Chapter 4

The Diplomat's Daughter and the Pilot

The responsibility of the current government in failing to foresee the Cylon attack has been a matter of much debate. Each side of the argument has authorities who are able to quote statistical evidence to support their point of view...of who knew what and at what point in time and who failed to listen to whom. There is even debate about who is ultimately responsible for the Second War, the humans who created the Cylons generations earlier, the Cylons themselves, or the government twenty years prior who had allowed them to leave ostensibly to found their own homeworld. Most accept now that the blame should be shared equally.

- Bartell, History of the Second Cylon War

.

On the night that the first Cylon bombs fell on the outer star system of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, Laura Roslin sat in her office in the Dressler Government Building where all members of President Adar's Cabinet had their headquarters.

It was 11:30 in the evening and she had been hard at work since 7:00 that morning. In less than ten hours her education budget proposal for the Twelve Colonies was due in the hands of the President's Director of Budget and Management.

At the age of thirty-six and Adar's Secretary of Education for less than a year, Laura felt the weight of her responsibilities much more than had her predecessor…or that was her opinion. Other than a year spent as a teacher twelve years earlier, she had worked in the government her entire career and had never known anything else.

She was finally in a position where she felt like she could make a difference in the often-slighted education budget of the Twelve Colonies. "Look at the children and you see our future," she had told Adar. "They deserve as much of our resources as we spend on finding new and evermore efficient ways to eliminate each other." In theory, at least, she thought he believed it, too, or he wouldn't have appointed her.

Laura knew the government well because she was the only daughter of a man who had started his career in the diplomatic corps and who had risen to become a Colonial Ambassador. She had moved in governmental circles her entire life. Her mother had been the aristocratic daughter of a former member of the Quorum of Twelve who had been groomed from her youth to be a diplomat's wife.

She tried to raise her daughter as she had been raised, but somewhere along the way Laura Roslin rebelled. It was not a noisy rebellion or one that involved boys or drugs or failure in school. It was more a rebellion of the spirit, the decision that she wanted to do something different with her life than host teas, plan receptions, stand quietly by her husband's side and raise daughters to do the same. Laura wanted a career like her father's, not necessarily a diplomatic career, but a career nonetheless.

There were some ways, though, in which she was like her mother. She had her mother's quiet beauty, the oval face, the smoky hazel eyes and brown hair that glowed with hints of auburn in the sunlight, as well as her creamy skin and cultured speech. She rarely raised her voice, rarely resorted to using even one curse word, and she never treated anyone discourteously.

From her father she had inherited her quick intelligence and her ability to almost instantly access any situation she found herself in and act on it. She had also inherited or maybe learned from him how to use a gentle tone of voice yet edge it with just enough authority not to be ignored. From a young age she possessed an intuition for reading other people as she interacted with them, for separating lie from truth and flattery from sincerity.

Sitting in her office she now removed her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her tension headache was getting worse. She would be able to go home soon, take a painkiller and sleep.

Putting her glasses back on she finished scanning the last dozen paragraphs of the budget proposal and then clicked the icon on her computer to save and print it. The building was so quiet that she heard the large printer in the adjoining room switch on and begin warming up. She gave the proposal time to print before she walked over and ran it through the machine that put it into a spiral binder. It was now ready for the morning.

She walked back into the outer office and over to the couch. Her new assistant, Billy Keikeya, was asleep with his head back on the cushions. He had stuck with her through the whole day, running errands, doing research, and helping her secretary make innumerable phone calls. Even when she had sent her secretary home, he had refused to go. He had finally fallen asleep as she had started the final proof of her proposal. He had to be exhausted. She certainly was. This was the third straight day they had both put in sixteen long, grueling hours.

He was twenty years old. If she had married young, she could have a son just a few years younger than him. Gently she touched his shoulder.

"Time to go home, Billy. We're finished for tonight."

He opened his eyes and she saw the momentary confusion. "What time is it?"

"Nearly midnight. The proposal is finished. Everything is ready for the morning."

"I'll walk you to your car."

"You know I don't drive. I always use a staff car and driver. Can we take you home?"

He stood up and stretched before he reached for his jacket. "Thanks, but I'll be fine. I drove in today."

Together they walked toward the door. Laura had just told him to come in late the next morning when they heard swiftly moving heavy footsteps in the corridor. They both looked at each other. The footsteps stopped. There was a knock on the door. She opened it.

A young Marine stood at attention outside.

"Yes, Corporal?"

"President Adar has called an emergency meeting of his Cabinet, Ma'am. The switchboard informed us you were still here. I'm to drive you to Marble House immediately."

