But all good things had to come to an end, and that included outrunning the Cylons.

"Talk to me," Adama growled as he came into the CIC, the Action Stations alarm blaring.

"We had a bunch of cylon raiders jump in," Tigh said. "Our CAP and the toasters took out a bunch, but not enough."

Adama nodded. The data codes were showing the fleet reacting to the alarm. The inorganic cylons had given them good data on the organic FTL, data that matched with Sharon's, so they had a decent baseline, which allowed them to have the fleet maneuver in normal instead of just emergency jump, potentially into an ambush if the cylons had cracked their codes or other wise obtained their coordinates. The images looked random, but it was a well drilled formation, ensuring that no ship would be where it was when the cylons jumped out, so follow up strikes couldn't know exactly where their prey was.

Adama considered the three data codes on the far side of the fleet. The base stars still had some humans on them, and this might be the first fight they had engaged in since the raid…presuming the organics were launching an attack and not simply scouting.

Adama frowned at the data codes for the Forge. If only they'd waited a few more months, they might have had a few more surprises for cylons, but you fought with what you had…including their current little project.

"Get me Commodore Markson."

Moments later, Adama was talking to Markson on his repair ship. Markson had relocated there to 'keep Diane from thinking I'm staring over her shoulder,' and Adama respected that. Besides, the Engineer Michelson was nearly as heavily armored as a battlestar.

"Michelson Actual," Markson said.

"What do you think they'll be going for, Tomas."

"Depends on what they have. If they're smart, the Forge and other mission critical units. They want to pin our warships. They haven't always been smart."

"Is Thunderbolt ready?"

"For one shot, sure. Can't be certain about any more," Markson's rueful tone made Adama crack a tiny smile. The engineer had taken it as a personal affront that the power grid of the ion cannon ship had so many persistent errors.

"If they pop out where I think they are, they'll be trying to avoid an immediate close range engagement. They'll hold back, send the raiders in and support them with long range fire. I want Thunderbolt to target one basestar and fire."

"One shot?"

"Yes. Then drift back through the fleet."

"Oh. Oh, sneaky Admiral. If we manage to damage a base star they won't be able to ignore it and…"

"Their raiders will have to run the gauntlet."

"I'll let my people know. What if the ship suffers a fault?"

"If they can fix it, do it. If they can't, prepare to evacuate. That's why they're only to fire once. I don't want to risk the ship."

"Yeah. Presuming it survives this, I may have a handle on the power grid problem, but that's a daggit for another day. I'll relay the orders."

"Galactica Actual out." Adama put the headset back. It wasn't that he didn't trust the crew on the Thunderbolt, but the simple fact was that every Colonial officer wanted to take a swing at the cylons… and he knew that Markson would give him the unvarnished truth.

Cheerleader squadron.

Valasa watched as the other craft from the Hera formed up around them. Raptors, their forms bulky with strap on missiles, gunships behind them, and further behind EW and SAR craft. Every viper pilot also had an over-sized life support pack— if they couldn't get back to a ship and they couldn't be retrieved during the fight, they would wait six hours and then trigger the beacon when SAR teams would jump back in with an escort (and hopefully after the cylons had left). Valasa, being one of those pilots, was a fan of that idea.

At one point, she'd been a student training to get her flight license, a cheerleader and though her (now dead) parents would have been furious, an individual considering some quite lucrative pin-up photo opportunities.

Now she was a Colonial Warrior. Her family, as strange as it would have been before the Fall to think that she had two wives and a husband, was behind her. So was her unborn daughter. If the cylons were going to harm them, they would do it through her dead body.

"Cheerleader Squadron. We are assuming our assigned position."

Valasa glanced at the disclike shapes of the cylon fighters. Well. Not all cylons were fighting them. Contrary to some, if she didn't particularly love the inorganics, she didn't hate them either. They had been enslaved as well, and if the inorganics had killed her fellows, slaughtering male students, they had not had the odd brand of sadism and self-righteousness that made the organics so terrifying— and still occasionally woke her up from a sound sleep screaming hysterically.

She wasn't unusual at all in that problem. A big sacrifice on the part of the Colonial Military was the inability to use sleeping pills so that they would be ready whenever the call came.

On the other hand, shooting holes in the organics had to count as therapy.

"Understood, Chrome-1," she replied. "You'll be helping with long range fire and dealing with leakers."

"Confirmed."

"Pinup to squadron. Stay tight until I give the order and for fraks sake, stick with your wingman. Anyone who doesn't, if they survive, will deal with me, then the Admiral and then we'll both give the smoking remains to Starbuck. Understand?" The assents rolled in and at the very tail end there was a flash as six basestars appeared. Valasa took a deep breath and once again considered her callsign. No, she probably shouldn't have mentioned the photo op…

Cylon Flagship

And here is the result of Brother's obsession, One thought.

"The plan is for us to try and take out the big mobile space-"

One cut the Three off. "The plan is bloody stupid. How many base stars do we have?"

"Six."

"And they have five battlestars, all of them fixed up. That doesn't count the other ships. Might I point out that the smallest and oldest of their battlestars, the Galactica, can fight two basestars with a very good chance of winning?" He turned to the Three, glaring at the other cylon. "So use that mighty brain of yours and predict for me the result of six base stars charging five battlestars, plus their friends. The only thing that strategy results in is six dead base stars. We'll hold back at long range, harass them, and then jump out if things look like they're getting nasty. We need to preserve our forces so we have enough to engage later."

"They can't have many skilled soldiers," A Six pointed out. "Look at their vipers…"

One nodded, the vipers in the forefront were moving with the deadly skill that had become common, but there were more in the rear and some of those squadrons were sloppy, while others were painfully neat, as if they were afraid to fall out of formation.

