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All I have left at this point...Meetings: Part I.“How do we do this?” General Marchbank asked her staff.“Big landers or a corvette are out,” Colonel Julieanne Rose said. “Stealth doesn’t help if someone can just look up into the sky and see a ship bigger than some of their waterborne warships.”“And there would be no mistaking them for a local aircraft,” another officer muttered. “At a distance, and as long as it isn’t doing anything strange, a raptor or dropship might look like one of their aircraft— at least to an untrained individual.”“What’s the rest of the fleet going to be doing?”“Adama has a flotilla that will be in jump range,” Marchbank made a notation on their holodisplay. “We’ve got no damned idea how paranoid they are, but we know they have a lot of nukes pointed at each other. If this turns into a frakup and someone down there decides that their enemies are responsible, the flotilla can jump into orbit and shoot down their land based missiles and bombers before they can get to anyone.”“What about sea based?” Another marine muttered.Marchbank thought.“Jump corvettes and raptors configured for anti-missile work into low orbit where they can shoot at anything trying those types of launches— it’ll be dicey, but…” Marchbank shrugged, “subs are designed to stay hidden. That hopefully means they’re kept in reserve for later usage which would keep them from firing everything off at once.”she thought. Of course, the single guiding rule of the Colonial military wasassume the worst case when planning an operation.“Here’s the target,” she continued. “It’s a small town, set up in a desert through this shallow pass— one of the primary access points down to the valley here…” her finger traced a line, “and the collection of big cities that pretty well extend to the coast.”“That place has airbases all through it…” Julieanne muttered. “Why not one of the less populated areas?”“At night and with our countermeasures, they’re unlikely to see us. The big threat is a ground encounter, and going to a smaller area might not get us what we need-and that would demand another trip and we don’t have. The cylons might not find this place for a hundred years or a raider could already be heading back to their main fleet elements.” There were a series of grim nods at that comment.“The data repository is here-” Marchbank said. “IR observation indicates that nobody comes into downtown after the sun goes down except for these depots on the far side. Not a problem. We can land our ships here, use some light transport vehicles to get in, remove as much as we can in thirty minutes and then leave.”“That’s going to be pretty obvious.”“As far as we can tell, these people don’t even have the capability to visit the other worlds in their system. I don’t think they’ll jump to off worlders immediately— and remember that the goal is to learn enough so we can talk to them, not frak around with random contacts.”Just asking had been talked about, but everyone agreed, they’d get very nice documents…which said exactly what the inhabitants wanted them to say. Granted, she expected that they’d still be slanted, but at least they could be certain that the information hadn’t been tailored for their own benefit.“Someday,we’ll stop looking for libraries…” Sandra muttered.“Yes?” the robotic voice of Davan responded. “And then we will be sent to obtain other items. Books are less likely to explode.”Sandra thought. There weren’tcylons in general fleet service— and the ones that were had been the point of several “frank discussions” between the command staff.Nobody said on whether such discussions had involved punches. Still, there were a few cylons in the Colonial military. Not a lot, but more than there had been when Sandra had started 5 years ago. Back then, the Colonial and cylon units only interacted at the highest levels, just in case some chucklehead started making toaster jokes.But things changed.“IR shows that the town is,” the pilot of the stealth raptor said. “No moving heat sources on the streets or in the buildings and those cars are giving readings consistent with being shut down for a while.”“Land at point alpha,” Sandra ordered. “We’ll take the ground vehicles in.” Raptors almost never crashed, but almost was the key word. If they did have a one in a million malfunction, better to have it out on the desert rather than in a town where a pillar of fire would probably bring people running.“We are so grounded,” Esther said quietly.“I… I didn’t mean to…” Mike gestured at the dead motor bike he was walking. Town was almost 5 miles away, and there they could call home…and get grounded. Esther’s parents would never believe he just wanted to show her how you could see meteors tracking through the sky away from the neighborhood lights, since she’d spent her first 13 years in New York City. They would assume much worse about his motivations.Mike had to agree. Even wearing her jacket, Esther had a shapely form that had some of the kids at school lusting after her— the ones who got over the fact she was a Jew at least.So it would be neat, and they could share their interest. Both Esther and Mike loved Space 1999, and had stood in line for Star Wars, and Esther had a map of the solar system in her room— to the disturbance of her rather old fashioned mother. Mike had a drawing of what the Shuttle would look like, next to an artists conception of what the first orbital space port would be like. Hegoing to fly it to that port one day.And now his bike had died andit. Back to town, wait for the angry call, wait to get grounded.“My life sucks,” he muttered under his breath.