It always seems to come in waves. . .

Over the last six months or so, we'd gotten fairly used to various and sundry attacks on the colony by everything from rogue autonomous war machines, to Yang gui zi Raiders, to a seemingly endless stream of Reavers.

You'd think they'd get the message. All of them. Except maybe the war machines that weren't programmed to care, and the Reavers who were too kichigaijimata to care. But in any case, you'd think that Hale's would have gotten a reputation as a place that wasn't high on the hit parade of colonies that were easy to crack.

In the Core worlds, you'd find that maybe one in ten folk had a knife they actually knew how to use. Maybe one in a thousand had a legal firearm, at least on the planets that allowed it. Out on the Rim, the numbers got a good deal higher. On your average frontier colony, most folk at least knew how to shoot a scattergun if nothing else. Most households kept at a scattergun or some kind of long gun around in case of trouble, even if only one in a hundred kept a sidearm.

On the more "civilized" Rim worlds, places like Beaumonde or New Melbourne, with their relatively large populations, proper law enforcement, and enough of an Alliance presence that they didn't have their own militia, most folk didn't travel armed even if it was legal.

Truly "frontier" colonies like Hale's Moon had a whole different set of problems. Maybe there was a sociodynamic law in effect. Number of firearms per capita is inversely proportional to the total population, with some set of base values that an undergrad could turn into a thesis for their Political Science Phd.

Me? I just knew that, per capita, Hale's Moon had a lot of firepower.

And, being a mining colony, we had more than out fair share of people with access to, and the skill to use, high explosives.

Which made me just shake my head when we get attacked twice in the same day.

The first one was probably just some low lifes trying to make off with some cargo that wasn't bolted down. Ident on their Firefly and the navtrak vectors made it unlikely they were part of the group that'd been hitting us off and on for months. Which meant these guys probably hadn't gotten the memo that raiding our little slice of heaven was usually bad for one's health.

Surprisingly, they, I never did get an accurate count on the attackers, managed to make off with Emma, a colonist who'd just settled in a bit after the Blackburne refugees got here. Got a wave demanding ransom, but before anyone could respond to tell them to piss off, Jai and Gabe set out in a little skiff and managed to recover her.

What I hadn't expected was yet another Reaver raid later that same evening. Seems they kept it mostly to the West side of town, near where the water processing station fed the town, which meant I didn't have an opportunity to get involved. Just as well though. Can never seem to get the smell out of my clothes when I have to tangle with those maniacs.

Some of the Blackburne folks, including Nack, got tangled up with them though. Apparently set a few fires over on the West side, and caused more than a few injuries but, fortunately, no fatalities.

I suppose though it's not entirely bad. It'll give Jai something to write about for her first column in the Herald.