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.

92. Chapter 92 July 3055

Chapter 92

By Cliff and posted 6 November.

Beta and Clean up: Not done

Reviewed by Hotpoint and Cannonshop

Unknown Space

July 3055

Jaime Wolf looked out the very small and thickly armored window in his cabin that was on the newly built from an Outreach shipyard, Odyssey class jumpship. This jumpship was carrying four dropships on the latest and also the shortest contract that the Wolf's Dragoons had signed on for over the last two decades. This was going to be the last mission that the old wolf would command. Okay well it would be the last one until Jaime asked for another one and the medical teams gave their okay for him to undertake it.

At first Jaime Wolf had enjoyed his time away from major command, but it had not taken long for that itch to command to have come back with a vengeance. At least now he could pick and choose what he wanted to do, until it was proven that he was no longer physically fit for combat command. That would be the time that he was finally put out to pasture….. full time. Well maybe not to pasture, but his plan was to be turned into a full time teacher for the younger generations of Dragoons before they were even assigned to a combat training unit.

Jaime felt a smile come to his face that was as close to pure evil as one Jaime Wolf got. One of the reasons to take this mission was that the autobiography book about his life was due to be released on Outreach's open market and to the rest of the Inner Sphere the day after his first jump out of Outreach. He had a bet with Colonel Blake on how long it would take before that bit of fecal matter hit the rotary impeller. A second bet was going to be about how long it would take before one of the more powerful leaders within the Inner Sphere sent a message to Outreach about talking to Jaime face to face about what was written on some of those pages.

This year already had been full of surprises for the "former" leader of the Dragoons and the rest of the Inner Sphere. First had been the little Dragoon Civil war that had to be dealt with on the surface of the planet Outreach. It was "only" a reinforced battalion of battlemechs, battle armor, and a few aerospace fighters going against all of the rest of the Dragoons that had not been deployed out of that star system. This rebel group had found out about the connections and how the damaged Wagon Wheel class frigate had been sold to the Dragoons.

It was almost shocking to find out that the data had been given to them by Jaime Wolf's own grandson, who had taken it out of Jaimes own office without being noticed. While the attackers had at first been on the winning side of this little civil war, but that was only thanks to surprise they had been able to generate in their attacks. Very quickly the rest of the Dragoons had lowered the boom on the rebels. The lessons learned with the Combine, and the loss of so many of the Dragoon's noncombatants had been well learned by the surviving Dragoons.

His grandson seemed to have been in total shock when the rest of the Dragoons had not joined him in the fight against Jaime and General Maeve Wolf. All because the pair were dealing with connections to some people connected to the No Named and other Dark Caste members off the edge of the map. When word leaked out about the reason for this rebellion, it was not greeted with much fanfare by the rest of the Inner Sphere… besides that there had been internal issues with the Dragoons that shut down Outreach for a week.

The Wolf Net file "leaked" to the greater Inner Sphere had connected this Dragoon rebellion to an effort to remove anyone within the Inner Sphere with DNA connected to what had been called Clan Wolverine. This information was connected with what those three Stars of Clanners that had been sent to do the same job years ago and had failed so badly. A secondary mission for that leaked file was that it was being used to get the rest of the mostly born and raised in the Inner Sphere Dragoons used to the idea of the Wolverines being a positive and not the bogyman they had been made into over the last century.

Then word had reached the rest of the Inner Sphere that in September of 3054 Takashi Kurita had committed seppuko and in his death leadership of the Combine had changed. Jaime had just had enough time to add his opinions on this Combine event to his book and give his "private" feelings about this man that was now dead. Truly Jaime was of mixed feelings about how he felt about the death of Takashi, but adding those last few pages had galvanized his thinking that now that one more of his generation was now under the dirt, he needed to do something. It would have surprised many within the Inner Sphere that Jaime Wolf had no longer wanted actively to see Takashi dead, not after the battle of Luthien was over and the damage had been repaired to men and machines. But that didn't mean that he would ever forgive that man for the death of the most honorable person Jaime had ever met. Oh, and then the whole Battle of Misery thing, quickly followed with the attacks that in the 4th SW that killed even more of Jaime's people all out of spite.

When asked about his feelings about the rest of the Combine by the current military leader of the Dragoons? Jaime Wolf had needed some time to put his thoughts together that were more than just a gut reaction to that question. In the end he had told Maeve to never trust the leadership of the Combine with anything long term, even if you have an agreement in what you think is Iron Clad. While the Combine would make friends on the short term, it was only going to be a matter of time before new leadership, or someone lower down, tried to screw anyone not born to the right class within the Combine much less anyone born outside that section of space. In the quiet nights afterwards, Jaime would wish someone would have told him that before he shorted that contract with the Lyrans after the last supply run from Clan space.

Then there had been the stories going around parts of the Inner Sphere about a raider using the name of the Red Corsair, the same name that a certain female leader of the Inner Sphere had used when she had been hiding from her crazy uncle. There was no telling how long these attacks would have continued if not for some leaked information that had come from the Watch of Clan Wolf. With information that pointed to these attacks all being a cover for a major attack by the Jade Falcons in hand. Then plans had been made to end this Red Corsair distraction before it could get out of hand and one of the clans took advantage.

A mix force of fighters and dropships, that were supported by warships went after the woman that had a fleet of dropships, jumpships and at least one warship, a Congress class Frigate, at her command. The leaked information had also said that the Congress that might have been called the Fire Rose when it had been in "normal" clan service. This was very unclan like behavior, and one that the clan honor road would strongly disapprove of.

The final report had almost been a funny read when warships supported by Inner Sphere crewed assault dropships and waves of fighters found this raider. These Jade Falcon raiders had been caught flat footed and the Red Corsair's fleet was successfully captured, if not without damage. Waves of Dragoon and FedCom owned Lupas and newly made NL-42 Battle Taxis and other types of small craft had docked to the enemy space vessels. Soon they then flooded combat forces onto the raiders jumpships and warship very early in the space battle. The hiding clan warriors had not just rolled over and died when the breaches had been made into the hulls of those vessels. Still the Falcons had not been expecting the attack while they were in deep space, much less fighting off attackers fitted with either clan grade battle armor or the best battle armored made within the FedCom to date.

The joint Dragoon and FedCom forces had cut through the enemy crew like butter, very much like what the Battle Cruiser Invincible had done to the ex-Jade Falcon Congress class vessel. Battles between Battlecruisers and Frigates normally don't end well… for the frigate, and that does not count when it was the battlecruiser that surprised the smaller frigate at the time of her choosing.

When the battle was over? The post battle cleanup had quickly found the required proof about who, by name and rank, that had ordered these attacks into the FedCom. It was enough of the right kind of data to even stand up in a court of law that said the Jade Falcons were behind these and a list of other pirate attacks against the FedCom and others. It was also found that these raiders were working with what the rest of the Clans would have called The Dark Caste. In the last report that had been sent to Jaime from Wolf Net; it was assessed that it was just too bad that the leadership of the FedCom had yet to come up with a viable plan to respond to this type of actions by the Falcons. Jaime had an idea of what Hanse wanted to do, but that was going to be harder to want to do, when compared on how to do the deed that he wanted done in the first place.

######

With a shake of his head, Jaime got his mind back into the game that he was currently playing against people he had only met face to face one time. Jaime knew that this jumpship was currently only 60 light years from a very important location, and he was hoping that it was going to be the key for the completion of this contract. But like many of Jaime's plans, that was not the only reason that he was trying for this kind of gamble in the first place. This new jumpship was carrying a short regiment, all carried in the Overlord Chieftain 2, two Lions, and a Mule class to provide cargo support for the whole mission to augment the 400tons of cargo carried on this jumpship.

The Dragoons didn't normally take contracts with ComStar as a general rule of thumb, and Jaime had suggested refusing this mission half a dozen times as the guiding hand of the Dragoons. Now things had just worked out to be way too good for Jaime not to take advantage of something that this contract might provide the Dragoons as a whole. The core of the "official contract" was that ComStar had lost contact with many units after "the" peace treaty was agreed to between them and the rest of the splinter groups. But it was the loss of contact with this base, one that contact had been very good even with the troubles of the recent past. It had even sent reports back to Terra on time that had kept up right after The Split cease fire had been signed, and that seemed to be worrying to the rebuilding ROM.

So ComStar wanted the Dragoons to check out all of the bases that were more off the beaten path than was normal for most of the rest of ComStar or the Great Houses for that matter. Wolf took this subset of the core mission because the base was listed as being nearest the Taurian Concordate that had been the Rimward Operation Area for the Explore Corps of ComStar. That pick had not gone over well with the rest of the Dragoon command staff before the ink was dry on the contract. Jaime thought that they were just being overprotective, and they didn't know that he had a reason for looking at this one area of space. Reasons that were only known to a few key people…mainly in Wolf Net.

Wolf Net had been looking out this way for some time now going all the way back to a time that the Dragoons had still been working for the Combine. Hellespont had been named as a ComStar base for the Explorer Corps in reports that were not public knowledge even to this day. It also seemed like more than a few people that had been part of the Word of Blake, Blake's Will, and other splinter groups from ComStar had fallen off the map in that general direction on the map over the rest of the three other Explorer bases in the contract. It would be very bad news if those crazy groups found a major support base that they could be centered around.

With all of those wildcards in play. Jaime "officially" wanted to make sure that this mission had some back up, and there was only one real place that might have the kind of reinforcement's that he might need if things went sideways. All of the Dragoon's warships were either needed to defend Outreach or they were still supporting the FedCom dealing with the end of this now very public Red Corsair business on the other side of the Inner Sphere. It would take those warships over a year to get to the TC and then there was the issues that the Bulls would have with that much firepower belonging to a FedCom Duke being that close to them. Wars had been started for alot less than having a few warships near a boarder. All Jaime could do is hope that he had the right set of coins to pay for those reinforcements.

As soon as the WDjS Green Trees arrives at the Split system, Jaime didn't even have to check to make sure that his recorded message about why he had so much firepower with him was sent out. He was one of the few people that knew that Wolf Net had sent a short and very incomplete message using a "Black Box" transmitter to these people already. This "first" message also stated that Jaime Wolf needed to have a meeting with the local commander reference needing to rent a warship to support a larger mission for both the Dragoons and second parties of the Inner Sphere. It only took a few hours before Jaime was in a Dragoon crewed small craft, the only one that this jumpship was fitted to carry was heading deeper into the star system at a steady 1g of thrust.

The bay that the Dragoon crewed small craft used in parking and was docked at what happened to be on the outer most part of the main hull of the space station. Jaime was the only one on the crew assigned on this mission that knew that the locals they saw sitting in Zero G was not normal for them. The crew on the small craft had been directed to a check point without getting a cavity search in the small craft bay. This was where Jaime was going to be split off from any Dragoon escort for the rest of this part of this mission. After Jaime was cleared threw one final check point, he was allowed entry into the "normal" parts of this station that used the amazing gravity plates being hidden as a massive hamster wheel grav deck. Jaime had only needed to take a short but escorted trip to the briefing room that he was going to have to do some hard selling within. Jaime was all smiles on the insides as he mentally prepared, this was almost as good as going into "real" combat.

#######

Robert passed the message from the TacFax section to his wife, and he could not keep his feelings from showing to her. This had only been the second time that a TacFax message had been literally run to him from the hidden room within this vessel's hull. When the almost running SLIC member had come onto the bridge of the Styx, Robert's heart had fallen to his toes. There was no way that this was going to be good news, not with this only being the second time this type of event had happened on this vessel. That first time had been when they were told of the Cylon attack and landing on New Circe. It had taken him reading the long message four times before he had passed the note to his hovering wife. While she was reading it, Robert was looking at her to try to gauge her own reaction to what was written on that flash paper.

When his wife seemed to be on her second reading of the message, Robert started talking. "Looks like we have to make another fast run back to the Lyssa."

While he was talking, Terry looked up and gave a slight head nod in understanding. Knowing what she had meant with that head nod, Robert did a half turn and he put on his Captain's hat. They were just lucky that currently the Styx was in the black between the stars and not in an occupied star system. That didn't mean that there would not be hell to pay, not to mention late fees on some of the extra cargo they were carrying that didn't belong to TTM or SLiE. At least Terry had been able to slip a change in the contract with the SLDF when something like this ended up happening. TTM would not be 100percent reimburse for those fees, but it was a lot better than TTM having to eat all of the fines they were going to get due to that message.

With the right amount of volume to get the job done, Robert spoke. "Helm! Get us back to Split. We need a least time course laid out to them within the hour. Make sure a copy of the flight plan and an estimated arrival time is passed to the TacFax team." Robert didn't need to say that the SLIC team would make sure that this data would be sent out to the Lyssa, by now that was an accepted given fact of life.

