Adama gazed at him trying to assess what part of what Leoben was saying might be true—if any of it. He shone the lantern in Leoben’s face, which was pale and beaded with sweat. The man seemed to be breathing fast, too. “You don’t look too good.”
Leoben opened his mouth, but seemed not quite sure what to say. Before he could respond, though, Tyrol’s voice cut the air. “Be careful with that, all right? Hey! Be careful with that! Look out!”
Adama turned just in time to see a large, caged rack of bombs overbalance and topple. As it crashed to the deck, crewmembers scattered for cover. When it landed on its side, one of the cage doors popped open, and out rolled a single shiny metal canister with red stripes around it. Its activation light came on and it was blinking red. “Take cover!” someone yelled.
Adama saw it coming toward them. With a yell, he grabbed Leoben and hurled him through the hatch into the dark compartment, and dove that way himself. He’d only begun the movement when the bomb exploded, throwing both of them through the opening, with a great thunderclap of light and heat.
As he hit the deck, he nearly blacked out from the concussion. But the force of the blast slammed the hatch closed, landing them both in blackness.
Chief Tyrol and Specialist Cally were the first to reach the hatch that had slammed shut on the Commander. It was flaming with residue from the bomb. “Commander! Commander Adama!” Cally shouted outside the hatch. She couldn’t get close enough to touch the hatch. The waves of heat drove her back.
Tyrol was busy trying to get around to the side. “Stay back stay back! It’s hot it’s hot it’s hot it’s unstable!” Tyrol was yelling. He shone a flashlight down onto the hatch area, trying to find an attack point for getting the damn thing open. It was going to be tough, he realized; the heat had warped and possibly fused the metal. It was a miracle none of them were hurt out here; the bomb must have put out intense, but localized, heat. He whirled around and pointed to a couple of crewmen. “You guys—go back to the ship! We need handlifts, fire equipment, and a plasma torch!”
“Wait—wait!” Cally was pulling at his arm. “Chief—listen!”
Inside the compartment, Leoben was laughing maniacally, as Adama coughed, trying to clear his lungs of the smoke and the smell of welded metal. The hand-lantern still worked, thank the gods. They struggled to their feet.
Outside the hatch, Adama could hear someone shouting his name. “Yeah!” he shouted back. He managed to get another breath. “Anybody hurt out there?”
“No sir!” he heard. It was Chief Tyrol. “We got some equipment coming, sir. We’ll get you out of there, but it’s gonna take a while. This hatch looks like it’s fused pretty good.”
Adama grimaced. The last thing they needed was to spend manpower extricating him and mystery man here. “No!” he shouted. “Get all the bullets and equipment into the ship first! We’re okay—don’t waste time on us!” He squinted, trying to see where this compartment led. “Is there another way out of here?” he asked Leoben.
“Yeah, sure,” Leoben said with a smirk.
Adama chose to ignore the smirk. He turned back to the hatch. “Listen, Chief! We’re gonna go out another way!”
“Sir, I don’t think that’s a wise idea,” Tyrol called back.
“You’ve got your orders. Tell Colonel Tigh he’s in command until I return.”
There was a slight hesitation, before he heard Tyrol acknowledge, “Yes sir.”
Adama turned to Leoben and gestured with the flashlight. “Let’s go.”
Leoben shrugged and slouched away down the dank, smoky passageway that looked as if it led much deeper into the station. In here the place looked more like a dungeon than a munitions warehouse. Water was dripping from the ceiling; evidently there was a leak somewhere, or malfunctioning environmental controls.
Adama rubbed his face with a grimace and followed Leoben into the gloom.
CHAPTER
35
Raptor 312, Patrolling for Survivors
Sharon Valerii frowned, completing the calculations for the short-range Jump. This would be her sixth Jump, and it would have to be her last. She had expended a lot of fuel in a mostly fruitless search for survivors. Not completely fruitless—she had located one small freighter with a crew of three and a cargo of fresh citrus products, and another rickety ship carrying textiles, electronic parts, and a few passengers. She’d sent both on to the rendezvous point. But it was hard to say that one of just two military ships in the growing ragtag bunch should be burning up its precious fuel searching the skies for so little.
