When the door opened to Detainment Alpha – the official name for what everyone on the ship knew as the 'Cylon cage' – Sharon automatically stood, stepping towards the phone that connected her to visitors. As she moved, however, she realized that Helo wasn't the one who had come to see her, and it wasn't Doc Cottle come to check on the baby, either. Lee Adama stared icily from just inside the door while Kara stepped over towards the cage and picked up the phone.

"You said on Caprica that you don't have access to everything the Cylons know, correct?" she asked.

"Yes."

"How do you access what you do know?"

She thought about that for a moment. "I…I'm not sure. The link is just in my head."

"But you said in debriefing that you severed your link in Caprica City so that they couldn't track you once you and Helo escaped."

"I did. But sometimes the link can be manipulated…like to rewrite a virus."

Kara nodded curtly. "We need information." Sharon glanced over to Lee, who still hadn't moved.

"The Commander is okaying this?" she asked.

"Leave that to me," he replied.

"I'm not going to turn on a tracking beacon right in the middle of the fleet!" Adama told his son later that evening as they discussed matters in the commander's office.

"Our whole existence is a game to them! She's only alive to give us information. If we're not taking advantage of that, then we might as well stuff her out an airlock."

"She's alive because if she dies, she goes home."

"You think they know she's alive? She's with the fleet?"

Adama gave him a small smile. "I'm sure it was on the short list of explanations as to how we fish-in-a-barreled their attack fleet."

"Kara thinks it's more than that…" His father looked up.

"What do you mean?"

"She thinks they know everything…about the baby…that it's alive. She thinks they'll come for it."

"Probably will…Now, is this all coming from intuition, information I should have, or something else I need to hear about?"

"The latter."

Adama nodded. "And why am I only hearing about it now?"

"Honestly…because I wasn't sure what to say…or if it was my place to say it."

He raised an eyebrow. "I wasn't a fan of this game the last time we played it," he told his son.

Lee shook his head. "It's not like that, Dad. No one's done anything wrong. I just…I'm hoping for Kara's sake that this little Cylon game ends soon."

Sharon wasn't sure exactly what Lee had said to his father – and knew she didn't have the right to ask – but in the end, Adama agreed to letting her try to manipulate her link. At best, she'd be able to tell them something vital they didn't already know. At worst…no one wanted to think about that. Everyone knew that it was most likely she'd simply discover whatever the Cylons wanted her to discover, and they hoped that that would be new information.

She would need a ship nearby to connect with, and no one was risking taking her off Galactica, so that meant waiting until the Cylons found them. Her baby was growing faster than a human child would, and the connection she had with her daughter only strengthened her abilities. She sensed the Cylon presence nearby even before the warning for "Action Stations, Action Stations" came across the overhead.

The stream of information that all Cylons shared in was just on the other side of a firmly locked 'door' in her mind. Unlocking it allowed her to explore what was on the other side, but also allowed others in. Several streams of knowledge were still off-limits, but she tried to locate and 'download' everything she possibly could. She didn't feel the presence of someone else exploring her own mind until it was almost too late – she quickly shut and locked the 'door' again.

She came out of the near trance she'd been in just in time for Galactica to execute a jump. Looking around her cell, she realized that Helo was standing by the phones.

"Anything?" he asked when she picked up the receiver on her end.

"There are more Cylons in the fleet."

"Sleepers?"

"Not all of them."

"What models?"

"I-I'm not sure, I just felt…others. This fleet only exists because they've chosen to let it exist. They know where you are, they already knew I was here, and when the time comes, they'll get what they want."

That night, Helo, Lee, Kara, and Tigh had a meeting with Adama. The thought that they were the rodent in a Cylon game of cat and mouse was not comforting to anyone. As far as being an experiment, keeping Sharon and the baby with the fleet was just as important as getting them back was to the Cylons. Adama could agree that, depending on the girls' motives, Lachel and Erin potentially had the same value. None of the children fully belonged to one side or the other.

"Think the toasters would go for half and half?" Lee asked. "We get two, they get the other two."

