03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding (5 page)

Head in the game, Starbuck, get your head in the game.

She barrel rolled and swung around toward a Cylon raider who was coming at
her, guns blazing. Except…

Except…

“They’re shooting wide!” she said as deep space was filled with Vipers going
up against Cylon raiders. “I’m not even dodging the frakking things! It’s like
they’re not even shooting at me!”

“Of course not, they’re shooting at
Galactica!
Or the fleet!”

“Negative, I say again, negative, Apollo,” Starbuck insisted. “I’m tracking
trajectory! They’re shooting at… at nothing!”

“Why the frak would they be doing that?” said Apollo. “Trouble with target
lock?”

“There aren’t people in those things shooting their guns, Apollo! Those ships
are
Cylons, remember? It’s like saying their whole fleet has a giant head
cold and can’t see straight!”

Even as she spoke, she continued to press the attack. And now Apollo saw what
Starbuck was talking about as the Cylons essentially did everything they could
to stay out of the Vipers’ way while returning fire that was woefully off
target. Apollo hadn’t been tagged even once.

“Not hitting them? Are you sure?” asked Adama.

Petty Officer Second Class Anastasia Dualla said, “Reconfirming it, Admiral.
Starbuck first noticed it, then Apollo, and now Hotdog and Kat are saying so as
well. Either the Cylons have forgotten how to shoot, or they’re deliberately
aiming wide of our people. And they’re not drawing appreciably closer to
Galactica
.”

“Admiral,” Gaeta informed him, “we’re ready to make the Jump.”

“Shall I recall the Vipers, Admiral?” asked Dualla, leaning toward her
communications board in that slightly hunched manner she had when they were in
the midst of a battle.

Adama’s mind was racing. He had come to know the clockwork repetition of the
Cylon mind, or at least he thought he had. Why in the world would they start
changing tactics now? Something seemed wrong.

“Admiral…” Dualla prompted.

“He heard you, Dualla,” Tigh said sharply, and Adama realized that Tigh was
standing near his shoulder. The decisive sound of his voice and defiant look of
his posture would never have betrayed the confusion in his eyes over Adama’s
hesitation.

“He’ll give the order when he’s ready.” Then, in a low voice that only Adama
could hear, Tigh murmured, “Which will be anytime now, right?”

“Tell the Vipers to buy us more time. Make sure the Cylons keep their
distance,” said Adama said in a calm, almost detached voice. Then he continued,
“Colonel… scramble a raptor for immediate launch. Lieutenant Gaeta, relay
the Jump coordinates to the raptor. Tell them I need a recon mission stat. In
and out. If they linger at the Jump point even one second, that’s one second too
long.”

Neither Tigh nor Gaeta nor any of the rest of the crew in CIC even pretended
to understand, but fortunately enough, understanding an order wasn’t necessary
for following it.

So it was that a raptor, under the guidance of Lieutenant Kathleen
“Puppeteer” Shay (so called for her compulsion to have her hands in so many
things), hurled itself into the ether while the Vipers continued to fight a
delaying action against the Cylons.

The call that came through seconds later from the
Pegasus
didn’t
especially surprise Adama. He picked up the phone and said into it,
“Pegasus,
this is
Galactica
actual.”

“Galactica,
this is
Pegasus
actual,”
came the voice of
Commander Barry Garner. The former engineering chief had been pressed into
service as commander of Battlestar
Pegasus
after the assassination of
Admiral Cain by a Cylon operative, followed by the scandalous murder of
Commander Jack Fisk, who had had deep ties with the black market trade. Garner,
who very likely had never figured to serve as his vessel’s CO, nevertheless did
his best to be up to the challenge. If he ever felt overwhelmed by what was
expected of him, he never let it show, a technique of which Adama approved.
“Admiral, all due respect, what are we waiting for? Our Vipers are battling the
Cylons right alongside yours, but it’s not as if we need an extended workout.”

“We’re investigating something,” Adama said cautiously. Under the
circumstances, it was never safe to assume that the Cylons hadn’t found a way of
listening in on their communications. In fact, it was probably safer to assume
they
had
found a way and to act with appropriate caution. “Stand by.”

