[Tabitha]

CVS-33 Colonial Corvette Defiance
1/9/48 1600
The DRADIS board of the Defiance lit up with the signals of hundreds of thousands of large targets. Tom Severny woke up to the alarms of the DRADIS and knocked over a cup of coffee. He reached over to wake up Ryan, but that was not necessary, both men were awake and trying to figure out what the hell was going on. The gunner, Chief Petty Officer 3 Myron Hecks, was also awake, and was trying to get the two remaining turrets, the dorsal and the port side turrets, to target the inbound signals. He was working hard at it when the board identified them as Colonial Solium Missiles. The cheers went up, the crew of the Defiance understood that the Cylons were about to have a bad day as well. They moved out of the flight path and monitored the missiles as they jumped.
Jeff waited until the last of the missiles jumped before announcing his plan, to reprogram the jump gate to take them back into system. He wanted to jump in-system and closer to a graving yard where they might be able to repair the Defiance. If it wasn’t workable, they would be forced to use the gate at Hyperion and try for Ragnar Anchorage. Either way, Defiance was going to get back into the fight.

COLONIAL FLEET INTELLIGENCE OFFICE

Planet Caprica: Monte Claire Radio Observatory.
1/9/49 1600

Delangelo waited for the green lights to stop blinking and stay on before switching the fleet DRADIS back on. The initial period was when the DRADIS aligned the hundreds of smaller dishes that were all over not only Caprica, but several other worlds. It happened automatically. He had nothing to do with the process, but 12 hours after the loss of the fleet dish array, the automated system would come back online in what they considered ELE mode, or Extinction Level Event. This mode was to enable ANY radio observatory left in the colonies, to scan the space lanes as well as to listen for life signs from other colonies. In this case, it recorded heavy jamming from the Cylon assault fleet. That problem was minor to Monte Claire, which had hundreds of times more power than the Cylon jamming ships, and the DRADIS burned through easily. For a starship or even the mighty Battlestar, the Cylon jamming would be sufficient to blind them, but with a set of solium reactors on 50% power each, the Radio Observatory was able to burn through the jamming like a hot knife through butter.
“Hey Mark, what do you make of this?” Major Delangelo asked trying to sort out the nearly half million Colonial signals suddenly converging on a brand new jump gate.
“Holy felgercarb Dave… you don’t think the Sentinels...” Ross nearly choked on words.
“Frack… I think they did. We might want to inform the Admiralty.”
“If there’s any Admiralty left to inform.” Ross said grimly. The solium bombing of Caprica City was felt as far away as Monte Claire, and the images were just as horrible. Both Dave and Mark had considered abandoning their posts to go home and help their families, but in the end, they decided that they could help their families and the Fleet most by working through the bombing to keep Monte Claire online. Granted, the automated systems were the real hero’s, but they helped, sorting through the local data, using the old out of date radio telescopes, for which Monte Claire was named, as well as listening to the Cylon radio traffic and breaking their battle codes. The last item took them all of fifteen minutes, working together. It wasn’t a code designed to stand up to their counter intelligence, it was obviously an old code, modified just enough to be effective to prevent the ships of the Fleet from breaking it on their own. The Cylons were not concerned with the long term abilities of the Colonies, and that scared both of them. It meant that the Cylons intended to destroy the Colonies all at once.
To Ross, who had worked in Fleet counter-intelligence before shifting to signals,
The Cylons plan to split their massive fleet into battle groups became apparent. Each battle group would be tasked with a different Colony, which also meant they would not be able to readily support each other. The Fleet stood a great chance of defeating them, if they coordinated their attacks on a single battle group, then shifted to the next, and the next…
“Say, Dave, I think we might have some good news for the fleet.” Ross said ignoring the bad side, which was that the Colonial Fleet would have to abandon the other Colonies in order to mass around a single battle group to destroy it, leaving the Colonies defenseless until they returned to destroy the battle group attacking the abandon colony.
“I'm all ears Ross, but before we tell Fleet anything, lets find them.” Delangelo said with a sleight laugh in his voice. It was a grim joke, not meant to be funny, but meant to lighten the mood a bit. “And it damn well better not be that you just saved a bunch of cubits on your Viper insurance by switching to Rycon…”
“Frak you.” Ross said laughing. It was an old joke, from the tri-dee commercials.