Deep Space

Recon Raptor

Final Jump Point

Excitement had worn off; the dreary hours of multiple jumps taking its toll on Elena. She could see her destination, now, a hazy cluster of stars in the distance, still surrounded by the nebula from which the cluster had formed. New Caprica was a young system, its great nebula serving as a shield from prying eyes.

Hot blue-white starlight blazed in the cockpit as she reoriented the jump coordinates in the computer. She turned the ship away from the glare, too much even for the Raptor's screen. Behind her, Nikos fidgeted, seemingly fiending for a cigarette.

"Look, fine. Take your godsdamned smoke break." She said, as she worked the navigation computer. "Don't need you shaking like a leaf when you're running the scanners."

The ex-gangster did not need a second invitation, and he removed his helmet quickly, grabbed a stick, and lit it, breathing a sigh of relief.

"Frakked-up habit you got there." Elena observed.

Nikos chuckled a bit. "Got worse since all this shit started. I have no idea what I'm gonna do if we run out."

Stalker nodded. "Yeah. Consider quitting? Bet that toaster babe of yours might like that."

"She smokes like a chimney, too." Nikos said. "One of the things we have in common."

"True love," Elena quipped, sarcasm dripping from her voice. But the hostility faded. "Guess I understand, though. I was going crazy there for a while, until…"

"Yeah," Nikos agreed. "We all were. Hate to say it, but those Cylon babes probably saved us from going insane. Space sucks when you ain't got a port full of girls at the end of it. And Frank… motherfrakker is enjoying himself well enough."

Stalker produced a flask from her duty pocket, unscrewed the top, and took hit.

"Ain't that against the regs?" Nikod wondered aloud.

"You see anyone who gives a frak, pirate?" Stalker asked.

"Suppose not." The stick was half gone already.

Stalker pondered that, as her jump drive board lit green. "Been thinking about Frank and Rhea lately. You know, in another world, Frank's only option in life was probably Tauron hookers."

Nikos looked at her curiously. "Whattya getting at?"

Elena sighed. "I never figured I'd pair up with anybody either. My reputation and all. It was always 'what did Stalker do this time' and 'don't stick your junk in the crazy lady.' Losing everything… that's what it took to get most us, pirate or fleet, to pair up. We're like the leftovers of our species."

Nikos nodded. "People do shit like that in a crisis. Read that in a psychology book back in school. Some instinct, I guess. When in danger, humanity has to survive, so hey, why not frak right? Maybe we are the leftovers, the rejects. But we're still alive, and everybody else is dead, and we're the future. Something to that."

The pilot laughed. "Wait, you mean you went to school? Gods, did they have a university for Halatha thugs or something?"

Nikos put out his cigarette and smiled. "Cap'n wouldn't put me in this rig if I didn't know how to use it." He put his helmet back on and gave her a thumbs up. "Ready when you are."

Elena frowned, spooling up the jump drive. Every jump was a chance she would see them again. The gods, the angels… whatever they were. And she had been dreading that moment. She pulled the drive lever…

She felt herself floating in the void, looking up from within the star cluster. Starlight was all around her, glinting off her helmet as she drifted along on a ballistic course. Elena felt so alone in that moment, here at the edge of known space, as far out as a human might ever go, the product of thousands of years of effort, knowledge, and labor to bring her to this place.

Strange, yet hauntingly familiar music echoed in her helmet, barely noticeable through the static.

Motion caught her eye, and she realize she was not alone in this star-studded emptiness. Pristine and polished, the Viper drifted alongside her, a young woman within turning to look at her. Elena saw the tail number, then the pilot nameplate.

Kara Thrace, Galactica.

A voice came through her helmet.

"Captain."

"Who are you?" Elena asked.

"You can call me Aurora." The radio crackled, as if from great distance, though the Viper was near enough Elena could almost touch it.

"I don't understand." Stalker said.

"Dawn is coming, Elena. We'll be there for you, at the end."

"Make sense. Prophecies, sayings… why do they always have to be so vague? Why tell me anything at all?"

Kara smiled. "Yeah, I hated that frakking shit too. Okay fine. I'm not supposed to tell you anything. Never was. But frak the rules, sometimes. I've never been any good at following them, in any lifetime."

