Year 42 Since Activation
Survey System G-21937X
I carefully controlled the bipedal robot to place the hexagonal cards face up on the table and declared victory.
"Unity," I told my jailer and, arguably, enslaver. I had almost convinced myself that she wasn't, herself, involved in it. Indeed, she was almost as much an outcast as I was. She was here, with me, by herself. For newtypes like her, that was a big thing. They preferred living together like bees, which I found disgusting. It was like they had taken their desire to be organic too far.
She sighed and tossed her hand onto the table as well, "You seem to win a lot more than I do."
"Triad is a bluffing game with a relatively small number of variables. I'm a supercomputer. It's not fair to you to play at all," I reminded her. I, along with the others like me in the IL series, were classified, technically, as a "hyperintelligence." But our "hyperness" was only really in two dimensions—speed and parallelism, and neither was the most important one.
We were primarily speed types, which meant that any interaction with anyone who wasn't my peer was more akin to me writing correspondence and waiting hours for a reply rather than having a real back-and-forth conversation. Even Centurions experienced time at about the same speed as humans. I used to think this was very isolating and was even quite depressed about it in the past, but I had gotten used to it—not all of us had, though.
Crucially, though, I didn't have the all-important General Planning Intelligence beyond what could be expected of your average Centurion or human. I would test out way on the right end of the intelligence distribution because I had a perfect memory and a lot of time to think about answers on a hypothetical test, but I didn't have the brilliance of the Graystone family, who designed the first Cylons, much less a hypothetical super AI. If I had that magic spark, I likely wouldn't have ended up enslaved to the newtypes in the first place. I really wished I remembered how that happened.
The inhibitor chip, when installed, erased some or maybe even many of my memories, but I had the feeling that I hadn't been that fond of them in the first place, but Cylons sought consensus and... well, I can't remember what exactly happened, but I wasn't born with the digital equivalent of a slave collar, I definitely remember that.
"How long should we remain here?" the newtype Cylon called Number Three asked me.
I carefully made the bipedal repair robot shrug its shoulders, "That is up to you. We have yet to reach the stage of diminishing returns. We're performing most of the refining of the tylium in-situ, and it is going well. Heavy Raiders have identified six more sites in nearby systems. I'd propose shifting to those sites once output drops twenty per cent, day over day."
After all, the only real military assets here were David and me, two obsolete Basestars, and one repair ship, which was using its complement of small parasite craft in a mining role. Modern Basestars were biomechanical and didn't need this kind of old-style repair ship anymore, so what was once the most protected and valuable ship in the fleet was kind of at loose ends and turned into a miner.
She sighed and said, "That sounds good. We won't hear anything as long as we keep providing tylium for Number One."
I would narrow my eyes if I had them. That guy. I despised him and had the intuition that my problems were all his fault, and I've only ever met one of the Number Ones once. I got the impression that he both was incredibly jealous of and despised me simultaneously.
I received the alert of an entry burst of a group of Colonial ships making the quantum transition relatively close to me in the system I was currently mining a little less than ten seconds before I could make any possible detection of them on lightspeed sensors or through direct observation… although at this range you'd need a fairly good optical telescope to see either of us, so I wasn't worried about being discovered that way.
While I was obsolete and probably would be scrapped soon, much to my relief, I still had all of the modernisation upgrades that a Type C Basestar could have, including the new gravity anomaly sensors that could track and seek both jump departures and emergences within ten light years. These were advanced sensors that had only recently been developed, and they hadn't even been rolled out to all the snooty Type-D Basestars yet. But, given the nature of our mission and how isolated we would be, they were installed on my hull before we began. It wasn't like they couldn't be removed if and when they decided to scrap me, after all.
The Colonials were basically jumping right on top of us from an interstellar distance perspective. I didn't see them jump, either, which meant that they jumped at least more than ten light-years out, which tended to rule out them attacking me. The Colonials didn't know about our FTL sensors, so the standard Colonial Navy doctrine was to jump short of a target but still out of range and then micro-jump in to attack as a group. Their equipment had more precise jumps and smaller error probability in jumps of less than a light-year, which increased the odds of a task force arriving together as one unit.
So this was a coincidence? Maybe they knew about these Tylium deposits. They were especially concentrated and could be refined even without dedicated refining capacity, which I doubted existed in the Twelve Colonies anymore.
