== Part 13 - Light's Out ==

"Oh, frak," Sharon said as she watched Bogie Beta die from the Raptor's camera feed. She had felt it die in a burst of mental noise that she could only assume meant it was uploading into the resurrection network, assuming there was one around here.

"You killed Fido, you bastards!" Bogie Alpha cried like a bawling child. "They told me not to let him get blown up again and you blew him up!"

"Galactica, Cage, Bogie Alpha has just opened fire on you."

Sharon's head spun to look at Cage's feed, just in time to see a series of small explosions scatter randomly across the Galactica's pristine hull just above the nameplate while something glowing bright weaved through expanding clouds of debris. She frowned. That couldn't possibly be an effective attack!

"What are they doing?" Adama wondered. "There's nothing there. No ports, no guns, no sensor or communication arrays. It's just bare hull. It can't possibly be trying to shoot through the armor."

"...now I have to ask again if I can take Fido out again and they're not gonna let me cuz he got blown up..."

"They're also scattering their fire, not concentrating it," Sharon said tightly, trying to ignore the blubbering rant in her head. It made her want to both comfort the child, and at the same time find their parents and give them a stern talking to for raising such a whining brat. Gods, did Alpha's rambling remind Sharon of a number of trips to civilian grocery stores. "They can't possibly be doing more than scratch damage."

"Ma'am," Gates called out. "Damage control reports armor plate damage to sections Bravo twenty through thirty five. They also confirm that it's NOT a sensor glitch."

"What?" Sharon said in shock. Those were the sections that Bogey Alpha was attacking. The Galactica's armor belt was laced with sensors for detecting damage. Concussion, thermal, radiological... There was even short ranged active penetrating Dradis to check individual five meter thick plates for stress fractures and proper thickness and would certainly detect chunks being blasted off outside from inside the ship. But to trigger those sensors, Alpha had to be doing far more than mere "scratch damage".

"Galactica, Coldcut, here. I'm getting a good read on Bogie's Alpha's fireworks, and I think they're using weapon grade lasers. Wait, it's stopped with the lasers and is radiating a lot of IR. I think it's cooling off before firing again."

As they watched, another volley of missiles was launched at the Galactica.

"How bad is the damage?" Sharon asked. Was there a pattern to that shot spread?

"Uh, the plate with the heaviest damage is down to 85 percent integrity," Gates reported. "The average integrity across all damaged plates is at 94 per... correction. The ticker just dropped to 93 percent."

"Admiral?" Sharon said, turning to Adama. The one word was both a question and a demand wrapped in one.

"Dammit, this could have gone so much better," Adama muttered. Then to Sharon, "Tell Cage weapons free."

"Cage, Galactica. Expedition Actual says weapons free! I say again, weapons free!"

Lucas had been expecting this. His guns were already locked on, and he had been on the edge of his seat just waiting to be given the go ahead. One flick of the thumb released the safeties on his guns while his trigger finger squeezed at the same time.

Three streams of red tracers leaped out at Bogie Alpha and Lucas felt a twinge of regret. After chasing Alpha around the fleet, Lucas thought that he had gotten a feel for the pilot's personality, and that they didn't deserve to be killed for a fit of justifiable grief.

And then his eyes widened as he saw red tracers ricochet off Alpha's hull.

The rain of bullets didn't seem to do much but spark off the other fighter, but it was enough to grab its pilot's attention. The fighter spun to face Lucas and a red light flashed from its nose. For an instant, Lucas thought he was going to die.

Then his guns stopped firing despite him still holding down the trigger and his HUD went berserk.

"Hey, STOP THAT!"

The instant Sharon heard those words in her mind, the sitrep hologram froze, the words SIGNAL LOSS flashing in front of it and several windows. Before Sharon could curse out another frakking glitch, reports started flooding the CIC.

"Frak! Primary network management server just crashed! Secondary and tertiary servers crashed as soon as they tried to take over. All stations are defaulting to local control!"

"Draedis has gone berserk! Everyone's reporting their displays are being cluttered with garbage signals!"

"Local gunnery control teams report that their remote cameras are offline." Sharon stiffened. The Lords Class was the first Battlestar class to have entirely remote controled weapons. "The guns themselves are operational, but they're completely blind." And Sharon knew there was no provision for manual aiming.

"Engine controls are down! Engines are still on, but the primary and backup control computers keep freezing every time they try to restart them."

"External comms server is still up, but it's getting red lights from over half its service connections."

"Galactica, this is Hack," Sharon's eyes snapped back to the hologram. While it showed SIGNAL LOSS for most of its displays, the Raptor window was still showing a live feed. "Half the fleet just suffered a complete power loss. Galactica is the only Battlestar – heck, the only military vessel that still has power. The only other ships with power are all civilian."

