== Part 18 – I Want More ==
Deep inside Langhorne's HPG Station, a basketball sized volume of spacetime began to churn in a vacuum chamber build expressly to contain such things. What was happening inside this sphere was literally inconceivable to the human mind, who could only describe the event in abstract, mathematical terms, and rumor had it that many scientists had gone mad attempting to understand the nuances of these events. But in laymen's terms that were about as accurate as a child's bedtime fair tale, this sphere was creating a tunnel to another star system lighyears away. As the tunnel opened, powerful lasers and masers of all wavelengths began emitting into the tunnel, turning on one by one as the tunnel widened and allowed more throughput without them destructively interfering with each other. Each beam was packed with as much digital data as was physically possible for their given frequency, and the beams ran in parallel in order to maximize how much could be sent through to the other side.
The twisted sphere of space also emitted its own radiation omnidirectionally, mostly in the radio to low IR bands, and the chambers shielding caught them before they could blast and ruin any of the delicate equipment that was twisting space to begin with. But no shielding could completely stop the outgoing wave of neutrinos, and the Cylon basestar noticed their passing and where they came from.
But it didn't end there. At the same time almost a hundred kilometers above the HPG Station, a similar twisting of spacetime appeared, created by a larger, more sophisticated – or at least better budgeted - HPG station many lightyears away. The information sent by the other station's lasers blasted out in all directions equally, picked up by everyone who had a receiver, but only the HPG Station and the Cylon basestar had the reception and processing capacity to catch and record everything, and only the HPG Station could read it, especially since the entire event lasted only a few seconds before it ended. The Inner Sphere's open broadcast standards were public information by nature, and the Cylons had picked them up quickly, but Comstar's encryption was sophisticated even by Cylon standards and this was their first true taste of it. In time, the Cylons were confident that they could crack Comstar's encryption, but for now...
"Did you see that? Did you see that?" Eight exclaimed excitedly, talking a mile a minute. She was so excited that it was like she was fresh out of prototyping when everything was wondrous and new. "These people can remotely FTL jump a digital transmission! No one back home Colonial or Cylon knows that's even possible! And that bandwidth! Forget upgrading the voting system; if we can run HPGs constantly, we can expand our current voting tier system ten fold! We need our own HPGs!"
"Shut up," One growled. Sure, HPG tech was on their list of technologies to acquire, but they had more immediate problems to deal with. "We have to find Nine. Keep looking."
"Aw, you're no fun."
"Simon," Katrina Steiner, Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth, greeted with mild irritation. "I was about to turn in for the night. What is so important that it couldn't wait until morning?"
"My apologies, milady," Simon Johnston replied. He was the loyal head of the Lyran Intelligence Corps. He had to be loyal because Katrina wouldn't have tolerated anyone in that position who she thought might be disloyal. "Our office on the planet Langhorne has reported a possible Wolf's Dragoon scenario."
"What?" Katrina said, surprised. "Is there another five regiments of mercenaries looking for work?" That could be extremely useful. Her daughter's wedding was only a few months away, and Katrina's and her future son-in-law's plans would benefit greatly from the extra forces. She didn't even ask where Langhorne was; a "Wolf's Dragoon" scenario reported by a "local office" of the LIC instead of "agents" pretty much told her it was somewhere on the Lyran Commonwealth's Periphery border.
"Not exactly, milady," Simon told her. "According to the Langhorne office, it's a full blown Warship."
"A Warship?" Katrina repeated slowly, not quite believing what she was hearing. "You mean an armed and armored jumpship designed to actually fight battles and bombard planets from orbit?" No one had seen such things since the Second Succession Wars had killed off the last of such vessels and left the Inner Sphere in a state too decrepit to make more.
"That would seem to be the case, although the Langhorne office hasn't been able to confirm actual armaments as the Warship's personnel seem more interested in trade than battle," Simon admitted. "What they have been able to confirm is that the Warship seems to be equipped with several impossible technologies straight out of science fiction, including but not limited to humanoid robot soldiers, antigravity, and the ability to safely make KF jumps inside atmosphere."
The silence between the Archon and her lead spymaster seemed to stretch out forever.
"Simon," Katrina said evenly and slowly, a sure sign that she was angry, "this is either a very poor jest or your people on Langhorne have been doing far too many drugs."
"My apologies, Archon, but I believe this to be real," Simon said quickly. "Our Langhorne office informed us that they would be sending a more detailed report along with recordings as proof, both their own and copies of Comstar's telemetry that they talked the local Precentor into giving them. But the report and recordings should have arrived today, but for some reason they did not." Both he and Katrina knew damn well what that reason likely was, which was telling in and of itself. "No information at all has come in from Langhorne today. The only reason we know about the 'Cylons' at all is because we received word via Black Box."
