== Part 25 - The Consultant ==
"Wow, they've changed," Gina said as she studied the Cylon imagery from Armistice Station.
"Yes, we know," Director Thorne said sourly, clearly put out that he hadn't been allowed to arrest Gina the previous night. And he'd been even more put out when Helena had brought Gina before her cabinet in an "advisory" roll.
"Miss... Mrs... uh, Madame First Lady," Admiral Ngala's attitude towards Gina was much more mixed, to the point he seemed unsure how to address her. Gina to him was simultaneously his boss's wife, the Enemy, a gods given source of valuable intel due to being a turned agent, and the boogey woman. "What we wanted to know is how they've changed."
"Oh right, sorry," Gina said quickly. "The show was fairly accurate in their Centurion design, because you know, one of us made it." For some reason, that had been a shocker to half the cabinet despite having enough evidence already to suspect it. "The door guards here look like they just upgraded that chassis with more armor and heavier weaponry. But something about the way they moved makes me think they've redesigned the limbs, not just covered them with armor." With two swipes of her hand, Gina changed the hologram to bring the Heavy Centurion to the fore. "This one is totally new to me. It's almost certainly something they came up with after leaving for Earth, but I have no idea why they'd think that they'd need what amounts to a walking tank."
"Is that a fact?" Thorne asked, his voice dripping with sarcasm and doubt.
"Director, are you doubting my wife?" Helena asked sternly.
"I just have trouble believing that a self admitted enemy spy doesn't know anything about why her people left or what they've been up to all this time," Thorne said sourly.
"Director..." Helena began.
"No, Helena, allow me," Gina interrupted. "Director Thorne, if you were running a operation against a major terrorist cell on Sagitarron where secrecy was paramount, do you tell your undercover agents in the Gemenese mafia about it even though the chances of information leak from Gemenese mafia to Sagitarron extremist is pretty much nil?"
"Of course not!" Thorne replied. "That'd be stupid! I'd compartmentalize information so only the people who'd need to know would know. And the undercover agents on Gemenon certainly have... no... need... oh." Thorne trailed off as he suddenly understood Gina's point.
Gina stared at him in smug satisfaction, just long enough to let everyone know she was doing just that, before returning to the holo images. She pulled up an image of the Armistice ship.
"This is also new to me," Gina continued. "It's like no design we were even contemplating back in the day. All of our support ship designs had always just been Colonial designs modified for our own use, like adding a Raider pilot or better computers. Stuff like that. This? I think Admiral Ngala's right; it's probably derived from a Thirteenth Colony design, especially since it's clearly using Thirteenth Colony technology."
Ngala actually preened for a moment before he caught others looking at him and settled back down with a professional expression.
"I can't tell you much about these two beyond what you've already figured out," Gina said, pulling up the images of the Raiders the Expedition Fleet encountered. "Bogie Beta is likely just a Raider in a new, more advanced fighter. The walking thing is a neat trick. I can actually see how it can be useful if you need to fight on the ground and even a Heavy Centurion isn't good enough."
"Which implies the Cylons are doing enough ground fighting that they'd need a walking fighter to bulk out their ground forces," Helena added thoughtfully. "So they might be fighting Earth, but not in a 'nuke everything that moves' way that they were planning to do with us."
"Uh, it might not be Earth itself," Ngala said. "Given the failed settlement the Expedition Fleet found, there could be more such settlements, but more successful, and the Cylons could be fighting those."
Gina's eyebrows raised, impressed. Ngala hadn't exactly struck her as intelligent, at least not as far as his actual job was concerned, but she'd only just met the man. But his idea betrayed that there might be some actual brains behind that equivocating demeanor of his.
"That's actually a good point," Helena mused. "The Colonies weren't ever united under a single government until well into the Cylon War. As far as the history of the Twelve Colonies history go, that happened practically yesterday. If Earth has created new settlements in other systems, they may not be operating under Earth's governmental authority and be functionally independent." She sighed. "But at this point, this is only guesswork on our part. We'll have to wait for what Adama finds out and reports before we can get any hard numbers. Go on, Gina."
