"We shoot it down," said Boomer.
"Tone it down, Boomer," Starbuck said. "Let's take time to hear their side. They must've had a good reason to pull out when they did."
"Yeah," said Jolly, "they're cowards."
Starbuck heard Boomer's soft malicious laughter in tacit agreement with Jolly's accusation.
"How do we propose we get to the Galactica, flyboy?" Boomer said. "You gonna take us all by the hand and guide us home?"
"We'll find it, don't worry. First, we've gotta make it to one of the fueling space stations or we're not gonna get off the pot."
"What makes you think the Cylons didn't take out all the fueling stations?" Boomer asked. "I mean the question with all courtesy, of course, skyrider."
"We'll just have to find out, won't we, Boomer?"
"You say so."
Boomer's plane banked and swept off from Starbuck's portside wing. Jolly followed suit. After a moment of hesitation, so did Starbuck.
Fortunately the fueling stations, which were hidden from Cylon view by camouflaging force fields, were all intact, and the squadrons were able to refuel. With the scanner transmission no longer jammed, they worked out the coordinates for the Galactica right away. Starbuck was puzzled by the fact that the battlestar was in the region of their home planet. That location only seemed to support Boomer and Jolly's accusation that Adama had taken the Galactica away from the fray for cowardly reasons. During the long trek back, as they made two more hops to fueling stations, Starbuck convinced Boomer, Jolly, and the other fuming pilots of the need for caution—not only to wait to find out what had happened, but to save themselves and their planes. Still, he could feel his own rage build to a boiling point.
As they neared the Galactica, Starbuck ordered the flight patterns set on a direct line to the battlestar's landing deck. When he pushed his own course button, however, sparks from the control panel flew suddenly all over the cockpit. At the same moment a piece of the instrument panel popped out and dangled from its moorings. The ship started to waver from the dictated flight path. Trying to keep it straight manually, Starbuck had to deal with the electrical shorting directly. His mind telling him to work slowly, he forced his fingers to keep wires apart and try to sort out the problem.
"Reading you, Red leader one," said a voice on the communicator. "From here something appears to be wrong with your craft."
"Damn right something's wrong. In trouble, in trouble."
Tigh's voice cut in.
"We read you, Red leader. How can we assist?"
Starbuck tested his portside stabilizing rocket. Normally its thrust could be controlled by a lever on the instrument panel. But this time, pressing the lever, he found it wouldn't respond to his touch. Instead, it coughed and swung about in an erratic rhythm.
"Battle damage," Starbuck reported. "Stabilizer won't keep steady thrust. Put a systems analyst on the line."
"On the line," said a voice immediately. Starbuck recognized it as Athena's. He glanced quickly at the small, round picture of her he had pasted as a souvenir at the top of the scanner panel, and could see her in his mind scowling over the gadgetry of the guidance system. "What's your condition, Starbuck?"
"This is no time for trainees, Athena. I'm in real trouble."
"I'm the best you've got right now, pilot. You'll stay in trouble if you keep talking like that. What's your fuel?"
He glanced at the gauge.
"Low."
"All right. Run the check with me. Alpha circuit, close and alternating to left servo circuit . . ."
Reaching deftly past the sparking circuit board dangling from beneath his instrument panel, he closed off a circuit switch.
"Alpha circuit closed and alternating," he said, "to left servo circuit."
He checked the stabilizer, which was now dead, not responding a bit to his touch on the lever.
"No response."
"Omega C circuit," Athena said. Her voice was calm, aloof, sounding much like it did in response to his sly proposals in the ready room. "Closed and alternating to servo support circuit . . ."
"Alternating to servo support circuit."
He felt the sweat becoming roaring cataracts down his brow. The stabilizer was still not responding.
"Does not respond."
A small choking sound—the engine beginning to misfire.
"Fuel zeroing out," he said.
Tigh's voice cut in again, addressing Athena.
"Bring him at zero thrust, with all stabilizers cut off. There's no choice."
"Wait," she said. "One last check. Is your right stabilizer steady?"
