Chapter 3
Battlestar Valhalla – Commander Vergis' Office
"I'm not sure you should be the one to go, Saundra. A battlestar needs her commander."
Vergis turned from checking her uniform in her mirror to give her XO a melancholy smile. "Sander, I have to go. It was my ship that intruded into the Galarans' space. It's my responsibility and I'm the one who has to be accountable for her."
"That may be the case but we know nothing about the people on that Earth ship. Maybe they are on the up and up. However, I believe you're taking an awful risk."
She squeezed his left shoulder gently. "Sometimes, you've got to roll the hard six, Sander."
He grunted and nodded reluctantly. "Even so, I'm not happy they don't want you and Asiel to go over there without your sidearms."
"Sander, they've guaranteed our safety. Besides, they have a Galaran civilian government official meeting with us, too. If we bring our sidearms, it might send the wrong message to the Galarans. However, I'm not worried about it."
"Why not?"
She grinned. Because I know if they get out of line, I've got you and the Valhalla to drag our sorry asses out of the furnace!"
He chuckled and said, "Saundra, don't take this the wrong way, but you've got some stones on you!"
"I choose to take that as a compliment, my friend," she drawled.
#
Battlestar Valhalla – Port Hangar Bay
"Commander Vergis, Lieutenant Asiel," Lt. Roland "Halo" Janik, Raptor 497's pilot asked, "are you certain you don't want to put on your flight helmets?"
"Since their ship isn't that far away, Wheel, we'll skip 'em. Naomi and I don't want to show up at the meeting looking like we have cats on our heads!"
Janik laughed heartily at the commander's little joke. He knew her decision had nothing to do with vanity."
Both women wore their hair short, as was the custom of most female pilots stationed on battlestars. So the helmets wouldn't have messed up their hairstyles too badly.
Halo now turned his attention to his clipboard and he ran through his checklist. Afterwards, he gazed at the deck chief through his windshield and held up three fingers spread wide. Moments later, the deck crew hooked his craft up to a small tractor. The machine towed his craft onto one of the elevator pads, disengaged and drove away.
Seconds later, he saluted the deck chief, who returned his salute and indicated to his crew to activate the elevator. When the lift raised his craft into the vacuum of the launch bay, he keyed his mike and said, "Flight Control, this is Halo. Request permission to depart port launch bay, over."
"Halo, this is Flight Control. You are go for launch."
He disengaged the grapples, allowing the Raptor to float above the surface of the deck. Janik then activated his aft thrusters and sent his craft hurtling across the deck and out into space.
"Flight Control, we have cleared the bay, over."
"Affirmative, Halo. Safe journey."
"Copy that, Flight Control. Halo over and out."
Minutes later, the Endeavor's Flight Control contacted him. When they gave him landing instructions, he changed course and steered his ship under the keel of the much larger Earth vessel. Soon, he saw an open ramp that appeared to lead into a large hangar bay. It was then when he noticed a hazy screen of what appeared to be an energy field of some kind across the opening.
"Flight Control, this is Halo. There appears to be some sort of energy field across the hangar bay entrance. Should I proceed into the bay? Please advise, over."
"Halo, the energy field will neither harm your passengers nor your ship. Please proceed into the hangar bay, over."
"All right," he muttered lowly. "Here we go."
He lined up his craft with the flashing parallel row of lights both on the ramp and the hangar bay floor. Moments later, his ship penetrated the screen without incident. The Picon native felt the Raptor pull down toward the surface of the deck due to the larger vessel's artificial gravity field. He compensated for the effect and turned his ship toward a square surrounded by oscillating lights. Janik then set his craft gently down inside the square.
Once the ramp raised to close the bay from the vacuum of space, Roland determined the bay was pressurized to one standard atmosphere and the air outside was breathable. Suddenly a beam of bright light flashed from somewhere overhead and swept through his Raptor. He keyed his mike and asked, "Flight Control, can you tell me about the light I just saw?"
"Halo, that light was just our bio-filter to ensure no harmful bacteria could be passed from your people to ours. Everyone on this ship has undergone the same process to protect your people from anything that could be carried by us, over."
"Copy that," he said. "We are now preparing to exit our craft, over."
"Acknowledged. Dr. Jackson and his party will meet you in the hangar bay shortly. Flight Control, over and out."
Now Janik switched off his wireless controls, unfastened his safety harness, went aft, and cracked the hatch open.
He clambered onto the Raptor's short wing and down onto the deck, immediately followed by Lt. Asiel then Commander Vergis.
Soon, a party of four marched toward them. Two men were in the lead. One was dressed in light blue coveralls and he wore a pair of eyeglasses on his face. The other man appeared to be garbed in a suit that wouldn't have looked out of place in Caprica's government circles. The men were followed by two women garbed in the same light blue coveralls as the man with the eyeglasses. One was at least a head shorter than the other; however, Roland didn't really have the opportunity to give the smaller woman a good look see because her companion had captured his undivided attention.
"By the gods…" he muttered when he realized the taller woman possessed the same tanned skin, dark hair, exotic almond-shaped eyes, and both the lovely face and figure the gods had granted to Lt. Naomi Asiel.
