Fic: Through the Winter chapter 8 (Cain/Gina)
Title: Through the Winter (8/?)
Author: phoenixstorm
Pairing: Cain/Gina
Rating: G
Word Count: 3,826
Summary: Another 'What if' fic. This time: What if Gina was a sleeper agent cylon?
Author note: And excuse my writing. ;>.> Gina strikes me as someone who'd use cursive, and I'm a block print person myself...whose writing is terrible even in block print. Sheesh.
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Chapter Eight
The monitor of the portable computer flashed green at her, and Gina resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Of course everything was compatible. She hadn’t spent all those weeks perfecting the network for there to be any problems with it now.
Still, what Helena wanted, Helena would get. But with that check completed Gina glanced at her watch and realised that although she was early she wouldn’t have time to perform the same procedure on another terminal if she didn’t want to be late to Helena’s quarters.
She stopped by her own quarters first to drop off her equipment, and as she was heading out the door again she paused, and then returned to her desk to pull out the book that she’d been using as a journal for the past couple of weeks. She didn’t bother sitting down, another of the admiral’s habits that she hadn’t realised she’d started to pick up, and picked up her pen to begin writing.
Gina was partway into the entry when suddenly she found herself being thrown face first into the wall in front of her. She stood there with her forehead against the metal for what could have been seconds or hours until she felt something wet start to run down her face. Placing a hand to her forehead she pulled away blood, and the sight of it shocked her just enough to manage to push herself up and stumble across to the door.
Were the lights out? Her head was still fuzzy from the impact, but a part of her was almost certain that it used to be brighter in the room. There were distant noises, almost like screams, and as Gina leant her body against the door she chuckled a little.
“Silly people...’fraid of...of the dark.”
She barely registered that she was now sitting on the floor when she had been standing only seconds earlier, but with her vision spinning she decided that a nap was definitely sounding like a good idea. Gina rested her head against the door, closed her eyes and was out like the lights.
---
The first thing Gina noticed was a sense of falling, but it wasn’t until she hit the floor that she managed to partly wake up. Someone had opened the door from the outside, and suddenly she’d lost the support she was leaning against. Still, the floor was plenty comfortable, and Gina was planning to continue her nap there until she was gripped under the arms and pulled to her feet. The person dragged her back into the room and she heard the sound of the door shutting again, and then Gina was seated on her bed with still not much of an idea of what was going on.
A pair of lips were pressed to her own, and the last traces of fogginess left Gina’s system as she registered exactly who it was that had brought her there.
“Helena,” she mumbled when they parted, leaning into the woman’s chest. “What happened?”
Gina could feel the admiral parting her hair to inspect the cut, and now that she was awake she noticed that her head was pounding.
“It was the cylons,” Helena told her, her hands moving from Gina’s head to stroke her back. “They attacked us. I’ve got a Raptor out scouting the situation at the moment, but all reports so far indicate that this wasn’t an isolated incident.”
Gina pushed herself up so that she could look the admiral in the eyes. “The cylons? You can’t be serious!”
“I’m afraid so.” Helena turned her head away, but not before Gina could see the grief in her eyes. “I have to go and get the ship back in order. I just wanted to make sure...”
Gina wasn’t sure why she’d trailed off there for a moment, but then the implications of what Helena had just said hit her and she gasped. “How many?” she asked, taking Helena’s hand and squeezing tightly.
“We’re still counting at the moment, and there are still plenty in critical condition, but estimates so far are...hundreds. At least five hundred, probably more.”
Gina was shocked to silence. Her vision started to cloud, and she just sat there with her lips parted as she tried to find the joke hidden somewhere in the admiral’s face. She knew of course that Helena would never joke about something like this, but even the smallest scrap of hope was better than accepting the alternative.
“Gods help us” she finally managed to whisper when she had given up hope of Helena revealing a prank. The lights flickered above them and she could hear the Pegasus creaking, sounding almost like low moans.
She looked down when she felt her hand being squeezed, but the admiral was getting to her feet. “Please go and assist with getting the Pegasus’ computer systems back in order. If the cylons attack again I want some weapons at my disposal. Oh, and Gina... I’m glad you’re okay. I don’t...” she paused and ran a hand through her hair, turning her back to Gina as she almost forced out “I don’t know what I would have done...”
