16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
03:43:29
Even with all of Enterprise's 144 QF6L Picador drones deployed deep within Ragnar I's atmosphere, there were limits to how much information they could glean from the Vo'lun portal on the surface of the brown dwarf's rocky core.
For one, said rocky core was nearly a megaklick deep within Ragnar I, and the temp and pressure at that depth was too hot and too dense for a drone to last long without being crushed to the volume of a pea, and lquefied into a rain drop.
Moreocer, Ragnar I grab was 16 times Earth's, requiring an escape velocity, at that depth, of nearly 180 kips to be able to up cycle, and a Picador simply lacked the remass to boost to that velocity.
Meaning the drones and the ship's Sentinel, were only able to fly five hundred klicks deep inside Ragnat I's murky depths, and visual cams and other passive sensors being right out of the question, and false-color sonar limited to a kiloklick below them.
Still, Lieutenant Commander Yasmin Spock was able to get some useful onformation from the dones' other active sensors, in particula, quantum eadar, which was able to ping all the way to the exterior of the artifact itself, and to about ten, maybe twenty meters through the alien structures' neutron-star like walls.
The structures in question were three terraced pyeamids, similar to those erected by ancient Central and South American civilizations, each pyramid precisely 144 stories high, and subdivided into levels and chambers within, at least as far within as the twenty-seven year old native of New York's sixth borough, Co-Op City, was able to “see.”
“Thanks,” she said to the bot delivering trays of hot, strong black coffee and sausage sandwiches to her and the rest of the ship's anchor watch, now manning various workstations round CIC, with Andi McKunstra, recently graduated Academy at the top of the lieutenant's promotion list, at the helm, running things in Yasmin's stead, while she continued her investigation of the Vo'kun portal.
And, it seemed, the portal had decided to investigate Enterprise as well, the starman first class at the radar station reporting,”sir, we're being scanned, scan point of origin is the artifact at the core of Ragnar I.”
Shipnet, a few moments later said,”We're being interrogated by an artificial intelligence orginiating from that artifact.”
“Hostile?” Yasmin asked, her first priority being that the shipwide AI network was not being hacked.
“No,” shipnet answered.”She has not forced herself on us in any way; she has minded her manners, thus far.”
“If anything,” shipnet added,”she's terribly lonely; she's been alone, standing her post, some six hundred thousand years.”
“Son of a bitch,” Andi interjected, the blushing, as she instantly regretted her outburst.
“Yeah, bubeleh,” Yasmin replied, meeting Andi's warm chocolate eyes with her black-eyed gaze,”I'd go apeshit after about a month, and I don't wanna even think about six hundred thousand freakin']/i] years.”
To shipnet, she said:
“Use your own judgement; right now, there's no harm in jusr ralking, but the instant she tries anything, sever the connection.”
“We'll be careful,” shipnet answered,”but, I don't thinlk she's up to no good, just half-crazed from being alone so long.”
“Yeah,” Yasmin agreed, as she sipped her coffee.”I think so too.”
259-69M2
04:04:00
“--Education Minister in both Baltar administrations,” Laura Roslin said to this admiral who could've been Kara Thrace's twin, while Gaius Baltar, reluctant Vice President-elect of the Twelve Tribes, nursed his drink.”When Zarek and the Monothiest won the elections of 63M2, the first thing to be ourlawed was public education--”
“Criminalized it,” Baltar found himself saying,”criminalized any form of organized instruction, on- snd offline, punishable by a visit from the then newly-organized vigilance committees which were slowly supplanting the Arbites.”
“'Kangaroo courts,'” Laura spat, the admiral from this North American Common Assembly not turning a hair, not raising an eybrow at something the former President of the Tribes still considered frakking linacy,”'Political tools of woke, radical Left polythiest elites.'”
