BSG Fic: The Body is a Myth (1/3)
Jan. 11th, 2009 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaSo, this is that thing I was talking about. It's enormous and therefore in multiple posts. It's also finished. The first 2,700 words were originally posted in this post, although they are also reposted here as there have been some minor edits to that section. And I want it all in one place. As you can see, I started this over seven months ago, although it languished on my HD for about five of those. It's so odd to actually finish something. As ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hmpf says, I'm back in the fic fold. :/
PART 1
Title: The Body is a Myth
Word Count: 28,182 (complete: all three parts.)
Spoilers: AU from 4x09 The Hub, but major spoilers for 4x10 Revelations.
Rating: Um, PG-13ish, I guess?
Disclaimer: Not mine, making no money.
Summary: Laura dies and wakes up on a basestar, Natalie is alive, and D'Anna breaks Kara Thrace by telling her the name of the final cylon. Then, of course, they get to Earth. JUMP!
with many thanks toasta77 for the beta.
Laura Roslin died; so much morpha she was barely aware of Bill or the book. Of his son, or of Kara Thrace.
Laura Roslin died, a cold metal ring on her finger, two grieving men, and the harbinger of death at her side.
Laura Roslin woke up in a vat of white goo. She was a little disappointed. She was tired; she'd been ready, she'd felt done. But this was impossible. The hub was gone. This was a morpha-dream. She'd wake up, barely, to Bill and the book and his son and Kara Thrace and they'd start again, this waiting for death.
Thrace was terribly inefficient. She'd mention that, when she woke up, in her broken voice. She'd mention it if she could remember.
That room – the room where she had died (no, she reminded herself, the room where she was dying right now) – that room was a place where her thoughts never made it as far as her lips. Her brain was misfiring on morpha; her thoughts were eating themselves the way her body was eating itself, and this was the first time in days she had entertained an idea that complex.
She wondered if she'd forget it, when she woke up. If she'd forget this dream: the goo was warmer than it had looked in the hybrid's bath. The vat was so much more comfortable than a hospital bed.
Laura Roslin turned her head to the left and saw Natalie, the Six, kneeling. Natalie pressed her long, elegant fingers against Laura's mouth, just for a second, and said, “I'm so sorry, Madam President.”
“What for?” Laura asked. Her voice was high and clear: it was like discovering she could have been a concert soprano. She had forgotten what it was like to speak without effort.
“It's not a dream,” Natalie said. “I'm so sorry.”
* * *
It was a state funeral. Kara watched the Old Man put a flag on her coffin and then stand, resolute, as they opened the airlock and committed her body to the heavens.
Kara thought of Leoben.
When she got back to her rack, he was sitting on it. Shirt like someone had puked over it, sleeveless red vest held together with thick plastic buckles. He was smiling, wide and easy. Of course he was smiling: he was pleased to see her.
“What is the first article of faith?” he asked.
Because there was no one else in the room, Kara answered.
“This is not all that we are,” she replied.
“This is not all that we are.”
Kara closed her eyes. “What if it is?”
Kara opened her eyes, and he was gone.
* * *
Natalie had found a bathrobe for Laura. It was white and fluffy. She was sitting in it, with her real hair and a body that didn't seem to be dying, on an antique chaise with a cup of coffee in her hand.
“You seem very calm,” Natalie said.
“I'm dreaming,” Laura replied.
“You're not dreaming. You weren't routed through the hub. This basestar is...unique.”
“So you've told me.”
Laura sipped her coffee. It was so nice to be able to taste again.
“You'll see,” Natalie sighed. She sat down next to Laura at the other end of the chaise. “When you don't wake up on Galactica you'll believe me.”
“A magical basestar no one knew existed, with its own independent resurrection facility just happened to be near enough to pick you up after you were shot, and just happened to be near enough to pick me up, and yet, by either choice or coincidence, has failed to pick up a single other cylon passenger, despite the fact that you are now, as a species, and by your design, Natalie, facing permanent mortality? Does that about cover it?”
“Yes,” said Natalie. Unrepentant.
“Was it worth it?” Laura asked. “Did it give your life meaning?”
Natalie didn't turn to look at her. She sat, straightbacked, shoulder-blades tense above the cut of her tank top, honey-brown hair only half-hooked behind her ears. Eyes somewhere else. Somewhere far away.
“I saw...” Natalie said. “I saw a forest.”
For a moment, Laura saw it too. The sun caught behind such bright green leaves. Like nothing she had ever found on New Caprica.
“It was beautiful,” Natalie said, and grabbed Laura's hand.
* * *
“Who's the fifth?” Kara asked.
“You are. Didn't you know?”
“Who's the fifth?” Kara leaned over the metal table, and for a second, she saw Leoben, not D'Anna, lazing back in the folding chair.
“Laura Roslin.”
“Who's the fifth?”
“Admiral Adama.”
“Who's the fifth?”
“You ever going to get bored?”
“No. Figure I can just ask you about thirty-thousand more times and work it out through elimination. Who's the fifth?”
“Why should I tell you? I lost four of my five life-lines when your damn Colonel decided to out himself.”
“Who's the fifth?”
Leoben leaned forward and whispered, “Daniel Thrace.”
“What?” Kara asked. Her chest was ice. “What did you just say?”
D'Anna lifted one side of her mouth and an eyebrow and stared at her like maybe she thought Kara had gone crazy, or maybe she was about to laugh. “I said, 'you, sweetheart, haven't we been over this?' But apparently I was mistaken.”
“You said Daniel Thrace.”
The expression on D'Anna's face, this time, was unmistakable. Open-mouthed. Afraid, even. Kara thought of Leoben and his God; his quest to find something so much larger than him it would drive him mad. D'Anna had been inside the Temple of the Five and looked at her hidden siblings and found they were neither spectacular nor mighty. D'Anna was the master of mysteries, the one with secret knowledge: the Oracle. D'Anna had never looked at anything and realised she was small, until, perhaps, now.
It was like rebutting a parlour trick with a miracle.
“How can you know...” D'Anna managed. “You couldn't know that.”
Kara felt it, true and bitter as a puncture in her EVA suit. But she couldn't say the words. To admit it would be a sin. To admit it would kill the music: the endless piano, rolling and alternating, three-steps from repetition. Those deep, certain chords that dropped like anchors into her soul.
“Daniel Thrace,” she shrieked. “Never survived the attacks on the Colonies. You killed him. You killed Daniel Thrace, just like you killed everyone else!”
Kara stumbled from her chair. She banged against the door and yelled for the marines to let her out.
Kara Thrace realised, shaking in the corner of an empty compartment, that it would be easier to accept that she was a cylon, than to accept that Hera Agathon was never the first hybrid.
* * *
After three days, Laura began to suspect she had fallen into a coma. She was sitting with Natalie, watching the hybrid. When she wandered off on her own, she got lost, and there didn't seem to be anyone else on board.
“Autonomic vent functions are unaligned. Re-adjust point three per cent. The somnambulist accepts solipsism before her god. What is a deity?”
“There!” Laura pointed. “The somnambulist. That's me.”
“The coolant veins are losing pressure. Worship. All actions performed in service to a single goal. In service to the coolant veins. The coolant veins are losing pressure.”
Natalie leaned forward, her hand half an inch above the milky liquid. She wanted to touch everything, Laura had noticed. Like a child, exploring. It made her think of the Caprica Six in Galactica's brig and her naïve, trusting curiosity mixed with such bitter violence. She shivered.
“If you're the somnambulist,” Natalie said. “She seems to be judging your easy acceptance that this is just a coma.”
“I've always been more practical than religious,” Laura growled.
“Saggitaron!” the hybrid gasped. “A constellation that forms the most reliable navigational point should form the basis of a star chart. Course correction one quarter astern. Fuel redistribution.”
“Are we going to Saggitaron?” Laura asked.
Natalie shook her head. “I don't think so.”
“Jump!”
* * *
Helo was putting Hera to bed and Sharon was out flying a CAP when Kara started pounding on the door to his quarters. She flew in, saw Hera in the crib she had outgrown at least six months ago, and froze.
“Starbuck,” Helo said. “You okay?”
She blinked, worked her mouth a few times before she turned to look at him. “Not really,” she said. “I need you to put me in the brig. And take my sidearm,” she unclipped it from her holster.
Helo frowned. Kara shook the sidearm at him by the muzzle. “Dammit, Helo, you have to arrest me!”
“All right,” he said, taking the gun slowly, and deliberately. “All right, but let's talk about this first. What's got you so wound up?”
Kara dropped onto his bed. Helo sat down next to her. Hera, confused, stood in her crib and asked, “Dada?”
“Kara's a little upset right now, Hera,” Karl told her. “But she's going to be just fine once we have a chat about it, aren't you, Kara?”
“Gods, Karl, I'm not three years old.”
He pushed her shoulder, playfully. “Could have fooled me, Starbuck.”
She turned and stared straight at him. She said, “The final cylon is Daniel Thrace.”
Helo felt his eyes go wide and his nose wrinkle. “Daniel Thrace as in...”
“As in Daniel Thrace, Helo. As in the only damn Daniel Thrace that would make me come here and ask you to arrest me. My father.”
Helo nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Kara, it's not your fault. It doesn't make you bad. We're going to go to the Admiral and talk to him about this, and we're going to make it all right. You're not a cylon, Kara. You're like Hera, or Nicky Tyrol. There is nothing wrong with you.”
Kara shook her head. “I don't trust myself.”
“I trust you.”
* * *
Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, watching Hera watch her right back, and wondering how long it would be before the Admiral showed up and sent her to the brig, when the alarm siren sounded, and she heard Gaeta calling action stations over the tannoy.
She'd been wondering how to explain why she had never looked for her father after the attacks. The idea of going to Dee and getting her to check the Fleet's passenger lists had occurred to her, just once, a few days after the Olympic Carrier. But he'd left when she was a kid, and she'd never heard from him again, and who knew if he was even calling himself Daniel Thrace any more. Everything was gone, and the thought of one more disappointment, one last abandonment, had seemed too much.
In retrospect, that was a terribly convenient decision.
When Gaeta called for condition one throughout the ship, Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, watching Hera and wondering if there could be programming in their brains.
When Gaeta called for condition one throughout the ship, Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, trying very hard not to think of the other half of the equation. In this tiny scrap of civilisation, Kara Thrace was famous. And Daniel Thrace had never come looking for her. He'd never killed himself to resurrect where his daughter was and save her. He'd never even taken a shuttle.
“Action stations, action stations. Set condition one throughout the ship.”
Kara picked up Hera and started running toward the hangar deck.
* * *
Laura and Natalie ran into the cylon CIC, though to Laura, the name seemed odd. A CIC was full of blunt technology designed to withstand nuclear explosions and immoveable military personnel designed to do the same, not elegant water features and nouveau architecture.
Natalie plunged her hand into a waterbed and gasped. It took Laura a moment to realise what she was doing.
“Where are we?” she demanded.
“Back with your Fleet,” Natalie replied.
Laura wondered if this was a symbolic journey. If her body was about to die, or if she was returning to consciousness.
“They're launching vipers,” Natalie said, turning to her with a panicked expression. “We don't have any raiders. We're defenceless.”
Death then, Laura decided.
“We have to hail them, Laura.”
“How?”
Natalie reached across, grabbed Laura's hand and forced it into the water.
Laura thought her mind was on fire. The ship sang through her body. The dislocation was as bad as the worst moments of her illness, when the pain was so intense, she couldn't function. Time stopped. She hung, suspended in white noise. She saw the Galactica, she felt fear; a dozen vipers were coming to pierce her skin – small nubs of heat in a bone cold stretch. Natalie had been trying to tell her something. The ship had crawled inside her chest and was begging her to do something.
Oh what was it?
Talk to them.
Comm frequencies.
They bloomed in her mind. A web of thin lines daggering between the vipers and the Fleet.