"What's going on?"

"I don't know, Ma'am. I just have my orders."

She turned to her young assistant. "Go home, Billy. I'll call you if I need you. Oh, before you go, please call down and tell the car service I've been delayed."

He turned back into her office. "Will do, and I'll be on the couch. Wake me if you need me to do anything else."

She nodded and set off behind the Marine who was walking at a very fast pace. He drove her to the residence of the President of the Colonies.

"I know my way from here, Corporal. Thank you."

The President was casually dressed in gray slacks and a dark blue sweater that emphasized his eyes. There was a time when she had looked into those eyes in a much different way than she did now. That was, of course, years earlier when the man who was now President of the Twelve Colonies was just Richard Alexander Adar, long before he was Mayor of Delphi or later Colonial Governor of Caprica.

Ten years her senior, he was running for the City Council in Delphi when they met. She was twenty-two and about to enter graduate school. Laura believed he would actually try to do something about education in the city. Early that summer she volunteered to work on his campaign.

She was on the rebound from her first failed romance, her only romance, if three years after it was over could still be called a rebound. Probably it could since she hadn't looked at a man during the intervening time. Her college years had been spent carefully avoiding all efforts by a number of young men who tried to begin a romantic relationship with her. Laura Roslin's heart was simply not on the market.

Adar was smart, polished and dynamic. He exuded charm the way the Libran moonflower exuded its intoxicating perfume. He finally breached her self-imposed isolation from men.

Their affair lasted one summer, until she went to graduate school in the fall. She knew he was married. She ignored her conscience. They were both very careful. As far as she knew no one ever found out. He remembered her discretion and six years later after he was elected Mayor of Delphi, he appointed her to a committee he had formed that was studying why education was failing in the inner city. Other appointments followed, but by then she was so good at her job that no one ever suspected why the first one had come about.

They had never resumed their affair and were now close friends rather than the lovers they had once been. After Richard she'd had a few other intimate relationships, but she had never loved anyone the way she had loved Bill Adama. She had never felt the depth of passion she had felt with Bill. She had never thought of Adar or any of the others the way she still thought of Bill, her first love and in so many ways her only love.

She was married briefly in her late twenties to a professor at Caprica University. He was sixteen years her senior and had been married before. At one time he had been her student advisor, but their romance had not started until after she had gotten her graduate degree and he had divorced. She was twenty-eight and establishing her own career. She never took his name.

Before their first anniversary she knew she had made a mistake. He did, too. Their divorce saddened her as any failure would, but it was amicable. Two years later when he remarried she sent him and his new bride a nice gift.

…

There were only three people in the large conference room, the President, his closest aide and his top military advisor, General Nathan Vargas. Adar left them and came over to her.

"Laura, I'm so glad you're here." He took her hand in both of his and she got the full power of those blue eyes. He was still a very charming man. He smiled but she could see the stress, feel the tension emanating from him. Something terrible had happened.

"Good evening, Mr. President. What's going on?"

"We're waiting for a few more to get here. It's the worst news, Laura. It couldn't be worse. There's been…"

One of his aides appeared at the door of the room. "Mr. President, Admiral Nagala is on the line. It's urgent."

"Coming," Adar answered.

Dear gods, Laura thought. The word attacked leapt into her mind. Was that what she had read from the President? Had one of the Colonies attacked another as had happened in the past? And then a far worse thought replaced that one. After two decades of peace had the Cylons returned? The thought was more than she could handle at the moment.

She went to her usual seat at the big table, sat down and massaged her temples. Her headache was getting worse. She finally got up and got a glass of water. From her purse she retrieved a painkiller and swallowed it. She shut her eyes and waited for it to work. With all the excitement she didn't think it would put her to sleep.

Perhaps it was the specter of a war looming in her thoughts, but a man she hadn't seen since she was nineteen years old came to mind, a pilot who was now commanding a battlestar, a man she could never remember without wishing she could change the past.

…

Laura Roslin was eighteen years old the year she met Bill Adama. They would never have met if her mother and father had not forced her that summer to participate in a ritual that was hundreds of years old, something that Laura viewed as a relic that had no place in a modern society…Caprica City's annual debutante dance. The dance harkened back to a time in Colonial history when the only duty of a well-bred young woman was to find a husband, marry and raise a family.

She considered it nothing but an archaic holdover from bygone times.

Young women of a certain social status were presented to society as a way of announcing that they were of marriageable age. Her mother had been a debutante as had both of her grandmothers. Participation was by select invitation only. Everyone who was invited considered it an honor…everyone but Laura. She did her best to break her family's traditional participation.

