Adama looked up and curiously turned towards her station and began to move.
"Yes Lieutnant, what is it?"
"Since we began the water retrieving mission I had not much to do here at Comms, so I started some system checks and analysis and - well, as you know sir, our ships use a very narrow band of frequencies for wireless communication, as most frequency areas were quite polluted back around at the colonies and - my system check used to contain not only our active frequencies, but also a wide band to test the limits of the equipment. Usually those checks turn out that most frequencies are quite silent - but here.. well I found a range of frequencies which are quite active in this region of space. Not only busier on background noise but even more busy than our wireless frequencies. It is a near constant flow of signals on a wide band, and it varies. It does not look like being of natural origin at all."
"Can you make any sense of it? Is it Cylon in origin?" he asked, his attention growing.
"No Sir, not at the moment.. I can not even begin to decide if it may be Cylon.. but I would say that it looks a bit like a frequency modulated signal.. like a carrier wave containing information of some sort. I'll need a while to analyse the data since we are not networked and my computing capacity here at Comm is quite limited, but I'd like to deepen in this research with your permission sir. It.. well it frightens me a bit." She answered, feeling quite unsure.
"Yes Lieutnant, follow that trail. I don't feel good about this. It could be a cylon trap, and I had too much of them already if you ask me. Check out what you can, and get any help you need. I want to know what it is as soon as possible". With this words, he turned back to CIC and gave temporal command back to Colonel Tigh before left for his quarters. Had he not been worried before, he was now.
A few days later, Lieutnant Dualla held a briefing on the results she and her team had brought up in the past days. As it turned out, they were quite .. surprising.
"..As I initially predicted, those signals really are frequency-modulated data streams, containing analogue information. We have figured out
that this streams contain two types of information - one is audio, the frequency modulated data, the other is video, in form of amplitude modulation.
Quite a clever idea actually, to use both frequency and amplitude for signal transmission, something we never tried back in the Colonies.
So, as strange as it seems - these signals are artificially created and not naturally caused. Further studies showed, that there are streams only containing audio, and that there are some that contain both audio and video simultaniously - we sadly only managed to construct a receiver for the audio only transmissions yet though.
What we found was quite a surprise - speech and music, obviously of human origin. We also found out that those transmissions are not bound
to one language, or even a few. We literally collected samples of words and sentences in over twenty languages, and that was only the point where
we had to stop to focus on a few samples or we would never achieve any analysis at all. None of the languages sound anywhere near Colonial,
so we have tried to match the samples to the written language samples we have recorded in our ancient scrolls regarding to the thirteenth tribe -
and we singled out a language in the streams which bears the most striking resemblance to the old texts. It seems that the language - it is called
English, that we could find out - evolved quite a bit since the ancient days, but it is still recognizeable. We could even decipher some easy
sentences in the stream telling things like "This is KBBl Radio and you are listening to Elvis Presley - Heartbreak Hotel". The "KBBL Radio" part
seems to state the name of the broadcaster sending this FM transmissions, a system they call "Radio", and the latter "Elvis Presley" seems to be a name, but we have no Idea what a "Heartbreak Hotel" could be. Sadly we did not have much vocabulary in the scrolls, so most of the spoken sentences don't make any sense to us now. Based on the data, we have concluded that this must in fact be a population of humans originating from the twelve colonies, or one of it's descendants. To this point, we have found no record how the locals call their planet, or if it is a planet at all. We now focus all our power on recording samples of the mentioned language, and try to figure out a broader vocabulary while we do so."
Adama sighed in relief - Earth, or at least another descendant tribe of the Twelve Colonies - proved not to be a myth after all.
"Lieutnant, since you showed us the mentioned sample earlier in the CIC, and it is in fact music even though it does not correspond to anything ever created in the colonies, you have given us all new hope that our quest may finally have a good chance of being successful. Do you have any other news regarding the finding?"
"In fact I have Commander Adama, another thing my system check turned up. The signals are all coming in from a distinctive direction, and seem to be originating from a very sparsely populated sector of space. Initial analysis of star charts and sensor data have ruled out most of the systems in that sector to start with, and we have found one candidate to be very possibly the source of the signal. It is a small, yellow sun, divided by over four light years even to its nearest neighbour."
Everyone in the room was speechless. Not only do they now know that someone IS out there, they even knew where he was.
"Lieutnant, how far away is this sun from our current position?" Adama asked, everyone's attention turning back to Dualla.
"Around 50 Light Years give or take a Year or two, we could be there in 4 Weeks if we jump non-stop, stressing our supplies of Tyllium a bit."
"Four Weeks?" Tigh exclaimed, "that would be a hard time for the engines, especially on the civilian ships. Please give an estimate using our usual jump parameters."
"Then we would likely need around two to three months, but it still is a very manageable distance."
Adama turned to everyone and took the initiative.
"Gentlemen, you heard it. As soon as we finish our supply mission here, we will set course for the system Dualla suggested. We'll use Tigh's Jump plan. One more thing: this information is top-secret. I do not want ANY civilians to know where we are headed, and what we have found out. It will be a hard time already informing the quorum and the president alone, and I can't even imagine the frenzy the press would start if any information leaks out. It would cause mass hysteria, and that is the last thing I need on my arse at the moment. Did I make myself clear?"
Everyone nodded.
The meeting was over, and everyone returned to their posts. Everyone but Adama. He had much to think about, and once more turned to the model ship in his quarters.
- End of Chapter two -