This story is heavily inspired by the works of Monbade, Wes Imlay and several others who have taken the idea that more than just the GALACTICA's fleet survived the Cylon Holocaust and run with it. I hope it honors them that some of their pen names are given to ships here.
Disclaimer: Battlestar Galactica is owned by Glen Larson Productions. BSG:2003 in particular is owned by Ron Moore. I am merely playing in their sandbox. No money may be made from this work of fan fiction.
The media called them pirates.
The Government ordered their eradication.
The Colonial Fleet hunted them for decades.
Then the Cylons came back.
o-o-o
They call themselves the Last Colony of Man...
...and they have a plan!
Exodus of Man: Book 1 Hades' Chest
A BSG: 2003 Story
Prolog
Picon Battlefield
14 Days After the Attack
For over a week, Floyd Woodright's team had been living in the wreckage of the Battlestar ZEUS' stern. Their shuttle docked to a ventral port nestled between the remains of the landing pod spars and the engine block.
The forward third of the ship had been sheared off by an explosion in the fore-central magazine when the CNP virus had shut down the ship's defenses allowing several nuclear missiles to strike the dorsal spine sequentially. The resulting damage had blown the forward half of the port flight-pod into scrap and blasted the starboard pod completely off the ship.
In spite of this damage, the ZEUS was amazingly intact. All eight of her massive sublight thrusters were in top fleet condition. Her jump drive tested out as ready and her primary energizers just needed to be reset to provide power. This they had discovered during their first two days aboard after all the evacuations around the various battle sites were completed.
Unfortunately, the Cylons were returning to each battle site on a regular schedule and any attempt to power up the derelict warship would be detected long before it could be made ready to jump clear, resulting in the loss of not only the ship but of the volunteers preparing it for removal to Hades' Chest.
Hades' Chest. The infamous pirate base that it was claimed had preyed on the outer systems for nearly the entire time since the Cylon... well now First Cylon war and yet had never been found by the Colonial Fleet. There was a very good reason for that fact. For despite its size and its general appearance being that of a rather run of the mill asteroid, much of its interior had been hollowed out into docks, housing, hydroponic farms, animal pens and industrial areas. But Hades' Chest's real secret were the four jump engines that had been salvaged from Cylon baseship wrecks immediately after the war. With them installed, the asteroid would jump to a new location well away from any search zone the Colonial Fleet might sniff at.
Now, Hades' Chest was the last hope of the few Colonial survivors in the Helios and attendant star systems. From a population of upwards of fifty billion, the survivors on all twelve worlds numbered in the single-digit millions. Some hiding in underground shelters, others taking to their planet's wilds in a desperate attempt to evade the Cylon centurions and their recently revealed bioform counterparts.
They needed hope. They needed help. Most of all, they needed an escape.
And that is why Floyd's team had been living in suits in a derelict battlestar for the last nine days. In that time, they had manage to use the ZEUS' remaining thrusters to stabilize the wreck, slowly eliminating its tumble and yaw, leaving it with a slow roll on its longitudinal axis. Now they were just waiting for the fleet repair cradle MONBADE to jump in, snatch the wreck and jump it back to the base.
There, the ZEUS' mighty engines would be stripped and prepared for installation in a second asteroid ship that had been hollowed years before and outfitted as a fallback for the people of Hades' Chest in a system four light years away. A system that was nothing but scattered rocks that had long been considered and rejected for the establishment of mining colonies.
Even so, the survivors had to be careful as the Cylons were now actively patrolling every nearby system, searching for the hundreds of ships that had survived the attack by fleeing to deep space.
Glancing at the chronometer on the bulkhead, Floyd rolled out of his bunk on the shuttle. After taking a quick sponge bath and downing a ration pack, he slipped into his suit, checked the seals then set off through the airlock into the cold, ghostly silence of the ZEUS. Of a crew of nearly four thousand, the recovery team had saved barely eleven hundred.
None of them were on his team. Not that they didn't want to be. In fact, to a man, they had all volunteered. But there was more important work for them to be doing, preparing for the ship to be brought to Hades, among other even more critical needs. So Floyd had a dozen ex and current fleet men and women to get the ship ready for her final jump.
Stepping into the ship's auxiliary control he glanced at the DRADIS display. One of the Gunstar wrecks still had power from its main energizer and while much of that ship had been destroyed, somehow its active DRADIS system was still pounding away. Thanks to that system, the ZEUS' remaining passive DRADIS sensor systems were able to give an amazingly clear picture of the debris field surrounding Picon.
