Passed 50K and not yet done.....
An excerpt,
Sir, there's no sign whatsoever of commander MuKusic's suit telemetry.
It dropped off the screen completely about three hours ago." Reported
the communications officer.
Mike considered, it had been 12 hours since the action at the asteroid
base Under commander McMasters was still unconscious in the medical
position onboard the sledgehammer. And the Phoenix was still tumbling
slowly towards the asteroid base. As far as my could tell the only
thing keeping the asteroid base from smashing the Phoenix into junk, was
the greed on the part of the Pirates of capturing a fully functional
warship. Although the heavy construction and armored composition of the
Phoenix would make that harder than it might seem from the outside.
Finally go flotilla Commander came to a decision, "were about as fixed
as we are going to get, get everybody critical off the sledgehammer and
onboard the ships that are going in." Said Mike.
The entire construct vibrated as booted feet ran from one ship to
another.
"What about the sledgehammer Sir? Should we be using It also?" The
question came from the tactical officer.
"We will leave a couple a crewmen onboard, but as a warship, the
sledgehammer makes a fine repair shop. According to the logs the
offensive weaponry was stripped out, when the ship was converted to a
repair vessel. I don't think adding another target to the mix will help
much." Responded Over Commander Hartshorn.
"On Prester John, commander MuKusic used his ship against the ground
troops." Responded the tactical officer.
"Yes I know, but that was with strap on, small arms pods under the body.
I'm not sure what small arms would do for us pounding on an asteroid."
Said Mike.
"Bring out asteroid base map, red indicates known weapons positions,
yellow marks suspected positions. Green points indicate destroyed
weapons far last pass, but don't trust that they could've fixed one."
Stated the tactical officer.
"That's make this pass fast, skip drive as close as we dare, inertial
field drive at maximum on the pass, and skip out as soon as you can, go
around and do It again." Mike said over the commanders circuit.
Mike than continued, "all we have is speed, we're faster than that
carrier, and the base doesn't move at all, but both of those targets are
pretty tough, and if they hit us square were gone."
"All closed up, ready to detach." Came the response from the operations
officer.
"Plainsman and Huron report all closed up and ready to detach." The
report from the communications board was almost an echo.
"All right, let's do this." Commanded Mike.
Regards,
Kevin