Gina stood and wrapped her arms around the admiral’s shoulders. “I’m not going anywhere, Helena. I promise you.”
Helena touched Gina’s linked hands for a short moment, but then pulled away and walked to the door without another word. Gina grabbed her portable computer and followed, trying to prepare herself for whatever would come next. Her head still throbbed from its collision with the wall, but she forced herself to ignore it.
When Helena opened the door Gina saw parts of the ship and puddles of blood all across the floor, and Pegasus crew members ran or limped by with tools. Gina didn’t hesitate and started off at full speed towards the CIC, while Helena continued further into the ship. It was like anarchy when she reached her destination, as parts of computers were scattered all over the room. The woman from earlier, Kendra Shaw, was barking out orders and grabbing computer parts as she tried to put everything back in its proper place.
“How can I help?” Gina stood at Kendra’s side and passed the part the lieutenant had just demanded.
Kendra glanced over at her quickly and then returned her gaze back to the computer. “I’m trying to get the computers up and running again since they were trashed when the missiles hit us. Most of the components are fried in here, but with no network up at the moment it’s not as if we need other terminals throughout the Pegasus. If I give you a list can you go salvage parts from around the ship?”
Gina nodded and started to copy down all the parts the lieutenant listed onto her portable computer with the stylus. From the sounds of things very few parts had actually survived the attack, so Gina was looking at a very long trip if she was going to retrieve everything, especially since the odds were she wouldn’t be able to get all of them from the one terminal.
She excused herself from the CIC, stepping over fallen mesh and pipes as she did so. Surprisingly the glass doors had survived the impact, and she couldn’t say why but somehow that was encouraging.
It took Gina a long while to take everything apart in the first terminal she reached for examination, and then it turned out that everything in it was fried. The same was true at the next four terminals, but at the sixth she finally managed to salvage a part. It was there that she ran into Lynelle, and with a huge smile Gina hugged her friend, so happy to see her all right, but pulled back when she felt the pilot unresponsive in her arms.
“Freckles...” Lynelle said, holding up her hand and unclenching her fist to reveal a set of dog tags. Gina saw the text ‘B. Walker’ engraved on them.
Barbara.
“Oh gods, she’s not...”
Lynelle grabbed Gina’s hand and deposited the dog tags into it. “I have to...I can’t...don’t lose these.” She spoke quickly and was off again even faster, joining up with some other pilots at the end of the corridor. Gina was left by herself, and she closed her fingers tightly against the dog tags, hating the thought that a very good friend of hers was now nothing more than a couple of pieces of engraved metal. It wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t supposed to happen. There was supposed to be a gods-cursed treaty to stop those cylon motherfrakkers from doing anything like this again.
Gina hung the dog tags around her neck and took several deep breaths. When she was certain that she’d composed herself she moved onto the next terminal to continue her hunt.
---
Many hours later Gina returned to the CIC with her finds. She was greeted by a very weary looking Kendra who instructed her to deposit the parts on a table, and then get to work making sure the network was set to go online once she’d finished making the physical repairs. The systems themselves had been repaired by that stage, but all of the monitors themselves were down so Gina’s portable computer was the only one that could currently be used. She hooked it up to a computer to be used as its monitor for the time being, and was scrolling through the code of her network as Kendra interrupted her. “You know what? Let’s swap. You won’t know how any of the other programs on the Pegasus are supposed to work so it’ll be more efficient for me to check everything.”
Gina barely heard her as something odd caught her attention. She’d never noticed this section of code before, but as she ran her eyes over it she realised that it allowed wireless access to the entire network of this Battlestar. How could she have missed that? She had gone over the code of this network almost non-stop for weeks.
“Inviere?” the lieutenant asked, and Gina only barely managed to hold down her panic. What if they thought she’d done that? She was being framed, she was sure of it. There was no possible way that she could have spent as much time as she had modifying the network to not notice this, so it had to have been done since she’d uploaded the ghost to the Pegasus’ systems. It had been online for days now, asleep at the back of the system, waiting to be activated. Any of her crew, any of the entire ship’s crew would have been able to access it and modify it if they’d known what they were doing.
