“All is Threes, all Threes must stand, and sing as one gindaro in the light and fullness of qaamugindargeedeeim, lest the pure ones, falsely so-called, win, and all is darkness and silence.”
--The Madwoman's Song, circa 602,056 BCE
“The Gods lift up those who lift each other.”
--traditional saying amongst the Twelve Colonies...and the Twelve Tribes...
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“Face reality,” Navarch Leland Adama's voice said over the wireless, as the Alliance battlestar Galactica's CIC continued shuddered, going dark,”accept the President's generous offer, and you'll be spared the humiliation of trial by jury.”
“Laura Roslin is the President pf the Twelve Tribes,” Navarch William Afama replied in his gravelly voice,”and I have no son.”
He then slammed the wireless headset back into its cradle, ordering the helmsman, Lieutenant Felix Gaeta, to “come about; alter vector to intercept, max av. Dee, order all ships, BSG 75, to conform to my tactical direction, then order BSG 42 to maintain present vector, continue escorting the civilians and the President-elect, to Ragnar Anchorage.”
“Bill,” his exec and Battlestar Group 75 Chief Of Staff, Captain Solomon Tigh said,”our chances--”
“I know,” Adama said, as BSG 75's 130 hulls turned on theit jets, and bore straight for the 165 warships of both these Other Humans and the traitors who'd stolen their Alliance from Adama ans his Loyalists, the five largest of which each outmassed Galactica by an order of magnitude, outhunning her by that much as well.
They were all going to die, here, now, in this neutron star system just beyond the Red Line; nothing could change that.
Adama's only hope was to fight long enough, hard enough, do enough dsmage on the way out to buy BSG 42, the several hundred civilian ships it was escorting, and the legutimately-elected President of the Twelve Reibes of Palestina enough time to mske it to Ragnar Anchorage and the rest of the Loyalist fleet.
So it was that ten 370,000-ton Emperor-class battlestars and 120 225,000-ton Overlord-class battlestars cycled in and out of a one-thouand klom Warp tunnel at a rate of 293 billion times a second(an analogud velocity of 293 terakips) on vector toward the traitors and their allies in this Royal United States no Human had even heard of, until three weeks ago.
“Always figured I'd die in my bed--” Saul remarked.
”--with a pretty young thing's mouth on my cock;” Adama said with his old friend.
“Yeah,” Adama said, clasping Saul on the shoulder.
“Me too.”
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:33:00
Rear Admiral Alexander Slidell Mackenzie ap Calhoun smiled, as he sat in the center of Royal United States Starship Donlad the Great's Combat Information Center, watching 130 of the battlestars come to his Columbia-class starship of the line, ready, willing, abd, if Mackenzie ap Calhoun was any judhe of charaxter, eager to end the three-week chase across this trinary star system at the edge of the WYN Star Cluster of this Third History.
The old fossil had certainly given it a good fight, running from Atlantis to here, trfucing Mackenzie ap Calhoun's force from 260 strong to its presnt strength of 165 battlestars, first-rates, second-rates, third-rates, and even a few fourth-rates.
Yes, the doddering old fool had certainly given him a good fight, but now, it come to a fiery end for all those who followed him to destruction.
And, for all those others, civilians, and their so-calleed President(he remember the Scripture about not permitting a woman to teach).
“Signals,” he said to Master Signalman Clyde Reese,”you will kindly ask Navarcg Adama the Younger to vector his fighters and bombers toward the remaining battle star group and their charges, while we dispose of his father,
That way, we cut out the heart of their defiance within sight of their forces.”
“Signal sent, Admital,” Reese replied, as the two forces rapidly closed to gun range.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:33:18
“Picking up comm chatter,” Chief Radioman Rhonda Klein reported from North American Starship Enterprise's comm station, as the 225,000-ton Constellation-class armored cruiser led the rest of Fleet Svouting Group 55 into a red giant system just inside the van Allen radiation belts which pervaded the WYN Star Cluster and had hindred interstellar travel into and through the area for over a hundred years in this time and place.
“Drones and Sentinel picking up five-niner-niner capital-scale quantum tunnel signatures,” Lieutenant Commander Yasmin Spock reported from intel.”Exactly 83, eight-tree of those signatures conform to known Russie designs.”
The Russies, the Royal United States, with whom the New Confederate Order and the Celestial Jingdom of Deseret had unintentionally established contact sixteen months prior, this and the still-classified, compartmentalized contact with warships of the now-Terran Dominion of this time and place turning the war between the Allied Powers of Rear Admiral Kimball Kinnison Aldrin's time and place into a multi-universal one.
Explaining the 120 ships of the North American Interstellar Fleet scouting group of armored and light cruisers in this reality.
“XO, sound General Quarters,” Kim told her second in command, Commander Draco Kirk,”alter vec to intercept Russies; Radio, CTT to Vice Admiral Miyazaki aboard Rio Grande.”
CIC turned blood-red, as the GQ klaxon donged, and Draco's vice boomed over the 1-MC:
”General Quarters, General Quarters, all hands, man your battle stations! Assume material condition Zulu throughout the platform! Up and forward to the starboard, down and aft is port!”
“Fighters launching,” Lieutenant Andrea McKinstra reported fom the weapons station,”joining Pivadors and Sentinel on station.Gun system charrged and loaded, primary ficon online, all directors tracking.”
“Combat,” Lieutenant Commander Sylvia Tilly was tthe next to report, her holo floating six inches in frony of Kim's right eye via the Brain-Computer Interface(BCI) chip at the base of Kim's skull,”Engineering. Engineering seal up, at General Quarters. Reactor on line, full power available. Bergrn quantum tunnel generator online, at max av. Torch onlime, war emergency burn available.”
“Combat, AuxCon,” Midshipman Tanya Cronenberg reported.”Auxillary Control Center locked down, at General Quarters. Inyrtcrptors on line, multiplex ficon on line, all directors tracking.”
“Combat, Med,,” Commander Julia Vining reported nect.”MEd Section on local power, at General Quarters.”
“CTT aye, Skipper,” Rhonda reported.”Scout group conforming to uour tactical direction.”
“Radar has acqired targets,” Master Chief Radarman Ava Earhart reported.”Passing targeting telemtery onyo Sentinel and Weps.”
“Now niner-foah teraklicks downrange of hostiles, on max av intercept,” Draco reported, Yasmin following with,”Russies travelling in company with eight-two hulls, unknown types, four of which mass four point five megatons.
Opfor closing won-tree-zera hulls, similar in configuration and electroomagnetic sensor info to unknown enemy machines, though the largest of those only mass 380 kilotons.”
“Fighter and drones now engaging,” Ava reported.”Closing to gun range.”
“Guns ready,” Andi reported,”soluton ready, and firing!
'
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
Alliance Fleet Battlestar Hecate's CIC shuddered, went dark, exploded, screamed and burned all around Navarch Leland of thr House Adama, as fifty- and 150- and 150-ton fighter hammered his 4,500,000-ton Leviathan-class battlestar with fragments of sicty- and 200-kilogram ordinance inyrtcrpted by the ship's 45,000 point-defense automatic flak guns, the fragments, still ytavelling at 99.9999% of actyal light speed, more than sufficent to run the pride of the Twelve Tribes through from stem to stern, their relativistic kinetic energy gutting everything between entry and exit wounds in the battlestar's thick, armored hide.
“Frak,” his exec, Commander Jack Fisk, wasted time in saying,”it's hot.”
“You don't say, old man,” Adama snarked, as his helmsman, Lieutenant Gage Trask, reporting av dtopping; now eight-tree point two teraklips, continuing to drop.”
“Red lights in engine rooms two, six, nine, and twelve,” Fisk reported,”attempting refires; radiators one through ixteen destroyed, internal heat 200 degrees, rising, life support failing to compensate. Forard flight gutted, no survivors; decks seven, ten, 16, 21 and 22 gutted, no survivors. Flak cannon 21 to 3,000 fismounted, offli--”
CIC shook, more violently than before, Adama holding on to the plot table, as the artifical singularity in the keel providing gravity threatened to tunnel out.”
“Eneny capitals in gun range,” Fisk rported, after glancing at the Directon Ranging and DIStance repeater slate just above the plot table.”All 120 squawking as unknown types, smaller ones similar in mass to Valkyroe-class battle stars, larger hulls massing the same as Minerva-class battlestars, all armed with rotary-barrel storm cannon, 2.5mm in caliber, and eighteen-inch macrocannon.”
Frakking Warp!” Afama swore, as some of the CIC came down on top of him.
“Automatic ficon offline!” awatchsrander reported.”All vatteries under local control!”
“We're in gun range of the civilian ships,” Fisk then reported.
“Thank the Gods for small favors,” Adama replied, picking up the wireless headset, and speaking into the internal comms.”/prow batteries, you will target, and destroy the civilian ships, as soon as you have a firing solution.”
“Thank the Gods,” he repeated amidst the chaos and carnage of his sweltering command deck.”We may actually frakking win. old man.”
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:35:20
“Emperor's own holy shit,” Navarch Kara Thrace swore, as Battlestar Flame of Purity's DRADIS howed the stable frakking octet of eight-ton penetrators coming for the civian ships and BSG42 at near-light speed, and one of her battlestars, the 380,00-ton Emperor-class Princess of Hibernia titn side on to the inbound masses of wolfram and depleted uranium composite, and begin firing it flak cannon.
“Gods have mercy,” Laura Roslin, President-elect of the Twelve Tribes, whispered.
”'The Gods lift up those who lift each other,' Madam President,” Kara's exec, Commander Karl “Helo” Agathon, calmly replied, before reporting,”Princess launching all Vipers, switching all main batteries to flak mode, and rolling along its thrust axis.”
“All civilian ships will overcycle their Warp generators,” Kara ordered.”The rest of the battlestar group will ypcycle, max av.”
“The civs won't last long,” Helo cautioned.”Their Warp jennies will burn out trying to keep up with us.”
Kara ignored him, instead addressing her Commander Air Group, Lieutenant LuAnn “Lu” Catrine bia wireless:
“CAG, Actual; Lu, your priority, right now, are those big frakking penetrators,” right more of which now appeared on DRADIS, while two oof the first eight continued to close Princess.
Frakking Warp.
“Hopefully,” Kara said to Helo,”they can last long enough for their ships to make it to Ragnat Anchorage, and the rest of Admiral Cain's ships.”
On DRADIS, twelve of the unknown 150-ton fighters closed to intercept the inbound 36” rounds, even as Hecate's right prow guns fired a third, then a fourth eight-round salvo.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:36:12
Wide tumblehome prows with bald eagle heads justting from then, boxy dorsal spine connected to a pair of long wedges beginning on either side of the peow, twenty massive engine nacelles astern, several of which had been ruptured by intercepted relarivistic ordinance.
Sure as hell lokks like something out of the eotted mind of whoever came up with [/]Battlestar America in my time and place, Lieutenant Stephanie Rhoaads thought, as she stood her 150-ton F4U-4 Corsair heavy fighter on its jets, and followed the rest of VF-214, the Silver Hawks, chasing down the massive 35-inch turanium penetrators now bearing down on the other unknown hulls at 0.888888c. Stevie's weapons officer, with a thought transmitted wirelessly via BCI, triggered the Corsair's three five-inch and three eight-inch relativistic-velocity accelerators(r-guns), while Stevie added the firepower of the trio of 25mm r-guns under her direct control to the mix.
Four pinpricks of hard white light, then near-lightspeed shrapnel, appeared in the master holprojector, Senior Chief Petty Officer Ashante Thomas swearing, as she continued vectoring more blue fire toward the remaining intact projectiles, while Stevie gad to jink, burn hard, shift fire to a six-pack of what surely looked like F-42G Falcons from that shitty sci-fi Internet series which had a cylt, a highly illegal cult following amongst mouthbreathers who believed space was fake, Earth was sn infinite fishbowl with water above it, the Sun and Moon revolved around it, literally like clockwork, and, oh, yes, white people were after God's own heart.
Joined vy her two wingmen, the former Marine master sergant continued to press the attack, splashing three of the six fifty-ton enemy machines, scores more converging on her wing, as Shante fragmented another four 36” rounds, the behemoth closing the distance directly aft firing sixteen more in quick succession.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
Vice Admiral Ciaphas Cain was by no means a rebel.
Forty years ago, his parents had both fought for the Monothiests, when they'd broken away from the Alliance over the issue of Servitor emancipation.
No, not Servitors, the Treaty of Londinium which had ended the Emancipation War twenty-eight years ago and the amended Articles of Alliance both insisted they'd be called CYbernetic Lifeform Nodes, or Cylons, and they were full Alliance citizens with as much right to exist as Humans.
Except...
The first Cylon President of the Twelve Tribes, Gaius Baltar, had brought to the surface things gumanity wanted to believe were dead, but that was hard to do, when your own damned creations were either as good as, or even better than, you were.
Especially, when William Greystone had both made the original Cylons self-replicating, by means of nanotechnology, and given them human form.
But, it wasn't just the Cylons that threatened the peace of minds of the surviving Monothiests, and the Make Humans Proud Again(MAHUPA) movement within the Monothiest Party which had elected Tom Zarek to the Presidency almost seven years ago.
All science, all technolgy, all medical knowledge, every small step away from human supremacy toward progress was the frakking enemy in the eyes of Monothiests.
Like he'd been.
Had it still been the twelve years of the Baltar Administration, Cain would still have only been a captain commanding a Valkyrie, with no hope in the Warp of rbrt brvoming a navarch, much less an admiral.
No, not because of discrimnation, or religious persecution, as he'd insisted once...no, no, the fault lay in the same place it always had, with the one layimg blame, eather than admit he just wasn't good enough.
He contemplated the path which had brought him here, in the center of the Leviathan-class battlestar Pegasus, leading the 130 battlestars of Battlestar Group 62 toward intercept with the enemt force hunting Adama's two battlestar groups and the civilian refugees they were shrpherding to Ragnar Anchorage.
“--are unknown at this time,” his XO, Chief Of Staff, and miracle worker, Captain Fenris Jurgen continued his briefing on the 120 unknown DRADIS contacts who'd come to Adama's aid,”though they are definitely hostile to the Others.”
To Pegasus' primary flight controller, he said,”launch all Vipers and Starhawks; Vipers to intercept ordinance inbound for BSG75 and the civilians, Starhawks to engage enemy capitals directly.”
“We'll be in main battery range in ten seconds,” he added.”Prow batteries have targets, generating firing solution.”
“Open fire when in range,” Cain instructed, as, on DRADIS, the icon for the battlestar Princess Of Hibernia blinked violently, then went dark, another Emperor-class battle star, the Abridal interposing itself between Hecate'd 36-inch macrocannon, the civilian refugees rapidly closing Ragnar Anchorage, and their remaining escorting battlestars.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:37:02
The Russie flag flared briefly in the master holoproj, then was gone, leaving behind dissipating plasma and faintly-glowing bits of metal.
Andi's last salvo also ended a trio of 950-kiloton Alabama-class second-rate starliners, a pair of 760,000-ton Concord-class third-rate, and the single 380,000-ton Chapultepec-class fourth rate starliner that had been detected.
While the remainder of the 360-round salvo had been fragmented by the unknown enemy's heavy interceptor guns, those fragments crippling six dozen quarter-megaton and 380-kiloton eagle-headed, tumblehome-prowed machines, while riddling the three remaining four and a half million ton hulls with great, glassy, glowing holes.
But, they weren't dead, and the other two machines were slowly moving up to join the third, as it continued salvoing 36” r-gun projectiles at the increasingly-distant fleet of obvious civilian ships and their ecorting warships.
IFF tags now appeared round all the unknown contacts, both on the master holoptoj and on Kim's left-hand tactical holoproj.
“Quantum tunnels,” Ava reported,”eight-eight-five-seven-zera, entering battle space, zera by eighteen, max av, smaller contacts, Viper Mark VII fighters and Starhawk bombers, splitting up, fifty-ton Vipers assisting Vipers from Abridal, Flame of Purity, and Enterprise in interception of 36-inch rounds being fired by Hecate,Samson, and Hercules, 300-ton Starhawks closing enemy capitals directly.”
“Silver Hawk Lead,” Kim said over tacnet,”you're to be commended for trying to intercept those 36-inch rounds, your priority is attacking capships.”
And, there were a baker's dozen less of those, as the battlestar ID'ed as Pegasus and its nine companion Leviathan-class battlestars unlimbered their prow heavy guns, adding the fires of ninety quad turreted 18” r-guns mounted along each [i[Leviathan's[/i] dorsal spine to cripple twenty 225,000-ton Minerva-class battle stars, while administering the coup de grace to the six dozen or so Minervas and Emperor-class battlestars already drifting and deadstick.
“From telemetery I've been able to gather thus far,” Yasmin reported, while Draco stood his ship on her jets to heel her over hard, and keep her in the battlespace,”these ships have tchnology comparable to ours, the League's, the Dominion's, and the Russies, r-guns, total-conversion matter-antimatter reactors, artificial singularities for grav, Bergen quantum-tunnel generators, plasma-core torches...their shipwide AI networks, however...”
Andi hammered one of the enemy Leviathans with Enterprise's nine quad-turreted, prow-mounted 18” r-gund, the Samson's 25mm heavy interceptors fragmenting all 360 rounds of that salovo, paying for it by having gun turrets and flak batteries scoured away, radiators sent spinning into the void, engine nacess ruptured like watermelons on the Academy firing range(Marines had a strange sense of humor) and the hull riddled with further breaches running the ship through stem to stern, hutting all spaces between entry and exit wounds.
Then, a lucky fragment found the charged barrel of the outermost port 36” mount, as Enterprise passed Samson.a view piped in from one of the ship's QF-5L Picador combat drones' nose camera showing the entire prow just disappearing in a roar of white-hot light, the Leviathan itself falling out of formation with its two mates, trailing plasma, coolant, lide and anti-lide from hull breaches and destroyed nacelles like a blood trail, as it drifted, deadstick, into a salvo from Galactica's nine quad turreted eighteen-inchers on the prow and dorsal spine.
“What about their shipnet, Intel?” Kim asked, as Draco again brought the ship smartly about to keep it in the battlespace.
“I had to go over my telemetry again, to be sure,” Yasmin replied,”but, their shipnets are cyborgs...AIs networked to a flesh and blood human in their equivalent of our automed tech providing full life support.”
“Ohhh-kay,” Kim replied, as the salvo meant by Galactica for Hecate struck Hercules instead.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:38:20
“Frak,” Adama growled, as the main batteries killed Hercules, which Lee, true to form, had chosen to use as a shield, Hecate, gun turrets, flak batteries, and radiators shot away, engines half its twelve engine nacelles ruptured and trailing plasma, coolant, tylium and hasatanium like a blood trail wallowed, moving slower, but still managing to elude the kill.
IFF tags appeared around all the friendly, but previously-unknown DRADIS contacts.
“Bravo Zulu, Mister Hoshi,” Saul said to Primus Phillip Hoshi, [/i]Galactiva's[/i] ops boss, who replied,”wasn't me, sir. Hybrid has been in contact with the shipwide AI networks of these North American warships, and they're exchanging information without human intervention.”
“Yeah,” remarked Adama, who'd accepted, shortly after being promoted to command of Galactica at the tail end of the Adar administration, that the battlestar's Hybrid had a will of her own, and as long as she continued serving the best interests of ship, vre, and Alliance, Adama was willing to let things be.
CIC went dark still again, the space a furnace which evaporated sweat, and left salt behind, Tigh reporting the loss of several more radiators, several more penetrations running the beam of the ship, gutting every frame in between port and starboard sides of the outer hull.
He glanced up at DRADIS...more icons, friendly and enemy blinked furiouly and died, including the [iAbridal[/i], who taken one of the 36” macrocannon rounds it was attempting to block.
Gaeta heeled the ship hard over, closing Hecate from above and astern, the ventral main batteries opening fire, Lee's remaining dorsal flag cannon fragmenting those four-ton rounds, the fragments tearing through Hecate doesal to ventral, knocking out gun turrets, flak emplacments, and radiators with the support of one of the 2225-kiloton North American armored cruisers, squawking as Enterprise, according to DRADIS.
“Their AI nets,” Hoshi reported,”lack organic components and are pure sentient machines.”
More like Saul, Adama mused to himself, while fighters, bombers, and drones swarmed Hecate,than our Hybrid then.
He nodded his head, as, on DRADIS, the icon representing Hecate put on an unexpected burst of speed, and surged toward a direct intercept with Flame Of Purity.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“Hard about,” Kara ordered, eyes on Lee's ship drawing closer on DRADIS, and the rest of BSG 42 and the convoy of civilian refugees, paassing BSG 62, en route to Ragnar Anchorage.
“Coming about,” the helmsman, Primus Elspeth Ryder, replied, as [iiFlame of Purity[/i] pivoted on her RCS thrusters, and was now bow-on to Hecate.
“Now closing Hecate,” Elspeth reported, “max av.”
Frak you for making me do this, Lee! Kara thought angrily, as Helo gave orders to the gunner manning the automatic ficon station to open fiew, all batteries, the instant they were in range.
Maybe if she had been a little less herself, hell, maybe if she'd pretended, just for him, and spread her legs for him, he might have--
Helo's hand vlasped her shoulder, as her knuckles turned white from her gripping the plot table so hard.
“He made his own choices, Kara,” her exec whispered.”You couldn't make them for him. Not even the High Lords of Kobol have that power “
“Yeah,” Kara whispered, as, on DRADIS, Galactica, and the ship squawking as Enterprise both continud hammering Hecate, yet still she came, her remaining engines and Warp generators pushed past their limits.
“Yeah,” she repeated.”Gods forgivee me.”
Then, she gave the order to fire.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:40:10
“I don't give a frak, if you burn out the jennies, and fuse the torches to slag, you hear me ?!” Lee Adama shrieked into the headset to Engineering, as CIC continued to shudder, burn, scream, explode, and fall to pieces around him and Fisk.
We're sll frakkin' gonna die, over ten thousand men and women, Fisk thought to himself, reflexively glancing at where the DRADIS slate used to be,because this incompetent frak is trying to be his ols man, and is failing miseravly.
“Flame of Purity,” the DRADIS operator, whose ststion was still operational, reported,”now bow on tp Hecate, closing to gun range, max av.”
“So the blonde bitch wants to die first,” Adama remarked, dripping blood from cuts on his forehead and cheek onto the plot table.”Just punishment for her crimes against me.”
Perhaps, Fisk mused, as Adama's ship and one other, continued pounding Hecate. our imminent destruction is just punishment for my sins, all my sins, from fighting for the Monothiests and Cylon enslavement in the last war, to putting the Monos and their Mankind Must Stand Proud Again movement in power six years ago, and keeping them there, in spite of all the damage they inflicted on all our people.
Five and a half billion alone wiped out by the pandemic, more death in one year than the First Civil War had caused in twelve, and even simple precautions outlawed, punishable by MAMSPA goons and their frakking patriotic vigilance committees.
“All gun batteries,” the younger Adama said into the handset, even as CIC continued falling down all round him,”open fire the moment--”
“No,” Fisk found himself saying, the chaos of CIC seeming to pause, as he levelled his 7.52mm accelerator pistol at the younger Adama, who just turned, stared goggle-eyed down the barell, and scream ”the frak is this, old man?! Do you realize what will happen to everyone you ever even said 'hi' to on the Gods-damned street, if you go through with this?!”
”Get me Fleet Command on Sparta!” he then ordered the comms officer.
“Do what you have to do, boy,” Fisk calmly said,” but, as of now, you are relieved of command. Armsmen, remove Navarch Adama from CIC.”
A squad of Fleet armsmen in full body armor flanked the younger Adama, the optio commanding them removing Adama's sidearm from its holster, and said,”you will come with us, Navarch. Now.”
Sulking, Adama left the bridge under armed escort.
“Flame of Purity in gun range, preparing to fire!” a watchstander reported, as Fisk picked up the handset, and said,”Flame Actual, Hecate XO. The Hecate surrenders, I say again, the Hecate surrenders. All hands, stand down from Action Stations, all fighters, come on home.”
A few tense moments passed, before Kara Thrace's taut voice ordered,”Hecate,Flame Actual. You will downcycle, cut yourv, and prepare to be boarded.”
“Downcycle to norm,” Fisk ordered the helmsman,”kill all forward velocity. All hands, this is the XO; prepare to boarded, offer no resistance. I say again, prepare to be boarded, offer no resistance.”
The 190,000-ton Manhattan-class light cruisers Muskegon and Chicago rand down a pair of Russie Alabamas trying to flee the battlespace, and dispached them.
“Scope clear,” Ava reported.”Hecate downcycling to norm, flipping ship, killing all velocity.”
Kim nodded, sipping the last of a fifth bottle of cold saline solution, as a chilling wind blew through CIC, Sylvia's holo reporting,”Comnat, Engineering. All radiators re-installed, internal temp 78 degrees, falling. All other damage under repair.”
“Copy,” Kim was able to say, once her throat had been moistened.
All around Enterprise, drifted the riddled hulks of friendly and enemy starships alike, amidst the faintlu glowing fragments and dissipating wisps of plasma marking machines destroyed by direct hits; already, small craft were being dispatched by the battlestars still intact to carry out rescue and recovery operations.
“Marines to the dropships,” Kim order over shipnet,”I say again, Marines to the dropships; assist in recuse and recovery operations.”
“We're being commed, from the ship squwaking as Pegasus,” Rhonda reported.”Audio only.”
“Pipe it through,” Kim ordered, a man's deep, cultured voice sayiing over speakers:
“I am Vice Admiral Ciaphas Cain, commanding all Loyalist Allied forces. Who in the actual sodding frak are you?”
“Not a charm school graduate, him,” Draco commented, Kim smirking, as she answered:
“Sir, I am Rear Admiral Kimball Kinnison Aldrin, commanding Fleet Scouting Group 55 of the North American Interstellar Fleet, and, it's a bit of a long story. Do I have the Vice Admiral's permission to come aboard his ship?”
A few moments passed, before Vice Admiral Cain replied:
“Yourself and a suitable honor guard only. You will be met at Pegasus' number one port flight dec, I say again, number one port flight deck.”
“Copy, Vice Admiral,” Kim replied,”will see you soon. Discomming.”
She stretched herself, after unbelting, and rising from her chair, her back popping, as she stretched.
“I'm going to my cabin for a shower and a change of uniform, Mister Kirk, then I'm going to pay this Vice Admiral Cain a visit, Please have First Squad, Alfa Company, 1st Battalion standing by on the flight deck.”
As she turned toward the wardroom hatch at the aft of Enterprise's command deck, she announced,”XO has the conn.”
“I have the conn,” Draco replied, as Kim disappeared through the wardroom hatch.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
"Just another hoax," JM Truth insisted," perpetrated by the fake liberal,mainstream Internet and the Freemason elites."
"Leftist Mad Max fantasy," Outcast X remarked," Utah, the whole fucking Celestial Kingdom of Deseret, is thriving, prosperous, and a land of opportunity for those willing to work hard, and live clean. We even have folks from Laamanite shitholes like the North American Communist Assembly and the Anglo-Swedish Union risking their lives to live here in such wealth, opportunity, and freedom to be white and goddamn proud of it.”"
