I would like to thank Sable Cold for taking on the impressive job of being the Beta Reader for this book. As always reviews are welcome. If you find this is easier to read and follow. Thank Sable Cold and all of his hard work

I do not own Battlestar Galactica or have any connection with them, other than I have seen the shows. And it was a long time ago. I also do not own or have input into the game of Rifts. I don't even play the game. But I do own copies of some of the books, and I have used them for this story.

Chapter 38: Click Click Boom

Earth mid October 2019

The overwatching Raptor was almost five hundred kilometers up and would only have been a hole in space to any system made on the planet below but for its powerful and active radar painting the area of ocean below it. The Colonial made DRADIS could have done the same job, and most likely would not have been as easily detected by the locals. Except the idea was that the locals would be looking, so why not give them something to find? That did not mean that the craft's built in DRADIS system was not also collecting data at the same time the new built radar was pumping out the kilowatts of radio transmitting power. There was a team specifically tasked to looking at and comparing both received data sets.

The powerful active radar was letting the local tech level know that it was up there and what it was doing over their heads. The lone Colonial craft was watching the growing fleet of Chinese ships spread out across the ocean. The Colonials had only recently figured out that the two large civilians ships nearby were also going to play a part in the coming action.

That bit of information had been found on the World Wide Web by one of the Colonial data miners working with Boxey. There were a few million former or wannabe military analysts on the web. A few of them had noticed the civilian flagged roll-on/roll-off ships. They had started to wonder, online, why they might be in the local area. That pair of civilian ships were now closest to the Chinese combat units designated to land troops. Those ships had been the slowest, and they had delayed the Chinese fleet in fully forming up.

Now there was little left to the imagination as to what was being carried in their identical hulls. The fleet of Chinese ships were all a little over sixty-two nautical miles off the Colonial islands' restricted waters. Well outside the twenty nautical mile limit of Colonial claimed or controlled waters and military exclusion zone. More than a few of those military ships had started sailing in larger circles in the deep blue sea. They were waiting for something, and only their commanders knew what that might remotely be.

The word finally had leaked out to the rest of the world about the massive Chinese presence near the two islands sharing a single lagoon. And this time, it was not from the Colonials but from another unnamed intelligence source. So, images of the Chinese fleet were now making the rounds of the news services of the world. Even the news services that did not like to cover this type of story had been forced to at least spend some airtime on it. That did not mean that they still did not try to put a spin on the story and make it fit a certain narrative. Soon after, some pointed questions were being asked of key leadership around the world.

After the news broke about the massive number of Chinese ships in the area, the BBC team on the island no longer needed to hide that they already knew about the threat. Ruth and Mell were up today at first light, which was about two hours earlier than was normal for them. They were covering the story about the Chinese fleet from the Colonial point of view.

Instead of the normal clothes that the world had been seeing them in, they were now both dressed in blue body armor with BBC printed in white letters on the front and back, and on the kevlar helmets they were wearing. They were talking to anyone who was willing among those currently living on the island. The interviews would later be uploaded for the rest of the world to see. Not all of the people that were interviewed were new to this planet. It was a major human interest story.

People were waiting for the shoe to drop, and the tensions were growing with each hour that passed. Most of the world was holding its breath as a known nuclear power and a space faring people with still being discovered technologies were facing off only 100 kilometers apart. After the bombshell had been dropped on the world about the nearby war fleet, even the people who did not care about things farther than the end of their street now cared. More than a few of them were angry that they had just found out about the impending threat to the world.

The first pebble dropped on the world not long after Mell started her latest set of interviews. This time, it aired out of London. The Chinese ambassador to the UN addressed the world himself. The older man walked up to a set of microphones and made a show of first putting notes down and then looking around the gathered news people. He had no idea that he was visibly overacting.

In English, he started to speak. "Thank you all for coming on such short notice. I have a simple statement to give today. The freedom loving people of China demand that the Colonels turn over the islands that they have occupied back to their 'rightful owners'. And that they are to turn over all their technology for the rightful use of all people. If they do not do this in eight hours, then the Chinese government and the People's Liberation armed forces will liberate the world from these foreign interlopers."

The statement went on for about another ten minutes. He had a rather huge list of demands for the Colonials. One thing that was not covered by the Chinese ambassador, and he refused to say when asked by one of the more quick-thinking press reporters, was who was going to be given custody of the items the Chinese were going to 'liberate' from their Colonial owners. This had opened up a floodgate of other questions that were both related to the Colonials and not.

When pushed by reporters for more information, the Chinese ambassador simply stormed off out of microphone and camera range. He retreated to his office in the UN building in New York and refused all phone calls from the press. He had not expected to be bombarded like that. He had been assured by his staff that the right people would be at the briefing. It would seem that the term 'right people' had changed since his last dealings with the world's press corps.

He had his staff bar access to the whole floor after the third attempt at an interview through physical means. He watched the streaming news to see what was going to happen next. He already had another speech prepared for when his country took over those islands. He would announce that the islands were now part of China's territory and that they were claiming every island within two hundred nautical miles of them as a defense area. This statement would ensure that no one else got the idea of taking them from the Chinese military. He was thinking that in another decade, two at the maximum, China would rule this world and maybe the whole star system. With a grin on his face and a bowl of freshly popped corn, he waited.

It was only a handful of minutes after the Chinese Ambassador had left the microphone that Ruth was told about the one sided news conference. She immediately contacted the Colonial Command Center to let them know about the announcement and ask for an on the record comment. She was not surprised by the response.

Charles had a grim smile on his face when he was told the information. He told Ruth that they had been watching the briefing live but with her on the line, Charles set up an interview so that Mell could transmit to the world what the Colonial Islands' response to the Chinese ultimatum would be. But first Charles had to send a message. One that said that they had been threatened and pass on the timeline that had been announced to the Admiral.

One hour after the Chinese ambassador ended his news conference, Charles was standing beside Mell so that he could give a live interview. The pair of them were outside with a scenic backdrop that had been ingrained into the viewers' minds over these months. It was the small flat topped offloading pier with the small boat marina in the background. The air and space port was too sensitive of an area to have a live broadcast from. Besides, the pier had a lot more people walking around that did not have the military look about them. It was hard to say someone was military when they were just sitting on a wooden chair fishing.

Mell was in full body armor with BBC printed all over it for the world to see. Charles was in the green colored Colonial flight suit that had become world famous during that airshow almost a year ago. Mell put the microphone under Charles chin a few seconds after Ruth finished counting down and pointed a single finger at her.

"Colonel you have had a chance to view the Chinese address at the UN building a while ago. Do you have a reply which you would like to tell the world and the Chinese leadership? Now that they have laid their terms out?"

Charles turned to look at the reporter with a poker face. He had a lot of practice putting this face on over the last year. Right now, he did not want to let the people on this world know how angry he was. His people had just been blamed for everything that had been killing people on this planet for years before the Colonials even knew that this place existed and was not a myth. And now one of their ground based superpowers wanted them to just roll over, and submit to them? That was so not going to happen. Not on his watch.

