While one fleet fought on Atlantea, a different battle was going on in the colony of New Europe. The world, a big moon in orbit around a gas giant similar to Saturn, had nice weather, and what is most relevant is that it had abundant liquid water. There wasn't a breathable atmosphere, and the colonists lived under big domes. In time, the atmospheric processors would raise the pressure, and the people would leave the domes behind.

However, right now, the only protection was these strongly shielded domes, protecting the scarce population on the moon. A massive orbital battle was being fought by two fleets, fifty Nexus units from the machines, and fifteen units from the fleet.

Moving along the orbit, the small human fleet was making its best efforts, interfering with the cubes taking position to fire on the colony. They were fighting a delaying action, evading the cubes and spheres as best they could. Damage was piling up, and with only two battleships, four heavy cruisers, and nine destroyers, it was just a matter of time. Sooner or later, accumulated damage would kill the light units first.

Two destroyers, Fletcher and Hoel, suffered several hull penetrations, and the wave armor was almost saturated. The Klein Fields were releasing the stored energy when they could, but it was never enough. Finally, a couple of spheres synchronized their attacks for better effect, and one powerful explosion affected the middle section of Fletcher. A few lifeboats were launched, and the destroyer exploded with half of her crew and her core. Hoel emptied all her tubes at one sphere, and the mix of Tsars and corrosive warheads destroyed the sphere.

Only a heavy cruiser, Maya, crossing paths with Hoel and absorbing the incoming fire saved the little destroyer. As a result, the other sphere exploded, and Maya ended with a turret open to space. The same situation, repeated with every ship, was leaving a trail of dead ships from both sides. The battleships, King George V and Prince of Wales, were doing what they could, only firing on cubes threatening the light units or the planet.

Clearly, this situation will find its logical conclusion shortly. Another heavy cruiser, the Southampton, and the destroyer Akizuki, lost their engines and helm, respectively. Sadly, both ships became targets of several cubes. Both ships reeled under the impacts and died with fiery explosions.

Prince of Wales. Bridge.

The bridge of the battleship was in chaos. Smoke, sparks, and energy arcs flooded the air. The mental model in command, a tall, blonde young girl with short hair, was doing her best to stay alive along with her crew. Slowly, she spent her nanomaterial reserves patching her hull, but soon, she would have to cannibalize her weapons.

Inside her hull, a storm of tremors and loud noises deafened the crew. The sailors, long ago, had understood the end was coming. They were firing as fast as they could, reloading and emptying the magazines of missiles. At last, she received a rain of beams on her command tower, and she lost all her command crew. She made another mental model in her secondary command bridge and continued the fight.

Even with all the interference, the shots on the domes continued. One of them, protecting ten thousand people, collapsed. In a matter of minutes, the city became a grave.

Relief fleet.

Shinano, the other two superbattleships, and the fleet arrived in New Europe. The situation was dire, with two domes open to the vacuum and just two battleships, two heavy cruisers, and three destroyers still fighting a losing battle.

Shinano couldn't avoid wincing as she observed the damage report from the fleet. The colony, quite new and almost defenseless, had only one dome with the shield active. Moving fast, she ordered to advance in two columns, keeping the surviving ships in the middle.

While the long-range batteries began to kill the cubes, she opened a comm with the two battleships. "Shinano, we are at our last legs, but we can't withdraw. If we leave, the colony will be defenseless, and they will focus on it," Prince of Wales reported. Shinano watched, worried about the poor girl, the scene behind her. The secondary bridge had been evacuated since the hull had been penetrated and lost atmosphere. For many sailors, however, it was too late. Their bodies were still in weird positions, strapped to the chairs. Since it was useless, the nanomaterial of the controls was recycled. The bridge was, in fact, empty of everything.

"Understood, we will send an escort," she replied. Her second self, Kyriko, was busy sending her greetings with their main weapons to a pair of cubes that were too aggressive. Both cubes lost their shields, and a dozen missiles finished the job.

For the machines, it was obvious that their main imperative was to clean the planet of infestation. They should have switched targets faster and not wasted time trying to kill the last dome. The two superbattleships, Berlich and Hindenburg, had received the same orders from Chih, and both ships had developed a new set of mental models. Just as a joke, they decided that the crews would give them their names.

With more mature behavior, escorted by the Iowa battleships and scores of heavy cruisers, they advanced to put the wounded ships behind their heavy shielding. The huge ships reached their comrades, but they were forced to slow down. There was no way the damaged ships could move too fast. King George was close to a structural collapse, so Berlich locked her with his tractor and extended his shields around her.

Since these ships remained almost stationary, the machines identified them as an easy target. Soon, it became obvious that they hadn't exchanged data in real time about the superbattleships. The concept of carriers seemed to be a new idea, too.