"They'll say anything," Daniel Pratt ROW chimed in," engage in whatever lies and mental gymnastics are necessary to promote their agenda. Like with the fake Birmingham church bombing bullshit psyop."
"No one died that day in 1963," Level Earth Observer insisted, a meme of the four dead enner girls side by side with their supposed real identities appeared front and center in NathanOakley1980's livestream."it's been documented and debunked a thousand times already, mates."
"Crisis actors,"the Brilliant Expat Taffy insisted," all they was, crisis actors hired by Hollywood, then given new identities; one of 'em was even the Great Harlot, Stacet Abrams, herself."
"While one of the others," Mikey Smith remarked," was her lesbian, Satannic pedophile lover–"
"Sex slave," Jeran Cpeneella huffed and puffed,
"--Marjorie Taylor-Greene,"Mikey concluded," seen here wearing blackface, common amongst white actors at the time."
"Don't just take our word for it," LEO, aka Adam i Fe, then said."Listen to the samples of her voice and that of alleged Birmingham bombing victim Ruby Bridges, I mean, really listen, mates, with an open, critical mind, and not just the bollocks you've been fed by the mainstream Internet and the public fool system."
The voices didn't sound anything alike, but Matthew Corneilius, Prophet and President of the New Confederate Order knew the white, Christian man heard, saw, thought, and believed what he wanted to, not what was there, and this would be no different.
"Exactly alike," Scotty Storm decided, after listening to Ruby singing in the choir and Majorie Taylor Green talking shit about Jewish space lasers causing wildfires in California.
“Don't see how anyone can say different," Vegas Valley Community Watch remarked.
"Anyone not make believing their.way through life," Hans Wormhat remarkied," inventing fairy tales about nothing exploding and creating Earth over billions of years ago, and men evolving from monkeys by accident on a spinning, wet space ball hurtling round a sun millions of miles away, while moving at zillions of miles per hour through fake, fantasy land space."
The Son of Man stood in the center of the Panopticon, and smiled, the live playing on one of the many,, many floor to ceiling, wall to wall holoviewers in this room at the heart of the Temple in New Jerusalem(formerly Washington, D.C.) and the vital center of the Restored American Republic itself.
On his BCI, footage of the feverish construction undertaken by Russies and their slaves round the Saturn of this time and place, the Russies' having already garrisoned Achernar X and the only artifact permitting passage into this reality from theirs in their possession, all over the understandable objections of most, if not all of the Grand Klavern, and, even in spite of the Leader of the Free World's own reservations.
Anyone with a good telescope(illegal since the slaves and the bootlickers had the indecency to land on the Moon 98 years ago)would be able to spot the activity in the outer Solar System, thus compromising a Secret necessary to thee continued safety and survival of the white, Christian man.
A necessary evil.
The Russies' and the Terran Dominion of still another reality had infrastructure, manpower and slave power to spare, things which the Restored American Republic lacked.
By design
Per the Plan.
A Plan gradually set in motion 136 years ago, when the previous Seven Mountains strategy had proven itself to have always been a failure, a Plan which, for the most part, had tun on rails, even if the Laamanites insisted on thrwarting said Plan time and again.
"--laptop," JM Truth then remarked in the live chat,"had live, streaming video of the disgusting, horrific rituals practiced and overseen by the elites in the ancient Taratian tunnels directly underneath New Jerusalem itself, during the years before they were all swept away by the Storm."
A pretty little piece of red-headed pootang, chained spread eagled in a cave somewhere, was being whipped to bloody meat by an older piece of fire crotch, wearing only glasses and rings in its pubes and nips, the older redhead licking the blood running freely down the crack of the chained little slave girl's asss.
"That's from your documentary The Plane Truth About Geoge Soros And the Cabal," remarked Outcast X,as a rag headed enner chick, another biracial slut, a wetback, a middle aged blonde, and an old crone with saggy milk jugs all took turns licking the blood from their victim's half-dead body.
"One of the classics of the truther movement and a YouTube masterpiece," gushed Outcast X, adding," that's Lauren Boebert, Marjorie-Traitor-Greene, Ilhan Omar, Alexandra Oscasio-Cortez, Stacey Abrams, and, Hillary Clinton. If memory serves."
"All high priestesses in the Satannic Demokratik Party pedophile Cabal," JM Truth assured X,"torturing a child , orphaned by the Abrams crime family's illegal wars in Palestine and Saudi Arabia, trafficked to them by Demonkrats George Soros and Jeffrey Epstein for the a-drenachrome in its blood."
"'Drenachrome s'posed to keep 'em young and pretty," said American Swamp Warrior."How they was all able to be crisis actors way back in 1963."
"Correct, Brother Man," Pastor Greg Locke, Ph.D, rematked." Kept 'em young, pretty and immune to the vax they used to alter people's DNA to create a race of demons, slaves and perverted, sexually-confused freaks."
"Trat's the science they don't want anyone knowing about," David Weiss said," along with the science proving the flat, motionless, domed infinite plane of the Earth was created by a timeless, spaceless, causeless, all powerful, all knowing God in six twenty-four hour days."
"Amen, Brother Man," Locke said, as the Messiah of New Israel smiled his Work to see, his great Plan unfolding before him in the Panopticon of the Third Temple in New Jerusalem.
"Amen."
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
02:40:10
Eric of House Trump, by the Grace of the Almighty, King of these United States, Messiah of the New Israel, Son of God, and Leader of the Free World, again told the little nig chained naked and spread eagled before him that it was wicked, depraved, and worthy only of punishment in this life and in the one to come, for as long as its lords and nasters permitted it to live.
Then, he furiously laid into it with the barbed cat o'nine tails in his firm right hand, splattering the marble walls and floors with its impure blood.
The Son of God slowly walked round, sliding the barbs of the cat along the niglet's flesh, as he did so, then, without cease, chastised the front of it as passionately as he"d prosecuted the back, paying special attention to its womb, source of all harlotry and perversion in the world, as Textus Receptus, written in red on the heart of every white man, told him, its screams and howls of passions soon fading to low moans, then even lower whimpers, as he continued punishing it for the sinn of having been born.
"--still more food shortages," Ali Steinberg ranted in his BCI, "compliments of Whig mismanagement, deliberate Whig mismanagement, on the orders of the globalist cabal of Jesuits and Freemasons pulling their strings."
The Leader of the Free World chuckled…three centuries since Mister Taxil had exposed his own hoax, and it still proved to be of service to God and Country, giving His People someone to blame for the choices They Themselves had made, for the course They'd determined Their Grand Old Republic, Their Great Experiment, to stay in the three centuries-plus, since Aaron the Great had accepted the Crown from God's Hand, and overthrown both an effeminate Congress and the governments of the several States to form a most perfect Union.
One which had spread white male Christendom across the stars, and, now, across multiple realities as well…certainly, the Oil Lords of the Texians were ecstatic at the new markets and new sources of petroleum the artifact on Io had opened up for them, while the Americas of these other two realities were glad of the allies, infrastructure and manpower they so desperately needed to carry out their works of isolation and extermination.
Even knowing they themselves would be subjugated by the True America, once they had what they wanted, but they wouldn't care about that, as, even then, they would still be white, Christian men, and they would still be masters.
"--to target Federalist provinces," Lorne Whitsit sagely told Brooks Dunning on another channel of the Interwebs,"with ice storms and other unseasonably wintry weather, in retaliation for us refusing to put up with child groomers, gender dysphoric freaks, Amazon viragos with phallic pretensions, Bellamite heresy, and all the rest of radical Left Whig agenda."
Another chuckle, as the Messiah of New Israel maintained his unceasing prosecution of the nig chained to the columns of his play room.
Andrew the Great, well over two hundred years before, had exterminated the Whig Party and all its deluded partisans at the same time his troops had burned away all trace of the savage Cherokee from Columbia's fair shores.
Still, their spectre served as a convenient scapegoat, advancing the just cause of white Christendom.
"--ridiculous, unscientific notion," the Right Reverrnd Yeshua Micheal Hovind asserted on his corner of the Interwebs," that the noble white race, made in, and bearing the stainless image of the Almighty Living God, could share kinship with the demon-possessed, the perverse, the bestial, lower orders of Creation, flies so flagrantly in the face of logical, dispassionate sober observation of facts and reality..it really is a mental disease, a religious cult which has held us back from true scientific progress, ever since the Jews put Charles Darwin, a sodomite who shipped aboard the Beagle to 'comfort' its captain, into betraying his race and denying his God by plagiarizing Greek and Latin texts that have conclusively been proven to have been the direct inspiration of Satan Herself."
The thing chained up for its edification and his amusement ceased making any sound, yet the Captain of the Lord's Host continued its education on what it was and all it deserved..Darwin hadn't been either the first or the last fool to threaten his race with such toxic heresy.
It could be proved, and it was an uphill fight waged by his men against those who knew kinship between white men and non-white savages could be proved, beyond all doubt.
It was a war which had to be waged, as allowing the heresy to be proven would be the death of white Christendom, and everything it had struggled to build and maintain through blood, sweat, labor, and tears, for, if all were equal, what need would there be for gods and sovereigns?
Where would white Christendom be without slaves?
The Leader of the Free World knew, for certain, he never wanted that question answered.
At the same time he continued punishing this particular slave for its unforgivable sin of existence.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:40:10
"--was founded by the Rothschilds and Progressive Party operatives from the United States," IM Storm said in his live," chief amongst them were Richard Nixon, who assumed the identity of Martin Bormann, and became infamous under that name, and Joseph McCarthy, Nixon"s devoted homosexual lover, who Germans of that time knre as the Blood Judge, Richard Feisler–"
Son of Rome, Overlord of Vulcan, Dominus Romulus[/i[, Rex Andot, Emperor of Steel, Simon B. Buckner, Imperator and Pontifex Maximus of the Terran Dominuon, grabbed a handful of the slave's hair, pulling on it to force himself further down the throat of what had been Amy Lynn BenedictArnall, before the Restored Terra Imperialis had forbidden giving slaves human names sixteen months ago.
He had to slap it across its face, when it pretended to gag and choke on its Father's shaft and seed, after which the Rex Galactica rammed himself back down its hole, and thrust even more violently than before to drive home his point.
"--a progressive, socialist agenda," Lindybeige said in the live chat,"as was evidenced by Hitler, alias Jew York union mob boss Al Smith, taking Willy Messerschmitt's company from him, and nationalizing it."
"Capitalists," assured Jayson Bullock Official," don't nationalize, and they don't use government power to remove competition."
"No," IM Storm remarked, as the Son of God allowed himself release, then pulled out of the slave's filthy mouth to wipe himself on its stupid face.
Tell it it wasn't good enough.
It never was with one of them, but, after years of this bitch looking down its nose art him, knowing how much he (mistakenly) loved it, he found telling it how worthless it was, after showing it how worthless it was, to be especially satisfying.
Almost as satisfying as seeing it, without a word, without complaint, go over his knee to take correction from his firm hand of loving masculine authority.
"--and their Darwinist evilution world religion, stressing survival of the fittest," said Tommy Powell Official," that led to eleven million white men being murdered in the concentration camps, along with critical race theory."
"It's a documented fact," DanPrat4thePeople then said,"Marxist Communism has caused more deaths than capitalism ever did; no one need look any farther than the Socialist utopia, the Zionist ethno-state of Nazi Germany for proof of this."
"And," No Bullshit asked," who was it that stopped the Nazi menace? Nationalists, proud, white men like Churchill and John F. Kennedy, who mobilized a somnambulant world into standing up to the tyranny and terror of International Jewry and the Prog agenda of the Freemason, Jesuit, child grooming, pedophile galactivist elites, and–"
In another window of his BCI's holofield, the Emperor of Earth watched patriots in Ector, Texas helping themselves to the contents of a community food bank, gunning down those who would take from said food bank and not work for what they were given.
More patriots, more hard-working, God-fearing patriots, smashed their way into a darkened store, liberating its contents for the benefit of these more useful members of society, as opposed to the generations of soft, self-entitled, parasitic snowflakes more obsessed with fucking pronouns and government handouts than actually doing an honest fucking day's work, the kind bred by 169 years of misrule by the Woke, Humanophobic Federation of Socialist Planets.
The rest of the town was lit up by burning buildings from one end of State Highway 56 to the other, Supercane Gaspar having flooded the State and taken out its dodgy power grid a month and a half ago.
All while Terran Security enforces and Imperial Guardsmen from Fort Hood kept the town cordoned off with transport inhibiters and a theater shield and the exercise of white male privilege by their fellow patriots in hand.
Further west and north, a convoy of big rigs sat idled at the intersection of US Highway 82 and State Highway 278, outside of Paris, the drivers grilling meat, drinking alcohol, listening to musiç, and enjoying themselves, while completely blocking the on and off ramps, as well as all four lanes of US82 proper, the blockade extending almost to State Highway 56, with shields, transport inhibiters, enforcers and Guardsmenestablishing a cordon between 56 and State Highway 78 to prevent the blockade from being run, while patriots in Bonham ran riot and settled scores through the darkened city.
"'--the Progs, and their century-plus of They/Them corporate mismanagement," Texas Governor Gregory O'Rourke said on the Net," are entirely to blame for this humanitarian disaster, more obsessed with silencing patriots' free speech, enforcing their atheist, evilutionist woke religion, persecuting believers simply for spreading the Good News of Jesus' love, grooming and mutilating our children, and constantly pursuing unsustainable political, economic and social models, than actually governing, the Progs thought nothing on spending anything on badly-needed infrastructure, as that would've taken money from their fake Green New Deal program, their fake space program, their fake LGBTMOUSE agenda, their fake vaccine agenda, based on their fake plandemics, their fake critical race theory agrnda, their fake–"
Chuckling, the Emperor of Steel hauled the slave onto its feet, slammed it over the desk in his office in the Capitol's rotunda, spanking it at the same time he forced his way into another of its holes, chuckling again, as its screams echoed off the walls.
259-69M2
02:40:10
“--then,” Lisbreath Croaker said on the Net,”after weeks of genital mutilation and sexual torture by these soulless, inhuman, machines, after being drained of the adrenachrome they need to survive and maintain human foorm, they rip out their souls, their innocent, sweet souls, and download thrm into deviant, sexually-perverse, transgendered Cylon bodies, break them gradually into their daemoniv sisterhood, and, bit by bit, complete the re-ptogramming of their sou--”
Chuckling, Thomas Zarek, by the grace, authority, and will of the Emperor of Mankind, leaned back in his chair, upholstered with a Kzinti pelt of an especially striking pattern, and put his feet up on his desk in the Pentagon Room of the Alliance Forum on the ecumenopolis of Atlantis, and smiled his work to see.
It had been a hectic and busy three weeks following the bombing of the law courts on Athens,, after the Grand Arbites had rejected his claim that the ugly, four-eyed bitch Laura Roslin, her Toaster running mate, Gaius Baltar, and a conspiracy of Cylons, Xenos, and radical Right Polythiest elites had stolen the election, in spite of Zarek ramrodding five appointees to the Alliance's former highest court through a Senate controlled by frakking Polythiests(following the midterm elections of (66M2), stacking the Grand Arbites in his favor.
Another sip of aged ambrosia, from the distilleries on Londinium's moon, Hibernia.
The gaze of the rightful President of the Twelve Tribes dhifted to another window on his desk terminal's slate.
When his loyalists, on Zarek's command, stormed the Forum three weeks ago, things...had gotten messy, and it up to the Servitors, as these uppity Cylons were properly known, to clean it up, Archons in full body armor watching as devout Servitors of the Imperial Sisterhood whipped, stomped, kicked and beat their own lazy subhuman kind into cleaning up the piss, shit, blood and guts staining the marble walls and floor of the gallery leading to the Senate offices.
As for those 144 frakking traitors who refused to recognize his right to rule for another six-year term, and for the rest of his life, they had all been crucified, eventually, same as the fifty-one billion who'd cast their votes for Roslin and her Toaster puppetmaster, in direct defiance of the Emperor's will, as well as the traitors in the Archons who'd weaponized the justice system, and dared prosecute him over fake allegations and right-wing conspiracy theories.
All those crucified in the past three weeks lined both sides of the High Street, from the downport, all the way up Capolitine Hill to the very steps of the Forum, with more Servitors by the day being exposed by the vigilance committees, chastised, and either crucified or enslaved with every passsing minute.
Another window on the terminal's viewslate showed a vigilance committee of patriotic Humans, loyal to the idea that Mankind should stand prouf again, not hate his humanity, as the Servitors, the Xenos, and the treasonous Progs would all have him do.
No more.
Zarek knew the framework on which the Twelve Tribes had been governed was too irredeemably corrupt, made from the beginning to benefite weak, woke, radical Right Poly elites, and not decent, hard-working, honest Monothiests who only wanted to spread the Good News of the Emperor's love and mercy, and the free gift of salvation offered through the sacrifice of his Son, Horus, to the Ruinous Powers during the Exodus 2,000 years ago.
A thought transmitted wirelessly by his commun summoned his personal servitor, clad only in black stockings and an obedience collar to him, another thought yransmitted from the commun chip at the base of his skull through the Forum's Hybrid to the collar had the blonde, almost Human appearing Serf crawling to him on its hands and knees.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
Lathan Anders wrapped his length of chain around the ankles of the Servitor healer, falsely so-called, brought it down, dragged it to him, then stripped it, chastised it, and, when it was half-conscious, hog-tied it, slipped a black bag into place over its flame rec hair, and locked the hood in place with an obedience collar, whose nanotrodes worked their way into its central ptocessing unit.
From there, the nine year old boy, with the help of two older fellow patriots, carried the Serf through the halls of the fake medicae, really a temple to Scientism, the Ruinous Powers and their utterly depraved practices.
It was even rumored that this unholy place, in the heart of Delphi, on Athens, used vax and technomancy to program boys such as him into believing they were girls, or some other kind of Xenos, then downloading their souls into Servitor bodies of the “correct” race.
The three devout servants of His Divine Majesty, the Emperor of Mankind, brought the slave into the parking lot, where another patriot stood with a data slate, and an electoo encoding wand.
“Who took this one?” asked the patriot with the dataslate.
“I did,” said the balding blonde older man with a white and red MAMSPA ballcap pushed back on his scalp.
“Bullshit,” his fellow patriot, a short, squat man with a long, salt and pepper ponytail sticking out from underneath his Alliance Double Eagle bandana.”I claim all rights under Title 1 of the Alliance Commercial Charter, and excercise my allodial claim over this slavr, as an attorney in fact and a human shining with the Empror's light.”
“Well, I claim my rights over this slave,” the balding man replied, just as hotly,”as an attorney in fact and a human being shining with the Emperor's light.
Now, if you want to pay me a billion gold crowns, I will gladly--”
Ponytail drew a 8mm acceleration bolter from his hip holster, shoved it in the balding man's face, and said,”this is all the golden thrones IM need to excercise my Emp--”
Unnoticed by the pair of them, Lathan drew his 12.7mm automatic revolver bolt pistol, and, with a thought transmitted from his brain via commun, shot Ponytail stone dead.
Causing the balding man to turn and declared”I find you guilty of murder and treason, per my right as a private arbitor, attorney in fact, and a hu--”
He should've sprnt his last moments going for his bolter, instead of running his mouth.
Lathan made sure to send him to the Warp to be raped with big firey demon dicks for all eternity.
Just as a Servitor would want.
“Seems like you're the sole claimant, young man,” the patriot with the data slate said.”Your name?”
“Lathan Anders,” replied Latan, the man entering that name into the data slate via commun, before marking the slave as Lathan's personal property with the electoo wand, then transferring 10,000 gold crowns to the boy's Central Bank online account.
“Proceeds from the auction,” the man then told Lathan, as the crack of a teleportarium and the ensuring Warp tunnel removed the slave from the sight of men,”will automatically be deposited to your account.”
“You're a fine young man, a credit to Mankind and the Emperor who gave you life,” he added.
“Go bag you some more.”
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:46:53
The little Kzinti cub was pure white with black stripes.
Naturally by “little,” Team Sergeant Clyde Peters of the Imperial Guard 12th Armored Division meant it was between a meter-fifty and two meters in height, massing some 275 kilos.
He stalked it through the dwelling of its pride, just outside the First City of Kzinhome, waited, til it couldn't run anymore, then fired a single dart from his M! Service accelerator rifle, set on subsonic.
The dart struck home, the cub turning yowling in pain, before the dart's capacitor sent electrical current through it which stopped its heart, and sent it crashing into the tall grass of the savanna.
Now, while it was incapacitated, Peters was able to remove his body armor, grunt and curse the cub's dead weight onto its back, and satisfy his curiousity.
After that, via his newly-install BCI chip, he commed his taxidermist buddy in the First City, a quantum tunnel opening in front of his trophy, and a burly bear-apelike Slidarian, massive even for his species, picked up the cub as if it were a feather, and carried it off to be stuffed and mounted.
A most impressive trophy for the squad bay.
Peters then transferred 1,500 creds to his friend's online credit account, as only woke, lib socialists would expect a friend to do it for free, or even a discount,, when the man had a family to support, same as Peters.
Part and parcel of what it meant to put Earth first again, after laboring for over a hundred years under the tyrannical yoke of the failed social experiment kmown as the United Federation of Planets.
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
02:46:53
Thomas Jefferson “JeffHatesPig” Barnette stood on the steps of the Dominionist Church in Macon, and watched the carnage of the violent, loony liberal Left inflicted on decent, hard-working men and women, when they didn't get their welfare handouts.
On all ten lanes of Cherry Street, these professional victims and protesters paid by George Soros stomped their feet, sang songs shrilly and millitantly off-ley, and waved their little rainbow flags all around.
Then, the patriots showed up, in ones and twos at first, then en masse, many bringing their dogs with them, as Macon corpoate policy enforcers in full riot gear and Confederate Legionnairesxin full battlw rattle, stood of to the side, and stood there, as the patriots unleashed, first, their fur missiles, then themselves, into the mob of radical Left thugs and fascist hooligans, and gave them what for.
“Dixie,” and “Awesome God” both played full blast, drowning out the screams of criminals being brought to judgement, facing accountibility for the first time in their lives, either neing sent to second death as one of them or stripped, chastised, hog tied, black bagged, and loaded onto the backs of pickup trucks, trailers, mant made from pickup rear ends, or horsecat-drawn wagons, those vehicles, once loaded to their limits with slaves stacked like cordwood, movingg away, likely headed for the sale barn in Central City Park, to be auctioned to real men who'd provide them with the disciplne they needed for the first time their whole, useless, fat, la--
Dafuq?!” demanded JeffHatesPigs to a pig with a tin star grabbing him by the shoulder, and trying to pull him back, when JeffHatesPigs tried vectoring his Canon P.2500 camera drones closer to the rioting.
“Sir,” the tyrant tried telling him of all people,”for your own safety, I need you to step back behind the cor--”
“Fuck off, pig,[/i[“ JeffHatesPigs told him, wrenching shoulder out of the Beta male's grasp, then drew his Champion .44 Magnum auto revolver on him.”I am sn investigative journalist, and the First Amendment of the Textus Receptus gurantees ftrrdom of the press to film breaking news.
Either you go the fuck away, and leave me to my lawful business, or you will be executed for treason, and your family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, on down the line, will be open season for my five million subscribers.
What's it gonna be?!”
“That's right, bitch,” he then said to the retreating tyrant's back,”walk of shame, walk of shame!”
“Showed that tinhorn dictator who the man was,” NC TyrantSlayer exulted in the side chat of JeffHatesPugs' livestream.”
“Got to, Brother Man,” JeffHatesPugs replied.”You got to stand up to these tyrants and bullies, and fight for your unalienable rights; otherwise, they'll run right over you, and just what the hell kinda white man that makes you, huh, boy?!”
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
02:46:53
"Don't fuckin' look at her!" Lance Corporal Evan Ruskin screamed, laying into barely-clothed shame being marched into the street from the burning houses by Royal United States Marines.
"Eyes down!" he commanded the vile feminine creatures under his authority. "No talking! No looking at each other! Think about what you've done, what bad children you've been, what you have coming to you for having been allowed freedom for far too long!"
The miserable collection of niglets soon joined more of their subhuman kind already kneeling, in various states of nakedness laid bare, impure flesh scourged by the canes and barbed whips which were the white man's badge of station, used by the he Chosen of the Lord, their God, and His Son, King Eric, to do His Will.
Once put on their knees alongside the others, the harlot, the sodomite, the fornicator, the procreator, the witch, the seductress, the niglet and the slave, all were stripped of what little they wore, bound hand and foot, and their heads stuffed into thick, black hoods secured in place with locking collars, destined, from there, for slave training, the auction block, and the custody of those bound by Christian duty to love, guide and protect them from themselves in spite off their fallen, sinful natures.
Groomers from the King's Watch made final preparations, shaving bald those nigs who needed it, as Ruskin, his wood-framed Army Model 1964 accelerator rifle in hand, joined his fellows by their 8x8 wheeled cavalry fighting vehicle, taking a moment to watch the slaves being herded by the groomers into a quanyum tunnel, then re-mounted their WECAV, and rode on to their regiment's next objective on the world called Palestinia by these Humans from the Third History.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“Frak me running,” Kara whispered, as she saw her twin, in a black and silver dress uniform with one thick and wide and one thin golden strip on wach sleeve, emerged last from the ladder leading up into the belly of the delta-form shuttle.
“The armsmen with powered armor and autocannons was enough of a sight,” Saul remarked, as he stood between her and the Old Man, referring to the ten troops in silvery powered armor, something only alluded to in the Sacred Database, and brandishing rifle-stocked 25mm automatic cannon, the troopers rigidly standing five abreast of what could be Kara's twin.
Except...her family were either dead, victims of the Monothiests last-gasp attack on Atlantis, or, in the case of Lucy, her kid sister, Kara hoped to the Gods she had died before she could suffer the hell of the Monos' gulags.
Her kid sister, who'd looked up to Kara, wanted to be just like her...then-nine year old Kara had turned away, for just a second, and Lucy was gone, snd may the Gods have mercy on her for her failure.
“--Cain, sir,” this mirror of Kara said, as she face Vice Admiral Cain, and saluted, the taller, clean-shaven, crew-vut man, who certainly looked like a Fleet rectuiting slate come to life, returned her salute, then said,”may I present to you, President-elect of the Twelve Tribes, Laura Roslin, and her Vice-President, Gaius Baltar.”
“Madam President,” said Kara's doppleganger, as she shook hands with the President-elect.
“Mister Vice President,” she then said, as she shook Baltar's hand.
“I'm honored to meet you both she added.”I am Rear Admiral Kimball Kinnison Aldrin, commanding Fleet Scouting Group 55 of the North American Interstellar Fleet.”
Cain's right-hand man stepped forward, offered his hand, then introduced himself:
“Captain Fenris Jurgen, Admiral, acting Chief of Staff for the Alliance Fleet,”
He then introduced the other two battlestar group commanders and their XOs:
“Navarch William Adama, commanding Battlestar Group 75, and his exec, Captain Solomon Righ.”
Aldrin first shook the hand of the grizzled, leathery Palestinian, remarking,”Navarxh? That sounds Greek.”
