The Long Patrol

Starbuck's unplanned double-date with Cassiopeia and Athena on the recently-reopened luxury liner Rising Star is interrupted when the Galactica picks up long-range transmission traffic indicting human life in a distant solar system on the other side of a vast asteroid dust field. Starbuck is recalled to duty to pilot the Starchaser, an up-powered reconnaissance viper denuded of weaponry and bearing a voice-activated computer - Computer, Oral Response Activated, known simply as CORA - that can handle the vast increase in performance in the new viper. Starbuck is enthralled by the new viper, but less enthusiastic about CORA, who bears a personality that grates on Starbucks nerves. Starbuck picks up two star-craft from hundreds of years vintage and in the process he is double-crossed and knocked unconscious by a smuggler of liquor. Starbuck later finds himself incarcerated on Proteus, a prison planetoid that is a surviving body from hundreds of such penal facilities scattered through the stars by the Colonies during the Cylon War, facilities that made munitions and liquor for the war effort. Proteus is now manned by the distant antecedents of its original guards and prisoners and continues to make ambrosia for Colonial warriors, even though hundreds of years worth of ambrosia have never left the planet - and the planet may not even survive, as a Cylon patrol that has detected Starbuck's now-stolen viper has spotted the planetoid while the stolen viper is being pursued by Apollo and Boomer.