Chapter 26
Starbuck and Apollo had returned to Galactica with another Earth ship, and a story.
This new Earth ship was a warship called a destroyer, though it was still small enough to land in Galactica's shuttle bay.
It was basically vulture shaped - long and and narrow for the most part, getting about twice as wide back by its wings.
It's extremely long neck, about half of it's overall length of 60 metrons, was barely wider than a Vipers wingtips - only about 4 metrons wide.
It formerly belonged to a group called the Eastern Alliance on a planet they called Terra, which meant Earth.
People were excited about that name, but less excited when they heard about the actions of the Eastern Alliance Enforcers who had crewed the destroyer.
Apollo, Starbuck, and the 6 people of the Terran ship had gone to a planet called Paradeen, where the 6 people - Michael, Sara, and 4 children - planned to live.
The planet was almost uninhabited, because the Eastern Alliance had attacked it, peaceful and unarmed though it was, with chemical and biological weapons several weeks previously.
This fact completely appalled the Colonials of the ragtag fleet.
After most of the human race - over 40 billion inhabitants between the 12 Colonies - had been wiped out by Cylon attacks, only about 1 person in 40,000 had survived. Those survivors had a visceral reaction when it came to any further killing of humans, or anything like it. It was widely felt that there were simply too few humans left - they simply couldn't afford to allow any avoidable killing, oppression, or any other behavior that put you in the category they called the Enemies of Man.
And killings and oppression were apparently par for the course with the Eastern Alliance.
While Starbuck and Apollo were off exploring an empty city on Paradeen looking for information, the Eastern Alliance destroyer had landed looking for information about the 2 Vipers sitting on the planet.
Twelve enforcers, led by a man called Commandant Leiter, left the destroyer and went looking for that information. They'd found the 4 children, and the very first thought expressed by Commandant Leiter was to torture the children to get the information he wanted.
Half the children had escaped and run a neighbor's farm nearby, while Commandant Leiter and his men took over the farm where Sara was, and started working her over for information too.
Before they actually started any torture, Apollo, Starbuck, and some neighbors attacked and stunned all the enforcers. But it was clear to everybody that torture had been planned. The Eastern Alliance definitely seemed to be led, and at least sometimes supported, by Enemies of Man.
Apollo and Starbuck had brought the captive Eastern Alliance enforcers, and their destroyer, back to Galactica.
While gone, Apollo and Starbuck had had many stories related to them about Paradeen, Terra, and 11 farming worlds colonized to help feed Terra. These farming worlds were seen as 'satellites' to Terra, as far as being subservient to it. And Luna was the name of Terra's real satellite - its moon.
Consequently, the farming planets had been named Lunar 1 through Lunar 11.
On the way back to Galactica, the Eastern Alliance men had talked incessantly about their ideology, in which they clearly had been thoroughly indoctrinated. That ideology was as simple as it was evil - that the strong should rule and the weak should serve, in master-servant relationships at all levels of society.
They believed they were entitled to whatever they could conquer or otherwise take.
The 10 professional politicians of the Council were eager to talk to them.
They felt that if only negotiations were handled by professionals such as themselves rather than warriors, who they called 'primitive ruffians', everything would turn out all right. They said - in so many words and despite the lack of any supporting evidence - that they felt that the only reason the Eastern Alliance had acted badly was that the Colonial Warriors had started it.
Alfred made it a policy to avoid anything Council except official meetings, so he missed the negotiating meeting.
Adama was often too busy with military matters to be there except for official Council official meetings, and he didn't even make it to all of those.
Though he'd probably have missed this meeting anyway in protest, since the Council had assigned him an overseer - a Council member to stand by him at all times and second-guess everything he did, vetoing everything she felt the Council would disagree with. This they did because Adama had let Apollo and Starbuck defy the Council and take the first Earth ship away to Paradeen, instead of keeping it for study.
