Chapter 16

Ottawa, Canada

Adama looked around the landing field of McDonald-Cartier airport, taking in the expanse. It was smaller than Dulles in Washington, but still had various large aircraft at the terminal. In two rows leading to the Raptor were six honour guards, each of them with wide-brimmed beige hats and red uniforms. A black car waited at the end, standing beside it was most likely Prime Minister Taylor.

"Admiral Adama, I take it." he said as Adama walked between the guards. "Prime Minister Taylor, we spoke on the phone."

"Good to be here," Adama said. "You said you found a proper facility."

"Yup." Taylor nodded. "There's space at the NRC, and it has some generators we can use as well as tapping into the normal power grid. The nuclear plant at Chalk River is also operating at top capacity."

"That's good, I have the... specialist here."

"That's my cue." said Remus, hopping off the wing of the Raptor. "Hi."

Taylor looked strangely at Remus. "That's your expert?"

"One of them." Adama said. "I have others awaiting transport."

Taylor still cast a confused look at Remus. "Alright then, but still..." He shrugged. "If it gets the Cylons off our planet, I'll be happy."

"That's the basic idea." Remus said. "I don't hold the new ones in very high regard."

"As opposed to the old ones?"

Adama sighed. "The ones we originally fought against, they were all scrapped after the newer models came into being."

Taylor grinned. "Well then they'll be no threat! It's the new ones I have a problem with."

"Exactly!" Remus exclaimed. "The new Cylons are the problem. And I'll be able to shut 'em all down. One thing about machines," he winked. "You can turn 'em off."

"And the human-lookin' ones?" Taylor asked.

"Well... They'll have nothing."

Adama nodded impatiently. "Yes, but can we get to the facilities?"

"Oh... Yeah, let's get going."

Adama got into the car, one of the hydrogen-burning models. One aspect he had noticed was that the humans of Earth didn't seem to use gasoline. All the engines he had seen were hydrogen, ethanol, or electric, more variety than seen on even Caprica. He was impressed by the hydrogen ones, though. They didn't rumble or make loud noise, nothing louder than a hiss or a purr. He hadn't been in an electric one, however, and he assumed them to be even quieter.

"What do you think of Ottawa so far?" Taylor asked.

Adama was startled out of his thoughts. "Small..." he said. "The colonial capital on Caprica was much larger."

"Yeah, well we're not the biggest city in the universe, we kinda accept that." Taylor nodded. "New York and Los Angeles are pretty massive, Shanghai, Hong Kong, New Delhi... Those would probably give your Caprica a run for its money."

"Perhaps... Washington was large, and I saw New York. But I do admit a smaller city isn't such a bad thing."

"Definitely." The Prime Minister nodded. "A lot quieter, friendlier, well relatively but you know what I mean. I like it. It's pretty recent compared to some cities, though. Like New York was big before Ottawa was a logging camp."

"A logging camp?"

Taylor grunted an affirmative. "That's all we were, a bunch of lumberjacks driving logs down to Montreal. Then 1812 happened, then confederation and Queen Victoria picked Bytown and called it Ottawa. Probably because most people couldn't find it on a map. Trying to prevent the Americans from getting at it, since both Toronto and Kingston were hit in 1812."

"You were at war with the Americans?" Adama exclaimed in surprise. "But President Warren said the Americans were a British colony at one point, and you're still in the Commonwealth."

"Well... They got rebelled against the British, had a few wars with them."

"Ah... I see." Adama paused. Perhaps that was one reason for the American neutrality, their common beginnings. Although now America and Britain were allies. Not so for the Cylons and the Colonies.

"Care for a drink, Admiral?"Taylor asked, holding out a bottle.

"What is it?" Adama said, looking at the dark liquid inside it.

"Just Coke," Taylor said. "Non-alcoholic, if you don't drink."

"Thank you," Adama took the bottle. It was a sweet flavour, one he wasn't familiar with. But he could easily get used to it.

He cast a sidelong glance at Remus. He was just staring out of the window, taking in the scenery of the city. Gods willing, he would end the Cylon threat for good.

Northern Russia

"Nothing, nothing and more nothing..." Lavochkin muttered to himself. Sure enough, that's what there was: miles and miles of empty steppe and pine forest. He yawned.