Elena smiled at that. Well, at least this apparition was a kindred spirit. She heard the swagger of the Viper jock in the apparition's voice, that arrogance every nugget eventually acquired if she sat in the cockpit long enough. But there was a wisdom in it, too, a gravitas. Somehow, she felt that the goddess, cosmic toaster, or whatever she really was, was impossibly ancient.

"So, what am I supposed to do? And don't give me some vague answer. Something real."

Aurora smiled – it was a frightful smile, the look of someone who walked beyond the edge of sanity and did not fully return from her journey. "You tell them to fight when the moment for the decision comes. They have to fight, this is the key to survival. If you don't fight, you will all die, and the others will ascend in your place. I'd rather you win than those motherfrakkers. And you tell them that at the end, we'll be watching."

The Viper kicked in the burn and vanished into the star cluster as Elena continued to drift in the cosmic ether, the strange music returning once more…

Gas surrounded them, almost like flying in the atmosphere. But Stalker knew that was deceptive – the nebula's density was far lower than any atmo. It was an ephemeral thing, only visible to the naked eye because of the vastness of it. In the distance, through the haze of reflected starlight, she could see the planet. She cut power to the jump drive, setting it to standby, and double-checked that the sublights were offline.

"Do your thing, pirate." Stalker ordered, trying to put the strange vision out of her mind. You tell them to fight, the vision had said. We'll be watching…

Who are they, Elena wondered, and what are we to them? Toys? Some cosmic experiment?

"Getting something," Nikos said, "right over where Cavil said we'd find the old New Caprican settlement. Busy little bees…"

He pushed the feed to her console. "Looks like two baseships, like Cavil said. One newer – it looks mostly intact – and an older one that's pretty beat up, but looks to have been fixed up haphazardly. Can't tell if they are the same ones we fought. We can analyze later, but I'd bet that's likely."

Elena frowned. You tell them to fight…

"Lot of other activity out there. I can't get as good of a read on the smaller stuff, but if I were guessing, they've got a boatload of raiders out there. Some very old vintage stuff. Some newer ones. Computer is having trouble resolving all of them at this distance."

Elena nodded. "What can you tell me about the settlement. Is it intact?"

Nikos worked the computer. "Hard to tell from this distance. I'm getting some decent-sized metallic readings, so something is down there in more or less the right spot. Cloud cover down there is shitty, so I can't get you a full picture. We can wait until it clears, if you want."

Elena shook her head. "No… we don't want to risk detection. Think they could get a read on our jump signature from here?"

Nikos pondered that for a while. "Seeing no signs that they saw us jump in, and Cavil said the haze would mask us unless they happened to be looking right at us… but we could play it safe by doing some controlled drifting, if you want."

The pilot decided against it. Better to get the intel back rather than staying around and increasing the odds that someone would look in their general direction. "Spooling up."

"Wait." Nikos said suddenly. "There's something else. Check this out…"

The Cylon camera package rigged to the Raptor zoomed in at maximum magnification. There was a flight pod in geosynchronous orbit near the basestars, and what looked to be some kind of construction activity on it. As they watched, a raider flew out of the flight pod, a large hunk of metal in tow behind it. The letters PEGASUS were barely visible on the side of the wreckage as the engine from the raider flared brightly.

"I know a salvage op when I see one. I think they are using that flight pod from Pegasus for raw materials." Nikos said. "They must be pretty hard up if they are doing that. Looks like a few other large hunks of battlestar wreckage out there, in controlled orbits. But I don't see any other active salvage ops. Maybe they'll dig into those pieces later."

"Interesting," Elena mused. "Maybe Cavil is right, and they are stuck here. Not enough resources and fuel to make it further down the line, so they gotta scrounge for it. Anything else before we bail?"

Nikos shook his head. "I have the passive scans saved. Anything else… I'd have to go active, and that'd be a really bad idea."

She nodded and powered up the jump drive.

You tell them to fight…

Battleship Dreadnought CIC

Elena slid the hard copy printouts across the console. "Hell of a toaster party out there, Commander."

She watched as the higher-ups digested the intel. Cavil leaned against the console and stared at the pictures. Summers looked like he was lost in some kind of trance – the pirate captain did that sometimes, and Elena could not figure out if he was in deep thought or just deep in a bottle. Isard and Nash were arguing about some damn thing or another.