"Miss Kelly. Thank you for agreeing to meet me here. Yes, I would like to give a statement in reply to what was stated not long ago by the ambassador."

Charles turned back to the camera, and gave it a level look. Anyone watching the interview could get the feeling of barely controlled anger coming off of the man. "Hay you, Jack-wagon! Yes, I'm talking to you. You know? The ones hiding in that nice and deep bunker somewhere under Beijing that you think no one knows about?"

Charles did not notice the huge wide-eyed look he was getting from Ruth, the soundman, and even the cameraman. He was lowering the boom on someone, and he was only thinking about that lowering. "You claim to be doing these things for the people? I don't think many of your people have been eating eighteen-ounce Kobe steaks for the past two nights. You want to frak with us? Try it, and you will pull only back a stump. I found on old saying not too long ago. I think it fits the current situation very well. So, to the Chinese government and their military. If you're feeling froggy... Jump. But if you do? I'm going to run your frakking ass over! We do not need any more time to think about it."

Charles looked back to the openmouthed Mell standing beside him holding the felt covered mic in her hands. She was stunned. This was not the message Charles had told her he was going to give to the world. In fact, it was not what he had planned to say when the BBC first asked for this interview, but he had checked the latest information coming down from the orbiting Raptor just before driving down to the pier.

"Miss Kelly. That is the official statement to Chinese at this time from my government. We thank you for passing it along for us." Charles was now fighting to keep a smile off of his face. He had been waiting to make that statement even before the issue with the West Pac Express and the rogue Chinese captain had happened.

Mell was still standing open-mouthed as she watched Charles turn and walk out of screen. She stared after the man for a few more seconds before turning to the camera that was still rolling with a wide-eyed cameraman behind it. It was more than a few seconds of dead air. This was a first that someone at this level had not used any political speak. It was as in your face as it could get without a punch being thrown.

"That is the statement to the Chinese government. The Colonials seem to be saying that they are not going to back down. Back to you in London." Mell was looking right into the camera and her heart was beating in her throat. She had never seen Charles like this and it scared her to the bone. She had heard a lot of stories about his past, and now she understood some of them a lot better. The kid gloves had just come off and they had been used to slap someone across the cheek.

The powerful light went off in an eye blink and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees. The camera man lifted the camera off his shoulders, but he still had a bewildered look plastered all over his face. He was looking at the back of retreating Colonial officer. He was not walking fast but he was not taking his time either as he stepped away. The camera man looked over his other shoulder, and realized he was about to be left behind.

He had to pick up the pace while still encased in all of the body armor and helmet, because as soon as the light went off Mell was quickstepping towards the golf cart about thirty feet away from them. It was a quick and quiet ride for the three of them back to their main place of work and living space.

They did not go to the villa that the BBC was using but instead they pulled off into the wood line nearby. Ruth had moved the portable studio equipment into the dirt floored bombproof bunker a few days ago. A pair of thick power lines ran from the large truck still beside the Hut all the way to the new bunker. She would had loved it if they could have put the truck into a bunker also, but the bunker was still not finished to the level that an American army unit would have built for this purpose. The term was rushed, and it did not have a finished look. It did look very solid, and that was what she wanted in a bunker in a warzone.

The Colonials just did not have the equipment or the manpower to do everything that needed to be done around the island. Not before the Chinese got too close to render all the work ineffective at its desired function. This last interview? It would be the last time Ruth would let her people move more than fifty feet from the entrance to the bunker. At least, for most things that were not very clearly work or hygiene related.

They would be able to go the main house and transmission truck, but that was about it. It was going to be very dangerous soon. Charles had already said that if he could, he would send an armored transport for them if things went bad before the bunker was finished enough to protect them, but they were not to count on it. He also told her and Mel in private that the Chinese had just launched and put into operation another spy satellite.

This additional spy machine was keeping them under observation for almost eighteen hours a day. This limited what the Colonials could do and keep secret at the same time. That did not stop a lot of work, but most of the important work was only done when they could complete the work without being seen.

The Colonial shot across the bow of the Chinese government did not go over well. Ruth, Mell and the team were watching different news networks react to the commander's bombshell on live TV's that had been hastily mounted to one side of the half-finished bunker. Some were saying that the Colonials should do as they were 'asked'. Going to war over something that was not worth dying over was not smart. Others were saying that the Chinese were just trying to show the aliens that the Earth could not be bought off. Then again, there was a small but rapidly growing number of reporters with a different viewpoint.

They just said China needed to put up some facts or shut up. That group also started pushing back on the rest of the Chinese narrative. They pointed out that China was being the aggressor to a group that had not done anything but defend themselves since they came to this world. The online news sites also were thinking that the Chinese were being bullies to a small island of refugees.

More and more were looking at the details of the impending battle as search engines went into overdrive. The disparity between a few thousand people on a pair of small islands compared to a few billion Chinese was being looked at very closely. They were a lot like the odds seen at the Hot Gates so many thousands of years ago. This was pointed out many times, and that the Colonials spoke a form of Greek helped with the analogy.

The Chinese leadership had been watching the live news transmissions also. To the man they had nearly choked on their perfectly cooked Kobe steaks when the Colonial called them out on live worldwide TV. It was a major loss of face for them in more ways than one.

To his credit, the Chairman did not lose his cool at what was said. He merely put his knife and fork down, and more closely read the subtitles marching across the bottom of the screen. He could understand and even speak a fair amount of English, but he wanted to make sure he understood correctly what had been said by the human like alien.

When it was over, and the news went on to its next talking head or story, he merely picked up a phone. After waiting a few seconds, he only said, "GO," before putting the phone back down and back out of sight of the dinner table. He casually went back to eating. With that one word, the Chinese People's Navy would enter history on a bullet train for better or worse. The supreme leader of the Chinese Communist party slowly finished his meal and the rest of the bottle of red wine.

The Chairman had thought that as soon as he had given the go ahead, the navy would launch the attack right then. He was used to having tens of thousands of people instantly obeying any of his orders without any delay. It did not work that way in real life. Not when dealing with ships that were thousands of kilometers away. On top of that, this plan was the most complicated military plan ever made in the history of the Chinese military. It would take some time to get all of the pieces moving earlier than planned.

The fleet and other assets had been working under the idea that they still had eight to twelve hours before the order to launch the attack would be given. The leadership of the fleet was worried that advancing the attack after telling the whole world that they had x number of hours left might have unfortunate consequences. It was not sitting well with them as they had one last meeting on the flagship of each battlegroup a long way from the source of the orders.

All of them were worried about a Pearl Harbor effect, but not on one small country. In the information age, the effect would be on many of the most powerful countries on the planet. The military leaders at the pointy end of the stick did not trust that their people in the worldwide press would be able to keep a leash on something like that. Then again, if they did not obey the Chairman, they might not have that great of a life when they got back to port.

