Part 1, Battlestar Galactica: Dawn

Chapter 1

I

June 2022

Leslie Michalak glanced at her three computer screens. She knew nothing was wrong or that nothing exciting was going on, but as when driving a car and sometimes checking the rearview and side-view mirrors, she did glance at her computer screens every few minutes, while finishing up her paperwork from yesterday's watch.

Leslie was thirty-seven years old and single. She had been working at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland for going on nine years now. She had joined SFC after a stint in the Navy, where she had studied engineering and photographic analysis. Helping to track and program the Hubble Space Telescope on a daily was like a dream come true for her. She had wanted to fly, but she didn't meet the physical standards for a pilot, let alone an Astronaut.

Today, Hubble had been tasked to study a region beyond the current orbit of Uranus. The target was some ninety-one light years away, an interesting clump of stars that seemed relatively close together that NASA wanted more information about. It was just an ordinary day. Or so she thought.

Something caught her eye as she glanced at Screen One to her left. She didn't "see" what Hubble was looking at, she just read the information that the space-bound telescope was sending back in the form of calculations and information. And while Hubble is programmed to see deep into space, it can detect movement much closer to Earth if something crosses its field of vision. The data on the computer terminal said that something HAD crossed its field of vision.

Leslie called the Operations Manager on Duty to inform him of the event. She wasn't overly excited, as meteors and comets and space flotsam often registered with Hubble all the time.

"Sir, Hubble has spotted an object or objects moving within her field of vision. Distance approximately 2.7 billion kilometers from Earth. No speed or path plotted yet."

"OK, Leslie", said Senior Controller Marvis West, a former Astronaut. "I'll get STScI to put eyes on the data to see what we can find out." And with that, Leslie passed the information on to the actual programmers and analysts who could see what Hubble saw. Her part in the matter was over.

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Senior Analyst Vidum Kadman had received the information from Marvis West a few minutes before and was preparing Hubble to look closer at the information passed along, indicating a moving object within Hubble's line of sight. A third-generation American who's grandparents had come from India, he had been in the Astronaut program. But after the Space Shuttle program had ended, he signed on with the Space Telescope Scientific Institute, which was housed at Goddard. He'd been with STScI for twelve years

He punched in the coordinates where the event had been observed and directed Hubble to focus there on its next pass. Hubble orbited every ninety-seven minutes, and the information he had been given was about twenty-one minutes old, so in approximately seventy-six minutes, Hubble would get another look at whatever was moving. It was nearing 11 am, and Vidum figured it would be a good time to eat his lunch.

When he returned, it was only a few minutes before Hubble would be in the position needed to track the target. At first, he wouldn't "see" what Hubble saw. Like Leslie, he would get readings on the object. The computer would then extrapolate from the data what was being "seen", and after that, Vidum could bring up an image that Hubble had recorded.

This first pass indicated that not enough date was available to make a preliminary analysis. That wasn't unusual either, as the telescope sometimes needed to gather additional date. He figured that after another two passes should give Hubble enough to take a run at what was out there. He would let the system do its work.

Hubble finished it's third pass around 4:49 pm. A few minutes later the analysis came over the computer terminal: the object was traveling approximately 16,500 kph, and was...turning? Objects in space didn't turn suddenly, or they never had when Vidum had examined the data. But the data said that the object had made a twenty-seven-degree turn, and that...the speed had dropped to 11,291 kph? There's no way that's right, his scientific-oriented mind objected. Maybe it was time to see what Hubble was looking at.

He punched up the images that Hubble had taken on the target. He had to focus inward on what the telescope was seeing, as it would not be very large within Hubble's sight line. The computer program helped him narrow in on the object...

......It didn't look like anything he had seen before. It wasn't a ball of ice or metal. It didn't have a tail of gas or ice behind it. It had real shape and texture to it. It seemed to have a geometric composition to it. But the image was still so small, relatively speaking, that he thought his eyes might be playing tricks on him. He increased the size of the image by a factor of fifteen.

He blinked a few times before focusing back on the image. The shape certainly didn't resemble a piece of rock. Was it...a ship? It still wasn't registering with his mind all that well. He increased again by a factor of ten.

His breath caught on the intake, and wouldn't release for a few moments. There it was. It was...a ship? It's a goddamned ship! It wasn't space junk in an orbit anywhere near Earth. This was out in the environs of Uranus. That giant teal-colored orb of ice and gas certainly didn't have anything from Earth parked near it.

He requested more information from Hubble on the...ship? It still didn't look big in the photograph, but the estimated measurements from the data indicated it was immense by human standards. He could see a superstructure; it looked like there were two wings or pods on either side, but couldn't make out what those were at that distance. But it clearly wasn't a comet or meteor. And it WAS slowing down, and it HAD turned. And no...ship...on Earth had ever approached such dimensions.

He adjusted his headset and with a clearly shaking hand, moved the cursor on his computer to the phone app to call Marvis West. "Marvis, I think you had better come over here. You're not gonna believe this..." He looked at the time: 4:57 pm, Wednesday, April 27th, 2022.