GateWar Interludes
Twelve was annoyed and grumpy.
It wasn't time yet, and that had him grumpy. He had this secret build up going on, a few hidden shipyards constructed which he knew the others hadn't yet discovered and he couldn't throw that little fact in their faces. Why? Because it was a secret.
He wanted to throw the little fact that he had built two hundred ships that they had no idea about in their faces, but he wouldn't, it would be more then a little stupid.
Didn't stop him wanting to crow about it though.
Didn't stop that fact that the Secessionist's had far more ships then him, just shifted the scales from roughly 4 to 1, to 3 to 1. A bonus, but it still left his faction the second largest, the second best. It wasn't good enough for the destruction of the secessionist faction and the various pirate groups he really wished to carry out, but it put him slightly closer to the goal. Besides which, it was a pretty safe bet the others were trying to build ships in secret too, best not to trust the reported ship numbers too much. The Guardians he would ignore, they were fighting for their redemption in their own way, protecting an every increasing number of human settled worlds from the depredations of the other factions, they might be growing in strength, building their own ships and even training human crews but they weren't on the offensive and he had diplomatic relations with them, they were no threat.
The Loyalist Remnant, the Secessionists and the few pirate groups were though, they needed to be dealt with for a start. Then, the Goa'uld, the Aschen and any other that dared to threaten the human race. The day their was no threat to the humans would be the day they would have their redemption, and not a single second sooner.
Of course, that meant their faction would have to survive the determined efforts that would be made to destroy it, but he already had ‘Alpha Sites' of his own set up, just in case. Sure, if his main force was wiped out, it would take the Alpha's quite some time to build up enough forces to continue the Unforgiven agenda, but given time they could and would.
A knock sounded at his door, followed swiftly by the shape of the Two or Boomer unit that was his personal assistant. She no doubt had another important report for him to look at, but he wished she could improve her judgement, important went in the Inbox, she only had to bring in anything that required immediate attention, and that she hadn't gotten the hang of, yet. He knew he could find out anything his cylons knew just by pulling it from the network himself but frankly it was too much noise, too much data. It was far too easy for that little essential piece of information to get lost under all the trivialities, hence why he had someone… well, someone's to shift through it all for him and pass the important bits to him through this Two.
“The Secessionist have dropped at least one device on the surface of Earth”
Okay, now THAT rated a ‘most immediate'.
“Just one?”
“Intel is suggestive of a ‘softening' campaign, followed by a massed strike of heavy units”
Twelve grinned; it looked like he had an excuse to show the Secessionists exactly how busy he had been.
“There is this quote I learned last time I was on earth, one that seems very appropriate to this situation, Shakespeare I believe… Cry ‘Havoc', and let slip the dogs of war! ”
Two smiled, “Julius Caesar, act 3, scene 1”
Twelve raised a surprised eyebrow, “I'm impressed”
“Know thou enemy is certainly true, but if we are to have our salvation, we need to know what we are fighting for in the first place”
He nodded, “agreed. Do we know when and where the forces for the massed strike will assemble?”
“Not yet, but I have already informed our intelligence assets to make that information a priority”
“Good,” Twelve thought swiftly, his mind racing through the locations of every unit under his command, their status and what little he knew of Secessionist activity. He didn't know enough about that last, but then, he never did, that was the price of Intelligence, “have the fifth, tenth and eleventh fleets move to the front. Eleventh fleet is to reinforce defensive pickets as necessary and destroy any smaller groups of Secessionist vessels they come across. The fifth and tenth I will command myself, arrange transport”
“The tenth and eleventh are unblooded formations” Two pointed out reasonably.
“And the others should not yet know they exist, I am well aware of these facts,” Twelve shook his head, “but if we are to distract the secessionists from their assault on Earth, even divert their forces then we need ships enough to be a threat. We ever use those unblooded units or waste time gathering enough ships from across our space to be a threat, weakening most of our picket forces. No, we need those units now; we will just have to accept the somewhat higher casualties”
Two nodded, her mind already composing the appropriate orders, “do I have the twelfth and thirteenth covertly move forward, just in case?”
Twelve grimaced, considering it. Combined, the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth comprised the bulk of his hidden forces, those 200 capitals he had build in secret, in theory without anyone knowing about them. He needed to expose two of them for the mission he was about to carry out, but did he need to potentially expose the last two by bringing them forward as well?
