TBntG Chpt 37

==The Bull and the Genie- Chapter 37 - Avast Matey! Tis the SASF! (and friends).==
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===Taking fight to the Pirates===
Toland System, Lyran Commonwealth
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There was little of complexity in the attack. The Potemkin had to get to the jump limit, and the pirates burn made it impossible to reduce velocity enough to evade the incoming strike. 
But equally, the enemy would be past them in a flash. If they could survive…
"Start firing!" 
"Right boss!" The big ships fore cannons started to speak, but while they killed a single incoming Leopard and a few fighters, they weren't killing enough. For their part, the enemy was shooting up the escorting dropships. More fool them. After all, they weren't planning on stopping to let those assholes dock. 
"Fuck! Get ready to roll the ship!" We can keep them from killing us and then we're through. They can't—
"Boss!", ship sensor operator called
What the fuck… Some of the ships were dropping something from their hanger bays but they weren't—
"Those are missiles! Fire, fire!"
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===Knock Knock===
Potemkin Troop Cruiser, inbound for the Jump Point - Toland System, Lyran Commonwealth
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Kumbhar felt his vision gray out. Wonder if this is when I'm going to die? Even with all their equipment the SASF lost people in training and they weren't working with the specially designed suits that cost a fair percentage of a Battlemech, just what they had cobbled up.
He felt his body squeeze as the boost killed the pods velocity relative to the battleship. That was the most dangerous moment, when they were still relative to the enemy—and his weapons. 
Then the pod just rang like a bell and the acceleration ended.
"Blow the hatch!" Kumbhar snarled. He got up, the injectors putting some pep in his step and shaving a few more years off of his life. Next to him, a young Lyran SWAT officer dangled in his harness, his vitals flat. 
Poor bastard. Probably a weak blood vessel. There had been no chance to do the full SASF vetting. 
Man had been a volunteer. If his family wanted it, Kumbhar would be certain he was put in the SASF's rolls.
Then the hatch detonated—single shot lasers gouging deep into the initial armor, before charges were fired in, blasting through the first level.
People assumed that ships were armored all over. They weren't. They couldn't be. A ship was armored to keep the vital parts intact and that meant that a lot of the armor wasn't on the surface. 
And courtesy of Comstar, they had the deckplans to find the weak spots. "Go! Sheila, give me coms!" 
"On it!" Sheila said, running out the wires. There was no sense of trying for anything other than line of sight wireless communications, so she had a kilometer worth of wire on a spool, hooked up to the pod, which could communicate with the other pods and fleet command, but more importantly, meant that Kumbhar could keep in touch with his people. Their own team would slap repeaters to the walls for local coms, but you couldn't always depend on them. 
And people wonder why we built an entire space station as a boarding training complex. 
"Go!"
His team was heading for the transit engine control complex, while others were heading for the firecontrol centers and the KF drive control systems. The bridge could wait—after all, without anyone to give orders to they'd have no hope. 
The first pirates they met were evidently damage control people, heading to the entry point. They were torn to shreds by the teams boarding flechette guns, but now the sirens were sounding.
<<"Team 2 to command, we ran into some pirates trying to move hostages! Pirates down but the hostage—">>
"Put them in a room and tell them to stay put!"
<<"Understood.">>
They moved down the corridors, heading for the big transit ramps that provided access to the entire ship when it was under thrust. Some of he pressure doors were closed, others were open in a fine display of sloppiness. 
They had more of those weird Wolverine paintings and Kumbhar wanted to talk to whatever idiot had let pirates walk off with their ship.
"Running a bypass," one of the troops said. "Got it—shi!" 
The rest was silent as he was torn to sheds by gunfire from lower in the ship. 
Kumbhar pulled out a mirror and checked. A barricade, full of pirates firing wildly. 
"Anyone down?"
"Tom's dead, Sue's hurt!" 
"Fine, mark your targets."
"Marked!"
"Marked!"
"Go!"
Two satchels were thrown, detonating into a blinding cloud.
"The problem with fixed barricades, is we know where they—and you are." Kumbhar rolled out from cover and from memory, fired three grenades from his gun, while behind him the recoiless team fired their weapon, while Denise chucked a demo charge. 
The series of explosions were deafening, the screams less so. 
Then they cut loose with the boarding flamer, and the screams ended.
"Go!" Kumbhar shouted. Nice thing about wearing pressurized armor, you can't smell what's around you. 
