BSG/Voyager Crossover-Part 12
For 
bantha_fodder's BSG/Crossover ficathon. Dedicated to
regencyg!
Pairing:Janeway/Adama, Sr. or Janeway/Roslin
Prompt: Galactica stumbles into the Delta Quadrant and meet Voyager, Bill and Kathryn bond over the demands of keeping everyone safe. Or Kathryn and Laura bond over being women in charge. Or both.
Title: Flying Colours Part 12: Truth like a hammer falling against an anvil
Word Count: 3,402
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Refer to Part 1
Flying Colours - Part 12: Truth like a hammer falling against an anvil
“Remember what I told you about the interplexing flectures you’re headed for,” Kathryn said holding their gazes. “They’re conduits not only through space, but through time as well.”
“So even if you know which aperture to take to get you where you want to go,” William said, “if you don’t stabilize the flecture, you probably won’t end up when you want to go.”
“Exactly!” Kathryn replied.
“Then why wouldn’t they have stabilized it?” he asked.
“Probably because they didn’t know it needed to be stabilized,” she replied. “Why do you think we’ve never used the flecture point at Alpha Centauri to explore this part of the galaxy and it’s in Earth’s own backyard? Even now, although they know it needs to be stabilized, no one on Earth--or the Federation and perhaps the entire alpha quadrant for that matter--knows how to stabilize an interplexing flecture.”
“Then how do you …” William began before realization blossomed in his eyes and he laughed. “Because you learned how to do it on this journey,” he said in admiration.
“Yep!” she said impishly.
“I think my head’s going to explode,” Laura complained.
“Oh, you’ll get used to it,” Kathryn chuckled, “but I’m getting rather ahead of myself.” She leaned forward still smiling. “From my perspective, in Earth’s time-frame, right now it’s the year 2381 of the Common Era. Ancient Greek civilization was at its height between about 600 to 150 BCE, Before Common Era. We’ll start with Zephram Cochrane, who started the ball rolling on interstellar travel with the first warp ship in 2063. His warp flight attracted the attention of a Vulcan science ship just passing by on its way to more fascinating ports than our little backwater. The last time the Vulcans peeped in on us, we were still petty little barbarians intent on polluting our miserable little mudball and lobbing nuclear weapons at each other. Now little more than a quarter century later, we’re fooling around with warp technology and worse yet, playing with anti-matter--you want to talk about flirting with complete and utter annihilation of Earth and the human species, lose control of a milligram of anti-matter.
“Anyway, the Vulcans figured that since we’d got that far, they’d better take us in hand before we reduced ourselves and our world to sub-atomic particles. So like all good parents, they grounded us, supervised our experiments, and put us on a fairly short leash. Whenever we tried to run ahead too quickly, they yanked us back. And I can tell you, it chafed--it chafed badly. But after the better part of a century of sitting on us and teaching us some rudimentary manners and how to work with others, their little barbarians began to grow up enough to be inflicted on polite Galactic society.”
Laura couldn’t help but laugh at the way she told the story. It was so charming and disarming.
Kathryn held her gaze with a bright smile. “Now, during the period from about 2065 to 2150, the Vulcans allowed us to tool around in warp one ships while they whizzed around the galaxy at warp factors almost unimaginably fast to us. They gave us just enough information to whet our appetites, to force us to figure it on our own. But as I said, many people chafed at the way Vulcans seemed to patronize humans, felt that they were holding us back, which of course, they were. However, we still managed to set up colonies and had ships that plied the trade routes, upgrading as we learned by doing. But there were people who simply took off, pointed their ships towards deep space and were never heard from until decades or even centuries later when we stumbled across them again. And then there were those ships that simply fell through the cracks in the universe.
“In 2097, thirty-four years after the first warp flight, a large colony ship called the Wings of Kobol, set out from Earth and simply vanished! The last recorded contact anyone had from it was radio contact with our space station at Alpha Centauri. The man who built this ship was named Alexander Dimitrios Cain--”
Laura was so caught up in the sound of her voice that she gave a little gasp at man’s name and met William’s gaze in complete shock.
“He was named Cain?” William blurted out.
“Yes, why?” Kathryn asked curiously.
“The original commander of Pegasus was Admiral Helena Cain,” he replied. “She was assassinated by a Cylon.”
