Title: Legal Machines
Author: Nopporn Wongrassamee aka The Evil Author
Summary: The Battlestar Galactica discovers Earth, sparking a battle unlike any other.
Warning: May contain spoilers up to the end of Battlestar Galactica Season 1.
Disclaimer: The characters and settings belong to whoever owns them. I'm just too lazy to look up who they are.
Part 2 – Rumor Mongering
The Sentinel Shieldship design was a byproduct of Sentinel philosophy. Shieldships were above all else, designed to defend an objective, even if it had to physically sit on top of it to absorb incoming fire.
A Shieldship was a three tiered saucer. The top tier was one big shield generator, a featureless, flattened dome with a polished mirror appearance. The shield generated was practically impregnable to weapons fire from another ship of similar size. And even when the shield was down, the dome was impressive armor in its own right.
The middle tier held the Shieldship's armament and guts. The interior contained the grav drives, power generators, and everything else required to actually run the ship. Spaced evenly around the rim were a series of massive gun turrets, set out just far enough to fire around the massive upper tier. Between the turrets were large racks capable of launching the Shieldship's fighter compliment like missiles interspersed with point defense weaponry.
The third, lowest tier was also the smallest, practically an afterthought. It held shuttle bays, tractor beams, guest quarters for organic beings and other supplemental equipment.
The Shieldship that hovered over a ruined Caprica City was a called a Buckler, a five turret model that was the Sentinels' workhorse design. It had come to Caprica at the Cylons' request.
On the ground, the Sentinels' representative was inspecting the ruins. Like her Cylon guides, the representative appeared human. Unlike her guides, the representative's flesh and blood was only cosmetic. Beneath was metal and plastic and circuitry. For simplicity's sake, the representative answered to the name Joan.
"Humans did this?" Joan asked her guides.
"Oh, yes," replied the Cylon who answered to the name Doral. "They warred with each other, using us as their slave soldiers. This," he waved a hand around at the ruins, "is the end result."
"And you know humans," the Cylon called Shelley added. "They turned around and blamed us for the destruction."
"So this Buffy knows how to find Earth?" President Laura Roslyn asked Commander Adama over the phone. Since Kobol, the fleet had been heading in Earth's general direction. The journey was long, and Roslyn feared that her cancer might take her before they reached safety. Now they had encountered a ship that if not from Earth, at least knew exactly where it was.
"So she claims," Adama replied, sounding disgruntled. "When we asked, she gave us a set of coordinates. Unfortunately, the coordinate system she uses is completely alien to the one we use. When we tried to get her to help us translate, she got bored and flew off."
"Flew off?" Roslyn asked, alarmed. "You mean she's gone?"
"Not exactly." Adama now sounded amused. "Look out your window Madame President."
Roslyn looked. The she jumped back, startled to find an alien spacecraft just outside her window. The ship waggled as if laughing, then darted out of sight.
"What was that?" Roslyn demanded.
"That is how our guest gets her amusement," Adama replied. "She's been buzzing the fleet since her arrival."
"Why would she do that?"
"From what little information that Buffy let drop," Adama replied, "that ship is the equivalent of a racing yacht, bought by a rich mommy and daddy for their darling spoiled princess." The last practically came out as a sneer.
"Oh, Gods," Roslyn said. This was not how she had imagined first contact with the Thirteenth Colony would go. In her dreams, she had imagined first contact would have been with Earth's military, or maybe just a cargo ship or passenger liner. Self absorbed dilettantes had simply never occurred to her.
"Tell me about it," Adama grumbled.
"What we need," Roslyn said thoughtfully, "is someone who can deal with this kind of personality."
"Who do we know that can speak with spoiled brats?" Adama asked.
"Cylon detector. Vice president. Baby sitter of Cylon/human hybrids. And now speaker-to-self-centered-aliens," Doctor Gaius Baltar grumbled. "As if I don't have enough jobs already…"
"Aw, poor baby," Six cooed. "It's so hard being a genius." She paused thoughtfully, then added, "Not to mention being God's instrument."