Sharon's eyes locked with the Admiral. They both knew what was going on. They were being hacked and sixty plus years of tech development and paranoid security procedures had done nothing to inconvenience the Cylons at all.

"Galactica, Cage. Half my systems are shutdown and the other half are doing frak all," Cage replied. "I'm going to do a hard reboot of my Viper."

Ah, the universal solution to all computer problems, Sharon thought sardonically. But...

"Negative, Cage," Sharon replied. "If you do that, you'll be a sitting duck."

"Ma'am, with all due respect," Cage began. "My engines are down and my weapons are offline. I'm already a sitting duck!"

"Dammit. Do it and gods be with you, Cage," Sharon replied.

"Hack, this is Expedition Actual," Adama called. "What's the status of your Raptor?"

"My Raptor's... fine," Hack said, his voice ending in surprise as he apparently realized what that meant. "Everything's running as smoothly as it ever does."

"Hack, Coldcut, right now, you two are the only eyes and ears we have in the Fleet," Adama told them. "Have any more ships jumped in from FTL?"

"Uh, no sir," came the reply. Sharon relaxed. Apparently, this wasn't a prelude to being massacred. "We're still all alone out here, except for Bogie Alpha."

"And what's Bogie Alpha doing?" Adama asked.

"...followed by zeta, eta, theta and iota! Then comes kappa and lamda..." Alpha was singing the alphabet? Alpha's rambling had become so much background noise to Sharon as she dealt with all the problems caused by their hacking, but now that Sharon's attention had been called back to Alpha, Alpha's voice came to the forefront of her mind.

"Uh, what it was doing before Cage shot at it," Coldcut reported. "It's shooting up the Galactica."

"Damage Control reports that hull monitoring systems are still running fine," Gates reported. "Affected plates are still being eroded slowly, but there's an error message that keeps popping up on their screens. 'Invalid Input CNP' then some long string of numbers. They don't know what it means."

Frak! Even the Colonial Navigation Program was going? That had been the one bit of flawlessly operating software on the whole ship since Sharon had taken command. If the CNP was being affected... Sharon stiffened, looked up and locked eyes with Admiral Adama again. He too had just realized what was going on. She spun to Gates.

"Call the contractors right now and tell them to shut down all the navigational systems!" Sharon ordered. "All of them, servers and client terminals alike! I want a hard shutdown that fully wipes their memories! Make sure they're ALL off before you bring any back up and see if that fixes the other systems. If that doesn't work, wipe the navigation logs for the last hour and do it again. And if THAT doesn't work," Sharon took a deep breath. "Restore them to factory settings."

Gates stared at Sharon for a moment, wide eyed. That last one would completely wipe all the exploratory information the Galactica had gathered since leaving home, effectively erasing the route back to the Colonies. Then his eyes widened further as he realized why she had ordered it.

"Galactica, Bogie Alpha is moving away from the fleet," Hack called. "I uh... I think they're done and leaving now."

"Galactica, this is Cage, I'm back up." The window with Cage's feed was animated again. "I have a missile lock on Bogie Alpha. Should I fire?"

"...gonna tell the others about you and then you'll all be in trouble..."

"Do it!" Sharon ordered instantly. This was arguably the Admiral's call, but he couldn't hear what Bogie Alpha was saying. She didn't want this apparent child to die, but in the fleet's current state, they couldn't possibly fend off an attack by vengeful Cylons.

"Fox One!" Cage's feed showed the missile shoot away from the camera. Bogie Alpha was still in visual range, too close to possibly dodge. Alpha didn't even try.

The fireball was spectacular, more than powerful enough to turn any fighter known to the Twelve Colonies into an expanding sphere of metal confetti. Bogie Alpha wobbled as the fireball engulfed it... and kept on accelerating away, its hull charred but otherwise seemingly intact.

"Ow! You Colonials and you Numbers will regret that or else I'm not Iota of Alphabet Constellation!" And then Bogie Alpha jumped out.

Sharon slumped, exhausted, leaning with both hands on the hologram projector. Dear gods, what had she just done?

"Well, Commander, I guess we know for sure now that it's Cylons," Slate said to her quietly.

"What was your first clue, Slate?" Sharon asked tiredly as she looked at him.

"That for starters," Slate told her, pointing at the Raptor feed. Sharon turned her head to look at it.

Scrawled with craters and burn lines above Galactica's name plate were the words CYLON WAS HERE.

Sharon stared in stunned silence at the damage to her ship for several long seconds with gaping open mouth before her lips twisted into a snarl.

"I'm going to kill them!"