“Standby?”

“Yes,
Commander,
stand by,” said Adama with particular emphasis on
rank, a not-so-subtle reminder of exactly who was in charge.

There was only the slightest pause, and then Garner replied,
“Standing by,
aye.”

Puppeteer, handling the controls with the vast confidence she always
displayed in such situations, folded space around herself and leaped to the
coordinates that Gaeta had conveyed to her. She had never quite adjusted to the
sensation. It wasn’t enough of a reaction that it hampered her ability to handle
a raptor or get her job done. It was just a second or two of nausea that swept
through her, and then she was able to mentally right herself and get on with
whatever her mission was.

This time was no exception. Puppeteer braced herself as the FTL drive kicked
in and propelled her to the new destination that was intended to be safe
haven—albeit temporary, of course, thanks to the damned Cylons constantly
nipping at their heels. Not for the first time, Puppeteer wondered if there was
ever going to be a time when humanity could just take a long, deep breath of
relief and go about its business without worrying about the damned toasters
leaping on them like jackals on lions.

Space twisted around her in half a heartbeat, using technology and scientific
theory that she couldn’t have explained if someone had put a gun to her head.
Still, it was like walking into a room and flipping a light switch. As long as the light illuminated the
room, who gave a damn how it worked.

She was never actually able to perceive the Jump while she was in transition.
It wasn’t as if some vast vortex of stars swirled around her in a hypnotic haze,
providing a tunnel through which her ship hurtled. She was simply in one place,
then she was in another, with a slight sense of having been stretched like a
rubber band and then having snapped back almost instantaneously.

The FTL drive spat her out into the new coordinates, and she felt that same
typical instant of nausea, which she pushed away from her.

Then space around her seemed to explode.

Acting completely on reflex and survival instinct, she jammed the raptor’s
stick and sent the ship spiraling backwards. Even as she did so, her eye had
just enough time to catch sight of something, and it took her brain another
second or so to process what she was seeing.

“Frak me!”
she shouted as she reactivated the FTL drive. Blasts continued
to erupt around her. The ship jolted and she felt a moment of panic—not just
from the prospect of dying, but from doing so without being able to get back to
Galactica
with her mission completed. She’d been hit—only a glancing
blow. But they were zeroing in on her, and she couldn’t count on her luck to
hold up. The FTL roared to life once more as she slammed the ship forward, and
suddenly there was a blinding explosion dead in front of her, and everything
went black.

“How much longer do we wait?” Tigh said. There was nothing in his tone that
suggested he was challenging Adama’s authority, but he was clearly getting a bit
apprehensive about the delay.

“Just long enough,” replied Adama. He had actually calculated exactly how
long he intended to wait for a report from the raptor, balancing that against
the apparently questionable Cylon assault. He was certain there would come a
point where the Cylons would drop the miss-on-purpose assault and start firing
for real, and he factored that in to a mental countdown that was running rapidly
toward zero. But he didn’t feel the need to say all that to Tigh, and Tigh—being
the officer he was with the long history that he and Adama shared—would never
consider pushing harder on the question.

Ten,
the mental clock ticked down in Adama’s head,
nine, eight, seven
…

Dualla suddenly turned and said, “Admiral! Raptor One is back! She’s
reporting…” Dualla’s eyes widened.

“Dualla,” Adama prompted, time running out.

“Sir, Puppeteer says the Jump point is swarming with Cylons! She says it was
like space was alive with them! She can’t even begin to guess how many there
were!”

Colonel Tigh paled slightly upon hearing the news, and there was a moment of
stunned shock in the CIC. Gaeta’s hand had been poised over the FTL controls the
entire time. Now, as if all feeling had fled from his fingers, he slowly lowered
it while staring in astonishment at Adama.

It never gets easier.

“An ambush,” growled Adama. “They’re trying to herd us right into it.” He
paused and then said, “Dualla… get the horses back into the barn.”

“All Vipers, return to
Galactica
immediately.”