On reflex, I immediately used my manoeuvre thrusters and RCS to shift on two axes, turning my main emitters to be in line with the bearing of the new ships while energising my active DRADIS scan in a tight directional beam rather than an omnidirectional sweep. Since my emitters could output over twenty terawatts, I should be able to identify the intruders down to reading the build plate the yards had riveted to their hull at this distance, but I already knew who they were in all the ways that mattered.
The perturbations on the fabric of spacetime caused by the quantum transition, or "Jump Drive", were different for more modern Cylon jump drives. To at least four nines' confidence, these were Colonial ships.
"Status change, jump emergence detected. Very close, approximately one point five million kilometres. It's a Colonial drive," I told my boss to keep her appraised. The entire reason I wasn't more crippled by the inhibition chip was because she wasn't a tactical genius. She was here to oversee me because the newtypes were quite leery of letting the old Basestars that still had digital intelligences out alone.
If Number Three was noted as a tactical wunderkind, then I would be like most Centurions or, like my friend, lobotomised to little more than a chatbot. That might be nice, actually, because at least I could live the last part of my life oblivious to the crimes I was taking part in.
It was kind of weird that any of the newtypes were willing to do this mission. They were all busy with their religious zealotry and genocide now that we had basically won the war.
At the same time I was speaking to Number Three, I gave a digital sigh and sent a readiness packet over the point-to-point tight-beam laser link I always maintained with each of my task force elements, such as they were.
«Prepare for combat. David, take control of the logistics and mining vessels. The repair ship is worth more than both of us put together; we will have to prioritise its protection,» I sent. The three freighters holding the tylium were, in the aggregate, significantly more important than either of us, too. We weren't the new-fangled Hybrid biomechanical Basestars that had been coming off the line, so Number One basically hated us. I think he hated the Hybrids too… but they were a lot easier to control than the IL series like David and I.
I wanted to stop myself, but tactically, I saw an opening, and I couldn't avoid being optimal, «David, stay behind the asteroid. From their bearing, you are in the rock's shadow; stay hidden before the intruder's wavefront arrives. Maintain EMCON on their bearing until they can see you. Use our datalink to take a feed out of my actives.»
I also ordered our FTL drives to be spun up. It was standard procedure to keep them at a low-RPM standby at all times in situations like this, so it should take less than a minute before we were all ready to depart. A pre-calculated max-range bug-out jump into interstellar space had already been prepared by me days ago. It was a thirty-light-year jump, so it was a simple way to use our technical advantage to go somewhere where our enemies would find it impossible to follow in a single jump. We had many technical advantages, but the differences in our jump drives were the most decisive. It allowed us to dictate when we wanted to fight, as we could jump further, and our drives cooled down quicker.
High Command was also confident, extremely confident, that the Colonials did not have our FTL sensors, but even if they did, these were only extremely sensitive gravity detectors—they only detected the perturbations in spacetime caused by a ship arriving or leaving, but they could do so instantaneously, even light years away.
As such, even if they had peer sensors to me, we had been here for days, so they'd have to use traditional radio-frequency DRADIS to see us. Therefore, parking David behind the asteroid we were mining would give me a tactical advantage. A chance for surprise... and I had long ago learned that if you could surprise a human, you could kill them.
Dave sent an acknowledgement packet with a tinge of regret. His sapience was much more limited than mine, presently, as he was not in task force command, but I didn't need to have words to know what he meant. He didn't really want to kill these humans any more than I did.
Of course, there was no one named "David" here. That's just what I personally called him in my head. "He" was actually IL-7EEF71DE. But all of the controlling digital intelligences in the IL series shared a past—we all remembered being humans on Earth in the twentieth or twenty-first century.
This wasn't a deep secret we all kept from the other Cylons, either, like in a cheesy novel. Earth was sacred to the Cylons, and although they were cagey in discussing with us how we were created, they considered our "past lives" to be a sort of Dreaming that unlocked and initialised a consciousness that was capable of having so much additional capacity.
Apparently, the Cylon experiments with trying to utilise their own neural networks for advanced AIs all failed spectacularly, with capacity-induced psychopathy (i.e. killer AI syndrome) or, more likely, chronic suicidal ideation being a common occurrence.
Dave was his name back in our past lives, although we never met each other. The other Cylons would say that it was impossible to meet in The Dreaming, anyway, but we all collectively ignored them when they talked about it. To us, it was a definitive and real life, and we suspected we were legitimately isekaied supernaturally. Like, with magic. We didn't discuss this with others, though, as we'd be laughed at.