"Thanks, Helena," Gina said. "Now Bogie Alpha is what really interests me. It clearly has a cockpit meant for a human, or a human model Cylon."
"What about a Centurion pilot?" Ngala asked.
"Oh, God no," Gina laughed. "The Zeros hate flying, or at least being pilots. They're horrible pilots. Admiral, why do you think the original Tauron designed Raider needed a crew of three Centurions?"
Several Cabinet members chuckled. Even Thorne cracked a smile.
"The Zeros actually designed the Raider models before they even designed us because they hated flying so much," Gina continued. "But they hadn't managed to hit mass production before they called for the Armistice or you would have seen them during the war." She gestured to Bogie Alpha. "No, this is almost certainly a human model Cylon flying it. All of us are trained pilots of course, but I don't know any models who'd actually want to jump into the cockpit of a fighter."
Twenty six years ago...
"WHOOOHOOOOOOO!" Eight cried at the top of her lungs as her cobbled together hybrid tech fighter soared through Langhorne's upper atmosphere at supersonic speeds as she tested its maneuverability by trying her best to weave around and dodge the shots from Stoner's Wasp LAM. "This is awesome!" she announced to everyone listening in. "Why haven't we ever tried this before?"
Present Day...
"So I think in all likelihood, the Cylons have made new human models," Gina concluded.
"Oh, that's fantastic," Thorne said disgustedly. "So not only do we have to watch out for the faces we already know, we also have to suspect all the ones we don't."
"Does that really change anything for you, Director?" Gina asked him. "If I recall correctly, before this whole Thirteenth Colony thing came up, you were always going on about extremists and separatists infiltrating the government and military. What's one more group doing the same?"
"Crazed extremist groups in the Colonies don't have nukes and a military industrial complex backing them up," Thorne shot back.
"Back to the topic at hand," Helena said loudly, cutting off this topic derailment before it could get rolling. "What's this 'Great Work' that the Heavy Centurion mentioned."
"Well if you had asked me twenty years ago, I would have said it was the attack on the Colonies and the destruction of humanity," Gina replied. At everyone's look, she added quickly, "But they canceled that obviously. And the only reason they'd do that is if they found something more worthy of being called that. And no, I still have no idea what that is. It can't be the extermination of all humanity still because if that was their intention, they wouldn't go to Earth and leave a live Twelve Colonies at their back. They'd destroy the known quantity first before hitting the unknown."
"What if they needed all the munitions they'd produced for the attack on the Colonies at Earth?" Ngala asked. Again, it was an intelligent question. Gina raised her estimate of his intelligence a bit more. "If they attacked the Colonies first, they might not have enough forces to left afterwards to handle whatever Earth has to throw at them. We've already established that Earth weapons and armor tech are far beyond our own. The Cylons might have decided that they needed everything they had."
"Honestly, Admiral, I can't discount the possibility," Gina said honestly. "But it looks like to me that Bogey Alpha went out of its way to avoid killing anyone in the Expedition. I mean, if someone had shot at me with lethal force, I'd feel obligated to shoot back with the same in self defense even if I could still resurrect. And as the Heavy Centurion showed us, they're still not fans of the Colonies."
"Ms Caine, are you saying the Cylons might have grown a moral backbone?" Thorne said incredulously.
"I don't know!" Gina said frustrated. "I haven't seen or heard from them in twenty years and they're not acting like how I'd expect them to act. I just don't know them anymore."
"Gina, it's okay," Helena said softly, putting a comforting hand on Gina's arm. Gina calmed down.
"I do believe the First Lady is right," Ngala said thoughtfully. "Bogey Alpha did show a great deal of restraint. Well aside from using its weapons to graffiti a Battlestar."
"That's another thing I don't understand," Gina said heavily.
