== Part 37 – Command Nine ==
A quartet of large lasers on CHP-W5 Chippewa heavy fighter raked across the Cylon basestar. Most missed due to the Cylon's heavy ECM messing with the Chippewa's targeting system, but one beam burned a dark line against mostly untouched armor. Mostly. The beam raked across an already damaged portion of the basestar's armor, resulting in a breach in one of the basestar's outer inhabited rooms, venting air. Automatic damage control routines sealed off the breached section before too much internal air was lost, but that trapped a Six and a Four in there who quickly suffocated.
The mind states of Cylons were automatically uploaded into the basestar's resurrection network upon their deaths, and were rerouted to the basestars waiting a lightyear away. There was after all, no point in resurrecting them on the basestar where they had died only to have them die again.
Gustav heard Nine out cry out in pain as the basestar shivered from the laser's damage. "What's happening to her?" he demanded. He wanted to jump up and run to the tub, but that would mean leaving his own frightened daughter behind. They understood that the Cylons intended to fight the Lyrans to the death, and for Gustav and his family, that would mean their deaths as well.
The Cylons flinched, startled, apparently having forgotten Gustav and Marcy had been right there.
"In there," Three said, pointing at the control tub, "Nine is feeling the Basestar's damage as her own. She's feeling its pain as her own. Because that's what the control tub does; it makes the user feel like they are the basestar."
"Then why is she still in there?" Gustav asked.
"We don't know," Six replied helplessly. "But I don't think she wants to come out."
Nine tried to work through the pain. She had to. The lives of the Argyles were depending on her.
The basestar's perception of the universe filled her mind. Weeks of practice with traffic control duties allowed Nine to quickly sort through the trivia and focus on what was truly important right now. Status reports filled her mind. Damage reports screamed at her, feeling like dozens of paper cuts all over her body with more being inflicted every minute. Lyran Dropships and fighters existed as probabilistic blurs of position and vectors in her mind's eye. Telemetry from the Raiders and surviving experimental fighters in their furball was actually letting Nine see their enemies more clearly than the Dropships and fighters attacking the basestar directly. The basestar's tactical programs had prioritized targeting the Achilles assault Dropships and fighters attacking the basestar over the decoy force the Cylon fighters were engaging. Five's statistics programs told Nine how long it would be before the two separate but related battles would end.
In a flash of inspiration, Nine realized that the basestar's targeting priorities were wrong. The fighters were providing better targeting data than the basestar's own sensors due to pure proximity to their respective targets. But Nine was still locked out of the basestar's weapon controls, so she couldn't change them. Watching the Dropships and fighters dodge and evade the basestar's fire though while periodically firing back less often than they theoretically could, Nine decided she didn't want to shift the basestar's fire to support the fighters, or else the Lyrans would start killing the basestar faster.
Nine needed to save the fighters and bring them in so they could spot for the basestar. She had no control over the basestar's systems, so she couldn't jump the basestar to support the fighters and leave the Lyrans attacking her safely behind for the moment.
But Nine could communicate. And she still had the traffic management programs that she had written.
"Frak!" Eight growled as the salvo of LRMs passed just in front of her experimental fighter's nose, and only a last instant braking thrust had prevented her and her fighter from being turned into so much confetti. The only reason she hadn't been killed yet was because her fighter had a more powerful engine and heavier armor than the others. Also, the endless hours of practice on old Colonial fighter sim games after the Eights had discovered that they loved piloting helped a lot. But Eight had already taken several hits and she could feel her fighter was on its last legs. One or two more solid hits would be sending her to the nearest available resurrection tub.
A Cylon mind impinged on Eight's consciousness.
"Nine? Kinda busy right now," Eight said. Nine's thoughts didn't come in words though, but as a series of vector changes in Eight's mind's eye that was constantly updating as Eight jinked and dodged the Lucifer that seemed intent on killing her personally. Nine wanted Eight to go somewhere.
"Ah, frak it," Eight muttered. In this furball, one direction was as good as another.