There was a real risk of exposure too, but if the secessionists did decide to ruin his day, he would need those units, and the Secessionists were not spread anywhere near as far as his public assets were. He could see how he would need those ships, but he didn't want to risk their exposure and discovery.
Cost/Benefit analysis, that was more the domain of the Nines, the Doyle units then any other but they were almost exclusively Secessionist.
Frak it…
“Move them forward, but make damn sure they know to be covert” he couldn't risk a reprisal strike blowing through his line again; the last one had caused damage enough. He would have to risk their exposure.
‘That was target enough to grab their attention' twelve decided, his arms resting on the tactical display as he gazed down upon the system displayed within. ‘No shipyards, but a mid-range supply depot, a major asteroid mining facility, surface mining on six worlds, one surface and two orbital refineries, masses of transports, even a repair depot for support ships and a twenty baseship picket. Yes this system would do fine'
“Good choice Two,” Twelve glanced up at his second, “I approve”
Two nodded, pleased, “a heavy patrol of eighteen basestars moves through in approximately eight hours; when that happens raiders will scatter across the gulf randomly checking for fleets hiding outside the system itself. I suggest we should be gone before then”
Twelve growled, “Normally I would say what and intercept them, but today, I want to be sure word gets out…”
He shook his head, “100 basestars against twenty, this should be brief and good thing too, we will need the time to strip the system and destroy whatever we cant take”
“Should I order the assault sir?”
Twelve glanced back up from the plot, gazing directly into Twos eyes, “plot a jump for the general location of the primary picket force and take us in”
The fleet jumped, arriving swiftly within the target system. Within seconds, the first snag became visible, a convoy was forming of older basestars reconfigured as supercargo vessels to take the refined ores out of the system, naturally such a convoy had an escort, an additional ten modern basestars was in system and their first move was to place themselves between the Unforgiven fleet and the convoy.
It was a minor snag all told, the Secessionists were still heavily outnumbered but it increased the likely numbers of losses his fleet would suffer, and he wanted to avoid losses, he wanted to pay a few more visits after this one before he retreated back behind his own lines.
Besides which, it wasn't a good idea to let twenty older basestars, fully loaded with supplies to escape. That meant supplies his enemy could use instead of him.
Swiftly, he ordered the Tenth fleet to destroy the convoys escort then capture the convoy itself; if capture was impossible then the convoy was to be destroyed. Following that, he ordered the Fifth fleet and his flagship to move on the primary grouping of picket ships, a group of ten basestars sitting above the fifth planet, unfortunately well within support range of an orbital refinery and its guns but that couldn't be helped.
The fight that followed was brief but bloody, the secessionist basestars had little illusions about their chances of survival but their orders also preventing them from abandoning the system. It meant they had nothing to lose and that made them deadly.
Fifteen of his basestars were destroyed before both the ten picket basestars and the orbital guns defending the refinery were destroyed, and twelve more as the remaining ten ships of the picket force assaulted the fifth fleet from the rear, leaving his formally fifty strong formations with only twenty-three ships, five of which had been rendered combat ineffective.
The Tenth fleet had better luck however, destroying the ten basestars of the convoy escort for the loss of just three of their own, exceptional for an untested force, then successfully capturing thirteen of the converted basestars. Of the remaining seven, three had been destroyed attempting to escape, two had shown they had a fully functional and modern set of weapons and accordingly had been destroyed and the final two had attempted to ram the warships of the Tenth fleet, destroying another of his vessels and rendering two more combat ineffective.
Twelve quickly gathered those heavily damaged vessels that were still hyper capable into a convoy and sent them home with orders to spread the word that the Secessionists had apparently started to insert Q-ships into their convoys, joined by two fully operational basestars as escort and the captured cargo conversions. Two vessels he was forced to strip, then scuttle, that left him with sixty of his initial one-hundred capital ships operational.
With sixty warships and no picket to deal with, Twelve's warships quickly rampaged throughout the system, stripping every single one of the facilities the Secessionists had built, including a small shipyard that he hadn't known about, one which seemed to be experimenting with minor warship designs, similar to Tau'ri MTBs. The uncompleted prototypes twelve was rather gleeful at having seized, everything that couldn't be stripped from the shipyard was then destroyed just as at every other facility within the system.
