Author's Notes: Second last chapter from the Viewpoint of Earth's people. If you haven't noticed, each chapter has introduced a new person. I was originally going to do this story in 1st person, and the other two in 3rd person like my other stories, but I don't think I'll do that now. I'm thinking that I should follow these people I've introduced throughout the whole journey (all three stories) from their point of view, and the Colonials from their point of view. Not doing it like this of course, with an entire chapter from the one viewpoint, about the one thing, but yeah, that looks like the course I'm gonna take with it.

The next chapter will be from an Earther's viewpoint (as I've said before), and then after that, I'll probably do four chapters from the Colonial's viewpoints from different characters, which will probably be, Lee Adama, Starbuck, Tyrol or Helo, and someone else yet who I haven't decided on, probably a female. Why do these chapters you ask? Well, to show how different viewpoints can influence the perception of things, and also to convey how the Colonials found Earth and what happened after New Caprica, in a broad sense.

After those 4 chapters, there might be one more as a 'conclusion', and then that's it for this story. You'll notice that not much happens in each chapter, it's more of a reflection. That'll change as soon as the next story starts. I'm thinking that the opening chapter of the next story will be the landing on New Caprica from a couple of the characters' viewpoints.

This is a bit of a 'deep' chapter – the thoughts of the character are rather deep.

Very long author's note. I'll conclude nice and simply: Enjoy and Review Please! Cheers – Aussie.

From the Stars:

Salvation

Chapter 3

Lieutenant Gary Myers – Pilot of the Huntress

Moments after I regain my senses, I feel the bile begin to rise in my throat and I make a concentrated effort to keep it down. As we emerged from the FTL jump, I remarked that I still wasn't used to the sensation. The ship shook violently and I actually look out the cockpit for the first time, only to see that we've emerged within what looks like an asteroid field, and the bad news was that we were screaming towards an asteroid about ten times the size of our ship.

"What the hell's going on up there?" I hear Lucy Thanos, the Navigation and ECO officer of the Huntress said through the wireless.

"You landed us in a damn asteroid field," I replied to her. Looking out the front viewport, I could tell that we were going to have a close call with the asteroid. I pulled back on one of the controls, pulling the nose of the ship up. I also fired the ventral thrusters as well as putting the main thrusters to maximum.

"Nick, take out any rocks inbound," I ordered the Weapons officer.

"I'm plotting a jump out of here," Lieutenant Thanos says over the wireless. "Done," I heard a few moments later.

"Jump!" I said, knowing that we wouldn't avoid the larger asteroid.

Moments later, I was feeling the same sensations as I had when we emerged from our previous FTL jump, and again, I was fighting to hold down the bile.

"Maybe you should have skipped on dinner before we left," Wynne Baudrice, the Huntress' Communications officer said, sitting beside me.

"Maybe," I replied.

"Lucy, where the hell are we?" Lieutenant Baudrice asked into the wireless to Lieutenant Thanos.

"Twenty million kilometres from the star of the same system," Lieutenant Thanos replied.

"We're going to start preparing the Hunter for jump prep," I heard Nick Raines say over the wireless. I noted the fact and turned the engines off so that we were coasting through space. I noted that the light indicating the Hunter's airtight seal to the Huntress had turned from red to green, indicating that Ensign Raines and Lieutenant Thanos were preparing for jump.

The Huntress was one part of a two part ship which could disconnect and act as two different ships, the Hunter counterpart. They got their names because of the respective male and female reference to each of the names. The Huntress contained the female joint for the two ships, the joint which would take in the male joint of the Hunter. The ships were perfectly capable joined as one ship, or as two independent ships. I remember my flight instructor from SpaceNav saying that the ship had been purposefully designed for the return to the Colonies. Our primary role was to jump ahead of the fleet and scout the systems for any possibility of Cylons, or unforseen obstacles as the asteroid field we had just jumped into. Once we arrived, the Huntress and the Hunter would separate, and one, usually the Hunter would jump back to the fleet to give the okay to proceed. Each ship was elongated and about four times the size of a raptor. Each ship had the sensor capabilities of a raptor, but was more heavily armed. The Huntress possessed a heavy turrent on the top of the ship, and the Hunter possessed the same turrent on the bottom of the ship. Two smaller turrents were located on the sides of each ship and were akin do turrented viper cannons. The ship also had a fairly large food store for extended voyages. Most importantly, the ship's hull was armed which meant that we could take a degree of small weapons fire from a fighter, which could be very useful.

The fleet had three of these ships, and we were usually the one on the ahead scouting missions. Another of the ships scouted behind the fleet, to make sure that we hadn't missed any contacts hiding in system which would reveal themselves after the fleet left. The other was an all-purpose ship, being used as the commanders of the fleet saw fit.

