Disgraced
Copyright© 2025 by Ogreface
Chapter 9: Pirate Base
All the marines, those who have been released from medical as well as the ones ready to fight, were gathered in a large room on the space station when Commander Brogan, Captain Lambert, Lieutenant McCord, and Lieutenant Miles walked in. The only other ranks were two sergeants of the First Platoon, five of their eight corporals, two who had light injuries, and Dane.
“Right, listen up,” Captain Lambert said. “Viscount Robles ordered me assume control of the station’s security while the rest of you rescue his family. I am ordering Lieutenant Miles to assume command of any marines who are still ready for action. Any marine here with a bandage or medical unfit status, you are staying onboard the station, under my command. Lieutenant Miles?” he said as he nodded. Miles saluted Captain Lambert and then faced the marines.
“The following marines will go with me,” Miles said. He then started reading off a list of names. When he was done, he dismissed the ones whose names he didn’t read.
“Brown, you are my one sergeant,” Miles said. “Pick two of the corporals, no, not Galan,” he added quickly when the sergeant looked at Dane.
“Gary Milano, Sam Owens,” Sgt Brown said.
“What I am going to do now is something no leader wants to do,” Captain Lambert said. “It is also necessary. PFC Belton, you are hereby promoted to acting corporal. Corporal Galan, you are now acting sergeant. Between you and Lieutenant Miles, you need to pick one more PFC as acting corporal. Lieutenant Miles, you have your orders. Do your best.”
Lieutenant Miles didn’t see it as a competition, but he won it anyway. Between the two platoons, they lost twenty-five percent of the marines through being killed in action or serious injuries. When the Windvane undocked from the back of the abandoned pirate ship an hour later, it had a full-strength marine platoon onboard, except that they were short on leadership positions. Instead of eight corporals, they only had four, two of whom were temporary corporals.
“This is a highly unusual situation,” Lt. Miles said as he and the entire newly formed platoon gathered in the mess pod, with the Windvane’s executive officer, a navy lieutenant joining them. “We are facing a bunch of experienced ex-marines. We don’t know how many or what kind of weapons they have. We also don’t know how many of them are there.”
“Do we know where they are heading?” Sgt Brown asked.
“While the fighting was continuing inside the space station, our engineering department decided to go outside and tagged both freighters.” Lieutenant Dern, the executive officer of the Windvane said. “The Windvane has two radar systems. A short-range anti-collision system with a range of a thousand kilometers, and a tactical radar with a range of a couple of million kilometers. We also have advanced passive sensors, which is what we are now using to track the devices we planted on the hulls of both pirate ships. The ship we are following has no means of detecting us since it only have the standard anti-collision radar. So far, the pirate ship is heading outwards towards the asteroid belt. At this stage we can determine that it is headed for a relatively dense clump of asteroids some hundred million kilometers away.”
“We do not want to blunder blindly into an ambush again,” Lieutenant Miles said. “I would suggest approach with care and hang back a bit when they reach their destination, so we can gather more data on them before we make any plans.”
“We do not need to follow them,” lieutenant Dern said. “We can deviate and approach from another direction, one they are not expecting us to come from. That might give them the impression that they are not being followed.”
After the meeting, Dane and Sgt Brown, along with the four inexperienced corporals, started working on possible tactics. It was obvious that the pirates doesn’t care about life or even their own wounded comrades, there were reports of a few wounded pirates being left behind by the group who kidnapped the viscount’s family. Their weapons of choice were handguns; all loaded with non-frangible ammo. Some had hollow-point ammo while others used full metal jacket ammo. While these types of ammo, when used in a handgun, was not capable of punching a hole in the wall of the average spaceship, they were capable of damaging critical components behind thin plates inside a ship.
“Sergeant Galan, I talked with a number of the marines here, and they all commented about your ability with the spikes,” Sgt Brown commented as he joined Dane in the mess hall a couple of days later. The navy had no new information on the exact destination of the fleeing pirate ship and was basically still following them.
“Sergeant, unless my sudden promotion or my age is bothering you, feel free to call me by my name, which is Dane.” Dane replied to the slightly older sergeant as he waved at the empty bench on the other side of the table. Dane and Nick were discussing possible ways to attack a spaceship in deep space, or a space station, and a number of marines had started to listen and even add comments when Sergeant Brown and his two corporals approached.
