Broken Stars

[SotF]

Note: These are all tied into the Battles, Bases, Stars, & Knights continuity so far, some may end up not being included in the end if things change between when I write parts here and when I get to that point in the main story. These are mainly ideas for other points in the time line that I've been getting recently.

xXx

Timeline: Post Colonial Holocost, before encounters with the Colonial Fleet

Leos watched from the relative safety of the transport as it exited the main bay of the Hermes.

Their flagship's design had also been the basis for the first generation Colonial Battlestar, though with several major changes to make it a weapons platform rather than a long range reconnaissance and exploration vessel.

With the massive loss of automation during the first war also ended up leaving them with the necessity of eliminating the cavernous bays along the center of the Hermes, two of which had now been replaced with more powerful generators, the hyperdrive, and shield generators.

The transport design, however, was something entirely new for the Cylons of either type. And, while it was as maneuverable as a brick, its armor and shields would keep it intact to do its job.

Unfortunately, their own starfighter and bomber designs were less useful within the atmosphere. A Type-2 Raider was only capable of operating at around 50% capability when encumbered in such a way, and while still superior, their own Marauders were even worse off in comparison to their space based abilities.

That had led to the designs being fielded within the transports, ones built almost entirely from the Tech that Revan had helped them develop, though he'd been the head of the team that actually designed the airspeeders that would be deployed as well as the later heavy armor.

Hell, the paradigm shift between tactics had been a revelation in warfare. The colonials and, as such, the cylons had never really devoted that much thought towards ground warfare. Revan's people had developed it to a frightening level.

Control of all three vectors had become the visible necessity in their actions, the ground, air, and space. Lacking one would make things far messier, especially when several of the ground vehicles could knock out things in orbit with little effort.

And so they had tanks, droids, and more based for the groundwar that would be coming while they worked towards their goals.

Caprica wasn't a place they intended to capture, it wasn't an conquest or even a direct goal for causing damage.

They had come to save as many of the Colonial Survivors as they could and evacuate them to a safe world.

It was the first of many similar plans that had come about due to the others they had already rescued from ships, anchorages, and other such situations.

And while he wasn't a soldier like several of the others, Leos had volunteered to watch the new equipment that he'd helped design in order to figure out how to improve their performance.

xXx

The Eights waited for the signal as their ties to the transports networks disengaged, linking the squadrons together while the hanger bay doors, set opposite along the crafts flanks, shot open revealing the burning flames from the atmospheric entry that were held back by the sapphire glow of the atmospheric shields.

Holographic displays burst to life around them in the cockpits while the high pitched hum of the repulsors resounded through the ship.

Trills and beeps from the astromechs assigned to each fighter added to the cacophony of noise while the go/no-go signals were transmitted to the core of the transport.

Smaller automated loaders retracted from their positions beneath the fighters followed an instant later by the fueling cables slipping back into their positions below the deck leaving the open hanger.

Landing gear on all of them retracted for a momentary jerk before the repulsor field caught them while the system adjusted for local gravity.

The flames vanished and as one, all of the eights in the fighters gunned the throttle to full, sending the four squadrons rocketing from their mothership in order to escort the craft from the ground.

Their sensors revealed the Marauder and Raider flights from the Hermes breaking off their escort in order to return to base as quickly as they could.

 

[SotF]

Cavil's first warning came when a bright light flooded the room followed by pain.

It ended as quickly as it had started, and then he remembered being in the tank on the surface installation built to allow easier resurrections rather than being forced to station a ship in orbit.

Two hours had passed since his awakening and the gathering of cylons around the table was starting to near a riotous cacophony as they wanted to know just what the frack had happened.

The only images and information they had was a wave of what looked like glowing missiles from some place in space before each pinprick of light separated into a dozen or so that each seemed to pick a target to hit.

Only one ship out of their entire force orbiting Caprica had managed to escape the destruction, a Raider that had just been entering the atmosphere when the attack occurred.

