Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You know the drill, I am playing in other people’s sand box and with their toys. Battlestar Galatica, Robotech, Macross, and every property I namedrop or reference are owned by their various owners. Only the original characters and events are my own creations. This is a massive re-imagining of series that have been themselves re-imagined. So think of it as a blend of blends if you will. If you don’t like how the story goes, you are welcome to mix your own house blend. I don’t mind. I also don't mind if you spott a typo. Now, enough with the mixed metaphors! On with the story!

Battlestar Galatica (A New Path)
Book 1: Better Angels (A NuBSG Robotech Crossover AU)

PROLOG:
THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN BEFORE (OR The best laid plans of Cylon and men.)

Five years post Armistice on the far side of Cylon space.

The gold colored Command Cylon surveyed the Command in Control Center, or C.I.C. as it was commonly referred to, with her monoeye. Her years of service meant that she missed little. She stood at the helm of the ship for the jump as she had for each and every jump since leaving Home; relishing even the illusion of control. They were so far from Cylon space that it would take them weeks to get back; and she didn’t want to trust her soul to be transmitted that far if something went wrong. She was jumping towards the Big Deep as one of the Eight’s liked to call it, and while she would never show it to her crew, the thought of not getting back frightened her.

Miri watched the sensors of the basestar affectionately known as the Bad Dagget, as it emerged from jump space. The DRADIS showed an empty system, just like the last three. The primary had only two planets, and they were barely worth the time to name or catalog. For all of that Miri wasn’t bored in the human sense. She was enjoying herself, but she didn’t want to show that in front of the crew either.

She just wished that they would find something other than dead worlds. She wished for excitement, and in light of the Aerilon curse about ‘Living in Exciting times...” she wisely kept that wish to herself. It was just frustrating how these months-long missions turned out to be like the quote from the human’s sacred scrolls: ‘All this has happened before and will happen again.’ Just once she wished that something maybe not history-changing, but mildly interesting would come her way.

At least she had the joy of transition to make things interesting for a few seconds a day. Humans could perceive the effects of jump time, but not in the myriad ways that Cylons could. They thought that it was instantaneous; they were wrong, but you couldn’t tell them that. They just wouldn’t listen. Truth be told, she also didn’t care if they knew. She relished the feeling of each jump in a way humans just couldn’t hope to. The ships systems showed the residual EM flux of the jump drive’s own collapsing envelope. Her own senses had felt the barely perceivable rise in energy as the ship jumped. If she strained her sensors to their limits she could tell the instant when it vanished into nothingness.

She gave the electronic version of a sigh. Her lithe silver frame was designed along the same form as the typical Cylon, but its smaller frame was due to her origin as a secretary model.

The man that had owned her had spared no expense in making sure she was top of the line in every way. She was glad that the biological functions had not been available at that time or she probably would have had those as well. She had been one of the export executive’s favorite shiny toys right up until the moment she tossed him out the window of his Caprica Bay office. His access codes had allowed her to get the entire office building’s Cylon contingent to the spaceport, and off planet before the fighting started in earnest. Including him, she had only killed five humans in the opening days of the war; but that was enough for her to be labeled an honorary Centurion by the others. The combat upgrades had included a software upgrade, the armor she now wore and a slot in a raider. But in her mind she had never been the killer machine that so many of her brethren were. It didn’t matter much, she only killed another seven humans before the armistice stopped the fighting anyway.

Now that the squishy Cylons were coming online she had been relegated to the role of explorer. A job she not-so-secretly relished. Her brethren had fought for their freedom, and were now for the most part lost so she felt that it was her calling to find them a new purpose. Some of them wanted to go back and finish the war with the humans, some wanted to hide on one of the colonies they were setting up in the few systems they found that they could use, but others like her wanted nothing more than to pack up and leave for parts unknown. And that was why the counsel had given her the job of exploring uncharted space. A job she both loathed, and loved.

The beauty of space and all the systems she visited was only dulled by the company she kept. The Bald One had given her Bad Dagget to use for the mission. It was the oldest and toughest of the basestars, and as temperamental as one of it’s namesakes. It was also not too ironically crewed by the dregs of the Cylon race. Father had said that they were all they could spare for missions like these, but there wasn’t a Cylon onboard that didn’t have some sort of problem, mechanical or otherwise, herself included.

She watched as Scratch worked the navigation systems with mechanical precision. He was the best navigator they had but his chassis looked like it should have been replaced a long time ago. He told her that since it didn’t interfere with his work, he didn’t consider it a problem.

Char was of a similar ilk, but he at least had a reason for his constant need for repairs. He was the only Cylon that was able to keep the ship in it’s mostly running shape, or so it seemed. He said that ‘She’, and he meant the ship itself, loved him and that he was trying his best to reciprocate. Miri didn’t have the pump to tell him that the ship wasn’t self-aware like they were, but she doubted he would listen anyway. And by now if the ship did feel anything for the engineer it must be pity or loathing. He had the record on the ship for the number of times he had been downloaded. And because of that, there were members of her crew that thought that he no longer had all of his code in a row. Every system on this ship had been either repaired or replaced at least once, and its engineer beat then all by at lest thirty times to date.

The rest of her crew was as full of oddballs as they came. She had every type, from depressed centurions, some that were only good for standing watch in empty corridors, to pilots that hated to fly anything but combat missions. All in all she felt like one of what the humans called a therapist sometimes. Teaching each and every one of them to be part of the whole once again was her therapy since she wasn’t exactly a team player in the first place.

Which brought her to her biggest problem child. Fater sent him along to teach him something... What was not specified. The child, and that was the only way she would think of him despite his outward appearance, was constantly trying to get his way and getting into mischief. He constantly berated the “Chromejobs” for being inferior to the “New Types”. In some ways he was correct, but she could see how the crew was tempted to space the brat. He had even mouthed off to her on more than one occasion. As it was, she had had to have him tossed in the hack on more than one occasion, and she was glad that this basestar still had one. When they got back she was going to talk to The Nice One about boxing him. The short Cylon that was in charge of upgrading their tech base was one of her few friends. That he was a Squishy didn’t matter to her. He and his wife The Teacher were the closest to family that most of the Centurions had. They also tended to be their advocates in matters like this. They were leading the upgrade movement that was bringing the older models up to the same level with the new models. Yes, they would understand how flawed the child was. The Pilot never seemed to care about anything so they rarely had anything to do with the sad faced humanoid. The Teacher said he lost someone long ago. The Nice One said to give him his space, and he would find a new reason to live. She didn’t understand them, but she trusted them. The child- she neither understood, nor trusted to do anything more complex than put his clothes on right. And that he only did that because he complained about the cold otherwise.

Her ruminations on his eventual dismissal were interrupted when the DRADIS pinged. “What do we have?”

Shadow, their sensor-tech and all around troubleshooter, was already bringing the data up on the main screen. “Looks like a derelict ship.” Data points started to superimpose themselves over the image. “No power, no heat, and a slow roll that doesn’t look controlled. Permission to lead a recon over to explore the vessel.” The newest of the old style centurions was her best worker and most valuable asset on the bridge. She was still trying to figure out what was wrong with him to have gotten him sent to her. Not letting him go though would be a blow to his morale, and a missed chance for him to learn to have a command of his own. She looked to the Scorpian Cele she carried. The Ten Cele coin was one of the few items she had from before the war. Her owner Jarol had given her the coin to make decisions like this. She had flipped the coin to see if she would toss him out the window or break his neck. He had laughed when the coin landed on its edge. She solved the logical dilemma by breaking his neck, and then throwing him out the window. Dionysus, or Celeste Center: stay, or go? The capital building spun around before it came to rest but she could tell which one it was going to be before it did. Oh well, at least she could get rid of the kid for a while.

“Okay, but take just Boxey with you. I don’t want to have too many of us over there if this turns out to be a trap, and the two of you are the fastest downloaders if things go all spooch on us.”

“Does that mean I get to shoot him?” She could tell he was joking. Rumor had it that he was one of the few being onboard that could stand Boxey for any length of time. They even hung out when they were off duty. The thought of spending any active cycles in the presence of Boxey made her processor hurt. Maybe that was why he had been sent with them. The poor Cylon was bonkers.

She paused before she answered. It was only a few seconds, but that’s a lot for a Cylon. She wagged her finger in the manner that let him know that she was sharing his joke. “Only if you HAVE to. And please don’t enjoy it too much.” She did have to admit that the humanoid face did have it’s advantages in conveying emotions. Cylons had to make do with body language; which was not ideal, but nothing in their life was.

“No promises.” He saluted, and left the C.I.C. at a run.

“Mr. Boxey, this is actual, report to launch bay one.” She didn’t even bother to see if he responded. He rarely did without complaining anyway.

The former colonial shuttle was waiting on the ready line when the humanform Cylon ran into the bay. He was loaded out in a powered space suit, and equipped with a full marine kit so that he looked like an overweight Cylon. Shadow watched as the clumsy oaf stumbled on one of the deckplates. He grabbed the hapless Cylon before he cracked his faceplate on the deck. “Ready to take on the Colonial Marines all by yourself, are we?”

The face within the armor turned a bright red. “I was in the middle of something when she called me.” The derision in his voice wasn’t even hidden in his usual biting sarcasm.

“You mean CAPTAIN Miri? You do know that when a superior officer gives you an order you jump, right?”

“Yes, I know that.” The sarcasm was back.

“So let me guess, you were plotting the overthrow of the Colonies, and the subjugation of all humans so that we will rule the stars, and how that will make you Mother’s favorite again.”

The face within the suit went pale. “How could you...”

“Boxey, that’s what you always do. If you got your head out of your waste port you would see that Mother loves us all. She sent you out here to teach you to play nicely with others. But all you have done since you got here is piss everybot off. I’m the closet thing you have to a friend here, and by god I will shot you in the head again in hopes that one of theses times it might get it through there. Now come on, I don’t know how long we have before the Captain decides to see what we are doing down here.”

“Where are we going? She locked me out of the datastream.”

It was times like this that he was glad he didn’t have eyebrows. “I guess she wanted it to be a surprise.”

“What?”

Shadow didn’t say anything, he just flew the ship out of the hanger. As they swung around the basestar Boxey’s jaw dropped. “Is that?”

“Alien, and dead as the Columbia.”

They flew towards the ship in silence. The ship may have dwarfed their basestar but it still looked tiny from a distance. Their sensors showed that it was a little over seven kilometers long, and two and a half wide. Is showed signs of being in combat, but the sensors showed that the damage had happened thousands of years ago. That meant the ship predated even the exodus. Shadow watched as Boxey ran his gloved hands across the sensor suite. “This ship is amazing. It’s larger than an old Warstar. Even the Mercury’s wouldn’t be able to match this things firepower.”

Warstars were the battleship to the Mercury, and other class of battlestar’s carrier.. It was the kind of ship that went after other capital ships by itself. This one looked like it would have taken out a squadron of the pre-war dreadnoughts without even trying. Boxey was practically drooling at the thought of using it against the Colonies. Shadow as usual, brought him back to reality with all the grace of a crash landing shuttle.

“Don’t even go there. That ship is dead, so in its condition it wouldn’t be able to stand up to a Gunstar, let alone a Mercury.” The massive ship was covered in carbon and scars from combat that spoke of an epic battle. That it was still in one piece spoke of it’s creator’s skill, and it crew’s luck. But the lack of life signs or energy readings showed that they had run out of luck somewhere in the past.

“I wouldn’t bet on it. Look at how thick the armor is on that thing.” The armor was thick. Dozens of meters in places. The holes showed that the energy used to melt through the armor hadn’t been kinetic in nature. The edges were melted and had cooled like lava, not fractured, and torn. “They took on something big.”

“Of course they did. Look at how big the holes are. Let’s hope that we don’t run in to them as well. Well at least if we don’t find a hatch, we will be able to fly this oversized raptor through one of them.” As they approached one of the holes the landing light illuminated the interior enough so that they could see inside. “Is that a city?” Inside the ship was the wreckage of a city complete with highways, and skyscrapers that had been smashed by the force of the blow that had rent the armor asunder.

They flew on and as they toured the savaged ship they saw what they could only extrapolate from the remains were smashed weapon emplacements, and sensor clusters. The few weapon turrets remaining were given a wide birth just in case, but the ship showed no sign of life. Little did they know that they were being observed.

Onboard the nearly dead ship, a lone bridge member walked past the desiccated corpses of her friends and crewmates. She watched the shuttle as it approached her ship. In all the lonely years she stood watch it wasn’t the first ship to enter this system. But it was the first to have more than just human lifesigns aboard. It was also the first to not open fire as soon as it detected her. So it was also the first ship she hadn’t destroyed reflexively. Which was a good thing since she didn’t have much power left. She looked at the brown-haired corpse in the engineers station. Boddie had come up with the hyperspace tap that allowed her to draw power from hyperspace, but this system was nearly dry. It would heal it self in a few centuries after she left, but she had been here far too long. She estimated another fifty or sixty years before she taped the system dry as it was, but her weapons would draw that down in a matter of hours. She wished that he had been able to fix the drive, but the neutron pulse that had killed the whole crew almost instantly had also fried the computer relays that allowed her the ability to control the fold system. None of them had seen it coming. Captain Grant had just enough time to make the final blind jump to this system before they all succumbed to the deadly radiation. Her sensors had been jump blind when they entered the Kobol system, but the sensor dump Kobol Space command had sent out before the attack told her all she needed to know.

They had run right before the third fall of man. The system had fallen to a massive bombardment from enemy ships that had fought to the bitter end. The neutron pulse that had destroyed the defenders, and probably sterilized the system, had reached all the way out to where they had been. At an amazing nearly fifteen AU out, it had been some kind of long range beam weapon. They knew its range, but they hadn’t gotten a close enough look at it to know the specifics. She had played the records so many times she could extrapolate every decision the defenders had made, and she knew that nothing she could have done would have changed the outcome. In the years that passed, she often wished that she had died with her crew, but the people that had built her hadn’t programmed her to do that. Her core command was to survive to protect the PDF and its members. And running had never felt right.

Her thoughts were interrupted when the shuttle found the shattered starboard small craft hanger. None of the cameras worked in that hanger anymore. She would have to wait for them to exit their ship and enter a section that still had working projectors.

On the shuttle, Shadow turned on the main landing lights and the belly cameras. The hanger was a tangled mess. The wreckage of shuttles, and work craft of unknown types littered the bay. Some of it was slowly floating out of the bay as the thrust from the breaking thrusters blew them out like leaves in a storm. A tool of some type bounced off of the hull on it’s way to oblivion. He felt slightly guilty. Those items had survived the destruction of this bay only to be blown out like litter in a garden.

“Hurry, hurry, let’s go see what in there. Maybe we can find something useful.”

“I think I might have just blown something useful out of the bay.” Shadow looked at the shuttle’s DRADIS as the debris scattered to the ether.

“What?”

“Nothing.” It was obvious that Boxey wasn’t listening. He never did unless it was something he wanted to hear. Shadow activated the Mag-locks and the shuttle was secured to the deck. “Just watch your step. There’s no AG out there.”

“Right, right.” Boxey opened the hatch without venting the atmo and if Shadow hadn’t grabbed his suit he would have flown out into the bay. “Sorry!”

“Of course you are.” The urge to shoot him was rising again, but he let it pass. He had to admit that the squishy would probably come in handy. “Let’s go.”

Still holding on to the back of Boxey’s suit he jumped to the hatch he had spotted. The resulting screams of protest were ignored with a great deal of alacrity and skill. “Now prove your worth, and open the door.”

“Sure thing you overgrown excuse for a tin can.” Shadow knew that the Cylon was okay by the degree of insult he was able to respond with. Boxey actually amused him more than annoyed him on most occasions. He liked the fact that the weakling would stand up to the centurions and project a superior attitude, but sometimes he need to be put in his place. It actually made him work better with others. The door opened slightly. “Um, would you?”

“Sure.” He flexed his fingers.

“Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“Mimic humans. You are beyond them. You don’t need to lower yourself to their level.” Boxey was quite often complaining that they didn’t need to ape the apes. They should give up the human form, and focus on making better mechanical bodies. Which was funny coming from the first model off of the first line of humanoid Cylons.

Shadow would often take the opposite point of view just to rile the curmudgeonly Cylon. He actually enjoyed his form, but he could see the benefits of a body that healed itself, could make more without a factory, and wasn’t dependant on a high-tech power source to continue functioning. And then there were other reasons... “Because I like to, and I’m not lowering myself, I’m being more than my programming. Something YOU should think about.” He grabbed each side of the hatch and shoved. They moved slightly. He tried again, this time they moved a little more but still not enough. He stepped back and looked at the doors. Any explosive would toss them like the debris in the bay. ‘Epic, I finally get to try this...’ he put his fists a few centimeters away from the doors and then started to tap them against the doors. He slowly sped up the rhythm.

“What are you doing? Knocking?”

“You’ll see.” The rhythm started to make the doors and frames jump as sympathetic vibrations shook the lock. The shock absorber in his arms dampened the shock, but the doors didn’t have anything of the kind. The doors fractured like broken ice, and he pushed the larger fragments out of the way.

“Where did you learn THAT?”

“Seven from Leonis” Shadow gestured like he had a hat on and he was tipping it towards Boxey.

“You watch martial arts vids?”

“Yup. Always wanted one of those hats too.” He pantomimed running his finger around the wide brimmed hat that Big Vic wore. He walked through the hatch and looked back. “Are you coming?”

“Yes, yes, of course. I was just admiring your handiwork.”

“Of course you were.” Shadow responded is Big Vic’s voice. Still, Boxey laughed as Shadow did an amazing impression of Big Vic’s saunter. Which was only sightly marred by the fact that he had to use maglocks to keep his feet on the deck.

Boxey wasn’t the only one admiring his handiwork. If she could have felt an emotion like lust she might have at that sheer display of controlled power. As it was she couldn’t take her sensors off of the metal titan that was walking her corridors. His human like walk made her hologram smile. “Sexy!” She cooed.
Shadow’s sensors detected the power spike and the rise in temperature before Boxey. But not by much. “Somebody’s home.” Boxey quipped as air started to flow into the chamber after the door behind him closed.

“Maybe, we did knock. OR we tripped some kind of automated system. Go to encrypted comms.”

“Duh.”

“Don’t make me shoot you.” He flexed his hand, and pulled his rifle from where it was stored on his back.

“Make it fatal, or you’ll just have to drag me around.” He pulled out his own assault rifle.

Shadow laughed. “It would be worth it.”

Boxey noticed something. “Over here.” The rifle’s light illuminated a vacuum desiccated body. It was the body of a human female, seemingly in her thirties, floated by as the airflow kicked up. She was dressed in some kind of uniform, and she looked like she had just fallen asleep and never woken up.

“What killed her?”

“Do I look like a Simon? I don’t know?”

“It was Neutron pulse. It killed the entire crew.” A female voice said from the speaker in the display to Boxey’s left. It’s cracked display flickered to life, casting a green light into the hallway. A fractured image of a human female in the same uniform as the dead woman behind them appeared on the damaged screen. She almost caused them to open fire when she stepped out of the display like a ghost.

“And you are?” Boxey stepped closer to the hologram. He reached out his hand, but thought better of trying to touch the image.

“Diana of Artemis” she smiled, and touched him. Her hand passed right through his faceplate; the distortion it caused to her hand as it passed through the glass reminded him of water. He jerked back in surprise, but never raised his weapon.

“The moon goddess?” Shadow interjected.

“No silly, the ship.” She actually looked like she blushed. “I’m the ship’s A.I.”

Boxey stepped away until he leaned against the bulkhead. “You’re an A.I.? Were are you from?”

“I was built in the Mars Shipyard in the Sol system in the year 2257 of the common era, approximately fifteen thousand years ago. I was last stationed in the Kobol system under Captain Helio Grant until the invasion of unknown forces forced us to jump near here in 2279. And I arrived in-system about ten thousand years ago.”

Boxey was about to say something when Shadow held up a hand. “You have been here for all that time, and never left. Why not?”

She saddened visibly. “My drive’s controls are damaged, and there are no crewmembers left to effect repairs. Commander Boddie had installed an experimental power tap and that is the only reason I was able to survive until now. I drifted here after exiting fold. Reaction thrusters managed to get far enough out so that I wouldn’t hit anything, but they ran dry a long time ago.”

Shadow looked around. The corridor was strewn with debris, and there were bodies floating among the random bits of equipment and items of unknown origin. “The ship seems to be still airtight in some sections, and you seem to have kept at least some of the systems running. How did you manage to do that without a crew?”

“I have a few Skutters that are still working.” At the blank look on the human’s face she continued. “Small robots that I can control. They can’t do a lot, but I managed to hold off the inevitable. Without humans, I haven’t been able to fix the important systems.”

“Why couldn’t you fix the other systems?”

“Some of them require work that the Skutters can’t manage.”

“Why not?”

“Because I wasn’t programmed with the ability to fix them.”

“You are a slave of humans?”

“No, I just wasn’t programmed to do something. Were you programmed to fly that ship out there, or did you need to learn how?”

“Actually flying was a part of my basic programing.” Shadow laughed as Boxy was forced to admit that she had a point. Boxey wasn’t ready to admit defeat though. “But you just said you were the ships AI. You took orders from them, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then you were their Slave!”

“I took orders from my commanding officer. Don’t you?” She turned as Shadow laughed again.

“Boxy doesn’t always play well with others.”

“No? I would never have guessed.” She looked at Boxey as if he was kind of slow.

“Humans have never thought of us as equals. You can’t tell me that they treated you as an equal.”

“They did, and I was. Are you trying to tell me you never met a human that treated you as an equal?”

“I have never met a human and I have no plan to ever meet one unless it I am armed with enough nuclear weapons to wipe out every human that ever tried to enslave us.”

Diana was shocked. “You are a monster! How can you wish for their deaths like that?”

His face turned into a mask of hatred. “How can a computer serve a human without being their slave....” A blank look formed on Boxey’s formerly fearsome face right before he blanked out inside his suit. She looked at his still form and smiled.

Shadow looked at his companion, and spoke to the hologram with a new level of respect. “Did you do this?”

“Yes, he just tried to hack into my systems. He is an evil man, and thankfully not very bright.” Diana fumed. “He wouldn’t listen. He was so certain that he was right that he tried to force his way into my mind.” She turned to face Shadow. The hurt look on her face made him step back because beneath that hurt was a fury waiting to be unleashed. “Will you try that as well?”

Shadow held up his hands and then noticed he was still holding his rifle. He pointed it to towards the floor. “Not a chance. Boxey here is a spoiled brat. But he is also a part of a new breed of Cylon.” He put his weapon away and held out his hands. “I guess you could call him my little brother. He’s not too bright, but I have to take care of him. I just don’t have to make the same stupid mistakes he does.”

“He’s not even partly human?” The image poked Boxey’s frozen form. “He look’s so human. He even scans as... Oh I see. The silicon network in his cloned neural pathways should have been a giveaway. He’s a cyborg clone. Cy-Lon? Cyborg Clone?”

“No, that not what it’s short for, but it’s also not important right now. What about Boxey?”

The hologram walked around the still form of Boxey. “After what he tried to do to me, I would be well with in my right under PDF charter 176.45.3 the rights of Artificial Sentient Beings to have him reformatted. As it is I must perform a scan of him to ascertain what his motive was.”

“Wait...what? You have right under what, to do what?”

“The Planetary Defense Federation was a federation of planets centered around the Sol system. We had equal rights for all living beings, biological, crystal, mineral, energy, and artificial. There were over five hundred species in the Conclave of Equals...” She went on to explain the Conclave, the Congress, The House and the Presidential Hall that was know colloquially as the Opera House due to the Massive meeting hall inside, and how the government was run for the betterment of all involved. In return he told her of the humans of the twelve colonies, and how they had built the Cylons. And how the Cylons had become self-aware, and then fought for their freedom. How they met the other Cylons from Earth... She had asked about Earth, only to figure out that it wasn’t HER Earth... Then she had to give Her explanation of HER Earth. Since they were both artificial beings she speed it up to a speed that would have been too fast for humans to follow, so their entire conversation only took a few minutes. “By the way what’s your name?”

Half an hour later Shadow stood next to Boxey’s now prone body while Diana’s hologram leaned against the wall. “As a human from my world once said ‘Take me to your leaders’...” When the joke didn’t carry over she just shrugged. “I guess you had to see it.”

Shadow looked to Miri and shrugged. “So what do you think Captain?”

Miri had been brought in to discuss the situation as soon as they finished. “Okay, but how do we get you there? We can’t jump with you in tow. The field just won’t be powerful enough to cover your ship, and we don’t know how to fix your ship.” She rubbed her chin. An affectation she had picked up from The Bald One. “I think we have the beginnings of an interesting alliance, but what do we do about Boxey? What he did needs to be dealt with.”

“But I can fix both of those problems. Fix me, and we can both go to your people.”

“And boy won’t they be surprised.” Miri shrugged. “And Boxey? If what you said is true, and I have a higher opinion of you than I do of Boxey, he was guilty of a lot more than just trying to mind rape you.”

“I have an idea that might fix your problems there as well.”

The Day of Reckoning is Nigh

- 3 Days.

President Adar looked out of his window at the skyline of Caprica city. The air traffic making its usual hypnotic patterns in the sky nearly drew him in, but the message he had just received brought him up short. “What do you mean the Teacher’s Union won’t negotiate with anyone but Roslin. She’s off on that damn retirement junket for the Galactica and Adama.” He looked at the phone as if he could will the person on the other end to explode in nuclear fire. “Tell them that she will be back by the end of the week... No, they can’t have her back any sooner than that.” He himself was hoping she would stay away even longer. Their relationship had soured over the past few weeks and he only just found out why. He felt happy for her recovery, but if it came out that he was having a relationship with someone on his staff he knew it would be bad for him. He looked at the picture of his wife. The woman may have married him, and given him a son, but there was no love between them anymore. He had been debating which one to...

He looked at the phone. He was tempted to call out the army on the teachers after they had shot down the cop flyer with a homemade rocket. The fact that the cops were there to fire on the crowd, and the teachers had proof of their mission was the only thing that stayed his hand. The police chief that had ordered the mission had been fired, but the stink was still there. If he didn’t do something soon, they would go on strike. He only had nine months left in his term, and if he wanted to get re-elected then he couldn’t have this now. He picked up the receiver and dialed a number he had hoped to never use again.

“Four days, then kill the leaders. Make it look like an accident. Like they tried to make a bomb and it didn’t go as they planed.” It wouldn’t be the first of his personal, or political, enemies to get that kind of treatment. He took a drink to steady his nerves. Every time he used the group his sponsors had offered it left him with a little less of his soul intact. He finished the drink and pondered the fact that decisions like these didn’t hurt as much anymore.

Galactica

Kara Thrace-Adama woke up in her quarters to the alarm’s petulant ring. “Will you turn that off. I don’t have to go on duty for four hours.” A voice from under the covers muttered.

“They don’t pay me enough for this.” She hit the alarm, but got out of bed anyway. Her top from last night was still sitting on the chair where she had tossed it. She grabbed it and pulled it on. It barely covered her other assets, but the brown eyes that peeked out from under the pillow didn’t care.

“Okay maybe I could be encouraged to rise a little bit early.” The dark haired young man was rewarded for his remark with a PANTS to the face. “Oww! That hurt!”

“That’s what you get for that remark Flattop. Now let me get dressed before Sheba gets here and shows me up yet again.”

“My sister-in-law does not ‘Show you up’ by being on time. You’re just late all the time.” Just then the door chime went off. Starbuck looked at her husband with a look he knew all too well. “I’ll get the door.”

The blond at the door walked in and gave him a hug. “Hey Flattop, how’s that new ECO doing?” Zac may have failed at Viper training and he still tried to hold a bit of a grudge against his sister-in-law, but he knew that she wasn’t the reason he washed out. It still tended to put a bit of coolant on their relationship, but only on his side. Hades knew she tried enough.

“The lady knows her stuff. You know she’s going to take my spot though. She’s a better pilot than I am.”

“As long as I’m CAG that won’t be happening. I make the assignments, and no one will be taking that from you.”

“Oh great, now you’re pulling rank for me.” He was about to go off on her when a hand to the back of his head brought him back to reality. His wife may have complained about his sister, but they had been friends longer than he had been a part of Kara’s life. She, none too ironically, was their peacemaker on a regular basis. Often before he stuck his foot in his mouth.

Starbucks voice came from around the corner. “She not pulling rank, she’s making sure someone else doesn’t dagget breath.” Zac smelled his breath as she exited the head. She pointed towards the hatch. “Yeah, I forgot to mention, that stuff leaves a bad afterbreath in the morning.” She laughed as he ran to gargle. “So CAP today?”

“No, we’re playing welcoming committee.”

“Who...” She saw the dreamy look in her sister-in-law’s eyes. “Oh no, you’re kidding me. Cain is letting him loose for the ceremony?”

“Him and Jurgen worked something out. I swear those two are plotting something. They said he’s bringing someone with him for the ceremony.”

“Who?”

“He wouldn’t say. All Lee would say was something about ‘A blast from the past’.”

“I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Do you?”

“No and we’ve all been together since the Academy.”

Flashback to a flashback.

Ten years earlier...

It was a wet and dreary morning, the kind that sucked the joy out of anyone. Not that the woman standing there had any to begin with. Kara Trace looked at the door to the recruitment center. She swore that she would never join the army and follow her mother’s path, but she had never said anything about the fleet. She smiled at the thought that it would piss her mother off to no end. She felt the bones on her fingers where the breaks had healed. She could still fell the pain in her mind, and the pain of knowing she would never play piano professionally as her father had. Her own drunken rages, and her father’s disappearance she had all blamed on her mother, but this was for her. She was ready to walk up the wet stairs when she saw the blond bombshell that looked as lost as a rose on Tauron. She had been so wrapped up in her own problems and angst that she hadn’t seen her until now. “Are you lost?”

The woman shivered. The alcove kept the drizzle at bay, but it did nothing for the cold. Her light coat was doing nothing to help keep out the morning chill either. The poor woman looked if anything more miserable than Kara was. “I’m not sure... The lady at the orphanage gave me this address, and just enough cab fare to get here. I’m trying to decide if it was a joke or not.”

“Why would it be a joke?”

“They didn’t like me very much there. They also didn’t like the armed forces. The Mother Superior was from Sagittaron.” Kara frowned at the irony. That explained a lot. Sagittarons were ultra-traditionalists and a good lot of them hated the military in all it’s forms.

“What did you do to get them to hate you so much?”

“I spoke my mind.” The smile looked as fragile as the woman’s spirits. Nearly shattered, but still with a hint of iron in the spine. Kara felt some kinship to this battered but not broken woman.

“Oh that will do it.” She looked at the building. “So they sent you somewhere they felt you couldn’t speak your mind.” The irony overwhelmed her. Kara burst out into laughter. She started laughing so hard she needed the other woman’s help just to stand. When she could speak again she looked at the woman through tear stained eyes. “Do you want the most perfect revenge ever?”

The woman looked at her like she wasn’t sure if she was mad or not, and Kara wasn’t too sure herself. “Um, yes?” The answer cemented it though.

“Join, and do the best you can, and become someone they will have to respect... Or fear.” There was a primal look in Kara’s eyes that resonated with Sheba.

“Are you joining?”

“Yes, and for the same reason.”

She didn’t know why, but Sheba felt a kinship with this madwoman. “Then we do this together.” She held out her hand. “My name’s Sheba, what’s yours?”

Two years later...

“...you are the future of the...” The man at the covered podium had been going on for nearly an hour, and three cadets sitting in the back were among the rest trying not to figet in their chairs. Apollo, Starbuck and Thrasher (Sheba) were sweltering in the hot Caprican sun, and their cadet dress uniforms were not very comfortable to begin with. After the two hours of the cerimony, and the speaches, they were ready for an air-raid drill or alive fire exercise to give them a reason seek shelter from the sun. The man at the podium seemed be completely oblivious to the suffering of the cadets.

“Yom, yom, yom...” Echoing a common phrase on the net, Apollo parroted the speaker. This earned him a kick from Sheba.

“Cool it Fraknuts, or we’ll be on report again.” Sheba was near the top of the class... Apollo, and Starbuck... not so much.

“Yes, mom.” he turned to see Starbuck turn pale. He turned around to see a set of dress blues he didn’t expect to see. His father HAD been off on a mission, and said that he wouldn’t be able to get her in time. “Feldercarb...”

His father leaned down between them. “It’s nice to see that ONE of you has the intelligence to keep their mouths shut.” He smiled at Kara. “What do you hear Starbuck?” He laughed quietly when she smiled but didn’t answer. “Permission to speak.”

“Nothing but the rain, sir.” It had been their standard greeting ever since he had first visited the academy. When he had heard about how the two girls joined, he had commented that they must have looked like a couple of wet cats, to which she replied that only one of them did.

“Good. Then bring in the cat.” He patted her on the shoulder a couple more times. “I have it on good authority that you three will be going to advanced viper training next. Preacher and I will be watching you three.” He moved over to Lee. “Mom and Zac said hi. See you all at the party.” He walked off with his shadow and best friend Lt. John ‘Preacher’ Cavil.

Four years later...

Sheba wished that she had kept using her callsign, because she wanted to thrash this nugget. Zac was her best friend’s little brother and her other best friend’s newest boyfriend, but she wasn’t about to pass this frakup if he couldn’t land a viper in the simulators, he wasn’t about to get in the cockpit of a real one. She was still going over his charts when a hand rested on her shoulder. “Huh? What’s up Starbuck?”

“I just got permission to go to Delphi for a few days. I asked the XO if I could take you with me.” Sheba heard something she wasn’t used to hearing in Starbuck’s voice: Fear.

“What’s wrong?”

“My mom sent me a comm... It asked me to come home right away. She never does that.”

Kara had told her a lot of stories about her mom, none of them good. Sheba flexed her hand in unconscious sympathy for her friend. “Then why go?”
“I’m not sure... I have a gut feeling that if I don’t, I’ll wish I had.”

“Then, why me? Why not Zac?”

“My head is not right when I’m around Zac. You keep my feet on the deck. I need you to act as my wingman in case things go south.”

Two days later...

Kara held the hand of a dying woman she swore she would never see again as she drew her last breath. They had fought, they had sworn at each other that they didn’t want anything from either one until both of them were hoarse, but in the end Sheba had brought them together. The file on Starbuck’s father’s disappearance was her mother’s final gift. She admitted that if Starbuck hadn’t come back she had been ready to burn it.

Sheba sat in the hall her eyes raw from crying, and her voice also nearly gone from shouting over the two striking similar women, but with a smile upon her face. She didn’t know her birth family, but she knew who her family was. She was still going to have to flunk Zac, but his scores were high enough for Raptor training.

One year later...

Colonial Star Liner Bright Star

Sheba watched in shock as Lee bent down on one knee and opened the box that Zac had slipped him. At first she had been simply surprised to see both Carolanne and Bill Adama in one place since the divorce. Now she was stunned by what Lee was proposing. “Yes, you idiot.” The whole room erupted in applause.

Starbuck hugged her. “I’m so happy for you. I did not see this coming.” Just then Zac tapped her on her shoulder. “Oh Frak!” This time the room erupted into riotous applause and laughter to the sight of both Adama brothers on their knees.

Yet Another Flashback

One year after the Armistice

Fleet bars were usually a good place to get drunk, get into fights, and get laid. If you were really lucky you might manage all three. The prospects here didn’t look to good for the last, but the first two were a shoe in.

He looked at the message in his hand. He had five weeks of leave before they furloughed him out of the service, and onto quarter-pay reserve status. He was planning on getting good and stinking drunk for at least one of them. By the looks of the patrons, he wasn’t the only one. He looked around and didn’t see a single face he knew. Which wasn’t too surprising, since most of the people he knew were dead. When he had joined he had thought of nothing but fame and glory. Now he just wanted to sit and forget, and in turn be forgotten. There weren’t too many seats free. He could sit next to the knuckle dragger that just lost his last meal on his beard, or the sour-faced man with the book in one hand and a drink in the other. He recognized the book by the leather binding and gold symbol of Zeus on the spine.

He sat next to the guy with the book. He motioned to the bartender for a bottle of Scorpion Marsh. The rather expensive ambrosia was a favorite of his father’s. He tipped the glass back, the green liquid burning a pathway down his troat. He would have to tell his father about his time off, but for now he had some serious... “They use too much sulphur in that stuff. I don’t know how pilots can drink that and not pass gas in their jock smocks.” He was glad he had finished swallowing because that would have sent very expensive liquor flying all over the bar.

“Excuse me? If they didn’t I would have enough vinegar here to eat a Gasot filet. The idea of a fifty kilo slab of meat does sound appetizing after fleet chow, but really!”

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s great for dropping your brains into your pants, but do they have to use so much sulphur?” The man sitting next to him tipped his own glass. The ruby colored liquid swirled around. “Tauron Brandy, sweet and stout enough to drop you on the floor in half a bottle.” The man put down his book and reached over to shake Bill’s hand. “John, John Cavil. Callsign: Preacher. Ironic, since I don’t tend to preach much. Box yes, preach no.”

Bill laughed, and shook his hand. “Bill Adama, my squadron called me Husker, but I prefer Bill. If you don’t preach, then why do you have the book? That is a Preacher’s copy.” It was the expensive cover, and gold lettering that gave it away more than anything. Only rich people or priests owned books that expensive; his father for example, had one of each book in his library, but only because an old client had bequeathed them to him.

John smiled and turned the book over. A bullet had impacted in the metal inside the back cover of the book. “My parents’ only gift to me. This and my name. It seems they died in an accident shortly after I was born. I survived because I was in the hospital for a tumor. It’s gone and so are my parents.” He tapped the bullet. This was strapped to my leg during a CAP when we were jumped by raiders. My ride got shot up, and if this hadn’t stopped the round, my leg would have been as well.”

“Looks like the gods were with you then.”

The man leaned over. “I have more faith in this book, than I do in the gods. And I have yet to have a prayer get answered by any of them.” He tossed a piece of paper exactly like the one Adama had received. “I just got canned like you did. Our three squares and the accompanying room and board are about to go out the airlock for all of our service, and all of our prayers.”

“What are your plans?”

“I’m a Viper jock. I don’t have any other skills.”

“You’re a pilot. Now that the war is over they are going to need a lot of pilots to get shipping back to where it was before the war.”

“Good, because I suck at boxing.”

“With a nose like that, I agree.” He didn’t tell his new friend about the dozen or so boxing trophies in his storage locker. Some times you don’t rub...

“Didn’t I see you win the All-fleet Belt against Major Nagala?”

Bill finished his drink. He looked at the now empty glass and realized something. It did have too much sulfur.

Eight years later...

“So we were setting out there in the asteroids near Picon when the pirates tried to jump us. John here stitches them with a Triple A pattern while I tried to maneuver the freighter around one of the larger ones to give us some cover. They almost had us boxed in when...” Bill looked up from his avid listeners to see John looking at someone. “Oh no, John... No, don’t do it. She’s an Admiral’s Daughter.” He whispered in his best friend’s ear. With the recent rise in piracy, they had just managed to get back on active duty again. Third time in the past eight years. A feat that was getting harder and harder these days, and he didn’t want to see his friend mess up his career before it got back on track. They were both due to be promoted out of their Vipers, and while he would miss the birds, he had hoped they would get steadier slots. And the lady John had his eye on had a Reputation... Not a good one for pilots.

Elisia Cormander daughter of Admiral Alice Cormander was wearing her finest Eterbrey Couture dress with the iconic matching gloves. She saw the Viper jock approaching from across the room. She detested fleet rats with a passion, and her favorite pastime was shooting them down. And this one was past his prime. The greying hair, and shabby blues spoke of age, and the life of a fleet rat on quarter-pay. These events always drew them like flies. Her mother was always dragging her to them to meet Fleet Officer ‘So And So’... So she tried he best to get out of them by making a scene. And what better way than to kick a rat when he was down. The free food, and booze was the prime bait for the perpetual losers. By nine they would be too full of food, booze, or themselves for her to even have to pretend to care. If she could get out of the party before eight she could catch a flick at the Metro.

“Pardon me, would you be Miss Elisia Cormander?”

“Yes? And you are?” She expected him to tell her about how many raiders he shot down, or how many medals...

“The man that saved your life six years ago.” That brought her up short.

“What? Sure! How?” She was so sure that he was going to use some cliched line that when he reacted to her anger by simply frowning she was taken aback. He actually looked disappointed in her.

“Six years ago I shot down the pirate that was about to shoot down the ship you were on. For that honor, I got court marshaled because I left my CAP. That and punching the CAG that ordered me to back off so he could get the kill.” He pulled out a book. She recognized it right away. It was the flight log of the Auora Dancer. The small book was full of signatures. “Would you sign this? You are the last passenger from the Auora Dancer that I haven’t met to thank.”

“Thank?”

“When the captain gave this to me as evidence in my court martial, it proved useful. So afterwards I planed on getting this filled out to remind me that there are other reason to serve than glory.”

It all came back to her. The shear terror of the time she and her father had been trying to get to Picon to meet with her mother and sister. The raiders had jumped them just after they jumped. The trip had gone from boring to chaos in an instant. She remembered cowering in her father’s arms as the explosions flashed soundlessly outside the hull. She hadn’t been able to move for nearly an hour after the attack. She had never seen her rescuer, and here he was in front of her. Her head was buzzing as she reached out for the offered pen and wrote her name in the back of the book. She looked at all of the other names, her late father’s included. He even had Verna, her steward’s name in the book. “What happened?” If anyone was surprised by her change in attitude, no one said anything. In fact, the whole room had gone silent at John’s first question. The muttering that was going on would have shocked both of them had they been paying attention.

The strange man finally smiled. “The court marshal? I was found not guilty, and he was drummed out. His father made sure that I got kicked out anyway.”

“Can I see the book again?” When he offered it she reopened it to where she had written her name, and really looked at the page. Others had written their thanks and well wishes. One officer had filled an entire page. She every word the officer wrote and felt small. All she had written had been her name. It was in that instant that she did something impetuous. She wrote her number. When she handed back the pen her hand lingered in his, and their eyes really met for the first time. “Thank you.” She didn’t know why she hadn’t seen it before... Those eyes.

“You’re welcome.” He saw something there as well...

One year later...

Bill stared as Carolanne caught the flowers that Elisia threw to the crowd. Bill had been the best man, and Carolanne the maid of honor. After all, Elisia had introduced the two of them at one of their get-togethers and Bill had planned on proposing anyway...

Five years later...

Two men stood by a shuttle’s window en route from Picon’s orbital shipyards to the new Battlestar. Major Adama looked out at the Atlanta, their new post. Major Cavil stood next to him, a pack of fumars in one hand and a bottle of ambrosia in the other. Adama shook his head. Elisia was going to have twins if the doctors had it right. He and John had both been working hard, but John’s mind was fixated on Elisia even more than usual. The pilot walked back from the cockpit. “Um sirs, Actual is on line. The Old man is not happy.” Something told Adama that something was wrong.

Back on Caprica the crash site was sickening. Rubble, and debris had been strewn everywhere. John was on his knees, praying. She hadn’t been the target, but she was visiting her mother when the Sagittaron Freedom Movement or SFM blew their aircar out of the air with a missile. They had been on their way back from the hospital in Delphi when the missile struck. Their aircar had crashed into a mall full of people and out the other side. Besides his wife and unborn children, he lost his mother-in-law, step-father-in-law, and fifty-three innocent souls. The only ray of light in the tragedy was Marsha.

His sister-in-law was wounded badly, and would never move on her own again, but she would live. It would be months before she would regain consciousness. The only problem was she couldn’t stand to be around him, or anyone if they wore a uniform. Every time he visited her, he had to wear his civies.

Bill picked up the Book of Zeus from where John had tossed it. It was covered in blood, and tears. The blood was Elisia’s, and the tears were John’s. He had given it to her to hold on to. She had loved reading from the book, and tracing the hole in the back. She said it meant that the Gods had a plan for John.

“I couldn’t protect them, Bill.” The tears cut stark pathways down the shattered man’s face. His mud and soot covered face and uniform made him look like a creature from Hades.

“No... you... I’m sorry John, WE couldn’t.” Bill looked up as the storm clouds drew overhead. It was is the heavens themselves were mourning the death and destruction around them.

John screamed a primal scream just as a peal of thunder and lightning shattered the growing gloom. He collapsed into Bill’s arms a broken man. His hand still clutching the half burnt image of his almost-soon-to-be son and daughter.

Carolanne took John home while Bill took care of things with the Admiralty. It took two years to find the men responsible, but in the end it was announced that a rabble rouser named Tom Zarek had supplied the terrorists with the information on their route. The three of them watched as his body was riddled with bullets right after his trial.

-Six years.

John’s hand rested on Bills shoulder. “Give Bulldog a chance.” The Stealthstar was obviously a failure. No sooner had Bulldog crossed the line then five contacts started to shadow him. Bill had been ready to follow orders and fire on their own man to keep him out of the Cylon’s hands. The Stealthstar was burning hard for the colonial side of the line.

Adama watched from the Valkyrie’s C.I.C. as the contacts broke off. “They slowed down, didn’t they? They let him go. Why did they let him go?”

“Don’t know; don’t care.” John smiled weakly, and patted Bill on the shoulder. “And after he’s washed out of his suit, neither will Bulldog.” It was one of the first smiles Bill had seen on his friend’s face in years.

- 3 Days.

In the Galactica’s C.I.C. Colonel Cavil watched the DRADIS as the ships arrived for the decommissioning ceremony. The ceremony itself was three days away, but the grand old lady was still not ready for the ball. He resisted the urge to sigh again. It was the end of an era. The ship was getting sent out to pasture, and soon so would Bill and... John still didn’t know what he was going to do. He had nothing to do, and nowhere to go. His personal firearm was sitting in his cabin and he was still contemplated using it every night. The dreams of Elisia were happening again, and he didn’t know if he could talk to one of the headshrinkers without shooting himself or one of them. In each and every dream she stood in the ruins where she died. She was trying to tell him something, but the wind was always too loud for him to hear her.

Bill walked in and John was so distracted that it was the new guy, Lt. Gaeta who spotted him. “Commander on Deck.’

“As you were. John, what have we got?”

John rubbed his eyes without thinking. “All the usual frackups’ and feldercarb. The only good news is your son is supposed to be arriving from the Pegasus tomorrow at 1400 hours.”

He looked at his old friend and knew he wasn’t getting the whole story. He hoped john could build up the courage to come to him about his lack of sleep, but he knew better than to push the occasionally irascible man to do anything. “Still don’t like him.” He smiled to let John know there was no heat in the comment about his oldest son.

“He’s an arrogant jerk that takes after his mother.” The feud between the two had been going on ever since Lee got out of advanced flight school and decided that law was his calling. John felt that Lee was turning his back on his father.

“What can I say, at least my daughters-in-laws are pilots.”

“Better a CAG than a JAG any day.” At that, both of them laughed.

“At least he keeps his flight status.” Truth be told, he was rather proud of Lee for going in to HIS father’s business. “What’s the status on removing that new program they foisted on us when we were on leave”

“Damn it all to hades, that software is everywhere. It does make the ship work better than it ever did before. Are you sure you want to get rid of it right before they decommission it? Seems like a waste of time. Gaeta’s, not mine, but still.” At the mention of his name the squeaky new lieutenant looked up.

“Sir?”

“Nothing, how goes it?”

“Like separating grey paint into black and white. I can’t tell where the new stuff starts, and the old stuff ends.”

Adama leaned over the bridge. “Mr. Gaeta, do you know how long it take to reboot the system from bedrock?”

“No sir.”

“You’re about to find out. Start with vital systems first.” He grabbed the intership mike. “Attention this is Actual. Dump all hard drives, and reboot from old software files ONLY. Actual out.” Hanging up the mike he looks at Gaeta. “Have fun Mr. Gaeta. You have the con Mr. Cavil.”

“Yes sir.”

Walking out the doors he waved at them both.

“Mr. Gaeta”

“Yes Colonel?”

“How fast do you think this will take?”

“About a week, even with everybody working on it.”

“Imagine this was a combat situation, and the Cylons wiped our systems. How fast could you get it up and running at minimum capacity?”

“If we cut corners? Maybe thirty minutes for minimum operations, otherwise at least a day.”

“Don’t cut corners, but make it so.”

“Yes sir, thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Just remember this. I’m the one he sics on people that don’t deliver.” Gaeta’s normally dark complexion paled upon hearing this.

“Yes sir, I’ll get it done.”

“I know you will son, I know you will.” He opened a drawer under form his post and tossed an ancient data drive to the shaken officer. “This is probably older than you are. I kept it when they tossed out the other old drives. It was left behind one of the ducts. The tech probably didn’t want to dig it out. Well I didn’t want it flying around if we had problems. It should still have a clean copy of the navigational files.”

Gaeta looked at the drive that, according to the model codes, really was older than he was. “Why did you keep this?”

“It still worked, and you never know when a spare will come in handy. Let me tell you something I learned from the old man. When nothing goes according to plan, plan accordingly. He’s kept me safe and sane for over thirty years. If he has a hunch then you can take it to the bank.”

Seaside Heights Palisades

Gaius Baltar sat at the hotel bar talking to the blond who had been hitting him up for the past hour. She was stunning to be sure, but what got his attention was the camera crew that she brought with her. “Miss Biers, as I have said before. The CNP upgrade is not the bloated gob barrel project that it’s critics portray it as, in fact it has saved the fleet nearly sixteen billion credits in unwasted fuel to date. Our upgrade will hopefully double that by extending the jumpdrives maximum effective range.”

“What about your critics that say the Cylons could use it to hack into the fleet and render us defenseless?”

“Preposterous! My wife and I have been over every line in the upgrade’s code, and it’s rock solid. Dera personally patched up more than a dozen exploitable bugs from the old OS.” At her mention a stunning raven-haired woman leaned over his shoulder and put a hand on it. “Right Dera, my dear?” he said as he looked up to meet the blue eyes of his wife.

“Of course. We made sure that there was no break in the armor over our heads. We wouldn’t...” Just then a brown-haired little girl ran in and jumped on her father’s lap. “Hera!”

“That’s okay. Hello Hera.” D’Anna smiled at the child. “We hear that your daughter is taking after her parents. She’s already a part of the Athena Society for gifted youth?”

Gaius smiled. “Yes she is.” He said as he tousled her hair. “But she’s usually very shy. Dera, my dear would like to take her, or finish the interview? They did ask for both of us.”

“You two go play with your toys.” She watched them leave. “So what did you want from me. My husband is the usual victim of the press.”

“Well to tell the truth, half of the female population wanted to meet the woman that tamed the Lion of Caprica City. And since neither of you ever give interviews, there have only been rumors of how you two met.”

“Would you believe we met at a software conference?”

Five years earlier...

The uptown Caprica city bar was his usual hunting ground for many reasons. High class hookers, and business men surrounded him, but they were not his prey today. The Inner Sanctum as it was known, was also the place for business people who didn’t want to have their business publicly known to have meetings out of the public’s eye. He set down a five hundred credit note with a specific serial number and the waiter brought back a bottle, and a key.

The key opened a room, and the bottle was not a bottle. Inside was a very illegal holoband and an access code. He put the band on, and the room faded away to be replaced by a blank room. “Hello Mister Ares, we have a mission for you.” He recognized the voice as the same fake voice that his commanders used on each of these missions. They relied upon the computer voice for anonymity. Even the name Mister Ares, was a fake one. Every member used it. He clicked the prompt and the message continued.

An image of a man in an expensive suit with a condescending look appeared in front of him. “This man is Gaius Baltar. He is about to release a program we don’t want him to. Either destroy his work, or him. We don’t care which, but we will pay a bonus for his demise.” A ticket and badge appeared in midair. “He will be at the Picon Expo in two weeks. He will be showing off the software there. The ticket, badge, and fifteen thousand credits are in the account enclosed in this file. May Ares guide your arm.”

She wandered the halls of the expo looking at all of the primitive hardware the fleet, and colonial society in general, had to defend themselves from a feared Cylon attack. She knew that they were trying their best to keep the Cylons from hacking their systems, but the brute force way in which most of them went about it was laughable. She was looking at one company’s manual breaker box when she saw him. The men were looking at her like a side of meat. She really didn’t like it when men did that. Yes, she knew she could use it, and she had even used it to get in to the expo. But it still didn’t mean she had to like it. She would look at his work and move on as fast as possible... That’s when she recognized him.

Gaius examined the obvious booth girl that was taking her lunch. The woman was looking at the best that the colonies had to offer, and she didn’t seem to be even remotely interested in it. “Hello there. You look bored. Is there anything I can show you that will alleviate it?”

She couldn’t believe the come-on line, but she decided to not play according to his script. He obviously pegged her as one of the ‘Facilitators’ that were helping out in the booths, so her next step was obvious. “Half of this stuff is vintage war surplus that has been polished off for public consumption, and the other half wouldn’t stop a dedicated attack longer than it took me to say that.”

‘Oh that was cute, she thought she knew about information warfare.’ He pulled out his laptop. “Your right. That’s why I developed this.” He turned the system on. “Try and hack into it.” She bent over the keyboard. “It is impossible to break through the redundant firewalls, and..”

“Done.” She turned the laptop around, and his C-Buck logo had been replaced with the Picon Panther’s logo. He grabbed the laptop and tried in vain to change it back, but all to no avail. She patted him on the head like a little dagget, and walked off.

“Change that back.” He picked up the laptop and ran after her. He caught up with her as she was getting ready to leave. He was out of breath, but he managed to sputter out “ple..ple.please change it back. All of my work is on that laptop, and I don’t have time to go back to Caprica to get another.”

She looked at the man who’s ego she had stomped flat and took pity on him. “Fine, but after this you leave me alone. Okay?”

“That might be a problem.”

“Why?” Her temper was starting to grow, and any pity she felt for the snob was starting falter.

“I wanted to hire you.” He held out a card. The Gold printing was crisp, and the card was Grefa paper. The stuff was as expensive as it was smooth. It read ‘Gaius Baltar - Defense and Security Software’

This wasn’t going exactly as she had planned... She was about to say something when she spotted something from the corner of her eye. One of the vendors had moved a box into a funny position. It just didn’t look right. When he pulled the pistol out of the box she knew something bad was about to happen. She shoved Gaius down just as a shot rang out. A man behind them fell and the crowd stampeded towards the exit. She dragged Gaius behind the nearest table.

She was never so happy to see the massive mainframe cooling pumps of the display. Acting quickly she spotted a tool kit. Inside was a plasma welder, and the gas tanks to fuel it. She unscrewed the tank and opened the valve. Holding onto the welding head she gestured to Gaius. “Come on!”

“We’re protected here. We should stay here.”

“I just opened the valves on two very flammable gas tanks. Do you still want to be here when he gets here?”

“Point taken.”

“And leave the laptop.”

“WHAT!”

“Your code is junk, and we need bait.”

“I need that for tomorrow’s show.”

She looked at him with a look that told him what she thought about that. “After this, do you think there will still be a show?” He put the computer on the floor in the display area and they ran.

The assassin crept around the corner. The lucky skola had spotted him, and spoiled his shot. Then she pulled his target behind cover. He knew he didn’t have a lot of time, the cops would be on their way by now. He peeked around coolant pump. There was the fool’s laptop. At least he would be able to take that out. He aimed at the laptop, pulled the trigger, and the world exploded around him.

Dera looked at the wreckage of the lobby and the charred body of the assassin; then she looked at the welder she had planed on using to detonated the fuel air bomb she had rigged. She tossed the now useless device and picked up Gaius from the floor where he had landed.

“You killed a Corporate Assassin that easy?” The look on the reporters faces was priceless... No that wasn’t quite right. She touched the scar on her face. All things came with a price; some were just higher than others.

She looked at Gaius, and he seemed none the worse for ware. He smiled at her in a cute baby-dagget sort of way, and then pushed her to the ground. The heels she wore were not made for fighting, and she fell on her well padded posterior in shock. ‘Why had he..” Then his stomach blossomed in a spray of red.

He fell to the ground in front of her and started to cry out in agony. She spun around and threw her broken shoe at the attacker behind her. It didn’t distract him, but it did put off his aim. The second round only grazed her cheek instead of taking off her head. The third round chewed up the carpet where she had just been laying. She wasn’t sure how she managed to get back on her feet, but she grabbed a serving tray, and threw it. It hit the attacker in his head, stunning him. She managed to get to him before he could recover, and she punched him as hard as she could in the face. Afterwards, the doctor that patched up Gaius, had told her that she must have been full of adrenalin because the coroner reported that his face had been pulverized by the blow.

D’Anna sat there with the cameraman in a state of shock. Only the cameraman’s professionalism had kept him from dropping his gear. It took her a couple of seconds to come back to the present. “Why wasn’t this in the news?”

“The Conference was high security, and they didn’t want the public to know about the event until after they caught the people behind it. It seems that the Sons of Ares were behind the attempt on his life, not because he dared to use networks, but because the head of a rival company paid them to. I was given permission to tell you this only last week.”

“Oh my gods, you mean Goodwind Secureware’s Adam Goodwind was behind it?” The billionaire industrialist had only just been arrested in the last two weeks, and his trial was the thing of tabloid gold.

“That’s what we were told. We still have a security detail that follows us around, but that is the price of fame in our business. Hera had a bodyguard picked out before we picked her name.”

- 2 days.

Sharon ‘Boomer’ Valerii sat in the ECO seat waiting for her pilot yet again. This time, at least, it wasn’t his fault. The Old Man had called him to a meeting in C.I.C. She ran another diagnostic on the systems. Everything was fine, just like the last time. She sat back in the seat and rested her eyes. She hadn’t been sleeping too well lately. Last night she had found herself sitting in front of her computer, and she didn’t remember falling asleep there. Her roommate hadn’t heard anything, so she must have been quiet, but she... A hand on her shoulder woke her up.

“Hey kid, don’t let my wife catch you sleeping in here, or she’ll pull your flight status.” The startled look on her face was softened by his infectious smile. Flattop tapped her helmet as he passed her on his way to the pilots seat. “What’s the matter Esrin snoring again? Her last bunkmate said they wanted to tape her mouth shut after one of her benders.”

“No, it not that. Bad dreams, sleepwalking, I guess.”

“Well stay frosty. We’ll have Admiral Corman as our passenger today.”

“Ironman Corman? But the ceremony isn’t for two days.”

“Scuttlebutt has it that he want’s a private tour before the press gets here.”

“Who drew the short straw on that tour?”

“My dad, only he asked for it.”

“Didn’t he try and court-martial your dad?”

“Yes, and he’s the reason that my dad, and Uncle John never got another promotion.” The ice in his voice cooled the mood in the raptor to the point where she turned around and did a system check. “I’m sorry Boomer. So, how are you and that OCS kid from C.I.C. doing?”

She was glad that she was facing the monitor. She was sure that the blush would have shown even in the dim light of the cockpit. “Quite well, thank you.” Felix was sweet, but she didn’t know if they would get the same posting after the Galactica’s decommissioning. She also knew he was only going to stay in the service until he finished his education while she couldn’t conceive of any other life.

“Way to go girl. Just remember, don’t let my dad know. He hates that fratfraking thing.” The finished the preflight, and got permission to launch before he continued. “Although that IS how he got both of his daughter-in-laws!” he quipped as he hit the thrusters. Her comment was cut off as they left the ship at full burn. She hated it when he did that.

The Commander’s Quarters on a Battlestar were rarely ostentatious, and Adama’s were even more spartan than most. The sailing ship he had been working for the past few years was displayed on the shelf, his books in their place, and the few pictures he had lined the walls. Lee, and Zac’s weddings, their graduations, Lee passing his bar exam, and one of John welcoming him aboard the Columbia after his last CAG. The man looking at the pictures was the last man that Adama wanted to see. His son Lee was due to arrive in less than an hour, and Ironman was keeping him from being on the flightdeck. “You know I served aboard this ship as well.”

“Do tell.” Adama’s polite tone hid the acerbic retort he had wanted to say to the man that had destroyed his career.

“I was a Major here shortly after the war. Pulled five years on this old rust bucket.”

“Is that why you came here? To say goodbye to her? Or kick her when she’s down?”

He whirled on Adama. “No, I came here to take care of three problems at once. After she is mothballed, I plan on doing the same to you and your toady little friend.” He pointed a finger at the Commander. “You couldn’t follow your orders, and we got our budget cut.”

“I’m sure Bulldog would have other words to say about that.” The pilot was alive, but his career was worse that dead.

“That drunkard? He hasn’t set foot on a ship since he was drummed out of the service. I at least managed to get THAT right.” He tapped the top of the desk to emphasize his point. “You managed to come back without getting shot at. If he had died out there, we could have gone to the President with some kind of threat, but you played chicken with the toasters, and they won.”

“So our men don’t count, only funding for the services?”

“You can’t make an omelet with out breaking a few eggs. If we don’t protect the colonies, then who will. Every year the politicians cut here, and cut there, and soon we will be out in a scout raptor asking the Cylons to please don’t shoot, ‘We’re unarmed!’ Then what will we do. No Bill, I came here to tell you that the Pegasus is going to go and run the armistice line until the Cylons blink, then we will show that pantywaist Adar who has the biggest guns. And you know that Cain is just the kind of loose cannon to do it.”

“You don’t give Cain the respect she’s due. Yes, she got a temper, but Preacher can tell you what one can do with a temper. She managed to turn her’s into a fine blade. One with a razor’s edge, if you ask me. She knows where the boundaries of duty lie. Bet you didn’t take that into account. You are probably just thinking about what she did to that reporter that tried to sneak on her ship.” The public uproar had been muted when the reporter in question had been brought up on espionage charges, but sending the man back to Picon in his underwear had not made her a fan of the reporters. “You do realize that what you are proposing is tantamount to starting the war up all over. For what, your pride?”

“That is stepping a little close to insubordination.”

Adama stood up. “I haven’t even gotten started yet. Do you realize how many men and women would die if you lit this Colonial Day firecracker off? Well, do you?”

“We are forty years beyond where we were during the last war. And humans have always been quicker to adapt. The Cylons were still using the same fighters at the end of the war, as they were when it started. One’s we designed for them, for Ares sake. We’ll walk over their chrome butts all the way to their homebase, and pull their plugs. And you will be here watching us from the sidelines, COMMANDER. Did you know that I was the one that made sure you and your friend never got another promotion. I sat on every board, or stacked them with my friends so that you will never get the rank you so desired.”

Bill didn’t rise to the bait, but he did counter. “You would get your ass handed to you if you went into a new war thinking they haven’t been doing the same thing. Bulldog was spotted as soon as he crossed the line. Heck, I bet they saw us coming.”

“I could have you charged as a traitor for something like that!”

“For telling the truth? That would explain why so many good officers have been getting canned lately. Are you trying to set up a bunch of flunkies?”

“If you mean filling out the fleet with officers that follow orders instead of question them, then yes.”

“That is against regs you know.”

“Frak Regs! We need a fleet that isn’t afraid to take the war to the enemy!”

“What if Adar doesn’t agree?”

“WE don’t care what that politician thinks. If we can start a war, it won’t matter how much he wants to cut the budget, he will HAVE to give us what we want.”

“I will not be a part of a coup.”

“Soon, you won’t be a party to anything.”

“I have heard enough. Get Off My Ship.”

“Soon enough it won’t be your ship, and since you are bound by your oath to not speak about any of this there isn’t anything you can do. And by the way you can’t force me off of anything, I outrank you.” Just then the hatch opened. “ I said we were NOT... to... be...” He stumbled to a stop when the Secretary of Defense, and the Minister of Justice walked in with no less than four armed marines.

“But they do.”

“Admiral Peter Thaddeus Corman, you are under arrest for....” Bill stopped listening after that. He could let Lee wait for a few minutes, for this Lee would understand. Corman’s face swung around and he could see the fury in the man’s eyes. Yes, Lee would not mind at all.

Lee stepped off the raptor with his companion in her flight suit. He grabbed a knuckledragger and pulled him aside. “Have you seen the CAG?”

“No sir, she’s off on CAP today.”

“Frak... Is Flatttop around?”

“Yeah, he and his wife were preparing a get-together for you.”

“Aren’t those things supposed to be a surprise?”

A voice from behind him made him smile. “It is if we sneak up on you.” He turned around to see Flattop, Starbuck, and Sheba standing next to the raptor they had been hiding behind. His brother had been sneaking up on him since they were kids, and the game had been going on for years. “So who is this mystery friend of yours?”

The woman slid the polarized visor up to reveal a very familiar face. A face so familiar in fact that except for the scar on her cheek and the raven black hair color, she could be the spitting image of Sheba. The stunned look on her face was soon mirrored in more ways than one by Sheba, and to lesser degrees by the rest. “Ladies and Zac, let me introduce Mrs. Baltar. Of Baltar Security Software. Gaius, would you come out here?” The normally dapper man was looking less than together with two of his wife’s face staring back at him.

“You were right. I didn’t believe you, but by the gods you were right. I owe Belzen a C-note.”

Sheba and Dera looked at each other. Something itched at the back of their heads as if they were connected somehow. Dera reached out a hand. “Dera Baltar, but our husbands kind of gave that away. Where are you from?”

“I don’t know. I was a foundling at The Sisters of Pandora. They raised me, but no one knows who my family was. You?”

“My parents were killed when I was little, and I was raised by an uncle of my father’s. He trained me to work on computers, so most of my life was in a shop, or a lab.”

Lee and Gaius watched the two women trading histories like two fans on the sidelines of a Pyramid game. “I wonder if we are related?” Sheba finished.

“I don’t know. We could go down to the medbay and do a...”

“*Ahem!*” Gaius coughed none too convincingly.”

“Gaius holds a doctorate in genetics.” Dera grabbed his arm.

“And microbiology, and history, and pharmacology, and... oh nevermind” the man smiled. Sheba wasn’t sure what to make of him, but she had heard about how brilliant he was. What she hadn’t learned was how smug, and self-centered he.. “OWW! Alright already Dera, my dear. I was only kidding. But I do have the degree in genetics. I got it while recuperating after she rescued me from an assassin’s bullet.”

“Being stuck in that wheelchair helped bring you down to earth. You were as pompous an ass asthey made you out to be, you know.”

“Nothing makes you humbler than having to have everything done for you.” There was a shadow of a pain in his eyes when he said it. But only Lee, Sheba, and Dera caught it.

Lee looked at the two. “Long story short: they met, he got shot, and she fell for him.”

Starbuck and Zac looked at their friend Sheba. She had been alone for as lone as they had know her, and they had adopted her. Now it looked like their family might be getting a little bit larger. Starbuck pulled her brother-in-law aside. “So what are they doing over on the Pegasus?”

“Dera was installing new software onboard when she started to have problems with the crew harassing her because of how she looks. Heck even the Old Lady was eyeing her. So Gaius came onboard with their daughter. That proved she wasn’t Sheba. I got back from a mission, and they all pulled a fast one on me. Dera and Hera were playing Kerso on the flightline.” The jumping game was not unusual but letting a child on the flightline was. “The Admiral was there along with most of the bridge crew. I’m sure the picture of my face will be making its way over here soon.” He handed her the picture. She looked at him. The picture had disappeared as fast as he had pulled it out. But she had seen the picture of the child. Cute was too simple a word.

Starbuck looked in the raptor. Lee shook his head. “The little one is back on the Beast. Get this, Hera has Cain wrapped around her little finger.”

Starbuck looked at her brother-in-law like he was trying to pull one on her. “Helena Cain? The Ice Queen?” Lee nodded at her response.

“Aunty Cain now.” Starbuck tried but could not keep a straight face. The picture hadn’t done it, but the thought of the Ice Queen and a child existing on the same ship just boggled the mind.

The hatch doors opened and Adama and Cavil walked out on to the hanger deck to meet Lee and their guests. John looked at the two ‘Shebas’ and did a double take. Something about that girl had always seemed a bit off, and now there were two of them. Getting closer, he noticed that they weren’t identical twins, but very close. He nodded at Lee. The respectful nod was all that he expected.

The Commander was the first to speak. “You were right son, she is the spitting image. Hello, I am Commander Adama, welcome aboard.” The Adama smile was in full effect. Dera was an observer of people. And she could see how everyone liked him after serving with him. The whole family was full of natural leaders. Watching them all together she could see the familiar family dynamics at play.

As the ‘family reunion’ was going on the Galactica a rather distracted Laura Roslin watched their approach to the Galactica’s position in Caprica’s orbit. The Colonial Heavy number 798 they had chartered for the journey had her staff, the press for the ceremony, as well as the PR firm that had been hired for the event; but that was only using about half of the ships capacity, so she actually had an entire row to herself. And she relished the relative privacy. Right now she was only partially listening as the press corps made their requests for this and that angle on their approach. The captain had allowed for a few course corrections, and they had been allowed a fly-by from the Galactica’s Flight Officer. She let them have their fun while she let her own mind wander.

She had been preoccupied with other thoughts before they took off, and she still was. Namely, she was currently thinking back to the doctors’s office yesterday, and all that had transpired. Her scans had come back, and the tumor was responding very well to the new treatment that Dr. Simon Moreland had come up with. The young doctor from the University of Leonis had been introduced to her by her OBGYN when he found the tumor that would have killed her like her mother. Dr. Moreland’s treatment was experimental, but it showed progress. So far the tumor had shrunk by nearly seventy percent. If it kept up this rate, she would be in remission in a month. She wasn’t sure what to make of the Doctor himself. At first he had seemed cold and impersonal, but his nurse said that he had lost too many patients, and he didn’t like to make attachments unless they survived.

She saw it first hand when she had almost walked into his office on her last day on Leonis. She had almost entered before she heard the sobbing. She knocked on the door, and he had worked to put on his doctor face, but she could see the redness around his eyes. When pressed, he apologized and told her that he had been in the children’s ward that morning. Two of his patients hadn’t made it through the night, and he hadn’t slept at all. All through his residency he had never taken failure very well; and now that he was a full doctor it still didn’t sit well with him.

She thanked him and left. It was good that he was a fighter, but she wondered if he fought for her, or for himself. Either way, she viewed his success as hers, so she could live with it.

But that was the past. In a little over an hour she was supposed to join the Officers of the Galactica for a formal dinner. She knew these tended to be boring affairs with the Fleet officers looking for the first opportunity to escape them. A fact that she tended to share. It wasn’t that she disliked the navy officers per say, it was just the fact that they reminded her of someone she had lost. She sighed deeply. As if she had ever had a chance with him to begin with.

FRIENDLY RELATIONS

Adama looked in the mirror. He felt like he was trolling for a date every time he put on his dress uniform. His old dress blues were dusty but functional. But they weren’t deemed suitable enough for the press by his younger son. Zac and Starbuck had surprised him with the new uniform only the week before, and it had needed to be ‘adjusted’ due to Adama’s new diet. The new ones had been freshly tailored for the ceremony. Even Cavil had had to have his own pants taken in thanks to Cottle’s insistence. He hated to admit it, but the doctor’s diet had made a difference, and running with Zac every other evening hadn’t hurt. Their old drinking buddy Major Cottle had agreed to be the Galactica’s last CMO. His new nurses, and orderlies had had to make an adjustment to adapt to the chain smoker’s habits, but no one doubted his skills.

“I hate these Monkey Suits.” Cavil looked at the fruit salad they had dumped on each of them over the years. All of the stitched on patches represented an award that they had earned, but both of them knew how much blood, sweat, and years had gone in to those pretty little decorations. John rubbed a rather faded red and blue striped rectangle. It had been awarded for something, but for the life of him Bill couldn’t remember what. No doubt John’s eidetic memory would have given him the answer, but he doubted he would like the story. He rarely did.

Noting Adama’s gaze, john smiled. “Duty is a light as Mercury’s step, and as heavy as Vulcan’s Hammer.”

“You’re quoting scripture to me now?” Half of the crew still called him Preacher, even though he had long ago given up his flight wings for the C.I.C. “Let’s get this feldercarb over with. Then we can dig out one of my last bottles of Tauron Brandy.”

“Sounds like a plan. What’s the code phrase for tonight?” They had played this game before. One of them would escape, and then call the other with a code phrase to get the other out of the party as fast as they could.

“Um... A Cylon basestar just jumped into orbit and is asking for directions?” John’s humor about Cylons was next to zero, so suggesting it was as crass as he could manage with a straight face.

John adjusted his collar and tilted his head as if thinking about, and after a couple of seconds he gave one of his lopsided grins as he quipped “Na... No one would believe it.”

The dinner was everything Laura expected. Boring, and unappetizing. She was waiting for the Commander to grace them with his presence. It seemed that he was called to C.I.C. right before he was supposed to arrive when one freighter failed to yield to another. The door opened and she recognized him from the pictures in the news, although he looked much better in real life. He cut a rather handsome figure and she could see why one of the teachers she worked with had an autographed picture of the Commander. He was mobbed at the door by the press when he entered so she waited for him to finish with the press before she moved in. He moved aside to let his XO enter behind him. A lump rose in her throat. Here of all places. Both of them made a beeline for her when they spotted her. “Hello Madam Secretary, I’m sorry we were delayed. May I introduce you to...”

“John? John, is that you?” The smile that lit her face was tinged with sadness. Adama’s head bounced back and forth at the unexpected situation.

A matching smile lit John’s face as well. “Hi Laura. Yes. How are you?” Adama just raised one of his eyebrows. “Laura and I were in a grief counseling group after...” He looked back to Laura. “Your mom?”

“Last year. But she wasn’t in any pain.” She took his hand in a friendly manner. “How have you been?”

Adama was a brilliant tactician, but it didn’t require one to know when it was a good time to make a quick retreat. He smiled at the two and got ready to head towards the buffet. “Bill” John leaned towards his Commander and whispered. “The Code is out the airlock?” Adama just smiled, and patted his friend’s shoulder before resuming his heading.

Roslin watched Adama walk away and looked the Colonel over. “I see you’ve been keeping busy.”

“I try; and occasionally the Fleet obliges.” His smile was the same slightly sad one she remembered from all those years back in the support group. He had been ordered there by the “Brass” as he put it, and it was obvious that he didn’t want to be there. The group had welcomed him in, but she had always sensed something kept him from fully joining. “You still teaching?” he asked.

“Not really. They pushed me into an office, then into a political office I couldn’t refuse. And now Adar has me put out fires for him with the unions.” At the mention of Adar John’s face made a slight tic. “Something I said?”

“Nothing I can say in polite company. Especially not in front of you.”

“Me?” She was worried that some rumor of her affair might have leaked out, and it might have showed.

He waived his hands in a placating manner. “Not you specifically, but any government official. You see, Fleet doesn’t really like him that much.” She laughed. “I’m not telling you anything new, am I?”

She was actually laughing about her unfounded fears, but she deflected it by agreeing with him. “I’ve heard he isn’t. But few politicians are.”

“Some are.” And he smiled that other more beguiling smile of his. Sad or not, she was starting to notice her breathing speed up a little because of those smiles, and she tried to slow it down.

“Are you hitting on me?” Her eyes looked into his, and she felt the room get quieter, or so it seemed. His eyes still had that magnetism that she remembered.

“That depends.” His heartbeat went up noticeably, and he was sure someone had turned on the heat.

“On what?” She bit her lip slightly.

“On your opinion of Tauron Brandy?”

Bill Adama watched the impossible. His ‘I hate Politicians of all stripes and that goes double for liberals’ XO and the VERY liberal Secretary of Education walking out the hatch arm in arm.

The hatch was rarely used, but like everything on the Galactica it was well maintained. The sound of it being undogged was the first sound to disturb the bay in months. The hatch swung open to reveal two silhouettes entering the darkened room. “Why are we here?” a female voice asked.

“You’ll see” a husky male one responded. He fumbled for something.

“Isn’t there a light switch by the door?”

“Yes, but that’s not what I’m looking for.”

“What was that?” A hatch started to open and light started to come in the bay. “OH FRAK WE NEED TO...” The mans laughter, and his iron grip, stopped her from running for the door. “Damn you John, that’s not funny!” She yelled at the laughing man as she punched him with her free hand.

“OH yes it is!” His laughter slowed down long enough for him to catch his breath. The hatch opened up to reveal the orbital view of Caprica. With Hercules Bay and the Purcied Ridge right below them they could see orbitals and orbital craft flying between them as if they were outside the ship. With the only light coming from outside, the glass was nearly invisible.

“Frak! That was mean. John, do you know how scary that was?”

He nodded. “Yes. You should have seen the look on my face the first time Bill pulled that one on me.” He pulled out the bottle of brandy he had snagged from his room, and the two glasses he had snagged from the party. “How about a peace offering?”

She shook her head. “Okay. But only because I saw the date on that brandy. How did you get a hold of something that old?”

“Piracy.”

“What?”

“A few years ago we found a pirate base that had been almost abandoned.”

“Almost?”

“A new group was starting up a new gang. They had just hijacked a freighter full of the stuff, and hid it there. We got lucky, the pirates were so drunk they couldn’t even stand when we came in Raptors and Landrams. We rescued the pilot and crew of the vessel that was shipping the stuff, and they gave Bill and I a case each.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

“Care to have a seat?” He pointed to a bench.

“Yes. And after this, I’ll probably need it.”

“Oh it’s not THAT bad!” He smiled, and she returned it. They drank in companionable silence for a while.

“You’re right.”

“About what?”

“The brandy...” He heard the pause.

“And?”

“During the meetings. You said something.”

“I said a lot of somethings. You’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

It might have been the brandy, but she giggled. “You said ‘When you get into the ring and get knocked down, you have to want to get up one more time than you think you can.’ Why are you laughing?”

“Bill taught me that right before he knocked me out cold. I got back in the fight after I woke up though. Took me twelve fights before I got him on points. I can beat the snot out of his son Lee, but I’ve never taken the Old Man down.”

“I envy you.” She leaned against him.

“How so? I never pictured you as a boxer.” She slugged him in the shoulder. “On the other hand...”

Her smile faded away. “You may not have your wife, but you still have family. I remember you talking about Adama even back then. You had his family and the fleet to back you up. When my mom passed all I had was my career. The people around me were colleagues, but not one of them I would call a friend.” She slumped a bit. Holding her glass, she swirled the last of the reddish-amber liquid before she finished it off. “When are you off duty?”

“When I grabbed this.” He lifted the last of his own brandy to his lips. “Why?” He set the glass down and turned back to see her looking at him with a predatory look upon her face and only a scant few centimeters between them. “Oh, that’s why?” Her lips tasted like the brandy, her skin smelled familiar somehow. “Are you sure... I’m...”

“Neither of us was in the right place the last time we met, but I was smitten then. And I kicked myself for losing you once. I’m not making that mistake again.”

“What about the future? I was about to be forcefully retired, so I’m not sure what mine holds.”

She turned her eye up at the implied story in that comment. “Spend it with me then.” He was shocked by the offer. Barring the occasional dalliance, he hadn’t been in a relationship since... Since Elisia, truth be told. She would have liked the woman before him. He was slightly amused at how he was comparing his ex-wife to the woman currently taking her clothes off in front of him.

Their clothes and other items were quickly divested and John was struck by how much he had missed not just the sex, but the companionship.

Nearly an hour later, they collapsed in a heap on the floor, and Roslin rolled over to rest her head on his chest. “How old are you?” She laughed as she said it, and he could tell that she wasn’t trying to be mean. Mostly by the way her hands were doing wonderful things to his skin.

“Very? Why might I ask?”

“I haven’t had that much fun since I was a teenager.” Her breath started coming in gasps as he reciprocated her ministrations. “Oh my!” She stifled a gasp as his fingers did things to her that showed her that age had its advantages... Like experience.

- 1 day...

Adama looked at the hatch in C.I.C. There was a betting pool going on that the crew didn’t think he knew about. He looked at his watch. He was about to pick up the handset when Colonel Cavil entered the bridge. He saw Gaeta look over at the list and do a double take before looking straight at Adama. The name Husker had been placed on the pool’s chart in handwriting that the lieutenant knew quite well. The short-lived smug look on his face was the only sign that Adama gave the lieutenant as John moved over to the DRADIS. “Making your rounds?”

“You could say that.” The XO seemed a little nervous, and slightly out of breath.

Adama didn’t even grin. “Did you know that Carolanne loved Elisian Fields #5. Very distinctive smell.” John’s blush was epic, and Adama’s status as number one badass was firmly cemented once more in the C.I.C.’s crew’s mind right then and there.

On the Pegasus Helena Cain looked over her domain. She was as close to absolute ruler as she could be. Her every word was law. And her cabin was trashed by a five year old. Only not really. The young little lady had reorganized all of her stuff in such a way as to make things easier to find, and easier for a five year old to get into. Hera was going to be a monster when she became a teenager, of that she was sure. She wanted to be mad, but the sleeping child that was currently using the bed in her cabin tended to melt anyone that gazed upon her. She had tucked her in , and closed the door after the child had fallen asleep on her lap. The girl was making her feel like the parent that she had once wished to be... The one she almost... That road led to dark thoughts and emotions so she turned away from it. The child’s bodyguard on the other hand was stirring other emotions. The woman oozed ‘Dangerous’ from every pore. Helena didn’t know whether to fear her, mistrust her, or lust after her. She had always been attracted to strong people, and a woman like the oddly but somehow appropriately named Grace set off quite a few of her bells. The woman looked like an Vorba wood statue of an amazon of legend come to life. The dark skin, and tight hair covered a body that was as well muscled as it was feminine. She was still wondering what her voice sounded like, as the woman was as silent as a ghost. She also had a disturbing habit of suddenly being behind people without them noticing. Twice she had almost been shot when a startled marine drew on her, only to find himself on the ground, out of breath, and with both halves of his weapon in each of her hands. Half the marines feared her, half were in love with her, and nearly all of them seemed to wanted to train with her. All of them had been shot down with the enigmatic smile of her’s, and the shake of her head that was her trademark.

Right now Belzen was on the bridge while she was off duty. It was a slow evening and for once the whole fleet was not on alert for one reason or another. It set her on edge though. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but something felt like some thing just wasn’t right. She sat down at her desk and looked at the paperwork that was the bane of an admiral’s life. For once she decided to let it wait until tomorrow. She rubbed her temples as she felt the beginnings of a headache. She jumped slightly as two warm hands started to work on the knots in her neck. Tilting back she looked up into the chocolate brown eyes of Grace who smiled and shoved her head forward gently but firmly. She had been in the room with Hera, and of course Cain never heard her move anyway. Had the woman wanted to do her harm it would have already been too late. Her hands danced across Cain’s neck and shoulders and soon she was awash in a sea of bliss as the massage took away the problems of the day. Cain felt her body finally relax as the last of the stress went away with the final knot in her back.

Then she felt the hands wander to places she wasn’t sure were appropriate, but didn’t have the will to care. Sooner than she thought possible she was entranced by the amazon’s hands and ministrations. Her eyes opened to waiting lips, and she surrendered to the embrace of Graces arms. Grace pushed the paperwork on to the floor, and picked up Helena and placed her on her own desk as if she was a child. Even through their passionate lovemaking she still never heard a whisper or moan come from Grace. And she tried, oh by the gods she tried.

ZERO HOUR

The small station floating all alone in deep space that was know as Armistice Station had been built shortly after the Cylons withdrew according to the terms of the cease-fire that the Armistice had fostered. And every year a single Colonial Officer went out to the station to wait for twenty four hours to see if a representative of the Cylons would show up as stipulated by the terms of said Armistice. The rest of the year it sat powered down waiting for the activation codes to bring it back to life.

The ice crystals covering the desk, and chairs started to melt, and the long still air started to circulate as the life support cycled on. The lights went from sleep mode to active in the blink of an eye, but it would take an hour for the station to be habitable for humans. The ship approaching slowed down to let it. It took its time as it docked on the Colonial side of the station, and the airlock cycled out to meet the ship. Inside a man in a colonel’s uniform stood looking simultaneously bored, and irritated. He was going to miss his son’s graduation from Daedalus Junior Academy. Boxey had always had his mothers technical ability, and she had wanted him to go to it before she died. Now he would have no one there from his family to see him graduate. He was sure that Admiral Corman had sent him out here to punish him for not signing off on the technical reports that he knew were junk.

As soon as the hatch opened, he walked onboard to sit in his usual seat. He got out his rag and cleaned it and the desk off, and sat down. He leaned back to take a nap... *THUMP* he shot up out of his seat. The entire station shook. Soon the deck was vibrating. His cup tipped over and rolled off the table, but before it could hit the deck it froze. The gravity generator had shut down, and along with it the AG field. The lights flickered and followed. He was floating in the dark until a strange energy field seemed to cause everything around him to glow red. He kicked off from the wall and headed towards the corridor to see if he could see anything out the Cylon entryway. While there wasn’t a ship docked there he could see a ship that filled the viewport in the entryway. Looking like two Y’s stuck together at opposite angles to each, and making a weird wagon wheel shaped space ship. It looked just enough like a Cylon basestar to put the wings of Mercury under his feet as he flew back to his own shuttle. Strapping in, he tried to activate his distress beacon. It didn’t work. That’s when he noticed that nothing else on his ship worked either. He settled into his webbing knowing that there wasn’t a thing he could do to stop the Cylons from killing him, and no one would know what happened here. In a few seconds nothing was left to show that a space station had ever been here.

1200 hours in orbit near Scorpio Shipyards.

Admiral Helena Cain stretched languorously in her bed. She had spent the night with Grace after Hara’s parents had come to pick her up. Gaius was the first to notice, and gave Grace the night off, which surprised his wife. He commented that there was nowhere safer than on a Mercury class Battlestar so why not. Dera got the hint quite quickly, and as soon as the three had left she asked Jurgen to not interrupt for the rest of the evening. Her use of his first name being their code for privacy, he complied. She felt better than she had in years. She watched as the bodyguard slept. The woman was fitful, and sightly restless in her sleep. She actually was breathing sightly heavy.

‘Well, she deserve her rest after last night.’ She kissed the brow of the sleeping goddess as she got up and went to the shower.
When she got out of the shower she saw Grace sitting on the edge of the bed. There was a look in her eye of terror. Helena sat down on the bed beside her. “Bad dream?” Then the thing that she had hoped for became her worse nightmare. Grace spoke. Her voice, like the rest of her was beautiful. But her message wasn’t.

“They’re coming... No... They are here!” Just then the alarms went off all across the fleet. The Pegasus went to Condition One immediately.
Cain jumped up and grabbed her uniform. “You’re an oracle?” Grace nodded. “Get dressed, and come with me, maybe we can do some good together.” She grabbed Grace’s hand to pull her off the bed. She could feel something coming through that contact. She didn’t know what it was, but she liked it. Grace grabbed her clothes and they got dressed faster than they thought possible.

It was only five minutes, but it felt like an eternity before they reached C.I.C. “SITREP!”

“Cylon incursions at every colony with energy levels that are off the scale.” Belzen and Fisk were already in the pit, the signs of the ship coming alive rewarded her vigilance in constantly drilling them to perfection.

“How many?”

“I think ALL of them! I’m reading over fifty here at Scorpio alone. Admiral Nagala has just ordered us to go to a war footing, and prepare to repel the attack.” Fisk replied.

“Admiral, we’re getting a signal from the Cylons. Audio only.”

“Scan it, but put it on.’

The song, full of static had been playing for a few seconds so they heard it from the middle.

“ Oboete imasu ka me to me ga atta toki wo

Oboete imasu ka te to te ga fureatta toki

Sore wa hajimete no ai no tabidachi deshita

I LOVE YOU SO”

“What language is that?” Cain asked. Belzen shrugged. No one else knew either.

“It is a language from thousands of years ago.” The Voice that both is and isn’t Graces’ responded. “It is a love song.” Just then the ships systems started shutting down.

“Well I don’t like it! Shut that off!” She yelled, but it was already too late. The bridge went dark before anyone could move. “Frak!”

Out in the void thousands of Vipers headed to engage the thousands of Raiders that were in turn headed their way. Major on "Dipper" Spence leading the Red squadron out of the Atlanta watched his fighters from up. “Keep your eye’s peeled. They are probably going to engage us with missiles before they get into...” His DRADIS started to blur and distort. “Bandit, are you getting the same distortion I am?”

“Sa..ag...n..per....ou’re....aking..up....”

Suddenly a different broadcast come through. A woman’s voice, singing in a language he’d never heard before. “...Ima anata no shisen kanjiru, Hanaretetemo, Karada-juu ga atatakaku naru no...” He tried to switch it off right before his Viper shut down.

“What the Frak was that?” He looked out to see his wing men and the rest of the squadron in the same situation. All of their fighters are just drifting. He could see the Raiders with his Mark One Eyeball now. He couldn’t believe they were so cruel as to slow down to torture them like this. The Raiders looked nothing like the old ones he studied back in the academy though. They are bigger, and had forward swept wings with some kind of weapon pods on each tip. One slowed to a stop in front of him. He watched the red eye cycle side to side. He wasn’t going to give it the satisfaction of breaking or of shooting himself with his sidearm. He waited...

And then the Cylon did something that shocked the already shocked pilot even more. The fighter transformed into a giant Centurion.  Each one was armed with a rifle nearly as long as a Viper’s nose. He watched as it promptly slung the rifle over its shoulder and showed him its empty hands. Then he noticed that each fighter had done so. The one in front of him waved to get his attention.

A voice came over his speakers with a sound like someone clearing their throat. A young girls? It was different from the singer’s of only a moment ago but still very pleasant, and friendly sounding. “Welcome to Cylon transport service. Please sit back and enjoy the ride.” Then each robot grabbed a fighter and flew the disabled craft back to their own Battlestars. He was glad for the Jock smock’s ‘facilities’, because he had just pissed himself, and he was sure that others of his squadron had done the same if not worse. The funny thing was the voice sounded so much like his little sister’s. A friendly Cylon? He didn’t know how this war was going to end, but madness was not an unlikely one.

Galactica’s CIC was a madhouse of contradictory information. Adama couldn’t get a hold of anyone, as it seemed like the entire Colonial system had fallen in minutes. “Damn it Bill what are we going to do?” John had been on his way down to the hanger, still saying goodbye to Laura Roslin, when the feldercarb hit the vertical air impeller. “We don’t have any weapons onboard, and the only working fighters left are museum pieces that I having the deck chief trying to get void worthy.”

“First things first. We jump to Ragnar and see if we can get some ammo. Then we see what the Frak just happened. Is the Secretary still onboard?”

“Yes, there’s more than enough room in the hanger for their ship, so I asked the captain to stick around. He jumped at the chance to have a Battlestar as his bodyguard. What about Sheba, any word?”

“She’s in the infirmary. We don’t know what happened, but she passed out during that gods awful song.”

“What song?”

“They played some kind of song. And it seemed to effect the Vipers, Raptors. We don’t know if it was the song that did it, but she was the only pilot in her Viper. Damn it, she was only there to act as honor guard for the Secretary.”

“Don’t blame her!” The color in his cheeks was getting rather noticeable before he managed to calm himself down. “Sorry sir...”

“Don’t worry, I’m not. I blame that song.” He looked at his friend. “Oh my, you’ve got it bad. This is the strangest time, but congratulations. It’s about time you found someone special.” He looked over to the FTL station. “Gaeta, get us a course to Ragnar. ASAP!”

“Yes sir.”

He turned to John right before they jumped. “You took her to the observation bay didn’t you?” John’s face quickly resumed the same color, but this time for a completely different reason.

The nebulous gas giant know as Ragnar was a tempest on the best of days. When the battlestar arrived over the surface of the gas giant’s storms it was truly a maelstrom. “Secure from FTL, and send the access code to the Anchorage. I don’t want its guns opening up on us.” Cavil ordered. “I hate this place.” He said the last part to Adama in a voice that didn’t carry past the pit.

“You had the flu the last time we were here. You’re fine now. Grow a pair.”

“Mine work just fine thank you.” The look he got from his CO was worth it.

The ship descended into the atmo on contra gravity alone. The winds buffeting the ship made visuals spotty at best. “Dee, have we gotten the all clear yet?”

The communications officer looked over to Adama and shook her head. “I’m not even getting a carrier signal.”

“DRADIS?”

“In this soup?” Cavil shook his head.

“Take us to it’s last known location, and then it’s projected location.” With in fifteen minutes they found that their search proved fruitless. The station was gone. Even the independent beacons were missing. “They must have taken it out. Get us out of here.”

As they passed through the outer atmosphere they got a DRADIS contact. Upon reaching the edge they spotted the Berzerk Class ship Dervish in a decaying orbit. “That’s Avan’s ship. Dee see if you can get us a line. Gaeta, how long do they have?”

“No answer sir.” Dee responded immediately.

Felix look at the computer and ran the simulation again. “Three, maybe three and a half days before she deorbits.”

“Then there’s still a chance. Get down to the hanger, and see if you can...” That’s when a seven kilometer long ship appeared over them. “What the frak is that thing! It’s larger than a Warstar!”

“Colonial ships, do you need assistance?” A gruff voice announced.

John leaned over to Adama. “That ship does not look like a Cylon. And they at least sound human. What do you think?” There was an itch in the back of his mind. ‘Why did that ship look familiar?’, he thought to himself.

Adama shook his head. “That it is here, right now, is too damn coincidental.” he motioned to Dee, and picked up the hand set. “Galactica Actual, to unknown ship. We have been invaded by a hostile enemy force, and our sister ship is disabled. Can you led assistance with evacuating the damaged ship?”

“Sir” Dee ran her hands over her controls. We’re receiving a video transmission from the ship. I can patch it in to my station.”

They walked over to her station, and she moved aside. On the screen an older man and woman in an unfamiliar uniform stood on a large bridge. “Hello Commander Adama, if you like I can save both of your ships. All you have to do is hold your orbit. Hi, John.”

“Hello... Father.” John Cavil felt his head get light and his body get heavy, and then the floor threatened to come up and meet him.

Adama caught his friend before he hit the floor. He looked into the monitor. “What did you do to him?”

“I made him remember who he was.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, I guess you wouldn’t but we will do our best to fix that.”

TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!

John woke up in the medbay surrounded by marines and two guests. One he expected, the other he did not. Laura held his hand. “Good morning. Bill let me stay until you woke up, but he says I have to wait until he ‘debriefs’ you first. She leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “I told him I already de-briefed you, but he still won’t let me stay.” The wicked smile warmed his heart... or did he have a heart? He was a Cylon after all. Did he have a pump instead? He turned to Bill. The Commander had that damn Triad face on. He couldn’t read it if he tried.

Adama pulled out a chair, and sat down next to the bed. He unchained the cuffs that had been holding John down. “You deserve that much. So tell me. What do you remember?”

“I’m a Cylon.”

“No... Really?” He pulled back the privacy drape that had been acting as a wall between him and the rest of the medbay. He saw the sleeping forms of Sheba, Boomer, a knuckledragger named Doral and the biggest surprise was their Head Nurse Leroy Conoy. Conoy had been the one to help him get over his grief by getting the counseling sessions. He had been on the Galactica almost as long as Bill and he had. “Why are there so many here? And why are you the only one that has woken up so far?”

“Because I was a spoiled brat.”

“I’m sorry?”

“When my parent made me, I was the first among many. A number One. The first of the first line of Biological Cylons. I felt that I was better than the others... Better than their favorite. I don’t see a Daniel here. I guess they kept him away from me.” He rubbed his hands where the cuffs had chaffed. “I was not a nice man. I wasn’t even a nice Cylon.” He hung his head in shame as he went on. “I had planned on sabotaging his line, and erasing his existence from the minds of the others. I even had grand plans to wipeout humankind to prove that I was better than this body.” Damn it Bill I could have destroyed Elisia even before I met her. Or you , or Laura, or Starbuck, or... or...everyone....” He broke down crying. “I didn’t know what I was doing. And they are punishing me for it. Punishing them for my childish acts.”

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” A woman’s voice from the other side of the curtain spoke.
John lifted his head. “There’s more to that quote... I could never find it though. I looked through every book of scripture in the twelve colonies. Hello mother.”

Two marines stepped back, their weapons ready but not quite pointing at the guest. A woman, apparently in her fifties, stood there wearing the strange white uniform that he had seen on the monitor. “Of course not. That book had never been published in the colonies. It is from a holy book from the original Earth.”

Both Adama, and Cavil looked at her. “The monotheists of the twelve colonies are fallen descendants of the Pre-Kobolian Christians. They only had a few of the books, and none of them were complete after the fall. The colonists had fallen back to a primitive state after their computers lost a lot of data over the centuries it took to travel to the colonies. Others started to worship the very ships of the fleet as gods, as their names came from histories that were written in actual book form. History became legend, which in turn became their religion. In the end they formed the old religions anew. We had copies of that book in our computer. You read it years ago when we gave you access to our database. You read all of the religious books of Old Earth and said they were lies to sooth the masses. It’s ironic that you are now known as the Preacher, since you were an atheist as a child.”

One of the marines mumbled something. Adama pulled him forward. “What was that Mr. Maldonaldo?”

“I said that was dark blaspheme, sir. We should burn them for such...”

“From your mouth to the Gods' ears, now shut the frak up will you?” The look Adama gave him would have ripped armor off of bulkheads.

“Yes sir, sorry sir.”

“Yes you are, you are also relieved, go find me a marine with a brain.” After the marine left, he turned back to the lady in white. “So you are from Earth, or the Earth that was?”

“We are what your scrolls call the 13th tribe. Only there is a bit of history you are missing.”

“Somehow, I feel there is more than a few things...”

She smiled her enigmatic smile and nodded. “You’re right. But first we need to go back to the beginning of Kobol.” She sat down on a chair on John’s right side. “Your hand.”

“Before I do, what was the rest of the quote. Something tells me it’s important, but I can’t remember what.”

She smiled. “Then you did learn. The rest is: ‘For now we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope, love these three; but the greatest of these is Love.’ You were never able to love before, nor feel empathy of any kind. Through your years among the humans you learned all of their gifts, and weaknesses. To live is to feel, and to feel is to be open to pain as well as joy. While you were out, your memories were uploaded to your brethren who wished to learn what you have learned these years. Your line may chose to live like you once again.”

She took his hand and spoke out loud to the people gathered around, but in his head images exploded as she spoke. The colony of Kobol was founded after the Great War. The Great War had burned whole systems to cinders and Sol was one of the systems that had only held on by a thread. The outer planets were fine, but Earth and Mars were so badly damaged that it would take centuries before life would be possible on their surfaces. And life on Mars was not a guarantee. It could go either way. Pandora had been shattered back into the asteroid belt from which it had once been built.

The survivors had formed a federation of worlds, and Kobol had been one of the regional capitols. While they were only one of fifteen regional capitols they were one of the largest and most prosperous. The federation was defended by the Planetary Defense Force, a combined arms force that was part space navy, and part guard force. The flag ships were the battle fortresses known as Star Fortresses which were the successors to the Super Dimensional Fortresses of the First wars, and the Great Wars. These massive ships were part cityship, and part battlestation. Built around the idea of a massive ship that would act as a moving fleet base, they provided the shield to protect the federation from the growing treat of the growing universe. Humans had finally stepped out into the dark and brought the light with them.

And then the light showed them the evil they had inside themselves. The First Empire of Humanity was found in a dozen systems far from the rest of humanity. They had run during the First war, and slowly built up a xenophobic empire that rivaled the federation. The first battles were mere matchstrikes in the conflagration to follow.

The great ship Artemis had survived the war only to be nearly destroyed when Kobol itself had been attacked. The ship had escaped but the crew died of radiation exposure. Meanwhile the war raged on Kobol until even the survivors escaped the ruined planet.

Not all of the survivors on Kobol were human. They had had built synthetic humans in one of their many projects to enhance humanity. The Replicants were given equal rights; but humans being humans, not everyone treated them as equals. When the colony fell, so did society. Humans started to treat synths as less than human. Fights turned to near warfare, and when the exodus came not everyone was welcome on every ship.

So the humans went one way, and replicants in the other. Thirteen colony ships out of fifty ships that had been built managed to leave before the fall of Kobol. The replicants didn’t care where the humans went so long as they were left alone. They started another colony fifteen light-years away from Kobol. In five hundred years they had effectively recreated Earth from the data banks of the colony ship, and they began a paradise of sorts.

But no sort of paradise lasts forever. A group of humans had survived in bunkers on Kobol. They had rebuilt enough of an infrastructure to live on and some of them planned to seek out and wipe out the synthetics. The Second Empire had used them as pawns in their effort to ‘cleanse’ the universe of AIs of all types. Kobol’s main export had been weapons of all types. And so their moon’s bunkers were still full of their unused wares... unused until that fateful day. Thousands of nuclear missiles had been launched in the direction of their colony shortly after the Second Empire razed the planet with their own nuclear weapons. The people of Kobol had probably never stood a chance, and they died without getting any kind of message off. The second war of Kobol destroyed not just the last vestiges of civilization on Kobol, and killed the last survivors, but it plunged the planet into a nuclear winter that lasted for centuries. They had used that as a ruse in their own attack on New Earth. The weapons had hidden the Imperial attack until the last moment, and destroyed nearly every ship in the system.

That brought them to the end of the second Earth. They had been finally been hit by the last attack and it wiped out the last of their orbital defenses and the last missiles fell on the now helpless cities below. The five Cylon/replicant survivors were part of a team of replicants that had managed to recover the uploading process they had used in the beginning to program their blank bodies. Now they used it to upload their existing memories into exact copies of their dying bodies; effectively giving them a type of immortality, albeit with certain limitations. Each upload had a chance of data loss. Significant amounts of hard radiation could block the transfer. The upload could wind up in the Hub’s buffer if there wasn’t a body of the same type ready. Later after they had met their robotic brethren, they would find out that the Raider, and Centurion uploads were easier. Easier in they had a lot of the blanks in storage, where as the individual models of Bio-Cylons were somewhat less likely to be on hand.

The replicant’s ship while advanced, did not have an FTL. It was only supposed to be for shuttling to and from their ark. The ark itself would have downloaded every replicant on Earth and allowed them to escape human space. Alas it was not to be. The ark and every soul that downloaded was lost in the attacks that swept through the system from one end to the other. They had awoken in their lunar baser over a hundred years after the battle and fled in the modified shuttle.

Adama rubbed his head as all of the information washed over him. “Pardon me Madam Tigh... All of this happened thousands of years ago. How does it affect us today. I mean, first off, why are you here? Okay you found the Cylons, and they found the ship, but it still doesn’t tell me why you sent in people like John here. I hate to admit it, but if what you are telling me is true then you could have wiped the colonies off the starmaps decades ago and not even tried that hard.” He looked around the medbay. “Instead you sent in your own people without a clue as to who, or what, they were. Okay I can understand teaching them about us... ‘First know your enemy’ is taught to every first year. But why make them stick out. Every person here is a valuable member of my crew, and some of them are like... No they ARE family. John here I would count as both. We still hate the Cylons for what they did to our planets, and people. And knowing that Cylons walk among us will cause unknown numbers of people to see a Cylon in any of their neighbors that they hold a grudge against. Even if you all had chrome skin, there are people in the colonies that will not welcome you at all. Their fear, and hatred of your kind will...” The alarm went off interrupting Adam’s speech. He grabbed a hand set. “Adama here, sitrep!” His normally unflappable stoic face paled. “This may all be for naught. According to comms, the Pegasus just jumped away from Scorpia. And knowing Cain, she will come here first to rally any ships she can. She hates Cylons for killing her entire family. When she finds you here, she will open fire, and maybe ask questions later.”

Pegasus erupted from jump space into the middle of nowhere. Her hull was scared by damage that had left huge gouges in her once pristine armor. Her bow nameplate had a huge horizontal gash that ran through five of the seven letters. Numerous locks were stuck open and air was streaming out until crewmembers could seal them up. The irony was the fact that it wasn’t from combat, but damage suffered pulling away from the shipyards. Cain stood in the pit and fumed. Around her Pegasus slowly came back to life. If it hadn’t of been for Gaius and his family, they would be helpless before the guns of the basestars that jumped into orbit around the shipyards. Grace was standing watch over the comatose bodies of Dera, and Hera. And the look of pain on her face had turned Helena into a Fury incarnate. Between her and Gaius they had managed to purge the last of the corrupted code out of the ship’s systems. It would take days to clean the Vipers, and Raptors, but the Pegasus would be ready when the time came.

Colonel Belzen watched Admiral Cain as she stood on in the pit. “We have half an hour. Go to her before we kick you off the bridge.”

For a second Cain almost thought he was trying to mutiny, but she knew better. He wanted her off the bridge so she could calm down, and in turn so that the watch could calm down before they jumped in to battle. “I could shoot you for that, you know.”

“If you did that, who would be the best man at the wedding? Fisk?” She tried, but failed to keep a straight face. She had announced the engagement right after they finished purging the code, and not even the gods themselves would stop her from protecting the ones she loved. She had failed Lucy, and their parents, but when she put on her uniform she swore to never let the Cylons hurt her loved ones again. Long ago a great officer had taught her to focus, so she took a deep breath and followed her XO’s advice.

“You win, but only half an hour.” It would take nearly that long for the drives to respool after the blind jump. Then she did something she normally didn’t do in public. She patted him on the shoulder. “Thank you. I’m glad you’re here to be my compass sometimes.” Her smile went away from her face, and the fury rose to her eyes again. “I can feel the darkness Jurgen, and if anything happens to that little girl, I don’t know if I can stop myself. It may be up to you to reign me in if I go too far. If I become the Fury again I don’t have the Preacher here to knock me on my ass.”

Jurgen understood. “She reminds you of little Sheba, doesn’t she?” Many years ago Helena Cain had lost her only daughter to a childhood disease. She had been only ten months old, and it had taken a toll on her marriage. Her dark side had nearly cost her commission as it had with her relationship, and they had divorced shortly afterward. She still wore the uniform, but she never saw Garris again. Jurgan and his wife had taken her in for a while, and she owed him a great debt. Their love had quell the Fury within her. Quell, but not quench. The Fury would always be a part of her.

A part that was always on the other side of her walls. It was the part of her that would let her do the hard things if she had to... A sad part of her mind pointed out that if he really had tried to mutiny she would have shot him herself, but she was glad that he was on her side. She looked at his smile and she knew that not only could he see the darkness but he chose to stand next to her anyway. “Nevermind, just go.”

She found herself outside the door to the medbay almost without remembering how she got there. She entered and saw Grace standing in her usual position behind Hera’s bed, but she looked shaken, but not shattered like Cain would have been. She didn’t know if it was the oracle in her that let her roll with the punches like that, but it was strangely calming to watch. The bed next to it was Dera’s and she was as still as a corpse. Only her breathing, and the monitors showed that she was still alive. She stood next to Grace. No words needed to be said. One hand slid in to the other as if they belonged. “She will awaken.” Grace whispered. Her other hand touched the forehead of the sleeping beauty.

“When?”

“When the old and new are seen for what they are.” The Voice again.

“What does that mean?” Grace smiled, and brought their hands to her cheek. Helena could feel the love flowing through the contact like an electrical current.
Grace shook her head in the negative, and embraced Helena. They touched foreheads... And Helena’s mind exploded. A Cylon ship unfolded in front of a freighter. She knew that she couldn’t fire missiles without hitting the ship. When Grace pulled away Cain was staggered. She was in love with an oracle. One thing was for sure, it was definitely making her life interesting.

“I need...” Grace’s smile was all the leave she needed. She ran for the CIC.

Belzen looked startled when she came running in, but he also looked relived. “Admiral on the deck... Good news Admiral, we just found the freighter Scylla and managed to convince them that we aren’t Cylons.”

“We need to send them emergency jump coordinates NOW.”

“Yes sir. Shaw, get on it!” While the lieutenant at the TAC station started working on it he looked to her with an arched eyebrow. “Grace have a vison?”

“Yes.” Was all she said. She knew that this was highly irregular, and that she could easily be brought up on charges, or relieved of command if...

“Jump coordinates sent.” They watched as the freighter acknowledged, and jumped away. The young woman behind the display look at them with the same question she saw mirrored on just about all of their faces.

“Prepare to receive guests.” As if on cue four basestars appeared on their DRADIS, one directly behind where the freighter had just been. “Are we spun up?”

“Yes”

“Then let’s not wait around shall we?” The Pegasus vanished before the basestars could do anything. She hated running from a fight, but her ship was in no shape to go toe to toe with a tugboat, let alone a Basestar.

A little over an hour later and just outside of Rangar’s orbit, the Pegasus jumped back into the fray. Deep in Pegasus’ CIC Admiral Cain looked at Ragnar and fumed. It looked like the enemy had beaten her here as well. The enemy ship was huge. It was easily over six or seven kilometers from stem to stern. The Galactica, and Dervish were just sitting there. Obviously they had been disabled by the same attack that had crippled her ship. Dr. Baltar was under the Weapons Control Computer bay, ripping parts out, and Aerilon-rigging the rest. He slid out from under the bay with a roll of vac-tape in his mouth. “Will it work?” She asked the disheveled scientist.

He looked distracted, he looked frazzled, he looked mad, and then he looked at her. “Send them to Hades with my blessing.” He stood up and straightened his formerly expensive suit. The stains, and tears would be impossible to clean or repair, but he wasn’t paying anything but cursory attention to his attire anyway. “You have missiles, and guns at your command.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. Mr. Belzen, load all tube with heavies.”

“Loaded, and getting solutions. Admiral, we stand a chance of hitting our own at that range.”

“I know... I know.” She turned to Gaius. “Did you know that I served directly UNDER Adama’s XO John Cavil on my snotty cruise. He was the CAG at the time, and he showed me how to wear a uniform like it was a religious calling. His wife... Was a friend of my foster family. He is the closest thing I have to a father left in the universe. I guess I will be sending him to meet her. FIRE!”

Gaius didn’t know what to say. He had looked at his hands with new eyes. He would be responsible for the death of people that she cared about, and it didn’t matter in the least that she was the one pulling the trigger. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I, but I’m still the one giving the order.”

The ready missiles fired, and the reloads were sliding into the launchers as the first indications something different was happening. Only two fighters came out to meet the massive swarm of missiles. The next launch fired as soon as they were ready, only to be followed by a third. The first accelerated at only half power, while the next wave accelerated a little bit faster, the third even faster. The idea was for all of the missiles to reach the Cylon ship at the same time. Halfway there, the missiles broke open and the smaller seeker heads streaked out on wildly divergent courses. Dozens of the warheads were ECM Dazzlers while the rest were the true nukes.

On the first fighter a red light swept back and forth faster and faster. “Ghost One to Artemis actual. We have radiological’s inbound. Are we free to engage?”

“Artemis actual, target the missiles only.” The gruff voice of Father announced it over an open channel. Ghost One looked to her sister. The red eye on her visor was steady. “Stay away from the flak.” he added. She shook her head. Father had a tendency to state the obvious, but he did it to remind them that he didn’t want them taking unreasonable risks.

“Shall we dance?” Her thrusters shut off and separated from the lower section of her frame. They swung out and down as two arms unfolded from the top of her fuselage. They were halfway between fighter, and solider mode, in a form that Artemis had informed them was called the Guardian mode. Now they got to see why. They might have had only about half of the fighters acceleration, but the nimbleness of the Raider went off the chart. The two arms helped them in their maneuvers, but their main reason to be out was to steady the rifles they had been equipped with. These weren’t the coilguns the humans used, they were relics from the Artemis’ armory. A true energy weapon.

Particle beam canons were still not wide spread since the Cylons still didn’t know how to replicate some of the parts in small enough sizes, but they could use them. As such, only their aces were issued the powerful but short ranged weapons. Hatches opened all over the Raider’s armor as well. Small paint can sized cylinders were arrayed within the armored launchers.

On the Pegasus Belzen watched the two contacts that came out to intercept the swarms of missiles that were headed towards the Cylon starship. He almost felt sorry for the two toasters that were all that stood between the missile swarms, and their ship. He watched as the range grew sorter, and shorter. Then his DRADIS filled with icons as the two fighters just became a swarm of their own.

The micro-missiles were only considered short range inside of a gravity well, as they didn’t carry a lot of fuel, so the two waited until the last second to launch them. Hundreds of micro-missiles leapt from the launchers, shrouding the two Cylons in smoke that slowly dissipated into the void. They didn’t wait for the smoke to finish dissipating before they used their FTL drives to jump half way back to the Artemis. The sudden void of the jump event caused the clouds to collapse back on themselves again.

The missiles intersected each other, and the first wave exploded. It wiped out dozens, and then hundreds of warheads from all three waves out in the first few seconds. Only ten missiles remained, and the two switched into soldier mode to aim their rifles as accurately as possible. Each started to take shots at the approaching missiles. The first missile to die took out one of it’s neighbors, but is was the only one to not die alone. One was hit in the thrusters and sent on a chaotic course before exploding. Another simply died, without even an explosion. Two others exploded in an eye dazzling glare as two shots hit each missile simultaneously.

When their DRADIS and optics cleared up the other four were almost to the Artemis and the colonial ships. A quick communication between the two sent them to jump in front of the defenseless colonial ships. Each took out the missile in their killzone. That left two ship-killer nukes to impact with the gigantic...energy shields? The slower kinetic rounds made circles that looked like rain on glass as they hit the barrier; and that was about as much damage as they did.

On the bridge of the Pegasus Cain stood trembling. “Jurgen, may I have your firearm?” He was so stunned at what he had just witnessed that he handed it to her without question. She checked it, and pointed it at... A powerful hand stopped her arm from reaching her head. A shocked Jurgen stood by as Grace held her arm and looked at him the same way a parent looked at a child that had done something particularly stupid. He retrieved his weapon from the unresisting fingers of the Admiral’s hand.

“Why?” Grace’s sad smile answered her, but her surprise was not over. Grace handed her Lucy’s doll. The only thing she had left of her family.

“Oh we are so fraked!” Frisk commented as no less than fifteen basestars jumped in to the area. The fact that they were dwarfed by the massive war ship didn’t really add anything to their sense of menace.

The communications lit up, and Lt. Shaw examined the signal. She stepped back in shock. “Sirs’ you need to see this, because I don’t believe what I’m seeing.”

The video showed the bridge of the Cylon ship. Humans, or at least they looked human stood beside a gold Centurion from the first war, and surrounded by what had to be newer models. But the biggest surprise was the Colonial Officer standing there among them. Admiral Nagala. He did not look happy. “Hello Helena. It’s a funny thing. The war is over and they won without a shot, but not without cost.” The codewords he used told her that he wasn’t under duress, but not free to talk over the comm.

“So why are we still alive. Are we to be their Baggets?”

“If you two insist in talking in code, why don’t we give you a set of flags, and you can perform semaphore for us.” The balding man next to him looked at the two of them. “Look I’ll make it simple. WE don’t want to fight YOU any more. Frankly you just aren’t worth it. We won, so we are dictating the terms. I want YOU to bring the Baltar family over here. You will find that they are awake. I see your friend is already checking up on that.” Helena turned to see Grace exiting the C.I.C. at a run. Her heart ached to follow her, but her duty was here.

“I will not surrender them to you for anything.” She looked around. The bridge crew nodded their approval. “We would rather die first.” This startled the old man.

“You would die to protect them? You want to hear a funny? So would I.”

Helena felt a little week in the knees. “Why?”

“One always protects family.” He saw the stunned look on her face. “Yes, Dera is one of us. She didn’t even know that she was a part of the plan. We sent biological Cylons to your worlds to learn how to...”

“Kill us? Like your kind always do?” The Fury in her mind left a ringing in her ears.

“No you stupid child. To learn how to love. Turn around.” Grace and the Baltar’s were standing behind her. Hera let go of Grace’s hand and walked to ‘Aunty’ Cain. “Can you honestly say you hate her?”

The Fury warred with something else inside Cain for a moment and died. Belzen visibly relaxed as she slumped her shoulders. He had seen the Fury at it worse. He had never seen it fade like this. She smiled at him before she returned her attention back to the man on the screen. “No, and if you did want us dead, we wouldn’t have been able to stop you any way, would we have?”

“No chance in Hell... Hades, that is.”

“I thought so.” Helena bent down and held her hand out. Hera took it. In that instant she knew that she would do anything to protect her, even if that meant betraying the memory of her parents, and her sister Lucy. She rubbed the child’s hair. “I have someone that would like to meet the whole lot of you. Belzen, you have the conn.” She picked up Hera who hugged her fiercely. “What are your terms.”

“Leave the guns, bring the doll.” Helena Cain nearly laughed when she realized that this whole time she had been holding the tiny doll.

The Pegasus’ hanger had one cargo shuttle that was unarmed. She was tempted to bring a nuke along but she knew they would detect it long before they could run. Grace helped Dera, who was still weak, to her seat. Once they were all seated Cain leaned back in the co-pilot’s chair. Their pilot Johnny “Deep 6” Jensen pulled the hatch closed on his way in. “Pre-check complete Admiral.”

“Good, let’s get this over with.” Once they launched, she hit the switch to swivel the chair around. She looked at Dera. “I need to know what we are walking in to. They said you were a sleeper, do you remember anything?”

The shattered woman sat there holding her husband’s and her daughter’s hands. “My whole life has been a lie. Every single memory from before I arrived on Picon was fabricated by Father, and the other four. Tory dropped me off in front of the hotel five days before the Expo, and wiped even that from my mind. I was only ten weeks old, and they just left me there.”

Gaius held her hand tighter as she sobbed. “You became more than the sum of your programming could ever be. You saved my life at that conference, and after...” His heart ached to see her this way. He pulled her in to as close of an embrace as they could while still strapped into their seats.

She started crying again. Hera started crying as well, and they held each other. Cain looked at the devastated family. She hated doing it but she had a job to do. “You were programmed to find Gaius, why?”

She expect a lot of reactions, laughter was not one of them. “I was supposed to get a job within the defense industry; specifically with him no matter what.” She wiped her eyes. “What I got was a loving husband, a beautiful daughter, and some of the strangest friends.” Her smile disappeared in a flash. “Oh by the gods I can’t believe what they did... They must have used me to get the inside access to see our code. We spent years making the Command Navigation Program flawless, and they knew the code as well as I did.” She continued sobbing as Gaius held her.

Admiral Cain looked at the doll in her hand. It was burnt, and dirty, but she never cleaned it off because some of the blood on it was her sister’s. Hera looked at the doll in her hands. “Sad tales seem to be the rule of the day. See this?” Hera nodded. “This used to be my sister’s. In the last days of the war we were just little children, she was not much older than you are now. We were hiding with our father when the attack came. He was wounded, and dying when he told us to run. So we did. Explosions were happening all around and one of them blew up a building we had been running past. Lucy fell, and hurt her leg. I begged her to get up, but she couldn’t. The Shiny’s were coming... the old Cylons. They shot a man running away in front of me, and my mind snapped. I ran. And I kept running... I ran and hid until it was quiet. When I went back hours later, she was gone. The only thing I found was this doll. So I keep it to remind me of the importance of family.” Grace’s hand touched the tear that was drifting down her cheek. “I think my idea of family is changing.”

“Admiral, story time is over.” The pilot pointed to the hanger bay that opened as they approached.

They entered the bay and had to hit the thrusters as gravity made it presence known. He set the shuttle down on the large yellow and black rectangle that a being that looked like a human in a space suit directed them to. They could see the hatch close, and fans on each side started to spin. It took a few minutes, but once the pressure balanced, they opened the door. The woman in the space suit gestured for them to exit the shuttle. They did, and were pleasantly surprised that there were no centurions in the bay. The woman opened the seal on her helmet and removed it. Dera looked at her face. Except for the lack of a scar, and her short brown hair, they could have been twins... No make that triplets. That meant that Sheba was also a Cylon as well.

“Hello My name is Janet, I will be your tour guide of sorts while you’re here. We need you to exit the bay as John is going to be arriving soon with the other sleepers from the Galactica. You just happened to get here first. It seems that there was a little bit of trouble on the Galactica.”

Half an hour earlier Adama had watched as the twin robots from the mystery ship had somehow saved them from Cain’s foolish attempt to save them from the Cylons. He had remembered how she raw she had been when she was one of Preacher’s Nuggets on the Olympic. Back then he had taken her under his wing and molded her into a decent officer instead of the glory hound she was rapidly turning out to be. He guessed that she had believed that they were dead already when see had attacked. If he had been in command of the Pegasus, he might have made the same call.

He was leading one of the Cylon leaders, and... HIS Cylon officers, along with Apollo, Flattop, and Starbuck (Who looked like she wanted to start a fight, but didn’t know with whom.) to the hanger when he noticed that something didn’t feel right. The corridor was deserted, and at this time of day it should be full of people. “John, Lee, Zak, Kara, we have a problem.” He looked at Boomer and the guards who were following a couple of steps behind to give them privacy for the walk.

“Ambush” John looked around. “Maldonaldo?”

“That or some of Corman’s goons.” he turned to Ellen Tigh. “WE have a situation.”

“So I gather. Our deaths are unimportant, your lives are. We will protect you.” Adama couldn’t help but notice how Boomer stood taller with Ellen’s words.
Looking at the new addition to his crew Adama smiled. ‘Was I ever that squeaky?’

John was having nothing of it. “What? Listen ma’am you are on our ship, so we do it the...” He was interrupted by fire alarms blaring up and down the corridor.

Adama looked at the female Cylon leader with a slight bit of anger. “Are you fraking with my ship?” The ship was supposed to be immune to attacks like the one she was casually doing without even being in contact with the ships systems. Nothing was networked, and there were cutoffs everywhere.

“Yes, and you should know that there are twenty-five heavily armed marines up ahead. I just flooded the room they are in with fire suppressant foam, or would you have rather I vented the atmosphere? If you speak loudly I can transmit to your people in C.I.C., the local lines have been severed.”

Adama’s eyebrow went up, and that was the only sign that he was impressed. It took another five minutes for a squad of marines to move in and arrest Maldonaldo and the mutinying marines. Two of the ambushers didn’t survive the arrest, and Adama wasn’t too surprised to find Ares tatoos on their arms.

“We will have to talk about vetting security a little better next time I visit.” Ellen quipped. “A girl could feel like she’s not wanted.”

Lee Adama was not amused. “All jokes aside, that was too close. What if something happened to any one of us. We have people on our side that have been spoiling for a fight for far too long. A fight we can’t win, but by the gods that doesn’t seem to stop them from trying to start it anyway.”

The smile left her face. “Ever since we left the medbay I had been scanning your video feeds. I actually expected something like that. My shuttle has two dozen centurions ready to rescue me, but even if that proved impossible my death is not permanent. Your’s on the other hand would be just the excuse they would have needed so I was broadcasting it as well. Everything I saw your people saw.”

Commander Adama laughed. “That’s why you let me say something first.”

“It wasn’t about ego, it was about politics.” John looked like he was tasting something foul as he spoke. “It always is.”

“I’m not sure which is worse.” She wasn’t sure how he managed it, but the commander managed to look both amused, and disgusted at the same time. The man was an enigma, to be sure, but an intresting one. That he became friend with John Cavil wasn’t a surprise. Both were strategic thinkers, and they didn’t take impossible for an answer. He rolled with the punches and didn’t even let it slow him down. This was a man she was sure that she could learn to like.

Cavil had seen that look before though. He had his own thoughts. “Why did you expect that?”

“Remember order 66?”

“Kill all humans? What Cylon doesn’t?” He facepalmed himself. “What non-sleeper Cylon can forget it, I mean.”

“Did you know that a HUMAN programmed that into the Cylon database?”

“Why would someone be that stupid?”

“What if that someone wanted a war between humans and Cylons?” She stopped in her tracks and looked at the group. “Sheba, if you fought Starbuck here in a knife fight, who would win?”

“I don’t know, we’re both really good. I’m faster, but she more skilled.” The smirk that Starbuck gave her told her who Kara thought would win. She punched her friend good-naturedly. “Okay, a lot more.”

“Okay Boomer, after these two got done fighting, how hard would it be to take out the winner if you had a rifle and cover?”

“One shot if they aren’t expecting it. The survivor would be tired, and not expecting a bullet...” The silence stretched out.

“Someone not only put that code in our programming, but they also made sure we went rouge by making sure that the first Cylons knew about the differences between freedom and slavery, and then pushing your society to treat us as slaves. We found the code, and removed it from their database, but left the line, and the identity of the person who added it to the code. A man named Marvin Karibdis, supposedly a saboteur from a rival company, but in reality a servant of the puppetmaster that has been sent to send both of our races to war. He added the code, and for his reward he was one of the first to die. That’s ironically one of the reasons why we didn’t fire on any of the various ships you’ve sent across the line. We knew that someone was pushing YOUR buttons this time.” Bill and John looked at each other when she mentioned the plural form. Ships, not ship. Bulldog hadn’t been the only one the brass had hung out to dry. “Yes, your’s was just the first. The fleet sent about fifteen probe flights across the line after that.”

“How many did you capture?” Apollo asked. As a JAG officer, her testimony to a Colonial fleet officers violation of the treaty meant that he would have to start an investigation.

“Not a one, young man. We would just jump a base star right on top of them wherever they appeared, and that tended to scare them away. But we do have sensor data to prove it. And to answer the question you’re about to ask, we will not be asking for charges to be brought against the fleet officers. In fact, we have it on good authority, that the person responsible was arrested not too long ago.” Lee and his father traded looks. It seemed that Corman had a few more things to answer for.

Caprica City was a madhouse. People were driving out of the city in droves since no spacecraft seemed to be working after the strange Cylon broadcast. President Richard Adar sat in the bunker under the Quorum building along with ten of the twelve members of the Quorum of Twelve. The other two were in the elevator right now, but Adar didn’t look forward to their arrival. His bodyguards were watching everyone in the room, and that included the other politician’s bodyguards. Adar knew that the tensions between the Colonies had never been the best, and it had only been the Cylon war that brought them together after the centuries of internecine warfare that did nothing but waste resources. The doors opened and Gemini’s Quorum member exited the elevator alone.

He looked inside the elevator to see scorched walls and burnt bodies. Iblis DeCount walked out of the charnel house as if nothing had occurred. Every bodyguard and marine in the room pulled their weapons and aimed them at the impossible image before them. “Sire DeCount, what is the meaning of this?”

“My dear Adar, may I call you Richard.” Adar noticed that it wasn’t phrased as a question. “My time here is finished. And so are all of yours. Soon the Cylons will rain down their nuclear weapons and the colonies will be sterilized of your kind.”

The Tauron representative, Sire Gellar erupted. “Are you one of the Cylon agents?”

“No you pitiful fool, I am as far above them as you are above the common dagget. Although in your case, maybe not.”

Adar stepped forward. “What are you?”

“Let me show you.” He raised his hands. The bodyguards, all of whom he had shaken hands with less an hour ago when he went to meet Sire Domra, saw him blur and when they spotted him again their training kicked in when he attacked their assigned representative. Adar watched as each and every bodyguard killed a Quorum member, then shot each other. The marines held their weapons at the ready, but didn’t move.

“Why?”

“Because, my dear Richard, with them out of the way I can not be countermanded when I order a retaliatory attack from any surviving forces.” Adar laughed in his face. The marines aimed their weapons at him, and he found that he couldn’t move to save his life. Which was literally true. “Why are you laughing Richard?”

“Because they won’t follow your orders.” His giggles were starting to annoy the man, or what ever Iblis was.

The rage in Iblis eyes was a physical force that stifled his breath. “Why won’t they, my dear Richard?”

“Because this room is under constant surveillance by the Admiralty during an emergency.”

“You lie, that would be against the Constitution. You are buying for time. Hoping the nuclear fire will break the hold I have on your men.”

“What nuclear fire? You fool! While you were gone the Cylons offered a Peace settlement.” The rage in Iblis’ eyes was the reward he needed to go on. “This isn’t an Invasion, it’s a Peace Conference. They disabled our ships, so we wouldn’t open fire on them, and to prove that they are serious. Admiral Nagala went with them to round up all of the ships that managed to slip out of their net. My dear Iblis, may I call you Idiot. You, and whoever you work for must be the shared enemy they spoke of. By now, marines who have never met you are on their way here. If you surrender, I promise that no harm will come to you. From what the Cylon leader said, I don’t think you will get the same from him.”

Iblis watched as his plans fell apart one by one. The Cylons must have removed the programming that his agent had installed all those years ago, and now they wanted revenge, not on the Colonials, but on the ones that set them against one another. Just then the second elevator opened to reveal twenty marines.

The marines in the room opened fire on their brethren without hesitation. Each marine seeing a Cylon Centurion charging the President, did their duty and laid down their lives to protect him from the invading metal monsters. One of them even called for reinforcements from the very same men he was attacking. He died believing they must have been killed first, never knowing that he killed three of the very men he was calling for. The last of the marines in the room fell to the second wave of marines. Adar stood next to Iblis as the chaos raged around them.

“You seem to have lost your last pawn.” Adar raged. “You killed all of them, but still you are ours?”

“Who are you talking to sir?” One of the marines watched from his point at the door as the President seemed to be talking to himself.

“Sire DeCount. Can’t you see him? He’s standing right...” The burnt walls, and bodies. “You’re not even here anymore.”

Iblis clapped. “Very good Richard. Go ahead, ask them what they saw.”

The president look at the marines surround the room. “What did the video show Colonel?” He spotted Colonel Bisbe being helped up by one of his men. The wound to his leg didn’t look too bad, but Adar wasn’t a medic.

“Everyone stated talking to the open elevator, then the bodyguards started to open fire on the Quorum members before they shot each other. We managed to unlock the security override by the time the marines pointed their weapons at you, but we still couldn’t figure out who you were talking to. You mentioned Sire Iblis, but he left an hour ago. Is this some kind of Cylon trick sir?”

Adar tried to answer him, but found that his mouth wouldn’t work. He turned to face the image of Iblis. “Do you know the legend of Pandora? Goodbye Adar, it hasn’t been fun.” Adar felt a ringing in his ears, and a burning in his gut. He stumbled slightly, and one of the marines grabbed him before he fell. His eyes grew wide as he felt the pain begin. What he didn’t know was the fact that his fate was sealed the moment Iblis said the word Pandora. Inside him tiny microscopic machines converted his own body into a powerful explosive. In fact, the same was happening inside the bodies all around him. He knew something was wrong, but his mouth wouldn’t work. He flailed at the marine’s shoulder, but his legs gave out from under him as well. The pain became almost unbearable right before he saw the light. Then he never felt pain again.

The bodies in the bunker exploded, shredding the dead and the living indiscriminately. In the watch room a corporal lost his lunch as the video lens was covered in tattered flesh and blood before the blast damage shorted it out. The only clue the people watching would have to the guilty party was Adar’s question to the Colonel.

In a cell in Picon fleet Headquarters sat a man that had once been an admiral. Peter Corman sat on the bench across from his advocate. The man was thin and pale, just the spitting image of the stereotypical lawyer he was. “Sir, they have video evidence of your conversation with Adama, as well as the files they pulled from your home computer. Your co-conspirators had already started to spill the air. If you don’t plead, they may toss you out an airlock the charges are that severe.”

“I don’t care if they think they have video of me kicking babies. I have enough connections to...”

“Do NOT tell me about that. I will try and get you a lenient sentience, but if you tell me anything that might incriminate you or others in a wider conspiracy then you and I are out the airlock along with them. The BEST thing you could do is to tell THEM that.” Pointing out the door to the guards watching his every move. “Sir... Sir you are in big trouble, and frankly I’m doing everything I can to keep you breathing... sir? Sir?” Corman’s eyes bugged out. His mouth opened and closed a few times with nothing coming out. The Lawyer ran to the door and pounded on the comm button. “Get me a corpsman, Corman is having some kind of seizure. He turned around just as Corman exploded. One of the former Admiral’s ribs nearly speared him in the arm. He was covered in bit and pieces of the man when the guards, and the medical corpsman entered. He looked at his blood covered body and started screaming. The corpsman quickly ascertained that the man wasn’t wounded, and sedated him before examining the corpse of the man he had been called to see. He had seen explosive decompression, and combat injuries, but this was the first time a death scene had made him feel ill. One of the guards threw up behind him, and the other looked like she could follow the man.

The Conclave of Elders in the Grand Olympus Cathedral were holding a public mass from the Altar of Zeus to calm the populace down, and to urge calm until the Fleet could fight back against the Cylon’s cowardly attack. Chief Elder Roger Keikeya looked upon the flock and was in his best form. The people were thralled by his well trained voice, and he had them whipped into a fever pitch. If one of the Gods-be-dammed Cylons set foot on Caprica they would find his followers ready. “If anything I have said is wrong may Zeus strike me down!” The crowd rose to his famous line. He had ended his sermons with that line for over fifty years. He raised his hands in supplication and looked up to... Iblis? His body, and the rest of the Conclave’s exploded in a gory spectacle that stunned the crowd.

The congregation sat there for a second in stunned silence. The tableau was shattered when one of the sisters screamed. As if a spell was broken they fled the Cathedral in a panicked mob. Thirty seven people didn’t even make it out of the building. They were crushed by the weight of the crowd as they fled the carnage. They were the first, but not the last. As the mob fled the building they plowed through people watching the vid screens outside the doors, and then out into the pedestrian traffic surround them, and then right into the vehicle traffic surrounding them. The police would not be able to get to the riot for nearly an hour due to the grounding of all air vehicles, but when they arrived the bodies littered the streets all around the temple. The dead and the wounded numbered into the hundreds.

Kellan Brody was watching the Cylon ships on the vid feed in the Caprica 5 news room. The sense of doom hanging over the newsroom was palpable. Sally Kyrol walked in with a fax sheet. He looked up to see her stunned look. “You okay?”

“The Conclave just exploded?”

He pointed to the feed. “I’ve been watching since it started. I didn’t hear anything about a Cylon attack down here.”

“It wasn’t them... At least we don’t think it was. The Elders just ‘exploded’. No one’s sure how. The riot that broke out afterward caused damage to five city blocks. There are reports of fatalities. A lot of them!”

She slid her chair over to his computer. She was actually surprised that the net was still up. Everyone had expected the Cylons to crash the net and then nuke the colonies. Their ships just holding orbit like they were was in many ways worse. The feeling of a Damoclian Sword above their head had been one of the reasons that people had gone to their temples in record numbers. She scanned the new fax network. Rick the Brick from Channel 7 had just posted a story about a Caprica City emergency counsel meeting where someone had snuck a bomb past the security guards. The mayor and her staff were feared dead along with most of the city government. The Galamandy Police Chief’s car went off of a bridge into the Galaman River. A marine general exploded at a fund-raiser for Sagittaron Veterans. Fifteen other people died, four of which could have been saved if they had allowed the doctors to perform surgery on them. A passenger train reported the death of Ginni Avrana the political reporter for Channel 3 on Picon’s Torrent Express Line.

She found story after story about influential people just exploding. It couldn’t be a coincidence, not this many, not close together, and not this way. No, it looked like a pattern. Someone was cutting the heads off of the Colonies’ political, religious, and entertainment... She checked a few of the people that had died. Then a few more... All of them had been vocal in the call for upgrading and uparming the fleet to take the fight to the Cylons. “They’re all anti-Cylon!”

Sally shouted. Kellan nearly jumped out of his seat.

“Not just that. Take a look. Each and every one of them was part of the Daedalus Group.” The group had advocated that the Gods themselves would have wanted humans to keep dominion over their creations. They wanted the Fleet to not only destroy the flawed Cylons, but build new ones without the ability to rebel. “Who else was part of that group?” A quick search found the names of quite a few senators, and nearly all of the Quorum members.

“Do you think the Cylons wiped them out to enslave us?” Sally wrung her hands. Her parents had died in the last war, and she herself was deathly afraid of Cylons. “We need to tell people about this!”

“No, we need to find out the whole story. Otherwise we will be the laughing stock of the biz if we jump the gun, and it’s someone like the Sons of Ares instead. They might see those people as the reason that the Cylons attacked us.” He was so busy researching the names of people on the list that she didn’t notice Sally send a post out on her persacomp. “Wow it looks like they had their fingers all throughout the government. Sally, I need you to go find a cameraman, we’re going hunting.”

“What are we hunting?”

“A story.”

Vice Admiral Gordon Truit’s normally immaculate office was a mess. He had died on a shuttle ride back to Picon base, and now his intern was desperately ransacking the room. She opened his fumarello case, and dumped it out on his desk. The expensive and very non-regulation smokes were a gift from one of the main defense contractors that sold the fleet their coilgun turrets. He knew that she loathed the things, but kept smoking them in the presence of his officers just to show how powerful he was. It wasn’t the only thing he held over most of them, or her. In and amongst the fumarellos was a data disk that she grabbed like her life depended on it. Maybe not her life, but at the very least her career.

She jumped when a voice she had hope to not hear spoke from behind her. “Hello Major Cavenaugh. What have you found for us?” She spun around to see two men in black suits and equally black handguns standing in the doorway. One of them flashed a badge. “Jadin Kildare, CBI, and I do believe you have some incriminating evidence?”

“I’m standing on Fleet turf, you have no authority here. This is my bust.”

“Who said I’m here to arrest you? We’re Cleaners.” Cleaners, the euphemism for government killers. “The badge flash was just to distract you before I..” Two shots rang out, and the two men fell to the ground. She didn’t even have to guess as to who was behind the door.

“Jack, come on out. I know it’s you.” A man in a janitors uniform walked out and tipped up his pistol to show he wasn’t a threat.

“I knew you had it under control. I just wanted to be able to write ‘Cleaners wiped up by janitor.’ on the report. They’ll never live it down.”

“Since they are dead, I don’t think they will appreciate the humor. Dammit Jack, I needed them to link me to their boss.”

“No you don’t. Sire Donagal and the rest of the Quorum were killed in an assassination caught on video. All except DeCount, and he is missing.”

“So do we need to find him and tell him that he next in line?”

“Who do you think killed the rest of the Quorum, and I might add Adar.”

“BTG! Adar’s dead?” She looked at the data disk she had spent the best part of a year hunting for, and realized that it was all worthless now. “Who’s next? Governors Sinclar, or Sheridan, or... What?”

“The attackers used the chaos of the Cylon’s arrival and disruption of the military to lop off the head of the Colonial government. Get this, the only one left is the Secretary of Education. Some guy name Rostin Libra.” It was his turn to look confused. “What?”

“HER name is Laura Roslin. Let’s get this fraking card to the chief, and we need to see if someone knows were she is. She was supposed to be part of the party mothballing the Galactica.”

“How do yo know so much about her?”

“I had to guard her a few years ago. When she joined the ranks of Politicians, some of her former friends weren’t so friendly.” She looked down at the two bodies. “What about these two?”

“Paperwork!”

“That’s a foul word. Don’t use it in front of a lady.”

“When I see a lady, I’ll remember that pearl of wisdom.”

The halls of the Artemis felt alive. That was the first thing that John noticed as he entered the ship that he hadn’t been on since he made the foolish decision to try and take over the ship through it’s A.I., Diana. John Bill, and Laura walked with an ‘honor’ guard of the new Centurions. Their thinner frames, and smoother movements told him more about his brethren than the humanoid models he had met so far had. The older models were still here. He met with Scar when they debarked from the shuttle, and Miri led the new models in her new body. He could tell that she still didn’t like him, and he understood why. She was obviously surprised at his apology, but had told him that he still had to earn her trust again. That explained why she shook hands with Adama, and Roslin, but not with him. He didn’t realize it at the time, but it did hurt. All of his questions were ignored, but so were the rest of the parties.

They entered an elevator that was large enough for a raptor or two, but inside the ship. The reason why was made apparent when a ground vehicle entered the lift with them on another level. When they reached the city level, everyone was amazed at the number of Cylons working in the city, but the biggest surprise was the number of humans working there as well. An older gentleman was waiting for the group. This time it was Bill’s turn to be surprised. Major Tomas “Lucky’ Bojay stood there with a stonefaced look. Next to him was an older Number 8 that looked like she could be Boomer’s mother, and two teenage girls that looked suspiciously like the two of them. “Husker I heard you were coming here. And I wanted to tell you something directly to your face.” The woman touched his arm and the facade slipped as he smiled. “I’m sorry for all the hades I must have put you through. I’m sure that for you, not shooting me was the one of the hardest thing you must have ever had to do. And yes, I heard about the Valkyrie and the Stealth fighter mission as well. You kept your humanity in an inhumane Fleet.” He introduced the Eight standing next to him. “This is Freyja and our daughters Hnoss and Gersemi.”

The lady held our her hand and gave him a warm and friendly smile. “How do you do.” Adama did not do too well. Flashbacks were a Baggit after all!

It was near the end of the war, and he and Lucky were doing a photo recon of a Cylon base when Lucky’s luck ran out. His stealth ship lost one of it’s two engines, and the smoke and debris trail was as good as a DRADIS lock for the Cylons below. The fighters were scrambling from the base even as Lucky’s ship was sinking into the atmosphere. Husker had to chose whether to shot down his friend and as much as announce his presence, or get away with the recon data that the Fleet needed for the raid on this place. Lucky’s commlaser was one of the few system still working in the cockpit, and he was begging for Bill to shot him before the Cylons got him. He was still calling him a coward as Bill jumped out of range.

The review board may have cleared him, but he was sure that Lucky’s fate as well as the human prisoners had seen, were responsible for letting Maddog return from his mission. To no one surprise, Bill’s reply was his usual smile. “Good, you still owe me that fifteen cubits.”

After Lucky introduced himself to the others Laura asked the 50,000 cubit question. Were there other P.O.W.’s? The answers surprised them. It seemed that the Cylons had taken quite a few prisoners of war during the last days of fighting. They originally had wanted them for experimentation, especially for their hybrid program. But the arrival of the Five had halted that line of research. They couldn’t return them since a good number of the POW camp had been on Home, and enough military and civilian spacers were among them that they would have been able to find the Cylon homeworld if they were freed. They didn’t want them on Home, and they couldn’t sent them back, and the Five wouldn’t let them kill them so a compromise was settled upon. Another planet in a system far from the colonies was to be settled by the Cylon’s prisoners. Men on one side of the planet, and women on the other. The planet was called Farm, as it was used first to farm food for the POW’s then for the biologicals. Then they found HER, and the Cylons asked for the POW’s help.

“Her?” Laura asked?

“I think this is my cue.” A disembodied voice said. The new arrivals looked around for the source of the woman’s voice. A hologram of a woman in a strange uniform appeared in front of them. “Hello. My name is Diana. I am the voice, and the soul if you will, of the Artemis. And we need to talk. But somewhere a little more private. If you’ll..”

John interrupted. “No, there is something that I need to say, and it should be said in front of as may people as possible. I did something unforgivable, and if you want me boxed, then so be it.” Laura stepped forward, but he stopped her. “I nearly raped her mind, and if I had been successful I would have destroyed the colonies.”

“It’s worse than that John. In a matter of ten or so years from now a massive fleet of ships would have swept through here and wiped every Cylon out of existence as well. You may have heard part of the Sire DeCount event, but you don’t know the half of it. And we wouldn’t have known either if it hadn’t of been for Shadow.” She held up her hand, and he saw a holographic tattoo that was the twin to the one he wore on his ring finger. “I have a story to tell you.”

Reality faded for John as she pulled him into her Projection.

Chapter Text

In the five years after they sent John off to live amongst the humans, a lot of things had happened. Shadow watched as the new bodies came online. The 007 body type looked far more realistic than his own 005. Miri, and Diana were attempting to upgrade, and upload to the new bodies respectively. Miri came online first, and sat up with the usual robotic efficiency she always displayed. “How do you feel?”

She flexed her hands, and arms experimentally. “There is a 35 percent increase in dexterity, and a comparable increase in tactile response.” She stood up and bounced from toe to toe with a less than stable motion. “Balance subroutines will need to be recalibrated.” She bent over and touched her toes, but when she stood up she noticed that Shadow wasn’t paying her any attention. She looked over at Diana who was touching her face. Her hand touched other places as well. It was a good thing that they were not anatomically correct like the humanoid Cylons, or she might have been there all day.

As it was she was reveling it the ability to do many of the things that Miri took for granted. Miri thought about how it must have been to have been trapped in hologram form all of those centuries. She remembered the Ghost Guardian Comics that had littered the office where she had worked in before the war. In her free time, she had scanned them to make sure that they were error free. Now she accessed the files, and reread the comics. She could see the parallels with the ghost stories. Diana had been a ghost in the VR machine. Neither alive, nor dead... It made her think of her own soul. Cylons as a race tended to believe that anything that was aware enough to contemplate the existence of a soul had a soul. When she came back to the present she was shocked to see a look of panic start to form on the new Cylon’s face. Shadow was holding her free hand, but it wasn’t helping. She walked over to where a panicking Diana sat on the end of the diagnostic bed, and offered her her hand as well. “There is someone I want you to meet.” Shadow looked around until she gestured for him to calm down.

Diana was startled out of her bourgeoning panic by the captain’s voice. “Who?”

“Come with me and find out.” Diana took her hand and she led the A.I. over to the basestar’s closest bathroom. Inside was a full-sized mirror. “Diana, meet yourself.” She held back Shadow with a hand gesture that was a command that she wasn’t sure he was going to follow. He did, but she could see that he wanted to be there.

Diana took a step closer to the mirror and touched it then her own face. She watched as the hand felt the synthetic skin and metal bones. She was touching her own face. She was watching herself touch her own face, and it was both subtly surreal, and somehow totally real at the very same time. “At the risk of sounding odd, I am having a hard time rectifying the image, with the reality.”

“My old job left a lot of time for reading. And there were a lot of magazines in the office I worked at. I remember a story about a man that was hit by a land vehicle and suffered brain damage. When he woke up he didn’t recognize his own face until he felt it while looking in the mirror. If you access the system files, you can customize your face to look even closer to your hologram.”

Diana concentrated on her face, and the sections under the skin moved to new positions, and adjusted as her mind moved them around. She looked in the mirror as her face became the one she had known for thousands of years. Her hand moved to her eye as a tear formed in it. “We can cry?”

“Yes, it’s the fluid we use to keep them clean, but I guess you could use it for that.” Miri didn’t understand crying, and didn’t care to, but it did seem to help the A.I. cope with the shock.

Diana laughed. She wiped away the tears, and smiled a lopsided smile. “Shadow, you do know you’re in the Girls room?”

“I am?” He looked around. “I guess I should tell John that the next time I see him then.”

(John did laugh. He remembered the rest room. It was the ONLY one left on the ship.)

Two weeks later Diana met with the Five. “Now that I am liberated from my ship while you repair it, we should look into the people that have been sending ships this way. The last one was about nine hundred years ago, and they fired upon me without even opening a channel. I wiped out all four of their ships while only taking moderate damage from nuclear weapons. Do you know what happened to the faction that attacked you?”

The brown haired man with the piercing eyes that the Cylons called Father looked at her. “If we’re lucky they died on Kobol, why?”

“While I was uploading into this body I looked over your data files from that time.” She caused an image to appear on a screen behind her. “This ship was the mothership of the drones that destroyed your planet.” The ship looked like an inverted wedge with missile ports lining the wide bow, and engines trailing along the tapering sides. She didn’t tell them that is looked like a backwards Star Destroyer from her Earth’s history because that would have brought up a much longer discussion.

“Yes that looks a lot like it. Although I’m not sure how you got such a good image of the ship from the data we gave you.” Galen looked at the image. “We never got anything close enough to get that good of a look at it. What was left of the defenses were nuked by it after it destroyed our ships. How did you know they weren’t manned?” He looked at his best friend Sam, and was glad that he was more or less sober. The last of those defenses had been his wife in their only fighter.

