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.

73. Chapter 73 Mid November 3051

Chapter 73

By Cliff

Beta and Clean up: Not done

Reviewed by Hotpoint and Cannonshop

Mid November 3051

Lyran side of the of FedCom

Peary Clemson was sitting in the kitchen of his nice home that they were renting with a placid look on his face, but he was wracked with despair. He was trying to work out what to do next, and he had run out of things that might work, at least in his head. Word of what was being called the 5th Wave of the clan attacks had started with world after world again falling to the clan invasion. It had not taken long for this news to spread at the speed that was only possible due to the faster than light messages coming out of the HPGs run by ComStar. This news flow was sped up because of the number of fleeing jumpships jumping as fast, as far as they could without killing their crews, or breaking their ships to badly. The only thing that could spread faster than the rumors within the Inner Sphere in this day and age, was bad news.

The "year of peace" had given him hope that the Clans would not be back, or at least not be back in his lifetime. But they were, and they had been reinforced by more and new clans along with their attached units. He had wanted to leave this planet almost a full year ago, but his father had vetoed that plan to flee deeper into the heart of the now united FedCom. This road blocking was causing his son no end of lost sleep as he worried about the future of his family.

All he wanted to do was save his family from this new war and any future wars if he could help it. He had thought living on this planet was perfect when they had first landed. They were not near a contested boarder, but they were still deep enough as not to have to risk too many pirate raids from the outer edge of the FedCom. There should have been enough FedCom mech units and aerospace fighters to stop these attackers, and they had seemed to have slowed them down. But something in Peary's mind told him that they still needed to go just a little further. They had been lucky that they had fled at the first news of something strange happening on the edge of "known space". What he didn't know was how far this enemy would make it into the country he had been born into.

So, every week after arriving on this planet, he found himself looking at transportation routes to get deeper into this side of the FedCom. Then he would work on a way to talk his father into moving, again to some place safer from the clan onslaught. By now he knew what would not work in talking to his father, so he would have to come up with something different. Peary was interrupted in his mental jungle gymnastics, by his 8 year old daughter. She was pulling on the thin sleeve of his over shirt with the persistence only found in someone of her age group. When Peary looked down, he was drawn deep into her deep blue eyes. The eyes that matched those of his long dead wife. Every time he looked into those eyes; he had remembered that loss. The Dropship crash had left him with only an empty casket to put in the ground without him even having that little bit of closure.

"Daddy! All of the lights are on! Daddy! All of the lights are on! Daddy! All of the lights are on!" She tugged again and started to try to pull him towards the entertainment system in the next room.

Peary let himself be drawn into the room by his little girl, and on the display were tri-d images about some kind of Resort wanting people to come spend their money there. In the background was a song about leaving all of the lights on for a long-lost person or love. Peary was dumb struck, and he could only watch the last 30 seconds of the message as it was displayed on the screen. Peary was locked kneed, and he was planted to the floor of the apartment like some great oak with his arm being pulled at an odd angle to his body. When he finally had been turned around, he saw his father sitting in an overstuff chair in the corner of the room. He noticed the sly little smile on his father's face. A smile that his son had not seen in a very long time.

The Elder Clemson knew that their last name had been picked out from an old list of warship classes from old Terra's wet navy past. It had been when his father had left a well-hidden planet to spy on the Inner Sphere, and he was to help with the cycle of resupply runs that they needed to keep prepared for the return of an old and evil enemy. That man had died when the now Elder Clemson was only ten years old. That death had been due to an industrial accident that thankfully had been quick for the 100 souls lost, that had included the first Clemson.

That sudden death had cut off the training of the now elder Clemson abruptly, and it had only barely started in the first place. His mother had been a drunk, and that had only gotten worse after her husband had suddenly died in that industrial accident. That had left a 10 year old boy clinging to what little training and stories that his father had given him before he had never returned from work that day. It had been a life ring that the young Clemson had felt saved his life until he was able to move out of the growing hell hole of a home.

Now the Elder Clemson made eye contact with his son being pulled around by the arm by his granddaughter. His son let his young daughter lead him to the second overstuff chair before letting go and leaving the room. The Elder man gave his son a knowing look before speaking. "I think a trip to Canopus IV would be a good idea. What do you think, son?"

The Elder Clemson knew that it was not going to be that easy to talk his son into taking this route. But at least now they had someone to talk to, and a place to run to with the whole family. The elder Clemson had been pinning his family's lives on those long ago vague stories and a song lost to the mists of time in the Inner Sphere. He had faith, and at least this time it seemed to be paying off for the Clemson family. Soon it was going to be the time to see if his faith had been misplaced for all of these decades.

########

The round trip for messages between the two planets should have taken a few weeks. There was a faster way, but this small family could not afford to pay for faster delivery of the message outside of the "normal" route of faster than light messages. This planet was not a major world, but Canopus was and rapidly growing, so it would not take that long for their message to reach the desired end point as it had done even half a decade ago. Then it would only take someone to read those messages all the way on the other side of the Inner Sphere before the next move could be made by the family…or someone else.

By the time that the Clemson family had sent the first message across the whole of the Inner Sphere from the Local ComStar run class C HPG. They had seen the advertisement a few times on the tri vid mounted on the dwelling's wall. Each time it played; it made the case easier for the elder man to sell it to his son. The song in those adverts brought back many long lost memories to the elder Clemson, and it seemed to take him back to some "happier" times every time that advert played. It would not be long before Trace Adkins was rediscovered by millions of music fans thanks to Every Light in The House playing in the background of that advertisement.

It was not that much later, only about a week from that first message. Then the Clemson's family name was added to a list of names that also just happened to contained names like Fletcher, Sumner, Akizuki, and a dozen other names that were on a list that Lora had been given by Jess from the almost forgotten SLIC files. Any messages that made it to the Resorts and had made a reference to White Christmas or leaving all of the lights on? They also were moved to the top of the list for getting a room at the Resort and the launching of a return contact message was sent.

This jumping of names caused some issues with some of the locals that were hired to "run" the newly reopened Resort. It would take some time before the local hired workers had stopped asking questions about why these unknowns were getting the full VIP treatment from this newly reopened resort. All while names that were of known nobles were just bumped down the line like they were nobodies or riff raff of some kind. They just had no idea of what the Resort's senior leaders' thought was an important person in their books. They were just lucky that the Resort was new and large enough that this bumping down didn't really happen that often to affect the arranged arrival dates of those noble families looking for the next "new" thing.

Lora would not discuss anything that was outside of a very strict outline that Jess and she had worked out to anyone, that was not part of the Family or their close network. Most of the people that contacted the Resort were coming on their own C or H-bill, but not all of them fell into this category. That was another fine line that she was having to navigate with very little guidance and even less experience. Travel tickets were passed along to those that "fit the profile" for any name that they knew was on the SLIC list.

The ones that were borderline were just handled like any other Resort would have done, which might or might not change after they had arrived. SLIC also had given Jess genetic samples of all of the people that had gone into the Inner Sphere. They had also supplied the names that they had left with, and a few possible aliases that might have been used after getting first set up. Robert and his family had the gift of being the only ones that knew what ones of them that were still active. It was carefully not looked at how someone in his family had gotten that information.

The families that were still active within the Family Network were coming out of their normal jobs, and they were bringing "things" with them that they might need a little help with getting them to the Resort. Most of these "things" might fall in the category of "normal consumer goods" as what someone born with in the Inner Sphere might think about it. As names on the list were contacted by the Resort, the subject of luggage and other transportation issues would be brought up by those that were more familiar with the resupply missions that New Circe had been running. Both sides had to worry about someone unfriendly that might be keeping an eye on them, so no one was bringing a battalion of battlemechs or something along those lines with them.

They also could not make it look like they were moving to the resort to live. The slowly growing map of those old mining tunnels were going to come in handy for storage that needed to be kept out of the public eyes. Then you had the tanks that Virginia Hall was going to have shipped out that would need to be held somewhere safe and low keyed. Still those people were only moving that way for a list of reasons that these moving families would give out to others when asked. After all, they had a lot of open jobs in that area of space, now that the MoC's economy was booming like it was. Oh, and it just happened to be on the other side of known space from the invading clans. The last was enough reason for 99.9 percent of the people to fill their curiosity.

Lora had already spent nearly five million C-bills of her budget on shipping cost in the first few months that the Resort was opened. Her budget would get some of that back in the end of the trip, but right now it was costing a lot to get some of the most active families ready to be pulled out of the Inner Sphere. The first people to come into the resort were the extended members of "The Families" that were the closest, or the ones that had been planning for this move too happened for some time before the song had been sent out. And the first families had just arrived when word of the new clan attacks had reached Canopus from the other side of the Inner Sphere.

Few would know that the warning and other news had not come out of the ComStar news service HPG reports on the planets of the MoC. Most of the information had come on the wings of jumpships or slipped into coded messages to certain groups on the planet and nearby systems. The next fastest sources of this types of information were coming out of the FedCom Central News Service and the Voice of the Dragon news service. MiM and Lora were some of the few that noticed this was happening with the data flow. ComStar was "helping" but for some reason they were not being totally truthful about the news coming from the Clan front. What they had to figure out was if this was just them passing on the wrong rumors or was this an active form of deception being performed by the leaders of ComStar.

It was "only" 32 days after the first message that was sent by the Elder Clemson on the HPG network going to Canopus. Then the whole family of the Elder Clemson and their remaining luggage were boarding a cramped modified cargo dropship at the nearby drop port. They had not been able to save much money since they had arrived on this planet after fleeing the clan invasion of their old home at the end of the first months of this new war. They had been more worried about speed than anything else at that time.

They would not have even been able to afford this normally cheap ticket, if the Resort had not paid for three seats and 30kg of luggage for each of the family members coming on this vacation. They would be packed into that modified cargo dropship almost like sardines or processed meat. It stayed that way for three weeks, before they would change dropships for the first time. Then they would be taking a single 2nd class cabin on a real passenger liners for the rest of the journey to Canopus. As far as any of the crew on those dropships knew, these were people just looking to start a new life in the MoC. By now this was not so rare of a story for the dropship and jumpship's crew to hear and talk about in the bars outside of the drop ports around the Inner Sphere.

Bivouac system

15 Nov 3051

Robert was relaxing in the cabin on the huge gravity deck on this space station as they waited for a guide to show up. The Styx had been moving around stars that had no planets and also in the deep black of space to try to stay off anyone's (read ComStar's) threat radar. They did some scouting along the way, but they were just killing time so that they would not arrive to soon even with "LF batteries" to speed the run of the jumpship to this location. The plan was that when the Styx arrived at this star system it would leave all three dropships behind to check out the local area and do some light trading. At least before the jumpship started making a short time trip back to pick up the load of steel and the SLDF's newest dropship. All the while moving as fast as the Styx could while hiding from the rest of the Inner Sphere.

At the same time, the Styx was working under a false IFF calling herself the Uncle Ralph when she showed back up at Canopus. Her crew would also check in with Lora and receive any reports that needed to be sent to Robert or if things went really bad, run all the way back to New Circe. Robert was hoping for an update on what might have been found in those tunnels while he had been gone, and an update on how the plan was moving about any of the lost Families making contact. After both types of pickups were done by the hiding Styx until "it had recharged its jump drive" then it would start moving along. These were types of data that they didn't want to risk sending on a ComStar Run HPG. It was risky enough to be sent over encrypted radio.

Then the modified Tramp class jumpship would again stay in the deep black of space as it returned all the way back to the Split system with the Mammoth class dropship full of different types of construction steel. It would drop off the fully loaded cargo dropship. She also would transfer the crews of the two invader class ships, which had been sold on Canopus months before the Styx had made this run back to see the Lyssa.

What the newest dropship in the SLDF, her cargo, and those jumpship's crew did on the Lyssa, was not that important to Robert. He could only make suggestions that the cargo dropship should be kept there, and then it could be used to help bring in large masses of cargo from the rest of the Inner Sphere in the future. This would make supporting this mission easier for the SLDF. Besides that trading, it would be in a ship that all of the Intel groups in the Inner Sphere knew that "belonged" to Copeland supply and salvage. At least that was the plan while a group from the SLiE were staying in the Bivouac system.