“Ah,” Kathryn said thoughtfully. “Anyway, Mr. Cain was a very rich man. He gathered a couple hundred followers--and their families--who found Vulcan rules intolerable to live under. He was also a man obsessed with ancient civilizations, especially ancient Greece and Persia; his family were of Greek and Turkish descent. What is now known as modern Turkey was once part of ancient Persia. In fact, the word kobol is from ancient Persian and means heaven.
“Cain had a great vision of the world he wanted to create--a great civilization to rival ancient Greece and it would be a monument to the human spirit. So he loaded up his ship with the very best technology of the time, some the best scientific minds he could attract to his cause and the best thinkers and philosophers.” She smiled again and pulled the portable computer to her and after tapping in a few instructions, turned it to show them the display.
“Zeus!” Laura whispered in reverence, looking at the face of her God in the display.
“No, Alexander Dimitrios Cain,” Kathryn replied gently. Another picture joined Zeus; a picture of a regal, golden-haired woman. “And this was his Hera, his wife, Alicia Baltasar.” After a moment, a third picture flashed up on the display and for a second, in this grey-eyed, raven-haired young woman, Laura saw her mother’s face--her Mommy, who had been the most beautiful woman to five-year-old Laura Roslin, not the woman who would waste away in a hospital bed twenty-five years later.
“And this was his Athena,” Kathryn said gently. “She was his Chief Scientist, an astrophysicist and mathematician at the forefront of quantum string theory and research. Her name was Dr. Marina Theodora Kieran.”
William looked at Laura in awe. “Your name, Laura,” he whispered, but she could say nothing as she stared at the picture. “Dr. Laura Kieran Roslin.”
“My grandfather on my mother’s side always said that it was an old family tradition since the founding of the Colonies,” Laura said hoarsely at last. “His name was Kieran Mulray; in my family they named at least one child in each generation Kieran, generally the eldest boy. When I was born, Grandfather insisted on it for my middle name. I had two older sisters and my uncles took a long time to settle down and start having children--anyway Grandfather was sure I would be a boy, and I guess when I turned out to be a girl, he was afraid there would be no boys in my generation.” She laughed as tears rolled down her cheeks. “But he used to call me his Athena.”
"Your grandfather sounded like a wise man," Kathryn said smiling. "Anyway, I do have Cain's crew and colony manifest as well as pictures some of the other principals in his venture. What happened after they reached the Alpha Centauri system and realized what the flecture was is anyone's guess. I can only speculate that they used it to get to this part of the galaxy and then went on to found Kobol, not realizing that they'd traveled back in time."
"But if they were only ordinary humans who had simply travelled back in time," William said, "how were they able to lead the Thirteenth Tribe back to Earth a thousand years later?"
"That, I believe, was the province of a Dr. Terrance Soros," she replied gravely. "He was a cell geneticist specializing in rejuvenation and life-prolonging technologies. During the first attempts at interstellar colonization, ships were so slow that a lot of technologies were investigated to ensure that people survived the long journeys--from cryostasis to anti-aging processes. Our guess is that once Soros perfected his process, he only used it on himself and the other principals of the mission."
"Why?" Laura asked hoarsely. "Why didn't he use it on everyone?"
"Because human beings weren't meant to endure that sort of modification," Kathryn said. "We've known about these technologies for hundreds of years, but there's a good reason for a moratorium on such research in the Federation and especially among humans. The psychological state called the god-complex psychosis that many of these techniques--and Soros' research field in particular--awakens in humans is extreme. Among other things, it would have produced unimaginable paranoia towards unaltered humans--there was no way they would have allowed their subjects to share in it. After all, what do Gods need most?"
"Worshippers," Laura whispered her gut roiling.
"You must understand, Laura," Kathryn said gently. "They probably didn't know what they were playing with--not really. They would have woken up from the process with their bodies nearly indestructible, their minds expanded beyond what human beings were meant to endure and they would have become telepaths of the highest order. The other humans on the ship may not have understood what was happening at first, but once they started to figure it out, they probably would have been very afraid of them. But if only Cain and his cabal had control of the ship's operations--well, I don't imagine there was much they could do about it. Ordinary humans would have become like children to them and they would have gone about setting order to the lives of the mere mortals under their control. In the ship they had, their top speed would have been--at most--warp 3 for short periods and it would have taken them a generation or two to get from the nebula to Kobol. By that time, the original colonists would have died leaving only the seemingly immortal Gods. There would have been no one to contradict Cain that Kobol was the first world of humanity and that he'd created the people."
