| A Naked Planet Guide to Sagittaron |
| Summary: | Home to all the bombed-out urban hellpits and shadowy insurgent camps one could want in a vacation destination. The CAG discusses a return here with her Saggie officers. |
| Date: | 11 Aug 2041 AE |
| Related Logs: | Clear; Blinders Off; Observe and Report |
| Players: |
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| Map Room - Deck 7 - Battlestar Cerberus |
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| The one object that dominates this room is the one it is named for: the giant plotting table in the center of the room. Bottom-lit like the plot in CIC, this one is twenty feet across and about the same distance wide. The maps, which are rolled and kept in a locker at the side of the room, provide much more detail than most of the charts in CIC and are especially useful in planning tactical operations. Unscaled models of ships are available to be situated on the surface of the table and risers on each side of the room allow for a small audience to watch or be briefed. A single large LCD screen is built into the wall at the far end to display reconnaissance or other supplemental material. |
| Post-Holocaust Day: #166 |
Cidra has spent a great deal of time squirreled away in the Map Room over the past week. It's less labyrinthine than the Ready Room, which never quite lets one forget it was made to hold more than three hundred people. She's bent over the plotting table at the moment, map of Sagittaron spread out in front of her. Geographical, not a space plot of the surrounding system. There's a model Raptor plunked in the middle of it, which she's idly moving about as she studies the topography. She's smoking, of course.
Three hundred seats, over half of them never to be filled again. The starkly-lit plotting machine could well seem comforting, after that. The doors whisk open — only Command seems free of the necessity to mess with hatches — and Tisiphone steps in, cautiously clearing her throat as she does. She's in her duty blues, all prim and proper, and has a large, softcover book under her arm, several papers poking out of it. "Sir?"
Cidra is rather hunched over the table. She doesn't actually straighten from it, but her head does tilt up at the voice, Focusing on Tisiphone. "Apostolos." Her own duty blues are wrinkled, top button undone. She looks like she's been living in them for awhile today. The book and papers are noted and eyed. "I take it you have been studying my comminque." She does not bother to specify the one she refers to.
Sitka arrives from Deck 7 Corridor.
Three hundred seats, over half of them never to be filled again. The starkly-lit plotting machine could well seem comforting, after that. The doors whisk open — only Command seems free of the necessity to mess with hatches — and Tisiphone steps in, cautiously clearing her throat as she does. She's in her duty blues, all prim and proper, and has a large, softcover book under her arm, several papers poking out of it. "Sir?"
Cidra is rather hunched over the table. She doesn't actually straighten from it, but her head does tilt up at the voice, Focusing on Tisiphone. "Apostolos." Her own duty blues are wrinkled, top button undone. She looks like she's been living in them for awhile today. The book and papers are noted and eyed. "I take it you have been studying my comminque." She does not bother to specify the one she refers to.
The re-Ensign'd pilot looks…in a word, /better/. The pale eyes aren't haunted, nor are they smudged with tired bruises — or a fog of medication. Her posture bears a bit of its old, half-languid, half-restless slouch instead of leaden weariness. "Yessir," she replies dutifully, stepping forward toward the backlit map and sliding her book onto the edge of it. It's one of the 'Naked Planet' travel-guides from the library, full of glossy photos and info-bites and little real substance. She starts to say something else, then eyes Cidra's cigarette and simply digs out her own pack, instead.
Cidra straightens out of her hunch. With a slight wince as her back returns to an upright position, after what must have been quite some time. Old, creaky CAG is old and creaky. She digs for her lighter, at least, though Tisiphone is already getting her own cigs. "Excellent. Thank you," she says. Idly her neck, also to work out the stiffness it's acquired. "I have been reviewing the photographs we gathered in our initial sweep of all the colonies after the attacks. And of course the information in our libraries. But that only takes one so far, especially for what I hope to achieve."
Make that three pilots in their duty blues, as the Knights' SL ambles on in in that quiet way of his; never a man to command much attention, much less fearful quaking in boots. Shiv, too, looks like he's spent much of his day in that uniform— to the point where leaving it on was probably simpler than changing once he finished his duty shift. Hands shoved into his trouser pockets, he makes his way toward the plotting table where CAG and Ensign are comisserating.
A slightly-bent ciggie is tapped out. Cidra's lighter is accepted with a somewhat shy nod, used, and hastily returned. "Thank you, Sir." After the first drag, she points the cancer stick at the photographs and confesses, "I haven't seen all the recon photographs yet. I mean- I haven't ever asked to see them." For reasons which are hopefully obvious. "You're-" She rakes her teeth against her bottom lip, reconsidering her phrasing. Her squadleader's arrival is watched, sidelong, as she thinks; he's given a mute nod, once he closes the distance. "What are you hoping for?" she asks Cidra.
