== Part 35 – Jump Cut ==
"...and if you implement a percentage based industrial tax code," Eve Steiner was saying to Baron Taggart, "then the tax income you'll receive from Langhorne's business enterprises will automatically grow and fall as their profits do, ensuring that you receive your fair share automatically without you having to manually adjust them every time there's a change in local fortunes."
Practically one of the first official things Richard Taggart had done upon arriving on Langhorne was raise the taxes on all the businesses that the Cylons were dealing with, apparently in anticipation of all the profit he had been told those businesses were going to make. Naturally, the businesses had complained to the Cylons, the Cylons had complained to Eve, and Eve had taken one look at Taggart's tax system and had been flabbergasted at the sheer inanity of it. The taxes on the common people were reasonable, or at least made sense to Eve; they were just taxed a percentage of their income as was common practice in the Inner Sphere.
The taxes on the businesses on the other hand were something else, especially on the bigger industries. They weren't taxed some high percentage of their profits. They were taxed a flat, very high amount, and as far as Eve could tell, that amount was manually adjusted by arbitrary amounts at arbitrary times for arbitrary reasons given that seemed to serve no purpose other than to squeeze them all for as much money as possible and kill any but the most minimal growth. Idly, Eve wondered how many other backwater worlds in the Commonwealth had tax codes similar to Langhorne's and how much they contributed to their inability to rebuild from the destruction of the Succession Wars.
A quick chat with Taggart's Majordomo revealed that while the Majordomo himself managed most of the tax law on Langhorne, Taggart controlled Langhorne's industrial tax changes directly, typically via HPG messages when he wasn't on Langhorne, but now directly that he was on planet. That struck Eve as strange, because her all too many conversations with Taggart on the Sound Investment during their voyage from Tharkad had given her the impression that Taggart knew almost nothing about his own planet and that he paid no attention to its affairs. That led Eve to suspect that his wife was the true culprit behind Langhorne's industrial tax changes as she had struck Eve as being far more intelligent than her husband.
That had resulted in Eve having to call Taggart and explain to him - practically in baby talk but still politely and respectfully of course - why his current tax setup was bad and that he needed to fix it in a hurry before Eve would be "forced" to report to the Archon how the Baron was getting in the way of his own planet's industrial growth which would no doubt incur the Archon's wrath.
"This is outrageous," Taggart grumbled. "I should be able to run my planet how I see fit." He exhaled and sagged slightly in defeat. "But if the Archon wills it, then it will be so."
"Thank you, milord Baron," Eve said with a smile. It was a fake smile, but a smile nonetheless. "If it will make you feel better, my staff has all manner of financial experts who would be more than happy to assist you in reforming your tax codes. My chief of staff can assign one to assist you if you'd like."
"I will consider it, Lady Eve. Have a good day," Taggart ground out, clearly still irate at having his privileges stepped on, but also not quite willing to explode at the Archon's personal representative. But he still cut the connection before Eve could say farewell back.
"My God, that man will be the death of us all," Eve muttered. She looked up at her secretary, who had entered the office while Eve had been talking to Taggart. "Yes, Alice?"
"I have a message from the local LIC office," Alice said, placing a single sheet of paper on Eve's desk. That got Eve's attention. Eve was pretty sure Alice was an LIC agent herself, Eve's "minder" from the Archon to ensure Eve didn't do something against the Commonwealth's interest our of naivete or even treachery.
Eve picked up the paper and read its message. Then she read it again before looking up at Alice.
"We really do have some kind of FTL communications system?" Eve asked. "One that can actually track the movements of Cylon ships?"
"So it would appear," Alice said neutrally.
"I mean I suspected the Cylons had FTL communications, but I had no idea we could track it," Eve said. "Why didn't the Archon...oh, I know why she didn't tell me. Because I'm young and an unknown quantity to her and that she wanted to see how I would perform as ambassador first before trusting me with a secret this big. I'm honored."
"Four additional Cylon basestars operating in our area might also have something to do with it," Alice suggested.
"Indeed," Eve agreed. She sighed. "But since they haven't yet shown up in Langhorne as far as I know, I suppose I'll have to pretend that I don't know about them. For now."
Four basestars sat in interstellar space, only a lightyear out from the planet Langhorne where a single other Basestar orbited. At this distance, message lag was negligible for the Cylons' faster than light communications system. Multiple conversations were going on simultaneously between the Basestar at Langhorne and the new arrivals from home, but most of them more or less followed the same pattern.
"Wow, it's all real?"
"Of course! Did you really doubt us?"
"The Ones thought a few of you had been captured and reprogrammed with false memories to lure everyone into a trap."
"Not me. I just thought Earth must have had some really strong drugs."
"But drugs don't even affect the Zeros!"
"So this is our new Nine, huh? She's cute."
"Hello!"
"Did you really sell an FTL drive to some random human on the street?"
"Um, yeah..."
"We think Nine's about to ready to move out of the prototype stage and into the mass production stage."
"Yay! More mes!"
"You sure about that? Nine sold an FTL drive to some random human!"
"Ahem. Hide and Seek."
"God, you guys are never going to let us Eights live that down."
"I like this control tub idea that Nine made. I wonder why we never thought of it before?"
"You guys really think we can bring peace to the Inner Sphere? I mean, even with the numbers increase the Constellation system allows, that's still over two thousand worlds."
"Nothing worth doing was ever easy. Yes, it's going to be hard and it's going to take a long time. But I think it'll be more satisfying in the end that just blowing up the Colonials."
"God has given us this challenge and we must rise to meet it!"
"I feel like the old challenge is more achievable."
"Brother, you only have to look around the Inner Sphere to see what the results of us attacking the Colonies will be."
