Children of Gods: Prologue
Title: Children of Gods
Authors: olga_theodora and olga_theodora
Summary: The First Cylon War is also the last.
Fandom: BSG/The Hunger Games (see Author’s Notes)
Pairings: Bill/Laura, Sam/Kara, Lee/Kara UST, Lee/?
Rating: MA (series), MA (this chapter, for subject matter)
Warnings: Non-graphic allusions to non-con and dub-con, character death.
Chapter Wordcount: 3000
Authors Notes: A billion gazillion thanks to the fabulous leiascully for keeping us honest, steppin’ up to the plate, and generally for being awesome. A note on the timeline: This is not the timeline you are looking for. We don't play by the same rules as in the canon BSG-verse, so things are a touch altered herein. Call it the Re-re-imagined series. This is less of a crossover and more of a mashup story. You won't find any of the Hunger Games characters here, but the worlds are similar. A hybrid, if you will.
---
The Games begin after the Fall of the Twelve Colonies, a punishment exacted by the Cylons on their human creators for their many transgressions. In the eyes of the machine race, humanity’s sins go beyond hope of redemption. Forgiveness is not the way of the One True God. The children of the gods must suffer their salvation.
The rules of the Games are few, but they are absolute:
Two children between the ages 12 and 18 --one male, one female-- from each Colony must be given in Tribute to the Cylons every year.
Tributes must compete to the death in the Arena. The last alive is the Victor.
The Games are aired across the Colonies all day, every day until the final battle has been fought. Viewing is not compulsory, but of course, it does not need to be -- no pyramid match could contend with the glory of the Games.
There is no greater spectacle in the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.
---
PROLOGUE: THE SPARKS ASCEND
Year 34 of the Unified Era
Laura Roslin is sixteen years old when she is selected at the Reaping for the 34th Colonial Games. Her younger sisters burst into tears as their father slumps to the ground, collapsing in grief. After the death of his long-sick wife, it is too soon to lose another of his girls.
For her part, Laura simply closes her eyes and gives quiet thanks to the Gods that her mother has not lived to see this day.
---
An older boy who Laura doesn’t know is selected as her fellow Caprican tribute. She doesn’t particularly enjoy being around him; there is no point in forming an attachment to someone she’ll have to eventually kill or be killed by, Laura reasons, and so she keeps her distance. Still, he can be quite charming at times. In another life she might have actually liked him.
The night before the Games, Laura idly considers sleeping with him, but quickly rejects the idea, deciding, on the whole, she’d prefer to die a virgin with a full night of sleep than to waste it in favor of an awkward, semi-painful rite of passage to an adulthood she won’t live to see.
Although she barely manages any rest, Laura has no regrets once morning arrives. Her decision proves a wise one when Richie Adar dies at the start, taking a knife to the throat thrown by a deceptively quiet boy called Wally Gray.
---
Six days into the Game, she finds the dark-skinned Gemenese girl sobbing over the body of one of the Libran tributes, a bloody knife on the ground by her side. Sesha Abinell’s cold eyes are colder now with death, and Laura does not mourn her.
Though her sobs, Elosha is attempting to perform the burial rites of her faith. When she sees she is being watched she merely closes her eyes, continuing to murmur as she waits for the killing shot from Laura's bow.
“You were praying for her,” Laura says, kneeling. She is not religious, and able to count on one hand the number of times she has been to the Temples to make offerings to the Gods. She sees no reason to worship the Lords of Kobol when they spared no mercy for her mother in her final hours, nor did they see fit, it would seem, to grant much ease or kindness upon her family even after her death. Still, Laura finds herself moved by Elosha's uncommon grace.
The girl’s eyes brim with watery tears that flow freely down her lovely, agonized face. “I was studying to enter the priesthood. They’ll never take me now, after what I've done,” Elosha sniffs. “My family will disown me, even if I win.”
She looks Laura in the eye, pleading with her. “Please kill me. I have nothing left.” Elosha shakes with grief, laying a slim thumb on Sesha's forehead to anoint the dead tribute between her brows with a bit of dirt - the Mark of the Gods.
