By ChaosEternus
Thanks to LONA of the BSGWS for Beta'ing this fic for me.
Thanks for the reviews, it is nice to now the story is being rewad and enjoyed so please keep them coming.
Okay, I may not be the best of judges but I am pretty observant and I don't think I would be too far off if I said the local civilian leader was ill, very very ill.
As in terminal.
Which was interesting, as you would thought they would have replaced a civilian leader who was terminal…
The icy cold pit of fear that had started to appear in my stomach solidified as the clues started to click together, the constant attacks, the overworked crew, the apparent lack of any support, the slowly dropping numbers of fighters and pilots…
This was just starting to scream fugitives to me, and yet they all seemed too solid, too normal to be criminals and that only led to fugitives from an alien race bent on their destruction.
Bugger, fuck damn and hell, I really hoped I was wrong otherwise we would be revisiting too many bad science fiction clichés for this to be a good thing.
Well, President noticed the wary look in my eyes apparently and just nodded slightly in my direction.
Well, shit.
It looked like we were about to get the full story anyway, with thanks to Donally's translation skills.
"Centuries ago, the cylons were created to make life easier on the colonies, to do all the dangerous or dirty tasks we no longer wished to do…"
I rolled my eyes at this point, I really didn't need to hear more to know where this was going, "why do I get the impression somebody forgot about Asimov's Laws Of Robotics?"
Donally and Dafydd shot me wry, agreeing looks, they too could add, they too had figured where this was going…
"Then" Donally continued the slow translation, "the day came when the Cylons decided to kill their masters"
Yep, no surprises there then, these guys really need to read some more science fiction, either that or watch it on TV, wasn't there a movie in '78 that was similar to this scenario?
Anyways, Donally continues through the war up till Armistice…
And once again, we roll our eyes at the inevitable. No contact? That just screams trouble, military build up. Dropping the sensible precautions of no-networking and the like when you know you have a race of hackers who have tried to destroy you and are incommunicado? Now that was just stupid.
Our friends, the guards, who still haven't told us their proper names, could understand what we were saying and they appeared to be crushed. I had to feel sorry for them, it seemed they had maintained sanity just by not really considering what had really caused their homes to be destroyed and I could certainly sympathise up to a point, but as always they had invited the bloody horse in, found it was uncontrollable and tried to kick it out again… only to leave the bloody barn door open and later add an invite to the door.
From what we were hearing, sheer unthinking stupidity destroyed the colonies; in fact, it had the earmarks of politicians all over it.
And now the colonials watched us, wanting to hear our side of the story, where we came from, what we could do to help them.
Which was sweet fuck all.
The devastated looks on their faces told me Donally had translated that literally. But what else could we say, Earth was not advanced, our technological abilities appeared to be way below the colonials in many ways and we could do little against an enemy that believed in coventrating their targets from space.
Of course, if they went for a land assault, we could kick their arses with ease, but that was unlikely to happen.
Now that raised eyebrows, and we had to explain exactly why Earth was groaning under the weight of war machines and armies.
They actually got interested at that point, though their crazy idea of going to Earth, assuming we could pinpoint its location, and using the massive military support base for a rapid build up, plain hoping that the cylons disappeared long enough for them to build up a reasonable force…
Yeah, right, like that was going to happen.
They correctly interpreted our cynical, disbelieving expressions and shrugged, it was just an idea.
But for now, they just wanted Earths location…
Which meant the Tempests Computers, and I was beginning to suspect those computers would be a shock to the colonials…