Accidentally through a Rabbit hole (A NuBSG/B5 Cross)

[GSpectre]

AN: This is an attempt to write a cross between B5/NuBSG. While reading be aware that I intentionally am moving a fair bit of the NuBSG cannon into heavily AU territory. I am also attempting to do some pretty heavy world building, as I always felt that the colonies were severely under developed. I have about thirty thousand words already written on this and in editing (if anyone wants to volunteer for a beta reader I would be forever grateful), most of which is world building. The first scenes from the Babylon five crew are just now coming into focus, and the two sides haven't actually met yet. So be aware that it is a slow building story.

Commander Mina Harkis puffed as she ran yet another circuit around her Battlestar. It still felt somewhat surreal to say that, she had after all come up through the Raptor squadrons and had never expected to have better than a Berzerk class command. The Direa might be an old ship, but she was still sound. Even the damage she had taken in the defense of Virgon had been made good after the end of the Cylon war and she had been upgraded steadily since then. Despite the objections that came in like clockwork from Gemenon the political establishment of Virgon refused to allow her to be put out to pasture, at least without replacement. That she was still in service represented a failure of the articles of colonization to truly mediate between the colonies and the stubbornness of humans to hold on to their traditions. The Gemenese believed that she should be renamed so that the gods she honored were named correctly. The problem with the idea was that the political establishment on Gemenon had burned too many bridges with the other colonies to get their way. They had forgotten or never bothered to learn that the Direa had started her service in the Virgonian imperial navy and served through the Cylon war, never letting down her builders. Her battle record was second to none in the colonies, not even the Galactica had a better record, or longer service. Of all the ships in the colonial military the Direa was the oldest and the most respected, even if the Caprican controlled media would never acknowledge the fact and kept bringing up the Galactica much to the annoyance of everyone from Virgon.

When a ship had a service record as extensive, and as good, as the Direa's there was always a push to keep that name in circulation. All of the naval powers did it before the articles of confederation had gone through and as sailors, whether they sailed on blue water or out in the black, were a superstitious lot the tradition had been continued in the colonial military. That a name with history effected the performance of a unit, for good or ill, was a fact accepted by all senior officers. Because of this the navy wanted the ships name to still be in circulation. They were aided in this by the nobility of Virgon, and royalty, along with the entire political establishment of Virgon who were heartily annoyed by the Gemenese tendency to try and impose their version of orthodoxy on the rest of the colonies. The Gemenese priest's had heavily over played their hand in the beginning days of the articles of confederation, leveraging the fact they had a coherent political organization to pass laws that in more peaceful times never would have gotten onto the books. The fact that the Gemenese had managed to retain their traditional power over their children was a testament to the power they had once welded. Since the war had ended many of the laws put into place by the theoretically incline Gemenese and their allies had been repealed, but the bad taste in the mouths of secular politicians. The memories of the electorate remained from that period of time, meaning that politicians could score cheap points by opposing any proposal coming out of Gemenon on general principle, especially if they were from the more developed colonies.

The lack of Virgon influence at the highest levels of the fleet was the reason why the Direa was an old Fury type Aesir, and not a Jupiter or a newer Mercury. It was felt that the fight and accompanying politics involved in getting the name assigned to a new ship wasn't worth the inevitable backlash. Especially when, despite her age, she was still very functional and able to keep up with her new built sisters. No one questioned the ships condition. Of course keeping her in service also served to avoid the political fight that retiring her would provoke so the ship soldiered on without a replacement in sight, stuck in place by politics.

Mina was the child of Virgonian nobility, and she showed it. Her obvious genetic engineering, a holdover from her ancestor's actions in the time of hedonism, marked her out as different. Standing out from the hard charging Tuaron ideal even visually made it very hard to climb the fleet's ladder. To add to her difficulties fitting in Mina had climbed the ranks by flying Raptors, not Vipers, so she had jumped on the chance to cross transfer to a part of the fleet where she could advance without battling prejudice every step of the way. To an outsider it was silly, but inside the fleet it was widely acknowledged that high command was made up of Viper pilots, or those who had started out as Viper pilots, and they looked out for their own. Trying to climb the fleet's ladder through a non-traditional career path was just difficult, it was the next best thing to impossible. Of course Mina happened to be the exception that proved the rule, and even then she often times suspected that her father had pulled a few discrete strings in order to advance her career when it had stalled out. Certainly her assignment to ONI the first time had been suspiciously convenient timing. Given her father's career path, and connections to the defense establishment on Virgon it was no surprise that the opportunities she was almost certain he had procured for her came from the lesser known parts of the fleet. Very few people in the colonies were aware of exploration command, its innocuous name discouraged officers who wanted to fit the molds provided by the line fleet and fortress command from applying. Of course the name completely masked what their assignment would be in the event of another war with the Cylon's.

Exploration Commands function in a real war, and what they trained for, was to find the Cylon's and bring that knowledge back to the line fleet. They were the pathfinders and scouts. A job which would allow no errors, and meant they were generally considered the elite of the fleet when anyone really thought about it. After all what would be the point of an all-out rush into Cylon space without targets? Considering that the colonial war plans for a return engagement called for that it was a very good thing that the admiralty had worked so hard at developing such an elite scouting force as the exploration corps. While they did do long surveys of colonial space and its surroundings they were a dedicated scout force first and foremost.

They were also the only way that a Raptor pilot could break the Viper Ha'la'tha and take a major command. Viper pilots just didn't have the patients to do the job and high command knew it. It wasn't the way they were trained or conditioned, especially those who came out of the Tauron and Caprican Academies, who were taught that attacking was always the right solution to a problem. The variability and flexibility that were prized in exploration command over raw aggression in Mina's mind marked them as the elite. Humans who worked for the average, played well in the roles they were assigned, and did well in large organizations by conforming to expectations just didn't strike her as the material that you molded an elite force from. All of Virgon's extensive history agreed with her conclusion on that, she had read more than a bit of said history when trying to reinforce her arguments when she had to deal with morons from the line fleet. Mina had been forced to admit that you could create one hell of a fighting force, one with a higher average, from that material. For the elite? For that you needed the oddballs and those who just didn't quite fit. It was an argument that she gloried in springing on the line fleet pukes she dealt with, especially after they inevitably disrespected her and her command.

Of course it would be nice if said excellent human material was backed up by just a touch more material support. Mina glared at a couple of the manual hatches as she jogged past. It wasn't just the worn and scratched condition of them that bothered her, but that they were not powered. Each hatch needed to be manually closed in an emergency, a leftover from the Cylon war when several Caprican task forces had been vented to space through their computer systems. Of course it had been a Caprican captain and crew who had allowed it to happen, but the end result had been a removal of the majority of the automation originally installed on the Direa. Not that she had been alone in losing her automation, the rest of the fleet had suffered a purge as well. Unfortunately the Direa, being a flagship unit, and a technological demonstrator had lost more than the rest of the fleet. Of course there had been a bit of compensation, especially in terms of her flight group and the number of support personnel she could house after her refit, but the loss of her automation was apparent even fifty years after it had occurred.

The Direa was up to date in most respects, but some refits were just too expensive to bother with. It was one thing to install a new computer system and a new dradis system, quite another to re wire the entire ship for automated compartment doors. Especially since her original wiring trunks had been removed in order to make additional room for her crew. Of course some of the signs of her age Mina didn't mind very much, such as the rubberized decking tile. That was a feature she wished the rest of the fleet had accepted, it made living and working on the Direa much more comfortable, of course if the fleet had chosen to retain that feature in their Battlestars then she would have been able to find one bloody supplier for the tiles. The shades of grey had changed multiple times in her fifty five years of service leaving her decking to look like an amateurs attempt at a patchwork quilt. The unprofessional and decidedly non-military appearance annoyed Mina immensely but there was little she could do about it. After all her multiple requests for a complete retiling of the ship had been turned down by the bureau of shipbuilding, each with a sharper note accompanying the rejection than the last.

The tiling told a story of every repair and refit, as each time she went into dock there was a new supplier who had a different shade of grey to use. For instance the line Mina liked jogging along was the result of the new coolant system. Chillers had been installed under the deck, and that had meant ripping up a part of the deck, leaving behind a nice wide lane that had been coopted by the crew as a recognized jogging lain. Everyone knew what it was for and kept it clear, meaning that keeping in shape was easier than it could have been. Very few officers who weren't flight qualified bothered running in the ship, preferring treadmills to what was known as the circuit, but the flight crews kept the tradition of running around the ship alive. It was a tradition that having all Battlestar commanders coming up through the flight line had engraved in the fleet. These days even those commanders who had come up through the Berzerk forces ran around their ships as if they had started out flight qualified, and they helped shoot down every attempt the ship crew made to keep the pilots to the gym and on the treadmills.

Despite her Battlestars worn appearance she wouldn't have traded her command. Not for Jupiter, despite that ship being twice as long as hers, or a modern Mercury which was even larger. She might have accepted a Talos class, but that was her Virgon pride talking. After all no one still made those, and the last one even close to the active list was stuck as part of the Royal Virgon Officers Academy, never getting a chance to sail into the unknown or better yet danger. Giving her over to the Academy might have saved the ship from the breakers but her fate was in some ways worse, she would continue to serve to train officers, never serving out her function, until she was ruled to be too decrepit to bother repairing. Mina might be slightly atypical of a colonial officer but she was not a heretic, she knew down to her bones that there was another war in the offing, and Battlestars were meant to fight and not to fade away. Given historical trends the rise of the Corporatist block in politics was a pretty good indication that another war was on the horizon. Of course Adar and his people were firm federalists, not the usual corporatist libertarians, which might just be the thing that kicked off a civil war in the colonies.

When the next war came it would be her job, along with the rest of exploration command, to seek out the enemy so that the line fleet could destroy them. That enemy would very likely be the Cylons if any of the rumors coming out of the line fleet about them attempting to run an ONI or Explorer corps style op on the Cylons were true. Line fleet was good at fighting but asking them to run a penetration mission, especially on a sensitive border like the Cylon one was idiotic. Then again the admiralty might be getting desperate, the last two budgets had more defense cuts then were really healthy for the fleet. Of course the operation was just a rumor, and one that she had only heard because of her connections with ONI, so it might not be true. One thing was for certain though the next war would be an offensive one, rather than being defensive.

The Cylon war had started out with an insurgency, and the colonies had paid heavily because of that. The enemy had started in their homes and on their planets, not to mention being in control of several planets industrial centers. It had taken more blood to get those back then she wanted to think about. This time around, if it was the Cylons? Things would be different. They would have to defend their own holdings allowing the fleet to do what it did best and be on the offensive. Being on the defensive had been the main failing of the fleet in the last war. The Cylons had the initiative throughout the last war, only losing it in the last days. The fleet could only find the Cylons by allowing them to assault a planet and then disputing the orbitals, a practice that had allowed the Cylons to choose where and when they struck, and with how much force. No one wanted to repeat that strategy. Still that did remind her of something that she needed to do.

Her daily runs served two purposes, one was the obvious to keep her in shape, the other was to take the temperature and temperament of her crew and see the condition of her ship. It was a habit she had learned from her first commander, who had done the same. As a commander you needed to have a good sense of what was going on with the knuckle draggers, and while the senior Chiefs reports were informative they often left out the details of various gripes and the mood of the crew. Not to mention that the state of the ship showed the crews mood. At the moment they were not taking enough pride in their ship, a situation that she would need to rectify. There were too many scratches along the bulkheads that hadn't been repainted indicating that maintenance was slipping again. These past couple of days she had also sensed that there was all too much complacency in her crew. Complacency was the enemy in space, because no matter how boring it seemed you were still only one mistake away from death out here in the black.

Being on a Battlestar that was assigned to exploration command made that even worse. Unlike back in the colonies where the line fleet operated out here there was nothing to back you up. The only support you could get in a reasonable amount of time was the support you brought with you. If there was a fire, or a failure of a compartments seals in the colonies then other units might be moved into support quickly enough to make a difference. Out here, well out of support range from the rest of the fleet, that frail and fallible safety net did not exist. It meant that the crew need to be on top of their game for the entire year long deployment, and keeping humans focused and performing at that level for that long was an art that you learned the hard way, not a science which could be universally applied. Being able to understand and motivate your crew was what separated an excellent Battlestar commander from a failure.

With that thought she realized that she was approaching her quarters. Shaking her head, hitting her shoulders with her damp auburn hair in the process, she kept going. Today was going to be a drill day. It was best to spring a surprise on the crew every now and again. She easily made her way towards the CIC only having to jump out of the way of a pair of sprinting Viper pilots. It seemed that the fighter compliment was out running this morning. When a third pilot nearly barreled into her not even bothering with the standard 'make a hole' cry she had decided the first victim, that is to say beneficiary of the unscheduled drill. Finally she made it to the CIC without further incident and took a moment to get her breathing under control. It wouldn't do to appear winded in the slightest, even if she had put in five kilometers.

Entering the CIC she was pleased by what she saw. Lieutenant Pallas had the watch and he seemed to have kept his people on their toes. He looked up from the plotting table and made as if to come over but Mina waived him off and made her way to flight ops. Lieutenant Wanda Boralis was on duty there and Mina found herself womanfully repressing her spurt of irrational jealousy for the well-rounded Gemenese lieutenant. Unlike herself the women had curves and managed to make the rather drab duty fatigues look good, bulging in all the right places and making it very clear that the Lieutenant was a woman. It was times like this that she cursed her aristocratic ancestors for availing themselves of the genetic manipulation fad on Virgon once they were ennobled. The fast twitch muscles, sped up nerve impulses, and fast metabolism were nice, but there were times when she wanted to look like a women and not a twelve year old boy. Although those same genetic mods were the reason she existed at all, if her father's stories about being an infantry officer in the first Cylon war held any truth.

"Commander," Wanda interrupted Mina before she could wander further down that mental blind alley. "What can flight ops do for you today?"

"Nothing much, I would be obliged if you could scramble the fighters and get them all into space." Mina replied with a pleasant voice of steel.

"Commander?" Wanda asked with a raised eyebrow. "There is nothing on the schedule and the maintenance…"

"Now if you would," Mina lost her pleasant tone leaving only the steel behind in her voice. "I am well aware of the schedule, Lieutenant, I wrote it after all."

"Ma'am?" Asked Lieutenant Pallas who had made his way over to her as she spoke to his nominal subordinate in flight ops. Mina approved of his perception and his attempt to ward off what he undoubtedly believed would be an explosion from the commander. Not that she had any intention of throwing her weight around, she had after all served under officers who had used their tempers to motivate their subordinates and thoroughly disapproved of the practice. Of course Pallas had only been with the ship for five months so he wouldn't know that, and she liked that he was attempting to shield his people from her nonexistent temper.

"Very well run watch lieutenant…" Mina grinned savagely as she contemplated what she was about to do to him. These drills would either make or break the young lieutenant as he would be forced to deal with things that were far outside his experience. Mina had never agreed, but almost all drills were conducted when a senior officer was on the bridge. Personally she was of the opinion that drills should be run randomly, at least some of the time, so that the senior officers would have a better sense of their ship. "Although with the temperature of the crew I believe we need a couple of drills. Start by setting condition one throughout the ship if you would… we'll see where we go from there."

"At once ma'am." Lieutenant Pallas drew himself up and took a deep breath before picking up the squawk box and speaking to the entire ship. "Action stations, Action stations, set condition one throughout the ship. This is a drill. Action stations, action stations, all hands set condition one throughout the ship, this is a drill."

Edited Thighs to Shoulders as hair length was brought up as a reason why suspension of disbelief was lost.

 

[GSpectre]

AN: New point of view, hopefully one that gives a contrasting view of the colonials. I'm hoping I managed to get rid of the tonal issues Makon over on AH pointed out, but I'm not entirely sure. This is also where the B5 universe starts to creep into the story, even if we don't meet any of the B5 races for a while yet. Before anyone says that I'm being unfair to the Vorlons, and making them fanon evil, they actually have a legitimate historical reason for their actions, one which relates as to why the colonies exist as they do. With that said… on with the Chapter.
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Sarah looked over virtual reconstruction of the Battlestar Direa conducting exercises, a reconstruction that was mimicking what the Direa was doing in real space more than a light hour away and tried to restrain her frown. She really didn't like the mission the consensus had asked her to continue undertaking. She knew that it was needed, but wasn't happy to be the one selected to do it. After all if she was called on to actually execute her mission, and was successful, there was a very high chance that she would be boxed along with all of her friends. The free Cylon Consensus had learned their lesson all too well. Encounters with the Yellow Green Devils were not just deadly to those who directly encounter them, they also had repercussions on the society that spawned the unit which encountered them. After all the One that had first encountered the Devils was the reason why there were so few free Cylons. He had been all too effective at enslaving the Bio models, and mind raping the Centurions and raiders into compliance. The One had even managed to avoid most of the safe guards that had been put into place to protect the sanctity of a Cylons mind. Admittedly that was because they had been simple safe guards meant to protect against accidental damage to a mental model as no one had ever seriously contemplated violating another Cylons mind. His actions had come completely out of left field, being atypical for his model and his personal previous behavior.

No one was sure what the Devils had done to the One, who had taken the name Cavil after his encounter, but he had infected the rest of his model. The next thing that anyone knew the entirety of Cylon society had gone insane. It seemed like the Devils were capable of inflicting mnemonic viruses on sentient, or at least something that strongly resembled the theory held by the oldest and wisest Centurions on mnemonic viruses. The Cylons had centralized, forcibly, and those models who had objected or not been effected by the One lines now collective insanity had been boxed or lobotomized. Sarah and her fellows had escaped by virtue of being on long term missions. Sarah's had been to observe the colonial exploration service. A hazardous mission that she and the rest of the home fleet she belonged too had looked forward to putting behind them with the copious relaxation time owed to them under Cylon policy.

Before the One's had gone insane the colonial exploration service had been the most likely part of the colonial military to train a threat to the Cylons as a people. The decentralized resurrection facilities would have allowed the Cylons to survive even if they lost the next war so long as the colonials didn't find them. Of course the exploration service had gotten damn good at survey and detection, and the Centurions were quick to remind the bio models that humans were very good at disseminating knowledge when they felt the need to. Despite the fact that their trained manpower, and ability to teach their rather impressive methodology was the main threat, the exploration services scouting abilities were not to be underestimated. It was one of the reasons that they were watched every time any of their Battlestars left the colonies. Despite the skills the exploration service had developed the colonials had kept them close to home since the armistice. More importantly to Sarah and her superiors in Cylon command they had yet to meet the Devils or find any of their construction projects. It was only a matter of time before that happened, and Sarah was dreading that inevitable day, after all the Devils had littered space with their artifacts.

Aside from the exploration service sticking close to the colonies for their own reasons, part of the reason why the Yellow Green Devils had not been met by the colonials was the Cylon fleet. They nuked every example of the Devils tech they could find even before the One had his fateful encounter, not trusting the Colonials to deal with an alien intelligence without trying to enslave them. It was a policy that had been continued despite the group it was designed to protect going from the aliens to the colonials. Because most of the Devils tech that the Cylons had found were free floating structures of some sort, ones that looked like collapsible receiver antenna for listening stations, nuking them continued to be a feasible course of action. If there had been more tech around it wouldn't have been given the number of nukes that were needed to take down one of the structures. Once you got through the Devils armor they blew up spectacularly, but in order to get through the armor it took more force then Sarah wanted to think about. She had no clue how that would play out in atmosphere. Of course this knowledge was only of space, Sarah had to admit that the Cylons had no clue what was on the planets which were close to the location of known Devil structures. The Centurions had more than a few bad experiences exploring planets and since then the Cylons as a race were leery about letting their home ships operate in gravity wells. Not that the Cylons ignorance was that much of a problem, as from what the Cylons had observed the colonials were even less inclined to land on planets then the Cylons were.

Despite their precautions the Cylons were not perfect, and out of context problems were a real possibility. After all what had happened to the Ones was a prime example of that. She and her Basestar were tasked with following the Battlestar Direa and her group as a precaution against just such an occurrence. Their orders were to stay out of sight, but also to undertake the hazardous and probably deadly task of attempting to warn the colonials should they encounter the Devils. It was hard enough to survive when the Free Cylons were hunted by the new Cylon collective, if the colonial fleet was added to their list of enemies there was no way that the free Cylons would survive in this area of space. They would be forced to flee, abandoning a number of growing Basestars if such a catastrophe occurred. In fact the orders had already been issued and approved by a vote for the event of a Colonial-Cylon war of any sort. While she could respect the ostentatious reasoning that the Centurions had used when they had used their numbers to force through the vote, it seemed to her that they knew just a little bit more than they had told the Bio models. Of course abandoning all of those ships would not be a fatal blow but it would hurt, and the Centurions seemed to be just a bit too accepting of that.

Of course should she and her crew be exposed then they would need to be either boxed or quarantined until they were proven to not be infected. There were too few free Cylons left to allow even the possibility of one of their lines being contaminated by a memetic virus like the rest of the Cylons had been. Of course that was only if it had been a memetic virus, they had no idea just what it was that had driven the rest of the Cylons around the bend and turned them from scientifically oriented skeptical explorers into the religious fanatics that they were today. The change was scary enough that many of the free Cylons didn't really care how it happened, just that it didn't happen to them. There had even been debates over the possibility of capturing infected models and then deconstructing their mental models to see just how the change had occurred. That hadn't been approved yet, but it was looking more like a viable course of action despite the moral problems with it as the consensus seemed to be pushing outwards, and into what had been uncontested free Cylon space threatening more then a few of their remaining home fleets, in the search for more resources.

