Disclaimer: Battlestar Galactica belongs to Ronald D. Moore and the Sci-Fi channel.
Chapter 21: What must be done
Tyrol met the Raptor as it landed and directed everyone into the cave. When they reached the computer, he looked over at Morgana. "I don't believe we've been introduced. I'm Chief Tyrol."
Morgana politely extended a hand to him, and then to D'Anna. "I'm Dr. Sorenson and I'm here to help you translate the computer."
"This should be interesting," D'Anna muttered.
The doctor walked over to the computer and set her bag down on the ground. While she reached for the translation device, Athena got the camera and began snapping pictures of the room. She paused when she noticed the triangle, inhaling sharply. "Is something wrong?" Morgana asked.
The dark-haired woman shook her head and continued taking pictures. "Nope."
Morgana turned her attention back to the computer, placing one had along the dusty console. She moved the translation device over the screen. "I think that's the file you want. It's on the desktop. It says 'seismic activity management.'"
"How do we access it?" Tyrol inquired.
Running her fingers over the panel, Morgana looked for a touchpad. She found the gray square, moving her index finger in it to see a white mouse arrow on the screen. "It's right here."
She placed the mouse arrow over the 'seismic activity management' file and pushed a button on the touchpad to click on it. A box appeared on the screen with another blinking minus sign. "When it does that, I think it wants a password," Tyrol told her.
Nodding, Morgana radioed Galactica. "Admiral, Laura, we need another password."
"Try four, then fifteen," Laura stated, recalling the second sequence from her dream.
Morgana inputted the numbers. The box disappeared and she saw a graph with numbers, as well as a picture of a rotating planet. "It worked. Now we just need to make sense of how to do the calculations."
D'Anna stepped forward to look over Morgana's shoulder. "I won't need my ship to solve this. It's a basic equation using the rate of the planet's rotation with its axis, the proportion of how much the poles' magnetic fields change in a year multiplied by fifty, and the frequency of seismic activity."
"Did you hear all that?" Tyrol asked the former president and the admiral.
"Yes. Did we understand all of that? Not exactly. Kindergarten math wasn't quite that complicated," Laura's voice mentioned over the two-way radio.
As D'Anna made the adjustments, the shaking stopped. "We seem to have solved the problem, but I can't figure out what the third code would go to. I wish that Dr. Gardener had completed his reports," Morgana commented.
"We'll deal with that later. The important thing is that the planet's government made a deal that they have to honor," Bill added.
The group returned to Galactica as Laura told the premiere about what had transpired. Reluctantly he agreed that the Cylons could move down as well, but they were restricted to stay within the Colonial settlement for the meantime. Over the next two months, the Colonial settlement finished constructing homes and public buildings. The planetary government even helped them build a wall around their city to delineate what belonged to them.
At first, their efforts appeared genuinely helpful. It looked as though the regular citizens helped in the construction of the wall and then left the Colonials to set up their own society. They had enough resources to be self-sufficient and began adjusting to their new home. Laura and Bill were still reluctant to move down to the planet, but they had a house set aside for them that they used four days during the week.
Settlement and reports discussing the settlement had taken so much of Laura's time that she had not had a proper moment to look over the pictures that Athena had taken of the cavern, which was actually on the property of their settlement. She was pulling filed out of a box, that Bill had insisted on carrying for her, when the photos fell out of a report. She took them back to the couch to study them.
Bill entered the room with a mug of coffee in his hand. "Coffee sure grows well here. Did you know that our people can grow five varieties of this stuff? It's as if- what have you got there?"
Laura glanced up as he walked over to her. "I forgot all about the pictures that Athena took of the cavern." She patted the couch and waited for him to join her before continuing. "That's the console that they used. And that's the generator to run everything. It's a strange room. And I still have no idea why that triangle is on the floor."
He drank a gulp of coffee. "Hmm, what's it facing?"
"A wall. See, this picture is of the wall, and everything in there is just covered in cobwebs," Laura pointed out.
"That may be true, but I think there might be something on that wall. You see where the cobwebs hang diagonally? It looks like the webs ran into something," Bill stated.
She raised an eyebrow. "Since when do you know so much about cobwebs?"
