== Part 36 – False Flag ==

A new forest was growing up outside the capitol city of Langhorne. It wasn't a forest of trees, but of Cylon biotech pillars growing in a grid pattern that started branching out horizontally to create cross connections at just above the height of even the tallest battlemechs. The resulting cubicle grid framing would be used as the basis of Langhorne's future factory complexes, with walls, ceilings, doors, and other structures added by more conventional Inner Sphere construction methods however the companies moving into them saw fit.

Touring one completed section and watching local construction workers adding walls and all manner of equipment a factory would need, Eve was impressed. Self growing, self maintaining buildings – or even just the frames of buildings – would save a huge amount of time and resources when building the new factories. It wouldn't be the bulk of the expense of course, but it wasn't small change either. All they needed was some raw materials and a power supply like a fusion generator – or even a primitive steam engine if it could provide enough electricity – and the building seed would sprout and grow on its own.

The biotech buildings were one of the few exclusively Cylon technologies that the Cylons seemed to be willing to share, apparently because they didn't see it as being directly usable against them. Yes, you could build the frame of a warship out of them, but not the weapons or especially the engines which had always been the Inner Sphere's bottleneck when it came to making combat platforms of any kind.

"...and the frames don't just provide structural support," Seven was saying. He seemed to be the designated tour guide in the Cylon party. As far as Eve could tell, the Sevens seem to be the most open to working with the Lyran Commonwealth while the Ones were not only opposed, they apparently objected to the Cylon's mission to uplift the Inner Sphere entirely. The rest fell somewhere in the spectrum between the two. "The frames also include data lines for computer networking, plumbing for supplying water and removing human waste, and power lines. All the tenants have to do is hook up their systems to the relevant connection ports on the frames. Although the plumbing and and power lines have limited capacity so any industrial level water or power needs will need their own dedicated pipes and cabling by the..."

Seven trailed off unexpectedly. Eve turned away from the ongoing construction to see that the Cylons were distracted not by something around them, but by something only they could hear, and their faces were a mixture of shock, sorrow, and a worrying amount of growing anger.

"What is it?" Eve asked. "Is something wrong?"

"The basestar was lured into an ambush at the pirate point," Seven said slowly. "We just lost a lot of Centurions and Raiders... permanently."

"And now the basestar is being attacked by Lyran aerospace forces," Five added, upset. "They're marked as Lyran Guards of various different units."

"What?" Eve exclaimed in surprise. Those aerospace forces were supposed to wait until if and when Eve or someone on Langhorne called for help, not attack without warning. "That can't be right."

"I thought we were supposed to have a non-aggression agreement," Three said tightly. "Why are Lyran forces attacking us?"

"I don't know!" Eve cried, seeing her mission going down in flames. Her bodyguards, aware of the sudden Cylon hostility, began closing in around Eve. Meanwhile, the Cylon Centurions were spreading out, surrounding them and Eve in turn. "This isn't supposed to be happening. I don't know about any attack!"

"I think she's being honest," Seven told the others.

"Doesn't matter if she is," One said bitterly. "I told you guys that these humans couldn't be trusted. It's damn obvious what happened. This Archon Katrina didn't like that we wouldn't help her in whatever war she's got coming up, so she got her nose put out of joint and decided to kick us out."

"But my Archon wouldn't do that!" Eve protested even as doubt wormed her way into her own mind. Would her Archon really behave this way? It made no sense for Archon Katrina to trust her with the secret of Black Box technology but not that she was planning an attack on the Cylons. But still...

"Wouldn't she?" One shot back. "We've read all about rulers who did pettier things than this in Comstar's history books, and I'm not even counting anyone outside the Lyran Commonwealth!"

"I... I need to go back to the Embassy and call our forces," Eve said quickly. "I'll try to call them off if I can, or at least find out why they're attacking you."

"No," one of the Centurions said, its electronic voice sounding as angry as the human Cylons were. There was the sound of cocking guns as every Centurion's hands transformed into gun barrels. "You will be going nowhere."


Adept Lucius Bing spun his Lucifer medium fighter, bringing his crosshairs to the next gaggle of Cylon aerospace fighters trying to get at him. His targeting computer was set to group mode, instead of single target mode, so it allocated one laser to each fighter and fired the LRM launchers in a shot gun spread. Some lasers missed as did a great many LRMs, but a good half dozen Cylon aerospace fighters died at the slightest hit and the survivors scattered to avoid being hit themselves which disrupted their attack run on Bing. Another salvo of lasers and LRMs from Bing's wingmate disrupted them even further.

The enemy fighters fired back of course, but their aim was shit even when accounting for ECM. Only a few bullets ping off his fighter's armor, only removing a few chips, and the few missiles thrown at him all missed.