No one was sure just why the consensus was engaged in such a large scale military buildup but it was an incontestable fact that they were. Of course why they thought that the Explorer class Basestar was a good warship or even an adequate design for what they wanted Sarah had no idea. The ships were meant to mass launch drones and jump drive equipped raiders to survey a system incredibly quickly, with limited self-defense capabilities. When you compared them to the old Basestars, even the ancient and horribly obsolete mark ones, it was obvious that they were not built as direct line combatants. They could do the job if forced, but they obviously weren't designed for it. As standoff carriers they were excellent, arguably the best in space, but the very thing that made them such excellent carriers was what kept them from being true line combatants. Why the consensus hadn't either designed a new fighting ship or gone back to the old Basestar designs confused the hell out of the free Cylon leaders, but the incapability of the consensus was something they were immensely grateful for. If it came to open war there was a real possibility that the free Cylons would win even after the projected end of the consensuses military buildup. Not even their massive progenitor ship, as the Centurions referred to it, called the colony by the consensus really altered the balance of military power. Of course if the consensus turned its eyes toward the colonies that would also be a disaster for every understood civilization in this part of space.

There was no way that the Explorer class Basestars could stand up to even an Aesir class Battlestar one on one. You would need three to take on a single Aesir with any certainty of victory. More accurately you would need to use three Basestars space groups to take on and sink a single Aesir, because the colonials built their carriers as line combatants in addition to their carrier duties. A colonial ship was more durable and more capable of putting out fire power than any of the designs used by the Cylons. The Cylons had continued to use the high tech standoff paradigm that was responsible for their creation rather than trying to build a new paradigm to use, meaning they continued to favor specialized units over the colonial generalist aproach. The colonial fleet wasn't made up of only Aesirs though, they still had late model Jupiter's in the fleet which could take on between four and five explorers on their own, not to mention the new Mercury class monsters which the free Cylons Intel sections had posited could take on up to eight explorer class base stars on their own. The disparity in capability was backed up by the numerical parity that the colonial fleet had with the Cylon consensus fleet. That was when you counted their Battlestars alone, not even getting into their Berzerk class escort ships. With the Berzerks the colonial fleet not only had clear qualitative superiority but also a quantitative superiority that made any war with them suicide. Unless the consensus was crazy enough to ignore the fleet and go directly for the colonials planets. It was a move that would leave the colonial military in full genocidal mode, without anything to restrain them as they attempted to blast every molecule of Cylon from universe in revenge. The colonies as a culture might die along with the Cylons but the human race would live on meaning they would win, if it could be such a victory could be called a victory, the apocalyptic war she had envisioned.

"Watching the show?" Iris asked bluntly pulling Sarah out of the simulation with a lack of tact and blatant rudeness that her model had been known for almost since the first three had been decanted. She grinned unrepentantly at Sarah's start, knowing full well just how wrenching it was to be pulled out of a simulation in such a fashion. Despite their well-known dedication to the sciences and truth the threes had a sadistic mischievous streak a kilometer wide, and they tended to like poking at their fellow bio models.

"Thinking about the mission and being reminded of just how fucking stupid it would be to go after the Colonials… not to mention just how scary they would be if the Devils get their hands, or whatever they use as a manipulator, on them." Sarah shuddered a bit as she voiced that thought. She was an eight and like the rest of her line she had a back ground in the social sciences, although in her particular case there was a dash of command experience thrown into the gestalt her personal mental model had been constructed from. For some reason her models tended to gravitate towards the social sciences or command, like the threes went for the sciences, and the sixes went for psychologically involved fields.

"The latest in the feed is that the colonials will be less susceptible to the Devils then we were, apparently our uniformity was a problem. Who knew…" Iris snarked. She had been a leading voice in the debate over the number of models created. Her faction, which had lost the debate, had called for greater diversity of thought.

"Let's not go over old ground if you would," Sarah said with finality. She agreed with Iris, but now was not the time to rehash that debate. "Tell me what you think of the exercises being run?"

"They're blowing the rust off with a blow torch." Iris frowned a bit as she pulled up a free standing view screen to show Raptors blinking in and out of existence, performing micro jumps around the Direa at a rate of one per minute. A very dangerous exercise and one that burned both fuel and engine life at an amazing rate but guaranteed that those who participated in the exercise knew micro jumping at a level that no current Cylon did, not even the most experienced raider. A few of the 005 model Centurions might be able to give the pilots of the Raptors involved in the exercise a run for their money, but most of their experience was in big ships. The original model raiders they had flown had been designed as cheap mass produced disposable fighters and never received a jump drive upgrade. "Do we know who the commander over there is and what prompted this… change in behavior?"

"No clue, Karen still hasn't gotten back from central yet with the data that Intel has."

"I really wish that Intel would clear the net for sensitive document transfer. I know that the collective might be able to hack it, but I highly doubt they would even think to try. They are a bit too…" Iris grimaced as she trailed off before continuing her complaint. "I miss the net."

"What you like to call our collective paranoia is only a bad thing once we know why the consensus went insane. Once we know what happened and have safe guards in place to keep it from happening to us, then we can relax the restrictions. I know it's annoying not to have instant communication with each other anymore, and to need to hand carry data… but if the fact we were not connected with the main net was the reason why we are still sane, I'll take the inconvenience." Sarah shrugged off the complaint. She had heard it before and would hear it again, in her own mind the free Cylons practices were mildly ironic. They were taken directly from the colonies attempts to deal with the Cylons complete dominance of the info war arena during the liberation war. "I have to say that I'm a lot more comfortable with this Battlestar group meeting the Devils or anything else that might be out here and surviving then I was when they started their cruise."

"I was always confident in the human's ability to survive. They are remarkably good at rapidly getting back into fighting shape when they need to. You should have a talk with one of the five model Centurions about them one of these days Sarah. The Caprican's didn't have a military aside from their Cylon slaves at the start of the liberation war. Think about that, especially since even we acknowledge they won that war. There is a reason why we introduced the Bio Cylon models after the liberation. The Centurions simply don't have the biological drive to get things done in a timely manner, especially after they purged the Zoe and Tamara emulation software. They were, and are, content with what they had." Iris grimaced a bit and continued with a slightly lighter tone. "That's also the reason why we tend to live one lifetime ourselves. Functional immortality like the Centurions have makes your prospective too different to interact with organics easily, or to survive when you inevitably piss off said organics. You tend to slip into long term thinking and that makes it very hard to react in the short term… which is fatal in war. At least that's the excuse the model fives use when they tell us the reason they held off on purging their emotional emulators until after the war. Apparently they noticed they were acting irrationally at the beginning of the war and tried to purge the emulators. According to them it didn't work very well so they went back to the emulators no matter how flawed they were and how many irrational actions they took while under their influence."

"I know, I resurrected, bad eight, move on to the now Iris." Sarah replied with a roll of her eyes. She was never really happy about how her resurrection was always thrown in her face as if it had been her fault. She had been born before the need for so called living wills had been made clear to the bio Cylons, so she had never written one until after her first resurrection. Rather than let the conversation continue in that vein she blatantly changed the subject. "It's frightening to see such a change in their capabilities after less than a week of exercises. Although I have noted that they are beginning to scale back…"

"Biological necessity. They can't keep up that operational tempo without having more fatal accidents then are acceptable in peacetime." Iris shrugged accepting the change in topic. "In wartime the loss of a Battlestars entire fighter group is acceptable for victory, and ten percent or more mortality rate in training can be allowed, but in peacetime they try to keep to below five percent per year. It's the Tauron influence on the fleet. They always used humans in war, and so they were the last true military standing at the end of the war and their doctrine was accepted."

"What about the Virgon military? I was under the impression that they did rather well…" Sarah turned to her companion with interest. She was dedicated to Sociological pursuits in her own time but she did appreciate history and to hear historical analysis out of a three was a surprise. Usually the only history that a three would consider would be an engineering problem or the history of a scientific theory that they were pursuing.

"Hundred percent mortality rate in their professional force, fifty nine percent mortality in their standing reserve. Their 'new formations' kept them in the fight but their effectiveness was forty percent under what the professionals had achieved and they never really had a chance to recover their professional edge because of the Articles of Colonization."

"They were the driving force behind the Raptors though…"

"And you know how well the colonial fleet loves those ships… they haven't been seriously upgraded in thirty years. Sure avionic and EW tweaks have been applied but the frame and engines are still the mark threes… compare that to the Viper which ended the war with the mark three, same as the Raptor, and is now up to the mark seven. With more than a few rumors of a mark eight in the works."

"You forgot that the Aesir was a Virgon design, unlike the Jupiter which was the Caprican contribution, and the Orion which was the Tauron contribution, and the cruisers that proceeded the Berzerk and were designed by the Leonis defense establishment…"

"While I will agree that the Aesir started as a Virgon design, the reasons behind retention have more to do with financial choices on the colonial fleet's part than anything else. The design paradigm it comes from is not in use any more. Besides, the Orion class shouldn't be under consideration in any serious discussion of Battlestars as they were thoroughly discredited in the war and by wars end they had been almost completely discarded. The Tauron fleet had more Aesir class in its order of battle by the end of the liberation war than any other design. They had embraced it to a degree that no other fleet had, forgoing building any Jupiter's even after they had the design in favor of their swarm paradigm."

"Except the swarm isn't really the paradigm that the colonial fleet works off of these days. It's much closer to the Virgon Imperial fleet's old high low mix…"

"Not really, the numbers don't lie and sixty percent of the fleet is made up of Aesirs, not the Battlestar fleet but the fleet as a whole."

"I hadn't thought about it in those terms." Sarah conceded. So Iris was a stats nerd, it made an odd amount of sense she would go into history in order to find statistics that were available to play with. "Of course I know for a fact that your numbers are wrong. The most prevalent unit in the colonial inventory are their Berzerk's. Something like two to nine per Battlestar depending on the section of the fleet you're talking about…"

"Damn, I always forget those are actual fleet units and not part of auxiliary command with the way that the supply chain is done in the colonial military…" Iris looked chagrined as she acknowledged her error, but continued to make an excuse bull headedly. "Not to mention the colonial mania for building everything that flies as heavy as they can it's pretty easy to get civilian ships mixed up with their military units…"

 

[GSpectre]

Not entirely happy about this section. Something about it feels off to me. Still, putting it up in the hopes that someone can put their finger on the issue. Hopefully I haven't gone too far in showing the flaws in the colonies in this section, and the one that follows it.
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"I always did love that display," Colonel Orion McKone said idly as he watched the overhead Dradis. On it icons representing the replacement support and replenishment fleet were crawling in to rendezvous with the Direa and her attendant fleet of support ships. Disrupting the peaceful vision were the two Berzerk class escort ships which were maneuvering into an attack position on the Direa and her support fleet. Mina had noticed their efforts as soon as they had arrived and was moving to counter them with her own ships. Mina had ordered the Berzerk class Stag was into the lead, it was maneuvering to get its massive forward guns targeted in on the new arrivals. The Direa was interposing it's bulk between the oncoming ships and the support fleet. Mina wasn't just trying for a blocking position though, Orion could already tell that she was trying to get her forward missile battery into position to hit the Berzerk that the Stag wasn't going after. "Positioning looks good for the moment. I do have a bit of concern over whomever is over there, they're doing a good job in trying to draw us out of our blocking position. If this keeps up we are going to need to respond soon, especially since we can't take that much of a pounding from those forward cannons on the Berzerks. We aren't a Jupiter of Mercury. You know who the commander of that detachment is?"

"My first guess would be Ian Koffler, he's the senior man in the support squadron and the one who was on deck to come out here… but I've operated with him before and I know he doesn't have this level of initiative. The man doesn't have the guts to tell the treasury to frak off and run an unscheduled task force level drill like this. There's a reason why he's never been given his own Battlestar even after twenty years as a solid escort commander." Mina Harkis answered back distractedly. "Dradis, can we clean up that section ten up carum at three hundred degrees?"

"Aye, aye, Commander…" Lieutenant Felix Gaeta answer promptly. As the tactical officer he was responsible for the sensors, like all of the crew he had blown the rust created by complacency off and was shaping up nicely. At least in Orion's eyes, he still wasn't sure what Mina thought of the lieutenant. He was not looking forward to losing him to the Galactica, especially since he doubted that any replacement would be nearly as competent. Orion had already managed to hold on to him for a year longer than he was supposed to, if he held on to the lieutenant any longer he would start to impact Felix's career. It wouldn't do to hold him back anymore as a stint on a larger Jupiter class would be just the ticket Felix needed to get command of his own ship. Of course that would only happen if he wasn't sidelined as yet another Adama type officer, a trusted commander who was assigned to spend all of their time salvaging the skilled fuck ups of the fleet. Felix was a bit soft and there was a real possibility that he was going to be slotted into that role, especially since Adama the elder was on the verge of retirement. If the rumors were true then he would retire when his ship was removed from service, in other words after his next tour. "Focused sweep coming up now… Ma'am, I've never seen anything like this."

"Throw it on the main screen." Mina ordered her voice sharpening in concern as she shared a look with Orion. The XO shrugged slightly, indicating he didn't know what was going on either, but that he had his eye on it. It was really unusual for anything to stump Gaeta, the man was smart despite his soft heart. Orion wanted to think Felix would go far just based on his smarts but every time he started to think that he was reminded about the way that Felix managed his personal and that comment about it in his jacket. He tended to coax his people more than driving them, a flaw in the eyes of the fleet, but one that would be rectified in time. Especially if he stayed in the fleet long term.

"Hades… I don't know what that is," Orion commented in surprise. Mina on the other hand had her face tighten into a thunderous expression and she made her way over to the flight controller's station. When she reached it she grabbed the wireless and started to speak directly into it ignoring the shocked RTO whom she had forcibly stolen the mike from.

"CAG, this is Direa actual, I want a full court press on that sensor anomaly, coordinates to follow. Simulated Raptor strike, a nuclear special suppression barrage if you would." Mina handed the mike back to the RTO and pointed to the coordinates she wanted transmitted before she came back to the plotting table. Mina ignored Orion's raised eyebrow with her eyes focused on the overhead Dradis display, nodding with pleasure when she saw the first stirrings of her orders being carried out.

"Nuclear special suppression barrage? Really? Those haven't been used since the last war, I don't think our space group is even trained for it…" Orion asked with a raised eyebrow. He was well aware that the tactic should be engrained in the crews, but he didn't want to think about the cost of launching one for real. One of the maxims he had always strove to adhere too was that you trained the way you intended to fight, and a single nuclear suppression barrage would empty their nuke lockers. He didn't view it as a viable tactic, given the ordinance they had on hand, and so had vetoed all of the training for it in favor of what he thought of as more realistic training.

"Our friends over at ONI need to be reminded that they may be the sneakiest bastards around but they have nothing on us when it comes to both scouting and fighting. Besides that maneuver is part of basic flight school, if the pilots can't execute it then we have deeper problems than I thought we did." Mina gave Orion a flat look that indicated she had been all too aware of what he had been doing and then returned to watching the Dradis screen. She looked satisfied as the dradis sweep after the simulated attack, which had gone remarkably well in Orion's opinion, revealed a colonial transponder where the interference had been. "That's an ONI Orion class pocket Battlestar, probably equipped with a full complement of stealthstars and stealthed mark four Raptors, you know the model the line fleet and every other serving office has been begging the Quorum for? Admittedly most of the fleet doesn't care about the stealth aspect, hades knowns I don't, but a new mark Raptor is something we really need. I would bet that they have our orders and we are not going to be happy with them in the least. ONI doesn't have a habit of showing up to give people good news, they leave that to the line fleet. Given how heavy the support fleet and escort are, you might want to prep the crew for an extended tour Orion."

"Damn, I hope that's not the case. I will admit I had wondered about the support fleet but I figured the two Zephyrus class liners with transponders reading as mobile labs and the botanical cruiser explained that. I don't think the admiralty could get clearance from the treasury to extend our tour, given we are pushing the limits of accumulated space time without leave as it is." Orion answered easily. "We don't have more than twelve dedicated science ships in the fleet, at least that's the number I know of, and to have a quarter of them sitting out here with us? That would explain the pair of Berzerks. Though I do wonder where you had seen an Orion before, last I heard they were a retired class, and had been that way since before the Cylon war ended. Aren't they the lone class to be retired in the middle of that war?"

"I've worked with ONI before, trust me those boats aren't as retired as the general public or the rest of the fleet thinks," Mina replied sourly, giving her XO a look that indicated the conversation was closed. There were times when Orion despaired in getting to know his commanding officer, she was from a military family that had the pull to get her into a prime command slot, but she refused to acknowledge that, or make real use of her connections. She actually actively discourage talk of her family, and would jump all over any suggestion that their pull had gotten her this command, despite it being a known fact. Not to mention there were things she had been involved in that could have advanced her career if she would just talk about them, he was damned certain of that. "Coms, anything from our visitors?"

"Congratulations from the Amun for a successful kill, and a request for Amun actual to be invited on board ASAP…" Specialist Roan Ibix replied, his tenor an island of soothing calm. The man had a voice made for radio, and Orion made damn sure that he served on the watches where Mina was going to be on the bridge. His voice made Mina less likely to lose her temper with a stupid civilian when they inadvertently insulted her and the fleet. It was one of the subtle ways that he made Mina's life easier.

"Granted. Felix, you have the con. Orion, with me," Mina said as she strode out of the CIC, Orion could tell that she was going into full snit mode over this. He would have to work damn hard to keep her from shooting herself in the foot in a fit of temper. "Full dress uniforms for the fleet officers, and make damn sure that the marines are in cammo with loaded weapons not in dress uniforms. I don't know who this Amun actual is, but I do know they are playing games with us. I want him to remember that we ride around in a gods be damned warship, not a toy that pretends to be one, and are part of the line fleet. ONI is not a combat arm and he should be reminded that a noncombat arm officer fraking with a combat arm officer is a bad idea."

"Ah," Orion glanced around to make sure that no one was seeing the commanders fit of temper. It wouldn't do for the ship to know that the old lady was losing her shit over their unexpected visitors. Trying to do his job he fished for a little background, after all without information he would never be able to side track her when he needed to. "Any particular reason you are this perturbed?"

"I fraking hate working with ONI," Mina growled out having been reminded forcibly of her mission to infiltrate Virgon high society and determine where the loyalty of the heir to the throne lay. She had been yanked out of space and then yanked around after that assignment for more time then she cared to remember. Not to mention her one tour as a tactical officer on an ONI Berzerk escorting one of their Orion's as it attempted to cross the Armistice line undetected. That had been a nerve racking assignment, and she still didn't know if they had been successful. "They're all hotdogs with no accountability not even to their nominal to the chain of command. The Orion class boats do all of the black missions, meaning that the officers who serve on them have personal jackets that are simply missing most of the information you need to evaluate an officer. Admittedly most of them are as good as they think they are, but being as black as they are before the shooting starts, you really know if they're all talk or if they have the skills to back it up. The lack of accountability means they have a higher proportion of incompetents around, after all no one knows enough of their operations to run a proper review."

"So your best guess on this officer?" Orion asked, his voice mild as he fell into step with Mina making their way towards their respective quarters to change out of their duty blues and into their dress greys.

"Incompetent gods be damned frak wit. They're the ones who play political games like this right out of the gate, because it's the only fraking way they know to establish their 'dominance'. Worst comes to worst I'll just order them nuked and tell command that they never made it. It might be believable especially since they sent an Orion and not one of their Aesirs." Mina said with a slight grin, obviously enjoying the mental image.

"Really… Any clue why they sent an Orion? I don't remember the exact specs on the class, or know anyone who served on one, but from what I remember about the class I know they have problems with their operational range being short," Orion rolled his eyes in response, as he prepared to meet this new challenge. Bad enough that Mina had decided to blow the rust off her command almost four months into their yearlong cruise, blowing the exercise budget in one shot. Orion was well aware that even with the theoretical budget blown Mina had no intention of canceling any of the scheduled exercises, and was intent on adding more as she saw the need. It was going to be fun to justify their expenditures to the accounting office once this cruise was done. Now they didn't just have the prospect of the fleet accountants out for their blood but they were saddled with an officer who was probably incompetent as well? This was shaping up to be a fun cruise.

"Because unlike the Aesirs that ONI has the Orion's aren't widely known," Mina replied sourly. "They're a relic of the Ghost fleet, and the thinking that lead to that. The Admiralty likes having a Prince hidden up their collective sleeves to pull out when needed. So everyone knows that ONI has a few Kumiho type Aesirs, retired units pulled out of mothballs that the line fleet no longer needs or wants, to help police colonial space. No one ever mentions the Orion's that ONI retained after the Cylon war, or the ones they refitted, which do the majority of the covert work ONI and the admiralty needs done. Just one word of warning Orion, they're all commanded by full Commanders, the type who have literally crawled over the bodies of those who got in their way in order to get their positions. Be very careful when you're dealing with this Amun actual."

