Chapter replaced on 12 July. Based on feedback received both here and on another site, I have rewritten this chapter and changed several aspects. One point of clarification: the time setting of the story is intentionally ambiguous. By "the near future," I don't necessarily mean next week – it could be, but it could also be five, ten, twenty years from now. Not every detail is going to match up precisely with what is true right this moment. Anyhoo, a real update should be here in a day or two. I've been incredibly busy with work (and I hate not writing any Bill/Laura scenes, which won't come until the chapter after next), but it's okay because this job is worth it! Thanks for reading!

CHAPTER TWO
The Thirteenth Colony, Part One


Reconnaissance Raptor
Geosynchronous orbit about Earth

"Galactica, Starbuck. Jump complete. Will descend into geosynchronous transfer orbit on your mark."

Captain Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, playing the role of electronic countermeasures officer on this exceptionally vital mission, took her finger off the Transmit button and looked over the Raptor's pilot, Lieutenant Sharon Agathon. "And now we play the waiting game."

Behind the Raptor's canopy, Sharon's husband, Major Karl "Helo" Agathon, and Galactica's chief communications officer, Lt. Felix Gaeta, were running the instruments through their final diagnostics check before putting them online to collect data from the planet below. "How long until we can expect Galactica's response?" Helo inquired while marking items off on a checklist.

"Ten to twelve minutes," Sharon answered. "The planets are almost as far from each other right now as Earth is from the central star."

"It really is beautiful," Kara commented, gazing out the window at the sphere of blue and green below. Wispy clouds covered about a quarter of what they could see, and the outlines of landforms such as deserts, ice caps, and mountains were taking shape. How often she had feared she'd never set eyes upon it again.

"Spectrometer online," Gaeta announced from behind them. "Commencing analysis of upper atmosphere."

"Altimeter online," said Helo. "Beginning final diagnostic run of heat sensors."

As the men performed the obligatory rattling off of their systems as they reached ready status, the women waited patiently for their radio signal to reach Galactica and visualized the approach they'd be taking down towards Earth. Their ultimate goal was to touch down on the surface; Sharon had just skimmed the upper atmosphere on her first run a few days earlier. A safe descent shouldn't take more than an hour with them running their scans at the same time, but if they encountered any debris, as Sharon had spotted on her previous mission, it could take them as long as three hours.

"All systems online and standing by," Helo informed them after about eight minutes had gone by since sending their message to Galactica.

Kara's attention for the last few minutes had been occupied by watching a cloud formation as it drifted from an inland sea toward a land mass that looked remarkably like a boot. "What's the gravitational acceleration?" she inquired.

"We'll need to confirm it on this run, but when I buzzed it before, I measured it at about ten meters per second squared," Sharon answered. Within the fleet, acceleration due to gravity was induced at just over eleven meters per second squared. A ten percent gravity decrease would be noticed, but shouldn't negatively impact their physiology in the long run. "Look at it this way: we'll all weigh less."

Kara snorted. "Good. I was worried about my ass getting fat once all this is over."

Sharon laughed. "I hear you. Could do with some long-term shore leave myself; check out some of those beaches..."

"Mmmm." Kara closed her eyes, smiled, and leaned her head back. "First thing I'm gonna do when we put the fleet down is lay on a beach, let the waves wash over me, and stay there until someone fishes me out."

"How's our sub-light fuel?" asked Sharon, remembering to get back on task. While it was almost over, they weren't there just yet, and this mission was an essential component on the path to a permanent home.

"We have enough for about three hours of sustained flight, but I'm guessing that'll be reduced by thirty to forty minutes depending on how much use the thrusters get while we descend to low orbit," Gaeta answered. "We may have to perform our jump back to the fleet from inside the atmosphere if we spend too much time down there."

The Cylon woman suppressed a groan. Atmospheric FTL jumps were among her least favorite operating procedures. The one fatal flaw in a Raptor's design, at least in Sharon's opinion, was that the engines needed to constantly provide thrust when in suborbital flight to stay aloft. Aside from burning fuel like nobody's business, this meant that when a jump was performed into a near-frictionless environment, like space, their craft would take a sudden lurch forward before they could decelerate to a comfortable velocity. Even a seasoned Raptor jock like her could have trouble holding on to their lunch in a maneuver like that. There was always the option of cutting the sub-light engines while going straight up and performing the jump just before gravity kicked in again and pulled them down, in that fraction of a second when they were essentially stationary, but a move like that contained a high risk of losing control. It was better to just suck it up.

Frakking conservation of momentum. The laws of physics were a harsh mistress.

Their wait had just passed eleven minutes when Bill Adama's voice came through the headset; heavily wrought with static, but distinct. "Starbuck, Actual. Will expect report when you touch down. Clear to proceed."

"All right, let's do this," said Kara. "You heard the Old Man."

Sharon grasped the controls. "Give me some thrust, Starbuck."

