== Part 7 – Define "Mercy" ==

"Dad, the Middle Finger has completed turnover."

Gustav Argyle, captain of the Jumpship Deliverance, acknowledged his daughter's announcement with a wordless nod. That meant three days before the pirates returned and told him where they wanted to go next. The Deliverance's KF Drive would reach full charge tomorrow, and not for the first time, Gustavus wondered if he should just jump out and abandon them.

But no, that would be suicide. Not that the pirates would kill him – they would if they could – but because the pirates were his only source of income to keep the Deliverance running. Between unexpected emergency maintenance work, predatory price fixing by the larger Jumpship family cartels, and predatory lending practices by the banks, the Inner Sphere and legit transport work was off limits to the Deliverance. It was either work for the pirates, or become little more than serfs in service of some soulless corporation or another on the Jumpship his family had owned and operated almost since the Star League's fall.

Although given the depravity of these pirates, Gustav sometimes wondered if he should have gone with being a corporate serf. Certainly he made sure to keep his family and crew – essentially the same thing – away from the pirates whenever they were docked. Normally, the pirates knew better than to mess with people who could leave them stranded in the literal middle of nowhere, but it only took one drunk, overbearing ass to running across his wife or daughter to... "create an unfortunate strain on their business relationship" to put it politely.

Thus here he was, helping a bunch of degenerate pirates ruin the lives of innocent people, staring out the window at the black starscape wondering whether he had made the best decisions he could have.

Gustav's brooding musings were suddenly cut short when the briefest KF jump flash he had ever seen dropped a giant metal starfish right in front of him. And then it spawned.


The Cylons were taking a risk. They had no idea what the capabilities of the Deliverance were. Sure, it was far smaller than their Basestar, but that didn't mean much when the Middle Finger had already displayed vastly superior weapons and sublight drive technology. For all the Cylons knew, the Deliverance could have been a Battlestar equivalent whose lasers would carve the Basestar up like a Colonial Day roast hen.

But the Cylons needed to know the nature of their enemy. They were desperate to relieve the suffering of their captive sisters. And most of all, they were very very angry. So they had spent as long as they dared gathering navigational data, refining their jump calculations, all so they could jump in as close as possible to the Deliverance without the space warping effect of their FTL jump pushing the smaller ship away, or worse destroying it.

Which as it turned out, was pretty damn close. About a little over two kilometers in fact, almost identical to the distance from the tip of one of its arms to the to the tip of the opposing arm. The Basestar's bulk filled the Deliverance's sky. Had the Deliverance been an alert Colonial Battlestar, a stunt like this really would have been suicide.

Mere seconds after the Basestar's appearance, it was launching every Raider, shuttle, and boarding pod that it had straight at the Deliverance. The Raiders weren't there to fight so much as to screen the boarding pods and shuttles from any defensive fire.

The Cylons needn't have worried. The Deliverance's two anti-debris lasers couldn't have stopped such a tidal wave of small craft even if they had been turned on.


Antonio Holstfast cursed as the intercom buzzed. He'd barely gotten started on his new slave girl today, and he didn't like to be interrupted because of some stupid shit someone on his crew had done. And of course the intercom was on the wall by the door, not anywhere in easy reach so he could do his business while chewing whoever called him out.

He got off the whimpering girl, stomped over to the intercom, punched the call button, and snarled, "What is it?"

"Captain, this is the bridge," a tinny, static filled voice came back. The intercom was about in as good a condition as the rest of the ship. "We just received a distress call..."

"So what?" Antonio barked angrily. "What do we care about some losers who can't keep their ship running?"

"Captain, it's from the Deliverance."

Antonio stared at the intercom for a long moment as comprehension dawned. Antonio knew he had many flaws; he was greedy, lecherous, and all too willing to indulge his vices. But he also hadn't live this long by being stupid and. failing to recognize threats to his own survival.

Oh shit, was his first thought.

"I'm on my way," he told them. Then he grabbed his pants and ran out the door.


Three days. That was how long the Cylons had to prepare for the Middle Finger's arrival. That was three days to interrogate the Deliverance's crew who had all surrendered without a shot being fired. Three days to search the ship from top to bottom and to ransack its computers for vital intelligence. The results were illuminating to say the least.

The computers were impossible to read directly. The coding right down the machine language level was completely alien to anything the Cylons had ever seen before, rendering it as so much incomprehensible gobbledygook to them. The human user interfaces proved little better as the printed text was equally unfamiliar to them.

But mere threat of violence seemed sufficient to get the Deliverance's crew to answer any and all questions the Cylons asked of them.

"Holy Frak, two thousand systems?" One said quietly as he stared at the holographic starmap. He was in shock, not wanting to believe what he was seeing.

"It does seem to be a bit implausibly large," Five admitted. "But all the humans on board and all the reference materials we can find seem to confirm it."

"But two thousand?" One repeated.

"I think we need to locate more sources for confirmation," Two suggested. "At the very least, send Raiders to the nearer systems to confirm that they're inhabited."

"Two thousand!" One cried. Was that statement? A question? The others weren't sure.

"Uh, One, are you okay?" Eight asked him, concerned.

"We can't fight two thousand systems full of humans!" One told them plaintively.

"Maybe we should focus on fighting just the one ship full of humans?" Seven suggested. "Or better yet, maybe we can get them to surrender without a fight."

