That brought her back to the present. “They’re … mopping up?”
“It looks that way, sir.”
Laura considered. “Am I right in assuming that they wouldn’t be … mopping up … unless they’d already”—she swallowed back her horror at the thought—“finished off the colonies?”
Lee grimaced, and did not hide his feelings. “That would be my assumption as well. And certainly consistent with the reports we’ve gotten. We know all twelve of the colonies were hit.”
Laura nodded. Twenty-three billion people, at last count. Twenty-three billion … .
CHAPTER 36
THE SURVIVOR FLEET
Sharon came out of Jump with a flash, and was stunned to see the size of the fleet that had gathered in her absence. Large ships and small. It was practically an armada. She checked for the refinery ship Tauranian, and was relieved to see that it had come out of Jump just ahead of her. She keyed her wireless. “Colonial One, Raptor Three-One-Two. I’m back and I brought a friend.”
The answering voice was that of Captain Russo, on Colonial One. “Welcome back, Boomer. Got a lot of thirsty ships here eager to make your friend’s acquaintance. Did you pick up any other contacts out there?”
“Negative,” she answered. “There’s no one left.” No one that we can spare the time and fuel to find, anyway. She piloted in silence for a few minutes, leading the refinery ship through the jumble of vessels toward Colonial One.
As she scanned her instruments, something caught her eye—a new blip on the dradis screen. It was a fast-moving craft on the outside of the fleet. Fast-moving like a Cylon raider. “Got a visitor!” she announced sharply.
“I see him. Can you jam his signal?”
“Trying,” she said, snapping switches on the panel. Helo, I need you! Nothing she did seemed to have any effect on the incoming craft.
The Cylon sped into the midst of the fleet, then back out—and vanished in a flash of light. Frak! FRAK! “It’s gone. Colonial, I’m pretty sure it scanned us …”
Laura stood in an urgent meeting at the forward end of the first-class compartment, with Lee Adama, Billy, and Captain Russo. Russo said flatly, “It definitely scanned us before it Jumped.”
Lee tensed, and when he spoke, it was in a strong voice. “We have to go. Now. The Cylons will be here any minute.”
“Can they really respond that fast?” Laura asked.
“They can, and will. They are almost certainly mustering a squadron at this very moment.”
“Will they be able to track us through a Jump?” the President asked.
“No sir, that’s impossible.”
“Theoretically impossible.”
“Theoretically,” Lee conceded.
Aaron Doral had joined the group, scowling. “Madame President, there are still thousands of people on the sublight ships. We can’t just leave them.”
“I agree,” said Russo. “We should use every second to get as many people off the sublights as we can. We can wait to Jump until we pick up a Cylon force moving—”
“No! We’re easy targets,” Lee said sharply. “They’re going to Jump right in the middle of our ships with a handful of nukes and wipe us out before we have a chance to react.”
“You can’t just leave them all behind!” Doral protested. “You’ll be sacrificing thousands of people!”
“But—we’ll be saving tens of thousands,” Lee responded, and his voice became fast and urgent. “I’m sorry to make it a numbers game, but we’re talking about the survival of our race, here. We don’t have the luxury of taking risks and hoping for the best—because if we lose, we lose everything.”
He looked squarely at Laura. “And Madame President, this is a decision that needs to be made right now.”
She gazed back at him, remembering the last time she had faced a decision like this. That time she had followed her heart, not her mind. She’d opted to stay with the disabled liner, despite the fact that they had no way to defend it—and only through Lee’s fast thinking, and the grace of the gods, had they come out of it alive. She dared not make that mistake again.
With a soft voice that belied the knot in her stomach, she said, “Order the fleet to Jump to Ragnar immediately.”
If it weren’t for the buzzing in her head, she would have sworn that time had come to a stop. Everyone had walked away from her—with urgency, with sadness, with anger. She was scarcely aware of their departure. Billy was still here. He must have something he wanted to say. The buzzing, though, was all she could hear.
Finally, Billy broke through, his words sounding distant, then drawing near. “Madame President, something else you should be aware of …”
She stared across the cabin, seeing nothing. “I have cancer,” she said suddenly.
For a moment, there was no answer. Then: “I know.”
She turned her head to look at Billy in amazement.
He looked ready to explode with tension, fear, sorrow. He was carrying burdens someone his age should never have to carry. “Little things you said or did,” he explained with difficulty. “A couple of comments you made. I don’t think anyone else knows; I haven’t said anything to anyone.”
She looked away again; she could not bear to face another human being as she said, “My prognosis is doubtful.” She paused for a heartbeat. “I wish I could say it was the least of my worries. But the world is coming to an end, and all I can think about is that I have cancer and I’m probably going to die.” Another heartbeat. “How selfish is that?”
Billy scarcely breathed. “It’s not selfish. It’s human.” After a moment, he turned sadly and started to walk away.
Laura watched him, her gaze narrowing. “Is there something you wanted to say to me?”
He stopped in the doorway leading to the next compartment, then turned. “Well, I—I just thought you should know. That little girl you met earlier, Cami?” His fingers tugged nervously at the book he was holding in both hands. “Her ship can’t make the Jump.”
