The Reunion War (BSG/Iron Blooded Orphans)

The Reunion War (BSG/Iron Blooded Orphans)

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Wordcount: 2500

Commissioned by Mackenzie Buckle

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William Adama

[The former commander of the famed Battlestar Galactica cuts an impressive figure even in farmer’s clothing. Having chosen to retire, and eschewing many rewards for service except a military pension, he now works on an dome farm on Titan where most of the colonists reside. His hydroponic farm is large, and even with automation, he says that looking after all his crops takes him the entire day.

He says that it keeps his mind off the past, his body in shape, and looking to the future.

He allows me to assist him in tending to trays of small tomatoes just a few feet from the airlock where a modified Raptor sits for his personal use in delivering his supplies. The hooks in its underbelly are still those used by the Colonies to carry Mobile Suits.]

Sheer, blind luck.

That’s how we found Earth.

Many will tell you otherwise. That we found Earth through divine intervention, prophecy, or fate.

But that wasn’t the case.

We were leaving New Caprica after it was taken to us from the Cylons. The plan was to do everything in our power to save our people.

We had a skeleton crew, and we were meant for picket duty in a place where everyone thought the Cylons couldn’t hope to find us, and we barely had enough crew for one ship. Our supplies could barely last us half a year, we had all the antibiotics the human race had left, and not enough hands to use all our guns.

Our jump was coordinated, practical, and normal. The plan was to hide, gather what strength we could, and commit to a plan to take our people back. That should’ve been all there was to it… us and what little we had against everything the Cylons had and more.

Except when we came out… we were in orbit of the planet the Thirteenth Tribe called Mars.

Most of us were speechless.

… a few were hysterical…

…and, a handful with a lot of ruined plans.

Mine included.

[Adama is quiet for a moment, as we fill a pallet together, and move it to the next batch. The lights on the dome dim as a shadow is cast upon the dome. It takes 16 days for the sun to set on Titan, which allows many crops to flourish in hydroponic farms, so the shadow is cast by something else.

It is Galactica II.

The Battlestar is covered in Nanolaminate armor from prow to stern, eliminating the weakness of the tremendous ships against Ahab Reactor-powered Beam Weaponry. Many theorize that with the Colony of Kobol’s alliance with Mars, and their expertise in traversing deep space, that it is powered by Ahab Reactors surrounded by Half-Metals and its hull is composed High Hardness Rare Alloys.

Its weapon full weapon compliment is currently unknown, but its prow bristles with massive main cannons as Pegasus once did, and its four flight pods promise an intense strike-force response during any engagement. Even if it cannot be seen, many are sure that it has many flak cannons, railguns, and beam weapons upon its hull.

Should those rumors be true, the warship a is indeed best described as Gundam Dreadnaught. A ship which can cleave its way through an entire fleet as one of the 72 Gundams would against modern Mobile Suits. It begs the question whether or not the Gjallarhorn can hope to stand against Mars without the aid of the Cylons and their Mobile Armors, as their leader claims, especially as two more ships of the class are in their trial phase and three more are under construction.]

Even when we took stock, we couldn’t believe what we found while it stared us in the face.  The weeks it took us to translate the languages, take data, and hide within the asteroid belt away from the Thirteenth Tribe… we needed it.

We needed every day we had to retrain, to see, and to get our bearings… especially when we realized we were dozens and dozens of jumps away from New Caprica.

That brought up a lot of problem later… but we’ll cover that later.

The fact that DRADIS wasn’t affected by Ahab reactor’s interference made all the difference. Otherwise, we’d have been flying through smoke without any navigations systems, since we didn’t have anything that could interface with Ariadne. It was a key advantage of ours before everything else. The ability to perform scans on ships, planets, and detect things farther and more accurately… I’d say that it was a bigger advantage than having the biggest warship in the fleet.

Yeah, even if the warship could appear anywhere it wanted and deliver a nuclear payload.

DRADIS gave us information. It let us take a look around from safety, and find concrete details about things we couldn’t believe, until we had to accept that we were looking at the Thirteenth Tribe, at Earth, and the brewing’s of an interplanetary war.

