Trash Wars!
Calgacus Military Space Dock 989, Border Ops Center
“They’re coming. This is wonderful, heck, look at those wonderful formations, the ‘X’ formation, taking the form of an x on it’s side, just whipping across the sky there. A really classic example, I must say, of a classical Pirate military formation. Two centrally overlapping lines of ships coming on forward, when one line is taken out it, it is immediately replaced. It’s their way of getting things done in the fastest way possible,” said Mike, the resident freak on Pirate military history. When he wasn’t wargaming or filling his face with a cheap sweet (and spilling the crumbs all along down his rather dirty little red beard), Mike was researching Pirate battle tactics. This was, of course, the first time he’d been there to watch them first-hand. He was quite excited.
Commander Garrard had called him down just for the advice on what these blasted Pirates were actually going to do. Garrard didn’t know a bloody thing about these guys. Up until the last half-hour ago, they’d been their mercenaries, for heaven’s sake. Now, of course, these morons had hauled off and set themselves upon the Morganites, and the old CEO was furious. Joe Nova was going to pay dearly for this one, the old bugger.
“That’s…great, Mike,” said the Commander, “but how do we break this up?”
“Well…that’s not so tough. Lamprey did it in the first Pirate Wars fairly easily at the fight at Hedge Sky Base, overlapped the whole Pirate fleet, destroying the flagship. A lot of Pirate Clan leaders went down in that fight…”
“Yeah…what was Fleet Admiral Lamprey’s plan?”
“Oh, simply to surprise them by striking them head-on. They expected him to hold their ground against him, but instead, he flew right at them, peppering them with everything he had. Ruined them. They’d have been wrecked had it not been for the guy that we’re facing now, Joe Nova. He became powerful after that fight, despite the loss. I don’t think he’ll fall for the same trick twice.”
“Maybe he will, but maybe he won’t. We have advantages the guys at the other station didn’t have a few minutes ago. Namely, we have a good security system. That algorithm of theirs isn’t going to take us down. Secondly, we actually have good troops. A whole hoard of fighters, two destroyers, three cruisers, one frigate... I think we can whip them. Or at least we can keep them back long enough…right, Mike?”
“Uh, well it’s been done before. Pirates aren’t really too hard to beat in battle…you just have to know where they are, and make sure you don’t send them any transmissions…” Mike rubbed something onto his uniform. In the darkness of the station Headquarters Bridge, the Commander couldn’t quite make out what it was. What a slob.
“Miss Oglander, what do you think?” the Commander looked at his lieutenant commander. She was one of the few officers at the station who wasn’t a brazen coward.
“It sounds workable to me,” she responded.
“Uh,” began Mike, “shouldn’t it be decidedly democratically?”
The Commander looked at him in the dimness of the room, smiled, and said, “No. We’d never get anywhere that way.”
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“Ah, Meroz,” spake “Captain” Milo Clancy of the Spitfire, while engulfing some rather cheap ale, “there she is. The Military Station Calgacus, 989, and what a beauty she is. She’s been there for as long as there’s been a Corporate Sector, me flukehead, built on the site of a Plasma Age Spartan Outpost. When this part of the galaxy was ceded to old Morgan, Calgacus went up as one of the Sector’s nine military stations…ah, Morganite heritage…really gets ya there…” continued Clancy, smacking at his chest.
“Yeah, yeah, all very neat, we’ll have to get a souvenir at the gift shop…” responded the Cepheleen unenthusiastically, running a scaly hand through his long black mane, “Where’s the bloody toll-port? That’s the thing. I hate toll-ports…especially crummy Morganite toll-ports…” The Military Station was in full view, appearing almost egg-like, like a giant Humpty-Dumpty floating about in space. Meroz the Bounty Hunter was never much of a fan of Morganite history. Morganites had ruined his planet and trampled down his people, what was to like in their checkered past?
“Meroz, I sometimes doubt your enthusiasm in Morgan Interstellar…Hey! Where’s the bleeding toll-port?”