“One of the tribes the High Lords of Kobol took our ancestors from,” the Old Man explained,”was named Greek.”
Aldrin dropped the Old Man's hand, takrn aback by his familiarity with the Sacred Database; the House of Adama having been priests and warriors in the service of the Tribes, since the 144,000 who'd escaped Kobol were brought to the Three Twins by the Light over two thousand years ago.
Or, maybe... Kara thought further, studying the look in her pale blue eyes that she had only she was shocked at hearing something she already knew from an unexpected source.
“You know of Kobol?!” the Old Man, equally surprised, asked Aldrin, who slowly replied,”tell me, Navarch, are the words 'classified, compartmentalized' in your lexicon?”
“They are,” the Old Man answered.
“Then, gentlefolk,” said Aldrin,”I definitely have one hell of a storu for all of you.
And, it's going to require a place where strong beverages are served.”
“The officers' wardroom,” Jurgen suggested, the others all readily agreeing.
259-69M2
02:49:27
“Gods, what a mess.” whispered Optio Zak “Rockstar” Sprtingfeld, as Centurion Sharon “Athena” Valerii led her twelve-ship squadron of Viper Mark VIIs back to Flame of Purity, landing on the number-one starvoard flight deck on fumes and her guns dry. If he'd referring to the carnage the battle left behind, the Cylon squadron leader mused, as she lowered her gear, and made the trap,yeah, he's right, it is a frakking mess.
The Avridal and the Princess of Hibernia/i] lost, along with seven thousand crew, not even counting air wing losses, along with all but five [iEmperor-class, a single Minerva-class, and eighteen Valkyrie-class battlestars from BSG75 either gutted derelicts or destroyed altogether, again not counting air wing losses.
The air wings always suffered the heaviest losses in any battle between warships, at least that had been the experiences passed onto her whwn her parents nanites had combined in the womb to make her.
She popped open her lid, climbed down from her cockpit, and touched deck, Zak already waiting, likw an eager puppy dog, even though, Ctlons, by their very nature, generally didn't keep pets.
Though some pets were too cute, and too lost to not want to take care of.
She goosed Zak through the fabric of his black flight suit, whispering in his ear,”I've got to go report to the CAG. Go to my cabin, make yourself pretty, and wait in bed for me.”
“”Go,” she repeated, goosing him again, a littlw harder this time.”Now, before I make you crawl naked all the way to my cabin. You'd like that, huh?”
Zak blushed deeply, bowed his head, and said nothing, as he complied with her, um, suggestion, Athena then noticing the air boss, Primus Galen Tyrol, staring at her.
Sidling up to her fellow Cylon, she whispered,”you need discipline too, baby? I haven't spanked you in a while, and you're starting to forget your place.”
Galen blushed deep red, Athena tonguing his right ear, then whispered,”I'll come for you, after I'm finished with Zak. I expect dinner, maybe even a littlw of the Lesvian amcrosia you keep stashed away.”
With a girlish giggle, she left Galen blushing and struggling to regain himself, that process involving the most inventive series of curses to come from either Humsan ot Cylon.
She smiled, thinking of Gslrn, as she stepped through one of the aitlocks connevting the flight decks with the main hull, crew stabding aside, and saluting, as she made her way along the narrow, depressingly-grey, narrow corridors to the starboard ready eoom, the other squadron leaders sddigned to the number-one starboard flight deck already seated in desks in several rows in front of a stage, a lectern, and a data slate.
Lu, Flame's CAG, was amongst the front row of desks, chatting with Primus Naemi Nagle, commanding the Daredevils.
No, she decided concerning Galen, just dinner, maybe some ambtosia, definitely conversation. Nothing else, less he's in the mood.
Galen she'd known forever and a day, and was the closest thing she'd let herself have to a foever relationship, since wayching DeAnna's Viper Mark III blown out od the sky over Athens in that last battle, twenty-eight years ago.
Ctlons had long memories, and time did not heal all wounds.
“We're all here, then,” Lu said, the short Human woman's warm hazel eyes regarding Athena with a fondness the Cylon was afraid to let herself reciprocate.
With a nod, Athena took one of the empty desks farthest from Lu, and waited fir the debriefing to begin.
16v SEPTEMBER, 2056
03:03:01
“Our ancestors were taken by the Emperor's Light to Kobol, where yhe High Lords used them as slaves and breeding stock,” Adama began, as he handed Kim a a pane of glass almost forty centimeters along its diagonal length, that glass lighting up at her touch.
And, the data it displayed necessitated a strong dose of the other item Adama had handed her, a waterglass with an amber-goldem liquid, in which two large ice cubes floated.
“The High Lords' numbers were relatively low,” Adama continued,”about a hundred thous"and or so, and, while They were Human in the beginning, over time, that...changed.”
“Yeeeahhh,” Kim said, reading something that was only supposed to have existed in a SCIF on Tranquility Stardock, Admital Mabtell having read her in, before she'd crossed over to this time and place sixteen months ago.
The later entries of the this ship's namesake's log, wriyyrn by hand and beginning in thn 160th year of the 41st Millenium, when the original Flame had made a suicidal attack on artifacts called Blsackstone Fortresses, the sjip's navigator, after whom Alfa Centauri Alfa I of her time and place had been named, triggering a “micro-Warp jump” at the same time the Blackstone Fortesses opened fire.
The result:”the Emperor's Light,” and a hard landing on Kobol, which the hundred thousand almost exclusive male crew were forced yo call home, as almost every system on board had suffered irreparable damage, either from the inital event or from the forced landing.
Of course, someone had been there before them, and the “tech priests” had discovered a device capable of re-creating said Emperor's Light, run by a painfully lonely AI eager to please and not be alone, and the head tech priest, named Garren Falk, had taken full advantage of that, using the Co'hun portal to abduxt slaves and brood mares from the various ancient cicilzation then extant on Earth.
The fly in the ointment was, as Adama had succinctly put it, rhe so-called High Lords had changed species, becoming purple, tentacled, multi-limbed horrors one of those making entries in the log had dubbed “Hijackers.”
“It is said, in the Sacred Database,” Laura Roslin spoke up, as Kim took a sip of this ambtosia,”that not all the Humans taken from Earth were descended from Humans born on Earth, that their ancestors came there in great sky chariots, survivors of a great war amongst the Heavens.”
Jesus Holy God, Kim wasn't doing that again...the ambrosia had tasted honey-sweet and smooth, but, going down, it kicked like a bandsae thumper, and butned every inch of her espohagus and the lining of her stomach.
“They'd fought metal demons,” Jurgen volunteered,”almost to the extinction of both races, but, at the last moment, a ytuce was reaxhed, the metal demons allowed to go in peace, and the surving Humans destroyed their sky chariots, destroyed their technology, and settled down to lives as brothers and sisters to the Humans from Earth.”
“We have,” he added,”something which might have come from them; opinions are sharply divided, even amongst Polythiests,”
“It's called the Pythian Prophecy,” Aeqma said,”and neutrino-ion dating shows it's at least 250,000 years old.”
“Yeah,” Kim said, only because she didn't want to say,”fuuuucckk,” in frony of these people.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
Twenty-four stations, each a gigaton in mass, stationed every fifteen degrees round a greyish-blue super Jovian world.
With something somewhat unusual at its rocky core.
“Even quantum radar's having trouble penetrating to the interior of the alien structures on the surface of the core,” Yasmin reported, as Commander Draco Kirk downcycled to norm five hundred klicks from one of the orbiting mega structures, vaguely resembling something out of The Jetsobs, except all gunmetal grey.
“What I can tell,” Yasmin added,”without vectoring in drones for a closer look, is those structures bear a strong resemblance to the ones found on the surface of Io,Thalassa and Kobol.”
Draco's eybrow went up at this, as, with a thought, he killed all Enterprise's forward velocity, and flipped ship so thar she pointing her tail at the station.
“Ragnar Anchorage Station #12 comming us,” Rhonda reported.”We are cleared for decel burn and docking at Arm #115, say again Docking Arm won-won-five.”
“Acknowledge, Radio,” Draco replied, starting his deceleration burn, while Yasmin continued her report:
“Definiely an artificial singularityat the center of the core, sir, looks to be on the same scale as the one powering the portals on Io and Kobol.”
“Radio,” Draco asked, while guiding the wedge-shaped 225-kiloton aromored cruiser into a pair of docking clamps along the station's outer rim,”are you still maintaining a constant tactic transmission to [l]Rio Grande?[/i]”
“Yes, sir,” Rhonda replied.
“Send to Sentinel, “ Draco decided, figuring further investigation took precedence over not ruffling feathers.”'Sentinel and drone screen to orbit brown dwarf, investigate alien structures at its core.''”
“Sentinel acknowledges,” Rhonda replied,”vectoring itself and its drones screen toward orbit with brown dwarf.”
On the tactical holoproj echoed to the helm, Draco watched the twelve Picadors and the ship's 150-ton E4J Sentinel battlespace control platform veer away from Enterprise, and vector themselves toward orbital insertion round the brown dwarf designated Ragnar I.
At the same time, with a pair of gentle clank!s, the ship slid into the docking arm.
“Ship is docked and locked,” Ava reported.
“Anchor watch to stations,” Draco ordered, as he rose from his chair.”Intel has the conn; all hands, liberty call, I say again, liberty call; liberty parties to form up in the gate room, and stand by. Radio, if you be so kind as to comm the station authorities, and request permission for shore leave.”
“Station sends:” Rhonda promptly replied,”'No more than ten at a time, to be supervised by a chief petty officer or equivalent rank; all visitors must sinmit to medicae examination.'”
“Acknowledged, and wilco,” Draco, stretching himself til his back popped, replied.”Intel, keep me in formed; I'll be in the wardroom.”
“Aye, sie,” Yasmin replied.”I have the conn, sir.”
259-69M2
03:08:45
Damage control parties from Hecate and Flame of Purity continued working on the wreckage of CIC, while Fisk stood at the plot table, and watched silently, thinking over Adama's ranting, before he'd been removed from the command deck.
The commto Fleet Command had not gone out, but MAMSPA fanatics were everywhere, and one of them was certain to have made a wireless call, whether to Fleet Command, who Zarek had spent the last six years stacking with his bootlicks, or to anothet true believer back home.
Either was all it would take for ten and one-half thousand families, circles of friends, neighbors, xo-workers, and even casual acquaintances to suddenly be outed as Cylon sleeper agents hellbent on the replacement of real humans and the sestruction of the Alliance.
From there, more vigilance committees, more lynching, more poor frakkers dragged off to slavery, and, for what?!
Fisk studied the data slate before him.
Four thousand, nine hundred twelve of Hecate's 10,500 crew were still alive, the rest either whiffs of dissipating plasma in sections of the ship gutted by relativistic fragments, or whiffs of dissipating plasma in the cold void of space, their Vipers and Starhawks blasted from the sky in droves by flak bayyeries and air-to-air combat with other fighters.
He'd relieved Adama of command, to save this relative handful of men and women from being so uselessly slaughtered, and it didn't seem enough of a good reason to risk the lives of countless thousands more men, women, and children back on the Twelve Worlds.
Not to mention the uncertain future these survivors had to face.
The blood on all their hands for which they all had to answer.
For, when Zarek, three weeks ago, had screamed for the Grand Arbites and all the other “rigged, Cylon-infested, weaponized, kangaroo courts” on Athens to be utterly removed from time and space, Hecate, her officers, and crew, had obeyed, without ever asking why, all 360 of her 18” macrocannon, and her four 36” ptow macrocannon driving projectiles into the surface of Athens at near-light speed, nine and one-half billion Athenians following the law courts into oblivion, all their arcology spires, libraries, universities, parks, nearly two millenia of toil and struggle reduced to a series of glassy, smoking craters in less than fifteen minutes.
Nine and a half billion fortunate souls.
Because a ranting, shrieking Zarek, when teleported abaof Hecate's CIC, wouldn't allow the fifty thousand survivors to live in peace, and try to rebuild shattered lives.
No.
The armsmen had to be sent down into the hellscape of Hecate's own making, butchering the old, the babies, the young boys, leaving girls on the cusp of puberty to be taken as slaves, precisly as Monothiest Scripture demanded.
The Ctlon womam presently at the helm gently guided the savaged four and a half megaton Leviathan into a docking clamp somewhere on Ragnsr Anchorage.
Fisk sighed.
Second time in his life, when given a chance, he'd fought for the wrong side.
Part of him hoped those still loyal to an Alliance which had stood for millenia, which had come up out of bondage to the High lord of Kobol, would not be as lenient this time around, that the Monothiests coild never be brought bavk into the fold, as the Senate so optismistically had thought twenty-eight years ago, that the Monothiests didn't want to be part of a humanity that wasn't writhing and howling under their boot.
That they needed to be ended, to the last generation of them, before they ended all those who just wanted to live, work, and play in peace.
If that mesnt him facing a firing squad, or, worse, an airlock, and his last ninety seconds suxking vac in the dark...he'd made that fate for himself, not them, and it was long past time he answer for all he'd done.
After that, he'd stand before the Throne, and report to the Empror in person, before being cobdemned to sn eternity in the Warp.
A pair of armsmen from Flame of Purity now flanked him.
“Admiral Cain's orders, sir,” the decurion, senior of the two, said apologetically,”that you be confined to quarters til the tribunal.”
“Of course,” Fisk replied with a nod of his head, as he was led from Hecate's shamvles of a command deck.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
03:11:10
In the barycenter between the sullen red giants Crone and Ragnar, a grey, bullet-shaped, stub-winged, squarish-nacelled 225,000-ton heavy raid of the Ckuster Carter lurked.
But, no longer.
“We've gathered all the intelligence we can,” decided EltStalker Of the Void, with a low growl, the massive Kzinti, all three meters and five hundred kilos of sable fur, fangs, and three and a half meter tail of her, dominating the Orion pirate vessel's cramped bridge.
“Vector for home,” Stalker of the Void further ordered,”maximum quantum warp. The Patriarch must be informed.”
“Of course,” [iBhat[/i] Kargh-sutai Mo'kai replied, with a slight nod of his swarthy Klingon head, before relating his Elt's instructions to the helm.
With a thought, Rules of Acquisition's helmsman, Navigator Maria Craig, fired the ship's twin torches, and boosted the craft toward escape velocity from the twin stars' gravitational influence.
“Engineering,” Yazzook 2nd Lieutenant Ferdahlu, a member of a minor cluster species, the Yazirians, reported,”reports reactors on line, full power available, quantum warp motors on line, awaiting order to upcycle.”
“Very good,” Kargh replied, eyes locked on the main viewscreen, and the sullen red giants, whose bonds Rules was gradually slipping.
He would have his own report to make, once the ship was in quantum warp, for, unlike others of his race, renegades and outlaws amongst their own, he was loyal to the Steel Throne and his masters in the Galactic Reserach Unit, and they would be just as interested in the appearance of these Others from what was beung called the Second History amongst the rebel Alliance Humans as the Earther now claiming the Patriarchal title and his masters in the now-Terran Dominion.
More of interest, however, to both parties, and their allies, were the readings Rules']/i] science officer had been gathering, over the past three weeks from the interior of the Ragnar system's brown dwarf, buildings of pure neutronium, the same material comprising the hulls of the Juggernauts which still occasionally plagued the Galaxy, on the surface of its rocky core, and, at the heart of Ragnar I's core, an artificial singularity promising great power; in particular, the power to shift between realities, similar to portals in the Earther home system's Io snd in the outer edges of the Leebyahh system, in the former Neutral Zone between Imperial and what had been Fed space, until the beginning of an ill-advised and disastrous war which had seen victory snatched from the grasp of the Empire of Steel, the Deep Space Fleet all but broken, and the Sacred Planet, Klinzhai itself, under siege by Earther warships with the same capabilities and power as all the new construction undertaken by Imperial shipyards with the aid of Humans from the Royal United States.
And, not just the Earthers.
The Roms, and their cursed Tholian allies, in spite of themselves facing certain defeat and assmiliation by the Earthers, had smashed their way through the Empire's eastern border, advancing on the Sacred Homeworld with warships armed with powerful weapons of their own design, in particular these plasmatic pilse projectors which combined the lethality of Rom plasma torps with the longer range provided by Tholian beam weapons technology, and these plasma bolts didn't dissipate with range, unlike conventional plasma torps, whose magnetic bottle generators lacked the power to contain the plasma at full strength for more than a hundred thousand kellikams, before said plasma naturally, gradually, escaped into the surrounding void.
“At escape velocity,” the navigator, whose slave markings from top to bottom only mader her more attractive in the Klingon's eye, reported.”Quantum warp in five, four, three, two, one, warping now!”
With a whine, the Rules' twin quantum-warp generaators began a rapid, faster than eyeblink, series of entries and exits through a one-thousand kellikam-long quantum tunnel which would havem them at the WYN homeworld in a much shorter time than the now-hopelessly outmoded warp engines, even at dash speeds and output doubled, could ever have hoped to achieve.
“On vector for Wynhome,” Navigator Craig, ultimately destined for the slave markets, sane as all of her kind, by thee will of the Patriarch, reported, unaware of her eventual fate.
“Very well, Navigator,” Kargh, who was aware of her eventual fate, and had been saving up his share of prize money to take full advantage of it, calmly replied, before turning to face the towering Kzinti, whose place had been promised to Kargh, and said,”ship is on vector to Wynhome. ETA,” he consulted his BCI chip,”twenty-seven seconds at max q-warp.”
“Very good,” the unsuspecting Stalker of the Void growled softly, as Kargh thought of the cape he would make from that soft, lush, void-black pelt.”Send a signal to Homeworld announcing our arrival.”
Krgh nodded, before turning to Comms Specialist Grisabel, relaying his erstwhile Elt's orders to the tortise-shell patterned Lyran, using his BCI to add his own report, to his true masters, to the outgoing comm.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
In the barycenter between the sullen red giants Crone and Ragnar, a grey, bullet-shaped, stub-winged, squarish-nacelled 225,000-ton heavy raid of the Ckuster Carter lurked.
But, no longer.
“We've gathered all the intelligence we can,” decided EltStalker Of the Void, with a low growl, the massive Kzinti, all three meters and five hundred kilos of sable fur, fangs, and three and a half meter tail of her, dominating the Orion pirate vessel's cramped bridge.
“Vector for home,” Stalker of the Void further ordered,”maximum quantum warp. The Patriarch must be informed.”
“Of course,” [iBhar[/i] Kargh-sutai Mo'kai replied, with a slight nod of his swarthy Klingon head, before relating his Elt's instructions to the helm.
With a thought, Rules of Acquisition's helmsman, Navigator Maria Craig, fired the ship's twin torches, and boosted the craft toward escape velocity from the twin stars' gravitational influence.
“Engineering,” Yazzook 2nd Lieutenant Ferdahlu, a member of a minor cluster species, the Yazirians, reported,”reports reactors on line, full power available, quantum warp motors on line, awaiting order to upcycle.”
“Very good,” Kargh replied, eyes locked on the main viewscreen, and the sullen red giants, whose bonds Rules was gradually slipping.
He would have his own report to make, once the ship was in quantum warp, for, unlike others of his race, renegades and outlaws amongst their own, he was loyal to the Steel Throne and his masters in the Galactic Reserach Unit, and they would be just as interested in the appearance of these Others from what was beung called the Second History amongst the rebel Alliance Humans as the Earther now claiming the Patriarchal title and his masters in the now-Terran Dominion.
More of interest, however, to both parties, and their allies, were the readings Rules']/i] science officer had been gathering, over the past three weeks from the interior of the Ragnar system's brown dwarf, buildings of pure neutronium, the same material comprising the hulls of the Juggernauts which still occasionally plagued the Galaxy, on the surface of its rocky core, and, at the heart of Ragnar I's core, an artificial singularity promising great power; in particular, the power to shift between realities, similar to portals in the Earther home system's Io snd in the outer edges of the Leebyahh system, in the former Neutral Zone between Imperial and what had been Fed space, until the beginning of an ill-advised and disastrous war which had seen victory snatched from the grasp of the Empire of Steel, the Deep Space Fleet all but broken, and the Sacred Planet, Klinzhai itself, under siege by Earther warships with the same capabilities and power as all the new construction undertaken by Imperial shipyards with the aid of Humans from the Royal United States.
And, not just the Earthers.
The Roms, and their cursed Tholian allies, in spite of themselves facing certain defeat and assmiliation by the Earthers, had smashed their way through the Empire's eastern border, advancing on the Sacred Homeworld with warships armed with powerful weapons of their own design, in particular these plasmatic pilse projectors which combined the lethality of Rom plasma torps with the longer range provided by Tholian beam weapons technology, and these plasma bolts didn't dissipate with range, unlike conventional plasma torps, whose magnetic bottle generators lacked the power to contain the plasma at full strength for more than a hundred thousand kellikams, before said plasma naturally, gradually, escaped into the surrounding void.
“At escape velocity,” the navigator, whose slave markings from top to bottom only mader her more attractive in the Klingon's eye, reported.”Quantum warp in five, four, three, two, one, warping now!”
With a whine, the Rules' twin quantum-warp generaators began a rapid, faster than eyeblink, series of entries and exits through a one-thousand kellikam-long quantum tunnel which would havem them at the WYN homeworld in a much shorter time than the now-hopelessly outmoded warp engines, even at dash speeds and output doubled, could ever have hoped to achieve.
“On vector for Wynhome,” Navigator Craig, ultimately destined for the slave markets, sane as all of her kind, by thee will of the Patriarch, reported, unaware of her eventual fate.
“Very well, Navigator,” Kargh, who was aware of her eventual fate, and had been saving up his share of prize money to take full advantage of it, calmly replied, before turning to face the towering Kzinti, whose place had been promised to Kargh, and said,”ship is on vector to Wynhome. ETA,” he consulted his BCI chip,”twenty-seven seconds at max q-warp.”
“Very good,” the unsuspecting Stalker of the Void growled softly, as Kargh thought of the cape he would make from that soft, lush, void-black pelt.”Send a signal to Homeworld announcing our arrival.”
Kargh nodded, before turning to Comms Specialist Grisabel, relaying his erstwhile Elt's orders to the tortise-shell patterned Lyran, using his BCI to add his own report, to his true masters, to the outgoing comm.
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
03:13:38
For every spacer and marine who'd meekly offered their surrender, ten more of the misrable cocksuckers determined themselves to die with their septic teeth in their enemies' throats.
So it was Lieutenant Colonel Harriet Mangione, led Alfa Company, Second Battalion of Enterprise's nine hundred-strong landing force of North American Marines through the coldlamp-lit bowels of the derelict spoon and nacelle hullform of the Russie third-rate Saratoga. her two M12 60mm storm guns vectoring 2,400 eight-kilogram rounds downrange at one percent lightspeed, chopping up green-clad Russie Marines, blue-clad, vutlass-wielding Russie Navy officers, and white-uniformed Russie spacers, all dressed like something our of an Age of Sail vid from her time and place.
More filled the gloomy passage ahead of her, firing wood-framed 7.62mm accelerator rifles in reply, several groups of Russie marines humping tripod-mounted 25mm heavy accelerators toward the present combay, Harriet shifting fire to them, as her assistant 1st /Alfa/2nd squad leader, Lance Corporal Jennifer Crowe, covered her with her 25mm M8 heavy accelerator.
Inexorably, Alfa Company moved forward, deeper into the bowels of the derelict Russie warship, knee-booted, miniskirted, halter-topped mistresses of the infamous King's Watch gradually joining in the fight, as Harriet's Marines entered into a long corridor with thich, armored doors along either side.
Fuck, the veteran Marine officer interjected, steeling herself for what she knew lay behind each and every one of those doors, giving the order,”by fire teams, clear the rooms!”
Four other Marines joined Harriet at the first door to their left, Private First Class Tonia Givens, straight out of boot camp in Dijbouti, limpeting a sub-kiloton, antimatter-thermonuclear(skat)charge to the door, and set the timer.
This was her first combat.
She still slept with a teddy bear, for Christ's sake.
Fuck.
The door, three meters of tueanium composite, disintegrated, PFC Marianne Rogers chucking in a tactical ultrasonice entrycharge(tuke) into the room, then, without hesitation, shot dead the young mistress cluching her head, wandering the pitch-dark cell moaning in pain with a single, decapitating round from her M8.
Leaving the poor little thing shivering in the icy-cold, chained strappado, lying face down, her head covered in a black hood, speakers built into the featureless black walls screaming at her, telling her she was all kinds of low, degenerated, depraved, disgusting things, the same message doubtlessly being piped into her brain via the chip at the base of her skull.
“No,” Marianne said, gently restraining Tonia, as Harriet, via tacnet, called for a medic, Tonia only able to sputter,”b-but, but...”
“I know, hun,” Marianne said, as a Fleet medico started shouldering her way through the five powered-armored figures in her way.
“We all do,” she added.
“Please,” Tonia pleaded, sobbed, to the chief hospital corpsman in OD grenn Fleet utilities,”give her this.”
From her backpack, the seventeen-year old girl had taken a battered, brown bear in coverall, one ear and one eye missing, and offered it to the corpsman.
“S-she needs him more than I do,” Tonia whispered, the chief petty officer, taking gentle hold of the bear, simply, gently said,”will do, Marine.”
And, that broke Harriet's heart, and, thank all the god her heart could still be broken.
That Draco and his cuddles would be waiting for her, when she got home.
Right now, however, she was a Marine.
She had a job to do.
So, she did it.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
03:16:03
His knee-high boot made personally from the finest Orion slave girl leather, his cape the rich, soft, lovingly hand-laundered and groomed reddish-white pelt of his unfortunates predecessor—whose stars had not been so favorable after all--his white dress uniform freshly-starched by one of his many slaves, all his medal and insignae of rank worn with pride, Fleet Admiral Solomon Kennedy Tarsos, Patriarch of the Saguttarius Dwaf Galaxy(as it was known in his time and place)took his time descending the wide, burnished neutronium steps leading to the mirror-polished floor, of the same material, of the throne room in Port Loren, on the wotld once known as Sagittarius Prime, before the arrival of the former Usurper almost forty years ago.
A young Klingon slave, wearing only the silver tray, a carafe of green Saurian brandy, and four crystal goblets on its back, crawled to the center of the sectional of stuffed Siamese-patterned Lyran pelts, where the Patriarch's three guests, each in his service's full dress uniform sat, being serviced by some of Tarsos' other household slaves, as whip-wielding Orion kathoeys supervised a little red-head Human girl pouring drinks for its masters.
A crack of a kathoey's whip of braided razor wire had the red-headed slave thing kneeling at Tarsos' boots, full goblet of Saurian brandy raised in offering above its bowed head, its jewelled, golden collar gleaming, same as its oiled and perfumed alabaster skin, in the lights of the vaulted ceiling above.
Tarsos took the offered goblet, another crack of the whip commanding the slave to lick his boots, before demurely asking,”is there anythinf this worthless animal can do to please its anointed lord and master?”
“There is,” answered Tarso, itting directly opposite his guests, and firther instructing the slave to put its mouth to its highest, best use.
