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[Darrian Wolffe]

The next several hours pass by in a blaze of activity.  There's repairs to be made to the Ajax - the Pentagon-class Dropship whose crew turned coat against their Rim Worlds handlers.  Several of you spend your hours working with the command crew aboard the ship to ensure that your flight plan won't raise any red flag (MoS: 4).  Freud and Hawker sequester themselves in the HPG compound and, with the help of the technicians there, transmit pleas for assistance to Dieron.

The return news is grim.  There's active fighting on practically every world within 60 light-years of Terra.  With the bulk of the SLDF in action against the Periphery uprisings, the Rim Worlds forces have totally overwhelmed the surprised SLDF homefront forces in a series of massive first strikes - usually with nuclear or chemical  weaponry, followed by conventional forces that show no quarter.  Many worlds are already completely pacified and under Amaris's thumb, and what resistance there is on the core worlds much resembles your own; individual guerilla commands striking back where and when they can.  No help is forthcoming.  Your orders are to get offworld, if you can, and join up with the rest of the SLDF resistance forces at the rendevous at the Kentares system.  If not, go to ground as do as much damage as you can the time you have left.

The hell with THAT, decides Freund.  We're getting offworld come hell or high water..

The decision is made.  You take off early the next morning on your flight path to resupply a Belt Colony.  Of course, that will put you cleanly on path to rendevous with the Davion-flagged Robinson-class cruiser at Io Base.  You've cleared the inner belt of Earth's orbital defenses and are passing into the outer belt when the Ajax's real-time communication system lights up.  A face appears on the screen.  Fat, sallow.  Squint-eyed.  A heavy, drooping mustache dominates the face, but your real impression of of the cunning, watery blue eyes that stare out at you.

"I want to speak to General Babcock." says Stefan Amaris.  "Show me he's safe and alive, or I'll blow your ship out of the sky."



WILL BE CON'T

[Darrian Wolffe]

Sensing that Amaris is completely serious, with great reluctance, you parade Babcock in front of the viewer.  Amaris's eyes narrow at the bindings and gags, and he speaks softly.

"Don't worry, old friend.  I'll make sure you make it home safely."

Then he regains his bearings, and addresses the remainder of you.  "I can see that you've got a flight plan taking you along the plane of the system out towards the Belters.  I'm assuming that you're actually making for a pirate point somewhere out beyond Jupiter where you'll make rendezvous with a JumpShip that you called for from the Winnipeg HPG.  Go ahead.  If you want safe passage out of the system, at this point, you can have it - you've earned it.  You're not worth wasting any more of my troops dealing with.  But what you are going to do is leave Anton at Io Station, alive and unharmed, with sufficient food, water, and life support for a minimum of seven days.  I'm dispatching a squadron from the nadir jump point to pick him up.  Further, you will have no contact with the ships currently docked at Io Station whatsoever.  They'll make a fine addition to my navy, once I get around to retrieving them, and can figure out where to get new crews.  So you understand how serious I am about getting Anton back, I want to you watch this."

His images fades into a new scene.  The shot is taken from a starport, in winter.  Pearlescent snow covers the ground, and ice sheathes the fencelines and power cables that lay strewn about.  The scene is marred by black scorch marks and scars of war.  Someone attacked this place, hard.  The control tower stands like a broken fang, snapped off and blackened fifty feet above the ground.  Smoking and flattened personal vehicles and small, unmoving bundles of rags litter the tarmac.  You recognize this place as the ruins of the Winnipeg Starport.  In the background, you can only assume the rising smoke emanates from the HPG station.  The person holding the camera holds this image for several seconds, then slowly pans around to show a ruined barracks, with a black-and-red painted Jackrabbit standing in the middle of it, its weapons pointing down at the backs of a group of battered survivors.  About two dozen men, women, and children stand in a line against the broken ferrocrete wall.  One, a Hispanic woman with a bloody gash on her forehead and raven hair, holds two young boys against her sides with their faces turned towards her, her hands on the backs of their heads.  She looks directly into the camera for a moment, staring sheer bloody defiance into the unblinking eye, and then turns her face downwards.  Come, Miguel, James,, you hear her say, it's the holidays.  Can you sing with me?.  Slowly, haltingly, she lifts her voice up in the eternal carol of the season.  Silent night!  Holy night!  All is calm, all is bright..  The quavering voices of the boys join that soul-aching soprano lift.  Round yon Virgin, mother and child.  Then all of the prisoners are singing.  Most are looking away, some looking seemingly right at you.  Holy infant so tender and mild.  Sleep in heavenly peace!  Sleep in-.  A sickeningly bright azure light fills the screen as the camera's filters overload.  The sound cuts out completely.  Slowly, the image filters back, grainy at first, and then with horrific clarity, showing clearly about two dozen blackened silhouettes  starkly outlined on the brick wall.  The camera pans back around and upward to show a black-and-red Griffin standing about twenty meters distant, its PPC smoking and with a shimmering heat rising from its sinks.  Then the image cuts out completely to show the watery blue eyes staring out at you again.