"Could they have really lived so long?" William asked after a long, stunned silence. "Could they really have been the same people who led humans back to Earth a thousand years later?"
"Using a combination of nano-tech rejuvenation and stasis, it is theoretically possible," Janeway replied. "They would have probably taken turns going into stasis while the others stood watch for a number of years--and of course, with their paranoia they would not have allowed any unaltered humans near where the stasis chambers were kept or near any of the technology they used to enhance their seemingly god-like powers."
"The Lords were said to go journeying at different times," Laura said quietly as she forced herself to accept the truth. "They would sometimes disappear for years, but you're right, no one was allowed into the inner sanctum in the City of the Gods on Kobol. Only priests and those with special dispensation could even enter the inner gates of the City."
"Anyway, they must have had some idea of the catastrophe coming their way to terraform those twelve worlds your people eventually colonized," Kathryn continued. "Perhaps an asteroid strike or a problem with Kobol's star--perhaps it was an extinction-level event that they couldn't avoid or change--but they would have needed at least one hundred years warning. They would have started with the most Earth-like world, terraformed it, settled scientists and other people necessary to building infrastructure and then as quickly as the other worlds became available, settled the rest of Kobol's population on them."
"Caprica," Laura said. "Caprica was the first colony, and then Aquaria, Picon, Arilon, Tauron--"
"I'm a Tauron," Kathryn chuckled softly and then laughed outright at their confusion. "Taurus is one of our constellations, but it's also an astrological birth sign, depending on what part of the year you were born. My birthday, May 20th, falls at the end of the Taurus period. May is the fifth month of our year; after Taurus is Gemini, which starts on May 22nd. A friend and I had our signs done for a lark when we were teenagers--each astrological sign has a series of characteristics associated with it and are supposed to govern an individual's nature. If I remember correctly, Taureans are solid, stable, practical, loyal, extremely determined to the point of stubbornness, can be prone to depression, slow to anger, but ferocious when provoked--they can explode in violent outbursts in which they seem to lose all control. Nope, doesn't apply to me at all," she said with an impish smile that broke the tension again.
Laura said contemplatively, "On Kobol, in the Tomb of Athena, we were transported into a field within a circle of standing stones and shown the symbols of your constellations--when the Colonies were founded, they appeared on the original Colony flags. They were called by the old names--the names you used. It was said that on Earth, the Thirteenth Tribe could look up and see their twelve brothers in the sky. The reason we knew to head in this direction was the image of the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Scorpio and why we hoped to find Earth there--"
"The Lagoon Nebula!" Janeway exclaimed in disbelief. "The nebula you're headed for is definitely not the Lagoon Nebula. The real Lagoon Nebula is only about five thousand light years from Earth--" She stopped short and considered their uncomfortable expressions. "Although, considering their astrometric tech in 2097, and the superficial similarities between the two, it is possible that they mistook what they were seeing, but why put it in Scorpio? Even if they had mistaken the nebula itself, Marina Kierans was enough of an astronomer to know that the Lagoon Nebula is in the constellation of Sagittarius not Scorpio."
"I have no idea," William said with a tired smile. "Every time I start to think I know something concrete, you come along and rearrange the universe. I just know that the ability to find astronomical markers like the--like our Lagoon Nebula, M8, was required learning for anyone with hopes of commanding a vessel."
"Good God, the M8 designation has even survived," she said with a brilliant smile. "M8 is an old astronomer's shorthand for Messier 8 object--Messier was a famous astronomer. He started a famous catalogue of stellar objects. Another designation for the Lagoon Nebula was NGC 6523.”
“How do you know all this?” Laura asked.
Janeway’s smile was nostalgic. “My father was very busy when I was a child,” she said quietly. “He was a Starfleet Admiral and rarely home. But the summer I turned nine, we spent every night for almost a month looking through the telescope he gave me for my birthday. I think it was the longest time we ever spent together and I wanted desperately to impress him.” She blushed and looked down at her hands. “As my sister, Phoebe, would put it, in my "typical Kath-obsessive way", I memorized everything I could get my hands on just in case he asked me a question. I suppose I’ve always been mortified of not having the right answer when asked a question.” She looked up and smiled ruefully again. “The last ten years have cured me of the worst of that bad habit; out here, I rarely have all the right answers and sometimes not even a single one. It’s very humbling.”
