Fifth Column
Episode 24: First Blood
21 March 3060
New Saint Andrews Battlespace
Cylon Protectorate
"I'm here, Admiral," Tigh said as he rushed into Galactica's CIC. "What's happening?"
"The SS Basestars have launched all their Raiders at us," Adama told him grimly. He raised his voice. "What's the Fleet's jump status?"
"It's… confused, sir," Gaeta reported. "I'm getting odd reports. It seems like half the Fleet has just seen ghosts."
"Half the fleet?" Tigh repeated incredulously. "It's gotta be some kind of Cylon trick!"
"If it is, sir, it's working," Gaeta replied. "The Raiders will be on us before any of the civilians can jump."
"Is something happening?" One asked as he entered the CIC.
"Your frakking cousins have launched against us," Adama growled. "Where is your so called 'protection'?"
"Oh, the bloody fools," One cursed softly. "Defend your Fleet, Admiral. I'm sure my people will have defenders here momentarily."
"Yeah, that's what we're afraid of," Tigh commented.
"What's going on?" President Roslin asked as she swept into the CIC.
Adama sighed.
"Old MacCylon had a farm," Nine sang as she helped unload the supplies that she had just driven in from town. "E eye E eye ooooh! Old MacCylon had a chicken! E eye E…"
"We don't have any chickens," Twelve pointed out. "We have nutritiously enhanced wheat."
"Whatever!" Nine said dismissively. "Wheat doesn't make funny noises."
"That's not the point," Twelve said in exasperation.
"That is so the point…"
Nine was cut off in mid-sentence. Both she and Twelve froze, listening to something that wasn't sound. Then Nine turned to Twelve.
"Raider's ready to go?" Nine asked.
At Twelve's nod, Nine dropped her package and sprinted for the barn.
"The Final Five are sounding very angry," Shelley noted.
"That is only to be expected," Simon replied. "We are violating their rules, after all." He hesitated then added. "God help us."
"Don't worry about it," Doral said confidently. "We'll make it up to them later."
"Um, you guys might not have noticed, but the Hill's targeting us with active sensors," Boomer pointed out.
"They're bluffing," Doral said with a smidgen less confidence.
"Six hundred Raiders inbound," Leoben noted. "That's odd. They're mostly coming from the outlying farms, not the Hill or spaceport."
"Bluffing!" Doral repeated.
"Huh," Cavil grunted in surprise. "The Five are saying they'll open fire if the Raiders pass their transport."
"Bluffing I tell you!" Doral insisted, almost frantic now.
The Cylons on all four Basestars watched with held breath. With data taken from Basestar sensors and telemetry from the Raiders, the human-form Cylons had an extremely accurate view of the coming action projected into their minds. They could see where everything was. Their Raiders were on their way to the Colonial Fleet. The Five's transport ship was coming from the Colonial Fleet, its vector a direct reciprocal to the Raiders'. In moments, inertial and engines would carry the transport right through the middle of the mass of Cylon fighters.
On close examination, the Cylons belatedly realized that the transport was armed. A thread of doubt, heretofore suppressed, began rearing its ugly head in the Cylon collective consciousness. Were the Final Five bluffing? Or would they really open fire? Would Cylon truly fire upon Cylon? Uncertainty roiled in the backs of their minds, but no recall order was sent out. They watched as the two forces cruised towards each other.
Contact.
The modern Type III Basestar used by the SS Cylons carried three hundred Raiders each. They were cheap, easy for the Basestars to manufacture. Thus the losses from the battle of the Ionian nebula had already been replaced. Between the four Basestars, twelve hundred Raiders were launched into space. One thousand were sent against the Colonials. The remaining two hundred were retained as reserves.
Between the thousand Raiders and the Colonials stood one solitary Leopard class Dropship. The Leopard and the two slightly modified Stinger mechs it carried were prizes confiscated from a random pirate band years ago. Aside from the some electronics upgrades and the installation of artificial gravity in the Leopard, the dropship and mechs were standard Inner Sphere machines. As the Leopard approached the Raider formation, its two forward mech bay doors rolled open, allowing the Stingers their chance to add their own smattering firepower to the coming fray.
Seeing the transport designated as "not-prey" coming, the mass of Raiders split up into two amoeba-like formations to pass the Leopard by on either side. The Cylons at the Leopard's controls weren't having any of that. As the first Raiders drew even with the Leopard's nose, the Leopard opened fire.
PPCs and lasers lashed out, the slightest touch of either fiery lance annihilated any Raider targeted. Sixty long ranged missiles flew into the Raider formations that were at was practically knife-fighting distances. The three Raiders targeted by the missiles died after only a handful of hits, leaving the majority of the swarm to hunt for their own targets. The Stingers added their own fire, their lasers accounting for a measly two kills.
