The War Room, Battlestar Galactica
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"So, what do we have?" William Adama asked aloud to the assembled members of the briefing.
Boomer and Crashdown had been all but dragged out of their raptor by the collars of their flight-suits by a contingent of marines within scant minutes of making the flight deck, barely enough time to pass along to Chief Tyrol her fears that there was another bomb inside her Raptor, now they had been shoved into the War Room and told to sit down and wait for the word of the gods to drop on them from on high as Felix Gaeta had been going through their sensor logs and flight recorders and all but fell into the war room before them with a splayed out array of printouts; a mixture of plastic overhead projector pages and paper copies in black and white before he half jogged over to the presentation screens and inserted a magnetic tape with the Raptors camera feed into the player just beneath.
Then the commander arrived with Saul Tigh the XO just behind him, followed by Chief Tyrol and Gaius Baltar under heavy protest.
"Sir, what we have here is a selection of printouts and the physical camera feed of Raptor flight 644 with Pilot Boomer and ECO Crashdown" Geata relayed as he bolted across the room to dim the lights and begin the recording.
It was shaky, glossed over black and white but Crashdown's impromptu camera work did him credit as the vast form of the unknown vessel came into view and stayed there as the Raptor did it's best to stay at extreme range from the potentially hostile unknown.
Saul Tigh was the first one to speak, his usual gruff tone laced with confusion.
"It's like someone took out all the best parts of an Orion class battlestar and then built a ship out of the afterbirth"
"Saul I was hoping you could be a little more constructive than that" Adama replied, but he couldn't doubt the opinion of the man who had been his best friend for the better part of four decades. His memories of the battle of Djerba had been long behind him but had never faded.
The Osiris, an Orion class pocket battlestar had been deployed as part of a new colonial offensive – and his first official mission aboard the Galactica. It had been destroyed in the mission but what little he remembered from the short time viewing the Osiris from the outside had looked similar to the ship before him, if someone had stretched it out to truly monstrous proportions.
It had a similar hull cowling, but the Osiris had the familiar hull ribbing to help the ship survive a point blank nuclear assault by spreading the force throughout the entire ships superstructure but this ship had no curves and no external ribbing. The slanted edges of this warships armour seemed to be a massive segment of flat plate, he knew this wasn't true because he could see the hazy details from the video footage but without any higher resolution all he could make out was vague details.
The engine layout was all wrong – an Orion class had four engines, two central to the hull and another two parallel whilst this beast had two clusters of three engines with none in the centre. Then there was the lack of any form of flight pod, instead this unknown seemed to have dozens of smaller docking ports and closed off bulkheads of which their purpose Adama could only guess at.
After this the positioning of the weapons was all wrong in that most colonial ships had their weaponry organised to present a single face to the enemy with the maximum level of firepower. This ship certainly did not lack in the firepower department but instead had it's weapons in mixed groupings spread evenly across the entire ship. In a fight it would certainly be no slouch, some of those guns looked bigger than the Galactica's primary Kinetics and he could definitely make out missile launch systems embedded in the hull, and by the gods those where a lot of missile launch systems; they seemed to be arrayed in groups of either 6, 12 or 24 and those groups had been placed close enough together to make it look from the outside like they might be fed from a single magazine system but without access to the interior of the ship he was merely making guesswork and observations.
But with enough of those missiles they might be enough to overpower a battlestar and perhaps even a basestar if their raider compliment was dealt with first but again he was verging into the realm of imagination and wild guesses.
"Maybe she was an advanced prototype? Abandoned during the war?" Tigh forwarded "Maybe the Cylons hacked her, opened all the airlock doors just an inch, let all the air out and left her out here to rot?"
"Maybe . . . Lieutenant Geata can you rewind the footage by proximately thirty seconds?"
"Sir" came his reply as the shaky footage rewound itself slowly.
"Pause here please"
The footage stopped and just off from the centre of the screen was the words emblazoned on the upper side of the cowling "SPIRIT OF FIRE" with an unknown Eagle logo and the apparent designation "CFV-88".
"Spirit of Fire" Tyrol said aloud as if chewing the words in his mind while his mouth said them to see how they felt "Not once have I ever heard of a military ship with that kind of name"
"Neither have I chief" Adama agreed "Doctor Baltar – you've spent time as a civilian amongst the fleet, have you ever heard of this vessel? Any kind of advanced prototypes the fleet had up it's sleeves?"
Baltar jumped at the sound of his name, surreally zoning back into the room.
"Whuat? Uhh, no. Sorry. No no I've never heard or seen anything like this before" He panted out, seeming distracted to everyone else in the room. The truth being that he was heavily distracted by the ghostly apparition of the Cylon he had known for over two years who had revealed herself as "Number Six" in the eventual atomic baptism of fire that was the fall of the twelve colonies.