“That one!” she heard herself gasp. She understood: somehow she needed to pick a strand of radiowave, and tell the ship to copy it, but she had no idea how. “That one,” she repeated.
Natalie, a presence so small in the shipworld of the waterbed that at first, Laura could barely perceive her, knew what she was doing. Natalie began to make changes, communicating with the ship at an unimaginable speed. It was like standing beside a waterfall and knowing every spit of spray was a syllable.
A line stretched between Laura's downturned palm and the Galactica.
“Now,” Natalie said. “Save us. Talk to them.”
“Admiral Adama,” Laura began, voice shaky. She was still in a world that was half-computer, half-deep space. She focused on her own feet against the deck of the basestar. On Natalie's hand pressed over her own. “Bill,” she said. “Please don't fire. We don't have any raiders. We don't have any missiles. We're not hostile. It's me, Bill. It's Laura.”
There were seconds and seconds of silence. Laura felt herself smile: she knew the exact look that would be on his face. Personal betrayal that the universe dare throw this trick at him. At him.
“If it makes you feel any better, Bill,” she said, surer now, in more familiar terrain. “I'm reasonably certain that I'm still in a coma in your sick bay, but on the offchance the universe is really this frakked up, on New Caprica, right after you grew that godsawful moustache, the day of the groundbreaking ceremony – do you remember that? You lied to me. You told me you were going to build me that cabin in the woods.”
After a pause, the words came. Slow, suspicious. Brief. “I told you I'd like to.”
“It was still a lie.”
The longest silence yet. And then, “I'm sorry, Laura. But this can't be you. You aren't the final cylon.”
Of course, Laura agreed with him, but she found herself unaccountably frustrated by his obstinacy. Here she was, returning from the dead in a cylon basestar, and even in her dreams, his response was to put his foot down and expect the universe to fall in line.
“Bill,” she sighed. “If you're really there and I'm really here, then I'm afraid we're both going to have to face some uncomfortable -”
“No,” he cut her off. “You can't be the final cylon because we know who the final cylon is. And it's not you.”
Well. She hadn't been expecting that.
“Perhaps I just really wanted to upstage Captain Thrace,” she said. “Does a basestar trump a viper?”
She thought she heard him snort.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“So far,” Bill said. “You haven't launched any raiders. And you're not setting off our radiological alarms. So I'm going to detail a squad of raptors to head over and secure your ship. If we lose contact with our people, for any reason, I'll authorise the release of nuclear weapons, and I'll blow your ship to hell.”
“That sounds entirely fair, Admiral. Believe me, I have as many questions as you do.”
* * *
Caprica sat on the floor of her cell, leaning against the cold metal frame of her bed. Action stations had been called over two hours ago, and still, they hadn't jumped. The ship hadn't been rocked by explosions. Who had found them, if not an enemy?
She closed her eyes and turned her cell into a forest. In a few more hours a long-faced marine would come into her cell and put a food tray on the floor while her companion aimed his automatic weapon at her (at her child). It might be days before anyone else came to speak with her.
She was lonely.
Even Gaius seemed to be avoiding her. She remembered their last conversation; days ago now.
“He doesn't care about you, you know.”
She had declined to answer.
“At least I never threw you across a room.”
She had declined to answer.
“Do you think this is it? This 'miracle'? You believe that's why you came here, that God was guiding your path? You threw your lot in with pirates and refugees. They won't even let you keep a pen, what makes you think they'll let you keep a baby?”
She had answered, quietly because her throat was full of tears. “That pen was never from you, was it, Gaius?”
He lit his cigarillo, the metal lighter snapping like a jaw. “The worst part is, darling, Saul Tigh has never even pretended to send you a pen.”
“Perhaps he can't,” she whispered.
“Oh, yes. Very likely.”
Caprica tried not to think of Saul Tigh on the Rebel Basestar. Of Tory Foster and Galen Tyrol and Samuel Anders. There'd been some sort of deal. D'Anna wouldn't reveal the identity of the final cylon, so Lee Adama had come down personally to ask for tips on how to make her talk. He stood, hands behind his back, suit pressed and tie straight, so earnest and so angry. It was an exacting politeness that spoke of coiled rage and, she suspected, quiet despair.
She had wanted to help him, but there was nothing she could offer. D'Anna did the talking, and the stealing, and the killing. At the end, if you were lucky, she left you standing. She had said this, to Lee Adama.
He offered her a tight smile and replied, “Not this time. She's our prisoner now.”
“That won't matter. She doesn't understand the concept of surrender. Or compromise. She never did. None of her.”
“But the rest of your people do. And now she's in our brig under armed guard until we can construct another of these,” he gestured around her glass-walled cell. “She's already lost, we just have to make her realise it.”
“Not if she keeps you guessing.”
Lee stared right into her eyes and said, “It doesn't matter. She's not going anywhere.” He turned to leave.
“Wait,” Caprica had said, hand outstretched. Too close, she realised. Her fingertips were half an inch from his pinstriped shoulder and she caught the angry twist of his lips before he redressed his expression to that familiar, distant shape. “You said my people understood compromise. What did you give them for D'Anna?”
She saw him consider her request and decide, presumably, that it was information she needed.
“D'Anna wouldn't play ball with either side. At one point, she had missile locks on the civilian fleet, the President and half the air-wing as hostages. Fortunately for us,” his smooth features creased, bitterly. “One of the final five decided to announce his identity, and tell us the names of three of the others. The rebels decided to exchange them for D'Anna, on the understanding that we'd share any information she gave us about the fifth.”
Her heart skipped; a double-jump that left her feeling dizzy and full of adrenaline. “And those four, who are they?”
Lee Adama sighed and ran a hand through his dark hair. “Tory Foster. Galen Tyrol. Sam Anders. And Saul Tigh.”
Her heart skipped; a double-jump that left her falling. She had grabbed the bedframe for support. She believed she had managed to nod, dumbly, as Lee Adama left.
Caprica tried not to think of Saul Tigh on the Rebel Basestar; tried not to wonder if he thought about her, if he missed her, if he had any answers. If he had tried to convince her people to demand her freedom also. The programs in her mind that kept her conscious thoughts away from her lost siblings seemed to have terminated in the face of specific information. She tried to reactivate the algorithms, but could not. She knew, and there was no going back. No happy hybridised family: she could not follow Athena's path. There was no acceptance for her here.
Caprica hid in the forest.
There were so many things she could not think about. They called action stations two hours ago, and Gaius never came to see her any more, and Saul Tigh had never even pretended to send her a pen. She did not know if the Cylon on the basestar even knew she was in captivity, and her one comfort – that the humans loved and coveted Hera as much as any child of their own – was gone. Because her child would be a Cylon, just like her, just like Saul Tigh who had his hands at her throat the last time they spoke.
Caprica hid in the forest, and thought it must have been a projected hallucination when a brown-haired Six walked in.
* * *
By the time Kara reached the hangar deck, the emergency was over. No one was really sure what was going on, but there seemed to be a basestar offering to surrender. She paced with Hera for fifteen minutes watching marines board raptors and get waved out of the tubes. Then she waited and paced more and watched as the raptors began to return.
Eventually she watched as the President – the dead-as-deep-space President – and a Six with brown hair, disembarked from Racetrack's bird, and the entire godsdamned deck went quiet. Dead as the dead President quiet.
The Old Man came down personally, with a glare that made sure everyone stayed that quiet, and Kara found herself shrinking up against a bulkhead to avoid him. She watched as he escorted Laura Roslin, hand out to help her down from the lip of the raptor, hand at the small of her back as they left the hangar.
Kara shifted Hera to her other hip, and nibbled at the nail on her thumb. If Laura Roslin was alive and had come back on a basestar, perhaps D'Anna had played her. She looked at Hera. Hera looked right back at her. Beautiful dark eyes, quiet and demanding.
She thought of D'Anna's eyes, the moment she had yelled her father's name. Frightened and alarmed.
“Are we the same?” she asked Hera, in a whisper.
Hera grinned at her and stuck her fingers in Kara's mouth. “Kara,” she said.
She should go back to Helo's quarters, wait for him to bring the Admiral. Or go find the Admiral and see what was going on with the President. Or see Doc Cottle. She should do something to sort out this frakking mess.
Instead she headed for the furthest section of the hangar: the place where they kept her viper. The perfect ship she'd flown back to the Fleet, when Earth had been a song in her mind – a piercing direction sharp as glass, sharp as a finger around the wet rim of a wine glass.
She missed it.
She climbed into the cockpit, sat Hera between her legs, and started going over routine pre-flight checks without switching on the power. She explained everything she was doing, and even though Hera was more interested in yelling at the deck gang and turning any dial within reach than listening to Kara, she felt herself relaxing.
* * *
Natalie pulled Caprica into her arms. “Are you all right?” she asked, and did not let go.
“I,” Caprica began. “Yes. I'm being well-treated.”
Natalie stepped back, cupped Caprica's cheek in her palm. “I asked if you were all right.”
Caprica gave a small, sad smile and shrugged. “Are you a prisoner too, now?”
This was Natalie, she was sure of it. Natalie the Six, who had chosen, even before Caprica's own celebrity had challenged the fabric of her nation, to wear her hair brown, to twist her mouth more fully when she laughed, and to keep it steady when she raged. She had been one of the first to follow when Caprica held Boomer's hand tightly in an attempt to remake the world. At the time, when Natalie had not been selected by lottery to join the New Caprican project, Caprica had been content to view it as coincidence. Now, she wondered if Cavil had arranged it, understanding, even then, that this would end them.
Natalie's mouth blossomed into a grin Caprica was not sure her identical lips could hope to match. Not now; not here. “I've come to take you home,” she said.
Caprica felt herself frown. The disbelief in her chest was something close to hope. It was wild, and she tried to crush it. “How?” she asked.
Natalie paused, throwing a glance toward the tinted window where there were, doubtless, observers. “The Rebel Basestar,” she said, carefully. “Is currently allied with the Colonial Fleet, but maintains its autonomy. But the basestar where I resurrected, is solely under my command.”
The emphasis was strange. A basestar was never under the sole command of a single individual. Even discounting the hybrid, even in this new nation of half-formed identity, consensus mattered. To stress the word – it was a message. Sole. Alone. There was no one else on board.
Caprica asked her own careful question. “When Athena shot you, I assumed that even if we were within range of the Resurrection Ships, the Cavils would box you. I mourned you.”
“Fortunately,” Natalie replied. “I resurrected far from their sphere of influence.”
Confirmation, then. They had been beyond the reach of the Resurrection Ships and Natalie had woken aboard an empty basestar regardless. There was only one ship that could be.
Her eyes widened. “I thought it was a myth,” she whispered. “A story we misremembered from our creation, before the Five left us.”
Natalie's eyes flashed a warning.
“It's a fully functioning warship,” she said. “Technically I'm in no position to repel boarders, but the Colonials will find it impossible to operate without our help. I've exchanged my basestar's membership in the Colonial Fleet under Adama's command, and our help to operate it in return for an amnesty for all Cylon rebels. That includes you.”
Caprica sat down on the bed.
“I've come to take you home,” Natalie said, crouching next to her. One hand, warm and loving, turned her face so that Natalie could meet her eyes. “We understand now, why you left.”
Did they? Even Caprica didn't understand. How could Natalie?
“It was...all going wrong,” she managed.
“Yes,” Natalie nodded. “It was.”
She grabbed her hand, and Caprica closed her eyes and felt her lungs shiver. They had been alone. They were never built to be alone. They were trees, in a forest. In a cell.
Natalie broke the silence. “Is it true?” she whispered. Caprica recognised her expression with the intimacy of experience. Awe and hesitation. The first time she'd seen Hera: a miracle in the New Caprican wreckage, she'd looked that way. Awe and hesitation. She had wondered if reaching for her would make her vanish.
“It's true,” Caprica said.
Natalie kissed her, bursting with joy. “You've been blessed,” she said.
Silently, slowly, Caprica nodded.
