Author: Cyclone
Feedback: Please be gentle.
Distribution: Gimme credit and a link.
Rating: Nothing worse than on the shows, except maybe language.
Spoilers: Up to Symphony of Light for Robotech, with a few ideas picked here and there from other sources. For the other... you'll see.
Disclaimer: The characters depicted herein belong to other people. I'm just borrowing them for a while.
Summary: A navigational error throws the SDF-3 into the middle of another war.
Author's Note: Beware the vorpal plot bunny.
"Wade, you're accepting this promotion," Rick said.
He was in his conference room with his senior command staff: Captain (Upper Half) Maximillian Sterling, his old wingmate and fleet CAG; Colonel Vincent Grant, senior officer of the Pioneer's marine detachment; the Pioneer's flag captain, Captain (Upper Half) Wade Anderson; and another old friend, Captain (Upper Half) Vanessa Leeds, commodore of the destroyer squadron and captain of the Xerxes.
"C'mon, Rick," Wade complained. "Bad enough you've got me flying a desk. Now you want to make a flag officer out of me?"
Rick cracked a smile, "Believe me, Wade, I know exactly how you feel, but without Reinhardt here, I need a Group XO and a Chief of Staff. Think of it this way: You have been complaining about having only the one ship to handle."
He scowled, "How come Max doesn't have to put up with this?"
"Wade, you know why," Max replied. "As good as I am with fighter tactics, I have no head for fleet tactics."
Wade glowered.
"You three are nuts, you know that?" Vince said, shaking his head at Rick, Max, and Wade. "I've never seen anyone who opposed their own promotions as much as you three."
"Glad to hear that, Vince," Rick said, his smile growing into a full-blown grin. "You're now the commander of all fleet ground forces."
Vince blinked, "'All'?"
Rick nodded, "Reinhardt was our overall ground force commander as well as my Chief of Staff, and we need to consolidate your marines with Sean's Army troops on the Xerxes."
His gaze swept over to Vanessa, who was snickering and doing a poor job of concealing it. She stopped and frowned as his gaze settled on her, "Admiral, you don't have any more positions to fill."
"No," he admitted, "but I figured I needed to invent one just to keep life interesting." He grinned. "I'll get back to you on that. For now, I'll leave you to inform Major Phillips of Vince's new status."
"Seriously, Rick, did you have to make me a rear admiral?" Wade complained after the others had left. The staff meeting had ended, but the new admiral stuck around.
"Yes, Wade, I did," Rick said patiently. "Admiral Cain has been through a lot, and she's under a lot of pressure. She could use someone of equal rank to talk to."
Wade pursed his lips thoughtfully, "Rick, did you actually look at the rank equivalency chart we hashed out? She's a rear upper!"
"That's awfully unprofessional of you," Rick shot back with a smirk.
"You know what I mean, Rick," Wade said, his eyes narrowing. "That makes her closer to one of our vice admirals than a rear admiral."
Rick's smirk broadened into a grin, "What? Bucking for another promotion already? Never knew you were that ambitious." His grin faded, "Seriously, Wade, the chart we knocked together isn't perfect; that commander rank of theirs really muddies it up. A rear admiral is a rear admiral, and if I made you a vice, she probably wouldn't treat you like an equal, more like a foreign superior, given the nomenclature."
"Why are you so worried about her?"
"Because... I've looked into her eyes, Wade. She's been looking into the abyss. And she blinked."
"What's done is done, Admiral," Commander Adama said calmly. "Given the circumstances, I didn't feel it necessary to include it in my report."
"You're standing on thin ice, Adama," Cain said, leaning forward onto the desk. They were standing in Adama's office. Cain stood because she preferred to, while Adama stood because protocol demanded it so long as she stood. She had had a Raptor prepped and had flown over to Galactica immediately after her conversation with Admiral Hunter.
She could have ordered Adama to report to her, but she was hoping to catch him unprepared, or at least off-balance, in case this was a genuine attempt to undermine her authority. So far, though, Adama seemed to be taking things in stride.
"The president felt that information regarding this particular Cylon agent was need to know, sir," he replied. "She did not believe you needed to know."
Cain straightened up and stiffened at that. This was not the time for a... for a school teacher to be leading the human race and dictating military policy... but Case Orange protocols were very clear.
In a sense, it was an attempt to undermine her authority, but not one by Adama... at least not directly.
"What do you think of these Earthers, Adama?" she asked. "Can we really trust them?"
"Can we afford not to?" he asked in return.
"No," she admitted after a long moment. "We can't."
There was another long and uncomfortable silence, which Adama broke gently, "Admiral, will you be transferring your flag to Galactica?"
She frowned as she considered it. The Galactica was old, but she was almost fully functional. The Pegasus was a crippled ship, engines shot, with barely a single squadron of functional Vipers left...
Her thoughts strayed back to the Vipers she had left behind, a dull ache throbbed in her chest at the memory, sealing her resolve. She'd made her choices. She owed it to the Pegasus.
"No, Commander, I will not," she said, shaking her head. "Pegasus may be crippled, but she still has her guns, she's still got Vipers, and she still needs a commander."
"We've only got the one prototype, so please, try not to break it, Captain!" That was Doctor Gaius Baltar, Vice President of the Twelve Colonies, yelling over the noise in the Galactica's port hangar pod as he approached Captain Adama. The entire bay was abuzz with activity as the deck crew frantically checked and rechecked the Vipers for the upcoming mission.