"Let me be clear, gentlemen.  I want Anton back.  I was mildly piqued that my forces were unable to stop a company of SLDF troops from getting offworld, though to be honest, I expected something like that to happen sooner or later.  This was how I deal with a spot of mild pique.  If I don't get Anton back, alive and unharmed, I add, then I may have to throw a tantrum.  Do I make myself clear?"

He grins at your ashen faces.  "I thought so."  The viewer goes black.

[Darrian Wolffe]

It's not until you're passing through the belt later that evening that something comes to break the sickened feeling in your guts.  Io Base is calling you.  You crowd the bridge; the communication is in almost real-time, with only a one-minute delay or so.

"Unknown DropShip, this is Io Station, Vice Admiral Joseph Rue speaking.  What is the nature of your intention?"

Hastily you transmit back whom you are and what's happened.  At the last moment, Xin breaks in and adds some data to the stream - a video file that almost doubles the size of the data package.  Freunde looks at him oddly for a moment, until Xin grins and shows the title of the data he added to the stream - Communication from Stefan Amaris,m 11 Jan 2766.  "Admiral Rue will be very interested in Amaris's plans for his ships, don't you think sir?", and hits the TRANSMIT button.  You wait for a breathless few minutes for the reply.

"Ajax, I'm confirming receipt of your data.  I'm looking it over now.  Let me talk to my people and I'll get back to you A-SAP.  On a first look, however, I can safely tell you to continue your present course and speed.  We will take no aggressive action against your vessel as long as you stay outside a 100,000-klick safety cordon I've established around Io Base.  The facility is...under new management.  I'll contact you on this channel once I've had the chance to go over the information.  Rue out."

You've barely managed to get some dinner down when Captain LaFontaine summons you back up to the bridge to converse with Admiral Rue.  Evidently, he's made up his mind quickly.

"It's worse than I feared, gentlemen.  Thank you for getting me this.  All we've heard from Terra  was that there was a military revolt and that we were to stay moored here until given further instructions upon pain of having the SDS grid set off on us.  Now that I've seen what's going on, I can safely say that, even though my government probably has no official position on what's happening, I am authorized to take any and all measures to secure the safety of my ships and crew.  And this prick Amaris, he's a definite threat to both.  To say nothing of the people he's already murdered, of course.  As much as I'd love to sail over to Terra and blow Vancouver off the map (and I say that as more than just a Boston grav-hockey fan), we'd never get past Mars, at best.  So I think the plan you had is a good one - use the pirate point on the lee side of Neptune to get outsystem and back to Davion space.  So, on that note, I've got some good news and bad news.

"Bad news first.  We're going to have to fight our way out.  The squadron moving in from the nadir point is coming fast.  Very fast.  Once they see us light off our drive flares, they're going to use that velocity to intercept us, almost certainly on the near side of Neptune.  We simply can't be ready to move fast enough to not be brought to battle.

"Good news is that there's more than just us here.  There's a Canopian WarShip squadron that got stranded here when hostilities with the Periphery broke out last year, and a Star League-flagged battlecruiser whose captain is willing to join our battle line and try to break out with us.  So we're going to be a bit more to chew up than those assholes might be expecting.  Full TO&E follows, plus the probable composition of the oncoming squadron from long-range sensor data.

[agustaaquila]

Captain LaFontaine, I might need to borrow your computer here to make some calculations. 

Cap, I have a suggestion, and a way to make the squadron make a choice.  If we maroon Babcock with a little food and water and a transmitter that won't turn on until after we leave.  After we burn, we allow him to contact the inbound troops and explain that if they go on a combat run, he will die of unpleasant dehydration.  In order for this to work, Rowan must disable the transmission systems for a specific time.  You think you can do it Hawker?

Also, we need to figure out exactly how little water to leave. Which I can guess at using the computer.

anyone else have suggestions? 

[Riegien]

"Well, if we were to stick the general onto a dropship and send him back to Terra, we could probably get that sucker up to a reasonable fraction of C.  We can tell Amaris that we're sorry for the inconvenience, and we are sending him back as quickly as possible... er..", Hawker mumbles and then snaps out of his musing. 

