Day 985 of the second Cylon War
Admiral Eva “Yevka” Lawson woke up in her bed, eyes wide open. She was covered in perspiration, her sleeveless, brown military tee shirt was soaked. Her hair was soaked and matted. “Shepard,” the voice of Admiral Samuel Mueller grabbed her attention. She clutched her chest.
“Or shall I say, Shepherdess? Or perhaps you prefer the nickname slut?”
“You’re dead,” Lawson rasped the words. Her tongue seemed to be stuck to the roof of her mouth.
“You know I’m not really Admiral Mueller don’t you?”
“I don’t know what you are. Admiral Mueller is dead. He died the day the Colonies fell. That’s why I’m sleeping in these quarters.”
“Last time we spoke, I told you that you would meet Adama. Did I not?”
“Yes,” Lawson answered. She closed her eyes and opened them, hoping to regain her lost sanity.
“You met him once and spoke to him a second time on encrypted wireless. True or false?”
“True,” Lawson’s heart was pounding in her chest.
“Heed my words. You are to become the symbol of death. The bringer of war to your people. You will lead humanity to its end. Stop now. Change your path.”
The uniformed Colonial Fleet person, who looked like the long dead Samuel Mueller but claimed he was something else, brought his hand down on the dresser. A loud crack filled the room.
“What are you?” Lawson demanded.
“I am the angel of truth.” He raised his hand from the dresser and smacked it down harder, filling the room with another loud crack.
Eva Lawson opened her eyes again. She was still soaked in sweat. What had she just experienced. Was it a dream? A supernatural force?
“What the frack!” she exclaimed.
Ever since she had ordered the fleet to evacuate the new colonies, Admiral Eva Lawson, had been in the grasp of guilt. It bound her as a pit in her stomach when she ate. It invaded her dreams.
100,000 persons left behind. Lawson had heard the speeches, many inspirational that urged colonial commanders to never leave people behind.
These speeches were inspirational. Now the words haunted her like a spirit, or a ghost. Everything she did, everything she had done was meaningless in the face of this failure.
She had tried burying herself in the details of her job. She was the fleet admiral. The box stopped on her desk. There was no escaping her responsibility. 100,000 persons left behind. Why were they left behind? Because the fleet admiral had not planned for the eventuality that she had known would come.
The settlement as it was known consisted of 11 habitable worlds. Survivors of the 12 colonies gathered in these rugged settlements because they lacked the resources to go anywhere else.
These worlds were really too small support a future Colonial civilization. They were 30 plotted jumps from the original 12 colonies. This was much too close to the Cylons to be strategically safe.
Events seemed to drive themselves. And the frenzy of activity that led to her appointment as fleet admiral,,,,, Admiral Lawson had warned against stopping for all of these reasons. The settlement was too close to the colonies. It lacked the resources to feed us inhabitants. Natural resources, such as fuel had to be taken from the Cylons.
Admiral Lawson had presented several plans to evacuate the settlement. These plans had involved ship building, and creating the capacity to move the entire population away. The ship building budget was rejected by the Peoples Council.
Military planners estimated it would take hundreds of FTL jumps to evade the strong forces that the enemy which were still trying to exterminate them.
The survivors were still in shock from the lost war and billions of souls. Lawson felt they were making the worst possible decision, due to grief an exhaustion.
Corey Brooks, the leader of the Peoples Councill had privately told admiral Lawson, that she agreed with her strategic analysis. The people were tired, shellshocked.
If given some time to rest, and some protection to give them a chance to think they would come around to agree to the admirals plan. All she needs to do was to protect them long enough for sanity to once again overcome emotion.
The admiral had agreed to civilian control of the military. Corey Brooks was the commander in chief of this fleet. In spite of her carefree career before the fall, Admiral Lawson took responsibility for her actions. Just because she’s submitted to civilian command and control did not relieve her responsibility. She should’ve tried harder. Every soul left behind was on her personal ledger.
When the report had come back from Commander at Emerson, she jumped on it. She organized the plan known as operation magic trick. The magic trick was to escape the Cylons and get far enough away, so they would never find humans again.
