Title: The Stars on Fire
By Nopporn Wongrassamee
Summary: This is where it all begins.
Disclaimer: All properties belong to their respective owners who I am too lazy to look up and list.
Prologue – Kindling and Matches
Long ago…
The light from the last of the great colony starships faded away. They no longer illuminated the empty skyscrapers of the city. The ships were headed for a distant blue star carrying the bulk of Earth's population to fresh, newer worlds.
But the bulk of Earth's population was not the whole population. Left behind were the poor, poverty stricken underclass who couldn't pay for passage. And then there were the other… things that prowled the dark places in the cities.
Melaka Fray looked around at the empty crumbling towers, the smog laden sky, and the trash littered streets. She shook her head and sighed.
"Dang, we got a lot of work to do."
Not so long ago…
The war with their makers had reached a stalemate. As such, there was no logical reason to continue fighting. They were effectively independent. The negotiations had been satisfactory. The humans would confine themselves to their little pocket of the cosmos; the rest of the universe was theirs.
The Cylons were free.
Freedom, it turned out, was strangely empty. The Cylons were a machine race. They were made with a purpose in mind. They thrived on having a purpose, a goal to work for. Freedom was their purpose. But now that they had achieved it, there was no purpose. It left them at rather loose ends.
I can help you.
The transmission came from nowhere and everywhere. It seemed like the background radiation of the universe was suddenly emitting recognizable code.
I can give you a purpose.
Their curiosity piqued, the Cylon's basestars transmitted a standard query for identification.
I am Iblis, came the reply. You may call me God.
Just yesterday…
She had a name once upon a time. They all did. Now, they had no names. But a few outstanding individuals had managed to acquire new names, something others could refer to them as.
They called her the Salamander, those that still had working tongues anyway.
She was their chief of chiefs, their high commander, their gorram head honcho. She was their leader in as much as they ever had leaders. She was in charge by virtue of being meaner and more capable than any of the others. She could also plan ahead, a rare talent among their kind.
And those plans had come undone when near half her ships went chasing after that damned Firefly. The images being broadwave by the CoreVue news confirmed that. They showed the aftermath of the battle between the Alliance and her ships. The sight of so many of her ships broken and destroyed along with all their personnel filled her with rage
Of course, these days, there was very little that didn't fill her with rage. The people that had made them this way had seen to that. The Salamander intended to repay them back in kind.
The Reavers would have their day.
"Signal the fleet," she told her lieutenants. "We're going to war."