Thats the first part of a story I have been working on the last month. Its still a work in progress, so feel free to suggest changes.
*******************
Date: Late Summer 2016
Somewhere in the emptiness between the planets, a space station was floating slowly towards its target.
Three weeks ago Catgirl Industries had acquired a larger contract to equip multiple asteroids in the Jupiter Trojans with a new defense system. Some Fen liked to live off the normal traffic patterns, but that also meant that they had to care themselves more about security. So instead of sending half of the crew far away, they decided to move Jenga to the Trojans for a few months.
Since the birth of Serina and her Exocomps Catgirl Industries had worked hard to redo all of the Modules of Jenga, but most of them were still without a dedicated engine. Because of this the maneuvering speed of Jenga made the journey to the Trojans a three week trip. The catgirls planned to stay there for a month and then return to the inner system.
Some of the Catgirls had protested against this ‘stupid boring trip’, but had no other suggestion how to deal with the distance and still get the job done in a reasonable time. Currently Mars was nearly 8 hours away by car, so everyone was camping the stations cinema in their free time or used the Interwave link back to Starbase 1. Some catgirls even thought it was nice to get some rest for working on interesting private projects without being interrupted.
Jenga was close to the middle point of their voyage as an alarm suddenly sounded through the tower and Cortanas avatar appeared in the holo tank.
“Something horrible happened, the Interwave is gone!” Cortana shouted agitated.
Harina, on of the two Catgirls in the tower switched off the acoustic alert. “Okay Cortana, calm down and tell us what is going on. No need to panic that quickly.”
At least not until the rest of the base began knocking on the towers door to demand to know where their Interwave was.
“The Interwave link to Starbase 1 just vanished without warning. No logoff, no signal degradation. Its just gone!” Cortana replied and suddenly looked thoughtful. “I just fired up my private backup link to Hedwig. According to the Trekkies Star Base 1 twitter, there should be nothing wrong with their transceiver.”
“Maybe its a problem with out transmitter station, I will ask someone to have a look at it, quickly.” Harina decided, still sitting at the command station of the tower. She quickly sent out a message to a few friends who had helped to wave Jengas backbone station.
Cortana shook her head. “It shouldn’t happen this way. Starbase 1 is not receiving our signal according to their status logs. And our transmitter has not raised a single warning in its logfile. Its still consuming the same energy, it does not produce more heat, nothing. That’s not right!”
“Could it be that something got into the path between us and Mars? Maybe some asteroid large enough to block the transmission” the other catgirl asked.
But Cortana wasn’t convinced. “No, Interwave connections are not electromagnetic waves, they cannot be blocked by normal matter that easy. Only active waved field generators like special shields or a jammer could...”
Cortana suddenly stopped talking. The lights of the holo tank flickered as a the radar of Jenga went to full power and sent out a pulse. But not a single other object appeared on the screen.
“Okay, that is strange” Cortana finally said. “The screen is clear and the radar seems to be working. But my receivers in the Stargazer could not detect them. I think something is actively disrupting communication and active sensors.”
“Cortana, call Space Patrol, we might need their help” Harina shouted and began to hammer the keys on her console. A series of images of starfields flashed on the screen and finally froze. The picture zoomed on a certain part of the screen, which turned a series of dull points into a group of incoming Fencrafts.
“Got them. Raising station wide alert, we might be under attack” she said and an alarm sounded through the control room. “Let me see if I can get them on radio.”
A few moments passed, but nothing happened.
“Different frequency, similar problem. Our radio signal is not getting very far, I would estimate we have a range of a kilometer at maximum.” Cortana said disgusted.
“What the hell do we now?”
----
A phone rung.
“Space Patrol, Heimdal office, Office Tom speaking. What can I do for you?” a voice could be heard through Cortanas communication line.
“Here is Cortana, the AI of Jenga... we are somewhere between Mars and the spin-ward trojans of Jupiter. And I think we will be under attack very soon.”
“Tell me what happened Cortana.”
Always good to flag a ‘did once work with OGJ’ tag on the screen of Space Patrol Cortana thought.
“We are still two weeks away from our target. Approximately five minutes ago, we lost our Interwave link to Star Base 1. Whatever took down the Interwave also blocks our radar systems. Oh, we also see a small fleet of vehicles incoming on our optical systems.”
The line stayed silent for a moment.
“You lost your Interwave connection?” a skeptic voice said.
“Yes, went down just like that, without any warning. The transmitter is still drawing power, but nothing goes out. Same for the radar, maybe some kind of passive jamming. We are speaking over a backup link I have with Hedwig. Different tech, I like redundancy.”
“Okay Cortana, I will see what I can do. That’s damned far out in never never land where you are at the moment. I will send the Roughriders a message, please coordinate it directly with them. If they cannot help you, call back immediately.”
“Thank you” Cortana said and cut the line, already dialing a connection to 36 Atalante.
