Chapter 5: 33
"We're going to have to live with fracked up things, but if that means that we get to live then I'll do the gods damned fracked up things. Doesn't mean I'll be happy afterward though."
Lieutenant Kara "Starbuck" Thrace after destroying the Olympic Carrier.
"1 minute remaining, Commander," Gaeta said as the clock approached zero. His eyes were bloodshot as the fleet had been up for the past 130 hours due to the Cylon attacking every 33 minutes.
The strain was starting to show across the fleet, both when it came to personnel and equipment. FTL drives were not meant to jump this rapidly on civilian ships and some were starting to break down. And the members of the colonial fleet had been on duty since before the cycle began, meaning that reaction times were starting to slow and mistakes were made. Even the best human training could not overrule biology.
"Contact inbound, same forces as last time," Gaeta said. They were being chased by a dozen basetars now, as in some of the wake or battles that they had had for quite some time. They had originally been chased down by 16 basestars but four had been destroyed in the earlier few battles before they had been forced to play defensively.
"Launch Vipers," Adama said, the tiredness clear in his voice. The old man had been put on stims and coffee along with other critical members of the crew but few people were up to the effectiveness of even a few hours ago. Everyone was starting to go insane, and fights had broken out across the fleet.
"Can we jump?" He turned back to Gaeta.
"Sir, the Larissa is reporting FTL troubles, they should fix it in 5 minutes."
"Tell everyone who can jump." He ordered.
Meanwhile, out in space, the vipers were vectoring to intercept the raiders. Despite growing tiredness pilots like Starbuck and Apollo were racking up kills in the double digits since the attacks every 33 minutes war had begun.
And despite their tiredness one thing aside from defending the fleet was keeping them from flying; their rivalry with the CAG of the Valkyrie, Captain Christopher 'Chris' Kinsingser. He had started as a raptor pilot before changing to Vipers and making it up the ranks and becoming CAG. He had racked up several kills against pirates while under the Valkyrie and became one of the few peacetime aces in the peace after the first Cylon war.
Now the three of them were locked into a battle as to who could get the most kills. It had gone back and forth more than a few times by now but no one was interested in stopping.
Behind them, Galactica's guns roared as they spit out point defense rounds and airburst shells that exploded in a massive ball of flak. They had expended a lot of ammunition in these 130 hours but it was less than 10 percent of their total stocks. Not to mention that more could be produced on both Galactica and the heavy support ship so in the long run that wasn't a concern.
The Viper battle turned into a brief melee as both sides clashed. In addition to all of the flaws that Thrace had been talking about since she had first fought a raider, the armor near the engines of the Cylon craft was very weak; and only a few rounds by an autocannon could destroy it. To be fair that was the case with most spacecraft, however, their slow speed meant that the raiders were especially vulnerable. Despite their tiredness, the colonial pilots fought well, taking few casualties before they were forced to withdraw behind the cover of the Galactica's flak field.
In the CIC of the heavy cruiser Lansing, Commander Hudson was also wearily surveying the battlefield. The Cylons had a massive number of missiles that they could throw at anything that they wanted to destroy and the only thing that could stop them was loads of flak.
"Sir, the Larissa is ready." Colonel Foln said, her voice mumbling as she spoke. She fell over after she spoke, managing to catch herself before the fall was bad.
"Major, you need to get some rest." He said.
"Commander, I'm fine. I won't rest until we have escaped and others can rest as well." Hudson admired the moral character of his executive officer but he knew that there was only so much sleep deprivation that they could realistically handle.
He wished that something could be done to strike back at them, but as just evidenced there wasn't much the crew could do except keep staying alive. They would need sleep for a counterattack and also some time to give their equipment some rest.
The FTL drive had been repaired on the one civilian ship that had been having trouble and soon the military ships were off. Three Vipers had been lost and a conventional missile had hit the light cruiser Trout, causing minor damage and 14 dead. The fleet was fairing surprisingly well after all it had gone through, but no one knew how much longer it would be able to last. Unfortunately, that was anyone's guess.
Back in the CIC of the Galactica Adama looked on as Dualla counted the incoming ships.
"Sir, the Olympic Carrier has failed to report," Dualla said with concern.
"Well count again!" Tigh ordered.
"I'm not seeing her on DRADIS," Gaeta said. "She couldn't have failed to jump, right? I mean, we had every contact jump out before we did."
"Tell the President, along with Commanders Bakerson and Hudson," Adama ordered. "We need to figure this out, and do it fast."
"How many people were aboard?" Tigh asked.
"1,344, sir," Gaeta replied.
Everyone was concerned but nothing could be done about the situation. Any raptors that were dispatched would be done so too late as the 33 minutes were running out of time.
But when the clock struck 33, nothing happened. No Cylons appeared, and after a minute of verifying and rechecking the clock it was decided that the Cylons would not be coming this time.
"Stand down from condition one to condition two, and start getting some rest," Adama ordered all noncritical personnel to get some sleep with volunteers and personnel critical to the ship's operation ordered to put in a few hours more.
