| Log Title |
| Summary: | Leyla and Marko attempt to piece together the coordinates from The Notebook. |
| Date: | 5 Jan 2042 AE |
| Related Logs: | More Than Just Ashes |
| Players: |
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| Map Room |
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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: #312 |
It isn't often that the Map Room is devoid of people working in it, and free to be used by any and all. And tonight is no exception. But what does seem a little out of place, is the pilot, still in her flight suit, who seems to have commandeered one of the plotting tables for her own use. No word on whether or not she had to throw Kal Trask's name around to get what she wanted. Certainly, from Leyla expression, she looks a though she's fully comfortable in the knowledge that she's supposed to be here. A collection of maps are strewn over her table, each made to overlap, one with the other, to cover colonial space.
Marko wanders in, clad in standard Fleet off duty garb, looking tired and perhaps even a little bit put out as he makes his way towards Leyla and her private map table. "Okay Sweet Pea….I'm here…now, what's all this about, eh?" he asks, stifling a yawn behind his fist as he looks for a place to sit. "You do know that MidRats are being served right now, yes?" he asks with the barest hint of a smirk. "I mean, we get about one real meal a day….."
Leyla's head rises, focusing on her ECO as he makes his way into the map room. Despite the long hours, and the double duties, she never has the good grace to look tired. Mostly likely because she doesn't have any other obligations outside of her work. No husband, no recreational activities, nothing but work time and a few hours of sleep time. "If you'd prefer to get yourself something to eat, feel free, Flasher." Tone of voice cool and efficient. She's not, it seems, in the mood to end up fighting the man rotations and CAPs dictate that she's all but living in the same flight suit with.
"Heh, tell me what's going on, and I'll make an informed choice." Marko, who does have a few dozen irons in various fires of differing temperature, replies with a smirk. "So, what's the urgent urgency?" he asks simply, looking down at the data on Leyla's desk. "Stellar cartography?"
"Of a sort." Leyla has been paired with her ECO so long, even when they're ready to rip each other's heads off, which, honestly, doesn't happen so very often, they still manage to work together in relative harmony. "These are coordinates we retrieved from a notebook left in an estate on Wreath of Roses. Given other evidence found there, it seems likely that these coordinates were not made by the woman who owned the house, but by a cylon doing research in the house since the evacuation. I've been trying to plot them against known coordinates, and I think I've found a few matches, but I could use your eyes." Not to mention that as an ECO, Flasher does a hell of a lot more number plotting than she does. "I don't want to turn this in to anyone without thorough fact-checking." Which means Marko has another iron in the fire.
"Sons of Dis…" Marko sighs even as he hauls up another chair to sit in and start to peruse Leyla's findings. "Okay, let's start at the beginning he says, fishing out the nearly omnipresent water bottle from his thigh pocket and taking a sip. "Talk me through this all?" he asks, fishing out his also-nigh omnipresent scientific calculator from the opposite thigh pocket.
"Alright." Leyla takes a moment, before she begins, to spread out the maps into a perfect representation of the colonies, arranging them, in this instance, with Tauron as the closest outer rim colony to Marko, the others in their proper spatial locations. "So here we have the colonies. And here, are the coordinate groups I picked out from the notebook. I didn't know what the point of origin was on them, but, given that we were inside the colonies when we found them, I assumed locations in colonial space." She begins to lay out coordinates superimposed over the map. "Assuming Caprica as the point of origin…" as most plotting usually does when traveling in colonial space.
"Hrmmm…." Marko replies, nodding slowly as he takes another swig of water, then offers the bottle to Leyla. Because, by now, they've probably got each other's cooties. "Okay….This leg _here_." Marko says, reaching out to trace his finger over a route between Tauron and a dead spot in space. "This one, I recognize. It's an old smuggler's lane, it's got a name, just can't remember it. You ever see that old show 'Phantom Six?" he asks. "About that tramp freighter?" he continues in the tone of just the kind of nerd that would know it back to front. "The writer used to make this run all the time." he says.
"You are such a geek, you really are." But Leyla takes the bottle regardless, a small sip, before she passes it back. "The Polias Run." Hey, she never said she wasn't a geek too. "I can't imagine why anyone would make use of that route now. It was just a waypoint. Nothing much there but deadspace." On the outerband of colonial space, which means fewer colonial military vessels to have to evade.
