Chapter 34: The Sleeper Stirs
Gaeta's encrypted channel carried a different frequency now — not the crisp professional tone of tactical analysis, but the tighter cadence of someone reporting something that unnerved him.
COLE — VALERII SITUATION ESCALATING. THREE INCIDENTS THIS WEEK. MISSED A PRE-FLIGHT CHECK YESTERDAY — FIRST TIME IN HER SERVICE RECORD. FOUND IN THE WEAPONS LOCKER AT 0300 WITH NO EXPLANATION. CHIEF TYROL FILED AN INFORMAL CONCERN — NOT OFFICIAL, BUT IT'S IN THE SYSTEM.
ADDITIONAL: COTTLE RAN A MEDICAL EVAL. RESULTS CLASSIFIED. BUT THE RUMOR MILL SAYS STRESS-RELATED ANOMALIES.
THIS ISN'T NORMAL PILOT BURNOUT, COLE. SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH HER.
I read the message in the Cybele's cargo office at 0400, the ship's night-cycle lighting casting amber shadows across the workstation. Dunn was asleep — I'd given standing orders that anything marked priority on Gaeta's channel woke me alone. This qualified.
Sharon Valerii. Boomer. Number Eight model. Sleeper agent whose programming is surfacing like a submarine breaking through ice — slow, inevitable, and visible to anyone standing on the right shoreline.
She was found in the weapons locker. She doesn't know why. Her conscious mind doesn't understand the impulses driving her to proximity with firearms, to emotional instability, to the gradual erosion of the identity she believes is real. But the programming knows. The machine underneath the woman knows exactly what it's preparing for.
I pulled up the system's Cylon detection interface. The blue text materialized in the dim office air:
[CYLON DETECTION: VALERII, SHARON "BOOMER"]
[LAST SCAN: INDIRECT — DAY 47 (GALACTICA VISIT, PASSIVE)]
[PROBABILITY AT LAST SCAN: 67% (±18%)]
[CURRENT ESTIMATE (EXTRAPOLATED): 72% (±15%)]
[CONFIDENCE LEVEL: MODERATE — INSUFFICIENT FOR ACTIONABLE IDENTIFICATION]
[NOTE: SLEEPER AGENTS EXHIBIT SUPPRESSED MARKERS — ACCURACY REDUCED]
Seventy-two percent, plus or minus fifteen. That meant anywhere from fifty-seven to eighty-seven percent probability that Sharon Valerii was a Cylon. High enough to be alarming. Not high enough to be proof.
What do I do with seventy-two percent?
If I warn someone — Gaeta, Adama, anyone — they'll ask how I know. "My alien technology gives her a seventy-two percent Cylon probability" is not a sentence that ends well for me. Even if they believed it, the false positive rate means there's a meaningful chance she's human and I've just destroyed an innocent woman's life.
And if I don't warn someone, she shoots Adama. Two rounds, point-blank, in Galactica's CIC corridor. The Commander goes down. The fleet fractures. The Kobol crisis spirals into a civil war between military and civilian authority.
I know this. I watched this episode on a frakking couch.
The coffee on my desk had gone cold hours ago. I drank it anyway — the bitterness grounding, physical, a tether to the present while my mind spun through scenarios that all ended badly.
Option one: warn Adama directly. Through Gaeta, through Dualla, through any channel. The problem: no evidence. My system's probability reading isn't shareable without revealing the system. And even if I could explain it, Adama wouldn't space a decorated pilot on a civilian logistics officer's hunch. He'd investigate — which would tip Boomer's programming and potentially accelerate the crisis.
Option two: warn Gaeta indirectly. Frame the concern as behavioral analysis — "Valerii's pattern matches known Cylon infiltrator behavior." The problem: Gaeta already suspects something is wrong. He filed the data with me. Pushing him toward a Cylon accusation without proof risks triggering another Litmus-style witch hunt — and this time, the target might actually be a Cylon, which makes the politics infinitely more dangerous.
Option three: do nothing. Let canon play out. Let Boomer shoot Adama.
The third option sat in my chest like the shrapnel from Day Zero — foreign, painful, impossible to remove without causing more damage.
Adama survives. In the show, he survives. He's in surgery for days, Tigh takes command badly, the fleet splits, but Adama comes back. The shooting is survivable.
But "survivable" in a television show written for dramatic effect is different from "survivable" in a real medical bay with real surgeons and real blood. My meta-knowledge says he lives. My meta-knowledge also said the water crisis would hit two days later than it did. The timeline isn't gospel. It's a rough sketch drawn from memory, and every divergence I've caused — every intervention, every positioning, every butterfly wing I've flapped — changes the picture.
What if my interventions have changed something? What if Boomer's programming activates earlier because of a variable I can't see? What if the medical team isn't in the same position? What if the bullets hit differently?
What if Adama dies because I chose to let it happen?
I put my head in my hands. The coded data pad glowed on the desk beside me, its screen showing the organization's contingency matrix — the plans I'd been building for a command crisis, the positioning that assumed Adama would be incapacitated but alive.