There was a lot of talk about going to Earth, to Gjallarhorn, and asking for aid.

They had the largest fleet, the most manpower, and the largest economy within the system. Mars only existed because they needed Half Metals and cheap labor. They had more than enough for themselves and the entire system on their planet.

If they could be prepared against the Cylons, if their technologies could be modified, then they wouldn’t suffer the same fate as the colonies. With Beam weapons, Basestars barrages would’ve been on the backfoot, and Raiders would’ve been swatted out the sky with enough human pilots in the air in Vipers and Raptors.

If we gave all we had to Earth, if we did everything, we could to prepare them, we had a chance at being part of the force that defeated the Cylons once and for all.

If we gave one planet the means to keep another subjugated, keep them as slaves who used children to mine metal until they die, while their own lives up to 200… we would be able to get vengeance we wanted and maybe, just maybe, save the rest of our people over in New Caprica.

In the end, though, that didn’t happen.

Thanks to a certain pilot of mine who was at the right place, at the right time, and get herself in the biggest, frakking mess she possibly could.

[Adama laughs for moment and shakes his head.]

It only took her three months.

Mikazuki Augus

[Mikazuki Augus, known as the Devil of the Tekkandan, has a calm cold gaze. The suit-clad pilot of Gundam Barbatos Lupus Rex’s right eye is covered by a black patch, while his right arm is in a sling strapped close to his chest. Though he smaller than myself, it feels as though he is looming over me, and he sits across from me in the café like a tiger in waiting. More than a few gazes linger on him as he consumes cake with tea across from me, and the two rings on his hand glimmer in the sunlight.

He answers my questions after a moment of gathering his thoughts. His voice was calm, cool, and betrayed no emotion whatsoever while he spoke.]

I found Thrace-san in a ship, and with Orga’s help, we moved her and her ship somewhere our superiors could not find her. We thought she was a pilot for Gjallarhorn, and that we could convince her to help us leave with her ship.

She realized this and kept it from us that her ship was practice craft that didn’t have enough fuel to break into orbit, or ammunition for its weapons.

She was a smart soldier even then.

Hiding her was difficult, but we had support from our fellow soldiers. We didn’t trust or respect our superiors. They treated us poorly, dehumanized us, and wanted to break us to make us easy fodder between them and the enemy.

Going against their orders, doing anything to survive, was something we all believed in.

There was no chance of her being found after everyone agreed to help her.

She spoke to us and taught us until we could speak to one another. Organ and I learned how to speak Colonial the quickest, while she learned how to speak our language as well. Everyone else learned at their own pace, or through Orga and myself, while we did as we were told. Even while as we learned, we were still Human Debris, and we needed to be until we knew we could escape.

[Did you ever suspect Kara Thrace was lying?]

Orga and I thought it was possible during the first month, but that changed over time.

She noticed we were both growing leaner, and when we told her she was receiving our rations and that we were orphans sold as soldiers and laborers, she began investigating the base and asking more about where she was.

The more she learned the more earnest her efforts to help us became.

[Upon finishing his cake, Mikazuki Augus orders another, and sips his tea while waiting. I took the opportunity to ask another question.

Is it true she discovered how to activate Barbatos?]

That is incorrect.

In the second month, she decided to begin exploring the base. She was lucky that she was not found, but she located the core of the CGS [Chryse Guard Security was the PMC outfit which preceded Tekkadan.] facility.

Barbatos was fully functional, but it lacked a cockpit due to battle damage.

It was otherwise a fully-functional Mobile Suit from the Calamity War and designed to defeat Mobile Armors.

We were speaking with the mechanics in the base about taking it for ourselves by using a Mobile Worker cockpit and the help of mechanics. However, without a sufficient distraction, it would have been impossible to do so. Every Mobile Armor was accounted for by the CGS, and they used Barbatos as a power source, as its Ahab Reactor was still fully functional, thus allowing them to operate with minimal costs.

