== Part 6 - Suffering ==

"Captain, the remaining fighters are breaking off pursuit."

Antonio Holstfast, Captain of the Union class Dropship Middle Finger, relaxed at the announcement. In his long and storied career as a Periphery pirate, he had done his fair share of raiding planets with armed aerospace defenders. Sure, he hadn't expected for someone to put a gargantuan space station in orbit of some backwater shit hole like Pressville, let alone stuff it to the gills with fighters. But that hadn't stopped him from executing a daring raid right under the napping station's nose and get away.

Not that it mattered if the station had actually managed to contest his coming and going, he thought contemptuously. The fighters that it had sent out were fast, but they had been starting from a bad orbital position when they had started chasing him, and never got closer than long range.

Antonio's long range that is. The fighters never got a shot off, clearly armed with weapons that couldn't reach the couple hundred kilometers to the Middle Finger. But the Middle Finger could pick them off with PPCs and Large Lasers. They weren't very accurate at this range, but the fighters died at the slightest touch of his energy weapons, so the low hit probability didn't even really matter. Antonio didn't even bother using the autocannons or LRMs; no need to throw good money on ammo away after all.

"Good job, everyone," Antonio told the bridge crew as he released his seat belts and got out of his acceleration couch. "Set the autopilot for the jump point, then join the rest of us for the party."

As he left the bridge, Antonio could hear the faint screams of women coming from the lower decks. Pressville was a shit hole, and the only thing even worth stealing from the place was the people living there. And it sounded like the crew was getting started on the fun without him.

Well that was okay with Antonio as long as the hot blonde he'd reserved for himself wasn't touched. She clearly wasn't a local, and probably came from whatever people that had put that weird looking station in Pressville's orbit. Idly, he wondered if she was worth any ransom money; he'd had to remember to ask her while he had his way with her.

It didn't even occur to Antonio to fear the owners of that station. He didn't even wonder who would have the resources to build such a thing way out here in the Periphery. Antonio had spent his life dodging government and privately sponsored pirate hunters. What was one more?


Seven woke up in the resurrection tank with a gasp. Memories slid into place as his consciousness restarted. He had died. He had never realized what being stepped on was like, and he never wanted to experience the sensation again.

"Easy there," another Seven said soothingly as he helped him out of the tank. "You had a rough time of it down there. Relax."

"How bad..." Seven gasped. He inhaled and tried again. "How bad is it?"

"Bad," the other Seven said grimly. "Worse than we had imagined possible."


"They're hurting them over there!" Eight cried. "We can hear them screaming at us! Can't we do something to help them?"

"We've been over this already," One growled back. "They're moving too damn fast. Sure, they're only accelerating at a paltry one gravity, but they've been doing that for twenty hours straight so far and show no signs of stopping. Even if we FTL jumped to them, they'll shoot right past us. If we try to match our jump exit velocity with them, they'll just pull away from us again like they did the first time. There's no way we can sustain that kind of acceleration for that long. How are they doing that?"

"What if we throw some obstacles in their path?" Three suggested. "They're moving fast enough now that any collision with a relatively stationary object should destroy the whole ship. Sure, we'll lose any intel we might have gained from questioning the crew and examining the ship, but at least we'll end our sisters' suffering and resurrect them into a safe environment."

"It's unlikely to work," Four said. "If we jump something like say, a Raider too close we can't guarantee enough jump accuracy to hit the ship. If we jump it in far enough away so that the Raider can maneuver to intercept the ship, the ship will have enough time to dodge out of the way or shoot the Raider with its energy weapons. Probably both."

"We have to do something!" Eight snapped. "A low chance of success is better than no chance of success. I say we try it out."

"Hey, guys," Seven began quietly.

"Oh, please don't tell me you want to let them go?" One said acidely. "I don't want to hear about 'living in peace and harmony" bullshit when our own people are suffering like this!"

"No it's not that," Seven replied. "I just wanted to ask, where are they going?"

Everyone stared at Seven, thunderstruck. The question hadn't even occurred to any of them, so concerned they were with getting their people back.

"They haven't FTL jumped out," Seven continued. "They've been accelerating for almost a whole day with no signs of stopping. They're moving at nearly ninety degrees off the system's ecliptic plane, so they're almost certainly not going to any place in this system. So I ask again, where are they going?"

Everyone continued to stare at Seven for several seconds, stunned. Then flurries of launch and recon orders to the Raiders started flooding out.


"Are you okay?"

Three hurt all over. Hours of abuse by the humans made her hurt in ways that she had never imagined that she could be hurt. Then they'd gotten tired of her and tossed her into this squalid room – not that the rest of the ship was much cleaner – with a bunch of bruised and battered human women. Judging by the screams still going in in Three's head, her tormentors hadn't tired of Six and Eight yet.

The woman who had spoken was clearly a prisoner like the rest. She was looking over Three with some compassion. "Here," she said, dabbing some kind of gel on one of Three's wounds. "This will help".

"I don't understand," Three said. "What's going on? Why are they doing this to us?"

"I'm sorry, but you've been taken by pirates," the woman told Three. "This is what they do." She sighed. "They grabbed me off Sileste a jump back. I'm Jane."

"'Pirates'?" Three said, confused. "I don't know the word." At the Jane's look of confusion, Three explained, "I just spent the last month learning to speak English. I don't have all the words yet."

"Oh," Jane said, understanding. Then she began to explain.


"Criminals? They're criminals?" Two said in disbelief. "I've dealt with the criminal underworld back in the Twelve Colonies. There's no way under God that the Colonial government would allow mere criminals to run around with this kind of military hardware, and they sure as hell wouldn't pull off brazen raids like this."

"We've pulled off raids like this," Five pointed out. "Got away with them too without the Colonials ever realizing that we were the ones that did it."

"First, we were never this sloppy with our raiding," Two shot back. "And second, we're not criminals!"

"Well actually..." Seven began.

"Shut up, I don't want to hear it," Two snapped.

"Relax everyone," Zero told them. "We are all distressed by the plight of our sisters, but we should not attack each other over it. Now, what have we learned?"

"There's another ship sitting above the local star's north pole, over a billion kilometers out," Five reported. "The ship our sisters are on is making a beeline straight for it, but for it to actually rendezvous, it's going to have to turn around and start decelerating within the next day or so."

"The second ship also isn't actually orbiting the star," Four added. "It's just hovering there with its main thruster pointed at the star."

"Given that the first ship didn't just FTL jump straight there," One added, "it seems highly likely that it doesn't have an FTL drive at all. The second ship must be some kind of FTL carrier. But while it's larger than the first ship, it's rather spindly and I don't see how it has the internal volume to take on the first ship internally."

"I don't think the technical details matter right now," Three said. "What matters is that the first ship can't leave the system without the second ship."

"We THINK the first ship can't leave without the second ship," Seven argued. "We can't be sure that's the case without positive proof."

"Granted, but I think the proof we do have argues strongly in its favor," Six said.

"So that's it then. We have a clear course of action," Eight concluded. "We take or destroy that second ship, and the first ship has nowhere to go. The question is, which should we do?"

"We take it," Zero said firmly. "We take it if we can, destroy it if we can't." His visor flashed. Not the normal back and forth strobing, but a full visor wide pulse of fury. "Then we will make these humans suffer for the horrors they have visited upon our sisters."

The other, younger Cylon models, had never seen the Centurions this angry before. For an instant, they had felt what many Colonials had felt during their war for independence. As one, they replied.

"By your command."