Title: The Stars on Fire
By Nopporn Wongrassamee
Summary: Meanwhile, back on the home front…
Disclaimer: All properties belong to their respective owners who I am too lazy to look up and list.
Chapter 3 – Violence and Strong Language
The blue giant star around which the Alliance had settled never had a proper name. Before colonization, it had a random alphanumeric designation that only an astronomer might know. After colonization, the settlers had simply called it the sun. When they were feeling formal, they called it the Blue Sun to differentiate it from the yellow sun orbited by Earth.
Given over a hundred worlds that could be settled by humans after a little – or a lot – of terraforming, it was no surprise how much space traffic bustled about the Blue Sun system. In truth, outsiders might have been surprised by how little space traffic there actually was. That was because only some thirty worlds could actually produce or at least support spaceships. Another forty odd worlds were still in the early stages of colonization or otherwise too primitive and sparsely settled to support any large scale industry. The rest were undergoing terraforming, earmarked for terraforming, or had failed to be terraformed. In one case, a perfectly habitable world had been evacuated when the population had been fooled into believing that the terraforming was failing.
Still, space traffic was mostly concentrated around the Core. The density of ships tended to trail off as one moved out towards the Rim. This had changed somewhat as Alliance warships moved into the area informally known as Reaver space. But most Alliance citizens would have been surprised to see two ships flash into existence in the interstellar void just beyond the Rim.
One ship was a mid sized cargo ship that would have looked utterly ordinary, both in the Blue Sun system and among the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. It was a basic baton configuration: bridge and crew quarters up front, a long spine along which cargo module were attached, and a cluster of drive pods in the rear.
The other ship was something else. Its main body was a saucer shape. Defining front from rear were three drive pods arranged in an inverted triangle, separated from each other by a series of struts. Gun turrets studded the hull, practically screaming WARSHIP to any outside observer.
Of course, the reason they jumped to this location was to avoid any observers at all. Today, they failed completely.
"Contact!" CPO Dualla announced to Galactica's bridge. "Unidentified contacts at extreme DRADIS range."
"Cylons?" Colonel Tigh asked. He was the second ranking officer on the ship and by default, the Fleet. Tigh was best suited for this position. He had had a brief stint as the highest ranking officer which proved it.
"Can't say, sir," Dualla replied. "Ship profiles are hard to resolve at this range."
"It could be local starships, sir," Lieutenant Gaeta suggested. "Given the hazards of navigating in this system, it would make sense for ships coming and going to do FTL jumps out here."
"It might be Cylons," Dualla continued. "They're not moving and do seem to be holding position relative to the fleet. Also, it's hard to tell, but one of the ships appears to be disc shaped."
"Which means that if it's Cylon, then it's either a new design or a relic from the first war," Tigh concluded. He snorted in disgust. "Or it might not be Cylon at all. Frak it, either way, we're going to have to send somebody to take a look see. Okay, send the CAP over there and launch the alert fighters to cover the Fleet. Who's on the CAP right now?"
"Hot Dog, Sheba, Racetrack, and… uh, Helo."
"Gods help us all," Tigh muttered. A pilot barely past nuggethood, an actual nugget from the Gods forsaken Pegasus, and the Cylon lover. He made a mental note to talk to the Old Man's kid in the future about just who got assigned together on a combat air patrol. "Send them anyway."
"Yes, sir."
"And someone get the Old Man up here."
"Two languages?" President Roslyn asked, rubbing the bridge of her nose. She was dying, she knew. Even with Kamala, cancer was eating away at her. Roslyn didn't have long to live and they were almost at the end of their journey. She could feel it. Unfortunately, the gods kept dumping these complications on them. "Doctor Baltar, are you sure of that?"
"Yes," Baltar replied. "I really should have seen this sooner and it's obvious once you know what to look for." He called up a graphic on the display. "These are the two character sets that I've identified so far. They're almost never grouped together." On the left side were the alien symbols. On the right were block characters that looked almost familiar.
"That almost looks like Kobollian lettering," Commander Adama observed, giving voice to Roslyn's own thoughts.
"Yes, they are very similar," Baltar agreed. "There are a number of minor differences, but no more than the modern Colonial alphabet. A couple millennia or so of independent evolution could easily account for the differences. In fact, this alphabet actually has fewer changes than ours."
"What about the other letters?" Roslyn asked.
"I haven't made much headway in translating them," Baltar said reluctantly. "I've been concentrating on the Kobollian type writing on the assumption that the two are basically saying the same thing. This other language not only seems to have more characters, even the spoken parts I've been able to identify seem utterly alien."
