Chain 021: Battlestar Galactica

Chain 021: Battlestar Galactica
Location: Picon
Age: 31
Identity: Human, Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+300] All Of This Has Happened Before
(Abilities: Savant; Durability; Regeneration; Hyperkinesis; Achron; Groupthink; United Front; Dropping The Mask; Friends In, Well, Places)
[Free]      Scrappy
[100/1000]  Like A Machine
[300/1000]  Everyman
[700/1000]  Mass Appeal
[800/1000]  A Mind That Burns Like A Fire!
[1000/1300] Omnidisciplinarian
[Free]      Origin Gear: Refugee
[1300/1300] Specialty Ship: Botanical Cruiser

There was something familiar about this whole place, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Checking my handy-dandy tablet, I found a number of interesting things about the world - AI was invented, AI rebelled, fought a war, then apparently decided 'screw this war' and disappeared almost forty years before. No sign of them since. There was a great deal more, but I was less interested in the minutiae behind the Cylons' long lost cousins finding them than I was with the here-and-now. And it seems that I've gained a few new abilities that I can feel will be of immense use in the future to come.

That was for the future, though. The present seemed more pressing - that being, I had a pocket full of a great deal of coin, a warehouse full of assorted supplies, and an uncertain future. And so I decided to carve out a niche as a bored genius-slash-trader. After all, this seemed to be the ideal place for it, what with Picon being fleet headquarters. The trading was easy, as I seemed to have any number of contacts that were interested, and (inexplicably) the keys to an agro ship that could serve well to haul foods around. By the time a year had passed, it wasn't the only ship I had, and I also had a semi-loyal band of misfits that seemed quite suited to the lifestyle. And the coin that I kept them in.

This, of course, all changed abruptly; just under five hours before the Cylon attack began, I became aware of what was coming and started working on what I could to deal with it. I told my people that I'd received word through classified channels of some sort of attack, and ordered everyone to abandon all the contracts and instead get to any FTL-capable ships they could - grab their families and run, if they had to. If it was a false alarm I'd step down and give the company to them all to run, but there was no chance that it was.

(Fleet Command above Picon received a warning that there was an inbound massed Cylon attack, as well. I was already fleeing the planet by the time they landed outside my domicile, thinking it was from some lunatic.)

Once it was apparent that there was indeed an attack, I had the majority of my employees and many of their families on board our ships, split almost evenly between the two cargo haulers, the cruiser, and a derelict craft that I had gotten retrofitted with a jump drive some months before. Without any better plans, we fled, trying to avoid the attack. And while we were running, I had a lot of time to read the tablet and get more background information. All of the things I really should have paid attention to before, but somehow missed.

We made contact with a few ships that fled, like us, and worked together to try and keep everything in order... Repairing ships was initially done, but a matter of days after we'd met other ships we found ourselves harried by Cylon basestars for the better part of two days. Jumping in behind us, every thirty-three minutes, until one of the ships that had joined us failed a jump... and then two jumps later, no more attacks. We all breathed a sigh of relief. And a number of cheers when a battlestar jumped in and sent out shuttles to us, after they spoke with me briefly on the radio.

At first, things seemed grand. They were especially interested in the agro ship, but others seemed to be of interest. I spoke with the marine detachment that she'd sent over, initially. We discussed how we'd escaped, who I was and what I did before the bombs fell, the fact that I'd pulled so many people together in the hours leading up to it on what I described as a hunch. Everything was fine - until I abruptly realized what was going to be happening in a few short hours.

(I may be human, but I don't live in the moment - my existence is spread across five hours. Hearing screams on the marines' radios in five hours, seeing them open fire on us as we resist them, watching them drag people off if we don't-)

When I asked how the fleet was doing, whether they'd had recruits who were signing up, I saw a bit of hesitation in the eyes of one of the marines and pounced on it. Surely there were people willing to sign up to help against the toasters. And really, doesn't the fleet need every able bodied man and woman it can get? Drafting into the military isn't unheard of in a war front. And they relented, in relief. Unfortunately, there was some press-ganging. There had been an unfortunate incident where someone had been shot.

