Disclaimer: I do not own Battlestar Galactica, nor do I own any part of the Starfire universe, on which some of the Terran technology is based.

AN: Thanks for the reviews. Um, to clear up the point about the Matsushimi Drive and the inertia-less drive, they are different things. The M-drive is for FTL jumps, and the inertia-less drive is for STL maneuvering.

If I don't give a Place/Time thing at a scene change, assume that its the same system and time. This only applies in space. On planets, I'll give a city name as well.

In the Eye of the Storm

Chapter 2

M324-02

1725hrs

24 June 2467 TSR

"All ships report successful transit sir." Harrison nodded in acknowledgment as the chorus of reports filled the bridge. Ignoring his fading nausea, he glanced at his plot. The survey ships had already begun to move off deeper into the system, whilst the escort waited, inert,but ready to spring into action if needed. That first burst of comm signals was all that would be transmitted unless a combat situation arose. Under condition baker, even the tightly focused transmissions used for battlelink communication were not permitted.

It was not a situation that Harrison enjoyed. He'd never understood why survey command insisted on such tight EMCON. Limiting comm transmissions and banning active sensor sweeps in unexplored systems was fair enough. If some unknown hostile force was too far away to detect both your M-jump and the impeller field created by the inertia-less drive, he might still be close enough to detect the distinctive emissions created by those particular activities. What he would not detect were the transmissions required by active battlelink systems. Designed to tie both the offensive and defensive armament of a ship together with the other ships in its battlegroup, battlelink was an impressive enhancement to the capabilities of RTN ships, allowing precisely coordinated, time on target fire from up to six ships at once, and ensuring that point defense functioned at maximum efficiency, allowing targets to be allocated to each ship so that the maximum number of threats were engaged. Crucially for the RTN's defensive doctrine, it allowed ships to cover the blind spot directly to the rear of the vessel, where no weapons could be brought to bear, of the other ships in their battlegroup. This blind spot was the favourite striking area for fighters, as the leviathans they were targeting had no way to retaliate. Battlelink had probably been responsible for the deaths of more pilots than any other military technology in history. Designed to be secure and untappable in the midst of battle, it's emissions were all but undetectable at more than two light seconds, and any vessel that close could hardly fail to miss the massive energy signature of an active impeller field, now could they?

More importantly to Harrison, his current lack of battlelink meant that his effective combat power was reduced by at least thirty percent. If anybody was out there, and was of a mind to kill his ships, they would be alone against any incoming missile storm or fighter strike, and having active battlelink would have made no difference to their chances of detection if any prospective opponent knew they were there. That is to say, detection was one hundred percent certain if any little green men were in detection range. Worse, his ships were prohibited from even having their shields at standby, as even hot shield generators produced an energy signature even easier to spot than an impeller field. Active shields were even more distinctive, which meant that if anybody was inclined to take a potshot at him, he was probably dead. It did not, however, look like that was the case this time. Unless said little green men were hiding in cloak, then there was nobody there. Whilst the Acsellians he had made a career out of fighting might have been paranoid enough to place cloaked picket forces in useless system, the chances of meeting another race of interstellar sociopaths was astronomical. Until the initial survey was completed and he'd received instructions to end condition baker from Admiral Archer, however, he could do nothing but wait.

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M324-02

1735hrs

24 June 2467 TSR

On Galactica, chaos reigned supreme. Bare minutes before, an overwhelmingly powerful Cylon fleet had seemed to materialise out of nothingness, well inside Galactica's theoretical sensor envelope. Fleeing before the Cylons for ten years had degraded both sensor range and acuity, but it had- until now at least- been possible to detect approaching basestars well before they entered firing range. These Cylons had snuck up on them, and were only about five minutes away from inflicting thermonuclear murder on the fleeing refugee fleet. Already the Galactica was dropping back, placing itself between the rest of the fleet and the oncoming holocaust. The civilian ships were accelerating at the best speed they could manage individually, putting bruising stress on the occupants, and Galactica's crash deceleration was fairly unpleasant for the personnel aboard her also. It was a move that smacked of desperation. Cylon raiders could out run the fastest ship in the fleet- machines had little fear of acceleration stress- and the force arrayed against the battlestar would roll over her like a nuclear steamroller.