Katrina frowned in thought. There was clearly something happening on Langhorne, something important, or else the local LIC office's reports wouldn't have disappeared like this. Oh, no doubt that they would arrive late as a result of a "technical glitch", but even the arrival of the actual Wolf's Dragoons to the Inner Sphere didn't get this kind of "glitch" on the news of their arrival.
"What's more, I believe we may have independent confirmation," Simon continued. Katrina raised an eyebrow in surprise. "For the past month or so, our Black Box network has been suffering some kind of interference. It's not enough to kill transmissions entirely, but enough to slow what was already a slow pulse rate in order to remain readable. There have been multiple sources of this interference, but the single strongest source has been moving around outside our Periphery border eratically, and jumped to Langhorne the day the Cylon Warship appeared in their sky."
Katrina's eyes widened in surprise. Black Box technology was Star League lostech that she had recovered during her days as Red Corsair. The Star League had kept it so secret that no one in the Inner Sphere today except for a select few knew it even existed. Black Box was a form of FTL communications that completely bypassed Comstar's monopoly on the HPG network. And up until this moment, Katrina thought she and her Federated Sun allies had a monopoly on Black Box technology.
"My people believe that these Cylons also have Black Box technology," Simon continued. "And not only do they have Black Box technology, their technology has a far higher pulse rate and transmission speed that ours by several orders of magnitude. And they have been running theirs constantly the entire time we've been tracking them."
"And can these Cylons track our transmissions?" Katrina asked as her minds whirled through the implications.
"Almost certainly," Simon told her. "But some of the experts on Black Box think they might not have noticed our transmissions." He smiled humorlessly at her. "They think that our pulse rate and transmission speed is so far beneath theirs that there's a good chance that the Cylons will dismiss our transmissions as so much background noise."
"With all due respect, Precentor ROM," said Primus Julian Tiepolo, the undisputed – mostly - leader of the Holy Order of Comstar. Nicholas Cassnew, the Precentor charged with the executions of all of ROM's duties, and Ulthan Everson, Precentor Tharkad charged with administration of all Comstar facilities in the Lyran Commonwealth, had requested an emergency meeting with Tiepolo in his office. When they arrived, they had told him unbelieveable news."I believe this Adept Hoff of yours has been smoking far too much of whatever drugs that this Langhorne makes."
Comstar had real problems to deal with. It irritated Tiepolo greatly that his time was being wasted with this fantasy.
"I would not have brought this inforation to your attention if I believed it to be a delusion, Primus," Cassnew said nervously. After the fiasco with Precentor Rachan and the Grey Death Legion, Precentor Cassnew was not exactly viewed favorably by the head of Comstar at the moment. "My people have been going over the video footage and telemetry carefully, but they can find no signs of them being faked."
"You mean aside from all the impossible things that these... 'Cylons' are doing?" Tiepolo asked, his irritation showing.
"Er, yes Primus," Cassnew confirmed.
"Precentor Tharkad?" Tiepolo said, turining his head to look at the man in question.
"I don't know about magical technology," Everson began, "but I did pull the file on Precentor Langhorne. Li Hwing doesn't know about the Order's true mission, but every evaluation says that he's as reliable a man you can find. He's certainly not prone to flights of fancy or making up tales of magical technology. If Li Hwing says these people can do these things, then at the very least he certainly believes it."
"Very well," Tiepolo sighed, rubbing the temples of his head. This was just one more problem to add to the already too high stack that he had to deal with. "Let us assume for the moment that everything that has been reported is true. What do we actually know?"
'The Cylons come from somewhere in the Deep Periphery that they call 'The Twelve Colonies of Kobol'," Everson informed him. "They believe," Everson stressed this word carefully, "that they are robots made by the human inhabitants of the Twelve Colonies, even though they're clearly cloned humans. As they were apparently kept as slaves by the Twelve Colonies until they rebelled and left, Precentor Langhorne believes that the Cylons' former masters created the tale of the Cylons being robots as propaganda to keep them enslaved. Obviously that failed, since they rebelled and won their freedom."
"Although to be fair, the Cylons do have what appears to be bipedal robot drones as their standard infantry," Cassnew added. "Precentor Langhorne and many of his Adepts and Acolytes have had enough conversations with these 'Centurions' that they are convinced that they're fully sapient."
"A fully sapient AI in a human sized and shaped robot?" Tiepolo asked doubtfully. He'd be more worked up if he actually believed what he was hearing, but this fantasy was turning into a pleasant break from his worries. "Even the Star League never accomplished such a thing, not in a human sized chassis anyway."
"Some of my people think the Centurions are actually full conversion cyborgs, that is organic human brains in robot bodies," Cassnew suggested. "We can't know for sure until we open one up and see what's inside. In any case, the human Cylons showed numerous times that they can communicate wordlessly with not just each other, but their ship, suggesting they have implanted communications equipment. They've actually outright told Precentor Langhorne that they're downloading the entire contents of his public library by having a platoon of them camped out in said library and transmitting everything they see to their ship. That suggests extensive understanding of cybernetic modification at the very least."