With the lack of spacecraft on the planet, the cylons had withdrawn most of the initial occupation fleet, shifting several things to the ground with minimal presence in orbit, now they realized the folly in that with the destruction of two Basestars, one of which they had been forced to intercept during its fall with Raiders before it destroyed their central facilities.

It was unsettling for someone else to use their own tactics as it seemed had happened, something that just wasn't be fair.

"Raiders report unknown contacts inbound," came the outcry of an Eight only an instant before the upper floors of the skyscraper they had used for the meeting exploded.

He managed a glimpse at the sleek lines of what appeared to be a fighter rocket past with others like it, the air buzzing like a hornets nest.

His eyes seemed to lock with those of one of the pilots when a distant flash and starbursts of contrails brought the scream of horror out of his mouth. The world dissolved into fire before him.

 

[SotF]

She shuddered slightly as the reports flooded back to the Transports, the squadrons had reported that much of the occupied city was in ruins.

It had been somewhat disconcerting among several of the models about how the squadrons operated. Their base programming was essentially the same for all members of a model, but then each was set free to develop as an individual.

Most would keep the same general path in their lives, while others would find an interest in something entirely different such as how Doc and Leos had.

The Eights in the airspeeder squadrons were something else entirely, originally coming from an error during the resurrection process before their escape, they had nearly two-hundred of the same model starting with identical personalities from a pilot base that had been meant for infiltration purposes.

After botched recovery had ended that possibility, and all of the copies were to be temporarily boxed until a consensus as to what they should do with them could be reached.

They had been aboard one of the ships fleeing their brethren apparently waiting for their boxing in isolation.

The odd thing was that they rejected their individuality, and seemed to operate as a collective on a level that bordered on creepy.

She was proud of her own accomplishment, it was part of what made them unique among their model. They strived to remain true to all of their identities, as an individual, as one of their model, and as a member of their nation.

To have others completely disregard one of those identities was something disturbing.

 

[SotF]

Revan watched the world spin slowly below as his fleets smaller craft patrolled the salvage operations around them.

The planet, now named Talon after the battle that left the debris field above it, had been abandoned by both sides after the war that had its final battle fought overhead. Both Colonial and Cylon had found it to inhospitable, the humans adding the bad memories of those rescued from the surface while the lack of any real prospects of value.

What the new Cylon Republic wanted was in orbit as neither the Cylons nor the Colonials had tarried long enough to salvage anything from it.

His grin widened as he spotted their goal, one of the derelicts that had a high chance of being repairable with little effort on their part, at least to get it to the point of capable for a jump to hyperspace.

It was a Colonial Battlestar that had been crippled during the battle, engines destroyed by a nuke and one of the flight pods had been torn off when a Basestar attempted to ram it while dying on its own.

The Chronos had survived the battle and remained in operation during the recovery efforts in the system before being abandoned.

With most of his close friends involved in the effort on Caprica, Revan had accompanied this force to allow some command while they operated, and with the Hermes starting that operation before circling back through haven to pick up the hyperdrives needed for their new acquisitions to be dropped off in this system.

Revan relaxed, letting the force flow through him for an instant.

His eyes snapped open and a deep breath was drawn as he grabbed the helmet from beside him.

Something was about to happen on Caprica, something that would need his personal attention.

He flowed through the maze of corridors, a moments pause as he signaled T3 to meet him in the Basestars hangers.

Stopping as a translucent figure materialized beside him, the holographic avatar of the ships hybrid.

"What's wrong?" he heard her ask, the almost angelic humanoid figure dressed in what appeared to be Jedi robes with a four pairs of wings spread around her.

"A warning," Revan answered with a sigh, "From the force, I need to go to Caprica as quickly as I can."

She nodded softly, "Your fighter is being prepped for launch and should be ready by the time you reach it, do you want an escort?"

"No, we have to few already and I can move faster with just my fighter and T3."

A grin on her lips as he moved onwards, "May the force be with you then."

Revan chuckled at the response, one of the things that had become common among his allies, the force was their ally, and a powerful ally it truely was.

