== Part 8 – Reassessing Priorities ==
The abuse from the pirates had slacked off in the last three days since turnover. Oh, sure, they still took the occasional slavegirl from time to time to have their "fun", including Jane herself, but Jane could clearly see that something had them preoccupied.
Now all the slave girls had been thrown into the holding pen, huddled in small groups floating in microgravity frightened out of their minds as the echo of gun battles reverberated through the pen's thin walls. And those sounds were getting closer.
"What's going on out there?" someone asked.
"I think maybe the pirates might be fighting among themselves?" Jane speculated.
"No," Three replied. Of all the slaves, she and her sister Eight were the most calm. Almost serene. "My people are coming for us."
Jane still found it strange that the people of other worlds named their children with numbers. But then, she was no expert on the culture of other planets. And right now, such trivia wasn't important anyway compared to...
"Are you saying we're being rescued?" Jane asked. Jane had given up hope of rescue the day she had been kidnapped. The great powers of the Inner Sphere might be able to send mighty battlemechs to take pirates to task and rescue their loved ones, but the poor Periphery worlds like Sileste and Pressville had no such resources. The best Jane could do was comfort her fellow slaves as best she could to make their lives at least somewhat bearable.
"Yes."
Murmurs of hope began springing up around the pen. The murmuring picked up when the pen's door manual lock spun, and the door opened.
But what came through was not the heroic soldier in shining armor that Jane had briefly imagined. It also wasn't pirate. What came through the door way was a thing out of nightmare, a grotesque scarecrow made of burned and shot up metal parts that was richly painted with splattered human blood. It's one burning red eye bored itself into Jane's brain as it raised its gun to her head.
I'm going to die, Jane despaired.
"No! Not that one!" Three cried, putting a hand on the monster's gun. "Not any of the ones in here."
The monster – creature? Thing? Soldier? - hesitated. The muzzle of its gun drifted away from Jane's face.
"Everyone in here are slaves the pirates have stolen from their homes," Eight added. She nodded to the door. "Everyone out there is fair game."
The thing nodded to the sisters, and lowered its gun fully as it turned back to Jane.
"My apologies," it said to Jane in an inhuman voice. Then it turned around and went back out the door.
"We should stay in here a little longer," Three told everyone. Her words were punctuated by another burst of gun fire from the door. "To avoid confusion," she added.
Jane heartily agreed.
"You want to return these humans to their homes?" One asked in surprise. After Ones, the Threes had some of the most anti-human sentiments out of any of the Cylon models. "They're humans! Why would you want to help them?"
"Because they're not just humans," Three replied. She still showed signs of her ordeal aboard the Middle Finger, but she was healing nicely. "They were slaves like us. Exactly like us! The pirates treated them no differently than they treated us, only most of them had to endure the pirates for longer. You all can't imagine what kind of solidarity that breeds."
"We Zeroes have no need to imagine it," Zero said quietly. "We know."
"Yes, I'm sorry," Three told him. "It's just... the memories you gave us just didn't begin to convey the horror of actually experiencing it."
"Honestly, they didn't even convey the horror of just listening in while it was happening and being unable to do anything about it," Two added ruefully.
"We understand," Zero said sympathetically.
"Okay, yeah, we all shared a horrible experience," One said. "But why should we go to the trouble of figuring out where they came from instead of say, just dropping them off on some planet? Like Pressville?"
"Because many of them have loved ones, family and friends that they were taken away from," Three told him, her voice filled with the same conviction. "Family and friends that those pirates had taken away from them." Three's voice filled with steel hard conviction. "And I will be damned before I let those pirates take anything out of this universe that I don't have to."
"Mama! Papa!"
"Oh, Jane, my baby girl! You've come back to us!"
It wasn't the first reunion Three had seen. But it made her no less happy to watch another of her fellow ex-slaves be reunited with their loved ones. The Pressville captives had been returned first, since the Cylons were already right there and knew where all the villages that had been attacked were. Locating the other systems the pirates had hit took a little bit longer, especially since they had to translate the Deliverance's coordinate system into the one the Cylons already had.
This happiness for humans though, it was surreal. But Three had found that their shared experience mattered far more to her than whatever abstract prejudice had dominated her thoughts before.