Since then he had been all too literally haunted by a copy of her that had been at his side and sometimes in other places around him, he had both feared and adored this ethereal version of her when she appeared. Feared her because of the moments of bizarre clarity she brought and impossible things she seemed to know. Adored . . . because of all too obvious reasons.
Right at that moment however, she had appeared to him the moment he had been gang marched into the room and had been nibbling on his ear ever since, only stopping the moment he had become aware that the commander had spoken his name.
"At least, I was never told about anything like this. Like this ship?" he struggled to vocalise as the form of number Six he carried in his head draped herself over his back, looped her arms under his and began to stroke his chest sensually.
"Maybe it was a ship from before the first war? Before the articles of colonisation?" Boomer interjected from the side of the room as the conversation began to revolve cyclically around the room and Baltars senses began to close in around him again until his entire world was him, the ghost of Six and the hands making their way towards his trousers.
"Stop it stop it stop it!" he both whispered and grunted through gritted teeth as Six released her arms playfully and motioned around before him, taking his entire vision of the rest of the room.
"Why Gaius" her voice dripped with low undertones "I'm surprised you are taking this so poorly, so far you've enjoyed my little visits" she grinned playfully "Besides, you of all people should know that I'm here to help . . . after all, it is a part of Gods plan that you survived so far and it will be a part of Gods plan that you reignite this lost and forgotten Phoenix"
"Well stop . . . playing with me . . . and give me something that will help already!" he half whispered once again, catching the gaze of one of the marine guards who shot him a momentary look of confusion but otherwise ignored him by returning to attention.
"Gaius" Six proceeded to lay both of her palms on his chest and drag them down slowly until she met the end of his shirt and the lay of his belt and continued lower, moving her hands towards his groin "my advice to you is to greet this problem the same way you've dealt with so many problems before . . . " she continued playfully, tones of utter lust in her voice before she grabbed suddenly and violently for his testicles and squeezed "and take it from behind".
A split second of pain and she was gone as he lurched over from the ghost of pain emanating from his balls. A cough and a yelp escaped from his throat as he suddenly thrust himself back upright as every set of eyes in the room was suddenly upon him.
"Anything you'd like to say to the room Doctor Baltar?" Commander Adama asked in his usual authoritative tone.
"Well no . . . " Gaius replied, the remains of Sixes words playing merry hell with his senses and his thoughts " . . . Actually . . . yes?"
"Take it from behind" she had said, what the hells? surely she couldn't mean?
He jolted forward towards the central briefing table and turned to Lieutenant Geata " Lietena- Lieutenant? Could you rewind the tape? Far enough back that we can see the rear of the vessel?"
The lieutenant stood confused, but a brief nod from the XO sent him to rewind the log to the point where the Raptors cameras had managed to grab a few scant seconds of the ships six engines, devoid of power.
Gaius stood, soaking in the image for a minute or so before Adama interrupted.
"What is it you are looking for? Doctor?"
"There's something missing here Commander . . I just can't put my finger on what"
Everyone in the room stood or sat confused until two words where muttered under Chief Tyrols breath, suddenly realising what Doctor Baltar had meant.
"Tylium burn . . . "
"YES!" Baltar exclaimed with almost far too much joy "THAT'S IT! THAT'S EXACTLY IT!"
Adama and Saul both looked at each other and then back to the Doctor and wordlessly between them both doubted his sanity once again since the fall of the colonies
"Doctor Baltar please, the last few weeks have been far too long and we've all had our patience stretched thin by-" Adama began but Gaius then cut him off in a way that very civilians could ever get away with.
"Commander Adama" He all but shouted "I can prove to you, beyond a shadow of a doubt that this vessel is not of Cylon or Colonial origin!"
"All right" the stoic voice of Saul Tigh cut in "indulge the dullard in the room" as he shot another look to Adama who silently agreed.
"Every vessel of Colonial origin since we left Kobol and originally colonized the, uh, twelve colonies has only ever used one form of fuel both for it's drives and to provide enough power to their FTL drives – and that fuel is Tylium" Gaius began as Tyrol nodded when the two officers looked over to him for approval "We've used nuclear power and batteries for backup systems and planet based power supplies but nothing in space has ever been close to the energy efficiency of Tylium!"
The assorted personnel in the room looked to one another in mild confusion or annoyance as the man who was supposed to be one of the smartest men alive before the fall recounted what was for all intents and purposes a basic high school lesson.
"The Chief sees it!" Gaius gestured at the freeze frame of the mystery vessels rear end "even if he doesn't fully understand it! Tylium is not a clean fuel, oh it's cleaner than hydrocarbons and doesn't have the half-life of nuclear but it leaves a telltale scoring and ash that builds up on every engine over time and his crew cleans it off of every Viper, every Raptor and eventually every ship of the fleet, every maintenance cycle! Tylium burn builds up on every nozzle, every engine – everything that burns it gets it and this ship has. no. Tylium. burn!" he finished off emphasising the last few words.