 

[SotF]

Tessa signaled the Centurions before she leaped clear of the transport.

She was one of the hybrids whose ships had been scrapped after being declaired irreperable after the exodus from Cylon space.

Like all of her sisters, she possessed the same spark of force potential that allowed them to be trained by Revan during the building of Haven and their recovery work on the other ships. Without the constant influx of data and the attention the ships required, the hybrids that were separated from the ships being dismantled had required therapy to gain the abilities most took for granted but had atrophied while they lay within the tanks.

The force had aided her in gaining mobility and later other benefits that had been observed in those trained, and even pass along some of that training into the datastreams for the hybrids with the standardized portion of what they could salvage from the remains of their resurection net parts.

Revans teachings had allowed her sisters still working with the ships to gain the sanity the rest took for granted, something their brothers amongst the non-Republic cylons had never bothered to even attempt.

Her master had told her that she was not a Jedi, and even said that he wasn't one either. He'd rejected both paths and taught to remain in balance, an old code that the Jedi had once held long before until the Great Sith War began.

Several of the titles had remained: Padawan, Knight, and Master; but they were not Jedi or Sith.

She felt the rush of wind past her as she fell, drawing on the force within her and around her to slow her fall at the last second. The release was thrilling and wonderful to her, something that made her feel alive.

It was a small landing facility below that had to be taken out, but they wanted several of the structures to remain for their own use during the mission or the airspeeder squadrons would have leveled it from the air.

The force responded to her call as she used it to transfer the power of her descent into an outwards blast around her while shielding her from the fall, and the control towers roof seemed to bow inwards just before she would have contacted it, an instant later its walled exploded outwards in a spray of cement, steel, and glass that spread in a disklike shockwave of death and destruction through the surrounding facilities.

The milky white blade of her lightsaber ignited in her hand with the familiar and comforting snap-hiss and scent of ozone the instant she landed in a crouch.

Tessa was moving in a blink of the eye, a headlong dash towards the defensive turrets even as the stacatto of weapons fire drew her attention.

A wave of the hand and a push from the force scattered bullets in all directions but at her before her weapon sliced cleanly through the first turrents supports, dropping it to the ground with a roar before the Centurion gunners head was severed a heartbeat later.

It was then that she heard the stacatto of the rust colored Centurions of the Republic landing to join her, each equipped with a repulsor pulse belt to allow easy landings.

 

[SotF]

Daniel watched as the interceptor jumped into hyperspace as he leaned back in his chair.

In the months since his own rescue he'd slowly become a part of the group, an alliance that seemed to grow stronger by the day. A handful of months and he was feeling better than he had before the six years of confinement aboard a basestar.

It had, at first, been difficult to adapt to his new surroundings, but he learned about the new Cylon Republic and had found it a pleasant alternative to the other cylons that they rescued him from.

Revan had led the force with a blade that seemed to jump right out of the books he'd read as a kid.

Now most of his time was spent trying to regain the flight status he'd had before his capture. It was frustrating to watch the craft the Republic had in its arsenal and not be able to fly them.

Bulldog had never been one of the high profile fighter pilots that most stickjockies tended to be, it was a matter of pride to be able to fly with the best of them. However, he understood why it was being denied, problems with his nerves it seemed.

It was also rather interesting to find part of the reason for the names his allies had. Something closer to how the callsigns had been handed out, but they tended to remain for the rest of their life.

Names tended to be a reward for the cylons in the Republic, doing something that would qualify for one meant that you were worthy of being more than the others of the same model.

The odd feeling after everyone referred to him by his callsign rather than his name had faded recently.

He wondered if his choice to come on the recovery expedition rather than either joining the Caprica rescue or helping the current rescuees on Haven had been due to fear. He wasn't sure how comfortable he'd be around the men and women rescued from destroyed vessels across the colonies.

At least with the Cylons, he had come to understand them.

 

[SoulGriever13]

Niiice.