“Don’t I know it,” William said. “Imagine fifty thousand people looking for you for answers and having nothing to tell them. There was nothing I could do but lie and spin a pretty myth for them--the myth of Earth and the Thirteenth Tribe.”
“Bill,” Laura said gently. “You did what you had to--what you needed to give us hope.”
He laughed. “Hope,” he whispered. “And when you began to make that hope a reality, I threw you in the brig.” Janeway’s brow rose nearly to her hairline and he laughed again. “When Laura wanted to send someone back to Caprica to get the Arrow of Apollo, the key to the Tomb of Athena, I wouldn’t even listen to her. Then she convinced Kara to go back to our Cylon-infested homeworld and I lost it, put her in the brig--damned near pulled off a military coup. Even my own son mutinied.”
“You know there was more to it than that,” Laura said clasping his hand. “And I’m sure if you hadn’t been shot by Lieutenant Valerii, you would have let me out after you calmed down.”
“Shot?” Kathryn said.
“Twice,” William replied, “in my own CIC no less. By an officer I trusted … an officer who’d just come back from blowing up a Basestar. We think they must have activated her then. She claimed to have no memory of it. Valerii was the Cylon cadaver we sent to your doctor.”
“I see.”
Laura decided to get the conversation back on track. “You’ll receive a full briefing tomorrow when you meet the Quorum,” she said and Kathryn nodded. “There are still a few things they’re reluctant to divulge, but I think I've convinced them that they should co-operate.”
Kathryn laughed at that and nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “What about the religious question? Will your Quorum and, more importantly, your people be able to deal with what I’ve told you tonight about Cain and his group?”
Laura held William’s gaze for long moments. “No,” she said at last.
“At least not the whole, blunt truth as you told it tonight,” William added. “It definitely won’t sit well that our Gods were simply dangerously psychotic humans hopped up on some longevity drug. Megalomaniacs who didn’t know what they were doing when they took the drug or when they fell through that flecture thing.”
“Actually, you’re lucky that they were megalomaniacs with such a strong sense of duty towards their people even in that god-complex state,” Kathryn said. “Believe me--you don’t want to know what could have happened to your people if they’d been the weak-minded, amoral sort.”
Laura’s mouth was suddenly very dry as she and William stared at the other woman in horror.
“It may be different when we get to Earth and your Federation,” she said finding her voice again. “Once there, they won’t have a choice but to face the truth. And added to the religious uproar is the fact that now it seems that we came originally from Earth and not Kobol … how certain are you of that?” she asked quietly.
“Entirely certain,” Kathryn replied, the tone of her voice ringing with truth like a hammer falling against an anvil. “In fact, we have an abundance of hard, scientific evidence from fossil records that human beings evolved from a primatoid ancestor on Earth over two hundred and fifty thousand years ago and there ruins of ancient civilisations that date back almost ten thousand years, all of which have been rigorously studied and dated. Also, your modern written and spoken language is English, which evolved on Earth only about one thousand years ago, and the form you use, for the most part, was cemented through universal literacy for the last four hundred years.”
Laura swallowed hard and nodded as her entire worldview shifted yet again; human beings evolved … on Earth over two hundred and fifty thousand years ago … ancient civilisations … date back almost ten thousands years. It made her feel suddenly small and insignificant; it made everything she thought she knew about humanity and its place in the universe, utterly small and insignificant.
“There are already enough of Quorum members who simply want you and the changes they feel you represent to go away and they don’t even know the half of it,” she said with a harsh, strangled laugh. “Tell them this and they may … no, they will become extremely hostile to you and your people in very short order. We could be looking at riots and loss of life we simply can’t control. We just don’t have enough security personnel to police our population spread out over so many ships and we can’t afford to lose people. However, I do know that the question of religion will undoubtedly be raised.”
“Then it’s time for the sugar-coated version,” Kathryn said with a wry smile as she tapped the computer again. An image appeared on the screen of blue skies and sparkling ocean dotted with green islands. Zooming in on one of the islands, Laura found herself staring at a great ruined temple on an Acropolis similar to the ruins on Kobol. “It’s time to give your people new hope and a new home.”
