They made their way over to the most senior person they could find, a young sergeant. The two officers saluted the sergeant before Kinraid asked, “Excuse me, do you know te’ head o’ this facility?”
The sergeant looked at them rather strangely, “I’m rather busy here commander.” As he set to the task of bandaging another soldiers wounded forehead.
“ Ahem, I’ll ask again,” Kinraid replied, his tone growing more menacing. “Do you fecking know, who is in charge o’ this fecking shit-hole!”
Startled by the sheer force in Kinraids words, the sergeant straightened immediately, and addressed him properly. “Err, yes commander, it’s General Kalidis sir, he is overseeing repair operations, number 3 tank factory.”
“ Thank you, would you know where that is now?” Kinraid replied.
“ I’ll have someone take you,” the sergeant suggested.
He shouted over to an even younger looking man, “private! Take a raider and these two men over to number 3 tank factory.”
“ Yes sergeant.” The private motioned for Kinraid and Logameier to follow him to a nearby unoccupied raider. This one was surprisingly undamaged, quite a rarity.
“ If you would like to follow me.”
“ Diplomacy works every fecking time,” Kinraid whispered to Logameier next to him, who quietly smiled.
The three of them climbed into the small transport, the young private who looked barely in his twenties started the engine and the 4x4 sped off towards the tank factory.
“ Your part of the Liberty crew aren’t you?” The private asked curiously, noting their different uniforms.
“ Guilty as charged,” Kinraid replied.
“ You guy’s are like regular Robin Hoods, always popping up out of nowhere and giving the Krenaran’s a bloody nose before sodding off again, if you beg my pardon.”
“ Really?” Kinraid and Logameier looked at one another, genuinely surprised at this. “Well this time it was us who got the bloody nose, otherwise we wouldn’t have carved out a four hundred meter trench right through that field over there.”
After a few minutes the Raider pulled up in front of number 3 tank factory, with a gentle squeal of its brakes.
The building had taken some light damage during the fighting, a few smashed windows here and there, and the occasional dent and hole in the steel cladded exterior, all-in-all it had emerged remarkably well. Being situated in the far south west corner of the base far away from the main fighting had also helped its cause.
A formidable queue of smashed, torn and blasted vehicles had formed outside however, occasionally a patched up raider or an apollo would rumble its way out towards a parking area at the west side of the building.
As the three men made their way inside, they found that it was a hive of activity. Almost two dozen damaged vehicles were parked up in bays forming two long rows, four engineers to every vehicle. Bright welding arcs flashed continuously, casting deep shadows across the interior and sending sparks splashing across the floor. The buzzing of grinders and cutting equipment sounding like a swarm of angry bees about the place.
A tall, thin man was barking out orders in the centre of the vast tank factory, “Johnson how is the rotator on that turret, Finlay, double check the inlet manifold on that raider. Jackson, that dominator should have been finished half an hour ago, come on people, these machines aren’t going to fix themselves!”
Kinraid and Logameier made their way over to this man, the private who was accompanying them said, “I’ve got to get back to the main gate.”
“ Yeah, see you kid.” Logameier replied.
“ Quite some operation, you have going here,” Kinraid said to the man.
The man stopped and turned to face them, Kinraid immediately noticed that the bridge of the man’s nose was taped, and he sported a hefty black eye. The commander thought nothing of it, most men around here bore some sort of war wound. “Needs to be, nearly thirty damaged vehicles a day are coming through here, the names Kalidis.”
He shook both of their hands, suddenly a loud bang reverberated throughout the bay, and one of the raiders let out a cloud of white smoke.
Kalidis spun around to the source of the noise. “Idiots, you didn’t check the fuel cells for ruptures!”
“ General, we need your help,” the two men asked in unison.
“ Join the queue, a lot of people need my help right now.”
“ You don’t understand, it’s not a vehicle we need help with.”
The general looked at them with a hint of disdain. “All I know is your holding up this operation.”
“ It’s a ship,” Logameier said.
This got the general’s attention, he stroked his chin thoughtfully, “a ship, here?”
“ It’s the Liberty, she’s crashed and we really need her to be able to break orbit.” Kinraid replied.
Dalvosh, Vargev, and Captain Ericsson boarded the E.D. F shuttle, its gravitic engines gently whined as they powered up. Gradually the small craft lifted off, and headed towards the upper atmosphere. While in flight, Ericsson told them about the battle above the planet.
“ It was the biggest fleet action of the war, one hundred and eighty eight E.D. F and Solarian ships took part, we were led by Admiral Sato of the Hermes. When we arrived in-system we found nothing, not even the Solarian ships could find any trace of Krenaran activity.” Ericsson pressed a few controls, levelling out the shuttle as it continued its ascent through the clouds.
“ As we moved into docking range of the Echo base shipyards, we picked up the signatures of no less than three hundred and forty one stealth ships, led by six command carriers.” Ericsson sighed as he remembered the awful sight of that enormous fleet bearing down upon them.
“ To begin with the battle did not go well, they decimated us, we lost over fifty ships in the first few minutes. The Solarian ships acquitted themselves well, when the first of the Krenaran command carriers fell to a bombing run from the Hermes bombers they began to go on the defensive.” He said, a smile beginning to form on his lips.
“ The Liberty, and a handful of Solarian ships accounted for another. That really put the wind up them, the Krenarans fought back, but now they were panicking and disorganised, they became easy pickings for the Solarian battlecruisers who tore into them, although the Hermes itself never made it.” Ericsson paused for breath, smiling at the memory of the destroyed Krenaran ships littering space around his ship. “The remaining Krenaran ships retreated and abandoned the planet. We were in no shape to pursue however, so we re-grouped at the shipyards. With barely fifty ships left, most of which were heavily damaged.”
“ Jesus,” Vargev said in reply, “and I thought you would never come.”
The shuttle shuddered slightly as it cut through the high altitude winds before gradually breaking into orbit, leaving the emerald green atmosphere of Gamma IV behind. The stars and faint outline of the shipyards were gradually revealed to them.
As they neared the vast shipyards, Vargev got his first glimpse of the sheer scale of the carnage that had taken place here.
What remained of the E.D. F/Solarian fleet was clustered around the newly re-taken shipyards, in the distance hundreds of damaged, broken hulls that were lost in the fighting floated lifelessly, mere corpses of the proud vessels they once were. It was an enormous graveyard, a testament to the scale of the fighting that had taken place here.
Many of the ships that had survived the battle bore the scars of their ordeal. Where once sophisticated weapon systems had been, there was only twisted blackened metal, with only the occasional spark from shredded power conduits revealing the extent of the damage. Ruined plasma drives trailed bright plumes of energised plasma into space.
Vargev felt a small tinge of guilt at his impatience at questioning whether reinforcements were forthcoming in the battle on the surface. As the shuttle began its approach toward the station, he now saw that things had been just as desperate up here, he had no idea.