Derelict SLDF Newgrange
Unnamed System
30th November, 3013
So, no shit, there I was floating in zero-g as our dropship nudged its way into this ramshackle docking bay…
Obviously these guys hadn't been the first ones to find the derelict Warship, since it looked like some of these structures that served as impromptu docking gantries were a century or two old. I'd say older in a couple of cases but that would put it before any chance for the Warship to have died in this system in the first place. There were also the ruins of more than a few of them scattered around – more than one crew must have had a bad day. Two of the intact ones were occupied by yet more Mules, completely dark and again looking very non-standard. Had someone been having a sale on the damn things?
The dropship gunners were keeping an eye out for anyone setting up to shoot at us but there didn't look like anyone was home. I was carrying a laser rifle with a back-up needler pistol, pretty much similar to the equipment the rest of the marines had, though my armour was reinforced with bits from the SLDF set I used as well. Not that theirs wasn't almost as good, it was just a few extra bits and bobs that fit into the vacuum suit well.
I couldn't actually tell if we were moving or not. Lucas had organised with Albi to only open the doors when we were at a halt relative to the rest of the ship, but we were moving so slowly that it felt like we were stationary anyway. I'd attached myself to one of the platoons and was going to be acting as the nominal executive officer of the operation, since Abdul was leading the other two platoons (Second and Fifth) on the Observatorys.
It was exciting and terrifying in equal measure. My first actual combat operation. Sure, I'd been in danger before, especially during the earlier stages of this whole operation, but this would be my first personal brush with someone shooting at me directly. I'd actually turned off the send function on my radio because I was having trouble keeping my breathing even and didn't want to inadvertently broadcast the fact.
"Alright, listen up!" Lucas was all of a sudden shouting in my ear. "We're about to come to a halt and get down to business. From what we can tell the majority of the ship is completely dead. Only two of the grav-decks and their surrounding areas, as well as some of engineering and the bridge, have power. So if you're in the dark for too long, you've gone the wrong way!" That got some chuckles, and I could see more people laughing in their suits without broadcasting. "We're not sure how much of the ship has atmo so take it easy and don't go putting extra holes in the hull if you can avoid it. First Platoon has the grav-decks, we'll hit them one after the other. Third Platoon is split between Engineering and the Bridge. You guys from Fourth are to hang here and secure the dock area. Any questions?" He paused for all of a second before continuing. "Good! Get ready to get to work!"
The doors open and we streamed out. The next couple of hours were kind of boring, to be honest. A Newgrange is over two and half kilometres long, so we spent a lot of time just moving along empty corridors, checking to see which routes were still available. I was with Third Platoon, Second Squad going for the Bridge with the platoon Preceptor backing me up while the Lieutenant took First and Third Squads to Engineering. Most of those spaces were completely vented of atmosphere and lacking in power except for some emergency lighting in the odd section. When we finally reached the Bridge we hadn't encountered anyone at all, but had moved through an "impromptu" airlock into an area with atmosphere and power – there didn't seem to be any route to the bridge from the rest of the ship that wasn't exposed to vacuum. There were indications of recent human habitation, yes, but nothing to say anyone had been through here in the last few hours or done more than cursory repairs to seal stuff off for decades or so.
Our table of organisation for the marines had two three-man fire-teams and a non-com leader for a squad, three of those plus an officer and a senior non-com for the platoon level, three platoons and a command squad for the company level, etc etc onwards and upwards. So we had a squad of marines in vacuum-rated combat armour with a Preceptor and rookie officer stacked up around the entrance to the bridge, which looked like it had seen extensive damage several times with slipshod repairs. Hand motions had one of the fire-teams and the squad leader set up to keep an eye down both sides of the corridor we were on while the other one set up on either side of the hatch. The platoon Preceptor, Volkher Cluff, held up his hand to begin a countdown when I held mine up in a stop motion. In the grandest tradition of green officers, I had an idea. He paused for a second and nodded, obviously wanting to know what I was doing and willing to give me a go for a second. I put a finger up in a wait motion for a second, switching my radio to a general region broadcast.
"Hello the bridge, is anyone there? Want to open the door for us?" Dead silence. I could practically feel the wut?and dead pan looks from all the marines in the squad, not just the Preceptor, but something had me thinking of the future and the less extra work I had to put in to repair this ship the better.