#########

Currently Robert, Jess, and two infantry troopers that were acting as the leader's escorts were being given a very detailed tour of the newest additions to the Bivouac System. Robert and Jess were very impressed as they finished being shown an operational small pressurized shipyard and a larger pressurized yard under construction. They all were buried deep inside a mostly mined out asteroid far from any jump point that even the craziest Casper Drone warship would not have use on a bet or dare. And this was only one of the caverns that this orbiting 3km wide rock held. How many other caverns were on this rock? That was something that was not discussed in polite company, but it had to be more than a few more large type caverns by the look of things to even a casual observer with a working half brain could conclude over a beer.

Robert looked over to the guide of this show and tell of the local production. "You had been busy! I take it that your dealings with MMM have turned for the better after all?"

That had been a good deal to start with between the two groups, and it was a lot better than anyone in an all most forgotten star system could have hoped for in their wildest dreams. But that was a long way from being better for the people living in that almost forgotten system, that now had items that someone the size of MMM wanted or needed to have access to. There were hundreds of stories about companies like MMM taking over whole planets to get what they wanted.

Margit Little smiled a knowing smile at the older man floating near her. She had been "elected" the leader of the system just a few months ago. The last leader of this star system had been her mother, until she had decided that it was time for her to step down from the leadership role in this system. Her mother was now in charge of what was currently being called the Bivouac Aerospace Company by a growing number of nearby planets and star systems.

Margit was always the one of that pair of women that was a better people person, and she was better at the political games than her mother had ever been. What her mother was very good at, was being the battleax that you hit others over the head with, or she could just body checked them into a nearby wall. Now that the Bivouac system was back on the Inner Sphere's map and more importantly. It was now on one of the main trading routes that pumped the life blood of the Inner Sphere. They needed subtle and Margit had that skill, and she was very effective at the political games well above her years in raw natural talent. And her mother was anything but subtle, but if she was needed to help the star system at any time. She was very close by, if Margit needed to use that battleax one more time on those with overly thick skulls. Being so close to her mother, Margit also was one of the few people in this star systems who knew how important these people were in the past and what they could do in the future for the Bivouac system.

"BAC and MMM are currently on very good working terms, and they are getting better with every shipment we exchange between them. We are the number one outside supplier of refined strategic ores to two of their factories, and we are closing in on that position for supporting all of their main factories on Canopus. The cost of shipping has been dropping so much over the last year, that it is almost now cheaper to import certain common refined ores from us as it costs them to mine it on the planet and then shipped the refined ores over land to the factory. Then we have been using that modified Tramp almost to death, and she has been a huge boost in income going to our people."

Margit had to quickly grab a nearby hand hold to keep from moving to far from Robert. "I might not have agreed with the price, at the time, for that jumpship. But it has more than paid for itself already, and now we might even one day be able to buy another one just like her from the FWL. Besides selling ores to MMM and some smaller operations. BAC is the largest builder of Small Craft hulls or sub dropship sized craft in the whole MoC. We currently have six months of backlog on orders for small craft and other hulls. I know that MMM and the MoC frowns down on taking orders and keeping a backlog on the books as a rule. But we have worked this way for longer than I have been alive. If we make a change? It will have a strong reaction from our customers as well as by my people. This seems to be understood and currently accepted by the leadership of the MoC, even if they are not happy with how we work."

Now her face showed a frown to the two outsiders. "We still have to import weapons for our defenses and to finish fitting out any of those small craft hulls before shipping out. Those weapons mostly are coming from MMM as payment for finished goods that we are shipping to them. They give us a nice price break for those weapons, but sometimes we still have to go to outside sources like the FWL or even the CC for items that MMM might not have when we need them. We even have been known to pick up the odd item on the mercenary market." She gave Robert a knowing smile, but she didn't say more on that subject.

She now shoots Copeland a side long look at noticing the silence from the man. When he did not say anything, she continued her walking/floating briefing. "During the Year of Peace, and maybe even more now that the Clans are back to taking planets. If it is packing decent amounts of weapons, you have very little problem finding a buyer or even having a bidding war for it to a point. That is unless you have something that they want more badly than the odd spare weapon."

########

Jess caught the look, and she knew that her boss had also seen that look, even if he was playing like he had not noticed it. What she didn't know, was where that statement from the young woman might be going. And that worried Jess. They had already traded some of the remaining Star League grade weapons to BAC and the local government out of the cargo bays of the Hercules. They had even sold a lot of the infantry scale weapons to them.

Jess does her own fishing with the younger woman. "It also seems like your repair business is really booming. It looked like you had a few ships waiting to be worked on when we jumped in, and your holding pattern around the station was as full as we have seen in some of the more major worlds we have stopped at." The last part was only mostly true, but it did hint that Robert and crew had been to a lot more high traffic worlds across the rest of the Inner Sphere.

Now Margit was positively beaming with pride at what the strange woman had said about "her" system. "Yes, we are. It has taken some time, but now we have about six months of maintenance backlog that we have been scheduled to work in our repair yards and bays. As with our production backlog, that is as far as we schedule out to keep the MoC investigators happy and off our backs. We have been working with other groups of repair bay owners to get the MoC to agree to a one year backlog for repairs. But they have yet to budge on that topic. We even have people waiting in case something may open up all of the sudden in the repair bays. That is why we have been building these two pressurized shipyards I was just showing you all. They are for us or reserved for the people from this system anyway, to use. I hope you were not wanting to get some work done on your dropships or the Styx?"

Near as Margit could find out, no one had ever worked on the Styx or one of the dropships that was known to have worked for Copeland in the past. She had talked to a lot of people about a lot of different topics.

Robert was watching as a huge chunk of metal that must have amassed a thousand tons being moved into the cave mouth holding the still building shipyard. He could not see what was being done in the smaller but working shipyard from this location. It just looked like a mass of metal, and it did not look like any ship that Robert had ever seen or heard about in all of his travels or study. He had never seen a Snowdon, so seeing one in action was lost on him. He had noticed that half a dozen new small factories were in different stages of construction in those shipyards he had seen.

Robert had to fight down a chuckle. "Oh no! We are good in that department. We have made agreements with another system that does all of our maintenance work that our crews can't handle. I was just wondering what you are not showing me."

Robert half turned and made eye contact with the "President". It had been pointed out that the locals had done away with the title of "System Manager", that had been normal for a few hundred years while this had been a company owned and worked star system. To Robert it was just another word to mean the same thing. At least this group treated those not in a leadership position as something other than slaves. That was something that SLIC had found in all too common occurrence within and outside of the Inner Sphere.

Margit looked around and then she gave Robert a level look. In a soft but flat voice. "Mom said that you were very sharp, and that I should be very careful with even blinking wrong around you. She also said, that if I was asked a question by you. That I should not lie, and you would keep anything quiet that I ask you to not spread around. My mother trust you, and the number of people that she trusts. Well, I can count them on one hand with fingers left over."

She gave a slight shoulder shrug at the flat looks she was receiving from the pair of outlanders that had proven so helpful to her people in the past. "This is one of our public improvement projects. Do you remember that project where they turned a small hollowed out rock into a massive grow house on your first visit to our little out of the way system?"

She waited for the older man to nod that he understood what she was talking about before she continued speaking. "There was a second rock that they had first tried and failed, on that modification from way earlier in our history. While they were working on it, the outer hull of the rock developed a crack that was large enough to fly a Monarch class passenger liner threw from the outer skin to the hollowed section if you had a good enough pilot. In that asteroid we are putting in a medium sized habitat, a pair of 17000ton class medium factory satellites, a small unpressurized yard, and then after all of that is done. We will start on putting a large unpressurized shipyard in that rock. One of the medium class factories and the small unpressurized yard have already been put into operation over there, and we are keeping that information from any visiting outsiders."

"After that. We are going to be looking at making a real factory on a third rock that we have been mining on for some time, but it still has huge veins of ores we can get at. That way we don't have to move the ores to the smelters, and then move them to our production areas. This should cut down on time, cost, and manpower to do all of the moving. We will have to pull in someone like MMM to help plan out that one idea. We need that because we can currently only grow past a certain point. We have been using that twinning function to sell those small factories, but the MoC has made it very clear that they are to know who is buying each and every one of them." Margit kept her face still as ice, as she talked about the MoC's main Intel department demands on her people.

Jess felt her jaw drop, but Robert was just nodding his head in understanding and asked his own questions. "Those sound-like the scale of plans of someone we know that lives around these parts. How were you able to swing all of that in such a short time?"

Margit was smiling again. "After Mom made that deal with you for the LF Tramp and the other dropships. Mom and I were able to do a deal with a few friends over at SelaSys Incorporated. Currently we are selling them some of the extra LF battery blocks we can make. We are only able to slowly make them, but every one of them is sold at a premium price. When we replaced those two small class factory sats without breaking a sweat to get back on track with other needed production. We traded some of those battery blocks off for a "complete" copy of the software package needed to run the larger factory satellites along with plans to make them by only using our small sats ability."

Jess snorted; Robert raised his eyebrows. Margit smirked, and then she went on talking. "Yea that did not work out as well as we would have liked, but we had enough data to get the things done as we needed them. We had the small shipyard making more of the small factory class satellites as fast as they could. At first it was to get us back on schedule of our long ranged building plans that kept getting pushed back. The last four of that type satellites, four for our own use that is, are in the building yard now. The six you saw here."

She points over her shoulder to the cavern. "Those are earmarked to be going to their approved new owners, when they are complete. After we get them done, then we are only going to be making a few more of the larger type of factory sats from now on for our own use. Most of their output, will be to get the rest of the shipyards we want to build into operation. It is a risk having larger factory satellites for an attacker to target. But we are running into the issue of having to little personnel to run so many smaller and less efficient factories. We might make more of the smaller class for the open market if MiM gets their act together and lets us do the business that will let us grow." She put a little bit of scorn in her tone at the end.

#########

As the young lady was talking. Robert was pulling up the data on the Medium Class Factory Satellite in his brain and he quickly pulled up the information about the capabilities for what she was talking about. He was impressed, if the locals could pull off getting the factory of that size into "factory level" production. He could think of a few uses, so he went fishing. "That is a lot of support. Are you thinking about making jumpships?"

This comment got the other woman to laugh, and she started to twist in the low gravity. "No! Not even if we had a Germanium refining plant and the spinning facility needed to cast a jump engine core. We would not be going down that road, at least not in my lifetime anyway. It takes too long, and the specialized equipment needs too much support just to make one jumpship every other calendar year. We are looking at making dropships and other deep space items, but not jumpships. Right now? We will make the hull plates, frames, and other things for dropships like for the Leopard, Leopard CV and the Union class dropships. We then will work with MMM, who will load the operational software on the dropships for what we don't have. As we get more copies of the flight and fire control software for those dropships? We will use their services less and less, as we get into full production of those core designs of whole dropships. It has worked out pretty well for both parties so far."

She did a little head shake and kept talking. "I had pushed for making cargo lifters instead of military dropships. We would not be targets for raids by people who want to add a few military dropships to their order of battle or dump them on the black market. When we talked to MMM about working together? They had a threat assessment for our system already generated, and it showed that it did not matter what we make dropship wise. We will be targets no matter what, for pirates or just "other groups" around this area of space. That pushed us into this direction of making combat dropships for sale to the MoC or FWL."

Robert could tell that the woman didn't want to believe what she had been showed by the largest military supply company in the MoC, but she knew that she had run out of cards to play in this game. She was a very good politician after all. Robert kept his head moving as the young woman kept talking. Maybe she was talking a little slower or Robert's brain was having an easier time of keeping up with her. Her voice was light on the cool atmosphere of the cavern.

