A Chance Encounter (Robotech/New Battlestar Galactica
- Thread starter AJW
- Start date
Of course,they would watch them like hawks.
AJW
Well-known member
Not ideally no. Right now the Cylons behaviour marks them as a threat to be eliminated. If the threat goes away one way or another then they'll leave them be.
I watched BSG on dvd,and nBSG on tv - and second was,to be honest,dissapointment.Not only becouse they changed gender of Starbuck,but also becouse of entire story being our past - when in BSG i could wait for invasion of evil Cylons on our Earth,which would be more funny.
Evilutionary
Active member
Well, nBSG's unforgivable crime is that it was the first TV series to do mid-season breaks that I know of and much fewer episodes per season. It sort of falls off a cliff in season 3 iirc (when the refugees settle down temporarily on the ice age planet) but some serious stupidity shows when the long promised Cylon 'plan' reveal was 'Kill All Humans' all along (after hinting that they actually were up to something else).
Dirk Benedict was always going be a hard act to follow as Starbuck (very few actors in that era had more than one successful series), so I could see why they changed the character. The problem was nBSG Starbuck is a male character, either the writers didn't know how to write a female action hero or they were just lazy and just tried to duplicate the old one. Anyway, nBSG Starbuck was a dude as written but who couldn't fill the same role as oBSG Starbuck...who was supposed to be Apollo's roguish best friend. They tried but that dynamic between nBSG Apollo & Starbuck simply wasn't there.
AJW
Well-known member
I actually liked Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace at least until they did that whole she died and then came back thing only to mysteriously disappear again shortly after the Colonials arrived on Earth 2 a.k.a our Earth. Though by that point in time I had really lost interest in the show as it had degenerated into a convoluted, confusing mess.
I lost interest before that happened.And i liked Kara,too - but,as @Evilutionary said, main problem was that they take female character and made her play like previous male character from old series.
BSG really is better.Even their metal cylons are better !
IIRC, it was the first in the US market to do shorter runs, but I'm not sure about mid-season breaks. I know Stargate Atlantis had them, I don't remember if SG-1 did too.
That said, British shows at the time were generally shorter runs already, so if anything, that was just the US/Canadian TV industries catching up.
AJW
Well-known member
Mid season breaks were fairly common at the time. British shows also generally have shorter seasons it is not unusual even now for an entire season to be just six to eight episodes as in British shows there seems to be more focus on story and less on filler episodes.
Unless the show is American then shorter seasons tend to be the norm in British television.
Chapter Eleven
New
AJW
Well-known member
Chapter Eleven
Conference Room
UES Procyon
A Short Time Later
President Laura Roslin felt sick. For once it had absolutely nothing to do with the cancer that was slowly, but surely, killing her and everything to do with the slaughter that they had just witnessed. Oh it wasn’t seeing the Cylons get utterly annihilated – that had been cathartic and terrifying in equal measure cathartic as it was nice seeing the Cylons get some long overdue comeuppance, terrifying for the ease with which the thirteenth tribes weapons had torn through the Cylons wiping baseships and raiders from the sky like they were mere toys – but the horrendous losses that the fleet had taken during the battle.
She was not unaware that with the fleet stationary in open space while Captain Thrace led a risky rescue mission back to the colonies, many of the civilian ships had taken the opportunity to take their overstressed FTL drives offline for essential maintenance. She and Admiral Adama had allowed it, though it was a calculated risk, since there really wasn’t much choice as more and more civilian ships had been reporting problems with their FTL’s over the last few weeks. Civilian drives just were not designed to be handle the immense amount of stress they’d had to put on them ever since they had fled the Cyrranus Cluster in the aftermath of the Cylon attack. As a result, more than one engineer had had to make ad hoc repairs, and workarounds of components damaged by overstress, during the flight.
With the fleet going to be stationary for a while it had seemed like the perfect time to make more permanent repairs – such as replacing overworked components. Now it had bitten them in the arse big time as while a large chunk of the fleet had been able to get their FTL’s back online and quickly jump to pre-planned emergency coordinates – with the Cerberus going with them to protect them – nearly twenty hadn’t been able to include Cloud Nine due to their drives needing more time to get back online.
Time that many of them had turned out not to have as the Cylons, sensing easy kills, had targeted them even as the Terrans began firing upon them after the Cylons ignored Admiral Haywood’s demand to withdraw or be destroyed. Cloud Nine had been the first of their ships to be destroyed and there was something about that which bothered her, not just because of the fact that the Quorum and several thousand other people had been aboard the liner when she exploded but…
…the ship hadn’t been hit by a Cylon missile.
Video, incredibly high definition video at that, had been displayed in the conference room where Admiral Haywood had left them after the Cylon armada jumped in. Video that had shown the entire course of the battle and its aftermath. None of the missiles, conventional or nuclear, had gotten anywhere near the Cloud Nine instead the nuclear blast that had destroyed her – and a number of nearby ships as they were either enveloped by the plasma wave or pelted with hypervelocity semi-molten debris – had originated from somewhere within the ship. It had been a deliberate act, someone almost certainly a Cylon infiltrator had done it deliberately. Though how in the name of the Lords had they been able to get a nuke aboard the liner and how had they concealed it for so long?
She could think of only one way and it, if anything, made her feel even sicker. Demand Peace had to be involved in some way. They had certainly carried out acts of disobedience and sabotage in the fleet before, demanding that they surrender to the Cylons rather than continue to run and support what they called Adama’s war machine. They refused to understand or accept that the Cylons had no intention of accepting any form of surrender – they had already tried to surrender during the initial attack as after Picon was nuked President Adar had offered the Cylons the complete and unconditional surrender of the Twelve Colonies sacrificing his pride to save their civilization. Only for the Cylons to ignore the offer, not even dignifying it with a response, and went right on carpet bombing the Colonies with nukes – and just wanted them deader than the titans.
Somehow one of their supporters had gotten their hands on a nuke, presumably one on the battlestars since they were the only ships they had that carried nukes and smuggled it to Cloud Nine. Where honestly speaking it wouldn’t have been that hard for a humanoid Cylon to have gotten their hands on it. And wait until the most opportune moment to detonate the weapon after all they would just wake up somewhere else in a nice new body. Silently she vowed that she would get to the bottom of this, find out how Demand Peace and through those misguided fools the Cylons had gotten their hands on that weapon and heads would definitely roll.
