Chapter 3

The Chimaera shook under the impact of a last pair of Concussion missiles into her weakening upper shields. After the first salvo, fired before anyone had had a chance to raise the deflector shields and after that same salvo had taken out the bridge deflector shields, the Pirate Uglies had made suicidal runs at the bridge tower in an effort to take out the brain of the ship before the Imperal weight in firepower and numbers came to bear. Even as the TIEs scrambled out of the hangar and turned to engage the pirate armada facing the ship, four of the Uglies made a run towards the bridge. It was suicidal, and they knew it. They also knew that this was their last chance to defeat [I]Chimaera[/I] or at least cripple her enough to be able to flee.

Most of them were shot down by the forward batteries as they made their approach, but one of them, a creation of an ARC-170 nose with a set of Z-95 wings managed to fire a single laser bolt right at the bridge before being blown out of the sky.

It hit before anyone could order the blast shields to be lowered. The material the bridge windows were made out of did it's job well and lasted exactly two seconds longer than the blast, so when they failed the bridge and everyone on it were not instantly vaporized. However, those unfortunate enough to be standing on the top-level of the bridge were instantly sucked out before the automatic cutouts could lower the blast shields.

Among the unfortunate few was the Captain of the ship, the annoying assistant navigation officer and a few other unfortunate souls. No one on the bridge could do anything but watch and hold on for dear life.

Which left the second in command as the acting Captain of the ship. Even though he held the rank of Captain in the Imperial Navy, Gilad Pellaeon had 'merely' been the Executive Officer, a mixture of seniority and politics being to blame for that. However much he had wanted a command of his own, this was not the way he had wanted it to happen, and as he struggled back to his feet from behind the chair he'd held onto he could not help but think of those that had died today already.

"Tactical, status?"

Over in the tactical section, the officer he'd been speaking to coughed and struggled back into his chair and checked all the scopes tied into his section. "Our fighters are engaging the enemy at their own initiative, and there are six more craft rising from the surface."

"Fighter Controller, have our half our fighters screen our damaged side against any attackers, have the rest of them hunt down and destroy those pirates. Helm, hard roll port, show them our unengaged side! Tactical, open fire on the launchers, just saturate the area if you have to."

Acknowledgements echoed around the bridge.

He didn't need to look outside to see the enormous number of green turbolaser bolts that slowly began to vaporize asteroids looked around for the now-acting-Executive-Officer, but couldn't see him anywhere. "Lieutenant-Commander Piett!"

"Sir?" Fiermus Piett appeared out from behind a pillar near the back area of the bridge. His normal station, so not surprising.

"Get me a damage report as soon as you can."

Piett nodded. "Yes, Captain." he said and continued without skipping a beat. "Starboard bridge deflector shield generators are off-line and the starboard ones were overloaded. No repair time given. No significant damage other than here and has been reported yet and nothing that would impair fighting efficiency. Casualties are minor only. And... that."

He pointed at the now missing windows and the Captain remembered why he had plucked the promising young officer from his backwater posting in spite of his lack of core-world background and had him field-promoted on his own responsibility. He was about to find out if Piett could handle the weight. He had just passed the first test with flying colours, but there was more to come.

They had both been placed into their new positions in a brutally abrupt manner, and now their crew depended on them to bring them out of this disaster of an engagement in one piece.

For the moment he continued to observe the battle as it developed around them. The TIEs tore the pirates to shreds and the ship's turbolaser batteries vaporized so many asteroids that a void began to develop in the field. No more missiles were incoming.

Surviving pirate fighters began to withdraw towards the larger of the two moons and out of weapons range of [I]Chimaera[/I]. Given what had happened already and what intelligence had been stolen from that depot taking the ship closer in was a risk, but he weighed it against loosing most of his fighter group and decided to do it. "Tracking, are there any active signal sources on that moon?"

"None detected so far, but we are still too far away."

"Maintain surveillance and let me as soon as you detect anything, Lieutenant. Communications, status of the ground team?"

The Communications Officer spoke a few words into his headset. "They have reached the camp perimeter and await orders to begin the assault."

Pellaeon frowned. Recent events had thrown the timetable out the airlock, and even though he was tempted to order the ground team to go in without support, but if there was one thing he had learned from the war it was that you didn't gamble with the lives of your men unless you really had to, and he had never been much of a Sabbac player.

"Tell them to hold until we send in the air support, but if they see any movement to evacuate or use those weapons against us, they are to prevent that at any cost."

"Yes, Sir."

"Helm, move us into maximum weapon's range of the moon's surface. We need to be able to support our TIEs if we have to."

"Do you think that they are hiding the stolen proton torpedoes there?" Piett asked, "We might be walking into the same sort of trap again."

"That is a possibility, but if they have the torpedoes rigged up to be fired..." Pellaeon trailed off and Piett passed another test when he picked up what his Captain had been meaning to say.

"Then why haven't they used them already?" He paused and frowned at the display that showed the battle as it played out. "They may have stationed them on the moon, hoping to lure us in."

"Maybe, but then why not just fire them at us right away? It is possible that they simply didn't want to risk us not taking the bait they showed us when we jumped in?"