"I'll try to be careful, Doctor," Lee replied sarcastically, leaning over so that the vice president could hear him. The prototype they were talking about was Baltar's first attempt to duplicate and adapt the REF Gallant sidearm for Colonial use. It was a scaled up version of the particle beam gun, scaled to fit a Viper's standard autocannon mount.
At the moment, Chief Tyrol and his select team were installing it in Adama's Viper, replacing its port-side autocannon.
"I just hope it works as advertised, Doctor," Lee added. "This op's gonna be messy enough without that thing quitting on me." He watched the installation with a critical eye.
Normally, he would have given the prototype to Starbuck -- more than anyone, he trusted Kara and her out-of-the-box thinking to handle any unexpected quirks in the particle beam cannon that were inevitably going to crop up -- but she had been temporarily reassigned to the Xerxes for a classified part of the operation.
Silence descended on the hangar bay. Gaius could still see the activity surrounding him, but he couldn't hear it.
"Hello, Gaius."
The familiar voice pierced the sudden silence. His eyes darted over, and he murmured under his breath, "I was wondering where you'd gotten to. You've been awfully quiet lately. Did... God... overlook these Earthers?"
Six slapped him, and he hissed, clutching at his cheek. "Choose your words carefully, Gaius," she warned. "No one is irreplaceable, not even you."
"You're frakking me," Kara said. She looked around the small briefing room, wondering if there were cameras hidden somewhere.
"Nope," Captain Sterling shook her head.
"That thing turns into a giant Cylon?"
"Not Cylon," Dana corrected. "Battloid. That's the term; get used to it. Cylons are the enemy. Battloids are equipment. Big, tough, expensive equipment with really big guns." She shook her head and muttered, "I still can't believe you've only got one word for 'robot.'"
"Okay, okay," Kara waved it off. "So... why were these hovertanks designed to turn into... battloids?"
"For that, we have to go back to the inception of the original veritech fighters, the VF-1 Valkyries, and the enemy they were designed to defend against," Dana said. She coughed and recited, "This information has been deemed potentially dangerous by Colonial High Command. Revealing it to unauthorized personnel will be subject to intense review and potential court martial." She smiled. "Now that that's out of the way..." she cued up a series of footage from the First Robotech War.
Kara stared.
"The average full-size Zentraedi stood around nine meters tall, though some were considerably taller," Dana explained. "They were a race of clone warriors created by the Robotech Masters." She switched to a still of a resizing chamber, "With a protoculture resizing chamber, a Zentraedi can be micronized to human size. Humans and Zentraedi are genetically compatible -- I'm living proof of that -- and the Zentraedi have largely been assimilated into Earth culture. We still don't know how humans developed on both Earth and Tirol, let alone Kobol."
Dana wasn't technically lying. They didn't know how human life developed on both Earth and Tirol, but they knew damn well the connection between Tirol and Kobol. That, however, had been classified at the highest level among the Colonials; only President Roslin and Commander Adama had been informed, as far as the REF knew. The reaction that information was likely to cause was deemed too great a risk.
Kara, for her part, noticed something odd about the footage. The footage never showed more than one Earth ship, and it was always the same class of ship, a blue and white brick about the size of a battlestar -- she didn't quite realize that the Valkyries were a fair bit larger than the Shadow Alphas she had seen in the hangar bay -- so where were the reinforcements?
"How come you only ever sent one ship against them?"
"We only had one ship," Dana replied off-handedly. "At least for most of the war, anyway. The Armor platforms and Oberth destroyers were almost all wiped out in the opening salvo. We were outnumbered, outgunned, and technologically inferior." She grinned, "We're kinda used to having our backs to the wall."
"Well, frak," Kara leaned back, impressed. "How'd you beat them?"
Dana cued up footage from the Rain of Death, "That's the Zentraedi Main Fleet. Nearly five million ships, some of which are over twice the size of the Pioneer, plus that massive thing in the middle there. We had convinced the Imperial Fleet, a force one million ships strong, to defect. With a combination of psychological warfare and a lot of reflex weapons, we were able to defeat them, but not before they leveled a good chunk of the Earth."
"My gods..." Kara stared. The display was showing gun camera footage of the Rain of Death itself, and the entire planet was ablaze, bombarded with weapons just like the Pioneer's synchro cannons.
Except bigger. Lots bigger. And a whole hell of a lot more of them.
She was watching a single planet being bombarded with enough firepower to devastate the Twelve Colonies. It wasn't thorough -- many of the shots overlapped, leaving parts of the planet completely untouched -- but it was considerably more devastating than the nukes that had hit Caprica.
Most of Caprica was still habitable, after all. The wilderness was practically untouched by the nuclear strikes, and even Delphi had been spared.
Hell, her apartment had been exactly as she'd left it before the war.
But what she was seeing now... she couldn't imagine trying to live on a planet that had been through that.
When the ship jumped into the system, it was spotted almost immediately. Cylon Raider patrols had been constant but small, but they had been stepped up after the Colonial reconnaissance Raptor had been detected nearby.
One of these patrols found their view of the system's pale star suddenly obstructed. Within one second, they had decided to get a closer look. Forty seconds after the ship's arrival, they tentatively identified it as the largest Earth ship, the Pioneer.
Forty-two seconds after the Pioneer's arrival, the Raiders were destroyed.
Author's Postscript:
Yes, it's that Vanessa Leeds. Her name was conspicuously absent from the list of dead that Supreme Commander Leonard mentioned in Dana's Story, so I decided that in my universe, she survived.