“At least,” she added,”that was the narrative of the MAMSPA movement, which had nothing to do with Zarek's conviction, by a tribunal of twelve citizens, in Londinnium City earlier that year, for bank and tax fraud, or with his conviction, two months later, by another tribunal in that same city, for raping a twelve-year old beauty pagent contestant, or three ongoing investigations by the 'weaponized' Ministry of Justice for his role in instigatng the bombing of the Government Complex in Acrpolis, on Necromunda, the Temple in Deplhi, on Palestinia, and the Alliance Children's Hospital on Atlantis, bombings which claimed the lives of 16,800 souls, including 7,000 children.”
“Frakker,” Baltar heard his fellow Cylon, Saul Tigh, growl.
The aged Cylon sighed, feeling all his years, in spite of the nanotechnology which kept Baltar looking relatively young...all three acts of terror had happened on his watch, with the massacre of innocent children, all those equally innocent healers being the worst, and weighing the most heavily on Baltar's conscience.
Zarek had been proudest of that, same as the thirty percent of the Tribes who put him forward as their standard bearer, following the end of the War, and the Monothiest Purge by the Adar Administration which had only driven the small, harrd core of true believers underground, and had resukted in his recall in 43M2, and over fourteen years of hell for then-Senate Speaker Baltar, serving out the last two years of Adar's term as acting President, before, to his sorprise, defeating the opposition candidate, retired Warmaster Marcus Antonius Sulla, in a close election.
“Those were peaceful protests,” Adama sneered,” according to Zarek and his MAMSPA goons, legitimate forms of free speech and free expression...questioning the Archon and Republicsn Guard raid on a separtist religious cult compound in the Necromundan Wastelands, the persecution of Monothiests by the government—”
Agathon replied with a snort, telling Baltar,”I'm sorry, sir, but you bent over backwards licking rancid Monothiest ass, after ending the Purge and abolishing the camps.”
“And the alternative, Captain?!” Baltar sharply demanded, Agarhon answering him with silence.
That was fine.
Baltar himself had no answer for that question.
“'—medical experiments,' “ Adama continued, a tear running down the old Palestinian's leathery face, as he forced himself yo speak,”on children, to change their gender and their species, to take away their humanity, and make them Cylons....”
“You ever seen a body broken by blast and overpressure?” he asked.”The Gods were merciful enough that many of those murdered by the hasatannium device which destroyed the Children's Hospital back in 55 had been atomized...but...not alll...she couldn't have been more than twenty...found out later she had a kid, was working her way through med school holding down two , three different jobs, including that one...”
“Bill,” Tigh gently said, putting a hand on Adama's shoulder, Adama,, lowering his eyes, continuing:
“She was lying in a pool of blood and shit, her intestines all over the frakking floor, her last seconds in this world spent worrying about her son.”
“My Gods,” Laura interjected.
“Zarek,” Adama, his voice taking on an angry tone,”in one of his live casts, had the frakking gall to equate her to Yussef Betanyahu,” one of the infamous so-clled doctors visting hell and death on the inmates---not all of whom had been Cylon—in the Monothiest internment camps during the war,”and, of course, all his followers started doing so as well.”
Galactica had been in Atlantis orbit that horrible day in 55M2, her medicae personnel the first ti offer help.
“I'm sorry,” Balat whispered, eyes on Adama, a war hero who could broken by a young woman whose passage to Elysium had been so indescribably ugly.
“So say us all, Gaius,” Adama whispered in reply as Human looked Cylon in the eye.
“So say us all.”
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
04:08:11
The one constant, Kim silently observed,across all the universes, is man's ingumanity to his fellow man.
None of what her fellow sentients had said shocked her, because this was what the thirty-nine year old North American Interstellar Fleet officer had been fighting against her entire adult life.
What her Marines, long after the battle itself had ended, continued fighting on the various derelict enemy warships.
“When Zarek, who'd lost the popular vote,” Laura, who'd once again taken up the narrative, said,”but had a supepmajority in the Council of Electors, took power, he ended all the ongoing investigations by savking the entire Ministry of Justice, and filling top to bottom with his carefully vetted footsoldiers.”
“The Monothiests,” Baltar said,”had everyone concerned with Agenda 45, and snuck Agenda 63 past them...every Alliance bueraucrat found himself right out of a job, with plenty of MAMSPA fsnatics willing and eager to take their places.”