----
“You see Jerry, no need to worry about at all. It will be a walk in the park.”
Jerry sighed silently. “Of course Mr. Randers, I just wanted to be careful. If we would have waited a few more days, we might have got a larger boarding group and the Stinger.”
Mr. Randers smiled. “You are sometimes too careful, Jerry. Sometimes you have to grab an opportunity if you see it, and you have to do it quickly.”
“But...”
“NO but...” Mr. Randers said a little bit louder. “You have to see the big picture. A whole basket full of Catgirls, most of them already know how to keep the head down. We are out in the middle of nowhere, they cannot see us, they cannot cry.” He looked over to the crew member at the station with the proud label ‘communication and electronic warfare’. “Isn’t it true?”
“Yes Mr. Randers, jammer is online and operational. Neither Interwave nor sensors are working for them. Unless they look out of the window, we are invisible.” the man replied.
“You see Jerry, everything is right. It will be like stealing money from a rich fat kid in a dark corner of a street. Everyone will be proud of us when we come back.”
Jerry chose not to reply while their ships slowly moved towards their target.
Minutes passed while the small fleet of ships continued towards the space station in front of them.
“Mr. Randers, we are being hit with a communication laser,” the man at the communication station said. “It seems they somehow found us.”
“Damned!” Randers cursed, “next time I want a fricking real cloaking device, not these cheap wannabes. Hit them with one of ours too, lets see if they are bright enough to surrender. Might safe everyone a lot of trouble.”
A loudspeaker cracked, and a nervous female voice could be heard.
“Here is Catgirl Industries Tower to unknown ships, state your business.”
Randers smiled as he replied. “Hi... I am just here to get a few valuable things to sell them later. It will not take long.”
“I don’t know who you are, but you are advised to keep a distance of at least 1000km. The base is closed for outsiders until the blackout is over.”
“I will make you a counter offer. I am a business man, if you just open the hangars and surrender, I promise you I will not hurt anyone.”
“If you will come closer than 1000km, we will fire on you. Stay away!”
“Fire with what? With your unarmed second hand cars? Safe me the bullshit, either you will open the doors or we will do it from the outside. It might take days until someone notices that you are not there anymore.”
“Never!”
“I give you twenty minutes to think about it. After this I will knock at the door.”
----
A wave of panic rushed through the corridors of Jenga, followed by a lot of anger. After more than one year of happy freedom and peace, the Boskonians were back to grab them again.
At least a few of them were back.
Some catgirls were running around scared, others were getting all weapons together in a central module of Jenga. A small group were working on locking some of the larger windows with waved steel bars.
“Is that really all of them? Just six damned little toys?” one of the catgirls cried, looking over the guns they had. One shotgun, three large pistols, a machine pistol and Cathys gyrojet pistol. And not that much ammunition.
“We will never drive them away with six lousily guns...”
“Seven!” Cathy said loud, carrying her steampowered cokelauncher, “and we don’t need to drive them away!”
“What you are talking about” one of the other catgirls asked.
“They have cut our radio and Interwave communication. They think it will take hours until someone is worried enough to look for us, maybe days... they are WRONG. Despite their jamming we still have connection to Hedwig, Space Patrol is already informed and they are on their way. We just need to delay them long enough!”
One of the catgirls eyed Cathys weapon. “Can I use this one?”
Cathy didn’t looked pleased. “Wave your own one, that is MINE!” She looked around. “Damned, what you are still waiting for? Each one with weapon training grabs a gun, the rest start preparing Jenga for defense! Build barriers, improvised weapons, anything that will keep them away until the cavalry arrives!”
Some of the catgirls looked thoughtful and suddenly run towards the lab areas of Jenga, others headed towards their private rooms. A large horde of Exocomps followed them, the small drones were always heading towards any kind of crazy construction they noticed.
Jenga wasn’t heavily armed, but it was made of thick plates of waved steel and transparent crystal from Venus. The attackers would not get it without a fight.
----
The noise of the speakers on the bridge became silent again. “The communication laser was switched off on the other side Mr. Randers.”
Finally the furballs were quit with talking. Panic would do the rest.
“Keep the speed until its time for breaking. Signal our fighter screen that it should take guard positions north and south of the station, we are going in.” Randers ordered, he wanted to play this by the book.
He looked at the picture of the space station in front of him.
“Looks like a series of huge containers smashed together. I wonder why they did not start with an asteroid, much more material to work with and much thicker walls.” He pointed towards the plan. “We will go in through this two gates, that way we can heckle them in the middle from two sides.”
He increased the magnification to maximum and looked closer to the doors he had marked.
“Make sure the boys have their toolkit ready, we might need to wield them open. And make sure that none of their small crafts escape. Shoot everything down that leaves the hangars!” He nodded, then Randers turned to leave the room.
“I will be taking on my armor, inform me at once if something unusual happens.”