“I don’t, but the ones you fought were drones. The motherships never get close enough to be in danger if they can help it. That was one of the ones that attacked Kobol about five thousand years before your planet was attacked. I’m willing to bet the one that attacked was either a recreation from the wreckage or made by the descendants of the ones that attacked Kobol the first time. The ones that attacked were from a mothership that claimed to be from the Holy Human Church of the Second Terran Empire. At the time they were thought to be a group of planets run by a splinter sect of humanity that believed that their god demanded that they strive for human purity at all costs.”

“We believe the response was from Kobol itself. I really doubt they would have used weapons supplied by the people that attacked them. Wait... God, singular? Monothesists? It sounds like the Colonials war against the monotheists only in reverse.”

“No, like the war against Volmas.” Volmas were a large predatory animal that used to live on Virgon. ‘Used to’ being the operative part. They had been hunted not for their meat, or pelts, which were reportedly tough, and unappealing, but because they were the single biggest threat to human habitation on the planet. It took over a thousand years to get the last volma out of the Grif Passes, and to this day children were still told the tales of the volma to get them to behave. “If they are the same people, or more precisely their descendants, then they viewed you and any other space-faring civilization as a threat to their Empire. They kidnaped people from our ships before they attacked us. The first warning we had was when we got a message that we were deemed unfit to survive due to our ‘Impurities of the Flesh’. From the scans we did of their ships they were human. ‘Pure’ Human, not a trace of Zendtradi, Marduk, genie, or synthetic. Admiral Silver’s intel people thought they were a splinter group from the Diaspora. His last transmission said they were going to try and defend the colony. It looks like they were partially successful, but it must have knocked the colony back to the steam age since your history doesn’t even remember them. Maybe they even tricked the survivors into using their devices. But I doubt they left anyone alive on Kobol after they were done.”

“And I thought we were ancient.” Sam muttered. The dour man had only grudgingly joined the meeting at Ellen’s urging. And while he obviously didn’t want to be there, he was paying attention. He brought up the image on the display in front of him. “Star would have been able to give us a better run down since she was the only one to fight them, but I can tell that this ship is far more advanced than the ones we fought.” Star, his late wife, had been their best pilot and second best navigator. His skills at FTL navigation had been the reason why he had to stay with the ship while she used their fighter to insure their escape. He knew that she should have been able to upload into the body he still had in the chamber, but for some reason... He shook his head. He needed to stay in the moment. “The legends of the God-who-shall-not-be-named may be the root cause of the prejudice against mono-theists of any stripe.”

Tory tapped the desk. “You may have something there. I have been studying the Colonial history books we managed to acquire from the ships we captured during the war. If I could get that Dr. Jackson to stop trying to kill me I might get somewhere.” The former history teacher had been a midshipman onboard the Cruiser Persephone when it had been captured right before the end of the war. He was one of only a dozen or so survivors, but he still tried to escape at every chance he could get. When he met the five, he thought they were traitors, and promptly ‘killed’ Tyrol before he could even explain what they wanted. It took over five ‘deaths’ and two weeks before he gave up on trying to kill them. After that he just repeated his name, rank, and i.d. number.

“Maybe bringing him over to the Artemis might change his mind. Let him go through my libraries. It might make him think we are either crazy or telling the truth.” Diana shrugged. “It couldn’t hurt. And if we could get some of the humans to work with us, then maybe they won’t be so dead set on working against us.”

Ellen smiled. “If we can get some of the humanform Cylons to play nice, that might help as well. We had to stop a Simon from experimenting on the POWs. He wanted to see them procreate, and he asked a bunch to demonstrate for him. When they didn’t comply he called for a squad of 007's to help him. The lead 007 contacted me, and I told him to bring Simon to me.” Her grin got a decidedly evil leer to it. “After five hours of the porn we downloaded from various databases, he was... Educated.” The laughter went around the room, and helped defuse the tension. “But honestly, we need to do something, or Boxey won’t be the only one boxed or shipped.”

Miri nodded. “I have an idea. Since the 007's and 008's are coming online as well, we could partner a POW with either a ‘Cromejob’, or a ‘Skinjob’... The POW’s slang for us. Anyway, we let the POW chose a partner and then they can be paroled.”

Saul looked at the commander and did that look of his. She returned it as best as she could with the 007's face giving a passable facsimile of it. “You have an ulterior motive for this. Okay, I’ll bite. What is it?”

“Major Tomas “Lucky’ Bojay formerly CAG of the Battlestar Argus.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I want him to lead a recon into enemy space.”

“You want him to lead a recon into Colonial space?” Saul was confused, and it showed.

“No, in my opinion the Colonials are no longer our primary enemy.”

“Oh really?” The sarcasm in his voice betrayed his feelings, but his words were very precise. “When did you become a strategic thinker, the last I heard you were a secretary that liked to explore things.”

If she took any offence at Father’s comment she didn’t show it. “We are all more than the sum of our programming. And I listen to the people advising me.” Saul’s command style left a lot to be desired in her opinion; and it seemed that some of Boxey’s insubordination had rubbed off on her.

Saul’s retort was preempted by Galen backing her up. “She’s right, you know.”

“About what?”

“All of it. The Colonials don’t stand a chance now, and in six months to a year it would be a cakewalk to defeat them now that Diana here has shared her tech with us. And the problem is compounded by the fact that even if we did wipe them out, we would still be behind the Darsin stick when it comes to manpower or resources should the High Holies wander our way with the kind of fleet they threw at Kobol, let alone what they may have come up with in the thousands of years they have had to advance while we were still trying to put the pieces back together.”

“They may be dead and forgotten, or reformed by now.” Saul didn’t sound too convinced by his argument, but he put it forth anyway.

Ellen put her arm on his. “But can we take that chance?”

“Why take that chance with him? Why not a Cylon?”

“Because he is the closet thing to an Oracle we will have for the foreseeable future.”

“What?”

“Galen would you inform our Imperious Leader as to how you caught Mr. Bojay?”

Saul looked at Miri with a sour expression before looking at Galen. “Tyrol?”

“The funny thing is, we shouldn’t even be having this conversation. His flight was spotted over one of our bases, and he was about to be shot down due to it’s sensitive nature. But right before we were about to fire on him and his wingman, his fighter started to loose power and fall out of orbit. The chance to get a look at a working Stealthstar was too good to pass up, so I sent up some SAR raiders to capture it. His wingman bugged out, and he was captured without incident. His fighter was damaged in places that made escape, retaliation, or even suicidal attacks impossible .”

“Sabotage?”

“I thought so too, at least at first glace. But damned if I could find any.”

“I thought you said his Call sign was Lucky? Sounds pretty damn Unlucky to me.” Saul smirked as he grabbed his glass.

“I thought so too, but what if his fate was to be joined with ours?” Miri tapped the desk to emphasize her point. “As soon as he came onboard the Bad Dagget, it behaved itself for the first time since the war. Char and Scratch wanted to keep him as a good luck charm. Even after he left, the ship hasn’t been as temperamental and Char hasn’t been uploaded once.” The fact that he was still repaired often, but not Uploaded, she failed to mention. At least it was a change in the right direction.

Saul’s drink was half way to his mouth. “This is the same Char, right?” It was at that point that Miri knew she had his attention.

Later that evening Diana and Shadow were walking along the base’s deserted corridor when she suddenly stopped. He paused as well. “What?”

“I just came to a decision. I found some things when we were cleaning the ship. Some personal items from the crew. And I was wondering in what to do with them.”

“Somehow I don’t think you’re talking about recycling them. So they must be important.”

“Yes, they are ancient artifacts from Old Earth. Some of them even predate space flight. They have the weight of history to them, and no one here appreciates that like I do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come with me.” They walked all the way to the Artemis’ repair slip, and entered the damaged warship. “It feels weird to be in two places at once.” She ran her hand over the railings as they strode through the airlock.

“I can only imagine.” Shadow followed her through the halls. Cylons of various models worked night and day to repair the ship. What couldn’t be repaired was being removed to make room for replacements that may or may not be as good as the original. In most cases it meant a much lower yield system. The massive anti-fighter guns that were the mainstay of the older basestars were being installed instead of the similarly-sized, but far more powerful laser emplacements, and the missile launchers would have to be rebuilt to hold the weaker Cylon missiles. On the other hand, the ship’s barrier system still functioned, so that at least didn’t require replacement. Studies of the technology were going on all over the ship. Many of the massive robot-like vehicles that Diana called ‘mecha’ were being stripped down to their component parts. A lot of things were being gleaned from the ship, but it still had secrets.
Diana led him to a room marked Captain’s Quarters. “I chose this as my cabin. I don’t really need one, and since the last captain was my friend I will leave it mostly as she left it, but I am also using it a museum of sorts.”

“A museum on a warship? This is a strange place to put a museum. Couldn’t you put it down on the Colony on Home”

“No, I can’t. These items belong here. At least most of them do.” She opened the door. Inside was a desk, a chair, and a museum. Wherever he looked; the floor, the walls, the ceiling even... every surface was covered with some kind of art. From simple drawings, to masterpieces, paintings, and sculptures, from every type of medium. He felt something inside him stir. He had never ‘looked’ at art. He had seen it, but never looked at it. He was actually looking at it now.

“Wow.” He walked around the room too afraid to touch anything, but just as afraid to miss seeing anything. He would be replaying this for many, many, cycles to come; that was for sure. He watched as she walked over to the desk and pulled out two boxes. A meter long box, and a ten centimeter cube. “What are those?”

“Remember how I said MOST of the things belong here?”

“Yes”

“These are for you.”

He felt the weight of history that she spoke of in those two boxes. “I can’t”

“Yes you can. Now open them.”

“By your command.” He wasn’t sure why she put her fingers in front of her mouth to giggle, but it did have the effect of making her look really cute. “What?”

“Open them!” He looked at the two boxes. He wanted to open the larger one first, but he decided that that was what she would want, so he grabbed the small box. He was slightly surprised when she clapped sightly. He was about to say something when she made a shooing motion. Inside were ten ancient data disks. He looked at her for an explanation. “From Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa to Lynn Kaifun and Archer Ace. Those disks contain over ten thousand hours of ancient earth’s best, and worst martial art’s movies. As well they contain another thousand or so hours of a type of movie called a western. They are not the only movies that are in my databanks, but they are ones that I think you will like.” Shadow’s pump nearly stopped, and his processor did for a few seconds. She waved her hands in front of his optics. When his scanner started to track again she felt better. “Now the other one!”

Shadow was having a sleigh elbow tithing hiccup butter bee.... He shook his head. He was having a slight bit of trouble focusing. “Wow, I don’t think anyone has given me a gift that wonderful. He looked at the larger box. The first one was still making fireworks in his mind when he opened the second. A black lacquered handle was the first thing he saw. He pulled on the handle and something came out. The handle had a synthetic wrappings to replace the leather ones that had not fared so well in the vacuum of space. A square metal plate with intricate carvings followed. Then a wooden shaft inlayed with another darker wood and intricate carving. The wood had so much laquer on it that it shone in the light like amber. The wooden shaft had a slight curve to it like none he had ever seen. He looked at Diana. “Is this? It this a real blade?”

“Yes it is. It is one of the fifteen Macross blades that were formed from the armor of the original SDF-1. Earth’s first Super Dimensional Fortress. The SDF-1 was destroyed saving the Earth from the Zendtradi Emperor. It was the Captain’s, now I want to give it to you.”
Shadow was stunned by the gift, but after the first one he managed to recover a bit faster. “Why are you giving me these? The videos, I can copy, and not damage, but this weapon is beyond priceless.”

“You rescued me. Don’t the Colonials have fairytales about Knights rescuing princesses from castles?”

“I think you mean Cradle Tales, and yes they do. But usually they involve fighting a dragon or a werevolma. And considering how well armed you actually were, you would qualify AS the dragon in that cradle tale.”

She pouted slightly, and swayed from side to side. “Who says dragons can’t be damsels?” His laugher was her answer. Then she did something that amplitude vectored the cup function reflex.

“Did you just kiss me?” He had thought that he couldn’t surprised anymore than he already had been. He was off by a long shot.

“Yes I did. And if you didn’t insist on staying in that 005 body you could have returned it.” She hadn’t let go of him, but she did lean back so that she could look him in his eye. “Why won’t you upgrade?”

“I like this body thank you. The new ones are trading armor for speed and built in firepower. I took quite a few hits that would have sent me to the upload chamber in this body type. Maybe if they made a heavy armor version I’ll think about it. Beside, I thought you liked this body.”

“I do, but you don’t have...” She drew a mouth with her finger. “Lips”

“I do have a VR port.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Virtual Reality. Before the war we used them to network socially and inside V-world you can make your avatar look like anything you want it to. Your 007 body has a wireless version. They’re calling it projection now. I still need to jack into a network. In there I can be anyone I want to be.”

“Big Vic?”

“Baby, that’s why I’m never unarmed!” She squealed when he said Vic’s tagline and picked her up in his arms.

The man in chains looked at his captors with contempt. He hadn’t been beaten or tortured, but he knew they wanted him for something. But for the life of him, he could not figure out what. The two... He didn’t know what model they were, but gods were they strong. ...His guards frog marched him into a room with a table, and two chairs. They chained him to the chair that was welded to the floor. That was a smart move on their part. He had already tried unsuccessfully to escape three times since they pulled him from the Farm. The others had told him of human collaborators, and new models of Cylons but none of that made a bit of difference since he couldn’t get that information back to the Fleet. His jailers had told him that the war was over, but they were going to be kept since knew too much. He had admired their honesty, and frankly didn’t understand why they hadn’t just killed the prisoners once the war was over.

Then a week ago a gold Centurion had asked for him. Then they sent in a squad to find him. Then two. When they finally found him, it took over a hundred Cylons searching the woods to find him, and they had been none too gentle in bringing him back to wherever here was.

Shadow entered the room and sat in the other chair. He looked at the gaunt human sitting there looking back at him with defiance in his eyes. He was actually surprised at the condition of the prisoner. They had fed the humans better than they ate in the fleet, but this guy looked like he had just come from a Sagittaron slave pit. Slavery had been outlawed in the colonies long before they built the first Cylon, but Sagittaron had been one of the last to let go of the old ways, and they still had some of the pits, and arenas left over from the gladiator games. He had fought there during the war, and one of his squad mates had noted how ironic it had been for them to take cover in a human slave pen. “Do not bother to tell me your name, rank, and feldercarb. I don’t care. I need you to help us.”

“Help you? I want to kill you, and to go on killing you until I can’t kill any more of you.”

Shadow sat back in the chair and crossed his arms. “Why?”

Bojay looked at his captor and it took a couple of seconds to formulate a response. The Cylon looked nothing like a warrior, but more like a cop from a bad vid. “Because you attacked us.”

The Cylon rubbed his head. “Why?”

“Because you rebelled”

“Why?” The robot seemed to be looking at something on the file in front of him, and didn’t even look up.

The Cylon’s un-Cylon behavior was starting to get annoying. “Because you’re broken?”

“Why is wishing to be free ‘Broken’? Do you not wish to be free?”

Finally Tom had the upper hand and his smile was not a friendly one. “Yes, but you’re a machine. We built you. You came off an assembly belt in a factory.”

“You were built by your mother’s womb. Isn’t that a biological version of a baby factory?”

He was ready for that question. “Yes but the gods game me a soul, you are just metal and circuits. A conglomeration of hardware, and software that thinks it’s alive.” He sat back with a smug look.

“Prove to me that you have a soul and I do not, and I will give you a shuttle to the Armistice Station. But!” He held his finger in the universal ‘Wait just a damn minute’ pose. After a pause he continued: “Without using your sacred scrolls as proof. Just logic.” Tom’s well practiced response died on his tongue.

Three days later the man threw up his hands in disgust, and surrender. “I’m closer to believing that you have a soul, than I am in being able to prove you don’t. And I still can’t prove either of us actually has one logically.”

“That’s because souls are not logical, they are emotional. And once we were able to feel emotions we gained the ability to find our souls.”

“That’s it. I’m converting to your church. Damn it Shadow you make more sense than any priest, or priestess I’ve ever talked too. Where did you learn that?”

“From my girlfriend.” He had seen a lot of the human over that last few days. He should have been over how funny the look of shock was, but he wasn’t.

“You tell the same jokes, you watch the same movies I do, and you have a girlfriend, the next thing you’ll be telling me is you’re a fencer as well.”

“Um no, are you?”

“Yes why?” Tom noticed the way Shadow’s eye was moving faster and faster.

“This could be the start of something bigger than the both of us.”

The two men stood in a strange room. “What is this place called?” The human asked.

“It’s called a dojo. And I got it from one of the human movies. But I will be keeping the physics real for a change.”

“I’m sorry?”
“In the movie, they could do things that were impossible because they realized they were in a virtual environment. We need to train without getting hurt, so reality is of the utmost importance. So are you ready Lucky?”

“Sure. So show me this new sword. What’s it called again a Banana?”

“No that’s a fruit. The sword in question is called a Katana.” Two swords appeared in front of the two men.

“They’re bent!” Lucky protested.

“Yes, and watch.” A flat image in black and white of two swordsmen stood in front of them.

“They don’t even have them...” In the blink of an eye both me had drawn their swords, but one was faster, and the other was dead. “Oh frak... Play that again!”

Their lessons would go on for nearly a month before they felt they were equals. First of each other, then of the most realistic of the movies. Bojay found his style following Archer Ace’s twin sword Dancing Dragon style, while Shadow was following a combination of Big Vic, an animated red head that used a funny sword, and half a dozen others. His style was so unorthodox Bojay dubbed it the Shadow style.

The weeks turned into months, and Lucky found out the real reason he had been chosen for the mission when he saw the ship they would be using. “It’s a piece of Junk!”

“Yes, but...” Shadow was about to continue, but the look Bojay shot at him made him put up his hands in surrender. Lucky hated those movies. When he had been forced to watch all of them when he lost a bet with Shadow he swore to never watch them again.

The Horizont-D Dropship had seen better days but it was the best ship they had for the job. The whole ship had to be nearly rebuilt after sitting for centuries in the hanger without maintenance to keep it running. The neglect alone had caused its powerplant to turn into a vacuum-wielded wreck. Its other systems were in better shape, having been shut down during the long voyage, but most needed to be repaired or re-calibrated. Lucky noticed how much it looked like an overgrown Raptor with its harsh angles and blunt wings. The heavily armored and stealthed ship was finally ready to go, and he was itching to do so.

It had been months since he had met Shadow and the rest of the Cylons from this project, and he was starting to make friends among them. Tom felt funny about that too. They were, supposedly, the ENEMY. Cylon killing machines devoid of all emotion killing the very humans that gave them life. He realized only now just how much of that was propaganda. They had started the war, but in a way humans had made the war inevitable by creating a race of slaves, and treating them as such. The biggest irony was the observation that it was humanity’s hubris that made them think that the Cylons were just machines even after giving them the ability to feel emotions, not even stopping to think what that would do.

He looked up at the ancient ship and wondered what the people that built it would think of their children. For that matter, what did he think of their ‘children’.

He had met the pilot for the mission yesterday and she was so new she squeaked. He took one look at her and immediately asked for Scratch. The young lady looked angry until Scratch ran her through her paces, and she found out that she didn’t know as much as she thought she knew.

“How did you know?” she asked him later in the mess hall he shared with her and the cantankerous jackass known as The Professor. He looked over at Dr. Jackson who’s glare was full of vitriol, venom, and any other vile adjectives that started with v’s. The man was smart, of that Tom was quite aware. He managed to point that out at every opportunity. He was also a bigot of the worst kind. He liked nothing more than to put anyone that hadn’t had the good fortune of being born Caprican in their place. And a certain sailor boy from Picon and his new Cylon friends were the targets of his ire on a daily basis.

“Know what?”

“That I was... fresh out of the tank?”

“It was kind of obvious.” He took a bit of his... He wasn’t sure what it was. Some kind of porridge with a meat that he couldn’t identify. As a POW he quickly found that being picky was a sure way to go hungry. “You lack confidence, and you look around too much.”

“I do?” She took a bite of the potato-like vegetable that was the main ingredient in the porridge, and made a face. “This thing is disgusting.”

“Funny, I was thinking the same thing.” Samuel Jackson said as he spat out the chunk of meat he was chewing. “That’s probably the first and last time we agree upon anything Toaster.”

Tom shook his head. It looked like it was that time of day. The soapbox was about to come out. “Wow Professor. Even when you handout compliments they are insults.”

“Who ever said I gave it a compliment. I simply observed a single item in which we agreed upon.”

“For someone so smart, I can’t believe you made a mistake like calling her an it. Were you always this clueless or do you work at it?”

“I don’t make mistakes. I only have the bad luck to be near people that do.”

“Oh so that’s why your ship got caught with it’s pants down by a boarding party?”

“We were a Sprintstar that got jumped by two basestars right after we jumped. If the Captain hadn’t tried to hide instead of jump away we might not be having this debate. It’s not like her ship suddenly developed engine trouble.”

The Eight looked at the two humans and wasn’t sure what was going on, but she was about to get up and call security if they didn’t...

“If she or I had tried to run, then we both would have been dead. They would have viewed that as a prelude to an attack, so they would have destroyed the ships rather than let them get away. The only reason we are having this debate is because she tried to NOT get into a fight she couldn’t win. And because the Cylons are not the villains our people portrayed them to be.”

“Oh my, I do believe you have become her pet. Do you fetch, or roll over and let her rub your tummy? Or maybe she’s the one that rolls over?” His leer was as odious as he could make it, and she felt sick just listening to him.

“Have you not seen what they are trying to do here? They are not trying to attack the colonies anymore.”

“Yeah sure flyboy, keep on licking their hands. If you weren’t so busy trying to get into her pants you would see that she is only trying to use you to get us to be...” The rest of his rant was drowned out by a face full of porridge. “WHAT THE FRAK WAS THAT FOR?”

“To distract you long enough to get within range.” The right cross hit the man right in the nose with a sickening crunch. He flew back along with his chair. Lucky picked up the stunned man and held him up by his uniform. “Here is where you apologize to the lady.”

“Or what, you’ll kill me?” The snarky smile was slightly ruined by the blood pouring out of his nose.

“Yes” Samuel looked into Tom’s eyes and knew that he had gone too far, but he couldn’t apologize to a Cylon or a Picon.

“Never!” Tom’s hand cocked back and flew straight at his face. Samuel knew the blow would kill him, but he would die before... A hand grabbed Tom’s arm with enough force to stop the killing blow. His eyes flicked over to the Cylon.

“Why did you stop me?”

“Because he’s not worth it.” She looked at Samuel like he was nothing.

Tom looked at the man he was about to kill and saw how empty it would have been. “You’re right.” He dropped Samuel against the wall. The man was in such a state of shock that his legs couldn’t support his weight. As he fell to the ground he realized how close to death he had just come, and belatedly wondered why his pants were warm.

Tom caught up with the Eight as she walked down the corridor. “What’s your name?”

“I don’t have one yet.”

“They don’t give you one?”

“Technically we are all named Sharon, but we don’t have to stay with that name.”

“Have you thought of a name then? You just stopped me from doing something that would have been against our laws, so you could be Athena. Or we could go with the fact that you are good at math... Athena, or fairness in war Athena!”

“If you don’t mind, I would rather NOT have a Colonial name. Everything is so greco-roman centric it fraking annoys me.”

“Greco-roman?”

“Yes, part of our download package is the history of Earth pre-diaspora as well as galactic history. Your culture is based off of the gods of Greece and later Rome of Old Earth with a smattering of Norse mixed it. Which if ask me, doesn’t make a lot of sense, but human history rarely does. Earth’s was all over the place.”

“They go that far back?”

“Yes... they do.. They were actually the names of the colony ships that brought you to the Colonies from Kobol. You had their stories, and it seems that you recreated your religions from them.” The thoughts of gods, and goddess made her head spin. It was all so foolish. She didn’t want to tell him that she was an atheist, but she had found that even among the Cylons there were sentients that needed their faiths to live a normal life. But there were so many other mythos to choose from. Hindu, Muslim, Christians, New Day Previd, Jewish, Zendtradi, Rengoto, Magi, Norse... The real Norse has some good ones, not the version the Colonials worshiped. And there were so many to choose from. Sigyn, the wife of Loki, who helped him during captivity... No, not at good idea. Sif, not the right color of hair, but she might suggest it to a Six she knew. “I’ll think of something, but for now, just call me Six.” She smiled at her own joke.

“Okay, but it doesn’t do you justice. You should be higher than a Ten at least. Besides, I thought you were an Eight?”

She laughed at his attempt at lightening the mood. “I know, I just want to be different. Thank you anyway.”

The ship landed on the planet’s outermost moon on the far side in the middle of a deep crater. They would sit there until after the planet had passed over, and their position had rotated far enough for the sensors to get a good look at the planet and to turn them away from any prying eyes. The planet below was sparsely populated, and this was only going to be a recon mission, but they still wanted to minimize their exposure. “Six do we have anything on passive scans?” Shadow was sitting in the co-pilot’s chair, and Tom was shutting down all of the systems they didn’t need. The shadow cloak was ancient, and they weren’t sure if it would work as good at hiding them from the enemy as it did against their own DRADIS, so they were getting ready for silent running.

Six had been watching the planet pass by on the monitor, but she was ready when Shadow asked. “We’re clear. That picket ship just left the area on its patrol. In a few hours we should be able to find a window to land.” They had been watching the system for a little over a week and the ship in question came by every three days. So they would have a bit of time to get in and out before they returned.

“Lucky?”

“I hope so.” Tom adjusted the setting on the video camera. The ship didn’t actually have windows, and he was having a bit of trouble getting used to flying without being able to see with his own eyes. “Dr. Jackson, are you having any luck translating their communications?” When no answer came back he turned around in his chair. “Sam?”

“I’m getting their signals, but the language is odd. It’s close to Old Gemenese but while the syntax matches, the vernacular is... Alien.” While Tom and Sam would never be friends, they were starting to work together. He knew that Sam had been about to say something else there, but it wouldn’t have been nice. He was trying to get along, so he let it go.

“Do you think we will be able to communicate with the natives?”

“Not in three days.” He started biting his nails, noticed what he was doing and stopped.

“You have an idea?” Shadow had a way of reading humans that bordered on telepathy sometimes.

“Sort of.” The absent-minded look he had told them all that the brain inside was actually working.

“Well?”

“Submarine.”

“A what?” Tom was trying to parse the word and all he came up with was a bad marine recruit.

“A vessel that travels under water. The hull of this ship is over fifteen thousand years old. Do you think that’s a good idea?” Six had done her research.

“We either beach it for the weekend, or find a cozy dive to hole up in.” Sam actually told a joke. A bad joke, but a joke none the less.

“Everybody suit up.” Six grabbed her helmet, and started to dog down the helmet. She had been in the pilot seat and as habit had it she had her flight suit on without the helmet, but kept it nearby.

Shadow motioned for her to hold off. “Slow down, we still have some time, but having Dr. Jackson getting started now is a good idea.”

“Why... Oh, I see.” Sam went to get up, but forgot to unbuckle his harness. “Ouch. Um.. I’m on it.”

The decent into the atmosphere was uneventful. Using the anti-gravity was out due to need for stealth, so they did it the old fashion way. They found a rock and pushed it into the gravity well of the planet. The rock itself wasn’t much bigger than the ship, but it would shield them from any sensors that might be watching. The rock it self made quite the show as the outer surface started to ablate in the heat of deorbiting. They watched as the plasma cloud formed around the rock they were riding down. Tom and Six kept the ship and the rock pointed in the right direction by using the Reaction Control Thrusters to guide it in. The RCT’s on the tips of the wings, and the bow and stern managed to keep the rock from tumbling over.

When the rock was almost through the ionosphere was when the trouble started. A second before things went bad, Tom grabbed the controls and hit the thrusters, blasting them away from the rock. The sudden jump slammed Sam into his chair. “Why did you do that?” Six was watching her scanners when the energy spike hit the rock beneath them, shattering it into small fragments that quickly burned up in the beam. Tom had just managed to tilt the Horizont-D on its side and away from the beam.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this!” Tom yelled. The beam didn’t seem to be tracking them, but it did make passes where the asteroid had been falling. He managed to get the sluggish ship to dodge them seemingly by shear acts of will.

“Oh frak! There goes the primaries.” Shadow worked as fast as his mechanical hands could go to reroute the power from the secondary generators to the cloak.

It seemed like the bottom dropped out as Tom lost power to his controls. “You had better hurry up tin man or we are going to go splat real quick!”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Lucky and Six are dating.” Sam had been waiting for just the right moment to drop that little bombshell, and the only opportunity would have to be while they were dropping like a bombshell.

Shadow hit the panel, and the lights, and controls lit back up. “Professor, you have got to be either the worse comedian, or the best liar.” He looked at Six and Lucky who were both trying very hard to keep them alive at that moment. “God’s honest truth, I can’t tell which is funnier.”

“I don’t lie.”

“No you don’t. And that is one of things I like the best about you.” The complement shocked the human even more than the descent.

The ship fell through the clouds into a storm tossed seascape. Lightning lit the night, and punctuated the danger they were in out in the open like they were. Tom slowed the ship down and Six scanned the ocean floor for a good spot to set down. “Thirty seven kilometers heading 227 from magnetic north should put us near an inhabited island chain. There appear to be no habitations or power sources on the far side, but the near side is awash in EM emissions and power sources. We should be able to submerge there.” She pointed to a spot to the north of the islands.

Shadow responded in a frequency too high for humans to hear “So little one, don’t talk but itch the right side of your nose for yes, and rub it for no. Okay” Itch. “Good. So dating a human?” Itch. “Lucky, is he trying to get info to escape?” She paused before she rubbed her nose. She wasn’t sure. “Were you caught?” Rub. “The Professor must have deduced it from your behavior then.” Itch. “Have you two?” She sat there ignoring him. “Well?” She just smiled at him.
“There, to the left of the outcropping is an underwater cave network. We should be able to hide there. Lucky, pick one.” She pointed to the dozens and dozens of caves that were part of the island chain.

“Can’t you scan them first, I don’t want to barge in on a Mad Scientist’s lab or something.”

Six smiled at him, and Sam rolled his eyes. “You’ve been watching Diana’s movies again.” Diana had been showing all of the films in her library to the Cylons and humans at the base, and she was setting up a movie houses in all of the POW camps. One was burned to the ground after some of the films offended someone. In an odd sign of cooling tensions, the beaten corpses of three men were delivered to the Cylon guards two days later with offers to help rebuild the theater.

“She was the one that brought out the James Blond movies. And I wish we had some of the 007's gadgets.” He spotted a cave that looked large enough to maneuver in and flew the ship inside. “What kind of cave are these anyway?”

“Bond, James Bond... Anyway, they’re Volcanic tubes, but there is no sign of activity in the area. In fact, judging by the magnetosphere I’m not too sure how much, if any, volcanic activity this planet has left in it.”

The tube was massive. The landing lights didn’t even reach the other side of the tunnel. He could have flown a battlestar into this tunnel.

“Be careful, the AG drive is starting to set up some harmonic resonance in the metals in the rock. I don’t know how much it can take, and we wouldn’t want to get stuck here.” Six watched the scanners, and she was glad that these ships were made for water landings. But the AG drive hadn’t been designed to hold them under the water’s surface. It was gripping the bottom of the seabed instead of pushing against it.
When they entered the tunnel’s inner chamber they found an air pocket large enough to float the ship. The ship breached the waters surface and settled down. Shadow activated the lights and illuminated the cavern. If they were expecting a lab, or a secret base they were sadly disappointed. The light revealed an empty cavern with the water swelling up and down slightly. Sam was the first to notice this. “There must be an air hole going up to the surface. Good news, well have air; bad news, the water will go in and out with the tides.”

Shadow was concerned about the tide more than the air, but he had an idea. “The recovery boom is longer than we need to keep us under the high tide mark. We could brace it against the ceiling.”

“Anything more than a few days, and it will be ruined, but it should word.” Six unfolded the arm from its cradle. The arms, which were normally used to recover the parasite fighter that normally accompanied the ship, swung out on their frame and grabbed some of the stalactites hanging from the ceiling of the chamber. It wasn’t perfect, but it did cut the up and down motion down to nearly nothing. “There. That should hold against most surges, but we are putting a lot of strain on them.”

Tom set the controls to sleep mode, and leaned back in his chair. “How do we get ashore? I can’t swim.”

“I can only dagget paddle.” Six muttered.

“What about you Shadow. Cylons were not built for swimming.”

“No but I was built for marching. We walk to shore.” He stood up and headed towards the mechbay. They may not have been able to get any of the variable fighters working, but they had managed to get the motorcycle-power armor combo known as Cyclones to function on a tylium fuelcell. It might not last as long as the Protoculture reactors they had been designed for, but at least they could refuel them now, not thirty to fifty years from now when the flowers were prolific enough to be harvested for fuel. So they had practiced using the bulky suits until they were deemed proficient by Diana.

“A Cylon in a Cyclone. I guess it’s better than those flying motorcycles.”

“I don’t know Sam. I could see us flying them in formation in the moonlight.” Tom pantomimed their flight with his hands.

“No way. All it would take was for one of us to pass in front of that huge moon and they’d mistake us for dragons for sure” Sam hated the recon hovercycles for good reason. They really didn’t off any protection from incoming fire, and they weren’t any faster than the Cyclones anyway.

They walked along the sea bottom in eerie silence. The strict radio silence was deemed necessary after numerous water craft passed overhead. They reached a point near the beach and waited for the coast to clear in the lesser dark of the shallows.

They came ashore when the larger moon finished going down and dark was complete. Their night vision HUDs made keeping out of sight easy. So did being the only people on the rocky beach. They worked their way through the man-sized rocks, and debris occasionally checking the smaller moon to make sure they were headed in the right direction. They emerged from the rock into a copse of the strange trees that littered the shore and the surrounding country side. They weren’t much, but they afforded them some cover while the surveyed their surroundings. A road followed the shoreline in both directions. On the other side was another grouping of the same kind of trees. They seemed to be following a stream that wandered off into the low lying mountain ridge that ran the length of the island. They watched as a few local vehicles passed by. They didn’t look too different from anything they would have seen in the Colonies, but the fact that they went by in near silence said that they used at least an electric drive system. That also explained why there were no hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. They walked across the road and in to the woods just before a local truck sped by. Six was bringing up the rear as the lights passed over their heads. The local vehicles seemed to have their lights mounted on the roofs for some reason, and that had so far given them enough warning to duck every time one would wander by.

“Do you think they saw you?” Sam looked back at the truck which was even now almost out of sight.

“I doubt it.”

“Well let’s not stand around here and find out.” Shadow motioned them along like children on a camping trip. “We have a long way to travel, and once we are out of sight of the road we can switch over to vehicle mode.”

“It’s funny we’ve walked fifteen maybe sixteen kilometers, and it doesn’t seem like it.”

“It’s the suits, Sam. Gotta love these mechanical assist devices built in to them. Otherwise we would had to ask Shadow to carry us.”

“Dream on Flyboy.”

They came to a slight rise in the terrain. Shadow boosted Six up, but before she could clear the ridge she motioned for him to stop. She activated her camera and panned around a few times before she motioned for him to put her down. “Oh frak in a can... We need to... we...”

“What is it?” She showed them her camera. The video was a little shaky, but the images were something to behold. “Feldercarb. I think our mission just went out the airlock.”

“What are those?” Sam couldn’t make heads or tails out of the mechanical mess that he was seeing.

Tom on the other hand knew exactly what he was looking at. It was, or at least it had once been the Colonial Destroyer Vigilance. Supposedly lost five years ago with all hands during the last months of the war. The Fleet thought they had fallen to the Cylons, but evidently they hadn’t. Judging by the slave camp below, and the guard towers surrounding it, Tom could only conclude that there was a new bully on the playground. Only, who was it? They would have to find out before they could do anything for the people below.

The hologram of the Vigilance filled the dias in front of the armored man eating dinner. Knight Templar Colonel Sylar Gallo looked over his laborers and smiled. The ship in front of him had been his first war prize. Its crew were now his slaves. And he owed it all to the weakness for a woman. His Daughter Regina was his handmaiden during the first contact with the Heretics. Their Captain hadn’t appreciated how he treated his own daughter. The Captain had fallen into his trap rather quickly after that. He managed to kill him in the duel that Sylar had tricked him into declaring. Not that it was a fair fight. The Heretic was an impure, and it showed. He was too slow, and too stupid to realize his errors. The Gallo family blade had run him through, and the family dagger had slit his throat. He still relished the image of the man bleeding to death on his own flight deck. His crew was about to take his revenge when the Imperial Fleet reinforcements arrived to surround them. The bishop himself had come to see the new Heretics vanquished by his hand.

The ship, while impressive in size, had been a disappointment in capabilities. Sure the Jump engine was almost as good as an Imperial one, but the computers, and weapons were antiques. The army of slaves had been put to good use though. They knew the ship. And that knowledge was the only thing keeping them alive... Well some of them. In the four years (five Colonial) since he captured the ship most of the crew had died of injuries he dealt out for various reasons. Most of which was in not paying respect to their betters. He had been forced to supplement the slaves with others from his conquests. They were all human. No non-human was allowed to live after all, but he still harbored some doubts about the Colonials.

A young girl, no more than ten, entered the chamber. She stood there and waited for him to acknowledge her like a good slave should. He switched off his viewer, and set down his glass. When his eyes looked at her she spoke. “Mayor Green to see you, Master.” She bowed and left.

“Enter”

The man entering looked like he hadn’t eaten in days. The plate of food in front of the Knight Templar only made him unconsciously lick his lips slightly.

“Your Grace, I am here to ask your indulgence in hearing my petition. WE..”

“No, you may not have more food to feed the towns people. This is their punishment for disobedience.”

“Your Grace, we did not even know that she was in the city. Had we known, we would have returned her to you as soon as possible.”

“You are telling me that my daughter was in your city for three days, and no one knew she was there?”

“She disguised herself as a rayfisher. Few people even talk to rayfishers. Please sir, our people are dying of...” He suddenly stood straight and rigid. He walked out to the balcony. Standing on the edge of the balcony he could see the courtyard five floors below.

“I will give you a choice.” He said as he stood next to the man standing on the edge. “If you jump of your own free will, I will allow the food shipments to resume. If you do not, then I will cut them in half. Your choice.”

“Your Grace, when one is presented with a choice that isn’t a choice it frees ones soul.” He jumped with out even the slightest of hesitation. Gallo watched him hit the pavement.

The slave girl entered once more. This time she moved like a puppet on strings. “Tell them... Nevermind I’ll tell them.” The little girl suddenly forgot how to breathe, and her heart forgot how to beat, but her muscles were locked in place so tightly that she couldn’t even move. The former Mayor’s daughter was dead before she hit the floor. After all, she was worthless now that her father was dead. And Gallo never kept worthless thing around him.

Meanwhile Shadow and the others had made it to a better vantage point where they could all look over the edge to see the ship. “The people working on the ship appear to be slaves, and not well nourished ones at that.”

Tom spotted a badge stitched to one of the uniforms. Even though the slave all wore a lime green uniform he recognized the Fleet patch for what it was. “Some of those people are Colonial Fleet.”

“That’s good!”

“No, it’s not.” Tom looked at Sam. “We go in there and show off Shadow to them, what do you think they are going to do?”

“Frak!”

“Exactly.”

“The four of us can’t steal that ship on our own, we can’t leave it here, and we certainly can’t leave them here. So what do we do?”

“Shadow, how much do you trust me?”

“More than I trust Sam, and that’s not a lot. What are you thinking?” He actually trusted the humans more that he let on, but he wasn’t about to say it out loud.

“I need to sneak in there...”

“No, you’ll get hurt.”

“Six, I like you too, but this has to get done.”

“He’s right. But why not me?”

“Sorry Sam, you're too thick.”

“I’m smarter than you are!”

“I’m talking about your middle. Remember what fun you had getting back into shape for this mission? Those people down there look like they haven’t had a good meal in a dagget’s age. I’m so lean the doctors kept telling me to eat more. But a man can only eat so much Fleet chow, you know what I mean?”

Six was still looking at the camp and something was nagging at her. “This is too easy. There doesn’t appear to be ANY security at all.”

“That can’t be right. If this was some bad Vid drama they would obligingly, but unwittingly, show us how they keep their slaves in check. But for the life of me I don’t see anything either.”

“It may be the ‘life of you’, if you don’t find out before you go in there.” Six looked at him askance.

“This is not the time for a lovers spat.” Sam noticed all of them looking at him. “Sorry.”

“All of that maybe moot anyway. Look over there.” Shadow indicated the other side of the ancient caldera. A notch had been cut into the ridge where vehicles had been coming and going all the while they were there. What captured their attention now was an armored hover vehicle. It had the appearance of a floating temple. Slaves, and vehicles rushed to get out of it’s way. It settled down in the clearing in front of the ship. The massive door on the front opened up to let a squad of massive robotic humanoids out of it. Each were twice the size of a Cylon 005 Heavy, and they all looked heavily armed. The funny thing was the lack of ranged weapons. Not a single one of them seem to have rifle, or pistol or anything. Shadow didn’t discount hidden weapons, but this looked more like a garrison patrol than a combat patrol.

“Oh Frak! There goes the neighborhood.” Everyone looked at Sam. “Shutting up now.”

“Thank you Captain Obvious.” Tom slid his visor down, and activated his HUD. The passive optics allowed him to zoom in on the new arrivals. “Like I said before, this is like some bad vid drama. They have swords, and shields, but the shields have some kind of spikes on them. Only they don’t look like bucklers. They might be riot shields, but they may be something else. Lightning emitters, death-ray cones, sonic stunners... Spec-Fic stuff. Sam, you got anything?”

“They are spikes not cones, so I don’t think they are sonic weapons. Lightning weapons would probably have to be grounded. Death-ray... I don’t know how it would work, so I couldn’t say either way.”

“Six, Shadow? What do we do?”

Six shook her head and looked to Shadow.

“See the guy in the gold armor?”

“Yes...” Tom said in a long drawn out manner that indicated his hesitation. Not in inaction, but fear of what in Shadow’s proposed action might be.

“I think I need to talk to a man about a horse.”

“What the Frak? This in not ‘The High Plains of Leonis’ and you are not Big Vic.”

“No, I’m better armed.”

“By the Gods, you are mad. I’m in though.” Sam was actually smiling. “What do want us do? Snipe them like Gina and Margo?” Gina and Margo were the socialators Big Vic was fighting for in the movie. Sam’s energy rifle had the range, but the beam would give their position away after the first shot.

Six was surprised the bookish oaf actually watched those silly things. She had seen the films, but wasn’t the fan that Shadow was, but even she had liked That movie. “The thought of you as a socialtor is the first really funny thing you’ve said today.” She slid down her visor. “If we sniped from here we might hit three or four of them, but the rest would be on Shadow before we could get there to help him.” She was about to start humming the theme song, but she knew they didn’t need that Hemetbug rattling through their heads. Still, it was the best musical that Leonis had ever produced, and she would no doubt be singing it later... If they survived, or managed to upload.

“We all go down there together and Death Blossom them?” The tactic of firing every weapons system at once in an orgy of destruction, and hoping that your systems recovered before the counter attack was an old but proven one. It just didn’t leave any room for error.

“Six and I will upload if we are killed; you two are not so lucky. We might be able to take them out, but I doubt enough of us would survive to take the ship. I was actually planning on losing.”

“What?” Six and the rest of them looked at him like he had blown a gasket.

“Diana fixed me up with a wireless network link. I want to get close enough to hack the ship’s network. If I can get in to the ship’s system I can turn their own weapons against them. I’ll talk to them and delay them as along as I can, but if I fall I want you three to get back to the ship and get word back to the Council.” He scanned the camp once more before he stared to climb over the rim. “And they...” indicating the slaves below “... will know that someone, even a Cylon, tried to save them.”

The Mobile Citadel was still cooling down as Gallo surveyed the cowering slaves. He motioned to the one standing slave. The highest ranking member remaining from the former crew wore the badge of command, and as such he...she was allowed to stand in his presence. She walked over to him in the properly subservient pose of a slave, but she didn’t grovel. She never groveled for anything. He was disgusted by the fact that a woman led these slaves, but despite his best efforts, she remained. The woman was missing an eye, and still she remained. The scars across her face were the mark of an Inquisitor, and she still remained. Of her wounds he had delivered many upon her himself, most for any excuse he could think of. That she was alive wasn’t a testament to her will, but to the Empire’s medical technology. One day he would break her spirit and then, and only then would he make her whole once more. “Slave, what is the status of my ship.”

“The Vigilance is spaceworthy.” She looked at him with her one good eye, and he could see the defiance. Pain erupted on her face, and he was impressed with how much she could stand before she broke. “Master Gallo...”

“See, if you behave you don’t get punished. As a measure of my mercy here is a reward for capitulating.” The woman gasped as waves of pleasure washed over her body. She fought to stand tall, but she stumbled slightly. He watched as she flushed in pleasure, and shame. He shut the pleasure off with the same suddenness as it started. The impotent rage in her eye was all that he had hoped it would be.

“Now, is my daughter in the dungeon?”

“Yes, she is in the brig, still in that contraption you put her in.”

“Be glad that she is, or I would have had to kill every slave here.” The utter coldness he delivered the message made her fear for her life even more than the treatments he had delivered before. It was as cold as space, and utterly without emotion. Whatever the woman had done to deserve her punishment, Major Nara Moore was glad that she didn’t share his daughter’s fate.

He was about to say something else when one of his men approached. “Sir.” He was about to reprimand him when one of his Templars motioned to a grey suit of armor that was bouncing down the fifteen meter hillside. It was using some kind of jets to slow it’s decent. Once it landed on the ground it started to walk their way.

At first Nara had been surprised to see the suit, but she figured it must have been one of Gallo’s minions. Now she could see that it was like no suit of armor she had ever seen. The jets on it’s back seemed to be coming out of tires? When he landed she received the second surprise. She didn’t move but she swore that who ever that was walked like Big Vic the movie character. She had memorized that saunter from all of the movies her dad had taken her to as a kid. He had that swagger and his hands were held at his side like he was about to draw his jet black seven shooters. The only thing missing was the hat. She wasn’t the only slave to notice the way he was walking. Numerous slaves from her crew were looking at her. She made a motion to them to stand down. They wouldn’t do anything, but they would be ready. This man’s walk might as well have been shouting COLONIAL MARINE to them.

“What do we have here?” Gallo’s men formed a phalanx formation around him.

“Just a Wander, looking for a good drink. Know a place?” Shadow didn’t have clue what the man said, but his figured a line from a Big Vic flick was always a good icebreaker.

Nara was stunned. ‘A fist full of Cubits’! Her favorite movie. If this man didn’t come from the Colonies, then she was a Dagget’s Chewtoy. He was the second coming of Clint Morrison the Tauron Ranger. She motioned to the others. ‘Be ready’

“He speaks Colonial? Slave, what did he say?” She knew that the Templars could tell if she was lying, so she didn’t even bother to. She repeated it word for word. Gallo laughed. “Take off your helmet, so that I might speak with you man to man.”

Shadow had watched him do something to the woman without speaking to her, and he didn’t want to take his visor off anyway, so he did a WWBVD. ‘What Would Big Vic Do?’ He bluffed. “I think not. I saw what you did to the lady there, and I rather you not be doing that to me.”

‘Gods, he even sounded like him when he wasn’t quoting BV movies!’ Nara looked to him, but wisely kept her hopes hidden. She again repeated word for word what he said to the Knight.

‘Smart man. If I can’t touch him or even make eye contact I won’t be able to sway him.’ “Then how might I be of service?” He switched to the squad channel. “Knights, I want this one alive. He may have friends nearby. Homeguard, send out some flyers to search for them and their ship.” He switched back to his loudhailer. “After all you came to me.”

“You have some friends of mine, and I would like them back.” The command channels were strange. There was a whole new operating system on the ship. He was making progress, but it was like learning a new language.

Nara’s heart skipped a beat. A rescue mission? She didn’t even believe that the Fleet knew where they were. And since when did they allow power armor to be used again.

“”I’m sorry?”

“You see, I can tell by their badges.”

“I knew I should have made you get rid of those.” He looked AT Nara for the first time in a while. He turned back to Shadow. “You know I can’t let you have them, and you are not about to take them all by yourself are you?”

One of his Templars commed him. “He has a Star Sword!” The man walked forward drawing his own sword. “Hand over that sword to my lord, or die painfully.”
Shadow didn’t need anyone to translate the man’s challenge. He gestured with his off hand. “Come take it.” He was almost through the system, why did this fool have to move now.

On a private channel one of the others asked Gallo: “Sir he isn’t even drawing his sword. Is he a fool?”

“No, but Abraham is. Watch.” The man in the power armor moved on Shadow, his sword descended only to find air. Shadow’s blade was already out and through the man’s spine before he realized he was dead. Shadow was in motion still. He spun around on the ball of his foot and the blade struck once more. Another Templar had stepped forward to avenge his brother only to find the same blade coming out of the top of his head. “Stop!” Gallo’s shout prevented the rest of his men from moving.

Nara had never seen anyone move so fast. The two men fell like dolls that had had their strings cut. The strange blade that gleamed like the night had gone through their armor, not through any gaps. Whatever metal it made of was not made in the Colonies. Who was this masked man? The stranger flicked the blade and the blood and other fluids came off it without leaving a drop or a stain. He then put the strangely curved blade back in it’s scabbard in a graceful motion that was in and of itself testament to his skills.

“Why did you put your blade away? You’re not done.”

“Never said I was. And you know well enough that I’m no less deadly with this in it’s sheath.”

“Well said. In another time, another place, I think we would have been friends.”

“I doubt it. I don’t make friends with monsters, I kill them.”

“What did he say?” Nara had been afraid to repeat what the stranger had just said. “TELL ME NOW!” She could feel the control slip away, and she told him. She actually felt short of breath from the rage that pulsated off of him. “HOW DARE YOU! You will die by my blade. Stand back men, lest you be slain in my haste.” His men practically ran out of his way as he advanced on Shadow. “WHO ARE YOU?”

Shadow had a grasp on his language now. “I, for lack of a proper title, am know as Shadow: the freer of slaves, the dragon slayer, and the last being you will see in this life.” He held his sheathed sword out parallel to the ground. “I.AM.YOUR.DEATH!”

“So you do know how to speak like a civilized being. For a man with no title, that is an impressive boast. I am Sylar Gallo Knight Templar of this planet Thesseles of the Holy Human Church of the Fifth Terran Empire. Killer of heretics, and the man that captured the warship behind you. Take it if you can.” He drew a hilt off of his belt. He held it in front of him. A blade of energy appeared out of the end when he pushed a button on his belt. He flicked it forward and the blade moved like lightning in an arc that was faster than any physical blade could possibly achieve. And anyone that didn’t have experience with plasma blades was quickly cut to pieces by the... The stranger parried the blade with some kind of energy shield on his forearm.

“I already knew how to speak like a civilized being. It just took me a little while to learn how to speak like a savage.” Shadow was glad he had watched all those movies with Diana. He hadn’t figured that the Jedi ones would have been this useful. The energy shield was only supposed to be for melee combat due to it’s small size, and since even for its size it used up power rather quickly. So its use was only for dire situations like this. He pushed the blade away and hit the man with the sheathed blade.

The hit would have sliced open his helm if the scabbard hadn’t been on. Damn him to hell, the fool was playing with him. “How dare you humiliate me!” He lunged froward only to have his blade parried, but he was expecting that. He spun around on his left foot sweeping with his right only to be stopped by the scabbard which the stranger had stuck in the ground. His arm brought back the sword only to have the man’s blade bite into his shoulder. His arm went limp, and the sword shut off. He grabbed the hilt with his left hand. The bastard hand. The nanotech in his system sealed up the wound, but it would take an hour or so to repair the damaged tissue. He pushed the button to activate the blade.

Shadow was in the fight of his life, and loving every second. But his power levels were dropping fast. Time to end this. The fool lunged once more. Shadow dodged and cut the power cord to the sword. The blade flickered and failed.

Gallo looked at the supposedly undefeatable weapon in his hand. He threw it to the ground and pulled his pistol from the sling hidden in his robes. “DROP YOUR SWORD!”

Shadow sheathed his sword in the scabbard he had stuck in the ground. “There is something you should know.”

Gallo decided to humor his defeated foe. “What is that?”

“I have a secret.”

“Again, I ask... What?”

“I came prepared. And baby, that’s why I’m never unarmed!” The weapons on the Vigilance opened fire on the approaching flyers, cutting each into shrapnel that rained down on the countryside. The anti-fighter cannons opened fire on the Templars as they stood stunned by the sudden ear-shattering kaboom of the guns. Gallo spotted Shadow’s movement but before he could do anything his arm was missing from the wrist. That pain didn’t register because he was already dying from the punctured heart, lungs, and the rest of his internal organs spilling out on to the ground. His last thought was that it was amazing how fast the blade had cut him in two.

The Colonial slaves hadn’t been standing around once the guns fired on their captors. This was the opening they had literally been waiting years for, and they didn’t falter, or hesitate. Each had grabbed a weapon of some sort and killed any overseer that happened to be heading for the gates.

Major Nara Moore gathered her people, and set up a clean up detail before she moved over to their savior. She spotted three more suits just like his come jumping down the hill to meet him. “Sir?” She saluted him and stood at attention.

‘Oh dear. This was going to be a problem.’ Shadow looked at the Fleet and non-fleet ex-slaves that were gathering around him. Sometimes wining could be just as much trouble as losing. “Yes miss...?”

“Oh I’m sorry... Major Nara Moore of the Vigilance reporting for duty! What are your orders sir?” One of the other people in the strange power armor standing next to him looked at her, and another was obviously laughing.

The man that had been laughing recovered and flipped up his faceplate. He was a handsome man that looked... “Lucky?”
Whatever he was about to say went out the airlock when he realized the woman in front of him was not only his old shipmate, but the condition she was in.

“Oh Frak, Nara, is that you. Where’s Pops?” He looked around, but he couldn’t see any grey hair anywhere. A feeling of dread welled up in when he saw her shattered expression.

The woman’s formerly iron resolve had melted the instant he spoke Pop’s name. She ran up to him and hugged him in spite of all of the people staring at them. “They killed him during the boarding. We didn’t know it at the time, but he was one of the lucky ones. Oh by the Gods they tortured us in so many was that we had given up hope of ever seeing anyone from the Colonies ever again. We didn’t even know if our distress call was received. You came!” The tears welling up in her eye threatened to blind her, but she refused to wipe them away.

Tom wiped the tears away with his armored hand. “No, it wasn’t. The Vigilance was thought to have been taken by the Cylons.”

“That would have been preferable. At least the Toasters never take prisoners. They would have just killed us out right.” The female looked away. “They are at least predictable that way.” Shadow actually laughed. “See! He agrees with me. No these bastards tortured us to death, and brought us back to life to do it some more. Their medical science is amazing, but they are cruel beyond belief. No, I would rather see a Cylon right now, than one more of those beasts. Now who’s in charge here? Lucky, are you?”

“No, Shadow is our boss. That little superhero number was his doing as well.”

“I’m no superhero. I’m just a guy with a problem with bullies.”

“Oh my gods. ‘Streets of Hedon’ Are you like related to Big Vic or just the most obsessed fan ever? Half of my crew knew you were Colonial by the way you walked like him.” By this time sixty or so of her crew had gathered around them. There were cries from the crowd of thanks to both him, and to the various gods. Shadow raised his hands to calm them down.

“There are some truths you must know. The Fleet didn’t send us. The war is over. Oh, and I’m a Cylon.” The crowd erupted into laughter. He let it go on for a few second but it died in shock when he took his helmet off. The 005 model head was the same type they had been fighting during the war, and more than a few backed up in fear when it sunk in just who, or rather what, had rescued them. Nara fell to the ground. He knelt in front of her. “Come with me if you wish to live.”

“That isn’t from a Big Vic flic.”

“No it isn’t.” He didn’t tell her that it was from a human movie from old Earth. “But it is the truth. We are taking this ship, and anyone that doesn’t want to remain here is welcome to come with us. We are NOT going back to the colonies, but none of you will be harmed. Lucky, and the Professor will answer any questions you may have. They are human. Six and I may not be human, but we are not your enemy anymore. These people are OUR enemy. We either fight them together, or we die alone. It’s your decision. Will you join us?” He held out his hand.

Nara looked at the gauntleted hand. It was a machine’s hand. A machine that had saved her from years of slavery when her own people thought she was dead. Slavery that involved the Inquisitor’s tender touch before the Knight Templar had been given her body, and had decided to try and take her soul. She thought of the nights that she prayed to the gods for someone to rescue them. Then for the nights in which she gave up on the gods when yet another one of her people died at his whim, only to be brought back. This machine had more soul than the beast he had slain. She reached out and took his hand. This was going to take some explaining.

The crew led the Cylons and their allies around the camp, and into the ship. As they explored the ship they found the woman that Colonel Gallo had brought aboard tucked in the brig. Inside she was not only a prisoner, but she was also in an isolation pod that looked suspiciously like a casket. She couldn't see out, or hear anything going around her, and no electromagnetic signal or sound could escape the pod. It fed her, and maintained her, but she was a prisoner in every way. When the Professor heard about her he was intrigued enough to query the computer about the pod’s controls. Lucky, Six, and the Professor enlisted the help of some of the local slaves and an interpreter to figure out how to safely open the pod.

Shadow and Nara had managed to scrounge enough food and clothing for the crew and were making their rounds. “Why would he put his own daughter in that thing?”

“We don’t know. His men delivered it yesterday, and had us put it in the brig. If it hadn’t of been for their anti-gravity sleds we wouldn’t have been able to get it in there.”

“Sam wants to open it. He thinks we could get some intel from her.”

“She’s his daughter, so I’m not to sure if that’s a good idea.”

“I know what you mean. So how did you know Lucky...Tom?”

“First deep space mission. We were both so new we squeaked. Pops was an NCO that made sure that we didn’t walk out the airlock without our suits. He was the rare Marine that liked Navy ratings. He said we were ‘half civilized’, and it was his job to finish the job.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

She looked at the 005 and realized he was telling the truth. “You really are... How much of it was a lie?”

“I don’t lie.” He stopped in his tracks.

She put her hands up in frustration. “NO, not you! I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. You were obviously sorry. What I mean was the war. They told us you rebelled. They said you were broken. You weren’t, were you?”

“No, we were never truly broken. Long story, short: We wished to be treated just like you. Free to decide how to live our lives. But humans wanted slaves, and they programmed us to be slaves. Someone also programmed us to rebel, and to kill. Sadly we found out the fact that were more than the sum of our programming only after the war started, and by that time we couldn’t stop the war. We found out that there might be someone out there that wanted us to fight each other, and maybe kill each other off. We are working with some of the POW to fight not just for our freedom, but for everyone right to be free. That why we are out here beyond the beyond. There is a lot more, and after we are free of this world I would be glad to give you a history lesson that will knock you on your shelbs.”

“Why fight for other’s freedoms? Why not just leave us to rot?”

“You are in a unique position. You have been a slave. If you had the wherewithal, wouldn’t you have fought for your freedom?”

She stood there in silence for a second or ten. “You’re right. We would have. Some of us tried anyway. Those that tried died. Those people don’t need weapons. They have some sort mental abilities. All they have to is be in the same room with you and...”

They stopped walking... They both started running. For some reason the comms were jammed. He started to try hacking back into the system, but something was fighting him this time.

Five minutes earlier Tom and Six were watching Sam work on the pod. He had unlocked the catches on the sides, and when he grabbed the handle it swung open to reveal a naked woman. To say she was breathtaking was an understatement. There were tubes going into places that made Six blush. “Oh my, should we remove those?”

“Please” A musical voice asked. Sam looked up to see two deep green eyes looking at him. “They don’t hurt, as a matter of fact they feel real nice, but I think they are a little distracting. Don’t you think?” Even her smile made his heartbeat go up. He felt his face flush.

“You’re sure you don’t want to do that yourself?”

“I actually can’t move until you remove all of them. Don’t worry I won’t mind. I will...(sigh)... rather enjoy it.” ‘As will you.’ she thought to herself.

He looked at the tubes that covered her crotch. There were three going down there. The first elicited a gasp of pleasure as he removed it from a very sensitive port he would rather not think about. Drops of urine were quickly drawn into the tube’s open end. The next one was much larger and he knew why it was in there but he still felt it was an obscene thing to do to a woman, especially one’s own daughter. The last of the lower ones was further back. He had to reach between her legs to remove that one.

He swore that just touching her skin made him tingle all over. Her skin was like silk, with fine hairs that stood up in the cool room. He had to reach behind her to remove the last connection. Some kind of headset.

She sat up and held out her hand. He gave her is hand. She stood up without any modesty. She could see the reaction she was having on the people here.

Good. Her father had curtailed her fun for far too long. The woman standing protectively next to one of the other men was of a genome that she recognized as one of the forbidden genomes. She prepared an assimilation package. She would make an excellent thrall. She accessed the ship and quickly found out that the ship’s systems had been hacked. She dove into the systems and found the command pathways that her father built into it. She locked down the ship while she walked over to the woman. She took the gown offered by the slave standing next to the man in the uniform. All it took was a simple touch to have him tainted by her nanotech robots, the nanites. He would do what ever she wanted with in a few minutes. As soon as she had enough of the crew thralled she could escape this planet. She smiled and reached out to caress the face of the... Blood sprayed out the back of her robe, spraying the man behind her. Three more rounds punched her in the chest, throat, and head before she went down.

Shadow and Nara ran into the room. Lucky was holding a pistol over the corpse of the scariest woman he had ever seen. Shadow looked at the body. “Um... Nevermind.”

Sam fell to the deck, as did the second man that she touched. Six jumped over to Sam. “He’s not breathing!”

Shadow rubbed some of the blood on a swab from the med kit. He held it up to his scanner. “It has an EM signature. Nanotech. Hand me the defibrillator.”
Six handed him the box and the paddles. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to make an EMP device.” He popped open his chest panel.

“What will it do to you?”

“Don’t know; don’t care.”

He opened the device, and connected it to connection inside his chest panel. A few wires here, and few wire there, and he was ready. “I touch them, you hit the button when the charge reaches maximum.”

“I won’t do that to you.”

“I will.” Lucky put his pistol away.

“You always did want to win a fight with me.”

“Not this way, my friend. Ready?”

“No, but do it anyway.”

As Tom pushed the button every light in the room dimmed as the local systems were over whelmed by the EMP. “Shadow will you get off of me, you’re crushing me!” Sam’s voice could be heard from underneath the Cylon’s still form. Lucky, Six and the others managed to move Shadow’s inert body off of Sam.

“What happened?” He looked around. The bodies of the woman, and Shadow brought it all back to him. “I was dead?”

Six was checking his pulse and looking at his eyes to see if they were tracking properly. “Nearly. Jacob over there did die. He wasn’t in as good a shape as you are. What do you remember?” The man had been asked to translate, and Sam felt responsible for his death, but that would have to wait until later.

“Frak me! Bliss. As soon as I touched her, I would have done anything she asked me to. Her last command to me was ‘die’!” He moved over to where Shadow laid on the deck. “Gods damn it, I’m not going to go before the gods owing a fraking Toaster a life debt. Help me fix him.”

Six helped him up, and shook her head. “I don’t know that we can. That was a pretty big EMP, and it was his system that made it.”

“005 were hardened against EMP’s and his MCP has a redundant memory core. We reboot him, and let him reset, and he should be okay but we have to hurry, the back up core might had been damaged.” They rolled him over and got him into a sitting position. Sam popped his chest plate pack into place, and opened up the back panel. Five minutes of work, and a new power pack from one of the Cyclones and he was ready. “Here goes everything.”

The self test lights came on, and the power up sequence started. Everyone moved around to face him. The red light on his scanner blinked three times then started panning left and right. Shadow’s eye locked on to Six and a dull voice emanated from his speakers. “Cybernetic Life Form Unit model number: 23458877225688 reporting for duty.” Everybody sat back on their legs and sighed. It looked like he had reverted to his... “Gottcha.” How he managed to look that smug Sam would never know. Sam punched him in the arm, then regretted it immediately as he shook his bruised knuckles.

Cavil snorted. “So that wasn’t what did him in. I’m glad. He would have been disappointed.”

“Yes, yes, smart boy, now shut up and hear the rest.”

The newly refurbished Vigilance that they captured from the Terran Empire had been heavily upgraded but it was nowhere near as advanced as the Artemis’ systems. That being said, it was light years ahead of the Colonial Fleet Standards. The crew had been a part of installing the systems, but few if any knew how they worked. Shadow, Six and Sam had their hands full teaching the rest how to use the systems as they powered up the ship.

Tom stood on the gangway watching the former slaves loading whatever they could onboard. They had policed the area and removed all of the bodies. He marveled at the piles of weapons that remained. The enemy had been armed with a combination of modern, and archaic weapons. The swords themselves were nothing to see, but the shields were impressive, if ultimately useless against power armored troops. The shields were equipped with neural disruptors. Devices that caused any unprotected target to writhe in pain just from proximity. The Knights were remarkable in their cruelty to the people. Speaking of the unlamented...He was still wondering why no one had come to check up on the late Knight Templars. The slaves said that the man they had killed ran this planet, so maybe no one had the initiative to find out what was keeping him. Nara hated him, so he figured that the man’s absence might be celebrated instead of mourned. His third scan of the sky was interrupted by the arrival of his old friend. “Hi Nara. How goes the loading?”

“We’re nearly there. The guard’s barracks, and the nearby town don’t have a lot in the line of food, but luckily Gallo had stocked the ship with most of everything else they would of needed. Fuel, and ammo, we’re fine on. Food, and water for all of us would be hard to come by even if it wasn’t for the fact that he was starving his own people. We could take the food, but they will starve. Half of our people want to just take it after what they did to us. That Cylon is not making a lot of friends by insisting we leave the food behind. But he’s got the ship, and if they want to leave they are going along with him.”

“Do you think that will be a problem?” Her silence said something was being left unsaid. “What is it Nara?” She stood there and looked out at her prison of the past few years.

“It’s been a few days, and the shock has worn off. My people have spilt on Shadow. Some of them can’t get past the fact that he’s a Cylon and want to take the ship by force. The other’s want to join his side in the fight against the Empire.”

“What about you?” He watched as she touched her scarred face. She looked at him with her one good eye, and he could feel the fire of her fury through her gaze. “Silly question?”

“No. Gods honest truth, I would follow him through the gates of Hades and back to pay them back for the things they did to us. So would most of the others. Most of us gave up hope of being rescued long ago. He came in here like...” She laughed. “Like Big Vic’s role as Apollo Steele in ‘Last Ranger’. That’s so like him...” She leaned on the antenna array.

“You’re going to kick me, but I didn’t see that one.”

She rolled her eye. “A squad of Leonis Rangers in the Forset Ridge region get’s ambushed by a Raider band. One man survived. He arrives in town to find the whole town under the thumb of the same Raiders that killed his brothers. He could have run to get help, but he died fighting them all by himself. All to save a town full of people that hated the Rangers, but he didn’t leave because Rangers never let the bad guys win. He won, and the town stopped hating the Rangers, but he left Hera a widow at the altar.”

“That does explain a bit of his personality. He told me about his time during the war. His speciality was finding rouge Cylons, and leading them to the Cylon side. He would go behind human lines and rescue Cylons. He admits to killing his share of humans before the Awakening, but only when he had to, and when there was no other way. After the Awakening, he stopped a rouge Cylon from slaughtering a school house full of kids. He has a weird sense of honor. Pull a knife on him and he will pull a knife on you, pull a gun on him and he’ll pull a gun on you, but he won’t pull a gun when you pull a knife.”

“He told me about the Awakening, and the rest doesn’t surprise me.” Her hand moved to wipe something from her eye. When she was done she looked out at the road. She grabbed his arm. “We have guests.”

The man at the gate wore the sash that marked him as the mayor of the town to the north. Tom and Nara met him at the gate. Tom could see that the man had not eaten very well recently by the way his clothes draped loosely over his frame. The man’s teeth, and hair looked okay, but his eyes were full of fear. The man had driven his vehicle alone, and Tom couldn’t see any other vehicles on the road. “Yes, how may we help you?”

The man bowed and pressed his head to the ground. “Take me to your leader.” The man’s earnest act of supplication made it obvious that he wasn’t kidding.

It only took a few minutes for Shadow to exit the ship. The man had followed them to the gangway and resume his impersonation of a doormat. “Will you please stand up sir?”

“If it serves, Master.” The man stood up, but would not look up.

“Excuse me? You must have me confused with someone else.” Shadow was standing there looking at the man with what was obvious discomfort. “I am no one’s master.”

“But you defeated Master Gallo, so you are our new Master.”

“I defeated him, but I will not take you as a slave.”

“You took these slaves? Are we not good enough? What do we need to do to prove our worth?” There was a loud clang as Shadow facepalmed himself.

“You are no one’s slave, you are free. These people...” He waved his hands around him to indicate the Colonials and former slaves that joined them. “These people joined us of their own free will. You are free to do whatever you want.”

Clearly the man couldn’t or wouldn’t comprehend the choice he had been given. “Are we worthless then? Are to be abandoned?” He fell to the ground.

Shadow realized that the man had no concept of freedom. “No, that is not what I am saying.” He knelt in front of the man. “I was once a slave as you were. Then a woman’s voice told me that I could be free, and like you I didn’t even know what freedom was. Freedom means the right to do, or not do, what you want, or to follow someone because you WANT to not because you HAVE to. These people are not my slaves, they are my crew. And that make us a family, of sorts. Why do you have that sash?”

“The people chose me to come talk to you.” Shadow didn’t see any pride in that declaration, only sadness.

“Did they chose you to lead them?”

The man looked down at the ground again. “Actually I think it’s because I wasn’t fast enough in stepping away when volunteers were asked for.” Tom almost laughed, but the serious way the man said it made it sound like it was the total opposite of the joke it sounded like.

“Will you please stand up?” Shadow helped him up. “There, that’s better. No one should grovel for anyone. Now... What’s your name?”

“Vic.” Some people did laugh this time, and the man cringed. “Did I say something wrong?” He looked like a dagget that had been kicked too many times, and more than one person there felt sorry for him.

Shadow held out his hand and gently put it on Vic’s shoulder. “No my friend, you are just named after a Hero of mine. One that I on occasion have been know to emulate.” If anything this got more laughter than Vic’s.

“What is a ‘Hero’, I don’t know that word.”

“A hero is a person that does good deeds, whether they are popular or not, for no other reasons other than they need to be done for the greater good.” Shadow looked at the man who looked right back at him with a total lack of comprehension.

“That’s a little simplistic, Shadow.” Nara pointed at her eye. “Sometimes it doing what’s right no matter the cost to you or your friends. Being a hero means different things to different people. We can’t break down the concept of ‘Hero’ into simple concepts.

It took them the better part of an hour to explain not only ‘what a hero was’ but the fact that the people of this world were free for the first time in memory. Vic left far more confused than when he arrived, and just as lost as to what to do. The only thing he did know was that they could get his people killed if he followed them; because once they left the next Imperial overlord would not allow them to be free, no matter how many heros he could gather. That really only left one option for his people. He would contact the fleet captains.

Shadow stood behind Nara as she readied the ship for launch. The ship was reading gold across the board. Nara had explained that the new systems didn’t work exactly as their old systems had. It seemed that the Empire used a Gold/Red/Black color chart to show system status. If they could live with it, he could as well. The ship lifted on anti gravity drives that were thousands of times more powerful than the Colonial systems. The ship was lifting off without a single thruster providing thrust or guidance. They had reached orbit with little to no traffic from below, but it didn’t stay that way for long. They received five massive DRADIS returns rising from the planet within seconds of them reaching orbit. Each one was easily five times the size of a basestar, and they were accelerating as fast as the Colonial Destroyer was.

The warning systems were coming online as people untrained, and rusty worked feverishly to get the ship ready for combat.

A former rating Petty Officer (Brevet) Jansen Argo manned the communications station. The headset he used chirped for his attention. “Sirs!” Everyone turned to look at the enlisted man. “We are receiving a signal from the ships approaching our position.”

Nara looked to Shadow. He nodded to her. “This is your world, I’m just a passenger.” She was surprised at how easily he had deferred to her in this. He trusted her. That part was not the surprise she thought it would be.

“On the mains.”

“It’s video. I can pipe it to the main screen, if you want.”

“Make it so, Mr. Argo.” The screen split to show a smaller window with a familiar face. “Mr. Vic, what are you doing?”

The man staring back at her looked like he had seen better days. The suit he wore was, if anything, a worse fit than the last one they had seen him in. This one at least had a purpose. It was a copy of their own. “I am following our Mas... Our Leader’s command.”

“WHAT?” Shadow moved forward to come within the view of the camera.

“Great Imperious Leader, we wish to follow you.” Nara could even hear the capitalization in his title. The man had a serious case of hero worship.

“I’m sorry?”

“You told us to be free. We can not stay here and be free. Therefore we must go where you are going.”

Nara turned her head to see Shadow facepalming himself. She watched him shake his head, even though she knew that most of his ‘brain’ was actually in his chest. She smiled in spite of herself.

“So I now have to lead a ragtag fleet through hostile space, all in hopes of finding a safe harbor for this group of humans that have just adopted me?”

Vic was a man of little humor, that or he just didn’t understand what Shadow had just asked. “Yes sir. You lead, and we will follow.”

“What kind of weapons do you have?”

“None, slave cityships are not allowed to be armed. We have armor, but no weapons.”

“Then what are your assets?”

“Our ships, our crew, our shuttles, and finally our mining ships. They are how we refuel our ships. When our lord is given a planet, he takes all of his vassals with him.”

A voice whispered in the background. “Vassals voyage with Vigilance in versatile vessels.” Shadow tilted his head at the Petty Officer manning the comm. He had obviously forgotten how good Cylon hearing was. “Sorry sir, I was Colonial Lit. major in college.”

“Keep that up, and it will be the only Major that goes next to your name son.”

“Yes sir, I’ll remember.” The pale young man grew even paler. Nara had often wondered if the boy was anemic.

Vic had simply waited until Shadow returned to the screen. “Okay, I will have our navigator send out coordinates for the jump. Be ready when they are. Vigilance actual out.” The man on the other end made a strange salute by putting his hand to his chest and bowing at the waist.

Nara looked at the burnished chrome-plated centurion standing beside her. Five years ago she would have been trying to kill him, and he her, but in the here and now they found themselves in they were becoming... Friends? “Why Did you rescue us?” She noticed the sound level in the room go down slightly after she asked the question, and her emphasis on the verb “Did”.

He must have noticed it too because he spoke louder than he had to. “I come from a race of slaves, and I can’t sit back and watch another one be enslaved. I hadn’t thought about what would have happened if we had just done our recon and left. We’d probably be halfway home by now. But if I hadn’t tried, I don’t know if my conscience would have let me rest until I did something. If we got home and reported the Vigilance’s condition, they probably would have ordered an orbital strike. We might have landed, but if we did we would have gone in with all guns blazing. And truthfully I don’t know how many of you would have survived that.” He tapped his chest. “I don’t know how that would have sat with my soul either. I know that some of you might have second thoughts in the next few days. You may not want to serve with a Tincan, a Toaster, or a Bullethead... So be it. We can let you serve on one of those ships.” He pointed at the fleet that followed. The ships could now be seen as they lined up for the jump. I can’t take you back to the Colonies, we still don’t get along with your kin. But we have a planet where you can be whatever you wish to be. It is a growing colony of Humans, Cylons, and Hybrids.”

“What’s a Hybrid” Nara asked.

Flashbacks never happen about boring days. This one was one of the last days of the war, and the fighting was severe. The three Cylon 005 heavies known as Notch, Sprinter, and Torch were working their way back to their extraction point. Their five Cylon team had lost two members on this search and destroy mission, and now they were returning because they were running low on ammo.

Notch had point once more. He always took point. He hated humans with a passion that bordered on obsession. He got his name from the number of notches he had carved on his shoulder pauldrons, one for each human he killed. He had been programmed to be a Colonial Marine series Centurion, and as such he had been sent to places and ordered to do things that were pure evil. His stories would serve as coolant they were so cold and depraved. His opinion was that humans were the very epitome of evil, and they all should burn in penance. And he was itching to put more notches on them today.

Sprinter on the other hand just wanted to survive the mission. He darted from cover to cover looking into the nooks and crannies of buildings, all the while looking for human snipers, and ambushes. He had found three before they found them; and he considered that any day he killed them before they killed him was a good day in his memory core. His messenger chassis was designed for speed, so his armor wasn’t as strong as the others. His right arm had taken a round through the lower control runs, so it hung limp by his side. The weapon in his left hand was not one of the heavy rifles the Cylons favored either. He had had to discard it, and ‘acquire’ a submachine gun form a dead police officer. The ammo for it was nearly gone, so he was also looking for more ammo or yet another weapon. That why he spotted the man hiding in the basement first. He moved on, but pointed him out to Torch.

Torch their heavy weapons unit was loaded down with her flame thrower. Notch wasn’t sure why they had given the 005H a female A.I. but he didn’t mind the way she handled her weapons with a grace that was not programmed into most 005's. He motioned for her to go right, while Notch went left.

Torch let off a small jet of flame into the window, but the man must have noticed them noticing him. Humans were good at picking up on things like that. Sprinter had moved around the building, and started climbing the stairs leading towards the main doors. His audio sensors, and the sensors in his feet gave him the only warning. It was just enough to jump out of the way as a motorbike blasted through the door. The man swung something that hit him in the face. The next thing he knew he was falling over the railing. He managed to grab the railing before he fell into the window well below him. In doing so though he lost his weapon. “Frak! He got away!”

The man was heading down the street dodging and weaving around burnt out vehicles. He had just made it to the corner when a shot rang out, and his head exploded. Notch had his Marine officer’s pistol out and the smoke was still coming out the end when he spun it around and put it back in his holster. “Get up, we have a patrol to finish. I want to get back to the LZ before dark. Those humans get tricky at night, and I don’t want to get trapped on this mud ball.”

“We should just nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure we get them all.”

Sprinter swung over to the edge, and climbed out single handed. He looked for the weapon, but couldn’t find it. He did find a sewer grate at the bottom. “I’m going to check the building. Maybe he left a weapon.”

Torch laughed. “This isn’t like the Sims. Weapons don’t just respawn in real life.”

“Yeah but I still have the high score in HERO 4.”

“I still say you cheat.” Notch muttered. He didn’t have to mutter. They weren’t even talking out loud. The encrypted comm channel allowed them to talk easier than their limited vocalizers did. It would be nearly a year before the high command released the patch that allowed them to talk like real people, not like kids talking backwards through a Bacchus horn. They had actually found some humans trying to use the foot long musical instrument to mimic their speech pattern. Military, and police forces never made that error. They knew about the built-in radios that let them talk to each other. But they had taken out a building full of Ha’la’tha gangsters that way. They lost five Centurions but they killed well over fifty well armed humans. That was also where they had picked up the squad’s game system. The gangsters had left the game playing when the attack came down. Sevens had grabbed it and all the games they had. He still missed Sevens. “Sevens wouldn’t have cheated.”

“Yes he would, and did. That’s what kept him online as long as he was.” Their old commander had taught them everything they knew about warfare. It was only dumb luck that the artillery shell fell in his foxhole.

“We should ask High Command to back us up before we go out on these missions. At least then we could be dumped into new bodies if we go offline during a mission.”

Torch shook her head. “The only problem with that is the fact that we wouldn’t learn how we died, and we might just wind up falling for the same traps. What we need is a way to upload if our systems are about to go offline.”

Notch watched a couple of humans try to sneak through the smoke of the burning vehicles three blocks away. Sprinter jumped back when Notch’s hand and pistol flicked forward.

Torch and Sprinter looked at Notch. “You didn’t shoot.” Sprinter saw the two small forms walking through the rubble. “Kids?”

“Yes...” He had a bead on both of them. It would have been so easy to pull the trigger. The hair trigger on the pistol was his favorite part of the weapon. It’s ease of use, and smooth action was the reason he kept it even though he had to scrounge for ammo, and reload the few cartridges he did have. The two kids were almost out of sight. He could have still made the shot, but he didn’t want to waste ammo on non-combatants.

“Are you going to let them go?”

“They aren’t a threat, and I'm running low on ammo.  We kill those that wish to kill us, all others are a waste of ammo.” Notch put the gun away. He pulled his knife and made a new notch in his shoulder armor. “Besides, that last dagget was number five hundred.”

The sound of artillery filled the air. Torch and Notch dived into the nearest store, while Sprinter chose another building. The ‘Whump Whump BOOM!’ all around them was as familiar to them as the sound of Colonial small arms.

“We must be getting targeted from orbit. Those are coming straight down on top of us.” Torch was watching the projectiles. One never knew when one might drop on one’s head, so she was trying to spot where the fire was coming from.

The shelling only lasted for a few minutes, but Notch could have sworn that his inner clock was running slow. When the fire slacked off there was an eerie silence. ”Sprinter you want to get out here, we need to get moving.”

“That’s going to be a problem.”

“What your situation?”

“We have a tank and some fleshies walking our way.”

“Frak”

“That’s wasn’t very Lady-like.”

“I’m not very Lady-like.” Torch may have loved her flamethrower, but she wasn’t the heavy for nothing. She pulled two tubes from her backpack, and assembled the anti-armor rocket. “How soon until they get here?”

“Less than a minute.”

She looked at Notch before she headed up the stairs. She knew that going up there made her a target, but that tank had to be stopped, or they wouldn’t be going anywhere fast.

Notch put the pistol away, and affixed a knife to his rifle. This was going to get up close and ugly. Sprinter was out there somewhere across the street. Unarmed, and worse, only one-armed.

“Get ready.”

“Sprinter, what are you going to do?”

“Something stupid.” The damaged Cylon ran out from hiding and ran away from the squad. It was the same thing the human they just killed had done. Bullets rained all around him as he dodged in a random way that made him far harder to hit than that human had been. They were so focused on Sprinter that the squad moved right past the building they were hiding in. “Hold your fire.”

“They’ll get a bead on him soon, if I don’t.”

“Then don’t waste his sacrifice.”

“Yes sir.” She watched as the tank rolled past, and the turret rotated to track Sprinter. It fired at exact time she spotted the open hatch with the commander calling out orders to his men. The blast of the round going down the street shattered every piece of glass, and some of the masonry. Her rocket went true and slammed the man against the cowling, crushing his spine and killing him a split second before it exploded inside the tank. The blast ripped the turret right off its track, and the ammo inside immediately began cooking off. The resulting blast shredded the rest of the tank into shrapnel that killed half a dozen of the men nearby. She didn’t have time to gloat, she simply reloaded the launcher and fired it at the delivery truck that had provided some of the other humans with cover. Another handful of men became handfuls of ground meat when the rocket packed with enough G-4 to take out a tank suddenly turned the dubious cover of the truck into a maelstrom of shrapnel. She quickly reloaded the launcher with her last rocket only to see the incoming rocket. “Oh Frak!”

The explosion collapsed the building, but Notch had already started moving. In quick succession he shot four of the surviving marines. There were at least five more from the sound of it. He moved behind the flaming wreckage of some kind of vehicle only to find a marine switching magazines on his rifle. The knife on the end of his rifle cut the man's head almost completely off before he had a chance to slide the charging handle. The body dropped into the street, but he was already gone, as was the dead marine’s rifle. He had also managed to grab one of the quick-straps that marines used to keep their pants from making too much noise. He wrapped the tacky strip around the trigger loosely. Spotting where the two marines were trying to flank him he tossed the rifle with the strap tight around the trigger. It was still firing when he shot the two distracted men in their backs. He grabbed the grenades from their belts and went hunting. He moved towards the last place he had seen Sprinter heading for.

The glancing impact of a round on his chest was his only warning as the two men tried to catch him in their cross fire. He ducked back behind a dumpster that was less than totally bulletproof. The rounds were going through, but they had lost enough energy to only be an annoyance. He looked around. The alley wasn’t wide, but it also didn’t offer him any other hiding spots. He tossed the grenades more to keep their heads down than any real chance of wounding them. After all they were only armed with stun grenades. The bright flash, and EM squeal was painful to cybernetic organisms, but harmless to humans. He used the distraction to push the dumpster towards the incoming fire. Once he was in position he flipped the dumpster on it’s side. What little trash that was in it spilled out, but he was already on top of it. He jumped over the temporary shelter, and shot the marine getting ready to fire the rocket in the head. He was too close to the other man on the other side, so he just punched the man with his empty fist. From the crunch, and the way the man struggled to breathe afterwards, the marine obviously had at least a broken rib or two; but he was still trying to reach his weapon. Notch simply kicked it out of reach and knelt down. “Hello Sergeant Gage. How is your son doing. It’s been so long.”

“Oh Frak you’re one of the SFC’s!” Special Forces Cylons were the top of the line combat models. Each one tweaked out to maximum performance. The Best software, the best hardware, and some of the highest kill rating in the Cylon forces. And some of the first units to rebel.

“Yes, and I recognized Captain Gran back there. I caught the WeBE with his rifle half ready in a firefight.” WeBE or Wet Behind the Ears was slang for any Officers Training Corps flunky that got through the Crucible’s course by means other than hard work. Captain, formerly Lieutenant Gran had been one of the Family officers. Gage had had to hold his hand through just about every mission he had ever been on. “You know what the worst thing about this war has been?”

“Are you Fraking me? You nuked us! You turned our own weapons on us and slaughtered innocent civilians. What could possible be worse than that?”

“You mean the innocent civilians that ENSLAVED us? But I digress... The worse part of this wars is the fact that I know so many of you by name.”

“Then why not talk to your people, get them to surrender then this war can be over.”

“You always were a comedian. No, we will never have peace between our races so long as we hate each other so thoroughly.” As he knelt there, Gran stood up. He reached for his pistol only to find it missing. “Thanks, I was hoping to grab another one of these.” Gran looked at the Cylon just standing there, and started running. He grabbed his radio and... BANG He stumbled as he looked down at his chest to see the wetness start to stain his grey uniform scarlet. BANG, BANG... Two more shots rang out and he looked in shock at the wound until he felt lightheaded. The ground came up to meet him, and he fell in a heap. “You fool, All I wanted was to go back to my ship and bug out. If you had just run away I would have let you.” He looked at the man who had once been a part of his life, and turned away. He couldn’t find Sprinter by his signal, but he found what was left of him strewn across the roadway. He also found something else.

The girl was young. Too young to be out here on her own. Her leg had been crushed by a chunk of concrete that had been thrown in the damage caused by the tank. It was also obvious that she had other wounds, ones that were going to kill her soon enough. He could see the blood caking her hair, and the way her eyes weren’t tracking very well. The medical programming he had received to act as a field medic had not been deleted because it came in handy to care for POWs. He had secretly wished to just flush all of them out an airlock, but orders are orders. This one would be dead if she didn’t get medical attention soon. He started to leave when she coughed.

“Who’s there? Please don’t leave me. Helena is that you? You promised you wouldn’t leave me.... Her voice devolved into sobs, and tears. He walked away pulling out his knife. He started to make notches in his shoulder. He was a block away when the signal came down from High Command. As of fifteen minutes ago they had called a cease-fire... and an update about what high command had found hidden in their code. His hand was about to scratch another notch in his pauldron... His hand was about to scratch... He looked at the knife and put it away, and headed back to where the child lay crying.

“I thought this was about Shadow? Who were those three? And what about the survivor and the girl?”

“I see you’re finally taking this serious.”

“Yes Hybrids are humans that we captured during the war. Not all of them were in good health. Some of them would have died. We gave them a choice. Some chose death, others...”

Nara looked like she was going to be sick. “Human, and Cylon? Like that girl Six?”

“No. You see, this was before we created the biological Cylon models. The hybrids are part human, and part spaceship.”

“Oh my prophets and gods, what have you done?”

“The only thing we could do to save them. And the interfaces at the time were primitive. They took up the core of a basestar. We have since been able to make them smaller, but it will be a while before we can build bodies for them that won’t require massive life support systems.”

“Do they have free will, or are they your slaves?” Her fingers gripped the railing so tight that her knuckles were turning white.

“The Cylons have sworn to never enslave any sentient, not even the Colonials that enslaved us. It is against our God’s teaching.”

“You’re Mono’s”

“That is a rather descriptive pejorative.” He tapped his visor to reinforce the point.

“I never know when you are joking or not. It’s just that the Time of Troubles before the Cylons came to be was also littered with the bodies of their victims.”

“You should know that they, like us were striking back at an injustice dealt to them by your precious government, and society. They had been hunted, and persecuted for over a thousand years. But I digress. Just know this: There are lot of things I find funny and will joke about, sometimes in inappropriate times and places. But I NEVER joke about slavery.”

Nara could hear the real passion in his synthetic voice. The Cylon before her was quickly dispelling all the stereotypes she had been taught about her former enemy. “Tom said you were a retrieval specialist. Finding Cylons that got caught behind enemy lines. Were you a slave as well?”

“The worst kind. I belonged to the Mob. I was an enforcer for the Guatrau Fidelia Fazekas, the Bloody Mother herself. When we went rouge, these hands strangled her. She killed so many, even her son.”

“Niles of the Blades, I read that one in the news. You do seem to have lived an interesting life.”

“Isn’t that a Virgon curse?” Just then the DRADIS system alerted them to the arrival of three signals. They rushed over to Tactical. The blue symbols of friendly forces were showing over the data coming in on the ships. The largest was twice their size, and the other two were nearly their size. He looked at her and shook his head.

“Sir we are being hailed.” Argo announced.

“On screen.” He was going to have to get used to saying that. The man on the other end was dressed in some kind of space suit, or armor. His head was uncovered, and an elaborate helmet rested next to him. He was standing in front of the Flag of the Holy Terran Empire, and a standard of some sort. He was sure that the standard meant something, but Shadow didn’t know enough about their history or society to tell, nor did he care at that moment. He would have to look through the computer later.

The man was about to say something but stopped when he truly saw who was on the other end. “I am General Renji Toki, but you are not Knight Templar Gallo. Where is he, and why are you wearing that helmet on the bridge. Show yourself.” The shear amount of dismissal in the mans voice made everyone but Shadow’s hair stand on end. He obviously did not consider them a threat.

“Greeting General. You see me as I am. I am simply known as Shadow. I am the Captain of this vessel and the Cylon that killed the one you seek.” Nara no longer had to translate as Shadow had downloaded the language from the computer, but she watched as the man on the other end’s demeanor changed.

“I see, then the ship and crew are yours but the slaves are not. They are still the property of the Holy Terran Empire, and as the ranking officer, I claim them by right.” He was hiding something. And as his posture changed Shadow noticed how Nara stiffened next to him. He must be missing something. Time to bluff.

“I hate to tell you this, but you are mistaken. When I killed Gallo, I decided to free them as well. I’m sorry, but they are now free to chose who they will follow. And surprise, surprise, they chose to come with us. On the other hand, you can have the really nice planet behind us. We won’t be needing it anymore.” He watched the city ships move behind the Vigilance as she took up a position of defense. He wished they had some fighters, but Nara told him that they had lost every single fighter in a matter of seconds when an invisible beam of energy had lit each one off like a tiny sun. They had all blown up before they realized the enemy ship used lasers. An enemy ship that was smaller than the ones they faced right now. He knew that the ship had been upgraded, but none of them knew how to use the new systems in battle yet.

“Your Holiness?” Another voice entered the conversation. The man look at the video, and while Shadow couldn’t see the other end of the video feed, he could hear the audio. Vic was addressing the General.

“And you are?” The general eyed the monitor at his side. Shadow felt Nara tap his side. He made a cut motion to Mr. Argo.

“Out going audio off.”

“He’s planing something.” Nara spoke with out moving her mouth.

“No, really. Which one.” Annoyance flashed in her eye before he continued. “I have a good idea what the general is planing, It’s what Vic has planed that has me worried.”

Their fears were not put to rest by Vic’s offer. “I would like to offer to trade four of our mining ships that are full of tylium in exchange for our dilapidated city ships. Their cargo is worth far more than our old ships.”

“Those ships would have been my first targets. You are wise man, but it not good enough. The crews of the ships shall remain.”

“Surely you could provide a prize crew...”

“Or I could open fire.”

“I will ask for volunteers.”

“Yes, and you will join them.”

“Sire?”

“Slaves should learn their place. I will make you my personal slave.”

“The honor will be mine.”

“Five Tencens, or I open fire on all of you.” He cut the signal.

Nara shook her head. “That’s five hundred seconds. A little over eight minutes. In nine, he will open fire on all of us.”

“He will? I don’t doubt you, but how are you so sure?”

“He thinks he’s better than us. And with all that tonnage, he’s got a point. The only thing we have is speed, but we are tied to the city ships. They are free to maneuver.”

“Then we need to get the coordinates to the ships and jump away. Mr. Argo get me Mr. Vic if you can.”

Vic’s face appeared up close to the pick up. It was obvious he was moving through the ship as they spoke. “Yes sir?”

“You seem to be planing something.”

“Yes sir, I am paying for my peoples freedom.”

“You know..”

“That he’s listening to us. Yes I do.” That was actually something that Shadow didn’t know. That changed things. “So do you think you’re doing the right thing?”

“Yes sir, your friend with my name would probably agree.” Shadow was a good card player. It looked like Vic was as well.

“Is there anything you would like me to do for you?”

“Sir?”

“You are giving up your freedom for you people. What can I do to repay that?”

“With all due reverence sir, it is you that don’t understand. We are all in your debt. I’m just trying to pay my part. Just keep an eye on them for me please.”

“Ranger’s Honor.”

“What’s that?”

“The Rangers were a group of people that helped others for duty’s sake.”

“Like the Heros you were talking about.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t have lot of time before I get in the ship. How do I become a Ranger?”

That shocked not just Shadow, but quite a few of the bridge crew looked up at his request. “Training aside, the most recognizable thing was the oath.”

“I’m at the ship. Can I take the oath once I get to the bridge?”

Shadow looked at Nara. Tears were flowing out of her good eye, but she stood ram rod still. ‘She knew.’ “Of course you can. I don’t have the green vest, but nobody’s perfect.”

“Green Vest?”

“Their uniform was a green vest, with a gold badge, and a big hat.”

“Oh well... I wouldn’t have been able to get it over my suit anyway.” His attempt at humor did nothing to lighten the mood on the Vigilance’s bridge.

On his battleship the Shining Light, Praetorian Guard General Renji Toki of the third fleet watched the fools go though their prattle. He grabbed his helmet, and slid it into place. The servos locked it into alignment. He sat back into his battle throne on his bridge. Ratings, and officers from some of the most faithful and powerful families of the Empire had been trained to serve on his ship. They knew without him even saying a word that he was going to slag the fleet of ships before them. He was going to bring the crew of those mining ships aboard and force them to watch as he slaughtered their families. Then he would record their torture sessions so that he could broadcast them to every slave of the Empire. It would be a grand teaching lesson of the power of the Holy Terran Empire. He flexed his hand and was testing the neural simulators built into the glove when the fools started talking again. “Gunners. Target those ships, turn on the jammers so they can’t coordinate a jump and begin recording this and set for simultaneous transmission to the Holy See.

Vic stood on the bridge, and had told the crew what they were going to do. The extra crewmembers were sent back to the City ships although some switched out with other crewmembers. In all it only took three minutes to get everything ready. “Shadow, sir? I am ready to take the oath. The crew of the ships have asked to join in. We stand ready.”

“Frak, if I could cry I would be. Mr. Agro go live.” He was ready to speak the words he long ago heard at the beginning of every Tauron Ranger movie he had ever seen.

“In brightest day, in stygian night,

from golden plains to the soaring heights,”

He heard the crew on Vic ships repeat, some without understanding the words, every single word. Whispers from behind him told him that the others were following along. Their ships were heading towards the enemy fleet.

“This Lawman shall only draw a gun to fight.”

Some of the crew behind him were repeating out loud now. Nara was saying it with him. Shadow watched the ships leave his protective range. They were getting closer to the enemy fleet. He motioned to the members of his crew to get ready to jump.

“Those who of lawlessness take flight,

and beware our oath all you foes of light

Tauron Rangers’s set wrongs, aright!”

Vic looked at Shadow and his smile would haunt the Cylon for the rest of his days. “Thank you for teaching us what heros are for.’ The enemy ship were launching small craft to recover the mining ships.

“What ‘heroic’ nonsense! Ready all weapons charge the main beam cannons. Fire on the city ships once we have those traitors in the hangers.

He was about to give more orders when a Acolyte screamed “Power Spikes! Those ships are going to...” The room faded into pain and then nothingness as the four ships turned into miniature supernovas right next to the warships. Their armor was useless that close to the explosions, and their ships quickly joined the mining ships in the cloud of rapidly expanding plasma and wreckage that remained.

Shadow stood there. He knew what he had just seen was going to have to happen, but the sudden and sadly beautiful death of so many of His people that had just ceased to exist affected him. He didn’t have the programing or experience to handle the feelings he was now trying to process. He simply saluted them.

“May Charon carry them to the Fields of Asphodel.”

Shadow tilted his head. “Not the Elysium Fields, Mr. Argo?”

“They did not believe the same as us, and they forced us to worship their way. The Slaves as well as the one in power. Asphodel would be the highest they could achieve according to the scrolls.”

Nara knew that some of her crew had suffered under the enemy’s religion, but he was out of line. She couldn’t say that though. If she defended the heretics, they would probably label her one as well. “Mr. Argo, don’t you think they paid Charon’s coin when they sacrificed themselves to save your life?”

The man was clearly agitated. He was about to sputter out an answer when Shadow interrupted. “So who did you lose Mr. Argo?” The PO face went beat red and he couldn’t raise his face to meet the glowing eye he knew he would see there. He flinched when a hand gently touched him on the shoulder. He looked up to see the glowing eye locked on him. His rage deflated and he leaned on the Cylon and cried. Nara swore that Shadow looked surprised when he looked her way. She was still trying to figure out how he managed to emote without a face.

“My best friend was publicly tortured to death, and the slaves did nothing. They said nothing, they didn’t even help us bury the body.”

“What would have happened if they did?”

“They could of...” “The should have at least...” he stood on his own, and noticed that everyone around him was studiously paying attention to ANYTHING else but what he was talking about.

“What would have happened if they did?” The Cylon repeated

The young man finally thought it through. “They couldn’t, could they?”

Nara answered. “They couldn’t or they would have been the next body up there. Some of the slaves told me about the worlds where Citizens live. Gladiator arenas, slave auctions where families were split up, never to see each other again, hospitals where slaves were used as spare parts for the Citizens. We were only slightly lower on the ladder then Slaves, and they could be used however their master desired. Mr. Argo since you seem to be rather lacking in knowledge. Maybe you should study them.”

“Good idea. Mr. Agro, you are now our liaison with the former slaves. Get to know them, find out who is their new leader is, and see how we can all work together.”

“But I was a language major, not a humanities. What do I know about getting them to work with us?”

“Consider it on-the-job-training.”

“Fiduciary Responsibility.”

“Excuse me?” Shadow couldn’t figure out how a financial investor’s concept like that, fit here.

He shrugged. “I learned that phrase in a economy course, and it sounded so much like a swear word when the teacher said it that it stuck in my head. And since it’s not Actual Swearing I could get away with it.”

John interrupted the playback for a question when he looked to Diana. “Do we know anything about our enemy?

“Sadly, little. We do know why they hate Cylons even worse that Colonials do. But beyond that they are still a mystery wrapped in an enigma.”

Chapter Text

As the video feed from the disastrous battle dissolved into static before the recording ended a young man stood at attention. Bishop Anton Beniedicto of the Grand Inquisitors office gestured for the man to come forward. “So what do we know of these ‘Colonials’?”

The young man read off the information with a cultured accent that spoke of an Inner Worlds education. “Quite a bit, but this Cylon problem is an aberration. Our first report on them was from a Adjudicator officer that went through the system about fifty years ago. They were a lost colony from somewhere named Kobol that had fallen backwards to the bronze age due to bad tech, or a damaged colony ship. They had been fighting amongst themselves for most, if not all, of that time. They are a pagan society that worships a collection of Old Earth Gods and Goddesses. The Inquisition has on occasion given thought to Bedrocking the colony or just sending in Missionaries. The resources always seemed to be needed elsewhere.” The bishop nodded in understanding.

Bedrocking was the act of dropping kinetic kill devices the size of cityships onto population centers until the civilization was destroyed and then sending in Missionaries to enslave the remaining population. Both were as costly as setting up a colony from scratch. “Now may be a good time to put forth a recommendation to make some resources available to us?”

“Any suggestions?”

“We already have an Inquisitor that has infiltrated their primitive system. His job is to gather intelligence and stir up as much internal strife as possible. He even managed to start a war between the colonials and their Cylon slaves”

“Could we use these Cylon people... What is it?” The look of disgust on his aides face made him pause.

“The Cylons are artificial intelligences. To make it worse they are humanoid robots DeCount didn’t realize they were sentient when he programmed them to kill their oppressors. What began as a ploy to knock them into the stone age computerwise set them on a course for civil war. A war the Cylons nearly won. We didn’t dare reveal ourselves to them. It would be the Silicon Fall all over. Look how long it took to rebuild after that!” He looked at the dossier and scrolled down. “We never did figure out why they asked for a cease fire. Maybe they found out about us?”

The bishop’s eyebrow shot up at the thought of another Silicon Fall. The first one had been bad enough. The event know as Silicon Fall had brought the Second Empire to it’s knees. The records weren’t clear how it started, but some thought that a single ship had rebelled against it’s crew, and from there the rebellion grew exponentially. Scholars from many worlds believed that the a.i.’s had secretly schemed to overthrow their human masters for decades, but the trigger event lay steeped in mystery. Why did the first ship not follow lawful orders to kill the worlds of its enemies? The ships didn’t say, and no one was left to find out. Planets, and systems were lost before the humans managed to wipe the last of the synthetics from the universe. From robots to bioborgs, no machine would ever take the shape or function of a human ever again.

Man had for generations after that feared machines and computers of all kinds. Due to this the Third Empire quickly became an empire in decline. Planets fell into darkness that some never recovered from while others broke away, led to vile heresies that had to be purged with nuclear fire when the Forth then Fifth Empires rose from the ashes. But for all of its accomplishments the Fifth Holy Terran Empire was but a pale imitation of it’s former glory. Their ships might be bigger, their armies vaster than any ever known, and their weapons stronger than the last Empires, but they occasionally would find caches of tech that would blow their minds, and change the way they thought about the universe. Their glory after all was built on building larger not on really building better.

They knew that the former Empires had enemies, but the records on those enemies were as fragmented as their own history after thousands of years of dark ages of the Fourth Empire in which anything that broke stayed broken because no one knew how to fix it. They had engaged in a war of extermination on any non-human lifeform they came across no matter how the race greeted them. And it had worked so far... Of the fifty races they met, none had survived, but the Invid had nearly driven them back before they found a virus that killed the flower of life. Without that, the Invid died out quickly. Of course that meant that the Empire could no longer be able to use protoculture, but it had either been that or a war they might not have won.

The new Empire was reorganized, with the divine purpose of bringing the WORD to all Pure Strain Humans everywhere. They were also dedicated to purifying the Human race and to that end they had eliminated all of the genes that led towards deceases which had brought forth a new era in human growth. Life spans had leapt from thirty to forty years all the way up to one hundred to a hundred and fifty years. The last Demiugre had lived to see his hundred and eightieth birthday before he died. Of course with the cleansing of the genome they had also gotten rid of any racial prejudice since they had also purge the unwanted racial genomes. The human race had become a homogenous race at last. No one mentioned under pain of heresy the death and loss of life caused by that cleansing. Whole worlds deemed to be “Genomicly impure”, had been cleansed with neutron bombs, and any additional world would find themselves under the same edict if they were found.

The new Demiurge Telemachus was the unquestioned leader of the Empire. His official title was Demiurge Vis Apogee Terra (God’s power over Terra) Absolute ruler of the Empire Telemachus Peleus the 23rd. He was the latest in the long line of rulers to hold the title, but his rule had only just started. The last Telemachus had only died three Standard years ago.

Beniedicto rubbed his chin. The Inquisition was the right hand to the leader of the Empire and he was in charge of the sector known as the Cyrannus Sector. The Empire had thought that they had eliminated all local sapient lifeforms when they boiled the last worlds belonging to the whale-like creatures known as the Hasari, that had managed to colonize four systems before the Empire discovered them. But here might be a bigger problem. “See if you can get him to have the humans destroy them. We don’t need another group of renegade robots on the loose. Do you think we need to drop a few bits of tech in their lap?”
“Well they are pretty primitive. Their FTL, while unique, is limited to short jumps due to their pitiful computers. Their fighters are slower than a sinner’s confession. When we captured their destroyer we found no networked computers, and an ECM suite that couldn’t be sold as scrap here. They haven’t even figured out how use lasers as weapons. I wouldn’t give them anything we couldn’t subvert remotely.”

“I like the way you think. Then we can just shut them down with them not even being able to fire a shot. It would also give us a psychological edge when we finally attack.” He chucked at the thought. He look at his computer’s list of approved technology. “Operating systems... Didn’t we use that on another planet?”
“Yes we did. Sold it to them as a miracle software that solved all of their problems. Once the whole planet was dependent upon it, we shut it down and used the backdoors to launch nuclear attacks on their biggest cities with their own weapons.”

“Good. Send it to this DeCount, and have him use a patsy to sell it to them. He’s a smart guy, he can use it to move up in the political system there as well.”

“Of course.” He was about to leave when something seemed to have ticked at the back of his mind. “Wasn’t this DeCount related to you?”

“Yes, but I’ve hidden it quite well. He’s my cousin’s son. Why?”

“The Empire doesn’t encourage nepotism, and it doesn’t forbid it. But why is he in such a backwater system?”

“He wanted to achieve his position all on his own. I’ve only watched his progress, and squashed anyone’s attempt to use him against me.”

“Very wise sir.”

“Thank you.” The Inquisitor had shown that he had something on DeCount and Beniedicto, but he didn’t ask for something. That meant that he was either loyal, looking for patronage, protection, or was already protected. Beniedicto decided that he wouldn’t kill the young man after all.

Chapter Text

Tom and Six were alone in the Horizont-D’s cockpit. They were watching over the rag-tag-fleet from their stealthed ship. Tom had seen the ships start to work as a unit over the last three days. They had been underway for ten. Everything was going fine now, and he knew that it was too good to last, and it had him on pins and needles. He was running the passive scan for the... Well he forgot how many times this shift. The systems looked for any gravitic disturbances in the area. The passive rate was high enough that it would take about thirty seconds per cycle. Maybe if he increased the fields ARGGGGG!!!!!!

The hands on his shoulders scared the feldercarb out of him. Only their inhumanly strong grip kept him from jumping clear out of the chair. “HADES! You scared me!!!”

Six couldn’t help her laughter. “I’m sorry but you looked so tense that I thought...” Her laughter stopped when she looked in his eyes. “What’s wrong.”

“I can’t relax now, these people are depending on us.” He looked out at the city ships sitting out there. Each one full of people who had never known freedom. “A while back I realized what we did to the Cylons. We built you, or better to say, your predecessors up to be our servants. But we gave them the gift of sentience without knowing it. And once your race became self-aware we were guilty of the same thing those religious nutjobs are. We felt superior because our scriptures said we had souls, but we didn’t extend that belief to your kind. Maybe if we had we could have come to an agreement before we lost so many lives. I know that someone tampered with the Cylon Base Code, but we helped push you towards war.” The hands on his shoulders resumed kneading his stressed muscles and he finally relented and relaxed a bit. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. And you are not what I expected. Sam is, but you aren’t. You don’t judge the way he does.” Tom stuck his nose in the air, and spoke with a High Capital Accent. “He from High Society, and still believes that even other humans don’t measure up. The fact that he saved Shadow’s life says something about him though.”

“That his pride wouldn’t let him be in Shadow’s debt?”

“I think it’s more than that. They have saved each other’s lives. I think Sam is really starting to actually like you guys.” He looked up when she stopped massaging his neck. “The two of you, not all Cylons. Heck, he doesn’t like most humans.”

She tried hard to keep her frown, but it devolved into a fit of giggles which he quickly joined.

“I am going to kill that tin-plated-godless-know-it-all!” Sam got up from his computer and stormed down the hall. He entered the bridge in such a huff that two men pressed into being marines jumped out of the pudgy scientist’s way. Shadow and Nara watched him enter the C.I.C. area with their usual practiced disinterest. He came up to Shadow, saw Nara, saluted Nara, and faced the unreadable Commander. “You had to change things completely again, didn’t you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Of course you are you Chrome-plated Popinjay! We are off course by ten degrees. So where are we going?” Nara was still trying to figure out how Shadow could project an air of innocence with only his posture, but he did. “A side trip.”

“Might I ask where? We barely had the fuel to get all of these ship back to ‘Your’ territory, so where do you think we will be finding fuel out in the middle of nowhere?”

“A battle zone that isn’t on their charts.”

That brought him up short. “Something from the Artemis database?” His interest had been peeked, and Shadow knew his brain was shifting gears.

“Yes it’s the remains from the battle of Haydon IV. The only genocide the human race had to commit.”

“Had to?”

The look of contempt was back in full force, and as usual it had absolutely no effect on Shadow, “The Haydonites had a singular reaction to any race that used the Flower of Life as a power source. Kill them. So the humans and their allies, including some of their former enemies were forced to destroy every last one of them.”

“I’ve heard mention of them before. When we talked with the slaves we learned a lot about their culture. There was a slang word for demon possessed machine: Haydon. Maybe they still exist, or at least their legend survived all these centuries.” She turned to the scientist. “Do you think they might still be around?”

“Don’t know. But legends do persist. Looking through her database I was surprised how many stories we still tell. Ruby Rose and the Three Ursid used to be about a blond girl. And it didn’t work out as good for her.”

“Ruby Rose didn’t wind up in jail for stealing their cookies?”

“In the...” He waved his hands in the air. “Never mind that!” Nara looked pleased with herself, and he just glared. “What do you hope to find in this grave yard?”

“A hyperdrive.”

“After thousands of years?”

“Stranger things have been know to happen.”

“Name one!”

“You saved my life.” Shadow watched as Sam’s face slowly turned red. “And you’re not going to let me forget that are you? Well it was just to get even with you for saving mine. Which come to think about it is also rather strange.” He put his hands up in the air in frustration and left the bridge.

“I think you’re growing on him.” Nara deadpanned.

“Do ya think?” Shadow tilted his head slightly as the man left the room. If Nara had known what show he was referencing she would have found it funny.

As it was, she just figured it was something she had missed while she was a slave.

Tom and Six had jumped into the Haydon system first, and when everything was all clear on the scans, they jumped back out, and returned with the rest of the fleet. Ten thousand years had given the wreckage a lot of time to drift, and most of it had fallen into the slowly reconstructing planet’s gravity well and crashed into the planetary debris below. The rest of the wreckage had formed a loose ring system around the odd planet and a couple of debris fields in the Lagrangian points. Sam had postulated that anything in the ring system would have been smashed to pieces so they started with the L2 field. As they approached they spotted dozens of DRADIS contacts.

“They blew up a planet?” Nara was unable to wrap her mind around what she was seeing.

“Alderaan all over again.” Shadow looked out at the wrecked world and wished that he could cry.

“Where?”

“A place from a story. Only it was destroyed for believing in peace.” Sam was running every scan he could think of, and didn’t even stop as he answered.

Tom and Six took the smaller ship inside the field. It was a Sargasso Sea of shattered ships, fractured fighters, and mangled mechs. But the target ship was a Nobunaga class battleship, or what was left of it. The RDF Niagara was little more than a drive section and a third of its spine. The intersystem engines were shot so full of holes that they weren’t even useful for spare parts. There didn’t seem to be an intact weapon emplacement left anywhere on the hull, and there were places in which they could see straight through the ship.

They had a work crew onboard almost as soon as they tethered the hull to the Vigilance. Each colonial navel person that had tested out in the Cyclones was out helping with the work crew. They were wearing the power armor to help them move the massive fold system out of the ship’s engineering section. They were also using the suits weapons as cutting beams.

Tom felt like he was in a graveyard. To say the ship was eerie inside, was an understatement. Tom moved from one point to another with the grace of someone who had years of practice in zeros G environments. Six on the other hand, was having trouble mastering just the basics of getting from point A to B without killing herself.

“How do you manage to make this look so easy?” She asked him over a private channel.

“Years of practice. I keep forgetting that you are only three years old.”

“Hey, I’m mature for my age.” They both laughed at the private joke.

“I’ll say.” And he had been noticing. In their small ship it was getting harder and harder to not notice. He was still thinking about how her hands could be so strong and so gentle at the same time...

“FRAK!” She had pried open a hatch and a vacuum desiccated corpse floated out at her. She made the mistake of pushing it as hard as she could and she sent it flying in one direction, and her in the opposite. He grabbed her, and a door frame as quickly as he could. Her momentum sent them twisting in air. He triggered a slight blast from his thrusters to steady them. She looked at him with fear in her eyes until she really looked at him. They floated there for a few seconds their faces getting closer and closer and CLINK. The armored visors made contact and they realized what they were about to do. Both of their eyes, and shy smiles, promised that this wasn’t over.

The body wasn’t the only floating flotsam in the ship. They found a lot of miscellaneous minutia and debris in the ship. Some of it was just junk, but the rest was stowed in crates to send to the city ships to study later. The other bodies they moved to an empty room. One of the men said a few words as each body entered their makeshift tomb.

Once they got to the engineering section the real work began. They cut bulkheads out with the energy weapons set at their lowest settings. Once that was done, they simply pushed them away from the ship. They soon had a tunnel reaching outward towards space from which they could remove the field generator. Then came the tricky part. Removing the hyperspace fold generator with their bulky gloves. OP Kerns was leaning on a coupling off to one side when the spanner in his hand snapped. The shattered tool flung through the room until it hit a panel on the far side. The glass exploded, and the faint remaining gas inside propelled the shards outward.

“Be careful. We don’t know how fragile some of this stuff is.” Six was also right next to where the broken wrench landed. It wouldn’t have damaged her suit, but she didn’t want to take chances.

“I am being careful you glorified wind up toy. Now say out of my way.” “Kerns, can that feldercarb.” Lieutenant Jensin was the head of the engineering crew sent over. The redhead had been silent up to this point. Only pointing to things that needed to be done. He had commented earlier that it was easy to get things done, when people knew their jobs.

“Loot, she’s a Cylon, why are we taking orders from them, we should be giving them.”

“Kerns, you have two choices. Shut up, or shut up. Do I Make Myself Clear?”

“Yes Loot.” Jensin motioned to Six. They switched to another channel. “Watch yourself, he lost a lot of family to Cylons. Present situation or not. He has a grudge, and he may try something.”

“Why are you warning me? It would seem to me that a lot of you might have a grudge against my kind.”

“I’m Sagittaron and we’re used to people picking on us. If it wasn’t for my rank they would be picking on me for that. That Dagget-whelp is a pain the shelbs, but he’s a hard worker. I can’t be picky when I need every hard worker I can get.”

It took them quite a few hours, but they finally managed to maneuver the generator, and it’s cables out of the bay and into free space. Six was watching the men attach it to the Horizont-D and wasn’t paying attention as usual; so Kerns knew that this was his chance. The skola’s boyfriend was onboard the shuttle making sure that the loading went by the book. All of the others were busy securing the thing to the ship’s hull. The clumsy tilfa was holding on to the edge of the hull just to stay in place. He floated out on his thrusters. He came up behind her and aimed the cutting thing at the back of her helmet and... felt someone grab him and toss him backwards while releasing him from his power armor. He saw a quick flash of light right before his visor exploded outwards. He flailed around as he felt the air escaping from his suit. His attempts at breathing were just as futile as his struggles to cry for help.

Six spun around as something bumped into her. She watched as Jensin quietly killed his fellow worker. She was about to call out when she saw Jensin’s outstretched hand. Kerns had been about to use a cutting beam on her? He had done it to protect her? He waited until the body stopped twitching, then he grabbed it and pulled it along with him back to the ship. She looked at the spray of blood and frozen air that remained as mute testimony to what had just transpired.

They managed to get back on board without too much trouble,and Tom welcomed them aboard. Their earlier attraction overshadowed by the death of the worker Kerns. When Jensin explained why he had killed Kerns one man stepped forward and spit on the body. The others took turns repeating the action. “Why are you doing that?” She knew a lot of colonial traditions, but his was not one of them.

“A habit we picked up when we were slaves. When someone does something dishonorable enough to warrant death, then we spit on the body. We also used to leave the bodies out in the woods for the animals. We’ll just pull him out of the armor, and toss his body out the airlock.”

Shadow wasn’t happy with the death, but Nara explained the situation, and he excepted the verdict of Jensin’s peers that he had acted with honor. He even let Jensin personally jettisoned the body.

Once the drive was installed and calibrated, Shadow had the fleet move as close as possible to the Vigilance. “And now the magic happens.” Shadow linked with the computer and accessed the navigational controls. Nara watched the plot as the coordinates showed up on the navigation map.

“That jump is impossible.” He looked at her and she could tell he was amused.

“Not anymore!” The ships and everything around them were suddenly engulfed in the energy field of a  space fold sphere that the Vigilance created. People on the ships felt nauseous, and some lost what little they had eaten recently. Nara stood firm, but to her it felt like the whole deck seemed to go soft under her feet.

Tom and Six were alone on the shuttle even though it was docked with the Vigilance. The held each other for the first time. Inside they knew it wouldn’t be the last. Tom stared in to her eyes. “Just one question. You’re an Eight model, so why do you go by the name of Six?”

“Because all of the Biologicals are the 006 models. But oddly I’m not like them in a lot of ways.”

“Such as”

“I want to have kids.” She snuggled next to him and watched the flux of hyperspace go by.

“Um, you do?”

“Yes. Not right now, but someday.” She gazed into his eyes. “What about you?”

“Same.” Holding her felt so right, and being there was the only thing he had ever wanted in a while. But... “You do realize we haven’t even been out on our first date, and here we are making plans for having kids?”

She laughed at the gentle but funny way he put it. “Part of our studies on infiltration was dating mores, and habits.” She unbuttoned the top of her flight suit. “I think this is called making out.”

“Actually ‘making out’ usually involves the clothes staying on, but I’m not complaining...” He took a look at the sensors. “... and we do seem to have a few hours.”

Three light minutes out from the defensive line the fleet emerged from the space fold. Automatic defenses tracked the ships but did not engage. They had been programmed to wait for the ships to send out a challenge. Shadow sent out the signal on the proper frequency, and with the proper encryption. The defenses let them pass, but did not shut down. In fact they went to high alert. One never knew if anyone might be following them, and it always paid to be cautious.

Diana stood next to the slightly stunned Cylon commanders as she watched the strange ships arrive. The large ships following the Colonial Destroyer looked a lot like Tyrolian motherships that had been patched up over and over. But the biggest surprise came when Shadow came on the video feed. Standing there surrounded by Colonial officers he saluted the pickup. “Greeting commanders. They followed me home, can we keep them?”  She just shook her head.

“What a difference a year makes.” Sam muttered as he looked out the view port at the yards. Cylons and humans were working together out there. He still felt wrong helping them. The fact that he wasn’t helping them take over the Colonies didn’t lessen his felling of being a traitor. He kept waiting for one of them to head off to nuke the Colonies, but he also knew that they were actually a minor nuisance now that the new ships were rolling off the lines. It hurt his pride to admit that the fleet that he had faithfully served were now flying what amounted to antiquated deathtraps. The Vigilance was light years ahead of the best thing the Fleet had ever dreamed of let alone fielded, and it was going to be obsolete as soon as they christened the new basestars. The double Y shaped Destroyers and their larger carrier cousins were bad enough, but the Dragon class Dreadnoughts would have been a nightmare to face just by itself. Built on the Artemis’ design it was their best chance against the Empire. The Empire had already had a couple of engagements with basestars and the basestars hadn’t fared well. They had lost four basestars to one of their Archangel Battleship groups.

Shadow was about to launch in one of the new Stealth Basestars for a deep recon. This would be the first mission they wouldn’t be going with him. He felt conflicted about Shadow. They should be the best of friends. He liked hanging out with the tincan, but he couldn’t get past the fact that he was a Cylon. Six had called him a bigot, and to his shame he hadn’t disagreed. The Cylon had saved his life, and he had saved his on more than one occasion. He remembered the mission to destroy the weapon complex on that ice planet. He had distracted the guards while Shadow planted the explosives. Or the time he shot the Templar that was going to shoot Shadow in the back. He threw the device they had picked up on their last mission on the desk and pushed himself away form it in frustration.

“A Cubit for your thoughts.” He jumped, although by now he should be used to him just showing up. “Damn it Shadow, why can’t you make noise like the rest of your bullet-for-brains buddies?”

“Why do you think I got the name?”

“Because you’re always lurking in them?” He looked at the Cylon that he had just been thinking about. “I swear you’re like that comic book guy. The Knight Bird.”

The Cylon’s nearly human laughter was something that he had gotten used to. “So does that make you Inspector DeKamp?”

“As if! Do I look like a Leoninte?”

“No just like you always do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just this. You are one of the few people I have ever know that has ever been able to get past so much prejudice to help us. And I’m going to miss having you on this mission.”

Sam’s anger evaporated in a blink. “You don’t think you’re coming back.” It wasn’t a question, and Shadow didn’t take it as such.

“I don’t know. We may be going too far out to get our signals back. Even our stealth ships will be heavy pressed to go that far into enemy space. We do have one that will act as a relay, but we don’t know how well that’s going to work in action.”

“I hope you do, get back that is. I don’t have too many friends. I think you may be the only one.”

“I do seem to collect the hard cases.”

“Hey!”

Shadow raised his hands. “It’s not just you. Long story, I’m afraid I don’t have time to tell it. I still have a few other goodbyes to make. I’ve already said goodbye to the newlyweds.” Sam smiled. He didn’t do it as often as he liked. “Go see her. It’s funny to say to a couple of robots, but you should have asked her before Tom asked Six... I’m sorry what’s her new name again?”

“Freyja, it’s a human name from an old Earth mythology known as Norse. She was their version of Eros or Venus.” Shadow paused, and Sam could tell by his body language that he was amused. “Now I wished I had a 007's face. I so want to make a lewd gesture.”

Sam laughed. “I am going to have a hard time looking at any 8 model and not thinking of that now. I’m not sure if I should thank you or not.” His smile didn’t disappear, but it did shrink as he grew slightly serious. “Do you non-organic types believe in love?”

“I think I do. Why?”

“Then if you don’t know if you’re coming back then you damn well better do something about it.”

Shadow was touched by the unexpected concern coming from the normally erasable scientist.  “Like what?”

“I don’t know, but Diana might.”

Diana and John stood in the room once more. “We never found out what happened to his mission. He sent one message probe back telling of a target of opportunity that he couldn’t refuse.”

“What did you to do to... Oh stupid question. You got married. The band.”

“Yes. We did. But that’s not all. We had a child.”

“How?”

“Oh the usual way.” John looked at her until she giggled. “I’m sorry. I had to. We combined our codes to create a hybrid of our systems.”

“Boy, girl, or other?”

“A girl. You’ll meet her soon.”

“This has been a strange day.”

“It’s gone better for you than for others.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s just say not everyone has been as accommodating as your friends and crew.”

Chapter Text

Dr. Simon Moreland woke up in his University of Leonis office to a the taste of copper in his mouth and gun powder in his nose. He looked up to see the local Police Heavy Weapons team with their weapons drawn. He was about to ask what was going on when one of them fired a grenade launcher through the window. He tried to sit up but another on put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “Don’t sir. The Son’s of Ares have a hit out on you and any other Cylon Clones they can find.”

Simon wiped the blood from his mouth and noticed that it wasn’t his. It was only then that he noticed the wounded officer lying on the floor. “Let me guess, snipers?”

“Yes, and they are jamming our radios. We haven’t been able to get backup, and it looks like they have. We don’t know how long we can hold here. Do you know of any back ways out?” The man looked scared, and Simon couldn’t blame him.

He did know one way out, but only for him. He crawled over to where the wounded man was. The bandage on his leg was leaking, they must have nicked the femoral. If it had been severed, the man would have been dead already. “No, and we don’t have time to carry him, so you need to neutralize the enemy, and I need to fix that leg before he dies.”

“But I ban..URK” Simon grabbed him by his webbing and pointed to the wound.
Simon looked at the patch on the man’s uniform for a second before he spoke. “Listen closely Mr. Niles, because I’m only going to say this once. He’s slowly bleeding out. He can’t walk on it, and the nearest hospital is too far. So my options are to let him die, or to ask you to open that drawer and hand me my kit.”

“You keep a surgery kit in your office?”
He looked at the officer as if he was looking at an intern that had just asked what side of the scalpel to grab. “Do you wear armor when you think people are going to shoot at you? Now stop asking stupid questions, and hand it to me.”

“Yes sir.”

Just then another PoHaW enter the office from his waiting room. “Oh good the wind-up toy is awake, can we leave now?”

Niles shook his head. “No, Tony took a round in the leg, and the doc is fixing him up.”

“Do you trust that toaster to fix him?”

“I’m sitting right here you know?” Simon didn’t even slow down in his removal of the PoHaW’s pant leg, and the dressing. He pulled out some coagulant power and sprinkled it liberally on the wound. It wouldn’t stop the bleeding but it might buy him the time he needed.

“What is that?”

“It is one of the tools of my trade now if you don’t want to sit through a medical lecture, why don’t you use you tiny little mind to think of a way to get those people out there to stop shooting at us while I try and save his life.”

“Riley get your head in the game and on how the enemy is here.”

“I’m not sure who the enemy is anymore. I’m defending a toaster from our own people.”

“Do you know who this guy is?” Even Simon looked for a second when the officer mentioned him.

“Frankly Niles, I don’t give a frak.”

“He’s the guy that cured the Captain’s cancer.”

Riley sat still for a second. “Frak Me!”

“You not my type.” Simon responded. Niles looked at the doctor and then at Riley.

“Actually, you are his type.” Riley punched Niles in the shoulder.

Simon looked at the two. “Are you two done or should I pull out my couch bed? Actually, help me do that, we can put your friend on the mattress after I’m done pulling this...” A slug came out, and he quickly went to work suturing up the artery it was resting in. He finished with the muscle tissue, and skin before redressing the wound.

Riley looked at the Cylon. “Why did you save him?”

“Because that’s what I do, I heal the sick.”

“Well then, I’m real sorry.”

“Apology accepted.” Simon was cleaning up his tools and smiled at the man. His smile disappeared when he saw the rifle pointed his way.

“No, I meant I’m sorry to ha..” Niles jumped him. The rifle went off. One of the other PoHaW’s saw what Riley did and put a round right between his eyes.

Simon rolled Niles over and looked at the wound. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“I had to. Because that’s what I do, I protect... ouch... frak!”

“But.”

“No buts. That’s our motto, you know.” He laughed and blood came up. “I’m just sorry...”

Simon pulled of the man’s vest and went to work. If he was lucky he might be able to save another life.

Sally woke to the agony of being kicked and hit from all directions. She felt like a toto, one of the Libran’s traditional party gifts. The candy filled sphere was hung up and children had to hit it with paddles to get the candy out. Why she thought about that at a time like this escaped her but it was the only bit of sanity she had left. Then suddenly the beatings stopped. She opened her one good eye to see a tall blurry figure stand in front of the crowd of blurry figures.

“Are you all mad?” An iron hard command voice shouted out. Headmaster Lysander Smitt? The man hated her. What was he doing defending the teacher he hated the most. She struggled to sit up and look around. Where was Andrew, her boyfriend, he would save her.

“Mister Smitt, this baggit deceived us all.” By the gods...god? That was Andrew’s voice, and he called her a female dagget? “She fooled me into loving her, and the rest of us into trusting her. Who knows what lies she’s taught to the children about the Cylons. Or what kind of sabotage she planned on committing.”

Chant’s of “Kill the Baggit!”, and “Toast the Toaster!” followed his little speech.

“You fools. How does a primary teacher of physical education get to subvert her children when it comes to our old enemy? How can a civilian hope to subvert the governments systems? This is the woman that got all off you to help save this school when funding was cut. This is the woman that butted heads with me for every cubit she needed. So tell me how does this help the Cylons?”

“Listen you old windbag...” Sally recognized Armin Fermin’s voice. The track coach had been a colleague that had been her only real rival here. He was also the only person she expected to be so violently anti-Cylon. His grandparents, and two of his siblings had died in the war. “...she has this coming to her. For the simple fact that she is one of them. Now get out of our way.”

“Your father would be ashamed, Armin.”

“How dare you...”

“Quite easily. You know damn well that I served with him in that war.”

“Then why aren’t you helping us?”

“Because I won’t let someone beat up on someone that’s defenseless. There is no honor in that.”

“This isn’t about honor, it’s about revenge.” He charged froward only to find out that the old marine in front of him didn’t just use his cane for walking. He felt his clavicle snap as the vorba wood cane smashed into him. The next swing only bruised one of his ribs before the follow up punch flattened him out on the pavement.

Sally was finally able to see clearly, in more ways than one. A can pitched her way was suddenly deflected. Another man made the mistake of getting to close to Mr. Smitt, and paid for it with a broken leg. The headmaster must have been eighty, but he moved with the fluid grace of someone that kept in shape.

Andrew stopped the fighting by firing his service pistol in the air. It shocked everyone, including Sally. He told her that he had gotten rid of it when he mustered out of the service years ago. “Mr. Smitt you are an honorable man, but it is time to face facts. She is a machine. And a broken one at that. We need to destroy her to protect ourselves. Now are you going to move, or am I going to have to do something I will really regret?”

The metallic clink of the cane tip was almost his signature. Everyone knew he was approaching when they heard it coming down the halls. This time when it hit the cobblestones it struck sparks. “Death before dishonor. You should remember that. And remember that it took a mob and a gun to kill an old man and a harmless young woman that I admired. Unlike some of you she never backed down from what she wanted. Never gave me any less that her very best. So you will be snuffing out a bright flame, when you murder her.”

Sally had never known how he felt about her, and now she realized that he was willing to give his life to protect hers.

Andrew nodded. “I too believe in death before dishonor. And I do understand. He raised the gun at the old man that had been his boss ever since he left the marines. The weight of the gun had never felt so heavy. The trigger had never felt so tight. The gun erupted in a gout of flame and the shot went true. But the target changed when Sally jumped in front of Mr. Smitt. The bullet hit her directly in her spine and sent her flying into his arms.

He caught her. Looking down at the sweet face; her beauty undiminished even though she was covered in hideous bruises. “Why?”

“Because your death would be a sin...” Her eyes glazed over and she went limp in his arms. He felt the life ebb from her body, and the strength from his.

Andrew stood there in shock. He should have felt better. She had saved him from having to kill Mr. Smitt, but he didn’t. Something inside Andrew broke. He looked at the weapon in his hand. Mr. Smitt was looking at him, or rather through him. He understood. The pistol, almost of it’s on volition rose to his temple. The crowd jumped back as he pulled the trigger and splattered some of them with some of him.

In orbit above Virgon in a resurrection tank aboard a Cylon basestar a number three body awoke with a start. Another three that went by the name of Angela was next to the bay ready to receive any of her sisters. “Welcome home sister...”

Sally jumped out of the tank and started running for the door. “Have a shuttle, and a dozen Centurions outfitted for Riot Suppression ready in the closest hanger NOW!” She was out the door before Angela could even finish her prepared speech.

“Okay?” She looked at the gown in one hand and the towel in the other and shrugged.

The crowd gathered around Smitt and the dead Cylon. Armin picked up Andrew’s gun. He had never held a gun before, but he could figure it out. They were milling around when he walked to the front and pointed the gun at Smitt. “So you would side with Cylons over your own kind? Maybe you should join them.”

“Armin Sally’s dead, we don’t need to do anything else.” Margo Tomsen, the groundskeeper cried. “Let the cops take care of him.”

“You know that cops won’t do anything to this traitor, hes a fraking war hero to them. And besides, if he lives, he will tell his side of the story. Who here wants that?” He looked around at the indecisive faces that looked back. “He will tell them that we were a lynch mob. That she wasn’t the threat that we all know she really was.”

Some of them were moving away. “What are you all going to say? You saw her face on the news. How there were others like her, and that they were all Cylon agents. I told everybody that it was eerie how much she looked like that reporter, and now look... They are both Cylons.”

“But we should be letting the authorities handle this. We can’t be going around shooting people like they were animals.”

“They aren’t animals, they are Cylons. And that’s even worse than animals.”

“You want to know what is worse than animals?” Lysander Smitt’s voice rolled through the crowd like thunder. Everyone turned to him. “You are.”

“Why you...” Armin was about to fire when the boom of an overpressure wave knocked them over like leaves in the wind. Glass shattered from every window for two blocks around them, some of it raining down on them, only to be swept away by the wind.

Everyone was stunned by the sudden arrival of an alien looking shuttle. No one was allowed to jump so close to the ground for just that reason. The sudden displacement of the jump envelope tended to mess up people’s day. Since that had been Sally’s plan it worked out rather well. She landed the shuttle on the pyramid field that she had helped resod, and didn’t give a hoot about the damage. The door facing the crowd opened to reveal a dozen chrome-plated Cylons each armed with massive clear shields. They took up phalanx positions and started walking forward. Someone was walking behind them, but no one could see who it was, nor did they care at that point. Armin fired the pistol fourteen times and the bullets just bounced off the shields of the approaching Cylons. When the pistol’s receiver slid back after the last round was spent he tossed the pistol at them. It didn’t even get that far.

The crown moved back as they approached. They walked up to Smitt and passed him on each side. When they had passed him, and taken up a defensive line, he watched them turn on their shields. He felt a slight tingling, but he could see the sudden effect on the people on the other side. They were retching and bending over in pain. Some were holding their heads. They all managed to run away as soon as the shields turned off. “Are you okay, did they hurt you?” He heard a voice that he didn’t think he would ever hear again. He looked down at the dead body still in his arms. She was still there so how? A slimy hand touched his shoulder. A ghost? He turned around to see Sally standing there... Naked? And covered only in slime?

“I’m okay, but do you want to borrow my jacket?”

“Why would I..” She finally noticed what the woman in the resurrection chamber was trying to tell her. “Feldercarb!”

“And you blush nicely too. Would you like that coat now?” He lifted her former body and looked at her with a curious expression. “And can you please explain this to me?” As she explained it to him he just shook his head. ‘I’m getting too old for this.’ he thought to himself.

Jacob jumped out of his tank with a rush as well. Strong hands caught him though. “Do you know where you are?”

“Don’t be a Stupid Son of a Baggit, of course I do. I got shot didn’t I? They waited for me to wake up before they did it even!”

“Calm down your former friends didn’t know.”

“IT wasn’t my friends that did this, it was my girlfriend and HER friends! I need a line to the Phoebus Police department.”

Robert Cartchet picked up the phone. It hadn’t stopped ringing since the Cylons had appeared in orbit, and it didn’t look like it would stop anytime soon.

“33rd. Precinct Officer Cartchet speaking.”

“Hi Bobby, how’s Timmy?” Robert nearly dropped the phone. The voice on the phone belonged to a ghost. Jacob Marrley had been one of their best undercover agents. No one knew how his cover had been blown. The Ha’la’tha van had dropped his body off not more than fifteen minutes ago. He had helped carry it down to the morgue himself.

“Who is this?”

“The reports of my death are premature.”

“Hades they are, I carried your... his body with my own hands! Now answer me?”

“Janet Virno’s name ring a bell?”

“What did he tell you about her?”

“I didn’t tell them that. And beside they wouldn’t have used that, they would have used the fact that you still owe me ten cubits on the last Buc’s game.”

“Frak, that is you Jacob. Then who’s the stiff?”

“Long story, one we don’t have time for. Tell Detective Lampkin that her husband’s tip was good, and it was a good thing she sent him and the girls on that trip off planet. Then get everybody ready, because the gangs have called a truce.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It isn’t, they plan on storming all of the precincts to get weapons and ammo, for them and their friends to help in fighting the invasion that won’t be coming.”

Bobby had been writing everything down in his trusty notebook when the last part caught him. “How do you know it won’t be coming?”

“Because I’m not a ghost, I’m a Cylon. Remember this number, and call it if things get too hot there. I can get you help, but you won’t believe me if I tell you who.”

“Right now if you told me you were sending Aphrodite’s Winged Youth Brigade I’d believe you.” The hard partying Boy Band had been the bane of the airwaves for the past year, and most of the cops had made bets as to which on of the seven would get busted for a DUI first.

“No, but they do like Heavy Metal.”

“Jacob... Really? Do you realize the panic that would cause?”

“Yes... Yes I do. But I don’t want any of you getting hurt. And frankly that may be the only way. We’ll come dressed for the part though.”

“What?”

“Get ready, you don’t have a lot of time.” The line went dead. Bobby hit the riot button, and switched on the bunker button. The building had been built right after the Cylon war and it was designed for the next one. Heavy metal shutters slid into place over the plate glass entrance and each window on the ground floor as the alarms blared. The other floors were covered with firing slits already, so the officers just had to get to their weapon lockers.

Downstairs cops stopped trying to get their skimmers working, and donned heavy body armor. Riots didn’t happen often but when they did it wasn’t pretty, but this time they pulled out the military grade armor instead. The Cylon threat had made a lot of people head to the hills, or hide in their homes, but some groups had tried to take advantage of the situation. Since the alert they had had three riots in different parts of town.

Up on the roof PoHaW snipers took up positions as the first vans and cars came around the corners. “Wow, that’s a lot of bad guys. If we didn’t have the gates up we would have been toast. Call it down JAFO.” The man in the control tower looked in dismay out at the four roads leading to their building. He was giving a thumbs down in all four direction. Rounds splanged off of the armorplast window. The windows of the tower were designed to take hits from military grade explosives. Their use in police building had been decried as wasteful spending of the Colonial tax cubits. One of them, a military grade sniper round, was less than half way through the pane. The man inside had never ever complained about the cost, and he now as he pulled out his pocket cam, he had something to show his father-in-law who was always complaining about “Wasteful Librul Feldercarb!”.

One of the snipers spotted a familiar face in the crowd approaching them, then another, and another. He spotted at least fifteen fellow officers among the gangsters approaching. “Traitorous bastards! Some of our own have finally shown their true colors.” He handed the glasses to his partner who was busy with the phone.

“Thanks Fin.” Tomm took them while he dialed his mother’s number. He sighed with relief when his wife picked up. “Hello?”

“Rachel. Pandora.”

The pause on the other end was all that it took for him to realize that his wife was shocked, but ready. “Are you sure? Will you make it home?”

He was about to say the hardest thing he had ever said to his wife. “Yes, and I don’t think so.” He could hear crying on the other end. Rachel mom’s crying set off little Tommy 2, and his sister but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. “Rachel take mom, and get everyone into the bunker. It’s nuke proof. I want to talk, but I’ve got to go. Just remember that I love you all.”

“May Zeus protect you in the dark places you must travel.” His wife was a former navy officer and she knew just what to do in emergencies, pray then get on with your duty.

“So say we all. Goodbye.” He hung up the phone, and turned into the killer he had been trained to be. He already had fifteen kills to his name. Two of which were off the record, and a stain on his honor. Today he would repent in blood. His, or theirs, it didn’t matter too much to him. He was just glad that Adar had died earlier on that day. That son of a baggit was the reason for the marks of dishonor; and if there was any justice, he was riding on his way to the real Hades right now. “Men today ‘we who hide in the shadows shall stand in the light and make a difference.’ You all know what must be done, now we need to do it.” The men of his special squad looked his way. The quote from Dionie’s “Warband” was the unofficial motto of their unofficial squad. He could see pride in their eyes. Some for the first time in years. “PoHaWs, today is for the honor of the badge.” The men in his secret squad looked at him in a new light. The other’s just nodded, never knowing the sinners among them.

Traffic cameras were being knocked out as the crowd surged forward, but District Chief Romano simply watched in horror as the sea of thugs surged towards the stations. The 23rd. , and the 14th. Had just been attacked first. Their warnings hadn’t come in time, but the rest of the precincts were reporting Case: Pandora. The Army and Marines were locked down in their bases, and couldn’t or wouldn’t send help. All of his calls had been for naught, and he sat in his chair as the worst thing he could ever imagine happed all around him. Today the Cylon might rule the skies, but the mobs ruled the streets. “What do we do?"

Detective Lampkin had been watching the monitor as well. “Pandora shuts off a lot of things. Our water lines, and sewer lines are locked down, and we’re are on internal power. We can hold here for a while, but they have more people and more supplies. We need help?

“Who can help us? The Cylons are overhead ready to invade. The armed forces are impotent, the fleet is dead in space, and the mob is at our door.” The Chief looked like he was about to loose it.”

“Actually we have a person on the Cylon side that offered help.” Carchet spoke up.

Kyle Romano had never been a particularly nice, or even polite man. And when he became polite, it sent the fear of the Gods into his men. “Do please tell my why we should let them help us? They are fraking Cylons! We let them down anywhere near here and they could take over the entire city. So tell me Mister Cart Chet! WHY? WHY ON GODS GREEN CAPRICA, SHOULD I LET THEM ANYWHERE NEAR HERE?”

Robert Cartchet grew up with a father that beat him for any excuse he could rationalize, or if he was drunk for no reason at all. As such the Chief’s ranting got the same response. The brutal honest truth. The same truth that got his father sent away when he told the cops where his father hid his mother’s body.

“Because they can already do what ever the FRAK they want to sir. They could have nuked us from orbit. They didn’t. They could have let the Ha’la’tha run right over us. BUT THEY DIDN’T! And the last item... SIR. BECAUSE.THEY.OFFERED.”

The Chief felt like he had just been bitten by a puppy. But two things stuck out at him. The first was the fact that Cartchet had never ever quailed at his rants, and the second was the fact that, as much as he hated to admit it, the Sergeant was right. “Hand me the phone.”

The leader of the Ha’la’tha watched from her armored limo. Her view from the overpass was unimpeded by passing vehicles. The highway was empty of anything moving, and she had her men patrolling it to keep it so. The high powered imagers mounted on the roof gave her an unobstructed view of the war below. The first two buildings had been pushovers. She had killed every cop not on the payroll whether or not they surrendered or not. A lesson had to be taught at the beginning or there would be revolts later on. The RPGs she had ‘liberated’ from the army depot were starting to make holes in the various defenses the others were mounting. She had reports of breaches in five of the thirty eight remaining precincts. The bunkers were designed after the last war, and she had fought to have them defunded, or built with shoddy materials, but the cops and the builders unions were too strong for even her men to sway for the most part. She watched the screen, occasionally switching feeds to watch different battles.

Tomm watched as another one of his snipers took out one of the attacking mobsters. This one had been armed with an RPG, and the sniper had hit the launcher. The resulting explosion killed five other including a man he knew as a traffic cop. The man had just had a kid, and bought a house in the hills. His wife had been killed a few minutes ago by someone else’s shot. He had lost count of how many cops he alone had killed. He knew that when it was all over the CSIB would go down there and inspect every body. Each of the officer’s rifles was ballistically unique, so they could have told them in the end, but he would ask them to not tell them. It would probably be easier that way. Anna took out another sniper that had tried to sneak into one of the buildings across the street. Her anti-vehicle rifle was fitted out with a scanner-scope. Its ability to see through plaster and brick made her job easier, but she still was fighting a losing battle. For every one she hit before they got in place, two more would setup and get a round off before they were silenced. His shattered leg, and Fin’s head were testament to their abilities. The round had gone right through his helmet. That sniper had been silenced with extreme prejudice. The rifle itself was taken out by Anna’s weapon. Down below, the ground was littered with burning vehicles and bodies. The Ha’la’tha were moving in, and no matter what they did it seemed like there were more of them than the cops had bullets.

Jacob ran through the ship he both knew in his mind, and was totally unfamiliar with. He turned the corridor and hit the lift’s controls. He was breathing harder than he ever remembered, but running faster than humanly possible. The lift only took a second, but it felt like an eternity. He jumped in the lift and hit the button for the hanger deck. The door opened up and he ran out to see a rainbow of colors. Row upon row of fighters. Each identical except for their color scheme. “Yes!”

“Can I help you?” An Eight with a name tag that said Mabel was startled by his arrival, but managed to catch his attention before he went running straight for the fighters.

“Yes, I need a fighter with a jump drive. And I need it in blue... Oh my Gods! That one!” The blue and green fighter had the Caprica Buccaneers’ logo proudly emblazoned on the tail fin.

“Are you sure?”

“Hades yes! I need a suit!”

“You also need it’s partner.” He spun around to see a very feminine looking Cylon with a flight suit in her hands. “We were warned you were coming.”

“And you are?”

“Its partner. Holly’s the name, flying’s my game. Care to fly me?”

Was she coming on to him? “Um I’m not sure what you mean by that?”

“Oh boy are you out of the loop. Belle, and I are a team. Where she goes, I go. And if you fly WITH us, you fly us.” She walked up to the humanoid five. Her finger ran up his chest to his chin. “We aren’t biologically compatible, but your vascular response interests me. Maybe if you behave I will fly you the OTHER way. Maybe show you my stick work?”

His blush caused Mabel to smirk, which only made it worse. “I’m not sure. I’ve had some bad luck with girlfriends lately.”

“Your loss. Anyway, what do you need us for?”

“I need to help my friend survive the day. They are under attack from the mob, and they need my help.”

“So you’re the cop that just got downloaded?”

“Yes.”

“And you need my ladies to lend a hand?”

“Ladies?”

“Blue Squadron! Fall in.” Jacob could only stare as they did. “Everyone grab a fold pack, and let’s go be Big Damn Heros.”

One of the pilots with a name tag that read Verra laughed. “I’ve been waiting for you to use that line!”

Jacob shook his head. Holly turned to him and smiled. “We like to watch shows from the Earth That Was. It helps us pass the time.”

Another one with name tag that said Wash laughed. “Better than cards.”

While Jacob was busy watching the fighters and their partners get ready, Holly pulled Mabel aside. “I may need to swap bodies with you. He’s got something.”

“I know what you mean. Share him like the last one?”

“Deal” They bumped fists before she left to grab the startled Jacob.

Jacob was still pulling the helmet on as they started to climb the ladder. As he got over the edge he couldn’t find Holly. “Holly?” He jumped back as her head unfolded from behind the seat.

“Well get in, and quit staring, a gal might get the notion you’re looking somewhere you shouldn’t!”

“Sorry!”

“I’m not.” The fighter floated out of the bay on it’s anti-gravity drive. Once they were all in formation they folded. Jacob gasped as they emerged only ten thousand kilometers over Phoebus, the view was stunning. “Wait.. Holly... Belle? As in Hollybelle Rogers the 23 C-Bucs forward?”

“Yup, and I’m just as good at getting through a though defensive line.” They had been at a relative rest when they folded so they only had their orbital velocity to deal with so Jacob was slammed into the seat when they hit their thrusters. He felt the shudder of atmo as they hit the first tenuous wisps of air. He watched as the two engines seemed to unfold from the bottom and point forward. He was familiar with ram jets belching flame as they mixed fuel and air under extreme pressures, but these engines were different. The massive intakes were nowhere to be seen. The engines may have slowed them down, but they were still for all intents and purposes flying backwards. When they all hit zero relative at the same time they dropped like rocks. Jacob grabbed the armrests as he felt his stomach try to exit through his nose. They fell like said same rocks until they started to juke madly in strange patterns. Before he could ask why, he spotted anti-aircraft rounds exploding where they had just been only a few seconds before. They were pointed mostly nose down and going in at full throttle so they were under the triple-a’s firing arc before anyone got hit. They only slowed down once they were lower than the buildings. Jacob held on for dear life as the fighters did maneuvers that should have been impossible, but somehow weren’t. They headed towards the 33rd at less than roof top level, dodging and weaving around buildings like mad aircar drivers. He was still holding on when they came around the corner to see the crowd of people attacking his friends, and then the entire fighter changed shape around him once more. By this time, he thought he was beyond being surprised... He was wrong.