"Possible," Piett conceded, "but it could be that they weren't willing to lose the more valuable part of their merchandise to sell to the Rebels."

"In any event, this ship has been tracing this shipment for five days now, and I will be damned if I let them get away with this." Pellaeon exclaimed. Everyone else on the bridge could only see the picture of an Imperial Officer, but it was more than the hatred for pirates that had been institutional with the various military forces throughout galactic history. Only those who had served with Pellaeon long enough knew that he felt this as a personal challenge and knew very well that his continued command of the Chimaera and in fact his continued career depended on his salvaging this gods-awful mess he'd inherited. Piett on the other hand was only too aware that in the light of his background his own continued success in the Navy depended on the Captain's patronage, quite aside from risking taint by association.

If the pirates actually managed to use them then having shorted out shield generators would be the last of their problems. There had been enough stolen from the depot to keep the Rebels in torpedoes for a considerable time, and certainly more than enough to destroy or at least severely cripple a Star Destroyer along with the careers of any bridge officers that happened to be on board. Not something either Pellaeon or Piett relished, each for reasons of their own.

So yes, they were very well motivated to succeed.

To Piett, there were two fundamental questions right now, one: 'Where were the torpedoes?' Not too easily answered, especially when he had to expect the lot of them being fired at him any second now. Two: 'If they're not here, have they shipped them to the Rebels yet?' He didn't really want to know the answer to the second one.

As for the first, he wasn't prone to speculating or guessing out loud, but he suspected that if they were still here, then they were likely stored somewhere. Rigging up a few crude missile launchers out of the tranport canisters and slaving them to the firecontrol of a ship was one thing, setting up torpedo platforms was another entirely, given that the pirates had stolen starship-grade weapons in the case of the torpedoes and not the smaller models that were being fitted to some gunboats or the new TIE-bombers he'd heard rumours about. No, these were the big boys, designed to be fired from and take out capital ships.

'Not something he wanted to see flying at Mrs. Piett's little boy', he thought as he watched the death of the last pirates.

"Captain, our TIEs have discovered an installation of the surface of the moon! It seems to be semi-sunken warehouses of some sort."

The Fighter Controller had barely spoken.

Pellaeon apparently thought of the same as Piett did when he heard those words. "Are they powered?"

The Tracking Officer checked with his section for a moment before turning to the Captain. "Barely detectable at this range. If we hadn't known the location..."

It was unclear how much Pellaeon was wont to blame people for things that were not their fault, so the Tracking Officer left the 'we would have missed it' unsaid in a way that still made everyone in earshot hear it.

Wanting to not appear too friendly with his officers, Pellaeon ignored it and instead tried to concentrate on the bigger picture.

"Any targeting systems?"

"None that they can see, Sir."

Pellaeon raised his eyebrows. "That doesn't mean much." he said with a wry, almost imperceptible grin. "It certainly didn't mean much when we moved close to the asteroid field."

He paused and looked over at his Executive Officer. Piett, sensing what his Captain wanted, nodded silently.

"Fighter Controller, launch the air support for the ground team. Have our fighters blockade the moon until the camp is secured, but they are to maintain a safe distance." No need taking unneeded chances in case someone had stored the torpedoes on the moon and had the entire installation on a dead man's switch. All they could do now was wait and hope the dice fell their way.

Two hours, a fierce, but futile stand by the pirates and a bloodless assault on the moonbase later, Piett found himself standing in one of the semi-sunken warehouses on the moon. As he had suspected, the torpedoes were stored in prefabricated warehouses that could have come from a hundred worlds in this sector alone and that had been partially covered with moon soil so as to make visual observation more difficult. The work that had gone into this and the base on the planet where the Pirates had landed a freighter and even constructed another few prefabs around it spoke of a more long-term plan. This wasn't just the usual hit and run robbers gang that was becoming so endemic on the Outer Rim together, but something altogether more permanent. Even though the attack on the base had yielded no evidence to that effect, all this made him think that a connection to the Rebels was more probable than not. The issue was that the computers that had been captured had revealed exactly nothing, and without anything to go on, this was where this investigation ended.

Of course Intelligence and the ISB would be looking into this, but he would be very surprised if anything really came of it. If the intent really had been to sell the entire lot to the Rebels instead of in small batches on the 'normal' black market, then the meeting had to have been somewhere else as neither side would risk the other backstabbing them, say what you wanted about the Rebels, they had enough in the way of smart people among them, and so far it seemed that neither the computers in the camp nor any of the pathetic prisoners they'd taken had known where that was. True, the pirates might be lying, but they knew Navy standard policy when it came to pirates and that their best chance for that to change from them being thrown out the nearest airlock back to a life on a prison colony was to tell the truth when being asked something.

Pellaeon would leave some sort of sentry behind when jumping out, but the chance that the Rebels, if they were indeed involved, would stick around long enough to allow for more than confirmation of their involvement, if that. So yes, they had accomplished the letter of the orders the old Captain had been given, but the spirit behind them, finding and crushing the Rebels... that task remained undone. A task he swore to complete.

tbc