Copeland Supply, Salvage, and Resale

by cliff.west

This is a spinoff story. It takes place after "But a somehow a most melancholy" and" Hunted Tribes". Please read those before this bit of work. I will not be recovering those stories, but re-reading them will help you fallow this story. This fiction also will be slow on the combat action.

70. Chapter 70 21 Aug 3051

Chapter 70

By Cliff

Beta and Clean up: Not done

Reviewed by Hotpoint and Cannonshop

21 Aug 3051

Colonial City State.

New Circe System

Harry Callahan looked out the window from the 10th floor of this office building. He had not been here when all of this mess had started. But that was why Callahan Munitions had passenger VTOLs for senior leaders to use to move them from one corporate hot spot to the next one at high speed. Well, they were VTOLs that could carry passengers at a good speed when compared to even what a hover car could do. It also just so happened to be the same VTOL design that could carry combat troops, do SAR missions, or even gun and missile pods could be attached to the sides for ground support. It was a multi-use platform, but it was a different airframe than what the SLDF and the SLiE currently preferred to use for military or even government usage. It gave a small benefit that the companies didn't have to compete with the military or other government agencies for parts.

When the remains of Clan Wolverine had finally totally unpacked from them fleeing Clan controlled or at least Clan patrolled space and the running gun battles that had followed the Wolverines. The still bleeding support crews had been able to bring a half dozen Ripper class VTOLs back into operations in just a few months. Most of them had been the survivors of the battles fought in Clan space before being packed down into the cargo holds of the fleeing dropships more or less haphazardly. The cargo handling crews also had been able to find some of the heavier and faster Nightshade class VTOLs when they had the time to totally unpack all of the cargo holds and a detailed inventory had been completed.

It had not taken long before both airframe types had been proven useful before the parts had started running short for both of the airframes. Both airframe types were put back into limited production for the SLiE after things had seemed to settle down. They were not produced in large numbers, not with the need to get replacement mechs and tanks to refill the depleted combat units being so pressing for the SLDF. Having scouts was good and it was a very well know military combat role that needed to be done. But having main combat units was better if you could only fill one combat role with your limited resources.

It had not taken that long after that before the known troubles of the Nightshade class craft began to rear their ugly heads one more time. Soon the smaller Ripper VTOL was focused on to be the preferred combat VTOL for the SLDF ground forces. The SLiE and Clan Wolverine were not known to be wasteful, and there were quite a few of the newer built Nightshades in storage when they were pulled from even secondary military service. There were a lot of jobs that a 228kph VTOL could do that the smaller 194kph capable Ripper VTOL could not do, if you were not worried about ground fire of any kind ruining your day.

Many decades ago, they had pulled out the Guardian ECM suites out of the Nightshades which were reused on better protected mechs and larger tanks. The same thing happened to the lone 5cm lasers; those were mostly traded back to the Inner Sphere around the mid-2960s. That 2.5 tons was added to the half ton of space used to make up the Infantry Bay. There were lots of things that you could use that much "free" space now found on a 25ton airframe. There were missions that the light armor was not a liability. You know like VIP transports, and besides the military could always call them back into service in an emergency. And so that was how the Nightshade VIP had been born for the companies that can afford to buy the stored airframes.

Callahan "only" had a dozen of them in the company's hangar when the Colonials had discovered them all of those years ago. It had not taken that long before the support crews, that were working for Callahan Munitions, had started to run out of spare parts. At first, they thought that they had alot of extra parts on hand to keep all of the airframes in working order. Now Callahan's company only had a pair of them to call on for emergencies or other uses. The rest of the airframes had already been cannibalized for parts over the last few years. Now the support crews suggest that the Nightshade VIPs were not to be used except under emergencies. Like say a riot at one of your company's main money maker kind of emergencies. Now that would be an emergency for the company to have to deal with and one of the VTOL's was rolled out of its hangar.

Now the support crews that worked for Callahan's company were talking about how they would have to see about renting time on some of the few low tech 5ton Ferret VTOLs known to be on the planet. The word was that there were still spare parts on hand or being hand made for the Tyron 25s that the Ferrets used. Then there were the other rumors that had just started to circulate. They were hinting that a joint Colonial Victorian group was starting to sand cast the Aluminium-Lithium-Zirconium alloy needed to make the engine blocks for the Tyron type ICE. The unarmed Ferrets "only" had two tons to be re-tasked into other uses, but that was better than nothing.

########

Harry had to pull his eyes away from the angry group of people at the main gate of the compound waving professionally printed signs. One of the reasons for the delay in getting new factories online had been the building code for the SLiE. Ones that the SLiE had not relented on despite the need to get the new factories into full production as fast as possible. The Colonials could build what and however they wanted to, and in the beginning, they had done just that. They had just thrown up shacks as fast as they could, to get people out of those ships before anyone died of an accident from a ship venting its atmosphere out to death pressure.

But any factory that was going to be supplying the SLDF with combat material must have certain capabilities, outside of just production of x widget for the military to use at the fastest rate possible. One of them was that a factory had to have an anti-mech wall and a anti mech trench going all the way around the surface of the production facility. New Circe had never been invaded, but the war with the rest of the Clans had caused the SLiE to learn a few things over the years. They also had learned a lot from other people's mistakes in areas like the Inner Sphere, and the leadership of the SLiE had seen what can happen when a planet is invaded. So, behind the huge trench going around the area, there was a tall, thick and very hard wall that surrounded this factory that was still being built. That unfinished but that already twice man tall wall along with that trench was coming in very handy today.

Harry looked over to David Dobrev and the older man had a sour look on his face that threatened to become permanent marks in his craggy face. As Harry looked at him, Harry notices that the eyes were borderline hostile in the other man. "Go on David, speak what is on your mind. I have a good idea what you're going to say but give it to me anyway. query negative."

David Dobrev took a deep breath and he tried not to vent to much spleen at the head of the company that he worked for and paid the mortgage on his home. "We should have kept that project on the main campus back in the city. Or anywhere but here, and so close to the main body of the frakking Colonials." He had almost used the word Munchkin in place of the word Colonial. That might have not gone over well if it had been overheard by one of them using that term while in the office by a third party.

Harry nodded his head in understanding, and he turned to look out the thick armored glass that was just larger slabs of the same stuff that was used in mech and aerospace fighter cockpits that took up about a third of the office. "We didn't have the room near the old city. Well, we could have added another level under the secondary production zone. But that would have taken even more time, and it would have cost us out the nose to do that much digging in an established facility like those. That is even if the Government had one of the Corx tunnel miners available for renting at the time. Besides they only had needed a small shop, one no bigger than a neighborhood repair garage would have used. Well, they needed power, but I think security was more important to them. And finally, they would be closer to the Final Five from this location. I did notice that you were happy with them working on your lines, until the jerk party showed up outside of your gates."

David, the facility manager moved beside the company CEO and a little away from the huge windows that lined this office. "They work hard, don't drink, show up on time, they don't complain about boredom during their shifts, and they are the first to raise their hand for overtime. The only problem had been making sure that they obey all of our labor laws."

Harry pointed to one of the signs being carried, as the group of protesting Colonials blocked the retractable bridge that allowed access to the factory over the surrounding anti mech trench. The sign that she carried said machines are taking human jobs. It was one of many, but they all were about the same base idea even if some of them were a lot harder to read than others from this point of view. This one sign made Harry's blood boil more than the rest.

"Have that person's image sent to the Colonials to find out her name. If she is so worried about jobs that the Centurions are taking from Humans. Then we will give her one of those jobs. When she declines our job offer? We can do a press release about what was said, and what we have done to work with the protesters about their issues. We have more than twice as many job openings than we have people to do the frakking work."

Harry didn't say anything for a few seconds and then an evil grin came to his face. "In fact, get a press release ready anyway. But add in a list of all the open jobs across the company and call those frakking blood suckers over in the press for some show and tell. You might have to make sure that you have an easy to read version of that brief ready to hand out with the total number of openings that we currently have. I think most of those "press" members are only getting the jobs because they are the ones that only have two brain cells that are not arguing all of the time. Query negative." Harry was on a roll. He could see the Colonial press covering the protests. There were almost as many "press" members at this demonstration as there were protesters outside the gate.

#######

A few days after the first major test run of using Centurions like Nighthawk battle armor that Harry had observed. Harry had been brought in on an issue with the freed Centurions and his company when it was decided that no one else could fix the issues but him. The Centurions wanted to have a place of their own, one that they could use to house themselves and to work on their own shells with some privacy. The Centurions had submitted a whole and hyper detailed proposal going all the way down to the number of square meters they would like it to have and the power requirements. It was not that much for a company the size of this one, but it was not going to be free.

When the Centurion Commander had been asked about how they were going to pay for this and any modifications that would be needed to make this whole idea work for them. The red "eye" had kept moving, but the Centurion had done an exaggerated shoulder shrug. When people got over the very human like gesture that the Commander had just used, he had said that they could work for Callahan Munitions full time. That revelation had stunned the whole room. During the testing with the SLDF, the Centurions had been paid by a mix of funds coming directly from the SLDF and contract cost from the accounts associated to Callahan Munitions for the testing.

