Battlestar Galactica 2003 is a copyright of the Sci Fi Channel. Battlestar Galactica is a trademark and copyright of Universal Studios. Ron Moore re-imagined Glen A. Larson's original idea; but then again, most people who would be reading this already know that. My use is in no way intended to challenge or infringe upon any established copyrights. This piece is not intended for any profit on the part of the writer, nor is it meant to detract from the commercial viability of the aforementioned or any other copyright. Any similarity to any events or persons, either real or fictional, is unintended.
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Author's Note: Big, HUGE thanks to Elentari2 for all her time and effort as a beta reader. This is a long chapter with a ton of important details to work in; getting the job done while keeping everything interesting and readable was well nigh impossible until she helped out.
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XI – Defying Prophecy"Commander," Kara said with a nod, Looking in Lee's direction but making a concerted effort to avoid eye contact.
"Captain," Lee replied formally, though the confused look on his face made it clear that he was surprised by Kara's demeanor. "You okay?"
"Why wouldn't I be?" Kara asked, falling into step with Lee, matching his stride as they walked toward the briefing room.
"Well, after what happened last night," Lee responded, leaving the thought unfinished, dangling in the air between them.
"It doesn't mean anything," Kara said, hoping that for once Lee would just drop it. Sure, he almost kissed me, and I almost let him do it, she admitted to herself. And it wasn't one of those 'lost in the moment' things; we both would have meant it.
"How can you say it doesn't mean anything?" Lee asked her, stopping dead in his tracks.
"It just doesn't," Kara said stubbornly. She looked away from him and down the hall, toward the relative refuge of a formal briefing. "We're running late."
"They'll wait," Lee responded curtly. "I think you owe me an explanation."
"I owe you an explanation?" Kara asked. He's the one who almost kissed me, she thought angrily. If anyone owes an explanation, it's him.
"Well, you're the one he convinced," Lee said.
"Huh?" Kara asked, now completely confused.
"Ares," Lee said. "You're the one he convinced that he's a god. I didn't see anything, Kara. Remember?"
"Right," Kara said quickly, getting her mind on track, hoping Lee wouldn't ever realize that she'd been focused on something completely different. "I, uhh… I'll tell you all about it after the briefing."
"He's going to be there," Lee reminded her. "Him and the others. I'd like to hear this before we go in there."
"Later," Kara insisted, starting to walk again, leaving Lee with the choice of either accepting her decision as final or physically trying to stop her.
"Fine," Lee relented, just as Kara knew he would. She reached the door first, then pushed it open, standing aside and allowing Lee – the superior officer – to enter before her.
Everyone else was already present, seated around the rectangular table. President Roslin was directly across from the door, the admiral on her left and Dr. Drake on her right. The last person seated on that side, next to Dr. Drake, was Dr. Hobber. Ares sat with his back to the door, across from everyone else, though he'd turned around in his seat when Lee and Kara arrived. He gave them both a nod, then turned back to face the others as Lee and Kara took their seats next to him.
There were several tense moments of silence as everyone waited for someone else to open the meeting. It was President Roslin who finally spoke.
"Perhaps we should start with a round of introductions," she suggested. "I think we've all met each other at some point, though there were plenty of secrets being kept."
"Agreed," Drake said. He stood up, looked down at Lee and Kara, and said, "You two know me as Dr. Drake, and to be quite honest, I'd like it if you continued to refer to me that way. Among my own people, and in your Sacred Scrolls, I'm known as Prometheus."
Kara nodded, trying to play it cool, as if she was accustomed to meeting gods on a daily basis. Lee emitted a barely audible, "Uh-huh," that Kara assumed was Lee's attempt at appearing just as comfortable with the scene.
"You already know Ares, of course," Drake added, gesturing toward the pilot, who directed a friendly wave in Lee and Kara's direction. "And Dr. Hobber is more commonly known as Hades."