He smirked. "It's not about the cobweb, it's about the angle."
"Care to investigate with me? I could use a walk," she persuaded.
"Not in broad daylight unless you're in disguise. Laura, curiosity can't excuse the fact that you and I are trying to hide something," he reminded, resting a hand on her growing abdomen.
Despite being six months pregnant, they had managed to hide her from public view by making trips at night, if at all. She sighed. "Bill, I'm so bored. I love having our books here, but I want to see that cavern."
A knock interrupted their discussion. Bill rose to answer the door. As he opened it to find Lee, he waved his son in. Lee nodded to both his father and Laura as he walked over to her. "We have a problem."
"Sit. What's going on?" Laura asked.
Lee sat in the chair across from her, setting a paper on the coffee table before resting his hands on his knees. "There are people at the gate, just ordinary citizens, that don't want our people leaving our city to enter theirs."
"So we've got a few hecklers. We've dealt with worse," Laura mentioned.
The younger man shook his head, giving her the piece of paper from the coffee table. "This is a flyer telling people not to hire Colonials, or what they are calling 'copied people.'"
Bill cleared his throat. "It sounds like we've got two problems then. First off, it looks like the government is using propaganda against us. Secondly, they're trying to keep their people in the dark as much as possible regarding the technology of the Cylons."
"But what do we do about it? The government here is forcing us to be isolated. We were too busy building our city to see it sooner," Laura pointed out.
"The Quorum is meeting to discuss it. I know you won't be there, but I wanted to keep you informed, in case you had any suggestions," Lee told her.
She nodded. "Thank you. I hope you and the others can find a solution to this."
Lee stood. "I'll tell you what they decide."
After he had left, Laura contacted the premiere on her two-way radio. "Tiberius, we need to talk."
"Having problems adjusting to planet life, Roslin?" he asked.
"Only because you seem to be turning your people against mine," she retorted.
He chuckled. "'Turnabout is fair play,' Roslin. You tricked my people, and we tricked you. I think this makes us even."
Her contempt for the premiere began to boil. "This does no such thing. Surely our people can learn to work together-"
"I think we're done here. Goodbye," he said snidely before she heard the radio click off from his end.
Sighing, she looked back at Bill. "Our people are going to be nothing more than second-class citizens on this planet unless we find a way to convince the general population out there that we're not the enemy."
"It's too bad they don't have television," he commented.
She began to pace the room. "There has to be something we can do."
"I'm going to find Dr. Sorenson. Maybe she can tell us something about the media on this planet," he remarked.
Using the two-way radio, he contacted Cottle, who passed his radio to Morgana. "Admiral, what can I do for you?"
"How is news distributed on Terra Prime?" he asked her.
"By newspapers and radios. The press members here are rather voracious when looking for stories. If you wanted information distributed, all you would have to do is contact the nearest radio station. That particular station shares the building with one of the continent's main newspapers," she explained.
"Thank you," he ended. Then he looked back to Laura. "If we start asking their media to spread positive news about us, things might look better."
Laura shrugged. "It sounds reasonable. I just wish that there was something I could do now."
"I need to find Saul and ask if anyone's been openly hostile. We might need our own marines around the city if the premiere's people are threatening our people with physical violence," Bill relayed.
Bill walked to Saul's home, a few blocks away. He knocked on the door, smiling politely when Caprica opened it. "Admiral, it's good to see you. How is Laura doing?" she asked.
"She's fine, just restless," he replied, stepping inside. "I need to speak with Saul. Is he home?"
Caprica turned back to the baby in an infant seat on the couch. As she sat down, she looked back to Bill. "He's in the kitchen."
The admiral proceeded in the direction of the kitchen, stopping when he spotted his XO leaning over the table, flipping through reports. "Site rep," Bill stated.
Saul looked up with slight smirk on his face. "It looks that way, doesn't it? I've got stacks of complaints from our people, and the Cylons. Instead of giving them to Lee, they dumped the reports on me."
"Do any of the reports say if our people have been physically threatened?" Bill inquired.
The other man shook his head. "I haven't seen anything like that, but it wouldn't surprise me of something comes up. Apparently they've said some pretty nasty things to the Cylons."