Instead of drawing her bow, Laura offers her hand. “I have a better idea.”
---
They make a good team. Three nights and days pass in a blur of blood and adrenaline, putting Laura and Elosha among a small group of finalists. But the Gamemakers have other ideas, and scheme to turn them against each other. Laura hates them all the more for it.
“We won’t do it!” She roars. “We’re friends, not your minions, and we’re done playing your frakking Games!”
She has no idea what her provocation will do. No clue that, across the Colonies, people will be moved by her defiance, will start to question the Cylons' divine authority. Will challenge the laws of their strictly ordered new society and start to rebel.
That night, a rain of arrows falls into the Arena. Elosha is hit in the chest. She dies slowly.
In the morning, a single golden arrow is left. Laura takes it, promising herself that a time will come when she will use it well.
---
It comes down to her and the Scorpian Tribute.
She recognizes him as the boy who killed Adar. He’s much bigger than she is, but not as clever, or as quick. Despite the blows he is able to land that fracture something in her sternum and leave streaks of blood across Laura’s face, Elosha’s little dagger slips neatly between his ribs, one last gift from her friend. All it takes is a twist of the knife, and it is done.
From somewhere she cannot see, a cannon erupts as Laura Roslin of Caprica is pronounced the champion of the 34th Colonial Games.
---
The unpleasant truth of life after the Games reveals itself slowly during the hazy, uncertain days that follow the Arena. The Victor, she learns firsthand, becomes a kind of state-controlled celebrity, compelled to make appearances throughout the Twelve Colonies in a traveling circus intended to fuel competition for the next year’s event.
The truth, as Laura sees it, is that the Victor is little more than a glamoured-up pawn shuffled to and fro throughout the star systems for no greater purpose than to further demoralize the losing Colonies. Surviving has done nothing to gain her freedom. But there is little she can do, and begrudgingly she submits to the handlers and demands of the Tour while wishing for the long months of travel to end so she can, quite simply, go home.
The previous year, Thomas Zarek led a successful, rebellious campaign for Governor on Saggitaron, wresting control from a long-held patrician oligarchy and leaving President Cavil no choice but to accept Zarek into his inner echelon. As evidence of good faith (and in retribution for Laura’s public defiance of the Cylons), Cavil presents his new, dangerously popular colleague with the greatest prize he has to offer: a champion of the Games.
---
The first time, she is led up a sweeping staircase to a room in an uncomfortably opulent hotel. Tom Zarek is a good ten years older than she is, maybe a little more -- a young, charismatic leader. He is also, she soon determines, a half-mad narcissist riddled to the core with a Zeus-complex, believing himself a protector of the weak and a voice of the oppressed. His eyes run over her in a slow, blinking leer that leaves her feeling naked, despite the fine blue nightgown she wears. That one look from Tom Zarek is enough to make her blood run cold.
Laura fights him. Occasionally she wins -- in one triumphant encounter, rending a long, deep gash down the side of his face with a shard of broken mirror -- but the first awful time of many, she loses. It is the start of many long, fearful nights that blur into endless days on unfamiliar worlds full of people who would prefer her dead rather than their own sons and daughters. She can understand their hatred. She would hate herself, too.
Amid the cameras and the interviews and turning around to find her own, unfamiliar face staring back at her on a screen, Laura realizes how skilled she’s become at acting her part. How good she’s become at hiding an ocean of hatred behind a coy, girlish smile. It makes her seethe the way that Cavil and his Games have made her into someone she doesn’t even recognize anymore. Makes her want to scream and cry and break everything she can get her hands on. And every time Zarek slithers his way into her room, she promises one day she’ll kill him.
In retribution, or perhaps simply for the fun of illustrating the extent of his new-found power, Zarek has her younger sisters murdered.
Two weeks after their funeral, Laura discovers she is pregnant.
---
Year 41 of the Unified Era
Bill Adama already feels like an old man at thirty-three when he meets the young teacher with the ancient eyes.