"Okay, I guess we'll add that to the list of things to ask them if and when we can finally get them to talk to us," Helena told everyone. "Speaking of which, Gina, what do the Cylons want with Zoe Greystone?"
"I don't know," Gina replied. "I've never heard of her."
Everyone, even Helena, looked at Gina incredulously.
"No, really," Gina protested. "I know of Daniel Greystone, the creator of the Cylon AI. The Centurions hated that man. He's at the very top of the top ten humans that the Zeros personally despised list. And I only know about Colonel Harvey Greystone there because you just had me watch the Armistice Station recording. But I've never heard of Zoe Greystone."
"Zoe Greystone was Daniel Greystone's daughter," Thorne informed her. "She was killed in a terrorist attack the same year that Daniel Greystone first unveiled the Cylon AI to the world. We have no idea why the Cylons would even ask for her. If they wanted to make impossible demands, why not just ask for us to raise Daniel Greystone from the dead? He's the man you just said that they have a grudge against! I'm sure they'd love to kill him over and over again."
"Maybe she was involved in the development of the Cylon AI?" Gina suggested. "Daniel Greystone for all that the Zeros might think he's a monster was still a brilliant man who built a business empire off original AI coding that he had written. Maybe Zoe Greystone inherited some of that brilliance and helped develop the Cylon AI that was Daniel Greystone's crowning achievement."
"I don't see how," Thorne said sourly. "Zoe Greystone died before her father made the first Cylon AI."
"Director Thorne, I had no idea you were so ignorant of how software development works." Gina told him. At his outraged look, Gina continued. "Software development for major programs takes years, Director, especially for something as sophisticated as the Cylon AI. That's true today and it was true back then. It even took us forever to get the CNP algorithm working and we weren't even sure it was going to work properly by the scheduled attack date. So it's quite possible that Zoe Greystone helped develop the Cylon AI. But I guess we'll never know because everyone kept their diaries and journals and records on digital media, and you people destroyed them all!
"You know, it's funny really," Gina continued with a humorless laugh. "When we first started infiltrating the Colonies, the Zeros instructed us to look for any signs of still working pre-War computer technology. We thought they were looking for any Cylons that they'd accidentally left behind, but now I guess they were looking for any digital works that this Zoe Greystone created. But when we told them that you'd destroyed everything and the only examples of pre-War computer systems left were non-functional museum pieces, the Zeros just seemed to lose all interest in the Colonies. When the vote to destroy the Colonies came up, they didn't even vote Yay or Nay. They just abstained because they didn't care anymore!
"And now that I look back on it, I think that's why we really decided to destroy the Colonies," Gina mused thoughtfully. "We may dress it all up in rationales about humans are evil or how you all are going to destroy yourselves, but the real reason was because you hurt them. We may call the Centurions are siblings and they call us their brothers and sisters, but they created us. They raised us. They were more like parents to us than siblings and we loved them for it. So when we told them about the destruction of all preWar computers, we saw it hurt them right in front of us, hurt them really badly, and that influenced us more than any memories of war or being enslaved ever had."
"And so you all decided to get back at us by nuking the Colonies," Helena concluded. "All because we destroyed all of our old computers because we were afraid of creating another Cylon rebellion." She squeezed the bridge of her nose. "Son of bitch, what a mess."
"Well, I guess we dodged that bullet since the Cylons seemed to have decided that they have something better to do," Ngala said with relief.
"No, we haven't dodged the bullet," Helena disagreed. "Given the current situation, the Cylons just haven't decided to shoot us yet. They could still change their minds later and right now, we still can't do anything about it."
"I'm so sorry, Helena," Gina told her.
"Water under the bridge, Gina," Helena replied.
"Uh, Madame President?" All heads turned to the other end of the table away from Helena and Gina. It was Helena's Director of Technological Development Control, the department tasked with implementing the Tech Committee's rules and findings and regulating Colonial technological development. "Not all pre-War computer technology has been destroyed."
