(for the sake of brevity, assuming all enemies disabled by now-NPC members of the lance.)

As the smoke and fire cleared, it appeared that Rat Lance had the advantage, with most enemies down through the efforts of the lance. The Thunderbolt pilot did the math. There was a series of small explosions at the cockpit as the head's cockpit hatch blew off its hinges and the chair went up in the air on a jet. A parachute deployed once the thing got altitude.

That's when the comms came in from 1-5, "Contacts bearing northeast of the position, three fast moving contacts at 20-40 tons each."

"1-6 here, pull back the vehicles and bring down fire on them, over. Fight's not over," Hart intoned grimly, "Let's see if we can't keep this at range." 

A quick glance over lance status info on one of the cockpit displays confirmed some of what the Captain knew. His group took a beating trying to fight that beast of a TDR. It looked like they were generally alright, but that the pirate had a roving patrol that they called in when there was trouble.

Mattlov checked his own status. He had a right torso that was pretty well mangled from the ammo explosion and scrapes along the armor, but otherwise, fundamentally sound. The Shadow Hawk ran fairly cool, except that the laser spiked the heat when used and needed to be nursed along. He checked for good terrain where he could set himself with that left torso exposed but the right shielded, to take some of the incoming fire, but could find little in the basin where they'd had their fight with the Thunderbolt.

There was comm chatter on the support tac net as the vehicles coordinated a withdrawal and the spotter, heretofore quiet and out of the fight, started to coordinate the fire patterns. The Arrow VI and artillery rounds screamed overhead in their trajectory toward the oncoming enemy, looking to catch them on the advance. Midway in the trajectory, the projectiles broke up and pieces scattered on the approach, along with the notification from the spotter, "Rat Lance, sending telemetry on the location of the mines, avoid those at all costs. We're switching to conventional rounds."

"Dropship is powering up," Hart added, "But we have a window to disable it if we can handle this engagement quickly." And then they'd get answers.