#
To A/R Interlude: Rated MA
Skip the smut - To Part 13
bantha_fodder's BSG/Crossover ficathon. Dedicated to
regencyg!
Pairing:Janeway/Adama, Sr. or Janeway/Roslin
Prompt: Galactica stumbles into the Delta Quadrant and meet Voyager, Bill and Kathryn bond over the demands of keeping everyone safe. Or Kathryn and Laura bond over being women in charge. Or both.
Title: Flying Colours Part 12: Truth like a hammer falling against an anvil
Word Count: 3,402
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Refer to Part 1
Flying Colours - Part 12: Truth like a hammer falling against an anvil
“Remember what I told you about the interplexing flectures you’re headed for,” Kathryn said holding their gazes. “They’re conduits not only through space, but through time as well.”
“So even if you know which aperture to take to get you where you want to go,” William said, “if you don’t stabilize the flecture, you probably won’t end up when you want to go.”
“Exactly!” Kathryn replied.
“Then why wouldn’t they have stabilized it?” he asked.
“Probably because they didn’t know it needed to be stabilized,” she replied. “Why do you think we’ve never used the flecture point at Alpha Centauri to explore this part of the galaxy and it’s in Earth’s own backyard? Even now, although they know it needs to be stabilized, no one on Earth--or the Federation and perhaps the entire alpha quadrant for that matter--knows how to stabilize an interplexing flecture.”
“Then how do you …” William began before realization blossomed in his eyes and he laughed. “Because you learned how to do it on this journey,” he said in admiration.
“Yep!” she said impishly.
“I think my head’s going to explode,” Laura complained.
“Oh, you’ll get used to it,” Kathryn chuckled, “but I’m getting rather ahead of myself.” She leaned forward still smiling. “From my perspective, in Earth’s time-frame, right now it’s the year 2381 of the Common Era. Ancient Greek civilization was at its height between about 600 to 150 BCE, Before Common Era. We’ll start with Zephram Cochrane, who started the ball rolling on interstellar travel with the first warp ship in 2063. His warp flight attracted the attention of a Vulcan science ship just passing by on its way to more fascinating ports than our little backwater. The last time the Vulcans peeped in on us, we were still petty little barbarians intent on polluting our miserable little mudball and lobbing nuclear weapons at each other. Now little more than a quarter century later, we’re fooling around with warp technology and worse yet, playing with anti-matter--you want to talk about flirting with complete and utter annihilation of Earth and the human species, lose control of a milligram of anti-matter.
“Anyway, the Vulcans figured that since we’d got that far, they’d better take us in hand before we reduced ourselves and our world to sub-atomic particles. So like all good parents, they grounded us, supervised our experiments, and put us on a fairly short leash. Whenever we tried to run ahead too quickly, they yanked us back. And I can tell you, it chafed--it chafed badly. But after the better part of a century of sitting on us and teaching us some rudimentary manners and how to work with others, their little barbarians began to grow up enough to be inflicted on polite Galactic society.”
Laura couldn’t help but laugh at the way she told the story. It was so charming and disarming.
Kathryn held her gaze with a bright smile. “Now, during the period from about 2065 to 2150, the Vulcans allowed us to tool around in warp one ships while they whizzed around the galaxy at warp factors almost unimaginably fast to us. They gave us just enough information to whet our appetites, to force us to figure it on our own. But as I said, many people chafed at the way Vulcans seemed to patronize humans, felt that they were holding us back, which of course, they were. However, we still managed to set up colonies and had ships that plied the trade routes, upgrading as we learned by doing. But there were people who simply took off, pointed their ships towards deep space and were never heard from until decades or even centuries later when we stumbled across them again. And then there were those ships that simply fell through the cracks in the universe.
“In 2097, thirty-four years after the first warp flight, a large colony ship called the Wings of Kobol, set out from Earth and simply vanished! The last recorded contact anyone had from it was radio contact with our space station at Alpha Centauri. The man who built this ship was named Alexander Dimitrios Cain--”
Laura was so caught up in the sound of her voice that she gave a little gasp at man’s name and met William’s gaze in complete shock.
“He was named Cain?” William blurted out.
“Yes, why?” Kathryn asked curiously.
“The original commander of Pegasus was Admiral Helena Cain,” he replied. “She was assassinated by a Cylon.”