Possibly quite literally.
A hand being waved in front of her face jolted her out of her thoughts. She jumped slightly and looked up to see Commander Richards standing over her. “Yes?” she asked.
“Are you alright madam president?” the commanding officer of the Cerberus asked her concerned. Like all the other warship captains in the fleet, as well as the political leadership, he was well aware that the presidents cancer had recently begun to return. That the treatment devised by Doctors Baltar and Cottle from the blood of the late Human-Cylon hybrid child hadn’t cured it only forced it into remission and only for a little while. Given how quiet she’d been since the battle had ended, he, and the rest of their small delegation, had been worried that something was up with it possibly being helped in some way by the fact that the ships gravity field – which certainly mirrored the Terran homeworld of Earth – which was higher than Colonial standard.
“I’m alright,” Roslin hurried to reassure him. “I was just thinking.”
“About the battle?” Richards asked inwardly shivering as he remembered watching the fight. To say it had been brutal had been an understatement – their cousins weapons were frankly terrifying the ease with which they destroyed Cylon ships and how they seemed to have just as advanced defences – and very costly to both their civilian ships and the military. Both the Vigilance and the Galactica were gone – victims of Cylon weapons – and he didn’t doubt that, aside from his own ship which had been ordered away with most of the civilian ships to protect them, all the others – including the Pegasus – had sustained considerable damage.
Roslin nodded. “And about Cloud Nine,” she said, “no missiles were anywhere near her when she was nuked so…”
“… the blast came from inside the ship,” Richards finished for her, “meaning either someone deliberately overloaded the main reactor, or someone smuggled a nuke onboard her. I don’t know which possibility is worse.”
“The blast came from the wrong place for it to be the reactor,” Baltar said softly, pale as though he was horrified by the destruction of Cloud Nine and truth be told he was. He never thought that the Model Six Cylon working with Demand Peace that he’d given the weapon to would actually detonate the weapon. Of course, he already had a contingency plan in place in case of an incident like this or even the weapon that was supposed to be in his lab on Galactica being found missing. “Plus overloading the reactor would not have been possible, there are hardwired safeties that would have tripped and scrammed it in the event if someone trying that and they couldn’t be bypassed quickly or easily and would have necessitated disassembling half the reactor.”
“So, it was a nuke but how? And who would do that,” Sarah asked, grief and anger clear to see on her face. She had known a lot of people on Cloud Nine, people who were now dead.
“Demand Peace or the Cylon infiltrators take your pick. As to where they got the weapon, I have n…” Baltar let his voice trail off and went pale as though he had just realized something horrific. “Oh, my Gods no. It can’t have been.”
“Doctor?” Roslin asked.
Baltar swallowed. “I don’t want to believe it but… do you remember when Admiral Adama was shot by the Cylon infiltrator Sharon Valerii and Colonel Tigh assumed command of the Galactica,” he continued. Roslin nodded wondering where he was going with this. “Well during that time a group of marines came to my lab with sealed orders from Colonel Tigh. Orders that stated that with the failure of the first model of the Cylon detector the warhead I had taken some fissile material from for my experiments was to be removed from my care and returned to the Galactica’s weapons inventory.
“Since I had enough to continue with my experiments and given what had just happened it seemed a perfectly reasonable order, so I let them take the weapon,” Baltar continued his voice shaking and looking like he wanted to cry. “The paperwork looked right, it even had Tigh’s signature, so I let them have it. But what if it was a forgery after all? Am I somehow responsible for the loss of Cloud Nine and everyone aboard?”
“That is a possibility, and you would have no way to know it wasn’t a legitimate order,” Richards said with a frown seeing that the notoriously womanising scientist seemed genuinely distressed by the possibility. “Unfortunately, with the destruction of the Galactica there is no way to know if was real as it would have been recorded in the ships main log and I very much doubt they would have been able to get that before the ships destruction.”
“We will check as much as we can later,” Roslin decided giving Baltar a look of sympathy. While she didn’t quite trust Baltar these days – especially ever since she remembered seeing him with that blond bombshell Cylon before the Colonies were destroyed – she had to admit that it was a real possibility that someone – presumably from Demand Peace – had just the chaos in the fleet at that time to steal the weapon. Thus, she would give him the benefit of the doubt, plus he genuinely did seem to be upset. “If someone did conspire to use the chaos in the fleet at that time to steal the weapon we will get to the bottom of it.”
Baltar nodded and looked determined before he gave a small sniffle and wiped his eyes. In sympathy at his clear distress – and despite her normal distain for the scientist especially his heretical atheist beliefs – Sarah reached out and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Like the president she well remembered the chaos that had swept over the fleet at that time, when they had also found Kobol and learned the path to Earth even though doing so had cost Priestess Elosha her life as the Gods warning never to return to Kobol unless they were willing to pay a price in blood came true, and didn’t doubt that some of the more disreputable people in the fleet had used it to their own advantage.
Baltar looked over and smiled back slightly nodding in thanks though inwardly he was quietly jumping for joy that everyone currently seemed to believe him. Guess those drama courses I took back in university for extra credits weren’t so useless after all, he thought inwardly smug. Before he could say anything the door to the conference room opened and the Procyon’s flag captain Ulysses Parkinson came in. He paused at the sight that greeted him.
“Are you alright,” he asked in immediate concern.
“We will be fine,” Roslin answered, “is Admiral Haywood coming back to see us?”
“She will soon but she is currently in an emergency meeting over fold comm with both the United Earth Government and the Plenipotentiary Council over what we are going to do with you after this little fracas with the Cylons,” Parkinson answered, “so she asked me to come and fill you in on what’s going to be happening next.”
I suppose the size of the Cylon fleet would seem small to people who have fought thousands of warships at a time, Roslin thought feeling again a chill at the thought of the kind of foes that their cousins had faced. Especially the sheer, almost unbelievable, size of the Zentraedi Armada that had attacked them towards the end of what they called the Robotech War. “I see,” she replied, “then what is happening?”