Someone was trying to blame this attack on her, and she would figure out who.
“Just a moment, I’ve got a strong security system on this which will need to be disabled for your use.”
Gina used the time she’d bought to cut the incriminating code from her network and insert it into the previous one. At least this way it would look as if the cylons had been spying on the Pegasus previously, and could have attacked because they’d lost that access with the new network. It was a poor story, but she needed to at least buy a little time until she could come back later and hopefully determine who’d really put it there.
She placed a copy of the code in a hidden folder on her system, and then passed it to Kendra.
Gina worked with the other people in the CIC on repairs, and a little while later she heard what she’d been fearing.
“...what?” Kendra asked out loud, staring intently at Gina’s screen. “What?” she repeated, louder, and stabbed violently at one of the keys. Several of the men and women in the room glanced at the lieutenant, but since no one asked the question Gina didn’t want to bring attention to herself by being the one to speak. She left Kendra to her programs as she continued with her own work, and she noticed Helena enter the room but didn’t bother with any greetings. Now was definitely not the time to be bothering the admiral.
Kendra came over to Gina to return the portable computer. “Thanks,” she said, “that was a very big help. How’re the monitors going?”
“We’re just about there with these ones, and a new circuitboard is needed over there,” Gina directed with her hand, “but then we’ll be right to go fully operational again.”
“Good, I’ll get on the one with the circuitboard then.” Kendra was away and asking one of the men to pass her a circuitboard before Gina could say another word. She shook her head in disbelief as she finished up the computers she was working on, because she couldn’t have been more wrong about this woman based on her first impression. She’d thought the lieutenant to be rather dense, probably one of the military folk who sat behind a desk all the time and had no idea what they were actually doing, but the woman was handling this situation remarkably well. Just as long as she was a little dense about the mysterious code...
“All ready here” she sung out, and after a few moments Kendra replied.
“Ready to reboot nav and defence computer systems. Stand by.”
With the last of the monitors operational Kendra placed the screen back down on hers and the system started to reboot. The logo of Gina’s company popped up on the screen and Gina turned her head away, worried, as Helena walked over to Kendra.
“Lieutenant” she heard Helena say.
“Admiral,” Kendra replied, and then turned to indicate to the monitor she’d just fixed. “The helms, weapons and FTL computers are all back online, and I think I know how the cylons took down our defence grid. These lines of code in the old navigation program? They’ve been designed to create a back door that could enable an enemy to wirelessly access the program.”
“So the cylons have been spying on us, is that what you’re telling me?”
“It’s a possibility, sir.”
Gina decided that she should interrupt there to explain the story she’d come up with. “If they were spying on us it sounds like they must have had something planned. Maybe they were forced to speed up those plans when they discovered that the entire fleet were revising those networks, since they’d lose all contact. There was definitely nothing like that in the new system.”
“No, I had you go over it more than enough times for that to be possible.” Helena agreed, and Gina felt horrible over how easily she’d been able to fool her lover. Despite what it would mean for her, she hadn’t actually expected Helena to buy the explanation. The admiral was too smart for that. So why...
“Luckily ours was already down,” Kendra continued, “but I suggest that we keep it that way, even if there’s no threat from the new network.”
Helena nodded. “All right Lieutenant, it’s your ball. Run with it. Maybe you’re not quite as useless as I thought.”
She looked at both Kendra and Gina. “How long have you two been at your stations?”
“I don’t know sir, I guess I just never left.” Kendra replied, and Gina was surprised to realise the same was true of herself.
“You might want to consider getting some rack time; it’s been two days since the attack.”
Gina nodded and packed up her gear, leaving the CIC as she heard Kendra call Helena back. She’d managed to run on adrenaline when she wasn’t thinking about how much time had passed, but since Kendra had mentioned it just then, and since she’d finally stopped working, her body had realised just how tired it was.