"So?" Saul gestured.
"So whatever this ship uses for fuel, it isn't Tylium – and it probably doesn't use a fuel at all as we know it, gods this thing could be using a form of fusion power for all we know but, but look!" he said as he gestured closer to the image "Cylon ships have no visible engines, I theorised they might use a form of gravitonic drive, or reaction-less drive but . . . but it doesn't matter! This ship has engines! Engines are something we've never seen on Cylon basestars of any design, only ships built by human hands have these kinds of drives! And without any form of Tylium burn this is a ship that has never been in the colonies, otherwise every ship in the fleet would be using these systems. Which means this ship came from somewhere else!"
"Somewhere else being? Earth?" Adama continued the train of thought to it's semi-logical conclusion.
"Well I wouldn't say Earth. I never said Earth. But the name of the ship is in clear Caprican right there on the side! and it is obviously a warship" Gaius filled in gaps, stepping up his confidence. He had turned them from a room of doubtful rubes to positively hanging on his every word.
"But what if, before the first war a couple of ships disappeared? Back when the colonies where still fighting each other but before the Cylons? They went off to parts unknown and set up a home and eventually reached a level where some of their technology differed from our own? Without the first Cylon war to throw back their computerised development and maybe without easy access to Tylium they developed in another direction . . . and a few decades later here we are? Finding the wreck of what could have been?"
The others looked onto him with half-doubts now but that explanation was easier to swallow than the alternative. The alternative being the utterly fantastical idea that this ship was somehow from the fabled Earth and that they had found it mere weeks after escaping the all too literal end of everything that they had known and loved.
"But that still leaves us with a mystery ship in the middle of nowhere and a fleet that needs its water supplies desperately refilled" Adama spoke aloud, putting a lid on that can of worms for the moment. "Boomer, Crashdown – I'm putting you two to a shuttle rather than a Raptor, but I'm also assigning two more Raptors, Six Vipers and a Marine team with yourself Chief and you Baltar along with Geata for support."
The two crew bolted to attention along with Tyrol and Geata, Baltar looked absolutely crestfallen that his shot at impressing the command elements of the fleet has suddenly turned into him being conscripted into a flight to the unknown.
"In the mean time, detach the Majahual and the Monarch from the Civilian fleet to begin mining those asteroids for water alongside the Gemini and Thera Sita for transport and logistics – Saul, you and the CAG set up the escort detail" Adama finished as Tigh gave a sharp "Sir!"
With this the room erupted into salutes and action around Gaius as the arm of the imaginary Six looped around his neck once again and his shoulders tightened again with the threat of returning pain.
"Relax Gaius this is all part of Gods plan, just lie back let the memories of Arcadia carry you to the future" she whispered into his ear as she vanished into nothingness once again.
A moment from Scythe himself.
Hokay . . . holy shit I was not expecting this kind of sudden reaction to finally finishing and releasing chapter one, and chapter two is shorter and sweeter but I want to try and cement the BSG side of the characters before I then introduce the Halo characters and then meld the two settings together properly. Also I included a nod towards the Fall of Reach novel in there, points to whoever guesses which character, which act and which line . . . however in the mean time I have a few reviews to reply to.
Conner Ohlander – Many thanks for saying it looks awesome, hoping I can keep up that flow.
Rvbrwby – I might include a few elements of 4 depending on how and where they fit in, but the thought of the Infinity dropping in and freaking the shit out of Cavil "It's a ship! That's shitting out more ships" is a fun one.
Sci-fi Guy 22 – I have indeed read BSG: The Guiding Fire and it was one of the inspirations to finally get this thing out of my brain, off of my hard drive and out into the wild - this story will follow similar ideas but obviously I do have very different things in mind as the fic continues.
northrigg – That will be one of the themes I'm following with this story. Enslavement to programming and the ideas of free will, alongside what it means to be human and by extension how one reconciles with life and eventually, death . . . much like BSG itself back in the day. As for Serina herself though? Just wait and see.
Brother Sergeant Bov – Haha, this dude is more than willing to provide more fiction so long as my fingers don't give out underneath my keyboard. This idea has been knocking around in my brain for about a decade but I only started actually writing it four years ago so the hope is to use this as a springboard to keep myself writing and get this story out into the wild. Many thanks for the compliments because I always worry my writing is overly wordy . . . so I do appreciate the good words friend.
As for everyone else – a massive thanks is due to you all for all the follows and favourites, I'll try my best to keep up to your expectations before I bleed my fingers dry against the keys.
But between then and now?
Tarrah for now . . .