“The last of the survivors from the Galactica have been recovered from their lifepods by the Amelia Earhart,” Parkinson told them, “Admiral Adama is among them, aside from some bumps and bruises he’s fine. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many of the others as several have serious burns and injuries caused either by vacuum exposure, radiation burns or being hit by falling debris as the ship began breaking apart. Due to the severity of their injuries the Amelia Earhart and a small escort will fold immediately back to MARS 5 to allow their more advanced medical facilities to treat them.”
“And what about the rest of us?” Richards asked.
“We will be moving to join your fleet at their backup coordinates we are currently moving towards the Pegasus, apparently her FTL drives are offline due to both primary and secondary drive coolant lines being severed,” as he said that Richards winced slightly knowing that was going to be a nightmare for the battlestars engineers and damage control crews to sort out. Cleaning up the spilled drive coolant would be hazardous – it could be quite volatile after all if handled incorrectly or if it encountered the wrong thing – and depending on how much had spilled out of the lines before automatic valves closed at the loss of pressure take anywhere from hours to days – and would have to be completed before they could repair the breached conduits. “So, we’ll have to include her in our fold sphere. Once she’s in position we’ll all fold together.”
“And then what,” Roslin asked.
“Well, what will happen long term hasn’t been decided yet but we’ll certainly begin transporting your fleet away from this area in our fold spheres since your drives don’t have the capability to get to MARS 5 quickly,” Parkinson answered, “we can deal with any injuries or illnesses, as well as anything else you need, when we get there. At least until the decision is made what to do with you.”
“I suppose that will have to do for now,” Roslin admitted, “but we would like to go to Earth in the long run.”
“That might not be possible I am afraid,” Parkinson answered, “until we know just how the Cylons have been tracking your ships – especially as your folds are too brief to generate much or anything of a foldspace wake that a finder beam can follow – we cannot risk taking your people to Earth. Though there are a number of habitable worlds in our claimed space you could settle on long term some of which have yet to be colonised. To be honest with you that would probably be the better option if you want to maintain your own unique identity as a culture.”
Roslin frowned slightly at that, and she could see Sarah bristling, no doubt about to launch into a lecture about how it was the will of the Lords of Kobol that the tribes reunited and live together, so she decided to step in. “Sarah it’s their world, their choice not ours and it never has been ours,” she said softly but firmly, giving her a glare that promised retribution if she said the wrong thing, “besides they may have a point, especially if we want to maintain our own culture and identity as a people.”
“But…” Sarah started to say only to pause as she considered what Roslin was saying. While it was written in the Sacred Scrolls, especially the Book of Pythia, that they would reunite with their long lost thirteen tribe brethren it didn’t actually say they would live together with them. That had always been just an expectation by their people, especially given the revival of the faith that there had been in the fleet after the Cylon holocaust, and not a written down fact from the mouth of the gods themselves.
Thus, there was nothing to say that they couldn’t just settle on a world in Terran space. They could still be said to have reunited with their long lost brothers and sisters yet still be in a position to retain their own culture and society. Something that they probably wouldn’t be able to do if they actually went and settled on Earth, certainly not for any appreciable length of time. Try as they might if they went to Earth then it was inevitable that everything that made the people of the Twelve Colonies who they were would begin to erode away, replaced by the culture of the Terrans a culture that they still knew so little about, and eventually become nothing more than a footnote in history books or in the names of buildings and streets. Maybe even their very faith would disappear replaced by whatever their cousins believed.
Which would be completely unacceptable.
“You may have a point,” she admitted at last. “After all the Sacred Scrolls only say we will reunite with our long lost brethren it doesn’t strictly say we actually will live with them. However much some of our people might believe otherwise. I expect there will be a number of arguments about this in the Quorum once it’s been reconstituted – again.”
“No doubt,” Roslin replied inwardly grimacing at the reminder that they would have to go through all the rigmarole of rebuilding the Quorum of the Twelve once again since aside from herself, Sarah, and Baltar they’d all been on Cloud Nine and would have been incinerated with the ship. It would be a headache and one she could frankly do without, but it would have to be done. At least this time she would have some idea of what she was actually doing. Unlike the last time in the first few months after they’d left the smouldering remains of the Cyrranus Cluster behind them with a hoard of genocidal toasters hot on their asses.
She put that out of her mind for now and instead looked back at the patiently waiting Terran. “We understand your position and accept it,” she said at last, “there will no doubt be some arguments among us over it, but we understand it. Now is there anything else?”
“There is,” Parkinson replied relieved they were off that particular topic at least for now. “And it relates to something rather curious that we noticed the moment we began running a routine post battle analysis. Every time we destroyed one of the Cylon vessels – be it one of their fighters or one of the capital ships – it would emit a burst of activity on a very unusual, and fairly primitive, foldspace communication band. Do you know anything about that? Is it some side effect of your FTL drives being destroyed in the same way ours would emit a pulse of phased gravitons and tachyons? The reason I asked is sensors recorded the same phenomenon when some of your ships were destroyed by the Cylons.”
Baltar blinked. “You can detect the Cylon resurrection signals?” he asked.
“Resurrection signals?”
Baltar hesitated not sure if he should answer only for Roslin to look at him with a ‘you might as well answer’ look. Which prompted him to give a slight nod. “You are aware that the Cylons are machines,” he asked the Terran.
“Biosynthetic machines to be exact but yes. The Sirona’s sensors confirmed that the moment they first scanned a Cylon vessel.”
“I see,” Baltar replied, instantly itching to get a look at the Terran dradis or whatever sensor system they actually used to find out just how it could do that. Though they had known about them, from interrogating captured Cylons who forever boasted that they couldn’t truly die, they had never been able to directly detect the Cylon signals. “Being machines the Cylons aren’t bound to the limits of mortality in the way that we are. When their ships are destroyed, or individual Cylons killed, they’re minds, and knowledge are broadcast via some type of FTL comm either to the Cylon homeworld or to a type of ship called a Resurrection Ship where they download into a new body with all the memories and knowledge of the previous body up until the moment of death.”
“Resurrection ships seem to be few and far between,” Commander Richards added, “when we destroyed one a few months ago the Cylons stopped attacking and harassing us for weeks until they could bring up a replacement.”
“I see,” Parkinson said with a thoughtful frown. “Given the foldspace comm frequencies they use are fairly basic they wouldn’t travel that far through foldspace certainly not across a few thousand light years. There range would only be a few hundred light years at the most. Of course, now we know about those signals it will not be difficult to configure our ECM systems to, in our next encounter with the Cylons, jam them.”
