Chapter 22: Warheads and war stories

The suited figures in red sank down onto the edge of the landing pod, towing missiles like they were paperclips. The missiles were nearly as large as the Vipers.
Chief Tyrrol stared in astonishment at the assortment of figures. All clearly human, mostly tall, and as they shucked their helmets it became clear that youth was evidently a major selection factor for the Terran fighter crews.
More than thirty missiles lay on the floor of the bay by then; Lee Adama, Colonel Tigh and Tamsin Reece were just arriving.
"Captain," he nodded. "Colonel, ah"
"Captain Tamsin Reece," she introduced herself. "Sorry to muck up your landing bay like this. We'll have this whole shebang out of here as soon as we can switch the warheads over, I promise"
"Good. Anything we can do to help"
"Got any spare nukes that aren't in inventory?" She asked rhetorically before staring across the bay, sticking two fingers in her mouth and giving a piercing whistle.
One of the figures loped across. Taller, with browner hair and a plainer face, but there could be no doubt of the similarity of features. "Gentlemen, this is Captain Trace LeBeau, commander of this squadron. Trace, Colonel Saul Tigh, the ship's XO, Captain Lee Adama, their fighter squadron commander, although they use CAG "
"Commander Air Group? That designation went out round about the time the US started letting women serve at sea"
"Shut up. And Master Chief Tyrrol, who is the head of their deck crew, please try not to piss him off." LeBeau began to open her mouth. "I mean it, Trace"
"Yes, sir," LeBeau rolled her eyes up. "And if you stuck a broom up my arse I could probably sweep the floor, too"
"Do you have a broom handy, Chief Tyrrol?" Reece asked in a perfectly calm and level tone. The Chief hunted desperately for something to say.
"That was a joke, Tamsin"
"Right now, Trace, it's really not very funny. Start swapping out the warheads, alright"
"Fine, but where do we put them?" She asked. "I can hardly pile those things in a corner, Tamsin, they weigh half a ton apiece"
"Better question, how do we move them?" Tyrrol asked. "Or even get the missiles back out of the bay? Our loaders aren't designed for those loads. Or that shape." "The old-fashioned way, Chief. Come on. Miller! Hong, Sampson, Tanachra, you three get on that end. Tamsin, take that side, Miller, the other…" LeBeau waved her arms around like semaphore flags and her squad leaped where she pointed. In front of their astonished eyes, six people lifted a missile that would have taken the entire deck crew to budge. Even more curious, LeBeau carried one end all on her own with ludicrous ease.
"Like that?" She asked mildly.
"Er." Tyrrol hunted for words. "Well, that's… convenient"
"You'll get used to it," she said almost kindly. "Sampson"
"Start stripping the panels and disconnecting things, I know, I know. I wasn't born yesterday, Captain," the chubby dark man with a pronounced Liverpool accent grinned. A curious Cally stepped up. "You know what you're doing?" She came up to his armpits. "I've never seen anything like this before"
"You kidding? I grew up fixing things. This is old home week for me, my parents owned a house next door to an ammunition dump. I got to play with some of the stuff where the actual munitions had been removed, sometimes"
"Only in England," Tamsin rolled her eyes up. "Where's England?" Tyrrol asked.
"Northern hemisphere, part of one of the islands off the European seaboard between the Atlantic and the Baltic Seas," he said. "And in my opinion, the only place on the planet that's still got a sense of humour. Except possibly Australia"
"Which planet's that?" Cally clambered up next to him to watch as he flipped open a panel and started punching in a code to deactivate the safety mechanisms.
