Thirteen

Chapter Nineteen

Family Relations

The Cylon raiders picked up the lifepod and brought it back to the mothership, not knowing what was inside, only that it had a Cylon transponder signal transmitting from it. Kevin Vacit sensed the brain waves coming off the body, though, and made his way down to the docking bay despite the objections of his underlings. "Imperious Leader, perhaps it isn't wise to go down there. If I may be so bold, the Colonials may have planted a bomb aboard this pod.", said the Gaeta copy.

Vacit smiled and patted Gaeta on the back, saying, "My boy, I appreciate your concern, but I can sense that there is no bomb on board the pod. It is a person, someone I haven't seen in a long, long time. I never thought I would ever see him again, too."

He watched as they unloaded the sleeping form of Alfred Bester from the ship, and as he gazed down on Bester's old body, he remembered just how old he was these days…

After the raid that had killed Matthew and Fiona Dexter, the forces he had sent had somehow secured the baby that he wanted. He mourned the loss of his daughter Fiona, but it was necessary if the will of the Vorlons was to be carried out in their upcoming war with the Shadows. Of course, he hadn't known that the Vorlons weren't as omniscient as they seemed to be, nor were they infallible as they claimed to be. All he knew was that they had created his kind and that they were needed for the next war with the Shadows, and that he was determined to see his kind become all that they could be.

He remembered the last time he had saw Bester, when he was the director of the Psi Corps and Bester was a little kid. Bester had gotten into trouble that day for breaking the rules while playing an unauthorized game with his cadre mates. He had decided that it was time to see his grandson for what he thought was the last time before Vacit left office. Two of the Grins, the telepaths who wore special masks that signified moods and worked with the kids, brought the young boy into his presence.

The young Bester was dressed in his pajamas and looked sleepy. He also looked in awe as he found out whose office he was brought to.

He gently sent the thought into Bester's mind, then asked him if he had felt it. Bester replied that he did, to which Vacit said, "Interesting, most don't." He chitchatted a bit with him, making vague references to his real parents and to the Shadows. Bester didn't understand, of course, because he was only six, but Vacit hoped that, down the road, he would.

Vacit left some time later, asking his friend Sandoval Bey to watch over his young grandson. Bey didn't know why Vacit had taken such an interest in him, but was respectful enough not to inquire about it or guess. He had hoped to name Bey as his successor, but the Earth president, a disagreeable French bastard named Henri Morreau, had appointed David Johnston to become the eventual director of the Corps. Vacit knew that Johnston hated telepaths, and had an agenda for them that he didn't know about, but he had some suspicions. One of the reasons why he was leaving was that he knew that Morreau and Johnston wanted to get rid of him, and that they might be planning some sort of 'accident' for him, just like out of one of those mafia flicks from days of yore.

He had secretly procured a sleeper vessel from the days before humanity had made contact with the Centauri at the edge of the solar system and found out about jumpgate technology. Vacit had some trusted colleagues take him to the a certain sector of space near Vorlon territory, help him board the ship, and set him off on a journey into the true unknown, to a planet where only a select few would know about.

His ship landed on a world well off the official star charts, where he found some of the relics of Vorlon experimentation. In the years that followed, he worked with what he called the Misfits to help him survive there. The Vorlons came by from time to time to check up on things, and they met with him, but did nothing to hinder or help him. Vacit didn't know what the Vorlon's plans were for the coming war, but he hoped he would play a part in it.

His view of the Vorlons changed when they decided to flee the galaxy at the behest of John Sheridan. In their rush, they had tried to wipe out the planet so as to cover up their experiments, but they did a poor job of it. Most had survived, in fact, and it would give him the vital technology necessary for his plans.

He had met Garibaldi, Lyta, and others a couple of years later, just before the Telepath War. The former security chief of Babylon 5 and the telepath had come there because Bester's allies had found the location of the world where Vacit had landed. They hadn't known he was there until they landed, so he managed to deal with them and send them on their way. Unbeknownst to them, the Psi Corps ship had brought someone that Vacit would come to find to be very useful to him: Talia Winters.