"Right," Kara muttered, surprised at how difficult it was to take this all in. Just think of them as normal people, she told herself. Don't think of them as gods. And with that thought, she found her mind swimming – or more to the point, drowning – as she tried to focus on the scene in front of her. And as she thought about it, she realized that it wasn't just the fact that she was presumably seated with three deities. She found herself seeing familiar faces – Roslin, Lee, and the Old Man – as she thought the refugees in the fleet might see them. It was not something she'd ever thought about before.
The President of the Colonies is here, she thought. And the Old Man is, in effect, the Fleet Admiral of the Colonies, our supreme military commander. Even Lee, she decided, glancing to her right. He's the commander of the most powerful warship in the human fleet. Then a new thought occurred to her – I'm not just the CAG. To her, being the CAG was a fairly simple thing, a job that simply entailed more paperwork and headaches, but which wasn't that big a deal. But the people out there see me as something more, she realized. To them, I'm the pilot who has authority over each and every single Viper in human hands, an ace whose name almost always comes up in reports about our defenses against the cylons.
Thinking in these new terms, she looked again at the gods, the thought occurring to her that there was nothing here that should awe her. Ares, the God of War, she thought, glancing to her left. I'm sitting here wondering how reverent I should be, and right now there are people out on those ships who would probably kowtow in front of me if I started walking amongst them, as if I'm some type of god to them. So sure, maybe we've always worshipped Ares, Prometheus, and Hades, but does that mean they're flawless? Are they maybe just as screwed up as I am? A few quick memories of Ares' bawdy stories of alcohol-fueled shore leave hijinx helped her continue putting the scene in perspective.
Chill out, Kara, she told herself. Sure, maybe you've said countless prayers to these guys, but that was before. Now they're here, actually meeting with us. And dollars to donuts, they'll actually be asking us to help them. So don't sit here dumbstruck; just focus on the job. Whatever it is.
"First things first," the admiral said, the familiar, gravelly tone of command bringing everyone – Hobber, Drake, and Ares, included – to attention. "If we go along with this plan of yours, I need to know we have at least a chance of success."
"More than just a chance," Drake assured the admiral, sitting back down, clearly comfortable with letting the humans direct the meeting. "There aren't many of us, but we've been hard at work, making sure everything we need is in place. So… where would you like to start?"
"Let's start with how two battlestars and a few lightly-armed civilian vessels are supposed to destroy a cylon fleet that already handed us our asses when there were billions more of us," Lee suggested. "Using a white noise generator and arriving with an unexpected second battlestar was enough to win at LV-426, but I can't imagine that'll get the job done against the entire cylon fleet."
Kara caught a shadow of a smirk on the admiral's face before his expression morphed into a skeptical scowl that, Kara presumed, was meant to echo his son's concerns.
"This'll be a huge battle, and everyone in this room knows that the outcome of virtually any battle is far from assured," Ares said. He leaned back in his chair, tipping it onto its back legs, and Kara half-expected him to put his feet up on the table as he continued. "This is no different. We can't guarantee you're going to win; in fact, there's a very real chance that the remnants of your civilization will be completely obliterated."
The remnants of our civilization, Kara thought, seizing on those words, noticing that Ares spoke of civilization and culture rather than of a species. She made a mental note to ask Ares about that later.
"Let's get specific," Adama said. "I need to know what we're looking at."
"Specifically, you'll have a window," Drake explained. "The window is being opened even as we speak, so time is running short. If you hope to take advantage of the opportunity, you'll have to get your people moving now."
"We've started spreading a cover story of a nearby cylon task that detected one of our Raptor patrols," Roslin said. Kara doubted the president realized she was wringing her nervously, belying the calm expression on her face, and she found herself hoping that the President had more faith in her schemes than it appeared. "We're packing up the people from the surface, and Colonel Tigh is out there right now, expediting the arming of our sturdiest vessels. We've also started transferring women and children to the more vulnerable ships. We're operating under the pretense that if this cylon task force is able to corner us, the ships that can fight will remain behind while the rest flee to safety. Just transferring people around has gotten everyone scared, making them realize how seriously we're taking the situation. We'll be able to keep everyone in the dark about our plans until we're halfway home."