Terry put her arm threw the left arm of her husband and pitched her voice very low. "This is going to be hard on the kids…. again. I think that I'll go down to the classroom and let the newest parents know what is going on and how it might impact them."

Robert raised an eyebrow at his wife as the bridge crew started running around the bridge to facilitate his orders. "I think that it would be a good idea to have the doctor break out the full med kits and spread them out near the crew's cabins. We might just have them take as many chemical naps as is safe on the young ones."

Robert gives a shoulder shrug when he sees the glare coming from his wife. "Maybe I will just let the medical professionals work that out and keep my mouth shut."

########

Precentor Alain Crosier looked around his office with a sly little smile on his face. The room was massive and outfitted well enough that even a Steiner would have been impressed with the display of wealth spread around this one room. He had taken this office when Precentor Saskia Dinelli had been "retired" after many years of service at this rank and Saskia had worked hard to get it the way that he liked…as far as what he thought decent decorations were. It had taken more than some help from the then Demi- Precentor Lisle von Radoslov before Blake's Will gave him this promotion of leadership over this star system. After that tragic hover car accident of Saskia's, it had been very easy to start shifting the focus of this base away from ComStar and more towards what Blake's Will thought was the real need for these facilities. The hard part had been keeping the information about this change of focus from slipping off the planet until they were ready.

Hellespont base had started life back in the early 2960's as a supply base for the then newly founded Explorer Corps. With Hellespont having fallen off most maps available to the jumpships of the Inner Sphere, the planet had needed to quickly grow to better support those long ranged missions. After that first massive growth spurt, the growth had been slow and steady as each year passed around the Inner Sphere. This had kept up right up until the Helm's core had been first found and then spread around the rest of the Inner Sphere to protect them. That one discovery had fueled another stent of rapid growth for this lost planet.

By the start of the 3040's the idea had been pushed around the First Circuit that this base and others like it might be updated to support real Warships of the Com Guards. That work was being done at a steady clip but even before ComStar had splintered to stop the Clan invasion very few within the core of ComStar knew about this planet. Still even after all of the work that had been done over the last few decades, it was going to take another decade to complete that kind of work to fully support "real" warships. When all of that work was finally done? This star system would be able to support and even repair all but the largest and or the widest warships made by the old SLDF Navy without any finished products needed to come in from outside of this star system.

By now the planet could support this warship support mission with food, air, any needed ammunition, along with a few but growing list of spare parts to repair those same said warships. The real heavy lifting was being done by the one of the now ex-ComStar Faslane class Yardships that had been assigned to both support jumpships and now warships for this part of the Inner Sphere. But that was not the only way that this planet was now supporting Blake's Will and its holy missions. This planet had been selected for its quiet occupation because this planet had been part of the plans for the Rimworlds Republic secret army that had been built in the Taurian Concordat.

The First Circuit of ComStar had not been interested in repairing those weapon production lines damaged from age and basic neglect so common outside of Terra. As a rule, ComStar had not been that interested in any mech or tank production that this planet might be able to build or support. But ROM had different interests, and without bothering to let the other members of the First Circuit know, they had stepped into the game. Out of ROM's own budget the first mech production line was put back into operations, and they had used this generic mech to help with ROM's active but hidden operations in this half of the Inner Sphere. To find the funds needed to start working on getting those other production lines back into operation, many of these Wolverines were sold to groups that worked off the edge of the map… read that they were sold to "real" pirates.

It was slow going in this expansion before the official Splintering, as the event was called by those that had left ComStar. And a lot of work was left to be done to get all of those military lines back into full production. Right now, the limiter in the production of those tanks and mechs was the supporting infrastructure and manpower organic to this planet. These production lines had not been some of the famed SLDF auto factories, but they had been designed for a lower educated workforce to turn out the desired products with minimal training.

Besides what Stefan Amaris had built to support the building of the Secret Army, the Blake's Will groups had brought in another pair of mech lines that they had found on a now nearby dead planet that also had fallen off the map. Those two new lines had been turning out Rampage and Phoenix class machines on a pair of single lines as fast as they could. That was nice support for the single light and medium mech lines along with the assault production line already on the planet if barely working as designed. The tank and APC/IFV lines were still not even close to being put back into operation even at this time. With the shortage of feed stock that could be safely brought in, there was little need to over tax the factory workers. It had been thought by both ROM and the leadership of Blake's Will that tanks and things like APCs could be brought in cheaper than to try to make their own. The same resources needed to make modern tanks could also be used to make more battlemechs so it was thought to better focus on making the harder to find mechs.

Most of those updated Rimworld mechs were going off planet to support the rest of Blake's Will and their limited allies with their updated firepower or for the funds gained from their sell to third parties around the Inner Sphere and beyond. The rest of the mostly age of war tech machines that were locally made were being both used to rebuilt or upgrade the local defenders to better support Blake's Will. Hellespont also was a central area were other supporters of Blakes Will could gather after leaving the watchful eyes of ComStar.

As of this week Precentor Alain Crosier had at his command a full Level III of mechs, a Level III of Infantry that even had a few dozen battle armor suits that they were working up on being trained on. The rest of the defenders were made up of a matched pair of a Level II of aerospace fighters and assault tanks that had been "supplied" by those "flocking" to the banner of Blake's Will. He also could call on two different mercenary Mech companies and four independent mech lances that were currently on the planet. Granted those "Mercenaries" were really just pirates that had agreed to "help" with Blake's Will plans all for "just" the use of the repair facilities on the planet and some extra cash.

Precentor Alain Crosier was hoping that he would be able to field a half of a Level IV Alpha in the next 12 months. They might not have been the best trained combatants around the Inner Sphere in both individual and unit tasks, but they would be three full Level IIIs of heavy firepower. He had bigger dreams of making it into a full Alpha grade Level IV, not counting any infantry use just for garrison duties under his direct command, but that idea had its own set of risks. One of those risks was that someone in Blake's Will's higher command might decide that a unit of that size of mechs and tanks might be better used in offensive operations. You know instead of just sitting around gathering dust and rust while on a garrison post on the edge of "known" space. Then again maybe he had a few ideas that would hide the real numbers of his garrison command from outsiders that might or might not want to take his toys away from him.

Alain was brought out of this line of thinking when the attack alarms started sounding loudly around him. He had to frown as even a flashing red light started strobing near the main door to this office, and it was one that had not been used in drills before now. Right up until now, he had thought that it had only been an emergency light in case of loss of power at night or when power was shut down during some types of drills. The huge windows of this office would have supplied enough light if the power was interrupted during the daylight hours. Then again someone working at this level rarely worked only from dawn to dusk.

Alain reached over to activate his communication station when it started "ringing" for his attention at a volume that should have made his ears bleed. The id number on the device told him that this was his own Deputy Commander calling and with a hard push of the button Alain activated the communications line. It took a few seconds before a woman's face was on the display on the high tech communication device. "Sara what is going on? I should have been told if there was a drill scheduled for the building." The tone was one that he used when he wanted to let someone know that he was very unhappy with them.

If he had taken the time to look at the screen instead of faking reading some pages on his massive desk, then Alain would have not bothered asking about a drill. Instead, his head snapped over to the screen when she used a hard tone in her voice that should not be used on a person of his rank unless they had a death wish. "Precentor! It's not a drill! We have three dropships making a burn slowing down for a zero-zero over the planet. They are only two days out!"

The Precentor's head snaps over to the display screen. "That is impossible!" After his gut reaction to the news, he relents. "Why were they not detected at the jump point? Are the E Wave detectors and alert software offline?"

There had been many reports about how the Clans could arrive in a star system but not being noticed by the locals until they were in the last stages of the invasion. Normally discovery about the arriving clans was about when they sent their Batchall to the locals. What most people didn't know was that 90 percent of those detection systems were in ComStar compounds, so some of the time it had been easy to hide the clan combat unit's arrival. That didn't mean that the Clanners had not been able to surprise ComStar from time to time. And so all Major bases and a few smaller ones had been upgraded with new systems that were hoped to cut down on the ability of the Clans to surprise ComStar now that the Clans goals had become known. Now it looked like those upgrades had not been worth the C-bills that ComStar had spent on them.

Sara looked like she wanted to slap the monitor with the image of her boss on display. "The detectors are up, and they just finished a full self-test four days ago! They are working! And they are blank!"

Sara got her tone and voice back under control before she started talking again, but her face was still leaking angry thoughts about her boss. "Maybe they took a pirate point that we have not been watching? About all we know is that they have three dropships and one of them is an Overlord! The other two dropships are Unions or maybe Lions, and none of them have been using any IFF codes much less one that we have seen before."

It was known that long term Pirates would run with their dropships and jumpships with their IFF systems off, but ComStar knew about a few tricks that not even the clans were supposed to know about to find out who those attacking dropships might be owned by. ROM had contacts in every dropship and jumpship yard going back to before even the first Holy Shroud missions had been launched.

Alain gave the woman a level look. "Well Demi-Precentor, WE will be looking into this after we have taken care of these…visitors. I will find out where the lapses were made and by Blake's beard, I will make them wish that they were never born." This was not just an idle threat; Blake's Will was not known for using soft hands about dealing with failures.

######

Jaime Wolf was strapped into one of the command chairs on this dropship and he was grinning like a mad man. This Overlord should have been with Alpha Regiment of the Dragoons, but they were now using Overlord Cs for any heavy lifting of the Dragoon front line units. Then again this was the Chieftain, well she was really the Chieftain 2, and everyone knew that she "belonged" to The Wolf as far as the rest of the Inner Sphere was concerned. With her spot in Alpha Regiment having been refilled by a new production Overlord C made on Outreach. The Clan built older design dropship might have been allowed to be picked up by the FedCom military. They had needed large movers like her as more and more RCTs were being rebuilt by the FedCom to fight the clans.

Yea Jaime was not going to let that happen, even if she had "lost" her full clan grade command suite a long time ago to be refitted into an Overlord C when production of certain components had lagged behind the need. That had worked out well for Jaime, and he had made sure that Wolf Net had refitted a command suite onto this ship that was more Inner Sphere related. That modification had concealed a lot of items that were not normally found in Clan systems of any kind. You see, Jaime was not averse to doing more than a little spying on the side.

Currently none of these three dropships were running a physically active IFFs systems much less transmitting an IFF code that said they were Dragoons. Jaime had made sure that all of his ships were running completely under emissions control and not sending out any stray RF energy that was not absolutely necessary for this mission. When the small fleet of combat dropships made orbit over the planet, the rules of the contract had said that the Dragoons would have to activate an IFF code that said they were part of the Com Guards. That was not something that Jaime wanted to do, but it was needed so that the contract holder could find out why this base had fallen off the ComStar map. Jaime would still get his full pay, even if it turned out that there was just some communication issues and some bad luck with the groups that had been sent out this way to check on them already.

Jaime needs to get his mind off waiting in orbit while those on the ground had more time to prepare for his forces that they should not have been allowed if he had been able to do as he pleased. It was one of the reasons that the Dragoons always wanted complete control on a mission. Jaime had paid to have the M/V Styx carry his three combat dropships all the way out here using its amazing jump drive. The owner of the Tramp kept to the story that they could only carry three dropships that was needed when word leaked out about this battle and all of the moving parts it had taken to pull this operation off. Still the run from the Split system had been with all of the dropship's bridges and sensors stations locked down and guarded by non-Dragoon personnel. The cover story was that a tug system was set up so this "Command Circuit" could be used and protected "by order of someone at the highest level in ComStar or Wolf Net". It would depend on who would be hearing about this mission on what group had set up the Command Circuit. That was where the hidden and very passive systems in the Chieftain would come into play as they collected data and then hides it.

After each jump the three dropships would rattle a little and an hour or two later, it would feel like they were jumping again. Only Jaime and the crew of the Styx knew that this was all a shell game to hide the real capacity of the SLiE. Still, that had forced Jaime to leave the Mule class cargo dropship and the Odyssey behind and under the guns of the Lyssa and the SLiE. That was going to cut down on the supplies that might be needed to fulfill this contract, then again, each Lion held over a thousand tons of supplies and even the modified Overlord had some extra cargo space that was not normal for this class to have at its disposal.

After the arrival at the Hellespont star system, the Tramp was 32 degrees out from the nearest jump point to help hide their arrival from the locals. It also had not used the HPG burst to cover its entry with a fake E wave. This was a pure stealth insert into a hostile star system. When the Styx's crew thought it was safe, only then were the three dragoon bridge crew teams allowed to return to their domain to get the dropships ready for battle. That was also where the Dragoon dropships sensors were allowed to be powered on for the first-time sense leaving the Split system.

