It might be of interest to you, dearest HQ, that the IMG are showing some curious initiative for a change. Me and one of the navy intel men participated in a convoy escort job. Paid well, looked like the miners could use the help too, didn't neglect any usual duties. Like there are any to begin with...
On the 22nd of june, at 1900hours standard, me and officer codename Sempiternal dearted from T23, our convoy princials were a pair of pelicans carrying... well... Nomad stuff.
Oh not that I don't trust the miners, it would just be stupid not to actually take a peek. The stuff was consistent with liquid cardamine. See, the fun part is that the stuff is RIDICULOUSLY rare. I've seen it only carried by either Maltese nobility - the religious and landed business owner kind, not the ones with fancy paint jobs.
Or... Aliens. Now... Don't get me wrong, I myself liberated some of that stuff from the squids and pawned it away at some point or another, but the amount the minershad either took years to accumulate or your guess is as good as mine.
Anyway, as soon as the whole escort job started, we seemed to have a very generous amount of support from everyone's favorite bunch of enigmatic techno-mongers - The Order. Seemed like they were the cargo's recepients to begin with... Some mercenaries too. We moved out aaaaand big surprise - a Maltese noble with about a dozen junkers jumped us as we entered Kyushu. Well, more like tried to. They were prepared to go after the transports - I eyeballed no less than a pair of warans, a roc, one funny roadkill-frog-like fighter, a gunboat and call it half a dozen various fighters. Well, in any normal cicumstances they'd wreck the principals easily, but us all friendlies combined outnumbered the attackers by a fair margin. The fight lasted fairly long, as the enemy would try (with no small success) disperse our units between t23 and K. After a couple minutes though, the path was cleared and the transports moved on. It was a long and annoying journey through Kusari and the sigmas. The second big fight happened as the convoy was pretty close to its destination, in zonerland o74. This time, we were jumped by aliens and mutants. Harder fight, sure, but again - too many of us and too few of them. I definitely saw an alien cruiser, alien gunboat and one mutant gunboat. On top of that no less than three alien bombers, two light fighters and no less than three Federal-build mutant fighters. I couldn't make an accurate count - here's why:
COMMS DISCIPLINE SUUUUUCKED
I had an unreasonable amount of trouble mentally filtering out all the verbal chaff that resulted from about a dozen and a half men chattering, butting into each others' sentences and generally having NOTHING constructive or relevant to the job at hand to contribute. Understandable during the lax-time, but not when the action starts. Only two of us were present and we just picked logical target, mostly ignoring what was said out loud. Text wasn't much more useful. Ok, granted, we aren't working in too large groups, but on the off chance, that we become like... a giant war machine (again) - I'd veeeery much like that a vox-discipline manual be written. Just so vox was actually helpful in mass combat.
At any rate, during the second fight, the intel officer got three kills, I got two. Which including the brawl in Kyushu comes down to six kills Fleet-exclusive. The IMG convoy lost their decoy pelican. Overall, it worked because the IMG kept moving at sensible times and the mob of fighters on our side outnumbered the opposition every time. Don't know or care what happened to the cargo later, I'd guess the Order received it.
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