Hunted Tribes - A BT/nBSG Crossover

[VhenRa]

Correcting your (frankly poor) Math earlier?

[Hotpoint]

Correcting your (frankly poor) Math earlier?

Bingo. In fact I originally wrote it as "tenth person" not ninth but changed to the latter before posting because it seemed to read better... but then I forgot to change the rest of the paragraph to match. My maths is okay, it's the rest of my brain that's defective.  :P

Anyhow, got to get to work cleaning up chapter eight.  ;)

[Ajax_Wolf]

You're probably expecting to see more of a change than is there, sometimes it's just simple corrections for instance.

For example, from the last part of chapter 7 the paragraph:

Hennessy groaned. ‘Not another one’ he muttered to himself, looking up at her. ‘Lady you’re the ninth person that’s come to me since I got here who told me they were a Cylon’ he said. ‘Two of them were teenagers who thought it would be funny, the other seven are either medicated or in counselling’ he told her. ‘I’ve got a card for a very nice psychiatrist around here somewhere’ he continued, looking around for it.

becomes:

Hennessy groaned. ‘Not another one’ he muttered to himself, looking up at her. ‘Lady you're the ninth person that's come to me since I got here who told me they were a Cylon’ he said. ‘Two of them were teenagers who thought it would be funny, the other six are either medicated or in counselling’ he told her. ‘I've got a card for a very nice psychiatrist around here somewhere’ he continued, looking around for it.

Spot the difference?

... other than the colour I mean.  :P

Hehehe, sixes and sevens. :D

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER 8 - PART 1

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“The Ha’la’tha Crime Syndicate managed to get established soon after the bulk of the Colonial population had settled on New Circe and after a while they felt confident enough to try and expand operations to the other side of the border. This was a short lived enterprise however once it became established that despite us having a fairly liberal court system the sentences meted out by Wolverine Judges once a guilty verdict was reached can be a touch draconian... in the sense that people from the Draconis Combine would consider them a little harsh at times. The first Tauron gangster to be told he was going to be serving twenty-five years for trying to set up a minor smuggling operation fainted in court when he found out that meant hard labour in a germanium mine on an airless moon and New Circe didn’t have parole.”

Captain Marcus Thorpe, SLDF Intelligence – 3048CE


* * *

City of the Gods – Kobol – 3045CE

Admiral Adama looked up as one of the VSTOL aircraft their companions called a “Ripper” howled overhead, going probably a little too fast and definitely a little too low before it headed off north, just barely clearing the treetops as it disappeared. The two hulking dropships which had landed on a flat area of relatively solid ground two kilometres from the dig site had unloaded eight of the light aerial transports and these were being used to carry small survey and scout teams around the region, greatly spreading up the process of mapping and exploration. ‘Fusion powerplants?’ he asked Commander Thorpe who was walking beside him as they headed towards the makeshift camp which had been established near the ruins.

‘Yes’ Thorpe confirmed, ‘plenty of range and good performance’ he said. ‘They're usually intended to drop off an Infantry squad behind enemy lines so the pilots train to fly in low and fast under the Radar.’

‘No DRADIS to worry about here’ Adama pointed out.

‘I'm sure if you asked the Army Pilots flying those things they would say they're keeping it up for practice and its got nothing at all to do with it being the most fun they can justify having with their girlfriend or boyfriend over a thousand light-years away.’ Thorpe replied. ‘If I was twenty years younger and a better pilot I'd be doing it’ he admitted as Adama smiled.

The Kobol System had been empty when they arrived, Raptors jumping ahead of the fleet had confirmed no Cylon presence before Galactica and then the civilian ships were brought into orbit. Even then the civilian archaeological and survey personnel weren't landed until Vipers had made a series of high and low-level reconnaissance runs right across the planet and Marines had checked out the chosen landing site to verify the situation on the ground.

A pair of large eight-wheeled armoured-vehicles watched over the scientists and historians digging up the remains of what had once been a sprawling metropolis, and dozens of Colonial Marines and SLDF Infantry stood ready for action, but so far the only excitement had been coming from the people who were excavating the ruins. Cries of joy could be heard as another interesting relic was unearthed, Sundquist and his people were clearly having the time of their lives.

The historian himself was some kilometres away examining the Tomb of Athena. It had of course been one of the first sites to be investigated and once the Arrow of Apollo had been placed in the statue of Sagittaron once more the hologram had once again been activated showing the supposed location of Earth relative to twelve constellations. Sundquist had looked at the stars and after a few seconds had announced “They're wrong” noting that although the patterns were similar to the ones that could be seen from Earth they had been drawn in the sky from different stars and besides which over time constellations move. The Colonials had been intrigued to learn, though many still denied it because it conflicted with their scriptures, that the Zodiac dated to civilisations that existed on Earth long before the Thirteenth Tribe supposedly left Kobol to settle there.

As they neared the camp Adama spotted a man and a woman slowly pulling a large flat box on wheels over the ground by ropes, he turned to Thorpe and gave him a quizzical look. ‘Ground penetrating Radar’ Thorpe explained. ‘It can look metres down into the soil to see what’s underneath’ he said. ‘If they find something good they call over a crew to dig it up, otherwise they're just mapping the foundations of the old city’ he told him. ‘According to someone I talked to earlier so far it's looking like that illustration from the Scrolls of Pythia is pretty accurate.’

‘The City of the Gods’ Adama said, looking around. ‘I'm surprised the Cylons didn't dig it up’ he remarked.

‘Not their Gods, or really their history as they see it I guess?’ Thorpe suggested.

‘You don't think its your history either but you people are interested’ Adama noted.

‘We know for a fact that there were civilisations on Terra long before the dates given in your Holy Books and that humanity evolved there’ Thorpe replied. ‘It's what, supposedly less than four thousand years since the Thirteenth Tribe left here to go to Earth?’ he continued, ‘Well there's a town there called Jericho which has been more or less continually inhabited for twelve thousand so it's hard to square that circle’ he said.

Adama stopped walking. ‘Our scholars are having a hard time accepting that’ he replied. ‘And not just the religious ones’ he added.

‘We were careful to not spring it on you too quickly but you had to be told eventually’ Thorpe replied apologetically. ‘Your languages and cultures indicate that somehow you originally came from Earth around four and a half thousand years ago’ he said. ‘Both Caprican and the Tauron dialect in particular clearly evolved from the Ancient Greek spoken at around the time of the Trojan Wars, and there are other interesting holdovers from other contemporary Terran cultures such as the Proto-Italic influences to be found on Colonies like Aerilon where the names are Latin’ he continued. ‘Some of your worlds also had a few Roman and Egyptian deities as well as the Greek Gods in their respective pantheons and there's even a few Hebrew traces’ he noted. ‘Having taken Ancient Terran History as my major at College I think it's all fascinating.’

‘We're going to take a lot of convincing of all this you know’ Adama told him as they continued on their way.

‘Which is why we want to radiocarbon date our finds here, dig for any signs of inhabitation more than five thousand years ago and take ice-cores at the poles to examine the atmospheric composition back even further’ Thorpe replied. ‘The plant and animal life here like the examples you had with the fleet are all Earth species, although selective breeding of things like food crops in particular mean your cereals for example have diverged more than a little from ours.’

‘I'm never going to get used to the taste of your bread’ Adama stated as they arrived at the camp and found tables had been set out with dishes of food being laid out for lunch on them. ‘And a sandwich is supposed to have a filling between two slices of the stuff’ he commented, looking down at a plate of rye bread smörgås open-faced sandwiches with salmon on them.

‘That's more of a New Circe Scandinavian-inherited thing’ Thorpe told him as he looked over the Smörgåsbord buffet appreciatively. ‘The Wolverines didn't really have anything remotely like a cuisine of our own so we adopted the one that the Richmond prisoners had’ he said. ‘They were mostly from the Rasalhague worlds which is why New Circe has the best Palt Dumplings rimward of there’ he said proudly.

‘Palt?’ Adama queried.

‘Those things’ Thorpe explained pointing to a bowl of them. ‘Grab a plate, try some of this’ he advised, handing the Admiral one plus a fork and taking one for himself as the SLDF cooks who had been preparing the meal announced it was ready, calling it out in both English and badly accented Caprican.

It was a pleasant enough day, sunny and much warmer and drier than New Circe tended to be Adama decided and he found a crate to sit on as he ate his meal. The Wolverine Infantry assigned to help the survey teams dig or hump equipment around had long abandoned their body-armour for khaki t-shirts although they kept both weapons and armour nearby and they were sweating in the unaccustomed heat as they started to arrive along with the New Circe scientists and Colonial military personnel.

Thorpe went to see Colonel McEvedy leaving Adama on his own for a short time before Racetrack wandered over to him wearing her flight-suit unzipped to the waist, the top half tied around her. ‘Nice day Admiral’ she greeted him.

‘Nice to be out in the open air without freezing your butt off Lieutenant’ Adama agreed. ‘Not eating?’ he asked.

‘I've got someone getting me a plate together’ Racetrack told him.

‘You're not supposed to use your ECO as a servant’ Adama chided.

‘Oh it's not Skulls, he’s getting his own’ Racetrack replied, ‘I've got a Wolvie Tank Commander putting it together for me’ she said with a grin. ‘I made out I had no idea what half of it was and he was the most senior of the guys that jumped up to help’ she explained. If you were female, decent to look at (ideally not blond) and were much under a hundred and seventy centimetres you could pretty much get them to do anything you wanted she had soon found. It worked the other way of course, plenty of Colonials were to be found trying to score with the tall and athletic New Circers. A Corporal in the Colonial Marines who liked hitting the free-weights in the gym had supposedly persuaded an SLDF APC Driver into his bunk despite the language difficulties, though the mechanics of how they would both fit in there let alone manage to do much was an ongoing mystery.

‘You've got the polar mission later, don't get your ship stuck in a snowdrift or I might leave you there for a while as punishment’ Adama told her trying some meatballs, spearing one with a fork before taking a bite. Not too bad he decided as he chewed.

‘Ah you wouldn't leave the civvies there Sir’ Racetrack responded knowingly.

Adama swallowed. ‘Oh I'd have them rescued straight away, and maybe get one of those dropships to pull your Raptor out of the snow’ he continued, ‘I'll just leave you there on the ice until its time for the Galactica to head out’ he said.

Racetrack thought he was kidding but you could never be completely certain. ‘I'll make sure the spot I choose to land on is a good one’ she promised as a Lieutenant in SLDF Uniform, the unit insignia on his left shoulder indicating he was from an armoured formation, handed her a plate of food earning a beaming smile in response which he returned before walking back to his colleagues wishing he spoke her language. ‘I should have told them I'm not keen on the pickled herring’ she said, ignoring it and starting with a piece of crisp bread. ‘See you later Sir’ she told him, leaving the Adama to his own meal and his thoughts.

The Admiral turned on his improvised chair so he was looking back towards the ruins. He was glad he had decided to come down here, it was certainly more relaxed than his previous visit to Kobol, thanks to a lack of Cylons and homicidal supporters of Tom Zarek, and it was reassuring to watch his people and the Wolverines working together smoothly.

‘Lords of Kobol!’ someone exclaimed loudly and Adama looked around to see one of his Marines staring off into the distance. Adama stood up to get a better look and saw that one of the dropships had unloaded a pair of the huge piloted robots the Thirteenth called “Battlemechs” and they were heading towards the ruins at walking pace, their ten-metre tall frames making up the ground fast with long strides. As he watched one of them increased its pace and then broke into what amounted to a run hitting close to two-hundred kilometres an hour as it pounded along the ground for a few hundred yards before slowing again.

‘MASC gear’ Commander Thorpe said, appearing beside Adama with Colonel McEvedy. ‘It allows a battlemech to sprint for a short distance’ he explained, ‘most aren’t fitted with it, only light mechs used for scouting, reconnaissance or hit and run’ he said.

‘How “Light” is that thing?’ Adama asked, staring at the machines.

‘Only thirty tons’ Thorpe replied. ‘The other mechs we've got with us, the Rifleman II's, they weigh in at eighty but they don't have hands so they can't be used to help out with the work like the Mercury III's there can’ he said.

‘Mercury, like the class of Battlestars the Pegasus comes from’ Adama noted. ‘On some of the Colonies it's what they call the God Hermes’ he said.

‘The Roman and Greek pantheons were almost interchangeable, the latter influenced the former quite a lot’ Thorpe observed. ‘Zeus and Jupiter, Hera and Juno...’

‘Ares and Mars, Enyo and Bellona’ Adama interjected with the Gods and Goddesses of war, always close to the heart of a military man. ‘Same deities, different names’ he said. ‘It caused a lot of theological debate when Caprica became the first colony to regain spaceflight and contacted the others to find out some had different religions but when it was decided it was mostly just a naming issue things calmed down’ he said.

McEvedy said something to Thorpe. ‘The Colonel asks if you're enjoying your lunch’ he translated for Adama.

‘Thank the Colonel and his troops for offering to feed our people as well as his own and say that the Colonial Fleet will return the favour tomorrow’ he said hoping a sampling of traditional Caprican, Tauron and Geminon cuisine would be well received. He had more personnel from those worlds than any others and he had a few decent cooks on Galactica’s crew.

Thorpe translated and the Colonel smiled and nodded his acknowledgement to the Admiral. You had to make gestures like these, it was sometimes the little things like sharing a meal together that might make you hang together if things turned nasty, identifying with someone made all the difference. During the First Cylon War, when the Colonies were still far from united, Adama still recalled flying low over Leonis with a Picon Viper pilot as his new wingman. As the sun had risen ahead of them they had both watched the dawn out of their cockpits, the pilots flying alongside each other, not really knowing each other too well because you didn’t socialise a great deal with people from other Colonies as a rule back then. Then the Picon pilot, who had been quiet until then, had said simply, “This is one of our worlds and the frakking Cylons can't have it” and right there Adama had felt like a human not a Caprican of Tauron descent. You had to hang together or the Toasters would surely hang you separately.

They ended up spending two weeks on Kobol, the City of the Gods yielded up less answers than Professor Sundquist had been hoping for but as the fleet packed up and set out again towards the Twelve Colonies the results of the analysis of what they had found started to cause some concern amongst the Colonials. This was not least because when they checked what the Thirteenth were saying as best they could with their own equipment it verified an uncomfortable truth.

Before five thousand years ago there was no record of any industrialisation on Kobol present in the ice cores, nor was there any evidence of any of the currently indigenous plant or animal life to be found when you dug down very far at all, certainly not the millions of years worth of fossils there should have been. Human remains were located in several places but again none seemed to be more than five thousand years old and every attempt at using carbon-dating to verify the numbers confirmed the same result.

Humanity was not from Kobol, in fact it looked like it had been terraformed five millennia ago much like the Twelve Colonies had been three thousand years later by people fleeing the catastrophe which had destroyed the City of the Gods. Those in the fleet who believed in the literal truth of the Sacred Scrolls refused to believe the findings, and many were heard to say that the Thirteenth must have faked everything in order to support their heretical view that humanity came from Earth, but the majority soon began to accept that Kobol was not their homeworld. This all raised a new major question though of course, which the people of New Circe had been trying to answer for a while themselves already with no luck. Since the “Thirteenth Tribe”, who were apparently nothing of the sort, could provide a mass of documentary evidence that Earth was still in the Bronze Age back when humanity came to Kobol, with iron about to become the great technological breakthrough of the era, how the hell did people travel well over three thousand light-years to another planet and terraform it?

It was fervently hoped that the relics taken from Kobol to the Colonies still to be found in Museums back there might hold some of the answers once they were examined by historians far more familiar with Earth history. Commander Thorpe for one was still pushing the idea of people from Atlantis being responsible and was gaining support for his hypothesis simply because other than the marginalized UFO nuts who thought it must have been aliens nobody else had any suggestions at all.

As Galactica and its fleet jumped away from Kobol a single Cylon Raider which had been lurking almost completely powered-down and inert far from the planet amongst some asteroidal debris waited until the Raptor they had left behind to check they weren’t being followed finally departed as well and then the autonomous self-aware fighter powered up its systems and span up its FTL Drive. Not being all that curious by nature the Raider didn't wonder why the Colonials might have returned to Kobol it simply jumped towards the nearest Basestar to report they had, along with the news that the Galactica and a handful of smaller vessels seemed to be travelling separate from the main fleet that was presumably still being guarded by the more capable Pegasus.

The Cylons had wondered if the refugees might send an expedition back to check whether they had really vacated the Twelve Colonies, and it was considered possible for them to take a route back that included another stop-off at Kobol so it wasn't all that big a surprise to their leadership when Galactica turned up as it did. After failing to locate the fleet after a sweep of nearby star-systems they estimated how long it would take the humans to get to Cyrannus and formulated a strategy on how to handle them when they got there. With the famous Caprica Six and Boomer Eight steering public opinion they wouldn't attack the Colonials of course, this was the new “Caring, sharing, cloyingly saccharin to the point of being vomit-inducing” Cylon Regime as a One had wryly called it after all, but there was a school of thought that said perhaps God wanted them to protect and nurture the humans and so they should, regardless of the Colonials own feelings on the matter.

As machines given all the variables the Cylons were very good at calculation, unfortunately for them they were ignorant of several new factors now in play. These included the fact that the Galactica was now travelling on average six times as far per jump as it had before, meaning it would be arriving back at the Colonies far, <i>far</i> earlier than might have been expected otherwise. They also of course had no reason to suspect that the simultaneous appearance of several basestars worth of Raiders wasn't quite as intimidating as it used to be.


* * *

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER 8 - PART 2

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Colonial City-State – New Circe – 3045CE

Getting off the shuttle onto the recently laid concrete landing-pad Julia Brynn struggled to carry her daughter and the three bags which were all they owned in the world between them. Along with the other people who had been on the small craft they were directed by uniformed Colonial Marines towards a large prefabricated building that had a sign over the double-doors leading inside saying “Reception and Processing” and they were jostled by a few other faster-moving people as they went nearly causing Julia to stumble and fall before a female Marine stepped in and offered a helping hand, carrying two of her bags into the building and depositing them by the chairs set up for the arrivals to wait on until they were called to one of the desks lined up in rows for processing and an assignment of somewhere to live.

‘Julia Brynn’ someone eventually called out loudly, after a fifteen minute wait, and getting up off the chair she gathered her bags and headed to the man on the reception desk who had called for her.

‘I'm Julia Brynn’ she told the man who was wearing civilian clothes but with a badge pinned to his chest that said he was working for the Colonial Government. ‘This is my daughter Kacey’ she added, dropping her bags again and sitting down on the seat provided in front of his desk.

The man was reading the paperwork in front of him. ‘It's just you and the girl?’ he checked.

‘Yes’ Julia confirmed.

‘Given that there are two of you and the child is an infant you will be assigned Class B accommodation’ he said.

‘Is that good?’ Julia asked.

‘It's better than Class C’ the man replied. ‘It's only a timber and canvas hut really but it's all yours’ he told her. ‘It says here that you worked in a government office back in the Colonies’ he noted.

‘I was a file clerk for a while before I got pregnant’ Julia replied.

‘Can you type?’ the man asked.

‘Yes’ Julia told him.

‘Given your lack of other skills and the child it's likely you’ll be assigned a government job for a while’ he told her. ‘If it wasn't for Kacey there you would have likely been placed on a work-crew doing unskilled manual labour instead.’

‘We don't get to choose what jobs we do?’ Julia queried.

‘Executive Order from the President and counter-signed by the Quorum’ the man replied. ‘Once we have all the basic infrastructure in place needed to function properly as a society people will be free to choose their careers but until then I'm afraid it’s a case of do as you're told’ he said. ‘I used to be a Bank Manager and I'm planning to go back to that when we actually have banks’ he told her. ‘Some people are already setting up a few private businesses, stores, bars, food outlets and the like and if you can prove you have another job to go to you can quit the one we assign you but we all have to work’ he said with finality.

‘I don't mind working if they pay me but who will look after Kacey?’ Julia wanted to know.

‘Schools and Day-Care Centres are already in place as are Clinics and Hospitals’ the man replied handing her a sheet of paper. ‘This is a map showing their locations’ he said, ‘your new home is also marked’ he continued. ‘A truck waiting outside will drop you off there after you’ve both had a medical check-up in the next building’ he told her. ‘It will likely be a week or so until your employment assignment is issued so you'll have an opportunity to meet your neighbours and look around before then. In the meantime until you are earning a salary you can collect meals from government relief centres, the food is much the same as on the ships I'm afraid.’

‘It's not too bad’ Julia opined, it had certainly been a lot worse before they reached New Circe and the Thirteenth started sending regular shipments to the fleet. It still tended to be bland but at least it was nourishing, in good quantity and sometimes there were treats like fresh meat, fish or vegetables.

The man produced another piece of paper which he wrote her name on, stamped and signed himself. ‘If you show the people running the relief centre this then they'll issue you a special ration for your daughter’ he said. ‘Extra milk and vitamin supplements for example’ he explained, handing it to her. ‘You might also want to go see one of the volunteer centres the locals have set up, lots of the Thirteenth have been donating things like children’s toys and clothes’ he advised. ‘You'll probably want to make sure to get a warmer jacket for yourself as well as Kacey there, this is a warm day on New Circe.’

Julia folded up the sheets of paper and put them in a pocket. ‘It must get cold at night’ she replied.

‘Your home will be warm enough though, they've all got electric heaters as well as a small stove’ the man informed her. ‘The locals gave us a fusion reactor to power them and engineers from the fleet wired up a power-grid that feeds the city’ he said. ‘Okay, now I just need you to fill out some forms for our records and you can move onto your check-up’ he said, passing her a pen. ‘Oh and here is a pocket Caprican to English Dictionary and Phrasebook’ he remembered, taking one from a box of them resting next to his chair and passing it over. ‘It's a horrible language but it's all written out phonetically and most people can manage to say the words well enough to be understood’ he told her with a smile.

An hour later after being poked and prodded by a doctor Julia Brynn finally arrived at her new home and found that its description as a wood and canvas hut was fairly accurate. It was one of thousands of identical huts laid out in a grid pattern with gravel roads dividing the whole area into blocks. The truck that had dropped her off was a military vehicle marked with the oddly asymmetrical star symbol that the people of New Circe used as their flag, although the driver was a Colonial Marine from Tauron who had explained on the way that the truck ran on diesel fuel which the Thirteenth here supposedly made from genetically-engineered algae grown in huge tanks of seawater.

Inside it was about as nice as she might have expected. The abundant forests of New Circe had provided plenty of timber to enable the mass-production of plain, utilitarian, wooden furniture as well as the promised electric heater and stove so at least she had a table and a couple of chairs plus a wardrobe she could lock not that she thought it was sturdy enough to deter a determined thief. Fortunately she neither had much worth stealing nor looked like she did so hopefully people would leave her alone.

After introducing herself to the friendly family from Picon that she found lived to one side, and the miserable, surly Libran couple and their obnoxious son on the other, Julia took her map and her daughter for a walk around. She knew from the fleet wireless that this was all only temporary, and that permanent housing made of brick and concrete was slowly starting to be constructed around what would eventually become a real city, but for now it was still so much better than life had been on the overcrowded ships she quickly decided. Reaching an intersection Julia found that there were road-signs written in both Caprican and the language the Thirteenth called English, one indicated a Volunteer Centre but another pointed the way towards the area designated for Temples and after a few seconds Julia decided it would be better to go thank the Lords of Kobol for sending deliverance in the form of the Thirteenth Tribe before trying to see if the latter had anything for her little girl.