Still, the president had given her an order.
She checked the plot, checked the spin on the FTL drive, and executed. In a moment, there was the familiar feeling of folding into herself, passing through a strange space-time boundary, and unfolding again. She blinked to clear her head, checked the dradis for Cylons first and survivors second—then, when she found nothing, turned on the wireless scanner.
Almost immediately, she heard a distant transmission in the blind. “This is refinery vessel Tauranian to any Colonial ship. Is anyone out there? Please acknowledge.”
Sharon’s heart leaped for joy. A refinery ship! That meant fuel for the fleet—or at least the possibility of mining some. She checked the dradis once more, switched to a more distant scan, and saw it this time—a faint blip at the periphery of her field. She set course toward it with a short blast, conserving fuel—and as soon as she had it in sight, she keyed the wireless. “Tauranian, Colonial Raptor Three-One-Two. I have you in sight. What is your condition?”
There was a short delay, and then an answering voice that sounded breathless with relief. “Raptor! Am I happy to hear from you!”
“Same here, Tauranian,” she answered. And it was especially true, now that the ship was coming into view. It was indeed a full-sized asteroid-miner and refinery rig, much of it an enormous collection of fuel tanks, bound together in the shape of a huge shoe box. “Please tell me you’ve got some Tylium in those big, beautiful tanks.”
“Almost full. What’s going on, Colonial? Is it true the Cylons have comeback?”
Sharon’s thoughts darkened. “Afraid so. It’s bad. Real bad. There’s not a lot left back on the homeworlds. Do you have functional FTL?”
“Holy frak…” There was silence for a few moments. Then: “Affirmative to the FTL.”
Sharon guided her Raptor alongside the ungainly but precious ship. “Good. I’m sending you a set of coordinates. I need you to Jump at once to rendezvous with the fleet.”
“What fleet? Who else is there?”
Sharon hesitated, struggling to voice the awful truth. “Every-one who’s left.”
The Gathering Fleet
There were now fifty-some ships gathered in formation around Colonial One, five hours out from Caprica at normal flight speed. The ships were of every shape and size, from private yachts and couriers to the massive, multi-domed botanical cruiser Space Park, which President Laura Roslin and Billy were presently visiting. Under a beautiful clear dome, they walked through a lush garden with the skipper of the Space Park, a large, soft-spoken black man with bright, kindly eyes. He was dressed in a short-sleeved, white uniform shirt with gold bars on the shoulders.
“Most of the passengers are from Geminon and Picon, but we’ve got people from every colony,” he told Laura. They were threading their way among crowded groups of passengers, who were either moving nervously through the garden, or huddled together in shock. Many of them looked as if they had gathered here under the dome for no reason other than the hope of finding comfort in numbers. Everywhere they walked, people could be heard asking one another if they knew of any word from this home-world or that.
“Give Billy a copy of your passenger manifest and a list of all your emergency supplies,” Laura said to the captain.
“All right. What about the power situation?” the captain asked. “Our batteries are running pretty low.”
“Captain Apollo will be making an
engineering survey of all the ships this afternoon,” she replied.
“Ah—” said Billy, behind her, causing them both to turn.
“Actually the captain said it would be more like this evening before he can coordinate the survey.”
“All right—this evening, then,” Laura said. “But you will get your needs tended to, Captain. You have my word on it.”
“Thank you, Madame President,” the captain said, shaking her hand.
“You’re welcome.”
They continued to stroll through the gardens, savoring a moment of respite. It might well be her last chance, Laura thought, to enjoy such a moment of tranquility. They came upon a young girl, seven or eight years old, sitting by herself on a long, unfinished wood bench, beneath a canopy of low, tropical trees. The girl was holding a rag doll in her hands, twisting and kneading it. She looked up at their approach, but did not speak as Laura sat down on the bench beside her.