* * *
Athena climbed out of her raptor after the weirdest frakking CAP she'd flown in a long time, pulled off her helmet and stretched out of the top half of her flight suit, when suddenly, she heard her daughter's voice. Gleeful. Delighted. So high-pitched it carried over the din of the flight deck.
She turned, expecting to find Helo. She'd throw her arms around them both. But he wasn't there, and following the noise, she found Kara in her viper with Hera pushing buttons and flipping switches and shouting, alternately, “Viper!” and “Kara!” and “Go!”
“What are you doing down here, Kara?” she asked. “It's crazy out there, and you're babysitting in a viper? Where's Karl?”
Kara shrugged. “With the Admiral probably.”
“Momma!”
“Hey, baby. You like it in there? Don't worry, you'll like it better in a raptor, I promise.”
“Viper.”
“Kid's got taste,” Kara said. “Don't blame me.”
“Why is she with you? What are you two doing down here?”
“Seemed more interesting than waiting in your quarters for the Admiral to come down and throw me in the brig,” Kara grinned. “Do you think Roslin's a cylon?”
Athena frowned. “What the frak does that have to do with this?”
“You think she's a cylon?”
Athena shrugged. It wasn't a question she wanted to answer, or even think about, yet. If she was a cylon it would explain the dreams: she had them almost every night now. Chasing Hera, trying to save her from the Six, the Six who swore she was only trying to protect her. What if Roslin was the threat? It was easy to believe; she'd stolen Hera once already. But Athena's mind was a computer, and the logic undercutting her emotions told her Roslin had no motive. What could the President want that would be so terrible for her little girl?
“Hard to tell,” she grunted. “Grand re-entry in perfect ships is becoming a bit of a habit for you dead girls. I guess we'll have to ask D'Anna. Hope she tips her hand this time.”
“No need,” Kara said. “She already did.”
She climbed out of the viper and handed Hera over to Athena.
“She says it's my dad. Which I guess explains why every motherfrakking one of you seems so interested in me.”
Athena shifted her daughter's weight into a more comfortable position, and kept her expression neutral.
“What, nothing to say? No big comments about my destiny? Not pissed off I got there first?”
Athena sighed. “What do you want me to say, Starbuck? Congratulations?”
“Guess I just figured you'd have more of a response than rolling your eyes. Especially considering what Hera seems to mean to you all.”
“Firstly, you don't even know it's true. And second, if it is? You're a person, Kara. That's all. A person,” she bit out. “Maybe it took leaving everything I had behind to realise it, but I have enough problems with prophecies and destinies without looking for more. We're all just people, and we might get along a whole frakking lot better if we realised that.”
Athena shook her head and walked away.
As she left, she heard Kara punch her perfect viper.
* * *
“Well the good news is, your blood work matches the samples I took before you died, minus any signs of cancer,” Cottle said. “The bad news is, you died, and to be honest, young lady, that's not a symptom I can easily reconcile with your being here right now.”
Roslin nodded. “If I'm a Cylon, then I've been one from the beginning. Your blood tests would be useless.”
“Kara Thrace, on the other hand, is giving some interesting results,” he dropped his cigarette into a sample tray.
Adama stood, monumentally, at the foot of her bed. Lee straightened his jacket and took the clipboard Cottle handed to him. He frowned as he tried to understand the numbers on the page.
“What did you find, Doc?” Adama asked, like a tremor in the deck.
“Before she died, gods rest her soul, Cally Tyrol brought her son in. Thought he was allergic to the algae. It was nonsense, but she was having a rough time so I drew some blood to do some routine tests and put her mind at rest.”
“Was there anything unusual about Nicholas Tyrol's blood?” Laura asked.
“Not enough to think he was a Cylon hybrid, if that's what you're asking,” Cottle picked up his cigarette again, and settled it in the crook of his mouth. “But he did have a few anomalies, small things. I thought at first he might have Zarin's Syndrome, but he was missing the key marker. The kid was fine, just a little unusual. Happens sometimes, like an odd eye colour or abnormal height. And he certainly had a blood type. AB positive, if you're curious.”
“And what does this have to do with Kara?” Adama asked.
“Well, I compared it with the results from those tests we ran when Thrace showed up in the nebula, and her blood work has all the same markers. Like I said, it could be random. But the chances of that are damn slim. If I looked at those results without any context, I'd think they were siblings. Cousins at least.”
No one spoke.
Cottle finished his cigarette and dropped the butt back into the sample tray. “I'd love to stay here and chat,” he said. “But one of you decided to release the Cylon prisoner, and considering the difficulties Athena had, I'm going to give her a few pointers on healthcare.”
Laura drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head against them.
“Nothing makes sense,” she said. “Are you sure I'm not still in a coma?”
“Pretty sure, yeah,” Adama sighed.
“How am I even here?” she asked. “How are two Cylons having a baby? More to the point, how did any Cylon have a baby nearly thirty years ago? This is the second time I've been impossibly cured of cancer. Once is a miracle. Twice is a joke. Something doesn't add up.”
“Maybe when we find Daniel Thrace, we'll get some answers. Several people claim they knew him, as a resistance fighter on New Caprica, but he's not on any of the ships' passenger manifests. What's more, he never was. I've started a ship-to-ship search. But without a photo, it might take some time.”
“Have you told Kara about this?” Lee asked.
Adama closed his eyes. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Not yet,” he said.
“She has a right to know. This isn't her fault.”
Laura put her hand on his arm. “We know, Lee,” she said. “We can't find her.”
“What? How could you lose her?”
“It's been a busy few hours,” Adama muttered. “Helo told me what she found out from D'Anna moments before the President's basestar jumped in. Kara wasn't a priority if we had to fend off a Cylon assault.”
“No,” Lee shook his head, looking genuinely confused. “I mean, literally, how could you lose her, we're in the middle of deep space.”
“According to Chief Laird, she waited until the raptors had all returned, then signed herself out on a CAP. In the same viper she had when she appeared in the nebula.”
“And he let her? That thing's quarantined!”
“She's still the CAG. Laird had no reason to suspect anything.”
“How long has she been missing?”
“I didn't realise she'd left until I called for her to report to sickbay for this meeting. I have Mr Hoshi hailing her and tracking DRADIS. I told him to send word as soon as he found anything.”
“As soon as he found anything? He hasn't found anything yet? She can't have flown beyond our DRADIS range since she launched. It's impossible. You think she's floating out there cold?”
“I don't know, son,” Adama sighed. “Probably.”
Laura tightened her grip on his sleeve. “She'll be back,” she whispered. “She always is.”
* * *
Kara's viper was floating, dead. She was drifting like a chunk of debris, tumbling further from the Galactica and closer to the new basestar. Pretty soon she'd have to start up her engines for long enough to make a course correction so she wouldn't smash into anything.
They were probably hailing her by now. Probably looking on DRADIS. As soon as she fired up her bird, she'd be busted.
“Why are we out here, Kara?” Leoben asked.
He was wedged behind her seat in an impossible position.
“Could ask you the same thing,” she said. “Why won't you leave me alone?”
“Because you're lost, Kara.”
“Yeah and being found by you's been working out just great.”
“I only want to help you realise your destiny.”
“Didn't I do that already? I'm the harbinger of death, and you're all dying. I said I could find the way to Earth and I found the rebels who got us D'Anna and now we have the final five and it's supposed to be their turn for once. I'm through.”
“You're lost. You need to lead your people to Earth, but you haven't. It's a wound in your soul. I can feel it. You're mourning.”
“Which people would those be?”
“All of them.”
When she was a child, Kara sat next to her father on his piano stool, playing the descant melody while he cycled through chords that made every key her fingers chose into something beautiful. Her mother broke her fingers, later, because she was always getting into things she shouldn't, because her hands were never still. Her first flight test, it wasn't the flying – it wasn't the way she let rip with the blanks loaded into her guns and tore five targets to shreds in three seconds; the way she bucked her ship between the stars like a Geminese fundamentalist in a fit of divine ecstasy – it wasn't that. Those were things she learned to love later, when she realised that wasn't the way it was for everyone, when she realised that wasn't the way flying was supposed to be, ever and always, and she'd better damn well grab it and own it and grin and kick and punch her way through anything that kept her from it. That first flight test, it had been her fingers, curled around the joystick; dancing across the buttons and the dials and the switches. Her fingers flying a descant to the low, thrumming chords of the engine.
She squeezed her eyes closed, and pushed out tears.
Kara will lead her people to Earth. Kara is the harbinger of death. Kara is a frak up. Kara is a hybrid. Never one thing, always another, it would be an easy way to explain every messed-up moment of her life with biology. That destiny, always three parts denial, one part terror, one part inappropriate joy. Evidence that she was worth a damn, she was special. Something to justify the fact that Kara Thrace had lived while billions died.
The part of her that wanted to believe Leoben, the part that had come back blazing in her perfect viper. It was going to fix everything she'd ever done before because now she had something to be.
“You never chase the ghost,” her Flight Instructor had told her. “You never go after that one last target, that bastard you just can't keep in your sights, because for every time you catch him, and you're the big shot top gun frakking smoothest vipe in the Colonies, you get your ass smoked. You die like a punk because you forgot what you were doing and pinned your expectations on one blip. You ever find yourself in live combat, Thrace, you buckle down and do your job and bring your bird in safe.”
Kara flew her bird into a maelstrom chasing a ghost.
Leoben was humming music her father invented when she was seven from his impossible perch behind her seat.
“Stop it,” she hissed.
“You called it Aurora's Lament, right? It was the day you learned about the goddess of the dawn. You were sick. Your father bundled you up in your duvet and sat you by the piano and told you if you could push through the worst parts of your fever, it would break, like morning.”
“I was a kid. I was delirious. I don't remember.”
“You're lying. He told you – Aurora was a goddess because she promised that nothing would last forever, and her tragedy was that nothing would last forever. He told you your fever would pass, but you should mourn it, because it would never come again.”
“What does it matter? He was a toaster and he left me. I was a kid and he dragged me out of bed when I was so sick I should have been in a hospital. You wanna know what I remember? I remember hearing an entire godsdamned orchestra and thinking I was in some kind of concert hall with ghosts watching me from a balcony. I was too out of it to even hit the keys straight. Whatever he played later, he made up himself. I didn't help.”
“You wrote it all,” Leoben said. “And it was new.”
Starbuck tried not to think about that fever dream. Blazing white figures filing from a balcony, turning their backs on her. Leaving.
* * *
“Please,” Sam said. “You make sure this gets to her.”
“I got it,” Helo said. “I always do.”
“Thanks, man. I just, I gotta talk to her somehow, you know.”
Helo clapped him on the shoulder but didn't say anything. Sam ran his fingers through his hair and drew a shaky breath.
“You sure you're not coming?” Helo asked.
“To that new, that new basestar? No. What's the point.”
“With the new amnesty you have freedom to travel. I could get you a visitor's pass to Galactica. Better than a letter, right?”
“Helo, she won't take my calls. I've been writing to her for weeks and she doesn't reply. What, there's an amnesty and a couple of hours later she's ready to make up? I'm not stupid, man.”
“Didn't say you were. Think you're determined, though.”
Sam gave a shrug, and leant back against the wall of the ship. He looked as greasy and red-eyed as he'd been the day he fell from the Viper and broke his leg. It was worse when he was sober. Less desperate, Helo thought, but sadder.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“Oh, you know. Fine,” Sam said, closing his eyes.
“And the others?”
“I don't... I don't really know about the Colonel. He doesn't leave his room much. Ever. Sometimes the Leobens try to talk to him, but everyone else has given up. Tory she, uh, she's doing okay. I mean, I think she is. She spends a lot of time up in the CIC learning about those computers. The water ones. Star pupil,” Anders pushed his hands into his pockets. He was wearing blue jeans, and an off-colour pattern shirt that looked like it might have belonged to a Leoben. “You know it's weird,” he said. “This is my life now. This is my life.”
