Admiral Adama and Colonel Tigh were conducting the debriefing of the surface teams aboard the Pegasus, when the phone rang. The Admiral's son, Commander Lee Adama was also present, reading through some of the reports. As commander of the Pegasus he answered the phone.
"Sir, we are having an urgent call from Colonial One", the voice on the other end of the line said.
"I'm in the middle of a debriefing. Can't that wait until later?" he asked.
"Sorry, sir. It's the president. He says it's urgent", the communications officer in the CIC said.
"Okay, put him through", Lee Adama said, knowing he had no other choice than to take the call.
"I don't know what you are planning, but this is not funny!" the president yelled.
"Excuse me, Mr. President. What do you mean?"
"I looked out of the window and saw New Caprica vanish right in front of my eyes. I don't know what kind of trick your father is pulling, but there will be consequences!" Baltar threatened.
"The planet is gone, sir", Commander Adama stated calmly.
"What do you mean with the planet is gone?" President Baltar yelled. "Is this some sort of sick joke?"
"The planet seemed to make an FTL jump just when our raptors were getting ready to land aboard Pegasus", Lee Adama explained. "It has completely disappeared. We have absolutely nothing on DRADIS."
"I demand to speak with the team leaders in person. Immediately!"
Shortly afterwards Colonial One landed in the starboard hangar bay of the Pegasus. President Baltar walked into the pilot briefing room and made Helo and Racetrack report to him in minute detail what they had seen and heard on the planet.
"So if I understand what you said about this Zathras character right, someone from the future sent a space station back in time to help us fight the Cylons?", the president asked after he had impatiently listened to the reports, pacing back and forth.
"This all sounds like a load of crap to me", Tigh said. "Time travel is impossible"
Baltar glared at him.
"Zathras described it as a place to gather, to fight, and to organize our forces. Sounds like some sort of command center, a staging area." Helo explained
"We need to concentrate our efforts on finding this space station. If Zathras is right, maybe we eventually find Earth. Imagine the thirteenth tribe being so far ahead of us that they have time travel technology. They could send back a powerful space station, loaded with their most advanced weapons and technology, supplies, ammunition and anything else we need to defeat the Cylons once and for all. A place where we can repair and upgrade our ships." Baltar suggested.
"Those are all wild speculations. We need to be realistic here", Admiral Adama reminded.
"We don't know if even the slightest bit of what those two frakking nutcases on the planet told our teams is true.", Tigh said.
"I saw some of their machines and equipment with my own eyes", Racetrack said.
"A whole industry to create custom made planets? Come on, give me a frakkin break." Tigh scoffed. "Not even our craziest Sci-Fi authors could come up with something as half-brained as that.
The idea of permanent settlement on New Caprica had turned into a total fiasco for Baltar. The sudden disappearance of the planet he had named New Caprica had sent his political career into a downward spiral before it even had a chance to take off. Gaius Baltar was intelligent, but he didn't know how to lead people. He almost always let his oversized ego get in the way and he rarely listened to the advice of others. He prepared a speech, to address the people in the fleet. He decided to use the information about the space station to give the people a new goal, to find this station and with it advanced technology to fight the Cylons as well as clues that would lead to Earth. This speech was an attempt to salvage what he could from this political disaster.
Admiral Adama, Colonel Tigh and former president Laura Roslin were listening to Baltar's speech to the people in the fleet.
Twelve marines were considered MIA after they had landed in two Raptors and secured the missile installation on the planet that had fired at the Pegasus several days earlier. They had been left behind to guard the missile site until the weapons experts and a replacement team arrived, while all other teams had returned to the Pegasus for the debriefing.
Admiral Adama was infuriated over Baltar's recklessness that had resulted in the loss of personnel and equipment. He vowed to do whatever he could get away with to oppose the president, short of staging a military coup, should Baltar ever risk the safety of the people in the fleet again in such a careless manner.
Baltar's popularity among the people had dropped considerably, even more so after his speech. Very little information had been released about what happened on "New Caprica" and why the planet had suddenly disappeared. Some people still believed the two men on the planet were survivors of a crash, others believed they were descendants of Kobolians, or even the thirteenth tribe, and still others believed they had been completely made up. Most people however agreed that this had all been some part of a huge conspiracy and they had been lied to. Everyone was angry at the president they had just elected two days earlier and there were many calls for his resignation.