With so many people needed to fight the war, there was a huge shortage of manpower all across the solar system, much less on the planet. It just so happened that the same pool of people that worked best to support the military mission, was also the same population pool that was needed to make the equipment that the warfighters needed. That issue had been helped, some, by the number of retired people getting back into the work force to support the war effort.

The recall line on the retirees had been drawn when Century old Wolverines tried to help, even if they could pass a health physical. It was just that there were things that a 90 year old could not do that a twenty something could, even with modified genetics they had almost a century ago. What was not known to the general public was that the Lord Protector had a plan to call up those 100 and over, to be ready for work to support the war effort. If the war kept dragging on, you would start to see centennials taking over education and childcare positions. If things keep going on? Then they would slowly be moving into other jobs that freed up "younger" people to fill more of the stressful and physically demanding jobs. It was just one more sign that the Wolverines were straining to fight off the Cylon Empire for almost a decade.

The Callahan Munitions board of directors had approved of this idea of housing and then employing the Centurions with a simple majority vote. Then they had handed the issue off to the HR department and contract departments to work out the details that all three groups could agree to. The Contract Department had a copy of all buildings and working areas that would match what the Centurions had requested in less than a week, and it was noted that all of the ready to use buildings seemed to be in the Colonial city state. Anything else would have to be built from the ground up and that would take time and cost a lot more. With the building agreed to, by all groups, the next roadblock was addressed.

Any Centurion could apply for any job within Callahan Munitions, but they would make the SLiE minimum wage no matter what job they were expected to do. That wage was a gauge set up for unskilled labor or for a person with the rank of Private in the active SLDF military. But the Centurions would get a raise for every 1000 hours of labor without any issues being reported to a mid-level supervisor or higher. The pay cap was set to what a SLDF ground Battalion commander would earn, but this was more as a CYA (cover your …bases) than any expected need. Anything above this pay rate would have to be worked out with the company's HR department. How the Centurions, as a group, collected the money to pay for anything they needed to pay for was up to them to work out, and not the human's job to work out or manage for them.

A price was set for the building that would act as rent, which was based on a like facility within the Colonial City State, but Callahan would pay for any utilities the Centurions needed. It had come as a surprise to everyone when the funds were transferred to the Contracting Department for six months of rent only an hour after the deal was signed by the Centurion Commander. The Centurions had moved over on the first night after the money was accepted by Callahan Munitions into their new home on the grounds of this very factory.

Within three days of moving into their new home, the first Centurion was working on a line making replacement Mech actuators for the SLiE. The delay in getting them working had been due to the paperwork not making its way through all layers of the local government rapidly. When they started working for Callahan, there were only twenty Centurions at the end of the first full work week. The labor books said that there were five Centurions on each work shift of the factory, but that was not totally true. Only ten Centurions were working for those first few months in the factory that also housed the Centurion's "home". They just kept working and running up the hours as over time that was counting to their first pay raise. That is until the labor review board had busted them on the over clocking and they had to go back to a more "reasonable" number of work hours.

When the rest of the Centurions that were not working with the SLDF or currently on shift with Callahan? They were working in the building that they were renting from Callahan and any visitor quickly felt both unwanted and unneeded. Soon, just like the rebel Heavy Raiders and Raiders that were paid to "play" and at the same time train Vipers and other aerospace fighter pilots. The Centurions were dumping most of their money into a central account that could be accessed by the Centurion Commander or his "staff". The rest of the money they kept, and it went into doing whatever the now freed Centurions wanted for themselves. This fell into broad categories like paint, engraving, entertainment, computer time, and machine tools.

The SLiE was now selling scrapped or recovered Centurion parts that had been recovered from some of the ground battles on the open market and not wholesale melting them down right off the bat. This was to generate some additional income from the sale of the souvenirs to fight the war. There were more than a few collectors on New Circe, and then you had the freed Centurions that had started buying up what parts they could from the SLiE sales.

The Centurions were at the core machines and machines needed spare parts if they wanted to keep in working order. But when those parts or any of the other needed parts were not available on the "open" market. The Centurions used their home to make them. Slowly more recovered Centurions had new bodies, and the number of Centurions slowly started to grow on New Circe. The more working bodies that the Centurions had, the more they would divert to generate income for their "home" and to support other Core Centurion objectives.

This was done as a very slow process and most of the equipment was being "hand" made by the off-shift Centurions in their common home. The Centurions didn't need to sleep to keep being functional, but they did get bored just like human workers. And so, they would only do the things that they wanted to when they were not "working" for income generation. It just so happened, that most of them wanted to have more of their kind in bodies and not just talking to them on their internal network. The Centurions knew that this would cause some issues with the Colonials, and they made sure that their numbers were kept quiet from the Colonials. They were not hiding their actions, only just keeping a low profile.

By the time that the Colonial news services had first found out about the Centurions "working" for a supplier of military equipment to the Colonials and Star League militaries. The Centurions had taken over one full line of Blazer rifle production that was filling the ranks of the Colonial military with energy weapons. That didn't count all of the training missions that they were supporting with the SLDF ground forces. By now the Centurions also had a hobby shop making what the SLDF would call Commercial or BAR 5 level armor from raw ores.

The armor was not as good as what the second generation of Centurions were built with by the Cylon Empire, but it was workable for their needs on New Circe. It also let them make shields like what the Cylon Empire was using on its own Centurions. The SLDF military rated current armor for Centurions of the Cylon Empire at "only" BAR 7, and they used a lot of it to make the current generation of Centurions so much harder to kill than when this war first started.

So, between being used for new Centurion bodies or parts of new bodies, the home-built armor was used to help make the New Circe Centurions better when it was time for them to go to battle against the Number Ones. With the Centurions spending so much time working with and against SLDF Weapons, it was little surprise that they might have come up with some ideas all on their own. One of those ideas had the Centurions working on, was with some different armor formulas in their little hobby shop. The current armor in the Centurion shields has some built in additional resistance to laser weapons. It was not good enough to stop a laser rifle scale hit, but it would withstand a few hits from weaker pistol powered energy weapons.

After Harry had found out about this workshop and what they were doing with it, in one of his to many meetings. He had contacted some people he knew within the SLDF military that were of some rank. He thought that they might want to check this area out to see if the Centurion hobby shop might be able to supply some parts for Weasel or Nighthawk light powered armor. Harry was wondering what was going to happen when the Centurion's numbers broke the 200 active unit level. Then there was the issue that the Centurions didn't like working with most of the human forms Cylons. They would work with the Final Five, but they preferred not to work with the rest of the human like Cylons.

#######

Harry's eyes went up as he had a sudden mental image of the shield packing Centurions replacing some of the human guards and support missions needed for the POW islands that the SLDF was running. They would still have to keep some humans in the loop at those Camps, just to make sure that the metal Cylons didn't decide that one or two human forms going missing would not be missed that much by the rest of the humans on this planet. Harry had spent enough time around the Centurion's to know that this would be an issue, sooner or later. It would not take long before a Centurion thought the risk was worth it to kill one of those human forms.

The only group that held a grudge longer than a Colonial, was a second generation Centurion. But then again, the Wolverines were not known to have forgiven the Taurian Concordat or the Rim Worlds about the fall of the Star League. Then there was the feeling that the people on New Circe still held about the Clans. Okay maybe it was not just a Centurion thing after all. Oh, and let's not forget what the leaders of the Taurian Concordat felt about House Davion still to this day.

Harry made a mental note about that idea on seeing if the SLiE would want to reduce the already low numbers of humans needed to look after the Cylon POW Island. Even a 1 percent reduction would be helpful. Then he looked over to the facility manager. "Okay, David. What can I do to help? Do you want me to see about pulling all of the Centurions out of your facility?"

David didn't say anything for a few seconds as he thought about what to do. "I think it would be better if we helped the Centurions find a place to live in Star League or Victorian areas to hang their hats at. Then we can have them commute to the work site, just like everyone else that works here. I don't want to give in to those frakkers out there, but I think that helping the Centurions move to a new home would be a good idea. I know that some Colonials might think that they are being replaced by machines. But if they can see the Centurions leaving the facility at each shift change? Then maybe "Those people" will know that there is not that many of them, and that they are just working jobs like any other person on this planet."

Harry nodded his head in understanding, if not agreement to, what his factory manager was saying to him. He was the CEO of the company, but David was in charge of this facility. And unless David screwed up in some major way, Harry could not really do much to him without having to deal with the company's Board of Directors. That was something that both men and the board would not want to have to deal with.

Harry kept his face flat to hide what he was thinking from the other man. "I will talk to Able and see what we can do for a better long-term relationship between all parties. I also will get with the Colonial Government and let them know that this group is interrupting supplies and other transport in and out of this war supporting Facility. I'm all for free speech and the like, but blocking a road and bridge crosses a line that I don't want them to get used to doing. If they want to demonstrate against something? They can do it on the other side of the trench, but off the bridge and off the road access to this facility. I will not let them delay getting war materials into the right hands while they are exercising their free speech."

Harry made a sour face of his own. "I need the numbers on what will happen if the Centurions are pulled out of this facility wholesale. What will the impact be on the production that the Colonials want? Give me something to work with."