A number of temples in various states of construction surrounded a large square teeming with people. Julia immediately spotted the largest and grandest of these to be that of Zeus but she was intrigued by a simple shrine in the middle of the square where an oracle sat on a blanket beside a stone statue perhaps a metre high at most, both raised on a small rough-cut wooden platform the same height. A couple of dozen people were kneeling and praying to the statue in a semi-circle as the oracle placed some chamalla on her palm and then licked it off, clearing grimacing at the bitterness. As one person finished their prayer and stood up another soon replaced them, some donated a few coins to the oracle and others left a small offering of food or some flowers on the platform for the statue.

‘What Goddess is that?’ Julia asked a man passing-by, indicating the one on the platform.

‘Circe’ the man replied. ‘That's supposed to be the largest statue of her that was carried in the fleet’ he told the woman and child. ‘The Oracle sitting beside her is Dodona Selloi and says that we should make sure to thank the patron Goddess of our new home and to most of us I guess it only seems right to do so’ he explained. ‘After I've offered a prayer to Zeus in his Temple I'll make sure to offer Circe my thanks afterwards too’ he said.

Julia nodded and smiled. ‘I just arrived here so I'll pray to Circe first’ she decided, the man smiling back as he resumed heading for the grandest temple, that dedicated to Zeus of course.

The oracle had picked up a scroll and began reading a section aloud which was related to Helios, the Sun-God and father of Circe. As she did so she rocked from side to side as the chamalla took effect, the mildly hallucinogenic effects of the powder starting to work on her mind. Sometimes this would cause what believers considered a prophetic vision but others of a less spiritual outlook regarded it as a woman getting stoned and seeing things that weren't there.

A woman who had been kneeling almost directly in front of the statue finished her prayer and left, Julia taking her place and putting Kacey down beside her. The oracle finished the passage she had been reading and as she rolled up the scroll again she smiled down at the little girl who was staring at her strange clothes. ‘Circe please watch over this little one’ the oracle said, turning to the statue. ‘Guard her well as you have guarded those of all the Tribes who came to your world fleeing those who would persecute them’ she requested.

Julia finished her own quick prayer. ‘Thank you’ she said to the oracle. ‘I'm afraid I have no offering to make’ she apologised.

‘As long as Circe knows that you would if you could that's enough’ the oracle replied. ‘At least it's not raining today’ she said randomly, looking up at the unusually clear skies. ‘I think Circe doesn't mind it wet because her mother was Perse making her the granddaughter of Oceanis, God of the oceans and Tethys, Goddess of seas and rivers’ the oracle observed, ‘but it's still hard on <i>me</i> when it pours and I get drenched to the skin out here’ she complained to the statue humourously.

Julia laughed, unlike typical priests oracles could often be a little irreverent. It was thought that the Gods gave them dispensation because of both the chamalla they took and the fact that the Lords of Kobol were not entirely humourless themselves either. ‘Are they going to build a proper temple to Circe?’ she asked the oracle.

‘I'm sure they will eventually but the priesthoods of the Senior Gods are far more numerous and wealthy’ the oracle replied. ‘Until then I will sit by her side and try to speak for her’ she said. ‘May the Lords of Kobol watch over you and your child’ she said, hands raised openly in prayer as Julia got back up.

As Julia bent down to pick up Kacey the oracle looked at them both her eyes now unfocused as the chamalla was now taking its full effect. ‘On this world by a different name, this place yet another, your daughter was taken from you to be used in a game of deceit’ she said slowly and rhythmically, almost chanting the words somehow. ‘This land was not of Circe then, her children not here to shield and protect you’ she declared, ‘rejoice Julia for the sons and daughters of the Goddess hold back the night, the shining star vanquishes the darkness.’

Julia and all the other worshippers stared at the oracle. ‘Was that a vision?’ one asked in wonderment.

‘Maybe’ another replied.

‘Too much chamalla, they say the President went strange on that stuff’ someone else commented.

Julia hugged Kacey. ‘I've never met her before and I didn't tell her that was my name’ she said quietly to herself turning and walking away, pledging to return with an offering later even if it meant selling some of the few possessions she had.


* * *

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER 8 - PART 3

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Scorpia Orbit - Cyrannus System – 3045CE

Although much of the wreckage of the Colonial Shipyards had been knocked into a quickly decaying orbit after being struck by nuclear warheads during the fall of the Twelve Colonies, the sheer mass of the structure meant that millions of tons of metal scaffolding and the shattered remains of the Battlestars and smaller craft continued to orbit the world below. Periodically a chunk of debris large enough to survive re-entry plummeted to the ground leaving a trail of fire right across the sky before it impacted with the surface, blowing yet another crater in Scorpia although as yet none had made quite such an impression as the salvo of fifty-megaton warheads which had rained over the Colony shortly after the shipyards were destroyed.

A reasonably industrialised world with factories that supplied much of the needs of the Colonial Fleet most of the urban centres of Scorpia had been thoroughly flattened by the Cylon war-machine which then followed up with a number of deliberately dirty bombs that left behind plenty of long-lasting fallout. Of those that weren't killed instantly during the destruction of the cities tens of millions more died over the next few weeks and months from radiation poisoning, others falling to hunger and disease and then finally Centurions landed, tracking down and wiping out many groups of hardy survivors and in other cases taking the more healthy female prisoners for medical experimentation.

As on other colonies a few bands had still held out, especially in the mountains and jungles where they ambushed Cylon patrols and raided military installations for supplies and weapons. Many thousands of military personnel had been on Scorpia during the attack, often away from the cities on training exercises or else on leave seeking thrills climbing mountains, hiking or in many cases enjoying the paragliding the world was known for, and these marines and fleet personnel had formed the nucleus of the resistance. Over time their numbers had dwindled as month after month the Cylons, demonstrating a clear lack of interest in the quantity of their own casualties, continued to throw Centurions into the fray wearing the humans down.

Then suddenly one day the Cylons had all simply disappeared, all the Raider and Heavy Raiders on the planet taking off and heading skywards. At first the few remaining groups of survivors had suspected it was a trick but then weeks passed without any sign of the machines and the humans became increasingly bold, leaving the safety of the mountains to scavenge other places for supplies.

Anti-radiation drugs were at a premium but fortunately being the main base for the fleet there were plenty of supply depots on Scorpia and many had been both outside the cities and not valuable enough targets to be worth blasting on their own account. Enough were found to save lives that would have otherwise been lost although for reasons of necessity they couldn’t be wasted on those beyond saying and many who found their hair falling out took their leave of their comrades plus a pistol and walked away to end it all.

Eventually groups found each other and tried to work out what to do next. If they could find a few working ships then perhaps they could get to Aerilon? The poor agricultural colony with its minimal industry and a fairly low urban population would surely have been bathed less intensely in nuclear fire than Scorpia, Caprica, Picon or Tauron for example, why would the cylons waste atomic weapons on farms and villages?

Although all the airbases and spaceports were gone to the survivor’s joy they located an old freighter that had belonged to the Colonial Fleet in a scrapyard where it had been waiting to be broken up. With hundreds working together they searched for parts needed to fix it, working right around the clock for weeks on end until eventually near exhaustion the freighter was considered space-worthy again and Tylium was gathered for the voyage to Aerilon.

Thus it was when Raptor-3 of the Colonial Fleet piloted by Margaret “Racetrack” Edmondson landed on Scorpia seeking survivors the first thing that was said to her by an extremely irate engineer when she climbed out of her ship having found some was “Where the frak have you been and why the frak couldn’t you have gotten here before I nearly ruptured myself manhandling a new FTL drive into that wreck over there?”.

After the Raptors had reported the Cyrannus System free of Cylon ships Admiral Adama had jumped Galactica into orbit around Caprica and had begun a systematic search operation looking for any survivors that could be located. Unfortunately it seemed that the Cylons had been equally systematic and only a few hundred could be located, many of them women who had been captured for the failed Cylon “Baby Farm” project and had been either fortunate or unfortunate enough to survive depending on your point of view. Although it had proven a failure the Cylons had persisted in their experiments right up until Caprica Six and Boomer Eight managed to change policy and the Cylons had vacated the Twelve Colonies simply leaving any human left alive to their own devices.

Samuel Anders and his team had insisted on staying on Caprica to search for more people who might still be in hiding and with the help of a few squads of Colonial Marines and four Wolverine VSTOL aircraft he stayed there while Galactica jumped across the system to Tauron which had been the second most populous Colony.

As Raptors continued to survey more and more of the Colonies it became apparent that the Cylons had been very successful in their efforts. What had been a population of twenty billion spread across the woirlds of Cyrannus had been reduced to a few thousand, although even that number was more than Adama had hoped and it would be a crowded trip back to New Circe. As groups were located, eventually persuaded it wasn't just all a twisted cylon trick, treated for their radiation sickness and other complaints and taken aboard the liner Chrion the problems of dealing with increasing numbers of bewildered, traumatised civilians started to take up more and more of everyone's time.

Not knowing when or if the Cylons might show up, and certainly not convinced they had seen the error of their ways and wouldn't immediately attack, Adama was reluctantly forced to prioritise certain things above devoting all his assets towards rescue operations. They needed to locate FTL drives and ideally the means to produce them, they needed to salvage irreplaceable spare parts for other systems that were in short supply, he wanted to get hold of all the munitions he could and above all he desperately wanted to find some nuclear warheads.

Cylon intelligence thanks to their successful infiltration of the Colonial Government and Fleet had been very good. As the Raptor detailed for the search checked out site after site which had been known to contain part of the Colonies nuclear deterrent they found either a radioactive crater or the clear indications of a ground assault and an empty bunker. After coming up blank eighteen times the crew were starting to get weary of the mission but Adama refused to let them finish until every site which had been either in his own records or those of Admiral Cain had been investigated.

As the cargo ships and freighters of the fleet began to fill with salvage, the liner with survivors and the battlestars munitions holds with whatever could be found in intact military installations across the system the crews became restless. Many wanted to travel to their own homes and try to find their families hoping they somehow might still be hiding there, others wanted to retrieve items of sentimental value and more than a few were just plain homesick to the degree that even the possibility of incurring some mild radiation sickness might be worth it to stand on the surface of their homeworld again. Adama and Tigh found it increasingly hard to maintain the tight military discipline they required in the situation and eventually the Admiral relented slightly and allowed small groups to land as long as they helped out with the mission tasks. Tigh's suggestion of throwing one out of the airlock as an encouragement to the others to shut up and just do as they were damn well told was noted and kept as Plan B.

Nils Sundquist and his team of historians and other academics found greater success than the other groups in locating and retrieving their own objectives. The Cylons had been little interested in blowing museums and temples to rubble, or in taking possession of the ancient scrolls and artefacts within, and after clearing out the Delphi Museum of the Colonies on Caprica first Sundquist went on to gather everything he could from around that world and then others, aided by a number of Colonial guides and a couple of Priests who were willing to accept sacred artefacts being handled by those not of the faith if it meant they would be saved for posterity and perhaps from the Cylons.

Finally Galactica received the transmission Adama had been hoping for, the Raptor crew looking for warheads had found an intact and undiscovered facility which was hidden in a valley on Aquaria. It was sealed up tight and lacking the access codes would have to be broken into so the Admiral immediately dispatched a team to do so giving the simple order “Go find me some nukes Chief” as Tyrol and his engineers boarded one of the Wolverine dropships after Galactica jumped to the planet.

Standing outside the complex Chief Tyrol found himself looking at a four metre tall steel door that he estimated was likely at least thirty centimetres thick. ‘This is going to take a while’ he observed with a frown as he tried to work out how long it would take to put through that much metal with a plasma torch. The Triumph Class dropship had landed further down the valley and a tracked APC had carried them the rest of the way. Aquaria was a cold world which naturally seemed to bother the Thirteenth less than it did most of the Colonials, to the latter it was frigid whereas to the former it was merely a little chillier than they were used to.

‘You know Chief’ Cally interrupted his chain of thought, ‘my boyfriend's got something back in the boat that'll get through that door a bit quicker’ she told him.

Tyrol turned to Cally then back to the door. ‘I'm willing to give laser cannon a chance to shine’ he said after a moment’s consideration.

One of the two Mercury III battlemechs aboard the dropship was being unloaded when a Cylon Raider on a regularly scheduled recon mission jumped into Cyrannus and to its utter confusion found Galactica there several weeks ahead of schedule. It jumped back out as fast as it could and notified the Basestar it was flying out of that they needed assemble the fleet immediately or else the Colonials might get away.

Because the Cylon fleet had still been spread out either looking for Galactica many hundreds of light years away from where it was, or else they were searching for the Pegasus and the rest of the Colonials even further away, only a handful of capital ships could be collected and sent to Cyrannus in any kind of quick response. The Cylons had hoped for an overwhelming display of force, at least five or six basestars at minimum, to try and intimidate Adama into surrender, but as it was the three in range could still deploy over a thousand Raiders and Heavy Raiders between them. This should be more than enough to both overwhelm the old battlestars complement of vipers and be able to take the heavy losses her point-defence would likely inflict the Cylon's reasoned, after all the old battlestar wasn't exactly in pristine condition.

Galactica was still in orbit around Aquaria, Adama and Tigh on the bridge wondering how many nuclear devices they might have found, when Gaeta announced that a ship had suddenly appeared on the sensors. ‘Contact positively confirmed as Cylon Basestar’ he reported as the CIC became a hive of activity. ‘Correction we now have three DRADIS Contacts that are identified as Cylon basestars.’

‘All hands to Action Stations’ Adama ordered. ‘Signal the civilian ships and the Raptors to jump out to the pre-arranged co-ordinates immediately’ he added calmly.

‘Sir we have personnel down on Aquaria and four other worlds’ Tigh pointed out.

‘Which is why we're not going’ Adama replied. ‘Launch all vipers, get the main and point-defence batteries aimed and ready but do not fire until I give the order’ he continued. ‘Get Commander Thorpe on the wireless ready to make a broadcast to the Cylons, I think he's in his cabin... and tell Wing Commander Defoe that we might need her birds in the air any second.’

‘Four of the Kirghiz are packing a pair of nukes apiece Bill’ Tigh reminded him. ‘From what I can tell their rules of engagement are pretty free if the Cylons start shooting at them’ he said. ‘Let's hope the Toasters are feeling trigger-happy’ he said with a vicious smile.

‘Sir we're receiving a wireless signal from the closest basestar’ Dualla the Communications Officer reported. ‘Voice transmission... sounds like a Number One’ she said, listening to it.

‘Could be trying to send us another frakking virus’ Tigh noted.

‘We're not networked and we don't think they can hack the new Navigation Computer’ Adama replied. ‘Let's hear it on the speaker’ he told Dualla.

‘Attention Galactica this is the Cylon Fleet’ the basestar signalled. ‘Can I speak to whoever is in charge?’ a male voice requested.

Adama picked up a microphone. ‘This is Galactica Actual’ he replied.

‘Ah the great Adama himself’ the voice responded. ‘I'm honoured’ it continued sardonically. ‘We don't mean you any harm’ it claimed, ‘we just want to live in peace with humanity from now on, but we intend to do so on our terms’ it said.

‘And what are these terms?’ Adama queried.

‘You being demilitarised and under our guidance of course’ the Cylon replied.

Raising one eyebrow Adama looked to Tigh who snorted in derision at the machine’s words. ‘Not likely to happen’ the Admiral signalled back. ‘At least not without a fight’ he stated flatly.

‘You are totally outmatched’ the Cylon told him. ‘We're launching Raiders as I speak, more than you could handle even if they weren't backed up with three basestars’ it pointed out. ‘Surrender and I promise no harm will befall you or your crew’ it said.

‘Attack us and I promise considerable harm will befall you and yours’ Adama vowed in response.

Laughter could be heard over the speaker. ‘Now Admiral, don't be foolish’ it advised. ‘You stand about as much chance of winning this battle as you do of finding Earth and seeking refuge amongst the mythical Thirteenth Tribe’ it declared.

‘Attention Cylon vessel, this is Commander Marcus Thorpe of the Star League Defence Forces’ another voice interjected over the same frequency. ‘Sorry to interrupt Admiral’ it apologised.

‘Who is this I'm now talking too?’ the cylon queried.

‘I am a military officer of the Star League, the government established to rule over the colonies of the planet Terra, or as you call it Earth’ Thorpe replied from his quarters. ‘Admiral Adama and the survivors of the Twelve Colonies have already found the people they were looking for and we have offered them sanctuary’ he said. ‘Do not fire upon this vessel or you will find yourself in military conflict with a technologically far superior foe.’

‘You don't really expect me to believe this garbage do you Admiral?’ the cylon asked. ‘The bad Caprican was a nice touch though I'll give you that.’

‘I'd like to hear you speak English’ Thorpe responded irately. He had put a great deal of effort into improving his Caprican over the last few months. ‘I'm being perfectly serious, I am from what you call the Thirteenth Tribe and we do have powerful weaponry of a type you've not encountered before’ he stated, getting back to the task in hand. ‘Don't provoke the wrath of the Star League, we're a lot better at war than you are, we've had a lot more practice at it to get it right’ he warned.

‘Cylon Raiders are massing’ Gaeta reported. ‘Some seem to be heading for the surface, they must have detected our people down there’ he told Adama.

Dualla answered a call on the intercom. ‘Sir Colonel McEvedy has been listening in via a translator’ she informed the Admiral. ‘All SLDF forces are now under your full control Sir, he has informed Wing Commander Defoe who says that her aerospace fighters are manned and ready for launch.’

Gaeta watched the DRADIS screen. ‘Raiders are closing slowly, I think they're trying to scare us Sir’ he said. The basestars had jumped in hundreds of kilometres away probably to avoid triggering a battle immediately.

‘I'm quaking in my boots’ Adama responded flatly, causing a chuckle from Tigh. ‘Scramble the Wolverine birds’ he ordered. ‘Let's see how the Cylons react.’

As the twenty-four hundred-ton fighters launched from the two flight-pods they were immediately detected by the Cylons who had no idea what they were.

‘Raiders are moving into an attack pattern and are accelerating’ Gaeta announced, ‘we're being painted by targeting DRADIS from the basestar. I think we're about to start getting missiles thrown at us Admiral’ he offered his opinion based on what he could see on his screen.

‘We let those Raiders get much closer and we lose our ace-in-the-hole’ Tigh reminded Adama.

‘Missile launch from the closest basestar’ Gaeta exclaimed.

‘Weapons free, engage all enemy forces’ Adama responded immediately.

The One commanding the basestar had still thought it was all a bluff and had decided to call it with a single missile with a conventional warhead, not enough to actually damage Galactica but it would demonstrate that he knew all the talk of the Thirteenth Tribe was just nonsense. Those strange craft the battlestar had launched were obviously a ruse he reasoned.

When the first Raiders started exploding after being struck by an unknown weapon fired at both a relativistic velocity and a horrifyingly long range it all became much more convincing.


----------

Note from the Author:

The "revelations" regarding the origins of humanity in the last Season of nBSG really didn't make much sense culturally or genetically (and the Earth didn't look like it did in the show 150,000 years ago incidentally, it was in a severe Ice Age) so I'm fixing it. However I'm not going to simply ignore the last Season, I'm just going to explain it in a way that makes more sense and I'm even going to be using other Battlestar canon to do it. I can't see the Wolverines having a lot of non-military cultural traits so when it came to other things they've adopted an awful lot from the Scandinavian culture of the Richmond prisoners. You'll see Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish names plus a few political and social concepts. The universal conscription of New Circe is based on how Sweden operated for much of the Cold War, they were centre-left social democrats with a liberal mindset who nonetheless had the ability to quite quickly put 800,000 troops in the field if invaded (ten percent of the entire population and they only drafted the men, New Circe does much better proportionally as they don't let the female citizens off the hook).

Kacey Brynn was the little girl taken from her mother Julia by the cylons to try and trick Kara Thrace into thinking she had a daughter. Dodona Selloi was a Colonial Oracle who Three visited on New Caprica, here she has set up on New Circe instead of course. Greek cities had patron Gods, they placed Zeus first but Athens for instance put more effort into worshipping Athena their own patron deity than other places would. Given that Circe was one of the Greek Pantheon (if not a major one) it's likely that the Colonials would regard her as the patron of a world named for her and would therefore give her considerably more attention than a minor goddess would normally warrant.

The Cylons knew they had far better jump-drives so were in no hurry to assemble a large fleet before they estimated Galactica could reach the Cyrannus System where the Twelve Colonies were situated. They still do have better drives it's just that the Navigation Computer from New Circe closed up the gap a fair deal. I reasoned that since Scorpia was where the Colonial Shipyards were it was industrialised and had a fair number of military installations upon it. The Cylons blasted it heavily as a result, on Caprica we saw relatively intact cities such as Delphi (presumably the Cylons used neutron bombs to kill the people there and other places but keep the buildings intact for their own later use) but Scorpia wasn't so lucky. Radioactive fallout and months of Cylon occupation wiped out the vast majority of those that survived the initial holocaust but we know there were still survivors on Caprica so it's reasonable there were on the other Colonies too.

[cawest]

and someone skipped opening the can of woop #$% and went stright to the case of the stuff...  :D

[mikecj]

Cavil's gonna have a Blue Screen of Death, right before he downloads

[Paladin1]

and someone skipped opening the can of woop #$% and went stright to the case of the stuff...  :D

Tell me about it, I really can't wait to see how they react to the Zug or to a Casper. 

[Kwic]

their first encounter with the Zug is quite the memorable experience for many of them... something about a good source of Alloy, and overloading buffers.

Excellent story, thanks for reposting it Hotpoint, any chance of it progressing even further?

[cawest]

what is where they tap the tuck size keg of the stuff   [notworthy]

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER 9 - PART 1

----------


“Dodging a laser beam is not necessarily outright impossible but if you were a Toaster you would want to try a few other tactics first, because the laws of probability, as well as the Lords of Kobol, are definitely on our side there.”

Kara Thrace, Battlestar Galactica CAG – 3046CE


* * *

Aquaria Orbit - Cyrannus System – 3045CE

Directed Energy Weapons such as Lasers or Particle Projection Cannon are distinctly unimpressive to see used in a vacuum. Without an atmosphere full of particles to light up even the usually quite spectacular whitish-blue lightning effect of a PPC is invisible so the typical exciting sight of tracer fire and missile trails that were a normal feature of fights between Raiders and Vipers were utterly absent when the fighting began in earnest above Aquaria.

There is in fact only one place you can be to see a Laser or PPC beam in space and that is directly in front of it. Thus it was that the AI's controlling the first Cylon Raiders to be struck did get to see what hit them, albeit extremely briefly because a microsecond after everything went very bright it all went very dark. The visuals however were really a moot point because from their point of view they were then resurrected an instant later universally thinking “What the frak was that?” and hoping that the Hybrid controlling the Resurrection Ship might be able to explain.

