"Smash and grab, now you're talking Colonel!" Ziska said, seeming to purr with satisfaction.

Catching herself, she smiled kindly, and then continued in a far more measured tone, "We should of course, most magnanimously, offer the transports the chance to surrender. However, if said transports fall into our hands and still elect to resist, well, we won't really have much choice. Violence is to be abhorred, naturally, but the survival of this fine company comes before concern for our enemies. These very same enemies will not offer us much generosity should we find ourselves out of supplies, ammunition, and most critically water. We are the villains now and a quick death is the only kindness that our new opposition will likely show us if we end up at their mercy instead."

Unmarred and seemingly unbothered by the discipline the Colonel had most cruelly leveled against her and Ingrid, Ziska seemed if anything to only be further energized by the growing tension. Her legendary conditioning had seen her through worse physicals trials and for all her many, many vices, MechWarrior Ziska took an almost masochistic pleasure in pushing her body to the very edges of physical failure. Even a pirate knew that if you wanted to fight, be it with fists, knives, or BattleMechs...you had to be fit enough to outlast your opponents. The blistering and utterly overwhelming warmth of a damaged BattleMech in combat leaking coolant by the second offered no respite for the weak or out of shape.

Basking in her newfound glory, Ziska made little effort to hide her obvious pleasure at how the day at developed. She'd almost gotten into a fight, despite having no intention to do so. It was a shame, Ingrid seemed far less amused about the matter than she was, but Ziska had begun to nourish a strange hope that she could somehow convince the Duchess to relax and abandon her hopeless chivalric notions. Even pirates followed codes of their own making, Ziska took no issue with such ideas. However, it was Ziska's firm conviction that a mercenary had to have a flexible code of honor, honor being a very loosely defined word when it came to professional sellswords piloting giant machines of war.

Equally intriguing and amusing was her new BattleMech. For it surely had not passed Ziska's notice that Reya had done something very sneaky and most wonderful to her RVN-3L. Ziska wasn't sure what exactly modifications the BattleMech engineer had completed to her BattleMech, but she knew enough about the recently popularized Guardian ECM to know that what the Colonel described was well above and beyond the abilities of the standard Guardian ECM stashed in a RVN-3L. She decided that she would interrogate the engineer at a later date. It was  always poor form to remain ignorant regarding recent technological developments. Especially when said field modifications might require rapid repairs during battle given the uncertainties of combat.

"MechWarrior Daschke raises an excellent point however," Ziska continued, nodding towards Ingrid with not even a trace of annoyance or mischief, a rare sight indeed when it came to Ziska. "Isolated and under supplied as we are, we can't exactly discount any potential allies or at least less hostile parties that may aid us, even if only for a short time. We are the stunning debutante at the ball, we might as well size up our suitors before we accept any invitations to dance."