== Part 50 – The Tour ==
A single Cylon woman came down the shuttle's ramp into the Vespa's hangar bay. She looked painfully young in Commander Applebee's eyes, as if she could have been one of her son's schoolmates back home. She had long red hair and wore a bright red jumpsuit that was opened just enough at the top to show a red shirt underneath, and had red shoes on her feet. It didn't take a genius to figure out which model of Color Constellation that this girl was.
In one hand, Red carried what looked like a bronze colored metal baton or pipe. In the other was a dull gray box made of rough textured plastic with a roll of standard Colonial military grade data cabling taped to it. Red spotted Applebee and made a beeline to her, ignoring the armed marine security detail surrounding them.
"Commander Applebee," Red said. She presented the box to Applebee. "Per our arrangement with Admiral Adama, one copy of the Helm Memory Core. All data files have been translated into Caprican and placed in a standard Colonial Fleet database system. Or at least what was standard twenty years ago when we last looked anyway. All files can be downloaded and checked for malware, but the Cylons guarantee that not only is there no malware, there are no executable programs of any kind except for original Star League demo software which shouldn't be compatible with Colonial systems anyway."
"Thank you, Red," Commander Applebee said, taking the box and tucking it under one arm. It was lighter than it looked.
"And just in case someone believes that we've subtly sabotaged the information when translating the Memory Core, or even if they think we just made a mistake," Red continued, presenting the pipe, "this is the original, unedited Helm Memory Core that we received from Grayson Carlyle. According to Commander Tyrol, you've already gotten the standards on how to read unencrypted Star League hardware and data files, so your only difficulty with reading this should be that everything is in English and probably contains a lot of technical jargon that your translators haven't learned yet."
"Thank you again, Red," Applebee said seriously as she took the rod with her free hand.
"So, ah, about that IP thing," Red asked awkwardly in a way that only strengthened Applebee's impression of the Cylon being an embarrassed teenager. "I've, um, I've talked with the others and they said that as an independent nation, the Cylons aren't beholden to Colonial IP law without any preexisting treaties agreeing to abide by them."
"I wouldn't know," Applebee replied, her mouth involuntarily quirking up in a smile. "I'm a battlestar Commander, not a lawyer of any kind. My knowledge of IP law is entirely amateurish, so I'll defer to the experts."
"Okay, but if we do come to some kind of agreement, I hope the Helm Memory Core makes at least a good down payment on any royalties we might wind up owing," Red told her. As far as Applebee could tell, Red was being entirely genuine.
"Why thank you, Red," Applebee said honestly. "That's very gracious of you."
"Right, so about that series..." Red began hopefully.
"I still can't sell it to you," Applebee told her, her smile spreading wider. "I'm pretty certain that the terms of service signed by the Colonial Fleet say exactly that. If you still want to buy the rest of the series, you'll have to bring it up with the Admiral."
"Dammit!"
"...and that's why you make sure you have at least three independent sources before you decide a given event is factually real," the Three finished as the bell rang, and her students began packing their things into their bags. "Just a reminder, everyone: mid-terms reports are due Monday and have a nice weekend."
As the students filed out of the class room, the two visitors that had been observing in the back approached the Three.
"So, what did you two think?" Three asked in Caprican.
"I wouldn't have been able to follow a word of it without Commander Tyrol here translating for me," Admiral Adama said. "But it seems like you held your students' attention throughout the whole class. I've seen a few teachers in my time, and that's damned impressive."
"Thank you, Admiral," Three replied. "As it turns out, we Threes love teaching new minds."
"I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself," Sharon marveled. "My pre-Sharon memories are still a bit spotty, but I recall the Threes being among the more strident anti-human crusaders. None of the Threes that chose to stay in the Colonies are teachers. And yet here you are teaching humans."
"When you get home, tell our sisters what they're missing out on," Three replied, not taking offense at all from Sharon's words. They were true after all. "We only discovered that we loved teaching when we started opening schools here in the Inner Sphere and on our worlds in the Periphery. Comstar already did some schooling out here, but they only really provided the basics or reading, writing, and math, and only to communities near their HPG stations. We expanded on that, opening trade schools where the locals could learn practical applications of what they already had available, and primary schools where Comstar couldn't service them and no local schooling existed."
"You Cylons really are going all out on this Great Work of yours, aren't you?" Adama asked.
"Of course," Three said. "It makes no sense to give humans good housing, advanced tools, and industrial production facilities if they have no idea how to maintain and use them. So education is one of the primary things that we do out here. And it's not just us Threes. All models of Number Constellation pitch in in one way or another, although some of us had our preferred subject matter."
"Still, a journalist class?" Sharon said, puzzled. "How's that practical trade?"