"How do you suggest we do that?" Three asked him.

"TWO! THOUSAND!"


As the Middle Finger decelerated to a stop just shy of five hundred kilometers away from the Deliverance, what Antonio saw on the telescope cameras wasn't good. Another one of those strange starfish stations was sitting on top of the Deliverance. Literally. The Deliverance's nose was so close to the station's hub that for all Antonio could tell, the two were touching. Swarms of smallcraft buzzed around the station, most of which appeared to be the same kind of fighters that had dogged the Middle Finger as it was leaving Pressville.

The message the station had transmitted was hardly inviting either.

"PIRATE DROPSHIP MIDDLE FINGER. WE ARE CYLON. WE HAVE YOUR JUMPSHIP. YOU HAVE NOWHERE TO RUN. SURENDER AND WE WILL SHOW MERCY. RESIST AND WE WILL DESTROY YOUR SHIP."

Antonio hit the transmit button. "No way, you're bluffing," he replied. "I know we got some of your people on board. They must be pretty important to you to go to all this trouble to get them back. So if you destroy my ship, you'll be killing your people along with us, eh?" Antonio sat back, sure that he had stalemated thus "Cylon". Was that the name of a person? A gang? A nation? Antonio didn't know, nor did he care. He was just certain that he had leverage over these guys and that's all that mattered to him.

"YOUR TERMS ARE ACCEPTABLE."

Antonio blinked in surprise. What the hell did that mean?

"Missile launch!" one of the bridge crew cried out. "I read forty plus incoming... uh, what are capital missiles?"

"Uh, warbook says they're the kind that might... Oh, lordy, they might carry nukes!" another crewmember replied.

Antonio blanched. This couldn't be happening!

"Impact in 30 seconds!" the first crewmember announced frantically.

Antonio scrambled for the transmit button. "We surrender!"

The missiles detonated... and Antonio and the Middle Finger were still alive afterwards. Pinging sounds rang through the Dropship as it was pelted harmlessly by debris.


The Middle Finger had no onboard gravity when not under acceleration. So when the shuttle's doors opened, the Zeroes poured out of it on the puffs of RCS thrusters. They were greeted by a party of slovenly humans in a bay so filthy that it made the Centurions glad that they didn't have a sense of smell. The humans were clearly armed, but didn't have their weapons raised.

The humans expressed surprise at the Centurions' appearance. Clearly they were expecting more humans, and the Centurions' bodies were lean enough that no human could possibly be inside them.

"You said that you would be merciful?" the lead pirate in the greeting party asked warily. It wasn't their true leader; he didn't match the captive Six's image of him.

"Yes," the lead Zero replied. Interrogations of the Deliverance's crew had made it clear these pirates knew nothing of value to the Cylons. And honestly, it probably wouldn't have made a difference even if they did. "Compared to how you treated our sisters, this will be merciful." And then it shot the pirate in the head.


Antonio flew down the corridor. Behind him, the corridors echoed with the pops of gun fire, the whine of lasers, the screams of his dying men, and the occasional explosion. His men could kill those nightmare robots,, but the robots had seized the airlocks and let in an endless stream of reinforcements. Only the Middle Finger's relatively tight corridors in the personnel sections prevented his men from being immediately overwhelmed.

But they were going to be overwhelmed, there was no doubt about that. The robots were throwing themselves into the teeth of his men's fire completely careless of the casualties they were racking up in doing so. Every assault costed Antonio men, even the failed ones, and it was only a matter of time before the Middle Finger fell entirely to them. And the robots had made it clear that they were NOT taking any prisoners alive.

Thus Antonio ran – or the next best thing that could be done in microgravity – for his quarters. Whoever this Cylon was, they wanted their people back. Antonio thought that if he used at least one of them as hostages, he might – MIGHT – be able to get out of this nightmare with his skin intact. Given that the Cylon had already shown a willingness to shoot the hostage, it wasn't a great plan, but it was the best Antonio had.

Had Antonio been thinking straight, he might have considered that getting in his mech would have given him better odds of survival than hiding behind a broken girl he had tormented for six days.

Antonio reached the door to his quarters and punched in his personal security code on the number pad. It took him three tries to get it right. The door opened and he scrambled in.

"Get over here, biACK!" Something unseen struck Antonio in the throat, causing him to choke and momentarily stunning him. And then he found himself grabbed and flung face first into a bulk head. His right arm was twisted behind him so severely that bone snapped, causing him to scream in pain. His other arm was broken in turn before he was flung into another bulkhead, this time landing on his back. His head bounced off hard metal.

Dazed, he looked up and saw his personal slave girl looming over him. Her left leg was broken; she had clearly injured herself to get out of her restraints. And in her hand was a knife plucked straight from Antonio's belt. She held it up and glared with hate filled eyes at Antonio.

"They promised you mercy," she told him with a voice hoarse from screaming and begging for days on end. "I promised you no such thing."


Two Zeroes came down the corridor where the Middle Finger's crew officially bunked, searching for any pirates that were still alive. The captured Six was also down this way and they needed to check on her.

Both Centurions were scarred with dents and laser burns from the battle. One was missing an arm, and had decided to compensate by using its good arm to carry a laser rifle looted from a dead pirate.

As they approached the officers' quarters, they heard screaming. Not the screams of a woman, but a man. The Zeroes paused, looked at each other, and in wordless consensus turned around and went back the way they had come.