"Odin Guard" By Eric Russel (Sagunt) Foreword A lone member of the Special Insertion Team (SIT) survives a Customs Inspection reinforcement foray onto an arms smuggler's vessel, the Comarca. Mission It's not one of the barges that normally berth at Nevialc Station, neither is it a personal transport sometimes used for smuggling. It is a light freighter retrofitted with transubstantiated plasma engines for faster speeds. It's a hot-lit cargo craft able to make civilian grade stock racers flame out for shame. The mass indicators showed a differential in the cargo from the manifesto, so the SIT was given Customs Inspection duty. When our team revealed a false bulkhead, things got hot. We lost three team members immediately, and the last is now hostage. This is where you come in. The Orbital Docks & Institutions Nexus Guard has been mobilized to deal with the situation because the only other SIT currently in orbit is on Belac Station, eight hours away by orbital lighter. You are tasked with breaching the bridge of the Comarca, destroying the weapons shipment, rescuing the SIT operative, and neutralizing the smugglers. Here are the schematics of the Comarca, though modifications have been carried out on her. All attempts should be made to keep her spaceworthy, but you are authorized to take extreme measures to insure this haul does not escape. We don't know how flight ready she is, that is why you must reach the bridge quickly. Insertion The personnel hatch was blocked, and we assumed overwatched on the inside. The boarding/breaching craft would allow flexibility in approach, but would show up on the Comarca's plotting screens. The best bet then, was a cargo skiff flown to the aft service hatch. It would not show up and give us away as we approached. What's more, we timed it to move simultaneously with the delivery of the fuel, so the crew was, with luck, at least somewhat distracted. The zero g of the deployment to the ship's open cargo bay only partly accounted for the giddiness I felt. We had done zero g work in training, we had done hot breaches in training, we had not ever had to actually put these into play in real life. We were all prepped and primed. There had never been a better moment to go blasting onto a vessel carrying illegal weapons. Our time was limited once the skiff bumped onto the Comarca and we started the bay doors closing. That amount of noise and vibration would be transmitted throughout the smugglers' ship, so we had to get in quickly. To solve this we had mounted a beam cutter on the cargo skiff that got us through to the interior within a minute of the bay doors booming shut and the pressure equalizing. It would not be there to help us get into the bridge, though. Inside the craft it was a straight shot into the bridge section, with galley and living quarters on the level below. We expected the SIT Grymn to be held on the lower level. We encountered a team of smugglers heavily armed with pulse guns directed at us from only 10 metres away. The first pulses hit the door in front of us before it was even completely out of the way. My team sent two diving through, a pistol pulsing in each hand. The rest of us covered them through the doorway. Bjarki, while still airborne, burnt two holes through the chest of one man, dropping him in a heap against the bulkhead at his back. The other man chose just the right moment to kneel. Three black scorch marks blossomed on the wall were his head had been, instantaneously igniting the panels. Our pulse pistols were certainly better suited to the close quarters than their full-sized pulse guns. The larger rifles simply didn't move quickly enough. They fire quickly, though, and we were warmed by several quick shots blazing through the hatchway. In the next instant, we all poured fire into the second smuggler, bursting his body with the pulses from our own weapons. The central corridor was ours. From here we could see into a cargo bay where the initial ambush had taken place. Several smugglers could be seen, but also most of the SI Team. To best insure a live delivery of our SIT Grymn, we dropped to the lower deck looking for her. The hatchway let us into the galley, locked down, but empty and undefended. It was from there we would have to make our push into the berths block. Peering through the vision port in the hatch, I could see two armed humans ready light us up. I set a smoke grenade at the hatch, letting it fill the galley with its haze, before pounding the trigger panel. The panel whisked open and the smoke was instantly set aglow by the pulses tearing through. More careful fire and manouver and we were inside the next corridor. The number of weapons we could bring to bear on our targets won us a very quick victory there. With a pistol in each hand, we could unleash ten discharges for every two of theirs. This was not an exercise in accuracy, but one of simply flooding the space with pulse blasts. A blind shot from one of the humans took Erik square in the chest, a quick death. We moved two into the berthing area to find our comrade, while two of us turned back for the bridge. Before we two had reached the bridge, they came hustling up behind us, the lower deck secured. Marni, of SIT, carried a commandeered pulse rifle. Marit unveiled the key to the bridge, three shaped charges to open us a hole through which we could assault the remaining smugglers. This would be the greatest challenge. The bridge was not big, but the cover available to those inside gave them a great advantage. The charges blew, but the door remained. It hung only by shreds of its monocrystalline iron reinforcements, but hung nonetheless. Marni stepped back, and with her rifle, began to pulse the few filaments that kept the main chunk in place. Before we had it down, we felt the ship hum, surging slightly in the direction of the station. Things had changed. While we were used to working quickly, this brought the whole population of Nevialc into danger. I sent Agnar back to engineering to see what he could do from there while we finished up at the bridge. He was gone so fast, I barely heard the “Yes, Loki.” As he sprinted aft. Before his footfalls had disappeared, Marni had separated the last bit of MC iron. We were back in business. We blindly tossed grenades through the hole to make our hosts duck. As soon as we heard the blasts, we were through the gap, diving, rolling, up, and shooting. I went straight, Bjarki left, and Marni took right. For a moment our pulses lit the bridge so brightly that the shadows disappeared. Even as the men ducked back for cover from our assault, we found our marks. Our next problem was the lumbering progress of the ship toward Nevialc. The grenades had done too much damage to the controls in the bridge, there was no turning her. Withdrawing from the bridge, we contacted Agnar to kill the acceleration to give ourselves as much time as possible. As we began our retreat toward our cargo bay, we felt a shudder in the ship. Something had been blown. Agnar came trotting up to us just as we reached our point of entry. Marni came up behind us, having returned to retrieve Erik's helmet. We loaded onto the cargo skiff, threw the levers to open the bay doors, and waited to get clear. The bay doors slowly eased open, and we were out as soon as there was space enough to get through. We radioed our status to Central, that they could deal with the vessel as soon as we squeezed through. Two tugs slowly drew near to nudge the smuggler away from its collision path with Nevialc Station. Another mission for the ODIN Guard. Light Infantry The Grymn are © copyright Hasslefree Miniatures and are used with kind permission. Many thanks to Kev White for reinventing the Space Dwarves and thanks to Sally White for supplying the No Limits Grymn army. Any other models shown in images are copyright their respective manufacturers.