"I can probably rig a countdown like that.  Though I'm not entirely sure of the point, really.  All the interdiction force has to do is send a single dropship or a shuttle or something to the station, and the rest of them can keep on after us.  I'm not really seeing the advantage in minimizing his chances of survival in this way.  Besides, if they DON'T rescue him and he dies cause of some stunt we pull, I don't want to think of what will happen back on Terra.  KISS applies here I think.  That said, is there any way we could use Jupiter to screen our actions from their view?  I know they are coming in from below, could we orbit up to the northern pole somehow?"

[Darrian Wolffe]

"Bright side about leaving him though, sir, is that any ship they dispatch to go pick him up is one less ship that'll be shooting at us."  Henrik shrugs.  "It's not like this clown needs any more reason to blow up civvies than he already has.  Hell, I can see him doing it for kicks.  You get a load of the radiation sensors north of the Court of the League just after we took off?  They sure as hell nuked the crap out of somebody.  Although I wouldn't want to have to explain to division command why - I dunno, Vladivastok, say - is missing from the globe when we get back.  Your call."

[Darrian Wolffe]

IO STATION AD HOC FLEET MANIFEST

STAR LEAGUE DIVISION

DESIGNATION	|class	|Gunnery	|Piloting	|DS Complement	|ASF Complement
THS Thunderer	|Monsoon-class BB	|5	|6	|0	|0
SLS Emden	|Black Lion-class SC	|3	|4	|0	|12 Gotha ASFs

CANOPIAN DIVISION

DESIGNATION	|class	|Gunnery	|Piloting	|DS Complement	|ASF Complement
MCS Jeanne 'D Arc	|Dart-class LC	|3	|4	|0	|0
MCS Calamity Jane	|Winchester-class CR	|4	|5	|0	|6 Transit ASF
MCS Belle Star	|Winchester-class CR	|4	|5	|0	|6 Chippewa ASF
MCS Maeuve	|Lola II-class DD	|4	|5	|0	|0
MCS Morrigan	|Lola II-class DD	|4	|5	|0	|0
MCS Enyo	|Pinto-class CRV	|4	|5	|0	|0
MCS Bellona	|Pinto-class CRV	|4	|5	|0	|0

FEDERATED SUNS DIVISION

DESIGNATION	|class	|Gunnery	|Piloting	|DS Complement	|ASF Complement
FSS Allegiance	|Robinson Block II-class LSM	|4	|2	|3 Leopard DS	|12 Corsair ASF

ESTIMATED OPFOR BASED ON BEST SENSOR DATA

DESIGNATION	|class	|Gunnery	|Piloting	|DS Complement	|ASF Complement
SLS Anguirus*	|Luxor-class CA	|3	|4	|1	|6 Lucifer, 6 Thunderbird ASF
SLS Saint Martinian*	|Cameron-class BC	|4	|5	|1	|0
Unknown	|Sovetskii Soyuz-class CA	|unk	|unk	|0	|unk
Unknown	|Sovetskii Soyuz-class CA	|unk	|unk	|0	|unk
Unknown	|Essex-class DD	|unk	|unk	|0	|unk
Unknown	|Lola III-class DD	|unk	|unk	|0	|unk
Unknown	|Vincent Mk 39-class CRV	|unk	|unk	|0	|unk
Unknown	|Vinvent Mk 39-class CRV	|unk	|unk	|0	|unk

* The Saint Martinian and the Anguirus are the only known vessels of their respective classes currently in the Terran system as of the last available active communication data before the lockdown of Io Base on 25 December, 2765.  These ship designations and their crew qualities are conjecture based on this information.

[Riegien]

Alright, I'll start working on the countdown.

 ((OOC: working on a system to lock down the communciations systems of Io station until we are underway.  I'm also going through and pulling the emergency comms and such out of any remaining shuttles or escape pods.  Also, GM, can you describe the nature of Io Station?  Things that are possible on something like the ISS wouldnt work on an O'Neil type station))

[Darrian Wolffe]

Alright, I'll start working on the countdown.

 ((OOC: working on a system to lock down the communciations systems of Io station until we are underway.  I'm also going through and pulling the emergency comms and such out of any remaining shuttles or escape pods.  Also, GM, can you describe the nature of Io Station?  Things that are possible on something like the ISS wouldnt work on an O'Neil type station))

GM: No problem.  You've got something like 8 hours on-station once you've connected up with Io Base before the fleet is ready to move.  Plentyof time to do what you're asking.  Simply physically disconnecting the power supplies are generally sufficient, and when done with a vibroknife so they can't be plugged back in.  Jettisoning the escape pods and lifeboats is also easily done.

