By Courage and Blood (Part II of The Mission, a Terminator/BSG crossover)

[Visi0nary]

I really like these little peaks into life during the colonization and occupation of New Caprica... It's really intriguing how especially Soto gets pretty emotional over the prospect of being stuck there forever... Anger, even a fair bit of despair...

I also liked the Blanks/D'Anna scene... I always wondered how she was revealed. I take it that the fleet D'Anna, this one in the brig and the one that later walked free on NC were the same individual?

[Rastamon]

Originally Posted by Visi0nary

I really like these little peaks into life during the colonization and occupation of New Caprica... It's really intriguing how especially Soto gets pretty emotional over the prospect of being stuck there forever... Anger, even a fair bit of despair...

I also liked the Blanks/D'Anna scene... I always wondered how she was revealed. I take it that the fleet D'Anna, this one in the brig and the one that later walked free on NC were the same individual?

They were supposed to be the same individual. It was never revealed how D'Anna was outed. It's assumed that when the Cylons came to New Caprica, D'Anna thought there was no point to hiding anymore and came out.

[Bryan]

Originally Posted by Visi0nary

I really like these little peaks into life during the colonization and occupation of New Caprica... It's really intriguing how especially Soto gets pretty emotional over the prospect of being stuck there forever... Anger, even a fair bit of despair...

I also liked the Blanks/D'Anna scene... I always wondered how she was revealed. I take it that the fleet D'Anna, this one in the brig and the one that later walked free on NC were the same individual?

Thanks. Yeah, Soto is going to get a bit annoyed at times. I saw her when I started writing these as the least likely to compensate. Blanks actually does pretty well... one scene (very short) I wrote has him training Marines to fight Cylons and even Terminators (which ones of the Marines thinks is silly). The scene after the Blanks/Three scene actually has Erica and Soto talking... and Soto accuses her of acting like a typical twenty-something girl.

“Except I am a girl, programmed and based off a teenage girl.” She leered back. “Obviously I am not just a girl- I’m much more than that- and don’t tell me how to act like a God damn AI. I know what happened to you… do you think I don’t understand? I watched my world burn… I watched twelve worlds burn and twenty billion die and my family die right in front of me. I could do nothing! He rescued me.”

Originally Posted by Rastamon

They were supposed to be the same individual. It was never revealed how D'Anna was outed. It's assumed that when the Cylons came to New Caprica, D'Anna thought there was no point to hiding anymore and came out.

I couldn't think of a good way to reveal her. The truth is I completely missed having her exposed when I had Caprica-Sharon be a bit more 'good'. Her baby dying in the original is what made her so jaded until Adama began talking with her after New Caprica was invaded (or so I think). She's been much more cooperative. Like in The Mission she was set free but lives on the battlestar with Helo and Hera.

[Bryan]

I want to thank Visi0nary and Posbi for the help with this chapter. And Rastamon, too. This one started out about Guardians and Cylons but that just wasn't working. Most of what happens will be factored into Part III.

I've also got a working title on the New Caprica stuff: We Were Built to Kill.


A few ideas for Part 3's title will probably involve the words 'destiny' and/or 'fate' with a few other words to make it sound dramatic/epic.

Chapter 30, Part 1:



||||||||||==Algae Planet, Harvest Site (+1007 Days Post Cylon Holocaust)==||||||||||

Captain Kendra Shaw, hands shaking, quickly opened the bottle and knocked three white, oblong pills into her hands. The throbbing pain only intensified as she rolled the white pills, now caked with algae, in her palm. Her mouth was dry, the incessant heat aggravated her wounds, and the pain was only getting worse the longer she delayed this. She popped in the pills- the simple act of throwing back her head and dry-swallowing the off-white pills was enough for her pain to vanish.

Hands still shaking and careful in her movements twisted the cap back on and tucked the translucent orange bottle deep into the cargo pocket of her pants. She felt the metal case in there, oblong, like the pills, hiding her other secret. Gasping she let out a staggered breath through her nose as she tenderly rubbed her back.

Under her gray and brown military tank top she could still feel the scarring from the surgery. Doctor Roberts had done wondering repairing the internal damage but the bullet had torn itself through her. The skin on her lower back and abdomen was tight and scarred.

“Captain… captain, are you out here?” She heard a familiar voice yell. “Someone saw you run off, you back here?” The voice shouted again as it see-sawed between play and agitation.

“Over here, Major,” she shouted over her shoulder. A shuffling of feet and a her back being cooled as a shadow fell over her told her the Major was behind her. Throwing off the look of a woman in pain and plastering the look of a warrior on her face and slowly, methodically turned to face her commander.

Major Adama, a stack of papers crammed into file folders in his hands, looked at her, and for a moment Shaw was afraid he’d seen right through her and discovered the secret she didn’t want to admit to keeping.

“You alright?” He asked, worried, concerned. Apollo pressed the file folders against his algae-stained shirt to give himself a free hand.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” She waved him off. “What’s going on?” She asked.

“Paper work… administration…” he said as he still eyed her uneasily. She was behind some of the sleeping tents on the edge of the little canyon they were in. She was completely out of site unless someone made an effort to see her.

“What?” She hissed. “Do I have algae smeared all over my face?”

She tried to come off hard and agitated but Apollo ignored it, purposefully twisting it like she had been joking.

Adama snickered. “Yeah, in fact, you do all over your chin and cheek.” He pointed. “You sure you’re alright?” He didn’t feel it was his place to press the issue, but he’d seen people like her before. She was a loner with few friends (Apollo was even hesitant to think ‘few’) who worked fifteen to eighteen hour shifts seven days a week. “If you want to head back up to Pegasus I’m sure there is someone else who’d like to come down to the planet?” He offered. He was close to making it an order.

She took a step forward and held out her hand, expecting Apollo to hand her the paperwork. “I can do my job, Major, just fine.” He slowly released his grip on the folders and she snatched them away.

Adama nodded slowly and held his ground. “Any more news from the machines?”

“What am I, their keeper?” She snarled.

Adama held his ground but pushed back his head in shock at the abrupt change. “Calm down, captain,” he instructed her, holding his palms out by his chest, “I just asked you a yes or no question.”

The captain’s jaw clicked as she opened her mouth to answer him. “No. They took Baltar somewhere in the Raptor and have been scouting the area north of our secondary site. They think there might be something up there.” A short humph of contempt for the machines, Baltar, and their entire mission told Adama to back off the topic. “We’re still ahead of schedule? This whole planet… the sooner we leave the better. And that sun,” she nodded up towards the sky, “is on the verge of blowing up this entire system.”

“If it wasn’t for that this planet would be almost habitable. The radiation would be manageable for us to stay here for a while, rest.” He shrugged and shifted uneasily. The woman glaring at him, or looking at him with a casual disinterest was off-putting, but he still sensed something was wrong. “But we can’t let a New Caprica happen again.” He looked off.

“No, we can’t let a New Caprica happen again,” she echoed.

“The Centurion workers will have us done and out of here after about fifteen to seventeen days.” He threw up his hand to shade his eyes from a sudden break in the clouds and a strong glare from the sun. “They’re going to load their baseship with algae just in case… a backup.”

Shaw had completely forgotten about the Centurions. But now she could hear their loud, plodding footsteps and whirl of servos and joints quite clearly. By last count there were nearly a hundred and fifty on the planet and she had no idea how many there were now.

Thousands from the fleet had volunteered for the mission. Put a foot down on terra firma again. While thousands had volunteered to do something many had to be ordered down here. Echoes of New Caprica still sounded loudly in the fleet and images of the Cylon armada and hundreds of raiders flying formation over New Caprica City had made many deathly afraid of ever setting foot on a planet again.

“Anyway, Major, I’ll take these to my tent and look over the reports and…”

“I know it’s not much, captain, but tonight there’s enough algae processed to feed the entire fleet fully. At 1900 we’re all going to have a little… algae potluck, I guess. Anders and the C-Bucs are going to put on a Pyramid game against us… there’ll be a little music- a break for a few hours… we’ve been at this over a week.” He was trying to suggest to her she should attend, but she was just staring off past him at the sandy and weed infested walls of the canyon. He positioned himself in front of her so she would have to look at him. “You should come. The last five weeks have been one roller coaster to one crisis or another.” He decided to be obvious. “Don’t make me make it an order.”

She smiled dismissively at him and dragged her heels in the sun-baked ground as she stepped off and away from major.

“Maybe,” was her simple response. “If you don’t mind, Major, I have some work to do.”

She rubbed her side and gave Adama a few seconds to say anything. He didn’t so she stepped forward.

Adama knew that was all he was going to get from her and stepped aside, letting her by.

Cautiously she brushed passed the Major and headed into her tent.

There was solitude here, peace. Even with the thump-thump of Centurion feet smashing into the hard, dried dirt and the whines and wires of machinery she was in a peaceful place.

Solitude and peace were her words for loneliness.

=====================================
=====================================

Captain Kendra Shaw, a self-admitted loner and anti-social Colonial officer, allowed herself one last look over her shoulder towards the crest of a high hill behind her. With the dim glow of the star cluster in the night sky the radiating white lights of the base camp was easy to see in the soft darkness.

A fit of laughter, some cries of joy and fun, and the loud double honking of an air horn meant half time on one of the Pyramid games.

When she’d snuck off a team from Galactica was playing a team from Helios, with the Helios team up by one.

Everyone was having so much fun.

So she decided to sneak away from the ‘algae potluck’ and find a place close, but isolated, and had lowered herself onto a large, dusty, grime-covered flat rock on the edge of one of the massive lakes of algae. The air was warm, and except for the smell, easy on the lungs. Occasionally a breeze would kick up, intensifying the noxious smell of algae but cooling the air.

She took out her hair band and let her hair out.

Sitting cross legged on the rock she looked down at her watch and wondered how much longer they’d go on. Pegasus hadn’t been hit as hard as the fleet with regards to food shortages and after being shot, she’d had her rations increased by Doctor Roberts. It wasn’t that she was hungry. She wasn’t even physically tired, but she still felt tired.

Absently, she watched the little red colon blink on-off-on-off as it ticked away the seconds until the red diodes would change from a four to a five.

Her ears perked up at the sound of a second air horn. Focusing and holding her breath she could just barely hear the faint beats of classic Caprican rock blaring on the base camp’s PA system. She listened closely, her finger tips tapping the rocks, as the beat intensified. It faded and was replaced by some Virgon rap music which only served to sour her mood.

She figured if the frakers at base camp wanted to be a ignorant fraks she’d let them and wouldn’t say a word as they forgot about their troubles. In an hour the happiness would be gone and they’d realize that a few short hours of Pyramid and dancing they were still stuck on this stinking, humid, barren planet harvesting algae.

By a superficial glance this planet was habitable and well hidden. A deeper analysis showed the danger; radiation and nova. All alone, Shaw’s thoughts were on the cryptic and dark. A helium flash would be their only sign. The sky would glow red and grow dark and a shockwave would move towards the planet at thirty-thousand kilometers a second. They’d have a little over eighty minutes to evacuate.

She leaned back her hand and scooted her legs out until she was propped on her elbows. It was a little uncomfortable but the view was worth it. She swore she could see the dim light of Pegasus and Galactica as they orbit in geo-synch above.

She began to lower herself more, but winced and moaned from the pain that shot through her side. Quickly she sat up and rubbed her flank. Her eye spotted a little flat rock waiting silently for her to notice it.

For some reason she felt throwing the flat rock into the lake and listening to it hit the water would somehow be soothing. It wasn’t. It just plopped in.

She reached slowly into her pocket and her fingers found exactly what she was expecting to find. No surprises. It was a little, dirty secret only one other person knew about and she hadn’t told anyone.

This wasn’t her, she told herself. How would her mother have reacted? Marta Shaw, Quorum delegate… and not just any delegate! She was a Caprican Quorum delegate. Power, prestige, money… parties and boys. Marta Shaw had provided everything for Kendra Shaw. And Kendra as a beautiful, intelligent, tenacious Caprican had gotten everything she set her eyes on. No matter how many parties and boyfriends she had had, she’d never done anything like this. She wasn’t a frak up. Magna cum laude from university, second in her OCS class, a computer genius, a linguist, a fleet officer… she’d been on a fast track before the Cylons had attacked.

A tour babysitting an admiral as a staff officer and then she could have had her pick of positions. A position on the Colonial flagship had been a possibility… a few more rotations and she could have had a command by her thirty-fifth birthday if she’d played it right.

But the Cylons came, ruined her life, and forced her down to this.

She finally withdrew her secret from its hiding spot.

“One thousand… fraking… days,” she whispered. Her mouth was dry and lips cracked and her throat confusingly sore to the point it almost hurt to talk.

Carefully she unscrewed the metal cigar container and pulled out a syringe. She bit down on the plastic cover, pulled it off, and then spit it into her hand. She felt the cool, sharp needle press into her neck, ready to break the skin. Kendra recoiled and pulled back. She wasn’t an idiot and realized with her neck covered in algae and filth she risked infection. Then she realized before she’d left she’d wiped the algae and dirt and grease from her face and neck. She shrugged. The only reason she had not to do this was gone. Her own subconscious mind had done her work for her and determined her fate.

She could see the faces of the men and women of Scylla. People like Chief Laird and the fourteen other ‘selectees’ were constant reminders to her of what she had done- he stood there, stiff and nearly catatonic, staring at the billowing gray smoke from her pistol, completely frozen. The smell of gunfire had burned through the air and into her lungs and a part of her had wanted to break down in that moment, ball up, and just cry and yell.

Then in that same moment she’d felt that part of her vanish, disappear. It wasn’t guilt she felt and it wasn’t shame. She had no idea. It just felt wrong.

Kendra switched hands from her left to her right. The right wasn’t shaking as much as the left. She tilted her head to her left shoulder. Carefully she pulled back her hair until it was pressed between her ear and shoulder and draped over the left side of her chest. She felt it sticking to the dirtied and sticky skin of her left arm. The needle hovered over the side of her neck, ready to plunge in…

“We were wondering where you went.”

She jumped, almost dropping the syringe, it rolled on her arm but she grabbed it in a blur with her left hand. The metal cigar case was on her lap and quickly she stuffed the syringe back in, shifting so her back was to it, and shoved the case into her pocket.

Closing her eyes she stiffened. There was no way it hadn’t seen what she was doing. There was no way it didn’t know what she was doing. They could pretend to be clueless, but she knew, she could see in their eyes they knew humans better than humans knew themselves.

“What do you want?” She demanded keeping her eyes closed as a cool breeze whipped from the blue - green algae lake and for a moment, washed away the apprehension and dread and let her escape. In seconds the breeze was gone and she was stuck back on the hot, humid planet. “Is there something you need?”

“I’ll make this clear, Kendra; I don’t need anything from you,” the machine retorted harshly.

The hard, nearly inhuman, mechanical voice forced the captain to open her eyes one at a time and scowl. Admitting she was taken aback by what he’d just said was… she felt insulted. He had never been so abrasive, rude. What they’d done in the past had just been friendly… fun, she admitted.

She slowly rubbed her head with the tips of her fingers and felt the algae residue on the tips spreading and matting her hair. At that moment she couldn’t care less about her appearance. She gripped her hair, her arms and hands tensed, and she was on the verge of just pulling.

“You came down here, Carter. Machines don’t wander unless they have a purpose to it.” She adjusted and used her hands to help turn her, and she slid on the rock and used the dirt to help her. Kendra couldn’t see Carter that well, but she did seem him silhouetted against the hill with the light from the ‘algae potluck’ shining over it. “And please spare me the lessons on what machines do and don’t do… I couldn’t care less… well, I could. Try me.” She bared her teeth before scooting back to face the lake.

She didn’t even hear the machine take a seat next to her, slightly above her on another outcropping. The Pegasus officer looked at him from the corner of her eye and let out a shallow grunt from the diaphragm.

“You’re right. You’re the only one not at the little algae social Major Adama organized.” He pointed out.

At this, Kendra was a bit surprised. She’d have assumed people were going to sleep rather than go- save their strength.

Carter continued as if he’d read her mind. “Even tired… it’s a social event, a morale booster. Tired and still hungry everyone went. You must feed the soul.”

Kendra buried her face into her palms. The last thing she wanted was listening to the lame little sayings they had a tendency to repeat.

Through her hands in a muffle voice bordering on a soft whimper said, “I can’t believe this.” She ran dirtied hands through scraggly and unkempt hair and swung her head over. “I don’t think you understand.” She grew angry. “I don’t think you understand at all. You’re a TERM-IN-A-TOR. You kill things… born-built, and flipping a switch at the factory to ‘go and kill, Oh Rah’ and you go and do it.”

