Chapter 21
Before the soldiers had even returned, they'd sent in a request for more plasma pistols, thermal-vision visors, and smoke generators. Alfred immediately approved it and scheduled production.
The next thing Alfred approved was an effort to recover the wrecks of the 2 "Pancake Stack" ships. Each constituted a vast amount of easily recoverable refined materials, if nothing else.
Lowering cables, tipped with extremely powerful electromagnets, down to the wrecks proved simple.
It was not so simple to pull them up to orbit.
In the end they solved it by having the 3 ships in the fleet which had the most spare engine capacity - LowBoy, the BattleSphere, and Fred the FRD, all tow at once, assisted by half a dozen Liberty Ships.
The long line of 9 connected ships succeeded by all working together, then did it again with the other Pancake Stack.
Once the 2 big wrecks were in orbit, further towing was easy, since it wasn't opposed by gravity any longer.
They examined the ships, determined they were not repairable, and commenced salvaging any usable parts, after which they would cut up the ships and use every component part as raw materials for building something else.
Some of it was put to use immediately, to repair Galactica and other damaged ships of the ragtag fleet.
In doing the repairs, the details of a crisis unfolded. All the agricultural ships had been hit and lost their crops. The 2 that had survived were repairable, but apparently nobody had thought to store spare seeds anywhere.
Alfred was amazed that there were not backup caches of seeds somewhere, but there weren't.
He had a few choice words to say about that, dwelling artfully on the topic of stupidity, and the magnitude of it revealed by 'keeping all their eggs in one basket' in a situation such as theirs, where attacks were frequent.
At least they wouldn't starve.
The food production of the tree levels and aquarium level of the BattleSphere, plus the 2 park ships, while very helpful, could not provide enough food to feed the whole fleet.
But there were now 23 ships with water levels acting as armor, fuel, and, most importantly at the moment, farms for algae, kelp, krill, shrimp and the like.
These were the 19 Liberty Ships, the BattleSphere, LowBoy's 2 pods, and Fred the FRD - counting it as only one even though it had its own water level, plus the water levels of its 12 built-in Liberty Ships.
The algae etc was edible as it was, though the people of the fleet didn't generally like it. So for the most part it had been pressed into cakes and used as feed for animals and fish.
And they'd had enough feed, so more recent water levels had mostly grown krill or shrimp, which most people preferred, even though it grew much slower than algae did.
But, with just a little scrambling to rearrange production, they could provide the whole fleet with kelp and algae cakes. It'd keep them alive, though a little hungry. And nutrition would suffer, as would, especially, enjoyment of meals.
So Alfred's people also instituted a search among all the seed and plant samples they had collected on Kobol, looking for anything that would fill their needs.
They hadn't spent much time on that to this point since, without serious amounts of space to grow them in, it'd be little more than an intellectual curiosity, and they'd had more urgent things to do.
For any suitable plants they found, it would take several generations of plants before they could get enough seeds to grow food crops. Accelerated growth would help significantly. Yet still, to speed up the process, they started growing what they could, of any specimens that looked promising, while investigations were still ongoing. Further study could be done as the plants grew. And they'd already have a small stock of seeds by the time they found a plant that would serve their purposes, assuming they did find at least one.
On hearing the bad news, Adama had immediately ordered a massive hunt for any planet they could find that had edible vegetation of suitable kinds.
Assuming they found anything, they'd need places to grow it in - ideally more than just the two repairable agricultural ships.
So Alfred had his techs re-evaluate what was salvageable on the wrecked Cylon carriers, with an eye towards possibly replacing the agricultural ship they'd lost.
They'd barely started salvage work on them so far, but it was enough to be familiar with what was there.
Soon they had a plan.
Of the 10 disks forming the two ships, 8 could be used - not as parts of ships in the normal sense, since they'd been too damaged, especially inside - but as something like enormous metal plates.
They would cut any usable disk free from the stack, then cut each disk in half to turn each disk into 2 'dishes' - big metal plates with a steady curve from the circumference all the way down to the middle.
Cutting the disks in half was the fastest way to get access to the insides, so they could remove, everything but the dish itself.
If they cleared off all the bits remaining from the Pancake Stack ship, and sealed up all the holes, they could end up with a simple yet large metal dish on which to build a new ship.
Several dishes actually - two per disk and 8 disks could be used this way.
It would be messy, especially clearing the complex and damaged bits, but Alfred's people had experience with this kind of work from cutting up the pyramid ship they'd found on Kobol. With the right tools, it could go quickly, especially if they used tricks like employing shuttles to yank free any bits they'd mostly detached.
They already had some of the right tools and making more would be easy, which they commenced to do without delay.