When Baltar went to see Gina, even she didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore. "Leave me alone and move on", she had told him and closed the door of her quarters right in front of his face without even giving him any opportunity to respond. She seemed to have changed into a completely different woman apparently overnight. Not only did she appear much more confident, but she had changed physically as well. Her hair was now considerably longer than just a few days earlier and the scars on her back were completely gone. Gina Inviere had spent an entire year traveling with the Doctor, but according to the clock in her quarters she had only been gone for fifteen minutes.
End flashback
After telling the worms about the discovery and disappearance of Magrathea, or New Caprica, as then-president Gaius Baltar had named it, they finally gave Starbuck the coordinates of Earth. The freighter they were on was currently en route to a trading station several day's travel away, about half way between Earth and Takwella, the home world of the worms.
Starbuck pulled out a deck of triad cards and taught the worms how to play. She managed to win back her Viper, including the parts the worms had removed. They had earlier claimed the viper under some obscure salvage rights as a fee for saving her life.
"This game is no fun at all. You keep winning all the time!" one of the worms said in frustration.
"Yeah", another one agreed.
"Let's play poker", the worm with the large hat suggested.
"Poker! Poker! Poker!" the worms shouted.
"Sore losers! Never heard of poker." Starbuck said.
"The humans on Earth play it a lot. Agent J has taught me how to play", the worm with the hat said and pulled out a deck of poker cards.
"Okay, fair enough. You teach me", Starbuck gave in.
"And when she loses, she'll have to take her clothes off", one of the worms suggested, vaguely remembering some humans playing strip poker on TV while he was on Earth.
"I am not going to take any of my clothes off!" Starbuck insisted.
"Spoilsport", the worm said.
Starbuck lit one of the Cuban cigars, while the worm with the hat shuffled the cards and started dealing. They were hoping they could win some of their stuff back, since Starbuck was new to this game. But after a few rounds she managed to catch on and began winning again. She got fairly good at playing poker and managed to win some star charts, a box of Cuban cigars, several bottles of Vodka, and a another bottle of Whiskey. She also ended up with a glass jar with a yellow lid labeled "Vegemite" and a few other items she did not recognize. Starbuck later used the contents of this jar to grease the landing gear and other moving parts when she reassembled her Viper with the help of the worms.
Another item she had won during the card game was an electronic book with "Don't Panic" on the cover. She had asked the worms earlier about other aliens and they told her she could find all the information she wanted in this book. The device had options to display the stored information as text, audio, video, or a combination of those.
"Mostly harmless? Seriously? Is that all?" she asked in surprise after playing the audio information about Earth.
"It's an older version, a bit outdated", one of the worms explained.
"Yeah, by a couple hundred years", another one added.
"You need to download an update", a third one said.
After a few more days of Starbuck fixing her Viper and playing cards and drinking with the worms, the freighter finally arrived at their destination, a trading station built into a hollowed out asteroid. Here the worms were planning to sell off many of the goods they had acquired on Earth, with the exception of alcohol, coffee and tobacco products. Those however they were going to take to Takwella to sell on the black market for astronomical prices, especially coffee.
The pilot of the worm alien freighter announced that they were on approach to Trading Outpost Sybelius-19 and were preparing to land in 10 minutes. Starbuck went to the cockpit and looked at the view screen that showed the outpost in front of the freighter. She could see dozens of ships orbiting the asteroid, the ones that were too massive to land on the hundreds of landing platforms and runways scattered around the trading station on the surface of the asteroid.
When Starbuck looked at the numerous ships circling the asteroid again, she couldn't believe her eyes. There was a Mercury Class battlestar and several other ships that she immediately recognized as Colonial in design. She also saw several other ships of unfamiliar design flying in formation with the battlestar and the civilian ships. The largest of the strange ships looked organic and was similar in size to the battlestar. Then there were several yellow, chunky, slab like ships following the battlestar together with the civilian ships. Starbuck realized that something must have happened. Where was the Galactica? And there were much fewer civilian ships following what appeared to be the Pegasus. Did the Cylons destroy the Galactica and some of the civilian ships? Or did the admiral decide to split the fleet? Could there have been a mutiny? Where did the other ships come from? She had to find out.