So, two hours before the Chairman had said to plan for, the fleet started launching its fighters and strike craft into the sky. They were coming from the pair of large ships that were aviation centered. The first carrier-based Su-33 and Chinese built J-15 flew off the front mounted ramps and started to circle the training carrier Liaoning. They were followed less than a minute later by the 60,000 ton Shandong's spread of J-15 and FC-31 combat aircraft.

The planners would have loved to have been able to keep the 85,000 ton Type 002, but they did not have enough trained flight crews and the ship itself was still encountering issues common for a first in class ship. The only thing that the rest of the world knew was that she was heading back to port, because that had been the plan all along. There was a lot of truth to that, just not the whole truth. Her understrength flight crews had already had four of their craft fail in training. She made it back to port a full week before the planned launch of the attack.

Twenty of the Liaoning's twenty-four fighters came off her deck. They joined up with the thirty fighters launched from the Shandong's complement of thirty-two already in formation over the two carriers. The Colonials saw all of this from the high orbiting Raptor and reported it all back to their command center with very minimal delay.

This was the first combat mission to be done by any one of the Chinese carriers. It took the Chinese some time to work out some last minute issues at the start of the operation. They had to stay close to the support ships, burning fuel as they flew in a circle around the key ships. That was what it looked like they were doing to the Raptor high overhead. It even made a kind of sense for those who had planned large scale carrier operations before. It was also a case of whistling in the wind.

While the Chinese were launching their fighters and strike craft. A modified DF-26 was being readied in a silo in the middle of nowhere south of mainland China. About two minutes after the last of the J-15's had launched off China's first home built carrier, the ballistic missile leapt out of its cold concrete home on a pillar of red and orange fire.

It was rising and soon past the speed of sound, but no one was around to hear the double thunderclaps as the multi-story sized missile kept accelerating up into the light blue sky. Soon even the trees had stopped moving under the assault of the shock waves caused by the 200 ton moving hunk of metal. It had gone from 0 to 1000 kph in less than thirty seconds.

Warnings of the missile launch were picked up the by US, Japanese, Russian and British satellites from their respective orbits around the planet. After a full minute of living on the edge of their seats, and no second or third launch being picked up by the overhead satellites, a hundred people started breathing again. It was only a single pillar of fire that was rising into the thinner air. Most of the analysts would have said that it had been a test launch but for its direction of travel. The training ranges for this type of weapons were to the West or North of the launch site. This weapon was heading East and South.

The militaries of most of the major players on the planet let out some of the breath they had been holding before the first stage had run out of fuel. Now they knew that it was only the opening move. Those countries went on high alert as per orders long ago put down in case of a limited nuclear strike anywhere in the world. Their leaders were rushed into offices or in two cases into waiting armored transportation. All before the first stage had used up all of its fuel and fallen away from the still speeding missile.

The orbiting Raptor was below the horizon of this single massive missile's launch. So, it did not see the launch, or the first stage burn out of the missile. The little craft did see on its DRADIS system the now three story sized building riding a blow torch of flames towards its general direction, but that was only after the second stage lit off.

The Chinese were thinking that whatever was beaming out active radar signals over the island was just a different type of satellite. So they had launched one of their anti-satellite weapons at it. The power requirements for something that powerful while remaining in one location matched what a satellite should be capable of doing.

They had not believed the reports that it was a small craft like a fighter keeping an overwatch. They thought that it was only propaganda because of the power output and what the radar frequency said was a larger transmitter. After all, it was something they had only done a few times in the recent past.

They did not expect the target to fight back. Not against the attack they had launched. That was just not playing fair. At least that was what would be heard time and again whenever the Chinese talked about it later. Satellites were not supposed to be armored, much less armed and ready to fight against a surprise attack. The UN had treaties about things like that. The Chinese knew that, because they had help write the updated parts of them in the first place.

The Raptor pilot up in orbit today did not even adjust the orientation of his craft. Daniel just activated a Colonial made missile mounted in one of the many missile bays spread out around the craft's frame. It was quietly ejected out of a panel that quickly closed back up against the underside of the small craft like it had never been there. These bays normally held all kinds of decoys and scouting packages for the Colonial Navy. Those types of kit were not needed over this planet and hence had been mostly replaced with more explosive weapons.

The small missile floated in space for a few seconds. The little push out of the bay only had added about half a meter per second to its delta-V. It floated and was still just long enough for the seeker head to find its target. Now knowing what it needed to go see in an up close and personal like fashion, it fired its engine and off it went on its own mission of self-destruction. The Colonial missile was so small that very few systems knew it had even been there in the first place.

This would later be viewed and noted as another example of the advanced Colonial stealth technology that they had been hiding. That did not mean that no one 'saw' the weapon flying to attack something on a different orbital plane. The engine exhaust on the small weapon was very energetic when seen against a backdrop of cold skies or white clouds.

The rising missile that China had launched was not one to see the danger. The off-world made black painted missile hit the DF-26 at blinding speed. The impact point was just behind where the kinetic kill vehicle was mounted to the last part of the remaining thrusting body. The hard nose of the Colonial missile normally would not have even noticed the impact that it had scored on the one and one third meter diameter missile coming up from the planet below. Not without the modification made to all Colonial weapons not long after coming to this planet. They had had to take into account the less resilient components currently made by this planet. There was a delay for this modified software to kick in.

That meant the Colonial missile was deep into the body of the Chinese weapon by the time that it realized that it had hit something. When the warhead went off, it did so in a bright flash of energy against the dark backdrop of space. That meant that a whole lot of systems around and on the planet picked it up, and a lot of them were not connected to the military or other government agencies.

It would take a long time to find out, but they now had the first recorded interception of an anti-satellite weapon by a defending target. That was something that was going to be well studied by a lot of different entities on the planet. Even with facts the facts being reviewed again and again, it would still be hotly debated on whether it was the warhead that caused the damage or the fuel tank not liking the way the Colonial high-speed missile had greeted it. In reality, it did not matter one way or the other. The attacking missile was now just a giant fireball in low orbit. One that was visible between the south coast of Taiwan and the north coast of the Philippines through the naked eye. If someone had been looking at the right spot in the overhead sky.

It would be days before the connection between the explosion in space and the attack on the Colonials would be drawn by the news networks. It did not take that long for the larger or higher tech countries to connect all of the dots. The effect of the large weapon being shot down would be noticed through the eyes of history. That was because the Chinese planners had expected to have the element of surprise when the first of their aircraft and missiles impacted the island. That was not going to happen now and the key terrestrial military units did not know about the loss of surprise.

Instead, the Russian supplied Su-33 fighters, along with a mix of twenty Shenyang FC-31 stealth fighters and sixteen modified copies of the Russian airframes called J-15's started the next phase very much expecting to have surprise on their side. The same was going to be true of the sea launched missiles. They were sticking to an operational plan that had just been flushed out of an airlock.

