Unity

by Steven Harper

  Kara shook off these thoughts and concentrated on the basestar. A glance up and port told her that Lee had brought his own Viper close to hers. Behind, she assumed, Kat and Hot Dog were keeping other raiders too busy to pursue her. She released a tense breath.

  Okay, all you Lords of Kobol, she thought. This is where you can prove that I’m one of your favorites.

  Tentacles of smoke wound out of the basestar. Missiles. Fear dried up Kara’s mouth. Even with Lee intercepting, she doubted she could dodge all of them, and it would only take one to wipe her out. They threaded toward her and Lee.

  “I’m reading a signal from the nuke raider,” Gaeta said. “It’s similar to a distress call.”

  “Starbuck,” Lee said, “we need to turn back.”

  Anger boiled in Kara’s stomach. The missiles were now eight or ten kilometers away. The basestar loomed, taking up Kara’s entire field of vision.

  “Are you frakking crazy?” she snapped. “Back through all those raiders?”

  “We can’t deal with those missiles on our own,” Lee retorted. “That’s an order, Lieu—”

  The missiles detonated. Every one of them. Flares of light flashed against Kara’s retinas, leaving red dots. The shockwave came a moment later, but the missiles had exploded far too soon to do any damage and she rode it out with scarcely a bump.

  “They know!” Kara whooped. “The toasters know I have their nuke. They didn’t want one of their missiles to set it off this close.”

  “A bunch of raiders got past us,” Kat said. “Company’s coming, Apollo.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Lee said. “Starbuck, go! Make it fast!”

  She went. Her sluggish Viper flung itself forward. This was the closest she had ever come to a basestar, and it filled her world with gray menace. The disgusting thing had actual frakking portholes in it, and she could see figures moving around inside. Did they know what she was doing, or that she was even here? She gnawed her lower lip in concentration. Flashes of light came over her shoulder, telling her that Lee had engaged the flock of raiders that had gotten past Hot Dog and Kat. Kara eyed the basestar, her eyes tracking rapidly back and forth almost like the single eye of a Cylon. And then she saw it—an open port. It might have been for launching raiders, it might have been for launching missiles. Hell, it might have been for launching Cylon sewage. Kara didn’t much care. She aimed for it and accelerated again.

  Lords of Kobol, she thought, keeping her hands steady by strength of will. Fear mixed with exhilaration, making both all the sweeter. The port loomed closer. At the last minute, Kara reversed all her thrusters. She slammed against her flight harness, and pain made an H across her chest. With a metallic screech, the nuke raider wrenched away from her landing gear. It spun like a discus, the single eye tracking frantically back and forth as it headed for the port. At the last moment, Kara fired her weapons. A tongue of flame touched the little raider just as it flew into the port.

  “Run!” Kara shouted into the comm. She flipped her Viper over and punched the thrusters hard. Acceleration shoved her backward, crushing her, and her vision flickered for a moment before she could recover. She rushed past the Cylons Lee was fighting. Lee flipped his own Viper and fled along with her. The raiders paused for a moment, then flew after them. Kara threw a glance over her shoulder at the basestar, waiting for the big kaboom.

  Nothing happened.

  Uh oh, she thought, then looked at the flock of raiders on her screen. Over a hundred behind her, and all would hit firing range in a few seconds.

  “If we live through this,” Lee growled, bringing his Viper in beside hers, “I’m going to kill you.”

  Starbuck flashed him a sickly grin and flipped her Viper one more time, guns ready. Lee followed suit. If she was going to go down, she would go down with her weapons blazing and the wounds on her front, not her back. The raiders rushed forward, their sleek, deadly forms almost invisible against the blackness.

  And then a horrendous light filled the universe.

  CHAPTER 2

  Kara flung up a hand to shield her eyes, though the Viper’s cabin was well polarized. Moments later, the shockwave hit, flipping her and Lee ass over teakettle. Both Vipers bucked and weaved as their pilots fought to regain control. Kara bounced around within her harness, jarring her new bruises. A few hundred kilometers away, the basestar was exploding in the world’s most brilliant firework display, as if the Lords of Kobol had cracked open a doorway into hell. Kara ignored the pain, ignored the light, and just frakking flew.