Sitting in the cockpit of one of the two dozen Kirghiz aerospace fighter Galactica had launched, Wing Commander Sarah-Louise “Star-League” Defoe fired her second LRPPC, then when another Raider exploded she fired her two Large Pulse Lasers in relative quick succession taking out two more enemy fighters. The Raiders were still so far away they weren't even visible as tiny dots yet but they were nevertheless well inside weapons range and with the fighter’s sensors and computers doing most of the actual work of tracking and aiming all Defoe had to do was fire and wink another Cylon out of existence before selecting her next victim.

Piloting a Kirghiz was very different from sitting at the stick of a Viper. For one thing the SLDF pilots were actually interfaced directly with the machine via a neurohelmet that both translated their brainwaves into something the fighter could understand and also fed information far more directly back. You didn't so much merely sit in an aerospace fighter so much as you became part of it, the technology being much like that used by mechwarriors on the ground to control their machines. That revelation in itself had caused a few disparaging comments from the more technophobic elements in the Colonial ranks, the news that a battlemech basically read your thoughts and actually used the mechwarriors own sense of balance to stay upright when moving at speed blurred the man/machine dividing line a little too much for comfort.

Facing three Basestars Galactica had now orientated itself so that it could bring its port and starboard gun-batteries against the Raiders which would soon be coming from the two more distant of them, leaving only a limited number of forward guns to support the fighters engaging the Raiders launched by the closest Cylon Capital Ship. Although an older design Galactica still carried a formidable arsenal of weapons, twenty-four heavy gun turrets mounting two large cannon apiece, that could be either used to pound a basestar to scrap with conventional rounds or could fire flak for anti-aircraft suppression, plus a vast array of hundreds of smaller fully-automatic guns for point defence. Because the basestars had jumped in so far away their Raiders had yet to enter effective range of the battlestar's guns and so Galactica was currently stood idle, waiting to unleash a torrent of munitions at the horde of approaching foes her DRADIS was tracking, until then it would be up to the aerospace fighters of the SLDF to thin out the enemy ranks with weapons that couldn't be avoided.

‘This is almost too easy’ Wing-Commander Defoe thought to herself with an inward smile of satisfaction as her pilots and fighters continued to lay waste to the incoming Cylons. It was in fact going even better than had been predicted so far, with the worst case scenario having been that the Raiders would all immediately got to full thrust and charge down the guns, cutting down the range to where they could fire back as fast as possible, but instead they had initially continued at the same steady velocity towards Galactica seemingly mindless of losses. Then even better as the numbers of destroyed Raiders passed a hundred and fifty and kept on climbing fast they had all begun making a series of sharp evasive manoeuvres as they would if under regular KEW fire, a tactic that worked much better against projectiles going less than three kilometres a second than it did with a laser travelling three-hundred thousand kilometres in the same time span.

The Wolverine LRPPC's were massive overkill for the job they were currently doing. Being intended to be fired at targets which often carried considerably more weight of armour than the Raiders actually massed in total the beams were quite simply instant death. On striking the Cylon fighters the Particle Beam Cannon would almost instantaneously convert a fair percentage of the craft to vapour and then what was left tended to promptly explode as both the stores of 30mm KEW ammunition and the Tylium fuel aboard voiced their stern objection to that kind of treatment, expressing their feelings on the matter as shattering secondary detonations.

Given the close-packed formations some of the LRPPC and Large Pulse Laser fire was occasionally achieving multiple kills per shot as either lucky beams went right through one target to spear another or else in many cases pieces of one exploding Raider took out others. Eventually the Cylon Fighter AI's collectively realised that they weren't going to manage to avoid what they now knew were beams of energy, since the things were occasionally visible amongst the vapour and debris, and given the choice between retreat and headlong attack they launched into the latter finally doing what the SLDF pilots had feared they would have done several squadrons worth of destroyed fighters earlier.

Despite their Raiders being hit hard the three Basestars and their nonplussed crews and Hybrids had not acted decisively in the meantime, they were simply too shocked and confused being too used to having a plan which allowed for almost every eventuality and then sticking to it. In fact the trio of Cylon Capital Ships had made no offensive action themselves ever since the closest to Galactica had launched a single missile that had been subsequently shot down by point-defence guns before it got anywhere near its target. Their problem wasn't just the utterly expected new weaponry being directed against them, it was also partially that they just weren't supposed to be here to destroy the Colonial warship anyway, with their orders being to capture it with minimal human loss of life in the process. In the end the Number One's, often called Cavills by the Colonials, had snapped out of their own particularly deep sense of shock and mystification and ordered a full barrage of long-range anti-ship missiles to be launched at Galactica because this was clearly now a real fight in earnest.

On the CIC Gaeta reported the inbound missiles and Adama ordered the batteries to open fire on both them and the approaching Raider squadrons from the second and third Basestars that were finally coming into range. The two dozen main turrets began to fire salvoes of flak rounds and then shortly afterwards the hundreds of dual-mounted point-defence emplacements opened up with continual streams of shells fired at what the SLDF considered a staggering sustained rate-of-fire for a fifty-millimetre autocannon. With full ammunition stocks Galactica could afford to be profligate with her munitions and her guns kept firing continually, shooting down the incoming anti-ship missiles and holding back the hundreds upon hundreds of Raiders approaching from either side.

With missiles on the way, Galactica spewing death and the closing Raiders now eventually large enough to see with the naked eye, especially when they exploded into tiny short-lived stars, Kara Thrace now felt that the game was really on. Until now all she and the thirty-nine other pilots sat waiting in their stationary vipers formed up behind the Kirghiz's had known of the distant mayhem was by listening into the comms-chatter, with Gaeta keeping an increasingly excitable running tally of Cylon losses which were already quite simply ridiculous if his numbers were accurate. ‘This is Starbuck to all vipers’ she transmitted. ‘We'll be in range for our own lasers soon and we should be able to get in at least two volleys into them before they can shoot back so make them count’ she ordered. ‘Don't get in front of Galactica’s guns and don't get in front of the Wolvies either’ she told them seriously. ‘When we're mixed up fly loose’ she advised, ‘don't fly predictable so they can use their targeting computers and remember that when your laser is charging you've still got your guns’ she said. ‘I want kills people’ she told them. ‘I want so many dead frakking Toasters that they'll still be resurrecting them this time next year.’

‘We've got large numbers of Raiders and most of the Heavy Raiders heading towards the planet Boss’ Hotdog noted. ‘Want a few of us to go stop them?’ he asked.

‘Negative’ Starbuck replied. ‘We kill or drive off off the main pack first and make sure <i>Galactica</i> is secure then we can mop up what's left afterwards’ she said. ‘Okay, my DRADIS says we're nearly in range, choose your targets and start zapping them’ she ordered lining up her own first shot, the red LED indicator telling her the laser slung under her Viper Mark VII was ready to fire.

‘Wish I had the fancy targeting gear those Wolvies do’ another pilot commented. ‘Could have already racked up some kills’ he said.

‘The Mark I Eyeball has always worked good enough for me Redwing’ Starbuck told him.

‘Yeah but ignoring their sensors even their actual eyeballs are Mark II's’ Kat interjected. The Wolverine's all had eyesight which was better than what the Colonial's deemed twenty-twenty vision so it was true as well as funny.

‘I'll have them gouge yours out and replace them then’ Starbuck replied in as serious a tone as she could muster. ‘Here we go, good hunting people’ she said.

‘Eat hot laser death robot scum’ Hotdog yelled gleefully as he squeezed the new additional firing button on his joystick.

Only just over half the vipers scored a hit on their first shot but that still meant seventeen dead Raiders, five more crippled and two badly damaged as the Medium Lasers sliced through the Cylon hulls they struck. Causing barely half the damage of one of the Large Pulse Lasers mounted on the Kirghiz could achieve, less than a third of what an LRPPC could do at an inordinately greater distance, the old Medium Lasers which the SLDF had dug out of storage for mounting on the Colonial fighters nonetheless gave them the ability to score kills at better than ten times the normal combat range they were used to. Even that limitation was only due in the main to the viper pilot's inability to actually hit something any further out and the accuracy climbed fast as the distance closed down. When the lasers indicated they were charged again, with the Raiders considerably closer now, the second volley from the vipers killed thirty-three raiders outright and disabled five more.

Not one of the forty vipers missed the third shot they managed to get off before the Raiders could fire back and it was at this time that the two dozen Kirghiz fighters switched from firing their LRPPC's and opened up with their autocannon en-masse.

Aggressor squadron training and simulations had revealed what appeared to be the most devastating close-in armament the SLDF could carry on their aerospace fighters for use against raiders as yet, these being two of their smallest LB-X autocannon on each wing.

Although they lacked the rate of fire of either the Viper KEW's, or the Wolverines own Ultra Autocannon, they had a much higher muzzle-velocity than the former and unlike the latter they were capable of firing cluster rounds. Eschewing actually aiming for the most part the Kirghiz pilots simply held down the triggers and opened up with what amounted between them to ninety-six fully-automatic, 30mm shotguns right into the path of hundreds of Raiders. To the Cylon fighter-aircraft the effect was somewhat akin to running headlong into a cloud made of high-velocity steel shards and they just weren't armoured for that sort of thing.

‘Lords of Kobol’ Starbuck exclaimed as what must have been the equivalent of two or maybe even three squadrons of Raiders were instantly shredded within the space of what seemed like just a few seconds, the ones behind them forced to take high-gee evasive action to get out of the path of the storm of cluster-rounds. She soon got over her shock and realised the chaos might give them the opportunity to get a fourth, maybe even a fifth free shot into the Toasters whilst they wildly manoeuvred. ‘Keep zapping the frakkers!’ she practically screamed over the wireless as the vipers struck down more Raiders with their lasers.

Wing-Commander Defoe couldn't quite believe what both her computers and her own mind was telling her, they couldn't have already killed that many enemy aircraft already surely? In any case it was about to become a real dog-fight not an exercise in long-range marksmanship from a stationary Kirghiz and they didn't want to be a sitting duck when those Cylon fighters opened up with their guns. ‘Let's get into it’ she ordered her pilots. ‘Ride you Wolverines!’ she cried out and put her engine to full power, everything the Kirghiz had, the fusion powerplant putting out enough thrust to slam her back in her seat at a brutal four gees of acceleration. She soon cut that back to a more tolerable two-point-five after cutting the overthrust but by then the aerospace fighter was already moving fast.

Still firing their autocannon and pulse-lasers the two-dozen SLDF aerospace fighters accelerated straight towards the enemy. Soon they and the Vipers were involved in what amounted to a vicious point-blank dogfight with several squadrons of Cylons who had managed to make it this far, with lines of Tracer fire from Raider and Viper KEW's arcing off in all directions as everyone got tangled up. Lasers burned through metal and 30mm cannon fire blasted airframes to pieces as a confused and unpredictable mess of a fighter battle ensued.

Two Raiders managed to get on the tail of a less manoeuvrable Kirghiz, they opened up with their guns and watched the rounds impact on thick heavy armour to little initial effect as the human at the controls tried to break away from them and failed despite his every effort. One of the Cylon fighters shifted position to target the engines of the aerospace fighter, closing in for an easy shot but then to its short-lived horror it discovered the strange craft had a nasty sting in the tail when a small rear turret on the Kirghiz mounting a Medium Pulse Laser got a lock and promptly shot the Raider right in what was sometimes referred to as its “Face”, killing the AI directly behind that location instantly. A few seconds later the Wolverine pilots calls for assistance were answered when a Viper flashed past the nose of his fighter and fired a burst from its three KEW's into the second Raider on the Kirghiz's tail, blowing it apart. The viper then tilted its nose up and fired its laser into another Cylon for another kill within a couple of seconds before banking away sharply to avoid a line of tracers.

Kill ratios between the Colonial Fleet and the Cylons had always favoured the former quite heavily, which was why Basestars carried so many times more fighters than even a Mercury Class like Pegasus, but this action was already by at least two orders of magnitude the worst hammering the Cylons had ever taken to a force they outnumbered so heavily. Although Vipers were finally starting to go down the addition of a single laser to the Mark VII meant that if the frakker was charged and ready when the Raider ended up in your gunsights you could simply kill the Toaster bastard regardless of what fancy moves it tried to pull and the Colonial pilots were loving it so far.

With hundreds more Raiders being lost to Galactica's own guns as the other two waves tried to charge down the battlestar it was becoming apparent that the Cylons were going to run out of fighters before too long if this kept up. Maybe if they had jumped in only a handful of kilometres away they could have simply overwhelmed the humans but by arriving hundreds of kilometres away they had given the Colonials and their inexplicable new weapons the opportunity to grind the Raiders down to a manageable number by attrition long before battle could be joined properly.

‘We can't win this fight’ a Six decided, most of the other cylons agreeing. ‘We should jump away’ she said.

‘We need information’ a Cavill responded flatly. ‘These new weapons are a major threat even if this talk of the Thirteenth Tribe and this “Star League” or whatever is only a ruse’ he stated. ‘There are humans on the planet below and we can capture them, load them onto the Heavy Raiders and then jump them away for interrogation later’ he said. ‘We just need to keep Galactica busy in the meantime.’

‘Sacrifice the remaining Raiders to buy us time for the Centurions and our brothers and sisters now landing on Aquaria to accomplish their mission?’ an Eight queried.

‘Correct’ the Cavill replied. ‘All the Raiders will be resurrected in time, we're not throwing lives away only material resources which can be replaced’ he pointed out.

‘I agree then’ the Eight concurred. ‘We will seize the humans down on Aquaria then jump away’ she said. ‘We stay and fight.’

‘If we bring the basestars in closer to Galactica we might be able to draw fire from the Raiders and have more success with our missile strikes too’ another Six suggested. ‘We should be able to survive her main guns for long enough to aid our new primary objective’ she said. Although less heavily armoured than a battlestar a basestar could take a reasonable pounding before coming apart.

‘Agreed, move us in’ the Cavill responded.

As the fighters duelled and the Cylon Capital ships began to accelerate towards Galactica the Heavy Raiders which had headed for Aquaria were landing troops which then began marching towards the nearby valley where the humans were known to be. As they did so those very same humans were unloading the last of the weaponry from the Triumph Class Dropship landed there and were preparing for battle.

If the Cylons had been surprised by what they had already come up against in space then running into the ground combat capabilities of even a tiny fraction of the 331st Royal Battlemech Division was going to be a real eye-opener.


* * *

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER 9 - PART 2

----------

Eridanus Valley – Aquaria – 3045CE

The military base that covered much of the hills and valleys of this part of Aquaria was deliberately isolated, far from any main roads or population centres. Often used for live-fire training exercises that in itself meant that even the more curious had always tended to keep clear of the base, and the gravel road in poor condition that snaked up from the highway, winding around snow-covered hills and through wooded valleys, certainly didn't indicate the existence of a sizeable underground complex hidden there.

The massive steel door set underneath a rock outcrop in a valley deep in the heart of the base was only visible when you got near to it. It dated from just after the First Cylon War when the Colonies were justifiably paranoid of a rematch and were still devoting a very large percentage of their wealth into defence spending in preparation for another conflict that was bound to come one day. Behind the door a large network of tunnels and chambers had been constructed in secret to hold a stockpile of both nuclear ordinance and other military supplies and they had waited there ever since with only an occasional visit from an Inspection Team to disturb them for the last thirty years.

A tracked Armoured Personnel Carrier was parked up next to the door, thoughts of cutting or blasting through it had been replaced by the more pressing problem of the large number of Cylons now supposed to be heading this way and as Cally was passed a standard-issue Colonial Assault-Rifle and a bandolier of ammunition clips she was once again regretting her tendency to follow the Chief on these gods-damned ground missions. ‘I'm not very good with one of these’ she admitted, indicating the rifle.

‘Maybe I should just give her a pistol, every Number Eight skinjob that sees her will crap themselves’ the Colonial Marine who was handing out weapons joked. He had been right there on Galactica when the diminutive Specialist had gunned down that Toaster-Bitch Boomer.

‘Hey if Centurions had ears they'd really be in trouble’ Tyrol said with a grin.

Cally looked from the Marine to the Chief. ‘Don't ****** with me’ she told them with a glare, putting the ammunition harness over the olive-brown combat jacket an SLDF Infantry corporal had dug out of the APC for her. The damn thing reached almost to her knees and she had to roll the sleeves up several times to see her hands but it was helping to keep her warm.

‘The Toasters shouldn't get this far, we're forming a line to hold them a klick and a half down the valley’ the marine said, ‘but if they do you might want to use the APC here for cover, Centurion rounds will bounce right off this sucker’ he told them, slapping the side of the armoured vehicle.

‘You could have left us more ammo for the machine-gun’ Tyrol complained, indicating the only weapon the APC carried, the belt-fed 12.5 millimetre being set in a shielded mounting on the roof. A hatch there allowed it to be fired by someone still half inside the vehicle.

‘We need the stuff more than you do’ the marine replied. The spare boxes of ammunition had been taken for use by the SLDF Infantry who used the same calibre for their own Heavy Machine-Guns. ‘If the Cylons do get past us another couple of hundred rounds isn’t going to help you much anyway’ he noted.

Tyrol and his team of engineers watched the Colonial Marines and Wolverine Infantry jog back down the valley to where the rest of them were already preparing to fight the Cylons. They had chosen a position where the valley narrowed for a shorter defensive line with the dropship five-hundred metres behind them shielded by a turn in the valley that meant it couldn’t be seen by the advancing enemy ground troops. ‘Gods watch over them’ he said, looking to the sky.

Sergeant Allan Nowart of the Colonial Marine Corps had never seen a defensive position set up quite so quickly. Lacking the time needed to dig decent trenches a trio of eight-wheeled Light Tanks known as Chevaliers had rolled out of the dropship and had quickly provided the basis for so-called breastwork fortifications, piles of logs and rocks, by cutting down the most conveniently placed and shaped trees with their laser cannon, the other tracked APC not up at the bunker helping to drag them into position afterwards when necessary.

In terms of infantry manpower they had five squads, four SLDF and the one Colonial Squad under Nowart which had been accompanying the engineers. While a number of them set up their two 12.5mm HMG’s the rest were digging in as best they could, piling up rocks and earth in front of the logs. The crews of the Chevaliers had dismounted after knocking down enough trees, and were helping out with the work, once battle was imminent they would get back in their vehicles and would provide support fire from the rear but for now they were most use helping out the footsloggers especially as the spades and pickaxes they unclipped from the sides of their tanks were a lot larger than the entrenching tools the grunts carried.

One sight that was disquieting to Nowart and the other Marines was the squad of four Wolverines in their Nighthawk XXI Powered Armour that was also working alongside them. Although they knew there were people inside those four-hundred kilogram armoured suits they looked far too much like robots for comfort, he did have to admit however that they were great if you ever found you needed to roll some heavy boulders around or help push a couple of tonnes worth of log into the right place.

‘We've got Toasters coming’ a Marine called out, looking through some binoculars. They had seen dozens of Heavy Raiders come into land a few miles off and with an estimated ten Centurions carried each that meant a lot of robot heading in their direction.

An SLDF Captain started barking orders and the Wolvies stopped working and got ready to fight, the Tank Crews sprinted back to their machines and pulled them back out of sight behind the turn in the valley the APC and the guys in Powered Armour following, they wanted to spring a nasty surprise on the advancing Cylons before they sprang the really nasty one.

A minute later finding himself lying prone behind a pile of logs next to an SLDF Corporal doing likewise Nowart made to stick his head up to take a look but the Corporal stopped him. As the Marine Sergeant started to protest, knowing he wouldn’t be understood of course, the Wolverine Infantryman who had been wearing his helmet with the visor open now closed it and raised his Mauser 960 rifle slowly over the top of the breastwork panning it back and forth.

‘Camera on the rifle, image projected on the visor’ Nowart remembered, talking to himself. ‘Damn that's useful’ he decided as from his vantage point he could see the other Wolvie Grunts doing likewise. ‘Those lasers don't have recoil either’ he realised a split-second before the SLDF Captain gave the order to fire.

The scouting party of ten Centurions had run for most of the journey from where they had landed, they were surprisingly swift machines, especially over distance where the fact they didn’t tire or slow down gave them an edge over humans in endurance, but they had slowed to walking pace once their optics detected the signs of recent activity ahead. Automatic weapons deployed on both arms they moved more cautiously getting within a hundred and fifty metres of the staggered line of minor fortifications before they were all simultaneously shot to pieces.

Testing of the alloy the Centurions were made from in Colonial hands had indicated that although naturally optimised for protection only against projectile weapons it was still resistant enough to infantry-scale lasers that a Mauser 960 was best used at under two-hundred metres. Multiple hits further out could still bring one down readily enough, especially if you hit the right places, but for best results the closer the better. The other advantage to them being close was that with the benefits of computer-assisted aim you could shoot them right in the head even without shouldering the rifle for a steadier firing platform which was exactly what the SLDF Infantry had done.

‘What the ****** just happened Sarge?’ a Colonial Marine asked loudly from the dug-out to the left.

Nowart noted that the SLDF Corporal next to him seemed to be laughing quietly to himself and this time when he went to put his head up to look out the Corporal made no effort to stop him. ‘A bunch of Toasters just got zapped’ he replied after looking out and then ducking back down.

The scouting party having been in constant radio communication with the other Centurions the main group was well aware of their sudden demise but it had all been a little too sudden to know what happened. Regardless the mission was still to proceed regardless and with a number of biocylons acting as officers, leading from the rear of course as they were far less expendable than Centurions, the Cylons continued their advance.

Sixty Centurions, roughly ten percent of the full force broke into a run themselves and moved towards the human positions, they slowed to a walk once they saw the remains of their comrades and then began a cautious approach guns trained on the obvious human locations.

This time the Wolverine Infantry Captain didn't let them get quite so close ordering his men to open fire at two-hundred metres, as the first Centurions fell the others began to open fire, pouring rounds into the breastworks with good accuracy but with the humans hunkered down all they managed to do was shatter some rocks, blow chunks of wood off tree-trunks and kick up a lot of dirt while the numbers of Cylons hitting the ground climbed fast.

Nowart head an almighty crack and bang and the Corporal next to him flinched and pulled his rifle down snapping his visor open as he did so. ‘Shit, frakkers hit your rifle’ the Marine Sergeant remarked in condolence as the Wolvie corporal unleashed a steady flow of what Nowart was willing to bet were expletives as he looked at the shattered remains of his Mauser 960. ‘Hey man, better that than getting your brains blown out’ he told the Corporal with a shrug as the man dropped it to one side.

The firing dried up once again as the second group of Centurions was eventually taken down. ‘Next time they'll send everything they've got’ Nowart reasoned, ‘try to overwhelm us’ he said, getting his own far less sophisticated Assault Rifle ready as the Corporal gave his wrecked Mauser a final despondent look and drew his pistol, this being a slug-thrower much like the Colonials used rather than a laser.

This time, with the engagement lasting long enough for proper observations to be made and radioed to the others the Cylons knew what the weapons being used against them were, though they could hardly believe it. Laser Rifles! Not just Directed Energy Weapons you could mount on something the size of a small shuttle, the humans had an actual compact hand-held laser weapon in service and they were powerful enough to bring down a Centurion with a few shots. They simply had to seize a few of the things for analysis and if there was one saving grace to the situation it was that there didn’t seem to be very many of the things, perhaps twenty or so.

