Turian Dreadnaught Palveran, In Orbit Near Newly Discovered Mass Relay

The Palveran was a mighty vessel, the flagship of the Delta Patrol Fleet, and her meeting room reflected this. Huge and circular, it contained hundreds of chairs, each row raised slightly further from the ground, so that at the General's orders a meeting of all the fleet's commanders and captains could be called for everything from mission briefings to award ceremonies.

And it was where Commander Haren Vakarian found himself. As a frigate commander he was sitting near the back of the room along with all the other frigate commanders. Seated in front of him were several cruiser captains and in the centre of the room near a large hologram projector system was General Septimus, the fleet's commander. All the commanders in the room were talking, as they did in these situations with varying degrees of confidence about the coming mission.

As the General raised his hand for silence, the muttering and discussion died off. Once he was satisfied that he had the room's attention the General began to speak "As you all know, earlier today, the frigate Firaxa discovered a previously unknown Mass Relay. This system has been documented before but at that time the Relay was enclosed within an ice moon and hence not identified. We believe that the Relay was activated by a pirate group or a mining corporation. We of course are here to destroy or arrest them. The 3rd scout flotilla and the cruisers Renix and Lulicrun will form our advance guard through the relay, they will scout the system on the opposite end and report back to the fleet. If they encounter heavy resistance they will fall back and we shall make a tactical appraisal as to how to proceed, although the most likely course would be that we merely muster our entire force and violently introduce ourselves" many of the Turians smiled "Now individual orders will be transmitted to your omni tools as you leave. We begin in three hours, good luck and dismissed"

As he and his fellow commanders began to file out, Vakarian was one of many feeling happy about the coming mission. His ship would be one of the first to go into action and that was always a good thing. If he bagged an enemy vessel, then it would be even better.

Escortstar Guardian, In Orbit Near The Object, Three Hours Later

Gaius Baltar didn't know how long it had been since the accidental activation of the object, he had been working to hard to bother looking at a clock. Sensor readings from the raptors currently making scans of the Tuning Fork flowed into his makeshift lab on the Guardian like ambrosia from an upside down bottle.

In short, what he was seeing was incredible, LADAR had identified a material in the centre of the rotating rings and blue glow that as far as he knew seemed to defy the very laws of physics. The curious part of the Scientist's brain told him to rip it out, slam it on a table and run tests until he found it what caused it to do what he had always thought impossible. His more logical, and arguably pessimistic, side however argued that if he did that the Tuning Fork would probably explode and kill them.

He hadn't even left the Lab when Sara arrived at the makeshift moon base with the latest batch of engineers, even though he was the one who had gotten her onto the approved personnel list. He hadn't gone to the flight deck up to greet her when she stepped off the shuttle from the base. And he hadn't noticed when she quietly opened the door to his small laboratory and stepped inside until she slid her arms around his neck and whispered.

"Hmm, I wonder what is more likely to draw your attention Gaius. The prospect of having your already well known name become a household one or a woman wearing the finest new lingerie proposing that you retreat to a more private area"

"Hmm, I think that we should test your proposal right here, don't you" Gaius replied as he swung his chair around and placed a kiss on her ruby red lips.

"If that's your theory Doctor" Sara replied as she broke the kiss and moved towards the door to lock it. Ever since she had begun her infiltration mission it had never ceased to amaze her how easy it was to get close to the supposed genius Gaius Baltar by simply undoing her pants. She imagined that in an hour or two she would know more about the Alien Construct then the Colonial Government did. As Gaius swung his chair around to face her, Sara slowly placed a hand on the front zip of the jumpsuit she had been issued earlier and began to pull it down…

Only to quickly pull the zip back up when the infiltrator heard a series of quick thumps on the hatch door. Before she could say anything, Gaius had stood up with a sigh and went to answer the door. Standing there were two marines with worried looks on their faces, Gaius suddenly remembered that day a few weeks ago when those two agents had shown up at his home and he wondered what was happening now. Not being a military man he didn't realise the significance of the full sets of body armour they were wearing and the rifles, as opposed to their normal pistols, they carried like security blankets.

The in the back of the room however did, the ship was headed into combat.