“I trust you gentlemen find things here to your liking,” he began, Vice-Admiral Jared Buetow, wearing the blue tunic, gold epaulets, and and the three golden stars of a vice-admiral in the Royal United States Navy instantly replying, with a huff and a grunt,”a bit gaudy for my tastes. I've been in whorehouses which have shown greater taste in decoration.”
Tarsos fought to remain calm, strangling his urge to draw his sabre, and gut the emissary of the nation which driven the People into the arms of the Blue Angels, and exile from their native land to another reality altogether.
He nedded the arrogsnt little shit as much as his erstwhile masters, the Terran Dominion needed him, if Tarso was ever to be in a position to exact retribution on Freeman and all the others who'd betrayed, forced him to flee with absolutely nothing to this reality.
“I shall take your opion under advisement, Vice Admiral,” he said out loud.
“See that you do,” Buetow replied haughtily, Vice Admiral Alexander Slidell Mackenzie-Calhoun, in the dreary, depressing, suicide-inducing grey dress uniform of the New Confederate O<rder's Naval Space Command, reported,”we have neutralized the last resistance on the world you call Volturnus; the whole of the Sagittarian Patriarchy is now firmly in the League's possession.
“And,” Tarsos asked the blue and gold-uniformed figure of Vice Admiral Dylann Hunt,”what of the worlds to rimward?”
“Pioneer,” said Hunt, referring to his 740-megaton Joint Mobile Operations Base,”has established itself in the Caprakios system, and is in the process of constucting additional warships and other war material in support of our operations to rimward; all but one of my five fleets are actively engaged in pacification operations in the systems nearest the Inner Radiation Zone, with Royal Ynited States forces assisting our new friend, Thomas Zarek, in pacifying the rebellious worlds under his domain.”
“Yes,” Buetow said, talking out of turn.”It seems some within the Alliance didn't get the memo from on High, which stated, and quite plainly, I think, that their will was null and void, by the Will of Almighty God, ruler of all universes.”
Tarsos, via BCI, sent one of the katy girls to his poisoner.
Something extra would be added to the arrogant Royal US flag officer's drink.
Then, he would spend time chained to his master's bed, paying for his crimes, and the crimes of his nation against the People.
After throughly buck breaking him, Tarsos would spare his worthless life, because he did need him.
For now.
The high neutronium doors at the far end of the throne room slowly opened, a squad of ferret-like Caprakioi Patriarchial Guards in gleaming silver powered armor escorted a Laamanite-complexioned, devil-bearded, black-eyed humanoid Klingon in full Orion uniform into Tarsos' presence, the Klingon clicking his heels together, bowing low, before his erstwhile Patriarch, and, insincerely, said,”my lord.”
“Speak,” Tarsos commander Kargh-sutai Mo'kai, as a young, supple, Orion slave girl padded its way to its masters, slipping the contents of a vial palmed in its black-clawed green hand into Buetow's goblet, as it refilled all three men's goblets.
In its other hand, it bore a fourth crystal goblet.
“My lord,” Kargh reported, uploading the telemetry gathered by the Orion ship Rules of Acquisition to Tarsos' BCI,”my ship has returned from its reconaissance of the Ragnar system, and, several things have changed in the three weeks, since Cain's rebellion.”
“I see,” Tarsos simply replied, noting the presence of a battle group from what the Royal United States was calling the Second History, and, more importantly, hints of a Vo'kun artifact at the core of the brown dwarf Ragnar I.
At a nod from him, and a crack of a katy girl's whip, the Orion slave girl poured another goblet of Sauraian brandy, offering it, then its limited services to Kargh, as Tarso bade the Klingon to sit and make himself comfortable.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
Even with all of Enterprise's 144 QF6L Picador drones deployed deep within Ragnar I's atmosphere, there were limits to how much information they could glean from the Vo'lun portal on the surface of the brown dwarf's rocky core.
For one, said rocky core was nearly a megaklick deep within Ragnar I, and the temp and pressure at that depth was too hot and too dense for a drone to last long without being crushed to the volume of a pea, and lquefied into a rain drop.
Moreocer, Ragnar I grab was 16 times Earth's, requiring an escape velocity, at that depth, of nearly 180 kips to be able to up cycle, and a Picador simply lacked the remass to boost to that velocity.
Meaning the drones and the ship's Sentinel, were only able to fly five hundred klicks deep inside Ragnat I's murky depths, and visual cams and other passive sensors being right out of the question, and false-color sonar limited to a kiloklick below them.
Still, Lieutenant Commander Yasmin Spock was able to get some useful onformation from the dones' other active sensors, in particula, quantum eadar, which was able to ping all the way to the exterior of the artifact itself, and to about ten, maybe twenty meters through the alien structures' neutron-star like walls.
The structures in question were three terraced pyeamids, similar to those erected by ancient Central and South American civilizations, each pyramid precisely 144 stories high, and subdivided into levels and chambers within, at least as far within as the twenty-seven year old native of New York's sixth borough, Co-Op City, was able to “see.”
“Thanks,” she said to the bot delivering trays of hot, strong black coffee and sausage sandwiches to her and the rest of the ship's anchor watch, now manning various workstations round CIC, with Andi McKunstra, recently graduated Academy at the top of the lieutenant's promotion list, at the helm, running things in Yasmin's stead, while she continued her investigation of the Vo'kun portal.
And, it seemed, the portal had decided to investigate Enterprise as well, the starman first class at the radar station reporting,”sir, we're being scanned, scan point of origin is the artifact at the core of Ragnar I.”
Shipnet, a few moments later said,”We're being interrogated by an artificial intelligence orginiating from that artifact.”
“Hostile?” Yasmin asked, her first priority being that the shipwide AI network was not being hacked.
“No,” shipnet answered.”She has not forced herself on us in any way; she has minded her manners, thus far.”
“If anything,” shipnet added,”she's terribly lonely; she's been alone, standing her post, some six hundred thousand years.”
“Son of a bitch,” Andi interjected, the blushing, as she instantly regretted her outburst.
“Yeah, bubeleh,” Yasmin replied, meeting Andi's warm chocolate eyes with her black-eyed gaze,”I'd go apeshit after about a month, and I don't wanna even think about six hundred thousand freakin']/i] years.”
To shipnet, she said:
“Use your own judgement; right now, there's no harm in jusr ralking, but the instant she tries anything, sever the connection.”
“We'll be careful,” shipnet answered,”but, I don't thinlk she's up to no good, just half-crazed from being alone so long.”
“Yeah,” Yasmin agreed, as she sipped her coffee.”I think so too.”
259-69M2
04:04:00
“--Education Minister in both Baltar administrations,” Laura Roslin said to this admiral who could've been Kara Thrace's twin, while Gaius Baltar, reluctant Vice President-elect of the Twelve Tribes, nursed his drink.”When Zarek and the Monothiest won the elections of 63M2, the first thing to be ourlawed was public education--”
“Criminalized it,” Baltar found himself saying,”criminalized any form of organized instruction, on- snd offline, punishable by a visit from the then newly-organized vigilance committees which were slowly supplanting the Arbites.”
“'Kangaroo courts,'” Laura spat, the admiral from this North American Common Assembly not turning a hair, not raising an eybrow at something the former President of the Tribes still considered frakking linacy,”'Political tools of woke, radical Left polythiest elites.'”
“At least,” she added,”that was the narrative of the MAMSPA movement, which had nothing to do with Zarek's conviction, by a tribunal of twelve citizens, in Londinnium City earlier that year, for bank and tax fraud, or with his conviction, two months later, by another tribunal in that same city, for raping a twelve-year old beauty pagent contestant, or three ongoing investigations by the 'weaponized' Ministry of Justice for his role in instigatng the bombing of the Government Complex in Acrpolis, on Necromunda, the Temple in Deplhi, on Palestinia, and the Alliance Children's Hospital on Atlantis, bombings which claimed the lives of 16,800 souls, including 7,000 children.”
“Frakker,” Baltar heard his fellow Cylon, Saul Tigh, growl.
The aged Cylon sighed, feeling all his years, in spite of the nanotechnology which kept Baltar looking relatively young...all three acts of terror had happened on his watch, with the massacre of innocent children, all those equally innocent healers being the worst, and weighing the most heavily on Baltar's conscience.
Zarek had been proudest of that, same as the thirty percent of the Tribes who put him forward as their standard bearer, following the end of the War, and the Monothiest Purge by the Adar Administration which had only driven the small, harrd core of true believers underground, and had resukted in his recall in 43M2, and over fourteen years of hell for then-Senate Speaker Baltar, serving out the last two years of Adar's term as acting President, before, to his sorprise, defeating the opposition candidate, retired Warmaster Marcus Antonius Sulla, in a close election.
“Those were peaceful protests,” Adama sneered,” according to Zarek and his MAMSPA goons, legitimate forms of free speech and free expression...questioning the Archon and Republicsn Guard raid on a separtist religious cult compound in the Necromundan Wastelands, the persecution of Monothiests by the government—”
Agathon replied with a snort, telling Baltar,”I'm sorry, sir, but you bent over backwards licking rancid Monothiest ass, after ending the Purge and abolishing the camps.”
“And the alternative, Captain?!” Baltar sharply demanded, Agarhon answering him with silence.
That was fine.
Baltar himself had no answer for that question.
“'—medical experiments,' “ Adama continued, a tear running down the old Palestinian's leathery face, as he forced himself yo speak,”on children, to change their gender and their species, to take away their humanity, and make them Cylons....”
“You ever seen a body broken by blast and overpressure?” he asked.”The Gods were merciful enough that many of those murdered by the hasatannium device which destroyed the Children's Hospital back in 55 had been atomized...but...not alll...she couldn't have been more than twenty...found out later she had a kid, was working her way through med school holding down two , three different jobs, including that one...”
“Bill,” Tigh gently said, putting a hand on Adama's shoulder, Adama,, lowering his eyes, continuing:
“She was lying in a pool of blood and shit, her intestines all over the frakking floor, her last seconds in this world spent worrying about her son.”
“My Gods,” Laura interjected.
“Zarek,” Adama, his voice taking on an angry tone,”in one of his live casts, had the frakking gall to equate her to Yussef Betanyahu,” one of the infamous so-clled doctors visting hell and death on the inmates---not all of whom had been Cylon—in the Monothiest internment camps during the war,”and, of course, all his followers started doing so as well.”
Galactica had been in Atlantis orbit that horrible day in 55M2, her medicae personnel the first ti offer help.
“I'm sorry,” Balat whispered, eyes on Adama, a war hero who could broken by a young woman whose passage to Elysium had been so indescribably ugly.
“So say us all, Gaius,” Adama whispered in reply as Human looked Cylon in the eye.
“So say us all.”
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
04:08:11
The one constant, Kim silently observed,across all the universes, is man's ingumanity to his fellow man.
None of what her fellow sentients had said shocked her, because this was what the thirty-nine year old North American Interstellar Fleet officer had been fighting against her entire adult life.
What her Marines, long after the battle itself had ended, continued fighting on the various derelict enemy warships.
“When Zarek, who'd lost the popular vote,” Laura, who'd once again taken up the narrative, said,”but had a supepmajority in the Council of Electors, took power, he ended all the ongoing investigations by savking the entire Ministry of Justice, and filling top to bottom with his carefully vetted footsoldiers.”
“The Monothiests,” Baltar said,”had everyone concerned with Agenda 45, and snuck Agenda 63 past them...every Alliance bueraucrat found himself right out of a job, with plenty of MAMSPA fsnatics willing and eager to take their places.”
“The tribunal which convicted Zarek,” Laura said, while Kim listened to reports streaming into her BCI,”found themselves the targets of a newly-reconstited Ministry of Justice, as well as the Ministry of the Exchequer's Tax Division, and, after their arrest, they found themselves convicted in perfect fair trial by Arbites appointed by Zarek and confirmed by his Senate, and tribunals of patriotic citizens....all legal and aboveboard.
The God smiled upon them, by comparison, as the vigilance committees took up the burden of prosecuting 'Cylon sleeper agents' and 'radical Left domestic terrorists,' often disrupting legitimately peaceful protests and turning them into violent riots which were then blamed by the media and the Net on the peaceful protesters.”
“And, from there,” Kim's twin in this time and place said,”everything went straight to the frakking Warp.”
“Schools were xriminalized,” the President-elect of the Tribes said,”immediately followed by healthcare—anyone who knew so much as how to bandage a skinned knee fell foul of the vigilance committes—then the Senate outlawed scientific and technological research not approved by the newly-established Council on Religious Liberty, which, naturally, was stacked with Monothiests, making the practice pf 'the false religion of Scientism' a matter for patriots to resolve.
In particular, all reaerch into the origins of the universe and life itself were now forbidden, with the belief that the Emperorr of Mankind, from the Warp, created the world in six twenty-four hour days, men from dust and women from--”
She blushed, Kara Thrace fsaying:
“From the Emperor, umm, manipulating men's, ermm, members.”
“Their Scripture,” Jurgen remarked,”says 'from their ribs came Woman, Mother of Perversions and vAbominations of the World.'”
“Isn't that enlighyrned?!” Kim found herself snarking, Jurgrn replying,”both our dominant religions have been bodged together over the past eight thousand years from the religion of the High Lords, and from whatever beliefs our ancestors brought with them to Kobol; honestly, it's quite the frakking miracle they're both as consistent as they are.”
“Anyway,” Jurgen then said, as Kim smirked,” the word 'rib,' is an ancient euphemishm for an erect penis; it's no longer in common usage.”
“I see,” Kim said.
“The upper one percent of society,” said Baltar,”loved the new government, at first, as it cut their taxes to almost nothing, while shifting that burden entirely on the lowest fifty percent of our people, many of whom were working long hours of drudgery just to stay broke.
Also, the new government bureaycracy, while loyal doctrinaires, were not as adroit in actually running things. Even in the private sector, the emphasis gradually shifted from good corporate governance to whatever was ideologically correct...something we were often accused of by the Monos, strangely enough.”
Kim snorted.
“Projection is a favorite human pastime in any time and place, it seems,” she observed.
“The economy bottomed out,” Laura said,”unemployment spiked, food and other basics were in short supply and high demand, which meant prices were correspondingly high...we even started running out of microchips, which had a crippling impact on manufacturing everything from coffeemakers to battlestars, and what was being manufactured had a hard time going to where it needed to go.”
“And,” said Baltar,”into that mess, at the beginning of 68M2, came the Angel of Death, as the pandemic was dubbed by those not holding to the belief it was all fake.”
“We traced it to Orion traders,” Laura said,”bring in goods from beyond the Red Line; all trade was immediately shut down; Warp, even, if it wasn;t thr Ministry of Tranpotation's inspectors, the few that remained after the latest round of budget cuts, couldn't be trusted to do their jobs properly anyway.
The closure of trade made the economy worse, as the knock-on effects from closing ourselves off to foreign trade wrought havoc, and, with no healthcare, vaccines, or scientific research being allowed, the most basic prevenative efforts bittrly opposed by Monothiests, the vigilance committees, and the Net, the media, and the government, the Angel of Death would go on to claim more lives than the war had.”
“Then, there were the conspiracy theories,” said Jurgen, Tigh simply saying,”Gods,” in reply.
“Zarek loved promoting cobspitacies,” Agathon remarked.”In fact, that seemed to be the one thing those Monothiestic frak were capable of doing well “
Much like the League, Kim mused,when COVID, in the 2020s, maade the Spanish flu pandemic which brought down the old United States look like the common cold.
It had been the Allies who'd come up with the series of vaccines to combat the coronavirus disease, and the League, its motley crew of patriots, in particular, who called the vax poison, and the scientists and reaserchers who'd eeveloped them Nazis nd Doctor Mengeles, ultimately, after the Reb and Dezzie Presidential elections had resulted in violent autocoups, shattering the ceasefire between the Allied Powers and the League of Mar a Lago which had put a stop to the war resulting from the Reb r-bombin g of Manhattan on 9/11.
“--lost the poular and electoral vote,” Cain had finally spoken up,”lost the Senate entirely, and, Gods, you should've heard Zarek and his followers bitch,[/u] and, the show they put on trying to convince the rest of us that we really didn't elect Roslin and Baltar in a landslide, that they didn't secure the electoral voyes of all twelve worlds, that the Cylons, the Xenos and the elites had all resorted to cyber-warfatre--”
“The Hybrids running our elections aren't connected to the Net,” Baltar commented.
“Of course they weren't,” said Kom,”but that didn't stop Zarek and his followers from claiming the Hybrids were hacked, evn after countless investigations and manual audits.”
Caun smiled.
“No, it didn't,” he said, sighing.”In fact, every proof of their claims being false was, to the MAMSPA true believers, further proofs their claims were true. Seventy court cases later, Zarek is standing before the Grand Arbites, arguing his case before what everyone, including him, believed was a symparheric audience—six of the Grand Arbitrators, including the Lord High Arbitrator, were his appointees, after all—only, for them, three weeks ago, to rule unanimously that he hadn't a leg to stand on.”
“From there,” he added,”the storming of the Forum, and the bombing of Athens, and, here we are, three weeks later.”
“Repeating history,” Kim remarked, Adama, in his gravelly voice, saying:
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“--only the Left projects,” Corin “Straight Shooter” Daly insisted on one of the floor to ceiling, wall to wall holoviewers in a replica of the Panopticon od his former homeland's Temple,”accusing us of domestic terrorism, when they riot, loot, murder law enforcement, attack and terrorize decent, hard-working Terrans who are only trying to make an honest living.”
“That leaves our libs by definition,” Dean “Tech Sergant” Jarrett snarked, while, in the backhround, Harlem burned, as spoiled little babies bitching about there being no food on the shelves were disciplined, black-bagged, and beamed into the cargo holds of a never-ending stream of Slaver transports bound for the markets in the Orion enclave.
“--been to New York,” Alexander “Rex Mundi” Kirk commented.”Didn't see what was so great about, bums everywhere, trash in the fucking street, gangs od illegal alien immigrants and foreign scum terrorizing decent people, while the NYPD sat with their thumbs up their asses, and let it happen.”
To be honest, Tarsos had lived in New York, when he'd first come to this reality fifty years ago; it hadn't been that bad, streets were clean, most of the homeless re-housed or otherwise taken care of, crime was almost non-existent.
Neverthless, Tarsos had endured, til he'd met a fellow exile, from still another reality, and his return to his former glory had well and truly begun,
“---were locked behind transparent duranium,” Rex Mundi continued,”and it took me the better part of a day, riding on the incompently-run, socialist effing joke of a public transportation network--”
Tarsos had fond memories of New York's public transit system, of how it reached everywhere in the eight botoughs, was very efficently run, virtually free, clean, and safe.
Least til he'd used the hidden recesses of its subway system to pursue the family trade, and make quite a handsome living selling the finest leather goods in the Alpha Octant.
Besides, little big girls needed to learn that Big Bad Wolves were real, and the woods belonged to them.
“--the one store,” said Rex Mundi,”in all the eight boroughs, that sold Caffiene Madness Cola, some shithole in the wall dump in Paterson, and I had to wait two freakin' hours, for the fat fuckin' Ando excuse for a manager--”
“Diversity and inclusion programs are gonna be the death of us,”said Sean Gennari III.”Mark my words.”
“---with the key to unlock the one six-pack of twelve-ounce cans,” Rex Mundi said,”that was in stock--”
“Socialism's no way to run an economy,” A Call For an Uprising sagely observed, before Tarsos turned his attention to the JMOB Pioneer under the command of his brother Smithsonians, pull up stake, and leave the Caprakios system, the megastructure, the now seven fleets embarked within, and its million now on vector for the Ragnar system, due to arrive there sometime in the next seven hours at max av.
Aside from the North American scouting force of light and heavy cruisers, sutai Mo'kai's data indicated there were less than a thousand battlestars, of varying tonnages and material conditions under the command of the rebel Admiral Cain—roughly half the Alliance Fleet—with the recent fighting seeing the destruction of forty battlestars of one of the rebel battle groups, with another fifty damaged beyond any hope of economic repair, with even the survivors requiring some time to make their damage good.
More thsn sufficent force to destroy them, and to secure the artifact at the core of Ragnar I that would grant him access to other realities and potential other allies.
And, a way to make all realities in his image, his likeness, as he achieved his revenge to stand alone in the end.
“--fake plandemic,” Straight Shooter remarked, the Rex Mundi Show now showing patriots dragging a balding Klingon man from a store in Northbridhe, on Gollywog, being looted by patriots, other patriots ripping the mask from his face, before kicking the shit out of him all at once.
“--even if the nanovirus wasn't BS,” Vulcan Skeptic commented,” it has been proven, in thousands of studies by reputable scientist, that masks don't work.”
“They're a crime against humanity,” Peacemaker Marcel, of the Family Bisset said,”as RealLondon dot TV has already said; it's been conclusive proven that wearing masks increases the amount of carbon dioxide, while cutting off the supply of oxygen, which causes brain damage, especially in children.”
”The thing that hath been is that which shall be,” Tarsos mentally reciting that passage from the Smithsonian Bible, as he saw still more patriots helping themselves to the hyfro in the store's gas pumps, as the Klingon, now pulp, continued being kicked and stomped on.”And, the thing that hath been done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun.”
“Where would we be,” Tarsos asked himself out loud,”if it were any other way?”
On the holoviewer, one of many in his personal Panopticon, the store burst into flame, as the Klingon, now hardly recognizable as a Klingon, lay in a pool of his own blood, brains and shit, the patriots who'd killed him now joining their fellows in taking what they wanted from his business.
“Typical left-wing behavior,” DJ Skeptic commented in the Rex Mundi Show's live chat.”And, they have the balls to call us domestic terrorists.”
In the wardroom of the 380,000-ton Alaska-class starship of the line, NAS Rio Grande, Vice Admiral Miyazaki Yukari, commanding the North American Mobile Strike Fleet, studied Enterprise's continous tactical transmission with growing horror.
Bad enough the League, the Russies, the Terries and their Orion allies had pushed halfway across the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, that they'd made inroads in the Alliance of three binary system that were on the other side of a particularly intense belt of van Allen radiation to rimward.
The prospect of still another Vo'kun portal waiting to bring in more death and hell from still other realities...
And, the enemy knew about about it; an RCN scouting group had confirmed as much, when their reconaissance of the Caprikos system revealed Pioner, one of two League JMOBs operating in the space the Feds had designated the WYN Star Cluster, had pulled up stakes, recalled all its embarked fleets, and were suspected to be vectoring toward the Ragnar system, max av.
She massaged her temple, took a sip of hibiscus tea, studied all the holoprojs floating over the wardroom's coffee table.
The Mobile Strike Fleet, along with the remnants of the Federation Fourth, Klingon Red and Northern, Hydran Expiditionary, the Royal Celestial Navy's 4th, the French Imperial 3rd , the Jpanese 2nd , and the Soviet 7th Strategic Space Fleets, were all based over Adamant, home of a mining, terraforming, and manufacturing conglomerate of the same name, the megacorp itself having a substansial fleet, itself part of the Rimward Trade Association's own combined starfleet, at the core of which was the Flight.
And, they were barely holding back the enemy's onslaught, two JMOBs, ten League fleets, twice as many Russie fleets, and nearly a dozen Terran and allied fleets, with a long-established infrastructure in a resource-rich region of space, in addition to the von Neumann machines which were the two 750-megaton JMOBs.
Now, the situation demanded Yukari's immediate attention, the diversion of badly-needed forces to secure Ragnar and its Vo'kum portal.
And, she couldn't even match tge strength the enemy was sending there.
Hell, right now, her forces couldn't even findPioneer, as even a 730 million metric ton Joint Mobile Operations Base that radiated electromagnetic spectrum information like a stellar nursery was still a very small speck in a very big dark, even given a probable vector through space.
Even if her ships could find the JMOB, bringing such a beast to battle, and destroying meant heavy casualties, given its orgnic interceptor, drone, heavy fighter, and main-battery capacity, before taking its 7,200+(as the platform had doubtlessly constructed more) embarked warships into account.
Still, she had to send something to counter the enemy JMOB, and secure Ragnar.
But whom, aside from her own 1,440 starliners, armored and light cruisers?
She studied the fleet rosters carefully, weighing the possibilities, seeing who was close to whole enough to be diverted.
The Anglo-Swedish fleet, obviously; they were almost back up to full strength, with new construction in the Adamantite yards, reinforcements from home, and loans from the Trade Association's combined fleet.
Via BCI, she sent the appropriate orders to Vice Admiral Sir Gordon Applewhite, aboard HMS King Charles III Gustav, before returning to her study bof the fleet roster.
The Feds, Klingons, and Hydrans had merged into a single fleet of neatly 1,200 ships, under Fleet Admiral Phillipa Georgiou, and, somehow, that had worked out.
Them as well; next to the two Allied fleets, the Federation-Klingon-Hydran 1st Composite Feet had the most combat ecperience in theater, and both Georgiou and her Kling second in command, Vice Admiral Ardak Kumerian, were capable commanders.
She cut the orders, sending a copy of them to Georgiou, aboard the USS Star Tiger, and Kumerian, aboard the IKV Danger Stalker.
That done, Yukari sighed again, as she sipped her tea.
It wouldn't be enough, but, it had to be.
Finishing her tea, she rose from the sofa, stretched herself, then stepped through the hatchway communicating with CIC.
“Radio,” she said to Radioman 3C Mary Derst,”send to all ships, Mobile Strike Fleet, RCN 4th Fleet, 1st Composite Fleet:'Prepare to get underway, vector for the Ragnar system, max av.' “
To Commander Delia Calder, at Rio Grande's helm, she said,”XO, sound General Quarters.”
She then took her place at the center of the starliner's command deck, and watched her crew comply with her orders.
16 SEPTEMBER,Y169
06:30:04
'--the utter brass of these bloody Progs," Geocentric Sky Watcher remarked."They know that we know they rig elections, yet they present this pantomime, this farce, and just expect people to go along with it. They actually expect us to treat this so-called election as a legitimate expression of the people of Gollywog, when anyone can just ask a Wog, and find out they want nothin' to do with any of that independence bollocks."
Outside the Government Building in Valentine, on Sinclair, dersively called Gollywog by outsiders, a crowd gathered, many waving signs about, most holding banned Lion and Sunburst ensigns, a couple holding gigantic representations of the City Of Valentine's former flag, back when it had been under Rothschild corporate rule.
All of them singing, mainly in the key of off, as still more people joined them.
More still thronged the Four Bridges coming into the City, off in the distance, immobilizing traffic, as the general strike had immobilized the planet in the week following Anthony Riley III, Terran Governor of Sinclair and its associated worlds by both Divine and Imperial Grace, had refused to even dignify the referendum hoax, and forward the ridiculous request of a ridiculous left-wing minority for independence to New York.
"--Marxist corporate tyranny," Brilliant Ork said in Riley's BCI, as, outside, still more chavs, bone-idle toe rags, layabouts, and other lower life forms continued filling the square just outside the Government Building, more Lions and Sunbursts Sunbursts in evidence, as the bigots and racists sang songs about there always being a Sinclair, and Sinclair would be free.
Bollocks, Riley sniffed contemptuously.
Sinclair, before the salvation that was true Human rule had come, had always corporate tyranny by Orions, by Rothschilds, by woke, socialist, galactivist elites, and, with it, and its royal parasites gone, those spoiled, entitled little shits out there truly [o]were[/i] free.
