Part 1 Battlestar Galactica: Back To The Colonies: Of Droughts And Grudges

Chapter 9

IX

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 8TH 2043

9:00 AM, Presidential Mansion, Sioux City.

"So President Bond's visit is still on?" Admiral Baltar asked Brendan Costanza. She and the Sioux City Chief of Police were meeting with the New Caprican President less than twenty-four hours after the bombings had ripped apart huge sections of the water pipeline in Missouri. Even though the pipeline had only marginal effect against the drought, it was a symbol of the resolve of two nations to fight the five-year-old plague. It had shaken people in both countries.

"Yes it is, Caprica", the New Caprican President replied. "He's a man that isn't intimidated by the bad guys, that much is certain."

"He's been in combat, Admiral", Chief Lawrence Sullivan offered, "just like the three of us. Once you've seen the elephant in the room it doesn't scare you as much. I know", he held his hand up, "I would rather never have to deal with any of that crap again but running away from it won't help either. He understands that."

"The American FBI has been combing through the old Galactica prison files from after the coup attempt", Admiral Baltar said, looking down at the latest information she had. "Of the almost one thousand people that were released after arriving on Earth, three hundred and twenty-seven are deceased; another five hundred have been accounted for, and the rest have fallen off the grid."

"In other words, they could be dead or alive", the President noted, "or they changed their identities at some point. A lot of people did that simply to start life over again, but I bet there are more than a few who wanted to get rid of their names for good reason."

"Has The Bureau sorted out names of people who may have fallen off the grid recently-say in the last year or eighteen months?"

"No, Larry, I didn't see any information as to when someone's name disappeared", Caprica informed him. "But I'm sure it's possible to have it broken down like that. Want me to call Richmond right now and see if they can break it down for us?"

"That might be helpful', Hotdog contemplated. "It may not mean anything. Some people obviously changed their name right after arriving and it wouldn't be a definite sign of anything suspicious, but right now we need to find that needle in a haystack."

Caprica left the room to call The Bureau in Richmond. She was advised that it wouldn't take more than thirty minutes for the information to be chronologically laid out. She asked them to send the information to her immediately after they were finished.

President Costanza delayed the meeting until the FBI could send over the information. It ended up taking about forty-five minutes to arrive. Caprica went into her office in the Presidential Mansion and made a scan of the list. A majority of the people listed had changed their names shortly after arriving on Earth and about forty percent of those had informed the New Caprican government of the name change. That pretty much eliminated those people.

From there she decided to a reverse chronological check to see if any names of interest had dropped off the grid in the last year. It wasn't hard to tell. People that had been paying bills, who had jobs and who paid taxes and suddenly the trail on them went cold meant that they either changed their identity covertly or they had simply decided to disappear.

She scrolled down to the bottom of the list, showing the names of people who had apparently had vanished in one form or another within the last 18 months. Most of the names didn't mean anything to her. Two names showed up fairly close together that caught her attention. She didn't place the name at first as they simply sounded familiar. Then she pulled up the last known driver's license image for both.