"Ha! You're the one who remembered it's name." Marko chuckles, taking the bottle back and sipping at it again. "And, for the record, Song could kick Sharra's ass any day of the week, and twice on Hemera." he smirks. "The rest of this..I dunno, he sighs. "I can see the Polias Run still being a going concern before Warday….but these?" he frowns, peering at the map. "This one, here, from….Gods knows where to Gemenon……That doesn't make any sense….Do you have any hard numbers on any of this?"
"This is it. This is all we have." Not that Leyla doesn't grant the man a smirk as he points out her own geekdom. "Now, I started trying to plot these coordinates from other points of origin, using all of the places we still know the Cylons have some presence." She moves the coordinates around, settling on Picon as the PoO. "We get this." Which is completely haphazard and pointless, since it doesn't even jump them near anything that's anything but the space between the colonies. Process of elimination. Of a sort.
"Hrm…Well….we know the Cylons left the Colonies." Marko muses, peering at the plots on the map. "Means they had to have some vector to come back on, right?" he asks rhetorically. "And they jumped one _hell_ of a big force into our space." he adds, chewing at his bottom lip. "Are there any other points on this map, maybe something leading towards Leonis?"
Leyla shakes her head, "I can't plot those jumps. The only place we KNOW the cylons might have been since the first war is Armistice Station. Only they never showed up there in all the forty years we were at peace with them. I have to find some way to make these coordinates make sense. And I'm sure they're inside colonial space. So I'm trying to plot them from each of the known cylon territories." A strange turn of phrase, but perhaps apt. The colonies don't belong to the colonials anymore.
"Well, okay, that sounds logical enough to me." Marko replies, nodding and switching on his calculator and starting to take a look at the co-ordinates as plotted on the map. "Well, at first blush, this seems like it's some kind of a route they're using." he says, starting to annotate the map carefully. "See here? They're moving from between Caprica and Canceron, and these points seem to be some kind of fixed way point for hops further out."
Leyla nods, making her own notes of the coordinates. "Trying to fit the coordinates into a route that makes sense is what's proving difficult. I can plot at least five intercolony transits with these coordinates, but I always have to leave some out, or assume jumps far outside of what's required. So the question really is, which of the transits is the most likely. Given what we know about what the Cylons are doing right now. And we know they're building more ships. That's a given. We know they're mining on Canceron. Tauron is the only place where we don't know what they're doing."
Marko hrms and peers at the map as if willing the numbers to start making sense. "Well, let's start from square one." he muses. "We know that Cylon FTL technology's more or less twice as advanced as ours, yes?" he asks rhetorically. "Which puts their Red Line a hell of a lot further out than ours." he continues. "So why bother with a way point at all?"
"Exactly." It really is a blessing to be paired with a partner who just gets it. "There's no reason for all of these jumps, hell, they could jump the distance with half of these coordinates and leave room to spare. And these way points…a smuggler's lane and a point in the middle of deadspace? Why would they even want to go there. There's nothing there of any value."
"Yep." Marko sighs, frowning thoughtfully for a few moments. "Wait a second…" he says after a few beats. "Son of a….of course….it makes perfect sense." he says, slapping his forehead suddenly. "The Cylons were out of Colonial space for forty years, yes?"
"So we're assuming. But given that we know they can appear human, who's to say if they ever left at all?" But there's no point in going down that road. "Okay, yes, they were out of colonial space for forty years."
"Right, so think about it for a second, leave the humanoid model stuff out of it for a second and think about it." Marko continues, speaking rapidly as the hamster wheel he calls a brain starts to gin up to full velocity. "A lot can change in forty years." he says flatly. "Now, we know the border was being monitored pretty heavily, so any installations there, the Cylons would have known front to back. But what about _inside_ Colonial space?" he asks. "Which both of these points are," he points out, tapping them one after the other. "And not to mention well away from any prying eyes. If I was gonna mount a scouting mission into enemy territory, I'd be hard pressed to find a better spot to jump in at. You're not likely to encounter any installations 'cause it's in BFE,…Maybe that was one of their probe points?"
Leyla, "I really hate it when you're right, Marko." Not that she sounds like she hates the man at all, "And if they used it then, it might still be a important place for them since Warday." Leyla doesn't need to say it for Marko to know it. She wants to go there.
"Yep. That'd be your beachhead, right there." Marko nods solemnly, his expression and tone making it clear he understands what Leyla wants to do perfectly. "That does sound pretty much like our caliber of crazy." he grins wolfishly.