It had been one of his greatest deals when he got the damaged Space Marine armor in early 2015. The original owner had died after the fight at Boskone Prime, but his damaged armor had been carried away on one of the few ships that managed to escape the Fen blockade.
It had cost him quite a sum of money to repair it to a working condition, but it had already proven its worth during earlier raids, just by ignoring pistol and rifle shots as they were dupes. It just was always a pain to get in and out of the armor. Luckily he had enough time, the speed of the main truck with the jammer was quite low as soon as the thing did its magic.
He quickly checked if the armor was still connected with the support frame that held it upright, then he removed his normal clothing and took the sensor jumpsuit out of the closet.
The original owner had been equipped with a series of cybernetic implants to control the armor as easily as his own body, but he had no plan to fight elite troops of the Fens head on. One of his fathers engineers had waved this jumpsuit to allow him to control the armor without implants. It was sometimes a bit quirky, needed lots of maintenance, but it was worth the effort.
The next step was to get into the lower part of the armor. This was one of the time consuming steps, because the armor had to be resealed with a special ‘blessed’ wax while whispering a prayer to some Emperor. He had tried to work around this time and time again, but neither recordings nor other people saying the prayer worked.
He checked the status lights that had activated and then slowly crawled into the upper part of the armor that was hanging on the wall. In his room on their asteroid base he had a higher ceiling and a mechanism that could lower to armor on him, but on a truck like this space was limited.
Finally the two parts of the armor connected and he could feel the servo motors of the armor started vibrating. The armor detached itself from the framework on the wall and he took a step forward.
“Close helmet” he said, making the voice recognition instantly close the armored visor. He smiled and opened the visor again. Everything worked fine and it had only taken 15 minutes to get into the armor.
With heavy steps, he entered the ‘control room’ again. He liked the moment when people looked with a mixture of awe and fear to him.
“Nothing happened, Mr. Randers, we will be in weapon range in a few minutes” someone told him.
“Make sure everyone knows... its showtime!” Randers replied with a smile.
----
Cortana and Serina were watching the incoming fleets through their cameras. In fact, they were watching them very hard.
Jengas optical cameras had never been designed for watching spacecrafts thousands of kilometers away. That’s what radar was for, they never had built a real telescope. Combining multiple camera systems and data from curious Exocomps on the outer hull into a three dimensional map of space was not that easy to improvise.
“Why are they approaching that slowly” Cortana noticed, updating the picture in the tower with a new batch of sensor data. “They should be able to get here within moments, but they are just crawling forward.”
But nobody had an answer to it. The space-fighters of the incoming craft had quickly moved into two polar positions around Jenga, ready to intercept any craft leaving the space station. Trying to get away with some of Jengas waved cars would have been lunatic at best and suicide at worst.
“They are changing their formation, I think we will get some warning shots soon” Cortana said, still keeping most of her attention on the incoming crafts. “If they continue with this speed, they will be here within less than 10 minutes.”
Harina wasn’t happy about this at all. “I still have no clear confirmation if their trucks and cars are armed at all! We just know that these planes have some kind of machine gun mounted at the nose, and two kind of missiles each. This will get very ugly soon.”
Cortana nodded. “Ugly or not, if they think we will just roll over and play dead, they are about to learn that they are wrong. Serina just told me that most of the external airlocks have been wielded shut now, same with the larger windows.”
Everyone looked at the steel barrier that now blocked the normal view at the stars all around the Tower. Nobody wanted to bet that the crystal from Venus could hold off the attackers alone and the Tower Module always had the largest windows.
“Would not be nice to abandon the Tower to them, these consoles were expensive and time consuming to build” Harina said quietly and turned her attention back to her screens.
“Heads up, I know that our friends in the labs are already working on all kind of defensive things against our visitors” Cortana said. “We will teach them that crashing a party is a risky thing to do!”
“The fighters are closing in slowly. They will get into zone 1 within 30 seconds.” Harina noticed with a vicious grin.
----
“Mr. Randers, both of our fighters have entered missile range. It will take another minute until we are in machine gun range.”
“Good. We might need them to shoot a few holes into the hull of the station to get in quickly. Signal them to fly around the station, then fire one missile into the Hangar with the ‘One’ on it.” he ordered the man at the optical communicator before facing one of his gunmen.
“Tell the boarding crew to get ready and keep the plasma torch in hand, we will have to cut our way in.”
“Yes Sir. Any special orders for them?”
“No. Get in, grab catgirls and anything looking expensive, get out before Space Patrol even knows we are here. That’s all. The other boarding shuttle will follow us, the truck with jammer stays back. Lets go!”
“Mr. Randers, there is some movement on the surface of the space station!”
Randers turned around instantly to the large screen that showed the magnified picture of the station. Yes there was something moving, he even recognized it But before he could shout a warning it was already too late.
