01 - Battlestar Galactica (14 page)

She hoped she hadn’t broken anything that would keep them from taking off
again.

“I’m going outside to patch the fuel line,” she said, squeezing past Helo.
“How’s the leg?”

“Good enough to come out there with you,” Helo said, wincing.

“No, stay here. I can handle it.”

He was already pushing himself up out of the seat. “The hell… you say. We
do… this together.”

* * *

Helo, in the end, wound up leaning against the side of the ship, wrapping his
leg with more strips of cloth and adhesive, while Sharon crawled under the
Raptor with a couple of toolkits to fix the fuel line. At least the bleeding had
stopped. He wouldn’t be good for running any marathons, but at least he could
stand. He hoped Sharon could stop the fuel leak as effectively.

In the distance, mushroom clouds rose against the horizon. It was
surrealistic—nuclear explosions reigning over this beautiful panorama of green
hills and scattered trees. He saw another flash, another mushroom cloud. “That’s
six!” he said in disbelief. What could the damn Cylons be hitting? What was
left? He ducked his head down to look under the craft. “How you coming on that
fuel line?”

“Almost there,” Sharon said. “We’ll be airborne pretty soon. And get back in
the fight.” She peeled the backing from a large patch and reached up into the
engine compartment to wrap it around the ruptured pipe.

“Yeah. Back in the fight.” Helo limped forward, away from the ship. It hurt
to walk, but he saw something coming over the hilltops, and he wasn’t sure he
was going to like it.

“Okay,” said Sharon, her voice muffled under the craft. “That should do it.”
His back was to her, but he could hear her close the access panel, and pull the
toolkits out from under the Raptor.

“Sharon?” he said suddenly. “Grab your sidearm.”

A moment later she was beside him, and they both had their weapons
out—large-caliber, Previn automatics. A sizable crowd of people was coming over
the hilltop toward them. “Helo?” Sharon asked uncertainly.

“Stand your ground.” Helo raised his handgun and leveled it with both hands.
Sharon did likewise.

It looked like forty, fifty, maybe even a hundred people—all running for their lives over the hills. They were headed straight for the
Raptor. Some carried suitcases, some books, some children. Some were falling
down and getting up again. One was on crutches. Helo thought he knew what they
all wanted. They all wanted to get off this planet before it was completely
destroyed. They had just fled from Hell, and they wanted to live.

There was only one spacecraft in sight, and that was their Raptor. And they
weren’t here to carry passengers.

Colonial Heavy 798

Laura Roslin leaned over the pilot’s seat and pointed out the cockpit window
at the tiny, tumbling spacecraft. “There he is. Can you maneuver over and bring
him on board?”

Captain Russo and his copilot, Eduardo, to whom Laura had relinquished her
seat, checked a few instruments. The pilot craned his neck to look back at her.
“We can. But it’s risky. I do have to think of the safety of the rest of the
people back there in the cabin.”

Laura put a hand on his shoulder. “Captain, if it weren’t for Captain Apollo
out there,
none
of us would be alive right now. Bring him in. Please.”

The pilot nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” He glanced at his copilot. “Let’s set up for
a docking. If he can’t maneuver, we’ll just have to float the number two cargo
bay right over him and bring him inside.”

“Let’s just hope the Cylons don’t come looking, while we’re wallowing around
doing that,” Eduardo muttered.

Laura closed her eyes, praying she wasn’t dooming the transport in the effort
to save Captain Adama. “I have complete confidence in you,” she said at last.
“Now, while you’re doing that, I have to see how our emergency planning is
coming along.” Without waiting for an answer, she headed out the cockpit door to
the passenger cabin.

At this point nothing in the Viper was working except the battery-powered
emergency life-support and wireless—and at that, the wireless mostly just
produced static. Lee Adama could only sit and wait. He would not have blamed the
captain of the transport if he had hit full throttle and run for safety, just as
Lee had told him to do. After all, he had a shipload of passengers who were his
responsibility. In fact, that was probably what the captain
should
have
done. But Lee was grateful, nevertheless, for the sight of the big ship
maneuvering toward him, its cargo bay door open.