"You are welcome," Cidra replies, as to the thanks for the lighter. It is returned to her trouser pocket. Sitka's arrival is missed, for her part, even with the nod Tisiphone gives him. Her focus back on the plotting table, left hand on her mini-Raptor while the other fingers her cig. "Command does wish to see how the Cylons have regrouped in certain areas following our encounters with them. For my part?" A pause. Eyes resting intently on the table. "We found enough alive back on Leonis that the destruction of our people cannot be complete. Perhaps we can find some trace of what remains."
It's a few moments before Shiv even speaks up, given that both women are so intently focused upon the photographs laid out along the backlit table. "Sagittaron may have been harder hit." He clears his throat lightly, eyes on some grainy black-and-white satellite image, the Captain himself keeping well out of Cidra and Tisiphone's personal space. At least he doesn't take his fondness for getting cozy in the cockpit, to his social relations. "The population is— was pretty heavily concentrated here, here and here." Two fingers are used to indicate the patchwork map, vaguely. "I'm not sure how they'd have fought back.." Pitchforks v. cylons wasn't terribly likely to go well.
"The way Lieutenant Oberlin explained it to me," says Tisiphone, reaching out for one of the recon photos and drawing it in closer for a better look as she speaks, "anyone left on Kythera wasn't going to be alive for long." She looks sidelong to Sitka, again, with the hint of a frown — as if this was a point they had disagreed on before. "The radiation was still settling. Weather patterns, you know? When winter came, Kythera was going to be just as poisoned as the rest of the planet. But." She shrugs the statement away; it's not about Leonis, anymore. "The big cities will be gone. They probably concentrated on the Northern Continent. Southern Continent did just fine ripping itself up. It's possible- the smaller communities, some of them were very self-sufficient. Around the mountains, here-" She sketches a curve with her finger, along one of the maps. "Heavy forests. More places to hide."
Up Cidra blinks again, at Sitka. He snuck up on her. "Ah. Shiv." No surprise, really. She made some attempt to poll all the Saggies on board about this. She leans over the table again, the palm not handling her cigarette resting on it, neck craning toward the areas he indicates. She doesn't invade his personal space either, but the areas he focuses on are eyed and noted. "Thank you for joining us. I am still gathering as much information as I can. We shall be trying to get down much closer to the surface than we did in our initial sweeps, so I would like our Raptors to be able to target their scans as much as possible. My hope is any who survived the attacks may have fled, actually. Or hidden." A little point of said cig at Tisiphone. "Mountains. Precisely. Areas that would have been affected less by irradiation, perhaps, than the parts of the planet the Cylons initially focused on. It is not quite winter yet." The last is muttered more to herself than the pair of them. There's an edge to the intensity of her focus, likely born out of an excess of coffee and nicotine over the course of the day.
The big cities. Gone. Something about the nonchalance of that statement has Shiv falling into one of his rather telling silences, for a time. It's like being kicked in the balls while asleep. You wake up, and you aren't quite sure what just happened, or how to respond to it. Instead, he goes for his pack of smokes. "..probably right." About the mountains, the forests. "All along the coast, as well." He indicates with a tip of his chin, since his hands are otherwise occupied. "Fishing villages, wayports to the smaller orbital stations.." Blue eyes lift to Cidra, then lower again as he lights his smoke. "Who'll, uh.. who'll be going, sir? Out of curiosity."
"It's how they hit the other colonies," says Tisiphone, voice quieter in the wake of Shiv's silence. "Big cities. Industrial centres." She doesn't look at him as she says it. Maybe she's talking about all the other big cities, and not the one he's from, right? Ri-i-ight. Her fingers linger on the southernmost edge of the mountain-range she was gesturing to before, then abruptly pull away when the Captain asks his question. /The/ question, it would seem, considering how intently her eyes go to Cidra in the wake of it. They stay there as she fills her lungs full of smoke.
Cidra regards Sitka a beat, fishing into her pocket to retrieve her lighter yet again. Though he gets his own fired up before she can. Unable to offer that, she rather awkwardly lets it fall back into her pocket and sets her hand back on the table. A small shrug. "One never knows. The Cylons spared much of Kythera from what I do understand. There may be other areas like that. It is not to be discounted entirely." Yes, spared it partially to conduct freakish experimentation on the remaining humans there in Rutger Tower. Not that she brings that up. To the question she replies, "Flasher is slated to ride back-seat for the Sagittaron mission. Still firming up who will pilot him. Likely one for the bus drivers from the Providers' squadron. These shall be fairly intensive outings, far into atmosphere. Quick in and out, but we will be taking a closer look than we have before. I do want to make sure those I send can handle it. Sagittaron will not be our only target. Colonel Pewter wanted a look at four of the outer-lying colonies. Aerilon, Virgon." A pause. "Gemenon." Another pause. It's said very quickly, no eye contact with either of them, and accompanied by a drag on her cigarette. "We shall fly over Sagittaron first, however. I hope we what we find may be a guide as to how to search the others."