"Doctor, you and your assistant need to come with us now" One of the marines said

"What, why" Baltar replied

It was at that moment that Commander Gram's voice rang out from the speakers "Actions Station, Repeat Action Stations, Set Condition One Throughout The Ship".

Placing a hand on the Doctor's shoulder Sara said "Gaius let's go" then she turned to the marine who had spoken before "Where are we going"

"Hanger, Ma'am" the marine replied "The Commander wants all the VIPs ready to evacuate in raptors in case we're forced to fight"

"Fight who?" Gaius interrupted.

In the CIC, Joseph was wondering the same thing. A minute ago, without warning, six vessels had suddenly appeared on DRADIS, however rather then suddenly appearing as a ship using a jump drive might. They appeared to approach at an insanely high speed, many times the speed of light before decelerating before slowing down to what he might call "normal" speeds. At the same time the ships had decelerated, the Guardian's sensor system had detected a large burst of energy coming from the area so for now he assumed it was some form of FTL travel.

Two of the vessels appeared to be about 450 metres in length and the other four seemed to be only 120 metres long, although they couldn't be sure, the vessels seemed to be using some kind of localised jamming, perhaps a missile spoofer of some kind, either way it was mucking with Guardians DRADIS. Weapons could still be targeted, but it was impossible to get a clear reading, for now his intelligence specialists relied on visuals from the external cameras.

As for the ship's purpose he had no doubt that they were military due to the fact that the two larger ships appeared to be of the same class of vessel and the same thing could be said of the four smaller ones. There was also the small matter of what appeared to be large cannons poking out of their bows. Judging by their size Joseph guessed that they were small guns with high rates of fire, if they turned out to be some kind of mass driver, then they could quite possibly tear his escortstar to shreds. At only 600 metres in length, ships like his normally dealt with pirates and rogue vessels. In real battles it was standard practice to let much larger battlestars to take the hits while they provided support.

"Lieutenant Etrino, contact the XO at base tell them to bring their missile batteries online and to transmit the hello package to our guests, all frequencies" Joseph ordered

"Aye sir" the communications officer replied

On the camera display, Joseph watched as one of the larger vessels and two of the smaller ones turned towards his ship. The other three were currently manoeuvring, probably to aim their bow guns at the base, although one of the smaller ones appeared to be tilting upwards slightly, which would put her in position to hit the freighter currently in orbit.

The only other contacts on DRADIS were the few raptors that were heading back to their motherships and the Guardian's attack squadron, twenty Vipers and four Raptors, all of which currently had nuclear missiles hung under their wings. Admiral Nagala had realised that just one escortstar would probably run into trouble by itself and so had allowed Joseph to take his pick of certain "special" weapons back on Picon. Each ship was carrying a load of SSN-18 missiles, the only anti-fighter missile in the arsenal designed to carry a nuke. Each Viper had just two but the Raptors had twelve aboard.

"Sir, all batteries report green and CAG reports that they are in position and are ready to go weapons free at your order" Etrino reported

"Lieutenant, tell CAG that if they're fired upon don't wait for my order, blast them to Hades. And transmit a message to the freighter, I want them to spin up their FTL and jump away" Joseph didn't wait for Etrino's reply but instead turned right back to the DRADIS screen.

Although he had never been a keen student of history, back in University he had studied the second Caprica-Picon war while working for his Heavy Aerospace Engineering degree. This situation reminded him of the last battle of the war. For several months Picon's forces had suffered many crushing defeats at the hands of the larger and more advanced Caprican fleet, although the enemy had not hit Picon itself. But that changed when Picon's Supreme Commander Leonidas, requested that they meet over Picon itself to discuss a peace treaty. Taking a mere twenty vessels to meet eighty Capricans, Leonidas allowed his fleet to drift for several days as negotiations continued.