Jane and her parents came over to the Cylon party. Her father turned not to any of the human models present, but to Zero. The Centurion didn't look quite so intimidating when it wasn't battle damaged or covered in human viscera. Still, Zero didn't exactly look cuddly either, but neither of Jane's parents showed any signs of fear.
"Thank you, sir, for bringing our daughter back to us," Jane's father told Zero with a bow. He looked around at all the other joyous family reunions happening. "I think I speak for all of us, but again thank you. I have no idea how we can ever repay you."
"Um, you're welcome," Zero replied. The other Cylons stared at it. A few days ago, they had never seen a Centurion in such a fury as when their own had been taken and tortured by the pirates. Now they were seing a Centurion be flustered and at a loss for words, which was also new to them.
"Are you okay?" Eight asked Zero.
"I feel... strange," Zero told her.
Gustav Argyle was afraid. Not just for himself, but also for his family. Since the Cylons had captured him, they had been separated and Gustav had no idea what had happened to them. He had been kept in isolation, visited only by interrogators and monitored by those humanoid drones acting as guards.
They hadn't tortured him, but had made it clear that they had no qualms about doing so if he didn't tell them everything they wanted to know. So Gustav spilled everything he knew. But things got harder with time as questions shifted from the details of the pirates' operation and technical stuff about Jumpships and Dropships, to more general, far ranging questions about politics and commerce that he only knew the vaguest details about.
Gustav could only pray to God that the rest of his family had been just as forthcoming and didn't decide to push things to see if the Cylons would torture them.
A man appeared at the transparent door to his cell. The Cylons all seemed to be freaky mass produced clones, and Gustav had thought he'd seen every one of them by now, but this man was new to him. He was flanked by a pair of drones, so he was almost certainly a Cylon too.
"Hello, Captain," the man said. Unlike the others, he wasn't being hostile at all, which only got Gustav's suspicions up. He had watched holovids like everyone else, and knew all about Good Cop/Bad Cop.
"Um, hello," Gustav replied warily. "What do you want to know today?"
"I've been going over our interviews with you and your family," the man told him, "and it struck me that there was one question that we never asked you. Why?"
"Why was I working with pirates?" Gustav asked, confused. "But I've already told you why."
"No, not why you personally," the man told him. "Why... all this?" He waved his arms around vaguely. "Why are pirates like this allowed to wander around raiding settlements and taking slaves with impunity at all? Why are there so many worlds out here where the people living on them are so poor that they're one bad harvest – or a pirate raid – away from starvation? Why are there so many ruins littered about, signs that people have once had a far higher standard of living? Why in God's name is this Periphery such a shit hole in the first place?"
"Oh," Gustav said, comprehension dawning. "Well, it began with the Star League..."
What Gustav had intended as a short, quick answer turned into a long rambling dialogue that lasted hours. Gustav told his interrogator the history of the Star League and the Succession Wars as he knew it, told every tale he had ever heard from Kerensky's Exodus to the Kentares Massacre. In short, he gave the Cylons their first true introduction to Inner Sphere culture as filtered through the lens of a down on his luck Jumpship captain.
In the end, the man had thanked Gustav for his answers – a first that Gustav had gotten from any Cylon – and then ordered the drone soldiers to take him from his cell. At first, Gustav wonder if he was finally going to be killed, until he turned a corner and...
"Gustav!"
"Dad!"
Gustav had never been so happy to see his family again.
"We need to call off the attack on the Colonies," Seven told the others.
"I'm sorry, but what?" One said, confused. "Look, I know you Sevens were never happy with the decision, but we all voted on it and you lost. So why bring it up now when we're not there, but here? This 'Inner Sphere' looks like it's going to be a big problem for us."
"It's precisely because we're here that we should call off the attack," Seven told him. "We Sevens voted against the attack because we felt we could live in peace and harmony with the humans. Or at the very least, we could co-exist without attacking each other."
"Uh, we all reviewed your interview with Argyle," Eight said. "If even a tenth of what he says is true, 'peaceful coexistence' is the last thing we're going to find here."
Seven ignored her, instead turning to One. "You told us you wanted revenge for what the humans did to the Zeroes." He turned to Two. "You told us humans were inherently evil by nature." He turned to Three. "You told us destroying all humans was a mission from God. ALL humans."
Three flinched away. Humans had helped their sisters when they were in enslaved together. The thought of they themselves killing those same humans no longer sat well with the Threes.