Scouts had brought in reconnaissance data. That data seemed too good to be true. Three habitable worlds in different solar systems. They were arranged in a cluster. There were dozens of small, potentially habitable astroids in the region. Surrounding the systems was a gigantic nebula. It was bright, it was beautiful and it had three easily defendable routes in and out.
Natural resources, necessary to at least feed the people were present within the nebula. Several astroid fields that contained many of the metals, and or is required to maintain a defensive fleet.
These asteroid fields also contained limited amounts of raw tylium fuel.
It was not known whether there would be enough fuel to maintain the fleet. That answer would be years down the road after many detailed geological surveys.
The possibility, however, did exist that they could quietly retreat into this nebula, and not be seen for centuries, or even millenniums.
Mercury CIC Jump 13
“Vampire, vampire vampire ,,, guided missiles, heading for the starboard pod struts and topside fire control.”
“ Prepare, flak, starboard,” order the executive officer.
“Negative. Sir. We’ve got several vipers in the engagement zone.”
“How many fracking times have we practiced air defense so the flak engagement zone can be quickly switched when they flank us with missiles?”
“Many times Sir. Many times.”
The missiles struck the upper part of the starboard flight pod, and the top side armor that protected fire control. The roar of crushing metal echoed through the ship. The deck shifted beneath their feet. In combat information center people had to grab hold of the tables to keep from being thrown to the deck.
The damage control panel showed yellow lights on the right side of the ship, and the top side of the ship. Several of the monitors mounted on the ceiling, flickered due to a power surge. Thunder echoed through the Battlestar sounding like a storm that was moving out to sea.
The question at hand was this: Could colonial civilization, using enemy faster than light technology disappear quietly into the stars. The distance was enormous. It was 400 jumps using colonial technology. It was up to 30 jumps using the newer borrowed technology.
To build this new society required more people. When the miracle recon report arrived in her inbox, Admiral Lawson already had a plan. She began fine tuning operation magic trick and added on her own twist. The people would gather in this new sanctuary. They would leave the cramped, Atlas carriers, and other odds and ends of civilian ships.
They would evacuate their spaceships, for the chance to breathe free. Fresh air versus artificially, recirculated air. There was no contest. Lawson did not ask for permission. She hoped that rescuing the settlement would get her forgiveness.
This freed up the ships needed to return and pick up the survivors of the failed settlement outpost.
She issued orders and coordinates. The transport would follow a stealthy path. The Mercury would leak data and attract Cylon forces. Like a noisy band heading for downtown, or a political demonstration without a permit, the audience would focus on her right hand, while in her left hand, was the rescue mission.
She had a rescue plan. She had the fleet executing a strategic battle plan as well. At the right moment, she would release the flash and dazzle her audience. The survivors of the twelve colonies would simply disappear. The Cylons could catch and kill Adama’s fleet or not. Humanity would survive.
The difficulty of course would lie within the details.
The secret of this operation was not complete. The warship was a rumor mill that had very few secrets.
A war fleet was embedded with civilian wireless and many social media channels.
Civilian cellular networks were pieced together any time civilian ships gathered as a fleet. Frequently these networks were extended to the military escort ship.
Long idle “smart” mobile phones were dusted off. Cottage industries to repair broken phones sprung up. Plans were made to manufacture new models.
Admiral Lawson had declined to put a stop to it, even though the security risks were huge. HG had assured her he could shut down the networks when needed. She had guessed correctly that this task would be quite difficult. She let the violation go, because it provided a sense of normalcy and hope.
It was nearly impossible to keep a secret. There was however, the art of misdirection.
During a six month semester in the War College of the colonial fleet number, Lawson remembered, one of her professors gave a lecture that made an impression. Then a captain, and squadron commander, she had been sent to school to cool her heels after a particularly memorable shore leave. Not that she remembered it. The admiralty remembered it due to a hotel that had been thoroughly trashed.
The professor that had taught the strategic studies course at the war college was a remarkable person. He was silver haired, tall and handsome, holding the rank of Colonel, having fought in the first Cylon war.