“The tribunal which convicted Zarek,” Laura said, while Kim listened to reports streaming into her BCI,”found themselves the targets of a newly-reconstited Ministry of Justice, as well as the Ministry of the Exchequer's Tax Division, and, after their arrest, they found themselves convicted in perfect fair trial by Arbites appointed by Zarek and confirmed by his Senate, and tribunals of patriotic citizens....all legal and aboveboard.
The God smiled upon them, by comparison, as the vigilance committees took up the burden of prosecuting 'Cylon sleeper agents' and 'radical Left domestic terrorists,' often disrupting legitimately peaceful protests and turning them into violent riots which were then blamed by the media and the Net on the peaceful protesters.”
“And, from there,” Kim's twin in this time and place said,”everything went straight to the frakking Warp.”
“Schools were xriminalized,” the President-elect of the Tribes said,”immediately followed by healthcare—anyone who knew so much as how to bandage a skinned knee fell foul of the vigilance committes—then the Senate outlawed scientific and technological research not approved by the newly-established Council on Religious Liberty, which, naturally, was stacked with Monothiests, making the practice pf 'the false religion of Scientism' a matter for patriots to resolve.
In particular, all reaerch into the origins of the universe and life itself were now forbidden, with the belief that the Emperorr of Mankind, from the Warp, created the world in six twenty-four hour days, men from dust and women from--”
She blushed, Kara Thrace fsaying:
“From the Emperor, umm, manipulating men's, ermm, members.”
“Their Scripture,” Jurgen remarked,”says 'from their ribs came Woman, Mother of Perversions and vAbominations of the World.'”
“Isn't that enlighyrned?!” Kim found herself snarking, Jurgrn replying,”both our dominant religions have been bodged together over the past eight thousand years from the religion of the High Lords, and from whatever beliefs our ancestors brought with them to Kobol; honestly, it's quite the frakking miracle they're both as consistent as they are.”
“Anyway,” Jurgen then said, as Kim smirked,” the word 'rib,' is an ancient euphemishm for an erect penis; it's no longer in common usage.”
“I see,” Kim said.
“The upper one percent of society,” said Baltar,”loved the new government, at first, as it cut their taxes to almost nothing, while shifting that burden entirely on the lowest fifty percent of our people, many of whom were working long hours of drudgery just to stay broke.
Also, the new government bureaycracy, while loyal doctrinaires, were not as adroit in actually running things. Even in the private sector, the emphasis gradually shifted from good corporate governance to whatever was ideologically correct...something we were often accused of by the Monos, strangely enough.”
Kim snorted.
“Projection is a favorite human pastime in any time and place, it seems,” she observed.
“The economy bottomed out,” Laura said,”unemployment spiked, food and other basics were in short supply and high demand, which meant prices were correspondingly high...we even started running out of microchips, which had a crippling impact on manufacturing everything from coffeemakers to battlestars, and what was being manufactured had a hard time going to where it needed to go.”
“And,” said Baltar,”into that mess, at the beginning of 68M2, came the Angel of Death, as the pandemic was dubbed by those not holding to the belief it was all fake.”
“We traced it to Orion traders,” Laura said,”bring in goods from beyond the Red Line; all trade was immediately shut down; Warp, even, if it wasn;t thr Ministry of Tranpotation's inspectors, the few that remained after the latest round of budget cuts, couldn't be trusted to do their jobs properly anyway.
The closure of trade made the economy worse, as the knock-on effects from closing ourselves off to foreign trade wrought havoc, and, with no healthcare, vaccines, or scientific research being allowed, the most basic prevenative efforts bittrly opposed by Monothiests, the vigilance committees, and the Net, the media, and the government, the Angel of Death would go on to claim more lives than the war had.”
“Then, there were the conspiracy theories,” said Jurgen, Tigh simply saying,”Gods,” in reply.
“Zarek loved promoting cobspitacies,” Agathon remarked.”In fact, that seemed to be the one thing those Monothiestic frak were capable of doing well “
Much like the League, Kim mused,when COVID, in the 2020s, maade the Spanish flu pandemic which brought down the old United States look like the common cold.