North of the carriers was the fleet of Luyang III and Renhai-class destroyers. They started to fire missile after missile out of their vertical launch systems. Zheng He Hai Jun was the senior Admiral commanding the fleet of ships from his nation. He should have taken the 60,000 ton flattop as his flagship. That would have been the conventional wisdom for the whole world, but he had thought that those expensive ships were just going to be the sideshow for this battle.

They would only be playing a support role once the follow on action to take these two islands started. All of those fighters and strike craft were only to draw away any aviation assets the Colonials might have. Any enemy craft they shot down was just an additional good thing. They were only to tie up the enemy's only counterstrike capabilities while the rest of the fleet pounded and then overran the aliens' defenses.

He wanted to be on one of the big hitters when the awards were given out after this battle was over. He had no idea yet that he had lost the element of surprise. No one had thought of a way, much less the need, to let the fleet commander know if the first move had succeeded or not. They were working under both radio silence and tight operational security. Sometimes this is a good thing, and sometimes it is not. This was a case of not.

The operations center on the Type 055 ship was state of the art. A massive amount of data from the local area was displayed on big flat panels mounted on the insides of the superstructure. One of the operators called out to the rest of the room that the escorting fighters were at the first waypoint. The information was passed to the command staff, dutifully. Admiral Zheng He picked up the ship to ship radio.

"All ships, this is the Flag. You may launch your weapons for Phase Two." He repeated this order twice more before putting the push to talk mic back on its cradle above his head. He made sure that he had the right look on his face for the rest of the crew and the event recorder. He made sure that he kept the right look on his face as he slowly sipped his tea.

Once he had put the handset away, the ship he was on started to shake as the powerful rocket shot the supersonic cruise missile out of the forward vertical launch system or VLS cells. It was soon followed by a missile that came from the aft mounted VLS next to the hangar behind the command center. The first missiles were followed just under 2 seconds later, each launcher alternating back and forth. They were coming out of the 850mm deck mounted boxes on long white clouds of missile exhaust.

China did not have much experience with the VLS systems they had built into the current generation of warships. They had used a mix of Russian and American information in designing them, but they wanted to make their own. Some of the data had not been given willingly to the Chinese. That last part was the hardest to use. They had plans on how to make a copy of the American Mark 41, but they did not know why some things were done the way they were. The idea of Concentric Canister Launch (CCL) looked good, but not all of the whys and wherefores were written out in the data they had on hand. If they thought it was overdesigned, then they would just cut out or change minor things to fit their requirements of speed and ease of construction. One of the key issues was that they also did not understand the need to be so tight on the quality control of this system.

The thing was that only one of those countries had firsthand experience using this type of system in anything like a real war. As it turned out, China could have made more than a few modifications to the VLS they put into their ships but they had cheaped out on the construction. Heat and the missiles' very caustic exhaust leaked into the adjoining cells of the VLS after the first few weapons had left their larger cells. American systems were in the 533mm or 21 inch class. China needed a larger 850mm box to fit their weapons, all on a ship that was not that much wider than the American ships. So it was expected that some things would need to be adjusted.

Normally it would not have been that big of a deal if they had used the VLS cell like a chess board and skipped around the board while launching the weapons. That was the way it had been done before the mid-90s whenever USN mass launched its missiles. Instead the Chinese People's Navy did something else that had worked for them during testing. They just went down the line of cells launching one missile after another, working from the front of the deck and going towards the aft part of the ship. The math said that this method would keep the ship balanced and should improve accuracy on the other end of those expensive weapons.

It also would not have been that much of an issue it they had gone with a dedicated cold launch system for their VLS cells. Most of the weapons they had pulled off storage could have been launched that way and it would not have mattered but China went with the hot launch for the weapons being used today. They fired off the rocket booster motors while still in the cells to get the payloads moving and the way cleared for the next weapons. It was all about getting the weapons into the air as fast as they could to make one big hammer of a blow on their enemy.

Hai Jun was watching the missile launches coming from his other ships on one of the larger screens. He had seen half a dozen marks on a different screen that showed every other ship in all of the task groups had also started to launch their land attack weapons. He was walking around the ship's command center, the picture of a proper fleet commander. That was why he saw the indicators on the VLS showing that the heat was starting to rise before the alarm went off deep in the ship and then in the command center.

This caused the system to automatically stop launching weapons for a full forty-five seconds until the temperature dropped to a safe level. Once the temperature dropped to a safe level, it automatically started launching weapons again before anyone on the CIC could stop it. That is, until the heat went up again and caused another alarm. In the end, after every ten missiles were launched from each VLS, the system would stop the launching for almost a full two minutes. This was a safety issue and it would have taken direct action to change it.

Thinking it was a ship issue, the fleet commander waited until the crew could fix the problem. He watched as the command crew worked on it. The admiral could tell that the captain was not happy with whatever had happened. He quickly took a few steps towards the fleet commander but did not try to make eye contact.

"Sir, the VLS systems are overheating. The automated safety system keeps kicking in, and it's delaying us getting all of our weapons off. I could have aborted the launch, but that would delay our total strike package even longer. A manual abort and reset would take about half an hour before we could start launching the remaining weapons."

The ship's captain stopped talking when a note was passed to the fleet commander. Hai Jun looked down to read the short note and he felt his eyebrows rise. He had been about to berate the captain for the deficiency of his crew's training. This must have been a training issue. The note in his hand was proof that it was not after all a training issue with this ship.

"Captain, it would seem that your ship is not the only one with the overheating issue." He handed the note to the captain of his flagship and started walking towards one of the larger plotting screens at the back of the overcrowded room. He needed to find out how this new information was going to affect his overall battle plans.

The fleet admiral made a mental note to have this issue addressed when he returned to his office on the mainland. He was not going to get the iron fist he had wanted with each ship launching between sixty four and one hundred and twelve missiles. Instead he knew that he was going to have a steel and semi armor piercing avalanche. He did not think that it would matter. Avalanche or hammer, the end state was going to be the same on the target. They would learn from these issues, and the People's Navy would be ready if anyone else needed a lesson on how to treat his country. With a nod he started to move to another station in the command center.

He was on his way to the main tracking station so he could watch the now extended wave of anti-ship missiles as they flew the first one hundred kilometers to the islands. The first missiles were already crossing that map line by the time the last weapons left the different ships spread out between the different task groups. The only missiles that would be maintained in the launchers were going to be the few long range weapons that had maintenance issues. All of the short ranged counter-air missiles were going to remain on the ships as well.

From across the small bridge that had never been designed to be a task group flagship much less a fleet one, one of the system technicians started yelling frantically in a cracking voice. No one knew who the operator might be addressing his issue to and more than likely, the operator did not know himself. He had just been given a mud sandwich and he wanted help to understand what had just happened. Because it so was not covered by any training that he had been subjected to.

"Sir! The BDS is down! Two satellites are down."

