Chapter 43: The Vote
Election Day tasted like ash and reconstituted coffee.
I stood in the Cybele's cargo bay at 0600, watching the fleet wireless broadcast the pre-election coverage, and drank Dunn's last reserve of Gemenese roast while forty-nine thousand people prepared to choose their future. The coffee was extraordinary — dark, complex, carrying the ghost of a world that burned four and a half months ago. Dunn had been saving it for something that mattered. Apparently, watching democracy walk off a cliff qualified.
"Polls open at 0800," Dunn said from her workstation. "Billy's office confirms: turnout expected above ninety percent. Highest democratic participation in Colonial history."
"Because the stakes have never been this simple. Settle or keep running. Binary choice, binary emotion."
"And the numbers?"
"Baltar by fourteen. Montoya's final assessment matches the public polls. There's no path for Roslin unless Baltar implodes in the next two hours."
He won't implode. In the show, Roslin tried to steal the election — ballot stuffing that Gaeta discovered and reported. Baltar won regardless. The fleet chose hope over caution, and hope was a planet with breathable air and the promise that running could stop.
I could try to prevent the fraud. Or encourage it. Or interfere in a dozen ways that my meta-knowledge makes possible.
I won't. Because the election isn't the crisis. The settlement is. And the settlement is inevitable regardless of who wins — the fleet's emotional exhaustion has determined the outcome more surely than any ballot.
The cargo bay hummed around me. Kwan stood at the entrance, monitoring the refugee section's orderly procession toward the voting stations — set up in the Cybele's mess hall, paper ballots because nobody trusted electronic systems after a Cylon infiltrated their most trusted ship. Vasic directed the lines with the hotel manager's instinct for crowd flow. Montoya observed from a corner, cataloguing voter behavior with the photographic memory I'd learned to rely on.
My organization, running an election process on a civilian transport. One hundred and thirty-five days ago, I was choking on blood in a medic's bay. Now my people manage the democratic infrastructure of the last human civilization.
The irony wasn't lost. The tragedy was.
[Cybele Mess Hall — Day 136, 2000]
The results came at 2000, transmitted fleet-wide from Colonial One.
"Citizens of the Twelve Colonies. The votes have been counted. With a margin of fifty-four percent to forty-three percent, with three percent abstaining, Gaius Baltar is elected President of the Twelve Colonies."
The Cybele's mess hall erupted. Refugees cheered, cried, embraced. Someone started singing the Caprica City anthem — off-key, tear-stained, beautiful in the way that broken things can be beautiful when the light catches them right. Children who'd been sleeping on cargo decks for months danced between the tables, and their parents watched with eyes that held something I hadn't seen since Day Zero.
Hope.
Genuine, unguarded, terrifying hope.
I stood at the mess hall entrance and watched. The system's passive scan registered the room's emotional state as a unified field of joy — the highest collective positive reading since Starbuck had returned in the Cylon raider, but deeper. More sustained. Not the spike of a miracle, but the foundation of a belief.
They believe they're going home.
They are. And then the Cylons will come, and the homes they build will become prisons, and the gardens they plant will be watered with blood.
The system flickered a notification I hadn't requested:
[FLEET EMOTIONAL INDEX: HIGHEST RECORDED]
[HOPE LEVEL: 94TH PERCENTILE]
[NOTE: HOST EMOTIONAL STATE: DIVERGENT — GRIEF/DETERMINATION]
I respect their choice. I will not sabotage their hope. But I will prepare for the day that hope is shattered, because someone has to.
I left the celebration without eating and walked to the cargo office.
[Cybele Cargo Office — Day 136, 2200]
Dunn and Marsh were waiting. Neither had attended the celebration — an absence that spoke to the organizational culture I'd built. My people didn't celebrate victories they knew were defeats.
"Settlement timeline," I said, pulling up the dual-track planning file. "Baltar will order fleet descent within two weeks. Construction begins immediately. The FCO proposal is dead — we're not formalizing into an institution that Baltar's administration controls. We stay shadow."
"Agreed," Dunn said. "The shadow structure gives us operational freedom that an official office wouldn't."
"New priorities. Marsh — the planetary communication network. How fast can you deploy?"
"Surface nodes: three weeks for basic coverage. Full mesh network: two months. But I need materials — transmitters, power cells, antenna components. The fleet's stripping ships for construction resources, and every salvageable part is being allocated to settlement infrastructure."
"Use the RTV."
Both of them looked at me.
The Resource Transmutation Vault. Unlocked since the Shelly Godfrey intelligence operation, unused for twelve weeks. A dimensional storage pocket that could hold materials, analyze compositions, and purify basic resources. The capability I'd been sitting on because using it meant risk — detection by Cylon sensors, revelation to witnesses, exposure of something supernatural in a universe that was already drowning in the inexplicable.