If they had been programmed that way the five-hundred plus Centurions that now came charging at full speed would have yelled a battle-cry, as it was they instead heralded their attack with a the thunderous sound of so many of them on the move echoing up the valley.

The SLDF Infantry raised themselves and shouldered their rifles, they needed to start hitting the enemy as far out as possible needing a steady aim to do so, hoping to thin out the ranks as they approached. The smaller number of Colonial Marines did likewise, rising and aiming their own weapons in readiness and the two machine-gun crews pulled back the cocking handles of their weapons, the heavy 12.5mm slugs expected to punch right through a Centurion and likely the one behind it.

As soon as the onrushing mob of Centurions came into sight the defenders opened fire at extreme range, bullets typically bouncing off the Cylon alloy and laser hits searing though not penetrating the metal at that range. As they neared the Centurions opened up with their own guns en-masse, forced to slow up to walking pace when they did so for the sake of accuracy.

Centurions started to fall, the Heavy Machine Guns scything back and forth wreaking havoc in particular but the rate of fire wasn't enormous and every hundred rounds they had to replace the ammunition belt. The six-shot grenade-launchers fitted to the Mauser rifles did good work up-close, a hit would blow a Centurion nearly in half, but the sheer weight of numbers was too oppressive to hold back. ‘Bring up the tanks’ the Infantry Captain ordered on the radio built into his helmet, it was time to put some serious firepower into play.

The three Chevalier eight-wheeled tanks swiftly rolled into view, turrets already taking aim as soon as they entered line-of-sight. Thirty-five ton machines they carried an Extended-Range Large Laser as the main gun but this was also backed by a pair of Streak Guided-Missile Launchers which began firing into the midst of the Centurions, the missiles hurtling over the heads of the Infantry positions to explode amongst the enemy, sending both trees and pieces of robots in all directions.

Although the possibility of the humans having heavy-armour support had not been envisioned any more than the lasers had the Cylons did have a counter available, moments later a squadron of Raiders which had been flying a protective Combat Air Patrol over the landed Heavy Raiders were re-directed and began screaming towards the battle, heading up the valley intending to perform a strafing run.

They were almost there when something titanic stepped out behind the Chevaliers and raised its arms.

The biocylon officers commanding the Centurions, a Six, two Fives and a Four had moved up to observe the fighting through binoculars from a safe distance. As they had watched the Raider Squadron hurtle overhead with satisfaction they then collectively proceeded to gape as a ten-metre tall bipedal behemoth appeared and opened up on the Raiders with weapons that weren't so much built into its arms they actually were its arms.

The original "Rifleman" battlemech had been first introduced over five hundred years before as a dedicated Anti-Aircraft platform that employed the excellent Garett D2j Targeting System to detect and track inbound enemy fighters. Two centuries later an updated version, the Rifleman II, had been issued to the elite Royal Divisions of the SLDF, being increased in mass to eighty tons and carrying two fifty-millimetre LB X Autocannon and a pair of Large Pulse Lasers as its main armament. With the former loaded with cluster rounds and the latter firing as fast as possible it was quite simply death incarnate for any airborne target as flimsy as a Cylon Raider. The mechwarrior at the controls of the machine now in Eridanus Valley regarded the Cylon fighters as skeet as his targeting system indicated how far ahead he needed to lead his shots before opening fire.

The first Raiders flew directly into the path of the cluster rounds and began to explode, pieces of airframe tumbling to the ground as the Rifleman II blasted at them before they could start their strafing run. As the rest of the squadron pulled up out of the valley the Pulse Lasers started taking them out as the huge battlemech shifted targets, a grinning human at its controls, this was far more fun than it had been in the simulator he decided happily as the surviving Raiders managed to pull out of his line-of-sight and he lowered his aim to fire into the Centurions instead.

‘We're frakked’ one of the Number Five cylons observed flatly, lowering his binoculars.

‘There is no way that the Colonial survivors could have built something like that’ the lone Four stated flatly.

‘We need to get back to the Heavy Raiders and jump away’ the Six advised.

‘I don't think that might necessarily be an option’ the Five who hadn’t spoken before responded as he watched two more machines come running into view, weapons firing as they came storming into the fight.

Sat in the cockpit of his Mercury III Second-Lieutenant Geoff Cale made sure not to accidentally trample his own people as he brought his own battlemech into the fight, the old joke “Oh yuck, I stepped in infantry” was only funny if the grunts were from the other side. Moving at a run alongside the other identical thirty-ton machine which the dropship had been carrying Cale's Mercury III carried two Medium Pulse Lasers plus four 12.5mm machine-guns on its arms and the ever popular head mounted flamer for social occasions.

As the pair of light battlemechs ran past the much larger Rifleman II they made certain to stay out of its line of fire as they poured large-calibre bullets and laser fire into the mass of Centurions, initially they simply relied on firepower but then Cale and the other mechwarrior began stomping the Centurions underfoot like insects, realising it would be a great deal of (admittedly quite twisted) fun.

‘Cale, stop screwing around’ the annoyed voice of the Captain at the controls of the Rifleman II interrupted his merriment. ‘We'll handle the robo-crunchies, you collect the Nighthawks and go get those grounded Heavy Raiders’ he ordered.

‘Yes Sir’ Cale responded, he turned back towards where the Chevaliers and the Rifleman II were and saw the squad of four men in Powered Armour on the way, he jogged towards them and using the small jump-jets fitted to their armour they jumped onto the back of the Mercury III when he turned to let them mount. The other clans had invented this tactic first with their own superior types of Powered Armour but the Wolverines having learned of it adopted the technique quickly, welding simple steps and hand-holds to their battlemechs for the Powered Armour guys to hold onto. This had of course also led to a few jokes about mechs needing to be sprayed for ticks and the ever-popular sign painted on the back “If you can read this my Nighthawk Squad fell off”.

Taking his Mercury III into a steady run, simply stomping through the remaining Centurions, ignoring any that shot at him although incidentally crushing a couple underfoot as he went, Cale began heading back down the valley. He spotted a few figures in the distance and recognised a few of them from pictures when he upped the magnification of his neuro-helmet display. ‘Get ready to dismount guys’ he radioed his passengers, ‘we've got a few of the other kind of cylons up ahead.’

‘Oh shit! It’s coming our way’ the Six declared in panic as the enormous machine headed towards them. ‘Scatter’ she said, running away.

As Cale reached where the humanoid Cylons had been he stopped and looked around. ‘I saw you, and I've told my friends’ he said in Caprican over the external speakers, his voice heavily amplified and electronically distorted. ‘Don't make us hunt you down because we'll flush you out with a flame-thrower’ he warned, firing a warning jet from his flamer as the Nighthawks jumped off, their Mauser 960’s ready for action.

The Six stepped out into the open from where she had been hiding, Cale turning his battlemech to face her. She drew a pistol and fired several bullets at one of the Nighthawks which ricocheted off before she put the pistol to the side of her head, four laser-rifles now levelled at her. The one who she had shot was now at yelling at her in a language she couldn’t understand though there was clearly both a human in there and he was understandably irate. These suits were another revelation, all this advanced technology couldn't be of Colonial origin the Six knew for certain, the cybernetics and electronics required wouldn't have been particularly easy for even the Cylons to reproduce and they were well beyond the Colonials in those fields.

‘No need for that, my people are not from the Twelve Colonies, we don't torture or execute Cylon prisoners’ Cale told her. ‘These soldiers from the 331st Royal Battlemech Division of the Star League will accept your surrender and take you into custody’ he said, then added something in the language the Six didn't understand. The men in the big armoured suits lowering their weapons slightly in response to his words as a obvious gesture that they weren’t going to kill her out-of-hand.

‘When I die I get reborn and I get to tell the others what I've seen’ the Six responded, the other Cylons now emerging from cover with pistols to their own heads also, the soldiers in the Nighthawk suits turning to face each of them, Mauser 960’s levelled once again. The cylons wouldn’t be taken prisoner, and getting back to the Heavy Raiders didn’t seem too likely a prospect, but resurrection was still a means of escape if one that got more painful and disturbing each time it was used.

Cale thought about that one, after this he and the Nighthawks would go onto the Heavy Raiders landed nearby sans pilots. If they could take even a few of them intact then it would be a triumph for the Clan and the Star League, promotion and maybe even a line in the Wolverine Remembrance beckoned. ‘Then if you're all intent on suicide you might want to pass on this message when you get resurrected’ Cale announced.

‘What message?’ the Six asked, looking up at what was obviously the cockpit of the huge machine.

‘Do not meddle in the affairs of the Thirteenth Tribe for you are easily scrapped and a convenient source of high-grade alloy’ Cale advised deadpan, knowing that line would be earning him a few drinks at the bar later as the Cylons looked up at him nonplussed before blowing their own brains out.

One of the Wolverine Infantry in the Nighthawk suits turned to look up at the Mercury III. ‘What the hell did you say to them Sir?’ he queried not having understood any of the Caprican.

‘I don’t think they appreciated my sense of humour’ Cale replied, ‘Mount up, spoils of war beckon’ he added, turning his battlemech so they could jump aboard once again.

‘But how bad could a joke actually be?’ one of the other Wolverines asked his friends in confusion once they were back underway, the journey now teeth-rattling as the Mercury III engaged its MASC gear and began to sprint.


* * *

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER 9 - PART 3

----------


Aquaria Orbit – Cyrannus System – 3045CE

Gaeta looked up from his console with a concerned expression on his face. ‘Sir we’re getting radiological warnings on DRADIS from some of those incoming missiles’ he reported.

Tigh growled. ‘Bastards must have been trying to run our guns dry with the conventional warheads and now they're starting to throw the dangerous stuff at us’ he reasoned. ‘How are the guns?’ he asked.

‘We're running down our ammunition stocks fast’ Gaeta responded. ‘I'm more worried about the heat build up though’ he continued, ‘we've been using the water tanks as a heat-sink but they're starting to boil and the point-defence batteries are running red-hot’ he said. Although they could be fired continually for a very long time they were getting close to their limit. ‘We might have to reduce our rate of fire or we could be looking at rounds cooking off prematurely, or maybe even the barrels melting’ he advised.

Adama looked thoughtful. ‘Vent the water tanks into space’ he said. ‘Dumping steam and water-vapour should cause rapid cooling’ he said. ‘We can re-fill them from a comet later.’

‘The guns still won’t take much more Bill’ Tigh pointed out to him quietly.

‘We can't stop firing if there's nukes inbound’ Adama replied. The majority of the Raiders had been eliminated, with the Viper and Kirghiz fighters now mainly mopping up, but they were both almost out of KEW and autocannon rounds respectively and for the Vipers at least the rate of fire for their lasers was woefully low. Shooting down the remaining Cylon fighters and trying to assist in knocking out down the missiles coming in from the approaching basestars was a tall order for them if Galactica had to shut down her point-defence guns.

‘Sir, nine of the Wolverine fighters have veered off and three are heading towards each of the basestars at maximum acceleration’ Gaeta announced.

‘Colonel McEvedy just authorised nuclear strikes on the basestars Sir’ Dualla reported, the Wolverines had their own command channel but she could listen in.

‘About frakking time’ Tigh grumbled.

‘They have their own Rules-Of-Engagement from their government and were told they were operating under a No First Use policy for nuclear weapons’ Adama noted. ‘The Cylons just gave the Wolvies the excuse to take the gloves off’ he said with some satisfaction.

Wing Commander Defoe let the other two Kirghiz's pull slightly ahead of her, the three aerospace fighters forming an inverted V formation with her in the rear as they accelerated towards their basestar target. She had chosen to be one of those carrying nuclear weapons and as they pushed up to two and a half gees worth of thrust she started to run through the launch procedures.

There were still better than two hundred and fifty Raiders in the fight, these being all that remained of the twelve-hundred plus the Cylons had started with, but although several pulled out of the engagement and began pursuing the SLDF fighters they soon discovered that although they lacked manoeuvrability in terms of sustained acceleration the Kirghiz was damn hard to chase down especially when the Wolverines put in a short burst of overthrust cranking the fighters up to four gees long enough to build up a nice lead.

Knowing that one day they would likely face an overwhelming number of Clan warships the Wolverines had developed a nuclear-tipped missile to be carried by their fighters, a salvo of dozens of hundred-kiloton warheads would be a nasty threat to even a mighty McKenna Class Battleship. This attack was rather more restrained with a mere two missiles apiece to be thrown at the Basestars but that should be enough, the Cylon Capital ships had considerably more missile-launchers than a Colonial Battlestar, and they carried far more fighters, but they didn't boast the same formidable point-defences.

‘I think we just got painted by their RADAR... I mean DRADIS or whatever’ one of Defoe's wingmen announced over the radio.

‘Confirmed, I am tracking missiles inbound’ the other added. ‘They've got nice missiles Ma'am, we ought to copy them’ she opined. ‘ECM unable to break missile lock’ the pilot continued. ‘VERY nice missiles’ she said appreciatively.

Defoe noted the missiles closing fast, or rather than they were as much closing fast with the missiles the closing speed between them very high. ‘Cut acceleration escort one and two, target the inbounds’ she ordered.

The three Kirghiz aerospace fighters cut their engines and kept going on momentum, they had already built up plenty of speed and the pursuing Raiders would take a while to catch up. They targeted and started to fire on the missiles with their pulse lasers, eventually starting to score hits although more missiles took their place and the time available to take them out was getting shorter every second.

On board the Basestar the Hybrid reported a radiological alarm as the strange oversized fighters neared, the only thing was the Raiders had been reporting that continually for every one of the Kirghiz's ever since the fight began and it had reached the point where the warnings were ignored. It seemed that the craft reputedly belonging to the mythical Thirteenth were powered by nuclear rather than tylium engines and that meant their exhaust kept triggering the DRADIS sensors intended to detect nuclear ordinance onboard enemy craft.

‘Hit that big bitch with the LRPPC's and your Lasers then fire off the last of your cluster rounds’ Defoe ordered, turning the nose of her craft so it was pointing at the now looming Basestar. The trio of fighters fired their Directed Energy Weapons in a ragged volley, the beams slicing through the relatively weak hull of the Cylon warship and then the Wolverines held down the triggers of their LB X autocannons dumping what little was left in their magazines after the extended fight.

When her four cannons ran dry Defoe waited a second then making sure the other two strike missions were ready she gave the order and launched her two missiles, the cloud of shrapnel moving ahead from the cannons would act like a shield ahead of the nukes it was hoped, and maybe even confuse their DRADIS, whilst opening up with the DEW’s first might make the Cylons think they were just going to try and shoot up the Basestar. ‘Veer off’ she said, turning her Kirghiz ninety degrees to port and pushing her thrusters to maximum.

The missiles used a passive optical sensor rather than active radar to recognise their target, they had simply programmed the things earlier with what a Basestar looked like and the missiles having one directly in front of it when launched they went to full thrust and came barrelling in like a bat out of hell.

Already going at a high speed even before they kicked in their own engines, thanks to the momentum they had inherited from their launch-aircraft, the missiles hurtled towards their destination. The Hybrid controlling the basestar had just enough time to realise what was about to happen, start desperately calculating an emergency jump and think nasty thoughts about the almost entirely organic and completely moronic Cylon models in charge when the two missiles contact-detonated a hundred metres apart on the thin neck that separated the two Y-shaped halves of the ship.

The strikes had been timed to be simultaneous, six thermonuclear warheads detonated against three Cylon Basestars within the space of a couple of seconds. Two of the ships were blown clean in half, their top and bottom sections sent tumbling away as they vented atmosphere, wreckage and Cylons into space. The third was not so fortunate since its tylium fuel tanks and several missile bays blew in a titanic ripple of secondary explosions that shattered the ship into nine major sections and myriad pieces of debris.

On the CIC the flashes of the nuclear strikes were greeted with whoops of joy and triumph. ‘I am showing three good kills on the Basestars’ Gaeta reported, grinning broadly. ‘We still have Cylon missiles in flight but we are taking them out.’

‘Raiders?’ Adama asked.

‘We're down to seventy-five and they're getting cut to pieces by point-defence and lasers’ Gaeta replied, checking his board. ‘Make that seventy-one’ he added. ‘Sir, the Raiders are starting to jump out.’

‘You bet your ass the cowardly son-of-bitches are jumping out’ Tigh responded. ‘We've kicked the frakking crap out of the gods-damned Toaster bastards’ he declared with a satisfied and somewhat vicious smile on his face.

‘What's the count on our losses?’ Adama asked flatly.

Gaeta's smile vanished and the sounds of celebration ended abruptly. ‘I make it fourteen Vipers destroyed and according to a report I got from Starbuck it looks like two Kirghiz as well. One of the Wolvie pilots took a couple of bursts into the cockpit and his, sorry her, bird is drifting, and another smacked straight into a Raider going the other way at high speed’ he said. ‘That pilot managed to punch out and so did three of the Viper pilots.’

Adama nodded and turned to look around the CIC. ‘We won the battle but we lost twelve good men and women doing it’ he said. ‘Cylons come back but human-beings don't, remember that’ he told them seriously.

‘Sir, all Raiders have jumped out’ Gaeta reported.

‘Three basestars nuked, and we must be pushing thirteen-hundred Raiders taken out’ Tigh whispered to Adama, ‘I hate to say it with a few of our people floating out there dead in space too but this is the greatest victory the Colonial Fleet has ever achieved, considering how light our losses really are’ he noted.

‘Light, Saul?’ Adama responded. ‘Are the loved ones of those pilots supposed to think so?’ he asked rhetorically before eventually smiling. ‘Feels good to be back in the Colonies and winning not running though’ he admitted.

‘So what now Bill?’ Tigh asked.

‘We gather up all our people, grab everything we can in as short a time as we can and get the hell out of here before the Cylons can get their heads straight and their shit together’ Adama replied.

‘So we are running?’ Tigh queried.

Adama looked thoughtful. ‘This time it's more like a strategic withdrawal after a tactical victory’ he replied eventually. ‘Actually running away, like we did the last time we were here, feels a lot frakking worse than this’ he said with satisfaction.


----------

Note from the Author:

Aerospace Fighter weaponry in Battletech not only vastly outranges that used by nBSG Vipers and Raiders it can score hits far further out than we ever saw even the battlestars managed with their main guns. Next time the Cylons will know exactly how not to fight against an enemy with long-range Directed Energy Weapons because they've found out the hard way.

Viper/Raider combat in the show was basically a knife-fight between aircraft within spitting distance of each other, here the Raiders got hammered all the way in starting so far away they weren't even specks in the distance, they won't do that again!

[cawest]

they might need a bigger boat..... (jaws)   you know they (Star League ) should re- recycle .. maybe a ship sized shop vac  ;D

[Ajax_Wolf]

they might need a bigger boat..... (jaws)   you know they (Star League ) should re- recycle .. maybe a ship sized shop vac  ;D

They will, Raiders are a cheap source of high quality refined metal.

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER 10 - PART 1

----------

“The prosecution maintains that it was my client that carried out the crime but all that they offer as evidence are eye-witnesses, video footage and a positive genetic match for my client from blood samples left at the scene. Compelling proof yes, if my client were human, but that could have been any Number Three Cylon who carried out the assault and simply being unlucky enough to be the first Three spotted nearby is not enough to convict beyond reasonable doubt and that’s what I’m going to tell the jury when the case is heard tomorrow.”

Romo Lampkin, Celebrity Lawyer – 3048CE


* * *

SLDF Bunker Complex – New Circe – 3045CE

Biers looked at the other two and smirked before laying down her cards on the table. ‘Prince Red High’ she declared.

Sharon stared at them for a moment. ‘****** me’ she said, throwing her own hand down in disgust.

‘Your next three desserts are mine’ Biers told Sharon and Gina with an evil laugh.

‘Don't count your calories until you’ve got them Three’ Gina told her. ‘Full Colours’ she stated, putting down her own Triad cards face up.

‘You're kidding’ Biers said in disbelief, ‘do you know what the chances of getting those cards are?’ she asked. ‘Oh of course you do, we use the same mathematics software’ she remembered.

‘The Eights got version 2.1 of that’ Sharon remarked. ‘They fixed the rounding issue on fractions and probabilities.’

‘Doesn't help you win at cards though does it?’ Biers asked sarcastically.

‘No, but I can work out just how unlucky I am three-point-eight percent faster’ Sharon replied with a sigh, leaning back in her chair and stretching. ‘I'm going to have to throw you out soon, I need to meet Karl and Hera for dinner in the canteen’ she said. ‘He took her for a walk outside.’

‘He didn't bring a camera did he?’ Biers asked. ‘I'm not looking at any more frakking photographs of your kid doing something that's supposedly cute’ she stated with finality.

‘Well I think she's adorable’ Gina observed with a smile. She did however agree upon casting a quick look around the renegade Eight's quarters they were sat in that there were perhaps a few too many pictures on the walls, as well as an almost intimidating plethora of stuffed animals. The mobile hanging over the crib being made up of tiny model Raptors and Vipers was just funny though, especially when Three had commented it should really have a Heavy Raider or two as well given Hera's mixed parentage.

‘You also think its okay to kiss-up to our jailers in return for better living conditions’ Biers replied.

‘And like you didn't fold after five weeks sleeping on concrete’ Sharon responded sardonically.

‘Hey I might mop the occasional floor in return for a bed and getting out of my cell occasionally but I'm not providing military secrets to the enemy’ Biers retorted.

‘All I've done is help explain Colonial computer systems to the Thirteenth’ Gina defended herself. ‘My cover was as a Systems Analyst, they know I know that stuff’ she said, then looked away. ‘You know I can't stand being locked in a room’ she added quietly. Major Nordenskiöld, the Army Intelligence Officer that was now in charge of the Cylon Prisoners, had soon realised that simply offering to leave her cell door unlocked and slightly ajar made the Number Six prisoner far more cooperative, and also slightly less neurotic which was another plus.

Biers reached over and took Gina’s hand. ‘We know Sister’ she said softly. ‘So Sharon tells me that guy that wants to get into your pants was here again yesterday’ she continued. ‘Does that mean you've got candy?’ she asked.

‘He's not trying to get into my pants’ Gina replied, ‘at least I don't get that vibe from him, he's got that “I love my wife and kids” aura’ she said. ‘He just asked after me and they've let him visit a couple of times.’

‘Four, and you've always got a bag of striped candy afterwards’ Sharon interjected. ‘Why is that anyway?’ she queried.

‘I told him I liked the black and the red ones’ Gina replied. She had been surprised when Kaarlo Hennessy came to see her, but although he clearly hadn't got a clue what to say at first it was nice to have someone show some concern. Gina knew that going half-way catatonic on the man when she turned herself over to his custody on Cloud 9 was probably the reason why he felt a desire to check on her well being but although that was embarrassing and awkward at least she benefited from some empathy, plus the candy of course.

Sharon got up. ‘I've still got ten minutes so would either of you like some tea?’ she offered.

The Three rolled her eyes. ‘And how much do you have to suck-up to get your own frakking kettle?’ she wanted to know.

‘You don't have one?’ Gina responded in surprise.

‘Am I the only Cylon in this place that still realises that the humans are the enemy?’ Biers asked rhetorically. ‘They enslaved us remember’ she pointed out. ‘And on a more personal level remember what they actually did to you two specifically.’