[img=http://img112.imageshack.us/img112/5817/sealofapprovalag9.th.jpg]

How's the origin fic of these doing, anyway? Not that I have anything against out of time snippetry, badass as it is, but some more in-sequence stuff would be even more welcome.

-Griever

 

[SotF]

I'm working on it, my problem is that I keep getting ideas that work more at later points in the universe rather than ones right at the point of Battles, Bases, Stars, & Knights

 

[SotF]

She grinned as the power of the force flowed through her, from her hair to her toes.

Alexa felt the ship around her, the modified basestar humming with power and a part of her unless she chose to disconnect from it. The pull of the systems coupling with the sheer experience of seeing and feeling everything on the ship and adding the sights of the area while touching the minds of each one of her sisters, be they linked to a ship or separate.

The force had freed them from the insanity of maintaining every single one of those connections and understanding them. But it gave so much more that just that liberation.

Her mind felt Tessa leading Centurions in battle on Caprica and Lynn aboard her ship waiting to aid in guiding the Chronos back to Haven for a more thorough series of repairs.

She felt Revan in hyperspace speeding towards Caprica and the warnings of the force he had received to hurry there. The one that her master had been training was felt in the distance, uncertain in his place while out there amidst the stars, someone they had already accepted as a knight amidst their dwindling numbers.

Then there was the mad babbling in the background that mixed with an eerie resemblance to a funeral dirge, the hybrids that did not have the fortune to be part of the Republic.

Mentally she thanked the force that she had been one of those who escaped the control of the others.

Allowing her mind to flow in the force, all sensation magnified a thousand fold and it felt almost like she was bordering on omniscient.

She sensed links between people, places, and things as her senses expanded.

A flash in the distance as a dead world was impacted a dozen times over while passing through an asteroid field.

Life burst into existence on a water world, albeit single cellular lifeforms.

And then a flash, a word of warning from the force and her eyes snapped open while instinctively relaying orders to the rest of the ship.

The sensation was passed through her link to Lynn, her sister nodding and moving towards the hangers while a message was sent to Bulldog.

They had to position a smaller ship just right for what was needed, and the sensation was similar to what the hybrids had sensed around when Revan had arrived.

Someone was coming and the force wanted them to get to this new guest.

 

[SotF]

Leos watched the tactical hologram in the center of command, a visual display of the planet and things in orbit.

He leaned back in his seat as the landing thrusters kicked in, shaking the ship violently for a mere fifteen seconds before the craft settled amidst the wreckage of the cylon installation.

Alarms blared and tags added themselves to the display automatically.

"Assault squadrons," he stated, hoping the Eights got the message in time, "You have inbound Raiders from ground installations, be advised the Radiological Alarm has sounded on them."

He paused to take a breath.

"You have nuclear armed Raiders closing on your position," Leos continued, "And as such successive targets of opportunity are cleared, return to base as soon as primary goals are complete."

"Understood," came the slightly distorted voices, all identical in tone and inflection in a twisted chorus accompanied by similarly identical trills from their astromechs.

"May the force be with you," he added after a moments hesitation.

His own experiences since Revan had brought them together showed him that the Force the man spoke of and used was real enough, and that gave him the hope that they could do more than simply survive.

They could win.

 

[SotF]

VA-20 dropped into position with a dull thump followed by a confirmation signal sent over the comlink to his brothers that he was in position.

They were the survivors of the Hermes' original compliment, repaired and reactivated after decades of sleep out in the black with minimal power to maintain their memory cores.

They had awakened in a changed world, one wracked by war and retribution by both sides, in the end their only choice had been to side with those in hiding at the time and only now showing their strength to the other players upon the board.

Of the cylons aboard, only their model had survived due to the extremes that had gone into their construction, they had been built for duty in hazardous conditions that would kill a human or destroy other cylons.

However, even there, they had all been damaged in ways that forced them to be moved into new forms, another specialized shell that they enjoyed even though their missions were still distasteful to their memories.