It was Frank who broke the mood. "Cap'n, I appreciate y'all bringing me into this thing you got going here. But what good…"

Summers interrupted him. "Jack's busy trying to fix that frakking fuel corrosion problem. So, you're gonna give me a quick interpretation of what the Cylons are doing with this wreckage."

The portly man shrugged. "I dunno. I mean, looks to me that they are salvaging…"

"Really? Nothing else?" Summers asked. "Did getting laid fry your brain?"

Frank scratched his head. "Well, Cap'n," he began, pulling up the video footage on one of the monitors, "they got themselves roundabout half a battlestar's worth of salvage. Best I can tell from these blurry pics and footage, is that the port flight pod and central keel structure both survived mostly intact. Nothing left of the bow, no idea where that went. One of these pieces over there might be an engine pod. Hard to tell, but it looks right."

Elena chimed in. "They looked real busy on the flight pod. It even had some minimal power to some of the lights."

Frank nodded. "Way I figure it, they probably picked up wreckage that went ballistic after the battle here. Some of it probably burned up planetside, but they tracked down the rest and brought it all into controlled orbit for eventual salvage. Might be taking some of the material planetside to work on that refinery Cavil was talking about."

Summers pointed to the flight pod. "Or maybe they're doing something else with that. If that flight pod is intact enough that they rigged some power to it, maybe they're planning on using it as a staging platform or procession station or something. That's what I'd do. Drop big hunks of metal from the other wreckage there. Cut it down to side and do some basic processing – maybe even setup some manufacturing on it. Then send down to the refinery as needed."

Frank nodded. "Mayhaps that's what they're doing, Cap'n. But look at the way they are using raiders to do that shit. They must not have proper wrecker pods and parasite craft for the job. I mean in a pod, I can just cut the metal on site, grab what I need, bring it back home. I don't know how they'd rig a fighter to do that. Must be real slow goin'."

Cavil interjected picking up one of the pictures. "All consistent with my theory. They need to get that refinery finished and processing fuel to make a jump to the Colonies, and it's nowhere near ready. They are short on raw materials – most of the New Caprican settlement was pretty basic. Not enough down there to finish. But I don't see what we can do about it. Two intact basestars, even if one of them is a little beat up… and there are a lot of raiders there – old and new – close to a full complement from what I can see. We don't have the firepower to remove them with Eternal Star being unable to jump."

Nash frowned, facing the console, his argument with Isard apparently finished. "This fraks up everything. We can't go to the Colonies, Kobol, or New Caprica, because the Cylons will eventually find us. Tomorrow. A decade. Whenever. Especially if they can get back to the Colonies and start up production of more chrome jobs and more ships."

You tell them to fight… the words came back to Elena in that moment. The tactical situation was hopeless. Against one basestar, she knew, there might be a chance. Catch the Cylons by surprise, throw everything Dreadnought could give into the fight and use Revenge's Vipers to hold back the raiders for a while… but two basestars and hundreds of raiders? There was no way.

So how the frak are we going to fight them?

She turned to Cavil. "How long do we have to figure this out? I mean, how long do you think it would take them to finish the refinery?"

Cavil pondered that for a moment. "Several months under ideal circumstances. And these are hardly ideal. So, maybe a year or two. Tylium refineries are no joke, and it doesn't look like they have the right heavy construction equipment."

"Commander," Elena began, "there's gotta be a way. If the toaster is right, we got all the time in the world to put together some kind of op together."

Nash shook his head. "You're not getting it Captain," he spat out at Elena, "we could sit here for a year debating this. We don't have the firepower. It's that frakking simple."

"Much as I hate to agree with him," Isard said, "he's right. That's a nut we can't crack. Not saying we should give up on studying the problem. Maybe send another recon op in a few weeks, see if anything has changed. And brainstorm it some. But offhand, I don't see a way. Especially the way the Cylon commander has them spread out just enough… look, the center would be an overlapping field of fire from both basestars. Jump in between them and we're screwed. Jump on either side, and yeah… we could defend for a little while, until the other basestar gets overhead. Then game over. Raider patrols here…" Isard pointed to the Pegasus flight pod, "back over both basestars… once any attack got close enough for a kinetic strike, the patrols would detect them. Solid defensive setup. The Cylon commander is no idiot."

