== Part 53 – Armor Test ==
"Helm control, try to hold the range open as long as you can," Commander Applebee ordered, hoping everyone was ignoring the ridiculousness of her telling them that the Vesta was running away from a ship that massed less than one percent of the Vesta's own tonnage. "FTL status?"
"Primary FTL drive is still down for maintenance," the report came back immediately. "Engineers are putting it back together right now. Secondary FTL drive is warming up and will be ready for jump in fifteen minutes."
"This idiot is going to enter our exclusion zone in less than ten minutes," Applebee growled, not liking the idea that she might have to shoot a ship that belonged to a supposedly friendly human nation. The incoming Union was still decelerating, but it already had so much velocity to kill that it was going to overtake the Vespa anyway. The fact that it continued to follow the Vespa when the Battlestar had tried to get out of the way suggested that its intentions weren't friendly. "Viper status?"
"All Vipers are manned and ready squadron are in the launch tubes."
"Hmm, no. We shouldn't need combat Vipers for this even if it does go hot," Applebee thought aloud. Also, even armored in scrap Inner Sphere armor, Applebee wasn't confident in their survivability against Inner Sphere fighters. Plus the Vespa still hadn't received replacement Viper pilots from home, so Applebee only had half the Vipers she ought to have. "Pull the ready Vipers and load recon Vipers into the launch tubes. Keep their pilots and logs constantly updated and have them ready to jump to Frozen City. They're our messengers to the Fleet if I need them. Launch the first one that's ready with a message to the Admiral informing him that we appear to be under attack from a single Federated Commonwealth Dropship. Meyer!"
"Commander?"
"What's the latest word from traffic control?" Applebee asked.
"The Union is refusing to answer any hails," Meyer reported helplessly. "Maybe their radio is out?"
"They wouldn't be following us if it is," Applebee replied. "Hail them directly and demand they break off. I don't want to shoot them if I don't have to."
"Contact!" a Petty Officer announced as Meyer started trying to hail the Union directly. "Six Vulcans just jumped in at twelve thousand kilometers. IFF says they're Alphabet Constellation. They're moving to intercept the Union at six gees."
That was a good fifty percent better than the Vulcans the Hansa had sold the Colonials were capable of pulling at max acceleration. No doubt, the Cylons had done some upgrades to their own Vulcans. Even so, it was going to be a close interception; the Cylons would reach the Union right before the Union entered Vespa's exclusion zone.
Applebee was going to feel very embarrassed if the Cylons wound up pulling her ass out of this diplomatic fire.
"Commander, the Union isn't answering my hails," Meyer reported. "And they're ignoring the Cylons' own hails too."
"Union has stopped decelerating," the Petty Officer announced. "It's lit up its ECM and fired... uh, something at the Cylons."
"Light our own ECM up," Applebee ordered, staring hard at the tactical display. The Vespa's computer technicians were still trying to create usable programs for the Vespa's ECM system from the Star League ECM algorithms that they had found on the copy of the Helm Memory Core that the Admiral had left the Vespa. But the Vespa's own native ECM wouldn't be entirely worthless.
Still, this attack made no sense. The Cylon Vulcans were still a several thousand kilometers from the Union, and it should be laughably easy for them to evade the two objects fired at them even if they weren't so slow that the Vespa's own cannon shots could have easily out paced them.
"First Viper is away."
A minute later, the Union fired another pair of identical objects. A minute after that, another pair. A few seconds after that third pair had been launched, the Union relit its fusion engine and began burning towards the Vesta at a full two and a half gees, drastically shortening its intercept time. The Cylon Vulcans changed course slightly to intercept the Union and avoid the path of the objects.
As the Union entered Vesta's exclusion zone, a couple of things happened at once. First, the objects it had fired suddenly lit their drives and revealed themselves to be large missiles, which then dove at the Cylon Vulcans at a hundred and twenty gravities. The second was that the Union fired a pair of even bigger missiles at the Vespa and this time, there was no delayed ignition of their drives.