The crew on those dropships were more than a little shocked that it seemed to be that they had arrived in this star system without the locals knowing. When asked about this by the command staff on his dropship, Jaime had just smiled at them. He told them that it was always nice to work with fellow professionals that were as good as his own Dragoons just in their own specialty. The carrying jumpship would act like a hole in space waiting and more importantly watching all of this local area of space after the Dragoon dropships had been let loose to swim in the black ocean.

Using only the skills gained by long years of training, the three dropships were kept hidden from the locals for the most of the seven-day transit from the arrival/jump area to the planet. The command center on the Chieftain had no problem hacking into the communications network of the locals even without using any ComStar supplied passwords on the first day of the stealth transit. By the time that the three dropships were in orbit, the command staff knew that the locals were now part of Blake's Will, even if only about half of the leadership seem to know this fact.

######

Jaime was floating around the bridge section of the Chieftain in full command mode. "Well, what do they say to the ComStar supplied message?"

A young man looked up from the screen with a sour look on his face. "Sir after we sent "the message" from the contract holders. The first thing they did, was that they shut down all civilian radio traffic on the planet. They are sticking to the story that they are a ComStar facility and that their HPG is down, and they need some hard-to-find parts before the HPG can be brought back online. They are saying that those "spare" parts are on order to the main office on Terra, and they are just waiting for them to come in from the Sol system. They also ordered that Faslane Yardship sitting over at the L3 to emergency leave the system. They just dumped a Star Lord out the repair bay into open space and jumped out. I don't think that they know that we are in their systems copying everything we can find. We know where that yardship is going, how long she will be there, and where she is to fall back to if not contacted in the next two months."

Jaime was not smiling at this information, and he was about to ask a dumb question. "And does that hold any water at all?"

The communications tech snorts loud enough to be heard out in the corridor of the command vessel. "Not even close. They don't have the counter codes that they should have, and before they shut down the local radio, we know that they were very anti Com Guards/ComStar, and anything remotely connected to the Clans. Oh, and we picked up a few HPG readings that say that they were sending messages before we made orbit over their heads. We can't read the damn things, but they were sending messages to somewhere between the next star system and 50 lights."

Jaime looked over to the ground force commander, after all Jaime was a little too old to be at the front and leading from the cockpit of his modified Archer C anymore. "Major Madeux, I think that we have enough information to prove that this is a splinter group from ComStar that is in current control of this planet. Under page 6, paragraph 2 of our valid contract. We are to land and work on removing any combat power that contest the change of government of this planet. You are in tactical control of this operation, and I will stay on the Chieftain's bridge or in the command center."

Jaime didn't need to say that if he wanted to, he would strap into his old mech and do some trigger pulling if he damn well felt like it. Oh, and there was nothing that could be said about it by anyone. Well, that is until they got back to Outreach. Then there was going to be a whole list of people that would range from being a little upset with one Jaime Wolf to the ones that would be mad enough to push jump start an Atlas.

The Major smiled and gave a head nod to Jaime before reaching over and activated the radio on his clan grade cooling suit. "We are a go for landing with Bravo 7."

Within a handful of minutes after the orders were given, all three of the Dragoon dropships were starting down the gravity well. Not much later the Dragoons were greeted by six enemy fighters rising from the drop port to challenge them. The old SLDF militia grade fighters were met by the six Dragoon aerospace fighters having been carried by the Overlord. This independent unit under Jaime's direction was not packing front line clan grade omni mechs or fighters. That didn't mean that they were not packing golden age machines or Inner Sphere designs that had been refitted with more clan tech than any house unit could claim.

The Dragoon Aerospace support had some of the same issues as the Mechs that were brought from the Pentagon Worlds. Thankfully this was quickly noticed, and they were stored on the mothballed warships before too much attention could be drawn to the Dragoons. But now with the Dragoon warships now active and the coming of the clans along with it now being known that the Dragoons had been a splinter group from them. Those Golden Aged fighter designs could be brought out with the rest of the Dragoon warship fleet. While this "little" contract was not a major Dragoon operation, but it was important enough that pure clan second line fighters were assigned to be the escort of Jaime Wolf. And while the spaceframes might be old in the Clan's eyes, the pilots were Dragoons and all that entailed on top of having hundreds of hours of combat time.

Thanks to the ComStar rules saying that the Dragoons had to announce themselves… at least as being members of the Com Guards. The planet's defenders were able to get six aerospace fighters off the ground to challenge the proposed next change of government or invasion depending on your point of view. A pair of speedy Trident 3Ts were leading the attack thanks to their very impressive turn of speed. They were followed by a pair of 60ton Gotha 500s, and the slowest to get off the ground, the final pair were the heavy hitters made up of two old Ahab 443s.

The Tridents were a great design, back in 2717 and the three Omicron 5cm lasers mixed with its incredible speed provided by the Rawlings 200 engine made them deadly. But the 20ton fighters were only protected by just two tons of StarGlo Ferro-Aluminum armor spread over the whole spaceframe. When the Dragoon piloted 40ton Pellas fell onto them, it was all over but the screaming. The pair of "light" Dragoon fighters did a Boom and Zoom down onto the faster enemy craft rising from the thicker layers of the planet's atmosphere. One of the Pellas took two 5cm laser hits and the second Pella took only one laser hit from the pair of enemy Tridents. The 8tons of clan grade Forging II Ferro-Aluminum armor had no problem dealing with this damage from the 300 year old laser weapons.

Thanks to the range provided by the Type OVR-X LB Autocannons and the pair of Series XIV extended range 8cm lasers on the Pellas. The Dragoons were able to fire first, but thanks to the high speed of the enemy, they also had the chance to fire their weapons before they died. Firing all three weapons put the two Dragoon fighters deep into the red on the heat scale, but due to the Pellas speed it was better to end this part of the fight…for now.

One of the Blake's Will Tridents fell to the ground thanks to getting cored that had started at the nose and going to the aft mounted engines, but it quickly was joined by the second Trident. That was thanks to the second light fighter losing all of the armor off the left wing and some heavy internal damage that had ended up causing the structure to fail under the stress of air and the Max thrust setting of its engine.

With the two light fighters out of the way and the two Dragoon Pellas off cooling down and using their built in Active Probe to scout around. The Pella's were now needed to see what Blake's Will might be hiding on the ground before the three Dragoon dropships made their landings. The last thing that the Dragoon ground commander wanted to do was to send his forces into some kind of trap. It would not take long before those two new sources of data pointed out a few issues that would be waiting on the Dragoons when they reached the planet's surface.

While the Pellas were scouting the situation on the ground, the rest of the battle for space superiority raged. The four attacking Dragoon fighter craft might have been heavier, but they matched the speed that the remaining Blake's Will craft could attain. The two Hydaspers class fighters were 5tons lighter than the pair of Chippewa IICs flying with them, but thanks to the first being fitted with a AeroFusion extra light power plant the Hydaspers could carry more weapons, heatsinks, and more armor than the heavier Chippewa IIC class. So, the lighter Dragoon craft broke formation and went after the pair of Ahabs and the Chippewas went after the enemy craft that were almost half their size.

Seeing all of this firepower coming at the Blake's Will fighters was disturbing for the quad of ex Com Guard pilots. One of the two Gotha pilots tried to make a break for it even before his wingman was shot out of the sky by the attacking Chippewa. The surviving Gotha had made a very steep dive and with the matched speed against the Dragoon, it would have been just a case of running long enough for the Dragoons to give up. That would have even worked against any other craft built within the Inner Sphere that had a matching thrust rating. It was just too bad that all of the Dragoon craft were built in clan space and their weapons were longer ranged than any matching Inner Sphere or SLDF made weapon. The fleeing craft was the last fighter under Blake's Will to be shot down, but still it was gunned down when the three Series 6bs 8cm lasers had eaten threw the last half of the CarbonDale IV Ferro-Aluminum that had been covering the aft of the old SLDF fighter.

The remaining Blake's Will fighters didn't just roll over and die, with four of the surviving Dragoon aerospace fighters having to be down checked until repairs could be made on them. Jaime would call that battle a draw in the short term at least. Now neither side would have any air support to call in for assistance, and unless the locals had any hidden fighters in reserve. The two Pellas would be needed to provide CAP on the grounded dropships until they ran out of fuel. The Dragoons would have a heavy lance ready for combat in only an hour or two at the latest with the final two fighters that should be ready in less than a day of repairs. These would return "air" superiority back over to the attacking Dragoons.

######

Major Gerald Madeux was named after his gene grandfathered that had died on Misery, and he was trying to work out how to fight this battle he had been given. The enemy was acting strange after the first attack on the Dragoon's LZ had been pushed back, and that made him uneasy. Most, but not all, of the enemy had fallen back to the area of the city that held the HPG compound. The rest of the defenders had been fighting from the wall that went around the whole city.

After defeating the scouts that had been left behind near the first landing sites, the Dragoons had run right to the nearest town/village and the factories. That was where they found out that on this planet, even those outlying areas had an anti mech wall surrounding them. The fight to take those smaller walled-off communities had not been "that" easy, but they had not been that hard with the limited number of defenders on hand when compared to the firepower and skill of the Dragoon attackers.

Putting up those massive and tall walls had only grown more difficult to deal with in the later stages of the fighting around the Inner Sphere before the coming of the Clans. It might not be cheap or quick to put up the tall and thick walls around a town or factory, but it could be done with local materials and labor. That was something that could not be said for putting together battlemechs and modern heavy tanks.

One of the only things that had been learned in the secession wars, was that the anti-mech walls should be high enough that it would keep most jumping mechs out of your city. As a rule of thumb, the wall also should be thick and strong enough to repel anything but a full company of heavy tanks all firing at one point of the wall at the same time. The gates also should be thick enough that it was not worth the risk of sending mechs to kick in the blocking doors at major road access points.

This defensive wall going around the largest city on the planet fit into neither of those categories that the Majors combat experience told him that it should have. Any assault mech with jump jets could make it over this wall without breaking a sweat. The wall also had been thin and weak enough that a pair of his Thunderbolt WDs had been able to push down a section of it and lived to report back. The inner voice of the major was telling him it was a trap.

This odd move of pulling a random part of the wall down had allowed a Dragoon lance to fire into the backs of a lance of defending Von Luckner tanks. The Dragoons had only been able to take out two of the enemy assault tanks, and the last two mech killing tanks had taken heavy damage before they were able to pull out of the line of sight of the attacking Dragoon mechs. Not wanting to run head long into a trap, the Major had ordered a short halt in the advance on the HPG compound. This was a risk that it was not a trap and the enemy had made a mistake, but you were not taking advantage of it and end the battle as soon as it was possible.

After a stop to make sure that the rest of the attack were ready to support him. Major Gerald Madeux leads his command lance forward into the now exposed city. The lance was of a high enough weight that had been rare to see before the coming of the Clans. Well, that is unless you were facing the Lyran scout lance or Zeta battalion on the open field. The Major had as his own ride an Archer WD that was not the standard Archer for even the Home Guard to use. It was a complete weapons refit of the Archer 2W with clan grade weapons mostly known as the Archer Wolf within the Dragoons. The rest of the Lance was made up of a Warhammer C that had been the refit copied from the data recovered during the Clan fighting during the Battle of Twycross and other battles away from front line clan units. Then there was a Victor C and Thunderbolt WD or as the paper worked called it a TDR-9W to round out this command lance.

The jumping Victor and Thunderbolt found the two remaining damaged Von Luckner tank so fast that it was a surprise to all four crews. The massive clan grade 8cm pulse laser, the gauss rifle, and streak SRMs made short work of the two tanks. The powerful and long ranged weapons had been able to take out the heavy tanks that had only a short ranged but very powerful AC-20 as their main weapons.

The running battle with a pair of Rampages proved harder to deal with, but these were not the only hit and run attackers. All for an exchange of "only" some armor and using ammunition the two powerful Rim World designed mechs were brought down, it had just cost the Dragoon Command lance a lot of time.

Madeux used his arm mounted clan grade over charged 8cm laser and the pair of Artemis IV guided LRMs were able to keep an enemy mech under fire longer than most of his lance mates. For anyone that was able to get in close to him would run in to three clan grade 8cm lasers right into the teeth. The enemy kept up these hit and run tactics against the Dragoons, but all of the time falling back, leaving wreckage of mechs, tanks and bodies behind them.

