by Chaoseternus Five
Our ballistic trajectory through the system took two days to take us to a safe point to jump, two days in which we sat, recorded everything and collectively shivered at the thought of the building storm that was about to head for our homes.
It didn't help that we had been forced to ignore radiological alarms as well; everybody and everybody's mother was packing nukes which was a shift from the last war. They had obviously overcome the programmed reluctance to use nukes, which was just one more worry amongst the thousands that were now filling our minds.
Hearts heavy, we jumped to the next system on our list, searching for more signs of Cylon activity; of anything that could help us in the war we now felt was inevitable.
A war the Colonies were not prepared for.
At the next system however, our luck ran out.
We jumped in right next to one of the new style basestars, and came under heavy fire.
Well, when I say heavy fire I mean a torrent of fighters and nukes pouring out of the ship and flashing towards us in a suicidal yet overwhelming manoeuvre that would become far too familiar in months to come.
Naturally, we returned fire, considering at this point that incoming fire obviously meant a defacto state of war. We didn't launch fighters however, we were rigging for jump and I wanted to leave straight away, the second we could jump. I really didn't want to have combat landings, a known issue with the Liberty class, to worry about.
Going single-handed in a relic of the last Cylon war against a Capital ship wasn't my idea of fun either, I wanted out of there!
The first of the nukes was just fifteen meters from our hull when we jumped, they could have detonated it their and then and most likely crippled us but they didn't, they weren't interested in crippling it seemed, they just wanted to kill us.
I can see their point; we were after all a hostile ship that had discovered their intentions. All we needed to do was make it back to Colonial Space and their plans were ruined or at the very least set back quite a bit.
No, they needed to destroy us before we got word out.
Our jump placed us back in the system where we had first seen a Cylon Raider, hiding amongst an asteroid belt. It was a dead system then, it wasn't now.
This system had been chosen as a predetermined escape point to jump to because it was far enough from Cylon space that it wasn't likely to be first on their search list and it was just within the capabilities of our jump engines.
We failed to take one point into account however, the Cylon fleet that was amassing in the system.
The ship shock, an almighty bang ringing through the hull as we left jump, the Dradis console flashing an OBE at us before going blank. Frantic signals arrived from all over the ship, crewmembers reporting seeing Cylon ships through the few heavily armoured windows and openings of the ship.
Our scanners flocked with contacts, a full fleet worth of capital ships but with Dradis Overcome By Events, we had no way to grab an IFF off every ship.
Not that we needed too, not with visual reports of Raiders and the number of contacts that had suddenly veered in our direction. The hull began to ring with impacts of Railgun rounds, like the tap of rain on a planetside window as Atlas and I frantically plotted another jump out of here, anywhere out of here just hoping the engines could take a third jump in a row despite their age.
We had a back-up Dradis we could bring online in the hole we like to call a back up Command Centre but we didn't bother. The main unit could handle far more contacts and if that was overloaded, the secondary wouldn't have a chance. Besides which, even my Quarters were larger than that thing, you couldn't get the normal bridge complement inside without literally squeezing.
"Radiological!" Omega's shout filled the bridge, and with a wry glance at each other, Atlas and I redoubled our efforts on the jump calculations, trusting in Omega to keep the ship safe and warn us of any more complications.
The shuddering of the ship wasn't helping, but we made it, imputing the jump calculations into the jump computers before any nukes hit.
Then the ship lurched, power flickering as the strange distortion of jump hit us.