Title: Stars on Fire
By Nopporn Wongrassamee
Summary: Firefly/BSG. The rag tag fleet comes across something strange in their search for Earth.
Disclaimer: All properties belong to their respective owners who I am too lazy to look up and list.
Chapter 1: The Starbuck Mystery
Space is vast, empty, and black. The tiny ship was doing its best to imitate that emptiness, its EM absorbent composite skin doing its best to look like the rest of the black sky. Normally, this was counted by the ship's pilot as a good thing.
Unfortunately at the moment, the ship was without power of any sort. Everything was dead. There was no power in the engines, the radio, and most importantly, life support. The pilot couldn't even hope for rescue; the ship's very stealthiness also made it very unlikely that any passer-by could even see it, never mind pick up the pilot.
"Frak," Starbuck muttered at the void. "Why does this always happen to me?"
"That," Gaius Baltar said, pointing at the image being projected on the wall, "is impossible."
"I know," Commander Adama growled in reply. Perhaps he was irked at the implied slight to the performance of his crew. "Yet that is exactly what our telescopes are telling us."
"Excuse me," Laura Roslyn interrupted. As President of what was left of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, both men answered to her. "I'm sorry for running late, so could someone please tell me what's going on?"
"Lieutenant Gaeta?" Adama prompted.
"Er, yes sir," answered the young officer. He gestured at the projection. "Madame President, this is a partial map of the system the transmissions are coming from."
"The ones picked up by Firefly?" Roslyn asked. Several days ago, the fleet had begun picking up fragments of odd FTL signals. At first, everyone had disregarded them as so much background noise. Then the captain of a small tramp freighter named Firefly reported that his equipment was displaying strange video and text. A close examination of Firefly revealed that many of its core systems, particularly the computers, were not of Colonial manufacture. The rest had been replaced with Colonial-made parts over the seventy-odd years that it had operated in the Twelve Colonies. And given that Firefly had changed ownership three times in the past five years just from Galactica's own fragmentary records, it was pretty much impossible to determine who had originally brought Firefly to Colonial space.
"Yes, ma'am," Gaeta answered. "This system is centered on a blue giant star. The blue dots on the map represent planets and moons that spectroscopic analysis says have oxygen nitrogen atmospheres. And since those kinds of atmospheres only occur on life bearing worlds…"
"There are a lot of them," Roslyn said softly, catching the significance.
"There are thirty four at last count," Gaeta said. "We're finding more all the time."
"Which is why this system is impossible," Baltar added testily. "See that green band around that sun? That's the theoretical life band. Any world located outside of that band would be too hot or too cold to support life. Yet thirty one of those worlds are outside the band and thermal analysis says they are all a comfortable temperature to support human life."
"The scrolls say that when our ancestors first came across the Twelve Colonies, that they were a gift from the gods," Roslyn mused aloud. "Everything we knew said that twelve habitable worlds circling a single star was impossible."
"Actually, it's not impossible," Baltar added pedantically, "just statistically improbable." He pointed at the map. "Now that's impossible."
"Could one of them be Earth?" Roslyn asked, getting back to business.
"Doubtful," Adama replied. "We're in the right neighborhood, galactically speaking. But even given two or three thousand years of stellar drift, the sky doesn't quite match the map we found on Kobol. But the Firefly transmissions do seem to indicate that this system is inhabited by humans."
"Have you sent any scouts in yet?" Roslyn asked.
"Um, no," Adama said uncomfortably.
"What? Why not?" Roslyn asked. "I'd think this would be something that would require an up close look."
"The problem is we can't do an FTL jump into this system," Adama told her. "Mr. Gaeta?"
"The problem, Madame President, is that we almost certainly haven't mapped every major body in that system," Gaeta explained. At Roslyn's blank look, he elaborated. "Faster than light navigation depends heavily on having an accurate and up to date map of every major source of gravity in the vicinity of both the starting location and the destination. Given enough distance, a star system can be treated as a single object in terms of gravity. However, when plotting an FTL jump inside a system, you need to know exactly where every major planet and moon is. If you try jumping without that information, there's no telling where you'd end up at."
"And since most of the worlds we've found so far are on this side of the star," Baltar added, "I can guarantee you that we aren't even close to finding them all. A small error in plotting would result in a ship appearing slightly off from where it should be. Anyone trying to jump in with a map this incomplete…" Baltar shrugged helplessly. "They could very well find themselves in another galaxy on the other side of the universe with no way back."
"And we don't dare take the fleet in system," Adama said. "If the Cylons came across us in there, we wouldn't be able to jump away. For that matter, we can't count on a friendly reception from the locals either."
"So there's no way to find out who lives here?" Roslyn asked.
"Now, I wouldn't say that…" Adama said. Then he began to explain what he had in mind.
The mission was supposed to take several days. The fleet would jump in as close as they dared to this monster system – they had found another dozen worlds while doing the jump calculations – then send the Blackbird in on normal space drive to recon the outermost habitable worlds. Even then, the trip was supposed to take several days.
Oh goodie, Lieutenant Kara Thrace call sign "Starbuck" thought when she was briefed. I get to live on canned rations in a cramped cockpit for a week. And if I get into trouble, I won't be able to jump out or even call for help.
"So is it true?" Karl Agathon call sign Helo asked as he sat across from her in the mess hall. "Are you really an alien, Starbuck?"
"Oh, ha ha," Kara replied dryly. "It's just my call sign that's alien, Helo."