"We've got to put a stop to this before someone gets hurt. One wrong move might cause a war. This wasn't how I pictured joining the rest of humanity to be," Bill expressed.
"How's Laura taking it?" Saul probed.
"Not well. I just hope she doesn't try to go off on her own and do something stupid. I should get back to her. Keep me posted if anything else comes up," Bill remarked, heading for the door.
"Yes, sir," Saul responded.
While Bill had gone off in search of Saul, Laura had dozed off in a chair. She was once again in the cavern. The three girls sat on the triangle, playing jacks again. However, this time she noticed that the triangle was indeed pointing to something on the wall. She walked over to it and cleared the cobwebs off to find a small box. It contained a key pad and enter button. She pushed in the numbers from the last number sequence and suddenly the wall slid back. Beyond the wall was a stairway. Then she heard a voice say, "You must show them unity. You can give them peace."
She woke, hearing Bill turn the key and open the front door. "What did Saul have to say?"
Bill sat on the couch. "People are complaining, but there hasn't been physical violence yet."
"I had a dream. I really think that we need to go back to the cave," she stressed.
He opened his mouth to talk her out of it, but then saw the sincerity in her eyes. "Grab a coat and a hat. Put the coat on over your hair," he recommended.
She left the house with him in her disguise. Fortunately people too busy to notice them. They reached the cavern and stepped inside. Laura pulled her jacket closer as the cool hair settled against her. Like in her dream, she walked over to the wall with the awkwardly hanging cobwebs and brushed them aside. Seeing what looked like a keypad, she inputted the number nine, then zero, and eight. Once again, her dream became real as the wall slid back, revealing a stairway.
"I'll go first, in case we run into any booby traps," Bill said protectively.
Laura nodded as they stepped into the stairwell. They had only gone up five steps when they found themselves walking on a long flat expanse. After a while they found more stairs. The stairs stopped at a ceiling hatch with another keypad. Laura tried the third code again and it opened. Bill moved ahead and then offered Laura a hand, pulling her into a new room.
They looked around to see boxes of files scattered around. Long desks with several computers lined the walls. "Bill, what is all this? I thought the people here didn't have this kind of technology."
He studied the computer units. They were simply monitors with boxes under the desks and mice sitting on pads on the top of the desks. He noticed that they were also still plugged in to what looked like a power strip. "Let's find out where we are first."
The room only had a few windows, all small and toward the top of the ceiling. At the far end of the room was a door. Bill tried the door, but it would not move. Laura wandered over to him. "It's locked, isn't it?"
Looking at the space around the door, he realized that the situation was more complicated than they had imagined. "Somebody sealed this door shut. By the height of the windows, I'd say we're in some kind of basement, but we're definitely not getting out of here by that door."
Laura glanced around the room for some clue of where they were. Then she noticed it on the wall next to a Periodic Table of Elements, above a rectangular device with a flat plastic extension, which held paper. "Look Bill! It's a floor plan. We're in the basement of a public library."
"Why go through the trouble of sealing all of this off?" he reminded.
"It might be to keep technology away from the people. Somebody went to an awful lot of trouble to make sure that nobody found this place. From the few papers we've seen in here, I can see notes for inventions, even though they're in what Sorenson called 'English,'" she pointed out.
He bent down and flicked the little red switch on the power strip. Then he pressed the button in the middle of one of the computer unit boxes. "I think it's time we got some answers."
As the system booted, she placed a hand on his arm. "Bill, what if someone can trace what we're doing?"
"Judging by the looks of things, nobody's going to look for us here, at least not for a while," he reassured her.
When the main screen came up, it had the blinking minus sign, asking for a password. Laura tried each of the three number sets. "I have no idea what the password is. None of these are working. I think it wants something longer."
"Why not try all of them together?" Bill suggested.
Laura typed on all three number sets and the computer screen changed. On a blue backdrop icons appeared, as well as a bar at the bottom. They realized then that it was in English and not Greek. "This could be a problem. Now what?"
"Maybe there's a way to change the language on the screen. What's that bar for? The Start menu? Try that icon that looks like a mouth," he mentioned.