For a people who had supposedly been used as slave soldiers, Bing thought contemptuously, these Cylons had an absolutely horrible grasp of aerospace combat tactics and skills. Their fighters just swarmed mindlessly, often getting in each other's way, and seemed unable to hit anything unless they were practically in spitting distance of their targets. The Lucifers and the Union CV that had carried them were slugs in comparison to the Cylon fighters, but they used actual tactic and supported each other in combat, disrupting attack runs before they could begin and killing the enemy fighters in job lots.

When Bing had volunteered as part of the decoy force and been told he could be facing up to eight hundred fighters thrown at him, he had expected to die in the name of Blake almost instantly, even though the fighters were supposed to have primitive weaponry and armor. At the very least, he'd expected a hard fought fight for his life before he went down. Seeing the actual number of fighters thrown at him be closer to six hundred than eight hadn't changed his assessment all that much. But the furball he now found himself in was closer to a video game turkey shoot than a serious battle.

Bing made a mental note to hold off on using his large lasers for the next few salvos. His Lucifer needed to cool off.

Things were going so well for the decoy force that the commander of Bing's Union CV had actually waived off help from the main attack force, telling them to focus on the Cylon's basestar. It was only a matter of time before the decoy force ground the Cylon aerospace fighter force down to nothing. A long time perhaps, and maybe long after they ran out of ammo, but the decoy force had plenty of energy weapons that needed do ammunition at all.

A larger than usual enemy fighter popped around a swarm and fired a stream of bullets at Bing. They missed of course. But the surprise large laser scored a long burn line across Bing's left wing. It didn't penetrate the armor, but the fact that it could do damage at all had been a surprise. This must be one of their experimental hybrids, Bing realized. Finally, a real challenge!


The pirate point was smaller than standard jump points, but it was still big enough that when the Comguard's main attack force had jumped in, their actual arrival location was well outside weapons range of he basestar, both theirs and the Cylons. So it had taken several long minutes, before they could fire on the Blake cursed demons from the Deep Periphery, which felt even longer when they had to watch capital missiles sail past them before they could even fire back.

Demi-Precentor Martin Hallows, the Comguard commander of this operation, would have had more peace of mind if his Dropships had some kind of point defense, say, small lasers, machine guns, or even a full fledged Star League tech anti-missile system. But the Precentor ROM had decreed that the attack had to be carried out only with what the real Lyran Dropships had, and they lacked any point defense weaponry. Which left Hallows watching capitol missiles pass by praying to Blake that the Cylons didn't get in a lucky hit. Even a primitive capitol missile hit could do enormous damage to his Vengeance, one of the Achilles, or especially his fighters. But the Star League standard ECM packaged which was used by everyone in the Inner Sphere seemed to be doing its job well even if a few missiles had come perilously close to hitting a real target several times.

Or maybe the Cylons just had horrible aim.

Hallows gloated as the first salvo from the main force went home into the Cylon basestar almost unopposed. The tidal wave of LRMs died entirely to point defense gun fire. But the flurry of PPC and long ranged autocannon shells all struck the basestar, blasting out chunks of primitive armor but did little else. It seemed the Cylons had no ECM at all and Hallows could just sit his main force outside their effective range and snipe them to death with long range fire, and the basestar's pathetic attempt to evade at half a gee acceleration wouldn't impair his people's aim at all.

Then just before his force's next salvo fired, the Cylon basestar disappeared behind a cloud of decoy images and false signals. Coupled with the evasive maneuvering, it was just enough to cause almost all of the main force's PPC and Autocannon shots to go wide. And of course, the few LRMs that remained on target were all killed by point defense again. A quick analysis by his EW specialist told Hallows that the Cylon ECM was just as good as could be expected from a Star League ship or station of similar size.

"Damnation!" Hallows growled. He'd almost started to believe that Blake was going to bless him with a bloodless victory. Well bloodless for him anyway. "Achilles Dropships and fighters, close the range," Hallows ordered. That was going to get some of his people killed, but they had all volunteered to die for the glory of Blake. And in any case, the mere fact that the Cylons had turned on their ECM so late didn't speak well of their actual combat skills.


"You know," Five said as he and the other newly arrived Cylons watched the unfolding battle from a lightyear away, "when we crunched the performance numbers, I thought we'd be doing better than this in a fight with Inner Sphere forces."

"We were arrogant," Two explained regretfully. "We had assumed because our ECM had always been better than the Colonials', the same would hold true with the Inner Sphere. So we didn't really look into it as hard as we should have, especially since their computer architecture is so alien at the machine level and documentation on their inner workings has been so hard to come by."

"And of course, the missiles were designed to be shot at battlestars, not tiny, much more maneuverable assault Dropships and fighters," Four observed. "Most of these misses would have been hits against something larger and slower."

"That doesn't explain the Raiders," Six pointed out. "Shouldn't they be doing better than this? They haven't killed a single fighter yet! The Eights in their experimentals are doing better than them!"