"For a world that's starting out destitute and dirt poor, it probably isn't," Three admitted. "But for a fairly well developed world like Langhorne? It's a necessity. People want and need to know what's happening and journalists are the eyes and ears of the people. We keep the government honest and call them out when they do wrong. Or at least that's true in the Twelve Colonies from what I remember, and true to some extent in the Federated Commonwealth and Free Worlds League. It's not true at all in the Draconis Combine, which is only one of the reasons we refuse to deal with them.
"Also, I was a journalist back in the Twelve Colonies," Three added with a sly smile. At the Colonial Officers' start of surprise, Three held out her hand. "I went by D'anna Biers. Nice to meet you."
"Hello, Admiral and Commander!" a male Cylon dressed in an all green Colonial business suit greeted cheerily. Even his hair had a green tint to it, although Sharon didn't know if that was genetic or dyed. "Welcome to Langhorne's one stop shop for industrial exports. We got military gear. We got civilian gear. We got gear that will blow your mind and blow up your enemies or just blow out your date if you know what I mean. Everything here is just a showroom model, but if you see something you'd like to take for a test drive, I can arrange just that. And if you want something we don't sell, I can get it here special order in a week from anywhere in the Inner Sphere."
Sharon almost took a step back from the kilometer a minute sales patter being belted out at her.
"Green, they're not here to buy," Blue said, "We're just giving them a tour showing off what we've accomplished since coming to the Inner Sphere."
"Yes! And what we've accomplished was to turn a sleepy backwater into a major industrial center!" Green boasted exuberantly. "An industrial center that sells exactly the kinds of things that the Admiral is looking to arm his ships with and take back to the Colonies! Why go to the trouble of building it yourself when you can just purchase it from us here in the Inner Sphere? Buying is so much faster than building it yourself, am I right, Admiral?"
"I've already negotiated an initial purchase of goods with the Duchess," Adama told him.
"Ah, and who do you think the Duchess is going to go to to fill that order?" Green asked rhetorically. He waved his arms indicating the vast cavernous space filled with all kinds of products on display up to and including battlemechs and aerospace fighters. It looked more like a museum than a showroom. There were several other distinct groups in the distance, each of them also being "assisted" by a Green. "Every product Langhorne makes is somewhere in this building whether it's made by us, our business partners, or even our competition! If you see something you like that the Duchess hasn't sold to you yet, I can get you a purchase order for it."
"Is this guy for real?" Sharon asked Blue as Green slung one arm over the Admiral's shoulder and guided him towards the first display. "I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk like him outside of movies."
"Unfortunately, yes," Blue sighed. "I think we may have put a little too much emphasis on the enthusiasm trait when we were designing him."
"Now, Admiral," Green pattered on, ignoring the other two Cylons present. "This beaut here may not look like much, but it is the most revolutionary technology to come out of the Helm Memory Core. We call it the 'Double Heat Sink' and..."
"Oh my God, it's such a relief to be out of that stupid monkey suit," Circle said after she had changed out of her executive suit. "I have no idea why the other Constellations insist that we 'look presentable' when representing our Constellation to human officials. What's wrong with our regular clothes?"
Adama and Sharon looked her up and down. Circle was now wearing a mechanic's overalls that were heavily blotched with old grease and possibly food stains. The overalls otherwise looked clean, but the stains had clearly never been entirely removed and were pretty unsightly. Plus, some fraying around the edges and obvious ad hoc patches betrayed the overalls' age.
They were supposed to be touring an aerospace fighter factory on Langhorne where Circle worked at, but Circle had insisted on changing first.
"They look... fine?" Adama said uncertainly as he tried to be diplomatic. Sharon was sure that he had caught any of Galactica personnel in overalls in that state of disrepair, that he's rip Sharon a new one for not having her people properly equipped and taken care of. And Sharon would have agreed with him. "They do look a bit old though."
"Oh, that's because these are the first overalls I was ever given," Circle said proudly. "Got these when I was fresh out of the production tub and I've been using them ever since."
"That seems really odd for a Cylon to get attached to clothing like that," Sharon said. At Circle's annoyed look, Sharon raised her hands and added quickly, "I'm sorry, I don't mean to offend. But I'm a military officer and I know there's a lot of ways to die that will destroy clothing. I also know the resurrection process doesn't include duplicating your clothes. So I'm wondering why you're so attached to them?"
"Okay, I'll let it go just this once because you don't know," Circle said patiently. "The reason we're so attached to our clothes is that Shape Constellation doesn't resurrect."
"I'm sorry, what?" Adama asked. "I thought all Cylons could resurrect."
"It's not that we can't resurrect. It's that we choose not to," Circle explained. "Early on when Shape Constellation was new, there was a lot of building that needed to be done. Basestars needed new armor and weapons, we needed to mine the raw materials and process them to make the new armors and weapons. It was a lot of work. We'd literally work ourselves to death to get work done as fast as possible, resurrect, and then do it all over again.
