== Part 54 – State of the Dragon ==
"Sho-Sho, I am pleased to report that the Dragon's Justice is once again ready to jump," Tai-Sa Montgomery reported.
"Half an hour on the dot?" Sho-Sho Hohiro Kurita said, impressed. "Very well, Tai-Sa, you may initiate jump at your discretion."
The Dragon's Justice was a modified Kyushu class frigate. Instead of the compact solid core the class had been originally designed with, it used an experimental liquid core inspired by the captured SLS Manassas, an experimental ship that had somehow jumped through time from Kerensky's Exodus to the year 3052. Given that the Manassas had jumped in directly on top of and obliterated a Dropship that had been keeping its gas core FTL drive spun up for a prolonged period of time in anticipation for an operation into Clan occupied space, Hohiro had heard quite a bit of speculation that due to the sheer unlikeliness of the event being a coincidence, that the Dropship's spun up FTL drive must had acted as a homing beacon for the Manassas' misjump.
Of course, no one knew how that could even work. But orders had been quietly passed to only keep gas core FTL drives spun up for the minimum amount of time necessary.
In any case, the Dragon's Justice's liquid core drive didn't work exactly like the Manassas' liquid core drive. The Manassass simply broke down its solid core into a liquid slurry and then rebuilt it between every jump, which allowed a greater tailoring of the core's germanium atoms' positioning to create longer ranged jumps.
A Draconis engineer had looked at the Manasssass' system, and had been inspired to go one step further. Take a gas core FTL drive, fill it with the germanium compound that the Cylons called "tylium". But instead of exciting the fuel into a gaseous state, the tylium stayed liquid as it was energized into a hyperspace responsive state, and then uses the gas core control system to make sure the germanium atroms in the liquid tylium were properly aligned for a safe jump. That took far more power than a normal gas core FTL drive, but Inner Sphere fusion engines had the power to spare unlike the Cylons' pre-Inner Sphere engines.
And while the Combine's liquid core didn't have quite the same jump range as the Manassas, it could jump far more frequently. The larger the liquid core, the longer it took to "recharge" - or more accurately, reallign its tylium liquid core for the next jump. For the Dragon's Justice's core, the reallignment time was about half an hour, an improvement that more than compensated for the reduced individual jump range.
Best of all, the Combine's liquid core didn't use up the Tylium fuel at all. Normally. Normally, the core tank stayed filled after a jump. But on random jumps for no reason anyone was able to discern, the tylium core filler would just vanish mid-jump. Experiments with smaller experimental liquid cores had once had the tylium filler be left behind, twice had appeared at the target jump point but thousands of kilometers away from the junping ship itself, and no one knew where the filler had vanished to in all the remaining disappearances.
Eventually, someone had figured out that the chance of filler vanishing was inversely proportional to how much mass the liquid core was trying to jump. The smaller of a percentage mass the liquid core took up inside the ship it was trying to jump, the more likely the core filler was to vanish, and the greater the percentage the liquid core took up, the less likely the filler was to vanish.
The Dragon's Justice had already been under construction when this discovery had been made, so it had been decided to swap out its solid compact core for an equivalent mass of liquid core plus two refills for the core tank. The predicted rate of vanishing core filler was around five percent, although that increased slightly when Dropships were attached. If the core filler did vanish, refilling the tank would take almost a couple hours. And the liquid core was so much simpler and cheaper to build than a solid core that the Dragon's Justice had additional Dropship collars fitted, as many as its hull could safely hold through a jump.
Hohiro felt the now familiar gut wrenching sensation of a liquid core jump. That was another downside of the liquid core. The unpleasant sensations of a KF jump were worse for a liquid core than a solid core, and a large percentage of his people would be incapacitated for several minutes. The Dragon's Justice bridge crew had been chosen for their resilience against those effects, and Hohiro himself was fairly hardy.
"Core tank is still full," a technician announced. Hohiro was impressed yet again. Five jumps in a row and no filler loss so far? Certainly, the odds were only one in twenty for any individual jump, but Hohiro had seen bad luck streaks before.
"Contact!" a Gunsho announced. "One Cylon basestar at nine fifty thousand klicks. It appears to be one of their small patrol carriers." Speaking of bad luck streaks...
"Argh," Tai-Sa Mongomery said, still shaking off the effects of the jump. "Sho-Sho, between the Dragon's Justice and the fighter complement in our Dropships, we should be able to handle this one basestar. Except..."
"Except there is no such thing as a Cylon basestar operating on its own," Hohiro finished for him. The DCMS had learned to its cost that what appeared to be a lone Cylon ship would usually have reinformcements waiting to jump in if they got in trouble. Damn it. Hohiro wasn't here to fight Cylons; he was here to liberate the system from Clan Smoke Jaguar. It was the furthest the Clans had reached into the Combine before turining back to fight the Cylons.
"Sho-Sho, the Cylons are hailing us."
"Very well, put me on," Hohiro said. The Cylons weren't launching against him yet, so perhaps the initial best approach would be to be polite and friendly. "Cylon basestar, this is Sho-Sho Hohiro Kurita of the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery," Hohiro said in English. "What brings you into our humble neck of the Inner Sphere?"