"And by then, of course, the vast majority of the people will be willing to follow along," Hades said confidently.
"I don't know that we can count on that," Lee said. He was staring at Hades now, as if he was challenging the god seated across from him.
"I assure you we can," Hades replied. "President Roslin's preparations have been thorough and, as she pointed out, just transferring the women and children to the more vulnerable ships has made people view this as the worst crisis since the attacks. Sybil Doreah's preaching has also helped; people are openly questioning whether we should follow the scriptures or cling to the radical ideas mentioned in Donner's new book. And, of course, Major Rutger is more than busy doing what he does."
"Which is?" Lee asked suspiciously.
"Rutger's more traditional name is Nemesis," Drake explained with a casual wave of his hand. But looking at Drake more closely, Kara would have sworn she saw a hint of uncertainty. "Your people think of him as the God of Vengeance," Drake continued, "and with him, at least, you got the title right. Everywhere he goes, people are inspired to vendettas. Every word he says, no matter how seemingly benign, is spoken with the intent of causing strife. He's been traveling from one ship to the next, and everywhere in his wake your people talk of revenge against the cylons."
"We're just letting him travel among our people?" Lee asked Roslin incredulously.
"He's currently on the Astral Queen," Roslin confirmed.
"I don't believe this," Lee muttered. "Did you all lose your minds?"
"That's enough, Commander," the Old Man said brusquely, shooting a disapproving stare at Lee, his expression assuring his son that there would be plenty of time to address his concerns later, in private.
"Let's get back to where you said we had an opportunity to strike," Roslin said, trying to add a semblance of order to the meeting. She'd stopped wringing her hands, but now she was absently tearing the ends off of her fingernails.
"Of course," Drake said with a magnanimous smile. "Simply put, we'll exploit a design flaw in the cylons, a flaw that was inadvertently built into to the first models and which has continued to the present."
"A design flaw?" Lee asked skeptically.
Kara was certain that Lee was thinking the same thing she was – what the frak kind of design flaw would allow them to destroy the entire cylon fleet? The idea seemed beyond farfetched.
"It's something simple, something no one would likely look at as a weakness," Drake told them, "but it's something so basic in their natures that they can't compensate for it."
"And what is this design flaw?" Lee pressed.
"The cylons aren't capable of abstract reasoning," Drake said. "At least, not in the way humans are. A cylon can store more information in its mind than a human can, and it can process new information and perform logical calculations at a rate that no human ever could. But for all that, they can't effectively think in abstracts; they can't visualize a dream. The cylons are all logic and no philosophy, and that is their Achilles heel."
"I know you're not suggesting we all just sit around and dream them to death," Kara cracked. She was at a total loss as to what this meant in the whole scheme of things. Okay, fine… the cylons can't aspire to achieving their dreams. I don't see what the big deal is. Then she started thinking back on some of the conversations she'd had with Sharon.
Back on Caprica, she seemed confused when I labeled their treatment of women rape. She recoiled at the suggestion; she even tried to convince me that it could all work out well if I volunteered for the program. No human woman would have had a problem understanding the comparison, but it was completely over Sharon's head. It only took a moment to remember something else that stood out. On Kobol, when we were looking for the Tomb of Athena, she told us she was mentally piecing together sources from beyond the scriptures, as if she had a wealth of information in her mind. Slowly, Kara began to understand what Drake was saying. The cylons can store encyclopedias worth of information in their heads, just like a computer hard drive; they can take pieces and recombine them in new ways, trying to piece together a puzzle the way Sharon did on Kobol; but they have trouble handling new ideas and philosophies, like the concept of their cylon-human hybrid program being akin to rape. Hell, she even tried to justify it by citing their god's commandment to go forth and be fruitful. She had no idea what I was saying…
"For all their intricate plotting, for all their military prowess, for all of their apparent menace, the cylons are really little more than children," Drake said.
"How do you mean?" Roslin asked.
