Starboard Hangar Bay, Battlestar Ulysses
Caprica Naval Shipyards

Commander Andrew Murray stood at ease, flanked by two Marines and Lieutenant Paul Quentin, the Ulysses' chief electrical engineer, as one of the hydraulic aircraft elevators lowered a Raptor to the hangar bay's reinforced steel deck. The dun-colored utility/EW craft was hooked to an aircraft tractor by several deckhands, and towed to a vacant space between two Mark VII Vipers.
The Raptor's side hatch opened, permitting its two crewmembers and a handful of civilian passengers to exit. The crew, consisting of Lieutenant James 'Deliverance' Collins and Ensign Emily 'Hatch' Seale, saluted Murray, the Ulysses' captain, and began standard post-flight checks of the spacecraft. All three civilians stood in place, confused and rather overwhelmed by the din of routine hangar operations.
"Mister Vernon, Commander Murray's there to see you," Collins pointed towards the officer. One of the civilians, a thin man in his early twenties, hesitantly walked towards Murray, followed by the other two.
"Commander Andrew Murray," the captain introduced himself, shaking Vernon's hand. He's got a grip like a dead fish, Murray thought.
"N-n-nice to meet you," Peter Vernon stammered, looking uneasy.
"What, first time onboard a Battlestar?" Collins chuckled. The Raptor pilot had handed off his aircraft to its plane captain, and, along with Seale, was now technically on shore leave.
"Shuttle's over that way," Murray pointed. "Twenty-four hours, remember," he frowned.
"Yessir," Seale nodded.
The captain laughed, discarding his artificially stern manner. "I was a lieutenant once. You all have some fun. Rest up for SILVERFLAG."
Both Raptor crewmen grinned. "Won't let ya down, sir," Collins agreed.
"Well, is this your first time on a Battlestar?" Murray asked, turning back to the civilian.
"Uhh...yeah."
"Sorry it couldn't be under better circumstances. The other two are with you?" The commander gestured towards Vernon's companions, a blonde woman and a pale man with dark hair and glasses. Both wore backpacks and carried briefcases containing
"Yeah. This is Paula and Jon. They're with the integration team."
Murray nodded. "I'll take y'all up to the CIC and computer bays. This is our chief electrical engineer, Lieutenant Quentin." Vernon winced as the naval officer's Aerilon accent showed, but followed him nonetheless. The two Marines took up the rear, before the small group boarded one of Ulysses' numerous high-speed elevators.
After exiting the flight pod, Murray lead the technical-support team down the port main corridor, located two decks below the CIC. A double-wide hatch to one side led to the main computer bays, stacked three decks deep. Murray used his ID card-key to open the hatch, as well as the heavy blast doors beyond, while the Marines took positions on either side of the hatch, their M22 rifles held at port arms. At the press of a button from one of the Marines, the blast doors swung shut, once again insulating the bay from any and all external radiation or interference.
"This here's our primary computer system," Murray said proudly. The Ulysses' central computer banks dated back to the years immediately following the Cylon Uprising, and had been specifically engineered to resist subversive electronic warfare techniques. "Scorpian Consolidated Systems Mark XV mainframe computing unit. Separated processors for maximum security. The whole bay has twelve-inch lead shielding.
"Scorpian Consolidated? I've never heard of them." Vernon frowned.
"Well, they went under about fifteen years ago. Right about the same time the Ulysses got her first refit, actually," Quentin said, speaking for the first time since the civilians had boarded the battlestar.
The technical expert nodded. "What's the problem, exactly?"
"Well, we installed the CNP program on the navigation computer," the lieutenant walked over to one of dozens of locked panels containing multiple processing unts, with external hard-disk memory units on sliding racks. "It completely crashed the entire system. We tried to reboot the computer, but it wouldn't respond. Still won't, actually." Quentin knocked on one of the processor cases. "See? Completely dead."
"Any idea why?"
Quentin shrugged. "This computer is damn near as old as the Ute herself. It's actually digital- no vacuum tubes here, at least. Some of the local stuff, though..."
"I get the picture."
"The Mark XV is a real squirrelly system, frankly. It's just designed to work with the old tactical and navigation programs. The CPU architecture is frakking ancient. I've never written much of any software for the mainframe, but it's just plain weird. The whole thing was designed to resist Cylon infiltration programs. Turns out, it just resists software updates," the engineer snorted.
"I see the problem," Vernon said, seeming somewhat more comfortable now that he was somewhat in his element. "Why wasn't the mainframe replaced at some point?"
"It's tied into the ship through direct electrical links. No data, only AC current. We'd have to tear the entire ship apart and replace hundreds, thousands of miles of wiring to take her up to current standards."
"Well, then, I'll leave you two to puzle out a solution. I'll be in the CIC," Murray informed Quentin and the civilian IT specialists.
"Aye, sir."
Vernon only nodded before turning back to the navigation computer. "Can you open up all the panels?"