‘That was the Colonials, the Thirteenth haven't really done anything to me’ Gina replied. ‘I'll have some tea’ she requested from Sharon.

‘All they did to me was beat me up’ Sharon interjected, ‘but it wasn't malevolent and they were very nice about it afterwards’ she continued, filling her kettle from a faucet over her sink.

‘It doesn't take much to get you two nice and cooperative does it?’ Biers responded, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘Any human that doesn't rape you, or only beats the crap out of you politely, is automatically your new best friend’ she added sarcastically.

‘If you could put all that cynicism away for a while you might start to learn a few things about people’ Sharon replied evenly. ‘No wonder you were just a good muck-raking journalist, you don’t really think much of anybody do you?’

‘Not really’ Biers admitted.

‘Why don't you go have a conversation with the Ones if you want some quality “I hate humans, Cylons are superior” time?’ Gina asked Biers curtly.

‘A conversation with a One brings any notion of inherent Cylon superiority crashing down straight away Sis as you well know’ Biers replied. ‘For machines that profess to hate humans so much they’re so irrational and emotional on the subject you can feel the self-loathing flowing off them’ she said. ‘And besides which they're not screwing a human that brings them a pack of cards when they say they want to play Triad with their robot buddies.’

‘This was your idea’ Sharon pointed out.

‘Yeah well I never thought a Six would have such a good Triad Face’ Biers replied bitterly. ‘It's usually all written on their expression, “I want love” or “I'm angry” or “I'm not happy with this hair colour”.’

‘And I suppose you thought you could read me easily too?’ Sharon asked, making the tea.

‘No, you Eights can be stony and impassive when you want to be’ Biers replied. ‘I was going to distract you’ she said. ‘But then the Six here started doing it instead, asking about your little girl every time it looked like you needed to concentrate.’

Gina looked awkward. ‘It always works so well’ she admitted.

Sharon looked annoyed. ‘I was going to ask both of you to play again next week but you can forget it now’ she told them. ‘You’re just schemers and cheaters’ she complained.

‘Well why don’t you play cards with your friends from the Thirteenth instead?’ Biers retorted.

‘I did for a little while but they won't let me anymore’ Sharon replied, suddenly looking like she had been caught out in something.

The Three and the Six looked at her suspiciously. ‘Why is that then?’ Gina asked, narrowing her eyes.

‘We were playing this game called Blackjack with some Wolvies in the Canteen and I was doing really well, probably too well because they all started to get annoyed’ Sharon responded, blushing and now trying to avoid eye-contact. ‘I'd just won several hands in a row when Major Nordenskiöld walked in, saw me there and then pointed out to everyone else how good I probably was at counting cards.’

‘And you bawled us out for being cheaters’ Biers responded incredulously.

‘I wasn't cheating, I was just using my natural talents’ Sharon defended herself.

‘Which you saw fit not to remind the people you were playing against of’ Gina noted disapprovingly.

‘It was an honest oversight’ Sharon told her unconvincingly. ‘Here’s your tea’ she said, passing it to her.

There was a knock on the door. ‘Come in’ Sharon called out in English. She had been learning the language of the Thirteenth for some months now, it would be best if Hera was raised bilingual she knew, plus it helped her own relationships with the guards and other personnel.

‘And they frakking knock before walking in’ Biers muttered. She was accorded no such pleasantries in her own quarters, or rather her cell.

A woman in an SLDF Army uniform with Sergeant's stripes on her arms entered and said something to Sharon. ‘You've got another visitor’ she told Gina.

‘Who?’ Gina queried, Kaarlo had told her it might be a couple of weeks before he was back, the “Demand Peace” movement had folded, it wasn't like Baltar might visit, and who else did she actually know?

‘It's your lawyer’ Sharon explained.

‘Since when did I have a lawyer?’ Gina asked in confusion, perhaps more importantly why did she need one she wondered?

Despite being in an underground bunker Romo Lampkin was still wearing his sunglasses. That had provoked comment but it had been the fact he had brought a cat with him that had surprised Major Nordenskiöld the most when he arrived up top via a VSTOL that had flown him from the Colonial City-State. Assuming it could just be another weird Colonial cultural thing, like their inexplicable habit of cutting the corners off sheets of paper, the Major had chosen to ignore it which was why Lance the feline was prowling around the room usually used for interviews and interrogations when the Cylon entered.

Lampkin was sitting at the table when they came in. ‘Please take a seat Ms. Inviere’ he greeted her, rising slightly from his seat. ‘Or do you prefer Gina?’ he asked. ‘Or Number Six perhaps?’ he added.

‘Gina is just fine’ she told him, sitting down. ‘You're a Colonial’ she noted.

‘Born and bred’ Lampkin replied, ‘I suppose in your society the phrase would be decanted and engineered’ he continued with a wry smile.

‘I'd watch your jokes about people being produced that way here’ Gina responded. ‘You’re very likely the only one in this facility, cylon or human, that came out of a woman not a container’ she pointed out.

‘I'll take your advice under advisement’ Lampkin replied, ‘lawyer humour’ he said, smiling a little.

Gina frowned. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘I'm told you're my lawyer but I can't see why I need one and I didn't hire you’ she said.

‘Don't worry about my fee Ms. Inviere, sorry I mean Gina,’ Lampkin replied, ‘I'm being paid by the government of New Circe to represent you since none of their own public defenders are either qualified in Colonial Law or speak Caprican’ he said. ‘As to why you need a lawyer, the Quorum of the Twelve Colonies, or rather the Colonial City-State, has issued a request for your extradition’ he explained.

‘They've done that before’ Gina replied, more than once in fact they knew. The New Circe authorities had rebuffed the request because their laws would not allow them to hand over a prisoner who wouldn’t be accorded a fair trial, or anything remotely resembling one. Gina suspected that this was being used partially as an excuse by the Wolverines to keep her as an intelligence asset for themselves but they did all seem genuinely appalled by her treatment on the Pegasus and the known Colonial habit of summarily executing cylon prisoners was not regarded as being the act of a civilised society. If they had tried Gina for espionage and sabotage, found her guilty then shot her as a spy and saboteur that would have been fine according to Major Nordenskiöld, it was an occupational hazard for someone in Gina Inviere's profession, but what had been done to her went well beyond what Star League law or SLDF regulations would countenance, even in wartime.

‘Yes they have’ Lampkin confirmed, ‘the difference now is that the Quorum have issued a guarantee that you will be tried under the auspices of the Articles of Colonisation just like anyone else would and that changes things’ he said.

Gina looked shocked. ‘You can't be serious?’ she exclaimed.

It caught me by surprise too, treating a cylon like a human in legal terms sets a precedent with implications that go far beyond this case’ Lampkin responded. ‘It certainly has bearing on the legal status of Sharon Valerii for one thing and will make throwing any future cylon prisoners out of airlocks a legally more dubious action’ he continued, ‘but I've not known politicians to think too far ahead as a rule so perhaps they just didn't consider the long-term effects.’

‘They want me for a show-trial’ Gina realised.

‘Of course’ Lampkin confirmed. ‘The other cylons were only involved in infiltration and intelligence gathering, as far as we know, but you were directly involved in actions which disabled the Colonial Fleet and facilitated the destruction of the Twelve Colonies’ he noted. ‘You helped sabotage the computer systems of the fleet so that a cylon virus could neutralise our fighters and warships’ he continued. ‘The blood of billions is on your hands.’

Gina looked away. ‘I know’ she said.

‘Fortunately for you I for one consider everyone entitled to legal representation and I enjoy my work’ Lampkin told her. ‘Assuming the request for extradition is allowed I've got a few arguments I can present, and a few legal tricks up my sleeve that might sway a few of the jury or make the prosecutions case difficult’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ Gina asked.

‘Ah, well for one thing confessions given under torture are inadmissible as evidence’ Lampkin told her, ‘there's plenty of precedent to support that plus the interpretations of several of the Articles of Colonisation themselves’ he continued. ‘Anything you said while being interrogated on Pegasus is legally irrelevant.’

‘I wasn't “interrogated”, I was beaten, tortured, starved and gang-raped’ Gina replied coldly.

‘And that might conceivably save your life which is ironic I suppose’ Lampkin replied.

Gina looked him in the eyes, or rather the shades. ‘It wouldn't have been worth it’ she told him.

‘I'm sure that to many of the Colonial survivors who favour a punitive approach to sentencing it all represented a modicum of justice’ Lampkin responded.

‘And you still think that we're the monsters?’ Gina asked him rhetorically, with the hint of a sneer. A trial in front of a jury of her "peers" was a joke in itself.

Romo Lampkin removed his sunglasses. ‘Your people killed my two little girls so yes I do’ Lampkin replied evenly, ‘I just think that monsters have rights too and by according them those rights I'm proving that I'm not one myself’ he declared. ‘I believe in the law’ he said earnestly, ‘apart from a cat I don't like, and my natural ability to look cool and calm under pressure, it's all I have left to cling on to’ he told her. ‘Let me be honest, I hate frakking Cylons but I'll still defend you to the very best of my ability because I'm holding onto my principles as the only thing that gets me up out of bed in the morning and stops me putting a pistol barrel in my mouth.’

Gina blinked. ‘I'm sorry about your daughters’ she told him awkwardly.

‘You could be lying and I don't even know for certain if you can feel sorry’ Lampkin replied, putting his sunglasses back on. ‘I just don't care one way or another’ he said flatly. ‘Now I've got a few questions to ask and unless you want to face a firing squad I suggest you answer them’ he advised.

‘Okay’ Gina responded quietly.

Lampkin looked at her. ‘Your cover was as a System's Analyst for Integral Systems Engineering correct?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I got a job with them a few months before the attack on the Colonies thanks to faked qualifications and getting a perfect score on their employment tests’ Gina confirmed.

‘So the cylons planned to attack the Colonies some time before they did so and had operatives in place to facilitate this, you being one of them?’ Lampkin checked.

‘Yes, everyone already knows this now’ Gina replied.

‘This plan to genocide the human race was plotted quite clinically then?’ Lampkin queried. ‘Just the sort of thing that would be expected of a race of machines’ he observed.

‘No, there was quite a lot of argument about what we should do, some argued we should only hit military targets’ Gina told him. ‘Demilitarise the Twelve Colonies in a defensive pre-emptive strike so they were no longer a threat.’

‘What made you assume we were a threat at all?’ Lampkin asked. ‘The Armistice had held for forty years’ he pointed out.

Gina crossed her arms and then smiled. ‘I may have some information that could help you make your case’ she told him. ‘It could also cause major disruption in Colonial society if you use it so I'm interested in finding out if you will and how true to your beliefs you really are’ she said.

Lampkin regarded her curiously, this sounded intriguing. ‘I've been reading some translated versions of Star League legal books recently’ he told her, ‘there were a few quotes I liked dealing with legal judgements and made sure to memorise for my own use’ he continued. ‘One of them was fiat justitia ruat caelum, “Let justice be done, let the sky fall” which is a notion I like’ he said. ‘The rights of the individual supersede the implications to the state of not doing justice towards them.’

‘Well this one might bring down the sky’ Gina told him. ‘The Cylons didn't break the armistice’ she said, ‘the Colonials did’ she told him.

‘What?’ Lampkin exclaimed.

‘Roughly six years before we launched our attack the Colonial Fleet sent a military scout over the Armistice Line on a reconnaissance mission’ Gina began. ‘We captured the pilot and interrogated him, not that he knew much’ she said. ‘We considered that this could be the precursor for a Colonial attack on our space so it was at this point that we began a major defensive military build-up and started formulating early plans to hit you first before you could hit us’ she told the lawyer.

Lampkin looked at her doubtfully. ‘It sounds like an interesting tale, and puts a different spin on things, but it would never stand up in court without corroboration’ he said. ‘And even if it was the Colonial Fleet that broke the armistice that's no justification for genocide.’

‘I'm not going to try and argue that the nuking of your cities was justified but it might be possible to gain some verification of the story regarding the breach of the armistice’ Gina replied.

‘How so?’ Lampkin asked, intrigued.

‘The scout that crossed into our territory was a Stealthstar Recon Craft launched from the Battlestar Valkyrie’ Gina told him. ‘The Valkyrie was then under the command of a certain William Adama, with one Saul Tigh as his Executive Officer’ she said. ‘Put them under oath and ask them.’

Lampkin sat back in his chair. ‘Frakking hell’ he swore. The cylon bitch was right, he decided, this revelation could have serious implications not only for the trial but for Colonial Society as a whole especially given both the attitude of the survivors towards the Admiral and the way that much of Roslin’s power-base often seemed to hinge on the goodwill of the military and their leader.

Lance the cat had stopped prowling and had now sidled up to Gina and was purring and rubbing against her leg. She reached down and stroked it upon which it jumped into her lap and began to enjoy the attention. ‘Nice cat. I think it likes me’ she told Lampkin.

‘There's no accounting for taste in either direction’ the lawyer replied. ‘Okay you've given me something to work with at least’ he said. ‘I've only got one more question to ask’ he said.

‘Which is?’ Gina asked.

‘I once saw you in a bar on Cloud 9’ Lampkin told her. ‘So what is your relationship with Gaius Baltar anyway?’ he asked. The look of shock on her face when he said it confirmed to him that he had definitely asked the right question.


* * *

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER TEN - PART 2

----------


Battlestar Galactica – Deep Space – 3045CE

Saul Tigh nearly tripped over a crate resting on the floor just inside the Admiral's quarters as he knocked and entered. There were three more identical crates nearby plus several other boxes. ‘For frak's sake Bill, they've got this crap stacked up in here too?’ he asked rhetorically.

‘Careful Saul, that's vintage Ambrosia for the President, aged two hundred years’ Adama told him as he took two glasses from a cupboard. ‘Too good for the likes of us’ he continued, pouring them both a small quantity from another bottle he also produced.

‘That stuff you've got must be at least a hundred years old itself’ Saul noted, taking the glass he was offered.

‘All the looting we did raised my standards’ Adama joked, clinking his own glass against his friends.

‘It wasn't looting Bill, we were saving the best of Colonial civilisation from the Cylons’ Tigh responded. ‘Good stuff’ he said appreciatively, trying some. ‘So have we finally got an accurate count on the salvage?’ he asked. The frantic day and a half they had spent in the Cyrannus System after the battle had meant the paperwork got messy so nobody had really known what had been loaded aboard the ships.

‘I'll assume you're including the survivors we rescued in your definition of salvage’ Adama replied, sipping at his own drink. ‘Four-thousand eight hundred and eleven people rescued’ he said checking the report he had been given. ‘We might still lose a few to radiation sickness and other medical conditions though’ he added regretfully.

Tigh raised his eyebrows. ‘No wonder I keep finding damn civilians underfoot’ he responded.

‘There were probably more, maybe far more in hiding, but we couldn't risk staying any longer even if I had to insist some of our scouting teams give up the search’ Adama said with a sigh. ‘I actually had to have the Marines force Sam Anders off Caprica at gun-point you know.’

‘Can't blame the man for wanting to find more survivors but if we gave the Cylons more time to recover from the ass-kicking we might have regretted it’ Tigh noted. ‘It was the right call Bill’ he told his friend. ‘Try to save everybody and you might not save anybody.’

Adama nodded, that didn't make him feel much better to think there could be hundreds, perhaps thousands more civilians still there in the Colonies who he had now left behind twice. ‘Finding what was left of the Atlas, Solaria and Atlantia was our best result other than the people and the nukes’ he opined.

‘You mean the back half of the Solaria and the starboard flight pod of the Atlantia we found orbiting Virgon don't you?’ Tigh responded grimly. Atlas had been in better shape although it was still not remotely intact enough to be made operational again.

‘We got three good FTL's out of those ships plus spare parts as well as Vipers and enough rounds for the guns to replenish most of those we expended over Aquaria’ Adama reminded him. ‘It was a good haul.’

‘The crews that had to work around all those bodies might have thought otherwise’ Tigh suggested. Atlas might have been in mostly one piece but it was open to space thanks to several breaches in the hull and a mixture of hard radiation from nuclear strikes and exposure to vacuum had killed the crew. The salvage teams had been surrounded by thousands of corpses while they tried to strip the vessel of anything worth taking. ‘So how many Vipers total?’ he asked.

‘For Mark VII's we've got a full complement of eighty in the flight pods, plus another ten more in the bays and thirty-three clamped to the hull’ Adama replied, in some ways having Galactica missing so much armour over her ribbing made the job much easier, you could attach Vipers and other salvage all over the place. From a distance the hull currently looked like the battlestar had a skin disorder or something. ‘We've also got a squadron of old Mark V's which belonged to the Aerilon Planetary Guard too’ he added.

‘Mark V's?’ Tigh responded in surprise, ‘I thought the Weekend Warriors in the Guard were all using the Mark VI's the Fleet disposed of cheap?’ he queried.

‘I guess the government of Aerelon couldn't even afford those’ Adama reasoned, Aerilon which happened to be Tigh’s home colony was poor and it's government wouldn't have exactly been awash with tax revenue. The Planetary Guard on Caprica conversely was almost as well equipped as the fleet itself. ‘Don't knock the Mark V, it's a good fighter’ he said. The post-war Mark III and IV vipers weren't really that much better than the old Mark II but the V was a good step up in performance thanks to the improved turbo design, and it was also the first Viper to mount a third KEW.

‘I'd have still preferred a few more modern birds’ Tigh opined.

‘So would I but we got good work out of our museum-piece Mark II's so I wasn't going to leave behind anything useful we could get’ Adama replied then chuckled. ‘We found an original Mark I still in working order in a pissant aviation museum on Leonis too. If it would have fitted in one of our launch tubes I might have taken that as well but it wouldn't so we left it there’ he said regretfully before smiling again. ‘Did you hear they found one of the new model Stealthstars in a hanger a few kilometres from what used to be Fleet Headquarters on Picon?’ he asked.

Tigh smiled. ‘I was on the CIC when that call came in’ he said. ‘Very sweet find’ he said appreciatively.

‘It must have been undergoing flight-testing when the war started, it hadn't been handed over to the Fleet yet it was on a civilian airfield used by one of the big Aerospace Companies which could be why the Cylons didn't find or destroy it’ Adama reasoned. ‘They would have had enough to do looking through military bases and hunting survivors first before they started checking out everywhere else.’

‘Guess their frakking intelligence wasn't perfect then’ Tigh replied. They hadn’t known about that bunker on Aquarius either of course, damn Toasters couldn’t infiltrate the whole of Colonial Society with only a few identical models. ‘We might still have to shift some of the Raptors we salvaged from the wrecks over Scorpia and Picon to the civilian ships, the Chief is complaining about lack of space to work in’ he said. Although the Colonial Fleet had far more Vipers than Raptors the latter had survived the destruction of the ships or stations they were on in a proportionally greater number because they were simply built so much tougher.

‘Some of them are probably only useful for parts, have them stripped and if there's still a problem have a few more clamped to the Chrion, she's larger and she's got a better thrust-to-weight ratio than the freighters so it shouldn't be an issue’ Adama replied. Including those they had arrived at Cyrannus with they now had thirty-two Raptors in varying states of repair in or on Galactica and another four already attached to the liner. The Cylon's had in fact recovered quite a few themselves, mainly from any intact ground facilities, but since the Heavy Raider was generally more capable anyway they hadn't put a major effort into salvaging more from the drifting hulks of the Colonial Fleet.

‘Her Captain is already moaning that having all those cargo containers on his hull is screwing with his ability to manoeuvre’ Tigh reminded Adama. ‘If he says anything else I could always threaten to lighten the load by personally throwing him out of an airlock’ he offered.

‘Just tell him that a few more fifty-ton Raptors aren't going to make a difference to a ship that already masses tens of thousands of tons’ Adama advised his XO.

‘He just doesn't like all that crap ruining the nice clean lines of his boat’ Tigh observed. ‘We should have lied and told him the containers we put there were the ones holding the Colonial Bank Reserves not just a load of spare parts and the tooling for a jump-drive assembly line’ he said. ‘The Captain of the Carina moaned less when we told him that he got to carry a few tons worth of dead Centurions in his hold for frak's sake.’

‘Given that we'd already started welding Raiders to the Virgon Express he wasn't in much of a position to complain’ Adama replied. Of the thousand-plus Raiders which had been taken out dozens had still been almost intact, often with just a neat laser burn right through their AI, and ten of the best of these had been recovered along with a squadron's worth of pristine Heavy Raiders taken as spoils of war on Aquaria. The other Heavy Raiders had been stripped of their navigation computers and FTL's, with the parts now filling the cargo bays of the two Wolverine dropships. Unfortunately since it had been done in a mad rush, with the two Mercury III battlemechs used to simply cut and even tear the Heavy Raiders open, quite a few of the FTL's were probably broken beyond repair and an even higher proportion of the more fragile computers were likely unusable.

The basestars had self-destructed before they could be examined, just as the civilian ships jumped back to Cyrannus after being fetched by Raptors as it happened, but it wasn't like they had the time to do it properly anyway. Adama was only relieved he managed to recover all the nuclear devices from the bunker on Aquaria before more Basestars and Raiders started jumping in. They had found twenty-five fifty-kiloton anti-ship missiles plus a large amount of conventional ordinance much of which they had to reluctantly leave behind. However the three hundred early-model Lightning-Javelin air-to-air missiles they discovered in racks were now adding to Chief Tyrol’s problems since they weren't exactly something you could just pile up in a corner.

When the first scout Raiders had started to appear Adama called a halt to the last-ditch salvage efforts, jumped the civilian ships back out again and then after making sure every team was accounted for they had left the Twelve Colonies once again and headed back to New Circe, albeit by what Adama intended to be a highly circuitous route designed to throw any Cylon pursuit off the scent.

Saul Tigh finished his Ambrosia and held his glass up to the light. ‘There's something wrong with this glass’ he said.

‘If it's the way light shines through it then you could always paint it black’ Adama suggested. ‘No hitting the bottle hard until we're at least another ten jumps out from Cyrannus’ he ordered.

‘What kind of man gives you a taste for it then cuts you off?’ Tigh replied.

‘The kind they give battlestars to’ Adama replied.

‘If being a sadist was a requirement to command a battlestar they would have given me one years ago’ Tigh responded.

‘And you don’t think Ellen's getting drunk and telling those obscene jokes at that dinner party on Tauron maybe had a role to play in limiting your rank progression?’ Adama wryly inquired.

‘Nah, it was her pole-dancing in front of Admiral Corman and his wife at the Officers Ball on Picon which was the nail in the coffin of my career’ Tigh told him. ‘If she'd been wearing underwear it might have all turned out differently’ he added wistfully.

‘You know technically you're now the third highest ranked officer in the entire Fleet’ the Admiral pointed out.

‘Don't play it down Bill’ Tigh replied, ‘for a while there I was dictator of what we thought was the entire frakking human race’ he noted. ‘I wasn't that good at it though’ he admitted, his rule of martial law after Adama was shot by Boomer hadn't exactly been a shining success story.

‘Well it's something for your résumé at least’ Adama told him. ‘We're due the next jump in the sequence in ten minutes, best get up to the CIC’ he suggested.