Sam was staring at the ceiling so hard, Helo thought he might start crying. He wanted to tell him about Kara, that they were more similar than Sam knew, and that everything would be different now. But that was classified. Kara was still missing, probably drifting dead in some viper in the middle of a civvy fleet in close formation. Stupid stunt. Just like her. Karl almost hoped she had disappeared on some new, miracle quest. At least that would be a mystery with a direction, not like this nauseous wave of revelations, every one breaking down something they had known was true, and none of them explaining how to make it back to solid ground.
“Hang in there,” he told Sam. “You'll see, it'll work itself out.”
“It's my life, Karl,” Sam said, like the idea had only just hit him. Shotgunned.
“Hang in there.”
“Yeah,” he shook himself, nodded forcefully. Helo had seen him do the same thing before Pyramid matches back on New Caprica; before he jumped into his bird. “Yeah, you don't need to worry. I'm doing okay. I've been staying with Galen – with the Chief. He has Nick and with the rumours about the Colonel and that Cylon in Galactica's brig,” he looked oddly embarrassed. “Well, it seems to be the only reason they ever want to talk to us. Have the Eights ever been like that? With you?”
Helo thought about the woman on the Hub mission, about all those bodies he nuked, any one of which could have been his wife and now never would be. “Yeah,” he said. “A little. You get used to it though.”
Sam actually laughed. “I hope so, man. I hope so. Because we've started sleeping in shifts so there's always someone awake to send them away.”
Helo laughed too. “Buddy, you realise how many people in this Fleet would kill to be you right now?”
It stayed funny for about three more seconds before they both really thought about what they'd said. About what being Sam Anders – or Karl Agathon, for that matter – meant. About who in Hades would ever want that.
“You'll get that letter to her, though, right?” Sam asked, shakily, into the silence.
“Of course, man. Of course,” Helo answered, resting a hand on Sam's shoulder.
* * *
Tory sat in the back of the raptor, opposite Captain Agathon. Technically this was a boarding party and once they landed, he would formally accept Natalie's surrender of the vessel. A heavy raider was flying formation to port and another raptor to starboard, carrying Cylon technicians and Colonial marines respectively. This raptor was for, Tory supposed, dignitaries. Karl Agathon, XO, representing the Admiral. The Six, Natalie, slender and miraculous. The Six from Galactica's brig, still slender and miraculous. And Tory herself. None of the others had wanted to come.
Tigh was a lost cause. She glanced at the Six from Galactica's brig (Caprica, she corrected herself), and wondered if anyone had told her that, yet. She had the steel-razor poise of all Sixes and a face that could turn from love to anger in an instant; at a muscle twitch, and often seemed to be both at once. Tory had worked that one out early, perhaps even on New Caprica; never cross the Sixes. Tory was used to them by now. That fifty-fifty chance; were they going to kill you or kiss you? It was the way the Leobens saw no difference between sanity and madness, or between themselves. It was the way the Sharons never seemed able to decide if they were in love with each other or desperate for the first ticket out of their naked yoga commune. Just like getting to know anyone, except there were a thousand of them with every possible permutation of mood represented, everywhere, all the time.
This Six was in a mood she hadn't seen before. Whether she was in love, or angry, or both, Tory thought, she seemed mostly sad. Lost, too. Like she wasn't certain why she was there. If no one had told her about Tigh, Tory decided, she wasn't going to be the one to do it.
She'd hoped for more from Sam and Tyrol. But she guessed it was disaffection more than human loyalty that had kept them from coming too.
They were both still mad at her for leaving. Didn't seem to matter to them that all she'd run from was a whole life of hiding and being hated for something that wasn't her fault. Wasn't any of their faults. Didn't seem to matter that they had labels and purposes: viper jock, grease monkey, drunken one-eyed robot XO. What did she have?
She had been trying very hard not to think about the President (Laura Roslin, she corrected herself) since she'd heard the news. She'd been trying very, very hard.
Sometimes Tory imagined explaining it all to Laura, and having Laura understand, and tell her it was all right. Or explaining to Galen that really, she hadn't had a choice. It was a matter of survival, for all of them, Nicky too. But Laura wouldn't listen, and Galen would probably try to kill her, and that was what God was for after all, wasn't it?
Sam and Galen let her sit with them at night, sometimes. Not that they really had anything to say.
* * *
It had been a bit of an oversight, Baltar had to admit, as a third centurion fell into step behind him. It certainly hadn't been his intention to set himself up as some sort of mechanical messiah. But it was hardly his fault the Leobens were so obsessed with the hybrid, the Sharons were so obsessed with Tyrol and the Sixes were so obsessed with whatever this latest new beginning was supposed to symbolise. So here he was, head of a group of religious fanatics with metal-for-bones and guns-for-hands who seemed to be exercising their newfound power of choice by choosing to follow him around.
It wasn't so bad around his human followers. The centurions seemed to gather at the entry way like imposing doormen, and Gaius had to admit he rather liked the effect. Their fondness for him had, in fact, been a deciding factor in the basestar's decision to approve his application for relocation. The centurions were sentient, he'd argued. The centurions should get a vote. Did they want to disenfranchise the centurions as profoundly as the humans had disenfranchised them?
He was beginning to wish he'd kept his mouth shut. A fourth centurion swung into step behind him, with a shunt-hiss of servo motors and that swinging eye-buzz he'd come to associate with silent, demanding questions he couldn't understand.
Once, a few weeks ago, they'd surrounded him for an hour, five thick on each side and stared at him. Eventually a Six had found him, and curled her lip at him before she sent them away. He would have found it sexy, a long time ago.
“They're your destiny, Gaius,” she said, slipping an arm over his shoulder as they walked through the unchanging halls of the basestar. “Don't be so ungrateful.”
“Oh yes,” he replied. “This week. And last week it was to bring the Word of God to humanity, and the week before I was supposed to be Hera's guardian, and the week before that I was destined to be President and the week before that it was to bring about the apocalypse and the collapse of civilisation as I knew it. I wonder what it'll be next week. Finding Earth? Is that my job too?”
She smiled, but as always, Gaius felt she was laughing at his expense, not his joke. “No,” she flashed her teeth. “Earth isn't your responsibility. Yet. But everything will be. I keep telling you Gaius; you'll be the father of a new generation. You just can't conceive of its magnitude. With God's power in your hands, everything will be possible.”
“That,” Baltar whispered. “Sounds awfully close to blasphemy.”
“I don't give a good godsdamn what you think sounds blasphemous,” said Saul Tigh. “Tell your buddies to let me through or I'll have the lot of them scrapped.”
“Tell them yourself,” Baltar replied, shaken. It had been a long time since she had distracted him this thoroughly. “It's not like they have to listen to anyone anymore, least of all me.”
“If only that were true for the rest of us,” Tigh sneered. “You,” he said, fixing a centurion with his one eye. “Get me another one of these.” He waved a nearly-empty bottle at the machine.
The centurion didn't move.
“Try saying, 'please',” Gaius suggested.
“I don't have to say 'please' to any godsdamned thing. Not here,” Tigh growled.
The centurion made a smart right turn and clanked down the hall.
“How did you do that?” Baltar asked, unable to keep the wonder from his voice.
“I'm special,” said Tigh. “Haven't you heard?”
“Will you tell the rest of them to leave me alone?”
“No.”
* * *
Natalie's surrender of her basestar was smooth and perfunctory. She welcomed the Colonial officers aboard and escorted them to CIC. A few Eights and a Two slipped their hands into the information streams and began assessing the ship, and instructing its hybrid to co-operate with the human boarders. If it felt any different, if the rumours Tory had heard – quick, quiet snatches of story Natalie sent to her in burst transmission; binary their brains were not programmed to understand, not really, but to nuance words, like body language – like a soundtrack to a conversation.
“It's a special ship,” Natalie had said, and her words sang. “The first,” she whispered when the humans were busy with pre-flight checks. “The ship where our models were born and designed.”
The binary in her brain stem tapped out: magic.
“Can I help?” Tory asked, casually.
“Of course,” Leoben replied. “The system's architecture is a little different, this is an older model basestar so let me guide you through the basics of the operating system.”
In the stream, they were connected far more securely than standard reality would allow. She saw Leoben's cool words were not lies for the benefit of human ears as she'd hoped. The ship was a little unfamiliar, and she let Leoben feed her protocols and guide her through basic functions, but there was nothing truly alien here. Nothing magic.
Dissatisfied, she broke from Leoben and began to travel on her own. Nervous system, propulsion, atmospherics, lymphatics, musculature and pressurisation. It wasn't until she hit networking that she felt anything new. It was faint; even fainter than the way Natalie had subconsciously underscored their conversation with wonder. But something in Tory's mind found something in the mind of the ship and she decided she wasn't satisfied with the simple DRADIS construction of the Fleet and the dark wound where the Hub should have been.
Tory pushed.
Tell me, she commanded.
Okay, answered the ship.
Tory managed an entire eight seconds before she fell reeling from the network and collapsed on the deck, holding her head, and, she thought, yelling. In that time, she had managed to establish a tracking lock on Kara Thrace's powered-down viper. The one floating dead in space. The one none of the other palm-down networked cylon had picked up since they boarded. The one it should have been impossible to find. The one that seemed to be functioning as a relay system, screaming that damn music into space, at the basestar, at Tory.
It was still vibrating in her heart, at a volume she thought would burst it, as she hit the deck.
* * *
It was disconcerting, to say the least, when Kara's viper started singing to her; especially when the dash was still dark. Especially when Leoben insisted on joining in.
“There must be some way out of here,” he sang, tunelessly. “Said the joker to the priest. Which one of us do you suppose is the joker?”
* * *
“Tory?”
Natalie had her in her arms and was staring down at her, wild-eyed with worry.
“I'm okay,” Tory muttered. “I'm okay. It's...Kara Thrace. The music. We have to follow the music.”
* * *
In the end, she had to turn her viper on in order to turn the radio off.
Of course, while the speakers stopped broadcasting rock music, they started broadcasting a really pissed-off Communications Officer demanding she return to Galactica.
She figured she'd be heading for the brig.
She certainly wasn't expecting abso-frakking-lutely everyone – human, cylon or who-the-gods-knew-what – to hover around her bird like it would take them all to Earth. Which, it turned out, was an ironic turn of phrase since when she started fiddling with the dials, it turned out that damn music had switched on the viper's SatNav.
Lee Adama shook hands with Natalie (who should have been dead) in the middle of the godsdamned hangar deck and declared that they would all go together.
* * *
END PART 1
PART 2.
hmpf says, I'm back in the fic fold. :/PART 1
Title: The Body is a Myth
Word Count: 28,182 (complete: all three parts.)
Spoilers: AU from 4x09 The Hub, but major spoilers for 4x10 Revelations.
Rating: Um, PG-13ish, I guess?
Disclaimer: Not mine, making no money.
Summary: Laura dies and wakes up on a basestar, Natalie is alive, and D'Anna breaks Kara Thrace by telling her the name of the final cylon. Then, of course, they get to Earth. JUMP!
with many thanks to
asta77 for the beta. Laura Roslin died; so much morpha she was barely aware of Bill or the book. Of his son, or of Kara Thrace.
Laura Roslin died, a cold metal ring on her finger, two grieving men, and the harbinger of death at her side.
Laura Roslin woke up in a vat of white goo. She was a little disappointed. She was tired; she'd been ready, she'd felt done. But this was impossible. The hub was gone. This was a morpha-dream. She'd wake up, barely, to Bill and the book and his son and Kara Thrace and they'd start again, this waiting for death.
Thrace was terribly inefficient. She'd mention that, when she woke up, in her broken voice. She'd mention it if she could remember.
That room – the room where she had died (no, she reminded herself, the room where she was dying right now) – that room was a place where her thoughts never made it as far as her lips. Her brain was misfiring on morpha; her thoughts were eating themselves the way her body was eating itself, and this was the first time in days she had entertained an idea that complex.