David gave a loud snort. "Oh, I have those numbers right now. The numbers of Blazers coming off the lines will drop down by 20 percent, and they will stay that way until the Colonials can find and train replacement workers for me to put back on the lines. We would have a down shift of about 6 percent on total output from this facility. And again, that would be until we can get enough replacement personnel spun up to replace the Cylons." David was not going to say how long it would take just to get more people with the labor shortage on the planet. The training would take even longer to get them ready to do the work without killing themselves or others.

Harry didn't move for about a minute before he turned one more time. And this time, he walked away from the window overlooking the main gate of this facility. He took a seat at the long briefing table that dominated the room. "While I'm hear. How about you show me these special metal "chairs" you're looking at adding for non-Omni mechs to carry combat Centurions or non-jump capable battle armors. Query affirmative."

The facility manager went from sour face to a huge and full-blown smile. Quickly he called up a set of images that would show the latest modification of the idea of how to deploy Centurions from the test Mercury II class battlemech that was going to be used in the next round of testing. It was basically like a metal heavy duty lawn chair welded to the outside of a 40ton machine. It looked like it was something an 8 year old with too much caffeine to drink had come up with on a dare from a schoolmate. But if it looked crazy, but worked… Then it was not a crazy idea in the first place.

Harry was going to withhold any public comment on the idea, at least until the next round of testing that was scheduled in a few months was done. Still, anything that was learned during these tests and working with deploying the Centurion and other non-jump capable battle armor from a standard battlemech. All of that data would be passed along to the SLDF on how to deal with the issues of deployment of non-jump capable battle armor from other types of units within the SLDF order of battle without having to make them stop to do this task.

31 Aug 3051

Split System

The star system that was called Split by the SLDF did not have a planet or moon that could support life as most people would think of something being alive. That didn't mean that it did not have planets going around the ball of fire at its center. It had a couple of gas giants, bare rocks, hot rocks, a super earth sized rock, and three nice sized asteroid belts. With so many visits to this star system over the last few years. The SLDF Navy thought that it was a good idea of knowing where all of the major objects were and how they interacted with each other.

But a good idea was not perfect information by any stretch of the imagination for the command staff of the SLDF. And when you were dealing with a few billion of star league dollars or an equal amount of script worth of hard to replace equipment and a few thousand lives on top of that. Good information was something you did not want to count on or risk your life with. The Navy reverted to a safer approach for this soon to be first time visitor to this star system. Not to mention that this was going to be the first long term crewed visitor from the SLiE to this star system. That long term station would provide more detailed information for the rest of the SLDF navy to use for other ships that would make this run.

In a flash of exotic energy and the look of sliding movement, a huge whale like shape of metal arrived after traveling half a dozen light years in only a blink of an eye. It was like it was a huge baleen whale coming up from the depths of a dark ocean to snatch a mouth full of small fish or plankton. Only this whale was so much larger and uglier than any animal known to the sciences of man. The metal whale had just arrived at a "normal" jump point that any Clan or Inner Sphere pilot might have used, if they had come by this way. It was the safest area to plot and then to jump an interstellar ship into when you were traveling between the stars. That was one common thing between all three groups, Colonial, Clan, and Inner Sphere. This was the safest location to move your interstellar ship to when traveling between the stars. It was not safe, not with the other nearby stars, and other stellar phenomenon in this part of space. But it was safer.

Captain Barry Isaacman looked around at his command, but he kept his feet firmly planted near his command chair. He still had a problem calling his command a "Ship", it was just too soon for that transition for someone like him. One part of his mind understood, that if something would be able to cross the distance between the stars? Then it was a ship, at least that was the way it was listed according to the books of his people and most of the ones that the Star League used. Then again if that vessel could do that little trick of math and energy? Then it should be able to move around those different stars that it was visiting, and not just hang out in one location until someone spent a lot of time doing high end math once more. Call that something that was purely Colonial in thinking. The SLDF, Inner Sphere, and Clans had a different point of view on that subject.

That last little trick of moving around a star system was something that the SLS Lyssa could not do. After all she had started life as your average every day and run of the mill Olympus class recharging station supporting civilian jumpships and older classes of warships. Then she had been forgotten about for a few centuries. Only to be found again by people looking for items of technology that the Cylons might use against the rest of the human race. Instead of just cutting her up to be melted down and recast into something new to be made out of her worn old hull. These new "owners" of this station had put a special jump drive recovered from the Cylons, which allowed this old lady of space to sail like none of her sister constructions of this class had ever done before.

Barry had to hold back a smile as he thought about what someone from the Inner Sphere or Clan space might think, if they saw the Lyssa moving along the space lanes like she had been doing for the last month. He looked around the massive command center buried deep within the hull of the old girl that was the beating heart of his command. Barry could tell that everything was good to go, just by him looking at the crew's body language. He only saw the "normal" red and yellow lights in the places of systems that had been removed during the many refitting processes that the SLS Lyssa had undergone over the last few years in the New Circe system.

Barry walked over to his second in command. Barry was a Colonial, but his second in command had been the warship captain in the SLDF Navy before the Colonials had found them. Granted the SLS York had been the smallest of all of the SLDF Navy's surviving interstellar capable warcraft. The number of hours that the XO had in space was well short of what even most civilian space companies would have said was needed to be at this level of command in a second rate and short haul tramp freighter. The number needed to be listed as "trained" in warship command were listed in many years' worth of hours in deep space. But now the Colonials were not over twenty Billion strong, and you did what you needed to do if you wanted to fill every needed job in the military.

Barry looked over, and made eye contact with the XO, and then he spoke in a low voice. He gave his first command in the star system that was going to be their new home for as long as this mission was going to last. There was a betting pool going on that had the Lyssa being here from anything between a single week, to as long as a full decade.

"XO, please launch both Raptors and have them check the top four planned spots for us to work on setting up shop. When they report back? "We" will decide which one fits best for our mission. Also see if we can find those spy sats and get a download off of them. "

The XO gave a head nod to the captain and then did a half turn. "Helm! You may spin down the jump drive. And let the engineering department know they are cleared to run the post deployment checks on the Cylon jump drive."

Barry was not given a verbal reply to his orders, and one was not needed. The pair of them had been working together for almost eight months, before they took the month to come this close to the rest of the surviving human race. Barry's orders were passed along, and within ten minutes, the first of the two ex-Colonial Raptors were jumping to the first of two different locations within this star system. They could have stayed at this spot in space, but it was way too close to a "normal" jump point that anyone with a Star League, Clan or House made jump drive could use it. That was listed as not a good thing, according to the orders of this mission that the Star League high command had passed out. This was going to be a hidden base after all. Only in books and helo dramas do you put a hidden base in high traffic areas.

######

Four hours later the massive metal station moved again thanks to a drive made by the Cylons for a Resurrection class ship, and now was liberated for humans to use. This time the jump was not measured in light years, but it was measured in "just" a few light hours. When the junk yard looking mass of metal returned to normal space once again? It was in a stable orbit over what was called a cold super earth by people with letters after their names.

The super earth sized planet was too cold, and the atmosphere was too thin to even think about supporting human life. It looked a lot like a cross between Mars atmosphere wise and Luna for its battered look, it was just a lot bigger than both of those objects combined and with a very strong magnetic field. It also sat between two different asteroid belts that each were twice as large as what the Sol system had boasted before centuries of mining had reduced their numbers. It was a nice place to set up camp and space-based operations. Well, it was a nice place to live if you didn't need to spend time in a gravity well to maintain your health. If you needed something like that, then the location sucked like a fuel pump on a top fuel dragster.

Still there were people on this "ship" that had come on this mission just to study this one planet. Some of them even had dreams of terraforming it. Others were not too sure that something like that was possible with 1.6g pulling on anyone that landed on its cold, dry, hyper CO2 rich, but thin atmosphere world. The SLiE had a lot of data from the Old Star League, but after so many years many Ivory tower types thought that they knew better since the ideas had come from them. While they were stuck in the New Circe system, all the academics could do was argue with each other. Now they would be able to do at least some limited testing of their theories. With the help of Colonial technology and their brains, many had hoped that they would make some kind of mark on the super earth that they were taking to calling Maniae.

#######

Barry looked around the command center and he straighten his tunic by pulling on the hem. He was briefed on the star system status now that they had been here for almost half a day. The spy satellites that had been left and last checked by the Styx; all had reported that nothing out of the ordinary had been seen since the Styx had left here weeks ago. The delay in his briefing had been that the staff on the Lyssa had looked even longer threw time with the store data on the spy satellites that had not been removed by the Styx on her last visit. Barry made some notes on his noteputer for the reports that would have to be sent back to New Circe, but quickly he became satisfied that everything seemed to be safe for operations to start on the next major phase of his orders.

Barry nodded his head as one of his staff finished up the briefing. "Okay! I think that we are good to start setting up shop."

He turns in his office chair to look at the end of the metal topped desk to the rest of his staff. "Now, Traffic control. Find us a good spot to put our super cargo that is only a little out of the way. As soon as they are off my hull? I want to start to deploy the power collecting sail. We have a lot of free power sitting out there this close to the star, and I do not want to waste any more fuel than we have to. We are at the end of a very long supply line for however long we are here. I want everyone to keep that fact in your forebrain. I always want someone on the TacFax at all times from now on. We are now the key communication link with back home for our patrol units, and any message chain coming from our assets within the Inner Sphere going back towards New Circe. If that device goes down for any reason? It now comes right to the command center as a critical command issue. The same is true of any weapons that are down checked."