So when the Eastern Alliance enforcers and their leader were brought to the 'neutral ground' of their own destroyer in Galactica's shuttle bay to meet with the Council, neither Alfred, nor Adama, nor his overseer were there.
And that is what saved them from being captured.
After the 9 Council members filed in to the destroyer and took seats, the Eastern Alliance men calmly locked the airlock, declared the Council were captives now, tied them up, and started issuing demands to Galactica.
Then, they started torturing the Council members to get all the information they could, despite promises to Galactica that, if their demands were met, the Council would be released unharmed.
They were just as trustworthy as they were kind.
They tried to launch their destroyer and flee, but before the Council had demanded it be made available for negotiations, it had been under study. So certain components had already been disassembled and removed for examination, and consequently the craft's engines would not start.
Alfred wanted to send soldiers and launch an immediate assault on the destroyer to recapture the Eastern Alliance men, end the threat, and, coincidentally though somewhat grudgingly, rescue the Council.
But Adama's overseer ruled out everything but negotiations. In reality this meant that she insisted that the demands of the Eastern Alliance men be met.
To meet their demands, certain part of teh destroyer needed to be re-installed.
While one tech was outside the destroyer re-installing part of an engine, he attached a listening device to the destroyer's hull, which could hear everything happening therein and transmit it to Adama.
Adama wasted no time, after hearing the Council members screaming while being tortured, to order an assault.
His warriors used explosives to blast their way through the hull of the destroyer, in 3 places, then charge in. This caught the Eastern Alliance men offguard, and the warriors had no trouble taking the destroyer.
Though, in a final act of spite, the torturers killed their victims.
Adama's overseer wouldn't believe it until she had seen it, and she rushed there before anyone had time to clean it up.
She took one look and went catatonic.
Efforts to revive her failed, so she was declared unfit for service and her seat on the Council was opened for elections, as were the 9 others.
Alfred went all-out in campaigning for practical people, though with little hope that it would do any good.
Sally ran all-day every-day broadcasts of her reality shows, with plenty of new material, much of it aimed specifically at the election, plus re-runs of favorite older material to fill in the time.
She included frequent replays of Cain's speech where he resigned his seat on the Council and lambasted the membership thereof as impractical fools who had no business running anything.
She broadcast these things to all the game units as usual, but also got permission from Adama to spend some of the official inter-ship communication bandwidth on the project as well.
Meanwhile, Alfred's people and Adama's techs examined the Eastern Alliance destroyer thoroughly.
It didn't take them long to crack their computers - while the Eastern Alliance probably felt their computer security was top notch, it, like most of their technology, was centuries behind that of the 12 Colonies.
The Eastern Alliance barely had space travel - it took their ships months to reach their colonies, while Galactica could make the same trip in less than an hour.
The cracked computers divulged much information, including the coordinates of Terra.
So Galactica and the fleet set off for Terra.
They arrived, but did nothing to announce themselves. And they stayed well back so that they would not be especially noticeable.
This was so that they could eavesdrop on all transmissions coming from any source on Terra, and get an idea what they were dealing with.
While sorting through that, plus the contents of the destroyer's computer, the first batch of Wanderer scouts were commissioned and launched, and a second batch were started.
Two dozen Wanderers scouted in the vicinity of the fleet, while the rest went off to scout for Cain.
Cain was continually raiding the Cylons. A continual series of news announcements came back about various attacks he'd done, in which he used every variety of tactics he'd used at the Bushwhack system and elsewhere.
Alfred heard that Cain was doing well, though he didn't have time just then to follow the news.
Then the election for the new Council was completed.
Alfred couldn't believe the results - a bare majority of non-politicians had actually been elected.
Sally's 5 newly elected Reality Stars, plus Adama and Alfred, would make 7 of the 12 Council that actually had common sense.
At least Alfred hoped they all retained their common sense. Getting elected could change them.
Though they seemed likely to be resistant to that - the folks who had been changed by becoming famous, had been weeded out as that happened. Mostly they'd become one kind of jerk or another and consequently had their show's popularity drop until the show was canceled.