----
A few seconds after the boarding shuttles started to make their run, two concealed laser turrets rose from Jengas surface and opened fire.
The first fighter didn’t even have a chance to dodge as two bright blue beams of light burned into its left wing. One of them burned clean through the wing, the other hitting a missile mounted below the wing. The whing wing just vanished in a bright red explosion, sending the wrecked craft spinning out of control.
The two boarding shuttles drives peaked as their pilots threw them into evasive maneuvers, waving up and down like mad to make themselves harder to hit while the two laser cannons recharged for the next shot.
Moments later the other plane launched both of its missiles, which quickly began to raced towards the two exposed turrets. The first turret fired at one of the missiles and missed. The second scored a glancing blow of the fighter, then the two missiles had closed the distance to their target and detonated.
The only things left of the turrets were two smoking holes, small lightning arcs crisscrossing the remaining the power cells.
The two shuttles eased their evasive maneuvers, heading towards their target again towards one of the hangar doors. Which was the moment the third turret rose and fired a beam of light at one of them.
----
“Evasive action, now!” Randers shouted, but there was nothing else he could do. He saw the two blue lines intersecting with one of his space fighters and the bright flash moments later. The damned ‘unarmed’ Kitties just had killed one of his precious crafts, his father would not be amused.
“Helmets, everyone” he ordered and closed its own visor while the missiles of his second fighter launched to take out the two cannons. For a moment he feared for the other fighter, but then the two cannons died.
The pilot stopped his evasive maneuvers and Randers just wanted to calm down as the window screen from his boarding shuttle lit up in the blue shine of the third turret.
Which luckily for Randers only managed a glancing blow. He thought he could hear the air leaving the craft.
“Get us to the hangar door NOW” he spit out, “or we all will be dead before we even reach our target.” He hoped that the fighter would take care of the last turret with its machine gun.
‘What if they have even more of this turrets?’ he thought, but then he pushed the idea aside. Laser turrets would not matter as soon as they were inside.
At least turrets on the outside of the station.
He watched as the closed hangar door quickly grew larger as his shuttle raced forward to meet its target as soon as possible and finally stopping in front of the huge hangar door he had designated as the target.
“It will take a few minutes to burn a hole into it” a man with a large plasma cutter floating in front of the closed hangar informed him as he left the shuttle. “As we heard they use Battlesteel both for the hull and for the doors.”
----
They had finally taken the first hangar.
Jerry was cursing silently about this idiot that organized the raid. The whole attack had already lost a lot of momentum and got worse by the minute.
‘First this damned thick outer door, then we find that all of the doors of the four parking boxes have been wielded shut... on both sides’ he thought and sighed.
It will be easy, like taking the cookies of a small child they had said.
Maybe they should have just continued with the extortion rackets, at least these were making profit.
But now they were inside the station and slowly advancing through one of the car boxes towards the corridor. An engineer had repaired the airlock with some waved plastic sheets and the room had filled itself again with an atmosphere... one of pure nitrogen.
So much for opening the helmet for a moment for a breath of clean air. Damned catgirls.
The loud sound of huge metallic foots made the boarding group to look for cover. through the door of the hangar they could see a huge shadow of a humanoid figure coming towards them.
Mechanical.
With some weapons instead of arms.
With some strange boxes on the shoulders.
And at least five meters large!
“Call for backup, the have a mech” someone shouted and Jerry could hear weapon reloading close to him.
The shadow casting mech finally stepped around the corner into the field of fire and everyone started shooting.
‘Aim for the cockpit’ Jerry thought and opened fire too. The whole hangar became a blaze of bullets for a second.
“Hold fire you idiots!” their Mr. Randers in his Space Marine armor shouted and everyone stopped firing, taking time to look at the mech for the first time.
It was a Madcat, Jerry recognized it from some Earth books.
Twin particle cannons, two shoulder mounted missile launchers, just bare metal without colors... and 60 cm high.
With a small spotlight mounted at a stick on the back that created a huge shadow on the wall.
“Some of these Catgirls had not enough beatings” Jerry cursed silently while Randers just laughed.
The miniature mech suddenly twisted his upper torso and fired with both his missile boxes. A swarm of tiny missiles shot towards the intruders, exploding in a a series of tiny green blobs.
Paintball ammunition. Did the catgirls even had real guns at all?
A few shots were fired and the Mech fell on his back. Jerry was about to join the laughing when it was suddenly replaced by an outburst of fury of his boss.
“DO SOMETHING” his boss shouted, pulling his gauntlet back and forth over his green colored visor. Two other of the boarding group were also frenetically trying to get their helmets clean without much success.
Someone tried to wipe the visor clean himself, but the paint stuck to it, leaving their only Space Marine and two other good men blind.
‘WAVED paintball ammunition’ Jerry thought again and sighed as the door to the hangar suddenly slammed shut, blocking their view on the mini mech they just had shot down.