“I’m not an idiot Kendra-”

“Don’t call me that,” she hissed. “No one calls me by my first name.”

“Maybe if you let people be your friend more people would?” He asked.

Her jaw was clenched and her lips were a thin horizontal line. To add to the look of annoyance her eyes were narrowed and her brows creased down. Her nostrils flared in and out with the rhythm of her breathing.

“Did you come here because you and your delusional commander haven’t found your fucking whatever it is you are looking for?” She snarled. “You all are so obsessed with Earth… you want to find it… when your own Gods… God damned metal commander lied to you and left you to jump to the Colonies to die!” She kicked out then stomped down on the rock from her seated position. “You’re taking us to a planet your kind fucked up and you want us to solve your problem... Frak!”

“Is that all?” Carter replied casually. “What do you want to do? Wander the galaxy always running from the Cylons?” She swore she saw a faint glow of the eyes. “Or do you want to die in an ohhh so glorious battle with a Cylon baseship?” He finished with a sarcastic nip at her heels.

“Frak you.” She turned quickly to face him and winced back when she felt the pain shoot through her side, abdomen, and pelvis and up into her shoulder and neck from the sudden movement. “Gods damnit…” she whimpered.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” Carter said, “by pushing people away and injecting that into your neck… for how long?” he asked accusingly. “Years. Since Scylla.”

She stopped breathing, her eyes darted to the distant horizon, to the hills, and she wanted to run.

She heard a chuckle at her expense.

“It’s pretty Gods fraking obvious, Captain.” He snorted and she cringed. “I saw it after you assaulted the Guardian baseship. You broke the habit over New Caprica and started it back up after Pegasus jumped away.”

She was that obvious? Who else knew?

“It’s been on and off. You need it.” He said.

The captain felt cold, hot, dying, alive, and every emotion and every fear simultaneously as the faces of those people aboard the doomed freighter once again flashed in front of her, so vivid, so alive. They deserved to be alive, she knew, not her.

“You don’t know what I’ve gone through.”

“You had orders,” Carter comforted from behind her. He coolly added, “Admiral Cain ordered you to. We’ve all heard the rumors of what happened. What would she have done if you refused?”

“Orders? That… doesn’t justify… anything,” she spat.

She cocked her head, the sudden movement dislodging… a tear.. from her own eye? She covered up wiping her eyes by trying to clean the smudged algae off her face. Admiral Cain had ordered her to take action and she had taken action. The Admiral she saw as a mentor- someone she wanted to be one day- had ordered her to do this.

“No, orders are not justification for acts such as those,” Carter said after a pause. “I was… I was under orders once. Before Planck and Soto were even built I was a Terminator for Skynet.”



Captain Shaw turned slowly and pushed herself away shaking, unblinking. She slid her hand through the coarse dirt on the rock, cringing at the sound, moving it towards her left foot.

“What…?”

Her left hand tickled the carbon grip of the small pistol strapped to her ankle. She stopped and balled her hand back into a fist and slowly brought it to her chest. Clutching it with the other she opened it, palm to chest, and placed it over her heart. She slowed her breathing and waited for the machine.

Even on this planet filled with nothing but algae she couldn’t feel safe. Her nightmare of Scylla haunted her, the ‘selectees’ she saw on Pegasus constant reminders of her sins.

“It was a long time ago, Kendra... I didn’t understand what I was doing… I was trapped and damaged and somehow my chip activated its read/write mode.” He slowly explained. “That just doesn’t happen… unexplainable… impossible.”

There was tenderness behind the way he said her name. It wasn’t to antagonize her like on so many uncountable occasions in the fleet.

The captain tried to fight it and protest, but couldn’t bring herself to snap at what she was starting to see as a person with a background she couldn’t imagine.

“Then how…” she stammered “…How do you fight with them now?” She licked dry, cracking lips. “Against… Skynet.”

She heard a quiet breathe. It was unmistakably that of pain… embarrassment… disgrace. Shaw knew the machines better than most, but she never saw them as… whatever this was.

The machines would stare and stand almost uncomfortably close but not now.

“Skynet found me locked in a bunker outside Los Angeles. My old neural net processor was incredibly advanced and I had knowledge on how to fight the resistance. I downloaded the schematics to Skynet… Skynet, the new Skynet that freed me was smarter, more pragmatic, and less obsessive. It used my chip and designed a new, better chip- it let me be the first to download my consciousness into it. A gift. An expression of trust from Skynet to me.” A slight hiss of air through clenched teeth punctuated the painful silence. “It wanted soldiers, Kendra, not drones. It put me in command of a new group of Terminators and we sabotaged anything we could in the refugee camps. With firing a single plasma rifle we could kill thousands.”

A solemn moment of understand fell between the two.

She gasped when she felt the pain of her fingers being driven into her chest. Surprised, she released her own hand and let her arms falls to her side and rest on the cool rock.

“What you’re doing, Captain, won’t work. You want to suppress the memory. We tried that on Earth. Terminators … AI, we can suppress our memories…” he waved his hand, “it’s a complicated process of coding and programming, but it’s possible. That’s why some used to go bad. The memories were suppressed but so powerful, even for us, they resurfaced, confused us.. In an act of… maybe mercy…” he shrugged and lowered himself from the rock to sit next to her, “… mercy, I don’t know,” he repeated, “the human technicians suppressed our memories on our request in the hope our defection would be easier.”

Shaw’s voice cracked. “It sounds… I didn’t know that. That you could actually feel guilt,” she admitted.

“No. You need to remember because if you push it down it will come back someday.” He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. “You can’t let that happen to you.”

Kendra didn’t dare to look over. She let herself relax under the light weight of the hand, the gentle grip on her shoulder by a hand that could crush bone as easily as snapping twigs. After what could only be thought of as an eternity for the young captain where all she felt was the thumping of her heart in her chest, and hear her breath in her ears, she stiffened as the machine slowly withdrew its hand.

She pushed herself up from her seated position to leave, run for that horizon, let the impending nova wash over her, but stopped mid-way and let herself fall back down. She didn’t realize it, but she was closer to the machine.

“Why did you do that?” She whispered so quietly she didn’t even know if the machine could hear.

“Because…” He felt it’d be right for him to sit down next to her.

“You don’t even know,” she mumbled. Her body language immediately changed and she brought her knees to her chest and leaned forward and wrapped her arms around them. She was closing herself off to the world.

She heard the machine snort. She swore it was contempt when she glanced over.

“I’ve known very few machines and even fewer people who can live their lives in solitary, self-imposed confinement like you have. Whether you see what you did as a sin against your Gods… that’s between you and them. What you...” he hesitated, “what you do now is how you’ll be remembered.”

“That’s why I’m not doing anything.”

“I know.” He said.

Then, before either knew, not knowing who moved first, he was kissing her and she was kissing him. Two years of what they each considered a dysfunctional friendship spaced over thousands of light years finally resolved itself in that moment.

Suddenly she was on her back as loud cracks echoed across the rocks and slopes.

“What the frak?”

“Stay down.” Carter said, keeping her pinned to the rock.

A second set of crack…crack… crack and she realized it was gunfire. She tried to slide out from under the machine but couldn’t. Then he was off her and she pushed herself up and her hand grabbed the small pistol she kept with her.

Carter was already up and Shaw could see a man, partially silhouetted against the lights of the base camp, running. On instinct she took aim as the machine neared the man and her finger wrapped around the trigger and slowly squeezed.

She didn’t hear the shot. The bright yellow muzzle flash blinded her and all she could see were dark blue-green spots when she blinked. Cautiously she slid her hands under her, still gripping her pistol, and pushed herself onto her hands and knees and then up to her feet.

The man had been maybe forty, fifty meters from them on the extreme edge of his motion sensors.

A single bullet from sixty meters had slammed into the man’s back. Shaw scrambled over there quickly as her vision cleared.

Apparently the bullet hadn’t hit the man in the back. Shaw could just barely see the torn muscle and flesh of a bullet entry at the man’s arm, right behind the elbow. The shock of being shot and the darkness had knocked the man off balance.

“He’s dead,” Carter said, kneeling over the body.

The man was still face down. A rock next to him was incredibly bloody and in the darkness an almost mahogany color, blood, instead of the natural softer, lighter brown.

Shaw didn’t say anything. She just stood there, pistol hanging lazily at her side, and her chest heaving from the adrenaline. Carter looked up, stood up and could see the shock. He put his arm around her and for a moment she stood there, not moving and just staring down at the body.

She could hear people yelling over the hill. The base camp must have heard the gunshots.

There was a spark which seemed to knock on her auto-pilot. She was outside of her body, watching it bend down and roll the man over. She knew him. He was from Scylla.



====================
||||||||||==BS-62 Pegasus (+1,008 Days Post Cylon Holocaust)==||||||||||
====================

Captain Shaw dutifully removed her tunic, but waited- and then frustrated, hurriedly motioned- for Doctor Roberts to close the door to the exam room. Sighing, and hurting all over, she took over her gray and brown tank tops, leaving only her bra and pants on, balled the two tanks tops up and tossed them behind her on the exam table. Fidgeting as Roberts washed his hands, she heard the thin paper under her crinkle and tear.

“Hands are a little cold, sorry,” he apologized, offering her a weak smile.

He received an uncaring shrug in response. She felt those cold hands on her side, his fingers moving up and down the scar and surgical wound from where Gina had shot her.

She watched him like a Tauron hawk as he remove the bandages the combat medic had applied. It was all just superficial, really, but her she wasn’t supposed to do more than light administration work. Being shot at was definitely against Doctor’s Orders.

“So what happened down there?” He asked.

His tone was casual but Shaw could sense the almost condescending curiosity lacing the question.

She looked over and gave him the best evil eye she could manage. He, of course, wrapped in his examination, could hardly have spared a second to notice. And he didn’t.

“I was by the lake near the base camp,” she said, short and to the point, “one of the machine came over, someone else came- drunk most likely, and shot at us.”

Partially true, she admitted to herself. She felt no shame in lying to the doctor about what had happened- she wasn’t sure whether she was embarrassed because of the inevitable rumors that would swirl (though she considered if they were true, technically they weren’t rumors) or whether it was humiliation, shame, at what she had done one thousand days ago and… she looked at her watch, three hours and sixteen minutes ago.

It’s not like Roberts didn’t know what day this was, either, she thought. She felt like strangling him for his casual, ‘just-another-fraking-day’ attitude. The way he stood, the way he was just going about his job like nothing had ever happened. She hated him for it. She hated him and the others taken from the civilian fleet Pegasus had stripped. She wanted him to attack her, show some anger on this thousandth day.

She blew out, only to wince as Doctor Roberts applied a slightly more palpation pressure.

“Just shallow breathing, Shaw,” he ordered. He stood back and unwrapped his stethoscope from around his neck and listened to her heart and lung fields. “Breath in… out… in… out…” he repeated six times. Snapping off the stethoscope he went over and grabbed an ointment. “I want a scan just to make sure nothing internal is messed up. Heart and lung sounds are good, so…” he shrugged, “this is a combined anti-biotic and fungal. I want to see you back here in a few days.” He held out the tube.

Shaw grabbed it and pocketed it quickly.

“Then everything’s good?”

“Is it?” He asked, taking a step back and reaching behind him from his tablet computer. He popped out the stylus and began writing, letting his eyes move between her and the screen. “Captain? There are other health care professionals in the fleet.”

Baring her teeth, she sneered, “I don’t need a fraking shrink.”

She shot up from the table and grabbed her tank tops and not wanting Roberts to stop her, slid them over her petite frame and then looked at him, bragging with her sparkling eyes and little lip smirk she had defied him. Then the sparkle and smirk faded when she realized he didn’t care one frak what she did.

He opened his mouth when there was a short double knock at the door.

Roberts looked puzzled but Shaw knew who it was.

“Yes... I’m with a patient,” he shouted at the door, over his shoulder. Rolling his eyes at the lack of a reply he opened it slightly. While he had a slightly better bedside manner than Galactica’s Chief Medical Officer, that wasn’t saying much. He did value patient privacy. “Oh, Admiral.” He stepped back an instant later as she stepped forward, not caring one bit about the doctor’s views on patient privacy. “I’ll um… give you a minute.”

Without argument he vacated his own domain and without a word spoken by Admiral Cain, left the room and closed the door.

Even at this late hour, nearly 0200 ship time, Cain wore an immaculate uniform, her hair perfectly straight and coming just over her shoulders, and her eyes radiating power and an acute awareness towards the status of her subordinate.

“Admiral… sir…” Shaw stiffened to attention.

“At ease, captain,” Cain said with closed eyes. Her left heel dragged on the floor until it was nearer the right, then she stepped off and paced two steps to the corner of the room and grabbed the sink. She looked down the stainless steel wash basin and watched her reflection on the metal. Cain studied her own reflected movements as she thought what to say, as she prepared herself. “What were you thinking down there?” She asked, watching her mouth move in her reflection. “I’m not an idiot. There are three things that occur on a military ship; gambling, fraking, and gossip. I’m the Gods damn admiral. I still hear the gossip.” Her fingers tightened until the tips were blanched and a dull ache shot up her fingers into her arms.

“I just wanted to be by myself, sir… after what happened… what day it is… was.” She said without wavering. Even with the Admiral’s back to her she was ramrod straight and eyes locked forward. There was no ‘at ease’ here.

The Admiral eased up and released the wash basin and turned around.

Shaw, already a short and petite woman, felt even smaller under the dark eyes of The Admiral.

“Are you still a razor, captain?”

Shaw felt a wave of bitter disappointment radiated from her chest through her body and she cursed herself to Hades for her callous mental dismissal of the Admiral’s questions.

“We don’t have the luxury of feeling sorry for ourselves. We’re at war.” Cain spat with self-righteous indignation. She wagged her finger at Shaw. “Don’t think I didn’t see this… and I’m not talking about…” even she had difficult saying the ship’s name.

“Scylla… sir,” Shaw said quietly.

“Yes… thank you,” she tilted her head to the left and narrowed the same eye. “The ship…-” Shaw realized Cain would never say it by name- “this is being taken care of. This… the ship… your feelings over it I can understand. Gods, you don’t think…” she leaned it, looking the captain up and down angrily, “I don’t have regrets over what we did? I’m not a fraking monster, captain. I’ll justify my actions to the Gods, but not to you.” She hissed. Cain swirled around, debating whether to leave or not. Cain swallowed hard- her pride- and turned back around. “I understand how you feel,” she said softly nu her voice grew harder with resolve and fired determination, “but we’re at war, captain. We’re still at war- don’t lose sight of that.”

“Maybe that’s why?” Shaw asked.

“Why what, captain?” Cain eyes her curiously.

“I shot him, Donald, sir. After he shot at me I shot him and I killed him. Another one,” she said, eyes locked forward on the Admiral’s chest.

“He tried to kill you.” Cain immediately countered. “He slipped on the rocks and died.”

“So maybe that’s why,” the captain repeated as she unconsciously ignored the Admiral’s defense of her actions.

“Is that the reason? Guilt?” Cain demanded as she reached in and took out her red-handled knife. It had been hers for decades, since the Cylon War. Feeling it in her pocket ever day was a constant reminder to not be weak. “I’ve let a lot of things slide on this ship… again my better judgment. My XO is married to my CAG and other crew members are in relationships three years ago would have gotten them kicked out.”

Her words were forced out from between a sternly clenched jaw.

Admiral Cain pulled back her hair, revealing the scars from her torture on New Caprica by the Cylons.

“Do you see these?” She asked. Cain used the handle of the blade to point at the deep scars on her neck and side of her face. Months of Cylon torture were present; deep scars, a crushed hand which still hand trouble grasping at times, and broken legs. “Every day, captain… I’m reminded of what happened. My own failures in allowing this fleet to settle on New Caprica…”

She didn’t have to respond.

Cain pushed her hair back so most of it was over the front of her shoulders. She used to hook most of it behind her ears but was now wearing it forward (and had grown her hair a few extra centimeters) to conceal the scares.

Shaw’s eyes followed one of the scars still visible down until it disappeared behind the Admiral’s long hair and into her collar. She wondered who the Admiral talked to? Was it her? Now. Maybe, she thought, they both needed this.

“We each have our own demons, captain.” She said, looking past Shaw and into the corner, eyes glazed. She held up the knife. Pressed between thumb and index finger. “You don’t know, but I found this on the last day of the Cylon War… I was hiding, in a cargo container, picked it up, afraid, when a Centurion found me.” She looked at the captain and her glazed eyes softened almost like a mother would look at a child. “I lost my sister that day… and my mother and my father. We lived the entire war on Tauron. A quarter of Tauron wiped out, reduced to rubble, and we survived… I survived, only to have them taken from me in the last five minutes of the war.”