She wondered if she'd forget it, when she woke up. If she'd forget this dream: the goo was warmer than it had looked in the hybrid's bath. The vat was so much more comfortable than a hospital bed.
Laura Roslin turned her head to the left and saw Natalie, the Six, kneeling. Natalie pressed her long, elegant fingers against Laura's mouth, just for a second, and said, “I'm so sorry, Madam President.”
“What for?” Laura asked. Her voice was high and clear: it was like discovering she could have been a concert soprano. She had forgotten what it was like to speak without effort.
“It's not a dream,” Natalie said. “I'm so sorry.”
* * *
It was a state funeral. Kara watched the Old Man put a flag on her coffin and then stand, resolute, as they opened the airlock and committed her body to the heavens.
Kara thought of Leoben.
When she got back to her rack, he was sitting on it. Shirt like someone had puked over it, sleeveless red vest held together with thick plastic buckles. He was smiling, wide and easy. Of course he was smiling: he was pleased to see her.
“What is the first article of faith?” he asked.
Because there was no one else in the room, Kara answered.
“This is not all that we are,” she replied.
“This is not all that we are.”
Kara closed her eyes. “What if it is?”
Kara opened her eyes, and he was gone.
* * *
Natalie had found a bathrobe for Laura. It was white and fluffy. She was sitting in it, with her real hair and a body that didn't seem to be dying, on an antique chaise with a cup of coffee in her hand.
“You seem very calm,” Natalie said.
“I'm dreaming,” Laura replied.
“You're not dreaming. You weren't routed through the hub. This basestar is...unique.”
“So you've told me.”
Laura sipped her coffee. It was so nice to be able to taste again.
“You'll see,” Natalie sighed. She sat down next to Laura at the other end of the chaise. “When you don't wake up on Galactica you'll believe me.”
“A magical basestar no one knew existed, with its own independent resurrection facility just happened to be near enough to pick you up after you were shot, and just happened to be near enough to pick me up, and yet, by either choice or coincidence, has failed to pick up a single other cylon passenger, despite the fact that you are now, as a species, and by your design, Natalie, facing permanent mortality? Does that about cover it?”
“Yes,” said Natalie. Unrepentant.
“Was it worth it?” Laura asked. “Did it give your life meaning?”
Natalie didn't turn to look at her. She sat, straightbacked, shoulder-blades tense above the cut of her tank top, honey-brown hair only half-hooked behind her ears. Eyes somewhere else. Somewhere far away.
“I saw...” Natalie said. “I saw a forest.”
For a moment, Laura saw it too. The sun caught behind such bright green leaves. Like nothing she had ever found on New Caprica.
“It was beautiful,” Natalie said, and grabbed Laura's hand.
* * *
“Who's the fifth?” Kara asked.
“You are. Didn't you know?”
“Who's the fifth?” Kara leaned over the metal table, and for a second, she saw Leoben, not D'Anna, lazing back in the folding chair.
“Laura Roslin.”
“Who's the fifth?”
“Admiral Adama.”
“Who's the fifth?”
“You ever going to get bored?”
“No. Figure I can just ask you about thirty-thousand more times and work it out through elimination. Who's the fifth?”
“Why should I tell you? I lost four of my five life-lines when your damn Colonel decided to out himself.”
“Who's the fifth?”
Leoben leaned forward and whispered, “Daniel Thrace.”
“What?” Kara asked. Her chest was ice. “What did you just say?”
D'Anna lifted one side of her mouth and an eyebrow and stared at her like maybe she thought Kara had gone crazy, or maybe she was about to laugh. “I said, 'you, sweetheart, haven't we been over this?' But apparently I was mistaken.”
“You said Daniel Thrace.”
The expression on D'Anna's face, this time, was unmistakable. Open-mouthed. Afraid, even. Kara thought of Leoben and his God; his quest to find something so much larger than him it would drive him mad. D'Anna had been inside the Temple of the Five and looked at her hidden siblings and found they were neither spectacular nor mighty. D'Anna was the master of mysteries, the one with secret knowledge: the Oracle. D'Anna had never looked at anything and realised she was small, until, perhaps, now.
It was like rebutting a parlour trick with a miracle.
“How can you know...” D'Anna managed. “You couldn't know that.”
Kara felt it, true and bitter as a puncture in her EVA suit. But she couldn't say the words. To admit it would be a sin. To admit it would kill the music: the endless piano, rolling and alternating, three-steps from repetition. Those deep, certain chords that dropped like anchors into her soul.
“Daniel Thrace,” she shrieked. “Never survived the attacks on the Colonies. You killed him. You killed Daniel Thrace, just like you killed everyone else!”
Kara stumbled from her chair. She banged against the door and yelled for the marines to let her out.
Kara Thrace realised, shaking in the corner of an empty compartment, that it would be easier to accept that she was a cylon, than to accept that Hera Agathon was never the first hybrid.
* * *
After three days, Laura began to suspect she had fallen into a coma. She was sitting with Natalie, watching the hybrid. When she wandered off on her own, she got lost, and there didn't seem to be anyone else on board.
“Autonomic vent functions are unaligned. Re-adjust point three per cent. The somnambulist accepts solipsism before her god. What is a deity?”
“There!” Laura pointed. “The somnambulist. That's me.”
“The coolant veins are losing pressure. Worship. All actions performed in service to a single goal. In service to the coolant veins. The coolant veins are losing pressure.”
Natalie leaned forward, her hand half an inch above the milky liquid. She wanted to touch everything, Laura had noticed. Like a child, exploring. It made her think of the Caprica Six in Galactica's brig and her naïve, trusting curiosity mixed with such bitter violence. She shivered.
“If you're the somnambulist,” Natalie said. “She seems to be judging your easy acceptance that this is just a coma.”
“I've always been more practical than religious,” Laura growled.
“Saggitaron!” the hybrid gasped. “A constellation that forms the most reliable navigational point should form the basis of a star chart. Course correction one quarter astern. Fuel redistribution.”
“Are we going to Saggitaron?” Laura asked.
Natalie shook her head. “I don't think so.”
“Jump!”
* * *
Helo was putting Hera to bed and Sharon was out flying a CAP when Kara started pounding on the door to his quarters. She flew in, saw Hera in the crib she had outgrown at least six months ago, and froze.
“Starbuck,” Helo said. “You okay?”
She blinked, worked her mouth a few times before she turned to look at him. “Not really,” she said. “I need you to put me in the brig. And take my sidearm,” she unclipped it from her holster.
Helo frowned. Kara shook the sidearm at him by the muzzle. “Dammit, Helo, you have to arrest me!”
“All right,” he said, taking the gun slowly, and deliberately. “All right, but let's talk about this first. What's got you so wound up?”
Kara dropped onto his bed. Helo sat down next to her. Hera, confused, stood in her crib and asked, “Dada?”
“Kara's a little upset right now, Hera,” Karl told her. “But she's going to be just fine once we have a chat about it, aren't you, Kara?”
“Gods, Karl, I'm not three years old.”
He pushed her shoulder, playfully. “Could have fooled me, Starbuck.”
She turned and stared straight at him. She said, “The final cylon is Daniel Thrace.”
Helo felt his eyes go wide and his nose wrinkle. “Daniel Thrace as in...”
“As in Daniel Thrace, Helo. As in the only damn Daniel Thrace that would make me come here and ask you to arrest me. My father.”
Helo nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Kara, it's not your fault. It doesn't make you bad. We're going to go to the Admiral and talk to him about this, and we're going to make it all right. You're not a cylon, Kara. You're like Hera, or Nicky Tyrol. There is nothing wrong with you.”
Kara shook her head. “I don't trust myself.”
“I trust you.”
* * *
Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, watching Hera watch her right back, and wondering how long it would be before the Admiral showed up and sent her to the brig, when the alarm siren sounded, and she heard Gaeta calling action stations over the tannoy.
She'd been wondering how to explain why she had never looked for her father after the attacks. The idea of going to Dee and getting her to check the Fleet's passenger lists had occurred to her, just once, a few days after the Olympic Carrier. But he'd left when she was a kid, and she'd never heard from him again, and who knew if he was even calling himself Daniel Thrace any more. Everything was gone, and the thought of one more disappointment, one last abandonment, had seemed too much.
In retrospect, that was a terribly convenient decision.
When Gaeta called for condition one throughout the ship, Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, watching Hera and wondering if there could be programming in their brains.
When Gaeta called for condition one throughout the ship, Kara was still sitting on Karl's bed, trying very hard not to think of the other half of the equation. In this tiny scrap of civilisation, Kara Thrace was famous. And Daniel Thrace had never come looking for her. He'd never killed himself to resurrect where his daughter was and save her. He'd never even taken a shuttle.
“Action stations, action stations. Set condition one throughout the ship.”
Kara picked up Hera and started running toward the hangar deck.
* * *
Laura and Natalie ran into the cylon CIC, though to Laura, the name seemed odd. A CIC was full of blunt technology designed to withstand nuclear explosions and immoveable military personnel designed to do the same, not elegant water features and nouveau architecture.
Natalie plunged her hand into a waterbed and gasped. It took Laura a moment to realise what she was doing.
“Where are we?” she demanded.
“Back with your Fleet,” Natalie replied.
Laura wondered if this was a symbolic journey. If her body was about to die, or if she was returning to consciousness.
“They're launching vipers,” Natalie said, turning to her with a panicked expression. “We don't have any raiders. We're defenceless.”
Death then, Laura decided.
“We have to hail them, Laura.”
“How?”
Natalie reached across, grabbed Laura's hand and forced it into the water.
Laura thought her mind was on fire. The ship sang through her body. The dislocation was as bad as the worst moments of her illness, when the pain was so intense, she couldn't function. Time stopped. She hung, suspended in white noise. She saw the Galactica, she felt fear; a dozen vipers were coming to pierce her skin – small nubs of heat in a bone cold stretch. Natalie had been trying to tell her something. The ship had crawled inside her chest and was begging her to do something.
Oh what was it?
Talk to them.
Comm frequencies.
They bloomed in her mind. A web of thin lines daggering between the vipers and the Fleet.
“That one!” she heard herself gasp. She understood: somehow she needed to pick a strand of radiowave, and tell the ship to copy it, but she had no idea how. “That one,” she repeated.
Natalie, a presence so small in the shipworld of the waterbed that at first, Laura could barely perceive her, knew what she was doing. Natalie began to make changes, communicating with the ship at an unimaginable speed. It was like standing beside a waterfall and knowing every spit of spray was a syllable.
A line stretched between Laura's downturned palm and the Galactica.
“Now,” Natalie said. “Save us. Talk to them.”
“Admiral Adama,” Laura began, voice shaky. She was still in a world that was half-computer, half-deep space. She focused on her own feet against the deck of the basestar. On Natalie's hand pressed over her own. “Bill,” she said. “Please don't fire. We don't have any raiders. We don't have any missiles. We're not hostile. It's me, Bill. It's Laura.”
There were seconds and seconds of silence. Laura felt herself smile: she knew the exact look that would be on his face. Personal betrayal that the universe dare throw this trick at him. At him.
“If it makes you feel any better, Bill,” she said, surer now, in more familiar terrain. “I'm reasonably certain that I'm still in a coma in your sick bay, but on the offchance the universe is really this frakked up, on New Caprica, right after you grew that godsawful moustache, the day of the groundbreaking ceremony – do you remember that? You lied to me. You told me you were going to build me that cabin in the woods.”
After a pause, the words came. Slow, suspicious. Brief. “I told you I'd like to.”
“It was still a lie.”
The longest silence yet. And then, “I'm sorry, Laura. But this can't be you. You aren't the final cylon.”
Of course, Laura agreed with him, but she found herself unaccountably frustrated by his obstinacy. Here she was, returning from the dead in a cylon basestar, and even in her dreams, his response was to put his foot down and expect the universe to fall in line.