Since he enlisted at nineteen, the first day he was eligible for service, he’s watched young men die and old men cower before the Cylons and their regime. Has seen their Centurion armies destroy the Temples and icons of the Colonies, turning thousands of years of human history into rubble beneath their feet. The Peacekeepers are meant to bridge the divide between the human and Cylon conflict, to negotiate civility with the restless human populace, to protect and assist in crisis, to defend the Cylon-occupied Colonies with their lives.
To some they are heroes; to others, traitors persecuting their own.
But for the most part, the Colonials simply accept the Peacekeepers for what they once were: members of the now defunct Colonial Fleet. He has been a Peacekeeper all his life because he feels a responsibility to protect Caprica, to protect his home, despite the fact that he has no love of the Cylon forces ruling them all with -- quite literally -- an iron fist. He is a pilot by training, and Commander of the Peacekeeping unit stationed down the coast. He is also the father of two young boys with an ex-wife run off to the Capitol, her head turned by the fashionable prison that is Caprica City. At least she left the boys when she went.
Laura Roslin teaches at the school where her young son and Zak are in the same class, which is how Bill first meets her. Not a year later, the boys are playing in long grass near the river when he asks the question, and the boys combined laughter sends flocks of birds soaring into the air. Laura’s pretty smile hides many secrets, he has learned, and she ducks her head to avoid his beseeching eyes.
“You know,” she says slowly, “that I can’t have any more children. Things went wrong when I had Billy. He almost didn’t make it.”
Bill watches her jaw clench against the grief and anger she has spent seven years trying to forget: a future that a cruel twist of fate and villainous political machinations stole from her, even as they gave her the darling boy she loves completely.
“I know you’ve always wanted a daughter. That’s not something I can give you.” The tone of her voice is flat and steely, something Bill recognizes as Laura’s way of responding to that which she cannot control, and instead recedes somewhere deep inside herself.
Out on the bank, Zak and Billy and Lee skip stones, tripping through the water after a hopping frog. They have grown up together over the past year, their boys; are brothers in their own way. Two broken families made whole.
“Laura,” Bill says, in his gently chastising manner, like he is speaking to one of their occasionally insolent children. He lifts her chin with two fingers. Just me, he says with a look. Don’t hide.
Later, Laura slyly pushes him in the river and the boys collapse in hysterics when Bill pulls her with down with him, but she only does so after kissing him soundly and saying Yes.
---
Year 48 of the Unified Era
Of the many qualities President John Cavil is known to possess, compassion is not one of them. Ambition, yes. Creative morality, exceptionally so. Deviousness. Cruelty. Arrogance. With so much space occupied by the many digital faces of his pride, precious little room remained for any programs concerning kindness or humility, let alone love.
The door of the President’s chamber opens. A Two and a Six enter, presenting themselves before his desk.
“We’ve detained another group of insurgents, sir,” the Two remarks, voice low and irritable. This particular Two, Cavil recalls, has been on the front lines before and died at the hands of humans in their petty attempts to maintain a wretched, backwards and inherently flawed status quo. The Two does not look happy.
“Where this time?” Cavil growls, certain he can expect the same ill-tidings as every other time the Two has walked into his office wearing that expression.
“Aerilon, sir,” the Leoben model says, dropping a folder full of photographs on his desk; some are of interiors, some mug shots. Some bodies. “We apprehended them in an abandoned granary. Very similar to the bunker we found in Virgon after the bombing at our primary research facility. This appeared to be a recruitment office, from what we could ascertain. Most alarming are the schematics of resurrection technology.”
“What about weapons?” Cavil snaps. It’s one thing for the imbecile native to throw rocks at iron houses. It is quite another if they have assault rifles and nuclear bombs.
The Six speaks. “The few we took alive claim to be operating as a singular cell, but some of the information could only have come from Caprica.” At this the Two and Six share an uneasy glance. “We think someone is feeding them inside information.”
