RidOv Chpt-35

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==Ridiculously Overboard!! (A Captain Roberts Tale!!)Chapter 35 - Shadows of past Battles==
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===Wreckage of a Battlefield===
Joan's Post System - Outworlds Wastes, Periphery
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"The plan ended up being similar to, but not exactly....
...the same as Devil's Breath. It turns out 'reconnaissance is a good idea' and the OMC/Snow Raven professionals were actual...y'know, professionals.
As in not-driven-by anger colonists or holovid-protagonist risk-takers.
Amanda's plot put the Evanescent in the stable lagrange between the superjovian gas-giant 5 full AU out from the orbit of Joan's Post-the-planet.
Within four hours at one gee of the cache site from the Naval database she looted.
Close enough to see that 'OWS Illusive' wasn't going to be a cool collection of salvage or another ship to add to her count.
It wasn't quite radioactive razor-blades, and there was likely to be salvage in the form of raw materials, a bit of armor, and maybe some components in the bifurcated wreck of it. There's this thing that happens when a Pinto class Corvette meets a Star League Defense Force battlegroup, and that thing quite visibly happened.
Aside from some holes through the pressure envelope, the dock-station was in better shape than NorthSun's, including having some systems ready to be reactivated and the H2 tanks were not only still sealed, but still (for the most part) filled.
The database showed that yes, in deed, the broken pieces of Warship trailing the asteroid base were, pretty much, all that was left of the OWS Illusive and her support group.
It was a good opportunity to refuel, while deploying small craft on strategic thrust to set up observation on the primary points in the system and identify traffic while they waited for the core to charge and the rest of the task force to arrive.
"Well...it wasn't another Bonnie." Larry commented.
"We should dive the wreck and see if anything useful survived that fight." Lori suggested, "Since we're doing this thing, adding to the resources available, and gathering intelligence are both high priority...and if we don't, some other scavenger will."
"I can't believe nobody had records of this." Bedwyr noted, "Pass the potatoes?"
Amanda looked thoughtful as she passed the bowl of reconstituted potato-mush across the table in the officer's mess. "Maybe."
"Maybe?"
"The further we get from an event the more things blur together." she said idly, as she added Brown to her own plate. "I mean, I don't remember most of my childhood, just some general stuff, I don't even know who my parents were, but I remember crying for my mom when I was in the hands of the men in white...when they were cutting me...so figure a massive trauma, the history books call it the 'periphery Uprising' and sure, there's lots of big battles in those books..."
"but not the little stuff?" Larry suggested.
"Not the little stuff. SLDF had hundreds of warships, the info I got out of the database was barely a local task-group, and they used Task Groups the way people today use fighter squadrons. The covert forces wouldn't even be a speedbump to the fleet groups SLDF had out here prior, so, anything that wasn't pivotal?"
"Gets forgotten, because it's all small stuff for the era." Larry agreed.
"The most traumatic experience you ever had, life-changing, and what. for them it was just...Tuesday?"
"Seems likely." Seron spoke up, "SLDF lost hundreds of warships just rolling into the Sol system, the fight here couldn't have involved more than three or four at the most...and SLDF still had hundreds of Warships when Kerensky led the Exodus."
"The ruins of Tuesday." Amanda said, and glanced out at the asteroid base. "Base, I dub thee 'The Ruins of Tuesday'!"
Her joke fell kind of flat.
"I'm going to add that to the log." Larry spoke up, "It's a good code-name...evocative."
"In ninety six hours, give-or-take, we're going to fight an action that wouldn't even have made more than a paragraph to the SLDF." Amanda muttered, "but it's significant to us...and with luck, courage, and audacity, maybe it will change some lives for the better down on the world of Joan's Post."
"Hear Here!!" Lori raised a drink-bulb, and the others raised theirs.
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===Repairs of a Lost Ship===
There's something...
...deeply satisfying about fixing something broken. 'Mister Samuel' was of the opinion, anyway. Construction work in low gee was how he wound up working for Larry Nichols in the first place.
He finished tacking the patch-brace, reset the feed on his welding unit, and started laying down the sealing bead.
'The Ruins of Tuesday' still had working tanks, and pumps, and some of the gantries weren't more than a few dents and degrees from fully functional, but the base had 600 milimeter holes from SLDF standard naval cannon driven through it, ruptured quarters areas, and it was all fixable.
Also worth the fix. A base in the system means an anchor for the eventual liberation or capture of Tresspass, and with that one, the possibility of an actual fleet base-this time, one set up by the SLDF for their frontier forces.
The Captain let him have some of the crew that weren't supporting the recon flights for this. They'd need a base out here, especially if things were as bad planetside as it looked...
Sam was good at construction. He'd worked six burrows in the outies with his father's co-op before running off to be a merchanter.
The work here is, if anything, easier than building life support infrastructure in an inflated asteroid, after all, at least this metal was relatively uniform, with very little slag to purge out before laying a welding bead.
Hull patching, in other words, and someone had kindly left most of a warehouse worth of hullmetal sheeting when the base was either abandoned or destroyed.
The engineer and some of the volunteers, had already pressed up a few of the major compartments yesterday. Today, it was the outer rim structures, the areas that had taken the biggest hits.
First you dry it in, then you work the internal infrastructure-the plumbing, the ducting, the electrical, test, and if the work holds, you move to the next compartment area.
Most of the damage had been secondaries-capital weapon hits, air transfers the shockwaves and feeds the fires until they're blown out by atmo loss.
Patching handles the structural compromise, then you seal it, check the utilities and mark the outgassing, patch those. run power, look for magnetic flux or arcing, fix that.
THEN you press it up and move on.
Meanwhile, Mister Seron was downstairs with the Captain and Larry, putting the datacenter back together so they can try to read the hard-storage drives.
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