The eventual intent was truly not as bad as it could have been. Con us into consolidating the refugees of the various ships into a single one. It did get progressively worse, though, and I saw where this would go. Press-gang those of a technical mindset into working for them. Strip the derelict-to-be ships of useful parts. All but abandoning us, except when they wanted to take more parts from us or take the food from the agro ship that we were already struggling to ration out. This was most decidedly not an acceptable course of action.

(The timelines where I interrogated them more aggressively, those I did not keep - often because the results were too horrifying, in more ways than one. But getting the codes to be allowed re-entry to Pegasus was not something I could have done otherwise.)

When I decided it was time to be straightforward and painfully blunt, the marines that had boarded the cruiser attempted to express their disagreement with bullets. They were rather surprised when I made a point of being everywhere but where their bullets were, before beating them down, but leaving them alive - after all, they could have easily shot bystanders. This did shock the hell out of everyone who saw it, but not as much as my decision to drag them onto the docked shuttle and pilot it back to the battlestar Pegasus.

I found there were a significant number of guns were pointed at me when I walked out of the Raptor, and I requested an audience with the admiral due to some sort of misunderstanding between her marines and my crew - of course everyone was fine and there was no loss of life, but I took it upon myself to bring them back to safety. I did some fast talking to avoid being clapped in irons, but the brig was a foregone conclusion. On the way there, though, she was not shy and explained to me exactly what she was doing. With a half dozen officers, weapons at the ready, escorting us - by which I mean being prepared to shoot me as soon as she gave word.

(I had to wring out every second that I could, just to get everything right. I have a little sympathy for Coil now - just a little.)

"I find myself somewhat confused, admiral. You see, I was of the impression that the duty of the Colonial fleet was to protect civilians. The last thing I had heard otherwise was that pirates were to be hung by the neck until dead," I told her.
"I am a Colonial admiral, and you are a civilian. I wouldn't expect you to understand," she replied.
"And I can't help but notice that we've walked past the brig and you have your eyes focused on the airlock ahead," I added.
"You assaulted Colonial military officers. Regulations give me broad authority in this matter," she said, a cruel smirk on her face.
"Ah. Well." I came to a stop; the marines escorting us aiming their weapons at me when I did so. "There's just one problem with that, Admiral Cain."
Cain drew her own sidearm, and leveled it directly with my head. "These are your last words. Choose them well."
"You seem to be laboring under the delusion that any of you are capable of killing me."

I ducked as she pulled the trigger and missed; she backed away, ordering her men to open fire, and I got into the middle of them. Cross-fire killed two of them; my fists put the others out of commission as she backed down the hallway, eyes wide. One of her shots winged me, my weathered clothes stained with blood from the wound. As I calmly walked after her, she ordered her men to kill me, and even sounded the boarding alarm. The shuttles on my ragtag fleet's ships were recalled and the marines poured into the corridors - but anyone who would think me to me a mere man would be surprised that so few shots hit me.

(I see where the guns are pointed, and calculate where the bullets are going. If I am ambushed, I can ensure the ambush never happened. With faster reflexes than a Cylon, the only bullets striking me do so by my intention.)

As I waded through squads of armored marines, I pulled my bat from the warehouse and used that to speed my way past. Bruised, battered, and disarmed marines were left in my wake, to the point that they started calling me some sort of beast and arranged an ambush at the location of my inevitable target: the bridge. Even grenades proved ineffective, thanks to having a tool to knock them away or

A couple of the officers shot at me, along with a wall of marines - only to see me dodge, but otherwise not take any action. Unsurprisingly one even tried to sneak up behind me, but whipping the bat around without even looking was effective. After they stood down, Cain threatened to open fire on the civilian fleet unless I submitted; I pointed out that they'd be jumping out in about twenty seconds, so she'd best made it quick. Perplexed, she looked to the DRADIS, only to see my words as the truth.