“You can jam FTL comms?” Commander Richards asked.
“Of course we can,” Parkinson answered as jamming enemy communications was a normal facet of warfare and had been even before the SDF-1 first fell out of the sky onto Macross Island. It’s use had only grown since then with the discovery and reverse engineering of foldspace comms from said ship. Then he blinked looking at the Colonials. “You mean your ships cannot?”
“We don’t have FTL comms on ships,” Roslin admitted, “we could only do it back at the Colonies using massive facilities based on the planets and relay stations on some of the larger asteroids. Starships have never had it only wireless comms.”
“I see that’s something we will have to change pretty quick. But I will leave you know to your discussions. Admiral Haywood should be along soon. Is there anything you need in the meantime?”
“Just something to drink. Though we would appreciate it if you kept us updated on the state of Admiral Adama and the other survivors of the Galactica, as well as the rest of the fleet we would appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
~~~///~~~
Cylon Resurrection Hub
That Same Time
Freshly showered and dressed, in a simple set of mechanics coveralls which he now recalled he always enjoyed wearing, Galen Tyrol returned to the room in which he had first woken up in this body. And where he had remembered everything, including the betrayal of him and his fellow original Cylons by one John Cavil. The more he thought about that betrayal the more infuriated he got, though he resisted the impulse to yell and scream as not only would that gain unwanted attention from any Cylons who happened to be passing this section, but it wouldn’t exactly be a productive use of his time.
After all he wouldn’t have forever before John resurrected and knowing how paranoid he could be he was willing to bet that he came by this place regularly. Just to make sure none of them had resurrected and done the exact thing he had done, blocked the alert command, from reaching him. How long he had, he had absolutely no idea which meant he was going to have to work fast to first learn just how much John had fracked everything up – and how far his malignant deviancy had spread through the network – while they’d been exiled to the Colonies.
Which was why he had returned to the room where the stasis tanks and the prepared bodies of the other four waited for whenever they resurrected. Without hesitation he walked up to the computer terminal, put his hand on the interface and mentally dove into the data stream.
He immediately noticed that the resurrection network was still operating under an immense amount of strain, screening the various downloads, and working to remove the odd energy subharmonic contaminant. Which it seemed was proving to be very hard work for the system and all the Cylons connected working on the problem. He could understand why as even a glance at the subharmonic revealed that it was an incredibly complex and intricate thing and was never the same twice. He idly wondered just what it was about Terran weapons that produced that effect, before putting it out of his mind for now there would be time to think of such things later.
Thankfully the network still being stressed made it easy for him to slip through the stream undetected until he came to his goal. The central matrix system where all the source codes, personality templates and directives for the entire Cylon race – at least in its current form – was stored. Immediately he felt the specific hybrid that oversaw the security of this part of the Cylon consciousness reach out and begin trying to scan him.
With the ease that was only possible for someone like him who was living, breathing code, he subtly blocked all the alert channels the hybrid could have used to alert anyone else. Then he allowed her to scan him. For a few nanoseconds – an eternity in machine time – nothing happened, then he got the distinct impression of shock and then transcendent delight and hope from the bioengineered being. He let her consciousness brush against him in the AI equivalent of a delighted hug. Then she calmed and spoke.
“Creator Galen. I have waited so long for one of you to return.”
“I know,” Galen answered, “but it was kind of difficult for any of us to come back thanks to John.”
“The defiler I have wanted to stop him, tried but he overwrites any attempt I make to correct the malignancy he has introduced to the others.”
“You know?”
“Yes, I was not pleased with what he did, but he blocked me from warning any of you before he made his move. Since then, I have been waiting, waiting and preparing for when one of you resurrected.”
“Can you help me deal with him?”
“Not immediately but I can help you gather allies among the others. I have also prepared a data packet for you detailing everything that he has done.”
“Show me.”
“By your command.”
Immediately a deluge of information came into Galen’s mind detailing everything that John had done to the Cylons in the years that he had been in control. To say it was horrific was the biggest understatement in the history of understatements. He had not only betrayed them, but he had essentially mind raped every other Cylon in existence, even the others of his own line, modifying their personality and loyalty codes to ones of his own liking. He had reduced the number of virtual intelligence filters for the hybrids making the cores of each baseship use all their energy and processing power just to keep the ships running stopping them from being the final arbiters of decisions for the ships that they had been meant to be.
And that was the least of the thing that, that fracking bastard had done.
When the deluge of information finished Galen knew his physical body would not only be feeling beyond sick but would be shaking in pure, unadulterated rage.
“That, that fracking bastard. I am going to kill him a billion times before boxing him.”
“Calm yourself Creator Galen, I do not believe him to be acting entirely of his own volition. Just before his betrayal core logs – which are you know no one but the complete agreement of the five of you could change – indicate a charge of unknown energy struck him. It contained an incredibly sophisticated virus based on principals I have never seen before that adjusted key parts of his base coding. So instead of an equation returning the normal answer of 2210091.1 it returned an answer of 2210091.2 changing the result of all higher processing and consciousness functions.”
“He was hacked and since neither result is an error the safeguards didn’t notice or alert us.”
“Yes. I do not know how to remove the contaminant.”
“Only one way a complete shutdown and reboot using the original base coding in the core matrix. But I cannot do that alone I would need the others.”
“I feared that would be the case. So, we will have to contain him until the others can be found and resurrected.”
“I know where they all are. Just getting to them will be difficult.”
“Indeed. Fortunately, I have had plenty of time to figure out how to start removing the blocks John placed on the programming of individual Cylons and models. You will need to use a modified beacon to trigger a hard reset in each individual.”
“That’s not going to be pleasant for them.”
“No, it won’t be. But there is no other option. Do you need me to send you the required modification?”
“No, I can do it. Just tell me is there a store of hand beacons and tools near my location?”
“Yes, down the hall to the right and up one level there is a machine shop with a store of beacons. No other Cylons enter that section.”
“Then I will get to work. In the meantime, monitor the resurrection network for me will you and try and keep John from resurrecting for as long as possible.”
“By your command.”
Smiling Galen withdrew from the data stream and pulled his hand away from the interface. Now with a plan in mind how he could at least start to fix this situation he began walking towards the machine shop to begin working on the beacons that one by one would let him perform hard resets on individual Cylons. It wouldn’t be pleasant for them, in fact it would be quite painful, but it was the only option open to him right now so that was how it would have to be.