"They did have a point about a few things. We should be able to make four Leopards for almost the same effort needed to make a single Mule class dropship. MMM is okay with us making Leos and Unions, they have been overloaded with building orders for years now. I think that they are getting pressure to make more Lion's and looking to make maybe larger combat dropships. I think that they are going for the Overlord class, but that is just a guess. MMM will get a small cut on the sale on each of the dropships that they have helped with in any way. We are still working on a shopping list for what we will build besides spare parts that we are now known for, but that will be only after we get all of the "real" production lines well online and all of the bugs worked out of them. We can always sell more of the small attack craft to keep the out system cash flowing into our coffers."

Robert started talking when the women let the air go still for a few minutes. "So, you are sticking with only large item production and the support local repairs plans."

Margit snorted. "Oh, no! We also are supplying spare parts for jumpships and some dropships as well as, Endo Steel, Ferro-Fibrous armor, and thanks to another merchant ship that we made a deal with. We can also make some of the components for the new high efficiency heat sinks to go along with the LF battery modules. It's not as well rounded industrial production as I would like, but it is what we have." Jess and Robert were impressed by the information they had just been given by the local leader. Other information was passed along as they were shown around this still growing production abilities of this asteroid base.

########

The last of the anti-missiles systems were snatched up by the Bivouac Aerospace Company, not long after Robert and Jess had returned from their tour. Those systems had not been selling that well so far in the travels of Copeland and his dropships. Everyone wanted things that went boom or zap and not what might be "only" a specialized machine gun in their eyes. Purely defensive systems like that one just was not sexy enough for most mech jocks to want to cough up the money to buy them. But out here without an atmosphere to help defend you from space, the ability to thin out a missile attack was worth the expense to these locals. Robert moved over 100 of those systems in just a few days, and Robert made notes that the market for them in this system was still not saturated.

They were also able to pick up some more ores and refined metals as payment to transport two dozen small craft for one of the Magistracy's quickly building or expanding military Academies. Robert had been planning to go that way before they had stopped over here. SLIC had said that they had wanted to get some detailed updated information about that area. This just makes it easier to explain why he was heading into a new area of the MoC. It also was a good use of his time by making this deal with the locals. Besides it gave him a reason to do a little more sightseeing and testing on what might be available on the markets in that area of space. There was not that much known as major manufacturing in that part of space, besides were he was heading. The MoC just didn't put an academy on just any planet under their control.

They could not leave this system until the Styx returned from her mission, so Robert and Jess did their jobs and let the crews on the dropships have some down time with the locals. When the Styx returned to this system? Robert would open the floor to see about taking some more of these "new" factories with him. If he couldn't get the whole deal, the satellites? Then maybe the locals would just sell him the tooling that made those small habitats into "real" factories. The SLiE didn't so much need the factory small Satellites. But they very badly needed the 250 tons of tooling that was fitted into the factories like there was no tomorrow, and Robert would do whatever he could do to fill that need for New Circe.

It took some effort and many meetings before it was brought up that MiM only wanted to know who was buying these factory "satellites". But he had asked, if MIM or others in the MoC had said that they would restrict the sale of tools and tooling that the locals can make? After the local legal department had checked the communications, Robert's guesses had proven to be correct. Robert was now able to get a thousand tons of tools, or what was equal to four small class factory satellites. That was for some first-generation extended range 8cm lasers, 5cm pulse lasers, about a dozen more of the anti-missile weapons, and some cash that Robert had collected on weapons sales in this star system. Both parties thought that they got the best part of that deal that had been worked out. Besides the tooling, Robert was wanting information to be leaked out that "his company" was now taking cargos, if the right conditions were met.

#########

Jules was on the edge of his seat as he sat in the command chair on the bridge of the SLS Styx. This ship was almost defenseless, as it made its way to Canopus without carrying any dropships on her long round hull. The Bad Kitty and the Hercules needed the firepower that the escort provided in the form of the Hobgoblin and her heavy fighters while they were left in the Bivouac System. The Styx "only" had her clan grade ER 8cm lasers and second generation anti-missile systems. That was way more firepower than any other jumpships outside of Clan controlled space could claim. As part of her defenses was that she was staying away from any star much less any star, which might have people living in it for as much of the trip as she could. The jumpship should be safe, as long as they didn't break something along the way.

That was also one of the reasons that the jumpship held both an HPG and TacFax along with the highly trained crews needed to run them. The crews could not just relax on this move between trade centers. They also had to do some paint work and reload the jumpships IFF while they traveled on her hidden route between the stars. The altered IFF would electronically hide the identity of the Styx as the M/V Uncle Ralph and state that she was part of Copeland Supply, Salvage and Resale Company to anyone with the right equipment to pick up the codes. A few of the specially trained paint crew would change the physical look of the Tramp class ship or for anyone that would see the Styx at something near to close range as measured while in deep space.

When Jules got to the Canopus system, he had to order the artificial gravity shut down as the massive dropship was attached to his ship. Jules was able to see the plasma flares from the pod mounted Bally Tech Super x40s as the huge dropship drew closer to the jumpship. The 277m x 277m x 170m dropship seemed to be larger than that, as it slowly closed the distance to the Styx. The crew of the Tramp would have to float like that, at least until the "prize" crew of the mammoth class dropship had been sent back to the growing number of support craft at this jump point.

The stay in this system was scheduled to last for at least seven full days. They were "recharging" the drive and those times were known down to the minute by anyone that was in this line of work. By local regulations, Jules could have let the locals know that he was going to be using the LF battery. If he had gone that route, they could have been gone at the end of the first day. But picking up the Mammoth class dropship and her cargo were not the only reasons to be in this star system. Besides one small company owning two rare Tramp class, and both fitted with the extremely rare and newly rediscovered high tech battery would be very hard to explain. It was not unexplainable, but it would raise some questions.

They had to check in with Lora, and she updated him on the Resort with coded and decoded messages. They were sent at the speed of light from the planet towards the jump point, just as if she was updating the parent company of the Resort that she was running. She was reporting that it was going well, and the first families had landed, and more were known to be currently in transit. Jules could have picked up a dozen of them right now, if he wanted to wait for a long range shuttle to make the trip all the way to the jump point. But that was not part of the plan, and he passed along that it was better to wait until there was more of them.

While he was just sitting here at the jump point, Jules had released another set of funds for Lora to use for her project. Still, all of that data transfer was done in less than a day. But still they were "recharging" the jump drives like any other jumpship known to the Inner Sphere. The main reason to stay for the full seven days at this jump point was to "tap" into any messages that the planet's HPG might send out for the week that the Styx was sitting at the jump point. Even a HPG station on a capital that was the size of Canopus could only send messages out only every other day. So, they would have to wait and collect as much data as ComStar might be sending out or receiving from this growing power. Those intercepted messages would help the leadership know about how closely ComStar was tracking this company.

It was with some relief when the Uncle Ralph (Styx) was able to leave this system. While they had been "recharging there jump drive", they had been messaged every few minutes for information about their travels. It was the opening move to find out if any of the many waiting dropships could catch a ride on the two visibly empty drop collars on the jumpship. Blowing off those attempts to contact without letting the rest of the system know that they were being blown off, had all fallen onto the shoulders of Jules.

The first jump out of this star system would take the Styx to a lonely spot between the stars that no one would dare to look for them at. Jules would wait there for six hours as everyone on the jumpship dropped whatever they were doing to take on just one job. That six hours was enough time to search the new dropship and get rid of any trackers that might have been slipped onto them by some second or third parties.

After that "break", and the pull of gravity was back on the bodies of the crew of the jumpship. Seven days of Zero g fell into the fun category, and not yet into the causing any health issues category for the jumpship's crew. That didn't mean that the whole crew was happy to have decks being back to being decks again. You can't please everyone all of the time, but you can please most of the people most of the time.

########

The Colonial made drive did what it could do, and they were on their way at a pace that the crews were more comfortable with. Soon every other hour the ship was moving fifteen light years like a well-oiled machine that it was. The only star system that it would stop at was within Duke Terry's Ltenhoe system. This stop had the Tramp now going under the name of Charon, under short term chartered contract out of the Outworlds Alliance to Copeland supply, salvage and Resale Company. The one good thing about having the dropship, was that the empty crew bunks on the huge dropship would ease the overcrowding that the Styx had been dealing with after dropping off the three dropships with Copeland and his team.

The Styx would only be in that system for only a total of six days. That would let any spies think that one of Copeland's ships, the Charon, was just faster charging her "drive", but she was really checking in with Terry and spying on ComStar again. The Charon would send coded messages down to the planet to let the planetary Duke know that it was almost time to start her plans for her own Exodus. This was not required, but it helped with the communication and any future plans. The more data they had, the more likely that they would succeed.

Jules received messages in return at the speed of light from the planet light hours away. One message was addressed to him and some of the others were for Robert, and some that were just covering junk mail. The message to Jules was an update on Terry's assets that she was going to use for the Exodus from the planet. It would seem that she had been able to "acquire" a passenger liner after Robert had left, but she didn't list the type or capabilities of this liner that she had somehow gotten her hands on. There were not any clues on how this event had happened, but it would make the next part of the plan easier for Duke Terry to work around. At least now she had a minimum seat count on who she could get out.

#######

When the timer on the bridge of the maybe Charon reads zero? The Styx was gone again with her colonial made drive's emissions being concealed by the HPG burst. This time she did not end up in the space between the stars or in a jump point of any kind for that matter. The Styx was in a preplanned location above the super Earth sized planet in the Split system.

Jules had to have a meeting over on the Lyssa as soon as his ship was settled in from the many jumps it had made in the last few months. He needed to bring up to speed the rest of the SLiE fleet and leadership about the changes in the plans that Robert had put together or modified after last contact with higher command. Jules was not looking forward to having those meetings. He also had to do a data dump of all of the reports that had been done along with the raw data that the Styx had collected on her travels.

The fully loaded Lion from the newest combat unit to form in the SLDF was going to be Key to this many revised plan. This was going to be their first deployment off of New Circe by any of the units on the slowly building of the 205th Royal Assault Mech BDE. She was supposed to be only used if Copeland found that he needed the ground forces as a big hammer to help pull out Duke Terry and her people, or if they were needed to help pull out the Families. It was always better to have a condom and not need it, than need one and not have one.

Robert still would have some of the cargo bays and opened bunks in the Infantry bays on the modified Lion called Bad Kitty. He also had the returned cargo space when the old style jump drive had been removed from the Styx. They also might have some cargo space in the Hercules, but there was not a guarantee on the amount of open space that would be in the Mammoth class dropship when it came time to launch her Exodus.

That was all of the space that Robert could plan on as being close to the facts when he had started this mission. Now with Duke Terry having a passenger liner, this had changed things some. But still what Copeland and Terry could do was going to be tided very closely to what the SLDF and the SLiE could push out this far down the supply lines, and what the political realities would let them do. What the SLiE could do in that arena was not fully known when Robert had launched on this run to the Inner Sphere. This information was not going to be risked being sent over the TacFaxs much less on an HPG message that ComStar, the Clans, or even unknown third parties could receive. The SLDF, much less just SLIC, was worried about leaking information with the Cylons and others being around. The story about the WW 2 German Enigma codes and machines had resurfaced on New Circe. There were many people that didn't want to revisit that episode of Hubris.

Jules was in the Split system for only three days, and it was a very busy 72 hours for him and his crewmembers. In that time, the crewmembers from the two invader class ships had left the Tramp class jumpship and made their way to the massive Star Lord in close orbit. You never knew when you might need a few extra dropship collars, and this craft had six that were not currently being used by anyone in the Split system.

A TacFax message was sent from the Styx to Robert, still relaxing in the Bivouac system, to let him know they had made the trip safely to the Split system. One of the nice things about the TacFax was that they were completely passive when they received messages from another TacFax. They only generated a power output of any kind when they sent a message into hyperspace to move faster than the speed of light. Soon each of the dropships used by the SLDF and the SLiE would have one of the new communication devices and a trained person to use it.