It had been the Allies who'd come up with the series of vaccines to combat the coronavirus disease, and the League, its motley crew of patriots, in particular, who called the vax poison, and the scientists and reaserchers who'd eeveloped them Nazis nd Doctor Mengeles, ultimately, after the Reb and Dezzie Presidential elections had resulted in violent autocoups, shattering the ceasefire between the Allied Powers and the League of Mar a Lago which had put a stop to the war resulting from the Reb r-bombin g of Manhattan on 9/11.
“--lost the poular and electoral vote,” Cain had finally spoken up,”lost the Senate entirely, and, Gods, you should've heard Zarek and his followers bitch,[/u] and, the show they put on trying to convince the rest of us that we really didn't elect Roslin and Baltar in a landslide, that they didn't secure the electoral voyes of all twelve worlds, that the Cylons, the Xenos and the elites had all resorted to cyber-warfatre--”
“The Hybrids running our elections aren't connected to the Net,” Baltar commented.
“Of course they weren't,” said Kom,”but that didn't stop Zarek and his followers from claiming the Hybrids were hacked, evn after countless investigations and manual audits.”
Caun smiled.
“No, it didn't,” he said, sighing.”In fact, every proof of their claims being false was, to the MAMSPA true believers, further proofs their claims were true. Seventy court cases later, Zarek is standing before the Grand Arbites, arguing his case before what everyone, including him, believed was a symparheric audience—six of the Grand Arbitrators, including the Lord High Arbitrator, were his appointees, after all—only, for them, three weeks ago, to rule unanimously that he hadn't a leg to stand on.”
“From there,” he added,”the storming of the Forum, and the bombing of Athens, and, here we are, three weeks later.”
“Repeating history,” Kim remarked, Adama, in his gravelly voice, saying:
”'Whar has happened, will happen again.'”
“So say us all,” he quietly added.
03:43:29
Even with all of Enterprise's 144 QF6L Picador drones deployed deep within Ragnar I's atmosphere, there were limits to how much information they could glean from the Vo'lun portal on the surface of the brown dwarf's rocky core.
For one, said rocky core was nearly a megaklick deep within Ragnar I, and the temp and pressure at that depth was too hot and too dense for a drone to last long without being crushed to the volume of a pea, and lquefied into a rain drop.
Moreocer, Ragnar I grab was 16 times Earth's, requiring an escape velocity, at that depth, of nearly 180 kips to be able to up cycle, and a Picador simply lacked the remass to boost to that velocity.
Meaning the drones and the ship's Sentinel, were only able to fly five hundred klicks deep inside Ragnat I's murky depths, and visual cams and other passive sensors being right out of the question, and false-color sonar limited to a kiloklick below them.
Still, Lieutenant Commander Yasmin Spock was able to get some useful onformation from the dones' other active sensors, in particula, quantum eadar, which was able to ping all the way to the exterior of the artifact itself, and to about ten, maybe twenty meters through the alien structures' neutron-star like walls.
The structures in question were three terraced pyeamids, similar to those erected by ancient Central and South American civilizations, each pyramid precisely 144 stories high, and subdivided into levels and chambers within, at least as far within as the twenty-seven year old native of New York's sixth borough, Co-Op City, was able to “see.”
“Thanks,” she said to the bot delivering trays of hot, strong black coffee and sausage sandwiches to her and the rest of the ship's anchor watch, now manning various workstations round CIC, with Andi McKunstra, recently graduated Academy at the top of the lieutenant's promotion list, at the helm, running things in Yasmin's stead, while she continued her investigation of the Vo'kun portal.
And, it seemed, the portal had decided to investigate Enterprise as well, the starman first class at the radar station reporting,”sir, we're being scanned, scan point of origin is the artifact at the core of Ragnar I.”
Shipnet, a few moments later said,”We're being interrogated by an artificial intelligence orginiating from that artifact.”
“Hostile?” Yasmin asked, her first priority being that the shipwide AI network was not being hacked.
