Chapter Thirteen - Part I----------
“There are very few problems that cannot ultimately be resolved by either the threat or use of a battery of Heavy Naval PPC’s. This may seem crude to some but it’s how the Star League did it, that’s how New Circe does it, and it’s worked out pretty well for us so far.” Captain Martin Ferry – SLDF Navy* * *Battlestar Galactica – Deep Space – 3045CEDRADIS picked up the contact moments after the pair of Raiders appeared, both the CIC and the CAP were on-the-ball and unfortunately for the Raiders concerned they had jumped in within LRPPC range because before they could jump back out they were neatly speared by particle beams and were downloading to new organic hardware in the nearest Resurrection Ship less than a minute after they located
Galactica.
Fortunately for the fleet they were due to jump out within half an hour anyway and were already slowly spinning up their FTL’s after several hours of regular maintenance, inspection and downtime. An engineering crew from the battlestar found itself stuck on the
Scorpia Traveller when Admiral Adama ordered a jump as soon as possible, they had been there fixing the CO2 Scubbers, but for the most part everyone was where they ideally needed to be when forty more Raiders jumped in and Galactica found itself in the middle of another battle.
It would take at least ten more minutes to spin up the FTL’s on the civilian transports so the ready fighters were launched to support the CAP as
Galactica added its own guns to the efforts being made to keep the Raiders away from the civilian ships. After a dozen more Raiders were destroyed the rest began to accelerate off out of range, still taking losses as they did so, and a few Viper and Kirghiz pilots requested permission to pursue but it was denied.
With six minutes left to go Adama started recalling the fighters a few at a time. Even with both the port and starboard flight pods he use they couldn’t land anywhere near all those airframes at once so
Galactica needed to space out the landings and clear the decks between group. The majority of the bulkier and less responsive, though also alas more heavily armed Kirghiz fighters had to be recalled first reducing the effectiveness of the CAP but for now the Cylons seemed content to get away so the Admiral gritted his teeth and started calling his most dangerous birds back to the nest.
Three minutes later five Basestars jumped in beyond the effective range of Galactica’s guns and swarms of hundreds of Raiders began to descend upon them from all directions. ‘Order any civilian ship that’s ready to jump as soon as they’re ready’ Adama ordered.
‘
Chrion is away’ Gaeta replied immediately as the liner disappeared in a flash. ‘
Gemenon Traveller,
Carina and
Scorpia Traveller report about to jump’ he continued. ‘They’ve gone’ he said.
Adama listened as Gaeta reported the other ships following suit including to his relief the ship made in the scrapyard on Scorpia. ‘That just leaves
Thera Sita’ he said.
‘Raiders in range’ Gaeta reported.
‘Open fire with all guns recall the rest of the birds and retract the flight-pods once they’re aboard’ Adama responded. ‘Comms tell the Captain of the
Thera Sita to pull his finger out of his ass and jump before he’s up to his neck in Raiders with no fighter cover’ he growled at Dualla.
The remaining fighters from the CAP came into land a lot faster than they would normally, emergency combat conditions meant they could get away with damaging the landing gear or putting a dent in the deck without getting too badly reamed by the CAG or the XO, but the last couple of Vipers, including that of the CAG Kara Thrace herself, only just got in before the flightpods were pulled in enabling the battlestar to jump.
Hundreds of point-defence guns spewing rounds in all directions
Galactica put up a wall of fire until the bulk transport Thera Sita finally jumped freeing the battlestar to do so as well.
On arrival an instant later Gaeta checked the DRADIS and every civilian ship had made it. Adama ordered the FTL’s to remain spun-up on all ships as other pilots made it to the hanger decks and a new CAP was already being launched as the aircraft stacked up in the landing bays were being bought down into the hanger below on the airlock elevators.