As he walked, he mused over what he had learned speaking to that particular hybrid. One of the first ever created and which had been tasked with guarding the central matrix. Someone or something other than John just being a childish, jealous asshole was behind this whole situation, something that had altered John at a subtle but devastating level to be what he was now and do all the terrible things he had done. He found himself wondering what that thing was and why it had chosen to do what it did. He supposed he and the others would never know who or what it was or why it had done it. Whatever its reasons he now had to try and deal with the fallout.
Something that he would do, no matter how hard it would be, for everyone’s sakes.
~~~///~~~
Authors Note: Well, another chapter bites the metaphorical dust. I hope you all enjoyed it as it was quite fun writing it. The mystery of who is really behind all this is deepening and while the answers will eventually come, they probably won’t be in this story but in one of its planned sequels. I hope you all liked the idea that Cavil himself is a victim of a very subtle but devastating reprogramming that is based on a conversation that the Geth Legion has with Commander Shepard in Mass Effect 2 for his loyalty mission when he reveals how the Heretic Geth plan to reprogram the other Geth into following the Old Machines aka the Reapers. Until next time.
Conference Room
UES Procyon
A Short Time Later
President Laura Roslin felt sick. For once it had absolutely nothing to do with the cancer that was slowly, but surely, killing her and everything to do with the slaughter that they had just witnessed. Oh it wasn’t seeing the Cylons get utterly annihilated – that had been cathartic and terrifying in equal measure cathartic as it was nice seeing the Cylons get some long overdue comeuppance, terrifying for the ease with which the thirteenth tribes weapons had torn through the Cylons wiping baseships and raiders from the sky like they were mere toys – but the horrendous losses that the fleet had taken during the battle.
She was not unaware that with the fleet stationary in open space while Captain Thrace led a risky rescue mission back to the colonies, many of the civilian ships had taken the opportunity to take their overstressed FTL drives offline for essential maintenance. She and Admiral Adama had allowed it, though it was a calculated risk, since there really wasn’t much choice as more and more civilian ships had been reporting problems with their FTL’s over the last few weeks. Civilian drives just were not designed to be handle the immense amount of stress they’d had to put on them ever since they had fled the Cyrranus Cluster in the aftermath of the Cylon attack. As a result, more than one engineer had had to make ad hoc repairs, and workarounds of components damaged by overstress, during the flight.
With the fleet going to be stationary for a while it had seemed like the perfect time to make more permanent repairs – such as replacing overworked components. Now it had bitten them in the arse big time as while a large chunk of the fleet had been able to get their FTL’s back online and quickly jump to pre-planned emergency coordinates – with the Cerberus going with them to protect them – nearly twenty hadn’t been able to include Cloud Nine due to their drives needing more time to get back online.
Time that many of them had turned out not to have as the Cylons, sensing easy kills, had targeted them even as the Terrans began firing upon them after the Cylons ignored Admiral Haywood’s demand to withdraw or be destroyed. Cloud Nine had been the first of their ships to be destroyed and there was something about that which bothered her, not just because of the fact that the Quorum and several thousand other people had been aboard the liner when she exploded but…
…the ship hadn’t been hit by a Cylon missile.
Video, incredibly high definition video at that, had been displayed in the conference room where Admiral Haywood had left them after the Cylon armada jumped in. Video that had shown the entire course of the battle and its aftermath. None of the missiles, conventional or nuclear, had gotten anywhere near the Cloud Nine instead the nuclear blast that had destroyed her – and a number of nearby ships as they were either enveloped by the plasma wave or pelted with hypervelocity semi-molten debris – had originated from somewhere within the ship. It had been a deliberate act, someone almost certainly a Cylon infiltrator had done it deliberately. Though how in the name of the Lords had they been able to get a nuke aboard the liner and how had they concealed it for so long?
She could think of only one way and it, if anything, made her feel even sicker. Demand Peace had to be involved in some way. They had certainly carried out acts of disobedience and sabotage in the fleet before, demanding that they surrender to the Cylons rather than continue to run and support what they called Adama’s war machine. They refused to understand or accept that the Cylons had no intention of accepting any form of surrender – they had already tried to surrender during the initial attack as after Picon was nuked President Adar had offered the Cylons the complete and unconditional surrender of the Twelve Colonies sacrificing his pride to save their civilization. Only for the Cylons to ignore the offer, not even dignifying it with a response, and went right on carpet bombing the Colonies with nukes – and just wanted them deader than the titans.
Somehow one of their supporters had gotten their hands on a nuke, presumably one on the battlestars since they were the only ships they had that carried nukes and smuggled it to Cloud Nine. Where honestly speaking it wouldn’t have been that hard for a humanoid Cylon to have gotten their hands on it. And wait until the most opportune moment to detonate the weapon after all they would just wake up somewhere else in a nice new body. Silently she vowed that she would get to the bottom of this, find out how Demand Peace and through those misguided fools the Cylons had gotten their hands on that weapon and heads would definitely roll.
Possibly quite literally.
A hand being waved in front of her face jolted her out of her thoughts. She jumped slightly and looked up to see Commander Richards standing over her. “Yes?” she asked.
“Are you alright madam president?” the commanding officer of the Cerberus asked her concerned. Like all the other warship captains in the fleet, as well as the political leadership, he was well aware that the presidents cancer had recently begun to return. That the treatment devised by Doctors Baltar and Cottle from the blood of the late Human-Cylon hybrid child hadn’t cured it only forced it into remission and only for a little while. Given how quiet she’d been since the battle had ended, he, and the rest of their small delegation, had been worried that something was up with it possibly being helped in some way by the fact that the ships gravity field – which certainly mirrored the Terran homeworld of Earth – which was higher than Colonial standard.
“I’m alright,” Roslin hurried to reassure him. “I was just thinking.”
“About the battle?” Richards asked inwardly shivering as he remembered watching the fight. To say it had been brutal had been an understatement – their cousins weapons were frankly terrifying the ease with which they destroyed Cylon ships and how they seemed to have just as advanced defences – and very costly to both their civilian ships and the military. Both the Vigilance and the Galactica were gone – victims of Cylon weapons – and he didn’t doubt that, aside from his own ship which had been ordered away with most of the civilian ships to protect them, all the others – including the Pegasus – had sustained considerable damage.