On the fifth day, hours before the hammered out treaty was to be signed, Leonidas's ships opened up with their newly installed mass drive guns while hundreds of fighters from hidden ground bases, surged to the heavens to meet the enemy. With the mass drivers allowing the Picon vessel's shells to punch right through the Caprican defences, they rapidly disabled the enemy carriers and with a numerical superiority in fighter craft they were able to quickly overwhelm the rest while suffering few casualties in return with long range gun volleys while Caprican missiles were destroyed in flight. The final tally had been eighteen Caprican vessels captured, twenty nine destroyed, the fleet's Admiral dead and the remaining thirty three had retreated back to their staging base near Ragnar. The results of that battle would eventually lead up to the creation of the warstars, which in turn lead to the creation of the first battlestars, several hundred years later.

What he saw happening on DRADIS reminded him of a computer simulation of the battle. The enemy didn't appear to be doing that much but they could be preparing for a single, stunning blow to the head, which would remove Guardian from the picture and leave the remaining civilians at their mercy. And just like that battle this encounter, although it may lead to peace or war, would most likely influence human history for decades, if not centuries to come.

Turian Frigate Firaxa, Preparing To Engage Enemy Forces, That Same Time

This was quickly turning into one most intriguing missions Commander Vakarian had ever been a part of, with his brother being the detective of the family and all he had always left mystery and intrigue to him, but that didn't mean he wasn't enjoying it. Here was a group of ship's that didn't resemble anything he had ever seen and although they appeared to be filling the communications channels with some kind jamming signal made up of gibberish computer code they hadn't fired on his vessels yet.

They also appeared to use weapons of a different configuration, instead of a main gun running along the length of the Turian ships the heavy cruiser protecting the base and supposedly unarmed ship, appeared to use multiple guns arranged in batteries along it's length along with several dozen smaller rotary guns, reminiscent of the days before GARDIAN lasers, and tubes for missiles, a lot of missiles. The major threat though were the ships arrayed between the Turians and the cruiser, he wasn't an expert on nuclear weapons but he knew a lot when they popped up on the sensors and while his kinetic barriers would stop the missiles themselves, heat and radiation would bleed through and against his frigate it would probably do serious damage. Of course nuclear ordinance had been banned long ago by the Citadel Weapons Conventions so having them was just one more crime on these pirate's list.

Most of the Commanders were in agreement, this was probably a major mercenary and piracy operation but the fact that they had nukes made it all the more important that they be shut down. The last time a pirate group had built up a small fleet and acquired a sizable stock of nukes, thousands had lost their lives and thousands more had been taken into slavery before the Council had let the Turians go in but by the time it was over enemy missile swarm tactics had claimed dozens of frigates, a few cruisers and had crippled a dreadnaught.

Leaving his thoughts alone for the moment, Commander Vakarian turned back to his battle display system. In the corner there was a clock, currently it read thirty seconds, thirty seconds to combat. The plan was relatively simple, his frigate and another from his flotilla, supported by the Renix would eliminate the warship while another frigate would attempt to disable the freighter and the fourth frigate and the Lulicrun would begin a bombardment of the missile base on the moon before they landed troops to ensure total control of the facility.

Vakarian looked at the clock again, five seconds to combat.

Escortstar Guardian, Preparing To Engage Enemy Forces

"Energy spikes, repeat energy spikes" Lieutenant Harris reported

The ship rumbled under what felt like weapons impacts and several crewmen fell to the ground, as he picked himself up Joseph shouted "Report, what hit us"

"Enemy kinetics sir" Harris replied "we've lost a heavy gun and two missile tubes, section 2D has been exposed to vacuum"

"Seal of that section and get a medical team down there to evac the wounded" Joseph ordered "Etrino tell our fighters to fire all missiles then move engage the frigate that's lining up at the freighter, let us take care of the rest. Order all gun batteries to engage the other three enemy escorts and prep for missile strike on the enemy capital ships"

"Yes sir" Etrino replied "All Vipers, this is Guardian you are weapons free, repeat weapons free. Sir I've lost all contact with the base and we were feeding them DRADIS returns to aim their missiles"

"See if you can get in touch with them Lieutenant, we're going to need those missiles"

On the DRADIS screen, the friendly contacts maintaining their position in between Guardian and the enemy suddenly became obscured by several dozen contacts that bore the sinister nuclear symbol. As they began to spread out from their launch points they split into six groups, one for each enemy ship, the escorts were targeted by ten missiles each and the both capital ships had twelve missiles gunning for them.

