Author's Notes: Here's the next chapter. Was going to be pretty short, but it turned out to be the length of the first one. Introduces another character. I'm looking at having maybe two more Earth characters introduced, which we'll follow throughout the whole saga, and then moving onto the Colonials and what happened to them since the ending of Season 2. going to be very broad and brief in that sense, but focus on how the Colonials and Earthers are different, from a Colonial Viewpoint.

I am not expecting anyone to being to 'feel' for my characters yet, (as that's what I'm trying to do), because they haven't been in any social situations which you, the readers, have seen. That's going to happen either next chapter or next story, don't know yet.

Enjoy and leave plenty of reviews! Aussie

Next chapter should be up in a couple of days... sorry for the delay, wouldn't let me upload a chapter for about 4-5 days.

From the Stars

Salvation

Chapter 2

Dr. Anne Peterson – Environmental Officer and Lead Sensors Officer

I was looking at the aerial photographs of Caprica which the Colonials had brought with them. It was obvious that they would have changed in the time since they were taken, especially since the entire planet was nuked, but we were getting a feel for the lay of the land, and where everything that was remaining should be. We had a digital representation of an aerial photograph of Delphi and the surrounding area shown on the centre console in front of us. Instead of laying out huge pieces of paper with the images printed on them, we had redesigned this piece of equipment to be a large flat digital viewing console which could be used for almost anything. Of course, we still had the ability to print the images, just in case of a malfunction or the like, however now days, we were doing it digitally.

Delphi and the surrounding area was currently being displayed, and I was driving the program from my workstation to the back of the control centre of the Astral Dawn. Being the chief Remote Sensing, Geographical Information System Officer, and Environmental Officer in the fleet, I was required at most of these meetings where possible situations and locations were considered for action once we arrived at the Colonies. I was mostly responsible for identifying features on aerial photographs, such as these, which would not normally be identifiable, and this was a complicated process. Currently, we were searching for installations which were likely to still be intact with one of the original Colonial Officers from the Battlestar Galactica. We were bringing this task to a close because it was almost impossible to tell what was surviving or not, even though Colonel Agathon said that he had seen the space-port fully operational in his time he spent on Caprica after the attacks. We couldn't take that factor as a major consideration as anything could have happened since then, although I did agree with a number of the crew – it was best to assume that it was still intact.

The meeting was over, and I checked my schedule, an hour until the next one. After the formalities post-meeting were over, I got up and headed to my rack. I needed a bit to think. I naturally liked the outdoors and open spaces and after spending so long cramped up on this little ship, I had started to feel claustrophobic and cramped. I had to serve in the military on Earth for a period of two years before I was accepted into SpaceNav as an Officer, and I had worked in cramped spaces there. Here it was different, for a number of reasons. The first was that the people acted differently up here. Down in the military on Earth, there was a slight discrimination between male and female personnel, and I, being female, felt it heavily. Up here, with the Colonials, there was no such discrimination and all unreasonable boundaries between the sexes had been dissolved. The other was that up here, there was no escape from the confined spaces. Earth-side, or Dirt-Side as everyone called it, it was fairly easy to go outside whenever you wanted to. Here, if you went outside, well, it was space, need I say more? I found that usually if I went to my rack, closed my eyes and pictured my home on Earth, I'd begin to feel better. With nothing else to do for the next hour, that's exactly what I was going to do.

I closed my eyes and thought of my home back on Earth. I lived on a five hectare block just West of Mackay, Australia. I loved it there, when I got to spend time there. I was always out on some project and barely got to go home. I lived out there alone after my partner died almost five years ago now. Everything there reminds me of him, which on some days, can be a good thing, but on others, it can be devastating. Still, today, I'd prefer to be back at home on my property rather than cooped up here in this ship.

Eventually my thoughts led to the Earth and how it had changed so much since the arrival of the Colonials. Interstellar space travel was not a thing of science-fiction any more, but a reality, I should know, after all, I was light-years from home aboard this ship travelling to a solar system which was the former home of the Colonials. I'd been through multiple FTL jumps, and that was just in my training alone. The mere thought of being able to travel light years in an instant was still overwhelming. A lot of the things that the Colonials had brought with them boggled the mind. The capabilities that we as a people now possessed were outstanding. A scientist, I believe it was Kevin Smithers of England had made the connection that for successful space travel over a long period of time, the air supply needed to be recycled, and the Colonials must have had this technology. When we questioned them, they had stated that they were capable of recycling the air supply almost 100. This ability to take in Carbon Dioxide and transform it back into oxygen was used to restore the Earth's atmosphere to pre-industrial greenhouse levels after we'd screwed it up so much. Thousands of weather balloons were launched world wide, each with CO2 scrubber attached. After that, we just had to wait about five years and measure the drop. Then, the weather balloons were used as target practice for the training viper pilots.