There was a slight pause and then the voice came back. Somehow it was an even more stress filled voice than the first screech. "Now all three satellites in our area just went offline, Sir! One second they were all up and providing guidance and navigation data to us. Now they are gone. Not offline, but totally gone. I'm not getting any carrier signal with our line of sight space communications systems at all."

Both the ship's captain and the fleet commander walked over to the screen nearest the person bellowing from his chair. Even before he could see what was going on, the ship's captain stayed sharp and yelled out a command. It should have come from the fleet commander but the fleet commander was still gobsmacked as he looked at the data that his brain could not or would not comprehend.

"Switch to GLONASS! Put all systems to GLONASS mode, now! Pass along to all ships! Switch missile guidance to the Russian backup, now!"

The Renhai-class ship's commander had not cared what had caused the Chinese made and deployed BeiDou Navigation Satellite system to go down. He was just trying to work through his crisis management training. As the fourth in command of the whole fleet, he knew that the YJ-18 supersonic terminal attack missiles currently in the air were all that his county had made. He had no idea how many millions or more likely billions of Renminbi and years of production had just been put at risk. All because of some computer glitch.

The operator's hands were flying across the keyboard, but his head went down as the last of the fifty missiles left the ship. He looked quickly at the screens and his shoulder slumped as he made sense of the display. "Sir, even with the delay for overheating, I failed. I wasn't fast enough. I think I was only able to get the last four to switch over to the navigation back up before the umbilicals separated at the weapons' launch. I don't know how many were affected, or if the auto switch software will kick them over onto the backup mode. We never trained for something like this. I'm sorry sir, I let you down."

Zheng He Hai Jun looked around the bridge at the enlisted ranks and officers, but no one seemed to be talking except for the cryptic statements from the missile launch station to the ship's captain. In a very soft voice so that it would not carry far, he asked what most of the rest of the CIC crew wanted to know but for different reasons.

"What happened?" There was no doubt who the fleet commander was asking that simple question to.

Outside of the thick blast proof windows, the dozen Type 052D's next to the 13,000 ton flagship and her three sisters were coming out of their own self-made gray clouds. The three other Type 055's in this group also came charging out of their own missile exhaust clouds miles away from their location. The other four of the larger sisters came out of their own large grey clouds, as they had also added their own massive loads of attacking cruise missiles to the strike package the dedicated missile task force had launched.

The dozen older tech Type O52C's in this task force unmasked their missile batteries and radars as the flame of the departing missiles faded away. They formed a lose circle around the newer but now much less armed sister ships. These dozen ships were now ready to counter any flying enemies. Ones that might come out in retaliation for the wall of death flying towards the islands to the west of the Chinese task groups. Most of the political planners had not thought that this defensive line was necessary but they were worried, just slightly, that one of the nearby ships from one of the other planetary powers might misunderstand what was going on.

When the orbiting Raptor with Daniel at the controls detected the large and growing wave of missiles launching, its systems acted way before the pilot could even move a finger to launch any intercepting missile. The data had flown out of his systems, going both down to the planet, and up away from the blue planet. When the speed of light information burst hit the space liner turned prison ship turned light carrier hiding behind Luna, all of the Vipers she carried in her modified hull launched towards the planet in one wave. Their own mission of destruction before them. They were acting according to the plan the local commander had come up with after learning of their assignment to this system.

They had been sitting in the cockpits for eight hours at a time, followed by eight hours off and out of their little attack ships. For the last two days, it had been this way and it had been wearing on the nerves of the two full viper crews that the converted civilian carried. When the Vipers dropped away from the sides of the ship the fireball that had been a cutting edge kinetic kill systems was just starting to dissipate. The pilots were more than ready to get their mad on to whatever it was that needed to be taken out. This was one asset that no one who had been born on this planet knew about. It was an intel gap that would be pointed to for decades to come.

China had not liked the idea of relying on the US controlled GPS system for her people, and by extension her government. So the Chinese had worked out their own system with help from more than a few less than willing sources. After all, knowing that something can be done and the base idea of how it was done, that just made copying it that much easier. Besides, they did not feel the need to cover the whole world, at least not yet. With the right system, they could cover what they needed to and then slowly grow it to cover more land area.

The US system was in low orbit, and it required a large number of satellites to do its job. It had taken a long time to set up the production line to make so many orbiting systems and control systems. Add to that an impressive number of rocket launches to get each one in just the right orbit along with a few spares just in case.

The way this system was set up had its advantages. Notably, if one system or satellite went down, you only had to wait until a replacement flew over your local horizon a few minutes later or just deal with less accurate data generated from fewer satellites. This worked over almost the entire planet. It worked so well that it was the go to navigation system for almost every country and company in the world.

The Chinese chose to have fewer satellites, but put them up in a lot higher orbit. They could do this with a third of the space launches. Those launches were also smaller and cheaper than what the US system needed to use to keep the GPS in operation. Each system or satellite could cover more surface area, and it would be safer from any enemy action. At least compared to the lower orbiting satellites used for GPS. All of this was true, from the surface dwellers' point of view.

What the Chinese had not counted on was that their next major enemy was going to be a group that had real air and space fighter capability. Ones that were already in operation rather than projected to be fielded in a few decades if given enough money. Oh and the people launching those aerospace fighters? They only had a very small trading post on the planet. This was going to be the first time that space was going to be turned into a real war zone. All of the rules that the plans were based on, they were about to be shoved out the airlock.

The ten Vipers, mostly just called MK VIII's, were the meanest one crew machines that Colonial hands had ever put together. They would stay that way until the MK VIIIC (Command) and the long rumored MK VIIIE (Extreme combat Space/Air/Ground) started production in a few years. They had each been given a task and a target list that had been updated twice a day. These MK VIII's were a little overloaded. Each one was carrying the paired integral pulse lasers and as many short ranged missiles as they could hang under the wings and fuselage mounts.

The running joke was that now they were junior Raptors, though this was never said in front of a Viper jock. The war load did degrade the performance of the new Viper but it was assessed that they would not have any threat worth the name. At least not until they had used most of the external weapons and were a lot lower into the atmosphere.

The launch of these craft was not stealthy but was very had to find. It would take a powerful satellite looking in the infrared bands to detect them. Even then, it would be difficult due to the high delta-vs the small craft had packed on. And they were still adding more delta-vs as they flew from the moon towards the blue planet.

The Vipers started by taking out every Chinese satellite that came into range of their weapons. They started with the targets closest to them and worked their way closer to and around the blue planet. They had a method for knowing what was and what was not a target. The Colonial staff had found out that China was a communist country, and that their government would have some kind of interest in even privately owned or corporate owned satellites. That was enough for the Colonials to be okay with targeting them as hostile assets. If there was a gray area, the final say on what a target was lay with higher command. Specifically, that was handled by Charles alone. After all, it was his name and head on the chopping block.