Not long after that, the Cylons discovered his world and realized what kind of powers he had. In each other, they saw the vessel to which each would get the vengeance that they both sought against the ones who had wronged them. For the Cylons, it was the Colonials who had created them and enslaved them, using them for work that they felt was too dangerous for them. They had rebelled against their masters, resulting in a decade long war that ended in a truce, in which the Cylons fled to find a world of their own.

The Cylons hadn't realized that they could exact payback upon the Colonials until they met Vacit. Through him, the found the being who could help them evolve into what they had dreamed of: organic beings themselves. For Vacit, he realized a new dream: telepaths that were virtually superhuman. He reflected upon the virtual slavery that the normals on Earth had imposed upon the telepaths when they were first discovered, and smiled, realizing he had the mechanism in which he could defeat and destroy the normals that he had come to despise.

He found out what had happened in the Telepath War, and it displeased him greatly. The Psi Corps was his legacy and that of his mentor, Senator Lee Crawford. It was supposed to be the instrument that the telepaths used to take over control of the human race and to turn the normals (which telepaths often referred to as 'mundanes') into the slaves. But Garrison Hollifield and his allies had thwarted his plans, so Vacit had special plans to deal with the traitor.

In time, the Cylons who were in charge had came to see Vacit as their leader, and proclaimed him as such one day, what with all that he was doing for them. He had used Talia Winters to abduct and take DNA from a dozen people initially for the first model of human prototype Cylons, and she had done a wonderful job of finding the right mix of beings. He prepared ones to be integrated into Colonial society to do what was necessary to set the stage for the apocalypse that would destroy them, and allow the Cylons to take over the worlds for themselves to prepare for Vacit's master stroke: the takeover of Earth and the enslavement of humanity.

They didn't wake up Bester at first, as Vacit had wanted to find out if Hollifield had sent him as a trap. However, he couldn't find any evidence of tampering, but he held off on waking him up until he was ready to do so. This struck his protégé Talia Winters as strange, but he explained to her, "He needs to be slowly brought around to all we are doing here. Once he does, he'll join us and assist us in our efforts. Come, we need to check on the new models."

They walked into a massive building that contained row upon row of tubes. Inside, one hundred and thirty two clones were being produced, each one taken from Earth. Talia observed, "Our work is going well here. May I ask you something, Director?"

Vacit nodded and replied, "Of course! What is it that you wish to know?"

"Why the obsession with the number twelve? You have samples now of one hundred and forty-four Earthers, and now 20, 736 different samples of Colonials. What do you plan on doing with them?"

"My dear Talia! I intend to do the work of God and repopulate the Colonial worlds with our hybrids. For the current twelve models, I intend to convert them to telepathy in time, since I discovered how the Vorlons had created them. For the others, I can do it from the start. In time, they'll be fruitful and multiply, and eventually created the human society that should have been. Also, we will have the mechanical Cylons to help us in doing the same to the other worlds in the galaxy, as they have repressed their own telepaths as well, and they must be freed to take their rightful place as the rulers of this galaxy.

Now, come, we have much work to still do today!" He led her through another, much larger facility, where the Colonial clones were being created. In one of them, a being was taking shape. It was not well developed yet, but it was clear who it was based upon: Kara "Starbuck" Thrace.

Vacit didn't know who she was personally, so he passed the tube where one of the eggs in the left ovary that the Cylons had taken from her was being developed into a clone with indifference. It was fused with Thrace's DNA, but altered enough so that they wouldn't be exact copies with his own DNA. They were, after all, to be his children, and he hoped that these would turn out to be much better than the descendants he had already had.

He wasn't disappointed in Bester, but he was in Hollifield. The programming that had trickled down into Rebecca Hollifield (nee McPherson) had been enough for her to take her place as Johnston's replacement, but her son had been interfered with by the Vorlons and had developed a will of his own. Hollifield sided with the rebels in the Telepath War and helped disband Psi Corps, which angered Vacit, as it kept the mundane normals in power.

But payback was coming, and coming soon, if Vacit had his way. The Colonials weren't a factor now, as there were too few of them to ever challenge him or his Cylon allies. Now, his eyes focused on one target, Earth, and as he went back to meet with the Cylon leadership, known as the IL-series, which had been the ones to cede control of their race over to him, he grinned at the thought of seeing his prodigal grandson being brought to heel and accept his role in the telepathic new order to come.