As the Viper continued its slow tumble, the transport rotated out of view.
Lee turned his attention back to his lifeless panels. If he could just get
attitude-control thrusters working again! He didn’t want to be rescued just to
crash on the inside of the ship’s cargo bay! Well, he hadn’t tried
everything
yet. There was still this manual control bypass down under the instrument
panel. Maybe he could fire the individual thrusters using the hand valves…

Pop… BAM…

Whoa. He had just slowed his pitch-over tumble. Or had he? No, that was the
wrong way. He groped around for the opposite lever and yanked it.
BAM…
whoosh…

By the gods, it was working. Good thing, too, he realized, as the transport
came back into view, looming suddenly very large outside the cockpit. He was
about to be swallowed up by that big, yawning cargo bay.

* * *

The Viper slammed and skidded onto the deck of the hold, as it came suddenly
into the influence of the Lorey-field gravity. Somehow it slid to a full stop,
just before smashing into a wall with a wingtip. Lee laughed to release the
tension, as he waited for the cargo bay doors to close and the area to
repressurize. It wasn’t a
good
landing, for sure—but if he could walk
away from it, then it was good enough. When he saw a couple of crewmembers from
the transport running from a stairway toward him, he realized pressurization was
complete, and he pushed the cockpit canopy open.

Loosening his helmet, he was happy to hand it to the first man to reach in.
“Welcome aboard, Captain Adama,” the crewman said.

“Thank you,” Lee said, climbing over the edge of the cockpit and carefully
down the ladder that the crewman had propped against the side of the craft. He
stepped away from the Viper and looked around at the cargo bay—surprisingly
large, like the lower deck of a seagoing ferry, and mostly empty. Then he turned
back to gaze at the battered antique Viper.
No more complaints from me. You
got me here in one piece, and you took out that missile that would have been the
end of all of us.
Taking a deep breath, Lee pulled off his gloves as the
transport crewman helped loosen the collar ring of his spacesuit.

“Captain! Are you all right?” A vaguely familiar-looking man was running up
to him.

“I’m fine.” Lee turned to inspect his craft more thoroughly. As he did so, he
caught sight of some very large coils just ahead of his Viper in the cargo bay.
He walked over to take a look at them.

“My name’s Aaron Doral,” said the man, practically demanding attention. “I
met you before. Took some publicity photos with you and your father.”

Right—the publicity guy. Lee was more interested in these components.

“What
are
those things?” Doral asked, disconcerted by Lee’s seeming
inattention.

That was what Lee had been wondering, and he had just figured it out.
“Electric pulse generators, from the
Galactica.”

“Really,” said Doral. “That… that’s interesting.” He became more sober and
determined. “Uh, Captain, I—I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you!”

“Oh? Why’s that?” asked Lee, finally turning to see what the man wanted.

Doral looked extremely agitated. “Well, see, Captain—personally, I would
feel a lot better if someone
qualified
were in charge around here.”

Lee looked at him in surprise. “Is something wrong with your pilot?”

“No,” said Doral. “It’s just that he’s not the one giving orders.”

Lee studied the man’s face for a moment, then decided he’d better go see for
himself what was going on. As he walked away, Doral followed closely behind.
“This is… uh, this is a bad situation, isn’t it, sir?”

Now, that’s stating the obvious, isn’t it?
“Yes,” answered Lee. “Yes, it
is.”

He found the stairway and ran quickly up out of the cargo area. In the
passenger cabin, he didn’t have to look far to see who was apparently giving the
orders. The Secretary of Education, Laura Roslin, was surrounded by a group of
people, whom she was questioning closely. She was a middle-aged woman whom Lee
had met before only briefly. An educator. Quietly intelligent, attractive,
almost motherly. Probably not the leader type, he would have guessed. She had a
thin blanket wrapped around her shoulders, as though she were cold. But if that
suggested any weakness, the impression was dispelled at once. “What if we transferred the L
containers from Bay Three to Bay Four?” she asked a man crouched beside her.
“Then we could use One, Two, and Three for passengers.”

Lee recognized the man she was talking to as the transport pilot, Captain
Russo. “Yeah,” Russo said, “that’s doable. It’s a lot of heavy lifting without
dock loaders, though.”