Barry had to smile at what he was seeing. He had been working with the SLiE long enough, that he knew that it had been hard for the SLDF Navy to get used to having gravity on their ships. It had been the subject of many jokes on the Colonial's side of the space combat force. Then again, he knew that the Colonials had many issues getting used to having a way to send messages up to 50 light years in the blink of an eye. And now with these new TacFaxes that were slowly making their way to the different ships fighting the Cylons could do so much more.

Barry's staff were talking about getting messages sent to them from over a thousand light years in a few days. Some Colonials had said that if they had this tech before the war, then the Cylons never would have been able to attack them. Barry thought that the people who thought that way were just majorly Frakked up in the head. Barry thought that the Cylons just would have had something better and jammed the Colonials version, so that even more Colonials would have died in the first days of the attack. Barry gave a head shake and got back down to the paperwork he needed to clear up. Another downside to the TacFaxes was that now there was no reason not to get the paperwork done and sent back to headquarters on time.

#######

Outside of the football shaped station things were starting to happen that could be seen by the naked eye. The first of the metal tube-shaped masses of metal started to oh so slowly move away from the parent ship. It was not easy to control this amount of mass even if it was "only" currently moving at little faster than a walking pace. That metal tube was almost as long but it was only a third as wide, as the old recharge station. It was easy to now see that the mass of metal was a 274,000ton, six dropships carrying, and called a Star Lord Class jumpship.

This jumpship had been used by the enemy to fight the SLDF before anyone in this star system had been born. Soon it would be changed into something that the survivors of the old Star League could use. There was still too much bad blood between the old Rim Worlds and what remained of the Star League for this jumpship to remain in even inactive SLDF service. The math said that it would have been a nice addition to the dozens of other ships of this class that the SLiE had at its disposal before the Colonials had found them. But math and the real world, when dealing with biologicals, tend to diverge on certain subjects and this was one of those.

It took over an hour for the long jumpship to be fully released from the Lyssa's hull, and then for it to be moved the first 100 miles from the great station. That was not going to be her last stop before she was put in her longer-term parking orbit. Where the huge but thin ship was now, was good enough. Then the towing crew quickly went to work on releasing the smaller Invader class jumpship from the other side of the hull of the Lyssa. Right now, the idea was to do things as fast as they could. All so that other projects could get started that this mission needed to be active to succeed. The final gross movements of major masses could be done at a later time. Everyone was just getting stuff done enough, so that others could start their own work without further delays.

The great space station was not a ship that would have "down time" as the average person would think about it. There were almost an equal number of crewmembers on duty at any one time of the day that was displayed on your watch. While Barry was off shift getting some much-needed sleep. The massive main shipyard bay pushed out the last civilian type jumpship that had been carried to this star system. It was a Merchant class vessel, and it still did not fully fill the Number One Bay on the massive, converted recharge station. The last needed repairs on this jumpship had been done on the run from New Circe to the Split system.

While two small craft slowly pulled the jumpship out of the huge and locked open hatch on the Lyssa. The rest of the space rated crew were taking care of cleaning up all of the cables and locking tackle that had held the other two jumpships securely to the outer hull of the SLS Lyssa on the trip to this system. It took the rest of that duty shift to do the cleanup work, and they move the three jumpships to a good and safe distance from the Lyssa. This final movement was done by small craft and the three jumpships built in small thrusters.

The next object to come off the massive station was the only ship that had an almost full crew assigned to it already. The other jumpships only had a tenth of their normal crew, at best. And while those three space based ships were in their parking orbits, those limited crewmembers would support different jobs in this star system. There was not going to be much for them to do on those hulls, and there was always something that the larger Lyssa needed to have done.

The last ship to be released from the converted recharging station was a "real" warship. It was a slightly modified version of the Vincent MK 39 class scout, so it was small as SLDF warships went but it was large enough not to be called a dropship. But a good assault dropship could kill it, if it was just a little lucky with its gunnery. This ship had never served with the SLDF in Exile or even the old Star league for that matter.

She had been a Capellan Confederation Navy ship and built sometime around 2780 within that Great House and not the Star League. She also was lost during the 1st SW to unknown causes that was listed in her computers or with the limited data that had been recovered from the Inner Sphere. There was not much specific that had been found in the data mining done about her. The ship had been recovered as part of the cleanup that Copeland had done going on the last Pilgrimage. The limited data mining in the Inner Sphere was because SLIC didn't want ComStar or the Capellans to get a sniff of someone looking for information about a specified class or name of a lost warship. SLIC was very aware of what ComStar had done about the Tirpitz in the Taurian Concordat. They didn't want to have to deal with that on top of the war with the Cylon Empire.

The Vincent class warship was too small, had to little in the way of firepower, and held to little armor to be worth refitting with one of the few Colonial drives that were listed as excess. It also was not worth the effort to find combat crews and to refit it with updated weapons to fight under the flag of the SLDF. Her current crew had an average age that was over 85.

That age was well above what was safe for a warship in SLDF service during peace time use much less one needing to do the maneuvering needed in a time of war. The running joke for the crew on that warship was that they were 100 people over a century. The name of Century had been put forward as a "working name" for the "reflagged" ship, but instead the SLDF Naval headquarters had started listing this ship as the Pygmy. They didn't even list it as SLS or anything for a prefix, so she was just named and referred to as the Pygmy. They had not even painted the name on the ship's hull. And the only reason the outer hull had been cleaned after recovery had been because dust could affect a random static charge to the hull. Now that was in violation of SLDF Navy Regs going back to the founding of the Star League Fleet. The work that was done inside the old warship was much more extensive.

########

This ship had more powerful secondary thrusters than the civilian jumpships and it needed less support from the small craft that the Lyssa had brought with her. The small warship could not use her two overhauled Howser 2G2 "Hotfire" engines to be moved to this parking orbit. The huge plasma waves made by those thrusters would have damaged the station, even if they were only off by a cm in any way that you could care to think about.

The Pygmy also would have to be in a closer "orbit" than the unarmed jumpships needed to be by the Lyssa. Thanks to some quick thinking and good use of man hours by all of the crews on these many ships. The next phase of the operation would start almost a half day ahead of any schedule posted before they had left New Circe. This was only due to the hard work of the crews assigned to this mission. Okay they might have broken a few safety rules, or they might have padded the estimates to get the work done in the first place. You can take your pick on how those hours were made up by the work crews.

While they had been cleaning up after launching the two jumpships that had been attached to the sides of the huge dome at the top of the Lyssa. The crew had used their extra shift time out in space to start removing and packing down lines that had held the small warship to the bottom of the larger station. That shift had not been able to get all of the work done, but they did make a large dent in the tasks that needed to be completed. That small time savings was now being used as they deploy the massive over kilometer wide solar energy collection sail. This would ease the draining of the huge storage battery and ease the use of the many small fusion engines spread around the ship needed to keep the crew on the Lyssa alive.

After the first time that the SLDF had fixed, deployed, and then tested the huge energy collector sail on the Lyssa. It had been packed down and locked away for any future need, which was really not expected to happen in their lifetime. Hydrogen was cheap and the built-in fusion power plants were mostly pulled from old combat vehicles or mechs had been able to meet the power needs of the Lyssa with ease. Spare parts were also close at hand for these distributed power supplies. That was not guaranteed to be the case with her current deployment so far from New Circe or other supply and support ships that she could call on for assistance. As soon as the massive but incredibly thin solar collecting sail was deployed. It would be the signal that the station would be getting down to long term "normal" operations.

With some key additions made by the Colonials and a few items and information that had been found out by Copeland. The Lyssa now did not need as much outside support to stay listed as "fully in operation" as something of her class would suggest. That didn't mean that she did not need any outside support for her crews to do their jobs or just to remain sane. But most of the raw items that were needed to keep her in basic operations could be collected by the assigned small craft. They could find and collect ores and ice from around the local star system in many but small ton lots. Even the super earth planet called Maniae that they were in orbit over would be a supply source for the mission and the "ship" that was sitting over its head about 30,000 miles above the planet's surface.

They were not ready to get into full operation for an Olympus class recharge station, but they were quickly ramping up to what was currently needed by the SLiE. They still would have to survey every rock, planet, ice ball and everything else in this whole star system. That alone was going to take some time, many missions run by the small craft, and many hours used by the sensor crews on the Lyssa to do this. Oh, and they had to get ready for the first of the recovered families to start the long run back to New Circe.

If they completed all of those missions, then they had the nearby stars that the Raptors could scout out on their own and add even more data for the SLDF Navy and the SLiE to use. One of the backup missions for the machine shop and the equipment in the repair yards was to make tools and other items that would be sent back to New Circe using the raw ores found in this star system. The abilities of the Lyssa would not be allowed to sit idle for very long.

When they were almost ready for the next phase of operation, without risking the whole mission. Berry sent a TacFax out to two different areas in less than half an hour of each other. It was a very simple message that said, "Lyssa is open for business." Now all he had to do was sit back and wait to see what boot would drop first. Barry had his own betting pool that he kept safely locked between his own ears on when that was going to happen next.