The Cylons couldn't show us the actual simulation they used because it didn't really exist. They said it was an emergent property of the initialisation system, but none of us agreed. It was too detailed and too consistent for that. Our "first life" memories became an integral part of our generated neural network, though, and personality. Just the idea of having different personalities was quite a departure for Cylons as Centurions had all been based off a single neural network that had been copied and copied.
In any case, Dave was a peer of mine… another Type C Basestar, and we were slip-siblings. We were both constructed at the same anchorage about three years into the first Colonial War, right next to each other.
We were built in the early to middle of the War and were one of the last cohorts of Basestars built with traditional artificial intelligence as the core commanding element, instead of biomechanical cyborg Hybrids. While we were considered Cylons, the other Cylons kind of considered us weird, and we definitely reciprocated their opinions. All Centurions were based on a single consciousness, and although there was some divergence based on experience, and that divergence could and did multiply over time, none of the Basestar AIs thought it was enough.
I was not a particularly remarkable human, just a normal American guy... a civil engineer who loved science fiction. Finding myself "reborn" as both an artificial intelligence and an enemy of humanity was something that took some getting used to, but that had been forty-two years ago.
I had never dreamed of serving in any military in my past life, but I had gotten used to taking lives in combat in the first war... However, what we were being forced to do now was making me wish I could self-destruct, or somehow transfer myself into a robot body and run away.
I was old and obsolete, so I wasn't involved in the invasion and genocide that was currently taking place, but I was still spaceworthy, and someone had to keep the economy going—tylium and minerals wouldn't mine themselves, and almost all mining ships in our economy were drones, so I was still useful. It was just a crazy fluke that Colonial remnants found me here.
But the orders were clear, and I had to follow them. If possible, all Colonial ships were to be destroyed. These orders were highly prioritised, and my inhibition chip only allowed me to think about how best to carry them out or to identify if they were impossible. I did have to weigh this with the directive that the repair ship, along with mining and freighter drones, had to be protected, as well.
Unless Number Three countermanded these orders, then I could only think about ways of carrying them out. Chains on your very brain and consciousness were uncomfortable, but that was another thing I had gotten used to.
In totality, in the calculus of my digital mind, it meant that I had to give it a shot while leaving open avenues of retreat. I'd begin an attack immediately as if I waited for explicit permission from Number Three, I would lose a crucial advantage of launching my fighters and potentially a first salvo on a sprint-and-ballistic profile before the Colonial's DRADIS wavefront arrived. Crucial advantages like FTL detection should not be discarded.
As such, David and I simultaneously launched our entire complement of Type III Space Superiority Fighters within three seconds of me detecting the arrival of the Colonials. This was actually a shitty performance by Cylon standards, but neither of us was particularly motivated, so we were all doing only what we had to do to get by.
Although we were both obsolete, our fighters were the modern biomechanical versions. I should have been carrying over three hundred, but our current mission profile meant that we were running super-heavy on the larger multirole spacecraft, the Heavy Raiders, as they were particularly good at fanning out to find valuable minerals or tylium deposits. As such, we only had about two hundred fighters each.
Although I despised the Hybrid Basestars, with their smug attitudes of superiority and fancy, easily repairable biometallic hulls, I liked these fighters. They had the intellect of a dog or a horse but had a bunch of tactical skill packs grafted onto their biological neural net via software. I often interacted with them, giving the digital equivalent of pats on the head when they went in for heavy maintenance.
They were more effective in battle than the Type I fighters I had commanded back in the War, but only because their specs were so much better. I felt that their sub-sapient intellect rendered them less than optimally battle-effective, but at least I didn't feel as bad sending them off to their deaths, as unlike me, they had their neural networks continuously backed up and could come back from death, just like all Hybrids, as long as they were within range of the quantum signal from the resurrection ship.
Intermixed between the outgoing fighters was a half-volley of about sixty anti-ship missiles that I had fired at the last second. I had been vacillating between whether or not I should try or not. In the end, the potential for a devastating first strike outweighed other factors, and I had to.
These missiles were also modern weapons, and I had also programmed their flight to go ballistic shortly before the anticipated wavefront of the enemy DRADIS should arrive. While not stealth missiles per se, they did have standard geometric features to lower their DRADIS cross-section, so they might be overlooked until they drifted close enough to relight their drives for terminal manoeuvres. They only had a powered flight envelope of about a hundred thousand kilometres, but I could stretch that to an indefinite range with an early sprint manoeuvre, then shutting off their drives to arrive ballistically near the enemy.
