Author's note: If you haven't played Starlancer, I'll give you a brief description. It's a slightly old game, but extremely good fun except for the ham-fisted attempt at coding and complete lack of proper playtesting that is quintessentially Microsoft. The back-story and a few gameplay elements are a blatant ripoff of the original series of BSG -the turbo button is even in the same place on my joystick- so it therefore suggested itself as a perfect crossover vehicle, and I've tried to write it for people who haven't played the game. Enjoy!
I'm Robert Cole, Lt. Commander Robert Cole of the Western Alliance Fighter Corps to be exact, and this is my story.
Of course, you won't know much about the Alliance. Not after all this time. I can't really be bothered to go into all the geopolitical and social circumstances that split our planet before we split the atom, and all you really need to know is that there are two big power blocks in the Sol system. The Alliance -most of Earth's western hemisphere's various nations- is a democracy, more or less. The organisation's pretty much like the twelve colonies of old; a council of representatives from each nation, though since every lump of rock in the Alliance half of the system has a representative there are significantly more than twelve, headed by a President. The difference is that each nation has a great deal more autonomy, so there's a lot of squabbling between them over minor issues, and Senate meetings are a lively affair. We manage okay though, most of the time.
The Eastern Coalition, well now, they're another matter. Didn't Areia go through communism at one stage? Well, the other half of the solar system is still in that self-same situation. And the two sides are mutually antagonistic most of the time. It's as much our fault as theirs, really, and there's been on/off skirmishes sparking up every few months for most of the century. Sometimes I suspect that the only reason that the Sol system isn't in a perpeptual state of all-out war is economics; we run out of weapons after a year or two, and then you get a reasonably long period of peace, albeit the sort where everybody's busy rearming.
The latest outbreak is the one I was in. The Coalition had gained quite an advantage initially, by the rather unsporting tactic of turning up to the signing of a non-aggression pact with a huge battle fleet and blowing up several colonies on Mars, and then going on to take half the system. My immediate family were wiped out when their apartment building was hit by a missile, fired by Coalition flying ace and professional evil bastard Ivan 'The Butcher' Petrov. I'm glad to say that I personally blew him out of the sky somewhat later, but that's another story altogether.
Anyway, suddenly the government finds itself in a lot of trouble. Not many pilots going spare right then, as you can imagine, and they actually needed pilots more than ground troops at this stage. So, they had a recruitment drive, 'The Alliance Needs You' and all that stuff. Along with a load of academy dropouts, ex-mercenaries and other ne'er-do-wells, I joined up.
Until then, I'd been making a more or less honest living as a freelance pilot-for-hire. Most of my working life was spent escorting convoys; not exactly mercenary work, more sort of bodyguard-cum-minicab driver, really. I ended up in the 45th Volunteers, later nicknamed the Flying Tigers by a grateful press and public after one of our more spectacular exploits. Surprisingly enough, we made it through the war without geting wiped out. Even more surprisingly, we became one of the best fighter squadrons in the Alliance military.
After the war, I think that the Alliance wasn't sure what to do with us. They couldn't very well disband the unit, but there wasn't really much they set us to doing, being rather overloaded with personnel. The pilots were getting well and truly fed up with mine-clearing and routine system patrol, as well. Obligingly, one of our first colonisation ventures outside the solar system provided the answer.
Our warp gate technology was still in the early stages back then, and to tell you the truth we didn't fully understand the physics. If you're wondering what we thought we were doing sending off colony ships dozens of lightyears in that case, you wouldn't be the first. We know now that for reasons which remain incompletely understood, the warp gate sent the ship back in time; about fifteen hundred years is the estimate I reckon sounds closest, though the long and the short of it is that nobody really knows. The eventual decision was to send a small and rather military-oriented team to find out what had happened. Who better to send than the famous Flying Tigers?
It was a volunteer mision, obviously. Anybody currently in fighter corps service could put his or her name in the hat, and candidates for the slots left vacant by the departure of some of the Tigers and our somewhat less illustrious sister outfit the 51st Volunteers, aka the Diamondbacks. Out of 29 vacant slots including reserves and pilots for our small complement of Hades torpedo bombers, we got no fewer than 157 applicants, some of them from top pilots. The Hornets, the Jackals, even the legendary Pirates; sorting out who to take was a nightmare, especially since as XO I got handed a good portion of the ensuing paperwork.
We begin our tale proper in July 2162, aboard the ANS Yamato, the Japanese-built carrier on which I had served for the latter half of the war, after the old ANS Reliant was destroyed when Captain Foster rammed her into an enemy warship in order to buy time for the convoy we were protecting to escape. I was looking out for one of the last Gold List pilots to arrive.
Peter Steiner was the youngest brother of the legendary Klaus Steiner of the Vampires, the greatest pilot Germany has produced since von Richtofen. We'd worked with him on a few missions, and the Tigers had a hand in extricating him and some of his squadron from an unpleasant Coalition prison ship during the only low point of his career. He'd died in combat during our last major engagement, winning a posthumous Medal of Honour in the process, and Peter was determined to follow in his footsteps. He was easily good enough to make the cut, with forty kills gained in two months of war- it had taken his brother nearly a year to get that many.
I was just about sick of standing around in the hangar when there was a dull clang above me, and the elevator began to lower from the landing area. There was a hiss of pressurisation, the doors to the elevator opened and a small shuttle taxied out. Several personnel clambered out, including a figure so hauntingly familiar that I was quite taken aback. Peter and Klaus were at opposite ends of a quite large family, separated by about eight years, but they were staggeringly similar in appearance. Both of them were tall and angular -Klaus was captain of the Luftwaffe basketball team- with perpeptually ruffled blonde hair and peircing blue eyes. Peter even had an almost identical little beardy thing, halfway between a goatee and a week's growth of stubble.
He stood to attention and tore off a salute. "Don't," I pleaded. "I used to have to salute your brother, and I'll just feel uncomfortable."
"I get that a lot." Christ, he even sounded like him! "It's generally about now that somebody jokes about either cloning or lebensborn, but please don't, Commander. I'd hate to be court-martialled for assaulting a superior officer." We laughed.
"One thing Klaus didn't have was much of a sense of humour," I remarked. "I'm Robert Cole, the 2/ic of the Tigers. We haven't sorted out who's going in what squadron yet but we might end up working together. Did Klaus talk much about our outfit?"
"Not really," he replied guardedly. I got the feeling he'd got very tired of people mentioning his big brother all the time.
"Okay, I'll start from the top. Fighter group commander -CAG in US jargon- is Colonel Maria Enriquez, referred to amongst us pilots as The Iron Maiden; terrifying woman when she wants to be, so try not to annoy her! Next step down are the two squadron leaders. My skipper's Mark Bannister, callsign 'Bandit'. You'll like him; he's a good guy to have a beer with. The Diamondbacks are run by Ned Dundee- yes, he IS Australian. I don't know him too well, but he seems okay. You'll very rarely run into Captain Mukai; I've met him once." I refrained from telling him that it had been when being awarded the Navy Cross for defending the Yamato from seemingly endless volleys of torpedoes during a naval engagement against the CS Pukov, because I don't like showing off.
I told him a little about the two other pilots who'd been with the Tigers from the start. Bandit was the only career military man left in the squad. Along with our now-deceased previous skipper Brad 'Viper' Callan, who deserted to join a pirate outfit composed of military fliers from both sides who were evidently tired of the pay and working hours, he was put in the squadron to keep us irregulars out of trouble. He'd only recently returned from a staff posting, following a long period recovering from a badly broken leg he'd suffered when a stack of mercifully empty fuel pods had toppled and landed on his plane and the repair crew who were working on it, one of whom had been killed.