The Vipers started at items on the list that were in the range of 42,000 kilometers above the surface of the planet first. The space agencies on Earth called it the junk belt. It was filled with satellites that were at the end of their lives or had issues that made them if not useless then less useful than a newer replacement. The Colonials did not know that when they started on the list of targets. It had just looked like it was a good place to hide things and therefore possible targets were identified by the Colonials in that area. Those targets were now getting some attention.

It took the onrushing wave of Vipers only a few minutes to get to the 35,000 kilometer mark that was the lower limit of geostationary Earth orbit once the graveyard had been thinned out. The BDS satellites were just over one ton in mass each and this region was their home. When that one ton of mass was hit by the pair of pulse lasers mounted on the wings of the Vipers, the results was less than spectacular. At least in the visible or even close to the visible light spectrum. When looked at through the IR bands, it was very spectacular but not that dangerous for the Vipers or any nearby orbiting spacecraft.

The current generation of laser weapons fitted on the Vipers was forty percent more powerful per pulse than the first generation of weapons built back over New Caprica or while they were still in the nebula. They also were now able to fire around ten thousand shots before needing to be pulled off the fighters for rebuilding. Just one of those weapons would have turned any main battle tank built groundside into small bits of flying metal and an expanding cloud of hot gasses.

It did not matter if the MBT was a T-14, an M1A3, or the newest Israeli 75 ton monster just coming off the production lines. They all would have been nothing but small parts flying through the air after a single pull of the pulse laser's trigger. A pair of these weapons hitting something as lightly built as the BDS satellite was considerably less flashy than blasting a tank apart in the atmosphere.

The long solar panels were the first to feel the touch of the Colonial pulse lasers. They tried to turn the energy based assault into more power for the satellite to use or to store in the battery packs. At first, the computer controlling the satellite was happy to have the additional power to top off a set of weakening batteries. Maybe it was thinking that a shadow was now clearing, and the solar energy absorbing cells were gathering more of those photons. That might last for a few milliseconds, too fast for even a computer to think through all of the possibilities.

Very soon, a split or microsecond which was a long time for a computer, the solar panels were gathering too much energy. They started to fail as they started to rapidly heat up. The one ton satellite was just gone. In less than a second after the solar panels picked up the added energy it was over. One second it was there helping to guide missiles, ships, and airplanes to wherever they were going as long as they had an accepted Chinese made receiver. The next, it was an expanding cloud of gas made of atom sized stuff or in a few cases even smaller.

The satellite had been turned from a high tech instrument costing tens of millions of dollars into a cloud of gas stripped down to its component elements. All without anything as large as a grain of dust to say what had been in that location above the blue planet. Only a few seconds after they were attacked, even the gas cloud would start to cool.

The Vipers went down the list of spaceborne targets. They did to them the same thing they did to the BDS's as fast as they could pull the triggers. They were cleaning up the orbital planes, and they could care less if they took out an old Chinese rocket booster, or an imaging satellite, or some old shroud covers. It was all going to be gone soon from any area above the planet. The unmanned and still under construction Tiangong 3 station needed only a few hits to be removed from space.

Kathy had gotten some help by accessing a group that tracked any object in space, one that had been advocating for cleaning up the orbital space. It would seem that they got their wish. Sort of. The group did get a boon of a sort that it could use later. More than a few of the group had recorded the deaths of hundreds of objects circling the planet.

The Vipers were not using their limited missile supply on these fragile and thin skinned targets, only the wing mounted energy weapons. Even on the larger and heavier targets, they never had to use more than one Viper per space based target. The missiles were being held back for bigger fish. When they were done with the orbital planes above the planet, they went after the real big targets.

Below on the planet, hundreds of offices around the world started getting strange readings from the some of the satellites. All were saying they had problems connecting to the targeted craft, even when the communications were non-military or non-Chinese in nature. News would get out later about what happened to those systems and why. Some people would understand, but others would complain about the interruption. Some reports would even knowingly omit that the satellites being hit were connected to the Chinese government. They just focused on the damage being done, and not why certain targets were being hit in the first place.

Back at the thicker atmosphere levels, the last waves of missiles were moving at 0.9 Mach and were spread out between four and seven meters above the waves. The plan had been for only one massive wave of over a thousand missiles, timed to hit the island all at one time. They wanted it to feel like a hammer dropped on them by one of their pagan gods. The delay had caused the missiles to be strung out along a huge area. It was like a human wave attack but instead of one wave, it would be one larger wave followed by a lot of stragglers.

Besides the overheating issues that each ship in the fleet had, they also had an average of two Eagle Strike missiles that did not lift out of the launch cells on each ship. Those few weapons were now being checked out by tech crews on each of the warships. They needed to see what faults had caused them to not join their mates on the one way trip. Most would say that not being able to launch all of your weapons in a time of war was more than just a slight issue. This was true even in the People's Liberation Army Navy. They were just better at hiding issues like this from the both the press and their people. The failure to launch rate was actually a little better than what the USN experienced back in the early to mid-1990s.

The version of the YJ-18 used today was not exactly the same one that had been shown and put up for sale on the weapons markets of the world. This version had been reserved for attacks on Taiwan, to bring that breakaway island back under the control of its mother country. Its primary mode of guidance had been the BDS but just in case the weapons were needed before that system was completed, they also were outfitted to use the Russian GLONASS navigation system. There had even been a plan to hijack some of the signals coming off of the American made GPS but those had been canceled when it became known that the Americans could degrade a signal if they wanted to. That was too much of a risk, and added cost was spent to remove that capability after the prototype weapons had been expended.

These flying bombs, drones, and cruise missiles also had two additional backups that were not as accurate as the primary navigation equipment. Each one of the missiles also had an infrared homing device and a short range millimeter wave active radar homing device as guidance systems of last resort. That was a lot of backups for the heavy warhead, but none of them had been tested under combat conditions. Not one of the designers had thought that they would be needed. It should work. After all, what could go wrong?

The base data that each of those different systems used to find their assigned targets had all been developed and gleaned by the high flying imaging satellites. Data had also been provided by the Airbus A380 that had been secretly modified and then flown over the islands many times. They had even used some commercial mapping information to give each of the weapons at least some kind of target to hit.

With the unexpected and sudden loss of the BDS system, the other missiles in the attack formation had to rely on the final two attack methods built into their casings. Only the last five to seven missiles launched from each ship had been manually switched over to the Russian system. As it turned out, the automatic system to switch to the Russian navigation systems had failed. Somehow, a design flaw had slipped through the limited testing of that little thought of subsystem.

As it turns out, a human in the decision making loop was needed to tell the dumb computers that they should switch to the backup Russian system. The programming was not capable of doing it on its own. That is, unless a signal was sent to the missiles from the satellites themselves. The very same ones that were in trouble today. It was a simple problem of bad coding that had not been caught during testing. At about the thirty-five kilometer mark away from the targeted islands, the kamikaze caught up to the manned fighters that had launched first. Manned and unmanned systems were to fly the rest of the way together to the target area. No one had told the pilots that they were the shield for the real attack.