This ‘easy’ operation was just getting better and better.
*******************
Date: Late Summer 2016
Somewhere in the emptiness between the planets, a space station was floating slowly towards its target.
Three weeks ago Catgirl Industries had acquired a larger contract to equip multiple asteroids in the Jupiter Trojans with a new defense system. Some Fen liked to live off the normal traffic patterns, but that also meant that they had to care themselves more about security. So instead of sending half of the crew far away, they decided to move Jenga to the Trojans for a few months.
Since the birth of Serina and her Exocomps Catgirl Industries had worked hard to redo all of the Modules of Jenga, but most of them were still without a dedicated engine. Because of this the maneuvering speed of Jenga made the journey to the Trojans a three week trip. The catgirls planned to stay there for a month and then return to the inner system.
Some of the Catgirls had protested against this ‘stupid boring trip’, but had no other suggestion how to deal with the distance and still get the job done in a reasonable time. Currently Mars was nearly 8 hours away by car, so everyone was camping the stations cinema in their free time or used the Interwave link back to Starbase 1. Some catgirls even thought it was nice to get some rest for working on interesting private projects without being interrupted.
Jenga was close to the middle point of their voyage as an alarm suddenly sounded through the tower and Cortanas avatar appeared in the holo tank.
“Something horrible happened, the Interwave is gone!” Cortana shouted agitated.
Harina, on of the two Catgirls in the tower switched off the acoustic alert. “Okay Cortana, calm down and tell us what is going on. No need to panic that quickly.”
At least not until the rest of the base began knocking on the towers door to demand to know where their Interwave was.
“The Interwave link to Starbase 1 just vanished without warning. No logoff, no signal degradation. Its just gone!” Cortana replied and suddenly looked thoughtful. “I just fired up my private backup link to Hedwig. According to the Trekkies Star Base 1 twitter, there should be nothing wrong with their transceiver.”
“Maybe its a problem with out transmitter station, I will ask someone to have a look at it, quickly.” Harina decided, still sitting at the command station of the tower. She quickly sent out a message to a few friends who had helped to wave Jengas backbone station.
Cortana shook her head. “It shouldn’t happen this way. Starbase 1 is not receiving our signal according to their status logs. And our transmitter has not raised a single warning in its logfile. Its still consuming the same energy, it does not produce more heat, nothing. That’s not right!”
“Could it be that something got into the path between us and Mars? Maybe some asteroid large enough to block the transmission” the other catgirl asked.
But Cortana wasn’t convinced. “No, Interwave connections are not electromagnetic waves, they cannot be blocked by normal matter that easy. Only active waved field generators like special shields or a jammer could...”
Cortana suddenly stopped talking. The lights of the holo tank flickered as a the radar of Jenga went to full power and sent out a pulse. But not a single other object appeared on the screen.
“Okay, that is strange” Cortana finally said. “The screen is clear and the radar seems to be working. But my receivers in the Stargazer could not detect them. I think something is actively disrupting communication and active sensors.”
“Cortana, call Space Patrol, we might need their help” Harina shouted and began to hammer the keys on her console. A series of images of starfields flashed on the screen and finally froze. The picture zoomed on a certain part of the screen, which turned a series of dull points into a group of incoming Fencrafts.
“Got them. Raising station wide alert, we might be under attack” she said and an alarm sounded through the control room. “Let me see if I can get them on radio.”
A few moments passed, but nothing happened.
“Different frequency, similar problem. Our radio signal is not getting very far, I would estimate we have a range of a kilometer at maximum.” Cortana said disgusted.
“What the hell do we now?”
----
A phone rung.
“Space Patrol, Heimdal office, Office Tom speaking. What can I do for you?” a voice could be heard through Cortanas communication line.
“Here is Cortana, the AI of Jenga... we are somewhere between Mars and the spin-ward trojans of Jupiter. And I think we will be under attack very soon.”
“Tell me what happened Cortana.”
Always good to flag a ‘did once work with OGJ’ tag on the screen of Space Patrol Cortana thought.
“We are still two weeks away from our target. Approximately five minutes ago, we lost our Interwave link to Star Base 1. Whatever took down the Interwave also blocks our radar systems. Oh, we also see a small fleet of vehicles incoming on our optical systems.”
The line stayed silent for a moment.
“You lost your Interwave connection?” a skeptic voice said.
“Yes, went down just like that, without any warning. The transmitter is still drawing power, but nothing goes out. Same for the radar, maybe some kind of passive jamming. We are speaking over a backup link I have with Hedwig. Different tech, I like redundancy.”
“Okay Cortana, I will see what I can do. That’s damned far out in never never land where you are at the moment. I will send the Roughriders a message, please coordinate it directly with them. If they cannot help you, call back immediately.”
“Thank you” Cortana said and cut the line, already dialing a connection to 36 Atalante.