"Right stabilizer steady."
"Cross patch right servo to left."
"Cross patching right servo to left."
Working as patiently as possible, Starbuck made the cross-connections on the panel. He looked out again at the stabilizer. It teetered limply, stone cold.
"No luck," he said. "I can't reverse thrust. Get everyone out of the way, I'm coming in hot."
There was a pause before Athena's answer came.
"All right, you're cleared to come in."
Her voice sounded apprehensive.
"You'll be coming in like a missile," she said. "The deck is cleared for an emergency."
"Thanks for the comforting thoughts."
"Don't mention it. See you on deck."
"That's a date."
Boomer's voice cut in.
"Would you listen to this guy? He loses one lousy stabilizer and he's gotta have all the ladies out to watch him ventilate the flight deck. If the ladies'd only—"
Jolly's voice interrupted.
"Good luck, Starbuck."
"Thanks, Jolly. Red leader to flight deck. I'm coming in hot, ready or not. I hope you guys aren't counting off for neatness."
His sweat felt like a raging sea in a torrential storm. The deck swung out from the Galactica way before he was ready. He knew the deck hands inside the battlestar were in readiness for disaster, ready to mop up his blood if that turned out to be the necessary duty.
He could lose this one. Well, the famous Starbuck luck had to run out some time. He engaged all the devices on his instrument panel that still functioned. His ship careened down to the deck. He could feel himself on the verge of blacking out as he made his descent, and he shook his head to clear it. Just before landing, he was able to turn the viper to something resembling the correct entry altitude. He knocked out a series of landing strobes as the viper touched the deck. Sparks flew in all directions. As his ship shuddered into the entry port and hit the emergency force cushion, he did black out . . .
. . . When he came to, after only a few seconds of darkness, he saw the small emergency vehicles racing out of pockets in the walls toward the crashed viper.
Everything was okay. He was in terrible pain, but everything was okay. The Starbuck luck was still as good as gold. He headed through the airlock.
"Starbuck, are you all right?" Athena cried, as she ran up to him and into his arms. He hugged her perfunctorily, released her abruptly, and started walking toward the elevators.
"For a guy who just had a whole fleet shot out from under him, I'm fine," he said. "No thanks to your father."
Athena hurried after him.
"What are you saying about my father?" she said. "Do you realize what we've been through?"
"Yeah? You should've seen how we spent our day. Joyriding, just joyriding. Keeping the Cylons off our necks while you took off on a pleasant little cruise away from—"
Athena stopped him in front of the elevator.
"Starbuck," she said, "don't you know what's happened?"
He guided her into the elevator, a bit roughly.
"Bet your life I know what's happened, little darling. You should get a scan of what this baby looks like from out in space when she quietly catfoots away from the scene of battle. A beautiful sight, serene—unless of course she happens to be your base ship picking up and sneaking away, leaving you high and dry like a—"
"Stop it! Listen! The colonies, Starbuck, they're all gone. All of them. Wiped out by those Cylon—"
"Wait, what are you talking about? Destroyed? How's that—"
The elevator door opened, and the raucous noise of the bridge drowned out the remainder of Starbuck's question. Angry, he stormed into the room. Nobody noticed him. The voice of one of the bridge officers rose over the clamor.
"Fighter ships coming in on both decks, sir."
Tigh moved toward the officer and said:
"Give me a full report. What's the count?"
Tigh? Starbuck thought. What's he doing giving the orders? Where's Adama? There can't be anything wrong with Adama! He felt disoriented, thrust into some alternate world where Adama no longer existed and the terrible cowardice of removing the Galactica from her proper place had somehow been transformed into heroism.
"Sixty-seven fighters in all, sir, twenty-five of our own."
"How many battlestars?"
The officer paused before revealing the information.
"None."
"What?!"
"We're the only surviving battlestar."
"My God." Tigh looked shocked. When he spoke again, it was in a choked voice: "Make the pilots from the other ships as welcome as you can."
Starbuck strode up behind him and said:
"Little late for that, Colonel."