Until then, laser rifles set to emit very narrow, continuous beams, made very good cutting tools, and large numbers of soldiers were happy to help by using their laser rifles that way.
Alfred also got some of his folks started on making four more pods, 41 through 44, just to hold the salvaged materials, since the BattleSphere and the G12 freighter would not be able to hold it all.
To free up more space immediately, they moved the Cylon Raiders which they'd captured on Tairac, and on the G12 and F105 freighters. The captured Raiders had been stored ready for flight on the BattleSphere and on G12.
But they didn't need them ready for flight as much as they needed space, right now at least.
So instead they 'parked' them in rows in space, and built the new pods around them.
Pods 41-44 would remain, for a while, in a configuration similar to the Park ships - with hull and major floors, but only every other minor floor and no further interior finishings. That way they could store maximum cargo.
Cylon Raiders were only 13.6 by 7.5 metrons, so, when ranked front to back and side to side, 78 of them could fit on a single deck of a pod, or 84 if you turned each sideways first.
So they had all 600 odd Raiders put away quickly.
As they worked, the plans came together and details filled in.
Agricultural ships need, first and foremost, to be very big.
And it helps if their size is wide and flat, so they can get maximum growing area.
The dishes would serve nicely for that, once all the wreckage was cleared off them and they were cleaned up and any holes patched.
The disks from the Pancake Stacks were each 1800 metrons in diameter - 43% wider than Galactica was long.
They would be very suitable for farms, when suitably rebuilt.
The dishes would be cleared and patched, then pairs of dishes would be welded together to form disks again. These new disks would just be big hollow enclosures, ready to receive dirt, air, water and plants, plus the machinery necessary to support them.
Two new disks would be placed side to side, with one more in front and another in back, forming a large diamond shape with 4 disks.
They'd connect them with structural members and passageways, add engines to the rear and a bridge in front to control it, and then it could cease being towed and instead fly itself, though not very well at first, while they finished it.
To finish it they would need energizers, and systems to generate, circulate and/or recycle heat, water, air, and especially light - the usual shipboard support systems. It would need various and sundry other bits like other ships did, though a lot less than most, since almost all of their space would be used for growing plants.
They got to work, and soon discovered that there was way too much salvage to hold it all, even with the 4 new Pods.
If they melted most of it down into large blocks, it would take less space, but they'd still need more room for it all. So they started melting while looking for more options.
The right way to melt it down would involve sorting, forges, and molds.
The expedient way they used, involved only laser cutters to free big chunks of material, a shuttle to haul it a short distance to an empty spot in the vacuum of space away from any gravity source, and a low power laser to melt it into a blob. They kept up the process - melting more blobs while letting the previously melted blobs cool, then collected and stored the cooled and solidified blobs.
Many things got melted together which were better separated, but that was better than not having the materials at all. They'd have to refine and purify things later before they used them, but they had to do that with new materials they collected anyway.
Leaving blobs of molten metal hanging in space wouldn't have worked if the fleet was moving, but the fleet was temporarily immobile while making repairs.
For more space, they managed to work out a system where they stored large blobs of salvage in some of the disks, such that one new 4-disk Agriculture ships would stay partly filled with salvage while the other was fully prepared to be an agriculture ship.
Then, as they used up the salvage, the 2nd new 4 disk ship would clear out and be used for agriculture too.
Alfred was thinking of naming them simply agro ship 3 and 4, but he noticed that his workers were calling them "Four Seasons 1 and 2" in reference to their 4 disks. He had no problem going with that name instead.
Some of his workers had asked why the new farming ships would not have clear tops like the old ones had. They'd had it explained to them that, while greenhouses had big clear tops to let in the sunlight, out in space there wasn't enough sunlight to make a difference, so it wasn't needed - the plants would get all the light they needed from artificial sources. Plus it was faster, and stronger, to just use the solid metal disks they already had, rather than try to lay down, and support, vast new sheets of clear glass or ceramic.
While Alfred was working on that, Adama's search had found, not just a habitable world with suitable vegetation, but a small human colony.
People needed, and were used to, carbohydrates, especially grain - if they didn't get carbohydrates, they lost weight no matter what else they were eating. That was a bad thing, for anyone who wasn't fat. And fat was almost unknown in their society. Generations ago on Taura, there had been a period where many chemical food additives had been tried, and most people got fat as a result. But when the chemical experiments had gone away, so had the fat, and it hadn't come back since, with rare exceptions.
The people of the fleet were already feeling the lack of carbohydrates, and clamored for an immediate mission to go to that colony and trade for grain and other seeds.
They didn't need to clamor - there was plenty of motivation at all levels to take care of the problem.
