01 - Battlestar Galactica (23 page)

Laura reached out with a smile, and gently smoothed Cami’s hair. Then she
nodded to Billy and the Captain, and rose. “We need to be getting back,” she
said softly.

Colonial One

The cabin was quiet, for which Laura was profoundly grateful as she leaned
back against the headrest of the leather seat. She needed time to think, to
rest. So much to be done. So few resources. Fuel shortages, food shortages,
thousands of people on the thin edge of despair and panic. The weight of her
responsibility as president was like nothing she had ever felt, or imagined.
I need time to absorb it all. Time to come up with answers.
But instead of
answers, her thoughts were full of memories of that little girl in the park. So
young, to be going through something like this.
As if it’s any better to be
old. Old and dying of cancer.

“Madame President?”

She focused her eyes. “Captain—”

Lee Adama sat in a facing seat, holding a piece of paper. “We got a message
from Lieutenant Valerii. She’s found a fuel refinery ship. Filled with Tylium.”
A big smile cracked his face.

Fuel for the spaceships?
Her heart lifted, though she was too tired to
show it.
“Oh.
Good. About time we caught a break. That brings us up to
about what—sixty ships so far? Not bad for a few hours’ work.”

Lee grinned briefly. “No, sir.” He quickly became more sober. “But only about
forty of those ships have faster-than-light capabilities. We should start
transferring people off the sublights onto the FTLs as soon as possible.”

“Yeah.” She closed her eyes for a moment. She opened them again, sensing that
he had something more to say.

He did, and there was urgency in his voice. “I don’t think we should stay
here much longer, sir. Sharon reports picking up signs of some Cylon sensor
drones, probably looking for survivor ships.”

That brought her back to the present. “They’re… mopping up?”

“It looks that way, sir.”

Laura considered. “Am I right in assuming that they wouldn’t be… mopping
up… unless they’d already”—she swallowed back her horror at the
thought—“finished off the colonies?”

Lee grimaced, and did not hide his feelings. “That would be my assumption as
well. And certainly consistent with the reports we’ve gotten. We know all twelve
of the colonies were hit.”

Laura nodded.
Twenty-three billion people, at last count. Twenty-three
billion….

The Survivor Fleet

Sharon came out of Jump with a flash, and was stunned to see the size of the
fleet that had gathered in her absence. Large ships and small. It was
practically an armada. She checked for the refinery ship
Tauranian,
and
was relieved to see that it had come out of Jump just ahead of her. She keyed
her wireless. “Colonial One, Raptor Three-One-Two. I’m back and I brought a
friend.”

The answering voice was that of Captain Russo, on Colonial One.
“Welcome
back, Boomer. Got a lot of thirsty ships here eager to make your friend’s
acquaintance. Did you pick up any other contacts out there?”

“Negative,” she answered. “There’s no one left.”
No one that we can spare
the time and fuel to find, anyway.
She piloted in silence for a few minutes,
leading the refinery ship through the jumble of vessels toward Colonial One.

As she scanned her instruments, something caught her eye—a new blip on the
dradis screen. It was a fast-moving craft on the outside of the fleet. Fast-moving like a Cylon raider. “Got a visitor!” she
announced sharply.

“I see him. Can you jam his signal?”

“Trying,” she said, snapping switches on the panel.
Helo, I need you!
Nothing she did seemed to have any effect on the incoming craft.

The Cylon sped into the midst of the fleet, then back out—and vanished in a
flash of light.
Frak! FRAK!
“It’s gone. Colonial, I’m pretty sure it
scanned us…”

Laura stood in an urgent meeting at the forward end of the first-class
compartment, with Lee Adama, Billy, and Captain Russo. Russo said flatly, “It
definitely scanned us before it Jumped.”

Lee tensed, and when he spoke, it was in a strong voice. “We have to go.
Now.
The Cylons will be here any minute.”

“Can they really respond that fast?” Laura asked.

“They can, and will. They are almost certainly mustering a squadron at this
very moment.”