No one paid any attention to her as she slipped into the admiral’s quarters, as she was definitely in need of a good shower first and didn’t want to spend the extra time and effort going to the communal one. She stripped down quickly, leaving a trail of clothing to the shower, and then leant back against the wall with a deep sigh as the water started to fall. It was warm and very comforting, and Gina stood there for a long while before she worried that she might actually fall asleep there. She reached up to start trying to scrub the blood out of her hair, wincing when she was accidentally too rough on her still tender forehead. With that done the water was turned off and she towelled herself dry, and after a sleepy shuffle Gina was over at Helena’s bed, under the covers and asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
---
The next few days Gina spent wandering around the ship, helping where she could, and in moments of free time she’d pull out her computer to study the code that she’d found on her network. She managed to pass by the rest of her friends in her travels around the ship, who were thankfully only sporting cuts or a couple of broken bones. There hadn’t been big funeral services for those who had died during the attack, so crew members had to assume the worst until they actually saw people with their own eyes. The bodies were just being placed in the airlock with the ceremonial flags, and Gina had heard the admiral had been going to farewell them all personally, but the names of the dead and the number of dead were still just rumours flying around all over the ship. She hadn’t seen Lynelle since just after the attack, and so she continued wearing Barbara’s dog tags as her own personal memorial to her friend.
She sat down with her computer at one point to really go through the code. She was hoping there would be some sort of ‘signature’ in it somewhere, a style of coding that the programmer may have used to mark the work as their own. But there was no obvious signature, and even worse Gina found that the only time the network had been accessed since its ghost had been uploaded to the Pegasus was through her own computer. She’d been lying before when she’d told Kendra that she had very high security on it, and now she wished that she hadn’t been. The upside was that no one was questioning the explanation she’d given for why the code was found in the old network rather than the new one, but of course that meant that there was still some way for the cylons to access the ship wirelessly that they hadn’t discovered, or there was somebody onboard working as a spy for them. Gina shuddered to think of the kind of person who would sell out their entire species to a bunch of machines. Were they being forced by a threat to their loved ones, or was it something as petty as the promise of power or money? In any case it was inexcusable, and she was determined to find them no matter how long she had to spend staring at her screen.
Right now, however, she felt that a break might possibly shed some light on the situation. She picked up the computer and started to wander, and she found herself in one of the hangers when a beep sounded through the speakers, indicating that the admiral wished to speak to them.
“This is your admiral.” Helena’s voice came through after a long pause. “I know that there have been a lot of rumours going around...about the destruction that has been visited on our home worlds by the cylons. I would like to tell you that they’re exaggerations, but in fact...they don’t even come close to conveying the horror that has just been unleashed upon us. The facts are...”
Gina found herself holding her breath, dreading the news that was about to come.
“That our colonies have been destroyed,” Helena continued, “our cities have been nuked...and our fleet’s gone too. So far there are no indications of any other survivors.”
There were gasps throughout the hanger, and Gina placed a hand over her open mouth. Gods, no, all her friends back on Scorpia...all her friends back on Gemenon...everyone.
Everyone fell silent when the admiral’s voice started to speak again. “I imagine you’re all asking yourselves the same question I am...what do we do now? Do we run? Do we hide? I think those are the easy choices. A philosopher once said ‘when faced with untenable alternatives, you should consider your imperative.’ Look around you. Our imperative is right here. In our bulkheads, in our planes, in our guns, and in ourselves. War is our imperative. And if right now our victory seems like an impossibility then there is something else to reach for. Revenge. Payback. So we will fight. Because in the end it’s the only alternative our enemies have left us. I say let’s make these murdering things understand that as long as this ship and this crew survive, that this war that they started will not be over.” There was a long pause before she added, her voice losing its strength, “thank you.”
There was silence in the hanger for a moment before a voice said softly “so say we all.”
Another voice echoed it, and then the first one called out, loudly, “so say we all!” The chant started with the specialist’s loud voice on top of a few quiet murmurs, but as it continued the other people started to get louder, raising their voices to match his. A few fists were thrown in the air as some people became enthusiastic in supporting their admiral’s cause while others just looked like standing corpses, their eyes hollow, but soon everyone’s voices could be heard chanting, again and again, “so say we all!”
Gina stood at the back, watching, her heart bleeding for everyone in the room. “So say we all” she tried to chant alongside everyone else, but her voice only came out in the smallest of whispers.
She wasn’t in the military, and speeches to boost morale didn’t work on her. “So say we all” she managed to choke out a little louder, but with tears filling her eyes she turned and fled, the voices of the last couple of thousand of her species following her out.