Cavil heaves a long suffering sigh. “So there is a mole in Caprica City. Wonderful,” he sneers. Humans are a wretched species: a virus to these worlds; a cancer on the universe. If only the Sixes and Sevens had gone along with the original plan to exterminate them outright, this conversation would be wholly unnecessary. “Have you traced any of our hapless insurgents stolen intelligence back to a source?” He taps the pads of his fingers together.
“We think.” the Two trailed off, choosing his words carefully. “What we suspect is that--”
“Where is the source?” Cavil repeats.
The Six hurriedly qualifies, “While there isn’t direct evidence of Peacekeeper involvement, we have some information that suggest--”
Cavil slams his palms down upon the table. The vibration is strong enough to send the vase of roses at its edge crashing on its side. “Where is the source!” he snaps.
A beat. “We think Delphi, sir.”
“Delphi,” Cavil says, sitting back into his chair. The water slides off the edge of his desk, carrying a line of deep red petals scattered across the surface to the floor.
His memory flashes, calling up the face of a defiant young woman. A young woman who incited one of the largest anti-Cylon movements to date. Quelled, naturally, but not after some damage to a great many of their resurrection facilities on multiple planets and the loss of tens of thousands of their brothers and sisters.
The petals flutter to the floor, bright splashes of crimson that fall before his feet.
Laura Roslin was born on Caprica, in Delphi; still lives in a coastal village not far from her hometown, last he had read.
Cavil frowns. It had been a mistake to let her live. Human beings, he has always felt, behave hardly any differently than the domesticated animals they had descended from. A danger to themselves and to others. That Laura Roslin was a dangerous creature he knows, but he has always assumed this was because of what she represented rather than what she was capable of. It seemed he has underestimated her. President John Cavil is almost impressed.
“Delphi,” he says again, a smile cracking his face. “How lucky for us all.”
He rises and walks to his window, looking out over the Capitol of Caprica City. Deep in thought, he pays no attention to the scores of flowers that are crushed beneath his feet.
---
CHAPTER ONE: CHILDHOOD'S END
Authors: olga_theodora and olga_theodora
Summary: The First Cylon War is also the last.
Fandom: BSG/The Hunger Games (see Author’s Notes)
Pairings: Bill/Laura, Sam/Kara, Lee/Kara UST, Lee/?
Rating: MA (series), MA (this chapter, for subject matter)
Warnings: Non-graphic allusions to non-con and dub-con, character death.
Chapter Wordcount: 3000
Authors Notes: A billion gazillion thanks to the fabulous leiascully for keeping us honest, steppin’ up to the plate, and generally for being awesome. A note on the timeline: This is not the timeline you are looking for. We don't play by the same rules as in the canon BSG-verse, so things are a touch altered herein. Call it the Re-re-imagined series. This is less of a crossover and more of a mashup story. You won't find any of the Hunger Games characters here, but the worlds are similar. A hybrid, if you will.
---
The Games begin after the Fall of the Twelve Colonies, a punishment exacted by the Cylons on their human creators for their many transgressions. In the eyes of the machine race, humanity’s sins go beyond hope of redemption. Forgiveness is not the way of the One True God. The children of the gods must suffer their salvation.
The rules of the Games are few, but they are absolute:
Two children between the ages 12 and 18 --one male, one female-- from each Colony must be given in Tribute to the Cylons every year.
Tributes must compete to the death in the Arena. The last alive is the Victor.
The Games are aired across the Colonies all day, every day until the final battle has been fought. Viewing is not compulsory, but of course, it does not need to be -- no pyramid match could contend with the glory of the Games.
There is no greater spectacle in the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.
---
PROLOGUE: THE SPARKS ASCEND
Year 34 of the Unified Era
Laura Roslin is sixteen years old when she is selected at the Reaping for the 34th Colonial Games. Her younger sisters burst into tears as their father slumps to the ground, collapsing in grief. After the death of his long-sick wife, it is too soon to lose another of his girls.
For her part, Laura simply closes her eyes and gives quiet thanks to the Gods that her mother has not lived to see this day.