She begged, cried and threatened to run away, but nothing swayed her parents. They stood firm and tried to explain to her that no one looked at the dance that way anymore. It was something that young women from certain families did. She should look at it as a good time, one night out of the late summer when she would wear a formal dress and dance with nice young men.

Both of her parents were smart enough not to call them eligible young men.

And that, of course, presented another problem. She needed an escort. She didn't have a boyfriend and refused to ask any of the young men in her class to put on a tuxedo and spend the night enduring the torturous ritual, even if all that involved was drinking a cup or two of punch and dancing a number of dances together. It was the principle of the dance to which she objected and selecting an escort would have made her complicit. She begged her parents to let her fourteen-year-old brother escort her.

"Absolutely not!" her mother said.

"He's as tall as me. No one will know."

"Don't be ridiculous, Laura. Even dressed in a tuxedo, he will still look like a fourteen-year-old boy. It's not acceptable."

Finally her father lost patience with her. Find someone or I'll do it for you! Defiantly she told him to go ahead. At that point she didn't care. Better someone he would find than someone she liked. He asked around among his friends. One of them, Joseph Adama, a prominent defense attorney, volunteered his son Lieutenant Bill Adama, twenty-three years old, an Academy graduate and currently training to be a Viper pilot.

Her father thought Laura would be pleased. He was wrong.

"You picked a military man? A pilot? What could we possibly have in common?"

Her father angrily pointed his finger at her. "You had your chance so I don't want to hear another word from you! Lieutenant Adama has agreed to escort you. He's a fine young man, an officer and a gentleman. I expect you to treat him with respect and keep your radical opinions to yourself for one night."

The next morning as she stood for the final fitting of her dress, she thought of the escort her father had chosen and broke down in tears.

"He did this just to punish me. I can't do it, Mother, I can't do it. I can't go to a dance with somebody I don't even know. A military man! A pilot!"

"Yes, you can. And you will! You should have thought about that before your father had to find someone for you. You could have asked any one of a dozen young men and they would have jumped at the opportunity to have you on their arm at a prestigious event like this dance. Sometimes your stubbornness amazes me. And Laura, dear, don't cry on the dress. Silk spots."

Laura had to admit that it was a beautiful dress, a gently scooped neck with spaghetti straps, fitted bodice embroidered with tiny pearls and long full skirt, made with layers of soft white silk. It made her creamy skin glow and set off her dark hair and smoky eyes.

But it looked like a wedding dress. All she needed was a veil. To be looked at and judged like Sagittaron slaves at the auction block five hundred years earlier. How fair was that? Would she survive the humiliation? As she emoted down the hall later, her younger brother laughed at her.

"Quit being such a drama queen, Laura. It's not all about you."

She went into her room and in an uncharacteristic move, angrily slammed the door. No one understood her. No one. Least of all her family. Would September and college never get here?

The next Saturday night, however, as she stood in the dress and pulled on her long white gloves, she changed her mind. She had never thought of herself as that attractive despite what others told her, but tonight as she looked in the mirror and saw her eyes sparkle, saw the way her hair tumbled in soft waves around her shoulders, she was actually pleased with herself. She saw something else in her reflection, too, something she had never seen before. She saw the woman she was becoming.

She could do this. She would smile and dance and then she would get on with her life. In two weeks she would go to the University. She would make this one last gesture and then put her childhood…and the beliefs of her parents…behind her. She had learned the first of a number of valuable lessons that would later enhance her career. She had learned when to stand firm on an issue and when to give in.

Her brother was right. It wasn't all about her.

As if to emphasize that point, her mother looked at her with tears in her eyes. "You are so beautiful tonight. Please try to have a good time. You don't know how much this means to your father and me."

Her father and the young lieutenant were waiting for her. The limousine and driver were ready to take them to the hotel ballroom where the dance was taking place. She smiled graciously as she descended the stairs, saw the pride in her father's eyes, and then she looked at Bill Adama and almost faltered. Standing straight and proud in his dress uniform, he was dark-haired and handsome though more in a rugged than a classical sense.

There was surprise in his eyes when he looked up at her. He managed a tight smile, courteously took her hand and greeted her. But it was a formal greeting, not a friendly one. He didn't want to be here anymore than she did. They had both been forced to do this. The smile froze on her face as she told herself. Four hours and it will be over. Four hours is nothing when compared to a lifetime.