She heard his words, and yet did not hear them. She stood frozen with regret and remorse … and she could not breathe, or even change the pained smile on her face, until something in the back of her brain was able to take those words and put them into a container where, at least for a little while, they could not hurt her any further. “Thank you,” she said at last, with a slight nod, releasing Billy from the awful spot he had just put them both into.
She turned away, then, to take a seat alone at the back of the first-class compartment. There was no room in her thoughts now for the living; there were too many dying, and she could only be with them just now.
In the cockpit, Lee was in the right seat alongside Captain Russo, with Eduardo on the comm and nav panel at the rear. They were going through the pre-Jump checklist with grave efficiency. From the overhead speakers, voices were coming in from all over the fleet. Voices crying for help, for mercy …
Captain Russo gave Lee one last look of regret before letting a shield slide over his emotions: “Set the SB trajectory.”
“Colonial One! For God’s sake, you can’t just leave us here!”
Lee determinedly ignored the voices. “SB set.”
“Cycle cryo-fans.”
“Colonial One, this is Picon Three-Six-Bravo. I can’t believe you want to leave all these people behind …”
Lee’s fingers worked the board. “Cycled.”
“At least tell us where you’re going! We’ll follow at sublight.”
Captain Russo glanced at Lee, then reached up to the comm panel to send a reply.
“No,” Lee said, reaching as though to stop him physically. “If they’re captured, then the Cylons know, too.”
“I’ve got fifty people on board! Colonial One, do you copy this?”
Captain Russo struggled for a moment with indecision, then lowered his hand, realizing that Lee was right. “Spinning up FTL drive now.”
Lee: “All ships—prepare to Jump on our mark. Five …”
“Colonial One, please respond!”
“Four …”
“May the Lords of Kobol protect those souls we leave behind.”
“Three …”
Alone in the passenger compartment, Laura sat listening to the comm exchanges. Her thoughts had nowhere to go, her feelings were spun into a suffocating web, her ears were ringing with the sounds of desperation and fear, her gut was tied into a knot so tight she feared if she moved so much as a muscle, she and her world would spin apart into a thousand pieces. Why me … why me … ? And why them … the innocent … ?
Aboard the Space Park, it was a little before dinner-time, and young Cami sat on her favorite bench under her favorite tree, whiling away the time with her rag doll. A lot of the people had left the park, but she liked it too much to leave. “Don’t worry, Jeannie,” she reassured her doll, dancing her on her head. “They’ll come and get us when it’s time to eat … they’ll come and get us …”
In the dark of space surrounding the shifting fleet, there was a sudden change. With a series of flashes, half a dozen vessels popped into the local space. They were moving at high speed, directly on a course that would take them into the fleet.
“I’ve got dradis contact—inbound targets heading this way!”
Lee kept the count steady. “Two …”
“I see them, too. Are they Colonial?”
Lee knew exactly what they were, and there was no way he could accelerate the count; he could only sit tight and pray. “One.”
“Oh my God, they’re Cylons!”
“Mark.”
“I hope you people rot in hell for this—!”
Laura felt the tears rising into her eyes, against all her inner bulwarks. There was no turning back.
It was done.
She could feel space begin to fold inward around her …
Throughout the fleet, dozens of flashes of light marked the Jumping of ships away from the fleet, away to somewhere else in space. At the same moment, a rapid-fire series of flashes came from each of the Cylon fighters. Long white streamers arced out in great, spreading bundles as the missiles painted their pretty, deadly tracers across the sky. It took only moments for each and every one of them to find their targets.
The sky began to light up with exploding spaceships.
In the garden, Cami gently smoothed out Jeannie’s hair. She had noticed some flashing out in space, through the overhead dome. That probably meant that some of the ships were going home. She was happy for them; it was about time. Maybe, she hoped, her ship would go home soon, too.
And then her sky turned white, like the sun up close. And she felt nothing, nothing at all.
PART THREE
THE FINAL GATHERING
CHAPTER 37
SOMEWHERE IN RAGNAR STATION
The passageways seemed to be getting narrower and narrower the farther they walked, with Leoben leading the way and Commander Adama close behind. Rows of pipes and ductwork lined the walls, from deck to ceiling. The deeper into the station they went, the more claustrophobic it felt. Adama couldn’t be sure he wasn’t being taken on a long walk to nowhere. Although he had questioned Leoben about the route they were taking, it was nearly impossible to keep his sense of direction here; there were too many little jogs and turns.
They had been walking for maybe twenty minutes, when Leoben suddenly doubled over, gasping. Adama came up behind him. “You all right?”
Leoben stood up, shaking his head. He was dripping sweat. “Fine. It’s just something about this place …”
He looked as if he meant to continue, but he didn’t. “What about this place?” Adama asked.
“Ever since I got here, something in the air”—Leoben gestured with his hands—“affects my allergies.” He let out his breath and started walking again. “You always keep me in front, don’t you—military training, right? Never turn your back on a stranger, that kind of thing?” He ducked through a bulkhead opening. “Suspicion and distrust, that’s the military life, right? War? Hatred? Jealousy, revenge, cruelty?”