Michelle 'Silky' McRae had learned to fly in a barnstorming show with her parents, and it showed. She was not only a good pilot, but pulled manoevres that I wouldn't dare contemplate on a regular basis. She had also beaten me at every drinking game I knew of -and there are several dozen played in the bars of Jupiter's less exciting moons- plus quite a few I had to invent specially.
"Chances are that the original volunteer pilots will seem a bit... undecorous at first. We're a load of ex-mercenaries, academy dropouts and civilian shuttle pilots, so we've never quite got the hang of rank and discipline," I warned. "I hope you cope with it better than your brother; Bismarck would have told him to lighten up!"
"Oh, that's the Klaus I remember!" Peter laughed. "He used to think he could get away with it just because he was oldest, but the rest of us would set upon him en masse and convince him otherwise." I had a sudden vision of a teenaged Klaus Steiner being jumped on by a small crowd of younger versions of himself, which I rather enjoyed. I'd always admired and respected him, but he'd never exactly been the friendliest guy in the world. No, let's not be euphemistic. He was like Himmler with a headache most of the time.
We filed into the briefing room, and Colonel Enriquez gave a short but very boring speech about what she expected of the pilots under her command. Then Bandit stood up and began explaining about what ships we would be using.
"The Tigers will be standardising to the Wolverine; sorry, Silky, this is from above." The Wolverine is my preferred mount, though I'd flown several other types in my time with the 45th. We tended to end up with whatever could be scrounged. The German-built Wolverine is pretty slow, but very well armed and armoured, backed up by fair-to-middling shields and a good enough rate of turn. To Michelle it'd be like a flying boulder.
"The 51st," Bandit continued dramatically, "are being fitted out with the Shroud." Cheers erupted from several pilots.
The Shroud is an amazing fighter, and Japan's first attempt at an indigenous fighter design. At the outbreak of the war, the Japanese military were using imported US designs, but they were mostly stuck with the outdated Predator in the primary strike role pending a firm decision on what to acquire to replace them. Suddenly finding that everybody had better things to do with their ships than sell them, they were forced to deploy the home-built but hopelessly outmatched Naginata trainer in the interim. They more than compensated with this new design; it was blindingly fast -400 KPS to the Naginata's 340 and the Wolverine's 280- and staggeringly manoevereable, as well as being the first Alliance ship to be fitted with a cloaking device, but I'd never been a great fan of the design. They were both fragile and undergunned to my mind, and my one experience with the type in actual combat had consisted mainly of trying very hard not to collide with anybody else; at full throttle it was like riding a Vagabond missile.
"I'm sure we can swap!" offered a Diamondback who apparently agreed with my assessment. Silky nodded gratefully.
"We haven't finalised the squadron placements yet, so take both planes out for a spin and get a feel for them. They're both good ships in their own way. Anyhow," Bandit continued, "we'll be heading to the new warp gate at 0800 tomorrow. There's no telling when we'll come back from this mission, so you might want to call or write to your families. Okay, that's everything, dismissed." We saluted -mostly for the benefit of the regulars, who had yet to get the hang of our disregard for military decorum, and for almost the last time- and filed out.
I've never been entirely comfortable with the warp system, which creates a small, temporary wormhole that can send a ship right across the solar system. The technology was a bit on the unpredictable side, especially in the early days, and my confidence in the method of transport was NOT helped by the revalation that the people who developed the process didn't fully understand the physics themselves. Apparently they'd created the phenomenon quite accidentally whilst working on something else altogether, the upshot of which being that there were an incalculable but almost certainly large number of wholly new ways of the bloody thing going wrong yet to be discovered, none of which I cared to experience firsthand. Fortunately for my continued sanity, our little fleet entered the huge warp gate built for the purpose before anybody had time to think about it.
The four ships came out in the vicinity of the brightest star in the constellation Orion. Astonishingly, it had turned out to be TWO stars less than a lightyear apart- our astronomers hadn't realised this because one was almost directly behind the other from our point of view back home. The survey team had discovered no fewer than five planets that might reasonably be terraformed, and a colonisation mission was sent out. That was the last we heard of it, until now...
After about an hour, I wandered up to the bridge on some excuse to find out what the Yamato's crew had discovered. Bandit and Ned Dundee (callsign Wombat) were already there, as was Silky, Ned's new XO. The rest of the fighter contingent and a good portion of the ship's crew were also trying to squeeze in, and Colonel Enriquez was trying to get rid of them.
"Get out the way, you lot! I do outrank you, you know," I complained. My copilot and old friend Mike Horrigan (callsign Moose, apparently because he's from Vermont) gave me a look. I ignored him, and simply resorted to judicious use of elbows. Somebody trod heavily on my foot in retaliation, and the whole undignified scrum broke down into a fistfight. The colonel stood back to watch, obviously trying very hard not to laugh out loud.
I freed myself with some difficulty, and saluted with as much military precision as somebody who's been recently kneed in the groin can manage. Colonel Enriquez finally gave up the struggle and roared with laughter.
"So, ma'am," I said without a hint of irritation in my voice [a feat of self-control of which I am inordinately proud], "what's happening?"
"We aren't sure," she replied. "There's a huge level of comms traffic, as much as around Earth."
"Aliens?" I said weakly. "We sent three survey missions and a colonisation ship and nobody noticed ALIENS?"
"I wondered about that as well," Captain Mukai admitted. "But they appear to be in English. We appear to be witnesses to the first documented instance of time travel."
The hubbub died down quite precipitously at this. "An unanticipated side effect of warp technology, perhaps," the captain continued, inscrutable as always. "We really know too little of the mechanics of wormholes to categorically disprove this theory, however fantastical it might seem."
'Fantastical' seemed a pretty apt phrase for the idea, but also for this whole situation. I stared out of the viewport and rapped one knuckle against the glass, thinking. An alarming idea came to me.
"Is it the colony ship that's moved in time, or is it US?" I wondered aloud.
"It's possible, I suppose," the captain admitted reluctantly.
"Why don't we send the Diamondbacks to the nearest colony world and find out?" Bandit suggested. "The Shrouds are faster and they can cloak, so we can monitor the situation from a distance."
"Makes sense," Ned agreed. "Just two ships ought to be enough, though. You and me, Silky?" Michelle kept her face absolutely straight, to her credit. Not so myself and virtually everybody else on the bridge. Ned had made no secret of his crush on her.
The next three days were the longest of my life. We wound up on five minute alert, sitting in the messroom waiting for somebody -God alone knew who- to attack. This is dreary enough in wartime, let alone a situation like this, but I don't suppose Wombat and Silky were any less bored. Personally, I'd rather be bored in the relative comfort -and I must heavily emphasise the word relative- of the quick reaction alert mess than bored in the considerable DIScomfort of a fighter cockpit on a long range mission any day.
After ten minutes of that, I felt the sudden vibration of the jump drive activating. The ordinary jump drive is a relatively crude process; a sudden, explosive burst of power followed by a long decceleration burn. Maximum range and speed vary with the individual craft's power/mass ratio and the capabilities of the jump computer [since the calculations required involve timing down to the hundredth of a second, it is exceptionally unwise to attempt a jump without the computer system; at best you are likely to end up dozens or hundreds of kilometres off-target, and at worst you will plough straight into the surface of whatever body you were headed for], but typical ranges are in between 5000 and 7500 km. The records stands at 37000km, but only for unmanned courier drones used largely by Parcel Force or Fed-Ex.