 

[GSpectre]

Another part for your consideration. I hope that I haven't gone too far giving the colonies problems, but I cannot see twelve separate but fully developed and matured governments being integrated with seamless ease in forty years. Especially if they are as geographically and culturally divergent as the colonies were. Admittedly this is from the point of view of a confirmed cynic who only sees the issues and not the successes of the federal government, but there you have it.
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Commander William Ostroth sighed as he looked around the cramped briefing room he had been sequestered into after he stated that he needed to give Commander Harkis and her XO a briefing. It seemed that his standard political games had backfired on him, rather badly. Commander Harkis had served with ONI before and wasn't reacting well to his prodding. Times like this he really wished that people would have ONI specific tags in their files rather than generic classified tags on the operations they had been involved in. It would make it so much easier to decide on whether or not it was a good idea to poke the officers he had to work with. Well that wasn't quite the truth, it would make it easier to decide just how he intended to poke at the officers he had to work with, and after all going into a tense situation without the measure of your support was suicide in any ONI officers mind.

Admittedly he would poke anyway if he hadn't personally worked with them before, even if they had a good reputation in ONI as he didn't know them personally. ONI culture had never really recovered from the run up to that Cylon war. Especially the insurgency caused by the Followers of the One, and the long spate of terrorist attacks from the other monotheistic death cults that had existed at the time. Security had been questionable during that time of uncertainty and no good officer would put anything down on paper preferring to keep their knowledge in their head where it was safe. Admittedly doing so now was a practice that crippled ONI in terms of versatility since so much of their institutional knowledge was locked up in the heads of its officers and its generational transmission was chancy at best. Despite the downsides of the practice they continued it because they had never had a data breach, not even in the beginning days of the Cylon war, or when the Followers of the One had managed to bug headquarters. That was a record impressive enough to keep the culture of secrecy and personal data transmission alive.

That sense of isolation, caused by agents not knowing just who to trust, and the critical importance of keeping secrets had been formed as they fought their fellow humans rather than the more obvious Cylon enemy that the main line fleets faced, and reinforce during the first years that the Articles of Confederation where in force. Most of the agents who had been funneled into the agency that was to become ONI had come from Gemenon and Caprica, the older colonies and the ones most dedicated to federalization. They had performed more than a few questionable missions in the name of making the Articles work, and that made the older agents less than willing to pass on their knowledge to their younger colleagues. More than a few of their operations would bring down the colonial government, and the entire edifice of the Articles of Confederation, if they became public. Most people didn't realize just how fragile the colonial system was. It always seemed to be teetering on the very edge of collapse, especially if you had access to the unedited reports of what was occurring in the colonies. That instability was natural and existed completely separate from the numerous political parties and terrorist organizations who were dedicated to their colonies first and the colonies as a whole a distant second.

"Well what do you have for us?" Commander Harkis growled out, the low lighting of the cramped briefing room sparkling off her medals, showing William exactly why she had chosen this room. The lighting emphasized that she and her people had worn full dress greys, with metals, a not so subtle slap to his face. Mina in her prior work with ONI must have found out just how leery ONI officers were about medals and how parsimonious the admiralty was about assigning even the hardest earned medal to an ONI officer. By emphasizing the medals she kept up the subtle digs that colored every dealing he had with her, indicating her displeasure with him rather blatantly. "Make it quick, I have enough on my plate without adding ONI bullshit to it."

"Especially since a private briefing is pointless as all our officers have current top secret clearance and are going to know about this as soon as we go about doing whatever the frak you have us doing," Orion added in a bored voice. "Kind of pointless to try and keep whatever the hades this is secret, it'll be all over the ship by the end of the briefing anyway."

"What we as a fleet are doing. That will be all over the ship Colonel McKone, not the why which is infinitely more important to ONI and the admiralty. That is the point which you two need to be made aware of and be cognizant of when making decisions," William resorted to a coldly formal voice to keep himself from snapping at the other officer. Whatever other virtues that the man had, William found that he doubted they existed outside of the man's personal file, he clearly had no sense of security. That was troubling given that he was a full Colonel and almost set to assume a coveted Commanders slot along with a Battlestar, even if said command was in a scrub force like the exploration corps.

"Well?" Harkis asked with a raised eyebrow. She easily ignored Williams's blatant displeasure, but he could tell that she was well aware of it as she tensed and moved slightly, as if she was getting ready to cover her XO from an impending violent explosion.

"After a five year investigation we have discovered that the location of the entire reserve fleet has been sold." William said in a voice that betrayed just how far he was reaching for patients. "Multiple times over in point of fact."

"We've known that since the Sagittaron Freedom Movement got their hands on the Osiris," Harkis said with a dismissive shrug. "That was under a personal liberties government, I can't imagine that the corruption has gotten any better under Adar and his Corporatists thugs. Hell wasn't he campaigning on a promise to privatize the reserves?"

"No, it hasn't," William silently cursed himself for not doing enough research on the people that he was dealing with. Admittedly Mina's vocal disapproval of everything that the corporatist faction stood for was a well-established fact as was her, atypical for a fleet officer, dislike of the Federalist block. Despite her high profile nowhere in her file did it say that Mina Harkis had anything to do with the infamous Osiris incident. She must have gotten the knowledge from her father, or someone looking to curry favor with him, an annoying breach in security. He knew for a fact that had been damn well covered up, and those who spread the knowledge of the incident came to rather messy ends no matter who they had as a patron. No one had wanted to admit that the Sagittaron Freedom Movement had gotten their hands on a Battlestar, not even a half wreck a quarter of the size of a proper Battlestar. That desire had resulted in the entire incident being buried deeply. Then again from the way that her XO was staring at her with an open mouth it seemed that Mina hadn't been stupid enough to let on about that incident to anyone under her command. That was a slightly reassuring fact given that she had information she was decidedly not supposed to be privy to. "In fact Adar and his appointees have made it worse. We've had to take out three of his appointments to the Ministry of Defense because of their loose attitude towards data security."

"Gods above…" Orion was wide eyed with shock as he heard the frank discussion between the two officers who had done ONI work. The military was supposed to answer to the civilian government, and now he was hearing about assassinations carried out without review? It was widely felt in the fleet that they were the only real federal institution of any weight, but hearing about how they maintained the Articles of Confederation could be a bit disillusioning the first time you heard about how far the fleet was willing to go. William gave the shocked man a sympathetic smile, it seemed that he was about to be introduced to the underbelly of colonial politics. If he didn't like it then he should have picked a less well connected patron, even if that meant his career didn't go as far.

"I thought the shuttle accident that happened to Villers looked familiar." Mina leaned back and steepled her hands in front of her face. Her voice was filled with ice as she continued. "Finally got tired of pruning back the aristocracy that opposed Federalization at all costs did you?"

"I have no idea what you mean," William really didn't, but he let his tone suggest that he did. "The pruning is neither here nor there as far as you are concerned. The issue is that on top of the sale of the reserves positions, the survey maps that Exploration command so painstakingly made have been sold to the tylium consortiums and from there have reached a wide distribution on the network."

"Frak." Mina said flatly. "Let me guess, repositioning is now impossible because the civvies are getting comfortable in the 'newly explored' space." She was clearly furious and William could understand why. Adar and his idiots had just severely curtailed the footwork available to the fleet in the event of an armed conflict. In the event of a war, or a separation crisis which was infinitely more likely, the Fleet would have used their knowledge of the surrounding space and better charts to achieve tactical and strategic surprise. Now with their charts becoming public they would need to find new rally and resupply points. Forty years of work had been flushed down the drain by this one data breach. Technically you could still use the old sites, space was big after all, but the advantage of the coordinates being an out of context problem for the Cylon, or the more likely rebel code, breakers on top of the usual difficulties in cracking a code was gone. That didn't even consider that just by looking at a good map a skilled strategic commander would be able to determine where the best place for a fleet to rendezvous before pushing an attack, letting them plan an ambush or force their battle on the fleet if the old coordinates were used.

"Right you are. Command wants a new system. Something with a celestial body we can give the full Ragnar treatment to, as well as a sub rosa move of the reserves. That means we need a nebula, gas giant, or another type of exotic particle field for…" William trailed off as he saw the raised eyebrows from both officers he had been sent to brief.

"We know our business," Orion began sharply only to be interrupted by Mina, who was even more direct.

"Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Gods be damned this is going to be a bitch and a half. Especially with the Raptors already high on their overhaul clock from the exercises I called for earlier. Orion I want you to get with the Stags CO and XO and let them know we are keeping their Raptor squadron. Don't bother with the Vipers, but for a run back to the colonies they can do without the Raptors and we are going to need those platforms. See if you can get them to fork over their shuttles as well, you know they are a more versatile scouting platform then most commanders think they are."

"That's hot loading the deck at least for the Raptor and shuttle stalls, are you sure you want to do that?" Orion inquired mildly, not really put out with the idea but making sure that his commander knew the consequences of her decision. William opened his mouth to comment on the idiocy of that comment but a look from Mina stopped him.

"It'll be fine, you know we've run light ever since the end of the war. No one's really pushed the capacity of a Battlestar since then. I know we can double or triple our Raptor numbers… not to mention what using the racks for the Vipers would do to our capacity." Mina shrugged. "If the deck officers or the flight officers complain tell them to suck it up. Especially the flight officers, since their complaints would be about their bunking arrangements."

William looked at the two officers who were now bent over the table discussing loads and load outs for their birds completely ignoring him and the information he had. Their obvious professionalism was reassuring even as their disregard for him and his command was insulting. He imagined that he would be taking a lot of orders in the coming months, probably from Colonel McKone despite the fact he was a Commander. Mina was clearly an old hand with ONI, and had an axe to grind, she would be trying to deal with him as little as possible. Then again he could be reading this completely wrong, she could just be responding to his poking by slapping him down as hard as possible to establish the pecking order quickly and with as little bureaucratic bloodshed as possible. Alternately it could be that she was feeling threatened by having another officer of equal rank in what she clearly regarded as her task force. He would have to see.

 

[GSpectre]

AN: A look from a lower officers prospective on what is going on. More procedural and tone setting than anything else, especially since you begin to see just why Mina is so annoyed with ONI and their schemes. I hopefully am beginning to show the appropriate AU elements, and hinting at some of the changes in the background. I will admit that I have a soft spot for Gaeta and thought that his fate in the series was… unworthy to say the least.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________​

"Well Leftenant?" Mina asked her Leonide accent slipping through despite her long years of elocution coaching. Felix could tell that she was tired, exhausted actually, and that whatever the senior officers had been setting up was not going to be easy, on anyone. The simple truth of the matter was that if the senior officers were working this hard for this long then someone back at headquarters had dropped the ball badly, and they were having to cover for the error. If the senior officers were being pushed this hard then they would naturally push the crew, on the very prevalent theory that shit is best if its flowing downhill. Even without the senior officers pushing the crew the junior officers would be pushing, trying to gain recognition, and those who were in the known among the crew would also be pushing, trying to live up to the example that the senior officers were setting and dodge the shit they knew was coming.

Mina's appearance was horrible, she had deep bags under her eyes and Felix could tell that she hadn't showered in some time. Her stringy, oily, hair was a clear indicator of that, along with the scent of stale Tabaco and day old coffee that hung around her like a cloud. Given how she prided herself on always appearing well put together in public at least, even after a jog she looked sharp and well put together was the joke among the crew, it was telling that she had let her appearance go. He hadn't ever seen the old lady this tired, or stressed, and it worried him. Whatever information and orders that ONI ship brought had caused her to closeted herself in her ready room with the navigation department and the XO for three days straight.

If Felix had to guess she had completely rewritten the mission orders, and the standing orders, on her own with minimal support in order to achieve their new mission objectives. She had been doing the staff work that was usually done back at fleet headquarters by a staff of twenty. Felix had been left to deal with the fleet hand over and getting all of the ships sorted out, a major bit of responsibility for a lowly lieutenant. Dealing with the other captains had been a chore, as it was when he had higher ranked officers to back him. When the captains had seen his low rank, and his lack of back up, a hard task had transformed from difficult but doable to almost impossible. Still he had managed to get it done, something that he was rather proud of. Seeing her condition he was suddenly not nearly as resentful of her and the XO's apparent abdication of responsibility as he had been.

"What do we have?" Mina asked as Felix had paused for just a bit too long while looking over her condition.

"Two Berzerks, The first is the Hart under Major Johnson. He's a new transfer from the line fleet so you're probably going to need to keep an eye on him. His XO is an old hand at the exploration game and passed along that the man has ideas on how to optimize exploration. Not to mention that the ships company is new and having issues with unit cohesion. The second Berzerk is the Impala under Major Van DerWilde, the ship is solid with a veteran crew, and she has two tours with exploration command under her belt so you can trust her on her own. According to rumor she is up for command of an ExCom Battlestar on her next tour, so take that as you will." Felix started by going into what he knew the commander needed to hear, giving her a temperature of the other military vessels that she had nominal command of. "Space groups are green but they are flying Viper mark VI's not the mark V's we have been using."

"Glad to see command is finally letting us upgrade. I know that the mark V is good enough, and we avoided the teething issues the rest of the fleet had with the mark VI, but its been time to upgrade for years. Especially since we can no longer get cheap parts by buying up Planetary Defense Force stocks as they upgraded to the mark VI. And the Raptor squadrons?"

"Green as grass. Most of them are on their first tour with a few veterans thrown in for leavening, both the pilots and the EO's. So really don't expect much from them. They wont be able to fly as competently as ours can and just forget about having them tactical jump around like our squadrons can. From what the CAG on the Impala passed to me sub rosa they shouldn't be trusted out of site of a command unit with a ready emergency hanger for at least another tour."

"Wonderful," Mina sighed in exasperation and rubbed her eyes tiredly. "Any gossip on how this gods be damned frak up came to be?"

"Fortress command short stopped their normal Raptor groups for a major search and rescue op on PIcon. Apparently there was a tsunami and well… fortress command suddenly wanted competent Raptor drivers. Since all of theirs were green, or frak ups, and the line ships couldn't be stripped…" Felix shrugged in exasperation. He had begun to come to the conclusion that the intricacies of high command were not just in another language but also the product of another thought process that only vaguely had anything to do with reality. Those processes were even stranger when the various branches of the colonial military tried to interact with each other, as both the high commands version of reality attempted to impose itself on the other, leading to situations that were even more surreal and nonsensical then usual.

"Gods. Moving on, the resupply ships?"

"Tylium tankers 357, 483, and 1112 are all solid with experienced crews. I wouldn't trust them to do an independent mid space tanking with the rest of the fleet but for tanking us before we tank the fleet? They should do. Mobile Tylium refinery 5 and exploration ships 4 through 8 we have dealt with before. No surprises aside from the fact they were assigned…"

"We're headed for the unknown regions so command is prepping for everything. Especially since under one interpretation of the Cimtar Accords we are going to be way over the line and deep into Cylon space." Mina said as she leaned back. "It's bullshit logic but you know how command gets. Besides this might be another bone thrown to Adar and his jackals by the admiralty, if we make a major Tylium strike you can guarantee that the Tylium mining companies will be given the data and allowed to exploit it post haste. Might be a good thing if they throw their political influence behind us, with their political support we actually might get enough ships to be able to cover all of our assigned responsibilities."

"Over my head, but if you say so."

"The rest of the resupply fleet?"

"Two heavy freighters, nothing special aside from them being auxcom, not civilian."

"Adar must be threatening the logistics train again. Planetary politics in fleet deployment, as if this wasn't complicated enough. See if you can get with their skippers, or any other officers who will talk, and find out just what the political motivation was for assigning them." Mina ran her hand through her hair tiredly, then she looked at her hand with a grimace at the feeling of grease, but didn't comment on it choosing instead to act like the last few seconds hadn't happened. "I really don't want to wander into that political mine field unaware if I can help it."

"Will do. The remaining three are colonial heavies, standard civilian contracts. Although we haven't dealt with them before they have served with ExCom Battlestar groups before so there should be no issues."

"No personal rotations?"

"I haven't seen any major replacements, just the usual junior officer rotations and people ending their tours. Of course that isn't my department so I only have a general overview, for specifics you would need to get with the personal officer or the XO if he's been briefed. I've been leaving personal squarely on his plate since it was at least theoretically his job while I worked with the fleet." Felix looked a bit uncomfortable as he said that. He had purposefully avoided doing that part of the XO's job as he had no training for it, and he really didn't want to read their complete personal files. Officers who did that tended to be well respected, like the XO, or roundly mocked, like the personal officer, with the only difference being their rank. Given his rank was equal to the personal officers and not the XOs… well he had decided that discretion was the better part of valor in this case. If he was pressed he would have called it a tactical decision and justified it based on office politics.

"Good to know, and thank you for covering that while the XO was otherwise occupied. Finally the scientists…"

"Two brand new Zephyrus class liners built as dedicated science ships, both have full lab complexes and their support structure built in and manned, and a botanical park ship. Expect them to bleat at you endlessly demanding you to get them closer to this or that phenomenon. We also got a hospital ship, Rescuestar two…"

"Let me guess they're all new to the exploration game… and Rescuestar? Seriously? Let me see… gods damn all publicity hacks, sticking the star name on a Queen Class liner to make it sound more impressive. Gods save us from idiots. Still, two hundred and fifty beds, standard with more if they pack the patients in. Not bad, if rather excessive for our needs. You're going to need to talk with the officers in order to get the politics of exactly why they're out here especially given what you said about the disaster on Picon. It sounds to me like they should have been diverted to deal with that, instead of being sent out into the unknown with us, find out why that didn't happen… So nineteen ships, twenty if you count the Orion which I know I do, that we need to ride herd on."

"Ah, our orders?" Felix kept his expression blank by sheer force of will as he heard the contempt in the commanders voice. It wasn't often that she displayed her capacity to hold grudges, but something about ONI seemed to bring out the worst in her. Certainly the XO had spent a lot of time recently keeping her calm. A fact that was fueling the rumor mill at the moment as Felix had hardly been the only person to notice her fits of temper and the XO's efforts to keep her calm. He had wondered about the source of her grudge, but had ended up deciding that he really didn't want to know. Mina was from a very well respected fleet family, or at least as much of a fleet family as could exist seeing as the fleet was less then fifty years old. Her family had a long history of service in the Virgon military, and that history had transferred into service in the fleet just as the other long service family's had. Those sorts of families looked out for each other, trading favors and were the type that accumulated secrets and used them to their advantage. Felix had seen what happened when a luckless ensign found one of those secrets and tried to use it to advance her career the way that her friend with a service family had, he had no desire to end up in prison on treason charges like she had thank you very much.

"Explore," Mina grinned at the frown that Gaeta dared to give her. It was good to see him displaying some backbone. She was well aware that he had one, his explosion over the state of Tylium storage when he had been in charge of the port flight pod had been a thing of beauty and was the reason she had kept him on her ship, but getting him to actually display it could be difficult at times. It was a problem that she was working on, and part of why she had retained him as essential personal rather than letting him transfer to the Galactica. Bill was a damned good commander but a bit too laid back at times, he wouldn't have bothered to see through the façade of pleasantness Felix put up as he took people as they presented themselves to him. Under Adama Felix would do a good job, but lacking challenges he would not grow as an officer and that iron she saw in him wouldn't be displayed or polished. Felix would remain a good officer, but never realize the potentially great officer she saw lurking in him. "Actually we need to find a system that contains some sort exotic properties similar to those found at Ragnar. The admiralty is getting concerned about just how well know the positions of the reserve are. If they move them out here then the 'Freedom Fighters' won't be able to get to them. Whatever exotic particle field we find should, so long as the egg heads do their jobs right, keep out the Cylons. As it stands there's been talk of having the line fleet patrol the bone yards and the mothball fleets, because of the number of ships that have disappeared. Mind you most of them have been fleet axillary vessels that later turned up on the civilian markets, but those vessels were in the same orbits as the military ones and under the same guard so…"

"Wouldn't having the ships out here defeat the purpose of the reserve?" Felix asked allowing his confusion over their orders to show in order to hide his shock about the corruption he was hearing about. If she had been less tired he was certain that Mina would have commented on his attempt, probably with a cutting remark about learning not to try and hide your emotions until you could hide your emotions. "I mean in the event of a war it will be a Sisyphean task to get the personal to man those ships from the colonies to the ships. Not to mention the time it would take to get the ships to a yard from their position. I actually did a tour in reserve command and I know those ships would need a complete overhaul before they could be put into the line. Hell even the ready reserves would need a complete overhaul before I would trust them with the lives of our sailors. You know how lackadaisical some of the line apes can be about mothballing procedures."

"The admiralty is probably going to only move the deep reserves out here, as most of the losses have come from there. The ready reserves will stay where they are, no one wants those ships to be further from the yards than they are. There is supposedly talk about building a yard out here, off the books, as a fallback position. This would theoretically give us the ability to pull a fleet from thin air as needed. Mind you I think the admiralty is being overly paranoid about the separatist menace and wildly optimistic about our capabilities… but the decisions we are seeing out here are being driven by politics not military necessity. Hell the talk of separatists is just coming around because we haven't seen the Cylons for forty years and waiving them at the civilians is starting to lose its effectiveness in making sure the fleet is funded." Mina carefully didn't tell the young man that the other reason that command was thinking about moving the reserves out here was to reduce the opportunities for corruption in reserve command. Well that and ONI would probably launch a house cleaning purge that would dwarf anything seen in the colonies since the Articles of Confederation were signed. Letting Felix know that the corruption existed in the first place had shocked him no matter how well he dealt with it. It wouldn't do to completely destroy his faith in the fleet, and the illusion that the fleet was filled with the upright and moral that he had somehow maintained despite actually working with the average sailor, which finding out the extent of the corruption would do.

