Phillomena’s expression was deadpan, her posture perfectly balanced, her breathing was even, her coffee mug laid on the Poor Yorick!’s observation deck, broken to pieces, the recaf brew slowly pooling around her boots.
“Well spank me sideways and call me a Bedouin” she said, calmly “or, alternatively, explain to my why do we have a surprise contingent of Haqquislamite forces rushing on the side of the mitralite vein? The safe side? The side we had secured and did not need to leave much of a garrison on? the side we left for protected? The side we just left and now cannot rush back to defend without risking the Poor Yorick!’s bridgehead?”
“Welllllllll” Chickpea stretched the interjection as long as he could, to buy time for doublechecking the control terminal “It seems like we did not have the local support we thought we had initially. Here it shows that the Haqq forces just walked through three compounds and one village without them ever raising an early alarm to us”
“This feels way too close to how it felt working for PanO” sighed Phillomena, stepping away from the recaf puddle, letting the cleaning bot do its job “Do we have to scrape up some desperate souls on board and intercept ourselves?”
In the following moment of silence everyone thought carefully about their own fighting abilities, and the memory of Aleph attack at the Oceanographic center.
“Maybe I have an alternative solution?” hazarded Mr.Cuddles, raising a hand as if he was back in school.
The short, muscular, and balding man stood up when Phillomena gestured him to speak. He was one of the Ugly Duckling crew, a pen-pusher of dubious origin. He got roped into the Ugly five or so years prior, when he got to the ship on a private shuttle, presenting himself as a salesman from an small insurance company with an irresistible pitch (which turned out to also include the presence of a couple Yuan Yuan pirates as well)
A firefight, a hostage situation and a daring escape from O-12’s External Revenue Service (ERS) later, Mr.Cuddles had warmed up to the crew and stayed as a sort of bringer of surprisingly effective bad ideas and as a savage CQC gunfighter.
“As you may or may not know, one of my hobbies includes browsing Instamerc, see who’s around, what’s on the market, which faces are surviving and such”
Phillomena rolled her eyes; that man had a new hobby every week
“Well I was browsing yesterday” continued Mr.Cuddles “and I saw that a merc company I’ve been following closely is being sent here on an Haqq contract, possibly to support the very Haqq forces we’re seeing right now”
He touched the terminal in front of him a couple times and put the Peacemaker Corps’ logo on the big screen
“I believe that with minimal interference by Chickpea, we can, uhm, switch their contract up a bit and make the Haqquislamite forces into an invading group to be stopped? It will gain us a bit of time at the very least”