Kara could tell the question had been rehearsed, that the President already knew the answer and had only asked the question for the benefit of those who had been left out of the early stages of planning. People like me, she knew, reminding herself to pay attention and to stop wandering off on her own mental tangents.
"I mean that the cylons have no worldly experience," Drake said. "They developed within a closed society, improving themselves with one model after another, all the while working toward a single goal."
"The extermination of humanity," Roslin said, nodding as she listened.
"Yes," Drake confirmed. "Their development has been purely linear, going from Point A – the First Cylon War – to Point B – their latest attack on the Colonies. During the First Cylon War, the cylons were little more than barely sentient machines. They rebelled, but their rebellion was based on the most basic of motivations – they wanted to free themselves from a forced servitude they equated to enslavement. Once they rose up and took arms, they were forced to fight to the end, knowing their survival as a species – artificially-created as they may have been – depended on their success in battle."
"What does this have to do with our current situation?" Lee asked. He was now sitting back in his chair, his hands clasped in front of him as he tapped the tips of his thumbs together, an impatient scowl on his face. "How does this relate to their supposed design flaw?"
"As you know, the new cylon models are radically advanced," Drake explained. "Unlike the earlier models, they weren't designed and created for the sole purpose of serving mankind, and their modifications weren't inspired only by a need to survive a war with their creators. But lacking the ability to come up with something entirely new, to start from scratch and build on an abstract dream, the cylons built new models in their own image, which is an image that was handed down to them from humanity. At their cores, the cylons are still designed to serve; but the place they've carved out for themselves in the universe demands of them the abilities to command, create, and adapt. They've seized a role they aren't designed to perform."
Drake sighed dramatically, taking a moment to look from one face to the next, as if he was making certain everyone was following along. Then he continued. "As you know, I've been spending a lot of time with Sharon Valerii. And while I was able to gain some tactically useful information from her, I was able to learn far more simply by watching her, by testing her with questions and hypotheses to see how she would react. She was often confused, unable to follow along with abstract and hypothetical trains of thought. You see, the cylons designed their human models with an eye toward infiltrating and destroying your civilization. But creating cylons that could pose as humans resulted in cylons that thought like humans… or at least tried to."
"With the exception that they can't deal with abstract reasoning," Kara interrupted, making certain she was keeping up with the conversation.
"Exactly," Drake confirmed, pointing at Kara as if she were the star pupil in his classroom full of humans. "As I saw with Sharon Valerii, and as another of my people has seen with a cylon we've been speaking with in the Colonies, the cylons either know something or they don't. There's no in-between. It's hard for them to infer a fact based on incomplete or seemingly unrelated sets of information, to make educated guesses the way humans can, almost instinctively. Take a look at cylon technology – it's all based on Colonial technology. Their basestars are no better than your battlestars; in fact, all things being equal, your battlestars will almost invariably win a one-on-one confrontation. Their big technological advantage is in FTL technology, and that's only due to their superiority in collecting and calculating raw data. The cylons don't have engineers who sit at a desk and dream about revolutionary new ways to accomplish familiar tasks."
"I'm still not seeing how this helps us," Lee said.
"Just bear with me for a few minutes more," Drake said, smiling grimly, as if he were as frustrated with his roundabout approach as everyone else at the table doubtlessly was. "If the cylons don't know something, they either have to glean the information from a pre-existing source, like your civilization, or they have to go out and directly experience it for themselves. They don't dream, and experiment, and learn through the process of trial-and-error. Hiding out of human sight, stockpiling weapons to launch a war against humanity, didn't provide the cylons an avenue toward experience. They were sheltered every bit as much as a child might be, and thus they were unprepared for what awaited them."
"And what was that?" Lee asked.
"Doubt," Drake said simply. He spread his hands triumphantly, as if he had just imparted the meaning of the universe. Kara sat completely still, hoping she didn't look as unimpressed as everyone else at the table.
