Azumangastar Galactica

Not-as-Thrilling-as-Advertised
3. Plan of Attack

Rated: T - English - Sci-Fi/Humor - Reviews: 12 - Updated: 06-21-08 - Published: 06-01-08 - Complete - id:4294345


The Six frowned across the data font at the Five standing across from her. "How did the Sea Slug escape deactivation?" she demanded. "That little frak-up cost us two of our Basestars."

"I don't know," answered the Five, blandly sinister as always. "We can only speculate that they'd disconnected their Command Navigation Program before we began our attack."

"Could they have discovered our agent in their crew?" asked a Three.

The Five shook his head. "No. He was killed by an exploding comm drone over a week ago."

"And he was never replaced?" the Six asked incredulously. "We've got a runaway Battlestar out there, I don't need to tell you what kind of a threat that could pose."

"We tried," the Five explained, "but the paperwork was taking forever."

The Six clenched her fist and shook her head. They'd managed to infiltrate the Colonies and successfully pull off a coordinated series of simultaneous nuclear attacks across twelve planets, only to have this wrench thrown in their plans by paperwork?

"We're taking care of it." An Eight was strolling onto the bridge. "We have an idea where they might be hiding, and we're going to arrange for an agent to link up with them."

"Who are you sending?" the Five asked.

"We're sending a Thirteen."

"I hope you know what you're doing," the Six warned. The Thirteens were even loopier than the Twos. "What about the Galactica?"

"We've reached word from our agent on Colonial Heavy 798 that it's holed up at Ragnar along with a small fleet of civilian refugees," the Five said. "We've sent a pair of Basestars to deal with them."

"Will that be enough?" the Six asked, cocking an eyebrow.

"That ship is hopelessly outdated," the Five assured her. "Two Basestars will be more than a match."

"And if they do get away, we still have our sleeper agent on board," the Eight said.

"All right." The Six rubbed her forehead. "No more mistakes. We need to eliminate these two Battlestars."

"Three Battlestars," the Five corrected.

"What?" She stared at him incredulously. "Three?"

"We've lost track of the Pegasus," he said, a little nervously. The Sixes were not a model one wanted to upset.

"What part of 'Wipe out the Colonial Fleet' was so hard to grasp?" she sputtered. "Okay. Fine. Three Battlestars." She waited, looking around at the others expectantly.

"What?" the Three asked.

"Anyone going to say four?"

Heads shook.

The Six nodded. "Okay. We need to eliminate these three Battlestars, whatever it takes. Am I making myself clear?"

"By your command," the other models all said at once.

"Don't do that," the Six said, "It just sounds weird."

Commander Yukari Tanizaki took the podium and looked out over the lines of bodies. She looked behind her, at the row of flight helmets symbolizing the pilots lost, floating out there near Sagitarron. She lowered her head and sighed. She looked over her crew in their dress grays. A solemn group. She took a deep breath. Gods she could use a drink.

"I've never been good with speeches, much less funerals," she began, glancing down the line at the flag that she was pretty sure covered the body of the ship's chaplain. Bastard, this is your department. "There's not much I can say to make this better." She took another breath and looked out at the faces watching her. All eyes on you, Yukes. Better make this good. "We're not just here to mourn our fallen friends and shipmates. We are here to mourn our families. Or friends, and our loved ones. Look around with you at your fellow crew."

Only a few heads turned.

"DO IT!" she bellowed.

They began turning and looking at each other.

"Everyone you see has lost someone. Everyone around you shares your pain. Rank, status, and colony don't matter now. We are all made equal by our shared pain and anger. Except for me, because I'm the commanding officer," she slipped in real quick.

Colonel Kurosawa stepped into the launch tube with a folded Colonial flag.

Yukari straightened, getting more into the spirit of speech-making. "But we cannot give in to our pain! We need to take that pain, and harden it. Turn it into anger."

Kurosawa lay the flag down on a body in the center row and returned to her place behind Yukari.

"And with that anger," Yukari continued, "we will avenge our fallen comrades! We will drive the Cylons from our worlds, and when we can rest once more we will immortalize the names of the fallen so that future generations will know that they gave their lives so there would be a future. So say we all!"

"So say we all," the gathered crew repeated.

"So say we all!" Yukari said again, louder this time.

"SO SAY WE ALL!"

The Firefly-class mid-bulk transport Something Delicate sat at the bottom of a crater, hidden in the perpetual shadow of Cambria's dark side. Even though all exterior lights and any interior lights that would be visible from outside had been extinguished, the young woman sitting at the helm couldn't help glancing nervously at the DRADIS and external video feeds every few minutes.

"Anything yet?" the Delicate's captain asked as she came up the gangway and stepped through the hatch.

The pilot shook her head. "No, looks like we were the last ship to make it off the planet." After leaving Tauron's atmosphere they had taken one look at the orbiting Basestars and at the swarms of Raiders picking off the fleeing civilians and had high-tailed it for the nearest moon. They had miraculously reached Cambria without being shot down, or as far as they knew even detected, and settled into the deepest crater they could find while they tried to get their FTL online. As suspected however, they needed replacement parts, which they would probably have a little trouble getting hold of now. If their employers hadn't already been turned to charcoal silhouettes the crew would have lodged a very strongly worded complaint.

The pilot took another drag from her cigarette. She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to look up at her captain.

"How you holding up?" Captain Asagi Ayase asked.

"How do you think?" Torako Takino asked bitterly and turned back to her console.