“Will they be able to track us through a Jump?” the President asked.

“No sir, that’s impossible.”

“Theoretically
impossible.”

“Theoretically,” Lee conceded.

Aaron Doral had joined the group, scowling. “Madame President, there are
still thousands of people on the sublight ships. We can’t just leave them.”

“I agree,” said Russo. “We should use every second to get as many people off
the sublights as we can. We can wait to Jump until we pick up a Cylon force
moving—”

“No!
We’re easy targets,” Lee said sharply. “They’re
going to Jump right in the middle of our ships with a handful of nukes and wipe us out
before
we
have a chance to react.”

“You can’t just leave them all behind!” Doral protested. “You’ll be
sacrificing thousands of people!”

“But—we’ll be
saving
tens of thousands,” Lee responded, and his voice
became fast and urgent. “I’m sorry to make it a numbers game, but we’re talking
about the survival of our race, here. We don’t have the luxury of taking risks
and hoping for the best—because if we lose, we lose everything.”

He looked squarely at Laura. “And Madame President, this is a decision that
needs to be made
right now.”

She gazed back at him, remembering the last time she had faced a decision
like this. That time she had followed her heart, not her mind. She’d opted to
stay with the disabled liner, despite the fact that they had no way to defend
it—and only through Lee’s fast thinking, and the grace of the gods, had they
come out of it alive. She dared not make that mistake again.

With a soft voice that belied the knot in her stomach, she said, “Order the
fleet to Jump to Ragnar immediately.”

If it weren’t for the buzzing in her head, she would have sworn that time had
come to a stop. Everyone had walked away from her—with urgency, with sadness,
with anger. She was scarcely aware of their departure. Billy was still here. He
must have something he wanted to say. The buzzing, though, was all she could
hear.

Finally, Billy broke through, his words sounding distant, then drawing near.
“Madame President, something else you should be aware of…”

She stared across the cabin, seeing nothing. “I have cancer,” she said
suddenly.

For a moment, there was no answer. Then: “I know.”

She turned her head to look at Billy in amazement.

He looked ready to explode with tension, fear, sorrow. He was carrying
burdens someone his age should never have to carry. “Little things you said or
did,” he explained with difficulty. “A couple of comments you made. I don’t
think anyone else knows; I haven’t said anything to anyone.”

She looked away again; she could not bear to face another human being as she
said, “My prognosis is doubtful.” She paused for a heartbeat. “I wish I could
say it was the least of my worries. But the world is coming to an end, and all I
can think about is that I have cancer and I’m probably going to die.” Another
heartbeat. “How selfish is that?”

Billy scarcely breathed. “It’s not selfish. It’s human.” After a moment, he
turned sadly and started to walk away.

Laura watched him, her gaze narrowing. “Is there something you wanted to say
to me?”

He stopped in the doorway leading to the next compartment, then turned.
“Well, I—I just thought you should know. That little girl you met earlier,
Cami?” His fingers tugged nervously at the book he was holding in both hands.
“Her ship can’t make the Jump.”

She heard his words, and yet did not hear them. She stood frozen with regret
and remorse… and she could not breathe, or even change the pained smile on
her face, until something in the back of her brain was able to take those words
and put them into a container where, at least for a little while, they could not
hurt her any further. “Thank you,” she said at last, with a slight nod,
releasing Billy from the awful spot he had just put them both into.

She turned away, then, to take a seat alone at the back of the first-class
compartment. There was no room in her thoughts now for the living; there were too many dying, and she could only be with them
just now.

In the cockpit, Lee was in the right seat alongside Captain Russo, with
Eduardo on the comm and nav panel at the rear. They were going through the
pre-Jump checklist with grave efficiency. From the overhead speakers, voices
were coming in from all over the fleet. Voices crying for help, for mercy…

Captain Russo gave Lee one last look of regret before letting a shield slide
over his emotions: “Set the SB trajectory.”

