In future if we capture one of Taine's starships, we shall keep it in the docking bay with the Ramp down, only a few token guards on duty and a tonne of explosives set to go off as soon as it clears the blast radius.
R-403 - Terran System
The galactic game of hide and seek was pissing Katz off.
There were four, no, five Raptors in his immediate vicinity, another pair of cruisers sweeping the outer system. Waiting for him to emerge. He wasn't about to oblige them; if they wanted to play find the needle, well he'd damn well make them search the biggest haystack he could find.
Earth.
The Terran system was a maze of transports and freighters, commercial and military traffic. Orion trading vessels, Amsus resource haulers. It was the heart of production for the entire Hegemony, feeding the great monolithic galactic power with raw trade goods, all packaged and shipped into the galactic market place with the Hegemony reaping the benefits of the export duties.
Nine planets, dozens of moons, thousands of objects of all shapes and sizes that occupied the asteroid belts, not to mention Pluto and the other Kuiper-belt objects out beyond Neptune. With thousands of places to hide and hundreds of ships to be mistaken for, the Amsus simply didn't have enough ships to hunt for and locate R-403 - that was if Katz could actually lose them.
He broke right, R-403 slinging down and under the outboard struts of an Orion freighter, coming up the other side as the pair of Raptors swung over the top, their weapons firing relentlessly after their renegade brother.
They'd been flying for days, escaping only to be found again. Dodging from system to system, cutting a course towards the Terran System, narrowly avoiding getting pinned down a couple of times, scraping out of it with a little luck and the sheer fact that R-403 simply refused to die...
Naturally that wasn't to say he was unhurt.
Three crewmembers killed in the battle; somewhere two days ago they'd lost their plasma cannons. The weapons systems had just given up the ghost, overheating from the constant usage. The sensors were acting up after a lucky Predator shot had torn the heart out of the lateral assembly, and Katz was still cursing the stupid collision with a Raptor that had jammed the ship's wings into their cruise position making atmospheric flight tricky at best.
Duct tape and prayer had been the solution to most of their problems. Alessandro was proving handy with spot repairs, trying to keep the small ship's reactors going despite the fact that they were painfully overworked and struggling under the strain.
It wasn't going to be good enough, and they both knew it. The young Kardiac EWO slipped into the gunnery seat and buckled himself up. He shrugged. "Eh Ragazzo, we are out of duct tape." He sounded ragged and tired, looking at Katz and reaching out to flip down the up-turned collar of his flight jacket that had been caught by his belts.
Katz glanced down at the tanned hand fiddling so close, and he looked up at Alessandro fussing over him. "I'll get us out of this," he vowed, leaning down to the NAV computer between the two seats and scrolling through it, keeping one eye on his flying.
People had been escaping Amsus Raptors for years in ships less equipped than R-403, and that meant Mars. He found what he was looking for and curled the Raptor on a steep bank, powering towards a group of civilian traffic, blinking at the small collection of TER-SEC interceptors dodging and weaving in amongst the ships, their flashing lights strobing the night.
"Romeo-Four-Zero-Three, this is Terran Security," the radio called out, and Katz grabbed it.
"Now is really not a good time!" he bellowed into it, catching Alessandro extending his hands for the headset. Katz gave it over gladly, continuing his run, now trying to stay away from the TER-SEC interceptors that, although seriously outclassed by a Raptor, could cause him problems if they got too close.
"Ahh scuzi, scuzi," Alessandro said chattily, "We were unaware of the speed limit officer, perhaps you should post sign, sì?"
"Romeo-Four-Zero-Three, you are requested and required to power down your engines..." the TER-SEC officer threatened.
"Che? No, no, we have no insurance, sì?" he flashed Katz a grin, "And momma, she say not to stop for strangers."
"Romeo-Four..."
"Call me Alessandro," the Kardiac officer chipped cheerily.
"Er..." the officer sounded confused.
"Sì, sì," Alessandro said into the radio, unclipping his belts and moving back to the sensor console, "And I shall call you Poliziotto Molto Importante, it means 'very important police officer'."
"Romeo..."
"Alessandro!" The EWO began punching in commands into his panel.
"Romeo-Four-Zero-Three!" The TER-SEC officer sounded irate.
"A-less-and-ro!" Alessandro sounded it out for him, "Uomo stupido è il mio nome non è più difficile..." he grumbled, still smiling, "Poliziotto?" he called into the radio, "You sure you wanna me to pull over?"
"Romeo-"
"Alessandro!" Alessandro snapped playfully, lifting his finger, "I don't answer till you use my name!"
"All right, Mister Alessandro..." the officer sighed in annoyance.
"No, no, just Alessandro," he corrected.
"All right Alessandro!" the officer said warningly, "Power down and prepare to be boarded."
"Hmmm," Alessandro mused, watching as Katz swept the Raptor around a large holographic Denver-Cola billboard and into the throng of spatial traffic, "No I do not think so, arrivederci Poliziotto!" he flipped the powerful jamming suite on as he leaned forward, slapping Katz on the shoulder and pointing at a path through the heaviest of the traffic.
