Stumbling Towards the Dawn - Part 1
I come bearing a new BSG fic, which I've managed to get done just under my self-imposed deadline of the premiere of the 3rd season--which, here in Canada is on Saturday, October 7, 2006. Again it's another of my tomes--I just can't get away from these really long fics. I started it way back in June, so it definitely bears no resemblance to all the great spoiler ads and interviews I've been bumping into everywhere. However, I took time off from it to work on the BSG/Voyager crossover which ... got away from me also.
Title: Stumbling Towards the Dawn - Part 1
Word Count: 2,813
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Not mine ... just playing.
Spoilers: To LDYB Part II - Everything is definitely AU from the moment the Cylons flew over.
Summary: When Cloud Nine is destroyed, it attracted the attention of not only the Cylons.
Author's Note: This is a crossover fic, with David Weber's Mutineer's Moon - Fifth Imperium universe, but I don't think that you need to know the universe of this trilogy of novels to get it. Hopefully, it's explained well enough in the story.
Stumbling Towards the Dawn
It was a nightmare from which Laura Roslin could not wake. All around the shanty-town, people milled about aimlessly in the endless drizzle like wraiths. Among them, hundreds of menacing Centurions gleamed in the pale light; when the Cylons had arrived the day before, there had been thousands more. Most had fanned out to form a security perimeter around the tent city.
Laura looked around for Kara, but couldn’t find her. Suddenly she realized that Tigh, Tyrol and many of the other military people were not present and she hoped that they had somehow fled before the Cylons had established themselves.
Lifting her gaze to the endless grey heavens, she prayed that Adama had been able to get the remnants of the Colonial fleet out. And she wished that she hadn't been so proud when his eyes had begged her to stay with him.
#
Fleet Captain Princess Isis Harriet MacIntyre sat ramrod straight in the command chair of Emperor Herdan and watched her bridge crew as the ship crept stealthily through the molecular cloud. They were headed towards the solar system from which those intriguing signals they’d been tracking for the last couple of weeks had emanated. The cloud was approximately twenty thousand light years from the rim of the galaxy, almost fifteen hundred light years directly “behind” the Sol system and Earth.
Harry brooded silently, but was careful not to let it show on her face; it wouldn’t do to broadcast her emotions to her crew. However, this wasn’t a direction that the Ancient Fourth Imperium--or the Empire that had succeeded it for that matter--had really expanded into. And since her father had re-discovered the ruins of the Empire over fifty years ago and by default become the Emperor of Humanity, it wasn’t really a direction Emperor Colin MacIntyre’s Fifth Imperium given much thought to. Until now.
At first humanity had been too busy fighting the genocidal Achuultani, a xenophobic race of centaur-like aliens whose society had been co-opted by rogue sentient computers that had kept them in a state of war for untold millions of years. The Achuultani had swept through the galaxy time and again, seeking out and destroying all sentient life wherever they found it. It was almost unbelievable even now, and had Harry not been of the first generation of children born during those turbulent war years when Earth had almost been destroyed, she didn’t think that she would have been able to imagine it.
She and her twin brother Sean, the Crown Prince and Heir Apparent, had grown up with the first generation of Achuultani children; children of the prisoners of war her father had captured. Those prisoners had been as shocked as humans had been to learn the true nature of their society; that they had been programmed with this genocidal fear of other species by the very computers they had once charged with ensuring their safety.
Now, those former POWs were building a new society on a planet they called Narhan and if humans were fanatical about building up their technology to withstand future Achuultani incursions, the Narhani, as humanity's new allies had renamed themselves, were that much more motivated to defend their new world and new friends.
And because of the continuing threat from the Achuultani--though right now five or six hundred years removed--they could not afford to become complacent. In looking for help against the aliens, Harry’s father had reactivated a lot of the old Empire’s technology, including ships like Emperor Herdan, an Asgerd-class ship that was the size of a large moon.
The Empire had literally sown the seeds of its own destruction when a lethal bio-weapon its scientists had created had gotten loose. Because of its long incubation period, by the time anyone had realized the danger, it had spread to almost every planet in the Empire, rendering them lifeless. In the intervening forty-five thousand years since the fall of the Empire, the bio-weapon had been neutralized on the planets it had decimated, but other than Earth, which had been a primitive outpost at the time, they’d only found one other planet of humans that the weapon had not touched, Pardal.
However, the Pardalians had survived by giving up all technology that required anything beyond muscle-power and in the process created a fanatical world religion as a safeguard so that humanity on that world would never again reach that level of technological destructiveness. And the priests had ruled Pardal with an iron fist. That is until Harriet and Sean, in escaping an assassination plot, had been drop-kicked with their friends into that world. Harry smiled thinly; the Pardalian Church was still reeling from their interference thirty years later.
“Captain,” Harriet’s executive officer Commander Jos Kirkland said, more a polite courtesy to get her attention. With her neural implants, it was more efficient to simply access his information rather than hear an oral report, but time and again, humans found that the interaction was vital in helping them to put myriad channels of information flow--made possible by the implant technology resurrected from the old Empire--into context.