“Ah,” Kathryn said thoughtfully. “Anyway, Mr. Cain was a very rich man. He gathered a couple hundred followers--and their families--who found Vulcan rules intolerable to live under. He was also a man obsessed with ancient civilizations, especially ancient Greece and Persia; his family were of Greek and Turkish descent. What is now known as modern Turkey was once part of ancient Persia. In fact, the word kobol is from ancient Persian and means heaven.
“Cain had a great vision of the world he wanted to create--a great civilization to rival ancient Greece and it would be a monument to the human spirit. So he loaded up his ship with the very best technology of the time, some the best scientific minds he could attract to his cause and the best thinkers and philosophers.” She smiled again and pulled the portable computer to her and after tapping in a few instructions, turned it to show them the display.
“Zeus!” Laura whispered in reverence, looking at the face of her God in the display.
“No, Alexander Dimitrios Cain,” Kathryn replied gently. Another picture joined Zeus; a picture of a regal, golden-haired woman. “And this was his Hera, his wife, Alicia Baltasar.” After a moment, a third picture flashed up on the display and for a second, in this grey-eyed, raven-haired young woman, Laura saw her mother’s face--her Mommy, who had been the most beautiful woman to five-year-old Laura Roslin, not the woman who would waste away in a hospital bed twenty-five years later.
“And this was his Athena,” Kathryn said gently. “She was his Chief Scientist, an astrophysicist and mathematician at the forefront of quantum string theory and research. Her name was Dr. Marina Theodora Kieran.”
William looked at Laura in awe. “Your name, Laura,” he whispered, but she could say nothing as she stared at the picture. “Dr. Laura Kieran Roslin.”
“My grandfather on my mother’s side always said that it was an old family tradition since the founding of the Colonies,” Laura said hoarsely at last. “His name was Kieran Mulray; in my family they named at least one child in each generation Kieran, generally the eldest boy. When I was born, Grandfather insisted on it for my middle name. I had two older sisters and my uncles took a long time to settle down and start having children--anyway Grandfather was sure I would be a boy, and I guess when I turned out to be a girl, he was afraid there would be no boys in my generation.” She laughed as tears rolled down her cheeks. “But he used to call me his Athena.”
"Your grandfather sounded like a wise man," Kathryn said smiling. "Anyway, I do have Cain's crew and colony manifest as well as pictures some of the other principals in his venture. What happened after they reached the Alpha Centauri system and realized what the flecture was is anyone's guess. I can only speculate that they used it to get to this part of the galaxy and then went on to found Kobol, not realizing that they'd traveled back in time."
"But if they were only ordinary humans who had simply travelled back in time," William said, "how were they able to lead the Thirteenth Tribe back to Earth a thousand years later?"
"That, I believe, was the province of a Dr. Terrance Soros," she replied gravely. "He was a cell geneticist specializing in rejuvenation and life-prolonging technologies. During the first attempts at interstellar colonization, ships were so slow that a lot of technologies were investigated to ensure that people survived the long journeys--from cryostasis to anti-aging processes. Our guess is that once Soros perfected his process, he only used it on himself and the other principals of the mission."
"Why?" Laura asked hoarsely. "Why didn't he use it on everyone?"
"Because human beings weren't meant to endure that sort of modification," Kathryn said. "We've known about these technologies for hundreds of years, but there's a good reason for a moratorium on such research in the Federation and especially among humans. The psychological state called the god-complex psychosis that many of these techniques--and Soros' research field in particular--awakens in humans is extreme. Among other things, it would have produced unimaginable paranoia towards unaltered humans--there was no way they would have allowed their subjects to share in it. After all, what do Gods need most?"
"Worshippers," Laura whispered her gut roiling.
"You must understand, Laura," Kathryn said gently. "They probably didn't know what they were playing with--not really. They would have woken up from the process with their bodies nearly indestructible, their minds expanded beyond what human beings were meant to endure and they would have become telepaths of the highest order. The other humans on the ship may not have understood what was happening at first, but once they started to figure it out, they probably would have been very afraid of them. But if only Cain and his cabal had control of the ship's operations--well, I don't imagine there was much they could do about it. Ordinary humans would have become like children to them and they would have gone about setting order to the lives of the mere mortals under their control. In the ship they had, their top speed would have been--at most--warp 3 for short periods and it would have taken them a generation or two to get from the nebula to Kobol. By that time, the original colonists would have died leaving only the seemingly immortal Gods. There would have been no one to contradict Cain that Kobol was the first world of humanity and that he'd created the people."