Twenty cubes and a complement of spheres advanced quickly against them.

Hindenburg Bridge.

They had received the order about the dual mental model system. However, but it was impossible to transfer a human captain. Both girls were alone, but they were committed not to embarrass themselves in front of their seniors. The cubes' advances were too obvious, too plain, and she was grateful for that. She and her sister had the wounded ships among them, so she simply began to fire all her batteries against them.

"They have a bit of tactical common sense, I see," Hind-1 said. "They are attacking above our waterline. Half of our armament is useless."

"They have bad coordination," her companion said while one of the weapons officers focused the under-hull's weapons on a cube, trying a solo attack maneuver. The cube had left her form of FTL close to her, only to be vaporized. The shields just resisted for a pair of seconds against the plasma and cutting beams directed at her.

"Quite satisfying," Hind-2 expressed her approbation to her weapon specialist. The man only nodded, looking for more targets. He had lost many friends on Richelieu.

Right now, Shinano released two hundred fighters. Since there were no fighters, the agile Eagles Mark III were armed with antiship missiles. They moved fast and began to add damage to the machine fleet. Individually, they couldn't destroy a ship by themselves, and they had to be wary of the warhead detonation and the cloud of fragments in the zone. They attacked the limit of the disordered formation, and it was obvious that they didn't have any dedicated anti-air defenses. The same beam weapons used against capital ships switched to pulse mode, but the firing rate was too slow. Dodging and avoiding the fire, the small ships kept part of the weapons busy on them.

Berlichingen Bridge.

The mental models had divided the tasks. While number one was busy killing everything around her, number two reserved part of her weapons to keep an umbrella over the survivors. For some unknown reason, the machines still wanted the survivors dead. So, she was protecting the girls along with Hindenburg.

"Why are they so fixated on killing the colony and the survivors?" Berlin-1 asked her XO. The woman shook her head slowly. "It seems that if they received an order, they died obeying it," she said. "So they are like a hive mind," Berlin-2 added to the exchange. "That requires a Brain or a Queen," the XO speculated, recalling several science fiction movies from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

"Perhaps we should discuss this idea later when we finish this battle," Berlin-2 suggested. A rogue sphere had dodged like crazy, and she found a way to reach Prince of Wales again. A pair of heavy plasma beams incinerated the sphere, but her mass center put the pieces into a collision course with the already damaged battleship.

One heavy cruiser, Maya, had her SGC deployed, looking for a good target. A lot of pieces of space junk were not a nice, juicy target, but she could help the battleship. She fired the SGC, tuning the graviton beam to collapse matter around the beam. A good half of the pieces disappeared, and the remaining pieces were too small to add more damage.

"Hey, girl, my crew and I are in your debt," the blonde mental model thanked Maya. Inside her own bridge, Maya frowned when the comms allowed her to watch the bridge. "Survive," it was her only response.

"Sure."

Battleship Iowa. Bridge.

Shinano was observing the status of the last dome. The shields were close to collapse. She made a risky decision and opened a comm to Iowa. "Iowa, new orders. Get your hull down there fast and open your mirror system on the last dome. Move fast, now, or we will lose the colonists!"

This was the first time Iowa had listened to Shinano's voice so concerned. "Prepare for atmospheric maneuvers now," Iowa advised her crew. Her speakers blared loudly, repeating the order. The battleship dived into the tenuous atmosphere and made a rapid reentry, leaving a long trail of green plasma behind and slowing, avoiding further damage to the dome. Finally, she hovered over it.

"Everyone, we're going to deploy the Mirror System over the colony," the mental model explained. Above Iowa and the dome, a black point appeared. The point expanded like an umbrella, reaching a diameter of two kilometers.

The engineer checked the readings of her main energizers. Finally, she said, "The output is stable, but the area is too large. Ten minutes, max."

"I concur," Iowa said. A pair of heavy beams from the dwindling cube fleet struck the colony. Some powerful, unknown force bent the trajectories, and the beams disappeared into the black surface. The dimensional portal was literally siphoning all energy patterns from this universe into a new one, rendering energy weapons useless.

The cubes—only twelve survivors and six spheres—realized that their orders regarding the dome were impossible to carry out. Now, the survivors accelerated as a fleet and made a firing pass around the right side of the fleet. The girls had formed a large sphere, with the H-44s in the center still protecting the damaged ships. A pair of heavy cruisers had joined the group.

However, the right side was a poor tactical choice.

Heavy Battleship Montana. Bridge.

Jane, one of the mental models of the ship, was tracking the machines' fleet. "They are forming, Captain. They are preparing to leave or attack," she said. Her captain, an Australian woman veteran from the Cylon War, added, "More probably, the last option."

Her wishes became real a minute later when the machine fleet made a pass on the fleet's right side.

