Part 1, Battlestar Galactica, Finding Humanity: Learning To Become Human Again

Chapter 1

I

One Year Ago

Saul Tigh couldn't get through a day now without being in physical pain. It wasn't so much the pain of where his eye used to be-that seemed to take care of itself, and he felt twinges there, but no overt pain. It was the constant pain in his legs, which The Cylons had abused while he was in prison. His left leg had taken the most punishment-he was sure that he had some torn ligaments in his left knee, but the human body can repair itself-at least to a point.

Yet his right leg was always killing him, too. He had to walk normally on that leg, less his left leg give out. He used a cane to get around these days, and it did help alleviate the pain that probably would always be there.

Yet the pain and the torture that the Cylons had heaped on him after he had been incarcerated-after Duck had blown up the graduating class of the New Caprica Police Force-hadn't put out the fire to pay back these human-looking toasters. It had only increased his want to see everyone of them dead.

Many people had simply vanished, never to return. Laura Roslin had been held captive, but not physically tortured. Mentally? That was another story. But Tom Zarek had been beaten, although not to the extent Saul had, and he had recovered. Chief Galen Tyrol had been spared because he was a mechanical jack-of-all-trades, and The Cylons deemed him necessary to help keep New Caprica running, even as he worked to destroy it from within.

Then there was Kara. She had disappeared long before Duck did his deed. She had vanished the day The Cylons began their occupation, and no one knew if she were dead or alive. Saul had been at Sam's bedside three weeks later, when he died of the lethal pneumonia virus that had swept through the camp, the agony in the man's voice wondering what had happened to his wife, Saul not able to give him an answer.

Eventually, The Cylons released their one-hundred-and-fifty or so prisoners who had been rounded up after Duck had blown himself up-at least the ones still alive. Some of their numbers had died in captivity, or so everyone believed.

Since that act of terror a year ago, the insurgency had only grown. It had built an intricate system of underground bunkers, some connected to each other, to allow those that were the titular leaders of this simmering rebellion to meet.

The leaders were who one would expect: Tigh himself, Laura Roslin, Tom Zarek, Galen Tyrol, Diana Seelix, on the "civilian" side there was Charlie Connor, as well as Roslin's assistant when she was President, Tory Foster. His wife Ellen sometimes was in on meetings, but she had not wanted to know a lot of what was going on.

Noticeably missing from those names were Gaius Baltar and Felix Gaeta. Baltar was elected President on the dream of this world, of New Caprica. Yet even before The Cylons invaded, he had simply lived a life of drinking, and fraking any woman who would take him in Colonial One.

Tigh had been shocked, to say the least, and more than a little angry, that Gaeta was Baltar's Chief-of-Staff, for lack of a better word. It galled Tigh to no end that the very talented officer, who Tigh had thought would have his own battlestar one day-if there had been any battlestars left-would work in tandem with that traitorous, self-indulgent son-of-a-bitch Gaius Baltar.

Tonight, Tigh would host a meeting consisting of Roslin, Zarek, and Chief Tyrol. That was the core of the leadership, and they conferred as often as they could.

To be sure, there wasn't much going on at the moment-The Cylons had cracked down on them, even after releasing all of them from prison. Yet The Cylons didn't know everything.

They didn't know that, before they had arrived, and before Galactica and Pegasus had left, that The Old Man had made sure to move scores of automatic weapons in hidden depots throughout the settlement.