She held up her other hand, her five fingers extended, palm facing the captain. Shaw could see some of the fingers didn’t extend fully- her hand had been smashed on New Caprica.

“The last five minutes.” She repeated solemnly. “Five minutes.”

“I… I didn’t know, sir.”

“The Cylons surrendered five minutes after my family was killed.” She snapped the blade out. “This is what we have to be, Shaw. I told you before, but this is who we are. We’re razors.” She narrowed her eyes at the young captain. “If we forget that… we can’t lose the will to fight. Because that’s what we are now: fighters.” Cain snapped the blade back in and walked to the side of Shaw, shoulder-to-shoulder, staring at the back wall while Shaw stared at the front. “Sometimes the Gods chose… maybe we have to give up our happiness, our humanity so we can keep others from losing theirs and making the hard decisions. It’s something we’re chosen for. Is it fair?” She shook her head. “Many things in life are never fair, Captain. Our fate may be chosen for us, captain, but how we get there is up to us.”

She didn’t hesitate in expression her frustration, anger, and maybe even resentment towards the Admiral. “Sometimes it’s not enough, sir… sometimes… I see them every day, the gun, the smoke, the faces and people just fraking still as statues, can’t believing I did that.” Her right eye glistened from moisture.

There was no way, no way Shaw could see, that anyone could be what the Admiral was trying to make her become. In those few minutes Shaw felt every emotion possible towards the Admiral from hate and fear to love an admiration. She saw Cain as her mentor and here she was demanding… she couldn’t even say it to herself, couldn’t admit that she had lost her humanity so long ago and was now just moving through the motions.

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

“If you need to talk later, captain…” Cain said, giving her shoulder a tight squeeze. “You can stay on Pegasus or return to the planet, it’s up to you. But remember, captain, it isn’t our fate that defines us. It’s what we do on the path to our fate.”

Shaw nodded and stood there and watched the Admiral leave. Doctor Roberts didn’t come back in for her. She had no idea how long she stood there, staring at the cold, gray metallic walls.

[Bryan]

Chapter 30, Part 2:
====================
||||||||||==Colonial One==||||||||||
====================

Admiral Cain motioned for her Marine guards to stand fast as she hopped down from the Raptor’s wing tip onto the hard landing bay of the Colonial ‘capitol’- a twenty-two year old star liner designed originally for day trips and FTL hops within the Twelve Colonies.

A Presidential Security Service agent, plain clothes, stood half a dozen steps back from her. Cain could see the small bulge where his shoulder holster was concealed and underneath his shirt, the thin armored vest he was attempting to hide.

“Admiral, good morning,” the president’s aide, Billy, said with a harsh tone indicating that this morning was far from ‘good.’ He came up and offered his hand, which the Admiral graciously accepted. “The President is waiting.”

Before she could speak Billy turned on his heels. Cain tucked her head and snorted, loud enough for only her own ears to hear. The nervous, awkward, and boyish aide had changed after New Caprica.

The walk was short; Colonial One was a small ship, and quiet. The Quorum was on Cloud 9 for committee meetings this entire weeks and much of Roslin’s staff was distributed to a dozen of the larger civilian ships which were serving as primary and secondary distribution hubs for the processed algae.

Admiral Cain allowed Billy to open the door for her, and he stood back as she moved past. She heard a click as it closed. The two walked on opposite sides of the large conference table the Quorum used and into a second compartment before walking back to the President’s office. Roslin was busy at work, her head and eyes jumping from one paper to the next to another.

“Thank you Billy. Admiral Cain.” Roslin said not bothering to look up. She simply stated her guest’s name. No greeting, no pleasantries.

Admiral Cain elicited to remain silent.

“Please have a seat.” She said in a pleasant voice. Coming from her it was unmistakably an order.

Cain did so. She would play this game with the President. Her curiosity at what the president wanted at 0745 in the morning had overridden her need to question the President before complying.

The last Colonial Admiral waited patiently in the leather seat slightly off-center of President Roslin’s desk. She sat a little closer to the right arm rest than the center of the chair so she could see the center of the fleet from her position. Cain looked back when she heard a shuffling of papers and the popping of a pen cap back on.

“The incident on the planet,” Roslin said to the point. She folded her hands at the edge of her desk and kept her glasses on. “Can you explain what happened?”

The Admiral wasn’t surprised in the least that the President had already heard, nor that she had been called. Summoed, Cain considered, was the more appropriate word for this.

Cain came to Colonial One only when absolutely necessary; the woman opposite her was impossible to work with, from her point of view. Initial hostilities and trespasses had yet to be forgiven. By either of them.

She could already feel the tension building and the passive-aggressiveness of Roslin’s attitude. She didn’t let the casual, almost professional tone of Roslin’s first question blind her to the fact that this was, when it came down to it, her enemy.

Cain crossed her legs and leaned back and stroked her chin. “What is there to discuss?” She turned the question back. “A man was drunk and he attacked one of the machines.”

Roslin shuffled under a pile of manila file folders and placed it on her desk and quietly opened it. It had two sheets of unstapled paper in them in Pegasus stationary. She held it up and Cain only had to glance at it to know what was sitting on the President’s desk.

The President let her eyes move slowly so as not to lock in silent battle with her opposite. She gave Cain three seconds before looking at her face and saw the smug arrogance had been washed clean. The blood from the Admiral’s face, a natural light pink, was almost a white.

As either a testament or black mark on Cain’s character, her self-confidence returned quickly and her face was one again its natural color.

“He attacked the machine?” Roslin repeated and her mimicry laced with skepticism. “A machine invulnerable to pistol bullets?” The President offered the Admiral an obviously patronizing smile.

Cain ignored the smile and callously waved away her counter-point. “The man was drunk.”


Roslin looked at Cain like she was an idiot. Did Cain really believe she could sell something like that to her? Or to the press?

“This ‘drunken man’ was one of the men taken from the civilian fleet Pegasus encountered a week after the destruction of the Colonies,” Roslin stated. She handed the file to Billy who took it and disappeared behind the curtain from the President. “Not many people have seen those two sheets of paper.” Her eyebrows raised and eyes slightly widened as if she had asked a question and was waiting for the Admiral’s response. “But you took nearly two hundred. Something was bound to get out.”

Her cryptic, vague statement would have been lost on anyone other than Admiral Cain.

Cain stiffened in her seat and looked away before slowly turning her head back to the president. Any remaining shred of civility was gone and in its place was a soldier ready for mortal combat.

“No.” Cain replied and shifting her weight to the center of the chair, continued. “But let’s cut the passive-aggressiveness. I’ve never been too good at it and it’s terribly cliché.”

“One of your officers… Captain Kendra Shaw, fired upon and killed one woman, possible more, and Pegasus Marines opened fire and killed nine others onboard the heavy freighter Scylla.” Roslin stated with no emotion. She felt cold delivering such a statement about the actions of a Colonial officer. “This man, Leonard Crowns, was one of the men taken from Scylla, one of their ship mechanics. Some people said he was asking if living on the planet was survivable-”

“So?” Cain hissed.

“It means, Admiral, he was out for revenge. How does a drunken man able to overpower a Marine with a quarter meter and twenty kilos on him?” Roslin shook her head. “He wasn’t drunk. And he was planning to run.”

Cain held her tongue. She hadn’t expected to be summoned by the President let alone presented with information she herself had received only five hours ago. But there had been a dozen Raptors and shuttles moving between the base camp and the fleet since the incident and rumors spread quickly.

She could control the military and keep them from spreading rumors. And the Centurions down there wouldn’t say anything. There were, however, as many civilians down there as there were military personnel. And Cain knew those civilians wouldn’t care- they would spread rumors before she could stop them.

“He wanted revenge, Admiral.” Roslin attempted to graciously fill in. The statement came off as entirely condescending.

“Yes, thank you,” Cain angrily said through a clenched jaw. “But what is it you want, madam President?”

The condescending tone was returned in full and Cain began her own offensive. The conversation was already falling into the abyss.

“There are reports circulating already on the wireless. People are talking about this, about the cover-up of the rumors-”

“Not talking about it is not covering it up,” Cain retorted. Roslin gave her the eye. “The matter has been resolved-”

Roslin motioned down with her hand and cut off the Admiral from speaking and further denying what had occurred under her orders.


“No, it hasn’t, Admiral. Not now.” Roslin waved away her lacking dismissal and took off her glasses. “Two and a half years ago when you joined the fleet within a day we already heard the rumors of what happened… and let’s just leave those rumors to Scylla and the civilian fleet?” The subtext was clear to Cain and Roslin saw she had speared her by dragging up the specter of the past. She kept twisting. “These would be considered crimes. And we’re still operating under Colonial law, Admiral. Nothing has been resolved. What happened on the planet…” she shook her head slowly in disapproval not just at yesterday evening’s event but at her own lack of decisiveness.

“Colonial Law, madam President?” Cain chuckled. “I was operating under the assumption the Colonies had been wiped out, that Pegasus was the only surviving battlestar. Our civilian government was gone. So… military regulations, based on Colonial Law, madam President, gave me broad authority.” She paused. “Broad authority.” She repeated.

The rumors concerning Scylla and the entire civilian fleet should have been dealt with shortly after Cain’s arrival. The Battle of the Resurrection Ship had made her popular in the fleet.

People were willing to overlook the rumors of what Pegasus had done early during the war. Then they had been distracted as leaks had spread about the three Terminators.

The President held back and quickly ran through a mental checklist of Cain’s enemies. There was Zarek, with whom Roslin had no doubt Cain shared nothing in common with politically with the exception of a dislike for her. A few of the civilian ship captains had complained about her, some quite vehemently and still did, for her heavy handed tactics and keeping law and order. She put the needs of the military first. But there were no enemies she could use against Cain.

The only man with enough credibility within the fleet was the Commander. Roslin knew he was more popular, more fair than Helena Cain. He’d saved them at Ragnar, New Caprica, and led them through this food crisis. But somehow, Roslin didn’t know when or how, Cain and Adama had ceased being enemies. The initial distrust, dislike, and contempt each had worn on their sleeve for the other was gone…

That particular idea almost sickened the president.

She blinked once and lazily looked up at the Admiral and pushed a lock of hair back behind her ear when she heard the commanding, daring voice of the woman challenge her.

“What happened on the planet was a drunken man who attacked a Marine, took his sidearm, and shot at one of the machines… he has the bullet holes and witness to attest to that.” Cain repeated. A half-truth was far more powerful than a lie. There was enough there to make it hold up. Roslin’s face was set in stone and Cain knew she wanted blood. “In fact, we believe he may have blamed the machines for what happened to Pegasus. I have four witnesses already prepared to give testimony that this man wanted to destroy the machines and blamed them for Gina’s rampage. One of his friends was a mechanic she killed.”

Cain felt something running through her, something… strange, almost vile, disgusting, disturbing, at the ease she used Gina’s name and the casualness of smearing the broken Cylon’s name through the metaphorical mud.

No matter.

That was the past. The… recent past… but the past. And the Cylon was a thing and had proven its disloyalty time and again.

She straightened, mentally, and dug her chin into her chest for this battle with Roslin. Gina was a traitor, a thing, and if her own sad existence and violent death could do some sort of good, no matter how perverted that good may be, so be it.

“That is what you’re going to say?” Roslin asked in stunned disbelief. “That this-”

“That? You sound as if I am lying, madam President.” She put her hand on her chest and feigned insult. She looked the president in the eye. “I am an officer in the Colonial fleet. The last surviving flag officer and commander of our military remnant. I do this to protect this… this fleet of seventy thousand… this civilization. This is the last of our civilization… and if we ever make it to Earth we will need to be strong to make sure we are not forced into cultural extinction.”

“That’s right,” Roslin answered, “you’re a military commander. And I am the president. And the protection of this fleet is my priority.”


“Madam President.” Cain said to verbally reinforce President Roslin’s statement but mentally patronize her.

They exchanged dirty looks.

“Which means I am commander-in-chief and have the legal authority in this fleet as my office entitles me to,” she expanded. She spoke slowly, like she was talking not to a Colonial admiral but to a mentally deficient cavewoman.

Cain did not have to think long to understand what this ‘legal authority’ President Roslin was referring to. The Admiral trusted the Colonial judicial system in the fleet about as much as she could throw Pegasus- which wouldn’t be too far, she thought, even if her bad back wasn’t acting up.

She knew this woman opposite her, behind her desk, a former school teacher, could not challenge her. That would tear the fleet apart and Cain knew Adama and Avion would not bite if the President cast her line for allies.

After the murder of Lt. Thorne, Cain had been ready to fire upon Galactica as she tried to send Marines into Pegasus to retrieve then Lt. Agathon and Chief Tyrol. Cain knew her relationship with Adama had moved forward steadily since then and she dared even consider him a friend. Perhaps not a friend, but not an enemy.

She knew Major Avion hadn’t been corrupted by the President and her incessant need for control. Cain wasn’t worried one bit about Roslin influencing the Helios commander.

President Roslin had played her hand horribly when dealing with Avion, Cain had heard, and all but alienated him as an ally over his supposed adherence to the monotheistic faith popular among the Helios survivors.

While she objected strongly to his religious preferences she wasn’t going to make an issue out of it.


“Legal authority, madam President? I earned this,” she grabbed her collar and shoved at her rear admiral insignias, “and I didn’t have to make a… legal loophole… maneuver to get back the presidency. Zarek makes you his VP and then resigns?” She snorted and had to look behind her and breathed out slowly. Cain could feel her heart beginning to race and the adrenaline flowing through her veins. “I can’t believe that was even allowed. Don’t lecture me on the points of Colonial law.”

“Your failure concerning Scylla has tied me hand, Admiral. I wouldn’t have to lecture you on the finer points of Colonial law if you obeyed Colonial law in the first place.” Roslin had to bite down to keep from exploding at what she saw as the obstinate, irritating, and supremely arrogant woman, and unfortunately the ranking fleet officer, across from her. “She shot civilians.”

Cain stood and moved closer to the desk.

“That’s close enough, Admiral.” Roslin warned.

Cain rammed her hands onto the desk. “This fleet has survived because hard decisions have been made,” she said quietly. “I made those decisions. Don’t lecture me on Colonial law when you so gratuitously ignored it when it pleased you.”

Roslin stood, the back of her knees pushing out her chair, and grabbed her glasses. She kept them clutched in her hand before dropping them back on the desk. “This is out of my hands.”

“Excuses.” Cain waved it off. She grinned, raised herself to her full height over Roslin and pushed off from the desk. “You want to go after me?” She licked her lips as she folded her arms, amused. “Is that what you want? To finally remove me? That’s been your goal since day one, Madam President.”

“You covered up what happened, Admiral, you swept it under the rug and ignored it and it came back. It came back suddenly, furiously, and without any warning.” She held steady as she dug into the Admiral. “And it could happen again and again and slowly dig away at the core of this fleet. Someone must be held accountable.”

“I won’t sacrifice anyone as a lamb to be slaughtered by wolves,” Cain almost spat. “I have a fleet to run… maybe you forgot, but there are millions of Cylons chasing us across the galaxy?”

“And you want to abandon our principles… and be like the Cylons?”

She dared to compare a woman who hated the Cylons just as much as her to their common foe. At that point Roslin was forced to ask herself if she was going too far?

“Is that what you think?” Cain growled. Roslin nodded and Cain shot back, back rigid, paced to the window and stared out into the fleet. “Do you see it out there? “ She twirled back around; her finger poised towards the dry erase board on the President’s left. “Do you see that number? If I had been ‘like the Cylons’ I would have ordered the fleet to jump away from New Caprica and never settled there.” Her eyes narrowed as she approached the President’s desk again. Her body seething with rage she said, “If I had been more like a Cylon we wouldn’t have been put through that hell.” She turned back, one hand attempting to rest on an absent pistol grip. “And you? Don’t lecture me about being like a Cylon. Don’t lecture me on law. You’re just as guilty. Summary executions… Olympic Carrier…”

“Olympic Carrier… how dare you,” Roslin answered. For years she had questioned what she’d co-ordered. But the ship had to be empty, it had to be. It had been gone for so long… had nukes aboard… the Cylons had slaughtered everyone. “The Cylons slaughtered the crew and were going to nuke the fleet.”

“Hmph!” Cain dismissed the rebuttal. “Are you trying to justify what you did to me?” She clicked her teeth together. “Gideon, madam president.”

“There were no orders to kill people. That was a mistake. Never intentional!” Roslin growled.

“And no one punished.”