"And who exactly is picking which side gets which?" Helo asked him with a glare. The CAG held his look, but didn't reply.

"What if we both got all of them?" Kara asked. Everyone stared.

"What?"

"They've already proven that Lachel and Erin can be uploaded, and I assume they could do the same thing for Sharon's baby if they wanted to…what if half-breeds can also be copied?"

"Copies aren't identical," Helo pointed out.

"We'd be giving them exactly what they wanted!" Tigh exclaimed. "Right now the only insurance we've got that they're not gonna blow this ship to hell is that they know their science project is onboard."

"Their science project is our secret weapon," Kara shot back.

"I was waiting for the rest of this plan," Adama told her with a smile. "Let's hear it."

"Sharon knows a thing or two about Cylon viruses," Helo explained. "If they agree to the deal, we hand them a Trojan horse." The commander considered it.

"You'd use your daughter for that?" he asked. Helo nodded.

"I'd never let them have her, not even a copy. She's one of us, not one of them."

They needed Sharon to tap into the Cylon information network one more time, but this time she was giving information instead of taking it. In order to keep the Cylons from figuring out the real plan, she wiped knowledge of it from her memory before connecting during an attack a week later. She then left an information string that the Colonists wanted to talk – about the future of both of their species.

"You think they're going to take the bait?" Kara asked Lee as they had lunch one afternoon.

"I think they want what we have a hell of a lot more than they want what they have."

"What if this is all for nothing?"

"What do you mean?"

"They could use our exact same plan back on us. The first Sharon didn't know what she was doing until she'd already pulled the frakking trigger. Lightning's not the only thing that doesn't strike the same spot twice – luck is just as bad."

"Kara, you've told me this yourself: if they wanted us dead, we'd be dead by now."

"Yeah, but we're not. And the 'why' of that is what bothers me."

Lee looked up as he noticed who was entering the mess – Tigh with a flask in hand. He had an interesting look on his face as he watched the two pilots. "I should get down to the deck," Lee said. Kara followed his line of vision and sighed.

"Right," she muttered as she gave Tigh a sarcastic little wave. "What do you think the sentence in hack is for having lunch together?"

"Stop it, Kara. We both knew without him having to tell us that this can't be."

"We're eating at the same table, Lee. Where's the crime in that?"

"It comes later if we don't stop ourselves right here. You and I both know how dangerous things can get around here when you toss the regs out the airlock because you care too much."

"I learned the hard way not to ever do that again," Kara quietly told him. Lee nodded.

"And I don't want my lesson to be learned with your life on the line. Eventually...we'll find a balance. But right now..." He held her gaze for a moment, then got up and left the mess.

A few days later, Doc Cottle was in the middle of making a house-call to Detainment Alpha when the alert sounded for action stations. "Well, there goes my good day," he muttered.

Sharon smiled slightly – and then her eyes rolled up and her body went completely rigid. Cottle just stared. "What the frak?" one of the guards muttered, stepping forward. The doctor waved him away.

She came out of it a moment later, looking around in confusion as she became reoriented. "I need to speak to Commander Adama," she finally said once she was able to speak again.

The Commander was having an interesting morning up in CIC. They'd had two Raiders show up on dradis, but instead of engaging the Vipers out on CAP, they played escape and evade with them for five minutes before jumping back away.

"Any ideas?" Adama asked Tigh as they both looked at the information up on center console. The XO just shook his head.

"Sir, Major Cottle needs to speak with you," Dualla reported from her station. "He's in Detainment Alpha." The ship's two lead officers exchanged a look.

Sharon was pacing anxiously when Adama arrived while Cottle watched her from outside the cell. "Somebody, tell me what's going on," Adama demanded. Cottle just pointed to the phone.

"They reactivated my link externally," Sharon explained once he'd picked up the receiver.

"I'm not sure I like the sound of that."

"It doesn't excite me, either, Sir. They want to hear our offer. They're willing to meet face to face."