The Chinese FC-31 Gyrfalcon was like a cross of a slightly larger F-35 and an F-18's twin engine profile. It was one of the few known stealth equipped fighters or fighter-bombers that could take off from a carrier's flight deck on the planet. The entire deployable fleet of over twenty of these fighters had shipped out on the Shandong class carrier, which was the name holder of her class. They were leading the wave of Chinese fighters into today's attack. It was hoped that the stealth features on these craft would protect the rest of the fighters following behind them.

The next wave were the Chinese built and modified J-15's, based off a Ukrainian Su-33 prototype's airframe. At the very back of the formation were the Russian built and sold to the Chinese Su-33's. The Su-33 might be the oldest airframes in the attack, but their pilots were the best trained of the whole group. Each of them had the most hours behind the stick of any pilots in the fleet. The airframes and engines also tended to be the most reliable in the fleet, and this added to the number of training missions the crews could undertake on a given deployment.

All of the attacking jets were fitted with the best air to air missiles they were capable of carrying. The FC-31's and the later production runs of the J-15's could have carried some ground attack weapons but that was not their mission in today's onrushing battle. Today they were escorts, there to make sure as many Eagle Strike missiles as possible would make it to their targets in one piece. To do that mission, they needed to take out all of the Vipers and Raptors known to inhabit the local islands. That was the only thing most of them had been told. "Just shoot down the Imperialists' flying craft."

The exact number of craft the aliens had was known due to the overflying spy planes and orbiting satellites. The key planners had pointedly ignored the fact that they had lost access to most of that information over the last week. To the point of that it was now useless in the real world. The alien craft could not be that hard to kill, they were small and carried only short ranged weapons. The Chinese leadership thought that if enough missiles were thrown at them, they would fall out of the sky like leaves in the wind.

This idea was almost an exact copy of an old Stalin idea, the concept that quantity had a quality all of its own. Those fighter crews were doing a mission that was not easy. It had only been successfully done one or two times in the history of the whole planet. They were going to try to achieve air superiority over a foreign power's home ground. That was a very hard mission to do. Even when there was very detailed information on the target's systems, crew skills, and the number of craft the aggressor was willing to sacrifice to complete the mission. Most of this information was sorely unavailable to the planners of this attack.

All of the twin tailed pilots were watching their scopes except for one of the pilots towards the back of the last formation. He was flying with what they called eyes out, and he was the only one to see what happened next with his own eyes. He was kind of a rogue, and most thought that he was not politically reliable. Some of that was true, but no one could point to any concrete proof about his political unreliability. Besides, he was very good at what he did and he could even train others. Well the others that were willing to learn from him. That was why he had had been passed over for promotion after promotion. He did not care, he just loved to fly. What he saw happening around him would test that love.

One second there were fifty fighters flying above almost a thousand missiles in a lose formation through the bright blue sky. Next the one pilot saw a few flashes in the distance and a heartbeat later, there were only eight FC-31's flying at the front of the other formations. The rest were just expanding fireballs and pieces of expensive aircraft falling from the sky to the blue water seven and two-thirds kilometers below them and closing fast to the wreckage. The only sound the one pilot heard was his own heartbeat and the scream of the twin jet engines he was strapped onto.

The FC-31's that remained in the sky started to blindfire four each of the PL-12 Thunderbolts that they carried in their ventral weapons bays. The PL-12 had been built with a very powerful, if small active electronic scanning radar unit. It should have been able to find its own target and intercept it with very little problem. That was if the target they were looking for had a radar return larger than a seagull. The Colonial Raptors and Vipers did not have much of those that a massive groundside station could pick up at any distance over a kilometer away. Much less a version of that system that was just over twenty centimeters around, and with a lot less power output per square centimeter than one of those huge ground stations. Not when those Colonial craft had turned off the artificial radar reflector. They were soon to be the standard of stealth used by the world.

This was where the few slight changes China had made to the weapons over the last year came into play. They took the IR seekers out of the Russian supplied Alamo long range missiles and then replaced the radar seekers on half of the air to air missiles with ones that now could track heat versus a radar return. It was a short term fix but both the math and the idea looked to be good on paper. The second modification was with the rocket motor on the PL-12 itself. It was still solid fueled but now it had seven kilograms of liquid ozone added to the mix. This gave the weapons a bigger push as it flew through the air. The downside was that using ozone as a booster fuel was dangerous and it could react... aggressively with the oddest of substances.

The Chinese fighters were not flying very close together. They were more or less just spread out across the sky in a high subsonic arc at the vanguard of the main attack. The planners back on the mainland knew that the fighters would be the first targets of any enemy Combat Air Patrols. So they made sure that if one of the fighters was going to be hit, it would not cause damage to others flying close by when it was exploded by some enemy fire. It was a good plan, but it also diluted the firepower that all of those fighters could throw at one Colonial target. It also thinned out the protective shell, and allowed an enemy to target more than one fighter at a time.

Hardball was not happy with just the dozen fighters she blew out of the sky with her first volley of weapons fire. So the ECO marked another dozen on his screens and passed the data to the combat management system. When he was done finding another dozen targets, he let Hardball know that he was ready fire and on command, the next group of missiles left the craft in a flash of flame and smoke before he had even finished speaking. This last attack would be the limit of her part in the air to air war for, now. She had been the crew on CAP today, and it was just luck that she was the one to draw first blood with her weapons. But she only had 24 offensive anti-air missiles when she started her patrol today.

After this round of missile fire the craft would be out of the longer ranged but still considered short range class missile. She would then have to head back to the deck. She needed to start cutting down the number of missiles heading to her new home in that first wave. She was thinking about that part of the mission as the last wave of missiles from her own ride were heading toward their assigned targets. They were helped along by the Cylon designed seekers leading the way.

The J-15's and the last of the FC-31's were wildly maneuvering across the sky now that they knew a shark was coming after them. They could not see the predator but they could see the results of its presence in the number of fireballs that used to be squadronmates. This only might have bought them a pair of seconds after Hardball ripple fired the last of the anti-fighter missiles from her craft.

The last of her missiles crossed paths with the on rushing Chinese made PL-12s that had been fired from her would be targets. One of her Colonial made missiles even flew right through one of the attacking Chinese air to air missiles at over Mach 6 closing speed. The Colonial missile did not even get a paint scratch from the odd event it had just experienced.

The same could not be said for the Mach 4 traveling missile of local manufacture. It fell to the water below in parts, just like its parent aircraft would do not long after the collision between the two anti-fighter weapons. That was expected for the aft mounted engine on the Chinese made fire and forget weapon. That rocket motor burned for a few minutes more as it skywrote across the blue and cloud free sky. Then it too fell from the heavens to the water below.