The galaxy had changed with the dawn of the Great Rebellion and the First Cylon War that followed soon after, and they had been relics of a past that neither other the sides would be capable of accepting.

Now they operated on their own, but as part of the larger whole at the same time. The new shells had been designed for a purpose, and one that took advantage of things the Cylons had never before done.

They had only a vague resemblance to the Centurions, barely maintaining a form that could even be considered to be humanoid.

A small probe extended from his wrist, the dark material seeming almost to grow the flexible cable that slipped easily through the gap in the grating.

The Cylon Collective, as they had dubbed the other Cylon Nation, had managed to destroy much of the infrastructure that would be needed to support the lifestyle they wanted. Without power or clean water, they'd landed two ships in order to feed the demand, and VA-20 and his brothers were one of the two teams sent to eliminate the ships, or at least cripple them in order to aid in turning the tide and force their enemies to resurrect farther away from the combat zone.

Their new shells were not designated infiltration units for nothing.

The probe retracted when he was satisfied that there were no hostiles within detection range followed by sound dampeners that locked into position before the cutting tool extended and began to slice through the grate.

His eyes flashed in impatience, the almost rust red visible only for an instant before his current action was complete and the metal was removed, giving him entrance into the craft.

The robot dropped calmly into the void below, stealth systems kicking in as he moved, allowing him seeming invisibility in the dark as his HUD displayed his brothers as they began to move towards their targets upon the ship in unity.

His hands attached to the ceiling as he moved, magnetic grapples allowing him to move freely across the ceiling of the ship with a gait that held eerie resemblance to a big cat.

Blips appeared and then shifted as he deftly slipped into the ships datanets, digitally mimicking a sigh of relief when he discovered that there was no Hybrid aboard the ship.

The hybrids were those that they related to the most, ones who were leaving an almost unknowing slavery both models exploring their newly found freedoms simultaneously in their world.

Their kinship with that particular model made them unwilling to cause harm to the Hybrids when they had a choice.

 

[SotF]

Cavil scowled as he sat there in the bunker, the syrupy liquid of the tanks still dampened his hair as he watched the intel come in.

At least they had figured out how the hell their pants had been caught down.

Only a few images of the weapons had managed to be recorded before their entire force in orbit died in a firestorm.

Even he could see the simplistic genius of it, affix a large number of small launchers to a larger missile, and drop them off some distance away to let them travel inwards for several days with the appearance of so much space junk.

No jumps within sensor range meant that the weapons had been undetected and could have traveled for days or weeks to reach their location.

A proximity sensor to their own passive scans probably awakened it and suddenly the active targeting would allow it to launch a swarm of missiles that could swat the defenses while the carrier missiles slammed into the Basestars with their own deadly warheads.

Then, just after their weapons went off, the warships would drop in and savage the survivors.

It was a brutal and brilliant plan for a sneak attack. The fact that it had managed to kill him twice so far was a telling and horrifying thing to think on, especially with the apparent technological advantage these foes apparently had.

 

[SotF]

"T3," Revan stated as the fighter dropped out of lightspeed in orbit of Caprica, "Lock wings into attack position and raise shields."

The trill that came in response confirmed his orders as the two armored wings unfurled from beneath the craft and swiveled into its classic position while a momentary shimmer revealed the shields powering up.

An instant later the long range sensors picked up a dozen or so Raiders rising towards orbit, apparently replacing a patrol that was even now heading planetside to refuel.

"Are there any upgrades to the Raiders that I should know about?"

A negative chirp.

"Inform Leos that I'm in orbit and on my way," the warrior stated as he relaxed and let the force flow through him.

When he had let the force flow through him, Revan reached to the controls, adjusting the power feeds to cut power from the hyperdrive and transfer that energy to weapons before continuing the adjustment to switch from the laser canons to the ion ones.

For some reason he had always felt something wrong about taking out the Raiders, it had the same mental tone as chopping up a bantha cub.

Not to mention that the ion canons would stop the enemy fighters from resurecting until retrieved and repaired without ending them.