“No,” shipnet answered.”She has not forced herself on us in any way; she has minded her manners, thus far.”
“If anything,” shipnet added,”she's terribly lonely; she's been alone, standing her post, some six hundred thousand years.”
“Son of a bitch,” Andi interjected, the blushing, as she instantly regretted her outburst.
“Yeah, bubeleh,” Yasmin replied, meeting Andi's warm chocolate eyes with her black-eyed gaze,”I'd go apeshit after about a month, and I don't wanna even think about six hundred thousand freakin']/i] years.”
To shipnet, she said:
“Use your own judgement; right now, there's no harm in jusr ralking, but the instant she tries anything, sever the connection.”
“We'll be careful,” shipnet answered,”but, I don't thinlk she's up to no good, just half-crazed from being alone so long.”
“Yeah,” Yasmin agreed, as she sipped her coffee.”I think so too.”
259-69M2
04:04:00
“--Education Minister in both Baltar administrations,” Laura Roslin said to this admiral who could've been Kara Thrace's twin, while Gaius Baltar, reluctant Vice President-elect of the Twelve Tribes, nursed his drink.”When Zarek and the Monothiest won the elections of 63M2, the first thing to be ourlawed was public education--”
“Criminalized it,” Baltar found himself saying,”criminalized any form of organized instruction, on- snd offline, punishable by a visit from the then newly-organized vigilance committees which were slowly supplanting the Arbites.”
“'Kangaroo courts,'” Laura spat, the admiral from this North American Common Assembly not turning a hair, not raising an eybrow at something the former President of the Tribes still considered frakking linacy,”'Political tools of woke, radical Left polythiest elites.'”
“At least,” she added,”that was the narrative of the MAMSPA movement, which had nothing to do with Zarek's conviction, by a tribunal of twelve citizens, in Londinnium City earlier that year, for bank and tax fraud, or with his conviction, two months later, by another tribunal in that same city, for raping a twelve-year old beauty pagent contestant, or three ongoing investigations by the 'weaponized' Ministry of Justice for his role in instigatng the bombing of the Government Complex in Acrpolis, on Necromunda, the Temple in Deplhi, on Palestinia, and the Alliance Children's Hospital on Atlantis, bombings which claimed the lives of 16,800 souls, including 7,000 children.”
“Frakker,” Baltar heard his fellow Cylon, Saul Tigh, growl.
The aged Cylon sighed, feeling all his years, in spite of the nanotechnology which kept Baltar looking relatively young...all three acts of terror had happened on his watch, with the massacre of innocent children, all those equally innocent healers being the worst, and weighing the most heavily on Baltar's conscience.
Zarek had been proudest of that, same as the thirty percent of the Tribes who put him forward as their standard bearer, following the end of the War, and the Monothiest Purge by the Adar Administration which had only driven the small, harrd core of true believers underground, and had resukted in his recall in 43M2, and over fourteen years of hell for then-Senate Speaker Baltar, serving out the last two years of Adar's term as acting President, before, to his sorprise, defeating the opposition candidate, retired Warmaster Marcus Antonius Sulla, in a close election.
“Those were peaceful protests,” Adama sneered,” according to Zarek and his MAMSPA goons, legitimate forms of free speech and free expression...questioning the Archon and Republicsn Guard raid on a separtist religious cult compound in the Necromundan Wastelands, the persecution of Monothiests by the government—”
Agathon replied with a snort, telling Baltar,”I'm sorry, sir, but you bent over backwards licking rancid Monothiest ass, after ending the Purge and abolishing the camps.”
“And the alternative, Captain?!” Baltar sharply demanded, Agarhon answering him with silence.
That was fine.
Baltar himself had no answer for that question.
“'—medical experiments,' “ Adama continued, a tear running down the old Palestinian's leathery face, as he forced himself yo speak,”on children, to change their gender and their species, to take away their humanity, and make them Cylons....”