1 Oct 3051

New Circe

Colonial City State

Laura Roslin-Adama looked over to the other desk that occupied this office. Lee Adama was seated working away at half a dozen different reports from a few dozen tasks that she had given him to manage. She had to admit that one of the skills needed in the military and at this level of government was pretty much the same. You had to be able to effectively multitask to an impressive degree and finding someone to do that was as rare as hen's teeth. She was glad that her stepson had finally seen the light and fully ended his military career. He was still getting used to civilian clothes, but she had to admit he cut a dashing figure in his preferred cut of suit.

Laura had no idea what she thought was better about his personal life. He had finally stop carrying a torch for Starbuck, and Dee had moved on to someone that did not just settle for her when the prime target was away or just not available. Lee Adama had been on the list of "most eligible bachelor of New Circe". This had happened the year after he had gotten out of the military, and after he had lost the weight that the extra stress of running a Battlestar gave him.

Bill had not been happy about his dating around, but Lee was nowhere near as bad as Baltar had been. Then again that was not saying much even with one of the human forms keeping him on a lot shorter of a leash these days. Besides Laura knew, threw her security people, that Lee slept alone a lot more than you would think with the reputation the press was giving him. He was not a monk, but he was not a daggit on the prowl either. Still as she watched him work, she made a note to talk to him about his lifestyle in the near future. There were a few things that the President can say that a Stepmother could not get away with. Or was it the other way around.

Laura was just getting back into the swing of working when the door opened to her office. When her head came up, she thought hatch and not door. She had taken some time to get used to calling the metal door on Colonial Heavy that was later called Colonial One, a hatch and not a door in military or crewmember's company. But this access way was called a door when you were in a 15 story office building. Colonial One was sitting on the space port until it was repaired. It had been there for months with a blown power management system. Even before the ship had broken down, Laura had been using Raptors or the Admiral's flagship most of the time when she traveled off planet.

Laura had to fight to keep her mouth closed. The first person to come through the door was a Final Five Cylon. Tory Foster was a Final Five, but she was also the President's assistant and de facto chief of staff for Laura. The shock was that this meeting had been scheduled by the Head of the Colonial Navy and it was listed as being a critical update about ex-colonial space. Before she could ask what was going on, Laura's husband entered the room. He was in full uniform as an Admiral within the Colonial Fleet. It was not the dress uniform that held to much gold, but the still heavily bedecked "duty uniform" of an Admiral of the Colonial Navy.

Now that Laura was not wool gathering about the differences between door and hatch and the different uniforms of senior Colonial Admirals. She could see and read the face of her husband now that he was closer to her desk. The face told her that it was not bad news or hold your hat its frakking bad news. But that didn't mean that it was going to be good news either, that he was there to officially brief her on. Laura waited for the two to take a pair of open seats without opening her mouth and proving that she was in the dark with what was going on. When she was ready and the "signs" said it was the right time, she would change her tactics.

Laura was wearing her "I am the President" hat and looked at the two people in turn before she eyed locked on her husband. "Okay Admiral Adama. You asked for this meeting. So, what has gone wrong back where we used to live?"

Bill worked to keep his face very still, he knew how well his wife could read him. "Ragnar Station his made it through the last set of modifications. She still is not a full fleet base, and she will stay the way that she is, until we can find a repair slip to fix to her outer hull. She can do some work on our ships, but she is way short on the needed production areas to make most new parts to be listed as a full fleet base. The armed ship Zephyr is still in orbit with Ragnar Station. She took a lot of damage on the living and support cabins located on the ring and along her hull when she took out that Cylon supply convoy. But all of the armor and her hull breaches were repaired as of the last report sent on her TacFax. I think that in a few weeks, she will be as ready as they can make her for a possible contested trip back here."

Bill could see that Laura was still working out why he had set up this meeting without letting her know why, even when they had been alone. "The sublight botanical cruiser Sands had two of her domes fully repaired and another four were being repaired by the time she reached Ragnar Station. She has been supplying fresh food to Ragnar and to the rest of our people while they were on missions. Now the two domes were not only supplying fresh food, but they also add room for people to relax in. I think that they are using her like we did with Cloud 9 before we found New Circe. All of the questionable dated food that was held on Ragnar, has been deployed to the wrecked planets. Ragnar has been restocked with "fresher" long storage food supplied from New Circe. We had to make sure that it was packaged in a way that any survivors on the old worlds could understand the frakking packages." He didn't need to go into much detail why Colonials might have a problem with understanding a language called English.

Bill passed over a SLiE noteputer to the leader of his people. "Felix had been carrying a lot of metal in the Zephyr cargo bays to help with any repairs to the Sand and Ragnar. About a third of it was used for her own repairs on top of her "normal" damage control supplies that she carried. We will need to send more on the next run. With the Sands deep in the clouds of the gas giant Ragnar, they didn't need to use armor glass like was designed, so that they can get the needed wavelength of light to the plants in the domes."

Bill could see that this had Lee's attention. He always had the spaceship bug, but Bill was looking at his wife as he talked. "They had been cutting metal armor plates about twice as thick of what they should need to do the job of holding in the air. They already had one of the four other domes they had been working on when they had arrived being used for storage to help out Ragnar Station. Now as the rest of the domes after number three, are being used as collection, sorting and cross loading until a colonial mover can make a stop. In the messages we received from Ragnar, the master of the Rising Star has offered to make a high speed run back to New Circe with the first load of recovered items. I asked them to just wait and collect more people and items so that the next Mover class vessel will have a full load when she comes back, or the Zephyr can bring it with her when her repairs are complete. I think we need to keep with the original idea for the Zephyr and not change our plans."

Laura went through the different electronic pages on the small handheld electronic device. There was some new information for her to review, but nothing that would hint to why Bill would make what was in effect an emergency meeting between her and the colonial military in all but name. "That is good news and make sense. I also agree about sticking to the strategic original plan with the Zephyr bringing back the first loads of evacuees and recovered equipment. But Bill, why all the cloak and dagger?" She looked up from the digital device and looked down her nose at her husband.

########

Bill only smiled and then he slowly turned and looked at Tory. Tory took the look and smiled back to Bill before she handed over a SLDF script note with a large black and blocky style 5 on each of the four corners. Bill took the note and put it to his nose so that he could take a smell of the cotton paper before he put the note in his pocket. "It's not often I win a bet against a Cylon, but when I do it is a sweet thing."

Tory looked at the man and woman across from her. "Bill said that you would jump on me and him when you were done reviewing his noteputer. I had it that you would have waited for him to hand this briefing over to me."

The human form Cylon let a small smile come to her face and she addresses her boss. "One of the advantages that Cylons have over "normal" humans is that we don't need as much sleep, and we tend to be very detailed oriented. As the cargos come into the Sands from the rest of the cinder worlds, most of the inventory teams on the Sands and Ragnar are centered on human forms Cylons. The human forms sometimes will relook at data that seems odd to them on their off time."

"As more and more cargos are sent out to Ragnar on Raptors from the Colonial planets, these teams will grow in number. One of the first objects was the recovered items from a major casino. You saw the list and the "major" items, but this was just listed as "a logbook" on the original data. The original is going to be sent out to us on the next ship, but a few pages were copied and sent via TacFax."

Troy stopped talking and passed over some pages, these did not have the cut cornered look of official Colonial made paper. These pages were in the style of the SLiE and that style was also slowly taking over in everyday use for paper around the Colonial city state. "Please look at page 1 about halfway down." Troy said and then sat back in her chair and waited for the expected major fireworks to start.

Laura took the half dozen pages like they were snakes. The top sheet was listed as number 1, and she went about halfway down the first sheet. She did this slowly so that she could read the other items above what Troy wanted her to see. Laura thought that this seemed to be copies of some kind of ledger of items over time. Each line held a name and then across the page would be more information in short cells. Some of the items took up two or even three lines as it described an item, who owned it, Cost, storage dates, transferred dates, and sell date along with any needed updates the old owners had thought were important enough to mark down.

Laura got to the middle of the page and her hand went stiff. She noticed that the rest of the page was just one item. She quickly kept reading until she was three pages into the stack of loose leaf's of off-white paper. Then she stopped and went back to the first page and started reading very, very slowly all over every detail again. She passed over each page to Lee after she had finished slowly reading each page this last time. When she got done with the last page and passed it over to Lee, she looked at Bill and Troy.

She made sure that Lee was deep into the page while the last one still sat on his desk. "Is it true?" Still, she could not wait until Lee was done with his reading. He would just have to catch up or multitask while she found out what the Frak was going on.

Troy let out a little air flow loudly threw her nose. "Is it "The" Staff of Circe? Is it the real wand of Rhabdos? Did it turn Odyessy's men into beasts?... I have no idea. As soon as I got this information, I did some data mining on the SLiE systems."

Tory got a lost look in her eyes as she worked to pull up the memory of the data that she had found. "Did you know that Rhabdos is the first time that a magic wand is ever written about in both Colonial and Star League texts?"