“A little hard work is just what the people need right now,” Laura said. She
looked up and saw Lee, as he strode forward to shake the pilot’s hand. “Captain!
Good to see you again.”

“Likewise,” Lee answered. To Russo, he said, “Thanks for the lift.”

The pilot laughed. “You should thank her,” he said, nodding in Roslin’s
direction. As Lee followed his glance, puzzled, the pilot slapped him on the arm
and headed back to the cockpit.

Roslin had already returned her attention to the discussion with the young
man who appeared to be her assistant. “Start the cargo transfer and then prep
Bay Three for survivors,” she said, with startling authority and efficiency.

“Yes, ma’am,” the young man said, and moved off to follow his instructions.

Lee was still trying to put all this together in his mind. “I’m sorry.
Survivors?”

Roslin looked back up at him and explained rapidly. “As soon as the attack
began, the government ordered a full stop on all civilian vessels. So now we’ve
got hundreds of stranded ships in this solar system. Some are lost, some are
damaged, some are losing power. We have enough space on
this
ship to
accommodate up to five hundred people, and we’re going to need every bit of it.”
She stood up abruptly, as though intending to walk away.

Behind Lee, Aaron Doral was sputtering. “But we don’t even know what the
tactical situation is out there.”

Roslin angled a glance at him and looked thoughtful. “The tactical situation
is that we are losing.” She swung her gaze around to look Lee straight in the
eye. “Right, Captain?”

Lee could hardly lie. As far as he had heard, they were losing
badly.
“Right,” he answered, with a nod.

“So,” Roslin went on, without a trace of self-consciousness about giving
orders, “we pick up the people we can and try to find a safe haven to put down.”
She walked toward the cockpit door, then turned. “Captain, I’d like you to look
over the navigational charts for a likely place to hide from the Cylons.” She
nodded. “That’s all.” And she turned away.

Lee, stunned by her complete command of the situation, glanced at Doral, who
was still standing nearby, fuming—no doubt waiting for Lee to take over. Lee had
to work a bit to hide a smile. As he walked away, he said simply, “The lady’s in
charge.”

An unhappy Aaron Doral glowered after him.

The Hills, Southeast of Caprica City

Helo aimed deliberately low and to one side and squeezed off a single round
from his Previn automatic. The round exploded in the ground, throwing a cloud of
dirt into the air between Helo and the advancing mob. The people fell back, but
his action did nothing to calm them down. Now they were not just scared and
desperate, they were angry.

He called out, “That’s as close as you get—okay? Let’s just settle down here.
Settle down, and no one gets hurt.” Even as he said it, his heart was going out
to the people. Could he blame them? Wouldn’t he be just as desperate to get off
the planet?

Shouts of anger gave way to pleas. One man was waving a fistful of money. “I
have to get to the port! I’ll give you fifty thousand cubits!”

“Sixty thousand!” a woman shouted.

“We’re not taking money!” Helo shouted back. “This isn’t a rescue ship. This
is a military vessel.” He leveled his weapon again as the crowd surged forward,
pressing their case. Beside him, Sharon had her own gun aimed at the crowd, protecting him, and protecting the
Raptor. “We’re not taking money!” he repeated.

Several of the people in the front of the crowd made as though to charge.
Sharon raised her gun and fired a warning burst into the air. The people fell
back again in alarm. But voices soon rose again, one woman calling, “But what
about the children?”

That was too much. “All right, all right!” Sharon yelled, her change of heart
taking Helo by surprise. “All right.” She caught her breath, but did not lower
her weapon. “Children first.
Children.”
She was suddenly flushed with an
awareness that
she,
not that many years ago, had through good fortune
alone escaped a cataclysm on her own homeworld of Troy. Why should she deny that
same fortune to these children?

There was a stirring in the crowd, as parents pressed bags or keepsakes into
the hands of their tearful children, and hustled them to the front of the crowd
before they could protest or refuse. Sharon and Helo waved the children into the
Raptor. Sharon silently counted them as they ducked through the entry hatch.
When all the children were aboard, she turned back to the crowd, her face drawn
and harried. “All right—we can take three more people.”