"On it." Quentin pulled a ring of keys from his belt, and unlocked the four bays containing the primary navigation computer systems.
"Gods," the civilian muttered. "Jon, can you bring that adaptor cable over and hook your laptop up to this thing. I want to see if we can get an error report."
"Good luck, buddy. My guess is that it corrupted a lot of the memory. If the damn thing won't even boot..."
Jon pulled a laptop and a bulky adaptor unit designed to interface with standard-issue diagnostic ports. He located an appropriate port on one of the processors, directly adjacent to a series of external bus slots, and connected the laptop to the aging mainframe computer.
"Uh, boss..." the programmer began.
"What?"
"Take a look at this." The team leader leaned over, examining the laptop's screen.
STOP: 0x00008A (0x083BH6, 0x93KB23, FF290CV8, 0x000000) - Address Px263SJ9 at 0x4RT98, DateStamp 0x4134G7
"That's not normal. I mean, I've seen old systems before, but this is crazy."
"I'm not familiar with the CNP code," Quentin interjected. "What are those decimal values?"
"Code line addresses. I've seen a few errors in other segments, but never here. I've been through some functions of the CNP before, but these addresses are just basic functions."
"I told you, the system architecture..."
"I heard," Vernon frowned. "What's the system written in?"
"AURL. There's a compiler to full binary, obviously." Quentin pronounced the language's name 'aural'.
"What the hell is AURL?"
"Aerilon University Resistant Language. It requires built-in security checks, hence resistant. Won't compile without them."
The IT specialist's eyes widened. "That's the most idiotic idea I've ever heard of."
"Have you read any logs from the Uprising? It's justified when they can take over your fire-control and shut down your ship."
"Umm...oh. I guess. Well, I suppose we could write an interpreter to get CNP into Aural or whatever it's called, and compile it from there. The thing is, with how complicated the program is, the interpreter would be huge and program speed would be...sublight. To put it mildly."
Quentin snorted. "With that kind of performance, we're better off calculating manually than using some patched-together solution."
"Agreed. Do you have a backup copy of CNP?"
"Sadly."
"I can't believe I'm saying this, but I suggest we purge the system. Total hard reset."
"Odd to hear, coming from someone who worked on the CNP, but..."
"Yeah, I know. Look, Baltar didn't account for whatever the hell this thing-" Vernon gestured around the computer bay "-is when he wrote it. He's a genius, no doubt, but old Cylon War stuff isn't his first priority."
"Tell me about it." Quentin glanced at the inoperative primary navigation computer.
"Just wondering, how many other ships have this thing or other Scorpian Consolidated mainframes?"
"Whew," Vernon sighed, looking upwards and stroking his chin thoughtfully. "The Protector, one of our escorts, has it. Maybe another one or two older Defender-class ships like her, two other Battlestars like ours- the Hydra and Dauntless. Past that, a lot of stuff from the Cylon Uprising. A lot of it is Reserve, Guard, or mothballed, best as I remember."
"So, not that much in the grand scheme of things. Okay. We can work this."

"So, what's the status on our air wing?" Murray asked Lieutenant Wolfe, the Ulysses' tactical officer.
"Ah...one minute, sir." The tactical officer entered several commands into his computer terminal, calling up a status report from the small-craft maintenance division. "Last report, seventy-six-percent mission-capable rate for the Mark Sevens. Eighty-two for the Raptor squadrons."
"And the strike Vipers?" In addition to troubleshooting software problems, the Ulysses had made port over Caprica to exchange one squadron of Mark VII Viper fighters with another squadron of the craft's two-seat strike/EW variant.
"Four have been transferred. VF-127 has returned all aircraft to the yard hangars before flying them down to Mugu Air Station, and the new birds are roosting in the starboard flight pod."
"Outstanding. Have we got an ETA on the rest?"
"No sir, but they're scheduled to all be on board by oh-nine-hundred tomorrow morning," Wolfe shrugged, recalling a typed report from the commander of the shipyards' fighter wing regarding the exchange of assets.
"How about ammunition levels?" Murray turned his swivelling chair to face Lieutenant (j.g.) Frank Redman, Ulysses' gunnery officer.
Redman glanced at the turret and missile bay status displays called up on his terminal. "Primary KEWs have seventy-four percent ammunition. All twenty-four ASMs are in the tubes, magazines are at fifty percent capacity. Twelve nukes."
"Understood. Lieutenant Redman, send in a requisition request for six thousand rounds. Get our magazines up to eighty percent; I want the ship at full combat readiness for the exercise." The battlestar, like most vessels in the Colonial Fleet, used automatic-fire KEWs, or kinetic energy weapons, which chewed through ammunition extremely rapidly. The Ulysses had engaged in a brief live-fire exercise against target drones on the edge of the Cyrannus system, which had consumed approximately one thousand rounds of ammunition. None of the costly Diamond Shark anti-ship missiles had been expended.
