by Chaoseternus Twenty
The situation with Pegasus and Seeker, especially Seeker put an urgency behind our efforts to contacts Earths governments that was frankly unhealthy. We needed Earth certainly, but her unique situation meant careful handling and we certainly had little reason to believe we would have time for that.
Not that mattered so much to Mailman, except how it effected our operations, but I have little doubt Hermes had a fun time of it. The ship to initiate contact was chosen from those vessels that had been in the system quite a while therefore would know most about the situation and then it was narrowed down to a CBR for several reasons, but the main two were that they could defend themselves should they come under attack and that being far smaller then a BSG it was less likely that the humans of Earth would have a paranoid reaction to their presence.
Well, that was the theory anyway and only time would tell if it would actually work. Not that I expected to hear much about it, I wasn't Commander of my own small fleet anymore, or second in command to Galactica's fleet, I was now just one Captain amongst many and of a relatively minor warship at that. As such, I was not privy to the high level meetings held by the senior officers and civilian administration. As soon as the various fleets were consolidated however, Adama found himself back in Command by way of Seniority, and by quite a margin too considering he had been in grade a full twenty years longer then the next candidate, the Commander of the E&E Wayfarer.
First job Mailman had was simple, offload what remained of the salvaged Vipers to the four full Battlestars of the fleet so they could be salvaged, made operational once more. That brought us a few hairy moments as you would expect when moving ships containing live ammunition and fuel, especially when they haven't been maintained since we recovered them.
Next off was a supply run to the nearby Alpha Centauri system, foraging for foodstuffs on the surface of that systems one inhabitable world for the fleet.
For a month, it was a boring routine, guard duties one day, food run the next, occasionally a shuttle run, shifting parts between ships. It was like nobody could entirely figure out what to do now that we had actually reached Earth, or just as likely, that all plans were on hold waiting for the final word from Hermes and the Earthmen.
Then a month after we arrived in the Sol system, almost to the day we received new orders, we were to lead a probe back towards Colonial, now Cylon space. With us, came our old friend The Transporter of the Books, an additional CBR, the Messenger plus the freighter Highland Dreams which was loaded to the gills with additional supplies and equipment. Once again, the Mailman was flagship for a small band seeking out other survivors, only this time we weren't seeking out a refugee fleet, though finding one would be nice, no, we were seeking out Pegasus and Seeker and hoping we could add both to the survivor fleet.
Our problems here were two-fold, Pegasus would be the easier to find most likely because Cain would most certainly be attempting to give the cylons as much grief as possible, therefore would most likely be in or near cylon space, a hazardous place to search. Seeker on the other hand could literally be anywhere, designed to go long term without resupply, she could easily have decided to simply flee to the far fringes of the galaxy and set up a colony far away from Cylon space, or hundreds of other possibilities. Worse in her case was the fact that she was believed to be compromised by the cylons, which could easily place her under cylon controlÂ… or not.
In both cases, we did not know the condition of the vessel we were trying to find either; they could be crippled, destroyed or fully operational and kicking cylon arse halfway across known space. There were a lot of uncertainty in this mission and frankly considering the sheer volume of space we had to search, success was extremely unlikely. But we had to try; we had to draw as many survivors as possible to Earth to hasten our rebuilding and then hopefully, our return to the offensive.
That was a large part of the reason that our first destination was the Colonies themselves, we doubted that any survivors could stay stealthed and hidden quite this long, so whilst we would look for those, we would not expect them. No, what we were hoping for was signs of attacks against the cylons, some sign that there were still active warships in the area fighting the enemy. From there, we had a greater chance of contacting them, and maybe bringing them into our camp.
StillÂ… the colonies even at FTL and having all the scan data of the systems in-between were months of flight time away, we had a lot of time, to plan, and to pray.
We left the rest of the fleet behind for the initial probe into Old Colonial Space, we didn't know nearly enough about Cylon patrol patterns and fleet dispositions to risk bringing the entire fleet in, that was what I intended for Mailman to find out. Though in truth, unless we had a little something planned for the Cylons, it was definitely a better option to keep as few ships as possible within this area of space to reduce chances of detection. Let's face it, the Cylons had to know that this would be a focus for any Colonial Military Units or even civilians surviving and they would almost certainly station units here accordingly.
Unfortunately, as soon as we arrived, we found ourselves witnessing a very real problem, one that would have severe impact on future operations here. We observed the Cylons and there rather strange and inexplicable movements in the area for five hours before we twigged onto what they were doing, they were cleaning up after themselves. To be exact, they were removing all the debris fields, all the wrecks both Colonial and Cylon, breaking the parts up and loading them into what, as far as our passive arrays could tell, was a trio of old style basestars being watched over by a basestar of the newer type. How long they had been doing this for, or how many trips they had been forced to make to empty their loads was unknown but from what limited returns our passive sensors could detect, they had already removed a significant amount of debris.
That meant fewer places to hide should we need to,and worse, the Cylons seemed to have taken the sensible, if annoying precaution of placing raiders inside each debris field, something we only spotted when one of the raiders was forced to move or be destroyed by the debris floating around them.
This could all have just been sensible precaution on the cylons parts of course, fewer hiding places for attackers, reduced navigation hazards for there own units but the sheer effort and time involved. To be frank, we could only see a small slice of space where we hid above Caprica and in this small area of space alone there were two basestars on patrol, four basestars and numerous smaller ships clearing debris fields and a whole mess of fighters either suspected to be hidden or clearly visible on patrol. It was, to be frank, a whole lot of ships for just a small section of space and if this effort was continued across the Colonies then it was a ridiculous concentration of effort, unless of course, they had learned that it was necessary. And if they had learned that it was necessary, then it implied that somebody was doing some righteous teaching.