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Chapter Nine
Author: phoenixstorm
Pairing: Cain/Gina
Rating: G
Word Count: 3,826
Summary: Another 'What if' fic. This time: What if Gina was a sleeper agent cylon?
Author note: And excuse my writing. ;>.> Gina strikes me as someone who'd use cursive, and I'm a block print person myself...whose writing is terrible even in block print. Sheesh.
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Chapter Eight
The monitor of the portable computer flashed green at her, and Gina resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Of course everything was compatible. She hadn’t spent all those weeks perfecting the network for there to be any problems with it now.
Still, what Helena wanted, Helena would get. But with that check completed Gina glanced at her watch and realised that although she was early she wouldn’t have time to perform the same procedure on another terminal if she didn’t want to be late to Helena’s quarters.
She stopped by her own quarters first to drop off her equipment, and as she was heading out the door again she paused, and then returned to her desk to pull out the book that she’d been using as a journal for the past couple of weeks. She didn’t bother sitting down, another of the admiral’s habits that she hadn’t realised she’d started to pick up, and picked up her pen to begin writing.
Gina was partway into the entry when suddenly she found herself being thrown face first into the wall in front of her. She stood there with her forehead against the metal for what could have been seconds or hours until she felt something wet start to run down her face. Placing a hand to her forehead she pulled away blood, and the sight of it shocked her just enough to manage to push herself up and stumble across to the door.
Were the lights out? Her head was still fuzzy from the impact, but a part of her was almost certain that it used to be brighter in the room. There were distant noises, almost like screams, and as Gina leant her body against the door she chuckled a little.
“Silly people...’fraid of...of the dark.”
She barely registered that she was now sitting on the floor when she had been standing only seconds earlier, but with her vision spinning she decided that a nap was definitely sounding like a good idea. Gina rested her head against the door, closed her eyes and was out like the lights.
---
The first thing Gina noticed was a sense of falling, but it wasn’t until she hit the floor that she managed to partly wake up. Someone had opened the door from the outside, and suddenly she’d lost the support she was leaning against. Still, the floor was plenty comfortable, and Gina was planning to continue her nap there until she was gripped under the arms and pulled to her feet. The person dragged her back into the room and she heard the sound of the door shutting again, and then Gina was seated on her bed with still not much of an idea of what was going on.
A pair of lips were pressed to her own, and the last traces of fogginess left Gina’s system as she registered exactly who it was that had brought her there.
“Helena,” she mumbled when they parted, leaning into the woman’s chest. “What happened?”
Gina could feel the admiral parting her hair to inspect the cut, and now that she was awake she noticed that her head was pounding.
“It was the cylons,” Helena told her, her hands moving from Gina’s head to stroke her back. “They attacked us. I’ve got a Raptor out scouting the situation at the moment, but all reports so far indicate that this wasn’t an isolated incident.”
Gina pushed herself up so that she could look the admiral in the eyes. “The cylons? You can’t be serious!”
“I’m afraid so.” Helena turned her head away, but not before Gina could see the grief in her eyes. “I have to go and get the ship back in order. I just wanted to make sure...”
Gina wasn’t sure why she’d trailed off there for a moment, but then the implications of what Helena had just said hit her and she gasped. “How many?” she asked, taking Helena’s hand and squeezing tightly.
“We’re still counting at the moment, and there are still plenty in critical condition, but estimates so far are...hundreds. At least five hundred, probably more.”
Gina was shocked to silence. Her vision started to cloud, and she just sat there with her lips parted as she tried to find the joke hidden somewhere in the admiral’s face. She knew of course that Helena would never joke about something like this, but even the smallest scrap of hope was better than accepting the alternative.
“Gods help us” she finally managed to whisper when she had given up hope of Helena revealing a prank. The lights flickered above them and she could hear the Pegasus creaking, sounding almost like low moans.
She looked down when she felt her hand being squeezed, but the admiral was getting to her feet. “Please go and assist with getting the Pegasus’ computer systems back in order. If the cylons attack again I want some weapons at my disposal. Oh, and Gina... I’m glad you’re okay. I don’t...” she paused and ran a hand through her hair, turning her back to Gina as she almost forced out “I don’t know what I would have done...”