So the folks that remained Reality Stars had all weathered the change from anonymity to popularity, leading to high hopes that they would weather this change as well.
Alfred certainly had no hope that any of the 5 career politicians who had also been elected would have any sense at all.
He looked forward to the first meeting of the new Council.
In the meantime, he got back to work.
His latest project was in deciding what could be done with the destroyer they'd captured from the Eastern Alliance.
Adama was insistent, and Alfred agreed, that any nation whose representatives' first thought, on meeting children, was to torture them for information - that nation was not going to get any extra power to abuse while Adama had anything to say about it. And every military unit contributed to the power of a nation.
So that nation was not going to get the destroyer back, and consequently it was being examined to see if it could be any use to the Colonials.
The EA destroyer was much much smaller than a Frigate, though bigger than a Wanderer scout. So it had a little usable space, though not a lot.
And it was built with comparatively ancient technology.
Its engines were pathetic, slow and inefficient. It was neither fast, nor maneuverable, nor built well enough to stand much in the way of acceleration.
It's sensors were not even a fraction as good as those commonly built into Colonial shuttles - and those shuttles' main job did not demand much in the way of sensors, so they got only very simple sensor suites.
And it's weapons were mainly simple missiles, and a few very weak lasers not even a twentieth as powerful as the ones commonly mounted on a LandRam.
So it was an unimpressive vessel all-around.
Still, the hull, at least, was usable, even though it was completely unarmored and unable to resist any damage, by Colonial standards at least.
It was, after all, a space-going vessel with all the systems that required.
They'd just have to figure out if it could be used as it was, or if an upgrade or two could make it usable, and if so, how.
They were still looking into that when it came time for the next Council meeting.
It was an odd meeting - the new members were clearly split. The 5 career politicians were in ornate Council robes and sat on one side of the table, while the Reality Stars were in ordinary everyday clothes and sat on the other side of the table.
The politicians clearly felt at home in the environment of an official meeting of the Council in the Council chamber. And the Reality Stars did not, though - used to being Reality Stars - they still wore their video cameras, as was usual for them.
They, and the politicians, were used to having cameras around, so Alfred and Adama were probably the only ones uncomfortable with being filmed that way.
The Reality Stars generally approached the situation cautiously, wanting to 'test the waters with a toe rather than jump right in', so to speak. They were mostly quiet while they figured things out.
But the career politicians jumped right in, rapidly proposing several things such as pay raises for certain classes of workers, new uniforms for Warriors, building a new ship for a certain kind of animal to thrive in, and unit designations for new Viper squadrons.
What that last one was proposed, Alfonse - a Reality Star who was currently a factory worker and had been a construction worker back on the Colonies, and who was famous on his show for constantly joking around - raised his hand and asked.
"What business is that of ours - can't Cain choose his own squadron names and numbers?""
Apparently he was not yet comfortable enough with the situation to try joking.
Each of the career politicians, and only them, replied, at first stumbling over each-other and then reverting to formal rules of procedure and taking turns.
The responses, in their various forms, amounted to "You're ignorant of How Things Are Done, let me take you under my wing and show you the ropes". That came across as patriarchal at first, but as the meeting progressed, that kind of response wore thin and then came across as condescending attempts to dominate and control.
At one point a politician encouraged the 'newbies' not to be afraid to voice an opinion.
Marie answered for the group, by rhetorically asking
"How can I have a valid opinion before I fully understand the situation?""
The politicians' proposals were all voted down, on the basis incomplete information, but with the disclaimer that the issues could be brought up again once there had been a chance for everyone to familiarize themselves with the issues.
The "newbies" aka Reality Stars, generally took the position that you never make a change without fully understanding it first.
Alfonse summarized it with the words:
"Only a fool starts laying bricks before he knows how many he has, how many he will need, or even what he wants to build with them."
