01 - Battlestar Galactica (19 page)

“We’re not going to abandon all these people.”

“But sir—if we stay—”

“I’ve made my decision, Captain.” She spoke clearly and unemotionally, her
eyes focused outside the cockpit, searching for the Cylons.

He stared at her in disbelief for a moment. She was as pigheaded and
irrational as his father. “You’re the president,” he said, peeling off his
headset and climbing out of his seat to squeeze past her.

She looked startled at his sudden departure. Eduardo moved quickly from the
jump seat back into the copilot’s seat. “All right, then,” she said.

“Permission to go below?” Lee asked, on his way out. He didn’t wait for an
answer. He had less than two minutes to act before the Cylons would destroy
them. She might think that he was jumping to his Viper—probably even hoping
that—but he had another idea. A ridiculously long shot, but what other choice
did they have?

He made his way at a run, down to the cargo deck. He had seen a small control
panel down there…

In the CIC, an enlisted man darted from the remote sensor console over to
where Lieutenant Gaeta was working on the FTL solution. After a hurried
conference, Gaeta darted just as quickly to Commander Adama’s side. Tigh
followed his movement with concern. “Sir,” said Gaeta, “we have remote sensor
telemetry from Captain Apollo’s position, and two enemy fighters are closing in
on her port…”

Oh frak no.
Adama grabbed the headset he had torn off in disgust a minute
ago, and tried to reach Colonial One. “Colonial One—this is
Galactica!
Apollo—you have inbound enemy fighters coming toward you! Get out of there!
Apollo! Lee—get—Lee—!”

The bloom on the dradis screen told him he was too late.

In the cockpit of the transport, Laura saw and
felt
a blinding blast
that hurled her against the back door of the compartment and took the world
away.

In the CIC, the dradis display flickered, sorting through static, then went
clear, showing no signal returns from the area where a minute ago there had been
two civilian craft and two hostiles. Then the screen went dark, as the remote
sensors were caught by the blast. They were all gone. Sensors, ships,
everything.

Adama watched in disbelief, and finally bowed his head. He could say nothing.
He could only fight to keep the pain from showing on his face.
Lee. Gone.
Why? Why Lee?
He stood that way for a very long time.

Finally he heard Gaeta’s voice through the inner static of the pain:
“Estimate a fifty-kiloton thermonuclear detonation.”

Nuke. Fusion bomb. Your only hope was to Jump out of there. Why didn’t you?
Adama’s face creased with pain. But he could not, dared not, show any more
emotion in front of the crew. Not now.

Gaeta’s voice continued, “Cylons moving off. Sir.”

Around him, everyone was silent. Everyone wishing they could help, wishing
they could change it, wishing they could just say something. Eventually Tigh
came up behind him and rested his hands on Adama’s shoulders. And stood with
him. Just stood.

The others slowly returned to their posts.

Adama, bracing himself on the plotting table, forced out the words, in a low,
tortured voice: “Resume… Jump… prep…”

As everyone moved, slowly, Tigh raised his voice and snapped the command:
“Resume Jump prep!”

Soon the attention-tone sounded, and Dualla’s voice echoed throughout the
ship. “Attention all hands. Jump prep underway. Set Condition Two throughout the
ship. Set Condition Two throughout the ship.”

Chief Tyrol watched on a monitor, holding his breath, as the last of the
Vipers came in for a landing. There was no way this could be an easy landing,
not with all the buckling in the landing bay caused by the nuke. But this
particular approach was heart-stopping; it was Starbuck, and her ship was not
controlling properly in slow flight. She was yawing wildly, nearly hitting the
side of the bay. It bounced and skidded as she hit the deck. Finally the Viper
came to a stop on top of the hangar elevator, and Tyrol’s crew wasted no time
bringing it down for servicing.

When Tyrol got a close look at the condition of the fighter, he was beside
himself. “Lieutenant! What did you do to my Viper?”

Starbuck was just coming down from the cockpit, yanking her flight-suit
jacket open. She looked exhausted; her flight-suit was soaked with sweat; her
face was an angry scowl. Squinting up at the tail section of the Viper, she saw
what the chief was so upset about. “I wondered why the engine gave out,” she
said matter-of-factly. A big chunk had been torn out of engine number one, the
topmost engine in the cluster, and along with it a good part of the vertical
stabilizer. It was a miracle she and the whole craft weren’t a cinder now.