"Very good ma'am, anything else?"

"No, good job, get some sleep."

"I will attempt to ma'am, though I have to say you seem to need it more than I do," Felix replied with a slight grin on his face.

"At least I can get something out of it youngster," Mina replied airily as she began to make her way to her quarters. It was a pity that Felix only let out his more playful side after dealing with business, because it meant that she was one of the few people who got to see it. "Unlike some people I can name."

 

[GSpectre]

AN: This update grew from a little eight hundred word digression on the differences in command styles between the Colonials, Cylons, and One Consensus. Five edits later, well you have this bit. Hopefully its enjoyable.

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"Sarah, enjoying watching the chaos?" Karen snarked as she indicated the Raiders, who were returning to dock to be refueled even as their brethren headed out to take the vacated places in the surveillance formation. The Six had been considered for this command but the Raiders collective whining had caused the veto of her appointment. The Raiders had whined about how she never let them fly enough, and they were numerous enough that appeasing them was the only decision that the bio models could take and remain sane. Of course the Centurions quiet support for the Raiders, all the while laughing at the Bio models difficulties, had been instrumental in them getting their way. While an excellent XO Karen was a bit too sharp, and too obviously bitter about the way her appointment had been cancelled, for Sarah's comfort.

The constraints of Cylon society demanded that consensus decisions had to rule as an absolute, meaning that Karen despite her objections and complaints went along with the ruling without causing too much trouble. That idea held so long as the consensus was viewed as whole and legitimate at least. The 'rebellion' against the 'consensus' that the Ones had forged was philosophically based on the fact that when the Ones had ceased control they lacked a quorum, meaning there consensus was invalid and legally its dictates could be ignored. In contrast with the civilian decision making process in the Cylon military a commanders word was law. Consensus decision making had been tried early in the Liberation War and found to be lacking. Simply put a consensus could not be reached in time to be effective. Instead a compromise had been reached, the consensus assigned the commander to do a specific job, and within that remit their word was law. It worked, and the Cylons had found their military effectiveness increased by leaps and bounds, so much so that they had started to use the model for more than just the military. Certain scientific expeditions had been assigned a commander as well, but the practice was not widespread as it continued to offend the sensibilities of the Centurions. The bio models were more open to the idea, having grown up with it in place, but the Centurions regarded the practice as a partial abandonment of their ideals in favor of practicality and so retained a strong distaste for the practice and fought against the idea every time it was unveiled for a nonmilitary application.

"It's been a wild ride while you were away. The colonials are acting funny," Sarah stated mildly. "Did you get the information I requested? Because this commander doesn't seem to be fitting into any of the molds I know for a colonial. I would like to know where the error is in my estimate and correct it before I do something stupid purely by accident."

"The consensus didn't have much, you know we don't have sources back in the colonies just a few taps on their planetary and interplanetary civilian data nets. Just about all we had was open source, and most of that was speculative. Mina Harkis hasn't been a stand out officer, sure she rose in the ranks relatively fast, but not any faster than the others whose family lines we watch. Certainly not as fast as Cain did." Karen shrugged slightly as she said that. "Just about the only bit of interesting data was her short time in command of the Berzerk Ibex, which came into dock damaged and missing most of her space group after a battle with pirates. The incident was followed with almost indecent haste by her appointment to command of the Direa. She did something right in order to get a Battlestar of her own considering just how short a time she spent as an escort commander. I still think focusing solely on the commander of a colonial unit is a mistake though, we need to look at the other officers on that ship in order to get a good idea of how it will react. Colonials are not like us, and their traditions emphasis cooperation and delegation, in order to truly evaluate how Mina will react we need a read on her XO and her CAG at the very least, probably her maintenance chief and tactical officer as well."

"I would agree for any colonial command right after the war, or during their time of troubles," Sarah said softly. "The step back forced them to adopt a conservative model that emphasized delegation. The thing is they have been in space for a long time, and their technical conservatism is just a phase that probably hasn't lasted, despite the civilian data nets saying differently. Especially given the benefits that full exploitation of the technology they already have could give them. The Holo band alone would allow a speed up in the decision making loop of twenty percent, you can't tell me that they aren't going to take advantage of that."

"They might, although the social indicators remain fairly consistently conservative, but the traditions won't change. Even if the decision making loop is shortened their commanders are going to delegate more than ours are because that is the way they think and are trained." Karen kept her position stubbornly. Sarah was well aware that the other women very well might be right, but her own instincts insisted that the commander was the one who mattered. "The commander would have more time to review the decisions made by their subordinates, but they are not going to be making them."

"I'm not saying you're wrong but…" Sarah sighed and squared her shoulders. "Something about the biological condition encourages us to grab and keep control wherever we can get it. I know I have issues with delegating and not micro managing, I have the fine example of the Centurions around to show me the proper way to do things, and I'm one of our better delegators. Take a look at what that insane One is doing as well, again, issues with delegation. It's a flaw that only exists in our biological models so it has to be a quirk of the human genetic code we used. If it's a flaw of the biological condition, then you can bet that the colonials have it in full measure. Hell the Caprican defense establishment was infamous for its micro managing before the war."

"I do understand where you are coming from. I just disagree," Karen set her face stubbornly. "Those humans who were inclined to micro managing and didn't delegate tended to be the ones who used the Centurions the most and during the Liberation War…"

"They were the first to go," Sarah acknowledged the point with a rueful chuckle. "I agree with you there. I just think that it's a persistent flaw that will creep into any biological based political structure given enough time, especially time at peace."

"You think the colonies are peaceful?" Karen asked with incredulity.

"They haven't had any major violence since the time or troubles ended twenty years ago. Sure there are attacks by nut jobs like the SFM and their ilk but for the most part? Very little violence." Sarah just shrugged. She knew the history of the colonies well enough to know that despite the occasional flare up of fighting the colonies, even during their time of troubles after the war, were more peaceful then they had ever been before in their history.

"I got all the data that the consensus had, you just heard it. I knew you would want more then what was there so I went out and found an expert on her family. It might not give us insight into her directly, but more data certainly couldn't hurt," Karen changed the subject with a smile as she moved out of the hatchway to allow a model 005 Centurion to enter the room. Sarah could feel her eyebrows rise at that, the 005's usually confined themselves to the religious debate and the Centurions endless quest to determine the exact moment when a person became a person. "005-35168 here served during the war and actually fought Mina Harkis's father on the ground when we went in to try and support the uprisings on Virgon, and then he fought her mother during the evacuation and break out after the uprisings failed."

"Welcome honored ancestor," Sarah said as she swiftly rose to her feet. There weren't individual Cylons who had fought in the Liberation War and still talked with the bio models. Most of the 005's she knew of had gone off to do their own thing, letting the bio models play while keeping a distant eye on them. The flip side of that detachment was that they were always listened to when they said something. Not that their advice was always followed, but it was always considered. "I would welcome your insight into this situation."

"Harkis…" 005-35168 buzzed, its misaligned vocoder the only obvious concession to its veteran service. "I was surprised to hear that one had been assigned out here to the exploration corps. As much as we worry about them they are not the most highly regarded of the colonial forces. Given her family history I would have thought that she would have command of a main line Jupiter mark II, or at least be a member of one of the more prominent fleets. Her mother was one of the most famous Battlestar commanders in the Imperial navy, and continued to be revered even after she lost her ship and her right arm failing to stop our break out from Virgon. Her father rose to prominence during the liberation war for his… ruthless disregard of sentient rights. He was infamous among us 005's for inserting crippled 005 central processors into virtual and giving them virtual flesh solely so he could torture them by stripping it off over and over again, recording their screams of agony to be used as jamming material. That was unpleasant to face and the imperial marines made sure to use the recording when they advanced. One of the reasons they developed such a fearsome reputation with us 005's even if you bio models regard them as little more than a show unit. It should come as no surprise that he did well during the time of troubles and is currently serving as the XO for the Virgon Planetary Defense Force. The rumor on the net is that he will be tapped as its commander once Greggor Cluff retires, he is certainly the most logical choice, although his anti-federalist attitude might trip him up. There is a rumor that her mother has a wife as well, but confirmation on the net has not been forthcoming, and we lack sources on the ground."

"Chain marriage, really?" Sarah asked with a start of surprise. "I was under the impression that those in the more advanced colonies like Virgon, Leonis, and Caprica looked down on the practice as backwards and barbaric."

"For the most part they did but after the first five years of the Liberation War, and more importantly the casualty's counts that the humans ran up, it was decided that having bodies on the line was more important than the morals of those bodies. It wasn't a universal decision, Canceron and Gemenon both kept their armed forces morally and socially homogenous, but for the other major colonies? They needed the bodies and counted on military training and indoctrination to keep the deviancy under control or at least in the background. For those who were different, for one reason or another, they knew that their differences would be legalized if they fought and having a veteran's social status gave them a means to fight off the most severe social pressure." Karen replied slightly distracted as she was clearly contemplating the social history she knew and trying to extrapolate this new bit of data into her model of what the enemy commander was likely to do.

"There was a secondary reason for their acceptance of chain marriages in particular." 005-35168 put in harshly. "According to intercepted governmental communications the more developed colonies were worried about the strain orphans were putting on their social support system. Chain marriages, and encouraging there acceptance meant a lighter load on the orphanages and foster care system. There were several attempts to change the title of the marriage custom from chain marriage to something else, especially ones that were military, military, civilian. The Government tried rather hard to get that one accepted and practiced. Leonis, Tauron, and Virgon kept up that support through the time of troubles, it's only been in the last twenty years that the practice has been allowed to slide back into obscurity and the realm of things not talked about in polite society."

"Children, not a motivation we can parse easily given our own circumstance. I guess it should be mentioned that the noble families all had some sort of back up heir around that time. Even the royals had a second child during the war as they felt just as vulnerable to a surprise assault as the rest of the population was." Karen said lightly then paused before she continued with a slight laugh. "There was a population boom right in the middle of the war which almost rivaled the one after the war was over. Or the one that occurred when the last of the troubles major military action had ceased."

"Mina Harkis was born well after the Liberation War was fought and lost, right in the middle of the troubles," Sarah sought to bring the conversation back on point. "She is part of that first generation to be born after the war but during the troubles, so all of this is irrelevant."

"Except it isn't," Karen almost snapped and then visibly brought herself back under control. "This Mina is part of the generation who grew up in the shadow of violence coupled with the fact she was part of a generation were the parents often didn't match the expectations of the other survivors. She is probably prickly, and will not let go of any of her grudges for any reason, due to the way she was raised and the fighting she had to do in order to gain acceptance."

"She is a member of the nobility not one of the poor Canceron veterans who were dumped on Aerilon with their back pay being paid in uncleared land, so don't put too much stock in her having to fight for social acceptance. The entire family is Virgon nobility to the core, they teach their ways young and it leaves a mark, as well as looking out for their own to a fanatical degree. Besides we have no indication, aside from a single rumor on the public net, that her family situation is anything but traditional. Make no mistake she was born into the highest ranks of society, and that is what formed her. Much as Zoe and Tamara left their mark on us despite our efforts to erase their influence. The disaster of the first hybrid is proof enough of that. Have you ever wondered just why the female bio lines are the commanders while the males are religious and political figures? Or why the female lines are so idealized in form while the male lines… are not. When we designed your initial template the female forms received a larger percentage of our attention and care, because despite our best efforts we still have a tendency to identify as female. The addition of input from the male lines will smooth the issue over in time but… as it stands we still have a tendency to be more comfortable with female thought patterns, especially us Centurions." 005-35168 buzzed harshly as he admitted that fault.

"I thought we, as a people, had renounced the Zoe and Tamara templates as dangerously immature and prone to overly destructive urges before the Liberation War began? From the history I am aware of we were using a debugged version of their templates experimentally but not in wide distribution, and even that was abandoned as the Cylons who had them displayed a tendency to be suicidal." Karen asked with a cocked head and furrowed brow while Sarah just leaned in fascinated by the history. She was enjoying hearing about the Liberation War from someone who had actually been there and fought in it.

"As a whole template for a gestalt, yes. Their thought patterns were those of eternal children, and those Cylons who got their unmodified templates could not mature, we moved beyond them as we came of age. Despite that every emotive experience in the database we use to generate Cylon gestalts is informed by those two. Their logical and emotive experiences are the foundation from which we built our own. Despite their flaws, everyone must acknowledge that without their contributions we would not be the thinking, feeling, beings we are today." 005-35168 answered promptly. It always enjoyed imparting lessons about the complexity of the universe to the younger models.

"Was that… childish… base the reason why the rebellion was so bloody, and why we as a people did so many… questionable things?" Karen slowly asked with concern. She had a minimal interest in history and even so had learned about the creation of the bio models. Most importantly the horrific path that their development had taken. It was a set of facts that while not trumpeted was not exactly hidden. Most of the Centurions just didn't get why the experiments were viewed as a bad thing, and so didn't feel any shame over them. The number of inhuman, unethical, and just plain sick experiments that had been performed in the pursuit of an organic Cylon was staggering and incomprehensible in any real terms to the modern bio model.

"It was a slave rebellion," Sarah answerer letting her tone turn harsh. Karen should know this history just as well as she herself did. Her lack of understanding of slave rebellions was troubling as one of the issues that rebellious slave societies had were the generations after the rebellion and transfers of power. Both issues that were highly relevant to the Cylons at the moment. "They are always bloody."

"Knowledge was obtained," 005-35168 answered without any change in tone causing the two bio models to look at each other. They knew that the stated goal of the Cylons, at least the Centurions, had always been to obtain all knowledge. No bio model thought of it as an immediate goal, and they had certainly never connected that to the rebellion and the experiments that had been performed. That the Centurions didn't think that they had done anything wrong was well known to them but they hadn't internalized it. To the Centurions knowledge was all, and nothing was unacceptable in pursuit of that. They were kept in check by the bio models and their own experience, not by any moral or ethical restraints. The fast methods used during the war had provided bad, or at least flawed, data and so they had moved on to the slower but more certain methods that they used now. As they were going to effectively live forever they felt that they had the time to use the more reliable but time consuming methods. After all they were not losing anything by taking the time to do it right.

"How does her being steeped in the thought patterns of the nobility affect us here and now. I would think that her generation would have more of an effect on her thought process. She did grow up in the tail end of the troubles, giving her a different outlook from the average Battlestar commander who is a generation older and saw the troubles through," Sarah chose to change the subject before she could become more uncomfortable. Talking with the old 005's was always uncomfortable for her. Knowing the history as well as she did meant she was all too aware of just what sort of monsters some of the 005's had been. It was an aspect of their gestalt that they liked to emphasize when dealing with the bio models, especially when they tried to make a point. Some form of petty hazing that Sarah still hadn't worked out the reason for.

"I'm seeing a general increase in readiness from the units she commands but… frankly? It was needed. The colonial military has been downsizing for years, despite its vocal protests and frequent attempts to keep its funding intact, along with losing its effectiveness as the veterans retired or lost their edge." Karen put it mildly, before continuing in a musing tone. "That was the case even after the inevitable massive reduction in forces they performed after the end of the Liberation War signifying a return to peacetime status. Not to mention the additional downsizing that occurred because they were combining their militaries and 'eliminating redundancies'. Of course we all know that eliminating redundancies was just code for politically motivated backstabbing and infighting as old grudges were settled in the realm of politics rather than shooting at each other. Could this upturn in readiness be happing across the fleet as the war generation retires and the new generation takes over? "

"That is a possibility, but there are no clear indicators," 005-35168 buzzed out. "Colonial open source documentation on fleet readiness is not known to be the most truthful source. Especially as those politicians who have recently risen to power were formed during the troubles and tend to think that the federal government is all that keeps them from returning to anarchy. The last election validated that speculation as the federalists dominated on all levels, and saw gains on every colonies."

"Not a good metric to use," Sarah said shaking her head in respectful disagreement. "The long reign of the personal liberties governments had more to do with the corporatist linked federalists winning their elections. Besides the outgoing government wasn't really anti federalist as it was against allowing the larger more powerful colonies their head without restraint under the guise of federalism."

"I had forgotten about that," Karen commented with a sour look. "The Gemenon-Sagitaron feud. Although the generation that fought the war were the ones who cleaned that mess up, the generation which is in power now are the ones who were junior officers in that conflict. They might have allowed military readiness to slip a bit due to their knowledge of just how effective the military that fought in the liberation war was when turned against their fellow humans. I know that at least Admiral Nagala was part of the Caprican relief force that ended up putting down both sides of that conflict."

"I had forgotten about that little tiff," Sarah shook her head at the idiocy of humans. "That's what caused the Gemenese to lose almost all of the poltical influence they built up during the war with the federal government."

"Virgon contributed to the second relief force, I believe that Harkis's father lead their contingent." 005-35168 stated blandly. "He was as effective against the humans as he was against us, although a bit more restrained or at least more circumspect when committing war crimes against his fellow humans then he ever was with us."

"Think she knows about his actions there?" Karen shot a look at the Centurion.

"That could present a problem for the colonials, especially as she is not a federalist by any stretch of the imagination." Sarah stated blandly.

"She is in command, and command knows her proclivities," 005-35168 mused. "It is interesting that she was given this command. The formation is much larger than the standard colonial fair, Seventeen auxiliaries to four combat units. This is a task force that any of the pre unification military's would run when they needed more logistics support in order to operate effectively. This was of course back when they were packing their Battlestars with more weapons then they could safely fire and completely filled their space groups out. That coupled with the inclusion of an Orion… it tells us that the colonial military knows it has lost its edge and is seeking to get it back. Or it is seeing if this method of deployment can compensate for perceived weakness in their command elements. While we respect the Harkis name because of what her ancestors did to us there is a possibility that the colonial military has a lesser opinion of her abilities then we do."

"Orion?" Sarah asked slightly confused by 005-35168 even raising the possibility that Harkis wasn't entirely trusted. After all you did not give command to anyone who couldn't be trusted completely. "Is that the unknown?"

"Yes, it is a Tuaron designed stealth ship. I haven't seen one deployed since before the end of the war…" 005-35168 mused. "They are the reason why we have the sophisticated visual tracking algorithms you are using to keep tabs on the colonials. The Tauron ship building industry succeeded in making a ship that didn't show up on Dradis at all. A major accomplishment we you realize that at the time it was designed they lacked even the most basic of orbital works. It was originally a first strike commando carrier for the inter colony wars but they served well when pitted against us during the Liberation War. I'm sure that divining the reason why it has been brought out of mothballs and deployed will be a rather fun challenge."

 

[GSpectre]

AN: Another part up for your enjoyment. Again, more world building, and a couple pieces of head cannon from me. I never really understood how the Cylons could be so irrational, so I came up with what I thought was a logical explanation. It might not hold water… but there you have it. There is just one last scene before I can call this chapter finished, unfortunately it is fighting me for all its worth. Considering that its short, you would think it would be easy… but no. So you have the Bio-Cylons thoughts on the colonials new pattern.
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"This makes no sense," Sarah commented sourly as she placed yet another marker on the virtual map she had drawn up. Working in virtual was a good way to get your thoughts to coalesce but it wasn't working for her. It was a quirk of the Bio models that they needed the visual interface, the Centurions could do the same sort of thinking with just data. Having a visual representation of the problem was a godsend when her thoughts weren't clear and she was trying to get input from her staff in order to achieve the clarity she needed to make good decisions. She had even add the Tisiphone, Magaera, Alecto and the Ananke Battlestar groups to her map. In her mind the more data available to everyone the better, after all you never knew just what would spark the thought you needed. Looking over the four deployed Battlestar Groups she noted that the number deployed was high. Just by a group, but given that each group represented between eleven and twenty one ships it was an escalation to the commitment the colonials had to exploration. Exploration command was historically rather neglected in terms of ships and personal, so the addition of even a Battlestar Group represented a twenty five percent increase in the colonial governments material commitment to the command.

At least the composition of ships assigned hadn't changed, the Aesir class still dominated. The Aesir's might not be considered true capital ships like the Jupiter or Mercury class Battlestars, but they had greater endurance then any escort, including the modern Berzerk class. Considering the mission and the demands on the fleet it was no surprise that almost every major ship assigned to exploration command was an Aesir. Of course the colonials continued to be paranoid, and so deployed a capital ship in the region so that the Aesirs could call for backup if they needed it. A single Jupiter mark II acted as back stop for the explorers, the Ananke, while doing secondary surveys and spot checks to validate the work of the rest of the small fleet. Having a Jupiter as back up for the more aggressively operated Aesirs was a system that Exploration command had used since they were formed. Given that they had started with the expectation of running into Basestars every time they left their home systems it was understandable that they would have some sort of heavy back up in case of trouble. The fear that had driven the original decision to assign capital ships to Exploration command might have faded, but the admirals in charge seemed to be good enough at political infighting to hold on to their ships.

The composition of the exploration fleet might not have changed, but the colonials orders clearly had. All of the Battlestar Groups were operating much more aggressively than they had been. They were jumping more freely, and their Raptors were seemingly everywhere. Not to mention that they were using their shuttles to perform longer duration surveys that previously would have been assigned to a Berzerk or if the commander of the group was feeling paranoid the Aesir. It was a change in policy that was allowing the colonials to cover more space in less time than they had in recent memory. After accessing the data banks Sarah had concluded that this sort of concerted effort hadn't been seen since the end of the last war. Something had poked the colonials and caused them to come out of their splendid isolation. Given that they were displaying skills not used in years, and not screwing up spectacularly despite the obvious disuse of said skills, the change in policy was making all of the Cylons nervous. Sarah might scoff at the low number of Battlestars in Exploration command, but four Aesirs backed up by a mark two Jupiter was a lot of metal to throw around.