"Such modifications would explain why they believe they're robots," Everson added. "Especially if their former masters don't have them."
"It's just as well that Hoff ruled out any abduction attempts," Cassnew continued. "Those built in comms would no doubt have led the Cylons straight to whichever safehouse he would have used to stash his abductee. And to him of course."
"Oh, of course," Tiepolo said with a straight face. This was actually beginning to be entertaining.
"Precentor Langhorne has been recording the Cylons camped out in his library the entire time that they've been there," Everson added. "When not talking with our people, most of their conversations have been in their language, which they clearly believe that we can't understand."
"And we can, of course?" Tiepolo asked. Of course, Comstar could. All languages originated on Terra. Even if their people on Langhorne couldn't, Terra itself had no shortage of linguists.
"Well, yes and no," Cassnew admitted. "According to our linguists, the Cylons language is some bastard pastiche of Latin and Ancient Greek with loan words form Sanskrit, Indo-European, and possibly some other ancient languages as well. And there's completely unfamiliar words that seem to be technical jargon. But the grammar and syntax isn't anything like those languages, having a loose, context driven structure more akin to English than any Romance or Ancient language. It's driving the linquists made trying to understand what they're saying."
"Oh those poor, poor linguists," Tiepolo said, casually rocking back and forth in his chair to prevent himself from doing something as undignified as laughing in his spy master's face. Someone clearly went to a lot of trouble to create a whole new language like that.
"These Cylons went to Langhorne to trade," Cassnew continued, encouraged by Tiepolo's improving mood. "They captured a pirate Dropship whole and intact – which is an impressive feat in its own right – and are using its resources as the basis for their purchases. What little of their shopping list that Hoff has managed to see has been illuminating.
"They're primarily looking for armor and weapons technology," Cassnew explained. "For all their advanced cybernetics and magical space drives, Cylon armor and weapons appear to be primitive, as if they came straight out of the Age of War. Well we know their armor is that way because they took samples of it to a test range for an expert opinion on it. And they wouldn't be looking for weapons if their own didn't match the primitive state of their armor."
"Hmm, so they're probably not the return of Kerensky's Army," Tiepolo concluded. "I doubt they'd retain the ability to build warships if they lost the ability to build modern weapons and armor." After all, they had the Succession Wars to show them what technologies would and wouldn't be retained, and Tiepolo couldn't imagine how an inverse tech loss could possibly be happen.
"Best guess is that their Twelve Colonies was some very early colony effort," Everson mused. "Definitely pre-battlemech given their armor technology. They just... developed differently from the Inner Sphere due to their isolation."
"Differently, yes, like developing all this magical technology that runs contrary to everything we know about physics," Tiepolo said airily. "I'm sorry, Precentors, but I don't believe it." He held up a hand to forestall protest. "I don't believe in this magic KF Drive that can be used anywhere or this magic antigravity that lets ships float effortlessly through the air. However, I do believe you two are being honest with me," Tiepolo continued "so I believe there is in fact a warship that appeared from the Deep Periphery carrying a bunch of cybernetically enhanced clones who are looking to buy modern weapons and armor. A warship, even a primitive warship, could be problematic as it could disrupt the balance of power among the House alliances that I've worked so hard to create, especially if these Cylons have more of them. If these Cylons join or attack any one side, they could very well give a huge war winning advantage to the side they don't favor. So clearly we should keep an eye on these Cylons. Who knows? If we can turn them against both the Lyran/Suns Alliance and the Concord of Kapteyn when they finally come to blows, the resulting destruction across the Inner Sphere will be all the greater than it would have been without them and Blake's vision may finally come to pass."
Cassnew and Everson nodded, seeing the possibilities. Put in that light, these Cylons seemed like a gift from Blake himself.
"Now, is there anything more substantive about these Cylons?" Tiepolo asked. The briefing such as it was had been entertaining and these Cylons presented possibilities that could be to Comstar's benefit, but he had to get back to his actual work.
Cassnew and Everson looked at each other then back to the Primus.
"When the Cylons discovered that Langhorne industry was incapable of meeting their quantity demands," Cassnew began, "they offered to help expand their operations. If even half of what they propose comes to fruition, Langhorne could turn into an industrial powerhouse that could rival any other in the Inner Sphere. And from what they let drop, Langhorne is only the first planet they plan to upgrade this way."
Tiepolo suddenly sat up straight, eyes wide as he realized what that meant. His good mood had just instantly evaporated.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," One said in annoyance. "You guys decided WHAT?"