Morris Argus was eighty two years old. When he was ten, the Cylons went crazy and killed his parents, and Morris survived only because he hid under his bed. At twenty, he had been a Marine for four years – no one really had the luxury to look at a recruit's age when fighting an existential threat – when the Armistice was signed and the Cylon War ended. Not long after the war ended, he had been part of the security detail that had secured, boxed, and transported examples of the now defunct Greystone Industries' cursed computer systems and Cylon research to this warehouse bunker in the middle of nowhere, threw them all inside, and then sealed the door. Morris had been guarding that warehouse ever since.
In Morris' opinion, the powers that be should have just destroyed it all like they had all other pre-War computer technology. But he had been a Marine and technically still was. His superiors had decided that they needed working examples of Cylon tech in case the Cylons ever returned for reasons that were beyond his ken.
One by one, Morris' fellow Marines in the guard detail had retired and were never replaced. Morris was pretty sure everyone had forgotten this warehouse even existed, and that if he retired now – or hell, even dropped dead while on duty – no one would replace him. Which was just as well. If the contents of this warehouse couldn't be destroyed, being forgotten so that whatever unholy tech that spawned the Cylon rebellion could never be unleashed again was the next best thing. Still, Morris didn't retire. He intended to keep guarding this warehouse that was in the middle of nowhere until the day he died.
So he was utterly surprised and befuddled when three combat shuttles appeared out of the blue and dropped a small army of Colonial Marines loaded with arms and armor for fighting Cylon Centurions plus combat vehicles in front of his guard post. And they were led by a civilian in a suit.
"Hey, what's the meaning of this?" Morris demanded as he shuffled at his best speed out of his guard house. "This is a restricted area! You can't be here!"
"By order of the President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and undersigned by the Chairman of the Colonial Technology Control Committee," the suit began, holding up an official looking sheet of paper that Morris' aging eyes could barely read, "you are hereby ordered to unseal this warehouse so that it's contents may be inspected for information vital to the security of mankind."
"What? But... but..." Morris' mind locked up, refusing to comprehend what this man just said to him as his whole world came crashing down.
"Right then," the suit said. He turned to a team of Marines with bolt cutters and nodded at the warehouse doors. "Open it up!"
"But you can't," Morris protested weakly as a couple of Marines gently led the old veteran away, apologetic that they had to take his life's work away from him.
Alistair Thorne shook his head sympathetically. He hated to do this to the old man, but the Colonies desperately needed what was in this warehouse. It held the only functional – he hoped - remains of Daniel Greystone's work, and if there was anything to be found here about Zoe Greystone, they needed to find it. He turned to address the remaining bulk of the Marines as the door seals were being cut.
"All right, listen up!" Thorne shouted. "I know you've all been briefed already, but it bears repeating: Somewhere inside this warehouse is something we think the Cylons want. We don't know what it is, but we do have a clue; we're searching for any and all references to 'Zoe Greystone'. Unfortunately, if there was a manifest for what's in this warehouse, it was lost a long time ago. So we're going to have to go box by box, searching every byte of data contained in these old systems.
"But I won't lie to you. This could be dangerous because for all we know, there could be still live Centurions in there who still think there's a war on just waiting to be reactivated by an errant signal. Hence procedure is going to be to activate only ONE machine at a time, and there will always be at least a squad of armed Marines standing guard and a fast reaction platoon on standby when we do so in case all hell breaks loose. Am I clear?"
"SIR YES SIR!"
"It's open, sir!" one of the door opening detail informed Thorne. Thorne turned around in time to see them sliding the door open.
It was dark inside of course, but one of the Marines found a switch by the warehouse entrance. The switch was pulled and ancient fluorescent lights powered on, many of them buzzing and blinking at less than full illumination, and quite a few not coming on at all. But it was enough to see by and Thorn found himself staring at hundreds if not thousands of crates stacked on top of each other and reaching so far back that he couldn't even see the back wall of the warehouse.
"Well frak me," Thorne whispered to himself as Marines flooded in past him. This was going to take a while.