Colonel Tigh had been off-duty when the first Raiders appeared but he had arrived on the CIC, bleary-eyed, half-dressed with his jacket still undone shortly before the jump and was now trying to sort himself out as he talked to the Old Man. ‘Why didn’t those basestars start throwing missiles at us?’ he asked. ‘With that many of the frakking things emptying their silos in our direction we couldn’t have put out enough weight-of-fire to knock them out and keep the Raiders off our ass at the same time’ he noted.
Adama nodded, he looked perturbed by the course of events too. ‘Your shoes are on the wrong feet’ he told Tigh.
‘Gods damn it’ Tigh blasphemed and started swapping them. ‘The frakking things are up to something mark my words’ he opined.
‘CAP is up, all ships report they are in working order’ Gaeta announced.
‘The Captain of the
Thera Sita promises it won’t happen again’ Dualla added.
‘We should threaten to leave him behind if it does’ Tigh muttered as he finished putting his shoes on properly and started to button his jacket.
‘Between the CAP and the battery we scored about sixty Raiders before we jumped out Sir’ Gaeta reported. ‘In case we’re keeping count’ he added.
‘Three less squadron’s worth of the things to worry about at least’ Tigh said appreciatively.
‘They’ll be back’ Adama reminded him, ‘Raiders resurrect’ he said.
‘Yeah but they still have to build a new fighter to stick the things mind in’ Tigh responded. ‘I bet those sixty slit-eyed black bastards cost a lot more to replace than the ammo we used on them’ he said with a satisfied smirk, ‘all those fancy jump-drives blown to hell.’
‘We’re getting reports of some panic among the civilians’ Dualla told Adama. ‘I’ve got a request from one of the decks for Marines to be dispatched to restore order’ she said.
‘Gods-damned civilians’ Tigh hissed.
‘Order our people on the ground to try to calm them down but have a platoon of Marines ready to assist if necessary, I can’t afford people causing trouble and distracting the crew right now’ Adama ordered.
‘Maybe we should ask the Wolvies to march a couple of their guy down there in Powered Armour, that should quiet them down’ Tigh suggested semi-seriously.
‘If you don’t mind me expressing my opinion on that idea Sir it would just cause more panic’ Dualla interjected as a warning.
‘We’ll save that as a last resort before I start having people thrown out of airlocks’ Adama told Tigh.
The XO looked at the Admiral. ‘You spent a lot of time with the President’ he said. ‘She must have rubbed off on you’ he observed.
Exactly thirty-three minutes after
Galactica arrived Raiders jumped in and everyone on the CIC except the Wolverine Technician that operated the new jump-computer either groaned or swore. ‘Not this shit again?’ Gaeta moaned as Adama ordered the fleet to jump.
They had only been a hundred and fifty light-years from New Circe when the pursuing cylons first appeared, a mere five jumps with the new computer doing the calculations, but Adama knew he couldn’t lead them towards the planet so he ordered a sequence of shorter random jumps that would eventually lead them to the
other destination they had planned for before setting out just in case they found themselves followed back from Cyrannus.
Thirty-three minutes after every jump the Cylons appeared again, it seemed likely that they were trying to wear down the human aircrews, keeping them near constantly awake for days with only short fitful naps at best between jumps. They couldn’t face the fearsome Directed-Energy-Weapons of the Thirteenth so they had opted to act against the humans with their fingers on the triggers instead. All the firepower in the galaxy was next to useless if the man at the controls was an exhausted wreck.
Adama knew that the Cylons, even the “skinjobs” handled sleep deprivation much better than humans, during the last time this had happened it had been noted by several observers how much better Boomer seemed to be holding up than most and she hadn’t even
known she was a Cylon back then. You couldn’t sleep through a jump, it felt too inexplicably
wrong, so even the non-military personnel wouldn’t be able to gain any rest and the problems with the civilians would become serious if this continued any length of time he knew. Frayed tempers, fear and exhaustion were not a good mix.
Wing-Commander Defoe reported to Adama that her pilots would be able to operate at near-peak efficiency for perhaps a day and a half longer than the Colonials could manage without sleep but after that they would soon be following the same downward spiral, having to resort to the short-term solution of drugs to keep going after a few more days before they’d inevitably crash in just over a week.
