Chapter 44: Brother John the Cylon

It was bizarre the way Brother John the Cylon was taken into custody. After weeks of quarantine Commander Lawson had bent the rules to have him in her quarters supposedly for a booty call.

Instead of that thirty minutes after his arrival John the Cylon was arrested for being a Cylon agent.

Fortunately for the commander there was evidence of wrong doing,

The bio-metric logs on her keyboard showed that he had accessed it an left behind DNA.

He had used the terminal at least four times in the weeks after the attacks, but before the pandemic.

John the Cylon had accessed classified information about the combat capabilities of the Battlestar Mercury. Documents had been accessed and read before several operations, including the near disaster raid on the Cylon refinery.

The problem with the chain of evidence was that was where the trail went cold. Brother John was the overly curious lover. He just wanted to check on his survival odds.

What Eva Lawson could not control was what the Cylon said during interrogation. There was lots of kinky bedroom talk to be repeated and Lawson knew it could permanently damage her command, perhaps the entire war effort.

Well obviously that was why John the Cylon had created the relationship in the first place. It was only natural that a woman of her vigor and appetite would find a lover.

What dumbfounded the commander was how she had found a way to do something worse than sleeping with a subordinate.

There was muffled talk in the hallways and corridors of the Battlestar. “Cylons look like us now. One of them was so convincing he was fracking the commander.”

Commander Lawson needed to manage this investigation and manage it fast. If this talk about Cylon resurrection was true they could not shove Brother John the Cylon out an airlock. They needed to bury him in a hole that was very deep.

They needed to keep him safe and not telling his Cylon friends about his romantic and other adventures on board the Battlestar Mercury.

The Dossier provided the first piece of the puzzle. The Cavil captures and eventually killed by Battlestar Group 34 was an accomplished liar.

He had conducted religious ceremonies, celebrated births, deaths and life events. “Thank the Gods,” he liked to say.

Commander Lawson turned over the evidence and gave six hours of recorded testimony to her XO, Major Ramirez. The trimmed down second in command was a witness to some of the goings on, but the Dossier convinced her that Brother John the Cylon could not tell the truth.

Maria Ramirez would lead the interrogation. After four hours she wanted to take a shower, but she needed to read her commander in.

“Brother John is obviously trying to tear apart this command, Ramirez said in her first informal report to her superior officer. “He spent a lot of time dropping kinky little tidbits thinking I would write it into the report or be disgusted by it.”

“He picked the wrong woman commander. I’ve done kink, both sides, top and bottom. It does not phase me in the slightest. What he has been circumspect about is how he got the data he read off the ship.”

“That data was not copied. Your thumb driver port doesn’t work. It was the first security measure I put in place on Admiral Mueller when I was posted to this ship. There was a man who could think complicated tactics or strategic fleet politics but did not know dick about information security.”

“It is pretty obvious they knew about the refinery raid before we jumped. They don’t have an infinite supply of base stars to just sit the refinery. They knew the time, place and planned date of the attack.”

“How?” Lawson saw a way out for herself.

“Major Martin’s scanner found a new breach that was put into place months before CNP. It was a little program that collected data in transit, decrypted the data data and transmitted it very slowly in clear text on a very low frequency.”

“I’m a little lost.”

“Brother John had your password. He had to acknowledge the documents he read. He was very careful NOT to read the documents you had not read. When he signed out of the document, he added a numeric string. There is a heavy hitting algorithm somewhere aboard this ship that takes any document with the right code and transmits it.”

“It is not secure it is not fast,” Major Ramirez “but it was ingenious. The transmission was from one network router to another one. That router was near the communications array. Normally we run a lot of traffic in and out of he communications array and that router is busy. But when we spool up for ops, we go radio silent. That is when the encrypted transmission goes out to the Cylons.”

“They don’t get a lot of warning, but they get enough warning to move around some assets,” Lawson surmised.

“Exactly,” Major Ramirez was in her element now. Information Technology. “We are going to have to purge every network device on this ship and lay down new code that has no vulnerabilities.”

“We did that to the computers already,” Lawson reminded her XO.

“The network infrastructure is different. A lot of it is read only so it takes a lot of network gear to store something as complex as a military operations plan. Trust me commander, this guy had it. We were compromised on this ship nearly two years ago.”

“Frack me,” the commander said.

“With regards to that.” Major Ramirez tossed a bag on the desk. “You are going to have to keep it cool for a while sir. A very long while. There is a substitute for the real thing in the bag. I have your back, but people are talking. The Peoples fracking Council wants to know why a known Cylon agent was sleeping with the fleet commander, before they approve your promotion to commander.”

“What am I going to say?” Lawson asked.

“Not a damned thing,” Ramirez said. “You have terrible taste in men. The agent was trained to take advantage of it. It’s all in the report.”

Major Ramirez dropped that on the commander’s desk. “They are coming in with the vaccine. You will be getting a shot in the arm soon enough. I’m going to make sure Brother John the Cylon stays alive, doesn’t teleport back to Cylon and never talks to another human being again.”

“Knowing he can’t die might make him prone to suicide as a means of teleportation,” Lawson speculated.

“He will be watched, but he will be safe.”

“Do you believe this resurrection story?”

“Yes Commander Lawson I really do. It makes sense of all the experiments the Cylons did during the first war. They wanted to measure the soul, the life force that made human being alive. They apparently figured part of it out.”

“Do we have the research?” Lawson asked.

“Yes we do, It is a book by Doctor Edwin Nelson of the Virgon Science Institute. I’ve forwarded a copy to your in box. If you need nothing further I will see to Brother John the Cylon’s permanent imprisonment situation.”

Having dodged a missile sized bullet, Commander Lawson needed one more thing to redirect from her own indiscretion. A big operation.

That was her next chore.