“So you’re a gun dealer/philosopher, I take it, right?” Adama answered.
Leoben stopped to lean back against some pipes, laughing. Then he lurched off again, still breathing hard. “I’m an observer of human nature, that’s all. In my line of work, I see things that don’t get mentioned in polite society. When you get right down to it, humanity is not a pretty race. I mean, we’re only one step away from beating each other with clubs—like savages, fighting over scraps of meat.” He glanced back at Adama. “Did you ever think, maybe we deserve what’s happened to us? Maybe the Cylons are God’s retribution for our many sins. Hubris—that’s Man’s greatest flaw. His belief that he alone has a soul, that he’s the chosen of God.”
Adama grunted. “You told me a little while ago you were a Geminon theist. Don’t you believe God gave Man his soul?”
“Maybe. But what if”—Leoben paused to lean against the wall and wait for Adama to catch up—“what if God decided he’d made a mistake—that Man was a flawed creature, after all? And he decided to give souls to another creature—like the Cylons.” He chuckled and lurched back into motion.
That made Adama flare with annoyance. He called after Leoben in a harsh voice. “God didn’t create the Cylons! Man did.” Leoben paused to hear him out. “The Cylons are just devices. Technology that’s gotten out of control. And I’m pretty sure we didn’t include a soul in the programming. So there’s no loss if we kill every last one of them. Let’s go.”
Leoben laughed and cocked his head a little as he looked over his shoulder. “You’re not even interested in knowing the truth, are you? Maybe the Cylons feel exactly the same way you do, but about Mankind. I don’t think they hate you, Adama—I think they fear you.” He stopped to cough again. “How about you go first for a while?”
Adama just glared.
GALACTICA, COMBAT INFORMATION CENTER
Colonel Tigh peered over the shoulder of Lieutenant Gaeta as the younger man hung up the phone. He’d just been conferring with Chief Tyrol, on the station. Gaeta looked up at the colonel. “The chief says we’re looking at three hours minimum before we have all the warheads in our magazines.”
Tigh searched for an entry in the thick inventory book he was holding. “The book says there’s also fifty tons of bundled—”
The attention-tone interrupted him, and one of the junior officers at the dradis console called, “Action stations! Action stations!”
Gaeta quickly checked his own dradis screen. “We have multiple contacts coming down through the storm, toward the anchorage.” He turned back toward Tigh. “It looks like more than fifty ships.”
“Cut us loose from the station,” Tigh ordered, and strode toward the command post. He tossed his inventory book onto the charting table and called out, “Launch the alert fighters.” He picked up a handset for ship-wide announcement. “Set Condition One throughout the ship! Prepare to launch—”
“Wait!” called Dualla, from the main comm station. “Wait—I’m getting Colonial signals now.” She was pressing her earphone to her ear.
“Confirm that!” Tigh said. He strode over toward the comm station and barked, “Don’t just accept friendly ID.”
Just as he reached the comm station Dualla added, “Confirmed, sir. Incoming ships are friendly.”
Amazed, Tigh picked up the nearest handset and keyed all-ship again. “Action stations, stand down.”
Dualla continued, “The lead ship is requesting permission to come alongside, sir. They say …” she hesitated, listening closely, “they say they have the President of the Colonies aboard.”
Tigh turned to look back at Dualla incredulously. Slowly his expression changed to reluctant acceptance, as he realized he had to assume the report was genuine. “Grant their request,” he said, his voice overlaid with skepticism. “Bring’em into the landing bay.” This had better be for real.
“Oh, and Co
lonel,” Dualla continued. “They say they also have Lee Adama … and Boomer. Both alive and well.”
Tigh blinked and rocked back on his heels. He tried like a sonofabitch not to break into a big grin. “Well, I’ll be damned …”
As President Laura Roslin stepped out of Colonial One into Galactica’s hangar deck, it occurred to her that it had been barely a few days since she’d left this ship, fully expecting that the next time she boarded the vessel, it would be a museum in orbit around Caprica. And now it’s the flagship of the surviving fleet of humanity. She remembered her argument with Commander Adama over whether the museum could be outfitted with a small computer network. She shook her head at the memory. Obsessive and controlling, she’d thought him at the time. But it turned out he’d been right about computer networks. Tragically right.
There didn’t seem to be anyone to greet them, except the deckhands who had brought up the stairs. She went down the steps, followed closely by Captain Apollo and Billy. The hangar seemed quiet, for a ship at war. “Where is everyone?” she asked the deckhand at the bottom of the steps.
“Everyone except the stand-by crews are busy moving munitions aboard from the station,” the deckhand said, gesturing toward the other end of the hangar. “Colonel Tigh said I should bring you to the officers’ briefing room.”
“I see. And will Commander Adama meet us there?” Laura asked.
“I don’t think so, sir,” said the deckhand. “There was an accident of some sort on the station, and I heard the Commander was tied up with that. Colonel Tigh is in command right now.”
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