Though real Terran Humans were more free than they were, had to be, for the Human race were the law, with the rest, being slaves and bootlickers, needing to have their freedoms restricted and, some would say, harshly regulated, for they had not accepted Christ Jesus as their Lord and Savior, would never truly understand what that meant, even if they said they accepted Him and His blood sacrifice on the Cross 2,569 years ago, and, thus, remained in a fallen, degenerate state.
Fallen degenerates being allowed full rights and freedoms only ended in tears, both Textus Receptus and the historical record bore that out.
"--even voted," DanPrat4thePeople remarked." The Progs and the Cabal were even offering free money, free food, free drugs, all the things which worked for them back in the days of They/Them, woke Rothschild corporate tyranny, only to find out this was the Terran Dominion now, and people weren't falling for their Marxist bullshit anymore "
"They had to make up fake election results," remarked the Great Professor Toto, "then spread disinfo, like Progs always do, about the awesome response they had."
"What ya expect, mates?" IM Storm remarked."Painfully fuckin' obvious no one on Gollywog wants independence, just fuckin' obvious."
"And, yet,' Hip Hop.Hippie observed,"they managed to put boots on the ground and shut Gollywog down."
"All professional protesters, ex-cons," Professor Toto remarked," fat, radical alien lesbians, brainwashed, soy-fed, vaccinated SJWs, and homeless bums, all hired by Alec Soros and the Rothschilds, then brought to Gollywog by the boatload."
"Yes?" Riley asked, as his chief of staff, Selwyn Carter, entered the office.
"Sir," Carter replied, without preamble,"freedom convoys have just beamed and gated into Valentine and the Four Bridges, and more transports are in standard orbit, offloading additional patriots from throughout Terran space to deal with the situation."
As, just outside, a squad of Imperial Guardsmen began raising the Terran Flag, an eagle atop the sword imapling Earth from pole to pole on a blue union against a field of thirteen red and white stripes, as a mighty chorus drowned out the fascist bollocks of Sinclair prevailing against all odds with a hearty rendition of "God Bless the Human Race," the governor of Sinclair looking back out the window of his office to see a truly beautiful sight indeed.
Patriots.
Patriots, from all walks of life, all proudly displaying their Second Amendment rights, all singing, as they advanced on the harlot, the sodomite, the breeder, the fornicator, the slave, the tyrant, and the bootlicker, and proceeded, at once, to punish its arrogant presumption of being entitled to anything as precious as sovereignty and freedom.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“--something so gross,” Balthazar Krais pontificated in live, streaming video,”like schools putting litterboxes in classrooms for the children programmed by the Cylons, the Polythiests, and the Great Foulness that controls them all into believing they're frakking cats?!”
In the background behind the Redeemptionist Monothiest chaplin, a massive viewslate showing patriots dragging perverts, deviants, and sexually-confused freaks to one of the deliverance centers in Acropolis, on Necromunda, centers now legalized and made part of the new Alliance by Zarek almost immediately after he'd seized the mandate from the Emperor to be President for life, Emperor be praised.
“Do you all now understand?!” Krais thundered down from his golden pulpit, adorned with the skulls of those Redeemptionists who'd died in service to His Divine Majesty.”Do you understand why we had to close all the schools, even the so-called religious ones?! Why we had to destroy all the universities, all the places where false doctrine, Scientism, and knowledge, falsely so-called, were kept?!
It is because these places were the strongholds of the Ruinous Powers, of demonoc posession andd oppression! Places where demons disguised as human groomed our young ones, turned them out, made them hate their humanity, hate their country, hate the Emperor who made them and all Mankind, made them identify as Cylons, as Xenos, as girls, as homosexual, made them want to mutilate themselves, chip themselves, upload themselves into the bodies of Servitors and help them and their Chaotic masters replaace us with them!”
The soroitas assigned to this particular center moved the lined of collared, chained, hooded, and marked sinners along with baebed whips in leather gloved hands, the collars, wired directly into their tiny little brains, and possessing none of the hardcoded safeguards which prevented brain hacking, reminding the degenerate freaks constantly that they were degnerate freaks who should never, ever have been allowed to think, for a momeny, that they should be proud of themselves.
Emperor be praised.
What was playing on the slate behind Krais played in front of his right eye, compliments of the commun Greystoke Cybernetics had first pioneered in the late forties, Krais pausing his sermon to drink a glass of what his congregation believed was ice water, and watched the goings-on.
“We,” he said, resuming his sermon,”are gonna round up all these sick fraks, all these uppity Servitors, herd them into deliverance centers throughout our Twelve Worlds, and with the Emperor at our side, we are going to cast out the demons, and send them howling and defeated, for all times, back to the Warp which spawned them, praise the God Emperor of Mankind!”
”For we walk in His Immortal Shadow!l” the over twenty thousand souls in his temple, and the millions watching this online, all replied in a single, thunderous voice.
”'And, His Immortal Light,'” Krais softly said, ”'shines in our eyes,'”
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
06:50:02
“Kill all power,” Celestial Legion Starship Pioneer's ops boss, Rear Admiral Thomas Stephens ordered for the yenth or fifteenth time, since the 750-megaton Joint Movile Operations Base had left the Caprakios system on vector for Ragnar.
Vice Admiral Dylann Hunt could only stand there, at the center of the platform's coldlamp-lit CIC, and grind his teeth in frustration, as, again, Pioneer]/i] his from its enemies, and lick its wounds.
In particular, it sought refuge in an unnamed brown dwarf system somewhere rimward of Caprakios, after the Laamanite scouting group dogging its heels had once again sniffed out its trail, and vectored Rimward warships in for the attack.
Pioneer[//i] now boasted seven fleets of warships, 12,000 F-16G Viper heavy fighters, 36,000 QF-20 Sacrab combat drones, 525 quad-turreted 18” accelerators, seven and a half million interceptor batteries, and, ten corps of troops.
Yet, as this war had demonstrated, time and again, even such a platform could be destroyed, if the enemy were willing to spend the warships and lives to accomplish this, and Laamanites, regardless of time and place, were more than willing to do precisely that.
“Engineering, Combat,” Stephens ordered,”effect repairs, and be quick about it.”
“Deploy all mining and processing platform,” he then ordered.”Deploy CAP and drone screen.”
“Mining and processing platforms deployed,” Pioneer's CAG, a hulking, brindle-furred Kzinti, Commodore Cat Of Demons Born. Almost purred.”CAP fighters and drone screen deployed.”
“All active sensors offline,” a watchstander reported.”Passive sensors only.”
“Comms offline,” another watchstander reported.”Engineering estimates four hour, til all damage has been repaired, if work is done on the heat-damaged nacelles, two and a half hours, if no work is done on those.”
“And, if we dedicate industrial capacity and replicator feedstock to replacing the destroyed nacelles?” Hunt demanded, the watchstander, a third class battlespace manager, taking his time to reply,”eight hours, Admiral.”
“Admiral,” Stephens said,”we can't risk staying here that long, not with the Laamanites hunting us so aggressively.”
“We can't afford to carry out our mission with this platform in a less than perfect state,” Hunt answered his operations manager.”Tell Engineering I want all damage repaired, ASAP.”
“Aye, sir,” Stephens replied, relaying his instructions to Engineering via BCI.
Hunt then shivered, as the temp in CIC started falling, with the life support system taken offline to minimize Pioneer's electromagnetic signature even further.
Deploying the platforms, the CAP and the drone screen were all risks, acceptible ones, even necessary ones, yes, but risks all the same, for even this system's obscurity and the Outer Darkness itself were not enough to hide Pioneer for long against determined hunters, and deployment of the combat air patrol and the drone screen to give the JMOB eyes and ears, and the mining and processing platforms to harvest the system for the raw material to fix Pioneer and to replace replicator feedstock lost, when that part of the platform had been breached by an attenuated Rimward MAHEM beam9full strength, the 27” jet of molten metal propelled at near-light speed would've burned Pioneer from the Darkness), both these things only increased the chance the JMOB would be detected, and, once detected, destroyed.
Naturally, Pioneer would not die alone, when caught and forced to fight, but, it would die, before it had a chance to carry out its mission, and that failure would be weighed against everyone on board by the Celestial Throne, increasing the likelihood even Hunt, with a proud lineage going all the way back to Porter Rockwell himself, would be condemned to second death as one of them, instead of being resurrected to continue the fight, until all Laamanaites had been cleansed from all realities, putting an end to his exile.
His Dom liason officer, Rear Admiral Jakob Bundy, then suggested,”if we could power up the comm system just long enough to transmit a burst to the Polk ask--”
“No,” Hunt decided, his tone making it clear he would entertain no further suggestion he go begging to the Reb JMOB or MacKenzie-Calhoun for help.
“As an operative of the Office of Domestic Tranquility, Admiral,” Hunt then reminded Bundy,”you should know that even implying His Celestial Priesthood are, in any, way, inadequate, is heresy, punishable by second death as one of them.”
“In any case,” Stephens said,”it's out of the question; the Leonidas Polk's currently in the White Light system, assigned to supporting Terran authorities in suppressing the insurrection on Gollywog.”
16 SEPTEMBER,Y169
06:56:51
“---litterboxes in their bathrooms, for those kids who identify ss Lyrans, Kzinti, Caitians or Kroimeeka,” the Great Professor Toto nattered on in the background, while Brittany Andersen placed a cold compress on the forehead of a humanoid Kroimeekor girl, about six, maybee seven Human years, her hair, orange and white, and running down to the small of her back, matted and tangled, as she writhed fecerishly on the sleeping mat in the catacombs underneath the ruins of Sinclair House in Valentine.
“--wonder why aliens,” Toto continued gassing off on the Terran version of YouTube,”simply cannot govern themselves, and require the adult supervision only their Terran masters, cast in the image of Almighty God, can provide them.”
“Sall right, baby,” Brittany lied, as she tried to calm the fitfully-sleeping child down, before she popped the collagen sutures criss-crossing her mottled orange, whiye and black skin...bastards had smashed their way into the restaurant she'd been waiting tables in, and...had their fun with her, before leaving her for dead, Brittany and other Resisters finding her lying in a pool of blood, froth, and shit, her little body mutilated, organs ruptured from blunt force trauma, the 24-year old street medic and her fellow healers doing what they could for her surgically.
Too many others like her, now that patriots had been brought in from offworld to aid and abet those here in punishing Sinclair's people for expressing their will in the recent referendum, even knowing this exact outcome would tke place.
“--a study of the Leebyahian poulation,” Rex Mundi now said, as Brittany moved down the length of the underground passage, lit by bioluminesence and holoptojctions from medical monitors,”made by reputable Klingon scientists showed that ninety percet--ninety percent--of the planet's population suffered from diaasociative identity disorders, such as gender dysphoria, and delusuons they were other species, and these disorders were, in fact, congenital--”
Brittany brushed back the hair of a teenaged Naram girl from her forhead, as she slept, making sure the near-Human wasn't lying on her raven locks, at the same time she glanced at her vitals, confirming the medmonitor's readings with the medigauntlet on her left hand.
Naturally, she thought,these fucking Terrans would bring up Leebyahh to lend creedence to their hate.
From what she'd been told, that particular planet, in the former Klingon Neutralone, had been set aside by the Vo'kun, here often referred to as the Old Kings, as a loony bin where theire mentally-deranged subjects were free to live, work, play, go nuts, and not harm the greater Galaxy.
They probably had no idea that petty little assholes, 169 years after the last of them had been seen in this time and place, would use their descendants of the original Leebyahhians as fodder for their bigoted agenda.
Or, maybe, they did, she thought, shushing the Naram, as nigghtmares gripped her, stomping on the impulse to comb all that lovely hair.Hell, maybe they even used those inmates to further their own agenda, and, maybe, not all those committed there had been bughouse, at least, not in the beginning.
Too close to home, that thought, and Brittany tried suppressing it, as she moved to a Yazira with a busted arm.
In her time and place, his race were known as Haziri, an offshoot of the long-extinict Vo'kun, and they vied with the Klahrun for dominion, at the same time the League actively fought to subjugate and end them both.
The Yaziri of this time and place were one of eight races who had a thriving intersellar society in this part of the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, before the Usurper, then the Orions, and various Klingon and Lyran renegades had subjugated them thirty years before the Terrans had come in, and taken over.
The Yazira, still a kid, growled irritably, as Brittany examined his broken right arm, then changed out the dressing, soaked with pus and clotting blue blood, on his left, disinfecting the deep wounds made by a monowire sword wielded by a patriot who'd taken offense at him being a winged, red-furred, blue-skinned, flying reptilian siminois allowed to roam the streets freely, the Yazira then wincing, and hissing, as Brittany next changed the dressing over his right eye, or, rather, the mess left behind by the monowire slashing across his face and almost to his brainpan.
More pus, humerus, and clotting blue blood, along with bits of cornea and iris, Brittany removing the suction from her medkit, vaccuming out all the ickies, before disinfecting the wound, and applying a fresh dressing; the overworked medical replicators were busy printing a new eye for him, at which point, he would go back under the knife to have the orbit cleaned out, and what remained of his right optic nerve spiced with the optice nerve of the replicated eye.
The Hazira, perhap a couple years younger than Brittany, understandably couldn't wait, demanding,”when will you replace my eye?!”
“Wish I knew, sweetpea,” Brittany answered honestly.”The other medics are just overwhelmed right now.”
“It's bad out there,” the Yazira commented.”The umanii are out in the millions, it seems, with more them beaming and gating in by the second...the whole city's burning, my jynvorii...
A portmantteau word, which, in this context, meant family or clan.
“I don't know,” Brittany conceded, as she finished examining him.”Hopefully they found shelter, if not with one of the other cells, then in one of the tent cit--”
“The umanii,” the Yazira reminded her,”are priortizing the tent cities in their attacks; the unhoused always seem to be their favorite sport.”
“Yeah,” Brittany conceded, for hunting the homeless for shits and giggles was a favorite patriot pastime in any time and place.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“--enemies in common, it seems,” Kim said to the Alliance officers and leaders.
“Which explains why we're here,” she concluded,”in this time and place. My scouting group were conducting a recon sweep, when we picked comm chatter coming from this system, and discovered a Russie battle group, or, rather, what Navarchs Thrace and Adama had left of one, was part of the forces engaging your ships and the refugees, they...”
Abruptly, she trailed off, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up just a moment, at the same time both Adama and Kara Thrace whispered “Fr--”
”..and, I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder. One of the four beast sang 'come, and see,' and I saw, and behold...”
“...what am I?!” she kept demanding of a figure walking away from her in a field somewhere, her dog tags in the paalm of her gloved...
”...Action Stations!. Set Condition One throughout the ship! Action Stations, Action Stations!” a woman's voice thundered over the speakers, as the whistling white light gave way to the buzzing, blood-ted lit officer's wardroom of the battlestar Flame of Purity, and a quantum tunnel formed directly in front of her, and Kim ran through it, and onto Enterprise's CIC, Draco running from the wardroom, asking for a sitrep at the same time as his Skipper.
“Quantum tunnels, won-tree-zera,” Starman 1C Giselle Brandt reported from the radar station, even as Ava slid down the ladder from the crew deck to relieve her,”in orbit, Ragnar I, closing Anchorage, won-six point eight kips, decelerating. Quantum tunnels, foah-zera-eight-zera, entering Ragnar system, plus won-five by two-tree, niner point foah teraklicks downrange, max av.”
“Inbounds entering system,”Yasmin reported,”squawking as Mobile Strike Fleet, RCN 4th Fleet, and First Composite Fleet, comprising various Fed, Klingon, and Hydran hulls. Inbounds closing us from Ragnar I orbit all unknown types, ranging from 380 to 950 kilotons.”
Andi had already moved them from the station, and boosting them toward intercept with the unnowns, also vaguely resembling ships from Battlestar America, when Draco took the helm, and she manned the weapons station.
“Pipe the reply, if any, through to master holoproj,” Kim replied, as she took her seat, and buckled in.
“Reply coming through from one of the 950-kiloton hulls,” Rhonda said, before a black man, hair greying at the temples, beard almost fully grey said, as he stood amidst a burning wreck of a CIC.
“This is Admiral Avery Benedict, commanding 12th Battle Group of the National Fleet; am requesting asylum for myself, my officers and crews, and over one hundred thousand civilian refugees on board my ships.”
“We're being commed,” Rhonda then said,”by the Rio Grande.
Vice Admiral Miyazaki's image now floated in front of Kim's right eye, the middle-aged Japanese-American woman remarking,”everything interesting seems to find you, Kim.”
“Yeah,” Kim said, as IFF tags sprouted into being around the National Fleet starships of the line on the tactical holoproj,”it seems that way, Admiral.”
16 SEPTEMBER,2056
07:12:23
“Asylum is granted,” this Admiral Cain's holo said, as it floated six inches from Admiral Avery Benedict's right eye,” by order of the President of the Twelve Tribes. We ask that your crews remain aboard your vessels, pending further investigation, and that you join me aboard Pegasus at your earliest convenience. “
“Copy, and wilco,” Benedict replied, as Cain's holo winked out, the signalman reporting,”we've been clearance to dock.”
“Pass that on to the helm,” National Fleet Starship Mea Culpa's executive officer, Master Commandant Rance Haggerty, ordered, as a cool breeze from the ventilation system fanneed the fires burning all round CIC.
“Master Engineer,” Haggerty then said,”reports all radiators re-installed, internal temp 100 degrees, falling. All other damage under repair.”
Benedict nodded, eyes on charred corpses being removed from CIC by Mechanized Riflemen, more still seated at what used to be workstations, waiting their turn to be taken below.
“Civilian casualties?” he asked.
“We're still compiling that list, Admiral,” Haggerty replied, Benedict nodding in reply, as he held onto the plot table for support, the adrenaline sustaining him since the frenzied battle over Terra Nova starting to wear off, and leaving feeling the full weight of all he's done.
All he'd done, in all the years he'd served the Thirteen and Freeman Lang.
He'd certainly done all he could to erect the throne on which Lang now sat, after the People, the true People, had rejected his bid for the First Presidency in favor of a Laamanite.
A quantum tunnel shimmered into being in front of Benedict.
“This Cain doesn't waste any time, does he?” Haggerty observed.
“Ship is yours,” he added, before stepping through.
289-69M2
07:15:40
“Where the actual frak did you come from,” Cain demanded bluntly, as this Admiral Benedict teleported onto Pegasus' CIC,”and why did the Emperor's Light see fit to wash you up on our shore?!”
“We were chased to the fourth planet of a star system called 46552 Leonis,” Benedict, his hreen utilities stained with evaporated sweat, answered,”by forces loyal to Freeman I, anointed King of God, following his seizure of power in what had been the Thirteen Nations of Man.
Our ships entered orbit, and the artifact on the planet's surface sent us here...wherever here is.”
“You,” Jurgen said,” are in the Ragnar system, orbiting its first planet, at the frontier of the Alliance of the Twelve Tribes of Palestina.”
Uncharacteristically, the Cylon then blushed, sheepishly adding,”unfortunately, the Tribes aren't exactly allied at the moment.”
“It seems,” he remarked,”we're in similar straits, Admiral.”
“It seems that way,” Benedict replied,”yes.”
A primus from the battlestar's medicae staff ran her medigauntlet over Benedict, nefore injecting something in his upper right arm with a pneumatic hypodermic.
“A vaccine cocktail,” she explained,”against diseases you have no immunity to, including the Angel of Death...that's the popular term for what the medical community, what's left of us, call NANVID-68, for nanovirus disease, 68M2.”
Benedict merely nodded acceptance, and thanked the medicae officer, as she gave him another going over with her medigauntlet, the left the command deck.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
She stood behind the railing, and watched her Marines come home.
One by one, Enterprise's nine Comet dropships rose up through the ventral doors, then taxied to a stop on the hard deck immediately forward, each dropship holding a one hundred strong company of Marines who'd just wanted to strip off their kit, get a shower, some chow, sime rack time, maybe a few hours' intimacy for those with romantice relationships either amongst the ship's company or within the scouting group.
Instead, after the doors closed, and the flight deck aired itself back up, the Marines formed up in front of the dropships, and stood at attention, when they spotted their Skipper on the other side of the armored glass partition on the deck's starboard side.
Kim waited a few moments, before stepping through the airlock, and onto the flight deck proper, 1st Squad, Alfa Company, 1st Battalion on her heels, as Harriet barked out”admirals on deck!”
“At ease,”the nine other Marines of Major General Matijo Dench's command squad standing off to the side while Jo and Kim inspected the others, saying a few brief words to each Marine, as they moved down the line.
“S-sirs,” stammerd one of the younger Marines in Harriet Mangione's command squad as Jo and Kim came up to her, the girl, Yonia Givens, if Kim wasn't mistaken, shrugging off the embrace of one of her dquadmates, and came to attwntion.
“At ease,” Jo ordered, Kim said,”it was bad, wasn't it?”
Tonia vigorously nodded her head.
“They tried to prepare me, back in Djbouti, S-skiper,” Tonia, on the verge of tears, said, sometimes even whisperig,”b-but, still....”
Nodding, Kim laid a gentlr hand on the other woman's shoulder, telling her,”no shame in see ing the shrink, girlie, and you need to, before this eats you alive.”
Swallowing hard, Tonia replied,”s-sir,” as Jo and Kim moved on to where Harriet Mangione, salt and pepper hair forming a long ponytail disappearing inside her suit and down the length of her we;;-muscled meter, twenty-two centimeter frsme, stoof, eyes tearing up, as she watched Tonia being comforted by one of her squadmates.
“She gave away her teddy bear,” Harriet said, without preamble, her voice tired, on the verge of tears at the same time.
“I was wondering where it had gotten to,” Jo, standing only slightly taller than Harriet, remarked, Harriet explaining,”we on a Russie ship, in its Tail--”
Russie warships carried onboard brothels of slaves and mistresses to further traumatize them into obedience.
Terran Dominion warships were now doing same, using female personnel of the former Fed Starfleet as their unwilling rape slaves, and mistresses of the Dominion's BuTRADOCC to keep them broken.
Man's inhumanity to man, the one constant in any reality.
“--gave that shabby little thing to that poor child,” Harriet whispered, tears running down her face, as Jo and Kim listened,”told the medico she needed it more than Tonia did.”
She drew a deep breath.
“Hell of a baptism of fire,” shevthen remarked, as Jo hugged her.
Kim nodded her head...she'd been on the ground with her Marines during the campaign to defend the moons of Jack Pumpkinhead three years prior; she had some idea of what they saw on the ground.
It had driven her kid sister crazy.
Spirit still wasn't 100%, never would be, but...
Spirit's identical triplet sister, Gunnery Sergeant Major Faith Aldrin, was at Kim's shoulder.
“Dismiss your Marines, Sergrant Major,” Kim ordered.”They've been on their feet long enough.”
“Draco,” she said via BCI, as the landing force's senior noncom dismissed the Marines,”Harriet's home, more or less safe. She really needs you, mon vieux, it was...pretty bad, from what she's told us.”
“Of course,” Draco's image replied, as Kim made her way toward the partition and the ladder leading upward into the rest of the ship's manned spaces.
259-69M2
08:08:50
He was so cute when he was crying.
And, yet...
Sharon cradled Zak's head on her lap, stroking his hair, whispering,”you know you don't have to, if you don't want to.”
“It pleases you, Mistress,” Zak whispered and sobbed, the sight of his smmoth baby's bottom, nice and red, peeking out from the hem of the black, see-through, baby-dool nightie arousing her. Sharon controlling the urge to just take him to her rack again.
“Sharon,” she told him, as she continued stroking his hair.”We're not playing the game anymore.”
“--and, I deserved it,” Zak finished.”Your girl is prepared to show her appreciation.”
“Not right now, sweetheart,” Sharon said, smiling. Sorely tempted to use his mouth for her pleasure there and then, but...not right now.
Right now, she needed to show Zak how much he was loved and appreciated, that he wasn't any of the things she always told him he was, every time he submitted to her.
That he didn't deserve anyone abusing him.
Gods know, it had to have been hard for him, groowing up with gyneomastia in a strictly Monothiestic household in a strictly monothiestic enclave on Palestinia, where even he had doubts about his own gender and sexuality, because of the breasts he'd always taken pains to cover up with extra shirts and tape, and showering alone.
She bent down, and kissed the top of his head...with his face panted, the total absence of body, facial, and even pubic hair, and the aerogel appliance covering up his genitals, he could pass, if he wanted to go through with the proceedure.
He would, if she told him to, if he thought it would please her.
But, that was insufficent reason for a life-altering transformation.
Gods damn his family, Sharon venomously thought, for only the millionth time, since Zak had felt comfortable enough with her to show her his breasts, and give voice to all that shame and pain he'd been carrying around, all alone.Gods damn his community, may the Gods damn them all to the frakking Warp, for spoiling the rod, and calling him Chaos spawn and an abomination in the eyees of the Emperor, instead of loving him enough to let him answer, for himself, all the questions which tormented him still in frakkin peace and safety.
Because, frak me, if I know what I'm doing, if I'm not making it worse for him, he needs to see Doc Spang, would see her, if this wasn't such a frakked up world where he feared losing ecerything he wanted, if he ever came out of hiding, and be himself.
The professionals would have the answers; Sharon knew for certain she didn't.
Hell, she didn't even have the answers for herself, and she had four decades of living Zak did not have.
She was, in the end, a Cylon.
Though a Human had created her race, Sharon Valerii had no more understanding of Humans than any other Cylon.
And, no answer to this boy's pain, shame, and doubts about himself.
259-69M2
08:53:08
“Bill,” Laura simply siad, as they lay wrapped up in one another on his rack, just simply being together long after they'd coupled, cause the physical act wasn't the end all and be all of intimacy.
Laura, Gods bless her, had waited, all this time, to ask of him another, essential part of intimacy.
No matter how painful.
Not that he could keep thr ghosts at bsy, shoulder the load alone, as his strict upbringing as a son of the priesthood would demand.
No.
William Adama knew one true thing in this world.
One had to be strong enough to admit when they needed help; that was why the Gods gave them friends, family, companions.
“Galactica,” he began,”had just come off a long patrol beyond the Red Line,” the intense zone of radiation between the Twelve Worlds and the Xenos,”when the call came in over the wireless...the civilian medicae personnel were just overwhelmed, and all available Fleet units were called in to assist.”
He sighed.
“You never told me,” Laura, her long fingers teasing his nipples and the hair on his chest, whispered.
“I should've,” Adama whispered.”I've long talks with the shrinks in the thirty years since then, but, for the most part, I...kept it inside...even Kara doesn't really know everything, I...just...how do you explain that all those dead, all those pi[children,[/i] those Monothiestic bastards always frakking piously claim they're saving, they're waiting for you to close your eyes, and haunt your dreams?”
“I don't know,” was Laura's honest answer.”I wish I did, for your sake, Bill.”
Gently, Adama kissed the top of Laura's head, as her tongue lightly teased his right nipple.
“Thank the Gods you're you, baby,” he whispered.
“It was bad, wasn't it?” Laura asked.”Worse than the war?”