---
An older boy who Laura doesn’t know is selected as her fellow Caprican tribute. She doesn’t particularly enjoy being around him; there is no point in forming an attachment to someone she’ll have to eventually kill or be killed by, Laura reasons, and so she keeps her distance. Still, he can be quite charming at times. In another life she might have actually liked him.
The night before the Games, Laura idly considers sleeping with him, but quickly rejects the idea, deciding, on the whole, she’d prefer to die a virgin with a full night of sleep than to waste it in favor of an awkward, semi-painful rite of passage to an adulthood she won’t live to see.
Although she barely manages any rest, Laura has no regrets once morning arrives. Her decision proves a wise one when Richie Adar dies at the start, taking a knife to the throat thrown by a deceptively quiet boy called Wally Gray.
---
Six days into the Game, she finds the dark-skinned Gemenese girl sobbing over the body of one of the Libran tributes, a bloody knife on the ground by her side. Sesha Abinell’s cold eyes are colder now with death, and Laura does not mourn her.
Though her sobs, Elosha is attempting to perform the burial rites of her faith. When she sees she is being watched she merely closes her eyes, continuing to murmur as she waits for the killing shot from Laura's bow.
“You were praying for her,” Laura says, kneeling. She is not religious, and able to count on one hand the number of times she has been to the Temples to make offerings to the Gods. She sees no reason to worship the Lords of Kobol when they spared no mercy for her mother in her final hours, nor did they see fit, it would seem, to grant much ease or kindness upon her family even after her death. Still, Laura finds herself moved by Elosha's uncommon grace.
The girl’s eyes brim with watery tears that flow freely down her lovely, agonized face. “I was studying to enter the priesthood. They’ll never take me now, after what I've done,” Elosha sniffs. “My family will disown me, even if I win.”
She looks Laura in the eye, pleading with her. “Please kill me. I have nothing left.” Elosha shakes with grief, laying a slim thumb on Sesha's forehead to anoint the dead tribute between her brows with a bit of dirt - the Mark of the Gods.
Instead of drawing her bow, Laura offers her hand. “I have a better idea.”
---
They make a good team. Three nights and days pass in a blur of blood and adrenaline, putting Laura and Elosha among a small group of finalists. But the Gamemakers have other ideas, and scheme to turn them against each other. Laura hates them all the more for it.
“We won’t do it!” She roars. “We’re friends, not your minions, and we’re done playing your frakking Games!”
She has no idea what her provocation will do. No clue that, across the Colonies, people will be moved by her defiance, will start to question the Cylons' divine authority. Will challenge the laws of their strictly ordered new society and start to rebel.
That night, a rain of arrows falls into the Arena. Elosha is hit in the chest. She dies slowly.
In the morning, a single golden arrow is left. Laura takes it, promising herself that a time will come when she will use it well.
---
It comes down to her and the Scorpian Tribute.
She recognizes him as the boy who killed Adar. He’s much bigger than she is, but not as clever, or as quick. Despite the blows he is able to land that fracture something in her sternum and leave streaks of blood across Laura’s face, Elosha’s little dagger slips neatly between his ribs, one last gift from her friend. All it takes is a twist of the knife, and it is done.
From somewhere she cannot see, a cannon erupts as Laura Roslin of Caprica is pronounced the champion of the 34th Colonial Games.
---
The unpleasant truth of life after the Games reveals itself slowly during the hazy, uncertain days that follow the Arena. The Victor, she learns firsthand, becomes a kind of state-controlled celebrity, compelled to make appearances throughout the Twelve Colonies in a traveling circus intended to fuel competition for the next year’s event.
The truth, as Laura sees it, is that the Victor is little more than a glamoured-up pawn shuffled to and fro throughout the star systems for no greater purpose than to further demoralize the losing Colonies. Surviving has done nothing to gain her freedom. But there is little she can do, and begrudgingly she submits to the handlers and demands of the Tour while wishing for the long months of travel to end so she can, quite simply, go home.