"You hittin' on me, Athena?" inquired Kara as she flipped the switch activating the aft thrusters.

"Oh, you know it, baby." The Raptor eased forward, and Sharon, keeping her eyes on the instrument panel, aligned it with the path Gaeta had calculated to take them to the next orbit level. "Okay, ease off. It's my first time."

"Helo," Kara whined as the decreased the power to the thrusters, "your wife's hitting on me."

"Is she, now?" Helo joked back with feigned disinterest.

"You bet I am," said Sharon. "What would you do if I left you for Starbuck, Helo?"

Grinning, Helo answered, "I'd sell tickets."

Gaeta rolled his eyes. "Remind me to hose you three off when we get back to Galactica."

While it was Sharon who did most of the steering, all four of them were doing things other than teasing each other; they were keeping a careful watch on their respective control panels for any changes that might put them at risk. With this being their first descent, they wanted to go in manually. Serving under William Adama and indulging his convictions had done them well. Should an emergency arise, their best chances for getting through it safely lie in their intuition and experience, something no flight computer possessed.

The thrusters were primarily to keep them on course; gravity was doing the work as they entered geosynchronous transfer orbit. Their elliptical trajectory would carry them to low planetary orbit, about two thousand kilometers above Earth's surface. They expected the descent to low orbit to take just over two hours. From low orbit, they would drop another one thousand kilometers into the thermosphere, at which point the Raptor's engines would need to be set to full power to guide them down through Earth's atmosphere.

The geosynchronous transfer orbit was essentially a controlled free-fall. Time was not going to be spent twiddling their thumbs, though; this was their preliminary data collection period. With only two hours at their disposal, they needed to move quickly. While Sharon and Kara kept them on course, making constant corrections as necessary, Helo and Gaeta began scanning the planet below with the Raptor's sensitive reconnaissance instruments. More precise readings would have to be made as they drew closer, but the data from the first half hour of their descent should give them an idea of where to go for the second stage of their mission.

It had not been stated outright, but Adama certainly implied that their next move would be to bring in the president herself and approach Earth's leaders. For this to be successful, it was necessary to locate Earth's capital city. In the Colonies, most of the time, though not always, the capital was the largest city on a planet – and even if it wasn't, going there would at least garner enough attention to alert Earth's leader, wherever he or she was. Several techniques would be used to assess this on their approach, from population density measurements to photon emission spectroscopy. Their entire plan operated on the assumption that the Earth humans possessed technology comparable to theirs, which, fortunately, appeared to be a safe bet. Sharon had observed several satellites and even something that looked like a space station on her first run, and Gaeta had started getting signals the minute the EM sensors came online, so things looked quite promising.

The first hour of descent was without incident. They had accelerated up to five kilometers per second, and could have gone faster in their frictionless environment with little power to the thrusters, but the G-forces associated with sustained flight at that velocity risked causing blackout. At their midway point, Helo focused his attention on the short-range radar, which would pick up any satellites or debris large enough to inflict damage. Their eyes could not be counted upon for this task; by the time they spotted something, it would be too late.

Sharon and Kara became much more active in the second half of the geosynchronous transfer path, making nearly constant corrections to both stabilize their descent and evade one piece of space junk with plenty of room to safely dodge the next. Forty minutes outside of their scheduled arrival in low planetary orbit, Gaeta informed them that he'd determined a likely candidate for the largest metropolitan area, and he would point it out to them on their next pass.

A few hundred kilometers above the low planetary orbit level, a beep brought everyone's attention to the DRADIS console. "Large craft detected," said Gaeta. "I think this is Athena's space station."

"If it is, we don't want them getting scared and shooting us down," Kara mused. "Think we're small enough for them not to see us?"

"As far as I can tell, we could jump the whole fleet in right now and they wouldn't see us," Gaeta returned. "I'm not reading a signal of any kind from it. It's dead in the water."

Sharon's brow wrinkled in confusion. "It was reading all over the place for me. Could it be an error?"

"Possible," Gaeta admitted. "We don't have time for another diagnostics test, though."

"Then I say let's pray to the gods and just go for it," said Kara. "It's not like we'd be able to keep ourselves a secret forever."

Little did she or anyone else aboard the Raptor know that their desire for secrecy was already a thing of the past.


Olympus international space station
Low Earth orbit

This was astronaut Katalin Li's third trip to the space in two years, one less than the mission commander, Diego Swan, but more than the other four astronauts who had accompanied them to the Olympus station, the planet's latest and greatest endeavor in space exploration . She was sitting shotgun next to Swan and would go back with him and a few others in five days, but the next trip was her turn for an extended stay – a honeymoon without her husband, essentially, since she'd gotten engaged the day before this shuttle launch, and they wanted to get married before she blasted off again. Their boys on the space station were supposed to catch a ride home with the Russians in three weeks, but a change of plans occurred when an experimental computer broke. The problem really could have waited until the next mission to be solved, since losing this computer posed no immediate threat to the safety of those on board, but no one in the NASA administration was comfortable with the idea of using bits of whatever they could find and fasten together with duct tape in the place of a futuristic, multi-million dollar processor to hold them over. Anyway, waiting for the Russians was cheaper, and Kate learned within the first few weeks of her eight years with NASA that one always went with the decision that wasted the most taxpayer money possible.