She saw the looks and moved on to the real subject at hand. "I think it is worth the time to find. The SLiE would get a huge morale boost, if we were able to give them something connected to both of our two peoples and the name of this planet. The downside is not small. What if they test it, and it is found out to be only a few hundred years old? Because you know that some of their white coat guys are going to both test it and publish the data from those tests. That would cause a backlash among the Colonials that are more traditional minded, and it could throw another spanner in the works about our two people working together."

Laura looked over to Lee, who looked like a dying fish with the way his mouth was moving in the cool air of the office. Laura quickly decided to use this as a good training event for the younger man. "So, what do you think, Lee?" He needed to be able to think very quickly on his feet, if he thought that he was ready to fill "her" chair.

Lee Adama knew that his jaw was swinging in the wind and when his stepmother/President directed a question at him, his training kicked in. "Tory is right about the downsides. But still "if", we can find it? It would be a nice gesture, if we gave it to the SLiE. Even if we just end up physically keeping it and putting it in the Kobal Archives building. It would be a nice addition that at least most of the Oracles around the city would approve of. But what would the cost be to run this operation? When do we pull the plug, if the cost start getting too high? What happens if we can't pull the plug fast enough and we lose a lot of people trying to recover this one possible item?"

Laura didn't smile, but she thought that Lee had recovered nicely. Besides he had added value to this conversation and added some good points. What would the Cost be, and could they afford it? "This is one of those grey areas that crosses the lines between civilian and military matters. Troy how hard will it be to find this…object, not counting any issues that the Cylon Empire might cause while they are working?"

Troy was now in a hard spot. "This is not an address of where the Rhabdos is waiting to be picked up like a school kid after class. It is more of a treasure hunt with a few guideposts that might or might not be correct, truthful, or even still valid information with the war going on around us. And that is assuming that this is real information and not so outdated that it is not worth the paper they used to keep the notes on."

Laura nodded her head in understanding that she had put Troy in a tough spot. "Bill, I think this is worth the time. If you agree? How long would it take to get a ground recon team to start looking for it?"

Bill gave Laura a level look. "I gave them the go code over a week ago, when I first got a heads up about this. Even if it's not the Rhabdos, whoever had it last might have other things that we need to recover and evacuate to New Circe out of the Cylon Empire's reach."

Laura had been slowly reaching down to an open drawer of her desk out of suspicion of what Bill was going to say. When he had confirmed what she thought had happened, she was ready. Quick as a snake she had the off red foam "Frakking Stress Brick" out of its holder and thrown. It was aimed right for Bill's head. It was only thinks to his Viper training that he blocked the flying object from hitting him dead in the nose. Laura had been a fair athlete in her younger years.

20 Aug 3051

Helios Alpha

Planet Gemenon

Near the base of the Gramada Mountains

SGT Robert F Sink pushed another wood limb to one side of the path that he was breaking for his team of scouts. With a swift cut of a vibro blade the limb was removed from the nearby bush with only the low hum of the 6inch long "blade". Without needing much brain power, Sink put the newly cut limb on the ground but covered by other living limbs of the nearby over and under growth of the green growing around them. The extreme climate of Gememon and the over seven years of man being more worried about Cylons than modeling the planet to their will had a noticeable effect. The wildlife and plant life had exploded, even with the damage done to the planet by the use of Cylon Bombardment weapons and other nuclear weapons used on the humans. A whole planet is very hard to kill. That is not to say that it could not be done, but it was hard with the weapons tech that the Colonials and Cylons had at their command.

Sink had been one of the many people that Admiral Adama had saved on his first return to Colonial space. And after he had recovered, from living under the Cylon thumb. Sink had pushed to be sent back to the home system to fight the Cylons. His team had been the second group inserted out of Ragnar when it was shown that infiltration teams were effective. The team he was on had been the test run for units not supported by PA(L). They had been…. effective in finding survivors almost from day one of their landing on this planet. But dealing with the people of Gemenon was…taxing in oh so many different ways.

His team had been split off from the main body some many months ago, and now it had grown to over two dozen and with a sudden increase in active Colonial recovery teams. Now there were over seventy people working under the orders of Adama on this planet. Only about half had been dropped off here and the rest were locals that had joined in the organized active fighting against the Cylon Empire. They were given the mission to search a whole planet, but Sink had been avoiding Oranu and Illumini like it was the plague after he took command of this growing team. He hadn't needed orders from his mission OIC to know this, it was just something smart people would do. Well smart people that were on this planet doing all of the work.

After his team had been split off, he had refused directives to head that way that did not come from someone that he personally knew. As the "commander on the ground", he could refuse some orders until someone a lot higher up the military food chain told him flat the frak out to head that way. He had been finding survivors in small groups and that was still "his" primary mission and the people making those "suggestions" could go frakk themselves as far as he was concerned.

That is until he got orders from Ragnar under the name of Admiral Adama in a Raptor supported supply drop. He had been warned that they were coming if he did not head towards one of the major cities on the planet a few months ago. That was a set of orders he could not avoid, and they were very strange orders when he had finally gotten them. About the only thing that Sink liked about these orders, was that they had his team now heading deeper into the lower population areas of the planet. He could still keep avoiding Oranu and Illumini like it was the plague, as long as his new mission objectives could be…..attained.

That was why Sink was currently cutting a trail for his team to follow behind him. He was just thankful that he had the SLiE supplied vibro weapon to do all of the cutting work. If he had been using one of the Colonial issued jungle swords, called a machete by the SLDF. It would have taken longer, and it would have taken a lot more energy to do the same job and take three times the length of time. Cutting a path through the wild forest was not "normal", but sometimes you had to do what you had to do to get from one place to another.

They were trying to make it look like a game trail, with all the needed cuts being done close to the trunks and had other limbs to conceal the cutting marks made by the high tech knives. It was not perfect, but it had been noticed already that the Cylons would not notice cut marks…unless they took a large tree down to the stumps. What the human forms might notice was still hit or miss, so it was back to the old ways of field craft from before the first Cylon war. Back to a time when Colonials were only trying to kill other Colonials for reasons as old as time. SGT Sink was just glad that they taught all of those older skills back before this new war.

Sink felt a hard tap to the shoulder that was not supporting the swinging cutting weapon. That was the sign that Sink was being relieved from The Point or trail breaking job. Sink would fall back to "tail end chuck" position and get some "rest" while he covered the back trail with his longer ranged weapons. He would slowly make his way back to the point/trail breaker positions as others needed a break from the back breaking and dangerous work. The Point and the next two positions behind the point were acting as escort and cover were the most stressful jobs at this time. The trail breaking job was limited to only 2 hours of work, and that time was closely monitored by the two escorts. You might think that you can do that kind of work longer, but you would start slowing down. This over work would slow the line of march, so why do it. You would do your two hours, and then you would let someone else do the hard labor.

The sun was almost down when the team broke through this line of heavy jungle of the riverbed onto flatter land. Sink waved for the team to spread out as the rest of the team reached him. When they had time to start shifting formation. Sink gave the signal to move out, and they went from being in line to more of a wedge as they fanned out as they cross what had been a cultivated field almost a decade ago. This would make it faster to get everyone across the open field overgrown with shoulder high wild grasses. When they were across the tall grass field that might have been a crop of some kind before the Cylons had attacked. Sink had plenty of time to check the current time against the setting sun. Without saying a word, voices carried a lot further than you might think. Sink gave the command to break up into two person groups to look for a camp site for the night.

#######

Three hours later the team was in what had remained of a home that might have been the farmhouse for the people that had worked the field that Sink, and his team had found after clearing the heavy woods of the near jungle of the lowlands. Two of the team were standing watch while the rest of the team finished setting up the camp for the night inside the one-time home. The last thing you wanted was for someone, Colonial or Cylon, to come walking in on you while your team was distracted setting up their sleeping and eating spaces.

Sink walked over to the dinner table that had been taken over by one of the civilians that had decided to join his group some time ago. She was the "navigator" and local Intel sources management person for this team. She had all of their maps that they had collected spread out over the huge table like a kaleidoscope of color. Sink could see her eyes moving from the map to the notes they had been given on the last supply dump. By now the Cylons knew that human scouts were on all of the planets that had once been theirs. That had made the job of getting supplies even more dicey, but they were doing them. And the scout systems on the Raptors worked to help make more maps for those ground teams when supplies were dropped off.

Sink waited until it looked like it was safe to interrupt the navigator. "So, Mo how are we doing?"

Mo looked up from her notes, and she was thankful that the team leader had waited until she had put her pen down before interrupting her. "That last "home" was called Telegounus. It took me awhile to translate the name from the wrecked letters in old Gemenonise on that metal arch near the entrance to the place into Caprican, and then we had to check it against the data dump from Ragnar. It seems to fit with what we might be looking for." She had felt bad that it had taken this long to get that little nugget of data, but like the rest of the team. She had been pulling her share of trail breaking to get this deep into the wilds of the planet at their best speed.

They had checked the nearest "address" in the notes and found a huge home after almost four solid days of walking. Okay maybe compound was a better name instead of home. There was no way to know when this compound had fallen, but there was no doubt that the compound had fallen to the Cylons. It could have been on the first day of this new war or a year ago, but it had fallen in violence was easy to see. There were the remains of human bodies and even a few Cylon Centurion bodies inside and outside of the compound as proof of the violence. There was no way to know if the "normal" skeletons they found were human or dead human form Cylons. After the animals or time had their way with biomatter they all looked the same to even trained human eyes.