"Bill, are you thinking what I'm thinking about the Olympic Carrier?" Tigh asked and Bill nodded. It could just be a coincidence that the ship had disappeared just as the fleet stopped being followed by the Cylons but it also could be.
"There could be agents throughout the fleet", Tigh said. "I don't like how this looks."
"Let's talk to the president, Bakerson, and Hudson," Adama said. The three of them combined with Adama were rapidly becoming the unofficial leadership counsel of the fleet while a Quorum was being set up.
"You're right about this maybe not being a coincidence, I can't shake a bad feeling about what's going to happen with this," Hudson said.
"We need a plan if the ship returns," Audrey said, worried rising in her voice. "Besides I don't trust that it won't be infiltrated by Cylons, or already is."
"If it comes in we will escort it in then board it," Adama said. "It will be a limited team and we will quarantine the ship until further notice and we can reasonably infer that it hadn't been infiltrated. Is there any opposition?"
After that no one said anything, indicating that the plan was a go. The crew was able to get some rest and nothing of bite happened in the next eight hours. It was presumed that the ship had just jumped somewhere else and had an FTL malfunction.
However, soon an interesting new development occurred. The Olympic Carrier jumped back. Adama, who had thankfully managed to get some time in the rack got the ship back up to condition one. The ship's communications were jammed and Apollo and Tarbuck were vectored to intercept the ship.
The standoff continued for some time, and the two of Galactica's pilots were joined by Chris and his wingman, Arnold "Gunslinger" Koran. The two had been flying together for quite some time; in fact, since they had joined the Valkyrie and had both graduated from the prestigious Advanced Tactical Training course, which took the top 1 percent of Viper pilots and melded them into the best pilots in the colonies.
The passenger liner advanced towards the fleet despite being ordered to halt its position. The four Vipers fired warning shots but this did nothing to deter the ship and they were ordered to not fire on it directly. Slightly less than a half hour in, a nuclear weapon was detected in the ship as it continued to accelerate toward the fleet.
And 33 minutes from its arrival, the Cylons returned.
"Captain, I want you to destroy that ship," Adama ordered Apollo, despite the protests of Roslin. However there was no time to get raptors onto the ship and disarm the warhead before it reached the fleet, so Roslin reluctantly agreed it was the right choice.
"This is fracked up, Lee," Kara muttered as they made a pass over the ship. It disintegrated with a few autocannon rounds, exploding but luckily not setting off its nuke.
"I know," Lee replied.
"We did what we had to do," Chris said. "Better one ship than many."
"If we had boarded it before then we wouldn't have that goddamn problem." Muttered Gunslinger the four Vipers headed back to the barn. After they were back to their respective ships the fleet jumped before the Cylons could do as little as a scratch against the ships.
They failed to reappear 33 minutes later, but the mood of the fleet was still glum. They still had likely killed civilians that day, and no one was happy about that in the slightest. Was it justified and necessary under the circumstances, yes, but was it also something that they wished they had never done? Also yes.
"We're going to have to live with fracked-up things, but if that means that we get to live then I'll do the fracked-up things," Starbuck said to Lee after they landed.
"You have my agreement there, but what will this war turn us into?" Lee said. "If we lose our humanity in this war are we any better than the Cylons?"
"Well we haven't lost ours yet and honestly I don't know what that would look like," Kara replied. "I need a stogie."
Author's Note: the same plot line about Baltar that was seen in this episode went on, it just wasn't much different so it wasn't worth adding.
The Advanced Tactical Training Course is essentially the Battlestar Umvisere's version of the US Navy's Top Gun program from our world. (And yes there is a series of in-universe films called ATT). Along with the aforementioned pilots, Lee and Kara were both graduates of ATT, and Kara was even offered the prestigious position of being a flight instructor there, but after what she did with Zack she was disillusioned with doing flight instructing.
As for the next chapter: I'm skipping the whole Water episode, as I don't think it would be relevant to this story overall due to changes in the fleet structure. I'll be showing the issue of resource scarcity, however, and water will be a minor part of it.
I don't think water would be that big a deal due to a couple of factors; there'd probably be more than a few dedicated water tankers in the fleet already and now that it's being doubled in size there would certainly be more. Water can also be fairly easily recycled in the colonies, I mean they could take care of a lot of consumption by recycling human waste which should be available in all of the military ships and a good number of the civilian ships meant for long times away from a planet would have them as well. Additionally, ice is going to be fairly common in asteroids and the fleet has the mining capabilities to handle this and they would be taking as much as they could. So it won't be a problem even if Galactica's water tanks would get taken out. That's not even getting into ideas about water being created molecularly which the colonials might have the ability to do. In terms of supplies, the fleet is in a better position than it was back in the series, with the production capabilities of the heavy support ship and the mobile dry dock along with other ships. If water ends up being a scarce resource then there is a major problem in the fleet.