“Doctor Mabuse and his team are ready with the translation and analysis of those signals we’ve been tracking,” Kirkland reported, blue eyes flashing with excitement. “Everyone’s assembled in conference one.”
“Thanks Jos,” Harry replied and rose. She smiled, nodding to him. “Let’s go see what they’ve come up with, shall we?” He returned her smile as she turned to Commander Rachel Good (Weapon’s Second). “You have the bridge, Commander,” Harriet said formally.
Good’s hazel eyes twinkled. “Aye Captain, I have the bridge,” she replied with equal formality.
The trip to the conference room five decks below the bridge took barely forty seconds via the main transit shaft. Harriet stepped out with the lithe grace of a dancer. Dahak, her father’s flagship and cybernetic friend, had been her first playground. According to her mother, she and Sean could use the accelerated transit shafts before they could walk.
Harriet smiled as she saw the conference room and knew instinctively who’d chosen the design this time. Using Herdan’s state-of-the-art holographic technology, it has been configured to resemble the ancient Athenian Acropolis.
“Interesting design, Sam,” Harry said to her chief xenologist. Major Dr. Isamu Mabuse grinned at her, almond eyes flashing in his dark brown face.
“Ain’t it just, Captain,” he drawled, “but it’s actually quite apropos considering the evidence suggests that these people came from Ancient Greece or there about.”
Harriet’s eyebrows flew up almost to the hairline of her sable mane and Mabuse laughed at her obvious surprise. “Then I think that we’d better get started, Sam,” she said as the hologram of her fellow captain and good friend Tamman Givens-Tsien, as well as the holograms of his senior staff, joined them.
As they all settled around the long marble table, Harriet turned the meeting over to Mabuse without further preamble.
The xenologist brought up a video image of an attractive middle-aged woman squaring off against a smooth and handsome, but rather smarmy, younger man in an interview with a beautiful blonde newswoman.
“Dr. Baltar,” the auburn-haired woman said. The translator caught her cold, quiet fury. “It is the height of irresponsibility to suggest that this planet is a safe haven for a colony.”
“Madam President,” Baltar replied, smugly confident. “The people are tired of this endless running. Even the military people are tired. We haven’t seen any sign of Cylon pursuit in weeks and many people agree that this nebular cloud offers further protection against detection. After all, I’m told that it was you who said it when we left the Colonies, Ms Roslin--our people need to find a safe place to settle down and start having babies.” There were titters from the audience; Baltar looked directly into the camera and gave a knowing smirk. “I believe that New Caprica is such a place. Instead of chasing some mythological dream, the people could have a real place to put down roots and build homes … build a new society.”
“And give up the journey to Earth?” the interviewer said.
“I, like everyone would have liked to find Earth,” Baltar said smoothly. “But D'Anna, with all due respect to President Roslin's claims of being the Pythia’s dying leader, all we got from Kobol were vague directions to head in the direction of some gods-damned nebula!”
The woman, Roslin, stared at him in shock as he revealed that piece of information; a wave of angry murmuring rose from the audience. It was obvious that they hadn't known just how tenuous the information was.
“The people need more from their leader than the half-baked fantasies of a dying woman, and I’d say that the fact that you didn’t die would cast considerable doubt on your role as the foretold leader that would gloriously lead us to Earth--wouldn’t you, Ms Roslin?” he said rather nastily. “I think everyone would agree that you did a fine job finishing President Adar’s term, but it’s time for change, Madam President, time to sweep away old regimes and old ideas. It is time to stop running in fear and to start looking to the future with hope. The people need more than this endless search for Earth!” he hammered home and there was a roar of applause from the audience.
“They’re searching for Earth?” Harriet said open-mouthed with shock staring at the paused images. Mabuse’s team all had wide smiles as Harriet and Tamman’s staff members stared at them utterly flabbergasted.
Mabuse’s grin widened. “Actually, they’re looking for Erets, Captain,” he corrected, “but in Ancient Phoenician, the word eh-reh-tsh is the root word that means Earth.”
“And that’s the language they’ve been speaking,” Tamman said, “Ancient Phoenician?”
“Somewhat,” Lena Andruskevich, the head linguist, replied. “It’s largely what Phoenician might have been like had it been a living, spoken language today. But like Modern English evolved from its largely Germanic roots influenced by French, Classical Latin and Greek, this language has evolved from an amalgam of languages based on Phoenician, but heavily influenced by Ancient Greek, Aramaic, Persian and Etruscan, the forerunner to early Latin, as well as a very heavy dose of Ancient Imperial, which they seem to refer to as Ancient Kobolian. However, their written language uses an alphabet that isn’t substantially different from a combination of Ancient Phoenician cross-pollinated with early Greek.”
“Kobolian?” Major Collette Tsien--Tamman’s younger half-sister and commander of Harriet’s Marine contingent--asked.
Mabuse chuckled, dark eyes snapping. “As far as we can tell, according to their sacred scrolls, all human life began on a planet called Kobol and humans were the divine creation of the Lords of Kobol.”
“What?” Tamman demanded.
“I think you’d better explain, Sam,” Harriet prompted.