“Hi,” Laura said, pulling off her glasses to gaze at the girl. “What’s your name?”
“Cami,” the girl said, in an untroubled tone.
“Hi, Cami. I’m Laura.” She studied the girl with a soft smile for a moment. “Are you alone?”
Cami nodded.
The captain spoke up. “She was traveling with her grandmother. But the grandmother’s been having some health problems… well, since the announcement. Not to worry,” he emphasized, gesturing toward the girl with his hand, “we’re taking care of her.”
Cami seemed to have decided that Laura was trustworthy. She suddenly spoke, in precise syllables. “My parents are going to meet me at the spaceport. In Cap-ri-ca City.”
“Spaceport. I see,” Laura replied, swallowing back a hundred things she might have said.
“We’re going to dinner,” Cami continued. “And I’m having chicken pie. And then we’re going home. And then daddy’s going to read to me. And then… I’m going to bed.”
Laura reached out with a smile, and gently smoothed Cami’s hair. Then she nodded to Billy and the Captain, and rose. “We need to be getting back,” she said softly.
Colonial One
The cabin was quiet, for which Laura was profoundly grateful as she leaned back against the headrest of the leather seat. She needed time to think, to rest. So much to be done. So few resources. Fuel shortages, food shortages, thousands of people on the thin edge of despair and panic. The weight of her responsibility as president was like nothing she had ever felt, or imagined. I need time to absorb it all. Time to come up with answers. But instead of answers, her thoughts were full of memories of that little girl in the park. So young, to be going through something like this. As if it’s any better to be old. Old and dying of cancer.
“Madame President?”
She focused her eyes. “Captain—”
Lee Adama sat in a facing seat, holding a piece of paper. “We got a message from Lieutenant Valerii. She’s found a fuel refinery ship. Filled with Tylium.” A big smile cracked his face.
Fuel for the spaceships? Her heart lifted, though she was too tired to show it. “Oh. Good. About time we caught a break. That brings us up to about what—sixty ships so far? Not bad for a few hours’ work.”
Lee grinned briefly. “No, sir.” He quickly became more sober. “But only about forty of those ships have faster-than-light capabilities. We should start transferring people off the sublights onto the FTLs as soon as possible.”
“Yeah.” She closed her eyes for a moment. She opened them again, sensing that he had something more to say.
He did, and there was urgency in his voice. “I don’t think we should stay here much longer, sir. Sharon reports picking up signs of some Cylon sensor drones, probably looking for survivor ships.”
That brought her back to the present. “They’re… mopping up?”
“It looks that way, sir.”
Laura considered. “Am I right in assuming that they wouldn’t be… mopping up… unless they’d already”—she swallowed back her horror at the thought—“finished off the colonies?”
Lee grimaced, and did not hide his feelings. “That would be my assumption as well. And certainly consistent with the reports we’ve gotten. We know all twelve of the colonies were hit.”
Laura nodded. Twenty-three billion people, at last count. Twenty-three billion….
CHAPTER
36
The Survivor Fleet
Sharon came out of Jump with a flash, and was stunned to see the size of the fleet that had gathered in her absence. Large ships and small. It was practically an armada. She checked for the refinery ship Tauranian, and was relieved to see that it had come out of Jump just ahead of her. She keyed her wireless. “Colonial One, Raptor Three-One-Two. I’m back and I brought a friend.”
The answering voice was that of Captain Russo, on Colonial One. “Welcome back, Boomer. Got a lot of thirsty ships here eager to make your friend’s acquaintance. Did you pick up any other contacts out there?”
“Negative,” she answered. “There’s no one left.” No one that we can spare the time and fuel to find, anyway. She piloted in silence for a few minutes, leading the refinery ship through the jumble of vessels toward Colonial One.
As she scanned her instruments, something caught her eye—a new blip on the dradis screen. It was a fast-moving craft on the outside of the fleet. Fast-moving like a Cylon raider. “Got a visitor!” she announced sharply.
“I see him. Can you jam his signal?”
