Sean-Michael Argo - Carrion Duty

He could have taken the ship and fled. Now that the enemy fleet was in range of the commune they would no doubt have chosen to kill Fiat Lux and allow the Fatalis to be prey for a later hunt. Though flight had never entered the mind of the captain, and if his crew had thought it they kept such things to themselves and did their jobs to the best of their ability. Captain Kochi demanded no less from any of his crew, or himself, and so they had gone to meet the enemy.

Kochi’s heart was racing, more so than it had in a hundred years, as he directed the last functioning guns aboard Fatalis like a conductor would manage a symphony.

The cor-sec frigate was not prepared for the daring close quarters attack, the ship’s captain likely a student of newer schools of void war in which torpedoes were the mainstay of all conflict.

Not so for Kochi, who came from another era of ship to ship combat, and he was in possession of a Wageri warship. The Fatalis had certainly caused much havoc with its violent torpedo attacks as the fleet came in range, but those too, were relatively outdated ordinance. Had the Fatalis been a modern capitol ship, the sudden flanking maneuver and torpedo fusillade Kochi had accomplished would have destroyed several of the frigates and at least crippled the lumbering Reaper tug. As it was, the bold attack had only seen the death of one frigate, a low-grade security cutter with hardly a crew of forty and a quarter the size of Fatalis .

The other frigates had screened well, and knocked out most of the torpedoes in flight, and those that did impact did not damage the ships enough to matter against the greater context of the conflict.

The mighty Reaper tug was a stout ship indeed, built for hard salvage ops in necrospace. Even though several torpedoes struck it, there just weren’t enough vital systems to stop the ship. It was too simple, too rugged a design for anything but catastrophic core failure to stop it.

Kochi soon realized that even if he torpedoed the tug full of holes, it would still carry on despite most of the crew being slain. The Grotto ship’s deficiencies in sophistication were made up for in sheer resilience, such was the way of Grotto Corporation and its people.

Not so, the cor-sec frigate that had allowed the Fatalis to close with it. The warship was equipped with a dozen tyrant class mag-cannons, larger version of what Ogre One carried on its arm, and at Kochi’s command the seven that still functioned punished the frigate mercilessly.

By the time the frigate’s battery crews were able to adjust their firing solutions to compensate for the point- blank attack, the Fatalis had already punched innumerable holes in the hull. At that range the mag-cannons went through the frigate’s armor as easily as a bullet cutting through cloth.

The Fatalis rushed past the dying cor-sec ship, leaving the frigate powerless and bleeding atmosphere as the ravager kicked its thrusters and screamed towards the Reaper tug.

Kochi became aware of his monitors again, and on a dozen screens he could see the mercenaries brushing aside the pitiful resistance put up by his surviving crew. He had not accounted for a boarding action, and as he’d been making his second torpedo run against the enemy fleet, the Merchant Militants had appeared from spinward and driven right into his hull. Clearly they had moved on the Fiat Lux coordinates separate from the bulk of the enemy fleet, and were lying in wait for Kochi to make the exact direct assault he had.

They were expert ship killers, whoever they were. Helplessly, he watched them seize deck after deck of his ship, as if they were some kind of hyper-virus that had infected his physical body.

The reprisal for Andromeda was disproportionate to the value of the station. Nothing that backwater orbital has would have warranted the sheer cost of mounting such a punitive mission.

Kochi assumed that there must have been some kind of tracking device on the Tasca ship that Lelani had not found, that was the only way he could imagine that they could have been hunted down so easily and so quickly. The fact that five security frigates, a Reaper tug, and a Merchants Militant faction had been dispatched to purge Fiat Lux implied that there was something of unknown and significant value about the Tasca slave cutter.

It was too late to consider such things however. Kochi heard the sound of gunfire just outside the hatch of his pilot’s chamber.

Kochi saw on a monitor that several charges were being placed at the fore of his ship by some of the elites, who must have moved across the spinward side of the warship’s hull while he’d been focused on his melee with the frigate.

Kochi was about to command one of the mag-cannons to blast them off of his hull when several tremendous explosions caused his senses to white out with pain and overload.

The entire engine section had been slagged, a quarter of the ship was sheered away from the main body by the traumatic blast and the ship was rapidly decompressing.

The mercs must have brought a tactical nuke with them. Kochi heard the lock on the hatch give and armored bodies force their way into his chamber with no intention of capturing the ship.

An armored hand grabbed his shoulder and he felt a painful pressure in his back. Six inches of bloody serrated blade now protruded from his chest.

His heart staggered painfully as he realized that the vital organ had been transfixed by the blade.

Then the planted charges detonated, sending the Fatalis tumbling.

Spinning uncontrollably through the frozen void, Kochi, the Deathless and the warship Fatalis died.

Rhett Calibos flexed his right hand for the seventh time since sliding his fingers into the tight mesh interior of the armored glove. He had worn such a glove on countless occasions, nearly every day since he had graduated from the Rubicon cor-sec academy, and that was years ago. It was as if he could not quite get comfortable with it, and no matter how many times he clenched and unclenched his fist the armor just didn’t feel right. He could sense the eyes of Captain Estrada and John Kratos upon him, and Rhett forced himself to stop flexing.

“Keeps me lucid, Captain,” said Rhett, displeased with how thick his tongue felt in his mouth, the painkillers and endorphin meds he’d been abusing for the last several days made it hard to keep his mind sharp or his speech from occasionally slurring. “I’m good. Let’s just get this done.”

The captain nodded and turned his chair to look back to the viewport and what lay ahead of them. The Fiat Lux ravager commune was obscured behind a thick layer of orbital debris. From their vantage point just above and behind the Reaper tug, the men strapped into seats on the pilot deck could see that it was going to be a bloody grind to reach the target.

Vitrian was holding course, though it was a challenge for even the brilliant pilot to avoid the obstacles in their path. The Reaper tug was about to impact against the main perimeter, and once it did, the only safe place would be just on the edge of the ship, between the prow as it smashed into the debris and the swirling wake that the ship would leave behind.

“I know the Reapers talked about it during the brief, but are they really just going to ram into that debris field?” Vitrian wondered aloud to the chamber. “That whole area must be mined and crawling with who knows what kinds of bootleg gun batteries. Even the cor-sec frigates have all pulled back.”

“That’s the Baen 6 Reaper tug,” responded John from his seat opposite Rhett. “Grotto builds all the tugs to be as tough as they can, but this one in particular saw duty in the Ellisian trade war. They’ve reinforced the hull for just this sort of thing, same goes for the scrap wagons.”