Admiral Nagala: the last commander of the Colonial Fleet

Admiral Nagala was a flag officer of the Colonial Fleet and the officer who inherited command of the entire Colonial war effort in the hours after the Cylon surprise attack on the Twelve Colonies. With Colonial Fleet Headquarters on Picon destroyed in the opening bombardment, Nagala took personal command from the battlestar Atlantia and ordered every surviving warship to converge for a counteroffensive over Virgon. The battle that followed destroyed what remained of the Fleet as a fighting force, and Nagala was killed aboard his flagship. Word of Atlantia's loss reached Galactica, and Commander William Adama assumed command of what was left.

The rank and the headquarters#

An Admiral commanded the Colonial Fleet and, together with the General of the Marine Corps, answered directly to the Admiralty. It was the top of a service structure that had spent forty years in an armistice with the Cylons, then two decades rebuilding itself around advanced warships and networked systems. The seat of that structure was Colonial Fleet Headquarters, also called Picon Fleet Headquarters, a military installation in the city of Perkinson on Picon where most of the Admiralty was based.

That concentration made the headquarters an obvious target, and the Cylons treated it as one. When Basestars were detected over Picon, Fleet Headquarters put the Colonial Fleet on general alert. The installation was then destroyed in the opening nuclear barrage, taking the senior command of the Colonies with it.

The first minutes of the Fall#

The attack that removed Nagala's superiors also removed most of his weapons. Two years before the Fall, the Command Navigation Program had been developed as a networked system for universal installation across Colonial military craft. Its architect, Gaius Baltar, was a proponent of the networking that had been officially banned during the Cylon War because of Cylon hacking. The Cylons obtained the program through an infiltrator and altered half of its algorithms so that their forces could penetrate its firewalls and disable ships with a virus at will.

The result was not a battle but a shutdown. Over Caprica, three battlestars moved to intercept the strike force and were disabled almost immediately, leaving the Basestars free to fire warheads at the population centres below. Similar engagements played out across the other eleven worlds. Over Scorpia, Raiders carrying nuclear missiles destroyed the Scorpion Fleet Shipyards. Roughly thirty battlestars, about a quarter of total Fleet strength, were lost in the first minutes. President Richard Adar offered an unconditional surrender, and the Cylons ignored it entirely.

Flag aboard Atlantia#

With the headquarters gone, Nagala took personal command of the Fleet and based himself aboard Atlantia, a battlestar that had served since the close of the First Cylon War and had survived the initial assault. The ship carried a long institutional memory. Galen Tyrol had served aboard her as a deckhand, and William Adama had flown from her as a major, feuding with the ship's landing signal officer in a rivalry that ended in a celebration of his thousandth landing.

Nagala's plan was the orthodox answer to a surprise attack. He ordered every remaining ship to break off local defence and rendezvous, intending to meet the Cylons with concentrated strength rather than let the Fleet be destroyed piecemeal over twelve separate worlds. Columbia, one of the most modern battlestars in service, was ordered to join the task force. So were Triton, assigned to Battlestar Group 39 of the Aerilon Combat 5th Division, and Solaria, which had also come through the first wave intact.

The Battle of Virgon#

The gathered force met the Cylons over Virgon. It numbered no more than ninety battlestars, a figure that followed from the loss of thirty ships representing a quarter of the Fleet at the outset, and it was destroyed. The reason was the same one that had emptied the skies over the Colonies, and it was still unrecognised. Ships reported computer failures constantly and no explanation could be given for them, because nobody in the massed fleet yet knew the Command Navigation Program was the weapon being used against them. Atlantia fell prey to the exploit like the rest, disabled and defenceless in orbit of Virgon. Columbia, Triton and Solaria were destroyed there without putting up a fight. Nagala was killed aboard Atlantia.

Galactica could not have helped. Recently decommissioned and stripped of armament, the old battlestar had been preserved as a recruiting symbol rather than a warship, and its refusal to run networked systems was the reason it survived the day at all. It sat out the Battle of Virgon because it had nothing to fight with.

After Virgon#

When news of Atlantia's destruction reached Galactica, Commander Adama assumed command of the Fleet and transmitted a signal picked up by military and civilian ships alike: "To all Colonial units: Am taking command of fleet. All units ordered to rendezvous at Ragnar Anchorage for regroup and counter-attack. Acknowledge by same encryption protocol, Adama." It was an order built on the same instinct as Nagala's, to gather and strike back, and it was overtaken by the same reality. No surviving battlestars or cruisers reached Ragnar in the hours that followed.

That silence settled the war. Adama concluded that the Fleet no longer existed, that Galactica's destruction was only a matter of time, and that the refugee convoy gathered by President Laura Roslin had to abandon the Cyrannus star system entirely. Of the Colonial Fleet that Nagala had commanded for a single day, only Galactica and Pegasus remained.