“Trying,” she said, snapping switches on the panel. Helo, I need you! Nothing she did seemed to have any effect on the incoming craft.
The Cylon sped into the midst of the fleet, then back out—and vanished in a flash of light. Frak! FRAK! “It’s gone. Colonial, I’m pretty sure it scanned us…”
Laura stood in an urgent meeting at the forward end of the first-class compartment, with Lee Adama, Billy, and Captain Russo. Russo said flatly, “It definitely scanned us before it Jumped.”
Lee tensed, and when he spoke, it was in a strong voice. “We have to go. Now. The Cylons will be here any minute.”
“Can they really respond that fast?” Laura asked.
“They can, and will. They are almost certainly mustering a squadron at this very moment.”
“Will they be able to track us through a Jump?” the President asked.
“No sir, that’s impossible.”
“Theoretically impossible.”
“Theoretically,” Lee conceded.
Aaron Doral had joined the group, scowling. “Madame President, there are still thousands of people on the sublight ships. We can’t just leave them.”
“I agree,” said Russo. “We should use every second to get as many people off the sublights as we can. We can wait to Jump until we pick up a Cylon force moving—”
“No! We’re easy targets,” Lee said sharply. “They’re going to Jump right in the middle of our ships with a handful of nukes and wipe us out before we have a chance to react.”
“You can’t just leave them all behind!” Doral protested. “You’ll be sacrificing thousands of people!”
“But—we’ll be saving tens of thousands,” Lee responded, and his voice became fast and urgent. “I’m sorry to make it a numbers game, but we’re talking about the survival of our race, here. We don’t have the luxury of taking risks and hoping for the best—because if we lose, we lose everything.”
He looked squarely at Laura. “And Madame President, this is a decision that needs to be made right now.”
She gazed back at him, remembering the last time she had faced a decision like this. That time she had followed her heart, not her mind. She’d opted to stay with the disabled liner, despite the fact that they had no way to defend it—and only through Lee’s fast thinking, and the grace of the gods, had they come out of it alive. She dared not make that mistake again.
With a soft voice that belied the knot in her stomach, she said, “Order the fleet to Jump to Ragnar immediately.”
&
nbsp; If it weren’t for the buzzing in her head, she would have sworn that time had come to a stop. Everyone had walked away from her—with urgency, with sadness, with anger. She was scarcely aware of their departure. Billy was still here. He must have something he wanted to say. The buzzing, though, was all she could hear.
Finally, Billy broke through, his words sounding distant, then drawing near. “Madame President, something else you should be aware of…”
She stared across the cabin, seeing nothing. “I have cancer,” she said suddenly.
For a moment, there was no answer. Then: “I know.”
She turned her head to look at Billy in amazement.
He looked ready to explode with tension, fear, sorrow. He was carrying burdens someone his age should never have to carry. “Little things you said or did,” he explained with difficulty. “A couple of comments you made. I don’t think anyone else knows; I haven’t said anything to anyone.”
She looked away again; she could not bear to face another human being as she said, “My prognosis is doubtful.” She paused for a heartbeat. “I wish I could say it was the least of my worries. But the world is coming to an end, and all I can think about is that I have cancer and I’m probably going to die.” Another heartbeat. “How selfish is that?”
Billy scarcely breathed. “It’s not selfish. It’s human.” After a moment, he turned sadly and started to walk away.
Laura watched him, her gaze narrowing. “Is there something you wanted to say to me?”
He stopped in the doorway leading to the next compartment, then turned. “Well, I—I just thought you should know. That little girl you met earlier, Cami?” His fingers tugged nervously at the book he was holding in both hands. “Her ship can’t make the Jump.”
She heard his words, and yet did not hear them. She stood frozen with regret and remorse… and she could not breathe, or even change the pained smile on her face, until something in the back of her brain was able to take those words and put them into a container where, at least for a little while, they could not hurt her any further. “Thank you,” she said at last, with a slight nod, releasing Billy from the awful spot he had just put them both into.
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