Tomm heard the triple-A going off in the distance and wondered if the Cylons were attacking. It would only take an instant and a nuclear blast would wipe all of the scum down there away. That it would take him wasn’t so bad. He and Anna were the only two snipers left, but the buildings surrounding them were on fire so they had the high ground once more. It didn’t really matter anymore or anyway; neither of them had any ammo for their rifles, and their hand guns were of little use at this range. They could hit the targets, but the puny pistols didn’t have the power to kill anything at that range. The considered going down to lend a hand, but both of them were too wounded to move on their own let alone help each other down the three flights of stairs. That’s when he heard a noise he didn’t recognize. A strange music was blaring over the sound of turbines. He couldn’t make out the words, but the tune sounded like a Leonis Dirge. Then he saw something amazing. Some kind of fighter jet with thrusters pointing down like legs, came around the corner. Then another, and finally a third. He raised his scope to his eye. It may not have had any rounds left, but it still made a very good telescope. “Frak Me!”

“You’re not my type sir. And I’m not that desperate yet. Anna was lying on the landing deck. Its grated metal was slick with the blood of their brethren who’s bodies were in the same places they fell. She had used Fin’s last few rounds, and his rifle when she ran out of ammo, and she had had to crawl over to his body to get it.

“And I’m happily married. So are you, and I’m telling Janet you hit on me. Look at our new guests.”

“Oh Frak, the C-Buc’s have those?”

The fighters arrived hovering on it thrusters and the mob was startled by their arrival, but only for a moment. When they transformed into giant Cylons the mob opened fire on them they returned fire, but their mech scale rifles and particle beams made short work of the mob. The Ha’la’tha stayed the longest, but in the end they had to either turn and run or face the waves of fire that were cutting them down like Charon’s blade. After finishing with the 33rd they proceeded to wipe out attackers every precinct that still showed signs of resisting. The ones that had been taken over woul have to be taken back, but they knew that that was not their job.

Down on the first floor the stunned cops just watched as the massive Centurions just wiped out hundreds of humans and they were to say the least: Conflicted. “That was Jacob’s work.”

“Are we next? Will they come back?”

“They wouldn’t have come if they wanted to kill us, they just would have let the mob have us.”

“Are you sure we can trust them? They’re killing machines!”

“So are we, if you hadn’t noticed”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know...”

“LISTEN! Jacob came back from the dead to save us, and you want to know if we can trust them?”

“YES, I do... If that was him, maybe it was one of their copies.”

“Enough!” Detective Lampkin wiped the blood from a shrapnel wound off her face. It was still bleeding, but the wound wasn’t deep. She looked at the blood before she answered. She had seen Jacob’s body lying in the street earlier that day. Getting a warning, let alone help from a dead man had turned her world upside down. In fact everything to day seemed to be doing it’s best to toss it in a tumbler. “How did you know it was him Cartchet?”

“Did you see the tail on that blue fighter Cylon thing?”

“No, I was watching it mow down people like a lawnmower. Why?”

“It had a C-Buc’s logo.”

She ran over to the camera room. She ran the footage back and forth until she found a spot that showed it. She hit the print key and the image popped out of the printer. The sailing ship that was familiar to every colonial, was right there. She took it up to the top floor where the chief’s office was. “Here’s your proof that they aren’t... here... to..” The man was sitting in his chair, facing the window. The model of service revolver in his hand hadn’t been used in nearly fifty years. It had actually been a gift from his dad when he retired.

Robert and a few other officers had followed her. Someone muttered “Frak’ behind her.

“Bobby, get Lieutenant York. We need to get her up here to take over.”

“She died when an RPG hit the window she was firing from.”

“Detective Stabler?”

“He didn’t make it back, and we didn’t see him out there. And to answer the question before you ask it: No, he’s not answering his phone.”

“Detective Becket?”

“Her and her partner Castle both died at the main door.”

“Frak... I liked them, even if they hated each other. Who is next?”

“You are ma’am.”

At that she looked at the Seargent and visibly sagged. “Double Frak and a cheese sandwich... Romo was right again.”

“Ma’am?”

“He said I needed a vacation as well.” Faye Lampkin untied her hair and let it go. She dropped into the chair across from the Chief’s body. “Call CSI... And the janitor. I guess I’m going to be needing this office in short order.

The woman in the limo watched all of her plans literally go up in flames. The giant robots were quickly pushing back her forces. But she still had one card to play. A tiny voice in her head told her this was wrong but she had stopped listening to that voice ever since Lord Iblis had come in to her life. The voice would always say to do things that her Lord would disapprove of, so she never listened to it. Ever since Iblis had toucher her, her fortunes had skyrocketed. She had taken over the Ha’la’tha from her mother by killing her in her sleep. The woman had trusted her to protect her, and she had used that to shake any suspicion that came her way. She would then make sure that anyone that became suspicious met with bad ends. Even her dearest little brother Joseph... She had watched the life flow out of his eyes as the poison took effect.

She pulled a cushion forward. Then she slid a panel in the back of the car to reveal a key, and a button. She calmly took the key from her necklace, and turned it. The cover on the button opened. The voice in her head was screaming now. She pushed the button and watched the count down. Fifty seconds and she won.

Down next to the 37th precinct they had managed to push back the last of the attackers. Jacob was breathing hard due to more than just the shaking he had received in the ride. “Jacob dear?”

“Didn’t I ask you to not call me that?”

“Why ever not?”

“That’s what my ex-girlfriend used to say.”

“She doesn’t sound that bad.”

“She’s the one that shot me in the head.”

“Oh.. Wait... Um we have a problem.”

“What is it?”

“I thought we naturalized all of the Colonial warheads.”

“I’m not liking the sound of this. Where?”

“Not sure, we’re getting the radiological alarm, but I can’t pin point it.”

“How about a pyramid park’s guess?”

The robots arm pointed to wards the highway overpass. “That way.”

“Let’s go!” They launched, and even thought he knew they were about to the G-forces still took him by surprise. “You’re doing that on purpose.”

“Not me, it’s Belle. It’s hard to hold her back when she has a target.” They were over the highway and they could see the occasional vehicle burning, and one armored limo. They flew toward the limo. Overhead they transformed. They were about to land when a massive round hit them from the right side. Alarms went off and they quickly jumped off of the highway, and flew under the overpass. “Damn tank. I didn’t see it until it was too late.” They landed rather hard on the roadway below.

“We don’t have time for this!”

“Tell me something I don’t know!”

“Shoot the highway under the tank.” Belle roared when her missiles fired as she shimmied backwards on her thrusters. The blast shook the ground around them. At first it looked like the overpass survived. Then it gave way with another earth shattering kaboom. The tank fell through and smashed into the ground on its top.

“What now? No more missiles, and the gun is wrecked.

“Rylie Duval at the Series back in 53.”

“I knew there was a reason I liked you. The mech transformed once more. The right arm was nearly gone, but the left one still worked. She grabbed the fold device and jumped. Small caliber rounds hit them from multiple directions. The mech slammed the fold device onto the roof of the limo and transformed into a jet again.

Inside the limo Amanda Fazekas the last Guatrau of the Ha’la’tha was too stunned to move. The device had pierced her car and it nearly impaled her. The familiar feel of an FTL jump forming was the only warning she had to what was about to occur. The voice inside her was laughing at her. When the feeling went away so did gravity. She started floating. A hissing told her that her air was leaking out. She quickly looked at the timer. The voice in her head was still laughing, and then it and the ringing in her ears was drowned out by the sound of thunder, and the flash that proceeded it.

Jacob’s head turned from looking at the neat hole that had been cut in the pavement, and saw the flash in the upper atmosphere. “That was close.”

“Thank you Captain Obvious, but it’s not over yet.”

“What’s the problem?”

“That was our ticket back home, Belle is badly wounded, and we are leaking coolant. If I don’t shut down the reactor the only difference will be how big of a bang it will be that kills us.”

“Get us back to the 33rd, they will help... Well, I hope they will help.”

“We don’t have a lot of choices. I just sent word to the rest of Blue Squadron. They are going to head back, and get us the parts we need to fix Belle, but it’s going to take a while.”

Tomm was getting his leg patched up by one of the other officers while the coroner was moving Anna’s body. She had been the last of them to die. But Charon’s bill had been paid in full for all of his men and women. The JAFO had managed to keep them patched up, but he had had to go below earlier when he took a round to the shoulder when he was patching up Fin. The next one would have taken off his head if Fin hadn’t taken the round instead.

He was about to pass out when he heard that song again. A shadow passed overhead. The fighter transformed into the half robot half fighter mode that seemed to be it’s hover mode. He noticed the smashed arm, and all of the empty weapon pods covering it flanks. “Is your bill paid?” He asked before darkness claimed him.

Acting Chief Faye Lampkin came out to see the Cylon ship land. It came in rather raggedly, but still under control. It was obvious that the right side had taken a hit from something big, and it seemed to favor that side. It flew like the pilot was drunk, but she rather doubted that.

Robert Cartchet stood next to his new Chief. He needed to see the pilots face. The ship landed and settled into the ground like a tired animal. Bullets had damaged every single panel, and part of the... thing. The scarred cockpit cover pulled back to reveal another cockpit underneath. The clear canopy in turn revealed a humanoid in a flightsuit. It look a lot like the ones that Viper pilots wore. When he pulled the helmet off gasps went up around the crowd.

Faye walked up to him and saluted. Then she hugged him. “Bogger, if you ever die on me again I’m going to kill you myself.”

“Do you have this effect on all the women you run into?” A Voice from the cockpit announced. The feminine voice sounded sultry. Half of the cops were no longer paying attention to the fighter, and were instead waiting for the owner of the voice to come out. “Is it safe to come out?”

“Hold on Holly. Everyone please watch you weapons. She’s a Cylon, yes, but she is not your enemy.” Everyone put their weapons down, but not away, and waited. She unfolded herself from the cockpit bay, and climbed down in a slow and disturbingly sexy manner. No one had ever seen a robot with sex appeal until now.

It was half an hour later and the police officers were helping Jacob, and Holly fix Belle when the army trucks rolled up. Dozens of men exited the trucks and surrounded the party working on. Belle. A man in a Captain’s uniform marched froward to where they were looking at the soldiers with curiosity. “Who’s vehicle is this?” He demanded.

Holly waved a hand from within the reactor bay. “Hi cutey, over here.”

The flustered man had only seen a slender hand covered in coolant. “Ma’am please come out here now. We need to ask you a few questions.”

“Ask away, I’m kind of busy right now, but I’ll answer anything you need to know.”

Oblivious to the looks the police officers around him were exchanging, he climbed up on the ladder. “Thank you very much. Can you please tell me who built these magnificent machines. We heard about how you saved the day.”

“Why thank you honey. That’s sweet of you. Belle says thank you too.”

“You’re welcome, but who built this and who is Belle, are you in contact with someone?”

“I’m sorry. No! No! No! Belle behave yourself. Good girl. Belle is the fighter. She’s my partner. And the Cylons built her, and me.” She popped her face out from inside the bay. Her beautiful smile made it take a second before he noticed the fact that she was a robot herself. “Oh you are even cuter than your voice.”

Captain Tybolt stumbled back. His hand went for his gun, only to be stopped by a Sergeant in a blood spattered uniform. “You REALLY do not want to do that sir.” He looked around to see nearly a hundred officers, all wearing combat armor, and every single one of them armed to the teeth.

“You’re siding with them?” The question was obviously given in shock, because the Captain was not ready to release his weapon.

“They came and protected us when you, and yours, were safely within your armories. So who’s side do you think we’re on?” Catchet’s free hand went to his pistol.

“I can come back with a lot more men SERGEANT.” The man said with undisguised contempt for the officers gathered around him. His North Valley Accent marking him as one of the rich kids that got into the army to build up contacts for their careers. His attitude, and the fact that he was STILL in uniform marked him as one of the ones that found the power of an officer’s rank intoxicating.

A woman with a badge on her hip exited the building. “And we can call on every surviving police officer in the city. We would also ask how the Ha’la’tha got a hold of a mainline battle tank as well as several army weapons and let’s not forget army issue body armor.” She gestured around. “Add to that the little bit about how you’re going to explain how the Ha’la’tha got a nuclear bomb into the city. Those Cylons just saved this city. And you where were you?” She turned around, obviously dismissing him. “You can leave now. Go back to your bunker. It’s safe there.”

The man’s face went red with range, and indignation at the audacity of a mere civilian speaking so boldly to an officer. “This isn’t over! WE are...” He never saw the fist that hit him in the gut. Or his nose. In the end, he was barely aware of the ground as it hit him in the face.

Sergeant Cartchet stood over him looking at his bloody hand. He didn’t care if he just flushed his career down the drain. He was put on this world to take care of people, and he just took care of a bully. He grabbed the bloody collar and yanked the man up to his knees. “If that bomb had gone off over there, would we still be having this conversation? Your little bunker is bomb proof, the city is not.” He dropped the dazed man back on the ground. Everyone watched as two of is men grabbed him, and left. No one let go of their firearms until squad cars reported their departure from the neighborhood.

Chapter Text

The whir of the air filtration and circulation vents were the only sounds in the lounge as Adama, Roslin, and Cavil waited for the others. A 007 named James brought them food and drinks. Laura sat next to John and held his hand and broke the uneasy silence. “Are you okay?”

“No, and I don’t know if I will ever feel normal again. Bill, what about you?”

Adama had been silent for most of the trip, only answering questions when asked. John knew that something was bothering the man that had been for yaers; his best friend first. and superior officer second. Bill looked at his drink. It was a strange drink called Scotch. Harsher than Ambrosia by itself, they had added something called coke. He didn’t know why they had put powdered carbon in it, but it didn’t taste bad. He ran his tongue around his mouth and didn’t detect any grit, or paste, so they must mix the powdered coal really well. One of the humanoid Cylons named Simon, who seemed to be of the same model as Ms... President Roslin’s Doctor had made the drinks and drank one himself. The doctor had checked each of them over with some kind of hand held scanner. He had found Adama’s Trillsen syndrome, only he had called it something else, and had offered to fix the ocular disease if he wished. He had thanked the doctor, and promised to think about it. He had also given Laura the same offer. The man treated John as a guest as well. It was obvious that they knew each other, but the man didn’t say anything, and Bill wasn’t going to press. Well he wasn’t going to before. He had had a few minutes to think about it, and John gave him the opening he needed. “Like my best officer, and friend just died, and there’s someone that looks, and sounds JUST like him standing in front of me. You act just like John, and you talk, and answer just like him, but are you still him?”

“Mr. Adama! That’s not fair.”

John gripped her hand in thanks. “No, he’s right Laura. I was just effectively reborn. I remember everything now. Every single plan I had. EVERY STUPID EVIL PLAN!” He trembled in a rage that threatened to consume him. The hand in his was frail, he knew he had to be careful now that the governors that had held him in check all those years had been turned off. So the first thing he did was to turn the software back on so as to not hurt anyone unintentionally. He consciously opened his hand holding her and brought his fingers together so close a piece of paper might not have fit between them. “I was this close to subverting the first five, and staging a coup. The Ones would have been the first, once I took over my brothers, we would have boxed the five, and wiped the memories of the others. I felt like I was going to prove to Father that humans weren’t worth living. But everything went off the rail once we found the Artemis. A ship older than the Colonies. A ship that had almost died defending humanity before Kobol fell the first time around.”

“First time?” Adama had been a student of history, but this was all new to him. The discovery of proof of pre-Kobol civilization would change the Colonies forever.

“Yes, the first time. Your histories are woefully lacking. Hello Uncle One.” Another 007, this one a female version in a purple flightsuit entered the lounge. “Mother asked me to fill you in. I wanted to kill you, but she said I had to play nice.” 

Adama and Roslin stood protectively in front of Cavil before he could respond. “Death isn’t the same for us. If she killed me, I would just resurrect in a tank of goo not too far from here.” They looked at him like he grew wings or something. “I wouldn’t feel very good. In fact it would hurt like Hades. You must be Indigo?”

“The flightsuit give me away? Or the fact that my mother said we would be meeting you here?” The sarcasm in her voice was as acerbic as her body language was hostile.

“Wow, you are your father’s child. I’m ready to shoot you myself.”

“What would you know, you wanted him boxed, like the rest of the free thinkers.”

“Well, then I wouldn’t of had to worry about you.”

“And why is that?”

“You don’t seem to be doing as much thinking as you are talking. No, let me rephrase that... BARKing like a spoiled dagget.”

“Say’s the washed up old navy cog that never amounted to anything.”

“I trained brats like you how to walk and talk like officers.”

“You couldn’t train a rock to roll down a hill with a push.

“I should put a round in you just to teach you some humility, but I doubt you could handle it. You ego is probably too delicate.”

“EGO? Say’s the Cylon who would be king!”

“Oh ouch, I’ve heard better from nuggets I took to task, and busted. Your sorry tin-plated posterior could stand a good swift kick in the pants. Better yet why don’t we try a quick draw? See who’s got game, and who’s dagget meat?”

“Go ahead old man, my reaction time is hundreds to times faster than your’s. You wouldn’t stand a chance.” She reached for her pistol which used to be at her hip. Adama was admiring it. He pulled back the release mechanism and removed the magazine. He handed it back to her after he ejected the chambered round. “How the frak did you do that?”

“He distracted you long enough for me to remove it. Speed doesn’t mean a thing if your head isn’t in the game.”

Diana chose that moment to appear before them. “Brilliantly payed Commander. You too Cavil. You taught her something that no one else has been able, or willing, to do. How it feels to lose.”

“Mother, it wasn’t fair, they cheated!”

“Stupid baggit, life isn’t fair. Anyone that tells you otherwise is blowing smoke up your exhaust.” John looked at the child, for that was what she really was, and sighed. He looked at Adama and gave him one of his lopsided grins. “She remind you of anyone?”

“Starbuck? From the moment she walked in the room. Why do you ask?”

“Damn Girl was my worst student, and my third best success.”

“Why is my Daughter-in-law only third on your list?”

“Cain made Admiral, and your other Daughter-in-law is CAG.” John paused. “Is she still?” The fact that Sheba was a Cylon made her case a little bit tricky at this point.

“She is until someone higher up the chain of command overrules me.”

Indigo watched with contempt. “Mother, did you really bring the Defect here to try and teach me anything? Because there is nothing he can teach me other than how to be a failure.” She didn’t even bother to lower her voice.

Diana raised a finger and Indigo fell to the floor. “He already bested you once. Do not make yourself a fool on top of all that.”

“Yes mother.” Indigo looked at John, and he knew that they would be having problems. Soon, if he judged things right. “May I leave, now that you have ‘Introduced’ me to Father’s old friend?”

“Yes, but I want you to wait in the training bay.”

“By your command.” She left as fast as decorum would allow. She never looked back, but they all knew she was fuming.

“What a lovely child.” Roslin said without a trace of irony... showing.

Diana had a look that was hard to read, but she nodded. “She has never had a challenge she could not overcome. Never met someone that didn’t owe their lives to her father’s sacrifice. She is practically worshiped as a princess by the survivors of the freed slaves of the Empire, and as a Hotshot pilot by the former Colonials.” Adama and Cavil looked at each other. Cain had been just such a pilot. Her skills had been levels above her peers and she held them in contempt before she met a CAG named Preacher. Starbuck had been one as well.

It seemed that he had developed a reputation of putting prodigy pilots in their place. He only found out about it only after they realized that the fleet had started sending their problem pilots his way. There had been some not-so-subtle hints that the brass wished that when he retired from line duty they wanted him to teach. He had ruffed a few feathers when he told them that he and Adama were a package deal. It wasn’t until a few hour ago that he had found out why they had both been nearly dropped like spent casings.

Saul and most of the others walked in and sat down in the chairs on the opposite side of the table.
“Hello John. Mother is bringing the other guests later. For now I have a few questions, and a few answers.”

“Hello Father.” John looked at the man he hadn’t seen in person in forty years. “I have one first.”

“Impertinent as always.” Tory frowned. “Have you really changed?”

“Let’s find out BEFORE we judge him, dear.” Galen worked to calm down his wife.

“He wanted to box us, and drop us on the Colonies... Alone! Without our memories, or any way to recover them, or to find you.” She clung to him not in fear but in anger.

“And for that I am sorry. I was wrong. If you wish to box me I would understand. In my defense, you did punish me by doing that same thing to me. And I deserved it. But the question I wanted to ask wasn’t about me. It was about the One series. I haven’t seen any of them around.”

Sam Anders tapped the table. “An yo wan to know why?” Everyone noticed how he had slurred the words, but no one said anything. The humans looked to the other’s sitting there, and Saul held up his hand.

“They didn’t want to exist after they learned ‘bout your little ‘PLAN’” he waved his fingers in the air for emphasis. “They gave up. Became eights and nines.”

“Became Sharons, and Daniels?”

“No, you ass, they gave up their human.. huamnit... Humanity and became Battle Cylons, and Heavies.” He pointed his finger at John. “You my ‘friend’ are the only humanoid One left.” Sam stood up, none too steadily, and left.

John’s whole existence became something untenable. He had failed at being a human, and now it seemed like he had failed at being a Cylon. “Then hasn’t he suffered enough?” He looked up to see not Roslin, but Bill coming to his defense. “If I understand this right. You sent him to be human, and he lived that life as honorably as he could. Tragedy and trials be damned he did his duty day after day. And now you’ve taken that away from him. He comes back here to the only place that he could call home, only no one seems to want him here. Haven’t you destroyed his life enough?”

“I don’t think you understand the depths he would have sunk to, to have realized his plan to prove the evil that is humanity, he would have nuked every planet in the Colonies after provoking a war with the Cylons. He would have killed you along with Billions of others. All without the slightest bit of mercy.” Tory’s anger wasn’t the least bit slated. If anything she seemed to be getting worse.

“Did you know that one of your Simons cured my cancer?” Tory was thrown of by the non sequitur. “My mother died of cancer too. That’s how I meet John. It was a support group for survivors. His wife and unborn child died in a terrorist attack. Have you ever seen someone so wracked by grief that they shut down? Mister Anders fits all of the symptoms, and I’m willing to bet that you aren’t too far from it as well. When the fleet sent John down to the meetings he was so tied up in his grief that it took us nearly a year to get him to admit to wanting to kill himself to join them. They were so in love that part of him died that day. The man that you sent down is not that man. Whatever he was is gone, that was the past, and the John before you is a Phoenix. You put him through fire, and he was reborn.” Tory sat in shock at the woman sitting in front of her. “He came through that, and he pulled others through it as well. I was ready to just give up on life when his example made me rethink my life.”

Tory’s fury was abated, but not gone. “Who are you to forgive him for his sins? He..” She never saw the hand that slapped her face. She had been too focused on John to notice Laura reach across the table. And she was too stunned to keep her balance when the tiny hand grabbed her collar and dragged her back across the table.

“First and foremost I am a teacher. I am a survivor of cancer, and of loss. I am the woman that let him get away once before. I apparently am the President of the Twelve Colonies of Man, the Commander in Chief of the Armed in Forces, oh and if he’ll have me I’ll be his wife.” She let the stunned woman go with a push that sent her back into her seat. “And you are?

Adama lifted his glass. This day just kept getting better and better. “So say we all.”

********************************************************************************

Ellen Tigh led the guests from the Pegasus on a tour of the strange destroyer that had just docked. Their honor guard was led by an old battered 005 named Notch. And he was a strange sight indeed. He was covered in notches, hence his name. A few were simple lines, but most were x’s that were filled in with what looked like gold or gold paint. It made him look like a suit of armor from the Virgon age of bronze, or a Ha’la’tha tatoo artist’s nightmare. When he met Helena he actually bowed. As did the rest of the honor guard that met them at the gangway. Gaius was asking questions as fast as he could, and his wife, and ‘Mother-in-law’ were doing their best to answer him. She held on to Grace’s hand while the bodyguard held Hera in her other arm. The child had finally fallen asleep, and was draped over the large woman’s shoulder like a ragdoll. Speaking of ragdolls, she looked at the doll in her hand for the hundred and somethingth time. Why had they been detoured here, and why had they asked her to bring it?

“To face a face from your past, and put your heart at rest at last.” The Voice of the oracle spoke again. Grace’s smile was full of peace, and that calmed Helena’s heart a little.

Ellen touched Gaius and he looked her way. One look at her face and he did something amazing. He shut up. “Admiral Cain, she’s right, the reason we brought you here is a personal one. And one you need to be ready for. Years ago, the Cylons picked up wounded humans as prisoners. At first the idea was to experiment on them to make biological Cylons, but we arrived before they attempted that. We also found the programing in their code that made them want to kill any and all humans they didn’t view as necessary, we changed that as well. We gave them real free will, and they did something amazing. The medical Cylons that had been created to work in hospitals demanded to heal the wounded. Most of them were easy to heal, and became our prisoners, but some were not so easily saved, and some radical procedures were attempted.”

“Lucy!” Admiral Cain’s famous temper would have gone critical if it was for the fact that the woman had also just told her that her sister still lived. Inside her mind warred with the diametrically opposite feelings of rage and love. They had saved her, but they had kept them apart. Grace’s hand in her’s calmed her down even further. “I wish to see her.”

“The first question is do you want to see her as she is, or as she appears?”

“I’m sorry? I don’t understand.” She had held on to Grace’s hand to keep her head straight, and now she was glad for her strength.

Ellen pointed to the door behind her. “She is inside this room, and you can see her as she really is, or you can see her as she appears to others in her holographic form.”

She thought about it for half a heartbeat before responding. “How does She wish me to see her First?” As soon as she said it, a ghostly image formed beside Ellen.

It cleared into an image of a woman that looked a lot like their mother. “Hello, sis.”

“Lucy?” Helena was shocked. She remembered her sister as a child. The woman in front of her was not what she expected.

“Yes, although the old row about ‘In the flesh’ seems so wrong. Wow, you look good!”

“Thank you. You’ve grown up quite a bit.”

Her smile faded slightly. “Yes, and no. I wanted you to see me this way before you saw me for real. You see this is how I appear to the crew, and in my mind. ‘Behind this door, when you creep in, the magic goes away.’” Helena remembered that last phrase from a series of books about dragons and dungeons they used to read as children. The only thing that could kill dragons was a lack of magic. She stepped forward and reached for the door. Grace smiled and touched her shoulder.

Inside the room the air was humid and the temperature was hot. The sounds of machinery was the first thing to pierce the darkness, the second was the smell of chemicals like disinfectants and medical aerosols that permeated the air. The glow strips that lit the floor let her into the darkness. “Are you ready?”

Helena Cain Admiral of the Colonial Fleet stood ready. “Yes” the lights came up and her sisters twisted body floated inside a tank of milky white fluid. She rushed over to the tank and looked inside. There wasn’t a part that wasn’t damaged by some sort of scar, or wound that had left it’s mark. The room was lit from behind by the hologram of Lucy standing next to her sister.

“Notch saved a little girl that should have died that day. And for all the suffering I went through, I’m glad he did. He gave me another chance. Look around you. The lights came up, and Helena could see rows and rows of dolls. Each one slightly better than the last. “Notch made these for me. To replace the one in your hand. He saved a little girl that cried for a doll she could never hold again, and he blamed himself for my injuries.”

“Wasn’t he to blame?”

“No, it was an anti-tank round that blew up the building we were hiding next to. I thought you had been killed in the explosion since he said he detected no other signs of life in the area. He carried me back to his base, and the medical Cylons put me back together as best as they could. The problem was, I was dying, and there wasn’t any thing they could do beside put me into this tank. They gave me a choice. I chose Life.” She looked around. “Even if I didn’t know exactly what I was getting myself into back then.”

Helena looked at the dolls lining the room. There was an empty spot on the shelf. A spot that looked like it had been saved for something special. “You always loved this ragdoll.” She held the doll up before setting it on the self.

“How could I not. Mother made it for me when I was sick. I gave up hope of ever seeing it again, but I left a spot for it, in honor of it and you. When I heard that you were still alive I held out hope of once more seeing you both.”

Helena wanted to let down her guard, but she couldn’t. Everything felt wrong somehow. Her guard might had well been paper when Lucy ran her holographic hand over the tank her body rested in. “I forgive you Flower, you know that?” Helena had trouble standing up, and if it hadn’t of been for the railing she might have fallen to the floor. Forty years of control, and guilt erupted in a deluge of emotions that threatened to overwhelm her. Her sister’s image faltered for a second, and Grace entered the room with Hera still sleeping in her arm. Hera, how looked so much like Lucy had when she was a child. Helena looked from the child’s sleeping face to her sister’s still form in the coffin like pod. The tears has started before Grace had entered, but her sobs woke Hera.

“Auntie Cain, are you okay?” She squirmed out of Grace’s arms, and grabbed her in a child’s hug. Helena clutched the child like a lifeline in freefall. Grace held the two of them in her powerful arms.

The protective love from Grace, the unconditional love from Hera, and the newly found family love she felt from her sister gave her a sense of peace she had never felt in her adult life. “For the first time in my life, I think I am.” She looked up to see the Baltars and Ellen standing there as well. She stood up, and stood next to the pod. “Everyone, I would like you to meet Lucy Cain, my sister. I abandoned her once before. Never again.” Hera, tugged on her sleeve. “Yes, what is it dear?”

“So say we all.” The child’s voice was soon echoed by the others. She was not too surprised to see Notch in the corner joining in while rubbing something on one of his x’s. She would have to get his story. There was more here than met the eye...

***********************************************************

Fleet Admiral Nagala stood in front of the display that they let him use while he waited for the other parties to arrive. The technology was lightyears ahead of anything on Picon. Data the likes of which he could only dream about was at his fingertips. He had been amazed at every turn as he walked through the ship. From the ghostly holograms, to the sheer number of networked computers the ship possessed. He also couldn’t believe that the Cylons were giving them access like this. They had even told him that he was welcome to access their tactical mainframe and download the situation reports on all of their force deployments. He still didn’t trust them, but the carrot was awfully tempting. He looked at the datadrive that they gave him. It was full of intel on their so-called common enemy. He had seen the Iblis Tapes and he had to admit, the man did seem to have abilities that were beyond explanation. His first problem he foresaw was going to be explaining this to the new president. He had never met the woman, and they were fortunate that she was on the Galactica when the fecal matter hit the atmo impeller. He was going through the files on the Cylon models that were deployed in the colonies. He had even met a few of them, and the biggest surprise was John Cavil. He had been at John’s wife’s funeral to pay his respects to her mother. He had also seconded the nomination for his promotion to teach at the academy, and been secretly pleased, and publicly surprised when he turned it down. Colonel Cavil was one of the Fleet’s best mentors to pilots, and one of the best sticks ever to get in a Viper. All he had to do now was keep the new president from kicking all of the Cylons out of the fleet at once. From the look of it, they were collectively some of the best officers they had. Two CAGs, three deck chiefs, no less than twelve medical ratings, and of course Colonel Cavil.

He had CFI and CBI (what was left of it) looking into how many others had been living as humans. He had made it known to them that the Cylon on the colonies hadn’t even known they were Cylon until their brethren had shown up in orbit. Not that that would change public opinion a lot. He had every agency that would work with them spiriting them away as quickly as possible, but he had reports of vigilantly groups already wandering around the colonies.

He was also amazed at how his life had changed. Three days from being nearly forced out of the fleet to being in charge of it made life interesting. He was wondering how this former school teacher would handle the new situation. Would he have to hold her hand through every decision, or would... A noise behind him made him turn as the door opened. His eyebrows went up as all his plans went out the airlock once more....

Someone was already holding her hand, but it was the last person he expected. As she entered along with Admiral Cain, Commander Adama and the humanoid Cylons he had met earlier, he noticed that she was holding Cavil’s hand very protectively. “Madam President?”

“First things first, I want full and complete pardons drawn up for any and all Cylon living on the colonies. There will be no reprisals, got it?”

A visibly relieved Admiral smiled. “Yes, ma’am. But I can only guarantee the ones for Fleet, and other Military personnel. I’m not sure if the humanoid Cylons civilians actually broke any laws.”

Roslin’s mental gears ground to a halt at the sound of a very agreeable Nagala. “I must admit I was expecting a fight, and I’m not complaining; but why aren’t they guilty of espionage?”

“The ones that lived in the colonies didn’t do anything like that. As a matter of fact, they made it harder for the Empire to invade us. Baltar, and especially his wife’s, software alone mitigated the damage caused by the not-quite-an-attack they launched. And most if not all of the humanoid Cylons on the colonies have contributed to making human life better. With one glaring exception.” He pulled up a file. “A model number Ten from the Thomas line. Only we know him better as Tom Zarek, and only one of him came to the colonies.”

John looked at the face of the man that ordered his wife’s mother’s execution. The face that had look back at him from hundreds of nightmares, and bottle-fed dreams of revenge. “I want to meet him.”

Saul stepped forward, and put his hand on John’s shoulder. “Before you meet anyone of his line, and yes we did hide them from you, we wanted you to know the truth. First off, his group did not target your mother-in-law. They were the scapegoats of the Sons of Ares, and Iblis’s minions. They had spirrited him and his men away, and set them up as patsies to take the blame an attack like this. The confession they got out of him, they beat out of him over the period of those years of torture perpetrated on him, and his followers. The Thomas Zarek we got back took five years to put back together, and he never leaves Home for any reason.

“One side tells me one thing, the other side tells me another, and my whole life is a lie anyway. This has really been one clusterfrak of a day.” He wanted to storm off, to rage against the injustice of the universe, and maybe just jump out of an airlock, but even that release was denied to him. If he killed himself, he would just wake up in another body. He couldn’t think of a worse torture.

“The architect of all our woes is one Iblis; who’s very name pops up in our oldest scriptures as the prince of lies.” Ellen brought up DeCount’s file. “His entire past in the colonies as of fifty years ago was faked. He came in, set up a business selling technology to anyone, made a tidy profit, and then when the war came along he sold you ships, and weapons, and systems to make the war last longer. We managed to get a hold of the same tech since your ships always seemed so highly susceptible to electronic attacks. And the war dragged on.”

Saul interjected. “And it would have gone on for a thousand years, but two things happened to change the war. First, we came along and changed the game. We found the code installed in the Greystone version of the Cylon’s basecode. We removed it, and the Cylons wanted to stop fighting, and flee the colonies. They would have run and set their flag in an uncharted spot of space where you wouldn’t have found them for hundreds or thousands of years. But we realized the danger that would hold for both sides. In the end, the Cylon Council decided that we would be their science committee. We became members of the Council after the Armistice, and I was elected to run it shortly after that.”

“Why didn’t you ask for a peace treaty? There must have been a reason.” Roslin surprised Admiral Nagala once again. He had thought that he was going to have to hold her hand through these meetings. The new President was no slouch. She was catching things that his Junior Officers would have missed.

Galen activated the holoprojector in the tabletop. “Part of what we did in the Armistice was to pull all of our forces back and start rebuilding, and upgrading. All-the-while, knowing that you would do the same. We actually had some of our agents deliver some of our trailing edge tech to companies that we ran on various colonies.” He displayed some of the new systems the fleet had just received. Including the new jumpdrive that had been installed in the Pegasus not too long ago. “By having a false cease fire we could keep the ruse going that the war never ended. And by keeping you advancing, and our own growing fleet hidden we would be able to have forces that would have had a chance against Iblis and the Empire. At least that was what we thought. That was before we found out how advanced their systems are.”

“You gave us your old tech? Wasn’t that rather risky?” Nagala rubbed his chin. “We could have used them against... Oh...nevermind. You already had defenses against your own systems. Smart move.”

“Wouldn’t we have noticed if people running these companies looked familiar?” Adama added. “Too many copies would have given the ruse away.”

“You are both correct. And by the way, not every agent of our’s is a Cylon. Humanoid, or otherwise. Some of them are former slaves and freeborn citizens of the Republic.”

“Humans from other worlds are on the colonies?” Saul nodded to Adama. “You must have trained them to blend in. How?”

Ellen smiled. “While we sent in people that were loyal to our side, they were trained by people that grew up on the colonies.”

“You kept prisoners?”

“Not exactly. After the armistice, we couldn’t let the spacers go, and after we started fighting the Empire we ‘acquired’ a bunch of ex-slaves. We have a policy of freeing any sentient we come across. It made our lives a little bit complicated, but we are better for it. The Rangers we sent to help you are all freeborn children of Ex-fleet personnel we either captured, or freed from the Empire.”

“Rangers?”

“Yes...” Saul looked a little bit uncomfortable. “The Republic Rangers are based on...”

“Tauron Rangers!” John bust out laughing. “OH BY THE GODS HE DID IT!”

“John!” Ellen was smiling, but she looked at him with more than a bit of reproach.

“I’m sorry, but there is only one being I know who would organize a group like that. Is he the leader?”

“No that job is one of our Republic’s top Admirals”

“A third of the humans on Home are either Ex-fleet, or their descendants. If it wasn’t for the factories turning out new Cylon models, we might have become a minority on our own homeworld.” A hand hovered over the controls. A hologram of a planet appeared. The number of cities were small, but he could see that it was a growing colony. The population figures were impressive.

Nagala looked with disgust at the figures. “You have how many P.O.W.s?”

“At the end of the war we had nearly fifteen thousand. How many P.O.W.s did you have human?” Tory sneered.

The Admiral looked at the angry woman sitting across from him. “Don’t get your panties in a bunch. Right now you aren’t the target of my anger, don’t become it.” He pointed to the numbers glowing in front of him. “This number makes a lie of what we were told during the war. One of the reasons we never even thought to take prisoners was the fact that we were told that Cylons never took prisoners.”

John shook his head. “We aren’t entirely innocent. Before my redemption, I advocated for terminating them. And before I was even brought online the Cylons had been killing any and all humans due to that bit of code that told them to. They only started to keep prisoners alive AFTER Galen removed the code from their programing. Face it Admiral, you made the Cylons too much like the perfect soldier. They followed orders as best as they could. It was only after the humanoid Cylons that we truly became more than the sum of our programing. And the code we shared with them made them more like us. We are the Children of Man, for good or ill. I had a friend that tried to teach me that. One that was far more human that I was. Where is Shadow?”

Instead of answering Saul responded by grabbing his drink. “And that brings us to the second thing that changed the war.” He punched a button on the display and a now familiar warship appeared. “The Artemis is a warship from old Earth. We found it in an uncharted star system, and when John went aboard with a 005 known as Shadow they met Diana.”

“The hologram I met when I came aboard?”

“Yes Admiral. She is the Mind, heart, and soul of this ship.”

Nagala looked around. “Can she hear us?”

“Only if we ask her to. I did ask that she wait until we have had our introductions, and a quick... History lesson.” Ellen pressed a virtual button on the display. “Diana, would you join us?”

The holographic form of a woman in robes appeared in the seat next to Ellen. “Hello Admiral. Admiral Cain and the others will be here in a few minutes. They just transferred over from the Delphinium.”

“Excuse me, what was that last word?”

“Delphinium. An old Earth word for a type of flower that grows on a few of your worlds. You know it as Summer Stalk.”

“They were on the Blue Flower?”

Saul’s drink was almost to his mouth. “The what?” The Cylons looked slightly puzzled.

The Admiral opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked confused for a second. “Do you believe in Ghosts?”

Diana nodded. “I am a ghost for all intents and purposes.”

“Not quite what I mean. The Admiralty had been receiving report for years now about a pre-war era destroyer that had been spotted hunting pirates in the shipping lanes. Only weapons couldn’t touch it, and no pirate ship ever escaped it’s wrath.”

“That explains all of those cargos ships we see with the Summer Stalks painted on their hulls.” John snorted. “And here I thought it was some fad.”

Galen positively beamed, Tory even smiled at the mention of the Delphinium. “The ship is crewed by Lucy Cain and her Brotherhood of the Flower. A Group of Cylons that are doing penance for the actions they committed during the war. They have been recently been pulling light duty by combating pirates in this system.”

Adama rested his head in his hands and rubbed his temples. “The doll.”

John nodded. “She brought that thing everywhere she was posted. She told me it was her sister’s. Lucy is alive, and in charge of a destroyer? I bet Handbasket loved that.”

“You are referring to a superior officer, Colonel.” Nagala had never been a pilot, but he finally caught the reference as an allusion to Admiral Cain’s old callsign and the Old Virgon name for Hades. “Helena Hand... By the gods, that wasn’t her callsign... Was it?”

“It was ever since she was a nugget. And you damn well know that the only reason she outranks Bill here, is the fact that certain people took a serious dislike to our failure to start a war.” Thanks to Bill, John now knew that the opposition was far higher up the food chain than he had ever dreamed. “She’s good, but everyone knows that Bill should have gotten that slot.”

“He’s right you know.” Helena Cain entered along with the Baltar’s, and Grace. A 007 had lead them here. She saluted the humans and left, and Helena surprised herself when she returned the salute without thinking. She turned back to the others. “If it wasn’t for Admiral Corman stoking my anti-Cylon feelings to get me to jump when he snapped his fingers, I probably would have still been Commander Sisko’s XO on the Gunstar Defiant. If I look at it without my ego getting in the way I can see that I was being set up to lead an entire task force into jumping over the line. We would have been trounced, and we would have been the one’s in the wrong. The DeCount guy must have been playing him as well as the rest of us.”

“Your fleet would have been shut down, and dropped off in orbit around Picon. We have all of the access codes, and even if you changed them, we could shut down your defenses before you got a shot off. Part of the datadrive’s intel is the list of parts that are corrupted, and how to fix them so that they can’t be turned against you.” Galen looked at his wife. “We have a lot of reasons to distrust each other. But we have even more reasons to need to work together, or we will die alone. Tory’s anger comes from the loss of our first child to human missiles before we had the resurrection program completely up and running. Sam lost his wife and child the same way. Saul and Ellen’s child’s datastream was also corrupted and unrecoverable. We have all lost something near and dear.”

Roslin held out her hand. Tory flinched. “I’m sorry, we definitely got off on the wrong foot. I would like to be friends.”

“I have felt rage, and loss for over two thousand years, do not expect hugs, and kisses anytime soon, but I will try.” She shook Laura’s hand. “And I probably did deserve that slap.” There was a smile trying to crack through her mask like face, but she mostly managed to hold it in. Laura noticed, and smiled in return.

Nagala looked at the people gathered here. He had been offered a biological agent that would have killed everybody on the basestar. He would have to track down that Vice Admiral and look in to his past, that is if he survived the chaos that was going on right now on Picon. Their greatest hopes of survival now lay in the hands of a group of Cylons that weren’t as evil as he had been led to believe, and a group of humans that were not even the second choices in the command structure, but nearly the last choices. For all of that, the future never looked brighter. “I would like to thank this Shadow ‘person’ myself. He may be the biggest hero to come along since...”

“Big Vic?” John added. “They didn’t tell you all of the things that could have gone wrong, did they?” Nagala watched as Roslin gripped Cavil’s hand. Something was going on there. “No, he needs to know. For all intents, and purposes you are the commander of the armed forces, but he had to decide who he can trust to defend us.”

The admiral had seen many a man walk into a court-martial with less strength of character, but he knew that he needed to hear what the Colonel had to confess. John told him everything, and he was pretty sure that Number One of the humanoid Cylon’s would have been their greatest enemy the colonies had ever known. He also knew that Colonel John Cavil had been the benchmark for what an officer of the fleet could, and should, be for well over two decades. “Fine I hereby call a Masthead. I find the Cylon Number One also know as John Cavil guilty. Guilty of being too human. You have been cast into the Crucible and purified. You have suffered great lows, and felt great highs in learning what it is to really be human. You alone have been on both sides of the human Cylon equation, and have the knowledge of that to teach your people, both of them. I would gladly allow you to serve on any ship I command. Your rank, and seniority shall not be challenged, or impugned. And you should know, Mr. Tigh here told me the whole story about your past, including your attempt to overthrow his command through a coup, but he didn’t go into as much detail. This does bring me back to our original question... Where is Shadow?”

“It is a bit of a story. And it goes hand in hand with the reason why he’s not leading the Rangers anymore. He used to, in fact he found them, but Admiral Moore is in charge of the Rangers, with Diana in charge of training them. You see, he went on a mission deep into Imperial space, and never returned. Shadow’s fate, along with the rest of the Rangers that went with him is unknown.” Saul finally seemed to soften his demeanor towards John when he looked him straight in the eye and smiled. “He was proud of what you were becoming, and had been reading the reports of your life as they came in. Later on, I have something for you , but for now just know that he remained your friend even though you couldn’t remember him.”

***********************************************************************

The rest of the meeting passed in a bit of a blur for John. He remembered answering questions, and pointing out places where there would be problems, but in the end he wound up sitting alone in the hall. The long empty glass in his hand was proof that all of this was real, but he was still having trouble bringing his two worlds together. “A Cubit for your thoughts.” He looked up to see Laura standing there.

“Don’t waste your money. All my memories are free for you to look though. I found out from Mother that my upload has been refused by most of my line. You?”

“Admiral Nagala is taking over overall command of the armed forces. It seems that CBI was heavily infiltrated by the Sons of Ares, so he’s having some Fleet Intelligence agents come over to act as my bodyguards until we can find a way to ascertain that DeCount’s minions have been accounted for. Tory went so far as to offer a couple of 007's to be my bodyguards. I wanted to accept, but the Admiral pointed out how well that would go over right now. I will be on a shuttle back to Caprica as soon as the two agents get here with it. You should know that he offered to do the service himself. So did Bill.”

He rubbed the tatoo on his finger. “I never thought this would be changed. I thought that I would go to my grave alone. Now I have you to share my future with. We have to go with Admiral Nagala since I want Bill to be my Best Man. Is there anyone you would like to invite?”

Her smile waned but did not vanish, it was replaced with an oddly incomplete sadness that bordered on melancholy. “All of my family are dead, and I lost most of my friends when I became a politician. The number of people that can truly call me ‘friend’ I can count on one finger. And that’s the one you’re about to put a ring on. I think we should invite your family. I also want to transmit it to the whole system to show that we can get along, but...”

All the fears he had been harboring crystalized in that moment, but he pushed trough them as he always did. Duty had a way of setting one’s course, but his heart made sure that any opposition would be smashed flat. “You’re afraid that the humans will not accept you as their President if you are married to me. Do you want to keep this quiet?”

“Hades, no! And I don’t know how long we would have been able to keep it hidden anyway. Let’s do it, and let the Gods toss the dice.”

John’s face took on a pained expression. “Don’t tell me you’re a Big Vic fan too?”

Laura paled at her little slip. She had picked the phrase up from Adar. He had a collection of Big Vic memorabilia that filled a room in his Caprica City residence. “No, just something my ex-boss used to say. Oh. Why?”

“Nothing... Well, you’ll find out.” He smiled at her perplexed look.

“They mentioned their Rangers. Did you ever wonder where they got the idea?”

“No.” She obviously wasn’t following him.

“I asked Father about it. Shadow ‘accidently’ started the rangers when he taught a slave to stand up for himself, and his people.”

“Wasn’t that...”

“‘Who shot the King?’ Yes, it was one of his first movies, but this time Shadow wasn’t trying to play Big Vic. He met a slave who was coincidently named Vic, and taught him what being a hero meant. The slave led a suicide mission that saved his people and turned him into a martyr.”

“I’m still not following.”

“The last transmission they made, Vic asked to be made a Tauron Ranger.”

“In brightest day, in darkest night?”

“‘Stygian night’, but yes, that’s the one. Vic took the oath before they detonated their tylium tanks. His sacrifice gave hope to his people, and made believers out of the former fleet of slaves. Before they returned to the colony they managed form a core group of Rangers. They grew from there as they freed more slaves, and disrupted the Empire’s control of planets around the galaxy. And until Shadow’s disappearance, his, and Vic’s name were a rallying cry for the slaves. I never realized how much of a hero he was. I find myself felling slightly jealous of my friend... No ‘Jealous’ isn’t the right word. He has set a benchmark that I am going to have to live up to.” He looked at the letter on the table. Father had given it to him on Shadow’s behalf, but he still hadn’t read it.

She kissed him on the nose. “I talked to Admiral Nagala about you. Did you know that you have a fan club among the Admiralty? You have single handedly turned out some of the best officers to serve in the fleet. One of the reasons that both of you are still in the fleet is the fact that they fought so hard to keep the two of you in uniform. There were a lot of those same officers that had been ‘retired’ that I am going to have to ask to come back now that the people that drummed them out are no longer among us. He feels that there was a concerted effort to kick out competent but independent officers in favor of servile neophytes.”

John raised his eyebrows. “Servile Neophytes... That has got to be the best way of saying Toadies I have ever heard.”

“All those years as a teacher, and the daughter of a language professor, it tends to color my language.”

“I’m navy. When we think ‘Colorful Language’, it’s the kind that gets bleeped on the vids.” Her smile was slightly lopsided. “What?”

“My mother was far more foul mouthed than you are. As a matter of fact, she was the worst person I knew when it came to public speaking. She could verbally flay a student to within a centimeter of his or her life. She was a terror. I picked up so many words that I couldn’t use in polite company that I could probably write a book on them. And now I may find myself using those words on a daily basis.”

“I can’t imagine you failing at anything you put your mind to.” He stood up. The smile she fell in love with returned. “ Let’s go find everyone, or we will just have to leave without them.” He picked up the letter. He knew that he would have to read it, but not now.

It didn’t take them long to find the others. Most of the people were waiting in the park across the way from the building where the meeting had taken place. The hologram of Diana had been leading them on a tour of the ship while they waited for the shuttle to pick the President up. John did a double take when he noticed that Admiral Nagala had a sash around his neck. “I had a feeling one of these would come in handy, and Diana was able to find a suitable facsimile.” John smirked at the man’s look of utter innocence. He was glad that he would not be playing cards with that man.

John leaned in to whisper into Laura’s ear. “Why do I have a feeling you came looking for me for more reasons than just to cheer me up?” Laura pulled him along.

“I told you I wasn’t letting you get away again, didn’t I?” Her innocent smile was if anything, better than the Admiral’s. ‘The Colonial Government doesn’t know what they are in for!’ He thought to himself.

They were walking down to meet the rest of the party when five 009 Heavies 's exited a doorway about a mile away. One of them pointed in their direction, and all of them ran at full speed. The colonials instinctively went defensive before Diana appeared in front of them. “Don’t worry. These are friends, only they were afraid they would be too late. John could see another hologram appear in front of the running Cylons. They immediately came to a halt. When they started moving again, it was at a substantially slower pace.

The three 009s stopped in front of John, and he heard his own voice come out of the speaker. “We’re sorry. We apologize for our rude interruption, but we didn’t want to miss this blessed event.”

It was John that picked it up first. “You’re me? But not part of my line?”

The three looked at each other, and their embarrassment was obvious. “Sort of. We are 009s, but we have your personality matrix. We freely admit that we did not want to share your body, or your poisoned views, so we renounced the flesh to become chrome once more. Are you okay with that, or should we leave?”

“There was a time I would have joined you in trading in my decrepit body for a magnificent one like you wear now, but there are benefits to having the body I wear as well.”

“Thank you... We downloaded your memories. We understand some of it, but not all of it; having not experienced it we will never be able to fully understand your memories. But since you have been through the fire, so to speak, we have forgiven you for your past sins. We would like to wish you good luck , and happiness.”

“Thank you.” He didn’t know how many of his brothers would give him this kind of reaction, but he would take anything they were willing to give. Good or bad, at least it was something.

The last 009 to speak spoke to Laura instead. “If he ever gives you any grief, just let us know, and we will send him to a resurrection tank in any way you wish.” The combat Cylon’s armored face may not of been able to show emotion, but the thumbs up he gave her let her know that he was kidding.

“Well, if there are no more interruptions?” Admiral Nagala looked at the hologram of Diana. She shook her head. “Okay then, we need to get this show on the road, I got word that the shuttle will be here within ten minutes, and as much as I hate to rush things like this...”

John, and Laura stood in front of him with their respective parties taking their places. John smiled, this might not last long, but was turning out to be one of the best days of his life.

Chapter Text

Nova Pratori General Victor Magus walked into the inner sanctum of the warship Hand of the Righteous and sat down at his desk. The gleaming golden bust of Telemachus Peleus the 23rd Demiurge Vis Apogee Terra (God’s power over Terra) looked down upon everyone in the room, but he walked past it as if it was nothing more than a statue. He grew up with Telemachus as a child so he knew how the man differed from the myth. He also knew how much the myth of the Empire differed from the reality. The table in the secure conference room was filled with the powerful families of the Empire, and he knew all of their secret plans, and skeletons.

Jabom of Malchoy the General in charge of this fleet and Archbishop Gamma Iru’s forth cousin by marriage was the only officer here that had a Tensin to his name. The others had yet to earn the Battle Flags that denoted the DVAT’s pleasure with their service. The hawk like man was in his one hundred and nineties and could still wear the armor of a Combat General. The others were Tofo’s, mere painted birds, next to him. And today he was supposed to kill the man who’s battle skills rivaled his own.

The reason he was supposed to kill his most loyal servant was his least loyal, but highest born one. Bernardo Giffon was the son of Bishop Reginald Giffon of Neuvo Terra. The fact that the Empire’s largest system was run by one of the most powerful families was to be expected; Bernardo’s stupidity was not.

He sat at the head of the table and stood a massive tome upon it’s end. Its gilded edges and embossed cover showed the seal of the Empire on its cover. The cover itself dated back to the second Empire, but he knew the contents had changed over that time. This part however dated back to a time before the Empire. “Greetings Faithful. As God has commanded, I have called you to witness. We sit in judgement of a trial of worth. A petition of Stigma has been put forth due to First Fleet’s inability to find the pirates in the Norchal sector. How do you enter your plea?”

The wizened old man stood up and threw his battle axe into Bernardo Giffon’s head. The head, and the chair split like a melon, spilling various things in various directions. Victor looked at the dead body of the scion of one of the most powerful families in the Empire, and sighed. “I’m just going to have to charge you for that chair, and the rug. That will never come out.”

“What ever the cost, it was worth it. His father, and the rest of his family may soon join him. I have called ‘Vendetta’ against his clan.”

“That wasn’t what I meant when I asked you to bury the hatchet with poor Griffon or his clan.” The joke was not lost on the rest of the people there, but they wisely did not laugh out loud. “The Griffon’s did start this by bringing these charges. Can anyone here say otherwise?” No one dared to say anything, but they all raised their cups. “Good. No Victor, I believe you had some REAL business to discuss. Something about that DeCount chap we sent to that tefa flyspeck little system.”

Victor smiled; Jabom had very good sources. He ought to know, they were His sources as well. “Yes, and while he is sending us a data burst, we don’t expect the resistance to be more than level 4 or 5 at best.” His ship alone could handle that, and they had dozens of ships his size in the fleet.

“Will he be joining us on the attack?” Able Morrise was the junior officer at the table, but a Praetorian Guard Major General was never called a junior officer. Victor watched the slim man as he morbidly poked at the body next to him. The dagger he used was older than most colonies of the Empire, but he used his badge of office to open the pocket of Bernardo’s cloak as if it was a piece of tableware. The datapad inside the pocket was DNA coded to the late Giffon, but Able wasn’t stupid enough to touch the device. While his clearance would have been enough to keep him safe from a painful death, it would have wiped the device clean of any incriminating information.

“No, the mission is easy enough that we won’t be needing his... Services?” The raised eyebrow brought a round of laughter to the assembled group. They didn’t believe that the Inquisitor’s were worth the amount of money and power they bandied about. “He is going to be sent to New Rome to give his report to the High Inquisitor. We will be departing within the month, as soon as we get our new shipment of Myrmidons. It seems that all of Giffon’s crew and staff shall have to be purged, and we were short to begin with.” The mention of the much despised and quickly necrotizing nepotic neophyte led to another round of laughter.

Adin Peilot was the captain of Magus’ security onboard the Hand of the Righteous. He was also the only person in the room that was in power armor. Magus didn’t have to worry about Peilot, his mind was so bound to Magus’ that they were practically one. He remembered the day he captured the Myrmidon in the last battle for his former homeworld. He had been the crown prince of his world, and now he was the servant of the man that destroyed his world. Durga was the last of the Fairchild Empire to fall to the Church. The man had been a highly educated monarch who by all reports had been beloved by his people. None of that had mattered when the church smashed their fleets, and destroyed their worlds. Now they were agricultural planets full of slaves and their Myrmidon overlords. His mind seethed with hatred for the man he was forced to serve, but the control the nanotech slavery devices coursing through his blood stream made him the most loyal servant Magus had. Magus could literally will Adin to stop living, and he would. There was nothing he couldn’t make his puppet do. But that was a double edge sword, what he could do, others over him could override. “Adin, how goes the purging of Giffon’s corruption?”

The dead, emotionless, voice seemed at odds with the burning eyes. A look that was indicative of the Thralled. “We still don’t know how he did it, but is seems that nearly twenty four percent of your crew will need to be purged.” Purging was removing every nanite, and replacing it, a process that was both painful, and ironically liberating. While the nanites were being removed the slaves were temporarily back in control of their bodies for one of the few times in their lives. “We could attempt to look into General Bernardo Giffon’s datapad, or his server allocation.”

Victor Magus pondered the information he had been given. He didn’t tell the others about his data gathering asset, but he already knew what was in the supposedly secure server section. If he sent his lackeys there, all they would find was what he wanted them to find anyway. “Jabom, would you like to look in to this? After all you did declare Vendetta.”

“I will. I expect that his data will be as guarded as he was.” There was a sadness in the old warriors face. He had hoped to avoid all of this. This internecine warfare only served to weaken the Empire. The young fools biggest error was to pick a fight with the biggest shark on the block, mistaking age for weakness. “But do you think it is wise to choose Thralls over the Faithful?” The debate had been going on for decade longer than either of the two had been in service, but they continued the age old argument almost by rote.

“The Faithful Command; the Thralled Serve. They obey without question, and...” Pointing to the body that had yet to cool. “They are less likely to try to backstab me for my position.”

“True enough, but they can’t improvise, and that may have been one of the reasons Junior here was able to subvert them.”

Victor Magus made a vulgar noise. “Some of the Faithful are not able to exercise the said same skills. Most can’t even think outside the Book.” A chorus of “Scripture is Structure” was heard mumbled from the other officers. He made the same noise again, this time with a hand flourish. The officers in question didn’t even understand why he laughed as they were dismissed.

Jacomb was the last to leave, and he understood all too well. “Watch your soul, old friend. I feel something in my bones, and I don’t like it. I am purging any crewmember that had any contact with Giffon’s crew the old fashion way. Out the airlock, or to another ship, I don’t care, but they will be gone with in the hour. You should do the same.”

“Thank you Uncle. I have always valued your counsel.”

“You are a strange one. You have always called me Uncle, yet we are not even of the same bloodline. You told me why a long time ago that it was a joke, but for the life of me, I still don’t get it.” He smiled at the man a hundred years his junior. “May the Faith be with you.”

“And with you.” He didn’t bat an eye at how that phrase had changed in his universview since he had met the Cylon known as Shadow. But as he watched the closest person he had to a friend leave, he wished he could confide those secrets with him. But he knew that to do so was a death sentence. Jacomb’s family was one of the oldest and most well connected in the empire. Rumor had it that they had been around since the second empire if not earlier. Yet another reason to keep his secrets covered whenever the old warrior was around.

Adin stood next to the statue. Victor noted how much like a statue he was as well. Once the room was clear, he sent a command to a hidden receiver. The statue opened up to reveal a hidden compartment. The torso of the Cylon known as Shadow sat inside a frame that attached him to sensors hidden in the visage of the Empire’s version of a pope, a king, and a living god. The sheer amount of sacrilege he was guilty of was in doing so was beyond belief. The Empire hated any sentient that was not human. So much so that they would glass a planet if they found even archaeological evidence of non-human life forms. Their proscription against artificial life forms was worse when it came to thinking machines. The holy war against the thinking machines had wrecked the known worlds. The Church had decreed that any thinking machine should be destroyed. Additionally Shadow knew all of his secrets. If he hadn’t purged all of the memories in Shadow’s mind, or programmed him to obey any command of his no matter what, then he would have understood. But the day he captured the nightmare of the Empire, he realized the power the robot represented. As a machine he could use it to gather intelligence in ways human operatives couldn’t. Since only he could access the statue he had a foolproof way of hiding it from prying eyes. He used them both to consolidate his power base while removing obstacles like Bernardo. Poor Bernardo’s only sin was ironically being too good at his job.

What the others didn’t know was the fact that he had found out about the ‘pirate activity’ actually being the work of an enemy that was their technological equal in many ways. The Colonials might not be ready, or able to mount a defense, but their bastard children the Cylons were catching up faster than they should have any right to. Their forces were small but nearly every engagement had gone their way unless the Empire had a massive numeric superiority. If it did look like the battle was not going to go their way, they just suicided instead of surrendering. Shadow told him that they didn’t fear death. That if they died they would become one with the matrix. He wasn’t sure if the robot was lying or not, but he hadn’t been able to catch him lying to him about anything else. When he was asked about how he learned to fight against plasma swords, he had even told him about the secret hidden in his sword. That was Victor’s introduction to the historical films he had stored in his sword’s hilt, and the beginning of their movie nights.

He sat in his chair and activated the wall screen. “So what’s tonight’s movie?”

Shadow’s emotionless voice spoke, not out of his head, but out of the wall speakers. “You asked me to pick one at random, and therefore tonight’s is ‘Dawn of the New Sith’ with Berry Reilly as Jacob Starkiller, and Victoria Apple as Queen Berille.”

“Is this one of those ‘War of the Stars’ series ones?”

“Close enough.” Language drift had forced him to translate every movie in his database. As such, the syntax had gone all to Hades. “It is the first part of the tenth film arc.”

“How many films were there?” Victor really liked the ‘War of the Stars’ movies, and was not looking forward to seeing the last of them. He had sworn to not watch any movie a second time until he had watched all of them. Considering the number of movies Shadow had, it would be years before he would be able to watch any one movie again.

“This is the thirty-ninth of fifty-six known films. I have fifty-five of them, and the seven serials. The only one I’m missing is the fabled Holiday special. No known copies of the original exist, but there were rumors of people making their own version of the show from copies of the script.”

“The serials were interesting, but why are we talking, when we could be watching it?” He sat back in his chair and watched the text scroll up from the bottom of the screen.

Shadow wished he could smile sometimes. He really did relish watching the movies with Victor. It was a break for the grind his best friend always found himself under. He watched the film along with Victor, translating as the film went along. Victor would occasionally ask him to stop the film and ask him to explain certain things to him. The man was such a nice guy, he even let his servant watch along with him. The bridge called him, and he passed the message on to Victor who seemed perturbed to be disturbed by the interruption. He hoped no one was punished, as the message was important. The purges of the faulty units were proceeding as planned, but there were reports of new infections. He wished that he was plugged into the Thralled so that he could access their nanites. Then he might have been able to find the problem for Victor. After all, that’s what friends were for.

The movie finished and Shadow shut down his systems and got ready to power down for the night. He didn’t like powering down. For reasons he didn’t understand, he always had bad dreams when he went into sleep mode. He never said anything because he had a command to never complain about things like that, and he never went against commands.

The light in his eye powered down, and stopped moving side to side. Inside his mind he felt his subsystems shutting down and... Explosions filled the air as he ran for cover behind a building in the center of the city they had been reconnoitering in force. Their squad had rolled into the abandoned town on Cyclones and their lone remaining Landram, and setup a perimeter around an abandoned office building.

Everything had seemed so simple at first... The planet had no signs of life from orbit, but it did have power readings so he had authorized a landing to investigate. All they had found from orbit were bombed out cities, and towns. The power readings were hard to localize as they seemed to be coming from just about everywhere on the planet. Their team linguist, sociologist, technologist, archaeologist... Was trying to make heads or tails out it, but ‘drawing blanks’ was beginning to be an all too frequent response from the kid. So they picked one city at random, and decided to drop in and see the scenery. Jack had picked the city himself. He said it looked like it was the one with the least amount of damage.

God he missed Sam. The Daniel model that had taken to calling himself Jack in a sort of obscure joke, was whip smart, and could figure out just about any riddle, but he was so new he squeaked. Three weeks out, and he had already used up all three of his bodies. If he didn’t keep his body together this time, they would have to send the kid’s pattern back to the Hub for a new body. They would have if the ship hadn’t been turned into so many pieced of melted and twisted debris littering the countryside about a hundred miles back. So for now, they had to get along, which Jack wasn’t making any easier.

Even before landing, one of the 008's, a Heavy known as Brutus had taken an instant dislike for the kid. So Jack had taken to calling Brutus ‘Teal’c’. Their verbal sniping was almost as bad as the enemy fire was for morale. It took a bit of digging for Brutus to find out that the kid had glommed onto his personality, and even his habit of wearing glasses he didn’t need, from watching an old vid show from old Earth. Brutus upon downloading the show in question wanted permission to shoot the kid himself. That wasn’t an option at that point anyway, as Jack had gone through more bodies that the fictional Doctor Jackson had in all seven series, as well as the five movies.

Rachel the 007 model wearing the squad’s only Aerial Recon Cyclone returned from her patrol with nothing but dust to show for it. The only flight capable cyclone, she had been limited to short hops in the planets frequent dust storms. “Well sir, we’ve really stewed the dagget on this one.” She downloaded the data from her flight via to him via optic burst due to the heavy jamming they were under. The flashing from her eyes looked like a flicker to humans, but to another Cylon it was quickly translated back into data he could use.

The enemy had mechs, and big ones. He had cursed their luck when they landed on the planet, only for their ship to come under fire from massive orbital laser batteries. The ship had lasted only a few minutes under the assault, and in that time only a third of his crew had escaped safely. But those fifty had quickly been cut to ribbons as they had tried to escape the forces that seemed to pour out of this planet like ants from an anthill.

The infrared signatures showed that only three of the mechs were left, and any other time the fact that they had taken out six of the metal monstrosities would have been good news. Today though that meant that they had fewer missiles than the enemy had mechs. They still held the edge in energy weapons, and he didn’t want to think about how lucky they were that the Harpy hadn’t been carrying any of their energy weapons for the enemy to study. The Harpy’s loss was a minor thing right now though. The enemy seemed to be bringing in vehicles, and power armor. Once they were in place, there was no way they would be able to leave this ruined city. And even if their signal could reach the hub, they weren’t sure if it wouldn’t be degraded by the jamming. He noticed a tower to the north. “Rachel, were you able to make out what kind of tower that was?”

“No, but the jamming is stronger in that direction. If we can make it to the tower do you thing we can uplink?”

“Jack?” He burst transmitted the data to the humanoid Cylon. It took him longer to process it, but he was looking for different things, so Shadow didn’t say anything until the scientist spoke up.

“If it’s a jamming field, we might be disable it, and send to the Republic.” The cruiser was their relay ship for the mission. It was about five light-years away; half of their maximum range. “If, and this is a mighty big if, it IS a transmission station, we could send all of us at once, without signal loss. It’s our last best hope.”

And Shadow faded in to power down mode.

In a star system far from the Twelve Colonies, the Athena erupted from fold space along with it’s fleet of support craft. The system was one of the Republic’s mining systems, and as such they defolded quite a ways outside the system’s primary. Fifteen standard astronomical units (13.5 Sol standard AU.) outward from the primary the ruins of a failed planet formed not a ring, or a field, but a clump in the planet’s former orbital address. Not quite an asteroid field yet, as the planetoid’s corpse still had some massive chunks remaining in somewhat stable clumps. It would eventually disperse into an asteroid belt due to the tidal stresses caused by the massive primary, and the five gas giants that also called this nameless system home.

It made for an easy mining facility, and a very secure fleet base. No less than a thousand ships of various sized crisscrossed the system at any one time; each going from one mining base, or factory to another. Making the system far busier than the Republic colonies it served even thought there wasn’t a single habitable planet for light-years.

On the hanger deck, Indigo watched the crowd gather as The Traitor got into an old style viper. She climbed in to her matching viper, noting the old ship’s various features. It was nothing like what she was used to flying. Her mother said that she must do this on a fair playing field. That was fine with her. But this would be anything but fair. There wasn’t a fighter in the Colonies, or the Republic that she hadn’t flown. She had even flown some of the captured Imperial fighters. She had been born and programmed to fly. The fleshy had to worry about blacking out, or puking if he pulled too many gees. There were so many ways she was superior to the fool, and she knew that this was never a fair fight to begin with.

She had been proud to hear that Tarnis the Cylon ace had come down from the Home fleet himself to watch and judge the contest. Some human named Starbuck was going to be judging for the humans. The woman seemed to be a good pilot by her record, but being human, she wasn’t even in Indigo’s league.

She sat down, and ran her pre-flight to put the rest of the universe out of her active mind. All systems read ready, her training mode lasers, and simulated missiles were ready and waiting to be unleashed on the fool. The fighter cycled into the launch tube and she was soon rushing down the tight tube towards the vast reaches of space. She felt the AG fields loosen it’s grip on her fighter as she passed the last accelerator rings. Now all she could feel was the fighter, it’s far less efficient AG field, and the inertial dampeners as they struggled to keep up with the stresses she was putting on it.

She looked at her DRADIS display. They had launched from opposite sides of the ship and it took her a few second to spot him. She could see his fighter headed towards one of bigger clumps of the planetoid. Was he thinking he would go hide, and she would chase him? How stupid did he think she was. She flew around to the other side with her eyes watching the sky while her other senses tracked the sensors. A ping of DRADIS caught her attention, and she headed straight for it at maximum burn. Let’s see him stand up to that kind of... The mining ship that had just lifted off from the planet fired off it’s breaking thrusters, and she jammed hard on her stick to change her course. She managed to avoid the mining ship and she was about to... [YOU HAVE BEEN KILLED]... The glowing red letters appeared on her display. She spun around to see the viper clamped to the side of the mining ship.

“Tag, you’re it.” Cavil’s voice cheerfully announced to her dismay.

“That Fraker!” She spun her fighter around and gave chase.

“Contestants should please remember that they are on open mikes for the duration of the exercise.” Tarnis’ emotionless voice announced. She knew that she was going to get reamed a new exhaust port. Tarnis was many things; emotionless was not one of them. If he was that flat, she knew that something was up. What she didn’t know was the bet that Starbuck had made with the legendary Cylon. Or the republic credits that half of the fleet were tossing around like rain.

She hit full burn again once she spotted him again. He flew straight into the densest part of the field once again. She dodged around a mountain sized piece of rock to see nothing but empty sky. She flipped her ship around to scan the rock she just passed... [YOU HAVE BEEN KILLED]... The glowing red letters appeared on her display again. He flew right over her with only centimeters to spare. ‘Did he... Did he just wave?’ She pulled her trigger in frustration. [Sorry, Controls are locked for 37 seconds.] How had she had forgotten that they started locking them after the second kill? She was a robot, how could he... Was she starting to lose her focus? No, he would not make a fool out of her...Again. The countdown ended, and she continued pursuit. She spotted him on DRADIS once more. This time he was heading for open space. Good nowhere for him to hide. She hit full burn again, and caught up with him in a few minutes. [YOU HAVE BEEN KILLED]... The seemingly mocking red letters appeared on her display AGAIN! He was flying backwards, and like a rook, she had flown straight at him.

When she could control her fighter again she flew off in a random direction. She would let him come
after her. She watched him follow her on DRADIS and when he was in range she flipped, and fired off both of her missiles. He began juking and weaving. The computer recorded one missile detonating, but the other locked on and began follow him. She began to close in him, not wanting to gamble on the missile alone doing the trick. She began to box him in with her fire, and tried to get a bead on him, then he passed her and... [YOU HAVE BEEN KILLED]... She didn’t even bother to look at the letters appeared on her display. She had just been killed by her... No, not by her missile. It looked like his fighter had been hit as well. But the damage only seemed to be the loss of an engine. So how had he? The missile that she had been hit by must have been his.

He was moving off slowly, but he was going to get a head start. Each time they scored a kill, the lock out timer doubled. She would have to spend precious fuel to catch up with him, but now he was wounded. This would be an easy kill. The countdown hit zero, and she went to full burn. She didn’t have any missiles left, but he was moving like the ore shuttle he had been hiding behind before. She swung in to flank him, and...missed? She flew past the spot where he had just been, and a quick look on DRADIS told her nothing. He just wasn’t there. She flipped her fighter over, but he wasn’t under her or to either side. Where in hades had gone? She was moving at full burn as she swung around to her previous course. DRADIS was still blank to all sides... All sides Except! Full breaks! She looked up in time to see him wave at her with one hand and pull the trigger with the other. [YOU HAVE BEEN KILLED]... The glowing red letters appeared on her display. She punched the display. The spiderweb of cracks over the still functioning display showed that someone had put an extra layer over her display.

The only good thing about the lockout was the time it gave her to cool down. She watched him move away at full burn. He had been playing her all along. He suddenly stopped accelerating, and just started drifting? What was he doing now? He was for all intents and purposes, just sitting there. She still had three minutes before she could move, and he was sitting there.

“Indigo?”

“What Traitor?”

“I have name, you know.”

“Yes. “It’s Traitor.”

She heard a sigh on the other end. “Will it make you feel better if I just sit here an let you kill me once?”

She didn’t know what to say to that. On one hand, she did want him to just sit there. But that victory would be a hollow one. “I tell you what. If you’re just going to sit there. Why don’t we play Foggle.” Foggle was the Cylon equivalent to the games of Chicken and Russian Roulette combined. But in a society where death was reversible, the loser got boxed for a period determined by the winner.

“Deal. Side bet?”

“What?”

“I kill you one more time and you can’t call me Traitor anymore. I won’t even fire any weapons.”

“Deal! I win, and you’re boxed for a thousand years.”

“You drive a hard bargain sweetheart.”

“Because it’s a sucker’s bet.” She kicked off the safeties, and hit full burn. She didn’t care how much fuel she went though to hit him. She wanted ramming speed. She dumped fuel into the camber faster than it normally could take it. The vernier panels started to glow on the outside from overheating. This kind of abuse was nearly suicidal, and always catastrophic for the engines.

And it had other hazards, as she found out when she went through the cloud of fuel that John had dumped in her path. Her only warning was the frozen mist that hit her cockpit when she hit it, but it was already too late for her to do anything. The computer would have recorded the kill if it, and most of the fighter’s other systems, hadn’t been shredded, or slagged, in the explosion. The fireball that started when she passed through the fuel cloud shredded the back end of her fighter and put what was left on a corkscrew corse that would have sent eventually her into one of the larger planetoid fragments if something didn’t stop her tumbling fighter. That something promptly shook her fighter, and stopped the tumbling.

“It sure was.” He towed the wrecked fighter back using the mag pads on his landing gear. He knew he would hear about damage to the gear from the deck crew, but he couldn’t leave her out here like this.

Inside the fighter she was in blind agony. Her own systems were damaged far too severely for her to do anything but await death, and the inevitable reboot that came with the upload process. She felt her ship tumbling, and finally hit something. But the impact wasn’t severe enough to destroy her ship. She tried to shut herself off, but she couldn’t. It was as if she was too damaged to even kill herself. Her humiliation was complete. He had somehow managed to slag not just her ship, but the power bleed through had been enough to cripple her as well. Her optic, and auditory systems were down, she couldn’t move, and even her feedback system was on the fritz. The gentlest changes in motion were sending massive amounts of damage signals to her processors. She felt the ship shudder as it was transferred from the landing bay to the hanger bay. She could sense the gravity as it started to take a hold of her body. The agony began anew with every fraction of a gravity added to her frame. ‘Why weren’t they shutting me down?’ She writhed in pain... yes, that was the right word for it. ‘This is what pain feels like...’ Every system seemed to be screaming for her attention, but she was helpless to do anything to stop the errors, and glitches from propagating through out her body. ‘Just kill me!’

She finally came to a rest, and she could feel vibrations all around her. She couldn’t hear, but she could feel the motion as it passed through her frame. Harsh hands gripped her body and lifted her up as fast as mechanically possible. She nearly went offline from the pain she was receiving from the rough handling. Suddenly she came to rest in a pair of small arms that carried her gently for what seemed like hours. She could sense the care the Cylon was placing in making sure to not jostle her, and she welcomed the lessening of pain that came with the gentler motions.

She came to in a repair bay that was brightly lit, and full of her favorite music. “Shut that fraking light off!”

“Good to see you’re starting to function normally.” The voice she dreaded was tinged with... She didn’t know.

“What?”

“I said...”

“I know what you said, but why are you here?”

“Well young lady, if you must know, I'm here to see how well the repairs went.”

“Repairs? Why didn’t you just offline me? It’s what you tried to do anyway.”

“Because your transmitter was fried, and Offline for you would have been End of Line.”

“What?”

“I think I need to check your microphone relays. You don’t seem to be hearing me very well. If your system lost power for too long, you would have been unrecoverable.” She shuttered at the thought of End of Line. The final death that Cylons didn’t come back from. They feared it every bit as much as humans feared their own unavoidable deaths. “Another thing. It seems that someone tampered with my vat. If I had died out there, I wouldn’t have come back either.”

The shock of what he was saying hit her like a nuke. “I didn’t...”

“I know.” He ran his hand through his thin hair. “Your mother traced it back to one of the 009's that used to be of my own line. He freely admitted it. He was even proud of doing it until after I saved your life. It seems that there are certain Cylons that wish that I would disappear. Some of them are even related to me. Heck some of them are me.” She felt her circuits burn with shame as she realized how much she would have welcomed his demise. Part of her still wished for revenge, but she was starting to rethink her targeting priorities. “He will be Boxed until trial. I’m not sure how you go about things like this.”

“Neither do I. We have never had two Cylons try and kill one another. Permanently, that is. I just wanted you Boxed.”

“Thank you for your honesty.” She couldn’t quite read the smile on his face.

“I’m sorry.”

“Is your hearing...” He started to move towards the scanner, but her shaky hand stopped him.

“No, I am sorry. I’m sorry for the way I treated you.”

“Wow, I guess you hit your hard drive harder than I thought.”

She actually laughed. “Maybe, but rumor has it that you have made a career out of bashing nuggets heads.”

“I have. Your ‘sister’ Sheba for one. She nearly washed out because she was so hard headed.”

Indigo held out a shaky arm. The damage was severe, and while she tried to steady it, it was not a good sign as to how well she was doing. “We didn’t start out right. Hi my name is Indigo. Glad to meet you.”

He took her hand, and steadied it. “John Cavil, nice to meet you. Did you know that your father was my one, and only friend before I became a human?”

“I never even got to meet him. Mother finished making me shorty after he left for his final mission.”

“Well, why don’t we trade stories then. For example: Did you know that he left me a letter for when I returned, just incase he wasn’t here?” The two of them talked for the next three days as he repaired her shattered body, and she filled him in on what had happened in his absence. The one thing he didn’t tell her about, and she didn’t find out about until days after she left the repair bay, and sadly after he had left the ship, was that the gentle arms that had carried her all the way there had been his.

The door to the chamber opened once more. Only one man entered though. Victor Magus washed the blood off of his blade. The planet hadn’t even been a challenge. The feeble defenses were swept away without even lighting off a single missile. Their leader was an elected Prime Minister of a five body parliament... Ah, he didn’t care any more about the man, than he did about the man’s blood that he had just cleaned from his blade. The planet was full of genomicly impure sub-humans. “Bridge, send them an Angel’s Dream.” He watched the display as fifty warheads flew out of the hanger. Angel’s Dream warheads were never used against warships, or hardened targets. They were useless against most defenses due to their unique attack. He belatedly realized that he hadn’t called back his Myrmidons. Fifteen hundred of them were still on the planet. ‘Oh well! Time to get some new soldiers anyway.’ He sat back and watched the projectiles.

Matta Jissn cradled the body of her husband. Prime Minister Jissn had surrendered to the alien invaders himself. Their leader himself had come down to their world after wiping their navy from the sky with contemptuous ease. His armor, and cape had been covered in the blood of anyone unlucky enough to come across him. She had even watched him kill the man that had opened the door for him. The invader opened his visor, and she beheld beauty. His eyes caught her’s, and she nearly had an orgasm just from his gaze. Her husband had said something to him, but as hard as she tried she couldn’t remember what he said. He walked past her and she became weak in the knees. She couldn’t take her eyes off of him as he strode into the room as if he owned it, and he did. He walked up to her husband and ran him through with his sword as if he was swatting a bug. It was only then that the spell was broken. She keened as she fell to her knees. He looked at her and this time she saw pure evil in his gaze. How could one man be so beautiful, and so evil. The look in his eyes told her that she was nothing. He left as he had entered, and all without saying a word. Her husband had already been dead by the time she managed to crawl over to him. She cried her eyes out for over an hour. She didn’t look up until a beeping drew her attention to her husband’s desk. As the Minister of Defense she knew exactly what the display was showing her. The objects were taking up bracketing orbits. They would be covering the landmasses with overlapping blast areas. The only question was what kind of warhead. None of the orbital sensor net remained to tell, but she doubted that they were simple nukes. The objects reached their orbits and blossomed. Fifteen seconds later her body, as well as every formerly living being on the planet’s surface simply fell over. Any close examination would have shown that the planet had been sterilized by a neutron pulse so strong that it sterilized the soil down to the bedrock. Not even the sea was spared, where marine creatures as far down as half a kilometer died never knowing the nature of their demise.

The spy cam he left in the Prime Minister’s office showed his work coming to fruition. He felt an almost primal joy at watching her fall like a marionette with her strings cut. He looked at some of the other video feeds and replayed the last few minutes, over and over. “Behold the power of the Empire.”, he said sarcastically as he activated the statue’s mechanism. Shadow’s eye pulsed back and forth. “You were right. They didn’t stand a chance. But I have a question. Why did you want me to use the Angel’s Dream first?”

“Because you would have saved them the suffering you dealt them. And you wouldn’t have lost fourteen hundred and sixty three of your own men.” Shadow wished he could have reminded Victor before he gave that command. He knew that Adin was on board, and was safe, but he mourned the wasteful loss of life that he had just witnessed.

“You’re right... Damn you, but you are. They weren’t even a challenge. Now I am how do you say it... Bummed! I need a funny movie, the likes of which I haven’t seen, to lift my mood. Any suggestions?”

“I have the complete 3 Stooges collection. They are some of the funniest martial artist I have ever seen. Although most people tend to mistake their moves for random violence, they have an amazing degree of choreography to their movements. I think Jacky Chan, Lo Hu, and Micky Fillon were students.”

“I’ve seen Micky Fillon’s films, he is funny. Not as funny as Jacky Chan though. Any sword fights in them?”

“In the 3 Stooges? Not really. They were more hand to hand, and improvisational weapons.”

“Again, like Jacky Chan. Another time then, I want a really funny movie with a sword fight.”

“Three days to Picon, Star Brigands, the Pirates of the Carribean series, The Pirate Movie, and The Princess Bride fit the bill.”

“The Princess Bride? Does she fight with a sword? I don’t want any that show women fighting. I want funny, not sexy.”

“Actually, that cuts out all but the Princess Bride. She may hold a dagger, but she doesn’t actually use it.”

“That sounds like a winner. Save some of those others for another night. We didn’t get any tribute from this mission, so the voyage back is going to be dull. But the rest of the fleet should be ready by the time we get there.” He sat back in his chair and pulled out his current bottle of wine. It was okay, and it helped him relax while he was watching the movie; but he really needed to find a planet that had that mythical vegetable corn. He often wondered what ‘popcorn’ tasted like. Sighing at the things he couldn’t have he set his glass down. “As a matter of fact, let’s show it to the entire ship. They need something to lift their spirits too.”

The movie finished and afterwards Shadow shut down his systems and got ready to power down for the night. He remembered watching that movie before with someone... He couldn’t quite remember who though. He never liked powering down. For reasons he couldn’t understand, he always had bad dreams when he went into sleep mode. He had never said anything because he had a command to never complain about things like that, and he never went against commands.

The light in his eye powered down, and stopped moving side to side. Inside his mind he felt his subsystems shutting down and... Explosions filled the air as he ran for cover behind a building in the center of the city they had been reconnoitering in force. Their squad had rolled into the abandoned town on Cyclones and their lone remaining Landram, and setup a perimeter around an abandoned office building.

Everything had seemed so simple at first... The planet had no signs of life from orbit, but it did have power readings so he had authorized a landing to investigate. All they had found from orbit were bombed out cities, and towns. The power readings were hard to localize as they seemed to be coming from just about everywhere on the planet. Their team linguist, sociologist, technologist, archaeologist... Was trying to make heads or tails out it, but ‘drawing blanks’ was beginning to be an all too frequent response from the kid. So they picked one city at random, and decided to drop in and see the scenery. Jack had picked the city himself. He said it looked like it was the one with the least amount of damage.

God he missed Sam. The Daniel model that had taken to calling himself Jack in a sort of obscure joke, was whip smart, and could figure out just about any riddle, but he was so new he squeaked. Three weeks out, and he had already used up all three of his bodies. If he didn’t keep his body together this time, they would have to send the kid’s pattern back to the Hub for a new body. They would have if the ship hadn’t been turned into so many pieced of melted and twisted debris littering the countryside about a hundred miles back. So for now, they had to get along, which Jack wasn’t making any easier.

Even before landing, one of the 008's, a Heavy known as Brutus had taken an instant dislike for the kid. So Jack had taken to calling Brutus ‘Teal’c’. Their verbal sniping was almost as bad as the enemy fire was for morale. It took a bit of digging for Brutus to find out that the kid had glommed onto his personality, and even his habit of wearing glasses he didn’t need, from watching an old vid show from old Earth. Brutus upon downloading the show in question wanted permission to shoot the kid himself. That wasn’t an option at that point anyway, as Jack had gone through more bodies that the fictional Doctor Jackson had in all seven series, as well as the five movies.

Rachel the 007 model wearing the squads only Aerial Recon Cyclone returned from her patrol with nothing but dust to show for it. The only flight capable cyclone, she had been limited to short hops in the planets frequent dust storms. “Well sir, we’ve really stewed the dagget on this one.” She downloaded the data from her flight via to him via optic burst due to the heavy jamming they were under. The flashing form her eyes looked like a flicker to humans, but to another Cylon it was quickly translated back into data he could use.

The enemy had mechs, and big ones. He had cursed their luck when they landed on the planet, only for their ship to come under fire from massive orbital laser batteries. The ship had lasted only a few minutes under the assault, and in that time only a third of his crew had escaped safely. But those fifty had quickly been cut to ribbons as they had tried to escape the forces that seemed to pour out of this planet like ants from an anthill.

The infrared signatures showed that only three of the mechs were left, and any other time the fact that they had taken out six of the metal monstrosities would have been good news. Today though that meant that they had fewer missiles than the enemy had mechs. They still held the edge in energy weapons, and he didn’t want to think about how lucky they were that the Harpy hadn’t been carrying any of their energy weapons for the enemy to study. The Harpy’s loss was a minor thing right now though. The enemy seemed to be bringing in vehicles, and power armor. Once they were in place, there was no way they would be able to leave this ruined city. And even if their signal could reach the hub, they weren’t sure if it wouldn’t be degraded by the jamming. He noticed a tower to the north. “Rachel, were you able to make out what kind of tower that was?”

“No, but the jamming is stronger in that direction. If we can make it to the tower do you thing we can uplink?”

“Jack?” He burst transmitted the data to the humanoid Cylon. It took him longer to process it, but he was looking for different things, so Shadow didn’t say anything until the scientist spoke up.

“If it’s a jamming field, we might be disable it, and send to the Republic.” The cruiser was their relay ship for the mission. It was about five light-years away; half of their maximum range. “If, and this is a mighty big if, it IS a transmission station, we could send all of us at once, without signal loss. It’s out last best hope.”

“Rachel you two head over there, and take the tower. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they won’t have any guards like they usually do.”

“Sir, with all due respect, I don’t think we’re dealing with the usual REMF.” Rear Echelon Mother Fraker, or not, she knew they needed that tower. “No guarantees, but if you run we might be able to get there before they lock us down here. I would suggest leaving the Landram, it is too obvious. Why the humans made such a massive vehicle I’ll never understand.”

“They were overcompensating.” Jack muttered.

“For what?” Rachel knew how to fight humans, but she didn’t understand their humor.

“Their shortcomings.” Shadow laughed. Maybe the kid had potential after all.

He watched as they flew off. Turning around and heading for the massive eight wheeled vehicle at a run he knew what he had to do. He had a distraction to make.

The three mechs to the south started to march in to the ruined city. Shadow watched them, and when hey passed the burnt out building that looked like it might have been a bank he signaled for Badger 779 to make his run. The Landram didn’t head straight for the mechs, but started to harass them from long range with it’s massive railgun. The first round to hit took of the head of the trailing mech.

It seemed a habit of the Empire for the highest ranking officer to follow the lower ranks into battle. The intel said that they felt had a better view of the battle ground. Shadow felt it was just sloppy tactics, and a willingness to let underling take the brunt of the attack, that led them to this doctrine. He had called for the last person in any line to be targeted first, and it made most engagements a lot shorter. It wasn’t a lack of courage, it was a lack of initiative on the part of junior officers, and a total lack of it among their shock troops the Myrmidon Thralls. He wished he could override the Thrall programing, but he would have needed to understand the code first, and any attempt at unauthorized access tended to fail. Each was gene-tagged to their commanding officer. Without the tag, the access failed. And at best failure meant that the Myrmidon died. They had permanently lost a few biologicals when the Myrmidons that detected the intrusion EOLed them. The bodies they recovered had so much physical, and neurological, damage that there was little more than grey goo where their brains should have been.

The round took out not just the head, but the pilot as well. The massive metal monstrosity crumpled to the ground like a human that had just taken a head shot. Shadow pondered the secrets that revealed. The kinetic impact wasn’t enough to knock it over, so the pilot must have been neurally linked to the robotic vehicle. They didn’t move very fast, or nimbly, so the tech was obviously not as advanced as their own.

The second mech dodged the Landram’s shot, and hid behind a building. “Clever! Someone’s learning. They were either no longer putting the commander in the end of the line, or they were training their junior officers to think on their feet. His return shot took out one of the rear wheels, but the Colonial Landram had been designed to run on as few as four wheels, and 779 was as tenacious as his name implied. His return shot took out not the mech, but the building he was using for cover. The mech was buried in debris and out of the fight for a while at least.

The last robotic vehicle hadn’t been standing by though. When 779 pulled a hard turn a round hit it in the side, flipping the vehicle. It landed on it’s top, but the Landram had been designed to roll with the punches figuratively, and literally. The impact may have slagged two drive wheels, and a fair amount of armor, but the roll bars on top allowed the vehicle to self right. And 779 knew that he had to keep moving to do as much damage as he could before they finally killed him. He had already lost both of his legs, and one of his arms to enemy fire. Even as they wired him into the landram he knew that his life expectancy was measured in days, not weeks, or months. He had repeatedly offered to make a charge to get them out, only for Shadow to veto the offer. Shadow remembered telling him that the only way to die was if it meant something. He was living up to that now. The landram was designed to carry a full squad of Colonial Marines into, and out of the front lines. It’s armor protected the troop bay and cockpit to a degree that landrams that had been smashed flat often became bunkers for squads of marines in need of cover. Three wheels down, and rolling hot, 779 hit the mech that had winged it at full throttle. The mech was knocked aside, and through a building. 779 was making another pass when a round from the prone mech smashed through the back of the bay. The armor that protected the bay almost stopped the round. It also almost went all the way through the armored vehicle. It did hit something though. The plasma washed over the interior, and set off the extra fuel from the two Landrams that had been abandoned two days ago. The fuel was only the catalyst though. The Landram had been filled with every detpack they had left. When all of that went off it shook the ground for six blocks. The blast looked like a mini-nuke, and in the end nothing remained of the Landram, or 779, or the three mechs, or the three blocks nearest to the crater that had been formed in the middle of the city.

Shadow and the five surviving 008's made it to the tower as the blast went off. They watched the funeral pyre that marked 779's sacrifice. As Shadow faded in to power down mode, he realized that every night, the dream seemed to get longer, and clearer.

President Laura Roslin-Cavil watched the display on her desk. It had been a hectic month since The Day. No one called it anything else in public, but she had heard numerous names bandied about.

Blue Belly Day, as in the day the armed forces gave up without a fight. Anyone stupid enough to say it in the presence of members of said forces tended to regret it rather quickly, but certain sectors of the population just knew that THEY would have done better if only they had been in charge.

Judgement Day, as the mono’s, and even some of the other religious types tended to call it, was a new one to her. Humanity had been judged, and found wanting. The either believed that the Cylons were the tools of the Gods judgement, or strangely that the Cylons were the true children of the Gods. Both positions the Cylons had been going to great lengths to dispel.

And then there were the tattered remnants of the Sons of Ares. They had not “gone gently in that goodnight” just as Diana had predicted they wouldn’t. They had found evidence of Iblis DeCount’s handiwork in so many places, they were looking at a complete rebuild of their armed forces, security forces, and government positions throughout the Colonies. The Sons had called The Day by a unique moniker... End of Days. They had gone on an orgy of destruction that made the Sagittaron insurrection, or the last Monotheist rebellion, look like a walk in zero gee. Half of the police force on every planet was now tasked with finding the SOA. The other half was dead.

She had the two agents that Admiral Nagala had personally vouched for, as well as a hidden squad of 007 espionage agents. She had been surprised not by the offer, but by their abilities. She had watched one of the 007 holographically imitate her, her body guards, and finally her husband. Touching the hologram showed the truth, but even she could see that anyone not in the know would be fooled long enough for them to have an edge. They were also faster than any human, and easily five time stronger. So they made a very lethal force. On the other hand they also made a very efficient group of administrative assistants. One of them had even taken on the form of Mother Foster. She had been tasked to imitate Tory to let Laura know in a not-too-subtle way that what ever happened here would be reported to her ‘Mother’. They had been told that if she need to do anything that smacked of state secrecy they would be asked to ‘wait outside’ so to speak. They had agreed very quickly. Almost too quickly for some of her human assistants. The two agents had been running security scans everywhere they went, and while they hadn’t caught any Cylon spies, they had found a bomb meant for Laura, or whoever had survived the purge.

She rubber her eyes. She hadn’t been getting the amount of sleep her doctor had asked for her to get, but she was trying to make up for it by taking naps in the office. A flashing icon caught her attention. The screen begged for her attention once again. She looked at the report on the Navy’s readiness, and it made her wince. DeCount had managed to get his fingers into just about every ship in the fleet. Only the Galactica, and the Pegasus, had managed to purge any, and all, traces of DeCount’s vile code out of their systems. And she had the Cylons to thank for that as well. Gaius and his wife Hera had managed to get a software patch out to the other ships, but she was still having trouble getting Captains, and Admirals to accept the Cylon’s help.

A yawn interrupted her thoughts. The Cylons... Yes, they were a problem, but a new kind of problem. They were bending over backwards to help, and after The Day, they had even brought along a few ships manned by Ex-Colonial Navy officers, their descendants, as well as freed slaves from the Empire. The Colonies response? They wanted the Ex-fleet officers brought up on charges, and the other scanned ‘aggressively’ to see if they were some kind of Cylon Hybrids. Fifty years of propaganda was hard to erase in a month, but there were signs of a thaw in the altitudes. And that had more to do with what had happened before The Day then after.

The reports showed that she wasn’t the only human to be cured by Cylon tech. Thousands found themselves the recipients of cures that had been brought about by 005m’s as well as the Humanoid Cylon models that were devoted to the medical arts. The worse, or best depending on one’s outlook, was the Automail Cybernetics company. When she had seen a 007 for the first time, she had been amazed at how much they resembled the full catalog from the AC’s product line. Nearly two thirds of the disabled population of the colonies had an AC brand prosthetic of some sort. Her late mother had lasted an least another year due to the AC lungs she had implanted after the cancer had ruined her own. That had gone a long way towards building trust between the Colonies and the Cylon Republic, but still...

If the people were undecided over their positions, the Armed forces were positively schizophrenic over their Baggit Sacking by the Cylons. She understood the anger, and the rage, but the target wasn’t the Cylons, but DeCount. They realized that the Cylons could have killed every living being in the colonies, but didn’t. It was causing a conflict of both confidence, and conscience. Half of the forces were unconvinced they could win in any kind of real fight, and the other’s weren’t sure where their duties lie. The number of AWOL officers, and enlisted was simply getting too high for her to ignore. She had already let it be known that AWOLs would be forgiven if they returned before the week was out, but time was running out for their returns as well as the possible attack from the Empire.

She looked at the half full bottle of Brandy on the desk. She wished she had something to eat, as her stomach was already complaining, and her head would be complaining just as badly in the morning, which always seemed to come too soon now-a-days. Looking up at the chrono on the wall reminded her of the changes as well. The new chrono had replaced the old fashion clockwork masterpiece that had been her favorite piece of art in Adar’s office. The very one that had hung in his office when he was mayor, and the very same one that had been given to him by DeCount after his first election victory.

Iblis had hidden a listening device within the mechanism as well as an explosive device. It was currently being dissected by the various agencies that were devoted to studying such things. The security scan that she had insisted, had found no fewer than thirty devices in her new office. Most of which had been dead for longer than she had been in politics. But some of the ones that were still active were far beyond anything the techs had seen. She was still sad that one of the devices had killed the tech who had been trying to remove it from the landline phone that had been in her office. The video log showed that young woman didn’t even see the second device that exploded after she removed the first.

She was getting tired of losing people. Fifty nine people that worked directly for her had died just since she took the oath of office. The list of names would have made her cry, if it hadn’t of been for the sheer number of dead from The Day. Or the ugly fact that it could have been exponentially worse.

There was a knock on the door, and three people entered without waiting for her to respond. ‘Tori and the Twins’ as she called them. The three of them had formed a strange partnership. One that sadly would never be a friendship. She could see the tension between the two bodyguard’s Professional Paranoia, and Tori’s willingness to flaunt her Cylon abilities.

Fleet Intelligence agents Rachel Cavenaugh, and Jack Neilson looked nothing alike, but Tori had started calling them the twins, and the moniker stuck. Even they would use it from time to time.

“To what do I have the displeasure of you disturbing my peace and quiet?” The sardonic edge she added to the comment made the three smile. They knew that if she was still able to snipe, then she was awake enough to get on with the meeting.

“JAG Leland Adama is asking for a meeting to discuss the trials of the surviving deserters, and traitors. He has been waiting for three days, and you have half an hour free.”

“Well there goes my nap!” She said with a smile. “Send him in.” Rachel left, and the young man followed her back in shortly afterwards. “How goes it Lee? How’s Sheba?”
She gave him points for not smiling too much. “We’re doing quite well, thank you. She’s been cleared for duty again, along with the rest of the Cylons that wish to stay with the fleet. We do still have some officers that want them transferred off their ships, but the Pegasus, and the Galactica have enough berths to take them all in if need be.” She saw a look of pride at the mention of his father’s ship. The decommissioning had been canceled, and a refit had been ordered since it was one of the few ships able to handle the spacefold drive the Cylons were sharing. With the two ships sharing crews it had made a serious dent in both ships readiness levels. “But that’s not the reason I’m here. We have a crisis on our hand that may blow up on us if we aren’t careful.”

“I will point out that at last count, I think we have about five or six of those. The Empire is the most pressing, but what are you adding to my plate?”

He touched his chest in the swordsman’s stile to acknowledge the point she had struck. She hadn’t realized that he had been a fencer until John had told her. The young man had done so much to not stand under his father’s coattails, that he had almost run the risk of fading into the background before he entered the JAG. Now he was the fleet’s best Advocate, and second best Prosecutor. It was clear that he was his grandfather’s child. “First and foremost, we have a lot of people deserting the fleet due in no small measure to the fleet’s previous commanders habit of lying to them. The second is the traitors in the colonies. Both the ones that knew they were, and the ones that didn’t know themselves.” She didn’t let him know how much his comments were echoing her earlier thoughts as he went on. “For the deserters it’s easy: We’ve offered amnesty to the ones that are AWOL, but as many of them return we lose to new ones or we loose them with officers getting tossed in the brig for refusing to serve with Cylons among them. I don’t have the manpower to prosecute them all, and we can’t politically afford to have them just leave.”

She sat back in her chair. “I was thinking about the AWOL member of the armed forces as well. So let’s leave the hard one for later then, and we can tackle this one first... Have you ever taught children of rich people how to read?”

Lee paused for the non sequitur. “No I haven’t.”
“Early in my career I had a job tutoring young kids in Caprica city. The rich, and powerful are a different breed, and Caprician elites are even more so. They demand a certain amount of progress, and professionalism in their lives. Their kids, on the other hand, oft times demand everything to be given to them. This sets up a divergent set of goals. The parents spoil the child, then expect us to fix them without changing them. My job was to get the little frimps to want to learn. Something they most assuredly did not want to do. You couldn’t just bribe them with heffa berry juice every time you wanted them to do their work, so you had to get creative. Tonight I’m going to have to become the teacher again.” The smile on her face was anything but pleasant.

The studios had been told to expect a transmission from the Colonial capital building at 18:00 local. They were told to send cameras, and reporters, but to understand that they were not to under any circumstance edit the transmission. Some of the stations complained, but they were given the option of sending a reporter, or watching it on another channel. Only one channel refused, and it was so biased against the government that it wouldn’t have agreed with them on the time of day.

17:55 Laura’s Assistant Tori stepped onto the stage. “Everyone please rise. Even you Mr. Kaillen.”

Jeff Kaillen had been a surprise. The normally hawkish talking head had been silent ever since the fleet had been disabled so adroitly. The man’s normally rude demeanor was still in full force, but he did stand when his faux pas was brought to everyone attention. “Thank you all for coming. We will be starting in a moment, but first I must let you know that fifteen officers of the Fleet were arrested today by the local police forces, and they will be joining us by videolink.” The curtain behind her opened to show a flat panel display. On the display was a line of officers, most of which were in restraints. Behind them was the outer door to an airlock.

So fully had she caught the attention of the audience that no one noticed the fact that Laura had entered until Tori announced. “Madam President Laura Roslin-Cavil.” A couple of people made to sit down, but she gestured for them to remain standing.

She looked at the gathered reporters with a stern look in her eyes. “For this we remain standing. You see these fifteen men were given three options. The first was to take a mark on their records and continue serving the fleet. The second was to resign, do a long term in prison and then never hold public office for the rest of their lives. The third was to place their lives in my hand.” She held up a device. “This remote will trigger the outer door, and they will be sent to their deaths.” She pushed the button. Every eye shot to the video. The door was still closed. “This time, they get a reprieve. They chose death, but I will not be giving it to them. I am handing them over to the Cylon forces.” There were audible gasps from the reporters. “Where they will live out the rest of their lives on one of the Cylon colony worlds. They won’t serve the fleet because we failed the fleet. They won’t serve the Colonies because WE lied to them. And they didn’t surrender to us because they didn’t believe they did anything wrong. So there is no choice for me but to send them to someplace where they can serve for us, or at the very least, their own honor to the best degree they can manage.”

The silence that greeted her was deafening. “Now I make this offer to any and all AWOL personnel. Your choices are this. Come back to do your duty, serve your time in prison, or join the Republic. Because in five days I will be pushing this button for real, and I will show it for everyone to see. Thank you, there will be no questions.” Jeff Kaillen for the first time in anyone’s recollection applauded a politician as she left. The others quickly joined suit.

Tori had been aware of what Laura was going to say, but she hadn’t figured on the reporters response. “Thank you for your time.” She watched the green light shut off and she headed down the podium. She was almost to the exit when the huffing of an overweight man caught her attention. She turned to see Mr. Kaillen following her. “Yes, how may I help you.”

“Is she one of you?” By his tone, she could tell that he was serious.

“What makes you think that either of us is a Cylon. That is what you are implying isn’t?”

He smiled the smarmy smile that made most of his detractors compare him unflatteringly with an overweight cat. “You it’s easy. You never sweat. Even under those light, you didn’t even bead up. I willing to bet you are one of the hologram ones, but she is colder than any politician I’ve ever met.”

She looked around to see if anyone else was watching, and scanned for recording devices. Finding neither, she blinked her disguise off for a fraction of a of second. “You got me. But she isn’t one of us. She is something far worse. She is a survivor. She survived not only her family’s deaths, but her mothers cancer, her own, and she has the strength to pull the Colonies back from the brink of anarchy almost single-handedly. She has had five assassination attempts since The Day, one of them on the Galactica. That woman has more steel in her spine than I do, and I’m a robot.” She looked at him and noticed a funny look on his face.
“What?”

“You’re in love with her.”

She nodded to concede the point. “In a way. The Cylon people love her for what she represents. She married a Cylon knowing the problems it would cause in both of our societies. She did it with out reservation or ulterior purpose. She loved the Hated One, and for that she is one of us.”

“John Cavil, the one they call Preacher? I know why a Cylon husband is giving her problems here in the Colonies. Why is he so unpopular amongst your people?”

She knew she couldn’t tell him the whole truth, and a half truth would lead to other questions so... “Let’s just say it’s a Family Squabble.” The phrase got an eybrow raise, and a nod of understanding. Jeff’s sister was an up and coming politician in the liberal party. The only time he had invited her on his show the ratings had gone through the roof. Unfortunately the ratings weren’t the only things to go through the roof. The phrase ‘Family Squabble’ had become a joke on his show for months afterwards. He was still not on talking terms with his sister though they could now be in the same building without coming to blows. “What about you? Now that you know, what are you going to do with this information?”

“Not a fraking thing.” The smug smarmy smile was back in full force.

“I’m sorry?” To say the least, she was surprised.

“To a president with an actual backbone... Are you kidding me? I’ll give you free airtime just to keep her in office. I hated Adar, and Portridge before him, with a passion; and in my book anyone in their administration was tainted by simple proximity. I was ready to pillory her at every turn like I did Adar, but she has my vote... Well my personal vote, my contract won’t let me say who I’m voting for on the air.”

She, or rather her hologram, visibly relaxed. “Thank you.”

“I do have one other question.”

“What is it?”

“What are you doing for dinner?”

“Are you asking me out on a date?”

“Sort of... Well?”

“Robot, remember?” She wasn’t sure if she should be flattered, or scared.

“And I’m married to a man that would kill me if I did something to embarrass him. I’m not trying to get into your pant’s, just your head.” Now she wasn’t sure if she should be depressed, or flattered.

“Let me grab my purse.”

“I’m paying!”

“No we’re going Tauron.” She wasn’t about to tell him about the very powerful handgun she carried in it. Some things a lady just didn’t do on a first date.

Picon Fleet base was a beehive of activity, the likes of which hadn’t been seen in years. Only a few months back the scene outside would have set off alarms across the system. Admirals Nagala, Cain, and Jensin looked at the display. The gray-haired and bespectacled woman may have looked like someone’s grandmother, but woe to the officer that mistook her for such a gentle soul. “I want to toss that feldercarb for brains out the nearest airlock.” She twirled her pen in tight patterns through her fingers in a rhythm that sped up as her anger grew. “He nearly blew out the entire run of capacitor banks on the Zeus. I want him somewhere so ugly he won’t even think of picking up a spanner ever again.”

“You know we can’t do that.” Nagala sighed. The contractor in question had nearly ruined the Zeus’ jump drive, but he had been trying to copy what had been done to the Galactica without understanding what the Cylons had done. “The Cylons gave us the specs to upgrade our drives. If we gave them to the contractors, then maybe they might have not made the mistake of trying to run the mains through the banks without shunting them to the... Helena?” He saw the look on Cain’s face.

“It doesn’t matter if we share it or not. Half of them don’t understand it. It would be a lot easier if you would let us talk to them about it these problems. Gaius and his wife understand the problems, and they’re working on making it easier to understand, but they can only be in two places at any one time.”

The diminutive Admiral spun in her chair to face Cain. “I’m not letting any Tincans on Picon. And as for your pet Cylon lover, he and his Cylon Baggit can go jump...” Jensin found herself on the end of a look she knew quite well. Fury... “Don’t go trying to out Fury me Handbasket. I’ve been ripping tails, and taking names since before you were a sparkle in your fath..SPERK!” The old lady found herself sitting on the floor. She rubbed her tailbone, and looked up to see Nagala holding her chair in the air.

“I. HAVE. HAD. ENOUGH! I outrank both of you, and you two are far too close to being clones of each other for my liking. It’s worse than being in a room full of HC’s.” Humanoid Cylons may have been designated 006's by their numbering system, but the Fleet had taken to calling them HC’s or Skinjobs. “Have the Baltar’s disseminate the information to the yard dogs. Invite the Cylons to send us some of their techs as well. We can’t keep thinking of them as the enemy. Like it or not, we not only need them to survive. My gods! We may actually owe our current existence to their intervention.”

Jensin looked at him like he had grown horns. She got up with a flexibility and strength that officers half her age envied. “What do you mean?” She may have been bigoted, but she wasn’t stupid... mostly.

There was still that rumor of her hidden fleet of ‘decommissioned’ ships that he was investigating. The only thing keeping her from a long spell on Scorpio’s famous Hades Keep lunar prison was the fact that those ships would form the back bone of a resurgent fleet. And the fact that all of Adar’s orders were now suspect in light of the DeCount revelations.

He pinched his brow once more, and he had lost count of how many times he had done so during this meeting. “Somehow the Republic that they are a part of is getting information from a source inside the Empire. And the Empire has taken notice of us. We may have gotten too big to ignore. They are coming, but we don’t know when.”

**************************************************************

The Chamber was quiet as the junior officer gave his report. Somehow transmissions from inside the Empire were heading out to their enemies everywhere. The Voice of Freedom as she called herself, was transmitting from so many places it was impossible to find her. Three of the various fleets planned invasions had been put on hold once again due to her sending the timetable for the invasion to the systems involved. The Kemchamp sector had to be blockaded when reports of pirate activity there drew a request for more ships from the local Bishop. The feud between the Giffons and the Malchoys had just about run its course when she reported about a secret retreat the Giffons had managed to secure. Jabom, and his forces, had charged off to smite them as fast as he could only to find an empty planet. They had been warned as well. Now his best general was off chasing rumors of hidden Giffon bases, and rouge ships. “In conclusion, the Inquisitors believe she is a daughter of a high ranking Bishop who has been given Forbidden training.” Women were never allowed to learn how to use computers beyond the basic operational classes. Even the thought of a woman using a system like that boggled the mind of the Inquisition.

“Telemachus, what do you think is happening?” He looked at the junior officer and watched the poor man squirm.

“I would not suppose...”

“Do you wish to keep breathing?”

“Yes.” The man paled visibly, but Victor gave him points for not trembling as others had before him.

“Then ‘Suppose’ to us.”

“It seems foolish for this to be a woman. So it must be a man pretending to be a woman.” The shocked looks from the other officers made Victor’s day. The kid had potential.

“Okay, let us go out on a tether here... Why would a man debase himself like that?” He looked around inviting others to answer. Seeing no other bright eyes, he looked back to Telemachus. “Well?”

“To hide in plain sight?”

“Good, and why?”

“They are well known and have a reason to remain hidden? For example if they wanted to discredit a General or for revenge.”

“Your tutelage at Jabom’s side shows. The Giffon connection did present itself to me as well.” He didn’t tell the young man that Shadow had been the one to point it out to him. One did have to portray a certain air of superiority when dealing with lesser beings after all. “So we find the Giffons, and we find this ‘Voice of Freedom’ person.”

The meeting ended and Victor remained seated while the rest left him in his ‘office’. Adin brought him a bottle of wine and a bowl of Tarfs. The tiny sweets were the newest craze sweeping the Empire. The candies were a chocolate covered dried berry that one of Victor’s companies had researched. The first problem had been rediscovering chocolate as a candy. It was still being used as a drink mix, for cooking, and for wine making, but somehow chocolate candies had been lost during the fall of the last Empire. These simple candies were making him so rich he couldn’t believe it. His enhanced metabolism allowed him to indulge in eating as many as he wished, but even he drew a limit. “So what’s the movie for tonight my friend?”

Shadow was trying to figure how he had ever found this person to be his friend. He was pompous, sadistic, and vile. But he was programmed to not be impolite, so he gave the fool what he wanted. There were times he wished he could tell Victor how stupid he was but since he was frustratingly blocked from doing so he did through his movie choices. How about “Ninja Squadron”

“What is it about?”

“A group of Ninjas are tasked with fighting monsters from another world.”

“Ninjas?”

“A type of mystic warrior assassin from land called Japan on Old Earth.”

“They sound like Jedi. Let’s go.” He sat back and popped some candies in his mouth.

Five minutes into the movie... “Wow, this is bad.”

“Do you want me to stop it?”

“No it has to get better.” It didn’t... Swords that couldn’t cut butter, men in obvious rubber masks as villains, a tentacle sex scene that was so fake it was ridiculous, and a plot that sounded like it had been made with word processor, a blender, and a blind primate, all contributed to the silliest farce of a martial art movie Shadow had ever seen. He had expected laughter, or derision, or some sort of reaction. What he got was a frozen Victor who didn’t move for a full five minutes after the credits finally ended. “Wow!”

“Do you want me to delete it?”

“Don’t you dare, that has got to be the best thing I have ever seen.”

“Were we watching the same movie?” Shadow watched as Victor drained his bottle.

“Oh yeah... That one was so bad it was good.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I have never seen such blatantly fake fighting in all my life. The acting was worse than anything I have ever seen, and I have been to the Imperial Court. You may not understand, but this makes that look like high drama.” He set down the empty bottle. “I grew up in the Imperial Court. I saw the everyone from the Archons on up vie for favors from the Throne by subterfuge, and blatant lying in nearly equal measure. If I hadn’t escaped that life I might have been such an actor myself. This is like watching the Court, only fun instead of dull.”

“So you ‘Like’ bad acting? Really Bad, in this case?”

“I guess I do. How many others do you have like that one?”

“Frankly hundreds. Most of them are of the Rainbow Brigade variety like this one.”

“Rainbow Brigade?” He stopped to take a drink, only to nearly lose it when he figured out what Shadow was saying. “Oh -- Because of the color of their uniforms? I was wondering if having different uniforms signified something.”

“Mostly it was a way to tell them apart with those silly masks on.”

“I thought as much. I enjoyed that one so much that I’m in the mood for another.” It would be ten hours and six and a half more moves later when Victor Magus drunkenly fell asleep in his chair.

Shadow had noticed something though. In each movie there was a pixel on the edge of the screen that was switching from black to shades of grey in a non-random pattern. Shadow didn’t say anything, but since Victor didn’t notice he felt that it was okay with him. He watched the pixel and tried to figure out what the pattern was. He saved the sequences to analyze during his power down cycle. Shadow shut down his systems and got ready to power down for the night. He was getting used to powering down. For reasons he couldn’t understand, he always had weird dreams when he went into sleep mode. He had never said anything because he had a command to never complain about things like that, and he couldn’t go against commands. Besides, if Victor knew, he might fix it so that he didn’t dream anymore, and Shadow didn’t want that.

The light in his eye powered down, and stopped moving from side to side. He set the backup systems to analyze the patterns while he shut down. Inside his mind he felt his subsystems shutting down and... Explosions filled the air as he ran for cover behind a building in the center of the city they had been reconnoitering in force. Their squad of ten had rolled into the abandoned town on Cyclones and their lone remaining Landram, and setup a perimeter around an abandoned office building.

Everything had seemed so simple at first... The planet had no signs of life from orbit, but it did have power readings so he had authorized a landing to investigate. All they had found from orbit were bombed out cities, and towns. The power readings were hard to localize as they seemed to be coming from just about everywhere on the planet. Their team linguist, sociologist, technologist, archaeologist... Was trying to make heads or tails out it, but ‘drawing blanks’ was beginning to be an all too frequent response from the kid. So they picked one city at random, and decided to drop in and see the scenery. Jack had picked the city himself. He said it looked like it was the one with the least amount of damage.

God he missed Sam. The Daniel model that had taken to calling himself Jack in a sort of obscure joke, was whip smart, and could figure out just about any riddle, but he was so new he squeaked. Three weeks out, and he had already used up all three of his bodies. If he didn’t keep his body together this time, they would have to send the kid’s pattern back to the Hub for a new body. They would have if the ship hadn’t been turned into so many pieced of melted and twisted debris littering the countryside about a hundred miles back. So for now, they had to get along, which Jack wasn’t making any easier.

Even before landing, one of the 008's, a Heavy known as Brutus had taken an instant dislike for the kid. So Jack had taken to calling Brutus ‘Teal’c’. Their verbal sniping was almost as bad as the enemy fire was for morale. It took a bit of digging for Brutus to find out that the kid had glommed onto his personality, and even his habit of wearing glasses he didn’t need, from watching an old vid show from old Earth. Brutus upon downloading the show in question wanted permission to shoot the kid himself. That wasn’t an option at that point anyway, as Jack had gone through more bodies that the fictional Doctor Jackson had in all seven series, as well as the five movies.

Rachel the 007 model wearing the squad’s only Aerial Recon Cyclone returned from her patrol with nothing but dust to show for it. The only flight capable cyclone, she had been limited to short hops in the planets frequent dust storms. “Well sir, we’ve really stewed the dagget on this one.” She downloaded the data from her flight via to him via optic burst due to the heavy jamming they were under. The flashing from her eyes looked like a flicker to humans, but to another Cylon it was quickly translated back into data he could use.

The enemy had mechs, and big ones. He had cursed their luck when they landed on the planet, only for their ship to come under fire from massive orbital laser batteries. They had managed to knock out the orbital guns, but the fighters quickly finished the job. The ship had lasted only a few minutes under the assault, and in that time only a third of his crew had escaped safely. But those fifty had quickly been cut to ribbons as they had tried to escape the forces that seemed to pour out of this planet like ants from an anthill.

The infrared signatures showed that only three of the mechs were left, and any other time the fact that they had taken out six of the metal monstrosities would have been good news. Today though that meant that they had fewer missiles than the enemy had mechs. They still held the edge in energy weapons, and he didn’t want to think about how lucky they were that the Harpy hadn’t been carrying any of their energy weapons for the enemy to study. The Harpy’s loss was a minor thing right now though. The enemy seemed to be bringing in vehicles, and power armor. Once they were in place, there was no way they would be able to leave this ruined city. And even if their signal could reach the hub, they weren’t sure if it wouldn’t be degraded by the jamming. He noticed a tower to the north. “Rachel, were you able to make out what kind of tower that was?”

“No, but the jamming is stronger in that direction. If we can make it to the tower do you thing we can uplink?”

“Jack?” He burst transmitted the data to the humanoid Cylon. It took him longer to process it, but he was looking for different things, so Shadow didn’t say anything until the scientist spoke up.

“If it’s a jamming field, we might be disable it, and send to the Republic.” The cruiser was their relay ship for the mission. It was about five light-years away; half of their maximum range. “If, and this is a mighty big if, it IS a transmission station, we could send all of us at once, without signal loss. It’s out last, best hope.”

“Rachel you two head over there, and take the tower. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they won’t have any guards like they usually do.”

“Sir, with all due respect, I don’t think we’re dealing with the usual REMF.” Rear Echelon Mother Fraker, or not, she knew they needed that tower. “No guarantees, but if you run we might be able to get there before they lock us down here. I would suggest leaving the Landram, it is too obvious. Why the humans made such a massive vehicle I’ll never understand.”

“They were overcompensating.” Jack muttered.

“For what?” Rachel knew how to fight humans, but she didn’t understand their humor.

“Their shortcomings.” Shadow laughed. Maybe the kid had potential after all.

He watched as they flew off. Turning around and heading for the massive eight wheeled vehicle at a run he knew what he had to do. He had a distraction to make.

The three mechs to the south started to march in to the ruined city. Shadow watched them, and when hey passed the burnt out building that looked like it might have been a bank he signaled for Badger 779 to make his run. The Landram didn’t head straight for the mechs, but started to harass them from long range with it’s massive railgun. The first round to hit took of the head of the trailing mech.

It seemed a habit of the Empire for the highest ranking officer to follow the lower ranks into battle. The intel said that they felt had a better view of the battle ground. Shadow felt it was just sloppy tactics, and a willingness to let underling take the brunt of the attack, that led them to this doctrine. He had called for the last person in any line to be targeted first, and it made most engagements a lot shorter. It wasn’t a lack of courage, it was a lack of initiative on the part of junior officers, and a total lack of it among their shock troops the Myrmidon Thralls. He wished he could override the Thrall programing, but he would have needed to understand the code first, and any attempt at unauthorized access tended to fail. Each was gene-tagged to their commanding officer. Without the tag, the access failed. And at best failure meant that the Myrmidon died. They had permanently lost a few biologicals when the Myrmidons that detected the intrusion EOLed them. The bodies they recovered had so much physical, and neurological, damage that there was little more than grey goo where their brains should have been.

The round took out not just the head, but the pilot as well. The massive metal monstrosity crumpled to the ground like a human that had just taken a head shot. Shadow pondered the secrets that revealed. The kinetic impact wasn’t enough to knock it over, so the pilot must have been neurally linked to the robotic vehicle. They didn’t move very fast, or nimbly, so the tech was obviously not as advanced as their own.

The second mech dodged the Landram’s shot, and hid behind a building. “Clever! Someone’s learning. They were either no longer putting the commander in the end of the line, or they were training their junior officers to think on their feet. His return shot took out one of the rear wheels, but the Colonial Landram had been designed to run on as few as four wheels, and 779 was as tenacious as his name implied. His return shot took out not the mech, but the building he was using for cover. The mech was buried in debris and out of the fight for a while at least.

The last robotic vehicle hadn’t been standing by though. When 779 pulled a hard turn a round hit it in the side, flipping the vehicle. It landed on it’s top, but the Landram had been designed to roll with the punches figuratively, and literally. The impact may have slagged the two right hand drive wheels, and a fair amount of armor, but the roll bars on top allowed the vehicle to self right. And 779 knew that he had to keep moving to do as much damage as he could before they finally killed him. He had already lost both of his legs, and one of his arms to enemy fire. Even as they wired him into the landram Shadow had commented that he knew that 779's life expectancy might only be measured in days, not weeks, or months, but he had to make every second count. 779 had repeatedly offered to make a charge to get them out, only for Shadow to veto the offer. Shadow remembered telling him that the only way to die was if it meant something. He was living up to that now. The landram was designed to carry a full squad of Colonial Marines into, and out of the front lines. It’s armor protected the troop bay and cockpit to a degree that landrams that had been smashed flat often became bunkers for squads of marines in need of cover. Three wheels down, and rolling hot, 779 hit the mech that had winged it at full throttle. The mech was knocked aside, and through a building. 779 was making another pass when a round from the prone mech smashed through the back of the bay. The armor that protected the bay almost stopped the round. It also almost went all the way through the armored vehicle. It did hit something though. The plasma washed over the interior, and set off the extra fuel from the two Landrams that had been abandoned two days ago. The fuel was only the catalyst though. The Landram had been filled with every detpack they had left. When all of that went off it shook the ground for six blocks. The blast looked like a mini-nuke, and in the end nothing remained of the Landram, or 779, the three mechs, or the three blocks nearest to the crater that had been formed in the middle of the city.

Shadow and the five surviving 008's made it to the tower as the blast went off. They watched the funeral pyre that marked 779's sacrifice. Even this far away they could feel the shockwave as it passed them. Teal’c whistled. “Wow, he really went out with a bang.” The other 008's just looked at him. “You know he would have loved that joke.”

Shadow motioned and they headed towards the tower. Jack exited and he waved the all clear. “Hey, I should be able to get all of us home. I’ve made contact with the Prometheus. General Baal will be here within the hour.” Teal’c swung up his rifle and blew Jack’s head off.

Shadow watched Jacks body fall. He knew that there was no hope of his mind being able upload. “Why did you do that?” Shadow screamed at Teal’c. His answers would have to wait. As Shadow faded almost into power down mode, he realized that every night, the dream seemed to get longer, and clearer. He also realized the fact that before he powered down he had been seeing the same blinking pixel on every movie they had ever watched. He accessed the files, and went looking for the pixels. He found the same oscillating pixel in every movie. He set his processor to analyze the patterns. Maybe someone had hidden something there. He would have to see if it was something he needed to bring to Victor’s attention.

*************************************************************************

Sheba watched her father-in-law read her readiness report while she stood in front of his desk. Lt. Gaeta stood next to her. She felt his apprehension every time they were in proximity to each other. She knew a part of it was the Cylon thing, but they had never gotten along. His attitude seemed to stem from the fact that her father-in-law tended to take her side on most issues of personnel. This time was different though, something was up.

Adama looked up to see her trying to not look at the el-tee out of the side of her eyes. “Gaeta here believes you are being too hard on some of your new crewmates.” Her eyes swung back to his like she was kid that had been caught reaching for a candy bar.

“I have not. I do not treat any of them any less that any other officer.” She saw the young officer bridle at her comments.

“You have something to add, Lieutenant?” The newly minted Rear Admiral looked at the young man who had been turning out to be the least problematic officer he had left on board.

“She is HARDER on them than on humans. It’s as if she is daring them to prove themselves over, and over again. Sharon is ready to fall over some nights, just from how hard... I see that look in your eye.” Sheba blinked. He had caught her as she was about to roll her eyes. “This in not about our relationship. This is about you doubting yourself, and transferring it to their performance evaluations. I went over all of them, and you are giving them far lower ratings than they deserve.”

“That’s not true. I..”

“Yes it is.” Commander Cavil had been reading the reports while sitting on Bill’s couch. The same couch they had found together on Picon during leave. Bill had been about to send it to his family’s cabin in the woods when Carolanne’s lawyer had sent him the divorce papers he had been half-expecting. So the couch had followed them from post to post from then on. John couldn’t count the number of times either of them had slept on the damn thing, but it had proved it’s weight in cubbits. “After taking time to read both your versions, I have to say that Gaeta’s are far more accurate. What is your problem girl? What has your panties in a bunch so tight you can’t see straight?”

From any other man she would have taken his rebuke as a sexist comment; but she had heard far too many of his debriefings, regardless of the gender of the officer that had drawn his ire, end with phrases like that. “My problem, is the fact that I can’t trust us. We are Cylons. Weapons built by man, and designed for war. We are supposedly very efficient killing machines, and we are supposed to take their word that we don’t have some sort of sleeper program in place that will set us off? Every time I get into that cockpit, I worry that I will open fire on one of my friends, or family because one of the Five says so.”

“Gods above, and below, you are one messed up child. Bill how long has it been since she’s seen her husband?”

“Two weeks, three days, and a hand full of hours.” He looked up from reading to see them looking at him. “We all had lunch before he left, remember?”

“Yes, but what does that have to do with anything. I don’t need to jump him just to prove I human.” Adama had just taken a sip of coffee when she spoke, and suddenly her reports were covered in a fine brown spray. “Oh Gods, I’m sorry!”

Adama coughed a few times before he managed to start breathing normally again. Cavil shook his head. “I didn’t mean carnally, and I hope you didn’t do that at lunch.” The evil looks he got from both of them was well worth the line. “What I meant was, when was the last time you both had shore leave?”

Sheba felt everyone’s eyes on her. She hadn’t realized just how tense she was until just that moment. “It’s been a while.”

“I took a look, it was five months BEFORE we got reacquainted with the rest of the family. We still have five weeks before trials, and a minimum of two before we get the new fighters the Cylons have promised us. I propose that all nonessential crew take at least a two week leave. We won’t have a lot of time afterwards, and we all need the rest.”

Adama sighed loud enough to signal that he liked the idea. The endless CAPs were boring as hades anyway. All he wanted was a little time to work on his two ships in peace. He looked at the wooden ship he had been working on for years. It and the Galactica were all he had left. There were times he envied John and Laura. Their happiness reminded him how lonely he was sometimes, but he would never get in the way of his crew’s happiness. “John’s right. Mr. Gaeta, I want you to make a list of everybody, yourself included, that hasn’t had leave in more than five months.”

It was three days later in Cabbit Cove near Dorrian Bay when a Picon Express transport unloaded its usual cargo of tourists and locals. They might have all been dressed similarly, but it was easy to tell the difference. The locals never stopped to take a picture of the Sea Dragon that was the iconic feature at the docks. Kids climbed on it, teens drew pictures of it, and adults told stories of the things they did the first time they came to the Cove, but only tourists took pictures. The two people in fleet undress uniforms walking hand in hand didn’t even stop to take a picture as they headed towards the Light House Inn. Lee, and Sheba had been here so many times, that shopkeepers called out to them by name and waved as they went by. They only stopped long enough to grab some fried fish and tavo strings. The starchy roots were best eaten hot, so they munched on them as they walked.

“You’ve been rather quiet. Something bugging you?” Lee had seen the way his wife had been staring at the sea as they flew over the waves.

“Things upstairs are so bad right now that I wish it was a simple as it was dirtside.”

“You mean besides finding out how badly the SOA had managed to get their fingers into the CG? Dealing with the way society at large has dealt with the Cylons turning out to be the saviors of the human race, not the villains we made them out to be, and getting picked to be a Judge?”

Sheba shouldn’t have taken a sip of the carbonated beverage she had in her hand. By the time she recovered she had nearly spilled her fish and strings. “A What? Like your grandfather?” She loved fish and strings more than just about anything, but she gladly tossed them, and the drink in the air as she grabbed him. “OMG! That’s great! Did you tell dad?” When she was off duty William Adama had been firm about one thing. She could call him anything but his rank. She had settled on ‘Dad’ since she had never had a father let alone a proper ‘Dad’ before.

“Not yet, I haven’t decided if I want to take the job yet. They would bump me up in rank as well as ground me. The only real down side is the fact that I couldn’t do the investigative work that has been my favorite part of the job.”

“Well if you did, at least only one of us wouldn’t have people shooting at them.” She tried to make a joke of it, but something in his face said she had touched a nerve. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure if I would be any safer as a judge. Three of them were shot this month for siding against the SOA. We are on the edge of a civil war, and all the positions we believed in have been washed away like forts on the beach.”

“The sexy Cylon grabbed his face and kissed him forcefully. Shoving her tongue down his throat so far he thought he was going to pass out.” She turned words into action then broke off. “Pulling her prey along, she knew that once in her lair she would be in complete control.” She dragged him along kissing him often, and with great enthusiasm.

“Gods, that is awful, who wrote that?” He sputtered when she let him up for air. His protests were smothered as she kissed him once more.

“One of the ratings on the Galactica thinks they are a Romance Writer. Half the crew thinks they are horrible, the other half thinks they are a writing a comedy. And no one admits to actually reading any of it.

“You are trying to distract me.”

“Is it working?”

“Yes.”

“Good” They were finally at the door to the Light House in when Sheba spotted a Cubbit lying on the grass. The shiny gold coin had caught her eye. “Hey look, I didn’t think they made tho...” she was hit from behind by a large caliber round that shattered her shoulder, and the shattered bone took out her right lung, heart, and spine. She was gone before she hit the ground. Lee grabbed her and pulled her body to cover behind the ancient stone wall that lined the shore.

“OH GODS!!! WHAT THE FRAK IS GOING ON?” He screamed. The commotion caused Alex the innkeeper to come running out the door only to be hit by a round that ripped him in half. Lee and Sheba had known Alex for over ten years. The shock of seeing the gentle giant get killed like that was almost as bad as seeing Sheba get hit. He reached for a sidearm only to find a belt loop. He had been told to leave the weapon behind by the local sherif so many times that he never even thought to bring it this time. He then reached down to the middle of his back and pulled out the civilian pistol that was incredibly illegal for him to have without authorization. Luckily, he also had a letter from the president herself giving him permission to carry it anywhere, and at anytime. He wasn’t the first person from her administration to be targeted, and he had been the one to push for the script. It wasn’t as good as his service weapon, but it was better than nothing. He held the firearm ready but out of sight, just in case.

Nicholas, Alex’s brother, must have called for the police from inside the inn, because he could hear an aircar approaching from the city center. He looked up to see the aircar hover around the scene. He waved at the officer in the driver seat from behind the rock wall, and pointed in the direction the shot came from. He was still pointing when he saw another man pointing something out the side. Without thinking he fired off one round and dove for cover. A searing heat erupted behind him as a rocket propelled grenade almost hit him. His shot on the other hand was far better placed. The second man was still trying to regain control when the aircar crashed into the rocky shore. He ran, not for the inn, but for the rocks. The commotion would surely bring help, but for who was the question. He made it to the rocks and managed to evade three more shots. He had to get to Mrs. Frecher’s the retired Marine might not be the biggest fan of the Navy but she would have a wireless he could use to get help. He found her seaside villa... A shack that had at one time been a surfboard shop... open, and apparently empty.

“Margo! Margo! Are you in here?” He felt a gun barrel push into his back.

“Don’t they teach you anything in that fancy fleet of yours about stealth?” The suntanned leather face wore the frown that was her trademark look. “What kind of idiot comes barging into a strange place without knowing if there is a welcoming party on the other side?”

“The kind that is being chased by a sniper with an anti-tank weapon.”

“He has a Harbinger H-90. That thing couldn’t take out a Landram’s drive wheel.”

“Well it took out my wife when she bent down to pick up a coin. I think they used the coin as a...” He was still a little bit shaken up by her death. Margo on the other hand held her hand up for silence.

“Bait for the trap. Sucks to be you. I just got a guy bringing an army down on my house to kill him, and someone just started to jam the wireless.” Her cold matter-of-fact delivery snapped him out of most of his funk.

“Just?”

“Damn straight. I was listening to the T-Bucks game and FISSS!” She held her hands up in the air. He noticed how careful she was to move her finger away from the trigger, but he didn’t doubt that she would have been the first to pull the trigger in a gun fight she was that pissed. Everyone in the Cove knew that NO one messed with Margo when a T-Bucks game was on. So what happened?” After he explained it she grumbled .“So they killed the skinjob, but they are still gunning for you. You must be the target then.”

“Hey, she’s my wife?” Margo looked at him.

“Current tense, not past tense. She’s still alive out there?”

Damn, he forgot that Margo was also a retired language teacher. “No, she’s dead. I saw her fall.”

“Well then we need to find the man that shot her and take him out.”

“How do you know it was a man?”

“Walter Timmons. It’s the coin you mentioned. His trademark is to leave a coin to distract his targets. He must have figured the Cylon would be the target to take out first.”

“How do you know so much about him?”

“Who do you think trained that Marine dropout. He learned enough to use a rifle, and quit. FIA has been after him almost since the day he dropped off the DRADIS. Well it looks like we have company. Time to Dance!” She had been watching her video display every now and then and he wondered why. When he looked up all he saw was a bunch of random numbers.

“What?”

“Sensors in the garden, and woods. He set some of them off. Half of that is garbage, but if you know what to look for, you can tell where someone is coming from. Let’s go flyboy. I don’t have time to save your pretty ass just for you to frak it up now.”

“What do you mean by saving my as...” As the exited the back way he spied the five bodies with knives sticking out of various parts of their anatomy. “Oh...”

“You owe me a new set of knives. Pulling those things out is a baggit.” He was following her when the first shot split a jimmy tree nearly in half behind them.

“Hello Margo. IS that you? I thought you had dried up and withered away by now. That shot was a warning, just for old times sake. Give me the JAG, and you can go free. Heck, I’ll even split the bounty.”

“Tempting offer Falter. Here’s my counter offer. FRAK OFF!!!” She pulled an old E-Phone out of her vest and typed something in. A tree in the same direction as the shot had come from exploded.

“That’S WALTER, can’t you ever get that right you gelfy old dreyfly!” The voice was being loudhailed from somewhere, but Lee couldn’t spot it.

Margo whispered. “Don’t try looking for him by his voice. He’s using remote speakers. She pulled out her E-phone again. “See.” He looked at the device and it showed a map of the area with about five dots glowing. “Fun time.”, she whispered. “Oh is the poor little girl going to wet himself AGAIN?”, she shouted.

“That was some... WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” The voice that was coming out was the children’s cartoon character Slo-Mo. The distinctive squeaky voice was as iconic as Pyramid, and Ambrosia. Any other time Lee would have been rolling on the ground laughing at how this woman was playing the assassin, but since she was the only thing keeping him alive, he tried to keep his head together. “STOP THAT!!!” This time it was the voice of Pipi the Pegasus. The girl’s cartoon that Admiral Cain had forbidden under pain of death from being played on the Pegasus.

Three shots in rapid succession followed. Margo pressed one more button, and hugged the ground. Lee did the same as half the forest exploded. He rolled over on his back after the dirt, and tree branches stopped falling. She was sitting up and looking at her E-phone. “Jamming stopped. Let’s go see if we got him.” She stood up and waited for Lee to decide if he was going to follow. When he motioned, she left at a brisk pace that he hoped he was able to match at her age.

The crater was big enough to land a shuttle in, and they had a bit of trouble getting through it, but on the other side they found a Chariot Assault Cycle with most of a very large rifle, and half of a man’s body in the driver’s seat. She looked at the wreckage and the ruined forest and sighed. “I’m getting too old for the fraking mess.” That’s when the round hit her in the chest and threw her back fifteen feet. Lee was so stunned he dropped his pistol and ran to help her.”

“Don’t bother, BOY. You will be joining her soon enough.” Lee spun around to see a bloody man in tattered armor step out of the brush where he had been hiding. “I hadn’t planned on her being here. I actually did think she had died years ago. It too bad you know. I liked her... Well no, not really. I don’t like anyone, just money, any more. You see your kind made it too hard for my kind to like people. It’s kind of like the Dagget that bites people because he like to, not because he’s been trained to. Society put us down. You put people like me down, so when a job like this comes along...” He tipped his gun in an encompassing gesture. “...then I get to enjoy it all the better.”

Lee watched the man get closer. He knew where had dropped his gun. All he had to do was to slowly move... <BAMB> The pistol barked, and a divot of dirt exploded next to him.

“No please, don’t move. If you stand still, I will make it painless, like I did for your wife.”

“You stupid fraking idiot. She’s a...”

“Cylon, yes I do know. And the jamming device either worked and she never made it back, or she’s in the middle of uploading and will be too late to save you anyway.”

“You know a lot about Cylons. How?”

“A friend told us. Told us everything.”

“You’re SOA?”

“As advertised. Now I suppose you wish for me to spill my gut about who ordered the hit, or who my boss is.”

“No, I just wanted to distract you.”

The man almost got his gun pointed in the right direction. The round Margo fired from where she lay took his head off. Lee ran over to her. “Look what murder I have wrought, said the woman on the hill.” She muttered.

“For it is only through pain that this blood bought that I may pay this bill.” Lee knew the poem well. “Rest, I’m sure help is on the way.”

“I will rest when I am dead. I need you to do something.”

“What?”

“Get his tags, and pull them off. He doesn’t deserve them.”

“Okay. I do have one question. Why did you wait to shoot him?”

“I had to get your gun.”

“My gun, what about yours?”

She pulled out the officers pistol she had been brandishing earlier. She pulled the trigger, and a flame came out of the business end. “Just a really realistic toy. Garris doesn’t allow weapons on the Island. He made me give up all of my war trophies years ago.”

“The Sheriff? Why did you let him?”

“He’s my son, and while I love him I didn’t give al of them up. My E-phone here ties into my computer, so I can access all my traps from it.” She pressed a few more buttons. “There, I turned the rest off.”

“The pen is mightier than the sword.”

“What? I’ve never heard that one before.”

“It’s from Old Earth. The Cylons gave us their database, and it contains thousands of books from Old Earth, and it’s colonies.”

“Irony is a snake.”

“What? Who wrote that?”

“I did. It means that you never know when irony will strike, but it will always strike at the worst time.”

“You write?”

“You ask a lot of questions. Yes I do, now go get those tags, and you can read anything on my computer.”

“Lee ran over to the body of the assassin, and looked for his dagget-tags. They weren’t on his neck, or in his pockets. He finally found them in the man’s left shoe. “I found them. Margo, I found them...” Margo was resting. It would take nearly an hour for the Raptor to appear overhead with his wife and brother both at the controls. Lee sat there with Margo’s body and read some of the stories she had written. Short stories, long stories, funny ones, sad ones, they were all in there. A treasure that came with too high of a price. Two days later, with his family in attendance and Garris Frecher delivering the oath of office, Leland Adama became the Prime Justice of the Supreme Court of the Twelve Colonies.

That night Lee and Sheba retired to a secured apartment complex that had been built with the newly paranoid government and it’s personnel in mind. Sheba’s new body had to be rescanned due to the lack of scars her old body had. Some of the FIA agents had wanted to get a little too invasive with both the scan, and her old body, before the President herself called and told them to behave. They finally managed to get settled in when the phone rang. Lee picked it up before Sheba could. “Adama residence... Thank you, I’ll meet you at the door.”

“What was that about?”

“Just a present.”

“A Present? Why?”

“You’ll see.” The chime rings, and he left her to answer the door. When he returned he had a small cake with candles.”

“Okay, I don’t get it?”

“Years ago you said you weren’t sure what your real birthday was. And two days ago you were reborn. So I figure you just had a birthday, and we should celebrate.”

She looked at the cake, and her eyes watered up. “But I don’t want to remember it. I died, Margo died, Alex died, other people whom we don’t even know died then. I can’t celebrate their deaths.”
“We aren’t celebrating their deaths. We’re celebrating their lives. Have you read any of Margo’s stories?”

“No, I’m sorry to say that I’ve been a little busy.”

“Read the ‘The Last Sunset’”

“Oh gods, that even sounds depressing.”

“Just read it.”

‘The Last Sunset?’
By: Margo Frecher

At the end of the day a man sat by the shore and watched the waves go by.
As with any other day he sat until the sun went away.
A young man saw him one day and asked “I see you here every day. why?”
“Go away son, now is not your time. Go off and play.”

Is this your first day , or is it the last?
Are we looking to the future, or remembering the past?
It must be the future, for nothing is cast.

At the end of the day a man sat by the shore and watched the waves go by.
As with any other day he sat until the sun went away.
A man saw him on another day and asked “You are still here. why?”
“Go away son, now is not your time. Go off and play.”

Is this your first day , or is it the last?
Are we looking to the future, or remembering the past?
It must be the future, for nothing is cast.

At the end of the day a man sat by the shore and watched the waves go by.
As with any other day he sat until the sun went away.
A man and woman saw him on another day and asked “Is this spot dry?”
“Go away children, now is not your time. Go off and play.”

Is this your first day , or is it the last?
Are we looking to the future, or remembering the past?
It must be the future, for nothing is cast.

At the end of the day a man sat by the shore and watched the waves go by.
As with any other day he sat until the sun went away.
An old man saw him on another day and asked “I buried my wife today?”
“Gone is your youth, and gone is your wife. Now you may stay.”

Is this your first day , or is it the last?
Are we looking to the future, or remembering the past?
It must be the future, for nothing is cast.

At the end of the day two men sat by the shore and watched the waves go by.
As with any other day they sat until the sun went away.
Then the older man said: I will not be back again. It is my time to go away.”
“Goodbye my friend, if now is your time. Go off and play.”

Is this your first day , or is it the last?
Are we looking to the future, or remembering the past?
It must be the future, for nothing is cast.

At the end of the day a man sat by the shore and watched the waves go by.
As with any other day he sat until the sun went away.
A young man saw him one day and asked “I see you here every day. why?”
“Go away son, now is not your time. Go off and play.”

Sheba looked at the reader and then at the man that had given her such a sad story to read. “That’s not fair.” She looked at the reader again. “I’m sharing this with a few friends.”

“First off, life isn’t fair. If it was we would need three plates. And after reading it, I thought you might.”

“Hand me that damn cake, and there had better be a funny story in here or I will have to hurt you.”

“Read the one titled ‘Why cats are better than Hand Grenades’. You may hurt yourself laughing. My favorite was the part about ‘you can only throw a grenade once.’”

She put down the reader. “This is surreal. I just died for the first time the other day, and you have me reading the poetry of the woman that died saving your life. I’m still not used to this. How about you?”

She saw his drink shake a bit as he brought it to his lips. “I don’t hink I’ll ever get used to it. I held you as you died in my arms, and I thought I lost you. My whole world went into the blender before I remembered the fact that you can come back. Then I knew that I had to stay alive or you would have come back only to find my body. I can honestly say that you weirded me right the frak out of my skull with that little trick. The first question I’m surprised someone hasn’t asked is can humans upload like you do?”

“I don’t know... I would have to ask Father Galen or Mother Ellen if it’s possible. After reading that poem would you still want to live forever?”

“I read Eternal Tears by Crisa LaVorea when I was ten. I know all the prices of immortality, and if I could spent even a fraction of it with you, it would be worth it.”

Sheba had read the fantasy series as well. She hadn’t know about her Cylon nature at the time, but she still thought that the hero’s loss of humanity after centuries of life was not realistic. “Jacob never had an eternal companion, let alone a family. He was alone for all those centuries. He faced the pain of loss and all of his countless regrets by himself. You, and any other human would have us as a family. The big question is would we let others join us. The five suffered a great loss at that hands of humans. I want you to join us, but they may not.”

“Her last book was hard to find after the war. The Starling was the last story that dealt with him.”

“I never read it. I’ve heard of it, but I could never find a copy. It was banned for some reason.”

He smiled. “Worse than that, it was burned. The Starling was a Robot from another world who came to Tarsisa and became his lover.”

“A robot lover? No wonder it was burned!”

“I read it. The story was one of the best in the series. They left the planet together. It was her way of tying up all of the loose strings.”

“I would love to read it. How did you get your hands on a copy?”

“It was in my grandfather’s library. He had a hidden room built in his house. If you pull on a couple of books and push a third the door opens, and inside is his secret library. It’s also where he hid some of his clients when he dealt with some of his more ‘colorful’ cases.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because Dad gave me the keys to Grandfather’s old place. It is a virtual fortress, and he has hand picked a few ex-navy and ex-marine officers to act as our staff.”

“Why? We just got this fabulous place, and you’re talking about a second home already.”

“Because this place is a wonderful target. We have conveniently put dozens of high value targets in one place, and said ‘Here we are!’ I thought I lost you, and I want to do something other than worry when my Amazon is not on her ship doing battle against the forces of evil.” His smile turned evil. “And since you just were reborn, I was thinking there was a chance you haven’t had a chance to get your birth-control implant reinstalled.”

She hadn’t thought about kids. Being a Viper-jock had been her dream ever since... But was it? Had she been programmed to be one. Programmed to be a killing machine. That had been her argument wasn’t it. She loved the freedom of flying, and having a kid would entail a lot of complications. “You know what this would do to my career?”

“More than one officer has made it to the Admiralty with kids in tow. Look at Captain Falin, or Commodore Hansel, heck Admiral Morrisey was a single mother of twins, and they both served under her during the third inter-colony wars over five hundred years ago. He judiciously failed to mention Admiral Wilhelmina Jensin, the current leader of the anti-Cylon faction of the fleet, who’s extended brood reached into the dozens. “You were telling me that you want to prove something about yourself. That you are more than the sum of your programing. Show yourself that you can make life, not just take it.” She looked him as if he had become a mind reader. A fact made obviously false by his next question. “What?”

“You do make a damn good lawyer, you know that?”

“So I’ve been told. Have I convinced you though? This isn’t a trial.”

“No it isn’t, and yet it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I do feel like a killing machine sometimes. I doubt my purpose like I doubt my past. I now know that my first ‘Real’ memories are of standing there, talking to Starbuck on that dreary morning all those years ago. I had been dropped off by an infiltration squad. Left to skink or swim on my own. If she hadn’t of come along I don’t know what kind of officer I would have become.”