You're a coward. You have information that could save a man's life, and you're choosing operational security over human life.
No. I'm choosing forty-nine thousand lives over one. If I reveal my capabilities — the system, the meta-knowledge, the organization's true scope — I lose everything. The network that protected the fleet during the water crisis, the intelligence that warned about Bastille Day, the coordination that helped the tylium raid. All of it, gone. Investigated, dismantled, and I'm in a cell answering questions about how a logistics officer has alien technology in his skull.
Adama can survive two bullets. The fleet can't survive losing the only shadow infrastructure that's been keeping it a step ahead of disaster.
The logic was sound. The mathematics were clear. And the weight of the calculation — the human cost of strategic patience — pressed down on me harder than anything since the day I'd woken in a dead man's body.
I opened the coded data pad and began writing the contingency plans.
COMMAND CRISIS CONTINGENCY — SCENARIO: ADAMA INCAPACITATED
ASSUMPTIONS: — Command devolves to Colonel Tigh (compromised — see assessment) — Military-civilian relations deteriorate immediately — Supply chain disruption within 48 hours — Political opportunism (Zarek, others) within 72 hours
ORGANIZATION RESPONSE: — Dunn: Activate full civilian coordination network. All ships, all contacts. — Marsh: Engineering readiness on all partner ships. FTL checked. — Gaeta: CIC liaison. Maintain intelligence flow. Do NOT reveal organization scope. — Montoya: Political monitoring. Quorum reactions. Roslin's response. — Yari Demos: Political advisory. Faction analysis. Legitimacy positioning. — Kira: Refugee population stability. Food/water distribution continuity. — Kwan: Cybele security. Protect organizational assets.
CRITICAL: Do not attempt to prevent the crisis. Position to manage the aftermath.
I saved the document. Encrypted it. Stared at the screen.
Eighty-eight days since I woke up. Two and a half months of building, recruiting, planning. And the biggest crisis of the entire first season is approaching like a freight train, and I'm standing on the tracks writing contingency memos.
The earpiece buzzed. Dunn — 0500, early, but she'd been keeping irregular hours since the Colonial Day attention spike.
"You're up early."
"Couldn't sleep."
"The Valerii situation?"
She reads me too well.
"Among other things."
"I have Demos's latest. Three more Galactica crew members reported unusual behavior from Valerii. She tried to space herself two days ago."
My hand stopped on the data pad.
"She what?"
"Attempted suicide. Prevented by deck crew who found her in an airlock antechamber. The official report says 'stress-related incident.' Cottle sedated her."
Boomer tried to kill herself. The part of her that's still Sharon Valerii — the human identity, the woman who doesn't know she's a machine — recognized that something was wrong and tried to remove the threat. By removing herself.
That's not in the show. Not exactly. The details are shifting. The timeline is bending.
"Dunn. The contingencies I prepared. I need them reviewed."
"I've been reviewing them since you wrote the first draft. The command crisis scenario?"
"Move it from contingency to active preparation. No deployment yet — but everyone in their positions, aware of their roles, ready to execute on my signal."
"What signal?"
When Boomer pulls the trigger. When the Commander goes down. When the fleet shatters and we're the only ones who saw it coming.
"You'll know it when you hear it."
A pause on the channel. The particular silence of Dunn weighing trust against curiosity, the boundary we'd negotiated a hundred times.
"Understood."
The channel clicked off. I sat alone in the cargo office, surrounded by contingency plans and cold coffee and the quiet, grinding awareness that I was about to let a woman shoot the most important man in the fleet because the alternative was worse.
Coward.
The word echoed in a skull that wasn't mine, spoken in a voice I was trying to forget.
Maybe. But a coward who's prepared is worth more than a hero who's exposed.
I closed the data pad. Filed it in the encrypted partition. And started writing a secondary contingency — the one I hadn't put on paper yet, the one that lived only in my head:
What happens if Adama doesn't survive?
The answer was too large for a data pad. Too large for a cargo office. Too large for a man sitting alone at 0500 in a ship full of sleeping people who didn't know the countdown had started.
I poured the cold coffee out and made fresh. The machine gurgled — the same sound it had made since Day Zero, when Dr. Yusuf's medical bay had smelled like copper and chemical fire suppressant, and the system had flickered blue text through the static of a dying body.
Survive the next hour. Learn this man's life. Don't say anything impossible.
The words from that first day. Still applicable. Always applicable.
Roslin's office had sent Starbuck to Caprica — that much the fleet wireless confirmed, though the mission details were classified. The Arrow of Apollo. The prophecy. The dying leader chasing scripture across a war zone, because faith and politics had merged into something that looked like destiny and smelled like desperation.
The Kobol operation is next. Then the shooting. Then the split.
Prepare. Watch. Position.
I added one line to my contingencies, coded in shorthand only I could read:
"B-DAY: UNKNOWN. EST. 10-14 DAYS. NON-PREVENTABLE. OUTCOME: CANON FAVORABLE IF UNCHANGED."
Then I hid the pad and went to find breakfast.
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