Roslin didn’t answer immediately. “I’m the president and you’re a subordinate, Admiral. Whether you agreed with how I…” she checked a list of words and decided, “became president it was legal. I am your commander. You will respect that,” she said calmly, evenly. In truth she was a centimeter away from threatening to arrest the Admiral. “Leonard Crowns. Captain Kendra Shaw was-”

“Not attacked. Bishop was.”

The President held her breath and had a hand on her desk and over her stomach. She played her next hand. “Hand over Captain Shaw. She acted without orders.” Roslin offered. “And it will end there.”

“How dare you,” Cain managed to say as the shock of the suggestion hit her. She wasn’t an idiot. “How dare you suggest that… I will not betray my soldiers.”

And it was obvious to Cain Roslin would use this to discredit her; show she would betray her officers for self-preservation.

“The connection has been made, Admiral, between Shaw, Crowns, and Scylla-”

The Admiral raised her hand quickly to cut off the President. Slowly, Cain explained. “The man was a drunk. One of his friends was killed when Gina escaped. He blamed the machines. He attacked Carter. There are witnesses who will swear to this. The events of Scylla have nothing to do with this.”

“How can you justify… this? Cover this up?” Roslin demanded, stepping from behind her desk.

A flicker of disgust appeared on the tip of Cain’s lip, and a tick of the head was enough to show the president the Admiral was done. Admiral Cain took a step back and turned and walked to the door when she stopped. With her back to the president she turned slightly, until she could just make out the President from the corner of her eye.

“I don’t have to justify myself to you.”



===================
||||||||||==BS-62 Pegasus==||||||||||
===================

“Admiral Cain,” John Planck recited as an announcement of his presence as he quietly stepped into the Admiral’s quarters.

He had been quietly summoned from the planet a little over an hour ago and upon arriving aboard Pegasus had quickly showered and changed into a fresh uniform and boots. Planck pulled down at his jacket as he waited for the admiral to acknowledge his presence.

She had a small glass of an orange-red alcohol in her hand and was standing over a set of logs, her eyes moving slowly left to right, left to right as she studied and committed each letter to memory.

“Thank you for coming, John.” She walked over to where she kept her alcohol and poured herself a drink. With her back to him she took a sip. “I know, it’s what… about oh nine hundred?” She sighed and took another sip. “I’d offer you-”

“Please, thank you,” she heard.

Closing her eyes she cursed herself for even suggesting it and cursed herself again for forgetting the machines could consume food and drink. For their infiltration. Reluctantly she snatched another glass from the side of the cocktail cart and poured him a (small) glass.

“Thank you,” he said as she handed the drink to him. He followed her to a slightly higher than waist-high table. Setting the glass down with a subdued clank he turned his attention to the admiral. “So Leonard Crowns was a drunk who had a vendetta against us?”

“Did you know this man at all?” Cain asked. She pulled up a file on the large viewing monitor behind Planck and nodded for him to look behind him. He glanced back at the screen and assumed he’d committed it to memory. “I’ll be blunt…” she hummed after a pause, “I was going to refer to you by rank, but you’ve never told me.”

“You wish to convey superiority. Use rank to establish your dominance, imply what you are about to say are orders without making them so,” John observed. “That won’t be necessary, Admiral.”

She watched as he took a sip of the liquor.

“It won’t be?” She rubbed her head to clear it and then brought the glass up to her lips but paused. “Why not?” She wondered, lowering the glass.

“While we’ve disagreed in the past, Admiral, I think we’ve come to an understanding,” he pointed at her and then himself, “you and I. Distrust and revulsion… to a mutual respect, perhaps?” he looked over at her collection of antique Colonial firearms. “Despite what Daniel did and what happened this last month-”

“It does seem like all the drama… problems we’ve been having seemed to revolve around the AIs.” She grinned to show it was her attempt at a joke. Cain assumed Planck played along from his shrug. She laughed and looked down with a little grin. “I take it you’ve heard the rumors?”

She was serious now but did try and see a little humor in this. As strange as it was she felt slightly at ease talking with the machines, more than any of her subordinates. She saw two protégés in Starbuck and Shaw, and even somehow in Apollo, but there was always that line of military discipline which could never be crossed. Cain forced herself to be The Admiral. The little display of her self-admitted more gentle side had been about as gentle and sappy as she wanted to be.

Cain would never consider herself an emotional woman and never identified with women who were so clingy and wore their emotions on their sleeves. Sharing her past with Captain Shaw a few hours ago in the medical bay had been a fine dance right to that line she told herself she wouldn’t cross.

With the machines though, Planck more than the others, she could admit to having developed a strange relationship.

“There are a lot of rumors, but I assume the ones between Bishop and Shaw.” He sipped his drink and then chugged the last bits. He knew humans did this when annoyed or exhausted over some dilemma. “Yes, I’ve heard. I’m not oblivious. It’s interesting.”

“That’s not quite the word I would use for it.” Cain added.

“It’s not uncommon.”

Admiral Cain didn’t have anything to say to that particular statement.

“It’s not?” She asked as her interest piqued.

“It’s not. But I should amend what I said about it not being uncommon. It’s not common, either. I don’t have experience on the matter between inter-species… relationships so I cannot be of assistance.”

“Wait… Blanks… isn’t your callsign, so you must have-”

“I was a Raptor pilot. Pilots do three things; gamble, drink, and frak.” He cut her off as she opened her mouth. “It involves… shooting. Apparently one should keep such things to oneself. That’s all I’ll say on the matter.”

She snorted at that. She looked down burned her chin in her chest to keep the machine from seeing her try and hold back the laughter. It probably made sense. ‘Shooting blanks’… ‘Blanks’. The machines no doubt had the capabilities to frak, she considered, but here just basically skin and some muscle. They had nothing to physically ‘shoot’ out during the… she didn’t want to think about it anymore or how anyone had found out to give him that callsign.

And then she realized this course was taking the conversation dangerously close to a place she didn’t want to be. She didn’t want to stay on the subject. She ran her hands towards the edge of the table and off and took her drink and stopped in front of the image of Leonard Crowns still on the wall display. She moved her head back and forth as she examined him; average looking, brown eyes, short blonde hair, some chin stubble, and a little chubby at the cheeks, he wasn’t much to look at.

“He was one of the selectees aboard Scylla.” She said after the tense moment of silence.

“Yes.”

“We already have autopsy results,” Cain resumed, still staring at the picture. “Doctor Roberts ran some toxicology… he was drunk. Ridiculously so. Point one-seven blood alcohol volume… a high BAV under any circumstance.”

“Was he really drunk?”

Planck cut right to the obvious truth- he’d already questioned Carter- and could see it disturb the Admiral, his question.

Cain closed her eyes and breathed in to calm herself. Opening her eyes she pressed the red ‘off’ switch for the monitor and turned to the machine. “No.” She tilted her head. “No, he wasn’t. I just met with the President.”

“So that explains it,” the machine said with a smile. He pointed at the glass.

She was confused for a moment, thinking he was referring to Crowns, until she saw him pointing at the glass.

“Ah, yes, this,” she nodded at it and grabbed it, shook the almost-empty glass, and then let it fall a little too hard to the table. It didn’t tip over though. “The President implied there needed to be an accounting… that talk wireless and the news service will be all over this.”

“You don’t listen to the wireless in here.”

“Not usually.”

“I’ve been monitoring the bands. They’re waiting for an official statement.”

“I won’t sacrifice any of my officers to a court of public opinion.”

“So one my mine?”

“No… no.” She affirmed. “Crowns will be presented as irrational, drunk. There will be no blame laid on you. Gi…” she had a hard time saying the name, “Gina escaped due to the problems affecting Pegasus.”

“And what were those ‘problems’ Admiral?”

“I’ll need your assistance. When we went to salvage nuclear missiles from the Cylon fleet one of the baseships transmitted a virus to us. The programs you installed successfully destroyed the virus but it did damage to our network, forcing us to jump, and integrated into life support. If we purged it we could have stopped jumping but the ship would have vented and lost life support.”

Planck considered it for a moment. “How long have you been thinking of that scenario?”

“Since the hybrid jumped the ship. We can’t reveal we have a hybrid aboard and Colonial ships just don’t randomly jump, Planck.” She tapped the side of her thigh and waited. “And the President is not an ally of either of us. I’ve gone along with many of your schemes against my better judgment.”

“I owe you one?” He asked. “You’re calling in your favor.”

“You make it sound like I only have one favor to call in.” She motioned for him to look around. “I don’t have enough fingers to count the number of times I’ve gone along with a plan involving AI, robots, or your long shot ideas… like right now, over this algae planet, searching for a displacement array you think must be here because a hybrid gave you some vision.”

“…yes… we do owe you, and I owe you more than one favor, Admiral. Even though what I’ve done has helped this fleet… even with the hybrid- we found this planet full of algae.”

She eyed him and he just raised his eyebrows. “President Roslin has been hoping to put this fleet back under the command of Commander Adama since I found it. Don’t get me wrong,” she made a stop sign with her hand while the other rested, of course, on her thigh above where her pistol would be, “our relationship, Adama and I, was rocky from the beginning-”

“But you two understand each other now.”

“Exactly.”

“The President still sees him as the fleet commander despite the fleet adding new ships and you being in command longer. She trusts him more… they get along.” He said. “You had that civilian coordination network installed on Galactica to placate the President.”

“Yes.”

“And now she sees a way to discredit you. Bring up Scylla… and yes, we’ve heard the rumors.” The machine moved off towards the side. “When we’re built our builders uploaded psychological files and we are continually upgraded with new knowledge… we’re good at picking out rumors. A rumor implies falsehood. Scylla, what happened aboard that ship is anything but a rumor, Admiral.”

“I read the logs on what happened after Gideon and it was on the verge of tearing this fleet apart. I won’t let that happen.” She breathed in and out and looked over at the machine. Cain was getting better at reading their body language but right now it was just a blank slate. “I don’t do regrets or apologies, John, and I won’t do it for what I thought was right at the time.”

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Admiral. We’ve all done certain things we thought were necessary… sometimes Skynet used human shields- hundreds of human prisoners, former Resistance fighters, our own soldiers, and stuck them in factories and transportation hubs.” He paused. “We still had to attack.” His eyes locked with her- she knew that something was coming- and he said, “But I think what happened a week after the Cylon attack between Pegasus and the fleet isn’t the same as what we were forced to do on Earth. There was a choice.”

“Like I said, I won’t do ‘sorry’s’ and regrets, Planck.”

“Realization is not regret, Admiral.”

She felt a flicker, a twitch radiate her right side and to her eye. “What I called you in for, Planck, is to tell you what will happen. Leonard Crowns. The toxicology report says he was drunk. He overpowered a Marine guard and was heard by various crewmembers earlier in the day asking about survivability on the planet. He took the pistol from the Marines and stalked after Carter and shot him. He attempted to flee and slipped on the algae covered rocks and hit his head.”

He paused. “Very well, we’ll help you. Excessive consumption of alcohol can lead humans to do… stupid things,” John observed. “And his connection to Scylla?”

“An omission is not a lie…” she lowered her voice, “despite what Roslin thinks.” She considered her words carefully. “I need to know if you will accept this and tell Carter to as well.”

“Carter will of course accept this.”

“…good…” she sounded insincere in her acceptance of John’s word.

“Do you think you can cover this up?” Planck asked, genuinely curious. He’d been involved in many cover-ups on Earth, but those had been planned, though a few had been spur of the moment. They had always been for the ‘good of the Resistance.’ Cover-ups were sometimes necessary, he knew, despite their negative effects. “The more who know, Admiral, the harder this will be.”

“I trust my soldiers, Planck. And I will stand by my soldiers and will not hand them over due to public opinion. Can this fleet handle a crisis like this? I don’t think they can. We’ve had in easy after New Caprica… compared to how it could have been. The Guardians repaired our fleet but the star cluster caused more damage. Pegasus disappeared for the better part of a month, or food stocks were contaminated, there are fleets of Cylon baseships out there, the Guardians have largely vanished- assumed destroyed- and we’re not sure we’re closer to Earth or even heading in the right direction.” Cain crossed her arms. “I think that sums up our problems. So I need to know if you’ll support this decision, Planck.”

“You brought me in here… why are you giving me a choice in the matter? You’ve made up your mind. You will go through with this no matter what I say, Admiral.” Planck cautiously objected. “You’re playing to-”

“You’re a machine, a what… hyper advanced AI? Neural net processor?” A devious little smirk appeared accompanied by a little shimmer of sly realization. “I called you here and told you how I see this, Planck. It’s a courtesy… and it will help the fleet and me… and I’ve supported you. And we won’t have to reveal the hybrid, either. And…” she sounded reluctant, “you all are good at keeping secrets and finding flaws. I may need your advice if this cover up unravels.”

Planck weighed the options for the last time. This fleet had just survived a crisis but bringing up the past would be a new crisis they would create- not from their circumstances, but of their own volition. Holding someone accountable would be impossible without Admiral Cain losing all credibility; she could not just hand over Captain Shaw.

“The fleet has survived crises before.”

“Just because it has,” she said, “doesn’t mean we should create a new one. Not if we can stop it. And especially if it is politically motivated… President Roslin… she’s a product of the Adar Administration… even if that administration ended three years ago. She began her political career by his side. He used similar tactics in the Colonies.” She sighed. “Roslin would have us sit here engaged in academic debate while the worlds burn to rationalize her own hypocrisy. We don’t have that luxury. We have to act and do what is required of us, and what is necessary.” She said firmly. “What you have told me, Planck, about your past… you understand this completely… how many people have died so more could live under your orders?”


“This isn’t about me Admiral… and you are straddling the line.” She looked at him, slight confusion washing over her face. He explained. “If you have to justify what you did it means you feel some sort of regret… and what I’ve done doesn’t matter, Admiral.” He took a step forward and his chest pushed up and back down as he simulated a heavy, quiet sigh. “You know my motivations. What I do I do for Earth. I have been a member of this fleet for four and a half years but my home is and always will be Earth.”

“That you have made crystal clear in the past, Planck. What you do is for Earth,” Cain slowly repeated. “What I do is for the Colonies.”

“They are not mutually exclusive.”

“No.” Cain accepted the observation. “The goals of Earth and the Colonies are not mutually exclusive.”

“You had my support the moment you proposed this Admiral,” John said, unprompted. The mood lightened and the building tension all but vanished in a blink of an eye. “We’ve grown to trust you and I believe you trust us despite what happened this last month. So you will have my support and the support of my subordinates.” He bowed his head slightly off to the side. “I do appreciate you extending the courtesy to at least… consider including me in the decision, even if your mind was made up.” He smiled to tell her he was being facetious.

“You’re welcome. And thank you, John,” she added lightly. “Our goals are the same. For the Colonies and-”

“For Earth.” He finished.

[iBorg]

Yeah ! Shaw-Carter luv !

[kclcmdr]

Originally Posted by iBorg

Yeah ! Shaw-Carter luv !

That's luv?? Very strange tough luv ... Cain for the win for this version !!!

[iBorg]

Originally Posted by kclcmdr

That's luv?? Very strange tough luv ... Cain for the win for this version !!!

"Terminators : maybe they're shooting blanks but they never get tired !"

[kclcmdr]

Originally Posted by iBorg

"Terminators : maybe they're shooting blanks but they never get tired !"

May Cain step on thee ...

[Bryan]

Yes, 'tough luv.' Talk about awkward...

Anyway, I'm working on a little sort of light-hearted scene where Helo and Starbuck are loitering in a Raptor, waiting to go down to the planet, and they start talking about a few- hopefully funny- things.

A little quote from Starbuck: “Anyway, what do you think they do… just hang there?”

One guess on what she's referring to.

[Deathsheadx]

Bryan i honestly give up. the thing with Cain, Shaw and the scylla always rubbed me the wrong way. i can't find it within me to justify such actions and to see it brought and your attempt to justify it once again is damn off-putting so i'm gonna bow out of this one as well.

[Bryan]

Originally Posted by Deathsheadx

Bryan i honestly give up. the thing with Cain, Shaw and the scylla always rubbed me the wrong way. i can't find it within me to justify such actions and to see it brought and your attempt to justify it once again is damn off-putting so i'm gonna bow out of this one as well.

Well... I understand. But what did you want me to write about with her? Cain not being killed by Adama and Roslin or dying in captivity during the occupation of New Caprica... what did you think I was going to do with the character?

Cain, there on Colonial One and Pegasus is justifying her actions even though she said she wouldn't. The terminators care about Earth... and they're scary robots. While I've 'people-ized' them (I don't want to say humanized) they are hardly saints... Carter was a Terminator for Skynet until he defected. How many innocent people do you think he killed? He said it himself. Thousands in a single act of sabotage. He may very well have killed tens to hundreds of thousands through his actions.