----
“You see Jerry, no need to worry about at all. It will be a walk in the park.”
Jerry sighed silently. “Of course Mr. Randers, I just wanted to be careful. If we would have waited a few more days, we might have got a larger boarding group and the Stinger.”
Mr. Randers smiled. “You are sometimes too careful, Jerry. Sometimes you have to grab an opportunity if you see it, and you have to do it quickly.”
“But...”
“NO but...” Mr. Randers said a little bit louder. “You have to see the big picture. A whole basket full of Catgirls, most of them already know how to keep the head down. We are out in the middle of nowhere, they cannot see us, they cannot cry.” He looked over to the crew member at the station with the proud label ‘communication and electronic warfare’. “Isn’t it true?”
“Yes Mr. Randers, jammer is online and operational. Neither Interwave nor sensors are working for them. Unless they look out of the window, we are invisible.” the man replied.
“You see Jerry, everything is right. It will be like stealing money from a rich fat kid in a dark corner of a street. Everyone will be proud of us when we come back.”
Jerry chose not to reply while their ships slowly moved towards their target.
Minutes passed while the small fleet of ships continued towards the space station in front of them.
“Mr. Randers, we are being hit with a communication laser,” the man at the communication station said. “It seems they somehow found us.”
“Damned!” Randers cursed, “next time I want a fricking real cloaking device, not these cheap wannabes. Hit them with one of ours too, lets see if they are bright enough to surrender. Might safe everyone a lot of trouble.”
A loudspeaker cracked, and a nervous female voice could be heard.
“Here is Catgirl Industries Tower to unknown ships, state your business.”
Randers smiled as he replied. “Hi... I am just here to get a few valuable things to sell them later. It will not take long.”
“I don’t know who you are, but you are advised to keep a distance of at least 1000km. The base is closed for outsiders until the blackout is over.”
“I will make you a counter offer. I am a business man, if you just open the hangars and surrender, I promise you I will not hurt anyone.”
“If you will come closer than 1000km, we will fire on you. Stay away!”
“Fire with what? With your unarmed second hand cars? Safe me the bullshit, either you will open the doors or we will do it from the outside. It might take days until someone notices that you are not there anymore.”
“Never!”
“I give you twenty minutes to think about it. After this I will knock at the door.”
----
A wave of panic rushed through the corridors of Jenga, followed by a lot of anger. After more than one year of happy freedom and peace, the Boskonians were back to grab them again.
At least a few of them were back.
Some catgirls were running around scared, others were getting all weapons together in a central module of Jenga. A small group were working on locking some of the larger windows with waved steel bars.
“Is that really all of them? Just six damned little toys?” one of the catgirls cried, looking over the guns they had. One shotgun, three large pistols, a machine pistol and Cathys gyrojet pistol. And not that much ammunition.
“We will never drive them away with six lousily guns...”
“Seven!” Cathy said loud, carrying her steampowered cokelauncher, “and we don’t need to drive them away!”
“What you are talking about” one of the other catgirls asked.
“They have cut our radio and Interwave communication. They think it will take hours until someone is worried enough to look for us, maybe days... they are WRONG. Despite their jamming we still have connection to Hedwig, Space Patrol is already informed and they are on their way. We just need to delay them long enough!”
One of the catgirls eyed Cathys weapon. “Can I use this one?”
Cathy didn’t looked pleased. “Wave your own one, that is MINE!” She looked around. “Damned, what you are still waiting for? Each one with weapon training grabs a gun, the rest start preparing Jenga for defense! Build barriers, improvised weapons, anything that will keep them away until the cavalry arrives!”
Some of the catgirls looked thoughtful and suddenly run towards the lab areas of Jenga, others headed towards their private rooms. A large horde of Exocomps followed them, the small drones were always heading towards any kind of crazy construction they noticed.
Jenga wasn’t heavily armed, but it was made of thick plates of waved steel and transparent crystal from Venus. The attackers would not get it without a fight.
----
The noise of the speakers on the bridge became silent again. “The communication laser was switched off on the other side Mr. Randers.”
Finally the furballs were quit with talking. Panic would do the rest.
“Keep the speed until its time for breaking. Signal our fighter screen that it should take guard positions north and south of the station, we are going in.” Randers ordered, he wanted to play this by the book.
He looked at the picture of the space station in front of him.
“Looks like a series of huge containers smashed together. I wonder why they did not start with an asteroid, much more material to work with and much thicker walls.” He pointed towards the plan. “We will go in through this two gates, that way we can heckle them in the middle from two sides.”
He increased the magnification to maximum and looked closer to the doors he had marked.
“Make sure the boys have their toolkit ready, we might need to wield them open. And make sure that none of their small crafts escape. Shoot everything down that leaves the hangars!” He nodded, then Randers turned to leave the room.
“I will be taking on my armor, inform me at once if something unusual happens.”