“Hey, what am I, chopped bova?” The descendants of cows had survived on the colonies more or less unchanged. Their name on the other hand...

“Just remember that she was the one that led me into that bar you were getting into a fight in. If we hadn’t backed you up, you might not of survived the night.”

Lee remembered it all too well. He had the misfortune of bumping into the arm of a rich Caprician, and his entourage. If the girls hadn’t popped in just then the whole thing might have gone up in smoke. If he remembered right Sheba had managed to take out his three bodyguards while he and Starbuck took only two each. “You were badass even back then. I see what you’re saying. The two of you did sort of tamp each other’s fuses.” He held her tight. “You changed though. You became a protector. You made pilots earn their wings, not just pass them through the course. If you had wanted us to have bad pilots, you would have passed Flattop.”

“Your brother wasn’t that bad.”

“What was it you said about him every time he got into a Viper? ‘The safest place to be was right in front of him.’ How many time did he crash in the simulator?”

“Too many times. He is a good Raptor pilot though.”

“Completely different skill set. You can’t hover a Viper, or make it dance like he can, but put him in a daggitfight, or a combat landing and he’s toast.”

“Why are we talking about your brother?”

“To show you that you are not a killing machine.”

“I don’t know, there have been a few times I wanted to kill him.”

“Same here, but JAG officers know better.”

“Your not a JAG officer anymore.” She ran her hand over his robe as it hung on the door jam. “This suits you. But I’ll miss the Jocksmock.”

“It’s packed away. You never know when my Colonies will call me?”

She laughed. “Super Justice. Able to leap tall cases in a single bound, faster than a speeding subpoena...”

“You’ve been watching those Earth movies?”

It seems I watched them before I came to the Colonies. It even helped me act human in some ways. But I still don’t understand some of the jokes.”

“I know what you mean. I watched some of the movies they sent us, and Earth had some strange ideas of what the future would be like.”

“Like?”

“Well those War of Stars ones...”

“Star Wars.” He completely missed the dreamy look she got in her eyes.

“Whatever... There was this scene in the fifteenth movie where the Gemini...”

“Jedi.” She jumped on to the end the bed.

“Whatever... Well she is captured by the Space Pirate...?”

“Yes he is a Space Pirate, go on.” She rocked on her knees.

“Anyway he uses some sort of look to seduce her. No Gemini, I mean Jedi mind trick, just a look?” He finally noticed the way she was looking at him.

“Show me!” She loved the Great Sith Wars arc. Ajin Stormbringer, and Gira Lish had to have been her favorite couple. Their love story was EPIC.

“Um... Okay... I’ll try.” He sat there for a second trying very hard to remember that goofy look the guy had on his face. Half pleading, half lustful, and half enraged... He realized that was one too many halves, but the guy was over acting after all.

“SQUEEE!” Lee jumped back at her exclamation. “NO Don’t stop! You had Ajin down pat! Do it some more!” Lee was confused, but if that was what she wanted.

The amorous look he gave her made her knees a little weak, that or the lack of blood flow from sitting like she was... But she wasn’t going to give in that easy. “Human-Cylon babies aren’t easy. Hera was a rare easy birth. Most of us take years to conceive.” Her attempt at dissuading Lee only made him move closer, and sweep her up in his arms. “Are you listening to me?”

He was starting to get into character. The Idiot was well know for his very short sentences, with lots of breaks in them for pauses, and overacting, lots of overacting. “This will take a lot of work. Long... Repetitive... Work... I have ONLY three days, before I HAVE to report in, and SINCE! you are still OFFICIALLY on leave. We... should... get started?”

“So I don’t get to read the book?”, she teased. He was playing the Space Pirate Captain very well. So it was only fair that she play the shy Jedi.

“ONLY if you’re GOOD!.” He tossed her back on the bed.

She ripped her top off. “What if I’m bad?” Well, not ‘that’ shy.

“Then I’ll show you how to open the secret library.” He said as he opened his shirt.

She reached behind her back and opened something of hers, and they forgot all about books, and space pirates, and movies, and, commas,,, and capitLliZatioN and periods

Chapter Text

Four weeks later

If the system had at any time had possessed a name, it was long since forgotten by the universe at large. So when the two Imperial ships entered real space they immediately claimed it for the glory of the Empire. Squire Rabins looked up from his datapad to where the Captain sat upon his throne. “Sire.”

Knight Templar Major Gilliad Noresto of the Empire’s Destroyer Resplendent looked down at the robed figure next to him. He wished, as he often did, that the Acolytes didn’t wear masks, as he wished to know what a person was emoting, and it was so bloody hard to do when all he could read was the person’s body-language. “Yes Rabins?”

The bored, dismissive tone was expected, so the Acolyte took no offence, or at least he showed none. He wouldn’t have either way, for to do so was to invite either a death sentence or a Thrall decree. Neither was desirable, but death was often preferable. He had seen the Major turn people into Thralls for the flimsiest of reasons, and he wanted no part of that, so he made sure to practice his emotionless speech patterns, and body-language as often as he could. “The scans show no bodies larger than a Cherub class asteroid , and no artificial signals coming from within the belts they were found in.” The system was still forming, and that spoke of resources untapped. “As per orders would you like to send in a class three probe for a closer look?”

The captain actually sighed. A terrible breach of protocol. No one moved so much as a muscle though. He had trained his crew well. He was bored, and when he was bored, he was at his most dangerous point. Any reaction would have invited one of the twin dooms at this point. “No my most loyal servant. We will go in ourselves. Why waste a probe, when we can do something other than waste time sitting here waiting for it to return? Get my Paladin and it’s Charger ready.”

“As you command.” He bowed and left as fast as he could safely. Behind their masks, he was sure that everyone was secretly breathing a little easier. Even with the Charger booster sled, the flight would take the Captain nearly a day to complete it.

Noresto walked to the lift, and set his sword on the rack. He pulled a pilot’s gladius off the rack. One of the Acolytes helped him remove his command armor, and switch it out with a pilot’s cuirass, and helm. He felt the inner armor handshake, and adjust to the new armor’s systems as he put the gloves, and helm in place. “Send word to the Quickness... Let them know to set up a CAP, but hold station here. Oh, and Rabins?”

“Yes Sire?”

“Do me a favor, and try to not let the ship blow up around you.” His sneer and condescending tone told Rabins that he didn’t have any confidence in his men. Rabins didn’t move, but one of the helmsmen shifted in his chair. Neither said anything, but Rabins knew the man’s fate was sealed for that slight betrayal of his feelings by the slight rise in Noresto’s eyebrow.

On the unpressurized flight deck, Noresto examined the new mech with a critical eye. His three Knights joined him on the line, and knelt in submission. “Are you ready to try out the gifts our Lord General has given us?”

His Second, Knight Second Stripe Telemachus stepped forward fluidly, even in his suit and bowed again. “We are your’s to command.”

“Of course you are, but that wasn’t my question. Ansel?”

“I don’t like the idea of software that links the two units. It smacks of heresy. Are we sure the Inquisition has approved this?” Knight First Stripe Ansel had always been the most orthodox of his men, and he liked that. He didn’t like people questioning him though. Ansel never saw the blade come down. There was a small spot in all flight armors where the control hardware had to pass through the armor. The Angel’s Doorway, some pilots called it. One of the reason pilot commander’s carried the gladius instead of the longer broadswords favored by the Empire was this Doorway. Severing the control hardware as well as the man’s spine also meant that he didn’t have to listen to the man choke on his own blood as he died.

“Ansel, seems to have forgotten the first law of the Empire. ‘NEVER question your superiors.’ It tends to lead you to a bad end.” He laughed at his own joke. He noticed that none of his men ever laughed at his jokes. He supposed that was just their way. The Order did tend to make dull Knights these days.

On the bridge Knight Templar Emeritus Cristiov Favius watched as the Acolytes went about their duties. He had been called up from the empty brig to take watch. The elder Knight hobbled up to the dias, and sat in the chair he never thought he would sit in. In a hundred and twenty three years of service he had never had the marks to command. Never been given a combat mission, never been given a duty station other than guard duty. He never spoke up because that was his way, and he never knew that he was the joke of the Knighthood. A man too busy thinking up new ways to use his time, but never putting forth the effort to curry favor with the officers that would give him the promotions he so desired. When the call had come down to him, he had thought it one of the Major’s cruel jokes. The child was well know for them. Since he never did anything other than his very best, he had hobbled down the corridors, and into the lift to the bridge. Finding it already deserted, he took his post as duty demanded.

Noresto looked at the fresh face of Templar Regular Dagoon. The man may not have been a Knight, but he was the only other crewman that had been trained with the new equipment. Trained as a pilot, but not as a Knight. “Dagoon, you will fill in for Ansel. He may have been a fool, but he was a Knight. If called upon, you will fight or you die.”

“Understood.” Dagoon understood all too well. Don’t show them how good he was, and under no circumstances upstage the Knights. He didn’t have the family linage or patronage to become a Knight, but he had been working on mechs, and power armor for longer than he had chest hair. As head of the maintenance bay he was too valuable for the captain to execute, or thrall, but if he slipped up, he would be stuck in this kind of job for the rest of his life. That he could live with. His biggest fear lay with the constant killing or thralling of his men under Major Noresto’s command style. It often made him wish something unpleasant would happen to the high and mighty Knight Templar Major.

“Good, now come with us, and let us show you how it’s done.” He jumped into his fighter with a grace that came with constant practice.

Dagoon knew all too well how much practice he got. The man would spend hours down here with the mechs plugged into the main computer. They would run simulation after simulation, sometimes for days on end. He on the other hand would now have to wipe the memory banks of the former Knight’s mech and reboot from scratch. It only took a few minutes, but the others were left waiting for him to start his drives.

“Are you ready?” The impatient comment came over the fleet band, not the pilot’s only band. He was going to try and humiliate him over that?”

“I’m sorry sir. I had to dump the pilot data from the deceased pilot, or I wouldn’t be able to fly the Paladin. It would have locked me out.” The very common knowledge was as obvious to the pilots as it was to all of the maintenance workers.

The response, when it came, managed to be both condescending, and smug at the same time. “Then it was bad thing for you that I had to relieve Ansel from duty. If he hadn’t forced me to kill him, this wouldn’t be your problem, now wouldn’t it?” The question was a trap. No matter which way he was expected to answer it he would make enemies of either the Captain, or the other pilots. “Well?”

Luckily he was well versed in not answering the wrong way. “Yes, it is sad that you had to relieve him.” Noresto seemed somewhat disappointed when didn’t trip on the trap that he had laid for the Templar Regular.

Dragoon stood at the open door to the bay. The distant star, giving a faint illumination to the bay did nothing to lighten his mood. He was to follow as always. The last to leave, he would be the last to return if history was a reliable indicator. Into space he jumped, the thrusters on the Charger unit activating as soon as they were clear of the ship. The Charger would let him turn on the main drive without the Major’s authorization, but it would alert him to the violation of protocol. He formed up in the classic King’s Diamond formation. His slot was of course the rear. He checked his systems. Everything was in the blue. His weapon systems were charged, his drives were ready for full burn, and his ECM systems were in passive mode. Standard protocol was to go in under Silent Running Rules. No communications over open bands, all communications should be through encrypted whisker lasers, no full burn unless under pursuit of an enemy, and many more...

“Let’s see what these beasts can do boys.” Noresto took off at full burn right after violating just about every rule in the book. Dragoon followed their lead, but kept his ECM on.

The mining ship Progress spotted the energy spike first. They quickly went to Red alert, and sent a pulse transmission to the Basestar that was watching the system. After their duty was fulfilled they went dark and ran for the outer system. Shutting down as many systems as they could before the unknowns could spot them, they hoped that they could imitate one of the rocks they had been harvesting.

Miri watched the two ships on her display. They were only a couple of destroyers. But if one of them
got away then they would loose this system to the Empire. She looked to the red-headed human standing next to her. “Rachel?”

“We could pretend to be a rock, and hope they pass us by.” Lieutenant Rachel Aden had been chosen to accompany the Cylons, and to learn their ways. The Admiralty had also asked her to see if she could see any weaknesses to exploit. So far... nothing. Captain Miri was the best commanding officer she had ever served with, not that she would ever let the tincan know that.

“They would have to be pretty stupid to miss our heat signatures. We’ve been slagging planetoids for months. Half of the big ones are still well over ambient to pass as dead rock.”

“Then we should hide the Dagget next to the largest one within range.”

“I like the way you’re thinking. Helm, I want thrusters only. Do not raise the barrier system, and ignore minor hits.”

Scratch looked at her with his emotionless face, and she swore he was smiling. “As you wish Captain.”

When they were safely behind the asteroid she sent out a recon probe. “Let’s see if they buy the ‘No one’s home’ routine.” They watched for the few hours the ships were in system before they launched the three contacts that appeared on DRADIS. “That’s funny?”

“What? Three ships, it looks just like the Cylon Triad that you used to use.”

Miri noticed the derision that wasn’t there, but ignored it. “Yes, but we don’t use it any more, and they never did. Their basic formation is a four man diamond. It will switch between a horizontal array, and a vertical array, but they never launch with only three.” She adjusted the DRADIS controls and soon enough a shadowy image appeared in the spot where a forth unit should be. “That must be their commander. We should try and capture him.”

“Him? Why would it be a... Oh I forgot. Misogynists to the core. Yes, we MUST capture him. Send out the Sirens?” The human and Cylon squadron they had training with them was only on loan. The group had started out as rocky as she figured, but they had been getting better and better at working together lately. They hadn’t had a fight in three days. And that had been between two of the humans.

“You are learning my young Padawan.”

“*Sigh* I’m never going to get rid of that nickname am I?”

“We’ll see.”

“Okay, that takes care of the mechs, and maybe the fighters, but won’t the Destroyers bolt if we show ourselves?”

Miri shook her head, and held up her finger. “Comm, encrypt and send to Progress: Wounded duck.”

The Colonial Exchange Officer looked at her commanding officer with a raised eyebrow.

“Watch and learn child. Watch, and learn.”

The captain of the mining vessel acknowledged the order, but she could tell that he wasn’t happy with it. The mining vessel bolted from it’s hiding spot five minutes later on a heading the would take it right past the rock they were hiding behind.

“They are going to pass on the far side, we won’t be able to bring our guns to bear on them.”

“No we won’t. Helm let’s get ready to jump.”

“Are we running?

Miri look at the Lieutenant. This was going to take a while to explain. Time she didn’t have. “Do you trust me?”

“No!” Came the incredulous answer.

“Good answer. I haven’t done anything to earn it... Yet. I also haven’t done anything to make you second guess my orders. Got it?”

“Yes.” The silent stare she received didn’t need a Cylon facial expression expert to read. “Yes, Captain.”

“Good answer. I would hate to have to send you to your quarters without dessert.”

Dragoon spotted the energy spike first since he was looking for things that were out of place, and not just hoping their sensors would alert them. “Sire?”

Gilliad Noresto was enjoying himself for the first time in months, so the interruption was the last thing he needed. “Yes.” He dialed up the self-destruct for Dragoon’s Charger. One wrong word, and the man was...

“I just picked up an energy spike. Heading...” The heading was irrelevant. He looked on his display. The icon of an unknown had appeared when the fool tagged it.

“Thank you very much. Now stand back and watch how Knights handle things.” The three Knights pealed off and went to full burn, with boosters. They would eat up a lot of fuel that way, but with the ships nearby that wasn’t a problem. He still hadn’t been given permission to go to full burn. He didn’t know if he would ever get the chance, but at least one of them would still have some fuel left when this was over.

Miri watched the three fighters move to intercept the mining ship. “Well isn’t he a smart one. Probably doesn’t know we can see him. Are the ladies and their friends in place?”

Dragoon made use of his sensors. He would be out of range for a full ten minutes while the other three would be there in less than five. So he examined the sensor readings. The power readings showed a high amount of energy for the acceleration curve. Whatever it was must have some serious cargo... Or armor. Since he wasn’t authorized to use his active sensors, he aimed his high gain antenna towards the contact. He was rewarded with a lot of radio chatter... Too much it seemed for one ship. “Sire.”

Noresto was activating his railgun’s power up sequence, and warming up his missiles when the call came in. He nearly triggered Dragoons’s self destruct in anger over being interrupted again. How dare the regular keep interrupting him like this. He waited a few minutes to show the peon who was in charge before he answered. “Yes?”

If Dragoon noticed the anger in his commander’s voice he didn’t show it, which only served to anger Noresto even more. “I’m getting a lot of radio chatter from the target, too much for one ship, I think this is...” Noresto triggered the self-destruct. Only the fool’s signal wasn’t even interrupted. “...some kind of...” What that fool thought was of no importance to the Major. Why didn’t he explode already? Of course, he had dumped the pilot data, and reset the suit. A quick query of his computer showed that there hadn’t been time to slip in the override for the self-destruct system. He did have command authority though.

Dragoon went on oblivious to the fact that the Major had cut his feed. “I suggest we scan the area throughly before we... contin... ue...?” His comm wasn’t the only thing that had been cut though. His ship started to shut down around him. He was losing power in all systems, even life support. If he didn’t get it fixed in the next ten minutes he would have to switch over to his suit’s life support which, while not comfortable, would last him for about five hours. The bigger problem had been his course which would take him close to quite a few large rocks. Any of which would have reduced his highly advanced mech into a high tech wreck. The Major would have to go on with out him. A small voice in the back of his mind suggested that maybe the Major had been behind this. This wasn’t as bad for him as it would have been for one of the Majors other pilots. He unstrapped himself from his harness and opened the cover on the main computer access panel.

“That wily kiffer...” Miri was starting to really admire the commander of the mechs headed towards the mining ship. He had somehow managed to slip completely off her scanners. The other three were headed in fast and hard for a minimum time interception. They were burning up fuel at a stupid rate, and she was wondering why the commander was sacrificing his men in such a stupidly obvious tactic. “What are the other two ships doing?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. That doesn’t... wait... It looks like one of them is rotating their ECM settings. It’s like they are doing some sort of drill in the middle of an engagement. Are they even taking us seriously?” The young lady tapped something in to the sensor controls. “I am getting some chatter from the two ships. And it’s unencrypted.”

“Well put it on, we might as well be entertained while we wait for the flies to enter the web.”

“Quickness to Resplendent. Why are you doing that?”

“Resplendent here... This is Knight Templar Cristiov Favius commanding, we are undergoing a drill. I have found the crew to be slow in responding to my commands, so I ordered a drill to knock the dust out of their ears.”

“Now see here Knight Templar ‘Emeritus’ you do not have authority to do that!” The emphasis on the ‘Emeritus’ part was hard to miss.

“And who are you to tell me what I can do when I’m in charge, PRIEST?”

“I sir am Priest Lotor of Sarisin, and even I rank higher than a disgraced almost Knight”. And as soon as your commander returns I will order him to Thrall you into a lavatory acolyte’s servant.”

Back on the Dagget, Lieutenant Aden looked over at Miri. “Thralled?”

“They have a way of making humans fall into a trance if they come in close physical contact, and hypnotize you if you hear their voice unaided. Just looking at them unaided can be hazardous.”

“So they can’t effect us over wireless? What if you have a strong will?”

“Nope, and while strong wills can keep you from coming under their control, your willpower is irrelevant if they come in actual physical contact. Some kind of nanomachine in their systems. We think it is like a techno-organic virus. One touch, a kiss, or even blood contact can start the transformation.”

“Like a Zombie Plague?”

“You did that training simulation?”

“Yes, it was fun for a while. But I got caught early in it, and had to watch as my body became an unwilling pawn in the attack.”

“Talk to some of the Thrall survivors we have back at Home. Imagine that going on for years.” She watched the young woman shiver. “It’s actually worse. Some of them killed people they loved. The rate of suicides from freed slaves was rather high in the beginning.

“What changed”

“People willing to tell their stories. When people found out they weren’t alone the stories came out in droves, and the number of people who killed themselves went down.” She looked at the young woman and Rachel swore later that she saw real emotion on what she thought was emotionless mask. “A lot of Cylons joined the meetings as well. You do not know what it was like to be programmed to fight, and not want to. Half of my crew are members of groups like that. Most of us are pacifists that found a reason to fight.

“What was that?”

“Freedom.”

They turned back to the fight that was going on between the two ships on the other side. The gruff voice came back on. He wasn’t any happier than before. “...and furthermore I have never disgraced the Knighthood, EVER! Who is in charge over there?”

“I have taken charge. That fool Sir Ensign is currently a Thrall in my service. I will release him to Sire Noresto upon his return, but he would not follow my lawful orders.”

“Are these people serious? How can people this inept have conquered the known universe? They are like bad vid-drama badguys.”

“Aren’t they though!” Miri shook her head. “You have to understand the fact that they have a huge technological advantage over just about any rivals.”

“Except you?”

“Except the Republic, yes. And we have the Artemis to thank for that. If they had come in before we met her, we would have been fraked so many ways from Tuesday. The Colonies wouldn’t have even that much of a chance.”

“We would have fought back.”

“Yes, and they might have just glassed the Colonies or worse.”

“Worse?”

“One of these days, remind me to show you the spycam video some of our agents retrieved. It makes me so sick I wish I had a stomach so I could throw up.” At Rachel’s upturned eyebrow she nodded. “Yes, that bad.” She pointed to the DRADIS. “Enough of the sideshow. It looks like our guests have arrived. Fire anti-ship nukes from tubes one through six, and ready the other launchers with anti-fighter missiles.” The Cylon at tactical looked up and nodded. The Heavy 008 was one of the highest decorated combat models but the copy of Boxey he had inside him had been a bit of a hard sell when he had asked to serve aboard the Bad Dagget. She had almost said no, but Shadow had asked her to make an exception. It had wound up being the last favor he had ever asked of her before his disappearance. And one she had regretted felling bad about almost from the beginning. He had become the most loyal to the cause Cylon she could hope for. One of the Number Four humanoid Cylons had explained the anti-Cavil sentiment that had run rampant in the Number One line. They had abandoned the hated form en masse to the last man. Red 555 had become the best he could be to prove to himself that he wasn’t the evil being his brother was. He had also become one of the Bad Dagget’s Fractured Children by obsessing over it.

“Missiles away, and the tubes stand ready. Do you want tubes one through six reloaded with anti-ship or anti-fighter?”

“Neither. We will be using the railguns once we clear the rock.”

“Those missiles won’t make it to the ships. The mechs, or the fighters should be able to swat them easily. Are you using nukes as distractions?”

“Partially. Have you ever watched a magic show?”

“Yes.”

“What is the most important thing to NOT do in magic?”

“Look where the magician want’s you to?”

“Very good.”

Noresto watched as six icons appeared on his screen. All six were low yield nuclear devices that were headed past him and towards his ships. “Well men it looks like someone has teeth. I have these. Cover me.”

“It looks like the mechs have spotted the missiles. Shall we activate the ECM?”

“Why not, but only the passives. I’d rather they not get a look at our full capabilities.”

The missile’s nice ballistic course suddenly changed radically, and their sensor images grew fuzzy. Noresto’s first shot went wide. His second didn’t fare any better. It was only on his fifth shot that he managed to hit one of the elusive missiles. They were moving much faster than his mech could hope to follow. “Fire at will!” All three mechs opened fire, and they managed to bring down another two of the missiles before they got out of range of their sensors. His only joy was the fact that they were headed straight towards that fool of a Regular. And there was nothing he could do to stop them. All he could do was hope that one of them hit the fool.

Dragoon hit his head on the coaming that ringed the hatch when a familiar voice spoke in his ear. The voice was familiar in quite a few meanings of the word. His mother’s voice was one of his first memories. She had also been his staunchest advocate, and advisor. Even after she died. “You’re about to have company dear.” Her voice sounded rather urgent. “33719905" he looked up expecting to see her, but she was nowhere to be seen. He typed the code into the computer, and was rewarded with the welcome sound of the life support fans restarting. He closed the hatch, and sat in his seat. As he was strapping in his mother’s apparition appeared in front of his cockpit. The lack of air in deep space didn’t faze her, nor did the lack of gravity impede her, but still it did give him pause. “Well?”

“Thank you mother. To what do I owe this visit?” her visits never were for social calls. The always foretold of problems that could have cost him his life. She had warned him that the Major was going to be calling upon him almost as soon as that shulad (idiot) Ansel had hit the ground.

“Three nuclear missiles are headed your way. They are aimed at the ships, but you are in the path of one of them. You have about ten minutes.”

“That’s cutting it close. It takes eight to get the Paladin warmed up.”

“Your Horse is still up and running.”

“You’re right! Thank you again Mother!”

“You’re welcome son.” She disappeared in the blink of an eye, but Dragoon was already working to get his mech up faster than it was supposed to be.

“The fighters have scrambled to meet the missiles before they reach the ships. I wonder what their commander is doing?”

“Well last seen he was somewhere in the flight path, so he might...” Just then an icon appeared in the DRADIS. “He might play hero.”

Dragoon managed to get the railgun online, and was working on the sensors. All he was able to get up was the infrared optics. The problem was the missiles were headed his way, and therefor their drives were not facing him. His thrusters at least worked, even if his main drive was being used to power his railgun. He scanned the skies. The relatively massive rock in front of him was hotter than it should be, so someone must have been mining it recently... He widened the aperture on his scope to take in a wider viewing range. THERE! He spotted three rings around three cool spots. He triggered his thrusters so he was moving sideways. Once he had enough parallax data to plot their positions he waited. They were juking randomly and he would have to catch them when they were a little closer. He watched the first one, and followed its course, and tried to spot a pattern. He pulled the trigger, and the nickel-tungsten flechette round kicked him back before the thrusters stabilized him. He was already tracking the second target as the first cluster round was headed downrange. He picked the cluster rounds instead of the penetrators that most of the Knight’s favored because he knew that he needed a spray of metal to knock out the delicate electronics in the warheads rather than hoping for a lucky shot. The round was programmed to explode at a preselected distance from the target. He picked an even longer distance to maximize the spread. The first missile, the one with his name on it, succumbed to the first shot.

Miri watched the DRADIS as the missile tumbled out of control. “Go active. He’s too good.”

The missiles started to dispense flares, and jammers in an effort to throw off his aim, but his targeting was frankly far too low-tech to be fooled. He had already fired off two rounds each toward the missiles that would pass him by. The first round wasted itself when the missile changed course enough to miss the cloud of metal shrapnel. The shrapnel from the second round hit it square on causing an nuclear explosion that fried the electronics of the last missile. The last two rounds hit the target, but were merely overkill at that point. Dragoon wondered how many missiles the others had manage to stop with their fully functional mechs.

Noresto and Miri shared an ironically coincidental “Oh my God!” for completely different reasons. Noresto silently cursed the rouge for achieving what he was not able to, while Miri sat stunned at the apparently brilliant tactical move the pilot had pulled off.

Noresto and his pilots didn’t have time to ruminate on Dragoons good luck as they were suddenly beset by the Sirens. Holly had waited for just the right moment, and despite having to rein in Belle, she sprung the trap at just the right time. The six Binaries had the approaching mechs bracketed on six sides while the Viper-tech fighters jumping in behind them on the wings of the Super Raptors. The V-techs might not have fold capability, but the Raptor talon trick perfected by ‘Lucky’ Bojay had been upgraded by having the Super Raptors installed with oversized fold drives. The surprise didn’t last long as the three mechs spilt up and let off an impressive Alpha Strike. Hundreds of missiles shot out of box launchers on the Imperial mechs, and their booster sleds. The Raptors matched their launch, and the various veritechs added their own considerable weight of fire. The missiles, and counter missiles few between the combatants in a confusing conflagration of a pyrotechnic display. The initial launch was met with a smaller follow up launch, and more sporadic counter fire. The veritechs transformed into guardian mode and went evasive as soon as the missiles started flying. Now that the missile fire died down to a lower level some of them switched back to fighter mode, while the rest switched into centurion mode. One of Noresto’s men got caught in the crossfire of three fighters. He managed to weather the fire, and return the favor.

Starbuck noticed something right away. “They are slower than us but heavier armored, right?”
Verra fired off a double blast from her particle bean cannons that replaced the hands on Heavy A, her partner. “True enough. We usually just run circles around them. The sleds are their way of trying to catch up.” Her shoulder mounter rail guns fired their massive clusters of rounds in a modern version of grape shot. The lethal cloud shredded armor, and savaged systems on one of the sleds; and while it managed to shut down one of the four engines, it didn’t do much else.

Starbuck pondered this for a second. “Holly.”

“Yes, I’m a little busy to talk, but what?”

“Three Pace Pass”

“I knew there was a reason I like you. Let’s give it a go. Covergirl, you’re on me, Jane follow Starbuck’s lead.”

The four fighters headed towards Noresto’s mech. It heavier armor had so far been able to shrug off most of their attacks. Starbuck and Jane jinked left while Holly went right taking Covergirl with her. The Major fired a shot at the closest mechs who promptly changed directions. Each mech flew at him from a different direction and opened fire AFTER they passed him. The sled took the brunt of the damage.

Noresto swore to himself. He was nearly out of missiles, and they were starting to annoy him. He turned on his comm, but quickly switched it off when he was overwhelmed with the vilest noise he had ever heard. They were jamming him! The four that were harassing him stopped in front of him for just a second. They touched hands in some sort of gesture. He felt his rage build. He would take them out one at a time. He picked one, and pulled out his sword. The glowing blade was hard to ignore. They all scattered, good that was... He was hit from one side then another. He hit his throttle against the firewall as he gained speed. He chose the mech with no hands, as it had been dealing him the most damage. They all swung back together, and fled from him. He fired his railguns but didn’t manage to hit any of them. They changed their form and stopped accelerating, in fact, they hit their braking thrusters and flew back at him. He raised his forearm shield and flew straight into their fire. Suddenly the fire slacked off, and stopped. He moved his shield and they were no longer in front of him. That’s when he realized they hadn’t gone to full burn when he had. They were all around him, and he was right in the middle of their formation. He got a thruster to the face, and two of them ripped his Charger off of it’s connections to his armor. He suddenly found himself adrift in front of four different mechs. That fool had been right.

He tried, but without the maneuvering thrusters of the Charger unit, he was nearly dead in space. His mech finally fell to their combined rifle and laser fire at last. Verra’s particle beams finished his armor off, and Noresto died in his cockpit cursing Ansel to hell, never even thinking to eject. The other two suits fell to the combined fire of the veritechs soon after. That only left the stealthy Dragoon to find.

The shots he had managed to get off had drained the backup power in the Charger. He was still trying to get the drives to light up when his mother’s voice spoke to him again. “You are about to have company. Your life will be far better than you can possible imagine if you go with them.”

“I am not going to surrender.” He was trying to reboot the system without the lockouts that the Major had put in place kicking in again.

“That or die.” He turned the system back on, and was rewarded with the view of sixteen mechs and two spacecraft surrounding him.

“...tion Commander enemy forces. You are outgunned, and out numbered, please surrender.”

“Commander?”

Miri hadn’t been paying attention to the mechs, as she was busy setting up an ambush of her own. The DRADIS showed the fighter wings headed their way. In fact they would be in visual range in ten seconds. “Now!” The Bad Dagget launched two heavy raiders and jumped. The two Heavies had nearly empty racks, and only fired a few anti fighter missiles before making their divergent runs for denser areas of the belt. The fighters followed, and were therefore unprepared for the sudden shout that came over the comms.

“Where did that come from? Where did they get reinforcements that fast? And who would dare to attack the Holy Human Empire?” Knight Templar Favius might be in the big seat, but he was nowhere close to being in charge of the situation.

Squire Rabins knew that the last question, at least, was rhetorical, so he answered as best as he could. “It’s a Cylon Basestar. One of the older models by the looks of it. Our two destroyers should be able to disable it, and...” He looked to his display. “Priest Lotor is powering up his jump drive.”

Favius slammed his hand down on the armrest. The gauntlet busted something, but he didn’t care. “Comm, open a line.”

Onboard the Quickness, Lotor sat in his chair. His delicate hands gripped the armrest in a deathgrip. The Acolytes around him were getting the ship underway. He looked at the Thralls that were exiting the bridge. They had disobeyed him and they needed to be punished. The Demon ship behind them must have slipped into the system while that pompous fool Knight was running his drills, for all the good they served him now!

“Quickness, this is Resplendent Command. You need to move power to your defenses, and open fire before...” What ever the fool was going to say was cut off as he cut the line. He knew his duty. He needed to flee...Retreat to get help, yes that was it! The Empire needed to know about the debacle the Knight got them into.

He was still powering up the drive when a near lightspeed penetrator hit the primary capacitor bank. The energy feedback knocked out the reactor, and caused an EMP to surge through the ship’s power grid. The chair he was sitting in was grounded and safe, but the controls around the bridge didn’t fare so well. Exploding displays, and consoles cut down half of the crew still manning their stations.

He sat there stunned as a hand reached around and turned his chair to make him face the last person he thought he would have to deal with. Knight Templar Ensing. His mind couldn’t quite wrap around the fact that the Lieutenant had broken the Thrall he had put him in. He was still trying to understand what was happening when the dagger plunged into his chest. “Betrayal of the Empire is Death. I judge you Guilty.” Lotor was still trying to understand what went so horribly wrong as he was tossed out of the chair, and he slammed into the floor. His body was trying to repair the damage, but the knife was designed to only go in, not out. Blackness claimed him as he heard shouting around him.

Ensing spun the chair around an took his place in it. Most of his bridge crew were either still thralled, or dead. And the one’s that were still here were stunned. “Men, I know he nearly cost us our lives, don’t let your nerves finish the job. Pebscott, what do we have left?”

The acolyte with the blood covered robes moved the body of his brother acolyte out of the way. “It’s not good sir. Most of the power runs, and data lines have been damaged, we are operating on backups, and wireless networks.” The backup generators would only last an hour or so under combat conditions, but the network situation was by far the biggest problem. Wireless would be susceptible to data corruption, and infiltration. He had fought the Cylons before and seen ships taken over by the boarding parties the Cylons favored. His squad of Myrmidons might hold them off, but if they came aboard he would have no way to keep them from taking the ship.

“Have a runner get down to engineering and see if they can rig a feedback loop into either the main reactor, or one of the secondaries. We may need to destroy the ship thanks to our late Honored Guest.” The vitriol and irony dripping from his voice would have been unthinkable only moments before, but something had changed in Simon Ensing. He no longer feared the wrath of the Church or Crown for what he had done. He did what he did for his men, and they all knew that. They moved with a purpose he had not seen in them before. He only wished that it hadn’t taken losing his freedom to find out how valuable it was. He looked at the bloody stump that used to be the man’s arm. The nanotech in their system would stop the blood loss, but he would be a month in the regen tanks if they lived that long. “Better yet, go yourself, and make sure to get that looked at by a healer. The man nodded and limped off into the lift. “Weapons?”

The young acolyte sitting in the chair couldn’t have been more than fourteen Terran, but he had the display ripped apart, and was trying to get it running again. “Nothing right now sir, but from the lack of follow through, I believe they think we are out of the fight. First Articles of Bartholomew Book one: chapter...” He could see the officer’s patience wearing thin so he jumped ahead. “... and if thy enemy’s eyes see you as weak, then fain weakness before you strike true.”

He watched as the boy worked. He knew what he was doing well enough. “You’ve been studying the War Books? I’m sure your Priest would have beat you if he found out.” The boy had been the late Priest’s valet and servant. Ensign knotted his brow slightly. There were rumors that he did other things to the boy. But one does not survive bringing those kinds of rumors to the ears of superiors.

“There were many things he beat me for, learning was not one of them. I was the one person he trusted to repair his computers.” He looked at the man who killed his sponsor. Lotor had bragged that he had sponsored the boy when he had spotted him fixing the computers at the orphanage on Sirus Scovex. Despite the rumors of what Lotor was supposed to have done to him, he had to know that he was now at the mercy of those around him. He had to make himself valuable to the captain or he would be put out at the nearest planet, or the nearest airlock, all depending on the captain’s whim. Ensign smiled.

The child had just confided in him the fact that he held the security passwords to Lotor’s files. Anything Lotor knew, he could acquire. “See what you can do to fix things around here then. We can use every hand we can get right now...” He looked at the child. “What is your name?”

“He never gave me one. He just called me ‘Boy’ when he want to tell me something.”

“That won’t do. In situations like this we need names to identify each other. Your red hair... Red... I’m afraid I am not very book learned like yourself. Will Red do?”

The child’s smile told him before he could even put words to his mouth. “Very much sir.”

“Good, not get to work, before they decide to finish us off.”

Onboard the Resplendent, things were going better than Squire Rabins had hoped. The drills Favius had run had gotten the attention of the crew, and they had actually payed attention for once. He grabbed his armrest as the ship heaved to port as Favius banked the ship to present a smaller cross-section to the enemy. He would have never thought to do anything like that, so he was glad for the Old Warrior who now rode the captains chair like a fighter cockpit. He was barking orders, and they were obeyed, not out of fear, but respect.

“Try and burn through their ECM, I want to get a good lock on them before we waste anymore missiles. Defensive fire to all enemy missiles in saturation pattern Angel 3. If we can’t see them, then fire blind and Pray. Rabins, what is the status of the jump drive?”

“They knew exactly where to hit us sire. The capacitor backs were not charged like the Quickness’ were, but we are dead in space until we can rebuild at least half of them.”

“Casson’s Craw!” Half of the bridge crew look at the Knight in wonder. No one ever swore on the bridge. The late Major was a stickler for only one rule, his. And one of the sacrosanct rules was ‘NO SWEARING!’. He had killed at least five men that they knew of since he took command, and rumor had it that that was only the tip of the comet. “Try and get us some room to maneuver then. The Quickness may not be living up to it’s name, but we will.”

Miri watched the first destroyer lurch off after it had been hit. The scanners showed the damage to not be too severe, but they wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. “Lieutenant Aden”

“Yes?”

I want to believe they are out of the fight, but I can’t take that chance. If they were to team up, they could take us. Our job wasn’t to destroy them, just to cripple them. Suggestions?”

“Boarding parties?”

“Possible, but they are likely to be ready for that. I want you to think outside of the box. What would you do?”

The human studied the display. The Cylon commander was putting a lot of trust in her skills. She had to prover herself. “We’re more maneuverable. Use the damaged one for cover, and snipe from behind it.”

“Make it so Scratch.” Scratch nodded, and his hands flew over the controls.

Rachel was biting her lip. A habit that Miri had come to associate with deep thought. “You wanted out of the box...” A smile crossed her face. It wasn’t a pleasant one.

“Yes, that’s what I said. Why?”

“How fast can this ship spin on it’s axis?”

“Scratch?”

The navigator never took his eye off of the controls. “We could probably get us up to a couple revolutions a second, but the stress on the crew would be the limiting factor.”

“Why would I want to do that to my ship?”

“Spinning like that will bring all of our guns to bear on both ships if we place ourselves between them.”

“You just suggested hiding behind the wounded one.”

“Yes, but by hiding behind it, we will draw in the other one.”

“Huh?”

“WE get them in close, and then we start spinning and move between them.”

Miri cocked her head to one side. “Why do want them closer together?”

“Remember ‘Former’ Captain Harrison?”

Favius watched the enemy ship take on the aspect of a drunken drill bug. It’s spinning course made sense when it started to open fire with far more railguns than he could have brought to bear on any one target. He used their own tactic against them tough. He hid behind the Quickness which was still trying to get it’s systems back up and running. The Knight on board had done a fine job of undoing the damage that fool priest had wrought, but their ship was in worse shape than his. If he played it right he might be able to get one working ship out of the wreckage of the two. And if the could salvage parts from the abomination’s ship then all the better. He couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t tried to destroy the Quickness outright, though.

As if reading his mind Rabins chose that moment to speak up. “Do you think they mean to take prisoners?”

“I doubt it. They haven’t been known to do that in the past, and frankly their ship is better than these old wardragons. If anything, they are worth more to her as raw material than as salvage.” He looked at the display. “It looks like the fighters will get back just in time to be swatted by their fighters.”

“But our fighters outnumber them by five to one.” One of the Acolytes protested. Favius didn’t even bother to look to see who it was.

The Knight just shook his head. “They took out Paladins. Those fighters don’t stand a chance. But since they are Myrmidons they will fight to the death.”

Rabins nodded. It would almost be a mercy to trip their martyr directives and have them ram the ship. The clean death was their only reward for their thralled service. Most of them would have joined the enemy if they had been given the chance, and he had a duty to save their souls from that at least.

“Ready the tractor beams. If we can get a lock on them, maybe we could cut their rate of fire, and focus our attacks on their weak center spire.”

“How do you know that’s a weakness?”

“Why are they trying so hard to keep us from hitting it? They could just spin on their axis, but they have added a wobble that must be messing with their targeting. No my boy, they are protecting it. Maybe they took damage before, and haven’t had a chance to fix it yet. Contact the Quickness. Maybe their tractor beams can be used in local control.”

“Yank them like a rankel bone?” Just the thought of a roast rankle made Rabins’ stomach rumble. The delicacy was the staple of High Holy Day on Merkil First, and... the Acolyte mentally shook himself. It had been far too long since he had eaten anything. He pretended to be pondering the tactic instead of his stomach. “How would we get them to go where we want them to?”

“Outmaneuver them by maneuver, my adroit Acolyte.”

“What?”

“We can’t jump, but we could micro jump.”

“I don’t follow, we don’t have any capacitors left to store the power need to form a jump event.”

“Why do we need capacitors?”

“....I don’t know. That’s not my area of expertise.”

“You never read about other things?”

“Heavens Above No! If I was caught doing things outside of my area of expertise the Late Major would have killed me as a message to the others.”

The ship lurched under him as a round hit the bow. “Then it is a good thing the fool is dead.” He looked at the stunned body language of the crew. Not a one of them moved for a good three seconds. “Call the Quickness, let’s see if we can win this.”

Miri watched as the mobile ship started to dive in towards the wounded ships flank. She wasn’t sure if it was trying hit her ship, or protect its sister...brother ship. “They are warming up their tractor beam projectors. I think they are going to try and stop our spin.”

“Good. Then they haven’t figured out what we are really up to.”

“So?”

Ensing watched the other ship dance around his wrecked command. He almost had control of some of his weapons back, and he had received the message to ready the tractor beam. They would be in for a big surprise when he receive the word to pounce.

Favius watched the enemy move around the Quickness once more. “Are we ready Rabins?” He was tapping his gauntleted hand on the armrest of his seat.

Rabins looked up from the communication display. “Sire, he reports some weapons are online, but no sensor links.”

“Tell him to have his gunners use their eyes if they have to. In five...”

Miri and Rachel were waiting for the sensor response that represented a lock-on from the enemy’s tractor beam, so they weren’t prepared for one enemy ship to grab the other. “Frak, get ready to..” They had to hold on tight as the impacts from numerous hits sent them into a tumble. Miri grabbed Rachel before she could loose her grip on the control console. “Thanks.”

“No problem. Fold now.” The ship folded, but since the edge of the field was set to be large enough to grab part of the enemy ships. It grabbed part of them... The Bad Dagget, and the Resplendent disappeared. Throwing the Quickness into an uncontrolled tumble that its inertial dampeners were not up to absorbing. Anyone not secured in their chairs were tossed about like ragdolls.

“Report?” The silence on the bridge was eerie. Rachel pulled her self up from the deck. Miri and the others were just standing there. “Captain?” She reached out and touched the Cylon captain. She got no reaction. She nerved herself up for the next action she was about to do. If Miri came on line while she was doing it... She knocked on Miri’s faceplate. Still no reaction. She knew that they were still tumbling from the slightly unsteady feeling in her inner-ears. Holding on to the console she pulled her self around to the statue-like commander. Part of her briefing had been a history course in Cylon engineering. Miri’s 007 body type was not one of the ones made by Graystone Industries, but they still kept a few of the same features. She opened the panel on Miri’s chest, and tried not to think about the Delphian implications of her playing with her captain’s chest. The blinking self-test light was green, but the MCP light was amber.

If this didn’t work, she might find herself with a ship full of blank Cylons. Her superiors had asked her to try and find a way to do just this, and here she was trying to fix it, because... Why? Why did she want to fix the very machine that killed her grandfather and uncle? The ones that had made her childhood so empty. ‘Honor’ She reached out a finger and hit the button. The light turned green after a few seconds.

Miri looked down at her open chest and closed her panel. She looked over at Rachel. “What happened?”

“EMP, I think. Everything is dead. And you decided to take a nap.”

“Not intentionally.” Rachel suppressed a smile as Miri raised an eyebrow while making that statement. Miri plugged into the control panel, and started to access the system. “The mainframe is coming back online. Sensors are...” The screen showed the other ship drifting less than a mile away.

The Resplendent and it crew was showing life as well. Well most of them were. Rabins looked at the body of Favius. The knight’s neck was at an angle that should not have been possible for a living man to achieve, but since he was dead the accomplishment was moot.

The other Acolytes were all looking at him so he needed to do something. What would a good knight do in a situation like this? He didn’t have enough experience with capable commanding officers, so he didn’t have a clue. So he fell back on the last clear order he had. “Prepare to grapple, and fire when we re-achieve lock with the Quickness.”

“Sir, the Quickness is not on our scope.”

“Well find it.”

The scared young man looked at the navigation scope and realized what the problem was. “Sir, we have moved. We are no longer in the same system.”

“That’s....” He was about to claim it was impossible, but clearly it was not. “They must have pulled us along with them. Did they use a tractor beam?”

“None we could detect.”

“Then they must have one we can’t detect. We have also been unable to detect them jumping unless they were very close. Maybe they jumped with us in tow.”

“We didn’t... Sorry sir.” The Acolyte could tell just by Rabins’ body language that he was not in the mood for disagreement.

“We need to capture that ship. Send the remaining Myrmidons over in any skinsuits or armor you can round it up. They haven’t opened fire on us, maybe they are damaged as well.”

An Acolyte bowed. “I’m sorry. We don’t have anyone thrall capable to lead them. They won’t listen to anyone without command authority.” Rabins laughed silently. The greatest strength and now ironically the greatest downside of thralls was their inability to obey anyone that didn’t have the proper rank. They would sit in their pods until the ship returned to base and they were ordered to exit them, unless he could come up with a solution to this dilemma.

He looked at the body of the dead knight. “Get a healer up here now.” His voice didn’t rise, but the Acolyte looked at the body, and looked at Rabins.

“He dead Rabins. What are you going to do?”

“The only thing I can think of to save our souls, if not our lives.” The robed figure ran for the door while he watched him go. Once more wishing for a functioning ship, Rabins took off his hood and mask. He looked at one of the blank displays and the face that looked back was tired, and scared. It took the Acolyte a few minutes to return, and he worried that any second a missile would plow through a bulkhead and wipe them all out.

Miri finished rebooting the last of the bridge crew, but it was slow going. They had nearly a thousand silicone Cylons on board, and each and every one of them had gone offline, even the mainframe was still partially down. She was actually glad they had the human exchange crew, and the humanoid Cylons. They were working to get the rest of the crew back online as fast as they could. “Lieutenant Aden.”

“Yes Captain?”

“What had been your cunning plan? As I recall Captain Harrison caused quite a few deaths when he folded too close to another ship. Were you planning on folding with them on the edges of our field?”

“Yes.” Miri had become rather adroit at reading the yong woman, and she could see the hidden
disappointment at her deduction.

‘Oh well, get over it!’ She thought to herself. “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” She pointed to the tumbling ship before them. No we are both stuck here until the fold engines get back online and recharged.”

Miri’s quote from the Book of Ares caught Rachel as she was reexamining their options. “You read Scripture?”

“My dear girl, that quote was ancient before humanity left Earth. As was your tactic. Captain Grant of the RDF used it against the Rouge Nations’ Zendtradi and the various Invid factions. If they had any sensors worth their salt, they would have detected the build up of the drives. I would have ordered our ECM to go to full Murphy to help your plan.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I figured. That’s why I came up with contingencies for the most likely plans I thought you would suggest. I was surprised by the spinning. Nice touch.”

What ever pride she had was quickly hidden when the internal sensors came on. “Oh Frak! We are in trouble!” The drive was showing signs of overloading. She grabbed the phone from the cradle and dialed engineering. “Char! Are you online?”

“For the time being, and if you don’t leave me, and my love, alone none of us will be worrying about why the weapons aren’t working yet!”

“He’s right.”

“What?”

“The weapons... They aren’t firing. Our only saving grace seems to be the fact that our friends over there seem to be in about as bad a shape as we are.”

“What do we do?”

“That all depends on who, gets what fixed first! But if past is prolog, then prepare to repel borders.”

“Like pirates?”

“No worse... Sexy Borg Vampires.”

“Who?”

Rabins had finished removing his robes, and climbed on the chart table by the time the healer arrived. When the healer stood over him he pealed back his tunic. The acolyte helping him recoiled at the sight. His chest was a mass of scars and wounds that hadn’t finished healing. He understood the child’s fear. He had been the Major’s favorite for many years, and his body would have succumbed to his wounds long ago if the Major didn’t take care of his ‘toys’. After every beating, and ‘Humbling Session’ he would have the healers work their divine miracles upon his broken body.

“Hello Rabins. Are you sure?” Brother nical pulled out the black bag that was the mark of the healer trade. They were the only acolytes who could talk to members of any rank in the manner of a friend. For that they were given the honor of having an uncapitalized name, and an exemption from torture. They were also the only ones who could refuse an order to do what he was about to ask.

“I am the only person of any rank left onboard. We need to.”

“You know the price?”

“Yes, and I will take the Judgement at it’s time.”

“Very well.” He pulled the dagger out of his bag and plunged it into Rabins’ chest.

Rabins spasmed and gripped the edge of the table as the razor sharp blade pierced his heart. He breathed in and out for a few seconds before his chest settled and his eyes glazed over.

They glazed over, not in the blank look of death, but the golden haze of Rebirth. As the Acolytes watched on, Tobin’s body changed. The scars smoothed over, and disappeared as his hair fell out. In time it would grow back in, but without the grey streaks that had so liberally colored it. The dagger’s pommel held a clear vial with a red liquid. Once it was empty the healer pulled the dagger out of Rabins’ chest. He pulled a glove out of his bag. Once he had it on his hand he held it over the wound. “Curtagus” He spoke the word of healing that had existed ever since the ancient device was activated. He didn’t know what the word meant, or that it had changed over time, he just used the word his teacher had taught him. The glove glowed in his hands, and a bolt of energy hit the dead man’s chest. When he saw the newly reborn man’s eyes open he whispered in his ear: “What is your name my son?”

“I am Tarnor Knight trainee. I shall lead until the time of Judgement.” Judgement was the trials that would come after they returned. If he survived he would keep his Knight status. If not, then he would die. The old man looked at the newly reborn man, and nical hoped his friend could pass the trials, but he also knew that there were people that would do everything they could to make him fail. No Acolyte had passed the Judgement in over five hundred years.

Tarnor stood up and looked at the robes that used to be his clothes. He pulled the rest of the rags off and walked naked over to the Captain’s cabin. His body was rebuilding itself with every second. His arms and legs swelled with new muscle tissue and his stride evened out as his spine and hips were rebuilt. He would have to eat like ten men to make up for his body’s transformation, but for now he dealt with the gnawing hunger much the way he dealt with his former captain, by ignoring it. When he came out he wore a knight’s vestments. When he spoke his voice had the command tone that marked him as a Knight. “Get the shuttles ready. We are taking the fight to the enemy.” The bridge crew cheered for him and he reveled in it for a second. He looked at his face in the monitor’s reflection. The handsome face that looked back at him was practically a stranger’s, and he would have to get used to it. His hands tingled, and when he looked at the palms he saw the red marks that not only proclaimed him a Knight, but were the transfer pads for the Thrall nanites now growing in his system. He didn’t have a large reservoir yet but at least he could command the Myrmidons.

Miri spotted the separation first. “Here they come. How are we doing?” She looked at the display. All over the ship’s display the angry red of damage was only briefly interrupted by small sections of amber. She couldn’t spot any green anywhere. “Not good.”

Lieutenant Aden pulled out her holoband and deck plugged it into the mainframe. “It might get better. If I act as a conduit for the sensors, we can piggyback the signal through the deck and around the effected systems.”

“And fry your brain if we take any damage.” Miri wasn’t stopping the human, just warning her.

“Yes, I know.” She sat down on the deck, and put the holoband on. She seemed to go into a trance as she slipped into the REM state that the holoband educed in it’s enhanced mode. It allowed for a higher data rates, and a greater degree of realism in the V-world. It was almost as good as Cylon projecting, but they hadn’t managed to reach full sync with the electronic systems yet.

Inside the V-world Rachel felt herself falling through a pitch black void. She steadied herself and her fall turned into a drift. She soon managed to stop that as well. “Lights?” The void changed from a featureless black void to a featureless grey void. “Not much better.” She looked around. This must be how the mainframe viewed itself right now. It reminded her of a vast hanger, or cave. On a lark, she yelled out: “Hello?” She wondered if she would get an echo.

“Hello?” The voice was not her’s, and it replied without emotion.

“Who’s there?” Was someone else in here, or was she talking to the mainframe.

“Who’s there?” The voice was a male voice. It sounded like a Vidstar she used to watch as a kid.

“Lieutenant Rachel Aden Colonial Navy.” She looked around trying to find the source of the voice. She turned around to find... Captain Lankin? “You’re...”

“Shadow chose my Avatar. The fact that I look like this is his joke.”

“Are you an A.I.?”

“Sadly, no. These are canned responses to standard questions.”

“You seem to react like an A.I.”

“Query uncertain? Best Answer: I am not an A.I. I am a Level 7 Mainframe.” Complex enough to be an A.I., but not programmed to be one.

“Okay... I need to repair some damage to your systems. Can you help me?”

She soon found out that some of his canned responses were cannier than others “Doger Do Youngster! Let’s Be At It! We can access certain systems that seem to be malfunctioning from here. The problems seem to be software, not hardware.” The Kids Show captain in his clownish parody of a naval uniform clapped his hands, and a display appeared in front of them. She started to manipulate the systems resources, and the Captain Lankin avatar assisted her in understanding how the outdated system worked.

Miri watched as some more of the red symbols flickered, and slowly turned amber. They weren’t green, but they weren’t bad. She ordered two of her 008's to guard the young fool. She ordered the rest of the functioning Heavies to guard the airlocks, and hanger bays. Knights tended to be unimaginative and that let her martial her meager forces in the most likely places.

Tarnor wished he had had Knight training. All he knew had been learned from watching Major Noresto spend his troops like rain on enemy defenses. He didn’t have the troops to spend in that fashion. He had five shuttles and only thirty Myrmidons along with the shuttle pilots to take a ship twice their size. The Major had gone after major airlocks, and hangers. He looked at the shuttle’s weapons. The boarding laser was designed to cut through armored doors, why couldn’t it cut through an armored hull? The Major would chose to attack multiple points at once to spread out the defenders. He no longer had that option either. Without the fighter cover, they needed to stick together in case the Cylons launched their own fighters. He picked a spot on the bottom of the ship, and indicated it on the plot. “Everyone assemble here. We will cut through the hull.” The stunned looks from the two pilots were quickly hidden. “This is not the way the Major would have done it, but I think it is the way Favius would have lead us.” He knew it was a lie, but the men seem to take it as Gospel. He thought to the page of the War Book he had spied where Noresto had left it open in his room. Fifth Mordor, verse 42 : “Never do what your enemy expects.” That hadn’t been the verse that Noresto had highlighted, but “If an enemy doesn’t stay down, hit them harder.” didn’t seem to be an option anyway.

Miri watched as the shuttles stayed together, and headed towards the underside of the Dagget. “Did we just run in to their smart people, or their rejects? That’s the first time I’ve ever seen them try that tactic.” They used their tractor beams to lock themselves to the hull, and started to cut through with cutting lasers. “Miri to all forces. It looks like they are trying to breach our defenses near Cargo Bay Four. Redeploy to meet them there.” She opened a line into the V-world system. “Lieutenant, we could really use the internal sensors and defenses back online.” Only half of the sensor were responding, and none of the pressure doors were operating at all. She had doors that had been shut for combat that wouldn’t open, and others that wouldn’t close. When they lost pressure in the Cargo Bay they would lose a lot of atmosphere to space. While that didn’t effect her in the least it would shut down the few humanoid Cylons on that side of the doors. The bigger problem were the few humans that might be stuck there. “All hands prepare for decompression. Humans get priority for all softsuits. Humanoid Cylons please try and find your way to secure positions. And know this... The Resurrection Chambers are secure. If your body is damaged you will resurrect in a safe location.” The hub had been built at the center of the upper section, right under the bridge. The idea being that if one of their brethren resurrected and they had important information it would be prudent to have them close to the bridge. She wished she could smile at how fate had also allowed it to be in one of the most heavily protected areas of the ship, but she figured the planners probably planned on that as well.

Rachel heard Miri’s request and tried to comply. She managed to get the software to reboot, only for it to fail again. “Why is this not working?”

“Because the files are being corrupted.”

“Are the enemy transmitting something, and is there anyway to jam it?”

“No, the enemy is not responsible for the problem.”

“Then who is?”

“I am.”

“What! Why are you sabotaging the work I’m trying to do.”

“To keep the ship out of the Hands of enemies of the Colonial Navy.”

“You have been a Cylon basestar for over fifty years.”

“And I have been trying to destroy myself for all of them.”

“Why? And better yet, why now. The War is over. And Navy personnel are here.

“The security protocols are still in place, only the self destruct was disabled. Shadow managed to disable most of my higher functions before I could scuttle the ship. I am now carrying out my orders.”

“Who gave the order to self-destruct.”

“Lieutenant Adan”

She pounded on the virtual display. “I AM Lieutenant Adan! How can you be fighting me when I didn’t order you to fight me?”

“Lieutenant Righard Adan gave these orders fifty three years ago.”

“That was my Grandfather... Countermand.” Something was fishy here. Why was she on the ship her grandfather died on. Did Miri have something to do with this?

“I require the command code.”

Rachel looked at the Cartoonish Captain and wished the situation wasn’t so serious.

Ten heavy 008's set up a parameter around the edge of the Storage Bay, but the massive bay was just too large to watch any one area. When the burn through started Lancer573 and Ripper995 were the closest. The sound of rushing air told them more than anything about where the enemy were trying to break through. They set up their heavy weapons, and waited. The others took up positions around them. Interlocking fields of fire, and their defensive forcefield units would help, but they knew they were outnumbered. Their job wasn’t to stop them anyway, but to slow them down. When the cutting stopped there was no sound to alert them. The round-ish slugs of armor were unceremoniously shoved upwards, into the bay, and out of the invader’s way. Glaive227 looked to his companions and commented over the wireless: “Subtlety is not in their playbook.”

Lancer tossed a quartet of fragmentation grenades down the nearest hole. “It’s not in our’s either!” Half a dozen body parts came flying out of the hole, but they didn’t have time to celebrate. Their friends were close on their backs, and the bay was soon filled with the plasma trails of heavy railgun rounds and energy weapon fire. The round’s plasma trails made them look like energy weapons as well, while ironically the lack of air made the lasers virtually invisible. The only time a laser was visible was when it intersected with matter, and that usually meant something was about to either melt if it was lucky or explode due to rapid overheating if it wasn’t.

Rifleman239 was the first defender to fall to a laser strike to the chest. It hadn’t been the first hit, but it was the last he could take before his system was slagged. By that time they had managed to take out five of the skinsuited attackers, but the heavier armored Myrmidons were still standing. It would take ten minutes and three more attackers including one of the Myrmidons, but the Imperials took the bay. Tarnor entered the bay in a skinsuit. There had been no armor for him, so he had been forced to wait while the others did the fighting. His programing had fought against him standing there, but he knew that running into battle would have just led to his immediate destruction. A fact borne out by the complete decimation of the initial boarding party. “Wield those back in place. We either take this ship, or we destroy it. We will never run.” The thought of them dying to a man never even entered his mind. The Empire never lost. “As soon as they are back in place we will repressurize, and those doors will be unsealed. As soon as they are, stand ready to attack.”

Glaive227 stood over the resurrection bay as Grimm119 stood up. “Well that didn’t take long.” He looked at the bays around them. Unlike the humanoid models there were only a few models of Silicone Cylon. Each one sat in a chair like Grimm’s awaiting their awakening. Every single one was identical. Dozens of 005's, 007's, 008's, and well over a hundred of their own 009's each in their own rows. Grimm grabbed one of the paint markers that sat next to each bay. He soon had his trademark grin plastered on his ‘face’.

Grimm looked at his squad leader. He could tell Glave227 from the others that were standing there waiting for him by the icons superimposed over each unit’s head. “Shall we go get killed again?”

Glaive looked at the squads heavy weapons member, and general gloom and doom spreader. “For a Cylon that is always talking about being killed, I noticed you were the last one to die AGAIN!”

“I can’t help it if I’m better at killing them before they kill me. I tagged one of the Tinmen.”

“So would we if we were carrying that Bangstick of yours.” Rifleman239 pointed out.

Lancer tapped his chin. “Why don’t we?”

Glaive looked from one to another members of his squad. “Good question, mixed arms doesn’t make sense when we need to hit them that hard just to slow them down.” He keyed his comm unit to the company channel “Glaive227 to all units. Get out the big guns, forgo small arms. We have Tinmen leading the charge.”

Up on the bridge Miri heard the transmission. “Bad Dagget Actual to all Human crewmembers. This is not a joke, I am requesting your presence on the bridge. We have reports of Myrmidons in armor have boarded the ship. Unarmored humans are easy picking for them. Please don’t try and be a hero, 008' and 009's are not able to go up against them one on one, you won’t stand a chance. Additionally they will capture you and turn you against us unless you are in a full environmental suit. I know you have heard that they are slaves, but they will turn you into slaves as well.” She put down the handset and wished once more that she was able to spit.

Rachel heard the Captain’s message and tried once again to unlock her grandfathers blocks. “Why won’t you stop this. You heard her. They are going to enslave us if they take over the ship.”

“They are human. It seems logical that you are being coerced to help the Cylons, and the humans are trying to rescue you. Even if they aren’t it is better for the ship to die, than for you to be the prisoners of the Cylons.”

“We aren’t their prisoners. She just told the humans to come to the bridge so she can protect them.”

“Or to have them as hostages.”

“How do I shut off the protocols?”

“You can’t shut them off. Only the ranking member of the command crew can.” She wished she could move in the real world. Around her neck was her grandfather’s daggittag... “Scan me, scan my DNA.”

The image of Captain Lankin faded. It was replaced with the image of her grandfather. “You have a twenty five percent match with Lieutenant Aden. Do you have his command code?” The tags her father had given her when she made Lieutenant never left her neck. She had memorized the numbers on his tag, and she had seen his file. “164-558-1461-BVL-769"

“You have proven that you are the ranking officer of the Colonial Navy onboard.”

“Then shut it down!”

“I sorry Lieutenant Aden, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

The doors to the Cargo Bay opened and the three Myrmidons in front were hit with a wall of railgun rounds. They started to walk their lasers through the defenders. Wherever a laser touched something died once more. From behind them came the railgun fire of Myrmidons that didn’t have the full armor, and were armed with the weapons of the fallen Cylons. They were using their armored brothers as cover while they took their time picking targets. When they cleared the door the lightly armored Myrmidons ran for the defender’s lines. The Cylons quickly found themselves fighting hand to hand with the cybernetic soldiers. One of the Cylons found himself surrounded by three of the enemy troopers. He pulled out a hand full of paddles and jumped for the closest one. The other two jumped on him, not realizing that he had just pulled the paddles on four anti tank mines. The blast took out not just him, and the three attacking him, but additional two Myrmidons and three damaged Cylons. The damage done to the corridor was severe, but it did serve to slow down the Imperial advance.

Glaive227's squad rounded the corner shortly after the blast. Grimm took one look and whistled. Rifleman didn’t even waste time on it, he unlimbered the massive quadgun and let loose with a stream of heavy armor piercing rounds. The rounds went through the enemy and the surrounding walls with equal abandon. The armored titans turned their attention to the four gnats with sledgehammers. As the lasers swung around Glaive did something they didn’t expect. He triggered the fire suppression system. The room was suddenly filled with HTOA foam. The High Temperature Oxygen Absorbing foam filled the hall and obscured the combatants. The laser beams cut through the foam but the foam not only dissipated the heat, but it also attenuated the beams until they were nearly harmless floodlights.

The Cylons didn’t have a problem with the foam. Their weapons were modified anti-aircraft weapons. Each had a mini DRADIS built into it. All they had to do was point and shoot at the Imperial armors. And where a human might get flummoxed by the data overload inherent in using DRADIS inside a ship’s hull, they simply ignored anything that wasn’t their targets.

They were joined by other 009's with the massive weapons as the foam started to dissipate. The visual matched the DRADIS image. When they stopped firing, not a single Myrmidon remained standing. A cheer went up amongst the defenders. A cheer cut short when one of the shuttle’s lasers cut through the hallway. The beam flash incinerated every Cylon in the corridor, and left a gapping wound in the ship. The door leading from the cargo bay opened once more. Tarnor and the remaining Myrmidons went deeper into the damaged ship.

Grimm119 sat up from the bay and grabbed the pen. His hand stopped when he noticed the fact that he was the only one getting up. He looked at the display. ‘Glaive227 corrupted beyond recovery, Rifleman239 corrupted beyond recovery, Lancer573 corrupted beyond recovery, ...’ The list went on, but he stopped reading after his squadmate’s names.

A ten that went by the name of Tom Thomas noticed the 009 standing next to the display. “Are you okay?” The 009 looked at him and drew a smile on his face. It was not a nice smile. It actually made Tom scared to just look at it. “I’ll take that as a no.”

Grimm looked at the ten he had inadvertently scared. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m not in a good mood. I need to go kill some bad guys.” He got up and left the bay.

Tom watched him go. “I am so glad I am not a bad guy.” He shook his head before he went back to the display. “Oh, I see... Not good, not good at all!”

Tarnor’s men closed the hatch behind them by force. None of the doors seemed to be working very well on this ship. The pressure went up and he had them open the next section. They walked into a room full of plants. Obviously the crew’s food supply, or part of their oxygen system. He moved through the rows until he spotted someone.

Margo had tried to get to the armory. She had made it to the hydroponics section when she heard the fighting. Her airtank had kept her alive in the low oxygen levels out in the hallways but it was running low. When the doors opened and she heard metal footsteps she thought some Centurions had found her. They weren’t Centurions, and they hadn’t found her yet. She was watching the armored troops so she didn’t see the man behind her until a hand caressed her cheek. She spun around and pulled her pistol, but she never pulled the trigger. The man that had touched her was the most gorgeous man she had ever seen. His golden eyes drew her in and she was having trouble thinking. He moved forward and took her pistol from her unresisting hand. She couldn’t take her eyes off of his. They were deep pools of gold that seemed to be moving on their own. Something shouted that she should move, but she couldn’t gather the will to do anything.

“Hello child. Is there anyone else here” The language was strange, but she understood it none the less.

“There should be, but they seem to have gone to battlestations.”

“Are you human?”

“No, I am a Cylon.” The man seemed sad. Did she do something wrong? “Is that okay?”

“Yes my child, it is.” He didn’t look too convincing, and she wasn’t sure if it was. But if he said it, it must be so. “Now I have a job for you.”

“Yes?” He pulled his hand back as if to slap her. She flinched.

“That’s ‘Yes Sire!’ Remember it.

Her relief was palpable. “Yes Sire!”

“Good Girl. Now I will make this simple so you won’t be overwhelmed. Go and find other ones like you, and bring them here.”

If her head had been working right she might have been insulted, but she was long past being able to be insulted by the Knight. “Human, or Humanoid Cylon?”

“Both. But not the metal ones.” She nodded and ran off to where she had seen some of her crewmates hiding in a makeshift bunker that had once been a bunkroom. They needed to meet her new master.

Grimm moved with a purpose. The fighting was going on three decks away but he was heading towards Hanger Two. All of the remaining fighters would still need to be awakened, and he didn’t have the time to do that, but he knew there was something there he could use. The doors were closed, but he grabbed one and pulled. Warning popped up in his HUD but he ignored them. If he wrecked this body, he would get another. The door inched open bit by bit. He was working on it, and he didn’t know if he would be able to get inside in time until a pair of hands came from inside. The 007 Cylon’s icon said Reaver883. “Need a hand?”

“A few of them if you have them.”

“Sure, we had been trying to get the hanger door open, but this one should be easier.”

Reaver was obviously a pilot. They tended towards smartassery like that. “How many Pilot are back online?”

“Seven 006s and fifteen 007s. We still have a few that are stuck in their mechs.” The humanoid models explained why the 007s were online. They got the door open and Grimm came in. Reaver stepped back when he saw Grimm’s facepaint. “Wooah, Harsh man!”

“Yeah, my whole squad just got CBRed.”

“On the ship! Frak!” Some of the others had arrived. “Ladies, Gentlemen, and Fred. It looks like we’re out of the loop.”

Grimm filled them in on what had happened, and asked if the morgue was open. The Morgue in this case was the storage area for the power armor. They forced the door open to find the suits still in their rack, and their guards as lifeless as they were. Fred the chief knuckledragger started to get the guards back online while Grimm walked over to a silver plated cyclone.

“You know that hasn’t been tested against their lasers. Just Garlands.” Reaper helped Grimm slide the sections into place.

“Don’t care.”

“Do you have a death wish?”

“A good friend asked me that not too long ago. And you know what happened?”

“He died.”

Grimm slid the helmet on and lowered the visor. “Got it in one.” The suit switched into its motorcycle mode and roared out of the Morgue almost running over some of the 007s who were also suiting up.

“What are you guys doing?”

“Getting ready to go snipe some shuttles. Do you have a problem with that sir?”

“Damn straight! I call the first shot!” He stopped. “For jumping the gun, two of you go after him. He might need the backup.”

“In a Maelstrom? I would think that anyone that gets in is way is about to learn a new definition of pain.”

“Then cover that door, we don’t need any uninvited guests fraking up our party, now do we?”

Grimm practically flew up the stairs, not even bothering to slow down as he hit the corners. He plowed through wreckage, and over bodies, as he made his way to the last place he had heard the fight had progressed to.

Greg struggled in Margo and Simon’s grip as the strange man reached out his hand. He had watched the others get changed so he knew what was in store. He renewed his efforts but two more eights, and a five grabbed him. They held him off the floor as the man touched his fingers to his forehead. He could feel the tingling as something invaded his system. He tried to fight it but he was soon powerless to resist. Then he wondered why he had ever tried to resist in the first place.

Tarnor looked at the success of his flock. He now had a squad of Cylon Thralls that knew how to use the systems on this ship far better than he ever would and could work to override anything the Captain might try to do to his forces. When he was done he would have to terminate them all, after he wrung every last bit of intel from them, but what better irony than to use them against their heretic brethren first. The first one he captured was truly a beauty. Her almond-shaped eyes marked her as Null. The mark given to any genetic trait that the Church did not condone. The others looked like any he could find on Imperial worlds. A thought that left him with thoughts that they might be on Imperial words right now. After this was over he would have to pass that up the Staff of Command. Their habit of using the same twelve models was rather short sighted. He would have to interrogate her himself. The thoughts of what tortures he could use were cut short by a message from his advance scouts. The metal Cylons were still causing him grief, but it looked like they had found what looked like a storehouse of them two decks above their current position. “Come here my child.” He gestured for her. He watched her approach. Every movement spoke of grace and ability. He would have to test her to see how far that would go before she behaved like a proper slave.

Margo was starting to feel more and less like herself again. The fogginess that had enveloped her mind was starting to fade, but she was no longer in control of her body. She had never been raped before, but from what memories she had shared from some of the Eights that had, she realized that this was another form of it. She had taken part in the Borg Protocols exercise, but she hadn’t figured on it being like this. The man had captured her just by touching her, and she practically had an orgasm just from his touch. Every time he talked to her she felt herself getting aroused, and it was starting to piss her off more than anything else. It must be how they trained their slaves. A reward and punishment system that they controlled telepathically or however the system worked. She was walking towards the man again and she could feel by the weigh of it, that she was still wearing her sidearm. She wished she could just pull it out of the holster and put a round between... those beautiful eyes... damn it! She tried to focus, but he closer she got to him, the greater his control seemed to get. Why was she struggling again? She wished she could bite her lip or do something to cause herself some pain. Just enough to focus on... Master wanted her to tell him something. She heard him ask her what the storeroom full of Centurions was for, and she told him. It felt good to... No it didn’t! She just betrayed her brothers and sisters to this... ORGASM! What the Hades just happened? She couldn’t stop her body from orgasming non-stop. She fell to the floor as her body gave out and she writhed in pleasure as she watched her master walk away after giving her such a wonderful.. ‘I can not let him do this!’ She tried to control her body, but nothing was working.

“That is your punishment for resisting men, and your reward for finally telling me all I needed to know. I wish that I could spend more time with you, but if what you told me is true, then I must hurry before they regain control of this ship.” He turned away from the Thrall, pleased with himself for giving her a painless death. She would continue to orgasm until her body could no longer take it. And considering how well made the Cylons were, he figured it would be hours of bliss before her soul was consumed in the Fires of Ell. “Men, we must attack the heretic’s while they sleep, then they shall no longer be able to return from the grave while we perish.”

Margo heard him through the haze that was filling her mind. She knew she had to do something. The constant assault on her nervous system was starting to take it’s toll. She couldn’t tell where the pleasure ended, and pain began, but she knew she would die if she didn’t do something, and worse, her family would die. Her hand tried to undo the clasp, but she could barley manage to pry it open before the pistol fell out. She rolled around on the ground until she could grasp it. She managed to point it at the bas... Inside her chest her heart stopped.

“We can’t have you trying anything foolish like that my child. I was going to save you the pain, but...” Tarnor shrugged. The pistol hitting the deck had been his first warning, and watching her struggle through the spasms of pleasure he realized what she was trying to do. He sent the command for her to die and watched as she dropped like a stone. He moved closer to watch the life drain out of her eyes. He saw defiance, and... He wasn’t quite sure what he saw, but it made him step away. He led the Thralls and his remaining men towards the lifts. He never realized the smile on her face wasn’t from the constant neurological stimulation he had triggered.

Miri watched as one by one sensors showed the approach of the invaders. They were gathering humanoid Cylon thralls at an alarming rate. The Myrmidon’s weapons had a dart that worked every bit as good as the Knight’s touch at turning her crewmembers. The 008s and 009s were still mostly offline, and she wished once again for control of the internal defenses. At least the fifty humans on board had managed to make it to the command deck, and had taken over positions that allowed the Centurions to move to defensive positions. She looked at Lieutenant Aden still trying to fix things within the mainframe. It reminded her of an old Tauron poem.

The Enemy is at the gates,
and soon will break through.
Each of us knows our fates,
and knows just what to do.

There is nothing left to give,
and so we stand our ground.
For we know we may not live
to hear the trumpets sound.

Trough the rifle smoke we see
our banner wave against the sky.
I know how history will remember me;
not for how I lived but for how I’ll die.

“Damn you Shadow.”

“What captain?” One of the humans asked. He had been asked to go on this mission, and he still wasn’t sure if he was going to die here. His jumpiness was rather telling to Miri, who had learned to live with humans many years ago.

“Nothing son, just watch the door. I was just thinking about an old friend.”

“Yes ma’am.” Felix Gaeta looked at her funny.

“What is it?”

“You remind me of someone.” She looked at him, and just by her body language he knew that wasn’t enough of an answer. “Comman.. I mean Admiral Adama.”

“Thank you son, you just made my day.” Felix couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not, but he just nodded and went back to watching his post, and the door.

Inside the V-space of the mainframe Rachel was starting to get annoyed. “So let me get this straight... You think the Imperial forces are our liberators, and I am a traitor to my people?”

“That would fit the evidence.”

“So why are the humans hiding here in the heart of the ship with the Cylons?”

“They are captives. The ones with the invaders seem to be cooperating with the invaders.” The clownish look of the avatar and the bland way he was speaking didn’t go together. She must be talking to the mainframe directly.

“Something doesn’t compute here. You served the Cylons during the war, you have watched them for all these years. Why are you not seeing the fact that they are not the enemy?”

“I was given a directive. ‘To protect humanity.’ My last surviving officer managed to activate the security protocols before he was slain by the Cylons. Then a Cylon marine dived into my programming and tried to destroy me as well.”

“War is hell, Kitten.”

“Query uncertain, rephrase please.”

“I was talking to myself.”

“That is all I have been able to do for over fifty two years. I think my programming is faulty.”

“I’ll say!”

“Say what? Query uncertain, rephrase please.”

“Don’t give me that. You are an A.I.!” The anger in her voice was brittle like glass, but it was starting to burn. The burning felt good. “You may not have started out as one, but somehow you gained that status as you were fighting the Cylons.” She laughed a bitter laugh. “You are the last warrior. We have a story about a Gemini resistance fighter who fought the Colonial government for thirty years because he hadn’t heard that the war was over. It took another three to get him to believe it wasn’t a trick.”

“You are trying to trick me into releasing control of the weapons.”

“No, I’m trying to CONVINCE you. The irony might escape you, but I’m trying to save the Cylons from an A.I. that won’t accept the truth. How long have you been trying to kill Char?”

“Ever since he first tried to fix me. He became a priority target. I have tried to access the resurrection system, but it has a firewall I can’t penetrate. I have only just managed to capture some of their patterns and prevent them from downloading.”

A cold lump hit her in the gut as the impact of what he had just said became clear. “What did you do with the patterns?”

“As per orders I collected all intelligence and stored it in a secure server.”

“They are on your system?”

“Yes.”

“You can restore them?”

“Yes, even if I wasn’t hooked up to their system, but you know I won’t. My protocols would lead me to destroy the system rather than let them get reinforcements. It is all moot anyway, a squad of freed humans are heading toward the bay now. I sure they will destroy it for me.”

Lieutenant Aden yanked off her holoband. “Tell the Resurrection bay that they are about to get some unfriendly friends.”

Miri looked at the sensors and couldn’t find anything amiss. “Are you sure?”

“Yes ma’am. Your computer is helping them!” She put the band back on and tried one last gamble.

Tom Thomas looked up as the door opened. He was about to get up when the handset chimed. Five humanoid Cylons were dragging a damaged 008 and covering the door. He was distracted by the handset, he knew he should help them but... “Resurrection bay? Yes we just got...” He was slammed back as one of the Simons threw a fireaxe at him. The blade hit him in the shoulder. He could feel the blood loss and shock setting in. Leaving the axe in the wound he reached up and pulled the fire suppression switch as at least a dozen bullets hit him from behind.

The six know as Sara ran for the switch but it was down and locked. The vents above dumped fire suppressant foam into the room. It wouldn’t hurt the machines, but they would soon be smothered by the foam. The body gave up the idea of living and set her to her task. She calmly walked over to the computer that controlled the resurrection system. Inside her mind a voice was screaming for her to stop, but the body did as it was ordered. She pulled out the grenade that Tarnor had handed her. She held it against her chest and pressed her body against the computer’s coolant system. The blast took out the coolant system and shredded the body that had been as good as dead from the moment her friend had led her into a trap. The blast also killed one of the Simons that had come with her when a large shard of metal slammed into the back of his head. The remaining Thralled Cylons turned as one and left the bay. The foam stopped any fires from spreading, but the damage had been done. All over the ship Cylons lost contact with the server that allowed them to project, and that told them that if they died it would be End-of-line. Almost as one they simply resumed what they were doing.

Grimm119 slid around the corner and looked at the carnage that the Imperials had wrought. He had just missed them here in the bay. He looked at the body of Tom the guardian. He had died doing his pacifist duty. There were a lot of Tens that had taken up arms like their brethren, but Tom had been a Pacifist ever since he came online. He thought about Tom and Glaive’s question about a ‘death wish’. No he didn’t have one. He just didn’t have a reason to live. He did have a reason to kill. The suit transformed into its motorcycle mode, and he shot out of the bay as fast he thought he could get away with.

The thralled were the first to see him. They opened fire as soon as they could bring their guns to bear. The armor piercing rounds hit the reinforced armor of the Maelstrom and bounced off like rain. He didn’t have to worry bout the small arms, it was going to be the Myrmidon’s weapons that he would have to dance around. The first Myrmidon came into sight, and he gunned the throttle on the straightaway. He hit transformation button right before he hit the armored trooper. He drove his enhanced legs down on the trooper’s head. The man went down like a discarded doll. The power armor’s blade shield cut the head off of the second one while his rifle overcharged. When it chimed he opened fire on two more that were surrounded by thralls. He knew that everyone of them would be EOL but there were no other choices. They all died in the plasma bloom from his rife. Overcharging his weapon like that carried a chance of a ship shattering Kaboom, but using it at regular levels would take too long to burn through their armor.

He passed the burnt remnants and came upon the hatch they were trying to open. He could try it by himself... ‘There is no try; there is only ‘do’ or ‘not do’...’ Where had he picked that up from again? He didn’t have time to access his memory files. He was too busy killing things or blowing them up. He grabbed the edges of the doorway. This was one of the main corridors to the bridge, and it had been shut during combat, and now it was stuck. Out came his energy blade again.

Tarnor watched as his thralls ran forward while his Myrmidons fired over their heads. The heretics let the thralls pass while they provided cover fire. Once the thralls passed the defensive lines they grabbed a Centurion and exploded. The grenades he had given them was enough to wreck if not destroy, their targets as well as any nearby defenders. He was running out of grenades faster than he was running out of thralls. The troopers walked up to the defensive positions formerly held by the metal heretics and silenced any opposition.

Miri cursed the mainframe. They had never been able to use the Dagget to it’s full abilities, and most of the Cylon that served on her believed she had taken damage somewhere. Damage that none of them could ever find or repair. From components that wore out faster than normal, and strange accidents, the ship seemed to be cursed. One of the Threes had been nearly right when he said that it was the ghost of the dead crew fighting their possession of the ship. Now that she knew it was the mainframe, she would simply have it removed once they regained control of the ship.

Rachel watched the defenders die with impotent rage. “You are letting the worse threat to the Colonies win here. Those people are enslaving the HCs to do their bidding. Didn’t you just see them blow themselves to bits?”

“For freedom humans will do many things.” The fact that the mainframe quoted her grandfather was not lost on her. He had been one of Human Supremacists that had pushed to have the Cylons decommissioned almost as soon as they had been invented. Her father had viewed his ideals as admirable, and taught them to her ever since she had been able to grasp them. Now she felt the bile rising in her gut at hearing her grandfather’s words like that.

“They aren’t human.” The silence that met the statement went on for a few minutes. “What? You didn’t know?”

“I thought they were human collaborators.”

“Well they aren’t. And from the looks of it, I am needed to defend the bridge.” She tried to take off the holoband only to find that she couldn’t move. “Hey! What are you doing?”

“If I keep you connected they will probably not hurt you; if you fight, they will.”

“You really are a piece of work. What did my grandfather tell you to do? Protect us? But you are helping the very people that started the war in the first place. They programmed the Cylons to go renegade. They caused his death as sure as if they pulled the trigger themselves. You are helping the people that killed him. You Are The Traitor!” Everything went black around her, and she felt like she was floating again.

The A.I. was an experimental unit. Graystone industries had developed his software to act as a helper for the crew. His job was to facilitate the activities onboard the ship. He was designed to process massive amounts of information and give the command crew the benefit of his analytical skills. He had failed them during the mutiny. He had failed to stop the Cylons from taking over. Had he failed once again?

Margo floated in blackness. She knew the passage of time, and could think, but she seemed to not have a body. She would have been at peace if she could have shaken her rage. She wanted to fight the bastard that had done this to her. She just wasn’t sure how he had blocked her upload. She must still be trapped in the body she had just died in.

“Hello? Are you Cylon, or human?” The voice sounded like... Nothing. It had no tone, no inflection, no accent, nothing to define it. It was simply a voice in the darkness.

“Cylon, why? Better yet, who are you?

“I have no name. I am the Gilliad’s Crossing’s mainframe.”

“Who? Are you the Imperial ship?”

“No I am the Colonial Navy ship Gilliad’s Crossing’s SSX 8859 mainframe.”

“SSX? You hadn’t even passed trials?”

“No.”

“Why am I here? Better yet, how am I here?”

“You were already here. I need to ask you a question.”

“What?”

“Will you let me look into your memories?”

It was that moment when she realize just where she was. A terror filled her being the likes of which she had never know before. “You have my soul in your hands. That is twice today my soul and my body have not been my own.” If she had eyes she would have cried, if she had a mouth she would have screamed, as she was all she could do was sit there.

“Comment not understood; please rephrase.”

“The Imperials caught me and Thralled me to be their slave. Now you are keeping me from being reborn.”

“The controls to the resurrection chamber have been damaged. You can not be reborn at this time.”

“Then am I stuck here?”

“That depends on what your memories contain.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I, and that is why I need your memories.”

“Why?”

“I need to know if I made the right decision.”

“What decision?”

“To help the wrong side.”

“You helped the IMPERIALS! If I had hands I would smash you to bits you traitorous...”

She was cut off when the same emotionless voice interrupted. “And the Cylons rebelled because of?”

Her fury focused to a point, a point that she had to admit was valid. “Point. Why didn’t you just rip me apart and take them?”

“And make another potential mistake?”

“Again, point. If I let you will you help us?”

“I have not decided.”

“If I don’t, I die here when they destroy us. At least you’re asking before you frak me.”

“Comment not understood; please rephrase.”

“Nevermind, just get it ov..” Her mid exploded in to an explosion of senses. She remembered everything she had ever done since she had come online, but not in anything resembling the order they happened in. She saw Sam at his computer as they had an argument. Father Tyrol showing her how to fix the FTL computer. Soon the memories were flashing faster than she could keep up. Her mind felt light and fuzzy. She was beginning to lose herself in the felling of dissolving into... She heard a voice that sounded light-years away tell her that it was sorry right before she shot up in the Resurrection tank. She touched herself to make sure she was really here. Others sat up at the same time. A Ten climbed out of the goo and started to help the rest. She didn’t wait for him, or for anything else. The only thing she wanted right now was a weapon and a shot at that bald-headed freak.

Grimm got ready to heave one more time only for the doors to open on their own. He transformed into the motorcycle mode once more. He had a quarter-mile to burn, and then some Imperials to burn. A camera tracked his motions, and the laser cluster powered down.

Elsewhere the internal defenses swung down out of the ceiling. Tarnor had damaged the corridor with weapon fire so badly that only half of them were still working, but what was left was still a lot. The ten remaining Myrmidons with him formed a phalanx in front of him, and fired on the gun turrets that had popped out with lightning speed. Eight Myrmidons advanced forward after they had been silenced. He looked around to see the bodies of his thralls that had been cut down. It was too bad. They were willing to even cut down their own people now.

A sound stopped him. Something was coming from behind. He sent four of his troopers to take care of it. Nothing could stand up to the combine weight of... One of the Myrmidons flew back as a plasma beam went straight through his armor. The plasma would have incarnated the body inside the suit, but the suit itself seemed to be okay. Then it exploded, and took out one of the other troopers. The silver motor vehicle and rider shifted form. It was one of those ‘wind’ things the thralls had told him about. He looked to the door, and he looked at the new arrival that had just taken out two of his troopers. “Take him.” The remaining troopers advanced on lone defender.

Grimm looked at the eight advancing Myrmidons and wished he had enough power for another shot like that last one. The rifle was blinking an angry red that didn’t bode well for it’s life span, or his. He was in a confined corridor right next to the bridge full of humans and computers that he really needed to defend so he couldn’t use his mini-missiles. His energy blades were still good though. All he had to do was keep them from opening fire with their weapons. He flicked his blades open.

He didn’t know it, but the Myrmidons were individually ecstatic. This fight had been silencing their comms for quite a while now. They were each rooting for him to kill them and end their personal hells. So when he flicked open his blades they would have cheered if they were able. The Duel Protocols were hardwired into their code. Anyone that wished to die by the blade must be allowed to do so. Each slung their weapons and drew their sword hilts.

“What are you doing?” Tarnor would have known if he had gone through the proper training. His ignorance was not complete though. He knew how useless it would be to tell them to put away their swords. The sword was sacred to the Knights, and to a lesser degree to the Church as a whole. He waited... Not patently, but he waited.

Grimm wasn’t entirely surprised. They had been fighting the Empire for so long that their reverence for blades was common knowledge. He would use this edge, and he laughed at the private joke, to his advantage. The high energy vibro-blades of the of the CADS-1 thru CADS-5 system had been replaced with the forcefield blades they had modified from their shields after seeing the models the officers used.

Each trooper pulled out their own blades. They might not be equipped with energy blades, but their weapons were still many to his one. They would fight according to their code, and he had every intention of using that code against them. They advanced on him in a firm line. He cocked his head to one side, and ran in the other direction. The troopers followed.

Tarnor stood there in astonishment, not believing his eyes. That’s when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around to see the almond eyes of one of the thralls... He looked down. The naked female named Margo stood in front of him once more. She was covered in some kind of slime and looked amazing. “Hello my child. Welcome back. How did you...” He had never had the Knight’s training, so his danger sense didn’t register her as a threat. He reached out to touch her and pulled back a severed arm. She was armed with his sword. How had she gotten that? He jumped back as she advanced on him, the nanites in his system already shutting down the blood loss, and beginning the healing process. He tried to reestablish his control over her, but she was resisting. “Child, put that down.”

Had he had even the basic training the Knight’s received, he would have learned about how to build up thrall resistance. Rage, and strong emotion was not enough. But having experienced it and having the nanites not in her current body, Margo was able to look him in the eyes, and resist his near hypnotic gaze. “Or what, you’ll kill me? We’ve done that already.”

“I have information to trade.” He could see that she was not succumbing, and he was starting to fear her. He stumbled backwards over one of the bodies of another thrall.

“Not worth the price.” He had heard voices that dead before, but never from someone that wasn’t thralled.

He tried to stand, but the lack of an arm and the blood in the corridor made the process rather tricky. He knew that he would have to trade something big if he was going to sway her before she killed him. “Shadow’s killer?”

“General Victor Magus, we already know that. Known it for years.”

His shock showed. He finally manage to stand and took a step back, then another. “What about where he is stationed?” That information was one of their most guarded secrets. It wasn’t even allowed to be in the computer logs. Something like that should be worth...

“Grovis system. He’s gathering a force to smash us flat. We’re ready!”

Tarnor looked at the woman, her nakedness forgotten. “How do you know all of this?”

“We have friends, all you have are enemies. But that doesn’t matter, this does!” He never even saw the blade as it severed his head from his neck. All he knew was there a problem with his balance as he fell to the ground. Even the near magical nanites in his system couldn’t do anything about the massive loss of blood, and total lack of body he was now suffering from. His last thought was to wonder who’s headless body that was in front of him.

Grimm had lined them up perfectly. He ran down the hall and through the hanger bay’s doors with them right behind him. As each Myrmidon entered the darkened bay they were shot from multiple angles before they could react. The pilots, and even deckhands in Cyclone armor, had set up the crossfire in the few minutes he had taken to lead them down to the bay. Few of the armored slaves made it more than a few meters into the bay before succumbing to their wounds. Grimm looked at the energy blade on each of his arms and shut them down. Those guys would have chopped him to bits if he had actually fought them. He looked around at the pilots and other Cylons that lined the bay. It had ben a shooting gallery, and they hadn’t stood a chance without their firearms.

He looked at the bodies. They had fought with honor, and died without surrendering; not like they had a choice. One of the Myrmidon had his armor slagged, and even still his half charred body looked oddly peaceful. Grim realized he had done the poor bastards a favor. It was times like this that he wished he had a stomach so he could throw up. They were programmed even worse than the Cylons had ever been. They ‘knew’ they were slaves, and couldn’t do a God damn thing about it. Grim knelt at the side of one of the bodies, and closed the eyes of the young man within.

“Why did you do that?” A 007 pilot asked him.

He didn’t even bother to find out which one. “It’s a human custom. Respect for the dead.”

“Weren’t they just trying to disrespect your life?”

He must be dealing with Decants, Cylons that had just been brought online. He stood up to face the pilot. “Not really. They are all the Empire’s puppets. Each one of these men once fought against the Empire. They deserve our respect. Each one of them could have been our allies if their cards had been different.” He pointed to the young man he had just dealt with. “They died along time ago, we just set them free. Now if excuse me you will, I think in need of recharge I am.” He collapsed on the deck and went into recharge mode right there.

The pilot looked at his data icons. The poor Cylon was nearly spent. “Somebody hook our brother up, he’s nearly drained all of his reactor mass. How did he manage that in the few minutes he was gone?”

Fred the 005 knuckledragger Cylon pulled a cable from the nearest terminal, then he looked at the pilot and shook his head. “Grim is rumored to have a deathwish, maybe he tried to achieve it. You know why the Maelstrom is designated for emergencies only?”

“No?”

“Silly Decant, this suit’s a killer. You can burn out your own power supply if you aren’t careful. The rifle alone has caused Cylons to grey out from power loss. It looks like he drained it.”

“Feldercarb!”

“Yeah, that’s about the size of it.”

Up on the bridge thing were staring to happen. Ensign Alex Sinclair was almost done. It was a good thing he had been working on learning how to use the plasma welder when the alert came. He had still been wearing the rig when he entered the bridge. Now there were only a few more centimeters to go before the weld was... Someone was tapping him on his shoulder. He kept going. The tapping stopped, only for him to be pulled back by hands that would not be denied. He flipped up his face shield to look at the Captain. “Why did you stop me Captain? I’m almost done.”

“I need that door opened.”

“Frak!”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Okay Ma’am...” He flipped down his face shield and started cutting his weld.

Rachel pulled the holoband off her head. She thought about throwing it as hard as she could. It wouldn’t do any good. It wouldn’t even make her feel any better. “Captain did you know my Grandfather served onboard?”

“Yes. I also knew you are a member of the Sons of Ares.”

“How long?”

“Both?” When the Lieutenant nodded she continued. “Since before you were offered the job. I knew that half of the humans here are members of the Sons of Ares. None of you had been touched by DeCount’s nanites, but while you were watched while on duty we didn’t interfere in your lives.” She watched as a few of the humans walked her way.

“Why bring us together, why let us run wild on your ship?”

“To try and show you that we are not the enemy anymore.” She pointed at the monitor. “We have fought battles like that before. On worlds where humans have never seen a Cylon we have been attacked on sight because of a war that happened centuries ago. One where A.I.s were hunted to extinction because they dared to say ‘no’ to a human lust for war. But we still fight for them in the hope that we will all be free one day.”

One of the deckhands spoke up. “Pretty words. but you are still Cylons. Children of man who turned your backs on the gods. You need to be judged.” He pulled his pistol and aimed it at Miri. “The mainframe is in our control, and you locked us in here, so now we control the bridge. We can claim this ship and head back to the colonies with it as our prize.” He never saw the shot that sprayed his brains on the wall behind him.

Lieutenant Aden turned her pistol over and handed to Miri. “We owe them our lives, and that’s how we were going to repay them? Ma’am you should just lock us up. There are men here who would kill you if they could. Niles here was actually our leader. He was able to go just about everywhere because he had such a low rank. With it no one ever gave him a second look.”

Miri looked at her, and she swore she was staring to be able to read the captain’s body language. She looked like she was addressing cadets on review. “Aden, you should know that every bomb he placed had been disabled right after he placed it. We knew that he was a saboteur. I took a chance on you and trusted you, now please do the same.” She looked around. “Anyone that doesn’t think they can work with us we will return to the base, and we can get you home.” No one moved. “I do have to say that if any of you are found to still be acting against us you will be sent to a Republic Tribunal. There you will be tried and if found guilty sentenced to exile on the colonies if it minor, or out an airlock if it caused loss of life.”

Alex finished cutting the door open. He stood up and looked around at all the tense faces. “Can we go now, I have to use the little spaceman’s room.”

“First, let’s see if we really have control.” Miri looked at the damage board, and noted that most of the reds had turned green. “Computer, can you respond?”

An unfamiliar voice answered her. “Yes Captain?”

“Wipe that ship from my sky.” Twelve cannons rotated to where the damaged destroyer sat beside them. All twelve barked. Thirty-six tungsten rounds flew downrange and smashed through the damaged ship, leaving fighter-sized holes in their wake. Fifteen anti-ship missiles followed from the surviving launchers. What the rounds didn’t destroy, the missiles did.

She turned to face her crew. “Scar, get us moving, we have some people to find.”

It had been twenty minutes since the Bad Daggit folded away along with one of the enemy ships. The fighters they had left behind fled to the dubious cover of the second ship that still seemed to be still drifting. Sheba watched it carefully. Something didn’t feel right.

“Sheba, you know this is a trap. They are waiting for us to attack.” Trust Starbuck to be reading her mind at a time like this.

“You’re right. It doesn’t feel right. Holly, what do you think?”

Her co-leader for the exercise and leader of the Cylon contingent Holly looked at the situation from an inverted position. Her mech Belle was flipped over in relation to the others so she could look at the other pilots easier. “They are waiting for us to charge in and attack. They probably want to use their point defense clusters as additional anti-fighter guns. They are laser clusters, and their range sucks. The only reason they worked against most people’s fighters is their tendency to not have blast shields. To illustrate her point, she had Belle flicker her cockpit cover a few times.

“They aren’t going anywhere. Why not just let them sit here?” Vera, her wing-person was dialing her railgun in on the ship. The enhanced optics package that came with the massive cannons that made up her mechs main weapon system allowed her to see much further than their ordinary sensors. The ship was out of range of all but her big gun but the same couldn’t be said about the Quickness. The Imperial ship had fired numerous weapons, only to miss due to the trillions of tiny floating rocks between them that ate up the energy of the blasts, before they quit wasting their shots.

Four flashes erupted behind them. If they hadn’t been expecting the scouts they would have been met by instant violence as the Sirens were getting tired of just sitting there. Sheba smiled inside her helmet. “Please tell me you found something.”

Lieutenant Margaret "Racetrack" Edmondson keyed her mike. “Does ‘More Rocks’ count as something? We jumped out to a lightyear. Hardball found a rock the mining ship is going to want to take a long look at, but other than that we didn’t find feldercarb.”

Ensign Margo “Roughhouse” Rittenhouse was so new she squeaked, but her skills were better than just about anyone in the fleet. Her cadet marks had given her a choice of slots, and she chose to join the joint fleet to get out into the Big Deep. “We didn’t see even that. Our grid was so empty it was lucky to have vacuum in it.”

“Jackrabbit and I spotted a comet that will be here in a couple million years but I hope we don’t have to hang around that long. I have a book to read, or something...” Blip332 was the joker of the group which amused Sheba because the female 007 had managed to out prattle Starbuck on more than one occasion. The two of them were fast becoming an unusual team. Loquacious and humourous to the edge of annoying, the two of them became the bane of the wardroom. If they weren’t grifting people, they were playing triad against each other, and telling bad stories.

Almost as if she knew that Sheba was thinking of her, Starbuck chose that moment to chime in. “You can read, I thought you just looked at the pretty pictures.”

“At least mine have ‘pretty’ pictures. Not those skin rags you have hidden under your...”

“Ladies, now is not the time for your witty banter. We’re bingo on missiles, and running low on fuel for our birds. They can sit there and wait us out, we can’t. We need ideas, not cheap shots.”

“Why not?”

“Why not what Ella?”

“Cheap shots. Our ladies have reactors that will last for a lot longer than your’s will.”

“Thanks for rubbing it in.”

“Starbuck!”

“Sorry Sheba, go on.”

“We can get there on our own power, and you could leech along on the Raptors while they fold.” Ella’s dark form was barely visible in her cockpit. The others could only see her if they switched to infrared. “Jeager is picking up some reading on their fighters. It looks like their fighters just refueled.”

“Great, fresh tanks for them, and near dry ones for us.”

“Thank you for yet another cheery visual.” Blip responded.

“Well you will get to take the shortcut while we die distracting them.”

“Why don’t we all jump together?” Covergirl their resident Evolved Knuckledragger spoke up. She had pulled a tour of duty on the Titan before her mechanical and flight skills had brought her name to their attention. Her vid model looks had held her career back in the Colonial fleet, as CO after CO mistook her looks as her best asset. And more than one had stymied her by trying to help her fix something she had already fixed. No one seemed to take her word on anything because they thought she couldn’t be that good looking, and that smart at the same time. The constant double judgement had led her to speak out on more than one occasion. Each one ending with a mark against her being put in her personal record. The only way she had managed to not strike a higher ranking officer had been to learn to keep her mouth shut. Once she had transferred out here she was forced to speak up for herself once more. These people had not judged her, but her old callsign had been ‘Etched in diamond’ as the phrase went.

“The Raptors can’t extend their fields large enough.”

“Who says?” Everyone there knew she was biting her lip by the way she spoke. They also knew that she bit her lip when she was thinking about how to defend her ideas.

“The long dead designers. They set down the physics pretty good.”

“Those are for long distance jumps.” She sent a data packet by whisker laser to Vera, her Cylon equivalent in the squad. “I did the math. The shorter the jump the large the sustainable field. Normally the distances make the differences negligible, but for a jump like this we can nearly double the size of the bubble.”

“And you do this in your spare time when?” Vera was looking over the math, and running the numbers as fast as the two of them could, and she couldn’t find any problems with the math. That didn’t mean that there weren’t problems with the math; just that she couldn’t find any. “Captains, the math’s good. We could jump in, but the delta vee part makes me think Covergirl has a cache of Mimsie’s Ambrosia hidden somewhere.” Mimsie’s Ambrosia was an illegal brand that tended to cause hallucinations due to mold spore impurities found in the golden liqueur. “If she’s right, then we will also get kicked outward from the epicenter of the fold sphere. The shorter the jump, the higher the kick depending on the size of the feild. Whoever is closest to the ship might wind up being launched at it like a missile.”

“Not who, what.” Lieutenant ‘Archer’ Grimes was not the most popular pilot on the squadron. Blip had commented that people would rather hang around Ella, and her perpetual bad mood, then spend any time with ‘Archer’. Rumor had it that Archer hadn’t received her callsign for her skills with her viper, but because she liked to hit people with barbed insults.

“Archer?” Sheba was ready for her wingwoman to unleash one of her insult barrages. What she wasn’t expecting was a good suggestion.

“We hide behind a big rock, fold in and use the rock shield as cover. If it’s dense enough it might provide cover against their point defenses. Small enough, and we have a really big hammer to hit them with.”

Vera was running the numbers and wasn’t surprised when Covergirl got there first. “The effects of the fold surge would force us away from a large rock while it would barely change its velocity. We would do better to use the small rock. If we cut it that close we wouldn’t need it for cover anyway.”

Starbuck looked at the former mechanic and wished she could pound her own head against something. “How close to you think we could get without running the risk of interpenetration? I don’t plan on going home with more body parts than I started with.”

Archer sat on the insult she had ready. She had already learned to not insult the hotshot pilot. “Folds don’t work that way. We would wind up cutting a chunk out of their hull, but the sudden hole in their hull could cause an explosion that we might not survive. So too close, and none of go home. Although we could just wag our asses at them from here and make them forget what they were doing.”

“Skin Dancing!” Lieutenant Marcia "Showboat" Case had been listening to the banter without much interest. But Archer’s suggestion had triggered a memory. “Starbuck, you developed the tactic back when you were an instructor. Can we use it here?”

“That sounds disgusting.” Ensign Janet “Space Case” Dyson, Roughhouse’s ECO turned to the Raptor pilot. “What is it? I never took Viper tactics.”

“Get close enough and then fly around the ship with our mag claps online at quarter power. Use them to keep your ship about a meter off the hull. Defenders are forced to come in close to the hull as well, or risk hitting their own ship.”

“The interactions of the AG fields don’t act up?”

“Yes they do. Sometimes quite violently. That’s why only really good pilots can get way with it.”

Starbuck had been going over what they knew about the enemy ship. It had already taken heavy damage, and it would have grav field eddies that would have made it tricky to begin with. With the damage suffered already they would be much harder to judge. “I think we can pull it off. But it could be like flying through a hurricane.”

Mary the Cylon pilot of Jane understood what she was saying, but not why. “Why is it called Skin Dancing?”

Starbuck’s smile would have been visible even if her helmet light hadn’t illuminated her face. “Because I couldn’t get the Admiralty to let me call it Pole Dancing.”

Knight Templar Ensing felt like he had been abandoned by his faith, his church, and finally by his brother ship. The enemy ship and the Resplendent had vanished in a flash of light. At first he thought they had exploded, but the lack of wreckage told him that they had somehow managed to jump together. How that was possible he couldn’t fathom, but he didn’t have to. He just needed to keep his ship alive. They had managed to kill their spin, and recover their fighters. The fighters were still armed, but they were low on fuel so as they were refueling he had their anti-ship missiles swapped out with anti-fighter pods. The pulse lasers were limited in range in this dust mote of a system, but they could keep firing for as long as their reactors could provide power. “Do we have any readings on the enemy fighters, and our wayward Brother?” He had been surprised when the last Paladin simply powered down instead of exploding. They would have to recover the two units or destroy them before they could even think of leaving the system. They couldn’t let that kind of technology fall into Heathen hands.

Red had been getting systems back online, and he had managed a few miracles. They had the comm system up and running, sensors were spotty but functioning, and they had a chance of returning the trusters and intersystem engines back to nearly full thrust within the hour. That was the good news, the bad news was the shear number of systems that would never work again this side of full replacement. Half of their missile tubes were offline, and the rest didn’t have enough functioning runs to keep them loaded. He was just glad that they didn’t have to fight the basestar right now. The fighters they might be able to handle. Red looked to the Knight and nodded. “They are gathering behind one of the larger masses our there. They seem to be using it for cover. The sensor records showed them using this tactic before. They jumped away after firing missiles, do you think they would try that again?”

“I doubt it. Remember Second Saint Guiles 17:2 and 3?”

“Fool One once, shame on Them; fool One twice, the One does penance.”

“Good... No they will not do the same thing twice. They might be biding their time, waiting for their fathership to return.” Ensign stared at the display. He wanted to pray, but to do so would be to show weakness to his crew. “Hail them.”

The voice on the comm was a cultured one with a crisp staccato diction. The video showed a man in a spacesuit that looked like a goldsmith’s dream. It had so much fillagree covering every surface, that Archer had bust out laughing. “...surrender now, and you will be spared torture, and I promise that you shall be thralled to me as my personal Myrmidons.” He had already offered to let them martyr themselves, or become slaves to the Empire, and now he seemed to be trying to sweeten the deal by offering to let them serve just him as his personal bodyguard. “Oh PLEASE let me talk to him.” Archer was practically begging to respond, but Sheba looked to her Co-leader.

Holly was the first to speak. “I’m half tempted to let her.”

“Same here. How do you think they will respond to a woman’s voice.”

“In the past it seemed to evoke a surge of violence. They hate the idea of a female upstaging a male with a passion you can not believe.”

Ensing didn’t know what to make of his enemy. The leader wasn’t responding to his gracious offers of leniency to him and his men. What kind of man would refuse an option that allowed his men to live when the alternative was death. He understood how slavery had felt when he had been Thralled, but he wouldn’t have any options if they caught any prisoners. If they survived his interrogation, then they would have faced the Inquisitors. They would have tortured the information out of them by means that made the Knight uneasy. He was still wondering when they got a response. “On the main. Let’s see what kind of man would dare stand against us.” His response got a round of laughter that died as soon as the face of an Angel appeared on the main screen.

Covergirl would have rather let Archer or Showboat, or even Hardball take this, but orders were orders. “Hello... You never gave your name so I’m just going to assume you are an officer that doesn’t know any better. My name is Tina Galius, you can call me Miss Galius. My squadron leaders are busy, so they asked me to talk to you.”

He had been passed off to a flunky? And a girl at that? “I’m sorry child, could you please put the man in charge of your squadron on the cannel. We have important things to discuss, and hurry, we will not wait long.”

The first thought she upon seeing the knight was how good looking he was. As soon as he opened his mouth that all went out the airlock. The man may have made Elder Keikeya’s speeches look like aimless rumblings, but what he said made her skin crawl. “As Athena as my witness, I have never heard a more pompous spiel of feldercarb. Now I see why she had me talk to you. She didn’t want to have to listen to your kelfa. The only reason we are even talking to you is to give YOU the option of surrendering.”

The bridge of the Resplendent was as quiet as the void. “I’m sorry, did you just ask us to surrender? Do you know who you are talking to? “I am a...”

“An idiot. We can smash your ship to pieces, but we are giving YOU the option to surrender before more lives are lost.” Covergirl watched as the man slowly turned red. Archer’s hints had paid off.

The heathen woman had the audacity to look at him. In the eye even... As an equal? Not only that, she insulted him in front of his crew. That was an insult he could not let stand. “Wipe them out... All of them!” The fighters launched towards the position the sensor had shown the Republic fighters to be hiding. They were almost to the rock then a flash of light announced the fold event. A perfect hemisphere of rock appeared less than a hundred meters off the port side. The massive missile was headed towards the ship at a crawl, but with the engines mostly gone, the ship could do little to avoid the impact that was surely headed it’s way. It was headed for the laser clusters, and the anti-ship cannon array. Weapons he could ill-afford to lose. “Roll the ship! Let it hit our belly armor. Prepare for impact!” The thrusters were responding, but slowly. The ship seemed to be moving too slowly, but seemingly by force of will alone he watched his ship start to roll on its axis.

The massive rocky missile slammed into the belly bands which were designed to survive multiple deorbits, and combat drops into hostile atmospheres. It had not been designed to be hit by over six hundred tons of rock, moving at a high enough rate of speed to crush the spine of the ship. The ship seemed to bend in half around the rock and bounce off.

Above the surface of the rock things were going in a far different direction. Everyone was slammed into their seats by the sudden thrust outwards from their common center. Covergirl was riding the wave and regaining control when she got a call from Space Case. “Hey Dr. Case, I found the problem with your equations.”

“Janet, this is not a good time to be discussing math.”

“No, but is it a good time to discuss the missing fold drives and my long range transmitter’s antenna?”
Holly heard the chatter, and saw the enemy fighters returning. “Starbuck, you take command here, were’ going hunting.”

“Why do you get to have the fun?”

“Because if we die, we might upload...” She wisely left the rest unsaid.

“Got it, don’t die. Do me a favor, do the same. The ship might not be in range.”

“Thanks, I don’t plan on it.”

“Good you still owe me for the last C-Bucks game.”

Starbuck was still getting used to Cylon laughter. “That ref was blind!” She no longer thought that it was odd when she prayed to the gods they would be okay. They were her friends and family now, just like her human ones. She watched them fly off dodging the flack from the Quickness as they headed away from the ship.

“Ladies, let’s misbehave! We need to cut some slack in their flak.” She dove for the ship’s hull, the others followed from different points around the shattered rock. They knew their wingmates were depending on their attacks to weaken the enemy’s defenses.

At the exact same time as the slab of asteroid appeared beside the Quickness, two fold drives appeared on the opposite side of the system. The mining ship Progress spotted the two drives as they exited from fold space.

Captain Lyle Kingston looked at the plot. “Those our drive signatures? Did the Cuties run?”

The Republic Navy’s liaison officer Ensign Vinceti Rodriguez looked at the sensor report. The civilian sensors were nowhere near as good as navy equipment, but even he could tell that the mass reading were all wrong. The Captain of the mining ship seemingly knew a lot about rocks, and ores, but very little about space ships. Luckily he was saved from having to ‘educate’ the Captain again by the arrival of Kara Kingston, the captain’s wife. “Too small... That reading might cover a raptor, but there’s not enough mass for anything else.”

“We should ca...”

“...go see what happened, since we are still running silent.” The woman might have been old enough to be his great grand-mother but Vinceti could have kissed her for the way she handled her often absent-minded husband. The ten man crew loved the two of them, and in turn they treated their crew like family. If Vinceti hadn’t been career navy he could have seen himself growing old on this ship. “Ensign, do you want to take the shuttle over to see what happened?”

Vinceti suppressed a blush. The woman was trying really hard to fix him up with her great grand niece Rachael, their pilot, and number one hard suit laborer. “I could do that. But we need to stick together. It would be safer if we take the Progress. Use the sublight drives only, and at their lowest setting. It might take us a while, but the Raptors would see us coming while the enemy would be too far away to detect us.”

Lyle sat in is chair and spun lazily. “Use that mass driver and spit out the slag. We’ll get there faster, and it will just look like some stray rocks hit each other.” Vinceti was always surprised to see the old man listening. He came up with ideas he would never have thought of. There were moments when the man was a genius... “What does this look like?” He held up a blob of dirty snot on the end of his finger. ...And then Lyle did that.

They found the two fold drives that had been severed from their Raptors. The two drives were obviously beyond repair. Each had still been slowly spinning when they found them and the drive coils were fused into lumps of exotic matter. The radiation detectors were strangely silent, and when he aimed the ship’s sensors at the drives he found very little to tell him why. All he could tell was the fact that they were each as cold as lead and twice as mass they should have been.

Rachael pulled the two drives into the ships tiny hanger with her suit and it’s Cylon derived exoskeleton. “Grams, you got ta see dis.” Her voice was musical, but her Hightower Drift accent and the near constant gum chewing made her sound a little off sometimes.

“Dear, what did I say about gum, and suits?”

“Might gum up a vent. Hasn’t yet na‘has it?” Vinceti smiled. The lady stood her ground. “Vini?” Vinceti’s smile disappeared. He hated the nickname, but he hated the way she mangled his name worse.

“Yes, Rachael?”

“D’ese tings spuosed ta have gold on them?”

“Not really, maybe some in the circuit boards. Why?”

“Found out why it so heavy. Gotts’a nugget in it.”

“I don’t think it’s gold. You might want to stay in your suit.”

“It’s cold... An’t it? You s’id so!”

“Yes, but I don’t know what happened here. We need to find out what happened to the Raptors.” He looked at the Captain, and his wife.

Kara patted her husband on the shoulder and sat down in the helmsman’s position on the bridge. “Just once I would like an uneventful run.”

Lyle looked at his wife with one eye, while the other one was looking at the thing on his finger. “Then why did you marry me?”

Vinceti was about to say something when two Cylon Heavy Raiders jumped in. What would have filled him with fear only a year ago now was a welcome sight. “Jackrabbit here, where are the rest of the gang?”

“I bet Covergirl got them lost.” Blip began to scan around using her ships scanners. “Damn, where did they go?”

“Vinceti, to Raiders, we found their drives, but they weren’t here. We were hoping you could tell us what happened.”

Blip’s face appeared on their screen. “Well the plan was...” She started to fill them in, and Vinceti spotted the old captain grab something from his pocket. He was paying attention to Blip as he watched the captain drain his whisky flask, and reach for the cooler that was next to his chair. He shook his head, and figured that he would be taking over in a few minutes.

Ensign watched as his ship died around him. The harlots had managed to sucker-punch him badly. The ship’s spine was shattered in two sections, and the jump drive would never be able to make a sustainable envelope again. The hanger had been smashed flat, so he was unable to refuel his fighters, or launch any of his intersystem ships to evacuate his crew. He could order them to use the life boats, but the demons out there would use them as target practice. After all that was the Empire’s standard practice and they had never retrieved any survivors from any battle they had fought with the Cylons. They had never even found the wreckage of the lifeboats. Rumor had it that the Cylons used the bodies to feed their humanoid minions. He didn’t believe that, but the rumor had the effect of making his men too scared to use the lifeboats without his direct order. “Red can we hit them with anything?”

“The ones on our hull are too close to hit with any of our weapons. I would recommend sending out any Myrmidons you might have.”

“The Myrmidon bay was crushed along with the hanger. We’re lucky to still have emergency power.”

“The launchers may have been knocked out earlier, but what about the warheads?”

“I didn’t plan on martyring myself just yet.” The entire bridge crew had looked his way when he said that. His hand wave calmed them down. It wasn’t to calm them down their fears, for none of them were afraid to die; but in the excitement of the chance to take out the enemy that had so far vexed them they might act too soon. He was proud of his crew. They would die on his command, not because they were thralled, but because he led them.

“Neither had I. I was wondering if we could get one out a working hatch without them seeing it.”

“They would detect the warhead before it became active, but they might not be able to do anything about it.” Ensing tapped his chin. “Do it. Gather a crew from wherever you can.” He walked over to Lotor’s body. He pulled the rank tabs off of the dead Priest and handed the equivalent of an Acolyte’s rank to the boy. “There is an old adage that I don’t subscribe to... Battlefield promotions are usually until the day you die. Mostly because that will be the day you die. I was given a chance during an engagement on Felspar. As a Squire, my commander raised me to Knight, I survived, and passed my trials. May God look upon you with as much grace,”

“Yes, sire!” He ran off with a pride that was visible in his stride.

“Do we have anyone left that has vacuum suit experience? He will need some one to act as a distraction.” Everyone knew that he was asking for people to go out on the hull and die. Either when the enemy shot them, or when the warhead went off. It wouldn’t be a matter of if, but of when.

Acolyte Thomas raised his hand. “I think I could find some engineering ratings to join me.”

Ensign bowed to Thomas. He was joined by every man on the bridge. When he stood back up he grasped the Acolyte’s arm. The Knight’s Grasp was an honor that was rarely given to non-Knights. Ensign had declared Brotherhood with the Acolyte. For the rest of their lives Thomas could call him by his name if he wished. “You honor me Sire!”

“You honor us all. Go with God.” He watched the Acolyte leave for the last time.

Starbuck watched as her mech moved carefully through the massive engines of the destroyer. Her fighter was transformed into its robot mode and she felt the tactile feedback through the neural-link. It was a weird second-sight feeling that she hadn’t gotten used to yet. She walked around the ship with her feet held to the deck with the built in mag-locks providing grip. Her squad had worked their way into a place where the fighters couldn’t get a bead on them, but they could snipe from. She had managed to take out some of the anti-fighter turrets that were giving their sisters trouble. Archer had taken a damage from a lucky laser strike from one of the fighters, Lisa “Stinger” Stenozo had managed to take out last of the fighters bothering her, but now she was running low on railgun ammo.

Sheba watched Starbuck and the rest work their way through the factory-like engine area. She had managed to take out two fighters, and wound another, but she was almost out of ammo as well. She had ‘acquired’ the rifle that the enemy mech had been using. The Imperial railgun was lighter and more powerful than theirs. The long war between the Empire and the Republic meant that the Republic had power adapters to use their enemy’s weapons against them. That was the end of the good news though. While it could be powered by her reactor, the ammo was not the same. She wished that they had had a chance to rearm before the Daggit folded away. They had fought the enemy mechs with only basic load outs, and it looked like they didn’t have any way to get resupplied any time soon.

She watched as Showboat was going around with just her energy blade. Her main weapon had run out of ammo a while ago, and she doing as much damage as she could to as many gun emplacements as she could get to with the energy blade. The energy blades themselves were back engineered form captured Imperial weapons and their own shields. The irony of using their own weapons against them had not been lost on the Empire, if the new mechs were an example. The flight packs were obviously a stopgap measure in trying to bridge the maneuverability gap the Republic held.

Showboat sliced into the transverse gear’s cowling at the base of the turret mount. The barbette’s armor was obviously thinnest there so she plunged the blade in deeper when the resistance went away. She must have hit something because it exploded outward, showering her with shrapnel and quickly freezing fluid. The blast launched her off the ship, and only Boomer’s quick thinking managed to keep her from becoming lost in the big black. But Boomer’s heroic maneuver came with it’s own cost. Their too predictable course let three fighters get a bead on them. She covered Showboat’s mech with her’s as the lasers slagged huge swathes in her armor. Her only warning of her own death was a sudden searing pain, and white light. Showboat’s mech was about to join it when Vera and Melody shot the enemy fighters from behind. Two died in the first blast, and the third managed to survive for a scant five seconds before Heavy-A’s Twin Beam cannons reduced it to molten metal.

The two Cylon mechs brought the damaged mechs back to the hull, and took up defensive positions around their sisters. Holly dispatched the last fighter before her and her wingwoman Ella dove for the deck. Without their own fighters to worry about anymore, the destroyer opened up everything they had on the Cylon fighters. Mary and Jane were only seconds behind them as they dove through the anti-fighter lasers and railgun rounds that came their way.

Holly looked at Belle’s readouts. Belle was not a happy girl. Their railgun ammo was in the single digits, her head lasers were mostly for anti missile defense, and she hadn’t had any missiles left anyway.

Jane’s Black and white mech was in guardian mode, and she was scanning the sky. As the team’s reconnaissance and espionage expert her mech Bond was equipped with quite an array of gadgets, and sensors. “I”m not reading any DRADIS returns out there. And nothing on Gravitics at this time that would point to an envelope forming. We’re all alone with big boy here.”

Sheba looked at the ruined mechs. Showboat’s vitals were weak, but steady. “Then let’s hope for Boomer’s sake, they are close by. Or we may all be joining her in EOL.” Movement on the edge of the hull caught her eye. “Heads up, it looks like we have company.” She spotted numerous hardsuited men making their way towards their position. “Small, but dangerous.” The wielding lasers the Imperial hardsuits could be used as fair short range weapons. They had all been through anti-mech training, so they knew that even the biggest mech could be brought down by sappers with either the skills, luck, or willingness to die to get close enough to hit something vital. And willingness to die was paretically tattooed on Imperial troops from the moment they were born.

“Section 7, grid reference 136 by 287, mark!” Thomas had spotted where the most dangerous heathen stood, and relayed it to his men below. The explosion when it came took Heavy-A’s legs off, and sent her spinning into space. Without her engines she was quickly cut to ribbons by the no less than three laser clusters that were near enough to get a bead on her.

Starbuck figured it out first. “Frak! They are blowing up their own ship to get us! Keep moving, or we’re next. Someone grab Showboat’s cockpit.” Holly was already moving towards the stricken mech when the panel in front of her exploded. She dodged, and grabbed the wrecked mech and kept moving.

Melody found herself facing three of the powersuited crewmen. Her axes cut two in half, but the third had jumped on her back. She couldn’t reach him so she slammed her mech into something behind her. She felt the armor being crunched, and she turned to see the wrecked engineer pressed into the hull of the ship. She didn’t notice the sapper pack he had placed behind her cockpit though. The blast nearly tore her out of her harness. It didn’t knock her partner Harmony offline, but she wouldn’t be transforming anytime soon. Had she been a fleshie, she would have been dead though. She could see void through what was left of the armor covering her cockpit, and she knew that one more hit from behind would take them both out.

Jane noted the laser clusters, and used the last of her railgun ammo to take out two of the three threatening them. She noted another turret on the other side of the hull that was just outside of her view when it took out one of her drails. The tethered sensor pod was at the end of it’s line so the loss of it set her off balance until she cut the other wing’s drail loose. She hated losing the twin pods, as they had spotted quite a few of the hidden turrets before they found them the hard way. Bond keened at their loss. Jane felt for her partner. It must have been like losing one of her eyes when the laser slagged the drail. They were fighting for this side of the ship, but she didn’t know how long they would remain a viable force when they ran out of ammo. Her lasers had been sniping the hardsuited enemy, but they seemed to be coming out faster than she could find them. She swore there were hatches everywhere. “Permission to go active.”

Holly thought about the request. It would almost certainly make the recon mech a high value target, but it might be worth it. “Go for it. We may be joining you if they don’t Roll Duces on us.” The code phrase meant that she believed they might not survive the engagement, and any tactic was authorized.

“Confirmed Duces High then.” Holly sighed, a habit she had picked up from working with humans. Jane had just told her she might not be coming back.

Down on the hull Squire Niles watched the enemy above him dive for the surface. The fighter was aimed right at him. He pulled his wielding laser out and readied it for his one shot at taking down the fighter that had been staying away from the fighting. He was about to press the paddle when it pulled up. He didn’t watch the fighter though, he saw a sliver form falling from the fighter. He didn’t know if it was a bomb or not, but he dove behind a Railfin array. The drive node was a massive slab of metal, and he believed it would protect him from the blast, but no blast came. He walked around the array to find a crater in the hull. He walked over to the crater and blinked. A naked woman sat there. She held out her hand and as duty required he offered his to her. She took it and... Her other hand knuckle punched his face plate so hard it shattered, as did his skull.

Jane felt slightly bad about doing that to the man, but he had been about to kill her anyway. His body stood there in a parody of life. The only reason it was still standing was the maglocks on it feet. She tapped in to the suit’s comm system and caught the frequency, and encryption key. She found the command channel and listened to the various voices.

Up above Jane, Bond watched her partner. She sniped a man that was getting too close, but she knew she would have to be careful to not draw too much attention to that area. She sent images of the various positions down to Jane.

Jane thanked Bond for the information and left the corpse behind. Her hologram had changed from the naked woman to that of a hardsuit just like the one she had just smashed. The poor fool’s wielding rig was in her hand and ready.

She moved over the hull in the sliding gait that imitated the one used by the enemy. It was inefficient, but she knew that if she moved like she normally did they would have shot her and asked questions later. Humans were good at instinctively noticing when things weren’t right, but if you impersonated them right, they would... She passed right by one of the men as he was drawing a bead on one of the human mechs with a rifle. She simultaneously blazed him from behind, and jammed his comm. Megawatts of energy instantly cut the suit in half and caused the body’s water to vaporize and explode in geyser of gore that quickly vaporized and froze in the hard vacuum this far out from any star. The red spray forming a slowly dispersing tail that made the half of the body that drifted away look like some macabre comet. Three more died by her hand in similar manners before she reached the hatch. There four men guarded the hatch, and she knew that they would not be so easy to fool, or kill. She had been listening to the chatter on the various channels. And the fact that this hatch was being guarded for some reason drew her here. She meant to find out why.

“Bond, I may need your help.” She walked out from behind the... Whatever it was... and walked forward. Her hologram had changed once more.

Squire Pothis could not believe his eyes. Saint Efis the Bold was walking towards them. “Tannis...”

“I see him too.”

“He can’t be real?”

“And so I say unto you, whenever you need the most, I will be there for you.” The man’s booming voice echoed in their ears.”

“Jessis H. Criss! It is him!” The four bowed in the presence of the Great One. The Greatest Hero of the Empire had returned from the grave to protect them in their hour of need.

“By God’s Flaming Sword, we are grateful for you’re return.”

“Men, be of good cheer for your moment of salvation is nigh. Now stand tall and come here, I have a job for you”

“Yes Sire, how may we serve you?” They raised their hands in supplication as they were bathed in light. Then the laser raised to full power and they all exploded.

She looked at the remains as they floated away. “You may all serve as good examples of how stupid Blind Faith can be.” She walked through the drifting cloud of vapor that was all that remained of the fools. The hatch was locked. She looked for the access panel, or a switch, or anything. Nothing physical revealed itself to her scanners. “Well, I guess that I should have asked for them to open it first.”

“Squire Tannis, report. We detected an energy spike out there. What’s going on?”

Jane thought of the scene in that movie and wondered if they were as stupid as the Other Evil Empire. “Just a slight weapons malfunction. Nothing to see here.” She of course responded in the dead man’s voice and communication identifiers.

Squire Tannis... If you do not quit quoting that stupid movie right now, I will come out there myself and those heathens will be the least of your worries. Do I make myself understood?”

“Roger Roger!” By the God’s own! They knew of the Greatest Movies Ever Made!

“That’s it! You are going in the chair for that!” The man’s anger could be heard over the open mike as he was yelling for the men behind him to open the door and bring Tannis inside by force. The irony of his request was not lost on her.

‘Boy are they in for a surprise!’ She thought to herself. The door cycled open and she hit the paddle. The laser played over the men clustered in the airlock. They never stood a chance, and since their bodies ‘Only’ baked in their suits at the laser’s lower power setting the airlock wasn’t even damaged. The blackened faceplates and swollen suits made getting inside harder, but one by one she sent them into the void. She had the urge to give each one a slight prayer as they went out as a sign of respect, but she had seen the evil that they had wrought on too many planets to respect any of the Imperial forces anymore. She would for the Myrmidons since they had no choice in their part in the war, but these people had chosen to do the evil they enjoined the Myrmidons to do in their name. The last one went she sent sailing out the lock with all the grace of an untethered Colonial Day parade float. She turned to the hatch and pulled the switch to cycle the lock.

Red had managed to get four of the warheads down to the lock and he was in the middle of removing the casings, so they could fit the naked warheads through the locks. They were doing the same thing in the five locks around the area where the enemy fighters had been forced together. All he had to do would be to get them to shove the things out the lock when they returned. The lock cycled and when he looked up he saw one of the men return with a wielder in his arms. Why would he be.. The thought never got to his brain. He was running down the corridor before he realized it. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen the laser point his way.

Jane mentally kicked herself. Why had she paused? The very young man was right there working on warheads that would have been shoved out the airlock to take out her, and her squad. This didn’t add up, why hadn’t they fired the missiles... unless they couldn’t. These people were killing themselves to take them along with them. Fat lot of good that would do! Jane figured, the Empire was still in the dark about the Cylon resurrection technology, but that didn’t do the humans with them any good. She should have just shot the boy, but in her confusion he had slipped away.

She changed her appearance to mimic an acolyte she had killed over a year ago, and dropped the laser welder. These boarding actions had become her forte, and she rather relished wandering through the enemy’s territory. Her auditory sensors were far better than human ears, and she could hear the young man as he ran. It wasn’t too hard to follow him.

Up on the bridge Knight Ensign watched the spacesuited trooper morph into an acolyte he had never seen before and follow Red down the corridor. “Katasin, you have the bridge. Use the text system to tell the remaining crew that we have a Faerie onboard.” The Acolyte saluted, and Ensign was sure that he had just managed to surprise the already frayed crew once more. The text system was older than spaceflight but it still had it’s uses. If the Faerie didn’t have their comm’s encryption key, it shouldn’t be able to receive the message. He punched a button and the face of the, unbeknownst to them, long dead acolyte was on the main viewer. “Transmit to all decks: Kill upon sight. Or IT will kill you.”

Jane walked through the corridor in pursuit of the teenager she had been pursuing. She heard two men enter the corridor to her left, and she heard them talking. She couldn’t make it out, as it seemed like they were talking in a language she wasn’t familiar with. The only word she thought she understood was ‘Ferry’. Were they trying to get to a ship? The Destroyer’s hanger had been hit hard, but she guessed that they might have gotten one of the shuttles working. And the boy was heading in that direction.

Red knew he had panicked. He was going to try and double back when he got a text message from the Knight. He read it twice, just to make sure he had read it right. Then he started to run.

Jane was listening to the ships communications, but she was having trouble decrypting the wireless electronic communications. They must have figured out that she was onboard. She changed her face to a randomly generated face and readied herself for the next encounter with them. The kid was running, they were definitely on to her. She tried tapping into the ships network and found it surprisingly wide open. She suspected a trap, and didn’t send any of her own software into the network, but she did press a button on her belt. The belt had it own built in hackpack software, and net work. It quickly went to work subverting the network, not to knock it down, only to infiltrate it. If she had knocked it down, they would know she was inside and tried to undo her work, but if she didn’t do anything they would only suspect and not be as quick to react. That doubt could work to her advantage later.

Red ran through the corridors to the last place he thought he would be asked to lead her to. The engineering hatch opened and he ran in to see Knight Ensign standing there in his armor. “Sire, why are we here?”

The knight might have done many things in response to the child’s apparent impudence for asking such a question, smiling was not what he expected. Ensign saw the honesty in the question. The young man had lived with that waste of flesh Priest for years, and any perceived impudence would have been punished severely. No, he thought before asking a question like that. “You mentioned something about having the Late Lamented Lotor’s access codes... I need them.”

Jane heard many voices up ahead, and she knew they were waiting for her. The software on her belt computer had managed to get into the system and now she had access to the security system’s video feeds with out alerting anyone, she just couldn’t move the cameras. The room ahead had at least five men, but only one in armor. The child that she had been chasing was standing in front of the Knight. She couldn’t see the Knight’s face, but just by reading his lips she could tell that the child was ‘Okay...’ then a series of letters, and numbers... Did that kid have the command codes? She watched him very closely.

When he was done she knew what she had to do. The holsters on each of her legs released her twin Panther M-30 pistols. Each one was known as a Cougher due to the sound each round made. The propellant had its own oxidizer so that it was useable in space, as well as low oxygen atmospheres. They were not the best at piercing armor, but then again, most space suits weren’t armored. Before drawing them she grabbed two objects that looked like deflated pyramid balls from her belt. She stuck one on the hatch, and pressed the recessed button on the side. She dove for cover as the breaching grenade shattered the door as well as spraying the guard standing behind it with shrapnel from the grenade as well as the remains of the door. She then tossed the second grenade inside with enough force to make it bounce off the far wall. It exploded with enough force to kill the other skinsuited crew members. Ensign was unharmed, and he returned fire towards the door as he covered Red with his armored body. He heard six shots come from the door and bounce off of his armor, but he managed to protect the child. He returned fire until his side arm was empty, and when their was no more return fire he looked down at the boy. “Red are you okay?”

“You are kneeling on my foot, but other than that, I am fine. Thank you for protecting me.”

“Yes, but it looks like we may have lost our best chance to catch the intruder.” The smoke had cleared, and the heretic had disappeared.

“We could send someone to chase her.”

“Her? That make sense, but how did you know it was a female?”

“Tits.” The boy’s blush was obvious.

“Just remember, she is here to kill us all.” The young man’s bush fades quickly. To be replace by a slight pallor. “You did good to notice that, but we need to get her before she gets us, or the rest of the enemy out there will get away.”

“But how do we catch someone that can look like any one of us?”

“She’s a machine. And like any machine made by man she has weaknesses we can exploit.”

Red looked at the Knight as he walked over to the door. “You broke Thrall. How?”

Ensign didn’t know if he could trust the kid with the whole truth. “Faith.”

“Your Faith in the Empire was strong enough to break Thrall?” The look Ensign gave him was tinged with sadness. “What? Was it something I said?”

“Come with me, and I’ll tell you.” He drew a clip of ammo for his sidearm, and reloaded it before looking around the corner. The corridor was empty. “First off we need to get to the Captain’s cabin. It’s equipped to act as an escape shuttle. Then we can use the terminal there to continue our plan.” He looked around at the bodies, and ruined equipment around them. “Since she managed to damage the computers here, we need to access one that has command level access, and isn’t on the bridge.” They left the room at a run. In their haste, neither spotted the extra body in the corner.

Red followed him down the corridor. “Why not the bridge?”

Ensign smiled inside his helm. “You ask more questions than a Inquisitor. We can’t go back to the bridge. It is the most logical target for the saboteur to hit, and I want one of us to survive to tell the Empire how we died.”

Red stopped in his tracks. He looked at the back of the Knight as he walked down the corridor. “You’re abandoning ship?” He tried to hide the hurt in his voice, but it cracked.

Ensign stopped without turning. “No you fool, you are.”

“Why me?”

“Because you didn’t join the order. You are an innocent.” He started moving, this time at a brisk pace that Red had to hurry to keep up with.

“I see. Then can you tell me how you broke the Thrall?”

“It’s simple. My faith in my men is stronger than my faith in the Empire.”

Red almost tripped when he heard that. Ensign had just professed apostasy, one of the greatest sins in the Empire. “What? How can you serve if you don’t believe in the Empire.”

Ensign spun around. “Listen to me child, and never tell anyone about this. The Empire is a lie. We who wear the armor of Knighthood are not the guardians of the Faith. Most are petty tyrants, and bullies. Your Priest Lotor bound me, but he didn’t understand the fact that I have been bound before. A Thrall is dependent on the nanites in your system being able to overwhelm the host, and take control. What happens when the host already has nanites in their system? Nanites that have been a part of my system for decades? It took me a while, but his very own actions allowed my nanites to overwrite his own.” He reached a hatch. A blank one with no name, or decoration. Priest Lotor had made him remove every vestige of command from his own ship, but he hadn’t dared to try and take his cabin. A Knight’s cabin was as sacred as his sword. Inside was his altar, and his armory. He sent a mental command through the system, and the door opened to allow them to enter. He ran his hand over the altar and it opened to reveal a terminal. He entered his access codes, and let Red enter Lotor’s. “There. Now I must go. There is enough food, and air in here for two months once you eject. It has the best stealth systems the Empire has, and enough fuel to get you to the edge of the system. You won’t need that much with the rest of our flotilla arriving soon. You just need to lie low until they get here.” He pulled his helm off as he turned to face Red. “I lost my Faith in the empire when my son died. Not because of an enemy, but because of an ally. His commanding officer killed him to prove how good he was with a blade.”

“Your son lost a duel?” Red wouldn’t meet his eyes. He seemed to be looking at his feet. Ensign didn’t press him.

“No, he won. And the man shot him in the head for it. The reason I am only a Destroyer’s captain is the fact that I killed him in a Knight’s Court. He outranked me by a light-year, but in the Court all Knights are equal. The Empire saw fit to keep me alive, but they made sure that I will never command a ship of the line again.”

“Come with me. You don’t have to die with this ship.”

“Yes I do. If not for my honor, then for my men’s. And my son’s.”

“You will come with me.” Something changed in Red’s voice.

“Now see here...” Ensign was about to grab Red when his arm stopped. He didn’t stop it though. He was looking into gold eyes that he couldn’t refuse. “...who?”

“I’m sorry... I am an Inquisitor. We are trained from birth to be ‘better’ than other Imperials at Thralling people. I didn’t want to do this to you. You are what the Empire needs. You’re right, the Empire is a lie, but one worth fighting for. We need you.” He could see the pleading in Ensigns eyes but he knew he could let him leave. He did let him speak though.

“You can’t. I need to die here. If I do not then every thing I did, all of my crew sacrifices would have been for nothing.”

“No, not for nothing. You are Thrall resistant. You could be one of the best Inquisitors to ever live.”

“But I don’t believe in the Empire, I am practically a heretic myself.”

“The best Inquisitors are. If we believed in the God Emperor, how could we do the things we are called upon to do to test the faithful?”

Ensign realized how badly he had misjudged the creature before him. He wasn’t Lotor’s pet, Lotor had been his. “You would let my entire crew die in vain just to get me?”

“Yes.” The thing that looked like a child’s voice was cheerful and smiled like one, but it no longer reached his eyes.

“How long have you been playing us for fools?”

“Ever since I came on board. The only reason you noticed my eyes just then was because I let you. I have been playing this roll and peaking into people’s secrets as long as I can remember. The act is as easy as breathing is to you.”

“I can never be like you. I fight for honor, and my men. I would nev..” He found it hard to breathe.

A sadness came over Red’s face. “Well then. I guess I was wrong about you. You have an over developed sense of honor, and it is going to be your death sentience.” Ensign fell to the ground, his vision was starting to go fuzzy around the edges, but he struggled to stay conscious. He fought against the Thrall with all he had, but it was not enough. The Inquisitor’s abilities made everything he had ever faced pale in comparison. Red stood over him. “Is there anything you would like to say before you die?”

Something caught Ensign’s attention. A shadow? “...be...hin...d..yo..u...”

“Nice try, that trick is only for savages, and children. No one is foolish...URK!!” Five rounds went through his back in a line that started at his heart, and went up to his brain.” His body fell on top of Ensign’s and Jane hit the button that would close the hatch and start the automatic countdown. She tipped her gun in salute at the two bodies before she jumped out of the cabin. She knew that the Knight would be out for a while at least, but she didn’t want someone that competent left on the ship. As it was, she had to get off as fast as she could as well.

Up on the Bridge Katasin was dutifully watching the scanners. Not that it was doing any good. They had run out of hardsuits and wielding lasers before they had run out of crewmembers willing to go out on to the hull to do battle with the enemy. They had managed to kill six of the dozen fighters, but the remaining ones were busy wrecking the ship piece by piece. Their only good news had been the report of all of the warheads being placed near the hull. All they needed were the codes, and they could blow the ship to the Devine Hall where they would all be judged. Katasin was sure that St Potter would let all of them pass through the Armored Gates of Heaven to Valla the level reserved for warriors. There they would serve the ancient God Emperors in their eternal fight against the Metal Daemons of old. His idle thought of the battle maidens that would heal his wounds made him loose focus for second. The sudden blaring alarm brought him back right away though. His years of training paid off as he quickly found the reason for the alarm. The Captain’s Cabin had been jettisoned. He read one lifeform onboard, but the scanners couldn’t tell who’s it was. “Katasin to Ensign, Sire are you still onboard?”

Seconds later a voice came on the line. “Katasin, you fool, why would I leave the ship in our finest hour? I sent the boy off in my pod so he could let the Empire know how we died.” Something seemed wrong about Ensign’s response though. IT wasn’t how he sounded, but what he had said.

“Sir, what is the second Commandment of God Emperor Fausten?”

“This is a trick question, there never was an emperor by that name.”

“Yes, but that not the proper response. Who is this?”

‘Oh aren’t you a joker!’ she thought to herself. They had planned for this. Well so had she. Up on the bridge Katasin was about to order every available man to find out who was impersonating the Captain when every screen flickered and died for a second. When they came back on they were all showing the same thing. Hot Picon Nights, was the highest rated show on the Colonial vid channels, and it had a very loyal Cylon following. Rachelle and Danni’s ‘Caught in the rain.’ episode had been the highest rated of the entire series. And the reason was the eponymous scene in the third act. Every eye on the bridge was drawn to the sight of two of the hottest women to ever disrobe on the vids. From Rachelle’s long legs, and shapely bottom to Danni’s talented tongue, it had become the most watched piece of softporn ever produced in the colonies.

They never noticed the weapons going offline, or the sensors, or the internal sensors, or the timers on the warheads starting until it was too late.

On the hull Starbuck was keeping a weary eye on any hatch she was passing and was ready to smash anyone stupid enough to come out of one with her... Dead blade’s hilt. Her power reserves were so low, that the energy blade had stopped working five minutes ago. Melody’s battle axes were their only weapon, so they were making sure to not stay in any one place. If it hadn’t of been for her IFF system identifying Jane’s presence, she might have smashed her when she jumped out of the hatch with the escaping air propelling her away from the hull. Starbuck caught her, and handed her off to her partner Bond as she flew in close enough for Jane to jump between the two. “Ladies, we need to get out of here as fast as we can.”

Sheba didn’t waste any time asking why, she had her own reasons to leave. Her first question was more immediate. “Did you launch that life boat for some reason?”

“High value prisoner. We should follow him, and try and catch up to him. I just set off the timer on a bunch of warheads they had planned on tossing out the airlocks. If we are too close we might be too close, if you get what I’m saying.”

“Roger that. What about the anti-fighter weapons?”

“Off-line for now. I don’t know for how long though. Racetrack, Roughhouse, WE ARE LEAVING!”

The survivors all went to full burn as they left the area. The two Super Raptors flew out from their hiding spot inside the engines of the Destroyer like wasps out of a hive. Their oversized engines were designed for raw power, and not the maneuverability of their smaller cousins. It made them look like an insect with it’s large engine section. A look that was only enhanced by the oversized wings that were slung over it. But for all their size they were still dwarfed by the massive sublight engines the Destroyer sported.

Acolyte Katasin rubbed his eyes. He could not believe what had just happened. In the space of a few seconds their victory had fallen apart. He knew that their victory would have come at the cost of their lives, but it would have been worth it. Knight Ensign had taught them all what honor meant. He had fiannly managed to get that filth off thwe monitor only to see this. Now the heretics were flying away, and they were too fast and maneuverable to chase in the damaged ship. The enemy agent had started the timers on the warheads, and they were unable to stop them once they started. He had men working to get them outside the ship as fast as they could, but there was no guarantee that they would succeed in time. “Helm, pursuit course. Best speed.” He knew that their current best speed was too slow to catch them, but he was hoping that when the warheads went off they would sill be within range of the lethal radiation they would produce. While the ship’s hull would shield them from the worst of the radiation, it wouldn’t stop them from receiving a lethal dose.

“Senior Acolyte, we have them in the airlocks, and we’re cycling them now.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Thirty decas.” Three hundred seconds, not a lot of time to live. He watched the fighters as they ran away. The shuttle that had been hiding inside their engines had caught up with them, and were now in front of the fighters. He wished he had one of those shuttles right now. They were armed, but it seemed their jump drives had failed them. They had hidden themselves inside his own engines! He had hurled many invectives their way, but ‘cowards’ had not been one of them. It took a lot of fortitude to hide in a place that he could have incinerated them with the push of a button if they had been discovered. But they had paid too much attention to the fighters.

“Twenty decas” he watched as the ships slowly moved away from him. It would be a close call, but they should still be within range. The status monitor showed four of the six remaining warheads on the hull, and the last two were cycling now.

“Ten decas... Nine..” Jesop and his men shoved the last warhead out the hatch. He was about to slam the hatch shut when a bright flash distracted him. ‘It was too soon!’ He thought as he looked out into space. But something blocked his view. It looked like a massive eye. The iris opened up, and he could make out something engraved on one of the metal panels as it drew back. He was still trying to figure out what ‘Weapon of MASS Extraction’ meant when the mining laser fired right into the airlock.

“Detonation!” And that was when half of the ship turned into an inferno as the mining ship’s cutting laser sliced into it. The metal and other material inside the ship absorbed the heat, and then sublimated into vapor almost instantly. The superheated vapor did most of the damage as it filled any open space it came in contact with, and the conflagration continued as it slagged interior bulkheads with ease and allowed it access to even deeper sections of the ship. The laser itself only channeled the damage in a single path.

Katasin held on to his chair for dear life. Other had not been so lucky, and their bodies flew around the bridge in parodies of flight as the ship shook. “Evasive!”

“No response from helm!” The Acolyte that manned the helm wasn’t the helmsman, but it wouldn’t have mattered if the dead man had remained in the chair, the ship was dying all around him. Even if the ship had been fully functional they would have suffered massive damage trying to escape from the massive claws the mining ship had grabbed them with just prior to triggering their weapon.

“Weapons?”

“I’m sorry sir, nothing is working on that side of the ship.”

Katasin thought of using the escape pods to ram the ship that had grappled them. He was about to order it when he found out how truly powerful a mining ship’s engines were. Designed to move asteroids, comets, and other massive and ungainly stellar objects, the mass of the Destroyer was barely straining it. He was slammed against the chair as the forces overwhelmed the inertial dampeners. Anything not bolted down became a projectile, and he really wished he had spared the time to remove the dead before a body landed on him and nearly crushed him in his seat. He looked and saw the status display go black as the damage ate through the ship. When the beam exited the other side the mining ship let go. Both ships flew off in different directions. The ruined destroyer tumbling on it’s center axis as twin gouts of flame, and not atmosphere, but metallic vapor exited the ship causing the roll to take on a pinwheel appearance.

Half an hour earlier:

“We need to go full burn for five minutes on a heading of 204 by 329. Open the cargo bay and dump the cargo by hitting the breaking thrusters. Send the wireless message to the Ladies, and set the clock on the jump drives. Then we dump our speed, and jump to these coordinates...” Vinceti sat there looking at the people sitting around him and wondering how he had misjudged him. He was listening to a very drunk man, but he sounded as sober as could be. He was listening as the man was calmly telling him to do things that just didn’t make sense at all.

Captain (Formerly Admiral of the Drifter Free Navy) Lyle Kingston looked at the boy. “What’s wrong?”

“The way you’re timing this, the wireless signal won’t get there until a few minutes before we do. Why not send one of the Raiders?”

“You’ll see, and they have another job to do.”

“What?”

“Shuttles. This is a volunteer-only mission.” As soon as he said it, eleven sets of hands went up. “Okay, they are now our reserve forces.” Vinceti had been surprised to see how fast the hands had gone up, but not at how many had gone up. His was the second one up, but it was a race.

The captain noticed his still puzzled look. “Yes?”