“We have some questions,” Brown said as he and the corporals sat down. “Are you noble born? The reason I ask is in the way you reacted to the viscount. None of us ever interact with a nobleman, even a baron, yet you didn’t seem to have any issues addressing the viscount, nearly on equal terms.”
“I am not quite willing to go into detail about my family, but yes, my sire is a viscount,” Dane said. “I am not a nobleman, and would never be. My sire has an heir and a spare; besides, my mother is a commoner concubine. I guess I was not flustered about being near the viscount because I realized long ago that they are just normal human beings with a bit of luck when it comes to their birth heritage.”
“I will call you Dane, even if some troops started referring to you as Lord Galan,” Brown said with a smile.
“Please don’t do that, especially near officers or real noblemen,” Dane said as he looked around the faces surrounding him.
“Tell us about your use of two spikes,” Brown suggested.
That question resulted in Dane giving a demonstration on the use of two spikes in confined spaces, which led to a two-hour practice session. The navy quartermaster was ordered to hand out all the spikes in his store so most of them ended up with two spikes. A few navy ratings also joined in.
“We have a fixed target, and some unexpected new developments,” Lt. Dern said to the gathered marines a week after they departed the space station. “The tracker on the pirate ship is still broadcasting its location as well as static parameters, like its speed. It seems it is now stationary relative to the clump of asteroids it is located in.
The captain moved the Windvane above the ecliptic, so we are not in a line between the space station and the pirate ship anymore. The disturbing news is that there is now a navy frigate transponder responding to our transponder. Each navy ship will identify itself with a code associated with the ship’s hull number to identify it as a friendly navy ship. Regular freighters do not have that capability and only other navy ships can trigger that response. The captain disabled our transponder once we picked up the transponder signal from the asteroid belt.”
“Does that mean they have a rogue navy ship, or is it an attempt at luring us into a trap?” Miles wondered.
“Neither,” Dern said. “The transponder system is automated. Unless they were watching their screens all the time, they would not even know that the Windvane is closing in on them. That particular transponder code belongs to a navy frigate that went missing five years ago after a major refit. It was being tested by the navy shipyard, not regular navy personnel, when it failed to return. The navy has been assuming it got destroyed, until now.”
“What is the next step?” Miles asked.
“We are not using our long-range radar anymore, has not since we left the space station, and our transponder is on trigger-only mode, meaning it sends out single query triggers every hour, causing any other navy transponders in range to send data every ten minutes for an hour. We now have a lock on the group of asteroids where the pirate ship is located. It has not moved for a few hours now. The skipper wants to know what you guys are planning.” The exec said.
“We should make use of Galan’s ranger abilities,” Miles said. “I had another look at your file, and also at Belton’s file. Both of you are jetpack certified and both of you are certified with high-power lasers.”
“You two are jetpack certified?” The exec asked in surprise. “We have four packs in stores. The captain was thinking of a way to use them, but none of the navy crew members are certified on them even if all of us are certified for vacuum operations. I will get two packs issued to you, and a high-power laser.”
Two days later the Windvane was imitating an asteroid, floating at nearly the same speed as the surrounding rocks. They were not near any asteroids, but even in a ‘dense’ asteroid field, the mean distance between asteroids were in the range of hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Individual ‘clumps’ of asteroids were usually tens of millions of kilometers apart.
The ‘clump’ of asteroids where the pirate ship was located, consisted of a dozen rocks with an average diameter of two-hundred to three-hundred meters, and with a mean distance between them of a thousand kilometers.
Two days later the skipper called the marine leadership to the bridge. Dane has never been on the bridge of any ship. He was as surprised as Lt. Miles at being invited onto the bridge of the Windvane, and suitably impressed at the size of the display screens. It was nearly as if they were floating in space, with detailed head-up displays all over the walls.
“We picked up what turned out to be a sentry, a guard post,” the skipper said as he pointed at a pinprick of light on the forward wall. The clump of asteroids was not visible but were represented by pinpricks of orange lights. “That asteroid is on the outer edge of the clump and in a line between the sun and the center of the clump of asteroids. We picked up some radio communications, somebody asking when their relief was coming. In relation to the ecliptic, we are currently ten thousand kilos above them, while they are a thousand kilos from where the response came from.” The skipper made some circles pop up to show what he was talking about.
“I would like to send Dane and Nick to that guard post on jetpacks, to see what is going on there,” Miles said. “What are the range of the jetpacks?” he asked Dane.