(The outcome was inevitable. The trick was getting the order of events lined hours up in advance, and fixing the circumstances where I failed to dodge.)

"And so we find ourselves at an impasse," I said to her with a grin, leaning against a wall; a smear of blood decorated it. The wound she gave me had closed, but my clothing was still bloody, enough that no one would really question whether I was still injured.
"Why won't you die?" she hissed from between clenched teeth.
I motioned vaguely toward her. "The gods must think I'm too nice. As opposed to... well. Pirate."
Screaming in frustration, she pulled out her sidearm and proceeded to empty it at me; she was decidedly displeased when nearly every one of the bullets embedded in the bulkhead, one striking me in the thigh, bloodying the leg quite badly. "You're no god!" she hissed. "You're just a man! You bleed red, same as the rest of us!"
"But I haven't claimed to BE a god," I told her, not unkindly. "If I were a god I would have stopped the Cylons in the first place, but I only saved those who I could. Nearly ten thousand souls. I would have seen to it that you weren't put in this position, to condemn them all to the void in favor of your own revenge. And yet... here I stand. A hundred men behind me who will be going through the infirmary. Not a single one dead except at other marines' hands."
She gritted her teeth, as if she expected me not to notice her slowly edging toward her XO, aiming to take his sidearm. "What. Do. You. Want."
"Resign," I said bluntly. "Your men have murdered on your command, and you have condemned innocents to death. I have been exercising exceptional restraint. Resign before your command is retired."
"Frak you," she snapped, taking his sidearm and firing again. I will say she has quite good aim. This time, I did not move and all her bullets struck my center mass; I felt my heart stutter as I coughed up blood, grabbing a console to remain standing. She crowed in victory, before she grabbed a sidearm from another officer as they continued to stare in shock.
I lurched forward, unsteadily, blood leaking to the floor. "I... am the punishment... of the gods... Helena Cain," I growled as I coughed up froth and blood, spitting onto the floor. Wild-eyed, she leveled the weapon at me and pulled the trigger again and again; all of them struck, but for one she'd aimed at my head. I hissed, blood leaking from my mouth, "If you had not committed... great sins... they would not have sent ME!"
She threw the weapon at me as I lunged for her as if it would achieve something, her bridge crew startled out of their stupor when I tackled her and wrapped my hands around her throat. They tried to pull me off of her, some shot at me and put more holes in my body and some just stared on in amazement, but it was all futile; she tried to fight back until she was rendered unconscious.
At which point the crew finally managed to drag me off of her, two of them bodily restraining me. I spat blood again, thin and crimson instead of frothy pink, and looked at them all. "It is the duty of every Colonial officer to refuse to obey any and all unlawful orders. I am relieving Admiral Helena Cain of duty."
They stared as I bodily yanked one arm away from the restraining marine, then the other; at least the blood on them had helped make them slick. "You should be dead," one of them whispered.
I gave a bloody-toothed grin to the marine, who shivered and stepped back as I stood under my own power again. "I'll walk through the Elysian Fields when I'm good and ready," I replied, looking toward the unconscious admiral. "Give me the gods damned radio and put her in the brig."

(Should I say how many potential timelines I burned to this work just right? I hadn't worked my Achron abilities this hard before, not ever. With hope, it will be a long time before I ever need to again.)

After a medic had come to the bridge and declared me to be miraculously uninjured - despite being covered in my own blood, my outfit full of holes - the crew was more than happy to place me in command. Helena Cain, on the other hand, was livid - until she saw me come to the brig in a clean outfit, showing not the slightest sign of discomfort. After a brief discussion, wherein I sliced open my wrist and let her watch as it healed, she was more than a bit catatonic.