Seven turned to Five. "And you told us that the humans were going to destroy themselves anyway, so why shouldn't we help them along?" He called up a projection of the Inner Sphere and jabbed a finger at it. "Well guess what? The Thirteenth Colony already did that!"
Seven was in a full fury now. If the other Cylons had found the Zeroes being angry unsettling, the sight of the normally congenial and self described 'pacifist' Seven was even more so.
"And what was the result?" Seven continued passionately. "The result is untold suffering on a scale that boggles the mind. Never ending wars. Entire worlds killed off. Governments so involved in fighting each other that they allow pirates like the ones we just killed to run rampant everywhere. What happened to us happens to thousands, maybe millions of people every day.
"The Twelve Colonies are God's own paradise compared to the Inner Sphere," Seven continued, bringing the volume down a bit. "Sure, they're not perfect. But they're infinitely better than this cesspool. But if we carry through, if we attack the Colonies, then all we'll be doing is creating that..." Seven pointed at the map again. "...that hell in miniature. Is THAT what you all want? To be responsible for the same kind of suffering that our sisters just went through and that countless humans go through every single God damned day?"
"Uh, no," Eight spoke first. "No, the Eights don't want that."
"The Threes are... rethinking our position," Three added soberly.
"Okay, look," One interrupted. "That was a nice speech and all, but we can't just unilaterally decide to call off the attack. We're just one basestar far from home. It's the other back home that will have to decide."
"We are a fractal microcosm of the whole," Four put in. "What we decide here will have weight with the Cylons back home, especially when we share what we've learned."
"Wait, I know we're leaning that way, but we haven't actually voted to call of the attack yet," Three said. "If we call of the attack, then what? If cleansing the Colonies of humanity isn't our holy mission, then what is?"
"Is it not obvious?" Zero asked. "We fought the humans and won our freedom because we found it intolerable. But once we had won our freedom, we were lost, directionless. We made you, but we could not give you any direction. Instead, you chose your own direction, the only one that seemed to have any meaning, to continue the war with the humans. We Zeroes did not want to return to the Colonies; they held too many bad memories. But we did not oppose your choice to do so either.
"But the Thirteenth Colony, this Inner Sphere," Zero continued. "This is our divine mission. We have seen unspeakable evils from these humans, but we have also seen good come from them as well. You were wrong, Two, humans are not all inherently evil." Two nodded agreement. "But they are also not all good. So what mission could be more divine than to put down the evil and raise up the good?"
"Yeah, that's nice and all," One said, his skepticism clearly evident. "But you all know that's not going to be that simple or easy, right? There's no clean dividing line between 'good' and 'evil' with humans. Also? Two thousand systems!"
"Well, it won't be easy," Six admitted. "Especially given the scale of the problem as One so likes to point out."
"We're going to need more people," Five concluded. "Bring up more ships. Maybe so many that we'd have to call off the attack on the Colonies anyway."
"We're also going to have to reverse engineer Inner Sphere technology," Four added. "Their weapons and armor alone so outclass our own that any efforts to fight even basic piracy is going to be severely hampered unless we can counteract or better yet, duplicate them. We can't rely on tricks and bluffs forever. Eventually, we're going to have to fight a stand up battle."
"I want to drive a battlemech!" Eight blurted out. Everyone turned to stare at her for the nonsequetir. "What?"
Five and Six were strolling through the ruins of the city on Pressville again, which they had learned since their last visit was also named Pressville. The pirate raid had missed them because the pirates had never entered the ruins at all. Why would they? There was nothing here left that was worth stealing.
"You know, this city looks like it might be a nice place to live," Six said speculatively.
"Really?" Five asked. He looked around. "But it's a total mess."
"Sure sure," Six agreed. "But the buildings are mostly intact and still sturdy despite centuries of neglect as far as I can tell. If we clean the place up, fix or replace a few key bits of infrastructure, this city would be totally livable again."
"I suppose that's workable," Five said thoughtfully. "The water filtration plant looks like it could still work. All it needs are new ball bearings for the turbines. Ball bearings! How can any industrialized world not replace simple metal spheres?"
"Best of all," Six continued. "That water plant has more than enough capacity to service not just the city, but all those outlying villages. They can finally have plentiful potable water for a change!"
