The cruiser slid right through the melee, hovering close to Galactica, making it past the big guns easily. Those were trained on the masses of fighters—fighters intended to accomplish exactly what they did: distract the Viper squadrons and draw them away from the real trouble. Galactica was about to be breached.
And boarded.
Tigh looked over at Athena in horror. "We're being breached," he said.
"That's impossible," she cried, watching the battle unfold in front of her. There were so many Cylons.
The guns were about to melt into Galactica's hull, they were firing so rapidly. Without the Tylium, their reserves were dwindling with every breath she took. But even so—she could see it—the Viper line was holding.
How had anything slipped through? It was useless to wonder about it. It didn't really matter.
Something had slipped through. A Cylon boarding warship, tearing its way through Galactica's hull right that micron. Like the monsters they were, they'd spotted the wound in Galactica's hull made by the bomb that Jinkrat had never intended to explode in such a dangerous, vulnerable spot.
"This is critical!" Athena cried. "Our only defense is those Council guards."
Tigh looked at her, his face a mask of disgust and worry. "We might as well send old women and children down to face those Cylons," he said.
"They're all we've got," she said. "The Vipers can't pull back. They'll be picked off like flies if they turn now."
Tigh nodded. He issued the orders to the Council guards—some fighters they were. Koren the boy could do better than them, Tigh thought darkly. The guards would probably run and cower behind the Council's dais, along with all the other sniveling baby men and trembling old women.
"Boarded!" came a voice over the comm, full of desperation. Athena turned, hearing the voice even from where she stood on the bridge.
"How many do you have?" Tigh said quickly, ignoring the Council guard's alarm.
"I don't know," the Council guard said slowly. "Seventy, maybe eighty."
"Go!" Tigh said. "They're breaching on Beta Deck, right where the bomb went off."
"That means they'll come out right at the—" the guard said, pausing for long microns. "The bar!" he said, showing an unexpected knowledge of Galactica's engineering layout.
"Get whoever you've got, with as many weapons they have," Tigh commanded. "The Cylons must not be allowed to board Galactica."
"I will, President Tigh," the guard said. Then his image faded to black.
"Lords of Kobol," Tigh muttered. "Old men, women, babies, and cowards standing against the Cylons!"
Athena looked back at Tigh. Then she reached down to check her sidearm.
"We'd better be prepared for anything," she said.
Tigh also checked his pistol, nodding at her, but saying nothing. There was really nothing to be said.
Darkly, Tigh wondered how many tin cans he could take down before—
But there were more communications coming in, and before he thought too much more about the inevitable, he was back to directing the Viper battle in space. All that lay between the people of Galactica and the fracking Cylons—a bunch of sniveling, whining, yellow-bellied baby men dolled up in fancy black uniforms that didn't mean a thing. A bunch of cowards who'd run crying and whining at the sight of Baltar, who answered to that traitor Aron for a few cubits.
Tigh would rather have had some of those refugees from Jinkrat's rebel forces than this crowd. What would they do faced with Cylon centurions? Tigh had a pretty good idea, and it wasn't something he wanted to think much about.
Tigh's hand itched to get his pistol. He wanted nothing more than to leap down to Beta Deck and "greet" the Cylons the way they deserved.
But even the great warrior that Tigh was, this was one fray he couldn't join right away. He and Athena were bound to the bridge as long as it lasted, he thought, sighing.
The Cylons poured out of their ship like deadly insects fleeing their nest. Jumping into the bar, they encountered no one, their red eyes scanning for danger, or for prey. They had their orders. They were to take these soft, ugly humans and destroy them, keeping only a few left that their leader commanded. But then again… in their small, limited minds, there were more than a few confused tin-cans among them. The orders weren't coming through very clearly. Nothing had come through clearly since they got to this accursed place. And none of the Cylons liked very much what had been done to get them here.
