EM June 2007 - 46 - Rescue
Jun. 30th, 2007 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arrow_of_apollo46 - Rescue
To say it had gotten routine isn't exactly right. I doubt that five days of continuous alert, no sleeping, barely any time to eat or even catch your breath could in anyway become routine. But after two hundred thirty-seven repetitions, we weren't expecting any surprises.
Which of course, was when we got one.
It began out of nowhere. Every thirty-three minutes, Galactica DRADIS would report contact with the Cylons. Before they could get into range, the entire human fleet would spin up its FTL drives and run, narrowly escaping. On the other side of the Jump, we'd do the head counts and restart the clock. Five days. Two hundred thirty-seven Jumps.
The alarms went off thirty-three minutes later, the order was given and the fleet executed Jump 238.
Except on the other side, the head count came up short one. The Olympic Carrier.
The Olympic Carrier was an Intersun Passenger Cruiser, one of the many ships among the survivors of the Twelve Colonies. She measured 825 feet in length, carried a crew of 345 and could comfortably accommodate 1,000 passengers "in style and luxury". She was a commercial, civilian craft, and as such had no defense or weaponry.
It could have been for any number of reasons. The most likely being that civilian ships' Jump drives aren't as hardy as military-grade FTL systems. Jumping that often had already begun to take its toll on Galactica's drives, and before every Jump, as many as ten of the fleet's ships would report malfunctions or difficulties with their own. It could have been navigational error. Or they could have been just a few seconds late and been destroyed by the Cylons.
The Cylons who, thirty-three minutes after Jump 238 didn't show.
When the Olympic Carrier appeared three hours later, we sent out a Raptor to check it out. There were already suspicions, naturally, but no one wanted to really consider the possibility that these people had anything to do with the Cylons.
They said they'd been spared, had used the time to fix their FTL drives and had Jumped, hoping the fleet would still be at these coordinates. We restarted the clock, Starbuck and I launched, and the Commander and the President made the big decisions. The first idea was to evacuate the Carrier's passengers and destroy the ship, assuming that it was the ship the Cylons had been tracking. But, the question arose, what if it was one of the passengers? Could we sift out a Cylon agent from thirteen hundred souls?
And then a radiological alarm sounded.
There was a nuke onboard the Olympic Carrier, the ship that was now silent. It responded to no wireless transmissions, would not shut down its engines or stop its progress directly toward Galactica, would not turn from a warning shot across its bow. Our Vipers made passes. I might have seen lights, but I was sure I couldn't make out any movement or figures in the windows. I think.
It wouldn't stop. Boomer, in Raptor 478, relayed the message, orders from President Roslin and Commander Adama both: destroy the Olympic Carrier.
It's never been harder to pull the trigger.
There may have been one thousand, three hundred forty-five human beings on that ship that could have been rescued. We'll never know. But there was a nuclear device on board and forty-seven thousand human beings who would have been lost if the Galactica had been destroyed.
My father gave the order. Roslin has the words Olympic Carrier on a slip of paper in her desk. But I pulled the trigger.
Not much of a rescue.
(600)
To say it had gotten routine isn't exactly right. I doubt that five days of continuous alert, no sleeping, barely any time to eat or even catch your breath could in anyway become routine. But after two hundred thirty-seven repetitions, we weren't expecting any surprises.
Which of course, was when we got one.
It began out of nowhere. Every thirty-three minutes, Galactica DRADIS would report contact with the Cylons. Before they could get into range, the entire human fleet would spin up its FTL drives and run, narrowly escaping. On the other side of the Jump, we'd do the head counts and restart the clock. Five days. Two hundred thirty-seven Jumps.
The alarms went off thirty-three minutes later, the order was given and the fleet executed Jump 238.
Except on the other side, the head count came up short one. The Olympic Carrier.
The Olympic Carrier was an Intersun Passenger Cruiser, one of the many ships among the survivors of the Twelve Colonies. She measured 825 feet in length, carried a crew of 345 and could comfortably accommodate 1,000 passengers "in style and luxury". She was a commercial, civilian craft, and as such had no defense or weaponry.
It could have been for any number of reasons. The most likely being that civilian ships' Jump drives aren't as hardy as military-grade FTL systems. Jumping that often had already begun to take its toll on Galactica's drives, and before every Jump, as many as ten of the fleet's ships would report malfunctions or difficulties with their own. It could have been navigational error. Or they could have been just a few seconds late and been destroyed by the Cylons.
The Cylons who, thirty-three minutes after Jump 238 didn't show.
When the Olympic Carrier appeared three hours later, we sent out a Raptor to check it out. There were already suspicions, naturally, but no one wanted to really consider the possibility that these people had anything to do with the Cylons.
They said they'd been spared, had used the time to fix their FTL drives and had Jumped, hoping the fleet would still be at these coordinates. We restarted the clock, Starbuck and I launched, and the Commander and the President made the big decisions. The first idea was to evacuate the Carrier's passengers and destroy the ship, assuming that it was the ship the Cylons had been tracking. But, the question arose, what if it was one of the passengers? Could we sift out a Cylon agent from thirteen hundred souls?
And then a radiological alarm sounded.
There was a nuke onboard the Olympic Carrier, the ship that was now silent. It responded to no wireless transmissions, would not shut down its engines or stop its progress directly toward Galactica, would not turn from a warning shot across its bow. Our Vipers made passes. I might have seen lights, but I was sure I couldn't make out any movement or figures in the windows. I think.
It wouldn't stop. Boomer, in Raptor 478, relayed the message, orders from President Roslin and Commander Adama both: destroy the Olympic Carrier.
It's never been harder to pull the trigger.
There may have been one thousand, three hundred forty-five human beings on that ship that could have been rescued. We'll never know. But there was a nuclear device on board and forty-seven thousand human beings who would have been lost if the Galactica had been destroyed.
My father gave the order. Roslin has the words Olympic Carrier on a slip of paper in her desk. But I pulled the trigger.
Not much of a rescue.
(600)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-07-01 01:27 am (UTC)You had no choice.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-03 03:02 pm (UTC)But I did. I think.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-02 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-03 03:00 pm (UTC)