Tax Evasion the Hard Way
Jump Point, Sathyos/Banasdan, 102/989
tWhile Vasquez had been dealing so spectacularly with the Imperials on the upper deck, Jeremiah was heading for the hold. Reaching the bridge, he ordered the lights off, and consulted the security screens to see what their last two unwanted guests were doing.
The area near the iris valve was deserted, but the aft security cameras showed where the two marines had gone; they were in cover astern, sheltering behind the fake "cargo" casings that covered the Nemesis' extended maneouvre drives.
He decided on a sudden attack, and went and stood on top of the iris hatch leading down from the bridge into the hold. Meanwhile, Vasquez had moved to the rear of the vessel and was standing above the other iris hatch leading down into the hold, a grenade prepared in each hand. Speaking over the scrambled communications of their battledress, the pair coordinated their actions such that Vasquez' grenades wouldn't drop until Jeremiah had jumped down, fired, and taken cover.
A word from the Shiransharan to Victor, and the hatch scythed open beneath
his feet. Jeremiah dropped through, gun already muttering, to land with
a deafening Whang! on the deckplates three metres below. His bullets
glanced off the cover one of the marines was behind, but several rounds
drove home into the other, and one shattered his spine, leaving him in a
paralysed heap on the deck.
He's done it again!
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Going so well up to here...
Jeremiah flung himself sideways instantly he landed, and had the marine returned fire in kind he would have been safe. However, the Imperial did what Jeremiah himself had scrupled to do in the hold, and fired a RAM grenade at the Solomani secret agent. It actually missed him physically, but struck the wall close enough behind where he'd been standing to catch him in the blast radius. Chunks of razor-sharp shrapnel tore through his armour with deadly force, and he hit the ground like a tin of paté.
Unaware of this, Vasquez prepared to pull the pins on her grenades, and stepped on the switch for the aft hatch. Which failed to open.... clearly the marines had borrowed a page from her own book and jammed the hatch shut. Putting the grenades down, the hispanic agent started frantically moulding plastique around the edges of the hatch, now worried by the silence from below.
Seeing what had happened to Jeremiah from above in the bridge, Fox drew his laser rifle and started firing half-blind through the forward hatch. With a lucky shot, he managed to smash the right elbow of the remaining marine, making him drop his rifle, and then the entire aft hatch structure was blasted out of its' mounts and into the hold, and Vasquez sent her two grenades after it.
The resulting explosion as the grenades went off finished the encounter conclusively.
Snapping orders to Victor to kill the grav plates in several places, Fox dived through the forward hatch, reaching Jeremiah a few seconds before Vasquez. They pulled his injector tabs and provided what first aid they could, before steering his floating form up to A Deck and aft to the sickbay, where they hooked him up to the autodoc. The machine commenced surgery, and after a couple of hours had extracted all the shrapnel from his battered body. It wasn't able to stabilize him to the point where he would survive without regrowth technology, though, so they put him in a low berth and froze him until the successful acquisituion of a regen unit.
While the machine was patching Jeremiah back together, Fox had resumed his pilot's seat and was preparing to move the ship, with an option on a desperate Jump if need be. This was a last resort; they were well within the 100-diameter safety range of the planet below, and the chance of a misjump would be high.
Victor, working from his conversations with the late Commander Hawkins, had enough information on his voice patterns to mimic his speech. Turning off the radio jammers, he tranmitted a call 'from' Hawkins, a very weak call, explaining to 'his crew' that a gravitics failure had wiped out communications and that he was coming back aboard, to fetch the prize crew.
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Vasquez and Victor, tethered with safety lines and armed with fusion gun and a hefty satchel charge respectively, opened the iris valve in the hold and ventured into the docking tube connecting the Nemesis to the Ikaanis Mugina. Stopping at a (hopefully) safe distance, Victor called again as Hawkins, asking the hatch to be opened, while Vasquez locked her armour into the designated firing posture required for use of the FGMP.
The iris valve sliced open in front of them, and her finger tightened on the trigger. Her eyes took in the four marines waiting on the other side, but by the time she registered the closed iris valve directly behind them, it was too late and the shot was loosed. Beside her, Victor's lightning positronic synapses and steel servos reacted faster; he halted the throw of his bomb in mid-swing.
The bolt of fusion energy streaked into the airlock and exploded. Normally, a battlefield fusion gun creates a large area of destruction from heat and radiation more than the blast pressure. However, in this case, the bolt was confined within an airlock two metres square and three metres high. The result for the unfortunate marines inside was catastrophic. Their armour was pulverized, along with the contents, and any subsequent chance of survival was lost along with the tube's atmosphere.
The blast was only confined on three sides, of course; towards the tube (and the firer!) the effects were free to spread. Victor and Vasquez felt the slightest of warmth as the edge of the fusion flame washed across them, lost in an instant as the air it occupied was lost to space.
The tube, blasted loose from the side of the Ikaanis Mugina, started to swing away from the ruined airlock, propelled by the force of the fusion explosion. The startled Vasquez watched in surprise as the cerametal surface slid past, and then turned and scrambled back to the Nemesis, yelling for Fox to get her moving.
As the two ships rolled gracefully apart, Fox slaved the gunnery systems to his pilot's console, handed it off to the massive 8/fib computer concealed in the analysis room, and opened fire with all four turrets.
The Imperial crew were obviously not expecting such an aggressive move. The initial salvo missed all the vital components of the Ikaanis Mugina, but blasted straight through both primary fuel tanks. Haloed in an expanding mist of frozen hydrogen fuel, the Ikaanis Mugina lost all power and began to tumble helplessly away. Unable to fire back, manouvrre or call for help, the patrol cruiser was a helpless sitting duck, and a few more salvoes was enough to reduce it to floating fragments.
Concluding that Sathyos was probably now not a good place for some shopping, the Nemesis turned around and moved back out to safe Jump distance, and Jumped for Nisinasha.