"Could they have really lived so long?" William asked after a long, stunned silence. "Could they really have been the same people who led humans back to Earth a thousand years later?"
"Using a combination of nano-tech rejuvenation and stasis, it is theoretically possible," Janeway replied. "They would have probably taken turns going into stasis while the others stood watch for a number of years--and of course, with their paranoia they would not have allowed any unaltered humans near where the stasis chambers were kept or near any of the technology they used to enhance their seemingly god-like powers."
"The Lords were said to go journeying at different times," Laura said quietly as she forced herself to accept the truth. "They would sometimes disappear for years, but you're right, no one was allowed into the inner sanctum in the City of the Gods on Kobol. Only priests and those with special dispensation could even enter the inner gates of the City."
"Anyway, they must have had some idea of the catastrophe coming their way to terraform those twelve worlds your people eventually colonized," Kathryn continued. "Perhaps an asteroid strike or a problem with Kobol's star--perhaps it was an extinction-level event that they couldn't avoid or change--but they would have needed at least one hundred years warning. They would have started with the most Earth-like world, terraformed it, settled scientists and other people necessary to building infrastructure and then as quickly as the other worlds became available, settled the rest of Kobol's population on them."
"Caprica," Laura said. "Caprica was the first colony, and then Aquaria, Picon, Arilon, Tauron--"
"I'm a Tauron," Kathryn chuckled softly and then laughed outright at their confusion. "Taurus is one of our constellations, but it's also an astrological birth sign, depending on what part of the year you were born. My birthday, May 20th, falls at the end of the Taurus period. May is the fifth month of our year; after Taurus is Gemini, which starts on May 22nd. A friend and I had our signs done for a lark when we were teenagers--each astrological sign has a series of characteristics associated with it and are supposed to govern an individual's nature. If I remember correctly, Taureans are solid, stable, practical, loyal, extremely determined to the point of stubbornness, can be prone to depression, slow to anger, but ferocious when provoked--they can explode in violent outbursts in which they seem to lose all control. Nope, doesn't apply to me at all," she said with an impish smile that broke the tension again.
Laura said contemplatively, "On Kobol, in the Tomb of Athena, we were transported into a field within a circle of standing stones and shown the symbols of your constellations--when the Colonies were founded, they appeared on the original Colony flags. They were called by the old names--the names you used. It was said that on Earth, the Thirteenth Tribe could look up and see their twelve brothers in the sky. The reason we knew to head in this direction was the image of the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Scorpio and why we hoped to find Earth there--"
"The Lagoon Nebula!" Janeway exclaimed in disbelief. "The nebula you're headed for is definitely not the Lagoon Nebula. The real Lagoon Nebula is only about five thousand light years from Earth--" She stopped short and considered their uncomfortable expressions. "Although, considering their astrometric tech in 2097, and the superficial similarities between the two, it is possible that they mistook what they were seeing, but why put it in Scorpio? Even if they had mistaken the nebula itself, Marina Kierans was enough of an astronomer to know that the Lagoon Nebula is in the constellation of Sagittarius not Scorpio."
"I have no idea," William said with a tired smile. "Every time I start to think I know something concrete, you come along and rearrange the universe. I just know that the ability to find astronomical markers like the--like our Lagoon Nebula, M8, was required learning for anyone with hopes of commanding a vessel."
"Good God, the M8 designation has even survived," she said with a brilliant smile. "M8 is an old astronomer's shorthand for Messier 8 object--Messier was a famous astronomer. He started a famous catalogue of stellar objects. Another designation for the Lagoon Nebula was NGC 6523.”
“How do you know all this?” Laura asked.
Janeway’s smile was nostalgic. “My father was very busy when I was a child,” she said quietly. “He was a Starfleet Admiral and rarely home. But the summer I turned nine, we spent every night for almost a month looking through the telescope he gave me for my birthday. I think it was the longest time we ever spent together and I wanted desperately to impress him.” She blushed and looked down at her hands. “As my sister, Phoebe, would put it, in my "typical Kath-obsessive way", I memorized everything I could get my hands on just in case he asked me a question. I suppose I’ve always been mortified of not having the right answer when asked a question.” She looked up and smiled ruefully again. “The last ten years have cured me of the worst of that bad habit; out here, I rarely have all the right answers and sometimes not even a single one. It’s very humbling.”