Once the dust had finally settled, I deferred fleet management to Kendra Shaw - the civilian fleet was treated less like a resource to be strip mined and more along the lines of something useful, but Pegasus still planned and executed against the Cylons - acting perhaps more fervently than before, as if trying to make up for what they had done wrong. I let the top officers - Shaw and Fisk - know the nature of my gift. Strength. Durability. Healing. Foreknowledge, albeit strongly limited. And with the last of those gifts, we set down a regular pattern - they would plan out three operations, be gone no longer than four hours, and return. If one went poorly, we would try the second option, if that went poorly, we would try the third. Only once were all options vetoed before the operation could be executed, and many more people lived than might otherwise have happened.

Gina Inviere on the other hand... as far as the crew was concerned, I took her to study. In their minds, probably destructively, since I'd told them I was going to find out exactly how . In truth, she joined me in my quarters aboard the cruiser, and we had a great many discussions about the nature of mankind, the Cylons, and the universe itself. She, of course, thought she could kill what she saw as the person who both usurped Cain's role and who was currently leading the Colonials. However, she did not expect to find my strength a match for hers, and my resilience against injury notably higher. God's will, or something like it, I told her. It probably didn't help her case that I freely acknowledged her as a sentient being, rather than a machine, either.

After I pulled out a certain tablet computer, the two of us had a long talk about the Truth: the nature of humans, Cylons, and where they all came from. She freely acknowledged that I told as many lies as truths, and asked how I knew what I spoke of - so I passed her the tablet and challenged her to look up anything she wanted. She initially considered it an elaborate scam, until she found information on it that there was no way anyone else could have known, not even her fellow models. About herself. About Gaius Baltar. The colonies, Kobol, and Earth. Random colonial citizens, specific iterations of her model and other models, the Cylons themselves and their previous iterations, the Hybrids and how they perceived the universe... everything she could find, she devoured the information voraciously. She even tried ot read about me, though my entries only started just over a year prior. Before that, it freely acknowledged I hadn't existed at all.

More notably, when she read about a spacecraft named Hyperion shadowing the fleet from a distance away... the thing easily the size of any of the planets, and keeping itself concealed... she just stared off into space for quite a bit, the implications disturbing her that much. When I made contact with her temporary-catatonic self via telepathy, it was more than mere shock that was written on her face. And after that, I started to bring her back around to a more proper semblance of sanity, even though she'd been traumatized. At least it was sporadically over the course of perhaps two weeks, rather than systematically over months or longer, but having someone else who could step through her memories helped more than I could have thought.

(She refused to believe I wasn't some sort of Cylon from Earth, or even earlier, after that happened. Or alternately, some kind of guardian angel. Whoops.)

(It does not help anything that Helena Cain was found to have hung herself in the brig later.)

Some months later, it came to pass that we intercepted the battlestar Galactica, and the fleets were joined. It was good that the botanical cruiser had gotten a good rhythm going over the last couple of months and was now producing bumper crops, because abruptly it was in high demand. It seems that giving people food more nutritious and flavorful than algae rations helped morale across the fleet, and the fact that I was getting to be a known businessman before the bombs fell meant that mine was a name known across the fleet.

Of course... when I came to Galactica with Commander Shaw and one of the other Pegasus officers, Commander Adama and President Roslin thought something was rather off. Especially with the way that Captain Taylor seemed to defer to me - then again, he was one of the ones who thought of me with something akin to hero worship. Or religious regard. We moved into a meeting room with a guard posted both outside and inside. Firstly, I recommended with Shaw's backing that Adama be quietly promoted to admiral so that there would be no question as to who commands the fleet. Secondly, with them being who they were, I felt they were entitled to the truth. I told them the same thing I had told the others - the reasons behind Pegasus' successful missions thanks to my limited clairvoyance, what Cain had done before I'd relieved her of command, the fact that I'd taken dozens of bullets with no wound to show-

Oh. That was perhaps the wrong thing to say. And now everyone's up with each other at gunpoint, excepting me who is still sitting here, and President Roslin backing toward the edge of the room.