Knowing that he was about to order his officer to roll the dice with the last
survivors of humanity, Adama said, “Lieutenant, plot a blind Jump. Best guess.
Get us out of here.”

Gaeta visibly gulped, but it wasn’t as if the order was a complete surprise to him. It wasn’t the first time that he’d been required to do
such a thing. He’d accomplished it successfully before, but it was always a
white-knuckle maneuver. Acting as the thorough professional that Adama expected
him to be, Gaeta said, “Aye, sir,” and number crunched as fast as he could. By
the time the last of the Vipers had returned to the bay, he had coordinates
transmitted to the rest of the fleet… prompting an immediate, albeit not
unanticipated, communiqué from Garner on the
Pegasus. “Are these coordinates
right, Admiral?”
he asked.
“They’re different from
—”

“I know that, Chief. The previous coordinates are unusable. This is our best
guess.”

There was the briefest hesitation, and then Garner said coolly,
“Well,
then, this should be fairly interesting.”

“Yes.” Adama hung up the phone, then turned to Gaeta. Gaeta was staring right
at him, waiting for confirmation. All Adama had to do was nod, and then Gaeta
keyed in the final coordinates.

“FTL engines on line,” Gaeta said. He glanced just once at his own hand,
feeling that the entirety of humanity was residing in it, waiting to see what he
was going to do. Then the FTL drive kicked in and the fleet vanished from the
site, hurtling into the complete unknown.

A split instant later, they reemerged into normal space.

A blazing star hung directly in front of them.

“Frak!”
exploded from Gaeta’s lips.

“Full reverse thrust! All ships!”
shouted Adama, and the order was
instantly relayed. It wasn’t entirely necessary, considering that when one is
hurtling right into a star, it doesn’t take much to realize that the best
direction to be heading at that moment is anywhere other than forward.

They were still thousands of miles away from the star, but distances in space
could be eaten up very quickly, especially by ships that were dropping out of
light speed. Furthermore, the
Galactica
wasn’t built for maneuverability.
It didn’t corner worth a damn, and it wasn’t designed to stop on a mark. Objects
in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by another force. With no
friction in space, the only force to halt the
Galactica
was the reverse
thrusters. Unfortunately, they were already being acted upon by another force
entirely: the star’s gravity field. It was just beginning to act on them and
Adama had no desire to pit the strength of his ship’s engines against the
pulling power of billions of tons of blazing gas. Worst-case scenario, they
would be yanked in and toasted in a matter of seconds. Best-case scenario, the
Galactica
would be ripped in half. Neither was an appealing prospect.

The smaller ships were able to halt themselves easily, but then they madly
scrambled to get out of the way, for the
Pegasus
—bringing up the
rear—wasn’t slowing any easier than the
Galactica.
The civilian
transports cut right, left, up, down and sideways, any direction they could go
relative to the aft Battlestar that would easily smash them to bits if it
collided with them.

The prospect of being rear-ended by the
Pegasus
occurred to Adama, but
he had to deal with one crisis at a time. Although he might have been imagining
it, he thought he could hear the hull of the mighty warship screaming in protest
as the engines labored to halt the ship’s forward progress. No… he wasn’t
imagining it. Above all the sounds of reports and orders being relayed and
confirmed, people were looking around in response to what sounded like groaning,
as if the ship were a senior citizen being forced to run laps. It wasn’t the
first time that Adama was being reminded that the
Galactica
had been scheduled
for retirement, to be transformed into a museum due to its age.
You and me
both, we could use the rest,
he thought grimly.

The
Galactica
hurtled toward a collision with the star, and the
screens adjusted automatically to dim the blinding brightness so the crew’s
retinas wouldn’t be burned away from looking at it. Adama had several seconds to
ponder the irony of that: that they wouldn’t go blind while they were exploding
in the nuclear heart of a celestial furnace.

The entire vessel trembled even more violently, and it was slowing and
slowing, but it was going to be too close. And then, ever so gradually, the ship
slowed to a halt and then stopped. Seconds later, the full force of the reverse
thrusters finally accomplished the job, and the
Galactica
started to move
backwards.