I hope you're worth it, Kate thought, taking a good long look at the processor before inserting it into the intricate web of fiber-optic cables before her. The technology they were dealing with was really quite fascinating, but having played a role in its development, she sometimes found it difficult to feel an emotion other than frustration. The processor was the heart of a genuine quantum computer, something several companies had been reaching toward for over two decades, but always fell short. Eight years ago, NASA, in conjunction with the Air Force – where Kate and many of her colleagues hailed from – finally built a prototype quantum computer under the guidance of then-chief scientist Dinakar Tempas. The processor was the only one of its kind known to exist; possessing all the power of Blue Gene/L, the fastest supercomputer in the world, in a device that fit in the palm of a hand as small as hers.

The downfall of the situation was that their prototype could only operate in zero gravity; hence, the space station, and why she was one of thirty computer engineers who suddenly had to be trained as astronauts. While it proved invaluable to their research, the fact remained that it still stood outside the mainstream market. They had the tools to make life easier, faster, more powerful than ever before. What they lacked was a way to turn them into something useful, and only once that was discovered would its existence be revealed to more than a handful of astronauts and high-ranking government officials.

"Still can't believe you guys managed to crash a quantum computer," Kate commented to her partner, cosmonaut Yuri Chekhov. "At the same time, though, I'm impressed. I didn't think it was possible."

"Vell, is as dey say, make it idiot-proof, dey vill make better idiot," Chekhov returned with a grin. "Saying goes double for spacemen."

Kate chuckled. "You can say that again. Can you angle the light a bit more up, please?"

One of the catches of repairing the quantum computer was that for safety reasons, virtually every system on the space station needed to be shut down. Auxiliary power kept them aloft and pressurized, but all the lights, computers, network devices, everything, had been turned off. Even their air filtration had been taken offline, which meant they had to work quickly. Their work was not exceptionally difficult or time-consuming, but the slightest slip-up with any power flowing through one of those wires would not only fry the hand that held it, but give quite a show for the people down on Earth when their space station came tumbling down in a giant fireball.

With Chekhov's flashlight guiding her way, Kate reached into the web of wires and detached the old processor: a mangled piece of metal, plastic, and circuitry with what she suspected was a titanium stabilizing rod impaled through the center. She sighed and shook her head. This was not supposed to happen. At least they knew what the problem was: the computer hadn't crashed, it had been impaled. There was no time to figure out what caused the act of violence committed upon the processor, though; already she was beginning to feel the lack of fresh oxygen. Analysis could wait until the lights were back on. She handed the broken machine to Chekhov and picked up the replacement. Four snaps of optical fibers later, they were back in business.

Space station heart surgery, Kate thought. She picked up her battery-powered radio and depressed the Talk button. "Diego, it's Kate. We're good to go. Turn the lights on, and tell Holloman and Keck that if they'd stop downloading all that porn, we wouldn't have to come up here just to fix the damn computer."

A soft laugh came through the speaker, followed by, "Copy that, Katie. Main power going online in three... two... one..."

A low hum resonated through the Olympus, accompanied by dim floor and ceiling lights that slowly grew brighter. Monitors flickered back to life, and control panels displayed system status. All in all, the station seemed to be recovering from her shutdown according to plan. As far as days spent in space went, this one could not have been more ordinary.

Beep.

Kate's heart gave a leap, and she rotated her weightless body in the direction of the sound. The surveillance equipment had just resumed activity, which was expected, but what they were showing on the monitor above the quantum computer's holding panels was not. Something had just come into the field of their medium-range sensors, something that was not there when they shut everything down.

Beep.

Chekhov had noticed the detection as well, and appeared concerned. "Vhat is dat?"

"Diego, radar just picked up a bogey, heading our way out of geo-trans orbit," Kate said into her radio. "This wasn't here ten minutes ago. It must have just come into range."

On the other end of the space station, Diego Swan was feeling deeply disturbed by the words from his second-in-command. If something was coming from Earth, that would almost make sense – he knew North Korea had been testing a new high-altitude aircraft, and they weren't the only ones – but something toward them? "The Koreans?" he ventured, trying to make sense of the situation.

"Didn't read like their signature," came Kate's reply. A sigh came as she continued to speculate on the situation. "Based on its velocity, I'd almost think it was a meteor, but it's definitely electronic, and it's following a course. We should get on the squawk box with Houston, and maybe Dinakar Tempas. Maybe a probe got lost, or – what in the hell?!"

There were three phrases a mission commander dreaded hearing above all when aboard a space station, and Katalin Li's last four words made up one of them.