The previous year, Thomas Zarek led a successful, rebellious campaign for Governor on Saggitaron, wresting control from a long-held patrician oligarchy and leaving President Cavil no choice but to accept Zarek into his inner echelon. As evidence of good faith (and in retribution for Laura’s public defiance of the Cylons), Cavil presents his new, dangerously popular colleague with the greatest prize he has to offer: a champion of the Games.
---
The first time, she is led up a sweeping staircase to a room in an uncomfortably opulent hotel. Tom Zarek is a good ten years older than she is, maybe a little more -- a young, charismatic leader. He is also, she soon determines, a half-mad narcissist riddled to the core with a Zeus-complex, believing himself a protector of the weak and a voice of the oppressed. His eyes run over her in a slow, blinking leer that leaves her feeling naked, despite the fine blue nightgown she wears. That one look from Tom Zarek is enough to make her blood run cold.
Laura fights him. Occasionally she wins -- in one triumphant encounter, rending a long, deep gash down the side of his face with a shard of broken mirror -- but the first awful time of many, she loses. It is the start of many long, fearful nights that blur into endless days on unfamiliar worlds full of people who would prefer her dead rather than their own sons and daughters. She can understand their hatred. She would hate herself, too.
Amid the cameras and the interviews and turning around to find her own, unfamiliar face staring back at her on a screen, Laura realizes how skilled she’s become at acting her part. How good she’s become at hiding an ocean of hatred behind a coy, girlish smile. It makes her seethe the way that Cavil and his Games have made her into someone she doesn’t even recognize anymore. Makes her want to scream and cry and break everything she can get her hands on. And every time Zarek slithers his way into her room, she promises one day she’ll kill him.
In retribution, or perhaps simply for the fun of illustrating the extent of his new-found power, Zarek has her younger sisters murdered.
Two weeks after their funeral, Laura discovers she is pregnant.
---
Year 41 of the Unified Era
Bill Adama already feels like an old man at thirty-three when he meets the young teacher with the ancient eyes.
Since he enlisted at nineteen, the first day he was eligible for service, he’s watched young men die and old men cower before the Cylons and their regime. Has seen their Centurion armies destroy the Temples and icons of the Colonies, turning thousands of years of human history into rubble beneath their feet. The Peacekeepers are meant to bridge the divide between the human and Cylon conflict, to negotiate civility with the restless human populace, to protect and assist in crisis, to defend the Cylon-occupied Colonies with their lives.
To some they are heroes; to others, traitors persecuting their own.
But for the most part, the Colonials simply accept the Peacekeepers for what they once were: members of the now defunct Colonial Fleet. He has been a Peacekeeper all his life because he feels a responsibility to protect Caprica, to protect his home, despite the fact that he has no love of the Cylon forces ruling them all with -- quite literally -- an iron fist. He is a pilot by training, and Commander of the Peacekeeping unit stationed down the coast. He is also the father of two young boys with an ex-wife run off to the Capitol, her head turned by the fashionable prison that is Caprica City. At least she left the boys when she went.
Laura Roslin teaches at the school where her young son and Zak are in the same class, which is how Bill first meets her. Not a year later, the boys are playing in long grass near the river when he asks the question, and the boys combined laughter sends flocks of birds soaring into the air. Laura’s pretty smile hides many secrets, he has learned, and she ducks her head to avoid his beseeching eyes.
“You know,” she says slowly, “that I can’t have any more children. Things went wrong when I had Billy. He almost didn’t make it.”
Bill watches her jaw clench against the grief and anger she has spent seven years trying to forget: a future that a cruel twist of fate and villainous political machinations stole from her, even as they gave her the darling boy she loves completely.
“I know you’ve always wanted a daughter. That’s not something I can give you.” The tone of her voice is flat and steely, something Bill recognizes as Laura’s way of responding to that which she cannot control, and instead recedes somewhere deep inside herself.
