Where do they keep coming from?

The first inkling I had that there was another Reaver attack was when one of the Orbital's techs came to tell me NavTrak had detected a small boat coming in hot. No pulse beacon. No transponder. No contact with Flight Control. But their engines were running open, no containment, and they were on a fast approach vector that would have them on the ground in a matter of minutes.

In fact, by the time I got wind of it, the chatter from the surface was that the town was already under attack. Though, fortunately, the Militia was quick to assemble and the Reaver boat was pretty small. Probably no more than eight or ten of them total on board.

There was no way I would be able to get down to the surface in time to join in the fray, but I could direct the Sappers to take care of the grounded Reaver boat. It seemed it was a lesson they never quite learned. Hale's Moon wasn't a typical unarmed, ill prepared, Rim colony. We were small, yes. But roughly one in four people were in the Militia, and we often had folks visiting ready to take up arms. Plus, being a mining colony and all, we were never at a loss for "things what go boom," as some of my friends would say.

Near as I could tell from the after reports, the Militia managed to take out four Reavers on the ground and the Sappers got their boat. All that for no fatalities, and only a couple of major injuries, including Nack who caught an arrow through the leg.

When I did finally manage to get back down to the surface, I ran into x0x0. Her opinion, based on their markings and behavior, that this was a different tribe than the one we'd been dealing with before. Given that their boat had approached from one of the few shadow's in our NavTrak coverage, I couldn't be entirely sure where they'd originated so couldn't add that bit of data to the equation.

There was still a lot of speculation about how the remaining Reavers organized themselves. They'd seemed to have some kind of tribal organization, but who really knew? AuroraBlue, at one point, might have. But we never gleaned the Reaver's secrets from her. Mindo maybe? Possible, but again not someone we were likely to get useful information from. Functionally, we could work with the tribe concept and leave it at that. Which meant that, if x0 was right, we were dealing with another small integrated group who'd probably be working and attacking together.

And learning the hard way why Reavers fared poorly against our Militia.