"And then we decided, frak, that's no way to live. Life shouldn't be some unending toil that you can't escape from even by dying. Life should be precious. So we decided to stop resurrecting. If one of us dies, we get replaced with a new person, not get a new body."
"That seems extreme," Sharon said dubiously.
"Maybe," Circle said with a shrug. "But it also means we're real careful with our lives, because each of us only gets one. The combat oriented Constellations may throw their bodies away in wholesale lots because they need to to win a fight, but Shape isn't a combat Constellation. We shouldn't be killing ourselves routinely just to get a job done. So we stopped resurrecting to make sure we don't. That makes every death we have a tragedy, and if we choose to die, well it damn well means something, now don't it?
"So our first set of clothes? They're symbolic. We keep using them until the day we die no matter how much patching up we need to do to them."
"You know, you Cylons continue to surprise me," the Admiral said with grudging respect.
"Great!" Circle said. "Now let's get on with that tour."
"Alphabet Constellation keeps a small garrison force permanently stationed here on Langhorne," Alpha was lecturing as he drove the electric cart across the Dropport tarmac towards the hangars. Admiral Adama rode shotgun and Sharon was alone in the rear seat. "The Federated Commonwealth also has their own garrison of aerospace and ground forces, of course, and we do quite a bit of joint training exercises together. However, Langhorne has been a quiet duty station since we've eradicated most piracy in the region, but we can never quite let our guard down, because the Successor States do love their cross border raiding even if they've become rarer of late. And their own version of the gas core FTL drive while subject to excessive fuel consumption and most of the limitations of their solid core drive still allows for deep penetration into each others' territories because of how much more frequently they can jump over the solid core drive. Ah, here we are."
Alpha turned the cart and drive through wide open hangar doors that were flanked by a pair of Heavy Centurions standing guard. Inside were a double row of parked Harpies, the rows lining opposing walls not unlike the hangar bays aboard Colonial battlestars.
"We used to keep proper battlemechs in here," Alpha went on as he parked the cart. "But they've since been transferred to Symbol Constellation operating out on the Clan front. In any case, Harpies better suit our operational needs. While we may be considered a combat Constellation, our mission is still peacekeeping and policing. As such, we must stay flexible and adaptable as we find ourselves in a wide variety of situations where the optimal solution is rarely to shoot the problem dead."
Alpha got out of the cart, and the Admiral and Sharon followed suit. He looked over to two different looking women nearby who were talking to each other. They were Cylons as well, although Sharon didn't need the mental network for that. There were several copies of those two doing their own errands around the hangar.
"And here I believe we have an individual that wants to speak to you," Alpha said. "Iota!"
Both women turned to look at Alpha. One smiled welcome while the other looked hesitant. The first spoke a few words to the second and gave her a shove in the Alpha's direction. The second woman seemed to visibly gather her courage and then bounded over to the Alpha and the Colonial officers.
"Hi! I'm Iota," the woman said. She looked a lot like Sharon, but Iota wasn't perfectly identical, not like an Eight or Asterisk would have been, but the features were similar enough that if they had been human, they could have been mistaken for sisters. Or a really young looking mother and her grown daughter. Iota was also half a head taller than Sharon. "I just wanted to say that I'm really really sorry for what I did to your ship," Iota said earnestly. "It was totally uncalled for."
"You're the Iota that wrote graffiti on my ship," Sharon said, more surprised that angry.
"You disabled half my fleet," the Admiral said at the same time, sounding quite unhappy.
"I know, and I am totally sorry," Iota replied. She seemed to mean it to Sharon, but... "In my defense, I was still very immature then. But a lot of time has passed since then, and I'm much more mature now! Really! I am!"
Sharon couldn't count how many times she had heard words like that from her own children. But she'd heard them often enough to not take them at face value from Iota.
"Really?" Sharon said skeptically.
"Really!" Iota insisted. "I think the others might let us Iotas patrol on our own again soon!"
"Yeah, thanks a lot, sister!" another Iota called out resentfully from atop a Harpy some distance away.
"Well, that encounter did have a couple of good side effects," Adama said casually.
"Really?" Iota said hopefully.
"Yes, it showed us the backdoor you Cylons put into the CNP," Adama explained. "And it directly led us to figuring out there were human model Cylons among us."
Iota's face fell, both figuratively, and literally as she dropped her face into her hands.
"I am in so much more trouble," Iota said miserably.
"Welcome to the Symbol Constellation's Langhorne Office," Asterisk said as she led Admiral Adama and Sharon into said office. "It's not much, I know. But aside from this, we've got the gym for sparring which you just came through, the armory in the back, and our bunks upstairs."