First, they would have to outfit all of the warships in the SLDF navy, all of the support ships the combat ships needed, along with the upper level headquarters of the war effort. The only slowdown in the deployment was that the TacFaxes were handmade devices, and only a handful of former Cylon refugees or POWs had the skills and time to make them. They were at the point that they could make them or work on making improvements on them, but they could not currently do both jobs at once. It was like they were making pocket watches but starting at the raw ore level and working until you put the device on the sales floor. Oh, and you only had a dozen people to do all of that work. That number of skilled workers was growing, but it was very slow work.

Jules did not have any idea when the next support ship would be coming to the Split system. Robert had told him to unload all of the cargos that had been acquired so far from the Styx, and that included any personal items that the crews didn't need. This also just happened to be the way that was going to be how Lora was getting her "household goods" sent to her new home. Yea Robert was a sneaky SOB, but he was the Crew's SOB. Then Lora's cargo was going to be stored on land that belonged to Robert, but it would be on New Circe until Lora could make it to that hidden planet and decide how she was going to sell it.

Without being planning on it, by Robert or anyone on the Lyssa. This cargo run was going to be a test run for the future returning Families, as well as the start of a stream flowing to New Circe filled with cargos of much needed items. Jules also passed along word that the Blockade Runner needed to be made ready to be handed over to the MoC, just as Robert had planned. This would put the small warship's crew on notice that they needed to be ready to leave and to train a new crew that would be made up of people from the Inner Sphere.

All of that would be just as Admiral Xi and SLIC had worked out months ago back on New Circe. Besides the Mammoth and her cargo full of steel, over three thousand tons of cargo was moved over from the Styx to the modified Olympus class station. It was a learning curve for the crew of the Lyssa to handle cargos like this. The hardest individual items were the battalion of tanks that had been built by Blackwell.

Soon the Styx would be returning to the Inner Sphere, and on this run she would lift the "small" warship to a location within one jump of the Canopus star system. The data for this" holding" star system had been gathered on one of the "killing time" missions to hide the true abilities of the Styx. The jump from there to the capital of the MoC would be the only real or updated jump drive training that would be given to any of the local born crew. Crewmembers that the MoC would send to "holding" to take over ownership of the Vincent class warship. That was the plan, anyway. And everyone knows about the plans of mice, men, and wolverines.

The reason for the delay in getting the SLS Styx back to the rest of the worlds of the Inner Sphere was caused by the unloading of the cargo bays on the jumpship in 100ton or smaller lots. As soon as the last container of cargo was unloaded from the cargo bays, which had at one time held a "normal" jump drive were locked down. It took a lot less time to attach the 420K tons of warship to 250K tons of an empty heavily modified Tramp class jumpship. It had not taken but an hour to top off the Styx with the colonial made specialized fuel for the faster than light engine. They were going to need that fuel for the many short jumps they would need to use because the Styx was carrying so much mass.

#########

The massive jumpship was gone again in a blurring of motion that was "normal" for Cylon and Colonial made jump drives. The Styx could have "towed" the Star Lord class jumpship to a jump point before she had left, but that would have taken time that the Styx didn't have. The small craft housed on the Lyssa would slowly tow that old jumpship to a jump point, from where her more conventional style jump engine could function without destroying the ship and or killing the crew of the vessel.

After dropping off the small warship, the Styx was taking a least time approach to make her way back to meet up with Robert in the Bivouac system. They would only need a few days to cover those many hundreds of light years. The Styx and her crew would have time to rest and run some more of the needed maintenance after arriving back in the Bivouac system. They would have to wait around seven days to "recharge" the engine at least to keep the cover, so why waste that time. That is unless Robert changed the rules….again.

There now were more LF batteries in use around the Inner Sphere, and the real-world facts were being passed around if you had the right set of ears. One of those facts, was the stress that those high tech batteries put on a "normal" jump drive when they were used. These batteries had their uses, but they also had an upper limit on how many double jumps you can do before you needed to replace them, or you spend a lot of time and money on maintenance of your jump core. This "new" information was going to make the Styx's movements that much harder to keep to her cover story, but not impossible. They could keep this cover story as long as no one knew who was providing the major repair work needed to support Copeland's company. They could do this as long as the jumpship didn't have a major engineering casualty while within the Inner Sphere.

That down time in Bivouac would also give them time for any last-minute deals to be done, before they started on the way to a few more different systems that Robert had already planned for. Jules just smiled as he thought about this run. The HPG team would slip in a message into the ComStar data feeds addressed to a few certain persons within the MoC government. The coded message would let them know that something special had arrived and that they should head towards Holding. One of the things that had always made him edgy, was that he quickly got bored with life. That was not the case on these runs to the Inner Sphere.

That was the last thought of Jules in this star system as it carried the small warship on the first step of it having a new home in the Inner Sphere. When that team was ready, a Tacfax message would be sent to Robert. And then Jules would put a message into the ComStar data stream for them to know where the MoC's new warship was. Then all the MoC would have to do was get a crew there, finish paying for the trip, work out how to make spare parts, and keep someone like ComStar from trying to blow it apart. Oh, and make sure that the CC and the FWL didn't try to take it away from them so that it could be put to "better" use in their eyes.

When the warship arrived in the Canopus system in late December 3051. The crew of old timers would go to the Resort and help Lora with whatever they could. The news of the warship arriving in this star system was so huge. That no one noticed that after the warship arrived over the planet, that some of the small craft had not landed at the capital but at a Resort. Those older people had left behind a lot of training materiel, but it was mainly focused on how to maintain the blockade runner. How to use it was going to be up to the new crewmembers of the warship to work out.

Shaky System.

3 RGT, 3312 Mech BDE, 331 Royal Mech Div.

Lieutenant Colonel Fredrick Charikov looked out of the armored glass that covered the front of his command battlemech. This was the second time that his unit had been deployed to what was called The Shaky System by the higher officers within the SLDF. This star system had been a gold mine that had supplied the SLDF Navy and the SLiE with a long list of much needed or otherwise very useful items in the war effort against the Cylon Empire. They were currently there in the hope of finding anything that the mixed team of DOME and Star League Corps of Engineers had been forced to leave behind during their ill-fated last evacuation of this star system. That was why he had been sent to this planet, twice. If the outer system had so many useful items, then the planet might have even more. Both of those two Star League groups were very well known for the size and the durability of their constructions. Those facts had not made the life of people like Fredrick very easy.

So far, the aptly named planet Shaky had not revealed any of her possible secrets. But there was too high of a chance that those two groups had left something behind. And the SLiE had to recover it or destroy it so that it would not fall into the enemy of mankind's hands. That risk of the Cylon Empire finding this system was the reason that a regiment of first line combat troops of the SLiE was currently here. Anytime that an expedition was launched to this planet to looked for items left behind, a heavy escort had to be attached to them for the entirety of the mission. This greatly added to the cost of these types of missions, but Clan Wolverine was not known for risking people of these searching groups of mostly academics. The Cylons had proven that they didn't care if you thought that you were a noncombatant or not. All they needed to know was that you were a human, and that was enough for the Cylons to want to kill you.

The Regimental commander was not going to let any rust develop on his unit's fighting skills while they spent up to six months on this planet watching the academics dig around in the dirt. Each search team had a lance or Platoon of warriors attached to them, to act as their close escort. The dropships that had brought them all to this planet, they also held a rotating guard force of a full company. The rest of his combined arms force was out in the field conducting war-games three out of every four weeks on the ship's calendar.

The only break in the training would be when a major earthquake strikes the area that was above 6 on the open ended R scale. The risk of landslides, tidal waves, and other dangers was just too high to keep training going at all hours. This rule was a pain to work around, but it was easier to deal with this added training issue instead of pulling a mech or tank out of a crack in the ground or out from under a landslide.

Fredrick looked down at a display as his 100ton Pulverizer II Omni mech rocked slowly forward and back in the air. He had to fight down a little motion sickness at the unnatural rocking of a 10m tall combat machine over road his multi ton gyro. "Yep 6.7 or better…..might be a foreshock. There goes my training schedule again. What is wrong with this Frakking planet and screwing with my training plans and schedules?" He made a sour face under his helmet. "Well, at least I don't have to deal with 2nd BN on top of this frakked up planet." He had no idea that he had been talking aloud to himself.

The 2nd Battlemech Battalion, 3rd Regiment of 3312nd Mech Brigade of the great 331st Royal Mech Division was supposed to have been deployed to help with the escort mission to the planet called Shaky. That is right until half of the unit's enlisted personnel and 20% of the officers had failed a surprise Drug test launched by SLIC. It was a test that seemed to have come out of the blue just before they were about to board the dropships.

The use of Chamalla extract was a growing problem that the Colonials had brought with them almost eight years ago to New Circe. That plant extract had been one of the first items band from importing into the SLiE side of the planet. That had fueled an underground smuggling network in the area of were the SLiE ruled. SLIC had found part of this network and tracked it to that unit…hence the surprise mass drug tests that was undertaken.

The loss of so many of the unit's personnel and not just some key personnel due to failing the drug testing. The whole battalion was down checked off of active deployment until it could be brought back up to full strength. The last thing any sane person would want to happen, was for a mech jock or tanker to start having some hallucinations or visions while they were going cross country with anti-mech scale weapons. Much less being in that state of mind when an earthquake hit them while they had live ammunition on board. The Gods only know what they would think was happening to them in that mix of drug and real life stress.

He had spoken aloud, and it was not because he had mental issues of some kind or that he just liked hearing his own voice echoing around his cockpit. This speaking aloud was something that was beaten into every mech jock in their earliest days of "real" mech training going all the way back to the first conflict using battlemechs. Just like the pilot voice and data records that were added to aircraft in the 20th century, Mechs had some of the same systems that preformed this same function and for the same reasons. It was a great way to find out what caused major damage to a multimillion C-Bill piece of equipment without relying on the pilot's memory.

#########

Fredrick reached over to his radio to make sure everyone was okay and to tell everyone to stay away from cliffs or steep hills. They would limit any movement for the next few hours until the sun rose to make navigation of any new hazards caused by the quakes easier. This was a strong and close enough earthquake to auto cancel this training event. This was the third time this month that a quake had been large enough to stop training of his units. That was just a normal month on the planet called Shaky for a very good reason.

Before he could do that bit of required administration for the safety of his unit, the radio came to life on the Emergency all hand settings. "Cylons jump signature! Cylon Jump Signature detected in system! 90 seconds to arrival! All units go to ground! This is not a drill!" This alert repeated three more times before the station followed its own orders and "went to ground." They would cut power generation as well as shut down all active transmitters to try to hide in the background noise of this star system.

Technically the dropship's commander should not have legally given that order to all of the forces on this odd little planet. Then again, those were standing orders from high command that broke more than a few older SLDF regulations. Still Colonel Charikov hit the same channel activation button. "This is Hammer 6…shutdown! I say again…..shutdown!"

As soon as the last word had left his mouth, Fredrick's hand was flying towards his mech's emergency engine shutdown button. Little did he know, was that this order and actions were already too late to hide. The Cylons knew that the humans were down there, and they had a good idea where they were at. Well at least they knew what part of the planet most of the humans were on. Oh, and close counts when you used large enough nuclear weapons.

########

The huge DreadStar had received the navigation data from one of the Cylon heavy raiders that had first jumped to the outer edge of this part of space. Getting to this location had not been easy, and even the Cylons had needed to take small steps. A long time was needed for them to work out the next small step on the path that the Cylon Empire was taking looking from more humans to kill. This small step process was faster and safer, for the human forms. So, the Cylons had just let the small craft do all of the leg work for the larger capital warships.

The group of Heavy Raiders had been dormant and collecting data for a few days that they were in that area of space. The Cylon entry point was in between the Oort cloud and the "normal" jump point of Inner Sphere style jumpships. Then they had fired up their sub-light engines and they had "slowly" headed towards the star at the center of this star system at a steady, but constant thrust rating. Soon those modified Heavy Raiders were moving fast, even by Cylon standards. By now they were moving about as fast as their armor could protect them from any grains of sand and tiny rocks that they might hit as they raced deeper into the more crowded parts of the star system.