"Doctor, are you saying that the humans in this system are coexisting with a race of aliens," Adama asked thoughtfully.
Lords, the cancer must be affecting Roslyn more than she thought it was. The possibility of actual aliens hadn't even occurred to Roslyn.
"'Coexisting' might be the wrong term, Commander," Baltar said. For emphasis, he called up some video. "We picked up this fragment just before I called you. From the format, it looked like a news broadcast of some sort. It seemed, ah, important."
The video showed a fleet of what were obviously warships. They were sleeker than something the Colonials might have built, but still looked like ships that humans might build. The ships were above a planet in formation facing away from it. Suddenly, another fleet appeared, charging straight at the first fleet. The ships in the new fleet had a distinctly different design aesthetic, as if built by demons out of hell. At what had to be point blank range, the two fleets started exchanging fire.
Roslyn almost jumped out of her seat when the newcomers started ramming their enemies.
"Lords of Kobol," she murmured. "Have we wandered into another war?"
That was when the sirens went off.
"Galactica, this is Helo," Helo sent. He was ironically the seniormost officer in the CAP, yet he was relegated to his old job as Electronics Warfare officer. But that's what happens when you fall in love with one of the enemy. "Bogey One is definitely some kind of cargo ship. Bogey Two is definitely disc shaped, but it's too small to be a Basestar. It's about half the size of Galactica."
"Roger that, Helo," Dualla replied. There was a pause and some muffled background chatter. "Any hostile signs from the Bogeys?"
"Negative, Galactica," Helo replied. "I'm not sure they've even seen us yet. It looks like there some small craft traffic between Bogeys One and Two…" A new blip appeared on his screen, moving at high speed towards the CAP. "Strike that! Vampire! Vampire! Inbound missile on… Holy Frak, that's a nuke!"
There was an eternity where nothing seemed to happen.
It was absurd. Nobody wasted nuclear warheads on fighters. It was extreme overkill. Even the Cylons saved nuclear weapons for antiship operations and even then, used them sparingly. As such, there wasn't any real doctrine for fighters to deal with any shot right at them. But some things were just obvious, like attempting to evade.
Which they weren't doing.
"Scatter, you morons!" Helo yelled.
Just like that, the two Vipers and one Raptor split up, trying to put as much distance as they could between each other so that whoever the nuke went after wouldn't kill the other two by proximity.
The missile turned to track Hot Dog. To Helo's amazement, it suddenly and violently veered away from them. It wasn't heading toward anything except…
"New contact!"
"Son of a whore!" Lieutenant Earl Wyatt, commander of the Alliance Gunship MAG-40013, swore. "Who the humping gos se are these people?"
For an empty piece of interstellar space, the sky here sure was crowded. After destroying a Reaver ship that had been stooging around on the outer edges of the System, Wyatt's sensor tech, Jane Hallahan had spotted an unusual radiation signature that she had claimed looked like a exhaust trail. She had said it looked like these Reavers were using some new fuel that was being experimented with back in the Core called Tibium, Termium, Tyreum… something starting with a T anyway.
Wyatt had been doubtful. It had looked like a sensor ghost at best. But this was the closest thing to a lead anyone had seen in weeks since the Reaver hunt had started. It had led them here.
"I dunno, sir, but the profile doesn't look like Reaver ships," Hallahan replied. "And that sentry they posted just fired a nuke at us."
Wyatt swore again and put his gunship into evasive maneuvers. As the sleek, delta shaped craft swerved jinked aside, his gunnery officer Clint Wood went to work. A stream of tracers flashed out followed by their own missile. There was an explosion, but no blinding flash.
"Got it, sir," Wood announced.
"Okay, I wanna know who these hwoon dahn are," Wyatt growled, sending his ship speeding towards the sentry. "Hallahan, get on the horn with Magellan and inform them of our situation."
"Yes, sir."
"Wood," he continued while Hallahan contacted Magellan, "get ready to dump some serious firepower on this…"
Gunship MAG-40013 suddenly ceased to exist.
"Frak! Galactica, Bogey Two just destroyed Bogey Three with some sort of energy beam."
"CAP, this is Galactica Actual," Commander Adama said. "You are ordered to return immediately. Do not engage Bogey Two unless it starts moving towards the Fleet."
He was going to have to move the Fleet. From the size and performance of the Bogey Three, it was obviously some kind of fighter. Bogey Three had been faster and more heavily armed than any Viper and Bogey Two had destroyed it with ease. It certainly seemed hostile because the nuclear missile had looked like it had been initially heading towards the CAP. The appearance of Bogey Three had apparently caused a shift in priority. And now that Bogey Three was gone…
"Roger that, Galactica," Helo replied. "Returning to…"
Helo's voice cut off so abruptly that for a moment, Adama thought he and Racetrack had been destroyed by Bogey Two.