My head was ringing something chronic from the recent FTL jumps. I don't know what it was about them that affected me so much, mostly everyone got used to it after a while. I, obviously, didn't. I think that I was making myself sick about the jumps, it was just something about ripping through space itself that I didn't feel comfortable with. I would put up with it in order to get to come on this mission, or have anything to do with SpaceNav though. It was absolutely amazing, here I was, light-years from home, on the way to visit thirteen other worlds, twelve of which were in the same solar system. If someone made you that offer, you couldn't pass it up for anything.

I looked at the dashboard in front of me and could see that the Lieutenant Thanos and Ensign Raines were almost through their pre-flight checks aboard the Hunter. Although they functioned as the Weapons, ECO and Navigational officers for the Huntress/Hunter when they were combined, each person aboard the ships was capable of performing the other's tasks once the ships separated, although not to the same degree. This made it possible for better all-round training of pilots and officers as well, creating experience in multiple fields instead of one. SpaceNav as well as the Colonial Fleet Headquarters believed that this was a good way of training enlisted personnel into officers.

"Lieutenant Myers, the Hunter is clear for separation," I heard Ensign Raines say through the wireless.

"Lieutenant Thanos, Ensign Raines, you are clear to disengage from the Huntress," Lieutenant Baudrice replied to them. I heard a series of clanks, and then waited five seconds, and I knew that the Hunter had separated from the Huntress.

"Huntress, the Hunter is away. Plotting a jump back to the fleet and updating old jump coordinates to this location," Lieutenant Thanos said through the wireless.

"We got you Hunter. See you soon. Huntress out," I said to them in the wireless. I looked down at the DRADIS console to see the icon of the Hunter disappear, leaving us alone.

I thought that it was completely fascinating being out here, alone, with just the co-pilot of the Huntress. When you put it in perspective, the thought of it was awe-inspiring. No one else had been here before: Correct that, no one else from my planet had been here before. The Colonials had, as they had it marked on their navigational records as one of the systems they'd visited on their way to Earth. I couldn't help but to be more excited as the days went on too, we were getting closer to New Caprica. Considering the distance from New Caprica to Earth, we were nearly at its doorstep. Maybe a week and a half worth of Jumps and we'd be there. No one knew what we'd find there. Whether we'd find Cylons, the humans which were left behind, both, or none. It was a scary thought that there was a damn good chance that the Cylons may actually be waiting for us, but that's one of the reasons we came on this mission, to seek them out. We needed intelligence as to their whereabouts and intentions towards us, as Earth needed all the information we could get. Sure, we were years ahead of ourselves technologically now that the Colonials had rocked up, but according to all the Colonial's I'd ever heard talking, the Cylons had the ability to nuke our planet so that it would be inhospitable for thousands of years if they wanted, after all, they did it to the Colonies.

"DRADIS shows a stray asteroid passing by us by lateral 270 degrees, 12 degrees inclination, heading 40 degrees, negative 80 declination," Lieutenant Baudrice said to me. I looked out the front viewport and could see the asteroid she was referring to, it was rather large, but it was far enough away so that it wouldn't pose a threat to the ship. I looked at the DRADIS screen and saw that there was a moon orbiting a small Mars like planet nearby and decided to go and take a look.

"Lets go have a look at that moon," I said to Lieutenant Baudrice as I throttled up the engines and adjusted our course. With a quick burst from the engines, I throttled them down to idle again, as drifting, according to the DRADIS display, would get us there in half an hour.

Twenty minutes into the journey to the moon and I found myself wondering whether there would be more intelligent life out there somewhere. We'd successfully found intelligent life from another world, or rather, they found us, but the chances of two different species evolving to be exactly the same were far to phenomenal. We had to have a common root in history somewhere; somehow we'd moved to the planets we now, or once, occupied. Or, someone moved us. There was absolutely no possible way that human beings could have evolved on two separate occasions. That led to the story of these 'Lords of Kobol' referred to in the Colonial's religion.

At first when the Colonials came to Earth, many on Earth believed that the Colonial's religion was very, very, very, false. No one knew how such an advanced race could believe the things which were told throughout their religion, some of which sounded like it was out of a TV show. What added more controversy to the mix was when the Colonials found out about the major religions on Earth, and how similar they were to the Cylon's religious beliefs. To say that the Colonial civilians and military panicked was an understatement for sure. Eventually, our leaders came to the table to discuss it and try to put it aside. I mean, after all, when there is a technologically superior race trying to destroy every last one of us, religious beliefs didn't matter much, it was about survival. Survival, however, is best done when one knows where one came from, and that was a very controversial issue indeed. We on Earth had a fossil record of humans evolving on Earth, while the Colonial Religion described humans evolving, or being made, on Kobol. The leaders of Earth tried to dismiss it as a religious misinterpretation, but the Colonials showed how many times their religion had got it right, recently too. The prophecy of the dying leader taking the remaining Colonials to Earth was one, stating that any return to Kobol would lead in bloodshed was another, and in all instances, the Colonial predictions about the future had been correct.