"Oh, damn it Adama, will you put that weapon down? I'm not a Cylon," I snapped.
"Coming back unharmed after being shot point blank?" Adama growled, as the marines aimed at the two from Pegasus. "Sounds a hell of a lot like a skinjob to me."
"Whoa! Okay. Okay. Kendra, Cole, stand down. Look, I can explain-"
"Little familiar with them, aren't you? Go on, then! Explain coming back from the dead!"
"I didn't die, damn it! Just- here, I'll prove it, right here, right now. Shoot me-" Bang. "Ow! Frak! No, let me finish! Shoot me in the HAND, you horse's ass!" Bang. "Frakking hell, I LIKED this suit-"
Roslin added, sardonically, "It'll look fine on you going out the airlock."
"Thank you so much, Madame Airlock- I mean, Madame President. I liked that kidney too, thank you for not shooting me in the face, commander, I happen to like this beard and regrowing it would take weeks. Now, are you all watching my hand?"
"What the..." "That's... impossible."
"All things are possible. Just not probable." I wiggled the hand, a little bloody, but intact with all fingers working properly.
"By the gods. I'd heard Cylons heal fast, but this-"
"Oh for the love of- pull your head out of your ass! I'm not a Cylon. It would be far more accurate to say I was blessed by the gods."
"You... you seriously expect me to believe that you've been blessed by the gods?" Adame had a skeptical look on his face, but he'd at least lowered his gun.
"He's a living saint," murmured Major Taylor.
I winced. "That may be laying it on a little thick. Mostly I've been in the right place at the right time."
The others slowly retook their seats, and Roslin asked the most pertinent question: "If you could see the future, you must have known you were going to be shot." I nodded, and so she asked, "Why would you let that happen in the first place, then?"
"It was the easiest way to get through to you two," I replied. "We could have sat here and prattled on for hours and came around to it, but let's be honest: none of us have the time for that. I'd rather skip the bullshit."
A grudging nod.
"Which brought us to our next issue: I wanted to have a few words with Baltar."
This rather shocked them, and they asked how I knew, but that was a foregone conclusion:
"Some of the bullshit we skipped probably would have involved things like 'oh, we saved the guy who designed the Command Navigation Program' and I would have gone 'oh, we captured the skinjob that sabotaged the Command Navigation Program and I interrogated her before she mysteriously disappeared out an airlock' and then it would have been a good idea for us to compare notes since I interrogated her extensively." A lie, of course; the information was on the tablet. I'd been paying attention to it, same as I'd planned our paths to meet.
Adama took note of the guilty looks on Shaw and Taylor's faces - they'd already been raked over the coals over the ordeal by their own conscience. Then nodded. "We might be able to arrange it."
"Another thing - I'm pretty certain the skinjobs can back up their minds. I can explain it in detail later, I spent a lot of time studying our captive in depth, but the short version is easy: You've heard how a mother can lift a car if her child is pinned underneath? It's on that level, except it's always on. Their bodies just ignore the fact that they're tearing their muscles apart until afterward. The only real change is in their brains. If they die, it kicks out a massive pulse of data. Not sure across what frequencies, but this means they have to be tracking the fleet and keeping some sort of ship close to collect the data. And if they can read from the brain, they can probably write onto it like a hard drive... or erase it, or lock it. Which means sleeper agents are probably very possible. I'd bet anything that they're all some kind of clones - a lot of this I didn't get the details of until very recently. But even if we catch them, we can't kill them - otherwise we're just giving away intelligence to the enemy."
This wasn't data that I'd yet shared with the Pegasus crew, and both Shaw and Taylor seemed extremely offput by it all... and yet, Adama was less surprised. When I inquired, he only mentioned he'd seen some insanity at the end of the war, but was never really sure - and this answered whether it really was.
They also mentioned that they had a Cylon prisoner, and I cheerfully volunteered to interrogate them - I told them I'd broken our Cylon with nothing but words, and I bet they could do the same. At which point Roslin threw her hands up in the air and asked, "You bring us a battlestar, intelligence, fresh food, fifteen thousand more people, AND you can break Cylons? Is there anything you can't do?"
With a shake of my head, I said, "About the only thing I can't do is point the way to Earth... but I can tell you the sacred scrolls weren't wrong. There are sign posts out there."
Adama stared at me for a good moment before asking, "How the frak did you even know about that...?"
Cole answered him: "Living saint."
Laura Roslin murmured, "I'm starting to wonder."