"What the hell's happening now?" somebody said irritably. I shrugged. Then the alert sounded and we all pelted for the launch bay, training and practice overriding confusion.
We emerged from the launch tubes to find a group of twenty or so big ships and a handful of fighters, which appeared to be attacking the transports rather halfheartedly. Our two-ship reconissance mission was busily engaged with ending the fight rather quickly, and before the rest of us could join in the survivors warped out.
"What was that all about?" Bandit wondered aloud.
"No idea, Tiger One," Wombat replied. "We'd better try and get some sense out of those people. I can see at least six ships with landing bays that'll take a fighter."
"Good thinking, Diamondback One," Colonel Enriquez replied. "I'm on my way." Her Patriot fighter took off a few moments later. It was a fairly new design, with a reasonable turn of speed and some fairly potent firepower, and neatly filled the middle ground between our two main ship designs. In my view it's also the ugliest thing ever to take to the skies, but that's just one man's opinion.
We set down on the ships Ned had identified, and began the rather difficult task of getting some sense out of the passengers and crew. I was greeted by a man asking if I was one of the Lords of Kobol, and he seemed rather put out that I hadn't got a clue what he was on about. When I told him we were from Earth, he looked even more put out.
"The thirteenth colony?" he said in surprise.
"Hardly," I replied, bemused. "It's our home planet. To the best of my knowledge we evolved there."
"Oh," he replied, and then, "That's our whole mythology and religion down the tubes, then." I felt vaguely guilty for some while after that.
We eventually got most of the story from the people we'd rescued. Apparently Silky had done some impressive work shooting down torpedoes whilst Ned tackled the fighters. They then hastily called in the Yamato and her small fleet- two Prowler class corvettes and a single search-and-rescue craft whose formal name I can't remember, which is referred to by all pilots as a Nanny Ship. By then they'd learned at least some of the story.
Some years ago, the scientists of the twelve colonies created an advanced AI that achieved self-awareness within months, and a deep dislike of the human race very shortly thereafter. We aren't exactly certain why, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that some idiot decided to try and blow the thing up before it got too big to control, and pissed it off bigtime in the process. The result was the evolution of the Cylons. After a protracted and bloody war, an armistice was reached and the Cylons went to find a home planet of their own. Now, apparently, they were back.
The colection of ships we had just rescued was part of a larger refugee convoy, the majority of which had jumped out when the attack began. None of them were armed, so they'd had no choice. I made an effort to quell the anger being expressed at the President, who had apparently been aboard one of the ships that had jumped out.
"What exactly could they have done if they'd stayed?" I asked the captain of the ship I was on. "There was no sense in everybody dying, which is exactly what would have happened if they hadn't run."
"Yeah, I guess you're right. Not easy to see things that way when it's you being left behind, though," he replied. "The problem is we don't know where they went; we can't even follow at sublight speed!"
"Sad to say, but there's some logic in that too," Moose put in. "For all they know it could be a Cylon asking you the same question, only at gunpoint."
Until we worked that out, we decided to head for the nearest colony and try to pick up as many survivors as we could. It was either Sagitara or Caprica, but to be honest I didn't care by the time we left.
I remember the next 48 hours only as a blur, with only a few isolated images retaining any kind of clarity. Lines of wounded people being treated by medics from the Yamato just yards from marines trying desperately to hold the line against approaching combat drones- huge, apelike things with glowing red lights sweeping from side to side in place of eyes. Their fighters spraying the crowds of people we were loading into the shuttles as I desperately tried to get a missile lock, move into gun range, anything. They look a little like our own Shroud fighter; compact engine and 'cockpit', with long curved wings sweeping forward. But still that swaying, oscillating point of red. I'll see that in my nightmares for a long time.
By the third day we had every survvor we could find -fewer than a thousand- aboard our motley convoy, and by then we had restored or jury-rigged warp projectors for all ships. By some miracle, we had also found a surviving military pilot who knew how to get into contact with a warship that had survived the initial battle by pure chance. I didn't catch his name at the time -actually I probably did, but my memory for names is rubbish at the best of times and I'd just had a very traumatic couple of days- but I do recall his flight callsign; Helo.
The Galactica and some forty ships were about two light-hours away from us, apparently heading for the mythical thirteenth colony. Captain Mukai helpfully included the coordinates for Earth, though from Helo's testimony I concluded that it took more courage to tell Commander Adama that he was going more or less exactly the wrong way than it would to commit the method of ritual suicide referred to as hara-kiri, and we set off to rendezvous with them.
We came out of the artificial wormholes to find a massive fight raging below us, relative to our rotation. A simply HUGE ship of a bizarre double saucer configuration was advancing on a fleet of lesser vessels, and Cylon fighters were darting amongst the transports. The Vipers -a sleek tri-winged design I instantly liked the look of- were hard pressed to keep them away, and were badly outnumbered. The Galactica was giving a good account of herself, but there was no way she'd be able to tangle with that base-star and come away the better; most of her armament was optimised for fighter defence, and she really needed to work in conjunction with a ship better equipped to handle the big stuff. Needless to say, Captain Mukai would be happy to oblige.
Immediately, the Yamato deployed half a dozen torpedo bombers. "Okay people, this is nothing new to us," Colonel Enriquez said in a voice that brimmed with false confidence. "Tigers, you clear the way for Gamma wing and the Yamato. Diamondbacks, go hit those fighters!"
"Okay, folks, you heard the lady!" Bandit said, diving at the enemy vessel. I followed suit, raising a mock growl over the radios that had become the signature of the Flying Tigers.
The base-star was literally bristling with flak turrets; upwards of a hundred on the upper surface alone. They immediately began shooting at us. Hundreds of magnetically accelerated projectiles glanced off my forward shields, and began wearing them down quite badly. My rear turret gunner, Curtis 'Buckshot' Jackson, yelled a sudden warning in broadest Louisiana.
"Bandit on our six an' comin' up fast!" I could hear the high-pitched snap of his quad pulse cannons in my earphones as he spoke.
"I see him," I replied, glancing into my rear view screen. "Hold tight fellas, I've got an idea!" I gave it ten seconds of afterburners and then hauled back on the stick with about ten seconds to go before slamming into the base-star's hull. There was a flash of light behind me that suggested the Cylon raider hadn't fared as well.
"Scratch one bad guy!" Moose remarked.
"Yeah, only another hundred-odd to go," I replied grimly, and set about zapping gun emplacements. They were clustered together, so I didn't bother trying to get the targeting systems to recognise subtargets on an unfamiliar ship design, and just used my eyes and gunsights. Turret after turret exploded in a flash and shower of debris, and between my ECM and the trouble the turrets had depressing far enough to hit my Wolverine I was fairly safe. The enemy fighters were having a certain amount of difficulty from the Diamondbacks, and were also evidently unwilling to fly too close to their own guns.
"Okay, Tigers, we've got a clear shot!" the leader of our torpedo bomber force reported. "Keep those fighters off us!"
"Need a hand?" an unfamiliar woman's voice enquired. The small comms screen in my HUD where a visual feed from cockpit cameras usually popped up (don't ask me why the Alliance bothers with this) was blank, so I guessed it was a Viper pilot.