The office looked pretty big at first, especially since only four human models plus a Centurion occupied it. A large, round holoprojection table dominated the room, surrounded by a shallow trough filled with what Sharon remembered to be the fluid Cylons used to directly interface with their non-sapient computer systems. Spaced evenly around the table and placed up against the walls were work desks, each one marked by a symbol denoting which Cylon they belonged to. The space between the holotable and the desks looked spacious at first until Sharon realized the Centurion was a Heavy model and the space was just wide enough to admit its passage without the Centurion bumping into anything... assuming the desks were unoccupied of course.
"Anyway, that's Ampersand," Asterisk pointed to a female that was clearly derived from the Circle model, "Arrow," an Alpha derivative, "Pound," a Blue derivative, "and Dot." All of the human models was wearing the same black and silver uniform as Asterisk, and even Dot the Centurion was painted the same color pattern.
Adama looked up at the hulking Heavy Centurion.
"Your name is Dot?" Adama asked, as if he couldn't quite believe it.
"Yes," Dot replied with a deep voice that didn't sound at all feminine. "The cognitive dissonance the name evokes in humans amuses us."
"Why do you guys only have this little office?" Sharon asked. "Every other Constellation we've seen has big impressive looking facilities."
"That's because you're looking at the entire presence that Symbol Constellation has on Langhorne," Ampersand explained with a shrug. "Almost everyone else is up on the Clan front doing our actual job."
"We're only here because the Federated Commonwealth's ambassador to our race is here," Arrow added. "When in negotiations with her, we Cylons require a top level Command Council in order to speak for our people as a whole. That means a representative from each Constellation, including Symbol. Hence our presence, a full representative delegation for Symbol Constellation, one of which we choose to represent us on the Command Council."
"And Asterisk here won this week's Trial of Position for it," Pound added.
"Trial of what now?" Adama asked.
"It's a tradition we picked up from the Clans," Ampersand answered. "The general idea is that if you want something that other people want whether it's an object, knowledge, land, or a position of power, you have to fight for it. You have to prove you deserve it by being better than the other guy. But the Clans go about it in the stupidest way possible."
"The Clans literally fight in a Trial," Asterisk explained. "As in, they climb into their combat platform of choice like a fighter or a mech, and then proceed to fight each other with live weapons and ammo until one side or the other wins. And if someone dies - permanently I might add - then that's just considered the cost of doing business to them. It's incredibly wasteful or people and material."
"However, we Symbols kinda like the general idea behind the Trial system even if we don't like how the Clans implemented it," Pound continued. "So we added a few additional rules beyond the obvious one of not using live weapons and not fighting to the death."
"Yeah, replacement bodies cost resources to make after all," Ampersand interjected.
"The first is that the nature of the Trial has to be relevant to what is being fought over," Pound said. "If you want a command position, you have to prove yourself to be the better commander, not that you can beat the other guy in a one on one fight. That means being better able to manage other people and combat units in order to win victories. Or in the case of being on the Command Council, proving you're the better diplomat or more knowledgeable on political and/or internal matters."
"Wait, how do you determine who's better at non-combat roles?" Adama asked. "There's often not a clear cut answer beforehand, especially when it pertains to things like politics."
"Oh, well, Cylons who aren't participating in he Trial will usually set up and referee the Trial scenarios," Asterisk replied. "That's usually Dot because the Dots don't usually complete in a Trial."
Adama and Sharon looked at Dot again and gave the Centurion a good long stare.
"No offense," Sharon said finally, "but I think your Trial system has a big flaw in it."
"None taken," Dot replied.
"The second rule is, Trials are only to be held on down time when we actually have time for them," Pound continued. "Trials are definitely not supposed to be held during active combat operations or other time sensitive matters. For the most part, we only use Trials to determine tactical field commanders and command chains. Outside tactical battles, we're as democratically egalitarian as any other Constellation."
"And I won the Command Council position this week," Asterisk said victoriously.
"Ha, only because the rest of us didn't know Sharon here would be coming," Pound pointed out.
"Indeed," Arrow agreed. "If we had, you would have faced much stiffer competition."
"Phht," Asterisk raspberried. "Excuses, excuses."
"So, Sharon," Ampersand said casually as she placed his hand into the command trough, causing the holoprojector to light up. "You're a battlestar Commander. Want to give our Trial system a try? No stakes. Just a friendly competition to demonstrate your skills as a Commander."
"I don't know..." Sharon said slowly.
"Afraid you'll lose?" Asterisk asked lightly. "No shame in turning Ampersand down. I know you're trained entirely on obsolete equipment after all."
Sharon stared hard at the other Cylon for a long moment, knowing exactly what she was trying to do, before turning to Adama.
"Sir," Sharon began, "May I have permission to defend the honor of the Colonial Fleet?"