A good amount of information had gotten dumped in Sharon's head when the Cylons connected. She was able to draw out the jump coordinates for the point where the Cylons wanted to meet: a barely touched system that just happened to have an old outpost on the moon of the fourth planet. There would be no Basestars, no Galactica, just a supposedly stripped down heavy Raider and a Raptor. Kara and Helo, and a third pilot, Shadow, got whatever weapons they could onto the Raptor, although they knew that the ship would be no match for the Cylons if they ran into trouble.

"Standby to jump on my mark," Kara told Helo as they flew away from Galactica. Shadow was up with her in the co-pilot's seat. "Mark."

As soon as they came through the jump and got their bearings, they began thoroughly scanning everything in sensor range. They only picked up one ship, a Cylon heavy Raider.

"I'll bet you twenty cubits we don't make it off that rock alive," Helo offered up. Kara smiled.

"I'm tempted to take that bet – when we're dead I won't have to pay you. Make sure you've got the jump coordinates back to Galactica programmed," she told Shadow, who was being left in the Raptor while she and Helo went into the base. "I'd be willing to risk jumping from on the surface if we absolutely had to." He nodded. Once they'd touched down, Kara and Helo drew their side arms and left the Raptor. Shadow shut the hatch behind them.

The base had obviously been abandoned for years. "Some meeting point," Kara muttered as they did a little bit of exploring. Helo shrugged.

"We already know they beat us here. So where's the party?" Almost in the same second that the words left his mouth, the lights in the room they were in turned on. Kara and Helo spun, guns raised, automatically putting their backs together to they could cover each other. They each wound up facing a Cylon, Doral and Six..

"You won't need those," Six told Kara, indicating her gun.

"Forgive me if I don't take your word for it," she shot back. The other woman smiled.

"Suit yourself."

Even though Helo's gun was still trained on him, Doral moved away, over towards the table that was in the middle of the room. "You had a proposition?" he asked the two pilots.

"You know that Sharon is with us," Helo started. "Our child will be born in the fleet."

"We know that Lachel and Erin are still alive," Kara added.

Six grinned, moving to sit down as well. "We were thinking of calling them model 13."

She wasn't expecting Kara to smile back. "I was hoping you'd say that," she told the Cylon.

"Oh, really?"

She nodded. "If they really are a new model, then you can make copies of them, can't you? And you could make copies of Sharon's baby." Six raised an eyebrow.

"If we wanted."

"We have what you want, you have what we want – but we both want both of them. And I'm assuming toasters don't get taught to share in school." Six let the crack slide, caught up in rapt fascination with their proposal.

"This solution is workable for you?"

"Would we be here if it wasn't?" Helo shot back.

"There are still many weeks left before your child is born," Doral pointed out. "Intervention to change that fact would more than likely result in her mother's death."

Six grinned. "I wouldn't have a problem."

"We would," Kara spoke up before Helo could get himself in trouble. "We each keep our respective prizes for now, and they'll both stay unharmed," she put a bit of emphasis on that last part, and didn't like the resulting smile on Six's face. "Decisions will be made once the baby is born."

"Agreed," Six told them. Doral nodded.

"We'll forgo tracking your fleet until this is resolved, as long as none of you return to the Colonies." Kara and Helo looked at each other. They'd already known that there was a plan in place for their former worlds – a plan they were probably powerless to stop – but it was still a hard concession to make.

"Agreed," they finally said in unison.

Shadow was pretty on edge by the time Helo and Kara returned to the Raptor; he had a gun trained on them as they opened the hatch. "What's going on?"

"Put that frakking thing away," Kara shot as she made her way towards the pilot's seat. Helo started running through the checklist for lift-off.

"What did they say?" Shadow inquired again.

"Nothing," Helo told him. "At least, nothing yet."

"I want my twenty cubits," Kara said.

He rolled his eyes. "We're not off the ground yet."

But soon they would be, and minutes after that, they were back amid the ragtag fleet. They'd returned without anything tangible in their hands, just a hope for what would be to come.

TBC...