The Major was currently hunting a Phoenix class mech and a Wolverine that were working together to delay the rest of the Dragoons. It had already been noted that it seemed like there were more Wolverines class mechs on this planet than was average, even for what was often called a generic 55ton medium mech in the Inner Sphere. The wolverine was painted in flames and skulls… pirate chic, and about the only thing odd was that the old tech Whirlwind autocannon was replace with an ultra class model that didn't take a zoom lens to know that it was battlefield salvage of some kind. The Phoenix was painted in the red and black paint schema that had become common with any combat unit supporting Blake's Will in combat operations.

The rest of the command lance were hunting their own pair of enemy mechs. It was only thanks to the clan tech weapons that the Dragoons had been able to stand up to such lopsided odds. Well, it was that and the higher skill level that the average Dragoon mech pilot brought to the battlefield. The Major felt a grin come to his face just as something stepped out from an alley way. The two rear mounted clan grade 5cm pulse lasers fired and slammed into the right leg of the Wolverine just as it stepped out of cover of the alley. The suddenness of the attack made the pirate pull back before it could return fire into the back of the Archer.

Gerald again moved slowly down the street, normally it was a risk to stay on a steady course, it left you open for ambushes. But the Major wanted the enemy mechs to come to him, all so that he could remove the threat of any future attacks. Then again that was why his mech was fitted with a clan grade ECM system, to hide a lot of what he was doing. Not a dozen steps later the 50ton Phoenix stepped out from a cover and fired the arm mounted PPC into the barrel like chest of the Archer. The Archers AMS system swatted down the four SRMs that had been launched from the shoulder of the old Rim World design without needing to be commanded by the Major.

The heavy armor on the 70ton mech took the hit and both arms shifted a little and then a set of twin energy beams leaped from the Archer's arms. Both energy beams hit the lighter mech in the torso and almost two tons of armor plate was melted or shattered off the enemy mech with that one strike. The other mech was able to pull out of the line of fire, but the Major thought that it was a good exchange. The enemy PPC hit hard, but each of the clan grade 8cm lasers could match them and the Major had hit twice compared to the single hit the Archer had taken. The Major smiled, he knew that if the enemy stuck to their pattern. Then the pirate Wolverine would be the next one to attack him, and knowing was half the battle.

######

The head of Blake's Will slammed his fist onto the desk and cursed every Precentor that had been the leader of this planet and its mission before him. Still Precentor Alain Crosier had to keep his voice down as not to more negatively impact the defense of "his" planet. As Alain watched he saw an Archer cut off the legs of one of the pirate piloted Wolverines that currently were helping defend this city from those infidel Dragoons.

Even for something the size of ComStar with the income it could generate every year, they had to mind where they spent their coins. Every important outpost on this planet had a full-sized counter mech wall, but to do this, the funds to build the wall around the capital city had been used. There was a wall around the capital city, but it was more morale armor than a real anti mech wall. It had been counted on that no one would dare attack a ComStar city. The massive wall and trench were scheduled to be built, but it was not to be started until the city planning for the next wave of expansion for the city was completed. Still the Compound wall of the core of the HPG station had been completed before any expansion around the planet had been started. That wall around the ComStar compound with its HPG system was formattable. So, its weapons systems had pushed back the first attack on the holy compound by the Dragoons.

#######

When Major Gerald Madeux brought his mech to a stop and then lowered his machine so that it was covered by a large building. He had planned on just taking a break and try to work on another way to breach the HPG compound. Then a command radio channel activated and then Major Madeux felt his stomach dropped down to his toes. The only way that The Wolf would distract a ground commander in the middle of a battle, was if it was really bad news.

The Major took a few heartbeats before he reacted to the buzzing as his brain worked on what could have gone wrong this time. "Chieftain, this is the Ground Commander. Someone over there was trying to reach me?"

Gerald tried not to crawl under his ejection seat when Jaime Wolf's voice came to his ears as clear as a bell. "Major, we picked up a pair of E waves at the Zenith jump point near that cargo transfer station. With the mass reading and strength of the E wave, we know that a pair of warships are coming into system. They should be in system by now, we hope to get a detailed breakdown of what and who they might be before too long."

The Major felt his mouth go dry and his mind froze for a few seconds at the thought of enemy warships, not warship, but warships joining the battle. Then his mind reacted like a rubber band, and it went into high gear straight from frozen. "Do we know what they are and when they will get here? Err, sorry Sir. I will start briefing my commanders to start thinking about having to deal with enemy orbital artillery." Today just got a lot more complicated for the Dragoons.

######

Demi-Precentor Takaski Sakai adjusted his artificial right arm, an arm along with an eye that he had lost against the clans. He was responding to the local commander's frantic request for support to repel an attack by the Com Guards. He could have only sent one of his two warships in this division to support an almost regimental attack on the only major Blake's Will support base in this part of the Inner Sphere. The only thing was that Blake's Will was still working to rebuild its support bases that ROM had been planning on using if things went sideways. No one could have thought that fighting the scavenger lords and the spawn of General K would be this effective in ruining centuries of plans and the losses of so many of those hidden bases.

That also meant that while Blake's Will was growing it was only by slowly absorbing or just co-opting other groups that had broken away from ComStar. Still, they were very weak, and Blake's Will could not risk the loss of one of the few remaining support and rebuilding planets that the organization called Blake's Will could use. That didn't even count that this star system was one of the few areas that could currently even provide minimum support to their few remaining warships. So, after forwarding a message hidden in other HPG traffic Demi-Precentor Sakai moved both warships under his command to attack these stains on Blessed Blake's memories. It was better to have overkill at your command, and then make sure that these pirates were dealt with. Then he could make sure that the attackers were not allowed to let information spread about this base to the other unbelievers.

Precentor Sakai could have led this division of warships on the Dart class Light Cruiser Red Dagger, but he knew a few things after spending the last few years of being in deep space. He had been one of the few in Blake's Will that had trained for years to be a space warrior above all else. Takaski felt that the reason that he had been pulled out of deep space and assigned to be the commander of just an aerospace squadron worth of assets instead of a warship, all had been because Focht and some of his lackeys had it in for him. When the usurpers stated where they wanted to lead ComStar towards in the future after the clan invasion had been stopped, Takaski had not liked it. He had quickly fallen in with key members of Blake's Will after that announcement. All of that experience was why he was leading this mission from the command center of the Quixote class frigate that was larger than what all the books said was a light cruiser. Any ship class with the name of cruiser on it would at first draw in more enemy fire than what most would call a less valuable frigate class warship.

The two warships in this combat division had about the same speed generation capabilities, and each warship should have been packing six dropships to be carrying as added "heavy" escorts. But Blake's Will was both short dropships and aerospace fighters after the battles around Gibson, Odessa, and the other now lost Hidden Worlds. Even adding a few Leopard class Carriers would have been taking assets that Blake's Will needed in other places that didn't have warship support. It was hard to argue that you needed a small carrier dropship when you already had a million tons of warships at your command.

Not that this fact had not stopped him from asking for some carriers and one of the Q Mules that he knew had been added to Blake's Wills order of battle at least in a few numbers. He also was one of the few that knew Q-Mules numbers were very slowly growing in the Blake's Will order of battle. It was so much easier to find old Mule class dropships than it was to find old military dropships that were not needed to do their designed roles. But still his request for those converted cargo carriers had been denied right along with the carrier support.

Demi-Precentor Takaski Sakai snorts, "Well you fight with what you have and not with what you want in your back pocket." Sakai had no idea that he had spoken aloud but at least his voice was low. Suddenly he looks over at his second in command and she gives him a raised eyebrow look that said that he had been heard by at least one person on this bridge.

Not wanting to seem that he had spoken without thinking, he finished his line of thought. "Besides that single Overlord, adding a pair of Lions is going to be very helpful for Blakes Will to be done in this part of space."

#######

The warship division commander gave orders and both warships went to 1g acceleration, and all sensors started looking for any enemies that also might be in this star system that had not yet been reported. They were the top predators in this part of space, and they were acting like nothing could or would stop them in their mission to protect this support node. They might have even been right in that line of thinking, a few years ago. Then again today was alot different type of animal that what Blake's Will had to deal with, it was just too bad they had not noticed the changes in the "real" world as it changed with the times.

It had been an easy few days for the Precentor and his crew on the two warships. A day after they had arrived at the jump point, the local commander on the planet had sent a message that the attackers were pulling out of the city and breaking up into lance sized forces when they exited the city. The "infidels" had only made one more attempt to breach the walls of the holy compound, but the Blake's Blessed defenders had been able to repel them without too many issues. It was just too bad that it had taken most of the pirates to do this repelling of the attackers. That was not bad news in the Precentors book, but the news that the attackers were from Wolf's Dragoons and were not in fact Com Guards had been a surprise. Oh, and they were packing a lot of clan tech weapons also was not good news for the ground defenders of Blake's Will.

Well, that is until the Percenter remembered an order that had come from the still forming Blake's Will higher command over a year ago. It had said that any Dragoons found, they were to be wiped out and that nuclear weapons or orbital fire support was precleared for use. Well, they could be used as long as none of the Dragoons lived to report this use of those weapons on their heads. The report that the three supporting Dragoon dropships had been seen displacing was less well received than anything by the warship division commander. If those Dragoon dropships were in space and not just hiding somewhere on the planet? Then it was going to take some skillful bluffing to get them into weapons range of one of his warships. This warship might have a dozen small craft, but they had a grand total of a dozen "real" marines spread out between both warships.

Demi-Precentor Takaski Sakai thought about lowering the thrust to give the Dragoons more time to pull further back from the HPG compound but decides not to, seven days should be enough for them to get out of danger close range to the HPG compound. The teams manning the sensors systems on the warships still had not found the jumpship that had brought the Dragoon dropships to this system and that was more than a little concerning. More and more of his staff were thinking that the Dragoon jumpship had a LF battery and it had already left from a pirate point that was not known to Blake's Will. That left only the Dragoons on the ground as targets that he could attack and when they arrived overhead, they would rain death on the blasphemers.

Takaski Sakai floated on to "his" bridge after a very nice sleep session on the grav deck, the rest of his spacers had to make do with sleeping in zero g hammocks. After refreshing, he had taken the time to stop by the ship's chapel to Blake. He had asked to receive Blakes blessings in the coming battle against these blasphemers. The Division commander took the time floating around the corridors of the frigate and not taking the shortest route to the bridge from the chapel to motivate the crew on this one warship. Takaski felt that he was channeling Lord Nelson as he floated around the vessel showing the rest of the warship's crew that he was not worried about the coming battle. When he had finally arrived at the bridge, they should be three hours until they reached orbit and less than five minutes until the massive engines on both warships started firing to put the warships into a stable orbit over the planet. It was just another day in the Blake's Will navy.

Precentor Sakai was feeling like everything was going his way as the warships slowed to make it into final orbit over the planet's HPG compound. Thanks to the Blake's Will ground forces, he had an idea of where his two warships were going to fire into first. As the images of those naval autocannons and naval grade lasers reached down and blasted the Dragoons apart, he smiled. He was brought out of his thinking when an alarm sounded all around him.

The Ship's Captain was yelling and so was the sensor operator on the other side of the bridge from the mission commander. "We have a contact! It just showed up danger close! We didn't pick up an E-wave!"

Sakai second in command and the ship's captain was yelling. "Was it stealthed! Get an ID from the war book! We need to know what they are!"

#######

Commander Anastasia Dualla looked over to Colonel Helena Three Anders and she gives the female Cylon a slight head nod. The only thing that both of these Colonial officers like better than taking down the Cylon Empire. It was to take down other zealots that seemed to have infected every group of humans after they had found out how to make fire. In their book taking a few warships away from a group of nut jobs like Blake's Will was an excellent use of the one-time flag ship of the Colonials Rag Tag fleet. It was just lucky that this ship was closest to the Split system when this idea was passed up the SLiE chain of command… and then as much of a shock to anyone, it had been approved.

Commander Dualla spoke aloud so that it could carry to the data records. "Colonel put the ship on combat alert and then jump us to low orbit over Hellespont."

Colonel Anders smiled and gave the orders and before her worlds had finished leaving the Number Three's mouth, the battle alert started sounding around the massive warship. In a change from how the humans had fought while fleeing the now named Cinder Worlds, the Battlestar's crew just didn't load the Battlestar weapons when they had been put on alert. The whole Battlestar's crew first finished putting on their space rated armored suits, that were very much like the suits used by Viper pilots. In those bad old early days of the 2nd Cylon war, the old girl only had enough protective suits for her pilots and a few extra pulled out of museum stocks of questionable repair and safety for some of the damage control teams. Even the Battlestar Pegasus didn't have enough protection for her surviving crew to use when she had fled the space dock while leaving a large chunk of her crew behind. It was one of the items only pulled out of storage in time of war. One of the first things cut by the bean counters was the idea of training like you fight.