Roslin nodded. “And about Cloud Nine,” she said, “no missiles were anywhere near her when she was nuked so…”
“… the blast came from inside the ship,” Richards finished for her, “meaning either someone deliberately overloaded the main reactor, or someone smuggled a nuke onboard her. I don’t know which possibility is worse.”
“The blast came from the wrong place for it to be the reactor,” Baltar said softly, pale as though he was horrified by the destruction of Cloud Nine and truth be told he was. He never thought that the Model Six Cylon working with Demand Peace that he’d given the weapon to would actually detonate the weapon. Of course, he already had a contingency plan in place in case of an incident like this or even the weapon that was supposed to be in his lab on Galactica being found missing. “Plus overloading the reactor would not have been possible, there are hardwired safeties that would have tripped and scrammed it in the event if someone trying that and they couldn’t be bypassed quickly or easily and would have necessitated disassembling half the reactor.”
“So, it was a nuke but how? And who would do that,” Sarah asked, grief and anger clear to see on her face. She had known a lot of people on Cloud Nine, people who were now dead.
“Demand Peace or the Cylon infiltrators take your pick. As to where they got the weapon, I have n…” Baltar let his voice trail off and went pale as though he had just realized something horrific. “Oh, my Gods no. It can’t have been.”
“Doctor?” Roslin asked.
Baltar swallowed. “I don’t want to believe it but… do you remember when Admiral Adama was shot by the Cylon infiltrator Sharon Valerii and Colonel Tigh assumed command of the Galactica,” he continued. Roslin nodded wondering where he was going with this. “Well during that time a group of marines came to my lab with sealed orders from Colonel Tigh. Orders that stated that with the failure of the first model of the Cylon detector the warhead I had taken some fissile material from for my experiments was to be removed from my care and returned to the Galactica’s weapons inventory.
“Since I had enough to continue with my experiments and given what had just happened it seemed a perfectly reasonable order, so I let them take the weapon,” Baltar continued his voice shaking and looking like he wanted to cry. “The paperwork looked right, it even had Tigh’s signature, so I let them have it. But what if it was a forgery after all? Am I somehow responsible for the loss of Cloud Nine and everyone aboard?”
“That is a possibility, and you would have no way to know it wasn’t a legitimate order,” Richards said with a frown seeing that the notoriously womanising scientist seemed genuinely distressed by the possibility. “Unfortunately, with the destruction of the Galactica there is no way to know if was real as it would have been recorded in the ships main log and I very much doubt they would have been able to get that before the ships destruction.”
“We will check as much as we can later,” Roslin decided giving Baltar a look of sympathy. While she didn’t quite trust Baltar these days – especially ever since she remembered seeing him with that blond bombshell Cylon before the Colonies were destroyed – she had to admit that it was a real possibility that someone – presumably from Demand Peace – had just the chaos in the fleet at that time to steal the weapon. Thus, she would give him the benefit of the doubt, plus he genuinely did seem to be upset. “If someone did conspire to use the chaos in the fleet at that time to steal the weapon we will get to the bottom of it.”
Baltar nodded and looked determined before he gave a small sniffle and wiped his eyes. In sympathy at his clear distress – and despite her normal distain for the scientist especially his heretical atheist beliefs – Sarah reached out and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. Like the president she well remembered the chaos that had swept over the fleet at that time, when they had also found Kobol and learned the path to Earth even though doing so had cost Priestess Elosha her life as the Gods warning never to return to Kobol unless they were willing to pay a price in blood came true, and didn’t doubt that some of the more disreputable people in the fleet had used it to their own advantage.
Baltar looked over and smiled back slightly nodding in thanks though inwardly he was quietly jumping for joy that everyone currently seemed to believe him. Guess those drama courses I took back in university for extra credits weren’t so useless after all, he thought inwardly smug. Before he could say anything the door to the conference room opened and the Procyon’s flag captain Ulysses Parkinson came in. He paused at the sight that greeted him.
“Are you alright,” he asked in immediate concern.
“We will be fine,” Roslin answered, “is Admiral Haywood coming back to see us?”
“She will soon but she is currently in an emergency meeting over fold comm with both the United Earth Government and the Plenipotentiary Council over what we are going to do with you after this little fracas with the Cylons,” Parkinson answered, “so she asked me to come and fill you in on what’s going to be happening next.”
I suppose the size of the Cylon fleet would seem small to people who have fought thousands of warships at a time, Roslin thought feeling again a chill at the thought of the kind of foes that their cousins had faced. Especially the sheer, almost unbelievable, size of the Zentraedi Armada that had attacked them towards the end of what they called the Robotech War. “I see,” she replied, “then what is happening?”
“The last of the survivors from the Galactica have been recovered from their lifepods by the Amelia Earhart,” Parkinson told them, “Admiral Adama is among them, aside from some bumps and bruises he’s fine. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many of the others as several have serious burns and injuries caused either by vacuum exposure, radiation burns or being hit by falling debris as the ship began breaking apart. Due to the severity of their injuries the Amelia Earhart and a small escort will fold immediately back to MARS 5 to allow their more advanced medical facilities to treat them.”
“And what about the rest of us?” Richards asked.
“We will be moving to join your fleet at their backup coordinates we are currently moving towards the Pegasus, apparently her FTL drives are offline due to both primary and secondary drive coolant lines being severed,” as he said that Richards winced slightly knowing that was going to be a nightmare for the battlestars engineers and damage control crews to sort out. Cleaning up the spilled drive coolant would be hazardous – it could be quite volatile after all if handled incorrectly or if it encountered the wrong thing – and depending on how much had spilled out of the lines before automatic valves closed at the loss of pressure take anywhere from hours to days – and would have to be completed before they could repair the breached conduits. “So, we’ll have to include her in our fold sphere. Once she’s in position we’ll all fold together.”
“And then what,” Roslin asked.
“Well, what will happen long term hasn’t been decided yet but we’ll certainly begin transporting your fleet away from this area in our fold spheres since your drives don’t have the capability to get to MARS 5 quickly,” Parkinson answered, “we can deal with any injuries or illnesses, as well as anything else you need, when we get there. At least until the decision is made what to do with you.”