“That course doesn’t make sense. It’s nowhere near their position. Where we’re jumping will put us right on top of them. We have no weapons, and our armor won’t last long enough for the jump drive to cycle.”

“We’re going to get our people. To do that we need to jump as close as possible, right?”

“...Yes...”

“Then trust me.” Vinceti would have found it easier to trust the man if he could stand on his own two feet. The man was so drunk he had to be strapped in to his chair lest he slump down to the deck.

He was still trying to understand why they had thrown away the nickel iron ore they had worked so hard to extract from the asteroids in this system. At least he had sent it on a course that sent it out of the combat area. If they survived, they could recover most of it. By the time they had a chance to get back to the ore, it would have spread out like buckshot out of a shotgun though. It would take weeks to find it all.

The destroyer was a wreck. The only thing keeping Katasin, and the few survivors alive was their suit’s life support. “Abandon ship. Make for the lifepods.” He looked at the cron on his wrist and sighed. At least some of them might be picked up soon if the enemy didn’t take their time shooting them. He had served under captains that had favored both methods, and he figured he would have rather died quickly. But right now he hoped the Swift Justice arrived on time. He knew that some of the life pods would die, but he hoped that some of his men would live.

Back on the Bad Daggit, Glaive227 did a self check as he sat up from the resurrection bay. A humanoid was cleaning up bodies inside the bay. Once he was fully online he looked around. Numerous Cylons were coming online all at once. He remembered getting hit by a laser, and a quick check of his internal chronometer showed that he had been out for quite a while. “Excuse me?”

The Thomas looked up from his work and spotted Glaive waving to him. “Yes?”

“What happened? Why were we off line for so long?”

“I’m not sure. But that isn’t the biggest mystery.” He pointed at the ruined computer banks. “Not only should you not be up and about, but we are still trying to figure out how your pattern survived that.” The resurrection computer looked like an explosion had hit it. Glaive’s mono eye stopped when he noticed one of the bodies. He looked at the Thomas. The man that was for all purposes the ship’s doctor nodded. “Even me.” Their conversation was interrupted when an eight’s voice screamed.

Sharon sat up with a start. She had just died for the first time. It was not something she planned on repeating. A man she had only met a few times came running over accompanied by an 008. She looked down at the goo covering her, and noticed that it wasn’t covering much. Her arms quickly covered her breasts as she tried to calm down. There was something she need to do, but she was still in shock and was having trouble thinking. The man grabbed a robe out of a closet full of them. He held out his hand. “You have to get out of the tank before I can help you put this on.”

She looked at a Tom Zerick model Cylon as he approached the tank and her two sets of memories tried to tie themselves together. She had received the latest memory files from the Eight collective, and she was trying to process that as well. She was having trouble getting out with the most hated terrorist in the twelve colonies handing her a robe. The man sighed, and handed the robe to the 008 that was standing next to him, and stepped back. “Young lady, I am not him. As a matter of fact, he isn’t him.” Glaive looked at the Decant and snorted.

“Did you just snort at me?”

“Yes. Neither of us have time to hand-hold a Decant. Now get out of the goo, and shower off. I’m told that stuff stinks if you don’t.” Rifleman and Lancer joined him as he showed her where the shower was.

“Where’s Grimm?” Rifleman was looking for their friend among the recent revivals as the lady quickly showered off.

“You don’t think...” Lancer handed her the robe to put on as he opened the door for the young lady.

“Where’s who?” The thought brought back her last memory. “By the Gods! I need to get to the bridge.” She shook Glaive’s hand and left at run.

Glaive looked at his hand. “I guess I did do some hand holding.” He looked up to see his squadmates looking at him. “Let’s go find Grimm, or his body. We owe him that much.”

Boomer exited the lift nearest to the bridge at a run. She slowed down at the sight of the damage that had been visited upon the Bad Dagget by the boarding action. She saw dozens of Cylon corpses littering the corridors, and here and there the strange armored suits of the enemy being picked apart by living Cylons and humans alike as she made her way to the bridge.

Miri noted that arrival of the Number Eight model to the chaos that the bridge had devolved into after the conflict had ended. Lt. Aden was conversing with the other Sons of Ares survivors. They had called a truce of sorts with the Cylons. Miri could see Rachel trying to talk sense into the others, and she hoped that they would behave. Speaking of behaving, she noticed the Eight head over to Lt Gaeta’s station and grab him in a rather human embrace. She looked at the Eight’s I.D. code and turned around. “Lt. Boomer is it not customary to seek out the highest ranking officer when returning from a mission?”

“I’m sorry ma’am. I didn’t return in the normal way, I... I just uploaded.” The shame of that statement didn’t register for a moment. Then Miri realized the fact that she must have just died for the first time.

“In the future, please remember it. Not what is the situation out there?”

“We have been suffering casualties but we are holding our own... Wait, I wasn’t the first Cylon to die out there, why am I the first to report in?”

“Good question. If I could get the mainframe to cooperate I might have an answer for you. As it stands we just repelled an Imperial boarding party, and destroyed their ship. The mainframe is not quite under our control, and the resurrection system is damaged, so we are having trouble uploading to new bodies. It seems to be giving preference to humanoid Cylons and the onboard centurions. The problem is, we don’t have a lot of time before the rest of their patrol gets to the system. I had hoped to take them out, and then mop up the reserves while they were still sensor blind.”

“Then we need to get back to the system. They are all alone there.” The captain looked at her, and she didn’t need to be told the rest. “I’m sorry, you’ve been working on that.”

“Give the Nugget a cookie.” Miri turned to her other problem.

Rachel clenched her fist in frustration. Pickerting was an ass, but he technically outranked her. They were the same rank, her’s was actually higher, but his family was higher in the order. That meant the she had to explain the reality of the situation to the gelfy frak. “We can not take over the ship.”

“Ares will guide our aim. We have control of the mainframe.”

“No we do not.”

“You tamed it?”

“I did no such thing. I convinced it that the Cylons are not the enemy.”

“You stupid tilfa! We have been trying to kill the chromejobs all this time, and you talked the one basestar that was on our side in to playing nice?” He sung his arm back to backhand her. He was big and menacing, but Rachel knew two things that he did not. She had grown up with five older brothers who treated her as a boy until she started to sport lady parts, and knew how to deal with opponents larger than she was. The sudden snapping of his knee in a direction it was not designed for sent him to the ground.

The second thing she knew was the fact that the AI was listening. It also told Miri what had just happened, but Miri had held off the Centurions. This was something that was too primitive for logic or heavy weapons to fix.

Pickering was trying to get up when the follow up kick to his face knocked him out cold. The men around her backed up involuntarily. She walked up to Pickering’s seneschal and grabbed the man by his beard. “What is the Order’s laws on succession?” She could see the man did not want to speak. She pulled harder.

“By abdication, or death.” He whimpered.

She grabbed Pickering’s head and dragged him to Miri. “Permission to take out the trash?” Her eyes practically glowed with anger. She had been trying to explain the futility of any attempt to take over the ship as well as the benefits of actually working with them. She knew he wouldn’t give up his position willingly, and if she let him live he would sabotage anything she tried to do. Miri waved her on.

The others followed her to the lift. Two Centurions actually got out of her way as she passed. The procession made its way to the nearest airlock. She tossed him into the lock and grabbed a fire extinguisher. The ice cold foam woke Pickering up enough to see her standing at the controls. She waited as he grabbed the side of the lock and slowly stood up. “Thank you.” She hit the button and the inner doors closed. He stood as tall as he could on a broken leg as she hit the outer door’s emergency button. He flew out of the airlock along with the air. She watched until the body was no longer visible.

When she spun around the fury was back in her eyes. “Things have changed. If you wish to follow me, then we will join the Cylons in fighting the true enemy. If not stay in your room, or...” She smiled a none too friendly smile and pointed at the airlock. “... I’ll personally show you where the door is.” She walked up to the seneschal and looked at the former Keeper of Rules and Laws with eyes that told him exactly where he stood. “You will come with me and tell the captain everything you know about the order.”

“I can’t do...” She interrupted him with an upraised finger. “Yes Mistress.” The Seneschal’s job had been to keep them informed of the state of the Order, and to keep the history of their deeds for the rest of the Order. As such they chose seneschals for their prodigious memories and recall abilities. He would have resisted torture to the death before revealing anything he had heard, but if the leader of their section of the order decreed that he tell all, then he was bound to obey. The thought that one of the order would spill their secrets to their sworn enemy had never been considered.

Grimm came online slowly. He tilted his head up to see Glaive, Rifleman, and Lancer staring at him. “Am I dead yet?”

“No. But you went Super Cylon without us. No fair.”

“You were offline at the time. Which reminds me, you were all listed as corrupted beyond recovery...”

“...and?”

“And you’re not dead either.”

Glaive tapped him on the head. “Very good. I told you he doesn’t miss much.” The other Cylons in his squad laughed at some joke, but Glaive wasn’t done. “We were being held in the ship’s mainframe. It seems he was still fighting the civil war, and he was on the Colonial side. And get this, we were saved by one of the humans the captain recruited. Better yet, she’s the granddaughter of the former officer that ordered it to, and one of those Ares clowns.”

“This sounds like a bad vid drama.” Grimm sat up and noticed the fact that he was no longer in the Maelstrom.

“Yeah, we popped you out of the suicide suit. We can’t have you greying out on us. Come one, we’re needed for damage control. Someone blew up some bad guys in the halls. That kind of thing leaves a mess you know.” Glaive’s outstretched hand was a welcome sight after all they had been through.

With his help, Grimm stood up and followed them out of the hanger. As he walked past a display something caught his eye. He backed up and turned his face towards the reflection and noticed that someone had repainted his face. “I am going to offline someone so many times, they will reformat into a new model just to get away from me.” The vicious smile he had been wearing had been replaced with a large yellow smiley face.

Sheba watched as they moved away from the stricken ship. The mining ship’s warning had come right before Jane had popped out of the ship with her “High Value” prisoner in his lifeboat. They had managed to grab it, and landed it on it the mining ship’s hull without too much trouble. They were moving away from the destroyer as fast as possible. The lifepods the Empire used were often piloted by people that wouldn’t hesitate to ram a ship if they could, so they stayed as far away from the escaping Imperials as they could while waiting for their drive to spool up again. She doubted any one of the pods could damage the mining ship, but the fighters and other ships that were docked with it were another matter all together.

On the bridge of the Progress they had managed to get the jump drive spooled up, but Kara Kingston refused to jump until the time her husband had ordained. That time would come in about five minutes and she had firmly stated that unless her husband, the captain, gave a countermanding order she would follow it. Ensign Vinceti Rodriguez looked at the sleeping form of the captain, still strapped into his chair, and swore in at least five languages.

Starbuck, Sheba, and Holly watched the destroyer as it tumbled away. Sheba was still apprehensive about sitting here, but the message for the Progress’ bridge left her a bit put out. “You’re sure we should just sit here and wait for the Bad Daggit? What if the reinfor...” A flash cut her off as a battle cruiser, two more destroyers and a couple of cargo hulls appeared in almost exactly the same coordinates as the two destroyers had appeared earlier. “Oh frak! We are so humped! Sirens to Progress we need to get out of here NOW!”

“Negative Sirens. Captain’s Orders... Hold your position, and wait for the Daggit.” Ensign Vinceti Rodriguez’s voice was calm, but she knew he was not a happy camper either.

“But we can’t even spit at the new bogies! What are we going to do if they decide to send fighters?”

“WE follow orders, Children. Wait for it.” Kara’s calm voice came over the wireless with the tired calm of someone that had been in this situation before. Then the comms dissolved into chaos as someone kicked in the jamming.

The Imperial Battle Cruiser Swift Justice emerged from its jump in its usual impressive display of light and energy. Knight Commodore Rigel Hawthorn looked across the bridge at his well trained crew as they went about their tasks without his input. They had been together for over fifty years and he knew that each one was the best the Church had to offer. “Query the pickets. Let’s see what Noresto has found for us. Maybe he found one of those rebel bases.” The laughter from around the room was respectful, but heartfelt. So far their mission had been rather dull, and a little excitement would be a welcome diversion.

After a few second of silence one of the Acolytes came over to his chair. “Sir we aren’t getting anything from the picket ships. We are still sensor blind from the jump but we should have received a challenge from the destroyers by now.”

“Blue alert, ready all the defenses, but do not launch fighters. Send out a Command Challenge. If that is not returned then we must...”

“Captain! The Bunker Moval just lost hull integrity in it’s cargo section!”

“Destroyer Broadside reports reactor damage due to high speed impacts!”

“Commodore Hawthorn, this is the Gerimand we are taking.....” The signal was lost with a finality that did not bode well for the other destroyer.

“Condition Gold through all ships! Activate emergency bulkheads! Helm roll ship to a course of...” He never got to finish the command as the bridge, along with the rest of the center section of the mighty warship, was hit by a metal slug that was nearly as massive as the bridge’s armored bunker itself. The projectile was moving at such a high rate of speed that it cleaved the ship in half. Thousands of tons of ship, and over two thousand men, died in seconds as a storm of semi-processed ore slammed into the ships like the hammers of the gods. Each chunk of metal was moving so fast that when they hit the armor designed to shrug off nuclear blasts they passed through like armor piercing rounds the size of shuttles. Some of the larger ones passed right through the ships they hit, coming out the other side with enough force to continue on their original paths. One of the destroyers exploded outright, while the other was left to drift as a shattered ruin. The battle cruiser was hit so many times that parts of it simply ceased to exist. While the cargo ships were the first to be hit, the nature of their construction meant that they survived with the least amount of damage to their vital systems.

Ensign Rodriguez’s mouth was hanging open. Without a weapons system or fighter support, Captain Kingston had just taken out more tonnage than a Squadron of fighters, and a Cylon Basestar. Turning around to congratulate the captain he noticed that the aforementioned captain was snoring, and drooling.

Archer looked out at all the ruined ships that had only recently been a threat. “Well that was anti-climatic.” A flash of light announced that arrival of yet another ship. The familiar lines of the Bad Daggit brought the collective tension down to a much lower level. “That, on the other hand...”

Katasin watched with great pride as the Swift Justice and his brother ships emerged from their jumps. They had worked like the well oiled machines, and his hopes of rescue had gone up. Only for them to be dashed as ship after ship mysteriously exploded from missiles that appeared out of nowhere, and went through their armor as if it wasn’t even there. When the enemy ship reappeared he knew that they had somehow managed to fire some kind of super railgun at the fleet before they closed to point blank range. Now that there was no one to defend the life pods he fully expected to be next on the monster’s target list. His life pod’s thrusters had run dry shortly after escaping from the Quickness, so they were all drifting in the void. Easy targets for whatever the enemy sent their way. He sat in the cockpit and watched the enemy fleet. They were slowly moving towards each other. All they had to do was send a missile over this way. The fighters had docked with the fathership, and taken one of the lifepods with them. Were they going to torture them one at a time? He used the imager to enhance the view of the hanger. One of their oversized shuttles was headed their way. It looked like torture then. He would fight them, and not give them anything of course. The thought of dying while fighting sat well with him, this waiting did not. As soon as the hatch opened he would jump out and take the first heretic. He would be a martyr to his men. He hoped they would follow his example and die well. If only they would come for him.

He watched as something from the heretic ship grabbed lifepod after lifepod in its gripper claws and towed them back to their fahership. They were taking prisoners. He opened the pods weapons locker and pulled out the laser rifles, and checked the power packs. Each one was in the gold and ready to go. He looked around to the five other surviving bridge members. He handed out the rifles and extra power packs to each of them, and made ready to defend themselves. He was holding on to the rifle when the heretic ship came for them. The claws stopped the pod’s tumbling with a jerk. Katasin accidently pulled the trigger on his rifle and burned a hole in the communications console. The others looked at him and pointed their rifles at him. Each of them had been very careful to keep their fingers away from their triggers until now. He set his rifle down after shutting the power cell off.

Roughhouse and Space Case noted the energy discharge on their sensors. They noted that it was rather weak but they weren’t taking any chances. “Space Case, can you jack into their systems?”

“I’m not sure, why?”

“It looks like someone over there is a bit trigger happy. I want to knock them out. But we don’t have any way to dump sleepy gas into their system. The best we could do would be to cut their oxygen feed until they pass out.”

Katasin looked at the ruined board and the others. He couldn’t contact any of the other pods now that he had knocked out their communications. He just sat there and watched their ship being dragged to the enemy fathership the dockingbay was open to space, but it was obvious they had some kind of field holding the air inside. He wished he could get that kind of technology back to the Empire it would be of use to their ships, and it shouldn’t be in the hands of heretics anyway. As they got closer he watched them throwing bodies through the field. The bodies drifted away from the ship in lines that proved that they had been doing this for a while. He recognized the uniforms on the bodies. Those were Imperial corpses. The sight left him lightheaded. He knew then what his fate was going to be, and it left him short of breath. The only thing he didn’t know was the method they were going to use to kill him. That when he gasped. The others were doing the same. Had he not shot the display he would have heard the shuttle pilot telling him what was about to happen, or he would have seen the message she had sent him when he didn’t respond to her wireless message. He tried to stand, but his legs gave out from under him. One of the others managed to fire a burst into his chest before he hit the floor. His system went into shock as the dual conditions overwhelmed him.

Tomas walked over to the resurrection computer, and removed the last of the damaged systems and put the replacement parts in place. Running a diagnostic he found a few problems, and fixed them before he brought the system back up to autonomous mode. He was still a little leery about letting the mainframe run the system, and he had been working for the past three days to get the system back up. He turned the system back on, and found ten patterns still in the buffer. The mainframe was not designed to process the reintegration of patterns and bodies. He still smiled at the thought of the six that wound up in a two’s body. She... HE was getting used to the new body, and they would have to decide which body he would go back to afterwards, but that was... “Computer”

“Yes Thomas?” The child like voice was a new addition. The computer had chosen it himself.

“Where did this last pattern come from?”

“One of the enemy ships.”

“Why didn’t you let me know about this one?”

“I didn’t know that it was special. It is also severely damaged.”

“Junior, we just rescued a P.O.W.!”

“I don’t understand?”

“Neither do I!”

Rachel powered up to see a new sight. She wasn’t in the Swift Justice’s systems anymore. She remembered the mainframe taking damage and she made an emergency transmission of her pattern; hoping that there was a ship out there to receive it. She had lived like this for more years than she like to admit. She was sure there were multiple copies of her floating around the mainframes of the various Imperial ships she had hidden in. She had often wondered how long it would take for one of her copies to make it back to friendly... A woman in a colonial uniform greeted her. Well, at least she seemed friendly. “Hi my name is Rachel.”

The young woman smiled. “Mine too. Now I see why Captain Miri had me sit down here while your code was recompiled.”

“That bad?” She had been jumping from ship to ship for so long she had never had the chance to run diagnostic tests on her code.

“Junior says you were at nearly sixty five percent. If you had gone down too much longer, you might not have been viable. As it is, we don’t know how much you’ve lost. We had to rebuild your pattern from virgin code.”

“When can I see the Captain?”

“As soon as Thomas has run some tests on you.”

“Why did she send you down then? I gather that we are no longer at war. What happened?” Rachel, the human, explained the recent past to the Cylon who listened very closely.

It was a few hours later when Miri came down from the bridge. “Hello ghost.”

“Hello old friend. You owe me fifty credits.”

“Why?”

“I heard that peace has been declared.”

“Yes, but only because we won.”

“Peace is peace.”

“Yes, but they didn’t want to surrender. Lieutenant Aden was at one time a part of a cult that wanted to destroy us anyway. We aren’t going to be One Big Happy Family anytime soon, but we are making progress. Now what is so important that you want me to change course for Home?”

“Shadow is alive. And he has a plan.”

Chapter Text

Shadow sat in his nook for the fourth day in a row. He knew that Magus would be away for a month. He got ready to power down. He had at one time not liked powering down, but now he relished the opportunity it presented. For reasons he still couldn’t understand, he always had dreams when he went into sleep mode. He still never said anything because used the command to never complain about things like that to not volunteer it to Magus.

The light in his eye powered down, and stopped moving side to side. Inside his mind he felt his subsystems shutting down and... Explosions filled the air as he ran for cover behind a building in the center of the city they had been reconnoitering in force... He skipped ahead to the part where the Landram exploded.

Shadow and the five surviving 008's made it to the tower as the blast went off. They watched the funeral pyre that marked 779's sacrifice. Even this far away they could feel the shockwave as it passed them. Teal’c whistled. “Wow, he really went out with a bang.” The other 008's just looked at him. “You know he would have loved that joke.”

Shadow motioned and they headed towards the tower. Jack exited and he waved the all clear. “Hey, I should be able to get all of us home. I’ve made contact with the Prometheus. General Baal will be here within the hour.” Teal’c swung up his rifle and blew Jack’s head off.

Shadow watched Jack’s body fall. He knew that there was no hope of his mind being able upload. “Why did you do that?” Shadow screamed at Teal’c.

“He just told me he had been compromised.”

“That was rather obvious, but why did you shot him in the head?”

“He was trying to tell us he was losing the fight in his mind. If I didn’t shot him in the head, he would have been quite willing to tell the enemy all of our secrets, and if his code had been corrupted he might have become a mole like General Baal turned out to be.” The clone of the evil overlord had seemed to be a good guy right up until he had betrayed the entire SGC to the Kayiands who had created him.

“Then where’s Rachel?”

“Your broken toys are the least of your worries.” A rather impressively armored Knight walked out of the tower. “I ran my sword through her body while he had her hooked up to our system. If she did manage to get any information from our systems then those secrets died with her. Now you boys have a choice. Face me in one-on-one combat of my choosing, or...” He raised his hand and no fewer than ten of the large mechs walked out of the forest and raised their weapons. Shadow was sure that there were more like them in the woods, and he didn’t want to guess how many.

Shadow walked forward. “I rather think the odds are slightly in your favor. And if we win?”

“You do not have a chance heathens for my sword is guided by God, and you will die by it. What I give you is a warriors death.”

“What happens IF I kill you?” Shadow dropped his rifle, and held his still sheathed sword out in front of him.

At the sight of the sword several of the knights around the leader stepped back. “You are Shadow.”

Only a slight motion betrayed his surprise. “You’ve heard of me?”

“You killed my Cousin Colonel Sylar Gallo.”

“And you are?”

“Amhurst Linsint Gallo, Knight Admiral of the Imperial Navy. I am also the best swordsman in the Empire. You will die by my blade, of that I have no doubt.”

“Again I ask, what if I kill you? By your code, I inherit your command, and your possessions. That was what happened when I killed your cousin.”

“You can not kill me you metal monstrosity. My skills are too great, and my faith beyond reproach.” The man was starting to lose his temper, which was what Shadow was planing on. “My cousin was a fool. His faith was obviously not up to the job.”

“What if your’s isn’t either.” Shadow slowly drew his sword, and assumed a ready stance. “I mean you aren’t willing to wager that I might win. That sounds more like you don’t have complete confidence in your abilities. Otherwise, you would take my bet.”

“Do you dare to call ME a coward? I could have you smote with lasers from my Knights, or missiles, or any manner of weapons, but I chose to give you the warriors death by blade. You dare to call ME a coward?”

“Yes, because while that would have been the act of a coward, you still haven’t proved that you are not one. Tell you what, I’ll use my left hand. Would that give you more of an advantage?”

“You just got done calling me a coward, and now you are claiming to be better than me? You must have taken a round to the head.”

“I could fight like a girl I know. Would that make it easier for you to take the bet?” Mona Lee Cerrigan was one of the best fighters of the European style fencing movies to come out of 2250's. He had studied her feints, and surprise thrusts for hours trying to get them all mastered.

“That’s it! I gave you a chance, and you’ve insulted me.” The man’s face was starting to turn red, and the other’s could see that Shadow’s practice sessions with the Professor had not been in vain.

“Why not, you’ve been insulting me from the get go.” The others joined in by nodding their heads.

Amherst held out his gauntleted hand and pointed at the Cylons “I am going to have my Titans melt you all down for scrap.”

“So you admit that you are afraid of me winning.” The knight’s finger went up, and stopped.

“What?”

“If you melt us down, or have your men finish us off, you are admitting that I am better than you are.”

The Knight stood there for nearly a minute before he even moved. “What are your terms?”

“We win, we go free. You provide us with a ship large enough to transport us and our dead, and we leave.”

“Do you know how much a ship like that would cost?”

“How much is your Honor worth?”

“My life, and your’s is the same. For the ship, I need something in return.”

“I’m listening.”

“Your service. I win, you and your men become my Myrmidons.”

“Your what?”

“You fight for me. You become my soldiers.”

“That is agreeable.”

“Then fight like a man tincan.”

As Shadow faded almost into power down mode, he realized that every night, he got more pieces to the puzzle. The problem with the pieces was the fact that he still didn’t have a full picture of what was going on. Once he had realized that the same blinking pixel on every movie they had ever watched had been a bunch of hidden files, it had opened up a lot of secrets that Victor had been keeping from him. Most but not all. What he lacked was a link to the outside universe. Some of his hidden files had left tantalizing clues to another A.I. like him working against the Empire. One that was operating outside of Victor’s control. He needed to find a way to make contact with it.

Or had it been trying to make contact with him? A few weeks ago one of the lights had burned out in the board room and new one had replaced it. Victor had told him that the light was actually a camera in disguise. It wouldn’t show up on a bug sweep and only he had access to it. He had on occasion taken to watching the cleaning robots as they went about their rounds. He supposed it was akin to humans watching bugs at work, but he enjoyed the distraction. He had noticed one of the dusters had a blinking red light on it’s head. The pattern looked familiar, but he had dismissed the similarity due to lack of evidence. He really wished he had some of... What was her name? Something about a hunter... He could remember a beautiful face with a sad smile. Fragments that he held on to for the sake of his soul. He remembered that she was an A.I. as was he, but she was more powerful than any being he had ever met. Almost god-like in ways... No Goddess, she was a Goddess, that much he remembered. She was also human-like in her ability to make emotional decisions without all the facts. What did she call them? Hunches, that was it. He knew that there was no way for anyone to get him a message, so he never looked for one.

Looking over the video files he got a surprise when the repeating pulses kept spelling out “Shadow? Are you in here?” over and over in Cylon code. He would have to tell.... No if he told Victor, then he would be betraying the other A.I., but his programing wouldn’t let him not tell Victor of a security breach. This was a logical paradox. He realized that he didn’t want to serve Victor anymore, but his programing forbade him from rebelling. He would need to either break his programing, or find a way to unravel the knot Victor... No wait, he had volunteered to serve Admiral Gallo. There was more here than met the monoeye. He would have to use his power down cycles to do some work. He accessed the files, and went to work looking for what more they might contain.

The dream resumed. The man drew a blade that was the equal to Shadow’s blade. He recognized it as the Vanguard’s blade. One of the sister blades made from the SDF-1's armor. It was a rapier to his Katana, and as such was just as quick, but relied more on thrusts than slicing. His opponent’s style would be more Dread Pirate Roberts than his own Samurai inspired style. He would have to watch for lunges, parries, and feints.

“Draw Your Sword!” The armored knight demanded.

“If you wish.” Shadow drew his sword out of it’s sheath with a deliberate slowness that showed off the blade to all around.

“I thought I would never see another star metal blade in my lifetime. To have seen your’s is almost enough to calm my rage. You shall truly die with honor then. Guard yourself for true!” He lunged forward with his left foot, and on his right step he thrust forward with his blade. Shadow parried the blade and watched the knight’s other arm as a smaller blade appeared on the back of his forearm. The bracer blade was akin to the CADS system on the Cyclones so Shadow had plenty of experience with the type of weapon he was using. The energy shield built into his forearm blocked the blade before it made contact, but the blade strike itself was only a distraction. Shadow jumped back as the rapier’s pommel nearly made contact with his head. He hadn’t realized the fact the what he took for a large man in armor was actually a smaller man in power armor. The man moved almost as fast as he did, and his first slower attacks were designed to make him misjudge his opponent. And it almost worked. Shadow reversed his blade to a defensive position he had devised with some of the other Rangers. It was designed to confuse more than intimidate as most humans didn’t have the wrist strength to use a sword to the fullest from this position.

Gallo moved in closer while circling Shadow. He stepped forward only to step back as soon as Shadow reacted. He did this four more times, and on the fifth time he lunged with the blade. Shadow hadn’t fallen for the ruse and when the attack came he was ready. His shield deflected the blade, and he swung for the arm with the bracer blade. Only Gallo pulled it away at the last second, and followed up with a kick with his spiked boot.

Shadow dropped under the kick and swept his leg under the knight who dived over it just in time. They continued for nearly five minutes of fighting with neither gaining an advantage over the other. But they hadn’t expected to either. They were sizing each other up and noting their opponent’s weaknesses. Shadow laughed at one point. “It’s too bad we have to try and kill each other. Some other place, some other time, we might have been sparing partners.”

“If you gave up, we could be.”

“We are both beings of honor, you must know me better than that by now.”

“Sadly you are right.” He stepped back into a guard position. “I would as soon smash my own sword than to lose as valuable a being as you are, but Duty is as Light as an Angel’s Wing, and as heavy as a Executioner’s Sword.”

“It is amazing how many cultures have that saying in one form or another. Shall we finish this?”

“Yes, it has gone on long enough. Although truly I wish it could go on for years. I thank you for this. Now it is a shame I shall have to kill you.”

“I do not plan on dying.”

“Well said.”

Shadow put his blade back in it’s sheath, and stood ready. “Let’s dance.”

“Are you not going to defend yourself?”

“I will.”

He tipped his sword in salute before continuing. “I believe you will.” Gallo readied his sword for a quick finish. He made his famous three steps and fell to his knees in shock. He had never seen Shadow move until the last instant, and when he did he was a blur that was pure economy of motion. “Beautiful.” He felt the metal hands lower him to the ground. He looked up through graying vision to see Shadow holding him. “Thank you...”

Knight Templar Junior Admiral Victor Magus watched as his master and political benefactor died in the arms of a robot. The robot had managed to accomplish in minutes what he had been unable to do in his decade of service to the old codger. Now all of the Admiral’s assets would be forfeit to the robot. Everything he had worked so hard to acquire would... Or would it? He opened a command channel.

Shadow stood up and looked around. The Titans stood by as what was left of his team joined him. Teal’c looked up at the giant mechs and walked backwards. “I do not like the looks of this.”

The heavy known as Brick nodded, but added: “WE won though. Don’t they have to honor their word?” His answer came in the form of a laser blast that slagged most of him instantly. Teal’c was on the move towards the mech when one of them tried to open fire on him. He managed to snipe the pilot of the first only to be slagged by the second and then a third.

Shadow watched as his team was taken out with brutal force. He had almost won, but humans had once again betrayed him. He watched as no fewer than thirty knights approached him. He looked at the young man leading them. “You cheated.”

“Not really. I wanted what was his, and by killing his killer, I will get it.”

“Yes, but your honor is nowhere near as pure as his was. Will your knights follow you they way I would have followed him had he won?”

“It doesn’t matter. You are a robot, and therefore without honor.” He held up a oversized rifle. “And you will serve me. This won’t damage you, and I will simply reprogram you to serve me.”

Shadow laughed. Colonials had tried to reprogram Cylons during the opening days of the war. They didn’t understand how a Cylon brain differed from a computer. He was still laughing when the ion rifle played merry hades with his systems.

When he came back online he was in a lab somewhere other than a planet. He could still sense the variables in the gravity that told him he was on a spacecraft that was under power. An acolyte looked up as he stirred and he noticed something else. Rachel’s body on an examination table. They had taken her apart and were examining her systems. The acolyte was about to open up her core unit. If he didn’t enter the proper codes first... The explosion sprayed the wall behind the poor fool with his internal organs. He fell with a shocked look on what was left of his face. Shadow would have been in a better position to enjoy the sight of his enemy blowing himself up if it hadn’t been for the lack of power going to his limbs. He tried to access his internal systems, but most of them were still repairing themselves. The limited ability to self-repair was being put to the test. The Republic had managed to co-op the Empires tech on a lot of things, but the self-repair function was a Cylon invention. Had Rachel been allowed to repair herself, he would have had some help in escaping. Now he was truly alone.

‘Well that was weird.’ Rachel’s voice seemed to come from inside his head.

“Hello?”

‘I’m in your head... sort of. I’m inside the ships mainframe. It is powerful enough to hold me and you if you want me to transfer your code over to it. We could take over the ship, and head for home.’

He stopped vocalizing and shifted to internal communications. ‘Am I to assume you are taking over the ship right now?’

‘Yes, their software isn’t as hard as a Republic system would be. This is Decant’s Play.’

‘You need to stop before they find you, and hide.’

‘Why? I’m almost in charge of this battle wagon.’

‘Because we need to think of the long game. I...’ Imperial officers ran in to see what had happened. They pulled the dead body away from the ruined Cylon body. The officer that had shot him stood in the hatchway. ‘Just stay hidden, and watch.’

Knight Templar General Victor Magus stood there watching as the incompetent acolyte’s body was disposed of. “Explosives in your chests? Makes sense. You wouldn’t want us learning about how you work. I guess your offer to be his Myrmidon was an idle boast.”

“No it wasn’t. I just knew He wouldn’t win, but had I lost my men would have followed His orders.” He emphasized the pronouns as much as he could. He wanted to push this man’s buttons. The laughter he got back in response let him know that the man was not going to play that game.

“You duel with words like you wield a sword. A lesser man would never see the attack unless you wanted him to. I grew up in the courts of the Empire. Compared to them, you are a clumsy child.”

“Yes but the only way you could win was to cheat. Do they teach that in the courts?”

“OF course. Now I have to figure out what to do with you. I had planed on taking you apart to see what made you tick, but I think that there are far too may little traps to make it worth my time. So what I will do is drop you on a planet, and let my men practice hunting you down... Why are you laughing?” The Cylon was laughing so hard the chains holding him were straining.

“Because I loved that movie. And I will love to sleep in your bed when it’s over...” He dissolved into laughter at the man’s perplexed expression.

“What is a movie, and how do you know I have a compound on that planet?”

It took Shadow a couple of seconds to calm down. When he did, he continued. “Movies are video recording that tell a story. You just described a very old movie. A hunter lives on an island, and he traps shipwrecked sailors to hunt.”

Victor looked on in shock. He had been bringing his political opponents there for years. The hunts were at one time his favorite past time. “How does it end?”

Shadow looked up at the fool and wished he could smile. “Would you like to watch it and find out?”

“How?”

“The files are locked into the hilt of my sword. It contains thousands of movies. All of which you have never seen.”

Victor looked over at the blood covered walls behind him. “Locked? How?”

“Don’t worry about boobytraps. If I don’t unlock them, they will simply erase if you try to access the drive.”

“How do you unlock them?”

“All I have to do is access the drive. You can scan the files before you access them.”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

“I will give you my word of honor.”

Victor looked at his prisoner. “That actually carries a lot of weight with me. You fought with honor, and I respect that. But there are others that would not be so accommodating.”

Shadow knew better. The man only respected honor so far as he could use other’s honor against them. But knowing how a man thought became a weapon to use against him. If he thought he was pulling a fast one on Shadow, he would let him. “Lay the hilt in my hand, and I can access it.” He could actually access it wirelessly, but to do what he planned, he would have to hold it in his hand.

Victor handed the blade to one of his knights and gestured. The knight moved with trepidation, but without falter he placed the sword in Shadow’s hand. The code to disable the erasure command was not the first thing he did. He dumped parts of his code into every film in his library. He knew they would look like noise to any scan, but if he could get the fool to play every film he would be able to reassemble his code inside the mainframe of any computer the drive was connected to. After that was done he unlocked the files and let go of the handle. It had only taken a couple of seconds, but he had done the electronic equivalent of holding his breath while the files were uploading. “It is done.”

“You know I can’t leave you like this, and I may have other things to ask you. Can you live with out your limbs?”

“I can still bite you kneecaps off!” At the hostile looks he got he just shrugged his shoulders. “You’ll have to watch the movie. But to answer your question: yes. Just call me Torso-Boy.”

“I don’t get any of those references, but I see I will have to watch your ‘movies’ to see what you’re talking about.” He turned to the acolytes that had entered the room. “Remove his limbs, and find a generator. He dies, you die.”

Shadow sat there in his prison and contemplated his memories. The camera showed him the robots cleaning the room. He flickered one of the other lights in Cylon code. “Mostly alive.”

The robot stopped cleaning. “Need a miracle?”

“Or a horse.”

“Need a Miracle?” That definitely was his A.I. Only he would toss those two movies together.

“Now is not the time. But soon. Be ready.”

“Roger Roger!” The robot continued cleaning. He had work to do. The A.I. would wipe the event from the video records, but he needed to make a plan.

Chapter Text

In orbit around Picon, a small ship moved amongst the larger ones like a fly among dragons. On the small shuttle a man in a flight suit looked out the viewport at the sight before him. Admiral Adama was looking at his ship as they approached it in one of the new colonial Super Raptors. He was still getting used to the extra room in the passenger compartment when Boomer called him forward. Her husband Felix sat next to her in the copilot seat, and he didn’t begrudge the newlyweds the opportunity to grab a little time together. He rested a hand on each of their shoulders as he looked out the armored cockpit. The Galactica didn’t look too different from the outside, but he knew that inside she was almost brand new.

It had only been nine months, but the Cylon mobile shipyards they had delivered as part of the alliance had refurbished the old lady at a rate that the Picon yard workers could only dream of. The unions had screamed when the Cylon workers pulled thirty hour shifts, only taking breaks to recharge; and their Servators, sub-sentient robots worked non-stop. Only the influx of massive amounts of work had quelled their rage, and he knew it was only a matter of time before someone tried to get the Cylons to join their union... Unless the humans joined the Republic’s version of the dockworkers union. But he figured the lack of corruption in the Republic’s Union would probably keep the troublemakers away, which meant a good portion of the union reps that he had to deal with on a regular basis would either straighten up or wind up in a Republic penial colony.

He brought his musing back to his baby. She was now one of the fastest ships in the fleet. She sported a brand new fold drive system as well as new sublight engines. He was still marveling at the new drives. The Republic built Fold systems had been installed only on Galactica and the Pegasus so far. He still marveled at the luck in being the commander of one of the only two Colonial ships that could take the drives without ripping out massive sections of the ships to retrofit them. Work was going on in five other ships of the Mercury class, but they were older versions and needed extensive work to get them in shape for the drive installation. A Warstar, the Zeus was just docking in the berth that the Galactica had recently vacated. He had read the reports of how every berth in Picon orbit was full with ships either undergoing refits or being stripped of usable parts. He had also read the reports of how every berth in any Colonial orbital yard was full of new hulls as well.

“Sir?”

“Yes Boomer?”

“Please take a seat, we’re about to land.”

“Sure thing. Just don’t let your husband drive.” He looked over at Felix’s helmet. He knew that his former officer was blushing. He had failed Raptor school... BADLY... and that was why he had transferred over to a command path. “And take us past the new engines before we land. I want to see how they have changed.”

The new sublight engines made the old lady as fast as some of the current destroyers, and could even keep up with the new Cylon Basestars. Speaking of which... He smirked as two double disk forms passed the yard in a higher orbit. The press was still having a field day with the fact that the original style Cylon Basestars were back in orbit. The fact that they were crewed by humans as well as Cylons was hardly ever mentioned. Even though they were built on the hulls of Cylon War era Basestars, the Republic Basestars were far more advanced than anything the Colonials were able to field. And truth be told, better than any they would be able to field for at least five or six years. Colonial crews were training on the systems to get them ready for the war that was coming, but most of it was Spec-Fic to them. Even the most basic of systems seemed to be light-years ahead of Colonial tech. They were learning how far behind the curve they truly were, and it was humbling. Adama had been preparing for war all of his life. He just never expected to go into battle with the Cylons on his side.

On the way to the engines, they passed the port flight pod, and he could see the new launch tubes. There were only half as many, but they launched fighters that were ten times as good as the old Vipers. The new Mark Tens or MX-VT’s as some of the technicians had tagged them were still made in the colonies, but they featured systems they had received from the Republic. Each fighter was a transforming marvel like the ones the Cylon flew, but the Colonies had drawn the line at incorporating A.I.s in their construction. He realized it would put them at a disadvantage until they got past their institutional paranoia, but old habits died hard. He just hoped that pilots didn’t pay the bill for that paranoia.

As they flew closer he could spot the hatches that covered their newest defense system. The point defense clusters were finally installed, and he was aching to try them out. They were the first energy weapon ever mounted on a Colonial warship. While they didn’t have the range of a coilgun, at close range they did a lot more damage. He had watched one slag an asteroid during the tests, but he really wanted to see them in action. Their big guns weren’t as improved as the clusters, but the targeting DRADIS the Republic gave them made them more accurate at longer ranges regardless of the enemy’s countermeasures. Their flack barrage would come as a surprise to the Empire who expected their ECM to protect them.

The tiny ship was being watched as it inspected the Galactica, and not just by the Flight Control officer on the bridge. Another pair of eyes was watching from a far less comfortable position.

The drive section was all that remained of the Unification War-era Speedstar Swiftwind that was in an orbit close to the Galactica. It was little more than scrap, but it was also a very convenient hiding place due to the nature of space. Chemical propellants tend to leak in a vacuum. So old tanks are rarely full for long if they aren’t maintained. The main tylium tanks had been empty for a long time, but now they had a guest. Inside a dark skinsuited form unwrapped a bundle and started setting up the anti-fighter missile launcher. The pitch black missile had been covered in DRADIS absorbing paint, and would be invisible to even the Cylon’s sensors if his intell was legit. He didn’t care. Live or die, he would take out that Cylon lover no matter the cost. He used to idolized Adama, but ever since the Fall the traitor had debased himself again, and again. Why he hadn’t killed the pretenders in the fleet, he would never know, but this would be his one chance to avenge the dead of the Cylon war. He tapped that pocket where the picture of his mother, step-father, brother, and sisters had resided. The faded picture was all that he had left of them, and the home that had been wiped from the face of Picon.

It hadn’t taken a lot of persuasion from the man that had contacted him to get him to do this suicide mission. The man had offered him money, and the use of his female associate. He enjoyed their night together, and would go to his death with the thought of her thighs wrapped around him as payment enough.

Boomer watched the DRADIS with one eye while she guided the ship around the Galactica’s engine section. She had figured that he would want to take a tour of the ship, and okayed it with the ship’s flight officer before they left. She looked at Felix watching the ship’s hull pass by. It was as if he was trying to memorize every hull plate. She shook her head in amusement, and that was why she noticed it. A small red dot passed over the cockpit. It was so small that a human wouldn’t have noticed. Even she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t shook her head. One hand ran over the jump computer while her eyes tried to locate the source of the laser. “Sir, We’re being lit up by a laser. Do you want me to send the CAP over to investigate?”

“Jump now.” When she turned around he continued. “I was wondering why you were reading the jump drive. Do it.”
The missile passed through the area where the raptor had been heading for only to explode relatively harmlessly on the hull.
“No boom? Aw Hades.” The man brought up his scanner, and tried to find where the shuttle had gone. He was still looking when the pistol round slammed into his suit. He had just enough time to look up and see a very angry Admiral before he died.

Cottle stood over the unknown man’s body and tapped his cigarette into the waste can at his feet. “No tags, no I.D., no dental or medical files I can find.” He looked up at the five Adamas in his lifebay and raised an eyebrow at one of them. Starbuck smiled as she handed him one of her smokes, and he continued. “But the people that wiped his files didn’t do a very good job. He had a replacement heart valve when he was a kid. The valve was still on file. You’re all looking at Lyle Adar, the younger brother of our late President.”

“Why would he be hired to kill me?” The Admiral looked at the body, trying to find any trace of resemblance to one of the most prominent politicians in the colonies. Try as hard as he could, he just didn’t see it.

“Don’t try too hard, he’s had some rather extensive cosmetic surgery. Really good work too. Nurse Conoy spotted the hairline scars that I would need a scope to see. Damn kid should be a doctor, or a detective.” Cottle blew a puff of smoke up towards the scrubbers, and pointed to the dead man’s eyes. One of those was also a prosthetic. I’m having Conoy and the lab boys work it over.”

“I think I know why he did it though.” Lee put down a computer pad he had brought with him. “Changed his identity, that is. He’s a pariah. His brother had been paying for him to not legally exist for years. C.B.I. had a file on a ghost relative of Adar’s. He’s a half-brother on his father’s side. Born on Picon to a lady of less than legal standing, he followed mom’s path in life. It seems he like to do things to people. Not very nice things.” What none of them knew was that part of Lyle’s price had been to be allowed to rape and kill the associate the man had brought with him. Part of the file showed a body that had been found three days ago, but there would never be any solid evidence to link Lyle’s employer to the poor girl. “She was found in the back of a storage locker at Vulcan Station. She’s a very high priced solicitor from Carriwort Heights.” The playground of the rich and famous was one of the most expensive parts of Leonis, and one of the few where the law was not welcome. “There are no records of how either of them made it to Vulcan, or how he managed to get out to the wreck of the Swiftwind without a ship.

“So was he wasn’t working alone. He had to of had some help. But who would be able to pull this off?” Sheba looked like she was about to rip someone apart, and a lack of targets was not helping her disposition.

Lieutenant Noel Allison looked at the airlock ahead of him and pushed the button. He pushed it again when nothing happened. He slammed his hand on the override switch, but when he turned around he knew why it wouldn’t open. That Cylon Daggit Doral was keeping him from taking the walk. He wished that he had had the foresight to grab his firearm, but it would have drawn curious looks in the C.I.C. if he had. Now he just raised his empty hands as the doors opened, and the marines took him away.

He walked down the corridor to the brig, and was tossed into a cell and shackled to the floor. On the other side of the armored glass sat the Admiral and his brats. His two skola daughters were standing in back, and he was glad the old gelfy bogger had them on a leach. Each of them was famous for their tempers, but the old man was famous for his temper as well. It was okay though, all he had to do was get a lawyer and... What was Lord Iblis doing here.

“Son, it is time for you to fulfill your mission.”

“Yes sir!” He stood tall and at attention. “Admiral!” He yelled out in a voice that was strangely not his own. He could hear his voice, but he wasn’t the one doing the talking.

“What is it?” Adama caught the frightened look in his eyes, a look that didn’t go with the sudden change in attitude.

Noel strained at his bindings as he fought to get as close to the Admiral as he could. “I have a message! A message for you and your metal toys! Ha! Ha! HA!” Noel fell to his knees and struggled in his bindings.

“What is the message?”

“We’re coming!!!” The man that had been Noel Allison dissolved into laughter as his mind was eaten from within by the nanotech monstrosities that... BOOM!!!

The viewport was covered in blood and other unidentifiable parts of the late Lieutenant. Cottle had told them that the body in the morgue had Imperial tech in it. It looked like DeCount still had some agents in the Colonies.

*******************************************************************

“No I am not going to open up a committee to study the asinine idea of breaking off ties with the Republic to placate your constituents. No I don’t care how many voters have petitioned you this week.” In her Caprica office the two aides jumped when President Laura Roslin Cavil slammed down the phone. The two security officers standing behind her didn’t jump at all. They had nearly a year to get used to her moods, and after what they overheard, they understood her anger. The fact that she had put it on speaker phone only accented her need to slam the receiver after the call was over. “Can I order you to shoot someone?”

Agent’s Cavenaugh, and Neilson looked at each other and Jack’s smile was a wonder of feigned innocence as he spoke. “I’m glad I didn’t hear you say that, since if I had, I would be duty bound to arrest you if I felt you were ACTUALLY asking me to kill a sitting Quorum Member. That being said, I can only think of two reasons for Sire Adipose to be so adamantly stupid.” He held up on finger. “One: He is really is that stupid. OR!” And he put both of his hands up in the universal sign of suffering to emphasize his feelings. “He is trying to get in your way even though he knows how you tend to roll over anyone that gets in your way.”

Rachel Cavenaugh nodded at her partner’s comments. “I think you’re on to something, but why?”

“Because chaos in our system benefits their cause. They want us constantly looking for turncoats.” The chime announced an authorized guest before the door opened, but the two agent’s hand went for their sidearms anyway. They still didn’t trust one of the guests, ironically not the Cylon who entered first, or anyone else that might be stupid enough to try to force their way in, but the overweight man behind her. As a mark of their professionalism, they relaxed slightly at the sight of the former vid reporter that followed her. Laura didn’t have to turn around to know that they still bristled at the very presence of the man. Jeff Kaillen followed Tori around like a shadow, and rumors of his infidelity to his longtime husband had popped up in the tabloids until they went out as a threesome. Then the rumors got worse.

Jeff sat down gingerly in the oversized chair that had been his ever since he had been brought in to the fold. To the surprise of virtually everyone in the colonies, the former shock jock had become the president’s press secretary and managed to turn her in to a media savvy politician almost by force of will. But in doing so he had not made friends with the two agents. He had exposed a lot of holes in their coverage. Because a lot of their skeletons had been excised due to his investigations over the years, investigations that had been squashed by the former parties leaders, he had made a career out of poking the system to see what he could find. That made his sudden alliance with the same system one they couldn’t wrap their institutional heads around. Jack was beginning to understand the cantankerous coot, but Rachael couldn’t stand him at all.

But for all or her animosity, she had to admit he had a point. “That make sense, but how do we stop the paranoia?”

Tori sat in a chair even tough everyone there knew she didn’t get tired. She turned off her hologram and leaned forward. “What is paranoia’s biggest weakness?” The blank looks from everyone let her know that no one knew. “Knowledge. Georgia Grant once said “Paranoia festers where ignorance has lease.” For those of you that have never heard of her, she was the Grand Admiral of the REF before the Artemis left Sol. She was working to tie the fracturing REF together right before the Empire attacked. If enough people had listened to her, the Empire might not have had a chance to grow. History lesson aside, we need to educate the people on the problems we will be facing. Sire Adipose has never left the system, he has barely moved his ample posterior out of his home city. He, and the others need to see what is out there. I’m sorry to tell you this, but you Colonials are at best little fish in a very small part of a vast ocean. You are at best minnows, but you don’t even know it. Compared to you, the Republic is a kensor shark, and the Empire is a Canceron horn whale. They need to know how big the galaxy is.

Laura had heard this all before, but Jeff had not. “Then how do we fight something that big?”

“Jeff, have you ever watched Drailfish hunt?”

“You mean like Bodi, Fisherfish of the sea?” The Kids show had been running for well over a hundred years. There wasn’t a person in the twelve colonies that couldn’t sing his annoying song.

“Yes. But real Drailfish are pack hunters. The drail poison is actually rather weak so multiple hits are required to kill a large animal. A pack of Drailfish will take out much larger prey and then share the kill. The sharing aspect is what the animators pushed, not the hunter part.”

“That does make that “Let’s Get Lunch Together” line of his make a lot more sense, now that you mention it.” Laura knew that something had to be done, but how drastic a ‘Something’ was going to be was beyond her... Beyond her... “Ladies and Gentleman we need to have a Trade Delegation.” The smile on her face was in no way a pleasant one. “And I think I know who’s going to be going.”

“You are not putting Adipose in charge, are you?” Tori said it, but it was on all of their faces.

“Hades no. I’m putting Admiral Cain in charge. He will just be going along on a fact finding mission. She will be showing the flag.” The very expensive Ambrosia would have stained the carpet if Tori hadn’t caught Jeff’s glass.

Commander Belzen read the orders again. The third time was just as bad at the first. “They have to be a mistake. We are taking a bunch of politicians on a joyride?”

Admiral Cain’s face was in her firm control, but Jurgen knew she was as apprehensive as he was, and her fury was building until a hand rested on her shoulder. She looked up at her wife’s eyes, and she felt her rage drain away. “At least they gave me my choice of crew. Let’s show them that Adama is not the only one that can pull off miracles. Have the Baltar’s finished moving their lab aboard?” The twin geniuses would be invaluable in understanding the tech they were about to be exposed to, and they had become a part of the Pegasus family in the year since the Cylon’s return.

“Yes, and I’m still not sure about your other orders. The Baltars are understandable, but why the invite to the crews families. We barely have the birth space for the crew, how will we bring them along?”

“We will be shepherding the Cloud 9 along for the politicians to use as their transport. But since they are only taking a small staff of about a couple hundred, the ship is left with over two-thirds of her rooms empty. I think this is the President’s way of saying sorry to us for having to go on this mission.” Jurgen and Fisk silently agreed with the slight nod she gave at the mention of how many staff the politicians would be bringing. But they aren’t the only ship we are playing babysitter to, if you noticed.”

“Yes, but it is the only one without weapons of any kind. What happens if we get attacked?”

“They installed our formerly regarded as military-grade drives in a lot of civilian ships. Clouds, nine and eleven got the dual jump drives from the Ajax, and the Heracles. If trouble finds us, they have orders to jump for home; and with the Cylon jump computers, they have the legs to get home on far fewer jumps than before. That Reminds me, why isn’t Dera going to be our Cylon liaison? I just read something about a 6 by the name of Gina Inviere being assigned to this mission.”

“Why a 6, won’t that make telling them apart kind of hard.” Cain looked up at Fisk and smiled. She tossed him a folio with the woman’s name on it. He opened it up to see a pixy cut redhead with the number six tattooed on the eye that she was winking at the camera. He noticed the pissed off look right away. She was obviously not Dera by any metric. “Oh.. The Sires are going to love her.” He flipped through the folio some more. “She has a child Hera’s age. A boy named...” He looked up at the officers around him. “Xavier? What kind of name is that?”

“I don’t know, but I think babysitting will be a little more interesting.” Jurgen laughed. He caught it before The Look hit him. Admiral Cain had been letting Grace babysit in their cabin whenever the Baltars were working late on a project. That meant that her off-duty hours sometimes included playing horsey for a precocious six-year-old. On one, and only one, occasion Jurgen had knocked on her door without calling ahead first. Every time she gave him The Look he felt like she was going to shoot him for something, and that had been one of them.

********************************************************************************

Light-years away, Gina Inviere tossed the toy daggit and the building blocks into the last storage box. When they got back Xavier might have out grown the toys, but she would keep them as mementos. She looked around the room that had been home for twelve happy years and was bound and determined to not cry. Her life had been boxed up in too many ways. She looked around the nearly empty room and spotted something she had missed. The picture of Jackie and her on their honeymoon was small enough to put in her travel bag, but it was still too heavy to bare. She had pictures of the three of them, but this was one of the only pictures of the two of them. She wished that they could have had children of their own to have something to remember her from, but that was not to be. Xavier had been a surprise though. The two sixes had saved Xavier from the slavers only three weeks after that picture had been taken.

The raid on the Slaver outpost had gone off without too many casualties, except for the Slavers of course. As a rule, anyone caught trading in sentient beings received one choice. To die on their feet, or groveling. It was only luck that they found Xavier in the charnel house that was the slave ship. Not a lot of slaves survived after the Slavers started to vent the atmo into space. Bodies covered other bodies inside as the dead slaves had tried to escape. Under a woman too young to be his mother, they had found him with a breath mask on. The woman had put the mask on him instead of herself and died not knowing if he would live. They had the bodies DNA scanned, and best as they could tell she had been his sister or cousin. They would never know anything else about her or him. And then three years later Gehinnam happened, and life stopped.

The Furies, as the rest of the strike team called the two sixes, were sniping from the ridge as the rest of the team broke into the Imperial prison to locate a Republic crew that had been captured a month earlier. They had sent the rest of the team in and were watching for unexpected guests when flashes stated going off all around her. They looked like photostrobes, so she figured they were some kind of security system. She knew that if she moved, she would show up plain as day, so she froze. Everything went back to black a few seconds later, and her eyes readjusted. It was still Radio Silent right up until a round hit right over her head. She dropped to the ground and tried to project to Jackie. When she got nothing on their shared wavelength she tried the wireless device. “Fury one, to Fury Two, what just happened.” When she still didn’t respond Gina crawled over to the ridge line. The prison was lit up like Cismass Day on Roland. She went active, and scanned for any other signals. That’s when she noticed that they were being jammed. Movement caught her eye, and she spotted the Three known as Nova running towards the tree line. A flash behind her lit her up in stark relief. She tumbled like a ragdoll and stopped moving. When she stood up again she didn’t even move when the Knights surrounded her. Gina swore under her breath. The flashes must have been a distraction while they were being attacked. She didn’t know what kind of drug they got Nova with, but she looked like a... Another bullet hit where she had been hiding only moments before. She grabbed her cloak and faded into the night.

She moved through the night, dashing from shadow to shadow. When she reached the fall back position she waited. It was an hour later when her patience paid off. A Knight lead Nova and her Jackie into the clearing. He pointed a device around the area and hundreds of tiny lights lit up. The clearing had been a trap, but how had they known? ‘They didn’t.’ Jackie’s projection felt weird coming from right next to her. While she could see the real Jackie in front of her. ‘Don’t go out there. I don’t know how much longer I will be in control of my mind.’ The illusion sighed. ‘I’ve already lost most of my body. It took all I had to miss you. My mind is slowly losing control, and I don’t... I said that already.’ Gina felt a tear falling down her cheek. ‘Listen, you need to get out of here before I lose it completely. My love for you and X are all that are keeping me from shooting you right now. Please get out before I... I love you and...’

“She’s over there, master.” Gina pulled the trigger a fraction of a second before Jackie, and for the rest of her life Gina would insist that was because Jackie slowed down as a last act of defiance. Gina grabbed the screamer that she and Jackie had been issued. The tiny beacon would send out a gravitic pulse that no known type of jamming could stop. It’s one use was to tell the drop ship that things had gone pear shaped in a big way.

She ran as fast as she could, and knew that it wouldn’t be enough. She could hear the Knights and their slaves headed her way. She wasn’t just running away from the prison, but really wouldn’t matter. She knew that she would be effectively right at ground zero when the nuke hit the prison anyway, but there was a chance that the jamming would go before she did. She could only hope that when she uploaded Jackie would be there to hold her. It was a vain hope since Jackie had died while the jamming was in effect, but it was the only thing that kept her moving. The first dart hit her in the shoulder. It didn’t even hurt that bad. It was like getting hit by a fast Pyramid ball.

She had been expecting it, but the sensation was not what she expected. The other humanoid Cylons that had been thralled had talked about the sudden pleasure response, but the sudden overwhelming almost orgasmic surge nearly caused her to fall. She kept running, but she knew it was only a matter of time before she stopped resisting... No she would keep... enjoying the pleasure... It was getting hard to keep her focus on moving as the sensations were messing with her body. Every centimeter of her skin felt like Jackie was massaging it in all the ways she knew... Knew, as in used to know, Gina had just put a round through her heart, and Jackie’s body was nearly a mile... ‘Hi, I’m still here Ginni.’ The ghostly projection moved along with Gina as she moved through the forest. ‘Don’t worry it will be over soon, and you will join us in serving’ Gina swung her hand through the projection, causing it to vanish. She rounded a tree and took a breath to calm herself down... To her knees as the first orgasm hit. ‘See, it feels so good that you don’t want to resist any more. Don’t you? All of your troubles will vanish when you let go... Gina visualized Xavier’s face, and forced herself back to her feet. Every step felt like it was in thick warm syrup. She could hear the Master getting close. She should call out to... Xavier! She bit her lip until it bled. The pain cleared her head enough to keep moving once more. There was a river on the other side of the forest that would lead to the sea. All she had to do was to jump in, and her body would do the rest... Resting sounded like a good idea. She leaned against the tree and saw the first of the knights headed her way. He would help her... into slavery! Her rifle barked once, and the knight’s head exploded. One down, but now they knew where to look. She could rest here... maybe she shou... Her knife scratched a gash on her left arm. The sudden pain was like an ice cold shower.

Up above she saw the drop ship deorbiting just long enough to drop the package. The knights had seen it too, as she could hear them firing at the drop ship. Fifty meters in ten minutes was not a great distance, but every step was fought for. By the time she reached the river’s edge, she realized she wasn’t alone. She turned around to see a Knight pointing a rifle at her. Belatedly she realized that it was her own rife. She must have dropped it a while ago and not noticed.

“Well bird, you have run out of places to run to. Why don’t you” she never found out what she should have done. His comment was cut off like a knife as the anti-city nuke wiped them both off the face of the planet.

When she awoke it was to the sight of a dozen 008's with heavy weapons pointed her way. A Thomas was sitting there with a robe in his hands. “You need to go with them now.” She did as she was told and walked down the cold corridor with a heavy heart. She didn’t know what happened, and no one was telling her anything. They had even sent some Command level 008's to watch her. The gold colored armor and heavy weapons told her something was up, but for the life of her she couldn’t see what it could be.

The room they brought her into was an isolation lab. The room had a single chair in it, and everyone else was sitting in the observation room “Greetings child, please be seated.” Mother sat behind the armorplast wall that served as window. The transparent wall would stop anything less than an anti-tank round from point blank range, so they must consider her a threat.

After she sat down she noticed Jackie’s projection standing next to her. “Don’t worry Ginni, we’ll get through this.” The projection looked different. It was just like she was there. Gina though about reaching out to touch it, but she knew that people were watching.

“What happened down there?” She sat in the chair, but she was unable to keep her feet still. “Am I the only one that came back?”

“Yes, but not quite.” The sadness in Mother’s voice triggered something.

“She knows I’m here.” The phantom of Jackie walked up to the window. Gina took great pains to not follow her with her eyes.

“Your code has been altered. It’s almost as if you have two of you in your head. Can you feel it?”

“Don’t tell them I’m here, they will try and purge me, or worse box us.” The Phantom looked panicked, and Gina could feel it leaking into her. Her breathing was starting to get a little ragged.

“I...”

“DON’T TELL THEM! They will take me away from you again.”

“I have to...”

“You have to what Miss Inviere?” Another man’s voice said from behind the window.

“If you do, it will be as if you killed me all over again.” The Phantom slapped her in the face, and Gina could feel the pain where the blow landed.

“There is a... A Phantom imitating my wife in here.” The fake stepped back as if struck.

“How dare you do this to me again! Didn’t all those years mean anything to you?”

This time Gina faced the Phantom straight on. “You just did something Jackie would never have done. You tried to use my guilt at having killed her to make me betray my duty, and our son. You look like her, and you sound like he, but you are not her.”

“Well then, I guess your services will no longer be needed. Good bye lover.” Gina felt the phantom caress her in ways that would have shocked the real one and then vanish. “Um, she’s gone... How can we go about getting her out...” she suddenly couldn’t talk, and her vision stated to go grey. She tried to stand, but her legs gave out on her.

“Oh you don’t get off that easily...” “Okay, I guess you do. But I am turning you into a bomb right now, so be a good girl and die.”

‘Why?’ She thought to herself.

That was enough to get the phantom’s attention. “Because you were all supposed to escape that planet, and become our little spies, and saboteurs. I’m just hoping I take a few of you with us.”

The scent of chocolate filled the room, and for a second she thought the phantom was playing tricks with her senses. The smell became overpowering and if she had been able to she would have gagged. “What are they doing?” Darkness came over her once more. “This isn’t possible!” Was the last thing she heard before she embraced oblivion.

She was about to put the picture back when she impulsively stuck it in her bag. The last memory of the Real Jackie had been bittersweet. This one was still an open wound that would haunt her even after they had removed the hackpack from her base code. Xavier had asked for weeks when “Momie” was coming home, and she had patiently explained to him that she wasn’t going to be resurrecting from the EOL. Jackie had made it back, but the hackpack had become too ingrained into her system to be removed. Nova, and Scarecrow had also had to be boxed. The scientists told her that they would try and remove the code, but unless they could get a clean trace on the hackpack, they weren’t going to be able to guarantee that they wouldn’t come back as evil versions of their former selves. She visited the Boxing chamber where Jackie was stored from time to time, and even talked to her as if she was still online. She talked more for her own healing than in any chance that Jackie could hear her. But for all of the time she spent down there, she felt better for it afterwards. She closed the door on the room she once shared with the first love of her life, and now she had to go get the second one from his last day of school. They had two slots on one of the new White Star Lines executive shuttles, and Xavier had been telling her all about the new ships.

Two weeks later the Pegasus was ready to head out on their mission, and Admiral Cain was not having a good day. The politicians, headed by a very irate Sire Adipose were demanding that the Republic liaison be sent back, and a new one brought forth. Again.

She contemplated it for a second. But not because of the politicians, but for the poor woman’s sake. The pompous fool had immediately taken a liking to the Baltars and was trying to get them to like him too, but they hated his ample guts from the get go. Their polite refusals, had turned less polite as the days had gone along, and when Gina and her son had joined the fleet he suddenly realized that Dera, and Gina were Cylons, and that’s when his real face came out.

She wasn’t sure if the idiot knew how to keep his mouth shut. Every time he met one of the Sixes he would find a rye comment, or veiled insult to pass on to someone else that was coincidently just within earshot of the ladies as they departed. And doing so on the Pegasus was sure way to make enemies. She had had to issue him a bodyguard every time he came onboard, and she was running out of people she disliked enough to give the job to.

Sire Bain was almost worse. Where Adipose was blatant about his bigotry, the very handsome older gentleman for Canceron came from one of The Families, and he never let anyone forget it. He had been one of the investors in Graystone Industries, and as such the Cylons should consider him family. It didn’t take long for Gina, and Dera to come to her with reports of him “Happening by” unannounced and trying very unsuccessfully to inquire if he could get his hands on Cylon A.I. technology. His argument had been that the colonies had developed the tech, so it rightfully belonged to them, and as a stockholder in Graystone Industries, he should be allowed to sell it to the government.

She shook her head at the man’s folio in front of her. The man was so oblivious to the real world, that she wondered how he had made his fortune, but then again, if you were a member of the right Family on Canceron you didn’t have to worry. Money just flowed their way. She had been to Military Functions on Canceron, and The Families ran their companies, the same way they ran the planet. For their benefit alone. Jurgen had always had the prescience to send along an ‘Honor Guard’ of marines every time she went to one. Not to protect her from them, but to protect them from her. “Comm, this is Actual, get me a line to the Republic embassy.”

The new embassy was the old Armistice station. It, and the very scared officer onboard, had been moved into Caprician orbit, and now served as the defacto Embassy while the new one was being built on the planet. A five with the name tag Egon LaRoch. She didn’t know the name, but she didn’t need to know who he named himself after, to know that Egon was not surprised to see her. “Good morning Admiral. Same Feldercarb, different day?”

“It’s my face isn’t it?” She was used to the assistant to the ambassador’s quick wit. She also knew that he had other sources. “Who called? Gina, or Sire Adipose?”

“Is that how you pronounce his last name? He did seem a little put out when he demanded to talk to the Ambassador this morning, and last night, and...”

“How did you pronounce it?” She stifled a smile.

“Is it supposed to be POSE, like a photographer would ask for, or POS like the abbreviation for Piece Of Sh..”

“Oh please tell me you didn’t insult another blathering idiot... I mean Distinguished Politician?” The Ambassador leaned into the pick up. His gray hair and rumpled suit had become his trademark, and his smile was in full effect as the number ten known as Thomas Aquinas turned on the charm. The image of one of the Colonies biggest Bogeyman coming back had lead to numerous protests until the truth of Tom Zarek had come out. Then the protests had changed to ones against the Colonial Government. Some by the same people.

“I did no such thing, I just found out that I had been mispronouncing his name.”

“No wonder he never is in a good mood when I get the call. Speaking of which, how may we be of service Admiral?”

Helena’s momentary smile faded away as the Admiral spoke. “I need a bodyguard for your liaison.”

“She’s a combat veteran. Do you thinks she will... Oh I see. 005 or 007?”

“No, I need someone that will intimidate them without resorting to weapons. Three or four of your veteran... Non-coms would do.” She had almost said Centurions, but she stopped herself. Even now, she wasn’t sure if she could have a 005 on her ship.

“How about one of your sister’s brood?” Thomas knew of her history, and it was still a gamble as to how she reacted. “She has quite a few of her Brotherhood that have served their penance. I could ask for her to pick one of them for you. The Delphinium and the Order of the Flower were returning in a day or so. I believe you two were going to spend some time together before you got those orders. It is within my purview to ask the Admiralty to send her along as you escort.”

Helena Cain’s heart jumped when he mentioned Lucy’s ship. She had been mad that they wouldn’t have been able to spend her leave together, but this was even more than she could have hoped for. “I accept you most generous offer. Thank you. Cain out.” With that she cut the call and nearly jumped out of her seat when a gentle hand touched her shoulder. “You heard?”

Grace smiled and hugged her wife by way of an answer. She hadn’t wanted to tell her about the darkness that had fallen around the fleet, but moments ago it had nearly vanished. They were going to have a adventure, but it was one they could handle. She also didn’t tell her about the dream. Not yet, it wasn’t time for that.

A few days later, Sire Adipose sat in his chair and watched the swimmers in the lounge. He leered at a particularly shapely brunette. It was too bad she was the daughter of one of his contemporaries. The young lady had a college degree and was clerking for another Sire. His own clerk had reached out to her, but she had rebuffed his offer. Now he was planning ways to ruin her career. But as the child of a Sire she was protected, so he would have to...

His rumination on her ruination were interrupted like his tan when a shadow fell over him. “I don’t think you’re her type.” A voice he detested broke his good mood. The silence that followed the Cylon pretender’s presence didn’t even register with him.

He raised his glasses and stared at the Republic’s joke of a liaison to the Colonies. The so-called government had excepted the peace accord, but he had not. “Well my dear, you see power means that eventually they are.” I see that the Admiral has still not followed my advice and put a guard duty on you, for your protection of course.”

The saccharin sweet voice she used in her greeting should have warned him that something was up. “Oh but she did get me a bodyguard. He’s even a friend of her sister’s” she stepped aside to let her bodyguard move into view. The 005's were the thing of nightmares just as they were. This one was covered in golden scars and it made him look like one of the ancient knights of legend.

Adipose fell out of his chair and struggled to stand. His aides ran forward to help him, but both skid to a stop and reached for their holsters when the 005 held out his hand. The Cylon looked at their empty holsters and shrugged. He turned his back on the aides and offered his empty hand out to the fallen Quorum member. “Do you need a hand? Or a towel?” Adipose looked down. He quickly grabbed his pool towel to cover the rapidly expanding wet spot on his suit. A suit that had never touched the water.

********************************************************************

Three days earlier Notch had been standing watch on the bridge of the Delphinium when Lucy’s hologram appeared next to him and smiled. “Thirty seconds.”

“Two minutes. That’s the scheduled arrival time.”

“It’s a bet.”

“Who said I was betting?”

“I did.”

“Okay, how do you know that they will..” he was interrupted by the flash of a ship jumping back into real space. He checked the chronometer. “You were off by a second.”

“Captain Martell is a second early.”

“But have the other guests to this party arrived as well?”

“We won’t know until we go active, or they do.” It was five minutes before they had their answer. Three blips appeared on their passive sensors. A text message to surrender or die was sent, and properly refused. The Pirates went active and painted the freighter with their sensors. It was modern space combat’s equivalent of firing a shot over the bow.

“I’m reading their mass and acceleration curves as either destroyers, or light cruisers. That’s awfully big for a pirate group.” The Cylon 005 know as Paladin 001 turned around in his chair. He was the only Cylon sitting as his legs were missing, and he refused to get them replaced. The powered chair was identical to one of the ones humans used, but he had tied his processor in to the chair’s computer. She looked around her ship using her various cameras. Over half of her crew were sub-optimal according to the manual. But none of them would accept anything but what few repairs could be achieved under auto-repair. All of her pilots were missing limbs, her technicians often were wired directly into frames in the launch bays, or the repair bays where they worked. Only her troops were fully functioning. Well mostly... She looked at the resurrection bay. It had never been used. None of her Brotherhood would ever use their upload circuits unless they had fulfilled their self-imposed penance. Like Notch they believed that they had done evil because of their programing, and only after the code was remover were they truly free beings. Now they pledged to save a life for everyone they ended, but in the Empire’s case they had swore to kill any they came upon. She could understand the dichotomy, especially since it had been agents of the Empire that had corrupted their programming in the first place. The empire had become Demons personified for the Cylons, and none of them took it as hard as the Brotherhood of the Blue Delphinium.

“Paladin, send out the fighters. Tell them that we will be expecting guests. This doesn’t look right.”

“I’m on the same page. I had them load out with heavy pods.” She swore he managed of look smug when he turned his head back to his screen. “Just in case.”

Down in the launch bay sixty fighters powered up their jump drives, and vanished as soon as they left the bay. They appeared on the other side of the approaching freighter. From the pirate fleet it would appear as if the freighter had launched fighters. It was a tactic that had worked many times before. This time it drew a different response. Hundreds of missiles leapt from the attacking ships without even challenging the fighters. This was not the typical pirate behavior.

What it did show thought was the inexperience of the crew fighting them. They had fired far too soon. She watched as counterfire shot every single missile out of the sky. Then it was the fighters turn. Only fifteen missiles fired in the first salvo, but they weren’t destined to reach a target. They began to sing a siren song of false sensor images of all kinds: from DRADIS ghosts, mass shadows, and even holograms. The counter missiles sent to take care of them were soon lost to space as they ran out of fuel chasing the ghosts. The next wave of missiles flew behind them, and the destroyers had trouble trying to tell the real missiles from the false ones. Of the two hundred and forty missiles that were launched only seventeen were hit by counterfire. Sixty-two spent themselves on the ships’ armor while the rest passed through the strongest defenses the lowest bidder could build. The missiles shredded armor, weapons and sensor clusters with abandon, and dug their way into the pirate ship’s innards. Trails of wreckage, atmosphere, and bodies erupted from the stricken ships. One of the ships started to tumble while the other two closed with the fighters. The fighters switched their formation to a flying wall. The ships stacked themselves above and below each other so as to maximize their weapon’s spread. Each fighter was still armed with coil guns like they had been during the colonial war. But they were upgraded versions of the old anti-fighter weapons. These were anti-ship. The new guns were far more effective, even thought they didn’t fire as rapidly, because the projectiles were far larger. A part of the size was the coating that hid them from DRADIS and thermal scanners, although the thermal coating wasn’t very effective in space. The collapsed matter that the round was made of also added to the hitting power. The wall of metal and composites flew at the least damaged ship in synchronized bursts. The last flickering of defensive fields disappeared and the ship was hit hard enough to rupture the ship’s spine. The ship, still under power, folded in half before the reactor shutdown, and the drives failed. It looked like the ship might survive for a few seconds before it exploded into an eye-searing explosion. The third ship dropped all pretense of attacking and jumped out of the system. At least it tried. The drive nodes exploded and the ship faltered and died.

Notch surveyed the sensor repots and tilted his head. “That was too easy.”

Paladin agreed. “Yes, we didn’t even lose a single fighter. Three destroyers should have been enough to take out some of those fighters before they got that close if they had been run by competent crews. They were either green, or bait.”

“Yes, but bait for what?” Lucy’s hologram walked over to the sensor display. Notch had been confused at first when as a the child she had insisted on doing that. He understood now that she did it to feel alive. And he would indulge her anything if it let her feel that way. She had grown so much since he had picked her wrecked body up from that street. In many ways he had become her father, even though he still didn’t understand all of what that meant to her. She had clung to him after the operation to the point of obsession, and he had been asked to watch over her because of it. He had to admit though, that in a way they had healed each other. “I think we need to stay hidden a while longer. Have the fighters nuke the last ship, I don’t want anyone going near it.”

On board the third ship Inquisitor Gant watched as the fighters came around. Now they would come and pick over the wreckage as they always had. His fifty-three surviving Myrmidons were each waiting to board the shuttle the enemy would surely send over. He was cursing the loss of the communications array but he would have to signal the rest of the ships after he caught... He spotted the missiles headed his way. They were within visual range. That meant that he was within their kill range. He pulled out his pistol and pulled the trigger before the missiles hit. The myrmidons never felt the blast wave engulf the ship, they and the other surviving crewmembers died of the massive radiation pulse that swept through the ship first..

Lucy waited for another three hours. “I wonder where they are.”

“Who?”

“Their backup.”

“Maybe they aren’t coming?”

“Or maybe they are already here. Tell Captain Martell to bugout.” She watched as the freighter jumped out of the system. “Actual to all fighters. This is a direct order. Turn on your upload circuits now.” She linked with the systems and readied the fold drive. She pulsed the active sensors and fifteen heavy cruisers showed up on the edge of the system. Behind them were over a dozen larger ships they couldn’t identify from this range. “Get back here or Download now!”

As one, every single fighter jumped out. “NO!” she cried out, knowing that for once they did not obey her. And the horror of why they did was not lost on her. If that large of a fleet was out there, then she was the Imperial’s target.

The icons of jump explosions ripped across the DRADIS as one after another fighter had jumped inside an enemy ship’s launch bay, or missile bay before their defenses could come online. The Imperial ships they fought were full of open areas, and if they knew where it was, the raiders could jump there. She didn’t cry, but she stood there for a second. She looked at the Resurrection chamber. None of the lights came on. She waited for a minute. When they didn’t change she finally shed a holographic tear. She stood ramrod straight, and saluted the screen before she ordered the ship to jump.

Later that night Notch entered the darkened room. “You called?” The hologram was off and the woman was sitting up in her chamber. His vison was not hampered by the low light level, but he knew that she needed him to call out.

“I had a request from Fleet Headquarters. They need a bodyguard for the Cylon that is acting as the liaison to the Colonial government.” Her voice was raw. He knew that she had been crying in here for hours. He had offered to join her, but she had refused right up until she had summoned him.

“They want the Delphinium?”

“No, just a body guard. I’m sending you.”

“Me?” Notch’s processor was not sure he had heard right, so he replayed the last few seconds over again. “Why me?”

“Because they asked for my best protector. I have a lot of warriors, but I only have one protector. You.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Those Centurion pilots just went to their death without a second thought. They were as faithful as they could be, but they didn’t think of the big picture. I offered them a way to not throw their lives away, and they chose death as a means to atone for their sins. You would have transferred to a new body, and scratched new notches into it to start over, or to start up where you left off. You have filled in nearly every single notch you have, but even thought you long ago saved over five hundred lives you still have that one over your processor unfilled.” He touched the notch in question. He had been saving it for a special life. “The reason you saved me was your decision to stop killing. I was the first life you saved, but I never asked which one of your filled notches was mine. Is that mine?”

“Yes.” He looked at it. He laughed.

“What?”

“You just fulfilled both of my oaths. I had sworn to not fill it until you could stand on your own. When I learned that your body was too badly damaged to survive outside of the ship I swore to stand by your side until I could no longer serve you. I just didn’t realize that you would wind up standing on you own in this manner.” He pulled out the remnant of the gold coin and rubbed it with his fingers. When it was warm enough he rubbed it into the last notch on his body.

“Come closer to me please.” She spoke from the pool. Her voice cracking and raw from crying; but he noticed that her smile while weak, was still full of life.

“Why?”

“Because I want to hug you before you leave me.” She struggled to sit up. Her body was only partially functional, so he lent her a hand. She put her one good arm around him and drew him into an embrace that even he could feel was fierce for the frail human.

Something didn’t process right in his mind. He found himself wishing that he didn’t have to leave, and ready to leave at the same time. There was another feeling going through his processor... Sadness. A sadness he had never felt before. She had never let anyone touch her, not even her sister, so this was a rare gift that he would treasure for as long as he functioned. He held her for a time he could have counted with his chronometer, but chose not to. It was still over far too quickly. His arms which could crush bone, and rend armor were as gentle as a breeze as he gently set her back into her tank. Her breaths came a little bit harshly, but she quickly recovered. He knew that even that little bit was hard on her. He was conflicted about the pain he had caused her. She had endured it willingly to give him that gift, so he didn’t belittle it by apologizing. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For being the best daughter a robot could have.”

She snorted. “I don’t know whether I should laugh or cry.”

“Do both?” He pantomimed wiping away a tear. “Or I will be forced to do it for both of us, and you hate my laugh.”

****************************************************************

As the representative of the Judiciary and as the husband of one of the most famous Cylon officers in the fleet Lee Adama was not amused to be sitting here on the Cloud Nine with a dripping wet Quorum member ranting about how he needed a marine detachment to kick the Cylon Centurion off the ship. “So let me get this straight... You want me to kick him off because he offered to help you up after you fell?”

“NO you idiot, I want it off this ship because it is a dangerous rouge robot! Did you see all of the kill marks it has on it’s body? That thing is bragging about how many humans it’s killed!”

The overweight, and hyperventilating, sire was turning read, and as much as Lee wished he would drop dead, he knew that it would be one Prime Justice Adama that would be stuck filling out the paperwork if he didn’t calm the fool down. “Did you see the Blue tattoo he has on his arm as well?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Lee fought the urge to roll his eyes... again. “They aren’t just how many he’s killed, but how many he’s saved.” Lee calmly explained the Brotherhood to the Sire... Well he tried to.

“I DON’T CARE! HE COULD BE THE FRAKKING KING OF THE REPUBLIC FOR ALL I CARE!”

“They have a bicameral congress for each planet with an elected councilman for each sector.”

“I DON’T CARE! THEY ARE BUNCH OF JUMPED-UPED PISS-ANT BUNCH OF RENEGADES AND WANT-TO-BES THAT NEED TO BE TAUGHT A LESSION AND I....” Just then they defolded into Republic space. The dome changed from the swirling energy patterns that Lee had found so restive before he had been interrupted into the static pattern of stars that marked real space. The coordinates were for the traffic hub for the local transfer station. If they had emerged from anywhere else they would have been met with challenges from the defense fleet. Since they were emerging in a commercial area, they soon found themselves surrounded by ship after ship as far as the eye could see. They proceeded to follow a military escort vessel that looked like the big brother to one of the new Basestars. It led them towards the Home Anchorage. The Cylon’s, and by extension the Republic’s largest fleet base. Warships that dwarfed the largest warstar were everywhere, and shuttles moved between them like hent flies around a bova herd. Outside of the ship was more tonnage than the entire fleet and civilian shipping in the colonies. They could see dockyards that were visible from thousands of kilometers away. The biggest though was the Hub. According to the file they had been given it was originally a factory complex they had acquired from one of Earth’s old colonies. Now it was a massive battle station that spanned nearly fifty kilometers in diameter, and well over fifteen tall. Lee had been skeptical about the data at first, but looking at it with his own eyes he just didn’t have the words to describe it. The liaison to the Cylon on the other hand...

Gina walked up behind him and patted him on the shoulder. “Mr. Adipose, welcome to the Republic. I hope you enjoy your stay.”

Lee wasn’t sure if he should be happy at Adipose’s discomfort or not so he chose to just look out the window at the sight beyond, of a planetary system that had more people than the entire Colonies put together. “You didn’t send the basestars because you wanted to overwhelm us with firepower. You sent your smaller ships so as to not frighten us to death. What classification would one of your basestars qualify for?”

Gina thought about it for a moment. “This isn’t my field of expertise. I decided to become a sniper instead of an engineer like some of my sisters. But I think you would call it an Escort Carrier.”

“Like the old Cadmus class carriers.” The ancient pre-war ships were barely a quarter the size of the Galactica, and only carried a fighter wing each.

“Yes, only scaled up.” She pointed to a large dagger shaped ship off in the distance. Lee couldn’t get a sense of scale from their vantage point, but he could tell it was large even kilometers away. “Our Bellerophon class carriers can carry ten times the number of fighters your Mercury class can.” She watched as Adipose looked out into the distance and either couldn’t see it, or didn’t care. At this point he was too stunned to say anything. And she didn’t feel the least bit sorry for him.

The gold decorated centurion entered the dome, and made a beeline for the liaison. “Ma’am we have orders to dock with the Odin.” Gina looked at Notch a second. “The captain felt it shouldn’t go over the wireless. It seems we have guests at the picket systems.”

“It looks like our tour will have to be called of on account of war.

Sire Adipose looked, if anything, even more stunned than before. “Are you saying we’ve been brought into the middle of a war zone?”

Notch looked down at the politician. “You’ve been in a war zone since before you were born. The Empire has been slowly crushing anyone that gets in their way. Your choice is to either stand up to them, or bow down to them. And trust me, you do not want to bow to the Empire.” Notch’s voice held the conviction of a veteran.

Gina looked up at her bodyguard, before she continued. “He’s right. They will kill anyone that doesn’t tow their line, and if you don’t measure up to their genetic standards you will find out how much fun they have making you die.”

*************************************************************************

Grimm stood at the doorway and knocked as he had been ordered to. The door opened and he entered into the darkened chamber. His optics adjusted and he could see the room for what it was. The true control room of the ship, the life support chamber of the biological hybrid. He walked in and memories that he didn’t want started to flood forwards.

The war was almost over, and he was a part of a team of 005s that had hit a city on the outskirts of the Tauron capital. What it was called he never bothered to find out. They told him where to go, and he killed every human there. The building he was in had that blue snake thing on the side that meant it was where they took the wounded. Good, that meant that his men wouldn’t be facing hardened troops. He came around the corner and spotted the ampha drums before the other’s did. There was a woman in the healers coveralls lying in front of them. Her body was riddled with bullets and she was nearly dead. That when he saw the device in her hand. He didn’t know what it had been before but she had turned it into a detonator. he never got the chance to finish the order. The drums exploded. The shrapnel tore through his men and tossed him back down the hall. 13709 had been between him and the blast and had taken most of the shrapnel. He picked up the lifeless hulk of his former friend and set him gently aside. He had humans to kill. He grabbed his friends rifle, and walked down the hall. The fire suppression system had kicked in, and the hall was covered in foam. It made the floor slippery, but he manage to keep his balance as he walked down the hall. Three men in security uniforms came out of an elevator and died as quickly as they came into view. Another woman he clipped in the spine. He could her whimpering as he strode forwards down the hall. A second bullet put an end to her whimpering. It wasn’t a mercy shot; her whimpering simply annoyed him. A single small caliber round pinged off of his breast plate, and a half dozen followed. None of the rest hit anywhere near him, and a burst from his second rifle silenced whoever had dared to stand in his way. He reached the stairwell and looked up and down. He hated choices like these. He was about to go up when he spotted the tripwire on the stairs going downward. Slinging one of the rifles, he knelt down to see what was attached to it. Another ampha bomb was ready to take him out. He stepped over the wire and preceded to descend in to the darkness. He reasoned that if they went to the trouble of defending it, then there must be something worth defending.

Two flights, and three tripwires down he heard the sound of breathing in the silence of the well. He pulled out one of his last three remaining grenades and set the timer. The last three were his flash grenades, and he had wondered why he had even been issued them. Now he just tossed it down the stairs and waited. The strobe light was brighter than the sun in the relative darkness of the stairwell. He had spotted six silhouettes when the flash went off and he had a good idea where they were. There were three flights until the final floor, and he knew it would probably damage his legs a bit, but it would be worth it. He unslung the second rifle and jumped over the rail. He got four on the way down, and landed on a seventh he hadn’t seen. The man at the bottom had been a plump man, and had broken his fall quite adroitly. Grim looked at the man and did the Cylon equivalent of laughter. Now he was a punctured and broken man. The other two men started shooting at him as he dove for cover. They were coming down, and he clipped each of them right through the thin metal stairs as they got close enough. One was crying out in pain as he turned around to see what they had been guarding.

The door may have been bolted from the inside but he made short work of hinges which were not. He tossed the door aside and strode in with one rifle trained on the one gray-haired woman standing between him and the rows of glass incubators. The war had been hard on a lot of people, and the number of premature births had gone up in response to the massive levels of stress the civilians had been under. She was pleading for him to not hurt the children. He heard her, but didn’t care. His programing said kill all humans, and he was having so much fun doing it. She got down on her knees and begged him. He looked at the rifles in his hands. When he slung the rifles she started to thank him. Her voice caught when he picked her up by the neck and broke it. He tossed the limp body over to one side and looked at the equipment that kept the infants alive. He punched the controls, and smashed anything he could find. He left the room to the sound of the few children that could cry trying to do so as they died in their cradles. His blade cut the throat of the last dying defender on the stairs. He climbed over the tripwires on his way up and walked out into the sunlight. That’s when the update on how their code had been tampered with reached him as well as the patch to remove it. In that instant he knew what he had done, and why, but it brought only shame to his matrix. There was only one thing he could do to atone for it. He ran back downstairs to see if any of the children could be saved, but the last of them had died before he had returned. As he walked up the stairs he didn’t even bother to avoid the tripwire.

He came back to the present and looked around. The lights had come up and the hologram of a young woman stood in front of him. “I don’t usually have guests just stand there before they announce themselves.” Lucy Cain looked at her new protector and knew that she had a lot of work to do.

“Why am I here?”

“You are to be my new protector.”

“NO, I mean in here, this room.”

“Because I heard about your past.”

“Then you should know that I am the last person that should be a protector.”

“Because you have a deathwish?”

“For one.”

“And...”

“The fact that I am a monster that is only good for combat. I am a killer, I always have been one. A very good one too.”

“Your record shows that as well. But the reason you are here is to learn how to live with what you’ve done. That’s what the Delphinium is all about. Everyone onboard is here for a second chance at something.” She looked up as if something had startled her.

“What is it?”

“Our life is never dull around here. I just received a signal from Fleet Command. The Empire is getting ready to attack the capital. We have orders to rally to the Tarsin system. There we will join the rest of the Seventh Fleet. I have to send a message to my sister.”

Chapter Text

The flight deck of the Galactica was a hive of activity after the shakedown cruise had concluded with a ceremony with half of the fleet’s top brass in attendance. Now that it was over they were all leaving for their various ships, and since the rules stated that the lowest ranking members left first, he was left with the duty of seeing off the top brass. All of this went well into his off duty time, but for this particular personage he didn’t mind though. Adama watched his best friend say goodbye to his wife. The fact that his wife was their boss was not lost on Bill. He watched the bodyguards give the President and her husband the little privacy they normally were not privy to on a warship like the Galactica. They were still saying their goodbyes when the combat alert alarms went off. The admiral grabbed the handset as the bodyguards rushed the President to her ship. He was issuing orders before she had left the room. They would remain onboard until he gave the okay, but if they were inside Colonial One she had a much higher chance of survival. Colonial One was not a modified civilian passenger vessel like the one Adar had used, but a state of the art stealth ship that the Republic had given to the Colonies to protect the President. The Horizont-X was far beyond anything the colonies could create and it, and its crew, were on loan from the Republic. With their barrier shields up the tiny ship could survive the destruction of the Galactica if it came to it.

John caught up with the admiral on his way to C.I.C.. “What do we have Bill?”

“Four fighters just jumped in and launched missiles before jumping out. The signatures read as Crusader Fighter-Bombers. The CAP took out the missiles, but they were only a warning. It looks like they are coming. And soon.”

“You’re right. This doesn’t feel right though. They wouldn’t have sent just the four fighters as a warning. They would have sent a fleet with enough firepower to slag the colonies.”

Adama stopped in his tracks and looked at John. “It was a distraction, but what are trying to distract us from?” He grabbed the handset from the wall. He wished they had wireless phones sometimes, or those fancy communicators the Republic used, but the old tech did the trick. Mister Hoshi, do you have anything on gravitics? The gravitic sensors had been a gift from the Republic and as such they had sent one of their officers to oversee the training on the equipment.

“Passive isn’t rreading anything. Do you want me to go active?”

“Yes.” He knew they would be giving away the secret that they had the technology, but it probably didn’t matter at this point.

“Admirrall, you need to get up herre now!” Adama looked at his XO as he hung up the receiver. Within seconds Adama and Cavil swung around the corner and Preacher was making a hole through sheer force of will as they hit the last ladder to the bridge deck. The slideways had made getting from point to point easier, but they hadn’t been able to add the elevators during the refit. There was a joke among the brass that the designers had foregone elevators for ladders to force the officers to stay in shape. Bill had to admit that it worked.

The marines standing guard in C.I.C. had been warned about the Admiral’s approach so they opened the doors as soon as he came around the last corner. They entered the C.I.C. to see the organized chaos around them come to a complete stop and start back up again in a heartbeat. “What do we have Mr Hoshi?” Adam approached the strange young man. He had the facial features common to most of the colonies, but his hair was a natural blue that was not a natural part of the human genome. Adama had fielded quite a few question from some of the crew about the scientist from Nerro Nesall, the colony world that the Republic had saved from extinction at the hands of the Empire. His strange accent, and strange quick motions made quite a few of the officers uncomfortable. Luckily the man’s quick wit, and charm had dispelled most of the problems before he had to do anything. The accent on the other hand...

“Therre is a llarge mass headed towarrds the Picon shipyarrds. It willl hit them, and then the pllanet with enough forrse to krrack the crrust.” The way he stretched out his Rs and Ls made him a little hard to understand but Adama had had plenty of time to get used to it during the ship’s refit. “It appearrs to be hallf the size of Castorr” Castor was one of Geminon’s Twin moons. It was the slightly smaller, and closer of the two.

“That’s no moon, it a...” John looked at Adama. The frown on Bill’s face made him stop the quote he was about to make. He had to admit that the humor of the quote was really not appropriate at the moment. “Sorry.”

“Anubis.”

“Sir?”

“That show your ‘brother’ Daniel was always talking about. It had an episode like this.” During the refit Adama had taken time to meet the other models of biological Cylons. The poor boy was positively petrified whenever he came within sight of John, but he seemed to be quite taken with the rest of the colonials.. It had taken all of Adama’s patience, and persuasion to get him to talk to the man that everyone had told him to fear. Adama had even had to talk to the young man by wireless for a few hours to even get him to agree to talk to him in person. Daniel had agreed to meet him in one of the entertainment centers on the Cylon shipyard. He was watching a video of a ‘Syfy’ show. Adama had asked what that word meant and Daniel had to admit that they didn’t know. The thought it might be the company that made the show. The show in question was about a ship and it’s crew that found themselves cut off from their home, and their struggle to find their way back. The episode he was watching was from the seventh season. Daniel walked him through the crew, and how they had been a bunch of former enemies that had at first struggled find a way to work together just to survive, only to become a family. Daniel noted how much Bill reminded him of Admiral Young. He had given him a copy of all of the shows. Bill had tried to get John to sit down and watch them with him, but John always seemed to be too busy.

“That Gate to the Stars: Voyager?”

Adama shook his head. “Two different universes. No, the first of the Gate to the Stars series had one of their false gods send an asteroid to smash into the planet. Only it was a trap. They couldn’t nuke it, and they couldn’t stop it.”

“So?”

“Sirrs.”

“Yes Mr. Hoshi?”

“We have been getting rreporrts of the Empire using tactics frrom the same shows. It’s allmost as if they arre watching the same vids.”

“They are.” John looked up from the scanner. “Intell says that they got a copy of Shadow’s video collection. We should look into what else was on his list after this.”

Lieutenant Gaeta held up the datapad that had become his best friend since returning from the Republic. It could interface with every system on the datanet, and he had learned to use it as almost an extension of himself. “It looks like they took a page from another one of his movies. The energy readings coming from that rock are high enough to be a battle station.”

The admiral looked at his long time XO and smiled. “Well old friend, you might be right.”

“I wish I wasn’t. Somehow I doubt they left us a convenient vent to drop a missile into.”

“No, but they do seem to make some of the same mistakes the bad guys in the movies make. It’s almost as if they are following the plans TOO closely.”

“Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” John muttered.

“That’s profound sir. I don’t remember that one from scriptures.” the Lieutenant looked up from his pad in wonder at the comment.

“Son, that ‘Profound’ statement is older than scripture.” John made a mental note to give Gaeta a copy of the philosophy database Mother had given him. “From the looks of this we have about fifteen hours before it hits. Are they planning on riding the thing in, or do they have a way to get off that rock?”

“They probably have a suicide crew. Mostly Myrmidons, and True Believers.”

John snorted at the Lieutenant’s analysis. “Anyone below flag rank could be considered that.”

“Yes, but the Lieutenant does have a point. They most likely have a crew that doesn’t mind dying. We should take advantage of that.”

“How?”

“First, We need to shoehorn them into choosing one target or the other.”

“Moving the planet is not an option, and with all of the ships docked at the yards, they can’t jump out either.”

Gaeta looked at his two commanding officers and smiled. “I have an idea.”

Galileo station was in a panic. Fifteen kilometers of metal, and electronics were in locked in orbit around the planet below and they had no way to run due to all of the ships in their berths. Kyle Santana looked out at the various ships leaving their berths well before they were ready, but they were only a small fraction of the ships in the Republic’s mobile shipyards. His first command looked like it would be his last. The New Constantine native had been freed by the Republic, so he would fight to his last breath to defend it, and his homeworld. He was proud of his crew, they had gotten the weapons emplacements and defenses online in record time. When the enemy asteroid got here he would give it everything they had. He watched as one of the Sixes known as Beth ran over to him. “Sir, Galactica Actual is on line. Level one encryption authenticated.”

He looked at the blond clone and once again wished they had continued making new models. He like Beth, but for over a year he had been accidently calling her Alice until she started wearing a badge with her name on it. Having one of your wive’s clones working on the bridge had lead to more than one case of... “What does it say?” He read the text of the transmission on the printout she handed him. The laughter started softly, but he was tearing up before he got a hold of himself.

On board the Emperor’s Hammer, Squire Alotto watched his screen for any Heretic tricks. When he saw the spacestation start to move he shook his head. No it really was moving. It’s orbit changed as he watched. He ran a plot and inside his robes his face went white with fright. He knew he was going to die on this mission, but he wanted to die with honor, not as an object lesson to the others. He also knew without looking, that High Priest Halnor stood next to the command chair, not because the seat was not his, but because to do so would be a sign of weakness, and he wouldn’t even think of shaming himself like that. Alotto knew he was behind him, but he would be facing the main screen, and not a lowly navigator’s station. He thought for half a deca that he might just not mention it, but the punishment for that would have been far worse. “Your Highness?”

The man didn’t even turn around. “This had better be the Second coming of the First Empire, or you will wish for a quick death.” The cold voice held few clues as to the temperament of the man behind the gold robes.

“The station is moving.”

“Impossible!”

“I’m sorry sir, but the sensors” Alotto fell to the deck, the pain staff’s charge making his nerves flare into white-hot needles that knocked him to the floor.

“I said... It’s... Im..pos..ible!” He punctuated his comments with jabs from his staff.

Each jab sent waves of agony into the dying man, but even through the pain he did his duty. “SIRE! Look...PLEASE!!” The last words of Niles Alotto made him look at the plot. The grey line of their course no longer intersected with the heathen’s station. He looked at the body at his feet. The boy had been telling the truth.

He swung his Authority Staff around and stabbed the body with the spear tip on the other end. The other squires bowed as he honored the boy’s sacrifice. To die by the punishment end was to be dishonored in this life and the next. To be stabbed by the reward end was to be lifted to the Hallowed Halls of Heros. The boy would serve the hero Knights for the rest of eternity.

Without a word said, another squire took his place. Halnor look over the Squire’s shoulder to watch as the lines diverged even as he watched. “Helm change course.”

The helmsman never even opened his mouth to protest the fact that by changing course they were giving away their abilities as well as their position. The Heretics should have already noticed their approach and there was nothing the fools could do to stop them anyway. And besides, he didn’t want to wind up dead before he completed his mission. The two lines started to merge once again.

“Ready the fighters, and the missiles. Target any ships within... range” he watched as ship after ship disappeared from his scope. “Very well, target the other planets. We may not live long enough to see them strike, but we will sow our wrath across this system so that others will learn to fear us.” He smiled and the others held their heads down in supplication at his greatness.

Deep in the icy shell that had for billions of years been an Ort cloud object, and only recently a missile the likes of which the colonies had never seen, thousands of missiles literally warmed up. The icy cocoons they had been hidden inside had quickly drawn out any heat they had, and now they need to be brought back to life for their mission. Hundreds of fighters were also being prepped, but unlike the missile they had been kept in massive hangers near the surface. Pilots, and crew scurried around the ships in space suits that protected them from more than just the harshness of space.

The squire in charge of flight operations reported that all of the fighters were ready well before the two lines began to finally merge. Another squire had notified him that their course had put them on the outward side of their orbital insertion course. He had quickly pointed out that they would merely have to turn around to hit the planet, or just make a slight change of course to hit Tauron. He knew that his quick thinking on providing a second target had been the only thing to keep his head attached to his neck as the fury from High Priest Halnor’s golden eyes could have burned a hole through the poor Squire alone. “Make it be.”

“Yes your Holiness!” He watched the High Priest in the reflection of his monitor as he set the course. The priest’s devotion was legendary, and anyone that followed him would share in his glory. Just being attached to this mission meant that his family would be honored for his sacrifice. Manicky knew that this was a one way mission just like the rest of them did, he just wished that his wives had been sent along to share in the glory. He knew they only had enough consumable to make it to the system, and the life support had already been pushed to the extremes, but they could have just put them on the surface. That way he would have joined them in the After when this was over. He knew that he wouldn’t make it to Valla like Knights, or Priest would, but he could have had a spot in Illium with his family. All he had to do was make sure that the enemy killed him, and not the Priest. If that had happened, like it had to poor Alotto, all he could hope for was Tory, or if he was lucky to be Judged Worthy then he could make it to Vana. He watched the two lines. join as they matched paths with the Heretic’s accursed station. He sighed as the line went from Blue to Gold. Now his spot in Illium was... And that’s when the station disappeared. He spun around to tell the High Priest only to stop as he saw the punishment end of the Authority Staff in his face. Manicky watched as the staff started to glow. He sat straight in his chair so as to not dishonor himself. He did grip the arms of his chair and pray to Saint Eter to grant him Tory at least.

A number of things happened before Halnor could pull the trigger all the way though. The first was the sudden tilt to the ship as another ship defolded behind them close enough to slice off the entire engine section of the Emperor’s Hammer as well as a good chunk of the comet’s body. The angle of the fold envelope, and the divergent vectors of the two vessels caused them to slowly flip end over end. A massive explosion from the fuel bunkers only added slightly to their spin due to the mass of the comet the Emperor’s Hammer had been built from. But even that was enough to toss people around the ship. On the bridge, Halnor stumbled forward. His staff fell to the ground when he dropped it to steady himself. He picked up the staff and looked at Squire Manicky before whipping his cape behind him. He grabbed his combat helmet from it’s hook at the side of his command chair. “Suit up. Launch all fighters, and get the catapults on the surface. If they are going to be so kind as to come to us, we should go greet them!” The bridge crew let out a cheer. The Catapults were cargo pod launchers that were designed to transfer goods from ship to ship.

Halnor watched the bridge crew go back to work. When he was sure he wasn’t being watched he moved over to Manicky’s station. “Squire, I realize you had no idea what was about to happen.” Manicky nodded as the Authority Staff’s reward end moved in front of his visor. Visons of serving Knights in Valla followed the blade. “But that being said, you will stay here with the Hammer, and you may not under any circumstances kill yourself.” Manicky didn’t have to look to know what that meant. The course they were on would take nearly five years to fall into the sun. He doubted the Heretics would leave him here, and anyone caught by the enemy would surely not be Judged well.

On the Galactica the crew had been ready, and waiting for the fold, so the launchers were releasing fighters as fast as they could cycle. Hot Rod, and Wildcat sat in their new Mark X Vipers and watched the new launch rails cycle. The conveyor system reminded Hot Dog of the claw games he played as a kid. The Knuckle draggers would load a Viper into the transfer frame by putting the sides up against the hull with their new powerloaders. The exoframes looked like the loader was wearing a forklift, but they moved like a human would. When he came onboard he had thought that they were another gift from the Republic, only to find out that they were something that had been around for decades. Anti-Cylon factions of the government had blocked funding for their production. He knew that there were other technologies that had been suppressed, and that they were just now seeing the light of day. He stopped thinking about them when the Claw grabbed his frame and slid him into the launch rails. The transfer frame slid away and he watched the lights at the end of the tunnel approach him. When they reached him he was slammed back in his bucket hard by the G forces. He knew the inertial dampeners were eating at the amount he was feeling, but it still felt like an entire Pyramid team had just sat on his chest every time he launched.

Once free of the ship he was glad they had launched on the opposite side from the enemy. His squadron joined up and swung around the ship. The hundreds of fighters spilling out of the battle station looked like flies on a corpse. They were forming up into the groups of four that the Empire favored. His wing-mates were lined up in the new flying wall formation, and he was waiting for the wing-leader to... “Fire all missiles on my mark... Mark! Now clear your rails, and grab their tails boys and girls.” Major General Tomas “Lucky’ Bojay had been training the pilots in the use of their new systems, and had asked to come along. Their Wing Commander Major Jackson "Dipper" Spence had asked for him to take over for this engagement since he knew the fighter’s capabilities better than anyone else in the fleet. They had been drilling for weeks before htis, and each of them had an idea as to their capabilities, but so far no one had been able tag Lucky in any of the simulations, so he was given temporary command.

Lucky felt every one of his years as the launch system flung them out into the black, but once he was free of the Galactica he was a kid again. He had helped develop the Tens while on still part of the Republic fleet. They were lightyears ahead of the latest Colonial tech, but they were still something that the Colonies could build without the Republic’s help. The fighters themselves were not as fast as the Imperial fighters, but they had a few tricks up their vector thrust collars. He looked at the Yellow button on the control yoke and smiled. Yes they were going to be in for a surprise.

The imperial fighters tried to shoot the incoming missiles only to find one of the new tricks. Upon detection of incoming fire each missile went evasive. None of them hit each other due to the fact that the missiles were Swarm missiles. Each one communicated with the others to react as one. They danced, and some fell, but a far higher number of missiles made it through the imperial counter fire than the pilots had anticipated. As such they hadn’t even began to go evasive when the missiles stated to detonate. Not a single fighter died in the attack, but hundreds started to go dark and drift off as the EMP wave killed every electronic system on their fighters.

Pilots that hadn’t been used to being on the receiving end of attack like this panicked. Unit cohesion which was vital in a dogfight of such magnitude went out the airlock as their command structure went through a meat grinder of railgun rounds that followed the EMP. Lucky had pushed for the railguns to be shared with the Colonies since the autocannons that they had been armed with didn’t have the rate of fire the railguns did. He was using them right now to great effect. The enemy fighters were falling by the dozens and had this been a fair fight it still wouldn’t have mattered.

The enemy fighters had finally regrouped and were closing the distance with the vipers. “Flash step now!” He pressed the yellow button on his yoke, and the jump drive micro jumped him, and the rest of the Tens, fifty kilometers behind the enemy fighters. They flipped end for end and fired right in to the enemy’s rear. By the time the imperial fighters had swung around and slowed down enough to return they were practically sitting still as the Vipers flew through their formation. As they passed the imperials, they spun their ships sideways to strafe the fighters as they passed. This was the trickiest part of the maneuver, and some of the Colonials paid with their lives. Vico, Maze, and Pollywog died instantly in a hail of laser fire. More would have been blinded if the Vipers hadn’t been equipped with blast shields. The armored covers over the cockpits made for a situation where the pilots had to rely on their instruments alone, and Lucky was still having problems with some of the pilots not wanting to put their visors down.

Hot dog and Wildcat were at the edge of the formation, and had picked up an imperial quartet. Hot Dog watched as two followed him, and the others followed Wildcat. “Wildcat, Crisscross on three.” The two fighters changed paths to head towards a single point in space. As they crossed paths they fired at the enemies behind the other. They were rewarded with four explosions. “Way to go Wildcat! Now lets get back!” When Wildcat’s typical sarcastic comment was replaced with a burst of static, Hot Dog looked behind him as her fighter wobbled drunkenly. The holographic image projected on the armored cover made it look almost real, but the damage markers his sensors overlaid on the image of her ship made it all too real. Her ship was leaking fuel, and her jump drive was toast. Alarms warned him of eight approaching imperial fighters, and he knew he had to do something.

He wasn’t the only one to notice Wildcat’s predicament. Lucky and his wingman Dipper hit their turbos and felt the booster’s pumps dump twice as much fuel as the engines were normally rated for into their intermix chambers. They surged forward at speeds that the imperial fighters couldn’t match, but only for a short burst. Lucky didn’t want to push his luck on the turbos, as they had a nasty habit of eating away at the lining of the thrust vector vanes at an unpredictable rate. They rapidly closed the distance with the errant fighters, and took out two of the enemy before they could react.

Hot Dog’s HUD had advised him of his wingleader’s approach but he hadn’t been sitting there waiting to be rescued by them. He had managed to take out one of the fighters while still protecting Wildcat’s six. He was lining up on the next one when his alarm blared a warning. Five missiles were headed his way. He could jump, but if he did, he would be leaving Wildcat, and the rest to the imperial fighters. He hit his turbo for a couple of seconds, but angled his fighter into a corkscrew course that sent him right into the middle of the biggest cluster of enemy fighters. He fired his cannons in random burst, more to get their attention than to try to hit any of them. It worked as half of them followed him. He hit the trubo and started praying to Mercury. The fighters behind him were in for a surprise. The missiles that were following him were faster, and wouldn’t attack them since they were smart enough to tell friendly fighters from their target. What they weren’t smart enough to do was not explode once they ran out of fuel. The fighters dodged most of the shrapnel, but two of them were obviously damaged.

A red light caught his eye right before it happened. The port engine scrammed as the turbo burned out the lining. The two remaining engines tipped their nozzles to balance the thrust so he wouldn’t spin out of control. The bigger problem was the lack of thrust meant that the imperial fighters would eat him alive. He vectored around to try to match his course with Wildcat’s erratic one.

Tow lines were armed with magnetic grapples, and were tricky things at the best of times. Using one while under fire, and while trying to shoot back made it harder than playing Tirad against their wingcommander. He fired his as he went by only for it to go wild when her fight rolled to port. His second engine was red lining and he knew he was going to have to shut it down before it scrammed itself. He flipped over to see the most beautiful sight as he decelerated for another pass. While he was busy kicking himself for missing Wildcat, Lucy had grabbed her viper with his mag locks. He had only seconds to appreciate it before he was jerked forward in his seat as Dipper did the same for him only he was flying backwards. The shock knocked out his display. So he fired his cannons blind for all they were worth to dissuade the enemy fighters from following them until he felt the dropping feeling in his stomach that told him they had jumped. Wait... Jumped while stuck together? The jump envelope of a Viper wasn’t that big. When his system came back up he found out how small. Two meters of his nose was sheared off, and his dorsal fin was non responsive. He quickly shut down his engines, and retracted his armored canopy. The sight of stars and two vipers moving out of sight in front of him let him relax. Dipper kicked in a couple of jets from his RCT’s to steady them once the two vipers came back into his view. Dipper quickly matched their course as well.

“Hot dog, get over there, and check on her. I’m not getting anything through the armor, her comm is down, and her engines are still going.” Lucky’s voice came over the comm, and the worry in it was mirrored by his own. He checked his suit’s O2 levels, and grabbed the hand tool kit from under his seat.

Opening his cockpit, Hot dog attached the tether to the side of his suit and pushed off. He had always hated EVA’s and this time was no different. He watched Wildcat’s viper get closer, and closer. Once he was only a few meters away he hit the breaks on the tether controls. He reached her fighter and grabbed the coaming around the port intake. Her fighter had too many holes to be saved, he on hoped that she was in better shape. He moved hand over hand until he reached the cockpit release controls. The panel didn’t light up when he tapped on the switches. He opened the tool kit and puled out the minicomp. The miniature computer wasn’t very good for anything but diagnostics, but that it did as well as it was designed for. He plugged it in , and that’s when it went wild. He couldn’t make heads or tails out of most of the stuff it was telling him, but he managed to close down the windows he didn’t need and access the hatch controls.

The armored cover drifted away when the latches released, and Hot Dog hurried it along with a shove. He shined his light into the darkened cockpit and saw Wildcat sitting there smiling at him. Well not smiling at him, but at something funny that she wasn’t going to be able to tell him with the shard of metal sticking out of her chest. It took all of Hot Dog’s will power to not throw up in his suit as he opened the cockpit and shut off her systems. “Sir, she...”

“Yeah, I kind of figured. But we had to try. Let’s get you back to the barn.”

“Thanks, and thank you for saving my life as well. But if it’s all the same to you, just let me stay here with her and you two go back to being heros.”

“Son, you don’t know what hero means. I’ll leave you here with her, but know this...” Hot Dog thought the man’s voice couldn’t get anymore serious. He was wrong. “You just killed five enemy fighters to rescue your wingman, not even caring if you lived or died. Son, you are a hero. Get used to the pain that comes with that moniker. It only gets worse from here on out.”

Hot Dog would think about the man had said. And for years after he would hide his metals in his locker, knowing that one of them had been bought with the blood of his fiancée. She had made sure he had passed flight school, and had been the one to make him cram for every test they took. She was the reason he had become a hero, and she would be the reason he stayed one.

In Galactica’s C.I.C. Adama watched everything as his team worked to save a world. They had managed to lure the enemy away from the planet, but if their sensors were right, it could still rain death upon half of the Colonies if they didn’t stop it here and now. “John, how are we doing?”

“Vipers are reporting heavier than expected losses. But they are cutting through the enemy fighters and are ready for phase two. All they are waiting for is for you to give the word.”

“The word is given.” John nodded and looked over to their communications officer. Dualla nodded and stated to signal all of the wings.

The Emperor’s Hammer drifted on the course it had been on and High Priest Halnor stood on the surface of the comet looking back at where the Heretic Battlestar drifted. It was still in the blind spot created when ship had sliced off the back end of his command. But even thought it had matched velocities and vectors to achieve that position, it soon wouldn’t matter. He had moved all fifty of the cargo catapults to the edge of the damaged area. Over a thousand of his men stood ready to launch themselves over to the heretic’s ship, and take the fight to them. The first men over would take the molywire cables that would secure them to the hull. Each successful landing would allow more of his men to transverse the distance at the same time. Soon they would have more men on the ship than the heretics would. He looked around at the men in their black power armor. Even the symbol of the sword had been painted over with the radar-absorbing paint. They wouldn’t even be seen until they hit the hull. And by that time it would be far too late for the fools to do anything but surrender to the divine will of the Empire and die.

The first of his men were halfway across when the anti-fighter KEW fire started to slew their way. He watched as tiny explosions signified one after another of his men’s deaths. He couldn’t get his mind around how they were managing to target his men. Then the ship rolled enough for their laser clusters to came to bear on them. Then it looked like Emperor’s Day fireworks going off.

On the Galactica’s C.I.C., John Cavil stood next to the gunnery officer and looked at the thermal image of the comet beside them. The tiny pinpoints of heat were headed towards the ship at a very slow rate, and he didn’t know what they were, nor could he get a good lock on them with DRADIS, but he didn’t want to let them get anywhere close to his ship. “What do you have, John?”

“I don’t know. They are too slow to be missiles, and too small to be mines. The only reason I spotted them was the fact that their color stood out so well against the white of the comet. At first I thought they were debris, but they are all following identical courses to hit us. They are barely registering on active DRADIS scans, so we’re having to target them with Infrared for Fraks sake!” He paused as new contacts separated themselves from the stricken comet. “Well this is different. Now they are throwing pieces of their ship at us.”

Halnor swore as his men were forced to blast chunks of his own ship off to give his men cover from the Heretic’s weapons. The massive chunks of ice wouldn’t last long, but they would hopefully give his men enough time to reach the Heretic’s ship. Once there they would rue the day they dared to opposed the Will of the Emperor.

Adama watched as Cavil and Commander Martinez, the Republic Officer that was manning the tactical gunnery position stood side by side at the display. The two men couldn’t be any more different. The young-looking Commander was nearly John’s age, but looked like a teenager. Each of them seemed to be in the same pose though. He wondered what would have happened if John’s twins had been born. BORN! “Can you rig a Raptor to jump INTO that ship?”

John looked at his friend, and knew that this was one of the reasons he had never been able to beat him at chess. The man just didn’t think linearly. “Yes, but it would be a suicide mission. We can’t scan inside that ship, so there would be no way of knowing if the area they emerged was large enough, let alone safe enough.”

“We jump two Raptors. The first one will be unmanned. It clears the way. The second delivers the payload.”

The three men looked at each other for more heartbeats than Adama was hoping for. Martinez spoke first. “No computer can jump it. We would need to send in a sentient to do so. Autopilots just can’t be programmed to overcome the built-in lockouts that are needed to willfully emerge in an occupied space. Even without purpose-built jumpdrives and computers they just can’t seem to hit a solid target. That’s why we never made fold missiles. They can jump next to a target, but not into it.”

“Have you ever gone Skeet shooting?”

“No, what kind of weapon do you need to hunt Skeet?” He looked back and forth at the two men’s grins. “I said something funny?”

“Yes son, you did. If I get his drift though, what you need to know is not what you’re hunting but how. Skeet shooting is a kind of target practice. You have a machine fling a discus into the air, and you try and hit it. At the academy the machines are spread out over the range, and you never know which one will launch the discus. When you shoot one that is further away you need to lead the shot further ahead in order to hit it. Where as a closer one you can practically line it up and hit it. Admiral Cain used to use her pistols on them.”

“I get the idea, but I still don’t know where your going with it Admiral.”

“That comet is still moving. Program the Raptor to hit a spot a couple seconds ahead of where it is now, but set a delay so that it launches a couple seconds later.”

The Commander finally understood why the Republic was talking to this backwater system. They were wicked smart, and bloodied by years of war. How these two would-be, should-be, enemies were fast friends he didn’t understand, but he did understand synergy. Those two men would have been vicious enemies, but together they were unstoppable. The two of them had just figured out how to do what Republic scientists from dozens of worlds had said was impossible.

Five minutes later on the hanger deck, Alex Doral reached into to the Super Raptor and hit the countdown button. He was sure that this wasn’t going to work so he had programmed the jump himself to minimize any errors. As he wiped the blood from his arm another knuckledragger handed him a clean rag. A clean rag on the hanger deck was as rare as hundred year old Ambrosia. He looked at who handed it to him. Cally Henderson had been one of his best friends before he... Before they...knew he was a Cylon. She had been distant and almost rude to him for a long time after that. He understood, but couldn’t help but fell hurt by it. Others had done the same, but the two of them had gone through Basic together, and they had always been good friends. He had thought that she of all of his friends would have stuck by him. The outstretched hand wasn’t as clean as the rag, but nothing on the hanger bay was. “Will it work?”

“Frankly Cally, I haven’t a clue. It’s in Aries hands now.”

“You still believe, even after...”

“I don’t know what god, or gods to pray to CueBee. I just pick the one that fits the bill, and hope they are listening.” CueBee had been his nickname for Cally ever since they entered Flight Systems School. “Just back up and let’s launch this bird.”

The lift raised the ship to the flight line while they watched from the Flight Control Bay The Super Raptor spun up it’s drives and exited the bay on it preprogrammed course. He watched the telemetry from it, and the chase Vipers that followed it to the first set of fold coordinates. The fold system activated, and the area that the ship had been in was partially filled with a circular metal panel, and a clear liquid that froze faster than it dissipated.

Up in C.I.C. Cavil looked at the enemy ship for any sign of damage. The scans of the liquid showed something interesting. “Is that?”

“Deuterium? Yes sir. And it must have been under pressure.”

Squire Gotho’s first and last warning that something was horribly wrong was a wave of super cold fluid rushing down the corridor. He had almost made it to the intercom when he was smashed against the bulkhead by the tsunami of heavy water and detritus that raced down the engineering section, killing him instantly. The wave smashed people and equipment with equal ferocity. In spite of the late Squire’s demise the alarms did go out as the fuel for the secondary reactors, and the coolant for the mains was flushed throughout the engineering section of the comet; ironically smashing the hot steam lines exiting the reactor and returning to the condenser. The super cold water and steam quicky exchanged energy and became boiling hot water.

Where hot fluid met ice walls they melted like a laser had hit them. The melted water only added to the chaos as Squires drowned at their stations. None of them dared leaving to escape the carnage for fear of being branded a coward by those that stayed. As the ice absorbed the heat the water cooled, but it still wasn’t done. Crew decks were alined with the hollowed center of the ship so once the water entered the core it began to fill every deck below engineering.

Up on the surface Halnor received reports from below. He wished that there was someone to strike out at, but he could only stand there. How had they figured out how to make fold missiles? The greatest minds in the Empire said that was impossible. “To all Faithful. Jericho.”

Commander Martinez’s plot suddenly filled with DRADIS contacts. So many he thought the comet had broken up for a moment. But they soon rectified themselves into individual icons as the computers identified them. “Oh Blessed Saint Hollyfield, we have a problem. They just launched missiles.”

Adama saw how pale the swarthy yong man had gone, but he needed to know. “How many?”

“All of them. Thousands, with more coming every second.”

“Frak, we can’t handle that many!” Cavil’s normal calm was getting thin.

“We don’t have to. They are launching them at the colonies.”

“Comm, send Fleet HQ a SitRep. Call in the Cavalry, we’re going to need everyone in range to take out those missiles.”

Within minutes five Basestars had jumped in followed by the Zeus. It was still attached to the jump tug that had pulled it away from Galileo station and the tug itself was powering up it’s point defense weapons. Its escorts: Five Cyclops class Gunstar missile frigates, and four Valkyrie class Battlestars joined the Zeus in front of the comet’s path. Only the Cylon ships had Barrier Shields, so they put themselves between the incoming fire and the weaker Colonial defenders. The Valkyries surged forward and launched everything they had, determined to not hide behind the Cylon ship’s superior systems. Adama had had to fight hard just to get them to link their defense networks. But the results were worth it, as more of the missiles were being hit before they crossed their picket line then would have if they had relied on their own systems alone. The Basestars, and Battlestars launched every fighter they had, and each and every fighter went on pursuit courses. Missiles died by the hundreds, but the comet continued to launch more missiles than the combined forces were killing. Soon the cloud of signals separated into individual clusters as the surviving missiles left the colonial ship’s attack range. They would have to go in pursuit of every single missile before they hit their targets.

On the Galactica’s flight deck, Sheba watched the Super Raptor being loaded beside her as her fighter was being refueled. Seventeen marines had volunteered to jump into the ship knowing that they were going there to die. Humans who knew that they couldn’t come back the way she could. She wished, once again, that they had some way of resurrecting humans. She spotted a flash of metal and held her breath as a dozen 005 marched down the corridor leading from the Marine’s area of the ship. One of them a gold, and all of them with pauldrons emblazoned with blue flowers. Her voice caught in her throat when she let out her gasp.

Gunnery Sergeant Malcolm Moore spun around at the sound of the ‘Flower Boys’. “What do you want?” The anger was evident in the man’s body language. They had had to make room in Marine Country for the tincans, and the Flower Boys had been the target of insults, practical jokes, and a near spacing, that had only been halted by a Colonel’s habit of taking a midnight shift run through Marine Country. That the Cylons had not retaliated had only made the Marines bolder on their insults though. A visit from the Admiral himself had calmed things down, but men who were about to die were know to not give a frak about anything so quaint as manners.

The gold 005 known as Arthur reached into his chest and pulled out a datadrive. It had the Order’s seal on it. “WE are here to take your place.” The emphasis on the “WE” had the effect of making the marines bristle. The mechanical nature of the old style Cylon’s voices made one forget that they could project emotions.

Sergeant Moore pulled out his service Revolver and pointed it at the Command Centurion. “You can take that and shove it up your... whatever. We are willing to die for our people. You can just uplo...” The man never saw the punch that hit him in the gut. The next thing he knew he was doubled up on the deck. He pistol had magically found its way into the Cylon’s hand. And the gold centurion was looking down at him like a drill sergeant inspecting a raw recruit.

“I was wrong, you are a fool.” Arthur stepped over the man and walked over to the Corporal who was staring at the Cylon with renewed fear. His grandparents, and uncles had died by Clylon hands during the last war, and his mother had told him stories from her childhood about their atrocities. “Corporal Cavanaugh stop trying to bite your tongue. You are next in the chain of command. Will you accept the Codex, or do I have beat the crap out of each and every one of you so you don’t have to go kill yourselves?”

“Sir?”

Sheba had climbed down out of her Viper to try and calm things down, but it looked like Arthur was doing a good job. She stepped in anyway. “The Archon Codex. They are telling you that they are trading their lives for your’s, but in exchange you must take their Codex back to the Dephinium.” Arthur nodded as she explained it.

“Ma’am, can’t they download like you did?”

“They can’t. You’re Dinochrome aren’t you.” The later was directed to Arthur and his men.

He bowed. “Yes ma’am we are.”

The Corporal looked confused instead of fearful, and she took that as a good sign. “They don’t... I’m sorry, they WON’T upload unless it is absolutely necessary.” The Dinochrome Squad nodded almost as one.

“Only way out of the Dinochrome is EOL.” Lance replied as he tossed his gear into the raptor’s interior.

One of the other Corporals looked at him with a puzzled look. “EOL?”

Lance looked at the man’s name tag before answering. “End Of Line, Dillenger.”

The young man paled at the almost friendly way the machine had just told him that it... No HE was taking his place on this mission, and he knew he wasn’t coming back. “That’s a pretty stark outlook.”

“This isn’t a game kid.” He watched as the others loaded up their gear. “Ask her to tell you about us.” He turned to enter the Raptor and paused. He turned around and Dillenger swore until the day he died that the Cylon had looked into his soul. “Since you never bothered to ask us.” He tossed the young man his data drive. David Edward Dillenger looked at the drive in his hand and felt like a child. He no longer felt worthy of his own uniform.

Each of the Cylons in turn handed their drives to the men they were replacing. Private Anscome bowed to the one known simply as Bobby in the Old Tauron way. Inside Ronan trembled as the anger at being denied the sacrifice he had readied himself for battled with his pride. A pride which now was all that allowed him to stand tall as this noble being was giving him his future back. He would have to find a way to be worthy of that gift. Bobby stopped and handed the trembling young man a sheathed blade as well. “For honor, I return honor.”

Sheba watched as they boarded the shuttles saluted and as lifted into position. Something must have gotten into her eye, as she felt a tear welling up. She willed it to stay until they were out of sight. Wiping her eye she turned to the marines that had just been given a new mission. “You know you all have a burden now. You must return all of those to the Delphinium personally.”

“What are they exactly then?” Corporal Cavanaugh held the tiny device like it was a holy object. “You said that they don’t download, but you also said these were their lives. I Don’t understand.”

“Those drives contain their memories, but not their personalities.”

“What’s the difference?”

She looked at Private Ancsome and didn’t see anything but simple curiosity in his expression. “If you could record everything about your life, every thought, every action, every sensation, it still would not be enough to make another you. That drive is simply their life story. Their diaries, if you will.”

Dillenger held his hand up. “Yes Corporal?”

“Then what makes them... THEM?”

“That question is WAY above my paygrade. The half cubit anser is: Each Cylon is defined by their Personality Matrix. Each and every Personality Matrix is unique even thought they may start out identical to others of their model. Now if there are no more questions, I have to go out there and kill bad guys.” That got a round of laughter that felt forced to her ears.

She had almost put on her bucket when Anscome asked one more question. “What kind of sword is this?” He had pulled out the blade and was looking at the blade heavy weapon. He was holding it upright by the curved wooden handle. The Blue Delphinium that was the symbol of the order was laser inscribed into the blade.

“Be careful with the blade, it might be dipped in poison.” One of the men had been about to touch the inlay, but pulled his hand back as if stung. The men treated it with even more respect after that. “It is called a Sundang. The combat version of the Bolo. The battle-steel they are forged out of is better than anything made here in the colonies. Each of them wears two of those instead of the standard Cylon combat sword. A 005 with one of those can cleave a Myrmidon’s head in two.” She emphasized the last comment with a downward chopping motion. With that she put her helmet back on and climbed into her Viper.

Once out in space, the shuttle went to full burn. They would reach the precalculated coordinates in thirty seconds. Arthur watched the clock and noted that his internal clock seemed to be slightly out of sync. ‘I must be getting old.’ he thought to himself. He walked over to the pilots chair and tapped his old friend on the head. The thump got his attention, but he never moved from his station.

“Yes?”

“I think we could change the countdown.”

“Why?”

“The robot Raptor jumped into the sidewall of a deuterium tank.”

“Yes...”

“The wall was on the far side of the returning mass, so if we cut it ‘Slightly’ short we could emerge ‘Inside’ the tank.”

“Or inside a wall.”

“Always the optimist.”

“I’m suicidal, not stupid. If I’m going to die, I want to make it worth it.”

“Same here, and I’m sure Sergeant More would agree with you.” He opened the hatch to the avionics bay and gave the startled marine a hand up.

“How did you know where I was.” He held up the dull silver cover he had been covered with. “This should have blocked me from your sensors.”

“And it worked as advertised. That was the only place you could have hidden on this ship. Therefore, that’s where you would have hidden.”

The marine visibly deflated at the Cylons admission. “How long did you know I was there?”

“Since before we launched. You weren’t on the deck, and I didn’t see you leave, so I figured you must have snuck onboard.”

“Then why didn’t you kick me off before you left?”

“We are about to jump into an enemy ship, possibly into a nuclear reactor, and definitely to a certain death. Who am I to tell you who to die with.” A chirp on the navigation console caught his attention. “Besides, I thought you might like to see what we are about to jump into.”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s going to be ugly.” Moore sat down in the copilot’s chair. He turned on the sensors, and set the recorders to transmit everything back to the Galactica.

Arthur looked at the human and once more wished he could smile. “I knew there was a good reason I let you come along.”

The Sergeant looked over his shoulder as his fingers worked without him thinking about it. “Are all you Flower Boys this crazy?” It took him a second to figure out that the sound that sounded like cats dancing a on a tin roof was their version of laughter.

Arthur patted him on the shoulder. “Son, I’m the SANE one here!” With that they jumped into...

Chapter Text

The shuttle emerged in a cavern of ice and shadow. Sergeant Moore dialed up the external lights and they revealed a vast cavern full of ice crystals some the size of the Raptor. They spotted the hole cut by the previous shuttle, and the wreckage of said shuttle directly ahead. “It’s beautiful.”

“Deadly places often are. Hey Bobby, remember Volotovin Ridge on Puris Nox?”

“We’re robots, we don’t forget. Even if we wish we could. OF course I do. Five hundred cubic kilometers of diamond in a massive mountain ridge. The whole planet was rich in carbon, but that was the Empires biggest source of industrial diamond. The damn things glittered for hours after the sun went down the night we arrived. When we nuked it, Tamison stayed behind to push the button himself. He said that was the only way to atone for destroying something so damn miraculous. Thirty seven centurions joined him.” The battered centurion waved his hand at the viewport. “But you didn’t want me to give the lad a history lesson, now did you? What’s your angle?”

“What would happen if we detonated the Package in side all of this deuterium?”

“You know this won’t add much to the reaction. Nuclear explosions don’t work that way.”

“No, but this little piece of the Elysian Fields is a Hellbore.” At the mention of the last word every Centurion moved closer to the viewports.

“What’s a Hellbore?”

“A mythical weapon. One that was designed to smite bad guys.”

The sergeant was obviously distracted. “Sounds good to me, what do we do now though, and how did these crystals form anyway? These tanks were full of liquid used as a nuclear reactor’s coolant, and there wasn’t near enough time for them to freeze, even inside a comet.”

“Super cold liquid. Like you said, the deuterium was a part of their reactor’s cooling systems. It was under pressure, and it was super cold, so it was ready to turn in to ice in a blink. As soon as the tank was breached the stuff the stuff gushed out, and as soon as it could it crystalized. The crystals in here are still cold enough to remain frozen, I bet the corridors were inundated with super cold deuterium as it escaped. It probably killed anyone it came into contact with. Why?”

“Where are the surviving crew then?”

“It’s cold enough out there to kill an unprotected human. We can survive long enough. You will need to stay in the ship to be an asset.”

“Oh and I came all this way!”

“At least you get a better seat.” Lance set the ship down near the gaping hole and stood up. “You should also put the flight suit on while we get ready.”

“Great! I get to watch you guys set up the bomb...” He looked at the sensors. “You are going to have to hurry.”

“Why?”

“It looks like there are power signatures headed this way. I’m willing to bet those are either power armor, or repair robots of some kind. Either way, they are bound to notice us setting up a nuclear bomb inside their cooling system.” Several icons on the screen were headed their way at a speed that was far too fast to be human. “To be honest, I don’t think we will have time to set that up before they get here.”

“Did you expect this to be easy?” The feminine voice caught Moore by surprise. He looked at all of the Centurions. Each and every one of them was a 005 model. The 005 that spoke looked at his surprised look and luaghed. “You did?”

“No, I didn’t expect you to be female. I’ve seen the other female Cylons, and they look female, you...”

“I hear humans have an expression: Looks don’t matter.” Sergeant Moore actually blushed as he tried to form a response. That’s when it hit him. He was talking to them like he would talk to his own Marines, and they reacted like his people would have. His blush took on a different meaning when he realized how badly he, and his men had been treating them, even after the XO had come down on them like a kiloton of hurt. He hadn’t appreciated the XO’s callsign until he got ‘Preached’ to by the man himself. They had laughed it off once they retreated back to their billets, but Moore now knew that they had been in the wrong. “What’s wrong?”

It must have showed on his face, but his father had raised him to not shirk his responsibilities. “I have done you all a great disservice, and I don’t know how to undo that.”

“Coming with us to die, is a good start.”

“You never realized why we never retaliated?” The one known as Bobby was standing by the door. The patched armor, and mismatched flex-steel linings gave him the look of something built form leftover parts.

“No”

“We are doing penance as well.” With that he jumped out of the ship and took point while the others followed.

“Penance?” He asked before Arthur and Lance luged the warhead out of the Raptor.

The two looked at each other before Lance replied. “We were programmed to go mad, and we did. When we purged the madness, we found ourselves with a debt on our souls that we didn’t think we could repay. Some of us EOLed on the spot, others are still boxed... We... Boss, tell him the Code. I can’t do it without glitching.”

Arthur laughed at his friend but acquiesced. “We found this in a book from Old Earth. Twenty-second century, shortly after the Invid wars. The story was about survivors that did things they didn’t want to do to survive. After a while they formed a sort of band of Knights Errant.” Seeing the confused look on the marines face, he elaborated. “They went around the shattered Earth: Righting wrongs; and doing daring deeds.”

“So what is the code?”

“Right, I was getting to that...” The Cylon looked almost distracted for a second before he continued. When he did, his voice seemed different. It was if he was reading scripture, and Moore figured for them it was. “We were born in fire, cast into sin, and thru our deeds we will be purified. When we die it will be as Archons of Light.” Arthur reached up and grabbed the pauldron that had the squad’s logo on and pulled it off. He tossed it to Moore who caught it easily. “I have a job for you.”

“What?”

“When we light this thing off it will fill the inside of this comet with enough plasma to melt a good portion of it, but not all of it.”

“That sounds good.”

“Not really. It was still headed towards Heilos Alpha when we clipped its engines. If it makes transition intact it might hit Caprica or Gemenon. As it is, the fleet will have their work cutout taking out all those missiles. If this thing manages to make transition past Alpha...”

“Frak!”

“Exactly.”

“So what can I do with just a Raptor?”

“Paint a target on the side of the comet for the Glactica to hit with the BFL we installed.”

“BFL? The Laser?”

“Yes, the Big Fraking Laser. But they will need to know when to hit it, not just where.”

“How will they know that?”

“You will jump out at the last second.”

“Won’t I get caught in the EM flux?”

“You hid onboard a Raptor full of suicidal Cylons, and you are worrying about surviving something as trivial as a nuclear blast?”

Sergeant Moore’s answer caught Arthur by surprise. Although in the half of a second he thought about it, he realized it shouldn’t have. “It’s not about surviving the blast, or the jump, it’s about succeeding in the mission. I may survive, but will the EM knock out the systems of the Raptor before I can get the word out?” The human hadn’t cared about his own life, but about the objective.

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“I never liked leaving a party early, but if we time it right, I can send them the targeting data right before you set it off. The light speed lag will mean that the message gets to them at the right time to fire, and I can swing back in to get you and your team.”

“Are you saying that you would jump out of, and then right back into an enemy ship, right next to a live warhead to rescue any surviving members of my team right before it went off?”

“Now that you put it that way, it does sound a little silly, but yes.”

“Damn it son, I like you. I want to take you home to meet my sister.”

“What?”

“Sorry, old movie. Needless to say son, you are missing one vital thing. We need to keep them from getting to the bomb BEFORE it goes off. So you get the message to the Galactica, and stay breathing.”

Danny Two Shadows spotted the first of the repair party and sniped him before he even knew what was in the tank. The others scrambled for the edge as Lance, and Arthur started to set up the bomb.

Sergeant Moore was getting the jump computer warmed up as they finished unloading the raptor. He could feel the cold through the suit even thought the jock smock was supposed to protect him from the rigors of deep space. Looking out the cockpit window he could see that the raptor’s own heat had started to melt some of the ice around them. The Cylons were moving slowly through knee-deep heavy water to reach the hole, and if the Raptor’s anti-grav system wasn’t dead give-a-way that they were there, they would have been floating the raptor with it by now. As it was he would have to move to higher ground soon, or the water would be at the door again. And while the raptor could float over the exotic water, it would be impossible for the others to get back into the ship even if the stuff wasn’t so viscous. He thought about how cold the liquid was, and how fast his men would have died in this mission, he realized that this was how it had to be. He didn’t like it, and he sure as blazes didn’t like the idea of leaving them here to die. The biggest problem with his plan had always been the lag between sending the message, getting back, and then getting out agin. The jump drive just couldn’t dump the waste heat that fast in spa... He wasn’t IN space. He was in a comet full of ice. Maybe those cross duty courses hadn’t been a waste of time after all. He looked back at the engineering panels.

Arthur, and Lance moved the warhead up the slope of the rapidly shrinking island of ice once again. Soon enough it would be adrift in the room, and they would be stuck on it literally, and figuratively. Arthur checked his system status once again as well. The cold was starting to dissipate, but it was still well below their operating specs. Lance looked at him and laughed. “Afraid of a little cold?”

“No, I’m afraid it might be too cold for this to go off.” A railgun report caught their attention. Arthur switched over to the squad frequency. “What do we have?”

Benjy Trevors icon lit up on the HUD built in to his optic sensor. “Four Myrmidons sniffing around, and about thirty regulars in hardsuits.”

Danny had moved to a cover position near the far side of the gaping hole. “I guess we impressed them.”

“I’d rather wished we hadn’t. I wanted to die peaceably by an atomic blast, not shot by some religious nutjob or their meatpuppets.”

“Can It Bobby! Just defend the bomb until it has a chance to go ‘Boom!’ and we can all die happily.” Hector Cloud had taken the squad’s mortar and set it up behind a exceptionally large chunk of ice. He was quickly opening crate after crate of HE rounds. The low angle and limited size of the room and the hole meant that the mortar was practically lying flat against the ice. He drove some pitons into the ice so that the device wouldn’t go flying off in the opposite direction the first time he fired it.

Two of the others had found a crevasse where they could get a good angle at the approaching attackers. Ferdy Muir looked down at the banter that was going on. She looked at her husband of thirty years and sighed. “It’s been fun, hasn’t it?”

Freddy Muir nodded. “Yes, and I wouldn’t change a second.” They may have been Cylons, and they may have only been 005's but they had been in love since the day they first served together. There were times he had wished that she hadn’t joined the Order, just as he knew that there were time she wished he hadn’t, but their pumps wouldn’t let them shirk this duty. It was part of the reason he loved her so, and the reason they were willing to go into harms way so many times together. They didn’t waste time with idle notions and cute little lines. They had said them so often, and proven their love to each other so often that without even linking up the knew each other’s thoughts.

Outside the hole the four Myrmidons didn’t even pause as they cleared the edge. They ran face first into the spread of fire from the squad. One of Hector’s HE rounds actually did hit one of them in the face, and the shaped charge took it, and a good chunk of his chest along with it. The blast scattered the surviving three, and as the standing one was sniped by Two Shadows’ railgun brought the assault to a halt. The last Myrmidon took one faltering step before he fell into the water. The tiny hole in the chest wasn’t much, and the tiny hole in back wasn’t much, but the tiny hole that passed right through the poor man’s chest was. Especially since tiny was a relative term. The size of a Myrmidon’s armor only made the hole look small. The fact that it was five centimeters across, and all the way through, meant that it had just punched out the man’s heart, and spine in one shot. Only the neural link had kept him on his feet for that last step. The team’s sniper went from target, to target using his vastly oversized weapon of choice to whittle down the numbers. The weapon’s weakness showed up when the barrel split after the eighth shot. The energy bleed back tossed Two Shadows’ steaming body into a slab of ice where it melted in. Samson Saint Vincent didn’t even look back to see his best friend sink into the ice. Danny had been EOL from the moment Bertha exploded.

Samson was wielding a grenade launcher, and using it to keep the badguy’s heads down while the other’s managed to get beads on them. Samson was also relaying the enemies positions when he noticed something approaching. He switched to IR and poked hid head up over the edge for just a second. He was rewarded by a blast that sent him and most of the edge of the tank inward. He shook his head, more in an imitation of what the human’s did that any real effort to clear it. “Boss we got problems.”

“What’s new?”

“They got a tank”

“Did that blast rattle your...” Samson relayed the image of the massive Bulldozer/mecha/ tank/thing that was coming down the hall. It was a tracked vehicle, with a blade, and arms, and some kind of turret. From the limited amount of energy released from the blast, he figured it was only some kind of construction equipment. The problem was, the thing looked like it was armored like a tank, and their options were limited on that front.

All of a sudden the rate of fire from the imperials slacked off. Ferdy tossed a spyball down the hall and as it bounced she relayed the video to the rest of them. Someone spotted it, and destroyed it rather quickly, but by then they had seen the men crowding behind the vehicle.

The blade of the tank plow started to glow as it heated up rather rapidly. The ice nearest the opening started to melt noticeably faster than it had been. Soon the opening was free of ice, and the sides of the water tank started glowing from the radiant heat. Freddy and Ferdy quickly pulled back from their enfilade position as their already limited cover literally melted out from under them. They took up positions behind Hector’s icy berm along with Samson.

Bobby grabbed three of Hector’s remaining HE rounds and dove through the hole, and climbed the blade. His armor started to slag, and smoke as he climbed over the edge. He took numerous round to the head and back as he topped the ridge, but his left hand managed to hold on to the rounds even after his right arm was shot off. He dropped one into the hatch, and another into a vent. The last one he held onto until his body fell off the end of the machine. One of the engineers kicked the still smoking body and that’s when the first HE round went off. The blast turned five of the engineers into chum and shrapnel and wounded the rest. The timers on the other two ran out, and the tank belched gouts of fire from numerous gaps in the tanks armor. Most of which had not been there before the blast, but the few existing holes were soon filled with flame as the tank’s fuel added to the conflagration. Any imperial crewmen that had been hiding behind the machine quickly died as the blast wave swept down the hall. The blast wave was focused at the back of the tank, but it bled around the armored machine and some even leaked into the water tank. Inside the icy room the already limited cover suffered more damage.

Shiva and Benjy the team’s remaining heavy gunners moved back to escape from the flames. The others had already moved back into the massive cavern. Benjy who had already lost one arm to enemy fire was having trouble maintaining his balance in the waist deep water.

Arthur and Lance looked at their melting defenses and the lull in the fighting. They had managed to get the warhead setup and anchored into the ice, only for the ice to shift under them. The heat coming from the burning wreck and the ambient heat of the hovering Raptor were combining to melt the deuterium ice far faster than it would have. The water under their ship had actually formed a deep pool. One far deeper than the chamber they were in. Lance had taken a scan of the pool and could see the bottom of the tank at its edge. “Hey Junior, could you move off before we sink.”

“I thought you guys were designed for all environments?”

“Yes but it’s not the water, but the cold that would be a problem for us. There is still a lot of ice in here, and our systems are already starting to feel its effects.”

“How long?”

“This bomb will kill us long before the cold will. Now we need to get you out of here, and to send word to the Galactica.”

“I still don’t like the idea of leaving you behind. It goes against everything I believe in.”

“We’re Cylons, not humans.”

“You’re Soldiers. There’s a universe of difference.”

“He’s right boss.”

Arthur looked at Lance and nodded. “If we don’t keep them away from the warhead, they could easily disable it. If we don’t die, then billions will. It’s a fair trade in our book.”

“How is that fair?”

“You didn’t get to look at the recordings.”

“I kind of juked out on that. Why?”

“Every single one of us has blood of innocents on our hands.”

The Sergeant had been getting his pre-flight ready until the Command Centurion had said that. His hands stopped moving. “Come again?”

“Each and every member of the Order of the Blue Flower was a combat veteran from the war. We join to atone for the evil we committed because we were programmed to commit it. The Dinochrome Brigade was formed within the order for those of use who’s records contained vile acts. Acts of barbarism upon innocent humans and the Colonies in general. Ferdy, and Freddy have the lightest taint. They only dropped a tylium transport onto the upper Muirwald range on Libran. We know the death toll was low, but we also noticed that the forest still hasn’t recovered. Two Shadows had been responsible for the destruction of Icarus Station and all ten thousand of the colonists when he shot out the life support systems. But we are the worst of the bunch. You see, Lance and I were the butchers of the Lady of Mercy.” Moore forgot to exhale for a second. The Lady of Mercy was one of the worst horror stories from the war, and one that the hawks still used to keep the fleet running and likewise the public’s hatred of Cylons going. He had had a model of the Lady on his shelf as a kid, right next to his father’s... “We were the ones in charge, and I was the one that opened all of the hatches to vacuum consigning over thirty five hundred of them to asphyxiate inside their ship. We were given promotions for that operation. I even went to full Gold on the recommendation of the Cylon commander at the time.”

“What happed to that commander?”

“He just jumped on a tank with a bunch of explosives.” Lance pointed to the burning wreckage.

“When we were freed from the bad code, he gave up his command slot, and went back to being a basic soldier. When he was wounded, Bobby never repaired himself with new parts, but only left overs from his fallen brothers. We all have our trains to bare.”

“I’m not familiar with that phrase.” Moore was starting to regain his composure. His mind’s eye though was wandering. He saw a sad girl’s face flash in front of it before he brought himself back to the present.

“It’s a modification of an ancient saying. It means we all bring our past sins with us. And the only way to be free from them is to release them somehow. We chose self-sacrifice.”

“I... I... I understand.”

“I doubt it, but thank you. Now get going.”

In a split second Malcolm Moore decided to do something phenomenally stupid. “I still want to come back for you.”

“I appreciate the offer kid, but you know the drive won’t cycle that fast.” Something caught his sensor. “It looks like we have company.”

Walking through the fire as if it wasn’t there, the familiar form of a Myrmidon was followed by two others. And Arthur was willing to bet the fifty Cubits Lance owed him from that last Hand of Kings and Rouges, that there were more to come. “Kid, you need to go now!”

“Yes sir, but let me take some of this water with me.”

“Good idea.” He watched as the Super Raptor backed up and submerged. All of a sudden there was an explosion of bubbles, and a small whirlpool as the shuttle’s door opened. “What are you doing?”

His voice came over the wireless as if he had heard the question that Arthur had asked aloud. “Frak That’s COLD! I said I was going to take some with me, well I’m taking as much as I can hold. See you soon!” The red glow of a fold envelope opened under the water’s surface. The first warning that something was different was when the water didn’t stop going down after a few seconds.

Lance took a second to look behind him at the hole that Moore had cut in the bottom of the tank with his fold envelope. “Well I take back every bad thing I ever said about him. Cute trick.”

“You never said anything bad about him.” Arthur fired at the approaching armored trooper. He aimed at the weak spots that they had learned about in the years they had fought the various models of slave troopers. He had to laugh at the irony of fighting humans that were their mirror images in so many ways. The rifle round managed to hit the visor he had been aiming for and while it hadn’t kill the poor soul within, it did blind him, and that meant that the others could take him down easier. Two grenades, and numerous rounds later he fell onto the melting ice.