Thanks to the SLiE and its already built infrastructure, the Colonials now could fight a space battle the way that the book said that you were supposed to. In only a few months after finding the SLiE on New Circe, every Colonial crewmember was fitted with a copper-colored combat pressure suit and proper helmets. It had taken longer for the rest of the SLDF Combat Navy to accept the need of those death pressure rated combat suits. By now it was required that all warships of the SLDF would have those suits and you would wear the full suits in time of battle.

When each section on the old Battlestar reported that they were at battle stations and crews were in their sealed suits, the backup damage control started to pump down the atmosphere in those parts of the warship. They would not be taken down the Galactica's internal space to "real" vacuum, but the atmosphere was soon thin enough to not support human life or fire. Still point one kilogram per cm of atmosphere could be dangerous under just the wrong combat conditions. At the report of the first hull breach special hatches would be opened by Damage Control to vent the last of the atmosphere into space to keep the warship from having a full blowout.

The warship's XO gave the master of this warship a nod in her helmet to show that the ship was ready for combat. The right hand of the Gods, at least on this warship just gave a simple hand jester to start the next part of the plan. That was all that was needed to have the XO take three steps towards the navigation and jump control station for the refitted Battlestar. Soon after a second alarm sounds in the suit's speakers that the well-trained crew knew that this told them that they are getting a ten second warning for a jump taking them into an active war zone.

The Battlestar Galactica arrives over the planet in a sliding motion that was so common with the use of a Colonial/Cylon made jump drive. It didn't take long before the two hangers of the Battlestar started dumping her complement of fighters into the deep black of space with blood in their eyes. While the mix of Vipers and Avars were leaving the massive warship, her huge autocannons and NPPCs turrets ether pop upped out of the hull or slides forward into locked position with the barrels exposed to space. The Colonial Battlestar was ready to do battle with anyone that was willing to accept the gauntlet that she had just thrown down. It would just take someone dumb enough to pick it up, and well Blake's Will might be smart but dumb at the same time.

#######

Precentor Sakai moved over to his XO who was looking over the shoulder of the conglomerate sensor section to better hear what was being said. Thanks to the slight pushing of the massive engines on the division warships, he could walk/bunny hop over to this command station quite easily. He arrives just in time for the bad news to be worked out… at least the start of the bad news.

The officer in charge of these multi-intelligence stations was speaking in a low tone. "We didn't detect a E-Wave but there was a halo of some odd radiation near it. Blake be good! She is larger than a Texas class battlewagon but smaller than a McKenna!"

Speed of light was not on the side of Blake's Will today and the colonial warship had been working with detailed information provided by the still hiding Styx. The commander and crew of the Galactica was well and truly inside the enemy's decision loop. It was just too bad that they were under orders not to let all of the SLiE's secrets out of the bag just yet.

A second and younger voice joined from one side of a second control station. "Bandits! We have bandit launches from the intruder! 12, 24, 36 and the number is growing. Positive id on fire control for Avar class light omnifighters, two other attack craft are completely unknown to the war book. Bandit's count 124, and now slowing but still growing. Some of the bandits are holding back in a CSP like bubble, and three other groups looked to be forming up as strike groups."

The division commander was paying attention to what was being said and what was now being displayed for the entire bridge to see. He also knew that data from his ship was being sent to the Dart class light cruiser Red Dagger. It was just like what the Dagger was doing with their data so that the division commander could have a common operational picture of the battle space. It took him only a few seconds to work a golden nugget out of all of the data from what the two warships were gathering every second.

Takaski pitched his voice to also carry over to the Weps, and the CAG stations halfway around the bridge. "They aren't carrying assault or carrier dropships. To pack in all of those fighters, support bays, and doors on a hull that size? They also had to cut deeply into her armor and weapons load out to carry that many aerospace fighters." Takaski used a less than command volume as he was trying to sound like it was just another day ending in Y and not possibly the end to his warships.

The head of the Intelligence section looked up with concern in his eyes that the Demi-Precentor had never seen before. After a lifetime in the intelligence business, the spook knew the power of assumption when mixed on the battlefield. He also was one of the few on the bridge that knew how fast you could die in a space battle thanks to his time as an undercover dropship's crew. He felt that it was his duty to try to stop what he had a feeling was an upcoming trainwreck, and a trainwreck was the last thing the head of the Intel section wanted to try to live threw.

With a visible effort he spoke to the officer in charge of this mess. "Sir, we aren't getting a match of any kind in our war books on that warship. This ship is a complete unknown to us... and I mean a complete unknown. She could be some kind of armed space station for all we know. Maybe something along the lines of the Dragoon's old Hephaestus Station….. but more combat related? She could have a massive number of fighter bays that is supported by an equal amount of heavy armor and capital grade guns. That would make sense for the observed data on that thing. It was not a jumpship but a battle station. One that they moved the orbit around to better face us, maybe by using some kind of clan made high efficiency fusion/fission torch." His voice went a little higher as he grasps for any straw that might be useful to stop this madness.

The commander gave the young officer a level look and the tone was pure, "you will pay for this down the road". "I think you need to spend more time reviewing Blake's words and less time taking council of your own fears. A space station is a sitting duck and not even the Titan Battle Station in the Holy Sol system could stand up to more than a few capital lasers or autocannons. But I will take your advice… Senior Adept."

Takaski turned and looked at his second in command and the master of this vessel, and with what could only be called an evil grin. "Send the "standard greeting to these interlopers, and then launch all of your own fighters. Let the other warship know that we will be starting with a missile bombardment and that both warships are to break out five nuclear weapons from the storage lockers. If a second volley of missiles are needed? Then each warship's captain will be clear to fire them at their own discretion without needing me to clear it. I will not micromanage this battle. I just want that Dragoon warship out of my skies. The order is fire when we are in range!" That was it and the nuclear weapons release had just been given.

The Intelligence officer looked deflated at hearing the division commanders' orders to break out a third of the nuclear warheads that were carried on these warships. There was nothing he could do now, and he also knew that his place in Blake's Will was in jeopardy if he said one word wrong for the next few weeks. Only he had a feeling that he was not going to live long enough for that to be an issue, but there always was the outside chance he might just live. There was nothing that he could do but try to do the best job that he could for as long as this battle lasted.

The Quixote class frigate was known for two main things when it first had been able to slip out of the building yard in 2350. One was her slow speed for something that was changed to be classed as a frigate in the ordering documents. That "down" classing had been done when it was found that she could not do the job of a Battle Cruiser as the SLDF foresaw it. The other thing was the sheer number of missile tubes that this class of warship had been fitted with from the get-go. She could fire twenty-six missiles in her forward arc spread across three different capital missile types with but a few button clicks needing to be done. That was what ComStar and the SLDF Navy had thought of as missile spam, and the Dart class cruiser could add four of her own large Killer Whale class weapons to that wave of spam. But this was the first time that the Inner Sphere sees a real Battlestar much less seen one in action. The bad thing about life is that she gives you the final exam…before the homework.

######

On the Battlestar Colonel Helena Three Anders walked over to Commander Dualla. "These Blake's Will frakkers have started flooding the frequency normally used by locals to communicate with a repeating message."

Commander Dualla gave the blonde human form cylon an odd look. "What are they saying?" She was thinking about Nike that used what she had called music to jam some of the Cylons before she had lost her hull. Now could it be that these people were trying the same trick, just with a lot less power.

Colonel Anders gave a slight shoulder shrug. "Oh, it's just you will submit to Blake's Will or die kind of thing. Then there is a bunch of chanting from what I think might be a religious text of some kind. Do you want me to make sure a copy is made?" Commander Dualla didn't have time to think as the enemy did something dumb.

When the missiles left the two Blake's Will warships, half of the deployed SLiE Combat Space Patrol flew into the teeth of the dozen heavier enemy fighters. The Colonial Mk 8+ Vipers were only 15tons, and they were the first ones to make contact, but Colonial and SLiE had fitted then with only a pair of clan grade 5cm lasers in place of the 30mm KEWs. Most of these fighters that had been launched from the Battlestar were the heavier clan grade 35ton Avars and they were totally different than Vipers. It also helped that the aerospace support launched from the Battlestar had years of combat experience to draw on for this "small" space battle. They might have "only" been battles against the Cylons, but the current generations of Heavy Raiders were closer to many "normal" aerospace fighters found within the Inner Sphere.

Thanks to this skill advantage to match up with a tech advantage, the Colonials used their higher speed to make slashing attacks on their outnumbered but heavier opponents. Some of the slower old Star League craft like the pair of Hammerheads were harder to kill by these types of attacks, but as a pilot called Starbuck had once said. All of that armor won't help you if someone punches a hole into your cockpit.

The Battlestar commander watched the on-rushing cloud of enemy missiles, and she was not impressed with what she was seeing. The locals might think that this was a lot of missiles to fire at one time, but Dulla had been on the bridge of this very ship during the Battle of Ragnar at the start of the 2nd Cylon war. Now that was a lot of missiles, and she had lived through that attack and the dozens of other battles that she had fought against the Cylon Empire that had followed.

On Dulla's orders, the great warship didn't open fire with her heavy weapons, and she let the enemy missiles get closer and closer with each passing second as a show of faith in her crew and command. It also just happened to be going to be showing how this one ship overpowered these two Blake's Will warships. With a single word the weapons on one side of the great Battlestar opened fire into the coming missile wave. These were not the old style close in weapons that this old Battlestar had been first built with back in the bad old days of the First Cylon War. Now all of those old twin turrets mounted the New Circe made 50cm Ultra-LBX cannons called the Hose of Death by those within the Colonial and SLiE military. Those rows of 50mm autocannons were backed up by many of the laser based anti-missiles systems that were made on New Circe.

A massive wall of flak rounds flew out and started taking out the attacking armored enemy capital grade missiles. The remaining colonial CSP had been very careful about staying out of the cones of fire from those weapons. As the old saying goes. Incoming fire always has the right of way, and friendly fire an't friendly. This was one of the hardest skills for fighter and warships crews to master when new crews were added. And it was one of the reasons that combat units always needed to undertake a shake down training mission for the crews before deploying into a combat zone.

The massively updated computers on the Battlestar had no problem plotting the course of the on rushing enemy missiles and at the same time finding out that not one of them packed a nuclear weapon of any kind in those spaceframes. In no time the close in weapons of the Battlestar had removed the last enemy missile before it could have been a threat, even if it had been packing a small nuclear weapon that had not been spotted. Thanks to working with the SLiE and the SLDF navy, the armored skin of those missiles proved less than a problem for the colonials to deal with than they would have been if this had happened back in 3046.

#######

Demi-Precentor Takaski Sakai was looking at the data with wide eyes and his mind was not even tracking that his command section was in total bedlam around him. It was like someone else was giving orders when the words left his lips, "Full weapons release! Fire everything we got!" It would take some long minutes before he realized that the high-pitched screeching voice giving those frantic orders had been his own.

Seconds later all of the forward mounted weapons on the two Blake's Will warships open fire on the lone warship standing defiantly in front of them and in orbit over the planet. It was not as one sided as you first might think, if this was a normal space battle. The long Colonial warship was outnumbered 2-1. And while she was larger than the other two warships individually, but the Blake's Will warships combined did out massed the old Battlestar. But the Battlestar had more and better aerospace fighter support even after killing the last Blake's Will aerospace fighter well short of being any real threat to the old warship. Then again, the gods didn't make warships equal. That had been done by Professor Oppenheimer in a desert of Terra long ago.

The naval laser of the classes of 55's, 45's and 35's arrived first between the two groups of combatants. Those speed of light weapons should have been held back until after the next round of missile fire or autocannon fire had a chance to first weaken the armor of the great old human warship. But the orders from the Flagship had been clear…fire everything and the crews took that to mean to fire them all right then.

######

Commander Dulla would not be sitting back any longer, and even before the last of the first wave of missiles had been taken care of. The Commander had ordered her great beast into a preplanned set of very complex maneuvers. There was not that much time to generate that much of a change in Delta V, but it was enough that only four capital laser beams played down the port side of the Battlestar. The SLiE made Ferro-Carbide armor went from solid to straight to gas under the high energy assault and four ovoid craters were melted into the upper most layers of the upgraded armor covering one of the most loved warships in the human fleet.

The Naval Autocannon rated in the 20 and 25 range came next to the area of the Battlestar moving at slower than the speed of light. These were some of the lightest but fastest capital grade autocannons shells that the Inner Sphere had ever made. But thanks to the training of the crew of the Battlestar only one of those incoming capital grade shells hit, and it was only a strike on fresh armor on the dorsal side of the vessel. The second wave of enemy missiles were even slower and before they were within range, the Colonial systems knew that ten of the thirty missiles held nuclear warheads of some unknown destructive power.