Eight tried to follow Nine's directions as best she could while dodging fire from multiple directions as best she could. She had no idea where she was going or why, but at the moment, Eight didn't have the attention to spare on such trivialities.
ATTACK NOW. The command was not made of words, but an impulse whose meaning Eight immediately understood. She flipped her fighter over, brought its large laser to bear on the Lucifer dogging her, which was still in the process of turning to face her, and fired. Eight's laser... missed.
I'm dead, Eight thought as her heart sank. She had the perfect shot and she'd flubbed it.
Before the Lucifer could complete its turn and blow Eight out of the sky, a Raider flew right up to it without its guns blazing, and then triggered its FTL drive. The Lucifer shattered away from the Raider's former position as if it were made of glass and God himself had set off a keg of explosives next to it.
Adept Bing blanched as he saw his wingmate explode away from the Cylon fighter's FTL jump. The ROM agents who had analyzed video of the Raider's in atmosphere jump had concluded that the Cylons had somehow figured out how to do away with the destructive environmental of a KF Jump. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been using FTL drives in atmosphere. Only now Bing realized that the Cylons hadn't done away with the destructive side effects entirely, just minimized them. And now they were using them as weapons.
Bing had noticed the change in the Cylon fighters' behavior immediately. They had suddenly all stopped swarming about randomly and had started flying in distinct formations. They stopped shying away from weapons fire but instead drove through them heedless of losses. But he'd paid the changes no mind because they were still armed with pea shooter and they were still horrible shots, and only the experiment hybrid fighters seemed even remotely dangerous.
That had been a mistake, and Bing was realizing it as the combat chatter from his squadron descended into chaos as his pilots realized what was happening and found themselves being turned from the hunters into the hunted. The disguised Comguard had killed a lot of fighters, but there was still somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred of them, now hunting them down as coordinated squadrons and even wings uncaring of losses. Some of them didn't even deign to use their FTL drives, but simply rammed them, doing far more damage than their guns could ever hope to.
Bing spotted one such ramming attempt at the last second and hit his thrusters, main and RCS alike, in an attempt to avoid it. He partially succeeded, and his Lucifer shuddered as the Cylon fighter struck its nose... and stayed stuck there. Bing found himself staring into a pulsating red eye slit right before the Cylon triggered its FTL drive.
In the distance, Bing's Union CV exploded.
More lasers and autocannon shells struck the basestar. A PPC struck a particularly sensitive component that caused Nine to cry out in pain again. But she ignored the pain. There was still work to do.
The decoy force had been defeated and there were only one hundred and eighty two Raiders left, plus two experimentals. Not as many as Nine had hoped to save. And they were low on fuel. Nine called them home. They were going to need more fuel, both for maneuvering, and for their FTL drives.
Demi-Precentor Hallows stared at the destruction of his decoy force impassively. The Union CV commander had self destructed his Dropship rather than risk the slightest chance that intact evidence might be left behind pointing the finger for this attack at someone other than the Lyrans.
Hallows didn't know what it was with these Cylons. First they acted like incompetents and then in an instant transformed into disciplined soldiers. The changes were so very abrupt that Hallows wondered if the Cylons were just slow idiots who had trouble finding the right combat programs to run or if they were just freakishly fast learners.
But what he did know right now was that those fighters were now the most dangerous thing to his mission.
"Chippewas, engage incoming Cylon fighters," Hallows ordered far more calmly than he felt. "Achilles Dropships are to remain on the primary target."
He still had all of his forty of his Vengeance's Chippewas. All of them sported some battle damage, but nothing serious. And given what he had seen so far, the Chippewas combined firepower and range superiority meant that they could kill all the remaining Cylon fighters before they could get close enough to use their damnable FTL drive.
There. The Vengeance had transmitted a message. The basestar and a few intelligent Cylons looking at it couldn't break the encryption. The Lyran encryption was just as sophisticated as their ECM, and they hadn't yet transmitted enough messages yet to give the Cylons a good sampling. But Nine didn't need to be able to read it to realize the Vengeance must be the Lyran flagship. After all, it had transmitted a message and every fighter attacking the basestar dropped what it was doing and started heading towards the returning Raiders.