The Heavy Raiders had not been in "Active" mode, and they had not been spotted by the humans. But the humans on the ground had been detected by them using radios to communicate with each other in their training movements. The navigation data and the information about humans being on this planet was compiled. All of that data was sent back on one of the Heavy Raiders while the rest of the Heavy Raider group went deeper into the system soaking up more and more data as they went. They were like fast, dark data vampires as they closed the distance to the possible enemy.

The remaining Heavy Raiders would not jump out and go back to their Basestar. Their coding said, that if they found humans? They were to wait in this star system after one craft was sent back to the nearest Cylon Capital warship. They were to wait until they were relieved by a human form Cylon, or the orders sent by them. So, when the Dreadstar jumped into the orbit of the oddly placed planet. It would use the extra data that had been collected from the rest of the scouting Heavy Raider squadron at the speed of light.

This Cylon Empire capital warship was a modified Dreadstar. She was the first of her kind, but she would not be the last of her kind to take up the call of battle against humans. It looked like an old Hades class Basestar connected to a cut in half second Hades class ship, and then those two half parts of the Hades were attached to the port and starboard of the core Hades class Basestar. The internal volume was alot larger than just using two whole Hades class vessels to do the same job. This was due to the lack of needing dedicated engines and other internal support systems that was now supplied by the core Hades to the attached halves.

The other modifications done on the Hades were the layers of heavy armor, and fitting of even more heavy class KEWs cannons. But these cannons were in place of fitting fewer missile launchers to the warship's outer hull. This one craft had a lot of Cylon made and designed heavy cargo lifters to act as assault landing craft for the ground troops that also was carried within her hull. This capital ship should be able to "take on" any of the human capital ships, but only long enough for it to run away. Ship to ship combat was not the reason for this modified Dreadstar. She was the taker of planets, not the taker down of human warships.

########

As the Number One smiled, two full Cylon ground Divisions were on their way to the main continent on the odd planet below them. Thanks to the data supplied by the Heavy Raiders, the Number One in command of this ship knew generally where the humans were on the planet below him. For just a few seconds the Dreadstar seemed to be covered in a cloud of some kind. Then long thin fingers of red started falling towards the planet out of that cloud of unburnt fuel that had wrapped around the metal warship. Those were missiles falling towards the planet, but they were soon joined by shells that were the same sized as was used by the Mercury Class Battlestar. When those cannon shells were fired towards the target, they had left no trace as they flew through space. With no trace of their passage, until they started interacting with the planet's atmosphere, their arrival was a surprise to those on the ground. Cylons surprises on humans tended to only leave a lot of dead humans in the wake of those surprises.

Normally if the Cylons wanted to launch an orbital bombardment, they would have launched one of their specialized Orbital Bombardment weapons optimized for that kind of thing. That device would fall towards a planet and when it reached a preset altitude? It would start shedding layers until the first short guided red tipped missiles were exposed. As the weapon fell deeper into the atmosphere, layer after layer of nuclear tipped missiles would launch from the larger carrying projectile. Many human cities had died under those Cylon weapons.

Only now all of those specialized Cylon weapons had by now been mostly used in action or the few remaining survivors had been pulled from the active Basestars and then disassembled. The salvaged nuclear warheads from those devices were needed to be used on "normal" anti-Battlestar missiles on Heavy Raiders or capital sized Cylon combat ships. The need to fuel the increasing large complement of fission powered Praetorians had caused the Cylon Empire to be stretched in both making Praetorians and turning out more nuclear devices of the size the Number Ones were used to. The Colonials and SLDF were not the only ones that the needed logistics was being a bane to the planned execution of their war plans.

From the high ground provided by the orbiting of the Dreadstar over the planet. The falling "conventional" ordnance was very hard to intercept by the people they were falling on. The anti-missiles systems on the dropships were able to take out some of these falling capital missiles, but they could not even touch the falling cannon shells. But that was why military dropships had a thickly armored hull. The laws of math and war said that you simply could not avoid or shoot down all of the enemy's weapons fire.

All three of the dropships took heavy damage, but they were not completely taken off the field of battle by this Cylon onslaught. It was just that they would not be taking off again from the planet's surface in the near future. At least not without a lot of work being done on some of the damaged areas on those dropships. The combat and academic units out in the field were on their own, and more than a few were knocked down by the pre landing bombardment launched by the Cylons. Very few of those mechs and tanks were mission killed by that bombardment. But some were taken down, and more had taken some damage to the Cylon weapons.

The rain of missiles and cannon shells was not meant to kill all of the humans on the planet. It was more to make sure that the humans kept their heads down as the landing force had started coming down in waves from the huge Cylon Basestar. The Number Ones might have been hardheaded, self-centered, and convinced of their near god hood level of intelligence. But if you hit them hard enough over the head? Then even a Number One could learn, it just took a lot of pain and not a few repetitions for them to be more…receptive to other ideas. You can fix dumb, and you can fix stupid. But that last one is going to hurt…them for a long time afterwards.

One of those ideas that had been beaten into the Number One's heads, was that you didn't land your invasion forces within the incredibly long ranged capabilities of the colonials and their new allies' weapons. The other thing was that you didn't attack the humans until you have over whelming levels of combat forces. At least having over whelming force in the area where you were expecting to make contact with the humans in the first place.

As the first landing waves of Cylons made sure that the local area was clear of threats. The landing craft would make a second and a third return to space to bring down more of the Cylon ground fighting units. But they had the time and after three runs from orbit to surface without issues and doing so they had landed the 2 full Cylon Ground Divisions. After they were on the ground, only then did the Cylon combat forces start to leave their landing zone. But this one time? It was going to prove the exception to that rule about hitting the humans with one powerful fist. They enemy gets a say in your battle plans… that is why they are called the enemy after all.

##########

LT Col Fredrick Charikov had used the time that the Cylon's landing had given them, as the Cylon's had slowly gathered their forces from the Cylon Basestar in orbit. He had been gathering up his own scattered and now battered forces as best that he could. He could not form all of his units of his regiment into one place in the limited time he had. In only one place did he have what was left of one ad hoc combat battalion in one place. The rest of his command were spread out in smaller sized units around the local area.

But Charikov was able to get many of his scattered combat companies online, and those smaller combat units were getting ready for the Cylons as fast as they could with whatever they had on hand. Still that battalion was not a "unit", but two mech companies and a tank company that happened to be close together at the time of the surprise Cylon landing. The mech companies were to have been attacked with the heavy hover tanks acting as the OPFOR for the training event. Then the Cylons had party crashed the training event, and so now this battalion sized force was formed.

The 3rd Regiment of the 3312 Mech Brigade was part of the 331st Royal Battlemech Division. In a change from the clans and the rest of the SLDF, this unit used four Battalions and other base four for the rest of their formations. But for this deployment it was made up of one battlemech battalion, a heavy hover tank battalion, and a hover APC equipped infantry battalion. It was a powerful force, but it was now outnumbered over 10 to 1, and the humans had just lost all of their air support. That was thanks to the damage done to the dropships that had been holding all of their aerospace fighters when the Cylons had launched their surprise bombardment.

#########

The Number One acting as the ground force commander was normally "just" in command of the 12th Cylon Division. Now he was acting as the commander of his division, and he was in command of what was being referred to as the 4th Cylon Ground Corps. At least it was now that the 7th ground division was added to this combat ship. As the overall commander of these two Cylon ground divisions, he was well back behind the lines of any expected combat. From this position he was to manage the battle of the Centurions, Praetorians, and the few other human form Cylons.

To help manage battles like this had caused another modification to be done to some of the Centurions of the Cylon Empire. This one modification had turned some combat Centurions into the sole job of transmitting data back to a command center run by human form Cylons. These data relay Centurions were spread out along the battlefront, all so that it was almost like the Number One was at each point in his battle lines all at the same time. The Number One could tell how he thought the battle was developing, and he ordered five squadrons of Heavy Raiders to launch an attack and provide air support for the rest of the Cylon Ground Corps.

The One gave an evil smile as the data played out as he had expected that it would. That data now showed him the spoiling attack forming by the humans. Then in a blink of an eye a wave of about a dozen 50ton hover tanks cleared a low ridge and charged into the advancing Cylon front lines. The overflying Heavy Raiders data showed him that less than two dozen of the walking human combat machines were supporting this attack against the heart of "his" division.

The hover tanks started sweeping their weapons across the front ranks of up armored Centurions as they passed in a blur of motion. The Number One had not cared at the numbers of metal Cylons dropping under the weapon's fire of these attacking hover tanks. Their job was merely to draw the enemy in, and that was what the falling Centurions were doing. Everything was going according to the plan that he had worked out when he had been ordered to attack this planet by the Number One still on the command bridge of the capital ship.

The attacking hover tanks streaked back towards the low ridge after their attack runs, only to turn around and fall in behind the advancing battlemechs. To provide heavy fire support to the smaller Centurions, the One moved his lines of Praetorians mini mechs closer to the point of battle. The humans in their huge mechs charge forward, and the heavier Cylon Praetorians were soaking up the fire right along with the lighter Centurions that were closer to the ground. All that the Cylons could do was take the hits from the longer ranged weapons used by the human's fighting machines.

When the humans were in range, a wave of very good Cylon made missiles were launched into the human war machines from the greater number of heavy Cylon walkers. Now the numbers were not working out as a positive for the Cylons, and the lower number of human mechs worked for them. The Cylons could only target so many weapons on each enemy human war machines, before the missiles were launched in near enough as it didn't matter into one wave of weapon's fire. So, the cloud of missiles fell over to the other side of the battlefield, but it was diluted by over 30 human combat machines to soak up all of that Cylon weapons fire.

That Cylon missile fire was diluted even more because each one of those human combat machines had at least one Laser based anti-missile system fitted. They could not stop all of those Cylon weapons, or even most of them. But they could stop some of the guided weapons that were headed their way with the intent of killing the humans. This was the classic Cylon missile spam attack, and the humans knew what to expect and were not surprised by it. The human mech pilots were not happy, but they also were not surprised by what was now just a "normal" missile spam attack.

The Number One smiled again as the images showed a few of the smaller human machines stagger out of the human's line of battle, but that smile went away when none of the human machines fell to the ground or looked to have been knocked out by his massed missile attacks. The Number One put his finger to the screen and it zoomed in with his mental command.

The Cylon equipment developers were still working on a wet interface that could be used in the field. But currently the slightest bit of dirt would have a devastating effect on the current generation of wet devices, and so they had used old Colonial components for their main field headquarters. This grated on the members of the Number One lines, but there was little that they could do but work on getting "proper Cylon" gear for the Cylon field commanders to use.

The "General" One had to zoom in some more and the ID number on the Praetorian was clear for him to see in his mind. The number matched one that was on a list that only he and the Number One on the flagship knew about. "Frakk, it's not in close enough. What is wrong with that thing? Well, I guess I will have to take over myself." He had spoken softly and more to himself than for any real need to give commands.

The "General" One gave some direct orders to that one Praetorian class walker. And soon the Praetorian was moving to engage one of the larger walking human mechs that was shooting down so many of his heavy raiders. When the walking Cylon warmachine was close enough to almost touch the 80ton human mech, a fresh set of orders went out of the Cylon command center on the Cylon specific wireless system at the speed of light. With the last few orders sent, the General One went to look if he could see where else his attention was needed. He found some, and more specialized orders were sent out to those Praetorians.

########

Many kilometers away, as the crow flies. A small package that was attached to the back of the Praetorian that only weighed in at 120 pounds and was a 152mm around when it activated. The pilot of the Rifleman III had no idea what was going on. She was working on taking out as many of the attacking up armored Heavy Raiders as flew within the range of her weapons. She was taking fire from one of the Cylon Battlemechs, but it was just chipping away at her side armor and was not that much of a risk just yet. Soon one of her "escorts" would take care of the nit that was taking small bites out of her armored skin. Then the world changed, and she had a front row seat to hell.