Unfortunately, to get to them, they'd be forced to run a gauntlet of everything else and the vipers weren't leaving the outer weapons' envelope of the capital ships.

"Commence long range missile strikes, aim at the Forge." It probably wouldn't get through but you never knew…

"We could send in the raiders…"

"We're at the very end of our logistics train," One snapped. My genius brothers didn't allow for failure and so we've got pirates, resistance in the colonies, little splinter fleets…

The fact was that if you were immortal, you might want to start to consider the fact that humans didn't take very long to go from "small group of survivors" to "massive interstellar nation coming back for vengeance." But just throwing their forces against the fleet would lead to dead raiders for no good return.

Not to mention we're already had resurrection failures… The hub had a limited range and even daisy chaining it with resurrection ships had a limit. Pretty soon they were going to have to either let some humans go, or move the hub and accept that some cylons would no longer be immortal, and One noticed that for all their determination to defeat the humans, few of his brothers and sisters seemed to be eager to be the ones who got to advance the cause of the cylons without immortality waiting in the wings.

And then there was the fact that they still couldn't reproduce naturally.

Let the Sixes talk about god. I think someone inserted deep code into our programming to prevent that for some reason.

Why not? After all, the Ones had done something exactly like that.

Thunderbolt

Major Chris Rosin frowned as he looked at the cramped CIC. The Thunderbolt was really more of a test bed than a pure warship. If it worked, they would probably build more, but the fact that so much of its mass was dedicated to supporting the cannon that it was in no ways capable of independent operations— their hanger could only hold a pair of shuttles, for Zeus' sake.

"We're to fire when we're ready sir."

Chris nodded. They'd selected the center base star, though it would be too much to hope that it was the command base star— the cylons weren't idiots and every navy worked hard to not make it obvious where the brains of the fleet were located. They also had a cloud of raiders between the two, which would be useful to see how effectively their cannon damaged raiders.

"Particle feed ready?"

"Yes sir."

Deep in the ship, ionized hydrogen was fed into the weapon, while 100 superconducting rings were charged by masses of dedicated generators. They would power the fields that would accelerate the ions to the target. Rosin had been part of the team working on smaller beam directors, hopefully to one day allow ion weapons to be fitted into turret based systems, but for now, even presuming Thunderbolt proved itself, the Commodore was more focused on semi directable casemate mounts.

Assuming the Thunderbolt didn't blow up, that is.

"Order the vipers to get out of line of fire," Chris said and waited until the way was clear.

"Odd…" A Five gestured at the readouts. "The vipers are opening a hole…"

Daring us to move on in? One thought. No, that makes no sense— it'd be suicide and they can't think we're that stupid.

"We can send through the raiders to destroy the ships they've uncovered!"

Make that not all of us are that stupid.

"No, this looks like a…"

"There's some kind of energy spi-" The Five didn't get to complete his sentence before Thunderbolt fired.

Lasers were seldom visible in space, save when they passed through a cloud of material.

Ion beams were far different. For several seconds, it looked like Thunderbolt and the unlucky base star were linked by a solid column of lightning. The base star shuddered as the beam didn't just transmit energy, but kinetic force, the atoms accelerated to nearly light speed. Lightning played over the rest of the ship as it shuddered, large chunks being shattered from its frame.

Nearly 20 raiders had been caught in the beam, and another 15 appeared to be having difficulty maneuvering.

"Good shot!" Chris punched the side of his chair. "Excellent sho-"

And then in a shower of sparks, the lights went out.

"What the frak was that?" One snarled.

"Particle beam, big one. Base star 04 is reporting massive systems failures, fires on several decks…they're out of action. They think they can get the jump drive-"

"Do it."

"The ship that fired the beam, look at it!" A Six shouted and One plunged his hands back into the data stream. The ship was tumbling, and the computer helpfully drew indications of hotspots on the hull.

"Looks like they don't have all the bugs out yet." One paused and then nodded. "All ships, prepare to jump."

"We're not going to attack it?"

"What part of five battlestars vs. Six— now five, base stars did you not understand." One gestured at the damaged ship."We can't get to it, and if they can get it firing again they have the range advantage. Good news, we probed before they had a half dozen of the things ready to pot us all from range."

Dammit, this is going to throw a real spanner in our tactics, One mentally snarled to himself. The whole system of base stars was that you stood off and lobbed missiles at the battlestars while putting up raiders to keep them from closing on you—which didn't always work, especially if someone had FTL spooled up. But now, with this… a few more of those guns and the basestars would have to risk being destroyed at long range or jumping in to point blank range with a battlestars KE cannons…

"Maybe mass jumps of raiders…" he murmured, then shook his head. The idiot Six was still talking.

"No. WE can't just risk losing this fleet," One cut her off. "For all we know that's what happened to the cylons chasing the Virgonians, and not only are they gone, none of them resurrected. We've got the forces in the Colonies, and of course that that other big group that is hiding out in the nebula and we've had no luck digging them out. We cannot just throw away our ships to no purpose. All ships, jump out!"

Thunderbolt's bridge was full of smoke and sparks. Chris was on the wireless to Adama and Tomas.

"We've got jump drive but the damned superconducting rings lost cryonic pressure, again and they arced over into the general power grid. Caused a cascade failure. DRADIS is down, our secondary weapons are on auxiliary power and on mount guidance only."

"Cylons are jumping out," Adama said. "We're not sticking around either. Jump to the emergency point and as soon as possible I want you on Forge."

"Yes sir," Chris said, and looked at the readout glumly. Not a great showing for our first combat deployment. Worse, the hopeful scenarios where every raider on the field would be disabled hadn't happened— only the ones in the beam or very close to it had been damaged.

Well, our cylons did warn us about that… he mused as he gave the orders for the jump.