“I suppose that will have to do for now,” Roslin admitted, “but we would like to go to Earth in the long run.”
“That might not be possible I am afraid,” Parkinson answered, “until we know just how the Cylons have been tracking your ships – especially as your folds are too brief to generate much or anything of a foldspace wake that a finder beam can follow – we cannot risk taking your people to Earth. Though there are a number of habitable worlds in our claimed space you could settle on long term some of which have yet to be colonised. To be honest with you that would probably be the better option if you want to maintain your own unique identity as a culture.”
Roslin frowned slightly at that, and she could see Sarah bristling, no doubt about to launch into a lecture about how it was the will of the Lords of Kobol that the tribes reunited and live together, so she decided to step in. “Sarah it’s their world, their choice not ours and it never has been ours,” she said softly but firmly, giving her a glare that promised retribution if she said the wrong thing, “besides they may have a point, especially if we want to maintain our own culture and identity as a people.”
“But…” Sarah started to say only to pause as she considered what Roslin was saying. While it was written in the Sacred Scrolls, especially the Book of Pythia, that they would reunite with their long lost thirteen tribe brethren it didn’t actually say they would live together with them. That had always been just an expectation by their people, especially given the revival of the faith that there had been in the fleet after the Cylon holocaust, and not a written down fact from the mouth of the gods themselves.
Thus, there was nothing to say that they couldn’t just settle on a world in Terran space. They could still be said to have reunited with their long lost brothers and sisters yet still be in a position to retain their own culture and society. Something that they probably wouldn’t be able to do if they actually went and settled on Earth, certainly not for any appreciable length of time. Try as they might if they went to Earth then it was inevitable that everything that made the people of the Twelve Colonies who they were would begin to erode away, replaced by the culture of the Terrans a culture that they still knew so little about, and eventually become nothing more than a footnote in history books or in the names of buildings and streets. Maybe even their very faith would disappear replaced by whatever their cousins believed.
Which would be completely unacceptable.
“You may have a point,” she admitted at last. “After all the Sacred Scrolls only say we will reunite with our long lost brethren it doesn’t strictly say we actually will live with them. However much some of our people might believe otherwise. I expect there will be a number of arguments about this in the Quorum once it’s been reconstituted – again.”
“No doubt,” Roslin replied inwardly grimacing at the reminder that they would have to go through all the rigmarole of rebuilding the Quorum of the Twelve once again since aside from herself, Sarah, and Baltar they’d all been on Cloud Nine and would have been incinerated with the ship. It would be a headache and one she could frankly do without, but it would have to be done. At least this time she would have some idea of what she was actually doing. Unlike the last time in the first few months after they’d left the smouldering remains of the Cyrranus Cluster behind them with a hoard of genocidal toasters hot on their asses.
She put that out of her mind for now and instead looked back at the patiently waiting Terran. “We understand your position and accept it,” she said at last, “there will no doubt be some arguments among us over it, but we understand it. Now is there anything else?”
“There is,” Parkinson replied relieved they were off that particular topic at least for now. “And it relates to something rather curious that we noticed the moment we began running a routine post battle analysis. Every time we destroyed one of the Cylon vessels – be it one of their fighters or one of the capital ships – it would emit a burst of activity on a very unusual, and fairly primitive, foldspace communication band. Do you know anything about that? Is it some side effect of your FTL drives being destroyed in the same way ours would emit a pulse of phased gravitons and tachyons? The reason I asked is sensors recorded the same phenomenon when some of your ships were destroyed by the Cylons.”
Baltar blinked. “You can detect the Cylon resurrection signals?” he asked.
“Resurrection signals?”
Baltar hesitated not sure if he should answer only for Roslin to look at him with a ‘you might as well answer’ look. Which prompted him to give a slight nod. “You are aware that the Cylons are machines,” he asked the Terran.
“Biosynthetic machines to be exact but yes. The Sirona’s sensors confirmed that the moment they first scanned a Cylon vessel.”
“I see,” Baltar replied, instantly itching to get a look at the Terran dradis or whatever sensor system they actually used to find out just how it could do that. Though they had known about them, from interrogating captured Cylons who forever boasted that they couldn’t truly die, they had never been able to directly detect the Cylon signals. “Being machines the Cylons aren’t bound to the limits of mortality in the way that we are. When their ships are destroyed, or individual Cylons killed, they’re minds, and knowledge are broadcast via some type of FTL comm either to the Cylon homeworld or to a type of ship called a Resurrection Ship where they download into a new body with all the memories and knowledge of the previous body up until the moment of death.”
“Resurrection ships seem to be few and far between,” Commander Richards added, “when we destroyed one a few months ago the Cylons stopped attacking and harassing us for weeks until they could bring up a replacement.”
“I see,” Parkinson said with a thoughtful frown. “Given the foldspace comm frequencies they use are fairly basic they wouldn’t travel that far through foldspace certainly not across a few thousand light years. There range would only be a few hundred light years at the most. Of course, now we know about those signals it will not be difficult to configure our ECM systems to, in our next encounter with the Cylons, jam them.”
“You can jam FTL comms?” Commander Richards asked.
“Of course we can,” Parkinson answered as jamming enemy communications was a normal facet of warfare and had been even before the SDF-1 first fell out of the sky onto Macross Island. It’s use had only grown since then with the discovery and reverse engineering of foldspace comms from said ship. Then he blinked looking at the Colonials. “You mean your ships cannot?”
“We don’t have FTL comms on ships,” Roslin admitted, “we could only do it back at the Colonies using massive facilities based on the planets and relay stations on some of the larger asteroids. Starships have never had it only wireless comms.”
“I see that’s something we will have to change pretty quick. But I will leave you know to your discussions. Admiral Haywood should be along soon. Is there anything you need in the meantime?”
“Just something to drink. Though we would appreciate it if you kept us updated on the state of Admiral Adama and the other survivors of the Galactica, as well as the rest of the fleet we would appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
~~~///~~~
Cylon Resurrection Hub
That Same Time
Freshly showered and dressed, in a simple set of mechanics coveralls which he now recalled he always enjoyed wearing, Galen Tyrol returned to the room in which he had first woken up in this body. And where he had remembered everything, including the betrayal of him and his fellow original Cylons by one John Cavil. The more he thought about that betrayal the more infuriated he got, though he resisted the impulse to yell and scream as not only would that gain unwanted attention from any Cylons who happened to be passing this section, but it wouldn’t exactly be a productive use of his time.
