The Call of Leonis
by Sawyer Averies
22 June 2041 AE
The orbit around Leonis was nothing I hadn't seen from the intel photos – scattered debris as if someone had put every known class of ship in a blender and poured it out among the starscape. It wasn't until we descended to the surface that the reality of it all hit the crew like a ten ton pallet of bricks.
We were split into two teams, one tasked with gathering intelligence and the other a splinter group primarily of pilots sent to see if some Vipers could be salvaged from a cache that a recon had found. Our team, led by Lieutenant Calvin Oberlin, touched down in Kythera proper, spilling out of the Raptors with an eager crunch of boots in the refuse of humanity. The city's skyline was of multicolored building blocks scattered in a toddler's tantrum, mighty buildings toppled by the force of the Cylons and the sight of it gave pause.
The march through the city was somber and pocked with peculiarities. Buildings were tagged in what could only be described as graffiti, large green painted 'III' on sunken storefronts and crumbling brick walls.
No one had time to reflect on this too deeply, as our strenuous pace soon had us facing what the Alpha team was tasked to find: the MolGen facility.
It was a building like any other, a corporate office that one housed a fancy reception area. It was the blackened hole to a hidden tunnel beyond that I found the most disturbing.
The entrance was blown from the inside out, as if occupants need a hasty exit from their captivity underground. The descent was maddening, as even the irradiated atmosphere of the surface as still more than most of us had seen in some time. The sunshine on our backs was soon forgotten, giving way to the artificial light we were accustomed. Wireless contact was lost when we passed below ground, the static unbearable to our ears so the devices were turned off for the sake of progression. The tunnel was sterile - surprisingly so in a post-apocalyptic world - stream-lined and simplistic ending in an ornate doorway with fluted ridged and a keystone of its decorative marble arch is engraved with a snowy white owl. The olive tree the owl clutched, however, did not stand for peace. Rather the contrary. We had little warning before the mini-gun hidden behind the benevolent bird chewed up the tunnel with its automatic fire, our team hugging the wall and returning fire to disable it.
It would not be the last booby trap we would encounter.
Just inside the door, we would lose the first member of our team. As we crept closer to the portal, a sub-zero chill was there to meet us. Beyond was a landscape of mirrors, a beautiful statue of a woman to guard it whose eyes glowed red with the angry light of lasers that glanced off the reflective walls in a spiderweb of crimson lines made visible by the freezing vapors in the air. Sergeant Arkat Galyian believed he found activation system, instead he stepped on a trigger and was met with freezing waterfall of some unknown liquid. There was nothing we could do to save him.
Don't look a Gorgon in the eyes. Lieutenant Penelope Paris broke a mirror and reflected the laser back at the statue's eyes and we could continue, all a little more on edge. Our progression into the facility grew more eerie with each room we passed through, met with sights like the crew's quarters where fourteen beds held fourteen corpses, an apparent mass suicide we couldn't explain past the assumption that the religious papers plastering the room's walls and the fourteen teacups that were lined in a serpentine pattern on the central table. But none of that prepared us for what we found in the work room.
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Science fiction met reality. At first, it was as if the majority of us could just stand around gape-jawed, the rest wanted to shoot first and puzzle it out later. There, in a leather chair was what we now consider a 'First Generation' Centurion sitting in front of a Colonial military transponder. Now we knew why we were here. Or at least, who summoned us. Through a synthesized voice, it called itself 'Miranda' and spoke constantly in the plural. It was connected to a series of computers, like all the terminals made up a gigantic brain and the wires were the neurons communicating between all the lobes. It spoke of how Cylons came into being. How they evolved. “They are of men as we are of men,” 'Miranda' told us, then showed images on a holographic screen. This machine eventually died while we were speaking with it, adding to the mounting numbers of dead that were quickly accumulating in the MolGen facility.
It was then that we found out we were cut off from Cerberus. Stranded. Lieutenant JG Evandreus Doe survived the destruction of our Raptor to come deliver the news. The freighter was gone, the other team was miles away, and we became orphaned children.
The remaining days we spent in the MolGen facility were not idle. What information we could pull from the computer systems there, we did. There was no time for analysis in the field. At the time, we were more concerned with survival.