== Part 5 – Meet and Greet ==

"What do you think happened here?" Six asked Five as they made their way through the ruins of a city. The Twelve Colonies would have considered it a smallish town. On this planet though, it was the largest urban area that the Cylons could find. Or it would have been had it still been inhabited. The two Cylons were here to see if they could find anything of interest, but it was clear that the city had been thoroughly looted of anything valuable long ago.

"I think it's obvious," Five replied. "The humans warred among themselves as is their nature, smashed everything, and now are just living in the shadow of their past." Indeed, humans still did live on the planet, albeit in small, primitive farming villages that would have made the most poverty stricken parts of Sagittaron look like technologically advanced utopias in comparison. Their most advanced technology were primitive windmills and pumps cobbled together from scrap looted from the city.

But what scrap it was. Even in ruins, the city was made out of all kinds of materials of incredible durability and toughness, resisting the elements and the march of time by showing almost no corrosion. Even the concrete-like material that made up the streets and sidewalks the two Cylons strode on was incredibly resistant to wear and tear.

"I'm not so sure that's the case,"Six disagreed. "Sure, there's signs of rioting, but I don't think mere rioting could have caused all this damage."

"I'm not talking about rioting," Five said. "I'm talking about full up military conflict." He bent down and scooped up a large shard of glass from the ground. Except it wasn't really glass, but some kind of transparent material akin to what the Colonial Military used for armored windows. Except that this material was much stronger. "I don't think anything less than military hardware can even damage some of this stuff."

"Then where's the military hardware?" Six asked. "We haven't seen anything resembling a combat platform of any kind. Surely you don't think any military force that would cause this kind of destruction would also neatly sweep up all of the wreckage of their broken vehicles, do you? For that matter, where are their enemy's vehicles?"

"I don't know," Five admitted. "The Contact team has finally learned enough of this 'English' that they're planning to ask the locals exactly that today."


This planet was not Earth.

When the Cylons first learned of Earth's location from the Temple of Athena on Kobol, both prudence and curiosity had demanded that they send an expedition to see what had become of the Thirteenth Colony. After all, the Ones argued, the Thirteenth Colony could be made up of humans that would object to the Cylons' plans for the Twelve Colonies. They could as the Sevens have argued be great friends. They Eights were just enamored by the novelty of seeing new humans.

In any case, in a rare unanimous agreement, the Cylons had dispatched a single Basestar plus support vessels to reconnoiter Earth and learn what they could. And it was a thousand lightyears short of their destination that they stumbled across a planet inhabited by humans. A planet littered with ruins of a once great civilization and whose humans had been reduced to little more than subsistence farming.

The local humans had been skittish when the Cylons first arrived, hiding from them whenever the Cylons entered a village. Some Cylons wanted to just go in hard and just grab some humans to interrogate. The Sevens though had prevailed upon them to take a less violent route, coaxing a few out by trying to show that they weren't a threat. And it had worked... sort of.

A few humans had come out, and the Sevens tried to talk to them. They quickly discovered the locals didn't speak any Colonial dialect or ancient Kobollian. Which meant the last few weeks of "conversation" had been focused mostly on language lessons before the Cylons could finally get around to asking for what they wanted to know.

"...and the ships from the Great Star League stopped coming, and there was no more holy mana to be had," said the village... mayor? Chieftain? High priest? The Cylons weren't exactly sure what his title meant exactly, but he was certainly one of the local leadership. His name was Phil.

They were assembled in the town square, sitting at a large picnic table like affair as the Phil's servants served the Cylons some kind of alcoholic drink. Each human model had a representative present. Also present was a squad of Centurions, the newer, sleeker models that the Cylons called Model Zero in keeping with their numerical naming conventions. One of the Zeroes was also playing representative.

"Hmm, what do you all make of this?" the Zero representative asked its younger brothers and sisters.

"It seems pretty clear that this 'Star League' was supplying this world with some vital resource that kept its technology running," Four said. "When the supplies stopped coming, the technology stopped working."

"All the technology?" said Three skeptically. "I find that hard to believe."

"Maybe not all," Five said thoughtfully. "Knock out a few key bits of infrastructure and everything else that depends on it could stop working in short order."

"Hey, like the power plant," Eight said. "The building that we think was the city's power plant is a total wreck. It looks like someone just tore it apart by hand."

"Sir," Six said to Phil, who was remarkably patient as the Cylons talked among themselves, "Do you know why the ships stopped coming?"

"Nay, only that they were replaced with the Great Scourge," Phil told them.

"Great Scourge?" One echoed. "That doesn't sound good."

"It is not," Phil agreed. "The Great Scourge comes in the form of ships from the sky like the one of the Great Star League, only instead of mana, they bring death and destruction to all they visit. And those they don't kill, they steal away to do with as they will. When you had first arrived, we thought you were the return of the Great Scourge."

There was a pause as the Cylons digested that grim bit of information.

"So there's someone running around with a ship attacking settlements like this one," One said slowly.

"We haven't seen any signs that there's anyone but us that has operational ships in this system," Zero pointed out.

"Which means that this 'Great Scourge' is coming from outsystem somewhere," Two concluded.

"Wait a second," Seven said. "Phil, you told us you thought we were the Great Scourge at first. Does that mean the Great Scourge is made up of humans? Or machines like Zero here?"

"Both," Phil answered. "But the men and women of the Great Scourge are irredeemably evil, and their metal men are much... bigger."

"Bigger?" Eight said. "How much bigger?"

Before Phil could answer, Zero suddenly jumped to its feet, hands folding back to reveal gun barrels. The other Centurions were likewise switching to combat mode. "Danger!" Zero barked. "Hostiles incoming! Get to cover!"

Explosions sounded in the distance. Human voices of the villagers cried out, and the Cylons could just make out the words "Great Scourge" being repeated.

"Come, we must get to shelter," Phil told the Cylons as he and his servants started to make a run for his manor. But they had barely made it a few steps when the manor exploded in a shower of splinters and debris as a giant, humanoid figure plowed through the building.

The figure was mechanical, around ten meters tall, and its head even sort of looked like a Centurion's. The Cylons' own Centurions opened fired on it, and their bullets just pinged ineffectually off the giant's skin without so much as scratching its garish paint job. In reply, the giant raised its right arm which ended in the scaled up gun barrel of its own and blasted the Cylon Centurions to shreds with a single burst of fire.