"The Eights are only doing better because they're flying fighters with actual armor and weapons that are worth anything," Seven disagreed. "Raiders are designed to fight Colonial Vipers, not these flying tanks. But the real problem isn't firepower. It's skill. And tactics. And experience. Our side doesn't have any of those things and the other side clearly does."

As if to emphasize the point, one of the experimental fighters ate a missile salvo, which blew off a wing. That caused it to staggered around unbalanced for several seconds before series of laser blasts from a different Lucifer tore it apart.

"That... may be our fault," Zero said apologetically. "We designed the Raiders to exploit resurrection so that they could learn from experience. But they have no experience because we signed the Armistice before they could be deployed against Colonial forces, barring the odd encounter with Colonial recon craft violating the Armistice Line. Even the training exercises we've done for them has been no preparation for this. And now it is costing us."

"Shouldn't we jump in and help them?" Eight asked.

"No," Three replied firmly. "This battle was totally unnecessary. But it was also inevitable because they decided they wanted to play white knight in the Inner Sphere. We didn't agree to any such plan. While their experiences have convinced me that killing all humans would be a sin against God, that's a far cry from convincing me that we can live with humans or that trying to solve the Inner Sphere's problems is a good idea."

"Besides which, we don't need Langhorne," One added. "We already have all the information we need to reproduce the most critical Inner Sphere tech. We just need to figure out a production chain most suited to our needs. We can even pick up Six's Knife before the Lyrans get to Langhorne. Anything else we lack we can just get through standard infiltration tactics." He paused and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Although thanks to these guys, the Inner Sphere knows all our faces. We'll need to produce new human models anyway if we want to infiltrate the Great Houses."

"Given the way the fight is going, it would be ill advised for us to jump in anyway," Five added. "I've crunched the numbers..."


"...and we're going to lose," Five finished. As if to emphasize his point, the Basestar shuddered as it took another hit somewhere. "So far, we've only got in a couple major hits so far, and none of them have been lethal or even crippling. At our current rate of expenditure, we'll run out of ammunition before we kill half of the Lyran forces. And that's assuming we're not completely stripped of weapons first, which the Lyrans appear to be working on."

Despite being fired upon and the basestar firing back, the Cylons on board were barely paying attention to the battle at large. Automatic combat routines identified the most probable threats and assigned weapons to shoot at them, and the intelligent Cylons had already weighed in on what they thought were the most important targets. As far as the Cylons thought, them taking direct control of the weapons would not appreciatively improve their so far abysmal performance and would probably degrade them even further.

"Hey, here's an idea: how about we just leave?" One suggested. "If we're going to lose anyway, there's no point in throwing away a good basestar in a fight that we can't win. The Ones say we run for it."

"No!" Three said emphatically. "If we do that, we'll throw away all the work we've done on Langhorne. We'll be throwing away our entire mission from God because the others will take retreat to mean that it's impossible. They've already decided to just stand by! The Threes say we stay."

"It'll also damage our credibility with the Inner Sphere if we run away from the first real fight they see us in," Two added. "Because of how war torn the Inner Sphere is, standing by your convictions and dying for them instead of running like cowards is very important to them. The Twos vote to stay and fight."

"I don't like fighting," Seven said quietly, "but I also don't trust that the Lyrans won't turn their weapons on their own people. If they're going to ambush us like this without warning, especially without telling their own ambassador, they might well be willing to massacre their own people. We need to stay and fight however long we can. The Sevens vote to stay."

"But we're going to lose," Five argued. "Barring divine intervention, all the numbers show it. Staying to fight is just throwing good after bad. The Fives vote to run."

"The Eights vote we stay and fight," Eight weighed in. "We can resurrect. They can't. So we're going to take however many of them down with us as we can and come back later for more if the others let us."

"The Zeros feel the same," Zero added. "We vote to stay."

"We Fours feel that if nothing else, this battle will provide invaluable data for the future," Four said. He shrugged. "The Fours vote to stay."

"The Sixes are conflicted," Six said. She gave a short laugh. "But I guess it doesn't matter because we already have a majority vote to stay and fight. Nine? You've been quiet all this time. I know you're young and only have one individual vote that won't change anything, but we still care what you think. What do you think we should do?"

Nine looked between her brothers and sisters and didn't know what to say. She didn't really understand all the nuances of the situation, but she had grasped certain fundamental details. The others had voted to stay and fight the Lyrans. In doing so, they were likely to lose and the basestar and everyone on it would die. But that was okay, because the Cylons would all resurrect on the distant basestars or resurrection ships.

Nine turned her head to look at the Argyles, huddling forgotten in a corner by the other Cylons. Marcy was softy crying into her father's shoulder as he tried to comfort her. Nine had known the Argyles almost her entire short life. They were as much family to Nine as the other Cylons. And Nine knew they couldn't resurrect. If nothing changed, the Argyles would all die. Forever.

If nothing changed...

Without a word, Nine grabbed the rim of the control tub and jumped in.