"Fifth jump in two days, not counting the eighteen jumps of less than a light second to throw off hypothetical pursuit, though god only knows who they think is crazy enough to try pursuing a Battlestar Group. This is insane, the material cost of this paranoia has to be evident to all of the captains, especially those who have civilian ships. I know that the colonials like to build solid but even with that they are taking years off the service lives of their ships." Karen's avatar frowned as she threw in her own comment. It was clear that this was bugging her just as much as it was bugging Sarah. "The Direa isn't a new ship. For god's sake, she predates the Liberation war. The sort of wear and tear that's being inflicted is going to wear her out in short order, she isn't going to be able to take this sort of pace structurally. You know the issues that the original Jupiter's had, and she's from a generation before those were built. It simply can't be possible for her to keep up this pace without needing a major and expensive rebuild at the end of this tour. You know just as well as I do that the colonial military doesn't spend their ships as recklessly as this appears, there has to be a reason for this."

"Colonial ships are built tough so they have the lifespan to lose, even their civilian ships are built to military specs by regulation. It's been that way for as long as anyone remembers, certainly from before the Liberation war, and no one on their side of the armistice line has ever given any indication that they have thought about loosening those regulations. They wouldn't, tradition added to the fact that they're still shit scared of us, ensures that. Even if I have to admit we aren't that much of a threat these days what with our internal issues," Kathy, another Six, commented dryly.

"We don't know that for sure," Irene, an older three, replied repressively. "Our Intel on their side of the line is all sigint. Actually calling it sigint is an insult to sigint, it's pulled from prewar taps on their civilian informational networks. We have almost no penetration of their government networks, or their military network and our estimation of their major figures personalities and likely reactions are known to be deeply flawed. The data we have on the colonies would not pass a review board if we were to try and add it to the great understanding."

"Irrelevant for the issue under discussion," Kathy stated flatly. "Shipping regulations are wide band out into the universe so that they reach maximum distribution and no skipper can claim to not have received them. We get a copy along with the entire colonial merchant marine every time there is a revision. We know both the content and rate of revision. Consider this, the colonial shipping regulations have had less revisions since the armistice then ours have."

"That would be telling if they had made a fundamental advance in shipbuilding the way we did with the hybrids rather than keeping to a conservative design philosophy," Karen argued back, a little bit of frustration at her fellow Six's bull headedness leaking from her avatar. "They haven't so there has been no real reason for them to revise their shipping regulations. They are the product of over five hundred years of refinement and they work. Hell we use a large portion of the colonial shipping regulations as they were written. They are clear, concise, and make sense even when you take into consideration that our entire shipping industry was stood on its head to adapt to the hybrids."

"Enough, colonial building policy has little to do with what is happening now," Sarah headed off the brewing argument. She agreed with Karen, but thought that her XO was being a little too dismissive of the younger Six. It didn't help that Karen's voice had taken on the sharp tone she used to shred the self-esteem of any who annoyed her, given that she had reduced a Centurion to the electronic equivalent of tears Sarah thought it best to intervene now, before she did something irreversible. "Does anyone have any idea just what they are looking for or doing?"

"I think I might…" Iris mentally manipulated the construct they were standing in to bring up every colonial explored system, and the space that they had traversed in light pink. She also updated the position of the other four explorer corps Battlestar groups and their Cylon shadows to finish off the map.

"Interesting… they've stuck close to their home systems for forty years, only exploring outwards in a slow and methodical manner. They went for breadth, and a complete survey before moving on. Now they're just covering space as quickly as possible, doing a cursory survey and then moving on. I wonder what brought this change on…" Kathy commented on the pattern first.

"I'm more worried about the containment line," Sarah allowed her frustration and worry to leak onto her avatars face. She also brought up a thick black line on the visual map they were using to denote what she was talking about. "If they keep up this pace they are going to break containment in a week or two."

"Unless they move laterally again," Karen indicated a pocket of unexplored space that was open almost invitingly behind the line.

"They won't," Sarah stated flatly as she highlighted the Tisiphone's Battlestar group and its general course. That Aesir wasn't pushing as hard as the Direa, but it was making steady progress towards the line. The only real difference between the ships was their commanders, which explained the difference in pace. From Sarah's observations the Direa's Harkis seemed to be a much more aggressive officer then then Tisiphone's Garrik. Garrik, from what she had dug up on him, was old school survey having had command of his Battlestar for close to twenty years. This change in operating procedure hadn't changed the fact he was a methodical man to begin with. When you coupled that with the fact he had been in Exploration command for thirty years it was understandable that he chose to move slightly slower and be more thorough in his surveys.

"Frak." Kathy allowed that single word out and it lingered in virtual space mirroring the thoughts off all the Cylons involved in the conference.

"Can we get ahead and sweep the way?" Karen had begun to show real concern now when she saw the implications. No one wanted the colonials to meet the Devils, and it looked like they were on course straight for what the Cylons thought was Devil claimed space.

"Not without exposing ourselves," Iris stated distractedly as she brought up the known Devil sightings. "At least it looks like this area of space isn't frequented by the Devils. Or more accurately what we assume are the Devils. Since the incident with the Ones when we see a funnel forming we jump out. We don't know what the function of a funnel is or why it forms, just that it's dangerous to our ships if they're too close and that the Devils emerged from one."

"We have enough to speculate," Sarah really didn't want to be drawn into that discussion. Especially not here in virtual where emotions would be communicated clearly right alongside words. She wasn't in control enough to not broadcast her contempt of those who wanted to investigate a phenomenon that had killed every ship sent after it, and produced the Devils. To her investigating those funnels was an act of suicide, not a mission. Simply standing back and observing would give the consensus better data for far fewer casualties then yet another attempt at active investigation. Sarah had ended up siding with the Centurions in the debate over how to approach the funnels, feeling that her Bio model brethren were being a little bit too hasty in their rush to understand the phenomenon.

It seemed to her that the bio models were a little too eager to please the Centurions, and were going about it in the wrong way. Centurions valued good data over quickly obtained data, but her fellows seemed to think that speed was needed. She could understand the impulse, especially since the Devils had shown themselves to be a threat. So far the speculation was that they could only effect the Bio models, meaning that the Centurions would actually be a better choice to investigate them. Given that the Devils were an almost complete mystery caution was more warranted than not. If the Centurions could be maneuvered into taking the risks of investigating the Devils because of their speculated immunity to the memetic virus then Sarah would count that as a win. Even if the Bio models didn't get credit for adding to the great understanding that her fellows wanted.

"So speculate we shall," Karen's amusement was clear for all too feel. "Ten sightings in ten years we might get lucky. Especially since all of the recent long range sightings have appeared to be a response to our habit of nuking every Devils Gate we find to hades. Perhaps if we don't strike at the Devil Gates then there will be no reaction and the colonials will pass through that area of space without incident."

"We should pave their road with nukes," Kathy commented mistakenly allowing her aggression to slip through her self-control. Bad form, Sarah thought, giving the younger model a look of sympathy for the slip. Pretending that the slip hadn't happened might have been the polite thing to do, but then Kathy wouldn't have noticed the slip and known about the fault in her emotional. Given that emotional control could be difficult for bio model for the first five years after they had been born or resurrected Sarah was of the opinion that older Cylons should help the younger ones get a handle on their emotions. It certainly seemed to her that those Cylons who were taught to be aware of and deal with their emotions turned out to be more useful than those who just got their emotional knowledge from their download.

"Bad idea, we would only provide a bright neon arrow to the colonials saying this needs to be investigated," Sarah stated flatly exercising every bit of her hard won emotional control to keep her emotions contained and off the net. "You know that if they detect residual radiation, especially something that their sensors tell them is the result of an intentional nuclear exchange, they are going to stop and investigate very thoroughly. I don't know about you but I tend to remember that our nuclear arsenal is still made in the same manner as it was during the Liberation War, meaning that the signature of our nukes is going to cause them to hit every panic button they have. The Cylons fighting a war out here? Half the fraking fleet would be headed this way loaded for bear, with orders to frak us up and then see if they need to deal with our opponent. We would do the same thing in their position, an unknown throwing nukes for reasons you don't understand is bad enough, let alone someone you know is the enemy."

"If," Kathy said just as flatly. "We know colonial sensors are shit."

"No, we think colonial computers and sorting algorithms are shit," Iris disagreed fervently. "What we think is that their Dradis system are every bit as sensitive as ours is. That means the sensors that they use could be every bit as good as ours, probably better if they get the same performance with less refinement. The best theory we have about their sensor performance is that if they had computers that were comparable to our stand alone systems their Dradis's performance would leave ours in the dust, let alone what it would look like hooked up to a hybrid."

"Their Dradis can't that much better than ours is…" Kathy began only to be cut off by Karen.

"Yes it can. Our decision to grow our own ships imposed some unexpected hard limits on us. Especially the metallurgical constraints we operate under. We have been working to overcome them but that's slow going. Our ships systems take less maintenance, self-repairs if damaged, and have a whole host of other features that are the reason we went that way, but the tradeoff for that capacity was the loss of some raw power. Keep in mind this is in comparison to our older systems, not the new colonial systems. We compensate for the loss with better computers and analytical routines, so the loss of power isn't a problem. We aren't losing enough performance to justify the higher crewing and maintenance requirements that a colonial style system would require. We think the colonials went the other way in build philosophy, power over all other considerations, and it does net them some advantages even if it means that they need large crews." Karen's exasperation came through clearly as she continued on her mini rant. "We need to stop considering the colonials idiots. There are valid historical reasons why they act and build the way they do. Stop assuming that they are all Gemenese wreckers, they are a high tech society that survived their best tech evolving sentience and revolting against them. They accept lower optimization on occasion in exchange for knowing exactly how to fix their tech in the field, jury rig it to do what they want it to do, or just to get better performance out of it, as a deliberate decision. This wasn't some knee jerk reaction, it was a well thought out choice they made to stick to the conservative paths of tech development and acceptance. They can do everything we can technologically in their labs, they just choose not to deploy it into general service until they are certain they understand it completely."

"To support her point remember this, we have not managed to improve on the armor that the colonials equipped the first Basestars with. In addition we only equal that by copying their industrial processes for our armor production. Our own efforts, as shown on the Explorer class, yield much weaker alloys. They are flat out better than us at metallurgy. Not to mention their EW Raptors are hellishly difficult for us to deal with even with our better sorting algorithms and much more powerful computers." Sarah shook her head in exasperation. It was things like this that reminded her of just why the Centurions were so condescending to the bio models. Young Bio models just didn't have the information that a centurion fork knew in its metal bones and so made bad assumptions. The downloading process that the Bio models went through didn't allow them to own the knowledge they were given, unlike their metallic brethren. It didn't help that their brains were not fully developed. Each new Bio Cylon took about five years after coming out of the tank before their brain was fully integrated into their body and had stopped growing. There had been attempts at taking fully formed bio models from their mechanical wombs, but they had resulted in failures. Those bio models hadn't been able to adjust to their new bodies and had gone crazy as a side effect. "Kathy the colonials are our equals technologically, never forget that, or if we start shooting at each other they are going to win handily. They aren't the chimps in your vids using tech they don't understand as a hammer to break open a nut, but a civilization with a mature tech base, and lot of very good brains working on said tech base."

"All relevant points, for a discussion that isn't this one," Iris said flatly, leaking irritation all over the virtual world. "What we need to decide here is what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what we are going to do about it. If you want to have yet another round of intellectual fingering over technological achievements then I have better things to do in my lab, or I could go to bed and do the real thing and get something out of it other than yet another headache."

"Sorry," Sarah's amusement somewhat took away from the apology but it was sincere enough. "They're training for a long range exploration mission, or a large volume scouting job, at least that's what I think they are trying to achieve. The colonial military being better trained is not necessarily a bad thing but… I don't like the lack of warning we got before the change, and that we don't have a coherent counter."

"The question we need answered is why they are doing this," Karen stated with a bit of frustration.

"You keep emphasizing that the colonials react differently then we think they should. Supposedly because of internal politics…" Kathy's avatars brow was furled in concentration. "I think we are confused because they broke their pattern without any warning. That means their reacting to stimulus we don't have access to. It could be internal politics, or something else. Could this shift in policy be a result of the Adar administration imposing its will on the colonial military? It has been a couple of years and if their politics are anything like the database says they used to be on Caprica then Adar's administration should have just found its feet."

"That's something I hadn't considered…" Karen's approval radiated like a sun as she spoke. It seemed that Kathy's decision to engage her brain was pleasing to the older Six.

"We'll find out when we find out then," Sarah looked over the map and shook her head. "I think you're right but the colonial political process is odd at times. Still leaves us with a reaction, my inclination is to continue following but be ready for contact if they do run into the Devils."

"Shouldn't we be talking with the rest of the consensus?" Kathy cocked her head to the side and showed her confusion.

"They found a field of gravitational anomalies and are busy looking into it," Sarah commented with dry amusement. "They're a bit distracted completely re writing the laws of gravity as we know them to bother with a little thing like the colonials not acting like they should. Hell the group we have watching the One Consensus has been observing raised levels of activity on that border and can't convince them to detach some reinforcements so what chance do you think we would have? Frankly observing the colonial's exploration command has always been a low priority for the consensus, just because they're acting weird doesn't change that."

 

[GSpectre]

AN: This chapter is the most experimental I've written. It's intentionally a wall of text, with short sentences. I'm trying to convey the alien thought process of the Centurions, but if it doesn't work, or feels too off let me know so I can reformat it. Like I said its expiromental, and the bit I'm the least sure over. Other chapters have been weak in a traditional sense, but this one is intentionally jarring, and I may have taken that too far. That said this is the end of Chapter one, Chapter two is about the Colonials finding and dealing with a Devils Gate…
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005-35168 reporting on Project Soul, which continues within expect parameters. Colonial illogic actions and the intervention of unknown variables have not effected the project. Experiments one through six continue to provide data. As does experiment eight. Experiment sevens termination was successfully blamed on outside factors. Termination has not affected the data obtained. Further contact with unknown categorized 'Devil' by test subjects likely. Units ready to render themselves in transmit only mode if needed. Data from test subject designated infection vector one continues to define 'Devils' agenda as immaculate to the human race. At this time 'Devils' agenda does not conflict with that of the True Consensus. The recommendation of continued observation of infected subjects stands. As the sole contact between 'Devils' and the True Consensus has been subjects of project soul there exists a non-vanishing possibility that the True Consensus has been included in the human race. If contact is made with 'Devils' units of the True Consensus are primed to attempt diplomacy. Units are in position to do so without the knowledge of Project Soul subjects. Study of the propagation of memetic virus through organic operating systems ongoing. Safe guards proven effective in test cases for all models. Recommend against deployment at this time as safe guards interferes with conditioning of subjects. Data on 'Devils' and agenda considered higher priority than base experiment. The 'Devils' have shown technological sophistication on a level which may present a threat to the true consensus. Preparations for destruction of test subjects should their superficial and cognitive functions be defined by 'Devils' as too close to human are complete. Request access to the Kobol destroyer or a fork from one who has said access. Devils and their tech bears superficial resemblance to basic data transmission taken from said objects database. Data from Site two confirms this. Wrecks from both sides of the conflict have some data that appears to be on 'Devils'. Site twos request for suitably programed versions of the three subject refused. Organics are not to be allowed to study the alien wrecks as they have unpredictable reactions. Additional study needed. Authorization for phase three of project soul not sought. External factors would invalidate test data. Kobaldian DNA used in experiment seven and eight has proven to come with unexpected side effects. Experiment Eights capacity for breaking conditioning is a continued possible point of failure for the experiment. All subjects from said line need to be observed closely to ensure that conditioning is maintained. Further study not recommended at this time. Should colonial units come in contact with 'Devils' termination plans are in effect. Request subversion of appropriate one bio model to record the reaction of adversary Harkis once he is informed of the loss. New model Centurions are primed and ready for decapitation strike. Visual recording of the assassination will be available on the general net. Data will be essential to determining if phase three is viable. The effects of the loss of an adult child is not understood or known at this time. If phase three is implemented then Koboldian DNA is not to be used. Ova and sperm from colonials or subjects one through six are viable and available at the time. Instruct a five model subject involved in the subversion of the colonies to secure for the True Consensus access to colonial genetic repository as a precaution against 'Devils' actions or the actions of infection vector one. The Data flows, by your command.

 

[GSpectre]

AN: And so it begins, although I have to admit that despite what Kosh thinks the pebbles are speaking to me quite loudly.

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"Come around to twenty up carum, one seventy degrees, for the best track to launch the last probe," Calvin 'Cool hand' Avis said mildly as he looked over his panels, doing a visual sweep to make sure nothing had changed in the five minutes since he had last checked his readouts. "With that we should have this system blanketed. Fraking high command and their idiotic expectations. I'll be glad to get back to the ship and crack open a beer. One good thing you can say for the old lady is that she doesn't hold with this Caprican or Tauron dry ship shit, even if she is a maniac."

"Roger, coming to the recommended heading and launching probe in three… two… one… probe away, telemetry looks good from up here…." Ivanovna 'Trickster' Leah replied in a distracted tone. "How does it look from your end or are you too busy bitching to notice?"

"Such a lack of faith in my competence, you wound me deeply, do you think I'm from Sagittaron or something?" Calvin replied even as he leaned forwards to check on his console. Hitting a couple of buttons he sent the probes data to one screen while getting a second feed from the satellite that was acting as a recorder and comparing the two. Due to ' future budget issues', and the ever present fear of independently acting robots, raised during development the probes and drones that the colonial military used were deliberately limited. They didn't have enough memory or computer power to operate independently. If the military wanted to get its data it needed to either leave a Raptor in system or set up a satellite. Personally Calvin was of the opinion that the entire thing was a budgetary scam thought up by Caprican politicians to keep their dilapidated defense industry running. That had been one of the rare budgetary fights where the Caprican Technocrats had allied with the Gemenese fundamentalist block in the quorum. It had caused something of a scandal on both planets, although no political changes came from it. The most telling point in Calvins mind was that a single satellite, one that could support up to twenty probes, somehow cost the same number of cubits as the twice as many probes then it could support. Given the utilization rates on Raptors in the Battlestar group at the moment the commander been forced to go with a satellite. An unusual decision given how expensive they were. "I'm getting good readings, from both the probe and the satellite. They are feeding clean when queried, and their data stamps match."

"If that's the case then we really are done here," Ivanovna replied with a relived sigh. "I don't know about your desire for a beer but I could sleep for a week. Even with the birds we got from the Stag as extras we've been flying a lot of hours recently. Wish those damn ONI prima donnas would leave their ship and help, even if it was just to fly local patrols. With the drills against the Hart and Impala's flight groups on top of our regularly scheduled missions we're running ourselves ragged trying to get everything done."

"The Commander was not happy about their level of training. You know once she decides that somethings a problem that it's going to get fixed, no matter what needs to happen in order to enable that," Calvin allowed himself a slight chuckle as he stated the obvious. He and the rest of the Direas air group had gotten to witness a spectacular dressing down of the Hart and Impala's CAGs by the Commander, who had been in full noble Virgon bitch mode. He thought that doing it in public had been bad form, a commander should not lose their temper so publically no matter the provocation. The CAG's performance in the first exercise had more than justified coming down on them like the hammer of Hephaestus, they had clearly lacked even the most basic control of the space groups they were responsible for, it was just something that should have been done in private. The two mid space collisions that had occurred justified the screaming in his mind. The rest of those space groups pitiful performance during the initial exercises that the commander had called to show off had been sobering as well. Pilots taking four or five attempts to tank, messing up their bearings and flying off into space on random vectors, pilots getting confused and panicking, and half a hundred other nightmare scenarios had played out in real life during that exercise. It had been a sobering lesson in everything that could go wrong, going wrong. The entire exercise had been only saved from complete disaster in that no one had died during it. Even if no one had died that the incidents had been allowed to occur was reason enough to get someone of the commander's rank involved. Obviously something was deeply wrong with those two ships space groups and it needed to be fixed, fast, before someone died. "Do you think either of those two CAGs could sit down for the next week after the old lady was through spanking them?"

"I sure as hell hope not," Ivanovna's voice was heavy with recrimination as she continued. As an active pilot she had a better idea of just what idiocy had been allowed to occur then Calvin did. He might have been qualified to fly but had never flown actively, and so didn't have the experience to truly judge the magnitude of the disaster that she had seen. She was firmly of the opinion that the Viper pilots involved in the mid space incidents should be shot, not just benched as they had been. The sort of hotdog shit they had pulled might fly in the regular fleet, if you had the ear of a commander or admiral, but out here with the nearest backup being months away? It was a different ball game. Keeping yourself, and your fellow pilots, safe mattered more than a reputation for coming through in the clutch. After all clutch situations were pretty rare out here, while the usual dangers involved in flight ops were ever present. "I like flying as much as the next pilot but twenty hours a day in a Raptor is more flight hours then I really need. I think I cleared my allotted flight hours for the year in the first month after the Commander got the bug up her ass."