"Spin us ninety degrees!" Applebee snapped instantly, as she watched the Cylons attempt evasive maneuvers. "Bring broadside to bear, point defense only!" There was no point in firing her guns at the Union; it was still well outside the Vespa's effective range.
Applebee knew what those missiles were. She had skimmed some of the weapon descriptions in the Vespa's copy of the Helm Memory Core, and paid particular attention to the capital grade ones. The missiles fired at the Cylons were called Barracudas, capital grade missiles intended for anti-fighter work. Which meant the larger missiles fired at the Vesta must be White Sharks or Killer Whales, which were intended for capital ships like the Vesta.
The Cylon Vulcans dodged as best they could, but the Barracudas hunted them down unerringly despite their ECM. One Vulcan decided to not dodge at all and fired cluster rounds from its autocannons at a Baracuda chasing its wing mate. It missed. All the Vulcans were struck, and amazingly, they all survived. But the drunken way they maneuvered immediately afterwards told Applebee that they were in no shape to continue chasing down anything.
The missiles fired at the Vesta ran into a wall of bullets and exploding flak. The missiles tried to dodge around the defensive fire, but the Vesta was a Mercury class Battlestar, not an older Columbia. Unlike the older Columbia, the Vesta didn't do dumb flak walls. The Vesta's point defense was targeted, ammo efficient relatively speaking, and two missiles were hardly going to overwhelm its defensive capabilities.
Although the fact that each missile took several obvious hits before they were destroyed was a bit worrying. Of course the Inner Sphere would put armor on capital grade missiles!
"Tactical missiles, return fire," Applebee ordered.
The Vesta fired its own capital grade missiles at the Union. They were roughly equivalent to the Barracuda, and Applebee really didn't expect them to do much given how armored everything in the Inner Sphere tended to be. Applebee had more missile launchers, but they were loaded with planetary bombardment nukes and would be completely overkill for this fight. Six missiles reached our for the Union... and two were blown out of the sky well short of it by point defense guns while the remaining four sailed past it.
Damn, Applebee thought, disappointed. She hadn't lowered her expectations enough.
"Contact! Cylon basestar jumped in at fifteen hundred klicks. It's launching Vulcans and Harpies at the Union, ma'am."
Fat lot of good that was going to do, Applebee thought. This fight was going to be over one way or another before they could arrive.
"Ma'am, Threat Analysis reports that there's something weird about the remains of the two missiles fired at us," a Petty Officer reported as the Union launched another pair of missiles. "Dradis is picking up a lot of lithium hydride in the debris, but nothing heavily radioactive."
That got Applebee's attention. The only use for lithium hydride – or rather, lithium deuteride, but the Dradis spectroscopic functions wouldn't be able to distinguish between normal hydrogen and its deuterium isotope - in weapons was as fuel for the fusion stage of a thermonuclear detonation as far as Applebee knew. But setting it off usually required a fission initiator, which required weapons grade radioactive materials like plutonium, which the Dradis clearly wasn't detecting. But if Applebee remembered her Academy class on nuclear weapons, you didn't necessarily need a fission bomb to start a fusion reaction in lithium deuteride; you only needed a sufficiently strong and concentrated energy source.
And the Inner Sphere had weapon grade lasers that could fit in Applebee's pocket. Frak.
Applebee opened her mouth to order the launch of the next messenger Viper, but before she could speak, the next two missiles arrived. Instead of attempting to dodge defensive fire this time, they just drove straight throught it. One missile was destroyed barely short of the Vesta's hull. The other hit.
A fifty kiloton sun blossomed in the middle of the Vesta's back.
Precentor Julio Alvarez gloated as he saw the Santa Ana warhead detonate.
Truly, Alvarez hadn't expected to get this far. When he had been briefed on this mission, the general expectation was that the Cylons would just intercept and destroy his converted Union Dropship long before it could get into firing range of the Colonial battleship. The point after all wasn't to destroy the battleship per se, but to disrupt the still nascent relationship between the Colonials and the Federated Commonwealth, maybe even the Cylons and the Federated Commonwealth. And of course a Federated Commonwealth ship using nuclear weapons which were extremely taboo to the entire Inner Sphere? Oh, what a PR nightmare that was going to be for them!