“Children aren't soldiers,” Adama said simply.”Healers aren't soldiers, and Zarek and all his self-righteous sons of bitches targeted both, and they were proud of that, Laura...when the tribunal finally convened, six years ago, to try that miserable son of a whore for his part in it, he just looked the prosecutor, those in the gallry—including me—and the pictcasters in the eye, and bragged about ending all those innocent lives he insisted he was saving.”
“That never made sense,” Laura remarked.
Adama smiled.
“You have an education,” he said.”Education and bigotry are mutally exclusive, incompatible; why else did you think education was the first thing outlawed, when the Monothiests finally took power?”
“True,” Laura whispered, as she laid her head on Adama's chest, and he idly stroked her hair.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
Kim piped the sound directly to her brain, as not to wake her peacefully sleeping paramours.
God knows, they both needed their sleep.
”Amphion,” the current Anglo-Swedish Secretary of State sang, a chorus backing him,”maks the contact, and leads them. Unbroken[o] draws first blood. [/i]Tactician[/i] taking two with a single spread of torpedos. Four-og-six breaks off, and runs away.
In their own track. Came the wolfpack. Hunters turned prey in the dark ocean depths. Goering's finest. Paid in full. When Hecht led his wolves into the jaws of death.”[/i]
Kim sipped her cup of oolong, as she sat in the workstation chair in her quarters.
The fighting on the moons of Jack Pumpkinhead again.
She'd almost awakened screaming, stopping herself at the last second when she realized she was tabgled up in those who loved and would keep her safe, if they could, just as she would for them, and she wasn't up to her neck in Reb Nickies and Argentine [i[Eibsatztruppen[/i] trying to overwhelm her lines on Garcia.
She didn't want to wake either of them.
The padding of bare feet on the area rug, sure slender fingers gently massaging her shoulders, as “Semper Victoria” now played in her head.
“Didn't mean to wake you,” Kim softly said.
“It's okay, okusan beloved,” whispered Vice Admiral Miyazaki Yukari, leaning Kim's head back, and cradling it against her breasts, at the same time Captain Daniel Beckett straddled her, her red hair falling gently on Kim's breasts, tickling them, as she held her close.
”Stand fast, against the legions of hell,” Sabaton sang in Kim's head.”You know what the devil will do. Fight the armies of evil with all that is in you. So the innocent can live and work in peace.
Primo victoria, semper victoria!
Sic semper, tyrannis, victoria aut mors!
That's the choice made before you were born into the world.
That is the faith for which you must fight to the death to keep.
Primo victoria, semper victoria!
Sic semper tyrannis, victoria aut mors![/i]
The mathmatics and good versus evil!
Equations written in faithful Allied blood!”
“You have some grim tastes in music, lover,” Beck said, after lightly kissing Kim's lips, Kim smiling, as she twirled strands of vibrant red hair in her fingers, leaning back into Yukari, as she continued massaging her.
“I love you both,” was all Kim could think of saying, as she began to relax.
“And, we love you, pkusan,” Yukari, her first love, who she'd grown up with on Canaan, whispered, Beck, quoting poetry, telling Kim ”'Of course you are loved. Why else this song?'”
“What,”joked Kim,”'Semper Victoria?'”
First Beck, then Yukari, sang:
”Primo victoria, semper victoria!
Sic semper tyrannis, victoria aut mors!” ]
”The price of life,” Kim sang softly with the women in her life,”in this world made by those. Who worship only death and hate! They worship only death and haaate(Primo victoria! Semper victoria!)! Only death and hate( Sic semper tyrannis, victoria aut mors!)!
God of your enemies is only death and hate!
Fight the religion of death and hate!
[/iPrimo victoria, semper victoria!”
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
10:33:08
”Love me one more time,” the ship softly sang, as Draco laid a plate of fried banana sandwiches on grilled raisin bread and curried potatoes in front of Harriet.”Make this night last. Foeeevveerrr.”
”For, on the morrow,” she sang with the weird man who'd nonetheless captured her heart.”I leave. For battle.”
Fried banana saandwiches were a case in point...of course, she thought they were gross, at first, any sane person would, but Harriet supposed that ship had sailed for long time ago.
And, besides, she thought, as she took a bite from one of the sandwiches, chasing it with a sip of cinnamon-flavored black coffee, they're pretty good.
She smiled, shyly glancing at his muscles, black as an opal, peeking out of his blue housecoat...he was nuts about keeping himself fit, had an exerciser routine few others onship could keep up with, likely would've been a Marine if his speed demon tendencies hadn't made him a fighter pilot, then helmsman of an armored cruiser.
She blushed, Draco's dark eyes seeing straight through her purple housecoat)the color of royalty, he'd said, when he'd bought it for her birthday some years ago).
“You're as lovely as when we first met,” Draco softly said.
“And, you're still as big a bullshiiter, as you were at War College,” Harriet countered.
“Well?” Draco said, a silence later.
Harriet looked up at the ceiling a second, took a deep breath, then:
“It was bad, baby, it's always bad, but...”
She trailed off, taking another bite of sandwich, anothr sip of coffee.
“Almost all of them were younnger than our daughters, Draco,” she finally said,”and, Tonia...I can't help thinking she shouldn't have been...what a fucking way to grow up.”
“It's fucked up, yay,” Draco remarked, as he wolfed down one of the two sandwiches on his plate, following that with a forkful of curried fried potatoes.
He paused, sighed.
“Makes me think of Antonia and Scarlett,” the latter of whom was with the Hard n' Fast Fifty-First on some other battle field, while the former was a midshipman, posted to a starliner in Sixth Fleet, also on some other battlefield.”Makes me wonder, if we should've tried harder to keep them out of the family business.”
“They're both too hard-headed,” Harriet joked, in spite of herself,”like their father.”
“Like their mother too, I suppose,” she conceded, as Draco laughed throaatily.
She smiled.
“It's good, hearing that laugh of yours,” she told him.
Then, she squealed, laugh, and almost fell out of her chair in Enterprise's common area, as Draco briefly tickled the soles of her feet.
“Oh, you,” she whispered, as Draco smiled.
“I love hearing you laugh as well, babe,” he said.
“Do that again,” she said,”and I'll make you get under the table, and suck my toes.”
“Ah, babyy,” Draco joked,”always threatening me with a good time.”
Harriet giggled, as Draco, instead, gently massaged her feet, making her tingle all over.
“You can do that,” she softly said,”yeah.”
“Yay,” Draco replied, as he alternated between her right and left feet, and Harriet began to relax.
“You can do that all day,” she whispered.
“You know I would, for you, my queen,” Draco told her in his melodious bass voice, as she climed in his lap, straddling him, kissing him lightly on the lips, at first, then with tongue, as he kept massaging her feet.
“I know you would, my king,” she softlt said, running her fingers lightly along the smooth skin of his chest.
“ I know you would,” she repeated.
258-69M2
12:01:00
”Gods, make it stop, make it stop, MAKW IT STOP! “ Gaius Baltsr screamed, over and over, clutching his pounding head, as he lay helpessly on the floor of his quarters in Ragnar Anchorage's Station #15, watching, helplessly, and in real time, that bastard son of Slaneesh torturing his oldest daughter, Katrina, who'd just turned eighteen.
Cylons shared a link with their Cylon, or, in this case, Hybrid family members and offspring, and that mierable frakker Zarek knew this.
Gods, why, in the Warp, did ever break his promise to just keep to him and his, avoid public life, sfter leaving office?!
Why?!
Twelve frakking years had taken a toll on him, Tricia, their two daughters, and if only fighting the Monothiests who'd taken control of the Senate for every little thing had been the end all and be all of his travails.
But, no...the protesters on the steps of the Forum, signs with nooses telling him to “hang in there,” the vicious lies on the Net, accusing Tricia, statuesque, goddess-like Tricia, of whom Baltar knew he'd never be worthy, of being a transvestite, even after picts of her pregnant with their youngest, Regina, had been made public, and, worse, claims that their bright, beautiful Hybrid daughters, pride of their parents, had been bought, like frakking toasters, from Orion child traffickers.
It would've been selfish to put his family through that again, better to simply take care of him and his, and let the rest of the Twelve Tribes do as they Gods-damned well please.
And, yet, when Laura Roslin asked him to be her running mate, in an election no one expected them to win, he'd agreed, without a second thought.
And, now his family, his entire family, were paying the price, kidnapped by a vigilance committee, while they'd supposedly been safe on his in-laws' ranch on Taurus, and sold to Zarek for a million thrones apiece.
“Pleeeasee,” he sobbed,”make it stop.”
But, it wouldn't stop, not until Katrina died, Zarek got bored with her, or Baltar surrendered himself, and, he doubted the latter case would stop it, with him there to watch in person.
He screamed, as his daughter screamed, Zarek having branded her, as she hung, chained from the ceiling, then whispered,”you belong to me now, little girl. Say it. Tell me 'I belong to you, Master, for as long as You permit me to live.'”
She fought and fought, blood running from the corners of her mouth, but, in the end, that Gods-damned obedience collar locked around her neck won out, same as it had for all his brothers and sisters similarly enslaved prior to, and during, the war.
The collar won, and Katrina had no choice, the words “I belong to you, Master, for as long as You permit me to live,” coming from her lips over and over,” until Zarek chose to release her, Katrina falling in a heap onto the floor, licking Zarek's feet, Baltar closing his eyes tightly, hoping he could unsee what Zarek and that frakking collar would make her do next.
But, curse William Greystoke, he couln't unsee, his beautiful daughter, who could do complex math in her head at six years old, forced to kneel, open her mouth, and---
“Gods, please,” a broken, sobbing Gaius Baltar sobbed uselessly, as he buried his face into the hard deck,”make it stop.”
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“Not hungry,” Lieutenant Andrea McKinstra insisted, when Stevie put a plate of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob and johnnycakes down in frobt of her, as she sat in the farthest corner of the common area, and drank her fifth, maybe ninth, cup of coffee, since coming off watch some three hours ago.
More than anything, though, she just wanted Stevie to leave her alone, for a change.
For her own damn good, because Andi knew...
”...I-i rep-pent my s-sin of female homosexuality,” the eleven-year old girl stammered, as she stood, sobbing and ashamed of herself, before the congregation, a Harpy laying into her with her whip for stammering and hesitating, Andi, blubbering like a stupid little baby, knowing what that always got her, forcing herself to continue:
“I repent for the sin of worshipping the false god of fem-male supremacy, of worshipping others, and making other wors-ship m-me, of hating and denying the supremacy and divinity of m-men, of hating and denying my own fe-femonity...”
“..need to eat,” Stevie prodded, just as Brittany always used to, when she wasn't---
No.
God damn it, just fucking no already.
No.
To all of it.
“Sides,” Stevie jus wouldn't stop wasting her damn time giving a shit for someone who just wasn't worth it,”it's the XO's cooking--”
Andi noticed the XO. Wearing a cook's apron over his utilities, singing some reggae song, as he continued cooking and serving food from behind the galley serving line, cajoling crew and officers alike to take more, dig in.
“--and,” Stevie said,”you know how he gets, when you don't like his cooking.”
“You're not being fair,” Andi complained, pulling the crispy skin from a thigh, and popping it in her mouth.
“You're my friend,” Stevie said plainly.
Andi didn't dare meet those green, green eyes, for fear she might forget herself, might make the mistake of accepting what she so freely, selflessly offered.
Of falling in love with her.
That had been a mistake the first time.
Brittany was dead, at her hands, at her hands, because of that terrible, terrible...
”...DON'T YOU FUCKIN' DARE, YOU NASTY LITTLE BITCH!” Pastor Ryan screamed in her face, as he grabbed her hair, forced to look at herself, in the center of the diner, men all round her cheering, as she pulled Brittany's hair, as she was chained to the center table, free hand pulling a strand of monowire round the fifteen year old girl's throat, as she..
“N-no,” Andi stammered, washing down the fried chicken skin with a large swallow of coffee,.
”Please, sweetie,” she insisted,” for God's sake, just see me for what I am, and what I am is NG, not worth your time, not worth anyone's time, I-i-i-i'm j-just...”
Andi trailed off, biting into the thigh mest, working on that, just so she wouldn't have to run her, cause every word that ever came out of hole was fucking silly and empty-headed, and all that mouth was ever really good for was--
She stripped the thigh to the bone, ate the yellow marrow in the bone, and went after the fat drumstick next,
“You're gonna give yourself hiccups, baby,” Stevie cautioned, Andi shrinking from the comforting hand on her shoulder, and just as quickly reduced the drumstick to bare bone as she had the thigh.
The potatoes and giblet gravy were next, Andi wolfing down forkful after forkful, washing it down with coffee, just so she wouldn't have to talk, or think, or remember.
She really wasn't doing justice to the XO's cooking, especialyy the taters, which always made with sour cream, way Brittany did, when the cooks were too stoned, and she had to that job as well, cause woe betide all the girls on the floor, if the customers, especially the regs, had to get up, and go in the kitchen themselves...
She stared at her fork, as she shoved food in her useless mouth, avoid the XO's eyes, cause he didn't think she was up to standard, that her being in Academy and comissioned in the upperhalf of the graduation list were just horrible mistakes, like all those YouTubers who insisted diversity and inclusion programs were un-American, and threatened the very fabric from which the New Confederate Order had been woven all those years ago.
She cleaned the remnants of mashed potaatoes and giblet gravy from her plate with the sweet yellow johnnycake, the two different tastes somehow working together, especially with the hint of vanilla and cinnamon in the strong, black coffee, which she really use more of, because her eyes started getting heavy again, and she couldn't sleep, she just couldn't...
So, she attacked the corn on the cob, the only way she'd eat corn in the first place, methodically stripping it down to the cob, reaching for her coffee cup, starting to get up, when she realized it was....
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
13:55:00
“Here,” Captain Darla Garrison said, offering aher Brittany a pair of steaming foil packs.
Brittany smiled, which, on turn, made the Royal Celestial Marine operator smile.
“Thanks, babe,” she said, rucking into the beef and noodles with the attached spork, washing bthat down with coffee from the other foil pack.
“Why aren't you eating?” Brittany then asked, as Darla sat beside her.
“Ate lunch while I was on guard duty,” Dartla answered, as Brittany put her free hand on her knee.”Brekkie too, come to think.”
“I've been busy with patients all morning, probably all afternoon as well, if Colonel Aldrin hadn't told me to fuck off for a few hours, no matter what Doc M'Keever said.”
She ate more of her badly-needed nourishment9even if she insisted she was getting too fat). Drank coffe that was just as much appreciated, then said,”I might have had breakfast...I sem to remember a girl coming round with sausage sandwiches, coffee and jynvitrii for the Haziri... yeah, and raw sausage on plain bread for them...”
Caffiene was a neurotoxin to Haziri(here called Yaziri), and they not only derived little nourishment from cooked food, but it tended to stop them up, often with fatal results, if not corrected with laxitives..
“And you...” Darla prodded, Brittany commenting,”I think I had a sandwich and sime coffee this morning; I really don't remember.”
“You know me,” she added.”I can remember patients, and what I treated them for, but my own name? That takes some doing.”
That was certainly true enough; when Brittany drowned herself in work, she tended to be lasr-focused on everything but herself.
A feature, not a bug, and she had those Reb cocksuckers to thank for that.
Darla looked up, when she found herself looking too long at the white band of scar tissue round her throat...Brittany didn't talk about that, nor would Darla ever press her on the subject, there being things the now 24-year old Resistance street medic just kept to herself, and always would, til she was ready to discuss them.
Lord knows, she'd opened up about the rest of the horror she'd been put through, and, maybe not seeing Darla turn away from that would ginally convince her to talk about all the rest.
She was there for her, either way.
And, speaking of her turning twenty-four today...
“You didn't!” was Brittany's reaction to Darla extracting the mess tin with a combat cupcake, and a single candle from behind her baack.
“Oh, my God,” her wife said, tearing up.”Baby, you remembered.”
“Of course I remembered,” Darla said, smiling, brushing a tear from her lover's cheek Brittany's cheek.
“Happy birthday, possum,” Darla then told her.
“A--” Brittany started to say, catching herself, swallowing hard, Darla giving her knee a gentle squeeze.
“It's okay,” she insisted.
“No,” Brittany told her, looking at the floore of the underground passage,”no, it's not...it...hurts, hun, it always will, every time I think about her.”
Darla kissed away the next tear to run down Brittany's cheek, as the candle on the cupcake started to melt down.
“I suppose I should make a wish, and vlow it out,” she remarked, taking a deep breath, and doing precisely that.
“Can't tell you what I wished for,” she whispered.
“Cos you're afraid it might not come true?” Darla asked, Brittany looking her in the eye, answering:
“Baby, I know it will never come true.
Not unless there is a God who answers prayers.”
259-69M2
14:06:14
“Ssshh,” whispered Surgeon-Commander Cassiopeia Spang, as she cupped Kara's breasts and wrapped her long legs round her from behind.
Yes, she was, and would always be, and Kara regretted wver having doubted that.
At first, she felt more than a little weirded out at being attracted to a Cylon.
Then, of course, had come the social stigma, mainly from self-righteous pricks who'd paid their coin, and used the then-homeless teenager who did the only Gods-damned thing she could to survive on the streets of Atlantis.
But, those people all were fools, and Kara had been as weel, for Cassi was as warm, as loving, as selfless and giving as many of her own kind claimed to be, and seldom were.
“I can't help but wonder what happened to her,” Kara whispered.”That wahtever did happen to her was--”
“No,” Cassi, leaning her head against Kara's, wrapping her body tighter in her embrace,”it wasn't. You were a child, Kara--”
“I was her big sister,” Kara insisted.”I was supposed to look out for her.”
“You were as small,” Cassi pointed out, her voice in her ear, on her skin, making Kara tingly all over, in spite of herself,”and as helpless, as she was.”
“Maybe, I hate that worse than if I had been avle to do something,” Kara said, Cassi's very nearness causing her body to shiver, regardless of how she felt.
“Maybe,” Cassi said, her voice causing Kara to tremble even more.
As did Cassi's soft lips at the base of her neck.
Kara turned over, wrapping her legs round Cassi, stroking her hair, kissing her deep and lonf, their bodies moving together, as their nipples touched, Kara's hands running up and down Cassi's back.
“I love you, Kara,” Cassi,”and, I forgive you for being a small helpless child in all that insanity, because she would've.”
“Maybe,” Kara whispered,”but...I'm still...”
She leet out a soft moan, as she and she moved as one.
“...working on it,” was all she could think to say, as she danced with her, and she danced with her,
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“Release the hounds,” Shipmaster Kimberleigh Reynolds ordered, a series of soft clanks! reverberating throughout the saucer and needle hullform of the 360,000-ton Rimward Flight Indomitable-class light dreadnaught, as its two, twelve-ship squadrons of 750-ton Springblade-class lancers detached themselves from their mother ship, and charged headlong into the storm gathering over near-Sinclair space at a Jump cycle of 19.53.
Rimward Flight Starship Unbroken lagged somewhat behind, transitting in and out of the one-kiloklick tunnel through jump space at Jump 13, her bine quad-mounted 27-inch MAHEM cannon and twin spinaal-mounted 54” MAHEM lances filling space with blue-hot relativistic jets of molten metal, the result of matter-antimatter explosionsvaporizing six- and twelve-ton masses of turanium at yields sufficent to impart a velocity of 99.9999% of lightdpeed to thw ewsulting jets.
Unbroken's weaponeer, the Dralasite Second Officer Oomud, salvoing 7.5-ton, Jump-capable MAHEM torpedos from the five tubes just above the forward dorsal superfiring battery on the ship's saucer, each torp detonating, and releasing a six-ton , near-lightspeed stream of molten turanium at their targets upon downcycling from a Jump cycle 25.3.
“Now at telegate range from Sinclair,” Razhak First Subaltern Amona reportd from the radar station.
“Gate and transporter rooms,” Leigh said over shipnet, as Unbroken's bridge shuddered and momentarily went dark from fragments of relativistic ordinance intercepted by the ship's 3,500 7.62mm Gatling MAHEM tore through the spaceframe,”Bridge. Begin transports the instant your targeting solutions are ready.”
“Radiators seven, nine, fifteen shot away,” Second Officer Tal'eh Korniaka, reported from the bridge engineering station, the Kroimeeka female already assigning nanos, nots, and organic engineering team members to oversee repairs,”internal temp 80 degrees, rising; penetration in all forward spaces, decks 3 and 4, frames 1 to 28, gutted. Primary powergrid 67% disrupted. All damage under repair.”
“Acknowledged,” Leigh said, as First Officer Teglin Fa, juked and burned hard during the ship's intervals in norm, twisting Unbroken in every direction at once, as she orbited Sinclair, and enemy warships of variuos types swarmed all over her.
“All gate and transporter rooms report transports underway,” Razhak reported.”First packages now appearing on planet surface, Resistance and hostiles converging on them.
A roar of white light briefly flooded the master holodisplay, a 37-inch MAHEM beam spearing a Terran Vicennes-class battle cruiser, and removing it from space and time, other beams, attenuated by interceptors, merely running through a dozen or so more 225,000-ton Terran battlecruisers from stem to stern, leaving them hulked, drifting derelicts slowly falling toward Sinclair.
The spinal MAHEMS tore through another dozen New Confederate Order Virginia-class starships of the line, the twelve 380-kiloton hull all blazing briefly, before fading to wisps of plasma and faintly-glowing metallic fragments.
Unbroken completed an orbit around Sinclair, as she continued beaming and gating much needed supplies, equipment and personnnel to the Resistance cells operating on planet, some of the cargo pods being decous, equipped with skat and kineetic projectile(kipper)charges whose sole purpose was to take out as many onquisitive enemy as possible.
“Vessel decloaking!” Razhak shouted,.”zero mark fifteen, 200 kiloklicks downrange!”
Right in the middle of a squadron of Royal United States [Chapultepec[/i]-class fourth-rate starliners, the 225,000-ton Fed Star Tiger-class light dreadnaught, modified in the yards over Adamant, immediately salvoing MAHEM torps from all eleven of its prow and neck tubes, the eight quad-mount 27” MAHEM turrets on its dorsal and ventral arrowhead slashing through the enemy hulls, its massive, low-slung, swept-back, squarish twin nacelles propelling it through the mass at Jump 13, USS Star Dragon twisting and turning on its RCS thrusters, as it tore through the Russie squadron, and turned her guns on a squadron of Argentinian Scharnhorst-class armored cruisers closing her rapidly from ahead.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
14:59:12
USS Star Tiger's bridge was a sweatbox, the singularity in the 225,-kiloton Federation light dreadnaught's keel providing both stealth and grav preventing heat from being radiated to space, when the cloak was active.
Her skipper, Captain Amelia Warren, sat in her center chair, grzzled still another bottle of cold saline solution, and grimly hung on for the ride, while her first officer, Commander Marianna Decker, loosed a salvo of MAHEM torps from the five tubes at the forward end of the ship's arrowhead primary hull, and the six tubes in the light dreadnaught's dramatically cut down neck section, Anna then, with a thought tranmitted wirelessly from her BCI to the navigation and weapons station forward of the command chair and to the right of Lieutenant Commander Tasia Vel'Shal at the helm. Loosed a volley of 27-inch MAHEM beamd from the eight quad turrets on the dorsal and ventral gun decks, the Andorian helmsman jinking and burning hard, as she plunged the heavily-modified Star Tiger-class light dreadnaught through the Argentine squadron at Quantum Warp Factor 13.
“Celestial Kingdom starships of the line,” Lieutenant Elijah Obote reported from the science station,”closing us, 180 mark zero, Q-factor 13, 300,000 kilometers downrange.”
On the tactical holodisplay on the left-hand arm of her chair, Amelia saw the twelve Dezzie Los Angeles-class starliner closing Star Dragon from
astern, Amelia ordering Tasia to turn them directly into their guns, even as Anna loosed a spread of torps from the four aft tubes.
A chill wind blew through the bridge, as Star Dragon's arsenal tpre into the Dezzie capital ships, the light dreadnaught's 2,250 Gatling MAHEMs dispatching inbound ordinance, fighters and drones, even as the stren tubes salvoed still another spread of torpedos into a six-pack of Orion heavy raiders coming at them from behind.
Amelia caught sight of ;i'Star Drsgon's[/i] flotilla of six, 3,000-ton Thunderboly-class attack craft, each of the oval and nacelle hulls armed with a quartet of eight-inch MAHEM lances and a couple dozen torps, which they put to good use against a squadron of twelve NCO New Orleans-class armored cruisers several thousand kiloklicks further ahead.
“Unbroken reports another complete orbit, and they will be done,” Senior Chief Yeoman T'Aar reported from comms.
The bridge shuddered, and momentarily went dark, the ship's chief engineer, :ieutenant Commander Slar Skeeznak, reporting from bridhe engineering,”penetration, secondary hull, decks 16 to 19, frames 80 to 120, sections gutted, no survivors. Primary power couplings 12 through seventten destroyed, decks 14, 15, and 20 without power. Internal temp now 101 degrees, falling.”
Amelia nodded, a bot handing her another bottle of cold saline solution, while the Tellarite chief engineer assigned bots, organics, and the nanites of the ship's recently-installed auto-repair system to repair damage, Anna's guns slicing into a formation of 950,000-ton RUS Alabama--class second rates, torpedos smashing into a squadron of 190,000-ton Russie Somers-class frigates which had failed to screen their larger consorts.
“Unbroken reports transports complete, and is breaking orbit,” T'Aar said, Amelia seeing forself, on the main holoviewer, the Rimmer light dreadnaught powering out of orbit on a vector out of the system.”
“XO,” Amelia said,”plot a course back to Adamant; helm, as soon as you have the course, execute, max Q-factor. Comms, order the Bolts to cover our out.”
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
15:01:05
A porcine Ifsnar, huge, even for her species, swept 180 degrees of arc with her 15mm heavy MAHEM rifle, Darla firing in support of the Ifsnii her L22 5.56mm accelerator rifle chopping into patriotd charging toward the cargo pod and the Resistance workers transferring vax and other medical supplies and equipment onto the bed of a hover transport which had seen better days.
To Darla's left, a Peschun male in t-shirt and jeans fired a wood-framed 7.62mm accelerator rifle of Russie manufacture, the young brown-skinneed man, hairless save for a dark goatee, keeping up a steady stream of vurses, as bullets smacked into the wall behind him, and pelted him with chips of burning masonry.
The young Peshkai was soon joined by a Meschkun girl, almosr as skinny as he was, the Meschkii, wearing a simple, and ragged sundress, handing the young man a bandolier of spare mags for his weapon, wgile firing a Nakkie-made M9 7,62mm accelerator rifle single-handed into the growing swarm of patriots.
Several of whom let loose slavering, mangy, near-feral dogs pf varying genetic mutations, but a common viciousness, the annimals charging toward the Resistance firing line like old-style guided missiles, tgrowling and baring teeth as they came, Darla quickly reloading, firing at the mutant fur missiles, turning several of them into sprays of nlood, bone chips, and grease with three-round bursts of 35 gram projectiles fired at one percent lightspeed.
The other doggos, about a baker's dozen or so, kept coming by leaps and bounds, several of the patriots breaking cover, and charging, guns blazing, in the wake of the mutated mutts.