But the noise they made did help motivate the Council to allow Alfred to send a Liberty Ship to the planet. It could land, load, and offload much much faster than a series of shuttles could.
And it would not be recognizable as a Colonial ship. For some reason the Council was very reticent to reveal the fleet's identity to the unknowns on the planet.
There had been some discussion on what to trade for the seeds they wanted, and energizers had been suggested. All small colonies needed more energy. Since Alfred had a bunch of these he'd made, it was easy to carry several along as trade goods.
And just in case energizers were not enough, it was decided to send a trained medical team as well, to trade medical care. No matter what, every group always needed more of that.
Cassiopeia from the Galactica headed that group. They all donned new Rayon clothes so their normal uniforms would not give away their identities, then set out.
It did not take long to get to the planet.
They left a couple Sensor Buoys in orbit, to give them warning of anything coming, then Liberty Ship 4 descended to the planet's surface.
They landed in an unused field near a town.
They'd planned to drive Bantam vehicles to town, but ended up not needing to - the town members had seen the ship landing and has come to them.
The planet was named Serenity, and the people there had a problem.
When the planet was settled, nobody had noticed the aliens living there. The aliens, named Boray, were like bipedal pigs and lived in caves. They were mostly quiescent, coming out and bingeing during the full moon, then semi-hibernating in their caves.
By the time the colony had discovered that, the ship they'd hired to bring them to the planet had already left.
So they were stuck.
It turned out that the Boray were violent, and the planet was covered with them.
The human colony on Serenity had steadily declined from the start, due to constant raids by the Boray.
The humans were tired of it.
They plead for help, were told to hang on a few centons, and the Council was called and consulted.
They deliberated.
Meanwhile, a brisk trade for all kinds of seeds, as well as bulk grain, proceeded - people tended to make the best of existing situations while hoping for better, so they traded now, while still hoping and asking for rescue.
Energizers did not trade as well as weapons, in this case.
And Cassiopeia got a lot of business too - she set up shop in town and helped any who needed medical aid.
Nobody expected a raid by the Boray, since the cycle of the moon wasn't right for it.
But apparently the large ship descending from the sky had looked similar enough to the new moon to rouse them.
They attacked the town.
Most of the town followed their usual habit of hunkering down during such attacks, while allowing the Boray steal what they wanted, in order to take as few losses as possible.
While they were rushing to protect themselves, they forgot to inform Cassiopeia, who stayed in her medical aid hut, and ended up being captured by the Boray.
They sometimes took captives for unknown reasons.
No captive ever returned.
The 200 soldiers who had come on Liberty Ship 4, in case of need, prepared to go rescue Cassiopeia, and the Council was duly informed of events.
The Council surprised everyone by forbidding a military rescue. Councilwoman Xine, supremely confident of her negotiating skills, insisted that she could placate the Boray and fix the situation, leaving both humans and Boray happy and living together in peace and contentment.
She wanted, and demanded, that the full Council go with her, for maximum negotiating effect.
Adama deferred, saying he would be derelict in his duty as military commander if he left the fleet and put himself at risk.
Xine reluctantly agreed, but redoubled her efforts to get the rest to go with her.
Alfred resisted.
While Xine was supremely confident of her abilities, Alfred was supremely confident that the Council was useless, had no common sense or connection with real-world practicalities due to living strictly in a world of ideas divorced from consequences, and would achieve nothing.
He plead urgency in working to finish new Agricultural ships, and stayed behind despite Xine's endless protests.
Somehow, Xine convinced the other 9 Councilors to go with her.
The 10 Councilors arrived in a shuttle, and landed near the Boray cave, where Cassiopeia was a captive. They approached with gifts, lots of friendly words, and no weapons.
They were immediately taken prisoner by the Boray.
That was enough for the soldiers, who immediately headed for the cave. They had been ordered by the Council not to rescue Cassiopeia, but had not been ordered not to rescue the Council.
That was all the excuse they needed.
They proceeded with a textbook assault on the cave, even though the Boray had no better weapons than spears.
With snipers covering the front of the cave, they used mining lasers to stealthily carve a new way in to the back of the cave.
They timed the completion of the new back entrance with a distraction - an explosion at the front.
When the explosion went off, the Boray turned their attention towards it and away from the new entrance simultaneously opening in the back of their cave.
The soldiers swarmed in the new entrance firing with abandon, since their lasers were set to stun. That way they saved time - not having to judge the validity of a target before firing. If they shot a friendly, no sweat - they'd wake up in an hour or so. And any enemies they shot were out of the fight and could be dealt with later, one way or another.
It was over almost immediately, but despite their speed, the soldiers had been too late.
The 10 Councilors were dead.