The person known as Galactica Actual was not waiting on those warheads to be a risk to the old Battlestar or more incoming heavy fire. First to fire from the colonial warship were the four massive naval grade PPCs that had been on a McKenna class battleship before being traded to the colonial warship. One of the advantages that the Battlestar had in this battle was that she had an updated war book and knew who and what she was facing. The same could not be claimed by the warships fighting under the Blake's Will flag. The commander of this vessel had been fighting Cylons and she had confidence that she could deal with the missile frigate. You could shoot down those weapons and yes, she knew that a large enough nuclear weapon would kill Dulla's command. She also knew that the only way to stop NACs shells and capital energy weapons was to get them to generate misses, take it on your armor skin, or to kill the mother ship as fast as you could. Well, you can guess what path Commander Dulla chose in today's little skirmish.

"Only" three of the massive near light speed energy weapons put their purple bolts of energy into the Dart class cruiser's armored hull. And just like that, almost 45 percent of the armor on the whole forward part of the old Cruiser was turned into gas. The physical shock of being hit by the bolts would shake the ship to its core. And well, there was a reason that the Red Dagger was called a "light" cruiser and not using words like heavy, or battle attached to the front end of that word. The rest of the Colonial made coil guns put a line of what the SLS Nike had designed and called armor-piercing composite rigid (APCR) shells that ripped into the side armor of the Dart like the armor was made of wet tissue paper. Those shell strikes took out about 12 percent of the armor all along that side of the light cruiser and the removed armor from the hull was now floating in space as sharp fragments or cooling particles.

By now the enemy missiles were taking fire from the close in weapons of the Battlestar and the unique weapons had started to be swept from space. The old warship, that was really younger than both of her Blake's Will enemies today, fire control system made sure that the nuclear tipped missiles were taken out first. This digital targeting shuffle was not without issues as the enemy weapons that might have been further away were prioritized over closer threats. This allowed four of the fastest missiles, all barracuda class, to hit the old Battlestar on its thick and hard armored skin.

The missiles might have been fast and their targeting computer top notch… for the Star League, but all that had left little room for an effective anti-warship warhead to be fitted to them. There had been many reports available to the SLiE that showed heavy aerospace fighters that had been hit with this type of weapon in the past. But even then, the clan made missiles had been tanked by those fighters, and the SLDF fighter craft still had been able to give effective battle as the Wolverines had fled clan controlled space. The crew of the Galactica barely noticed the impacts of these missiles on her hull. The Colonial warship was still in the fight without any of her capabilities compromised by this round of enemy fire.

#######

The Demi-Precentor was still in some level of mental shock, but he had good commanders on his two warships. While those two captains fought their warships, he needed to plan what to do in the midterm. This enemy kept springing surprises on him, like they had a fabled magic hat at their command. First had been all of those light and ultra-light fighters that had been launched from one warship out of what looked like a hundred individual launching bays. At first, he chalked up the killing of his dozen escorting fighters due to them being outnumbered by this new enemy. But now he knew that they were both outclassed in tech and in his pilot's average combat skill. Still, he had been so sure of himself that his first wave of missiles was more than enough to if not kill the enemy warship, that it would at least force them away from the planet.

Then the speed of the enemy battleship had surprised more than just the division commander, according to computer projections, that massive ship was almost 30 percent faster than both of his ships if they wanted to push their engines. The armor also seemed to be tougher than anything in the data files of the Star League, but he thought that it could not be that thick and the weapons firepower was so far not up to battleship grade in his opinion. Then again that long ranged firepower was better than anything but maybe a Black Lion and larger warship that had been under the Com Guards command before The Splintering.

At least so far it had not proven to have any missiles and ECM capability outside of just what a pre–Star League battleship should have been fitted with. Then just as he had thought about the lack of an enemy ECM capability, most of the command center's screens went white with static. He didn't need anyone to tell him that the enemy had just turned on its next level of ECM and ECCM systems, and they were very powerful systems. Takaski wonders if this was what it was like to fight against some of the near mythical Bugeyes of the old SLDF Navy.

The division commander felt the ship vibrate as another volley of weapon's fire left his flagship to try to kill this Hades own warship. He had no idea how the enemy's electronic warfare would affect the fire control on this ship, much less on the battering that the Dart had already received. He was just thankful that the enemy seemed to be more interested in taking out the Dart and not the ship that was around his very valuable skin.

There must have been a bubble in the enemy's ECM field, or they might have done it on purpose. But for only 97 seconds the screens cleared on the bridge of the Blake's Courage, and in that time Precentor Sakai knew what death looked like. How do you spell death? It is a light cruiser exchanging three volleys of fire with a pissed off enemy battleship. The Dart was burning all along the bow and down one side that had been facing the enemy warship. Then suddenly the one-time Terran Alliance warship exploded right in Takaski Sakai's face in a great wave of red, orange, and blue waves of fire. When the wave of fire finally went away, he could see great rents and cracks in the armored hull of his escort. It looked like a monster had tried to claw its way out of the very hull of the old warship, and in a way, he was right with that way of thinking. Only that monster had been the atmosphere that the warship had been carrying to keep the crew alive and in fighting trim.

Just like all of the Blake's Will members and the Com Guards before them. The deep space fleet of warships and dropships fought in a short sleave environment that was meant for the crewmembers to be more efficient in their work tasks. But as the colonials had showed the SLiE, all that did was turn your expensive warship into a bomb just waiting for the right circumstance for it to go into unfriendly mode. That had just happened to a Dart class cruiser that the old SLDF had thought wiped from existence back in 2722.

Now the Demi-Protector had only one thing in the forefront of his mind, and it was sooo not to try standing toe to toe alone with an enemy battlewagon. The term was called fight or flight for a very good reason. "XO! Turn us around! Get us to the nearest possible jump point! We need to leave before it comes for us!" He was getting close to the point of becoming totally unhinged with his surroundings.

The XO of this warship division head's snaps over so fast that her body twisted in its restrains so hard that it almost drew blood. She had never heard that level of pure terror coming from anyone but those that ROM had made arrangements for them to see Blake Himself before going to hell. For a split second, she thinks about shooting her commander out of hand for cowardice as was noted in her special orders from the Blake's Will's own version of ROM. Then she thinks a little harder on the facts and concludes that the Demi-Precentor is right that this battle is lost. Now all they could do was flee and get word out to the rest of their people about this beast floating in this part of the deep space with an appetite for Blake's Will warships or other combat units. This was so much worse than the perversion that were the Clans.

With a lot calmer voice than what the Precentor had used, the second in command of this Division gave clear orders and soon her ship would start moving to the nearest known pirate point on file within the navigation computer. With her orders given, she used what brain power she had left to start working on her final report that would be handed off to the Intelligence collectors of Blake's Will. One that she would make sure showed that it was the cowardice and arrogance of the commanding Precentor that had led to both the defeat of this division and the loss of this key support node of Blake's Will. If she wrote the report just right, she could get a promotion out of this debacle. In her mind, that was just how things worked within the Blake's Will.

#######

On the bridge of the Galactica the female Cylon and second in command of this great vessel looked over to the Commander threw the clear glass of her visor mounted on her helmet. "Looks like they are trying to break off contact. Do we let them go? We have four holes in the armor and a few compartments open to space."

Commander Dualla thought for a few seconds at this question. She could end this fight with a flight of her own missiles fitted with nuclear warheads of their own. The downside was that they had run out of Colonial or even many captured Cylon made missiles and the ship had been modified to use SLDF standard Whale Shark missiles bodies in their place. But while the bodies of the missiles were plain vanilla SLDF, the seeking heads were a mix of Colonial and Cylon technology to make the already deadly weapons system into a true nightmare for anyone not SLiE or Cylon. To use a few of them would be a drain on the supplies that the whole SLDF could draw on for combat, and she was already passed the end of a very long supply line.

As she watched, the missile frigate started to turn as it vented atmosphere from a few holes in the hull, and the engines suddenly went to maximum thrust if not just a little more. The flames from the thrusters were blue hot, but the sign that they were pushing harder than they should was the flashes of red and orange within the blue flames coming out of the massive thrust bells. While capital grade autocannon rounds were cheap, even the new ones that the Nike had help design before her old hull had been blown out of space by the Cylons, they did have a cost. Even using the energy weapons on this warship would increase the need for certain number of maintenance hours with each live weapons shot. Thinking about the Nike made the commander remember one item in her ship's arsenal that she could use without worry of needing hard to find resupply. They were prototypes after all and any data they gained would be totally worth the resources used.

The Battlestar Commander quickly looked at the angles and thought that this fit close enough to her orders, and she looked over to the Colonel. "Alert "Them" and when they are ready fire the two Suicide Sleds when they are ready to go on that ride."

The human form felt her jaw drop and hit the inner ring of her helmet. Of all of the things that she had expected, using a Cylon idea that even the SLDF had called Suicide Sleds was not on that list. But she had been given an order and the XO sent a message to two special teams hidden deep within the bowels of the old warship. She was not surprised that the teams were already loaded and ready to go on a mission just on the off chance they would get the green light. With her orders already given by the ship's master, Colonel Helena Anders activated the final command to send them on their way. Quickly the two sleds were moved, and they replaced two active missiles in the silos of the one time flag ship of the Rag Tag Fleet.

Less than 45 seconds after the order had been given, two massive missiles came flashing out of a pair of armored missile silos on the massive back of the Battlestar. The hyper fast missiles turned and started closing on the now retreating enemy warship. The high tech sensors on the missiles locked onto the quad thrust bells on the aft of the enemy warship very quickly. Soon the Galactica and the small warship were only exchanging weapons fire that was marked in the logbooks as being called "light". The Colonial would fire some of the bow light coil guns at the fleeing enemy, and the after mounted L55 naval lasers on the frigate would fire back at the maneuvering Battlestar.

The SLiE missiles were trying not to be hit in the crossfire and they were corkscrewing and shifting around as they were closing on the Quixote just in case. This was a set of preprogram maneuvers carried in the computer brains of the missiles, one that had been loaded into the fire plan on the Battlestar to make sure they were not shot down with friendly fire. That didn't totally protect the two missiles and one of them got to close to the plasma exhaust of the enemy warship and the weapon was destroyed.

The second Whale Shark class weapon popped up and dived into the hull of the frigate just forward of the four massive Rolls LeFay plasma thrower engines. When the nose of the massive missiles made contact with the enemy vessel, it didn't detonate a warhead, but this weapon was far from being a dud. Thanks to the very detailed data provided by the SLDF Navy, the guidance package on this weapon knew were to hit this enemy warship to complete its first time ever mission. The heavy weapons had been moving at a speed reserved for only the fastest space craft when it had slammed into a cargo hatch on the old enemy warship.

######

Hal kicked with his strong metal legs, and the thick armored outer covering of the missile went slamming into the back of this compartment. It went flying back hard enough that it would have killed any human that might have been caught between the flying metal and the back wall. The enemy ship was pushing 2gs acceleration and for once it had worked to Hal's advantage in getting out of this modified transport. Hal then used his powerful metal hands to climb out of the hatchway and make room for the rest of this team to exit the SLiE made craft. Hal had seen the death of the other sled and for not the first time he was glad that he was a Cylon and not a biological lifeform.

All of the Centurions on this mission had made an updated full mental back up that was now safely deep within the Battlestar's hull. Another update had been done just before the loading of the twin eight-"man" teams. Then quickly they had been locked in the midsection of the pair of modified anti-ship missiles. After all the name for the transport given to it by the SLDF was called Suicide Sled for a very good reason. Now it would be both faster and easier for just an update to be sent back when something went wrong in a battle somewhere on the edge of known space. The latest digital mental update was then to be put in a new Centurion type body. He had very much agreed with humans that most of the time it was better to be safe than sorry, at least when the demon Murphy might jump out and slapped you on the head almost between eyeblinks. That had been a very hard lesson for the Cylons to learn while fighting humans.

Hal was the first from this eight-person team to reach the metal deck and he anchored himself while he covered the rest of the team's exit from the repurposed missile. Normally a boarding team would have used mag boots to do this function, but those needed a constant supply of electrical power to be used effectively. And the stronger the thrust gravity? Then the more power those boots would need to keep the person standing on the decks. And well power was something that Centurions were very aware of and what would happen if they lost power during combat against the humans. So, for this mission the Sled Riders were fitted with metal claws on their feet to clamp down into the metal decks to hold them securely emplace with each step. Those devices did the job, and they didn't have a constant drain on the rider's on-board power supply.