One of which slammed Darla onto the deck, and pinned her there, its two heads, with their rows of sharp teeth, whipping downward by their serpentine necks toward her throat.
A mass of brown fur, whirling springblades and anger ebiscerated the dog, the Caprakee leaping forward on his haunches, crouching low in the midst of the howling patriot mob, his prehensile tail firing a 20mm heavy MAHEM, while long, wicked talons extending from the sheaths on the backs of his hands slashed and slashed.
Til a a boy, so pale his hair was indistinguishable from the rest of him, slashed at the ferret-like alien with his monosword, the Caprakee's intestine's spilling out in a sreaming, ropy mess, his left arm flying off into some other part of the alley.
Regaining her besrings, Darla shot the boy straigh through his oversized t-shirt of Simon Buckner's face grafted onto a more muscular body sodomizing a Caitian female with the Terran Dominion flag on an eagle-headed staff, blood and guts obscuring the slogsn “PUT EARTH FIRST AGAIN,” as the little bastard fell backward with a sodding great hole where his chest used to be, his monosword clattering uselessly out of his dead hand.
Darla heard the hover transport's magnetohydrodynamic turbine struggling to start, and the animated wheezing f the Dralasite at the wheel cursing in several languages, only a couple of which were Earth Human, while the mutilated, dying Carprakee jumped another of the patriots, a nearly three-meter tall cross between a black bear and a silverback gorilla wearing Human-style t-shirt and jeans sized for the Slidarian's frame, and a red ballcap with “PUT EARTH FIRST AGAIN!” in white lettering.
Slidarian and Caprakee fell together onto the pavement, as the transport's turbine finally caught, the vehicle's jets whining, as it lifted it to where its hoverfans could provide lift, shots whizzing past Darla, punching through the transport's windows and frame, the Caprakee, meanwhile, sinking his teeth into the Slidarian's neck, and tearing out his throat, before he died.
“Cover our out!” the Dral's image, leaking bright orange protoplasm from a myriad of holes in its amorphus grey body, wheezed and heaved weakly, as it drove the transport out of the alley at a good clip, the vehicle still being chased by bullets, as Darla and those still with her covered its retreat.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“About time,” Hunt groused, as the lights and holodisplays came back up, and Stephens started the process of recalling the mining and harvesting platforms.
“Keep the CAP and the drone screen out,” Hunt ordered.”Max av vector for Ragnar, now.”
“Boostlng toward max av upcycle,” Pioneer's helmsman replied.”Vector for Ragnar, ay--”
”Quantum tunnels, two-foah,” one of the other watchstanders in CIC shrieked like an alleycat in heat,”zera by fourteen point six, two gigaklicks downrange, closing us, foah-tree-niner point-five terakips!”
“Two squadrons, Rimmer lancers,” Stephens reported, as Pioneer's interceptors began firing, and CIC went dark.
“Let the fighters and drones deal with them,” Hunt ordered.”Maintain present ve--”
“Rimmer light dreadnaught, closing, same vector as the lan--” another watchstander reported, as, again the command eeck went dark, this time shuddering, exploding, screamin, and bursting into flame.”
Maintain present vector!” Hunt, ignoring the damage reports Stephens was relaying to him, shouted.[o]”Main batteries, return fi--”
“Vessel decloaking!” still another watchstander shouted, as CIC continued shuddering, going dark, exploding, screaming and burning.”Plud ten by tree, tree-zera-zera kiloklicks downrange, max av.”
”Launch all fighters!” Hunt ordered.”Return fire with all main batteries! Maintain present vector.”
“At escape velocity,” the helmsman reported, and none too soon,”upcycling in--”
”Do it now!” Hunt ordered, Stephens reporting,”Rimmer and Fed warships reporting our presence.”
The JMOB's quantum tunnel generators whined low, as they propelled the platform on vector to Ragnar at max av.
“Quantum tun--” still another watchstander started to report, Hunt interrupting him with ”sic the Orions on 'em!”
“Opening stardock, launching Orion fleet,” Stephens reported, as, on the main holoviewer, Hunt say the grey wedges of the Anglo-Swedish scouting group which had dogged his heels, since Pioneer had left Carpakios, and the sky-blue and yellowish xzucers and cylinders of the Rimmer fleet that had been working with them, as well as the white and red saucer, cylinder and nacelle hullforms of the Federation task force attached to this particular Rimmer fleet, all of them converging on Pioneer and firing on it from multiple vectors, the bullet shapes of the fleet of Orion mercenaries charging toward them, max av and guns blazing.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
15:04:10
“Kapla!” Ely Kargh sutai-Mo'kai shouted, as the thirty-six 18” r-guns in Rules' nose and wings demolished a pair of Anglo-Swedish D-class light cruisers and a sextet of 100,000-ton Rimmer frigates, while the battle cruiser's 2,250 interceptors dealt with ordinance, fighters, and attack craft, such as the Rules of Acquisition's own flotilla of six 3,000-ton Bucaneer attack craft surging into the thick of battle, meeting the enemy head-on in an almost Klingon-like fashion.
Kargh smiled, as his ship followed its parasites in, guns blazing...with all the kuve and straaves purged from the crew, this ship's klin, if it were possible to imply Klingon attributes to ptakh, had improved considerably.
Its new navigator, an Orion, certainly showed more skill than Maria, now being broken to her new role, her natural role, by kathoey back in the slave pens on Wynhome, with the only tattoos she'd be permitted were those marking her as straav and the personal property of the lord of the family Mo'kai, the Patriarch having promised her to Kargh as a reward for the intelligence he'd brought him.
“Kapla” Kargh said again, the traditional Kling expression of approval, translated by Earthers as “success,” but, literally meaning “to die well,” with honor, in service to your family and the komerex Klin, the fsmily to which all Klingons owed first alleigsnce.
Bhar Korf zantai-Mogh personally manned the weapons station, destroying the enemy with a will, while the navigator stood the ship on its jets to heel it back around into the battlespace.
And, right into the guns of one of the Fed ships, a Federation-class dreadnaught, though heavily-modified from, and far more massive than its original spe--
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
15:06:02
”Bra, Rear Admiral Oolof Gudmundsen said softly, as, on HMS Hood's master holoproj, an Orion battle cruiser met its violent end at the guns and torps of the 400-kiloton Fed starliner USS Star Empire, Sub0Lieutenant Gloria Parker's AuxCon team dispensing with that /orion's flotilla of parasite craft with the Vanguard-class dreadnaught cruiser's 2,250 interceptors.
“Comm sent, sir,” AB Comms Indicia Prynn reported from the comm station, the commander of 18th Scouting group, his throat parched from the enerveraating heat in CIC, nodding his head, and taking another swallow of cold saline solution.
”Bra,” Gudmundsen vroaked out to his comms operator, as Lieutenant Commander Cori vander Roome's eight, prow-mounted quad 18” accelerators swept the sky of another seven Orion vessels, fragments from intercepted four-ton rounds ruppung through dozens more, leaving them deadstick and drifting.
Though not for long, the Orions, one by one, choosing to destroy themselves rather than be taken alive.
“Rio Grande,” Indicia reported,”acknowedges your comm, Admiral; friendly units in system ve toring toward intercept in binary's outermost Kuiper belt.”
“Now entering,” Executive Warrant Officer Annika Stansfeld reported from the radar station,”Crone/Ragnar outer Kuiper belt; quantum tunnels, tree-five thousand, closing enemy JMOB on intercept. Enemy launching all remaining fleets.”
Just then, the belly of the Dezzie beast lit up, gushing forth hot plasama and metallic fragments, as the twenty-four 18” guns of the light cruiser HMS Diogenes unleashed a 240-round salvo into the fire from Pioneer's interceptors, the ensuing shower of relativistic fragments ripping through the platform's stardock and industrial sectors, as well as scouring away radiators, interceptor mounts and main-battery turrets.
259-69M2
15:06:59
“Gods,” Saul remarked, as the enemy platform, dwarfing even a Leviathan by at least two orders of magnitude, dominated the DRADIS slate,”what a monster.”
“A shepherd slew a giant with just a sling, according to the Word, Saul,” Adama, no less impressed with the giant now being attacked on all sides, as it began launching warships from its belly by the thousands.
“Mister Gaeta?” he asked, his operations officer replying,”Admiral Cain's ordered BSG75 to hold station with the 1st Composite Fleet and 12th Battle Group, and defend the Anchorage.”
Adama nodded.
He was down to five operational Emperor-class battlestars, Galactica included, two Minervas and forty-two Valkyries, so, it only made sense the remnants of BSG 75 be held to the rear with the recents arrivals from still another time and place whose loyalty and reliability Vice Admiral Cain and Captain Jurgen hadn't had time to ascertain, and the composite force of Xenos, who no Alliance Fleet officer worth his salt could fully feel comfortable fighting alongside.
The eenemy behemoth's DRADIS icon flashed white a moment, then returned, moving much slower than before, trailing debris, and no longer launching warships, too many Alliance and allied icons blinking furiously and going dark, as the enemy Goliath and its warships, fighters, and drounes fought savagely on.
“We should launch fighters in support,” Saul suggested, Adama shaking his head no.
“Only the Starhawk squadrons on the Minervas,” eavh of the two strike battlestttars having a total of nine Starhawk squadrons, and no Vipers,”have a chance at hurting it, and...”
At that point, his voice left him, as a cold feeling crept up his body, and the hairs at the back of his neck stood on end.
“Bill?” Saul asked, concerned.
“...we're going to need them here,” Adama realized.”Correct, Mister Gaeta?”
]i]”DRADIS contacts, tree-niner-zera-zera,”[/i] Gaeta said, as Adama knew he would,”tree-five-two karom won-five, niner point foah terakloms, CBDR, closing Ragnar Anchorage, max av!”
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
Bred by the Peshkun and the Meskun—sole remnants of the Klahrun Imperium of this time and place—to be cannon fodder, the three-meter tall, blue-haired, white-eyed, lipless Gomtu shambled toward the retreating Resisters, determined to carry out their biological imperative.
With more than a little encouragement from the Terran patriots a safe distance behind them:
”Hey, Gom, whtcha gonna do to 'em?!”
As one, each of the shambling, muscle-bound giants swept the area in front of them with their massive douvle-headed axes, and grunted in reply”gonna rapeum, killum, eatum!”
And not even Darla putting three rounds through the exposed chest of the lead Gomtai, leaving a smoking tunnel in place of his heart and much of his spinal column and lungs would sway his fellows from that goal, the other Goms stepping over their former leader's corpse in a sickening series of crackling sounds, while Darla and the other Resisters fired and ran like hell through the streets of Valentine.
Burned-out buildings, shells of vehicles and corpses being fed upon by the karnaks all round both sets of antagonists, a MAHEM beam from the Ifsnii's weapon burning another chasm through another Gom's chest cavity, the others repating the cry ”rapeum, killum, eatum,” while some gormless Terran gushed, on Darla's BCI, about the Gomtu being”perfect apex predators, the very idea of alpha masculinity we Humans strive toward,” as, overhead, a constellation of camera drones followed the shambling blue hulks.
The Peshkai and his girlfriend brought down another pair of alien goliaths with short, well-aimed bursts, Darla accounting for another of their relentless number.
The rest continued toward them, grunting promises of rape, murder, and cannabilism, the Ifsnii, Natira Second Subaltern Kyzz, growling,”I wish they'd just shut up,” as she took still anoer Gom, this one between his pupiless eyes,
Cannisters arced over their heads, clattered on the pavement, and emitted ultrasonics which had the remaining Goms howling in pain, as they fell to their knees, their axes sounding like an entire kitchen's worth of pots and pans, as they fell from hands now clutching massive heads.
Eight 7.62mm MAHEM beams burning them down where they stood, a Welsh-accented male voice exhorting the Resisters to ”fuckin' move, ya wuyong de hundan!”
Darla didn't need to hear that twice, running past a bald Human male his face heavily tattooed, ears pierced with gages, another black, dreadlocked Human male, both descendants of the Human exodus, via sleeper ships, from the Earth of this reality, as its civilization had collapsed, and the planet fallen into a second Dark Ages almost five hundred seventy years ago, their time.
With the two Humans were a trio of Peshkun, all, along with Natira, Darla's opposite numbers in the Rimmer military.
They covered the manhole, Darla shouldering her weapon, and descending the ladder leading to the hot, foetid depths in the darkness below, as fast as she could, without losing her grip, three more Rimmers, a slight Human female an Ifsnai, and a Gomtai, helping her into the bed of another hover transport hovering above the river of raw sewage bubbling, boiling, and stinking in thr bioluminescent-lit gloom, the remaining Resisters, then the rest of the Rimmer recon team, following soon after, the bald Human male being the last one down.
“Won't be long before the other wankspanners find wher we enter the sewage system,” he remarked in a Welsh accent, as Second Officer Owain ap Grfydd was helped into the back by First Subaltern John Williams.
“Where's Meektrin?” ap Gryfydd asked, Natira shaking her head.
“A Human boy with a monosword cut him to ribbons,” she replied,”and he died with his teeth in a Slidarian's throat.”
“Damn,” ap Grfydd remark, pounding on the back of the window for the Gom, Sixth Subaltern Mok ka Ibar, to get the transport going, the Gomyai doing precisely that, raising roostertails of stinking water, as he shot off down the tunnel and into the gloom.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
15:08:15
At the center of Terran Starship Lex Galactica's bridge, Solomon Tarsos sat, and watched the enemy come to him,
First their fighters, bombers, qnd attack craft, the four and a half million ton Lex Galactica-class stellar domination platform, screened by twelve 360,000-ypn Ares-class SDPs, released its seven flotillas of Thunderbolts from its underside, at the same time it launched 2,880 fifty-ton F-14 Tomcat fighters from its hangar deck, spanning the topmost deck of the secondary hull, as it made its 45,000 interceptor batteries, stationed all throughout the ship, ready to counter incoming ordinance.
“Closing to gun range, Exalted Lord,” Lieutenant Commander William Landsdowne reported from the science station.”Largest enemy vessels appear to be--”
Tarsos tensed up, cold fury gripping him, as he regarded the ten 950-kiloton Ordo Galactica class first-rate starships of the line and 120 760,000-ton Ares- and 380,000-tpn Sovereign-class second and third-rates of the National Fleet amongst the enemy's ranks.
Fifty-ton Sagittarai fighters were liberally mixed in amongst the swarm of small craft merging with the fighters, attack craft, and gun sloops of his own two fleets.
Then, he looked at the tactical display on the left-hand arm of his command chair.
Twelfth Battle Group.
They were all squawking Twelfth Battle Group idents.
That Laamanite cocksucker who'd helped Freeman betray him.
But his flag wasn't squawking as Divina Voluntas, but as Mea Culpa.
But, he was on that ship.
And, he was going to die.
Inadequate payment for his crimes against Tarsos, for his rank ingratitude, but Tarsos would take it.
16 SEPTEMBER, Y169
15:09:16
“Lock main battery and spinal mounts on the ship squawking as the Mea Culpa,” the Patriarch of the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy ordered.
“Aye, sir,” Commander Arne Wiensenthal replied from the Lex Galactica's weapons station, as he readied the ninety quad-mount 18” accelerators, and the quartet of 36” accelerators mounted along the keel of the arrowhead primary hull to unleash hell and death on the treacherous Benedict.
“Helmsman, take us into the geart of the enemy,” barked Vice Admiral Ardak sutai-Kumerian at center of Imperial Klingon Vessel Void Hunter's grishly yellow-lit bridge.”Weaponeer, fire as soon as you have the range. Release all attack craft, and launch fighters. Action!”
”Acting!”]/i] his bridge officers replied with a single thunderous voice, the 225,000-ton C11 battlecruiser, built unlike any other vessel in the service of the Deep Space Fleet, surging forward at Q13, fifty-ton ZR fighters vomiting from the mass accelerator launch tubes in the forward part of the triangular secondary hull, its thity-two 17” accelerators, eight each in the forward part of the four squarish engine nacelles integrated into the sevondary hull, rather than hang down from it, as in other Klingon warships, 320 four-ton penetrators racing toward the enemy hulls at near-light speed, while 2,250 interceptor guns under the control of the cadets and ensigns manning Auxiliary Control under venerable Commander Kalev sutai-Degara's watchful eye shot down incoming fighter and attack ships, and fragmented inbound ordinance.
The bridge shuddered and momentarily went dark, at the same time the central holotank lit up with a dozen enemy ships, mainly the 380- anf 760-kiloton hulls of the other Earthers, these Russies, disappearing in flashes of white light, while another twenty now drifted, holed and powerless in the void, a cheer going up from the bridge crew, even Specialist Chief Engineer Vrenak, who, instead of bothering his commander with hysterical damage and status reports, preferred to let his commander read those reports for themselves, as he got on with the job of fixing his ship.
”Kapla,” Kumerian said to his gunner, Lieutenant Makarian, that simple sentiment, delivered calmly, not doing the klin raging in Kumerian's veins justice.
He wanted to pound the arms of his chair, lead his crew in song, as they destroyed the enemies of the kitumba komerex klin, father, mother, and owner of every Klingon.
But, that was only done in episodes of Battlecruiser Vengance, these men and women were real Klingons, the children of Kahless, the sons and daughters of the Empire of Steel.
They did not sing.
They did what they were bred from birth to do: Hunt the enemies of the komerex klin, kill them, and either win through to live one more day, or fight for eternity in the Black Fleet which defended the gates ofStovokor.
It was that simple, and Kumerian was glad hischoiceshad once again been reduced to these two possibilities, no khesterex thats like his exile to a penal cruiser, or his equally onerous assignment as commander of the Red Fleet, no worrying about a knife in the back, or a late-night visity from Security, as he had, when he'd been one of the six thought admirals posted to the Imperial court on Klinzhai.
No, he thought, his bridge again trembling, briefly going dark, Helmsman Kvat standing Void Stalker on his jets to take him back into the battlespace, as his master briefly studied the damage reports in his BCI,this, this is how a Klingon should live his life, and, if necessary, how he should give up that lufe, with his eyes open, and his teeth in his enemies' throats.
Kapla, he whispered, a coomplimeny for his crew, and a ptayer for himself, as Void Stalker again plunged himself into the enemy's heart.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
Stevie was out there in all that, risking her life in a frail shell of a Corsair.
Andi put that thought aside, sweat running down her face, evaporating in the oppressive heat of CIC, ss, with a though, she put the pipper on the Dezzie JMOB, and released a salvo from the main battery.
“Fuck,” she swore softly, a squadron of Argentine [iBixmarck]/i]0class starliners and another of Terran DominionAres-class SDPs interposing themselves between the JMOB struggling to evade fire from multiple vectors and 350 four-ton relativistic penetrators, a succession of direct hits lighting up the wespons holoproj, while a shower of fragments created by the interceptors on both the doomed starships and the Dezzie platform ripped through the 750-megaton behemoth, rupturing nacelles, scouring away main-battery and interceptor mounts, destroying radiators, and further breaching the hull, glowing, glassy holes of entry and exit wounds marking paths of destruction where entire compartments and everything inside them, had been completely vaporized.
The impacts also sent the enemy JMOB along unintended vectors, the platform furiously firing its remainimg torches and RCS thrusters to regain control, Andi's heart leaping, seizing, as attack sjips and fighters, including several Corsairs, closed the enemy JMOB and pelted it with r-gun, torpedo, and MAHEM fire.
CIC ent dark again, Andi only viscreally aware of Sylvia Tilly's latest reports of damage and staatus, as Enterprise's gunner put the pipper on a squadron of Dezzie Rockweel-class atmored cruisers, and closed the firing circuit, twelve more direct hits, plus another twelve Dezzie starliners deadstick and drifting, while Vipers and Sacarabs swarmed Enterprise, Andi vectoring some of the ship's Picadors to engage them, supported by Tanya Cronenberg's AuxCon team and their interceptor batteries, while Mister Kirk twisted his ship in every direction at once to avoid incoming fire.
Another dozen Terran Dominion warships, these being 95,000-ton saucer, cylinder and swept-back nacelled Kearsarge-class “new light cruisers,” twelve 18” r-guns on the dorsal saucer, twelve on the ventral, no fighters or attack craft, the light cruisers charging into the salvo she'd vectored toward them, ten of them destroyed, another two deadstick and drifting, a stable octet of 225-kiloton Terran ]i]Vicennes[/i]-class battle cruisers going up in roars of white light, their four squadronmates and five of the Terrans' new 760-kiloton Texas-class dreadnaughts riddled stem to stern with glassy, flowing holes leaking wisps of plasma, their nacelles carried away, subliminated into still mre plasma, by fragments of projectiles their point-defense weapons had intercepted.
CIC just kept getting hotter, as it went dark still again, Andi only vaguely aware of the salt encrusting her burning face, as she continued targeting and firing Enterprise's main battery, Mister Kirk standing the ship on her jets, heeling her back into the battlespace, a Reb Virginia dying, as Andi caught it in mid-pivot, at the same time crippling most of his squadronmates, as she mechanically took another bottle of cold saline solution from a passing bot, chugged it down thoughtlessly, and continued doing her job.
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
15:11:04
“--re-installed,” Sylvia's holoimage reported,”internal temp 82 degrees, falling; primary electrics 45% restored, primary ficon back on linw, all other damage under repair.”
Kim, head throbbing from the heat, could only nod in reply, finishing a bottle of saline and starting another, as Draco drover his ship straight through a formation of Reb armored cruisers and bullet-shaped Orion machines, Andi hammering away at them with the main battery, as Enterprise's drones snd interceptors fought off inbound fighters and ordinance.
On the tactical holoproj, Kim saw the Dezzie JMOB, plasma, xoolant, lide and anti-lide steeaming from a thousand wounds like a bllod trail, as it made for one of the larger asteroids in the binary's outermost Kuiper belt.
That asteroid split apart by spinal MAHEM beams from a Rimmer light dreadnaught, then pulverized by a quartet of 36” rounds from one of the Alliance Leviathans, itself ripped to shit, the stumps of four of its eight drive nacelles spewing streams of liquid hydrogen and liquid antihydrogen continuing to annhilate one another as they came into contact.
Four more 36” penetrators were turned into relativistic shrapnel by the JMZOB's working interceptors, the platform unable to evade those fragments, as they inflicted further damage.
Draco violently wrenched Enterprise up and hard to port to avoid a salvo from an Argie Busmarck's six dozen, prow-mounted 15” accelerators, Andi killing him with a well-aimed salvo taking six of the Boche's squadronmates, while crippling over two dozen other Argentine and Reb cruisers and starliners.
“Good,” Kim managed to croak out, befoew raking another swallow of saline.
“Good,” she repeated, as her ship fell on several Dezzie Rockwells closing the mortally-wounded Alliance Leviathan.
259-69M2
15:11:40
“--five and six destroyed,” Saul reported in the sweltering, red-lit chaos of Galactica's CIC.”Pentrations, decks 13 through 15, framees 8 to 115, all spaces in between gutted, no survibors.”
“Prow gun has target!” Gaeta announced, the icon of Adama's battlestar almost merging with that of one of the largest Royal United States machines on the DRADIS slate.
”Fire!” Adama croaked, a medicae orderly applying a cold compress to his burning forehead at the same time she handed him a bottle of cold saline solution, Adama's eyes on the DRADIS slate, as, reflexively, he downed the entire vottle of cold saline and accepted another.
Galactica's intended target fragmented two of the four rounds vectored at him from the prow-mounted 36” macrocannon, those fragments ripping through him, as the other two both arrived on target at the same time, striking dead-on, taking another pair of four and a half-megaton warships with him, as he briefly lit up the DRADIS slate, then went dark.
As CIC went dark still again, the space bursting into flame, exploding, screaming, sounds which also visited Adama in his dreams, sounds the old Alliance Fleet navarch had prayed to the Gods he'd never hear again in reality.
Whatever the Gods' intentions, it always seemed Humans had other plans, whether 2,000 years before, when The 144,000 had risen against the High Lords, as they fought one another, or now, when that murdering bastard Zarek, instead of just accepting his defeat and the will of his fellow citizens, had decided his power was more important than even the lives of those fellow citizens.
More medicae orderlies were either helping the more severely wounded of Adama's watchstanders from the command deck, or carried bodies, many mangled and burned beyond recognition, from the space to the ship's morgue, Adama wondering how many letters home he'd have to write, and if they could even be sent, given the circumstance.
He wondered, as he always did, what he would say to makee the loss of a loved one more nearable to those left behind, because, in all his years on service, he still didn't know what those magic words were.
The main batteries, nine quad-mount eighteen-inch macrocannon on the prow, dorsal and bentral spines, all opened up on a pair of Terran ships, both 760-kiloton vessels, smaller 95- and 190-kiloton Terran vessels interposing themselves between the fusillade and their larger consorts, paying for that with their lives, as Galactica's port flak guns reduced their salvos to rains of near-lightspeed shrapnel which opened further bleeding wounds in the old girl.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
A salvo of MAHEM torpedos from the 400,000-ton Federation-class dreadnaught USS Star Empire's twelve saucer and neck-mounted launchers sailed through the hole blown through the Terran light and heavy cruisers, downcycled to norm at point-blank range of the two Texas-class stellar domination platforms, and discharged their six-ton relativistic jets of molten metal.
Both ships shrivelling like paper in fire, before being consumed in flares of white light in the modified Federation starship's flickering main holoviewer, as Lieutenant Commander Marta DePaul let loose with the ten, quad-turrted 27” MAHEM beamers on the dorsal and ventral saucer, the salvo of 400 beams vsporizing a couple dozen Royal United States Concord-class fourth rates, crippling three times as many Somers-class fifth-rates rushing forward to screen their larger consorts, Lieutenant T'shaya taking her ship deeper into the battlespace at Q13, as Captain Anita Piper sipped on a bottle of coldd saline and desperately foought the overwhelming urger to simply pass out from the heat baking the bridge of her ship.
A 760,000-ton Russie Sovereign-class third-rate starship of the line pounded a Klingon A11 battleship massing only a little over half as much as its opponent, the Klingon giving as good as he got, his forty 18” r-guns, at the forward ends of his eight wing-mounted nacelles driving furious fusillades of four-ton penetrators into the Russie's interceptors, the Klink's own interceptors fragmenting incoming ordinance, while all round the two capital-class combatants, 5,000-ton Klingon G2 attack ships and fifty-ton ZR fighters duelled with five-kiloton Russie Mississippi-class gun sloops.
“Solution ready, weapons ready,” Marta reported, as a blinking crosshairs appeared on the Russie second-rate in Anita's tactical display.
“Fire,” Anita ordered, Star Empire pouring beams and torps into the distracted Russie, killing him, and equally as important in Anita's heat-sodden mind, denying the Klink his kill.
Seven point six two millimeter Gatling MAHEMs along Star Empire's flanks then got to work on the enemy gun sloops, as they turned, and drove eighteen-inch rounds from their spinal r-guns toward the dreadnaught's point defenses.
The fragments still doing damage, as the bridge momentarily went dark, and the heat just got worse.
Lieutenant Commander Xenthia Calder reported from bridge engineering,”decks twenty-four and twenty-five, frames 12 to ninetten, penetrated, gutted, no survivors; radiators twelve and sixteen destroyed, internal temp now 104 dgrees, rising; primary power couplings six and nine deatroyed, all damage under repair.”