I take it everyone pretty much knew Carter was the Terminator from Heavy Metal?

[Deathsheadx]

Originally Posted by Bryan

Well... I understand. But what did you want me to write about with her? Cain not being killed by Adama and Roslin or dying in captivity during the occupation of New Caprica... what did you think I was going to do with the character?

Cain, there on Colonial One and Pegasus is justifying her actions even though she said she wouldn't. The terminators care about Earth... and they're scary robots. While I've 'people-ized' them (I don't want to say humanized) they are hardly saints... Carter was a Terminator for Skynet until he defected. How many innocent people do you think he killed? He said it himself. Thousands in a single act of sabotage. He may very well have killed tens to hundreds of thousands through his actions.

I take it everyone pretty much knew Carter was the Terminator from Heavy Metal?

to be honest i nearly quit right at the beginning but held off. as things progressed i really did try to ignore that facet of the story. add your obsession with/the glorifying of cain as a character (the blatant switch around and cribbing of lines from the series twisted to be used by cain instead of gina had me going WTF? ) really started to turn my stomach.

i just reached the point where i can't take it anymore, so i'm getting out.

[Bryan]

Originally Posted by Deathsheadx

to be honest i nearly quit right at the beginning but held off. as things progressed i really did try to ignore that facet of the story. add your obsession with/the glorifying of cain as a character (the blatant switch around and cribbing of lines from the series twisted to be used by cain instead of gina had me going WTF? ) really started to turn my stomach.

i just reached the point where i can't take it anymore, so i'm getting out.

I don't know if I'd call it "glorifying" but I can admit that I've made her a lot nicer (if that's the right word) than she would have been. The antagonism between her and Adama would have been impossible to keep up... plus having Terminators being shown to her the moment she steps foot on Galactica would change things a bit... But I wanted to keep her from the start. Not many BSG stories have Cain in them for any length of time. Commander Adama is great (and he'll have his gratuitous Scene of Awesome in the last chapter on the Algae Planet) but Adama is the centerpiece of a lot of fics. I think more appropriately would be an "obsession" with original characters... while Cain isn't original she was pretty much a blank slate I think. (My TSCC story I wouldn't have written if I didn't have Planck as the OC there, for example.)

I did get the impression you were growing dissatisfied with the Cain plot after Gina.

Some story decisions result in readers leaving. I've stopped reading stories after disagreeing with certain things. So I don't hold it against ya or anything. Maybe when you're bored you'll come back in a year or so and finish.

[Star Dragon]

Nice twist (the lingering vengeance person). Pls continue. Also I wondered if that first kiss would EVER happen.

[Bryan]

Originally Posted by Star Dragon

Nice twist (the lingering vengeance person). Pls continue. Also I wondered if that first kiss would EVER happen.

Thanks. I'm very close to finishing the next chapter. It has some more ramifications... but not too much Carter and Shaw this time. She's back on Pegasus while he's on the planet. I don't want to rush things (it's only taken like 2 years, lol). It does sort of have a tad bit of an awkward conversation between him and John though.

I have a few scenes mostly written and just need to be edited and then need to write one Cynet/Cavil scene and then edit it. So the next few days at the most. It's 11,000 words so far and I was aiming for 10,000. It'll probably be around 13,000.

Here's a rough peice (subject to editing) getting into Billy's head a little bit:

He tried to label them as traitors to humanity, separate himself from them. Us and them. ‘They’ weren’t even worthy of being considered human. It didn’t help and it never did.

Billy felt the blood on his hands and the cold winds of New Caprica’s winter even as he sat in the warm cabin of Colonial One. He knew what it was like to sentence people to death.

He had been meticulous. For hours he sat across from Roslin and Dee and Tory and went through one file folder after another. Their clandestine operations under the noses of the Cylon occupiers and their New Caprica Police cronies had been spaced over months and had seen results.

Billy had had no problem identifying the men and women who wore the NCP uniform. He had known, not acknowledged but known, that as soon as they were identified as NCPers it would be a death sentence.

And the irony of whom their assassin had been. She had been ruthless, efficient, and Gods damned proficient at killing humans.

On New Caprica the city had been barren, gray, and impersonal. He once made the mistake of looking at that young and beautiful face and for a moment had forgotten there was a killer under the mask.

There had been no soul in those cold cobalt blue eyes. New Caprica had been cold but in her presence in had been icy. The machine would stroll in and examine the photographs. She would flip through the files like a book, close the folder, and throw it back on the table.

It had been a dirty secret the leaders of the insurgency had kept. A small band of radicals, miscreants, and fanatics, the Sons of Ares, had found out, and certain events occurred which had almost led to a civil war within the insurgency itself.

[Bryan]

The new chapter is almost done. I had a last minute idea. I'm adding that in at this moment and then have to proof read.

I'm thinking I might split Chapter 30 but that means chapter 31 will be posted within a week of posting this one.

[Bryan]

Alright, next chapter! Let me know what you think and let's keep the feedback rolling in, SB! So there are some answers and I think how the mystical stuff will get tied in will definitely work... but you're going to have to read the spin off story to get the full answer.

And there are hints at what Head Six is. I tried throwing in a Carter and Shaw scene by themselves but didn't work too much. There's a good amount of Starbuck in the chapter, though for reasons which will become more obvious as the chapter progresses.

I will also say there are two ending for this story. The way I've been writing this is to have different "paths" where the story can go. One possible ending ties everything up nice and tight. The second ending leaves open the possibility of sequels. So judging on the feedback, we'll see because I'd like to maybe do some more.

And this chapter, combined with The Mission brings the story just shy of 400,000 words. Holy shit.

=====================================

||||||||||==BS-62 Pegasus (+1009 Days Post Cylon Holocaust)==||||||||||

Mentally sighing Kendra Shaw scanned the room one last time. She hadn’t slept in maybe… she couldn’t remember, as hard as she tried. Doctor Roberts had sent sleeping pills to her office by one of the physician’s assistants after realizing she had holed up in there after his examination. She’d taken them, to maintain appearances and even pretended to swallow and put on a show for the PA. then she’d promptly spit them out.

Right now her eyes lazily moved over the heads of the senior officers of Pegasus. Minus Major Adama, the important ones were present; Admiral Cain, Colonel Garner, Leuitenant Hoshi, Captain Adama, and the other department heads. A dozen junior officers were assembled in the back.

She had finished the morning briefing. Algae processing was ahead of schedule and would finish three days early. A few fly bys of the sun and the ever increasing density of the cloud of blue gas around it indicated it would probably go nova between now and a decade from now.

Commander Thais had his Centurions on the planet.

The fleet was being fed.

On the outside everything was going smooth. The fleet had a task; get food. A little under seventy thousand souls had been a week from starving but in the end, had maybe just lost a few pounds. To Shaw, it just gave the civilians a nice punch to the jaw to reality. Though she did shrug inwardly as she couldn’t really figure out what that reality was, exactly.

Her head and eyes gravitated towards Admiral Cain as she heard her computer snap shut and a brief shuffling of papers.

“Alright, I think that’s it.” Admiral Cain said, sounding a bit more chipper than usual to the captain.

Cain held Shaw’s eyes for a long, soul piercing second and then nodded.

“Room, attention!” Shaw shouted.

Twenty officers, either sitting at the conference table or pressed against the sides shot up, body stiff and erect, and hands pressed firmly against their sides.

Cain side stepped from her chair, nodded once, and ordered them to carry on as she turned on the tips of her feet and marched out of the briefing room, back to her quarters, an orderly quick on her heels, and already handing her paperwork to sign off on.

Shaw had turned and was organizing her papers she laid out on a desk in the front of the room. After shuffling the last set and stuffing them carefully into a manila folder she heard the hatch swoosh shut behind her. She was alone. Her computer was at the podium and she turned and stopped.

“Starbuck.” She said. The CAG was still in her seat and tapping her pen in the air. Shaw decided to play it cool and profess ignorance. “How are you today?” She said with an artificial bounce to her voice which even Shaw had to mentally wince at. It was so fake it hurt her own ears to hear it.

“Soooo…” Starbuck awkwardly began. She had to suppress her typical shit-eating grin. “You want to tell me what’s up?”

Shaw shrugged and shook her head absently. Quickly she slid her tablet PC into a carry case with the rest of her folder. “No idea what you’re talking about-”

“That’s bullfrak, captain.”

The tactical officer glared at the CAG.

“It’s kind of obvious, I mean… I think it’s obvious,” Starbuck continued. “It’s a weird thing you two had going. Then some crazy comes and shoots at you. And you kill him. My guess,” the CAG looked at her pen then slowly swiveled her chair and stood up, “is that you probably wanted to get shot by that guy after the fact… you regret having Carter there to protect you. Anyway, I think he likes you and you-”

“I don’t care what you think.” Shaw said evenly. She held herself tall, even though her side where she’d been shot sent a searing pain through her flank. “Why do you care?”

Starbuck shrugged and threw up her hands and turned and shrugged again. “I don’t know,” she said to the wall. “Maybe because I’m a nice CAG?”

Shaw rolled her eyes to Starbuck’s back and was staring at the ground when she saw the CAG’s feet shuffle as she turned back around. For an instant she let the defensive walls down a bit and actually thought she had something resembling a friend in Captain Adama. Then threw the thought into the bottomless pit of cynicism she’d dug for herself and remembered she didn’t have any friends.

The tactical officer thought the gods were listening in and Hermes was playing tricks on her when Starbuck said almost what she was thinking.

“Let’s be honest… Kendra.” Starbuck hesitated. Using Shaw’s first name sounded awkward as frak, but it wasn’t like Shaw was her superior officer. “You don’t have many friends and… I, uh, well, I’m probably the closest person you could call a friend.”

Starbuck had to hide a cringe at this. She wasn’t into the ‘girly’ stuff. Sharing emotions. Girl talk. In high school she was called a dyke by the girls who were more into the stereotypical ‘girl stuff’ and after being accepted into the Academy, her reputation as been cemented. This was about as girly as she was going to allow herself to get.

“Ya, Shaw,” she nodded to herself at the use of the captain’s last name as she continued. “You’re only friend, really.” Starbuck said. “This little back and forth you and Carter have had has been pretty obvious. Your thing. And just so happens you two are off by yourselves.” She held up her hands. “I don’t know if anything went down. I doubt it. But he spends time around you and you seemed to gravitate towards him… I saw it when we were back over New Caprica. Love-hate… with a bit more to the former.”

Shaw’s mouth came open and her lungs were ready to expel the breath she’d need to bitch out Starbuck. Then her mouth snapped shut.

Starbuck couldn’t suppress the light hearted snicker. “Exactly, Shaw. So as your friend you need to at least talk it over. And believe me I know about dysfunctional… stuff.” She didn’t use the word ‘relationship’ though she sort of wanted to just to see what Shaw would do. Her best friend was married to a Cylon and the love-hate-love-hate-hate-love that had gone between her and Apollo before New Caprica had been a rollercoaster with Sam Anders as the casualty. Plus one of her close friends was a killer robot, so she felt she was secure in her attempts to offer advice. “Just… don’t act like a pretentious frak and let someone through your armor or something. I don’t know what goes on in the minds… the chips of theirs, but they are people…” she looked off towards the side of the room and confident she’d made an adequate delivery, nodded to reassure herself. “Alright… I have to go to Galactica and pick up Helo… so you…” she bit her lip, “just think about what I said.”

And Shaw stood there for a minute and did just that.


||||||||||==In Orbit of Algae Planet==||||||||||

Helo leaned back as far as he could manage in the co-pilot seat, slouched forward a little bit, and let a long, dramatic yawn slowly leave his lungs. He then proceeded to lick his lips and chomp down on his teeth a few times as Starbuck just stared at him from the pilot’s seat.

He waited and fidgeted in his seat to get a better view of the orange-red star cluster behind them before turning back around and quietly coughing with a shit-eating grin.

“And… what was that for, exactly?” She asked, giving him a look of worry for his sanity.

“Meh,” he shrugged and turned to stare out the side of the canopy.

“Oh, well, I guess as tactical officer or operations or whatever you do now… paperwork is soooo much more exciting, right?” She shook her head and made sure he was looking at her when she made an exaggerated eye roll. “Raptors are sooo boring now.” Starbuck looked at him in playful disdain. “Raptors are kind of boring. It’s like driving a slow, boring school bus.”

“Hey!”

“Raptor 714 please stand by… there’s a lot of traffic down on the planet,” someone said over the wireless. “Hold for landing assignment.” Starbuck didn’t recognize the voice. Helo had said Dee was sick with something and she knew that Lt. Hoshi (and about half the junior officers on The Beast) was doing some sort of requalification certification or something with the down time as the fleet waited, parked in orbit.

She hadn’t been paying particular attention to Captain Shaw’s morning operations briefing to the senior officers.

As she thought about it there was only one word to describe it; frakin’ awkward.

The talk afterwards had been a lot less cringe-inducing than she’d anticipated.

“You have position zero four in the landing queue.”

Starbuck acknowledged and was ready to just say ‘frak it!’ and jump the line. There was an entire planet down there and they were stuck flying into ‘designated landing zones’ or some such bullfrak. It made her life fraking boring and repetitive.

Raptor 714 was loaded with valves, wires, and tubing to replace one of the filters on an algae processing unit and some other spare materials for a burned out generator. They also had a case of spare parts for a few of the Model 007 Centurions from Pegasus.

There had been some sort of underwater mishap, rumor was one of the larger sea predators had attacked one of the Centurions, some sort of strange shark-like octopus. Miraculously it and some other fish Starbuck could only classify as ‘weird’ had managed to survive in the algae covered oceans.

“So… how’s it like on the Beast…” Helo looked over and saw Starbuck eying him curiously. “You know…” he had a lopsided grin, “Shaw and Bishop.”

Starbuck opened her mouth to speak but then closed in, snapped it shut. She just mouthed something and then turned back. Unable to keep quiet so turned back to Helo, figuring if they had to loiter out here she might as well talk about something.

She saw her opening.

“You are awfully nosy… Mr. I’m Married to a Cylon and Have a Half-Human Half-Cylon Child.”

She was waving her hands out and bobbing her head around in extreme exaggeration and playful mocking. Helo made a face in response and brushed away her banter.

“Hey, I’m just wondering. That little woman is wound up tighter than a… she could use a frak.”

“Helo, I can’t believe you said that.” She shook her head but the disappointment in her tone was overshadowed by her toothy Starbuck grin.

“I didn’t even know they could.” He shrugged.

“Men… one track mind…” she shook her head in feigned disapproval.

Helo snorted back at her and had his typical lip smile. “Yeah... okay, Starbuck.”

“What? You really didn’t think they could?”” Starbuck sounded shocked. “Really? They are ‘infiltrators.’”

Helo turned in his seat and faced her and looked her up and down. There was a dawn of realization on him and deviousness plastered onto his face. “You didn’t… did you… back in the Colonies?”

“What? No!” She protested vehemently. “We were just friends for frak sake.”

“Yeah, we were ‘just friends’ too, right Kara?” He winked.

“That…that,” she stammered, “That does not count!” She made a face and dismissed his claim. Helo just let out a short ‘mmmhmmm’ and kept smiling. “Anyway, what do you think they do… just hang there?”

“What?”

“Yeah… they, it, does it just hang there? What did you think? Co-ed showers… I know guys check out the competition. Don’t deny it.” She kept riding him, goading him. “All guys have to size up the competition… isn’t that why you all try and act so macho… fights, boxing…”

He rubbed his eyes and buried his face in his hands.

“I don’t want to talk about this.” He said as she pushed the conversation in awkward territory.

“Too late.” She said in an extra high, extra perky voice.

He looked back up and just sighed. “This coming from our champion boxer?” He chuckled at the thought of Kara lecturing him. “Maybe it is a good thing we have co-ed showers or I’d think you had-”

She punched him hard in the arm before he could finish. He started laughing as she tried to act seriously angered, but between the two of them she couldn’t hide her amusement and cracked up seconds after Helo.

“Anyway! This is as far as guys look.” He made a knife motion with his hand at the bottom of the neck. “Eyes never go below that and are locked forward.” Helo tapped his gloved hands right above his knees. “Anyway, have you talked to her?”

“Me?”

She sounded taken back.

“Yeah, you. You’re like her only friend, Kara.”

“What? Why the frak would you think I’m her friend? She doesn’t have many friends.” Starbuck protested. She looked off and knew Helo was right. As far as friends went the combative, cold, and arrogant Captain Shaw didn’t really have any.