“That, Milo, is what I just asked you…” Meroz responded rather irritably.
“Doesn’t it just figure? Doesn’t it? The one time I really need to get into this bloody place and find the bloody toll-port and the damned thing is nowhere in sight? I mean, what do they pay these people for? They are probably too busy checking out old biddies in transit shuttles to bother with our own armed vessel. The whole Hiverian fleet could come in here, and that toll-port wouldn’t care…I mean, what’s it there for? It’s there to collect money…and to make sure no undesirables come in!” Meroz tactfully ignored Clancy’s rants.
Suddenly, something shot out of the sky, moving at a tremendous rate of speed, shooting along with a fiery tail trailing out along behind it. It looked like a shooting star. It was headed right for Clancy, it seemed. As it came closer, the stunned Captain could make out that it was smaller than his own small vessel, yet at the pace it was moving at it would definitely be a nasty thing to bump into. Meroz managed to identify it. “Bleeding heck!” he cried, “that’s the toll-port!”
Clancy managed to emit, “Whaaa?” The toll-port, burning rapidly, scraped past the small “garbage war-ship”, still travelling at that tremendous speed, and slammed right into a ship that pulled up alongside Clancy’s. The ship had been struck right in the gun-ports. It was definitely a Pirate ship.
“That,” said Meroz, pausing for effect, “is not a good sign. I guess some Pirates shot that toll-port into, if you forgive the figure of speech, ‘warp-speed’.”
“Damnatio flukehead! The Pirates are attacking! Those damn double-crossing…” Another Pirate ship pulled up alongside Clancy, and the small ship shot ahead. “Send out a message to the Station…we aren’t Pirates…but damn it, the guys behind us are!”
Meroz turned his head back and saw the Pirate fleet forming behind him. Hundreds of ships, small and large, fighters alongside destroyers, cruisers alongside escorts, every single ship looked fearsome. Before Clancy and Meroz sat a huge Morganite ship, almost as large as the station itself…it was a fighter transport. These babies could carry up to two hundred and fifty fighters…maybe even two hundred and eighty at maximum capacity. They were big as the devil and mean as hell. Before the Cepheleen’s very eyes the mouth of the transport dropped open and from it hundreds of small fighter ships were vomited forth. This wasn’t the best spot for the garbage ship to be in. “Hey, Milo, let’s get out of here…”
As the small ship shot forward, trying to get to the protection of the military station, a small Pirate vessel made straight for them as the Morganites and the Pirates engaged. Meroz looked back once again and saw, to his horror, the Pirate fighter on their tail, superimposed, it seemed, in front of a large Pirate frigate around which dozens of Morganite ships swarmed like angry hornets. “We’re being followed…”
“Don’t I know it, Meroz, old boy…” A chunk of Morganite fighter suddenly glided by. Had Milo not been chased, he’d probably have gone back for it. Alongside the warship came the real Morganite beauties, one frigate, two destroyers, three cruisers, and all headed right for the attackers. They’d break them up, no doubt. “I think we’re in the clear, old boy…” Milo’s optimism promptly vanished as the fast Pirate fighter swung round in front of Milo’s ship, and turned it’s guns directly at him. Milo immediately wheeled round, shards bouncing off the hull.
“We’re sitting ducks! Let’s use the damned guns!” Meroz pointed to the gun controls.