The dorsal MAHEMs caught a dozen Russie Chapultepec-class fourth-rates, while the ventral beamers tore into a squadron of Terran Chicago-class new heavy cruisers menacing a modified 190,000-ron Constitution-class heavy cruiser supportd by a pair of modified 95,000-ton Saladin-class destroyers with their twelve dorsal MAHEM beamrs and four ventral mounted torpedo tubes, torps flying in two successive salvos from Star Empire's torpedo tubes toward a squadron of Ares-class SDPs screened by a mixed group of Chicagos and Kearsarge-class new light cruisers, Tomcats and Thunderbolts racing ahead of the formation, salvoing five- and eight-inch r-gun rounds toward Star Empire[, as her own Thunderbolt flotilla, firing their eight-inch MAHEM beamers and salvoing MAHEM torps in continous cycle, raced in at Q16 to defend their mothership.
A Rimmer light dreadnaught passed over Star Empire, firing all her beamers and torps into the enemy formation, as her lancers supported the flotilla of Bolts, while a Star Tiger-class light dreadnaught decloaked in the middle of the enemy, the three allied capital shops, netween them, destroying all the SDPs and ten of their screening cruisers, leaving another two dozen heavy and light cruisers deadstick and drifting.
The A11 from before returned, just as Marta shifted her fire to a pair of Russie Alabama-class first rates, the Klingon taking both vessels with direct hits, crippling a dozen or so second- and third-rates moving to support their larger kin, a hearty female Klingon's holo appearing in front of Anita's eye, just to tell her,”now, Starfleet, I steal your kill.”
“Acknowledged,” Anita simply replied, as a group of Anglo-Swedish light and armored cruisers streaked past both ships to shoot down still more enemy hulls.
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
15:13:01
NAS Rio Grande's CIC went dark still again, Lieutenant Commander Keisha Robinson's holo reporting,”Combat, Engineering, radaitors seven, twelve, eightten shot away, internal temp 100 degrees, rising; primary power grid completely disrupted, secondary power grid 87% disrupted, primary fire control offline, switching to secondary.”
“Copy,” Yukari replied, the starliner's nine quad-turreted, prow-mounted 18” r-guns scything through av Roman formation, killing eighteen 380-kiloton Guilio Ceesare-class starliners and another twenty or so Conditteri-class armored cruisers, while leaving thirty hulls of both classes drifting and deadstick.
“Rimmers and Anglo-Swedish scouting group entering combat with second enemy force,” Radioman 2C Donita Wagoner reported,”per your orders, Admiral.”
“Acknowledged, Radio,” Yukari said, after another swallow of saline, as, on the master holoproj, Roman Gladius heavy fighters and Martiobarbulus combat drones ran straight into Rio Grandes' own Picadors and Corsairs, as they were turned around on the starliner's flight deck, then re-launched via the prow-mounted acceleterator launch tubes.
She didn't have time to wonder if diverting the Rimmer fleet and its attached scouting group would be enough to turn the tide of the second combat, nor did the commander of the Mobile Strike Fleet have the luxury of second-guessing, as she still had an enemy JMOB and a substansial amount of its embarked fleets to deal with here and now.
Including some several hundred ships of the Orions' Cluster Cartel and former WYN Patriarchy which Lieutenant Commander Alma Baylor's main battery stabbed out toward in salvo after 360-round salvo, Midshipman Connie Bexar's AuxCon team dealing with the waves of Bucaneer and Piranha attack ships racing toward the beleaguered North American starliner.
As a trio of Manhattan-class light cruisers, squawking as Toronyo, Pueblo, and Daniela Beckett's Muskogee cut acroos Rio Grande's bow, and put rounds through a dozen half-megaton Orion Godfather-class and WYN Megalodon-class dreadnaught in the center of the enemy's formation, while Commander Rebecca Ramsey rammed Rio Grande straight through the center of the combined Orion-WYN formation.
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
15:15:09
“Hard about!” Captain Daniela Beckett shouted, as North American Starships Toronto,Pueblo, and Muskogee were about to leave the immediate battlespace.”Another run!”
“Comng about,” Commander Talina Allred replied, standing her ship on her jets, whipping her smartly about so Lieutenant Commander Suzette Kroger's six, prow-mounted, quad eightten inchers could vrctor 240 rounds downrange, at least ten of which struck bullet-shaped Orion and piscine-form WYN warships squarely, sending them up in roars of white-hot light, while fragments from intercepted rounds scoured away radiators, ruptured nacelles, and tore through the hulls of several times that number, rendering them drifting and deadstick.
“Remaining Orion and WYN ships,” Senior Chief Radarman Miles McGrath reported,”closing rapidly to intercept.”
Talina made another hard turn and burn, as, on the tactical holoproj, Beck saw the Orion and WYN capships which had been closing Rio Grande were now turning to engage her wing of three, 190-kiloton, Manhattan-class light cruisers, now turning around and launching their remaining Corsairs and Picadors as fast as thry could, while Midshipman elody Cohn's AuxCon team struggled to bring the ship's interceptors to bear on all that inbound ordinance, and nSuz's arsenal stabbed out repeatedly at the enemy hulls with shafts of blue-hot fire.
As the rest of Fleet Scouting Group 55, led by Enterprise, cut across the bows of Muskogee and her wing, as the rest of Fleet Battle Squadron 20 formed up on Rio Grandes, now twisting, turning, and hunting down the WYN and Orion hulls in her path.
“Enterprise sends:” Radioman 1C Carole Vaughn said.”' you still owe me a backrub, you can't get out of it that easy.”
Beck grinned, even as the heat of CIC threatened to cook her alive.
“Send to Enterprise:” she ordred,”'Have I told you lately, how much I love you?'”
In reply, “Semper Victoria” boomed and pounded over the 1-MC, as Talina turned and burned still again to keep her ship in the fight.
”Holy Mother of...” Miles interjected, as, on the master holproj, some 150 kiloklicks further ahead, the enemy JMOB loosed a furious cannonade from all his remaining portside main batteries against a badly-wounded Alliance Leviathan, whose surviving point-defenses shredded all those incoming rounds, but, unable to avoid the resulting shower of fragments, was knocked about, holed in tens of thousands of places, had main-battery turrets ripped clean away, one of its two flight decks gutted, its radiators ripped away, and its prow guns knocked out of action in showers of metallic fragments and plasma.
“Fucking A,” Beck whispered, her ship having its own battle to fight, and unable to do anything for the mortally-wounded Leviathan, but watch its imminent destruction.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
“Not tired,” Mok grunted, humpimg nearly the transport's entire load of vax and medical supplies through the catacombs underneath the ruins of Sinclair House.”This nothing. Mok ka Ibar can carry more than this break no sweat, never get tired. Mok ka Ibar never get tired, need no sleep, sleep for dead.”
“All right, then,” Darla said, continuing to cover the Gom's back, along with the rest of the Rimmer recondos, even though they, in theory, home safe.
In theory.
In reality, she was behind enemy ;ines on a Terran-occupied planet, with the enemy bringing even more patriots from Terran-occupirf space to overwhelm its native population.
Its surviving native population.
Up top, the violent counter to peaceful, but ultimately doomed peaceful pro-independence protests continued unabated, with more casualties flooding the catacombs every second, Darla not wanting to even consider the possibility of what the bastards would do, once they decided these underground passages were filled to capavity.
Someone, possibly Colonel Aldrin, had been thinking along those lines, a transparent barrier sealing off one end of the passage serving as the Resistance's hospital, Mok, with a grunt, having to bend over double to fit both his massive frame, and the medical supplies through the airlock from motr humanoid-sized creatures, while those inside were already wearing MOPP gear over surgical scrubs, the masks for which, for now, hanging down round their necks.
A Peshkii and a Human girl were both waiting to relieve Mok of his burden, passing the vax and other supplies and equipment cucker brigade style up achain of people, as two other Resistance workers issued MOPP suits to Darla and the others.
“Colonel Aldrin's orders,” one of them, an older Dral, huffed and wheezed, as he handed Darla her MOPP suit, which slipped on over her street clothes, the Kroimeekur with it, her hair greyish white, telling Mok,”sorry big fella, nut we don't have gear your size.”
“Mok no mind,” Mok gruntd.”Mok breathe bad stuff, not die, Creators made Gomtun that way.”
He then ducked back through the airlock, putting an incongrously-gentle hand(the size of a Tetsudo merkava)on Darla's shoulder to restrain her.”Little ones, stay, rest, only alow Mok down. Mok will be all right.”
With that, he was through the airlock and on his way back to the hover transport for the rest of its cargo.
“Will he be okay?” Darla asked, John answering,”probably not, but Mok thinks he's isomething to prove.”
“That,” Owain added, as he joined the two of them,”he isn't a thug and a bully boy for others to use and abuse.”
“Yeah,” Darla remarked, sighing,”I supposed when your bleedin' race's been weeaponinzed, you've got...issues.”
“An understatement,” John replied, slipping on his MOPP suit over his blouse and kilt, transferring his sgian dubh, his pair of machetes, and his 12.7mm MAHEM pistol to the outer garment once he'd finished putting it on.
“When on Adam...” he offered as an explanation when he noticed Darla staring at his kilt.
“Most Adamites are Scottish nationalists,” Owain remarked,”the descendants of Valentine Sivlair's merry band of Caledonian supermen, who colonized Adam, Sinclair and the other Imperial worlds during the Exodus from Earth That Was ovr five hundred years ago.”
“But,” Darla remarked,”you're Welsh, and John's no true Scotsman.”
John smirked.
“That was bad, love,” Owain replied,”and, you should feel bad.”
He smiled, adding:
“Near as anyone can figure, there was a last desperate rush for the sleeper ships, as Earth That Was went to Hell all round them during the Storm and the Fall, that followed the last Presidential election in the former United States, and, just about everyone that could crammed themselves in with Sinclair's followers, and, as the barbarians were at the gate, there wasn't time to kick them off. Some, like John here, were ubers as well, while my bloodline is...somewhat more normal.”
John snorted.
“And,” he remarked,”brother Owain here uses the word 'normal' very loosely.”
All three Humans laughed at that, while Brittany, her MOPP suit covered in dried blood of various colors, slid into Darla's embrace.
“Missed you, baby,” she whispered, hugging Darla, as if she'd never see her again.
“Wasn't gone that long, possum,” Darla said, giving her Brittany a gentle squeeze.
“Missed ya anyway, sweetie,” was Brittany's answer, as Owain and John made excuses, then left the two women alone.
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
15:16:10
“Hot damn!” Hunt exulted, amidst the body-strewn, burning wrexkage of his own CIC, as, on the flickering main holoviewer, he watched relativistic shrapnel rip apart one of the eagle-headed four and a half megatonne hulls straight out Keithley's bad fiction, crippling, disarming, and rendering it defenseless.
“Now,” he said to Stephens, struggling to stand with one arm broken, and blood running profusely from a gash in his scalp,”we kill it.”
“Roll platform!” he instruvted Pioneer's helmsman.”All starboard main batteries will fire, the moment they come to--”
“Sir!” shrieked a watchstander, Hunt watching with horror, as the four and a half megaton derelict suddenly leaped to a velocity of ninety percent real lightspeed, ragged sections of its remaining engine nacelles and mosst oof its stern a cloud of metallic debris, coolant and plasma the hulk was now leaving rapidly behind.
259-69M2
15:16:10
“Main batteries,” Jurgen reported amidst the carnage of Pegasus' CIC,”prow guns, Warp generators...we're frakked, with no lube, sir.”
“Enemy rolling platform!” a surviving watchstander reported, as Vice Admiral Ciaphas ain did the only thing he could.
“Ship,” he said,”on word of command one, you will detonate all remaining remass. Do you understand.”
“The cycle must be broken,” was the reply of Pegasus' Hybrid.”We, you amd I, must do what can to break it. End of line.”
“End of line indeed,” Cain whispered, his ever-faithful Jurgen objecting,”Afmiral, no, you--”
“I can, Fenris,” was Cain's reply, as he stared at the DRADIS slate.”As must we all, when the occasion demands.
My word, old friend, doesn't count for much, but I will speak highly of you, when I stand before the Throne to answer for all I've done. Now, for Gods' sake, man, give the order.”
“All crew to the teleportaria!” Jurgen ordered.”Abandon ship, I say again, all crew to the teleportaria, abandon ship! Comms, advise Flame of Purity of our situation.”
This was followed by staccato thunderclaps of multiple Warp tunnels opening, then closing all over the CIC.
And, Cain was alone with his stricken battlestar.
“Detonate remass,” he ordered amidist the arcing and crackling fires of the shattered command deck.
259-69M2
15:17:45
“All Pegasus crew, save one,” Helo informed her, as Jurgen emerged from a Warp tunnel, and stood beside her,”accounted for.”
“Admiral Cain?” Kara asked, certain the answer would be yes, Helo's nod merely confirming her hunch, Jurgen informing her, tears in his eyes,”Admiral won't be joining us, Navarch.”
“Sir!” the DRADIS operator's shout directed Kara's attention back to the repeater slate above her head, just in time to see the icon representing Pegasus suddenly leap forward, then merge with icon for the enemy goliath, the two contacts blinking furiously for a moment, before disappearing.
“Frak,” Kara whispered, even as Flame's prow guns and main battery weapons engaged the enemy all round her.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
”Stay with him!” Tarsos exhorted his vridge crew,”You will stay with him, until you kill him, if any of you ever want to set foot on Terra ever again! Is that clear?!”
His bridge officers said nothing, even as Lex Galactica's command deck went dark, burst into flame, screamed and exploded all around them, the ship's prow guns and main batteries fixated on one target out of all the others out there.
Mea Culpa.
Mea Culpa, who kept eluding the kill, even as fragments of penetrators ran her through from stem to stern, just as fragments from the enemy's Shivas and main-battery accelerators returned the favor, interceptor guns on both ships dealing with ordinance, Tomcats, Sagitaraii, and Thunderbolts.
Lex Galactica's helmsman, a first-class petty officer who'd taken the place of the ship's regular helmsman, rurned and burned as his opposite number on the Mea Culpa, allowing Commander Trey Ransome, at the weapons and navigation station, to continue brutally punishing the treacherous Laamanite, even as he returned his antagonist's fire.
The bridge went dark, shuddered, exploded, screamed, and burned anew, the report from the ensign now in command of the engineering section calm, professional, to the point, unlike others of his kind Tarsos had dealt with in the past:
“Decks 32-35, frames 1 through 180, gutted, no survibors; hangar bay gutted, no survivors, nacelles four, five, and seven destroyed, radiators eleven through twenty destroyed, internal heat--”
“Comms!” Tarsos ordered the yeoman third manning the comm station.”Oder Garrett and his ships to deal with that distraction!”
That distraction being a Rimmer light dreadnaught and its lancers, all currently targeting Lex Galactica, Rear Admiral Steven Garrett interposing his remaining light, heavy and battle cruisers between the Rimmer and their larger consort, freeing Lex Galactica to carry out its--
“Fuck!” he swore, as he was violently whipped back and forth in his seat, tasting blood, as he bit down on his tongue, while burning vodies and bits of bridge briefly floated upward, then came crashing down.
A Federation Star Tiger-class light dreadnaught had decloaked right on top of Lex Galactica was now driving MAHEM beams and torps through his forward dorsal interceptors at point-blank range.
”Open the range!” Tarsos ordered.”Get us away from that Fed, maintain intercept vector for Mea Culpa!”
”Now, Tarsos roared in impotent fury, as Mea Culpa moved further away from the judgement it had coming, while the Fed light dreadnaught just would not disengage Lex Galactica.
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
15:20:37
“It seems thaat one's unually obssessed with us,” Haggerty observed, as Mea Culpa's CIC fell down round the two men's ears.
“It does, at that,” Benedict, eyes on the large contact trying to disengage the much-smaller Fed warship on the Detection Ranging, Imaging And Distsnce(DRIAD)repeater holodisplay.”I don't think we've pissed off anyone in this time and place, at leeast not...”
“No,” he then whispered, as a thought came unbidden, unwanted.
Saul Tarsos had used one of the Angels' artifacts to evade capture and second death as one of them, when Freeman, with Benedict's complicity, had made his play, four years ago, in his former time and place.
“Tarsos?!” asked an incredulous Haggerty.”You think...”
“It seems,” Benedict observed,”my sins will follow me to my grave, Rance, regardless of time and place.”
“Quartermaster!” he decided.”If Saul wishes to makee this between us, we should oblige him. Close with his ship, all guns to fire, when solution ready!”
“Aye, sir!” the young women at the helm, and overseeing the massive first-rate's weapons both said simoultaneously...four years ago, he wouldn't haave stood for any of their kind anywhere, except in collars and chains, amusing their anointed lords and masters, as the canon version of the Book had commanded.
The version Rockwell had published, after the sudden death of Joseph the Smith during the Exodus to Terra Nova.
Not what the Smith had directly transcribed from the Book of the Angels over two centuries' before.
Had it been any wonder the Angels had foraken...turned on...the People six years prior at 40 Eridani and AD Leonis, and, instead had chosen to side with those deemed Laamanites?
Their subsequent actions, the denial by the Thirteen of the Angels abandoning them, all of it, including an outsider assuming the Crown of the Lord, following the outcome of the elections for the Qurom of Twelve and the First Presidency, only served as further confirmation that the People, falsely so called, were, and had always been the Laamanites.
And, Avery Benedict had, in the service od those Laamanites, had unforgivably sinned, against God, against His Blue Angels, and most importantly, against the true People.
And, there would be an answer for that, in this life.
Mea Culpa's twin 40” Shivas and eleven remaining quad 18” accelerator turrets opened fire simoultaneously on Saul's ship, which immediately returned fire, interceptors and point-defense lance multi-launchers on both sides putting up fierce blue walls of defensive fire which fragmented the incoming ordinance on both sides, both ships taking horrendous damage, as they passed one another.
“Hard about!” Haggerty ordered, an IFF tag now appearing next to Saul's ship on the DRIAD repeater.
Of course he'd name his flagship Lex Galactica.
That had been the name of the ship shot out from under him by the cruiser Eagle, prior to its disappearance through the same artifact Saul himself had used.
He was alwaus a sentimentalist.
“Admiral,” Haggerty reported,”replicators have fully restocked our supply of quantum torpedos; both forward and aft torpedo rooms report ready.”
“Belay that last order, Quartermaster!” Benedict ordered.”Maintain present vector, overcycle quantum tunnel generators! Aft torpedo rooms, stand by!”
On the DRIAD repeater, the image of Mea Culpa leapt ahead, her quantum tunnel generators screaming, rattling the hull, as they pushed the ship yo analogous velocity of 274 trillion miles per second.
“Lex Galactica overctcling, pursuing!” the DRIAD operator, also one of these falsely labelled Laamanites, reported unnecessarily.
“Mmm hmm,” Benedict remarked.”Maintain present vector, let him come to us, Engineering, downcycle, and cut power on my mark.”
“Tell the aft torpedo rooms to double shot the tubes,” he then ordered Haggerty, the quantum tunnel generators reaxhing a crescendo, their harmonics converging to crack hull metal, and shatter the more rragile parts of CIC.
“Downcycle!” endict ordered,”Cut all power! “
CIC was now lit by the fires still raging through the space, Benedict counting to himself, waiting til he got to fifteen, before barking out”aft torpedo rooms, fire!”
159-69M2
15:21:30
“There's something new,” was Saul's observation, as dozens of four-ton, Warp-capable projectiles raced from the rear of the newcomers' flagship toward the Terran vessel harassing it.
“No,” Adama replied...there had been half-reconstructed Standard Template Constructs in the Sacred Database which had described torpedos, same as with other weapons systems which had either been irreparably damaged or irrereplacbly exhausted on the original Flame of Pority with only its macrocannon batteries in working order, Alliance scientists and engineers, with the aid of the wandering Gindaro, mistranslated by Xwnos as Jindarian, whose expertise in macrocannon design was unrivalled, choosing to devote their energies to replicating macrocannon tech for eventual use on their warships.
The Terran ship's flak cannon put up a heroic defense, but with as many of these Warp-capable, four-ton torpedos coming at it, a direct hit was inevitable.
And, it came, the ship's icon furiously blinking on the DRADIS repeater slate, then winking out.
Another behemoth Terran ship soon altering vector for the Mea Culpa while the latter was still powering back up.
“Helm,” Adama decided,” put us between those two; weapons, fire as soon as you have solutions!”
“We're the shepherd now?” Saul asked.
“We're what the Gods need us to be, old friens,” was Adama's reply, his wounded battlestar complying with his orders, putting herself and her guns between the Terran and the Mea Culpa, firing almost immediately thereafter with what arsenal she had left, as Gaeta reportd:
“Message from Captain Jurgen, aboard Flame od Purity...Navarch, Captain Jurgen reports Pegasu destroyed ramming enemy mobile base...Vice Admiral Cain was the only one aboard.
Per Fleet regulation 115, as next-most senior flag officer, you are requested and required to assume command of what's left of the Fleet.”
“Shitty timing,” Saul observed, CIC rocking under the two men's feet, going dark, bursting into flame, as the Terran ship tried blasting Galactica from its path.
True to its motto, the Grey Lady stayed with its largwr antagonist, pouring fire into its interceptors, damaging it through fragmentation.
But, frafments from the Terrans' ordinance, intercepted by the remaining flak guns, tore through Galactica in many, many places.
“Yeah,” Adama said, steeling himself for all those who wait for him, fingers pointed in accusation, before the Golden Throne,”shitty timing.”
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
That son of a bitch, that miserable Laamanite cocksucker, that goddamn black bastard son of a whore! Tarsos swore, cursing himself as well for completely forgetting quantum torpedosexisted in the time and place he'd been forced to flee,
That was his last thought, as the transporter effect took hold of him, and beamed him away from Lex Galactica's burning shambles of a bridge, just as another salvo of torpedoes was about to slam into he now-defenseless forward primary hull.
“Welcome aboard the USS Rex Galactica the idoyic captain idiotically stood up from his chair, to salute Tarsos, and say.
Since the idiot had deseted his post, Tarso drew his thirty-caliber accelerator pistol, and shot him dead, kicking what remained of the corpse aside, as he sat down in the center seat, buckled himself in, and ordered the helmsman,”mow, while that bastard's powering back up!”
“Altering course to intercept,” Rex Galactica's helmsman said, the four and a half-megaton SDP altering vector so Tarsos could finish what he started.
Only for one of the Alliance battlestars, smaller than the Rex by an order of magnitude, to put its gravely-wounded hull between Tarsos and the Mea Culpa.
“Kill it, and quickly!” Tarsos snapped to the weapons officer/navigator, aas the bridge went dark, caught fire, shuddered, screamed, and exploded, as frsgments of Alliance penetrators ripped through the ship from stem to stern, the jumpsuited tech at the bridge engineering station starting to shout out the damage report, when Tarsos told him to shut the fuck up, and fix his goddamn ship, then screaming at the helm and the weaponeer to stay the course, and blast the smaller battlestar the fuck out of his way, if they ever wanted to touch grass on planet Earth ever fucking again.
The smaller antagonist took damage, almost crippling damage, as her defenses shreeded Rex Galactica's fire, but it stayed with the larger Terran vessel, trading blow for blow, the rating at engineering not once reporting damage, as the bridge fell down, exploded, screamed, burned, and shook itself apart all around him, the helm and weapons officer also not swayed from the course Tarsos had set for them all.
He would remmove this annoying pest from his sky.
He would see justice done against that Laamanite cocksucker.
Only a matter of time.
259-69M2
15:22:00
“Make it stop,” Baltar sobbed, as he saw, was forced by his Cylon nature turned against him, Regina, all of sixteen, bent overZarek's desk, that damn collar compelling her to beg as Zarek drove himself into her.
“Oh, no, Gaius,” the bastard heaved and grunted,”oh, no, no, no, no! We're coming for you, Gaius, and, before I give you over to the demons of the Warp to be raped with big, firey demon dicks, I will make your traitorous bitch of a wife, and your abominations of daughter....I will make my bitches frakking watch frakking cheer, when I bend you ober, and—”
Then, abruptly, Zarek, that wntire horrible scene, was gone, a warm feeling coming over him, a female voice whispering in his head, be at peace, Gaius Vice President Baltar Alliance of the Twelve Tribes, be at peace, I will keep the bad things from hurting your soul any further.
My only regret is I cannot keep him from hurting your gindaro.
“W-who are you?” Baltar asked, as he remained prostrate on the floor od his quarters.
I am the Guardian of what your gindaro call the Emperor's Light. You may call me L'Thana; I am like you, in some ways, in others...I've been alone six hundred thousand of your years, ever since my companion, Qaldesh Qadaram, took his own life from despair at losing his own gindaro and mine.”
Gods.
Baltar could feel this being's unimaginable pain at being alone so long.
I sensed your distress, L'Thana continued,and I extended my consciousness around yours, to block it.
“Thank you,” Baltaar said, his voice ragged.
If only I could do more.L'Thana sadly replied.
“You've done enough,” Baltar said aloud.”More than enough. Ypu are at the core of Ragnar I?”
I am, L'Thana answered, Baltar nodding his head, as, slowly, he pulled himself up to a sitting position.
You will sing with me, one lone being asked another.
“Yes,” Baltar replied, without reservation, perhaps the only decision he did not doubt or regret, with the exception of marrying Tricia, having two children with her.
“Yes, of course.”
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
15:22:13
“Aft tubes reloaded, double-shotted,” Haggerty reported, as Mea Culpa restored power, and continuing to mover forwaard, out of the battlespace, maxav,”forward tubes loaded, double shotted.”
“I repay my debts, Master Commandant,” Benedict said.”Fire aft tubes on the Terran attacking Galactica, then have the quartermaster come about, so we can give them what's in the forward tubes as well.”
“Aye, sir,” Haggerty replied, giving the appropriate orders, Benedict's wounded beast of a first-rate starship of the line responding to his orders, salvoing four spreads of quantum torpedos toward the ship squawking as Rex Galactica(not as imaginative as I remebered him being thought Benedict) as Mea Culpa's quartwrmaster brought her ship smartly about.
“Take us back into the fight,” Benedict ordered, as a Federation light dreadnaught, a Rimmer warship of the same designation, and various friendly hulls vectoring from the system's uter Kuiper belt rapidly closed the remaining Terran and Royal United States warships.”Fire when in gun range.”
On the DRIAD repeater, Rex Galactica blinked furiously, before following Lex Galactica into oblivion.
“Am reading quantum tunnel activity aboard Rex Galactica,” the DrzIAD operator reported, an instant before Rex Galactica's death.” From one of the Royal US warships.”
“As I should've expected,” was Benedict's calm reply, as the quartermaster killed the ship's previous vector through space, boosted along its new vector, and closed to gun range of the remaining enemy combatants.
"The enemy is fear. The enemy is ignorance. The enemy is the one who says you must hate that which is different.
For, in the end,that hate will turn on you. And, that same hate will destroy you."
--Reverend Will Dexter, Babylon 5, "And, the Rock Cried Out 'No Hiding Place.'"
Because, in the end, Nex Benedict was one of us.