The Cylons had no idea that they had just reinvented the W48 from the United States' Army back in the time of the cold war on Earth, just with a Cylon twist. When the code was received, the weapon activated and in less than ten seconds the area was ground zero to .072kilotons or 30TJ of energy that was released in about a microsecond. Soon all along the line of Cylon attackers more of these "small" nuclear bombs were activated on the back of the large Cylon machines. In this eye blink the attacking human combat battalion was destroyed. It had also cost the Cylons almost a short brigade from the 7th Cylon Ground Division to do that work. But they had removed a lot of humans and their equipment from the battlefield in this field testing of a new Cylon tactic.

If someone had just looked at the numbers lost on both sides of this battle, it would have been a draw. It was not uncommon for a SLDF and Colonial Mixed battalion to be able to take on and force off of the battlefield a Cylon ground brigade while being gutted. What the use of these "small" devices did, was to force a large hole into the human defensive lines. This worked as planned for the Cylons with the nuclear weapons, it was just that the plan was crap. That is not to say that it would work for that long against the humans. Humans were known to counter surprises very quickly.

Now if the SLiE had been part of the clans or the Cylons had used these weapons against some clan unit. They would have reacted with a lot more…. Aggression, and most likely they would have charged right into the guns of the enemy that had dared to fight wars not according to their rules. Now Clan Wolverine and the SLiE had a large supply of nuclear weapons of their own, and they had planned on using them against the rest of the clans when the time was right. They had worked out long ago that if they used these weapons, then it was a good bet that someone would return the favor of sending you cans of instant sunshine. So, they had already worked out battle plans decades before the SLiE ran into the colonials and then the nuclear weapon happy Cylons.

#########

LT Col Fredrick Charikov looked at the line of markers going across his command screens. His eyes shot up and he could see the line of dark black and orange laced clouds rising higher and higher into the air. He could not move for a few seconds, and then his training kicked in. His hands went to his radio and flipped it to a rarely used setting.

Fredrick was about to do a full powered radio transmission to any human radio on this side of the planet. His transmitter was about to put out enough RF energy to cook any of the trees that were nearby. Not that they were already probably going to die because of such a wide use of nuclear weapons any way. "Six to all units! Go for Magic Mushrooms 4. I say again. This is Six! And go for Magic Mushroom 4! Light these Frakkers up. Good hunting, and I will see you all on the other side. Six out."

He looked down and resets his radio RF power back to something that would only reach to his local lance and not much further. "Major Buckler take Sargent Sergent and head north. I will take Sargent Kumar and head south. Let's see how we can bleed these Frakkers."

Major Buckler was the second ranking officer for this unit, and he used the heavy autocannon of his mech to render a salute to the senior officer before breaking north at the trot. All around what remained of the 3rd Regiment broke down into preplanned smaller units to keep from giving the enemy a target worth using a WMD on. The idea was that the combat units would be small enough that the enemy would not "waste" a nuclear weapon on trying to kill them. And if the Cylons did use one? Then it would reduce the risk to any other combat group in the area of those unlucky enough to be at ground Zero of the blast of Einstein's magic math problem.

This was not a great plan or even a good plan as those things went. One of the down sides would be that now the Cylons could use their larger numbers to swamp the smaller groups of human defenders. The humans would lose some of the effectiveness that their better weapons gave them in this war. The way that the 3rd Regiment members thought about it, was that it just means that the humans would not take as many Cylons down at one time.

But as old Uncle Joe always said, quantity has a quality all of its own. Now the hard part was to find out how small the unit needed to be, so that the Cylons would not open little cans of sunshine on them out of hand. It was going to suck as a learning curve. The one time lance of four massive assault class mechs broke apart and each pair of massive combat machines made their way to the sound of battle and nuclear detonations killing their friends. The March of Cambreath was playing within the minds of more than just this one lance.

#########

SFC Brenties Infantry platoon was backed up by an ad hoc lance of hover APCs only a few meters behind them covered by trees and cut brush. These were not the normal 10ton hover APCs that his unit had been issued when the Colonials had arrived over New Circe. These were newer or at least recently rebuilt versions of machines used for about the last century and a half on New Circe. These had the old 60 rated generic ICE engines replaced by 60 rated Leenex model fusion engines. The now opened space once used for fuel storage, the larger, and bulkier engine was now used to carry a half ton more supplies and a second generation 5cm pulse laser mounted in the front hull. It still had its 12.5mm Machinegun in the top mounted turret that just cut down Centurions like ripe wheat. Brenties had to admit, that it was a nice modification to the old age of war designed machine. He had thought that just because it was old did not mean that the weapon system was not still good and useful for many tasks.

Besides making support out on the battlefield easier without the supply chain needing to bring fuel just to run the APCs. When they were back on New Circe that was not an issue and being able to hide was more important than supporting them off planet. The fusion engine also allows for quicker recharging of all of the energy weapons that the squads used in the fight against the Cylon Empire. The SLDF had always used a slightly modified Mauser 960 pulse laser rifle for the infantry unit's main weapon. With the coming of the Cylons, this had not caused any changes, at first.

Now with the up armoring of the main ground force combatant designs of the Cylon Empire. More energy weapons were added, at least to the front line units to counter the enemy reaction to the first contacts with the SLiE. Gone were the old slug throwers side arms and they were replaced with double barreled Colonial pistols or a growing number of Blazer style handguns. Now the SLDF ground teams didn't have to carry more and different ammunition to their jobs. At least now the different types of power packs were limited only to three different types of power storage devices for their energy weapons. They still had to make room for any extra 12.5mm ammunition needed for the turret machinegun and extra grenades for the 960's every person was carrying.

Brenties had heard rumors that the old ICE engines went into helping maintain the now very overused cargo trucks needed to supply the whole SLDF ground forces in other units or doing work back on New Circe. He had no idea that there was a limit on this modification cycle making this type of Hover APCs. That the limits on getting more of the APCs converted was having the right sized fusion engines that Copeland was bringing in from the Inner Sphere was not something most thought about.

The NCO adjusted his position deep in his fighting position that had been dug for him to use. As he looked at the hidden hover tanks, he thought about the other testing equipment. While his unit received these hover APC's, another unit had received some of the Hilux gun trucks that the Colonials were so happy about. Brenties was not sure about this light truck and its use off planet, and it was not just about the underpowered and overweight gas engine they used.

The Hilux gun trucks had not been armored and carried a team of four, but the 30mm KEW was nice to use when you needed to thin out the Cylon wave attacks. The KEWs also had a little longer range than the 12.5 machinegun on the APCs, but not by that much. The second generation 5cm pulse laser had a lot longer range, and it would punch threw two or even three of those up armored Centurions if the angle was just right.

SFC Brenties had a smile on his face as he thought about the lasers on those APCs cutting down Centurions, then his eyes drifted down at the black badge on the front of his battledress. That black badge was his radiation detector and danger ranking. And the black color said that he was in a bad way, because there was not a higher level of tracked radiation that a human body had been exposed to without a huge amount of medical care.

Brenties ripped his eyes away from the badge and they went to the video feed that his thin wire cam was displaying for him on the insides of his helmet. In that view was a large group of Centurions complete with heavy shields carried in one arm. An Observation Point had reported the group of Cylons moving this way a little while ago. The hope for this platoon was to take out this group of unsupported Cylons. The NCO smiled when the group of walking AI's turned as one when they cross a trail that had been carefully left behind by one of the platoon's hover APCs. If the Cylons followed that "trail of signs" it would lead them right into the teeth of this unit's firepower.

With the sudden turn toward the dugged in SLDF small unit hiding from the Cylons. The NCO knew that it was about time to get some pay back for the radiation sickness he knew that was waiting to start on him as soon as tonight. Only you had to be alive to have that body wracking sickness, and a black badge left even that fact in doubt. He activated the very low powered radio link to the rest of his soon to be very sick troopers.

"Okay you apes. Fire off your grenades on my mark, then reload with what you have in your holes. We can get more when we get back to the dropships. Blazer and SRM team, hold fire for the Pretorian mechs. That is unless they get within 50meters, then do what you need to do to those Frakkers." He stopped talking and the radio cut off.

The NCO was not going to get into too many details for his people. Brenties had a good combat platoon, and they already knew their jobs. He also was not going to say that they would have to live to make it back to the dropships. The dropships that were about 300km from them in a straight line from their foxholes.

SFC Brenties now was looking closely at one corner of his data feed. He was eye locked on a tree limb half sticking out of the ground. On the side of the brown limb that faced him was a red line about as thick as his thumb. When he counted the third Centurion that had pass that mark in the open field. The NCO stood up in the back of his fighting position and put his rifle at an angle that his weapons fire control system said was proper to hit the area of ground he wanted. Then he yelled into the radio, "FRAG OUT!"

###

As the last of the two words left the NCO's mouth that were older than the Star League had been, the first of six explosive balls flew out from under the laser's barrel. His actions were mirrored down the line of foxholes. Normally the 960 fired a mix of different types of grenades when it dumped its whole magazine like this. But while fighting the Cylons, the SLDF had found out what worked the best. So smoke, incendiary and IR Flares were removed from "normal issue" and now the ground forces only carried HE/FRAG. The other types of grenades were carried in their dropship, but as a rule, only the big firecrackers were carried out in the field.

There had been talk of removing the Fragmentation warheads and then increase the HE load, but it was found that while the FRAG would not stop a Centurion or damage them enough to put any of them totally out of combat that were within their blast radius. The fragmentation rounds would make the shields the Centurion carry shatter like cheap glass. With those shields down, or now useless, the laser fire was more effective in putting the Centurions down for the count.

As soon as the grenades had left the bottom of SFC Brenties's pulse laser rifle. He had jumped to the forward part of his foxhole like his butt was on fire. And now for the reason that this was a modification of the old Star League weapons was so important. Without all of the junk in the weapon instead of being in the trooper's rucksack, the weapons were lighter for the trooper. Even for someone the size of the current generation of the average SLDF ground pounder. Lifting a weapon like that over their heads for a firefight of any "common" length was not easy.

The NCO used the camera and fire control system mounted on his weapon sticking over the top of the lip of his hole in the ground to fire into the wave of Cylons. SFC Brenties didn't take down a Centurion with every shot, but he took one down with at least every second pull of the trigger. And he very rarely missed what he had been aiming at with this kind of range. This was not normal for the rest of the troopers on this line of holes in the ground to achieve, but it was close. This was not the first battle for most of them. The lasers were not the only weapons firing, as some of the SLDF troopers fired off any grenades that were still attached to their field kit.

The NCO was in "the zone", and he didn't remember pulling his weapon down to change the spent power pack. At least not until he realized that he was patting the pockets of his battledress looking for another replacement power pack. Part of his mind knew that this just had to be wrong. The NCO had started this battle with six extra power packs, and that was not counting the one in the weapon when the battle started. Now that his mind was back in working order, he looked and could "see" what was going on around him. The whole area that he had been firing into was covered in a cloud of thick dust or smoke.

"Ceasefire! Ceasefire!" He was about to yell this command into his radio a third time. That was when he noticed that the numbers of weapons being fired made a large drop, and soon no more weapons fire was coming from his side of the battlefield.

The NCO used his weapon's optics to scan a larger area of the battlefield. At first, he couldn't see anything, but as more smoke and dust had slowly started to clear in the local area. Now he could see more and more burnt and blasted hulks of Cylons stretching out into the distance of the open field. When he could not see any threat? He popped his head out of the foxhole and put the more powerful field glasses to his face.

After the first quick scan of the local area. The NCO started a second scan, but he also had things to do besides looking around. In war you had to be a multitasker, or you didn't make it to the Platoon daddy level of command. "Squad leaders! Check your people. Runners go back to the rides, and pick up the backpack power cells. Then start handing them out to anyone that needs them. Make sure you bring back the spare weapons to replace combat damaged ones. The extras can go into the backup fighting positions."