“I would use them if I didn’t have these chaps on my tail…” The fighter was, it seemed pursuing him. Digging their way right to the very rear of the Pirate battleline, Milo suddenly glanced a dark shape hanging in the sky, making no movements whatsoever. “It’s the Probe Ship!” Of course, every Pirate squadron had one. Milo could imagine the Data Angels scurrying around inside, collecting data, trying to send their virus into the Morganite ships. They were small vessels, armed lightly, but more dangerous than the little fighter on Milo’s tail. “Alright, then, we’ll give these Data Angels a scare!” called the pilot, to no one in particular. Milo took his ship right at the Probe Ship. He barely avoided a collision, when he suddenly swooped downward, underneath the Probe Ship, moving up behind it. The Probe Ship began firing wildly.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” cried Meroz. The words had barely trickled out of his large reptilian lips when a horrific flash half blinded the poor fellow. Looking back, he saw the Probe Ship fall to pieces, literally before his eyes. The fighter was gone. It was apparent what had happened. The fighter had slammed right into the Data Angels. As the Probe Ship vanished, wreckage, human and otherwise, began to float away from it. Meroz looked through a porthole as the corpse of a black-uniformed Data Angel floated past. “Ugly little bugger, isn’t he?”
Milo was smiling to himself, “Well, that’s my good deed for today. Let’s get back to the military station, now.” The garbage ship did just that, despite the following Pirate ships, which were immediately raked with Morganite fire. The battle was a fairly nasty one. No more nasty than Samnos or Naxos, of course, but nasty all the same. It was smaller than the previous space battles, of course. As the garbage ship made it out of harm’s way, the Pirate attack was slowly beginning to crumble. Shortly, the Pirates fell back to regroup. Despite minor losses, they might well win after all, right?
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Commissioner’s Offices, Orbiting the Planet Namibia, M1 System, Corporate Sector
Commissioner Hercules Lemesieur, the Commissioner of the entire Corporate Sector, was an old man, but he certainly wasn’t senile. He knew what to do in a case like this. Though half of the Corporate Sector was under Terran control and the rest was under Spartan control, he still acted like the Morganite he’d always been. Naxos had surrendered. They’d put up a good fight, but the forces had cut themselves to pieces. The Governor was injured, the Admiral was injured, and there was no real point in holding out any longer. The Commissioner had given his blessing on the surrender after the flagship had been boarded and captured (despite heavy losses to the Terran boarding party, nearly 80% were dead or wounded). Naxos could really not hold out longer either. The fall of Naxos had taken away the last force in the three Morganite systems that had been attacked…there was, of course, the military station Calgacus…but there were conflicting reports on that as well. The damned Pirate mercenaries had betrayed them, taking several stations. They’d launched some sort of attack on Calgacus, but had been rebuffed. Now the Terrans were settling down, calling a cease fire. Why didn’t they call off their Pirates?
As the Commissioner watched an asteroid fly past the many yellow rings of the gray planet Namibia, he decided that he might well send a message to the Terrans, asking them kindly to stop the Pirate attacks. He had sent out messages to all his men ordering them to cease fire unless attacked, he had expected the Terrans to do the same. Much to the Commissioner’s relief, the Terrans soon sent a reply. The Pirates were ordered to stop their attacks, but the Morganites were to be evicted from the Cycladic System. The Commissioner sent his message out to the Commander, a man named Garrard.
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From his seat in the small escort ship, Commander Garrard watched as his men slowly withdrew from their docks and battle positions, forming a convoy, moving slowly out of the system and to safety beyond Terran lines. They would, of course, be Spartan vessels and troops now. Only in name, of course, they were really Morganites. They’d be Morganites as soon as peace ‘broke out’. That, Garrard was sure, would be very soon indeed. There was nothing more for these Terrans to do. Any more ‘expansion’ and they’d be committing suicide. Morganite, Spartan, Drone, and Believer ships lay just over the new Terran border. Peace was next on the agenda for everybody. Garrard looked down at the lonely station, watching yet another explosion tear through its foundations. Standard operating procedure: one must always blow up what might come in use to the enemy when it must be abandoned.
From his MorganCDPlayer, the Morganite National Anthem boomed across the escort ship. As a converted garbage ship flew by Garrard’s porthole, the line in the Anthem was: “And liberty for all, forever…” Then the singer went onto the lines about Morganite heroism, Morganite honesty, Morganite chivalry, etc. Nice tune, lousy lyrics. At least the Morganite Battle Anthem was coming up next. Now that was real music...