"Sir, Weekly reports that enemy point defence are engaging the missiles, he says it looks like some kind of laser system" Etrino reported

As Joseph watched, missiles began to disappear from the DRADIS display. Every second another one or two blinked off until only five missiles got though, two on the capital ship gunning for Guardian, two on the escort going after the freighter and one on the capital ship lining up to hit the moon base, as detonations appeared on sensors the crew cheered, against ships that small the nukes would probably be a deathblow. The DRADIS blurred for a moment then cleared as the residual heat and radiation died away, to reveal all the enemy vessels still intact.

"Etrino, tell the CAG I want a visual report on damage" Joseph didn't know how the enemy had survived that attack intact, that many nukes would have put a Columbia class battlestar in drydock for a month.

"Sir, the CAG reports that the escort is venting atmosphere and he can see her engines dying, other birds report that the two capitals have both suffered damage to their bow and they appear to have stopped firing their main guns for now"

"Good, Harris reroute our heavy batteries to focus on the damaged sections of those capital ships and standby our point defence guns to receive enemy missiles and fighters, if their guns are gone they'll probably launch fighters if they have any. Etrino, tell the fighters to make a few passes over that damaged escort then fall back to provide cover for us"

The ship rumbled again and Etrino shouted "Impacts, one on the bow, the rest were glances. Sections 3A through 3F and flight deck have been breached and heavily damaged. We may not be able to recover our fighters Sir"

"Can we still launch our evac raptors?" Joseph asked, if the FTL was lost to the next slavo, then they would be trapped here without the raptors and he had a sinking feeling that he wouldn't be winning this battle, or even bringing Guardian out of this mess in one piece.

"I have a DC team inbound to make an assessment sir, hold on" Etrino stopped as he raised his hand to his headphones "Sir, fighters are reporting that the enemy vessels are protected by some kind of shield, they've made two runs against the escort but none of their shells have hit the hull, they were also briefly engaged by enemy point defence systems, three birds down, no eject"

"That would explain how they survived our nukes, tell the fighters to keep trying and have all the raptors currently deployed to return to our external airlocks, if DC says that we can fly our raptors our get them away, if not get the civilians to the airlocks . Harris, activate all our defensive batteries and target the escorts hitting us and get the FTL spun up, if this gets any worse I want to jump away at my go"

"Yes sir, all batteries are online and engineering says that they'll only need a few minutes to recharge our FTL" Harris replied

The ship shuddered slightly as Guardian's heavy mass drivers began to launch salvos against capital ships, while the point defence guns, normally used to engage enemy fighters and missiles, began spitting thousands of rounds at the enemy escorts.

As the salvo began, Joseph switched the DRADIS view screen over to the feed from Guardian's external cameras. Zooming in on one of the escorts, he thought he could make out a thin blue surface appearing where his ship's shells impacted on the hull, the problem was that the blue film was several metres away from the actual ship hull.

"Harris, inform all tube crews to prepare for a missile strike, load all tubes not already carrying them with nukes and unsafe our strategics, I want to take as many of these bastards out as possible before we jump" Joseph ordered, so far the only kind of damage he had been able to do was with the nukes, so he'd hit them with all the nukes he had.

"Yes sir, crews are loading the missiles now. We should be ready for the strike in thirty seconds." Harris replied

Turning back to the camera feed, which was now focused on a damaged capital ship, Joseph watched as what he had once though of as his mighty guns did nothing to ships that had barely a third of his tonnage. It was then that, like a bolt from Zeus himself, a round from one of the heavy guns managed to impact on the hull.

Harris began to say something but Joseph interrupted "I know Harris, focus all guns, heavy and defensive, on the ship we just hit then focus all the guns on the two escorts. We can drop there shields and I want these bastards to stop shooting at me"

The capital ship began to swing off course as rounds designed to kill a heavily armoured battlestar slammed into the lightly armoured alien vessel. Now it was a race against time, would the enemy hit something vital on his ship, or would he knock down their shields and destroy them first.