Brenties was still scanning the battlefield that spread out before the line of holes his people were firing out of. He knew that this was only going to be the first battle and there would be others in the near future. The Cylons would now know where this group of humans were hiding, and they would move the nearest heavy unit over to kill them. The NCO just hoped that his team were not large enough in numbers for a nuk to be dropped on their heads by the Cylons. He could always pull back into a new area, but he had seen the map when they had gone to ground here. The next good fallback line was over 10kms away, and that was too far to make it if the Cylons were close. And he knew that the Cylons would be close on their heels.

It was less than ten minutes later that SFC Brenties felt the ground start shaking. He had been in combat with the Cylons long enough to know that a lot more Cylons than the scouting force was now closing in on him. He was just glad that they had the time to get every one of the large backpack sized power packs for the rifles. Also, all of the remaining grenades had been passed out, and now the APC's were empty of combat supplies. Every trooper under his command with a 960 had a total of nine of the deadly little devices of joy making projectiles. If the enemy had only waited another ten minutes? The platoon runners would have been able to pick up another set of recharged small power packs for their energy weapons, which were sucking energy off of the fusion engines as fast as they could and not short out something important.

In a low voice. "Well, you fight the battle with what you have and not what you wanted." Fell from the NCO's lips and into the open mic of the unit's radio.

He kept scanning the area in front of his hole in the ground, and after what seemed like forever. He saw the first line of Centurions running towards him, but he knew that the mechs would be right behind them. When he scanned across the open field one more time, to make sure that the Cylons were only coming up the one way towards him. He looked back towards the growing number of Cylons, and he could now see the tops of their light weight mechs coming up behind the front ranks of "small" Centurions.

He activates the unit's "push to talk" radio to everyone and this time the APCs would also be able to hear him and the orders. "Okay here they come. When they hit the mark on the ground, the troopers will fire off their grenades by squad. Blazer, SRM team, and the APC's fire on the Praetorians out there. Those are your primary targets until you run out of weapons effect. Time to pay the debt that all people owe."

########

The attacking force was made up of two full Cylon ground battalions and each of them had a Cylon company of larger Praetorians to add firepower to their little brothers. They should have had Heavy Raiders support, but the remaining ones were currently being serviced on the Dreadstar. The Cylons knew in what direction the humans were. All they needed to do was see what remained of the 12th Division's scout company. Then all they had to do was close the distance and kill the humans that had ended the Cylon scout company as a fighting force.

This new attacking wave of Cylons was still working its way over the field of smoking and broken Centurion hulks when the tree line in front of them erupted in laser fire and missile smoke trails. As the lasers hit the first Cylons. small explosives dotted the ranks of the attacking wall of metal in dark clouds streaked with bright fire and silver flash of SLDF made metal hitting Cylon made metal. The attacking Cylons didn't stop in their run when the weapons fire started hitting them. They just pushed closer and closer to the human fighters in their fighting positions.

SFC Brenties was picking his targets as the attacking Cylons got closer to the hole he was standing in. His unit was stacking them up like cord wood, but soon the Cylons were only 200 meters away and then they were 150 meters from him. The APCs had fired their weapons so much that the carefully applied cover of wood and leaves was smoking or outright burning on the small craft. It might have been the APC's firing their weapons or the incoming fire from the Cylons that had set those small fires. In the end it didn't matter.

The 5cm pulse lasers were cutting into the Cylon sized mechs in pulses of invisible energy that blasted the small mechs into wreckage. It took a few hits to kill this generation of Praetorians, but the crews were working together, and each pair of APCs were picking their huge targets. So, the smaller Centurions where able to get closer than they would have been able to. Then the hover APCs had to start firing into the shorter but heavier waves of Cylon attackers.

And still the Cylons came on with the range going quickly from 100 meters to 75 meters. Even with the mass that the current Centurions now had to haul over the battlefield, they should have moved faster on the attack. They were, but the ones in the front ranks were being turned into slightly used spare parts almost as fast as the next line of Cylons could move forward. This had the effect of slowing the attackers down in closing on the humans.

When the Centurions crossed the 15 meter mark, the weapons fire was starting to slacken from the human lines. It might have been due to the human casualties, or it could have been that the members of the infantry platoon were out of power for the energy hungry weapons. On an open radio channel that the platoon sergeant knows would make it back to high command, he gave his last commands. Not for the first time he had wished that he had some artillery to have called down some final protective fires on these chrome domes. But this was not that kind of war.

#########

"Okay Boys. These Frakkers are not pulling back this time. Fix bayonets! Die on your feet, and not on your Knees. For the Star League! Wolverines!"

With the last word on his lips, SFC Brenties jumped out of his smoking and mostly collapsed foxhole that had served him so well. He used his now powerless rifle as a buckler to block a down swinging bladed arm of a Centurion like he had been trained to do. With the enemy attack blocked by the useless weapon. The NCO brought down his vibro ax just like his grandfather, a slave pulled from a Combine world, had trained him starting at seven years old to do.

A Viking ghost once known as Egil Skallagrimson shed an equally invisible tear as he saw his descendent going into battle for the last time on this physical plain. The old ghost almost smiled as one of his own channeled the Berserker without needing training or help from his side of the realm to achieve that horror. All he could do was watch and wait as the NCO went into the line of death yelling his death song of profanity, as he cut down one after the other of the metal Cylons.

The old ghost almost felt each cut on the human that he was watching fight a hopeless battle. Egil thought it was over when an arm moving almost too fast for the ghost to see took the helmet off the NCO in a vicious swipe of metal claws. Only to see and hear the roar of the NCO coming up off the ground and he decapitated his would be killer with a high-tech axe. But the old fighter knew that there was no way that his descendant would last much longer in this fight. There was only so much that one, even riding the Berserker, can take. Egil forced his eyes to remain open when the final blow finally came. The long metal fingers flashed in from the NCO's unguarded side and cut deep into the all too human body. It was over but for the last few cups of warm red blood to flow out of the body and the releasing of the soul for him to collect from this battlefield.

#########

All along this battle line others on this side of the planet fought the wave of death coming towards them. All of them were watched by ghosts from the past and they waited to greet their kin that were soon to die in battle. Those ghosts wore Blue, Grey, Butternut, and half a hundred different types of camouflage that covered their own signs of combat. They still had their ghostly shields, long swords, bows, bowie knives, Pennsylvania rifles, Springfields, Garands, M16s, M4s, AKs, and Mausers. And all were wishing that they could help fight this one more good fight. But they could not, and that was not why they were there on this day. They were there to help this group of heroes into this new realm that would be strange for them.

The ghosts saw the humans they were watching attacking the machines with whatever they had at hand. Empty SRM Launchers were used to bat away blade hands, so that the loaders could close in and smash red eyes with six-inch long vibro bayonets. They also saw humans getting disemboweled but living long enough to empty their sidearms into the heads of their metal attackers. Oh, and they saw more of the blinding glare of nuclear detonations. About the only favor that the group of ghosts could do, was letting the newest members of their kind to stick around in the local area to see who was going to win this latest battle in the very long war of good vs evil.

#########

The SLS Yukon had been sitting quietly in this star system for a few weeks. They were not part of the escort for this mission looking from more hidden technology or useable items. The ground unit didn't even know that she was in the stellar area much less in this star system. The first warning that the Yukon had that an attack was coming, was at the same time the ground units were alerted to the fact. They were not on an alert, so the warship's crew needed a whole ten minutes to get their feet under them. Soon they were recalling their close in CAP, but they were only just getting ready to launch an attack on the Cylon Capital warship when the nuks started to be detonated on the planet's surface. The Yukon was a match for any first or second generation Basestar, but the newer ones were a different kettle of fish.

The alert was sent via a TacFax message out in an omni direction, and the staff went to work on coming up with an idea on how best to counter the warship and support the ground units of the SLDF being attacked. As it worked out, they came up with an idea when the first set of nuclear detonations were picked up on the planet's surface. First this updated information had to be passed along to New Circe, and then they could lower the boom on these frakkers.

As soon as that alert was confirmed being sent to New Circe and the rest of the SLDF about the mass use of nuclear weapons by the Cylons on ground targets. The Destroyer sized Carrier class Warship powered up her Colonial made drive and she jumped behind the gas giant that Shaky orbited. As soon as the huge planet was between the human crewed warship and the Cylon crewed one. The SLS Yukon fired up her huge engines and the command had been quickly given to redline them. Thanks to the cover of the giant planet, the Cylon's had no idea that she was there or what she might be doing. That is until the nose of the warship came screaming out from around the gas ball at speeds not normally safe to be at this close to any orbital body much less a planet.

When the Yukon was "sighted" by the enemy warship, the human jump fighter's micro jumped and started working on the cloud of Cylon Heavy Raiders near the capital warship. They had been on their way to provide much needed air support to the Cylon ground forces. The thirty human jump fighters were badly outnumbered, but they had two things working for them against the space based Cylons. One was surprise, and the other was almost more important than the surprise they gave the Cylons. The up armored Heavy Raiders had been outfitted to provide air support for the ground forces and not outfitted for counter fighter/Viper operations.

The remaining ten human aerospace fighters were not jump capable and they rode off to the sides of the charging warship acting as close escort. Those few fighters were the warship's CAP, and they were there to stop any Cylons that tried to sneak in and kill their ride home. They would not be out of the battle for long, but every second that they were not killing Cylons was driving them more and more nuts to get a knife stuck into the enemy. Soon the Cylons would do their own short jumps to attack the human warship, and they would run right into the teeth of ten very angry and skilled human space fighters.

The Yukon was moving so fast that the One in the command center of the modified Dreadstar had a problem understanding what was going on. In that slight delay, the smaller warship was able to bring her nose mounted heavy naval autocannons and medium class naval PPCs into play. Then the side mounted navel lasers reached out at the speed of light to run their light speed fingers all over the Cylon warship's armored hull. It was long range, but soon the Yukon was scoring more hits on the armored hide of the Dreadstar. It would not take many hits like that before the human weapons started to make it through the new outer armored skin and to start working on the "normal" skin that the old Hades had been designed with.

The "Admiral" Number One now had an idea of the risk that he was in. And the huge Cylon warship started to fire her own cannons that had come off of or designed like the ones that a Mercury class Battlestar had fitted to the chin of her great alligator like head. Those huge cannon shells were joined by Cylon missiles after a not short delay in firing. The delay in firing of those heavy missiles had been in the need to move the ground attack missiles out of the firing queue and then replace them with weapons that were better at countering human warships. Still that delay was amplified when it came to moving large nuclear anti-ship warheads for those anti-ship weapons. The scout heavy raiders had not reported seeing a human warship, so those heavy warheads had not been activated much less fitted to the heavy missiles. That might have been a slight oversite on the commander One's part, not that he would admit something like that.

The Yukon was able to weather the storm of Cylon weapon's fire, and she still charged into the guns of the enemy that had used nuclear weapons on the planet below. The human warship had taken many hits from the Cylon weapons, and she was leaving a virtual cloud of armor fragments in her wake. She had not slowed, and her engines were on the brink of overloading, but her captain would not slow down. Not even with the engineer officers screaming over the inter-ship radio that said the sub light engines were at risk of blowing up under their feet. The warship's antimissile systems were working in overdrive mode to swat down the Cylon's missiles as fast as they could. All while the Yukon fired every weapon that was pointed even in the general direction of her Cylon enemy.

As the range fell between two combatants, more and more of the human warship's heavy weapons struck home onto the Cylon Capital warship. The same was true for the Cylons, but not as much as what the human ship was landing on the machine's ship. The Dreadstar had more engines than was normal for a Cylon Battlestar at the start of this war. Still, it was not what a human would have called Fleet of foot when the spurs were put to the great craft. The smaller human warship was fleet of foot, and she used that maneuvering power to mitigate some of the incoming Cylon fire with pure engine power and piloting skills of her helmsmen. The Dreadstar was throwing out three times the firepower than what the small human warship was able to accomplish, but the human's weapons hit harder.