That meeting took more out of me than I expected, and I hadn't even used being an Achron to do more than shift where I sat so Adama would hit my kidney instead of my liver. (Certain things heal more easily and less painfully, you see.) But it worked out - Pegasus was a part of the fleet now, firmly under Adama's command, and things were going surprisingly well in that regard. I was a part of things as an advisor - Baltar had helped with a couple of operations, even if he had a far more nervous demeanor than my own, so it's no surprise that it gave a valid angle for me to more than occasionally do the same. Other than that, it was largely a matter of logistics - the crops kept coming, though every square inch of workable space on the cruiser had been turned into farmland - no one in the fleet went hungry, shockingly. (Even cats.)

While the details of fleet supply were being worked out, though, information came in about the Resurrection Ship; I doubted it was the ONLY one of its kind, but no one beside Adama and Tigh needed to hear my concerns about that. On my suggestion, after the fleet jumped, a Raptor flew back to take pictures of the wreckage. It was gruesome work, but it served a purpose - pictures of the faces of six of the models were gotten. Composites were drawn and circulated among security so they could be quietly arrested.

Baltar, on the other hand, well... he was an odd bird. He reacted more oddly to my presence than I expected, walking on eggshells as if he were afraid I would lash out at him at any moment, and it took a great deal of talking to get him to lower his guard around me even the slightest bit. I told him I knew the truth what happened and that his sins were pride and lust, not wrath and greed like Cain's - I was hardly going to do anything to him, though he needed to manage them a bit better.

"Just count yourself lucky," I told him. "After all, God is watching out for you, Gaius."
"He- I- wha- how did-" he sputtered.
I watched him, trying and utterly failing to hide an amused look on my face, until I couldn't stop myself from speaking any more. "I mean, I'd ask you to introduce me to your imaginary friend, but I imagine she's a bit confused by my presence."
"Y- er- I-I-I wouldn't say that- bu- how d- wait, she's REAL?!"
I grinned toothily. "Oh, as real as you, me, and God himself. Though from what I read, he doesn't like to be called that." After a pause, I mused, "I wonder if it's a little similar to the whole 'living saint' nonsense I'm dealing with, no one here has a context for it so they call it religion."
Baltar just stammered further, before simply... fainting.
"Well. That was underwhelming," I said with a shake of my head, before addressing the otherwise empty room. "At any rate, you know I'm not one of the locals, but I've got next to no information about you all and I doubt I'll get any. I'm trying to take a light hand - you know I could do otherwise - but I'm not one that can just let injustices stand, so I'll do what I can to keep people on an even keel. Whether they're freeborn, force grown, or manufactured. I'm looking forward to getting a chance to talk to an honest-to-goodness Cylon, since they're out there - I mean, I'm not counting these guys. I'm honestly curious whether I can establish peaceful dialog with them."
I didn't hear a response before I left the room. But then again, I didn't really expect to get one.

Things progressed, perhaps a bit more smoothly than they otherwise might have. A nascent peace movement was shot down after the two experts on Cylons - Baltar and myself - agreed during an interview by one D'Anna Biers that the Cylons, as they were now, would not be open to dialog, but at the first opportunity we would attempt to test that.