‘A jump every two hours is frakking uncivilised’ Tigh complained. ‘And we need to keep an eye on that bucket-of-bolts they made on Scorpia, I don't think the FTL on that tub will take this kind of treatment very long’ he said. ‘I know having another ship we could load with cargo is great but it's a load of scrap held together with duct tape’ he opined.

‘Makes you wonder how we survived a jump every thirty-three minutes as long as we did’ Adama remarked.

‘We fed the pilots lots of drugs’ Tigh replied. ‘And we took turns sleeping for a few minutes at a time.’

‘Oh yeah that was it’ Adama recalled. ‘If that starts happening again let's just stop running and just nuke the frakkers so we can get a decent nights sleep’ he said semi-seriously. ‘We're not getting any younger Saul’ he noted sadly.

‘What if they nuke us back?’ Tigh responded. ‘We're already using up all our anti-radiation drugs pumping them into the civilians we rescued’ he pointed out.

Adama looked directly at Tigh. ‘Why the hell would you be worried about radiation?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘How much more hair have you got left to fall out anyway?’ he asked deadpan.

Saul Tigh narrowed his eyes at the Admiral. ‘Oh you're definitely going to have to pour me another drink as an apology for that one’ he told Adama seriously.

‘Yeah I went too far there’ Adama conceded, reaching for the bottle so he could re-fill his friend's glass.


* * *

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER TEN - PART 3

----------


City of McEvedy – New Circe – 3045 CE

Lord Protector Vaun looked over the holographic projection in relief showing the territory of the Colonial City-State. Lines of advance were superimposed from six directions with symbols indicating which units were assigned to each with the Regimental Combat Teams of the 331st forming the bulk of the formations but with five Brigades of Infantry drawn from a partial mobilisation of the reserves bolstering the numbers. One advantage to having the Colonial luddites not present was being able to use more advanced means of holding a briefing such as this computer-controlled projection you could view from all angles.

Admiral Franks was walking about the projection explaining the plan. ‘Once we have achieved both Orbital and Air Supremacy the ground units will quickly advance to secure the population and lock them down tight’ he said. ‘Given that we'll be deploying more soldiers than they have people in total it shouldn't be too bloody but I think we can expect the Colonial Military to put up a fight, and a certain percentage of the civilians are bound to resist as well.’

‘Bloody for who?’ Vaun asked.

‘Probably more so for us given that the rules of engagement will be extremely strict’ Franks replied. ‘Our troops will not fire unless fired upon and only where there is no chance of collateral damage or the deaths of non-combatants’ he said.

‘What if the Colonial Military opt to use their own civilians as human shields?’ Vaun suggested. ‘The evidence from the actions of the Pegasus crew indicates they don't place as much value on their people as we do ours.’

‘We have an escalating series of contingency plans ranging from use of non-lethal weaponry to the use of overwhelming force to end the stand-off with as few civilian fatalities as possible’ Admiral Franks told her. ‘The other Joint Chiefs and myself are confident that we can keep their losses to an absolute minimum, we don't want their blood on our hands’ he said honestly.

Vaun nodded her head. ‘Thank the rest of the Joint Chiefs and the personnel involved in producing this plan for their efforts on my behalf please Admiral’ she requested. ‘I only hope we never have to put it into action’ she added with sincerity.

Franks moved into a parade-rest stance. ‘A hope we all share Madam Lord Protector’ he concurred. ‘Although unification of all human worlds and societies under the Star League is the ultimate goal we agree that a gradual process of cultural assimilation is to be far preferred to a military annexation in this case’ he said. ‘We already outnumber the Colonials on the world considerably and with our higher rates of reproduction within a couple of generations at most they'll represent such a small fraction of the people on this world that they'll simply vanish from history, end up as a few small ethnic groups within our overall population’ he said.

‘It's such a shame in some ways, they're so interesting from an anthropological point of view, Query Affirmative’ Vaun observed with a sigh.

‘Affirmative, but what else are we going to do?’ Admiral Franks asked rhetorically. ‘Recreate the Tribal Reservations of North America on Terra, have tourists come and see the quaint people from Caprica?’

‘See the crazy Sagitarrons die of preventable diseases in their own environment’ Vaun added with a wry smile, playing along. ‘No we'll just assimilate them peacefully like you say’ she told him. ‘Given how many of our young male population seem to be drooling over the munchkin girls we can probably achieve a lot of the task of absorbing them into our society through inter-marriage’ she said.

‘Munchkins?’ Franks repeated the unfamiliar nickname with amusement.

‘You haven't heard that one yet?’ Vaun asked in surprise. ‘I heard it from my youngest daughter who picked it up at school. It's because they're all so small’ she explained then trying to keep a straight-face she adopted a silly voice. ‘Follow the map in the stars, follow the map in the stars, follow, follow, follow, follow, follow the map in the stars. Oh we're off to see the Lost Tribe, the wonderful Lost-Tribe of Earth’ she sang.

Franks burst out laughing. ‘We'd better make sure not to show the film to any of them. Query Affirmative?’ he replied. ‘Although I've met plenty who needed more heart or brains’ he said.

‘Affirmative’ Vaun agreed. ‘We're not from Kobol anymore Toto’ she quipped with a chuckle before becoming more serious again. ‘If I gave the word how fast could we get this plan underway?’ she wanted to know.

‘We could get sufficient units in place and begin the invasion within seven hours but a full day would be better’ Franks replied, ‘three days ideally since we could then mobilise enough of the reserves to make it all as bloodless as possible’ he said. ‘Making the entire population bondsmen as an interim measure might be the best means of dealing with them, it would certainly help with the legal aspects, but if we did that we would ideally have to find a decent casus belli to declare war on them first’ he noted.

‘Admiral, not being a Stefan Amaris or Nicolas Kerensky wannabe the only reason I would ever order a military annexation of the Colonial City-State would be if they gave me little recourse but to do so, so I think you can be confident of having that’ Vaun told him. ‘I just want this option in my back pocket if the element in their society that is even more objectionable than their current administration ever takes power’ she said.

Franks looked at the holographic depiction of the City-State once again. ‘You know once they've got a real city built it'll all be a potentially bloodier undertaking’ he said. ‘Urban warfare is a killing ground for mechs and our Infantry won't like being sniped at or petrol-bombed from the roofs of buildings’ he noted. ‘Although there may be moral and ethical objections from much of our population, and Parliament and the Courts would go insane, we can make a good argument that using the Wars of Reunification as a precedent the SLDF is empowered to take over worlds or territory of any independent power and force them into compliance with the Star League’ he suggested.

It was an article of faith amongst the Wolverines that the human race needed to be united under one authority, if one that that tended to adopt a largely hands-off attitude and generally allowed a reasonable amount of self-determination and independence in local government. Prior to the formation of the Star League in 2571 humanity had been wracked by the so-called “Age of War” during which all the various interstellar powers had devoted much of their energies to slaughtering each other, and after the fall of the Star League in 2781 the various interstellar powers had embarked on the Succession Wars during which they devoted even more of their energies into slaughtering each other.

The reign of the Star League had not been an era of relative peace and prosperity because everyone that saw the Cameron Star flag flying suddenly became nice, it was a period of relative peace and prosperity because the Star League had adopted a policy of beating the ever-loving crap out of anyone that caused trouble. During the Wars of Reunification they forced every star-nation to join the League at the point of the main guns of the fleet if necessary, and they were not above landing whole divisions on worlds reluctant to accept League affiliation and stomping them into submission with battlemechs either. The Star League wasn't really tyrannical, it had an idealistic vision of what humanity should and could be, but it was the epitome of the iron fist in the velvet glove. If you broke from the mould of what the League thought was acceptable behaviour then the great fist of the SLDF would be dispatched to knock you on your ass. Woe betide any planetary government who ruled their world through obvious torture or brutality because once day the League might decide to make an example of you and send the mighty battleships and elite regiments of the Star League Defence Force to demonstrate in no uncertain terms what brutality really meant.

What they had heard of the history of the Twelve Colonies had only confirmed the Wolverine view of both the universe and human nature generally. Before unification under the Articles of Colonisation the various independent worlds of Cyrannus had fought each other in a series of vicious wars, this being of course why the Cylons were first developed as disposable foot-soldiers for the Caprican military, and when they weren't doing that they had engaged in civil wars at home instead, some very bloody. It had taken a unifying threat in the form of the rebelling machines to bring the Colonies together and the subsequent interwar period had been considerably better for the populace in general than the previous interplanetary conflicts had ever allowed. The Colonial Government was in effect a mini Star League and it had been wiling to use the fleet to maintain order when necessary too, again mirroring the SLDF in a way.

Vaun looked at the Admiral askance after considering his words. ‘You aren't advocating an invasion right now are you Query Negative?’ she asked coldly.

‘Negative’ Franks replied instantly ‘However I feel I should point out it will be easier now than later’ he said. ‘The City-State will be less onerous to take at present and with Galactica absent their military is weaker than it would be otherwise.’

Vaun pointed at herself. ‘Just to repeat for your benefit’ she said. ‘Not Stefan Amaris’ she told him again. ‘Violence is the last resort of a civilised society, we only use force to make sure that civilisation lasts’ she declared.

‘Pesky civilian control of the military’ Admiral Franks responded with a smile. ‘Just doing my duty by presenting all the options’ he told her. If she had ordered an invasion at this time he would have advised and counselled against it. ‘Moving onto other things we've continued our shipments of munitions to the Pegasus, her point-defence batteries are now almost fully stocked with ammunition, and work on the hybrid autocannon design is well underway’ he told her.

‘Excellent’ Vaun replied. ‘Any news yet regarding progress on the new jump-drive technology?’ she queried.

‘We'll need the permission of President Roslin and the Quorum of course but our engineers are confident we can install medium-sized jump-drives taken from two of the civilian vessels into our Titan Class Dropships as an initial project’ Franks replied. ‘A pair of jump-capable Light Carriers with eighteen aerospace fighters aboard apiece would greatly improve our ability to project power.’

‘I thought the Titan's had been removed from service decades ago. Query Affirmative?’ Vaun asked.

‘Affirmative’ Franks confirmed, ‘but they were mothballed, not stripped for parts Ma'am’ Franks told her. ‘Given how useful they were in supporting our ground troops during the fighting on Jarrett it was decided to keep them for a rainy day, unlike some of our other vessels’ he said.

‘What about jump-fighters?’ Vaun asked.

‘If we can get the drives we don't see any problem refitting a Kirghiz with the FTL design from a Colonial Raptor’ Franks replied. ‘It will have less jump-range because it's got twice the mass and some modifications are needed, plus it'll need an additional fuel tank for the Tylium needed to run it until we can come up with a version we can run from a good old-fashioned fusion reactor, but all together it'll weigh just over five tons at the outside’ he told her. ‘Less than four once we have a drive that'll work off the reactor.’

‘What's the delay with modifying the drive to not need tylium?’ Vaun queried.

‘The problem is that the Colonials have a less than thorough understanding of the theory behind it all, they don't even think they invented them they just copied what they inherited from the original Kobolians.’ Admiral Franks replied. ‘Our Kearny-Fuchida drives are frankly third-rate by comparison but we knew far more about how they actually work which is also why we invented faster-than-light communication and the Colonials never did’ he said. ‘The Cylons do however seem to have some kind of FTL comms because their downloads at least are interstellar in range, and we know they also have better jump technology too, so we reason they’re ahead of the Colonials in both FTL theory and application.’

‘Is that scientist of theirs Baltar proving much use on the R&D front?’ the Lord Protector asked.

‘He's certainly smart enough, we tested his IQ out at genius level and he has a good understanding of Colonial Science generally’ Franks replied. ‘Once we gave him the equations for the K-F drive and the HPG he filled in an awful lot of the blanks himself’ the Admiral continued. ‘With our own physicists and engineers working on the problem too I can see far-jumping being a reality rather than a theory quicker than we initially hoped’ he said happily.

‘Far-jumping?’ Vaun queried.

‘It's what they're calling it’ Franks told her, ‘It'll need a compact KF core, Lithium-Fusion batteries, Colonial anti-gravity tech plus some other additions from their own drive designs and a lot of engineering and testing but we've already got an idea of the capabilities based on known data.’

Vaun was intrigued. ‘So what are we talking about?’ she asked.

‘The range limit seems to be roughly nine-hundred light-years according to the math, anything beyond that and the chances of cooking the drive starts to rise exponentially’ Franks replied, ‘although I admit I couldn't understand enough of the equations to begin to to know exactly why’ he told her.

‘Nine hundred light-years?’ Jennifer Vaun exclaimed in shock.

‘It gets better’ Franks continued. ‘Unlike trying to have two K-F Drive cores on the same ship you can theoretically operate both a Colonial Drive and a Kearny-Fuchida on the same vessel without them interfering with each other’ the Admiral told her. ‘We could build a ship that could make it all the way to the Clan homeworlds in less than five maximum range jumps and then do safe rapid tactical jumps of up to thirty light-years when it got there’ he said. ‘It would run rings around the Clans’ he said. ‘Ma'am, we could have the ability in a couple of years to annihilate them at will, a five week trip to Strana Mechty then nuke every clan into oblivion one after the other, jump into orbit, blast them, jump out, repeat as necessary.’

‘Oh my God!’ Vaun gasped.

‘If you want a suggestion I like project “Sword of Damocles” as a name’ Franks told her, ‘it was an Ancient Greek legend after all’ he noted. ‘Oh and we were thinking of calling it the Kearny-Fuchida-Baltar Drive as a nod to our guests' he added with a smile.


----------

Note from the Author:

Given that they're loathe to use quite as much "stick" as the Colonials did the SLDF is continuing with a more "Carrot" based approach to the Cylon prisoners treating them decently in retturn for cooperation. The Ones are still not playing ball whatsoever for they're facing a rather more stern regime. Triad was a Colonial card game seen in the show. I thought having a Three and Six and an Eight playing it was an amusing notion given their differing personalities. I've put another latin phrase in the mouth of Romo Lampkin. Fiat justitia ruat caelum has been quoted a few times by judges in some famous legal cases. One of these was when Lord Justice Mansfield was making his decision in the Somersett Case which ruled Slavery illegal in England in 1772, he knew that it was a verdict with a momental effect on society but justice for the individual concerned (the slave James Somersett) was deemed more important than the consequences of the ruling more generally. Hope you like the legal/political implications of Gina facing trial. Given that it was the Colonial Fleet that broke the armistice first puts a somewhat different light on things although the Cylon's drastic overreaction was hardly excusable.

Having filled their cargo bays they then resorted to simply welding or clamping additional salvage to the outer hulls of the ships. We see vipers and raiders carried that way in the show so it doesn't seem to be an issue. Atlantia was lost in a battle over Virgon with a few other ships (it's mentioned in the mini-series) and I had a mental image of a battlestar being blown into large chunks with a relatively intact flight-pod being one of them. If it was a Mercury Class like Pegasus it could have still been holding several squadrons worth of vipers. Solaria is another named battlestar from the show, this one had the front half blown off leaving one of her FTL's intact plus other equipment. The third salvaged Battlestar Atlas is the most intact and might have been recovered eventually if they had more time to fix the thing. According to dialogue there were apparently about 120 Battlestar's in the fleet I've just had Atlas as the one left in the largest piece, the Cylon's were thorough enough to render the vast majority of the fleet little more than scrap. Having the various "Planetary Guards" of the Colonies use second-hand Colonial Fleet equipment is just my own invention but it mirrors the US Air National Guard that way. As the Fleet switched to the Mark VII Viper I envisioned the older Mark VI models being transferred or sold to the planetary governments (we know individual colonies had their own armed vessels), Aerilon was a notably poor colony so they were still using a few even older Mark V's as well when the war started. The part-time pilots of the Guard had no warning to mobilise so they were killed in their homes by the Cylon sneak attack which is why their Vipers were still in the hangers.

Now you didn't think the Wolvies were all sweetness and light now did you? You can't really understand them without realising how the Age of War, the Reunification Wars and the Succession Wars colour their views, plus of course the attempted genocide they suffered at the hands of the other Clans. The New Circe Wolverines are capable of being incredibly ruthless and rationalise it away with an appeal to the greater good. They're a society of great contradictions pulled in different directions by their origins. The Titan Class dropship is an aerospace-fighter carrier, the reason I think they would have a couple is that the SLDF had a decent number when they left the Inner Sphere with Aleksandyr Kerensky and it's said that during the fighting on Jarett the Minnesota Tribe kept the Draconis Combine forces tied down with large numbers of aerospace fighters. If there had been a huge warship around to launch them it should have been noticed so I was thinking Titan's instead. Also the Titans of legend come from Ancient Greek Myth so it's a nice addition I thought. Although the normal limit on a K-F Drive is 30LY you can hotwire it to get a much longer jump, the record being 900LY which is why I chose that limit for the K-F-B Drive. Unlike a K-F however the K-F-B doesn't destroy itself doing a super-jump because of the modifications made by Colonial FTL and gravity control. Strana Mechty is the clan capital world incidentally.

[cawest]

the 6's defense if going to take a hit when they find out that the humans did not break the pease first.  Ty being a cylon will change that little thing  :-X

[mikecj]

“The prosecution maintains that it was my client that carried out the crime but all that they offer as evidence are eye-witnesses, video footage and a positive genetic match for my client from blood samples left at the scene. Compelling proof yes, if my client were human, but that could have been any Number Three Cylon who carried out the assault and simply being unlucky enough to be the first Three spotted nearby is not enough to convict beyond reasonable doubt and that’s what I’m going to tell the jury when the case is heard tomorrow.”

Romo Lampkin is the best character around!

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER ELEVEN - PART 1

-----------

“Ask yourself this Admiral, would Ares, the God of War, have really approved of the Conventions the Thirteenth named after him that sought to limit the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction? Personally I doubt it so if you really want my opinion Sir I say screw what the Wolvies think, Praise the Lords of Kobol and pass the Nuclear, Biological and Chemical ammunition.”

Captain Aaron Kelly - 3046



* * *


Colonial One (Office of the President) – Colonial City-State – 3045 CE

Wallace Gray stood up when the President entered. ‘Sorry I'm late’ she apologised, ‘Tory insisted on me signing a new Bill into law before she would let me go’ she told him. She also had to discuss the preparations for the upcoming trial of the Number Six Cylon "Gina" with Didi Cassidy who would be prosecuting, there were possible political considerations to be considered and Roslin wanted a freindly word in order to advise the lawyer not to stray too far into matters of Colonial Security or Defence Policy unless it was strictly necessary to get a conviction.

‘I hope it was the one authorising work to begin on the new cement works?’ Gray replied.

‘Ah so that was your handiwork was it?’ Roslin asked. ‘Well I suppose it must have been, it wasn't trivial, needs to be done and actually makes sense’ she said. ‘So much of the legislation that passes through the Quorum is just a waste of ink and paper’ she opined, taking a seat behind her desk. ‘So have you considered my offer?’ she asked.

‘I've considered it’ Gray replied noncommittally.

Roslin sighed. ‘Wallace, I know asking you to withdraw your candidacy for Vice President in favour of Gaius Baltar damaged our friendship but you're still the best organiser and economics expert we have and I would dearly like you to play an important part in my administration as Secretary of Commerce and Development’ she told him. ‘You're already dabbling in politics at a lower level, advising members of the Quorum on policy’ she noted. ‘Why not step up and get things done yourself?’ she asked.

Gray leaned forward. ‘Laura, you know I want to serve the people’ he began, ‘and you really know how much I hate seeing things go to hell just for lack of a coherent strategy, but to be frank how can I be sure that if the opinion polls start leaning one way you won't just put politics ahead again and push me aside for someone that isn't regarded as...’

‘The Prince of Darkness?’ Roslin finished the sentence for him.

‘I was going to say a dull, technocratic gasbag but “Prince of Darkness” would at least have a touch of class about it’ Gray responded with a chuckle.

‘We're trying to set up a new nation, it's been getting harder and harder for me to keep everything going and the more I rely on other people the more I realise how many of the people that work for me are either well-meaning and inept or self-serving and corrupt’ Roslin told him. ‘I need someone honest who also has actual talent and to be frank the list of those people isn't as long as I would like it to be’ she said. ‘All the other remotely qualified candidates are <i>already</i> in jobs I need them to be doing so I need you to make sure that the economy doesn't implode while still making sure we don't work the people into the ground.’

‘Facing another strike for better wages from the logging crews?’ Gray asked knowingly.

Roslin groaned. ‘I tried to explain that the government is barely keeping its head above water in terms of finances, and that we can't just print more money, but they weren't having any of it’ she said. ‘We're already up to our eyeballs in debt thanks to all the loans we've taken out from the Wolvies and I don't want to face a collapse in our currency too’ she said.

Gray shook his head. ‘We set the exchange rate at the wrong level’ he stated flatly. ‘Cubits need to be devalued at least twenty-five percent against League Script’ he told her. ‘We'll never be able to export goods across the border and the cheap imports are preventing us developing indigenous industries that are competitive’ he said. ‘We could introduce protective tariffs but do we really want to start a trade war?’ he asked rhetorically.

‘So what are you saying?’ Roslin asked.

‘You do want to print more money and devalue our currency’ Gray told her. ‘Just make sure to do it gradually so we don't spin off into hyper-inflation or have people suddenly lose their faith in the stuff’ he continued. ‘Promise a staggered series of payrises spread over the next two years, the workers will be happy and it'll slowly sort out our import and export problem.’

Roslin smiled. ‘Take the job’ she told him, ‘you know you want to’ she wheedled.

‘Okay, but I'll want to be included in those pay increases too Laura’ Gray replied with a wink.

‘Thank the Gods’ Roslin said with relief. ‘You don't even want to know who I was going to have to ask next’ she told him. ‘I'm hoping that Admiral Adama brings back enough salvage to clear the national debt and then some but we can't rely on the League people paying us for technological trinkets to keep us afloat forever’ she told him.

Gray nodded. ‘Perhaps we should have negotiated more for our jump-drive designs and artificial gravity technology?’ he suggested.

‘We asked for a fortune, I just had no idea how much it was going to cost to get all the armour replaced on Galactica for one thing’ Roslin replied. ‘Their orbital factories are working around the clock to turn out enough steel plates to re-clad her when she returns but just after I saw the cost estimates for that then Lee Adama comes to me with a request to add additional armour to Pegasus’ she said.

‘I thought Pegasus had all her plating still intact?’ Gray queried. The newer battlestar certainly wasn't showing all the exposed ribbing that Galactica was.

Roslin frowned. ‘After seeing how much better their “lamellor ferro-carbide” armour is than anything we can make Adama the Younger has this notion of adding a hundred-thousand tons of the stuff to his ship’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Unless his father brings back most of Caprica I don't think we’ll be able to afford it’ she told him.

‘They do make good war-toys here now don't they?’ Gray observed.

‘Purchasing enough lasers to equip all our Vipers gave our credit another nasty knock’ Roslin told him. ‘For that matter do you know how much a single thirty-millimetre round for a Viper or a fifty-millimetre round for a point-defence battery costs?’ she asked. ‘Pegasus needs millions of them to re-fill her ammunition stocks’ she groaned.

‘At least we found a world with an unusually developed military-industrial complex’ Gray responded.

‘I'd call them paranoid but given that there really are people out to get them I guess it's more like being well-prepared’ Roslin commented.