I waited a few moments before I shrugged, gesturing for the countdown to begin. He shook his head at me and started but had only reached three when the hatch opened and a voice floated out. "C'mon in, none of us are armed in here. We surrender."
There were six of them in total in the room, all wearing vacuum suits and clustered around one of the few working screens left on the bridge, conspicuously away from the six helmets for said suits. The screens showed the dropships and their surrounds, a few odd indicators flashing now and then that I figured were the fighters or shuttles flitting about. The marines spent a few seconds securing them with zip-ties and putting them against the wall before I made my way in front of them to ask them some questions I had a burning desire to know.
The bridge and engineering crews were largely descendants of the first group of pirates that had found this ship here over two centuries ago. One of their members had actually been ex-SLDF navy and had served on the ship before it was abandoned. They'd come here knowing that the ship was basically a skeleton – everything had been taken off, the Work-mechs, the shuttles, the supplies, manufacturing and repair centres, the weapon batteries, even the majority of the fuel and foodstuffs had been taken – but that large sections of hull were still intact along with at least one grav-deck, the power plant and life support, which meant it could be used as an R&R and transhipment point within League space for raids against nearby systems. The main drive was crippled yet worked enough to generate some minimal thrust, but the KF-drive was completely inoperable.
That first crew had gotten everything working enough to get it to its current position from near the Zenith jump point and then made sure it was in a stable orbit. A few more repairs had been carried out to expand the airtight living and secured cargo spaces before they had come to a stop – another pirate crew attacked them and more or less took over. That had happened more than a few times over the centuries, but the original crew had taken up responsibility for the bridge and engineering spaces and had wound up setting themselves up as semi-independent subservient workers for whichever pirate crew was currently in charge. In return for their services they got extra workers to keep things running – both in the form of captured techs to help do the actual work and women and men to help them avoid inbreeding. Slaves of different kinds, basically.
While I'd been getting part of this story (the gaps were filled in later with the rest) the Preceptor had radioed back our success, shortly followed by the rest of Third taking Engineering with no issues thanks to the Lieutenant following my example, a dozen assorted techs letting him inside without a fight after he talked to them right before they breached. First on the other hand had run smack into a bunch of belligerents at the only entrance to the main grav-deck that wasn't sealed before pulling back. Lucas had left a squad at the entrance to make sure none of them followed and then secured the half-working one – it was empty of people, though again there were signs of recent habitation. He then ordered Third secure their prisoners and send whoever they could spare to help with the actual fighting portion of the day.
We left a fire-team behind to make sure the pirates didn't try anything with instructions to leave them alone for now, since they hadn't caused us any trouble yet. Wasn't time yet for the stick, I still needed to get information out of them. It took us a while to get to the grav-deck's entrance, narrowly beating the other squad from Third Platoon that the Lieutenant had sent. He'd remained behind in Engineering to keep an eye on the prisoners there – something that Lucas in fact ordered him to do since he wanted me to lead the assault, I later found out.
The grav-deck and its surrounds were one of the areas with full life-support through pre-existing systems rather than jerry-rigged run arounds like to the bridge even if most of the entrances were sealed off. Hence why it had taken as awhile to get back there, we'd had to head all the way back to the dock since there was no longer a direct route that wouldn't end up with us lost in a maze of corridors. Even the pirates had to suit up to get back there. Passing through a number of repaired compartments had me amazed at the ingenuity required to do half of the work that had been done. And it'd be done by pirates, what a waste.
That was a distraction that I didn't need. I shook it off and come to a stop next to where Lucas and the First Platoon leaders were waiting. "Good, you got here. We've got somewhere between a half dozen to twenty enemy combatants set up in defensive positions just inside the grav-deck entrance, technically in the zero-g section still. They've got good cover and a mix of weapons – slug, needle, laser, cone, they've shot it all at us." He spread his hands. "Wow me with a plan."
We didn't have plans for the ship, so there were no helpful hints there. Hadn't had time to interrogate the captured crews for potential weak points. Visual scans on approach hadn't pointed out any access airlocks we could send people around the outside for. A charge straight down the corridor would result in a blood bath.
"Did you try asking for their surrender?" I asked, figuring since it had already worked twice it was worth a shot. I got snorts from everyone on the channel. Guess that was a no.
"Yeah, we figure some of the current chiefs are the ones in charge over there, guys with actual warrants and such – known pirates in other words. Not quite the response you got from the dropship captain out there, but still pretty vulgar."
