Two hours later, I found myself preparing to sortie inside Krishna’s cockpit.
“Um, the completion time for the convening of reinforcements is after 36 hours, right?”
“That’s right.”
“So why are we preparing for sortie now then?”
“Let’s see. Mimi, what would you do if the roof of your house is about to fall on top of you, or if the entire house is about to burn down due to fire?”
“Um…… I’d escape to a safe place?”
“That’s right. In other words, that’s how it is.”
As I replied to the puzzled Mimi who was tilting her head cutely, I ran Krishna’s diagnostic program just in case. Yep. The results were all good. Our ammo supply was perfect. As expected of my crew. The work was very thorough.
“Um, in other words, we’re preparing now because the pirates might decide to run away?”
“You got it. They’re probably making preparations to escape right about now. And that’s why we need to prepare for an early sortie as well.”
“The Refill Prime colony is a colony with a lot of elves, so it’s relatively difficult for outsiders to do shady activities here without being noticed, but it’s not like there aren’t any of those seedy types who do business with pirates here. They’re probably aware that Lt. Col. Serena, or rather, the imperial military was preparing to take action to some degree already.”
“Lt. Col. Serena wants to catch them off guard. That’s why we’re going to begin the operation way earlier than officially scheduled and get the pirates while their pants are down.”
“I see. But will they really fall for this? And do we have enough forces?”
“I’m sure those have already been accounted for. In the first place, there’s a good chance the schedule we were given was false from the start.”
There’s a saying that in order to deceive your enemies, you’d need to deceive your allies first. Well, in other words, that’s how it is. We couldn’t be sure when and where an information leak might occur after all. That’s why they disseminated false info to throw the pirates off. But how effective will this strategy prove to be? Well, we’re about to find out.
“Well, right now, we are just hired guns. Let’s just obediently follow our client’s commands…… Mei, Krishna is ready to sortie any time.”
『Understood. I’m in the middle of processing our departure from the port. As soon as we launch out, we’ll join up with the rest of the combined fleet and begin synchronous navigation.』
“I’ll leave it to you.”
I cut my call with Mei and sank my body deep into the pilot seat. I found Krishna’s main pilot seat really comfortable to sit on. Perhaps it’s because the ship was meant to be piloted for extended periods of time.
“In the end, we won’t have anything to do until the main battle starts, so let’s just relax for now. Just take it easy, you two.”
That was what I thought earlier.
『Enemy ship detected at Sector 3C. Hurry and head over.』
“Will do!”
It was extremely busy. Who said that we wouldn’t have anything to do until the main battle starts in earnest? I’ll sock him good.
Ugh. I really thought of things lightly.
The reason it was this busy was that the ruse was working a lot better than we expected, and many fishes were biting the bait. That’s why Lt. Col. Serena has been continuously making arrangements to intercept and wipe out the escaping pirates as we waited for all of our combined forces to convene.
“They’re actually using military spy satellites and anti-FTL traps for this operation. How lavish.”
“Those things are usually reserved for use in conflicts with other countries after all. She’s one nasty woman alright.”
The strategy of Lt. Col. Serena is basically as follows:
First, she’d scatter high-performance military spy satellites to the areas between the pirate bases and hyperlane nodes so we’d be able to detect the movements of the pirate ships attempting to escape via hyperlane. Once those ships get near the entrance of the hyperlane nodes, she’d activate the anti-FTL traps to interdict them and render their FTL Drives virtually useless. Finally, she’d send out mercenaries like me and the corvettes and destroyers under her command in order to capture or destroy the grounded and helpless pirate ships.
“Target spotted. You ready, guys?”
“Whenever you are.”
I aimed Krishna’s four laser cannons straight at the pirate ship currently suffering from uncontrolled multi-axis rolls due to being forcibly interdicted. Since it was next to impossible to get a steady aim in order to simply neutralize the target due to it spinning so much, them surviving my attack would depend on the pirate’s luck.
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