Io Base is made of two separate parts.  Io "Base" is a domed base actually on Io, and is under microgravity except for an extremely high-tech grav deck built into the surface of the moon.  This is by far the larger of the two facilites; the ground operating station of, essentially, a WarShip boneyard.  Mostly made of administrative facilities, living quarters for the technical staff, a robust hangar system, and several extremely large storehouses meant to take ships out of mothballs on about 1-2 months notice (which is quite fast, given the pace of interstellar warface).  In fact, it was these support systems that led to the Thunderer being available to you at all; once Admiral Rue determined that there was a problem on Terra, he immediately ordered the entire support staff to start workups on the Battleship - which has easily enough space and spare parts to evacuate the entire facility's worth of personnel by itself.  The ground base has absolutely no defensive capability aside from a few anti-fighter emplacements.

Io "station" is indeed an orbiting facility wherein parts and crews are transshipped from the ground base to work on the mothballed ships.  It's a 500-m station very similar in stats and layout to that Kuritan prison facility in one of the late Jihad sourcebooks, save for better quarters, a smaller complement, and more storage space.  The area also sports several naval-gade PPCs in orbiting satellite mounts to keep anyone from trying to take off with a mothballed ship. These satellites are too far apart to use for any real tactical situation.

Finding a place to stash Babcock where he will have limited, if any, access to any communications equipment is extremely easy.  Locking him in a mess hall either planetside or spaceside is the simplest solution and physically sealing the access points from the outside is the simplest solution (they can always cut him out).  Locking him somewhere where it will be physically impossible to escape, but where he can still be recovered, is next to impossible, as computer access is eventually possible from almost anywhere.  Your only real solution would be to put him somewhere on the space station, cut the power to that section, physically disconnect any access from that section (by opening areas to vaccuum), and give him an environment suit and several spare air canisters and batteries.  That's a LOT of work, and you may end up killing him anyway.

[Riegien]

Hawker looks over information on the sections of the base.  “Well theres a couple options here.  We can dump him on the moon and barricade him in a room, or we can do similar on the spacestation.  We can use the defense grid to blow away the one we don’t stick him in.  OR..  Banzai, are you interested in doing a little creative programming?  We can try to hide a backdoor into the defense systems, environmental, and other systems here.  It would be a handy staging area for the SLDF when we get back here to kick that fat little toad off Terra.  What do you all think?” 

[Black Omega]

Hawker looks over information on the sections of the base.  “Well theres a couple options here.  We can dump him on the moon and barricade him in a room, or we can do similar on the spacestation.  We can use the defense grid to blow away the one we don’t stick him in.  OR..  Banzai, are you interested in doing a little creative programming?  We can try to hide a backdoor into the defense systems, environmental, and other systems here.  It would be a handy staging area for the SLDF when we get back here to kick that fat little toad ##$%g turd off Terra.  What do you all think?” 

(Fixed it for ya )

"Great idea, Hawker.  Hmmm, let's see..." Banzai pours over the Io Base and Station computer systems searching for power routings and control systems for the waste recycling, air conditioning, airlocks, and lastly, the defense grid of naval ppc's in the orbiting satellite mounts.  Banzai attempts to write and install hidden virus that will (upon receipt of activation code "xxxpcag".....)
1-when defense grid is energized and targets a ship with SLDF transponder, the air conditioning system reverses and blows sewage gases into defense grid control room.
2-if any manual override is engaged, all airlock explosive bolts are armed and all station and base inner doors and inner airlock doors are opened and then powered down.
3-if naval ppc's are selected to fire at SLDF transpondered ship then airlock explosive bolts will fire blowing oxygen out of station and base.
4-deactivation code is "by my side."

Does anyone have any other ideas?

[agustaaquila]

"Alright you groundpounders, welcome to the Black.  My name is Commodore VanKindler, XO of the Emden and right now liaison coordinating this fleet.  I have served on vessels that have twice won the Shandra Noruff medal and one that received the McKenna Wheel.  Enough about me, I am here to tell you a little about the Black, and how to keep alive in this next battle we will have.

First, you will be watching screens, and if something goes wrong yell.  This is not your battlemech, with just one person.  There are hundreds of people on this ship, each trained in their job.  Let them do their jobs, and we shall send these bastards to their maker.

So that you don't stick out like a sore thumb, don't be calling the left and right side of a ship.  Its larboard and starboard to those of us born in the Back, or port and starboard.  You go up to the fore of the ship, and back to the aft. 

Watch your screens, do your job, and we will be with the General soon.  Questions?  Good, dismissed!"