Cylons didn't question orders, but there wasn't one of them—not that they thought too much about anything in any case, but they did have opinions, if anyone cared to ask, which no one ever did, including other Cylons—and if they had to sacrifice a whole Cylon battlestar just to blast a hole into this accursed corner of space or time, or whatever it was, well, most of the Cylons didn't think that seemed right. But who were they to question? A Cylon was to do and die. A Cylon seldom wondered why. If he wondered too much, the Imperious Leader would just have him decommissioned and melted down into slag.
No Cylon wanted to be slag.
So they poured onto the Galactica in their hundreds. Besides, it made them happy to be hunting humans.
Most of them were very excited, circuits popping and eye-beams scanning, as they poured into this strange ship. In fact, most of them had never even seen humans, but a Cylon knew a human when he saw one—that was never much of a problem. Shoot anything that looked soft and didn't shine: that was the rule.
So, the lead troops were quite happy to see soft, moving things as soon as they left the first area where they had landed.
They were happy right up until the time blue laser bolts slashed out and blasted them back into the bar, the lead troops smashing back into the others with the force of the fire.
"Humans!" one of them cried. He was having issues firing back, because his arm seemed to be missing. It was even worse when, in a rage, the centurion behind him grabbed his other arm and ripped it off, right where it was joined to his shining silver torso, tossing it back, where it landed on a whole new crowd of boarding troops, casting them all into confusion and disarray.
The ragtag defense squadron in the hall paused and cheered when the Cylons who emerged from the bar entrance fell back, wailing and squealing at their wounds.
The security guard moved his hand to caution the defenders arrayed behind him.
"This is just the first wave," he said.
"But we beat them!" one of the men cried.
"Cylons are slow," the guard said, showing unexpected insight. "But they don't really know fear. They'll be back. That ship that's breached our hull holds hundreds of them."
The motley defenders seemed to understand their situation for the first time.
"We could seal the corridor," one of them said. "I've got charges. We could toss them in and—"
"A temporary solution at best," the guard said. "They've got borers, and unlimited manpower compared to us. They'll just send in more centurions and workers. They don't care about those at all. We've got to stand and fight. It's our only chance." Grimly, he surveyed the group.
"Let's do it," one of the others said.
Soon, all were joining in a cheer.
"We've got nowhere to run," the guard told the squadron as they crouched in fighting position.
"Neither do the Cylons, sir!"
For the first time in centars, the guard smiled—and then he began to laugh, even though the menace was right there, a few yards away down the corridor. And they had only microns before the Cylons were back—smarter this time, expecting resistance, and fully prepared.
Chapter Twelve
LORDS OF Kobol!" Doctor Salik cried as the two men carried the prone form into sickbay. Baltar's body had arrived.
The men laid the body on an exam table. They were both wild-eyed; Doctor Salik thought that he recognized them from engineering. The events of the last sectare had carried them far from their usual duties, he thought, but there seemed little to say.
He gestured for
Cassi to come assist in the examination—she had returned, unable to find Starbuck—but she seemed distracted, leaning over Sheba with a strange look on her face.
"We've gotta get going," the men told Doctor Salik. He nodded to them.
"Fracking Cylons!" one of them said. They turned to leave.
"Wait!" Doctor Salik cried. "What do you mean?"
"Didn't you hear?" one of the men said, breathless. "They got into the Galactica—they're headed for the bridge."
"Yeah, they're getting hold of everyone they see. Lords only know what they're—"
"We gotta go!" the second man cried, tugging on his partner's arm. "Come on!"
There seemed no point in Doctor Salik complaining about another patient to join the horde that had long before overwhelmed him and the rest of the sickbay staff. He looked at the awful wound in B altar's chest.
Salik had never really hated Baltar, their old enemy—not like other people had. Half-heartedly, he moved his med-probe over Baltar's body, and thought about the old man's life. A very sad life and a lonely one, the Doctor thought. He didn't think that Baltar had ever really had a friend. Maybe things would have gone differently for Baltar—for all of them—if Baltar had been able to accept Adama's friendship. Friends meant everything, Salik thought. He glanced over at Cain's body. Some friends would be lost, soon, he thought.