The first dance was always for fathers and daughters and the second for the debutante and her escort. As Bill took her stiffly in his arms, she looked into his blue eyes and smiled. "So who made you do this tonight?"

Her question took him off-guard because he hesitated before he answered. He told her the truth, though. "My father."

"It was both of my parents. And don't worry about insulting me. I don't want to be here either. My parents are old-fashioned about everything. I can't wait to get to the University this fall. The only way I could have gotten out of this, though, was to throw myself off the roof and break a leg. This is slightly less painful, don't you think?"

She made an effort and smiled at him again.

Suddenly he wasn't quite so stiff and proper. "I thought I was going to get stuck with a dog who couldn't even get a date. I never counted on you being so beautiful."

"That's a nice touch. Flatter me and you think I'll forget you had to be coerced."

"Not coerced." He smiled, his first genuine smile of the evening. "Ordered."

"That's right. You military types are big on orders, aren't you?"

"Orders are what the military runs on. What society runs on. Even religion. Orders. Laws. Commandments."

"Let's leave the law and religion out of our conversation tonight, Lieutenant Adama. The same goes for politics. I can tell we have some major differences there. Why don't you start by telling me about yourself? I know your father is a lawyer. Do you plan to follow in his footsteps when your military obligation is over?"

"My name is Bill. I prefer that to my rank. I just graduated from the Academy. I'm training to be a Viper pilot. When I graduate Flight School in six weeks I'm going to kick some Cylon ass and help us win this war. It's gone on too long already. I'll never be a lawyer. One day I'm going to command a battlestar."

She pondered his answer a moment. "And that will better humanity in what way, Bill?"

"It will protect humanity. I'll leave the betterment of humanity to others such as yourself."

"How do you know I want to better humanity?"

"Your father told mine you would win Teacher of the Year by the time you're twenty-five. Is that true?"

"My father wants me to follow him into the diplomatic corps. My mother just wants me to marry well."

"And what do you want?"

"To make our worlds a better place to raise our children. I just haven't decided how I want to do that yet. Teaching is only one possibility. Being elected Caprica's delegate to the Quorum is another."

"I'm sure you'll accomplish anything you set your mind to."

He smiled again and Laura felt the first spark of something between them, something hot and primal that flared beneath the cool and virginal white silk. He felt it, too. She saw it in his eyes. Saw the hot spark dance behind the deep blue, and something else, too, near-disbelief that it was happening.

Neither one of them had counted on this. The military man and the budding humanitarian. The diplomat's daughter and the pilot, as different as night and day.

He hesitated and then gently pulled her closer. She willingly let him.

…

The President's voice brought her back to the present. She opened her eyes. Her headache had dulled enough that she could pay close attention to his words.

"Thank you all for coming out tonight on such short notice. I'll get right to the point. The Colonies are under attack by a force presumed at the moment to be Cylon. We received word earlier today that we had lost touch with the Colony of Aerilon and are as yet unable to reestablish contact. Just a few minutes ago Admiral Nagala notified me that Canceron has also gone silent as has Aquaria. That's all the habitable planets in the Helios Delta system. Our military is currently making every effort to find out the size of the attacking force. I don't think there is any doubt as to their intention. We will keep all of you updated as word comes in."

The low rush of sound that went through the group was like a wave.

Laura realized that she had placed her clutched fist over her heart and murmured, "Oh, dear gods."

The Secretary of Transportation, Scott Mickelson, asked the question that was on all their minds. "Mr. President, does this mean we're at war?"

"As you all know this month is summer vacation for the Quorum of Twelve. Half of them are on their home planets so they've not met and made it official, but yes, I think you could say we're at war. Our military is prepared to engage the enemy. In the next few hours we hope to have further news. That is all I can tell you at the moment. The media already has word that something has happened. I will be addressing them on our position early in the morning. I would ask that none of you speak to the press until I have had the chance. I cannot answer any more of your questions now because I don't have any answers for you. I will keep you informed as word comes in to us from the other colonies. Expect called meetings at any time. Thank you again for coming on such short notice."

Mickelson spoke again. "Will we be going to Condition Delta?" He was referring to the condition at which the President, his Cabinet and members of the Quorum who were currently on Caprica would retreat to a bunker deep under the capital.

"Not yet, but I feel that it will be coming soon. Start making preparations."

He turned and left the room.

Laura remained quietly in her seat as questions and comments and speculation burst out around her. The louder everyone else became, the deeper into herself she sank, her thoughts with a certain commander of a battlestar. He had survived the First Cylon War. Her prayer to the gods was that he would survive this one.

That they all would.