The hand on her shoulder squeezed slightly. "Yeah, same here. Just . . . keep scanning the wireless, okay?"

Torako nodded as Asagi reached over her and took the handset for the intership comm. "Shimauu, how are you coming with that FTL?"

"I'm not," an irritated and somewhat breathless voice came back, "I already told you we need parts we don't have."

Asagi sighed. If Shimauu couldn't get their jump drive working, no one could. Though she'd been a little apprehensive when they'd been saddled with her little sister's eccentric friend as their wrench jockey, she had to admit she was very good at what she did. Her tendency to dance while working took some getting used to though . . .

"Maybe we could salvage something?" Torako suggested from behind her. "There's bound to be a lot of wreckage floating around out there."

Asagi looked at her in disbelief. "Pick the flesh off the dead? We're not vultures, Torako."

"Salvaging's legal, Captain," Torako pointed out, though she doubted that mattered now. "And if we don't get our FTL working soon we'll be dead in the water." Then she added, "We can get outside Colonial space on a hard burn, but we'd never live to reach somewhere habitable."

Asagi opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. Torako didn't usually talk much, and when she did as much as she was now she usually had a very good point. "I guess we can't stay here, can we," she said.

Torako shook her head. "What little I'm picking up on wireless says we're getting slaughtered. Some Commander Adama's taken control of the Fleet and ordered a regroup at the Ragnar Anchorage."

Asagi sighed and rubbed her forehead. "That's clear on the other side of the system." They'd never get there by sublight.

Torako nodded. "From what I'm hearing I don't see what good he can do, our ships are dropping like flies." She picked up a printout. "Atlantia destroyed, Triton, Acropolis, Valkyrie, Columbia . . ."

"Sea Slug?" Asagi asked.

"Not on the list." She hesitated. "But I'm not feeling optimistic."

Asagi nodded, then sighed. "Okay, I guess we have no choice then. How's it look on DRADIS?"

Torako checked. "I'm reading a couple base ships, but on a hard burn we should be well out of range before their Raiders can reach us." She looked back at Asagi. "And the blast oughtta confuse their instruments so they can't get a fix on us." She was just guessing now; Torako had no idea what kind of hardware the Cylons had.

Asagi patted the back of the pilot's chair. "Okay, take us out." Then into the comm, she said: "Shimauu, fire it up and get ready for hard burn."

"Aye Captain!"

Something Delicate lifted out of the crater, slowly at first, then accelerating as she scrambled for open space before she was detected by the two Cylon vessels distantly visible against the scorched backdrop of Tauron. As she sped away from the moon the Delicate's reactor vents opened and her hindquarters began to glow orange like her arthropod namesake. Then there was the blinding flash of a controlled hydrogen explosion, propelling Asagi and her crew away from their home planet and out into open space at over sixty million miles an hour.

"I want all our Raptors outfitted for combat," Yukari was saying. "Missile pods, guns, swallows, comm drones, everything."

Kurosawa nodded and jotted it down on her notepad. They were in Yukari's quarters, discussing their next plan of attack. "I'll get the deck crew working on it." She hesitated, then asked, "What about the order to meet up with the Galactica at Ragnar?"

Yukari looked at her as though she'd just suggested eating out of the waste reclamation tanks. "See, this is why I'm the Commander," she said.

"What?" Kurosawa asked. "Adama's taken command of the fleet."

"He doesn't outrank me!" Yukari said, flicking her collar pips. "And besides, Adama's an idiot. You heard about how he botched that mission at the Armistice Line." She leaned back in her chair and took a sip of ambrosia.

Kurosawa nodded. Everyone knew that was why he'd lost command of the Valkyrie and had been put on the Galactica with its crew of failures. "Still," she said, "we'd stand a better chance against the Cylons with another Battlestar than we would alone."

Yukari just scoffed. "That old thing? It's probably been destroyed already anyway."

Kurosawa sighed. "Do you really plan to take on the entire Cylon fleet with a single Battlestar?"

"It's called guerilla warfare, I would think you'd have learned that at the academy," Yukari said.

She resisted the urge to sigh again. I suppose it would be wrong to stage a mutiny . . . "Yukari, we have no idea of their resources. They could have over a thousand Baseships for all we know. To stay here and fight is suicidal."

"So you want to run," Yukari said with a disgusted expression.

"Yes," Kurosawa said. Actually saying it, it felt less cowardly. "This war was over before it began. We lost."

"Abandon all those people back on the Colonies," Yukari said, gazing at her XO with undisguised contempt.

"Oh wake up, Yukari!" Kurosawa snapped. "There's no one left to save! The wireless freqs have been dead since Adama sent his order. And do you actually believe any other planets got off any better than Sagitarron?"

Yukari's voice turned cold. "We are not leaving," she said.

"Sir, I really think-"

"Leave this room while you're still a Colonel," she interrupted her.

Hopeless, Kurosawa thought as she stood, saluted, and strode out of the Commander's quarters. If I don't do something about her soon, she thought, she's going to get us all killed.


-Author Notes-

Okay, who didn't see Torako surviving the attack coming a mile away? Yeah shut up, it serves the plot.

Also yes, Firefly-class transports exist in the Galactica universe. Don't believe me? Watch the window while Roslin's at the doctor's office in the pilot miniseries. I'm taking some liberties with the tech for consistency, however. Colonial Heavy 798 was clocking around sixty-one million miles an hour on its way to the Galactica, so I went with a speed somewhere around there.