[WarMachine]

Part 6, cont'd

THE YAHREN 7348, 21st Day of B'Kra

ABOARD THE BATTLESTAR MEDUSA

PLANET VIRGON

The Medusa cruised in concert with the Celebration-class liner "Unification Day" and host of twelve other, much smaller craft. The ships of the Celebration-class was easily the Medusa's size, and then some, but would never be mistaken for military vessels: they were covered in large armorglass portholes and viewing windows, and were all a burnished, off-white color.

Under other circumstances, Cyrus thought that they would make an impressive and moving site: fourteen stately ships cruising through space like debutants at Unification Day gala...

Presently, he was just worried at how he could make them less of a target.

What stuck in Cyrus' mind was the ship that he had dispatched the day before to the outer planets. The Avalon was the very first Battlestar ever built by the Colonies. An absolute, ungainly monster, when compared to the two-generations-later Columbia class, her mass was nearly four times that of the Medusa.

Nearly a thousand yahren old, she had been kept - theoretically, at least - in sailing trim as a testament to Colonial engineering; of her four landing bays, only one had been converted to handle the Viper Mk II(Colonial flight cadets used it as a remote landing platform); the other three were still configured to handle the nearly-ancient Python Attack/Fighter...which was quite fortunate, considering the other surprise that Cyrus had gotten.

Gold Star Transtellar's Master Engineer, the man in charge of Gold Star's asteron graveyard, had turned out to be Hephaestion - one-time Chief of Engineering Instruction at the Colonial Warrior Academy on Gemon; Cyrus had not had him as an instructor, but he had certainly heard of him; Pelops regarded him as nearly God-like.

Hephaestion had apparently left the Academy under a cloud(a rumor of an affair with a Libran Siress), and had gone to work for Gold Star ten yahren before; he had dropped almost completely out of sight since then.

Hephaestion had, according to his account, contacted President Adama on Fleet CommLine Alpha as soon as the Gold Star base detected the Galactica in-system; Adama had dispatched as many fuel and maintencance ships as could be spared to help him get the ships back online.

What no one but Hephaestion knew at the time was what he had been doing for Gold Star: in an attempt to lease them to the Colonial military for out-system support, one of the Celebration liners had been turned into a massive hospital ship; the other liner had been gutted, and turned into a strange kind of carrier-ship - capable of launching an entire strike wing simultaneously, its sixty-four launch "chambers" were capable of launching anything up to a shuttlecraft in size. In a radical departure for warship design, it had a single landing bay that ran down the centerline of the ship, into its superstructure; Hephaestion had installed a heavy battery of tertiary-grade lasers as point-defense for the landing bay's entrance. Counting the landing deck, the ship devoted a total of four decks to parking and smallcraft launch - it was able to comfortably house nearly three hundred fighters.

His other project had been upgrading a group of old Python class fighters. These had been given engines equal to a Viper, and a much heavier firepower battery - it fired slower than its newer cousin, but had a better chance of destroying its target with a single shot. In addition, the Python was more intended for atmospheric combat, rather than combat in open space, the Viper's specialty.

When he receieved Cyrus' orders, Hephaestion had sent one liner to each Colony, "escorted" by a number of Pythons, most of them on auto-pilot, controlled by a Flight Controller on board the liner; Hephaestion reasoned that there were plenty of pilots planet-side who could fly the Pythons(their controls weren't that different from a Viper's), so sending them was a good idea.

Cyrus had sent Commander Dansen and the Avalon into the outer system to help out; they had a number of pilot-trainees, and - according to Colonel Brandt, head of the Command Academy's Strategic Planning Staff(who had been inspecting the facility at the time of the Cylon attack) - several experimental Viper models salvaged from a secret research facility(there was apparently some tension going on between the two officers abourd the Avalon - Dansen could be...problematic...at times - but Cyrus decided to sort it out later).

In the meanwhile, Cyrus had ordered his total force of one hundred fifty-one Vipers to split into eight-Viper flights, and head out to each Colony to cover the liners; he kept strike wings of about 26 Vipers with both the Medusa and the Myrmidon. Those small numbers were dangerously small, but unavoidable...

...but then, Cyrus had long ago determined to forgo a quiet life.....

*****

PLANET LEO

Evan's legs were cramping; the weight of his backpack was dragging him down. He tried desperately to readjust his grip on the bridge girder silently; the Cylon patrol was too close.

There was a high-pitched whine, followed by the sound of the Cylons above him running and boarding their vehicle. Looking upriver, he saw the reason: a fighter was bearing down on the mag-lev rail line, preparing to strafe the bridge to destroy the vehicle.

Frak, he thought. His options were pretty slim. Oh, well he thought, at least I tried.

He hoped the water beneath him was deep...

*****

Pelladon had found his calling. He was always confused in space combat, and could only barely hold his own. But down in an atmosphere, he seemed to excel.

As he jinked through the clouds in the upper-kilometrons, his sensors picked up a Cylon communication. He dialed in its location without looking as he banked and rolled, and swept down under the cloud layer, over the approaches to the verdant plateau and resort lake where the refugee landers were operating from.

Fifteen kilometrons ahead, he spotted a maglev railway bridge spanning the cobalt-blue river below; some part of his brain babbled on about how the river was called the Bug, and how that had to be some silly and suitably ancient Leonian dialect. Through his real-picture scanner, he saw that in its center rested a Cylon scout track, several tin-heads milling around it. Presently, he realized that he had been spotted, as the Cylons began moving back to their vehicle, and the tracks' anti-air cannons began to swivel onto him.

Pelladon smiled grimly. Not today, he thought, as his thumb caressed the firing stud...and lifted off after only one bolt, as a figure dropped away from the bridge's underside, falling into the river ten metrons below.

Frakfrakfrak, Pelladon thought; he gave little thought to the now-burning Cylon track. He keyed his mic. "Falcon Five to Down-Base: hold the next rail transport - there's a burning Tin-Head track in the middle of the Bug bridge...also, I think we have a friendly in the water - he might appreciate a towel..."

And with that, Pelladon pulled back on his stick, and soared back into the clouds, returning to his hunt.

End, Part 6