“Don’t I know it,” William said. “Imagine fifty thousand people looking for you for answers and having nothing to tell them. There was nothing I could do but lie and spin a pretty myth for them--the myth of Earth and the Thirteenth Tribe.”
“Bill,” Laura said gently. “You did what you had to--what you needed to give us hope.”
He laughed. “Hope,” he whispered. “And when you began to make that hope a reality, I threw you in the brig.” Janeway’s brow rose nearly to her hairline and he laughed again. “When Laura wanted to send someone back to Caprica to get the Arrow of Apollo, the key to the Tomb of Athena, I wouldn’t even listen to her. Then she convinced Kara to go back to our Cylon-infested homeworld and I lost it, put her in the brig--damned near pulled off a military coup. Even my own son mutinied.”
“You know there was more to it than that,” Laura said clasping his hand. “And I’m sure if you hadn’t been shot by Lieutenant Valerii, you would have let me out after you calmed down.”
“Shot?” Kathryn said.
“Twice,” William replied, “in my own CIC no less. By an officer I trusted … an officer who’d just come back from blowing up a Basestar. We think they must have activated her then. She claimed to have no memory of it. Valerii was the Cylon cadaver we sent to your doctor.”
“I see.”
Laura decided to get the conversation back on track. “You’ll receive a full briefing tomorrow when you meet the Quorum,” she said and Kathryn nodded. “There are still a few things they’re reluctant to divulge, but I think I've convinced them that they should co-operate.”
Kathryn laughed at that and nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “What about the religious question? Will your Quorum and, more importantly, your people be able to deal with what I’ve told you tonight about Cain and his group?”
Laura held William’s gaze for long moments. “No,” she said at last.
“At least not the whole, blunt truth as you told it tonight,” William added. “It definitely won’t sit well that our Gods were simply dangerously psychotic humans hopped up on some longevity drug. Megalomaniacs who didn’t know what they were doing when they took the drug or when they fell through that flecture thing.”
“Actually, you’re lucky that they were megalomaniacs with such a strong sense of duty towards their people even in that god-complex state,” Kathryn said. “Believe me--you don’t want to know what could have happened to your people if they’d been the weak-minded, amoral sort.”
Laura’s mouth was suddenly very dry as she and William stared at the other woman in horror.
“It may be different when we get to Earth and your Federation,” she said finding her voice again. “Once there, they won’t have a choice but to face the truth. And added to the religious uproar is the fact that now it seems that we came originally from Earth and not Kobol … how certain are you of that?” she asked quietly.
“Entirely certain,” Kathryn replied, the tone of her voice ringing with truth like a hammer falling against an anvil. “In fact, we have an abundance of hard, scientific evidence from fossil records that human beings evolved from a primatoid ancestor on Earth over two hundred and fifty thousand years ago and there ruins of ancient civilisations that date back almost ten thousand years, all of which have been rigorously studied and dated. Also, your modern written and spoken language is English, which evolved on Earth only about one thousand years ago, and the form you use, for the most part, was cemented through universal literacy for the last four hundred years.”
Laura swallowed hard and nodded as her entire worldview shifted yet again; human beings evolved … on Earth over two hundred and fifty thousand years ago … ancient civilisations … date back almost ten thousands years. It made her feel suddenly small and insignificant; it made everything she thought she knew about humanity and its place in the universe, utterly small and insignificant.
“There are already enough of Quorum members who simply want you and the changes they feel you represent to go away and they don’t even know the half of it,” she said with a harsh, strangled laugh. “Tell them this and they may … no, they will become extremely hostile to you and your people in very short order. We could be looking at riots and loss of life we simply can’t control. We just don’t have enough security personnel to police our population spread out over so many ships and we can’t afford to lose people. However, I do know that the question of religion will undoubtedly be raised.”
“Then it’s time for the sugar-coated version,” Kathryn said with a wry smile as she tapped the computer again. An image appeared on the screen of blue skies and sparkling ocean dotted with green islands. Zooming in on one of the islands, Laura found herself staring at a great ruined temple on an Acropolis similar to the ruins on Kobol. “It’s time to give your people new hope and a new home.”
#
To A/R Interlude: Rated MA
Skip the smut - To Part 13