"There's about three squadrons heading our way, so yeah!" Gamma Leader concluded.
A slightly different Viper -the Mark 2, I guessed- came into view. The pilot gave me a little wave. "Call me Starbuck," she said. "Heads up!" The Viper looped around and shot up an oncoming raider, then snaprolled and set another in its sights.
"Holy shit!" I remarked, firing a missile at a raider this Starbuck character had missed. The torpedo bombers got into range and let fly, with a full broadside from the Yamato's launchers following. Twenty six torpedoes hit the base-star in ragged succession, and it exploded in spectacular fashion.
"Boom, baby!" Moose yelled in victory. "The rest of the fighters are buggin' out!" We'd done it.
"Attention Galactica, this is Captain Mukai of the Earth Western Alliance strike carrier ANS Yamato. I request permission to send a delegation aboard."
"This is Commander Adama of the Galactica. Permission granted," a stern male voice replied.
A shuttle left the Yamato's aft bay, and wheeled around. "Squad leaders and XOs take up parade escort formation," Colonel Enriquez ordered. There was a general groan. "This means a diplomatic mission, and I'm really not good at diplomatic!" I muttered.
"Neither am I, pilot," replied the Colonel, "but I guess we can learn together." She was in a good mood, which always unnerved me because the things that put the Iron Maiden in a good mood are not things that put normal people in a good mood.
We set down aboard the Galactica, and I finally got my head around the sheer size of the thing. Just the launch bays were the size of the Yamato, and the main body massed at least as much as some of our bigger space stations. And by Helo's account the Galactica's pretty small by Colonial standards. "They certainly don't bugger about when it comes to building ships in these parts," I remarked as we set down on the elevators into the hangar deck; the launch system was well-nigh identical in principle to the Yamato's, but I suppose there can only be a limited number of ways to get planes off carriers.
A broad-shouldered man of late middle years with greying hair in a military uniform was waiting for us, along with a slightly younger woman in a very sharp suit. I clambered out of my cockpit and dropped to the ground, then came to attention and managed a salute. Comander Adama replied to it, and turned towards the shuttle where Colonel Enriquez and Captain Mukai were exiting. There was a flurry of introductions, and then Silky and I were left talking to the Galactica's air group CO.
"Nice ships," he remarked. "What're they like in the air?"
"The Shroud's the fast one," Silky replied. "Put all power into the engines and she'll do 600kps, 400 the rest of the time. As for that flying tank-"
"What've you got against the Wolverine?" I retorted amiably. "More armour, more hardpoints and more guns, even if it's not as fast. I can't handle a Shroud at full throttle in a dogfight, but a Wolverine's got half the turn radius, and that counts for a good deal at close range. All the same, if you're a good enough pilot -and I most definitely am not- then the Shroud's lethal against enemy fighters." Silky smiled at the remark.
"Must try that some time," our new friend said cheerfully. "I'm Lee Adama; yes, that's my father in charge." He takes after his mother, or so Starbuck assured me much later.
"Hi. I'm Robert Cole, and this is Michelle McRae. The guy with the beard trying to hide the cigarette is Mike Horrigan -they're refuelling aircraft in here you pillock! Put it out!- and the hillbilly in the turret is Curtis Jackson. Don't know the other guy."
"My copilot," Silky put in. "Steve Duncan."
"Well, why don't you guys come on down to the recreation deck and meet the rest of the pilots whilst our fearless leaders sort out all the politics?" he suggested.
"I can see why you made CAG!" Silky replied.
The recreation deck was a necessary addition to a ship that was expected to be away from home for upwards of a year- just getting between solar systems could take months. The Yamato and most other Alliance ships of the line aren't as well appointed, but our forces are usually no more than ten days away from a military installation with reasonable shore leave facilities, so we've largely avoided the necessity. There was a fairly spacious messhall with attached bar, a couple of basketball courts and a small gym. Officers had their own mess with a good deal more luxuries, but it was the regular mess that Lee took us to. I couldn't blame him; I'd earned the right to the Officers Mess on the Yamato nearly six months ago and still hadn't got used to it, and he'd been CAG for about a week. We sat down at a table full of pilots congratulating themselves for not dying this time around; it was rapidly dawning on them that this was a pretty worthy achievement, as it had for me after my first big naval engagement. Immediately they leapt up with about a hundred questions each, but once they'd calmed down a bit we got things more or less straightened out.
I honestly couldn't hazard a guess where all this Kobol stuff came from; artistic license on somebody's part was the most plausible suggestion that arose from our discussion. Every sociology and anthropology student in the Sol system would be clamouring to do studies about this stuff, and I suspected that potential interviewees would be able to name their price.
We were on our second bottle of extremely good whiskey when an aide turned up to haul Lee, Michelle and myself up to the briefing room, where formal arrangements were being made for command and liasion structures. What they thought we could usefully contribute to this discussion I had no idea, but I knew better than to argue.
"On the surface, it seems simple. Galactica stays with the fleet and provides cover against enemy fighters, whilst the Yamato deals with the base-stars. However," Colonel Enriquez continued, "we have insufficient fighter numbers to protect both ships."
"You have shields, which gives you a decided edge," Adama pointed out. A practical shield system was a fairly recent innovation for the Alliance, and we'd had sporadic outbreaks of low-grade warfare for the last hundred and twenty years.
"Not as much as you'd think," she replied. "Shields can be worn down, and in less time than you'd expect. Our fighter cover is woefully inadequate right now."
"Erm, Colonel?" I spoke up, trying to look helpful. "I had a quick look at the cargo manifests of the ships we rescued, and one of them was on a military contract hauling crated fighters and spares."
"How many?" President Roslin asked. I thought back.
"About fifty or so, I think, though I'm not sure. I can check easily enough, though." Roslin's aide was already tapping at a computer terminal. "Forty eight Viper Mark 7s, twelve Raptor reconissance ships and enough spares and fuel for a full year's operation. All bound for that new carrier, the Posiedon."
"That brings us almost up to full strength," Adama said jubilantly, "and those spares will keep us going until we reach Earth."
"Assuming we don't encounter any Cylon battle fleets along the way, that is," Lee added.
"Ever the optimist, Apollo," Colonel Tigh remarked wryly.
"He's got a point," I countered. "I doubt they'll let us go that easily. And what if they pursue us all the way to Earth?"
"That would be a problem," Captain Mukai admitted. "But not an especially large one. Our weapons and ship technology is considerably ahead of theirs, and our fleet is on a war footing."
"Sir, we have fewer than twenty operational carriers, and the Coalition have even fewer," Bandit pointed out. "God only knows how many of those monsters the Cylons have."
"Then we make random course changes, double back on ourselves a few times, and give them the slip," Adama replied. "We can do this!"
The rest of the discussions are too tedious to be worth mentioning, but the upshot for me was that a liasion officer would be drawn from the Yamato's fighter contingent on a rota. I was first up, and my first assignment was to try and organise a flight exchange program, so that we were familiar with the capabilities of each other's ships. I had to spend several hours listening to Lee, Colonel Tigh and just about everybody who knew her explaining all the reasons why under no circumstances should I put Kara Thrace in a Shroud, and eventually decided to put her at the top of the list out of sheer spite. Peter has yet to entirely forgive me for landing him in the back seat with a pilot whom Apollo is quoted as describing as 'beyond insane', and having seen her fly I am obliged to agree.