That led to the question 'where do we come from', seeing as we had evidence for the creation of man, and so did the Colonials. The answer, well, no one knew the answer to that question; yet. But the fact that the Colonial religious telling talked about the Lords of Kobol, that was interesting. Out here in the middle of space, all alone apart from your co-pilot, I tended to get thinking about these things. Could there be another race out there, these Lords of Kobol, which was vastly different than us. So different that we, at our current level of development would interpret them as Gods? After all, the history that the Colonials had brought with them showed that the Colonial people were about as developed as America in the 1940's when the Twelve Colonies were settled. Or were they really Gods, not extra-terrestrial beings influencing human-kind. Or were they human in themselves, just a vastly more advanced version of us? I didn't know, and no one else on Earth or this fleet did either, and probably never would in our lifetimes.

It was too hard to believe that we were the only intelligent life out there in the universe, apart from the Cylons. Just looking out the front viewport I could see the amount of stars, and it was unbelievable. And those were only the ones I could see. Out there, somewhere, there had to be another form of intelligent life. Earth couldn't be the only place where it remained, if it would remain for long. We didn't realise how valuable we were in the universe, whether we were alone in it or not, and I believe that this would be a lesson to be learned by future generations. Even though I knew of this lesson, I really didn't know it, and neither did the population of Earth. How could we, we'd just started taking our first small steps out into the universe just now. I think that if we, as a species, is to survive, this is a lesson we must learn, and learn fast. We already have the means necessary to wipe ourselves from the universe, and history, both of the Colonials and us Earthers, has demonstrated that we may come to that at some point in our future.

I think that we may have began to take some of the smaller steps to doing that. Already, a number of nations had dissolved their borders, but most of that was for economic reasons. The largest example, was of course, the United States of America. Once the Colonials came to Earth and cooperation was set up, the USA had decided to place all of its effort towards the space military machine. Almost all of it's industries were converted so that they would serve SpaceNav, at the time, the newly set up international Earth Space Navy. In doing so, the President of the time had put the USA in a huge financial deficit. Unbeknownst to him though, or maybe he did know, countries in Africa and Latin America were reaping the rewards. All the industries that America had once possessed were shut down, and therefore the American people needed somewhere else to get these products and food from, a fact that many of these countries realised. Almost immediately, industries to serve America and other countries which had chosen the same route were set up in these poor areas, and money flooded in. Much of the poverty of the world disappeared in just a couple of years, with farmers being able to export their product for much higher benefits than ever. SpaceNav had even made it an unofficial law of importation that the poorly developed countries be put on the top of the list for supplying imported products. A number of these countries had since then, dissolved their borders to create a larger economic power. Also, the entire continent of Northern America was now one nation. Canada and Mexico had taken the same path as the poorer developed countries and supplied the USA with all their needs, and their treasuries had skyrocketed while America's plummeted. In a historic deal between the leaders of each of the nations, it was decided to create a new country out of the three: the UNC, the United Northern Continent, which still remained in the position of the USA as one of the world's superpowers. So, we were taking the first steps to realising our place in the universe, the unification of the peoples of Earth had began, but it would take a very long time, and even then, that was just the first step.

"DRADIS Contact," Lieutenant Baudrice said. "Receiving SpaceNav and Colonial Id's. It's the fleet," she announced.

"Send a reply that we're just going to check out this moon," I told her. Just then, it hit me. We were making our first steps to realising our place in the universe, but we were a far, far, far way from reaching the ultimate goal at the end of that passage. While I sat there and thought about how much 'better' the human race was becoming, I was taking part in a mission to find the likely whereabouts of another intelligent race, albeit one which wanted to destroy us, so that we may perhaps make efforts to destroy them. It was then that I knew that out there, if there was something else, they would probably have the same problems as us and that we'd each destroy ourselves before we even had the slightest chance of meeting one another. For us to survive as a species, we needed to overcome our differences with the Cylons, and perhaps try to teach them the same things that we'd realised. I knew, that on an individual level, there was hope. I could individually accomplish that goal, and so could many others. I knew though, that we, as a species were not going to stop pursuing the Cylons and building our forces until we knew that they were exterminated, and neither would the Cylons.