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Calgacus Military Space Dock 989, Border Ops Center
“They’re coming. This is wonderful, heck, look at those wonderful formations, the ‘X’ formation, taking the form of an x on it’s side, just whipping across the sky there. A really classic example, I must say, of a classical Pirate military formation. Two centrally overlapping lines of ships coming on forward, when one line is taken out it, it is immediately replaced. It’s their way of getting things done in the fastest way possible,” said Mike, the resident freak on Pirate military history. When he wasn’t wargaming or filling his face with a cheap sweet (and spilling the crumbs all along down his rather dirty little red beard), Mike was researching Pirate battle tactics. This was, of course, the first time he’d been there to watch them first-hand. He was quite excited.
Commander Garrard had called him down just for the advice on what these blasted Pirates were actually going to do. Garrard didn’t know a bloody thing about these guys. Up until the last half-hour ago, they’d been their mercenaries, for heaven’s sake. Now, of course, these morons had hauled off and set themselves upon the Morganites, and the old CEO was furious. Joe Nova was going to pay dearly for this one, the old bugger.
“That’s…great, Mike,” said the Commander, “but how do we break this up?”
“Well…that’s not so tough. Lamprey did it in the first Pirate Wars fairly easily at the fight at Hedge Sky Base, overlapped the whole Pirate fleet, destroying the flagship. A lot of Pirate Clan leaders went down in that fight…”
“Yeah…what was Fleet Admiral Lamprey’s plan?”
“Oh, simply to surprise them by striking them head-on. They expected him to hold their ground against him, but instead, he flew right at them, peppering them with everything he had. Ruined them. They’d have been wrecked had it not been for the guy that we’re facing now, Joe Nova. He became powerful after that fight, despite the loss. I don’t think he’ll fall for the same trick twice.”
“Maybe he will, but maybe he won’t. We have advantages the guys at the other station didn’t have a few minutes ago. Namely, we have a good security system. That algorithm of theirs isn’t going to take us down. Secondly, we actually have good troops. A whole hoard of fighters, two destroyers, three cruisers, one frigate... I think we can whip them. Or at least we can keep them back long enough…right, Mike?”
“Uh, well it’s been done before. Pirates aren’t really too hard to beat in battle…you just have to know where they are, and make sure you don’t send them any transmissions…” Mike rubbed something onto his uniform. In the darkness of the station Headquarters Bridge, the Commander couldn’t quite make out what it was. What a slob.
“Miss Oglander, what do you think?” the Commander looked at his lieutenant commander. She was one of the few officers at the station who wasn’t a brazen coward.
“It sounds workable to me,” she responded.
“Uh,” began Mike, “shouldn’t it be decidedly democratically?”
The Commander looked at him in the dimness of the room, smiled, and said, “No. We’d never get anywhere that way.”
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“Ah, Meroz,” spake “Captain” Milo Clancy of the Spitfire, while engulfing some rather cheap ale, “there she is. The Military Station Calgacus, 989, and what a beauty she is. She’s been there for as long as there’s been a Corporate Sector, me flukehead, built on the site of a Plasma Age Spartan Outpost. When this part of the galaxy was ceded to old Morgan, Calgacus went up as one of the Sector’s nine military stations…ah, Morganite heritage…really gets ya there…” continued Clancy, smacking at his chest.
“Yeah, yeah, all very neat, we’ll have to get a souvenir at the gift shop…” responded the Cepheleen unenthusiastically, running a scaly hand through his long black mane, “Where’s the bloody toll-port? That’s the thing. I hate toll-ports…especially crummy Morganite toll-ports…” The Military Station was in full view, appearing almost egg-like, like a giant Humpty-Dumpty floating about in space. Meroz the Bounty Hunter was never much of a fan of Morganite history. Morganites had ruined his planet and trampled down his people, what was to like in their checkered past?
“Meroz, I sometimes doubt your enthusiasm in Morgan Interstellar…Hey! Where’s the bleeding toll-port?”