A small part of Hal's computer core was wondering what these enemy humans would think when they first saw those claw tracks cut into the metal decks of their ship. Hal would not admit it to any of the "friendly" humans, but he also was looking forward to seeing what those sharp and powerful claws would do to humans on this enemy warship when he finally "ran" into them.

Hal had been one of the Cylons that had been downloaded and debugged by the captured Resurrection Ship after the failed invasion of New Circe. Before that time, he had fought and died a dozen times in the war against humans and that kind of thing can leave a mark on a soul. Hal and a group of like-minded Centurions if not liked at least didn't dislike killing humans, and there was only one way to do that and not end up boxed or deleted in his current situation. That had been the reason that this group of Centurions had come up with some out of the box ways to scratch that itch of killing humans.

Hal took two steps to his left when the second member of his fire team had almost made it to the ship's deck. After moving he used the toe claws to lock down again, and then waited for the rest of the team to join him. Hal took the time to make sure that each member of his team was mission capable, and he first saw the blood red painted Centurion with an odd flexible metal covering over the lower half of it's shell. Most humans and even human form Cylons thought that all Centurions were masculine and for the most part they were, but not all of them.

Red Queen was one of those other Centurions and she loved the color of red. Queen wanted it put on everything that she "owned" and even spent her limited funds on making this so. Queen even claimed that the metal skirt she was currently wearing gave her added protection from light human weapons fire and for little cost in added mass. No one had done more than raise an eyebrow at the Red Queen and her antics. All the SLDF needed to know was that the Red Queen was a capable fighter, and she was willing to fight. Anything else was something that the humans were more than willing to work around at this time.

The next team member to join Hal on the deck had been Max and then there was Archie. The rest of the team waited until Archie had retrieved and then attached his metal combat shield complete with a Roman 3 painted on it was attached to his left arm. 45 seconds after the shield was attached, the eight Centurion squad had done all needed combat checks, and they were ready to start this mission of destruction on this enemy vessel. What was the mission of this boarding action? Well first they were to make their way to the jump core and then make sure that this vessel could not jump out of this star system. Next, they were to attack the main engines and kill any or disable any engineers at those two locations if they didn't surrender to the Centurions.

#######

Precentor Sakai had just started relaxing as it seemed that the larger and faster enemy warship was not going to follow his battered and bleeding frigate away from the planet. He had thought that they might have been out of functional weapons, or they were ordered to support the ground forces attacking the HPG Compound. At least that was what he thought when the only two capital missiles fired at him had turned out to be duds. Just when he thought that this crew would be able to get a handle on the battle damage, the first garbled transmission reached the bridge from the Warship's internal communications station. Before anyone on the bridge could get more details, the transmission was cut off with a hysterical scream that made the bridge's crew blood run cold.

Before the bridge could work out what to do, the computer support systems around them told the staff that the jump drive was now offline. That had been one of the few systems on this old warship that had not taken any damaged during the battle with the Dragoon battleship/space station/Whatever the hell that was. That was the last thing that the Demi-Precentor needed to know to tell him that the frigate had somehow been boarded by the enemy. They had not taken the time to try to work out when or how this was done to his ship. He just knew that they needed to take out the boarders as fast as they could, or they were going to be stuck in this star system with an enemy battleship that had already neutered this division of warships.

Precentor Sakai took control of repelling these boarders while the warship's master and his XO tried to save her ship from the trap that they had fallen into. There was little need for a warship division commander that only had one ship to manage, that was why they had captains assigned to the warships. And Takaski had been trained at first as a ROM ground agent for a few years before being moved to space, thus he knew what end the laser bolt came out of a weapon.

That was how he came to be looking down at a red painted metal…something. He had known about Battle Armor for some time thanks to his ROM ground training and then the coming of the clans to the Inner Sphere. He had even used some of the limited light powered armor that ROM had access to, in at least one training event. So, when he made it to the body of the first boarder to be taken down by the crew of this ship, he was confused. After checking the armored suit, he quickly notices that many of the key areas had parts that were too small to support an adult body. After checking the armor, a little more closely by lifting up a few of the battered armored covers all he found was more metal, plastic, and ceramics. A body was very clearly missing from the battle armor that had been floating in this corridor. One part of his mind said that they had to be AI suits, but that was impossible….. even for the fabled Star League. The Star League had been able to make AI warships, aerospace fighters, and even tanks. But battle armor, that had to be impossible.

The next "body" the Division commander had passed had still been holding a now laser blasted shield with some roman numerals still visible… if barely. The next suit he had passed had a name of Max Headroom still visible on the back of a blasted "head" wedged into a half open hatch. All of those suits had been like the first, they had clearly not been operated by a human or other biological body. That had left only one of these strange boarders left to be dealt with by the now depleted ship's crew. This one remaining battle armor suit had taken over the main engine control department and was not going down easily, at least not without damaging something important.

The Blake's Courage had started this battle with 56 officers and almost 300 enlisted personnel just a few days ago. The enemy boarders had cut threw them like so much ripe wheat and the Demi could see the bodies of a dozen of them floating dead outside the main hatch to the next room alone. Sakai pulled out a grenade launcher, a type of weapon that should never had been allowed on a ship in space. Then again, the Division commander was the one that should be the one that enforced those rules. The one time ROM agent floated to the top of the corridor and after making some adjustments to make sure that he would not float away. Satisfied, he fired all six grenades into the next room with a single pull of a trigger.

As soon as the 35mm rounds started to detonate in the other room, the officer leads a dozen others into the next room. What awaited them was a scene out of what any of them would have thought was straight from their own internal view of hell. A huge bubble of blood and parts of bodies floated around, a bubble that was still in the process of being remixed thanks to those detonating mini grenades. After the humans came to a stop, they were still in shock at what they were seeing. Still after what they had lived through, when any metal was seen to move the surviving crew fired first, second and third before bothering to ask questions. That was how the last of the eight enemy boarders on this Blake's Will warship died.

Sakai floated over to see the wreckage of the enemy battle armor and he was surprised to see that it was still responsive to stimuli. Whatever was in that suit, it was still very much alive. The right arm slowly moved and set of long blades flipped around and soon the middle of the three blades was pointed up at the human officer. It didn't take but a second for Sakai to know what that hand sign might mean, but then a very human sounding deep laugh started coming from the suit had sealed the deal. The Demi-Precentor was being given the middle finger by the odd set of powered armor. If he had been an aficionado of 1980's movies, he would have known that voice was a dead-on copy of the actor known as Sonny Landham.

Hal was the last to die of the SLiE boarding team, but he had been able to hack into the ships computers remotely while he waited to be downloaded back on the Colonial warship. He was more than done when the crew of this enemy vessel had screwed up enough courage to finally attack him. And with Hal 9000's death a Deadman switch was activated in all of those computers and hatches that Hal and his team had passed by during this boarding action. In a blink of an eye a blast wave driven by dozens of high explosive grenades rocked the warship from the insides. The entire enemy warship was opened to space in less than four seconds, and then the power was suddenly cut to the whole vessel. The remainder of this ship's crew and fire was quickly sucked out into deep space were they both quickly died to oxygen starvation. The engines had gone from idle to full shut down at the same time and the ship went on a ballistic coasting phase.

Final ground battle.

When the last of the two enemy warships had started pulling back toward deep space, the staff on the Chieftain had been ready. Very quickly orders were sent out to the Dragoon ground forces, and they had responded just like you would expect from an almost elite rated unit. The Dragoons quickly turned around as if driven by one mind, and they had rolled over the now out of position defenders. Soon the Dragoons had again push them back into the ComStar HPG compound with almost shocking ease. But the Dragoons had not been able to stop all of the defenders from successfully making it safely back behind the HPG compound's thick walls and its built-in defenses.

Precentor Alain Crosier looked at what remained of this over half strength level IV that had been assigned to defend this planet. The first of the defenders he had worked so hard to build to die had been the Level II of aerospace fighters. They had all died to a group that had space frames never seen even before the enemy had made land fall. Next to fall to the Dragoons were most of the mercenaries that had been collected to eventually be rolled into the military of Blake's Will.

Of the over strength battalion of mixed tanks and battlemechs the supporting pirates had put into the field. Only a few of the tanks and four damaged fast medium battlemechs had made it back to the main HPG compound before the massively thick metal doors on the anti-mech wall had closed behind them. When the Dragoons had first pull back from the city the HPG compound was surrounded by, Alain was not sure what was going on. Then the short ranged data collection systems had told the commander that a pair of Blake's Will warships had arrived and were making a steady burn for the planet.

This new information goaded the Blakes Will ground commander into ordering all of his defenders to attack the now fleeing Dragoons thinking this was to be a quick victory over the hated enemy. This had even seemed to have gained the locals some success when they were able to overrun some of the more damaged enemy mechs and put them down with massed heavy weapons fire. Then all of that change seemingly between eyeblinks. All of the sudden the once fleeing Dragoons had turned and attacked his forces like something out of a bad Tri-vid.

The next to die of the Blake's Will forces were the last of the mercenary tanks and what remained of his own armored Level III that had been supporting the attack on the fleeing Dragoons. The Von Lockner class heavy tanks were massive vehicles with nice and very thick armor and heavy weapons, but they were very slow for even the battlefields common in the 3rd SW. In the current type of warfare, they were snail slow. It had not even helped when the stored extra tanks had been pressed into service combating these invaders.

Alain Crosier's command lost all of his battle armor when they had refused to obey orders to fall back to the main compound. They had died to a man trying to cover the few hover squad carriers of standard infantry that had made it back within the compound's walls. That had been the last action of his infantry Level III as a cohesive force in spite of the sacrifice of the battle armor. The last to fall was most of his mech level III to the Dragoons that had also been his last dozen Rampages. Now he was down to only six battle-damaged mechs, with another four that were more a walking collection of spare parts than battle machines, and a third of his shattered infantry within the walls of the old ComStar built HPG compound. Well, that "only" left his remote-controlled weapons that were mounted along the anti battlemech wall that had been built around the compound before anything else had been done on this planet.

He had been brought out of thinking about the loss of this combat forces when he had been passed a message that the Dragoon ground forces commander wanted to talk to him. Alain gave in, after all what would it change from the last briefing he had been given. Besides Blessed Blake was with them and not the Dragoons.

######

Jaime waited for the video line to connect with the local enemy commander sitting in the HPG compound that his forces were taking the last steps of placing it under siege. When the device clicked, and a face was displayed and what Jaime saw deeply disturbed him. Jaime had seen eyes like that before, and more than a few times in his long life of combat. It had taken him a few times before he knew what this look would mean when displayed on a human face. To Jaime Wolf, those were the eyes of someone that was about to do something very dumb.

Jaime kept his voice very light so not to push this guy any further into the Deep End than he might already be. "Precentor, I think you know who I am. I want to talk to you about surrendering your command to me and the people that I am under contract to. You have to see that this battle is lost." At once Jaime knew that he went too far.

The Precentor turned first red and then just as quickly started to turn an odd shade of purple, and then he started to yell at some volume into the mic. "You will never step onto Blake's holy ground you infidel! You will see Blake's holy fire and be cleansed by it!"

Suddenly the line was cut, and the screen went blank but for some static softly playing in the background. Now Jaime tilted his head to one side, and he started to wonder what the Precentor on the other line was talking about. Jaime started to wonder what cards the other man might still have up his sleeve, but he was coming up blank for a second. Before he could only come up with half a dozen possible clues to those cards, one of his communication techs yelled from across the command section built into this Overlord class dropship that had cost a mech lance worth of cubicles before the Dragoons had come to the Inner Sphere.

"Emergency message from someone called Galactica Actual! There is a nuclear weapon active in that compound.!" The command room was still, until one person moved.

Jaime hit the emergency command circuit that would slam his words into every radio the Dragoons had on this planet. "FLASH, FLASH… Magic Mushroom! Everyone! Pull back! I say again… Magic Mushroom!"

No one had noticed the nuclear weapon hidden within the old ComStar compound during the battle. It was only noticed when the Precentor had pushed a few buttons, and the device was pulled out of its thick lead lined container deep under the main building of this compound. The nuclear weapon was automatically moved from its storage area to be near both the center generator needed for sending faster than light data packages and the main computer data core for this facility. This automatic movement was only a move of three or four meters, and it was done without any humans needed to get in the way or any unauthorized human knowing what was being done. Well, that is until it was clear of the container and the old BattleStar's DRADIS picked up the active nuclear weapon.

The device had a hard coded 10-minute countdown that only the "last" Precentor of the HPG compound knew about. That was all the time the Dragoons had to get out of the blast zone of this scuttling charge. After the local commander had pushed the last button, it was a done deal, and the man took the remaining time to come to peace with what he thought of as the Blest Blake and wondering what he had done to fail him.