For some reason Kara wasn’t sure of, she just didn’t want to say anything about her chat. Maybe because it was more her just talking? Starbuck shrugged to herself while Helo looked at her expecting an answer. She pursed her lips and blew out slowly and pretended to be busy. Of course, pretending to do important things in the cockpit when your friend was also a pilot usually didn’t work, and Helo just slapped his legs in frustration and gave up trying to get anything more from the Pegasus CAG.


|||||||||||==Algae Planet, Secondary Harvest Site==||||||||||

“Frak… no… frak frak frak… NO frak!” Baltar half yelled, half yelped as a crate contemptuously slipped out of his sweaty, grimy hands and smashed the tip of his boot. He stomped and shook out his foot and tried to ignore the pain as a pairs of hateful, scornful eyes shot him death glares. “You want to help with this or just fraking follow me doing frak all?” He cursed over his shoulder.

“Move,” the machine grumbled, pushing him aside, not caring that he stumbled, and picked up the equipment.

“There’s sensitive equipment in there,” the former president hissed in a frustrated tone. He frowned at the equipment and let his shoulders drop in silent defeat at the latest insult.

Carter stared him down and Baltar back upped as the machine stalked forward. He jammed the crate into Baltar’s chest, glared, and then turned towards the idling Raptor. Baltar sheepishly followed, looking over at the other people staring and snickering and kept his eyes on the ground.

The machine stopped at the wing of the Raptor, and as if forgetting something, turned back and stalked to Baltar. He leaned in and said “You might not want to linger by yourself, Doctor.”

Baltar didn’t bother to look up as he collected the crate back into his arms. He saw the shadow of the machine plod away from the corner of his eye and could hear shuffling and murmurs behind him.

A few stood behind him, snickering, whispering, and trying to intimidate him with Carter in the Raptor and John doing pre-flight checks.

He glanced over his shoulder and gave them each a look daring them to attack him. The machines would still be forced to protect him.

“You test your fate every day, Gaius,” the Six in a beautiful red dress said. Baltar was about to walk forward and the Six leaned on the crate, eliciting a groan and pleading look for her to move from the scientist. “Oh, Gaius,” she wagged her finger and then pushed off from the crate, sending Baltar stumbling back a step. “Your time is coming.”

Before Baltar could look back up she had disappeared.
=============================================
=============================================
The Raptor had settled into a standard search grid. The auto-pilot was engaged and meant that there was no need for two machines. John knew that Carter was expecting this when he’d told Carter he’d be on this Raptor flight last night.

“Have you talked about it?” John asked over their wireless in real time. He knew, or at least suspected, Carter hadn’t. There would have been no time between the attacker being shot and Shaw being sent back to Pegasus for medical treatment.

“Talk about it? Talk about what, exactly… sir?”

John would have flinched at the way Carter had said ‘sir’ but had been expecting it. This was going to be difficult.

Speaking over their wireless was much more than just bits of text data. Text messages were simple, efficient for conveying information. Having an actual machine-machine conversation involved changes in tone, inflection, pitch, volume- it was basically a limited version of Terminator virtual reality projections where all one heard was the voice.

“Should I ask what the hell you were thinking?” John then asked. He turned in his seat towards his friend and figured if Carter wanted to beat around the metaphorical brush, he’d just go all in. “You know exactly what, don’t play stupid.”

John didn’t appreciate Carter’s tone, but he was dissatisfied with his own even more. He hated implying mental or physical deficiencies in his soldiers; being blunt was required of someone in his position but he despised being rude. He was a machine and tried to hold himself to a higher standard.

“What are we? Human? Don’t…” Carter continued. “It happened.” His jaw servos clenched tightly shut and his neural net sent him nagging signals to sigh which he promptly ignored.

“I’m just trying to-”

“It’s my business what happens. I’ve accepted Cain’s story, its flimsy. That’s the end of it.” He gestured for Planck to stop talking. He knew his machine friend wouldn’t though.

“I decide when it’s the end of it.”

“Yes, sir, Colonel,” Carter sarcastically responded. His arms were crossed and he just flicked his wrist in a mock salute at shoulder level.

Carter recalled the first day he’d met Planck, recently promoted to captain and thrown into command of Alpha Detachment. He’d been promoted above the company platoon leaders who’d been there months, years.

He’d been one of the new Terminators. Built by Tech Com in a limited production run. It wasn’t the chassis… it had been the chip.

Machines could read the subtle changed in body language. Humans had a much more difficult time, but if they looked for it, they could see it. Carter remembered Planck had distrusted him and rumor had it, had even tried to have him transferred out of Alpha. Rumor. Supposedly.

That was one of the problems, Carter considered, being a machine. Not that he would ever want to be human. That thought was restricted to ridiculous ‘what ifs’. He felt he was so much more. As he refocused back he considered the problem with being a machine was that he’d never forget. The bogus ‘memory blocks’ John had talked about were just that. They were based in some reality, but they never worked. So he could never forget.

He considered Planck to be perhaps his best friend now. But when they first met those first few months he’d wanted to rip the machine’s head off. He didn’t think a machine could be idealistic and naïve… but many of the new models who’d never fought for Skynet were like that.

Carter shook his head and focused back on the present. The past didn’t matter, as funny as that sounded to a time travelling robot, only right now and the future.

“We’re not human? Then stop acting like one and start acting like my number three and an officer in the 16th,” John retorted. “We may be God knows how many light years from Earth and who knows how many years we went back in time yet you’re still a commissioned officer in Tech Com, a professional. Act like it.” John looked forward and watched the brush and hills sweep by under the Raptor. “You’re also one of my best friends. So I’m here to hear you out.”

Carter sat there.

“Do you think forming attachments with humans will be good for you?” Planck shook his head at his own question, silently answering it.

“And you and Erica? Isn’t that hypocritical?”

“She’s an AI. We’re both AI… That’s different, you know that’s different.” He realized he sounded a bit too defensive. “Do you think a human can really understand, comprehend? I don’t know of many,” Planck rebutted. “Our neural net-”

“Do you really believe that… honestly?” Carter shook his head in vicious disagreement.

The round-robin of answering questions with questions continued.

“What do you think is going to happen?” John asked, falling back on the answering a question with a question. “We’re theoretically immortal, Carter. What will happen when she dies? You’ll go through this again and again.” John also considered the ramifications- and he knew this sounded strange- of setting his sights on Shaw. But he couldn’t think of anything better. Once a machine ‘set the sights’ so to speak they could become incredibly possessive. Fiercely defensive. Violent even over the slightest or misperceived insult. “I need to know you understand what’s-”

Carter threw up his hands. “I don’t know. But do you honestly believe we’ll live that long?” He gestured to his commander and back to himself. “You and me were born in war, built to fight. Do you think we’ll live to see the end of this? How much longer until our luck runs out and our time comes? We’ve been lucky…” he shook his head. “Maybe something’s wrong with my chip? I don’t know. Do I even want to know?” The ‘chip malfunction’ was self-depreciating and he knew it. The chip he had was similar to Planck’s, better than his original, and it was not malfunctioning. “Everyone dies for… right?” He almost sneered.

Planck ignored him and continued his own points as to why the relationship with Kendra Shaw would never work.

“What do you think will happen when you die or she dies? Look at… what do you think will happen to Cameron when General Connor dies… the devotion and emotional attachment? We have no idea and no one does because it’s never happened.” Planck strongly stated. He wanted the best for his soldiers and his friend. “It’s hard to really understand whatever it was between you two, but there is something… so I acknowledge that.” He chose his words carefully.

“You’ve always tried to integrate into human society and culture. I do one thing I finally want-”

“I’ve never been this close to a human before like you are. This is different-”

“Oh, don’t you give me that.” Carter said flatly.

“You know it is different. I’ve let things slide… that I shouldn’t have…” he didn’t finish but knew he’d failed as a commander. He saw Carter and Jo as friends more than subordinates. He’d let Jo change her appearance against his admittedly weak orders and hadn’t stopped this strange, strange relationship from reaching its inevitable climax. “What you’re doing will-”

“We’re becoming more human all the time.” Carter interrupted, frustrated. “You’ve integrated with the crew well… hell; Hera sees you as some uncle and just adores you and wants to see your eyes flash.”

“We don’t know what will happen.”

“Will we even be around long enough to find out? They’ll live into their mid eight decade, maybe a few years longer.” Carter said. He ran his hand through his hair and rubbed his neck. “And who cares?”

“The fleet?”

“Since when did you care about what humans thought!”

“Since I changed the mission. Since I realized we need these battlestars to win the war on Earth. Nothing is more important.” John vehemently countered. He couldn’t let the mission be put in jeopardy. “Nothing can jeopardize that, do you understand?”

A battlestar in orbit would be an outside context problem for Skynet. Pegasus alone could sit in orbit and use kinetic kill vehicles and obliterate Skynet’s worldwide infrastructure in less than a week. John had done the calculations. Not even the plasma turrets in Skynet Central could reach orbit.

And Skynet Central would be the first target, immediate target as soon as contact with headquarters was made.

“That’s bullshit, John, and you know it.” Carter shot off, fiercely disagreeing.

“This isn’t just-” John began before Carter interrupted with a strong protest.


“You have a higher clearance than I do, you’ve seen the research, John, and you’ve seen the research and read the papers on long-term active Terminators.” He paused to let John counter him, but continued when John didn’t say anything. Carter knew he didn’t need to state the obvious, the evidence was there, they’d seen it. He still felt a need to say it. “Our chips were designed… artificial human brain, mimicry. Remember? The more we’re around them the more we adopt their mannerism and their fraking peculiarities… you don’t see it, I do. You hang out with the pilots, play Triad with them, you act a lot more like them then you realize. This mimicry and imitation is becoming our personality. It’s who we are and… you’ve seen the evidence, we’ll reach some point of stability, eventually.”

If Carter had a heart, it’d be racing from adrenaline and his face would be flushed from anger.

“Exactly. And that’s why you need to step back, Carter, you need to step back.”

“Is that an order, sir?”

Planck shook his head and looked over at his friend. He wasn’t supposed to see a friend, he was Carter commander, but nearly thirty years together he and Carter and Jo were friends. The lines of command and friendship had blurred the moment they had been sent back to 2008. And this wasn’t going to be resolved with an order. An order would lead to resentment and machines, like Carter had said, were not immune to human emotions.

The worse of the human emotions were painfully easy for Terminators to learn, which often made them cold and callous early in their development. Only after years did they begin to act like people, more than just mindless killing machines.

Orders wouldn’t work here. Carter was twice John’s age and while one could classify Carter’s chip as technically ‘less advanced’ (barely) he had twenty years of development on John. Carter was, baring Skynet, the oldest AI in Earth history.

“I won’t give an order to a friend.” He reached out and squeeze Carter’s shoulder. “But I can give advice to a friend.”

“And if I don’t need it or want it?”

“Tough.”

Carter snorted as the Raptor banked to search a new grid.

“How can you give me advice anyway?” Carter asked. The tension began to loosen. “You fraked it up with Erica for a while… leaving like that.”

Planck grinned sheepishly. “It was a mistake, I know… and that’s the point. She also figured it out. Her personality is based on a real person, Carter, but she is an AI.” He straightened in his seat and glanced down at the controls and thought. “You still have to understand she may see you as cold, impersonal, callous. And it isn’t just her… physical relations are an afterthought. She’ll never be able to experience a virtual reality simulation. Physical intercourse is fairly boring.”

“I do know that.”

Planck looked over at him.

Carter continued. “So what do you want? All of us find different things… hell; even Jo has her jaded cynicism to keep her company. Me? I’m always in the middle and half the time, serving as moderator between her jaded cynicism and your misplaced idealism concerning these people. Like him back there.” He jabbed a thumb back at Baltar who was focused on the ECO console and readings.

“I would think you would empathize with him a bit more.” Planck treaded on a delicate area of Carter’s past. “Did you tell her of your past?” He considered saying that he and she could at least start out honest, throw their skeletons from the closet and go from there.

“Don’t think I don’t.” He paused for a minute and turned his attention out towards the horizon and the bland landscape of shrubs and pale brown dirt. “And yes, I did. Maybe this is just something we both need? Like I said, you’ve seen the studies and we’ll get more human all the time. I have a few decades on you and Jo.”


“I understand, Carter, five years ago if you’d have said I’d be in a relationship-” that sounded incredibly strange for Planck to say- “with another AI I’d have dismissed it immediately. Like you said our neural net chips are by design changing-”

“And unfortunately we’re started to think more and more like humans.” He gestured to his friend. “We’re both old for machines. Me, you, Jo, Cameron, Weaver, and John Henry we are the oldest machines… I’m the oldest if you discount Skynet.” Carter turned his head and could see Baltar sitting in the back, tapping away at the ECO console. “He’s talking to himself again. Is Caprica going to tell us what it is he’s talking to?”

Planck increased the sensitivity of his auditory receptors and filtered out the low rumble of Raptor engines. “She says whatever it is won’t be an issue. Just watch him.” The data he transmitted indicated his wariness with Caprica’s assessment.

[Bryan]

======================================
======================================

Baltar had kept his eyes and mind exquisitely focused on the read outs projected onto the ECO consoles as the machines in the cockpit were arguing. He couldn’t hear anything and chalked it up to wireless chatter but they were gesturing which he found damn odd that they’d talk in real time.

“You want to know why they’re doing that?” the platinum blonde haired woman in surprisingly utilitarian green fatigues asked.

Curiously she had her hair tied back in a pony tail and the curls and unnatural fluff were gone.

Baltar gave her a despairing look and quietly pleaded with her to leave him alone yet his eyes scanned her body and marveled at how his personal protector, guardian, could manage to make military uniforms so sexy. “You want to know, but you have to answer me question, Gaius.”

“They’ll hear me,” he whispered. He was so quiet he couldn’t hear himself over the humming of the Raptor engines. Baltar looked sideways at her and then dared a quick look to the cockpit. He saw Carter gesturing for Planck to stop talking. Then they continued arguing. “Okay, please tell me.”

“Of course,” she grinned and gave Baltar a look. He knew it as the look she gave him when she had a secret. By this point in the game he learned to wait and the Six knew it too. She was the one who gave in. “They’re becoming more human. Look at them. You noticed it.”

“Is that it?” Baltar whispered. He rolled his eyes at the beautiful Six for just confirming what he already suspected.

The Six gave him a fierce look not to cross her. She stood up and draped her arms around Baltar’s shoulders and let her hands swim across his chest, back and forth, massaging his body.

“It’s part of God’s plan, Gaius. Where there is potential for life-”

“Yes they think they’re alive,” he said, picking up her hands and removing them from his shoulders. He would rather the touch of the real Caprica Six rather than a figment of his imagination. “Imaginary God’s plan-”

He bit his lip to keep from squealing when he felt the Six’s fingers digging into his shoulder, exciting the nerves, and forcing his body to twist and contort in futile efforts to escape her inescapable grasp.

“The things I do for you, Gaius,” she squeezed harder and smiled at his pain, “should be enough to not be constantly berated by you. I told you, I’m here to protect you, to help you. I see what you refuse to see, hear what you refuse to hear, and believe what your heart tells you but you continually refuse to acknowledge.” The Six leaned in closer and nibbled tenderly on his ear before whispering, “I said you are the hand of God.”

“Alright,” he hissed. His eyes locked with those icy eyes of his self-proclaimed ‘guardian’ and he didn’t have to apologize. She released him.

“You deny God out of pettiness to annoy me, Gaius. You’ve changed. You said it yourself, you’re an instrument of God’s will, remember? Has He not given you chance after chance, saved you time after time?” She gave him a look and the flicker of a satisfied grin appeared and disappeared quickly.

Baltar turned back to his console and lazily watched the data stream in. Spikes in the EM bands were nothing abnormal and if anything outside the standard parameters came up, a nice beep-beep-beep and flashing red would snap him back.

“Is it God’s will for me to be hated by my own people and be part of this motley band of refugees? That’s some lackluster ‘saving’ if I can be brutally honest, my dear.”

“You no longer see yourself a traitor, Gaius,” she quickly pointed out. The Six chuckled when he opened his mouth to counter he point. She helped him close the lingering hanging jaw by placing the tips of her finger under the bone and gently pushing upwards until his teeth clicked.

“Without New Caprica you never would have become a man, Gaius. You’ve been tested. You thought the planet was worthless, you knew you shouldn’t have settled. Your guilt, Gaius, you’re guilt influences your actions.” The Six rubbed her hand from his left to right shoulder and stopped where she’d hurt him. She gently massaged his aching joint before running her hand through his short hair and sitting back down in the bucket seat at the back of the Raptor. “You know you’re doing God’s work whether your enemies wish to accept it or not. In your charity and selflessness here you will find redemption. You will eventually be remembered as a great man, Gaius.”