Alfred was refreshed to see someone actually referring to practical experiences as a yardstick for how to proceed. He was used to politicians that had lived solely in the world of ideas for so long that they thought they could pass irrational laws and have them work despite their impracticality. He'd once seen a politician who'd been told his plans couldn't work because they were "against the laws of physics" counter with "you tell me which laws and I'll get them repealed".
The first meeting of the new Council ended without much having been achieved. Despite the politicians eagerness to vote on things, the newbies voted against everything they didn't fully understand yet - which was all of it.
Alfred was satisfied with how the meeting went - it was his first Council meeting since getting elected where nothing stupid had been voted in.
He didn't have long to reflect on that though.
Dramatic events were happening.
On his shuttle ride back to LowBoy, out his window, he could see an amazing light-show over Terra.
He got the details about it as quickly as he could.
It turned out that the 2 factions on Terra - The Eastern Alliance and The People's Nationalist Alliance, which between them controlled the whole planet - had launched all-out attacks on each other using incredibly large numbers of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.
If Galactica had not intervened and shot down all the missiles, all life on the planet could have been extinguished.
If Galactica had still been escorting unarmed ships, there would have been a temptation to leave, quietly and quickly, such a dangerous place.
But the remaining fleet all had laser turrets, and many had their own Vipers.
So Galactica and the fleet stayed in place while trying to figure out how to keep the vast number of humans on Terra from killing each-other.
Almost immediately after the ICBM's got shot down, the Eastern Alliance launched several dozen Destroyers, apparently to investigate what happened.
These soon detected Galactica, which had moved in closer the better to shoot down missiles.
Having been seen, Galactica tried to contact them on the frequencies they were known to use. It was time for that, and any further contact would be open, rather than the stealthy observations they had been doing.
But the destroyers did not reply.
Instead they attacked Galactica, or tried to.
Their lasers were so weak they could not do any real damage.
And as soon as their intent was clear, Galactica shot them all using her laser turrets set on stun.
That setting temporarily overloaded systems on ships and set them drifting without power.
So Galactica, demonstrating her maneuverability, simply flew carefully up to each one and scooped it into a landing bay, where Warriors were waiting to open the captured destroyers and take the crew prisoner.
Galactica could easily scoop up such ships, but she could not hold many and still have room for her Vipers.
So the BattleSphere was moved up and the destroyers were transferred to the cavernous bays it had on Shell 2.
While they were doing that, they got a call from The People's Nationalist Alliance. They wanted to meet and negotiate.
A special session of the Council was called to discuss the idea.
In that meeting, the career politicians were excited to demonstrate their expertise at negotiations, while the rest were suspicious of the situation, especially the fact that the The People's Nationalist Alliance, or Nationalists as they were more simply known, insisted on meeting on the planet's surface.
The Council meeting turned unfriendly fairly quickly, with the career politicians effectively implying that the newbies were cowards - either afraid, or too inexperienced, to do their jobs.
But the newbies wouldn't budge - there were not going down to a potentially hostile planet without better information at the very minimum.
So the career politicians, 4 of the 5 of them anyway, decided to go anyway and 'show the unqualified how it was done'.
The 5th protested ill health on the grounds that it would be 'unconscionable for him to carry a virus or germ to the surface, which the inhabitants may have no resistance to'.
He didn't seem ill, and may have just been trying to stay behind, though with a believable excuse.
As they walked out of the meeting, Councilwoman Lara, a Reality Star diver who worked in the big aquarium at the center of the BattleSphere, commented to Councilman Yosh, another Reality Star:
"Why is it that I feel they are putting words in my mouth which I never said nor intended? Worse yet, they denounce those words in a way that makes it appear that I am a fool, even though they are not my words, nor my thoughts. I am not a coward."
Alfred didn't hear the rest as each went their separate ways.
The 4 career politicians requested a shuttle from Galactica, since they had not been yet assigned their own.
Adama asked Alfred if he had any readily available, since Galactica's bays were still crowded with captured destroyers.