I took on the task of showing Sharon Valieri, aka 'Boomer', how to fly a Wolverine. This is an experience that I will not soon forget, and for all the wrong reasons. It also led indirectly to a rather bizarre revalation about Cylon replicants and the semi-involuntary desertion of Dr Gaius Baltar...
I'm Robert Cole, Lt. Commander Robert Cole of the Western Alliance Fighter Corps to be exact, and this is my story.
Of course, you won't know much about the Alliance. Not after all this time. I can't really be bothered to go into all the geopolitical and social circumstances that split our planet before we split the atom, and all you really need to know is that there are two big power blocks in the Sol system. The Alliance -most of Earth's western hemisphere's various nations- is a democracy, more or less. The organisation's pretty much like the twelve colonies of old; a council of representatives from each nation, though since every lump of rock in the Alliance half of the system has a representative there are significantly more than twelve, headed by a President. The difference is that each nation has a great deal more autonomy, so there's a lot of squabbling between them over minor issues, and Senate meetings are a lively affair. We manage okay though, most of the time.
The Eastern Coalition, well now, they're another matter. Didn't Areia go through communism at one stage? Well, the other half of the solar system is still in that self-same situation. And the two sides are mutually antagonistic most of the time. It's as much our fault as theirs, really, and there's been on/off skirmishes sparking up every few months for most of the century. Sometimes I suspect that the only reason that the Sol system isn't in a perpeptual state of all-out war is economics; we run out of weapons after a year or two, and then you get a reasonably long period of peace, albeit the sort where everybody's busy rearming.
The latest outbreak is the one I was in. The Coalition had gained quite an advantage initially, by the rather unsporting tactic of turning up to the signing of a non-aggression pact with a huge battle fleet and blowing up several colonies on Mars, and then going on to take half the system. My immediate family were wiped out when their apartment building was hit by a missile, fired by Coalition flying ace and professional evil bastard Ivan 'The Butcher' Petrov. I'm glad to say that I personally blew him out of the sky somewhat later, but that's another story altogether.
Anyway, suddenly the government finds itself in a lot of trouble. Not many pilots going spare right then, as you can imagine, and they actually needed pilots more than ground troops at this stage. So, they had a recruitment drive, 'The Alliance Needs You' and all that stuff. Along with a load of academy dropouts, ex-mercenaries and other ne'er-do-wells, I joined up.
Until then, I'd been making a more or less honest living as a freelance pilot-for-hire. Most of my working life was spent escorting convoys; not exactly mercenary work, more sort of bodyguard-cum-minicab driver, really. I ended up in the 45th Volunteers, later nicknamed the Flying Tigers by a grateful press and public after one of our more spectacular exploits. Surprisingly enough, we made it through the war without geting wiped out. Even more surprisingly, we became one of the best fighter squadrons in the Alliance military.
After the war, I think that the Alliance wasn't sure what to do with us. They couldn't very well disband the unit, but there wasn't really much they set us to doing, being rather overloaded with personnel. The pilots were getting well and truly fed up with mine-clearing and routine system patrol, as well. Obligingly, one of our first colonisation ventures outside the solar system provided the answer.
Our warp gate technology was still in the early stages back then, and to tell you the truth we didn't fully understand the physics. If you're wondering what we thought we were doing sending off colony ships dozens of lightyears in that case, you wouldn't be the first. We know now that for reasons which remain incompletely understood, the warp gate sent the ship back in time; about fifteen hundred years is the estimate I reckon sounds closest, though the long and the short of it is that nobody really knows. The eventual decision was to send a small and rather military-oriented team to find out what had happened. Who better to send than the famous Flying Tigers?
It was a volunteer mision, obviously. Anybody currently in fighter corps service could put his or her name in the hat, and candidates for the slots left vacant by the departure of some of the Tigers and our somewhat less illustrious sister outfit the 51st Volunteers, aka the Diamondbacks. Out of 29 vacant slots including reserves and pilots for our small complement of Hades torpedo bombers, we got no fewer than 157 applicants, some of them from top pilots. The Hornets, the Jackals, even the legendary Pirates; sorting out who to take was a nightmare, especially since as XO I got handed a good portion of the ensuing paperwork.
We begin our tale proper in July 2162, aboard the ANS Yamato, the Japanese-built carrier on which I had served for the latter half of the war, after the old ANS Reliant was destroyed when Captain Foster rammed her into an enemy warship in order to buy time for the convoy we were protecting to escape. I was looking out for one of the last Gold List pilots to arrive.
Peter Steiner was the youngest brother of the legendary Klaus Steiner of the Vampires, the greatest pilot Germany has produced since von Richtofen. We'd worked with him on a few missions, and the Tigers had a hand in extricating him and some of his squadron from an unpleasant Coalition prison ship during the only low point of his career. He'd died in combat during our last major engagement, winning a posthumous Medal of Honour in the process, and Peter was determined to follow in his footsteps. He was easily good enough to make the cut, with forty kills gained in two months of war- it had taken his brother nearly a year to get that many.
I was just about sick of standing around in the hangar when there was a dull clang above me, and the elevator began to lower from the landing area. There was a hiss of pressurisation, the doors to the elevator opened and a small shuttle taxied out. Several personnel clambered out, including a figure so hauntingly familiar that I was quite taken aback. Peter and Klaus were at opposite ends of a quite large family, separated by about eight years, but they were staggeringly similar in appearance. Both of them were tall and angular -Klaus was captain of the Luftwaffe basketball team- with perpeptually ruffled blonde hair and peircing blue eyes. Peter even had an almost identical little beardy thing, halfway between a goatee and a week's growth of stubble.
He stood to attention and tore off a salute. "Don't," I pleaded. "I used to have to salute your brother, and I'll just feel uncomfortable."
"I get that a lot." Christ, he even sounded like him! "It's generally about now that somebody jokes about either cloning or lebensborn, but please don't, Commander. I'd hate to be court-martialled for assaulting a superior officer." We laughed.
"One thing Klaus didn't have was much of a sense of humour," I remarked. "I'm Robert Cole, the 2/ic of the Tigers. We haven't sorted out who's going in what squadron yet but we might end up working together. Did Klaus talk much about our outfit?"
"Not really," he replied guardedly. I got the feeling he'd got very tired of people mentioning his big brother all the time.
"Okay, I'll start from the top. Fighter group commander -CAG in US jargon- is Colonel Maria Enriquez, referred to amongst us pilots as The Iron Maiden; terrifying woman when she wants to be, so try not to annoy her! Next step down are the two squadron leaders. My skipper's Mark Bannister, callsign 'Bandit'. You'll like him; he's a good guy to have a beer with. The Diamondbacks are run by Ned Dundee- yes, he IS Australian. I don't know him too well, but he seems okay. You'll very rarely run into Captain Mukai; I've met him once." I refrained from telling him that it had been when being awarded the Navy Cross for defending the Yamato from seemingly endless volleys of torpedoes during a naval engagement against the CS Pukov, because I don't like showing off.
I told him a little about the two other pilots who'd been with the Tigers from the start. Bandit was the only career military man left in the squad. Along with our now-deceased previous skipper Brad 'Viper' Callan, who deserted to join a pirate outfit composed of military fliers from both sides who were evidently tired of the pay and working hours, he was put in the squadron to keep us irregulars out of trouble. He'd only recently returned from a staff posting, following a long period recovering from a badly broken leg he'd suffered when a stack of mercifully empty fuel pods had toppled and landed on his plane and the repair crew who were working on it, one of whom had been killed.