When she clicked on the mouth, a long list of languages appeared. They found the one that looked familiar and clicked on it. Immediately the screen changed to the alphabet that they recognized. The date at the top of the screen was fifty years old. "I'm surprised that everything still works after fifty years," Laura commented.
They found a folder on the desktop marked 'Medical Project' and clicked on it. Entries from Dr. Gardener appeared on the screen as a detailed explanation for full-body prosthetic replacements. Bill and Laura continued searching the computer, finding reports about technology being stolen, similar to what Sorenson had shown them. There was also a file note about a danger of creating new beings if the process for generating prosthetic bodies were to be misused.
"He's talking about the Cylons, Bill," she remarked.
"Which means that the humans from Earth created them, or at least had the theory for creating them, as we already suspected," he added.
As she clicked on the icon of an envelope, she saw a list of messages. Clicking on one, her eyes widened as she turned back to Bill. "Look at the date on this one. It's the same date as the last transmission that Sorenson received. It confirms the successful complete-body transfer of five accident victims, on these dates. Five people who were human had their consciousness moved to a new body to save their lives. And there are attachments. Oh gods, Bill. Look!"
Right in front of them were the medical files of the Final Five, Laura included. He rested a hand on her shoulder. "I think we've seen all that we need to see. Let's go home."
She shook her head. "Not yet. We need to find out why this place was sealed off. Now there has to be something somewhere…" she trailed off, finding a note on one of the reports in front of her. It was from Dr. Gardener again, saying that he had to use the secret entrance to reach the computer because the government had banned the use of computers.
Laura and Bill stared at the name of the man who had been the premiere fifty years ago: Julius Blackwell. "I'll bet that's the current premiere's grandfather," Bill assessed.
Nodding, she shut off the computer. "It seems that his family has a history of hating technology."
"I think it's more than hating technology. He's been taking it away from the people to keep them uneducated about it," Bill remarked.
They began walking back toward the door and the stairwell. "But fifty years wasn't that long ago. You would think that someone out there would remember and say something."
"It's possible that we're dealing with a generation that didn't talk to their parents, or that the previous generations were kept quiet by some kind of force or threat," Bill assessed.
Laura walked ahead of him. "Surely the rest of the planet isn't like this. How would a person keep others from finding out about technology from the rest of the world?"
He sighed. "I think the answer is simpler than that. First of all, if each continent is self-sufficient, there wouldn't be much of a need for trade between them. Secondly, without the use of computers or a network, or even television, news here doesn't travel very quickly."
They did not speak again until they had returned to their house. "Bill we have to tell them."
"Tell them what, exactly?" he asked, pouring himself a glass of water.
She placed her hands on her hips, slowly pacing. "About the Cylons, that their own people started the technology. We have to find a way to print out the reports that we were looking at. Our people, their people, and the Cylons are all a breath away from war. It's the only way to bring everyone together. We have to show them that they're all linked."
He took a seat on the couch. "Just how do you plan on doing that?"
"By bringing their press, our press, and meeting with their planetary government, for starters," she said as she stopped pacing.
Standing, he eyed her with concern. "But that would mean they would learn what you are."
As she sighed heavily and closed her eyes for a moment, she felt the full weight of what needed to be done. "They have to. It's the only way to bring peace to everyone."
He adamantly shook his head. "No! You'll be hurt, or worse. I will not take that chance. You don't need to be involved in this."
I wish that you understood. Will you ever truly understand what I have to do? She reached to touch his face, brushing her thumb along a few scars. "I have to do this. I am the one who is supposed to keep peace between all of us, and the best way to begin is to tell them what I am. I owe them some peace."
When he glared back at her, she could read the sadness in his eyes. "You don't owe them anything! Laura, you've been their 'Dying Leader' twice. You've led them to this planet. You owe them nothing. You owe yourself a chance to have a life," he paused, resting a hand on her abdomen. "You owe her a chance too."
"Bill," Laura whispered, "I love you, so very much. But she's a part of this as much as I am. I have to show them that we're all one people. I have to do this."
(My thanks to McGonagallFan, Mythtern13, and carolann for reviewing :D)