"Earth, of course," he said. Lee, watching Tamsin, saw her wince. "There's only one England, after all. Can you hold this back, please, lass? Alright, what's wrong"
"To them, Earth is a bit like Atlantis to us," Tamsin remarked mildly. "And they've spent about a thousand years hearing how their long-lost brethren settled there"
"Not bloody likely, we've been around far longer than that. Hell, a thousand years ago would have been – well, it's 2856 now, so that'd be during the reign of Queen Victoria the First"
"Steam engines were high-tech then," Trace noted. "Got everything"
"Huh? Oh, sure. Here, take this, lass," he pushed a large sphere with wires coming out of it into Cally's cringing hands. "That's the detonator guard. Give me ten minutes, I'll have this out and we can swap in whatever we're going to use." He paused. "What are we going to use"
Tyrrol looked at Captain Reece. She motioned to Captain LeBeau, who pulled out what looked like a sheet of paper with the bottom half printed as a keyboard. She put it on the floor and started typing, and he realised it was a computer terminal. As thin as a bit of tin foil.
"Standard MDM warhead, right? What you do is…" For all his technical expertise Tyrrol had no idea what she was talking about for the next three minutes. Finally she finished with, "and that forms an implosion centre in here, which we fill with the radioactives they use for fuel and that gives us a rather crude fission warhead"
"Bloody hell," Sampson remarked. "Never even knew that was possible. Ever tried this before"
"Yeah, but I don't know if worked"
"What?" Tyrrol asked.
"Why not?" Lee Adama asked.
Tamsin shrugged. "We tried it at R'Shok to increase our warhead yield. Problem was that no one in a position to take notes survived the battle. Worst casualty rates of any battle we ever won, that battle was"
"You're that Tamsin Reece?" One of the other pilots, an Asian woman who looked ludicrously young to be in uniform at all, said incredulously. "I thought you were dead"
"I don't die that easily"
"Where's R'Shok?" Cally asked, stuttering a bit.
"Other side of occupied space. The Kangas had a very large set of battle stations in orbit over R'Shok Six, where they had all their weapons manufacturing capacity for the sector, and we had to take it out. Only the only forces that could be spared for the strike were borderline for being enough to win even with every advantage in our favour. Basically it was a suicide run"
"How bad was it?" Cally asked.
"We sent seventy-four thousand, six hundred and twenty-four people in. Afterwards there were seventy-four thousand, six hundred and twenty-three funerals to hold. But we took out the Kangas." Tamsin shrugged, her eyes fixed on a point far, far away. "I've always wondered if it was worth it." She walked over to help lift another missile into the bay.
"Who was the survivor?" Tigh asked Sampson as he worked. "What happened to him"
"Tamsin? She'd been the strike leader for the fighter squadrons – she was a colonel back then. She spent six months in a psychiatric ward on suicide watch, and then she left the interceptor corps and trained for the Marine Corps Heavy Raider insertion teams, which is about as far from fighter piloting as you can get. She got the Fleet Distinguished Service Medal and the Solarian Grand Cross, and didn't get back in a fighter cockpit for a very long time. Hasn't flown in combat since." He shrugged. "Pity, really. After LeBeau told me she used to fly I hunted up her service record. She was one of the best fighter pilots who ever lived. Arguably the best at commanding squadrons in battle. I've always wondered why she volunteered for the run at R'shok. None of the guys who went expected to come back. Pass me the spanner, would you"
"Hey, Sampson!" A skinny short man with a red spot tattooed on his forehead yelled. "What's the deal with this lot"
"'Scuse me," He nodded politely to the Galactica crew. "I'm the top ESO in the squadron, so this is my problem. Chief, those fissionables of yours"
"We can't handle them safely, the equipment's on one of the fleet ships"
"We'll improvise," he said. "If nothing else, our suits are damn near impervious to radioactivity. Push comes to shove, we can just do it with gloved hands." His lips twitched. "And to think I thought this posting would be boring"
"SAMPSON!" LeBeau bellowed. "STOP CHATTING THE LADY UP AND GET OVER HERE"
He tipped an imaginary cap to Cally and tossed his spanner to someone else to finish the job. "No tact, that woman," he muttered, talking about his CO. "No tact at all."