  The other Vipers turned tail and ran as well. Ahead lay the Galactica and safety. The raiders buzzed about, obviously confused and uncertain by the loss of their commanding ship. In a few minutes they would recover, however. The light and shock of the explosion faded, and Kara regained full control of her Viper.

  “Get ’em!” Lee barked.

  The fight was short, nasty, and to the point. The Cylon raiders didn’t have a chance to regain their equilibrium before the Vipers shredded them the way a chef shredded soft cheese. Into an omelet. With tender mushrooms and sweet onions and—

  Kara’s stomach growled as another Cylon puffed into a satisfying fireball under her buns. Guns! Under her guns. Frak, when had she last eaten?

  The basestar was an expanding nebula of radioactive debris, and Hot Dog got the last Cylon raider, a fact he announced with a whoop that made Kara’s ears ring.

  ″Let’s go home, people,″ Lee said. ″You did good.”

  ″Services for Shadow?” Kat asked.

  ″This evening,” Lee said.

  Kara eased her Viper around to face the enormous Galactica, her mood gone suddenly pensive. She had barely known Jen “Shadow” Curtis and now she was gone. Kara had long since stopped keeping track of the number of Viper pilots they had lost since the Cylon attack—the number was just too depressing. What she wanted right now was a stiff shot of something that would burn all the way down, a hot meal, and maybe a card game. Or sex. With someone nice and—

  “Viper squadron, I’m reading a distress signal,” Gaeta said, breaking Kara’s chain of thought.

  “From the basestar?” Lee said, surprised.

  “Negative. The signal is Colonial.”

  Kara’s heart jumped. “Is it Shadow?”

  “Also negative. It’s an automated signal from an escape pod.”

  Escape pod? “Vipers don’t have escape pods,” Kara said, “and we’re the only ones out here. Gaeta, you’re seeing things.”

  “Still negative, Lieutenant. You should be getting it on your screen now.″

  Kara glanced down. Sure enough, the source of a Colonial distress signal was flashing.

  “Have any ships in the Fleet launched escape pods?” Lee asked.

  There was a pause. “Negative, Captain,″ came the warm voice of Tactical Officer Anastasia Dualla—“Dee” to her friends. “No distress from the Fleet, and no pod launched.”

  “Apollo, Starbuck, go check it out,” Adama ordered.

  “On it, sir,” Lee said, and both Vipers swung around. Kara made a face and her stomach growled again. Dammit, this mission was over. She was supposed to get food and booze and … maybe something else. Still, curiosity nudged her. So did suspicion. Cylons could be slippery as a snake in an oil refinery. This might easily be a trick.

  “This might easily be a trick,” Lee said.

  Kara suppressed a snort. “You read my mind, Captain. Scary.”

  “Frakking scary, Lieutenant.”

  Kara homed in on the signal, brought her Viper about, and hit the acceleration. May as well get this over with. Lee followed, a little above and behind her. She dodged around a couple pieces of basestar debris and finally caught sight of the signal’s source. The pod was boxy, about two meters tall, two meters wide, and five meters deep. A red distress light winked steadily on the top, and it was slowly rotating end over end. A rudimentary thruster jutted from the back, designed to give just enough boost for the pod to grab some distance
from whatever vessel it was trying to flee. Kara stared, instantly recognizing the design.

  “It’s a Colonial escape pod,” she reported, not quite believing it. “Where the hell did it come from?”

  “Has to be the basestar,” Lee said, his tone also conveying disbelief. “Unless one of the Fleet ships blew up when we weren’t looking.”

  “No such luck, Apollo,” said Colonel Saul Tigh, the Galactica’s executive officer. His voice was dry and hard as old wood, and Kara could imagine him in CIC, his bare scalp gleaming in the artificial light. “Nothing that comes from a Cylon ship is worth saving. Open fire.”