"Cassi," he said. "Come here, look at this. Most curious." Salik had never seen that sort of readings. Not from a dead man, anyway.
"Give me a moment," Cassi said. "I'm checking Sheba—she's growing unstable, Doctor." In fact, it was a miracle that Sheba was still alive. "Can't stop just now—"
And just like that, Cassiopeia collapsed.
Maybe it was stress, or more likely it was a combination of hunger and pregnancy and stress, the request for a moment of her attention being the final straw on the daggit's back. Whatever it was, one moment Salik had a dead man on his hands, forcing himself to at least give a cursory look—and the next moment he had four critical problems, Sheba, Cain, Baltar, and now Cassi!— As Salik struggled, a small figure entered sickbay. Salik looked over his shoulder and saw the boy, Koren.
"Cassi!" Koren cried, immediately sensing danger.
"What's the matter?"
"She's fainted, Koren. Make sure she's all right, and I'll finish her work."
When Salik got a look at Sheba, he nearly fainted himself. She was completely critical! The bleeding was so profound. In fact, she should have been dead.
But she was clinging to life. He cursed the situation they were in. They had been forced to use traditional transfusions, but Sheba's blood was almost unique. There was nothing left—he couldn't give her his blood. That would kill her. Ordinarily, his stem-cell enhancers would take care of this. Sheba could build her own blood back up, with the help of plasma. But those were long-gone, used up even before that last awful battle.
Salik shook his head, and then he looked over at Cain.
Cain was still in some kind of stasis beyond life and death.
"That's it!" Salik cried, running for the transfusion equipment. Cain's blood!
As he exposed Cain's pale, lifeless arm, he whispered a brief prayer.
Salik was a doctor, and not very religious, but he knew that Cain had been found and brought back for a reason. To save Sheba's life!
As he worked, Koren came up. "Cassi's breathing fine, Dr. Salik," he said.
"Thanks, son. I'll get her a cold compress, and she'll be fine soon enough."
As her father's blood entered her body, Sheba's eyes flickered. "What… ?" she asked, and then suddenly her eyes went wide. "No!"
Sheba, coming awake, was pointing at the door.
A Cylon centurion strode arrogantly into sickbay. His red eye scanned, and he immediately started toward Cassi's limp form.
"I come for the woman," he said in his horrible, mechanical voice.
"Oh no you won't!" Koren cried. He had a gun in his hand— for the life of him Dr. Salik could not have imagined where it'd come from (through the truth was that Koren had taken it surreptitiously only a moment before from Baltar's hand—the very pistol Apollo had gently closed Baltar's fingers around after the Council chamber melee). Koren aimed the pistol at the Cylon, and before the creature could even begin to react, he had blown the Cylon away.
And that was how Koren shot his first Cylon and became a real warrior.
The mob that had gathered on deck six to lynch Apollo not a centon before was still milling about, hoping to scent blood, when the Cylons stormed that section of the Galactica.
They got to smell blood, all right.
Their own blood.
Seven Cylon warriors burst into the corridor, armed and battle-hungry, shouting commands.
"Surrender or die!" shouted the Cylon commander.
"Clasp your hands behind your head and form a line in the center of the corridor!"
"We're going to die," whispered an old man—the same old man who'd whispered to Apollo as he'd been dragged before the Council.
"Do as they say! Are you trying to get us all killed?"
The old man whacked a Cylon with his cane—unfortunately, Bojay wasn't there to see the senior citizen making good use of his cane. The old man got a Cylon beating for his valiance.
"Stupid human animals," said the Cylon who'd taken the cane blow and administered the beating.
"You will all become slaves!"
"Never," said the old man in a bare whisper.
As the Cylon commander instructed two of his troops to march the civilians to the boarding ship, where they'd begin their life of slavery.
And took his remaining troops to the bridge.
"I can't make sense of this," Tigh told Athena.