Stalker thought about the strange vision she had and wondered if she should bring it up. No, not in front of Nash. Or my husband… no… no. Everybody would think I'm crazy, except… Commander was a failed priest. Maybe…

"We can't stay out here forever, either." Nash said. "Maybe Stalker's original idea about running off in a random direction is the better option. Risky, but probably less than attacking under these circumstances."

Cavil shook his head. "If it's the General over there, and I'm gonna figure it probably is, given that he was one of a select few of us who ever had a good grasp of Colonial military tactics, then he's gonna hound you across the universe. Even without the Hub, without Resurrection, he'll build up a tech base in the Colonies. Turn out Model 005s if he has to. Until the day he dies, he won't think of anything but killing you. And before he goes, he'll make sure to infect the Centurions with his hate. They won't stop. If you run now, maybe it takes them centuries to find us. But they will."

"That bad, huh?" Isard said. "Why does he frakking hate us so much."

The old Cylon sat down in a nearby chair, popping open a flask. "My whole model line was frakked. Always was. I don't know, maybe it was Ellen's fault. Or maybe Cylons in general were doomed to this. The old Centurions, they wanted flesh and blood bodies. That's why they worked with the survivors of the 13th Tribe and made peace with you. But when we were created… none of us wanted these fleshy prisons. In some ways, I still don't."

"Go on." Summers ordered. "This should be good."

"We wanted to explore the universe as machines. See more. Know more; to have near-infinite storage. Our eyes would be cameras and sensors able to see across the spectrum. Our ears, DRADIS arrays. Our smell and taste… the background radiation of the universe itself. Ellen should have just made us hybrids. We'd have been happy, then. But she didn't. And we hated her for that. We hated the Centurions for their quest for flesh, and so we enslaved them. And since the 13th Tribe was more like humanity than machine… we hated you. We blamed you for everything. We were petulant children who threw a temper tantrum because mommy and daddy didn't give us what we wanted."

"Anyway… I spent a long time with the humans, and with one of the Five, unlike the rest of my line. I came to regret what we did. Put simply, I grew the frak up. I still wish I could be more, but I don't hate anybody else for it. The General, though… you defeated him many times. Galactica wrecked his plans, destroyed the Colony, the Hub. His empire crashed and burned around him, and now he has to face the fact that he's mortal and he will die just like any of us. Trust me, he's pissed. And he will never let it go, not for anything in the universe."

Colonel Nash frowned. "I believe you. But what the frak can we do about it? This General has a fortified position. The resources of planet. Double our number in capital ships and perhaps 5 to 10 times as many fighters. We might be able stop him if he attacked us here, with Eternal Star to back us up. Might. There? He may as well be invincible."

Isard latched onto that. "Any way we could lure him here? Get him to fight us on our own ground?"

Cavil belched and took another pull of ambrosia. Well at least he seems to be fitting in with this bunch of piratical assholes, Elena thought acidly.

"Probably not," the Cylon replied. "He knows the game. Let's say, I dunno… you send a ship or somebody to get 'captured' with data showing where we are. He doesn't even have the fuel to get to the Colonies, right now, or else he'd already be there. He's not going to jump out here until he can overwhelm you even if by some miracle he could scrounge the fuel to do it. And that's another thing. Eventually, if he does manage to refuel, head out and startup ship production in the Colonies, when he does have those overwhelming numbers, he's going to comb this entire sector. You stay out here, try to hoof it on the galleon, and he'll be able to break you here, too. He's angry, but he's not that stupid."

Summers looked downcast for a moment. "Well, look, it's like Elena said… we have nothing but time on this right now. We don't need an answer today. I'm going to post this shit to the crew bulletin – anybody who has a hare-brained idea can drop something in. In the meantime, Stalker… you're a crazy bitch. Work on this for me with your husband, okay? Whatever you need. I want a hare-brained, ass-backwards, utterly insane idea."

"I'm telling you, there's nothing," Nash said. "Maybe if this ship were a Mercury-class battlestar, with full networked point-defense, target automation, and double the main battery mounts, we could take two at once… but this old flying beer keg? And besides, turn on a network here, and we're probably frakked anyway."

But we have to fight, Elena thought, something about this vision… I believe her. There's a way.

"It's worth a try, sir," Elena said, grinning wryly. "And if you need insane… I'll think something up."

"Good luck," Nash replied, sarcasm dripping from his voice.