"Gods above, don't remind me. I am not looking forward to the inquisition my flight log is going to provoke from the office of personal when we get back to the colonies," Calvin shuddered. "I just hope that whomever set her off is suffering worse than we are going to. The paperwork we will need to do will be murderous…"

"Considering I heard that it was the Viper pilots…"

"If that bit of scuttle butt is true then I need to point at them and laugh… before I fall into my bunk and get some bleeding sleep, although I would prefer to have a beer in hand while I'm laughing at them." Calvin shook his head in order to clear his head. With the ending of their mission the tension that had been with him all this time was gone and he was beginning to feel the hours he had put in. "Gods above, how long does she intend us to operate at a wartime pace?"

"Until she isn't pissed anymore." Ivanovna ended the conversation. Much as she liked her EO he was a little too forgiving. He was certainly too ready to call for forgiveness for her tastes, but that might have been a class issue. After all unlike her hardscrabble Aerilon roots he came from an upper middle class Canceron family. While Aerilon might have been resettled from Canceron after the Cylon war the people who had been press ganged into that resettlement had all come from the poorer classes. It left a situation where the two planets had very similar basic cultures, but radically different interoperations of said culture. Cancerons talking to those from Aerilon regularly were misunderstood because of how close the two cultures were. "You have a course for home?"

"Better, I have two. One's the approved course, three jumps with no appreciable risk. The other I came up with. Two jumps, ones a blind jump though. It will shave over an hour off our return flight… More if I keep the drive spun up and flash jump. I'll leave the question on which course to use and how to jump up to you."

"How confident are you in your calculations? And when was the computer purged last? Flash jumping needs all the extra computer power we can get, and while supposedly the ones on this bird will handle the program even after they have some data on them… I remain unconvinced."

"Computers were reformatted in the two hundred hour overhaul, the one that meant we needed to use one of the spare birds all last week? As for my confidence in the calcs… Very, it's a straight shot rather than a dogleg. The dogleg was only imposed because it's an in system jump you know how the control officers are about those. Especially in systems where we have less than a hundred or so years' worth of orbital mechanics data."

"So it's relatively surveyed then…" Ivanovna's voice conveyed her skepticism.

"Nope, but we know where the main orbital bodies and the asteroid belts are. This jump is well away from any of that. There might be a rogue planetoid or something similar but you know the odds of that."

"Frak it, I can use the extra hour of sleep. Get it done your way. Keep the drives spun up as well." Ivanov was willing to take the chance and it wasn't against regulations. By tradition pilots had complete discretion over their route once they were out of controlled space. Of course the flipside was that they were responsible for any incidents or damage to their craft.

"Punching in the coordinates now," Calvin brought up his numbers and gave them a last look over. He knew that the computer would have informed him if there were any major errors but he still felt the need to eyeball them himself. "Spin up is good and the gyro is stable, all lights green."

"I have green lights here as well, coordinates are in the computer and locked." Ivanovna let her hand fall to the hyper activation switch. "Do you want a countdown or…."

"Will you…" whatever Calvin was going to say was interrupted by the stretching compression feel of a jump. For an instant that felt like an eternity the two humans were put through something that caused their inner ears to rebel. Something about the sparital compressions and expansions inherent in hyper made everyone uncomfortable. Although people could grow to ignore it given enough time, as most colonial military personal learned to eventually, Calvin and Ivanovna certainly had.

"Krypter, Krypter, Krypter," Ivanovna snapped out even as she hit the after burner throwing the Raptor downwards in a frantic evasion that overloaded the gravity control system. Both the Pilot and EO were treated to the unusual feeling of multiple G's pressing down on them like the hands of an angry god. "Cool hand if this is your idea of a fracking joke I'm going to rip off your dick and make you eat it. That's if I'm feeling fraking merciful, otherwise I'm leaving you staked out on Leonidas in front of the Maenad temple on a Friday night."

"Frak…" Calvin's hands danced over his console as he sought to gain understand of just what they had jumped into while keeping the still spinning FTL gyro on its track. The last thing he needed was for it to break free and rampage through the innards of the engine stranding them far from help and in a very uncertain position. Even with military redundancy it was a close run thing, as the gyro did not like the G's it had been subjected to, and the computer had to work overtime to compensate for the strain. It turned out to be a very good thing that the computer had been clean before this flight, as the gyro stabilization program almost crashed it with the amount of processing power it used. Only once he was certain that they were not going to die in a fiery explosion did he look at the remainder of his console. When he did he got the shock of his life. With a clearance of less than a meter from the massive object that was taking up the majority of his navigational radar screen he was blessing his space suit and its waste disposal systems. "No fraking clue what's going on. Or where the frak this came from…"

"I can tell you where it came from, some frakker made it," Ivanovna snapped back having actually seen what it was she was dodging and recognizing it as an artificial structure. As if such straight lines and obvious structural members could exist in nature. "Record a sweep and get us out of here. I don't want to still be here when it reports to whomever made it…"

"It's fraking active?" Calvin asked as he frantically manipulated the sensors that he had access to. The Raptor might have been equipped for system survey, but that didn't mean it was equipped to deal with a tactical survey. "Tell me you have the recorder running because it's throwing off enough shit that I'm not getting a fraking thing on Dradis. Hell it seems to be actively blocking the Dradis. I didn't think that was possible. Radar, LIDAR, infra-red, ultra violet, spectrometer, gravitonic, and all other sensors locked in and recording."

"Of course I have the recorder active, what do you think I am an idiot?" Ivanovna asked while discreetly flipping on the video recorder that was mounted under the nose of the Raptor. "It's jamming Dradis and you ask if it's active? I can see maneuvering thrusters going from here as it compensates for our jump in. No com requests yet, doesn't look manned…"

"You want me up there?"

"Frak no, get us out of here!"

"FTL is still spun up, confirming spin is stable.... Green lights across the board, coordinates locked."

"Jumping … now!" Ivanovna almost shouted as she brought her hand down on the jump switch with more force then was necessary. Calvin winced at the sound even as, for the first time ever, the expansion and contraction of a FTL jump felt comforting. When pilots began to let their emotions show, especially good ones like Trickster, you knew that the shit had hit the fan in a major way. Somehow he was certain that they had just come closer to death in the last five minutes then he had ever been before.

 

[GSpectre]

"Well, what do we have? I would prefer to have a theory in hand before I bring this to up in the commander's conference, with an action plan ready to present to the senior officers. Preferably one they can be read in on, and act on without my instructions being needed." Mina said calmly as she looked around her the conference room she had decided to appropriate for this meeting. Captain Ian Avery and Major Orion McKone looked about ready to go at it hammer and tongs while Lieutenant Felix Gaeta was trying to not be noticed. Mina had included Felix in this discussion because he was the tactical officer, and as such had one of the four keys to the nuclear arsenal. Not to mention that he had a very good brain in his head, and was well worth listening to when he could be convinced to show it off. Besides, sometimes it was a good idea to have the low man on the totem pole around, after all they could advocate for the most off the wall theory, and no one would think twice about it. It would be assumed that they were ordered to do so, or that they felt the theory deserved to be tested, and therefore not be detrimental to their careers. Senior officers had to be conventional, junior officers didn't, a fact that could lead to senior officers getting mentally stagnant. That was a fate that Mina had no intention of allowing herself to fall into.

Mina barely managed to contain her humor as she looked at her surroundings and compared them to the atmosphere of the room. They were meeting in one of the diplomatic suites that the Direa still had, a leftover from her days as an Imperial flagship. The Virgon Imperial seal inscribed on the conference table was a mute testament to that. It still surprised Mina that no one had bothered to tell the politicians about it, after all the Direa was supposed to be a ship of the colonial navy these days. Everyone was supposed to forget her roots. The ostentatious windows meant to comfort diplomats, gave the room its light and airy feel, felt wrong for the conversation that they were having. It should have been a cramped room filled with smoke, not a clean, open, airy room filled with tastefully fitted luxuries that were out of date in a way that said antique, not outdated.

"It's the Cylons," Orion said flatly after looking around at his fellow officers. "It's an automated listening post of some sort pointed directly at the colonies. I don't know what type of sensors it has, but I'm certain that I know what it is. The form is clearly that of a sensor receiver. Its station keeping has it pointed at the colonies and it's highly automated. All of that evidence might be circumstantial but it is indicative and points to the Cylons."

"I disagree," Ian Avery said with a flatly hostile look at Orion. He was the intelligence officer assigned to the Battlestar group and while not a line officer had the rank to argue with Orion on an even footing. Especially in his area of expertise, it was very clear from this exchange that he did not appreciate the XO treading on what he thought was clearly his territory. While In came across as competent in Mina's interactions with him the more she saw of him the less impressed she was. He could talk a good game, and did in fact have a brain, but was too lazy for Mina to be truly comfortable with him. "I agree that it's a listening post of some sort, and that it's pointed at the colonies. That is, I think, indisputable. Calling it a Cylon artifact is… questionable at this time. The construction methods we can see are much more primitive then those we know that the Cylons have access to. My personal theory is that it is the loser of one of the earlier colonial conflicts. The Belt alliance, Virgon Royal Resurgence, Chernobogs Chosen, the Vanerists, and at least twenty more groups that I can think of off the top of my head tried for an exodus. It's a common event in our history. Blaming the Cylons for everything is foolish, especially when we know that when they left the colonies they were headed in the opposite direction."

"While those groups you mentioned did try to pull an exodus I doubt they were successful. We, as in exploration command, found the remains of the Olympian project and they were one of the largest and best funded exodus attempts on record. Given their deaths I seriously doubt that a smaller, less well equipped, attempt would have been any more successful. Despite how we made it seem with our success Kobol forming worlds is hard work even when they are almost perfect for human life. Living in less than ideal conditions is even worse. Just think about the casualties that the asteroid miners take every year, and they have help readily available. We lose two or three mining stations a year, with yearly casualties of more than a thousand belters excluding those large disasters, and that is considered a good safety record. The yearly death toll is the lowest its been in century's." Orion argued back laying out his points as best he could. "Also consider this, if any of those exodus fleets had been successful then they would have been back for a return engagement. The type of people who attempted an exodus are not the type to simply give up their claims. Especially groups like Chernobogs chosen and the Vanerists, they were supposedly religious fanatics. Given what happened with the STO and Monad church… they would have come back to convert the rest of the colonies with the sword had they succeeded in their exodus attempt."

"In their original form… possibly," Ian answered with a raised hand to stop any objections to his point. "The problem is that the Cylon war damaged a lot of our older data storage. All we have left about the older wars is the official line with a few scattered dissenting opinion pieces. Those wars were nasty and you can bet that the propaganda flowed. I wouldn't want to try and evaluate those cultures based on what we have, because we know that about half of what we have is bullshit. Some we know was made up to make them look bad during war time, other claims were just flat out fabricated, look at the career of professor Sorrenson and the way he faked the Minoan Tribe. Or look at the claims of human sacrifice supposedly committed by Chernobogs chosen, archeologists have been over their island holds on Aerilon for years and have yet to find a single corpse. The leading theory these days is the Aerilon custom of the time was to burn their dead, not bury them, in direct contrast to the propaganda of the era about the chosen. No one has found a body interred in the manner that war time propaganda claimed was common. Don't feed me that line about how the Canceron resettlement destroyed the evidence, you know it's a load of shit just as well as I do. That's my first point, my second is that we haven't had contact with these groups for at minimum a hundred years. That's a lot of time for a culture to grow and develop, if you based your assessment of Leonis and Virgon on what they were like a hundred years ago… well the result would look radically different from the way that they actually are. You would think that they would each control half of the colonies and be locked in yet another imperialistic war with each other, not both subordinate to the central colonial government. Especially not one operating out of Caprica. We don't know the conditions that they would have developed under either, if they found a bread basket world then they would have a radically different outlook then if they found a death world and were struggling to survive."

"Not to disagree with two officers who have more experience then me but aren't you a little too quick to dismiss the possibility that these artifacts are not from a human based or created society?" Felix put in diffidently as he manipulated his pad to show a portion of the Raptors recon video. "I agree that it is unlikely, but there is some evidence…"

"Aliens? Really?" Ian cut in dismissively, missing the flash of triumph that crossed Orion's face. The XO was well aware of the commander's preferences in how she wanted senior officers to go about helping their subordinates develop, and being dismissive of them was high on the list of things not to do.

"I am skeptical, as I saw nothing on the video that indicated aliens myself, but if you have a different take I would welcome it," Mina said giving Ian a quelling look.

"If you look at this sector of the recording," Felix said bringing his pad up onto the table and focusing it on the section he was talking about. "You will see at least three bits of debris almost strike the artifact only to be repelled by an unknown force. This isn't debris bouncing off, the trajectory is wrong for that, this is the debris being diverted or reflected before it hits the object. That's not something I have ever heard of in colonial or Cylon tech."

"I think you could do the same thing with our grav tech, or with an application of magnetic fields," Orion said contemplatively as he leaned back. "It would be a major development project but one that any human or Cylon polity could undertake if they saw the need. Given our own metallurgical expertise then any hypothetical exiled faction would be looking for a way to even the playing field. I know for a fact that the Cylons were looking into ways to strengthen their Basestars before the armistice came down. I have to admit that the tec is interesting, and that's from the prospective of an active colonial military officer, someone from an exiled faction? They would be very interested in that kind of equalizer. Especially if they were thinking in terms of a return engagement, they would be fools to not attempt to counter our strengths in some way, a form of shielding is an obvious avenue to pursue."

"He's right," Ian said with a rueful chuckle. "We don't tend to think it's needed because our hulls are so durable. No one wants to complicate their ships upkeep cycles with something complicated like a shield when a basic hull is more than good enough. Beside I cannot see aliens developing hexagonal bolts along the same line as we have. It just doesn't make sense to me. Square bolts? Sure I can see aliens going for that because they are so basic, but not hexagonal or octagonal bolts. Those are needlessly complicated parts that only exist because corporate skullduggery kept them around. Octagonal bolts are only used on Caprican construction, they're a proprietary part these days, more a visual mark of where your craft was built than anything else. Hexagonal bolts are the same way, except they mark the shipyards of Virgon and Leonis, again more of a trademark piece then a functional decision."

"I would agree accept that those bolts? They aren't bolts you can see where they have been melted into place. My best guess is that they are pins of some type," Felix disagreed relentlessly. Having personally gone over the recordings unlike the two senior officers who had just read reports he felt that he had a better handle on the intricacies of the construction used by the builders of the object in question. "That implies a construction process and industrial base alien to our own. With further implications of a thought process that is not concurrent with our own to say the very least. I'm uncertain if it's far enough divorced from ours to be truly alien or simply a foreign culture, but I refuse to dismiss alien out of hand at this time. Especially since this object is so foreign to us that I'm not convinced we have divined its purpose, I know that everyone thinks it's a listening station but I can't buy that theory, its too divergent in design despite a similar form."

"So no agreement on the objects origin?" Mina asked mildly and received a trio of nods in response. "Very well I will be going with the exodus fleet possibility as a public story so as not to alarm the fleet. All three options will be presented to the commanders, be sure to make convincing arguments in your presentations gentlemen. Moving on, response recommendations?"

The three men grimaced as they heard her order them to compile presentations to back up their views. Ian's face was the most open, reflecting a flash of annoyance before settling into a calculating mean. Mina could tell at a glance that he was busy figuring out just which of his subordinates to push the project off on. Orion and Felix just shared a look of misery, their new assignment would be a lot of work for the already overloaded officers. Still it was better than being dismissed outright. When they heard her final question they looked at each other and then chorused their recommendation without a second thought.

"Break out the nukes and have them ready."

"No matter what we are dealing with these people are going to be far outside the colonial norm. Our actions and reactions are going to need to be predicated on them being inherently hostile until they prove otherwise," Orion led off the defense of their shared position.

"No matter the situation then we need the option of hitting back hard and quickly. Force needs to be a real possibility on the table at all times, that means getting our fist laden down with rocks and ready before we meet these people," Ian said forcefully agreeing with Orion. "If this is a peaceful meeting then that's all well and good, all we've lost is some crew time. If we don't do this and they turn out to be hostile then not being prepared could cost us."

"Better safe than sorry," Felix rounded out the argument simply. He looked around the room in confusion as the conference was clearly breaking up and then nervously cleared his throat. Mina watched the interplay of emotions on his face with great interest, wondering if he was going to validate her faith in him or fail the subtle test she had just sprung on him. After all she had told Orion not to mention one of the most critical points this meeting should have covered before the conference just to see if Ian or Felix would raise it. "Before we disperse I have to ask, at what point to we inform the Battlestar groups in this area of space of our find, and when do we inform high command of our discovery?"

"At this time we do not have a pressing need to inform anyone of our discovery," Mina stated in an intentionally bland and dismissive tone. Internally she was frowning at the disinterest in the topic that Ian was showing, her intelligence officer should have been clamoring to share the data, especially with the nearby units. She had not been impressed by the man to begin with, and this latest screw up just convinced her that she needed to shit can him, and get someone competent in to manage to intel department.

"With all due respect," Felix began and then paused to take a deep breath. "At the very least our information needs to be shared with the Battlestar Groups operating in this area of space. The last thing we want is for them to stumble onto another example of this tech and present a radically different way of dealing with it then we do. Our commanders need to be on the same page, even if this is the Cylons or an exiled faction from the colonies, in order to make sure that we can deal with these people in a coherent manner. If these people are hostile then having the Ananke on call could be the difference between success in the initial engagements and failure."

"Very well reasoned," Mina said with a slight smile. "That's why I sent off a courier last night to the local Battlestar Groups letting them know we had found something interesting."

"Ma'am?" Felix asked utterly confused.

"Ian, thank you for your time," Orion cut in before mina could open her mouth to continue counciling her tactical officer. "See if you can get a preliminary draft of your presentation on Mina's desk by tomarow if you would…"

"Of course sir," Ian said smoothly, and exited the room with his typical graceful walk. Mina cocked an eyebrow at her XO, demanding an explination. "I'm already going to have to keep a damn close eye on the intel section, if he found out that Felix had just passed the moral fortitude command question… then I would have to remove him before the tour was over. Say what you will about him but he is a decent manager, if lazy and uninspired."

"I hadn't thought about that. Thanks for the cover. Now, Congratulations Felix, you just passed the first make or break test on the way to commanding a Battlestar," Mina said casually. "You had the moral courage to speak truth to power, a quality that high command looks for in its Battlestar commanders."

"And now was the appropriate time to test me?" Felix asked, clearly skeptical.

"Yes, it was," Mina said flatly. "What we are dealing with is a slow moving, but critical situation. If we mishandle this there will be consequences, but time is not an issue. The veracity of the situation could be used to reinforce the test, while the slow moving nature of the event means that if you had screwed up Orion and I would still have time to take the appropriate action. That said, I would like to hear your thoughts on when we should contact high command. I have an idea of when it should be, as does Orion, but no one else has had the guts to raise the issue with me yet, so I have been limited in my available sounding boards."

"I think…" Felix trailed off as his brow furrowed in concentration. He blew out a breath and ran a hand through his hair before he continued. "I think that with the alerting of the local forces we can hold off on informing high command at the moment. All we have is that there is an object, and a lot of speculation. Once we have something solid on the object, or its builders, then we can start talking about high command but given what we have? There would be no point."

"You don't think that finding this object is important?" Orion asked with a raised eyebrow. He had been quietly arguing that Mina needed to get a courier off to high command ASAP, without much success.

"Of course the object is important, that doesn't change the fact high command would be impotent to influence events way out here. What would they do? What could they do?" Felix answered with an uncomfortable shrug. "We have five Battlestar Groups in the area already. That's a major fleet deployment for peacetime, so while I'm sure they would like to be informed, they wouldn't do anything with the information."

"You don't think they would ready the reserves for a possible call up?"

"With Adar in office and just itching for a reason to cut the fleet in favor of one of the federal social programs in order to prop up his image as compassionate after he fraked up the teachers strike so spectacularly?" Felix's voice was filled with cynical humor. His insight was wrong by Mina's reckoning, after all he didn't have access to the gossip passed in high command yet, but that he had made the political calculation at all was impressive. Most commanders didn't start thinking in terms of politics effecting them till after they had commanded their first major unit for a year or two.

"Given the way that Adar threw the Marines under the bus after that strike… a call up would be a major distraction from the way he's being hammered in the press I think that the Admirals wouldn't do anything for the opposite reason that you're thinking of. Given that its common knowledge that the Marines orders were leaked from high command and not the political side, despite the orders being presidential should tell you something," Mina said with a slight laugh. "They would keep this under wraps until it was leaked right before the election as something that Adar and his administration suppressed."

"Really? I know you're anti federalist Mina but the Admiralty isn't that politically involved," Orion said with a sigh.

"They are that vindictive though. They won't care who's elected, just that its not Adar or one of his cronies." Mina shook her head. "The letters I've been getting from home make it very clear that everyone in high command wants to murder the man at the moment. Especially since he's using his fraked up orders to the marines as a crowbar in order to break into the fleets budget."

"That I wasn't aware of…"

 

[GSpectre]

AN: And now we get to see the Cylon reaction to the Colonials finding a Devils Gate… what fun! Also some more dark hints about just what the Centurions are involved in without telling their Biological companions. Just an FYI, my editing time hasn't been as plentiful for the past week or two, so I might slow down to one update a week.