He heard Athena, keeping pace with him, whisper:
"No, Starbuck, not—"
He could sense all the bridge officers staring at him, as Tigh turned toward him.
"For some of those guys you want to welcome," Starbuck said, "it was a tossup to them whether to land here or blow the Galactica to pieces with a bellyful of torpedoes. Maybe they got talked out of it, or maybe nobody had any left, but—"
"What's the meaning of this insubordination, Lieutenant?" Tigh barked.
"He doesn't realize what's happened yet," Athena interjected. "I told him some of it, but it doesn't seem to be sinking in. I don't think any of them really know."
Puzzled, Starbuck looked around him. He noticed Boomer and Jolly, looking just as furious and frustrated as Starbuck felt, just arriving on one of the elevators.
"Realize what?" Starbuck said. "That the old man turned tail and ran, leaving all our ships to run out of fuel, making—"
Tigh's angry gesture compelled Starbuck to stop in the middle of his sentence. The Colonel nodded toward one of the officers.
"Put the tapes of the transmissions we monitored back on the scanners. For our young patriots here."
Starbuck started to complain further, but the pictures that came abruptly onto four of the screens on the console effectively silenced him. The pain of watching the disaster on a single screen was stretched to unbearability when multiplied by four. Starbuck's fists clenched in frustration as he became aware that there was no chance he could climb back into his cockpit and battle these Cylon warships that had worked their grisly havoc hours before.
"I'm sorry," he said, "sorry."
Behind him he heard Boomer and Jolly, muttering sadly, joining him in his remorse.
Adama stood on the old familiar hill, inspecting the line of the new, unfamiliar battle scar that ran in a deep rut across his land. The line seemed to go off to infinity, or at least to the base of the row of fires that raged at the edge of the crumbling, far-off city. Every building there must be ablaze by now.
He headed down the hill, unaware of Apollo following close. A faraway sound of many voices was growing rapidly louder. Glancing over his shoulder, Adama could see the flickering of a dozen torches beyond Apollo's viper. Roaming mobs already. Well, he would deal with them when they reached him. Unless they had some kind of fanatical, wild-eyed leader, he believed he could handle any mob.
He turned back and resumed his walk down the path, the one he had so carefully laid, stone by stone, in the first year of his marriage to Ila. The broad, deep battle scar cut across it, too, running all the way toward his home. He kept his eyes away from the house for as long as he could, but finally he had to look. Once an attractive series of living units—he had laid out its interlinking half-circles himself, as diligently as he had put down the stones in the path—it too was now sliced down the middle by the straight-line scar of battle. On one side of the line much of the dwelling still stood, but the other half, the half containing Ila's sitting room, was now charred rubble. All lingering hope of Ila's survival left him as he stared at the damaged structure. There was little chance Ila had wandered off by herself. She knew his first impulse when free would be to return to her here, and she would wait. If she were here now, she would have run out of the house into his arms. What was her schedule for the time of day when the attack had occurred? Late afternoon. That was the time she usually took a nap. She had probably been asleep then, or been awakened by the shrill squeals of diving Cylon fighters. He did not like to think of her in terror. It was unlikely anyway. In recent years Ila had become slightly hard of hearing, although she didn't like to admit it. Anyway, she could sleep through anything, no matter how loud. She had probably stayed asleep.
Stop this rambling! he thought. She's dead! Admit it to yourself. She has to be dead! There's no other possibility.
Adama felt the tears well up in his eyes. Walking into the house, he didn't have to stop for the scanning device, which had been reduced to a knobby lump of debris and dangled by a wire from a jagged hole in the wall. The front door hung uncertainly from a single hinge. He went directly to the living room, to the row of holographic photographs that had been implanted into a wall years ago. There was a single source of light in the room, a rectangular candle with each of its twelve permanent wicks ablaze. Each flame represented one of the twelve worlds, and Adama felt a momentary odd surge of joy when he saw they all still burned, as if the candle were saying to him that the colonies must, and will, survive.
