When Will The Vultures Arrive?
The only obstacle the quartet of Hive-type ships present in terms of running them down is time, and even that is quite trivial. They’d just reached relative equal velocity with you as you overhauled them, thanks to some careful planning on the helmsman’s part, and singular carefully aimed PPC hits disabled their transit drives with ruthless efficiency, leaving them helplessly adrift.
With that the shuttles launched, carrying the boarding parties. The Marines had expected some resistance, and weren’t disappointed in that there was, in fact,
some resistance. Not much, to be fair.
On the other hand, the reason for the lack of effective resistance enraged the boarding parties and only iron discipline had allowed for any prisoners to be taken.
Each of the Hive-type ships had about a dozen ‘marines’ on board, none of whom met the boarding parties in the airlocks. Instead they were scattered about, drunk or high, engaging in… fornication… with slaves, who were then being murdered as the drunk pirates finished with them.
There weren’t
many prisoners taken, but iron discipline allowed for a few to survive the ass kicking the Marines inflicted on the pirates over this. The reports rather tactfully describe most of the lethal injuries among the pirates as ‘pelvic’. And all of the survivors had… ummm… ‘pelvic’ trauma as well.
The problem, however, is that the ‘flagship’ of the pirate formation had been one of the Stinger-type dropships that is currently an expanding ball of debris. So there is very little intelligence to be had, given that none of the pirates seem to know anything beyond how to murder, rape, and pillage. You have no idea when the jumpships are scheduled to return, nothing.
The other problem is that there are so many rescued slaves that you’ll need to make a decision. Few as the pirate survivors are, you lack the life support capacity across HMS Renown and the transport carrying the Olympic team to convey both them and the freed slaves out of the system.
Now, pirates have always been considered hostis humani generis, as have slavers, and these scum are both. They have no useful intelligence to offer, as none of them know where their bases are or anything else of actual use.
Therefore, it would be quite lawful to simply space the bastards, which would be the quickest means of handling the issue and would result in you having barely enough life support capacity to convey all of the freed slaves to NRI territory, where you are assured by the liaisons they will be well treated as most are NRI citizens. You could take the time to give all of the pirates summary courts-martial and then space the bastards, but that would leave you stuck here in system for several weeks while going through the motions and require a number of the ex-slaves to remain aboard the hulked Hive-type ships.
You could, if you were feeling excessively charitable towards the scum, take them along, but that would require leaving behind freed slaves, and you are not willing to do that. You could have the Free Folk jump back to Griffon’s Roost, pick up a pair of dropships including, perhaps, the
Tarawa-class transport, return and load all of the prisoners and freed-slaves aboard and send them back home.
You have options…
[] | Action | Result |
[] | Space the bastards | Journey continues uninterrupted |
[] | Hold Courts-Martial | You’ll arrive late, but with such a story to tell |
[] | Fetch reinforcements | You’ll arrive late, with a great story to tell as above, but also gain a few hundred refugees. |