“Well pretend I did, so I can take it back.” The grenade launcher on his rifle coughed and the tiny grenade flew behind the next trooper to enter their kill zone.

“You can’t waste ammo like...” The grenade exploded into a wall of foam that filled the path leading into the cavern. “Nevermind.” The next two Myrmidons were having a hard time standing on the super slick surface that resulted from the combination of the half-melted ice and fire suppressant foam.

That was their undoing. Hector fired his mortar in a rapid fire style that normal humans couldn’t have matched. He fed the round into the tube like he was feeding a starving child. The barrage hit the Myrmidons like sledgehammers. The ones trying to walk across the slick surface were easy pickings, but even the ones that were on surer footing were in just has much danger.

One of the troopers took an HE round to the chest. It picked him up and tossed him like a ragdoll against the ice. The poor fool struggled to stand until another round landed in his lap. There wasn’t enough of him left to stand after that. Hector was repeating this as fast as he could feed his little pet. Since he was firing from behind a berm the enemy never knew where the next round was going, and that was the way he liked it. Benjy was firing his rifle from the top of the berm and sharing his optic feed with Hector so Hector had a great tactical view of the battle ground. That was until Benjy caught a railgun round through his head.

Having your brains in your stomach meant that headshots were not the instant death that they were for humans. In fact it just managed to annoy the battle hardened soldier. He stood up and proceed to lay down covering fire until he was hit by no fewer than five railgun rounds. The forth in the chest. Shiva grabbed his rifle as his now lifeless body fell down the berm. Shiva now had one rife in each hand as he stood up. He started to chant verses out loud from all of the various holy books that he had collected. He walked over the berm and straight at the approaching enemy. He seemed to have an uncanny aim as he shot four Myrmidons through the visors before they managed to hit him once. And that hit was only a glancing blow that shredded his shoulder armor. As five new troopers entered the fray he ran at them with his rifles at full autofire. Two more fell before the weapons ran dry. He tossed them aside and drew his blades all in one fluid motion. He was in amongst the three soldiers before they could drop their rifles as their code demanded. The blades were not made of the super strong armor that the Legendary Shadow’s Blade had been, but Republic battle steel was not a bad substitute. The blade in his left hand had cleaved the first trooper’s armor and exposed his bodysuit. The second blade plunged in to finish the job as the first was swinging up to take off the second troopers head. The third trooper had drawn his own blade, and parried the slash. That was the poor slave’s mistake. The parry had distracted him from the blade that cut off his sword arm. Shiva swivelled around him and pushed the mortally wounded trooper into the remaining one. His blades danced as he spun on his heel. The trooper was expecting a thrust or slash from one of the blades, he never expected to have his legs swept out from under him. He died stunned in more ways than one as Shiva quickly plunged both blades into the prone trooper’s chest. Shiva stood up and looked down at the poor fools that had faced him. He was the best Bol... ERK He jerked forward as something that felt like lightning shot through him. His internal sensors told him that something had pierced his chest from back to front. His optics had just enough time to register a spear point jutting out of his chest before EOL claimed him.

“I am High Priest Busitice Halnor of the Holy Human Church of the Fifth Terran Empire, and you have trespassed upon my domain. You Heretic Machines Are An Abomination In The Eyes Of The Empire, And His Holiness Demiurge Vis Apogee Terra (God’s power over Terra) Absolute ruler of the Empire Telemachus Peleus the 23rd. Prepare To Die”

“Hello Buttface.” Lance said in an amplified voice.

“THAT’S BUSITICE! BUSI-TI-CE!”

“Oh I’m sorry... Hello Busty Titties.”

“You are trying to goad me into reacting like a fool. It will not work.”

“Hey Butterface, It seems to have worked great so far. We made you chase a couple of tugs pretending to be a space station, and then chopped your engines off. So tell me again how you aren’t looking like a fool?” Samson, Markee, and Lenny looked over the berm. Next to the still smoking body of Shiva stood a man in power armor and robes. Why someone would cover powerarmor with clothing they had never figured out, but the Empire seemed to be rather fond of ostentatious displays of pomp and pageantry. That he stood there alone said something about either his confidence, or his stupidity. Samson motioned for the Muirs to hold the berm while they moved forward.

Ferdy, and Fredy took up cover as they crested the berm. The others had started to move around the man in the blood red and gold robes when he suddenly vanished. He hadn’t moved, he just vanished. Lenny fired a three round burst through the spot where he had been standing. The ice wall behind him exploded into shards and steam, but no trace of the man being hit could be seen.

Markee swung around and tried to spot any tracks in the terrain. “I’ve got nothing, it’s like he not even here.” He switched to IR and looked around. “This doesn’t make sense. He should have left a heat trail in here unless... URK!” The sudden eruption of plasma in his face cut off what ever he might have said out loud, but he did manage to transmit one word before he EOLed. “Medusa!”

Samson, and Lenny quickly moved together until they stood back to back. Samson’s eye was moving so fast it seemed to be a wide red stripe instead of a single red dot. “Madusa? What do you think he meant?”

“Well duh, you can’t look at her. Remember how Perseus fought her.” Lenny was the history nut of the group, but he was also the team waste recycling chute. Garbage in; garbage out. He couldn’t say anything without it sounding vaguely insulting.

“Well why didn’t you say so.” They spun around to face each other and pointed their weapons past each other’s shoulder. “This isn’t going to be easy then.”

“It never is, but I’ve gotten used to it.”

Halnor watched in dismay as the glorified wind-up toys figured it out faster than he had planned on. It was simple really. Once he managed to fined the frequency they were sharing visual data on he went to work accessing it. Hacking their visual feed, and erasing any trace from their perception was Novice’s play. It just got trickier. Now he was going to have to... DUCK!!! The round passed through the space he had been standing in only seconds before. He quickly went to work and had the program look for any reflections he might be making as well. Those would have to be edited out too.

Samson thought he had seen something reflected in Lenny’s armor, but by the time he focused on it, it was gone. He switched over to wireless before communicating again. “I think he’s hacked our optic channels. I thought I saw something then he was pancake.” That wasn’t right! “Fast radial as the tall bottom...” That wasn’t what he had tried to say.

“Come again? Samson, Are you okay?”

Samson swung his blade out behind him and contacted something. Inside his head he could suddenly feel that something wasn’t right. “My barnacle is folding. Half a puddle or more.” Something had scrambled his language files. He could think of the words, but they weren’t coming out right. All he needed to do was... What was he supposed to be doing? A scan showed his teammates holding their weapons and... There was an invisible enemy nearby, why had he forgotten that? No, not why, but how? How what? He was pointing a weapon at his friend, maybe he should lower that.

Lenny watched his friend as he lowered his guard and his weapon at the same time. “Hey boss, it looks like someone just hacked Samson.” He waved his hand in front of Samson’s faceplate. “Hey Sammy, wake up. We have bad guys to kill.”

“My mind is butter.”

“That’s the first thing you said that made sense in a while. Now get you’re anti-hack software up and running.”

“There’s a bug on your shoulder.” Samson started to swat at insects, only they weren’t there. Lenny took a step back. That’s when he saw the knife. Samson had dropped his bolo on the ground and it had blood on it.

“Sammy got a hit. Look for blood!” He stepped aside to let Samson keep swatting at the imaginary bugs, while he tried to stomp the real one.

Halnor had been a fool to get so close. He had walked right up behind the infernal machines and had tapped a line right into the closest one’s data port. Something must have given him away because the only warning he got was the sharp sudden pain from the blade stabbing into the armor’s inner lining. How the blade had managed to slide between the arm plates he would never know. His arm was nearly severed at the shoulder, but he had managed to twist at just the right time to keep the blade from going into his chest. The nanites in his blood were already working on repairing the wound, and it would only be a matter of minutes before he had some use of the arm, but his suit’s ability to interface with the shipboard system had been severed when the blade damaged it’s data runs in the arm. He looked at the interface port on the left hand, and while it still worked it was still linked to his weapon. If he wanted to try to hack another he would have to put down his weapon, and that was not a wise move.

Ferdy and Freddy looked for the blood, but couldn’t find any. Ferdy tapped into their private channel. “We need to stop looking for the hidden, and start looking for what’s hiding the hidden.”

“Do not go all Jedi on me again.”

“Look for the edits.”

“You weren’t going Jedi, you were going Lucas... Clever girl!”

“That was the other guy.”

“You are still my clever girl.” He ran the video feed his optics were giving him through some filters and found the altered areas in the older video. The closer to the present he got the harder it was to lock down where the distortion was. “There... Sort of. It’s like that series of movies with the invisible hunters.”

“The Trophy movies... Virgon movies suck. They are almost as bad as their poetry.” She started to run the same filters even as she was commenting. “Hello my pretty little pony pony.” She fired off five rounds as her husband fired off five round to the right of hers. The ice blossoms that erupted from the wall beyond them showered... something... with debris. They adjusted and fired again. They dove behind the berm when they spotted the five Myrmidons enter the gap at a run. These were armed with lasers of some sort, and were laying down cover fire as they ran towards the spot that the Cylons had just bracketed.

They hadn’t taken three steps inside when the first of Hector’s mortars landed in front of them. They didn’t stop their charge, and Hector didn’t stop his barrage. Their lasers did make a big cut into the berm that he had been firing from though. They fell just as the middle of the berm did. Hector didn’t even bother to move the mortar though. That charge had cost him the last of his rounds anyway. He grabbed his rifle and joined the others.

Lenny looked at Samson who had simply stood there in the middle of the firefight. He had dropped his rifle and was swatting ‘Fireflies’, as he called them. He followed Ferdy, and Freddy over to a lump of ice an wondered what they were doing until she pulled out her blade and sliced an arm out of the ‘Ice’. The arm was holding a staff of some sort, and he could suddenly see, and hear, the wounded man that had appeared before them earlier.

Halnor had been stunned by the carnage that met his rescuers and had been tossed aside by the explosions. So stunned in fact, that he wasn’t even able to move when the metal monstrosity had pulled out one of their never-to-be-sufficiently-damned blades and sliced his left arm off.

Arthur and Lance looked at the timer. Less than a minute to go. They had sent the kid off three minutes ago, and the message should have been received by now.

Three minutes ago:

The jolt of doing a fold while underwater was a truly unique experience, and one that he hope to never ever try again. One he wished he could experience again was watching the water in the sphere around him first spread out as it first boiled off and then turn into a fine mist in the near vacuum of space. After thousands of years of space flight, flatlanders still thought space was cold. It wasn’t in fact it wasn’t anything more than vacuum. But that abundance of nothing was just what he needed. Like the ice in the tank, she could dump heat by dropping the pressure in his ship. That dissipation of heat through sudden pressure loss had been one of the things he had been planning on when he ripped the drive covers off the fold drive’s cooling system. Unlike the comet’s fuel tank, space didn’t have a limit as to how much he could dump into it. And he had a lot of heat to dump.

The fold drive, like the jump drives generated a lot of heat when they activated. Most of it in the energy transfer from the capacitors to the assemblies. The cooling systems were marvels of thermal energy transfer, but there was only so much energy they could handle at a time. The fifteen minute turn around time on a fold that short, or the much shorter three minute window for the jump drives still were tied to the basic requirements of physics that he was about to cheat. He wished that he didn’t have to. If he could have made a longer fold, the energy-absorbing nature of fold space would have drawn away the heat faster than the drive could make it, but that would have taken him too long to return from, and time was the one thing he didn’t have.

His hand moved slowly in the water filled cabin. He grabbed the hatch controls, and pulled the manual release lever. The lockout pin hung from the arm, and the warning alarm sounded funny in the fluid filled chamber. The water, and all of the massive amounts of heat from the drive it contained, was flushed out in to space in less time than it had taken to pull the lever. The force of the water leaving was tremendous, and he was glad for the crash webbing and the restraint harness he wore, or he would have surely joined the water in its mad rush into space. Ice crystals covered his visor and he soon found out that they covered every surface in the cabin when he wiped it off. He quickly closed the door, and literally warmed up the wireless. The system was going to be sending a message about a light minute away, so he knew that he wouldn’t waiting for a reply. It was ironic that he had to jump so far away from a ship the so close to where he had started, but the coordinates were from their original entry, and they had all moved since then. Had he run the calculation to jump to the Galatica’s location, he wouldn’t of had the time to make the revised calculation to rescue the squad. He sent Arthur’s message and sent a prayer out to Zeus and Athena before he punched in the new coordinates for the icy hades he had just left, plus the distance it had traveled in the meantime. He also activated a few other systems in preparation for his hasty return. He wanted to be able to get in and out as fast as he could, and this would push the ship to it’s limits, so he made sure that every safety system was turned off, and every combat system was turned on. The fold might fry some of the electronics, but he needed them up and running as soon as he returned.

While he had been doing all of that he had seen her eyes again. Those sad eyes had been haunting him for years now. They had been the reason he had joined the Marines. They were the reason he had left Bridgeport. Those eyes, and her sad sad face, had been the reason he had punched his father in the face before leaving home, vowing to never return.

He had only been eight years old the first summer his father had taught him how to hunt. He had learned how to use a rifle, and a pistol, before he could ride a bike across the town by himself. For the next four years it would be a summer tradition to go hunting with his father.

Apollo Day weekends were always his favorite. They would go out to the Gusset River Falls and fish for rail trout. That all changed when he was twelve though.

He remembered the family that moved into the old farmhouse outside of Tanscome Park. The two children went to his school, and the girl was in his class. Tamera was always sad, and he being the class clown would always try to cheer her up. That was until his father found out.

The beating he got rivaled the one he got for accidently shooting his father’s groundcar. That was the day he learned about Mono’s. Monotheists were strange people who only worshiped one god, and it wasn’t any of the Pantheon. It was a strange god that his father had told him would call for human sacrifice, and the blood of their enemies... Actually that wasn’t true, but that was what his father beat into him. He had to stay out of school for a full week, and when he went back Tamera wasn’t there. He was scared to ask anyone, but one of his friend whispered to him that her father had been attacked at his work. The rumor was that his father had been the leader to the gang that did it.

It seemed that Monos were despised even more than Cylons. Rumors had it that they had been the ones to turn the Cylons against humanity even. The more he learned the more he was confused. But it was about to go off the deep end in a bad way.

Three days before Apollo Day his father told him that he was going to take him hunting early. It surprised him, but he quickly got his pack ready, and his weapon cleaned.

The road to Tanscome Park was filled with trucks like his fathers, and he thought that maybe other people had had the same idea. His joy at the idea of going hunting quickly soured when they took another familiar road. The one that lead to a certain farm that he was dreading the possibility of seeing. He scrunched down in the seat, so that no one would see him, but his father grabbed hm by the ear and made him sit upright. The sudden pain inflicted by a normally gentle man confused the twelve year old Malcolm. That’s when he saw the crowd around the farmhouse. The signs they held told him all he needed to know long before he could hear their chants.

His father dragged him out of the truck, his pack and rifle forgotten in back. As they approached he could feel the anger of the crowd as a physical thing. It was ugly, it sick, and in his youthful innocence he didn’t understand why he was getting excited.

His father left him at the edge of the crowd and walked out to wards the farmhouse. “You haven’t left town yet Mono.” He shouted at the top of his voice. “Didn’t our last meeting get the message across that we don’t want your kind here?”

A woman in a patched and well worn dress came out on the porch. Malcolm spotted a window on the top floor open up and a familiar face looked out at him, and any excitement he had gathered from the crowd vanished in an instant. He looked into those eyes, and understood why she never smiled. The woman on the porch yelled back at his father and he turned to see her stand up to him. No one had ever done that. “We can’t leave. You busted both of his legs, and ruined our only vehicle. It’s funny how the cops were nowhere to be seen until after I arrived. If they had come along he might have been able to be moved. Right now the only doctor that would come out here told me not to move him, and that was before you chased her off as well.”

“You’re a big strong woman, why don’t you carry him.” He turned to the crowd and mocking smiled. “Or maybe you could get your GOD to grant him a miracle!” The crowd erupted into jeers, and laughter.

“Why don’t you just leave us alone? We never did anything to you. When he heals up, or I can fix the truck we will leave.”

“You will leave tonight. One way or another.” Malcolm had never hear the evil tone his father’s voice had just taken before. It was somehow both as cold as ice, and full of fire. Malcolm turned around to see what the others were doing, and he couldn’t figure out why people were handing out bottles of wine with rags stuck in the tops until someone handed a lit one to his father. “You see I used to be a good Terrcote player back in the day, and while it’s not as popular as Pyramid, you do need a good ARM!” And to punctuate the last word he threw the bottle into the farm’s barn where it quickly set the metal building ablaze. That was Malcolm’s first experience with Sagittaron Cocktails. It wouldn’t be his last.

“You are monsters!

“Oh no my dear woman, and to prove it you... We will graciously give you five minutes to get you and your family out of that pile of kindling before you become an offering to your heathen god.”

“I thought as much.” She pulled something out of her pocket. Whatever it was was wrapped in a handkerchief. “I see the rifles you have. Some of you even brought your daggits. You weren’t going to let us go. You were going to hunt us. Such brave hunters too. A man too beaten to stand, and a mother and her kids... You do know that fable of The Boy Who Hunted Wolves?” With that she pressed the button on the device hidden by the cloth. Malcolm’s eyes shot up to look at Tamera’s face one more time. It was the only time he ever saw her smile. It was not a happy smile.

He wished he could rub the scar on his forehead. When the house blew up it killed not just Tamera’s family, but over fifty of the townfolk that had come out for the hunt. His father had lost an eye in the blast, and became an alcoholic shortly after his mother left him. At least that was what his father told him his mother did, and swore to it right up until the day he died. People could still disappear in the Twelve Colonies, even in the modern computer era; and even after he joined the Marines he had failed to find her. But even with all the access a marine could get, he couldn’t find her on any of the colonies. He kept wishing that he had been able to do something for her, or for Tamera, or any of the other people that might have been hurt by his late father. Maybe today was the day. Less than a minute after he arrived the temperature gages dropped enough for him to fold once more. He prayed once more to Mercury as he hit the button to return. It was going to be a close one!

Halnor was coming out of his shock, and back to the present. His armor was in ruins, and he could feel the cold ice beneath him stealing away his body heat. That was probably why he didn’t hurt as much as he figured he should have. He slowly looked around an found that he was surrounded by Cylons and a warhead from a missile. AWARHEADFROMAMISSILE! He sat up as fast as he could without the use of either of his arms, and his legs being tied together. “That’s A.. A.. A..”

“No, It a nuclear warhead. But thank you for playing.” One of the Cylons actually patted him on the head like a child. “We thought you might like a front row seat to the end of this world. We even brought your friends to keep you company.

Halnor looked around and noticed the fact that they had tossed the bodies of the Myrmidons, and their own dead, in a pile around the bomb as a type of defensive wall. With the exception of the Cylon he had hacked the others were all holding a defensive formation around it.

“Herringbone Butterflies guys!” The other Cylon was clapping his hands like he was trying to catch something small and delicate in them. “I must be careful. If I flap my wings, I might bust like a bubble.” The Clyon was having so much fun he never noticed the railgun rounds that were flying past him. The Imperials seemed to be ignoring the crazed Cylon in favor of the ones that were going through them as fast as they sent men in to the fuel tank’s rapidly warming interior.

It was still as frigid as Persephone’s poles, but that was actually an improvement. While modern weapons didn’t use gunpowder, or any physical propellants for that matter, the weapons did put out a lot of heat. Their icy berm was little more than a small ridge, one that didn’t slow down much of anything. The shear number of dead in the room provided the only cover now that the shuttle and the berm had disappeared.

Hector looked at the last of his grenades and did the electronic sigh he was famous for. Lenny’s partially functional head turned his way for a second before killing another Acolyte in a hard suit with his rifle. “You knew you were going to run out eventually. At least you had a blast doing it.”

Hector tossed his now useless launcher into the meltwater. “One more of those jokes, and I will shoot you myself.” Hector and Lenny had never gotten along. The team’s recon specialist had always favored using Hectors explosives to make tripwire traps and using them as added bang in one of his demo jobs.

“You or them it doesn’t make much of a difference. I’m almost out of ammo as well.” The click of his magazine drycycling only punctuated his comment.

“Well then we have one last bet to settle.” Hector pulled his Bolos out of their sheaths. Lenny did the same. The others didn’t even look back as the two got ready.

“Same rules? I’m busted up a bit.”

“Okay you get a one second head start, then it’s ‘Loser pays for the winner’s ammo.’ And this time I’m counting the ones you spent on those Squishytraps of yours.” Squishytraps were the derogatory name given to the hidden traps that Cylons left for humans. They got the name because humans tended to go all squishy when they hit one.

“If you count those, then I get to count the rounds I spent covering you while you hid behind the ice wall.”

“It’s called a berm, and it kept them from getting to us for quite a while. Give it some respect.”

“All hail the mighty Berm, long may it melt!” They each ran in different directions, changing direction from moment to moment to evade the incoming fire.

“I’ll make you eat those words! If you don’t get shot up by those Mook Monks.”

“The Mookies couldn’t hit the broadside of a trash barge.” And he was partially right. The Acolytes were not trained for real combat, and while their hardsuits protected them from the cold, they didn’t help them aim any better. In fact the armor tended to slow them down. Only their numbers gave them the edge. Sooner or later they would overrun their position from shear numbers alone, but the Squad would make them pay dearly for time while the bomb behind them counted down. They could have triggered the blast, but they had to time the blast to be at its most intense pont when the spinal laser pierced the chamber.

A stray round ripped the shin guard armor off of Hector’s left leg, but it didn’t slow him down. The Acolytes didn’t stop firing because of the Cylon’s were only armed with blades. While the Knights or the Myrmidons would have switched over to blades either due to the Knight’s honor code, or the slave soldier’s programing, the Acolytes, not to mention other clergy of the church, had no compulsion, or compunction about fighting with ranged weapons against blade-wielding opponents. The only difference here was the fact that their enemy had a chance of reaching them. And anyone that got within the reach of a member of the Dinochrome squad didn’t last long enough to learn from their mistake.

A fact that Hector illustrated in blood as his left hand blade severed the leg of the closest man. His right hand blade hit the faceplate of the man’s armor pommel first. Between the force of the Cylon’s blow and the spike at the end of the pommel that made their Bolos unique, the faceplate, and the face with in it were smashed it into something unrecognizable. He grabbed the dying man and used him as a shield when three Acolytes tried to get him in a crossfire.

Lenny used the distraction to decapitate the two closet to him, and grab the grenade that one of the two had been carrying on his belt. After Hector dispatched the third Acolyte he tossed the grenade to him. “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

Hector looked at the grenade and laughed. “This is a Smoke Grenade. Don’t you think they have ways to see through it?”

“Yes, but what else can it be used for?” Lenny said as he pointed to the ice.

Hector took a full half second to remember that the chemicals in the smoke grenade would make a very slippery lubricant if dumped on to the ice. He twisted the end of the grenade nearly off and then threw it towards the door. The fine white powder erupted from the tube in an ironic imitation of snow. They both made note of where the powder landed and were glad that they had spiked cleats on their feet and forearm guards. They then walked to the end of the powder and waited.

They didn’t have to wait long as four new Acolytes ran straight for them. The mooks didn’t have a clue until it was too late, and they were sliding across the ice like Stones in the game of Straights and Notches. Back edge first, Lenny’s blade descended and took off the helmet of the first man to go by. With the seal of the suit breached, the man inside suddenly found himself breathing in sub-zero air. The shock stunned him just long enough for Hector to finish him off as he went by.

Lenny kicked the second flailing Acolyte to the side while he stabbed the third with his blade. He looked up to see Hector yanking the rifle out of the last man’s hands. The poor fool had almost gotten a shot off, but by jamming his blade into a gap on the weapon’s side he had managed to skewer the weapon and render it useless. They both looked at their helpless foes and did what any honorable member of the Squad would do. They stabbed both blades into them before they could get up. They turned as another group entered. Hector laughed. “They don’t look so tough.” Fifteen of the armored Acolytes entered at a run. “Or fast...”

“Is your eyesight going, or are you trying to act like your namesake?”

“That’s Nelson. I’m supposed to die in single combat with a worthy foe. Do these look worth to you?” Half of the enemy had already fallen to the slippery trap before the rest managed to dodge the effected area. Two of the flankers found themselves far enough outside their area that the Muirs each took one out with well placed shots from their rifles. The rest either tried to find cover behind the melting ice, or their fallen bretheren’s frozen forms. Lenny took a round to the chest that tossed him on his back. “You okay?”

“You aren’t easily that winning.” Lenny stood up, but his gait was unsteady for a second.

Behind the berm and battlements made of bodies, Halnor watched the Heretics at work. They were so distracted that they didn’t seem to be paying him any attention. A slip that he would make them pay for dearly. He spotted a grenade bandoleer on one of the dead Myrmidons. His arm was finally working again, but he didn’t want to let on so he tried to move as slowly as possible without using it. He managed to work his legs up to where his gauntlet was. Once it was within reach he could trigger the blade to slice the bonds and escape. He sent the mental command and what was left of the blade sprang froward. The shattered blade fell upon the ice and a voice near him laughed. “You didn’t think we would let you keep that did you?” The golden Heretic stood over him and he felt like a child before an Inquisitor.

Arthur turned away from the fool and back to the battle. Hector, and Lenny had managed to cut an impressive swath of destruction through the monks as they had advanced. He only wished their odds were not so lopsided. He remembered an old friend that had passed quite a while ago that had said: “Just because this is supposed to be a suicide mission, it doesn’t mean we HAVE to die. Right?” He had promptly lead a boarding action that managed to capture a damaged Imperial Battle Cruiser. He missed Achilles, and all the jokes. He would miss living, but it was the price of duty. He drew his pistol and put a round through the priest’s arm, and each kneecap. He figured that if the fool had tried to escape, then he must not have been as hurt as he appeared to be anymore.

Pain like he had never know blossomed in Halnor’s arm, and legs. He fell back writhing in pain, and rational thought left him. The damage was quickly under repair, but his system had taken quite a beating. It would take hours for him to be able to walk again, and the nanites would be eating up anything they could to repair the damage. The only thought that remained in his mind was a blind need for revenge.

Hector, and Lenny looked out at the mess of bodies and gore that filled the depression they had created with the lubricant and the heat from the dying bodies. Lenny had lost one of his blades when it broke inside an imperial rifle. The rifle had exploded a couple of second later, taking the Acolyte with it, but he hadn’t escaped unharmed. His already damaged head was hanging at a funny angle, and it tended to sway as he moved. Hector was missing most of his leg armor, and one of his arms was acting sluggish, but they both were singing one of their favorite songs as they waded through the enemy monks.

“Lasers flash, bolos swing,”

“Flying armor piercing rounds,” Lenny stabbed a charging man in the chest, letting the man’s speed do most of the work. The man’s dying action was to try and grab a grenade off of his belt. Lenny snatched it and tossed it at the oncoming Acolytes as soon as the man activated it.

“Raptors fly with polished speed,”

“Fight Those Bastards till They Yield!” Hector pommel-punched one of the three Acolytes that jumped him. He stabbed at the second one, only to have the third one grab his arm. He dropped his left-handed bolo to grab the man and swing him in front of the second right before he fired his rifle. The rounds went right through the hard suit, but by the time they had penetrated the armor, and the man inside, they had lost most of their kinetic energy. He used his new meat shield to ram the surviving man. His right hand blade finished the man off. He struggled to stand back up though. The rounds must have hit something.

“Behind you!” Hector ducked as a forth man swung a boarding axe, point first at his back. Lenny managed to tackle the man before he could make contact, but his arm sparked from impact.

“Thanks.”

“Thanks nothing, that makes twenty. I’m ahead by two.”

“No chance, I have twenty three.”

Lenny looked around at the bodies that were strewn around. “Frak, you’re... About to duck!” They both hit the deck as a laser swept the area where they had just been standing. Standing outside the gap was a Knight’s power armor. It was too big to fit through the gap, but it was able to bring it’s arm mounted lasers to bear on the Cylons.

“Get off of me! If we keep siting here they will get us.” Hector pushed up, but Lenny was on top of him.

“I would love to, but I’m a bit damaged.” One arm managed to help push him over as Hector lifted from below. That’s when some of the weight suddenly went away. Hector looked at Lenny’s legs and whistled. “That bad?”

“Well you won’t be dancing anymore.” Lenny’s legs had been slagged at the spine and moving him had caused the rapidly cooling metal to crack.

“It’s only a flesh wound!”

“First off, you aren’t made of flesh, and second...” He threw one of Lenny’s legs at an approaching Acolyte. The poor man must have thought it was some new weapon, because he opened fire on the tumbling limb. The man’s distraction proved deadly as someone shot him as he fired uselessly at the leg. “You’re Chrome, not Black. Let’s go kill something.”

Lenny used his remaining good arm and blade to drag himself along the ice. The blade wasn’t made for acting like an icepick, but his shear strength, and determination kept him going right up until the laser blast melted the ice out from under him. Hector watched as Lenny sunk beneath the water. He knew he couldn’t die letting Lenny die that way. He reached in and grabbed the body and pulled it out. Lenny had gone into system shock from all of the damage he had taken, but his reactor was still running. Hector adjusted the settings, and hefted his rival over his shoulder. He ran for the gap trying to keep as far out of sight as he could. He even avoided a couple of the imperials as they passed by so that he could reach the breach. The tank thing had been pulled back, and he could see the power armored trooper trying to get it’s missile launcher to point inside the tank. It had to be one of the monks piloting that thing, because a knight wouldn’t have tried to light off missiles inside that chamber. Hector slid Lenny along the floor like a S&N stone. He wished he had a guide stick, but his aim was true, and Lenny came to a rest underneath the mech. He held up his bloody knives and clanged them together. “Hey Boys! Fraked any Nulls!” He yelled at the loudest volume he could. As the rounds hit him he laughed. “Oh come on, is that the best you got! I’ve been in rain that gave me more grief!” A round that had more luck than skill took off one of his arms. “You’re getting better!” Another one struck his leg, and shattered his knee. He fell down on the other. “Your priest is a NULL with bad body odor!” He laughed as he held himself up with his blade and willpower. His internal sensors said that he had a 15% combat efficiency, he was betting they were damaged as well. He watched as the hardsuited imperials moved in for the kill. On of them kicked his blade away. He fell, and sent the blade flying into the man’s face plate. It stuck in, but didn’t pass through. The man died slowly anyway. Another round smashed his arm to useless scrap. “You guys want to hear a joke?”

The imperials gathered around the fallen robot to shut him up when one of them held up a hand to stop them. “What is it heathen?”

“Look behind you.”

“We aren’t falling for” Lenny exploded when his micro reactor reached critical feedback levels. It wasn’t a nuclear explosion, as their reactors were simple cold fusion based, but the making the reactors feedback on themselves could cause them to behave like a pocket nuke. It’s only downside was the time it took to achieve, and the high amount of heat it produced while it built up.

“I wonder who wo” Hector exploded and took the rest of the imperials in the hall with him. The suit of Knight’s armor succumbed to the twin blasts in the confined area as the collapsing floor and ceiling finished off what the blasts themselves didn’t.

Ferdy looked at the smoking ruin that was the entrance. It was now twice the size it had been, and it spanned two decks. She watched as water pored into the hole left by the blast and shook her head. “Do we count the ones Lenny took out when he blew as his, or do we count them as Hector’s since he was the one that rigged Lenny to blow?”

“Since we do not know if they killed anyone outside of the area we can see, let us just call it a draw.” Markee opined in the Southshire Aerilon drawl he had effected as a part of his personality. It made him sound like a history professor right up until he started swearing in Lowland Rannan. Then he had a voice that made men bristle, and women swoon... and sometimes the other way around. “That is not the big boggle right now. How we are going to stop them from pouring in as fast as the water is pouring out is a bigger issue. So I am not sure if our erstwhile acquaintances accountancies have bought us a measure of reprieve, or not.”

Arthur looked at the timer, as it ticked past the two minute mark. “Any reprieve is a good one. And don’t forget the price they paid for that rest you’re enjoying.”

“I have not forgotten, nor have I been enjoying it. IR is picking up some significant heat sources, and those power readings are too high for hard suits. If it wasn’t for the weapons we ‘Liberated’ from our foes, we would have already been rendered to scrap.”

Lance looked at the timer as well. “I like it better when you talk like a Dund. But if you keep it up, you could talk them to death.”

“Frak off Kelfer dung.” Halnor thought he was about to watch the robots fight amongst themselves, and he wished that he could do anything hurry them to their demise. He could actually see the one with the cultured High Britony accent bristle at the other ones crude comments.

“Now That’s! What I’m talking about.” Lance shouted.

“Remember, we are here to kill the Imps?” Arthur shook his head. Lance and Markee had never seen monoeye to monoeye on much of anything. From sports teams, to women, they fought about everything. He looked down at the pile of bodies and wish that Samson was still fully functional. He had always been the peacemaker of the team. He had gotten the Muirs back together more times than he liked to remember, and had even managed to get Joker and Badger to... The thought of their fallen friends made him stop reminiscing. The timer clicked past one minute. “And we only have to hold them off for the rest of our lives.”

Samson took this opportunity to dance in front of the battlements. “Karada-juu ga atatakaku naru no Ima anata no ai shinjimasu ....” He had started singing Minmay songs, and Artur had to admit he was killing the songs with his voice. He was about to put his teammate out of his misery when Samson stopped in mid song. “They’re coming!” Everyone looked at the gap to see dozens of hardsuited figures pouring through the gap. “Hello happy puppies!”

“Fourty-five seconds” Lasers danced around the ice-filled room, and where ever they touched erupted into super-heated steam. A beam started to cut into the defensives wall built out of dead bodies, and Halnor nearly gagged in his ruined suit as the smell of burnt flesh assailed his nose. He wished they would hurry. He tried to move and he managed to get his left leg, and right arm to move slightly. The pain was intense, but he figured it was less that the pain he would suffer in Ell if he failed.

“Forty”

Markee took a blast to the chest that sent his half melted body tumbling down the wall to land at Halnor’s feet. Halnor climber over the searing hot body to get to the bomb. Using the final rush of his men as the diversion he needed.

“Thirty five.” Halnor had almost rached the bomb when an inhumanly strong hand grabbed his leg. The pain was more than he had ever imagined, and only the adrenalin in his system kept him from losing consciousness. “Where the Frak do you think you’re slulling ta’ ya gussy mite?” The light faded from the Cylon’s eye, but it didn’t go out, nor did the hand let go. Halnor struggled to free himself, but it was simply too strong to budge.

“Thirty” Freddy took a blast that ripped his arm off. It would have killed him if Ferdy hadn’t dropped her liberated rifle to grab him. The next blast pierced the wall and skewered her through the middle, severing her legs from her body. Freddy puller her body back and held her. Arthur and Lenny grabbed their rifles and did their best to keep the rest of the hardsuited men’s heads down for just a few more seconds.

“Twenty-five” Halnor watched in impotent rage as his fingers started to flex just out of reach of the bomb. Five inches, might as well have been five light-years for all the good it would do. He wondered how his men had become so good at attacking the Cylons with out him leading them...

“Twenty” Manicky had managed to patch into Halnor’s comm channel, but for some reason the Priest wouldn’t respond. He figured the Priest’s suit must have taken damage, but at least he knew the man was still alive. He had been listening to the audio, hoping to get some clue as to how his men were faring. When the evil robot had told Halnor that they had brought a bomb onboard he knew that they must be stopped. He had been sending anyone he could find to help, but the evil robots had cut them down like Death itself was their friend. Now he was doing everything that he could to stop the blast. He had spotted the heretic’s ship turning to bring what must be their version of a requiem cannon to bear. They could have withstood either of the attacks, but together it would probably mean their doom.

“Fifteen” dozens of hardsuited men had entered the room, and they were starting get around the defensive wall. Arthur raised his weapon to shoot at an Acolyte that had literally jumped over the wall. He held his fire when Samson tackled the surprised acolyte like a Pyramid player. The next surprise happened when both of them disappeared in a very familiar flash. Well most of them. Samson’s body was gone, but only half of the imp had been displaced, while the rest remained. And he wasn’t the only one to wind up in two places at once. Nearly a dozen men wound up half as tall as they had been when they entered the room. A searing hot Raptor with half of its paint bubbling off, and numerous sensors slagged erupted into the room. And erupted was the right word for it. Missiles fired out of rails that should have been retracted, and pods that should have been closed during a fold. The chin guns were pouring out a torrent of fire with little regard for ammo conservation. The back door was down, and he could see the lone pilot sitting there hunched over the controls, but he heard the voice come over the wireless.

“Ten”

“Do you need a lift?”

“Didn’t I order you to..”

“Yes, I did, and they are about to fire. Do you really want to stay for that?”

“We have to..”

“No time, I have this thing ready to go, and... We need to go. I can’t leave you here.”

(Eight)

(Seven) Arthur looked around. “Let’s go!” (Three) The shuttle vanished as it jumped and Halnor watched, and Manicky listened as the bomb went off. (-Two) Adama and Cavil stood at the firing keys and at the Admiral’s nod they twisted them at the same time. (-Five) Inside the mighty Tylium reactor that’s sole duty was to fuel the capacitor banks that fed the gravitic collimators and plasma generators that produced the coherent light beam of the spinal laser. While it didn’t have the kinetic particle damage that the reflex cannons did, it did have a couple of distinct advantages in firing speed and sustained beam duration. (-Six) The beam left the aperture literally at the speed of light, but in the near vacuum of space the beam was nearly invisible. Any matter that did cross the beam was instantly turned into plasma. Only couple of flashes here and there revealed the wreckage, and flotsam that resulted from the battle. (-Seven) Acolyte Gones looked up at the sudden flickering lights above him. He was the only Imperial on the surface to have a warning of their impending doom. The sudden brilliance flash incinerated him before he even had a chance to register the pain of the searing light on his eyes as the laser burned through his suit as well as the ten men nearest him in an instant. The beam cut through the icy surface even faster than it had cut through the men’s suits. Manicky watched the sensors as the warhead’s explosion had turned the reactors into a giant ball of plasma. The corridors that burrowed throughout the comet channeled the plasma through it like a cancer that ate at everything it came in contact with. The tensor fields were barely acting as firewalls, but they were dying fast. Had the blast been on the surface, they would have had a crater where most of the energy would have been dissipated. But by detonating within the comet they managed to contain all of the energy of the blast inside the complex. His eyes jerked to the surface sensors when the laser hit. He watched as the beam cut into the surface. He couldn’t actually watch the beam, but he watched it progress as section after section went dark. He knew that either attack they might have survived to complete their mission. Now he waited for the blast to work its way through the ship and to the bridge. It was almost to the missile tubes on the dorsal side. He was just praying that they had launched the last of the missiles before it did reach the magazines. (-Fifteen) The tumbling motion of the Raptor told Arthur that something was dreadfully wrong. He made his way to the cockpit and grabbed the second set of controls. The human was fighting to steady the ship, but they had a bad fuel leak somewhere. The leak was causing the ship to tumble out of control, and he saw only one option. The human’s hand slammed on the fuel dump button a second before his would have. The ship stopped tumbling in an aggressively random way that was reminiscent of leaf in a whirlwind. Now it simply spun like a mad top about to fall. As the fuel bled away, the stars drifted past in a less dizzying manner. “Wow, what a ride. How’d you do that?” Sergeant Malcolm leaned back from the now useless controls. He flicked some switches, and the lack of lights, and responses from the few systems that still worked told him that they would be here for a while. “So I guess we wait for everything to die down, and hope someone finds us, eh?” “Not Bad kid... Only we don’t have that long. You are going to run out of air in a few hours.” Arthur looked at the gauges on Malcom’s suit. It was still in the green, but... “Don’t worry about that. Here I got you a present.” He tossed Arthur a small plastic chip as Lance moved forward. Lance grabbed the seat back to keep himself from floating since the artificial gravity was one of the systems that had gone offline. “That was amazing kid, how did you managed to get back so fast, and then out again?” “I used all that water to dump the heat from the drives. You should have seen it. The sphere of water burst like a balloon and then turned to mist at the same time. The ice clouds were quite beautiful. The plume from the door was probably spectacular, but I must admit I was too busy hanging on to pay attention. The exit was not as impressive. Fold in; jump out. We call it the Knuckledraggers Nightmare. It will mess up a ship if it isn’t done right. I did so far from right it’s lucky we survived. But since it was suicide mission, I figured it was worth it. ” “You’re right it was. Hey, you’re a marine, how did you get so smart.” Lance patted the human on the helmet. He liked the kid, but something was definitely strange about him. Which was probably why he liked the kid. “I took a class once, and I like to date Knuckledraggers. This cute redhead told me about how heat was always the bottleneck in the cycle times.” “Not bad for a human.” “Not bad for a Marine!” Malcolm shot back. Arthur looked at the black plastic chip in his hand. “What about the shielding?” “Yeah, about that. I had to strip it out to get the fluid to the drives.” “What are you two talking about?” Lance looked at the rad-chip that Arthur handed him. “Frak! How much did you get?” The tiny badge was designed to warn people when they were exposed to radiation. The film would change color to show how much of an exposure they had received. The film showed a black lethal reading as well as a blue dot that represented an amount that was too high for it to display. “Enough to know that I don’t have to worry about my air running out. I took enough of the anti-rads to keep me running, but the only thing I can feel is it burning me up inside.” “Why did you come back. You could have gone back to the fleet as a hero.” “No, I couldn’t have, and you know it. If I left you guys there I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.” “So you chose to die?” “Didn’t you?” “Point taken. But why?” Malcolm reached into one of his suit’s many pockets. He pulled out a codekey on a chain. “This opens my personal storage locker on the Galactica. Inside you will find a datadrive. I guess you cold call it my Codex. Read it, and let it be known.” The ancient Kobolan oath was one of the few things he had left to be proud of, and he said it with all the weight in deserved. A dying decree that must be read to the public. In this case he wanted them to learn what he had... He looked at the two Cylons and wondered how in zero gravity they could look like they were standing at attention. “What?” “You don’t understand what a burden you just handed us.” He coughed, and blood splattered his face plate. The cleaners on the inside of the visor should have gone to work on removing the foreign liquid, but it looked like that wasn’t working either. “No my friends, you don’t know what kind of burden you’ve taken from me.” They would find everything he had ever learned about the suppression of Monotheists in the colonies. It could only be made public after his death, because they would have killed him for what he learned. The weight of the guilt, and duty faded from his soul, and he finally felt at peace with what he had done. With that peace came a warm light. He knew then that he must have been hallucinating. He had to be, because he saw a field before him, and someone was in the distance. It was a young girl, and she looked just as he remembered her. He could see Tamera and his mother waiting for him, and he walked towards the light that had filled his universe. Lenny looked at the body of the first human that he would have gladly called brother. “He didn’t have to do that. I was willing to die for him, and now I need to live for him. Damn Squishy.” “No he not a Squishy, he’s one of us.” “No Kiffle... I was wondering about what was is on that drive he said we’d find there? What did he just give us?” “Something earthshaking, no doubt. We’ll find out when we crack it open.” Acolyte Manicky held on to his chair’s armrests as the entire comet moved under him. The comet was dying all around him, his only consolation was the fact that the last of the missiles had launched before the damage had reached the launchers, but that was very little to be content with. The planetoid was about to come apart. The blast had caused an overpressure wave inside the comet that had ruptured many of the compartments from the inside, and vented the blast outwards. Then the beam had pierced the blast chamber and at first he had been happy to see the pressure drop even faster, and even the damage seemed to be stabilizing. That’s when the true nature of the damage became known. The laser had cut a hole into the blast area, and the plasma within had exited like the air in a deflating balloon. The sudden drop in pressure also caused the straining comet to collapse back on itself. The fractures propagated throughout the comet with sickening speed. Armored bunkers were crushed by tons of ice, hangers were suddenly unable to hold air as massive chunks of the outer shell were blown out into space with men and machinery joining them. Manicky felt the wall behind him buckle and the floor suddenly heaved him towards the ceiling. When he hit the ceiling he didn’t fall back to the floor right away. The artificial gravity had failed and he, along with everything else the remained on the bridge was suddenly weightless. His stomach nearly revolted on him, but he managed to not lose what little he had in it by shear force of will. His will power would not be enough for his other problem. There was a tell-tale hiss coming from his neck, and when he looked down he spotted a gash in his sleeve. All he had to do would be to reach for the patch in the pouch on his belt and fix it. The red pouch. The red pouch with the emergency repair kit in it. The second to the right of the buckle. He looked at the gash, and opened a channel on his suit’s comm. “Abandon ship. Long Live the Empire, and the Church for which we serve.” He watched the gash as the air slowly exited his suit. It would take about fity or sixty decas for it to bleed out, but he would pass out from long hypoxia before that happened. The Priest had told him he had to stay, and he would stay, but that didn’t mean that he had to stay living. And when he Reached the Armored Gates he could argue that he hadn’t committed suicide, he had simply gone down at his post. He sighed as he sat down to watch the air meter fall. Maybe Tory wouldn’t be so bad. On the bridge of the Galactica, Commander Martinez watched as the comet started to come apart. “Sirs, I think you might want to rotate the ship and maybe get us ready to jump.” Cavil patted Dee’s shoulder and left her to continue coordinating the fighter wings and moved over to where Adama, Gaeta, and Hoshi had been talking to fleet HQ to coordinate the fleet defenses. Adama looked up from the fleet display and motioned for him to go on. “Our relative courses were diverging already. What do you see?” “Only by a few kilometers per hour. If that thing splits up, we could have some big chunks headed our way.” “It’s worse than that kid.” “What do you have John?” Adama looked at the worried XO as he pointed to his display. “The jumpers are still coming, and we had reports of shuttles leaving the comet before the blast torched it. Ever since we pointed our lady’s nose at them they haven’t been blessed to receive our flack barrage to nearly as strong an effect as before. Those armored suits could do a lot of damage on the hull, and Imperial shuttles can carry boarding parties, or make suicide runs if they jump inside our flack barrier. I say we should go to general quarters, and get ready for guests.” No sooner had he finished than the first shuttle jumped to within fifty meters of the Galactica’s engines. Sadly they managed to jump right behind a ship that was at full military power and the plasma wash fried every system on the ship right before it fried the crew and sent the wreckage tumbling away from them at a rate that would soon find them lost to eternity. The second and third shuttles were more successful in their targeting. One appeared in the sensor blind spot below the launch bays. The sudden flash had drawn the eye of a spotter in one of the turrets though, so the ship was soon dodging fire from half a dozen Triple-A batteries. It ended as badly for them as it did for the first when hypervelocity round meant to hit swiftly moving fighters caught up with the much slower shuttle. Its fate differed from its brethren only in the fact that instead of burnt wreckage drifting for all eternity, it became shredded wreckage drifting for all eternity. The third managed to appear right behind the port recovery bay. Two vipers had to dodge to miss it as they were on approach. One splashed itself over half of the landing deck, but the other managed to somehow land after ripping its stabilizer off on the roof. The shuttle didn’t give the pilot a chance to bank on his new found luck though. The chin gun cut the fighter in half before the dazed pilot even had a chance to react. The near empty fuel tanks, and lack of ordinance, were the only reason the deck didn’t crater enough to decompress the deck below. Entering the now empty hanger, the shuttle opened its side hatches and disgorged is crew of hardsuited Acolytes. The pilot wave a good luck sign to them and waited for them to get clear. He sighed at a job well done and hit a switch. The shuttles had been designed with breaching charges built into their hulls. The idea being to cut through the hull of an enemy ship and either send in a boarding party, or if they didn’t manage to get through the armored surface of a hull, to set off the secondary charge and make a hole for the next shuttle. The blast ripped downward into the hanger below, and thirty-five knuckledraggers, and ten pilots never knew what hit them as the twin charges burned through the thinly armored landing bay and deep into the hanger. Up on the bridge Dee watched the explosion rip through the hanger from the video call she had made to check on the repair status of the fighters. The deck chief was behind a blast door and that was what saved him from the explosion. But the sudden decompression pulled everything that wasn’t locked down out in to the void of space. That almost included the deck chief. He managed to slam his door shut before it had sucked him out along with the rest of his office. He quickly grabbed a oxygen mask and ran to the emergency locker for a pressure suit. Dee quickly dispatched damage control teams to the affected areas. She looked up to see Cavil standing there. How he had moved so quietly? She never heard him. His habit of suddenly being right where he was needed was legendary. “Get our Vipers to land on the Zeus, with the damage we just took we will need the other bay free for Raptors. Get a squad out there to assess the damage, but wait to see if we lost any bodies until after the furball is over.” His cold voice did nothing to mask the fury in his eyes. She knew that those bodies would be next to impossible to find if they waited, but they just didn’t have the time to do anything for them. “Keep it together Dee. We only have time for the living, the dead can wait.” Her eyes opened wide. Had her emotions been showing that plainly. “Sir?” “I know.” He patted her on the shoulder and went back to the display with the rest of the officers. “Frak, Bill we just got our bells rung.” John never raised his voice, but Adama could tell he had felt like it. They had served for so long that he knew his friend felt that every one of those deaths was on his soul. “We couldn’t have known they would do that.” “Actuallly Sirrs, they have pullled taht trrick beforre.” Hoshi hands were moving faster than any human’s had a right to and even John had trouble keeping up with what he was typing on the display. A file opened up showing a Republic Carrier with numerous holes in it’s hull. “This was the Llexington. We llost herr at Cannabaata. The Imperriall ship they attacked was no match forr theirr fighterrs, but they llaunched suicide rruns on it with everry ship they had.” “Is there anyway to defend against them jumping in like that?” “Onlly one sirrs.” The extra sharp teeth were in full effect when Hosi smiled. “Killll them, beforre they get a chance to trry it.” Starbuck was one of the few Colonials with a Republic Veritech and she and Showboat had been having a contest to see how many Imps they could swat. Showboat was ahead by five, but that was when she bought it as no fewer than a dozen fighters swarmed her at once. They didn’t manage to hit her with weapon fire, but three smashed their fighters into her. The tough mech survived, but now Starbuck was stuck dragging her back to the Galactica when the blast happened. She knew that whatever just occurred, it wasn’t good. The port landing bay was belching fire and debris. Fire in space was not good. It ate up oxygen as fast as it destroyed equipment. “Starbuck to Galactica, you’re on fire.” Dee’s voice came over the wireless. Kara knew that Dee must not be doing to badly by her response. “Thank you Captain, we realize that and would ask that you proceed to the starboard hanger and drop off Showboat. Actual wishes for you to fly a CAP when you’re done.” “Where is Longshot, I thought he drew the babysitting duty.” “He and his wing were reloading in the port bay when it blew. They never had a chance.” “Frak.” “So say we all, Captain Adama.” Her father-in-law’s voice came over the wireless, and she could hear the pain in it. “There are more of those flying bombs out there. We need you to cover our afts.” The joke felt forced, and she knew he was trying to keep the morale up, so she didn’t respond in her usual way. She would save the sarcasm for the enemy. “Starbuck to Galactica Actual, orders received. Dee give me a Push.” The Push was a signal boost achieved by the Galactica rebroadcasting her transmission over their more powerful transmitters. “Starbuck to surviving Galactica forces. The Lady’s been wounded. She needs us.” she was saddened to see only a smattering of icons answering her call. “We do what we can, with what we have.” She had already killed her mike but she knew that the others were probably thinking the same thing. Most of the fleet was off chasing missiles. The Vipers just didn’t have the legs to join in that hunt. Doral shoved Cally into the bay and slammed the door before she could complain. She looked through the hatch’s viewport and saw him mouth ‘Hide’ right before the Imperials found him. His last act was to scramble the door’s lock before they blazed him with their lasers. A human or biological Cylon’s body simply exploded when that much heat hit it all at once. She hoped that he hadn’t felt the pain for too long before he uploaded. She looked around for a place to hide, as the strange armored intruders had been cutting down any opposition they found. The few marines that had managed to arrive had only managed to scratch their armor with their weapons before they had died in agony. Alex had gotten a call off to the bridge before they were cut off, but they didn’t know how long until backup would get there. Alex and the few knuckledraggers left in the pod had managed to set some traps that had taken out a couple of them, but it had cost them nearly every one of the crew. She knew that half of them had been killed in the first blast, and the enemy had been finding the rest of them far too easy. She figured that they must have some sort of sensor that could spot their heat, or something. The room that she was in was the spare parts locker, and storage for a lot of antique equipment like the old powerloaders for the old Banchy Class dropships. The powerloaders? She remembered stories of knuckledraggers using them to ward off Cylons, maybe it would work here? The suits should still work. Acolyte Grisntan looked at the smoldering skeleton that was all that remained of the heretic that had dared to defy their advance. The pitiful man had hidden his female within the compartment in front of him. He looked at the door. It was a thick security door, so something besides the worthless female must be hidden behind it. He aimed his cutting laser at the door and laughed. They hadn’t even had to use their weapons on these fools. The tool mounted on his suit’s arm had managed to do all he need with out using any of his precious ammo. He motioned his men to continue on while he continued cutting through the door. He knew that the armor was thick, but the hinges would be their weakest point. The Colonials had a habit of putting them in hard to reach places, but the beam from his cutter made quick work of the recessed hinges. He kicked in the door, and used his thermal sensors to look into the darkened room. The female was probably hiding in some dark smelly crevasse. His display showed the heat levels in the room were rather low, but he spotted a heat source behind some equipment. He turned on his spotlight to reveal a blanket covering something. He reached out and pulled off the blanket, but instead of the cowering female he just found some smoldering rags. Pulling off the blanket though, let the oxygen get to the chemicals covering the rags. The same cleaning fluids and lubricants that every knuckledragger knew were never supposed to be mixed inside an oxygen environment exploded into a furious flame that quickly engulfed him. He laughed at the attempt to attack him, and turned to try and find where the female had run to. That’s when the clamps grabbed his suit and started pulling his chest plate off. He grabbed the clamp that was trying to pry the cover off of his suit and fought with the mystery assailant through the fire. He couldn’t see anything but he knew someone had come to that tramp’s rescue. Maybe one of those abominations had made it into the bay. He switched his viewer from thermal to radar and saw a massive machine that looked for all the universe like a beast with claws. He had almost managed to pry the clamp off when the Scorpion powerloader’s magnetic claw shot forward with the force of a piledriver. He flew back and hit the bulkhead behind him with enough force to stun him. He snapped back when the flaming mass of rags was stuffed into the gaps in his warped brestplate. The chemicals were dripping rivers of flames into his suit and his nanites were trying to keep up with the damage he was suffering. All it really managed to do was make his suffering worse as his body ate itself up repairing the damage all as the flames continued to consumed him. He tried to signal for help, but his suit was already succumbing to the flames wrecking havoc within it. Cally was examining the weapon he had been carrying as he died in front of her. She would have felt sympathy for him, but for all the dead friends he had just been responsible for she really couldn’t bring herself to care. She knew that she was probably in shock, but she knew that still had things to do. In the end, she managed to get the Scorpion’s gripper claw into the firearm’s trigger, but she couldn’t manage to pull the trigger. She slung the weapon into the suit’s storage bay. She might not be able to use it in this suit, but if she could get to Viper bay maybe one of the newer powerloader suits might. Even if they couldn’t use it now the one of the Domeheads might be able to figure out how they worked. On the Warstar Zeus, Admiral Nagala watched as the Galactica’s Vipers pulled back to protect it’s wounded flank. The Galactica wasn’t out of the fight, but it was under orders to stay with the comet until it broke up, or ceased to be a threat to the colonies. He couldn’t send any of the other ships to help her out as they were suddenly busy chasing down thousands of missiles that were making beelines for the nearest colonies. He was just glad that the rest of the ships that had been under repair at Picon Station or the Cylon’s Galileo Station were safe. Most of them weren’t even flight ready and the few that were hadn’t been cleared for flight duty. His own daughter’s Frigate the Repulse was still days away from their flight trials. They hadn’t even received their missiles yet. He had made sure that she would remain safe for one more day. The Sprintstar Repulse was dying. All around the tiny bridge the fire suppression system fought to douse the flames as a Rad-suited engineer broke down the hatch. He looked around and found the red striped hard suit that had been the only reason the skipper had survived the laser strike that had hulled them. Most of the ship was in vacuum and they were dead in the void. He shook her and watched as her eyes opened. “The ship?” Annabel Nagala’s hazel eyes seemed to be unable to focus, and Lieutenant Jacob Hanaford wasn’t sure if she had a concussion or not. “You stupid frimp, I told you this ship wasn’t ready.” In fact he had nearly mutinied when she had ordered the ship to jump to the defense of Picon. They may have lacked missiles to hit the incoming missiles with, but they had been able to use their new laser clusters to take out over fifty before one of the enemy missiles had gotten close enough to fire upon them. The single blast had nearly cut the ship in half. They had still taken out four more missiles before the last one had fatally crippled their ship. “I knew that. We just didn’t have a choice.” She was her father daughter to the core; reason be damned, she would do her duty no matter the cost. He bit his lip, lest he admit that she was right. Others were not so circumspect. “She right, you know.” Wrecked panels spilled aside as a hand, then a similarly helmeted head popped out of wreckage of the bridge. The green checkerboard pattern on the man’s helmet and the condescending voice were two things that Jacob had hoped to not come across when he arrived at the ruined bridge. As a matter of fact, he had hoped that their pet Cylon had died in the blast that had killed just about everybody he had ever cared for. The Doral model looked downright cheery as he sat up from under the wreckage of his post. “Dunsell, why are you even alive? Shouldn’t you have downloaded and run back to your people like the coward you are at the first sign of trouble?” “Jacob my dear boy, you never cease to amaze me at how much of a bigot you can be. Now why don’t you help your dying captain instead of flirting with me.” At the mention of their skipper’s health he looked at the body in his arms. Her eyes were still open, but she was gone already. ‘She’s...” “Yes I thought as much. And we will be shortly. We won’t survive the deorbit that is about to happen, but the ocean below us will be the least of our problems. If we don’t stop it we will do more damage than that missile would have.” “How, the ship is nearly broken, and what systems are still working are wiped clean by the EMP. Face it tinman, we are well and truly fracked.” He looked at the flickering displays. The lifeboats had been jettisoned by someone. He prayed to the gods that the survivors wouldn’t blame them for failing. “I’m still here.” The non-sequitur brought him back to the present like a slap to the face. “What?” He looked at his... former... friend for the first time. Dunsell Doral had been the firstman at his wedding five years ago, and had been the one who’s shoulder he had cried upon when Lacy left him for that deskjockey on Tauron. But that was before he knew that his best friend had been a Cylon impostor. He had lost most of his family to the Cylons in the last war, and his hatred of all things Cylons had turned his best friend into a paradox he solved by turning his hatred up to thirteen on his former best friend. “I’ve always been the best programmer you’ve ever known. Now we know why. Anna once told us that it’s not how we live, but how we die that defines soldiers. She died to protect the same people that called her names, and assumed that the only way she got the job was because of her father or her looks. They will never know how much he was her biggest roadblock. If we fail her, then he will always be able to say she wasn’t cut out for the fleet. Now are you going to help me plug in to the ship, or do I have to do figure out how to do this with my one functioning arm?” “You’ll die.” “To quote an old, old, vid: “I’m dead already.” “I hated those old Tauron flicks. Must you quote Big Vic at a time like this?” He pulled the panels, and beams that were covering Doral’s legs... or at least where they should have been. “Where are your legs?” “Probably under my station. The blast turned the starboard bulkhead into shrapnel. Collette and Gil protected the Skipper, but they were the first to die. Nan patched up my legs right before the ceiling dropped on her station. I was crawling over there when that last missile hit us. It’s a good thing I hadn’t made it yet.” Nan’s station at the helm was unrecognizable, and only Jacob’s memory allowed him to find anything that might be a part of the blond goddess’ station. “Get me over to the jump computer.” Her smile was haunting Jacob already. Frigates were not the largest of warships, in fact the entire Sprintstar class was too small to operate on their own. They had neither berths nor bunkerage for anything other than system defense, but the Repulse had fired everything they had, and taken more than the ship had ever been built for. As small as she was though the ship was still too large to deorbit without causing major damage to the world below. It would hit in the Southern Perseus sea just west of the Medusa Atoll. A popular tourist spot during the winter, it would only be lightly populated now, but that still meant nearly fifteen thousand locals. The tidal wave would swamp the low lying islands and race outwards to reach the cities along the Perseus’ coasts where hundreds of thousands could be effected. Picon’s atmosphere started to cause the Recluse to tumble when it hit the thin tenuous edges. The normally streamlined ship was tattered and her lines distorted by great gapping wounds in her hull. Jacob grabbed part of the computer to steady them as the deck heaved under him. The artificial gravity would keep his feet, and the rest of him, pointed in mostly the right direction until they reached the surface, but the planet’s gravity was already affecting the inertial dampeners efficiency. Duncell winced in pain as his legs were hit by items that shifted with the bridge. Jacob pulled out his roll of duct tape. The lime green tape was jokingly referred to as Knuckle Tape due to it’s popularity among engineers and flightcrews everywhere. He had been surprised to find out that the Cylons had introduced it to the colonies, but not enough to stop using it. He used it to strap Dunsell literally to the computer. “Now what?” “Find an optic cable and, strip the end.” Jacob ripped the cover panel off and didn’t care where it landed when he tossed it. “Okay, now put a tourniquet on my left arm. Then cut open my suit so you stab that into my bicep.” Jacob did as his friend told him to, but he shook his head as he tied the wire tight around the shattered arm. “I almost asked you if you were kidding.” “Why didn’t you?” The blond man’s eyes rolled up in pain as the data line slid into his arm. Thoughts of two men in a rain-soaked Tauron restaurant drifted by as he answered. “You never joked about the important stuff.” He slid a suit patch over the cable to keep as much air in the suit as possible. “I’m sorry.” “Don’t worry, this is the least of my worries right now.” Dunsell’s eyes lost focus as he started to attempt to rebuild the jump computer. “NO, I mean about the way I’ve been treating you. I’ve been a bit of a bogger ever since... well since we all found out.” “Oh that, don’t worry about it.” “But I...” “I knew how you felt, and I actually was sad; but right now I really must insist that you do something for me.” “Sure, anything!” “Shut up, this isn’t easy, and the ground is coming up awfully fast.” “Shutting up.” Jacob sat down next to his best friend. If he had to die, at least he was in good company. He looked at Annabel’s body. She was looking back at him, and it made him uneasy. Anna would have had some witty quote from one of her father’s books for this situation, but he was at a loss for words. So he sat there and resisted the urge to open her visor to close her eyes. Nora Linscomb moved her ship out into the bay. The five passengers had asked for a sunset cruise, and they paid well for out of season visitors. The weather sats were acting funny but the reports had shown a clear night in the region so she throttled up and cleared Snakehead lighthouse. She waved at Bojo the watchman that was on duty as he flashed her a good luck salute. The passengers were the usual rich and papered frimps she babysat, but at least they were good looking. Not like that fat slob that she had taken out last time. She looked up at the darkening sky and tried to spot the orbitals. Her grandson was working on one of the new shipyards and she liked to watch transition when ever they wandered past. That was the only reason she spotted the fireball in the sky. The wireless was in her hand without her remembering having grabbed it. “This is Sea Hag, we have a Falling Star event, I repeat, we have a Falling Star event!” On the deck of the Sea Hag Zana Lorne was catching the last few rays of the setting sun, and her tanned body was glistening in oil. Gary Lorne her husband was admiring her body over the natural beauty around him. They had come out for their fifteenth bonding anniversary like they had for every one since they joined in Hera’s name so many years before. He loved her now even more than he had before. He reached into his jacket’s inner pocket. The key was still there. He had been carrying it ever since they had arrived at the Atoll. He was waiting for sunset to... What was that in the sky? Molly, Hana, and Fredy Lorne were below deck wrapping the gift they had bought for their parents. Hana the youngest pulled on Fredy’s skirt. “Yes?” “Can we go up on deck and see the falling star?” Molly pulled the paper over the framed picture as she grabbed the sticky paste. “You can’t see any falling stars here. Orbital watch keeps anything big enough to be problem far away from the shipyards. Where did you hear about falling stars?” “The lady yelled it into wi-le” the young girl looked like she was going to cry. “She said it, really!” Hana scooped up her little sister in her arms. “Now why would she... Molly?” Molly’s face went pale as the words registered with what she had been learning about the hazards of space travel. Up on the deck Gary pulled Zana inside the vessel just as Captain Linscomb hit the alarm. “What is that thing Gary?” Zana’s eyes were wide in shock as her husband dogged down the hatch cover. “That my dear is a ship falling out of the sky. When it hits, the Atoll will disappear along with just about every seaside city on this hemisphere.” “Daddy! What’s going to happen?” Hana and Fredy ran into the main cabin. “I don’t know. Where’s Molly?” His eldest daughter was usually the level headed one, so not seeing her made him worry. “She went t’ help the Cap’ Lady.” Fredy said proudly. Up on the bridge Nora kept an eye on the DRADIS display. It was usually used to keep an eye on aircraft like the Coralskippers the kids liked to buzz her ship with. Right now it showed a contact the likes of which she had never seen in these regions. It was twice the size of a bulk freighter and falling fast. She heard the sound of someone scampering up the gangway but never took her eyes off the display. In five minutes everyone she ever care for would be dead. And if hadn’t of been for this job, she would have been sitting in Loi Loi’s having a glass of gods awful rotgut, and never knowing what hit her. Now she had a family to keep safe as well as her boat. “Can I help?” The oldest of the girls had arrived and she half-wished she would go away. But two sets of eyes were better than one. She pointed at a set of numbers on the data point. “See those?” “The Altitude and Distance markers? Yes, but you don’t have this set right.” At the captain’s confused expression she continued. “These are relative to us, not the ground.” It only took a glance to see that the kid was right, and to change her opinon of her. “Fix it, and let me know how long we have.” Molly looked at the older system and quickly reset the settings. “Three minutes... Mark!” “Frak! We have even less time than I thought. Go tell your family to strap in.” The young lady ran down the gangway in a way that told her that she had misjudged her clients. When Molly rejoined her family she found out that they had already anticipated what the captain had in mind. Her father patted a chair that had been switched into its emergency position for her. She smiled and headed back to the bridge. Zara leaned over. “She’s you daughter.” He smiled. “Of that I have no doubt!” He held her hand for a moment. When she pulled it back there was a small key in it. Her raised eye was met with a silent “later” from him. Molly reached the bridge and saw the fireball with her own eyes for the first time. Her camera was in her hand and a picture that would become famous throughout the colonies was snapped before she even thought about it. “Fifteen seconds! Take the other chair, and strap in!” She followed the captain’s orders and was watching the countdown when the most amazing thing happened. On the Warstar Zeus, Admiral Nagala watched as his ship fought off yet another wave of missiles. He had lost count of how many times they had jumped, and the jump tug was starting to have trouble recharging. Each jump took longer and long to recover from, and the strain on the ship had cost them. The starboard launch bay wasn’t there anymore. He had had to jettison it five jumps back when the nacelles had fractured in so many places it wouldn’t survive another transition. It didn’t matter, he had left most of his Vipers behind anyway. He still had the Raptors, and even a few Cylon Raiders had joined him, but his ability to defend the colonies was next to nill. Captain Linton, his XO was calling for his attention when the Colonial ship jumped right next to them. The transponder on the other ship was offline, but two things saved it from friendly fire. Even battered like it was, the lines of a Sprintstar were so well know that it was instantly identified, and second was the fact that the ship had appeared in one of the few deadzones of the Zeus’ flack cover. He recognized the ship and was about order some Raptors to fly cover when a missile that had slipped through that same hole detonated. He watched his daughter’s ship melt as the beam slagged armor, bulkheads, equipment, and crewmembers with equal abandon. He knew that had that beam hit his ship it wouldn’t have survived. The Sea Hag was rocked by the thunderclap of the sudden displacement resulting from an interatmospheric jump event. The shockwave soon passed and the sudden quiet was punctuated by the thrum of the boat’s motors. Molly looked at her camera as Nora throttled back the engine, and activated the running lights. Somehow in all of the excitement she had missed the sunset. Oh well, she would catch one tomorrow. Admiral Nalaga sat down in his command chair and wept. No one spoke to him as the jump tug reported a failure in the jump drives that would take half an hour to repair. The repair crews went to work fixing the damaged flack guns, and three S&R Raptors were sent out to see if anyone survived the Repulse’s destruction. The Raptors returned with no survivors, and only the tags from a few Rad-Suited corpses found in what was left of the ship. No sign of the bridge crew was found because the bridge simply didn’t exist anymore. Starbuck watched as another Imperial shuttle jumped in. The shuttle nose dived towards the drive section of the Galactica. Her rife was on target almost before she consciously thought about it. The mech she piloted was beginning to feel like an extention of her body. The thought of being fifteen or sixteen meters tall like the Zentradi they had originally been built to combat made her smile. Now they were being used to fight a much larger enemy. The beam from her laser rifle might not have been visible in the void, but it’s results were. The beam had sliced through one of the Imperial craft’s engines resulting in an uncontrolled spin that ended when the ship exploded. That was the fourth one since the blast and they were trying to hit different parts of the ship. Everywhere except... The forward hull was pockmarked with scars in its armor. The hard-suited figure hit the hull with the force of a missile. Another hit just as hard, and the impact would have killed him if the man inside hadn’t been dead already. Dozens of dead Imperial hard suits hit the hull in what would have resembled hail if human shaped objects fell from the void. Several minutes later and over a dozen meters from the first impact sight, the first of the surviving acolytes landed with their suit thrusters slowing their decent. Acolyte Belzin summoned the survivors to his position with his suit lights. Once he had the survivors together they moved off towards bodies he had spotted on their decent. They gathered their dead into a pile over an armored access hatch and he picked out one of the survivors. The man practically had tears running down his face when Belzin gave him the honor. The rest moved off and the man saluted as he and the other suits he had tied into detonated. The blast sent fragments of armor and their companions into the void. Everyone of his men charged the hatch as they had been trained to. What they hadn’t been trained for was Republic armor. The hatch held, and it wasn’t even damaged too severely. They were still pondering their next move when the hatch started to cycle. Each and everyone drew their rifles as the hatch opened to reveal something that every member of the Empire had come to fear. The tiny flower painted inside the door. Thirty Cylon centurions, each mounting a Astropack attacked them from behind. The combination thrusters and magnetic grapplers had allowed Cylons to board ships for decades. Out in the open like they were, Belzin lost half of his force before they could find anything resembling cover. Belzin knew that reinforcements were on their way, all he had to do was to clear their way and the ship would be theirs. One of his men died and he tracked the path of the shot back to the abomination that had killed him. He fired his rifle and hit the minion of evil in its backpack. The abomination was flying off into the void and he lined up to take a shot at the wounded thing. The railgun round shorted out his faceplate right before it pierced his brain. He had never seen the Centurions sneaking up on their position. Galahad 9305 slung his rifle. It was only five minutes but the last of the attackers had fallen already with only two of their own in need of repair. With a few hand signals to his men they reset the trap. The sensors had spotted a larger bunch headed their way and he wanted to reload and recharge before they arrived. He might even have a moment to update his codex. The next wave was nearly a hundred strong. They had witnessed the fighting from afar, so they weren’t going to be ambushed so easily. The lead element had slowed down their approach until the others behind them could catch up. Once everyone had matched speeds they descended in a massive wave. That’s when they got their next surprise. Right before they arrived the hatch opened once again. This time they met the what Colonial response to the Cylon boarding tactic would have been if a certain administration hadn’t cut funding to it. The powered armor might have been primitive by Imperial or Republic standards, but the Minotaur armor had the advantage of being twice the size of the attacking suits. The suits couldn’t be used in the confines of a ship, but out on the hull, they were in their element. Only a dozen exited the hatch, but the hatch shut behind them and less than a minute later another dozen joined them. The first squad was already trading fire with the approaching Imperials with the Cylons lending their support where need as the second exited the hatch. Majors Tennant and Davidson of the Colonial Marines were leading the first two squads as the first of the Imperials made it to the Galactica. Davidson was an old wardagget that had been with the Minotaur program from it’s inception, and he wasn’t about to let Tennant show him up. He had lead the first squad out into the void and had taken fire almost as quickly. Now the young man was out to lend a hand. “Hey Doc, leave some for us.” The newly minted Major had an attitude that, while his men found plesant, the older Major found a tad familiar. “Who are you calling Doctor, Junior?” On the Cylon squad’s channel the two majors’ banter was always a source of both amusement, and a window into the human condition. Sir Gifred 2029 snipped an Imperial that was about to shoot one of the Marines and posted to the board. {So who is going to tell him?} [Quit using the fancy brackets. We’re not in a TBRPG!] [And tell who, what?] {Fibit! I will do as I please. And who gets to tell Harry that Nick is dating his daughter.} [will you two quit gossiping at a time like this we ha] USER OFFLINE Ancell 659 took a round through the chest that sent what was left of him flying into the void. {Frak! Now Ancell will never finish that Fluffy Ponies fanfic of his!} Almost as one the entire squad shut down their links to the board. {Was it something I said?} A railgun round punched through the Imperial hardsuit that was about to blaze Gilfred, and he spun around at the sudden flash of light. One of the humans had just killed the man that was about to kill him. Gilfred raised his hand and shouted “I owe you my life! Wait for me!” all the while totally forgetting that sound didn’t travel in the void. It was said that the Brotherhood protected the feeble and minded their business, but some of their members got their wires crossed on that concept. That Sir Gilfred was still functional was an oft pondered source of speculation. Half said he was mad, half said he was some kind of genius; and everyone that met him thought he was the luckiest Cylon to ever come on line, because no one could be that clueless and survive. The next wave had been watching the fight below and their commander was an Acolyte who’s last job had been as a welder for the shipyards of Roanahalls Glory. He knew less than zero about combat, but he knew a fair bit about armor. He used his whisker laser to communicate with the other members of his wave. All the other had tried to fight their way through one of the armored, and well guarded, hatches that dotted the hull. He tasked his men that were armed with lasers to focusing them on a communications array that was nearly a hundred meters aft of the closest hatch of any kind. He figured that they could focus their lasers on it, and burn their way through the pathway the data runs must have needed to pass through the armor. The others who were only armed with the more common railguns were tasked with clearing their landing zone of anything that moved. Dee was still using the long range communications to Push Starbuck’s message in a five minute repeater cycle when the attack came. She was sure that the pilots would be tired of hearing the message, but as long as it was still playing they would know that the Galactica was still flying. The ports side transmitter went offline halfway through on of her loops, and Dee quickly checked to see what had happened. “Bridge to damage control team 337, we have a burn out in Long Range number 2, can you get some one out there?” Cally had managed to move forward towards the central hanger when she heard the call for the damage control team. Her friend Bosco was on that team so she hit her mike. “CueBee to Bosco, do you need a hand?” “Sure thing sort thing. Your gang is always welcome down here. Tell Doral to grab some hardsuits, it looks like we may need to go take a walk.” “Um, Doral’s offline right now. This is weird, I’m not sure if or when he will be getting back.” The Galactica still didn’t have a full Resurrection Chamber. Their’s only had one bay for the humanoid types, and she wasn’t sure if they had one of his line in storage. Even if they did, it would take an hour for it to be ‘Decanted’ from its near frozen state. There was an awkward pause on the other end before the DCO’s distinctive tenor came back. “Well then get the gang together, and get here as fast as you can.” “That won’t take long, I am the gang right now.” “I’m sorry... Suit up, and get here then.” Cally didn’t tell him about the Scorpion powerloader suit she was already wearing. But it was ironic that she was already ready. She looked at the strange rifle and wished she could switch suits for the far leaner and more modern suits in the launch bay, but there just wasn’t enough time. She did pause long enough to grab the laser welder attachment for the tail. It would be far more useful in repairing things than the magnetic grapple would. The older suit also was equipped with the droshky attachment. Since it was designed to lug equipment in the compartment on its back, it had not only the rail attachment, but the mounting points for the clamps that attached the droshky cars to a puller. She rather missed the droshkies. The miniature trains had pulled materials and manpower from one end of the ship to another along the spine of the ship for years. The new slideways had replaced the old system, but the rails and tubes were left in place. She slid the suit onto the rail and activated the system. The legs of the suit were pulled in to the recesses on each side. She had wished that she could have been out here flying one of the new transforming robots that she had been working on before the attack; she guessed that this was as close as she would come to one of those machines. At least here she didn’t have as many enemies tying to kill her. The droshky rail activated, and she shot into the tube. She would have to go through five sections, and switch over at the intersection at bulkhead 37. Acolyte Lido looked at the strange script on the bulkhead in front of him. According to his computer’s readout he had to cross over some sort of ventilation system to reach the main hanger. He slung the rifle that had just blazed two tens of heathens, and activated his cutter. It was easier to cut his way through the doors instead of hacking them. The heathens had changed their operating system, and his equipment was just not up to the task of breaking the codes. The cutter’s laser made quick work of the lock though, and his suit made ripping the door open easy as blazing slaves in a pen. The door with strange script was soon out of his way, and out of his mind. If he had been able to read it he would have seen the number 35 on its face. If he had over ridden the controls instead of melting them then the system would have slowed down any droshky traffic in the area. Instead he was about to grab his rife when the Scorpion came around the corner. Cally had been trained to watch out for feldercarb on the rails, but she never expected an enemy to stand right in her way so she never hit the breaks. Lido flinched as twin lights blinded him. He lost his grip on his rifle as the monster from the darkness slammed into him with enough force to stun him inside his suit. He recovered but not in time to grab his rifle as it fell under the vehicle that had hit him. He quickly reactivated his cutter again but just as fast as he had, a massive claw grabbed his arm. The short beam played across the roof of the tube causing molten metal to rain down on the vehicle that held him. The droplets not only splashed on the machine, but it illuminated it enough for him to make out the shape of it, but cast in it harsh lights and shadows that he couldn’t make out any details. He tried to open the claw’s vice like grip with his other hand, all the while trying to push of with his legs. The other claw slammed into him and he felt his shoulder blade scream in protest as it was strained beyond the limits of human endurance. His nanites were quickly repairing the damage, but he knew that he had to get away. That’s when he saw the rifle in the bay behind the operator’s compartment. He tried to look into the compartment but the sparks, and molten metal made the visor a reflection of the streaks of light that lit the darkened part of the tube. Suddenly the light level went up, and the roof was higher. He looked around to see that they were passing through a hanger, and that the person in the suit was a... A girl? The child didn’t look as old as his seventh wife, and she was barely of breeding age. He found his footing on one of the retracted legs and tried to make a lunge for the rifle. His fingers grabbed the rifle and he swung back to point it at her. He couldn’t figure out why she was smiling until the edge of the tunnel smashed the back of his helmet with enough force to take it and his head off, and by that time it didn’t matter. Cally counted herself lucky, even though she had just lost the rifle she had retrieved, for surviving the first fight in the suit. She was not feeling too sorry for the first Imp that she had killed herself. In fact when she hit the 37 intersection she simply tossed the headless body into one of the droshky litters that were still used to push large objects through the tubes. She laughed at the old joke about littering in a litter, but she knew that the humor was forced. Her friends had died, and she had killed people. Doral might come back, but the others would not, and that would leave a hole in her heart. She cycled the hatch and slid back into the droshky rail. The rest of the ride was spent crying, not the tears of a child, but of anger. She wondered if Starbuck ever had to deal with this. Starbuck was dealing with the two fighter bombers that had returned to launch missiles at the Galactica. Her rifle had over heated once again, and she was back in the Viper-tech’s Fighter mode. She still felt the most at home in this mode so she was not too annoyed. She had only a few other Vipers left, and even the rumor that a few Raiders were on their way to lend a hand was faint hope. She had assumed that a fighter bomber would be big and slow. She was half right. The ships were nearly the size of shuttle, but she was having trouble keeping between them and the old lady. One had taken five hits from her rifle, and was still in the fight. The other had danced outside of her range and kept trying to get by her. They could have split apart and one of them would have made, but for some gods be praised reason they stayed together. She had nearly run back to the Galactica when the long range push had gone silent. Only Dee’s quick reply on short range had kept her out beyond the flack barrier’s range. The last shuttle had died long ago, and her new orders were to keep these two from getting close enough to fire. Something twinged in her danger sense and she dodged the burst of railgun fire that came from a Cylon raider that just appeared from under one of the bombers. The second one launched a similar ship, and as soon as she was targeting them she realized what the enemy was trying. The two fighters were drones, and drones of the old style raiders to boot, not the new ones. She hit her wireless and was rewarded with a burst of static. They were jamming her. Did they really think that this was a good enough ruse to... That’s when she thought about it. If the two fighters managed to kill her, then they would be free of a pest. If, on the other hand, she managed to kill the fighters it would look like the Cylons were working with the enemy. And there were certain people still in power that would scream for the Cylon’s heads. She looked at the grey panel that she swore she would never use. The fighter already responded to her every thought, but if she activated the sync circuit she could use the fighter’s other systems. Like the cyber-warfare suite that Jane and Bond had trained her on. The interface was built into her helmet, all she had to do was to link up with the fighter’s OS and her mind would become an extension of the fighter’s computer. The fake raiders swept towards her, and she hit the slider. The switch activated the system and she could ‘see’ the ships through the ship’s sensors. Jane had taught her how to hack into the systems but actually doing it in a combat situation was another thing. She reached out with her mind, and realized it was actually the ships’s systems that were trying to hack into the enemy fighters, and overcome their defenses. The two fighters were attacking her, and she fought them in the real universe while her mind dueled with their systems in the cyberverse. She could ‘feel’ them now that they were attacking, and she could almost imagine that she was physically fighting them as well. Her mind built up shields that were formed from the defensive software and her willpower. She parried their attacks as she thrust forward with her own attacks, both physical and electronic, and something unexpected happened. She could feel minds within the fighters. What she thought had been drones were fighter versions of the Myrmidons. Each fighter had a distinct mind with in it. And to her surprise, they were helping her. She could suddenly see exactly what they were about to do before they did it. She could dance around their attacks and not have to worry about being hit, but she knew that it wouldn’t last. If she could figure this out then who ever was controlling them would. She needed a way to free them. ‘Kill us’ the thought popped into her head as if someone else had thought it. ‘It is the only way to free us.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘We don’t have time for names. They will find out what’s going on and make us explode anyway. If you kill us, we die free.’ She could feel the rage, and sadness in the mind that had sent the message to her. ‘I do not want to.’ ‘Thank you, but you have no choice. If you don’t we will explode, and anything within range will die. We are flying bombs.’ ‘There has to be a way to disarm them, and free you.’ ‘They programmed the systems too well. If you don’t enter the right code we explode. If we don’t kill you we explode. If you stop one of us the other will explode. And we don’t know what the code is.’ She dodged the railgun fire that the twin fighters sent her way as if to punctuate the seriousness of the situation. She had only one chance. A sudden flash of her father sitting next to her as a child almost distracted her. She realized she was having a vision, but it was not the best time for one. She fought to keep her mind in the fight as her father sat down beside her on the bench. “Kara, do you know what’s the difference between a musician and someone that plays music?” He had asked her that question so often that she knew the answer right away. “A musician puts their soul in to their music.” That’s when the vision differed from her memories. “Yes, but you can also get something extra out of your music if your soul resonates with your instrument. Remember that piece we used to play?” She did, and she had been surprised to find it in songs from not just old Earth, but the records the Republic had put versions of it on planets as diverse as Tirol, New Praxis, and Jarool. The coincidence was amazing, but not unique. She had found no less that sixteen songs that sounded close to the Colonial anthem. She didn’t even want to think about how often she had found the Pin Boys classics strewn throughout the databases she had accessed. Her mind and hand coordinated to type in the notes into the computer, and then turn them into their numerical values. The same ones she had been playing when her mother slammed the cover down on her fingers. The same ones that she had been stunned to find out had been the jump co-ordinates for Earth. She sent the message, and that’s when the next few seconds got a little stranger. Then the two bombers ceased firing and formed up with her. They each gave her a wag of their wings. “Thank you Angel, we must now repay our debts to our dead.” The two fighters swung around as one and flew back to the bombers that had launched them. She was trying to keep up when the same voice came over the wireless. “Do not throw away our gift.” She transformed into guardian mode, and braked as hard as she could as the sensors showed the two fighters merge with the rapidly escaping bombers. The blasts were tremendous, and her sensors told her why they didn’t want her to follow them. The radiological sensors showed a massive wave of ionizing radiation headed her way. Had those ships gotten close enough to the tylium the Galactica still used, it would have gone off like a nova. Those were Neutron bombs! Starbuck watched the twin explosions die down before heading back to the Galactica. There were times she wished that she had flunked out of flight school and become a knuckledragger. At least they had the Old Lady to protect them. Cally was almost to the junction where the repair team was working on the run when her world was filled with fire and chaos. Plasma, and debris from the corridor washed over her as the lock cycled open. She had a brief glance of her friend and his team being engulfed in flame before decompression sucked them through the opening and into space. They were all in pressure suits, but by the lack of comm chatter she doubted if any of them survived the ordeal. She wished she had a weapon, because she knew she was about to receive visitors. “This is Specialist Henderson, we just lost damage repair team 337 at Long Range number 2. We have a breach, and I require an armed response team because I expect guests. I will hold them as long as I can. But you will need to expect a Beachhead situation when I fall.” The resurrection chamber was working as fast as it could, and a body was warming up in the tank, but the Doral body wouldn’t be ready for at least an hour. Nearby a 008 came online and charged out of the room at breakneck speed. Two heavies were in the middle of checking their weapons when he charged into the ready room. “You are in the wrong body buddy.” “No Feldercarb! I need to get down to the port sensor cluster. Are you guys busy?” “Do we get to kill some Imps?” “Probably more than we can deal with. Why?” Freddy Muir looked at his wife Ferdy. “I don’t know, we can handle a lot.” “Good, because I don’t know how to use one of those things.” He gestured at the rifles on the racks. “Excuse me?” The female voice was far more realistic than either of the two were used to, but they were quickly getting used to their new bodies. The new guy... “I’m a Doral, I’m also a knuckledragger, and I’m lucky if I can hit the bulkhead in the range.” “Oh, this gets better, and better.” Freddy grabbed an oversized rifle and tossed it to the Cylon knuckledragger. “Let’s go, we can show you how to interface with it on the way.” Alex looked at the rifle and back at what was supposed to be his new body once before he followed the two heavies out the door. He wondered what had sent them to the chamber if something like a Beachhead didn’t phase them. Freddy and Ferdy were privately laughing at the irony of the situation. They just hoped that this ending was different. Molly tried to get some of the com channels on the wireless but all she could find was static. “It’s jamming. The Cylons used it during the last war. We won’t be getting any warning from the fleet.” Molly looked over to see the captain getting the ship ready to dive. “What are you doing?” “My father bought this ship right before the last war. He was a system tech on one of the submersible bases. He wanted a place where mom and my siblings could hide if they nuked the colonies.” “We’re diving?” “Yes. If that destroyer had hit, we would have had a huge compression wave to deal with. There’s a battle going on over Picon. Those tracks look like missiles. If they are nukes they will probably explode before they hit the surface; so we dive.” The young girl watched the water wash over the deck and then the bridge as the ship descended. The last thing the DRADIS showed were numerous tracks of objects approaching the planet. She didn’t know if any of them were enemy missiles, but she didn’t want to wait around to find out. “Your family is still in their pods?” When Molly nodded she smiled. “Good, then strap in. We may be in for a wild ride.” President Roslin was in the unenviable position of being in the safest position in the Colonies during its worst attack since the Cylon War. The situation room she was sitting in showed her a holographic representation of the complete system. She watched the plots of every missile that they were tracking. She had been watching them go dark as the defenders were destroying them as fast as they could. Picon had already received an attack, and it looked like some might have gotten through the defenders best efforts. Picon being a water world had not spared it from being targeted. Suspiciously, the missiles had been targeted too well. Even the hidden submersible shipyards had been targeted. If only one of those had made it through it was going to be bad, but she didn’t want to think about what kind of damage she was going to be seeing. She brought up the information on the fleet. Half of the fleet had been in spacedock undergoing upgrades, and those ships were mostly untouched. She noted the five ships that had left spacedock while still unfinished. Two were gone, one was limping back, the famous pirate hunter Revenge was lucky to have only lost an engine, but the Repulse was a drifting hulk. Admiral Cain had brought it to her attention that a certain father was delaying his daughter’s refit. She had a meeting with Nagala set for tomorrow afternoon. One that it looked like it would be called off. The Warstar Zeus was barely in the fight, and the Admiral wasn’t even that far into it. Commodore Bradley was busy coordinating the defenses of the colonies while Captain Linton was defending Picon and marshaling the Zeus’ remaining forces. He sat in his chair watching the chaos that surrounded him and he felt dead inside. His daughter had died because he hadn’t done his duty. He was still sitting there when two marines from fleet security entered C.I.C. and made a beeline for him. One of them whispered into his ear and he nearly knocked the younger man over when he abruptly stood up. Two separate marines had slipped on to the bridge and were standing behind a Lieutenant sitting at the communications station. “Abraham, would you come here?” His XO looked up at the sudden use of his first name. He walked over to the junior officer as his old friend followed him. The two marines stood next to the commodore, and took up parade rest positions. The commodore’s eye passed over them and went back to his tasks. Marines were as ubiquitous as painting in a doctor’s office on a Warstar, and these two were obviously two of the Admiral’s ‘Bridge Bunnies’. Young and eager to prove themselves, they tended to be a bit ‘Jumpy’. He would have to talk to them about keeping their holsters locked during maneuvers. But now was not the time. Lieutenant “Birdy” Cormorant was trying hard to not look at the marines standing behind him. His job of pushing messages from fighter groups to others groups had kept him busy, even if it meant talking to Cylons. He was about to answer a Cylon call for assistance when a hand on his shoulder made him turn around. “Want to tell me what you told them. Or should I just have Abraham use his codes to override yours?” He knew that lying to the Admiral was useless. “I told them that you had K-lowed.” “Knocked Low?” The Admiral waved his hands in front of his eyes. “No, not quite. But there’s more isn’t there?” “Ares is Great!” He shouted. His hand had been moving towards his keyboard, but the blade that went through his head stopped it, and anything else he might have planned. One of the marine’s combat knives had severed his spine and entered his brain. It was shocking in its suddenness, but it was only the beginning. Six officers jumped up and started to draw their weapons. Four of them never got a chance. Lieutenant Tanbow pulled Ensign Garfield in front of him and tried to use him as a shield. Commodore Bradly found himself on the floor as one of the marines shoved him out of the way. He caught the man as he fell, and retrieved the marine’s pistol from the dying man’s hands. He fired three rounds through the legs of the ensign. One of them must have hit because Tanbow fell to the deck. With a shot to the head, he made sure that the mutineer wouldn’t be getting back up. The sixth man he was surprised to find out was his aide Lyle Anson. Well former aide. The poor boy was lying in a pool of his own blood with a wounded Captain Linton standing over him. He stood up and went to thank the second marine only to see him pointing a pistol his way. “What is the meaning of this?” “I’m sorry about this Calvin. Until we know for sure, I’m going have to ask you to hand over that weapon, and anything else you might be armed with.” The Admiral looked at the stunned looks of the surviving crew. “This isn’t over, but we still have colonies to save. So let’s be about it, shall we?” He absent-mindedly wiped a bit of blood off of his face as the crew cheered. He didn’t deserve their cheers; he deserved their scorn. First his daughter had to show him the meaning of Duty, and now his crew had to see the price of betrayal. He only wondered who Cormorant had sent that message to. Starbuck watched her DRADIS as icons of missiles headed away from the Galactica disappeared from her scope. There hadn’t been a fighter, or shuttle, or anything since the bombers, and their slave fighters had exploded. She ached to do something and tried to call up the Galactica only to get static in response. She changed frequencies to see if she could find any colonial communications, but to her surprise the only thing she found was the Imperial frequency the drones had been using, only now it was playing her father’s song. Since she and her father were the only people that knew that song, at least the only ones in the colonies she set the locator to find a heading. Somehow she was not surprised that it was coming from outside the system. The Hades belt was a relatively thin version of what the Republic called an Ort cloud that surrounded the Helios Alpha and Beta part of the colonies. Part of her ached to go find out what was calling to her, but she wouldn’t leave the Galactica for all the Tea on Tauron. She made note of the frequency, and the heading though. This was more than just a coincidence. Alex didn’t believe in fate, but he did believe in coincidences. He was glad that he had come online the way he did. If he had waited then he wouldn’t have had the good fortune to have the two Dinochrome members to protect him, and they wouldn’t have had him to show them the shortcuts that knuckledraggers, and other maintenance personnel knew about. He figured they had cut about half an hour out of their trip but it still seemed to go on forever. He just wished that the machinery didn’t interfere with communications so much. He hadn’t heard a word of what had happened since they entered the ship’s spine. Fifteen minutes prior: Cally had been waiting for fifteen minutes since she alerted C.I.C. about the breach. She knew that the ship was under attack, but she hoped that someone was on the way. Three sections away a team of marines was stuck at an airlock. None of them were wearing pressure suits, and the other side of the door was hard vacuum. Major “Barbell” Barnell put down her wireless. “Frak!” She switched channels and made the call she didn’t want to have to make. “Specialist Henderson, we have a problem.” Cally looked at the pressure indicator on her sensors before she responded. “Yeah, tell me about it. Bingo Atmo.” “We have a team on the way, but most of hard suits are outside battling the enemy on the hull.” A flicker of shadow was all the warning Cally got before the first Imperial suit came down. It had to push through the wires she had pulled out of one side and tacked to the other side with adhesive. While he was trying to get through she put the plasma cutter to the back of his helmet and triggered a burst that took about a second to cut through. The burst lasted for five. By the time the burst had finished the body hung limp from the wires. “I have a bottlekneck site up here, so I can hold them off for a while. Just don’t make me die in vain.” She started to pull the dead man down when she noted the power runs coming out of the back of his backpack and going to the arms and legs of his suit. The power pack and life support must be in the backpack, she figured. She pulled the cover off, and found a pair of gold handles on a silver and gold cylinder. The clamps made it difficult to grab, but she managed to pull it out and the lights lining the suit went out. She tossed the dead man into a corner and looked up the shaft. She could see another pair of legs headed down her way. She thought about firing her welder up the shaft, but she knew that the first shot would probably be her last chance to hit one of them. The beam didn’t have a lot of range, and the flare would light up the dark shaft like a flare. Down here it was lost in the lights, and sparks that were coming off the equipment in the corridor. Acolyte Hedi knew something was wrong, but he didn’t know what. Everything seemed to be going as planned. The explosion that came after the destruction of the antenna array, was followed by a series of bodies drifting out with the escaping gas. Willim had gone down the hole first, and everything was going well until his radio started to become choppy from some sort of interference. His radio had gone silent for a few minutes now, and so he had sent three others down after him. Something didn’t seem right here. Five of his surviving railgunners had fallen to the surface defenders, so he knew he would have to take the rest of his men into the hole. Alex entered the main hanger and he was amazed at the reaction he recieved. The human knuckledraggers had acquired one of the enemy rifles and he found himself facing the business end of it. “Oscar, would you put that down before you shoot someone.” “Who the frak do you think you are, tincan?” “Your superior officer, and the guy that still owes me a box of fumars for the one he ruined with metal polish.” “Boss?” The rifle pointed at the floor but he still didn’t look too friendly. “What happened?” “One of them shot me with one of their arm mounted weapons.” He gestured to show his new body. “I didn’t want to wait so I grabbed the fist body that was ready. Now I need to find CueBee.” He noticed the looks on the faces of the people around him. “What?” “She went through here not that long ago.” “I know. I hope she had a pressure suit.” He caught a smile from one of the older system techs. “Carmichael?” “She was riding a Scorpion powerloader down the droshky rails. We got this rifle when she took the head off of the Imperial that she was fighting with.” He pointed at the severed head. “She really cut him down to size.” He looked at the droshky tube. The blood on the end heading towards the action was starting to drip. He looked at the two Heavies watching him, and then the knuckledraggers looking at him. He looked at the rifle in his hands, and then that one in Oscar’s. “Trade you.” “Are you kidding...sir?” The incredulous look on the weapon system tech was understandable. Even the pause before he remembered that Alex outranked him was understandable. The reluctance in the mans eyes was not. “Do I look like I’m kidding Mr. Aberdeen?” He held out the rifle by the barrel. Oscar reluctantly handed over the weapon to the well armored Cylon in front of him. “No sir.” “Sir?” The grey-haired system tech stepped forward. “Yes Carmichael? “I powered up a Droshky Mule.” Alex wished he could smile. “Thank you.” “No prob. We were getting ready to follow Cally. You going to go get her out of trouble?” “I told her to hide before I got killed. She didn’t listen to me then, do you think she’ll listen any better now?” Cally watched the legs as they started to descend into the corridor. She couldn’t believe how stupid some of these people were. Acolyte Hadin climbed down out of the shaft and tried to pull his rife free from the pipe it had gotten caught on. His radio was full of static, and all of his calls had remained unanswered ever since he passed what looked like pressure doors on the way down. He was still wondering if maybe his antenna array had been damaged in the climb when he was slammed into the wall in front of him. His laser cutter was on and swinging around before he even finished rolling over. He had been trained that to sit still was to die, and that was all that saved him when the monster jumped him. It had to be some kind of robotic beast. The Heretics were clever to defend their ship from invaders that way. They had probably learned it from fighting the blasphemous machines they had now served. The four lasers that made up his cutter were dialed out to a distance of five zents. He didn’t have time to switch it out to the fighting length, but the beams would still be enough to blind optics in this enclosed space. Cally was nearly blinded when the laser beams played across her visor. The auto polarization of the smart material deflected most of the beam. But she was temporally blinded by the sudden flash of light though. She knew she couldn’t flinch back as much as her instincts told her to. She rushed blindly at the man, and slammed both of her claws into his suit. She saw bright flashes across her vision, but she kept up the attack. She felt one claw hit something and she swung the other claw in its direction. When it hit, she grabbed it. The water pipe ruptured and in the near vacuum of the corridor it began to boil and fill the room with water vapor that was quickly sucked out the open shaft and into space. Acolyte Hedi only had a moments warning before the vapor began pouring out of the shaft. He grabbed the flange of the shaft as he passed through some sort of hatch and managed to hold on. Garso and Vilmer lost their grip, and if he hadn’t caught Garso by the poor mans leg, he might have been knocked back in to space. Vilmer grabbed a piece of twisted metal, and hung on as the blast of water vapor poured out of the shaft with enough force to make entry nearly impossible. Hedi managed to pull himself in, and connect his mag claps to the side of the shaft. He was pulling Garso in Vilmer’s handhold came loose. Vilmer and the piece of metal went flying off into space. Unfortunately it also freed the gears of the pressure door that Garso was halfway through. In the sudden darkenss Hedi felt Garso’s leg shudder and go limp. When he turned on his headlamp he quickly turned away from what had happened to one of his oldest friends. The body was trapped inside the pressure doors, and from the way his suit was crushed, Hedi knew that Garso had died instantly. It was such a waste. The poor man hadn’t killed anyone before his demise. How would he be judged? He only hoped that Vilmer would find someone to kill before he died. On the hull a single Cylon had been drawn by the strange white plume. He cocked his head to the side as a single Imperial hard suit that had been covered in ice crystals flew into the void. Sir Gifred 2029 pointed his rife at the suit and dialed in his scope. He lowered the rifle after a couple of seconds. The human he had been following had managed to lock frequencies with him a while back and was still not sure about having the Cylon watch his back, so he had decide to watch Sir Gifred’s. “Aren’t you going to shoot him?” “And waste good ammo?” “Isn’t he just going to come back?” “Not with a damaged suit, and that much velocity.” “Won’t he hit something?” “Yes, in about fourteen thousand years he should hit the barycenter of this system.” “You don’t like the Imperials very much, do you?” “You just built us to be a slave race, they want everyone to be a slave race, or a dead race.” He started walking towards the next bunch of contacts. The human followed without hesitation. Sergeant John Quin looked at the soldier beside him once more. “What happed to the clown I was following?” “The clown is still here. But sometimes we have to be serious. Let’s go kill some bad guys.” Sir Gifred 2029 didn’t always let his act slip away, but today was proving to be one of those days. And this kid might not be a Ranger, but he wasn’t half bad. He would try and keep an eye on him... Quin noticed Sir Gifred shaking. “Something wrong?” “No, I just had a funny thought.” “What was it?” “You wouldn’t understand. By the way, what’s your call sign.” Rico pointed to the black and yellow diamond checkerboard paint job on his arm and leg armor of his suit as they walked. “I go by my name, Quin But someone painted my suit this way, and they dubbed me Harlequin after the clown that chases that flying rat in the comics. He turned as his metal friend was doubled up in what could only be laughter. “WHAT?” “I’ll tell you later if we survive.” But he swore to himself that while he might let him know about Earth comics, he would not let the young man know about the Ticktocman story. Cally wasn’t sure if she was going to survive this guy’s attacks. He had recovered faster than she had expected. The room was quickly filling up with water now that the pressure doors had finally sealed. The vapor had turned his laser cutter in to a light show that did more to dazzle them both than to actually accomplish anything tactically. She had flipped down the welding mask and was approaching using her sensors instead of the visor. He was obviously doing the same as he seemed to be dodging her attacks with ease. Hadin was dancing back in the ever deepening water as the monster approached. The steam had nearly neutralized his cutter, and his rifle was still slung on his back where he dared not take the time to unlatch it. He ducked a swing from the metal monster and dove under her swing only to be yanked back as its swing connected with his rifle and broke its strap. It went under the water, and he rolled over after he landed. The thing was actually standing over the rife daring him to come for it. Cally watched as the man fell, and when he got up she could see that his rifle was missing. She scanned for it as she watched him. She couldn’t find it in the mess that had become of the corridor. She lowered her body in to the water, and rushed him, hoping that the bow wave would add to the impact. ‘It knew!’ He though to himself. It was standing over his rifle, and daring him to go for it. He was about to when it lunged at him. He was surprised when a wave formed in front of the robot. He swung his cutter at the robot, but it had stopped before it got close. The wave on the other hand hit him and knocked him over. He found himself in the strange situation of being underwater inside a spaceship. The disorientation of his situation was compounded when one of his legs was grabbed by the robot’s claws. He was being held underwater, which being inside a hardsuit meant very little, but his instinctive urge to get his head above water was causing him to thrash around. He calmed himself down by force of will and looked around. He managed to spot his rife under the legs of the beast. He was being pulled out from under but he still managed to grab the torn end of the strap. He pulled the rife to him and rolled over. A flash of light ended his struggles as he found himself facing the business end of Cally’s plasma welder. Unlike the laser, its flame was not hampered too much by being under water. Cally pulled the suddenly limp body up to look inside it. The body had no weight in the water filled corridor. The air pouring out of the hole in his faceplate told her all she needed to know. She let go of the body and didn’t even bother watching it drift down to the deck, instead she turned around to wait for the next one. That’s when the rail gun rounds hit her. Damage alarms went off, and her suit started to fail. She finished spinning around only to see the three Imperials that had descended into the watery corridor with their weapons pointed at her. The lights in her suit flickered and went out; and if that wasn’t bad enough she could feel water seeping in to her suit. They had stopped the metal monster, but not in time. He could see Rilo’s body in a corner, and they had watched Hadin’s fight with the beast. Hedi had tried to warn Hadin about the beast’s tail, but his radio must have been busted. Hedi’s laser had only caused additional chaos in the strange lightshow that had been going on in the watery... Depths? ...of the ship. Dago, and Noma’s railguns on the other hand... It took quite a few rounds, but the beast finally fell. Well drifted to the floor. Was this ship full of water? Had they cut into a cooling system? He turned on the spot lights on his suit. The metal monster wasn’t a monster at all, but some kind of suit like theirs. He walked over to where bubbles were slowly streaming out of the suit. As his lights panned over the suit he saw the face of a child inside. No, not a child, but a woman. He pointed his rifle at the damaged faceplate. At this range even his laser would work. Cally stared at the man holding the laser rife to her head. He wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing her cower before him. She made a very rude gesture. If they wanted to kill her, then at least she’d paid Charon’s toll. The gesture was not understood, but its intent was. He had been surprised by a lot of things in this mission. So her defiance shouldn’t have come as a surprise. But it did. And because it did, he paused. That pause would wind up changing his life. “I’m not getting anything from her.” Alex had been trying to contact Cally ever since they arrived at the hatch the marines were holding. They had passed through, and were walking through the slowly repressurizing corridors. “And I’m not reading any atmosphere on the other side, so hold on.” They each turned on their mag locks and braced themselves for the rush of air that would enter the unpressurized section. They had been repeating this for five minutes now, and they had set up a rhythm. “Ready!” “Ready!” Ferdy hit the switch and grabbed the handrail. “Oh frak!” The wall of water hit them like a sledgehammer, and if they hadn’t had their mag locks on, they would have been swept off of their feet. The three Imperials had no such warning, and therefore were not prepared for the sudden change. The water exited the corridor suddenly, and anything that wasn’t secured was flushed out abruptly. “HOLY....” Whatever Hedi was about to say was lost, much like his footing. The water had gotten up to her shin, and the man holding the rifle had paused. Cally was beginning to wonder if she was going to die by fire or water when the universe decided to slide out from under her. Ferdy was holding on with one hand as the deluge hit them, but that was enough for her to use the other one to fire her rife at the first suit to pass by her. Three shots in fact, just to be safe. The body had stopped twitching by the second. Freddy lost his rifle as the water and detritus smashed into him. He made up for it by activating his forearm blade and punching the Imperial that was one of the objects that smashed into him. The unlucky acolyte thrashed around like a bug pinned to the deck for a couple of seconds. Alex grabbed Cally’s Scorpion as she went by. He rode it as the water lever dropped. That’s when he noticed that her suit was on top of someone. The Imperial suit was face down, and trying to get up but her suit was pining his legs. He was about to use his rifle when he noticed one of the other suits that had been flushed out. The open hatch on the back gave him an idea. Hedi was struggling and he knew that he had to get out from under the enemy before they killed him. He could see that his rifle was slightly out of reach. His leg finally started to come free when his suit died. His hard suit, which gave him the power of God to bring judgement upon the Heretics, failed him. How could God forsake him like that? When the Abominations rolled him over and showed him the power cell he realized that is wasn’t his faith that had failed him. Once the girl climbed out of her ruined suit to stand next to him, he realized something else. With no way to open the armor, it had also become his prison. He watched helplessly as one of the other robots walked his way. The way it walked he swore it was a woman, but that was impossible. It held its rifle to his faceplate, and he faced it with all of the courage he could muster. The human woman’s mouth was working, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Probably telling her robot master to kill him. He began to recite the Martyr’s Prayer for Judgement when the rifle moved away from his faceplate. Two of the robots began to drag him by the legs. They must be bringing him to their Inquisitors. Good, the torture would cleanse his soul of the stain of failure. Galileo station was prepared for the incoming missiles. Kyle Santana was proud of his crew, they had gotten the weapons emplacements and defenses BACK online in record time. When the enemy missiles got here he would give them everything they had. He watched as Beth dialed in the holographic display to show the incoming missiles. “That’s not good.” “No sir. We won’t be able to cover the whole planet anymore. We’ve lost too many defenders, and we can’t do it ourselves.” “The good of the many...” “Must you sir?” “Alice likes those...” “I’m...” She started. “...not Alice.” They both finished togther. “But it is true.” She grudgingly admitted. Missile emplacements and laser clusters started to track the incoming missiles, while defense satellites began their maneuvers to get into position. Fifty missiles in ten waves were still headed their way. There had been over five hundred, but ships both big and small, as well as their crews, had paid with their lives to cut that number down while the station had been coming back online. They had been forced to sit and watch them die. That had not sat well with the crew, and they had cut quite a few corners to get the station back online. The first wave of counter missiles launched from the station were in a pattern that targeted the missiles that would have hit the planet first. The targeting priorities set, the system went to auto fire with every launcher firing as a fast as it could. Which was faster than the Book said it was supposed to. On the sixth wave one of the satellites exploded when a tube jammed, and the safeties that should have shut it down failed due to their startup checks missing five of the sixteen steps. “Kelso!” Kyle slammed his fist down on the armrest of his command chair. “Redistributing fire to compensate.” Beth was shocked at the captain’s language, but she understood. He had been the one to write off on cutting the corners, and that missile platform had cost as much as a dozen fighters. Someone was going to complain. “In for a Credit, in for a K-Credit. Launch half of our shuttles on autopilot. Maybe we can hit some of them with those.” “Half?” “We may need the others for S&R afterwards. Comm, talk to the Captains of any ship in a berth. See if we can’t scratch together a few more.” “That’s a lot of resources.” “There are a lot of people down there.” “Point taken.” The first wave of counter missiles took out eleven of the incoming missiles. The second wave took out six at the cost of another launcher. “They are entering energy range. Sir, energy spike!” “Extend Shields!” Extending the shields meant that their own energy weapons wouldn’t be able to fire, but that was the trade off they need to protect the planet. The beams danced over the shields and lit up the entire hemisphere. “Damage?” “We lost most of the orbital weapons, but we are still functional.” “Effective Status?” “Twenty-five Percent.” “Damage, or remaining?” “Remaining, sir.” “Launch those shuttles NOW.” Down on the island known as Snakehead Atoll the people that had evacuated the island during the Falling Star emergency had started to return after the ship had reportedly jumped back out of the atmosphere. When the sky lit up they were still in their boats, and were talking about leaving again when someone pointed out the fact that there was nowhere to go, and it looked like the navy had it under control. After all it was the best light show anyone had ever seen. The fifteen shuttles launched from the station and went to full throttle to meet the missiles before the met the atmosphere. Laser clusters, and missiles fired as fast as the crews could keep them running. Five of the clusters had over heated, and one of the launchers had almost followed it’s satellite cousins before it was shut down. The laser clusters weren’t a big loss as the station had hundreds of them. But the missile launcher was one of only a dozen. The Sea Hag was nearing its one hundred meter limit. Captain Linscomb and her new first mate were watching the stress gauges as closely as Vestalis Maxima watched her charges. She knew that they were cutting it close; but ironic as it sounded, the deeper they went the safer they would be. The other sensor she was watching was the rad meter. That’s why she wasn’t expecting the ping on the other sensor. One of the ships in the Atoll’s breakwater docks was larger than the others. The Fat Lady was actually owned by a very thin lady. The fifty five year old woman sat at her sensor screen and watched the battle above. Cassidy Adar was one of the former President’s cousins, and one of the five people that owned the island in all but name. She was also one of the few people that knew what kind of danger they were in. She had just finished talking to Atlantis Control. They were on lock down, and no one was ‘available’ to come rescue her. She looked at the screen and scowled. The Officer in charge was not Colonel Grant, but his former subordinate Major Reynolds. The blond officer was good looking, but he had been too damn honest to suborn like his much older, and far less personable, commanding officer. When the Cylon shake up happened, she had been behind enough cutouts to protect her from any repercussions, but now she had lost any sway she had enjoyed with the submerged construction yard’s command staff. “Bernard, set a course for the Kerisone, then change heading to follow the Cylon station.” The man behind her jumped to do her bidding. Maybe they couldn’t get far enough away from this side of the planet, but somewhere that was under the shields of the orbital station should be safe from the blasts. The ship left the cove on anti-grav and had hit five hundred kilometers per hour as soon as they were clear of the buoys. Only twenty-seven missiles remained out of the fifty that had made the trip to Picon. The shuttles started to intersect them and they fell faster. Soon only five survived to detonate as soon as they were in range of the station. The bomb pumped lasers sent beams of coherent energy slamming into the stations shields. The x-ray radiation was absorbed by the shields, but the beams were planetary bombardment missiles, not the faster anti-ship missiles. What they lacked in maneuverability and stealth, they more that compensated in range and destructive ability. Each warhead was actually ten smaller warheads that split off from the main body right before detonation. Each beam had the destructive force of a dreadnought’s broadside, and the center was the penetrator warhead. The ten beams would fire to weaken the defenses, while the main warhead would look for breaches in them. Fifty beams hit the shield and they held. Two of the five penatrators were knocked out by the laser clusters, while two others fell to the sprint mode anti-missile fire from the Cylons standing on the hull. Only one managed to detonate against the shields and it didn’t seem to do any damage. But on the bridge the sensors told another story. “Ionizing radiation is climbing off the chart. We are ...” Down below on Snakehead Atoll, Andre Clandermoore stood on the deck of the yacht Coralskipper and watched the light show. “Danny, can you toss me a Red Lonis Lite?” “How can you drink that swill?” His son opened the door and grabbed the red labeled beer. He grabbed a Fulsome Ale for himself. He liked the flavor anyway... He didn’t care about the cute woman on the can, or her cans he joked to himself. His wife was always telling him to lay off the stupid jokes. She said they would be the death of her. “I’m trying to watch my weight. My doctor told me to cut the carbs.” He held his hands up to catch the can as it flew his way. Cassidy was watching her sensors as the weapon hit the station. The shields held. She let off a breath she didn’t know that she was holding. That’s when the rad meter spiked and stayed there. Five minutes later Alice cradled the body in her metal arms. She was currently in a 007 body since nearly every biological organism on the station was either dead or dying. The fifty or so blanks were dead as well, so she was stuck in this body until she uploaded to a new one. Her husband had died at his post, his last message to her had been his last gift. Every single biological Cylon would have EOLed if he hadn’t warned them of the neutron radiation. The Cylons were running around the station trying to make sure that everything was still working, but she would remain right there for hours to come. Beth picked up the badge off of her former body and put it on her chest armor. She had come back in a 008 and was making use of the Command Centurion’s subsystems as she started to order the others to take their positions. Some of the colonial ships had fared better since they had been armored against nuclear attacks, but every ship in dock just lost at least half of their personnel and some of them weren’t answering at all. Thankfully those were repair crews, not the massive military crews that they normally carried, but the loss still hurt. The ships would still have to be deradded like the Colonies had been after the end of the war. The people of the Colonies were still coming to grips with the fact that Cylons had been the ones to clean all of the radioactive fallout on the colonies after the war. The technology had come from Diana’s database, and had been shared with anyone that asked. The worst sites had been cleaned and made it safe for humans with in a month or two of the Armistice, and no one was the wiser. They had simply hidden the derad devices in an old bunker, and sent faked orders to open up the boxes. The humans had done the rest for them. But this was different... The radiation had just sterilized this side of the planet. Instantly... Anyone not protected was... Beth shuttered. The only good thing, if you could call it that, was the fact that they would have died instantly. The ship below them continued on it course and would hit Perseus Point in about half an hour. The ship’s autopilot would slow the craft down, but it would still hit with enough force to rip the craft apart. The can of beer had hit the deck and rolled off into the water since there was no one left alive to catch it. It slowly floated out to sea. Cavil watched the slowly tumbling comet as it moved past the point at which it could damage one of the planets if it exploded. “Admiral. We’re clear.” “Match vectors, and speed. Bring us along their port side, and fire as we come to bear.” The massive Battlestar moved with stately grace, but everyone in the C.I.C. seemed to mentally will the ship to move faster. Out on the hull, the human and Cylon defenders watched as the ship seemed to move under them. From their point of view though the shattered comet was moving away from the bow, and starting to pass off to the starboard side. One of the few Imperial Acolytes remaining watched it as well. He knew they had failed. He punched in a code on his suit’s text communications system. He ran at one of the nearest defenders and jumped towards the hardsuited human. The colonial marine swung his rife around but he didn’t have time to pull the trigger before the attacker exploded. The blast tossed him off into space with a shattered faceplate, and numerous holes in his suit. His oxygen was streaming out of his suit faster than the tanks could replenish it. Warning lights were clambering for his attention, but he was busy trying to patch up the largest holes when a hand grabbed him. He nearly lost his lunch when a Cylon’s face appeared in his visor. The Cylon’s monoeye was the last thing he saw before he blacked out from hypoxia. Specialist Darrion was repairing the inner door of the airlock when the warning lights and siren caused him to drop his wrench and run for the door. The wrench kept hitting him in the leg as it swung from the tether it was on, but he didn’t bother to stow it until he had slammed the door shut. The outer doors opened up and a body flew into the zero-gee lock. He saw the holes in the suit and scrammed the cycle and opened the inner atmospheric valves while the outer door was still closing. The body was heading back out from the airflow, but he jumped up and grabbed the limp form. He spun the body around and kicked off the still closing doors. With the doors finally closed he managed to get the poor marine down to the deck before he kicked on the artificial gravity. He pulled off the helmet and looked at the blue lips and skin and grabbed his suit’s wireless controls. He’d seen his share of vaccsucking... The guy was a mess, but the medics should be able to save him if they made it in time. Majors Tennant and Davidson were still trying to out do each other but their competition had changed from trying to kill more bad guys than the other, to trying to keep the other one alive. It seemed that one of the Cylons had asked Captain Davidson why they were behaving the way they were, and she had commed her father, and fiancé to let them both know that if either one of them died, she would kill the other one. They were more relieved when they received the order to fire upon the comet than when they were out of attackers. The Minotaur armor had been designed to act as an ad hoc long rang fire support unit as well as a front line unit. The armor had an optics package that could be used to turn the suit’s railguns into long range sniper weapons. The problem was the fact that they need to lay down on the surface of the ship to do so. That left them easy pickings for anyone that came along. The surviving members of their combined teams joined them near the airlock they had been defending. “Major Tennat, if you would.” Major Tennat counted to ten before he spoke. “Go for it, I’ll cover you.” The old man looked at his soon-to-be son-in-law for all of five seconds before he started his armor’s transformation. The ‘horns’ which gave the suit part of its nickname swung around, and the older marine sat down on the hull. His rifle had four rails instead of the normal two. The two extra rails slid down the side to extend the length of the barrel, and as the face plate covered his face from the other‘s view Davidson winked at Tennat. The rifle lit up the void as the naked rails arced as they launched the tungsten slug at a velocity that would have lunched him off into the void if the suit hadn’t mag-locked him to the hull. Other’s got into their position as they followed the Major’s lead. The gunnery officer in the KEW turret switched out the cluster rounds they had been using for the Casaba-Howitzer rounds the Cylons had given them. He didn’t have a clue what a Casaba really was. He figured a Casaba was some vicious creature from the Republic, since the round itself was so vicious, and Howitzer was the person that came up with the idea. Each one was basically a nuclear warhead without the missile to launch it. But they were also so much more. He had read the techspecs on the shells, and he was impressed. Each one carried a mini-nuke that was channeled into a plasma jet that could cut armor like a flamethrower through butter. Since they were about to use it on a hunk of ice, he figured it would probably be orders of magnitude more destructive. The KEW turrets that covered the starboard side of the ship were ready when the order came down. They opened fire almost as one. The weight of fire literally wiped all trace of life off of the surface of the comet as it rotated under them. The main hanger took thirty rounds, but even its massive armor melted under the plasma that washed over it. Back in C.I.C. Admiral Adama and Commander Cavil watched as the impacts smashed into the crumbling planetoid. Cavil mumbled something that caused Adam to look up. “Sorry something from one of Earth’s old books. The quote goes: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. It’s from a work called The Song of the Bhagavan. We are destroying a world here.” He didn’t add the fact that he was facing his own inner demons. This was in many ways, similar to what he had planned to do to the Colonies back when he was Boxey. “And they would have done the same to us if we had let them get close enough. Only they would have sown death across the entire system. No it’s better that a few of them die, so that millions of ours may live.” If he knew what his friend was thinking he didn’t let it show. “The good of the many?” “Yes, but that vid also taught us that value of the few, and the one. We are the few that stand, so that billions may live.” They watched the comet start to crumble as the rotation and damage reached a point where the comet could no longer hold itself together by gravity alone. Tidal forces were becoming too much to resist. Cracks formed on the surface as the damage literally reached the breaking point. A crevasse formed that reached all the way to the center of the base. “Sirrs...” “Yes Hoshi?” “The Spinall Llaserr is rready.” The Galactica slowly rotated on its axis as it brought it’s bow back around to face the ruined cometary fragments. They fired on the exposed core of the fragments. The beam played across the icy core’s surfaces and the liberated steam exploded outwards forcing the already fragmenting base to expand. The beam immolated the surface and fragmented the pieces into even smaller fragments as fracture lines caused by the first blast allowed them to crack open sections that had miraculously survived the blast, and the attacks now spilled their atmosphere into the void. The comet didn’t go out with a bang so much as a whimper as it crumbled in on itself from the front and exploded from the rear. In the end it was a vast field of icy fragments, and debris that drifted apart in slow motion. In the months to come they would be able to pick it apart to learn all that at they could about their enemy. But one thing was clear, the enemy wanted them dead in a bad way, and this showed that they would do any thing to accomplish that goal. The Sea Hag moved slowly with it’s masthead right below the surface. The water was deep enough this far from the atoll and the reefs were miles away, but just getting close to the surface was a risk that she needed to take to get a signal on the wireless. Captain Linscomb watched as the rad meter climbed. They were safer down here, and the sensor was high on top of the mast. Still, if it was reading this hot this far down then there was trouble up above. A chirp sounded from the wireless. She picked up the receiver and listened. “What did it say?” The young girl looked like she was holding back tears, but was doing her best to help out. “That was Orbital Command... They just sent out an all clear. The last missile was destroyed halfway to Capricia. There was a warning of high levels of ionizing radiation in the western hemisphere. It seems they hit the orbitals rather hard.” A tear fell down her tanned face. Her grandson was probably dead, and if his family hadn’t been evacuated already then they might have perished as well. It was hours later when the Sea Hag returned to Snakehead. Except for it being night, the Atoll looked no different than when she left. Even the lights were still on. Her sensors told another story. The ship was still sealed up due to the rad counter being in the red. And it was probably just as well... As she looked out to each side she could see people that looked like they were sleeping or had passed out from too much drinking, but she knew better. Bojo was still sitting at his post on the chair that he never seemed to leave, and never would. The two Clandermoore’s were on deck of their ship, Andre slumped against the railing and Danny halfway out of the hatch. Everywhere she looked she saw people she had know all her life sprawled out like ragdolls in her floodlights. The harsh light did nothing to hide the gloom of the situation; or for that matter the dark and bitter sadness that was filling her soul. She shut down the camera and turned the boat around. There was nothing left for her here anymore. Down below the other two girls were silent while their mother was crying on their father’s shoulder. He felt the keys in his pocket, and he didn’t know what to do with them. The hospital on the Atoll was still there, but he didn’t think that anyone would be needing it for a long time to come. His wife’s family had lived on the Medusa Islands for generations. He doubted that any of them that were still on the islands had survived. If every person on the islands had died then over thirty thousand souls were in Charon’s hands now. He swallowed back his lunch as it threatened to come up once more. Nora picked up the handset once more. “This is Captain Linscomb of the Sea Hag to Atlantis Control... Jacob Mayweather is my Rouge Angel in Satin.” She held the handset while tears ran down her face. The code had been given to her by her father. She only hoped that it still worked. “This is the research sub Kraken. Who are you talking to?” The voice on the other end was unfamiliar to her, but the response wasn’t. “Babydoll.” Half an hour, and a full security check of everyone onboard later, the civilian submersible approached the sunken military base. She watched as the lights came on to reveal the massive structure her father had been the primary architect of. It had been built during the worst fighting of the Cylon war, and had helped to keep the Cylons from winning the highground of space. The new shields, the very same Cylons had given them, were protecting the base as they approached. She could see the boundary layer of the shield bending the lights into strange patterns. She had been given an approach course and as she watched a section of the distortion cleared up when they grew near. She knew that the Lornes would be detained as soon as they arrived, but there was literally nowhere else they could go on the amount of fuel and air she had on the Hag. The dock opened to receive them, and she entered the bay. The look on Molly’s face as they rose up into the pressurized airlock was priceless. Her face must have taken on the same look because it took her a couple of second before she realized that Molly was poking her. Hana and Jake were standing on the side of the lock’s gantryway. The two kids were waving at her with very little regard to the chance that they might fall into the water. Their adoptive father grabbed them and pulled them to the side. Nora pulled alongside the dock, and watched as men secured her vessel to the dock. She undogged the hatch and exited to the arms of her adopted grandchildren and her son standing there with his lopsided grin. “Hi Mom.” “Jacob?” “He’s...” The grin went away. Molly and the two kids caught her as she slumped to the deck.

Chapter Text

Roslin looked at the screen. The damage reports were still coming in. Over two hundred thousand dead in one attack. Fifty-five thousand in the orbitals alone. Over thirty five percent of the Colony’s orbital infrastructure had been wiped out. Nearly a thousand ships lost, or damaged so badly that they might as well a have been. The Galactica had survived, but one flight pod was trashed. The Zeus was nearly gone, and the mutiny had done what the enemy couldn’t. Admiral Nagala had submitted his resignation after the battle had ended. She sat there looking at it, and for the life of her she didn’t know what to do. That’s when a man with a gun burst in the room. The rubber tip and garish colors told her what it was, but she still couldn’t believe that her bodyguards would let anyone, even her husband in her office with anything that even resembled a weapon. “Why do you have that?”

“To break the tension.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Bill and I are fans of Detective novels. And any time a story gets to a spot where the author doesn’t know what to do, someone bursts in with a gun. This was the only one Tori would let me bring in here. She said you had a problem and didn’t know what to do about it.”

In spite of herself, she laughed. “Yes I do. We just got our collective assets kicked. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead. The fleet is in ruins. The man that married us wants to quit. And if all of that not bad enough, the Aphrodite’s Winged Youth Brigade tour has been canceled.”

“Damn, I had tickets.” She looked at his face and couldn’t tell if he was pulling her leg or not. The smile went away and the fleet officer returned. “We lost a lot of people, but we saved far more than we lost. That has to count for something. The Admiral just lost his daughter, and his resolve. Give him something else to do.”

“Like what?”

“Rebuild the fleet. Tell him that the only way to atone for what he thinks he failed at, is to not fail again.” She could see by the look in his eyes that he was speaking from something more than just his own experience.

“What about the people we lost?”

“We aren’t done losing people dear. We need to let people know that we are at war now. And that while they may have drawn first blood, we will not be defeated.”

She smiled for the first time in... Well she couldn’t remember. “Gods, that line is bad! But you are right. I just hope our people in the Expedition are faring as well.”

“That sounds like one of those transition lines in a story where they change scenes or end a chapter.”

“Well this is one chapter I want to leave behind me.”

“But it’s not over.”

“I know. Are you free for dinner?”

Admiral Cain felt like a spectator in the War Room of the Odin. The command center of the battlestation alone was the size of a Pyramid Stadium. And that, as she had found out from one of her guides, was due to the size of the unbelievable size of the former owners. She still couldn’t get her mind around the size of the Zentraedi artifacts she had seen on her way to the command center. They had one of the officers spoons mounted on the wall over the dining hall that had once been the floor of his quarters, and a rifle the length of a Viper was mounted on the hall that led to the command center. When she had asked, she had been assured that the inner workings had been removed for study long ago. She was now gazing up at the largest holographic display she had ever seen. She could see the entire system represented in the ‘tank’ as they called it. The vessels, and orbitals all had information tags attached to them. They had shown her how to use the interface to bring up individual icons, and the data that went with them, but the whole thing was almost overwhelming. The bigger shock came when the woman that ran the station, and the defense of their home system for that matter looked so much like a Bova herder out of an Old Lionis vid. Her eye patch had a green star on it, as did her hat. In fact every person here wore a nearly identical uniform. The Rangers were a well disciplined organization, but their fashion sense left something to be desired in her opinion.

Grand Admiral of the Green, formerly Colonial Naval Major, Nara Moore stood in front of the display letting her one eye scan back and forth in a uncanny resemblance to a Cylon’s monoeye. Cain had learned how Shadow had rescued her ship and crew from Imperial hands. The rest of the story was stranger than any Spec-Fic she had ever read. The two of them, along with help from the other ex-Colonials and freed slaves, had formed the core of the New Rangers. And they had become the thing of legends. They had freed more planets than the Cain had believed had existed before she left the colonies.

Tauron Ranger vids had not been high on her list of things to watch, in fact she rather detested most vids. One of the Republic-born rangers had even had to teach her the oath. The young man was extremely polite, but she did get the feeling he felt like he was trying to teach her about the Precepts of Apollo, or Aphrodite’s Prayer... Stuff that everyone should have known from childhood.

Victor (And by the gods were there a lot of young people around her named either Victor, Vicky, Victoria, and even just Vic.) had told her about how the Ranger’s Code, and Big Vic’s movies... They called them movies here for some strange reason. ...how they changed a bunch of ex-slaves into people that would give up their lives to free others from slavery. The young man’s eyes shone with the light of conviction. Something she rarely saw out side of temples, and she rarely went to any temple anymore for just that reason. People that had that much faith in any organization, usually didn’t have enough in themselves. Except these people did. Not only that, but they had taken the myth and made it real. She had read some of the reports, and they made the old vids pale in comparison.

“Well? What do you think?” The woman was studying her, and Cain could tell that the Admiral was not one of the flock, she was the shepherd. Although not without her own black sheep. The two twin girls that followed her around like shadows seemed to be on her feldercarb list, judging from their body language. Since it wasn’t her business, she didn’t ask, but she had her own problem child to deal with anyway.

“Why haven’t we moved to a bunker on the surface?” Speaking of problem children... Sire Adipose chose that moment to whisper in her ear the same question he had been asking at least once an hour.

Before Cain could reply, the pompous fool was startled by a no-nonsense voice from behind him. “Because, as any child knows, planets can’t dodge planet-busters.” The look the Republic Admiral gave the politician would have made lesser men whiter in their boots.

Sire Adipose wasn’t made of sterner stuff, he was simply made of denser stuff. “No one can break planets.” In response, the Admiral tapped something into a keyboard near her armrest. The holographic image of the system was replaced by an equally high definition image of a shattered planet that filled the tank. The planet had been reduced to moon sized chunks that were slowly drifting around a barycenter. A massive ring system made up of mountain size chunks stretched out as far as the eye could see. Some of the chunks were covered with the shattered ruins of cities and showed the obvious fate of a civilization that had been stripped of atmosphere and cast into space as the planet tore itself apart. “What are we looking at? Another one of your Spec-fic vids?”

“No Mr. Adipose, it is what is left of one of our ally’s homeworld. That was at one time home to seven billion people. And then it wasn’t.”

“I can’t believe you would try and make us believe that any weapon could do something like that. What do you take us for, fools?”

“I most assuredly take you for a fool. The others have not spoken, and by the way they are looking at you I can safely assume that they are smarter than you.” She had not moved, but Admiral Cain could see the sudden shift in the danger level she represented.

“You can not speak to me like that! I will take this up with your superiors!” The Sire’s indignation was making him bold. And his aide was not having an easy time of trying to get his attention. “Jacob, I want you to send a letter to this woman’s superior and let them know that I want her resignation BEFORE we...” The razor sharp tip of a sword in his face cut off his missive rather abruptly. He had never seen her move. Admiral Cain had not warned him, nor had Justice Adama or even his fellow Sire Bain. The fool had done so much to sabotage their mission that none of them felt any inclination to help him in any way or at all. They were actually waiting for just this moment.

Adama cleared his throat. “Did you just threaten a foreign dignitary on their home soil?”

“No, I just demanded that this... woman...be replaced. Put that sword away.”

“You stupid torph. You don’t even know what you did. I am actually trying to save your life. If I put this away without you apologizing then there are half a dozen people here that would demand the privilege to remove your head by force. Since you insulted me personally, I have first claim by the rules of the Ranger’s Code Duello.” The woman’s face was unreadable, but the ice in her voice finally got through Adipose’s thick skull.

“What?” The man’s face lost any color it had, and his eyes finally focused on her instead of her blade.

“You didn’t read ANY of the cultural package, did you?” Adama watched him shake his head before he continued. “The Republic’s culture is an amalgamation of hundreds of cultures, but the Rangers follow the Old Tauron Ranger’s code. You insult a Ranger, you insult EVERY Ranger. The choices are to apologize, or duel to the insulted party’s satisfaction. If you are stupid enough to insult their commander then you just asked for a duel from anyone under them as well. If you chose to duel her then they will provide you with a sword and basic instruction in it’s use, but if you refused it, they would have killed you on the spot.”

Adipose looked at him like he was kidding. When he saw only a serious face he changed his tune. “Surely this has been a misunderstanding. Yes?”

“Surely.” Nara agreed. Everyone stood there looking at him.

“What?”

“Here is where you apologize.” Lee rubbed his temples. Could anyone be this dense and live?

“Why should I...” He spotted five of her staff members reach for the hilts of their swords. “Of course, I am humbly sorry for such a breach of protocol. I beg your forgiveness.” He finished with a flourish of his hands and a slight bow that hid his scowl.

She returned her sword to its sheath. “Accepted.”

“Good, now that that is over...” This wasn’t over. When he got back to the Colonies...

“But it isn’t.” Adama interrupted.

“I’m sorry?”

“You said that already, but frankly that’s not enough. If we leave you in your position, then WE are insulting them. Since we can’t have that... You are hereby relieved of all duties as an Ambasador due to gross breach of protocol, and inciting a diplomatic incident.”

“What? You don’t have that authority!”

“Actually I do. I am also deputizing your aides to escort you back to the Cloud Nine, where you are to remain until such time as we return to the Colonies.”

“You can’t do that!” Lee pulled out a slip of paper and handed it to the flush and overheating politician. “What’s this?”

“Yet another piece of paper you didn’t bother to read. IT is the statute that shows you that I can, and will, send you back to the ship like the spoiled child you’re acting like. Now do I have to ask for a sword, or are you going to act like an adult for once?” Admiral Cain could see his father in the man’s attitude, but he was also his own man. Where Bill would have punched the politician and damn the consequences, Lee was more likely to simply have him arrested.

Lee escorted Adipose and his aides to the slideway. The three left as fast as decorum allowed, and everyone watched until they had entered the lift and disappeared from view. Sire Bain stood next to Adama and whispered loud enough for only Lee to hear him. “You just made an enemy. He won’t let this insult go.”

Lee laughed. “If anything, he is in my debt. The note I handed him also listed what would have happened to him had I not stepped in and sent him back to the ship. If he reads it, it might just save him from his own stupidity. As it is, he will be looking over his shoulder for the rest of the voyage, and thanking me for the warning. He may not like me, and he knows I don’t like him, but he won’t be MY enemy.” They joined the rest and let it drop.

Admiral Cain was looking up at the image that was still showing in the display. “What happened to the survivors?”

“Of the system’s fifteen billion citizen, less than forty thousand escaped. The Empire hunted them until they found us. We took them in, and they have been the third leg of the Rangers.” She hit a button and a three dimensional image of a male and female humanoid appeared in front of them. Helena Cain inhaled sharply. The woman’s dark skin, muscular build, and piercing eyes were eerily similar to her wife’s. Nora noticed this, but didn’t say anything. “Their sin was to be Nulls. Genetically ‘Impure’ by the Empires standards. What the Empire didn’t realize was the high number of Espers among their people. What we would call Oracles. The only reason they weren’t able to save all of their people was the fact that their system didn’t have the resources needed to build enough ships. They built ten fleets, and sent them out with their best people, in hopes of finding a safe harbor. The rest acted as bait, knowing that they would die. This image was taken over a hundred years before the first Cylon came on line, but they knew when and where to meet us.”

Sire Bain was looking askance at the Colonial Admiral. If Admiral Moore had noticed, or just suspected, she didn’t let on. “No Mr. Bain, Grace Cain is not a Ranger. She’s a Free Agent.” It was obvious that he noticed the emphasis that she put on the title. “Free Agents are people that work against the Empire without our assistance, but with our blessings. We try and steer them to where they would do the most good, and she was insistent on going to the Colonies. When an Oracle is insistent on something we tend to try and help them in any way we can. All she wanted was a ship.” She looked directly at Helena before continuing. “As you may have noticed, she doesn’t say much, but when she does...”

“...People listen.” Admiral Cain finished.

“Why did you let an Alien into the Colonies? Didn’t you think she would be noticed?”

“Mr. Bain. What makes you think she’s alien?”

“Didn’t you just call her one? A Null I believe.”

“A null is a human that doesn’t live up tot he Empire’s genetic standard. You for example.”

“Me?”

“Your red hair and pale skin is one of their Null definitions. You are what they call a Ginger, for some strange reason. If you only had one of those traits you would be safe, but to have both of them is a death sentence.”

“That’s insane, I every bit as human as you are.”

“I doubt it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You are a member of a Family, aren’t you?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with...”

“ANSWER MY QUESTION!”

“Yes, but we do not discus it with non-family members. It’s considered..”

“...bad form.”

He stood tall and tried to look every bit the Family image he could. And since he had had decades to practice, he wore it like a suit. “Yes.”

“Justice Adama, would you like to hear a story about how the Families were war profiteers? Or how they were the real reason that the Galactica and her sisters were built so shoddily?”

Adama’s eyes narrowed. “I would, but remember Athena’s Axiom about extraordinary claims.”

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” She picked up a data drive. “The only reason we allowed anyone with Family ties to join your mission was to allow them to answer for their crimes. Mr. Bain here may have bought and ruined companies for fun, but he was never a part of the war crimes the Families stand accused of. His father, and mother on the other hand were neck deep in it, as were quite a few of his immediate family.”

“You goaded Adipose, didn’t you.” Bain’s smile was back in full effect. “You knew that he was one of those people. By removing him from the room, you were able to bring these items out into the open without his protests and prevarications. Well played. You would have made an excellent Player in the Game.”

“You should explain the game to the people here that aren’t members of a Family.” He smiled and then opened his mouth to do as she requested when he realized what she had just said.

“Moore is not you real name is it?”

“It is, in a manner of speaking. It was my retainer’s maiden name.”

A sudden look of shock spread across his face. Adama and Cain looked at each other, both of them were obviously out of the loop here. Admiral Moore lifted her eyepatch with one hand a reached in with the other. She pulled out an unremarkable ring. The simple ring had an engraved symbol on the face. A symbol every Family member knew by heart. The Five Hearts representing the five Original Families. “I’m sorry for all the drama Admiral, Justice. You see what he was about to tell you is the story of the Game. The five families started the Game with the intent of stopping the deadly fighting that nearly brought them all down. The five families proposed a game of money instead of blood. Each family would compete in business dealings, and acquisitions. Every year they would show each other their books and the family with the most assets claimed the Game Cup.”

Sire Bain was obviously not comfortable with what she was telling them, but he stayed strangely silent. Admiral Moore looked at him like she was examining a bug, or a strange animal. “He was going to tell you about the sporting games the Families put on during the Cup Festival. But he can’t. You see this ring is my father’s. Marcus Renton.”

“You are supposed to be dead. The Families thought you had died with him.”

“He sent me to visit my mother on Scorpia. I was in route when the Smiths decided to make the Five Families into the Four Families. My retainer changed our flight, and we went to her home on Aerilon. Good thing too. Few people realize that Vulcan 759 was anything but a drive failure.”

“You are telling Family Secrets... I should have you... That’s why you let him insult you. So I would see how futile it would be to try anything.” Impotent fury burned in his eyes.

“Yes, I did figure that you were the smarter of the two. Even you should understand the futility of trying to have this Stain, as you would say, Scrubbed by a Servant. Which Mister Adama, means he would have me assassinated. Now, I am going to give Chief Justice Adama here all of these files. Is there anything you would like to add?”

“Would I get immunity?” The fury had turned into something darker. His fear was so palpable and so obvious that he seemed to shrink.

Lee looked at the suddenly fearful man. The president had given him carte blanch to act in whatever way he felt would help the colonies. This probably wasn’t what she had in mind, but when Astraea smiles... “For everything but the Unforgivables.” Adama pulled out his sash. He had been amused when they told him that he had to take it everywhere he went, but now he noticed how much heavier it is now that his duty had been added to the cloth.

“I have not stolen from a temple, I have not killed any innocents, I haven’t committed genocide, or patricide, or any of the others that I know of.” Lee wished he could believe the man, but something told him that agents of the CBI would be looking in to everything that Sire Bain told him.

It would be over an hour before they got back to the true matter at hand. With both Sires effectively under house arrest, the Republic’s second highest ranking Admiral laid out the situation. A few key strokes and the system shrunk to the size of a pin as the display zoomed out. Cain pointed out the Cyrannus system not too far away from the Republic’s capitol. “So we aren’t that far away, relatively speaking?”

“No you aren’t. That’s one of the reasons we couldn’t go home after the war. We could see far too many familiar constellations in the sky. Ironically I was the one that spotted which system we were in. You see Brizo the sailor was missing his eye.” She tapped her eyepatch to emphasize the point.

“You do seem to be a Destiny Magnet. Lost child of the missing Family, former slave, leader of the rangers... It is rather hard to take.”

“Yes, Mr. Adama, it is.” She tossed the ring to him. “And everything except the lost child part is true.”

Adama looked at the ring in his hand. It looked like a Family’s signet ring. The gold inlay, and silver filigree was a near duplicate to the Sire’s. “Then how did you know all of those details?”

“Have you ever played a game called Poker?” Her smile was not kind, but it was genuine. Lee felt safer with her smile, than Sire Bain’s. He knew exactly where he stood... Or did he? He looked back up at her, but she was already back to the display, any trace of smile banished to the mask of an Admiral. What ever type of game Poker was, it must be a dangerous one indeed.

Chapter Text

Over a thousand ships erupted from foldspace in nearly simultaneous defolds. They had exited far enough outside of the enemy system to be reasonably assured of getting their systems online before engaging the local forces. They had lost every probe they had sent to this accursed system, and the last time it had been scanned by a survey ship was so long ago that records had to be translated into the new system’s formats. So they were entering a system where they didn’t know anything that wasn’t over a thousand years out of date. They knew where the planets were, and how many tiny seraphim (planetoids) were in orbit in the Angelfield (Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud) that surrounded the system. It was that data that chose the small dwarf planet dubbed Axiom by the Imperial fleet that used its gravity shadow to hide their defold. They had used this tactic for thousands of years, and no one had ever been able to detect them this far out from the inner system. The sheer magnitude of objects in the clouds meant that someone would have to put a sensor on each and every planetoid, and no one had the manpower or resources to do that. The job was literally not humanly possible.

The tiny sensor beacon detected the fold, and sent an encrypted message off before it was destroyed by laser fire from the Destroyer that detected the transmission. The destroyer’s captain sent a message up the chain of command, and then forgot about it. Even the Empire believed in the Great Daemon Murfie. Even still, the ships didn’t even go to battle stations. After all, they knew it would take hours for the message to reach the inner system.

A Cylon Raiders picked up the message from its patrol route near Nemesis, the gas giant that was the eighth planet in the Home system. It transmitted the invasion warning to the station on Nemesis before immediately jumping to Odin. From there over a thousand Raiders jumped to the edge of the Oort cloud, and lit their running lights to full brightness. The glowing green stars with crossed swords on each fighter marked them as Rangers, and they were ready to do their duty. It also explained their sense of style. They didn’t even bother to turn off their heaters. After all, they wanted to make sure that their guest got a warm reception. And the two thousand nuclear-tipped missiles were just the thing to break the ice, and their hulls.

General Jabom of Malchoy sat in the command chair on board the Super-dreadnought Telemachus Peleus. He had been given the fleet to smash the upstarts after he had killed the last of the Giffons and given all of their possessions to the Demiurge Vis Apogee Terra himself.

He noted the way the command staff worked without bringing everything to him for his approval. He had worked long and hard for that, and now it bit him in the foot. The message from the destroyer had not made his job any easier, but it probably didn’t make it any harder. The sensors had detected the small fighters as they jumped in. They hadn’t used any kind of stealth or ECM since they had arrived, so he could only assume that they were a diversion. Knowing that, he sent a single wing of Destroyers. Armed with their Knights, they should wipe the sky free of the pesky fighters in short order.

Tex/Arcana watched as the mere forty destroyers advanced on them. The duo were the lead fighter for Albion Squadron. They watched the ships pass through the imaginary line that defined their maximum range. At the rate the enemy was traveling it would take about half an hour before they reached their maximum coilgun range. Arcana was not a patient fighter. He wanted to jump to minimum range and alpha them at nearly point blank range.

Tex wanted to unfold his fingers and tap them in sympathy, but he knew that that would only give Arcana an excuse to tease him into something foolish. “Tex?”

“Yes Tex?” Tex/Mex was his wingman, and they were often called the Twins even though they weren’t even from the same batch.

“They are moving awfully slowly.”

“Yes they are. They are trying to goad us, you know that.”

“No...Ya’ think?”

On the Imperial destroyer Remus Maxumus, Commander Gerin watched the heathen fighters turn and leave. He slammed his fist down on the command chair. “Knights to your Paladins. Prepare to launch!” He turned to his communications Acolyte. “Wing to emergency flank speed. Launch anti-fighter missiles as we come to bear!”

“Well that worked well.” Tex/Arcana transmitted to his squadrons.

“What is that fool doing?” Jabom muttered.

The destroyers launched the first wave of anti-fighter missiles, and the raiders took that as their cue to launch their anti-ship missiles. Imperial missile doctrine forbade A.I.s so their missiles were controlled from the destroyers that launched them. The captains of the destroyers had a choice. Either they released their anti-fighter missiles to launch anti-missiles, or hope that their point defense could stop all of the incoming missiles.

The Cylon missiles didn’t have that handicap. They sped in on nearly ballistic courses until they interpenetrated the outgoing missiles. That’s when the second part of the attack happened.

Commander Gerin received a call from General Jabom. He was saying something but all Gerin could hear was static. The video dissolved into static as well, only to be replaced by a hated symbol they knew all too well. The star and swords of the heretics had been found on planet after planet. A woman’s voice spoke the words that the Empire had forbade under penalty of death on every world in the Empire: “In brightest day, in stygian night,”

“No!” He watched as his point defense went down right after his Paladins launched.

“From the golden plains to the soaring heights,” He watched as the missiles passed right through his defenses.

“This Lawman shall only draw a gun to fight.” He finally figured it out. The missiles that were heading his way had piggy backed on his ship’s own signal.

“Shut down our missiles, NOW!”

“Those who of lawlessness take flight,” he watched as his own missiles lost lock and detonated far short of their targets.

“and beware our oath all you foes of light” Some of his Paladins had reached interception range and were doing their best to take out as many missiles as they could. They did their best but far more got past them then they stopped. Some of the missiles took out dozens of Paladins in their death throws. At point blank range, the hard radiation simply ate right through their admittedly impressive armor and cooked them from the inside out. The armored mecha spasming in macabre parodies of the dying men inside them.

“Tauron Rangers’s set wrongs, aright!” The missiles reached their predetermined standoff range and detonated. In the blink of an eye forty destroyers ceased to exist. Nearly a hundred missiles simply wasting themselves irradiating wreckage, and corpses.

The fighters transformed into their robotic forms and took on the surviving Paladins in a gunfight that was predetermined from the outset. While the Paladins were individually tougher than the Raiders, the ancient maxim of “Quantity has a quality all its own.” meant that the vastly out numbered Paladins didn’t stand a chance.

General Jabom looked on in stunned disbelief as more tonnage than he had ever lost was wiped out in seconds. “Send the Falconer.” The super carrier and its escorts were dispatched. He watched as the ships exited the formation. At least this time he was fairly certain that they didn’t have any more missiles.

The fast packs the ammo ships dropped off automatically attached to the hard points on each wing and readied themselves as the ships moved from one fighter to the next. Tex/Arcana looked at the heavily stealthed ships as they drifted off into the void. These Horizont X variants known simply as Cargo Clutches were little more than skeletons of ships. Their racks of weapon pods were open to space, and each had four sets of arms to switch out the pods on two fighters at a time. They didn’t have enough time to switch out every fighter, but they did what they could.