I followed this discovery closely, as well as many others which had been produced since the Colonial's arrival as best as I could, but I missed out on most of them as they happened and I had to wait until I got back into town to catch up on them. I had spent most of my life working a the leader of an Environmental Management team in Australia, and over that time I had also learned how to use Remote Sensing and GIS applications as well. People constantly told me that I had an uncanny knack for it, and I had a reputation for coming up with unusual solutions to problems using these applications. I'm guessing that's what got SpaceNav interested in me as a Sensors Officer and an Environmental Officer. I was confused when they first approached me, why the Space-Navy of Earth would need any Environmental Officers, but after signing a couple of non-disclosure agreements and accepting to the terms anyway, I found out. Because I had a fairly good reputation as an Environmental Officer, as well as a Sensor Officer, I was going to head up a team of Environmental Officers and Environmental Engineers delegated with the task of exploring routes we could take to clean up each of the Colonies and restore them back to habitable condition.

At first, I thought that it was a completely ridiculous idea. There was no way that we'd be able to restore an entire planet back to habitable condition, but then I realised that SpaceNav wasn't talking about in our lifetime. They were just talking about starting the process, and maybe in the future, our descendants may be able to return to the planets hundreds, if not thousands of years earlier. Also, after consulting with one of the lead Engineers which had been contracted for this task, I had my hopes up. He had a good theory on how to build a device to filter out radioactive material from water, and that was a damn good start as any for rebuilding the ecosystem of a planet.

I was also acting as the lead Sensors Officer for the fleet. The Astral Dawn had been converted into the best sensor platform that the Earth had ever seen. If there was information out there, we'd be able to find it, and seeing as I was one of the experts in a wide range of sensor applications (Remote Sensing (Aerial Photographs and the entire discipline that goes with that) and GIS (Geographic or Spatial Databases)), SpaceNav had decided that if I excelled in my Officer training with the dirt-side military, then I'd be put in a fairly high position. It wasn't too much of a fancy position, basically I overlooked everyone's work in my field, and if any of the commanders of any of the ships needed a rundown, I'd be the one to give it to them. Also, if there were any hard knuckle-biting tasks that needed to be accomplished, I'd usually be on the team.

I thought back to the previous task, trying to identify landmarks on each of the Colonies which might still be standing. That task was hard enough in itself, let alone trying to determine which of those would still likely hold information which could be useful to us. It was made even harder when the only data that we had was from a year prior to the holocaust. Who knows what would have been destroyed, or what the Cylons may have put there in the time that they occupied the Colonies, if they'd even left. For all we know, we could jump into the Colonial system and find ourselves in the middle of a nuclear minefield.

Still, the senior officers in the fleet looked to know what they were doing. Coupled with that, plus the monumentous experience of the Colonial Officers remaining in the fleet, I thought we'd come out alright. The Colonials were both older and more experienced, seeing as they had a longer lifespan. That was one of the other facts that shocked me, aside from the arrival of the Colonials at Earth, was the fact that their average lifespan was about one hundred and twenty years (Earth Years), as a result from their higher standard of living, better medicines and whatnot. I'm guessing that's one of the reasons why the higher-ups had decided on this scavenger hunt back to the Colonies, so that we may obtain that life-span as well. After all, I'd like to live to one hundred and thirty or so, and I'm betting the world's leaders wouldn't mind it either. It was good however, as most of the Colonial personnel from both the first and second fleets which arrived at earth, which agreed, were on this voyage. I know that I personally feel safer with them around rather that more of us Earthers. Unlike us, they've actually seen the enemy, they've actually seen space combat, they've actually seen and lived on the Colonies, and they've actually spent an extended period of time in space.

I was startled awake as I realised that the alarm I had set went off; it was time for my next meeting. I was actually looking forward to this one. I was meeting with the head Environmental Engineer and a few others, and we'd be discussing techniques on how to start to filter radioactive material out of the Oceans of each of the Colonies. It was the best way to start, because if we could filter out the radioactive material, we'd be able to introduce huge quantities of algae, which would then start to produce fresh oxygen to start to restore the planets' atmospheres. There were, of course, many obstacles to overcome to achieve this, and that's what this meeting was about; tackling some of those obstacles.