Right on schedule, there was the flash of a Cylon raider jumping in to sweep through and scan the wrecks. Floyd found himself counting down as the homicidal machine wove its way through the detritus of its compatriots' handiwork. And with another flash, it was gone.
"Two hours. Mark." Sue Clifford stated, pushing a button on one of the consoles to start a clock.
Picking up a handset from the plot table Floyd punched one of its buttons. At the far end of the cable, in the remains of the port flight-pod a light flashed on the console of a small Colonial craft. "Raptor 2-1-7-3. Go for traffic."
"This is Woodright. Light is green, schedule is set. One hour fifty-nine minutes and counting."
"Raptor 2-1-7-3. The clock is running. Understood."
With that, the crewwoman in the back of the small Colonial attack craft reached out and unplugged the cable from her panel, tossing it out the open hatch. Already, as the hatch was being sealed, the pilot was maneuvering out of the wreckage.
Another flash on the DRADIS showed Floyd the departure of the raptor.
It felt like forever as the sweep-hand of the clock crept its way around the dial but in reality it was right at two minutes when an extremely bright flash washed out the DRADIS from close aboard. As the screens cleared Floyd could see that the MONBADE had already unlatched its gaping maw and was rapidly approaching from the ZEUS' stern even as the giant ship's thrusters worked to match the ZEUS' rotation. As the engine housing passed through the opening their rotations synchronized allowing docking cranes to begin extending toward the mortally wounded beast.
Now time seemed to be speeding up and crawling at the same time. Ponderous movements of gigantic equipment seeming to take far too long while the sweeping hand of the clock seemed to be moving far too quickly. Fifteen minutes to properly position the cradle relative to the ship. Forty minutes to latch on the various docking cranes to secure it. Ten minutes to run load queries and perform jump calculations with the new mass.
But ZEUS was not the only project occurring today. For while ZEUS' main power might have been off-line, that was not the case elsewhere in the debris field. Much like the gunstar with the jammed on DRADIS, numerous other heavily damaged ships still had power, and with the arrival of the MONBADE raptors raced to every one of them.
As the time counted down to fifteen minutes until the next Cylon patrol sweep, first one, then three, then a full dozen wrecks jumped out to coordinates provided by the raptor crews. Three battlestar hulks and three times that number of lesser support craft jumped away, each stuffed to the gills with salvaged weapons and munitions from the battlefield.
When the MONBADE jumped there was finally true silence amongst this graveyard of the Colonial fleet.
At one minute until the return of the Cylon patrol, a titanic explosion ripped apart the remains of the bow of the ZEUS as her full load of nuclear warheads was set off at once, shattering the remains of the nearby ships. The arriving raider having to dodge frantically before being slammed by a piece of debris and being forced to resurrect.
While there was only one cradle left and this time its mission had been the recovery of the ZEUS, similar raids conducted over several days at Virgon, Scorpia, Canceron, Libran and a dozen lesser locations had resulted in the recovery of engine blocks of twenty battlestars and nearly a hundred smaller craft.
While many of these warships were never to sail again, their beating hearts would continue to serve their people.
Hades' Chest – Gamma Cyrannus System – Hart Belt
14 Days After Attack
Jack Smythe stood in front of the monitors in the Hades' Chest central control room. At his shoulder stood Gandolf Uri, Admiral of the Tauron Home Guard Defense Fleet. His flagship, the RA, a flight 2 Jupiter class Battlestar was one of the few surviving warships remaining. With the first Cylon war era Gunstars HATHOR and ISIS and four thirty year old Firestar escort frigates, they were the core of what was known to be left of a combined system wide and planetary active defense fleet that numbered nearly a thousand ships.
Their survival being more luck than any particular level of skill that was not present in equal measure on any other ship, Colonial Fleet or Home Guard. Picon Fleet Command had gotten yet another sniff on the Hades' Chest, but with the Armistice Day fleet festivities approaching, they had handed off the followup to the Tauron Home Guard.
Thus Admiral Uri and his seven ship element found themselves cruising the Helios Gamma Oort Cloud. As per their usual modus, the Hades' Chest was far away from where she was being sought, but a small carrier ship with a wing of first war vipers was hanging around the search area with the intent to bait the searchers and keep them from sniffing the real trail.
The arrival of the radio traffic about the attack caught both groups unawares, but the rapidity of the Colonial Fleet's fall was stunning. By the time the RA and her escorts were ready to jump back it was clear that the battle was well and truly over and the Colonies had lost. Badly.