  Kara stuck her tongue into her cheek and moved it around. Tigh wanted the pod destroyed, and that automatically made her reluctant to make it happen. Tigh was a grade-A, no-holdsbarred, frakked-up, drunk-ass shithead. In her humble opinion. Unfortunately, the frakked-up shithead also had rank on her.

  “Sir—” she began.

  “Belay that,” Adama interrupted. “Starbuck, can you get any closer and check it out better? Apollo, you provide cover.”

  “Commander,” Tigh said, “I don’t think that’s a good—”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Adama cut him off. “Your objection is noted.”

  “Moving in, sir,” Kara said, not bothering to keep the smugness out of her voice. Adama—now there was a commander you could respect. If Bill Adama asked her to check out the heart of a star, she’d salute and fire all thrusters. She edged her Viper closer. Beyond the pod, the blazing yellow sun continued pumping out radiation across the spectrum. Already, the basestar debris field had largely dispersed. Kara matched velocity with the pod, though it continued to turn slowly end over end. Her finger remained on the fire button for her weapons. Colonel Tigh was an ass, but that didn’t mean she had to be stupid.

  The pod rotated some more, and a porthole slid into view. Through it, Kara caught a glimpse of a human face, a male she didn’t recognize. He was staring into space with wide, frightened eyes. They locked gazes for a startled moment.

  Help! he mouthed. Then the pod’s rotation carried the porthole out of view.

  “There’s someone aboard,” Kara reported, forcing her voice to remain steady. “I just saw a man’s face.”

  A moment of silence fell over the airwaves. A raider was just one shape Cylons came in. Some Cylons were shiny metal robots, complete with built-in pulse rifles. And some looked perfectly, exactly human. Cylons also seemed to go in for repetition. All their robotic forms looked alike, and the human forms seemed to be limited in their variation. Kara had heard rumors that the Cylons used only twelve human shapes. She herself had encountered at least two female forms and three male forms, and she had killed one of the latter back on Caprica when—

  —a shiny shard sinking into soft flesh, a choked cry gurgling from a ruined throat, an ineffectual hand clawing at her face—

  Nausea quivered in her empty stomach and Kara shoved unpleasant memories aside. She needed to concentrate on the present job, not on past nightmares.

  “Is he human or Cylon?” Tigh demanded.

  “No way to tell, sir.” Kara resisted adding an epithet about the stupidity of Tigh’s question. “He looked human, and I haven’t seen him before, but that doesn’t say much.”

  “I’m dispatching a search-and-rescue Raptor, Starbuck,” Adama said. “You and Apollo can return to Galactica.”

  “Sir,” she acknowledged, though she felt oddly reluctant to leave the guy, whoever he was, spinning alone through space. The feeling wasn’t rational—there was nothing she could do for him in a Viper, and for all she knew, he was a Cylon. But the feeling remained. She gave the pod one more glance before bringing her Viper about and falling in behind Lee as he headed for home.

  Home, she thought. When did Galactica become home? As a Viper pilot, Viper trainer, and occasional CAG—Commander Air Group—Kara spent more time on ships than she did planetside, and her small apartment on Caprica usually showed her neglect. But now that Caprica and the other Twelve Colonies were overrun by Cylons, she felt a strong need to return there, feel the open spaces around her, breathe the crisp, fresh air. Cook a meal. Sink into a soft chair. Hell, she even missed dusting the furniture. Before the Cylons attacked, she had treated housework as something to be seriously considered after every major earthquake. Now she would happily spend a year hunting down dust bunnies if it meant she could go back home whenever she wanted.

  The thought struck her as strange. Kara had never seen Caprica or her apartment as anything but a base to operate from. She usually felt out of sorts planetside, and came truly alive only when she was flying. It was, she supposed, the lack of choice. Before the Cylon attack, she could go home if she wanted to. Now that the Cylons had removed the choice, she wanted it back.

  “Viper four-one-six/Galactica,” said the Launch Signal Officer. “Approach port landing bay, hands-on, speed nine eight, blue stripes. Call the ball.”