"Okay, you've seen the Inner Sphere is real. Are you going to send a ship back and tell the others it's real now?"
"We'd have to send a full basestar back or else they won't believe us. And I'm not entirely convinced myself."
"What we really need is to confirm first hand some of the information you've acquired. You've barely scouted the Inner Sphere with your Langhorne project."
"Ah, we thought you might feel that way. Hell, we've felt that way, but we didn't feel we could budge from Langhorne until we got some backup from home. Now that you're here, we have this list of places that we think should be priority recon targets. Capitol worlds, industrial centers, shipyards..."
"Ooh, this Solaris VII does gladiatorial mech fights! We should stop by there."
"Are you frakking serious?"
"You know, one of us should really visit Terra. You know, the job we sent you guys here to do?"
"Hey, maybe we should crash this big wedding they're holding there."
"Let's not scare the humans too much now. We should keep the basestars out of sight and only go in system via shuttles."
"Hmm. That should allow us to cover more ground. The original plan was to have one basestar on overwatch while another goes in system. If all the basestars are on overwatch, we'll be able to cover four places at once instead of two."
"Sounds doable. It'd be nice to confirm what's real and what's propaganda from the news..."
"Emergence signature. Sun-Langhorne Jump Point. Scout class Jumpship with Union class Dropship."
"What? More raiders? Who keeps sending these guys?"
"Who cares? Watch this. You guys are in for a show."
He was called Isaac. It wasn't his real name. It wasn't even the name the Order had given him. But he'd had so many aliases over his ninety three years of life that he didn't remember was his actual name was. He was sure the Order kept a record of it somewhere, but it didn't matter to him. As such, "Isaac" was just a convenient handle that the team he was currently working with called him.
But even that team was gone now, evacuated to the Union. On the off chance the Union survived this mission and emerged victorious, Isaac's teammates would live to serve the will of Blake again. But not Isaac. Isaac was too old for another mission. Win or lose, this would be Isaac's last mission, and he had volunteered to go out in a blaze of glory rather than retire with honors to some tropical island on Terra.
Isaac sat alone on the Scout's bridge, drinking whiskey from a zero-g drinking bottle. He studied the radar display and was disappointed. These Cylon devils had clearly learned. Their ship had jumped in at safe distance from the Scout and they were only sending in a handful of boarding pods and escorting fighters rather than the torrent that had been their response to the mercenaries.
As the boarding pods approached, Isaac reflected on the life he had lived. As a ROM agent, Isaac had done a lot of horrible things in the name of the greater good that was Blake's Vision. He didn't exactly regret his actions per se, but he'd seen much and the Inner Sphere today seemed little different from the Inner Sphere of his youth, and he'd wondered if Blake's Vision had even inched closer into being fully realized.
The distant clanging of docking boarding pods brought Isaac out of his reverie and a glance at the radar display showed that no more Cylons were coming into his grasp. It was a shame, Isaac thought, that the Cylons had realized that just because the KF Core wasn't charged, that didn't mean the KF Drive couldn't still be activated.
Isaac had already cut the safeties. So he flipped up a cover shield and hit the JUMP button.
The basestar's entire command council went white as a sheet simultaneously, their faces a mix of shock and horror.
"What? What is it?" Gustav asked, concerned. He and Marcy had decided to sit in and listen to half the conversation the Cylons were having with the newly arrived basestars, and stayed for the interception of the new raiders. But now something had happened that looked like it had scared the shit out of the Cylons.
"They're dead..." Nine replied, on the verge of tears. She wasn't in her tub, but she was part of the command council by virtue of being the only Nine on board.
"But don't you guys resurrect?" Marcy asked confused.
"The Scout activated its KF Drive," Four told her. Gustav's and Marcy's eyes widened; it was suicide to do that so close to the previous jump! "The resulting misjump completely whited out the entire boarding party's resurrection transmissions as well as the escorting Raiders'," he said grimly. Then in a fury he brought his fist down on the rim of the empty control tub with an audible thump and snarled, "We lost EVERYONE!"
Looking around, Gustav and Marcy could see that every other Cylon's shock and sorrow were also turning to anger, except for Seven and Nine.
"Union has activated ECM and launched twelve Lucifer medium fighters," Nine said absently, falling back on her traffic control routine to cope with the unexpected loss even though she wasn't in the tub at the moment.
"Oh, these guys wanna fight do they?" One said angrily. He looked around. "Any objections?"
No one said anything but...
"There's something odd about that ECM..." Seven began.
"Who the frak cares?" One snapped as he dipped his hand into the control pedestal's basin. He was in no mood to hear Seven's bleeding heart philosophy right now.
Forty capital missiles launched from the tips of the Basestar's pylons as Raiders began to launch en masse. The Cylons watched in grim satisfaction as the tidal wave of missiles bore down on their hapless targets. And then they got their second shock of the day when all of their missiles flew through false Dradis images that were as good as anything the Cylons had ever created, leaving the real Union and Lucifers completely untouched.
The Cylons had never truly faced Inner Sphere ECM before now, largely because they'd never been in a real fight with an Inner Sphere military force. They'd done some perfunctory analysis of captured systems, even had some tutoring on them from Rick's Ravagers, but with everything else that needed researching, they hadn't dived into them too deeply. And in any case, they were Cylons, living machines. Surely ECM used by humans who barely knew how to program their own computers couldn't match the Cylons' skill at electronic warfare, right? It had never occurred to the Cylons that the "dumb" ECM programs used by the humans today had been written during the height of the Star League, that despite being "dumb" were as skilled and sophisticated at ECM as anything the Cylons had ever done, and had been designed to be used by humans with zero programming skills at all.
But before the Cylons could think about what had just happened, Nine made another announcement,
"Emergence Signature!"