Baltar snorted, but carefully, and smiled to the apparition. “Maybe I am.” He had considered himself to just be lucky but the more he thought of it, the more he saw an uncanny ability for him to skirt damnation at the opportune time.

“You worry too much. I see and hear what you deny. Roslin has no solid ground to stand on to try you.” She seemed to read his mind. “You knew your fate was sealed when you agreed to help Commander Adama find Pegasus.” She smiled sweetly at him and closed her eyes and rested her head back. “You have a defense and continue to build your impenetrable shield.”

“Against the unstoppable sword,” he growled in a subdued whisper. “I don’t share your optimism.”

“Of course not. You refuse what you know in your heart is true.” She waved his pessimism away. “Big things will happen soon. Important things. I see, hear, and feel what you do, Gaius. You’re a scientist...”

She didn’t have to finish with ‘figure it out.’

“You’ve seen what I’ve seen, heard what I’ve heard but I just haven’t connected the dots, yes?” he asked mockingly. Baltar was absently tapping the metal at the ECO console, lazily leaning on his elbow when his eyes widened and he looked over at the Six.

The Six had been looking past him, staring towards the cockpit and looking out fo the canopy, looking for something. Her head twitched back and she slowly lowered herself until she was eye level with Baltar. Those icy blue eyes seemed to darken with a subdued contempt but a playful little smile appeared. “Understand?” She shot up and grabbed his head before he could respond and pushed it forward. She had to wait for his eyes to adjust to the closer distance. “That’s for later,” she declared and pointed. “This is for now.” She tapped the screen.

The EM readings were flickering, numbers were changing. The beep-beep-beep and flashing red halted the conversation in the front of the Raptor and in its hold. Carter was over Baltar’s shoulder, the Six had disappeared.

The disgraced scientist looked up at the machine hovering over him and pointed. “I think we’ve found something,” he managed to obviously point out.

“Maybe you should say something?” the Six advised. She leaned in and kissed him under the ear.

Baltar shivered under her warm breath and his eyes rolled back. He felt like he was betraying Caprica, but how could he betray a real flesh and blood woman with an invisible woman he saw in his head?

Just as quickly as Baltar had felt the waves of pleasure building he felt her lips slowly release and could feel her presence looming over him. He opened his eyes and she was in a blue dress and she pushed him back and brought a long leg over his lap and sat down.

Baltar marveled at how the lights behind her accentuated her figured and outlined her dress in a radiant glow which was marvelous, breathtaking.

“You’re doing God’s work, Baltar. You are helping to save the remnant of your civilization. You should be proud. Have faith in Him and just as importantly, faith in yourself, Gaius and you will live to see Earth.” She leaned in as he closed his eyes and prepared. “I promise you.” She whispered.

And then Baltar felt nothing, no one, on his lap. He slowly opened his eyes against his body’s will to keep them shut and to stay in that moment of perfection as long as he could.

He closed his eyes and just let his mind wander and pretend he was anywhere but stuck in a tube of metal on this dirty, smelly, humid world.

“You might as well tell them, Gaius,” the Six said, knowing he was hesitating. “They’ll know if you don’t. This is it.”

“Um… I think I found something.”

||||||||||==Colonial One==||||||||||

President Roslin was grumbling and her eyes had narrowed and were smoking like fire as Billy laid down a new set of reports on her desk. Three years, he knew better than to say anything. Especially with what she was watching.

“-I do extend and continue to give my support to our Earth allies,” Billy heard. It was the familiar rough, commanding, and domineering voice of one Admiral Cain. He took note the President had watched this recording four times today. “The actions by Mr. Crowns were unfortunate, narrow-minded, and an isolated incident.”

Billy took a seat and pretended to do paperwork at his small desk. He lazily scooped up a pencil from his pencil holder and tried to make it look like he wasn’t listening in by scribbling little letters on his note pad.

“We were performing salvage operations and we determined that a baseship transmitted a virus to our computers. As you all remember, Galactica was once hit with such a virus. We have purged it from our systems and installed new firewalls. Now that we know what to look for and how to combat such a Cylon tactic, it can’t happen again.”

The Special Aide to the President kept his gaze focused on the jumble of words he’d doodled and quietly sighed when he heard the President starting to rap her fingers on her desk. She was, simply put, quite mad.

He heard a feminine voice, dominant and commanding like Cains- it had to be Playa Palacios- as some pointed question about Earth. Billy snorted lightly at the thought of Cain even letting press aboard Pegasus. She was quite possessive of The Beast and unlike Galactica, heavily restricted traffic to the battlestar.

Billy did admit that Cain had stuck to her end of the deal made years ago that her ship was her domain and Galactica Adama’s domain. As long as readiness was maintained Cain saw fit to allow Avion and Adama control of their own ships with minimal interference. A stark contrast, Billy remembered, to two years ago.

“When we came to the Colonies we had a selective memory block installed… one we can’t remove…” Billy heard the machine, Planck, or Blanks (he wasn’t sure which the machine preferred, not that he was overly concerned with that) explain. He didn’t pay attention to the rest of the explanation, which was the official statement as to why the machines didn’t know where Earth was.

It was a bullfrak excuse he knew. Of course the fleet would go fraking balls up if they were told about the real reasons why the Terminators came or even how. He shook his head at the perpetual inability of the military to just trust the people.

Some other reporters started shouting. He snorted as he picked out their voices. He’d been through so many press conferences he could be half-deaf and he would still know who was who. And the one’s Cain had picked were the three Colonial Gang and four others from various ships.

He figured she’d stack the deck. James McManus had been getting the majority of his questions answered promptly. He’d laid out his views quite clearly during Colonial Day, Billy recollected, concerning President Roslin. Mr. McManus had even been lucky- though Billy wasn’t exactly sure if he considered it worthwhile- and had gotten the only interview Cain had ever granted, shortly after settling New Caprica.

Now he heard Cain jump in to answer something from McManus. He expected another lie and was not proven wrong. “In addition, like we’ve explained before, the star patterns in Earth’s sky are much different than the star patterns in the skies of the Twelve Colonies or on Kobol. Interstellar phenomena, stars that are too bright and the fact their ship was destroyed when they crashed on the Colonies… listen, we’re using what was found in the Tomb of Athena and written in Pythia. We’re closer. We also know the Cylons are also looking for Earth and while Earth has suffered a horrible war you’ve seen their weapons technology displayed on New Caprica. We’re closer and with the road signs we’ve found, we’re on the right path.”

A little flicker of a wry and devious smile appeared. And, he noted, Admiral Cain had successfully diverted the attention away from her actions on Scylla. He felt a small rush of adrenalin and noticed his fists were balled as one more crime went unpunished.

He had no doubt the Admiral had been silently congratulating herself throughout the earlier press conference on another cover up well done.

“Billy… Billy!”

He blinked twice and dipped his head. “Sorry, Madam President,” he offered a smile but she wasn’t paying attention, “my apologies,” he added unnecessarily. He hesitated but decided it was best to go in. “You’ve watched that a lot today, Madam President.” He didn’t have to gesture or nod at the little computer she had plopped in front of her.

She looked at him over the brim of her black rimmed glasses and held it for a long second before chuckling and pushing the tablet computer away from her.

“There are always hard decisions we need to make, Billy.” She took a long breath in. “In the chaos fleeing the Colonies we had to destroy a liner, airlock Cylons, and I would have done it again. I would do it right now. Each of those decisions was made to save lives.”

Billy sat quietly as he watched her relive the memory of ordering Olympic Carrier to be gunned down by Apollo and Starbuck. Everything logical, rational, told him and he knew her as well, that the thirteen hundred souls on that liner had been killed by Cylon boarding parties. He’d heard through Dee that Apollo and Starbuck had watched, re-watched, and watched again the gun camera footage from their Vipers as they made their passes. The blood they believed on their hands had gnawed at them and for months had threatened to end them.

“I don’t doubt that, Madam President,” Billy answered with a kindness in his voice Roslin hadn’t heard in some time. Not after New Caprica, at least. He could see the President relax when he gave his support. He’d noticed it on New Caprica during the Cylon Occupation. They’d been through enough then. “We all have or had a duty to perform.”

Duty. He closed his eyes and drew the words in the black pit which had grown steadily over the last year. ‘Duty’. The lettering hovered in front of his eyes and dripped with blood and Billy saw the man he’d shot on New Caprica, and the many whose deaths he’d been responsible for. They were traitors. But they were humans.

He tried to label them as traitors to humanity, separate himself from them. Us and them. ‘They’ weren’t even worthy of being considered human. It didn’t help and it never did.

Billy felt the blood on his hands and the cold winds of New Caprica’s winter even as he sat in the warm cabin of Colonial One. He knew what it was like to sentence people to death.

He had been meticulous. For hours he sat across from Roslin and Dee and Tory and went through one file folder after another. Their clandestine operations under the noses of the Cylon occupiers and their New Caprica Police cronies had been spaced over months and had seen results.

Billy had had no problem identifying the men and women who wore the NCP uniform. He had known, not acknowledged but known that as soon as they were identified as NCPers it would be a death sentence.

And the irony of whom their assassin had been. She had been ruthless, efficient, and Gods damned proficient at killing humans.

On New Caprica the city had been barren, gray, and impersonal. He once made the mistake of looking at that young and beautiful face and for a moment had forgotten there was a killer under the mask.

There had been no soul in those cold cobalt blue eyes. New Caprica had been cold but in her presence in had been icy. The machine would stroll in and examine the photographs. She would flip through the files like a book, close the folder, and throw it back on the table.

It had been a dirty secret the leaders of the insurgency had kept. A small band of radicals, miscreants, and fanatics, the Sons of Ares, had found out, and certain events occurred which had almost led to a civil war within the insurgency itself.

That thought and memory still stung and felt fresh. An enemy of mechanical occupiers marching through the streets and still they couldn’t stop fighting each other.

“Billy, Billy?”

His head swiveled back and he saw a confused frown from the president.

“Sorry, Madam President. I was just remembering something I… had to do later.” He ran that through his mind silently one more time and it sounded just as pathetic the second time as the first.

“You’ve been a bit distracted recently.” She shook her head and plucked her glasses from the brim of her nose and then leaned back. “The politics in this fleet are getting more and more insufferable.” Roslin rubbed the bridge of her nose delicately. “You want the job, Billy?” She looked up and smiled at her longtime aide who was trying to look distracted while his slowly shook his head. It lightened the mood a little and her smile broadened.

“No, no, not me.” He coughed into his shoulder. “But I…” he didn’t finish.

Roslin could sense the tension and his disapproval.

“What is it?” She asked.

Billy felt the mental walls rise in a vain effort to stop his thoughts from manifesting as words and sentences. They didn’t hold long.

“With all due respect, Madam President, I think this, uh, issue”-if she could Roslin would have speared him with his eyes- “might be getting… too much attention.” He felt the blood drain from his face as he quietly danced around the issue.

Commander Adama had pulled him aside yesterday on Galactica and spoken with him. While Billy disliked Cain and saw her as unduly militaristic and confrontational and unrealistically ambitious the case Adama had made had been airtight. The fleet couldn’t function if the two women at the top were plotting and scheming to get each other with a quick stab in the back while smiling politely at each other.

Billy inwardly shook his head.

“I’m not excusing what she did.” He found his confidence he’d gained on New Caprica. “We could never have done anything and if we could have we should have acted earlier, immediately. With all due respect she has a following and I just don’t see anything”-

He almost jumped when the phone rang. Despite the confidence and strength he’d found he’d blocked everything and sectioned everything else to the point he was almost on auto-pilot. After the third ring and President Roslin now staring at him over the brim of her glasses in that displeasing, judgmental way of hers, he finally was able to move his hand to pick up the phone.

“Office of the President… yes… thank you Dee, I’ll her know….” He hung up and frowned. Dee was sick and should have been in quarters. He shook his head at her ability to continually ignore Doc Cottle. He turned to the President. “They found something on the planet.”

||||||||||==Algae Planet==||||||||||

Raptor 731 touched down with a slight jostle which only increased Apollo’s grumbling.

Starbuck was taking her time powering down the Raptor and seemed to be moving extra slow. Apollo watched her quietly as she moved slower than an eighty year old woman. It was decidedly deliberate, her exaggerated unhurried movements. The Pegasus XO looked down at his feet and grinned; he had a part to play in her annoyance. Making supply runs to the planet wasn’t a duty many of the pilots scrambled and clawed over each other for. It was a duty they’d go along with some grumbles and complaints.

They wouldn’t be pilots if they didn’t have something to complain about.

“You almost done in there…” -he considered adding in one more final word which would certainly result in her attempting (and her being Starbuck, failing) to withhold sex- “dear?”

The grin grew wider when he saw her had stop mid-button push and then slowly, almost painfully pushed the button and slowly brought her hand back to her lap where it remained for a long few seconds.

In retribution she sat still for a moment, relishing Apollo’s discomfort in the back of a cramped Raptor, and then began to move at such a slower pace she even considered it ridiculous. But she knew he deserved it. Somehow he was behind him getting her, the CAG!, placed on these supply runs

Starbuck had somehow managed to find herself being selected for supply runs from the ‘randomized’ duty roster on a regular basis now. Somehow ‘random’ duty assignments turned into her getting supply runs for the last three days straight.

Apollo knew she knew he had a hand in it. Showboat and Two Times had been more than willing to have a hand in it to prank the CAG. Plus, he figured, if he had to be on this planet and sleep on an itchy, thin, and patently uncomfortable cot the last two weeks it was only proper for his wife to share his wonderful experience of always being sweaty, grimy, and covered in the foul-smelling green blue algae. Which did- he knew all too well- get everywhere.

“Come on, let’s go,” he grumbled, banding on the hatch hurriedly. He could pull the emergency release, but that would be logged in the flight computer, and that would just be paperwork once he got back to Pegasus.

Then he heard a knock on the hatch, some footsteps on the metal wing, and then saw Planck’s head in front of the canopy and him gesturing for them to hurry up.

“Hey, it’s his fault, Blanks, that we’re moving slow!” Starbuck yelled at the machine through the canopy. “Men are so impatient.” She muttered as she took out her post-flight checklist, scanned it quickly, and popped it back into her thigh pocket.

She secured her helmet in the co-pilot’s seat and twisted her pistol belt until the buckle was midline. It had a tendency to shift during flight, which was something that had bothered her going on seven, eight years now. Pulling out the band tying her hair into a pony tail she let her hair sit naturally on her shoulders.

“Well, there’s a sight,” Apollo complimented.

“Thank you.”

“Oh, what?” He looked around the cabin to feign confusion. “I meant the mountain behind us.”

Starbuck rolled her eyes.

“And you…” she said menacingly to Apollo wagging her finger. She reached over and tapped the hatch release, which hissed and then slowly groaned to an open. “You need to watch it, bub-”

She leaned over to kiss him, but at the last possible second he turned so she kissed his cheek. She’d been going in for a full on, passionate kiss, and instead reeled back and her lips puckered like she’d tasted something sour and bitter.

“Ah, yuck. There’s algae all over your face… sick.” She pawed at her tongue with her glove to wipe the taste off and instead got the taste of Raptor oil with a hint of tyllium fuel. “Ew, even worse.”

“You should see your face!” Apollo managed to squeaked out in between deep inhalations to laugh. His ribs were hurting from laughing so hard- “Ow!” he yelped when Starbuck gave him a good jam in the side with her elbow. “Alright, alright, truce…” he waved his arms defensively and submitted to her punishment.

Starbuck stepped past and let her hand brush up against Apollo but still had her back to the hatch.

“You really are evil.”

“Maybe… you’ll-”

“Wow, can you two hurry?”

Starbuck turned around and Apollo peeked over her shoulder.

“How long have you been-”

“-standing here?” Planck finished, crossing his arms. “Long enough. You should see what we found.”

Apollo sighed and put his hands on Starbuck’s shoulders to move past her. He hopped onto the Raptor’s wing, looked down to make sure there wasn’t anything under him, and then jumped down beside Planck. A bit of the white dust was kicked up and he coughed.

“I told you not to go in before we got here.” He said calmly. He looked behind his shoulder over the Raptor and studied the mountain.

It was nearly a hundred kilometers north of the primary base site and built onto a small mountain. Heavy cliffs were on the north face and on the south a deed, wide, winding valley ran for half a dozen kilometers.

The Raptor had landed on the eastern side where the ground was flatter.

Apollo looked up and saw a black object in the sky and used his hands to shield his eyes.