Fortunately they didn’t need to be awake that long. On the eighth consecutive jump
Galactica as expected found it wasn’t just its own fleet that was waiting when it arrived. They were now just over a hundred light-years anti-spinward of New Circe at the emergency pre-planned coordinates and there was a jumpship waiting for them.
The Magellan Class jumpship was technically a civilian vessel not a warship, although it was unusually heavily armed for a non-military craft, but it could only carry one dropship making it a bad choice for hauling cargo like most civilian jumpships were intended for. The Magellan Class was a specialised design, it was intended for very long voyages into the Deep Periphery and in fact was custom built for the Comstar Explorer Corps as a means for them to search far beyond the Inner Sphere looking for lost colonies or perhaps caches of long-abandoned Star-League equipment from before the fall.
This particular vessel had been successful in its maiden mission twenty-three years before, it had discovered a
very impressive piece of Star League technology whilst scouting over a thousand light-years rimward of the Magistracy of Canopus, but its crew hadn’t quite been expecting to find themselves under the guns of a pristine and fully crewed Black Lion Class Battlecruiser which was itself heading corewards escorting another jumpship carrying cargo dropships full of surplus Star League era weaponry for sale.
After deciding that their standing orders to commit suicide if facing capture by blowing up the ship sounded much better in theory back in the Sol System than they did in practice way out here the twenty Comstar crew had promptly surrendered and eventually found themselves on New Circe. Three of them eventually opened a restaurant together using the compensation money they were given as an apology for being press-ganged and the others reluctantly found work after drinking most of their own money away. The ship itself was added to the Star League Navy Rolls as the
SLS Pheidippides and was utilised as a long-range scout by Clan Wolverine instead being in fact the
third Comstar Explorer Corps vessel to get impounded by the Star League in Exile, though the other two weren’t nearly as special.
The crew of the
Pheidippides had now been waiting around in the middle of nowhere for eight weeks and even though they knew the arrival of
Galactica meant big trouble of the Cylon kind they weren’t exactly crestfallen at the news when Colonel McEvedy contacted them via the battlestar’s wireless, or as they called it, radio. At least they were going to get to go home now after day after day of utter boredom and after double-checking they had the right coordinates from McEvedy the Magellan Class jumped out towards New Circe. Eleven minutes later the Cylons turned up again and
Galactica and its entourage of civilian ships; now alas minus the ship from Scorpia as its FTL had given up after three such rapid jumps, its crew transferring to the battlestar by Raptor, jumped away in a different direction.
Pheidippides was unusual for a civilian jumpship in several ways. Not only did it mount extra firepower to defend itself in the back of beyond, it carried enough fuel and supplies to operate for nearly two years without re-supply and it mounted Lithium-Fusion batteries normally only found on warships that meant it could perform two jumps in quick succession. The first jump the Magellan Class performed took it thirty light-years, and then it triggered the second straight away taking it another thirty light-years closer to home but leaving itself in interstellar space in the middle of nowhere. It would now need to recharge its Kearny-Fuchida Drive for nearly a week before going anywhere else.
Still over forty light-years short of New Circe the
SLS Pheidippides now got to employ the thing that made it truly special, a highly-advanced Hyperpulse Generator of Comstar design. The HPG could transmit a signal up to fifty-light years and although it wasn’t simultaneous two-way communication the ability to send a faster-than-light message was a very useful trick.
Galactica and its small fleet made another six jumps before they arrived at the second set of planned coordinates and this time when the five Cylon Basestars arrived thirty-three minutes later only the civilian ships jumped away. As the Raiders converged and the battlestar stood its ground the confident Number One leading the Cylon Fleet decided that Adama must be waiting for assistance, there must be a plan for the second battlestar,
Pegasus, to meet him here. Between the two Colonial warships and the oversized fighters and advanced weapons of the supposed “Thirteenth” they probably
could reasonably take on five basestars so it wasn’t a bad move for the old Admiral.
