Chapter Six: Let the Flames Begin (Oh Glory)
Chapter Six: Let the Flames Begin (Oh Glory)
I took them by surprise when I jumped into the Tortuga system. Most of the Jumpships that were present were in the middle of charging their K-F drives and no one expected a Warship to come in and start firing. After all, there hadn't been a Warship used in combat in Centuries. While the weapons systems were automated, everything else had to still be done by a hand. So while I manned the navigation console by myself, I let the automated systems do the heavy lifting as far as taking anything out that was present when I jumped in.
Shock and awe worked a lot better than I had expected. None of the Dropships that were attached to the docking collars of some the Jumpships had time to detach or launch any Aerospace assets and were destroyed with the Jumpships.
After I thought that I had destroyed all of the opposition at the Jump point, I scanned and noticed that one of the Jumpships, a Merchant seemed to have only suffered superficial damage. In fact, it was powering up and before the ship could re target it had jumped away. "Well, there goes that plan." I swore angrily under my breath at the one Jumpship that got away. After triple checking the scans, I stopped and began to go over the ship with a fine toothed comb. I didn't want any boarders or anything possible damage to render me combat incapable before I began the rest of my sweep of the system.
Twelve hours… It had taken me twelve long hours of going over every system to make sure that none of the potential safeties had been broken on the automated systems and that there were no boarders. I was exhausted. So after eating more of the MRE's that were surprisingly still within their expiration date (Even if they tasted awful and made you shit what felt like literal bricks) I shut everything off and went up to the bridge for a little bit of sleep before making my way through the rest of the system.
After sleeping for six or so hours, I woke up from my nap and went to do a manual reload of the ships guns. It turns out, that while the automated systems could fire and track relatively well (As long as the opponent had an IFF beacon active) it couldn't reload the internal magazines from the stores automatically. Which, while a stupid design flaw, ensured that the crew still had plenty of work to during a battle. So, I began running too and fro reloading internal magazines and using mechanized trolleys to shift tons of Naval Autocannon rounds and missiles to the internal magazines. This process took another six hours seeing as while I had used firearms many a time before, reloading an internal magazine was not as simple as it was shown in the tank movies.
"Why are there so many parts?" I asked myself as I loaded the last Naval Autocannon round into the internal magazine. "They had way too much time on their hands." I shrugged after dusting my hands off. "Then again, the SLDF R&D budget was really ridiculous. Not to mention the standard thought process of. Build hidden outpost. Fill hidden outpost with 'Mechs and vehicles. Forget about hidden outpost." I had to keep up a string of conversation with myself or I was going to go insane after spending so much time alone.
Finally finished with all of the preparations and double checking my work to make sure that everything was loaded properly. (I'd hate to have something explode from being loaded in facing the wrong way.) I went back to the bridge and strapped myself in for the rest of the flight down to the main world of Tortuga III.
While I was strapped in, I began tracking all of the Dropships that had been headed towards the jump point when I had decimated the Jumpships there. The traffic that there was, had begun the process of flipping their Dropships around and were trying to counteract their momentum before I could catch up to them. Once I had a good trajectory and course plotted I began my journey into the system. Based on current rate of speed and acceleration, I was going to catch most of the Dropships before they had finished changing their momentum so as to head back towards the planet. If they managed to burn much faster than they were, they would black out to G forces long before I got there and that would be just as fatal to them as any of my Shipboard armament were. Well, I had quite a while before I would be anywhere near the pirates and so I started reading one of the stellar navigation logs that had been kept by the ships navigator. While dry reading, it contained a lot of the math used in calculating the proper jump points and had information as far as thrust vectors and maximum "Safe" speeds before the reactor red-lined and began to cause issues.
The ships crew had kept extremely detailed logs of everything they did and documented anything that they thought was necessary. And included a lot of the things that they didn't think were necessary but they cared about anyway. In fact, from what I understood of the SLDF the crew seemed to go contrary compared to all of the hidden bases and other things that had been hidden by the SLDF over the years. And having detailed notes were one of the things that had allowed me the chance and ability to fix both the K-F drive and be able to do the things that I had so far.
"Alright Mark, enough woolgathering." I said to myself as I authorized the targeting of the Dropships I was catching up to. There were a small number of aerospace assets with this group, and they had launched and begun to maneuver to attack in what they thought were blind spots as I got close. Fortunately for me, none of the fighters were armed with Nukes and they seemed to be ill trained. Or just not prepared for the missiles that the Manassas carried that were designed to deal with these kinds of scenarios. Only two of the Aerospace jockeys managed to evade the White Shark missiles and were still evading them as I shot past them while hitting the Dropships with a barrage of fire that caused secondary detonation as I flew past at one and a half G's. The two fighters left were barely able to catch the Manasses and fell prey to the rear NL45's.
Seeing as that was the last of the threats on my sensors apart from what might be on Planet, I slowed the drive down to stop accelerating and used some of the station keeping thrusters to slow my Warship down to a more traditional pace. That left me with a few days of transit time in which to make sure everything was reloaded for the final space combat of the system.
Now that I had actually done the reloading process and was familiar with it, it only took me a measly four hours instead of the six that it had taken previously. Leaving me with still way too much time on my hands. "Man… Why'd I have to get dropped off here? Why not Somewhere that space travel is faster?" I complained as I reached for the books to start studying again. The learning in this era never ceased after all.
After a year of nothing but studying the ship and working on things like maintaining both the Fusion reactor and the K-F drive I had developed a new appreciation for Math that I hadn't possess before being stranded here alone. What I had learned on this ship would totally blow away the physics researchers of the twenty-first century. I mean, not just the physics, and don't get me started on material science. The casing of the laptop was tougher than the sidearm I had showed up with, even if I did hate the limited OS that was on it and longed for a basic Microsoft or Apple system.
The stack of books that I had set aside to read on my journey dwindled as I got closer to the planet. And I may have actually cheered a bit when I started being able to intercept Comm signals. Even if they were enemies of humanity, just hearing human voices again that weren't from an Tri-Vid or song nearly made me cry. That still didn't save them when they launched the remainder of the Dropships in system at me but it was nice to here a voice again. After dealing with the Overlord that was the biggest threat to me at the moment, I pushed the ship to a geosynchronous orbit over the area that seemed to be the CIC of the planet. It was a Palace complex according to my sensors and virtually all of the communications traffic funneled in and out of it. Seeing as there was no HPG on planet at this time, I knew that if I wanted the pirates to crumble for a while that I would have to begin bombardment from orbit.
Saying a prayer underneath my breath for whatever innocents may end up in the crossfire, I made my way to one of the gunnery stations on my own. None of the automated systems could target a planet. It was written into their safeguards and so I had to do this all on my own. Reaching one of the forward NAC/35's I began to rain hellfire from above down onto the palace complex using sensors to detect when the entire place turned to rubble. I kept firing until the internal magazine of this station had run dry, And then I watched until the dust settled. After I was finished, I made my way back to the bridge and began my trip back out of the system