“That, Milo, is what I just asked you…” Meroz responded rather irritably.
“Doesn’t it just figure? Doesn’t it? The one time I really need to get into this bloody place and find the bloody toll-port and the damned thing is nowhere in sight? I mean, what do they pay these people for? They are probably too busy checking out old biddies in transit shuttles to bother with our own armed vessel. The whole Hiverian fleet could come in here, and that toll-port wouldn’t care…I mean, what’s it there for? It’s there to collect money…and to make sure no undesirables come in!” Meroz tactfully ignored Clancy’s rants.
Suddenly, something shot out of the sky, moving at a tremendous rate of speed, shooting along with a fiery tail trailing out along behind it. It looked like a shooting star. It was headed right for Clancy, it seemed. As it came closer, the stunned Captain could make out that it was smaller than his own small vessel, yet at the pace it was moving at it would definitely be a nasty thing to bump into. Meroz managed to identify it. “Bleeding heck!” he cried, “that’s the toll-port!”
Clancy managed to emit, “Whaaa?” The toll-port, burning rapidly, scraped past the small “garbage war-ship”, still travelling at that tremendous speed, and slammed right into a ship that pulled up alongside Clancy’s. The ship had been struck right in the gun-ports. It was definitely a Pirate ship.
“That,” said Meroz, pausing for effect, “is not a good sign. I guess some Pirates shot that toll-port into, if you forgive the figure of speech, ‘warp-speed’.”
“Damnatio flukehead! The Pirates are attacking! Those damn double-crossing…” Another Pirate ship pulled up alongside Clancy, and the small ship shot ahead. “Send out a message to the Station…we aren’t Pirates…but damn it, the guys behind us are!”
Meroz turned his head back and saw the Pirate fleet forming behind him. Hundreds of ships, small and large, fighters alongside destroyers, cruisers alongside escorts, every single ship looked fearsome. Before Clancy and Meroz sat a huge Morganite ship, almost as large as the station itself…it was a fighter transport. These babies could carry up to two hundred and fifty fighters…maybe even two hundred and eighty at maximum capacity. They were big as the devil and mean as hell. Before the Cepheleen’s very eyes the mouth of the transport dropped open and from it hundreds of small fighter ships were vomited forth. This wasn’t the best spot for the garbage ship to be in. “Hey, Milo, let’s get out of here…”
As the small ship shot forward, trying to get to the protection of the military station, a small Pirate vessel made straight for them as the Morganites and the Pirates engaged. Meroz looked back once again and saw, to his horror, the Pirate fighter on their tail, superimposed, it seemed, in front of a large Pirate frigate around which dozens of Morganite ships swarmed like angry hornets. “We’re being followed…”
“Don’t I know it, Meroz, old boy…” A chunk of Morganite fighter suddenly glided by. Had Milo not been chased, he’d probably have gone back for it. Alongside the warship came the real Morganite beauties, one frigate, two destroyers, three cruisers, and all headed right for the attackers. They’d break them up, no doubt. “I think we’re in the clear, old boy…” Milo’s optimism promptly vanished as the fast Pirate fighter swung round in front of Milo’s ship, and turned it’s guns directly at him. Milo immediately wheeled round, shards bouncing off the hull.
“We’re sitting ducks! Let’s use the damned guns!” Meroz pointed to the gun controls.