Chief Tyrol circled around behind. “We’re gonna have to pull the whole
mounting. Get the high-lift.” He stepped up to Lieutenant Thrace. “How did you
manage to even fly this thing, much less land it?”

She seemed to be getting angrier by the moment. She yanked off her gloves.
“That’s not something I want to think about right now. Where’s Prosna? He has to
get that frakking gimbal locked, or I’ll have his ass.”

Chief Tyrol looked at her. “He’s dead… sir. He died in the fire.”

Suddenly she was a lot less like “Starbuck” and more like a stunned Kara
Thrace. “How many did we lose?”

“Eighty-five.”

Kara absorbed that shocking figure for a second, and her face narrowed and
seemed to harden. “Right.” She turned and strode away.

“Oh, Lieutenant,” Tyrol called.

She turned darkly.

With difficulty, Tyrol said, “I don’t know if you heard about Apollo, but—”

She looked completely defeated. “What?”

He couldn’t say it. He could only look down, imagining how the Old Man must
be feeling right now. His last son…

She suddenly got it. The blow, oddly, made her stand a little straighter, as
though in defiance against the stream of bad news. “Right,” she said.
Swallowing, she began again to leave, then once more turned back. “Any word on
Sharon?”

This time it was Tyrol who felt utterly defeated. He knew the score, even if
no one was willing to say it. “No, sir,” he said, looking up to examine the tail
section of another Viper.

Kara hesitated, nodded, then headed off to the wardroom.

Tyrol suddenly felt paralyzed, surrounded by people, machines, things that
urgently needed to be done. He could barely stand up straight, much less lead
the crew. Specialist Cally, who had observed the exchange, stepped closer. “You
okay, Chief?” she asked in a strained voice. She had only just hauled herself
back together, after losing Prosna.

Tyrol couldn’t answer.
No, I’m not okay. Neither are you. None of us is.
Finally he found his voice enough to whisper, “Get back to work.” And he
turned and walked quickly away.

Raptor 312, Caprica Escape Orbit

Sharon Valerii, too, seemed less like a “Boomer” just now and more like a
sorrow-weary young pilot. In order to conserve fuel and avoid attracting
unwanted attention, she had cut propulsion once she’d achieved a transitional
high orbit from which escape velocity was just a short burn away. There was
little flying to do at the moment, but she couldn’t help fiddling and checking.

When a scan of the area revealed no Cylons nearby, she decided to risk
launching a communications drone. The ten-year-old boy she’d brought aboard was
still sitting in the right-hand seat, watching her every move. Her hand on the
launch button, she counted down, “Three… two… one… launch.”

There was a little shudder through the deck, and a momentary flash of light
as the drone streaked out from the bottom of the hull and twinkled off into
space. “Drone deployed… and transmitting,” she said to the boy, watching the
drone’s stats.

“Now they’ll come find us?” he asked in a small voice.

“Hard to say. There’s a lot of interference around here,” she said, lifting her voice a little to sound more optimistic than she felt. “A
lot of noise. It keeps my wireless from working.” She fiddled with the
electronic controls, then added, “Hopefully, once that communications pod I
launched gets far enough away from here, a Colonial ship will pick up the signal
and start looking for us.”

The boy was silent for a bit. Then he asked, “Is everyone on Caprica dead?”
He looked at her with imploring eyes, asking to be corrected.

“I don’t know,” Sharon admitted, in a muted voice. A lump swelled in her
throat as she thought about Helo.

The boy seemed to accept that. “My dad’s in the Colonial fleet,” he said.
“His name’s Colonel Wakefield. Maybe you know him?”

Sharon hesitated a moment, then shook her head.

“He’s a diplomat. He goes sometimes to that station where the Cylons are
supposed to meet us.” The boy looked very thoughtful, very vulnerable. “They
never did, though—did you know that?”

Sharon nodded.

“They told me he’s missing. But I think he’s dead, too.”

