Chapter 18: Politics
Finally the babble died down. Lee stared at her, his heart in his throat. "You're really from Earth," he breathed.
"Not me personally, thank you," she seemed almost offended. "I was born on a planet called Siberia. I lived there until I was eighteen, when my family moved back to Midgard and I went into the Academy there."
He shook his head. "We spent ages hunting for Earth, pinning our hopes on it, and - well..."
"Here we are? It's not going to be that simple, Captain. Believe me."
"What do you mean?" Laura Roslyn asked.
"Politics," Reece rolled her eyes up. "Can you stand a bit of a dissertation on the subject?"
"Alright," she still looked shaken.
"We've been at war for nearly six hundred years, and the war started when the Kangas rolled into our solar system, destroyed all our settlements off Earth, nuked every major city and military facility they could hit and destroyed almost everything in orbit, whether it could shoot back or not. We lost four billion people in that attack. The second real attack they did, on Midgard, wiped out ninety-nine point eight percent of the planetary population. They considered that an unacceptably low kill rate." Her emotionless recital of these facts had the Colonials staring. "They've improved since. Now if they get even one light tender into near-atmospheric range, we can expect to lose everyone. They wiped out our colony on Marushka nine times. More than a billion dead in total."
"We had worse," someone muttered.
"In terms of proportion of total people lost compared to survivors - quite probably. I'm not disputing it," Reece answered them without moving her attention from the little group around the table. "But over that time, the military acquired huge powers over commerce, industry, education, agriculture, exploration, scientific development, budgetary allocations - you can guess. Ever since the war finished, acts removing those powers have been shoved through as fast as our legal process allows, and very few of the elected officials have tried to seriously oppose them. So as soon as word gets into the news nets that we may have another war on our hands, the civilian officials are going to hit the roof and insist that the military not get any more powers and keep on giving up the ones they've got, the military are going to agitate to start increasing numbers again and try to get back into the state they were in when the war was still going, and there'll be accusations flying right left and centre." She paused. "For that matter, I'm willing to bet a lot of people will say the military somehow created this threat just to stay powerful. There's plenty of people silly or paranoid enough to believe it. With the election coming up soon, the President is going to be damned whichever side she comes down on, and all that's likely to leave you hanging in limbo until after the election at least, and quite possibly a lot longer than that."
"You can't do anything to expedite things?" Roslyn asked, feeling crushed. She couldn't wait that long. She wouldn't live that long.
"Not really. Our laws allow for acceptance of refugees, but there's a phrase in there somewhere about 'in so much as doing so does not compromise national security'. Which means that if accepting you as refugees means the Cylons will attack us, then I don't have the authority to do that. You'd have to go higher up - which leads to the problem of politics again. And just to make things really interesting, technically I'm obliged to deal with you as a separate nation, which means if you want to merge into our nation rather than just work out some kind of deal, you would lose your sovereignty."
Lee realised that maybe quoting President Roslyn's oath of office to Tamsin Reece had been a mistake. Reece was very good at laying things out.
"So what would your recommendation be?" Roslyn asked after a moment.
"Well, there's at least nine planets in this sector more or less fit for human habitation we haven't settled yet," she said after a moment. "Mostly because of travel time and the isolation. You could take one of those and settle, and ask for military aid. You could go further in, towards our central worlds, and find somewhere to settle there we haven't claimed and hope we would stop any Cylons simply to defend our own settlements. You could keep on moving and try to outrun the Cylons."
"We can't outrun them," Adama said heavily.
"Why not?" She asked. "You got this far."
He looked aside.
"You think they've got you infiltrated. They're not following - they're waiting." Her all-too-accurate assessment made Adama wince.
"How did you know that?" Baltar asked, admitting their dilemma without thought of the magnitude of the admission.
"A display of mass nervousness is a good indication something is wrong. The rest is just logic." She paused. "But when they came here, they went after us instead of you. So they're not perfect, or at least their field units don't have perfect intelligence. They don't have battle screens, or not as we use the term. And their scout vessels are about the size of our interceptors." She leaned back. "What's their fleet strength?"
"You mean, how many ships do they have? We don't know."
"Rough guess?"
"We've seen up to thirty basestars at a time."
"And a basestar is what size, with what armaments and what maneuverability?"
Lieutenant Gaida passed her over a manual they had put together for training new recruits. She paged through it, frowning and obviously working to put figures into terms she could relate to.
"So they're about the size of one of our cruisers, and pack less firepower than our destroyers but it's more spread out," she said calmly. "We can take them, although their fighters could be more than just a nuisance. We don't fly the kind of stubbies you need to take them ship-to-ship."
"Stubbies?" Tigh said.
"Terrible term, isn't it?" She grinned. "Came from a squadron recruited from a planet called Outback, settled almost entirely by people from Australia - a continent on Earth," she clarified. "And Australians tend to have their own brands of beer, slang and humour, not to mention poisonous everything that moves and a lot that doesn't. To them, stubbies are either very small fighter-craft, small bottles of beer or really short shorts. And the first meaning came last. They probably thought it was funny."
"When you say their own brand of humour…" Roslyn still looked wobbly.
"Their standard brand of sunhat has corks on strings hanging off the brim. They claim it knocks the flies out." She nodded at their looks. "I swear. The Australian version of a barometer is a piece of wood and a bit of string, and a set of instructions. If the string is dry, it's sunny. If it's wet, it's raining. If it's at an angle, it's windy. If it's at right angles, it's very windy. If the string is smoking, the house is on fire. If the string is missing, some bugger's flogged it. That's one of the more minor examples of an Australian sense of humour." She paused. "And it's rather off the topic."
"You think you can handle the Cylons?" Adama asked.
"Maybe. The problem isn't whether we can beat them - we probably can. The problem is whether we can beat them here. Avarin's a new, vulnerable colony, and the ships in orbit can handle themselves but they can't protect all the settlements. The people are pretty spread out, because it takes several years to condition the soil enough to get a decent crop so you need lots of land to start with if you plan to feed yourself. A nuke like they pack will barely make our destroyers shrug. It'll devastate a town." She sighed. "And Avarin's a lot better defended than our other colonies in the area, at that. If the Cylons go after one of them, we won't know about it until it's too late."