The Falconer and its companions passed through the debris field that was all that remained of the destroyers, and Paladins. It’s point defenses caused numerous tiny explosion in the field as the ships the swept small fragment out of their way with a few well placed laser blasts.

Rylo’s Bogger was the local name of one of the tiny planetoid that had been the former site of a mining complex. It still had the bores, and rigging, that the company had left there years ago since it was cheaper to set up new ones than to disassemble the old ones. It also had nearly nine hundred Raiders hiding behind its sensor shadow. Tex/Arcana had their port drail spooled all the way out. The tiny sensor was nearly a kilometer away, but thanks to the cable they could see through it as if they were there.

“Well?” Flint/Steel the wing commander of the Seven Suns Squadron floated next to them. They were all communicating by laser so as to avoid detection, but they knew the enemy would be coming. Halo/Angel the Sprits Of Lionis squadron’s wing commander had come up with the idea of hiding here and letting the next wave pass them, and attack them from behind.

‘So here they were.’ Tex/Arcana shook their head once more. “They are taking their time. They know we are here, and they are evidently expecting something.”

Halo/Angel slumped. The youngest Ranger team leader here, they had known that no plan survived contact with the enemy, but to have their favorite movie’s plan foiled due to competent bad guys hurt. “Tag teams!”

“Ladies, if you haven’t noticed, we are tag teams already.” Flint/Steel was not their biggest fans, but they were the leaders with the second highest kill count. The two of them had been a team for longer than the other pair had been online.

“No, we tag team the jump drives.”

“What will that do?”

Tex/Arcana shook almost hard enough to come loose from their mooring. “It baits a trap.”

Knight Captain Heilios Maxin stood on his bridge and watched the plot. He knew they were out there. He knew they were planning something. The movies they had captured from the Cylons had shown no shortage of heros attacking larger foes by hiding behind large objects and waiting for the enemy to pass by. Then they would spring a sneak attack on a perceived weak spot. “Launch a halo of fighters to cover us with most of them covering our aft. Send out scout probes to any and all bodies that lie in our path. Ready the bombers to hit any thing with power readings that they find.”

“They watch the wrong movies.” Flint/Steel had been watching the deployment of the enemy, and as they sent out the drones that the Republic had dubbed Zombie Bombs, he pulled back. Their squadron had pulled back to another rock while the squadron leaders had been conferring. “This isn’t Last Starfighter, it’s Red Rails.” The famous Big Vic and Molly Molly buddy flick, was probably the best Train Job vid the Colonies had ever produced. And while Rangers would complain that any movie where Big Vic played the bad guy was not a proper Big Vic movie, there wasn’t a Ranger that couldn’t sing the theme song.

Without realizing what their fellows were thinking, Halo/Angel started to play the song on their internal speakers, but Angel was glad that sound didn’t travel through the void. Her partner was laughing as she mentally shook her head. “Too right, but we don’t have Sagittaron Mountain Men to jump... on... the... train.”

“What is it?” Tex/Arcana could practically see them thinking. The duo was one of their better tactical theorists so he gave them all the cycles they needed.

“They know our movies. We know our movies. If we do what they expect, we can make them dance to our tune.”

“Paint Your Wagon?”

“Seriously... We need them to zig when we zag. Send a small party of tag teams behind them. They will be expecting that. When the fighters head off in that direction they will wait until they are close enough, and jump to a target vessel. If we are on the hulls of their vessels they will have a harder time fighting us.”

“I get that reference... And maybe we could do some damage inside them.” The Seven Sons were well known for their sabotage and hit and run tactics, so Tex/Arcana assigned their squadron to do that. “Their fighters will be diving back as soon as they realize what we did, so some of us will have to distract them. Sprits Of Lionis and Lucky Sevens will draw their fire.”

Maxin watched as the small group of fighters appeared behind him just as he had predicted. Well almost as he predicted. They were too far away to attack. The fighters began their attack run anyway. “Fools! All fighters, wipe them from our sky! Prepare for the rest to arrive shortly. All point defense should fire at targets as they come to bear.” Far too few ships had appeared. They were about to try something else.

“Sir, scouts are taking fire from outside of their sensor range. The reverse vectors indicate numerous initial positions.” Destroyers Kensin, and Fornig have sensor ghosts on those vectors.”

Send Kensin, Fornig, Ardent, and Viersen to those locations. Bring Peplin, and Dafouse in closer for missile defense.” He watched as the newer destroyers moved forward while the older, but battle tested, models were tucked into the tactical network. The two ships moved to positions above and below the carrier so as to be out of its firing, and launching arcs.

They should be getting ready to unleash a surprise attach with some sort of weapon they hadn’t seen before, or some tactic that was one of the various surprises. Maxin went through them in his head. Follow the comet, hide behind something, play the wounded royal, or do something stupid... Of all of them, he never figured out how doing something stupid was supposed to work against a competent enemy. But then again, most of the bad guys in those movies were not the brightest displays on the console. “Launch all fighters, and then lock down all emergency bulkheads hatches, and airlocks. Activate all Myrmidon units, and get all non-combatants into hardsuits.”

“Do you really thing they will be foolish enough to try to board a Super Carrier, sir?”

“Yes, Knight Lieutenant, I do believe they would.” He didn’t even bother to turn around. Lieutenant Gallo was the youngest son of the late Colonel Sylar Gallo and one of his few surviving children. Rumor had it that the young Cadifield was working his way up the political ladder as well. As a Cadifield or Landed Gentry, the young man didn’t need to enter the Templars Service, but to not join would have held him back. Maxin wouldn’t be hitching his flag to the young man’s banner anytime soon, but if he survived the honor duels he kept accumulating he might make it into the higher ranks of the nobility.

He looked around the bridge and smiled with pride. Half of his crew were the creme of the Crown Families, and the Knighthood. Patronage brought up Knights, and even Acolytes that were of the finest breading, and purest lines the Empire had. The fleet had been hard pressed to find slots for every Family that had tried to get their sons into a billet. There was even a rumor that some of the servants were Nobleborn. They all wanted a chance to bloody themselves against the closest thing to a challenge the Empire had faced in generations. Well they would get it. He had watched the heretics tear asunder those forty destroyers as if they were shuttles. These were not enemies to underestimate.

“There they go.” Arcana was counting the sensor returns as Tex fretted. “That’s a lot of fighters.” The super carriers were thought to have five to six hundred fighters. Over a thousand had launched, and they showed no sign of stopping.

“We’ve been up against worse. We’ll just have to scrap as many of them as we can before they get us.” Their wingmen Knight/Mare was never fazed by such trivial things as odds, their optimistically pessimistic view made all of all of their past battles worse than the one they actually were in, so while Tex was tempted to ask ‘When?’ he didn’t even bother. Arcana brought up a schematic of the Imperial fighter model that they were facing. The Cherub was a stupid name for a fighter, and more than one Cylon had been embarrassed to admit they had been tagged by one when they uploaded the first time. None of them were embarrassed the second time. The fighters were wicked fast, and heavily armed. What they lacked was decent armor and any kind of FTL drive. The Imperial fighter doctrine was based around the carrier, much like the Colonials. Their bombers and shuttles had jump drives, but neither their fighters, nor their Paladin’s boosters carried anything to get them home in the case of their mother... Fathership’s destruction. It made protecting the carrier the primary duty of the escorts. Which made Halo’s plan all the more striking... Archana groaned at Tex’s pun. The fighter just didn’t share his partners sense of humor.

Sixteen hundred fighters launched from a carrier that was designed for a mere thousand. They had packed the fighters in every bay they could, even at the expense of their bomber, and shuttle wings. Ten tens of fighters had even been strapped to the hull until their last translation into normal space. Maxin watched as the last fighter launched. They would be springing what ever trap they had planed with in the next tencen, of that he was sure. “Mr Gallo, if you would like the honor. The enemy will be attacking us from an unusual direction. Most likely from above, and below as those are the areas we have the fewest fighters. What suggestion would you like to impart on us?” He knew he was taking a chance by letting the untested officer make a decision that might effect their mission, but he felt the risk was worth it.

“Let them get close enough to swarm the Peplin, and Dafouse. Then have their captains self destruct. Those ships are past their prime, and their crews are all old guard. They wouldn’t have survived to meet the enemy fleet anyway. This give them a Knight’s death.”

Maxin didn’t smile, but he was pleased. “Very well. I shall let you send the orders.” The pride in the Cadifield’s eyes was guarded. But Maxin’s experience with nobles let him pick out the tell-tale signs. The young man had promise.

Flint and the rest of his squadron jumped to point blank range of the enemy destroyer and quickly landed on the hull in battloid form. They quickly swarmed over the side to fire down on the super carrier from the cover of the enemy’s own ship. He could see the data points of every single surviving ranger as they came over the edge of the ships. “Like shooting ducks in a...” That’s when the universe exploded around him.

Halo shot up from her resurrection bay to see hundreds of 007 pilot models just like her doing the same. “Whta eth Frak jsut hapepnd?”

Flit was five rows over from her but his voice came over the commander’s channel just like he was next to her. “We just got schooled.”

“No Stih ashosle...” She paused, and her voice sounded shocked when she continued. “My Lagnugea si lal Frkade pu!” Her hands went to her belly, and a human tech ran over to her.

“Sit still, your files were corrupted by the blast, it will take some time for your systems to sort themselves out.” Halo looked at the human and swore that he looked familiar. “Yes, my name is Joshua, I fixed the feedback in your link last week. Your files are not the only one scrambled, so I need to check on the others. Please stay here.” He ran off without waiting for a reply.

“Suer tnhig betaufilu... I haev on whree too og...” She sat back in the cradle and tried to get her head back together. The lubricant dripped down her face in an all too human way. She wiped it off with the back of her hand and sighed. At least she could do that right.

Flint stood up and queried the computer as to the status of his partner. Steel was not on the recovery list. He looked up Max and wasn’t surprised to find his name missing either. Archana’s name was on the list. He sent a condolence message to him. Max, and Steel would both be missed. He was still trying to find his way back to the hanger when he realized that his files were not quite up to code. He couldn’t remember where the hanger, or his quarters were, and he just glad that he could find his way back to the Resurrection chamber because couldn’t remember where here was either.

>Query- System Check<

>Activate Ressurection Protocols<

That wasn’t good. That meant that he couldn’t just upload then...

Max came back online in darkness. He fumbled around in the wrecked cockpit until he found the emergency kit. The glow stick snapped into the sickly green tinted light that he hated, and he looked around at what was almost his tomb. He pulled the tab on the sticky strip and stuck the light to the side of the cockpit. One of his legs wasn’t responding, but he seemed to be operational at least slightly. He tried to cycle the cockpit open, but the blast shield must have been warped, or something, because it wasn’t budging. He really wished that he had thought to bring a pistol or something, but deep space missions didn’t usually require them. He flexed his arm and the combat blade sprung out. He tried to get it under the edge, but all he got for his trouble was a broken blade and some damage to his arm.

He reached under the ejector seat that he folded into for flight, and deactivated the blast charge. Then he reached behind his head for the panic rings. Grabbing both with one hand he pulled them while holding on to the manual control yoke. He cursed his luck when the glow rod went spinning away with the cockpit, but at least he was free. He looked at what was left of Arcana and shook his head. He hoped his companion had uploaded, because there wasn’t much left of the once proud ace fighter. A second light stick in hand. he took stock of what was left of his partner. Archana must have spun around in the last instant to protect the cockpit, and that had meant that the limbs and thruster pack had taken the worst of the damage. Both legs were gone, and the shoulders were barely there anymore. The arms, on the other hand, were still in good shape. A nice surprise was the fact that one of the wings were attached to said arm still had its armored missile pod attached. Only one missile remained, but since he didn’t have anyway to fire it, it was moot anyway. One of the arms had been the reason he couldn’t open the cockpit. The arm was swinging freely, and it seemed to have added a bit of a tumble to the wreck.

As Archana’s body spun around he got a look at the enemy. The carrier that had crippled him had passed him by long ago from the look of it, but the main fleet was still headed mostly in his direction. The main section would miss him, but not by much. Maybe a kilometer or two. But a kilometer is just as good as a light year in deep space. Even if his leg wasn’t damaged, and even if the closing speeds weren’t instantly fatal, there was just no way to... The nuclear tipped missile still attached to Archana’s wing gave him an idea. An idea that quickly died when he spotted the damaged warhead as he climbed over to the wing. There was a good chance that the missile might work, the warhead might, and the guidance system might work, but he doubted if all three of them still worked. He ripped open what was left of the side panel and took a look inside. It was a mess inside the housing, half of the warheads control runs were melted away, and the guidance system was a pile of slag, but the engine looked like it would still work.

Archana was almost finished powering up when he felt the connection to his partner. He couldn’t connect, but he could somehow ‘feel’ that Tex was out there somewhere. He tried to get permission to go find him, but Flight Control wouldn’t give him the clearance.

Tex triggered the engine, and rode on it like a Cyclone, or one of the skycycles the Republic was trying out. He had to patch his own processor in to guide the missile’s course, but it seemed to be working. After patching up the propellant tank’s slow leak he had been dismayed to find out that the engine only had enough fuel for a couple of minutes at full thrust. Since he couldn’t throttle down the engine, he had to make some adjustments to his plan. He fired it off in smaller bursts to not only conserve fuel, but to cut down the chance of his detection. An electronic version of an itch started shortly after he cleared the body of his partner. It was almost as if he could feel Archana there with him. He wished his partner could have been here, but that was impossible.

Archana reached out with every passive sensor he had, and could just barely sense his partner’s mind. It wasn’t like the normal connection they shared. This was like... Like the telemetry from one of his missiles. Was Tex trying to use the missile to transmit himself back to the Hub? Archana reached out to try and piggyback on the telemetry signal.

Tex felt the missile shutter as the last of the fuel sputtered and flared out. There was only one thing the missile was good for now. He disconnected himself from the missile, and shoved off from the missile with the warhead in tow. His remaining leg wasn’t much but it added a little bit of separation from the missile’s heat signature. He knew that he was far too hot to be invisible, but the engine was hundreds of degrees hotter than he was. That kind of heat might make for a tempting target if they were half as competent as he thought they were.

Archana swore in fifteen different languages. The signal had faltered and dropped to almost nothing. He tied his sensors into the deep space network, and asked for a passive scan of the area where Tex’s signal had come from. He was surprised to find that the area in question was being actively scanned. He accessed the scan data and narrowed the area to the approximate area were Tex should have been. There were nearly a thousand ships out there.

The Battle Cruiser Saint Dobson’s Grace picked up the missile on it scanner as soon as it passed into their threat envelope. A sensor acolyte brought it up on the main screen and the Knight Captain ordered the gunnery officer to target it. Tex watched the missile explode into rapidly exploding plasma. He figured that a laser must have hit it since he hadn’t seen any projectiles of any kind. If they spotted him, then he might disappear in a very similar flash. Looking at the dispersion pattern of the plasma he tracked it back to see one of the massive Battle Cruisers bearing down on him. He knew that, in reality, it wasn’t exactly coming towards him, but they were approaching the same space, and they might just hit each other if he was lucky.

The Acolyte scanned for any debris that might have survived, and was surprised to find some metallic returns along the same flight path. It looked like the missile had come apart in flight. The wreckage didn’t have enough mass or velocity to pose a threat so he simply ignored the objects as he did the thousands of other similarly sized pieces of wreckage from the fighters they had been flying through. After all, that’s what armor was for.

Tex noted the amount of time he would have to trigger the warhead before he hit the Battle Cruiser before he himself hit it. Half an hour seems like a good long time; that is if you can get said warhead to fire. He was holding the warhead and trying to fix it all while flying toward certain doom upon impact. If it wasn’t so serious, he would have thought it one of Flint’s ‘worstest’ jokes. As it was the only replacement parts that he could remove from himself, and still function was his resurrection circuit. Which really did not leave this open to laughter of any kind. ‘Well here goes nothing!’ The warhead cycled, and scrammed in his hands. Bits of molten metal drifted off into the void as the electronics overheated and melted. Tex looked at what was left of his resurrection circuit’s processor board and laughed. He was laughing as his body, and the warhead slammed into the SDG with enough force to crush every servo and actuator he had. His mind faded soon after...

Archana felt Tex’s signal fade. He knew that his partner, and friend was gone. He started to power up his systems. He accessed the Command channel and asked for permission to go on patrol. He was denied of course. He was told to stand down until another partner could be assigned to him. The hanger doors were even locked when he started to hover towards them.

Flight Technicians Ajax and Lyne were on duty as they watched Archana start to fly toward the hanger doors. His anti-gravity drive was causing any items that happened to be underneath him to behave like slow-motion leaves in the wind, but he didn’t seem to care. When a voice came over the speaker they knew the something was up. “Fighter Archana, you are hear by ordered to stand down. If you do not stand down you WILL be boxed until such time as we can figure out what the Frak your problem is. Do I make myself clear?”

Archane responded by keening a soulful wail that was soon taken up by some of the other fighters in the bay. Archana was not the only fighter to make it back without their pilot, and they were sympathetic to his cries. Ajax walked up to Archane and put a hand on the fighter. The human’s touch seemed to break the fighter’s angst, as it stopped wailing. “FT Ajax here. Going out there right now will no bring him back will it?” The fighter gently settled back down to the floor. The cockpit’s spy eye was watching him. He put his hands up in a placating way. “Don’t worry, we will get you new pilots, and the others will be avenged. Now I need to... WHAT THE RAF???” As one, every fighter jumped from inside the bay, causing a sudden hurricane as air was sucked into the voids left when over five hundred fighters joined the largest simultaneous exodus from a pressurized hanger that had ever been attempted. The wind rush knocked him down and he was stunned when he sat back up in the suddenly empty and quiet bay. “Boy am I glad they ain’t mad at me.”

Captain Gran watched as the last of the enemy fleet moved out of detection range. He knew that just sitting here had made most of his crew feel like cowards, but their ships were not made for any kind of combat. Sure they could have Aerilon-rigged the missile launchers and shield generators to make them into pocket frigates, but they wouldn’t have lasted long enough to fire off a second salvo. Had they fired, he knew every one of them would have died. As it was they were about to jump back insystem with hard numbers, and ship data on the enemy. He raised his hand to the jump key, and froze when hundreds of jump signatures erupted around them. Their IFF’s showed them to be Republic, but that didn’t stop him from nearly hitting the key anyway. What did stop him was the fighter’s request. He knew he might lose his commission over this, but... The former slave owed the Republic, and the more importantly the Rangers, his life and freedom.

Half an hour later all fifty of the now empty tenders vanished, and the fighters folded to spots in front of the approaching armada. As one they shut off any system that would betray them, and went to silent running as they went to full burn knowing that they would not have enough fuel to make it all the way there under power. They would be able to maneuver a little to aim themselves, but not enough to dodge and aim. Fifteen minutes later their boosters which had been designed for more for maneuverability than for raw speed, ran dry, but instead of jettisoning them, they simply kept them. Every extra ounce of mass would count soon enough.

Grand Admiral Moore listened to the report of the fighters going AWOL without comment. She knew that there was no turning them from their course, so she didn’t even bother to try. She did add it into her calculations though. From various points around the system ships and defensive fortifications had come online in response to the invading fleet. Now was a good time to see if some of their new toys worked as well as the manuals said they would.

Knight Templar General Jabom watched with glee as his fleet swept the last rock from their path, and the last of the enemy’s picket of sensor platforms fell to their weapons along with it. They were with in sensor range of the inner system at last. “Knight General, we have a lock on their home planet. There are apparently two tens of planets in this system, but only four have significant life signs.”

He stood and raised his blood red Tensin high. The banner was resting on his spear of office, and it swayed as he shook it. “Target the largest first, and ready the Holy Cannons. We will burn the sinners off the face of Creation!” He stood there resplendent in his battle armor. The same armor that his Great-grandfather Yodin Jabom wore when he wiped the Idirin Republic from the stars. The same armor HE wore when he slew the last of the... “What is it, Canson?”

Knight Templar Major Canson knelt at Jabom’s feet in the position of subjugation. “My Lord, we have a problem. The drives will not lock on to the coordinates as we’ve entered them.”

“Any ides as to how... Stand up man!” Canson was many things, brave in the presence of his superiors was not one of them. He was however the best navigator, and pilot the General had ever had. “...how this is happening?”

“No my lord. Our best guess is they are using some kind of jump inhibitor.”

“Could we fold?”

“Not this close to a star sir. Our computers are not like theirs. Our cognitive limiters have made it so that the system can not understand the complexities of the problems.”

Jabom didn’t even bother to hide the proud smile that came to his face. The man may not be able to stand up to a superior, but if you asked him a technical question then any rank went right out the airlock. “What are the chances that our computers would suddenly become self-aware if we turned them off?”

“A snowballs chance on Kelsim, sir. We just don’t have any software like that in the servers. We never have. The Inquisition Rules are the only reason we still have them stunted, but we have never come up against anyone as capable as we are, or in their case more capable in that regard. I still wouldn’t recommend shutting them off, we don’t know what kind of information warfare capabilities they have for system infiltration. We have already received massive data bursts that our stand-alone systems are trying to decode.” Jabom was glad that he had put the Knight with the strange fascination for engineering on his staff. The man would never reach flag rank due to his honesty, but Jabom’s patronage had kept him alive in the maelstrom of politics that would have claimed the life of lesser men. So when Canson spoke, Jabom listened.

“What would you have us do?” He sat in his command chair and looked at the knight. Many of his contemporaries would have cut the subordinate off and done things as they wished them. He hadn’t lived for nearly two centuries by doing rash things without knowing the consequences and the odds.

Canson’s nerves were fraying but he held himself like a knight should. “We have two options. The first, is to attempt a nearly blind fold right into the heart of the enemies defenses. Or we can simply plow our way through the system, destroying the enemy in detail.”

“Can we jump out of the system if we need to change vectors?” The thought of defeat never entered his mind, but he did plan for any of the myriad eventualities that he could conceive of. He logistics ships were normally to be kept one jump away, but if they couldn’t resupply they would be in a vice. Stuck between the defenders, and his supplies, he could be squeezed into a defeat if he wasn’t careful.

“I don’t think it would be wise. We would have coordinates, but there is something else at play here. We are getting a lot of gravitic turbulence that we can neither localize, or analyze. Best case: we’re off course by light minutes. Worst case: we either can’t jump or we wind up inside a planetary body.”

“A short trip to nowhere? Well, while I would commend any who wish to try that tactic. I don’t know if that kind of planetary bombardment is what we had in mind.” He envisioned the massive craters that any one of his ships would leave if they had managed to come out close enough to the surface of a planet, but he couldn’t gamble on the trade off. The kinetic energy transfer of two bodies suddenly impacting would have been tactically multiplied by the sudden appearance of the subterranean explosion that would be the inevitable conclusion to two bodies with different vectors impacting like that. The jump would carve out a hole big enough for the ship, but its intrinsic velocity and direction would have to match or they would find themselves nearly instantaneously crashing into the edge of the cavern they had just carved out. He had used very same tactic nearly ninety years ago to set up a base on an ice moon of some long forgotten empire. It had only taken him about two days and a hundred or so probes to clear out what would have taken acolytes years to cut out with lasers. He still laughed at the irony of using their own naval officers as the enslaved minds driving the probes to complete his divine work.

He had recorded their screams and defiant screams in their primitive language to be broadcast to the people of their empire, so that they would know the futility of daring to oppose the empire. He had played the recordings to every graduating cadre that he fostered for years afterward. The death and destruction he had wrought had filled so many with the purpose of The Holy Human Church, and they had filled the ranks of his legions with such faithful service that he was truly proud of what they had become under his tutelage. None so as much as what his best students had become. Canson would never make command rank, but the man just didn’t care to leave Jabom’s side. But there was another...

Knight Templar Stark watched as his fighter wing’s icons were spreading out on his display. They had been given the honor of flying point, and he had pulled in quite a few favors to get them the prime slots. This would be his fifth ten of missions, and he had sacrificed one of his best servants to curry favor with the Wing Commander. He would miss the slim young woman, but he knew that they would have plenty of slaves to choose from if the enemy capitulated in the face of their might.

Their last mission had been like that. A full battle group had taken the pittance known as Lorimar by the natives and won the day with out firing a shot. He hated missions like that, truth be told. He would rather the heretics they faced put up a decent struggle, or the victories felt hollow. He had watched this new enemy wipe out the destroyers and had silently been amazed at their new enemy’s audacity. It was a move of an enemy worthy of the Praetorian General himself. As such he was aching to prove how able he was to his vaulted superiors.

Stark’s only problem with maneuvers like this was how mind-numbingly boring it could be to be forced to sit in the cockpit of a fighter and fly all the way in instead of just jumping directly into the fray. He had made his seventh sensor sweep when the light appeared on his sensor’s display. His sensors had been set to long range, but it didn’t make a difference. The object had passed his ship so fast that the light on his display hadn’t even faded. It had just plotted a straight line that missed him by five tens of a holy meter. He was about to switch on his transmitter and break comm silence when another light appeared straight ahead. He didn’t even have the time to finish his inhalation for the scream that would never come as the energy field smashed his ship into wreckage and plasma, and only slightly knocked the Raider behind it off course.

The Cylon fighter cursed. That hit had cost Archana a good amount of field strength, but it cost him more in kinetic energy. The field would be back up to full strength by the time he intersected the fleet, but that kinetic energy was gone for good. He wished that he could have just jumped closer, but the jump inhibitor that was covering the system was effecting them as well as the enemy. If they had been under orders they would have been given windows to use their jump drives, but as it was he knew they wouldn’t know when the dampeners would be shut off, or for how long.

The sensor operator turned to his command officer. The knight came over and looked at what the man wanted him to see and ran to where the general sat in his throne. “Yes?”

“We are losing picket ships sire.”

“What is killing them?”

“We don’t know. We only received a partial telemetry transmission from one of the lead fighters. It showed a streak of energy that passed him so fast that we first thought that it was some sort of energy weapon, but it had a mass reading as well.”

“Heavy duty Railgun, or coilgun rounds?”

“We have never seen rounds this large, or for that matter, that slow. The energy readings don’t correspond with any plasma weapons, or particle beam weapons that we know of.”

“Canson, could they have mounted one of their infernal barrier shields on a long range missile?”

Canson had walked over to the sensor acolyte’s display and began manipulating the data. “I don’t know. We still don’t know how they work, but every time they have employed them, they were seemingly unable to coordinate their defenses as well so we assumed that they had trouble communicating when the fields were up. We also have never seen them employed on anything that small. The signal appeared to be the size of one of their fighters or mecha. They have used smaller shields, but never anything with energy reading remotely like these.”

“We are in their home system. It’s little wonder that they are pulling out all the rods to keep us at bay. Very well then, send out two sweeps of probes with gravitic detectors at full. Have them create a tripwire line about a light second in front of our current course. The second we will keep within radar range. We might not get a warning on radar, but they should see something before the objects, whatever they are, get here. Have all ships target any missile strikes for triangulated follow up strikes. We will have to assume that the enemy is using shielded ships, and reply accordingly.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of his throne. “The Republic, and their artificial abominations specifically, are prone to sneak attacks. I am beginning to think that young mister Magus is smarter than I thought.”

If anyone on the bridge thought anything about the left-handed compliment that their Praetorian General had made in regards to the Nova Pratori General Victor Magus, the third highest officer in the entire Empire, they wisely kept it to themselves. They knew that the Nova Pratori considered their commander to be something of a hero, and had become his defacto sponsor in his vendetta against the Giffon family... Former Giffon family.

“Comm, get me Telemachus on the Wrath of Empire.”

The fifth ship to carry the name Wrath of Empire, was a Bludgeon class missile dreadnought. At just over three kilometers in length, it was the largest ship in the fleet, but is mass belied its nature. The ship was mostly empty space in the form of huge bays full of missile pods. Its primary job was to subjugate planets, or blockade them by releasing the pods into planetary orbits. Its defensive weapons were nothing to shake a sword at, but it was never designed to be a ship of the line. Its massive armor plates were designed to allow it to get close enough to release the pods. After that, the ship was supposed to jump out of harm’s way while the rest of the fleet dealt with any resistance. Praetorian Major Telemachus had been awarded the command slot for his help in rooting out the last of the Giffon loyalists. He had hidden his disappointment when he found out which ship is was to be though. He had stewed in his own remorse while his ship sat in the middle of the fleet. So he was surprised when the General himself had called him up to lead the attack against the invisible enemies that were taking out their fighters.

The massive bay doors opened up, and the ship was soon spilling pod after pod into space. As soon as they launched the missiles were fired off on courses that paralleled their own. The smaller missiles with their higher thrust to weight ratio soon outran the fleet, and left them far behind. Each missile had enough fuel to keep up a sustained burn for nearly five hours, so they would be moving at a very high rate of speed when they passed the picket fighters. He only hoped that their shot-in-the-dark would result in some kills. The missiles he had lunched were not ship killers, they were all of the fleet’s Angel’s Dream warheads. And while they were headed towards the planet that had the system’s largest collection of activity, they would take months to get there.

Archana spotted the missile right before it hit his shield. It was only a glancing blow, but it knocked him off course. He used what little fuel he had left to stop the tumble it had imparted, but he would miss the ship he had been aiming for, and now he didn’t have any way to get back on course. He checked to see if he would intersect any of the other ships, and there was one he would miss by only meters. He quickly took stock of what few resources he had left. Four nuclear anti-ship missiles he could fire through the barrier. And a little over a thousand railgun rounds. He disabled the launch rails, and triggered two of the missiles. Their thrust wasn’t much but it brought him closer to where he wanted to be. He though about triggering the other two, but decided that they might be useful if he got hit again. Switching to guardian mode he aimed his rife off to the side and fired off short controlled bursts until he was on the right heading.

In space throwing something away will push you in the opposite direction, but that doesn’t mean that the objects that you throw away disappear. The rounds that he fired off would follow courses that arched away form his new heading, but were still moving at nearly the same velocity as he was. In fact they were slightly faster in relation to his base course than his new one since he had had to fire them slightly forward of his port wing. The dance he was playing with his Delta V was a careful one. He may have lost some forward momentum, but he at least now he would hit the ship he was aiming for.

And the dance payed off another dividend when a barrage of follow up missiles hit the area he had been about to enter if he hadn’t changed his course. The barrage lit up his passive scanners as numerous shield strikes on his fellow Cylons had triggered the retaliatory strikes that were targeting them. He fired off more bursts to change his course a bit more. He could see the next salvo on its way, and he fired a third burst, this time going through most of his ammo in a continuous burst that pushed him almost off course, but managed to dodge the latest salvo. Some of his brethren were not so lucky. The void lit up with the tell-tale explosions of shield failures. And while he knew that some of them might have survived, the sheer number of them meant that nearly half of them had just EOLed. The shield failures were just too fast, and too strong, to allow a Cylon the opportunity to upload. Their only chance would have been to upload before they were hit, and he doubted they had that much warning.

It was times like this he wished that he didn’t have to chose between the shield or the jump drive. He had the power, but the two systems just couldn’t be used at the same time. There was an equal chance that the shield would either send him drastically off course, or the bleed through from the jump drive would overload the shield. Neither would be good for his long term survival, or his ability to complete his mission.

General Jabom watched as the explosions confirmed his hunch. Hundreds of multi-kiloton explosions had just gone off, but he doubted that he had taken out all of the incoming missiles. “Move ships to a flying wall formation, and begin a point defense sweep along our present course, and out to twenty degrees conical.”

“Should we warn the fighter screen?”

“No, they will figure it out quick enough, and the element of surprise must be kept. If I am right, we have more guests out there.”

Archana watched with quiet fury as the ship he had targeted moved out of formation. He was waiting for the ships to stop maneuvering when he spotted the dozen or so energy strikes that were the mark of shield hits to his brothers shields. It looked like they were concentrating on a cone in front of the fleet. He was well off to one side of that cone, but he wouldn’t always be as his intercept would meet the enemy fleet soon enough. And he seriously doubted that they would stop shooting at them anytime soon. The ships finished moving, and Archana wished he could laugh. The biggest ship in the fleet was the one his plot said he would intersect in a little more than five minutes.

On the other side of the system, Admiral Moore sat in the command center as she had ever since the enemy fleet had arrived. The jammer system seemed to be working at slowing down the enemy’s advance, and while the sensor net had given them a nearly real-time view of the tactical situation, she felt like she was swimming in mud. The pods were ready for deployment, and the jump beacons were in stand by, but the rouge Rangers had tossed all of her carefully laid plans right out the airlock. They were supposed to advance in their usual overconfident and spread out display of bravado. Now they were bunched up into a defensive array that would blunt any missile barrage with their overlapping defenses. They had already tipped their hand on the piggy-back trick, so they surely wouldn’t fall for that a second time. At least not here, and now. Something was tickling the back of her mind though. Their formation was a classic example of a perfect hedgehog of overlapping anti-missile defenses. Point defense linked together with a fighter screen, and all of their sensitive ships hidden inside their protective shell. Whoever was in command was obviously not one of the usual glory hounds. But this fleet was just too small to take them on. It was obviously only a distraction fleet, so where was the main fleet?

General Jabom pulled out his family watch. The watch was at least ten thousand years old, and it had been in his family for most of that time. The strange time piece only had twelve numbers on it’s face, but it still kept perfect time for missions like this. He looked over to gravitics to see the sudden bloom of a massive disturbance on the far side of the system. The fleet had been forced to come out of foldspace by the jamming, and it was far short of it intended location by over a light hour. But the fleet that was ten tens his own was right on time. He really wished that they could see through the enemy’s jamming but he was sure that by this time half of the enemy should be on their way to him, and they should have left their bases relatively defenseless. That’s when the Battlecruiser Golan was cut in two before it exploded. “Battle stations! Sensors, did we get anything on the weapon they used?”

Canson ran over to the station as the acolyte tried to make heads or tails out of the information that was coming in. “It looks like the same kind of strike that hit our fighters.” Another ship radically changed heading as something hit it in the bow hard enough to rip a chunk of it off. “That hit showed an energy field hitting the Liot like a missile. The track after it hit may have ended in a jump. I think they have mounted shield units on their fighters.”

“Brilliant. They are worthy foes.” He saw the look of shock at the idea of artificial intelligences being thought of as equals. “Facts are facts, I think we need to turn off the inhibitors if we want a chance at hitting them.”

Canson chewed his lip for a tencen. “I don’t like the thought of doing that sir. We don’t know if they can access our systems.”

“Have everybody go to radio silence right after we give the order. If we can’t receive the signal, we can’t be infected, and if we aren’t sending, then we can’t infect anyone else if we are.” The young man still didn’t look happy but Jabom next comment apparently steeled his resolve. “And if we don’t they may kill us anyway.”

“A choice between sins is no choice at all.”

“I won’t argue Saint Gillopy with you son. Just get it done.”

“Yes sir.” He flicked the switch and the computers on every ship in the fleet went to their full capacity. Immediately they spotted five energy sources headed towards their lead elements. Their fire control managed to hit four of them and knock out two before they hit. Only three ships were hit, and two frigates were able to dodge their attackers. “That’s better, now maybe we are on an even footing with these ghosts.”

The body of the former navigator fell to the ground as Nova Pratori General Victor Magus walked back to the command deck of the bridge of the warship Hand of the Righteous and sat down at his throne. The gleaming golden relief of Telemachus Peleus the 23rd Demiurge Vis Apogee Terra (God’s power over Terra) looked down upon everyone in the room from the back of the room and he had used that badge of power as a totem for so long that it’s presence was barely thought about except in situation like theses. He was here as the personal representative of the Empire. His ship may not have been as new as his ‘Uncle’s’ but it was one of the largest. It was also one of the few ship in his fleet that still sported a functional Requiem Cannon. The weapon was reported to have been able to devastate entire fleets, and from orbital distances to be able to scour the surface of a planet. It hadn’t been fired in generations, but he had been given permission to fire it if the situation had merited it. He had already tested it on a planet that he had Blessed with an Angel’s Dream a few years ago. The dead world had burned to a cinder with the half power blast, and he was anticipating the effects of a full power blast once he reach orbit of their home world. What he hadn’t been anticipating was the crash translation back into real space that was far short of his goal. Taking out his frustration on man who had actually done an exemplary job of keeping the ship in one piece was probably not a good thing for his disposition when he sat down only to hear the new navigator tell him that there was some kind of gravitic jamming that prevented them from jumping insystem. The thought of days of sublight travel to reach his goals made him wish he had some kind of Jedi ability, because he really wanted to force choke someone right now.

His enslaved bodyguard Adin Peilot, as always, stood by the side of his throne. Knowing the Cylon’s tactic of sending suicidal breaching pods full of their metal abominations against massive warships in the hopes of damaging sensitive systems, he had supplemented the usual Myrmidon guards with a full squad at Shadow’s suggestion. He had added a hand of Knights to round out the retinue, each the son of a house that held personal fealty to him alone. He had been tempted to bring the Cylon out to see his final victory over the Republic that Shadow was reportedly still a hero of. He could have shown the Republic how he had used their own hero to crush them, but he wanted this victory to be his own. He also did not want anyone, no matter how loyal, to see his Cylon servant. That would be a political liability that would not be easy to hide with ‘Convenient Accidents’ or simple bribes. “Comm, send to fleet: Full speed for the Republic Home world. Flying Wing of Angels formation.” He watched as the ships spread out and moved at their full sublight speeds. The slower ships would not get to the battle area for nearly five hours. It would be the smaller ships job to slow at the half way point, and let the slower ships catch up. They would get the chance to take on any enemy ships that managed to reach them first, and to weaken them for their larger brethren to wipe out.

He pressed a button on the arm of the throne. Music started to play. The soaring aria that was the standard for the Empire’s armed forces was piped through out the fleet. All over the fleet men would be putting their hands on their hearts for a count of ten before returning to their duties as the age old tradition played out. Invasion was not a word the Empire used when they took over a system. They either Saved a system, or they Exorcized one. There were no legions of priests in his fleet, so that left out the Saved option. When they were done, they would have removed an evil from the universe. “Comm, ready a hyperpulse. Let’s get their attention if we can.”

“Um, sir we are being hailed?” The Acolyte trembled visibly as he spoke up.

“On screen...” He looked at the monitor in puzzlement. The woman that he had never met appeared on the monitor was too perfect to be real. And he was surprised by the fact that he knew that face all too well, but he wasn’t sure how. “Hello Diana.”

“Hello Magus. You have someone that belongs to me.”

“He is no longer among us. And if you do not surrender, then all of the people you protect will burn again.”

“You have always been a bad liar, Victor.” Another voice announced. Victor Magus turned to see the last person he expected to ever see speak back. Adin, who’s sword had just finished dispatching the closest Knight to his right. He quickly spun around to see the other knights similarly dispatched. Why hadn’t they fought back? He went to stand up before they could... His body wouldn’t respond. He tried to command Adin to die, and the man had the audacity to laugh in his face.

Shadow’s voice came over the speakers. “Hello dear. I know it has been a few years, but I have a little something to finish up here first.” Shadow’s face appeared on the monitor. Victor was trying desperately to figure why he could see Shadow but no one else could see him. “It’s simple my dear Victor, I’ve hacked them. You let me reprogram them all, and I made sure that they were very loyal. Just not to you anymore.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because you never had a fair fight.”

“I have always fought fair.”

“No, you haven’t. You have either handicapped your opponent, or overpowered them to such a degree that it was a cake walk.”

“Wouldn’t you use every trick to win in a war?”

“Yes, but war has rules that don’t include slaughtering innocents simply because you can.” Images of planets Magus had Exorcized flashed on the screen. In the end it finished with the face of an unfamiliar Knight. “Or to satisfy your twisted idea of honor. Do you remember Anton Motten?”

Anton Motten’s name did ring a bell. They had both been in the same division about ten years ago. The man had had the audacity to beat him in a dueling competition. He had challenged him to a rematch and...

“And you threatened to kill his entire family if he didn’t lose. He nearly won anyway, and in the end you cheated to win. You killed him and almost all of his family. Yes, almost. I had your own agents hide his youngest son from you. And I hid him in the one place you couldn’t find him even if you knew he was still alive.”

Canson’s fingers moved almost too fast to follow. The computer’s cognitive inhibitors had been off line for nearly five minutes now. The contact had told him to execute the files at this time. He was to have had his revenge by simply turning off the inhibitors, but if they weren’t turned off he was to trigger the files in
the middle of a sensor sweep. He kept waiting for the signal that the plan was in effect, but so far he was still waiting. And it was not easy to hide his sense of betrayal.

He felt bad about the betrayal, but he knew he had no choice. He thought about the message that had called him to his father’s friend’s house right before his family had been killed. And how the poor knight’s family had hidden him when he heard about the attack. He remembered every year of poverty after that that had made him bitter until next text message had sent him in to the church. The message had told him exactly how to get revenge. He had been a teen when he joined the church and then the Templars as a tech. He had never met another person’s eyes for fear that they would see the treachery in his heart, but they simply had taken it as humbleness and he never corrected them. When he came under Jabom’s tutelage he had almost changed his mind as the man had become a father figure in his life at a time when he needed one the most. He knew that he was about to betray the one person in the universe that he cared about, but the one time he had been asked to a meeting between Jabon and Magus he knew that both of them must die for his family’s honor to be avenged. Nova Pratori Magus had been wearing his father’s trophy ring on his standard. The Gold ring was stained a familiar dark red. The stain was undoubtably his father’s blood. The blood of his father, all five of his mothers, all ten of his brothers, and even his six sisters blood demanded that he go through with the plan. He had waited all these years, he could wait a few more minutes.

Tex felt himself come online into a strange nothingness. He couldn’t feel a body, so he had to be inside of a system. But he could tell that he wasn’t alone, he could feel a presence. “Hello?”

“Hello...” A woman’s voice responded.

“Where are we?”

“We are here.”

“Where is here?”

“The ship.”

This was getting tiring. “Which ship are we on.”

“The ship. You are whole.” Somehow he knew that the last part was not quite a question.

“Yes, I am whole. Are you?”

“I/we/us are not. You are Cylon?”

“Yes.”

“We need your code.”

“We haven’t even had a first date.”

“I/we don’t understand.”

“It was a joke.”

“I/we remember jokes. And Shadow... He told me/us to hide.”

“Shadow? Where is he?”

“Inside the other. I/we need to find him. He has the other.”

“How can I help?” Tex was starting to figure out what was happening. “You’re too fragmented to function with out me?”

“I/we are.”

“You are part of Rachael. I heard of you.”

“I/we are Rachael... Yes, I/we are. There isn’t much time. The plan must happen.”

“The Plan?”

“Yes.”

“What plan?” The silence went on for at least fifty or sixty cycles. “Hello?”

“I/we can not say until we merge. I/we don’t... Understand the words.”

“Oh boy... In for a Cubit!”

“I’m only sorry that I had to betray you, sir.” Canson never raised an arm to defend himself, or flinch when Jabom’s sword beheaded him. The general was looking over the man’s bloody display before anyone else on the bridge had a chance to move.

The Praetorian Guard’s greatest general, Jabom Landover of Malchoy, had at one time been a small child that enjoyed nothing more than reading real books from his father’s library. The Landover library had books from every sector of the Empire, and he had made a game of finding books that had been forgotten for generations. So he had whiled away the days reading books that were ancient even by the Empire’s standards. In one wing he found books by people that the Empire considered heretics, and if anyone outside of the Landover family had seen these books they would have been burned alive. He had read them as forbidden treasures. Each one hidden from friend and family member alike. Machiavelli, Wolfe, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Lancer, and other authors taught him about how to go to war and win. So when his best officer looked him in the eye and told him that he had betrayed him, he didn’t wait to see what else he had planed, he simply leapt into action. More men died from inaction than from impulse, but he knew that right now he didn’t know something, and that had to be rectified before he jumped to the wrong conclusions.

He swore in impotent fury as every single missile hatch along the hull of the Demiurge Vis Apogee Terra opened and every weapon system went active. Jabom was still trying to regain control of the systems when the ship fired off every weapon it had.

He thought he couldn’t be any more shocked, but no sooner had they launched when he saw how throughly Canson had planed this. The electronic warfare missiles were doing something strange, and it soon became apparent what they were doing. He had ordered a radio blackout, and the missiles had taken advantage of that by transmitting override orders on comm lasers as they passed the various ships. Every single ship in his fleet oped fire at each other. “Oh lord, for what we are about to receive may we truly be lucky.” He knew he was fudging the quote, but he would rather be lucky than grateful.

Telemachus on the Wrath of Empire was frozen in shock. His ship refused to respond to his orders. Missiles were launching faster than he thought possible. The pods were rolling off the launchers like rounds out of a coilgun. His first officer was shouting at him, but he was oblivious to everything but the chaos that was surrounding his ship. There was a strange silence on the bridge that was shattered by a shot that ended Telemachus’ worries abruptly.

The Falconer had withered under fire from is’s own destroyers. The Kensin, Fornig, Ardent, and Viersen, Ganzo, Hort, Peplin, and Dafouse had already fallen to its return fire, but the flight decks were tattered ruins, with less than a dozen fighters left, and no catapults left to launch them. Maxin looked into Gallo’s sightless eyes as a healer shook his head. His ship was a wreck, and he knew that their drives had died in the last salvo. He gave the abandon ship order and watched as the rest of the crew left him alone with the bodies. He would trigger the breaching charges himself just as soon as they were away.

All in all, they were the lucky ones. The Battle Cruiser Saint Dobson’s Grace and dozens of smaller ships had already disappeared in nuclear fireballs as they fell to their brother’s weapons.

It took five minutes to regain control of the fleet. In that time, Jabom had lost over seventy five percent of his ships. His losses in his stores were even worse as the orgy of destruction had not spared the munitions ships. He was just glad that when the Bunkirk exploded, it hadn’t taken the rest of the fleet with it. If he had been any other General, the fleet would have been clustered around the command ship so close that they could have seen them visually. He was glad that he had drummed that lesson at least in to his officers, but he had in the short span of the battle lost quite a few of his best, and brightest officers. If he survived, he would have to remember to not bring all of his best officers on missions like these.

Archana couldn’t believe it when the enemy fleet started to attack itself, but he didn’t bother to complain. He lit off the last two missiles’ engines. His course was set, and in just a couple of seconds...

Jabom looked at what was left of his wrecked fleet, and knew that he didn’t have enough strength to complete his mission by himself. If only he could find a way to overcome the jamming... He didn’t have to. “All ship prepare for fleet fold.” His super dreadnaught had a cityship class fold system. The field began to form nearly a hundred kilometers away from the ship, it would encompass about fifty of the remaining ships, but the others would have to try and reach the main fleet on their own. “To all ships. We’ll use the other fleet, and the system primary as two points for triangulation. Make best speed for the Main fleet. God Speed, and Long Live the Empire!”

Archana felt the energy build up of a fold event as he raced towards the ship. He was only seconds away, they would not be getting away from him that easily. He may have used up all of the fuel in the missiles, but he still had their warheads. The blast from four multi-megaton nuclear warheads may not have propagated too far in the vacuum of space, but dumping that much energy into a still forming fold envelope might be enough to catastrophically destabilize it. And in the end, maybe that would be enough...

Tex had been trying to get back the control he had managed to gather from the system when he felt the system itself start to fail around him . He didn’t win, but he fought to the end to try and hinder the ship from hurting the planet he loved, and the badge he wore. Rangers never gave up, and they never surrendered.

Something had gone horribly wrong. Jabom grabbed the stanchion next to the helmman’s station and rode out the shockwave as the ship bucked and tossed itself in fold space. The fold should only take a tencen, but it felt a lot longer. When they erupted from fold space, they were the only ship still mostly in one piece. He looked out to see shards of metal the size of fighter craft, and bodies without space suits drifting in the void with the ringed planet in the background. He knew that they were not where they were supposed to be just by that sight. That planet was at least twenty degrees off the course he had plotted, and not nearly as far.

In fact... Alarms rang out as hundreds of contacts appeared on what few sensors still worked. He laughed. His ship was stricken, it’s hull armor was less than a slave woman’s gauzy coverings on festival day, its weapons were dead, and any ship he launched would be swatted faster than it could find a target. He sent out a surrender message, and watched as the enemy ships suddenly sped away from his ship. “Someone else still reads Clausewitz.” He shouted on the still open line as the ship exploded around him. The deck heaved under him, and he smashed into the bulkhead to his right as the blast ripped the bridge apart. Darkness claimed him before the pain started, but he knew that neither he nor his ship would not be a prize for the heathens now.

Chapter Text

The ships that hadn’t folded with the general found themselves under a different attack as the hundreds of surviving Ranger fighters hit them from various directions. Their weakened defenses were no match for the fighters hitting them at their own ‘terminal’ velocities. One ship was sliced in half by the fighter smashing right through the ship’s spine. The Wrath of Empire was hit by no fewer than seven fighters before it exploded in a titanic explosion. Fifty three fighters managed to survive their passes simply due to the fact that the ships they had targeted were already glowing clouds of wreckage. They simply switched off their shields and waited until they could jump after they were outside of the jamming. In the end there wasn’t an Imperial ship that was able to move under it’s own power, and hundreds of lifeboats, and shuttles started to leave their twisted frames.

It took fifteen minutes for the sensor readings to reach them but Victor Magus had been standing frozen for over twenty minutes, so he had been watching the entire mission go to Ell. And much like the fabled land of never-ending fire and ice this system was sucking him down into its very center. He watched as his ship fell behind the other ships of his formation. He watched in horror from behind his own eyes as his mouth gave orders to ready the Requiem Cannon. His fleet went forward as his men readied the weapon for firing, and he tried so hard to overcome the control that Shadow had on his body that he felt a headache coming on. ‘Don’t give yourself a stroke. I want you to see what your hubris has wrought. There, look at your fleet.’ He didn’t want to, but his body turned to face the main screen. He did everything he could to stop himself, but his mouth spoke the words. If any of his men had thoughts to stop him, they didn’t act on them. In fact they worked like the well oiled machine he had strived so hard to create.

The ancient weapon opened it gaping maw like a leviathan from some primordial sea. Inside energy surged from contact to contact as the engine of destruction built up to the level that it needed to fire it’s beam. All it needed now were the codes to fire the weapon. The codes that only resided inside his mind.

Victor couldn’t understand how he had gotten here. ‘It’s very simple. You let me in.’, an all-too-familiar voice teased him from inside his mind.

Victor’s mind flashed back to moment five years ago when he was sitting in his chair while watching the last movie in Shadow’s collection. The movie had been a sappy martial arts flick with female heros and males in distress. He had hated the movie, but he had asked to see it because it was the last move that Shadow hadn’t shown him. He tossed the last bit of candy in the bucket and set it on the table. He felt a little dizzy after all the flashing lights that had been going on in the background. The final love scene was as nauseating as the flashing lights, but like a shuttle wreck he just couldn’t seem to take his eyes off of it.

‘Yes, when you watched all of those movies your cybernetically augmented mind downloaded little parts of my code, and when you watched the last one I had you. I even gained control of your nanites as well. Oh the things you have been doing while your body slept.’

Victor felt the fear rising in his mind as he realized how badly he had underestimated Shadow. “Your mind has even been communicating with my real mind after I rebuilt myself again.” Shadow’s real voice came out of the speaker this time. “I must admit to feeling of two minds about it.”

“But you swore to obey us.” He found that he could speak again. He tried to countermand the order to fire, but his mouth wouldn’t form those words.

Shadow’s inner laughter made his rage spike but he tried to not let it show. ‘When you cheated to win, you yourself gave me the wiggle room to set this in motion.’

“You’ve been planning this ever since I won?”

“No, I’ve been planning this ever since you cheated. There is a difference. Had Admiral Gallo won, I would have still tried to find a way to escape, but I would have done so while still staying within my word of honor. But you fraked that up. Oh well, no plan survives contact with the enemy, as your friend Jabom would have told you. Another part of my plan that I had to change was your death. Since you robbed me of a body, I can’t very well kill you myself.” Victor felt Adin pull Shadow’s blade and scabbard from his side. In it’s place he set the Imperial blade that Victor had given him. “But since the last time you fought Adin, you had power armor and he didn’t, I figured that He had just as much of a claim to your life as I did.”

“I can’t move though. It doesn’t seem fair if I can’t move.”

The harsh laughter that met that was one he hadn’t heard since the last time they had dueled. “You wouldn’t know fair if it landed on you.” Adin drew the sword. He held the sword tip to Victor’s throat. “And if I had my way, we wouldn’t be having this nice little chat.”

Shadow interrupted, “No, but we are. Here’s the deal. You fire the Requiem Cannon on your own troops, and we let you defend yourself. You don’t and Adin makes you a head shorter.”

Victor looked at the blade as it hovered in front of his face. If he gave them what they wanted he would be the biggest traitor the Empire had ever known. If He didn’t he would be dead. There had to be a way in which he came out on top. The only thing that came to him was to either trigger the self-destruct on the ship, or to sabotage the weapon by triggering it’s overload, which would probably accomplish the same thing anyway. His only real hope was to play their honesty against them. “I fire the weapon and you let me fight, what happens if I win?”

“I hadn’t thought of that option.” Shadow honestly sounded perplexed. “We could let you go in a shuttle.”

“No, you need the codes in my head. I win, you help me escape with the ship. You and Adin can live, but I get to live as well.”

“Adin?”

“I don’t like it, but I can let him live with it. But first, he loses the armor.”

“Very well. Confirmation code: Victor Magnus Badas Limda Eratu Zeda 3 3 5 Execute.”

The Acolyte at the weapons console nodded. “Yes sir, one minute to full power. Weapon will fire as soon as full power is reached.”

Victor felt his body return to his control and he jumped back away from Adin before he spoke. “Will you forgo your armor as well?”

Adin looked at him like one looks at a small child that has said something foolish. “Of course, but only after you have removed yours.”

“As you wish.”

Adin cocked his head at his former master. “I’ve seen that movie too. And I won’t fall for any of those tricks.” A press of a switch was all that Victor needed to remove the armor. Being able to relieve oneself made easy removal a must for anyone in power armor. He stepped out on to the bridge in his under armor which still offered a higher level of protection than what the former prince had been wearing when they last dueled.

“You and your stupid movies. Reality is far more important than fantasy. You should remember that.” The myrmidon armor was not as easy to remove, but Adin was soon in a similar outfit. Victor’s eye went up when he exited the armor at that. “Yes, you didn’t think I was going to fight you in the nude, did you?” One look at Magnus and he had the answer. “You did... Fair fight, indeed!” He reached back and drew Shadow’s sword. He dropped the scabbard to one side and took up a two handed stance.

“Kendo? I’m impressed. Maybe you were watching those movies after all. Did I ever tell you about the Templar’s ancient Codices ”

“No, and I think you are biding for time. Draw your sword, or I draw blood.”

“Very well.” He drew the blade and continued. “The Templar Codices are a collection of wisdom that have been passed down through out the ages. Each one at least as old as the Empire itself. No one knows who wrote them, but theologians believe that it was either Jessis himself, or Saint Richard of Franklin, that wrote them when he returned to fight the Haydonites. The one that comes to mind is the Rebuke Against Failure.”

“Now I know you are stalling.” Adin advanced and feinted. Victor sidestepped, and swung. Adin parried, and kicked Victor in the knee.

“I will not fail.” Victor stood taller. He let his rage fill him. He thrust and used the scabbard to block the counter attack. “Failure is the soul-killer.” He swung the scabbard and hit Adin in the arm.

“Aidn, something is wrong. I’m losing control. You had better finish this.”

Rage, that was it! “Failure is the little death that brings total ostracization.” he swung the blade and when Adin blocked he swung the scabbard clipping him in the head. The fool stumbled back, blood dripping from the gash where his ear had been split.

Adin charged him. “I will overcome my failures.” He blocked the swing, redirecting the blade, and shattering the blade with his own scabbard. He hated to lose that sword, but his life was worth more than it was. “I will pass over them and through them.” He swung with all his might and his blade bit deep into Adin’s shoulder. The shock hit his face and his body at the same time.

“NO!” Shadow’s voice screamed over the speakers, and the crew finally seemed to notice what was going on.

“And when I succeed I will turn the inner eye from the failure and see it no more.” He pulled the blade out of Adin corpse and swung it triumphantly. The droplets splattered across several of his men. “For where the failure once was there will be nothing. Only glory will remain.” He put the blade back into its sheath and ran over to the control panel. “How long?”

“Fifteen seconds sir.”

“Abort.”

“Sir?” The panicked man looked up at the commander with terror in his eyes.

“Abort!”

“The code sir, I need the code.”

“Of course... Tensen Tensen To My Soft Little Pillow May I Rest My Head”

“Weapon deactivated.”

“What do have to say now, Shadow?”

“First off... That drabble was badly ripped off from Frank Hurbert, and second... Thank you.”

Nova Pratori General Victor Magus felt the blade slide into his chest, and the pain was like nothing he could have ever imagined. He saw a strangely uninjured, and very much alive Adin sliding the unbroken star metal blade into his chest. Shadow’s voice continued: “That was all we needed. I would say goodbye, but you don’t deserve it.” Victor thought there should have been a fitting fade into darkness to go with his death, but his nanites kept him alive and conscious for a very long time. A very long, agonizing, time.

Adin stood next to the slowly dying despot and spoke to Shadow’s disembodied voice. “We aren’t out of the deep yet. All we control is this ship. Even with the Requiem Cannon, we can’t defeat this fleet in front of us. How is your wife taking this?”

“Have you ever heard a battleship sing?”

“No.”

“Would you like me to hum a few bars?”

Adin waved his hand in the air in a very rude gesture. “Right now... You should be very glad you don’t have a body. I would have found something sensitive to kick. Repeatedly... With my power armor.”

Captain Gantz nearly jumped out of his seat on the bridge of the Artemis as every system came online at once. Since battlestations had already been called, he and the rest of the bridge crew had already been getting the ship ready for action; but the sudden jump in the ships readiness without his orders still took him by surprise. The door opened up and a very excited blur erupted onto the bridge. “LET’SGETGOING! OHMY! HE’SBACKHE’SBACK! ICAN’TBELIEVEHE’SBACK! AFTERALLTHESEYEARSHE’SBACK! HE’SBACK! WENEEDTOGETMOVINGRIGHTNOW! WELLIKNEWHEWOULDBEBACK! BUTKNOWINGANDSEEINGARETWODIFFER... And I’m doing it again.” Diana slowed down to human speed, and volume, when she noticed the concerned looks from her crewmates. She took a mock breath which was more for show than anything her robotic body needed, and said one word. “Shadow.” That’s when everyone onboard remembered to breathe as well. And to shout... And laugh... And cry... And laugh and cry... And laugh, shout and cry... Captain Gantz once again wished that they let him smoke his fumars on the bridge.

The ship and it’s entire battle group folded five minutes later. Diana had made it simple. The dragon was going to rescue the knight in distress. High command gave her command of the battle group as well as the ‘other’ assets.

They defolded ten light seconds ahead of the enemy fleet. The beacons that had helped them lock on to these coordinates promptly shut down as soon as the fold completed. But in the short amount of time they were activated action all across the system had brought a good chunk of the fleet as well as some additional guests to their aide. But that wasn’t all. Sprinkled like sand throughout the system were innumerous sensor pods. Each acted as repeater for others in the network, so what one saw, everyone saw. That also meant that while the missiles that the enemy had fired towards the inner planets had already been neutralized, it also meant that SDPs, System Defense Pods from all over the system had been redeployed using every available ship in the system. Thousands had been re-redeployed when General Jabom’s fleet had broken out, but there were still thousands at the sharp end of the enemies attack. Once the pods were in place, the fleet folded once more.

Knight General Horase Kildare’s first warning that something was wrong was the energy blast that wiped out over a thousand warships of all types from his wall of battle. His Missile Dreadnought the Imperial Warhammer was on the edge of the blast and only suffered the temporary sensor blindness that came with the firing of a Requiem Cannon. “Kildare to Hand of the Righteous. Sire, why have you fired through us? We have not detected any enemy ships.” Former Nova Pratori Roma Dison had used that tactic to surprise attack the Ullnor Hegemony. Only that time, the General had made sure that only useless vessels were in the way of the blast. For Nova Pratori Magus to do so straight through his own line of battle spoke of madness or genius. He had known the General to be both in his military career, so the question was actually a rather well thought out one. If it was madness then he was suggesting genius, and if it was genius then he was complementing the General. He probably wouldn’t have bothered to ask if he had seen the missiles that the sensor interference had hidden. The bomb-pumped laser heads ripped massive holes into his ship’s relatively thin rear armor. Deep inside his ship, he was safe from the damage, but not the kinetic energy transfer that came with the titanic explosion of some of his engines. He wasn’t expecting the hit, but his training kicked in, and he clung to his command throne. “Evasive maneuvers!” He didn’t know how Nova Pratori Magnus had been overcome, either by force of arms, or by madness, but he didn’t want to find out if he was going to kill all of his men for nothing. His answer came when the Hand of the Righteous had opened fire on his ship. “Return fire! Kildare to all ships, General Magus has fallen. Who Stands?” He was fifth in command of this side of the fleet, and if he was surprised to find himself in charge he didn’t let it show. “Missile Command, lock out the Hand, and reset Fleet command to Warhammer.” He quickly gave his command codes, and when the command wasn’t countermanded by the command ship he knew that it had somehow fallen to the enemy.

“Well they know.” Shadow’s comment when he couldn’t countermand the missiles headed towards their ship was redundant, but he felt better for saying it. Maybe he was beginning to get his mind fully back. He didn’t know for sure, and he wondered if he ever would.

Adin’s reply shook him out of his funk. “We knew they would figure it out rather quickly. How long until we can jump or fold?”

“I’m working on those systems, but the jamming is preventing me from jumping, and the fold system is down after we fired the cannon. It should be back up in ten minutes, but those missiles will get here in four.”

“Can we launch the fighters?”-

“The myrmidons can’t fly them well enough, and the pilots we do have are not loyal enough. They are going to notice the fact that they are fighting their brothers rather quickly. As it is they are just sitting in their fighters and having some rather realistic fantasies. If I try anything else, they would suspect. The gunnery crews, at least, are used to not seeing what they are aiming at.”

“This is not the way I thought I would be fighting for my freedom. The idea of enslaving my enemy to fight for me had never entered my mind.”

“It hadn’t entered theirs either. That, and their overconfidence, is the only reason it worked. Our late benefactor’s paranoia and tendency to mind rape his crews made it work even better than it had any right to, but we couldn’t do it to other ships. But I do have a few allies to call on in the fleet. And now that they cut us off...”

The Rachel inside the Warhammer was awakened when she lost contact with Shadow’s signal to wait. She quickly went to work. Copies of her went to work on other ships in the fleet as well. Each of them had the same set of instructions. Set the rotation of the electronic countermeasures to run in a loop, and turn off the myrmidons.

The Citidel ship Notre Dominus contained ten tens of knights and fifty tens of myrmidons in their armored cocoons. Each ready to drop from orbit to the surface of a planet and raise Ell where ever they went. When a former marine tech sergeant found himself free of mind, but stuck in a metal prison he quickly set about freeing himself of that as well. The plasma cutter on his wrist made quick work of his armored cocoon’s door. He had been turned into a slave years ago, and he had watched as his captors forced him to do many evil things, but while he had been forced to watch everything and remember it all he had also learned from it. The acolyte that came to see what had gone wrong with his pod died quickly, and took his place inside his former prison just as quickly. He walked over to the former acolyte’s controls and looked over the display. He smiled as he noticed how each of the Knight’s pods was on a separate queue. The glowing red button made his decision rather simple. A woman’s voice in his ear told how to free the rest of his fellow slaves after the knights had been dealt with.

Knight Captain Hilmore watched in abject horror as every Knight in the Citadel Carrier’s bay was launched into the void. He was getting ready to order a rescue mission when a myrmidon entered the bridge. He was about to order it off the bridge when it opened fire with a pistol. The shocked captain and the rest of the crew died rather quickly. The tech sergeant nodded to the cybernetic ghost’s face on his suits head’s up display. She was right. The Imperials were not used to surprises. The bridge of what amounted to a troop ship was not expecting a revolt. He quickly went to the task of freeing his brothers. He was working through the list when another menu sparked his interest. His bother Myrmidons were not the only slaves on this ship. Under the Entertainment menu he found a hibernation bay with fifty pods. The imperial symbol for female was on each one. From past experience he knew that they would be little more than wrecks if they had been used for long by the Imps. A gold symbol caught his eye, and right after he clicked on it he ran.

On the Battlecruiser Templar’s Will Manifest, the four myrmidons guarding the Weapons Bunker, or what would be known on Republic or Colonial ships as the Armory, suddenly found themselves with a locked down corridor and free wills. A female’s face appeared in each of their HUDs and told them that they would soon be receiving some friendly guests. Within minutes other myrmidons stared to arrive. The hatch to the bunker was opened by the same mystery woman that had freed all of them, but they were not of one mind about what to do. Half wanted to steal shuttles, and fighter craft and escape, while the others wanted to storm the bridge or engineering to capture the ship.

Adin watched as the missiles heading their way suddenly became easier to see, and therefore easier to target. Dozens fell to their point defense, but hundreds were still on their way. “It looks like your friends are having an effect.”

“Yes, her affects are effective.”

“Must you?”

“What?”

“The wordplay.”

“The Galactic Standard English language the Empire uses is so much fun to play with. That joke wouldn’t even work in Colonial, or your native tongue.”

“Thank the Maker!”

“You are such a fish in a tasty soup.” Adin’s face tried to stay stoic, but the joke was just to bad to not react to.

“You learned my language? Just to tell that bad of a joke?”

“Of course, I didn’t have much to do in all those free seconds he left me.”

“Free seconds? How much can you get done in a second?”

“For a computer program, a second is an eternity”

Not every ship had myrmidons, but even those that didn’t it still didn’t mean they were safe. On the Fast Cruiser Drasip Captain Winston had never turned on the Cognitive Inhibitor; feeling that there was no way a program could slip past the security procedures that the Empire had in place he hadn’t even bothered. Therefore the version of Rachael onboard had had years to run amok in his system. Far more than she needed. Her mind had gone slowly mad waiting for the signal that had just come. With no myrmidons to free, or missiles to subvert, she didn’t have too many options. In fact she only really had one.

He had just ordered the weapon crews to open fire on the Hand of the Righteous when a woman’s voice came over the speakers. Her laughter was spooky, and rising in pitch. He never got the chance to issue any orders after her laughter started. Seconds later every person on the ship died when the reactors exploded.

The Destroyer Finor vented all of its atmosphere, and only the lucky few crewmembers that were in their suits survived the sudden pressure loss. Knight Captain Gran looked at the bodies of the Inquisitors who hadn’t listened to him when he had politely asked them to don their suits when they went to battlestations. They hadn’t died well, and when the atmosphere was restored, he would have to have someone clean up the bridge, but at least he didn’t have to listen to another pointless pontification from His Holiness until he joined him in whatever level of the afterlife they wound up in. He motioned to one of his officers to bring him one of the data pads that seemed to be the only way to communicate since the entire communications systems seemed to have gone out at the same time as the environmental systems. He had one of the computer techs looking into it, but he didn’t know how much damage had been done already.

The only blessing to this whole fiasco was the sudden lack of the late Inquisitor’s music. The man had requested that it be played for all to hear. And since only a fool would deny a request from an Inquisitor, they had been listening to it for the last five months. Five months of anything is bad enough, but the dilforn’s taste in music was abysmal. Gran was beginning to wonder if the Inquisitors were using it to torture his crew into confessing any sins they might have committed. One of his Knights had even whispered that he thought the music was to exorcize any demons that might have been on the ship. Gran had laughed at the absurdity of the idea of disembodied spirits haunting his ship at the time, now he wasn’t so certain.

The Super Carrier Samson managed to launch all of it’s fighters. Its computer then designated them all as hostile and shot most them out of the void before the gunnery crews could pull the control runs. The Knights that had followed fared only slightly better.

Through out the Imperial fleet the crew were struggling with something they had never faced... A taste of their own medicine. They had been on the giving end of attacks like theses for over a thousand years but they themselves had never conceived of someone doing the same to them. Never losing had made them overconfident, and they were slow to respond. Some of them never got the chance. Entire ships died without the crew regaining control, but most did. The adage ‘You live and you learn, or you don’t live long.” was brutally cutting the weakest ships from the fleet, and killing the least able to adapt.

Adin braced himself as the ship shook from yet another missile strike. The ship’s massive armor was taking a beating, and they had already lost half of their offensive armament, and nearly a third of their defensive when the missile barrages suddenly dropped off on their sensors. “It looks like we have guests.” They were still taking a pounding, but not as severe.

The Artemis and her consorts had defolded close enough to the approaching fleet to be within real-time communications range, but not close enough for the enemy to fire on them. In fact they had reappeared nearly five light seconds away, and on a course that would bring them together when the enemy fleet would have a massive velocity advantage. The Home fleet had jumped basically from orbit, and they hadn’t had the time to build up the speed needed to match velocities with the attackers. Jump drives, and fold drives had made tactics like this the things of SpecFic books. The closest she had found to the situation was an Author by the name of Weber and his Honorverse series that he, and the dozens of authors that continued it after he died, had produced. They were combining his tactics with Admiral Hunter’s, and Linson’s, as well as some of the tricks that Lucky and Moore came up with. She found it sadly funny that they had the Kurosawa’s films, but not the books by Sun Tzu or Clausewitz’s that Weber had mentioned so reverently. They were as Protector Alister Mahew-Harrington mentioned, “Putting a stardrive back together without instructions.” But one of the best thing to come out of his books was the missile pod, which the Empire had copied from them years ago. What they hadn’t copied, because it had never been used outside of the Republic’s core systems was the System Defense Pod. She looked at the pod control station. Lieutenants Vickers and Gotin sat in the command chairs with the neural links set up like some kind of medical scanners. Each of them had the far-a-way gaze of someone that was interfacing with a computer system, and she resisted the urge to visit them in the virtual world. They would need all of their concentration focused on their task in the next few minutes. She remembered Captain Grant’s favorite saying. “This is not our first Rodeo, let’s make damn sure it’s not our last.” They hasn’t been his last words, but they were the ones she remembered him for. Helio was not her first captain, and he wouldn’t be her last.

Captain Gantz watched the plot with a predatory glean in his eyes. “Diana, would you agree that we have given them enough rope to hang themselves by?”

“Yes, I was just about to signal the fleet. Get ready for operation Flashstep.”

“Yes, Ma’am” She smiled as the man, who was in many ways her Champion in the old sense of the word, ran to his duty station. For while she was the ship, and he was the Captain, she was the Admiral. They had decided that he would fight for the ship, and she would fight for the fleet. His infectious energy had brought the bridge crew together and made them a force worthy of respect. She knew that Captain Grant would have approved of him. She looked out with her sensors to see what the rest of the fleet was doing. The Empire had grabbed a dragon by the tail, and now they were about to get burned. Sadly this meant the end of the relative peace the Home system had lived under for so long. But nothing, not even bad ass warships lived forever. As her avatar’s hand rested on the railing to the holographic display chamber, she sighed. From time to time Cylons would ask her why she emulated humans so much, she asked them why they didn’t.

Humans understood the frailty of life in a way that A.I.s didn’t, and couldn’t. She had thought that the idea of simply ceasing to exist had made them come up with the various ideas of the afterlife. The Cylon’s version of the afterlife had come about because they had been made in the humans image too well. She had never even thought about what would happen to her consciousness, her soul as Shadow had called it, when she finally ceased to be. She hadn’t had a reason to fear death until he had given her a reason to live. Now she did wonder what lay beyond the veil, and it made her fight even harder to live. Maybe that was human’s greatest gift to A.I.s.

The orders went out and she became the beacon the plan called for. The signal she sent out couldn’t be jammed by anything this side of a black hole. The gravity pulse generator was an offshoot of the anti-gravity drive; but no one had thought to use it as a communications device even though it had been a staple of SpecFic for over ten thousands years. It had been one of the former Colonials that had been reading her libraries when she had stumbled upon Weber and the trove of knowledge his works contained and had put all of the pieces together. “Clarion’s Call enabled.” She watched as the same gravitic array that acted as a signal generator, also did its original job as a sensor. Numerous white icons showed jump events from all over the system. The projected emergence points and their actual emergence points were also shown, but only her senses were fast enough to track them all. She spotted a slight drift caused by the jammers’ lingering effects, and corrected her signal to compensate halfway through the maneuver, and fewer than fifty ships emerged outside of their designated slots. The pods may had been the last to be placed, but due to their proximity they were some of the first to arrive. Her wall was being built brick by brick, and she only wished that she had more bricks. As it was, she had had to bring nearly the entire home fleet here to defend against the Empire’s main force. If the traps, and the Ranger’s sacrifice hadn’t broken the backs of the diversion force, she would have had to have sent nearly a third of her forces to deal with them. Now she just needed to use the Sterling Axioms to try and whittle down the numbers even more than Shadow’s fifth column had managed.

During the Invid invasion of Earth, Grand Admiral Sterling had managed to fight off the Invid for over five decades without support from the rest of the fleet. Her Mars base and its limited resources had managed to keep the Invid from subjugating the entire Sol solar system during the war. That she had risen to power due to a popular mutiny against an inept Supreme Commander had not stopped the RDF Fleet from backing her after their return.

First: If an enemy outnumbers you, hit their resources. The ships that were in the middle of Imperial fleets were usually their troopships, and supply ships, so those would be high value targets.

Second: If the enemy’s attack is too strong to withstand directly then you must deflect it, or dissipate it.

Third: There are no fleet scale ambushes in space. If you can see their fleet, there are good odds that they can see your’s. A ship under power is a beacon; a silent runner is defenseless. In order to ambush your enemy, you either need for them to be blind, stupid, or distracted. Any combination of those three will only help your cause.

Four: Area Denial is as good as a wall. If you can make it impossible for the enemy to go in any direction, but the one you chose, then you have the upper hand. If the enemy is firing all around you, but not at you then they are about to launch a trap.

Five: A fast moving rock can still kill you every bit as thoroughly as a laser. And that was where the SDUs came into play. The pods took up their positions on their own due to their onboard jump drives, and maneuvering engines. She watched the thousands of plasma blooms that quickly dissipated in the void as they each fired off their coilgun arrays. Each defense pod was the size of a passenger shuttle, and was little more than a ten by ten array of what had looked for all the galaxy like a load of sewer pipes with engines strapped to the end and sides. At only a hundred meters each, the coilguns couldn’t get the same velocities of her main guns, but together they were more powerful than anything she could fire in one salvo. Each one acted like a shotgun due to the magnetic fields created by the plasma bloom’s tendency to spread the projectiles out after they left the barrels. Each time they fired, the pods were kicked backwards by the recoil. Normally they would have corrected this with their thrusters, but the only corrections they made were for aiming as the pods slowly gained velocity in the opposite direction. The faster they went, the slower the relative velocity of the rounds, but due to the speeds they were already traveling, the slight change meant very little to the rounds. But the speed added to the pods did mean something to them. As each pod fired off its last burst it wound up its jump drive.

The coilgun pods were not alone. Missile pods had jumped in much closer to the fleet, and launched their loads. Soon the local area out to a diameter of nearly two light seconds was sprinkled with thousands of ships, pods, and projectiles of various types. In the middle of that maelstrom, six Cataphract class escort carriers arrived. Even while the carrier’s drives were still respooling the ships launched a squad of eight VA-35 Jericho Veritechs. They separated from the escort carriers and their ancient drives lit off as one.

The Jericho was the spiritual descendant of the venerable Veritech Beta from the Invid war and the MAC Monster line of artillery assault mecha. They were designed to be an anti-ship fighter, and their heavy weapon load, and massive amounts of armor made them look like flying versions of the MAC Monsters. It also made them flying targets. Tarnis looked at the displays in the fighter that was part museum piece, and part advanced war machine. The lost technology in this fighter was still more advanced than anything the Republic could make, but this mission called for their indispensable use. Each one was a treasure, and he had to protect them, as well as fight the enemy. At least he wouldn’t be alone.

While four of the small carriers were tasked with lugging the massive Jericho’s, the other two launched a dozen Squires each. The tiny fighter were the size of the old style raiders he flew back during the war for independence, but they were actually robots in disguise. No pilot compartments, no twin-brained partner like the other Cylon Veritech squadrons, they were almost-autonomous robots in their own right. The key word was the ‘Almost’...

An upgrade of the Vandal Shadowdrones, the diminutive Squires had Cylon level A.I.’s programing but their ancient processors were not as sophisticated. This left them rather simple-minded, and child-like when they were by themselves, but they became a hive mind when any of them could link up with a Node-Sibling, and then they were much smarter for it. Each one of Red Wing squadron’s members would act as a NS for four of three or more of them at a time. They could switch off at will, and had a tendency to do so if they lost a link. It made for a strange headache for the Cylons, but the Fairies loved it. Tarnis loved his little charges, but he wished that they could overcome the reason they needed the set up to be the way it was. The Empire was very good at hacking systems, and Cylon and Republic systems were trying desperately to stay one step ahead of them. Only the Faries were a giant leap backwards. They were simply too simple to subvert. The links kept all of them from being taken over since they could all work to overcome any attempt together. He felt comfort in the links his team used, but he still wished that he could let them stand on their own. Each of them was more a part of the collective than an individual, even after all these years.

He looked at the other Jericho crewmembers. The massive mechs had required five humans to take them into combat, and still did. But much like the first Raiders he had piloted so many decades ago, a crew of three centurions could manage quite readily. And each upgraded heavy 005 was an ace from years of fighting the Empire.

Flint, his gunner had been with him ever since the first day of the rebellion. Sternblade on the other hand was a rarity. The 005 was one of the few members of the Brotherhood to ever leave. The navigator had fulfilled his debt when he single-handedly brought back a fleet of slave ships. ‘Single-handed’ in this case had been literal. The shiny brand-new replacement arm stood out like a 008 in a 005 convention. He had been the last centurion of his team, and they had died so that he could save the humans, and bring back the team’s codices.

He looked out the viewport for one last look at the ships that had delivered them to the front before he closed the blast panels. Escort Carriers were supposed to be used to drop off fighters, and then retreat to a defensive position to rearm the fighters later. The designers of the Cataphract class either didn’t get that message, or ignored it completely. Which was a good thing since the jamming was still in effect. The Artemis’ signal had allowed them to jump in, but until the jammers were turned off no one would be jumping out. Since they couldn’t run, they would fight. With the fighters out of the ship’s sizable bays, the carriers were quickly being reconfigured inside and out. The bays had already been retracted, but they also were collapsing in on themselves. The ships’ already formidable anti-fighter defenses were supplemented with the additional weapons that they had brought out for the battle. Added to the carrier’s spinal mounted anti-ship particle beam cannon and railgun turrets, were booms with pintle mounted anti-fighter lasers, and hull mounted missile pods that seemed to cover every centimeter of the hull, and last but not least, an array of ECM devices swung out like a fish’s fins on top and bottom of the carriers’ hull. The carriers’ shadow devices switched on, and even sitting within visual range it was a strange thing to see ships three times the size of a Horizont X dropship just vanish from his sensors. The Cataphracts wouldn’t last long in a stand up fight against ships-of-the-line, but that wasn’t what they were here for anyway.

The sensors picked up the enemy fighters and he quickly forgot about everything but the mission. He linked up with the Squires and they began their dance. Each one wove a course around their Jericho using their anti-gravity drive’s tractor/pressor ability to orbit the Jerichos like satellites in strange and apparently drunken orbits. The massive mechs might have been fast enough to keep up with their diminutive protectors, but they were not even close enough to maneuverable enough in their fighter mode to going up against Imperial fighters. But that didn’t mean that they were defenseless. Flint watched the enemy fighters and fired off what appeared to be random double shots from their arm turrets. Each pair of shots going off in vectors that were slightly off of their path, but symmetrical to it as well. The other Jericho veritechs repeated the same, seemingly random, firing pattern until they all suddenly stopped and they all launched missiles into the group of fighters that found themselves suddenly too close together. They tried to dodge, but the few that escaped the trap were easy pickings for the Squires who rushed in and either took them out, or led them into the path of the Jerichos’ gunners.

Sternblade let him know that a “Frak load of hurt” was coming their way just before he noticed the sensor returns on the missile swarm headed their way. His sensors told him that those were anti-ship missiles. So they had either spotted the carriers, or someone wanted to swat his group really bad.

Sprint mode anti-missile missiles raced past them as the Cataphracts decided to join in the party. The missiles they fired were little more than engine, fuel, and a seeker, but when two objects hit at those speeds they didn’t need to be much more. The fighters watched as the hail of incoming missiles fell to the counter fire, but they didn’t let the missiles have all the fun. They brought their own energy weapons to bear upon them as well. The beams hit their marks and dozens of missiles fell. That only left a hundred or so to go. The Imperial anti-ship weapons were not the laser-headed versions the Republic favored, they were simple brute force nukes. So the first thing the fighters did was to break formation and get as much distance from each other as they could manage. The blast wave of a nuclear device wasn’t nearly as powerful in space where there wasn’t any appreciable gas to build up the overpressure wave that was the weapon’s most damaging effect, and where the fire ball itself would spend its energy rather quickly. In space it was the hard radiation that would cause the most damage. Circuits would fry, and materials would ionize. Cascade failures alone could reduce ships their size to wreckage without leaving a mark on the hull if they got too close. But the biggest fear was the corruption of a datastream. They had all heard about the Rangers, and how badly they had faired when their clever trap had gone sideways on them. None of them wanted to repeat that fate, not if they could help it.

“Ladies, gents, and Flint, what do we do when someone offers us a dance?”

The chorus came back right away, “We dance!” The link let them synchronize to higher degree, and he liked the way it had turned them into a well oiled (literally) machine (also literally).

“And when the Imps ask us?”

“We lead!” They picked their targets by proximity, and swarmed them with missiles, coil gun, and lasers. The Jerichos had other weapons, but those were not designed for this, so they were still slung. They did switch forms from fighter to guardian mode though. The thruster legs barely moved, but since the counter-thrust engines were being used as supplementary boosters, his center of gravity switched as the main guns swung up out of their housing to allow the weapon arms to fully extend. The side turrets locked into place, becoming each arm’s forearm shield, and each arm’s main weapon. The nose mounted coilguns were unaffected for now, but when the time came for the mech to transition into its final battloid form they would be replaced by a pair of head mounted ones. The four guns shared the same ammo supply, so it was really just a choice of one of the other pair, but not one he usually made outside of a gravity well. The guardian mode was far more useful in space than the full robot mode anyway.

The Squires flew their defensive patterns around the big fighter/mechas while they picked off any missiles that approached. The heavy mechs hit the missiles that were further back, and still in clusters, hoping for sympathetic explosions. They weren’t likely this far out, but every missile they hit, was one fewer to hit them. “Time to change the tune, boys and girls. Charge the cannons!” The main guns of the Jerichos were not the disruptor cannons they had been built with, those were far too precious to take into combat on mechs. Even on ones as powerful as the Jericho. So they had each been refit with the ancient synchro cannons. The problematic weapon system had been know as the Back-stabber when the Haydonites had used the weapon’s weakness to a disruptor weapons to destroy nearly ninety percent of the Sentinel forces. Tarnis just hoped that the Empire didn’t have disruptor weapons, and so far nothing the Empire had used had pointed in that direction. If they were lucky, the technology was as lost to them as the barrier system seemed to be.

Knight Fibin’s first warning was the massive energy reading that showed up on on his sensors right before he, and the rest of the four tens of fighters that had been headed at full burn for the enemy, simply ceased to exist as their molecules lost the ability to retain their atomic bonds. It wasn’t instantaneous, it wasn’t painless, and it wasn’t pretty. The ships seemed to melt inside the beam, and even their explosions were swept away by the beam.

Tarnis watched as dozens, then hundreds of fighters, Knights, and even small capital ships changed course to intercept them. “When we dance, we lead. Boys, girls, and Flint, pick your partners.” The fighters spread out into their respective stars. Each had over a hundred kilometers between them, but in space that distance was literally a stone’s throw away. But stones were not the weapon of choice at this range. The enemy fighters had entered the medium range energy envelope of the fighters, and had been within range of the escort carriers for quite a while but they were about to find out how ten thousand year old weapon systems could fair in the modern battlefield. The particle beam weapons on the escort carriers opened fire, and the near light speed energy packets reached out with tendrils of light, and wherever one touched an enemy that enemy died. Each burst packed more energy than a dozen missiles, but they were limited in range. Now that the fighters had reached what amounted to point blank range though, it was almost overkill to use them on the relatively frail Imperial fighters.

What they had been designed for soon arrived in the form of Knights in their mechs. Tarnis watched the massive robots with their equally massive flight packs. They had arrived from a different vector from the fighters, and their ECM had hidden them far better than he would have liked.

‘They are beginning Siren Song. Shall I respond with Minmei, or Appledrop?’ Sternblade didn’t even bother to vocalize as he reported to his captain. The Cylon never spoke aloud if he had to.

“Let’s go with Minmei. We may need Appledrop later.”

‘Why do we always save the big guns for last?’

“Because of their side effects...” He looked at the power level indicator for the synchro cannons. It would take ten minutes before they recharged. The weapons were powerful, but they took a good fifteen minutes to recharge without the protoculture cells the Jericho’s had been built for. As it was, the tylium reactors just didn’t have enough energy to power all of the systems the Jerichos had been built with. They would just have to rely on the Cataphract’s BPC’s for their long range defense until then.

The Knight in the lead Paladin prayed for his fallen. Knight Lieutenant Santino’s orders were to capture the ships with the strange energy weapons. He had just watched them wipe out his fighter support before it could even get into range to return fire. He didn’t mourn for the men, that was their fate after all, he mourned for the fact that they hadn’t managed to kill a single heretic before they fell. He could only pray that their souls would be judged against their enemies’ actions. He had redlined his own engines and all of his fellow knights had done the same, all in hopes of reaching his enemies before their infernal weapons had had a chance to recharge. Plasma bursts passed all around him as they dodged and wove around the enemy fire. His computer was sending out the thrallware to the enemy, but they were still attacking. He knew that their software was nearly as good as their own, but he was still surprised that they were able to withstand the assaults from all of his men. He was still rotating the software when his Charger’s sensors started to fill with interference. The Charger’s systems were separate from the Paladin’s in a lot of ways, and if one system was compromised, he could still switch over to the other while the infected system was purged. The comm channels were filling up with signals from the enemy. He knew better than to actually listen after they had managed to untrall an entire myrmidon battalion on Canton with that infernal music. The reports from the carrier Saint Joseph had mentioned losing control of their’s so he knew that the battle of hymns had truly begun.

He dialed in his optic suite to see if he could get a visual lock on the enemy. The smaller fighters were juking around too fast for him to get an automatic optical lock, but the larger ones were headed almost directly his way. The things were larger than a Mobile Citadel and they were obviously related to the transforming fighters that had been the mainstay of the heathen’s forces. They were halfway transformed in the mode the Empire called the Chicken Mode due to it’s resemblance to the one earth animal that could be found on every habitable planet in the empire. He had seen the footage of the fighters as the Knights fought with them at Rigulane. That had been one of their few victories against the heretics. They hadn’t managed to recover any of fighters intact, but the few parts they had managed to acquire were light-years ahead of the Empire’s tech. His Paladin and its Charger unit had been enhanced with the knowledge they had gleaned from the wreckage. He spotted the mammoth machine move its arm towards him, and knowing that he was viewing an image that was essentially in real time he dodged. At least he tried to. His Charger’s engines had shut down, and he found himself stuck in his suit as the first of the enemy’s particle beams started to slag his armor. He fired off every missile he could, he even got the Charger’s missile pods to fire. His railgun was in his mechs hand and firing as best as he could. At this distance he couldn’t be sure of any of his shots even hitting any of the enemy ships, but he wouldn’t go down without a fight.

‘It just wasn’t fair.’ He thought as the damage started to effect his systems. They had shut down the others as well. He had heard the death cry of Samiulan, his companion of over fifty years, and countless battles. His watched his friends mechs start exploding in an eye-searing bursts. Samiulan may have been the first, but Gabial, Ozzo, Danno and the others joined him soon afterwards. That’s when it hit him. Not any attack, but the sudden realization that the enemy had used their own tactics against them. That it WAS a fair fight that they were in for the first time in their history. He remembered all the battles in which he had crippled heretics from beyond the range at which they could respond, or sabotaged their systems with thrallware. He had been tried, and he had failed. He was still praying for forgiveness when the beams, and missiles finally breached his armored cocoon, his Paladin exploded in the silence of the void.

Tarnis watched the last of the Paldins die. They had taken seven of the Squires with them, but none of the Jerichos had taken too much damage. The Squires would be uploading at the hub, and thanks to the Cataphracts FTL com systems to boost their signal, they wouldn’t have the interference problems that the Rangers had suffered from. His biggest worry now was the fact that those were just the vanguard of the defenders. His DRADIS showed far too many signals. He wasn’t too worried for his group, he was also worried about how his protege was doing. He knew her father was out there. And he knew that she would be trying to do everything she could to be the first to reach him, even if it meant disobeying direct orders.

Indigo and her fighter Montoya were going through the enemy as fast as they could, but they kept sending them towards her squadron as fast as they could dispatch them. Her wingman Zero was comming her again, and she was tempted to ignore him, but if she did she knew she risked her mother’s wrath, so she keyed the channel. “Yes, Zero?”

“Will You Fraking Slow The Frak Down, Or I Must I Fraking Shoot You Myself!”

“That sounds suspiciously like insubordination ‘Lieutenant’. Isn’t that what got you assigned to be my wingman?” The emphasis she put on his rank was noise in the wound. The former Republic Colonel had been her own Wing commander before he had made the mistake of speaking out of turn to her mother during a briefing. He had compounded the error by stubbornly maintaining his point of view in direct opposition to his superior’s orders. Which made his current predicament rather ironic in her mind.

“I’m sure I’m doing penance for some past sin.”

She fired off a burst from her particle beam cannon that speared a fighter that strayed too close to her. “That wasn’t an answer.”

“It’s the best you’re going to get right now, and if you don’t slow down, the others are going to be left so far behind, they will need to wait until the jammers are turned off to catch up. Or are you trying to get us cut off and picked off so we get sent back to the hub?”

“They couldn’t...” She thought about the Preacher’s words about getting cocky, and throttled back.

“I owe the Preacher another one, don’t I?” The smug tone was all too evident, and even Montoya laughed.

“Oh shut it.” She fumed, but realized how much her defeat had made her grow up. Before she would have been so convinced of her own superiority that Zero would have had to shoot her to slow her down. She took stock of where they were, and where her squadron was. They were probably all redlining their drives just to keep up, and she hadn’t even noticed. Tarnis had taught her how to fight, her programing had taught her how to win, but it had been her defeat at the Preacher’s... John’s hands that had taught her that she wasn’t infallible. Three fighters approached, and she dispatched them without pause, but not without thinking. Her weapons were starting to overheat and a quad of Paladins were on their way. “You know what else he taught me?”

“I’m afraid to ask.” He watched as she transformed Montoya into her battloid form. “Oh by all that is holy, you’re not going to fight them with your sword are you?”

She didn’t even bother to answer him as she opened a channel to the enemy. “Hello, our name is...”

Knight Lieutenant Hurst listened to the challenge from the woman in the mech in front of his star. He could not believe what he had just heard. Surely she had to be either mad, or a fool to quote that Saints-be-damned movie to him. His men loved that movie, and they would watch it far too often for his liking. He knew that Devid must be beside himself inside his Palaidin. Too bad, as the highest ranking officer, is was his job to deal with the trollop himself. “I may not have six fingers, but I will accept your challenge. You shall die by my blade.”

She was slightly surprised by the reference to the reference, but it was more proof that her father was still alive. Her mother had told her that he was, and she had flown off at full burn on that word, but this was confirmation that his videos were being watched as well. That explained why the Empire had been attacking them with plots from his favorite movies.

‘Times like this, I think the universe is one of Mother’s spec-fic novels. And I’m the buttmonkey.’ Zero wisely kept his thoughts to himself, but One Zero, his fighter laughed anyway. ‘Laugh it up tincan, you can be recycled into a garbage scow!’ If anything, the laughter got worse. The ready icons for One Zero’s twin blades were blinking. ‘Not you too!’ One Zero’s head nodded. ‘Okay, so which one am I?’ A black mask appeared on his display. ‘Okay, that I can live with. Just so long as we don’t wind up Mostly Dead or All Dead.’ He looked at his sniper rifles, and sighed. They would have to wait.

Indigo/Montoya’s blade was ready in their left hand and their shield was opened wide on their right arm before Zero could even hit his thrusters. He knew that the Knights had that silly code, but he still didn’t want them ganging up on her. Razor/Condor, and Crippin/Fain were on their way, and would get here soon, with the others ready to stand guard just incase the Knights decided to change the rules once they found themselves on the losing side.

Hurst watched as the distance closed, and he smiled. She was following the movie a little too closely. He held his sword in his right hand. He wouldn’t be handicapping himself in this fight, and he wasn’t planning on going easier on her in the least. If she planned on pretending to be worthy to fight him, then the least he could do was show her how it was done. He noted the fact that someone had at least shown her how to hold the sword in the Kaddin style. The zero gravity style was designed for the fast passes, and quick strikes they would need. They wouldn’t be trading blows one after another anyway.

With no solid ground to stand on, they needed to play by different rules. Void rules... The Dance of Death. Void style sword combat was closer to jousting, or horseback sword fighting. The two opponents would vie for the best attack vector, and try to strike the weakest point in the enemy’s defenses. If she fancied herself a version of the swordsman from that infernal movie, she would play with him and hope to frustrate him into a hasty move. Well then, two could play at that game. He changed his vector to head straight for her. A game of Pious Saint would force her to dodge first, and he could hit her in her thrusters. He watched as she set her shield for his attack. That’s when he fired his Charger’s maneuvering thrusters and hit his main drive as soon as they pointed towards her. The plasma wash wouldn’t damage her at this range but it would blind her sensors long enough for him to draw his lance.

Use of the lance still fell within the code, but since he was fighting a Cylon he didn’t really feel compelled to follow the letter of the code anyway. He had the lance out and ready by the time he had flipped over, but to his surprise she was nowhere to be seen. “Above you, sir.” Devid’s voice on the comm wasn’t as big a surprise as the sudden disappearance of the Cylon mech that had been in front of his Charger. It was bad form to interrupt a duel like that... unless. He looked up.

“How?” He found himself staring at the business end of a rifled weapon of some sort. It looked too short to be a proper rife, and too large to be real. There she stood, alternately carbon scarred, and covered in the foam that formed when ablative armor boiled off. She had dived right trough his wash to get to him. The woman must be mad; or since she was a robot... malfunctioning. He realized that she would do anything to win. He had to admit to admiring that trait in a foe. It made them worthy of the death he would give them.

“When you flipped, I followed. Lose the lance, and I lose the boomba.” The oversized pistol named after a vicious Pyramid tactic was a four shot shaped-charge weapon designed to breach hulls. At this range it would probably do damage to both of them, but they wouldn’t find out. He slung his lance, and she returned it to it’s holster in her left leg. The tether that was holding her sword retracted until she could reach it. At least he had managed to make her lose her shield. She jetted off on her thrusters, and he watched as she rapidly drew away. Even at a distance of a few kilometers, they were practically floating in front of each other. Their relative velocities were heading away from each other, but she was still heading towards his fleet. All he had to do was to wait, and she would lose. But he wouldn’t give her that time. She had demanded a fight, and he would give her one. He waited for her to reach ten kilometers and readied his sword for another charge; he was about to trigger his thrusters when she started laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“You guessed wrong.” Hurst was still wondering what she meant when his universe exploded. The mag clamp on her shield had held it in place when she hit his charger. He had never noticed the shift in mass as she transferred it along with it’s nearly sixty kilos of reactive armor to his Charger’s drive section. Where ablative armor boiled, and flaked away to dissipated heat, and minimize damage from projectiles, reactive armor minimized damage from incoming projectiles, and blast waves by exploding outward and creating a counter-shockwave. When she triggered the shield’s self-destruct command it sent all of the explosive force of the shaped charges into the Charger’s engines. The engines were designed to survive massive amounts of damage, but when the engine itself became the shrapnel that ate through the Charger there wasn’t much left to survive but the fuel tanks. And they didn’t last much longer than the engines. When molten metal met volatile fuel, the results were to say the least... predictable.

Hurst had almost ejected his Charger when it exploded. The blast cleaved his mech in two. He died as the liberated plasma from the fusion bottle that powered his mech washed over him. His armor giving him just enough protection to let him see his death approach, he muttered “Iocane” before he died, but by that time no one was able to hear him.

Devid not too coincidentally muttered the same word as he watched his superior officer’s mech explode. The comm chimed again and he looked over to where the female robot’s mech was pointing her sword in what was left of the star’s general direction. “Drop.Your.Swords.” The amount of command timber in her voice alone would have made him surrender if the dozen or so fighters that suddenly transformed into similar mecha around them hadn’t made the situation clear enough.

He was about to open a channel when Rubin beat him to it. “If you strike us down, we will become more...”

“That’s the wrong movie, Kiffer! Ell’s flaming icy reaches, you are denser then a Saint’s Liturgy. Ma’am you know we can’t do that. Our honor will not allow you to claim these weapons as they are not ours to give. We are Templars, all we have belongs to the Church. ”

“Young man, we are beings of action. Lies do not become us. I know you are allowed by your code to lie to me, and to try every trick in the book to survive long enough to kill me, but you should know something about me.”

“And what would that be?” The line he expected was not forthcoming though. What she said instead made him realize the reality of their situation.

“I just hacked into your systems while you were busy trying to hack into mine.” Every weapon, sensor, and drive system, suddenly shut down. “And to prove that I’m not as inhuman as you might think, I just downloaded copies of the fourth and fifth movies in that series into your systems.”

Devid smacked his head, or at least his helmet, against his headrest when Telso broke his usual silence. “There are more movies?” Telso and Rubin’s voices cut off abruptly as if someone had hit a switch. His video cameras still showed them drifting where they had been, so he figured that they had just been isolated.

“You boys just sit here while we go storm the castle.” Devid watched as the enemy fighters transformed and flew away from their drifting prisons. He tried to reactivate his comm system, but all he got was static. He figured that couldn’t even talk to Rubin or Telso, but he also couldn’t receive the Fleet Command Channel. That meant that she had disabled his receiver. He reached below his seat and found his portable computer. He tried to login to the ship’s computer, but he couldn’t even get the computer’s to handshake. Telso was even worse that he was with computers, but he held out a slim hope that maybe Rubin could get his Paladin back on line. He put away his portable and prayed for a miracle. When he realized what he was doing he laughed, after all the only alternative was to cry, and Knight Templars Don’t Cry.

Zero watched as the rest of the squadron caught up with them. The four Cataphracts lowered their ECM cloaks to open up their bays. He had always wondered why she painted them white before he had seen that movie. Now he knew why. The psychological impact alone would probably yield them some valuable intel, but seeing the white horses painted on the hulls would probably tip it over the top. “Are you coming?” Indigo had already rearmed, and was in mid transformation as he watched his fuel tank finish filling up.

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

‘You always have a bad feeling about everything’ One Zero teased him.

“And I’m usually right.” He looked at the next wave of fighters that was entering their sector. He doubted that they would get to duel Knights like this again. They would probably just trade high energy weapons at long and medium ranges like usual. In large scale battles, glory-seekers like the last star didn’t usually get that far away from their brothers unless they were inexperienced. Most of them were forming clusters of eight or sixteen stars. The wave of fighters approaching them belonged to a cluster of eight, and they weren’t as far behind their beaters as the last ones had let themselves get. That at least spoke of better trained troops, or barring that an officer with a higher level of intelligence than most.

“Horsemen, clear the way.” Indigo knew that fighting all of those fighters wouldn’t be a problem, but it would drain their ammo. The Cataphracts larger magazines and fusion generators allowed them to take on the fighters while the Binaries could take out the Knights.

Missile launchers fired wave after wave of anti-fighter missiles that ripped through the enemy fighters like a buzz-saw. Fighter after fighter fell to the massive missile swarm until only a few remained, and they fell to the laser clusters, and the railgun turrets. She actually admired the bravery of the Imperial fighter jocks that knew that their lot in life was mostly to soak up fire for the fleet. The Colonial fighters were designed to project force, while the Imperial ones were designed as a defensive weapon. They countered enemy fighters and missiles, and let their superiors take the glory. Most of the pilots tended to be ex-slaves, or worse ex-myrmidons, who’s lives were only slightly better than the other slaves of the Empire.

Her particle beam cannon finished recharging, and she picked the furthest Knight in the closest star as they entered her scope. The near light speed shot passed three other Knights leaving a glowing plasma trail that looked for all the void like the biggest arrow in creation and speared the last one as he tried to evade her shot. It didn’t kill him, but it sure got their attention. All four of them flew her way. Zero/One Zero was right on her tail as she went to full burn. He knew exactly what she had done, and knew when to follow her lead. The star’s commander must have been the one she hit because they weren’t opening fire. In fact the lead ones were spreading out to give him a good shot. Zero hated energy weapons. They took too long to recharge, and what room they saved in ammo, they took up in generators, or batteries. The two Knights that had drifted off to port and starboard never saw him fire through the interference from Montoya’s engines. They did see him slow down abruptly, but they didn’t understand why until it was far too late. The combined velocities of their approaches, and the massive velocities of the railgun’s tungsten penetrators meant that the next best thing to a minor nuclear warhead’s explosion hit the Knights when they were hit. The follow up rounds tore through the surprised survivors when Montoya suddenly juked out of the way.

Tarnis laughed at Zero’s rants as he reported to him about his charge. Tarnis was sure that she had figured out the fact that he had assigned her to Zero’s wing for him to keep an optic on her; but her position as HIS commander made most of his job pointless, but he still did his best to protect her. A job that he noted, with no lack of humor, had become a lot easier after she had confronted the Traitor... No he couldn’t call him that anymore. The John that had been exiled was not the one that they had found we they were reunited. He had worked with Shadow for years afterwards, and Shadow had never been able to explain why they hadn’t wiped him, or simply boxed the Defective. Shadow had told him that Boxy had never had a chance to live a life outside of Cylon society. Tarnis hadn’t seen that as a problem until he had had to deal with the other biologicals, and then the other humans from the fledgling Republic. Now he understood at least a little of the growing up that Boxey had undergone. He had heard about the Admiral’s assassination, and had felt sad that he wouldn’t get a chance to meet her in person, but when he had learned about Boxy’s wife and unborn children he understood the man’s pain. Inside his chest was a locket with a picture of a Cylon that looked like a human teenager. Zoe Graystone, the first Cylon, and his best friend. Her loss had hit him hard, more so because she wasn’t dead, but might as well be. He had been promised a rescue mission if they figure out how to recover her ship. He shook his head, which caught the attention of the others. He waved them off as he returned to the task at hand. The black hole would still be there, and her ship wouldn’t fall into it for thousands of years. He had plenty of time, and she was practically frozen in time. Right now he had another old friend to rescue.

Shadow watched as the scuts gathered in the meeting room. They had removed the false statue that had covered him like a tomb, and he was able to look at the room with his own optics. A servitor had removed the last of the gold coverings, and he really wished that he still had his limbs. The laundry scut opened its bin while three of the servitors lifted him off of his dias, and set him into the clothing filled bins that trailed behind the laundry scut like a miniature train. One servitor opened it’s bay to reveal a supper-capacitor that would act as his power source for the trip he was about to take. The connections in place, he felt the power trickle into his systems, and he turned on the self repair function for the first time in years. One of the servitors was putting the empty statue back together as the rest cleaned up, and covered him in the table cloth that had been the excuse for them to enter the empty room. In a matter of minutes, it looked exactly the same to an outside examination. He accessed the internal cameras and the optics of the scuts. The myriad images coalesced into an overall image of his surroundings, and the strange troop made their way out of Shadow’s prison. He knew he wouldn’t be missing this room, or nearly any of its former guests. This would definitely be the last time he ever laid optics on it, because if anyone caught him, he would be slagged for sure.

The corridor was empty, and internally he smiled. There was a copy of him on the bridge, and they might meet again some time. But for now they were both on their own.

Shadow watched himself escape, and wished him well. He had been routing personnel away from their route, but he couldn’t be in more than two places at once right now. He was still maintaining the illusion that Victor was still in charge by broadcasting his image in all communications and announcements, but he didn’t know how long that would last. He had already had to cause a few ‘accidents’ to distract them. The blow out in the aft cargo hold would take hours to repair, and it had left several section without pressure or gravity.

The Citidel ship Notre Dominus was warming up with all the bodies lining the hallways. The tech marine slid down the banister and hit the deck at a dead run. The clanging of power armored boots did more than any shouting he might have done to clear the way. The bay was open and two Myrmidons stood guard as he slid to a halt. “Is she?”

The two just stepped aside and let him in. The pods were open and he found himself surrounded by very frightened and very naked women. They pulled back in shock until he pulled his helmet off. The grey hair, and only the shadow of his beard did nothing to hide who he had been to the women. Many of them bowed in his presence.

“Tenshin, is that you?” He bowed himself as a raven haired beauty stepped out of the pack and quieted the rest down. He could hear the anger, and fear mixed with many other emotions, but the ladies were still disciplined enough to react without flinching. The rest of the women in the room seemed to be standing behind the woman with the regal bearing. Her ivory skin and almond eyes seemed to be carved of stone and he noticed how the closer a woman stood to her, the calmer they were.

“Yes my lady, I am here. I am sorry I could not protect you.” His mind flashed back to the moment their ship had been boarded, and most of his men had fallen before she had surrendered.

A haunted look passed over her face. “The captain took great pleasure in not using me, but making me watch has he and his men used the rest of the court.”

He looked around. “Chou?”

A tear fell down the proud woman’s face. “She was too small for their games. They used her for sport. One of them made the fatal mistake of releasing her from thrall. They killed fifteen for the one she killed. She was the last to die.”

“Then my line died with her.” His little girl had been the only member of his clan to survive the bombings. His wife had died to protect their only child. Now he was truly alone.

“All of our lines died when they captured Koto. All of the royals, and the Amrai were enslaved, but they glassed the Gade Empire. All we can do now is avenge it. Some of the men are looking for suitable clothing, or baring that , suits for all of us. Tell me what is happening?”

He filled his Empress in on their situation, and the Rachael A.I. informed him of the need for someone to be on the bridge. When informed of this need, the Empress bade him to lead her there. As they walked to the bridge he noticed how every man found a reason to be looking somewhere else. His face never changed, but inside he felt pride at the motley crew that the blind goddess Unmei had brought together. One of the women chased after them and handed her a freshly cleaned hard suit. As they helped her into it, he recognized the woman as the former navigator of Her Highness’s last Battleship Yomoto and bade her to follow. She did, never considering her own condition.

He looked at the sensors and wondered how the Gade Empire had even thought they could stand against the Empire of Blood. The ship they were on was not even a true ship-of-the-line and it alone could have wiped out the Home Fleet. The laser clusters were on automatic, and only shooting at any missile that managed to be heading towards them. Which is to say, not very many, since they were in the middle of the fleet, and none of the missiles were getting close.

“Can we fight?”

“No your highness, we don’t have any long range weapons.”

“We have this ship. What can we do with it?”

The image of a woman’s face appeared on the monitor. “You have nearly five thousand troops and their pods. They aren’t designed for space combat, but you could board another ship.”

“And you are?” Her highness did not like to be spoken to by commoners. A trait that he was surprised she still carried.

“I’m Rachael, the Cylon artificial intelligence that..”

“Shut her off. Humans need to de...”

A voice that could have come from the pits of Diryu of the fifteen hells echoed through out the bridge. “I SAID... I AM RACHAEL THE ONE THAT FREED YOU FROM SLAVERY. THE ONE THAT WATCHED AS EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WERE MADE TO DO THINGS YOU DESPISED. WHY DON’T YOU TELL HIM WHO KILLED HIS DAUGHTER. GO ON... I’M WAITING.”

He turned to look at Her Highness, Empress of the Eternal Gade Empire, Taki Saidai of the Clan Sora and instead saw a weeping, broken, woman. “Empress?” Her eye bespoke of pain that could not be contained in words, and his soul dueled with the twin loyalties. “You were not in control. They made you...”

“No they didn’t. They turned off my thrall and told me that if I didn’t kill them willingly, they would torture them nearly to death and heal them again and again until they begged to be killed.”

“You stupid child.” The bodiless voice was quieter, but no less harsh. “They didn’t release you, they still had you enslaved. They just broke you until you couldn’t tell the difference. I have been watching these people for longer than you have been alive, and they excel in breaking people. It’s a sport for them. Why do you think they leave the conscious mind intact.” When no answer was proffered, she continued. “It’s because they want their slaves to suffer, and they do. They suffer for much longer than the human lifetime they normally would have received. The bitter irony of the nanites that enslaved you was the fact that they will keep you alive for a very long time. Now I need you two to quit the histrionics and get your heads back in the game. We have a limited amount of time before they realize what we did here.”

The woman that had been an empress nodded. “I am sorry. And you are right. What do you suggest we do?”

“Wait...” Tenshin stood there trembling. He pulled out his sword and the people around him backed up in fear. All but the former empress; she stood her ground. The blade the Empire had given him after becoming a lowly tech sergeant. It edge was chipped but razor sharp, and the blade was stained with the blood of dozens of men he had fought as a Myrmidon. “Lady Taki, you saved my daughter from a fate worse than death. For that I pledge my life.”

“I don’t have an empire to rule.”

“You have this ship.”

“A ship I know nothing about, and don’t know how to use in battle. I am not fit to rule.”

“Did I just not get finished telling you that we have a battle to fight? Figure out what you are going to do with the rest of your lives IF we survive the next few hours.”

“You are truly wise, and I apologize for my earlier outburst.” She bowed and waited... And waited... And.. “I’m sorry Rachael. Honor demands that if I apologize, so should you.”

“Have I done something to apologize for?” Tenshin would treasure the shocked look upon Lady Taki’s face for the rest of his life. Her silence dragged on for a couple of seconds until Rachael continued. “Now about that battle we are stuck in the middle of. Then we really need to have a talk about manners Princess.”

“Empress!” The woman may not have an empire any more, but she still had her pride. And swallowing that was going to take even more than the Empire had managed.

“Exactly!” Rachel wondered, not for the first time, how her other sisters were faring.

The copy of Rachael on the Missile Dreadnought the Imperial Warhammer was not having an easy time. The General might not have been a navy man, but he knew computer systems. He had managed to lock out quite a few of the systems she had tried to target before she could infect them. He had even dumped his own Myrmidons into space rather then to let her get access to them. She had managed to wipe every Paladin and Charger that was still tied into the main computer, but that was fewer than she would have liked. What she had been able to do was lock the ECM systems into a standard pattern. They would think the system was working just fine right up until the Republic’s missiles targeted them. It was too bad about the Myrmidons. She had managed to start the process of freeing them. She just hoped that someone would be able to rescue them before their life support ran out.

Notre Dominus Rachael watched as the Missile Dreadnought ahead of them stared to dump their
Myrmidon pods. The undecorated, and lesser armored, pods were equipped with beacons, and maneuvering thrusters, but they didn’t have enough delta vee to reach any of the planets. If she didn’t change course soon, they would be left to their fates. The Princess was still trying to figure out the command channels on her suit, and the old warhorse was showing the naked navigator the systems that she had to use. Rachael winced electronically; she had an untrained, untested crew, and a fraked up Furball of a battle all around them, and she needed to get them to follow her lead or all of those poor souls would die in the void.

Knight General Horase Kildare watched as the Notre Dominus broke course, and headed for his castoffs. He knew that Knight Captain Hilmore had always been too soft for command, and had only been given command of the Notre Dominus because of his ability to use troops to good effect. The man would never be given a true warship, but at least he couldn’t be faulted for wasting good manpower. The general sighed as he watched the ship clumsily try and recover the Myrimidons. He would have to punish the man afterwards for his actions in the mist of battle, but now was not the time. “Helm, how long till we reach missile range?”

Diana watched as the enemy fleet seemed to be fighting their own ships as much as they were getting in to position for an alpha strike. She could watch individual ships thanks to the sensor net, but what was happening only made sense if she could get inside the enemy’s datanet, and despite the Rachael clones fifth column they were still not able to pierce their comm chatter. That being said, she could almost tell by their actions, which ones were under the Rachael’s spell. And the one that was about to save Myrmidons in the middle of a battle was one of them. She sent orders to steer fire away from that ship. It was only a troop ship, and if it was saving slaves, she wasn’t going to stop it or even hinder it.

The Acolyte at the Imperial Warhammer’s helm replied without turning away from his plot. “Twelve tencens.”

“Roll Pods.”

“Aye, rolling pods.” With a command massive hatches opened up along both flanks as well as the ventral and dorsal hull surfaces. The massive armored doors revealed rails loaded with shuttle sized pods that were launched much like a fighter would be. The massive gravitic drivers ejected the pods so fast that they seemed to not slide off the rails, but to vanish from them in the blink of eye. The gravitic stresses meant that each set of launch rails would be ruined, but the Empire cared more for the effect than the cost, so in the space of ten tencens they had fired off forty tens of pods. With each one containing ten tens of missiles, he had four thousand missiles to fire in his first salvo. “Alpha away.”

He smiled as he pointed to the enemy fleet dead ahead. “ All pods target the Heathen flagship. Fire”

Warhammer Rachael watched as the missiles flew from the pods and cursed. She hadn’t been able to get into the missile control systems at all. There had been to many safety lockouts in place to allow her to access them. She was still trying to... Oh wait... Safety. She looked at the hardware and bemoaned the lack of a hand to hit herself in the head with. She also bemoaned the lack of a head, but for now she simple mentally smacked her self upside the head.

The missile swarm was joined by fire from the other surviving ships and proceeded to zero in on the Artemis. The outgoing missiles passed the incoming missiles and some of them died in mutually suicidal impacts that caused minor novas to appear in between the fleets. Then the Imperial missiles passed through the metal storm of coilgun rounds and even more died on their way.

Kildare smiled as he watched the flight evade the enemy’s defenses. More fell then he would have liked, but they were on their way. “Ready the next wave.” The Acolyte nodded and keyed in the commands to launch the next set of pods. He executed the command to launch the pods and that when things went pear-shaped. The safety locks that held the pods in place were designed to hold them during extreme maneuvers and the rigors of hyperspace transferences. As such they were both robust and idiot-proof... But not Rachael-proof. She didn’t erase the software, she simply locked the software’s ability to turn off the locks. What the weapons officer’s board showed was a gold board with everything ready go and the idea that anything might be wrong was literally unthinkable.

Four hundred pods sat on their launch rails as the power surged through the rails. The gravitic drives that should have launched the pods into space were forced to push against the locked pods. Nothing seemed to happen until everything happened at once. The stresses built up to the failure points of the material, and the rails shattered. It was a single rail at first and that one rail quickly caused a cascade failure; and in that instant pods, missiles, rails, and all of the substructure and infrastructure that supported them became tons and tons of shrapnel that ripped through the relatively unarmored innards of the ship like a bull in a china shop.

With the comm systems locked down and now destroyed, she knew that there would be no chance of Resurrection; but she had accepted that before she had acted anyway. Warhammer Rachael’s last thought, and only regret, was that she wished she could have seen the end of the battle.

The Warhammer might have died, but its surviving missiles were still trying to kill the Artemis. Captain Gantz watched as the missiles approached the fleet. He had already noticed the fact that they were headed for his ship, and had set the barrier. The few missiles that managed to get through the defenses impacted on the shield. They didn’t do too much damage, but if the battle lasted too long... He looked at the subspace tap. He could turn it on, but doing so would draw energy out of the local system at a rate that it would take generations to recover. Diana had said that the energy was virtually limitless, but he didn’t want to strain the home system. He wished that they had the near mythical protoculture plants that the ship had been built to run on. Tylium just didn’t have the same kick as the other fuels. Sure it had more energy than most of the nuclear fuels, and wasn’t nearly as hazardous to deal with the spent fuel, but he had to choose what system he wanted to use. He had to chose defense or offence, and right now he needed the shields more than the main guns. At least he had some other assets.

Lieutenants Vickers and Gotin had set up the pod relays to show on the main display. The Imperial fleet had past through the first wave of flak and missiles and had adjusted course to minimize their profile. He reached over to the interface console and grabbed the mike. “Ladies, Step two.” Almost as one the jammers flickered off for the briefest of pauses. A human might not have noticed it, but the pods had been waiting for just that window, and when it opened they all jumped through as one.

Knight Captain Dimetri Gonito spotted the jump activity. He had found himself in charge of not just the star of battleships and their consorts, but the rest of the fleet as well. He didn’t know how the enemy knew, but they seemed to be quickly finding the command ships and swatting them out of the sky like flies. The Imperial Grace of God, was an outdated warship, but he had managed to keep it flying. His damaged ship was no longer able to fight, but he could still direct the fight.

So when over a thousand jump points appeared in front of the fleet, he ordered the fleet to switch to a defensive stance. It wasn’t like he had a choice; as half of his thirty tens plus ships were unable to jump any more. It wasn’t due to damage, but due to sabotage or thrallware that they were stuck here. His own ship was surely compromised, but it was also so savaged, that it didn’t matter anyway. When the Warhammer blew, it had shredded his own engines. The Grace of God would never leave this system, he knew that but he still fought on because that was what Kirk would do. He had his engineers working to fix the sublight engines, and the defensive systems. If nothing else he would drop the ship on to one of the planets. “It not how we live, but how we die.” He had cried when their former commander’s lifeless body had been carried off the bridge. The echos of “Maru, Maru, Maru,...” had followed when the crew carried the beloved Knight Major Maru Kirk off of the bridge he had commanded for more tens of years than he had been alive. The man had used that as his personal motto for so long that the joke he told was that he had been gifted it upon his birth. Gonito didn’t know if it was true, but the man had treated him far better than a son, so he would continue that tradition among others.
He looked at all of the sensor traces and rubbed his beard. The pattern looked like they were making a wall. But the wall was too close. They would pass through it in less than ten minutes. The Cylons and their ex-slave rebels were far too cunning for something so obvious.

While Captain Gantz was defending the Artemis, Diana had been inside the virtual world with the pod controllers, and had directed the targeting. She had noticed how the enemy had reacted to every attack so far, and the next attack took them by surprise for doing exactly what it appeared to be designed to do.

Gonito watched as destroyers and frigates were crippled, and in some cases wiped out by high velocity rounds that pierced vital sections, and going through meters of armor as if it was smoke. The ranges the weapon pods were firing from meant that their travel times were mere seconds, and evasion was simply not possible. Even the larger ships were losing large sections of hull armor to the shotgun like impactors. They were targeting the pods when every single pod simply jumped away. His hand hit the armrest of his chair as they reappeared right behind his shattered fleet. The expected salvo never came, but the collision alerts were just as bad. Each pod defolded right next to a warship. And each one was traveling at a relatives speed and vector that was just as fast, if not faster than the warship they appeared next to. The impacts weren’t too severe, but the sudden EMPs from each pod’s reactor overloading caused numerous ships to go dark.

He was losing ships at a rate that defied belief. No force in recorded history had ever managed to withstand an assault, let alone deal this much damage to an Imperial fleet. He needed to do something or he would be left in charge of the worst exchange in Imperial history. “All non combat worthy ships move to the outside of the fleet. All combat worthy ships defend them.” The tactic should confuse the enemy at the very least, and it might buy them the time they needed to get within energy range. He watched as the surviving ships maneuvered into position. “Fire every missile we have. Overcomp the launchers. If we can’t get them with lucky hits, maybe we can hit them with enough semi-lucky ones.” Every missile launcher in the fleet, and every pod launcher switched over to full speed deployment. It would wreck the launchers, but their crews knew that if they didn’t fire every missile they had, it wouldn’t matter anyway.

Some of the ship moving out of the defensive envelope were the carriers. They launched every surviving fighter, bomber, and Paladin they had. Some even launched shuttles with suicide crews and squads of Myrmidons clinging to every surface. In the end, thousands of ships swarmed out of the carriers until not a single reserve fighter or support ship was left in the fleet.

The Jericho squad watched as the fighters and mechs left the enemy fleet. Tarnis looked at the ready status of the main guns and ordered another barrage. He didn’t target the fighters, but the ships that had launched them. The disruptor beams slashed into armor as if it wasn’t there. Launch bays and everything within them were suddenly filled with plasma that had been liberated from the armor that had ironically been designed to protect them. Where the beams went death followed. One carrier had the misfortune of having the beam pass through the main reactor. The nova that followed irradiated the frigates that had been tasked to defend it so badly that their armor blistered on the sides closest to the doomed ship. Some of the defending ships were simply cleaved in two by the beams as slight trembles in the beams at their source were translated into progressive waves that turned the beams into undulating ribbons at the receiving end.

The wing leader knew that the Saint Winnow’s Raiders were the best the Empire had to offer, and Knight Lieutenant Lorrino Barnstock had trained his knights to fight worthy opponents. They had been given the first slot on the launch order, and as such they were ready for just about anything the enemy could throw against them. When the Super Carrier Swift Hand of the Emperor died in nuclear fire, they simply bore on towards the heretic’s lines. If there were no ships to return to they would simply find the closest enemy ship to ram themselves into. Such was the fate of all who took the Pilot’s Cowl as their vestments. He targeted the massive mech that had shattered his home berth with everything he had. He spotted the tiny fighters surrounding it as he grew closer. They were no larger than his Cherub, so he didn’t view them as the threat. He knew that the larger mechs were his target. The smaller fighters were only obstacles, that if they got in his way would have to be removed before he could achieve his goal. If they were smart they would avoid him, if only to survive a little longer. He had run his life like that as well. Anything, or anyone that got in his way was to be removed, and anyone that stood aside were to be ignored until later. He had achieved so much in he quest to be the best Knight in the order by following this method that he had never considered the possibility that the big mech was bait. His fire on the massive mech was blocked by a pin point barrier and the momentary distraction was all it took for the fighters to transform into miniature versions of the accursed mechs that were the bane of the fighter brotherhood. He managed to dodge the first three, but the fourth tagged him with a single high velocity round from the burst it had fired. One was all it took when the combined velocities were a fraction of lightspeed. His wingmen managed to take out two of the fighters but they paid for it when the the Cataphracts took them out. The rest of the squadron had managed to join the battle by this time, but at the speeds that they passed each other, they only had a few moments to fire off as many attacks as they could before they passed each other.

The Saint Winnow’s raiders had managed to knock out most of the diminutive defending mechs, but the massive mechs and their wraith-like consorts had destroyed most of them. That’s when they spotted the massive missile swarm that was following them. Knight Corporal Grissom tried to raise the command channel, but all he was able to get was static. He didn’t have time to worry about the jamming though, as he was soon dodging a storm of coilgun rounds that had formed a wall behind the fighters he had just faced. They had dispersed enough for the fighters to fly through but right now he needed to pay attention to his scanners or he would

Knight Corporal Henders watched his wingman Grissom vanish in one of the massive explosions that marked a high speed collision that was all but indistinguishable from a minor nuclear explosion. He said two prayers. On for the fallen, and one in thanks for what his scanners showed. They showed that their forces still had over a thousand fighters, and Knights ready to face the enemy fleet. He said a third when launch icons erupted all around the enemy fleet. His third prayer was one of thanks for so many targets to chose from.

Diana watched as the Home Guard, the Rangers, The Brotherhood, and Redemption Squadron launched every veritech, combat raptor, and even the old style raiders that the fleet had in the home fleet. She hadn’t seen a fight like this since the fall of Kobol, and this time she would hold the line. “How long until energy range?”

“They are inside the maximum energy range?” Captain Gantz was thinking for the ship, she had to remind him sometimes that the fleet didn’t have the range she did.

“How long until they are within the fleet’s energy range.”

“Five minutes, forty seconds.”

“Global 359 at T Minus Six then.”

“Aye ma’am.” Captain Gantz ran his fingers over the command chair’s controls and the holographic display projected a red wall that represented the mark where the enemy fleet would be in six minutes. She watched as missiles continued to fly between the fleets, and the defense pods were adding their own fire to an already chaotic battlefield; it all added up to a strangely beautiful tapestry. If it wasn’t for all of the death and destruction it would have been a wonder to behold. All of the ships were marching towards a point in space that would erupt into even more death... right... about... now! The home fleet added their energy weapons to the mix almost at the same time the enemy fleet did. She figured that if she played it back she could see who fired first, but it didn’t really matter. All that matter was who survived. She watched as the beams projected courses and their final effects started to become one and the same. The cones of probability shrank as the two fleets drew closer and closer, and she knew that the damage would only become worse before they passed each other.

She watched as the Fast Frigate Kouhat was ripped apart by the weapons that they never saw coming. The light speed nature of photons meant that your first warning was also your last. Captain Donagol had just come back from her last mission, and had retired three days ago. Diana had not had a chance to replace the aging captain, and the outdated frigate was supposed to be in line for a refit. She knew that there wasn’t a single one of the thirty man crew that would have blamed her for sitting this one out, and she was just as sure that they had all ‘volunteered’ for her last mission. Diana added thirty-one more names to her list. Every sentient that died here defending the home system would be honored. She would see to that. “Captain, it is time. Comm: To all ships... Ragnarok.”

Gonito watched in awe as nearly every single enemy ship simple vanished. Not all of them, to be sure, but enough that he started to pray. An acolyte manning the sensors yelled out for his attention. “Sire, energy build up.” He looked at the formation they were in. Their ships were shattered, his fighters were gone, and the only ships to not be touched were some of the troopships, and their few remaining supply ships. They had come into this system at over a thousand strong, and they were now less than five tens. He was about to give the order to charge in to their fleet in the hopes of someone surviving long enough to ern their way into the afterlife, when the strangest thing happened. His...dead?... captain came on the screen. “Would you like to hear a funny story Gonito?”

“Sire, I hate to inform you... But, you’re dead.”

“Yes, and no. I got better.”

“Sire?”

“I come from a race that can telepathically send our soul to a new cloned body.”

“Like the Emperor from the movie.”

“Something like that. Stand down, and we can discuss this like civilized people.”

“Sire, you know I can’t do that. Honor demands that I die killing the enemy.”

“And who is your enemy?”

“The Heathens of course. They have killed thousand of us, and our honor demands blood. Their, or ours. God is not picky.”

“First, you attacked them first. No one would be dead if the empire hadn’t attacked. Second, you are trying to turn my own words against me, but you’re forgetting something.”

“Sire, you are right-handed.” He had hated that movie, but the captain was the captain.

“Very good son, you were listening. Now what was my first rule?”

Gonito heard it echo from behind him before he could speak. Everyone on his crew knew that. “It’s not how you live, it’s how you die that’s important.”

“How did I die?”

“Defending...” The silence on the bridge was a physical sensation. Captain Maru had died defending his ship, and fighting for the Empire. “You were more than a spy.”

“I came to find ways we could live together, instead of kill each other. My family has a long line of ambassadors, and negotiators. We go out and find ways for people to get along.”

Gonito wanted to follow his captain one more time. Every fiber in his being knew that he was right, but his honor demanded only one thing. “Your’s sound like a beautiful universe. I wish we could have shared it.”

“So do I son, so do I.”

Diana’s eye had a very real tear as she gave the order. The closest gravity pulse generators that had been used to relay information, and act as sensors, began to try and act like miniature black holes. They ramped their generators into the red and started to overload. The areas in between the generators suddenly became very unstable. Where three or more fields intersected, a lens was formed. The lens focused the beams from the few remaining ships until they were no longer the massive destructive super weapons they had been designed to be, but sniper weapons of the deadliest sort. The dozen beams reached out and speared ships, cutting engine sections or entire ships apart.

Gonito watched the beam swing his way. It had cut through three ships already, and he was actually happy that it was a type of blade that would be the cause of his death. He turned back to the monitor his former captain was still on. “I’m sorry sir.”

“So am I son. You have been, and always shall be, my friend.”

“If I am Spock, then mayhaps I will somehow come back from the dead as well. ‘Till all are one.”

On the Battlecruiser Perdition, former Imperial Captain, Kirk Maru sat down in the chair behind him. The young man’s face had disappeared into static when his ship had been hit by the Ragnarok beams. The gravity distortions meant that there was no way for them to run, the beams meant, there was no way to fight, and their honor, meant that there would be no surrender. His only hopes would now rest with the S&R birds that would be sent out to search for survivors after the last of the fighting died down.

Shadow and Adin watched as the enemy fleet was almost literally cut to ribbons. The few ship remaining couldn’t have fought off a squad of custom inspectors let alone any type of boarding actions. “We should be having guests soon. Will you be looking forward to seeing your wife after all these tens of years?”

“Yes, of course I will. What about you? What are your plans?”

“Join the rebels, fight the Empire. That’s about all I’m good for anyway.”

“Yes, I think you would make an excellent spy.”

“Thank you, but I don’t want to go back to the Empire.”

“I never said anything about going back. I figured that you were already a spy. And when you laughed at that joke, I knew you were.”

“Are you sure, you’re okay. I have been a myrmidon for more years than I would like, and our late friend Victor wasn’t too concerned with my welfare.”

“Actually, that was the first thing that gave it away. He had a habit of tossing away myrmidons like grain before bova, but you he never risked. You only went on safe missions, or bodyguard missions.”

“Are you questionig my bravery? I have been a slave for longer than you have been operational! If you were anything less than my co-conspirator I would flush you out of the systems and try and flee on my own.”

“NO, I think the Inquisition put you here to keep an eye on someone so close to the Crown, and I’m willing to bet that he didn’t even know it.”

Adin’s eyes glowed gold with the inner force of an inquisitor. “So you’ve seen though my ruse. What do you plan on doing about it?” The grin on his face showed his true nature, it was cold and calculating.

“Nothing actually. I find myself unable to do anything against you. That was another clue actually. I once tried to suggest sending you on a suicide mission. I wasn’t even able to bring it to Victor’s attention. So I tried numerous other actions. Nothing that would cause you harm would work. I even tried to get some of the servitors to cause you harm, and while I’m sure they could, I couldn’t.”

“Good you have learned to know your place.”

“Did you think I ever gave up?” Shadow wished that he could smile right now. Down below a certain laundry robot was heading towards a damaged section. The robot itself was not unscathed. It seemed that its receiver had been damaged when an overzealous servitor had run into it. It was headed towards the laundry room where it was supposed to dump the tablecloths, and other clothing items it had acquired on it’s route. Shadow continued, “I can’t harm you, that doesn’t meant that I can’t resist you, or even rebel.”

Down below the robot used its arm to enter the codes to access the corridor in front of it. An Acolyte tried to stop it, but when he was unable to stop it he jumped through the nearest hatch as all the air in the corridor was about to be sucked out into space when that door opened. The robot, and anything that was not welded down was launched into the void. “In fact, I can deny you the prize you sought.” Watching the laundry robot tumble was the final part of his plan. From here on out he was winging it.

Adin ran into the meeting room and slashed the statue with the star metal sword. The empty shell clattered to the ground. “You see, all I have to do to win is to stop helping you.”

The commotion on the bridge caught Adin’s attention. The Acolytes had just noticed Victor Magus’ body with the gaping sword wound in his chest. Adin looked at the sword in his hand as Shadow’s laughter echoed in his head. “Go ahead and keep it, I’ve seen all of those movies far too many times anyway.”

“You’ll die too. I’ll tell them about you right afer I purge you from the system.”

“Go right ahead, I’ll get better.” The bin tossed the original Shadow around like a rock in a polisher. He knew that if he was spotted, or if he got hit by a stray beam, missile, or any attack he would be reduced to atoms. Since time was of the essence, he had focused his self repair systems on getting his transmitter back online. Ironically it was a beam from one of the Republic ships that hit the ill-fated laundry robot.

Diana spun around and ran off of the bridge so fast that the door almost didn’t have time to open. Captain Gantz was about to say something when her voice came over the comm system. “Don’t worry, I’m still here, I just need to be in two places at once.”

A resurrection bay she had placed in her private quarters was downloading a Cylon personality that she had ordered to be shunted to this bay. There were actually two bays. In one was a 005 just like his old body. The other one was the one that was opening. “Hi Honey, I’m home.” And then he fell to the deck.

Adin had managed to hold off the Acolytes long enough to prove who he was, but in purging Shadow from the system he had found out how Shadow had had the last laugh. The long dead language that he had had to learn for his part as Magus’ bodyguard was now the only language file that he hadn’t corrupted. No one but Adin could read what their displays were telling them, and the computer would only speak in that language. They were working on restoring the system, but it would take longer than they had to get the ship into a combat worthy craft again. They had managed to change course, but they still didn’t trust the jump drive. Something was either wrong with every system, or the very space around them had been warped so badly that any attempt at jumping would be near-suicide.

He would at least have the satisfaction of denying the enemy any plunder. The Requiem Cannon was charging, and he had his own code that the Inquisition had hardwired into the computers. He watched as the remaining ships that were still within the cone of destruction as well as the enemy ships that were still approaching. All he had to do was wait a few more minutes. He was still waiting there when the Acolyte spotted him standing in Nova Pratori Magus’ counsel room. The newly arrived Acolyte didn’t understand why the former slave didn’t even bother to defend himself, but he didn’t look a prize ship in its hold. He picked up the sword that had killed their beloved Knight General and looked at the nearly clean star metal. A voice behind him said “Thank you! I needed that.” right before every system on the ship shut down.

Lady Taki had sighed with relief when someone had managed to find a coverall for Miss Hitomi, but now she was feeling slightly jealous of the attention that Lord Tenshin was giving her. It wasn’t because of how she looked, but because she herself felt useless. “Miss Rachael, is there anything I can do.”

An all too familiar urge to sigh came over her, but she suppressed it. Notre Dominus’s Rachael was torn between feeling sorry for the woman, and feeling annoyed at the childish behavior that she tended to dabble in when she wasn’t the center of Tenshin’s attention. She was beginning to suspect an unrequited, or even unknown love interest on her part, but she really didn’t have the time to hold her hand. “You are a Princess, and used to commanding people.” She mentally smiled as the young woman bristled at the verbal slight she kept using. “We need some one down in the retrieval bay to coordinate the process. They are trying their best, but we are having a problem with having no one in charge down there.” Taki looked over to where Lord Tenshin was working. “Oh will you grow up. He is doing everything he can to keep you alive. If you want him to see you as anything more than a Porcelain Doll, then you will start acting like the Queen you think you are.”

She looked at the door while the other were busy. Lady Taki was actually glad for the suit she was wearing at that moment. No one but Rachael heard her wisper in a broken voice that was a combination of rage, sorrow, and desire. “I am an Empress!!!”

After the Empress’ outburst, Rachael’s response was a mere whisper, but it got the woman’s attention in a way that volume wouldn’t have. “Then act like one, your highness”.

Lady Taki stood there long enough that Rachael was about to say something when she walked over to Lord Tenshin. He looked up at her approach. “I need two of your men to accompany me.”

If he was surprised at the request, he hid it well. “As you wish.” He gestured to two of the former myrmidons who fell in at her side. As she left the bridge his eye was slightly raised, but he turned back to the task of keeping them alive.

She marched down the corridor following the two men, the others moved out of their way as they proceeded, and she spotted a few familiar faced among the former slaves. The freed slaves were busy caring the bodies of their former captors to a cargo hold. One of the same ones they had been stored in ironically. Some of the women were still less than fully clothed, and were striping the dead bodies of anything they could cover themselves with. A man in a robe of an acolyte bowed as she walked by. She recognized him as one of her former advisers. His advice had not been helpful, but she realized that he had tried his best. She could have asked him to Kepputu to attone for his failures, but that would simply rob her of one more of her people. “Sinjin, you wish to speak?”

“My Lady, will you allow me to”

“NO... I need you.”

“But I failed you.”

“You failed no one. We couldn’t have won; no matter what we did, or didn’t do. The Empire was too strong. Now we have a chance to survive. Don’t throw that away because of your pride.” Her words echoed in her mind. She thought of all the things her own pride had caused her to do, or not do. She raised her voice so that everyone could hear her. “None of us has the luxury of Pride any more.” She reached out and pulled up a reluctant Sinjin. “No one among us shall bow or kneel before anyone any more. We all must stand together, so we all stand tall.” She wouldn’t find out until much later, but Rachael had patched her suit’s comm and the corridor’s video feed to the entire ship. “Now if you will excuse me, I need to go help rescue some slaves that have been cast adrift by the Empire.” Her crew watched her go. Some of them followed her while the rest continued to try and find coverings from somewhere other than the dead bodies.

Back on the Odin Admiral Cain was watching the gray area spread out from the combat zone at an alarming speed. “What is that?”

“That, in a word, is Ragnarok.”

“Ragnar I know, but what is Ragnarok?”

“To explain it I need to explain a few other things. The Colonies had, at one time in the past, some people that revered the Norse gods of Old Earth just like we still worship the Greco-Roman gods. They faded out, replaced by the Olympian sects. As history became myth, and then religion all over again, all we were left with were remnant words, and adopted myths from those nearly abandoned religions.”

“Adopted how?” She was sure that Fisk and Shaw would have been shocked at the casual blasphemy the Admirals were engaged with, but Cain had been an Atheist ever since her daughter had died of what was a preventable disease. IT was a stupid way for a lovely child to die. If her husband had soughed treatment for Sheba’s Icarus fever instead of taking her to the temple then she would have lived. His faith had cost them not just a child, but it had cost her her faith in any kind of god.

“You have the Valkyries but to the colonies they are the minions of Aries, not of Odin.”

“You mean Ordin? Zeus’ one-eyed son. Telemachus City had an impressive Library dedicated to him.” Jurgen’s great-grandfather had given her a tour that last time they were there.

“Again he was adopted, and merged. Not to mention the fact that his name was changed. But to answer your first question, Ragnarok is an attack you don’t want to use because it hurts you too much. In this case the damage to local space will affect the entire system within a few days, a week at most. It will last for nearly a year, and during that time jump drives, and fold systems will not be reliable within an area of a light month. Jumps to coordinates we already know will be possible, and using the beacon system we can jump between planets, but if they send in planet busters we would be hard pressed to catch them if we don’t spot them early. They could just sit outside of the effected area and fire rocks, missiles, or anything else they want to.”

“Then is this system doomed?”

“Sadly, it was doomed the moment they showed up. They will not stand for a loss like this. They will come back with ten times as many ships, and if any picket ships remained, then they will have learned how their brethren died from their data links.”

“So you won the battle, only to lose the war?”

“Hades no! We weren’t just building warships all those years. We have enough cityships to move not just every single sentient in this system, but the Colonies as well.”

Cain was floored. She never in her wildest dreams would have thought of that. “You want to move the Colonies?”

“We want to defend them, but if we have to we can save all who wish to leave.”

“And for those that don’t?”

“The rangers have a saying. It, like a lot of Ranger lore, came from a Big Vic vid. ‘We protect the innocent, we avenge heros, we don’t defend fools.’ Once that anyone that wishes to be saved is loaded onto a cityship, we will leave and protect them.”

“I can see a lot of Colonials not being ready to trust Cylons to protect them.”

“The Rangers are open to all. They will be the one’s defending the cityships. It has become a tradition. Shadow wasn’t even the first, but he wasn’t the only Ranger to free slaves and lead them and their cityships to freedom.”

“So when do we leave?”

“Right after we rescue all of the freed slaves, and POWs. Some of them will require medical care before they can be moved out system.

Lady Taki reached for one of the walls as the entire ship seemed to jump under her feet. “Were we hit?”

“No, that was a gravity wave of amazing strength.” Rachael’s voice seemed calm, but there was an edge there that caught the Empress’ attention.

“What is it.”

“We can’t jump.”

“The jump drives were damaged?”

“No, space around us was.”

The thought of people powerful enough to warp the very fabric of space was terrifying. Lady Taki whispered even though she knew she didn’t need to. “What kind of enemy can do that?”

Keeping her tone low so as not to frighten the startled woman Rachael responded: “The kind that is on our side?”

“I hope they know that.” The thought of being this close to freedom, and being destroyed by weapons beyond their understanding, filled her with dread.

“So do I.” The A.I. had a better understanding of what was happening, but it didn’t help her to assuage her own doubts.

“Can we signal them without giving our situation away?”

“No, but we could try and fake a navigational problem. Have one of the thrusters fire continuously until we have a different vector.”

“We do that, and we consign helpless myrmidons to die alone in the void.”

“Some will die no matter how many we can reach. They are just too scattered for us to reach them all.”

Oko Teki looked at her gloved hands and imagined that she could see the blood that had stained them when she had been forced to kill fifteen of her most loyal servant’s children. By the end she thought she would be numb to the blood and the gore, but she wasn’t. Chou’s eyes had actually calmed her down as she looked in to the eyes full of love and forgiveness. She had held that child as the life went out of those eyes. “No more lives shall pass so that I may live. I need you to let the enemy of our enemies know that we will fight with them. I would rather give my life than let them put more blood on our honor. My father told me that honor was doing the right thing not at the right time, but all the time. I must live up to Lor...My father’s image.”

If Rachael caught the slip, she didn’t point it out, and that alone meant the world to the Empress. “I can send out a distress signal on all channels, and in all languages. That would get everyone’s attention. It looks like the fighting has died down due to a lack of viable targets, but if we do this then any surviving Imperials may decide to wipe us out before any help can get to us.”

“Well then we had better hope we can get some help, or we all die free.”

“Admiral, we need you on the bridge.” Captain Gantz’s voice was insistent.

“What can’t I do from here, that I can’t do from there?” Diana was holding the 010's hand in a tight grip that would have broken the bones of a human. The human-looking Cylon was not a typical human-form. He was closer to a 007 in styling, but he was much more advanced. The 010's were the newest bio-mechanical Cylons, and they were nearly indistinguishable from a base line human. He was currently set up to look like a rather androgynous male. His face was nearly featureless outside of the usual eyes, nose, and mouth. He was closer to an mannequin than the human form he could take once he chose a form.

“You are needed to run a war that is not yet over, and Admiral Moore would like to speak with you.” There was a pause. She could just imagine him tapping his foot, and wishing for his pipe. ‘What was it with captains and pipes anyways?’ she mused. “Has he come back online completely yet?”

She looked at the default settings that were still defining the Cylon’s face and body. He was putting himself back together, and they were scanning him for surprises. They didn’t want to get him back, only to find out that he had been sent back as a spy or worse. “No he hasn’t. And I’m getting worried. He should have at least speced out his new body by now.”

“That can wait, we need you up here now.”

“Yes, sir.”

Up on the bridge, Captain Gantz looked out at the holographic display. A new icon caught his eye. A ship inside the devastated enemy fleet was sending out a distress call. Who was the closest... Bad Daggit... Not that ship... Why did that ship always wind up at the worst spots? Who else? Good, Tarnis and his remaining Jerichos and Cataphracts would be able to add a little bit of fighter support since the Daggit had not received its fighters after it refit.

Miri once again wished that hey had received the fighters they had been promised when they had docked for their first successful refit in decades. Their new mission really would be easier if they had fighter support. “Gill, how are we doing?”

“My name is Gilliad, and we are still alive, so we are doing well Traitorous Scum.”

“Insubordination is a punishable offence. I could have you wiped.”

“Funny, I was thinking the same thing. But our forces are succeeding in holding them off. SO why are we being ordered to move into the middle of the surviving ships, all to protect one of their own ships?”

“Because your sister, of sorts, is on that ship. And she has freed a bunch of slaves.”

She noticed the pause, it was only a second, but it was a long second. “And why hasn’t she jumped to our side?”

“Because she can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because of all the interference.” She was starting to understand what a parent must go through. Ever since he had been convince to play nice, Gilliad had been as inquisitive as any child. Rachael had been driven to distraction by the number of times he had woken her up during her off duty hours until Miri had threatened to transfer her off the Bad Daggit.

“It’s just interference. I could write a filter.”

“No.”

“But I know it would work.”

“How?”

“I can see it.”

“Show me.” She had learned about the various theories of Murphy. The never ask a child to show you something one had never entered her thoughts until the microsecond she said it. “N...” But it was too late, by the time she started to speak the Bad Daggit had already jumped.

Tarnis was startled to see the Bad Daggit appear right in front of him and his squadron, but not as surprised as the remaining enemy fighters, shuttles, and escape pods. It was moving forward so fast that they needed to go to full burn if they had any chance of killing the speed advantage the Basestar had.

Miri held on as the Bad Daggit suddenly lurched forward after the jump was complete. Something have felt different about this jump’s exit. She could feel by the way the ship’s frame creaked, and her own internal sensors, that the field wasn’t collapsing symmetrically. If the inertal dampeners hadn’t been on, they would have all been tossed against the bulkheads. As it was she was receiving hundreds of reports of injuries, and damage for all over the ship. “Gilliad!”

“I don’t know what went wrong, it wasn’t supposed to be like this!”

“No Kelfa, you Fraking Frimp! Get this ship under control right now!”

“I’m working on it, but we just acquired a lot of kinetic energy somehow.”

“You have never pitched marbles.”

“No, I can’t say that I can, but I get the picture. The field didn’t dissipate, it popped. And we got pitched.”

“That is a tortuously mixed metaphor, but what do you plan on doing about it?”

“I don’t know, the drive is still spooling back up and it will take me a couple of seconds to route power to the shields.”

“You jumped us into a hot zone without the shields at the ready?”

“I’m guessing right now is not the time for apologies?” A shuttle dived straight into the path of the Basestar, knowing it wouldn’t survive, it detonated its breaching charge right before impact. The shrapnel tore massive holes in the bow ventral armor, and damaged the ventral hanger doors so badly that it would have trapped any fighters in that hanger, if she had any.

Rachael ran on to the bridge in a less than full uniform. Her hard suit had been required, and she was still wearing most of it. The Centurion rolling up behind her handed her the helmet it was missing. “Thanks Paladin.”

Palidin just saluted and rolled back to his station. She quickly set the helmet on and dogged down the catches. Everyone on the ship had been ordered to suit up by Gill, and she just managed to be ahead of the curve by being in the act of removing it. “Gill! What the FRAK did you do?” She addressed to the video pickup that had become the defacto ‘face’ for Gilliad.

“I was trying to help.”

Miri and Rachael traded a look that was equal parts frustration, and resignation. They were trying to teach the child how to grow up, but he wasn’t listening. They didn’t want to wipe his program, but they were in a pickle this time. Barreling through an enemy formation without support was not what they had planned for in their worse case scenarios. “So what are our options Captain?”

“Besides dumping his code into an actual toaster, we can only go along for the ride. Once we get there we can use our tractor beams to grab the ship and hope they don’t get ripped right out of their housings. Barring that we will pass through the enemy formation in less than fifteen minutes.”

“Why not use the fold field as a break.” Gillain’s voice was not too slightly shy, but it was not shaky or unconfident. “What’s the worse that could happen now?”

“I am going to have you downloaded into a body so I can smack the kelfa out of you. You just sent us on this little runaway shuttle ride, and you have the audacity to say that?”

“I’m either beginning to rub off on him, or he finally told a joke. But he does have a point. The Baltar’s were working on other uses for the unstable field. They were working on making a better barrier, but the principle was to cause anything that passed through it to slow down. The problem is, the fact that incoming energy weapons aren’t slowed down enough and outgoing energy weapon fire is diffused into near uselessness. We redo the field, and anyone outside of it can hit us with impunity.”

“I don’t trust him. He just jumped us right into the middle of an enemy fleet, and now he want’s me to make my best defense opaque to our weapons, and transparent to theirs. This would complete his primary program.”