It had been one of his greatest deals when he got the damaged Space Marine armor in early 2015. The original owner had died after the fight at Boskone Prime, but his damaged armor had been carried away on one of the few ships that managed to escape the Fen blockade.
It had cost him quite a sum of money to repair it to a working condition, but it had already proven its worth during earlier raids, just by ignoring pistol and rifle shots as they were dupes. It just was always a pain to get in and out of the armor. Luckily he had enough time, the speed of the main truck with the jammer was quite low as soon as the thing did its magic.
He quickly checked if the armor was still connected with the support frame that held it upright, then he removed his normal clothing and took the sensor jumpsuit out of the closet.
The original owner had been equipped with a series of cybernetic implants to control the armor as easily as his own body, but he had no plan to fight elite troops of the Fens head on. One of his fathers engineers had waved this jumpsuit to allow him to control the armor without implants. It was sometimes a bit quirky, needed lots of maintenance, but it was worth the effort.
The next step was to get into the lower part of the armor. This was one of the time consuming steps, because the armor had to be resealed with a special ‘blessed’ wax while whispering a prayer to some Emperor. He had tried to work around this time and time again, but neither recordings nor other people saying the prayer worked.
He checked the status lights that had activated and then slowly crawled into the upper part of the armor that was hanging on the wall. In his room on their asteroid base he had a higher ceiling and a mechanism that could lower to armor on him, but on a truck like this space was limited.
Finally the two parts of the armor connected and he could feel the servo motors of the armor started vibrating. The armor detached itself from the framework on the wall and he took a step forward.
“Close helmet” he said, making the voice recognition instantly close the armored visor. He smiled and opened the visor again. Everything worked fine and it had only taken 15 minutes to get into the armor.
With heavy steps, he entered the ‘control room’ again. He liked the moment when people looked with a mixture of awe and fear to him.
“Nothing happened, Mr. Randers, we will be in weapon range in a few minutes” someone told him.
“Make sure everyone knows... its showtime!” Randers replied with a smile.
----
Cortana and Serina were watching the incoming fleets through their cameras. In fact, they were watching them very hard.
Jengas optical cameras had never been designed for watching spacecrafts thousands of kilometers away. That’s what radar was for, they never had built a real telescope. Combining multiple camera systems and data from curious Exocomps on the outer hull into a three dimensional map of space was not that easy to improvise.
“Why are they approaching that slowly” Cortana noticed, updating the picture in the tower with a new batch of sensor data. “They should be able to get here within moments, but they are just crawling forward.”
But nobody had an answer to it. The space-fighters of the incoming craft had quickly moved into two polar positions around Jenga, ready to intercept any craft leaving the space station. Trying to get away with some of Jengas waved cars would have been lunatic at best and suicide at worst.
“They are changing their formation, I think we will get some warning shots soon” Cortana said, still keeping most of her attention on the incoming crafts. “If they continue with this speed, they will be here within less than 10 minutes.”
Harina wasn’t happy about this at all. “I still have no clear confirmation if their trucks and cars are armed at all! We just know that these planes have some kind of machine gun mounted at the nose, and two kind of missiles each. This will get very ugly soon.”
Cortana nodded. “Ugly or not, if they think we will just roll over and play dead, they are about to learn that they are wrong. Serina just told me that most of the external airlocks have been wielded shut now, same with the larger windows.”
Everyone looked at the steel barrier that now blocked the normal view at the stars all around the Tower. Nobody wanted to bet that the crystal from Venus could hold off the attackers alone and the Tower Module always had the largest windows.
“Would not be nice to abandon the Tower to them, these consoles were expensive and time consuming to build” Harina said quietly and turned her attention back to her screens.
“Heads up, I know that our friends in the labs are already working on all kind of defensive things against our visitors” Cortana said. “We will teach them that crashing a party is a risky thing to do!”
“The fighters are closing in slowly. They will get into zone 1 within 30 seconds.” Harina noticed with a vicious grin.
----
“Mr. Randers, both of our fighters have entered missile range. It will take another minute until we are in machine gun range.”
“Good. We might need them to shoot a few holes into the hull of the station to get in quickly. Signal them to fly around the station, then fire one missile into the Hangar with the ‘One’ on it.” he ordered the man at the optical communicator before facing one of his gunmen.
“Tell the boarding crew to get ready and keep the plasma torch in hand, we will have to cut our way in.”
“Yes Sir. Any special orders for them?”
“No. Get in, grab catgirls and anything looking expensive, get out before Space Patrol even knows we are here. That’s all. The other boarding shuttle will follow us, the truck with jammer stays back. Lets go!”
“Mr. Randers, there is some movement on the surface of the space station!”
Randers turned around instantly to the large screen that showed the magnified picture of the station. Yes there was something moving, he even recognized it But before he could shout a warning it was already too late.
----
A few seconds after the boarding shuttles started to make their run, two concealed laser turrets rose from Jengas surface and opened fire.