The Hades' Chest's carrier had come out of hiding and immediately offered to stand with the Admiral whatever decision he chose, but that if the disaster was as bad as it seemed then perhaps they might need a plan other than 'die valiantly'.
And so, very shortly, the Admiral found himself utterly flabbergasted by the FTL arrival of the largest object he had ever seen jump.
Now he was in that behemoth's command center overseeing the third phase of the plan they had hammered out that day.
Phase one was the rescue of as many fleet personnel from the wrecked ships and disabled fighters as possible. The successful combing of the battlefields and wreckage having resulted in the recovery of almost a hundred thousand fleet personnel of various specialties and ratings. A corollary to phase one was to guide as many civilian ships and surviving warships as possible to the Hades' Chest where they would either be docked or sent on to a fallback location.
Phase two was the salvage of the battlefields onto recoverable wrecks and the preparations for their retrieval. Work that was now finished at one site and nearly so at all the others.
Phase three was now underway. The retrieval of the designated wrecks for salvage or reconstruction.
The FTL flash of arriving ships set off alarms in the command center that were quickly silenced as the teams aboard the not-quite derelicts checked in. Exuberant smiles were on everyone's faces as ship after expected ship was checked off the board, loud cheers breaking out as the MONBADE made its arrival.
For decades, the citizens of Hades' Chest had come to Cyrannus Gamma as a safe haven, mining the asteroids of the system, hollowing out some as fallback positions should anything happen to the Chest. Now that preparation was being put to use for completely different purposes. Already the Cylons had begun patrolling through the system, making it unsafe to keep all of these ships out in the open.
With the final arrival, tugs swarmed from the various rocks like angry hornets from a disturbed nest. Latching on to the nearest ship, they began maneuvering them down the bore-holes of the various hollowed out rocks. Even as MONBADE docked within the rock that was already known as Hades' Hope the last of this first group of warships were being secreted away in other rocks in the nearby field.
By the time the next Cylon patrol came through there was nothing to see but gravel and boulders.
00—00—00
Endnote:
Ship Classifications
Due to there being only two known surviving ships during the series run and very limited information being available outside of that (Blood & Chrome), fandom has gone a number of different directions with ship classifications. For purposes of this story, classifications and roles for each vessel will be as follows:
Battlestar: Battlestars are ships of the line. Capital ships intended to stand toe to toe with the enemy. They are hybrid battleship/carriers. Cannonically, Battlestar fighter compliments are shown to have little to no means of directly attacking opposing Capital ships, so they serve a purely defensive role for the fleet, keeping enemy raiders, which do have ship-killing offensive capability away from critical units. Battlestars are not capable of deep atmospheric/planetary landing operations.
Gunstar: Gunstars are the equivalent of heavy cruisers or battlecruisers. They supplement the firepower of the Capital ships. Generally they have less armor and little or no fighter compliment and are not designed with the purpose of conducting combat flight operations.
Carrier: As the name indicates, this is a pure-play combat fighter deployment platform. These have generally been phased out in favor of Battlestars by the Colonial Navy, though an effective carrier/gunstar fleet combination can fulfill the same role, albeit at a higher crew-to-tonnage ratio.
Firestar: Firestars are the equivalent of Frigates or Destroyers. Their role is area denial to enemy light units, protecting the flanks and approaches to the line combat units and supplementing short range suppression fire.
Marinestar: Marinestars are Battleship/Landingcraft hybrids. Their job is planetary assault and their primary weaponry is oriented for that purpose. Heavy anti-ship batteries are traded for ventral mounted KEWs capable of targeting meter size planetary targets from orbital range. Marinestars are the largest Colonial ships capable of planetary landing and take-off.
Commentary:
From all in canon appearances, the Colonial Navy seems to have preferred individual unit survivability over operational force survivability. They do not embrace the Quantity over Quality dynamic. Preferring one heavy, well-armored vessel over a larger number of less capable but still powerful substitutes. What's the German tanker's line about the Sherman... "Our tanks are better than 10 of yours, but you always have 11." Of course, when you're dealing with an enemy that can turn out new, fully trained troops in hours, vs taking 18 years, well one can see valid arguments for their strategic mentality.
Red Line: For purposes of this story, the 'Red Line' shall be the maximum safe distance that a ship can jump using standard FTL calculation tables. It is not a discrete location or border, it is the defined position at which the margin of error is too great to safely jump. Longer jumps are possible if more variables are taken into account but they require more time or processing power to calculate. This distance is mutable based on known variables such as detail available via existing maps and the speed and accuracy of stellar cartographic operations.