“Bill,” she sighed. “If you're really there and I'm really here, then I'm afraid we're both going to have to face some uncomfortable -”
“No,” he cut her off. “You can't be the final cylon because we know who the final cylon is. And it's not you.”
Well. She hadn't been expecting that.
“Perhaps I just really wanted to upstage Captain Thrace,” she said. “Does a basestar trump a viper?”
She thought she heard him snort.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“So far,” Bill said. “You haven't launched any raiders. And you're not setting off our radiological alarms. So I'm going to detail a squad of raptors to head over and secure your ship. If we lose contact with our people, for any reason, I'll authorise the release of nuclear weapons, and I'll blow your ship to hell.”
“That sounds entirely fair, Admiral. Believe me, I have as many questions as you do.”
* * *
Caprica sat on the floor of her cell, leaning against the cold metal frame of her bed. Action stations had been called over two hours ago, and still, they hadn't jumped. The ship hadn't been rocked by explosions. Who had found them, if not an enemy?
She closed her eyes and turned her cell into a forest. In a few more hours a long-faced marine would come into her cell and put a food tray on the floor while her companion aimed his automatic weapon at her (at her child). It might be days before anyone else came to speak with her.
She was lonely.
Even Gaius seemed to be avoiding her. She remembered their last conversation; days ago now.
“He doesn't care about you, you know.”
She had declined to answer.
“At least I never threw you across a room.”
She had declined to answer.
“Do you think this is it? This 'miracle'? You believe that's why you came here, that God was guiding your path? You threw your lot in with pirates and refugees. They won't even let you keep a pen, what makes you think they'll let you keep a baby?”
She had answered, quietly because her throat was full of tears. “That pen was never from you, was it, Gaius?”
He lit his cigarillo, the metal lighter snapping like a jaw. “The worst part is, darling, Saul Tigh has never even pretended to send you a pen.”
“Perhaps he can't,” she whispered.
“Oh, yes. Very likely.”
Caprica tried not to think of Saul Tigh on the Rebel Basestar. Of Tory Foster and Galen Tyrol and Samuel Anders. There'd been some sort of deal. D'Anna wouldn't reveal the identity of the final cylon, so Lee Adama had come down personally to ask for tips on how to make her talk. He stood, hands behind his back, suit pressed and tie straight, so earnest and so angry. It was an exacting politeness that spoke of coiled rage and, she suspected, quiet despair.
She had wanted to help him, but there was nothing she could offer. D'Anna did the talking, and the stealing, and the killing. At the end, if you were lucky, she left you standing. She had said this, to Lee Adama.
He offered her a tight smile and replied, “Not this time. She's our prisoner now.”
“That won't matter. She doesn't understand the concept of surrender. Or compromise. She never did. None of her.”
“But the rest of your people do. And now she's in our brig under armed guard until we can construct another of these,” he gestured around her glass-walled cell. “She's already lost, we just have to make her realise it.”
“Not if she keeps you guessing.”
Lee stared right into her eyes and said, “It doesn't matter. She's not going anywhere.” He turned to leave.
“Wait,” Caprica had said, hand outstretched. Too close, she realised. Her fingertips were half an inch from his pinstriped shoulder and she caught the angry twist of his lips before he redressed his expression to that familiar, distant shape. “You said my people understood compromise. What did you give them for D'Anna?”
She saw him consider her request and decide, presumably, that it was information she needed.
“D'Anna wouldn't play ball with either side. At one point, she had missile locks on the civilian fleet, the President and half the air-wing as hostages. Fortunately for us,” his smooth features creased, bitterly. “One of the final five decided to announce his identity, and tell us the names of three of the others. The rebels decided to exchange them for D'Anna, on the understanding that we'd share any information she gave us about the fifth.”
Her heart skipped; a double-jump that left her feeling dizzy and full of adrenaline. “And those four, who are they?”
Lee Adama sighed and ran a hand through his dark hair. “Tory Foster. Galen Tyrol. Sam Anders. And Saul Tigh.”
Her heart skipped; a double-jump that left her falling. She had grabbed the bedframe for support. She believed she had managed to nod, dumbly, as Lee Adama left.
Caprica tried not to think of Saul Tigh on the Rebel Basestar; tried not to wonder if he thought about her, if he missed her, if he had any answers. If he had tried to convince her people to demand her freedom also. The programs in her mind that kept her conscious thoughts away from her lost siblings seemed to have terminated in the face of specific information. She tried to reactivate the algorithms, but could not. She knew, and there was no going back. No happy hybridised family: she could not follow Athena's path. There was no acceptance for her here.
Caprica hid in the forest.
There were so many things she could not think about. They called action stations two hours ago, and Gaius never came to see her any more, and Saul Tigh had never even pretended to send her a pen. She did not know if the Cylon on the basestar even knew she was in captivity, and her one comfort – that the humans loved and coveted Hera as much as any child of their own – was gone. Because her child would be a Cylon, just like her, just like Saul Tigh who had his hands at her throat the last time they spoke.
Caprica hid in the forest, and thought it must have been a projected hallucination when a brown-haired Six walked in.
* * *
By the time Kara reached the hangar deck, the emergency was over. No one was really sure what was going on, but there seemed to be a basestar offering to surrender. She paced with Hera for fifteen minutes watching marines board raptors and get waved out of the tubes. Then she waited and paced more and watched as the raptors began to return.
Eventually she watched as the President – the dead-as-deep-space President – and a Six with brown hair, disembarked from Racetrack's bird, and the entire godsdamned deck went quiet. Dead as the dead President quiet.
The Old Man came down personally, with a glare that made sure everyone stayed that quiet, and Kara found herself shrinking up against a bulkhead to avoid him. She watched as he escorted Laura Roslin, hand out to help her down from the lip of the raptor, hand at the small of her back as they left the hangar.
Kara shifted Hera to her other hip, and nibbled at the nail on her thumb. If Laura Roslin was alive and had come back on a basestar, perhaps D'Anna had played her. She looked at Hera. Hera looked right back at her. Beautiful dark eyes, quiet and demanding.
She thought of D'Anna's eyes, the moment she had yelled her father's name. Frightened and alarmed.
“Are we the same?” she asked Hera, in a whisper.
Hera grinned at her and stuck her fingers in Kara's mouth. “Kara,” she said.
She should go back to Helo's quarters, wait for him to bring the Admiral. Or go find the Admiral and see what was going on with the President. Or see Doc Cottle. She should do something to sort out this frakking mess.
Instead she headed for the furthest section of the hangar: the place where they kept her viper. The perfect ship she'd flown back to the Fleet, when Earth had been a song in her mind – a piercing direction sharp as glass, sharp as a finger around the wet rim of a wine glass.
She missed it.
She climbed into the cockpit, sat Hera between her legs, and started going over routine pre-flight checks without switching on the power. She explained everything she was doing, and even though Hera was more interested in yelling at the deck gang and turning any dial within reach than listening to Kara, she felt herself relaxing.
* * *
Natalie pulled Caprica into her arms. “Are you all right?” she asked, and did not let go.
“I,” Caprica began. “Yes. I'm being well-treated.”
Natalie stepped back, cupped Caprica's cheek in her palm. “I asked if you were all right.”
Caprica gave a small, sad smile and shrugged. “Are you a prisoner too, now?”
This was Natalie, she was sure of it. Natalie the Six, who had chosen, even before Caprica's own celebrity had challenged the fabric of her nation, to wear her hair brown, to twist her mouth more fully when she laughed, and to keep it steady when she raged. She had been one of the first to follow when Caprica held Boomer's hand tightly in an attempt to remake the world. At the time, when Natalie had not been selected by lottery to join the New Caprican project, Caprica had been content to view it as coincidence. Now, she wondered if Cavil had arranged it, understanding, even then, that this would end them.
Natalie's mouth blossomed into a grin Caprica was not sure her identical lips could hope to match. Not now; not here. “I've come to take you home,” she said.
Caprica felt herself frown. The disbelief in her chest was something close to hope. It was wild, and she tried to crush it. “How?” she asked.
Natalie paused, throwing a glance toward the tinted window where there were, doubtless, observers. “The Rebel Basestar,” she said, carefully. “Is currently allied with the Colonial Fleet, but maintains its autonomy. But the basestar where I resurrected, is solely under my command.”
The emphasis was strange. A basestar was never under the sole command of a single individual. Even discounting the hybrid, even in this new nation of half-formed identity, consensus mattered. To stress the word – it was a message. Sole. Alone. There was no one else on board.
Caprica asked her own careful question. “When Athena shot you, I assumed that even if we were within range of the Resurrection Ships, the Cavils would box you. I mourned you.”
“Fortunately,” Natalie replied. “I resurrected far from their sphere of influence.”
Confirmation, then. They had been beyond the reach of the Resurrection Ships and Natalie had woken aboard an empty basestar regardless. There was only one ship that could be.
Her eyes widened. “I thought it was a myth,” she whispered. “A story we misremembered from our creation, before the Five left us.”
Natalie's eyes flashed a warning.
“It's a fully functioning warship,” she said. “Technically I'm in no position to repel boarders, but the Colonials will find it impossible to operate without our help. I've exchanged my basestar's membership in the Colonial Fleet under Adama's command, and our help to operate it in return for an amnesty for all Cylon rebels. That includes you.”
Caprica sat down on the bed.
“I've come to take you home,” Natalie said, crouching next to her. One hand, warm and loving, turned her face so that Natalie could meet her eyes. “We understand now, why you left.”
Did they? Even Caprica didn't understand. How could Natalie?
“It was...all going wrong,” she managed.
“Yes,” Natalie nodded. “It was.”
She grabbed her hand, and Caprica closed her eyes and felt her lungs shiver. They had been alone. They were never built to be alone. They were trees, in a forest. In a cell.
Natalie broke the silence. “Is it true?” she whispered. Caprica recognised her expression with the intimacy of experience. Awe and hesitation. The first time she'd seen Hera: a miracle in the New Caprican wreckage, she'd looked that way. Awe and hesitation. She had wondered if reaching for her would make her vanish.
“It's true,” Caprica said.
Natalie kissed her, bursting with joy. “You've been blessed,” she said.
Silently, slowly, Caprica nodded.
* * *
Athena climbed out of her raptor after the weirdest frakking CAP she'd flown in a long time, pulled off her helmet and stretched out of the top half of her flight suit, when suddenly, she heard her daughter's voice. Gleeful. Delighted. So high-pitched it carried over the din of the flight deck.
She turned, expecting to find Helo. She'd throw her arms around them both. But he wasn't there, and following the noise, she found Kara in her viper with Hera pushing buttons and flipping switches and shouting, alternately, “Viper!” and “Kara!” and “Go!”
“What are you doing down here, Kara?” she asked. “It's crazy out there, and you're babysitting in a viper? Where's Karl?”
Kara shrugged. “With the Admiral probably.”
“Momma!”
“Hey, baby. You like it in there? Don't worry, you'll like it better in a raptor, I promise.”
“Viper.”
“Kid's got taste,” Kara said. “Don't blame me.”
“Why is she with you? What are you two doing down here?”
“Seemed more interesting than waiting in your quarters for the Admiral to come down and throw me in the brig,” Kara grinned. “Do you think Roslin's a cylon?”
Athena frowned. “What the frak does that have to do with this?”
“You think she's a cylon?”
Athena shrugged. It wasn't a question she wanted to answer, or even think about, yet. If she was a cylon it would explain the dreams: she had them almost every night now. Chasing Hera, trying to save her from the Six, the Six who swore she was only trying to protect her. What if Roslin was the threat? It was easy to believe; she'd stolen Hera once already. But Athena's mind was a computer, and the logic undercutting her emotions told her Roslin had no motive. What could the President want that would be so terrible for her little girl?
“Hard to tell,” she grunted. “Grand re-entry in perfect ships is becoming a bit of a habit for you dead girls. I guess we'll have to ask D'Anna. Hope she tips her hand this time.”
“No need,” Kara said. “She already did.”
