Chapter 33
(Adama's POV)

What Cottle is hinting at is almost more than I can take and if it is this bad for me I don't even want to contemplate how hard this must be for Kara, who probably feels like all of a sudden she has been thrust right back into a nightmare she had thought she had escaped. The problem is that the scenario Cottle is describing is not just horrifying... it is also disgustingly logical and something I can easily picture the cylons doing. The truth is that, even though up until now we had focused mostly on Leoben and his twisted mind-games, he is only one out of a number of cylons and, while they have a common goal, their implanted personalities are different enough to allow them to approach a single problem from a number of different perspectives. In other words, from the moment she said that at first she had been handed over to Simon, we should have realized that Leoben hadn't been operating alone.

Of course, I also know that right now that doesn't really matter, that right now our top priority has to be Kara herself because, as disturbing as the idea that we may yet find ourselves having to face the 'consequences' of her captivity someday in the future may be, it is not our most pressing concern. That is something we may have to deal with eventually, not now, and one of the first lessons a soldier has to learn if he is to survive is that allowing himself to be distracted by what might happen in a future battle is the best way to ensure that he won't make it through the current one.

Still, whether we like it or not, this is something we are going to have to address and if we want to be able to do that we are going to need a better idea of what the frak is going on here.

"Lee, would you mind staying with her for a moment, please. I'd like to have a word with Cottle," I say, trying hard to keep my temper under control, especially in light of the devastation I can see reflected on Kara's eyes.

"Sure, dad," he says, looking rather worried himself.

"Would you mind telling me what the frak was that all about?" I ask, glaring at the doctor as soon as I'm sure we are alone.

"What the frak was what all about?"

"That little speech!" I all but yell at him.

"It was about something called 'the facts', you may have heard about them," he growls.

"Don't give me that crap! She didn't need to hear that, not now... especially not after everything she went through with that little girl and you knew it!" I insist.

"Oh, you are right about that but there was nothing else I could have done... not without making matters worse," he replies.

"You told us that we had to tread carefully and then you..." I begin but Cottle interrupts me.

"I know, but what you don't seem to realize is that I didn't have a choice... not without making an even bigger mess out of this one. Yes, that was bad --very bad-- and I wish it hadn't been necessary but at the same time it was still the lesser evil," he insists.

"The lesser evil?" I repeat, still trying --without much success-- to understand what it is that Cottle is not saying here.

"Yes. She had a right to know what the cylons had done to her, there was no doubt about that. The only real question was whether she should have been told about it now or if she should have been told about it later... and while 'later' would definitely have been preferable, given the fact that she was asking about it now, any attempt to put it off would have entailed lying to her, at least in the short term, and that was precisely the one thing we could not afford to do. Remember the odds I mentioned after she made it out of surgery?" he asks, seemingly out of nowhere.

"Yes. You told us that she had a fifty percent chance if we could somehow manage to regain her trust and a twenty percent chance if we didn't," I reply, even though I'm still not entirely sure as to where this is going.

"Well, what you have to keep in mind is that lying to her wouldn't have done us much good in terms of regaining her trust and that trust was the key to my original assessment --and it still is-- though the odds themselves have changed since then."

"They have changed?"

"Yes. The good news is that she is doing as well as can be expected under the circumstances, that she at least seems to be willing to do her part to meet us half-way, and that means that we could probably change that fifty/fifty to a sixty/forty in her favor, though she is still nowhere near out of the woods. The bad news is that --seeing how in these past few days she has come to rely on the fact that we are actually going to be there for her-- if any one of us were to do anything that could possibly be perceived as a betrayal of that budding trust then that original eighty/twenty would probably turn into a ninety/ten against her. Simply put, the fact that she has managed to climb part way out of the hole is deeply reassuring but it also means that if she were to slip back into it she would now have a greater distance to fall... and as much as I may not have wanted to tell her what I suspected the cylons had done to her, I knew lying to her was not a risk we could afford to take."

"Is she going to be alright?" I ask, finally realizing where Cottle is coming from, even if I'm still far from comfortable with any of this.

"It won't be easy and it will probably take a while for her to come to terms with it but yes, in the long run, I think so... and, if nothing else, at least now we won't have to worry about the possibility that this whole thing will come back to bite us on the ass when we can least afford it."