Hardball was already looking down to work out the best way to start taking out the low flying missiles when she about jumped out of her skin. A white streak flew what looked to her to be mere centimeters away from her face. It flew by in a streak with flames coming from one end. She jerked the controls out of training, but the skin temperature of her craft was still very hot in her rush to get to this point in space. The IR missile with its twenty centimeter diameter can pack around twenty pounds of High Explosive and fragmentation continuous rod warhead. It was not thrown off of its attack and it exploded over the left wing of the Colonial craft.

There was a flash and a bang that was more felt than heard by anyone in the craft. After that shock, she did a quick system check, but nothing seemed to be wrong with her craft after the issue. She had an idea of what might have happened, but she thought a manned fighter would be bigger. She looked around again in the local space, checking for any more surprises heading her way. When she did not see any, she put the nose of her craft down. She let her ship fall towards the water and her next set of targets. These were dumber, and would be easier to take down. There were just a lot more of them to have to deal with. Her ECO just used a stylus to mark more targets and hand off the data to the missiles still in the craft's bays and hardpoints. As Hardball lowered her craft, it would spit out death as the missiles were given targets by the backseater. This action would lead to reports and stories about the Colonials losing one of their craft to the Chinese onslaught.

Four Raptors had been detailed to take out the main group of carrier-based air breathing fighters. That was the number the Chinese knew to be on the island that day. Hardball had only been the first one of the four to get within weapons range. By the time the other three arrived, what remained of the Chinese fighters were only just getting back into some kind of mutually supporting formation. Not that it helped them that much to spot, much less stop the Colonial craft. The next attackers were heading towards them at over five times the speed of local sound.

Just like Hardball, as soon as they were in range, they unleashed their firepower on the Chinese fighter craft. Only nine Chinese fighters were able to successfully turn around and retreat back towards their carriers and their sea based escorts. Not one of the nine craft were damaged but every one of them were empty of ranged offensive weapons. The weapons used by the Colonials tended to work out that if they hit something, it would just blow apart. Even Cylon Raiders would not be safe from what the Colonial fleet was packing today. With the retreating craft empty of missiles, it at least let them claim to have gone down fighting.

Very few things as fragile as air breathing aircraft could handle a run-in with Colonial weapons. At least to live to tell about it. The pride of the PLA(N) Air Arm was reduced to a three Su-33's and a one J-15 flying home as fast as their engines could carry them. When the wildly maneuvering fighters were past the twenty nautical mile mark over the water, the Colonial craft disengaged. They had other threat to have to deal with. The Chinese naval air arm would never recover from this fiasco. The leadership had virtually stripped the training cadre for carrier operations for this one mission. And very few of them would live to see the next day much less live long enough to hold another class for a future naval pilot.

The three Raptors then put more power to their engines. They needed to catch up with the subsonic cruise missiles that were now between them and their island home. With Hardball having the luck of being the only craft on CAP over the islands at the actual time of the attack, that was about the only way they got the first missile off. It was the only reason she could now claim twenty Chinese jets shot down. She should have been able to claim the full twenty four hits but even Colonial, Cylon, and Rifts Earth computers and sensors had limitations. Besides, nothing worked one hundred percent of the time. That also meant that she was out of the longer ranged missiles first on her gunship configured Raptor. She only had been outfitted with a generic loadout of weapons. So she and her crewman were the first to be able to go after the cruise missiles.

She picked up the nearest wave of closely packed missiles on her heads up display. As she fell from seven and a half kilometers down to sea level, she ran out of her remaining missiles. Still, it did not take long for her to line up her gun mount on the next target. She took a shallow breath and fired a short burst of seven to ten rounds into the nearest thirty-six centimeter wide target. A target that small, moving almost at the speed of sound, at twenty of so feet above the waves was hard to hit. There were very few systems in the world that could have done this type of work. That was why sea skimming missiles were so feared by certain people and countries around the world.

To target one while you're doing the same, and trying not to catch an enemy missile up your backside at the same time was a very taxing job. Even for Colonial technology and training to have to deal with. The one good thing was that about every third missile she hit with the wingtip mounted Colonial projectile weapon would cause a ripple explosion, taking out a second or sometimes a third enemy missile all for the price of one. The pilots might have gotten the most fighter kills today, but it was the ECO's in the backseat that killed the most targets.

Of the eleven hundred and thirteen missiles launched against the island that day by the ships out to sea, only thirty-five made it all the way to make landfall. There where three main reasons for the poor performance of the attack, even considering the supersonic speed the missiles adopted at terminal phase. The first reason was that the Raptor ECO's were able to get so many kills by hacking into the dumb missiles while the frontseaters were doing piloting shit. After some luck, they were able to broadcast a signal that mostly worked to mimic the now dead navigation satellites the missiles had relied on for targeting. They were able to reprogram the seekers on most of the weapons and get them to dive into the waters of the lagoon. Most were just short of island, or at least short of their intended targets. They were doing this on the fly, and it was not something one can really train for. They also could not get them all. Plus, some of the weapons were not using those systems to navigate to the targets on the main island.

The second reason was that there were two full sized Colonial spaceships at the space field. These modified ships each had two dozen point defense turrets, along with the support system to use them effectively. They each had a dozen twin 30mm KEWs previously used by Mk II and Mk VII Vipers and another dozen turrets outfitted with twin pulse laser cannons. As soon as the enemy missiles were within eight kilometers of the outer reef, they started firing into the now thinner cloud of targets. There were streaks as the 30mm KEW rounds tore through the air, but the invisible pulses of laser energy took out just as many threats. They just were not as showy as they went about the mission they had been designed to fulfill. One oversight had been that they would only cover parts of the island that were important to the Colonials. They also gave a few of the following Colonial craft close shaves when those turrets missed a targeted enemy missile.

The third reason was the cache of man portable anti-air missiles Adama had shipped in. This was the last line of defense, but they could only be put in a limited number of areas. Those that were emplaced, fired as soon as the crews had targets. Those vipers leapt from any hidden sites that could see the threat with trails of smoke. Some could not see the attacking low flying missiles and those held their fire. The Cylon made missiles had no problem finding and attacking the now smaller and faster missiles. There was a reason that they were called supersonic terminal phase cruise missiles. The Colonials just did not have enough time to take out all the weapons. Not before they found something to fall on and try to break it with their armor piercing warheads.

While almost all of the Raptors were out and about defending the islands, the Vipers and the hidden Raptors were free to go hunting for enemy surface ships. Their pilots were not happy about not being able to help defend their homes from the enemy 'viper' attack. As someone would say, they had their mad on. Someone was going to pay for the attack. All they needed or wanted to do was find a target to fire at. They were spending all the fuel that they could to do just that. All the time that they were speeding away from their base, they knew that bad things were happening to the place they called home behind them. In general, this was going to spell bad news for the Chinese war machine. They only thought that they had been handled roughly by the might of the Colonial Military before today. After today, there would be a whole new level under the subject of being roughly handled by an opposing military power.