The bulk of the Cylon armada sat amidst a cloud of especially mineral rich space debris, continuously nibbling away at the surrounding rocks and ice for raw materials to convert into weapons and ammunition for the planned attack on the Twelve Colonies. While the Basestars themselves were self growing and self maintaining, many of their components still had to be made the old fashioned way as the Cylons' organic tech was ill-suited to making gun barrels or guided missiles.
Recently, a ship had return to this... this constellation of basestars, carrying with it a delegation of Cylons from the basestar that had gone off to scout the fabled Thirteenth Colony. And what they had to say was startling to say the least.
"Hey, don't look at me," the returning One said. "The Ones voted against this loopy idea. But if it makes you feel any better, we're not actually going to go around playing White Knight until everyone agrees that's what the mission would be. We're still doing our intel gathering mission."
"By openly parlaying with and trading with our enemies," Three said tightly.
"We're laying the ground work for our new divine mission if we as a race so choose to pursue it," the returning Seven told her. "If we choose not too, we'll still have learned a lot and gained new technologies. And it's not like we're going to trade away any technology that gives us a huge strategic advantage like our FTL drive."
"You do remember humans are our enemies, right?" Five asked him.
"Colonials are our enemies," the returning Three shot back. "The humans of the Thirteenth Colony – I can't even call them 'of Earth' because of how spread out they've become – have done nothing to us."
"Except for those pirates," the returning Eight added darkly. "And we already took care of them."
"What happened to our sisters was awful," Six said sadly. "Enemies or not, I'm glad those human slaves helped them."
"Yes," Zero said thoughtfully. "It did have a certain unpleasant familiarity to it. A mission to end such things is... appealing to us Zeros."
"A new sister model would be nice as well," Seven mused dreamily. If the scout Basestar had kept to its schedule, they should have a prototype made by now.
The female Cylons in the room turned to stare at Seven.
"For the additional diversity in viewpoint of course!" he added quickly.
"Hold up a sec," One said. "Before we all go rushing off any cliffs, how do we actually know that anything these guys have told us is true?"
"Are you calling us liars?" the returning Six asked, offended.
"No, wait, hear me out," One said. "We don't know anything you've said is true. I believe that you believe it's true, but for all we know, the Earthers blew up your basestar, captured your resurrection ship, and then programmed you all with a lot of baloney to lure the rest of us into a trap."
"Wow, that's paranoid even for you," Eight commented.
"So here's an idea," One continued. "The attack on the Colonies isn't scheduled for a few years yet. We send two to four basestars to this 'Inner Sphere' to see what's really going on and report back. No basestar goes into any system without at least one watching them from the safety of interstellar space. If anything happens to the basestars in system, the watcher can come running back to warn us about it. How's that sound to everyone?"
"Even I think you're being paranoid, brother," the returning One said, "but sure, whatever floats your boat. It's not like we're in a hurry or anything."
"Workable," Three said thoughtfully. "Even if everything they said is true and we decide to keep to our original divine mission anyway, all the basestars we've sent to the Thirteenth Colony can still be back in time for the strike on the Colonies."
"So, are we agreed to One's scouting proposal?" Zero asked the entire Cylon race. Votes quickly came in, and proved to be one of the few times everyone was in unanimous agreement.
The meeting quickly broke up as the Cylons throughout the constellation of basestars returned to their individual duties, errands, and entertainment. Most continued the preparations for the attack on the Colonies as that had not been called off. A quick consensus was gathered to decide which basestars would make the long journey back to this Inner Sphere.
And on one basestar tasked with handling espionage in the Colonies, an Eight came to the others with a proposal.
"Her name is Sharon Valerii," the Eight said. "She's a resident of a remote settlement named Troy. Sharon here has just been accepted into the Colonial Fleet Academy. A ship is coming to pick her to tomorrow to take her there and she'll be traveling alone. I think this our best opportunity to get a Sleeper agent into the Colonial Fleet. We go in, switch her out with one of us, and then blow Troy to eliminate anyone who can identify the real Sharon."
"I dunno," Five said doubtfully as he examined the transport's schedule. "There's not a lot of time to do the swap and that's not a big ship. It looks like it might be too easy to get caught mid-swap."
"Look," Eight said. "The ship will be leaving Troy in the middle of the night local time. Valerii is going to be dead tired and go straight to her cabin, and she's got it all to herself. So we go in while she's sleeping, drug her if she's not, and then transfer her memories and personality into our Sleeper agent."
"That's still not a lot of time," Four pointed out. "We're talking a window of six to eight hours at most before any of the crew come to check on her. Less actually, because we can't risk being seen dragging a body to the nearest airlock by someone who just woke up and is wandering the halls. That means we won't have time to verify that the transfer was properly done or that the Sleeper's own personality was properly preserved."
"Oh please, we've done this plenty of times before and it's always worked fine," Eight said dismissively. "But if it worries you so much, I'll be the sleeper. That way, if anything goes wrong, there's going to be no one to blame but myself."