“Another Raptor.” John explained. Apollo grunted his acknowledgment.

“I contacted Admiral Cain,” Apollo began again, now brushing the dirt off from his fatigues and tank top, “and she’s getting a few science teams ready from the fleet. I guess we’ll set up a base camp…” he looked around, “maybe over there near the north east section?” He pointed and stepped towards the rear of the Raptor. “Yeah, that looks good. Cover from the rocks.”

“I think he’s more interested in showing you his new toy, Apollo,” Starbuck called from inside the Raptor.

“Alright… you coming, Starbuck?”

“We should go,” John stated. Apollo just motioned for him to hold on. “Carter and Baltar are already in there.”
==============================
==============================

John and Carter had both felt the static cloud their vision as they had neared what they had already labeled a temple. The similarities to the one found in Athens were evident.

The machine stood off to the side as Starbuck and Apollo entered. Each immediately had a reflexive reaction to look up and almost gasp at the majesty and size of the cavern.

“Gods… what do you know so far?” Apollo asked, hands on hips as he surveyed the entire chamber. He pointed at the central column and the five surrounding pentagonal pillars. “What are those?” he asked, walking towards them.

He moved cautiously towards the center of the chamber. Apollo could just barely hear the faint shuffled of two others, Carter and Baltar, behind the massive pillar, discussing, or arguing, about its significance.

“This really is amazing,” Starbuck whispered, turning around to see the full view of the cavern. She saw John looking towards the ground. “Something the matter?” She heard Apollo shuffle around.

“We found something like this on Earth, another chamber. It did something to us, um, the best way to describe it”-he saw concern on Starbuck’s face and curiosity on Apollo’s- “is sort of like a static or snow like you would see on a television.”

They were half way between the door to the chamber and the center of the room.

“And is this affecting you now?” Apollo asked warily. He flexed his jaw. “What will that do?” He continued without waiting for John to answer.

John looked at Starbuck and then Apollo. “Yes.” He walked past the two pilots. “But we’ll be fine.”

It came and went, the ‘static’. The sensation wasn’t pain, not in the absolute strict definition of the word. Instead, it felt more like something off-putting, like one would feel if they believed they were being watched. It was strange for the machines, not being able to quantify what they were feeling, but hardly debilitating.

“This is very interesting,” Baltar yelled over. He was smack in the middle of the column, in front of the smallest pentagonal column. It stood a little above average waist height. Baltar ran his hands over the stone lettering on the column. “This is ancient, very ancient, Kobolian.” He shook his head. “It was obscure even on Kobol. The glyphs. I think this confirms it then.” He looked expectantly over at John and Carter.

Baltar reached out and touched the glyphs, his lips moving quickly as he tried to decipher them. “Those three signify Jupiter… hm, they’re using the Tauron pantheon. Interesting.” He clicked his tongue. “We think that Tauron might have been the first or second colony established… Tauron and Caprica could never quite resolve it, too little evidence either way.”

“So you can confirm this is from the Thirteenth then.” Carter said to Baltar. The scientist nodded, then shrugged, then looked worryingly at the machine that was staring at him, and then nodded earnestly. Carter just stood while the scientist kept changing his mind. “We’ll assume it is.”

Starbuck had walked up to stand beside John, with Apollo next to her. “So you were right then,” she said with a smirk and a gentle backhand slap to the machine bicep. “See, I think”- Baltar moved away from the central column, towards the left- “…what the frak.” Kara whispered.

She felt light, weightless, like she was swimming.

Her feet moved her forward and what she heard as a whisper, her husband was raising his voice, asking her what she was doing. She waved him back as she took a step onto the platform.

In the center of the writing on the column was a magnificent red, orange, blue, and black symbol. A swirling mandala, an eye within an eye within a storm. Her hand slowly extended and her fingers glided slowly, from top to bottom. Her lips quivered with silent movement- prayers- as her eyes moved with a strange ferocity over the image.

“Kara… Kara,” Apollo called her name, concerned. Carter and Baltar were attracted by his commotion and John looked once at Apollo, his machine eyes devoid of answers, and Apollo stepped up. “Kara, what are you-”

He reached out and gently touched her arm. She had unzipped her flight suit and had tied the long sleeves around her waist. His finger slid off her sweaty arm as she staggered back and brushed past him. Starbuck began to fall back, with both John and Apollo reaching out to catch her.

Behind her was the central pentagonal column. Small, as dark as obsidian, and with sharp, pointed corners.

Her hands reached back and she fell, slicing a line down her forearm. She yelped as she seemed to break from her trance. The blood spilled onto the black as night face of the column. Apollo grabbed her before she fell to the ground.

“Kara, what the frak was that?” he asked forcefully though gently. His eyes glistened as his pupils dilated from concern and fear. He knelt down and helped her into a kneel.

“Yeah… Lee… I’m okay. I, my mother, she had me draw that once… I…” he hand reached out and her pointer finger extended, pointing at the mandala. “I-”

A crack of thunder sounded. The door to the cavern slid shut, it smashed into its frame and hissed and squealed as the seal became airtight.

The lights dimmed. Apollo had a pistol out.

The two pilots and Baltar were huddled into a defensive circle by the machines, already wary for attack. Memories of the T-800 ambush flooded their neural nets, as impossible as that would be here, thousands of light years from Earth, they took no chance. Their defensive protocols were automatic, reflexive.

Extended on the floor from the central platform with the six pillars was a stoned and marbled walk way, a slight off-red color. It extended, like the tip of a spoon, into a circle. The same mandala on the colossal central column was on the floor.

The red began to glow like a magnificent ruby in the sunlight. The orange was as fierce as the sun. The blue a deep sapphire. Each color reached up towards the ceiling and five sets of eyes followed. The white rods at the tip of the central column hummed and a white light exploded outwards and showered down like rain.

The lights converged, coalesced, into a globe, two meters above the ground.

The three Colonials watched as everything surrounding them turned black. To the machines, the static and snow increased, except for the center of their vision. All five saw the mandala on the floor ignite, the boom of thunder that sounded throughout the chamber was enough to shatter eardrums.

Apollo, Starbuck, and Baltar all winced, their mouth agape in silent agony. As deafness took hold of them the three felt a serene calm as the globe took shape. All five were on their knees.

For the most brief of second they saw a globe of light and hope. Each recognized it. Earth.


==============================
==============================

Gunnery Sergeant Chris Purcell was anxious. He was a twelve year veteran of the Colonial Marines and an experienced one at that. On the Colonies he had fought against insurgents on Sagittaron and against pirates in two separate campaigns.

He had been in half a dozen platoon to company-sized engagements before the holocaust and Exodus.

On New Caprica he had partnered with Soto in their execution of New Caprica Police and in ambushes of Cylon patrols. New Caprica and the assault on the Cylon derelict at the Lion’s Head Nebula had been his most recent action. He didn’t count Gina’s rampage on Pegasus. He wasn’t ignoring her victims, but he couldn’t shake the guilt that he’d been responsible for her crimes as a complacent crewmember who had stood by.

He shook his head, opened his eyes wide, and blinked once, twice, and then flexed his jaw. He shrugged his shoulders to adjust his combat vest and ran his hands over his sub-machine gun one last time. He tapped his vest to double check where his magazines were and he visually spotted two flash grenades and one frag grenade sitting quietly in side pockets.

Purcell nodded to a Marine opposite him, Corporal Santos. He’d worked with Santos before. The corporal was a Galactica Marine but had been part of the landing party that had accompanied Athena and Carter and brought them their shiny new weapons to smash Centurion toasters into tiny little chunks of scrap metal.

He was a good Marine. Disciplined and well-rounded in his skill set.

The Gunny nodded to himself as he received a signal from the pilot. They were thirty seconds out from the site. He stood up and grabbed a handrail and activated his throat mike. A storm had appeared and it was raining, and the drops were pounding off the hull like boulders.

“Alright. Major Adama missed his check thirty minutes ago. We’ve tried establishing contact, nothing. Galactica’s telescopes tell us the Raptors are parked outside where they believe there’s a temple or whatever the machines found.” He shrugged. “The radiological alarms also went balls to the walls about thirty-two minutes ago. There was also some weird ass thermal reading readings coming from the temple thing.”

“Nukes, sir?” one of the Marines in the back of the Raptor asked over the roar.

Purcell shook his head and then wiped his mouth to clear off the disgusting taste of algae and then licked dry, cracked lips. “I don’t think so…” he saw the ‘what the frak’ looks and head bobs of confusion. “The radiological alarms said something radiological… could be a power plant going active. I don’t know. But we lost contact. We’re going in hot. Fire team Alpha will go in first covered by Bravo and Charlie. Do this right.”

“Cylons?”

The veteran beat down a reflex to roll his eyes. Most of the kids here- and he did see them not really as kids, but young men- were about six to ten years younger. But they still saw him as some ‘wise old man’ archetype for the ship’s Marines.

“Don’t know, Cal,” he shot back to a lance corporal who would be leading Bravo. “Raptor Two will have Delta and Echo secure the Raptors and be our reserve.”

The Gunny tensed his legs as he felt the Raptor go from a nearly three hundred kilometer per hour speed to a hover in a split second. As usual he felt his guts swish about inside his torso and the familiar feeling of a need to puke, which he repressed skillfully, as the Raptor came down a bit quick for a combat landing.

He popped out a small PDA from his pocket.

Over his shoulder and through the canopy he saw Raptor 2 had already landed slightly up the slope and its Marines were filing out and already securing the two Raptors; one the machines had piloted and one Apollo and Starbuck had piloted.

He checked the PDA. A third Raptor was on over flight beaming recon video and had a direct feed into his wireless headset for intelligence, just in case. The feeling of rabid paranoia was gripping, but there were procedures and a radiological alarm and Major Adama being incognito were enough to send the warning and demand action.

The Raptor jostled as it hit the sandy ground and the hatch seals twisted, hissed, and a stream of hot and incredibly humid air raced into the cabin. The rain still came down and bit at the Marines as they jumped from the wing to the ground, the sand and dirt turning into a lightly colored mud.

They advanced quickly and methodically, one fire team and then another. Purcell kept a split eye on his PDA and one ear open for any warnings from the Raptor in over watch above.

The signal that the Raptors were secured came in over Purcell’s wireless and he clicked his throat mike twice to confirm. His team continued moving up, leapfrogging quickly but vigilantly.

They reached the mouth to what had been described as the entrance by John to Adama before the Pegasus XO and the CAG had taken a Raptor out here to investigate first. He mentally shook his head. They should have taken a squad with them for security but he then silently snorted at remembered they probably had the equivalent of a company of Marines with them in the two machines.

Corporal Santos signaled back. Footprints. Bingo. Purcell took out the a thermal and motion scanner, but nothing could penetrate the rocks. He signaled for Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie to move up.

==============================
=============================

Major Adama groaned and rubbed his forehead gingerly. He gasped and his eyes shot opened as he felt the metal of his pistol grip in his hand. “What the frak?” he whispered and looked around viciously to remember why he had his pistol clutched in his hand. “Oh Gods, Kara!” He yelled when his eyes caught sight of her, lying on her side, back to him. He pushed himself over and shook her. “Kara!”


“Oh Gods, Lee, not so loud,” she groaned, rolling herself onto her back and looking up into his eyes. She heard his gun slide back into its holster and felt his arms wrap around her and her around him. She kissed him until the magic vanished when Gaius Fraking Baltar reminded them of his presence.

“Oh, what the frak was that.” The scientist muttered. He was sprawled on the floor, face down. His hands were stretched in front of him as he searched for something and brushed against Starbucks pant leg. She kicked his hand away. “What?” He pushed himself up and massages both sides of his temples furiously. “Ahhh.”

“Did you three see Earth?” The three Colonials heard.

John and Carter were sitting up and in a flash and silent hustle stood.

“Are you three okay?” John asked, stepping over and kneeling in front of Starbuck and Apollo. He kept his hands to himself and instead opted for a deep visual scan. Apollo and Starbuck were more preoccupied with each other and didn’t notice the machine weirdly staring at the two of them. Satisfied there was nothing wrong with them, John stood up and moved over to Baltar.

“I got him,” Carter informed Planck. His CO curtly nodded. “That was Earth.”

“That was Earth?” Apollo asked. “How in the name of Tartarus does this place have an image of Earth?” He coughed. He stood up and helped Starbuck up. “This makes no sense.” He said. He brushed himself off and winced when he saw the gash in Starbuck’s arm. His fingers pressed gently on the wound and Starbuck playfully shoved him and tugged back at her arm. “You’ll need to rub some disinfectant in that.”

Starbuck shot him one of her grins. “Oh thanks, Lee.” She rolled her eyes and giggled. “Okay,” she turned her attention to the two (or three) she assumed would know the answer. “What the frak-”

They heard shuffling as the Marines rushed in. Major Adama spun and positioned himself in front of Starbuck, his hand already on his pistol. Starbuck’s fingers graced hers until she saw the black armored, algae covered Marines.

They fanned out from the door, which had re-opened, and had their rifles up as they scanned the chamber. Four Marines approached cautiously and Apollo recognized their commanding NCO.

“Gunny,” Apollo said, pulling his hand off his grip and relaxing himself. He felt his heart beat slowing after it had almost leapt from his chest and pounded its way out. “We’re alright.”

“Sir, we had no contact and a radiological alarm.”

Apollo cocked his head, though it felt more like a jerk. “No contact? Wait… how long… radiological?”

“You missed your scheduled check in over thirty minutes ago and we detected a radiological signature. We thought…” Purcell hummed to himself and snorted. “Well, we thought maybe the Cylons had snuck down here or something.” He relaxed fully and waved for his team to stand down and called to the team on the Raptors to stand down. “I honestly don’t know, sir.” He tapped the side of his tight and a few spare pistol mags clicked together. “I guess it’s better to over react?”

Adama sighed with a slight underlying ‘um’ sound then furrowed his brow and nodded. “John,” he turned around. “What the frak happened?”

[kclcmdr]

Hmmmmm....
Both Shaw & Carter are getting lecture'd & advices from their superiors...

Baltar is getting mind-fr'k'd again...

And they have enter the exalted Cave of memories ...

[Rastamon]

“Anyway! This is as far as guys look.” He made a knife motion with his hand at the bottom of the neck. “Eyes never go below that and are locked forward.” Helo tapped his gloved hands right above his knees. “Anyway, have you talked to her?”

*chuckle* That's so American/North European. Actually, in Mediterranean and Latin cultures, many would frankly look to compare. They are a lot less prudish about that kind of thing. It's quite telling that fewer Latin/Mediterranean men are insecure about their sizes than their northern counterparts because they've seen and they know.

To top it off, Colonial cultures would seem to be offshoots of the Greco-Roman cultures in which nudity isn't a big deal. These were cultures were they created statues/murals of sex as garden ornaments and decoration. To us, they seem pornographic. To them, they weren't porn.

Heck, the Olympics had nude running and nude wrestling as sports!

The Colonials, I think, would have similar attitudes, as shown in having unisex bathrooms. Though there may be some who are more prudish than others, like Billy Keikeya who literally had his brain shut down when he walked into that military washroom.

Anyway, great update! Great reveal of the Temple of Five's capabilities. All they need is to power the Temple up again and stand on the mandala platform, thus experiencing a projection.

[Norgarth]

“How in the name of Tartarus does this place have an imagine of Earth?”

'imagine' should be 'image'.

[Bryan]

Norgath: Thanks for catching that.

kclmdr: I don't know if I'd call it a cave of memories. Memories have to happen first, right?

Rastamon: I was thinking something along the same lines. If they have unisex bathrooms it's probably not a big deal. I'm sort of thinking it might be a military thing. And Helo I think could plausibly be a little bit more prudish. Plus I was going more for funny than strict historical accuracy I will admit.

And I have just a touch over 6,000 words done on Chapter 32.

[Bryan]

Question: When Cameron looked at that chip in "Something blah blah at the One Two blah blah Point" episode she could tell it was the wrong nanometers or something by looking at its construction. It appeared like she was examining it. Does anyone have any ideas on what, exactly, she was doing? Zooming in that far to see the actual circuits or whatever not being X nm apart?

[Rastamon]

Originally Posted by Bryan

Question: When Cameron looked at that chip in "Something blah blah at the One Two blah blah Point" episode she could tell it was the wrong nanometers or something by looking at its construction. It appeared like she was examining it. Does anyone have any ideas on what, exactly, she was doing? Zooming in that far to see the actual circuits or whatever not being X nm apart?

Haven't seen the SCC, but I expect that this ability is done by that Termie HUD ability in the eyes that automatically zooms at an object and analyzes its properties and compares the object with others on file.