Montana and her four sisters were the backbone of this side. Forming two lines of three and two ships, they waited. All the ships on this side launched a massive spread of missiles. The cubes kept their courses, but the spheres were destroyed, their inferior shields unable to absorb the damage.

The weakened cubes, with shields compromised and the external hull damaged, faced the Montanas directly. The battle degenerated into an old style battle, ship against ships. The cubes rotated the sides facing the fleet, so new, fresh shields protected them.

After twenty seconds, the heavy plasma batteries found the metal under the shield, and the space inside melted and vaporized. The damage increased, and something vital collapsed. One by one, the cubes died, fighting uselessly.

It was a bit anticlimactic when the last enemy ship exploded. They had won, yes, but New Europe's status would change, for now, from colonized to unoccupied.

The surviving ships, free from the danger of imminent attacks, docked quickly with nearby battleships. Their sick bays were more capable of coping with the avalanche of wounded sailors, and the nanomaterial stores were larger, even if they were insufficient. Prince of Wales and King George V only tried to seal hulls, reinforce them, and stabilize the energizers. Just as a precaution, the few remaining missiles were moved to the other ships.

The heavy cruisers were, however, in remarkably good condition. The light units, as always, in a fight with capital ships, were either intact or ruined. A direct shot can kill them; it's that simple. Maya and Atago had survived this battle. Their comrades had died, and their Union Cores were destroyed, too. When they return to Alex, there will be time to regret their losses. Right now, the heavy cruisers were functioning as large transports from the dome city to the superbattleships.

At least twelve hours would be necessary to finish what, regrettably, was a withdrawal. The trip between the dome and the fleet was slow, and the people still in this situation wanted their belongings.

Starbase Alexandria.

Two concerned Admirals were walking through the long, immaculate corridors of the starbase. The conversation could have been better, but right now, the Nexus was advancing on the outer colonies.

"This is the second planet we've lost," Jackson sighed. "We need to deflect the hits, or we'll fight around the inner colonies soon," Chihaya added and nodded, "You're right. They'll arrive today at the machine's border."

"Right, it will be interesting," Jackson said. "It was the first time the DSC - Dimensional Submarine Corps - would be used to its maximum capacity," Gunzou admitted. The number of submarines reached the thousands, and they would visit four colonies. Ten years later, they had shared with Shinano their claimed territories. At least six star systems were in that map, but the Fleet didn't know if they had extended even more.

Her old friend, Iona, will be there. The U-boat fleet, the most numerous, will visit a mining colony and its factories. The other fleets will keep the station in the void. The I-400 sisters will map their territories and assign targets.

"We know of at least one colony for sure. The sensors show large objects in orbit around the second and third planets, likely orbital factories or shipyards," Gunzou said, wondering if Tigh would accept the mission.

"Who are you thinking of?" Jackson asked. "I said we should put Gal's SGC to good use," Gunzou said. "It's still the biggest SGC in operation." Jackson didn't need to think twice. "Kill the star, so they understand we're serious too," he nodded with enthusiasm.

"Alex, please patch me through to Admiral Tigh," Gunzou said.

"Comms enabled with Galactica," Alex confirmed.

Admiral Tigh was conferencing with Gal and Lee about the latest news. The Cylon nightmare was repeating itself again. He was very close to retirement, and now, he would have to go back to the fight. His physical constitution was still strong, but he wanted something more. He was feeling restless, and the idea of exploring space as a civilian was really tempting. Focus, stop daydreaming, he said to himself.

Lee was speaking about the different types of enemy ships with Gal. It should have been fascinating chatting with old William, but Lee was a bit plain. He lacked the command aura that William had all his career. He did a good job, yes, but he lacked the strength that William transmitted to his men.

"Admiral Tigh, stand by for incoming transmission from Starbase Alexandria. Admiral Chih speaking," the communication officer said aloud.

"Accept the transmission, on screen," Tigh said, thankful for avoiding a boring discussion about the machines.

On a big virtual screen, the face of Admiral Chih smiled. "Admiral Tigh, how are you?" It's the same mischievous smile from Yamato when she is going to send your entire universe to the crap, Tigh thought.

"I believe this is not a social visit, right? What do you have for us?" the old man said. "Gal is dizzy from spinning around Alex."

"Tigh, I'm glad you and your crew are still looking for a fight," Gunzou said, smiling. "We are going to return the kindness at the Machine system beta," he explained while a new map was displayed on the screen. "Iona and her sisters are looking for the star systems of the machines, and they destroyed two Federation planets. We are going to balance the scales, and Gal will put her weapons to good use."

Gal approached the screen. She would go to war, finally. Gal and Lee listened attentively to every word.

"This is the idea. I'm sending you all the tactical data I have. Good hunting, Saul," Gunzou said. "Ok, I will leave Forge in six hours. I need time to plan the attack."