The small two lane highway was empty, and Lavochkin was pleasantly surprised not to find a huge crowd of refugees or even abandoned vehicles. Once they were closer to the enemy he might worry, but for now it meant the column could move relatively quickly. All they had were jeeps, some of them modified with twin machine guns but most without. Some of the battalions were on foot behind the advance group, and they would probably be aching quite a bit.

"Forty kilometres!" the navigator shouted, fighting to keep the map straight in the light breeze.

"Where's the resistance?" Lavochkin asked. "You think they'd put up a bit of a fight, surely they know we're here!"

"Damned if I know!" the navigator shouted back.

Lavochkin sighed. It was almost too easy, just driving up the main highway with no resistance, not even snipers between them and the town.

And so the convoy moved on, pausing at intervals to allow the marching troops to gain ground. At the astonishing rate, they were bound to be in the town by dark.

"Major!" the signalman reported, "The recce squadron is late reporting in."

"How late?" Lavochkin asked. This was the first bit of bad news they'd received, although it might have been nothing.

"At least fifteen minutes."

"Thank you," Lavochkin said. No doubt, this wasn't good. This was either a breakdown in communications, which was bad, or worse a large force was waiting for them at the edge of town.

They exited another forest, with a narrow plain flanked by conifers. Lavochkin could see the distant spires and towers of the target. Between them was a stretch of light wood, plus a few assorted highway overpasses and one river bridge. The reconnaissance jeeps had been tasked with capturing the river bridge, using twin mounted plasma guns to hold it. It seemed now like the bridge wasn't being held.

"How far until the bridge?" Lavochkin asked the navigator.

"Five klicks," came the reply. "At this rate, another fifteen or thirty minutes. An hour at most if we wait for infantry."

"No time," Lavochkin replied. "Signal Kuznetsov, I want to go ahead and get to bridge as soon as possible."

"Yes, sir."

Lavochkin took out his binoculars. Glancing under a highway overpass ahead, he caught a glimpse of the bridge. There was no smoke, so it hadn't been demolished. But no sign of any activity. The jeep was bouncing too much for any more detail than that.

Five jeeps increased speed, pulling ahead of the column and racing towards the bridge.They're advance was cut short sooner than expected, though.

The jeep to the right of Lavochkin exploded suddenly as they approached the highway overpass, sending red-hot debris into the other four vehicles. There were no serious injuries apart from the doomed crew of the demolished jeep, but the four hit their brakes.

"Everyone out!!" Lavochkin bellowed. "Move yourselves!"

Though the jeeps had not quite come to a halt, the occupants dived out of the jeeps to sides of the highway, small clouds of smoke and dust thrown up by standard machine-gun bullets surrounding them.

"Where's the fire?"

"They've got the overpass occupied!" the signalman from Lavochkin's vehicle shouted. "I see at least fifteen metalheads up there!"

"Mother of God..." Lavochkin hissed. The entire column would have to pass under, and there was no way of moving the motorized component to another road. They were trapped.

"We have to recapture the pass!"

And it would be another twenty minutes before the lead groups of the column arrived. Until then, they could do nothing but hold out.

Yaroslyl, Russia

Doral winced as another explosion went off in the distance. "What are they doing?"

"I don't know..." Cavil muttered. "I wish they'd give up on the bombing! It's their own people!"

Sure enough, because the Cylon headquarters were in the middle of the city Soviet forces had little idea as to where the commanders were. Recon flights were almost hourly, pinning down the Cylons in their installation. Had they attempted to leave, they would have been spotted and most likely followed. This way they could at least hide, hoping that the Russians would not be eager to attack their own citizens. It had not turned out like that, though, as the Red Air Force had pounded the cities not only with bombers but with missiles and whatever satellite weapons they could contact. It seemed as though they were trying to level the city and with it the Cylon resistance. Several bombers had been obliterated, but the missiles were harder to stop. And the citizens were paying for it.

"We've got the weaponry, we have the infantry, but we have no mobile armour..." Doral complained. "Sometimes I wonder what I'd give for one of their tanks."

"We've held pretty well without them, so far. Centurions can travel over rougher terrain, with the right rockets they can simulate the firepower. Less accurately, but still..."

Another explosion flattened a house two blocks away. "Damn this!" Doral muttered. "Why won't it just-"

The sentence was cut off as the door burst open. A centurion entered the room in their customary jerking fashion. It came to a complete stop, entirely motionless. "Status report: enemy drive halted one-nine-one degrees from city." came a flat electronic voice. "Scouting units contained, estimate larger force beyond visual range."