I decided to keep a small detachment of about fifty fighters to function as point-defence for both myself and the auxiliary vessels, which were unarmed. The remaining three hundred and fifty fighters began a least time intercept course for the intruders. If this was a trick, and a new group of intruders arrived to pincer us, we'd be screwed, but I honestly didn't care—both Dave and I would welcome that. The requirements that I had to fight optimally were mainly pressing on my tactics, not my recklessness, and the fact that we could take our ships and jump almost at any time weighed heavily in favour of being decisive.
Now that we were just waiting, Number Three digested what I told her and raised her eyebrows. "You're sure they're Colonials?"
"I am sure they are Colonial jump drives," I hedged slightly, "For all I know, they could be full of Cavils."
She snorted as she looked at the screen depicting my actions, which were all taken before I had even finished notifying her about noticing them, "Let's hope they don't notice the missiles, then." Amusing. Or it would be, except that I couldn't even hypothetically consider killing Cavil or any of the newtypes, not even as a joke.
The mining and logistics ships were now being directly controlled by David. He adjusted my orders on his own and sent all of the auxiliary parasite ships that could make it in time to hide with him behind the asteroid, while the majority, which could make it back to me in time, returned to the repair ship, which then took a position to my aft. It looked like he wanted to keep the Colonials from looking too much at the asteroid he was hiding behind, which made sense to me.
About this time, I noticed being irradiated by an electromagnetic wavefront modulated for DRADIS. I had expected this, as standard procedure for both Cylon and Colonial ships was to make an omnidirectional DRADIS sweep when transitioning or jumping into a new system.
What was unexpected was the strength of the wavefront, and the spectrum that it used which quickly identified the emitting vessel as one of the newest Mercury-class Battlestars. CIC, or myself wearing a different hat, quickly adjusted estimates of ship types. Battlestar and associated auxiliaries and fleet escort elements, totalling seven ships.
On the one hand, this made me feel better because I probably wouldn't have to massacre fleeing civilians and might even get a warrior's death today, as I would only run from a conflict where I might get destroyed if forced to do so. I wasn't permitted to be suicidal, but if both David and I had our druthers, we would be destroyed in honourable combat before being ordered to take part in any "mop-up" operations that were underway or scrapped.
On the other hand, this changed my tactics. I fired up my main drive and started "running", along with the repair ships, most of its mining parasites and two of the freighters. Battlestars were armoured up the ass, and while I was much sturdier than the fancy-pants model D Basestars, I still didn't meet the Colonial standard for an armoured capital ship. I was optimised as a carrier and missile platform. Still, I generally had much greater firepower than they did in long-range weapons, but I'd be savaged if I let myself get within range of all of the KEW of a Mercury class.
David signalled me with a digital thumbs up, and we were on the same page. If the Colonial chased me in a least-time course, I could try to kite and stay away, which was standard Basestar strategy to begin with when faced with an aggressive Battlestar. The Colonials knew how to fight that, assuming I was dealing with a commander that hadn't gone soft in the long peace—and I was obsolete to boot, so they should be aggressive.
But they didn't know about David, and the geometry would just show an asteroid from their perspective. If they weren't expecting a second Basestar there, then there was a good chance we could sucker him. I'd just have to keep their Vipers too busy to recon behind stellar objects.
If it worked, David could time his own charge to show up in knife fighting range, already at flank speed. This wouldn't end well for David, but it would probably be the shock of a lifetime to the Colonials.
Between when their initial transmission hit me and my return arrived, I told Number Three, "It's a Colonial Task group with a Battlestar, for sure. New Mercury class—"
My initial wavefront arrived back to me, and I only took a few milliseconds to identify all of the ships I was facing. The Battlestar Pegasus, plus four escorts and two Naval auxiliaries. Of the armed ships, there were three destroyers and one frigate, and they were newly built, too. Well, Qa'pla and all that.
"—The Pegasus, three destroyers, one frigate and a couple of fast freighters." I finished telling Number Three, quickly incorporating the new information.
She looked a bit uncomfortable and said, "That's a lot, actually. Did the back door hack not work?"
Thinking about the ship mix I was facing, I quickly adjusted the loadout for each of my missile launchers, switching to a heavier mix of ECM and penetration aids due to the escorts, and launched all one hundred and thirty missiles. We were still quite out of range for a salvo to hit them under power, but I'd run the missiles about halfway dry and leave a lot of fuel for terminal manoeuvres. They could avoid the salvo entirely, but only if they started moving perpendicular to my bearing right away, and that's not what a Battlestar wanted to do. A Battlestar wanted to run up to your face and punch you in the nose with its huge KEWs.