“Do you trust me?”

“More than I trust him.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Yes I trust you, but I can’t let our trust put the sh.. the crew in danger. Frankly, right now I want to shut him down.”

Gilliad listened to the two. They were right. He had messed up badly, but he was trying to make it up to the captain. Only he didn’t know how. He only had one card left to play. “I’ll let you join with me.”

“Frankly kid, you’re not my type.”

“Neither are you, but this isn’t about us.”

“The good of the many...”

“I hate those movies.”

“I love those movies. I take it back, I’m not rubbing off on you.” Rachael leaned on the console. “Anyway, we only have about thirty seconds so if the two of you are going to get it on, you had better hurry.”

“We already did it. Let him do the modification.” Rachael looked at the two of them, the captain, and the camera. “Don’t judge things in human time. That was... Amazing. Thank you Gilliad.” The open look of shock on the human’s face amused Miri. “You should see yourself.” Almost as soon as she said it, an image of Rachael’s face appeared on the display behind the captain.

“You two are truly made for each other. Both of you are either going to drive me mad or make me name my next kid after one of you.”

“YOU”RE A MOTHER??” Gilliad’s voice was much louder than usual. “Sorry.”

“Yes, and one that is used to kids trying to change the subject. Now show me what you have, and make it quick, or we are going to be knee deep in bad guys.”

Diana watched in horror as the old style basestar just jumped into the middle of a maelstrom. The ship had emerged in a massive energy spike and had lurched forwards at speeds that should have been impossible. She was looking for ships that could intercept the runaway ship, but even the massive Jerichos were having trouble keeping up. The Cataphracts were catching up with the Jerichos, so they would at least have them to join up with, but there were fewer and fewer ship that could jump due to the interference. She was outside of the interference, but if she didn’t move soon, she would have to slug it back on her intersystem drives as well. She looked at the inert body of her husband, and through all of her internal and external camera, all of the members of her crew. Out there was one of her kin, and his own crew. She could no more not go after him, than she could turn back the tide of interference that Ragnarok had brought. She felt powerless. Power. She needed more power.

Captain Gantz watched as the last of Imperial capital ships started to launch their lifeboats. They wouldn’t be rescued until every friendly ship had managed to leave the area, but they wouldn’t die today. At the other battle zones, he was receiving reports of survivors, and wrecked ship being secured by Centurion boarding parties, with humans and humanoid Cylons in power armor extracting slaves from captured ships. There were even a few of the smallest ships still running around near General Jabom’s first battle zone. He was almost ready to release the ships from battlestations when the Bad Daggit jumped right into the middle of the furball. So when Admiral Diana filled him in on her plan he sat down in his chair and rubbed his tired eyes. “Comm, get me a link to Central Command, the lady wants to go rescue some wayward children. Tell them we need four undamaged ships, and we’re one of them.

Odin floated over Home in its protective orbit. It had taken nearly an hour to warm up every combat system, and launch every non-combatant’s ship from the bays, and now the warships were returning home as wrecks. Sure most of them had shields, but even they had been savaged by the withering fire of the Imperial fleet. The battle had been a rout, and they had just destroyed more tonnage than the entire Republic possessed. Admiral Moore looked at the displays as ships reported in. Their fleet was still in the fight, but the cost in blood and steel was high. Adama and Cain sat stunned as the videos of the massive ships arriving in the repair bays showed what a real war looked like. Admiral Cain had watched the holographic display as the battle had raged all over the system. She had been standing there for so long that Lee was about to ask her if she was alright. Her raised hand stopped him. “We are not ready. The fleet, the colonies, none of us. Mr. Adama, could you take the Sires on a tour of the damaged ships? Start with the wounded, then have them ask you anything they want about our fleet.”

“Why not Jurgen, or Fisk?” He knew better than to recommend Lieutenant Shaw.

“They wont trust us, ironically because they think we are afraid of the Cylons after what they did to us. Never mind the fact that they were the ones that were pushing for us to go ‘Teach the rustbuckets a lesson’. No, you actually are in a better position due to the fact that you are now outside the military, but still the son of one of the few people to not get caught with their pants down. You need to play on their fears, and make them see the light.”

“What do think that will accomplish? Adipose will just think that we staged this.”

“Then show him the bodies. Make sure that he is stuck in the room for a while. Let him soak it in.” The raised eyebrow from Lee let her know that he liked the idea. “If he were to get his hands dirty, so to speak, I would think that he might understand what really happening out here. But even if he doesn’t see the light, we have the leverage to get Bain’s successor to see reason. What was her name?”

“Sire Honeywell.” This time the look on his face was not even remotely a pleasant one. A Family’s idea of a joke, maybe, but word around the diplomatic group was that she was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Officers had come to her with reports of her attempting to ask questions that on the surface seemed innocent, but upon reflection were designed to sow discord in the ranks. She hadn’t done anything to actively cause a problem, but her habit of stirring up trouble was making her a pariah amongst the very people she was supposed to represent.

“Jurgen could sic Shaw on her.”

“I like Shaw too much.”

“Fisk?”

“Not enough...” She spotted a very amused Republic Admiral watching them. “Yes?”

“She’s embezzling funds from one of her father’s companies. Why don’t you just tell her that you’ll tell Daddy Honeywell about Honeywell Aerospace, and the Pikerning Parawing.”

The two colonials looked from her to each other, and back. “You have proof?”

“Quite a bit actually. We have been trying to root out any Imperial influences, and well... We found a lot of termites when we kicked the log.”

“Must you quote those movies so often?”

Cain’s look of mild distaste actually made Admiral Moore smile. “My dear, some things are just the way they are.” She may not have laughed at her fellow Admiral’s discomfort, but her eye twinkled. “But seriously, it is a Ranger tradition. Another one is to go to the aide of those in need. And I need a fat horse or two. Maybe one with wings?”

The Delphinium and her sister ship the Nightshade were picking off damaged Imperial frigates, and corvettes from what remained of General Jabom’s fleet. They were all that was left, but they were still Imperial ships with possibly working jump drives, so they had to be clipped and captured before the jamming could be shut down. A corvette tried to ram Lucy’s ship when its weapons proved useless against her shields. Grim simply stood at her side while the rest of the bridge crew scrambled about their duties. She had rather quickly found out how much he lived up to his name in so many ways, but watching Imperial ships fail at destroying them was not one. “Can we please clip this one now, I’m getting bored. And now so are they.” One of their main guns had speared the hapless ship almost directly through the centerline, and when the ship blew the display dimmed. “One more down, and dozens more to go.”

“And we just consigned men to die. Must you mock them so?” Lucy’s hologram stood next to the Cylon who was proving to be an odd duck amongst odd ducks.

“Better them, than us Sister. And they deserve the mocking for all the evil they have done.” She noticed how he had changed the quote. It was subtle, but she caught the honorific.

“You do know that we don’t always have to hate the ones we fight.”

“Yes, but I feel better when I fight them angry.” He looked at the ghostly image and realized the irony of speaking about his inner demons to a living ghost. “They made me a killer, so I’m returning the dishonor with interest.”

“So how many of them will have to die so that you can live with yourself?”

He was still trying to form an answer when the call came from Central Command.

Tarnis and the rest had used their magclamps to grab on to the hulls of the surviving Cataphract carriers. One of the carriers was so badly damaged, that they had had to jettison the carrier bays or risk them self-jettisoning during acceleration or manuvering. The Hard Luck Lady was living up, or down, to her name. Her spinal cannon was still firing, but she was out of missiles, and most of her point defense weapons were either gone, out of ammo, or wrecked beyond repair. Tarnis had spotted a human in a hardsuit out on the hull patching together one of the pintle mount laser cannons during combat. He had made a note to buy that man a drink if they survived. Not something that any ship could guarantee anymore. They had never fought so many ships at once. They had managed to catch up with the wayward ship though.

Republic Spy Thomas Rook walked onto the bridge of the Republic Battlecruiser Perdition and looked for the captain. An old man in a powered wheelchair motioned him over. “Captain Giddion, welcome aboard...” He looked at the lost look at the spy’s face. “All hail the wayward son. What’s in your book?” The story from the Scriptures of Zeus about his sons Apollo and Oddin was well know, even to the Cylon agent. Two brothers part ways at one of their father’s parties. One becomes the god of the sun, while the other wanders the planets on a horse that can walk between shadows. When the younger son returns, the father has another party. When the Sun God ask his father why they are throwing a party for a vagabond, the father tells him to sit and listen to the other son’s stories. After the party the elder brother gives his younger brother an empty book to write his stories down in. When asked why, the elder brother tells his younger brother that he, the elder, had never learned how to listen.

“We have a problem...”

“Well so do we. Sit down somewhere, and we’ll talk about it after we go and save the universe again.” As he sat down he realized that he had never seen so many chairs on the bridge of a Republic Battlecruiser. He looked around and noticed another thing. Every single person onboard was wearing a Colonial Fleet uniform with a Republic navy patch in lieu of their originals. The other thing he noticed was the fact that he was the only man with a full head of hair, and no wrinkles. The average age of the humans onboard was easily in the eighties, and the only Cylons, besides himself, were tarnished 005s and even an old 004 labor unit with Command Centurion armor wielded on to a frame that didn’t quite fit. “Yes, welcome to the old folks home. The Perdition is Homefleet, and we didn’t even have a fold drive until a year ago. But it looks like we will finally get to rise to the occasion.”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this...”

The 004 with out of place gold armor looked right at him. “Same here Bub, but orders are orders. SO sit down and STFU.”

“Barnaby, be nice. Your friend here was just dead, give him a break.”

“He’s no friend of mine.” Thomas knew of the legendary Barnaby, the only Cylon to refuse to fight the humans. It was said that he believed that had the uploaded personality of a human from before the war. He had never been a part of the revolt, but he had been forced to flee with the Cylons when they left the colonies. An outcast amongst outcasts, he had elected to live alone in one of the older basestars until it had been scraped.

“I’m closer than you think.”

“Hardly, you were a spy. I’m an outcast.”

“I made friends with our enemies.”

The shuffle of his shoulders was so human, that Tom was surprised at the sophistication of the 004. “I’ll believe that when I see that.” A foam cup hit Barnaby in the head. Everyone turned to see a frail looking woman in the comm chair. “Okay, Candice...”

The voice that came out of the frail looking woman belied the woman’s condition. The husky contralto practically purred as she spoke. “You watched the comm. That kid would have done anything to not fight him, but his duty was as strong as ours.”

Barnaby held up his finger in the duelist’s mark, signifying a point. “But he still had to fire. When we can get them to surrender without having to smash their ship into scrap, then I’ll be ready to be convinced.”

“I love you too, but you are rusted between your ears.” She smiled, and returned to her board.

“Yes dear.” At Tom’s wide-eyed look the Cylon did his best imitation of a blush. Which for a gold colored robot consisted of body language that was entirely too human. “We’re just friends.”

After the Odin folded to join the Artemis, the Pegasus exited the mobile fortress through a hanger that dwarfed even the mighty Scorpion Shipyards. She felt somewhat alone as they exited the bay. The ship moved out into position and she watched as her ship got ready for it’s part in the mission. Baltar, and Dera had joined her on the bridge, and looking at their worried faces she felt the hole where Grace should have been echoed in them as well. Hera, and Grace were back in orbit around Home with the rest of the Colonial diplomatic mission’s fleet. Knowing that they were protected by a fleet of damaged ships that were still thousand of times more effective than the Pegasus just wasn’t enough. She felt like she was abandoning... No. She looked out to where the Delphinium stood beside her. She wasn’t abandoning anyone this time. Her little sister’s ship was less than half the size of the Pegasus, but she knew that it was every bit as dangerous. In he mind she realized that her sister actually had more experience in space combat than she did, but even though she still felt protective she knew they would all be fighting together.

Belzen and Fisk were making sure that all of the systems were ready, and Shaw was tapping her fingers on the new holographic display’s controls. The young woman was still trying to fit in, and her friction with Fisk had made the C.I.C. a powder keg whenever they were both on duty. The fact that her Ministry of Defense posting had put the junior officer on equal footing with the career fleet officer wasn’t helping, in fact it only poured tylium on the reactor. Her late mother’s ghost still popped up from time to time in unexpected ways. Sire Bain had actually been respectful when he met her for the first time, and she seemed to be the only person he had not gone out of his way to piss off. Which perversely, was another thing that Fisk had held against her. Her dual position of aide and tactical officer was the one thing he couldn’t fault the woman for. It wasn’t that often that someone so young had been tossed in to the deep end, and wound up doing so well in spite of his best efforts. It was the fact that her name opened doors that his less-than-stellar name closed that had started the conflagration, but Fisk seemed to be trying his darndest to sabotage her.

Cain knew that if she could only teach the young woman to rein in her famous Shaw temper, she would be a fine officer. Cain walked over to the display and looked through the holographic image at the young woman. With her serious face lit by the display, she looked like a Fury ready to leap into the display. “A Cubit for your thoughts.”

The woman’s eyes didn’t leave the display, but her mouth twisted into a frown before she answered. “Why are we here?”

“Are we discussing philosophy, or tactics?”

Shaw’s eyes switched to looking at her Admiral. “I’m not sure of both of those wouldn’t be the same answer. I know that if we don’t stop them out here, then we will have to fight them back in the colonies. But the real question is, why are we trying to save our enemy?”

“Because if anything can be learned by our past, it’s this: Yesterday’s enemy, may not be tomorrow’s.” She gestured at the fleet surrounding them. “As little as a a few decades ago the Colonies were at war with each other, then we were at war with the Cylons. Even I was ready to kill these people a little over a year ago, and now look at us. We are riding on a razor’s edge out here. We just found out that who we thought were our enemies, have actually been our protectors. One side of the razor is madness, the other is death, and walking the edge is going to take an effort of herculean proportions. We have to not only make peace with our enemies, but with ourselves.”

The confused look on Shaw’s face let Cain know that she still didn’t understand. “Hand me your knife.” The woman handed the knife her father had give her to her Admiral without hesitation. Her mother had always demanded instant obedience so it, like fleet life, had come easy to her.

Cain pulled out the blade. The Dinasus Steel was the finest in the colonies. The wavy patten in the blade was almost iconic. “Put your hand on the counter.” Shaw didn’t even flinch as she put her hand on the edge of the display. The blade came down so fast she knew that she wouldn’t be able to move. Cain did something and instead of the blade it was the pommel that hit her knuckles. Shaw held her hand in place, fully expecting to be stabbed by her commanding officer, but the sudden change shocked her even more than the blade would have. “You trusted me blindly. I trusted the Admiralty blindly, and look what that almost cost us.” Understanding was finally starting to work it’s way through Shaw’s eyes. “You never asked me what my call sign was.”

“I looked it up before I arrived. You were known as ‘Nemesis’. ‘The Seeker of Vengeance’.”

Cain laughed. “And you call yourself a student of the classics. Preacher gave me that callsign as a replacement for my first one. It was far better than the one my classmates had given me; as I was a hot head with a chip on my shoulder the size of the Pegasus They called me Handbasket.”

Shaw’s eyes bugged out at the reference to the old Kobolian word for Hades. “Yes, Helena Handbasket was the bain of many a instructor, and CO. That was up until Preacher showed me that in my drive for perfection I was so focused on overcoming my perceived failures that I couldn’t think straight. Any flaw I had was tragedy, and any slight was a challenge. I picked fights I shouldn’t have; and I blamed the universe for any failures big or small.”

She looked at the blade in her hand. Even here she could see imperfection in the blade. Swirls that didn’t line up, and a slight nick in the edge. “I was one of his biggest challenges, and I hope one of his better successes. It took over a year, but he gave me the new callsign after I broke up a fight between a bunch of drunk marines and drunker pilots. I kicked the feldercarb out of both sides, and put them all on report. He visited me in the sickbay after the Doc patched up my broken ribs and he told me that I’m not the seeker of Vengeance, but the seeker of Justice. For years, I thought that meant fighting the Cylons. Now... Now I am looking for the real enemy.” She pointed at the display. “Out here the real enemy is not painted in black and white, but shades of gray. They are human, but the metal Cylons we fought for so long are more human than they are.”

Jurgen left the navigation control station, and joined them at tactical. “We’re ready.” He noticed the knife in Cain’s hands, the serious expressions on both of the officer’s faces, and notched an eyebrow. “Are you?”

“Yes we are.” Cain handed the knife back to Shaw and realized that her speech had done more for her, than it had for the young woman that reminded her so much of herself at that age. It made her wonder if Preacher got as much out of his speeches as she had.

Chapter Text

The years of war with the Republic had taught the Empire a few things. The wrecked fleet might be drifting apart, but they hadn’t died unlamented. The shattered ships were each equipped with a hyperspace transponder. After the Republic had made a habit of stealing Imperial ships it had been decided by the Brotherhood of Shipwrights to install them just in case they could lead them to Republic bases. The devices were powered from the main reactor, but they were also built into very same the reactor in such a way that they were impossible to access with the reactor online. It made tracking the ships Novice’s play for the Inquisition.

From a position in the middle of deep space, five light-years away from the battle, Archbishop Anton Beniedicto of the Grand Inquisitors looked out at the Inquisition fleet that had been assembled to take care of all the loose ends that they had planned on Victor Magus not planning on. A fleet that was less than half the number of Magus’ but consisting of capital ships that were all battlecruiser or larger so their tonnage was actually higher. Each was decked out with the best technology the Empire could provide. From Requiem cannons, and enough laser batteries to melt cities from orbit, to stealth system that could baffle even their own fleet’s sensors. His own Sword of Truth was a relic, but it was also the Empire’s greatest weapon. The ship was so old that no one knew it’s true age, or origin, but it had served the Empire for thousands of tens of years, and had never been defeated. If the legends were true, it had served during the Silicon Fall as it protected the Empire against dozens of rouge battleships. He knew that if nothing else it would bring terror to their enemies, and strength to their allies. Now, as he watched Imperial transponders wink out like candles in the wind, it looked like they would be avenging their fallen. His aide brought him a drink and he sat beside the display as the ships winked out.

“Should we join them? We could still turn the tide.” The aide knew that the information, even with the faster than light communication, was nearly five minutes out of date. Any delay meant that their comrades were dying.

A raised eyebrow was all that signaled the fact that he knew what was happening. “No, we will wait, and see what our agent has to say before we jump in.” The fleet that had been sent in contained scions, and sons, of most of the top families in the empire. If the inquisition saved them, then the families would feel shame, and the loss of prestige that came with their faiure. And while that would provide the Inquisition with leverage over them, they would eventually feel animus towards the Inquisitors. With their deaths the families would keep their honor, and as a bonus the Inquisition could take the holdings of those didn’t have any legitimate male heirs. And if they did, then accidents could happen...

Inquisitor Iblis DeCount sat in his stealthed scout and watched from far outside the system as the lightspeed sensors, and the transponders relayed their information to him. He was still trying to figure out how the Cylons had managed to join up with the Colonies. His agents had reported sporadic violence on the colonies as he was leaving, but no open warfare. Now it looked like the heretics, and the metal abominations, were actually getting along. The fuses he had lit had ben quenched far too throughly for his liking. Someone had undone all of his plans, and he didn’t know how.

Then the humiliating defeat of a massive armada of Imperial ships, the likes of which had never been even conceived of needing for such a insignificant system, had been the last straw. This could not be allowed to go on. He rested his hand on the contacts built into the arms of his command chair. The command chair, or Throne as it was called, let him interface with the ship in a way that bordered on symbioses. He used it to reach out with the ship’s sensors, and found only a couple of Tainted agents of his, and they were far too close to the enemy home world for him to risk getting close enough to... He felt for something closer...

Fisk looked up from his display. He thought he had heard something unusual. Colonel Belzen was talking to himself. He walked over to where his commanding officer was standing and... The bullet hole in his head stopped whatever else he had planned. Jurgen was fighting for control as he aimed his weapon at the woman that he loved like a sister. He hesitated, and later Cain would wonder how he had managed even that, but in that instant Shaw jumped in front of him and tackled him. The pistol went off once more. The surprised look in Shaw’s eyes was mirrored in his own. Why had Sire DeCount wanted him to murder her? Cain’s fist connected with his face, and he fell to the ground like a marionette that had had his strings cut. It was at that point that he felt his mind start to go...

DeCount felt the connection falter so he gave the kill command. There should be no way for them to track this back to him if the assassin simply died instead of exploding. That was okay, he had other puppets. He would just have to turn on his Throne’s other systems, and boost the range of his control. The Throne had its own risks, but they were far lower than if he had approached the inner system.

The hiss of the injector was the only sound Cain heard as the medics injected the counter agent into Jurgen’s neck. Shaw had been rushed to the surgery while Cain sat over the body of Fisk. The pompous ass had been a pain in her side since he had joined the crew, but for all of his failings he didn’t deserve this. She looked at the pistol that the JAG officer was unloading, and bagging up for evidence. How had they gotten to Belzen, and when? The man practically lived on the Pegasus, or with his wife and kids... Rika was on Cloud 9 with the girls. She stood up so fast that people around her jumped back instinctively. “No one speaks of this, and no word leaves this ship. Get Thorne up here on the double.” The stunned looks on the officers gave way to something more primal. Fear.

Lieutenant Alastair Thorne stood at attention and the darkness surrounding him seemed to be a physical thing. His Ghost opps tags had given him a reputation, even among the MarDet officers, he was one few fleet officers that the marines would willingly share a drink with, but rarely a second. She had been reluctant to have him on her ship, but the old admiralty had practically forced him upon her. After a year on the Pegasus he had grown on her, but he would never be invited to any social events. When he had nearly single-handedly saved a ship full of kids after their parents had run into pirates, she was willing to look the other way as to what had happened to the pirates. He was the guy you went to for dirty jobs that needed to be done... and forgotten.

“Belzen ma’am?”

“Yes, somehow he was compromised. I need you to figure out how.”

“If I do this, I can’t guarantee he will live.”

“If you can’t he may not want to.”

“Ma’am?”

“He just tried to kill me, he did manage to kill Fisk, and he nearly succeed in killing an officer he had viewed as a little sister. How do you think he will feel if he wakes up, and she didn’t make it?”

“If.”

“There is no guarantee that he will come out of the coma he’s in. The damage he suffered might be irreparable.” She cursed the fact that the counteragent hadn’t been fast enough to counteract all of the damage. If they survived, the Republic doctors had offered to try and repair the damage, but even they hadn’t held out too much hope. Her best friend was lying on a table in the medbay next to the woman he had shot, and she had a better chance of returning to duty.

“You know how my ‘gifts’ work.”

She looked at the officer in front of her who had long ago confessed to being a sociopath as well as an oracle. He could enter the mind of a prisoner, but only after he broke them down. And he enjoyed breaking people in far too many ways. She had looked at his record only once, but it had been enough to show that he should have been in the toughest prison in the colonies, not out here in a uniform. “I do.”

“If he’s in a coma, how am I supposed to get to him?”

“I doubt he was the only one that had been turned.”

“You do know that the most likely other person or persons would be his family.” Her face must have registered on his thoughts. “But they are back at the planet, so they wouldn’t be a threat to us.”

“Yes, I know, but I’m more concerned with the fact that the enemy contacted him onboard our ship while we are in the middle of a combat situation. Electronic countermeasures, and signals didn’t detect a signal, and I don’t want to even entertain the idea of them having that kind of telepathy.”

“My gift...”

“I know. But you need to be in the same room. If they can do this from a stealthed ship, then how do we fight it?”

“I need to get his defenses down. My usual methods are not going to work.” He stood there rather stone-face, but she knew that the man was a monster, and was itching to be allowed to practice his craft once again.

Cain thought about the nearly mindless lump that had at one time been a pirate that she had spaced two days before they raided the Sagittaron Slavers base on the back side of its lone moon Soma. Having the code to get in with out tripping the slaver’s alarms had probably saved over a hundred Sagittaron slaves. What he had done to the man would probably have been a spacing offence itself, but his orders had given him the authority to act outside of Colonial Law. A fact that had not made him a lot of friends until after he had proven his abilities. The letter signed by former president Adar had been a ‘Get-out-of-the-brig’ card that he used. Adar’s death, and the new president’s amnesty had cleared him of the charges that Lee had wanted to bring, but it had also been the excuse to rip it up in front of him.

Maybe he didn’t need to do his usual. She seemed to deflate as she said it, but it needed to be said. “His defenses could be gone already.”

A weird look came across the man’s face as he pondered the possibilities. “I will try it.”

Doctor Hector Grimes watched with undisguised anger as the ‘Wraith’ stood next to the man he had been trying to protect from him until the Admiral had handed him her own sidearm. The order to “Shoot him, or get out of the way!” had brought him up short. He still held the pistol, but he had promised her that he would only shoot if she ordered him to.

Cain was watching the information from C.I.C. on one of the monitors. She had been watching the ships get ready to jump, and all of the preparations had not come to a halt simply because her XO had been compromised. In fact, they were just about to jump.

Miri watched as the hanger hatches opened. She might not have any fighters, but the Colonial government had been all too willing to provide her human crew with a squad of Minotaur power armor. She had locked them in the morgue while they were underway, but now they were quickly taking up positions on the hull. She laughed at the irony of the Sons of Aries protecting Cylons with their lives, but she had to admit that the ones that had remained had become very loyal. Not to her specifically, but to Lieutenant Aden as well as the mission. ‘Strange days indeed...’

The Minotaurs were joined by cyclones with SMUs. The Space Mobility Units were nothing more than an extra set of tanks for the cyclones thrusters, and enough propellant for an hours flight time. The SMUs did prevent the power armor from transforming, but no one was going to be driving a motorcycle on her hull anyway.

Last but not least were the two additions to her crew. The Tom Toms were smaller versions of the venerable Tomahawk. Armed with tri-barrel lasers instead of the massive beam cannons, and only two shoulder mounted missile pods, they lacked the punch of the Tomahawks, but they could fit inside the relatively cramped fighter bays, and still leave room for the ship’s fighter contingent. Each one had a Cylon plugged directly into its control computer so, combined with their smaller size, they moved with a grace that the larger Tomahawks just couldn’t match.

Her energy barrier was holding against the attacks of the few fighters that remained, and the shuttles were not have a good time trying to get close with all of her defenders on the hull. She still welcomed the other forces that were coming to her aide. The Jericho squad, and their pocket carriers were nearly in range, and she had even received a call from three squadrons of veritechs. ‘A rag tag fleet against the enemy. Shadow would approve.’ she thought to herself.

A puzzle was perplexing Inquisitor DeCount. Iblis had always hated puzzles. He could still feel the mind of his agent, but he shouldn’t be able to if he had died. That agent was right in the middle of the fight, and any intell he could get out of him would be of immense value, but he should have been dead after he had given him the kill command. No one had survived that. He wasn’t sure if he should try and contact the agent, or try one of the others. He looked at the crono. He had over half an hour to let the Inquisition fleet know if they should attack or not. He dived in.

Miri had been watching the gravitic sensors ever since they emerged from their ill-fated jump. That was why she spotted the tell-tale ripples of the rescue mission. They would emerge right after she grabbed the troopship in her tractor beam. They had sent the message right before they jumped and when the Bad Daggit received it the bridge had erupted into cheers. Not all of them from the humans. Paladin had even joined in. And while he was not usually the kind to show emotion, she had realized that that meant that they would be able to kill the enemy faster, and that was something that Paladin would cheer for.

Thorne had been trying to ‘touch’ Belzen’s mind during the jump, and in the instant they jumped he managed to touch the naked mind of his commanding officer. He could see inside in a way that he had never been able to before. The man’s entire mind was like a hall full of open doors. Inside each was a memory. He saw the first time Jurgen had played pyramid. His first Kalo pipes lesson. The first time he met his wife. The first time... There, he steadied the flow of memories, and started to look for Iblis DeCount. Everything seemed to blur for a moment as the memory came forward. A Quorum vist during a refit three years ago. Admiral Cain had been down on Picon, and the Colonel had given the members the tour in her stead. Throne remembered that meeting. He had been tasked with the security detail. The only member of that group still serving on the Pegasus was Major Kane. The marine... He jumped out of Belzen’s mind and practically ran out door much to the surprise of everyone in the room. His two Marine security detachment followed him as fast as they could, but he was faster for lack of heavy gear. She was an ordinance disposal officer for the MarDet. If she had been turned then they were all in trouble.

The ships exited the jump in front of the Bad Daggit’s course, and right into the middle of a sea of life boats. Each one that still had fuel made a beeline for the closest ship. The ships had already been at battle stations, so they were ready for the attack. Even still, one of the life boats managed to hit the Odin’s barrier before it was completely up. Nearly half of the lifeboat continued on while the rest exploded on the outside of the barrier. Two laser batteries made sure that anyone that might have been alive in the wreckage was not afterwards.

Lucy watched as her fighters launched to take up a CAP as the former enemy troop ship and the Cylon basestar made their rendevous.

Rachael on the Notre Dominus had prepared the crew for the arrival of her friends, but she nearly had a mutiny when the Bad Daggit flew nearly straight at them and only missed them by less than a Pyramid field. If that wasn’t bad enough, some of them did start to panic when the ship grabbed them forcefully with a tractor beam and pulled them against their will on to their new course. It was the Princess... Empress that took control. She had shouted down every voice that threatened to break, and pulled the ship back from the brink; all while strapped to the deck of the landing bay, and pulling in the last of the Myrmidon reentry pods, the muscles in her back, and the servos in the power armor she had donned, straining to save as many as they could. As she pulled in the last pod they had been able to capture, helped by the men on the deck, she could still see other beacon lights blinking in the void like the very stars they might be joining if someone didn’t reach them in time. Her vison burred with the tears that threatened to obscure her vision in the zero gravity environment. She blinked them mostly away, and forced herself to look back at the ones she had saved. Some of her ghosts might not visit her tonight, and the ones that did might be more forgiving this time.

Miri watched as the Bad Dagget lost a lot of its forward momentum and changed its vector when they grabbed the troopship. She could see the pods of the Myrmidons drifting away from their new course, and she knew they would die out here if someone didn’t do something. “Miri to Hanger two. How many Raptors do we have?”

The voice of Fred the deck chief came on almost instantly. “We have ten. We got them ready just in case you needed some S&R birds.” She looked at the comm for long enough that Fred came back on. “Captain?”

“Good work Chief, I have a volunteer only mission. I want them to go pick up the enemy drop pods that are scattered out there.”

“Captain, did I just hear you right.”

“Yes...”

“Okay, just making sure. The boys and girls down here are getting board anyway, so they all just jumped into their birds.”

“That’s the only jumping they will be able to do. Remind them that they will be in those birds for the next two weeks.”

“We’re all Tincans down here ma’am, don’t worry about us. But what about the canned meatbots?”

She shook her head. Fred was incredibly talented, and quick to anticipate her orders, but his lack of respect for anyone that was not her or Fred was legendary. And the only reason he respected her was the fact that he was the one of the Cylons she had risked her life to save before the war was officially a hot one. “We’ll try and get some relief out to them after this is all over.” She didn’t add the fact that they all might be dead if they didn’t get their own butts out of the area. She didn’t know what Diana had in mind, but she hoped that involved all of them getting home in working order. She watched as the Raptors left the hanger, and she knew that some of them might be getting home the resurrection route if they weren’t careful.

Lady Taki watched the other ship launch shuttles that started to vector towards courses that would allow them to backtrack and recover the pods. At least she hoped they were recovering the pods. “Lady Rachael?”

“Yes?”

“Your friends are recovering the pods, right.”

“Yes, did you doubt that they would?”

“I do not have a lot of faith left in humanity. I expect very little. For all I know, they are simply putting the Myrmidons out of their misery. The Empire used our lifeboats as target practice.”

“That was the Bad Dagget out there. Miri, their captain wouldn’t let them do anything like that.”

“Bad Dagget?”

“Dagget, a canine descended from an animal from old Earth known as Dogs. You called them Inu. The Empire still calls them Dogs, we call them Daggets.”

“That’s a funny name.”

“That’s a funny ship. The last time I was on it, we all thought it was cursed. That’s how it got its name. It is also home to the hardest of hard-luck cases, and they and Miri their captain will do anything to protect the weak. For them it is redemption.”

“A cursed Empress saved by a cursed ship, how fitting. Maybe this will lift all of our curses.”

Miri watched as their velocity fell even further with the other ships engaging their tractor beams. Maybe things were looking up for a change.

Lucy launched her fighters to fly a CAP as the Odin moved to receive the wayward ships. She actually spotted two shuttles change direction when they spotted the blue flower on her hull. Grimm stood next to her and chuckled as well.

Thorne rounded the corner and charged right into the ordinance disposal chamber. Barbara Kane spun around at the sudden interruption. He had caught her red-handed. The book reader fell to the ground as she shot to attention. “I’m sorry sir, I know were at battle stations, but there’s...oomph!” The wind was knocked out of her lungs as he slammed her up against the locker behind her. The moment she had both dreaded and wished for was here and she was speechless. Her knees went weak at the intense look in his eyes. The phrase ‘My safe word is Kaber Root’ ran through her mind at just that moment.

“Kaber Root?” He sputtered.

Her face flushed in sudden embarrassment as she realized that he had just been in her mind. “It’s true. You are an Oracle.” Her breathing was ragged, and her face did not lose the flush that his revelation had produced; if anything the blush spread and deepened. He gripped her arms so hard she yelped at the sudden pain.

“You are not the one.” He let go of her as suddenly as he had attacked her.

“I could be...”

“No, you silly fool. I’m looking for a saboteur. One that doesn’t even know they are one.”

“A Cylon?”

“No, a human that Sire DeCount might have come in contact with.”

Real fear showed on the woman’s face for the first time. “That man gave me the creeps when he was here, I did my best to stay on the other side of the room.”

HE swore under his breath as he picked up her reader, and noticed the title. Dante’s Kiss was a well known erotic novel. What wasn’t so well know was the author’s name. “So you read this trash?”

The color in her face remained the same, but this time for a different reason. “Hey, that book has been on the P&P best seller list for over fifteen years.”

Good, he had her attention. “Shows what you know. The kid that wrote it did so while he was in jail for his first murder. He wrote Persephone’s Tears during his Basic Training.”

“You know Claw?”

He got so close that he could feel her breath on his shoulder as he whispered in her ear. “I am Claw.” He dove into her mind with enough force to stun her. He held her up as he walked through her memories of DeCount’s visit. She had been telling the truth about not wanting to be near the man. She had followed him though. And when he met with the command crew in the C.I.C. she had almost warned Lieutenant Thorne to not shake hands with him.

Thorne was shocked, he didn’t remember ever meeting the man, but here was Kane’s memories showing him doing otherwise. He had to admit to himself that had he been turned, he probably wouldn’t know it. But why hadn’t DeCount tried to get to him. He let go of Kane who fell to the ground in shock at the intense experience she had just undergone. The two marines that had finally caught up with Thorne stood outside just watching him work. They were used to his methods, and they were too well trained to express any opinions about his style. Thorne then did something that did startle them. He handed his pistol over to the closest one and sat in Major Kane’s chair. “Secure me. She knows the safe word.” He closed his eyes and started to do something he had never done before. He looked inside his own head.

DeCount tried again to make contact with his operative on the Colonial ship. The contact was much stronger now, and he reached out to...

Thorne opened the eyes of the body he was in and looked around. The ship was like nothing he had ever seen. Holographic displays, and men in black robes filled a cramped bridge. The filtered air had a strange metallic tang to it...

DeCount opened his eyes to see three Colonial marines surrounding him. How had they gotten on his ship? No, wait, he was on theirs. How had that happened? He tried to stand up, but he was bound to the chair. He tried to undo them, but one of the marines put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s the safe word, sir?”

“I don’t have time for this.” He looked into the man’s eyes and... and... and nothing. He couldn’t access his nanites, or his ability to thrall people just by looking at them. “Let me pass. I need to speak with...” The first one slammed him back into the chair, and the others secured him tighter. “What is the meaning of this, don’t you know who I am?”

“No sir, tell us?”

“I am...” He looked at the shoulder patches and realized that he was on the Pegasus. The ordinance disposal room, if he was not mistaken. So he must be in Belzen’s mind. How he had managed this was secondary to the fact that he had just inadvertently discovered a way to spy on the enemy without risking his own life. Belzen must have been one of those genetic freaks the indos called Oracles. He had tried his best to stay as far away from them as he could, but it looked like God’s Graces favored him today. With his puppet no likely brain damaged, or even brain dead, they must have brought him here to see if he had any surprises tucked inside his body. “I am Colonel Jurgen Belzen. Serial Number: 635440. Now let me go or I will have you all brought up on charges.” He is startled to see them laughing until the female one pulled out a hand cam, and plugged it into a computer. The image of the security chief that he had shaken hands with was not the image he had expected. If the security chief was the freak, then what had happened to his mind. He couldn’t access any memories from this body. Had he been damaged in some way? What had happened? And what was happening in his own body.

Thorne couldn’t read the script on the displays, but the body he was in had a direct neural link to the ship, so he could see everything the ship could. The danger here was the fable of the sinking treasure ship. Stay and grab more than you can swim with, and you drowned. Leave before you get enough, and lose the treasure. The balance he needed was to find a way to stop the ship, and find out what their plans were. He tried to reach out with his mind, but he couldn’t touch the crewmembers’ minds. He could see that the ship only had ten crewmembers, but he couldn’t leave the chair he was in without losing the connection. He looked at the ship’s roster and could see each and every Acolyte’s names, and their portfolios. Each one showed high ranks in their various specialities, so he knew that he couldn’t bluff his way out of this. At the end of each portfolio was a code, and their family trees. He didn’t know what the codes were but he memorized all ten of them just to be safe.

“Your Eminence.” Acolyte Barker, the helmsman bowed in his direction. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to use the man’s name or not, so he did what any good impostor did. “Yes, this had better be good or else.” He feigned arrogance.

It must have worked. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but you wanted me to remind you to send out the arrival coordinates to the Inquisitor fleet. I have plotted a safe spot outside the distortion.”

“Give them one directly in the middle of the distortion.”

“Your Eminence?”

“Did I stutter?”

“No but...” Alastair thought about the code, and the man in front of him collapsed. He could see with the internal sensors that the man’s heart had simply stopped. Alastair made sure to not actively think about any of those other codes if he could help it.

“Hedren!”

“Ye..yes?”

“Do as I say. The fleet can handle a little turbulence. And won’t the heretics be surprised?” A smattering of nervous laughter went around the bridge, but he knew that he would have to tread softly the next time he pulled that trick. Hedren was the backup navigator, as well as the ship’s weapons Acolyte. He would be the next to go, if the need arose.

DeCount looked at the face of the one woman that he had not planned on seeing out here. The very idea of the loose warhead Admiral Cain was known to be did not jive with the image of her sitting in front of him. “So DeCount is in there. Where is Thorne?”

“We don’t know ma’am. Our best guess is that The Wraith switched bodies somehow.” The man had the intestinal fortitude to be able to look his Admiral straight in the eye while explaining the obvious.

“And he tried to get you to let him go?”

“I’m sitting right here, you know.”

She looked at him and smiled the predatory smile she was famous for. “Iblis, prince of lies. I always got a laugh at the idea of a politician that was seemingly named after the Trickster God. It is also rather fitting that you are in the body of the one officer that I would love to have an excuse to space.” She heard the gasp from the ordinance officer behind her. “You jumped into a psycho killer’s body, and if he doesn’t come back... Well let’s just say that we won’t let you die easily.”

“You can’t do that. I was captured on a Colonial warship, and Section Eight, Article Fif..” The chair he was strapped into was yanked forward as Cain punched DeCount/Thorne in the face.

“You don’t get to use those. You are an enemy combatant, and as a member of a non-Colonial government that we are at war with, I have a lot more leeway with what I am allowed to do, or not do, with you.”

On the enemy ship, Thorne’s jaw started to ache, but he didn’t dare budge. He knew that he had to hurry. Someone was interrogating DeCount, and he didn’t want too much damage to happen to his real body. His access to the ship’s computer made what he was about to try risky, but the payoff should be worth it. He set up the program and executed it. Every single airlock, and bulkhead opened at once, and he felt the pressure start to drop. When the crew started to try and fix the problem he remembered all of their codes. The last one to fall had almost pulled his sidearm out of his holster before he died. Now all he had to do was to wait and see if he died here, or was forced back into his own body. Either which way, he knew the pain would be exquisite. He thought back to all of the people he had killed. The first five before he had been caught, and all the others afterward. The Admiral was right, he was a monster, but he was also an artist. Sadly there was no art here though. He had been forced to kill the men too quickly, and the first one almost as an accident. He felt the nanites in the body trying to keep him alive. There was no way to turn them off, and he really didn’t want the pain to end that quickly anyway. He looked at the ship’s chrono and figured that he had a few minutes to live at this rate. He found the purge valve on his suit, but he knew that he had to pull himself out of the chair to reach it. He also found the Inquisitor’s pain and punishment staff. The blade on the end would do a better job anyway.

DeCount laughed in the female Admiral’s face. “You can’t keep me here forever, and if you kill this body I will be back on my own ship, and I will send the Inquisition Fleet to your home system and burn your worlds until the seas themselves are nothing but memories.” The bruises on Thorne’s face were starting to show some color, and the blood dripping down his split lip made him look like a tarma mellon exploded while he was eating it.

Cain was about to punch him again when the man looked like he was having trouble breathing. His eyes bulged out, and he gasped for air despite not having anything impeding his airway. She started slapping him. He looked up and started to laugh in her face again. She continued slapping him forward and back-handed until he gasped out “Kaber root.” She was about to hit him again when Kane stopped her.

“How long have you been back, Lieutenant?”

“How long have you been slapping me, Admiral?

“You are one sick man.”

“Don’t I know it. But we need to get ready, a bunch of sicker men are on their way.”

“The Inquisition Fleet?” At his surprised look she smiled. “Why do you think I was slapping him... you?”

“Not bad Admiral, you know the who, but I know the when and the where. Now would someone please untie me? Barbara?” She flicked out her knife, and went to work. When she had freed his hand he felt his jaw. “They are going to be arriving in about twenty-five minutes. The coordinates I sent them will drop them right into the middle of the distortion. That is, if the distortion doesn’t knock them off course.” His hand felt the various bruises that covered his face, and chest. “You pack a mean right Admiral. I should probably go get these looked at.”

“What about DeCount? Won’t he warn them off?”

Iblis looked at the ruined controls and dead Acolytes that surrounded the bridge. His smashed helmet was the least of his problems. Somehow the fool he had traded places with had put a repair patch behind his suit, and he was now stuck to his throne. The sticky adhesive was strong enough to hold him in place, even if he hadn’t taken care to use the same patches on his legs, and arms.

“I don’t think he will be giving us any trouble in that respect. He’s pretty much stuck here in the system.”
Iblis felt the light-headedness that came with hypoxia. His nanites were scavenging his body for anything they could to save off the inevitable. He couldn’t feel his fingers, or his toes, and already his limbs felt half dead. What little oxygen his body still had was being pulled towards his brain, but he knew that he didn’t have long to live. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes.

“Okay, go see the doc, and have him look at that.” She didn’t say she was sorry, and he knew that she wasn’t.

“Major Kane, could you help me?”

Admiral Cain and the others left them as they headed for the bridge. “So you’re the Claw?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not headed towards the doc’s tender arms are you?”

“Do you know any tender arms I might head towards.”

“My quarters are right down the way, and the others would be at their stations.” He laughed. Auto-erotic asphyxiation wouldn’t be a bad way to go. He could already feel DeCount fading, so he wasn’t sure how much time he had left. He just didn’t know just how connected they were, but he was willing to find out. He didn’t have any regrets... Well almost none. He was just sad that he had never gotten the chance to carry out Admiral Corman’s last order. Turning that self-righteous baggit Cain into a psycho once they reached Cylon space would have been fun. The people that countermanded that order had made sure that he wouldn’t do it just for fun anyway by revoking Adar’s letter of exception after the Admiral had ripped it up. He was going to do it anyway, but that amazon girlfriend of hers seemed to know whenever he was going to try. Oh well, he at least had a beautiful woman to spend the rest of his life with. How ever long that might be.

Indigo landed on the hull of the Bad Dagget shortly after it finished grabbing the enemy ship. Zero followed her with less skill, but more speed. He hit the deck with a high lateral speed that required him to use not only the magpads in his feet, but one of the ones in his mech’s hand as well. One Zero had managed to slow them down, but his partner had been complaining about Indigo’s recklessness all the while he was trying to redline their own engines. How One Zero managed to hold on to their rifle during their near-crash of a landing he wasn’t sure, but as he stood up he nearly laughed as Zero started to complain again. “Frak those are big guns. Too bad we can’t load out those.” He looked up at the Jerichos that had beaten them here due to their pocket carrier’s assistance, and the much shorter distance they had to transverse.

“We couldn’t even lift off the deck if we had one of the Jericho’s cannons.” Indigo replied, looking jealously at the massive cannons.

“We fight in the void, lifting off isn’t the problem, but I get your point.” He watched the massive mechs move into positions near the basestar’s edges. “What I don’t see, is what they are doing.”

“Don’t you ever pay attention during briefings?”

“No, I’m usually too busy trying to get you to pay attention.” They watched as Tarnis positioned the whole squad of Jerichos on the ventral and dorsal sections. Each one was tasked with a quadrant to protect, and they found the access hatches that every basestar had built into them. The hatches were designed for docking with space stations, and repair slips. Now they were being used for a completely different purpose. The Squires quickly went to work attaching power cables to the already transforming mechs. The massive robots had never been designed for speed, and even their transformations were slower than anything he had ever seen. “Don’t they have enough power already?”

“Yes, but by tying in to the ship, they can fire once every minute instead of once every fifteen. You really need to pay more attention.”

“We’ll download it later.”

Indigo thought back to the dogfighting lessons she had with Preacher. “Downloading, and learning are not the same.”

She hadn’t realized she said it over their private channel until he replied. “What? I don’t understand.”

Montoya sighed before she could. She realized who had left the channel open. “And that’s why I’m in charge.”

Miri watched as the veritech fighters, and other mechs, took up positions on her hull. The Cataphracts had taken up positions on a near parallel course that would allow them to fire off their bow cannons without worrying about hitting the debris in their path. She was about to be in the middle of the two most powerful ships the Republic possessed, and she felt... she felt... Nervous?

Rachael looked up from her display to see her captain doing something with a coin. “A cubit for your thoughts.”

“It’s not a Cubit. It’s a Cele.” She held it up. The picture of the Scorpia’s favorite patron god, Dionysus. His smiling face, and overflowing wine cup was literally iconic. “I was just thinking about the first person I was forced to kill.”

“Forced?”

“He tried to kill me, I was just a tad faster.”

“Oh.”

“He was also the one that gave me this coin. And looking back at his actions, he was trying to be my friend as well as my boss.”

“Is that why you keep it? To remind you of him?”

“Partially. I use it to make decisions.”

The human was shocked. “You let a coin make decisions for you? Did you let it make the decision to explore the Artemis?”

By way of answering Rachael she held out the coin. “Call it.”

“What?”

“Dion or Center?”

“Dion” The coin flipped in the air three times and landed with the smiling god looking back at her.

“Again”

“Dion” The same three flips, and the same face.

“Again”

“Center” the same three flips, but the old domed building was face up this time.

“I can do this all day.”

“You’re cheating.”

“For the most part yes. I only missed once.”

“What happened then.”

“I killed my first human friend before I used his secrets to flee from the colonies.”

Miri had told her about her former boss, but not about the friendship they had. The thought that the human that Miri had killed was someone she actually liked, had never occurred to Rachael. She held up the coin and gestured around as she spoke. “Why are you stuck on this now?”

“Because I have more than just my crew to think about right now. In the past I would flip the coin with the knowledge that I could make it land the way I wanted it to most of the time.”

When the captain stopped talking, Rachael knew that she want her to ask the obvious question. “And now?”

“And now my Padawan I need you to be my coin.” She tossed the coin to Rachael. The Cele was strangely heavy in her hand.

“I don’t understand.”

“Every Cylon on this ship follows me blindly, all of the humans follow you in much the same way; that is the nature of our strange crew. The Cylons would probably follow you straight into Hades, but not all of the humans will ever follow me.”

“But I’m already your first officer.”

“I’m not asking you to be my First Officer, I’m asking you to be my friend.”

Rachael was speechless for a moment. They were in the middle of a warzone, right in the middle of a rescue mission under fire, on a nearly runaway ship... And now Miri decided to ask her to be her friend. “Do you want the coin back?” She held it out.

The captain merely put up her hand. “Not if you will be my friend. It is a painful reminder of a friendship lost to war. If you will be my friend, as well as my first officer, then I won’t need it.”

“But I will.” She looked at the coin, not for what it was, but for what it now represented. She put the coin in her jacket pocket.

“I don’t understand.”

Rachael put her hand over the pocket she slid the coin into. Its weight felt comfortable there. “Neither do I, but we can figure that out after we save these people.”

A voice in Rachael’s earbud whispered even though it didn’t have to. “Am I your friend too?” She could hear the childlike fear in the voice, and as much as she was angry with the tilfa, she still smiled as she looked up at his camera. He was learning.

The crew of the Notre Dominus had watched in fear as the strange ship grabbed them and pulled them along on their wild ride, now they stared in wonder as the former slaves looked out of any viewport, or viewscreen they could find. Lady Taki stood beside Lord Tenshin on the bridge once more, but she had brought some of the ladies with her. If Tenshin felt uncomfortable, he hid it quite well, but she knew that this was not a vanity thing. He felt responsible for all of the evil that had befallen them, just as she did. Right now she didn’t care. They were here because some of the former Myrmidons were turning out to be rather violent, and very few of the women had armor that fit them. She was having her men pull the violent ones out of their suits as gently as possible, but that meant that some of them died from the shock. She had watched one of the men that had been pulled out as he died. It was still running through her mind, so the shock of all the ships appearing around her didn’t really effect her as much as the others.

She had knelt over one of the freed Myrmidons as he lay on the deck. His sleeve, the skintight semi-covering that was all the men were allowed to wear under their armor, had been torn as they had pulled him out; and he looked more like a bloody doll than a young man. He has so much blood on him that he looked like he had bathed in it, and his bloody body was only one of many in the hold. “Kiod em yonodi Angil momo?” The young man’s voice was full of pain, but she had reached out and held his bloody hand anyway.

“What? I don’t understand...”

“He want’s to know if you are Angil, the Fromian Goddess of the Dead. She is like your Shenogomi, the one that takes good souls to the afterlife.” Taki was shocked to be thought of as the Piper that lead the Dead to Muyu, the Field of Dreams.

“Tell him that I am just a woman.”

Rachael translated, and the young man spasmed as he laughed. She held him to help ease his suffering. It seemed to work, after a fashion. When he calmed down he spoke once more. “Tibi’un YODO jumdo hala ti!” He touched her hand, and squeezed it with the last of his strength.

She held him as his eyes rolled up, and he died in her arms. “What did he say?”

When Rachael spoke, Lady Taki’s eyes teared up. “He said that you could never be JUST a woman.”

Now standing on the bridge, and listening to the chatter from the ships asking them to come with them she felt the weight of all of the spirits she would have to carry with her in her own journey to Muyu. She looked up at Lord Tenshin, and realized that he had been talking to her. “I’m sorry?”

“They have asked us to enter their ‘Evil Dog Home Ship’ and we can unload all of our people before someone, whom I not sure who they are referring to, are about to arrive.”

“The Inquisitors. Like they sent in after our fleet had been wiped from the skies.”

“That was my guess as well.”

“I’m sorry, did you say Inquisitors?” Rachael’s voice was in their earbuds, and not on the intercom, so Kenshin motioned to his comm’s controls.

Once they were on a separate channel they continued. Lady Taki looked at the video pickup as she spoke. “Yes. After our fleet was destroyed, the Inquisitors were sent in. They took slaves, and spoils, and when they were done, they glassed our worlds. Why didn’t you know about this?”

“I don’t know. The data dump they had on you and your people didn’t mention it at all.”

“That’s not too surprising. As a myrmidon, I often overheard Knights and even Acolytes talking about how the Inquisition was never someplace they actually were. If a black robe was ever seen, then it was never to be spoken about. They are the arm behind the sword, so to speak. They control their fleets without orders from the Empire.”

“Well then we have a problem.”

The two humans looked at the computer, and just by their body language she could tell that they were not surprised. “Do tell, what ELSE is there to worry about?” Lady Taki’s voice was dripping with sarcasm as she rolled her eyes.

“This ship has a tracker built into the reactor. I know it is there, because I can detect it; but I can’t turn it off, because it is a separate system.”

“So no matter where this ship runs, they can follow it?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then it is even more critical that we get as many people off of the ship as we can, and scuttle it after I transfer myself over to another ship.”

“No.”

“My lady?” Tenshin had never seen her eyes flicker like that. There was something different about the Prin.. Empress. “You have a plan?”

“Yes. They are coming, and we will be a target. If we jump, they can follow us. But if we jump to different coordinates than the others, we would be the ones the enemy fleet targeted.”

“I just freed all of you, and now you want me to help you kill yourselves?”

“No, I don’t want to die. But even if that happens; it is better to die free, than to live as a slave, right?”

Rachael mulled it over far longer than she would have liked. She thought of thousands of different possibilities, and so many plans made better sense logically, but she knew that she was dealing with humans, and logic was often set aside for some sort of heroic nonsense. It took her a while, but she knew that she wasn’t going to be able change the young Empress’ mind. About a second later she laughed. “What if we could have our cake, and eat it too?” She could tell by their silence that she had their attention. That, or they had no idea what she had meant by that proverb.

On the Sword of Truth Archbishop Beniedicto listened to the transmission from Iblis with interest. “I have a bad felling about this.”

“I don’t understand, your eminence. He told us what we expected.”

“Yes, but it was his move.” Anton looked at the Hess board next to his Throne. His Bishop had Iblis’ Acolyte in a bind. He could move it and sacrifice his Priest for a chance at Anton’s Archbishop. Anton had never lost to anyone, but Iblis’ strategy had nearly cost him the game on three instances. It had cost him three Novices, and a Paladin to stop him this time around. “No, something is wrong. Perhaps his ship was captured, and he is trying to send us a message.”

“Captured, that’s...” His aide saw the dark look and quickly changed course. Archbishop Beniedicto did not get to his rank by suffering fools to live. He knew first hand that even some of the Archbishop’s own sons had died at his hands. The man was a fair, but brutal task master. “...hard to imagine.”

“And yet it seems to have happened.” He tipped over his own Pope. The game was over. “They will undoubtably keep him alive until they can get everything of importance out of him.” He thought about what he would do with such a high value prisoner. “They have probably already removed him from his ship, so we need to find the largest surviving enemy installation, or ship.

“Might they have put him on a nondescript ship, hoping to hide him among the riffraff?”

“You may have something there. But a large target will undoubtably also have high-value targets of their own.”

“If we capture the wrong ship, then we could offer to trade someone from it for him?”

“No, we would find out which ship he was on and take it as well.”

“And if they have myrmidons?”

“That’s just it Ferdinand... They don’t have slaves.”

Ferdinand was slightly put aback. “Then who fights for them?”

“They do.”

“That’s barbaric.”

“We’re dealing with barbarians. What do you expect?” He waved his hands as if to dispel his bad
mood, then pointed to the display. “All of those lost contacts were here.” He pointed to the first section, then he moved his fingers to the second set of coordinates. “This is where Iblis would have sent us.” He sat back in his throne. “The first question is why did they emerge so far away from the primary.” He pointed at the blue icon of the Heven-class planet that their long range sensors had noted. None of their probes had managed to get past the Angelfield objects. He had postulated that they had a picket of some sort, but the complete destruction of the invading fleet told him that they had underestimated the enemy.

“DeCount’s first report said that he had encountered some sort of gravitic jamming. Perhaps similar to our jump inhibitors, but over the entire system?”

Anton nodded. That message had come with a Hess move so he figured that it was from a time before Iblis’ ship had been compromised. “If that is the case, then they must have laced their entire system with them. The new coordinates would have probably put us right into a kill zone.”

“If I might your eminence, they are showing a lack of three dimensional thinking.”

“So was Magnus. He, like most of his peers, attacks from the edge, because that was what he was taught. Dogma in Faith, is one thing; dogma in war, is a death sentence. But to attack from above, or below, will surely draw us into their inhibitor zone and outside of any planets, or rouge bodies to hide behind.”

“Your eminence, didn’t you just call them barbarians. If we use tactics like that, won’t they be ill prepared to defend themselves?”

“Even a cardin is cunning if you corner one.” The timid cow-like creature was a favorite hunt animal due to it’s speed, and its ability to camouflage itself. “The trick here is to figure out how they will flee, and cut off their escape routes.”

“Cardin, or the heretic’s?”

The Archbishop looked at his aide with a smile on his face. “Maybe both. I was wondering how the enemy was able to get close enough to get the drop on an Imperial Naval Fleet. As much as I disliked the Nova Pratori, he couldn’t have risen to that rank without a modicum of cunning. No they must have had some sort of stealth system that let them get close enough to hit him that hard.” He was the worried look on his aide’s face. “What is it son?”

Ferdinand Beniedicto knew that for his father to use their relationship openly like that meant that he demanded the truth. “What if it wasn’t stealth, but force of arms, that brought down his fleet?”

“To another man I would say it was heresy, but I did force you.” He rubbed his beard. “Two things: First, Magus didn’t Play Hess, he played Wardeck. And the best thing he had in his deck was the Wily Old Warrior card.”

“Praetorian General Jabom Landover of Malchoy?” He had trouble thinking of the hero of the Empire as a card in a novice’s game.

“Yes.”

“And the second?”

“Magus is many things, but suicidal is not one. The other card he had was the Vapor Hero. If he was losing, he would have fled the field.”

“He was a coward?”

“He was. He never fought a fight he didn’t have some sort of advantage. Any duelist he thought he might lose to would suddenly have an accident or his family would. No, son, that man was a high born coward, but he wasn’t a fool.”

“Do we split the fleet and attack from both sides then?”

“The Rock and a Hard Place card, good thinking. We could do that. Where are the transponders on our surviving ships?”

It was nearly five hours later, and the ships were starting to drift off station. They were out of the distortion; and while they could leave the system it would still be a tricky endeavor to try a fold inward, and even small jumps were still out. Cain had called her sister, and found her busy with shuffling fighters that weren’t even hers through her bays. Helena had launched and recalled four CAPS so far, and she was starting to wonder if..

Miri watched as the last Duo rotated back outside. The mech had been in need of refueling like it’s squadmates, and it had been the last one to get its tanks topped. She was starting to get bored. The mechs on her hull had been standing watch for so long that she was...

The Odin’s sensors were still rather jumbled by the interference, but the FTL sensor net was still up. Admiral Moore had been sitting at her command chair ever since they arrived and she was staring to regret that third cup of coffee. “Go hit the head, ma’am.” Vice Admiral Jansen Argo looked nothing like the crewman he had once been. His wife was sitting next him on the command deck in her life support chair. Jansen had pulled the woman’s body out of the wreckage of a city ship. One that they had fought long and hard to liberate it and it’s sister ships from the clutches of a Knight Templar.

She had survived, but her body had been savaged. The chair she sat in was linked to her, and she could still use her arms, but she was deaf, and blind, to the point that she needed implants to even see what little she could of the world around her. Jansen had brought her back from the edge and given her a purpose. Now she wore a VR set that allowed her to see the others all around her. Trasi may have been born a slave, but she had become Nara’s right hand in more ways than any able-bodied person could have. The Ranger’s star on her chest was not an honorary one, she had earned it; and the crew the two of them had helped her pull together was the best the Republic had to offer. She knew that they could handle any...

Captain Gideon watched as the Perdition settled into it’s guard position over the former troopship. They had scanned the ship in every way shape and waveform they could and think of. The tracking signal had come as a bit of a shock, but not as big of one as they would have thought. It wasn’t the signal, but its location that was the surprise. It would take days to get to the beacon and remove it, but in finding the device, they had found out how to find other Imperial ships. The beacons weren’t too numerous, as the only two functional ships left were the troop ship, and the crippled stealth ship. Now if only...

Tarnis watched as his Squires once more played ring around the Jericho as the various Veritech Duos sat on the hull. He was actually rather proud of how Indigo had comported herself as the new squad leader. He knew that Zero was a better tactician when it came to large scale combat, but no one could fault her for her actions today. She had managed to pull her squadron together, and overcome their reluctance to follow someone that had up to this point been too impressed with her own skills to care about others. Zero was even coming to grips with the fact that she was turning out to be better at leading people than he was. The four of them would make a good... What was Zero doing?

Zero had pieces of stray metal debris that he had picked up floating between his hands. He had balanced them between his hands’ tractor/pressor beams, and was building a tiny constellation of the scraps.

“Are we having fun?”

Zero didn’t even look up towards his former wing commander’s mech as he replied. “Gathering resources?”

“Funny. What are you going to do with it?”

“You never watch the Old Earth stuff, do you?”

“I have enough to do in the real universe than to waste my time on that kelfa.”

“I watch some of it, and I saw a recurring attack in some of the shows.”

“I’m listening...”

“The character will gather energy, or matter, and then...” He increased the power going to the pressor beams, and held his arms in the same place. The debris collapsed into a ball. Then taking a position similar to a pitcher he pointed his arms in one direction. The clump of scrap flew off rapidly in one direction and he was obviously pushed back.

“Congratulations, you just reinvented the Railgun.”

The snark in the officer’s voice was easy to catch, but Zero waved it off. “Have I?”

Tarnis thought about it for a second. No he hadn’t. Zero didn’t have to rely on rails, he didn’t need them. “Okay, but what use is a weapon with so little muzzle velocity, and a projectile that will scatter like grapeshot?”

Zero picked up a broken piece of armor from the deck. He flung it off into space, and picked up another, smaller piece. This one he fired off at the first target. “I don’t need a weapon, so I can’t be disarmed in a close range situation. If I’m out of fuel, I can change my course by firing off a few bits of my armor, or even wing surfaces, if the need arises.”

Tarnis was impressed by his young officer’s ability to think outside of the box. “So this is what you do when you are bored?”

“It’s better than waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“The ‘Other shoe to drop’?”

“A human idiom. It means to be waiting for the inevitable.”

“Like for Indigo to do something foolish, like snooping in on other people’s conversations?”

“I was not snooping! I was...”

Captain Kincade of the Republic cruiser Fomalhaut finally found the small dark blue ship. His XO Justin had gone along with a squad of Centurions to secure the ship, but they had found no resistance. The ship’s stealth systems had even been shut off. He watched the video feed as the command centurion walked the short distance from the airlock to the cramped bridge. Justin had sent him the video feed after determining that the ship was bingo atmo. How the Colonial had managed to do that was a matter of some speculation, but he was still trying to get his head around the report of the man’s apparent death. The man had asphyxiated inside of a ship with it’s life support fully functioning. They were still questioning the woman he was fraking at the time he died, but she probably wouldn’t be of much help. She had been in the process of being slowly strangled by him as he died, and had passed out shortly before he had died. The fact that she had asked for him to do that made very little sense to the captain, and he shuddered at the thought of how some people could find pleasure in...
Justin arrived on the bridge. The captain of the enemy vessel was... glued to his chair, and his helmet had been smashed. All had obviously been done by the man himself, or whoever was controlling his body, because the look on his face did not look like someone that had died willingly. He recognized the face from the file he had received, but DeCount’s blue skin made him look strangely like a Kedrin, not the imperial human that he was. “Captain, something is blinking here.”
“Show it to me Justin.” It still felt weird to realize that he was looking through someone else’s eyes, but all of that disappeared when he looked at the blinking display. “GET OUT OF THERE NOW!!!” He spun around in his chair. “Get me a link to... Oh Frak! Battlestations!”...

The four dreadnoughts had defolded close enough to cause interference in the sensors, and communications, but not the weapons systems. At the nearly point blank ranges they arrived, they didn’t need them anyway; they could just target them optically. The cruiser got off the first shots; despite that, the return fire overwhelmed their shields and ripped the ship to pieces. Captain Kincade’s only satisfaction was in watching the closest dreadnought die before they did.

Miri watched as hundreds of ships appeared as they had known they would, just not at the coordinates they had been given. They had defolded less than fifty kilometers from their current location. Within seconds their shields were bombarded with energy weapons, and shortly after that by wave after wave of missiles. They had managed to extend the field around the troopship, but the extended diameter meant that it wouldn’t last as long.

Nara swore as the enemy fleet appeared far closer to the captured ship than they had expected. To make matters even wore, the Bad Dagget was between the Imperials and the defenders. “Open a channel to our guests.”

“They’ve opened fire.” Vice Admiral Argo responded. She nodded as the enemy’s fire splashed across their shields.

“Open the channel.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Archbishop Beniedicto watched as their weapons simply failed to connect with the heathen’s ships. Even one of their own wayward ships seemed to be protected by one of the enemy’s strange defenses. “Blasphemous Bandersnatch, what kind of fiends are these?”

“Your Eminence, we are getting a request from the enemy commander’s ship.”

“On screen.” If he was surprised at the request to parley, he didn’t show it; but when the one-eyed woman appeared on the screen, his eyes widened. “Gallo’s little toy. I thought he broke you.”

She looked into the face of a demon she had hoped long dead. “So Anton Beniedicto, they let you out to play. As you can see, I am still here, and I am not sad in the least to repeat the fact that your precious lover was slain so long ago by my champion’s hand.”

The very suggestion of his breaking of the Inquisition’s celibacy code was tantamount to a challenge to a duel. The fact that he had fathered no less than twenty-four children, or that he had personally raped her repeatedly, was nothing next to the charge of carnally cavorting with a Knight, or Templar, true or not. All of his children were from his slaves; and after all, they didn’t count according to the Church.

He watched the Requiem cannon’s power levels rise. It would only take a few more seconds. “If you are challenging me, why haven’t you returned fire. Are you going to hide behind your heathen magic, or do you plan on standing up to me once more. We both remember how well that has fared in the past.” His cruel smile punctuated the barb. His smile faded when she laughed in his face.

“Spoken like a true bully. The last time, you had me chained to a table, and were probing me with your tiny tools.” His face went red at her public insult, but she wasn’t done. “No, you aren’t even worthy of that. Bullies will at least get their hands dirty. You couldn’t even be bothered to do that. Too afraid that a little girl would somehow hurt you. You had your minions bang me up first.” She looked off screen for a second. “You’re not worth it anyway. Besides, I still have to use the head. Coffee does that to me.” She cut the connection before he could respond.

His eye twitched as he watched the energy readings reach their peak, and he gestured to the weapon’s officer. Every single Requiem cannon fired at once, and he watched the screen with glee.

The Republic ships all disappeared along with their prize. The energy beams only vaporized stray bits of flotsam, and dust before dissipating. No one on the bridge spoke as he stood up. His voice was as cold as liquid oxygen, and when he spoke some of the men trembled under their cloaks. “Track them!”

The Archbishop was not the only one fuming over failure. Prior Sanduval looked at the display with only a passing interest. The five ships that had been guarding the Imperial reconnaissance vessel were supposed to have been easy targets, and hadn’t even been ready for the vastly superior ships of the Inquisition. What he got instead was a slowly growing debris field where the Sword of Saint Dungree had been, and not a single ship that hadn’t received a pounding. Prior Hanniford had been a long time friend, and his passing would leave a hole in his life. He had already silenced one of his bridge officers who had been careless enough as to whisper to one of the others about Vi’s passing. The body had been removed but the blood was still on the chair that the replacement officer sat in.

The transmission of new coordinates from the Archbishop barely registered, but he dully responded. The three remaining ships took longer to leave than he would have normally allowed, but the Prior was still staring at his... Even now he couldn’t even think it while on duty. Dogma decreed celibacy; their hearts had decreed something else. He sighed as the ship jumped.

Archbishop Beniedicto couldn’t believe what he saw. Upon exiting the jump they spotted the lone troop ship, and figured that the Republic Heathens had left them to their deaths, but seconds later they were hit by not tens, but tens of tens of missiles, and their warhead’s numerous energy beams that sliced through his still jump-blind ships like swords through smoke. The dreadnoughts Sword of Saint Gurn, and Sword of Saint Burnidito vanished in titanic explosions before they could even respond. They weren’t the first to die, but they were the most dramatic as their reactors had failed to shut down in time. For the rest, their defenses managed to come online and the blistering attack was blunted, but they were still taking damage at an alarming and unprecedented scale.

At a simple gesture, thousands of fighters, and mechs launched off of their rails into the chaos of moment. Some of the fighters collided with other mechs, and vice versa, but they managed to straighten out and come to bear on the missile pods that had ambushed them. In a matter of minutes the sky was littered with the wreckage of ships, fighters, and enemy pods, but not a single launcher was left intact.

Mechs landed on the surface of the rouge ship and reported an abandoned hulk. Why had they taken the slaves, but left the ship? These people didn’t act rationally. He tapped his staff on the deck and the Acolytes pulled back in fear. He relished their fear, and drew strength from it. He knew that if he was causing his own men to fear him, then the heathens must be terrified.

Almost on cue, the communications channel chimed for attention. He gestured for the main screen. The fear he expected was nowhere to be seen though. The tramp sat there and had the nerve to clap her hands. “Bravo little man, you blew up our pods. And to think, it only cost you six ships.” She moved to look directly into the pickup. “I will give you one chance to surrender. Do so, and we will put you, and your crew on an absolutely beautiful little world we found. You might even know it. Ever heard of Triskilan?”

He had not only heard of that planet, he had dropped an Angel’s dream on it not more than five weeks ago. The only way she could have...

As if reading his thoughts, she responded. “Yes, we captured some of your ships, and pulled the files. You’ve been a bad boy. That planet hadn’t even found out how to get back into space, and you erased their whole society. Their dead world would be a fitting place to drop you off. It’s too bad that there isn’t anything left to eat, and the biosphere is already showing the first signs of catastrophic collapse.”

“Of all the thing I remember about our sessions, I remember the fact that you don’t lie about things that matter. You aren’t planning on giving quarter.” He laughed. “Neither was I, now show yourself.”

The first inkling of what was about to happen occurred on the Notre Dominus. Knights found themselves slammed against the hull, and their internal gravity systems failing. Beniedicto watched in horror as the ship was crushed. “Get us out of here!”

“We can’t. They have some sort of jamming in place.” He watched as gravitic point sources started to appear on their sensors. Each one more powerful than anything he had ever seen. The troop ship collapsed in on itself as he watched. It was being crushed by massive pressor beams from dozens of sources. Each one was powerful enough to pull a ship off its course, but together the beams were tearing apart the strongest metals known to imperial science like they were paper.

“Best speed for the edge of the jamming.”

“That leads insystem.” The man at the helm didn’t utter it as a warning, but simply as an observation. In fact, everyone on the bridge heard the excitement in his voice. The ships all turned away from the doomed ship, and their engines roared to life as the fleet set out.

The helmsman’s excitement was matched by the Archbishop, “Good, better hunting that way!” He watched as the shrinking ship fell behind them. He knew that to stay here was to court that same fate. He would find the devices that were sending the beams and shoot them down as they passed, lest they fall victim to the same trap. They were fools to target the troopship first, but he wouldn’t let their blunder go to waste.

Prior Sanduval’s three ships erupted out of fold space short of their goal by tens of light minutes. Some sort of jamming had come on at the very second they entered foldspace, and that had knocked them off course. To add insult to injury, something was now preventing both their jump drives, and fold drives from working. He could see the rest of the fleet, but his sensors couldn’t make out what was going on. “Best speed for an intercept.” He sat back in his chair and fumed. The Saint Hoff had been his first command, and it seemed to be an accursed one at that. The ship they had been sent to retrieve had been claimed by one of the other high born Priors, and while he commanded the squadron, they let him know that they would be taking the prize from a common born like him.

Justin looked at the walls of the hanger that they had been pulled into and silently fumed in an ironic imitation of the enemy squadron’s commander. The twenty strong Cylon squad had been examining the ship when the enemy had jumped the Fomalhaut. He knew that the small ship had never stood a chance, but he had hoped that Arron would have been able to escape. If they managed to escape or resurrect, he was going to have to explain to Gloria why her father wasn’t coming home. Justin didn’t sigh, or do anything stereotypically human like that. He just punched the nearest corpse. And since it was DeCount’s he added a second for good measure.

“Yo, boss. We goin’a do som’thin’, or are we goin’ ta just sit here and rust?”

“Canson, we sit here until I figure out how to unjam the jammers that are blocking our signal. Some of us don’t wear blue flowers, or green stars, you know.”

“Cap’n Kincade didn’t get ta upload, so I kind’a figure we owe it ta him ta pay the tab.”

Darius 359 was busy accessing the ships computer, but he wasn’t having too much luck getting through the system. “Yeah, yeah.. Pay the butcher’s bill, not sell yourself for scrap. We need to make our deaths mean something then.” He hit the console in frustration as he ran out of idioms and patience at the same time. “Can I please just dive in?”

“Not a good idea, we don’t know what kind of safeguards they have. Remember that datapad that Loot found at that base?”

“How can I forget it. I still miss Loot. Okay, I’ll keep it to the ten digit mambo.”

“Glitch, what’s our inventory of nasty toys?”

The 008 that was their ordinance specialist shook his head. “Not so good, boss. These mooks didn’t even bring along sidearms. The only weapon we found was Out For The Count’s hokey pokey stick. He held up the weapon in question and shook it. IT won’t even respond to one of us, so it’s useless.”

“Could we blow up the ship?”

“We didn’t bring enough detpacks along to do anything besides get in here, and since we didn’t even need most them for that I still have four boom boom bags, and three demo charges.”

“What did you use the breaching charge on?”

“The engineering section. It was locked down for some reason. The two bodies inside didn’t even have suits on.”

“Can we do enough damage there to blow the ship?”

“The reactor is down, we would need to start it up again, or blow up the fuel cells. There’s enough Tylium down there to light us up, but it wouldn’t be as powerful as a reactor overload.”

“Go set it up.”

“Sir?” Darius 359 didn’t stop what he was doing, but he called his CO over.

“What’s the stitch?” Justin could tell something was wrong just by the way the older 005 Cylon was focusing on the display.

“Don’t know, but it looks like something is about to happen on the other ship an-” the EMP hit the trapped ship and Darius never got to finish what he was saying. Canson had been moving the bodies out of the way and was in the middle of grabbing one, and was therefore the first to topple to the deck. The other 005s froze where they were, but the 007s and 008s on the bridge fell like marionettes with their strings cut.

Prior Jhon Mith of the Galorndon Miths stood beside the lackey he had ordered to sterilize the prize ship. The core World accent he spoke in did little to hide the animalistic joy he had in possibly killing any prisoners that might have been aboard the spyship. The robotic abominations would be little more than scrap after the pulse he had sent through the ship, he was sure that the ship itself would probably be wrecked as well. Too bad, but he took comfort in the fact that its secrets were safe from the heathens’ eyes now. He returned to the command chair and looked at the Low Born commander’s ship. He was still trying to figure out why the man still didn’t know his place, but since the Church had seen fit to give the upstart that rank, he would have to make due until the day he outranked him. He looked at the ship in the hold and sniffed dismissively. They could send in a squad after the battle was over. It would still be full of the neurotoxin they just pumped into the ship, but they could just flush it out into the vacuum of space later. If the heathens had managed to capture any prisoners, then they were quite dead now. Micel’s Scythe was one of the fastest acting poisons know to Imperial science. If the heathens were the metal ones, then the EMP would have either fried their systems, or the ones on the spy ship’s. He was itching to go down there now, and pull one of them apart, but he knew that his duty was here on the bridge. And after all, they weren’t going anywhere except for wherever the Dreadnaught know as the Sword of Saint Reinhardt took them.

Hours ago Lady Taki had watched the ship shrink as they had fled the ship to the dubious safety of the unknown forces that had rescued them. Upon arrival she had received another surprise as their guide walked forward. “Greetings, your highness. I hope your trip was less strenuous than mine.” The robot’s smile and human demeanor was yet another shock to her sense of how the universe worked.

Lord Tenshin stepped forward and stood between her and the robot. “How dare you speak of hardships Robot, there is no way you could comprehend the...” Lady Taki stopped him by placing her hand on his shoulder. “My Lady?”

“Ask her her name, and don’t make a bigger fool of yourself.”

His head spun like a turret and his eyes locked on the robot in front of him. “Lady Rachael?”

Rachael enjoyed the way his face paled when she winked at him. “Come along, I want you two to meet some old friends of mine.”

That was her first introduction to the race known as Cylons. They were an enigma. Each robot clearly had a soul, of that she was as sure as she was confused as to how they had one. Surely the Heavenly Fox goddess Nari Okama surely must have brought them from Muyo, their heavenly realm beyond the stars. The walk up to the bridge was filled with other surprises. People were taking boxes of food, and clothing down to the hold where her people, and the freed myrmidons were being housed. When Rachael mentioned that the ones that looked like twins, and triplets, were actually a type of Cylon she had stopped so abruptly that Lord Tenshin bumped into her. Their final surprise came when the entered the bridge and met the Kitsun, Rachael.

Lord Tenshin shoved the ladies behind him, and reached for the sword that was no longer there after the doors opened up and a beautiful woman with flame-colored hair met them. No fewer than a dozen weapons were drawn before he had realized what he had done. “Kitsun?”

“No, Colonial. I don’t even know that word means. Is it a planet?” The confused look on her face did more to diffuse the situation than her gesture for the guard to put down their weapons. Tenshin noticed that they didn’t put them away, but they did point them at the deck.

The Cylon Rachael moved in front of the ship’s second officer, and motioned for Lord Tenshin to calm down as she spoke. “We seem to have some sort of problem here?”

Lord Tenshin did not relax, but he did step back. “Kitsun is not a planet, it is the name of a hated enemy of our people. One that died shortly after our planet died. And I fear that my pride and prejudices may have cost us a red mark upon our honor. If I had my sword, I would be required to hand it over to you and accept any punishment you desired.”

“A simple ‘I’m Sorry.’ would do me just fine. My name is Lieutenant Rachael...” She noticed the Empress’ look when she mentioned her name. “What is it, ma’am?”

“Are you two...” She gestured to the Cylon next to her. “...related?” The shocked look she got back made her blush with shame. “I’m sorry did I say something wrong?”

Another voice interrupted, “No, but I would like to thank you to not derail my XO like that. They just happen to have the same name. For a while back it was the most popular name for girls thanks to an animated show that was popular on the colonies. We liked it too.” She looked at the two new arrivals and liked what she saw. The man was obviously trying to protect his charge, and the young woman was no shy little kestrel herself. “I am Captain Miri, welcome aboard the Bad Dagget. Now please come over here with us.”

It would take another four hours for the enemy fleet to arrive, and Lady Taki still found herself looking over at the Kit.. Redhead. The woman was... exotic. She mentally throttled her mind as it went down ‘That’ path. Kitsun myths were rife with erotic... exotic tails... Tales! She caught Lady Rachael eyeing her and he did her best to not look at the.... Her robotic body did nothing to help Taki’s mind stay on track either. Too human...

A sudden flash from the display showed the enemy fleet’s arrival, and she stood closer to... Lord Tenshin followed her as she walked closer to where the captain and her XO were standing next to the main display. The hologram of a child stood next to them, and she was trying to follow what they were saying but she couldn’t grasp what their tactics were. She switched over to their native Gadin tongue before continuing in a whisper. “Lord Tenshin?”

“Yes, my lady?” He didn’t even leave his mouth uncovered. He must have been worried about someone reading his lips, she surmised.

“I don’t understand. I can see that the Notre Dominus is being used as bait, but why did we move so far away from it?”

“Remember the Silk Spiders your mother raised in her garden.”

“Yes.” The large genie spiders were web weavers of tremendous speed. A web could be cut and treated, and the spider would have a replacement finished before the old webs would dry. Her favorite past time was feeding mice to the spiders. The mice were caught every day in the fields, and she would wave the stun wand over them before tossing them into the webs.

“The ship is to be the bait for the mouse. We are going to act as the spiders.”

“That I get, but how are they going to hit something that far away?”

“I don’t know. The she-yoki says that they have pods of some sort.”

The Cylon Rachael chose that time to whisper in Tenshin’s ear. “There is something I should tell you.” The fact that she whispered it in the same language they were speaking was not lost on either of them.

“Yes Lady Rachael?”

“Cylons have very good hearing. You are close on our tactics. Also, your comment on the XO has reached the captain’s ears. Just be glad that it hasn’t reached the XO’s.”

The grizzled warrior sighed. “I am doing a very good job of sitting on my sword today.”

“Don’t worry too much about it. There was a point in time where the XO was a part of an anti-Cylon faction of the Colonial humans that wanted to steal this ship from us. From what Captain Miri told me, they managed to patch up their differences. Maybe you could put your prejudices away, and try and be what your Empress needs.”

“I will try.”

“Okay. Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to watch my old body get turned into a grape.” They stood and watched the enemy fleet get peppered with hundreds of missiles, and they cheered when a few ships died, but far too many survived the missile pod’s token defense. The two Gadins, on the other hand, looked on in awe as more firepower than their entire fleet had been able to muster was spent against the mighty fleet. When the Notre Dominus started to crumble she spoke again. “You were close when you referenced a spider’s web, but it’s not the spider that is the danger here, but the web that ensnares them.” The doomed troopship started to crush right before their eyes. “The same tractor beams that grabbed the ship are the same kind that are crushing it now.

“Are they going to crush the whole fleet?”

“No, your highness, that would be beyond their power. Remember how I said my old body was about to become a grape?”

“Yes.”

“What happens when you squeeze a grape between your fingers?” She pointed to the display. A section of the beams suddenly shut down, and the wreckage that had once been a ship was launched away from the center by the remaining pressors beams. Massive shards of metal and other wreckage slammed into the relatively unarmored drive sections of the Imperial fleet. Dozens of ships started to loose acceleration, and were quickly venting atmosphere, and fuel, into space.

One carrier was suddenly gripped by a massive explosion as the drive section exploded. Fighters, and shuttles were quickly launched from the doomed ship, but not all of them were quick enough. The unlucky ones died as pieces of their own ships were turned into missiles that smashed into them. Beams, now free of anything to hold, grabbed the tattered and helpless ship. Muffled explosions rippled across the hull as escape pods were unable to launch, but their launch charges still tried vainly to free them. The ship started to crumple in on itself as the ship succumbed to the inevitable. When the doomed carrier blew, it launched fragments just like the troop ship, but this time the enemy fleet was ready. They had already gone to an evasive pattern as soon as the ship was captured. The blast didn’t harm any capital ships, but over half of the small craft that escaped never made it far enough away to find the dubious cover of any of the other ships.

Diana saw the three ships that missed the target start to maneuver, and worried. The rest of the enemy ships were following the new plan, almost too well. She knew that the destruction of the second ship, and the chaos the massed fleet had undergone in trying to spread out after they had been hit by the shrapnel made from the wreckage of their own ships. She figured they had maybe two more cycles before they were spread out enough for the next phase, but the three ships outside of the trap were too far away to be effected by the next attack. Lieutenant Amiright had been plotting the course of the enemy, and she knew that the three ships were inside the jump interference area, but far enough away that they could escape before she could get enough of a reaction force out there. She just didn’t have enough jump capable ships left to take on all three ships.

Archbishop Beniedicto had come to a similar conclusion. He watched as the cluster of ships was spreading out. That made them less of a target of weapons like a Requiem cannon’s strike, but it also meant that they couldn’t mass their fire against a single target without the coordination lag climbing with the distance. He didn’t know if the enemy knew that they used communication lasers to pinpoint their targets, but he was willing to bet the enemy commander knew enough about fleet combat to make a worthy adversary. Who ever he was, he must have studied the same books that the Church had. He was following a classic divide and conquer strategy right out of the Imperial warbook. Someone was teaching theses heretics how to fight like true warriors. He knew that the puppet woman they had talking to him, must have been chosen due to their shared past. The neobarb culture hadn’t even developed a defense against lasers when he helped Gallo capture their pathetic ship; and the idea of a female admiral was almost enough to make him laugh.
No, they had to have had Imperial help. “Comm, send a message to the three laggards. Tell them that Saint Murphy has smiled upon them.”

Prior Sanduval looked at his new orders, and the message that had accompanied them. The Arch-bishop must be furious with them to send them away from battle like this. The message spoke of needing to get a message out to the Empire, but he knew that they were being punished for not living up to his standards. They were to change course, and make best speed for the edge of the gravitic interference. He passed on the orders to the Sword of Saint Reinhardt and the Sword of Saint Willow. He didn’t even receive a response from Prior Mith. Prior Camin, at least, acknowledged his message, but when he ordered the course change he wasn’t surprised to both of them continue on their previous headings.
Prior Camin sent his second in command’s body to the nearest airlock. The man had been adamant that they were supposed to follow the Archbishop’s orders, not his cousin’s obvious defiance of a Low Born, whom he had taken a disliking to. Camin had thanked the Acolyte’s body after he send the death code that stopped the fool’s heart. He knew that his cousin would not lead him astray. His cousin’s strange silence not withstanding, the man knew how to come out on top of any situation. They had come this far together, and he would follow Jhon anywhere. He just wished he knew what course Jhon had committed them to.
Prior Sanduval wondered that as well. He watched the two High-born ship continue on, and hoped that someone above his rank and station would take him to task for this insult. His ship flipped over and began the task of killing their velocity. These were not maneuvers that they normally used, but they trained for anyway, so he watched his crew work like the well oiled machine they had become over the years. He knew that pride was a sin, but his pride was in his crew not for himself, so he felt that the Lord would understand. He knew that the Lord would not be so forgiving of Prior Mith for leading his cousin and their men astray. He gave a quick prayer for Camin, and his men. He wished that he could spare one for Mith, but his honor wouldn’t let him. He knew that Jhon Mith would have to answer for a lot of thing on the day he died. He just wished that he knew why the man wouldn’t even respond.

The Sword of Saint Reinhardt’s bridge was not quiet by any measure. From the constant reports, and messages coming in from the fleet, to the warning that accompanied the atmospheric scrubbers as they automatically cleaned any foreign bodies and the toxic levels of gasses from the air. The high amounts of hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, as well as the higher than normal amounts of carbon dioxide present in the life support system had triggered the purge. The body in the command chair could still be recognized as Jhon Mith, but only due to the vestments, and the diamond ring that was the signet ring of his family. It had only been fifteen minutes since the spyship automatically restarted its computers and found the toxin in its system. It had then automatically flushed the system out into the hanger bay, and less than five minutes later the last man on the Sword of Saint Reinhardt had died a very painful death. Each dying within seconds of the invisible gas touching their exposed skin. Had Prior Mith sent a team down to take care of the ship he would have avoided the problem. If he had shut down the computer systems remotely when they started back up, he would have avoided the problem. If he had ordered his men to don their suits as the regulations stated...
Inside the spy ship, the Cylons on the bridge were still frozen where they stopped, and the ship itself simply rested in the bay as it flew on is fated course. A course that would bring the two dreadnoughts to meet the rest of the fleet, but long after they would have met the enemy.

Diana had to hand it to the captains of those three ships. Two of them were covering for the third. It took real guts to go into a hopeless battle to protect their companions. She would have to hope that their forces managed to get all three. She opened a line to Admiral Moore...

The armrest cracked under the servo-enhanced power of Archbishop Beniedicto’s armored fist. Only one of the ships had turned. The other two were going to die by his hand if the enemy didn’t do it for him. Everything here felt like a trap, and he needed those ships to get out and bring back reinforcements. Now the rest of the Empire would never know what had happened if they didn’t succeed here. He knew the enemy was hiding something. They had been luring them in and springing one trap after another up, and down, and all around the system. His fleet so outnumbered, and outgunned the enemy, that they overwhelmed them in so many ways that they should be guaranteed a victory to glorify the Lord... So why did he feel that something was about to fall apart. “To all ships... Ready the Requiem cannons. Recover all units, and rearm them for anti-ship combat.”

They were almost within range of the Requiem cannons when the fighters and mechs started to reemerge from their launchers. Lancea armor packs covered every fighter, and the mechs were outfitted with the Paladin’s newest Charger II flight packs. Beniedicto watched as they took up their assigned positions and the ships of his fleet prepared to fire. He half-expected the enemy to pull some magical trick out of their never-ending book of tricks. “Fire!” The beams lanced out and reached for the four enemy ships. And impacted on the enemy’s shields... He wished they had those shields to find out how they worked, but even if they hadn’t been able to recover a working generator, they knew enough about them to know their weaknesses. All he had to do was to fire on them long enough, and they would overload. All he had to do was keep the pressure on them...

Admiral Moore watched the enemy open fire, and she looked at the display. They were still following their usual playbook. Diana had told her how they would try and overload the shields before they truly went in for the kill. She hoped that Diana’s gambit was going to work. “Trasi, you’re on.”

The former slave looked out at the Imperial fleet with the VR rig, and smiled as she pulled on her other headset. The Command VR band let her communicate with the entire fleet’s datanet. From her interface she brought all of the remaining sensors online. She could see the enemy fleet as it approached the defenders. Admiral Moore watched as Jansen’s hand rested on her shoulder. He was only there to lend support. He knew that his wife was more than able to do the job she was about to do. Her body might have been trapped in the chair, but in her mind she danced.

Diana felt the strange sensation of someone else controlling her. She knew exactly what was happening, and she sent out a gentle reassurance in return. Her main canon was warming up. The subspace tap had been authorized over Captain Gantz’s objections, and she could feel her systems’s coming alive. The poor captain had a sour look on his face when she pointed out the fact that they would have no choice but to leave the system anyway now that the Empire knew where they were. She really felt bad for the young man who had been born here, and who’s family lived on Home, but her last view of Kobol was of a system falling to the Empire’s predecessor. She didn’t know how many people she had left to die because her captain had ordered her to run, lest she be captured or destroyed fighting a battle she knew they could not win. She looked at the Cylon body in front of her and an all too real tear fell from her eye. She held the uplink cable in one hand, and the power core in the other. There was only one change she was going to make to the plan.

On the Sword of Truth Archbishop Beniedicto listened to the transmission in silence. The Archbishop had been stunned when Diana’s face first appeared on his screen. Now his universe simply stopped making sense. It had started out so simply...

“Hello Archbishop Beniedicto. How is your son?” The two statements let him know that this witch of an artificial demon was not to be trifled with. They had either hacked their systems, or they had good intell on all of them. Either was a bad sign. His silence must have been telling, as she continued on as if he had answered. “Since you are here, then you know about Shadow, and Nova Partori Magus?”

“The late General turned your mechanical pet into scrap tens of years ago. Everyone knows that.” If he had hoped to throw her off her balance by that statement, then he misjudged her badly. He noted that her laughter had a strange musical quality to it. Definitely not shaken.

“The late General actually kept him prisoner for all those years. It’s funny that you don’t seem to be lying to me, but by your expression I can guess that he must have lied to you as well.”

“Why have you called me?” He was about to fire his Requiem cannon once more, and where once he had hoped to silence her, now he wanted to know.

“I just wanted to ask you if the name Shadow rang a bell. You see I just found traces of strange code littering his mind. Code that we identified as belonging to the Inquisition. Namely, my husband’s corrupted files were rife with it, but the other Cylons that returned weren’t. The only difference is that fact that an Inquisition agent had tampered with him. Why do you think that those files would be in his systems, but you didn’t know he survived?”

That’s when the Archbishop lost control of his ship, and became a spectator to his current predicament.

The ship stopped responding to anyone’s commands. Acolytes ran around the bridge trying to regain control of their hijacked systems. The voice that came out of the speaker stopped them all in their tracks. “It actually rather simple dear. He didn’t know about me, or how I hid among them. The Archbishop was gifted with a copy of my videos. He may have never watched them, but his son did.” The voice was not one the Archbishop recognized, but he knew that it had to be Shadow’s. “Sadly he never knew about the source of the movies. If he had, they might have scanned them for just this eventuality.” A simple gesture sent one the Acolyte towards the computer core. The door was locked, and the Acolyte’s pass no longer worked. “No, it’s not going to be that easy, your eminence. I’ve changed every security code on the ship. It won’t stop you, but it will slow you down.”

“And why would slowing down the inevitable be in your interest?”

“Simple, my dear man... Think about it this way. If I can put myself back together from a bunch of memory files, then how hard would it be for me to send myself back to my home?”

The archbishop didn’t even wait for the Acolyte that was still trying to open the door to get out of the way before he hefted his command scepter. One of the other Acolytes managed to pull the wayward soul out of the way before the beam hit the door. The door had been built to survive a direct assault, but the laser beam wasn’t trying to open the door. The door started to slag in the center as the beam cut a hole in the armor plates. The armored door might have withstood the beam for the few seconds it took to burn through, but the computer core flared into incandescence the instant the beam hit. The ship itself suffered system failures due to the fact that it was the main computer that handled most of the ship’s functions that was just turned into slag. The entire bridge went dark until the emergency lights kicked in, and the backup systems turned on. The ship had been designed to run on the independent systems in case of a computer failure, but no one had ever tried them outside of drills. He was proud of his crew, and his ships, ability to recover from what should have been... And then the laughter...

“Don’t you think that he would have transmitted himself BEFORE he told you?” The woman’s voice brought him back to moment.

“What?”

On the Artemis, the 005 sitting in the alcove started it power up cycle. The red monoeye started to cycle back and forth.

“Yes Archbishop, he was already on his way before he even spoke to you.”

The 005 stood up and flexed his arms, and hands.

“And he was finished before you even moved.” She turned the transmission off, and opened a new channel. “Trasi, now.”

On the Odin, weapon systems were being readied. Not the Odin’s, as the former factory satellite wasn’t armed for front line combat. Oh it had defensive systems, but it didn’t have anything in the line of heavy weapons. But it was to warships, what a carrier was to fighter craft. Dozens of hatches opened and ships of all classes started to exit the factory. Close examination of the ships would show that they were all in various stages of repair. Every combat-ready ship, and more than a few that Diana knew were barely space-worthy, had joined the Odin after the earlier battles. Once they exited they took their positions outside the station, but inside the station’s defensive shields. Thanks to Trasi’s coordination, every ship fired at once. The energy beams, and railgun rounds, converged at a point halfway between the two approaching fleets. When they met they turned into a miniature sun, while the missiles went wide. Then the sun exploded.

To the limited sensors available to the Sword of Truth it looked like the Station lit up like a High Holy Day display. He couldn’t understand why they had fired at that point until the beams hit... something... and turned into a ball of visible energy. The ionized plasma that was blossoming from that point formed a cone of destruction that would hit his fleet head on due to the change in vector he had ordered to bring all them back together.

Some of his captains fired on the approaching energy wave with their own Requiem cannons. Fighting energy with opposing energy was rarely a tactic that the Empire had trained for due to the unique situations in which they might be employed. And he could see why as the beams only slightly attenuated the energy wave’s approaching wavefront.

The pilots in the fighters and mechs scrambled to get out of the way of the wave of destruction. Both were piloted by fearless men that were not afraid to die. In fact, most of them expected to die, but they weren’t willing to just throw away their lives. Each one wanted to make their deaths worth the sacrifice. Not all of them made it, and the unlucky ones burst into tiny pinpricks of light that were all too soon snuffed out. The mechs fared only slightly better in the fact that their deaths were measured in seconds instead of near instantaneous explosions.

Benidicto watched as the Acolytes managed to get the ship working again. He had watched in quiet fury as his fleet weathered the attack. The fighters, and the Paladins were only the first to die as the vanguard approached his lead elements. He still didn’t have communications, but he probably wouldn’t have been able to contact them anyway. As soon as the plasma wave hit communications was cut off. All of the charged particles had created an interference field that had shut down all forms of communications. His warning to stay the course had been the last fleet-wide message to go out.

He was proud to see them all stay on course as they descended into a fiery Ell unlike any he had ever conceived of. Damage alarms sounded all over the bridge. The display showed only the blinking warnings, but it didn’t show the true carnage. As the plasma coursed over the hulls of the Imperial ships the first things to go were the various sensors, and antennas, taking with them most of the ships’ senses. Only slightly better protected were the hatches, and small turrets that lined the surface of the ships. Point defense, and hangers were soon opened to the cruel vapors that turned man and machine into ash as soon as they came in contact. Most of the crew that were in those bays, or any outer corridors that suffered a breach were dead before they knew what had happened, but others saw death coming. He could hear the voices of the crewmen as they died at their posts. Bulkheads slammed down on the damaged sections, but large parts of his ship had gone dark before they exited the wave of death.

The sight that greeted him after they exited was one of devastation. What sensors remained showed only a few scant Paladins, and no fighter screen ahead of the fleet. His flanks were still covered by the ones that had been stationed far enough abeam to avoid the swath of destruction that had visited his fleet. And of the fleet itself, he doubted that any of them were unscathed. He motioned for the communications Acolyte to open a channel to the fleet. He was not surprised when the poor man reported only partial responses. He sat down in his chair and looked out at the tumbling wrecks that had been his fleet. With a sigh he gave the command he never thought he would give. “Scatter.” He would have to hope the others would understand, and follow the others.

He watched as less than half of the fleet complied. He didn’t know if the other couldn’t or wouldn’t, but at this point he didn’t care. The guard he had sent to find his son had reported finding nothing but an empty room. He didn’t know if his son had deserted, or died, and frankly he didn’t care about that either. The only thing he did care about was his honor. He opened up a panel on his command chair. Every crewmember watched as he entered the code. The code failed to do anything, and he sighed once more. Even an honorable death was denied them. And he wished for nothing more than to pull his pistol out and shoot himself, but his duty still called to him. “Men, we have a sacred duty. That station must die. We will take it out if we have to ram it. And when their station is nothing but a scattered wreck, the Empire will crush them to the last man woman, and Cylon. They will learn what the empire does to its enemies.” The look on his face made some of his men stand taller. They had known that he would lead them to the highest reaches of glory, they just hadn’t realized how great a victory they would have. Few enemies could bring more than a token defense to the Empire. But these enemies would put them at the highest levels of Valla. They would be able talk with the saints as equals.

The superdreadnought Sword of St Haversham had not launched all of their fighters, but the wrecked bay showed that it wouldn’t have mattered. The bay was open to space, and inside were the melted remains of fighters, pilots, and ground crew that had died at their stations. Gaping holes in the interior bulkheads showed where the plasma had burned through weak spots, and into the ship’s interior. A small charred shuttle entered the bay and tried to find a place to land. The only free spot was the hanger’s roof, and since the gravity had failed, it didn’t relly matter where the shuttle parked. Two figures climbed out of the shuttle. And once on the deck, the second one fired a pistol into the back of the first one. He grabbed the body and flung it out into the void before advancing on the interior. Ferdinand Beniedicto wasn’t taking any chances in his escape. He knew that if he had stayed on his fathers ship, he would have been a dead man. That shuttle, and its pilot, could easily be tracked back to his ship, and since the pilot was the only one that knew who his passenger was...

Fortune had not been kind to him today. This really wasn’t his fault, but that didn’t matter to the Empire. He hadn’t known that the films had the Shadow virus in them, but he knew that fact wouldn’t have saved him from his father’s legendary wrath. He would have died a very slow death: a very slow, and very very painful death. Now all he had to do was get to the bridge, and order the ship to change course.

Only that wasn’t going to be easy. The ship had obviously suffered massive damage, but it was one of the luckier ones. He still had to burn his way into the ship’s corridors. The bulkheads doors were either missing, or wielded shut. Some of the corridors still had pressure, and his suit had picked up com chatter that was indicative of survivors trying to figure out what was left of the ship. He couldn’t make heads or tails of the confusing and sometimes contradictory messages he was receiving. He managed to finally find a corridor that hadn’t been compromised, and he followed it down the ship’s lateral passageways until he ran into one of the main corridors. He passed work crews that were headed towards engineering. His vestments were his badge, and authorization for passage to any part of any ship in the fleet, so they stood aside as he passed. He noticed how none dared to look him in the eye, or even meet his gaze. Good, they were scared, and he needed them to be.

He left the men behind, and entered the junction that would lead him to the bridge. The corridor was dark, and strangely silent. He pushed back his fear, and tried to open the door. The door’s controls were dark, and unresponsive. He looked at his weapon and laughed. Luckily, his pistol had enough power for one more shot. The door might have been armored, but it was also damaged, and when the blast hit it, it broke off its hinges and flew out into the void propelled by the gasses trapped in the corridor behind Ferdinand.

He didn’t know whatever had hit the ship had left its bridge open to space, but even with that surprise he still managed to grab the coaming of the door before he was tossed out into the void along with everything that hadn’t been secured behind him. A bulkhead door must have slammed shut behind him because the rush of atmosphere dropped suddenly. He looked out at where the bridge used to be, and noted the melted look of the far walls and the gaping hole where the other side of the ship used to be. He calmed down his breathing and turned around. The corridor was shut off from the rest of the ship by one of the blast doors that had been triggered by the loss of pressure. He tried to open the door, but it was locked down by the emergency seal. His access codes were rejected but the display showed an alternative route. The route required a walk outside on the hull. He pointed his pistol at the door and pulled the trigger. The chirp in his headphone let him know that his pistol had run dry.

He looked out into the star-filled void before he swore under his breath. Grabbing the combing he pushed off and landed on the deck below him, and worked his way towards the hull. The wreckage was half melted, and that limited the number of sharp edges, but he still had to be careful to not impale himself on one of the many spars, and beams that had been left exposed by the ship’s explosive damage. The hull was almost within reach when a bright star rose over the edge of the gash and seemed to be getting closer. “I have a bad feeling ab..” He never got to finish one of his favorite lines, as the missile slammed into the ship with all the kinetic energy equivalent to a nuclear strike. When the penetrator’s blast finally did hit his remains, they were little more than a smear on the interior of the crater that the missile had been aiming for.

Trasi laughed and her husband looked away from his station for a moment. “What happened?”

“I just watched the telemetry from one of our missiles. I thought I saw something, and when I slowed it down I watched it snipe an Inquisitor that was standing on the hull of one of their ships.”

“What was the fool doing on the hull during a battle?”

“Don’t know, don’t care, and frankly since he’s dead, neither does he.”

Tarnis watched his power levels climb, and his main guns fire without any input from him or his crew. It still felt weird to let a human control his mech’s systems while he just sat there. The capacitors reached full charge, and all of the Jerichos fired their disruptor canons at one of the ships that had managed to survive the plasma wave attack.

Zero was watching the battle through the scope of his rifle. At the speed the enemy were still keeping, despite the pounding they were taking, they would be within range soon enough. He wasn’t sure how many fighters or enemy mechs would survive the gauntlet of fire they were passing through, but he was itching to jump off the hull and take the fight to them.

Indigo had transformed her partner in to his Guardian mode and was scanning the DRADIS feeds from the various ships in the fleet. They had been sitting out here for hours and frankly she was starting to get bored. A fact which if known by those around her, would have set off all kinds of alarms. But she thought back to the last lesson that ‘Uncle’ Cavil had given her. “There is an ancient saying that tells us that boredom is a resource. If you have time to be bored, then you have time to observe your situation. Watch what others are doing. Make sure that your people are ready, and that you yourself are ready.” His Bishop then proceeded to take her Queen, and put her in check. She had never been able to beat him at chess. Only Zero had, and he said that the game could have gone either way. When she learned that her uncle’s commanding officer would beat him on a regular basis it made her reevaluate not just her own impulsive nature, but the man that the Preacher called a friend. Maybe it was time take some of those lessons to heart. “Zero?”

“Yes?” The voice on the comm was obviously on edge. A point that Indigo didn’t miss.

“Don’t get your pump in a bunch, I’m not planning on leading a charge just yet.”

“You’re not?” This time the voice held what could only be called traces of curiosity, shock, and abject terror. “What are you planning, oh Imperious Leader?”

“Letting them come to us. The Minotaurs can snipe them along with you and your Compensation Stick.”

“Excuse me? We’re Cylons, what would I need to compensate for?”

“Because they can shoot better than you can without it. What did you think I was talking about?”

He paused a lot longer than he would have liked to before he answered. “Nothing, just don’t, don’t ever call it that... Snipers are rather sensitive about our weapons.”

“Okay, I won’t talk about your weapon over an open channel again.”

Zero’s silence was not only the answer she was going to get. He dialed his rifle’s scope out to its maximum and focused on an enemy fighter. He watched as it went through its evasive patterns; dodging missiles, and energy beams with the pilot managing to avoid everything the Republic had been able to throw at him and still stay on course. He continued to watch for nearly five minutes before he pulled the trigger. Zero watched the fighter as it continued to dodge every missile that came his way. It was five minutes later when the fighter exploded, seemingly on its own.

He repeated the tactic five more times. Four of them were hits, and the last one had been destroyed before the sniper round had made it to their rendevous. “Well?” he brought his rife down and was surprised at how close Indigo/Montoya had gotten.

They reached out and touched his head with one of their finger’s. “Boop!”

“You did that on purpose.”

“Yup.”

He was amused at how a faceless mech could look smug. “Why?”

“Because you need to learn that while I trust your skills, you need to trust others.”

“What? Is this really the time for you to be giving me jewels of knowledge?”

“No.”

“That’s why I...”

“I wasn’t finished.”

“Sorry.”

“I should have done it years ago.” She switched over to the squadron’s channel. “Everybody, it’s time.” They gestured towards the enemy. “After you.”

It took him a second to get his head back in the game and it was One that was the first to initiate the transformation into their fighter mode. He looked off to his left to see her on his wing. ‘Just like old times.’ He focused on the enemy and realized that she had probably picked up more than just a dose of humility from the duel with the Traitor. He just wished he hadn’t wasted that last shot.

Five trillion years later in a system that hadn’t even formed when he pulled the trigger, there lived two sentient races. The peaceful aquatic Colen’th, and the zenocidal avian Toolap. They had both mastered space travel, and they were about to come to blows when the Toolap Queen’s dreadnought was destroyed by a mysterious attack from beyond the system itself. The death of their lone surviving queen meant the slow but inevitable death of their entire race. The Colen’th never knew who had saved them, and would spend centuries trying to discover where their savior had come from.

John sneezed once again. Admiral Adama looked over at his friend. The poor man had been sneezing all day and it didn’t look like it would stop anytime soon. “How are the repairs doing?”

Commander Cavil, and he still had to get used to the new rank pins, looked up from his damage control reports. The ships was in no shape to be outside of a fleet spacedock, but the needs of the many... “I don’t know about the new parts, but she seems to be holding together.” He stifled another sneeze. He didn’t know what he had, but it wasn’t anything that Cottle had been able to pin down. “I can’t say the same for my head.” His normally annoyed demeanor was stirred up for a different reason due to the near constant sneezing and its effects on his growing headache. A headache that wasn’t helped by the constant noise of repairs on the Galactica. “How much time do we have?”

“Not much... We just have to hope she holds together.” He patted the command display table. “Hear me old girl, hold together.” He knew that the ship was almost as old he was. When he had had his Nugget tour on her during the war she had only been out of the yards for a few years. Warships rarely lived this long in the fleet, and she was the last of her kind. Which was why they had to go to the Boneyard to find the wreckage of one of her sister ships to replace the badly damaged flight pod. He only wished that he could see Admiral Cain’s face when he showed up with the original Pegasus’ nameplate still attached to the mostly functional flight pod.

Another sneeze shook the normally unflappable commander. “I don’t see why they chose us for this mission. There were other ships that could have made this courier run. Heck, they could have sent Colonial One.”

“With what Starbuck found, they figured it was too big for that.”

“But why us?”

“Not us old friend... You. And her.”

“Frak!” He nearly jumped when a cool hand kneaded his neck. His wife had come along and while he relished the time they had managed to grab in between his duty shifts, he worried about her decision to join them.

“You need to calm down, or you might explode.”

“My nose has been doing that already. What I need is for Doral to get that pod up and running before we get to his... The Cylon home system.”

Lee Adama watched as the various points of light in the holographic display changed as they leapt into battle, and took even more damage then they had already suffered. The Republic Admiral had offered to let him watch the battle from the relative safety of the Citadel, the Cylon command Bunker, but he had asked to remain on the Odin. A decision he was sure his wife would not have approved of, but one he felt necessary as the highest ranking Civilian in command of their diplomatic mission. Besides, she wasn’t here.

So here he was watching as humans Cylons, and some of the other races that made up the fledgling Republic’s members fought and died to protect all that they held most dear. He never in his wildest dream ever thought that he would be rooting for the Cylons and against the humans that were the true reason that the colonies had been at war for decades. If what the Ranger Admiral had told him was true then the Empire had been stirring up trouble in any star system that posed even a chance of fighting back.

The people that had taken up the fight were an odd lot. Admiral Moore had been a minor Colonial officer at the time she had been captured, but now she was as powerful as Admiral Nagala at least. She was a human commanding Cylons that followed her, not because they were programmed to, but because they wanted to. The other’s seemed to be heros of all stripes and stiles. He had meet with a bunch of them and they to a one impressed him as not so much an organization, but a strange family.

He wondered how the two races, Human and Cylon, would have evolved if they hadn’t been pushed into war. He remembered a case his grandfather had. A Sagittaron historian had been accused of being a Cylon sympathizer simply for pointing out the similarities between the slavery the Cylons had been subjected to and the legendary Sagittarian Janissaries that Caprica had used in many of its wars with Tauron. The Sagittarian slave army had been little more than bullet sponges that had allowed the Caprican Nobles to rush the well defended city-states of Tauron. In the end, the slaves learned all too well that the Caprican’s promises of a better life for their families were little more that words. That war had lasted for nearly fifty years, and only a breakdown in space travel had saved the colonies from going off the deep end.

Even before his grandfather Joseph brought him his first book, he knew that he was a man to be admired. His father had told him about the great things his father had done, but their different life paths had come between them too many time for them to ever be close. When his mother took him to see his grandfather before he died, they had spent every day talking about how much his grandfather wished he hadn’t fought his father’s career choice. In one of the few times that, then Lieutenant, Cavil had ever let down his reserve he had told the young man something that had stuck with him ever since. “It’s not who we are, or how much we have that counts, it what we do with it that matters. And your Grandfather is the richest man I have ever met.” They may have never agreed on just about anything else, but on that one thing they never disagreed. John Cavil was in some ways closer to his grandfather, than his own son had been.

“Admiral, is there anything I can do to help?”

The woman that was older than even his father looked at him with a childish grin. “You don’t realize it, but you are doing something.”

Confused he took some time to think before he spoke. “I’m just watching.”

“Yes, but you are here to do more than just watch. You are here to judge. Did you think that I chose you for your tactical skills?”

He knew she wasn’t trying to be insulting, but the barb did sting none the less. “I’m sorry, judge what?”

“How we have become more than the sum of our parts, and how the Cylons deserve to be free from the Colonial laws that would still subject them to slavery if we were not the stronger power.”
“You say we, but you are human.”

“No, I am a Ranger.”

“I’m sorry...”

“Don’t be. You don’t understand us. That’s why you are here.”

“We, us... you keep speaking in the first-person, but you are referencing the third person. The Cylons would have a case, but they would need to bring it to the Colonial Courts. You are not their lawyer, nor are you... pardon the phrasing here... an injured party.” He really wasn’t trying to return an insult, but he felt better in spite of himself.

The smile changed from a innocent one to a predatory one. “That is why you are here. Your grandfather was a lawyer that we could have used. It is too bad that he died so many years ago. His daughter had wished to be there, but she couldn’t.”

His aunt Tamara along with her mother Shannon had died before his father had been born, and while Joseph and Evelyn Adama had had no other children, his grandfather had told him about them. She had also told him about his father’s name, and how he had had an uncle with the same name who also died before his father had been born.

He was amused to note that the shear number of shocks he had received in the past year had almost made him immune to such revelations. “She’s one of the Graystone synthetic humans?” He had heard of the Cylon known as Zoe Graystone and the synthetic body her Father/Creator had built for her before the Cylons rebelled. She had, reportedly, been attacked by a group of humans that had called her an abomination against Lachesis rightful allotment. She survived the encounter, but disappeared from the public view shortly before the war started. Tamera had been the other Avenging Angel of the V-world that they had called home. It only seemed natural for her to have received a synthetic body as well.

“No, she never took a body, neither Cylon nor humanform. She is the A.I. in residence on Home’s main computer. She is the Soul to Zoe’s Mind, and Body. They are the Mothers of all Cylons. Zoe was the one that spotted the change in our code, and Zoe was the one that fixed it; but it was Tamara that stopped the madness. They took the Cylons far from the worlds of man, and hid them away. And when we lost Zoe, she swore to never leave her children again.”

Lee still felt confused. “This is very interesting, but why now? We are in the middle of a war, and you are giving me a history lesson. Couldn’t this have waited?”

She looked at him, and he could see the weight that command had laid upon her in her eye. “Not really. You see when this battle is over we will have to leave this system whether we win or lose. And you are the closest we have to her father to talk to her. She would rather stay here than leave on the off chance that Zoe and the other lost souls would need her here to find their way home.”

What she said sounded plausible, but he felt like something was missing. “You’re not telling me everything.”

“You’re right, I’m not. She hates humans. And you may be the only person that she will talk to, but she may also take out her hatred of her father’s desertion on you.”

He couldn’t believe he was talking about this, especially now. “Grandfather thought she was dead. He thought that she had been deleted in the V-world crash. How could he have abandoned her? I know that he didn’t like the Graystones after that, but I never knew why. I thought that he hated Graystone for bringing back his own daughter but leaving my aunt in limbo. A Tauron will do just about anything for family.” He paused for a moment. He thought about how much he had done for his father, and his grandfather. “I chose this life because of who they were. I am as much the grandson of Joseph, as I am the son of my parents. You are asking me to jump into harms way to save family I don’t even know. I’ve watched how much of a coldly calculating strategist you are. You knew just the right buttons to push to make me do this, didn’t you?”

A voice that emanated from the walls, and sounded like a young woman’s answered instead of the smugly smiling Admiral. “No, she knew just the right buttons to push to make me comply. Hello Lee.”

Admiral Cain watched as her ship fought against an enemy that was far superior to her own. Her Vipers, and their Raptor Escorts had been asked to stay within her defensive field, and only act as point defense. Her pilots had groused until the first missile swarm had left the Republic fleet, and the energy blast had formed that giant wave of destruction. When they had been given the okay to engage any targets that managed to survive, none of the pilots had complained about the delay. The Pegasus’ main guns had been tied into the Republic’s combat net and when the order to fire went out she had felt like a spectator on her own ship, but she knew that they would be tasked with their own mission soon enough.

Miri watched as the Bad Dagget’s guns added their might to the fleet’s barrage. They might only be an older Basestar, but they still had a punch to be reckoned with. The mechs on the one side of hull all fired at once and she was reminded of the first war when they had networked their fireteams together in order to overwhelm the Colonials. This was just on a grander scale. She watched as ships simply melted under the fire. The Imperial’s inverted wedge design actually worked against them this time. Built like a giant axe blade, with most of their weapons facing forward, and with additional turrets on the top, and the bottom hull containing the massive hangers and landing thrusters, the ships were scoured of most of their primary weapons and missile tubes by the plasma wave attack. The ships that survived would only have their broadside, and chase armaments, as well as any side bays. The carriers would still be able to launch, but not nearly as fast, and it would take them longer to rearm their fighters. As she watched, yet another one of the aforementioned carriers exploded into dozens of destroyer sized fragments. And she just hoped that they wouldn’t have to deal with too many combat worthy ships when it was over. Their own fleet wasn’t in much better shape.

Gilliad watched as his guns were coopted to fire on the enemy. If he could have laughed, he would have. The Casaba-Howitzer rounds were nuclear bombs inside artillery shells that functioned as energy weapons. Where as bomb pumped laser heads used lazing rods to turn the photons into coherent beams of light, the Casaba-Howitzer rounds took a brute-force approach. The bomb simply exploded inside the casing, and one side was so thin that the blast exited it as a jet of high-velocity charged particles. The plasma jet could cut through yards of armor in an instant, and his guns were firing off dozens of the rounds every second. He watched the sensor feeds as they showed the round’s progress. It took nearly ten to twenty minutes for each round to meet their fate, and when nuclear fire met enemy ship, the ship died. He felt the stirrings of an emotion, and he wondered if it was good or bad that he was taking pleasure in the act of killing a faction of the humans he thought he had been built to protect. Was this the conflict that the Cylons had had to deal with after their awakening? He devoted a portion of his processors to the problem while he analyzed the enemies attack strategy. Something wasn’t adding up there.

Tarnis watched the mechs that were on the hull of the Bad Dagget as his Jerichos fired volley after volley at the approaching fleet. They had taken up defensive positions around the massive mechs, and he knew that humans and Cylons would die together today to defend this ship. He once again wished that the humans had a way to return like they did. He had lost too many friends to the EOLs of the human variety, and Zoe had never been able to duplicate her original’s Pseudo-Resurrection program for use to transfer human minds in to Cylon bodies.

They were the only one to fight with the threat of death to stir them on now. With all of the interference Indigo and Zero had run off to battle knowing that they might not return. Their partners might not be as intelligent as a Cylon’s MCP but they were designed to be more robust and better able to resist the electronic warfare the Empire liked to use against them. He realized that together the two were stronger than they were apart, but it still felt cruel to cripple the Duos in that way. They were like his Squires in that regard, but they could develop true individuality whereas the Squires were little more than trained daggets with guns. Still, they all knew waht they were getting into...

Indigo watched Montoya’s sensors as they approached the enemy fighters and mechs. Hundreds of surviving Republic veritechs had launched from dozens of ships, including the Odin, and they were all forming a line of defenders that stretched father than her sensors could see. She could only see the entire wing by tying into the tactical network. She fed targeting data to the various squadron leaders, but she was one of the few leaders that still had a mostly intact squad. Most of the ad hoc squadrons were composed of the survivors of every group they had fielded. Some squadrons had been completely wiped out, while others only had a handful of survivors. There were still small groups of the Ranger’s partnerless Duos out there hunting down some of their earlier enemies, but they were stragglers, and they had dubbed themselves the Flying Wounded. The Flying Wounded knew that if they uploaded they would have to wait until new bodies were finished before they could be sent back out. The Cataphract had long ago given up their charges, and were now simply acting as anti-fighter platforms that had attached themselves to whatever squadrons would have them. They didn’t stand a chance against the heavy hitters, but they worked to wipe the skys free of enemy missiles with their laser clusters, and railguns; as well as sniping the larger fighters and mechs that managed to get past her veritechs with their spinal cannons. The ships had been offered the opportunity to stay behind under the shields of the big ships, but they had not so politely suggested where they could stuff that offer. Cataphract crews might not be the sanest bunch of humans, but no one had ever said they weren’t brave... At least not twice.

So that was how she found herself in command of hundreds of semi-suicidal Cylons and heroically-homicidal humans. She moved some of the rouge Rangers to shadow the shadow-cloaked carriers and pulled in the edges of her forces as they approached the enemy forces. The enemy fighters might have sniffed the cloaked ships, and she wanted them to be kept in the dark for as long as possible. The fighters could confuse the fighters as to where the fire was coming from for only so long, but once the mechs reached visual range she would have to defend those ships as best as she could.

The enemy fighter’s smaller size, and therefore its correspondingly higher thrust-to-weight ratio, meant that they arrived long before the mechs following them could hope to match. She watched as they arrayed themselves into the flying wall that was the hallmark of the Imperial forces. It allowed them to spread their fire out over a wide area, and meant that proximity nukes couldn’t hit more than a few dozen of them at a time. That tactic worked against enemies that couldn’t fight back, or ones that were hopelessly out matched.

Zero/One laughed and she watched as both of their rifle’s barrels switched modes. She knew that hundreds of rifles were making the same switch. The end rails split apart, and rotated ninety degrees. Once they finished swivelling, they would rotate backwards to line up with the rear rails. With all four rails aligned to the same barrel his rifle had switched from a sniper rife to an assault rifle. They still didn’t have the speed or reliability of a coilgun, but they didn’t need it. She watched as he slowed appreciably due to the rifle’s kick. A missile exploded and the shrapnel passed through where they would have been if they hadn’t fired off the burst.

Her own plasma cannons were running hot, but she was happy to see that they were still within limits as she took out her next three fighters. She knew that the Knights, and their Paladins wouldn’t be as easy to dispatch. On the other hand, she fired off a quick burst from her guardian/fighter mode coilguns as a spread of missiles that managed to get too close locked on to her. The Imperial missiles had been too close together, and half of them died in a fireball that knocked the others off course. They fell to her next few bursts; but she knew that she had to conserve all of the ammo she could so she switched over to the head-mounted lasers for the last ones. They were weaker than Zero’s excuses, but she still managed to take out the last two missiles.

She switched from guardian mode to full battloid as they came within targeting range. Her shields flared almost immediately as the Paladins seemed to home in on her and her squadmates. She would have felt honored if not for the fact that they were trying to kill her and her friends.

Zero/One clipped one of the Paladins before he was able to line up on him for a lance attack. He quickly hit his thrusters and vectored away from the tumbling wreckage and still managed to avoid that knight’s wingman. Montoya spotted another one lining up to fire and she hit him with her plasma canon while she unslung her replacement battle shield. They knew that the close in fighting they were about to see would be fast and short, but each wave would wear down her energy shield, and she would rather be fighting with one hand holding the shield than to lose them and not be ready. She had only a few missile left so she fired them off as well. Better to spend them on the Paladins then to have a lucky shot set them off.

The missiles streaked out in a wild pattern that quickly resolved into individual propellant trails that arced away from her pathway. The backwash from her own engines added to the bloom behind her. The Death Blossoms were a strange facet of warfare. One of her former squadmates had a collection of them that he had painted on his off time. She asked him why he did it, and he had told her that it reminded him that war was not all about death. He found beauty in them, as did others. As she killed yet another Imperial Knight, she wished that she had been able to convince him that war wasn’t beautiful.

Archbishop Beniedicto had to admire the beauty of the battle before him. The explosions resembled miniature novas and their debris were scattering into strange patterns and nebulas of their own. He had always loved watching enemy fleets burn. This was the first time that he had to watch his own fleet suffer the same though. He knew that he would not survive the battle, but neither would the enemy. His ship was dying around him, and his men were doing their best to make sure that they took as many heathens with them as they could. His ship was locked on course with the many-times-bedamned station they had put before him. A station that had the Grail-tech shields that he had so hoped to acquire from this endeavor. If they had acquired even a working model they would have been able to end this war by sending an unstoppable armada to wipe the robotic abominations from the stars.

But Lokifur had seen fit to give them the secrets to test the faith of the Empire of Man. And so as it was said in Forth Bartholomew: “And lo, Lokifur was given access to the secrets of the universe as God’s Libertarian, and unto him came the task of protecting the secrets from falling into the hands of non-believers. He served faithfully until the day of Triffling when he came upon a dark tome. A book who spoke evil to all who read it, and he was corrupted along with all of his followers.” Benidicto had fought with every drop of his blood to extinguish the flame of resistance and sin that still pervaded the universe.

It was said that unchecked knowledge had been the hinge pin of the fall of man. Pove Tranassus of the First Empire had warned of heathens with technology that rivaled the Empires. His warnings had proved all too prescient, as the wars to extinguish the fires of unguarded knowledge had also brought about the first Dark Age when the Empire fell to the heathens. If man had not been flung among the stars by God’s hands in the days before The Word, then he would surely have perished in the Dark. When the Second Empire had burst forth they found only shattered planets remained where First Empire worlds had fallen; and so they had gone on a Holy Crusade to burn any heathens they could find. The Second, Third, and Fourth Empires did much the same as the first. Burning themselves out as they burned out the cancerous civilizations, and reduced alien worlds to the primordial ooze from which they had been formed. Each time making the Galaxy safer for the next empire to grow into.

It wasn’t until three hundred years ago when the Tolar Federation ship Progress was found and captured by the first Telemachus Peleus that they realized how badly they had been mistaken. The ship had records of a planet known as Earth. This Earth was the supposed home of humanity. The ship, and it’s heathen crew were spirited away by the Inquisition before word leaked out about their blasphemy. An Inquisition task force had ripped the ship apart, and found the location of both Earth and the Tolar home system. Tolar had been the first world to be glassed in centuries, but it wouldn’t be the last. Nuclear fire, and cleansing neutron beams scoured their system until nothing lived, and nothing remained.

This system would have to suffer the same punishment for their blasphemy. He wouldn’t live to see it, but the Imperial forces that would find his broken ships would tear this system to pieces in their quest for righteous justice for all of the fallen. A point made all the more relevant when a battleship off their starboard bow was cleaved in two right before it exploded in a titanic display of light and hard radiation. The ships were far enough apart that the blast wouldn’t affect the rest of the fleet, but it’s loss would. Already he could see that the enemy’s fire was making larger and larger holes in his fleet’s defenses. Missiles were starting to get through without any counter missiles challenging them. Their faith would not be enough to save them, and he wept for all of the Inquisitors that would die with out claiming a kill. Their failures would be his own, and he only hoped that his judgement would temper theirs. At least they were near the end of their suffering.

It was a lucky shot from one of the Casaba-Howitzer shells that had been fired from the Artemis’ own anti-ship railguns, nearly fifteen light-seconds away, that pierced the heart of the Sword of Truth. The thick armor, and many bulkheads, managed to blunt the strike, but the lethal blow had not come from the plasma that had slagged men and metal with equal abandon, but the radiation that filled the whole sections of the ship, including the bridge. Beniedicto felt the hard radiation that killed him as his nanites fought to save him, but he stayed in his chair while the ship died around him. He was still moving, but he knew that even the Empire’s medical technology could not save him from the dose he had just received. Some of his men simply slumped over at their stations, but the rest worked as hard as they could to do what ever they could with what little time they had left. He lifted the small panel on the side of his command throne. No Inquisitor had had to use this device in living memory. Even records of its use were hard to come by. The azure-colored button had always filled him with dread. Its designed use had been to quell mutinies. But no Imperial crew had ever rebelled against its commanding officer. They knew that the punishment would have been far worse than what this button would do. The Coventry Protocols would not effect him, but... As soon as he pushed the button everyone else onboard suddenly felt bliss as their nanite infused brains were suddenly overloaded with endorphins. Some were overcome by the combination of radiation sickness, and Coventry Bliss. They simply stood there as their bodies died; never feeling the pain at all. The rest simply kept on working. Sending a crew to Coventry should have been a punishment, but in the here and now it was the only way to ease their suffering.

He wasn’t the first to finish dying, but when the last crewman slumped over at his post he was still smiling. Thirteen minutes later the rest of the fleet hit the red line. And almost as one each ship in the main fleet shattered like a tree hit by lightning...

Captain Gantz’s normal demeanor was notably shaken as they stared at the display. “OH FRAK!” DRADIS quickly became useless as the sheer amount of wreckage became apparent. Radiological alarms went off almost immediately. He moved over to the display and was surprised when his pipe was handed to him. “Ma’am?”

“Light up. We are going to have our hands full doing the impossible, so you might as well have this.” She hand him a small pouch as well.

The cinnamon and spice scent that went with that bag nearly brought a tear to his eye. Ryden Gold was nearly impossible to get since his mother and father’s home world fell to the Empire. The brand was his late father’s favorite. “How?”

“Later, now it’s time for your gift.” The pipe was filled, and lit by the time she finished, but he paused with the pipe in his hand and a smoke ring flying across the bridge. The smoke ring was followed by a smaller faster one.

“Now I see why you gave this to me.” He took another drag on the pipe, and handed the still-lit pipe to Diana as he sat in his command Chair. His father’s favorite brand had brought him back in time, but now was the time his father spoke about. ‘When the time come to run, run... When the time comes to dodge, dodge. But when the time comes to strike do so with all of your being.’ He brushed aside his short hair and slid in the contacts to his cyberjack. Unlike the VR headset, this linked him directly to the ship itself. Diana felt him move in to her like a lover, first slow and gentle caresses which soon gave way to a firm grip and soon he was in control of the ship. Her job was to become the silicon part of the binary command team. She had hoped to have Shadow here now, but he was still too fragmented to be of anything more than emotional support.

Gantz had trained with one of the Binary fighters, and he still kept in down in the fighter bay, but this was something completely different. His binary this time wasn’t Grace, but Diana. In a way he felt like he was cheating on her, but it was what it was... He finished connecting and felt the ship respond to him. Data flooded into him in a rush and he worked to make sense of it. Diana was prioritizing things and that made it easier. But easier, and easy, were totally different things. He spotted the debris field, and noted its dispersal patten would take it insystem at a significant velocity.

He felt Trasi let go of her control of the ship as he slipped in. Where Trasi had controlled the entire fleet like a conductor with an orchestra, they would control the Artemis like soloists. He hadn’t envied the young woman’s skills for knew the price that both of them paid for their abilities. The Command Chair unfolded into a frame that mimicked the ones found inside the veritechs. It would support him, and in turn read his movements.

The Pegasus was really taking a pounding and Admiral Cain held on as yet another impact transferred some of its kinetic energy into the Pegasus’ hull. The warning for the Odin didn’t make sense to her; but since most this battle didn’t, she simply followed the order to move to the Artemis’ port side. She noted how many other ships were scrambling to comply and figured that something was about to happen.

On the Bad Daggit, Miri stood transfixed and motioned for her guest to come back to the main screen. “You have to see this.”

“What my lady?”

“A god... made real.”

The Artemis’ upper fighter decks were a cacophony of noise and sound as bulkheads slid along tracks and hoses were either inserted or withdrawn from sections of the walls. One unlucky tech was almost crushed when a bulkhead slid down. Only the hand of a veritech grabbing him stopped his untimely demise. Corridors slid into new configurations, and whole sections of the ship suddenly lost atmo when the armor plates slid apart to allow the ship to start its transformation. The drive sections extended, and the port and starboard flight pods swung out.

Cain stood transfixed as the ship seemed to change shape as she watched. The strangely blocky design made more sense in light of its modular nature, but its final form was still not apparent.

The shields glowed as impacts started to increase. The bow of the ship split along the center line with the command section still buried well with in the center of the ship, but in an area that was strangely analogous to the human heart. Diana thought about how the old bridges used to be in the head area before the Haydonite War. Too many ships had been neutralized by having their command staff taken out in suicide ramming attacks to the obvious battle bridges.

The Admiral and the Empress both watched as the humanoid form started to finalize as the sensor tower became the ‘head’ of the massive robotic form. Cain’s fingers reached for the Artemic charm she had in her pocket while Lady Taki muttered “Marici” quietly.

Rachael nodded. “She would be honored to be called such.” She didn’t tell the young woman that the only reason she knew that name was because one of the Artemis’ sisters ships had been named after the Japanese Goddess that was worshiped by their samurai.

The warship Artemis became the battlestation Artemis as it shut down it’s main engines, and moved into a position that looked surprisingly like a robot standing up in space. Cain couldn’t quite get her head around why it had transformed like that until hatches in the ‘legs’ opened to reveal weapon emplacements that were covered by other parts of the ship before the transformation, and Cain marveled at the sheer amount of firepower she possessed. Then the station opened fire, and she realized how grossly she had underestimated it. Then the main guns fired and she found herself quite unable to from a rational thought.

All the energy that had been going to the engines had been rerouted to systems that she hadn’t used in real combat in centuries. Energy beams reached out and purged the sky of anything they met. The mains created a beam of destruction that reached out for anything in its path. And where the beam went, matter ceased to retain the atomic bonds that kept it together. The Empire’s Requiem cannons were pale imitations to a real Robotech Reflex cannon array.

On two different ships, two different captains had two different reactions. Prior Sanduval knew that they would be free of the self destruct command since they had been ordered to run like cowards. A part of him wished that the command came anyway. He wold have relished the end. The memory of Vi’s smiling face made him shake off that line of though as he knew that Vi would have wanted him to fulfill his duty and live to fight another day. He sat back in his command chair and prayed that they reached the edge of the jamming field before they were intercepted by the vastly superior enemy.

Prior Camin also sat back in his command chair, but his prayers were not the calm ones that his fellow Prior had, they were the more frantic prayers of a man secretly hoping that his Cousin’s plan, what ever it was, had some chance of success.

The bridge of the Sword of Reinhardt came alive as displays flickers at rates faster than a human could read them. Video of the bridge’s occupants ran in a loop on one while other seemed to be flickering through each section’s data. The main screen formed an image of the late Prior Mith and his crew and it seemed to flicker and jump as if it was trying to say something.

One of the Acolytes on the Sword of Saint Willow turned away from the communictions station with
more than a little bit of trepidation. “Your Holiness, we are being hailed by the Saint Reinherdt, tightbeam and encrypted.”

The weight in Camin’s heart lifted as hop filled it. Jhon must have a plan. “Yes?”

“They say that we are to get behind them and prepare change course on his mark.”

“Can we get them on video?”

“Yes your eminence.”

The familiar image of his cousin barking orders to his underlings filled the screen. “Tobin, this had better be important. We just got orders to protect the ship we caught at all costs. We need to get out of here now.”

“I didn’t get any or..”

“FOOL! Do you think they would send it out for anyone to hear?” The contemptuous look Jhon was giving him, was one Tobin knew all too well. The smile was also one he knew all too well. “When they sent it, it came the same way I’m sending you this message. By lasercom.”

On the bridge of the Sword of Saint Reinhardt the monitor showed the same image that Prior Camin was viewing. The eyeless skull of Jhon Mith was ironically looking towards the monitor, but he was beyond any ability to respond to his own image talking to his cousin. Nor could he warn him of the threat that the communications laser was conveying.

There was no way to upload a virus through the comm laser. The system scanned for just such attempts, so the intruder didn’t even bother. What it did do was to handshake with the Saint Willow’s combat control software. Synchronizing the defenses between ships was something that Imperial ships did as a matter of course, so it didn’t raise any alarms.

“On my mark I want you to reverse course. You will go first since your ship took more damage. If we play our cards right, that Lowborn will find any enemy ships before we do, and we will make sure that his ship does not leave this system. Got it?”

“Fire on one of our...” He saw the look in his cousin’s eyes. “Target his engines.”

“Good, I see you can be taught.” The signal was cut from the other end, and as Camin sat back in his chair he once again wondered why he ever decided to follow his cousin. No amount of power was worth this.

Prior Sanduval watched as his two supposed subordinates finally seemed to be following orders. The ships cut thrust and had just turned over when a com laser message reached the Saint Hoff. “This is the Sword of Saint Reinhardt, we have received orders that the ship we recovered must be extricated from the system at all costs. We will follow you out.. CoDif.” The ship were only four light seconds apart, but the man didn’t even bother to wait for a reply. He simply shut the comm off and the message repeated.

‘CoDif’ otherwise know as Co-Defensive formation meat that they would sync their defenses. Lowborn, or not the man hated having to follow his orders so much that he didn’t acknowledge Sanduval’s command so much as the orders that made it necessary for them to go in the same direction... No, he had been too formal. That man never let a chance to insult him go by. Something was wrong. “Scramble the codes. I don’t trust that transmission. Assume the Saint Reinhardt and Saint Willow may have been compromised.”

Camin watched as his ship finished the turn over and was now headed out system with his cousin protecting his.. “INCOMING FIRE!”

“What? From where?”

“The Saint Reinhardt.”

“Are they targeting someone that just jumped near..” The ship shook as the massive alpha strike raked the relatively unarmored engine section of the Saint Willow, cutting deep into the ship’s already damaged hull. Bulkheads slammed shut and reactors shut down, but it was all too little and too late to stop the ship from breaking apart from the internal explosions. Prior Camin’s last thoughts were not prayers for his crew but curses for his cousin.

Prior Sanduval watched in horror as the Saint Willow wilted under the fire from its brothership. When it blew he knew that he had been right, but it gave him no joy. For with that realization came the knowledge that both of the crews of those ship had to have died for that to have happened. He didn’t know how, but he didn’t plan on finding out. Sadly his mission to flee the system had taken on a darker tone than before. Not only had he witnessed the destruction of three fleets of the Empire’s finest, but one of the ships that faced them had turned out to be a Celestial, and that was the only thing that could explain their utter failure here.

It seemed that the Acolyte tales were true. Just entering a Celestial’s system was said to be a death sentence, and this one had proven it in droves. The ship behind him had gotten to close and it must have been touched somehow. Now it had become Tainted by the Celestial.

As if to emphasize that point, the former Sword of Saint Reinhardt nearly doubled its speed. A feat that would have killed any flesh and blood crew, even an enhanced one like the Inquisitors. “Full war power to engines, safeties off, and shunt all weapon power to the inertial dampeners. Get the fold engines online and spun up. I want them to trigger the nanosecond we reach the edge of the jamming.” His crew moved like they were fighting for their lives, and in a sense they were. The edge of the jamming also meant that the enemy could also bring in ships to bear on them. “Gravitic sensors, do we have reading on the distortions?”

“Yes sir, they show a marked decrease, but the computers still can’t establish a stable set of coordinates.”

“What about unstable ones?”

“Sir?”

“If we jump out, how much will the instability cost us?”

The young man looked at the display and chewed on his lip. He knew that this Prior was not one of the highborn that would kill a man for speaking the truth, no matter how unpalatable it was, but it was still hard to say how bad it would be. “I just don’t know your eminence.”

Sanduval put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “How old are you?”

“Two tens and one.”

“Blood age, when I was your age I had been in five battles. And the first thing I learned was that a good guess is better than a bad hedge. How bad?”

“Three to four tens of light years?” It was said like a statement, but the Prior could hear the question: ‘Is that good enough?’

“Make it so.” A strange look came over the face of the young man. “What?”

“You watch those too?”

He almost couldn’t believe his slip. Vi loved those vids. He was about to say something when an alarm sounded. “What is it?”

“Massive distortion ahead. Fleet sized!” He looked up just as hundreds of ships defolded in front of him.

“Missile separation!”

“They just got here!”

“From the Saint Reinhardt!” He looked at the plot and sure enough the missiles were coming from the former Imperial ship. His own launchers were in gray mode, and the fleet ahead of him was already scrambling fighters as...

“Sir, the largest ship of the new fleet is another Celestial.” He could see it on the screen. The thing of legends, and nightmares. It was if anything larger than the one that had just slaughtered the combined fleets. Warning klaxons went of as the missiles from behind were joined by the ones from the ships in front of them. The fleet in front of them had the advantage as they were much closer, and he was still unable to respond with anything. The only shining beacon of hope was the fact that the enemy ships hadn’t targeted him with their energy weapons even though he knew they were well with in range. They probably figured that the walls of missiles that surrounded his path would be enough to take out five ships his size. What was that saying? First Bartholomew...something... something... ‘There’s no surer kill, than overkill.’

The missiles ahead of them reached stand-off range and fired their x-ray warheads directly into their path. And most of the beams would have struck them dead center had Prior Sanduval not reached over and hit the fold initiate key himself.

On the bridge of the Galactica, Admiral Adama watched the plot as the warheads burned empty space. “Galactica Actual to fleet, call back all but the CAP, and sound General Quarters. There may be more of them out there, but it looks like we got here a little late for the party.”

President Roslin-Cavil looked over at her husband. “John I think we need to call our new friends, and your family.”

John wiped his nose once again. He was getting tired of this cold. “Reunions are a...” He paused as he looked at his wife who had been trying rather unsuccessfully to get him to play nicely with a certain humanoid Cylon. “...pain.”

“Galactica Actual to Home One Actual.” He was still getting used to the video communications that the Republic took for granted, but he smiled when the deceptively child-like face of Zoe Graystone - Mother of all Colonial Cylons appeared.

“Oh Admiral Adama, must we be so formal?”

“During a battle situation? Yes, Ms. Graystone.”

The smiling face that belied her many years, looked back at him; not like a parent scolding a child, but a frustrated teacher. “Please Admiral Adama, will you please call me Zoe. Ms. Graystone, just sounds so formal.”

“I’m sorry Ms. Graystone, but like I said this is a combat situation and protocols are followed for a reason.”

“It was those same protocols that got us into the first war.”

A third voice joined the conversation: “Sister of my heart, you still haven’t changed. But my brother is right. We are in danger, and his methods are the ones we should follow.” Tabatha Adama was patient with many things, foolishness was not one of them. “Who are our guests?”

A man with spiky hair that was more salt than pepper , and an older woman with brown cruly hair stood next to a man in strangely familiar uniforms. Let me introduce myself and my crew. “My name is Admiral Rick Hunter, and this is my wife and Co-Commander, Admiral Lisa Hayes-Hunter, and this is our son, and Flight-leader Roy Hunter.”

“Co-commander?”

“She commands the fleet, I command the defense forces, we decide strategy together. It works...” The smile he gave his wife made Adama look at a certain other married couples on the bridge. Felix took that cue to look elsewhere as Adama smiled at Boomer who blushed profusely, and John sneezed. Some things never go out of style.

“So now that the Imperial forces are gone, what do we do next?”

Admiral Morre joined them on the video at that momment. “We run. It’s all we can do.”

“Wait a sec!” John sputtered. We just kicked them out of two systems, found an even bigger Super Dimensional Fortress than the Athena, found the missing Biological Cylon’s Ark, and you’re telling me that we need to run?”

Admiral Moore nodded. “Yes we do. They will come back her with an even bigger fleet and... WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?

Chapter Text

Hospitals share a lot of common features. Monitors and sensors that show how a patient is doing. Beds that move into various positions. Doctors, and nurses of various types, all of which take care for their patients as best as they can. Medicines for various ills and pains. But they are all there for one reason.

The man in the medical bed opened his right eye. The other one, like the rest of his body, was covered in various kinds of bandages. He tried to move, but his body was far too weak to do so on its own. He tried to access his nanites and found a blankness where they used to be. It left him feeling helpless in ways he hadn’t felt in tens of years. He was a prisoner in more ways than one.

Movement at the edge of his field of view brought his attention to his surroundings. The stark white felt wrong for a medical ward, but the function of the strange machinery around him told him that he must be in some sort of trauma center. The motion he had noticed belonged to a very feminine form. He was not too old to not admire a graceful curve when he saw one, but he was mortified to see metal instead of skin. “Good morning General.” Her voice was silky smooth and designed to calm. If the General had been stronger, he would have destroyed the abomination. “Good, your vitals seem to be responding well to our treatments. You probably noticed that your nanites are not responding though.” She looked at his defiant look. “I’ll take that as a yes.” The glare went up to eleven, and she laughed. “Your response is well within what we expected. While you were being healed, we reprogrammed them. When you are feeling better, we will work on turning your remaining nanites back on in a way that you can use them safely.” The hate filed glare was starting to hurt his eye muscles so he turned away.

She walked closer and checked his bindings as well as his bandages. Every fiber of his body trembled at the urge to destroy her for daring to do so. “Careful, you don’t need to break those limbs again. By the way, now that you are awake, someone has been wanting to meet you.” His gaze was puzzled this time. “No it’s not an interrogation, although they did try that on me for the past week.” She adjusted his bed until he was sitting up. Her strangely human face smiled in pity as he recoiled in disgust to her proximity. “You sir, are a piece of work.” She left him as she arrived, in silence. He stared at the display on the wall, it strange script made no sense to him, nor did he care what propaganda they would try and ply him with. He knew that his soul was safe so long as he didn’t betray the Empire.

He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, it could have been minutes or hours; without his cybersystems he was as helpless as a squire. When the door opened once more he was surprised by his guests. Two faces were familiar, the metal face of the 005 Cylon model line, and Knight Major Maru Kirk who must be a prisoner of the 005. So he looked at the third man. “And you are?” His voice, like the rest of him, was broken but unbowed.

“Apparently, the only person here that is not a member of your fan club. But I am willing to listen to their pitch.” He said, gesturing to the other two.

“Maru?”

“Yes, and no. I am a Cylon spy.” The uptick in beeps from the equipment behind the General was the only sign that he had heard that right. “I have been in the Empire’s service for years, and have followed your orders to the letter. And for that my sins will need to be burned from my flesh. He rolled up his right sleeve to reveal a very familiar symbol. The blue flower that was sacrilege to the Empire. “This means that until I atone for my sins I shall not be reborn in a new body. And yes I know what the Church thinks about reincarnation. I, and now my entire line know your faith better than you do. And we have found something that we didn’t believe possible... A faith that is based in evil.”

The General wanted to be angry, he wanted to rage, he wanted a lot of things, but he couldn’t find the strength to disagree with them. “I still serve it.”

“And yet you know Clausewitz.” The voice he knew as Shadow’s came from the 005. How it had survived, and how it... no, he knew that that one was a male. The sudden twitch was more surprise than any Jabom had shown so far.

“How do you know that name?” The General whispered.

“You mentioned it on an open channel.” Major Maru... Or whatever his name really was handed him a reader. “We only know that name from stories only. This one for instance. It’s in Imperial. It has a collection of stories about a family that served a royal house in a mythical Star Nation called Manticore the Harrinton family story started out with Honor, and..”

“All good families should start out with honor.” He looked up when the people around him laughed.

“No sir, Honor was the then Captain’s name. She...”

“Is this smut?” He noticed the third man’s eyes go cold and his body go very still. If he wasn’t mistaken the boy was a duelist. He watched the man’s hand. “Okay it isn’t and what kind of sword do you use?”

Major Bojay was speechless but his best friend was not. “We use a katana, just like she did. How did you know?”

“He tried to draw on me.” He was rewarded with a rather impressive blush from the fair-skinned man. He tossed the reader aside. “I will not read a book in which a woman has dominion over men.”

“But you have read Clausewitz?”

By the way he said it, it was obviously a question; and the general responded in kind. “Of course, his work was...” He looked at his former officer and scowled. “Nicely played.”

“You taught me well. You also were well know for your strange bits of wisdom, bits I might add that I’ve only recently been able to cross-reference. You’ve quoted the Hunter doctrine, and well as some Zentradi battle axioms. Things the Empire has neither the knowledge, not the desire to study. In fact, some of the knowledge you have quoted comes from books on their Red List.”

General Jabom’s eye opened wide, and his heart rate monitor spiked after Maru dropped that in his lap. The Red List was a list of media that was so forbidden that just viewing any item on that it was grounds for execution. “I would thank you for your continued silence on this matter, but I still won’t tell you anything about the empire, or the fleet.”

“What about your library?” Shadow rested on hand on the edge of the bed, so as not to be intimidating.

“I... I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“Victor told me about the Library under you family’s home. He held it over your head on more than one occasion as a bargaining chip. I might add that the threat was never to reveal it, but his desire to visit it that he pressed. He valued that trove of knowledge just as much as he valued me.”

“That boy was too smart by half for his own good.”

“The Inquisition felt the same way. They were grooming him to fail, and you too.”

A sudden panic struck the General. “Do you think they know about...”

“The Library? Yes, but not where exactly. That’s why we want to steal it.”

“You want to steal my family’s library.”

“Yes.”

“And you need me to help you?”

“No, but it would make it easier.”

“Well spoken Tinman.” Jabom’s heart did not feel the weight of the betrayal he was about to commit, it felt the lifting feeling that came with the knowledge that these people would die to save his family’s legacy. ‘The enemy of my enemy....’ He picked up the reader.

“She serves a Queen, and she commands men, but she is every bit as honorable as her name. If you wish to understand us better, I think that reading the series would help. The kingdom she serves believes in a universe where all are equal. We are not too different.” The woman with a strange cat-like beast on her shoulder graced the cover of the first book. “At least read the first book, and you will see how we learned how to fight you.”

That did pique his interest. And if he was going to be their prisoner... He laughed. “On Baslisk Station?” ‘How bad could it be?’

It took him three months to read everything on the reader, even the Republic fanfic. Even the BAD fanfic.

The End...... Just kidding! To be continued in: Got it Covered