Doral and Cavil were silent. "That's it..." Cavil suddenly said. "The bombing... Quite a diversion."

"Yeah..." Doral mused. "But what do we do about it?"

"Signal for some air support and crush them of course!" Cavil responded, gesturing. "We can have a squadron of Raiders here in less than fifteen minutes."

"Perhaps..." Doral said absently. "But what if we were to let them into the city?"

"That's what they want!"

"Exactly." Doral suddenly became very aware. "We put up token resistance, then collapse in on ourselves. They charge right up into the city, where we can wear them down with snipers and mines."

"Urban warfare..." Cavil rolled his eyes. "I've been in space too long. Never would've thought of that."

"It's perfect... And the bombing would stop!" Doral was already running through the possibilities in his mind. "We have a section of Centurions hold their position, but not reinforce them. The Russians will surely break through eventually, and they'll have a clean sweep right until the city limits. When the last unit is in..." His train of thought continued, the words unnecessary.

"I like it, provided it works and there aren't too many of them. What I'd like to know is how an army can appear out of nowhere like that, we've bottled up the front pretty well."

Doral nodded. "Well, we've thrown almost everything that isn't still here to the front, there's nothing between here and there, we're overextended until those others arrive."

Cavil was fixing himself another glass of vodka. "Yes, but those soldiers will still have to come from somewhere. We don't exactly have centurions coming out of our ears."

"We've abandoned three more Colonies, that frees up some."

Cavil nodded, eyebrows raised. "Okay, you've got a point. I still think this isn't gonna be a cakewalk. We're not ready for operations of this scale."

"Once we solidify our hold on Russia, we'll be fine." Doral looked out the window. "We're making history in more ways than one. No invading force has ever occupied Russia and held it. If we hold it, we'll be the first."

"I don't have your obsession with history and all that stuff." Cavil swallowed. "Just make sure you use it all to your advantage. And I don't mean throwing a textbook at them."

"Don't worry. Centurion, have all units at enemy location hold position but not to expect reinforcements. Meanwhile organize several sniper and mortar batteries. Execute order."

The centurion walked out of the room.

NRC, Ottawa, Canada

Remus looked up from the wiring he was formatting to see Tyrol walking into the room. "Hi, Galen! Join the party!"

Tyrol looked around, taking in the mess. "You manage to work here?"

Remus laughed. "I made this mess. Shoulda seen the look on the janitor's face when he walked in yesterday morning, I think he hates me now."

"What are you working on?"

"Well, I'm trying to reconnect the transfer coils, hook up the transceiver assembly to the FTL unit and plotting the end of civilization as we know it. Oh, and I'm hungry too. Anything else?"

Tyrol didn't know whether to laugh or worry. "Yeah... Not really."

"So yes, but not really? Really, bro, make up your mind!" Remus dropped the two wires and stuffed them into the panel. "So I guess you're here to help or something, right?"

Tyrol nodded. "That was the general idea, yeah."

"Yeah, well I've managed so far. And no broken bones yet."

"What's this code you're trying to transmit?"

"Huh?" Remus looked blankly at him, then nodded. "Oh, that... Yeah, trying to shut down the Cylon machinery. One problem with basing your society on machines is you can turn them off."

"Even the ones not connected to any receiver?"

Remus dropped his pliers and picked up a screwdriver. "All Cylons, well the machine ones, are hooked up. Makes things easier to manage. Pretty much all mechanical parts have some connection or another. They're arrogant enough to think no one can do what we're trying to do, hack in the backdoor and shut them down."

Tyrol could understand that, also remembering the time the other Sharon had disabled an entire fleet of Raiders before Galactica vipers tore them apart. Cylons weren't used to it.

"So one code and they all shut down? I thought it was more complicated than that."

Remus shook his head. "Quite simple." He looked up from his work. "Spend a few years with the Cylons, you'll learn a whole lot."

"I just find it a little odd how easy it seems to be..."

"Ha! Not exactly a walk in the park, but I see what you're getting at. Yes, why should you trust me? Why should one Cylon who spent forty years with your enemy suddenly come back with a miracle cure, right? All too easy... Maybe it is." He looked off into the distance. "Hell, maybe I'm a double-agent trying to screw you all over, thought of that?"