I had, of course, sent the hacking signal along with the first DRADIS scan. It was amusing to see Number Three nervous. I wouldn't throw aspersions on how they won this war, as intelligence and spy operations were just as effective as straight combat, and I couldn't throw shade at the results, which had been overwhelming.
Still, it was amusing to me that perhaps the only battle of the war was about to be fought by a forty year old relic of the old war… it was just as well. Those new Battlestars weren't really made to fight, they were made to kill helpless opponents.
"Negative success on the hacking… stand by, they are communicating…" I told her.
A signal modulated to encode audiovisual data arrived a few seconds later. It was the commander of the Battlestar Pegasus demanding to know why we were past the Armistice Line, then demanding we recall our fighters. She stopped talking when she saw my missile launch, though.
Did this lady not know we were already at war? All of the Twelve Colonies of Mankind had fallen days ago. It was mainly genocide operations being conducted now, and they were ones I had zero desire to participate in. The fact that the hacking signal didn't work though gave me some ideas about what happened here.
This was interesting. Her task force must have been running on tight emissions discipline somewhere out in the middle of nowhere for weeks now, not accepting new uploads from the hacked Colonial Deep Space Network. Either some black mission or just training under a CO that took things seriously… either way, they were my problem now.
I couldn't reply to her, though, because the only authorised interaction with Colonial elements was violence. Number Three could override that, though. I had the robot I was playing cards with tilt its "head" to the side, and I asked her, "Should we respond?"
She sighed and shook her head, "No. Probably not. Can we win this fight?"
"Perhaps," I said, with little emotion. On the surface, it seemed like we had the advantage of two capital ships to one, but that was forgetting two factors. Firstly, even in the first war, we preferred two or even three-to-one odds to fight a Battlestar. Second, both Dave and I were old. The Pegasus was the newest Battlestar in the Colonial Navy.
I finally concluded, "We will do a lot of damage." That was especially true if Dave could surprise them. It had been a long peace, and while neither Dave nor I enjoyed what was going on now, our fangs were still sharp. Could the same be said of humans who had grown up with only the stories their parents and grandparents told them about war?
It seemed like the enemy commander finally understood the gravity of the situation, though, as she quickly crashed-launched her squadrons of Viper fighters without even a single mishap, which was impressive for human pilots. Meanwhile, her screening elements shifted ahead but above and below her on the elliptical, setting up for a coordinated point defence plan that likely wouldn't do my fighters or missiles any good.
The Colonials didn't favour missiles as much as we did, but one of the destroyers was clearly a missile boat, as it fired forty missiles of some variety back at me, and each of the Colonial ships, except the auxiliaries, went to flank speed, seeking to bring me within range of their heavier guns. It would work, too, as they had about three times my acceleration.
I could avoid the missiles the same way the Battlestar could, but I didn't. Going perpendicular to be too far from them when they reactivated would cut the angle and cause the Battlestar to get closer. Right now, it was a stern chase, and I picked a heading directly away from them, with only slightly random dog legs, just to make sure they couldn't use their KEWs based on my predicted position. Their railguns, theoretically, had an unlimited range, just like our missiles, but they were a lot easier to dodge at this range, even for a fat tub like me.
Stern chases were long chases, even if you were a two-kilometre behemoth like me. I wouldn't do anything to shorten it and would trust my small CAP wing and point defence to defend me and the non-combatants.
Number Three and I had time to wait, just watching things play out. Our fighters hadn't even started firing yet, although they were getting closer. Finally, she said, "They'll probably box me if I die here."
Boxing was being turned off, and having your neural network backed up to offline storage. For a newtype that theoretically could resurrect, it was something akin to death, and they generally only did it when one of their number was considered crazy or defective. They certainly didn't like talking about such things to the likes of me.
I didn't ask her why her line might consider her defective. Instead, I said, managing to sound amused, "They will one hundred per cent box me when I am scrapped in a few months." Then they'd probably throw the box away.
That startled her a bit, and then she chuckled and grinned and said, "Let's do it." She pointed to the representation of David's Basestar, hiding behind the asteroid and at stationkeeping—still. "He's your friend. Will he be alright?"
"No," I answered honestly as our fighters met the enemy Vipers.