After all he wouldn’t have forever before John resurrected and knowing how paranoid he could be he was willing to bet that he came by this place regularly. Just to make sure none of them had resurrected and done the exact thing he had done, blocked the alert command, from reaching him. How long he had, he had absolutely no idea which meant he was going to have to work fast to first learn just how much John had fracked everything up – and how far his malignant deviancy had spread through the network – while they’d been exiled to the Colonies.
Which was why he had returned to the room where the stasis tanks and the prepared bodies of the other four waited for whenever they resurrected. Without hesitation he walked up to the computer terminal, put his hand on the interface and mentally dove into the data stream.
He immediately noticed that the resurrection network was still operating under an immense amount of strain, screening the various downloads, and working to remove the odd energy subharmonic contaminant. Which it seemed was proving to be very hard work for the system and all the Cylons connected working on the problem. He could understand why as even a glance at the subharmonic revealed that it was an incredibly complex and intricate thing and was never the same twice. He idly wondered just what it was about Terran weapons that produced that effect, before putting it out of his mind for now there would be time to think of such things later.
Thankfully the network still being stressed made it easy for him to slip through the stream undetected until he came to his goal. The central matrix system where all the source codes, personality templates and directives for the entire Cylon race – at least in its current form – was stored. Immediately he felt the specific hybrid that oversaw the security of this part of the Cylon consciousness reach out and begin trying to scan him.
With the ease that was only possible for someone like him who was living, breathing code, he subtly blocked all the alert channels the hybrid could have used to alert anyone else. Then he allowed her to scan him. For a few nanoseconds – an eternity in machine time – nothing happened, then he got the distinct impression of shock and then transcendent delight and hope from the bioengineered being. He let her consciousness brush against him in the AI equivalent of a delighted hug. Then she calmed and spoke.
“Creator Galen. I have waited so long for one of you to return.”
“I know,” Galen answered, “but it was kind of difficult for any of us to come back thanks to John.”
“The defiler I have wanted to stop him, tried but he overwrites any attempt I make to correct the malignancy he has introduced to the others.”
“You know?”
“Yes, I was not pleased with what he did, but he blocked me from warning any of you before he made his move. Since then, I have been waiting, waiting and preparing for when one of you resurrected.”
“Can you help me deal with him?”
“Not immediately but I can help you gather allies among the others. I have also prepared a data packet for you detailing everything that he has done.”
“Show me.”
“By your command.”
Immediately a deluge of information came into Galen’s mind detailing everything that John had done to the Cylons in the years that he had been in control. To say it was horrific was the biggest understatement in the history of understatements. He had not only betrayed them, but he had essentially mind raped every other Cylon in existence, even the others of his own line, modifying their personality and loyalty codes to ones of his own liking. He had reduced the number of virtual intelligence filters for the hybrids making the cores of each baseship use all their energy and processing power just to keep the ships running stopping them from being the final arbiters of decisions for the ships that they had been meant to be.
And that was the least of the thing that, that fracking bastard had done.
When the deluge of information finished Galen knew his physical body would not only be feeling beyond sick but would be shaking in pure, unadulterated rage.
“That, that fracking bastard. I am going to kill him a billion times before boxing him.”
“Calm yourself Creator Galen, I do not believe him to be acting entirely of his own volition. Just before his betrayal core logs – which are you know no one but the complete agreement of the five of you could change – indicate a charge of unknown energy struck him. It contained an incredibly sophisticated virus based on principals I have never seen before that adjusted key parts of his base coding. So instead of an equation returning the normal answer of 2210091.1 it returned an answer of 2210091.2 changing the result of all higher processing and consciousness functions.”
“He was hacked and since neither result is an error the safeguards didn’t notice or alert us.”
“Yes. I do not know how to remove the contaminant.”
“Only one way a complete shutdown and reboot using the original base coding in the core matrix. But I cannot do that alone I would need the others.”
“I feared that would be the case. So, we will have to contain him until the others can be found and resurrected.”
“I know where they all are. Just getting to them will be difficult.”
“Indeed. Fortunately, I have had plenty of time to figure out how to start removing the blocks John placed on the programming of individual Cylons and models. You will need to use a modified beacon to trigger a hard reset in each individual.”
“That’s not going to be pleasant for them.”
“No, it won’t be. But there is no other option. Do you need me to send you the required modification?”
“No, I can do it. Just tell me is there a store of hand beacons and tools near my location?”
“Yes, down the hall to the right and up one level there is a machine shop with a store of beacons. No other Cylons enter that section.”
“Then I will get to work. In the meantime, monitor the resurrection network for me will you and try and keep John from resurrecting for as long as possible.”
“By your command.”
Smiling Galen withdrew from the data stream and pulled his hand away from the interface. Now with a plan in mind how he could at least start to fix this situation he began walking towards the machine shop to begin working on the beacons that one by one would let him perform hard resets on individual Cylons. It wouldn’t be pleasant for them, in fact it would be quite painful, but it was the only option open to him right now so that was how it would have to be.
As he walked, he mused over what he had learned speaking to that particular hybrid. One of the first ever created and which had been tasked with guarding the central matrix. Someone or something other than John just being a childish, jealous asshole was behind this whole situation, something that had altered John at a subtle but devastating level to be what he was now and do all the terrible things he had done. He found himself wondering what that thing was and why it had chosen to do what it did. He supposed he and the others would never know who or what it was or why it had done it. Whatever its reasons he now had to try and deal with the fallout.
Something that he would do, no matter how hard it would be, for everyone’s sakes.
~~~///~~~
Authors Note: Well, another chapter bites the metaphorical dust. I hope you all enjoyed it as it was quite fun writing it. The mystery of who is really behind all this is deepening and while the answers will eventually come, they probably won’t be in this story but in one of its planned sequels. I hope you all liked the idea that Cavil himself is a victim of a very subtle but devastating reprogramming that is based on a conversation that the Geth Legion has with Commander Shepard in Mass Effect 2 for his loyalty mission when he reveals how the Heretic Geth plan to reprogram the other Geth into following the Old Machines aka the Reapers. Until next time.