Kara Thrace discovered it and offered the usage of her Raptor for repairs.

[Were there any issues with that?]

The Alaya-Vijnana System is designed to allow pilots to act as processing computer to the point of being able to operate machines without training or a manual. With modifications, we believed that the cockpit of the Raptor can interface with the system, and one of the mechanics deemed it possible after seeing the simple but robust software of the training plane, with the usage of spare parts use from the Mobile Worker stockpile.

We had access to that since we were expected to perform repairs when engineers and mechanics were unavailable.

[Can you clarify on the issues that came with piloting Barbatos because of that decision?]

The Colonial Raptor is designed to have powerful sensors and electronic warfare systems. We initially believed that the Ahab Reactor will diminish the amount of data fed to the pilot from these systems, which we couldn’t remove.

We were wrong and I lost my right eye during the first battle as the data proved too much for my system.

However, it unleashed the full potential of the Gundam frame in exchange, because of the information it provided with its sensors. I was able to interface more thoroughly with the machine and utilize it to its full potential against experienced soldiers with Mobile Suits, which were launched by Gjallarhorn against the CGS three months after we met with Thrace-san.

[Many, even amongst the Colonies of Kobol, state that Kara Thrace forced you to pilot the Barbatos knowing that fully activating it will send a signal to the Battlestar Galactica and Pegasus. They say that she took advantage of child soldiers in order to be rescued, and then leveraged her authority to begin Mar’s reliance upon the Colonies of Kobol. What do you have to say regarding those thoughts and statements?]

After the first battle with Gjallarhorn, Thrace-san first did three things.

She acquired a weapon, and proceeded to imprison our officers who sought to abandon us while they fled, and began arming all of us.

Secondly, she pulled me out of my cockpit, and screamed at me for being a foolish imbecile, as she planned to pilot Barbatos herself after reciving an Alaya-Vinjnana System herself.

[That would’ve most likely killed her due to her age and that time period. It’s only recently that the procedures required for it to be implemented to adults have been rediscovered.]

She did not care about that fact.

The moment she learned about our situation as Human Debris, she aimed to help us, free us, and ensure our safety.

Even if it meant her dying.

[Our meeting is briefly interrupted by the arrival of cake, but the pilot speaks again soon after.]

The third thing that Kara Thrace did after the battle was raid the medical facilities of the CSG and ordered for food to be cooked and given out properly to us. She left Barbatos to be looked over the mechanics, and helped cook food herself, while we ate our fill.

When the Battlestar Pegasus and Galactica arrived over the planet, she was as surprised as the rest of us.

[The pilots eats, content that he has answered all my questions, and when I check he has. It is easy to forget that he is crippled on his entire right side.

After a moment, I offer him another question.

Would you care to provide insight on how you and your peers felt about discovering the Colonies and the Cylons? Many did not believe it, despite all evidence presented, until the war between the two factions arrived in the solar system.]

Fear.

We felt fear that there was a powerful, enemy force that strove to destroy humanity with nuclear weapons, and who already killed billions.

We felt fear because our enemy destroyed entire fleets of the most massive ships we ever saw, of a people that had more sophisticated technology, and who were likely to come after us next.

But Orga used that fear the right way.

He took a look at us, at the Battlestars, and told us the only way to survive was to help them… and that was the only way to survive against the enemy.

So, that was what we planned to do, even if it meant allying with Gjallarhorn. Survival was something that we all fought for before, so with that in mind, we joined the Colonies of Kobol to do our best to survive what was to come.

[But the Cylons reached them first.]

Yes, they did, and so we had to take Mars with the backing of the Colonies of Kobol, and use it as a staging ground for the fight against Gjallarhorn and the Cylons.

[Do you know how it was possible? How Cylons made contact with Earth when it took months for their first Basestar to arrive?

My question draws the gazes of his guards, until raises his hand and both look away while disabling their communications.

The legendary pilot whispered the answer to me.]

A Colonial Raptor was missing at the time, along with several individuals formerly reported on the ship.

I believe that Cylons arrived the same time as the Colonies of Kobol did.