“Colonial One! For God’s sake, you can’t just leave us here!”

Lee determinedly ignored the voices. “SB set.”

“Cycle cryo-fans.”

“Colonial One, this is Picon Three-Six-Bravo. I can’t believe you want to
leave all these people behind
…”

Lee’s fingers worked the board. “Cycled.”

“At least tell us where you’re going! We’ll follow at sublight.”

Captain Russo glanced at Lee, then reached up to the comm panel to send a
reply.

“No,” Lee said, reaching as though to stop him physically. “If they’re
captured, then the Cylons know, too.”

“I’ve got fifty people on board! Colonial One, do you copy this?”

Captain Russo struggled for a moment with indecision, then lowered his hand,
realizing that Lee was right. “Spinning up FTL drive now.”

Lee: “All ships—prepare to Jump on our mark. Five…”

The time stretched…

“Colonial One, please respond!”

“Four…”

“May the Lords of Kobol protect those souls we leave behind.”

“Three…”

Alone in the passenger compartment, Laura sat listening to the comm
exchanges. Her thoughts had nowhere to go, her feelings were spun into a
suffocating web, her ears were ringing with the sounds of desperation and fear,
her gut was tied into a knot so tight she feared if she moved so much as a
muscle, she and her world would spin apart into a thousand pieces.
Why me…
why me…? And why them… the innocent…?

Aboard the
Space Park,
it was a little before dinnertime, and young
Cami sat on her favorite bench under her favorite tree, whiling away the time
with her rag doll. A lot of the people had left the park, but she liked it too
much to leave. “Don’t worry, Jeannie,” she reassured her doll, dancing her on
her head. “They’ll come and get us when it’s time to eat… they’ll come and get
us…”

In the dark of space surrounding the shifting fleet, there was a sudden
change. With a series of flashes, half a dozen vessels popped into the local
space. They were moving at high speed, directly on a course that would take them
into the fleet.

“I’ve got dradis contact—inbound targets heading this way!”

Lee kept the count steady. “Two…”

“Isee them, too. Are they Colonial?”

Lee knew exactly what they were, and there was no way he could accelerate the
count; he could only sit tight and pray. “One.”

“Oh my God, they’re Cylons!”

“Mark.”

“I hope you people rot in hell for this—.”

* * *

Laura felt the tears rising into her eyes, against all her inner bulwarks.
There was no turning back.

It was done.

She could feel space begin to fold inward around her…

Throughout the fleet, dozens of flashes of light marked the Jumping of ships
away from the fleet, away to somewhere else in space. At the same moment, a
rapid-fire series of flashes came from each of the Cylon fighters. Long white
streamers arced out in great, spreading bundles as the missile painted their
pretty, deadly tracers across the sky. It took only moments for each and every
one of them to find their targets.

The sky began to light up with exploding spaceships.

In the garden, Cami gently smoothed out Jeannie’s hair. She had noticed some
flashing out in space, through the overhead dome. That probably meant that some
of the ships were going home. She was happy for them; it was about time. Maybe,
she hoped, her ship would go home soon, too.

And then her sky turned white, like the sun up close. And she felt nothing,
nothing at all.

Somewhere in Ragnar Station

The passageways seemed to be getting narrower and narrower the farther they
walked, with Leoben leading the way and Commander Adama close behind. Rows of
pipes and ductwork lined the walls, from deck to ceiling. The deeper into the
station they went, the more claustrophobic it felt. Adama couldn’t be sure he
wasn’t being taken on a long walk to nowhere. Although he had questioned Leoben
about the route they were taking, it was nearly impossible to keep his sense of
direction here; there were too many little jogs and turns.

They had been walking for maybe twenty minutes, when Leoben suddenly doubled
over, gasping. Adama came up behind him. “You all right?”

Leoben stood up, shaking his head. He was dripping sweat. “Fine. It’s just
something about this place…”

He looked as if he meant to continue, but he didn’t. “What about this place?”
Adama asked.