(D'Anna and I had a more private interview, afterwards. To wit: she came alone with me to the cruiser, met Gina Inviere, and the three of us sat down and had a very long, very frank discussion about certain memory alterations made by a particular individual to every one of the rest of them.)

It turned out there was a nascent black market forming in the fleet, as well. Being the only source of fresh food, it wasn't so surprising that it would happen, but some sort of underground movement trying to steal food wasn't tolerated by the crew, by my men. An abject example was made of them - not any harm other than them getting beaten up... unless you count the fact that they were shipped back to Cloud Nine in a shipping crate, rather uncomfortable. And also naked.

(It didn't hurt that Lee Adama liquidated a chunk of the black market a week later after one of them had the balls to kill the XO of the Pegasus, though.)

After that, though... well, I had been very quietly seeing to the capture of various Cylons, especially with the aid of D'Anna and Gina. Isolate one, and then simply talk to it. Show it the truth. Some were initially nervous since the closest resurrection ship had been destroyed, but there were details that simply couldn't be faked. And speaking to them telepathically, bridging them so they could share memories, was something that simply could not be protested against. Within forty days, all that were still in the fleet were brought into the fold and kept on the cruiser.

(I may have disappeared during this time aboard Hyperion in order to investigate a certain basestar that dated back to the end of the war. The Cylons peacefully letting me speak to their leader

Rather more irritating, in truth, was the issue of New Caprica, as coined by Baltar. Ridiculous, yes. Borderline absurd. But the civilians in the fleet were exhausted and saw an opportunity, and it didn't take much to get people to agree to it. And so I gave her a recommendation: run for reelection on the platform of not giving up the search for Earth, but giving people a safe haven until they can have a better place to relocate to. Because some of us like to use common sense. Reluctantly, she agreed - and my endorsement of her made enough of a difference that she remained president. And her naming the planet Haven, not New Caprica, seemed to emphasize that the situation there would not be permament.

As the votes came in, I led the Cylons to the Cloud Nine, keeping their faces hidden, and ransacked it - a plutonium core was recovered before it could have detonated, the device in the hands of two of the more insane Demand Peace members (who were subsequently quietly put on trial and executed by Admiral Adama). Apparently they'd intended to strike one of the battlestars with it but couldn't figure out how to suppress the fleet's radiological alarm once it was in transit. One battlestar they could fool, but two? No.

As such, the bulk of the civilian fleet relocated to the planet's surface, though there were enough optimists to keep Galactica staffed with a decent crew, scouting around regularly and supervising occasional mining operations in nearby systems, bringing back materials for reprocessing. Pegasus' on board manufacturing capabilities saw to it that building semi-permanent habitation was possible, rather than simply being a tent city - things were fully planned out. Even a few plants proved to be sturdy enough to grow in the cold, under the diffuse light that reached the planet. Baltar took up a place as a teacher, of all things, and found he had an unexpected love for teaching.

I, meanwhile, bowed out for a bit - the cruiser stayed in orbit to supplement the food situation planetside, but I returned to the Colonies. Adama knew about it in advance, of course - he would have had to approve it - but he didn't know the nature of the ship I was taking. He thought it was the derelict ship that I'd retrofitted with a Colonial jump drive, and sure, I left on board that with a group of hand-picked individuals. Tory Foster, the president's aide, for representation from the civilian government. Colonel Tigh, ostensibly for military supervision. His wife, because there was simply no escaping that woman when she put her mind to something. Samuel Anders, for knowledge of conditions post-war. Galen Tyrol, in case we had any technical issues that needed sorting. And finally... all of the Cylons, though they kept their identities concealed until we'd gotten situated.

The brief panic was settled when I pointed out that I'd subverted all of them - or rather, opened their eyes to the truth. I let the other five of them pass around that tablet, simply because the reactions they had to finding out they were all Cylons (from Earth!) amused me. And then I ensured everyone had their eyes out the windows as I had Hyperion deactivate its cloak and bring us aboard, and watched the former outrage of them being said to be Cylons fall to utter silence as we landed within a planet-sized ship.