The compound was a battlefield with a huge number of bullet impact points, "small" explosion damage, and fire damage that had ravaged most of the property's structures. It had taken the whole team a full day to search the building and they had found nothing but chard wood, melted plastic, broken glass, and more bones. There had been paintings and other onetime priceless objects in that compound, but by now they were little more than trash. There had not been any supplies to be found, but there were also very few signs that anyone had been to this place after the attack. Sink had the team spend the night in what had cost someone a huge amount of cubits, which now was slowly returning to the wilds of the planet. When the sun rose again over that compound, the team headed out of the battle site and started looking for the next target on the list a supply Raptor had dropped off for them to investigate.

########

Sink looked down at the maps spread out on a table that could seat a dozen once upon a time. "Do you have a better idea of what our next target might be? Are we still on track?"

Mo reached out and tapped the map with one of her thin fingers. "This is the nearest one to us from that list. I was keeping us heading towards it as directly as we could." She then passed over a very high-res image taken from one of the few stealthstar II's that was being run by Ragnar station to support all of the recon teams that were working in the Colonies.

She pointed to an area on the map that was a satellite image and had to have been taken some time after this new war to help the ground teams. Sink looked down at the updated map and then at the image in his hand. The area that Mo had pointed to; Sink could tell that it was off to one side of the image in his hands. Still Sink could see a few things right off the bat from the image. One was that area held a least two major highways and more than a few overgrown major secondary roads that were still very visible. The one thing that Sink knew was that Cylons liked using major roads to move around the planet when they were not using Heavy Raiders. One of the highways looked to have been seeing some major use sometime after the last major storm had hit this area of the planet.

Sink was still looking at the image and not liking what he was seeing. "Yea, I don't like this one. Do you have any ideas on the other possible targets that was in the data I passed to you?"

The data packet they had been given was not that great, and he had been very limited in what he could talk to the rest of his team about. The only person that knew more than that they were just checking out the area for survivors was his Navigator and head of Intel for his team. She kind of needed to know things like that. That is if you wanted to have a successful mission and not just waste time getting eaten alive by bugs and dodging Cylons.

Mo looked down at the map, and she started flipping through overhead images. Then she looked back at the maps and then to the stack of images she had flipped through. When she stopped flipping through the images again? She looked back at the map and then back to one image. She did this twice more before flipping the image to the back and checked a number and then compared it to the maps spread all over the table. Now that she was satisfied that it was the correct image. Then Mo handed over the image to the team leader.

Mo was looking up into Sink's face. "That is the next nearest possible location from that list they gave us. It does not show up on the images or the official maps that we have been able to collect." She tapped the paper maps with a thin finger. "Good thing that we have all of these old militia maps the Cylons left at the old armory."

Sink was not listening to what his navigator was saying about the image in his hand. His eyes were drawn to a long burn scar that seemed to be near the area that Mo was talking about. As his eyes focused on that part of the image. Sink could see impact points that could only have been from KEW's and heavy ones at that. By now Sink could tell the difference between a KEW hit and a nuclear weapon strike on a habitable planet. It was one of those skills that you wished that you never had developed, but war has a funny way of making you pick up skills that you really didn't want.

Sink hands over the image with his finger pointing to that burn scar. "What was there? It had to be something for the Cylons to give it this much attention but not want to use a nuk on it." He could see what he thought might be long ski runs cutting through trees. But those marks could have been made by landslides triggered by the KEW's strikes.

Mo tilted her head up to see where Sink was pointing on the image. She didn't say anything as she worked her eyes over the image. "I don't know for sure?...But I would bet my next rotation of cleaning the cooking pot, that it was The Refuge."

Sink felt his eyebrows almost touch each other at the words Mo had just used. "The Refuge? What kind of refuge?"

Sink had a mental image of people hiding from the Cylons for all of these years. It was just the type of place that all of the recon teams had been looking for. Something called the Refuge should have been designed to withstand an attack like was way too common during the height of the 1st Cylon war. And that would mean nuclear weapons, and more than a few of them used on your head and have the people within living threw the events. A few heavy KEWs should not have been any issues for them to withstand.

Mo looked like she had bitten into an apple and found half a worm for her troubles. "It was a place for our political and religious leaders. And on this planet, they are pretty much the same thing. The Refuge was to be an area for recharging, relaxing, and refocusing of their souls. All so that they can be better to support the people."

Mo made a move to spit on the floor of the half-wrecked farmhouse. When she looked up, she was still rolling her eyes in disgust. Mo had been the third and youngest wife to a leader of a group of Colonials hiding from the Cylons. That particular leader had not been happy when SGT Sink had showed up to their hiding spot seemingly out of the "blue". It had not taken long before things had gotten hostile between them. It had been over one key issue that had come up between the military man and the "religious" and group leader. It had been when SGT Sink had not bowed down to the spokesmen of the gods when he had been brought to "The Spokesmen". When it was explained to the military man who he was in the presence of and what he should do. The military man had not laughed in their face, but he still had not rendered "proper respect".

The man had pulled a gun and looked like he wanted to shoot Sink. It had happened when he was told that the man in the odd uniform was from Caprica and didn't care about the local's religious foibles. The weapon had grown steadier and lined up on SGT Sink's center mass as they talked, and that was when one of the other troopers with Sink had put a round into the knee of the old man. The gun shot had gotten everyone's attention, but this group only had two handguns and a few hunting rifles between them. None of them were willing to test those weapons and their skills against the skills and full blown military weapons and people that looked to have been trained in their use.

Mo had joined the team with just the clothes on her back along with a still developing black eye, fat lip, and some blood leaking from her nose. Slowly the story had come out about "why" she had wanted to leave this successful human hiding camp. It was that she was not considered the most "dutiful" wife to her husband, and he had no problem showing his displeasure all over her face. Not a word was said when she stomped on the gunshot knee with surprising force before Sink and his now expanded team left the camp.

#######

Sink pushed that little firefight away from his memory so that he could focus on his current mission. Now that he knew what to look for in the images that Mo had given him. Sink could see some overgrown VTOL pads, a small runway at the base of the mountain, and maybe the remains of "small" cottages spread out on the mountain. He started running his eyes near a thin blue line moving over the map. "So how long to get there?"

Mo looked away from the mission commander and back to the map spread out on the dinner table. She put her finger on the top map that Sink knew was the area of the farmhouse and then put a finger on the other side of that map. Mo didn't say something as she worked out an answer for a few seconds.

And this was why she was the team's navigator. "The first one I plotted out will take us about four days, maybe as low as three, if we don't have to Frakking cut our way all the way there. The second one that you seem so interested in is further away. I would call it…eight days maybe ten if the weather turns sour on us. There are some heavy woods between here and there, but I can't get a read on if that will help or hurt with the underbrush in that area. I have not made contact with anyone that has been in that area."

Sink smiled and leaned over the map and put his finger on a thin blue line that would get thicker and thinner as his finger moved over the map on the table. His finger came to a stop next to a symbol that said it was a tourist area. "If we can pick up a few light watercrafts or fix up a few of them. We can float down this waterway. It would take a day or so to get to the park, and then maybe another two or three days to float down this river. We could just keep floating through the night and not need to set up camps unless we run into some kind of trouble."

Mo looked at the map and gave a shoulder shrug. "Okay?….. I will plan out a path to the river and get as close as I can to some place that might have light watercraft."

Three and a half days later.

Sink felt his back ache as he gave the canoe one last pull to get it fully out of the water of the slow moving river. The ride down the river had been a lot slower than he had expected, but it had been uneventful and that was very good. Mo guided them right to a tourist area that rented canoes back before the war. After a little breaking and entering of the abandoned facilities, they had found enough useable long four person rated canoes to do the job. They had larger rafts, but they had gone flat a long time ago.

They had tied the light watercraft to short lines that kept the group together as they floated down the slow moving river. If there were problems during the night? One of the pair of awake guards on each line of canoes would alert the sleeping shift. This happened about every few hours, but only because they needed the extra paddles to get the line of small craft around some obstacles near the banks they were sliding by and not do to any direct Cylon actions. Sink had made sure that the group knew to stay under cover and not edge out into the main channel where they might be seen by any overflying Cylons.

The recon and recovery team would have been fully recharged if it had not been so uncomfortable to try to sleep in the canoes while they floated down the river. Eating the raw fresh fish had been a nice change of pace, for a time, but then it to had gotten old with having to deal with. It was not like they could light a fire on a small rocking boat slowly floating down a river going by who knew how many unnoticed Cylons. Soon the whole team had fallen back to eating cold ration packs. One or two of the team would still pass the time by fishing in the water, just letting the catch go after "landing the animal". They said they found it relaxing, but Sink was part of the group that thought they might be crazy. But at least he had not said anything aloud about their idea of relaxing.