At that moment, the Endeavor people stared at Asiel.
Meanwhile, the Commander, Asiel and he stared at Asiel's twin.
Then the man in the coveralls quirked his right eyebrow and quipped to Asiel's double, "Shannon, did your mother forget to mention that you had a twin sister who happened to live on another planet?"
In response, Asiel's double narrowed her eyes at the lieutenant and snorted, "Never mind that," she growled to the man then turned to Valhalla's navigation officer and demanded, "what in the hell did you do to our hair?!"
#
HMS Endeavor – Conference Room D
After Daniel was able to calm everyone down and assure the Colonial commander that Shannon had not been surgically altered to impersonate and replace Lt. Asiel for nefarious purposes, he'd managed to guide their wary guests to one of the ship's conference rooms.
Waiting in the room for them on the large center table were translating devices that Jennifer Hailey had created by using the Asgard core and the trans-mat. The devices could be placed over the shell of a person's ear and positioned a powerful mini-microphone near an individual's lips. Once everyone was situated, Hailey continued trying to soothe the nerves of the shaken Colonial officers.
"I believe," she said, "the situation we have here with your Lt. Asiel and our Captain Satterfield is simply a freak occurrence involving genetics. There are only so many combinations of human DNA that can occur before nature produces a close duplicate of an individual."
"I see," Commander Vergis said in the way that Jackson suspected she'd only had made the statement because she had not wanted to tell Hailey that she'd had no idea what the smaller woman was talking about.
"Commander Vergis," he said in an attempt to get the meeting back on track, "after we were able to assure one another that no one had wanted to launch an attack on anyone, you told me that your people believe that Earth was settled by your ancestors from your society's homeworld. Can you expound upon that for us, please?"
"Of course, Dr. Jackson. Lt. Asiel," the woman said to Satterfield's twin, "please tell them about the exodus of the Thirteenth Tribe."
"Yes sir. Our most sacred scrolls tell us that on the planet Kobol, the cradle of humanity, there were thirteen tribes of mankind who lived with the Lords of Kobol, the gods who created man and woman in their image. According to the scriptures, four thousand years ago, the Thirteenth Tribe struck out on its own and settled on the planet Earth which circled a distant star. Unfortunately, the scriptures are silent about why the members of that tribe had decided to leave Kobol."
"For another two thousand years, the remaining twelve tribes continued to live with the Lords on Kobol. Then came a day when the bickering and violence between the tribes had caused the gods to grow weary of the presence of man. Thus, the gods drove the Twelve Tribes from Kobol to another star system where they'd prepared a place for us. That system turned out to be a double binary system with twelve inhabitable planets and moons."
"After our ancestors had relocated to the new system, our people lost touch with the brothers and sisters of the Thirteenth Tribe. Until now, the existence of your planet had been lost to the ravages of time."
Jackson simply nodded and said nothing as he tried to process the story Asiel had just told them. Suddenly, he experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach and he lamented to himself that, somehow, some way, it was probable that two dire events would occur.
First, the conflict between the Colonials' religious beliefs and the truth about humanity's origins would most likely bite them all in the ass in the end.
Second, Jack would find a way to blame the whole mess on him.
Pressing on, Daniel sighed deeply and said, "Although no one in the field of anthropology on Earth has come across any references concerning either Kobol or the Tribes of Man to my knowledge, we assure you we will seriously look into the matter to determine if we can corroborate your claims from our historical records. From your account, though, it doesn't appear that the Lords of Kobol behaved in the depraved manner of an alien species that had passed themselves off as ancient gods from Earth."
"Wait a minute," Vergis snapped, "are you saying that these creatures impersonated Zeus, Athena and the other Lords?"
Jackson nodded. "Yes. I have actually met one who'd claimed to be Athena. Some of these aliens have claimed to be other gods as well." Daniel had decided to be careful in disclosing that the parasites had been quite liberal in stealing from many of Earth's ancient cultures and their many gods, divine beings who were not the gods that Ancient Greece, and, apparently, the Colonials, had revered. "These creatures call themselves the Goa'uld. The Goa'uld were a technologically and socially more advanced species than our ancestors on Earth thousands of years ago."
Asiel nodded at that. "That is not surprising, Dr. Jackson. After the Twelve Tribes had arrived in the new system, our ancestors lost much of their technology when they'd settled on Gemenon, the First Colony. It took hundreds of years before we'd regained the knowledge of space flight and subsequently settled the other eleven inhabitable planets and moons in our system."
"I see," he said, filing away the knowledge that the Colonials had been able to travel through space for a far longer time than most human societies in the Milky Way. "Well, a Goa'uld is a parasitic life form that is similar in appearance to serpents in their native form. Any one of these parasites can use anyone they'd encountered as a living host."
The blood drained from Vergis' face at that unpleasant news. "A host?"
Lan Taran, the Galaran envoy, next took up the thread. "A Goa'uld invades its victim's body and winds itself around his or her spine and cerebral cortex. From there, the creature entirely submerges the victim's personality and takes complete control over that individual. With the assistance of their then superior technology, the Goa'uld converted other humans they'd abducted into an enhanced humanoid they used as their soldiers and enforcers. These people are called the Jaffa."