"And, finally..." Murray spun his chair to its forward facing. "Navigation. Status on the primary nav computer?"
"Still down, sir," Ensign Sarah Dremmond sighed. "The secondary's working just fine, though. It's that damn CNP. Sorry, sir, I just don't trust the thing."
"Can't say I do, either. I don't care how useful it's supposed to be; if something crashes a solid computer that's never given us a problem before, it ain't worth it. The Fleet can handle VLF flash traffic for position updates if they're so keen on centralizing things."
Lieutenant Commander Nick Kleiner, the Ulysses' XO, frowned. "The Admiralty is going to have serious problems with that. For how much they paid Baltar, they'll be mighty pissed..."
"Sir, for how much they paid Mr. Baltar, they should expect the damn software to work on Fleet computers," Dremmond pointed out.
Kleiner's nostrils flared. "Ensign-"
"That's fair," Murray noted. "Quentin thinks it's fundamentally incompatible with the CPU architecture or some weaselly technobabble like that. It doesn't sound like an easy fix." He picked up the interphone handset from its socket next to the main polar-plot DRADIS display. "Paging Lieutenant Quentin, paging Lieutenant Quentin, please call the CIC. That is all." He set the handset down.
A moment later, the interphone rang. "CIC, Quentin," the electrical engineer said flatly.
"Lieutenant, what's the status on repairs to the primary nav computer?"
"Uhh...we're pretty much dumping its memory. We'll need to get some spare drives in case the entire system was corrupted. I could see us having to start from scratch and just reload the old software from a backup copy."
"Thank the Gods we didn't install the thing on the secondary."
"Glad you and I are on the same page, sir. We can get eighty-five percent calculation performance for the exercise. It's not perfect, but it's the best we can do."
"Thank you, Lieutenant. That'll be all."
"No problem, sir."
Murray hung up the receiver and sighed. The navigation computer fault was only one of the worries he bore. SILVERFLAG was the other.
An annual large-scale exercise focused on fighter operations, SILVERFLAG was hosted in Helios Delta's orbital system, near the sparsely-populated colony of Aquaria. The Ulysses, her escort group, and three other battlestar groups had been selected for the first week of the exercise. From the operations order Murray had read over, the Aurai, Invincible, and Boreas- of the Valkyrie, Glorious, and Mercury classes respectively- would be present.
Tactical jumps were frequently a major component of successful operations. While Murray was fully confident in his ship's ability to execute long-distance FTL travel, he was unsure if the secondary computer, with its somewhat reduced performance, could calculate navigation solutions with the pinpoint accuracy required when operating in close proximity of friendly forces.
"Dremmond, what's your opinion on the secondary nav computer, for tactical jumps?"
The blonde navigation officer shrugged thoughtfully. "Workable. We can't cut things quite so close, though."
Murray cursed the old design protocols that forced an uneven division of computing power between the two units. Use of the secondary had not been judged likely enough to justify a full duplication, and the primary computer had received the remainder of the vacant bays. The commander distrusted computer networks almost as much as his Academy classmate Bill Adama, but even old Bill had to admit that the damn things could be useful from time to time.
"Give us a twenty-percent additional safety margin on all jump calculations until Quentin and the tech-monkeys have the primary up again."
"Yessir."

"Of anywhere in the Colonies, why in the hell did it have to be here?" Lieutenant James Collins groaned as he stepped off the personnel shuttle and onto the tarmac at one of Caprica City's numerous spaceports.
"Krunch, can you please explain to me what the hell is wrong with Deliverance?" Seale frowned. "A twenty-four-hour pass on Caprica, and he's complaining?"
Lieutenant Charles 'Krunch' Wakefield snorted. "He's from Aerilon, you know. They prefer tractors."
Deliverance laughed despite himself. "Yeah, y'all are pretty much right, I guess," he admitted, looking somewhat resigned. "So, what heretical nonsense are you getting us into now?" he asked the two other Raptor crewmembers. Krunch and Deliverance were both line pilots in their mid-twenties, while Hatch had only graduated from advanced ECO training six months prior. All were assigned to VAQ-142 'Wolves', the Ulysses' single Raptor squadron. Lieutenant Toby
"I wouldn't call it nonsense, per se...maybe we can hit up some of the local casinos," Krunch suggested.
"Gambling's a sin!"
"Says the guy who won two hundred cubits off my sorry ass in the past week or two."
"Well, organized gambling, I guess," Deliverance shrugged, slinging his digital-camouflage backpack over one shoulder. "The kind with strippers."
Krunch feigned disappointment. "Well, what's a bored Raptor jock to do?"
Deliverance shot his friend an expression that suggested the answer was obvious. "Bars," he snorted.
"Once an Aerilonian, always an Aerilonian," Hatch laughed. "I hear there's a lot of good places near here. Thirsty Fleet folks off on leave, you know the drill. We can take a cab."
"Works," Collins agreed, content with the entertainment, if not the destination.