Cassiopeia had been saved alive by the Boray because she was useful to them while she was caring for their wounded, which she'd begun instinctively, when she first arrived and found sick and wounded Boray in the cave.
The Boray had not found the Councilors to be useful, but rather annoying, and had killed them soon after arrival.
Then they'd proceeded to butcher and eat them.
Though humans universally balked at eating another intelligent species, the Boray apparently had no qualms about it.
The soldiers had qualms about leaving man-eaters unpunished, who, when it came to it, were also murderers, kidnappers, vandals, and thieves, so they made sure justice was served, after getting Cassiopeia out of the cave.
Cassiopeia would need counseling to get over her experience, but was safe.
The Serene - what the inhabitants of Serenity called themselves, though they were anything but 'serene' as commonly defined - heard the story and redoubled their efforts to be evacuated from the planet.
Though they were armed now, they still didn't want to stay a moment longer on the "horrid pest-hole of a planet", as they called it.
It hadn't been hard for them to figure out that the one ship they saw was not the only one.
But it was the only one needed to carry the people away from their bad situation on the planet - their numbers were down to 2260.
With all the robbery and vandalism they'd been subjected to, they didn't have much in the way of goods, yet 'not much' is a relative term.
Liberty Ship 4 could carry all of them away when it left, but would have trouble packing in all the Serene, plus their goods, grain, and livestock animals.
So Liberty Ship 7 was sent as well, towing pod 45. LS 7 would carry their goods until they got settled among the fleet, and pod 45 would carry their animals.
The animals presented something of a problem.
The fleet's livery ships were already full of animals - they didn't need any more.
And although Pod 45 could hold them, they'd be packed in and unable to really thrive while there.
While doing so it wouldn't be much use for anything else.
Yet the livestock animals represented a large fraction of the Serene's wealth.
While they wanted off the planet, they didn't want to abandon any more of their wealth than was absolutely necessary.
That's how Alfred became a rancher, at least temporarily.
To resolve the issue quickly, he simply bought all the livestock, using vouchers for various amounts of production time. Once it was explained to the Serene, they were happy to get them - they didn't know, now, what they'd need while living aboard spaceships, but once they found out, they could use the vouchers to get it, whatever it turned out to be.
With that, the rest of the process moved very quickly, and the last humans left the planet the next day.
Alfred had only vague plans for what to do with the livestock. He'd just wanted the situation resolved quickly & so he had acted to make that happen.
He figured he'd let the livery ship managers look everything over and decide what to keep and what not to, then probably slaughter the rest for food, though not all at once.
Liberty Ships 4 and 7, with pod 45 and the new refugees, rejoined the fleet with the the new elections for Council already in progress.
Because they'd been gone for the first round of it, an infrequently used clause of the law was invoked, to allow write-in candidates to join the election at any time before it ended.
And as they returned, they resumed towing other ships - something that had recently been started to save fuel.
Every ship in the fleet with a pre-Marron drive was towing a Marron drive ship.
Tylium stocks had been diminishing for a long time. Even though 86 ships had been converted from Marron to pre-Marron drives, there were still 115 of the original ragtag fleet using Marron drives, plus the 6 Frigates, the 4 Puck-type Destroyers which they had not yet had time to convert to fusion-powered Kobold-designed reactionless drives, and a whole lot of new Vipers.
Towing them, were 86 ragtag ships, LowBoy, 19 Liberty Ships, pods 37-40 which were not complete ships yet, but had bridges and working engines, the BattleSphere Mousetrap, Fred the FRD, 5 Firebases, 3 Destroyer Escorts, 2 Scarab and 1 Sphinx ships they'd recovered on Kobol and refurbished, and the 2 Cylon-built freighters F105 and G12, which had had their original engines swapped for Kobold engines, though you couldn't tell by looking at them.
So every ship in the fleet had a ship available to tow it, with a couple to spare.
The Galactica was not towed.
It was too big for any one ship to handle towing and they didn't have enough ships currently available to try working together to tow it.
Not yet.
That being the case, they hadn't even asked Adama, yet, about towing his ship. He took pride in its speed and maneuverability and it would be hard for him to accept a tow.
Big battles, like the recent one, burned a lot of fuel, especially since they 'pulled out all the stops' with their Vipers, and used them all, to their maximum performance.
The massive scouting effort took fuel too.
Some fuel had been recovered with the wrecks of the Pancake Stack ships, and a continual trickle was found and recovered on comets and asteroids they passed. But it wasn't enough.
With towing and more engine conversions, they would be able to keep going, but their combat ability would plummet without tylium.
They needed their Vipers and Vipers needed tylium.
So they towed ships, to save every drop of tylium they could.