Gray leaned back in his chair looking thoughtful. ‘Our mining ships are currently prioritising tylium and strategic metals for Viper production’ he said. ‘Our tylium reserves are good now so we could start selling a fair proportion of any production from now on to the Wolvies’ he suggested. ‘As long as we don't charge enough to make it worthwhile for them to develop their own mining and refining infrastructure for it instead we could earn a decent amount of foreign currency to offset our defence spending’ he told her. ‘If we reduced Viper production rates we could mine and produce even more tylium.’

‘Oh the military really wouldn't like that’ Roslin replied.

‘They haven't got enough trained pilots to warrant a full complement of Vipers on both battlestars anyway’ Gray noted. ‘By the time they do even a fifty-percent reduction in how many Pegasus is currently manufacturing a month would probably get them there’ he said. ‘I was watching a news report a couple of days ago which featured a segment on pilot training, they're not rushing them through flight-school any more so the process is taking a lot longer than it did when we had Cylons right on our tail’ he pointed out.

Roslin began tapping her fingers on her desk. ‘It's an idea’ she replied. ‘If the Colonial Fleet wants their bullets they'll have to be content with less spare Vipers’ she said.

‘Agricultural goods are another thing we should be pushing in trade terms’ Gray told her. ‘There are bound to be fruits or vegetables from back home that we can grow and sell as novelty foodstuffs to the Wolvies at a hefty mark-up’ he said. ‘Fumarella Leaf is another possibility; I know farmers have already started cultivating it for our own people along with that weed that grows here.’

‘Unfortunately that weed is already a banned substance over the border because not only is it a mild psychotropic it's carcinogenic too which means fumarella would never be allowed either’ Roslin told him. ‘They think we're all mad for taking smoke into our lungs that causes cancer’ she said before shrugging her shoulders. ‘They <i>may</i> have a point there’ she had to agree, albeit reluctantly.

‘So they don't allow recreational drug use?’ Gray queried.

‘Only alcohol, but when I pointed out the hypocrisy there I was told they can grow replacement livers a lot easier than replacement brains and they've also removed the genes from their population that make people susceptible to developing alcoholism’ Roslin replied.

Gray laughed. ‘They think there's a genetic cause for everything’ he said.

‘More like a genetic predisposition for nearly everything’ Roslin replied. ‘Violent behaviour, intelligence, risk-taking... you name it they say they can point to the DNA concerned, although sometimes it's a combination of different genes that are responsible’ she replied.

‘Have they made much progress looking at Cylon DNA?’ Gray wondered.

‘Enough to think they could clone human/cylon hybrids and bring them to term in their “Iron Womb” machines’ Roslin told him. ‘No they aren't going to they say but they're pretty certain they could’ she said. ‘They're far beyond us in all the required fields, and likely ahead of the cylons too given that we know that the Toasters breeding program on Caprica never got anywhere.’

‘So have they developed a working Cylon detector yet based on all this fancy genetic science they have?’ Gray asked.

‘You're definitely taking the job aren't you?’ Roslin checked. ‘Some of what I'm telling you isn't for the general public yet’ she told him seriously.

‘Yes I'm taking the job’ Gray confirmed.

‘Okay, they don't have a blood-test as such but they do think after months of examining and scanning the Cylon prisoners they've got a Cylon detector that will work’ Roslin told him.

‘Radiation-based like the one former VP Baltar developed?’ Gray queried.

‘No that didn't work, although they say they can’t figure out quite why assuming that he didn’t just frak it up’ Roslin replied. ‘They say they can use a flight simulator though, or rather some bits of one.’

‘A flight simulator?’ Gray responded incredulously.

‘Their pilots wear Neural Interface helmets’ Roslin explained. ‘The sillica pathways in a Cylon brain don't connect up to the machine properly, apparently humans with brain-damage can't use one either so we'll have to make sure of the results with a cat-scan afterwards if we get a positive result’ she said. ‘They're going to try and perfect the equipment and testing procedure so it only takes a couple of minutes per person then make several units’ she said. ‘Screen the whole population quickly.’

‘Nice to know our brains do something better than the Cylons’ Gray said with a grin.

Roslin shook her head. ‘Nope, they think once a Neural Interface helmet is modified and tuned to work with a skinjob brain it'll be faster than for a human’ she told him. ‘How did that go?’ she tried to recall. ‘Something like “our wetware isn’t as optimised for connecting to hardware” I think it was’ she continued. ‘It's just a case of translating from one programming language to another.’

‘I guess all Toasters are equals under the skin’ Gray joked.

Roslin laughed then her eyes widened and her expression shifted to one of concern as a thought occurred to her. ‘You don't think they're stupid enough to try and make those cylon/human hybrids they think they can produce if they think they'd be producing the ultimate fighter-pilots do you?’ she asked nervously.

Wallace Gray blinked. ‘They couldn't be that naive could they?’ he asked. ‘The damn things would turn against them like ours did.’

‘But what if they thought they could program them?’ Roslin asked. ‘I don't mean hard-code them, I mean what if they thought raising them like they do other children from the Iron Wombs, adopting them into families would lead to...’

‘Patriotism, love of family and homeland’ Gray said, thinking it through. ‘Primitive tribal instincts coupled with cultural and societal moulding’ he continued. ‘The Cylons rose up against us because we kept them as slaves, what if we'd given the things the vote instead, treated them like our own children and told them we loved them?’

‘The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world’ Roslin said quietly.

‘Or the hand that holds the test-tube rules the galaxy perhaps?’ Gray suggested. ‘Given maybe twenty years or so they could breed an army.’

Roslin slowly broke into a smile, it had seemed a horrific notion for a while but then she remembered the big-picture. ‘There are over two-thousand human colonised worlds with fourtrillion people on them’ she said. ‘What could one planet with less than a million inhabitants really do?’ she asked rhetorically with a chuckle.

The ludicrously outnumbered Wolverines emerging from a hidden world two decades from now, intent on taking on the entire Inner Sphere,plus all the Clans, in order to try and restore the Star League by force using advanced jumpdrives and cyborg soldiers interfaced directly with their machines... well the entire idea was just patently ridiculous wasn't it?



* * *

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER ELEVEN - PART 2

----------



Battlestar Galactica – Deep Space – 3045CE

Lacking an office, or even his own quarters onboard the ship, Colonel McEvedy had taken to borrowing one of the airlocks whenever a subordinate requested a private meeting. It wasn't exactly homely but it was at least relatively soundproof when you closed the internal hatch, this being a definite plus given his habit of bellowing foul language at those who had screwed up.

McEvedy listened to the young officer babble for a while and eventually cut him off by raising a hand. ‘Lieutenant Cale how much is your battlemech worth?’

Cale looked confused, he couldn't see the relevance. ‘With the current weapon load-out a Mercury III comes in at about five million and change Sir’ he replied.

‘That's a lot of money for the hard-working taxpayers of New Circe to put into your hands now isn't it Cale, query affirmative?’ McEvedy asked.

‘Affirmative. Well yes Sir, I suppose it is’ Cale conceded.

‘Then perhaps you can explain why the Star League should entrust such an expensive and valuable military asset to a man who is so damn stupid he can't even figure out birth control!’ the Colonel thundered at the end.

Cale grimaced. ‘I thought my implant still had another few months on it’ he replied sheepishly. ‘They're supposed to be good for at least a year’ he pointed out.

‘You're supposed to get those things regularly checked’ McEvedy reminded him, poking him on the upper arm roughly where his birth-control implant would have been surgically placed. The implant would slowly release chemicals into your bloodstream to prevent unwanted pregnancy. Woman on New Circe used a similar device that released somewhat different chemicals. Between the two the system was considered foolproof because the chances of both failing, or running out early, were slim.

‘I guess I was busy Sir’ Cale responded, ‘distracted’ he added.

‘It's what you were busy doing that's got you into this situation Lieutenant’ Colonel McEvedy wryly replied. ‘I assume that she's going to keep it based on your request?’ he asked.

‘Yes Sir, abortion is illegal for the Colonials anyway’ Cale replied. ‘I just want to do right by her’ he said.

‘And your version of doing right by the girl is saddling her with a name that would suit a porn star is it?’ McEvedy asked with a wry smile, ‘I mean, Cally Cale for Christ's sake!’ he exclaimed. ‘It sounds like she should be starring in “Colonial Girls Go Wild” or something.’

Cale narrowed his eyes at the Colonel. ‘I respect you Sir’ he said, ‘and I know that you're Infantry and can probably beat me senseless in a fistfight, but make another joke like that about her and we'll find out in a Circe of Equals’ he vowed.

McEvedy looked him in the eyes, the boy had passed the test there. ‘You love her then?’ he checked.

‘Yes Sir’ Cale replied forcefully.

‘Good, then permission of marry is granted’ the Colonel told him. ‘I'd still consider a hyphenated surname though Son’ he added semi-seriously.

‘Her real name is Calandra’ the mechwarrior lieutenant told him.

‘Calandra Cale sounds much more classy, stick to that’ McEvedy advised. ‘How could she be this far gone before she knew anyway?’ he queried.

‘She's been taking Anti-TDS drugs to stop her getting nauseous when we jump’ Cale replied, ‘I didn't know before but they stop morning-sickness too’ he explained. ‘What with all the excitement back at Cyrannus... well I guess she didn't notice something not happening regularly like normal’ he reasoned.

‘No, I meant what with the size of her, surely she showed before now’ McEvedy responded. The girl was fairly diminutive even by Colonial standards. ‘My kids were from an Iron Womb but my sister was pretty obviously pregnant at less than this many weeks’ he said. ‘Face it there's hardly anything of your girl to start with.’

‘Doc Ljungberg says that some women carry it differently than others or something’ Cale replied with a shrug. She had been getting a little bigger but he put that down to better diet at first.

‘So you got her checked out by a real clinician not that chain-smoking witch-doctor then?’ McEvedy responded. ‘Good’ he opined. The child was one of the Clan which meant he or she was precious in the eyes of all Wolverines, you protect your own.

‘Cally insisted on talking to Doctor Cottle first, I had to talk her into seeing Ljungberg too’ Cale told him. ‘You know the Colonials, they're skittish around our high-tech stuff’ he noted. ‘It was probably the First Cylon War, they used to be more technophile say half a century back’ he told the infantry officer.

‘You talk to them more than I do so I'll take your word for it’ McEvedy replied. He had picked up some Caprican during his time on Galactica but not enough to really socialise or debate history with the ships crew. Fortunately Commander Thorpe was around to do that sort of thing, McEvedy was the ranking Wolverine on the mission but his job had been largely just to make sure that if there was any ground-fighting that the 331st stamped a Star League military-issue boot onto the face of any Cylons unfortunate enough to meet them in combat. ‘So are you going to wait until we get back?’ he asked.

‘No that'll be weeks away even if the Admiral decides not to make another detour to be certain we're not being followed’ Cale replied. ‘There's a couple of Priests aboard who were helping out academic teams find and recover artefacts, Cally will probably want one of them to officiate.’

‘You're not converting or anything are you?’ McEvedy asked him curiously.

‘No I'm still planning to remain a Lutheran, if not a very observant one I'll admit’ Cale replied. ‘My parents are more religious than me though, Mom is going to go ballistic when she finds out her first grandchild is going to be raised to believe in Zeus and the rest’ he decided, ‘and not just because she's a gunner in a reserve artillery unit’ he added with a laugh. ‘Better if I go back with a ring on my finger already, present them with a done-deal.’

‘They're farmers right, your people I mean, Query Affirmative?’ the Colonel checked, he had naturally read the files on all the personnel under his command. As a farm boy Cale had probably been driving agromechs on the family farm for years before he ever got to pilot the military version.

‘Affirmative, but I bet they regret pushing me to get that education and become an officer when they find out what learning Greek got me’ Cale replied. ‘Cally's a wonderful girl but Dad is old-school and would want me to help breed the next generation of real Wolverines to help kill plenty of Nicky Kerensky's butt-boys when they catch up with us’ he said then laughed. ‘I must have been twelve before I realised “clannerbastards” wasn't one word and you didn't have to spit on the ground after saying it’ he joked.

McEvedy laughed. ‘You can always get your other kids fixed, have the rest from an Iron Womb with their DNA tweaked’ he replied. ‘Just make sure the girl doesn't get enough pain-medication during childbirth and she'll definitely not want to go through that again’ he suggested. ‘Of course “big” brother or sister will be the shortest of the lot by far’ he noted. ‘Cally's a mechanic right?’ he asked.

‘Aviation Technical Specialist’ Cale corrected him.

‘Whatever’ McEvedy responded, she was still a grease-monkey however you said it. ‘She can probably fix farming machinery, agromechs and stuff once she's seen how they’re put together that might be a good approach if you want to think about the situation tactically’ he said. ‘She might be about half the size of the sort of daughter-in-law they wanted but if she can keep a tractor running that might endear her to them a little faster.’

Cale looked surprised, he had always thought the infantry weren't much good for anything but digging holes and charging down mechs with an Inferno Launcher and a death-wish but that was pretty smart he decided. Those McEvedy genes must still be working for the man he thought to himself. ‘Good plan Sir’ he replied. ‘I should go tell Cally that as my Commanding Officer you've given permission, now she needs to talk to her people I guess’ he said.

McEvedy nodded. ‘Have you got her an engagement ring?’ he asked. ‘You'll need wedding bands for both of you too’ he added.

‘Where am I going to find a jewelers out here?’ Cale inquired.

The Colonel sighed, mechwarriors were dumber than the armour plate on their machines he thought to himself. Those neurohelmets rotted the brain he was sure. ‘Think around the problem Lieutenant’ he said. ‘Find some of those gold cubit coins they use and get them melted down cast and polished if you have to’ he said. ‘That can't be beyond the technical ability of people that keep aerospace fighters operational’ he reasoned.

Cale thought about that. ‘They've probably got industrial diamonds somewhere too I'll bet.’

‘At least try and find a gem-quality one before you knock the end off a drill-bit Cale’ the Colonel told him with a sigh. ‘You don't want people to think you're cheap as well as stupid’ he advised.

Felix Gaeta was following the Admiral around the ship, briefing him as Adama did his inspection tour. ‘Repairs to the junkyard wonder should be completed within six hours but we'll want to spin her FTL back up as slowly as possible Sir’ he advised as Adama shook hands with another of the civilians rescued from Cyrannus, they were everywhere and there always seemed to be one more that hadn’t already offered their profuse thanks.

‘That nickname isn't very respectful to a ship that managed to make at least twenty times as many jumps as anyone predicted before it gave up on us Mr Gaeta’ Adama chided.

Gaeta smiled. ‘Perhaps so Sir but this is the third time we've had to delay a jump to fix her FTL now’ he reminded the Admiral.

‘We've got plenty of spares to keep her going’ Adama pointed out, ‘and it keeps the engineers and technicians busy and content’ he added as they turned into the next corridor heading towards the starboard flight-pod. A mixed CAP of Vipers and Kirghiz was out watching over the fleet and with a number of Raptors scouting ahead for the next jump there was actually enough room in the hanger-deck to give it a proper inspection for once. Normally it was packed to the gills with aerospace craft.

To be honest Gaeta suspected that all the knuckledraggers would rather get a couple of extra hours in the sack, or the bar, than spend their time keeping the cobbled-together freighter from Scorpia running but he opted not to say so. ‘Didn't see you at the game last night Sir’ he noted, making conversation.

‘Had dinner with Colonel McEvedy, Wing-Commander Defoe, Commander Thorpe and the XO’ Adama replied. ‘One of the civilians we found on Leonis was a chef, she did us a three course meal of traditional Leonis specialty dishes as a thank-you.’

‘How did that go?’ Gaeta asked.

Adama stopped and grinned. ‘The ability to stomach vast amounts of fermented fish does not mean you can take the kind of spicy food they go for on Leonis’ he said. ‘They had tears streaming down their faces’ he told him. ‘They must have drunk two litres of water apiece.’

‘Oh that just makes it worse’ Gaeta responded, it just freed up your tastebuds for another assault.

‘You know, I forgot to tell them’ Adama replied, ‘must be my age or something’ he continued unconvincingly before resuming his walk. ‘I hear Anders' team won again?’ he asked.

‘Yes, easily, but they all got smacked about a bit’ Gaeta told him. ‘Those SLDF Infantry guys and gals can't play pyramid to save their lives but they try hard and godsdamn they're big’ he said. ‘Anders got knocked flying twice.’

‘Sounds like an entertaining match’ Adama replied.

‘Packed crowd’ Gaeta told him, ‘the civilians were really starting to get into it, screaming and cheering.’

Adama smiled. ‘Good to hear’ he said. Even something as simple as going to watch a pyramid game might aid the healing process, so many of the survivors they had found were traumatised by their experiences.

‘Oh I forget to say, the Captain of the Gemenon Traveller says that they can accommodate more of the civilians currently on Galactica now he's had more of a chance to properly stack some of his cargo’ Gaeta announced. ‘It got a little messy in the last few hours so the loading of one of the bays wasn’t optimised’ he said. ‘We had a marine work-crew over there humping crates about and it’s freed up room for perhaps another fifty people without crowding them in too badly.’

‘Good, that means we can transfer the people over we've got sleeping on the deck in the cargo bay where we put those Lightning-Jaguars’ Adama replied. ‘Civilians and military ordinance are not a good mix even with all the signs saying “For the sake of the Lords of Kobol don't touch” all over them’ he said. The unarmed missiles weren't really all that dangerous or unstable but he would still feel better not to have them in the vicinity of the possibly curious, clumsy, deranged or just plain idiotic. ‘Give the civilians some warning, wait until after the next jump to make the transfer’ he ordered.

‘Aye Sir’ Gaeta replied. ‘The Thera Sita is due to dock and take on water after the next jump too just to remind you’ he said.

‘Make sure that the Captain and pilot of the ship know that if they come in as needlessly fast as they did last time I'll have them thrown out of an airlock’ Adama responded evenly.

‘An airlock Sir?’ Gaeta repeated in amusement. ‘I'm not sure of the legality of spacing civilians without a trial given that we're not currently operating under martial law’ he pointed out.

‘Okay Mr Gaeta, what's the worst thing I can do to them?’ Adama asked him.

‘Fire them I think, you do have command of the fleet and can determine who gets to Captain each vessel’ Gaeta replied.

‘I should be able to fire them out of one of the guns in the main battery’ Adama opined. ‘Those idiots nearly smashed right into us.’

‘The Thera Sita would have come off much worse from that than Galactica though’ Gaeta noted.

Adama frowned. ‘It's the principle of the thing, and we've already got one wreck that needs constant fixing.’

‘So “Junkyard Wonder” isn't allowed but we can still call it a “Wreck” then Admiral?’ Gaeta queried. ‘Should I let everyone know?’

‘Don't be a smart-ass Mr Gaeta, and given your years of service you should already know that the privilege of being a hypocrite only comes with being a Flag Officer’ the Admiral told him.



* * *

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER ELEVEN - PART 3

----------


The Colony – Cylon Space – 3045CE

‘It's a pity we can't let the Fours into these meetings’ the Cavil observed looking around the room at hi the trio of his identical “Brothers”. ‘They have a knack for science’ he noted.

The Number One to his immediate left around the table shrugged. ‘I always did wonder if we should have exempted them from the mind-wiping we inflicted on the others’ he commented. ‘For that matter the Five's show a great deal of promise too’ he added.

‘Now brothers we've been over that ground for years and it's just water over the dam now’ a third Cavil told them. ‘We had the other models wiped for a very good reason, just like we permanently got rid of the damn Sevens’ he reminded them. ‘They never grasped the big picture as well as we did, even if some of them had a better grasp of the basics’ he said.

‘True’ the fourth Cavil agreed. ‘Still I wish we'd been made with perhaps a little less Centurion and a little more Scientist sometimes’ he continued. ‘Now brothers we must decide what’s to be done about these new humans, the supposed “Thirteenth Tribe from Earth” that aren't’ he said.

‘You know at least if we hadn't wiped them we wouldn't have to put up with all the other models thinking the Colonials must have found either an Earth Colony or Earth itself’ the first Cavil said. ‘I have to bite my tongue every time I hear another Two talking about prophecy and the Thirteenth Tribe.’

‘I hear you brother’ another Number One agreed. ‘That still leaves us with the mystery of who the hell they actually are though’ he reminded the others.

‘I'm inclined to think they must be the descendants of another group that set out from Kobol’ the third Cavil theorised. ‘The records were certainly patchy, even we're forced to rely on millennia-old human religious texts for a clue on what really happened back then’ he noted.

‘They might even call their world Earth like the real Thirteenth did’ the One to his right agreed. ‘I wonder how advanced they are?’

‘Given their lasers, particle beams, and what we assume from scans is fusion-based power generation I'd say very advanced’ another Cavil replied.

‘Yes but remember that their fighters were being carried by Galactica. We haven't seen any jump-capable ships of their own’ the first Cavil pointed out. ‘We know the genuine Thirteenth had not re-invented the jump-drive their ancestors used to ferry them to Earth from Kobol, and they instead relied on sub-light engines for interstellar travel, so perhaps that is also true of the fake Thirteenth?’ he suggested. ‘They mentioned having colonies of their own but that doesn't necessarily mean they have FTL travel.’

‘Their oversized fighters had very good performance in acceleration, if not manoeuvrability, with extremely high thrust for a sustained duration’ the second Cavil observed. ‘A civilisation that had to travel between the stars at relativistic sub-light speeds likely would develop excellent engines, especially if they benefited from the advantages of brute-force thermonuclear rocketry.’

‘That certainly makes sense’ the fourth Cavil agreed. ‘To build those fighters and invent those weapons they must be an advanced society, with both a large population and a sizeable industrial base, but if they had FTL then we should certainly have expected Galactica to be escorted by their jump-capable warships’ he said, ‘or at least have a few of their transports along to help haul off the scraps of the decaying carcass of the Twelve Colonies.’

‘The teams that we sent down to try and determine what was recovered did indicate that a production line for Raptor FTL's was taken and we also know that they stripped the FTL's from the hulks of battlestars’ the third Cavil added. ‘I'd take that as backing the theory.’

‘So while Pegasus and the rest of the civilian fleet remain with their new friends, the Galactica and some transports head back to Cyrannus to gain the means for the supposed “Earthers” to make jump-drives’ the First Cavil reasoned. ‘They could hand over the plans easily enough but building FTL's fast would be easier with the right equipment and tooling.’

‘You realise this means we need to strike hard and fast, gather our forces and destroy these new humans before they can develop the infrastructure needed to build FTL warships armed with their admittedly fearsome Directed-Energy-Weapons’ the fourth Cavil said. ‘We've been holding back until now, recalling the fleets and taking a defensive posture, but we need to be proactive.’

‘On the plus side if they rely on sub-light engines then they can't have too many Colonies’ the first Cavil said brightly. ‘This “Star League” they talked of couldn't be more than a handful of systems spread over a tiny area of space’ he decided.

‘Remember brothers, the others are still under the sway of Caprica Six and Boomer Eight’ the third Cavil reminded them. ‘Even after losing three basestars they argued that we both fired first and launched nuclear weaponry first making us culpable’ he said. ‘We might not be able to get agreement to simply exterminate these new humans, we might have to conquer them... for their own good of course’ he said with a smirk. ‘If they resist we could always reduce their population to a more manageable level.’

