Part 2: Battlestar Galactica, Dawn: Collision

Chapter 8

VIII

The Cylons had also dropped ground troops in around the planet as well. They couldn't conquer the planet, but most were tasked to go after power grids, dams, and other infrastructure items at different locations around the world. They could and did do plenty of damage.

One place they had dropped in a large number of Centurions was near Omaha. The Cylons weren't dumb and had studied the audio and video coming from the planet and had, in short time, deduced that one of the main leaders if not the main leader on the planet was holed up in a military base in that vicinity. They wanted to take the soul out of any resistance if they could.

They had landed about fifty-thousand Centurions in the first two days, and they would work independently of the nuclear bombardment from the Baseships and of the attacks on cities that the Raiders were carrying out. They set up a perimeter that began near Columbus, Nebraska to the West. To the North, their ring went around about twenty miles South of Sioux City, New Caprica, then Southeast between Atlantic and Villisca, also part of New Caprica, then Southwest between Nebraska City, Nebraska, and St. Joseph, Missouri. The circle was completed back up to Columbus. It was pretty open territory, and the Cylons intentions were quite obvious, so they began to close the circle two days after landing.

Captain Kara Thrace's Charlie Squadron of the 20th UED Air Force flew missions against the marching Cylons as did other squads from Offutt, as well as from Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota, Minot AFB in North Dakota, Wright-Patterson in Dayton, Ohio, and Whiteman in Missouri. American Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force F-35's also were in action near Omaha as well.

The Cylons met the Allied forces on the fifth day and had made some progress, although not as much as they had hoped. The Allied land forces and the continuous strafing from above made the going quite slow for the Toasters. They had taken Nebraska City in the South. To the West, they had only advanced a handful of miles to David City and had actually been pushed back closer to Sioux City to the North. They had made the most gains East of Omaha, taking Avoca, New Caprica on the seventh day of the campaign.

Kara's squadron was tasked to stop the movement from the East, and while they were doing damage to the Cylons the Toasters kept coming. She was even flying missions when her squadrons of Falcons were not in the rotation. She was pushing herself almost beyond her physical and mental endurance.

If she didn't let up, she wouldn't be around the see the war end.

President Justin Bond could hear the sounds of war above him. There would be a loud crump of incoming from the Cylons, with their laser cannons and even some bomb-like ordinance being released on or near Offutt Air Force Base. He was in the underground Command Center, which wasn't just a command and control for Offutt, but it was his new Situation Room, to monitor the movement of the U.S. Military, the Battlestars, and the fighting around the globe.

Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York were gone. Not just damaged, but gone. The Cylons had hit each city and about twenty or so others around the planet with thermonuclear devices in the vicinity of seventy-five megatons, an astounding explosive power. The largest device ever detonated by anyone on Earth had been in 1961 when the now-dead Soviet Union had tested the fifty-seven megaton, Tsar Bomba. That explosion had been some 1500 times larger than the weapon used at Hiroshima. The largest his nation had tested was the Castle Bravo thermonuclear detonation in 1954, and that had "only" been fifteen megatons-and had only been scheduled to be ten megatons. These weapons were two-thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima.

The ones dropped today around the planet from those Baseships in space...the effect would be incalculable by all accounts. He couldn't even wrap his head around it. The one dropped on New York would affect an area halfway across Long Island to the East, Northward almost up to Newburgh, New York; Westward it would reach near Hackettstown, New Jersey, and South just beyond Ashbury Park. Fully fifteen million people were within that zone.