Nine filed the little fact away for later. The Vengeance was currently hanging well back out of the reach of the basestar's remaining missile launchers. And Nine needed to save her Raiders. Somehow.
Nine checked the basestar's inventory to see what else she had available.
"Nine's destroyed the decoy force," One said, sounding grudgingly impressed.
"I had no idea she had it in her," Three added, sounding like a proud parent.
"Look, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the odds are still stacked against them," Five broke in. "The Raiders are almost out of fuel and those Chippewas are going to blow them all away as soon as they're in range. Once that happens, the Lyrans can take the basestar apart at their leisure."
Eve listened in. The Cylons had their own language, one she didn't know. They had no need to be discussing tactical details in front of her except to rub her nose in the fact that her nation had betrayed them. And her.
Eve still couldn't understand it. She refused to believe that her Archon would do something so petty as to order an attack out of nowhere on the Cylons like this. The Archon had explained in far too great a detail what the Cylons presence meant for the Commonwealth and what could happen if they became enemies. The Archon was also trained military officer, and had to know that she couldn't possibly have expected the other four hidden basestars to just sit out the attack while one of their own was being destroyed.
All Eve could conclude was that whoever was attacking the Cylons, it wasn't the Lyran Guard. But how could she prove that to them if she couldn't even contact the real Lyran Guard forces? Not that it would matter, Eve thought bitterly. Given the progress of the attack, even if Eve could access the LIC's Black Box here on Langhorne, it would take far too long to transmit the call for help. The Cylon basestar would be destroyed before the Black Box could even finish transmitting four letters. It was just that slow and Eve had no way to speed it up.
And then suddenly Eve realized what to do.
"Excuse me," Eve called.
"Oh, what do you want?" Three said irritably.
"Shh, let her speak," Seven told her.
"I just wanted to let you all know that I don't believe those are real Lyran Guard forces attacking your ship," Eve began. "I believe they are impostors, and I think I just figured out a way to prove it."
"Oh yeah? What's that?" One asked belligerently. "You gonna call up your Archon on the phone and have her tell us that in person?"
"Not exactly," Eve said. "All I need is for you to transmit this message in an omnidirectional broadcast: 'Lyran Guard aerospace forces attacking Cylons at Langhorne-Sun pirate point. Send help.' Make sure to send it in the clear in standard Inner Sphere plain text format."
"How is that going to prove anything?" Four asked, puzzled. "There's no one else in the system. And even if there is, they'd have to be so far away that it'd probably take hours to reach them. That'll be far too late for our basestar."
Eve inhaled, steeling herself. She had no idea how the Cylons were going to reach to what she was about to tell them. For that matter, Eve didn't know how Archon Katrina was going to react!
"I need you to broadcast the message so that it can reach every neighboring star system instantly," Eve answered.
Every Cylon present suddenly flinched as if they had been struck. Even the Centurions.
The Chippewas bore down on the incoming Raiders. The basestar's automatic tactical routines ignored them, prioritizing the still attacking Achilles Dropships. Given the performance of the Lyrans so far, Nine had a pretty good idea when and where they would be opening fire and counted down the seconds. They would open fire in five, four, three, NOW.
"Now" wasn't the moment the Chippewas fired. "Now" was the moment Nine brought in her next improvisation.
A couple dozen ships jumped in practically on top of the Chippewas' formation. Unfortunately, in space terms, "on top of" wasn't so close that the warping space of the ships' arrival destroyed any of the Lyran fighters. But the ships were huge, each a cylinder as long and narrow as one of the basestar's pylons, with an engine block on one end, a cluster of mechanical arms on the other, and in the center, an overpowered gravity manipulator that cranked up to full power as fast as it was able.
While the gravity tugs hadn't jumped in close enough to destroy the Lyran Chippewas instantly, they were close enough to throw off their aim as the Lyrans found their fighters suddenly being dragged aside just as their fighters opened fire. Their lasers and missiles flew wide of the Raiders, and the Raiders charged forward actually using the power of the tug's artificial gravity to boost themselves. As the Lyrans struggled to control their fighters as gravity kept changing around them in strength and direction, the raiders shot past them, using precisely timed algorithms Nine had provided them to tune their own gravity manipulators on the fly to avoid the worst of the effects.