“Till our air runs out,” Dane said with a shrug. “We can accelerate and then coast for years.”
“Smart-ass,” Miles said with a smirk.
“The trick is to get back to the Windvane before our air runs out,” Dane added.
“We can supply you with a dock-worker rig,” the exec said. “It is a frame with mounting points for tools and air tanks. You can mount a heavy laser on the frame as well as a bunch of air tanks. The frame does not have its own jets, they are just glorified tool caddies.”
Six hours later, Dane and Nick tested their tool frame by moving it in a circle around the outside of the Windvane. The skipper wanted to make sure they could actually use the jetpacks since it was similar to operating a spaceship but without the mass.
They had a heavy laser, two extra power packs for their suits, as well as enough air for a week. They also have the two extra jetpacks tied to the frame, which consisted of a rectangular metal frame of two meters by one meter by half a meter and a few cross-members. Their space suits had place for extra water but no way for them to access food while in vacuum.
“We are not moving closer to the pirate base until both of you are back onboard,” the captain said as Dane and Nick double-checked each other after the navy chief engineer also did a check. “We will only use the directional laser communication system to communicate with you. You only have the regular omnidirectional radio so try not to respond unless you have to, in case they pick up your signals.”
Dane and Nick were shown how to use some other navy tricks, like a small laser range finder. It used an infra-red laser beam, so nobody could see the beam when it was in use. While ten thousand kilos sounded like a huge distance, Dane’s calculations told him that they would have to start decelerating after an hour if they wanted to come to a stop relative to their objective. He and Nick used a wire cable to talk to each other since they tuned their suit radios to the same frequency the pirates were using, and then turned off the transmitters. To talk back with the Windvane, one of them had to switch to the marine command frequency.
As they floated through empty space, they listened as the two pirates complained about their suit power running low. They were also hungry, and that it was a waste of time to hang out there in case a navy ship came to look for them.
Dane and Nick slowed and came to a stop a kilometer to their target when they picked up radio messages about a relief sled being sent out. It took an hour before they finally spotted a strange metal frame with maneuvering jets mounted on it, and two space-suited figures inside the open frame. The tool frame and the jetpacks were dark gray, so they tried to hide their pale suits behind the frame as they moved closer to the point where the object, a mining sled, was going to meet the asteroid. They also heard as the new sentries called to the old sentries, with the last message being that their radio batteries were about dead. That was confirmed when the signal quality was very bad, with the Windvane not being able to pick it up at all.
The sentry post was nothing more than another mining sled anchored to the sun-facing side of a two-hundred-meter asteroid. Dane and Nick were on the surface of the asteroid, just over the very short horizon from the sentry post, when the relieved guards started heading back to their base. As the sled suddenly appeared a few meters over their heads, Dane realized that the two pirates were not even looking in their direction.
Dane acted on instinct, launching himself at the sled as it passed over him. His mass resulted in the sled starting to spin, which freaked out the two pirates piloting the sled. Dane had one of his spikes with him but didn’t even pull it from its sheath. Instead, he anchored himself using his legs and used both hands to grab the one pirate’s helmet and just unclipped it.
Space suit helmets didn’t just unclip. One had to grab it just right and press two different release points to unseal the helmet while also twisting the helmet. While the one pirate was trying to grab at his helmet as the suit deflated, the other pirate was battling with the spiraling sled, not noticing what was happening behind him. When he finally figured out that something else was wrong, he turned his body to look behind him and looked into the helmet-less face of his buddy, with frost covering the already dead head. Then Dane stabbed him through the chest with the spike.
What caused the second pirate to have trouble controlling the sled, and why Dane used his spike instead of also removing the other pirate’s helmet, was because Nick decided to follow Dane, causing an extra mass disturbing the sled.
“Next time, warn me before you do a crazy stunt like that,” Nick grumbled as they brought the sled under control, and then headed back to fetch their tool frame.
“What did Galan do now?” Miles asked over their secure directional channel. Dane concentrated on moving the sled to where he could see the second sled and ignored Nick who gave the lieutenant a description of their action.
With the sled stationary and just barely in view of the other sled, at a distance of about fifty meters, Dane pulled the tool frame around and aimed the heavy laser at the two pirates. They just reported that they were in position and would report back in two hours’ time, unless something happened. Then Dane used the laser on another human for the first time. The one pirate was using some bulky piece of equipment and looking at what looked like a regular tablet, while the second pirate seemed to have curled into a ball below the sled. Dane aimed and hit the alert pirate in the side of his chest, causing the suit to instantly expand and then tear as a boiling mass of human organs erupted from the erupting space suit.
