Book 4 Prophecy: Chapter 6 The Search
“Jump Complete. Threat board is quiet. There may be a few long range targets hiding in the astroid field.”
“Launch Vipers. Get the reconnaissance birds out.” Commander Richards ordered.
“Flight deck get ready for combat landings. Put up the DRADIS repeaters. There are a lot of places we need to check out.”
“This is freighter Malcinor. We are getting some funky signals in sector 17. Something is out there.”
“Contacts. Two small toaster hulls. Missiles inbound. We got vampires.”
“Recall all birds. Combat landings. Get those frakking birds on the deck right frakking now.”
“Jump key is in. Nav computer is synced. Double checking the jump coordinates.”
“Birds are on the deck. Everything is green. We are ready to jump.”
“Jump the fleet. Civies first.”
“Jump complete. The threat board is clear. No unusual emissions.”
Commanders log: Commander Steven Evans recording.
Searching a vast quantities of space is hard on people and the equipment. We are consuming fuel and spare parts at a rapid pace. Everyone is exhausted. Nobody wants to think about the consequences of failing to find and rescue the Battlestar Mercury and her task force.
I have begun to encounter more Cylons in the area. We are not facing Frontline forces. Typically we are running into a lot of first war relics. They seem to be very fond of him behind astroids with nemesis class ships from the first war. Whenever the any of our forces jump into a system and try and set up a network or scan the system, they try to launch a missile salvo force an emergency jump.
The plan to set up a communications network through thousands of solar systems is not going very well either. I am, technically, temporary commander of the fleet I need to set up a vast network, to detect Cylon movements, and somehow report them back to base without being discovered by the enemy.
We cannot transmit across the grid to New Helios without giving away its location. There can be no integrated network. There needs to be hundreds of small networks. Some will be interconnected and some will not.
In order to get any data back to the Colonial Intelligence branch, there had to be a sort of electronic dead drop. A data package would then sometimes sit for weeks before it would get picked up. If they could set up a large number of networks, it might catch a hint of what happened to the Mercury.
Even if it could not achieve that objective, the network will function as an early warning system that might give us advance notice of a major Cylon invasion. Still, we need to be careful to spread the network out. The last thing we want to do was create a plot map that gave away the location of New Helios.
“Another damned dry hole,” Commander Evans slammed a clipboard on the CIC table and left the tired crew.
“Everything has happened before. It will happen again.”
“Launch all vipers.”
“All batteries concentrate fire on the nearest base star salvo mode.”
Video Segment 2
Full Video Chapter 6