Then there was that mysterious group of high energy sensor contacts that had appeared at about the same time as the Cylon battlefleet. The range was too long to get detailed readings, but their power output was terrific. No one had ever seen anything like them, and there was unspoken dread amongst the crew in CIC that they were some new Cylon vessel that made defeat more inevitable than it already was. They had not yet made any action, not given any indication that they knew the colonial fleet even existed, and bar a brief initial burst of comm signals, had made no transmissions since their appearance. Those signals, what few could be intercepted, were heavily encrypted and scrambled, inviolate to any casual inspection, but they were short, mere seconds long, far too little time to exchange complex tactical data. The consensus was that they were merely reports of successful hyperspace transit. I any case, another eight vessels would hardly make a difference in the upcoming massacre, whether they joined in on the side of the Cylons or Colonials.

Commander Adama strode through the chaos of personnel dashing to their battle stations, an oasis of calm in the disorder surrounding him. He had donned a comm headset when the first call for condition one had echoed through the Galactica, and he was speaking into it now.

"How many basestars?" He winced "Damn. Get us broadside on to them. Have DC teams standing by and get any available Vipers into action now."

The battlestar shuddered as she piled on more deceleration, spinning spinning to present her port weapons batteries to her foes. Lieutenant Gaeta's voice continued over Adama's headset.

"Those unknowns still aren't doing anything. They might not get involved at all. But, regardless, this is going to hurt. A lot. And there's something wrong about those basestars. Apart from the fact that they seem to have found a way to become invisible to sensors, their acceleration is too high. Either they've cut mass, or they've sprung two technological surprises on us at once. Not too surprising I suppose, they have an intact R&D establishment, whilst we..."

"Thats enough, lieutenant." Adama snapped. "We can still get away from this. We just need to buy the fleet enough time to charge their hyperdrives, and then we can leave. We might even survive." This last was said to the young man in person, as Adama stepped into CIC, striding over to the DRADIS screen in the centre of the installation. The red blips of the Cylon fleet were almost in range. Already, the smaller dots of raiders were spilling from them, far outnumbering the Vipers exiting the Galactica. Turning to Gaeta, he gave the familiar command.

"Stand by enemy suppression barrage."

"Standing by, aye." Targeting systems reached out from both sides, groping through the darkness with mindless malevolence, struggling to find an enemy for their attached weapons to kill. Then Cylons crossed into the range of the rows of mass drivers and railguns that lined the Galcatica's flanks.

"Fire!"

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"Sir, I'm getting some strange readings here." The young woman sitting at plotting certainly sounded confused.

'Probably she thought that being in such a state was better than being bored stiff, which was her previous state', Harrison thought. Survey duty- as one of the escort, anyway- was notoriously boring, and the midshipman was just out of the academy. She looked almost like a child dressed in her mother's uniform. He did not voice his thought, however. Instead, he simply said "Oh?"

"Yes sir. Here" Activating the tactical holodisplay in the centre of the bridge, she highlighted a small section of space not more than thirty light seconds away. "It looks like a bunch of really low power impeller fields. They're not cloaked, but they're so weak it's possible that they're just sensor ghosts."

This was alarming. Thirty light seconds was just under ninety thousand kilometers. That was well inside the missile envelope, even for standard missiles, and not that far shy of the maximum range of most energy weapons. If that was a ship, or a group of ships out there, then they were creeping around awfully suspiciously.

"Can you confirm that there is a drive source out there?"

