Assault on Sanseong station

The USA recognizes that a US citizen is being held illegally, in a condition of slavery, and is asking for help. It seeks the assistance of the ICC Biotech Division. The USA authorizes the operation and provides intel, money, and cyber warriors to ICCBD. The ICCBD plans the mission, provides money, additional intel, additional cyber warriors, equipment, assault troops, prosecution, criminal investigation, and victim rehabilitation.   Intelligence pulls all records on records on Sanseong, turning this information over to cyberwarfare and mission planners.   Cyberwarefare division begins probing the system and discovers that the systems have been extensively altered beyond the official construction specifications, that the station is full of pirated software, and that the station cybersecurity is a complete joke. They have soon thoroughly infiltrated most systems, and don’t think they have alerted the Sanseong sysadmins. By accessing surveillance cameras, they are able to feed those video signals into software which automatically generates 3D maps of much of the station’s interior and exterior. They are unable to find surveillance devices in the command suites though, so those are unknowns. They determine the number of soldiers on the station, and in fact are able to build a small dossier on each of them. They have a general idea about what kind of equipment the soldiers carry.   Based on the intel, an appropriate number of soldiers and other personnel are selected for the mission. The soldiers are equipped with weapons capable of defeating the enemy armor, and armor capable of defending against the weapons carried by the enemy. A fusion freighter is contracted, and the mission is disguised as a commercial shipment. Their cover story is that they are a team traveling to a near Earth asteroid to build a colony.   The mission could not travel in secrecy. Numerous parties watch all fusion ship movements and immediately publish any deviations from filed flight plans. The Sanseong systems watch for this kind of thing.   As soon as the flight plan is filed, the Sanseong systems alert the Sanseong government that the freighter will be coming uncomfortably close to the station. The journey lasts months before the freighter departs its flight plan. It turns off its transponder and makes an unscheduled burn which will bring it to the Sanseong station within weeks.   A chaff cloud is released in the direction of the station, obscuring a precise radar lock on the freighter. Blinding lasers are shined at the station to prevent it from gaining detailed information about the freighter using optical telescopes.   Unfortunately this means that Sanseong will have weeks of forewarning in which to prepare. The turrets are discovered to be malfunctioning and repair crews scramble to get them working. The radars are calibrated. Air locks are booby trapped. The station rocket engines fire to make the station slowly tumble, making it more difficult to dock.   The attacking intel teams have slimmed down their operation to a trickle of data. Still some of the exfiltrating data is noticed and the station IT team severs all external data connections.   The freighter begins making its deceleration burn just outside of the station’s minigun range. (“Range” here does not refer to a distance the bullets are unable to reach, but a distance beyond which the guns are too inaccurate to have a chance of hitting their target.) The freighter also begins making erratic maneuvers, albeit at a low delta V, so that its position is never predictable.   Before and after the deceleration burn, numerous missiles and drones are launched. Both use solar panels for power, and a combination of chemical rockets and ion engines for thrust. The missiles generally carry no warhead. Kinetic energy from their velocity difference is more powerful than any chemical explosive.   The Sanseong government orders that the station adjust every compartment either to vacuum, or to the maximum safe pressure, which is about 1.5 bar. The hope is that this will make life very difficult for attackers cutting their way through bulkheads.   The miniguns manage to destroy most of the drones and missiles, but are overwhelmed by numbers. The missiles impact with the miniguns and radars, destroying them. In two situations the missiles had to fly through parts of the station’s hull in order to hit their target (the tumbling station had positioned one radar and one missile behind the hull from the perspective of the incoming missiles). Numerous casualties resulted from the resulting explosion and loss of pressure.   A second wave of drones arrives some time later, decelerating enough to come to a stop with respect to the station. These conduct surveillance on the target, determining whether the guns and radars were in fact all destroyed. (They were.) Crews are attempting to repair both. The drones blind them with lasers and fire uranium needle rounds at them. Several sustain injuries despite their armor, and all retreat back into the station with their work incomplete.   The freighter comes roaring in, making its final deceleration burn. As soon as it is at rest with respect to the station it ejects the cargo containers and then accelerates erratically away just in case the station has a concealed weapon. It does not.   The cargo containers are self-contained space ships using solar panels and chemical rockets. One of them races up to the station and does a retro burn directly against the station wall, dislodging radiation shielding mass, and exposing bare metal. Numerous large screws project from the rear of the cargo container. It crashes into the wall with enough speed to embed the screws partly into the wall. Powerful motors turn the screws, clamping the container to the outer wall of the station.   The connection between the container and the station would leak badly, despite the thick, foamed silicone gasket. Drones spray a sealing sticky foam around the joint from the inside and it soon hardens, essentially preventing the leakage.   A drone uses a plasma cutter to cut a small hole into the station. The compartment was pressured at 1.5 bar, so air flows into the container, spraying the interior with molten metal, until pressure is equalized. Once the hole is large enough, all of the drones fly through it and into the station where they conduct surveillance and attack any hostiles.   Since the defenders could not predict the location of the breach, it was not booby trapped. The attackers continue widening the hole with a plasma cutter, this time being run by a human operator. Once it is large enough, the human attackers follow the drones.   This general approach is repeated as the attackers move from compartment to compartment. They always send the drones first. Defenders are temporarily blinded by lasers, tazed, and if that fails to neutralize the threat sufficiently, shot with guns using frangible bullets. The drones only fire when ordered to by a human operator, but automatically target weak points in the target’s armor (such as joints). Frangible rounds don’t penetrate armor at all, but they also are much less likely to penetrate objects which are likely to explode or render the station lethal. (Frangible rounds are made from powderized metal particles, loosely pressed into bullet shape. They carry just as much kinetic energy as any other bullet of similar velocity and mass, but disintegrate back into metal powder as soon as they connect with any object that is at least semi-rigid.)   The attackers make their way directly toward the nearest airlock, which they find thoroughly booby trapped. They send a drones to disable a gun emplacement and to remove two bombs. One of the bombs detonates when moved, destroying two drones, but does not destroy the airlock.   The other cargo containers take turns docking with the captured airlock, and disgorge their contents (mostly more drones and people) into the station.   The attackers break up into several teams who move from compartment to compartment, capturing them as they go. Once the entire station is captured, several attackers have been killed. Several more have been seriously wounded. Over half of the defending soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded. Roughly a dozen non-combatants are killed and several dozen are wounded.