01 - Battlestar Galactica (2 page)

Kissed him. But why?

His mind went utterly blank, then returned with an awareness only of this
moment. There was a power in this kiss, almost a supernatural power, that made
other thoughts and cares flee. Her lips were afire with passion; they worked to
discover the exact shape of
his
lips. Her breath was hot on him now.
Lust, awakened from a deep slumber, began to flare to life in him. He returned
the kiss now, answering passion with passion. Her grip tightened on the back of
his neck. All thought of his mission fled, all thought of his wife….

In the deep, deep darkness surrounding the station and its docked spacecraft,
another ship was moving. It was immense, and shaped something like two sea stars
joined face to face, kissing, their arms twisted at odd angles. It was,
unmistakably, a Cylon base star. Beside it, the Colonial ship and the station
looked like tiny plastic toys. It was now moving away from the station, gaining
a little distance—but not too much—before a single white point of light streaked
out from somewhere within it, and began to turn in a graceful curve around the
extensions of the base star’s arms. Then the light whipped back inward, toward
the little space station.

As it struck the station, there was a blinding flash….

The colonel felt the deck shudder beneath him, as the kisses came more and
more urgently It was almost as though she were trying to draw something out of
him, some passion no human had ever touched before.
Something terrible was
happening
—of that he was certain—but his mind was too fogged by her raw,
commanding sexuality to focus and comprehend. And not just her sexuality, but a
feeling that she was touching him in some inexplicably deep way, drawing from him emotions he could never express. Another shudder shook
the room harder than before, and he tried to break from her kiss. For a fraction
of an instant she smiled, a bit sadly and sweetly perhaps, and with a probing
gaze, murmured, “It has begun.”

He struggled to pull free, but there was an inhuman strength in the hand
pulling him back toward her lips. Her mouth met his again as the papers on the
table began to flutter and fly away. As she breathed in his mouth, he felt all
the air rushing from the chamber. If he did not break free and get to a safe
place,
he would die.

The third and final shudder jarred his senses, but only for an instant—before
he, the woman, and the entire space station exploded in a ball of fire and
hull-metal shrapnel.

In the silence of deep space, there was no sound of the explosion. No human
still living was close enough to see the flash of the fireball. And no warning
signal was ever sent.

Its single, simple mission concluded, the Cylon ship quickly moved away and
vanished back into the darkness of the interstellar void.

Warship Galactica

Thump, thump, thump, thump…
The rhythm of the running footsteps
echoed in the spaceship’s passageway, a high, trapezoidal corridor lit by
regularly spaced, vertical blue-white light tubes along the slanted support
beams. The passageway was spotlessly clean, but well worn with use, and now, as
always, full of people.

Kara Thrace rounded a corner, jogged past a handful of crewmen coming the
other way. Kara was an athletic, short-haired blonde woman in her late twenties,
and a fighter pilot. She bore down on a knot of tourists gathered in the
passageway ahead. She was already breathing hard, but that didn’t stop her from
yelling, “Make a hole!”

That produced some startled looks from the visitors and their guide. They
hastily backed to either side of the corridor and made a hole. Kara plunged
through their midst and never looked back, though she shuddered a little at the
tour guide’s voice, telling the people about the history of the
Galactica,
the sole remaining battlestar from the era of the Cylon War. “Originally twelve battlestars,”
he said in a perfect museum guide’s tone of voice, “each representing one of
Kobol’s twelve colonies…
Galactica
represented Caprica…” Frak, Kara
thought as she left the tourists behind. Wait until the ship
is
a museum,
will you…

Such thoughts were very much in Commander William Adama’s mind as he walked
the ship’s corridors. He had a speech to give, and he still hadn’t quite worked
out what he wanted to say. The
Galactica’s
stocky, craggy-faced
commanding officer didn’t much like giving speeches under any
circumstances—throughout his long years in the service, he’d managed to avoid
that duty whenever possible—and he certainly didn’t like to dwell on the reasons
for this particular speech. Nevertheless, it had to be done, and there was no
getting around the fact that as
Galactica’s
final master, he was the one
who had to do it.