Michelle 'Silky' McRae had learned to fly in a barnstorming show with her parents, and it showed. She was not only a good pilot, but pulled manoevres that I wouldn't dare contemplate on a regular basis. She had also beaten me at every drinking game I knew of -and there are several dozen played in the bars of Jupiter's less exciting moons- plus quite a few I had to invent specially.
"Chances are that the original volunteer pilots will seem a bit... undecorous at first. We're a load of ex-mercenaries, academy dropouts and civilian shuttle pilots, so we've never quite got the hang of rank and discipline," I warned. "I hope you cope with it better than your brother; Bismarck would have told him to lighten up!"
"Oh, that's the Klaus I remember!" Peter laughed. "He used to think he could get away with it just because he was oldest, but the rest of us would set upon him en masse and convince him otherwise." I had a sudden vision of a teenaged Klaus Steiner being jumped on by a small crowd of younger versions of himself, which I rather enjoyed. I'd always admired and respected him, but he'd never exactly been the friendliest guy in the world. No, let's not be euphemistic. He was like Himmler with a headache most of the time.
We filed into the briefing room, and Colonel Enriquez gave a short but very boring speech about what she expected of the pilots under her command. Then Bandit stood up and began explaining about what ships we would be using.
"The Tigers will be standardising to the Wolverine; sorry, Silky, this is from above." The Wolverine is my preferred mount, though I'd flown several other types in my time with the 45th. We tended to end up with whatever could be scrounged. The German-built Wolverine is pretty slow, but very well armed and armoured, backed up by fair-to-middling shields and a good enough rate of turn. To Michelle it'd be like a flying boulder.
"The 51st," Bandit continued dramatically, "are being fitted out with the Shroud." Cheers erupted from several pilots.
The Shroud is an amazing fighter, and Japan's first attempt at an indigenous fighter design. At the outbreak of the war, the Japanese military were using imported US designs, but they were mostly stuck with the outdated Predator in the primary strike role pending a firm decision on what to acquire to replace them. Suddenly finding that everybody had better things to do with their ships than sell them, they were forced to deploy the home-built but hopelessly outmatched Naginata trainer in the interim. They more than compensated with this new design; it was blindingly fast -400 KPS to the Naginata's 340 and the Wolverine's 280- and staggeringly manoevereable, as well as being the first Alliance ship to be fitted with a cloaking device, but I'd never been a great fan of the design. They were both fragile and undergunned to my mind, and my one experience with the type in actual combat had consisted mainly of trying very hard not to collide with anybody else; at full throttle it was like riding a Vagabond missile.
"I'm sure we can swap!" offered a Diamondback who apparently agreed with my assessment. Silky nodded gratefully.
"We haven't finalised the squadron placements yet, so take both planes out for a spin and get a feel for them. They're both good ships in their own way. Anyhow," Bandit continued, "we'll be heading to the new warp gate at 0800 tomorrow. There's no telling when we'll come back from this mission, so you might want to call or write to your families. Okay, that's everything, dismissed." We saluted -mostly for the benefit of the regulars, who had yet to get the hang of our disregard for military decorum, and for almost the last time- and filed out.
I've never been entirely comfortable with the warp system, which creates a small, temporary wormhole that can send a ship right across the solar system. The technology was a bit on the unpredictable side, especially in the early days, and my confidence in the method of transport was NOT helped by the revalation that the people who developed the process didn't fully understand the physics themselves. Apparently they'd created the phenomenon quite accidentally whilst working on something else altogether, the upshot of which being that there were an incalculable but almost certainly large number of wholly new ways of the bloody thing going wrong yet to be discovered, none of which I cared to experience firsthand. Fortunately for my continued sanity, our little fleet entered the huge warp gate built for the purpose before anybody had time to think about it.
The four ships came out in the vicinity of the brightest star in the constellation Orion. Astonishingly, it had turned out to be TWO stars less than a lightyear apart- our astronomers hadn't realised this because one was almost directly behind the other from our point of view back home. The survey team had discovered no fewer than five planets that might reasonably be terraformed, and a colonisation mission was sent out. That was the last we heard of it, until now...
After about an hour, I wandered up to the bridge on some excuse to find out what the Yamato's crew had discovered. Bandit and Ned Dundee (callsign Wombat) were already there, as was Silky, Ned's new XO. The rest of the fighter contingent and a good portion of the ship's crew were also trying to squeeze in, and Colonel Enriquez was trying to get rid of them.
"Get out the way, you lot! I do outrank you, you know," I complained. My copilot and old friend Mike Horrigan (callsign Moose, apparently because he's from Vermont) gave me a look. I ignored him, and simply resorted to judicious use of elbows. Somebody trod heavily on my foot in retaliation, and the whole undignified scrum broke down into a fistfight. The colonel stood back to watch, obviously trying very hard not to laugh out loud.
I freed myself with some difficulty, and saluted with as much military precision as somebody who's been recently kneed in the groin can manage. Colonel Enriquez finally gave up the struggle and roared with laughter.
"So, ma'am," I said without a hint of irritation in my voice [a feat of self-control of which I am inordinately proud], "what's happening?"
"We aren't sure," she replied. "There's a huge level of comms traffic, as much as around Earth."
"Aliens?" I said weakly. "We sent three survey missions and a colonisation ship and nobody noticed ALIENS?"
"I wondered about that as well," Captain Mukai admitted. "But they appear to be in English. We appear to be witnesses to the first documented instance of time travel."
The hubbub died down quite precipitously at this. "An unanticipated side effect of warp technology, perhaps," the captain continued, inscrutable as always. "We really know too little of the mechanics of wormholes to categorically disprove this theory, however fantastical it might seem."
'Fantastical' seemed a pretty apt phrase for the idea, but also for this whole situation. I stared out of the viewport and rapped one knuckle against the glass, thinking. An alarming idea came to me.
"Is it the colony ship that's moved in time, or is it US?" I wondered aloud.
"It's possible, I suppose," the captain admitted reluctantly.
"Why don't we send the Diamondbacks to the nearest colony world and find out?" Bandit suggested. "The Shrouds are faster and they can cloak, so we can monitor the situation from a distance."
"Makes sense," Ned agreed. "Just two ships ought to be enough, though. You and me, Silky?" Michelle kept her face absolutely straight, to her credit. Not so myself and virtually everybody else on the bridge. Ned had made no secret of his crush on her.
The next three days were the longest of my life. We wound up on five minute alert, sitting in the messroom waiting for somebody -God alone knew who- to attack. This is dreary enough in wartime, let alone a situation like this, but I don't suppose Wombat and Silky were any less bored. Personally, I'd rather be bored in the relative comfort -and I must heavily emphasise the word relative- of the quick reaction alert mess than bored in the considerable DIScomfort of a fighter cockpit on a long range mission any day.
After ten minutes of that, I felt the sudden vibration of the jump drive activating. The ordinary jump drive is a relatively crude process; a sudden, explosive burst of power followed by a long decceleration burn. Maximum range and speed vary with the individual craft's power/mass ratio and the capabilities of the jump computer [since the calculations required involve timing down to the hundredth of a second, it is exceptionally unwise to attempt a jump without the computer system; at best you are likely to end up dozens or hundreds of kilometres off-target, and at worst you will plough straight into the surface of whatever body you were headed for], but typical ranges are in between 5000 and 7500 km. The records stands at 37000km, but only for unmanned courier drones used largely by Parcel Force or Fed-Ex.
