Forging Freyja - Chapter 11.1

Lummatii
Lothian League
Marian Hegemony
The Periphery
27 January, 3150





     Freyja awoke with a start, her heart racing, an her skin clammy with perspiration. She sat bolt upright,trying to force herself to relax after having just burst awake from a nightmare.

     "What's wrong, are you okay?" she recoiled at first at the feeling of Gunnar's hand on her back, then closed her eyes as if trying to will a sense of calm over herself.

     "Yeah, I'm fine, just a nightmare." she turned to face Gunnar Logan, who had groggily sat up beside her in the bed. "I'll be fine."

     "Must have been some nightmare, that scream probably woke half the city," he smiled reassuringly. She knew he was just trying to make her feel better, but the truth of the matter was that he was right. Ever since the night of her attack at the hands of Raiden Trogg, she hadn't slept well, wracked by nightmares and waking in fits of panic.

     "What time is it?" she rubbed her eyes as if doing so could wipe away the fatigue.

     "It's only about three thirty. We don't meet with everyone until ten. Plenty of time for you to rest up." he pulled her into his embrace. She wished she felt safer wrapped in those arms, as she knew she should. But the closer to the confrontation with the pirate band they came, the more nervous and unsettled she became.

     "I'll try," she said, not sure if she was trying to convince Gunnar or herself.

     Seven hours later, they found themselves standing at the head of a table, where an impromptu map of the planet had been drawn up. Raiden Trogg's jumpship had appeared at the system's jump point, and his dropship was three days away from making planetfall. The various leaders, and those committed to the fight against Trogg stood gathered around the table, with the goal of organizing the resistance.

     Freyja had thought a lot about the coming fight. They had managed to scrounge up seven battlemechs, mostly mediums. They had a further dozen agro and industrial mech mods converted to some kind of fighting shape. On top of that, they had a smattering of combat vehicles and vehicles that could be counted on for some kind of fighting spirit when the time came. She had the rough outline of a plan in her head, and she knew it would work, but the trick was getting everyone to go along with it.

     "So what you propose is splitting your force and giving up the capital? That hardly seems reasonable." The speaker was a rather rotund man, one of the planet's senators to the Lothian Senate.

     Freyja sighed. "Not when you put it like that, Senator." She tried to give the man due deference, but it was hard. Over the last few days, that had been one of the hardest things for her, balancing the fact that she was, in essence, still just a slave here with no standing, against the fact that she was now the de facto leader of the opposition to Trogg's pirates. "There's reasons for everything that I'm proposing. First of all, Trogg doesn't know we're opposing him on a large scale. We use that to our advantage. Count Logan is going to preemptively pay his share of Trogg's fee, make it look like we are capitulating here in the capital at least."

     "The senator has a good point though, why not hit Trogg with everything we've got? Why split up?" The man who spoke up this time was Lord Governer Pitcairn, the man in charge of the province where the Bakker's hold lay, and the man who had passed judgement on her months before for striking one of his wardens.

      Freyja responded firmly. "Our forces are naturally broken into two groups regardless. We have the Battlemechs, whose advantage is mobility, and the conversions, vehicles and infantry, which pack equal if not more punch, but lack mobility. What I'm saying is that we play to both of those strengths. When Trogg lands, I'll take a lance of the Battlemechs and make a show of force out by Abercrombie. It should be enough for Trogg to commit the bulk of his forces to crush us. When he comes out, we lead him on in a running battle, while the bulk of our people hit the capital and drop port. We seize his rear area, and lead the battle back in that direction. He will think he's going to have us pinned between his two forces, when in reality, we will be leading him into a trap."

     "And if he doesn't play along?"

     "That's why we have a few mechs in reserve, to escalate things if need be, to draw him out. If he doesn't, we fight a running battle with him and take his forces out piecemeal. Either way, we dictate the terms of things. That's the main point. We dictate the terms of the fight, not him." She tried to sound confident in her plan to the assembled crowd.