When the three are finally done with the conversation - a mix of shouting, hugging, talking, and crying; a rollercoaster ride of emotions to which I paid the bare minimum of attention so Ferdinand could hear and see - I ‘retire’ to the bridge, where Alice, Brenna, and Charlene are discussing pns.

  “So… we all pile into the tugs, one of us stays here and just handles science officer operations for locking on, precision targeting, and such, while the other three do a focused fire runaround.” They seem to have already reached a conclusion based on Alice's summary.

  “I'd like to volunteer for the stay-at-home position,” Charlene comments, “I'm curious what childbirth is like.”

  “Painful and messy,” I shake my head as I enter, “You're welcome to it.” I pause a moment, “Oh, and just in case… do you mind setting our guests up with some Environmental Field Colrs out of our real stock of UPB's? I don't want to leave them dead if we shuffle ships around or something… I have an idea for next level that might trip that.”

  “Oh?” Alice raises an eyebrow.

  “Well…” I shrug, “Tier seven has the minimum of everything we want in a mothership; I was thinking then at seventh we could switch to using the party ship as the mothership, and if we all dip Conscript for the Pilot specialization, we could be fighting with a small fleet of tier eight tugs… oh, and with a Bioship, we could switch from four shuttle bays to two docking canopies, and save enough to go with the Colony Ship framework on the mothership…”

  “...thus greatly increasing the output from the Industry AND giving us a bit more firepower,” Alice smiles, “Sounds good to me.”

  “You already have a dip in Conscript,” Brenna objects, “it's not deying anything on your build.”

  “Well, with the permanent buffs, does it dey anything on yours?” Charlene raises an eyebrow.

  Brenna pauses and looks off to the side, “I want to have all my keystones in pce without the buffs. It's possible they'll get Wished away or something.”

  I pause, “Fair, that spell does still exist. You could of course also go with the walking deity tempte and be able to repce them yourself, then you only need a retive handful of keystones to get the rest back. Keep a couple of your real spells or talents known for escape, and you're good to retreat, rebuild your buffs, and come back better prepared.”

  “Yeah… we probably shouldn't all have the same build…” Alice shakes her head, “if there's some hidden weakness to it… well.”

  “Then we're all lost if someone takes advantage,” I nod, “okay.” I mean, I'm having trouble identifying any possibilities, but I suppose that's kind of the point. Still… I can buff people sky high; it shouldn't be a big deal if they can't mega buff themselves.

  “Anyway, strategy.” Charlene prods.

  “Ah, yeah. Just what we pnned when building the ship: Long range sniping. Whoever stays behind focuses on support: Spam Lock On,” Brenna broadcasts, “which gives us a little binus to hit, but more importantly fgs a target for focused fire. We shoot at them from the limits of our sensor range, and use our superior speed to keep them there. If all goes well they'll never see us to get a shot off.”I nod, and think as we head to our individual ships: Am I really going to do this? I mean… we're about to open fire without warning on a rather lot of people… four hundred and change, across the station and all the ships per our scans earlier… with intent to kill. Of course, they're sitting there with orbital weapons keeping watch over a world that was murdered by said weapons… so yes, yes I am. Right now, I am a soldier engaging in an act of war against other soldiers… that's allowed.

  I go through the checklist with my “copilot” summon (an Avian Conjuration Companion with the Mindless tempte for more hit dice, the Quick Companion form talent for better dexterity, Small sized for yet more dexterity, Altered Size to make it smaller and more dexterous still, and Extra Limbs so it has hands for working the controls: It runs the gun, and should do very well due to the high base attack bonus and superb dexterity… but it is very single-purpose) while I jack into the ship (well, drive my possessed minion through that). We power up the engines and unch, coordinating with the others so we all unch simultaneously.

  It's fun BEING a ship in space. There's stars everywhere, and I can see SO clearly… probably because I have the best sensors avaible. I divert power to the engines as I fly the ship, just testing… works great. Looks like Charlene is starting us on the station itself… that works fine. I give the orders to my minion to focus on whichever ship Charlene locks on, and it dutifully fires… the beams from all three ships are quite pretty as they evaporate the shields on that arc of the station and dig deeply into the hull… warping the weapons array on that arc, pitting the thrusters, and… huh, I think we cut a few lines in their sensor array… some of their active scanners just went dark. Nice… although I watch as their engineer replenishes their shields and the science officer focuses them on the side we just shot… heh, not going to help.

  The ships start heading straight for us, which we expected… they'll be able to actually see us soon if we don't move… so of course, we do. We go perpendicur to our primary target, and fire again: Three more beams of exotic particles fly through the void and strike true, blowing away the station's shields and causing it to go dark entirely… the hull is fully breached and it's venting air, but the crew will live if they are all in their armor.

  Well, unless we keep shooting at them.

  Charlene picks a new target, and we move and fire… and the closest fighter goes up in a bright fsh as the beams of energy from our ships not only carve through the shields and hull of the target, but blow through the power core as well… whoever was unlucky enough to be on that one is free floating in space… oh, two people, huh? Both armored… we might yet get prisoners from them.