"Negative sir. I can't get a solid reading on it, but I don't think that its a ghost. It hasn't gone away, and it's showed a constant acceleration between the points I've detected it at. I'm defining it as group sierra." As she turned in her seat to deliver her statement, her console let out a wail that Harrison, veteran of the recent Third Interstellar War, recognised all too well. She whirled back to her board.

"Multiple electromagnetic emission sources! High frequency lidar and radar! Battlecomp calls them targeting systems!" The holosphere blinked as the projected locations of the scanning objects were placed on the display.

"General quarters! End EMCON, engage battlelink!" Harrison yelled. "Flotilla orders: Raise shields, charge weapons grid, stand by point defense!"

"Flotilla orders: Raise shields, charge weapons, stand by point defense aye." Repeated Howard, as the GQ alarm began to howl, and the crew of Atlantis thundered to their stations. On the plot, the icon's of the flotilla changed from a steady green to a blinking blue, whilst its possible aggressors remained a red haze in the holosphere.

"I want an active sensor sweep now. Find me some targets to run a plot on!" Bellowed the young tactical officer, as lights on her board began shifting from red inactive icons to amber standby or green ready lights. It was doubtful that most of the techs and ratings had arrived at those 'ready' weapons batteries or point defense stations, but if those there thought that they were ready, she had no way of checking, and it only took three people to operated the basic systems needed to fire the weapons. The extra personnel were for redundancy.

"Engaging active sensors!" There was a collective gasp on the flagship's bridge as the extent of the fleet before them was revealed.

"Jesus." Someone breathed. "What the hell have we walked into?" The group were broken out of their shock by the scream of the midshipman at the tactical console. "Missile launch! Birds... not inbound. Closing on target sierra three-one from targets sierra one through three-oh. Estimated time to impact... twenty five seconds... mark! Multiple fighter launches detected. Bogeys outbound from targets sierra one through sierra three-one on convergent courses."

"What the..?" Harrison glanced over at the exclamation, seeing Howard staring at the display in shock. He grinned at the expression on the commander's face.

"Hmm. It seems that we've stumbled on somebody else's war. And I don't particularly want to get involved, not with fleets of that size running around. Get me a fighter shell at one light second, and keep tracking everything they do. If they take a shot at us, I want to hit back, hard."

"Aye sir."

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The first missiles sped towards the Galactica and raiders spat from launch bays, ready to add their payload of thermonuclear death to the carnage. These missiles were fitted with far more destructive warheads than the colonials had seen before, and, it was hoped, allow the fleet to finally stamp out these annoying remnants of their enemies.

As the raiders assigned to the strike against the Galactica launched, another pair, unarmed, but equipped with extra sensor gear, sped off towards the group of unidentified vessels. The outbreak of hostilities had finally drawn some reaction. Comm chatter had blossomed between them, and multiple sensor emissions had been detected. Two of the ships had begun launching fighters, but the contacts were frustratingly featureless. Only that intense blaze of energy registered, allowing no detailed scans at this range. That was what the two raiders were for. To gain detailed observations, and establish contact. Or to establish if they had hostile intentions. It would be better to loose two raiders in discovering such, as opposed to this unknown element striking by surprise.

What was not expected was that the occupants of those ships to be human. The fighters, possessing far less intense energy levels, were the first objects scanned by the raiders, and the results left no doubt. The life forms aboard those vessels were human, and that left only one option- they had to be exterminated.

Twenty of the basestars, along with their fighter components, broke off from the engagement with the Galactica, and moved towards the other group of human ships, spewing missiles towards them from well inside optimum engagement range. A salvo of 160 missiles was followed by 2400 fighters, each bearing twelve smaller missiles of its own. Though the fighter missiles were smaller, it was the drives that had been cut down, not the warheads. They were each as powerful, individually as the longer ranged shipboard missiles.

The beings on those ships would have smiled if they were able. The long hunt was finally drawing to a close.

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Next: See the RTN get its head handed to it by the Cylons. See the colonials (barely) escape the jaws of death. And see the Royal and Imperial parliament go into a state of collective shock at the news of another war.