing troops two hours after achieving victory in orbit.

I would be going down in my Highlander with the second wave of landings on General Jorgensen's insistence. . .

XXXX

AN: So here we see another walkover, though the casualties are a lot higher against Redjack Ryan than they were against Maria Morgraine. Ryan had an awful lot of metal in orbit, after all. It helps that he can build a handful of Dropship classes like Leopards, Intruders, and Leopard CVs locally, along with building fighters locally. Butte Hold is no joke when it comes to production, thanks to Jozef's Dad's efforts. Unfortunately for Redjack Ryan, Jozef just has too much technical advantage and unit cohesion for a mix of pirates, local recruits, and hired corsairs to defeat, even if their equipment is considered good for the Periphery.

Now all Jozef has to do is win the ground war, which is going to be easier said than done. Ryan has a lot more Mechs under his command than Maria Morgraine did. He found a large stash of Clints and several other assorted mechs on various worlds he raided, along with Von Luckner Heavy Tanks, which he can refurbish and build thanks to Jozef's Dad. Fortunately, he doesn't have a whole lot of air support, since he sent a lot of his aerospace fighters into orbit to fight and die against Gauss Rifle-equipped Vulcan Heavies. Plus there are tactics, morale, technical advantage, and a half dozen other variables in play. It still isn't going to be a cakewalk, though.

At any rate, next up will be the start of the Ground Campaign.

Stay tuned. . .