"What the hell's happening now?" somebody said irritably. I shrugged. Then the alert sounded and we all pelted for the launch bay, training and practice overriding confusion.
We emerged from the launch tubes to find a group of twenty or so big ships and a handful of fighters, which appeared to be attacking the transports rather halfheartedly. Our two-ship reconissance mission was busily engaged with ending the fight rather quickly, and before the rest of us could join in the survivors warped out.
"What was that all about?" Bandit wondered aloud.
"No idea, Tiger One," Wombat replied. "We'd better try and get some sense out of those people. I can see at least six ships with landing bays that'll take a fighter."
"Good thinking, Diamondback One," Colonel Enriquez replied. "I'm on my way." Her Patriot fighter took off a few moments later. It was a fairly new design, with a reasonable turn of speed and some fairly potent firepower, and neatly filled the middle ground between our two main ship designs. In my view it's also the ugliest thing ever to take to the skies, but that's just one man's opinion.
We set down on the ships Ned had identified, and began the rather difficult task of getting some sense out of the passengers and crew. I was greeted by a man asking if I was one of the Lords of Kobol, and he seemed rather put out that I hadn't got a clue what he was on about. When I told him we were from Earth, he looked even more put out.
"The thirteenth colony?" he said in surprise.
"Hardly," I replied, bemused. "It's our home planet. To the best of my knowledge we evolved there."
"Oh," he replied, and then, "That's our whole mythology and religion down the tubes, then." I felt vaguely guilty for some while after that.
We eventually got most of the story from the people we'd rescued. Apparently Silky had done some impressive work shooting down torpedoes whilst Ned tackled the fighters. They then hastily called in the Yamato and her small fleet- two Prowler class corvettes and a single search-and-rescue craft whose formal name I can't remember, which is referred to by all pilots as a Nanny Ship. By then they'd learned at least some of the story.
Some years ago, the scientists of the twelve colonies created an advanced AI that achieved self-awareness within months, and a deep dislike of the human race very shortly thereafter. We aren't exactly certain why, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that some idiot decided to try and blow the thing up before it got too big to control, and pissed it off bigtime in the process. The result was the evolution of the Cylons. After a protracted and bloody war, an armistice was reached and the Cylons went to find a home planet of their own. Now, apparently, they were back.
The colection of ships we had just rescued was part of a larger refugee convoy, the majority of which had jumped out when the attack began. None of them were armed, so they'd had no choice. I made an effort to quell the anger being expressed at the President, who had apparently been aboard one of the ships that had jumped out.
"What exactly could they have done if they'd stayed?" I asked the captain of the ship I was on. "There was no sense in everybody dying, which is exactly what would have happened if they hadn't run."
"Yeah, I guess you're right. Not easy to see things that way when it's you being left behind, though," he replied. "The problem is we don't know where they went; we can't even follow at sublight speed!"
"Sad to say, but there's some logic in that too," Moose put in. "For all they know it could be a Cylon asking you the same question, only at gunpoint."
Until we worked that out, we decided to head for the nearest colony and try to pick up as many survivors as we could. It was either Sagitara or Caprica, but to be honest I didn't care by the time we left.
I remember the next 48 hours only as a blur, with only a few isolated images retaining any kind of clarity. Lines of wounded people being treated by medics from the Yamato just yards from marines trying desperately to hold the line against approaching combat drones- huge, apelike things with glowing red lights sweeping from side to side in place of eyes. Their fighters spraying the crowds of people we were loading into the shuttles as I desperately tried to get a missile lock, move into gun range, anything. They look a little like our own Shroud fighter; compact engine and 'cockpit', with long curved wings sweeping forward. But still that swaying, oscillating point of red. I'll see that in my nightmares for a long time.
By the third day we had every survvor we could find -fewer than a thousand- aboard our motley convoy, and by then we had restored or jury-rigged warp projectors for all ships. By some miracle, we had also found a surviving military pilot who knew how to get into contact with a warship that had survived the initial battle by pure chance. I didn't catch his name at the time -actually I probably did, but my memory for names is rubbish at the best of times and I'd just had a very traumatic couple of days- but I do recall his flight callsign; Helo.
The Galactica and some forty ships were about two light-hours away from us, apparently heading for the mythical thirteenth colony. Captain Mukai helpfully included the coordinates for Earth, though from Helo's testimony I concluded that it took more courage to tell Commander Adama that he was going more or less exactly the wrong way than it would to commit the method of ritual suicide referred to as hara-kiri, and we set off to rendezvous with them.
We came out of the artificial wormholes to find a massive fight raging below us, relative to our rotation. A simply HUGE ship of a bizarre double saucer configuration was advancing on a fleet of lesser vessels, and Cylon fighters were darting amongst the transports. The Vipers -a sleek tri-winged design I instantly liked the look of- were hard pressed to keep them away, and were badly outnumbered. The Galactica was giving a good account of herself, but there was no way she'd be able to tangle with that base-star and come away the better; most of her armament was optimised for fighter defence, and she really needed to work in conjunction with a ship better equipped to handle the big stuff. Needless to say, Captain Mukai would be happy to oblige.
Immediately, the Yamato deployed half a dozen torpedo bombers. "Okay people, this is nothing new to us," Colonel Enriquez said in a voice that brimmed with false confidence. "Tigers, you clear the way for Gamma wing and the Yamato. Diamondbacks, go hit those fighters!"
"Okay, folks, you heard the lady!" Bandit said, diving at the enemy vessel. I followed suit, raising a mock growl over the radios that had become the signature of the Flying Tigers.
The base-star was literally bristling with flak turrets; upwards of a hundred on the upper surface alone. They immediately began shooting at us. Hundreds of magnetically accelerated projectiles glanced off my forward shields, and began wearing them down quite badly. My rear turret gunner, Curtis 'Buckshot' Jackson, yelled a sudden warning in broadest Louisiana.
"Bandit on our six an' comin' up fast!" I could hear the high-pitched snap of his quad pulse cannons in my earphones as he spoke.
"I see him," I replied, glancing into my rear view screen. "Hold tight fellas, I've got an idea!" I gave it ten seconds of afterburners and then hauled back on the stick with about ten seconds to go before slamming into the base-star's hull. There was a flash of light behind me that suggested the Cylon raider hadn't fared as well.
"Scratch one bad guy!" Moose remarked.
"Yeah, only another hundred-odd to go," I replied grimly, and set about zapping gun emplacements. They were clustered together, so I didn't bother trying to get the targeting systems to recognise subtargets on an unfamiliar ship design, and just used my eyes and gunsights. Turret after turret exploded in a flash and shower of debris, and between my ECM and the trouble the turrets had depressing far enough to hit my Wolverine I was fairly safe. The enemy fighters were having a certain amount of difficulty from the Diamondbacks, and were also evidently unwilling to fly too close to their own guns.
"Okay, Tigers, we've got a clear shot!" the leader of our torpedo bomber force reported. "Keep those fighters off us!"
"Need a hand?" an unfamiliar woman's voice enquired. The small comms screen in my HUD where a visual feed from cockpit cameras usually popped up (don't ask me why the Alliance bothers with this) was blank, so I guessed it was a Viper pilot.
"There's about three squadrons heading our way, so yeah!" Gamma Leader concluded.
A slightly different Viper -the Mark 2, I guessed- came into view. The pilot gave me a little wave. "Call me Starbuck," she said. "Heads up!" The Viper looped around and shot up an oncoming raider, then snaprolled and set another in its sights.