He remembered the pleasure Ila had found in that candle when she had discovered it in a nearby town bazaar. She always delighted in searching for bargains, and would often go too many uneconomical miles out of her way and come back arguing that her latest purchase was especially economical. The flickering light from this special candle cast strange auras on the series of pictures she had so carefully selected before arranging for the laser procedure that made them part of the wall. There were photographs of the entire family, he and Ila, Athena and Apollo and Zac. Zac. He could not bear now to look upon the eager hopeful smile of Zac, nor could he examine the chronological half-circle of photos that traced Zac from child to adult.
Adama recalled a recent conversation with his youngest son, one of the last talks they had had. Zac, somewhat drunk from a glass of the unusually potent Libran wine which always tasted so mild but provided such a heady kick, had revealed to his father his intention to eclipse Apollo. He said his whole life was directed toward bettering his brother's achievements. When Adama had begun to provide soothing fatherly advice, Zac had interrupted him by telling him he simply didn't understand.
"Father, all the time I was growing up, it was Apollo this and Apollo that, every second thing I heard about was some big heroic Apollo exploit. Well, okay, don't get me wrong, I'm just as proud of him as you and Mom are, as Athena is, but don't you see we all have somebody we have to beat. Sometimes it's just some idealized role model, sometimes it's somebody real. With me, it's Apollo. I love him, but I've got to beat him."
Adama had tried to convince Zac that there was more to life than a stratified sense of competitiveness, but the boy wouldn't listen. He had left his son that night feeling a vague sense of failure. Had he invested his children with a distorted ambition to succeed? Or was it the war that fired up his heroic ambitions? Perhaps Adama had devoted so much of his life to the war, hardly taking note of his own considerable achievements in it, that he had failed to give his progeny a proper perspective on life. Perhaps he had made Zac and Apollo, even Athena, pale copies of himself. All of them were geared to perform heroic acts, make important decisions, assume
leadership as naturally as others went about daily tasks. Years ago Adama himself had accepted such responsibilities as natural consequences of being his own father's son. Was it possible that the cracks in a life devoted so completely to military matters would start emerging in the third generation? No—he was being too hard on himself. Zac may have been unreasonably ambitious, but he was also young. Adama suspected that at the age of twenty-three he might have been similarly oriented toward success and just as energetic in talking about his future hopes. And his other children, Apollo and Athena, showed no signs of personal or psychological problems. Apollo, combining bravery with intelligence, was a fine fighter pilot, one of the best, and Athena's sharp-witted ability to synthesize information in order to come to a quick decision seemed to destine her for a command post.
As he looked away from the pictures of his children, Adama realized that he was exaggerating Zac's slightly besotted declarations because of his own deep sorrow. Zac had just shown a natural, youthful desire to flee from the nest. But even as he told himself that Zac's aspirations were not his fault as a parent, Adama could not quite rid himself of the nagging thought that perhaps they were.
For a moment he wished that all these pictures were not embedded so firmly in the wall. He would have liked to turn them around, face them toward the wall, as angry people did in the ancient novels he often scan-read during recreation periods.
Finally, he had to look at the pictures of Ila.
The poses in the neat circle depicted her at several ages from seventeen to fifty. The most recent photo showed her smiling broadly at her fiftieth birthday party the previous year. In the background he and the three children stood, their figures dimly lit, perhaps put in shadow by the glow of her pride. He reached out to touch the figure in the foreground of the picture, was surprised at the framing glass which blocked his hand from the three-dimensional figures inside.
He and Ila had both drunk a bit too much wine the night of that birthday and had foolishly speculated on the far-off future—on the day when Adama would have come to the end of his usefulness to the Colonial Fleet and could pension himself off to his home on Caprica. Even as they had spoken, they knew how absurd their hopeful speculations were. As long as the war continued, Adama would have refused retirement and pension, and was likely to serve in at least an advisory capacity after he became too feeble to command. In Ila's last letter, which arrived just before the beginning of the peace conference, she had written that if the conference was successful then perhaps their absurd hopes for the future might be realized after all. He had enjoyed a moment of hope—but just a moment. That was all the Cylons allowed, one moment.
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