Sharon smiled briefly, despite the sharp pang the boy’s words gave her.
“What’s your name?”

“Boxey,” he said matter-of-factly.

She nodded, offering him another tiny smile. “You know something? Both my
parents died when I was little, too.” Another pang, as that memory resurfaced
for the second time today. The terrible accident on the mining colony of Troy,
which had destroyed the dome that was the only thing keeping two hundred
thousand people safe from Troy’s toxic atmosphere. They had all died, including
her parents. Sharon had survived only because she was away at the time, en route
to Caprica and her admissions interview at the Colonial Academy.

“Where do you live now?” he asked.

With an effort, she shook off the memory. “With a bunch of other people on a
ship called
Galactica.”

“Isn’t that a battlestar?”

“That’s right,” Sharon said. She thought a moment. “Hey, I have an idea.
Maybe you could live there, too…”

In the rear compartment of the Raptor, Gaius Baltar sat huddled with all the
other refugee passengers. He was cold, miserable, and lonely. He had never felt
so alone in his entire life. No one was speaking. He could hear nothing except
the throb of pumps and the hum of equipment in the compartment surrounding him.
Until…

“You know what I love about you, Gaius?”

The voice was familiar; so familiar, for a moment he thought it was right
inside his head. He looked up and started to look around—until he froze at the
sight of Natasi, seated directly across from him, wearing that red, low-cut
spaghetti-strap number that drove him wild with lust.

“You’re a survivor,” she said softly, huskily, leaning forward until he could
feel her breath.

Natasi? Here? No, that’s not
—

He blinked and averted his gaze for a moment, shaking his head like a dog.
None of the other passengers seemed to have noticed. They were all sitting,
huddled as he was, in a state of shock. The nearest one was the old woman he had
helped to get on board. He shifted his gaze back to Natasi. But there was no one
there. Just the old woman, and the others.
Not real. I’m hallucinating.

But it sure had seemed real—Natasi had looked as real as—

He suddenly came down hard on his own thought.
No, it was not Natasi. Even
Natasi was not Natasi—she was a frakking Cylon.

Model number six of twelve models.
He began to tremble, thinking about
it.
Model number six. Maybe that’s what I should have called her: Number Six.
She didn’t deserve a real name.

The old woman was looking at him curiously now, and that’s when he realized
he’d been starting to talk to himself. He managed a slight, tortured smile,
rubbed his stubble-covered chin. And turned his thoughts back to the inside,
back to where someone was trying to drive him mad….

Galactica

The ship was closing up as though readying itself to spin a cocoon. All the
Viper patrols had returned, and the launch bay and landing bay doors rumbled
closed and locked into place. In the engineering bowels of the ship, great gears
and magnetic sequencers ground into action, and the entire port and starboard
launch pods began to retract into the great hull of the ship. The entire
procedure took ten minutes and forty-three seconds. When they were finished,
Galactica
looked noticeably leaner.

In the CIC, the Executive Officer was going around the horn with final
checks: “Nav?”

“Go.”

“FTL?”

“Go.”

“Tactical?”

“Go.”

“Flight ops?”

“Go.”

“Sublight?”

“Go.”

“Helm?”

“Go.”

Satisfied, Colonel Tigh spoke this time to Commander Adama. “The board is
green, ship reports ready to Jump, sir.”

Adama was standing at the plotting table, glasses on, mood subdued. He was
showing no emotion, no sign of the blow he had just suffered. He spoke without
wasting a single word: “Take us to Ragnar.”

Colonel Tigh turned toward the FTL console. “Lieutenant Gaeta, execute the
Jump.”

The attention-tone sounded as Gaeta spoke into the shipboard PA. “All decks
prepare for immediate FTL Jump.” Gaeta reached down to the FTL console, gripped
the handle of the FTL safety interlock, and pulled it out of its repository. On
the end of the chrome handle were two long, bright-glowing blue crystals. He
lifted it clear of the Safety slot and inserted it carefully into the Jump slot.
Once it was in place, he twisted it firmly ninety degrees to the right. The
mechanism clicked into place, and several lights came on across the board.

Gaeta spoke into the PA again. “The clock is running. Jump in ten… nine
… eight…”