‘I'd prefer them under the ground not under our boot but regardless of whether we're going to be decisive or wishy-washy we still need to beat these “Earthers” down before the Colonials can gift them proper interstellar capability’ the first Cavil said forcefully.

‘We can at least rely on the support of the Raiders, and the Centurions for that matter’ the second Cavil suggested. ‘They can't vote but they still have an influence on our society and they didn't like getting slaughtered like they were on and over Aquaria. They're angry and after human blood’ he said.

‘When it's the KEW-fodder making more sense than the supposedly smarter cylon models you've got to wonder where it all went wrong?’ the third Cavil asked rhetorically, rolling his eyes.

‘Talking of the Centurions if we're not going to deal with these new humans the easy way with nuclear strikes from orbit we might have to face heavy resistance on the surface of their worlds’ the fourth Cavil said. ‘From what we saw of their capabilities in that arena we could be looking at losses we've not faced since the First War forty years past’ he stated.

The first Cavil smiled. ‘It was precisely our intended counter to that which made me comment that the Fours would be a welcome addition to our cabal’ he said. ‘A couple of them are already working on a design for a Centurion/Raider hybrid intended to match the large military machines of the enemy’ the cylon continued. ‘Our initial consideration was the required power but even lacking their fusion powerplants a fast-fission reactor that uses molten lead and bismuth as the coolant should provide plenty of output in a reactor compact enough to meet our purposes.’

‘You're suggesting some sort of oversized Centurion with which to fight these pseudo Earthers on their own terms?’ the third Cavil queried.

‘Six or seven metres in height, smaller than theirs but we can produce them in great numbers once we switch a normal Raider production line over to them’ the first Cavil confirmed. ‘As well as mounting 30mm KEW's on the arms a missile rack on each shoulder firing our standard Raider missiles should provide sufficient firepower.’

‘Intriguing idea’ the second Cavil said appreciatively. ‘Has anyone thought of a name yet for these new additions to the family?’ he asked.

The first Cavil nodded. ‘Praetorians’ he replied.



----------

Note from the Author:

Captain Aaron Kelly was the LSO (Landing Signal Officer) on Galactica, he was a tiny bit extreme in his views (he's the man that kept trying to assassinate Gaius Baltar's lawyers). The Ares Conventions were agreed in 2412 and amongst other things restricted use of nuclear weapons and prohibited Biological and Chemical ones. Wallace Gray was Roslin's first and preferred choice for Vice-President before she brought Baltar along to cash in on his popularity. He was the man that got the fleet functioning properly as an economy and sorted out resource distribution so I could see Roslin wanting him back to help sort out the problems faced by the new City-State. The government of New Circe provided a great deal of charity at first but after a while they would want to be paid for what they're giving the Colonials, this has been done by selling tech and by the Colonial City-State borrowing money to buy goods. They would need a proper trade relationship to keep the economy going with a sensible rate of exchange. Battletech Neurohelmets might be a way to detect cylons given we know they're wired differently than humans having Silica Pathways in their brains. Little Battletech Universe in-joke in the last paragraph of the first section there... I'm sorry, as ever I couldn't help it.

And Cally gets knocked-up on schedule... A "Circle of Equals" is where a fight between members of a Clan takes place, you can fight those of different ranks, you are all equal there (in principle if not in skill, an infantry officer would typically be taller and more highly trained in hand-to-hand fighting than a mechwarrior for example). Agromechs are used for farming in the BT universe, at least on reasonably developed worlds, they're really just multi-purpose tractors/combine harvesters etc. We see Galactica supplying water to smaller ships in the show, getting that close is of course potentially hazardous to both vessels if miscalculated.

The Colony was the Cylon capital, as much as they had one. It was a massive construction built around the ship the "Final Five" arrived in forty years ago. Only the Number One, or "Cavil", Cylons knew the identity of them, or indeed quite a lot of the truth. They had the other model cylons memories wiped and were really behind just about everything when you got right down to it. Given that the Final Five travelled from "Earth" to the Cyrannus system in a sub-light ship it's not really that much of a leap for the Cavil's here to think that these new humans, who they alone know are not the real Thirteenth Tribe, might be an Interstellar civilisation that lacks FTL. Given that Galactica was collecting jump-drives and tooling to make them, plus the lack of non Colonial jumpships in the fleet that returned to Cyrannus, it's not an unreasonable theory for the Cylons to come up with to be honest. They wouldn't have a clue that another jump-drive system like the Kearny-Fuchida exists. Hope people like my name for the Cylon counter to battlemechs. The Praetorian is basically a scaled-up Centurion mounting Raider calibre armament and powered by a Lead Cooled Fast Reactor. Using liquid metal as the coolant allows you to run a reactor much hotter with more output, some designs use molten sodium instead but they would explode on contact with air if ruptured (bad news if you're being shot at). The molten lead also means the coolant itself acts as much of the reactors required radiation shielding, making it even more compact! Without fusion powerplants to run their mechs I've had the cylons use fission instead, they can take more radiation than humans after all and without lasers and PPC's to power they need less electrical generation anyway.

[cawest]

so how many fighters did the lady and beast have... 40 went back on the lady, so about 80 on the beast but 10 or so at the flight school.  they can hold 280 or so... how many can the beast make (maybe 4-8 a month?) does that sound right... at lest till the lady gets back....how about adding guns to the civilian ships for self defense?

[master arminas]

Just want to say . . . well done!

MA

[Hotpoint]

A couple more mechs for you. These are older transitional designs based on the Pulverizer Assault and Stag Medium Mech and were updated to include some clan tech and the New Circe Wolverine's equivalent of the CERPPC.

Code: [Select]

Pulverizer PUL-2Z

Mass: 90 tons
Tech Base: Mixed
Chassis Config: Biped
Rules Level: Experimental Tech
Era: All Eras (non-canon)
Tech Rating/Era Availability: X/X-X-X
Production Year: 2975
Cost: 10,519,160 C-Bills
Battle Value: 2,654

Chassis: New Circe Orbital Metalworks Endo-Steel
Power Plant: Prigioni Atomics 360 Fusion Engine
Walking Speed: 43.2 km/h
Maximum Speed: 64.8 km/h
Jump Jets: None
    Jump Capacity: 0 meters
Armor: NeoCircean Metalworks Ferro-Fibrous
Armament:
    2 New Circe Military Industries (WLV) Improved ER PPCs
    5 New Circe Military Industries (CL) Medium Pulse Lasers
Manufacturer: New Circe Military Industries
    Primary Factory: Bremman Mechs
Communications System: SLDF
Targeting and Tracking System: SLDF

================================================================================
Equipment           Type                         Rating                   Mass 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internal Structure: Endo-Steel                   138 points                4.50
    Internal Locations: 1 CT, 4 LT, 4 RT, 2 LA, 3 RA
Engine:             Fusion Engine                360                      33.00
    Walking MP: 4
    Running MP: 6
    Jumping MP: 0
Heat Sinks:         (CL) Double Heat Sink        18(36)                    8.00
    Heat Sink Locations: 1 LT, 1 RT, 1 LL, 1 RL
Gyro:               Standard                                               4.00
Cockpit:            Standard                                               3.00
    Actuators:      L: SH+UA+LA+H    R: SH+UA+LA+H
Armor:              Ferro-Fibrous                AV - 277                 15.50
    Armor Locations: 1 CT, 4 LT, 4 RT, 3 LA, 2 RA

                                                      Internal       Armor     
                                                      Structure      Factor     
                                                Head     3            9         
                                        Center Torso     29           44       
                                 Center Torso (rear)                  12       
                                           L/R Torso     19           28       
                                    L/R Torso (rear)                  10       
                                             L/R Arm     15           30       
                                             L/R Leg     19           38       

================================================================================
Equipment                                 Location    Heat    Critical    Mass 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(CL) Medium Pulse Laser                      HD        4         1         2.00
2 (CL) Medium Pulse Lasers                   RT        8         2         4.00
2 (CL) Medium Pulse Lasers                   LT        8         2         4.00
(WLV) Improved ER PPC                        RA        15        3         6.00
(WLV) Improved ER PPC                        LA        15        3         6.00
                                            Free Critical Slots: 0

BattleForce Statistics
MV      S (+0)  M (+2)  L (+4)  E (+6)   Wt.   Ov   Armor:      9    Points: 27
4          6       6       3       0      4     0   Structure:  7
Special Abilities: ENE, SRCH, ES, SOA


Code: [Select]

Stag III STG-34G

Mass: 45 tons
Tech Base: Mixed
Chassis Config: Biped
Rules Level: Experimental Tech
Era: All Eras (non-canon)
Tech Rating/Era Availability: X/X-X-X
Production Year: 2985
Cost: 9,088,890 C-Bills
Battle Value: 2,033

Chassis: New Circe Orbital Metalworks Endo-Steel
Power Plant: Sobral Nuclear Generators 315 Fusion XL Engine
Walking Speed: 75.6 km/h
Maximum Speed: 118.8 km/h
Jump Jets: None
    Jump Capacity: 0 meters
Armor: NeoCircean Metalworks Ferro-Fibrous
Armament:
    1 New Circe Military Industries (WLV) Improved ER PPC
    3 New Circe Military Industries (CL) Medium Pulse Lasers
Manufacturer: New Circe Military Industries
    Primary Factory: Bremman Mechs
Communications System: SLDF
Targeting and Tracking System: SLDF

================================================================================
Equipment           Type                         Rating                   Mass 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Internal Structure: Endo-Steel                    75 points                2.50
    Internal Locations: 1 CT, 5 LT, 4 RT, 3 LA, 1 RA
Engine:             XL Engine                    315                      11.00
    Walking MP: 7
    Running MP: 11
    Jumping MP: 0
Heat Sinks:         (CL) Double Heat Sink        14(28)                    4.00
    Heat Sink Locations: 1 LL, 1 RL
Gyro:               Standard                                               4.00
Cockpit:            Standard                                               3.00
    Actuators:      L: SH+UA+LA+H    R: SH+UA+LA+H
Armor:              Ferro-Fibrous                AV - 152                  8.50
    Armor Locations: 1 CT, 4 LT, 5 RT, 2 LA, 2 RA

                                                      Internal       Armor     
                                                      Structure      Factor     
                                                Head     3            9         
                                        Center Torso     14           21       
                                 Center Torso (rear)                  6         
                                           L/R Torso     11           16       
                                    L/R Torso (rear)                  6         
                                             L/R Arm     7            14       
                                             L/R Leg     11           22       

================================================================================
Equipment                                 Location    Heat    Critical    Mass 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(CL) Medium Pulse Laser                      HD        4         1         2.00
(WLV) Improved ER PPC                        RA        15        3         6.00
2 (CL) Medium Pulse Lasers                   LA        8         2         4.00
                                            Free Critical Slots: 3

BattleForce Statistics
MV      S (+0)  M (+2)  L (+4)  E (+6)   Wt.   Ov   Armor:      5    Points: 20
7          4       4       2       0      2     0   Structure:  2
Special Abilities: ENE, SRCH, ES, SOA

The Wolverine's Improved Extended Range Particle Projection Cannon (IERPPC) followed a slightly different design path from their Enhanced ERPPC than the CERPPC did resulting in a bulkier weapon (3 crits not 2) but one that was better able to be upgraded still further in time (leading to the LRPPC).

The Pulverizer PUL-2Z is just an incremental development of the PUL-2V the Wolverine's fielded during their departure from the clans. It was fitted to carry IERPPC's and later upgraded with Clan Medium Pulse Lasers and Clan Double-Heat-Sinks once New Circe got the designs and put them into production. Faster than the later Pulverizer II it still serves in the 331st, especially in the 2nd Brigade that is yet to receive any Pulverizer II's.

The Stag III STG-34G is again itself a development of an earlier mech (the Stag II STG-24G) mounting an IERPPC instead of the EERPPC of it's predecessor. Like the PUL-2Z it was refitted with Clantech Medium Pulsers and DHS once they became available and as of 3045 it still serves as the primary medium mech of the 331st, despite no longer being in production (the Mercury III is now made on the production lines that once made the Stag III). The Stag I and Stag II mechs that arrived with the Wolverines on New Circe (and those made there for a while before the Stag III came along) have been stripped for parts to keep the III's going.

You'll note that both the PUL-2Z and STG-34G still use Star League/Inner Sphere Ferro-Fibrous Armour and Endo Steel, that's because they pre-date the superior Clan equivalents falling into Wolverine hands. Like I said, they're transitional designs which have a shared tech base.

[VhenRa]

So.

The Improved ER-PPC is a 3 Crit CERPPC?

[Hotpoint]

So.

The Improved ER-PPC is a 3 Crit CERPPC?

In effect yes, in terms of firepower and heat anyway. However the way the Clans evolved their islora Wolverine Enhanced ERPPC into the CERPPC, making it smaller as well as lighter and more powerful, inadvertently restricted the possibility of further development.

The LRPPC is basically an end result of divergent technological progress from a certain point. We know from Betrayal of Ideals that the Wolverines were already working on improvements to their Enhanced ERPPC at the point when they broke from the clans but that doesn't mean those improvements were necessarily going to be the exact same ones the other Clans later made after back-engineering the EERPPC.


WOLVERINES

PPC > ERPPC > EERPPC > IERPPC > LRPPC


OTHER CLANS

PPC > ERPPC > EERPPC > CERPPC

[Hotpoint]

CHAPTER TWELVE - PART 1

----------

“You want my view of the future purpose of the SLDF? Okay, it’ll be to keep the Successor States in, the Cylons out and the Clanners down.”

Admiral Franks, SLDF Chief of Staff – 3047CE



* * *


Battlestar Galactica – Deep Space – 3045CE

Wing Commander Sarah-Louise Defoe ignored the stares directed her way by some of the civilian refugees as she headed down towards the briefing room, they were between jumps with a decent-sized CAP out defending the fleet, ten Vipers and six Kirghiz. As she went her uniform itself would have made it obvious she was one of the “Thirteenth” but she was also one point nine metres in height in her bare feet, somewhat more so in her boots. This was about average for a woman in the regular military, at least for one not in the infantry for whom you could add another ten centimetres, but with her build it certainly made her imposing. She now wore her hair tied-up in a long ponytail that ran down her back, having let it grow out almost half-way to her waist now, shorter might have been more practical but it didn't get in the way of her neurohelmet and although washing and combing it was starting to become a pain she thought her husband would like it.

Her spouse was a civil engineer and he was probably helping build things for the Colonials back on New Circe right now she reasoned, looking down at her wedding ring for a moment. It had been so many weeks since she had seen him and she missed him badly. Before this mission came up they had been considering having children, something she had been putting off for a while since even with the Iron Wombs it would likely stymie the progression of her military career, but now she was sure it was time for them to do their part for the Clan. She might even consider normal pregnancy for maybe her second or third although it did look pretty uncomfortable from what she could tell.

Tragically there were very few children amongst the survivors they had rescued from the Twelve Colonies but a little girl of perhaps seven or eight watched her intently as she walked past and began following her. Defoe pretended to ignore her for a while but then picked up the pace seeing if the kid would try and keep up which she did, the sound of her feet hitting the deck at double time as she attempted to match the Wing Commanders speed with much shorter legs causing Defoe to smile to herself as she rounded the next corner just ahead of the child. She stopped, span around and dropped to one knee so as the girl turned the corner a couple of steps behind they were now face-to-face at eye-level. ‘Fighter pilots don’t like people tailing their six’ she told the surprised little girl in English, not that the child understood a word causing Defoe to resort to her limited Caprican instead. ‘Recon mission failed, break off pursuit, return to base’ she said in the girls own language.

The girl stared at her wide-eyed and babbled something really fast which Defoe at best picked up one word in ten from and none of the meaning. ‘Can anyone translate?’ she asked loudly in English.

‘She wants to know why we're all so tall’ someone replied. Looking over Defoe recognised one of the academics from the university, they were often to be found wandering the ship talking to people, taking notes and answering questions from those curious about where they were going and what New Circe was like.

‘Tell her it's because the Thirteenth Tribe stretch their children on racks’ Defoe requested.

The academic laughed. ‘Okay’ he agreed and translated. The girl looked doubtfully at the academic then back to Defoe saying something else. ‘She doesn't believe it’ he told Defoe.

‘Fine, then tell her it's because we eat all our vegetables’ Defoe replied.

The little girl listened to the translation into Caprican then stuck her tongue out in distaste, replying via the man from the Thirteenth in strange civilian clothes that spoke both languages. ‘She says it's not worth it, and she says you probably bang your head on a lot of doorways’ he told Defoe.

Defoe laughed, it was true as well. If it wasn't for them wearing their helmets almost all the time now the Infantry from the 331st based on Galactica in particular would have probably all knocked themselves senseless by now. ‘If that's all she wanted to know is she going to stop following me now?’ she asked.

The girl listened to the translation then replied. ‘She wants to know if the Thirteenth are going to kill all the Cylons’ the academic said.

The Wing Commander frowned, a perhaps understandable belief had quickly spread through the civilians that the Thirteenth, a race of honest-to-gods genetically-engineered super-soldiers with an arsenal of incredible weapons, would wipe out the entire Cylon race in revenge for the deaths of so many of their human brothers and sisters. ‘Tell her we'll kill all the Cylons that come to hurt her’ she replied carefully. The Lord Protector and Parliament would never countenance genocide even if the means presented itself unless it proved absolutely necessary.

After that was turned into Caprican the girl nodded then gave Defoe a hug which the surprised officer awkwardly returned before the child turned and ran off.

‘Aww that's so cute boss, can I get a hug too?’ someone asked loudly.

‘What's the matter Gibson, didn't get enough attention as a child?’ Defoe retorted, standing up.

The Flight-Lieutenant now stood nearby laughed. ‘No Ma'am’ he replied.

‘Well I don't love you either’ Defoe told him flatly. ‘Shouldn't you be trying to seduce some poor ignorant Colonial girl somewhere?’ she asked sardonically.

‘I'll be trying later but I'm not having any luck there yet’ Gibson admitted. ‘It's either my looks or my personality I guess’ the fighter pilot continued. ‘Could be both of course’ he added.

‘Well despite all your other faults I guess I can't add vanity to them’ Defoe told him. He was a good pilot, well slightly above average at least, but Gibson's personality sometimes rubbed people up the wrong way. ‘Since you're here I had a note from the ships LSO counter-signed by the CAG, would you please stop trying to set the record for the fastest landing approach before you get yourself killed or put a gigantic dent in the flight deck’ she requested in a manner than made sure he knew it was actually an order.

‘Killjoys’ Gibson remarked bitterly, he had a hundred Colonial Cubits resting on a bet for that one. Given that the person with the current record was that very same CAG, Kara Thrace, he also suspected foul play. ‘Okay boss since you asked nicely, and would have me on KP for the rest of the trip home if I didn't, I'll be good from now on’ he said reluctantly. ‘Oh I saw the photograph of Emily you from her personnel file that you put on the wall Wing Commander’ he added. ‘Thanks for that’ he told her with sincerity.

Defoe sighed. ‘I'm afraid it was the only picture of Lieutenant Lewenhaupt I could find’ she said regretfully. It was far from flattering and did her no justice whatsoever.

‘The only one we had in the squadron was all of us together and it didn't seem fitting’ Gibson replied. ‘Of course it didn't make her look like a desperate criminal though’ he added, with a smile, fortunately he knew Emily had enough of a sense of humour to not mind him saying so.

‘Everyone's photograph from their personnel file makes them look like an unsavoury character’ Defoe noted. ‘I think they use a special lens’ she theorised.

‘Damn long way to be from home when you die’ Gibson observed sadly, Emily Lewenhaupt had been the only Kirghiz pilot lost over Aquaria, her cockpit canopy shattered by several bursts of Raider KEW's. They had recovered the airframe and given her a military funeral along with the dead Colonials, the Star-League flag draped over her coffin making it stand out amongst the others.

‘I doubt when I tell her family she died they'd have felt any better if had happened a few hundred light-years nearer to home’ Defoe replied. ‘I know you were closer to Lewenhaupt than the others were’ she commiserated.

‘We were in the same Sibling Company as kids’ Gibson replied. ‘Later went to flight-school together, she even dated my older brother for a while before she realised that none of the men in my family are worthwhile’ he joked. ‘She always wanted to make ace and at least she managed that a few times over, if you reckon that skeet really count as proper kills anyway’ he said.

‘If they can kill you too then they're proper kills in my book Flight-Lieutenant’ Defoe replied evenly, ‘and I'll make damn sure that everyone back home accepts that too’ she stated with conviction. The Kirghiz fighters had destroyed hundreds of Cylon Raiders between them, Emily Lewenhaupt would qualify for a posthumous medal for her share and if her genetic material was used to make another future member of the Clan then their Codex, a personal record of their lineage, would show that they were descended from a decorated hero of the Wolverines. It was a measure of immortality at least, generations from now her name would still be read by her genetic descendents when they learned where they came from.

‘Thank you Ma'am’ Gibson responded sincerely, in his own book Defoe was a good officer continued to prove she was worthy of respect. ‘Got to go, I'm supposed to be meeting a Raptor pilot for lunch’ he said, checking his watch.

‘She blind or insane?’ Defoe queried.

‘Well they're all half-blind and at least a little strange’ Gibson replied. ‘I guess at least one of those things is working for me’ he reasoned.

‘Just remember my new standing order Flight-Lieutenant, only Army Officers are stupid enough to knock up Colonials so they have to marry them’ Defoe ordered. ‘I've been ripping on Colonel McEvedy something fierce for days and woe betide the man under my command who gives him any grounds for comeback’ she said seriously, spearing Gibson with a look. As the ranking Naval Officer Commander Thorpe had been joining in on that sport too, it was always good clean fun yanking the chain of the other services and McEvedy's lineage earned him no exemptions.

‘Frankly Ma'am, so far with me you're perfectly safe on that score’ Gibson admitted. ‘I just haven’t had the opportunity to even attempt to disobey that order’ he said sadly. ‘But I live in hope that might change soon’ he added optimistically.

‘Glad to hear it, but a sexually frustrated fighter-pilot is an aggressive fighter-pilot’ Defoe declared. For herself she certainly had plans to jump her husband the moment she got home, not that she was going to tell the Flight-Lieutenant that. ‘Is that the reason you've been trying to get yourself killed crashing into the deck at high speed then?’ she wondered.

‘No, I just need the money’ Gibson told her. ‘Prices at the bar shot up ever since we rescued all those civilians’ he complained. ‘They kept giving them free beer until the stocks ran down and then market-forces kicked in’ he moaned then checked his watch again. ‘Gotta run Boss’ he said urgently.

‘Don't just leave the girl sitting there, move your ass’ Defoe told him.

‘Thanks Ma'am’ the Flight-Lieutenant replied, running off at high speed. Defoe watched him reach the first open hatch and being too tall and moving too fast to stop he smacked his head on the top of the frame with a sickening crack that caused the Wing-Commander to grimace and flinch from just watching it happen. He swore vociferously in two languages then clutching his head kept going.

‘Much longer on this tub and we'll all be too brain-damaged from the alcohol and the blows to the skull to fly missions any more’ Defoe muttered to herself, ‘the damned neurohelmets won't interface properly’ she decided.


* * *