“You ever seen a body broken by blast and overpressure?” he asked.”The Gods were merciful enough that many of those murdered by the hasatannium device which destroyed the Children's Hospital back in 55 had been atomized...but...not alll...she couldn't have been more than twenty...found out later she had a kid, was working her way through med school holding down two , three different jobs, including that one...”
“Bill,” Tigh gently said, putting a hand on Adama's shoulder, Adama,, lowering his eyes, continuing:
“She was lying in a pool of blood and shit, her intestines all over the frakking floor, her last seconds in this world spent worrying about her son.”
“My Gods,” Laura interjected.
“Zarek,” Adama, his voice taking on an angry tone,”in one of his live casts, had the frakking gall to equate her to Yussef Betanyahu,” one of the infamous so-clled doctors visting hell and death on the inmates---not all of whom had been Cylon—in the Monothiest internment camps during the war,”and, of course, all his followers started doing so as well.”
Galactica had been in Atlantis orbit that horrible day in 55M2, her medicae personnel the first ti offer help.
“I'm sorry,” Balat whispered, eyes on Adama, a war hero who could broken by a young woman whose passage to Elysium had been so indescribably ugly.
“So say us all, Gaius,” Adama whispered in reply as Human looked Cylon in the eye.
“So say us all.”
16 SEPTEMBER, 2056
04:08:11
The one constant, Kim silently observed,across all the universes, is man's ingumanity to his fellow man.
None of what her fellow sentients had said shocked her, because this was what the thirty-nine year old North American Interstellar Fleet officer had been fighting against her entire adult life.
What her Marines, long after the battle itself had ended, continued fighting on the various derelict enemy warships.
“When Zarek, who'd lost the popular vote,” Laura, who'd once again taken up the narrative, said,”but had a supepmajority in the Council of Electors, took power, he ended all the ongoing investigations by savking the entire Ministry of Justice, and filling top to bottom with his carefully vetted footsoldiers.”
“The Monothiests,” Baltar said,”had everyone concerned with Agenda 45, and snuck Agenda 63 past them...every Alliance bueraucrat found himself right out of a job, with plenty of MAMSPA fsnatics willing and eager to take their places.”
“The tribunal which convicted Zarek,” Laura said, while Kim listened to reports streaming into her BCI,”found themselves the targets of a newly-reconstited Ministry of Justice, as well as the Ministry of the Exchequer's Tax Division, and, after their arrest, they found themselves convicted in perfect fair trial by Arbites appointed by Zarek and confirmed by his Senate, and tribunals of patriotic citizens....all legal and aboveboard.
The God smiled upon them, by comparison, as the vigilance committees took up the burden of prosecuting 'Cylon sleeper agents' and 'radical Left domestic terrorists,' often disrupting legitimately peaceful protests and turning them into violent riots which were then blamed by the media and the Net on the peaceful protesters.”
“And, from there,” Kim's twin in this time and place said,”everything went straight to the frakking Warp.”
“Schools were xriminalized,” the President-elect of the Tribes said,”immediately followed by healthcare—anyone who knew so much as how to bandage a skinned knee fell foul of the vigilance committes—then the Senate outlawed scientific and technological research not approved by the newly-established Council on Religious Liberty, which, naturally, was stacked with Monothiests, making the practice pf 'the false religion of Scientism' a matter for patriots to resolve.
In particular, all reaerch into the origins of the universe and life itself were now forbidden, with the belief that the Emperorr of Mankind, from the Warp, created the world in six twenty-four hour days, men from dust and women from--”
She blushed, Kara Thrace fsaying:
“From the Emperor, umm, manipulating men's, ermm, members.”
“Their Scripture,” Jurgen remarked,”says 'from their ribs came Woman, Mother of Perversions and vAbominations of the World.'”
“Isn't that enlighyrned?!” Kim found herself snarking, Jurgrn replying,”both our dominant religions have been bodged together over the past eight thousand years from the religion of the High Lords, and from whatever beliefs our ancestors brought with them to Kobol; honestly, it's quite the frakking miracle they're both as consistent as they are.”
“Anyway,” Jurgen then said, as Kim smirked,” the word 'rib,' is an ancient euphemishm for an erect penis; it's no longer in common usage.”