"What?" she said, struggling to keep track of the battle. The Vipers had split into two wings. This was incredibly dangerous; the Cylons could go through the weak center and drive straight toward the Galactica.
"They've broken through at the hull breach," Tigh said. "We're hearing from the defense squadron—the Security Guards are in retreat." Then Tigh's face changed.
"Athena," he said more slowly, looking at her in horror. "The guard we talked to is alive, but barely. He's trying to make it to sickbay."
"Tigh," she said. "What are you—"
"He said he had seventy men with him down there. The Cylons came in wave after wave. They killed… at least a hundred Cylons… he says. But there were too many. They were overwhelmed. He's only got ten men left. Those who can are headed here."
"Lords of Kobol," Athena whispered.
"I don't think they can make it in time," Tigh said.
"The Cylons are headed here, and fast."
"All right," Athena said, checking her weapons belt. "That's it."
Tigh nodded. "Just you and me."
Pistols at the ready, Tigh and Athena waited.
On the battle screens, the Vipers fought on, but it seemed utterly hopeless.
Microns later, the bridge alarms sounded. The Cylons were at the doors, guns blazing.
Athena and Tigh crouched behind the console, firing in unison at the Cylon intruders.
Dozens of silver centurions fell in the huge firefight—wave on wave on wave of them, fearless and bloodthirsty. In moments parts of the bridge were in smoking ruins.
Then all at once, the Cylons retreated.
"They're regrouping," Tigh told Athena. "Be ready for anything."
"This is the bridge," Athena said. "They won't destroy it. Galactica will be useless to them if they do that."
Tigh shook his head, and then his pistol. It was red-hot. "That's assuming they know what they're doing," he said. "I wouldn't ever credit a Cylon for knowing that."
Suddenly, everything fell silent.
Something was flashing on the console. Cautiously, Tigh rose and went to look.
"Athena!" he cried. "There's something new—it's—" But Tigh was halted by a blast from a Cylon centurion who'd barreled into the bridge. The bolt
struck him in the thigh and Tigh fell, groaning and firing back at the intruder.
With a great cry, Athena came out, blazing at the Cylons. She took off the head of the one who'd shot Tigh, and the others paused a moment. Then they slunk back behind the bridge doors. Panting, Athena went to Tigh's side.
"I'll be okay," he told her. "Go! Get them!"
Athena rushed forward, and saw, to her complete shock, that a new fleet had joined the battle in progress. These ships were massed behind the Cylons, and they were bearing down fast upon the three battlestars.
The Chitain! They had come, and this time, they weren't fighting alongside the Cylons, they were giving them everything they had—like they were fighting their last stand.
"Don't look a gift Boray in the mouth," Athena said in a low voice.
She watched the Cylon fighters pause. Vipers harried them as the attack halted. The Viper line joined once more—that was it!
Now they were giving the Cylons heavy fire as the Cylon fighter cover turned to protect their rear. And a Chitain wing was coming up on their flank.
"Tigh! It's the Chitain—only they're giving Hades to the Cylons!"
Tigh, groaning, struggled to his feet.
"Tell the Vipers to turn back. It's our only chance."
"Right," Athena said, immediately realizing the opportunity that the Lords of Kobol had given them. It was the barest chance, thinner than any hair on her head, but if the warriors could get back to Galactica, they might just manage to get these Cylons off the battlestar and regroup.
"The Chitain," Tigh said. "I wonder what made them decide to—"
But there was no more time for talk. The Cylons at the door were coming in again.
Athena and Tigh crouched together, firing wildly. But their weapons had faith and strength on their side, and once more, the tin cans were driven back.
Still in the thick of the battle, Troy and Trays flew wing to wing.
"I can't believe how many there are," Troy said over the comm.
"More to give my loving attention to!" Trays cried, peeling off and banking, firing on a pair of Cylon fighters.
"Hotshot," Troy grumbled, following his partner. Then his eyes refocused. A whole wing of Cylons was coming at them—it was eight to two.
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