Knowing then that he was coming close to the eight hour limit, Twelve then ordered his ships to the next, rather lesser target. The next system was picketed only because it was close to the frontlines; it contained little in the way of useable resources and his ships swiftly dealt with three of the systems four ship picket. The fourth vessel fled into hyperspace as soon as it picked up the IFF beacons of his fleet.
The final target was a distribution centre, a heavily used facility to which most of the supplies for the Secessionist ships along the border were brought ready to be parcelled out. It was unfortunately a location that you couldn't even hope to know how many ships would be at, except to say that it had a permanent picket of fifteen vessels. The facility itself used to be colonial and was known to be jump capable if provided with sufficient external power and Twelve was hoping that all the resources it contained could be diverted to his needs, though its destruction would serve his needs just as well.
It quickly became clear that far more ships then the fifteen ship picket were in the system, but given the nature of the target, that had been expected. They were only five extra basestars in system, mixed in amongst seized colonial cargo and support ships, custom built Cylon cargo ships and the odd old basestar conversion, but upon their approach, the distribution facility itself spewed forth enough fighters to equip six basestars. According to the intelligence he had, the base itself had two squadrons permanently assigned, the others he guessed were new craft, awaiting assignment.
Ploughing through the scattering support ships, Twelve first attacked the picket warships, destroying six of the fifteen vessels for no loss before the horde of fighters fell upon his fleet. It became at battle of attrition as the already depleted fighter squadrons from his own basestars engaged both the fighters from the picket warships and the fighters from the distribution facility but Twelve knew that even depleted as they were he still had more fighters then the enemy. Therefore he ordered his basestars not to support the fighters, but to converge upon and destroy the remaining basestars of the picket, destroying the final nine vessels for no fatalities amongst his own. Several vessels were rendered combat ineffective however and retreated to the edge of the system under escort.
Now free to manoeuvre, he ordered the fleet to support range of the fighters and swiftly, the combined effort of his basestars and fighters finished the hostile raiders off, but not before a further two basestars were forced to retreat to the edge of the system and a third was destroyed by kamikaze attacks.
That left just the redistribution facility itself and the five basestars not of the picket, these vessels were busy gathering the scattered support ships into a convoy, obviously planning to escort them and their precious cargos out of the danger area. Not willing to let that happen, twelve bypassed the base for the moment and assaulted the five, quickly overwhelming them but not before those cargo vessels that could escaped into hyper.
The rest were older cylon or captured colonial types and twelve captured as many as he could, overriding their computers or those of their ‘chrome toaster' crews, not a particularly difficult task, and the rest he destroyed out of hand if he could. A few did manage to jump before he got to them.
Twelve now found himself with thirty-five ships for the assault on the base itself, the rest were either crippled or were guarding the cripples and captured cargo ships. He decide he had enough ships and continued the assault, his ships closing on the base, weapons spitting across space as they attempted to collapse its Goa'uld derived shield, an upgrade the Secessionists had installed.
The shield fell, but not before the bases weapons had bracketed and destroyed six more of his warships, as soon as the shields went down however, his fighters were able to sweep in and destroy the generators that provided the power for the weapons and shields, which in effect had just been bolted on, not refitted into the design.
Hoping for a successful capture, Twelve ordered two of his basestars to force dock and offload their warriors and deal with any computer based resistance. Unfortunately, as soon as the two vessels, a titanic explosion ripped through the base, destroying both basestars and setting debris spinning through space which collapsed the shields of eight more and wiped out the drives of a ninth. That ninth he had no choice but to scuttle despite the fact that otherwise, it was in good condition, he just could risk the time needed to repair it.
The mission completed, the remnants of his task force retreated back behind Unforgiven lines having successfully destroyed fifty-three enemy basestars, captured a significant amount of usable resources and emptied three systems of all hostile activity for the loss of only forty-three capital ships.
All in all, a successful raid and one Twelve had little doubt would get the attention of the Secessionists.
Two days later, Twelve received word that the Secessionist fleet gathering on the edge of Tau'ri space had been diverted and was now heading for his border.