A Cylon base ship entered the orbit of the seventh planet of the Chi Draconis system. The orbit was littered with debris from an ancient battle. The hybrid constantly had to make course corrections in order not to collide with the burnt out hulks of ships that had fought here many centuries ago.
"Out of all the planets in this sector, you picked THAT as the location for our forward base?" the One shouted at the Six standing next to him in the control room of the base star.
"This planet is perfect", the Six responded. "The debris field in orbit will make it difficult to detect our base on long range scanners. The DRADIS the Colonials are using won't pick us up down there. You would have to get as close as we are right now to be able to detect any installations on the surface."
"I am picking up life signs", a Two reported, "About 5 million individuals scattered in small settlements all over the planet. Many of them underneath the surface.
"What? Out of all the planets in this sector you picked the one that is inhabited. Are you completely out of your mind? As if we don't have already enough problems chasing down not one but two groups of human survivors." The One yelled at the Six.
"If we study the inhabitants of that planet, we might be able to grow more efficient hybrids", a Four offered.
"What? With three eyes and four ears and tentacles on their heads?", the One asked sarcastically.
It had been very difficult for the Cylons to come to terms with the fact that they and the humans were not the only beings in the galaxy. Many of the lifeforms they had encountered were very similar to humans. That raised the question should the Cylons exterminate those humanoids as well. Many humanoid races had very advanced civilizations, some more advanced than the Cylons. Other aliens they encountered did not even remotely resemble humans at all.
The group of Cylons that were hunting Crichton's fleet of survivors was getting further and further away from Cylon controlled territory, stretching their supply line rather thin. So the model One who was leading this group of Cylons had put a model Six named Holly in charge of scouting out a suitable location for a forward base. This base would then be used to manufacture more raiders, house a resurrection hub and serve as a staging area.
Holly had sent out raiders, which quickly found an abandoned space station that was suitable, but scouts from the Pacifica arrived there at about the same time. Unfortunately for the Cylons, Crichton's people had been able to overpower the forces Holly had sent to capture the station. Crichton's forces also managed to take her sister Gayle prisoner, a fellow Six who had been leading the assault on the station. Holly knew that Gayle was a prisoner. If Gayle had been killed, she would have downloaded aboard a resurrection ship.
Shortly after the debacle with the abandoned space station, which was now firmly in the hands of Crichton's group of survivors, one of the raiders Holly had sent out had discovered the planet they were currently orbiting.
On the planet below, an elderly humanoid was sitting around a campfire with a group of children of his species. Several of them were his own grandchildren. The humanoids looked very much like humans, with the exception that they were completely bald and had bony ridges around the back of their heads with tiny earlobes at the base of their necks.
"Back in the old days, long before any of you were born, even before I was born…", the elderly humanoid begun, "… back then, the Minbari were a proud race. Our ancestors even travelled between the stars."
"How did they do that?" a young Minbari girl asked.
"Our ancestors had gigantic ships that would sail between the stars, taking them wherever they wanted to go", the Minbari grandfather explained.
"How come we don't have star sailing ships?" a young boy asked.
"Many cycles ago there was a great and terrible war. A war between the light and the darkness. Our people lost and very few survived. The ones who did survive, did not know how to build ships to sail to the stars. A lot of knowledge was lost in the time after the war", the grandfather explained.
"Grandfather, please tell us more about the war", another boy begged.
"I do not know how the war started, only that our side appeared to be winning until the Shadows destroyed the great fortress in the sky. There was a prophecy about a great leader named Valen, who was a Minbari not of Minbar. He would bring with him a new sky fortress to replace the one the Shadows had destroyed and he would guide our people to victory. This prophecy gave our people hope. But the days passed after the destruction of the sky fortress and Valen never came.
"Maybe Valen got lost along the way?", another one of the children suggested.
"Do you think Valen will still come and bring us food and medicine and teach us how to build star ships and how to sail to the stars?", the first boy asked.
"I do not know the answer to this question, to tell you the truth", the old Minbari answered.
"Some time after the Shadows had destroyed the great sky fortress, they came with thousands of their own star ships. They destroyed the few ships that we had left and then they attacked our cities with terrible weapons", he continued.
"The cities? You mean the places we are not allowed to go to because of the Slow Death?", a girl asked.
"Yes, the cities. They were like very big villages, with millions of Minbari living in them.", the grandfather explained.
"Millions? Really that many? I have never seen more than a few hundred of our people in one place."
The old Minbari continued telling his story, stopping occasionally to answer questions from the children. Without Valen presenting Babylon 4 to the Minbari as a replacement for their battle station and leading them to victory over the Shadows, Minbar fell within weeks. All cities and major settlements on Minbar were destroyed, only villages too small to be detected from orbit remained. Only a few hundred thousand Minbari survived and many of them fled underground. The war between the Vorlons and the Shadows dragged on longer and both sides almost completely annihilated each other.
Over the curse of the centuries, the population had slightly recovered, climbing back up to a few million, despite high infant mortality and a much lower life expectancy. The technology level of Minbar was now comparable to that of 14th century Earth. Minbar's orbit was littered with hundreds of wrecks of Minbari ships and a few dozen Shadow battlecrabs. Many wrecks have deorbited over time and impacted on the surface, especially in the first years after the war. That was the reason for most inhabitants to move underground.
The Cylons began to construct a planetary base in a resource rich part of the planet near the equator. They also started studying the wrecks in orbit and had a few pieces of debris towed into one of the hangar bays of their lead basestar. They managed to reconstruct computer models of the different ships based on scans of the wrecks and quickly realized that there were two very distinct groups of ship designs. One was shaped like a fish and bluish purple in color, the other was shaped like a crab and black. The materials used in the construction of the fish ships were similar to the ones found in the ruins of the cities below. The materials the crab ships were made of were completely foreign to the Cylons and seemed to be organic or semi-organic. There was far more debris from fish shaped ships than there were crab shaped ones, which meant that the crab shaped ships, which had been the attackers, had suffered far fewer casualties. The Cylons also began capturing and enslaving the native Minbari to use them for biological experiments.