“Damn, that I didn’t expect to happen,” Nick commented. “Let me get the other one, we might want to examine that thing they are using.” Dane had to agree; shooting the second pirate with the laser would have damaged the mystery equipment and the sled.
Nick decided to take the second sled, after they pushed all four the dead pirates off towards the sun. They were both eager to use the two sleds to attack the pirate ship, but Miles ordered them back to the Windvane.
“We are close enough to use our high-power optics to examine the objective.” The captain said to the massed group of marines and navy personnel crammed into the marine mess pod. By that time Dane and Nick had a few hours’ rest while the navy engineers examined the piece of equipment and the two mining sleds. “There are four freighters docked to a standard mining hub. The mining hub is basically a central cavity with four docking ports sticking out in four different directions, like a ship’s hub. One of the ships is the missing navy frigate. The other three are regular freighters.”
“I suggest we try a two-pronged attack,” lieutenant Dern said. “The Windvane will attempt a stealth docking maneuver to the back of the stolen frigate, while Galan and Belton use the sleds to dock onto two of the other freighters. We need to do this at the same time. The marines should be divided into three equal teams, one team on each of the sleds and the third team on the Windvane.”
“By the way, that piece of equipment you brought back, it’s a magnetometer,” the captain told them. “It can detect metallic object over reasonable distances. If we approached the pirate base by following them, they would have detected the frigate and warned their base. All navy ships have them. This one must have been taken from that stolen frigate.”
The Windvane slowly drifted so it was behind the nearest asteroid, about twelve hundred meters from the four pirate ships. Then the two captured mining sleds, under control of Dane and Nick, move down and below the four ships as they moved closer. Each sled had a heavy laser mounted on it as well as twenty-five marines being towed behind the sleds with towlines.
Once the two sleds had left, the Windvane, with the remainder of the marines, made its way over the top to the back of the stationary frigate. Dane was expecting some kind of reaction from the four ships, but nothing happened, even after they gently tied the sled up to the external frame of the freighter they were aiming for. They took great care not to let any metal-on-metal sounds enter the ships. The only actual windows on any spaceship was the small porthole sized windows built into the airlocks, of which there were two.
A quick and careful peek through the window of the airlock they were aiming to use, revealed that the inner hatch was closed with nobody in the airlock. All freighters, and navy ships, had the functionality built in to be able to manually open an airlock from outside, a safety feature which needed some skills to disable. Using the manual override only worked if the airlock was in vacuum but since the ship had power, Dane was expecting to use the electronic override system.
“Go! Go! Go!” the signal came over the platoon-wide radio channel. Dane instantly pressed the button outside the airlock. To his relief the air started to be pumped out of the airlock. That was the most critical point since anybody on the inside would be able to figure out what was going on since there would be warning lights.
They could only fit six marines into the airlock but once he was inside the ship, Dane changed the system to expel the air instead of slowly pumping it into the ship. That meant the rest of the group entered much quicker.
Dane posted six marines at the freighter’s wheel hub and led the others towards the mining dock. He was surprised to find the ship void of pirates, unless they were all asleep in the pods. The four hatches of the mining hub was standing open, so they all crammed into there. Then they were suddenly in the fight of their lives.
A number of pirates happened to enter the hub as Dane led his people into the hub. The hub hatch was wide enough for at least four people to move through it at the same time. At least none of these pirates had pistols, but all of them had spikes. None of them were wearing space suits either. Dane was fighting two pirates at the same time, when two marines squeezed past him and stabbed both pirates. The hatch formed a bottleneck, limiting the number of combatants. It didn’t last long before Dane’s marines pushed him into the second freighter, with Dane being protected by the bodies of two pirates. The rest of the pirate crew, about fifteen of them, didn’t last long.
“Anybody injured?” Dane asked.
“You cannot go outside like that,” Nick chuckled as he pushed a finger into a hole in Dane’s spacesuit just below the helmet ring. “Your suit has new ventilation holes. Any pain?”
“Nah, I’m fine,” Dane replied. He was relieved when none of the marines had any injuries. “We need to find the prisoners. Six of you, guard this hub,” Dane ordered. “Call if you get opposition. Let’s go see if the others need our help.”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.