  The battle progresses like that… we almost never miss, and it's generally two hits to disable a ship, three to destroy. We get out of data nets’ range of Charlene after a little while, and pick our own targets… but the enemy never gets us in sensor range (well, they do Charlene, but apparently don't have the sensors to penetrate the cloak, as they don't react to her presence). They scatter once they're down to half their forces… which, honestly, took much longer than I expected.

  We don't let them get away.

  We chase them down and keep shooting, systemically disabling all of the ships that were watching the dead world… and then we run into a problem:

  “We don't have carriage for the prisoners,” Brenna signs through the fleet video communication channel once the battle is won.

  Alice shrugs, “So? Kill them all. Seriously, they were presiding over a world where they murdered civilization.”

  Charlene sighs, “Look, Alice, we don't know their situation. Do you really think a tin pot despot only recruits people who willingly sign up? A lot of these folks could be draftees who weren't here for the original sughter, who only work for the guy because it's do or die.”

  “You don't know that!” Alice shouts back.

  Charlene keeps her voice level, “You're right, I don't. But tell me: Are you so sure that guess is wrong that you're willing to kill a few hundred folks that are now helpless and at our mercy when it might be murder?”

  That quiets her down, “...no, no I am not. But we can't exactly take them with us.”

  The tension leaves Charlene's voice as she continues coaxing her beloved off the edge of a war crime, “True. How about we disarm them, and drop them off on the pnet? They'll need to fend for themselves, but we can show them to the stash of food from the dead bunker to get them started; there's decades worth of rations for two, so these folks should be good for at least a few months, long enough for them to set up their own food supply or maybe get a rescue.”

  “That will do…” Alice agrees.

  We set one of the ships to broadcast a general message on repeat: “We are in the process of recovering the crews of the ships disabled in combat. Prisoners will be disarmed and released on the surface next to a decommissioned bunker with several months’ worth of field rations for all of you to share. Those who surrender peaceably will live. Resistance will be met with lethal force.”

  We then have a small army of summons collect and disarm everyone at gunpoint… and we lose sixteen prisoners because they decided they didn't want to be captured. We put them in a cargo bay, have them strip to their civilian clothing (and we use Detect Magic, Detect Tech, and Detect Augmentation to confirm they're disarmed… although we do leave the augmentations in, as pulling them would get very messy), put them in Extradimensional Torpor in batches ten at a time (via the Chain Spell Metamagic feat), and take them to the surface where we let them go, pointing them at the hole on the ground with the supplies.

  As we're dropping the st batch off and preparing to leave, one of them has the gall to shout at us: “You can't leave us like this!”

  I look at him. We let them keep their armor, Estex Suits, apparently standard issue; they are going to need the radiation protection. He's showing captain's stripes on his. He's a dirindi, a stout humanoid with three eyes. I decide to y it out for him pinly, “We're standing on a world where civilian popution centers were nuked from orbit… apparently using the weapons on a ship you were actively manning. Where I come from, that would be cssified as a war crime, and after a short trial, we'd likely execute all the officers involved for it.” I let that sink in a moment, and continue, “but we don't have a suitable judge, jury, nor legal counsel avaible for a proper trial. Nor do we really have the carriage needed to put you on ice until I can find them.” Okay, that st bit is a lie; I could easily arrange for a summon with Extradimensional Torpor twice and the Stasis Storage feat, but meh, “so we're dropping you off here, on a pnet that may still have some of your victims running around, with some shelter and enough basic supplies to st you several months. One of our number wanted to just kill you all out of hand… we could still do that, if you don't wish to accept our mercy.”

  “You… you won't get away with this! This is an act of war! Our king will…” he starts.

  “Oh, that reminds me:” I interrupt, “Cleanup…” I cast Greater Invisibility on my host, and then start spamming the Powerful Charm “Amnesia” from the Mind sphere with Ranged Mind and Chain Spell (slightly better than Mass Charm for my current purposes) for a while, until all of them have lost all memory of the past week. The others pick up on what I'm doing, and copy me while I work. As far as these folks will know, they just woke up unarmed on the surface of the pnet they previously oversaw. We pce an illusory sign saying “Food” with an arrow pointing to the semi-busted bunker so they hopefully don't starve any time soon.

  On the way back up to the ships, Alice comments telepathically, “You know, there's no reason at all that we can't fix most of those ships up and staff them with summons. We have the spare UPBs.”

  “Enrge our fleet with some real, disposable ships, eh?” Brenna considers on the same channel, “not a bad idea… worst case scenario we waste some UPBs repairing ships that will be captured by someone else.”

  “Let's do it, then….” Charlene is grinning, “I can be a fleet admiral.”

  I chuckle silently into the vacuum, and we get to work. Turns out that the station is a colony ship with a hangar bay, two shuttle bays, a super nuclear silo, a basic drift engine, and storage. The fighters are short range vessels (no drift engines or crew quarters, they're… well, fighters) while the shuttles are basically armed cargo shuttles (likewise short range). We repair and staff the main ship along with five of the fighters and one of the shuttles. The other ships are just too far gone to repair with what we have, so we abandon them to slowly drift into the local sor primary.

  That done, we park all of the working captured short range ships in the colony ship, park our own Tugs in our party ship, sync our drift engines, and plot a course for Absalom Station….