“Actually, the word kobol was one of the keys to giving us a handle on what was going on,” he replied. “In Ancient Persian it simply means “heaven”. Anyway, what we have from the radio broadcasts and the vids that have somehow been accelerated through hyperspace is pretty fragmentary,” he said more soberly. “However, what we do know is that according to their version of history, about thirty-five hundred years ago the Lords of Kobol created human beings and they lived in harmony on Kobol for a thousand years. Then apparently a great catastrophe befell Kobol and the people were forced to flee. The Lords created a great ship to take the people away; twelve of the Tribes of Kobol went to a binary system where twelve worlds had been specially prepared for them. However, the Thirteenth Tribe took another ship to found colony far away, a shining blue world called Earth.”
“They believe that Earth is a colony?” Collette said as disbelief mounted.
“I don’t understand this,” Harriet said in confusion. “How could anyone way out here have come from ancient Earth? Dahak was in Earth’s skies for fifty thousand years! He certainly would not have let any mutineers off the planet and they were the only ones with ships.”
There were nods of agreement all around the table. The ancient Fourth Imperium ship, Dahak, disguised as Earth’s moon, had indeed been trapped in orbit of the planet for fifty thousand years when a mutiny started by Anu, the chief of engineering, in an effort to take over, had disabled the ship’s key systems. However, Dahak’s commander at the time, Fleet Captain Druaga, had given the ship’s central computer the task of suppressing the mutiny by all means necessary. Druaga had rendered the ship uninhabitable and the entire crew--mutineers and loyalists alike--had been forced to flee to Earth. He’d then ordered Dahak not to allow any mutinous officers back on board; only loyal crewmembers or their descendents were to be allowed to return to the ship, which was why when Harriet’s father, United States astronaut, Commander Colin MacIntyre had first set foot on the old ship’s bridge, Dahak had immediately shanghaied him to be captain.
But while the loyalist faction of ship’s original crew had been forced to flee in simple lifeboats, the mutineers had fled in Dahak’s parasites, armed sublight battleships, which they’d clandestinely used to hide for the next fifty thousand years. And in order to keep the loyalists from being a threat to their security or getting back to Dahak, Anu and his mutineers had searched out each functioning lifeboat and destroyed them, killing as many of the original crew as he could find. Inevitably, the survivors lost their technology, but in the process gave rise to Earth’s modern humans, supplanting her indigenous humanoid species, including the Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon man and other early examples of Homo sapiens.
In the interim, Anu had forced most of his minions into stasis to “await their glorious triumph” and never woke them up. Instead, the mutinous engineer and his inner circle had used those unsuspecting sleepers as a source of young, technologically enhanced bodies in an effort to obtain virtual immortality. Imperial technology was such that once enhanced, Dahak’s original officers could expect an average lifespan of five to six hundred years, but eventually they would die. However, in an effort to cheat death, once their bodies began to wear out, Anu and his henchmen would take a candidate from stasis, remove the brain and have their own brain surgically transferred into the new body.
Harriet shuddered inwardly. Only one ship of mutineers had defied Anu … the parasite battleship Nergal, commanded by Harriet’s own grandfather, Horus. Sickened by Anu’s slaughter of the loyalists, the crew of Nergal had committed a second mutiny against the mad engineer and for fifty thousand years tried to mitigate Anu’s worst excesses in order to give the inhabitants of Earth a chance. But while Anu had spent much of his long exile awake, hopping from body to body, the crew of Nergal could only stay awake for a few years--at the most a decade or two--at a time, trying to help the ancient civilizations that rose up across the planet, before being forced back into stasis to sleep away the centuries.
However, afraid of those infant civilizations creating technologies that could be a threat to him, Anu had systematically destroyed each as quickly as he could. Not until the Middle Ages--when perhaps tired of the long exile--did he begin to foster development of indigenous technology. Over the millennia, Dahak had destroyed every ship, probe or other piece of Imperial technology Anu had sent into space. Horus believed that Anu hoped that by spurring indigenous Terran civilization to high technology, locally-produced ships and space technology would be exempt from Dahak’s orders to destroy Imperial ships and technology trying to leave Earth.
“So how did humans speaking Ancient Phoenician get the hell out here?” Harriet reiterated in frustration. “Dahak is sure that no ship arrived at or left Earth for fifty thousand years. Perhaps someone could have slipped out during the first couple hundred years while power levels were very low directly after the mutiny, but certainly not after he repaired his systems.”
“And then they wouldn’t be speaking Phoenician and Greek,” Andruskevich pointed out with a smile. “The roots of those languages developed on Earth less than five thousand years ago; Phoenician, as these Kobolians speak it and especially the written alphabet in this form, showed up around 1700 to 1400 B.C., while Greek is generally accepted to have started flourishing only about 1000 to 900 B.C., although they seem to be using a fairly early version of it.”
Mabuse laughed again. “Seems impossible, doesn’t it,” he said eyes flashing in amusement. “But the problem is that everyone has assumed that there were only two factions of Imperial officers on Earth after the mutiny--well three if you count Nergal’s crew--Anu’s mutineers, Druaga’s loyalists and Horus’ double-mutineers.”
“Who else could there have been?” Tamman demanded.
Part 2