Among the transmission fragments picked up by Firefly was an advertisement for Starbuck's coffee. Until then, everyone had assumed that the franchise had gone up in nuclear smoke along with the rest of the Twelve Colonies. If it weren't for the alien symbols crawling across it, it could have been mistaken for an advertisement from back home.
Given her call sign, Kara had once done a little research on the coffee franchise. One of the few things she remembered was that Starbuck's had been operating in the Colonies for the past seventy years. She didn't think it was a coincidence that both the franchise and Firefly both appearing in the colonies at the same time was a coincidence.
"So how did you get your call sign?" Helo asked.
"Back when I was a nugget," Kara sighed – she had already told this story several times today, "my flight instructor thought I was too hyperactive and eager, like I drank too much coffee in the morning…"
"What do you know about Starbuck's?" Adama asked.
"She's your best pilot," replied the being who answered to the name Sharon Valerii, call sign Boomer. She was in fact a Cylon made to be indistinguishable from human beings. She wasn't even the Boomer they started out with, but one of many copies. "She's something of a maverick, doesn't like Colonel Tigh, and for some reason gets stranded a lot. But then, you know all this, Commander, so why ask me?"
"Maybe I should have made myself clearer," Adama said, exasperated. "What do you know about Starbuck's coffee?"
"Tastes great?"
Adama sighed.
Two days into the flight and Kara was ready to go insane with boredom. Luckily, she had reached her first planet. Following procedure (since she had been the one to invent the procedure, she had no trouble sticking to it), Kara put the Blackbird in a wide orbit of the planet. She was looking for any possible ships that might be hanging around. Kara didn't really expect to find anything as the planet didn't seem to have any kind of wireless communications going. That made this world relatively safe place to get her feet wet so to speak, work the kinks out of the procedure so that…
The sun changed color.
During her approach, the local sun had been barely visible as a slightly brighter star in the sky. Suddenly, there was this bright yellow disc hanging where the blue star should have been. As Kara looked in stupefied wonder, the sun changed back to a blue star.
A few more orbits and some zig zagging back and forth later, Kara deduced what was going on. Someone was shining a laser on the planet, a focused beam of light to heat the planet up to a proper temperature. Presumably, whoever was doing this was focusing the light from the blue sun, but they were also changing the frequency of the light somehow. It was impressive.
And damned scary.
The planet proved to be uninhabited as far as Kara could tell. Here and there, the Blackbird's camera showed a few clusters of what might be buildings, but the image was pretty fuzzy. If those were towns, they couldn't hold more than a few thousand people each. The rest of the planet appeared to be covered in scrub brush desert.
Kara didn't have the fuel reserves to land and take a closer look. She made note of the possible towns and moved on. The next planet she was supposed to check out was only three hours away.
About an hour into her flight there, she came across another ship. At first, Kara thought it was a Cylon Raider. It had the same basic body plan, a central fuselage with two forward projecting wing pods. But then she realized that was all it had in common with a Raider.
It was too big for one thing, closer in size to Colonial One than any fighter. Another thing was that it looked like some undead ghost ship from a space horror movie that Kara had seen once back on Caprica. And the ship was leaking enough radiation to kill a Cylon within an hour, and didn't look very healthy for human beings either. And just to complete the horror image, the other ship was decorated with what appeared to be human corpses.
The other ship didn't appear to see the Blackbird. That was good, because Kara had absolutely no intention of drawing its attention. She carefully pointed the Blackbird's nose away from the other ship and poured on a little speed.
At that point, the other ship spun around and charged at her at an unbelievable speed.
It was only her fast reflexes that saved her. Hauling on her control stick and slamming everything on the throttle, Kara managed to dodge the horror ship before it rammed her. The other ship proved less maneuverable that the Blackbird, but it had already spun around and was decelerating at an amazing rate.
Kara cursed herself. The other ship might not be able to see her with whatever it used for dradis, but it must have seen the thermal plume of her exhaust. It had been a stupid, elementary mistake on her part. To make things worse, that horror ship was faster than the Blackbird, so she couldn't get away by simply running.
Kara figured her best chance was to accelerate away in a random direction, then shut her engines down and hope that the horror ship wouldn't be able to find her. The trick was to start playing dead while the other ship didn't have a fix on her…
A brilliant beam lanced out from the other ship and clipped the Blackbird's nose. Kara yelped when arcs of electricity danced across her instruments. Then everything went dead. The displays were dark. The engines ceased to apply any thrust. Even the background whir of life support vanished. A few desperate flipping of switches didn't improve anything.
Kara watched helplessly as the horror ship slowly approached her. Apparently, it still couldn't actually see her as it made several course corrections. And just to complete the horror image, the wing pods unfolded to reveal themselves to be a pair of robotic arms with huge claws on the end.
Then something streaked into the horror ship and exploded. In an instant, the other ship was converted into an expanding cloud of debris.
Another ship appeared in Kara's view. Unlike the horror ship, this newcomer had the sleek lines of a fighter. But although it was smaller than the horror ship, the delta shape sailing through the debris of its kill was larger than any fighter had a right to be. More to the point, it didn't have any corpses decorating its hull. For a moment, Kara entertained the hope of being rescued.
Then the new ship turned and zoomed away. Dammit! It couldn't see Kara either, probably didn't even realize that she was there. She was left all alone in a dead ship no one could see, living on a couple hours left of canned air.
"Frak," Kara muttered aloud. "Why does this always happen to me?"