My head nodded slowly as I continued to think. According to our scouts, all of the other entranceways to the grav-deck were sealed, at least from our end. We wouldn't be able to blow a hole in their prepared defences without basically venting the whole area to space so that was out. Hmmm.
"Protector Ramsden, Karter here. Relay this to your prisoners – is there any unsealed alternate route onto the grav-deck than the main way?" I got onto the radio and asked the fire team leader back on the bridge to question the captured crew there. Hey, this was practically their family ship considering how long they'd been on it so I figured what else did I have to lose? Lucas nodded approvingly at my idea at least, so I wasn't too far off the ball for this.
It took some time but the scratchy response came back. "Negative, Lieutenant. All exterior points were sealed by their grandparents, apparently since some idiot liked space walking and almost blew out each of the maintenance airlocks on multiple occasions. Only got the main corridor for access to grav-deck."
Well, shit. There went the sneaky option. It looked like it would have to be a straight up assault down an open corridor. I turned to Lucas and the other leaders. "Do we have any portable covers? Anything for the front runners to hold up in front of themselves, absorb a bit of fire? I don't think we covered this in any of the breaching training I did, usually we wouldn't have to worry about such a long corridor as our first breach point." The marines were equipped with a mix of shotguns or laser/needle rifles, with either a needle pistol as back up or with some other personal sidearm, depending on taste. Other equipment was their armoured vacuum suits – an ablative/flak mix, father had paid out the nose to protect his people – the breaching tools as well as various life-support equipment in case of vacuum exposure. No heavy weapons – they never fought on the ground and so never had to damage mechs or tanks, just other squishy human beings. Most of the time the marines were in combat it was pretty close quarters so these sorts of situations never really happened.
Still, I think I didn't disappoint because Lucas slowly nodded at me, obviously deep in thought. "I think we still have those riot shields we picked up once upon a time, a just in case we need them thing. Christ, I think we bought them on Dneiper and never wound up even unpacking them."
I shrugged. "Well, if they're rated for small arms fire and there are enough of them, I can think of a couple of things. Otherwise, we might have to settle in for a siege."
So I sat in place while Lucas and the rest of the marines there – barring a couple of the fire-teams from First Platoon – headed back to the ship to lead the search for the riot shields they'd bought years ago and never used. Sometimes soldiers were the weirdest crosses of packrats and minimalists. I wasn't idle though, I got a couple of the better shots to start pinging away at the pirate positions – just a random shot every now and then, preferably at the covers they were hiding behind with minimal exposure time themselves. Just to keep the pirates honest and all that. I also got as much of a look as possible at the passageway itself – not that there was much to look at.
The section we were currently in didn't have gravity. The gravity section didn't start until after the pirate chokepoint. This meant the whole fighting portion of the event would happen in zero-g. Our boots had mag-grapple-like bits on them that meant we could "walk" along if we had to, but floating was the quicker of the two. The mag-boots made it difficult to run.
A long empty space in zero-g. Floating down it to fight. Down it.
Screw it, I'm going go full cliché and Ender's Game it. Get everyone with laser weapons, especially pistols, to ride the riot shields down the corridor firing as they go and then have people switch weapons once they're through. No recoil means no counter-reaction movement which means if we set up right they'll just sail on through.
I spent the rest of the time waiting trying to flesh out my plan well enough to explain it and a possible contingency or two. I did get distracted at one point by yelling – it seemed like one of my distraction snipers winged one of the pirates at the same time he got winged himself. Nothing major, a ricochet or fragment of something just happened to get him as he was pulling back, piercing a weak spot on his suits neck. The yelling was him starting to cheer only to start cursing part-way.
By the time the search party returned I'd worked out two plans. The Ender option, or a moving shield wall marching down the corridor firing as we went. I shared both of them with Lucas who seemed oddly intrigued with the Ender plan – I think he'd thought I'd only come up with the shield wall option or something like it. We all talked it out for a bit, trying to poke holes in the plan and ways it could be executed.
They had found a full platoons' worth of the shields in storage and had decided to bring all of them along. The shields were rated against small arms fire of all different types, being made of something similar to mech armour even at a much reduced size and weight. They also had this odd linkage system to allow them to grab onto each other – it was kind of magnetic but not? I can't really describe it.