"Holy shit!" I remarked, firing a missile at a raider this Starbuck character had missed. The torpedo bombers got into range and let fly, with a full broadside from the Yamato's launchers following. Twenty six torpedoes hit the base-star in ragged succession, and it exploded in spectacular fashion.
"Boom, baby!" Moose yelled in victory. "The rest of the fighters are buggin' out!" We'd done it.
"Attention Galactica, this is Captain Mukai of the Earth Western Alliance strike carrier ANS Yamato. I request permission to send a delegation aboard."
"This is Commander Adama of the Galactica. Permission granted," a stern male voice replied.
A shuttle left the Yamato's aft bay, and wheeled around. "Squad leaders and XOs take up parade escort formation," Colonel Enriquez ordered. There was a general groan. "This means a diplomatic mission, and I'm really not good at diplomatic!" I muttered.
"Neither am I, pilot," replied the Colonel, "but I guess we can learn together." She was in a good mood, which always unnerved me because the things that put the Iron Maiden in a good mood are not things that put normal people in a good mood.
We set down aboard the Galactica, and I finally got my head around the sheer size of the thing. Just the launch bays were the size of the Yamato, and the main body massed at least as much as some of our bigger space stations. And by Helo's account the Galactica's pretty small by Colonial standards. "They certainly don't bugger about when it comes to building ships in these parts," I remarked as we set down on the elevators into the hangar deck; the launch system was well-nigh identical in principle to the Yamato's, but I suppose there can only be a limited number of ways to get planes off carriers.
A broad-shouldered man of late middle years with greying hair in a military uniform was waiting for us, along with a slightly younger woman in a very sharp suit. I clambered out of my cockpit and dropped to the ground, then came to attention and managed a salute. Comander Adama replied to it, and turned towards the shuttle where Colonel Enriquez and Captain Mukai were exiting. There was a flurry of introductions, and then Silky and I were left talking to the Galactica's air group CO.
"Nice ships," he remarked. "What're they like in the air?"
"The Shroud's the fast one," Silky replied. "Put all power into the engines and she'll do 600kps, 400 the rest of the time. As for that flying tank-"
"What've you got against the Wolverine?" I retorted amiably. "More armour, more hardpoints and more guns, even if it's not as fast. I can't handle a Shroud at full throttle in a dogfight, but a Wolverine's got half the turn radius, and that counts for a good deal at close range. All the same, if you're a good enough pilot -and I most definitely am not- then the Shroud's lethal against enemy fighters." Silky smiled at the remark.
"Must try that some time," our new friend said cheerfully. "I'm Lee Adama; yes, that's my father in charge." He takes after his mother, or so Starbuck assured me much later.
"Hi. I'm Robert Cole, and this is Michelle McRae. The guy with the beard trying to hide the cigarette is Mike Horrigan -they're refuelling aircraft in here you pillock! Put it out!- and the hillbilly in the turret is Curtis Jackson. Don't know the other guy."
"My copilot," Silky put in. "Steve Duncan."
"Well, why don't you guys come on down to the recreation deck and meet the rest of the pilots whilst our fearless leaders sort out all the politics?" he suggested.
"I can see why you made CAG!" Silky replied.
The recreation deck was a necessary addition to a ship that was expected to be away from home for upwards of a year- just getting between solar systems could take months. The Yamato and most other Alliance ships of the line aren't as well appointed, but our forces are usually no more than ten days away from a military installation with reasonable shore leave facilities, so we've largely avoided the necessity. There was a fairly spacious messhall with attached bar, a couple of basketball courts and a small gym. Officers had their own mess with a good deal more luxuries, but it was the regular mess that Lee took us to. I couldn't blame him; I'd earned the right to the Officers Mess on the Yamato nearly six months ago and still hadn't got used to it, and he'd been CAG for about a week. We sat down at a table full of pilots congratulating themselves for not dying this time around; it was rapidly dawning on them that this was a pretty worthy achievement, as it had for me after my first big naval engagement. Immediately they leapt up with about a hundred questions each, but once they'd calmed down a bit we got things more or less straightened out.
I honestly couldn't hazard a guess where all this Kobol stuff came from; artistic license on somebody's part was the most plausible suggestion that arose from our discussion. Every sociology and anthropology student in the Sol system would be clamouring to do studies about this stuff, and I suspected that potential interviewees would be able to name their price.
We were on our second bottle of extremely good whiskey when an aide turned up to haul Lee, Michelle and myself up to the briefing room, where formal arrangements were being made for command and liasion structures. What they thought we could usefully contribute to this discussion I had no idea, but I knew better than to argue.
"On the surface, it seems simple. Galactica stays with the fleet and provides cover against enemy fighters, whilst the Yamato deals with the base-stars. However," Colonel Enriquez continued, "we have insufficient fighter numbers to protect both ships."
"You have shields, which gives you a decided edge," Adama pointed out. A practical shield system was a fairly recent innovation for the Alliance, and we'd had sporadic outbreaks of low-grade warfare for the last hundred and twenty years.
"Not as much as you'd think," she replied. "Shields can be worn down, and in less time than you'd expect. Our fighter cover is woefully inadequate right now."
"Erm, Colonel?" I spoke up, trying to look helpful. "I had a quick look at the cargo manifests of the ships we rescued, and one of them was on a military contract hauling crated fighters and spares."
"How many?" President Roslin asked. I thought back.
"About fifty or so, I think, though I'm not sure. I can check easily enough, though." Roslin's aide was already tapping at a computer terminal. "Forty eight Viper Mark 7s, twelve Raptor reconissance ships and enough spares and fuel for a full year's operation. All bound for that new carrier, the Posiedon."
"That brings us almost up to full strength," Adama said jubilantly, "and those spares will keep us going until we reach Earth."
"Assuming we don't encounter any Cylon battle fleets along the way, that is," Lee added.
"Ever the optimist, Apollo," Colonel Tigh remarked wryly.
"He's got a point," I countered. "I doubt they'll let us go that easily. And what if they pursue us all the way to Earth?"
"That would be a problem," Captain Mukai admitted. "But not an especially large one. Our weapons and ship technology is considerably ahead of theirs, and our fleet is on a war footing."
"Sir, we have fewer than twenty operational carriers, and the Coalition have even fewer," Bandit pointed out. "God only knows how many of those monsters the Cylons have."
"Then we make random course changes, double back on ourselves a few times, and give them the slip," Adama replied. "We can do this!"
The rest of the discussions are too tedious to be worth mentioning, but the upshot for me was that a liasion officer would be drawn from the Yamato's fighter contingent on a rota. I was first up, and my first assignment was to try and organise a flight exchange program, so that we were familiar with the capabilities of each other's ships. I had to spend several hours listening to Lee, Colonel Tigh and just about everybody who knew her explaining all the reasons why under no circumstances should I put Kara Thrace in a Shroud, and eventually decided to put her at the top of the list out of sheer spite. Peter has yet to entirely forgive me for landing him in the back seat with a pilot whom Apollo is quoted as describing as 'beyond insane', and having seen her fly I am obliged to agree.
I took on the task of showing Sharon Valieri, aka 'Boomer', how to fly a Wolverine. This is an experience that I will not soon forget, and for all the wrong reasons. It also led indirectly to a rather bizarre revalation about Cylon replicants and the semi-involuntary desertion of Dr Gaius Baltar...