And Alfred dug out of storage, one of the thousand yahren old shuttles they'd recovered from Proteus, which was only a little more advanced than what the Terrans had.
He, too, suspected the Nationalists, and didn't want to hand them any new technology, if they decided to keep the shuttle.
Shortly after that shuttle entered Terra's atmosphere, the Nationalists informed Galactica that the shuttle had crashed and all aboard were presumed dead, though a search was being made.
Alfred was worried, until Adama pointed out that Galactica's scanners had been on the shuttle the whole time and showed it landing successfully, after which it was put in a hangar and the Councilmen taken to the entrance of an underground transportation network, which could have transported them anywhere.
It was clear the Councilmen had been captured and that there was no intention of returning them.
Galactica's scanners were looking for them, trying to find the signatures of their hand-held computers, but that would take time.
Meanwhile, massive numbers of Eastern Alliance destroyers had been gathering above Terra. When they got 1500 together, they swept in and attacked.
It proved to be no harder to shoot them all down than it had been to shoot down a much larger number of ICBM's.
Collecting the stunned and disabled craft took quite a long time, especially since each was full of thoroughly indoctrinated and fanatical soldiers.
It also took a while to work out a procedure to take them all alive, without losses among the warriors.
Since they didn't want to take any risks, they used large amounts of knockout gas, then sent in tripod lasers firing continuously on stun. That left the Enforcers very thoroughly stunned, but was better than risking any Warriors.
During that time, they redirected half of the two dozen Wanderer scouts which had been examining the nearby area, and sent them to Lunar 1 through 11, plus Paradeen, to check on conditions there and report.
The other dozen Wanderers continued their general surveys of the nearby area.
And Alfred's people came up with a proposal for what to do with the captured destroyers.
As-is, they were effectively useless - too slow and inefficient to even make good shuttles. And their layout wasn't suited to freight anyway - too many structural members would have to be changed to make that work. It'd be better to simply build new ships from scratch instead.
To upgrade them as any kind of fighting ships would also be more complicated and time consuming than simply rebuilding them from scratch - almost everything would have to be changed to give them any real maneuverability in the first place, much less brace them to survive the stress of such maneuvers.
But one kind of military ship could work.
To survive combat with anything modern, speed and maneuverability were needed most importantly, but also good armor, sensors, weapons, and a host of other things.
But there was a way to participate in and contribute to combat without ever getting near it: pulsars.
Each destroyer was big enough, barely, to house one pulsar and enough energy storage for 2 shots, assuming they also swapped out its engine for a pre-Marron drive.
Then they could either leave all the other pathetic systems in place, or, if they had the time and inclination, do things like upgrading their sensors and communications to be equal to those on a shuttle.
Individually they wouldn't be much, but in large numbers the effect could be significant.
And that was the only way these ships would ever be significant.
What decided them to upgrade the sensors and communications was the need to also upgrade the computers.
And they had that need because nobody wanted to fly them. That meant they needed a way to fly themselves if they were to fly at all. And that meant they needed CORA computers such as Recon Vipers had. And CORA wouldn't work without good sensors and communications.
So for each destroyer, they would build a pulsar, energy storage for it, a pre-Marron drive, and the same package they would normally build for a Recon Viper containing its sensors, communications, and computer.
It sounded like a lot, but it would be less than half as complicated and time consuming as building a similar ship from scratch, since the new parts were almost all off-the-shelf stuff. The only custom work would be a few small modifications to the bulkheads of each destroyer, and designing a set of energy storage cells to fit into each nook and cranny of the ship.
They got right on it, since having the ships fly along under their own power would get them out of the way and put them to use at the same time.
All the Liberty Ships were already set up to finish Wanderers as their partly-completed hulls came out of Fred the FRD in a continuous stream. They just ceased building new Wanderers for a while, and filled all the available capacity, both in the FRD and at the Liberty Ships, with destroyers undergoing conversion.
While Alfred was buried in that project, he paid some attention to the attempts to have professionals reason with, and hopefully socialize, the Eastern Alliance enforcers they'd captured on all those destroyers.