She climbed out of the viper and handed Hera over to Athena.
“She says it's my dad. Which I guess explains why every motherfrakking one of you seems so interested in me.”
Athena shifted her daughter's weight into a more comfortable position, and kept her expression neutral.
“What, nothing to say? No big comments about my destiny? Not pissed off I got there first?”
Athena sighed. “What do you want me to say, Starbuck? Congratulations?”
“Guess I just figured you'd have more of a response than rolling your eyes. Especially considering what Hera seems to mean to you all.”
“Firstly, you don't even know it's true. And second, if it is? You're a person, Kara. That's all. A person,” she bit out. “Maybe it took leaving everything I had behind to realise it, but I have enough problems with prophecies and destinies without looking for more. We're all just people, and we might get along a whole frakking lot better if we realised that.”
Athena shook her head and walked away.
As she left, she heard Kara punch her perfect viper.
* * *
“Well the good news is, your blood work matches the samples I took before you died, minus any signs of cancer,” Cottle said. “The bad news is, you died, and to be honest, young lady, that's not a symptom I can easily reconcile with your being here right now.”
Roslin nodded. “If I'm a Cylon, then I've been one from the beginning. Your blood tests would be useless.”
“Kara Thrace, on the other hand, is giving some interesting results,” he dropped his cigarette into a sample tray.
Adama stood, monumentally, at the foot of her bed. Lee straightened his jacket and took the clipboard Cottle handed to him. He frowned as he tried to understand the numbers on the page.
“What did you find, Doc?” Adama asked, like a tremor in the deck.
“Before she died, gods rest her soul, Cally Tyrol brought her son in. Thought he was allergic to the algae. It was nonsense, but she was having a rough time so I drew some blood to do some routine tests and put her mind at rest.”
“Was there anything unusual about Nicholas Tyrol's blood?” Laura asked.
“Not enough to think he was a Cylon hybrid, if that's what you're asking,” Cottle picked up his cigarette again, and settled it in the crook of his mouth. “But he did have a few anomalies, small things. I thought at first he might have Zarin's Syndrome, but he was missing the key marker. The kid was fine, just a little unusual. Happens sometimes, like an odd eye colour or abnormal height. And he certainly had a blood type. AB positive, if you're curious.”
“And what does this have to do with Kara?” Adama asked.
“Well, I compared it with the results from those tests we ran when Thrace showed up in the nebula, and her blood work has all the same markers. Like I said, it could be random. But the chances of that are damn slim. If I looked at those results without any context, I'd think they were siblings. Cousins at least.”
No one spoke.
Cottle finished his cigarette and dropped the butt back into the sample tray. “I'd love to stay here and chat,” he said. “But one of you decided to release the Cylon prisoner, and considering the difficulties Athena had, I'm going to give her a few pointers on healthcare.”
Laura drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head against them.
“Nothing makes sense,” she said. “Are you sure I'm not still in a coma?”
“Pretty sure, yeah,” Adama sighed.
“How am I even here?” she asked. “How are two Cylons having a baby? More to the point, how did any Cylon have a baby nearly thirty years ago? This is the second time I've been impossibly cured of cancer. Once is a miracle. Twice is a joke. Something doesn't add up.”
“Maybe when we find Daniel Thrace, we'll get some answers. Several people claim they knew him, as a resistance fighter on New Caprica, but he's not on any of the ships' passenger manifests. What's more, he never was. I've started a ship-to-ship search. But without a photo, it might take some time.”
“Have you told Kara about this?” Lee asked.
Adama closed his eyes. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Not yet,” he said.
“She has a right to know. This isn't her fault.”
Laura put her hand on his arm. “We know, Lee,” she said. “We can't find her.”
“What? How could you lose her?”
“It's been a busy few hours,” Adama muttered. “Helo told me what she found out from D'Anna moments before the President's basestar jumped in. Kara wasn't a priority if we had to fend off a Cylon assault.”
“No,” Lee shook his head, looking genuinely confused. “I mean, literally, how could you lose her, we're in the middle of deep space.”
“According to Chief Laird, she waited until the raptors had all returned, then signed herself out on a CAP. In the same viper she had when she appeared in the nebula.”
“And he let her? That thing's quarantined!”
“She's still the CAG. Laird had no reason to suspect anything.”
“How long has she been missing?”
“I didn't realise she'd left until I called for her to report to sickbay for this meeting. I have Mr Hoshi hailing her and tracking DRADIS. I told him to send word as soon as he found anything.”
“As soon as he found anything? He hasn't found anything yet? She can't have flown beyond our DRADIS range since she launched. It's impossible. You think she's floating out there cold?”
“I don't know, son,” Adama sighed. “Probably.”
Laura tightened her grip on his sleeve. “She'll be back,” she whispered. “She always is.”
* * *
Kara's viper was floating, dead. She was drifting like a chunk of debris, tumbling further from the Galactica and closer to the new basestar. Pretty soon she'd have to start up her engines for long enough to make a course correction so she wouldn't smash into anything.
They were probably hailing her by now. Probably looking on DRADIS. As soon as she fired up her bird, she'd be busted.
“Why are we out here, Kara?” Leoben asked.
He was wedged behind her seat in an impossible position.
“Could ask you the same thing,” she said. “Why won't you leave me alone?”
“Because you're lost, Kara.”
“Yeah and being found by you's been working out just great.”
“I only want to help you realise your destiny.”
“Didn't I do that already? I'm the harbinger of death, and you're all dying. I said I could find the way to Earth and I found the rebels who got us D'Anna and now we have the final five and it's supposed to be their turn for once. I'm through.”
“You're lost. You need to lead your people to Earth, but you haven't. It's a wound in your soul. I can feel it. You're mourning.”
“Which people would those be?”
“All of them.”
When she was a child, Kara sat next to her father on his piano stool, playing the descant melody while he cycled through chords that made every key her fingers chose into something beautiful. Her mother broke her fingers, later, because she was always getting into things she shouldn't, because her hands were never still. Her first flight test, it wasn't the flying – it wasn't the way she let rip with the blanks loaded into her guns and tore five targets to shreds in three seconds; the way she bucked her ship between the stars like a Geminese fundamentalist in a fit of divine ecstasy – it wasn't that. Those were things she learned to love later, when she realised that wasn't the way it was for everyone, when she realised that wasn't the way flying was supposed to be, ever and always, and she'd better damn well grab it and own it and grin and kick and punch her way through anything that kept her from it. That first flight test, it had been her fingers, curled around the joystick; dancing across the buttons and the dials and the switches. Her fingers flying a descant to the low, thrumming chords of the engine.
She squeezed her eyes closed, and pushed out tears.
Kara will lead her people to Earth. Kara is the harbinger of death. Kara is a frak up. Kara is a hybrid. Never one thing, always another, it would be an easy way to explain every messed-up moment of her life with biology. That destiny, always three parts denial, one part terror, one part inappropriate joy. Evidence that she was worth a damn, she was special. Something to justify the fact that Kara Thrace had lived while billions died.
The part of her that wanted to believe Leoben, the part that had come back blazing in her perfect viper. It was going to fix everything she'd ever done before because now she had something to be.
“You never chase the ghost,” her Flight Instructor had told her. “You never go after that one last target, that bastard you just can't keep in your sights, because for every time you catch him, and you're the big shot top gun frakking smoothest vipe in the Colonies, you get your ass smoked. You die like a punk because you forgot what you were doing and pinned your expectations on one blip. You ever find yourself in live combat, Thrace, you buckle down and do your job and bring your bird in safe.”
Kara flew her bird into a maelstrom chasing a ghost.
Leoben was humming music her father invented when she was seven from his impossible perch behind her seat.
“Stop it,” she hissed.
“You called it Aurora's Lament, right? It was the day you learned about the goddess of the dawn. You were sick. Your father bundled you up in your duvet and sat you by the piano and told you if you could push through the worst parts of your fever, it would break, like morning.”
“I was a kid. I was delirious. I don't remember.”
“You're lying. He told you – Aurora was a goddess because she promised that nothing would last forever, and her tragedy was that nothing would last forever. He told you your fever would pass, but you should mourn it, because it would never come again.”
“What does it matter? He was a toaster and he left me. I was a kid and he dragged me out of bed when I was so sick I should have been in a hospital. You wanna know what I remember? I remember hearing an entire godsdamned orchestra and thinking I was in some kind of concert hall with ghosts watching me from a balcony. I was too out of it to even hit the keys straight. Whatever he played later, he made up himself. I didn't help.”
“You wrote it all,” Leoben said. “And it was new.”
Starbuck tried not to think about that fever dream. Blazing white figures filing from a balcony, turning their backs on her. Leaving.
* * *
“Please,” Sam said. “You make sure this gets to her.”
“I got it,” Helo said. “I always do.”
“Thanks, man. I just, I gotta talk to her somehow, you know.”
Helo clapped him on the shoulder but didn't say anything. Sam ran his fingers through his hair and drew a shaky breath.
“You sure you're not coming?” Helo asked.
“To that new, that new basestar? No. What's the point.”
“With the new amnesty you have freedom to travel. I could get you a visitor's pass to Galactica. Better than a letter, right?”
“Helo, she won't take my calls. I've been writing to her for weeks and she doesn't reply. What, there's an amnesty and a couple of hours later she's ready to make up? I'm not stupid, man.”
“Didn't say you were. Think you're determined, though.”
Sam gave a shrug, and leant back against the wall of the ship. He looked as greasy and red-eyed as he'd been the day he fell from the Viper and broke his leg. It was worse when he was sober. Less desperate, Helo thought, but sadder.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“Oh, you know. Fine,” Sam said, closing his eyes.
“And the others?”
“I don't... I don't really know about the Colonel. He doesn't leave his room much. Ever. Sometimes the Leobens try to talk to him, but everyone else has given up. Tory she, uh, she's doing okay. I mean, I think she is. She spends a lot of time up in the CIC learning about those computers. The water ones. Star pupil,” Anders pushed his hands into his pockets. He was wearing blue jeans, and an off-colour pattern shirt that looked like it might have belonged to a Leoben. “You know it's weird,” he said. “This is my life now. This is my life.”
Sam was staring at the ceiling so hard, Helo thought he might start crying. He wanted to tell him about Kara, that they were more similar than Sam knew, and that everything would be different now. But that was classified. Kara was still missing, probably drifting dead in some viper in the middle of a civvy fleet in close formation. Stupid stunt. Just like her. Karl almost hoped she had disappeared on some new, miracle quest. At least that would be a mystery with a direction, not like this nauseous wave of revelations, every one breaking down something they had known was true, and none of them explaining how to make it back to solid ground.
“Hang in there,” he told Sam. “You'll see, it'll work itself out.”
“It's my life, Karl,” Sam said, like the idea had only just hit him. Shotgunned.
“Hang in there.”
“Yeah,” he shook himself, nodded forcefully. Helo had seen him do the same thing before Pyramid matches back on New Caprica; before he jumped into his bird. “Yeah, you don't need to worry. I'm doing okay. I've been staying with Galen – with the Chief. He has Nick and with the rumours about the Colonel and that Cylon in Galactica's brig,” he looked oddly embarrassed. “Well, it seems to be the only reason they ever want to talk to us. Have the Eights ever been like that? With you?”
Helo thought about the woman on the Hub mission, about all those bodies he nuked, any one of which could have been his wife and now never would be. “Yeah,” he said. “A little. You get used to it though.”
Sam actually laughed. “I hope so, man. I hope so. Because we've started sleeping in shifts so there's always someone awake to send them away.”
Helo laughed too. “Buddy, you realise how many people in this Fleet would kill to be you right now?”
It stayed funny for about three more seconds before they both really thought about what they'd said. About what being Sam Anders – or Karl Agathon, for that matter – meant. About who in Hades would ever want that.
“You'll get that letter to her, though, right?” Sam asked, shakily, into the silence.