Glancing down at the paper in his hand as he walked, he tried once more, in
his deep, husky voice. “Though the Cylon War is long over, let’s not forget the
reasons why—”

A voice from behind him interrupted. “Commander Adama, if I may!” It was
Captain Kelly, the Landing Signal Officer.

This was the third time he’d been interrupted before getting through the
opening paragraph of his speech, but Adama didn’t really mind. He glanced back
as Kelly caught up with him. “Captain?”

Kelly appeared to feel awkward now that he had his commander’s ear. “Well,
sir, I… just want to say what a pleasure it’s been… serving with you,
under your command, sir.”

“Kelly.” Touched, Adama turned to shake the officer’s hand. “It’s been my
honor. Good luck in your next assignment.” Kelly was only the latest of many
members of the crew to approach him with such sentiments today. Adama felt touched by all of them.

“Thank you, sir.” For a moment, Kelly looked as if he might have something
more to say, but finally he just nodded and turned down a side corridor.

Adama kept walking, trying to remember the opening line of his speech without
looking down. Murmuring, he began, “The Cylon War is long over. Yet we must not
forget…”

Jogging footsteps behind him, coming alongside. “Morning, sir!” called a
familiar voice.

“Good morning, Starbuck,” he answered, without looking up. “What do you
hear?”

“Nothing but the rain,” answered Kara Thrace, keeping pace beside him.

“Then grab your gun and bring in the cat,” Adama said, completing the ritual
exchange he and Kara had shared for as long as she’d been a pilot on his ship.

Kara grinned and pointed a finger at him. “Boom boom boom,” she said, and
accelerated ahead to finish her morning jog. Adama watched her with a smile as
she disappeared around the bend. There went one of his top pilots, and one of
the biggest hell-raisers on his ship. Practically a daughter to him. He shook
his head and went back to rehearsing his speech.

This time he made it to the fourth sentence before he looked up to see a trio
of enlisted crewmembers from the hangar deck, a woman and two men muttering to
each other with some urgency. Adama just caught the words “…wrapped that
yesterday,” and some under-the-breath curses, as Specialists Socinus and Prosna
passed something behind their backs, while trying to look innocent.

“Too late,” Adama said. “What’s up?” He wasn’t worried; every commander
should have such a reliable crew.

The three crewmembers saluted. Socinus made the quickest recovery. “Nothing,
sir, just another leak in that frakkin’ window.” The young man hesitated.
“Pardon me, sir.”

Prosna, hands still behind his back, added, “This is supposed to be a
battlestar, not a museum. Sorry to say so, sir.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Adama said. “Be careful out there, all right?”
Letting them keep their secret, he turned back toward his destination. As he
neared the Combat Information Center, he tried one last time to rehearse his
speech, but it was no use. Once he stepped into the CIC, there was no such thing
as a private moment.

The CIC, located deep in the belly of the massive ship, was the battlestar’s
nerve center. It was the center of both flight and combat operations—a huge,
dimly lit room filled with consoles and overhead monitors, work counters and not
enough seats to go around. During normal operations, there could easily be
thirty or forty crewmembers moving about here; today, there were maybe a dozen.
You could feel the coming decommissioning hanging in the air; it made Adama sad,
but also proud to be here at the end.

Greeted by the Officer of the Watch, Lieutenant Gaeta, Adama kept
walking—casting a casual but perceptive eye over the various workstations as
Gaeta briefed him from the stack of papers in his hands, printouts of the day’s
comm traffic. This was the only battlestar in the fleet that still kept
everything on paper, and that was exactly the way he wanted it. “Anything
interesting?” Adama asked, looking up to scan the overhead monitors.

