The one wherin the Reavers make it an all day event

I've said it before. I will say it again. Probably many, many, times. I don't like Reavers. Cannibal Berserkers never really get fun. Ever. They're not even fun when taken separately, Cannibals and Berserkers are each an individually bad idea. Together, they become the stuff of Frontier nightmares, political suicide, and low budget late night Cortex feeds.

I knew that cracking the nest out in Beetle's Baily wouldn't actually end our Reaver problems. Even with their losses during our two main attacks, we'd barely managed to take out twenty percent of their population. For Reavers, as long as there was one to go on fighting, they would go on fighting. We'd seen that proven out time and again, though, admittedly, they didn't always suicidally fight until the last of them went down.

This time was different though. Rather than sending in a load of them all at once with a few boats, they trickled in in two's and threes over the course of half a day. There had to have been twenty or thirty of them by the time it was all over.

In hindsight, it's hard to actually tell what happened. The first colonists terrified cry of 'Reavers!' ringing out across town was answered almost immediately by supporting gunfire from one of the militia. Within a few minutes, the first wave was dead, but that wasn't the end. In ones and twos, coming into town from several directions, the Reavers kept coming. Even Lily was taken aback by the ferocity of their attack. 'Not like before' she said. And it wasn't. These actually showed some tactics and skill beyond screaming and leaping to the attack.

Normally, with a raid, I stay out of the way and let the militia deal with it. More than one member of the Town Council has told me my role as Mayor is more important to the town than my experience as a soldier, but this time they just kept coming and the folk taking up arms were getting tired. I ended up killing one in hand to hand on my way up to the platform, and then two more from my perch up on the tower.

Navtrak caught at least one Reaver transport on the ground, but where the hell was it? That Alliance Lieutenant who'd taken up arms with us before, Otsuka, answered our distress call with his patrol skiff. But he couldn't spot it either. Probably because he was concentrating on trying to add supporting fire without damaging any of the buildings in town.

It was only later, after we'd started cleaning up the mess, that we were able to find out where they'd been - five clicks southwest of town in a sheltered ravine. The spilled lubricants and reactor coolant led us to believe they'd been attacking less for food, than to keep us away while they fixed their crippled transport.

Still, why were they so fierce? Lily was right. These weren't like the Reavers we'd encountered before. At least not within our limited ability to actually tell the difference. Where these some kind of 'other tribe?' Did Reavers even have tribes? It was obvious they had some sort of organization. They could cooperate with each other well enough to keep their boats in the Black and they'd never been documented attacking each other. But how were they organized? Who led them? Did they have leaders? Or was it just some kind of controlled anarchy that somehow worked well enough to keep them going.

How would we ever know?

All we could do now was count the cost. Eighteen wounded, four dead, for twenty two dead Reavers and an unknown number injured. If hadn't been for the militia being on their toes, the numbers would have been dramatically worse. Hell. Weren't for Belize treating the injured, it would have been fewer wounded and more dead.

Hated doing funerals, but for the Citizens, that's what we did. The Reavers? No funeral. Just a mass pyre down wind of town and a few sincere words for the men and women who'd lost their Humanity to the Pax. I didn't like Reavers. But they'd been men and women once, like us, and they didn't deserve the cards they'd been dealt.