He had launched the class with a magic trick. He walked up to Captain Lawson and pulled a cubit out of her ear. With a magic wand and a brown, shiny top hat, he used flashes and even managed to pull a rabbit out of that hat.
Then he proceeded to work through the tricks slowly, showing how the trick was done. “You are never going to enjoy a magic show after today,” he smiled as he showed where the rabbit was hidden.
“The point here is misdirection. When you want to do something, and you don’t want to get caught you have to get the audience to focus on something else. The flash of light, the cute bunny. It doesn’t really matter. You focus the toasters on something that grabs their attention, then you flank them and drop a dozen nukes in the middle of their task force. They are machines. Even if they can be programmed to not pay full attention to the loudest, most attention grabbing event, they eventually try and time slice and pay attention to everything.”
“As machines, they can focus on a number of events at the same time. They can exceed our capacity. The trick here is to give them too many inputs. Overload them, and make them time slice so much that they don’t have time to do anything else.”
“Also they tend to write off crazy moves. If a Viper pilot pulls a high gee move, they can decide incorrectly that the human pilot will not survive the maneuver, and focus on threats with higher probability of success. Oops, the viper pilot yaws in and shoots out a half dozen point defense turrets, a hole is opened and a Cylon invasion fleet is cracked open like an aluminum can.”
“Like magic,” Lawson said under her breath.
Admiral Lawson, and taking a huge risk offloading civilians to a planet, that the Cylon may have explored. There were a lot of doubters concerning the use of Cylon faster than light technology.
The increased jump range, and the fuel economy made the technology almost irresistible. The chief technology officer of the fleet, Captain Miller, better known as HG, stood for head geek, and his team had spent many hours making sure there were no communications leaks on the battlestar.
Every inch of the Mercury, which was the class ship of the type, making her the oldest and most modified of the class, was gone over with a fine toothed comb. Every router was hardened. Every cable was checked for splices. The electronic signature of the ship and every plane that flew off her flight decks was similarly stripped and checked.
No ship was allowed to land on the Mercury for the two weeks prior to this mission.
The amazing report had come in from the “Fearless”. The Cylons had jumped in on the settlement and launched hundreds of nukes, with multiple, independent re-entry vehicles. There were hundreds of flashes when the order had come in to pursue the Colonial fleet.
Having seen what the Cylons had done to the twelve worlds, the dusty outposts of the “new settlement” had devised a defense. Lacking a satellite communications network and a kinetic defense, the plan was to build the communications network first.
Natural resources were tight, and after several months with no Cylon incursions, the defense budget was cut. A bright engineer had remembered a history lesson which told of an entire satellite network that had been chowed up by a collision, sending shrapnel, which collided with other low orbiting objects. A chain reaction had been triggered, taking Picon off the communicative grid for months.
Picon had been an accident. This defense plan was having the same kind of accident on purpose.
With Cylon base stars in orbit, the communications network was going to be jammed anyway. The trigger was set and the low orbiting satellite network was transformed into an hive of metal shards. They nukes were armed, and made a spectacular show. Exploding in space, they left a muddy cloud over the outposts.
A few nukes had made it through, a few even managed to explode. The population had been widely dispersed due to the rugged conditions. Just a tad over 87,000 survivors were waiting to be rescued. It would be a tight fit, but twenty Atlas carriers, accompanied by a motley assemblage of first war wrecks, might be able to rescue the souls that had been left behind.
50,000 persons had been unceremoniously dumped on a habitable world surrounded by nebulas. There were only three routes in and three routes out. Even with the Cylon FTL technology it had not been possible to jump directly inside the nebula. To get there, a ship had to jump to a waypoint outside the region and travel in on sub-light engines.
It was difficult, and there was a lot of radiation. The Cylons did not like those side effects at all.
“Missiles hitting the topside?”
“Fire control?”
“No, they are trying to damage the sub-light engines. Trying to take down our navigation.”
“More hits topside rear. The armor is holding for now. If it gives way, the power surge could damage a lot of systems.”
“Radical turn, Lets deny them a firing solution.”
“FTL drive is spooled. We need to jump out of here before the armor fails.”
“Board is green!”
“Jump the ship!” Admiral Lawson ordered.
