The Mailman
by Chaoseternus

As always, thank you to everyone who has reviewed

Twenty-one

We returned swiftly to the location where we had left the rest of the fleet, a place that was deep within the gulf between stars, only to find that the fleet wasn't there. A basestar was though, along with a horde of Scimitar type Raiders which promptly swarmed us as soon as we arrived.

Discretion was certainly the better part of valour here and I quickly ordered a full burn away from the basestar, which at least would prevent that joining in the fight without microjumping, whilst we waited for the Jump drives to recharge. That did place us under fire from the Scimitars for ten minutes and worse, it was fire from dead astern where we had no defensive batteries and sensors were compromised by the main drives.

Luckily for us, whilst we detected several radiological signals, no actual nukes were fired at us, in fact, after we had jumped out and had a chance to inspect the damage on the exterior of the hull, it became clear that the Cylons had been firing to disable not destroy.

That was, to put it mildly, an interesting and threatening development, one that raised a lot of questions. Were the Cylons now attempting to capture all survivors they could find, no doubt for interrogation purposes? Or had they noted our return, how long we had been away and had their interest piqued? Had we been connected to the successful escape of Galactica? Did they merely want us for the location of the survivor fleet or, worst of all; had they somehow connected us to Earth?

In truth, it was not that relevant. We knew the location of Earth, of the gathering place of the survivors and as such we could never allow ourselves to be captured, indeed, I had covertly placed several additional Self-destruct systems in place and briefed a handful of crew on ways to destroy the ship should it appear the cylons would be successful in seizing the Mailman.

Our lives, my command for the continued safety of Earth and the survivors we all knew was a small price to pay, the longer we could keep that secret, the better.

We made our jump to the back-up rendezvous point and were rather ecstatically welcomed by our fleet but from there, we could go no further. The external inspection of the hull had shown structural damage around the drives, damage which would need to be repaired and fast. As a result, I couldn't take Mailman to complete the recon and was forced to send the Messenger in our place whilst we hid and repaired, hoping that the cylons would not find us whilst we were vulnerable.

The Cylons did not find us during the five days it took us to repair, but neither did Messenger return as scheduled. In fact, we gave her ten days after the expected rendezvous before, extremely worried, we were forced to consider her lost and carry on without her.

Unfortunately the loss of just one ship put in a more then a bit of a bind, it left us with just the Transporter of the Books , which as you know is a merchantman converted into a carrier, the Highland Dreams which was our supply ship, a supply ship whose bunkers were starting to get low at that, and the Mailman. Both the Highland Dreams and the Transporter needed escort as the ships themselves were lightly armed despite the heavy offensive punch of the fighters Transporter carried, which was why a second CBR had been assigned, but we had lost the second CBR.

Mailman was the best vehicle to recon the Colonies, and that was a mission we had to complete, and taking the entire fleet on a simple recon would greatly increase the chances of discovery. Unless we abandoned the mission, which I was not going to do, we only had one choice. After ordering the Transporter to increase the size of her CAP, increasing the strain on her pilots, I took Mailman back in on recon, hoping the fighters would survive long enough if there was an attack for the Transporter of the Books and Highland Dreams to get away.

First locations we checked were Libra and Tauran, the locations of the Messengers patrol, hoping to find some indication as to why she had disappeared, hopefully put our minds to rest as to whether the location of Earth was safe or not.

Unfortunately, whilst activity over Libra was non-existent, the planet itself clearly having completely collapsed into ecological ruin, the space over Tauran was packed and we were swiftly forced off. Not however, before we noticed the remnants of what appeared to be two new style basestars burning as they re-entered the planets atmosphere, somebody had been busy and very recently too.

It meant trouble for us, the kicked ant-hill principle of course, but I was damn glad to see that somebody had managed to off two of the gargantuan warships. I doubted it was Messenger however, under the right circumstances a CBR can, as I had shown during our initial escape from Colonial space, kill a basestar but two was beyond the realms of possibility. Unless of course, Messenger decided to go Fox-Four, kill the first ship with her small cache of thermonuclear devices, then ram the second.

Still, we may only have gotten a quick ten minute look, but we saw nothing that screamed that a CBR had died there. Then again, those were a very busy ten minutes…

And once again, we had to retire and repair. This heavy damage business was getting to be a habit and our spares of structural members and hull armour plating were getting depleted. A quick docking with the Highland Dreams refilled our bunkers of ammunition and spares, but only helped highlight how low we were getting on other supplies, such as fuel and food. Before long, we would either have to seize more supplies, or head home. It would not have been such a big issue, except that we had to throw a lot of food supplies early on due to Tylium poisoning, fuel we could mine and was reasonably abundant, food was the problem.

Still, we had enough food to stay another two weeks before it become do or leave time, and I intended to use every minute of it. Unfortunately, it took us ten of those twelve days to recon every one of the old Colonies and the picture we had developed was grim. Whilst the cylons had nuked cities and destroyed every warship they saw on sight, they had captured orbital shipyards and planetary shipwrights and were using all those facilities to produce more fighters, more basestars and more support ships. We saw definite indications that they were using colonial built mines on the surfaces to increase their supplies of raw materials and judging by the fact that Caps of Cylon fighters were spotted over several R&D and computer manufactory plants, it was a safe bet that they were using those too.

Something needed to be done.