“Of course, man. Of course,” Helo answered, resting a hand on Sam's shoulder.
* * *
Tory sat in the back of the raptor, opposite Captain Agathon. Technically this was a boarding party and once they landed, he would formally accept Natalie's surrender of the vessel. A heavy raider was flying formation to port and another raptor to starboard, carrying Cylon technicians and Colonial marines respectively. This raptor was for, Tory supposed, dignitaries. Karl Agathon, XO, representing the Admiral. The Six, Natalie, slender and miraculous. The Six from Galactica's brig, still slender and miraculous. And Tory herself. None of the others had wanted to come.
Tigh was a lost cause. She glanced at the Six from Galactica's brig (Caprica, she corrected herself), and wondered if anyone had told her that, yet. She had the steel-razor poise of all Sixes and a face that could turn from love to anger in an instant; at a muscle twitch, and often seemed to be both at once. Tory had worked that one out early, perhaps even on New Caprica; never cross the Sixes. Tory was used to them by now. That fifty-fifty chance; were they going to kill you or kiss you? It was the way the Leobens saw no difference between sanity and madness, or between themselves. It was the way the Sharons never seemed able to decide if they were in love with each other or desperate for the first ticket out of their naked yoga commune. Just like getting to know anyone, except there were a thousand of them with every possible permutation of mood represented, everywhere, all the time.
This Six was in a mood she hadn't seen before. Whether she was in love, or angry, or both, Tory thought, she seemed mostly sad. Lost, too. Like she wasn't certain why she was there. If no one had told her about Tigh, Tory decided, she wasn't going to be the one to do it.
She'd hoped for more from Sam and Tyrol. But she guessed it was disaffection more than human loyalty that had kept them from coming too.
They were both still mad at her for leaving. Didn't seem to matter to them that all she'd run from was a whole life of hiding and being hated for something that wasn't her fault. Wasn't any of their faults. Didn't seem to matter that they had labels and purposes: viper jock, grease monkey, drunken one-eyed robot XO. What did she have?
She had been trying very hard not to think about the President (Laura Roslin, she corrected herself) since she'd heard the news. She'd been trying very, very hard.
Sometimes Tory imagined explaining it all to Laura, and having Laura understand, and tell her it was all right. Or explaining to Galen that really, she hadn't had a choice. It was a matter of survival, for all of them, Nicky too. But Laura wouldn't listen, and Galen would probably try to kill her, and that was what God was for after all, wasn't it?
Sam and Galen let her sit with them at night, sometimes. Not that they really had anything to say.
* * *
It had been a bit of an oversight, Baltar had to admit, as a third centurion fell into step behind him. It certainly hadn't been his intention to set himself up as some sort of mechanical messiah. But it was hardly his fault the Leobens were so obsessed with the hybrid, the Sharons were so obsessed with Tyrol and the Sixes were so obsessed with whatever this latest new beginning was supposed to symbolise. So here he was, head of a group of religious fanatics with metal-for-bones and guns-for-hands who seemed to be exercising their newfound power of choice by choosing to follow him around.
It wasn't so bad around his human followers. The centurions seemed to gather at the entry way like imposing doormen, and Gaius had to admit he rather liked the effect. Their fondness for him had, in fact, been a deciding factor in the basestar's decision to approve his application for relocation. The centurions were sentient, he'd argued. The centurions should get a vote. Did they want to disenfranchise the centurions as profoundly as the humans had disenfranchised them?
He was beginning to wish he'd kept his mouth shut. A fourth centurion swung into step behind him, with a shunt-hiss of servo motors and that swinging eye-buzz he'd come to associate with silent, demanding questions he couldn't understand.
Once, a few weeks ago, they'd surrounded him for an hour, five thick on each side and stared at him. Eventually a Six had found him, and curled her lip at him before she sent them away. He would have found it sexy, a long time ago.
“They're your destiny, Gaius,” she said, slipping an arm over his shoulder as they walked through the unchanging halls of the basestar. “Don't be so ungrateful.”
“Oh yes,” he replied. “This week. And last week it was to bring the Word of God to humanity, and the week before I was supposed to be Hera's guardian, and the week before that I was destined to be President and the week before that it was to bring about the apocalypse and the collapse of civilisation as I knew it. I wonder what it'll be next week. Finding Earth? Is that my job too?”
She smiled, but as always, Gaius felt she was laughing at his expense, not his joke. “No,” she flashed her teeth. “Earth isn't your responsibility. Yet. But everything will be. I keep telling you Gaius; you'll be the father of a new generation. You just can't conceive of its magnitude. With God's power in your hands, everything will be possible.”
“That,” Baltar whispered. “Sounds awfully close to blasphemy.”
“I don't give a good godsdamn what you think sounds blasphemous,” said Saul Tigh. “Tell your buddies to let me through or I'll have the lot of them scrapped.”
“Tell them yourself,” Baltar replied, shaken. It had been a long time since she had distracted him this thoroughly. “It's not like they have to listen to anyone anymore, least of all me.”
“If only that were true for the rest of us,” Tigh sneered. “You,” he said, fixing a centurion with his one eye. “Get me another one of these.” He waved a nearly-empty bottle at the machine.
The centurion didn't move.
“Try saying, 'please',” Gaius suggested.
“I don't have to say 'please' to any godsdamned thing. Not here,” Tigh growled.
The centurion made a smart right turn and clanked down the hall.
“How did you do that?” Baltar asked, unable to keep the wonder from his voice.
“I'm special,” said Tigh. “Haven't you heard?”
“Will you tell the rest of them to leave me alone?”
“No.”
* * *
Natalie's surrender of her basestar was smooth and perfunctory. She welcomed the Colonial officers aboard and escorted them to CIC. A few Eights and a Two slipped their hands into the information streams and began assessing the ship, and instructing its hybrid to co-operate with the human boarders. If it felt any different, if the rumours Tory had heard – quick, quiet snatches of story Natalie sent to her in burst transmission; binary their brains were not programmed to understand, not really, but to nuance words, like body language – like a soundtrack to a conversation.
“It's a special ship,” Natalie had said, and her words sang. “The first,” she whispered when the humans were busy with pre-flight checks. “The ship where our models were born and designed.”
The binary in her brain stem tapped out: magic.
“Can I help?” Tory asked, casually.
“Of course,” Leoben replied. “The system's architecture is a little different, this is an older model basestar so let me guide you through the basics of the operating system.”
In the stream, they were connected far more securely than standard reality would allow. She saw Leoben's cool words were not lies for the benefit of human ears as she'd hoped. The ship was a little unfamiliar, and she let Leoben feed her protocols and guide her through basic functions, but there was nothing truly alien here. Nothing magic.
Dissatisfied, she broke from Leoben and began to travel on her own. Nervous system, propulsion, atmospherics, lymphatics, musculature and pressurisation. It wasn't until she hit networking that she felt anything new. It was faint; even fainter than the way Natalie had subconsciously underscored their conversation with wonder. But something in Tory's mind found something in the mind of the ship and she decided she wasn't satisfied with the simple DRADIS construction of the Fleet and the dark wound where the Hub should have been.
Tory pushed.
Tell me, she commanded.
Okay, answered the ship.
Tory managed an entire eight seconds before she fell reeling from the network and collapsed on the deck, holding her head, and, she thought, yelling. In that time, she had managed to establish a tracking lock on Kara Thrace's powered-down viper. The one floating dead in space. The one none of the other palm-down networked cylon had picked up since they boarded. The one it should have been impossible to find. The one that seemed to be functioning as a relay system, screaming that damn music into space, at the basestar, at Tory.
It was still vibrating in her heart, at a volume she thought would burst it, as she hit the deck.
* * *
It was disconcerting, to say the least, when Kara's viper started singing to her; especially when the dash was still dark. Especially when Leoben insisted on joining in.
“There must be some way out of here,” he sang, tunelessly. “Said the joker to the priest. Which one of us do you suppose is the joker?”
* * *
“Tory?”
Natalie had her in her arms and was staring down at her, wild-eyed with worry.
“I'm okay,” Tory muttered. “I'm okay. It's...Kara Thrace. The music. We have to follow the music.”
* * *
In the end, she had to turn her viper on in order to turn the radio off.
Of course, while the speakers stopped broadcasting rock music, they started broadcasting a really pissed-off Communications Officer demanding she return to Galactica.
She figured she'd be heading for the brig.
She certainly wasn't expecting abso-frakking-lutely everyone – human, cylon or who-the-gods-knew-what – to hover around her bird like it would take them all to Earth. Which, it turned out, was an ironic turn of phrase since when she started fiddling with the dials, it turned out that damn music had switched on the viper's SatNav.
Lee Adama shook hands with Natalie (who should have been dead) in the middle of the godsdamned hangar deck and declared that they would all go together.
* * *
END PART 1
PART 2.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-01-16 01:35 am (UTC)There were seconds and seconds of silence. Laura felt herself smile: she knew the exact look that would be on his face. Personal betrayal that the universe dare throw this trick at him. At him.
Hah. For Bill it's always about him, isn't it.
Caprica hid in the forest.
*meep* Frankly I'm amazed at how much sympathy I've developed for her. I certainly didn't feel that way in the begining. At any rate, this idea is awesome.
“Well the good news is, your blood work matches the samples I took before you died, minus any signs of cancer,” Cottle said. “The bad news is, you died, and to be honest, young lady, that's not a symptom I can easily reconcile with your being here right now.”
Heeeeee! Cottle--so blunt and so funny.
Love it that Kara went into her viper for comfort. Also, head!Leoben, yay!
Kara's dream about ghosts watching her from the balcony... cool.
Tory had worked that one out early, perhaps even on New Caprica; never cross the Sixes. Tory was used to them by now. That fifty-fifty chance; were they going to kill you or kiss you? It was the way the Leobens saw no difference between sanity and madness, or between themselves. It was the way the Sharons never seemed able to decide if they were in love with each other or desperate for the first ticket out of their naked yoga commune. Just like getting to know anyone, except there were a thousand of them with every possible permutation of mood represented, everywhere, all the time.
Tory's summation of the models she knows best is really interesting. and possibly I'm far too fascinated with the Twos and their weird shared obsessions
Baltar as the centurion messiah is fitting and scary. (even scarier, later on)
“Earth isn't your responsibility. Yet. But everything will be. I keep telling you Gaius; you'll be the father of a new generation. You just can't conceive of its magnitude. With God's power in your hands, everything will be possible.”
Yes. That kind of 'scarier'--I can't believe how well you made all of head!Six's statements work by the end.
More music! I have this odd feeling of satisfaction that Tory is overwhelmed by what she seems. I think I want to see her discomfited in some way after her role in Cally's death and her apparently guilt-free composure.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-17 03:40 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about Caprica. I mean, I always found the Sixes more sympathetic and fascinating than a lot of people but Caprica's shot up to like, the kicked puppy of the show for me. Well, her and Sam Anders. ;)
And OMG COTTLE. I really wish I'd had an excuse to write him more in this story.
I'm glad that Kara's head!Leoben and behaviour and dreams worked for you and that you're seeing a connection between the religous babble Six spews out in the first section and what happens eventually. I did want the story to hang together quite tightly in terms of the crazy metaphors people spew out and the dreams they're having so it's nice to know I kinda succeded there. ;)
And don't worry - I'm very much obsessed with the Twos as well. I think they all share all their memories, which is going to be interesting if that's no longer possible now the Hub has gone.
I absolutely think that Tory's guilt-free composure is something she's trying to trick even herself with. I think she can't let herself feel the enormity of what she did because it would break her. She's very strong-willed and is directing ALL of that at ignoring what she did and forcefully believing that she doesn't need to be guilty because God will forgive and save her. I think that's why she was so quick on the Baltar bandwagon. It gave her an eaay out for her subconscious and a coping mechanism.
The line at the end with Tyrol and Tory is supposed to be an indication that she just told him something awful: probably about Cally.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-06 02:59 am (UTC)