We ended up making it so they were stacked three deep and then set in a basic three by three square. If any one shield failed, there'd be the next one underneath to absorb the fire and it would provide the most cover possible for us to bring people along behind. Then we spent another ten minutes setting people into position and locking them down. And then came the fun part. The wind up and the throw!
That was the most difficult part, actually, since we had to get it right the first time or the square would drift and end up flipping part way. Multiple people had to push to give the starting momentum because it was still a decent amount of mass to move, but it had to be done in one smooth motion to not accidentally put some spin on it.
I wasn't one of the marines on the square, though I did help with the push. Instead I followed along behind it closely, watching as it sailed up the corridor taking fire. It felt like forever but after just a few minutes the square-riders opened fire on the pirates, who seemed shocked to see them riding the shields like they were – I think they'd thought they'd be the pushers and would be able to get a few of them first.
Three dead and four wounded pirates later we'd pushed them out of the access point and into the grav-deck proper. A couple of marines had taken wounds bad enough to send them back to the dropship but generally the armour held up and they were otherwise all okay. I mean, if it had been a vacuum fight they'd have been in more trouble due to suit breech but as there was some atmosphere they were fine.
A short break to figure this all out and get sorted then we pushed on out. I swear I saw a stray shot go flying past my face as we poured out but the pirates were still falling back from the entrance and didn't seem inclined to stop for now. I don't think I hit the one I snapped a shot at, but he did go down around that time so I might have got my first kill.
Pretty quickly we mopped up the actual belligerent pirates. The ship crew were all hunkered down in quarters and gave up when we came knocking on their doors easily enough, though apparently a few of their younger ones had joined the current "overlord" crew to fight us for their home. It was tempting to shoot them, especially the one who actually managed to kill two marines when he faked a surrender to lure them into the gunsights of his mate, but we didn't have that authority since we hadn't caught them pirating, so to speak.
After that it was all clean up. To much grumbling and grousing I ordered the marines to empty out their bunk spaces on the Honesty and then used them as impromptu jail cells for the captured pirates, whether from the fighters, dropships or the Warship. In the meantime most of the marines relocated onto the pirate dropships to help out as impromptu crew members. I got Lucas to give me Third Platoon for the time being to finish securing the ship while the remainder went on guard duty. All the dropships were brought into the dock and we arranged the necessary transfers there.
I'd gotten the leader of the Warship crew, Vineet Symons, to sit down with me separately and tell me the story of how they'd stayed on the ship. The original crew had restored life support to the grav-deck and engineering easily enough, but had to run the cabling and venting through several damaged sections to get to the bridge – hence the airlock. Over the years they'd patched a lot of gaps in the inner hull but had had equipment damage to their dropships, which had made resource gathering impossible after two pirate groups had fought a pitched battle in the dock and over the hull. Literally over the hull, he showed me a picture of a pair of mech legs still magnetically locked to the hull somehow from the knee actuators down.
The Behemoth had been attached the whole time, apparently it had been caught on board when the Warship had originally been attacked by a suicide group of Rim Worlds Warships that slipped past the SLDF navy. The Aqueduct had been taken in a raid in the Commonwealth somewhere and somehow found its way here and had been used in conjunction with the Muleoutside to get fuel while they were still able to detach it – when the collar failed one day they had just used it as a massive fuel bowser rather than moving it around. That Mule had previously been converted to gather fuel from various sources, which apparently the system was fairly rich in.
The two that were inside the dock had been converted to work as mobile asteroid/moon mining bases. They'd had several work-mechs on board along with zero-g metal refining equipment – not advanced material stuff, just plain metals – which had pretty much been wrecked during the firefights because the doors had been open to unload. Since then they'd been relying on the resources brought to them from raids to keep things going since the dropships had proved unable to be repaired.
Before the dropships had been damaged they'd gotten a significant amount of work done to make it a comfortable place to live. The living quarters on the main grav-deck were decently appointed, with the partly working one converted to garden spaces and low-g exercise. The engines had seen some repairs and could probably get the ship up to somewhere between . 25 and . 4Gs of thrust, rather than the .1 they had originally moved it at. The fuel bunkers were even largely full so they could theoretically relocate to anywhere in the system given enough time.