Out on the bank, Zak and Billy and Lee skip stones, tripping through the water after a hopping frog. They have grown up together over the past year, their boys; are brothers in their own way. Two broken families made whole.
“Laura,” Bill says, in his gently chastising manner, like he is speaking to one of their occasionally insolent children. He lifts her chin with two fingers. Just me, he says with a look. Don’t hide.
Later, Laura slyly pushes him in the river and the boys collapse in hysterics when Bill pulls her with down with him, but she only does so after kissing him soundly and saying Yes.
---
Year 48 of the Unified Era
Of the many qualities President John Cavil is known to possess, compassion is not one of them. Ambition, yes. Creative morality, exceptionally so. Deviousness. Cruelty. Arrogance. With so much space occupied by the many digital faces of his pride, precious little room remained for any programs concerning kindness or humility, let alone love.
The door of the President’s chamber opens. A Two and a Six enter, presenting themselves before his desk.
“We’ve detained another group of insurgents, sir,” the Two remarks, voice low and irritable. This particular Two, Cavil recalls, has been on the front lines before and died at the hands of humans in their petty attempts to maintain a wretched, backwards and inherently flawed status quo. The Two does not look happy.
“Where this time?” Cavil growls, certain he can expect the same ill-tidings as every other time the Two has walked into his office wearing that expression.
“Aerilon, sir,” the Leoben model says, dropping a folder full of photographs on his desk; some are of interiors, some mug shots. Some bodies. “We apprehended them in an abandoned granary. Very similar to the bunker we found in Virgon after the bombing at our primary research facility. This appeared to be a recruitment office, from what we could ascertain. Most alarming are the schematics of resurrection technology.”
“What about weapons?” Cavil snaps. It’s one thing for the imbecile native to throw rocks at iron houses. It is quite another if they have assault rifles and nuclear bombs.
The Six speaks. “The few we took alive claim to be operating as a singular cell, but some of the information could only have come from Caprica.” At this the Two and Six share an uneasy glance. “We think someone is feeding them inside information.”
Cavil heaves a long suffering sigh. “So there is a mole in Caprica City. Wonderful,” he sneers. Humans are a wretched species: a virus to these worlds; a cancer on the universe. If only the Sixes and Sevens had gone along with the original plan to exterminate them outright, this conversation would be wholly unnecessary. “Have you traced any of our hapless insurgents stolen intelligence back to a source?” He taps the pads of his fingers together.
“We think.” the Two trailed off, choosing his words carefully. “What we suspect is that--”
“Where is the source?” Cavil repeats.
The Six hurriedly qualifies, “While there isn’t direct evidence of Peacekeeper involvement, we have some information that suggest--”
Cavil slams his palms down upon the table. The vibration is strong enough to send the vase of roses at its edge crashing on its side. “Where is the source!” he snaps.
A beat. “We think Delphi, sir.”
“Delphi,” Cavil says, sitting back into his chair. The water slides off the edge of his desk, carrying a line of deep red petals scattered across the surface to the floor.
His memory flashes, calling up the face of a defiant young woman. A young woman who incited one of the largest anti-Cylon movements to date. Quelled, naturally, but not after some damage to a great many of their resurrection facilities on multiple planets and the loss of tens of thousands of their brothers and sisters.
The petals flutter to the floor, bright splashes of crimson that fall before his feet.
Laura Roslin was born on Caprica, in Delphi; still lives in a coastal village not far from her hometown, last he had read.
Cavil frowns. It had been a mistake to let her live. Human beings, he has always felt, behave hardly any differently than the domesticated animals they had descended from. A danger to themselves and to others. That Laura Roslin was a dangerous creature he knows, but he has always assumed this was because of what she represented rather than what she was capable of. It seemed he has underestimated her. President John Cavil is almost impressed.
“Delphi,” he says again, a smile cracking his face. “How lucky for us all.”
He rises and walks to his window, looking out over the Capitol of Caprica City. Deep in thought, he pays no attention to the scores of flowers that are crushed beneath his feet.
---
CHAPTER ONE: CHILDHOOD'S END