Katz did as he was told, pulling back on the throttle as he weaved through the convoy, the Raptors on his tail overshooting as he peeled in the opposite direction, knowing that the enhanced jamming systems were flooding the space around them with chaotic signals and misinformation. Civilian transports, dependant on their Radars to manoeuvre inside such a tight formation, began evasive manoeuvres. A few of the slower moving vessels collided with each other as they cut erroneously across the flight paths of other ships.
Traffic control, co-ordinated from Stickney, endeavoured to salvage the situation, but with their own scopes just as fried, things were rapidly descending into sheer chaos.
Katz used it to full advantage.
* * *
Mars. Once the pride of the UN colonization initiative, swollen in its own prosperity. A place of the rich, a place of a wealth of natural resources that had fuelled the UN expansion and seen the birth of the Imperial Empire.
Unlike its mother Earth, Mars had been blessedly spared the strife that brought the world government toppling down, the colonial legislature isolating themselves. The resilient colonists of the cold red world had elected to stay out of what they saw as 'An Earth War'. The Isolation hadn't saved them from one man.
Warlord Alexander Richard VonGrippen.
It had taken a special kind of vision to shape the fiercely independent Martian Colonies, to provide them with a purpose other than their own selfish decadence. VonGrippen had done exactly that. Flush from the final victory over the UN, and with the new Emperor still rising the dais for his coronation, VonGrippen had broken the peace pact with Mars, positioning the war-hardened Imperial forces to strike simultaneously at the Martian leadership and strongholds.
That single act had seen an end to Martian independence and had been the catalyst that freed the Martian people from colonial rule. VonGrippen had instituted the Martian Combine, forming the world and its moons into one cohesive government. Ensuring that they held their own authority, it was VonGrippen who had negotiated a powerful voting position for the colony in the Imperial High Council. Ironically, by stripping their independence, VonGrippen had assured them their prosperity and prominence in the new order.
Yet at the end, Mars never forgot the occupation. And as the Amsus advanced on Earth, Mars rebelled against the Imperial order, turning valuable Imperial Military assets over to the Amsus, and surrendering.
And again Mars had been spared the ravages of war.
Under the Amsus Hegemony, Mars had continued to grow, but in a new fashion. Its bright lights and semi-independent laws attracted the dregs of human society. Casinos and the promise of a share of Martian riches were alluring, and Mars quickly sank into its own moral decay. It became the dumping ground for the refuse of the Amsus Hegemony. Beneath the bright lights of the modern cities, the billboards and vibrancy of its wealth, the utopian society's underbelly scraped through the muck.
It had become a joke, a place where souls literally went to the highest bidder, and anything could be bought, traded, or sold on the commodities exchange.
The Martian domes had become a great, thriving, if malignant metropolis on the rusted world.
TER-SEC maintained a token presence there, endeavouring to crack down on the illicit trade that flowed out of Mars like the river Styx, spreading its disease to other worlds. Constructs, drugs, prostitution. It was a place where the baser of the galaxy's lusts could be fulfilled.
And laughably, its capital was called Port Trinity. As if anything holy would ever reside there. It was a planet of perpetual decay, a place where a dream had died, choked to death in its own filth.
It had taken Katz a number of tries to successfully land R-403. The landing fields were little more than red mud, wet from the broken irrigation canals that brought water out of the large lake reservoir and through the suburbs of the city. The Orion terraforming units, purchased several centuries before, had never been brought up to full capacity, and so Mars lay just on the edge of becoming fully terraformed.
The Raptor's wings had eventually folded up enough to allow a tight landing, and Katz had been glad to get outside. After days cooped up with no sleep, he'd appreciated the chance to take a walk, despite the rain and stale air around him.
Alessandro bounded through the mud, splashing with his long strides as he ran back from the port master's office. He'd gone to pay cash for what was laughably classified as a landing field, returning with a couple of cups of coffee, one of which he pressed into Katz's hands.
"Ragazzo, they are looking for us," he said, nodding upwards to the sky.
Katz cursed as he tried to peel back the plastic lid to the coffee and spilled it down him, shaking hot coffee off of his hand as he peered upwards. "What did the dock master say?" he asked, tasting the coffee gratefully, leaning back to examine the cup. Denver, how did he know it was going to say that?
"He said no, then I paid double, and offered to double any rewards, He seemed happy. He suggested painting Romeo to blend in. He had a discount on the paint, e qui, splendido." Alessandro gestured back towards the small truck, bounding through the mud towards them loaded with a paint sprayer. "Besides, Ragazzo," he bent and picked up a handful of reddish brown mud, "Red is a better colour, eh?" he flicked the mud away and wiped his hand down Katz's tee shirt.
"Gee, thanks," Katz said sarcastically, resting his hand on his service automatic as the team of rough-looking individuals unloaded themselves from the truck, "They look friendly."
Alessandro looked back at them and nodded. "Sì sì, we should watch them, Ragazzo," he said, climbing up and into the Raptor, pulling open the weapons cage, and selecting an Amsus issue sub-machine gun and slapping a clip into it.
"We're going to need more than that," Katz said, nodding to the weapon, "If we're going to survive here."
"Eh, Ragazzo," Alessandro tapped him twice on the shoulder, "You have me."