‘Right on time’ the Cavil told the other cylons on the bridge of the flagship basestar when
Pegasus jumped in beside
Galactica only five kilometres or so off, a lone Raider quietly jumping out when it did.
Less than a minute later seven more basestars jumped in. ‘And now we get to chase down and destroy both of them’ the Cavil declared smugly. ‘After that we can play nice with the Colonial Civilians we find and bring the Thirteenth into line before they can develop their own FTL’ he said, looking at Caprica Six who was stood across from him.
‘We should give them the chance to surrender’ Caprica Six stated. ‘They must see that their situation is hopeless’ she said. ‘We don’t want any more blood on our hands’ she reminded the others. ‘We want peaceful co-existance.’
‘Which
will require the humans to be disarmed’ the Cavil responded as the twelve base-stars and thousands of Raiders converged on the two battlestars.
‘We’re going to give them the option to
lay down their arms first’ Caprica Six insisted. ‘Get me Admiral Adama on the wireless’ she said.
The ships hybrid established a wireless connection with
Galactica immediately on the Colonial Military Channel. ‘Admiral Adama this is the Cylon Fleet’ Caprica Six signalled.
‘
This is Galactica Actual, what do you want ?’ came the curt reply.
‘A peaceful resolution, your surrender’ Caprica Six told him. ‘I give my word that none of you will be harmed if you lay down your arms’ she promised.
‘
Not a chance in hell’ Adama responded flatly.
‘Admiral you are completely outgunned and outnumbered’ Caprica Six told him. ‘A brave ending is still just a pointless ending here’ she said.
‘
I’m not planning to go anywhere’ Adama replied.
‘This is foolish Admiral, you’ve fallen right into our trap’ Caprica Six told him, the Cavil laughing nearby.
Adama must have been able to hear the Cavil because he laughed himself. ‘
No’ he said. ‘
You’ve fallen into my trap’ he responded.
Caprica Six turned to the Cavil with a quizzical look on her face. ‘It’s a stupid bluff, nothing but bravado’ the Cavil told her.
‘Massive jump signature detected two hundred kilometres away’ a Four announced. ‘Wait, two more large vessels now appearing on DRADIS’ he added. ‘We are being scanned by a similar detection system as we encountered on the fighters of the Thirteenth’ he continued, ‘only with several orders of magnitude more power behind the signal.’
‘Closest vessel shows on DRADIS as the size of a battlestar’ a Three reported.
Aboard the
SLS Zughoffer Weir Admiral Franks wondered if the Cylons had a clue what was about to happen to them. ‘Order
Bismark and
Yukon to launch dropships and fighters and fire at will’ he said. ‘Captain Ferry you are free to engage’ he told the ship’s Captain.
‘Weapons officer’ Ferry responded happily, ‘Give ‘em a broadside’ he ordered with obvious glee, unleashing the staggering firepower of the Heavy Naval PPC’s that lined the flanks of the 1400 hundred metre long McKenna Class Battleship onto the Cylon Basestar that was unfortunate enough to be in their way.
The LRPPC carried by Wolverine aerospace fighters weighs six tons, a Heavy Naval PPC conversely weighs six
thousand tons which gives some conception of what the
Zughoffer Weir was lashing out with, though of course then you also really need to factor in that the McKenna Class carries forty-eight of the things...
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Comments/Suggestions/Abuse? :p
The Cylon tactics of relentless pursuit used in episode 1:01 33 aren't a bad way to deal with the firepower of the Thirteenth, if you can't beat their machines beat them instead.
The Magellan Class Jumpship used by the Comstar Explorer Corps is an ideal long-range scout (and message runner) especially given that it mounts a Hyperpulse Generator and Lithium-Fusion batteries give it a nice 60 LY "sprint" ability too.
The Star League McKenna Class Battleship mounts fearsome firepower and can also carry 50 fighters plus six dropships. It's the large battletech ship shown in the picture in the very first post of the this thread incidentally.