Gina stood and wrapped her arms around the admiral’s shoulders. “I’m not going anywhere, Helena. I promise you.”
Helena touched Gina’s linked hands for a short moment, but then pulled away and walked to the door without another word. Gina grabbed her portable computer and followed, trying to prepare herself for whatever would come next. Her head still throbbed from its collision with the wall, but she forced herself to ignore it.
When Helena opened the door Gina saw parts of the ship and puddles of blood all across the floor, and Pegasus crew members ran or limped by with tools. Gina didn’t hesitate and started off at full speed towards the CIC, while Helena continued further into the ship. It was like anarchy when she reached her destination, as parts of computers were scattered all over the room. The woman from earlier, Kendra Shaw, was barking out orders and grabbing computer parts as she tried to put everything back in its proper place.
“How can I help?” Gina stood at Kendra’s side and passed the part the lieutenant had just demanded.
Kendra glanced over at her quickly and then returned her gaze back to the computer. “I’m trying to get the computers up and running again since they were trashed when the missiles hit us. Most of the components are fried in here, but with no network up at the moment it’s not as if we need other terminals throughout the Pegasus. If I give you a list can you go salvage parts from around the ship?”
Gina nodded and started to copy down all the parts the lieutenant listed onto her portable computer with the stylus. From the sounds of things very few parts had actually survived the attack, so Gina was looking at a very long trip if she was going to retrieve everything, especially since the odds were she wouldn’t be able to get all of them from the one terminal.
She excused herself from the CIC, stepping over fallen mesh and pipes as she did so. Surprisingly the glass doors had survived the impact, and she couldn’t say why but somehow that was encouraging.
It took Gina a long while to take everything apart in the first terminal she reached for examination, and then it turned out that everything in it was fried. The same was true at the next four terminals, but at the sixth she finally managed to salvage a part. It was there that she ran into Lynelle, and with a huge smile Gina hugged her friend, so happy to see her all right, but pulled back when she felt the pilot unresponsive in her arms.
“Freckles...” Lynelle said, holding up her hand and unclenching her fist to reveal a set of dog tags. Gina saw the text ‘B. Walker’ engraved on them.
Barbara.
“Oh gods, she’s not...”
Lynelle grabbed Gina’s hand and deposited the dog tags into it. “I have to...I can’t...don’t lose these.” She spoke quickly and was off again even faster, joining up with some other pilots at the end of the corridor. Gina was left by herself, and she closed her fingers tightly against the dog tags, hating the thought that a very good friend of hers was now nothing more than a couple of pieces of engraved metal. It wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t supposed to happen. There was supposed to be a gods-cursed treaty to stop those cylon motherfrakkers from doing anything like this again.
Gina hung the dog tags around her neck and took several deep breaths. When she was certain that she’d composed herself she moved onto the next terminal to continue her hunt.
---
Many hours later Gina returned to the CIC with her finds. She was greeted by a very weary looking Kendra who instructed her to deposit the parts on a table, and then get to work making sure the network was set to go online once she’d finished making the physical repairs. The systems themselves had been repaired by that stage, but all of the monitors themselves were down so Gina’s portable computer was the only one that could currently be used. She hooked it up to a computer to be used as its monitor for the time being, and was scrolling through the code of her network as Kendra interrupted her. “You know what? Let’s swap. You won’t know how any of the other programs on the Pegasus are supposed to work so it’ll be more efficient for me to check everything.”
Gina barely heard her as something odd caught her attention. She’d never noticed this section of code before, but as she ran her eyes over it she realised that it allowed wireless access to the entire network of this Battlestar. How could she have missed that? She had gone over the code of this network almost non-stop for weeks.
“Inviere?” the lieutenant asked, and Gina only barely managed to hold down her panic. What if they thought she’d done that? She was being framed, she was sure of it. There was no possible way that she could have spent as much time as she had modifying the network to not notice this, so it had to have been done since she’d uploaded the ghost to the Pegasus’ systems. It had been online for days now, asleep at the back of the system, waiting to be activated. Any of her crew, any of the entire ship’s crew would have been able to access it and modify it if they’d known what they were doing.
Someone was trying to blame this attack on her, and she would figure out who.