And the best part was, the Successor States were already quietly exploring the idea of equipping Dropships with naval missile launchers because of the Cylons. So there was going to be plenty of finger pointing no matter the outcome of this battle.
But actually destroying the Colonial battleship? That was just Blake sent gravy on top. The only reason Alvarez even got this far was apparently because Langhorne had been so quite and secure for so long that Cylon security forces had gotten lax. Witness that their anemic initial response had only been six heavy fighters when they had an entire basestar stuffed full with more available.
"After the next salvo, turn over and start braking again," Alvarez ordered. "We want to stay in range as long as possible to fire as many missiles as possible."
The Colonial batteship twisted in place, clearly attempting to bring intact armor to bear. Its guns didn't fall silent this time as Alvarez's AR-10s loaded more nuclear tipped White Sharks. Instead, the Battlestar was firing directly at Alvarez, but the range while dropping was still long for them and most of their shots missed. Alvarez heard some distant pinging as something hit his Union, but his armor status display indicated no damage thus far.
Another pair of White Sharks fired away. With the battleships guns concentrated on the Union, both missiles drove through the pathetic defensive fire that remained and their warheads both detonated on the Colonial battleship's bulbous nose.
Surprisingly, the battleship was still there and firing. Given the performance of the Cylon basestar in this same system twenty five years ago, Alvarez and the mission planners had thought two direct hits to the same general location would have been more than enough to destroy the Colonial battlestar. Oh well, Alvarez thought, a third hit to the nose should finish the job, especially since the battleship wasn't continuing to turn, but kept its nose facing the Union as it surged forward. Even a McKenna class battleship couldn't survive three direct hits on its nose from 50 kiloton Santa Ana warheads in a row.
Ah, of course. The Colonial commander wanted to bring their own guns into range, which really could tear apart the Union if they got in the Colonials' range. According to Alvarez's Adepts, the battleship's autocannon were firing some kind of cluster ammunition as if they were naval grade LB-X autocannon. They could do great damage on a direct hit, but their effective range was far shorter than they ought to be because of inferior propellants producing low muzzle velocities.
"Adjust thrust by forty five degrees to push us away from the battleship," Alvarez ordered. "Let's not get too close."
As if to punctuate his point, Alvarez heard and felt something crunch into his Dropship and the "right" side armor indicator flashed yellow. A lucky direct hit.
Alvarez kept his eye on the AR-10 reload timers. Despite his orders, his Dropship just had too much forward velocity to overcome. With the battleship driving itself directly at Alvarez, if the next pair of missiles didn't kill it, Alvarez's Union would careen into the battleship effective range and would almost certainly be torn apart.
"In three, two, one, NOW."
Alvarez's Union cut main thrust and flipped over again as the AR-10 launchers were still loading. The launchers finished just as they were brought to bear, and the missiles fired the instant they were ready.
Alvarez continued to gloat as the battleship didn't change its fire pattern, and both missiles punched through to the battleship's nose again.
And then Alvarez's jaw dropped in shock as the battleship continued to drive through the twin fireballs of its own vaporized armor with all guns still blazing, engines still very much under control, patches of ribbing exposed, and zero indication that any internal damage had been inflicted at all.
Applebee watched with grim satisfaction as Vespa's guns shredded the Union as damage reports flooded into the CIC. There was some internal damage, mostly concussive. A couple of water tanks and some plumbing had sprung leaks that were going to be a bitch to clean up and repair. One of the forward main gun turrets and several secondaries had been wrecked by those last nukes. Still, it wasn't as bad as it could have been; four fifty kiloton nukes to the nose would have wrecked the Vespa entire forward section before it had been refitted with multiple layers of Inner Sphere armor.
How much of that armor was left? Applebee had no idea. But she imagined that there wasn't much on the Vespa's nose now.
"Launch a message Viper to Frozen City and update them on our situation," Applebee ordered, sounding completely calm. "Meyer, call Langhorne again with a message for Duchess Eve Steiner politely asking for an explanation of what just happened."