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===Enlightenment thanks to Demolition Charges===
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Fighting into the fire control center had been a mess. There were a lot of pirates here and they didn't want to surrender. They had the first teams pinned down just outside the big pressure doors. Fortunately, Lisa McKay didn't have to take it intact. She was peering into the dark access way that the team had cut open. "So that leads to the fire control deck."
"Yes."
"We gonna try to take the deck?" one of the newbies asked, a MechWarrior who had made the physical.
"Now why would we do that? We have a nice access way passing just three feet under that deck they're trying to defend. Greg, you were a demolition's expert, right?"
"Back when I was active with the SASF, when dinosaurs roamed Terra, yeah."
"And our team has what, just under two hundred kilos of demo charges."
"Yep."
"Can you see your way clear to enlightening those poor deluded souls on the fire control deck as to how safe they really are?"
"Ten minutes, and they'll be explaining their sins to St. Michael."
"I don't think that's where they're going."
"Well, it's an arc. The explosion pushes you up and then you see Michael at the top of the arc, so if they can talk fast…"
"Don't think that's how theology works but get to it, old man."
"I didn't faint during the ingress, so who are you calling old?"
Lisa nodded, "Good point." And five us us didn't make it on the way in. Well, you didn't join the SASF for the extra pay.
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===Final Charge===
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"Down!" Kumbhar snarled, pulling another newby down from where he'd been about to charge. 
"But we can get through!" 
"Not yet. FireTeam go!" 
The flamers let go, and protected from the radiated heat two men ran forward while the pirates were ducking back. They were sort of intelligent. Since they'd left the doors open enough to peer out, instead of just letting his team wander up to the, but… they were only sort of intelligent. They should have kept most of their people out here, where they could bottleneck them at every door. 
Now the first two men were at the partially open doors, and they hefted a pair of satchels through. 
Explosives and thousands of metallic pellets. Even an armored suit would have a problem at close range, but most importantly, his team was shielded from the blast by the partially closed doors. 
Which meant for a few seconds, nobody on the other side would be ready for them. The First Team, including Kumbhar was through almost before the shockwave passed, and they were in a big room, full of complex machinery, most of which was having a very bad day. Men were flailing and screaming and Kumbhar put a magazine in one.
If they'd wanted to surrender they could have stopped the damned ship. 
Then they were shooting it out with others who had been further away. One pirate was immolated by a flamer, while Kumbhar dodged another one who was swinging a vibroblade like he was some hero out of Immortal Warrior and then opened fire with his second magazine feed, even as grenades were going off—and a big heavy gun, held by a equally big pirate fired and Kumbhar spun around as his arm was blown off just below his shoulder. 
"Shit—" the world went gray and then peaceful as the auto-injectors activated and the emergency tourniquet on the pressure suit contracted while spraying foam to seal the penetration. 
"Fuck!" That was Sheila and it turned out the pirate might be big, but that didn't matter when someone shot you with a HEDP grenade. "You okay, Boss?"
"Peachy." Kumbhar looked around, trying to fight the fuzz away. "Someone shut those damned motors off!"
"Got a report, primary fire control is off. If anyone's shooting, it's on mount and…" Sheila looked up. "We're about to turn the engines off."
"How?"
"Demo charge in the main sequencer. They don't have anyone down at auxiliary control, so the system will shut down."
Fuzzy from the drugs, Kumbhar shook his head. "I really hope nobody was planning on selling this thing…"
"Could be worse, we could have been forced to use the gadgets."
"Good point."
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Message to the Archon
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"General, we have confirmation from the boarding teams. All three objectives were taken. KF Drive is operational, but they have cut the control runs, other systems are knocked out."
Mary stared at the repeater. It was showing the big Warship and the debris of the pirate dropships surrounding it (save for the three that had surrendered) just drifting aimlessly. 
"Good. Get boarding crews on it. Causalities?"
"SASF says they're light. Only twenty-five percent." The officer paused, and then muttered. "Bloody maniacs." 
"But our maniacs." Mary said. Twenty-five percent here, God knows how many on the world… They'd suffered more casualties than any Taurian unit since the First Succession War, she bet. "Get me a link to Archon Steiner. Now that we have it, I guess it's her problem on what to do with it." Mary paused. "But let them know—collect every last bit of data. I want to know where that ship came from and who had it."
And if there are any more…
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