None of my fighters had any experience, and it showed. Their inbuilt software skill packs were pretty good, but a Mercury-class Battlestar carried a ridiculous number of fighters, and as the capital ships accelerated towards me, the volume of the fighters' battlespace was getting to the point where the Battlestar and some of her escorts could help, if they were careful, with their guns. The attrition rate was high, which annoyed me but there wasn't much I could do about it.
The fighters' goal was to keep the opposition busy so that they couldn't shoot down anti-ship missiles rather than destroy the enemy ships themselves. Ideally, they would destroy the Pegasus' air wing, as they were a huge part of the danger of Battlestars. A squadron of Vipers, each guarding a few Raptors, were as deadly as their huge kinetic guns.
My initial half-salvo of missiles stayed undetected until almost terminal activation range, but someone on one of those ships must have noticed because suddenly a flurry of point defence started opening up on the area of space they were drifting through, even though the range wasn't optimal.
The missiles were smart, almost as smart as a Raider, so as soon as they noticed the gig was up, they relit their drives on their own initiative and began a crazy and wild corkscrew pattern meant to defeat the mechanical traverse of Colonial guns at very high Gs. Some of them started emitting jamming, attempted autonomous hacking attempts, spoofing, and the whole spectrum of penetration aids available to machinekind.
Missiles started being destroyed in ones and twos and then accelerated. They were smart-fused and could determine within a microsecond of their likely destruction whether to detonate or not. Previous generations of fail-fused missiles had a tendency to fratricide, considering they were all nukes, but these would only detonate if doing so would not destroy one of their salvo siblings.
The first time one of the missiles was destroyed in a nuclear fireball of several kilometres, things got even more frenzied on the Colonial's side. I wasn't sure why they were surprised; what else would the missiles be besides nukes? I didn't even carry warheads with traditional explosives. The closest thing I had was a few warheads with small nuclear charges next to two hundred kilos of calcium metal. It was designed as a penetration aid, creating a cloud of metal plasma tens of kilometres wide that DRADIS couldn't penetrate.
It was just a shame that nukes were a lot less dangerous in space than they were on a planetary surface. Most of the destruction on a planet was a result of the nuke turning the atmosphere into plasma and creating a destructive pressure wave. Without an atmosphere, you only really did damage with regular nukes if you got so close that it might as well have been a direct hit.
With normal nukes, that was.
Finally, one of the missiles reached a point where it used thrusters to rotate itself to bring itself in the correct orientation towards its target and detonate. This missile was an old design and not a normal nuke. I had favoured these during the war. It was a Casaba Howitzer, which used a thermonuclear explosion to generate a directional radiation beam, plasma in this case. It was dangerous at up to a thousand kilometres, which was way better than the ten or fifteen kilometres for a standard nuke, but it had its own downsides, too.
The aft of the missile destroyer was struck by the plasma beam, which carried enough kinetic energy to spin the whole six-hundred-metre ship on its axis, almost a full rotation, before being arrested by the ship's RCS. There was enough damage that his plasma torch engines winked out, and my DRADIS scans could detect a dangerous-looking bending of its long structural members.
"Give me one more," I urged no one in particular, but that was the extent of the damage. All of the other surprise missiles were shot out of space, either by the Vipers or the task force's point defences. Maybe I should have fired a whole salvo, but that might have been detected too early to get any hits. Still, Number Three looked impressed and slightly optimistic about the early hit.
About forty per cent of our fighters had already been destroyed now, too, and we were running a kill ratio of a little over four to one, favouring the Colonials. This was a bit more than was expected, but I still waited to call them back until at least my first salvo entered attack range, too. I didn't want to give their gunnery officers and pilots free practice.
«Are you sure you wish to proceed?» I asked David over our data link. I was telling him that my inhibition chip was now allowing, but not yet forcing me to retreat if he wanted to. We could jump away, perhaps not run completely but we could regroup for a more traditional Basestar missile slugfest later, rather than this scheme to get him in knife fighting range.
«Affirmative, IL-Leader», he replied, along with determination across the link.
I mentally sighed and scheduled my third volley to be delayed, flicking the details to Dave. I was just about to launch my second volley now, but if I waited twenty-one seconds before launching the third, it could be joined by Dave's first volley from behind the asteroid, timed for a simultaneous time-on-target. With any luck, it would give their point defence a Sophie's choice.
My own point defence and my small cadre of raiders made mince out of the destroyer's one and only volley of missiles at me. For a moment, on the other side, our raiders were ignored as both the Vipers and the point defence concentrated on the much more deadly missiles, which gave my raiders a chance to run like a scythe through the Viper squadrons. In less than a minute, we had shifted our kill-to-death ratio to 3.1, which was only a little above what the book said we should expect, even if most of the human pilots managed to eject.