"Sir, DC teams report that we'll be able to launch raptors from the flight deck without to much trouble" Etrino reported

"Good tell the evac transports to lift off and jump away as soon as they make safe distance. Harris, fire two more salvos then reposition our heavies to…"

The ship rumbled under another impact and the screens around the bridge along with the lights suddenly darkened, for a moment the CIC crew were stumbling around in pitch darkness before Guardian's emergency lights switched on.

Etrino and Harris rapidly rebooted their stations to check he ship's status, meanwhile Joseph stared at the blank DRADIS console. Looking up from his console Harris said "Frak they hit the reactor emergency power is online but we'll need to evacuate Sir, FTL is gone along with all our weapons"

"Alright then" Joseph replied "Lieutenant Harris, get your crews to set a timer of forty minutes on all remaining nuclear warheads. Etrino, while he does that, I want you to organise an evacuation, get as many people as you can onto the raptors and get the rest onto the shuttle. Radio the viper jocks and tell them to land at the base and try to bolster the defence, we'll be back with a full battlegroup as soon as we can."

Guardian had served him well and she had fought the enemy as well as he could expect but Joseph wasn't going to leave her intact. If he was lucky his girl would take an enemy vessel with her but if it did happen he wouldn't be there to see it.

"Etrino, Harris, follow me we're leaving"

Turian Frigate Firaxa, Preparing To Engage Enemy Forces, That Same Time

As the heavy cruiser's engine's died, Commander Vakarian breathed a sigh of relief. He had never seen any ship short of an Asari dreadnaught take that much fire without active shields, whoever had built that ship must have had access to some serious credits. Scans had indicated materials ranging from steel to depleted uranium present in the hull, some tanks in private armies and solar research ships used composite armour like that but he had never seen it used on a warship, the it just cost to much despite the benefits.

There was also the weapon's systems, if this group had built more ships like this then the Turian's would probably need more ships then what they had brought, the two heavily damaged cruisers and the gutted frigate were evidence enough of that.

Then there was the apparent lack of any kind of element zero core onboard. They hadn't detected it at first because of the ambient radiation from the nearby mass relay but the increasingly strange vessel didn't have a gram of eezo aboard. The same was true of their fighters, although how their pilots could survive the manoeuvrers they had performed without blacking out without the protective field of an eezo field were beyond him.

His earphone buzzed and one of his officers began to speak "Commander, we have detected several of their strike craft launching from the stricken vessel, they are too small for any kind of FTL so I would assume they are attempting to retreat to their base"

"Move to intercept them with our GARDIAN lasers and attempt to disable them I want prisoners to interrogate" Vakarian replied

Although he couldn't actually feel it, in his mind's eye the Commander could see his frigate closing in on the helpless shuttles. One the battle-display in front of him were a dozen small contacts leaving the cruiser along with one slightly larger one, probably some kind of shuttle seeing as the others were gunships, there were also eight fighters currently heading for the base. However while he couldn't catch the fighters his frigate was in a perfect position to cut the gunships off, being almost exactly between them and the base.

However before his eyes, the contacts on the screen began to disappear. The Firaxa raced towards them but no one was firing, the ships were simply disappearing. There we only two left when the frigate entered max range for there lasers and a moment later one of the symbols on the hologram was spinning around but a moment after that the final gunship disappeared.

Puzzled as to what happened Harren radioed his external sensors operator "Can you show me visuals of those gunships"

"Yes sir, I was just going over them myself" the officer replied

Harren the switched over to the XO's channel "Move us toward gunship we disabled and prepare a vacuum team to move the ship into our hanger bay. Radio me when they're aboard"

The display of the battlefield disappeared. The last thing it showed was the damaged Renix and Lulicrun moving to land troops on the moon, while the frigate Jenoran began its transition through the relay to report back to the fleet.

These ships were a true oddity, as he watched they disappeared in a flash of light and didn't reappear. This mission was quickly producing questions faster then he could think of answers and he had a feeling that it was far from over.

Author's Notes

Yay new chapter, featuring first contact and first blood between humans and the Turians. Hopefully some of what I've written will answer a few questions that were posted in last chapter's reviews. Speaking of which, PLEASE REVIEW THIS alerts and favourites are fine but reviews are better.

Also, I'm going to rewrite some of chapter 3, so when I post the next chapter you should go back and check that.

Anyway, enjoy and remember to review.