And more enforcers continued to trickle in, as destroyers attacked the Wanderer scouts on the way to, and at, each of the 'satellite' colonies of Terra - Lunar 1 through 1, as well as Paradeen.
The Wanderers had no trouble defeating the destroyers and capturing them, but towing them back was getting time-consuming, so some Liberty Ships went out to meet them and take over the towing. These got attacked too, and similarly captured the attacking destroyers, demonstrating by deeds what the sociologists were learning in interviews with the prisoners - they were so thoroughly indoctrinated as to be totally unreachable by reason, and they never gave up struggling to 'succeed' as their ideology defined it - by conquering.
What to do with them was not a simple problem. If they dropped them back on Terra, they'd pick up the struggle again as best they could, probably oppressing their neighbors while they were at it. And neither was there a prison big enough to hold them, nor would it have been a good idea to support them in a prison indefinitely.
Someone suggested they be made to support themselves in a kind of prison.
So a suitable planet was chosen - one they'd passed by not too long ago and which could be farmed, but which was too far for Terrans to travel to with their own technology.
It was named Sylvania, after it's mostly sylvan territory, and after the farming that would go on there.
It had only about 25% land area, but that was well watered and temperate over most of its surface, resulting in over 39 million square miles of farm-able area. Even allowing a full square mile each, it could accommodate about 39 million prisoners - many more than they could imagine needing.
So they started sending shiploads of prisoners there, to be marooned with a few simple, unpowered tools, plenty of seeds, food, and a 'how to' book each - actually printed on durable plastic pages rather than give them anything technological.
Each prisoner was set down, with his equipment, a mile from any others, so they'd be on their own. After the first few, they took to lowering each new prisoner and their equipment on ropes, so there would be no possibility that existing prisoners would travel, band together, and try to capture a shuttle doing a new delivery. With the rope-delivery method, if they tried that, the rope could simply lowered faster until it touched ground, then detached, allowing the shuttle to escape, never having come within 50 metrons of the ground.
The plan was to have no contact with the people of Sylvania, so that they could live simple lives without bothering, or being bothered by, anyone. To that end, they left some sensor buoys and defense satellites around the planet, and declared it off-limits.
Defense satellites were not terribly effective against fighters, but they should be adequate to prevent any other visits, whether from folks intending to free the prisoners, pirates, or any other kind of visitor.
There on Sylvania, they could live out their lives, as they chose, without harming anyone - at least no one who wasn't just as guilty. And maybe they'd even come to some realizations while they were at it. That was the hope.
In a few generations, after their simple existence had driven their ideologies out of their minds, Sylvania could even become a productive colony.
Without warning, the Galactica's scans finally found the kidnapped Councilors on the surface of Terra.
A flight of Vipers was sent in to strafe everything in their vicinity on stun setting. And a shuttle full of Warriors landed, retrieved them and returned.
They told a harrowing story. The survivors did anyway - 2 of the 4 had died while being tortured for information.
That was bad enough, but theere was more.
What they thought was an opportunity to escape, aided by a fellow prisoner, was actually an elaborate ploy by the Nationalist government to trick them into unlocking their personal computers. The 'fellow prisoner' had actually been a member of the Nationalist secret police, planted in prison just to 'earn their trust'. He'd led their escape, during which they'd 'just happened' to recover their computers, soon after which they had - not coincidentally at all - discovered a need to look up information. As soon as they'd unlocked their computers to do so, the secret policeman pounced and re-arrested them, eager to look through the now-unlocked computers.
But that computer use had also enabled Galactica to find them.
The news outraged the people of the fleet, who generally felt that such evil had to be stopped.
Talk in the Council, for which new elections to fill the 2 empty seats had already been started, was pretty unequivocal.
Alfred particularly liked the exchange between Councilwoman Marie, and Councilman Yosh.