“Just a moment, I’ve got a strong security system on this which will need to be disabled for your use.”
Gina used the time she’d bought to cut the incriminating code from her network and insert it into the previous one. At least this way it would look as if the cylons had been spying on the Pegasus previously, and could have attacked because they’d lost that access with the new network. It was a poor story, but she needed to at least buy a little time until she could come back later and hopefully determine who’d really put it there.
She placed a copy of the code in a hidden folder on her system, and then passed it to Kendra.
Gina worked with the other people in the CIC on repairs, and a little while later she heard what she’d been fearing.
“...what?” Kendra asked out loud, staring intently at Gina’s screen. “What?” she repeated, louder, and stabbed violently at one of the keys. Several of the men and women in the room glanced at the lieutenant, but since no one asked the question Gina didn’t want to bring attention to herself by being the one to speak. She left Kendra to her programs as she continued with her own work, and she noticed Helena enter the room but didn’t bother with any greetings. Now was definitely not the time to be bothering the admiral.
Kendra came over to Gina to return the portable computer. “Thanks,” she said, “that was a very big help. How’re the monitors going?”
“We’re just about there with these ones, and a new circuitboard is needed over there,” Gina directed with her hand, “but then we’ll be right to go fully operational again.”
“Good, I’ll get on the one with the circuitboard then.” Kendra was away and asking one of the men to pass her a circuitboard before Gina could say another word. She shook her head in disbelief as she finished up the computers she was working on, because she couldn’t have been more wrong about this woman based on her first impression. She’d thought the lieutenant to be rather dense, probably one of the military folk who sat behind a desk all the time and had no idea what they were actually doing, but the woman was handling this situation remarkably well. Just as long as she was a little dense about the mysterious code...
“All ready here” she sung out, and after a few moments Kendra replied.
“Ready to reboot nav and defence computer systems. Stand by.”
With the last of the monitors operational Kendra placed the screen back down on hers and the system started to reboot. The logo of Gina’s company popped up on the screen and Gina turned her head away, worried, as Helena walked over to Kendra.
“Lieutenant” she heard Helena say.
“Admiral,” Kendra replied, and then turned to indicate to the monitor she’d just fixed. “The helms, weapons and FTL computers are all back online, and I think I know how the cylons took down our defence grid. These lines of code in the old navigation program? They’ve been designed to create a back door that could enable an enemy to wirelessly access the program.”
“So the cylons have been spying on us, is that what you’re telling me?”
“It’s a possibility, sir.”
Gina decided that she should interrupt there to explain the story she’d come up with. “If they were spying on us it sounds like they must have had something planned. Maybe they were forced to speed up those plans when they discovered that the entire fleet were revising those networks, since they’d lose all contact. There was definitely nothing like that in the new system.”
“No, I had you go over it more than enough times for that to be possible.” Helena agreed, and Gina felt horrible over how easily she’d been able to fool her lover. Despite what it would mean for her, she hadn’t actually expected Helena to buy the explanation. The admiral was too smart for that. So why...
“Luckily ours was already down,” Kendra continued, “but I suggest that we keep it that way, even if there’s no threat from the new network.”
Helena nodded. “All right Lieutenant, it’s your ball. Run with it. Maybe you’re not quite as useless as I thought.”
She looked at both Kendra and Gina. “How long have you two been at your stations?”
“I don’t know sir, I guess I just never left.” Kendra replied, and Gina was surprised to realise the same was true of herself.
“You might want to consider getting some rack time; it’s been two days since the attack.”
Gina nodded and packed up her gear, leaving the CIC as she heard Kendra call Helena back. She’d managed to run on adrenaline when she wasn’t thinking about how much time had passed, but since Kendra had mentioned it just then, and since she’d finally stopped working, her body had realised just how tired it was.