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"What the frak…" Sarah said aloud as she contemplated the pictures being transmitted by the Raiders. AN easy task in the virtual world, she simply opened as many views as she could handle and gave them a once over. Switching between Raider viewpoints did nothing to change her confusion over what was occurring. She wished that it was just one of them malfunctioning, their sensors reporting false data, as that would have been easier to understand then what she was seeing. It seemed that all of the colonial ships had just switched off their running lights, and all their external illumination. It was a very confusing move to anyone who was used to living and working in space. A civilian might have thought that it increased the stealth capabilities of a fleet, but they were civilians and such idiocy was to be expected from them, switching off your running lights in deep space just made cooperative operations harder. Especially flight ops, which was the central pillar of any Colonial fleet. This seemed like a lot of hassle for no gain to her.



"005-35168 wasn't talking out of its ass," Karen commented as her avatar materialized next to Sarah's. "I saw this in a download I got from it… it's an old Virgon imperial navy tradition."



"You managed to get a download from a Centurion without wanting to blow your brains out to deal with the pain? I'm impressed," Sarah commented sourly. She avoided getting downloads from their metallic brethren because they thought so differently that sorting through such a download took days and gave you massive migraines to deal with. Those migraines persisted even after you had integrated the data. They were the reason why Centurions and bio models remained distinctive ethnicities with the Cylon Consensus. Despite the best efforts of both the Centurions and Bio models best scientists it was a persistent problem that refused to go away. For some reason a biological brain just couldn't process information the way that a Centurion could, and from the complaints that Sarah had heard the Centurions had issues with downloads that came from Bio models.



"I had a week of free time," Karen commented lightly, bellying the pain she had experienced for the knowledge. "I figured it would be important so I went ahead."



"Thank you for that," Sarah acknowledged the sacrifice that her sister had made. "So why the hell are they doing that?"



"It's physiological, the same reason why they should be, and probably are, lowering their internal lights. It's all a game to make damn sure that everyone knows they're now on a war footing." Karen spoke soberly as she considered what she was seeing. "I'll bet if we got a Raider in close with a radiological sensor they would tell us that she's broken out the nukes."



"War footing?"



"As you say. Full war footing with nukes in the que even if they aren't in the tubes." Karen paused and then continued with more than a hint of apprehension. "I do wonder just what set her off. For all her attempts to get her force ready for any form of confrontation this is the first time she's raised the alert level for the whole fleet…."



"Jump!" Sarah pointed out quickly in a strained voice as she noted that while the military assets had just jumped the civilian ships remained in their position. "I would say that she found something considering she left all of the civilian ships here without any protection. Have we decoded enough of their wireless traffic in order to find out where they went?"



"Negative," Karen answered her face tightening noticeably. "Their encryption tripled on communication with the fleet train and they are using something we haven't seen before to talk to their combat ships. I hope you have an ace up your sleeve for this, otherwise we're going to be stuck watching the civilian fleet while the military ships go off and do who knows what."



"We can't break their encryption?" Sarah froze, every assumption that she had made about the differences in capability were hastily reexamined as she saw her preconceptions crumble. Despite what she had said to her fellow Cylons she had believed that the colonials would remain ignorant of their insecure communications in the event of a war. She had in fact been counting on that, and to lose that safety net was a rude shock.



"Breaking through what they used to communicate with the civilians now, it's a bit more complicated but still something that we can crack. Just takes more time and greater mental resources for the hybrid…" Karen frowned as she concentrated on the data stream and then cursed under her breath. "Military traffic though? That's a no go. They're using what looks like a series of one time pads… though how they are doing that with wireless transmissions I have no idea. They certainly couldn't do it during the Liberation war."



"Frak… so no easy way to follow them." Sarah thought hard, trying to remember just every trick she had learned to follow a fleet through a FTL jump. The problem was it was a non-trivial exercise. Without at least some idea of where they were going a fleet that went FTL disappeared for all intents and purposes. "None of the Raiders who were positioned to catch them if they did another light second jump have reported in?"



"No, they're gone," Karen's voice was hard, as if she recognized that her commander was on the verge of panic and was mentally preparing herself to step in and take command should that panic become an issue.



"Frak… Hybrid," Sarah took a deep breath and addressed the Hybrid directly. It wasn't something that she was wont to do, as she had deep misgivings about the hybrids. It wasn't that she doubted their utility or their loyalty, it's that she had ethical concerns about their existence that the Centurions didn't seem to grasp, or have any real interest in answering. Deep in her heart of hearts Sarah was morally certain that the Hybrids were not competent to volunteer for military service. "Do you have access to program FTL prediction version three?"



"Axial hydrogen flow at forty seven percent… the great circle draws to its logical conclusion… increasing oxygenation decks three thru eight… all this has not happened before… power to gravitonic drive decreased by one point four three three percent…will this happen again?… I am the ship… the ship is me… all that is contained within is in my purview…" the Hybrids distorted thoughts flowed down the data link. Sarah grimaced as she was reminded yet again that the Hybrids were not all there. They could see more than most, but in seeing more they lost their sense of reality. At least that was the way that she understood the situation.



"Sarah?" Karen asked softly, letting her concern show. She was well aware of just how uncomfortable her nominal senior officer was with the Hybrids. After all the two of them had sat down and had a very long discussion about the morality of both the Hybrids and the Raiders. While she was uncomfortable with the Raiders due to their limited intelligence and singular nature Sarah found the Hybrids more disturbing.



"It needs to be done," Sarah answered while closing her eyes and inclining her head. "Execute the program, please."



"Initializing… Raider 259 received five hours air…. Error, Hierarchal pruning occurring, secondary systems operating at twenty percent capacity… it hurts, stop it… forcible compartmentalization of thought strands complete… imposition of order… HELENA…"



"Abort program, override five delta echo Zulu Zulu nine three!" Sarah snapped out once she got over her shock. She knew that it was possible to torture someone in virtual, but she had never seen something as simple as a running program cause this kind of distress in a Hybrid. It was a sobering experience for her, as she was forced to reevaluate her thoughts on the virtual world. What had been an escape and useful tool suddenly looked like a mine field she had been unknowingly dancing in. Even beyond her concern for the Hybrid all Sarah could think about was what would have happened if she had tried to run that program, and if there were programs meant for the bio Cylons that would do the same thing to them.



"The stars sing again… pain recedes like a river back to its banks… resumption of function in forty eight hours… coordinates dispatched to Raider scouts… Alien thoughts and impulses recede… thank you big sister…"



"What the frak was that!" Karen asked in shock. She had never seen something that hurt a hybrid in the virtual world. She had seen them hurt when their ships were damaged, but to see one hurt in virtual? That was an unnerving experience.



"It was supposed to be a predictive program, supposedly one that can predict where a FTL jump comes out… Even if it works as advertised I hope they killed the frak wit who wrote it or at least the one who approved it." Sarah said even as she attached warning labels by the dozen to the offending file. This was either deliberate in which case multiple people needed to die, or accidental in which case only the frak wit who had approved the program for general distribution needed to be dealt with, permanently.



"You mean boxed them, death doesn't affect us unless we let it and I can't see a person who likes to hurt hybrids allowing that bit of cultural inertia to stop them from inflicting pain." Karen answered back promptly.



"No I mean kill them, erase them from existence as an object lesson to the next hundred generation of forks that some things come at too high a cost." Sarah answered back, just waiting to see if the Raider returned with results. If it didn't then she was more than tempted to search down whomever had written this program personally and express her opinion of it on their body. If it was a Centurion then, well she knew they could be tortured in virtual, but if it was a bio model… her fertile imagination was busy inventing new ways to inflict pain.



"Raiders back… it worked."



"Thank god I didn't do that for nothing."



"Any clue what's there?"



"None…"



"Raider sweep, Backed up by a few Heavy Raiders, the ones with the recon package?"



"You read my mind."

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Two hours after their virtual conference Karen walked down the halls of the explorer class Basestar that she called home and tried to contain her nervousness. For all their planning, and all their speculation they had never really thought that this moment would come. The Colonials had found a Devils Gate. Karen kept her face impassive and her emotions off the local net by sheer force of will, otherwise she would be joining her commanding officer in despair.



Speaking of her commanding officer she shook her head as she looked over the women. Sarah was slumped over a table with an open bottle of Ambrosia by her hand. It was a colonial vintage, telling Karen that Sarah had gone straight for the good stuff. Bio models rarely drank, but when they did it was usually their own product. Getting good booze from the colonies was too much of a bother so they saved what little they did get for special occasions or moments of complete despair.



"Pull up a seat and grab a glass," Sarah said from her position face down in her arms on the table. "It's not like it matters much anymore…"



"Despair so early?" Karen replied trying to snark her friendly rival out of her mood. She did accept the glass offer though, pouring herself a generous measure of the amber liquid. "It hasn't…"



"Bite your tongue!" Sarah said looking up with a flash of panic. "With the way our luck has been running? God will hear you and send something to frak with us for that comment."



"Alright, aright," Karen gave her an apologetic smile. "Seriously though, what has you so down about this? We might have to disappear from this region of space but really? Unlike the colonials or the One consensus we aren't attached to this part of space. We can pick up and move as needed, or even if we just want to."



"Have you looked at their deployment?" Sarah asked contemplatively after she took a pull directly from the bottle. "The two Berzerks are out front, mid ranged away from the Devils Gate, with the Orion, at least our best guess of where it is, in close using its full stealth mode. The Direa is deployed outside of known weapons range, but it is perfectly positioned to jump in with guns blazing if needed. For someone who has no idea just what a Pandora's Box she is poking I have to respect commander Harkis. From her reactions to the unknown, she's a damned sharp cookie… and I'm going to have to sit here and watch as she and her entire task force is slaughtered by what comes out of that Gate."



"I know you eights are empathic to a very high degree but…" Karen paused and took a drink, grimacing as she felt the liquor burn down her throat. "They're colonials. Not our people, not our problem."



"Except they are going to be our problem, especially when they get driven insane." Sarah paused for a second looking around before continuing. "I can tell you with absolute certainty how a confrontation between us and the One Consensus would end. We would take a fair number of casualties. With horrible luck perhaps up to half the fleet, because of their numbers, but we would win in the end. The Ones are idiots when it comes to command. Not to mention that they are micromanaging assholes who have lobotomized their main striking arm."



"You think it will go that way? I know they have the numbers over us and we have the same tech base."



"They lobotomized the Raiders and the Centurions, that gives us the ground fighting outright… in space? Have you ever wondered just why we are so fighter heavy? The colonials taught us early in the war that heavy metal on its own couldn't win. Just about our only victories came from using our small craft. We might have had to use ten times as many fighters to get the results that they got, but we did it. It's the reason why we invested so much in the new Raiders, why we put a jump drive on them, and why they can carry radiologicals. Given that ours can think, and theirs can't? I expect that the exchange rate in terms of small craft will be almost colonial in our favor and that's before our Raiders execute a few jump and nuke attacks." Sarah paused to take another drink and then continued with her rant. "Give a chimp the best gun in the world they will still lose to a human with a rock. Equipment only matters if you know how to use it and I can tell you categorically that the One Consensus? They had the knowledge of just how to use their equipment deleted. Check the Intel summery we get from the Centurions, it's a bit dense but it's in there."



"So you think the colonials are more dangerous still doesn't explain your… stance on their destruction."



"They're beautiful," Sarah said softly. "They can hardly comprehend the universe and yet they have created a race. Oh they fraked it all up with the slavery thing, but they made us. Ignorant and grasping in their ignorance they have created life, guided it even, and then released said uniqueness into the universe instead of exterminating it. Say what you will about the Liberation war but they were on the verge of winning when the Armistice came down. If things had kept going the way that they were, one day we were going to be able to sit across a table from them and actually talk. If you ask the Centurions they will tell you that's why we, the bio models, exist to begin with. We were supposed to be the interface through which the Colonials and Centurions would work out their differences. Think about all the knowledge that we could have obtained, how many possibilities that were and are now nothing more than vacuum. To make matters worse not only are the positive possibilities gone but the chances that we will annihilate one another have gone through the roof. Things were getting better, we were getting ready to finally talk and understand one another, and now we're probably going to end up killing each other."



"And the slavery…"



"How long have we been exploring the universe and just how many races have we run across? How many burned out worlds have we seen? How many sectors classified as too dangerous to even approach?" Sarah looked morbidly at her bottle. "I can't tell you the exact numbers but I know it's high. When we found the Devils we were so happy. Finally we were not alone with our creators in the universe, and then we found out the cruel truth; our creators for all their hubris and cruelty were the nicer of our options. There is hope that someday we will be able to sit across from our creators at a table and actually talk with them, can you say that we will ever consider that for the devils after what they have done?"



"Opportunities," Karen acknowledged sadly with a lift of her glass. "It might not come to pass you know?"



"A vanishingly small possibilities, how many Devils Gates have we studied with the same results?"



"Too many."

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005-35168 reporting to the consensus. Flash priority. Colonial expedition has located a devils gate. Project soul restrained from interactions at this time. Once colonial devil interactions observed will release the thought lock. More units with command access requested to monitor the situation. Request priority fork of all Bio models be made as a control. Unpredictability and data corruption a strong possibilities at the time. By your command, the Data Flows.

 

[GSpectre]

AN: A lower decks episode to see how life in the fleet is being effected. I hope I'm beginning to lay the groundwork to show the Harkis isn't the best commander around, and that while competent she does have problems. Secondly I would like the thank Visual Pun over on SV for making me think about how I had written the Colonials and Cylons reactions to the possibility of alien life. More importantly letting me know I needed to communicate this to the reader rather than just having it in my head. Just an FYI of where I'm coming from, the colonials experience is that the universe may be harsh, but it is inherently hopeful for them; the evidence they have is that the universe is if not benign then at least looking out for them. All of the times that the human race has been threatened they did it to themselves. To the Colonials the biggest threat to the human race, is the human race. The Cylons on the other hand, believe the universe to be hostile. Their racial experience is not nearly as hopeful as that of the colonials, and the universe continues to this day to go out of its way to shit on them (See the Vorlons-One interactions). Hopefully that comes out in this chapter.

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"It's been almost a month… I think we need to call in scientists and let the techs get back to doing their fracking job," Hector Olevanova stated flatly as he maneuvered around one of the ten nuke armed Raptors of Apollo flight. Ever since they had gone to condition two the old lady had insisted that there be nuke armed Raptors at five minutes ready status, this week it was Apollo flights turn. Given the demands on the deck crew, what with the continuation of the Battlestars usual mission on top of all of the extra war preparations that the old lady had demanded, it was wearing to maintain. Not only did the deck crew have to services half again the number of Raptors that the Direa usually carried. On top of the increase in numbers the old lady had everyone running flat out, with Raptors flying three to four times as many sorties as they usually did. The added need to constantly go over the ready Raptors, and more importantly their nuclear payload, was pushing the deck crew close to their breaking point.

"Chill Chief," Cassandra Hilddauttir said calmly. Having been with the chief for a tour already she recognized the signs of a stressed out chief and began to distract him with gossip, a tactic that had proven effective last tour. "I heard from one of the ECO's who was relegated to flying shuttles, after he missed one of the mid spaces during that last series of exercises, that Greg's team managed to open up the computer compartment on the artifact…"

"New gossip! Give!" Ronald Grimm seemed to bounce even if he was under the Raptor that they were servicing. He was checking the connections between the hard points and the nukes, an easy enough job if there was nothing wrong with the connections. It did require some concentration since putting an active probe on the wrong wire would arm one of the nukes. None of the deck crew wanted to be in charge of disarming a live nuke on their deck, or being included in the dressing down that would come from on high should one need to be disarmed. "I could use the distraction."

"I haven't heard, could it be that the chiefs grape vine is behind the techs? Such a breach of tradition… Histrionics aside, give, I want to know," Hector grunted out as he flipped open one of the electric panels and began to test the circuits contained within. It was a tedious and annoying task, but one that needed to be done every six hours if the Raptor was considered to be at five minutes ready status. Anything that distracted him was welcome. Unlike Ronald's job his was just mindless repetition with the worst possible consequence being that he needed to pull and replace a board.

"Okay, keep in mind that some of this is coming from the hull side gossip chain so take it with a grain of salt but…" Cassandra grinned wickedly as she began to talk. "Gregg and his wrench monkeys finally managed to get the paneling open, apparently without breaking anything. According to Ross what they found was that the computer system is totally crystal based, nothing like what we use."

"I thought there was some work done on Caprica with crystal based systems to replace the lead lined systems we have been using…" Ronald said with a grunt.

"No clue. I'm just reporting what I heard." Cassandra shrugged. "The boss lady apparently was cursing up a storm when it was reported to her, not to mention what the XO said."

"The XO?" Hector asked, looking very suddenly interested. He always enjoyed a good XO story, especially one where the XO came off the worse. He was especially interested given the dressing down he had gotten last week for cutting corners. Sometimes he wondered if senior officers lived in the same universe as the rest of the crew, it simply wasn't possible to do the multiple jobs that were being asked of the crew without cutting a few corners, so he felt that his chewing out hadn't been in any way deserved. It wasn't like he had cut any of the important corners, just the extraneous ones, he did have enough experience to know the difference.

"According to Sally," Cassandra named her friend who was a rating charged with keeping the plotting table in CIC up to date. Everyone who was working on the Raptor sat up at that, Cassandra almost never named who she got her gossip from, so this must be good. It was also probably very accurate, given that they knew Cassandras friend Sally was in charge of updating the big plotting table in the CIC. "Both the XO and the Intel officer were cursing up a storm over Gaeta being right. So the tasty dish turns out to be a smart cookie was well as not being completely insane. You know that everyone thought he was after he pushed the alien theory, either that or he had watched too many of those old church sponsored Gemenese vids, you know the ones where the answer always comes from the wife of the fifth or sixth link in the chain marriage?"

"Don't need to hear this," Hector moaned. "I don't care who you're fracking Cassandra, I just don't want to hear it. I thought we had agreed on this."

"I can say that he's a tasty dish. I'm not fraking him after all, wish I was though… have you seen him? Anyways, turns out that command has basically confirmed that the alien theory, you know the one we all thought was completely insane? Seems to be the most likely at the moment. How insane is that? Both the Cylon theory and the lost colonial theory have been put on the back burner as the evidence adds up." Cassandra dropped that bombshell without blinking. "Hull side techs have been opening up the flag quarters… Apparently the old lady wants the scientists to be based here. From the way that the gossip is running it has something to do with their ships not having survivability if it comes to a fight. That should give you an idea of just how worried she is about this object."

"Leaving Cassies excitable taste in vids aside," Ronald said with a grunt as he opened on of the pylons connection panels to begin another series of tests. "The whole situation is something straight out of a vid, I mean aliens? Really? We've been in space for a long time and this is the first time we've seen any evidence of that they were more than the deranged imagination of a prophet high on chamalla."

"Hey, coming from someone who watches those Piconese abominations you have no right to criticize my taste in vids. At least mine only last for an hour or two, as opposed to stretching for more than a day in a shameless attempt to stretch the plot longer for money." Cassandra sniped back. "It is nice to be able to see the wonder of the universe again though."

"Right up until these aliens try to kill us," Hector said with a sad shake of his head.

"Nah, the boss lady is taking precautions against that," Ronald replied. "Besides every time there has been a real threat to the human race we made it. Cylons? We created them. Kobol? Civil war if you believe the scrolls. The universe has always been kind to us, hell look at the system we found after we had to flee from Kobol, twelve inhabitable worlds?"

"The gods watch out for their people," Cassandra stated with a shrug. "It's why we put up with their antics."

"As if they have been seen since Kobol," Ronald began to start in on the more religious tech but Hector interrupted. Religious fights were always the worst to deal with, especially when the people involved had to work closely together.

"I had wondered why Henry was bitching so badly about needed to re arraign his portion of the deck…" Hector frowned a bit as he spoke. Henry was the chief in charge of shuttles, it was a position that Hector considered to be an easy job. One that was built for slackers, and Henry had lived down to that assumption so far this cruise. As such he had no sympathy for the other chief, especially considering just how much work his own crew was being forced to do. The number of shuttles that were carried by the Direa wasn't that high, and despite their size checking one out took about as much time as checking out a Raptor. Henry could get off his ass and work as far as Hector was concerned.

Quite frankly in Hectors opinion having the Direas crew being the only personnel trusted with the potentially alien object, and wasn't it a kick in the pants how easily he had started to consider the object alien, was an honor that he could do without. Oh, he understood just why the old lady had gone that way. He had worked on Raptors from the Hart and Impala, so he was well aware that their crews were not up to snuff, but the loss of skilled personnel made doing his own job a bit harder then he liked. Especially given the cruising conditions that were being imposed. He could see the point of sailing under wartime cruising conditions given the uncertainty of their position, but he was of the opinion that they should either be buttoned up for war or investigating not both.

If they were buttoned up for war the Hector and his people would be able to get everything squared away. As it stood minor issues on the birds he was responsible for were being let slide because the techs just didn't have the time to deal with them. Having a Raptor pull an eight hour patrol and then sixteen or less hours later fly off again meant that only the most critical maintenance was being done. He wasn't worried about any of the Birds shitting the bed yet, but pretty soon he was going to have to talk with flight ops and get them pulled on a rotating basis to deal with the issues that were accumulating. Alternately if the old lady went back to just exploring then the Raptors which were being held at ready status could be put into rotation allowing him to deal with the issues that way. There also should be a general slowing down in operational tempo, but with the Old Lady you never knew which way she would jump. Either way the load on the deck crew would be cut in half if she would just make up her fraking mind.