"The rest of the human abductees? The Goa'uld would take them from Earth and seed them on other inhabitable planets to be used as slave labor to support the Goa'uld System Lords," Shannon Satterfield explained. "To maintain their control over their slaves, the Goa'uld had forbidden, upon pain of death, the offspring of the abductees from ever learning or using the language of their homelands."
Janik's face clearly showed the outrage he apparently felt concerning the crimes of the Goa'uld. "How did you deal with those frakking things?" the pilot asked.
"Thousands of years ago," Jackson said, "one of the ancient nation states on Earth had amassed enough power to lead a rebellion against the System Lord who'd controlled Earth. He abandoned the planet, cutting off all contact with Earth. After that, our planet was able to develop on its own without any outside interference. There also had been a few worlds where the Goa'uld slaves had either driven the aliens off or had been abandoned by the Goa'uld after the planets' resources had run dry. They also were allowed to create their own societies without any interference from the snakes. However, there were many worlds that were under the protection of a powerful and ancient race of aliens that even the Goa'uld feared to challenge."
Jackson paused momentarily to take a sip of water from his glass. Then he said, "About twenty years ago, Earth inadvertently reengaged with the Goa'uld. Fortunately, we made contact with the ancient race of aliens who was the snake's sworn enemy. We also managed to find several worlds like Galar that provided us with technology we could use in our war against the Goa'uld System Lords. After ten years of desperate struggle and sacrifice, we destroyed all of the old System Lords. Although the Goa'uld, as a species, still exists, their power over humanity has been shattered, hopefully, for good. And thanks to the ancient alien race that had become both friend and ally to us, we gained a number of technological advances that allowed Earth to take up the mantle for the other race. That race had protected many primitive human societies from further exploitation by the Goa'uld, allowing them to develop at their own pace. The people of Earth take our responsibility quite seriously concerning the worlds under our protection. We shall not allow anyone to exploit them in any way, shape or form."
Vergis gave him a sober look then. Good, Jackson mused. They need to know we're as serious as a heart attack if they stumble about the galaxy and try to take advantage of any of the planets governed by the Protected Planets Treaty.
"Dr. Jackson," she said, "thank you for your report on the Goa'uld. Perhaps, our location in the galaxy was so far off of their DRADIS screens, we had the good fortune of avoiding any contact with them."
He snorted. "Lucky you."
When she shot a questioning look his way, he sighed. "I apologize for that, Commander. You see, people I cared about and loved, an entire world that had taken me in and given me a home, were completely destroyed by the Goa'uld."
Vergis shook her head. "No apologies are necessary, Doctor. We Colonials also have suffered gravely, except our nemesis hadn't been an alien species; we'd faced extinction as the result of our own hubris. More than forty years ago, a team of scientists had created cybernetic servants we'd used to tackle the jobs that were too dangerous for man. Somehow, these robots had developed into sentient beings that saw themselves as nothing more than slaves to humanity. These robots, who we call Cylons, rebelled against us and had tried to destroy every human being on all the colonies. Nearly a billion people died during the war that had lasted twelve long years. That war had ended when both sides signed an armistice. Once the boundaries between our space and the space controlled by the Cylons had been negotiated, every Cylon had left our space for their own territory. In the thirty nine years since then, we have neither seen any signs of them nor have we heard a word from them."
"We've heard similar stories from other races we've encountered," Major Hailey said. "Those races also had incidents where the artificial life forms those societies had created to protect the societies from external threats had seen themselves as little more than slaves. These life forms had all rebelled and had become a threat to the societies that had birthed them."
"So, we're not the only people in the galaxy who've almost been hoisted on their own petards, eh?" Vergis quipped.
Jackson smiled gently. "No, Commander. We've nearly cooked our own goose a number of times."
"The same holds true for the people of Galar," Laran admitted.
"And some of the more advanced races from antiquity, including our ally which helped us defeat the Goa'uld, faced disasters of their own making that had nearly wiped them all out," Satterfield added.
"That's good to know," the commander said. "Although it appears you've effectively addressed your Goa'uld problem, I'm concerned by the possibility that if you ever encounter the Cylons, they would probably associate you with the humans of the Colonies and attack you all. If so, your military forces may not be capable of defending you against them. You see, their capital ships, which they call 'base stars,' are nearly as big as our largest capital ships, which are more than twice the size of mine. The Cylons are also armed with nuclear as well as conventional missiles. To help prepare your people in the event you ever run across the Cylons, I would be willing to approach the Colonial fleet admiralty about providing military assistance to your governments."
No one said anything for a few moments. Then Laran said, "Commander, I have a question I would like to ask, if I may."
"Please do, Envoy Laran."
"Thank you, Commander. I was wondering…do the Cylons and your fleet use energy shields on your larger capital ships while you both simply rely on anti-missile cannon and armor for your smaller vessels to defend against the low yield nuclear warhead yields you both apparently use in combat?"
When an apparently gobsmacked Vergis simply blinked thrice and didn't utter a sound in response to Laran's question, five words came to Daniel's mind at that point in time.
Jack's going to kill me!
#
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