“I see,” Kim said.
“The upper one percent of society,” said Baltar,”loved the new government, at first, as it cut their taxes to almost nothing, while shifting that burden entirely on the lowest fifty percent of our people, many of whom were working long hours of drudgery just to stay broke.
Also, the new government bureaycracy, while loyal doctrinaires, were not as adroit in actually running things. Even in the private sector, the emphasis gradually shifted from good corporate governance to whatever was ideologically correct...something we were often accused of by the Monos, strangely enough.”
Kim snorted.
“Projection is a favorite human pastime in any time and place, it seems,” she observed.
“The economy bottomed out,” Laura said,”unemployment spiked, food and other basics were in short supply and high demand, which meant prices were correspondingly high...we even started running out of microchips, which had a crippling impact on manufacturing everything from coffeemakers to battlestars, and what was being manufactured had a hard time going to where it needed to go.”
“And,” said Baltar,”into that mess, at the beginning of 68M2, came the Angel of Death, as the pandemic was dubbed by those not holding to the belief it was all fake.”
“We traced it to Orion traders,” Laura said,”bring in goods from beyond the Red Line; all trade was immediately shut down; Warp, even, if it wasn;t thr Ministry of Tranpotation's inspectors, the few that remained after the latest round of budget cuts, couldn't be trusted to do their jobs properly anyway.
The closure of trade made the economy worse, as the knock-on effects from closing ourselves off to foreign trade wrought havoc, and, with no healthcare, vaccines, or scientific research being allowed, the most basic prevenative efforts bittrly opposed by Monothiests, the vigilance committees, and the Net, the media, and the government, the Angel of Death would go on to claim more lives than the war had.”
“Then, there were the conspiracy theories,” said Jurgen, Tigh simply saying,”Gods,” in reply.
“Zarek loved promoting cobspitacies,” Agathon remarked.”In fact, that seemed to be the one thing those Monothiestic frak were capable of doing well “
Much like the League, Kim mused,when COVID, in the 2020s, maade the Spanish flu pandemic which brought down the old United States look like the common cold.
It had been the Allies who'd come up with the series of vaccines to combat the coronavirus disease, and the League, its motley crew of patriots, in particular, who called the vax poison, and the scientists and reaserchers who'd eeveloped them Nazis nd Doctor Mengeles, ultimately, after the Reb and Dezzie Presidential elections had resulted in violent autocoups, shattering the ceasefire between the Allied Powers and the League of Mar a Lago which had put a stop to the war resulting from the Reb r-bombin g of Manhattan on 9/11.
“--lost the poular and electoral vote,” Cain had finally spoken up,”lost the Senate entirely, and, Gods, you should've heard Zarek and his followers bitch,[/u] and, the show they put on trying to convince the rest of us that we really didn't elect Roslin and Baltar in a landslide, that they didn't secure the electoral voyes of all twelve worlds, that the Cylons, the Xenos and the elites had all resorted to cyber-warfatre--”
“The Hybrids running our elections aren't connected to the Net,” Baltar commented.
“Of course they weren't,” said Kom,”but that didn't stop Zarek and his followers from claiming the Hybrids were hacked, evn after countless investigations and manual audits.”
Caun smiled.
“No, it didn't,” he said, sighing.”In fact, every proof of their claims being false was, to the MAMSPA true believers, further proofs their claims were true. Seventy court cases later, Zarek is standing before the Grand Arbites, arguing his case before what everyone, including him, believed was a symparheric audience—six of the Grand Arbitrators, including the Lord High Arbitrator, were his appointees, after all—only, for them, three weeks ago, to rule unanimously that he hadn't a leg to stand on.”
“From there,” he added,”the storming of the Forum, and the bombing of Athens, and, here we are, three weeks later.”
“Repeating history,” Kim remarked, Adama, in his gravelly voice, saying:
”'Whar has happened, will happen again.'”
“So say us all,” he quietly added.
Statistics: Posted by WillDexter — 2024-06-15 12:24pm