Honour Bound

Chapter Thirty Six

LPS Redemption - Unknown system, 30 December 2041

The pirates fought to the last, it had taken hours to clear the station the defending warrior contingent had been decimated as had the crew.

Brian had left four teams of his own guard and some crew members to help restore order aboard the station. The new armour had proven it's worth, despite numerous strikes against his Guards armour there had not been any injuries.

The disabled Frigate had been boarded and secured, unfortunately life support had been knocked out by the missile impacts along with main power. This meant that with the overall poor state of the vessel that emergency hatches had not closed when the hull was breached, the crew were all dead from exposure.

The good news being that the Frigate was salvageable, with a prize crew aboard making repairs it would soon depart for home base.

The Redemption was currently docked with the station allowing his engineers easy access to help with repairs. It also allowed the temporary support already at work to sleep in their own quarters and rotate with other crew providing round the clock support.

Brian was meeting with the station executives in the conference room.

"Lord Protector we are in your debt, we would all be dead had you not intervened. I had to admit when I saw a Frigate charging down a Cruiser I thought you needed a mental assessment."

"It was a calculated risk Director, one not guaranteed to work, we could not stand by and watch as pirates assaulted your station. Though I would like to know why they singled you out, do you have any idea why that would be?"

"Lord we are a trade station, we hold significant amounts of cargo waiting to be collected for onward movement. I can have the manifest sent to you if you would like, there are items of significant value on the station."

"Why would you store such cargos? Surely it holds a great deal of risk?"

"It does indeed Lord, our station was thought to be well defended against pirate attack though the threat assessment was based on what was deemed to be normal pirate behaviour where the most we would likely encounter was a pair of destroyers.

The station is a business venture between a guild of independent traders not beholden to any House, often when cargoes are to small or of too little value to transport it directly they are stored. There are seven such stations including the one you are now docked to within three week hyperspace travel. Traders will pick up small or low value loads when they reach a destination regardless of where they are due to be delivered, timelines are often long on such cargos. They bring them to stations such as this to offload, then they fill their ships with stock for a single destination. The unloaded cargo is then processed by its intended destination waiting for another ship to take it on its way.

The houses often don't deal with such cargos as they hold to little value for ships to deliver which allowed our guild to take advantage of the hole in the market. If the cargo had been destroyed or stolen it would have been crushing to our guild. No one anticipated a squadron of pirates led by a cruiser to assault the station."

"We were surprised by that also Director, it is something I intend to get to the bottom of. Hopefully there aren't many pirate controlled heavy warships out there or this region of space could become a lot more dangerous. Many others will have threat assessments based on pirates controlling light warships like yourself, they will all need to be revised.

Is there any support you can call on to help protect yourselves?"

"Unfortunately not Lord, not unless we concede ownership to one of the Houses but we are reluctant to do so. We value our independence."