"I didn't mean-"

"I know. But I've run into that ever since I've gotten here. I don't expect it to change. But one day, procedures like that might be justified. One day you might get a bad one. At least you're alert and ready."

"Yeah... Need any help?"

Remus nodded. "Get me a box of timbits, will you? I'm starting to like 'em."

Northern Russia

Veslovsky listened to the messenger with a little trepidation. The Cylons seemed to have a good grip on the overpass, and Lavochkin's small scout party had nothing heavier than a few grenade launchers attached to their rifles. They could hold, not push forward.

But he couldn't accelerate the column any more. With the troops on foot, he would have to do the best he could.

They had to punch through to Lavochkin's position. Unfortunately, the overpass was completely jammed to radio communication. And with forces completely confined to the single highway, there weren't many other places to swing around. The scout forces were completely pinned down, with nothing Veslovsky could do. A majority of his jeeps were towing light artillery, with the rest in behind the main body of the column. None of them were armed or armoured.

Up at the overpass, Lavochkin was having his own difficulties. The Cylons again and again had raked his ridge with machine-gun and mortar fire, although his men were hunkered down far enough that they rounds had little effect. The jeeps had by this point been completely demolished, easy targets for the machine-gunners on the overhead road. The staccato pounding and thunder had continued unceasingly through the day, making rest impossible. Lavochkin himself was becoming jaded to the noise. But he prevented any attack, trying to keep his men alive in case some centurions left the overpass and tried to rush his small hideaway from the rear. Unfortunately this option led to his men being restless towards the rear, always keeping a watch on the foreboding conifer forests.

But the assaulting forces remained on top of the highway overpass.

"Radios are still down, Major!" came a call. "We can't raise Division!" In the din, Lavochkin couldn't tell who had spoken.

The pounding continued.

Washington, D.C.

She had been holed up in this foreign country for days on end, perhaps longer, as all she could focus on was the inexorable battle for her country. The loss of Moscow had been a hammerblow to her, many of her friends and family had lived there.

But the mourning could only be momentary.

Bleary-eyed, Tatiana Beria again pored over reports from her motherland, reports not only cataloguing the Front, but a daring plan be General Yeremenko, an airborne assault on the Cylon headquarters. The armoured linkup was still breaking through the Front, but the airborne forces by all measures were ahead of schedule. However, four hours before the reports had been made communications with the First air Army had gone dark, meaning either they had encountered resistance and were being jammed, or they had been destroyed.

Beria tried not to think about that.

Her staff, supplemented by American contractors and Russian embassy workers, was doing their best to coordinate with Yeremenko and Karenin in the SSR. They also tried to dissuade her, as many times during the past few days she had insisted on leaving America to return to her country.

"The men are becoming restless, without victory! They need a morale boost, and quickly!"

Chekov shook his head. "Madam President, it's too dangerous. And this new mission is exactly that: a morale boost and a chance to end this war before christmas."

"I'm sick of hearing that..." Beria muttered, tossing her hair over her shoulder. "Everyone always says 'this plan will end the war!' and then it doesn't... Don't be quick to say that."

"You're right, but still..."

Beria grunted, her face still remained expressionless. "I have to do something! I cannot keep sitting here, reading reports while my soldiers are out there being slaughtered!"

Chekov shuffled anxiously by the door. "Yes, Madam President, but the situation is not as hopeless as you believe. We've managed to launch a counter-offensive against the Cylons and we are holding the line."

"But for how long? The American aircraft carriers have left Russian airspace, they've gone completely neutral."

Chekov glanced at the door again. "If you'll excuse me, Madam President."

"Yes, of course. Go." She waved her hand.

As he left, she once again sank into her deepening thoughts. Granted, her country's situation wasn't worsening, yet. But with the pullout of the Americans, she wondered what the state of affairs would become. This time the Europeans were on her side though, and that had to count for something. The RAF and the Luftewaffe would both be instrumental in protecting the Front.

After that... It was anyone's guess.

And far above, the Valkyrie orbited. She couldn't help but wonder what Adama was up to. Ever since the Cylons had come his pleas for settlement had faded into pleas for defensive action. The Americans had ignored both. China was always stockpiling munitions. The European Union had taken the SSR as proof and had ramped up, and Russia herself wished she had listened.

Beria nodded to herself. For certain, things weren't turning out the way Adama had intended. That much she knew for certain.