No one paid any attention to her as she slipped into the admiral’s quarters, as she was definitely in need of a good shower first and didn’t want to spend the extra time and effort going to the communal one. She stripped down quickly, leaving a trail of clothing to the shower, and then leant back against the wall with a deep sigh as the water started to fall. It was warm and very comforting, and Gina stood there for a long while before she worried that she might actually fall asleep there. She reached up to start trying to scrub the blood out of her hair, wincing when she was accidentally too rough on her still tender forehead. With that done the water was turned off and she towelled herself dry, and after a sleepy shuffle Gina was over at Helena’s bed, under the covers and asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
---
The next few days Gina spent wandering around the ship, helping where she could, and in moments of free time she’d pull out her computer to study the code that she’d found on her network. She managed to pass by the rest of her friends in her travels around the ship, who were thankfully only sporting cuts or a couple of broken bones. There hadn’t been big funeral services for those who had died during the attack, so crew members had to assume the worst until they actually saw people with their own eyes. The bodies were just being placed in the airlock with the ceremonial flags, and Gina had heard the admiral had been going to farewell them all personally, but the names of the dead and the number of dead were still just rumours flying around all over the ship. She hadn’t seen Lynelle since just after the attack, and so she continued wearing Barbara’s dog tags as her own personal memorial to her friend.
She sat down with her computer at one point to really go through the code. She was hoping there would be some sort of ‘signature’ in it somewhere, a style of coding that the programmer may have used to mark the work as their own. But there was no obvious signature, and even worse Gina found that the only time the network had been accessed since its ghost had been uploaded to the Pegasus was through her own computer. She’d been lying before when she’d told Kendra that she had very high security on it, and now she wished that she hadn’t been. The upside was that no one was questioning the explanation she’d given for why the code was found in the old network rather than the new one, but of course that meant that there was still some way for the cylons to access the ship wirelessly that they hadn’t discovered, or there was somebody onboard working as a spy for them. Gina shuddered to think of the kind of person who would sell out their entire species to a bunch of machines. Were they being forced by a threat to their loved ones, or was it something as petty as the promise of power or money? In any case it was inexcusable, and she was determined to find them no matter how long she had to spend staring at her screen.
Right now, however, she felt that a break might possibly shed some light on the situation. She picked up the computer and started to wander, and she found herself in one of the hangers when a beep sounded through the speakers, indicating that the admiral wished to speak to them.
“This is your admiral.” Helena’s voice came through after a long pause. “I know that there have been a lot of rumours going around...about the destruction that has been visited on our home worlds by the cylons. I would like to tell you that they’re exaggerations, but in fact...they don’t even come close to conveying the horror that has just been unleashed upon us. The facts are...”
Gina found herself holding her breath, dreading the news that was about to come.
“That our colonies have been destroyed,” Helena continued, “our cities have been nuked...and our fleet’s gone too. So far there are no indications of any other survivors.”
There were gasps throughout the hanger, and Gina placed a hand over her open mouth. Gods, no, all her friends back on Scorpia...all her friends back on Gemenon...everyone.
Everyone fell silent when the admiral’s voice started to speak again. “I imagine you’re all asking yourselves the same question I am...what do we do now? Do we run? Do we hide? I think those are the easy choices. A philosopher once said ‘when faced with untenable alternatives, you should consider your imperative.’ Look around you. Our imperative is right here. In our bulkheads, in our planes, in our guns, and in ourselves. War is our imperative. And if right now our victory seems like an impossibility then there is something else to reach for. Revenge. Payback. So we will fight. Because in the end it’s the only alternative our enemies have left us. I say let’s make these murdering things understand that as long as this ship and this crew survive, that this war that they started will not be over.” There was a long pause before she added, her voice losing its strength, “thank you.”
There was silence in the hanger for a moment before a voice said softly “so say we all.”
Another voice echoed it, and then the first one called out, loudly, “so say we all!” The chant started with the specialist’s loud voice on top of a few quiet murmurs, but as it continued the other people started to get louder, raising their voices to match his. A few fists were thrown in the air as some people became enthusiastic in supporting their admiral’s cause while others just looked like standing corpses, their eyes hollow, but soon everyone’s voices could be heard chanting, again and again, “so say we all!”
Gina stood at the back, watching, her heart bleeding for everyone in the room. “So say we all” she tried to chant alongside everyone else, but her voice only came out in the smallest of whispers.
She wasn’t in the military, and speeches to boost morale didn’t work on her. “So say we all” she managed to choke out a little louder, but with tears filling her eyes she turned and fled, the voices of the last couple of thousand of her species following her out.
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Chapter Nine