Sitka doesn't even seem to realise that Cidra's going for her own lighter, until it's far too late. And a little bit awkward. His mind, of course, was a million miles away— somewhere down on that map, where a marker neatly typographed with 'Aera Yazd' points to what once was a smudge of third-world industry steeped in centuries of dynastic rule. "Flasher's a good backseater," he confirms quietly, darting the CAG a wan smile as if to boulster his succinct praise. His eyes stitch across Tisiphone briefly, then back to the map. Silence, while he smokes, listens, and ponders.
"Considering the reason they spared Kythera…" Tisiphone begins, then leaves the rest to dangle on a smoky exhale. "That- research station? In Sagittaron orbit. It didn't sound any better than Rutger Tower, that's for sure." She rakes her teeth across her bottom lip again, peeling off a scrap of dead skin. "What if they find survivors?" she asks, looking up abruptly from the maps. "You can't ask us to stay up here if they do, Sir."
"I trust Lieutenant Scaurus very well," Cidra affirms as to Marko. Her tone containing actual discernible fondness for the young ECO. It's subtle but it's more than she shows for most. "Much of this shall be conducted in electronic searches for heat signatures, and I am sure he will be most thorough." Barest hint of a smile is flicked back to Sitka, though it doesn't quite touch her eyes. Head tilts are Tisiphone. "The initial passes to these colonies shall be purely a fly-over. Gather information. So, if we find something suggestive that there *are* people alive down there…we can go retrieve them in proper force."
"I'd like to request to go down there, sir," the Captain opines, close on the heels of Cidra's elucidation upon how she plans on proceeding with things. "If.. if people are found." Blue eyes flick back up to the CAG. And up, owing to the slight difference in height, in her favour. "Please." There's a certain weight behind the word; on another, it might easily come off as begging. After an exhale of smoke, he reaches briefly past Tisiphone to indicate another, more equatorial region. "Here, the Jharkhand Basin." There's a rough, throaty quality to the word 'jharkhand'. Like he's about to cough up a loogie. Such a pleasant-sounding language. "There, uh, I know this is going to sound strange, but it was where a lot of the insurgents were trained." It's probably best not to ask how he knows this. "They pretty much made a business of flying under the radar, and they'd have had weapons, bunkers, you name it."
"Same goes for me, Sir," says Tisiphone, not long after Shiv's 'please'. The good Captain has the grace to ask nicely; the Ensign just treats Cidra to another pale, earnest, unwavering stare. It doesn't drop away until the Jharkhand Basin is mentioned — then she glances away from the both of them, pulling a sharp, restless drag off her cigarette. "Cylons wouldn't do any better pulling them out of their hidey-holes than the CMC did," she finally says. Her mouth twitches, eyes suddenly sharp with black mirth. "Though they'd be more willing to just drop a nuke and let it sort itself out."
"I shall see there is a place for you both," Cidra replies to them. Without hesitation. She passes a look between the pair of them. "I do think it would be highly advisable to have as many Sagittaron crew-members involved in any extraction as possible, actually. It might make contact an easier matter." A nod, and actual faint smile, when teh Jharkhand Basin is mentioned. "This is good. That is precisely what I needed, actually." She guides her model Raptor to 'fly' over it. "That sounds the sort of place people seeking refuge they trusted might flee. More of the population than the CMC might like to believe. There were many such places in the colonies where the government back on Caprica was not well-loved." Caprica, not 'the Colonial government.' A rather pointed comment, and one she likely would not make in the company of many on the ship.
Pointed, and so noted. The look Cidra gets from Ibrahim is silent, but acknowledging in its way. For good or for ill, who can say. Another faint smile at something she says, and then a glance at his watch. What's left of his cigarette is put out, and gingerly tucked away. "I'll see if I can come up with anything else. But I should.. I should go get some rack, sir, if you don't mind." He eases away from the plotting table, backwards. "And.. thanks, sir."
"Mmn," is all Tisiphone says, on matters of Caprica versus The Colonial Government, though there's a wry glimmer in her eyes. After a drag on her smoke, she adds, "Je-ah, Lieutenant Stavrian's familiar with the Northern Continent." As if he took a fancy cruise there, once, or something. "He'd be a good one to speak to, too." She ashes her cigarette off the edge of the plotting table, flicking the filter with her thumbnail a few more times than is strictly necessary, then glances to Sitka as he ambles back. "Sleep you sound," she says to him.