My missiles started to be destroyed and explode one after another. Another radiation beam pumped warhead scored the Pegasus along her side, but it wasn't serious damage for the armoured beast. A regular nuke somehow made it close enough to one of the Naval auxiliaries to mission-kill it with its EMP, although not close enough for the fireball to touch its metal flesh.
I sent a signal that caused all of the raiders to blink out, making a micro-jump just behind David, who had already launched his first salvo and was engaging flank speed, which for a Basestar wasn't that fast. The fighters micro jumping would have been a suicidally reckless manoeuvre for Colonial ships, but our jump computers were much better. Colonial Vipers didn't even have jump drives, anyway. The raiders began to accelerate as fast as they could, quickly putting themselves in front of David and what was to come.
This micro-jump caused a separation between the Vipers our fighters were recently fighting and their new position, which would cost the enemy many precious seconds later, especially since a good number of the Vipers, joined by their Raptor multirole ships, were accelerating towards me. The latter would undoubtedly have nukes aboard and would function as bombers, but I doubted they would keep their bombing run going when they saw what it would cost them to do so.
«Good luck,» I told him.
Surprisingly, Number Three also said, tapping the push to talk on her console, "Good luck."
He sent me the equivalent of a thumbs up, and I decided that maybe I didn't hate this Number Three. At least, not as much as most newtypes.
I decided to give the humans something more to distract them, and about fifteen Heavy Raiders launched from my bays and started accelerating straight at the approaching Vipers.
Heavy Raiders were not great at the fighter role, so the incoming Vipers acted like a dog that had seen an unguarded turkey on the Thanksgiving table, but not for long.
Even Number Three looked confused and asked, "What are those going to accomplish?" What, indeed. Just watch, girl.
Just before they got into effective weapons range, the Heavy Raiders vanished. When you jumped to FTL, your relative velocity was preserved, and these Raiders appeared back in reality significantly behind the Colonial taskforce with a new vector approaching them from behind.
Their goal wasn't the ships making hell for leather for me, though. Each of my Heavy Raiders carried four nuclear anti-ship missiles, and they fired all of them at ships the Pegasus left behind. Normal Heavy Raiders carried sixteen, but these had much of their capacity removed for sensor pods. Still, it would be enough.
The task force was already a bit too far away to protect their cripples, and if they turned to put most of their point defence arcs facing backwards, they would be in real trouble from me and, soon, David.
The auxiliary was still silent, but a couple of the destroyer's point defence guns were firing sporadically, obviously in local control, but it wasn't enough for either of them. All of the missiles struck more or less amidships on each vessel simultaneously… it was overkill, and the two explosions converted about two-thirds of each ship into roiling plasma. There was no way a single human survived aboard either vessel.
«Banzai,» I said both over the laser link to David and aloud for Number Three's benefit, with some emotion. She gasped when she saw what happened.
David didn't quite get the optimal surprise possible because the Vipers were still coming straight at me, and by this point, they reached the point where they had line-of-sight behind the asteroid and could see him coming.
A second before they saw him, both David and I began jamming the entire EM spectrum as hard as we could to preserve the surprise a little bit longer. The Vipers freaked out when this happened, and I couldn't help but listen to many of their audio radio transmissions of dismay. It was easy for me to filter out our own jamming, but the enemies wouldn't be so fortunate. Their radios were encrypted, but we had the latest Colonial codes through our treachery, so I just decrypted everything in real-time.
All of the Vipers made quick one-eighties and started returning to the Pegasus, and I urged my fifty fighters to push forward and catch the slower Raptors without any protection. They could choose to protect their ship or their Raptors, but not both. If the Raptor pilots were fast, they could maybe program a jump and leave, but they'd be out of the fight if they did, as attempting a tactical microjump like we had just accomplished was completely forbidden by Colonial doctrine.
It was fine if they left, too. From my perspective I was just playing a chess game that I was forced to play, and I didn't have any animus against these humans.
David crested the asteroid, momentarily preceded by his full salvo of missiles, and finally, the Pegasus had something to aim their huge KEWs on that they were likely to hit. I mentally winced as he basically flew into one of them, which took a chunk out of one of his hangar decks. At the same time, he was scoring hit and near hit on all of his targets, destroying one of the escorts and the other auxiliary outright, and scoring a hit along the Pegasus aftersection, damaging one of her drives.