The Precentor had never used a nuclear weapon before, and he had never taken the time to understand the effects… outside of the information found in popular entertainment shows. He had assumed that the can of instant sunshine would kill anyone on this side of the planet. That effect had been a common misconception among civilians about how nuclear weapons worked going all the way back to the 1960s. But this was "only" a small tactical weapon and one that had only been designed to take care of the sensitive equipment and destroying the data that ROM had been worried about. The weapon had not even been "seeded" to make the small bomb even more deadly for a larger part of this planet. This 32kg weapon "only" generated a yield of about 1,000tons of TNT.

Before the 1Kiloton weapon's firing circuit was activated, the last of the Dragoons had been able to get behind something that would act as a blast shadow. They were very lucky, and it was not needed; the 5 PSI ring was totally held within the walled compound of the HPG station. The other effects of the detonation were not that effective against battlemechs and tanks that the Dragoons had brought to do battle with. Most of the buildings, even the ones that had not been damaged so far in this battle were not as lucky.

######

That nuclear blast was the end of the battle, and this contract could now be listed as being completed and not just in the eyes of the Dragoons. Well, it was done after Jaime could contact the contract holders to file the final reports. But that was going to be the rub. What was he going to tell them, because they were going to want to know details.

The Chieftain had more sensors than any vessel of her type found in both the Inner Sphere and in Clan space on top of what Wolf Net had hidden within her hull before this mission had lifted off from Outreach. That also didn't count the two ground stations that had been set up to support this mission before the ground combat had first started for the "capital" of this planet by a special team from Wolf Net. All three sets of these sensors and data storage systems had been collecting data on the space battle going on over their heads.

For the first time Wolf Net had both seen a Battlestar and seen what it could do in action, and it was done at what was very short range….. for space combat. That set of data had worried Jaime, and that worry would only grow when the main office of Wolf Net received this data. It took a few hours, and many draft edits to come up with a report that covered all things about this mission. But at the same time, it didn't let any secrets out into the wilds that Wolf Net could not explain.

Jaime sends a deeply coded Black Box message to the nearest FedCom unit in the updated code book that he had been sure to bring along on this mission. The encryption was not to keep the data in that message from the Styx, but only Jaime knew that he had left a decoding book with the people who lived off the edge of the map. He had a suspicion that this was not needed, but it was a show of trust on his part to this strange ally. A second message was sent from the Chieftain, but this one was just sent via a Radio transmission and limited to the speed of light. It also was a very short message, containing only two words. Those words were Gama Seven. It always was best to come up with a whole shopping list of possible plans you might need to fall back on.

######

When the Black Box communication message was decoded at the FedCom base it was then filed with both the MIIO and LIC. Then the special LIC agent had a message sent to the POC code word laced message via the ComStar run HPG network. It would only take a total of 26 hours for the message to be received by all of the Dragoon contract holders after it was first put into the HPG network. That would start the ball rolling now that the contract was done. It was reported that all of the clauses had been needed to be activated, and the payments made ready to be transferred. Clauses with the new ComStar, FedCom, and the TDF were not the only ones that had needed to be activated that day.

The original plan had it that the Chieftain would launch after the battle was over and join back up with the Styx to get a fast ride back to the Split system. With all of the damage done on the planet's surface and the use of not one but two Blake's Will warships. Well, that had thrown all of the most likely contingency plans right out the old air lock. Then again that was why a good command team came up with many different plans to cut down the jumping through hoops that would be needed when Old Murphy showed up on the battlefield. Now the Chieftain would be staying on this planet and the whole command would fall under the Ground Commander Major Madeux and not Jaime Wolf.

A crew was drawn up from a mix of trained aerospace personnel and one of the aerospace fighter pilots off of the Overlord to do a two-part mission. The main ex-ComStar compound might have been turned into a blasted ruin, but that didn't mean that all of the Blake's Will assets on this planet were rubble. A long-ranged shuttle was checked out and cleared for flight from one of the main backup fighter support bases. Jaime Wolf was loaded onto the craft and when he left this planet, and now no one would "know" that he had ever been there in the first place.

The small craft could "only" make 1.25gs to the hiding jumpship due to medical needs of one Jaime Wolf, and you have no idea how much that bothered the Old Wolf to be told this when he complained about the pace of this flight. Not soon enough for Jaime, the long-ranged shuttle docked with the jumpship, but they only stayed attached long enough to unload Jaime, his baggage, and refuel the small craft with air and fuel. The small craft made a little faster transit back in the general direction of the planet, but that was not because the shuttle's crew was in a hurry to get back planet side.

Dropping off The Wolf was only half of the mission that this craft had been required to perform. Now the small craft had to catch the mostly remaining warship used in this attack, the frigate. After they had caught up to it, they had to put a remote beacon on the outer hull so that it would help the Dragoons or contract holders to find it at a later time. After all space is a damn big place and even an over half a million tons of warship was barely a grain of sand on a huge beach that made up just one Star System. There still were hundreds of warships that had been "lost" due to people forgetting the orbit the wrecks had been put in at the time of their abandonment.

The payment for the Dragoons to run this "training mission" was not just in cash funds, nor would ComStar be the only one paying the dime on the contract payout. If this mission had a points system of some kind? Then the more points the mission went sideways, the more that the Dragoons would get out of the deal. It had taken a lot of lawyer's time to get ComStar, the Dragoons, the FedCom, and the Taurian Concordat to agree to this complication in the planning of this operation that was in their back yard.

Soon one of the old SLDF made Newgrange class yardships under ComStar's control would be escorted by a pair of FedCom crewed warships and supported by half a dozen jumpships would be heading this way. ComStar would be re-taking control of this area, but in the long term, the planet would fall under the Bulls to govern. The Dragoons and the FedCom would each be getting one of the smaller but new built Faslane class yardships being made at Titan base in the far-off Sol system. They also would only be charged a 1 percent fee on any new yardship hulls of that design that the pair of governments would build to support the growing fleets of both the Dragoons and the FedCom.

The fleeing Blake's Will yardship would be collected by a different group than anyone connected with the Inner Sphere. Part of the data that Jaime had given over to the hidden SLIC team when he had been brought back to the Styx was the expected current location of that Faslane class vessel, how long it should be there, and were it was expected to go to when no one else showed at the rendezvous point. The information about the yardship had been in the briefing given to the Dragoons by ComStar before the contract had been finalized. The price for the SLiE's help had been a yardship, and they didn't care if it was a used one or one fresh off the building slips near Outreach. For some reason Jaime doubted that the battleship sized SLiE vessel that had been this operations backup would have that much of an issue taking over the yardship they had seen fleeing. He even had a good idea on how they would get it back to the SLiE's hidden home. It was not required but Jaime was planning on leaving that Mule full of all the things needed to support a combat mission behind. The crew would just pack up and join him on the Green Trees for the trip back to the rest of the Inner Sphere.

Then there was the issue of the only light to mildly damage frigate that had been disabled in the battle by "some kind" of unknown internal issue. The Dragoons didn't need another old and poorly designed frigate that also had more issues than any two other warship designs combined. But the Dragoons and the FedCom could use a nice cargo carrier/convoy escort… At least they could use one after it had been repaired and the right modifications done to it. The Dragoons had both the plans for the Volga and the Clan update to that design. Updates that had fixed most of those known issues with the first few runs of Volga modifications. Now the Dragoons had one on hand to help the job of copying to make more of the design that the FedCom was sure to be asking for as soon as it became known that it would be possible to replicate the design.

When the ComStar yardship made it to this far on the edge of the Inner Sphere. It would first be required to fix the one recoverable enemy warship and safely hold it until a crew from Outreach could be sent out to bring it back to the Dragoons base for the rest of the work that needed to be done. Work that would be needed to make it better to support the coming conflict that would be taken to Clan space if Wolf Net was right about what was happening behind certain closed doors. The Dart class Light Cruiser was only going to be useful for refined metals maybe for the factories on the planet to use or the replacement yardship. But in the end, it would be up to the Bulls and ComStar to figure out what to do with the wreckage of the old warship.

What the Dragoons and contract holders didn't know, was that a special message had been sent to the planets of the Inner Sphere just before the HPG had been blasted into a radioactive crater. The message was not just to be read but it also contained special executable software that someone on a now long dead ROM team had put together. This data and attached files had been found by agents of Blake's Will that also died when the nuclear weapon had been detonated.

#######

Commander Dulla smiled, much to her surprise and the rest of her staff, the information from Jaime Wolf had been spot on. One of her scout Raptors had found the Faslane at a Nader Jump point of a G5v star, one of the few stars of this class with only gas giants and asteroid belts for company in this part of space. With the updated and exact location of the massive yardship locked into the Navigation computers of Galactica and her support craft, it had been child's play for the Battlestar to plan and then launch an assault on the unsuspecting high value high payoff target.

The first wave of twenty Raptors had jumped into a location in space that was less than 10km from the enemy vessel and they had quickly put onto that yardship 200 SLiE Marines fitted with space rated combat PA(L)s. It would have been better if they had the 1ton battle armor suits, but corridors on the old Battlestar were too low for them to move around without causing damage to the vessel and the Marines. And if it was too low on the Battlestar than it would be the same situation for any non-clan warships they might find themselves in. The 200 marines in their armored suits cut thew the defenders like a hot knife threw butter. When a dozen Raptors returned after picking up another load of combat forces? There was not much that they were needed to do, so they were mainly used to keep an eye on the POWs.

The two supply or support dropships had tried to make a break for deeper into the star system in the vein hope of avoiding capture when it was clear that the yardship was lost. That idea went right out the airlock when the Galactica jumped in between the two dropships and the "safety" of the inner system. Between the weapons of a battleship sized warship and over six dozen aerospace fighters, the support dropships returned to the Yardship. Now it was time for the hard part.

The crew of the old warship spent the next week inspecting the newly captured yardship for any boobytraps and finding them by the boat load. This just happened to also "let" some of the crew members that really didn't want to be POWs act up…. and get blasted out an airlock for their troubles. It might have been a surprise, but a good part of the 232 crew and passengers on the yardship were not that thrilled to be part of Blake's Will. The same was not true for the crews of the Mammoth and Octopus class dropships, they ended up dying along with 50 members of the yardship.

Thanks to the training of carrying "super cargo" the colonial flag ship had been able to slowly close the distance between the two vessels. In three days the yardship was finally secured to the armored hull and then the great Battlestar started jumping back to the New Circe system. The Battlestar's only long term stop would be at the Split system were any troublemakers would be held until they could be brought to New Circe. That would be done a few at a time so that they could be better integrated into the population, just like what had been done with the captured ComStar and pirate ships after the founding of New Circe. The yardship had a long list of ships that would need its attention, and that work would start within a week of coming to its new home.

########

Notes:

Raid: Explorer Corps Rimward Operations Area HQ: Hellespont, Taurian Concordat,Commander: Precentor Saskia Dinelli, Deputy: Demi-Precentor Alain Crosier. Other Explorer Corps posts: Spinward Exploration Theater: Demi-Precentor Simon Bland, Anti-Spinward Exploration Theater: Demi- Precentor Lisle von Radoslov.

Hellespont forces: Weak lvl III mechs, Lvl III Inf, Lvl II armor (Lvl III if any warm body was put into a tank), Lvl II aero fighters. Some merc units (2 different companies, and 4 different Lances).

Blakes Will aerospace: 2 Trident 3Ts, 2 60ton Gotha 500, and 2 Ahab 443's

Dragoon aerospace. The rolls were not kind to the BWs. 2 100ton Chippewa IIC, 2 95ton Hydaspes and 2 40ton Pellas.

Dragoon command lance. Thunderbolt WD (9W) JJ 120M, 15DHS, CLPL in R arm,3x torso CMPL and LRM10, Victor C, Archer WD, (the Wolf 2 cERLL in arms, 2cmpl in rear 2 clrm20 with Artemis IV, ECM and AMS, case and 15 DHS, and Warhammer C

Dart class Light cruiser: 680k, with 6 small craft, 6 drop collars, Killer whale missiles (TRO 3057U) speed 2/3

Quixote class frigate: 780kton with 12 fighters, 6 small craft, 6 drop collars Nac 30s, killer whale, White sharks, and barracuda missiles. (TRO 3057U) speed 2/3.

The speed of Galactica. I think that the old bucket is as fast as a Texas class battleship so that is 3/5.

Suicide sleds: whale shark missiles fitted with 8 Centurions. Yes, I stole this idea from David Weber and Steven White Starfire book: Crusade.

Names of the 1st squad of Centurions on the sled: Hal-9000, Max Headroom, Red Queen, and A.R.C.H.I.E 3. Have fun looking those up and connecting the dots 😊.

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