Marie said, "There's a government down there that arbitrarily arrests its own people, disposes of any who have information which they don't want getting out, routinely lies to its own populace through an official propaganda arm as well as in other ways, encourages its own citizens to turn in other citizens to the secret police, and rewards them for doing so, and...nevermind. The list is to horrible. It has to stop. That government must go."
"You're right." Yosh agreed, "It must stop, if only for the torture alone."
"That's mostly the other government - I was talking about the supposed 'good guys' - the Nationalists."
Agreement was general, the vote nearly unanimous, and planning began.
Cain was contacted for his opinion as well.
It was pointed out that, with the continual attacks from one faction, and the kidnapping and killing of high government officialls by the other faction, the fleet was already at war with the whole planet Terra.
A Reality Star, arguing on his show for intervention, said "Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.", and that became their battle cry.
So Galactica, and the Colonials of the ragtag fleet, took over the planet Terra, and, soon after that, all its 'satellite worlds'.
It proved to be surprisingly easy, in most ways.
Galactica's sensors had long since noted the locations of the centers of government, even their hidden underground bunkers, since these still transmitted plenty of commands and such.
So targeted strikes by Vipers, strafing with lasers set to stun, silenced all defenses.
Shuttles full of troops attacked, stunned, and captured the leadership on both sides.
Then the Colonials declared themselves to be in charge of the planet now. They listed the reforms they intended to pass and the order and pace at which they would pass them.
They made sure to keep strictly to the schedule they promised, so folks could learn that Colonial rule was benign.
They also declared that any serious or violent opposition would be banished for life.
Comparatively few people ended up needing to be banished.
Most of the people could be retrained, though they had been indoctrinated to, and lived in, all kinds of oppression for decades or longer.
But the leaders, and a few others, were found to be beyond the help the Colonials could provide.
The former leaders of both countries were sent off to farm on Wasteland - a mostly desert planet near Sylvania. Despite being mostly desert, it had enough good farm-able land for almost a million people, at one per square mile.
Any who were found rioting or fomenting rebellion went off to farm on Sylvania.
Some groups managed to gather unseen, and attack the centers of the new leadership on Terra. These were simply strafed on stun and banished to Sylvania as well.
And a new proclamation went out, that any public gathering of more than 6 people, would be stunned and questioned.
Further opposition was just private muttering, which petered out as people realized how much better off they were under the new laws.
That realization came faster in the former Nationalist territory than in former Eastern Alliance territory, both because the people living under the Eastern Alliance had been more oppressed - and more indoctrinated to think that was normal - and because they had been oppressed for much longer than the Nationalist citizens had.
The Nationalists had actually had freedom during the lives of some of the current generation. But they had gradually lost it - mostly under the excuse of increased security to oppose the Eastern Alliance. So bit by bit, they'd lost their freedoms. Now, for every little thing, they had to be granted permission through paperwork, processes, and permits.
So, before Galactica arrived, the Nationalists were almost as thoroughly oppressed as their enemies were.
People even needed permits, yahrens of training classes and internships, and a certification involving tests, before doing such simple things as massaging pets.
Since the people were used to such absurd restrictions on freedom, it would take a long time for them to get used to having freedom again. And it would take every available Colonial to teach them, and administer their planets until they were capable of doing it better.
Colonial society was not perfect, but it was far better than anything the Terrans had had.
To prevent the 5 billion plus Terrans from simply swamping the votes of the not-quite-1-million Colonials, no Terran would be allowed to vote until they had adequately socialized. Extending the vote to Terrans was projected to start in 15 yahrens, and would then be phased in over time: it often took a long time to unlearn things that had been learned and practiced for a long time.
They were honest and up-front with the Terrans about it, and protests were minimal - they weren't used to having any real say in government anyway.
Similarly, until they could be trusted to have left behind their old ways, Terra and her colonies would not get any technological advances from the Colonials.
It would be a very long process to civilize the inhabitants of Terra, teach them to live better than they had before, and generally bring them up to the standards of the 12 Colonies. But it had begun.