* * *
There are no secrets in the military. Not in a world full of social media and talk wireless. A Valkyrie class ship join the Mercury several jumps into her journey. A few days later the Endurance, an elderly yet re-worked tough Artemis class ship also join the convoy.
The topside guns on the Artemis class ship were extremely helpful in protecting the Mercury’s task force, which really consisted of a couple of transport chips and a freighter.
Captain Miller, the head of fleet IT had reached out to Admiral Lawson before the journey. He had handed her a USB drive in the middle of the night. Sometimes when sleep was impossible, the admiral walked the empty sections of the Mercury that had been thinned out for Operation Magic Trick.
While power walking at 3 AM, Lawson was not surprised to meet Captain Miller.
“I understand from your mission profile that you want some amount of a electronic visibility that only you and the XO can monitor. Why can’t I come along for the side trip you have planned?”
“Because, HG, the fleet depends on you, keeping the toasters out of our net work. I can get a few jumps away from the fleet before my presence is missed. I can have orders prepared to extend that period of uncertainty, a little bit longer. I know that the fleet is safe from cyber attack and Cylon viruses because of your efforts day and night. They need you.”
“Somebody on my staff is placing vulnerabilities into our networks. I have moved most of my staff to the Athena, and personally see to it that the ship and all your planes are clean.” He pressed the USB key into her hand. “This is totally my work. Nobody even knows it exists. You plug your laptop into the net work, it only works wired. This program will get you a signature. It may help you identify which of my staff is not loyal.”
“You know I’m a lucky fighter jock, not an IT guru says yourself. Is it simple enough for me to operate?” Admiral Lawson squeezed his hand, taking the USB key.
Captain Miller spoke softly. “Easier to operate than it is for you to land a mark seven viper.”
“All right, HG who is going to keep my networks safe from the Cylons?”
“Lieutenants Debiers and Warren will head a staff of 4 NCO’s to maintain Mercury’s cyber defenses.”
“If our networks are compromised, we have a sufficient back up?”
“Yes Sir. Be vigilant. If we have a traitor on my staff, the person is quite the ghost. He or she has maintained cover for nearly three years now. This person has managed to leak just enough information to keep the toasters on our six when we tried to run. I suspect the information breach and downloads are very infrequent. Perhaps delivered by a certain long range recon raptor.”
“Could it be the pilot?” asked Admiral Lawson.
“No,” answered Captain Miller. “Something I did only for your air wing was to install a second encryption key into the transmission gear. Since the beginning of the current offensive logistics, disruption campaign, all the information leaks are associated with three recon raptors. They were all lost on scouting missions.”
“They’re not transmitting data on routine flights?”
“No, sir, three breaches associated with three lost birds. The second one was a two plane mission. Lieutenant Uber was rescued when the Raiders shot up and destroyed raptor six niner seven.”
“We suspected her. Did we keep her in the brig for a couple weeks?”
“She needed a break, I worked it out between us. The breach was lacking the second encryption key, which is what led me to understand it was my staff. The only other possibility is that I am a toaster and don’t know it.”
“When I’m ready to close the breach and go dark, how do I clean up our networks?”
“That’s the second program on the USB key. Double click on it, the password is your service number. It will clean up every system on the ship that does not include my second encryption key. Even an assault raptor that stops in for a five minute reload will get cleaned up.”
“What is Plan B? I know all you IT geeks have a Plan B.”
“The third program on that USB disk in your hand admiral is the password to unlock a pre-mission back up. It’s on read only media. It is completely secure.”
“So HG if we find the person is on Mercury, are we going to airlock the person? I suppose that is my call.”
“I cannot cover all eventualities. Our best play here might be to leave them in place and start feeding the Cylons, false information. Now that we have the nebula, and those three planets in there, we can send the toasters thousands of light years in the opposite direction.”
“How did you know, HG?”, Admiral, Lawson asked.
Hg smiled, a brighter, more mischievous grin that he was not known for. He was grimly bent over a keyboard. “I did not know for sure until just now. Unless I’m a toaster and don’t know it we are the only two people who know about this. Good hunting admiral.”
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