“I would use them if I didn’t have these chaps on my tail…” The fighter was, it seemed pursuing him. Digging their way right to the very rear of the Pirate battleline, Milo suddenly glanced a dark shape hanging in the sky, making no movements whatsoever. “It’s the Probe Ship!” Of course, every Pirate squadron had one. Milo could imagine the Data Angels scurrying around inside, collecting data, trying to send their virus into the Morganite ships. They were small vessels, armed lightly, but more dangerous than the little fighter on Milo’s tail. “Alright, then, we’ll give these Data Angels a scare!” called the pilot, to no one in particular. Milo took his ship right at the Probe Ship. He barely avoided a collision, when he suddenly swooped downward, underneath the Probe Ship, moving up behind it. The Probe Ship began firing wildly.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” cried Meroz. The words had barely trickled out of his large reptilian lips when a horrific flash half blinded the poor fellow. Looking back, he saw the Probe Ship fall to pieces, literally before his eyes. The fighter was gone. It was apparent what had happened. The fighter had slammed right into the Data Angels. As the Probe Ship vanished, wreckage, human and otherwise, began to float away from it. Meroz looked through a porthole as the corpse of a black-uniformed Data Angel floated past. “Ugly little bugger, isn’t he?”
Milo was smiling to himself, “Well, that’s my good deed for today. Let’s get back to the military station, now.” The garbage ship did just that, despite the following Pirate ships, which were immediately raked with Morganite fire. The battle was a fairly nasty one. No more nasty than Samnos or Naxos, of course, but nasty all the same. It was smaller than the previous space battles, of course. As the garbage ship made it out of harm’s way, the Pirate attack was slowly beginning to crumble. Shortly, the Pirates fell back to regroup. Despite minor losses, they might well win after all, right?
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Commissioner’s Offices, Orbiting the Planet Namibia, M1 System, Corporate Sector
Commissioner Hercules Lemesieur, the Commissioner of the entire Corporate Sector, was an old man, but he certainly wasn’t senile. He knew what to do in a case like this. Though half of the Corporate Sector was under Terran control and the rest was under Spartan control, he still acted like the Morganite he’d always been. Naxos had surrendered. They’d put up a good fight, but the forces had cut themselves to pieces. The Governor was injured, the Admiral was injured, and there was no real point in holding out any longer. The Commissioner had given his blessing on the surrender after the flagship had been boarded and captured (despite heavy losses to the Terran boarding party, nearly 80% were dead or wounded). Naxos could really not hold out longer either. The fall of Naxos had taken away the last force in the three Morganite systems that had been attacked…there was, of course, the military station Calgacus…but there were conflicting reports on that as well. The damned Pirate mercenaries had betrayed them, taking several stations. They’d launched some sort of attack on Calgacus, but had been rebuffed. Now the Terrans were settling down, calling a cease fire. Why didn’t they call off their Pirates?
As the Commissioner watched an asteroid fly past the many yellow rings of the gray planet Namibia, he decided that he might well send a message to the Terrans, asking them kindly to stop the Pirate attacks. He had sent out messages to all his men ordering them to cease fire unless attacked, he had expected the Terrans to do the same. Much to the Commissioner’s relief, the Terrans soon sent a reply. The Pirates were ordered to stop their attacks, but the Morganites were to be evicted from the Cycladic System. The Commissioner sent his message out to the Commander, a man named Garrard.
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From his seat in the small escort ship, Commander Garrard watched as his men slowly withdrew from their docks and battle positions, forming a convoy, moving slowly out of the system and to safety beyond Terran lines. They would, of course, be Spartan vessels and troops now. Only in name, of course, they were really Morganites. They’d be Morganites as soon as peace ‘broke out’. That, Garrard was sure, would be very soon indeed. There was nothing more for these Terrans to do. Any more ‘expansion’ and they’d be committing suicide. Morganite, Spartan, Drone, and Believer ships lay just over the new Terran border. Peace was next on the agenda for everybody. Garrard looked down at the lonely station, watching yet another explosion tear through its foundations. Standard operating procedure: one must always blow up what might come in use to the enemy when it must be abandoned.
From his MorganCDPlayer, the Morganite National Anthem boomed across the escort ship. As a converted garbage ship flew by Garrard’s porthole, the line in the Anthem was: “And liberty for all, forever…” Then the singer went onto the lines about Morganite heroism, Morganite honesty, Morganite chivalry, etc. Nice tune, lousy lyrics. At least the Morganite Battle Anthem was coming up next. Now that was real music...
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