Nine had ordered the Raiders to ignore the Chippewas and get home as fast as possible. That was a costly mistake.
The Chippewas fired wildly, but not at the fleeing Raiders, but at the very large, very stationary gravity tugs. The tugs were unarmored, and one hit from... anything really in a Chippewa's diverse arsenal was sufficient to start a chain reaction that blew the struck gravity tug apart. One out of control Chippewa rammed into its gravity tug for much the same effect. And once the tugs started going down, the destruction cascaded as the freed Lyran fighters assisted their fellows still trapped, and by the time they were done, the Raiders hadn't yet left their effective range.
Only one experimental fighter and three Raiders made it to the basestar's airlock.
Colonel Christian Harker looked at the fax message in shock. Lyran Guard aerospace forces were attacking the Cylons? Where had they come from? His aerospace forces were the only ones that were even supposed to be in the neighborhood! And of course, the message had come in far too quickly to have been sent by a Lyran Black Box device.
That meant the Cylons had not only sent the message, they had sent it in the clear in a format the fax machines could read. They had to know that the Lyrans – or at least someone other than themselves – had Black Box technology. Had the Archon's ambassador been compromised? Was this a Cylon trick meant to lure him into a trap? Or was it real?
Harker had to make a decision and make it now. He couldn't ask anyone up the chain of command for advice or clarification. It would take all day just to send the request! Given the stakes he had been briefed on, it was entirely possible the fate of the entire Lyran Commonwealth, perhaps the entire Inner Sphere, rested on what decisions he made in the next five minutes.
And he couldn't use Comstar. Aside from the security issues, there was no Comstar to contact where Harker was stationed. His superiors had noticed the Cylons using jump capable smallcraft to scout the surrounding systems, so they had taken a page from the Cylon's book and stationed Harker's Jumpship and Dropships in the middle of interstellar space two lightyears from Langhorne. Between being far from any help and having to charge the KF Drive from the Jumpship's fusion engine, the entire operation had everyone on edge while they waited to be called.
"Tell everyone to prepare for jump," Harker told his aide, "and to switch everyone's IFF codes to backup one. I don't want any targeting confusion or friendly fire."
Pain had become Nine's world. Physical pain in the form of weapon strikes on the basestar's hull that were increasing in tempo as the Chippewas rejoined the Achilles Dropship's assault. Emotional pain as she tallied up what the basestar had left and realized that there wasn't enough left to kill the force attacking it, and that the Argyles would die because Nine just wasn't good enough. Even if she had control of the basestar's weapons, there just wasn't enough ammo left to kill everything.
And in that moment of helpless despair, Nine learned something new. She learned frustration. She learned anger. She learned to hate. Nine's attention focused on the seeming source of all her pain.
Maybe Nine couldn't kill all of the Lyrans. But she was sure she could kill specific Lyrans.
"Give me weapons control!" Nine shouted.
Eight staggered after climbing out of her fighter, exhausted. Looking back, she saw that her beloved experimental fighter was little more than a cockpit, an engine, and thrusters. Everything else had been blown off, shredded, burned, or otherwise mangled beyond all recognition.
Eight had no idea how she was still alive or why she even bothered to survive. The basestar was done and it was only a matter of time before the Lyrans' weapons blew it wide open. At that point, Eight would die and resurrect on one of the other basestars or a resurrection ship. Maybe Eight just didn't want to give the Lyrans the pleasure of killing her personally.
Eight stiffened when she received a message through the basestar's network.
"Nine, you want me to do what?"