Gaeta was young, efficient, and usually a good judge of what Adama was likely
to consider interesting. Adama was going to miss him. “Mostly just
housekeeping,” Gaeta said. “Though there is one sort of odd message we were
copied on.” He handed Adama the printouts. “It’s the one from Fleet
Headquarters. The courier officer’s overdue coming back from Armistice Station, and they’re
asking for a status report on all FTL-capable ships, just in case they need
somebody to jump out there today and see if his ship is having mechanical
problems.”

Adama chuckled as he flipped through the printouts. “I think we’re a little
busy today Wouldn’t you say so, Lieutenant?”

The watch officer grinned. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m glad we agree,” Adama said wryly. He handed the stack of printouts back
to Gaeta and prepared to walk on.

Before he could take another step, though, Gaeta continued, “May I take this
opportunity to say what a pleasure and honor it’s been to serve under you these
past three years?” He gestured awkwardly, pushing the edges of the paper pile
together.

“It’s my honor, Lieutenant Gaeta,” Adama replied, saluting. Lords of Kobol,
was everyone on the ship going to say that to him today? Perhaps he had better
get used to it.

Turning, he glanced back at the piece of paper he’d been carrying for the
last hour. To himself, he repeated softly, “The Cylon War is long over…”

For Aaron Doral, the day had been a nonstop series of encounters with the
news media and other VIPs newly arrived aboard
Galactica
—all of them here
for the decommissioning ceremony scheduled for tomorrow. For today, his role was
to explain and extol. His role was to interest the press and to lay the
groundwork for the tour guides who would indeed be giving this spiel once the
old crate was
officially
what it had been in reality for years now—a
museum piece. But making the old seem fresh, and the ugly beautiful, was what
Aaron Doral was good at. Aaron Doral was thirty-two, nattily dressed in a blue
civilian suit, and a fast talker. Aaron Doral was a public relations man.

As he strode through the ship’s passageways, leading a cohort of media
reporters and others lucky enough to have wangled passes, he spoke energetically
about what the ship had meant to the Colonies through the years, and why she was
the way she was. Doral was a hard man to impress, but even he felt twinges of
pride in this ship that had served for nearly half a century, at one time the
flagship of the fleet, and now the oldest of all the battlestars. Also, a flying
anachronism…

Doral gestured as he led the latest group through the public portion of the
ship. “You’ll see things here that might look odd, even antiquated, to modern
eyes,” he said, turning to face the knot of people following him. “You’ll see
phones with cords, all kinds of manual valves in the most awkward places,
computers that barely deserve the name.”

After confirming that people were nodding in acknowledgment, he continued,
“It was all designed to operate against an enemy who could infiltrate and
disrupt even the most basic computer systems.
Galactica
is a reminder of
a time when we were so frightened of our enemies that we looked backward to our
past for protection. Backward to simpler computers, and away from the networking
of the day, networking that at the time made us so terribly vulnerable to the
Cylon threat. Of course”—he paused to gesture toward the CIC, which they would
not
be walking through—”modern battlestars resemble
Galactica
in
only the most superficial ways.”

Doral paused to say hello to an older gentleman with thinning gray
hair—Colonel Tigh, the ship’s Executive Officer—but he got only a pained scowl
in return as Tigh stalked past. Good God, the man looked hungover. Lucky
he
wasn’t going to be serving on board much longer. One thing Doral knew was
that he wasn’t going to say anything about that to his audience. No, smile and show respect to the old fossil, that was the way to keep this audience
pleased with their tour.

“Next,” he said, looking back over his shoulder again, “we’re going to walk
down the port side of the ship to get a view of the real meat and potatoes of a
battlestar—the hangar deck, where her real fighting force, the Vipers and
Raptors, are serviced and kept ready for action at a moment’s notice….”

The hangar deck was precisely where Commander Adama was headed at this
moment, having completed his round of the CIC. The crew chief had asked him to
come down to see something special.

Adama stepped down off the ladder onto the hangar deck, to be greeted by
Chief Petty Officer Galen Tyrol. The chief was obviously working to keep a sober
face as he called all hands on deck to attention. Adama saluted and as quickly
put the scattered crew members back at ease. “Morning, Chief. How are you,
today?”