"The vault can store and transmute raw materials," I said. "I can acquire components that Marsh can't get through official channels — salvage from decommissioned equipment, purified materials from waste streams, things that would take weeks to requisition but exist in quantities nobody's tracking."
"You've been holding this back," Dunn said. The words were neutral. Her tone was not.
"I've been holding it back because using it carries risk. Cylon sensors may detect dimensional activity. Anyone who sees the vault in operation sees something impossible." I met her eyes. "But we're past the point where holding capabilities in reserve is smarter than using them."
"What changed?"
"The election. We have maybe a year before the Cylons find New Caprica. Every day of preparation counts. I can't afford caution when the cost of caution is being unprepared when the occupation starts."
The word occupation landed in the cargo office like a grenade. Dunn's jaw tightened. Marsh's glasses adjustment halted mid-motion.
"You've said 'when,' not 'if,'" Marsh observed.
"Because the Cylons have been tracking this fleet since Day Zero. A static settlement on a planet — even one hidden in a nebula — is exponentially easier to find than sixty-three ships in FTL transit. The question isn't whether they find us. It's when, and whether we're ready."
The silence stretched. Through the viewport, shuttles were already moving — advance teams heading to the surface, carrying survey equipment and agricultural supplies and the fragile architecture of hope.
"RTV operations," I said. "Marsh, give me a materials list. I'll acquire what you need. Private — you and me only. Dunn, you know it exists but not the specifics."
"Compartmentalization."
"Standard protocol."
Dunn accepted this the way she accepted all operational constraints — with controlled displeasure and immediate adaptation. Marsh began writing his materials list on a data pad.
The organizational pivot had begun.
[Cybele Observation Deck — Day 136, 2330]
Billy found me standing at the forward observation port, watching the first surface shuttles descend toward New Caprica's misty atmosphere.
He looked terrible. Not physically — Billy always looked slightly disheveled, the natural state of a twenty-three-year-old carrying a government on insufficient sleep. But his eyes held the particular flatness of someone who'd poured everything into a cause and watched it lose.
"We did everything right." His voice was quiet. Raw. "The logistics were perfect. The messaging was clear. The policy was sound."
"It was."
"It wasn't enough."
"No."
He stood beside me. Two men watching shuttles carry hope toward a planet that didn't deserve the trust being placed in it. The silence between us had the texture of shared defeat — different in nature, identical in weight.
"Lieutenant Cole."
"Billy."
"What happens now?"
Now Baltar takes office. Tory Foster becomes his chief of staff. The settlement begins. For a year, maybe more, forty-nine thousand people build houses and plant gardens and fall in love and have children on a planet that's already been marked for death.
And I build the infrastructure that saves as many of them as possible when the death arrives.
"We work. Different administration, different priorities, but the fleet still needs logistics coordination. Still needs efficient supply chains. Still needs someone who sees problems before they become crises."
"You think there'll be crises?"
"There are always crises, Billy. The only variable is preparation."
He absorbed this with the particular gravity of a young man who was learning — faster than anyone his age should have to — that idealism without power was a beautiful thing that people buried with honors.
"The President asked me to stay on. Advisory capacity under the new administration."
Good. Billy inside Baltar's government is an intelligence asset I didn't have to create.
"And you said?"
"I said yes. Because someone needs to be in the room who cares about the right things, even when the room is run by people who don't."
Conviction eighty-five. The highest I've scanned in the fleet. This boy — this man — is going to walk into Gaius Baltar's government and try to keep it honest through sheer moral force.
He'll fail. The system is too corrupt and Baltar is too compromised. But the trying will matter. The trying always matters.
"Then we'll still be working together."
"I'd like that." Billy turned from the viewport. At the doorway, he paused. "Cole? Thank you. For the campaign. For the logistics and the volunteers and the podium adjustment and all of it. You didn't have to help."
"You're worth helping, Billy."
He left. I stood alone at the viewport and watched another shuttle descend, its running lights dimming into New Caprica's atmospheric haze.
Preparation timeline: approximately three hundred and sixty days. Give or take. The show's one-year time jump between settlement and occupation — but timelines have been unreliable since Day Zero.
Three hundred and sixty days to build a resistance infrastructure for an occupation that hasn't started. To cache supplies, establish communication networks, position key people, and prepare forty-nine thousand civilians for a war they don't know is coming.
Starting now.
I opened a new file on the coded data pad. At the top: PREPARATION TIMELINE.
The cursor blinked. I started calculating.
Author's Note / Support the Story
Your Reviews and Power Stones help the story grow! They are the best way to support the series and help new readers find us.
Want to read ahead? Get instant access to more chapters by supporting me on Patreon. Choose your tier to skip the wait:
Noble ($7): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public.
Royal ($11): Read 17 chapters ahead of the public.
Emperor ($17): Read 24 chapters ahead of the public.
Weekly Updates: New chapters are added every week. See the pinned "Schedule" post on Patreon for the full update calendar.
Join here: patreon.com/Kingdom1Building