  Kara guided her Viper into the Galactica’s port landing bay, as instructed, keeping her speed at ninety-eight for a manual landing. Lee preceded her into the cavelike bay, its roof arching high above, its floor perfectly flat. A ways ahead of her was an elevator pad painted in blue stripes. Lee was already skimming down to land on one with red checks. All her instruments were in the green and she was having no problems.

  “I have the ball,” she said, and guided her Viper down to a perfect landing. The elevator pad dropped down, taking Kara and the Viper with it. A few moments later, she was on the even more cavernous flight deck. Ceramic tile that had once been white faced most of it. Rows of sleek Vipers and boxy Raptors stretched into the distance. Half a dozen members of Galen Tyrol’s damage-control people surrounded Kara’s little ship before the elevator pad could drop flush with the deck. Kara released the canopy. She pushed it up and removed the helmet to her vac suit with familiar ease. Hard smells from the flight deck assailed her—sharp solder, scorched plastic, metallic air. Kara shook her short blond hair, then hauled herself out of the Viper. The flight crew ignored her as unimportant. The Viper needed their attention more.

  “Not bad out there, Starbuck,” Lee Adama said. He had removed his own vac helmet, revealing a startlingly handsome, boyish face topped with tousled brown hair. Bright blue eyes met her brown ones. “Did you forget your receipt?”

  “Receipt?” she said, puzzled.

  “When you returned the merchandise to the Cylons,” Lee clarified with a grin. “Looked like they wouldn’t accept it without a receipt.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Gosh, Apollo—so funny I forgot to laugh.”

  “Wisecracks are your department. Everybody knows that.”

  “How much damage did you do this time, sir?” broke in a new voice.

  Kara gave Chief Petty Officer Galen Tyrol an insouciant grin. He was a stocky, dark-haired man who wore a continual expression of worry from the long hours and short supplies he dealt with as chief of Deck Crew Five. He and his people oversaw the maintenance and repair of the Vipers, Raptors, and shuttles that defended the Fleet. Kara was notoriously hard on her Vipers and wasn’t much bothered when they came back to him heavily damaged. She knew that to a man like Tyrol, it was like bringing home a sports car covered in dents with all the glass broken, and she could rarely resist teasing him.

  “Meh,” she said. “A few dings and cracks. Nothing you couldn’t suck out with a plunger or slap together with some epoxy.”

  Tyrol’s pained expression was interrupted by the staccato clatter of boots in quick-march. Startled, Kara drew back in time to avoid a squadron of marines. They wore full combat gear, face plates, and flak jackets. The barrels on their pulse rifles gleamed and their stomping boots echoed in the enormous flight deck.

  “What the frak?” Kara said as they trotted past.

  “The SAR Raptor’s bringing in that escape pod you found,” Tyrol explained. “The marines are just in case.”

  Kara was supposed to head for a post-flight debriefing, but there was no way
she was going to miss this. Lee stayed with her. News about the pod had evidently leaked out because a small crowd of other onlookers slowly gathered. Most of them were Tyrol’s technicians, and they were clearly performing make-work to have an excuse to stay close. Kara made no such pretense, and leaned casually against her Viper. Twice she caught Lee looking at her out of the corner of his eye, and she caught herself looking back. Idle curiosity? Or more than that? She felt a faint flush coming on and looked away. Several weeks ago, Kara had returned from a classified mission on Cylonoccupied Caprica. The events of the mission had been upsetting, to say the least, and Lee had done his awkward best to comfort her. And that was when he had said It.

  Upon her return, Lee had met her at the airlock and grabbed her in a tight hug. He had followed this with a brotherly kiss that had, for a second, turned into something a little more powerful. Both of them had pulled back in surprise. Others had been present, however, and they hadn’t had a chance to talk until later when Lee found her in a locker room, disconsolately bouncing a Pyramid ball. Lee had asked what was upsetting her, but Kara refused to talk, and Lee filled the silence with words of his own.

  You’re my friend, and I love you.