Forty three Raiders in total were destroyed, but they didn't die alone. In natural reflex, the Raiders turned and returned fire with their cannons. Individually, the cannons were pathetically weak by Inner Sphere standards. In addition, only two hundred and six Raiders could actually return fire without their flight mates obstructing their fire. Still, that was a lot of guns, and the Leopard's frontal and side armor was practically flayed away. Still, the Leopard could have conceivable survived the opening volley, except that one round slipped through one open mech bay door, punched through a wall and into one of the closed mech bays where the tylium traded from the Colonials was stored.
The resulting fireball vaporized the entire Dropship and its passengers.
Fenton Crackshell watched in horror as the Final Five ship died. He could hear and feel many of his fellow Cylons express the same feelings. And already, Fenton could sense denials and rationalizations making its way into the Basestar networks as the Cylons tried to come to grips with what they had just done. Idiots, he thought. Morons! What did they expect to…?
One of the statistics programs Fenton had been running pinged in his head, diverting him from unfolding disaster at hand. His eyes widened as he read the new data and understood the implications.
The resurrection net had just picked up the memories of eleven Cylons whose types it had no instructions for.
"Why did they do that?" Doral asked despairingly. "Why did they do that?"
Before anyone could answer, a new development called for their attention. The Type I Raiders rising from the surface had jumped out. Of more immediate concern was that the Hill had just opened fire on them.
Precentor Bareil stood in front of the café where he had breakfast every morning. This morning, it was closed. Puzzled, he looked around. Normally, the streets would be teeming with traffic by now. Instead, they were empty. Where had all the Cylons gone?
As if answering his thoughts, Bareil was suddenly hammered with a wall of light and sound as Hill launched forty capital missiles skyward.
"Defensive fire only!" Cavil snapped as the missiles from the Hill reached towards them.
When they had first discovered the Final Five living on this planet, the Six had for convenience's sake placed their Basestars in orbit directly over Cylonville. It was for the Five's protection of course. Unfortunately, with the Hill firing directly up at them, it was the worst spot to be defensively when fighting an opponent on the ground. Still, they had four Basestars to coordinate defensive fire and the advantage of their weapons not having to fight gravity.
The others understood why Cavil had ordered defensive fire only. They had to minimize damage to the Final Five if they were to salvage anything out of this fiasco.
But again, God, fate, the universe, or whatever was not cooperating.
Having fought only the Colonials, the Six Cylons had become spoiled, fighting in the manner of accustomed technical superiority. They had launched their counter-missiles as they would have against a Colonial attack. But for a critical moment the Six had forgotten that they weren't fighting Colonials this time; they were fighting fellow Cylons.
Nineteen capitol missiles made it through the counter-missile fire. The reserve Raiders killed six. Last ditch gun emplacements nailed three more. One of the Six's Basestars was struck by the remaining ten. It shuddered with each hit, but the damage was mostly cosmetic until the last missile found one of the shuttle airlocks exploded inside, snapping off a pylon in the middle of its length.
Below meanwhile, gravity played merry hell. Where gravity had been their advantage tactically, it became an absolute beast in other ways. The Six Cylons watched in horror as debris rained down on the fields and town surrounding the Hill causing untold damage and starting fires that promised even more. And that was before the counter-missiles that missed joined the fray
Nineteen counter-missiles rained down, their impacts having the force of minor nuclear warheads. Sixteen landed in farm fields rich with partially grown grain. Two landed in virgin woods the Five had set aside as park land. One hit the Hill itself, causing only superficial damage and exposing some armor.
One hit Cylonville dead center.
"Oh, the poor bastards," Hot Dog said, not quite believing that he was feeling sympathy for Cylons of all things. First things first: he and a Fleet to defend and incoming Raiders to kill.
There were a lot of Raiders.
They were still pretty far away. Hot Dog could only make out a smear of speckled light at this distance. But the enemy was coming in hard and fast and would be on them in only a few minutes.
The cloud was growing fast and was beginning to resolve into individual fighters when hundreds of old Type I Raiders flashed into existence on their flanks. The inertia they carried though FTL had them charging right at the Vipers.
"Frak!" someone yelled on the wireless. "Ambush!"
Hot Dog hauled on his stick, rapidly reorienting his Viper to shoot at the intruders. Only, the Final Five Raiders broke off first, swerving away from the Colonials and towards the oncoming Type IIs.
"Hold your fire!" Hot Dog said over the open Viper frequency as the newcomers engaged their SS counterparts. Most Vipers held their fire, but someone wasn't so quick on the uptake. Hot Dog almost groaned as a stream of red tracers raced outwards.
Hot Dog had heard the rumors that the Final Five had some kind of super armor on their fighters. He didn't believe it until he saw several rounds bounce off the targeted Raider to little effect.
"Hey! He shot at us! I'm going to…"
"Negative! Stay in formation Nine!"