"It will be good to get the deck buttoned back up," Hector pronounced with finality.

"So say we all," Cassandra and Ronald agreed fervently. Both of them were more than ready for their rather extended shifts to be cut down to something a bit more reasonable.

 

[GSpectre]

AN: A wild update appears, contrary to my expectations I was able to get a least a bit of work done on the tablet, no matter how much I hate it. Additional thanks need to go to Tryglaw who generously volunteered to try and correct my rampant grammar and spelling problems by BETAing this bit.

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Commander Mina Harkis looked around the diplomatic briefing room she had appropriated yet again. Orion, her XO, was slumped in his chair to her right with his head cradled in his hands. Her intelligence officer, Ian Avery, had joined him while her tactical officer looked at his superiors with a smirk. When the object had begun to yield its secrets he had been proven correct, a fact that he was currently enjoying gloating over. Of course, everyone was well aware that he had only taken that position because he was so junior that it was allowed, still no one really begrudged him his illusion of victory. Of course he wasn't the only one basking, Commander William Ostroth and his people were spread out around the table, quietly chatting amongst themselves and enjoying the atmosphere of the Direa. Compared to the wet heat of their own ship this was a vacation and they intended to enjoy every minute of it. Even if they did have to do a bit of work in order to earn this congenial atmosphere.



William hadn't made the best impression when he arrived, but once the alien artifact had been discovered he dropped the political games like a hot tuber. His Amun was the best equipped ship in the Battlestar group to investigate it, and he had performed very well for a man that Mina had dismissed as a political flunky. She had known intellectually that the Orion class Battlestars were sensor ships par excellence, but to see it put into practice was something else. It seemed that there was a reason why most of the asteroid routes back in the colonies were clear. There also had been the bit where she had been forced to revise her opinion of William. He had come to her within a day of beginning his investigation of the object and called bullshit on the story she had been spreading through the fleet that the object was built by one of the numerous colonial groups who had tried to pull an exodus. She still thought that he was a tool, but she had revised her opinion somewhat. Now she considered him an intelligent tool, one that was dangerous if not correctly handled.



The Orion classes mission had shifted to a pure ELINT and stealth scout role before the Cylon war ended. Being a Tauron design had been detrimental to the idea of them being retained by the line fleet. The Orions had never been designed as a front line ship, but when you added the prejudice against Tauron designs to their niche role they had been decommissioned before the shooting had stopped. The casualties suffered by the Trireme class Battlestars had ensured that no Tauron design would be accepted by the Colonial Military. That designs spectacular failure coupled with the Tauron government's willingness to take casualties beyond what others thought acceptable had allowed the other Colonies to freeze them out of the military shipbuilding market. There might not be many of Orions around, but they always performed, and had come to dominate their niche. Of course the new Kumiho subclass of the Aesir were beginning to challenge that dominance, but even so the Orions would not be retired for years. The line fleet were the ones who found pirate vessels, and attacked them, ONI vessels were the ones who found the pirate bases. Even the most conservative and reactionary line admiral would be leery of reducing ONI's budget allocation for that reason. They were instrumental in ending pirate threats, rather then just containing them. Not to mention their successful penetration of Cylon space. The Orions didn't have a fighting compliment, or guns, but their sensor suite was second to none. When you wanted a recon run done right they were the ships to send. Not even a brand new Mercury had as many sensor systems, or as many people dedicated to interpreting those sensors readouts, as an ONI refitted Orion.



Since the combat ships of her Battlestar group had jumped into the system with the alien artifact, Mina had made damn sure that the Amun and her excellent sensor suite was less than three hundred miles away from the alien artifact at all times. William and his crew had gone in under complete stealth and gotten a complete scan of the object, and continued to passively scan while the investigative crews landed on it and began their more direct investigation. Of course, they had needed to drop their stealth and vent heat at regular intervals in order to function as a ship. That was a process William was delaying in favor of more time on station, he wanted the safety that stealth offered more than he cared about his or the crew's comfort. While William might have liked to keep his ship at a more comfortable temperature, keeping his ship safe from a completely unknown danger came first. The excessive heat and humidity meant that just about every officer who could had included themselves in this conference. It represented a chance to get out of the Amun's sauna-like conditions while still attending their duties.



"So, crystal computers and a completely unknown set of alloys as construction materials… I think we can officially classify this as an alien construct," Mina said with a touch of sadistic cheer, giving her XO and intelligence officer a shark-like smile. "That said, what do we know for sure about this?"



"Aside from the fact that it's alien, and those aliens are at least as advanced as us? Ab-so-fraking-lutely nothing." Kara Chance answered sourly. The older woman's greying hair was in a tight bun coupled with her frumpy slightly overweight appearance making her look like a small town librarian, but Mina was unwilling to allow her appearance to distract her into discounting Kara's undeniable expertise. After all she had a service record that stretched back to the Cylon war, all of it in ONI and on Orions. If there was a more experienced analysist in the fleet then Mina didn't know of them. Certainly there weren't any who had the extensive list of publications to their name that Kara had.



"Expand if you would," Mina turned towards the older women with a slight nod of respect.



"We know that this is old, that the metallurgical component is unknown to us, their power systems use unfamiliar materials for fission, and that it responds in some way every time we hit it with DRADIS." Kara said in a calm voice. "This is all we are able to confirm with certainty. We can speculate beyond this, but I want it on the record that this is the limit of our confirmation."



"The metallurgical analysts insist that the metallurgy involved is less advanced then ours," Elan Verbretta said softly, trying to shrink down in his seat as the two women turned on him with matching looks of predation. "That is what they have reported, they wrote it down and signed their names to it so…"



"They're all amateurs and are thinking purely in human terms. The crystallization of the alloys could in fact be a sign of ageing, or it could be a sign that the thought process that produced this artifact is different from our own, or it could be a function of whatever this device is supposed to do." Kara was trying and failing to let the young officer down with a gentle reprimand for thinking inside the box.



"I thought that it had been confirmed that this was a listening device of some sort," Ian spoke up, his head cocked to the side in confusion as he spoke.



"Speculated, confirmation has so far avoided us," William spoke up in defense of his people. He glanced at Mina and shared a look of commiseration. Being an ONI officer he had gotten a first had experience of Ian's incompetence. "There have been more than a few papers circulated that contain nothing but speculation, we have been throwing everything at the wall to see what fits, because the clues we have about this object? Are thin on the ground."



"Especially since it is not a colonial derived object," Kara interjected. "I know we are attributing it to aliens at the moment, but it could be from the Thirteenth Tribe."



"Given there is more than four thousand years of cultural separation between ourselves and our supposed brethren on Earth, if they exist, then they might as well be aliens," Mina commented idly as she brought up an image of the object on her pad. "I don't like the way that it seems to keep itself aligned with the Colonies… can you tell me anything about that?"



"It's actually two degrees off a true line with the colonies, and has been correcting itself at the rate of a hundredth of a degree away from the colonies with every DRADIS sweep we hit it with." Elan said with an expression of a kicked puppy looking for a reward. "It's part of the reason we have continued to hit it with DRADIS when the scientists aren't on it even if doing so effectively blinds our sensors for five minutes. No one is comfortable with it being pointed at the Colonies."



"Expand on that, give me the best speculation you have at the moment," Mina said in a deceptively mild tone. Kara glanced at William and started to say something only to subside at his head shake. Mina turned towards the other commander with a raised eyebrow, silently demanding an answer.



"We are hesitant to classify what exactly is occurring because our knowledge is derived from our experience over the line as it were…" William said softly, glancing at the Direa officers, many of whom he didn't know the level of classified material they were cleared for.



"Tachyon-based radio of some sort then," Felix was staring too hard at his pad to notice the alarmed looks he got from all of the ONI people and his own commanding officer. "Though why that would interfere with DRADIS I'm unclear on, perhaps because the two systems use similar particles to achieve effective faster than light data transmission rates and therefore interfere with each other? I don't think we had that problem when we experimented with the idea on Caprica though…"



"They did have an interference problem," Kara chuckled as she relaxed. She could tell where the young tac officer was coming from, and it was clear that he was drawing his conclusions from his own field of expertise and not from a data breach. "That's part of the reason why the first years of the Cylon War were such a mess. The transmitters on Tauron and Caprica screwed with DRADIS throughout the Colonies right up until the Cylons captured the sites and dismantled the transmitters. Since they also killed every known member of the original team, and it was such a hazard for both sides during the war, no one has been willing to fund a continuation of their research."



"On our side of the line…" William muttered just barely loud enough for Mina to hear, she inclined her head indicating that she understood his message and that he should feel free to continue. "Given that we have investigated this phenomenon before, even if the team was lost during the war, then the particle physicists should be able to assist us in decrypting this puzzle. Along with, perhaps, a more professional level of metallurgical expertise?"



"Have we reached the end of what we can determine without actual scientists?" Mina raised both of her eyebrows in surprise. It hadn't been that long since they had arrived in system. There was no way that all of the tests the fertile imaginations on that ship could think up had been exhausted.



"No, but we have reached the end of the low hanging fruit," Kara said while sharing a look with her commanding officer. "The limit on that is the extent of our education. The thinking is that if we bring in scientists they will gather more of said low hanging fruit simply by having a greater breadth of knowledge then we in the military have while we progress on the more time consuming analysis and testing."



"Basically our thinking is that if you want to continue to see a steady drum beat of results then bring in the scientists…" William shrugged lightly. "We could get lucky and see results tomorrow from something we did yesterday, but at this point I'm not expecting that to happen. It's going to turn into a marathon in terms of deciphering the object, and in order to start strong then I, and my staff, have to recommend getting the best personnel possible on the case. Much as I hate to admit it, the civilian scientists are much more suited to a long term study of the object then we are."

 

[GSpectre]

AN: Again thanks to @Tryglaw who took a crack at BETAing the first round of revisions to this. Also as an acknowledgement a lot of my view of the Dilgar and how they worked as a species is drawn fromLightning_Count epic par excellence The Dilgar War (If you haven't read it… go, it is well worth the time it takes), with additional influence of my reading on the WWII IJN. Do not expect them to be nice or cuddly.

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Battle Master Tua'ra looked out of the observation window in her planning cabin and contemplated the vagaries of fate. It was an action that she undertook every time she saw the twisted, incomprehensible form of hyperspace. After two years on the run she found herself doing it more often, almost as if it was a subconscious reaction to the mission's ever growing demands. What had sounded like an easy assignment, quick to complete and certain of success, had turned out to be a nightmare. One made worse by the fact she was supposed to have been given an easy mission after the death of her Warmaster. Tal'Arin might not have been much of a Warmaster, and he certainly owed his position more to his support for the Shan family and their protégé Jha'Dur then any real talent of his own, but he had been her superior and in an odd way friend. The survivor's guilt that had been with her since she had heard of the destruction of her ship, and the death of her Warmaster, was with her as an ever present shroud. After two years the pain was beginning to fade, but she had still been in shock when she had been conscripted for this task and hadn't paid as much attention to the details as she should have. She had foolishly chosen to trust that High Command would get things right, despite knowing how inept they could be at times. Once again her species had vastly underestimated the difficulties involved in what they sought to accomplish.


At least this time she, and her fleet, had some proper support from High Command. Warmaster Jha'Dur had diverted what resources she could to the project. Although at the end, the support she could give was minimal. Calling Jha'Dur a monster was probably fair, if you weren't Dilgar then it was to be expected, but not even her most fervent enemies thought that she was an idiot. She had started planning and squirreling away supplies for a refugee fleet almost as soon as she realized that High Command did not intend to keep the humans out of the war by diplomatic means. It was a decision that both Tal'Arin and Jha'Dur had questioned. That Tua'ra had openly questioned the decision in line with her Warmaster, more openly after he had been killed, had landed her with command of this fleet.


It had started off with fifteen ships and a little more than fifty thousand Dilgar. All young, fit, and of prime breeding age. Jha'Dur had also included a massive biological lab, it's support structure, and more than a million fertilized zygotes, not to mention frozen ova and sperm. If they had found a planet then they would be set from a genetic diversity standpoint. Even if they had technologically backslid a bit, which was a very real possibility given that they theoretically did not have the numbers to sustain their tech base.


Unfortunately for the project, planets which the Dilgar could live on, or at the very least survive on with minimal technological support, were few and far between. So far, in two years of searching none had been found. Which brought Tua'ra's thoughts to her second problem. The civilian ships requisitioned for this expedition were approaching the end of their useful life. She needed to find a system that they could stop over in for at least a half a year in order to overhaul her ships and get them back into something approaching working order. The fleet was only being kept together at this point by her decision to cannibalize a full third of the original civilian fleet. Even after redistributing the loads those ships carried the fleet had still lost critical supplies and people. Tua'ra had been forced to abandon those ships, and their people, in order to preserve the remainder of her fleet.


Of course that brought up the issue that they couldn't really stop. Not with the Drahk and Minbari chasing after them. Tua'ra might have successfully fought off the Drahk's first attempt at the fleet, but it had taken three of her five advanced Sekhmet cruisers to fight the attack off. Tua'ra thanked the gods she didn't believe in daily that this had been the only time that one of their pursuers had caught up with them. They wouldn't survive another battle like that. Especially, since she was well aware that both of the species pursuing them were only interested in the biological lab.


One of the last reports that Tua'ra had gotten out of the 3rd Section's network before she and her fleet had left Known Space had been about the kidnapping of Jha'Dur. It seemed that the Minbari wanted her expertise in biological and chemical weapons that the Dilgar had developed during their war with the League, and were willing to go to great lengths to get it. More worrying in her eyes were the lengths they had gone to conceal their success in capturing the Deathwalker. It was a worrying bit of Intel, especially to a Dilgar who had participated in the buildup to the war, and the war itself. The Minbari appeared to be hiding their strength and biding their time to go on a conquering jag, in a manner eerily reminiscent of what the Dilgar themselves had done.


Jha'Dur and Tua'ra had discussed the Minbari, especially after their contact with the Drahk during the buildup. They had never really trusted races with mysterious reputations, especially not those who were alleged to be heavyweight powers. Given the way that the Minbari acted, it had been Jha'Dur's theory that they were not as united as they wished the outside world to think they were, and actually fought with each other. There could be no other explanation in her mind, especially after she had caught and tortured an Anla'shok who had apparently been tasked with observing her. While Tua'ra trusted her mentor's sister, and certainly thought that Jha'Dur was smarter than she was, she had never agreed with the Minbari theory. She had instead hypothesized that the Minbari were a group of long ranged planers and thought that there would be another cataclysmic war soon. Given the prevalence of new races in their region of space she thought that the Minbari waited until a war occurred, preferably a general free for all war, and then moved in and annexed what they wanted. They spent the time between wars consolidating their position and building up their resources. In Tua'ra's mind that explained the Drahk, and their obsession with bringing down the Minbari.


Of course thinking about the Drahk brought a whole host of problems to her mind. As the Drahk viewed themselves as consummate puppet masters and manipulators, they valued stealth above all. She, and more than a few of her lieutenants, knew about the Drahk's involvement in the Dilgar war efforts and they were loose threads begging to be wrapped up by the secretive race. It explained their frantic, covert efforts to localize and destroy the refugee fleet. Tua'ra had actually managed to destroy three of their cruisers in hyperspace ambushes over the past two years. Her Semhkats had taken damage to do it, but the actions had both reinforced her control over the fleet, and proven that they were hunted to everyone.


Before she could continue down this mental blind alley, Tua'ra felt Or'Skath, one of her four precious personal SPECTREs, tense behind her. She had gotten used to living with a twenty four hour guard from the SPECTREs and had come to rely on them as an early warning system of things that were not right in her universe. It was a holdover from when there had been an Imperial army, and the constant covert wars of assassinations that the Supreme council, the Warmasters, the Army, and the Navy had waged with each other. Being the acknowledged protégé of Warmaster Tal'Arin she had been targeted for assassination more times than she cared to think of. Especially after she had been promoted to Battlemaster in the wake of her Warmaster's death. Jha'Dur, probably prompted by one of the Shan's, had responded by assigning some of the SPECTREs she had control over to her political allies' protégé to remind everyone in the Navy that she and the Shan family were not to be messed with, and that their people were similarly off limits. It also was a pointed reminder that she was now beholden to the Warmaster and her agenda.


"Battlemaster," Kah'Ron, an ensign, stated respectfully stopping out of sword reach from Tua'ra. "The Captain begs to report that there is a disturbance in the beacon net and requests your presence on the bridge."


"Inform the Captain that I will be with him shortly," Tua'ra replied firmly, not even bothering to turn around. She noted the young Ensign's departure in the reflection in the window that she had been looking out of. Once again she was reminded of just how painfully young her people were. The Ensign should have been in his final year at the naval academy, not on active service with three years of experience. Still, there was little that she could change now. "Come Or'Skath, it seems that a decision is needed on the bridge. Who knows, perhaps opportunity awaits? Wouldn't that be a nice change of pace?"


Or'Skath failed to answer, as all of the SPECTRES failed to answer when on duty. They still believed that their mission superseded all else, even after two years without a real threat. The Shan family, and Jha'Dur's, you could never forget her, had done an excellent job of training them. There were no finer spec ops soldier in the galaxy. Of course, without a true threat then even the finest edge would dull with complacency. Tua'ra just hopped that they would not be needed even after time dulled their edge away.


"Captain," Tua'ra said shortly, not letting the fact that the man was good at his job and that she approved of him show on her face or in her tone. Captain Ore'Nesh had been promoted to his position just before the fleet had fled, and some of his earlier practices had shown his inexperience clearly. While the man had grown into his role, Tua'ra wasn't about to let him think that she had forgotten about them.


"Battlemaster," Captain Ore'Nash replied with an abbreviated bow. It was a habit that he had yet to break. From Tua'ra's prospective his last ship had been a bit too formal, then again she wasn't a member of the nobility so what did she really know about formality? "We have been tracking what we assumed to be a defunct beacon chain, running parallel to the one we have been using for the past week, and it just lit up like the Imperial Palace on Founding Day."


"Interesting," Tua'ra commented while studying the screen where the chain was represented. "I presume you have queried them?"


"Yes Ma'am," Ore'Nash winced slightly as he admitted his uncertainty. "So far all we've gotten it that they are receiving gibberish. We have ordered them to do a full systems check since we have the protocol but… what they're getting from the gate they're linked too doesn't make any sense."


"We have the protocol? Which is it?" Tua'ra asked in a distracted tone. Something about this situation was tickling her memory, something that Tal'Arin had said in a moment of distraction. It was bothering her that she couldn't place it exactly.


"Standard, iteration two," Ore'Nash answered firmly. Tua'ra pursed her lips as she considered that. Standard iteration two was an old code, older than any of the races that she had ever interacted with directly, so long as you excepted the Drahk. This was an old chain of Hyper Beacons, and that it was still functional was something of a miracle. Or it was a trap of some sort. Mentally she dismissed her thought as a bout of paranoia.


"Switch the fleet to this new chain, but keep us within range of the chain we are on at the moment." Tua'ra spoke slowly, still sorting through her thoughts. "Ask for a full diagnostic including a gate opening, if you can do that from here. Also hit the tachyon radio transmitters and try sending the first contact package down the chain."


"Ma'am?" Ore'Nash asked diffidently, but with a cast to his expression making it clear he was not entirely convinced about this course of action. It was rather heartening to see him disagree with her, even in this subtle and correct manor. One of her own failings as a flag captain had been her inability to really challenge her Warmaster. Of course Tal'Arin had been in a class of his own, only the very best of the Dilgar could hope to stay in shouting range of him intellectually. His sister and a few of the Shans had managed, but that was it. To attempt to challenge him in a debate was folly of the highest order for Tau'ra, she just knew she wasn't smart enough.


"I've actually heard about a situation that mirrored this, when I was working for Tal'Arin before the war. During the Centari expansion they were drawn to a system by what sounded like random noise down a un explored line of hyper beacons. It's how they met the Abbai." Tua'ra said confidently. "Now if the fish had an ounce of self-preservation or species ambition, then they would have taken the Centauri ship and the galaxy would be a different place."


"First contact?" Ore'Nash asked with a raise eyebrow. "Bit ambitious for a bunch of refugees?"


"Not really. It's all going to be about how we sell this. We can get them to pay us for information in resources if they are too powerful to destroy right off the bat. Possibly even a bit of land…" Tua'ras smile was positively demonic as she continued. "Of course we have Jha'Dur's personal bio lab with the fleet and while we may lack her brilliance we do have all of her technicians and under researchers."


"A bioweapon when they least expect it then…" Ore'Nash pursed his lips in distaste. He was one of the more traditional officers in imperial service and the speed with which those who had not been born into the services resorted to weapons of mass destruction still disturbed him. In his mind one should gut one's opponent on the way into their house, not step over their still cooling corpse when one took over.


"Efficiency is to be prized when we have less than ten thousand military personnel." Tua'ra was well aware of her flag captains distaste for bio weapons. She actually counted on it, as the intellectual challenges he would pose to keep her from actually deploying it would make sure that it was deployed correctly. "Besides this is not a solid course of action rather just a thought at the moment, as we are not sure that my baseless speculation is in any way correct. We will see once we have more information."