The Cylon basestar was dying. It had to be. Its once pristine white hull was crisscrossed with the blacked burn marks of laser burns and numerous craters from autocannon shell and missile impacts. There had been dozens of depressurization events already before internal damage control stopped them. Over half its weaponry had fallen silent, only the capital missiles still launching with accuracy so laughable that the disguised ComGuard fighters had stopped trying to destroy them and had started focusing on the close in defense weaponry that might have posed an actual threat to them. The Cylon ECM was going strong, but it didn't matter anymore because Hallows' pilots were now closing to where they could be seen with the Mark I eyeball, and at that distance, no amount of ECM could hide a two kilometer wide basestar.
A pair of Chippewas got brazenly close, skimming just above the surface of a pylon, firing at anything that even looked vaguely important. And just as they were about to skim off the tip, the entire basestar seemed to twitch. It didn't look like much from Hallows' perspective on the Vengeance, but from the heavy fighters' perspective, it must have looked like the basestar surface had just leaped out at them. The fighters smacked into the pylons' scored armor at a shallow angle, rolled along its rising surface while spitting parts and fragments off in all directions before their crumpled remains finally were flipped off the tip of the pylon.
The remaining fighters started to prudently keep a safe distance.
Hallows clenched his jaw in fury at the totally preventable loss of good, faithful pilots. Had that been an accident caused by the basestar's dying death throes? Had it been a deliberate maneuver? Given the Cylons' schizophrenic performance thus far, it was even money which one it was.
The basestar's capital missile launchers all fell silent. Not one by one as would be the case of them being destroyed, but simultaneously. The Cylon's fire control couldn't have been destroyed; the close in weapons were still firing. Were the capital launchers out of ammunition? Hallows didn't trust it.
He was right. Moments after falling silent, the Cylons ripple fired all their remaining capital missile launchers, fifteen in all, firing them at... nothing. Hallows watched suspiciously as the missiles arced around. They couldn't be firing on themselves, could they?
No, the missiles continued to arc around and just as they completed a full circle, the basestar rippled fired another set of fifteen missiles that joined the first salvo in flying circles. Then as the second circle was completed, another salvo of fifteen missiles were fired. But the third salvo didn't start doing circles. Instead, the third salvo's missiles all curved around and started heading straight at one Demi-Precentor Martin Hallows, and the first two salvos of missiles joined them!
Seeing that wall of forty five capitol missiles bearing down on them, Hallows' Vengeance pilot didn't need orders. She spun the Dropship until it pointed sideways from the incoming salvo and hit the thrusters at full burn. The Vengeance couldn't possibly outrun capital missiles, but it might be able to get out of their way before the majority could get a solid lock through its ECM. Hallows was nervous, but not too worried. Given the Cylons' missile performance thus far, the majority of the missiles would miss and the Vengeance would be able to survive two or three hits.
An unarmed Cylon shuttle suddenly appeared out of FTL next to Hallow's Dropship.
Hallows barely had time to register the shuttle's presence when all forty five capital missiles changed course and converged on his real position. The Vengeance was torn apart as it was struck by thirty nine missiles. Hallows died cursing that he wasn't going to be able to see the accursed Cylon basestar die.
"I'm sorry!" Nine wailed as Zero gently pulled her from the control tub, cradling the girl in its arms. The basestar was shaking constantly now as the surviving Lyrans renewed their attack with a vengeance, quickly stripping the basestar of its remaining weaponry. And the scream Nine had let out when one of the pylons had snapped off had become too much for the rest of the Cylons to bear. "I tried! I really tried," Nine sobbed into Zero's metal chest.
"It's all right, little one," Zero said soothingly. "You did the best you could. Better perhaps, than the rest of us."
"But I..." Nine began, then she froze. "Emergence signature!" she cried.
The new arrivals were an Invader class Jumpship carrying another two Achilles, another Vengeance which was even now deploying more Chippewas, and... a Mule class Dropship? All of them sported all too familiar colors.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me!" One shouted in frustration. "More Lyrans? Wasn't the first batch enough?"
Before anyone could respond, they all heard the new arrivals' broadcast.
"This is Colonel Christian Harker of the Lyran Guard First Special Missions Aerospace Regiment," a male human voice announced. "I don't know who you bastards wearing our colors and sporting our insignia are, but this system and the Cylons are under the protection of the Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces. Surrender now or be destroyed!"