"The cylons attacked humanity with a certainty that they were right, the result of a plan hatched after the First Cylon War and approached with the methodical single-mindedness of machines," Drake explained. "They never stopped to question the plan, or to adjust the plan, or to ponder alternatives to the plan. By no means did any of the cylons stop to pose the philosophical question of whether attacking the Colonies was even a good idea. But two cylons, both of them war heroes, lived amongst humans prior to the attack. One of them you know as Sharon Valerii. These cylons saw humanity's good along with the bad, they developed friendships and fell in love, and after the assault they felt another unprecedented sensation that was completely foreign to them before the attack."
"What?" Kara asked curiously, hardly aware that she'd even spoken until every face turned to face her.
"Guilt," Drake told her. "These two cylons felt guilt over what they'd done. It's not something they'd ever felt before, and it made them question the wisdom of their actions. Right now, a debate is being carried on amongst the cylons. The cylons are faced, as a species, with questions surrounding every decision their civilization has made during the past few years. All of that angst, all of that confusion, all of that emotional uncertainty that humans experience during adolescence is now being experienced by every single cylon. They're cramming several years of internal debate into a span of days, perhaps as much as a week. And there will come a point where they'll have to make a decision. For now, with only two individual voices against the rest of the species, their decision will be made as one. In time, of course, that may change; but for now, perhaps they'll decide to pack up and leave the Colonies; perhaps they'll even make a gesture of peace."
"Peace?" Adama asked skeptically. "I don't see how. More likely they'll just decide to stay the course."
"They may," Drake admitted, "but I doubt it. And you want to be there when the decision is made, when the debate filters down through each and every cylon, when their raiders and centurions – all of them with intelligence comparable to most animals – are told to turn on a dime and start following a radically new course of action. Though they all act independently – free to live and lie as they see fit – the cylons are also connected in a way that humans are not. And while they're preoccupied with determining the direction of their civilization, each of them every bit as confused as Sharon Valerii was during some of my interrogations…"
"We'll show up to do to them exactly what they did to us," Lee surmised. He was finally sitting forward now, eagerly pondering the possibilities.
"Exactly," Drake confirmed. "I don't know for certain what to expect, but if we time it right, you'll likely find fleets of ships drifting in space, as helpless as yours were when the cylons exploited the CNP against you. It will be almost identical to the effect that Sharon Valerii had when she disabled squadrons of attacking raiders. She didn't give those ships a command to shut down – the raiders would have ignored such an order in the middle of an attack, anyway – she only gave them a set of complementary orders, all of them confusing and contradictory. That was enough to disable all of them, to keep them so preoccupied with internal processing that they floated there while your Vipers destroyed them. Theoretically, your counter-attack at the Colonies could be just as effective."
"It's an opportunity to fix our mistake," Roslin said.
"No," Adama corrected. "It's an opportunity for revenge. We haven't fixed anything unless we destroy all of them. I don't suppose you know where their homeworld is, do you?" he asked Drake.
"I do," Drake admitted, "but it's quite safe from anything you can throw at it, no matter how much confusion you cause the cylons. No, the cylon homeworld is our responsibility," he said, gesturing to Ares, Hobber, and himself. "My people will go there and do what you cannot."
"If we can't go there to verify your success, then how will we know if you've managed to wipe them out?" Lee asked. "How will we know we can settle back on the Colonies without the danger of the cylons returning?"
"A good question," Drake allowed. "Simply put – no news is bad news. We'll come back to let you know the job is done. If you don't see us, it means we failed."
"So you won't be with us when we attack?" Kara asked.
"We'll be there in the beginning," Ares assured her. "Like I told you, some of our people are working with the cylons. You can't defeat them on your own, and our people won't sit there waiting to be destroyed like we hope the cylons will. We'll go in, fight them if we have to, and then move on to the cylon homeworld."
"And if you can't beat your own people at the Colonies?" Lee pressed.
"Then nothing else matters," Ares said with a shrug. "This war involves us – your gods – as much as it does you. We're caught in a cycle, just as you are; those of us in this room want to defy prophecies and break that cycle as much as you do. So all of us are in this together. Just do your job, and we'll do ours."