"Galactica," Helo's voice returned. "Bogey Two has just jumped out."
The modern Alliance Cruiser was designed for the post-Unification verse. They were big, bigger than a good many War and pre-War battleships. They were the most impressive warships ever made in the Blue Sun system. Proponents of the design would point out the unmatched firepower, the fleets of gunships, and the battalions of infantry carried aboard them. This was a ship made to keep the peace. And to intimidate any would-be rebels more, the Cruiser's bulk was inflated even more by its "City on a Platter" design.
The critics said they looked damned silly.
The City on a Platter design might look impressive, but to anyone with even a smattering of engineering know-how, it was an inefficient beast. Even worse for a fighting ship, the design was more fragile compared to a more conservatively designed warship.
Secretly, Commander Harken, commanding officer of the IAV Enterprise, agreed with the critics. But it was his ship. No one would ever hear him uttering any insults about his beloved command. After all, with the Independents little more than a memory, there was no one left who had ships that could go toe to toe with the Alliance Fleet.
Unfortunately, that assumption had proven groundless when the Reavers turned up in force, ambushing a concentrated force of older Alliance warships. The battle had been brutal, a nearly one for one exchange in ship losses. The Alliance had only prevailed because they had two or three more ships than the Reavers.
Harken had had some previous exposure to Reaver handiwork, so Reavers being real didn't come as a complete shock. What came as a real shock was that the Alliance had been responsible for the creation of the Reavers in the first place. What was even worse was that so many of his comrades had died unwittingly trying to cover up the crimes of those responsible.
But now the Alliance military was finally fulfilling their responsibilities. Despite the political chaos at High Command, orders had been issued sending ships out to hunt down the remaining Reavers. Post-battle analysis indicated that it was a fluke of local conditions plus the shock of surprise that allowed the Reavers to destroy so many Alliance ships. If they could keep their distance, Alliance ships should be able to destroy the Reaver ships with impunity. With that in mind, the assembled fleet of Cruisers escorted by swarms of gunships swept out and flooded the space around Miranda ready to destroy any Reavers they found.
They didn't find any.
The Cruisers and their attendant gunships scattered, looking for the Reaver fleet that intel had said should have been at Miranda. So far, all they had found were a handful of obvious stragglers. Harken had wondered about the accuracy of the intel.
As a side benefit of the search, Enterprise had been designated as the flagship coordinating the search. Of course, that reduced Harken to the Number Two man on his own ship, but he got to work with a legend.
"Sir, we have a message from Magellan," he informed his superior. "They received a garbled message from one of their gunships about a fleet of ships parked out beyond the Rim. It looks we've found the Reaver fleet.
"Good, assemble the fleet," General Sherman Williams ordered. He was a famous hero of the War, leading an Alliance fleet through the Independents' rear areas devastating their war production facilities. He sighed. "Son, do you know why it took so long for any of us to believe in Reavers?"
"Sir?" General Williams was in one of his reflective moods.
"The logistics of the Reavers simply didn't make sense," the General mused. "Psychotic madmen subsisting entirely off human flesh? To feed themselves, the Reavers would have needed to eat so many people that we couldn't help but sit up and take notice. And then there was your supposed encounter with Reavers. They left a perfectly good supply of human bodies right there on that ship. Why didn't they take them? And let's not get into how they keep their ships flying."
"But, they're real, sir," Harken protested.
"Yes, and we drove them mad, made them mindlessly aggressive." Williams sighed. "And yet they're still able to work together without turning on one another. They can operate a space going fleet for years and still feed themselves on something other than human flesh." He smiled humorlessly. "That, or some tah mah duh hwoon dahn was outright supplying the Reavers with food and equipment."
"You're kidding me," Roslyn said in disbelief.
"No joke, Madame President," Adama replied. "That cargo ship we captured is fully loaded with food stuffs, ship parts, practically everything we're short of except for weaponry. Oh, we're being careful to make sure none of the food is tainted and that none of the machinery is booby trapped, but my people are optimistic. Although we are wondering why one cargo hold was filled with nothing but drums of red paint."
"And there was no sign of the crew?" Roslyn asked.
"No," Captain Lee Adama answered. "We think that the crew transferred over to the warship right after the jump. Although we did find this in the galley." He held up an empty mug stamped with the Starbuck's Coffee logo.