"Howdy, yer highness," came the reply, which when accounting for light speed lag, was virtually instant. The female voice and accent alone told Hohiro that he was speaking with a Beta, which in turn told him the Cylons weren't looking for a fight. If the Cylons had been looking for a fight, an Alpha or even an Omega Centurion would likely have answered. "We're just here to waylay any Clan supply runs for their local garrison. Our orders say nothing about the DCMS. Don't mind us."
"Ah, so you won't mind if we head over to the planet and take it back from the Clans?" Hohiro asked.
"Not at all, be our guest," Beta replied cheerfully.
"Deploy Dropships and begin system transit," Hohiro told Tai-Sa Mongomery. While Montgomery busied himself with fulfilling Hohiro's orders, Hohiro resumed his conversation with Beta. "I'm surprised, Beta. We have been under the impression that the Cylons didn't like us."
"Truth be told, highness, we don't have a problem with you or your father," Beta told him, her voice more serious now. "But we do have a problem with the system you've sworn yourselves to defend. Still, you're better than those Smoke Jaguar assholes. Beggars can't be choosers I suppose."
Hohiro didn't know whether to be complemented or insulted by the Cylon's attitude. For practical reasons, he decided to be the former. He was his father's son after all.
"Well, thank you again, Beta," Hohiro said. "If you're still available when we finish liberating this system, perhaps would you like to join me for some... personal celebrating shall I say?"
"My, you're a randy one, ain't you, Highness?" Beta laughed. "I'd love to, but you'll have to ask me again after y'all win. I can't be sure I won't be called elsewhere in the meantime."
"Ah, such a disappointment," Hohiro said with mock despondence.
"Oh, and by the way," Beta added. "Congrats on going from Luthien to Wolcott in under three hours."
"Hohiro reports that the liberation of Wolcott goes well," Kanrei Theodore Kurita reported to his father, the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine and in theory, future ruler of the universe. "He expects to be done by the end of the week and will be moving to the next system almost immediately."
"You seem less than pleased with your son's performance," Takashi Kurita noted neutrally. "Do his victories not please you?"
"They do please me, Father," Theodore answered. "But... the transcript of his conversations with the Cylons are less than becoming of an heir of House Kurita."
"Oh? Please elaborate," Takashi told him.
"It's just this pattern of behavior he has," Theodore said, searching for the right words "He propositions every female enemy commander he comes across. This Beta. Victoria Steiner-Davion. Others as well. And more dangerously, he has been leading on the daughters of many minor Houses of the Combine, some with powerful nobles and Warlords. Two granddaughters of the Red Duke no less! I have warned him that if he chooses one for his wife, he will make enemies of the families of everyone else. But Hohiro continues on with his games nonetheless. It amazes me that he has been mindful enough in his trysts to not have created a legion of bastards yet, and... Father, are you laughing at me?"
Although not laughing out loud, Takashi's shoulders were shaking and he was clearly struggling and failing to prevent the smile from manifesting upon his lips.
"Oh, the son wins numerous glorious victories, but the father complains and disapproves about how the son goes about winning those victories and what he does when not in battle," Takashi said mockingly. "Where ever have I heard this story before?"
Theodore didn't immediately reply, but turned his father's words over in his mind before conceding that he had a point.
"Coordinator, your humble son accepts this justified rebuke and begs forgiveness for his years of transgression," Theodore said, bowing formally.
"But you will not change your ways, will you?" Takashi asked pointedly.
"No, Father," Theodore replied. "Again, I humbly apologize."
"Hmph," Takashi sniffed. He had expected nothing else. "If it will set your mind at ease, my son, I have been working to make sure that it doesn't matter in the end which woman my grandson chooses for his wife."
"Father, what have you been up to?" Theodore asked with mild alarm.
"Oh, just cleaning house," Takashi said mildly. "Subhash?"
A rice paper door slid aside, revealing a harmless looking old man in a wheelchair.
"Yes, Coordinator?" responded Subhash Indrahar, leader of the feared ISF, the Combine's secret police. Everyone with any power in the Combine knew the man was far from harmless.
"How go your preparations?" Takashi asked.
"Very well, Coordinator," Subhash replied with a smile and as much of a bow as he could manage. "My agents await the last of the conspirators before they move in. In fact, they may even be moving in as we speak."
"Very good, Subhash," Takashi said, pleased. He looked back at Theodore. "You see, my son, while you have been planning glorious military victories for the Combine, I have been busy making sure that I will pass onto you a Combine free of a rot that has infested our State for far too long." Takashi's face grew thoughtful. "It seems for all the complaints these 'Black Dragons' have about how the more abundant interstellar communications and faster travel times of gas cored FTL drives have infringed on their personal power, they've failed to grasp some of the finer implications of an interstellar communications network that the Dragon and the Dragon alone controls.
"So, my son, fret not about your son's marriage prospects," Takashi concluded with a shark-like smile. "I have no doubt that his list of marriageable candidates is about to get much shorter. By a great many heads I imagine."