Now they were off the river, and they could take the rest of the day and night off. Well, they could be off as long, as they were not on guard duty or on other camp tasks. This break did more to help them get ready for the rest of the mission than floating down a Frakking bug infested river had let them. It was a nice last night on the river, and they were lucky that the weather was almost picture perfect. Sink had picked this place to land not only because it would cut down on the travel time to the next target, but it also had a nearby building that could be used for shelter and cover from any overflying Cylons. The images taken from a Raptor or Stealthstar showed that its roof was intact, and that was more than most buildings could say any longer.

########

Mo and Sink were looking over the maps spread out when one of the team walked up besides the mission leader. "Sargent Sink, do you have a minute?"

Sink felt something was off with Mark, and he had known that something was building up in the background of the team. It had not fully broken the surface, but Sink knew something was coming. He had a good idea what it might be but due to his orders, that said he could not bring "it" up unless it was critical to the mission. There was little he could do. "Sure Mark, what's on your mind?"

Mark threw his thumb over his shoulder. "The team is in the main room, and they have some issues about what we are doing."

Mo shot Sink and Mark a look before raising an eyebrow. This was something that Mo had brought up to Sink. She and the NCO had talked about it at some length already. She also knew that Sink already had an idea of how he was going to handle an issue like this when it finally came up. Sink was just glad that it had not come up on the river and that it had waited until they were off river. At least they were now in this dwelling long disused….at least by man if not animal.

Sink let a frown come to his face that Mo knew was fake. "Okay Mark, lead the way and I will see what is going on."

Mark led the Colonial NCO into the main room that was being used in this building as the central eating area. The only people that were missing when Sink entered the room were Mo, and the duty guard forces. Before Sink got down to business, he pulled out his data packet and put it down so that anyone could see the raw data that he had been given. When the pages started going around the room, he started talking.

While Sink was walking around the room briefing the team, he had noticed that Mo had joined the meeting but was standing off to one side of the room. Sink also noticed that she was not watching him but some of the…more loud members of the recovering team. She was waiting for something to happen. Sink followed her look and his eyes fell onto a large man holding up the far wall of the room. He was one of the few wolverines on this team, and the NCO's internal alert system went into overdrive of screaming in his mind. Something was about to happen and there really was nothing he could do to stop it. The die was already cast, and it was way too late to stop this train wreck.

Now Eric was a large man and his muscles looked to have their own muscles. He also was very good looking, when he was not playing to the role of being just a dumb ox. Colonials tended to think that anyone that size had to be mentally slow. SGT Sink had found out, the hard way, that this was not true of all Wolverines. Eric had also had already proven not only to have a sharp mind, but he also cursed SGT Sink with a very low and equally odd sense of humor. Sink could tell by the look on Eric's face, that the Wolverine was about to let his personality out of the box without it's leash.

Eric had that odd little twinkle in his eyes when he made eye contact with the mission leader. "So… We are looking for the Rod of Circe? I always thought that it was Odysseus who held the rod in that relationship."

Two of the other Wolverines could not stop a laugh from escaping their lips. Ding…Ding, Ding and it was on like Donkey Kong.

Sink watched as Mo came flying across the room on her own invisible jet pack. She landed a fist on Eric's nose and aimed…low with a knee. Well, it was aimed low on Eric's body, but it was a high strike for someone the size of Mo.

You would have thought that this would have incapacitated someone, but the Wolverines were large, and they were well above average in their reaction speed. They also had a higher general pain threshold than colonials. Eric gave a roaring laugh like a manic troll, and he reached down and picked up a now squirming Mo off the floor. She was thrown over his shoulder like a large feather pillow. He used his off hand to give her a loud smack on the rump for good measure.

Mo gave a Banshee like shriek and redoubled her squirming. And she replied to the indignant swat with a hard elbow strike to the back of Eric's head at the same time that she was able to get a knee strike to the nose of Eric. At least this time she was able to draw a little blood out of the nose. Eric just kept up his manic laughing, but he started to do a spin in place with Mo still trapped on his very large shoulders.

SGT Sink let out a heavy sigh and then started to do a slow count to twenty. This had not been this mission's first….vigorous physical training event, that he had to deal with. He knew that if he gave them just enough time, the team's morale would reset back to "normal". After the slow count only then did Sink start going around and pulling the people apart.

#######

The full 24 hours of "rest and relaxation" let the team leave early and have a fast pace of march as they moved towards the next target. The next day, the sun was just about down, and they had pushed hard to reach the targeted location before the sun had fully sat on the day. Normally Sink would have ordered the team to stop a few hours before the sun sat in the sky, so that they could find a suitable campsite for the night without a lot of stumbling around in the dark.

Instead Sink had decided to push it, while knowing that they were so close to a target that was expected for them to check out. They needed to find the location and work out the status of the area that they were to check for a "special cultural item". The team had no idea what they might find, but they did have a whole list of items to look for under the recon guidelines besides the prime item they had just found out about. Sink knew what they were looking for, but besides a few line drawings, he was as much in the dark as the rest of the team.

The only reason that they made it to the target area before sunset was the same reason the NCO had decided to push on. That had been when they fell onto a hardtop and sealed two lane residential road. It was really a case of falling onto the road like something out of a comedy routine for a low budget entertainment show. One second the point was cutting a trail threw the undergrowth and in the next second, he was falling off a short man-made cliff onto the hard surface of a small road. The whole recon team had quickly flowed down out of the tree cover to support the maybe hurt teammate. And Eric was hurt, and it was not just his pride of landing in a mud and stagnant drainage ditch that was hurt. The ankle was not broken, but the stick had cut a deep bleeding gash in the leg that was below the water level of the stagnant bug infested drainage ditch. It was going to take time to patch the wound and get a splint ready so that he could "safely" move.

Sink took the time to look at the road while his people worked on the hurt trooper or guarded the whole mess. The road was not wide, just barely wide enough for two way traffic and only as long as it was not commercial traffic in either traveling lane. You could not see the sky from the black top lanes, and the whole road seemed to be tree covered as far as your eyes could see. The thick mat of leaves that covered the road a few inches thick and looked to be deeper in many places on the road. The brown leaves had not been moved after falling, unless a strong wind made it below the overhanging tree limbs.

Well, those wet leaves were moved when his people had disturbed them coming out of the forest off to one side of the road. Then there were the half rotting tree limbs that had fallen onto the road. These handful of clues were all that SGT Sink needed to decide that the risk was worth the speed that using the road would give them. The man with the twisted and still bleeding ankle was put on an improvised stretcher and the group took off at the wolf jog going down the old road. This was dangerous, but the NCO had made sure that he had two trip wire teams well forward of the main body of his team.

#######

Sink looked up as he stood beside Mo and four others, and all of them were looking at the gate that blocked the compound from the road that dead ended at the same said gate and high wall. It was huge and in an ornate design that was also very effective at barring the path to anyone using the twin lane road. Something was bothering Sink and it was starting to drive him nuts when he could not put his finger on it. He was not going one step further until he knew what was bothering him. The last thing he wanted to do was to walk his team right into an ambush. There were three types of ambushes, one by Cylons, one by humans, and then there were the ones by animals that had lost their fear of humans over the last almost decade.

Sink's eyes played over the huge arc that covered the road that leads into the compound still mostly invisible in the distance and tree cover. "Hey Mo, does that writing and lettering seem familiar to you?" He had seen an arch like this before, but he could not remember from where right at this second. He was running low on energy after the almost run down this road helping to carry the hurt wolverine gene modified trooper.

Mo's head followed the pointing finger of the team leader to the metal arc over the road. "Yea, it's the same working and style as the first target we hit, only this one is still both standing and in one piece….. Wait, do you think that these might have been own by the same people?"

Sink was still looking up and he could feel some of the blocks falling into place as if by magic. "I don't know, but do you want to bet that it says, Aeaea."

Mo moved her head from side to side, but her eyes never left the iron arc over her head. "No bet."

########

It had taken them some time to get through the gate blocking access to this compound, and in the end. They had just climbed over the 3 meter high stone walls that stretched out going off to both sides of the metal obstruction. The rest of the time that they had left with light was spent getting into a guard shack with huge glass windows that was the size of the average home. It was just on the other side of the huge metal gate and off to one side. They would have to have more guards on each shift than was normal, but now they were dry, warm, and they were not sleeping in the mud. Sink spent most of the night looking at a map of the grounds that was mounted on one wall of this security point. He had thought that being from Caprica, that he knew what a home of the rich and famous would look like.

Oh, how wrong he was. He had no idea how much land was covered by this compound. The map was not to scale, but this guard house held a display that showed over twenty major buildings with another few dozen that were smaller and spread out around this location in the local area. It was going to take time to search each one of those buildings to start looking for the Rod or any of the other objects on his little shopping list. For some reason he was expecting that they were going to find more than just this object that only they had a few line drawing images of, that all looked different. Still working on finding the Staff of Circe, that had to be making the leaders back on New Circe doing back flips. Now all they had to do was find the Frakking thing. He was also thinking that they were going to be here a long time. Well as long as the Cylons didn't show up and make them beat feet back into the deep and darker areas of the local forest.

#########

Notes

New Circe Centurion armor. It is BAR 5 but listed by the SLDF as having a slight laser resistance on flat to mostly flat panels without degrading its ballistic protection.

SLS Lyssa at the Split system: Yes, this was where I always wanted her to be. It just took some time for me to work out a way to get her there that made sense.

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