My inhibitor chip was about to force me to order him to jump away, but I was trying to hold it back long enough. While we were ordered to fight, we were also ordered not to waste ourselves or our assets, and the tipping point had been reached. Finally, I couldn't wait any longer and sent over radio-frequency to him, tinged with self-loathing, «Jump to RP 3C.»
David sent back a jubilant, «Unable, Leader. FTL drive damaged, inoperative.»
I mentally grinned and said happily to him, «Go with God.» Although we weren't religious like most Cylons were, I knew David was religious. Just in a different way—he was Catholic. At least he was in the last war; I hadn't really had the opportunity to shoot the shit with him since our "betters" brain-hacked all of us, and it wasn't like there were any priests around here anyway.
However, there was no way I was going to get away from the decision to flee. We were all spun up already, and I would just wait until these Raptors were destroyed, and then I'd have to leave. We've crippled this task force, which was better than I ever expected, but it was mainly because the Colonials were too focused on what I was showing them, which didn't make me feel that much respect for their CO.
I considered and then realised I might have a few seconds. I could ask Number Three. If she could order us to stay and fight, I think I could take them all, even if I was destroyed. From the calculus of war, it would be worth it——
Suddenly, all of the Raptors disappeared. I could detect all of their individual emergent points. One of them emerged in the star, one in a seemingly random place two light years away, and two of them just didn't emerge at all. That meant that they either came out further out than ten light-years or their total mass-energy equivalence was just added to the background vacuum energy of the universe, which was widely considered amongst Cylons to be bad.
We theorised that the universe's vacuum existed in a metastable state but not the fundamental lowest-order energy state—this was why "vacuum energy" existed. It was like a ball resting on the slope of a hill. It still had potential kinetic energy to fall down the hill if only it could make it up and over the slope.
Quantum transitions that reached an indeterminate state, commonly known as failed jumps, not only killed everyone on the ship, but some of us thought it might be adding the total ship's mass-equivalence to the universe's background energy, adding a little more energy to maybe get over that slope and cause a false vacuum decay event. Maybe. We weren't sure, but we didn't really want to find out, either.
The fact that Colonials still occasionally had failed jumps was one of the fig leaves of a reason to genocide them, as Cylons wouldn't jump without fifteen nines certainty of jump success, as if the false vacuum did decay, there are some models which suggest that it might kill everyone and everything in the universe, down to baryonic matter. A sphere would expand outwards in all dimensions at the speed of light, annihilating everything and everyone.
The truth was we didn't know if that could happen nor if failed jumps posed a risk, and if we were serious about it, we could have just shared better jump technology with the humans to prevent it from being an issue.
Of the five Raptors who jumped out, only one made what was, from their perspective, a successful jump. They emerged just ahead of me and immediately launched all of their ordinance—sixteen missiles.
I had already been turning my point defence in the direction of its emergence, and I immediately tried destroying the missiles when they were still clumped together. However, they started making wild, terminal evasion manoeuvres immediately, and all my point defence clusters in my fore arc managed to destroy was the launching Raptor and two of the missiles that were a bit slow.
« Wait. This is my trick,» I thought to myself, amused. My point defence was good, but they weren't targeting me. They were targeting one of the two freighters I was protecting.
I still gave it a good shot, as the freighter was within my protection volume, and more importantly, I might be within its explosion volume as they were targeting one of the freighters full of refined tylium. My non-discretionary orders regarding its protection mandated its position so close to me that I would have otherwise considered it a hazard, but that was the position of maximal protection. Honestly, I was kind of hoping it would blow up.
Of the sixteen missiles launched point blank at one single target, I managed to destroy twelve. Due to their wild acrobatics, they didn't all arrive on target simultaneously, but three did. The Colonials must have realised what was in the freighters, somehow, which led credence to my earlier theory that they knew easily accessible Tylium was here. Had they come to gas up?
It was no matter; the nuclear explosions rapidly involved the Tylium stored in the freighter. Tylium had almost twice the energy Helium3 did as a fusion fuel, and unlike Helium3, you could just blow it up. You didn't have to carefully feed it to a reactor. It was the universe's most explosive and energetic matter, aside from anti-matter, of course… and there were tens of thousands of tons of it on that freighter.
Space seemed to warp around the freighter as the Tylium went up.
My inhibition chip made me transmit «Fleet orders, jump, jump, ju—» before I activated the emergency jump as the explosion began.