The first fighter didn’t even have a chance to dodge as two bright blue beams of light burned into its left wing. One of them burned clean through the wing, the other hitting a missile mounted below the wing. The whing wing just vanished in a bright red explosion, sending the wrecked craft spinning out of control.
The two boarding shuttles drives peaked as their pilots threw them into evasive maneuvers, waving up and down like mad to make themselves harder to hit while the two laser cannons recharged for the next shot.
Moments later the other plane launched both of its missiles, which quickly began to raced towards the two exposed turrets. The first turret fired at one of the missiles and missed. The second scored a glancing blow of the fighter, then the two missiles had closed the distance to their target and detonated.
The only things left of the turrets were two smoking holes, small lightning arcs crisscrossing the remaining the power cells.
The two shuttles eased their evasive maneuvers, heading towards their target again towards one of the hangar doors. Which was the moment the third turret rose and fired a beam of light at one of them.
----
“Evasive action, now!” Randers shouted, but there was nothing else he could do. He saw the two blue lines intersecting with one of his space fighters and the bright flash moments later. The damned ‘unarmed’ Kitties just had killed one of his precious crafts, his father would not be amused.
“Helmets, everyone” he ordered and closed its own visor while the missiles of his second fighter launched to take out the two cannons. For a moment he feared for the other fighter, but then the two cannons died.
The pilot stopped his evasive maneuvers and Randers just wanted to calm down as the window screen from his boarding shuttle lit up in the blue shine of the third turret.
Which luckily for Randers only managed a glancing blow. He thought he could hear the air leaving the craft.
“Get us to the hangar door NOW” he spit out, “or we all will be dead before we even reach our target.” He hoped that the fighter would take care of the last turret with its machine gun.
‘What if they have even more of this turrets?’ he thought, but then he pushed the idea aside. Laser turrets would not matter as soon as they were inside.
At least turrets on the outside of the station.
He watched as the closed hangar door quickly grew larger as his shuttle raced forward to meet its target as soon as possible and finally stopping in front of the huge hangar door he had designated as the target.
“It will take a few minutes to burn a hole into it” a man with a large plasma cutter floating in front of the closed hangar informed him as he left the shuttle. “As we heard they use Battlesteel both for the hull and for the doors.”
----
They had finally taken the first hangar.
Jerry was cursing silently about this idiot that organized the raid. The whole attack had already lost a lot of momentum and got worse by the minute.
‘First this damned thick outer door, then we find that all of the doors of the four parking boxes have been wielded shut... on both sides’ he thought and sighed.
It will be easy, like taking the cookies of a small child they had said.
Maybe they should have just continued with the extortion rackets, at least these were making profit.
But now they were inside the station and slowly advancing through one of the car boxes towards the corridor. An engineer had repaired the airlock with some waved plastic sheets and the room had filled itself again with an atmosphere... one of pure nitrogen.
So much for opening the helmet for a moment for a breath of clean air. Damned catgirls.
The loud sound of huge metallic foots made the boarding group to look for cover. through the door of the hangar they could see a huge shadow of a humanoid figure coming towards them.
Mechanical.
With some weapons instead of arms.
With some strange boxes on the shoulders.
And at least five meters large!
“Call for backup, the have a mech” someone shouted and Jerry could hear weapon reloading close to him.
The shadow casting mech finally stepped around the corner into the field of fire and everyone started shooting.
‘Aim for the cockpit’ Jerry thought and opened fire too. The whole hangar became a blaze of bullets for a second.
“Hold fire you idiots!” their Mr. Randers in his Space Marine armor shouted and everyone stopped firing, taking time to look at the mech for the first time.
It was a Madcat, Jerry recognized it from some Earth books.
Twin particle cannons, two shoulder mounted missile launchers, just bare metal without colors... and 60 cm high.
With a small spotlight mounted at a stick on the back that created a huge shadow on the wall.
“Some of these Catgirls had not enough beatings” Jerry cursed silently while Randers just laughed.
The miniature mech suddenly twisted his upper torso and fired with both his missile boxes. A swarm of tiny missiles shot towards the intruders, exploding in a a series of tiny green blobs.
Paintball ammunition. Did the catgirls even had real guns at all?
A few shots were fired and the Mech fell on his back. Jerry was about to join the laughing when it was suddenly replaced by an outburst of fury of his boss.
“DO SOMETHING” his boss shouted, pulling his gauntlet back and forth over his green colored visor. Two other of the boarding group were also frenetically trying to get their helmets clean without much success.
Someone tried to wipe the visor clean himself, but the paint stuck to it, leaving their only Space Marine and two other good men blind.
‘WAVED paintball ammunition’ Jerry thought again and sighed as the door to the hangar suddenly slammed shut, blocking their view on the mini mech they just had shot down.
This ‘easy’ operation was just getting better and better.