I almost admired them a little bit, but they were pirates if at several removes these days. Even these guys would likely end up doing hard labour somewhere, unless they got a real hardliner judge and then it would be execution. Unless…
There was a final bit of interesting news. Apparently at some point they'd found out that the original Star League engineer who'd signed off on the KF-drive being unrepairable in-situ had been wrong. Overworked and exhausted he'd misinterpreted something that one of his subordinates had told him that implied the drive core itself had taken damage. It hadn't, the surrounding systems had and none of the subordinates had picked up on his error.
It was repairable.
An insanely difficult and time consuming job to do, but still within doable bounds. The pirates had never managed it, they'd kept it quiet after one of their kids had picked up on it almost a century ago but had been too scared they'd screw it up to try.
New ideas were percolating through my head. My main problem with going for Helm had been that I would never have the lift required to loot it down to the ground myself, I'd have to take it to one of the Great Houses to get the resources and would end up having to split it as the junior partner – as well as run the risk of word of it leaking out. If I could get the yardship somewhere nearby I could just quietly take everything using my most trusted crews over several months. Hell, if I was willing to accept a longer travel time I could send the dropships all the way out here until the KF-drive was repaired. It would be a secret base I could move around as necessary, my own version of the Dragoons Hephaestus station – kind of not really, though. I mean, it had the spaces to build up a manufacturing capability but I'd have to source all of that which would likely set off some kind of alarm bells somewhere.
God, the manpower requirements alone would be insane. Crew for an operational Newgrange was over seven thousand people, though apparently the vast majority of those were the people working the dockyard. The pirates had managed to operate it as a station with a crew of around a hundred "trained" spacers. An unarmed Warship seemed kind of like an oxymoron, but we wouldn't be able to replace any of the weapon systems. Hell, we'd be lucky to do further repairs to the transit drive even if the KF-drive proved an easier than expected fix. Sealing up more of the ship, getting grav-decks working and atmosphere and power to more sections, those two were doable. We might even be able to knock loose the stuck dropships at some point as well as fix up the Mules, which were honestly probably a priority over repairs other than to the KF-drive. The less stuff we had to buy on the open market the better our chances of keeping it a secret.
I wanted it so bad. I needed to talk to people to see how feasible it was. Time to call a meeting.
The dropship captains and Jessica were the ones I chose to call in, being spacers themselves. I'd want to speak to Ephraim and Celene about this as well to see what input they as jumpship captains had too (mainly in relation to repairing the KF-core) but for now these six would do. I got them all into the meeting room on the Honesty and laid out my plan for using the ship as a future base site, using the Dragoons example. I also threw in a few ideas about modifications we could make, like converting cargo space and small craft bays into aerospace hangers and turning it into a general orbital factory.
They didn't laugh at me outright. I could tell that they were honestly thinking about the idea rather than just dismissing it out of hand. The only thing I could really ask them was did they think it was feasible long-term to try and ways we could work to keep it secret.
Personnel was the main sticking point. It would be a gargantuan job requiring many extra hands, way beyond our capacity to provide. The only thing I could think of was basically press-ganging the current ship crew – at least until we could quietly recruit enough people to replace them. We'd have to weed out the more "piratical" members of the crew, but some of them were only pirates because they had literally been born on board and never had a chance to leave. That would leave us with a decent core to maintain the ship and we could recruit from there hopefully.
It was a shit option that even I as the one who made it looked down on, but it had to be looked at.
So many new plans would be available if it worked out…
<^-^>
So, the Newgrange is a complete wreck, like I mentioned above. It was travelling with another one that also took battle damage, which took the time to strip this one down almost to the bone of everything it could use to fix itself - including data-cores for any potential Warship systems. The long-dead engineering office made a boo-boo that none of his subordinates caught, and they left a ship with a repairable FTL-drive in a system thinking it was dead.
Anything that the SLDF salvagers missed, two centuries of pirates picking the bones found and sold. The original pirate group lost control to another, but the survivors set themselves up as the caretakers of the ship in exchange for extra hands down the line. Some of the follow up crews shared their longer term vision, bringing in industrial equipment to help build the ship only for it all to be damaged during infighting between pirate bands, then one day a bright child found the error in the engineering report, but none of the crew alive by then were qualified, or indeed knew anything about, jump-core repair and so kept quiet.
Now I have two damaged Mules in the dock-space (converted miners), one on the docking collars (converted fuel miner/refiner) as well as an Aqueduct which can't detach and a heavily damaged - practically destroyed - Behemoth which also can't detach. And no way to easily repair or crew any of it.
This is going to take years.