"We have never once done anything remotely crazy." You know, if you don't count once evading a whole squadron of raiders and then going head to head against four basestars fully loaded dead stick. "So," Leyla continues, "If we keep this point, and the Polias Run, then that leaves us with these points to plot on a straight line, and the only PoO that fits is Tauron." She rearranges the points to match. "Here is Tauron. Here the first waypoint. Here the Polias Run. Here the midpoint. Here the point in deadspace. Leaving the last waypoint for." She sets the last coordinates down, just outside of the outside edge of Gemenon space.
"Damn.." Marko breathes as Leyla puts the last piece of the puzzle in place. "And Gemenon's the one they hit hardest." he adds, wincing. "And you know what else? There might be a reason for them to use the way points….Do we have the data on the dates and times of the attacks we've had?" he asks. "Maybe we combine that with the ship's position, we see a pattern emerge…"
"The religious centers and universities were hit and the major cities, but not ALL of the planet was glassed. Not like Aquaria. Nor Picon. And…" Leyla reaches for a file full of papers, reports and images from the recon of Gemenon. "According to the recon, the second one we did, there's activity on the surface. Activity of some unknown nature as a recorded number of locations, including Lampridis Falls." The very same sorts of locations they seem to be looking at on Tauron. "I thought about that, but they didn't use either the Run or the deadspace points to launch attacks at us. I plotted that." Leyla pulls out an overlay, already marked out with all of the places the Cerberus has been since Warday, red circling attacks by the cylons. None are close enough to the run or the deadspace, even for cylon forces.
"Lampridis Falls?" Marko asks, cocking his head curiously and peering at Leyla. "Refresh my memory. Heard of the place, but never got there when I was in college." he adds. To the evidence that shoots his promising theory down flat, he merely sighs and shrugs a little. "Hey, it was a thought." he chuckles ruefully, scratching at the back of his head. "But back to this Gemenon thing…There's surface activity at the Falls….The frak are they doing with a waterfall?"
"You'd know better than me, I've never even been to Gemenon, and you were the one who did the recon with Bunny. He never mentioned anything about what you were photographing while you were over there?" Leyla can read the report, but she wasn't there. But she knows one thing for sure. Not everything said between pilot and ECO makes it into the report.
"We were a little bit too busy trying not to get shot to ribbons by Raiders to pay much attention to the surface." Marko replies with a shrug. "Spent most of that hop trying to get the FTL working after we got tagged by a detection grid."
Leyla nods. She's not about to make any sort of cheeky remark about multi-tasking. The report spoke for itself. Bunny and Marko were lucky to get out of there alive. "Toast is Gemenese. I'm sure she'd be able to give us some insight into the location. Especially when we bring this to her attention. Along with our request to survey both the Polias Run and the deadspace point."
"Still kind of pissed about it….I ran every frakkin' scan.." Marko grumbles testily. "Nothing, not a Godsdamn thing….Next thing we know, we're up to our asses in Raiders….How the hell we got out of there with all of our parts attached is beyond me. Obviously, one of us was giving offerings to the right deity." he sighs. "And yes, we have seriously got to talk to Toast about all of this, maybe she can shed light onto why they'd be interested in that."
"They're not a known enemy, Flasher, for all we'd like to think so. Who knows what they have the potential to be able to do, including masking their DRADIS signatures. Hell, we could make a raptor look like a battlestar, if we wanted to. Why couldn't they make themselves look like something other than what they are?" Leyla begins to put together the maps, and the coordinates in the order that seems to fit best, "If you want to go grab something to eat and then meet me, we can go see if she's on the ship. I don't think we have time to wait."
"Eh, I think I can forgo the feed bag for a little while longer." Marko replies. "I've still got some of those ration packs we snagged at the mall." he grins. "This needs to get some motion behind it, and _now_. Speaking of motion, keep this tucked firmly beneath your hat, Sweet Pea, but there's motion on another of my jobs as well….You know, the one I can't really talk about? Just keep your ears open and make sure not to purge the buffer in the Raptor before I've had a chance to download it."
Leyla takes her time, finishing up everything, before she moves to clean away everything else she was working on. Clearly, she doesn't intend to leave anything behind that could be used for good or ill. Things are just too hairy right now, "You know I'd never do that, Marko. If I did, we'd never get the recon back to look at it ourselves." On his other job, she doesn't comment. She doesn't have any idea what other job he's even talking about specifically, so why speculate. "Come on, let's go find Toast."
Marko nods and hauls himself out of his seat to follow along. "Heh, she's gonna wig we she sees this." he comments with a wry chuckle.