And then there's the one that escaped . . .

Given the things we have to deal with out here on the Rim, I've come up with a pretty concise order for arranging the dislike for things shooting at us. Bottom of the list is your common Raider. They're usually just your run of the mill untrained gun hand set on some ill gotten gains. A well trained militia makes short work of them unless they're very careful, or very sneaky. Next up, you've got Reavers. I know Reavers scare the hell out of most folk, but a few well placed rifles can tear a raiding party apart if folks don't panic. Folks here on Hale's Moon? Folks here don't panic. More trouble than Reavers are the renegade Alliance troopers lurking out in the desert. Loyalists, they call themselves. Never knew what they considered themselves loyal to, but unlike Raiders or Reavers, they're well armed, well trained, and disciplined. Regular military gone bad. The combat drones were even worse, but they weren't causing us any grief yesterday.

We'd been talking about figuring out where the Loyalists were hunkered down and sending in a team of our own to get our shit back. Plan hadn't come to much over the last couple weeks, but that didn't mean they weren't going to remind us they were there.

Duncan, I think it was, caught one or two of them inbound scoping the town and exchanged a few rounds before putting out the alert. Inside a few minutes, the townsfolk had assembled a small force that pursued the Loyalists back into the mines. Not exactly the best thought out plan we've had, but we had a few folk in from off world so the support was there. Have to admit, I was glad to see Nack taking up arms for us. The way things had been going, that show of support was about the best thing that could have happened to make things right between us.

I spent most of the time up on the tower tucked under the Naktrak antenna with my long gun, but with most of the fighting in the tunnel there wasn't a lot for me to shoot at. Of course, I doubt the one I shot was expecting to take fire from town while he was making a break from cover for the mine entrance.

Gotta love that long gun.

Together our folks managed to take down three or four of the Cheong Bao Ho Tze Loyalists with only a few wounded. Surprise was capturing a couple of their number in town after most of the fighting was over. I remember the report on 4th Platoon, D Company including a handful of women in the unit. Didn't expect we'd capture a couple of them. Though that's when Nack did the best thing he could have done to make things right between us: telling Archer that if I said not to kill the captives, we didn't kill the captives. My moon, they play by my rules. That was the admission I needed to hear to put the whole matter of disrespect aside.

We got both of the captives down to Doc Lavochkin who did her damndest to patch them both back together. Sad for the Doc, one of them didn't make it. She'd taken a couple rounds to the chest through the armor and there was just too much blood loss.

Against my better judgement I left the last one alone with the Doc. She was military trained and all, but even disarmed and shot up I was worried that little Wei Shian Dohn Wu was going to try something. Still the townsfolk needed to see things were back under control, and that meant going out and being seen.

Should have known she'd escape.

Not sure exactly how she managed to pull a fast one on the doc, but I wasn't exactly surprised. Only down side was we didn't get much of a chance to question her. Given that 4D was a hidden, hand picked, special ops unit, I doubt we'd have gotten much out of her anyway. But there was a chance, a slime chance, that maybe they'd see we weren't treating them like animals. Might be some hope they'd be willing to take amnesty and come in out of the desert.

Can't say another Loyalist raid was a good thing, except maybe in thinning their numbers. But it was the catalyst to set things right between me and Nack, and put our two colonies back on speaking terms.

I think that's worth a few bullets.