"Yes, well this instrument could use a break, thank you very much," Baltar groused.
"You do good work, Gaius," Six told him. "The military has a saying. The reward for good work…"
"…is more work," Baltar concluded with a sigh. He turned to a nearby tech who was busy trying to ignore the fact that the fleet's resident miracle worker was holding a one sided conversation with thin air. "I'm ready, now."
The tech handed him a phone.
"Alright, what's the next item of business today?" Admiral Maybourne asked during his staff meeting.
"Sir," his intelligence officer spoke up. He was a Commander in Earthfleet, and had been cursed by his parents with the unfortunate name of Jack Daniels. "I have some concerns about this intel report from the Sentinels."
"What, the one about the human supremacists?" Maybourne asked.
"Yes sir," Commander Daniels replied. "Everything in it is second hand information gleaned from a single source, these Cylons. And since these Cylons are the Kobolians' enemies…"
"Who?" asked Captain Carrie Sampson, Maybourne's operations officer.
"Kobolians," Daniels repeated slowly, as if to a child. "The human supremacists. They reportedly come from a polity called the Twelve Colonies of Kobol."
"Ah, okay."
"As I was saying," Daniels continued, "since these Cylons are the Kobolians' enemies, their information might be at least a little biased."
"Biased?" Sampson said. "Are you implying that these Cylons lied?"
"Well…"
"The Sentinels say that these Cylons are a purely synthetic machine race, not Ghosts," Sampson said. Being a Ghost herself, a human mind uploaded into an artificial body, this was a topic she was sorely familiar with. "We have never seen a purely synthetic race that's good at deception. That's where human minds excel at. Sure, we've seen pure synthetics be mistaken, make miscalculations, and even be downright delusional. But deliberately lie…"
"Captain, can the political diatribe," Maybourne ordered.
"Yes, sir," Sampson acknowledged.
"Good. Now, Daniels, what about these Kobolians?" the Admiral asked. "How much of a threat are they?"
"If the reports are accurate, not much," Daniels replied. "They have one, maybe two actual warships. But they're primitive, no match for a modern warship although they can threaten civilian shipping. The real concern is the 50 or so civilian ships trailing after them. The warships might be able to distract our defenses long enough for the others to kamikaze against the Halo satellites or a surface city. The actual damage would be pretty minor, but the political fallout…"
"…would be disastrous," Maybourne concluded. "That's not going to happen." He thought for a moment. "Alright, we'll try to talk to these guys and get their side of the story, but we won't take any chances. If they try and get to Earth without permission, we'll blow them out of the sky first."
Standing on the Galactica's observation deck with phone in hand, Baltar's "negotiations" with Buffy were going well. He had so far managed to get her to sit her ship in front of his window.
"Come on, Buffy," he cajoled. "Wouldn't you like to see the interior of a Battlestar?"
"Not really," Buffy replied. "Your ships are all looking a little run down from what I can see out here. I mean, like, ick. I don't even want to imagine what the parts I can't see are like."
"You know, a face to face conversation would be so much more enjoyable," Baltar said.
"True." There was the briefest of pauses as Buffy considered. "Okay, hang on a sec. One face to face conversation coming up."
As Baltar watched, a crack in the hull of Buffy's ship appeared. From the crack, Baltar had only a moment to see a flash red light. Then the world dissolved away. A moment later, Baltar found himself standing in his home on Caprica. It was a place he knew well from his fantasy trysts with Six.
Only, it wasn't Six standing across from him. The young woman there was half a head shorter than Baltar. She had long blonde hair hat fell to her waist. Her clothing was ragged, but artfully torn in places to maximize attractiveness. This must be Buffy, Baltar realized.
"How…" Baltar began, but couldn't put his surprise into words. He gestured wildly at his surroundings.
Buffy just shrugged and said, "You have a data port open."