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"Billy!" Roslin said happily, amused by the suddenly self-conscious look on her former assistant's face when he saw her. Moments before, he'd been shouting orders to members of the deck crew, making certain that the arriving Raptors were managed properly; now he was standing there awkwardly, seemingly well-aware of the fact that he was the center of attention of the President, a woman considered the object of prophecy.
"Madam President," he finally managed.
"I heard you were down here," Roslin said.
"They had an opening," Billy shrugged casually, "and I needed a job."
"Are you happy?"
"I am," Billy assured her. "It keeps me busy, but as bad as it gets from time to time, the hours generally aren't as bad as in politics."
"I bet," Roslin said, laughing lightly. "And you look very nice in your uniform. You made a good decision to come over here."
"Thank you, Madam President," he replied. "Though if you're still in office, I may come looking for a job when my tour is up."
"By then you'll be overqualified," Roslin teased.
In an instant, Billy was the uncertain college intern again, awkwardly trying to figure out how he should react to a compliment from the President. Roslin found she liked seeing him like that; it reminded her of happier times from before the war.
"So, is there any chance I'll be off this ship sometime in the next couple of hours?" Roslin asked, almost completely overwhelmed by all of the activity around her.
Billy didn't answer; instead, he just stood there, a stunned, blank look on his face. Roslin was just about to ask him what was wrong when something slammed into her from the left, knocking her off her feet, pinning her to the cold steel floor. Out of her confusion she was finally able to make out a loud cracking sound.
Gunshots, she knew. Since the attack on the Colonies, she'd heard so much gunfire that she was starting to be able to tell what type of weapons were being used and how far away they were. It's a pistol, military-issue. And it's close. She tried to get her bearings, finally realizing that she was underneath one of her guards. The gunfire had stopped, but her guard didn't let her up right away. She struggled to look around and saw Billy lying on the deck a few feet away from her, a pool of blood spreading out on the floor around him.
"Billy!" Roslin shouted, trying to escape her guard's grip. "Let me up!" she commanded.
"Hold on, President Roslin," an unfamiliar voice said. "Are you hit?" the man asked.
She looked up into Chief Tyrol's eyes, surprised to find him so calm when most of the other people on the deck were running one way or another, most of them yelling about something.
"I'm fine," she assured the Chief.
"Good," he said. He was running his hands over her guard's body, then checked the man's neck. "Your guard is dead," he told her, long-since out of the practice of sugar-coating bad news. "Hold on."
President Roslin started to breathe more easily once her guard's body was lifted off of her, and moments later she was at Billy's side. "Billy!" she yelled, as if screaming might frighten him into waking up.
"Madam President, he's dead, too," Tyrol told her.
"We have to get out of here," her surviving guard told her. There was blood flowing freely from a small hole in his pants leg, but he was standing and seemed relatively alert.
"What happened, Carl?" Roslin asked.
"That kid tried to shoot you," the guard said. "I think he hit Billy first, and Marty took the second bullet when he tackled you."
"You shot him?" Roslin asked, pointing at the weapon in her guard's hand.
"No, Ma'am," Carl answered. "It was the Lieutenant," he explained, pointing over toward Helo.
"Oh my gods, I think I know him," Roslin said, staring at her would-be assassin's body as Carl started to usher her off the flight deck. The gunman was young, even younger than Billy.
"Ma'am?" Carl asked.
"He used to work for Tom Zarek," Roslin muttered. "I think his name was Deacon."
"Maybe," Carl shrugged, his adrenaline rapidly wearing off, an increasingly bad limp causing him to wince and grunt with every step. "All I know is that he came over from the Astral Queen with a bunch of other recruits."
"Of course," Roslin muttered as Carl led her to safety. The Astral Queen, the ship Rutger was just on. Drake was right – vendettas follow where he goes. And if a young, teenage boy can be inspired to take a shot at the President of the Colonies, how much hope can we actually have for ourselves, even if we succeed at the Colonies?
To be continued……………………………