#########

The medium class Naval PPC was a huge weapon, and its charged particles were moving at near light speed. A PPC has three main parts to its destructive effects that made them such a favorite weapon for the SLiE. They are the heavy impact force, EMP part, and the heat part…lots of heat. The Number One in the command center of the Dreadstar had started trying to shift the huge warship around to spread out the damage that was growing at an alarming rate on his flagship. That moving would prove to be his undoing. What he should have done was just pull out of the battle, but that would have left two full Cylon divisions on the ground. That would have had a major negative impact on the Cylon Empire's future plans

The bolt of purple/white ball lightening that was characteristics of a PPC blast had been delayed in being fired from this weapon due to a combination of power loss, heat spike, and battle damage done to the human warship. The lone energy bolt flew straight and true to its Cylon target. It was just that the target had moved a little between the times that the other purple bolts had left the bow of the Yukon and when the last had arrived at the Dreadstar.

For a split second the Cylon capital ship was a washed in autocannon and energy weapons impacts. Then the last shot came down, the enemy warship had moved a little in how you measured things on the scale of a space battle. Now a hole that had been blasted into the Cylon ship earlier in the battle had become more aligned with the incoming purple bolt of lightning launched from the SLS Yukon. It was not a perfect energy strike into that hole in the armor, but it was close enough for government work.

The edge of the autocannon hole that was closer to the center line of the Cylon ship, took about a third of the PPC hit and it only made the existing hole a little wider. If anything was coming behind the last energy blast, then that expanded whole in the armor would have been helpful. Currently nothing was, and that part of the naval PPC hit did exactly zero benefit for the human fighters. But now the destabilized energy bolt went deep into the Cylon warship. The remaining impact energy was enough to finish off the armor at the bottom of that autocannon crater. The power of the charge particles forced their way 10 meters deeper into the hull of the Cylon ship.

Those 10 meters of hull under the last armor layers were gone, but the shockwaves went out from this impact point at faster than the speed of sound. The closer to the impact point, the more violent the shock was. In some of the rooms, it was like a Terrier going after a rat. Those items in those few rooms were shaken that badly as well. And as any ship builder would tell you, off axis shock is a type of damage that was almost impossible to design for. Most of the time they just did a guess on the level of this type of shock happening and they just added a few more percentage points to the planning data. This time a decimal point might have been put in the wrong area when this ship was designed and then later built as fast as the Cylon yard could. Power lines, coolant lines, all were broken, along with other objects that were shaken off their fixed mounts.

Then the heat from the strike moved at the speed of conduction threw that part of the Cylon warship. Now some things will not burn when they are in a liquid form, and great care was taken with what was placed close to the armor layer. Still another five more meters of the inner hull went from solid to molten metal and ceramics in a blink of an eye. This heat then started to vent back into space, but vacuum was a poor conductor of heat. Just ask any crewmember on a Battlestar and they would tell you, there was a reason that they wore just undershirts when not on duty. But metal on the other hand was a very good conductor of heat, and very quickly it went deeper into the warship. Soon a lot of those fluids that were safe when liquid and even just after turning into gas, all were exposed to heat that drove them pass that safe level of temperature and went deep into the dangerous levels.

Now that the bolt of energy was this deep in the enemy warship's hull, the slight EMP effect came into play for the humans. The EMP effect damaged the Cylon systems in this part of the ship, that was in an area not expected to see this kind of damage when it was built. Soon motors of all kinds took an energy surge that cause them….issues. Most of those motors would just shut down and the crew of the huge warship would have to replace them post battle. But that was not going to happen to all of those damaged motors. In a few cases the motors or other systems shorted out in a shower of very hot and very long-lived sparks.

When one of those systems reacted like that in a room that held super-heated and now very flammable fluids and high temperature gasses? The pressure would build up…explosively. One of these exploding room forced open one of the main fuel lines for the thrusters that the command center was currently overusing. This literally added more fuel to the fire. In less than five minutes these raging fires reached more fuel tanks and ammunition bunkers, and that was the end of the DreadStar. It still was going to be a long five minutes for the Yukon to live threw.

New Circe

Lord Protector's office.

It was very late on this side of New Circe, and by all rights everyone sitting in this room should have been in bed a long time ago. The Lord Protector put down the digital device and rubbed her overly tired and red rimmed eyes. When they felt somewhat better, she looked around the room. She was betting that every person in this room felt as tired and useless as she currently did. She had not felt this tired since she had her first set of twins and thought that she could handle them not sleeping threw the night and a full-time job for the first three months of their lives.

The Lord Protector gave a slight head shake to get her mind back on the current issue, and she went back to looking at the bearer of this latest round of bad news. Then she asked a single question that was weightier than the few words would suggest. "We lost them all?"

The head of the SLDF ground forces didn't so much as flinch at the pointed question. "No, the exploration team is okay. And about a tenth of the deployed 3rd Regiment was successfully recovered from the planet's surface. But they are all suffering from different levels of radiation sickness and other injuries related to combat."

Jenifer felt like she had been punched in the guts by an assault mech. "It was a waste to have kept sending teams to that Frakking planet. Query affirmative." The disgust was ringing loud and clear in her voice.

Admiral Xi looked around without moving her head more than a few degrees. "Not really Lord Protector. We know now that the land, rivers, and lakes do not hold anything of value to us, but we still have the planet's seas to search. We know that the old SLDF and the Star League Corps of Engineers likes to hide things underwater almost as much as they like using mountain ranges to do the hiding. It would have been nice if they would have made things easier for us to find, but that just was not their style. Query affirmative. I still think it is worth the time and effort to keep looking, we will just need to be more careful with our exposed teams and any surface camps."

The head of the ground forces looked like he was sucking on a lemon, and he waited for a few seconds before realizing that he agreed with the navy supply puke. "Admiral Xi is right. Now we know that the Cylons also know about the planet. So, any of my units that go there will not be caught spread out doing training missions and not ready for a surprise orbital insertions and landing. I hate speaking ill of the dead, but at least Charikov made the Cylons bleed to kill his command."

The Lord Protector was a little taken aback at the statement from her commander of all ground units within the SLiE. She had to school her features to hide her surprise. "So, I take it you're advocating to continue sending the search teams and their escorts to Shaky." She now made a face and picked up the device that held the official report filed by the captain of the very badly damaged SLS Yukon. "Will you be able to recover the battlefield? Query Negative."

The General now looked a little uncomfortable at the pointed question. "No, or at least not at this time on the land mass. The Cylon used smaller than normal nuclear weapons, but they used a frakking lot of them on not a small part of the planet's land surface. And all of those blasts were as good as ground or subsurface strikes. This pumped a lot of crap up into the atmosphere on top of the conventional orbital strike they launched to cover the landing of their ground forces. That planet is going to be starting the downhill slide into a Nuclear Winter in a few weeks. Also, those Frakkers salted the bombs with a mix of Cobalt and a Tylium alloy of some kind we have not been able to identify before tonight's meeting. That has dumped a lot of long lived radioactive soup all over the places that also were near the sites of the fighting."

"By the time that this soup is safe, even if we used every ounce of our glycine-manganese radiation Sorbent, that we have on hand to protect our people. That planet will be well into its "normal" ice age pattern when the computers project the effects of Nuclear Winter have subsided, but that might be useful for our needs. While we wait on the atmosphere to settle out, we can do the work in small bites. Oh, and we will need to pull out those Oppies to recover the dead and try to recover anything useful on the land surface. At least the Colonial made Viper and Raptor flight suits are excellent protection from this kind of soup as long as they have airtight seals. Having our people in those suits will help a lot in any recovery of our dead and weapons."

Admiral Xi jumped into the conversation now. "And even then, we will only be recovering any wrecks to be re melted down into ingots and the like. It is just too hot in all the ways that we can measure, and most of that is due to the Salting those frakkers did to their warheads. We have lost every weapon and the larger systems that the 3rd Regiment landed on the planet with, and that includes most of the equipment that the search teams had been outfitted with. That is going to take time to recover and then replace what was lost. But if we don't recover it? Then you can bet that the Cylons will. Query affirmative." Cylons didn't really worry about radiation of any kind, so they might be able to recover something that would help them in this war against the human race for what they think are acceptable losses.

The Lord Protector still had that sour look on her face. "Yes, let's get back to that. We will have to rebuild that unit. The public will demand that we do that and do it quickly. Query affirmative. I know that we will not be able to refit the unit with the same level of equipment that we just lost, at least where the fighters, dropships, mechs, tanks, and APCs are concerned. At least we can use what is left of 2nd Battalion as a starting point. The infantry weapons and body armor for them will be easier to replace than even finding new personnel to fill the ranks."

She looked over to the ground forces commander and then back to the head of the SLiE supply department. "Pull what you need out of the cache sites as you have new crews and pilots for them. I will waver the yearly limit until this unit is back to full strength. The cache sites were meant to be used in times of war and to replace combat losses. I think both fit in the 3rd Regiments case. As soon as new Omni tech weapons come off the production lines, they will still need to go to full active units. But any extra will need to be sent to this unit for their rebuilding."

The Lord Protector got a lost look in her eyes, and she didn't say anything for long enough that the rest of the room started to worry that she was going to drop a huge bomb on them. And to a point they were right. "We have finished fielding all of the small units with Weasel light powered battle armor. If I remember the numbers right, even counting the limited battle losses they have sustained. We have about twelve hundred suits in deployment to all combat services. I think that it's time to start looking at fielding them to some of our main ground units. I think this unit would be a good fit to start this and work out any issues that "we" know are going to come up. We might as well get that started now. Query affirmative."

The leader of the SLiE got another lost look in her eyes as she worked on something that had been said before in this meeting. It took her tired mind a few seconds to get back to it in her mental filing cabinet. "Okay why would working on this planet be better in some ways during its ice age instead of how we have been doing things?"

The general was caught flat footed and then rocked back in his office chair. "Well for a few different reasons. One is that the ice age will slowly lower the ocean levels across the whole planet in an almost perfectly uniform manner. That alone will expose more and more of the shorelines around the planet's oceans. This will help us find any hidden underwater access points to the mainland or to islands that we might have missed so far. Not that we think this is likely to have happened with the systems that the Colonials have given us, but it is always good to double check these things. Also, as the ice builds up, and the oceans will get shallower. Then we can use one or more of the Neptune's to scout under the ice and in the waters of the oceans. They can go deeper and deeper in the water without needing hyper specialized craft with the falling sea level. We can use a grid or a type of spiral searching method as they get deeper looking at what is around the sea floor."

He stops talking for about two seconds. "I am kind of partial to the grid pattern method, but I know never to tell someone how to do their jobs. Next it is very well known that it is hard to see threw sea ice to any measurable depth, even for the old SLDF. That is why the old SLDF liked hiding so much in deep water. But the same is not true when you're looking up threw the sea ice or water. So, when our sealed and safe Neptunes or other support craft comes up close to the surface? They can scan the local space with very little chance that someone is looking the wrong way at just the right time. This will help protect any search teams that we send to Shaky during this time of extreme cold weather."

The Lord Protector was impressed with the out of the box thinking. Using something like the Neptune would lower the risk, the number of her people, and it might be just crazy enough to just work as advertised. She went to a new page on the electronic device and reviewed the data on it. With the notes taken, she got back to the reason that this meeting was called. What had caused the destruction of the 3rd RGT, 3312nd Mech BDE, 331st Royal Mech Div.

#########

Notes:

LT Col Fredrick Charikov and 3rd regiment: It has 2 BNs of Mech, Bn Armor, Bn inf along with fighters and dropships support. Number One has over 50 small nuclear weapons on Praetorian. They take a long time to build but use less resources than a standard Cylon nuclear weapon. W48 155mm .072Kton or .30TJ.

The ghost watching idea. I got it remembering an old comic called Haunted tank.

49