"Rest well," Cidra says simply to Sitka, looking at him right back as he goes. "And thank you." It's a moment before her eyes return to Tisiphone and the plotting table. "Yes. I am hopeful to gather input from all your countrymen and women aboard ship." She puffs at her cigarette again, but she's smoked it nearly down to its end. She'll need to put it out soon to avoid burning her fingers. "All right. The mountains, the fishing settlements on the coastline…most certainly this Jharkhand Basin." Her accent mangles the pronunciation into 'Jaa-rhaan' as it tries to soften the word and erase the consonants. "Is there anything more you can think of, Money Shot? Religious sites, perhaps?"
"You too, Apostolos." The Captain's gaze lingers upon Tisiphone only for a moment before swapping back to Cidra. "Take it easy, sir," he offers gently, before the woman turns away. And then he's off, to the lumbering beat of bootfalls on the deck.
Sitka leaves, heading towards the Deck 7 [Out].
Tisiphone clears her throat before tucking the cigarette back into the corner of her mouth. She moves over a half-step closer to Cidra, pulling the map of the Southern Continent to a spot equidistant to them. "My family lived here," she says, showing a spot near the edge of the forested mountains. "About fourty of us when I left. And then another enclave, here…" Her hand sketches around the mountains, past Sthenoi (labelled as a Local Capital upon the map) to a spot just below Aera Yazd. Again near the mountains. "Not far from- where- Shiv lived for a while. All I know is Sthenoi and Aera Yazd. I'm sure they nuked both. It makes sense. I never… travelled, I left Sagittaron when I was seventeen. But I was wondering something, Sir. If we end up down there."
"The initial reconnaissance of Gemenon does show all the holy places on the planet were nuked with a vengeance," Cidra murmurs soft. Pushing her little Raptor over the cities Tisiphone indicates. "Yet on Caprica they left Delphi untouched. It is strange what is spared, and what is not…" She clears her throat. Head tilting up at the younger woman from her rather hunched position over the table. "Wondering what, Money Shot?" A pause. "You are thinking of home." It's not really a question.
"Maybe they felt Gemenon was a threat, and Delphi wasn't. Delphi's a symbol. Gemenon's an entire colony of /belief/." Tisiphone posits this smoothly — then looks up sharply at the end, as if realizing just /who/ she's running off at the mouth to. "Ah. That was- presumptuous of me. I'm sorry, Sir." Clearing her throat again, she bullies onward. Change the topic, girl, and /quick/. "I'm working with Lieutenant Lunair in the garden- the hydroponics facility, I mean- and it's obvious we need some real seed stores. Miniature oranges and mint aren't going to keep us going. I'd like to- make a list if I could, Sir. Of useful harvest locations."
Tisiphone adds, hastily, "I- know it's- probably a trivial detail, Sir. It's just an idea. But. If we somehow have time."
"A colony of belief…" It is repeated ruefully but without agreement. Her cigarette's been put out, and the fingers of her right hand idly caress her left wrist. Both bare wrists are partially visible with the sleeves of her wrinkled uniform a little rolled up, to play with the plotting table. "I do not know so much about that. Like any place it struggles with itself as much as the Outside." A look flitted down to the map of Sagittaron, and back up to Tisiphone. She makes nothing of the 'presumption.' But the subject is dropped. A nod about the hydroponics. "Yes, Raine did mention that to me." The Marine LTJG gets a first name, apparently. A nod. "Please do. I am sure Medical and likely Support as well would be most interested in adding more to the stores."
"I'll have that for you tomorrow then, Sir. I've got KD in the morning and- Shiv's got me on afternoon CAP, so- by early evening. Maybe there's a location that'll fit in with the other objectives. I mean… it's- assuming there's survivors." The enthusiasm gets reined in, awkwardly and uncomfortably, at the end there. "I should- unless there's anything more, Sir? I should rack out as well."
"Assuming, yes," Cidra says, straightening. With another wince as her muscles and joints de-hunch. Creaky old CAG. She does not dwell on the dampening, however. "Nothing further. Dismissed, Ensign, and I do thank you. I should be hitting my own rack." A blink as she catches a wall clock. "It is past zero-hour. The twelfth already." It is noted randomly, in an abstracted sort of way.
"No rest for the wicked, Sir." Tisiphone sketches a quick salute, straightening up from her own slouch with considerably less creak. Youth is wasted on the young, or so they say. "Sleep you sound, Sir. I'll have that information to you as soon as I can." Her glossy travel-book is recollected from the plotting table, and off she goes.
Cidra lingers in the Map Room a little after Tisiphone goes. Clearing the plotting table, putting everything away nice and neat before she can leave it and collapse.