"What? He shot you, Ten!"
"He's also not pursuing. It was probably an accident. We'll deal with it later."
"Whatever. Hey! The Type IIs are in LRM range!"
The Inner Sphere called it swarm. In essence, if a missile missed its target or its target died first, the missile would go hunting for another one until it ran out of fuel. The Protectorate's advanced computing technology had improved on that, adding an IFF component and a choice for the user to turn it on and off at need. Still, it wasn't something to fire into a dense melee involving friendly units.
In this case, there was no melee. There were two separate groups charging at each other. Six hundred refitted Type I Raiders fired five LRMs each at a range which the Type II Raiders couldn't effectively reply. The Type IIs attempted to evade. They dropped decoys to spoof the missiles. But there were three thousand missiles coming at them and they had started out as a dense cloud, a perfect target for missiles in Swarm mode.
Unfortunately, the missiles they faced were Inner Sphere designs. The Inner Sphere had been dealing with far more effective anti-missile systems for centuries. The solution they had come up with in the end was to simply overwhelm any possible defense with sheer volume of fire.
Of three thousand LRMs, half were spoofed by and expended themselves on decoys. That still left nine hundred and fifty seven Type II Raiders to deal with fifteen hundred missiles. Design decisions made by their masters had left them with little in the way of armor. They could be killed by a single LRM and many were. Others were lucky insofar as they only had a wing blown off. But this left them as sitting ducks for LRMs whose original targets had already been destroyed.
Twenty two Type II Raiders actually survived unscathed, shielded in their rear most position by their flight mates and debris. Inertia carried them forward into the laser armed teeth of their intact Type I counterparts.
From first shot fired to the destruction of the last Type II was seventeen seconds.
Fenton noted the quick destruction of the Raiders. Statistics programs pulled data from the rest of the local network. One thousand Type II Raiders destroyed. The Six's local resurrection net waited like a monstrous houseplants waiting to be watered with the memories belonging to the killed Raiders.
No memories came. The local net reported that one thousand Raider memories had been downloaded to other resurrection stations. Fenton blinked. There weren't any other resurrections stations except…
BOOMER!
Grief. Sadness. Mourning. Failure.
These were the emotions running through the Hill as it soaked up the memories of those killed in the bombardment. Defense had been why the Hill had been placed here, after all, and it had failed. But another, hotter emotion was running through the Hill too.
Fury.
In a double flash of light, the Hill vanished with a monstrous thunderclap as air rushed in to fill the vacuum left behind.
"Call in reinforcements."
"What?" Cavil said.
"Call in reinforcements," Boomer repeated. "Now, before those Raiders get here."
"Those fighters can't hurt us…" Doral began.
"Yes, they CAN hurt us," Boomer snapped. "We're in BASEstars, not BATTLEstars. We don't have sufficient anti-fighter guns and missiles to fend off that many fighters and our Raiders are obviously worthless against them. They will swarm us. They might not be able to penetrate our armor, but they can sure as hell attack anything that's exposed: sensors arrays, weapons, you name it. They'll reduce us to blind, unarmed hulks that a frakking five year old could take out!"
Outside, the Hill materialized from a FTL jump above the Six's Basestars. Surprise was complete. As it shook off the vegetation and topsoil still clinging to its saucers, the Type I Basestar could finally use ALL its weapons. The first salvo went in almost completely unopposed.
A Type III Basestar used by the Six massed less than the original Type I. Where the Type III had pylons, the Type I had full saucers. The Type III had been designed by human-form Cylons to be lived in. In contrast, the Type I had originally been designed by humans as a heavily automated military support base. While less comfortable than a Type III, a Type I was better armed and armored, almost a match for any three Type III Basestars.
"Call the frakking reinforcements!" Boomer shouted at her Basestar rocked from the impacts.
An unfamiliar emotion ran through Nine as she downloaded the news of Cylonville's destruction. Certainly she would miss the place. And there were friends she would never see again. Sadness wasn't an emotion that Nines had never felt before. The universe was always changing after all. Things came. Things went. Nothing lasted.
But somehow, this new emotion was different, something hot and bitter that no Nine had ever experienced before. There was no time to analyze it however. As her Type I Raider swept towards the dueling Basestars, Type II Raiders appeared ahead, moving to intercept Nine's formation. A quick count showed that there was Nine's own force outnumbered them three to one. This wasn't even going to be as hard as a cakewalk.
"Okay, you guys wanna dance?" Nine snarled, locking on to a random enemy Raider. "Let's…"
Up ahead, three more Type III Basestars suddenly jumped in and began pouring fire into the Hill. At the same time, twelve hundred Type II Raiders jumped in and fell upon Nine's group of six hundred from the flank at knife fighting range. They opened up with missiles and THESE missiles were each more than capable of shredding even an up-armored Type I Raider.
Which one did to Nine's.