(It turns out that Fifth Imperium technology was easily able to undo what John Cavil had done and restore their memories fully, as well. Interesting, isn't it.)

Our return to the Colonies was eventful - with the cloak active, it was not difficult to subvert the majority of the Cylon basestars in the system, it simply took time to take control of their systems and lock anyone out. Only a handful managed to jump away, the rest just remained dead in space (with life support going, mind). The Cylons on board were instructed to exit via the heavy raiders on board, and the basestars were deconstructed around them after they launched, with a capsule built around the core instead to keep the base's Hybrid intact and safe, before that capsule was brought aboard Hyperion.

Unsurprisingly, the heavy raiders had already been subverted, and we had something of a giant Cylon reunion aboard the Hyperion where they all brought each other up to speed on Cavil's treachery. Hyperion rebuilt the basestars and let everyone head back home, and there was something of a civil war for a period of time. This was rapidly brought to an end after the inhibitor chips were removed from the Centurions, and the boxing of a particular One. After that... the Cylons were abruptly a non-issue for the Colonials. After all, they weren't coming back, and we weren't going to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow, either. Only a handful of Cylons stayed on, among them D'Anna Biers and a couple of Sixes, and the Five themselves.

During all of that, the reclamation of the Colonies began. And yes, there were a great many humans still surviving, though conditions were questionable - some were recovered from some rather disturbing facilities, others were just trying to eke out an existence. The sensor package on Hyperion was powerful enough that they could all be recovered, and I freely admit to cheating to make sure everyone was well-fed and medical conditions seen to as the derelict went from planet to planet, evacuating survivors. Depressingly small numbers of survivors. Barely a hundred thousand, all told, out of twenty billion. It was miserably cramped on board the derelict, the quarters improvised and packed unpleasantly... but it beat waiting to be shot, starve, or die of radiation poisoning planetside. Once that was done, we jumped back to Haven and Roslin decided she wanted to strangle me for introducing all those issues that come with effectively tripling the civilian population, but it was eventually handled. Even if supply counts seemed to be much higher than people expected - they wrote it off as a blessing from the gods.

Galactica had skirmished with the Cylons a few times while scouting for Earth before I returned with news of a ceasefire, though they'd not run across Earth until Kara Thrace found it afterward; I joined Galactica along with the handful of Cylons, and we all travelled to it together. It was, sadly, uninhabitable due to the radiation, and the decision was quietly made to not notify anyone about it at all. Especially considering it seemed that the human Cylons created their own machines, who revolted. After having revolted against humans and gone their own way.

I suggested that the Sacred Scrolls needed the line 'thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of the human mind' to it, considering the known count of 'this has happened before' was now up to four - Kobol, Earth, the Colonies, and the Cylons' own civil war.

It went up to five after Cavil was unboxed and tried to enslave the organic Cylons again; the Centurions swore the whole thing off, dumped them ALL planetside, then took all the basestars and joined the First Hybrid and the older models in just completely leaving the colonies. With their industrial base cut off and them scattered about the colonies, their resurrection ships in orbit, they were forced to simply make the best of what they had. They had limited FTL in the form of Heavy Raiders, but the rest were all taken away.

The Colonials found a very promising planet and decided it would be Earth, meanwhile, so they set up shop. And though they did not throw their technology into the sun, they did leave the majority of it on the dark side of the Moon. Sadly... by the time I was leaving, it was looking like they were going toward a more primitive existence (also known as "Lee Adama, what are you SMOKING?"). Not all of them, but a good number - about two thirds.

The remainder were building a separate city-state elsewhere. I believe they were calling it Atlantis.

Meanwhile, I fucked off to space for the remainder of my stay, to chill with Campbell Lane and the Hybrids. They were better company than the others.

But to be terribly honest... maybe if humanity and its children are split across three different places, they're less likely to repeat the mistakes of the past.