He looked out again, hoping for some kind of salvation, spotting only the wreckage of the old city below. With barely a thought, he banked his Viper for the ruins, and the Raider followed.
Trays' Viper handled more easily at a lower altitude, restoring some maneuverability. But the Raider was close and closing fast. Trays took it lower still, and dived through the space between the wreckage of the ancient buildings. The Raider fired at him, missed, fired again, and smacked his apex pulsar.
The Viper banked and turned down a juncture, keeping as low to the debris-choked streets as it could. Trays was playing a game of hide-and-seek with the Raider, counting on the clutter of buildings to hide his Viper from the Raider's monitors and hoping inspiration would strike him before a turbolaser could.
Trays was hoping he could wind back around behind the Raider and blast it to dust, but he didn't think his Viper was going to last that long. He looked ahead, down the length of the long, narrow avenue through which he pushed his limping fighter, and smiled.
He looked at the info-scroll inside his helm, gauged his speed and the Raider's, and fired his turbolasers at the front of a tall, crumbling edifice on his port side. The lasers blew great chunks of stone out of the building, and, already weakened, the building began to collapse in a shower of stone and smoke. Trays' Viper passed by the avalanche just in time, hearing smaller stones banging off the wings and hull of his fighter. A larger stone struck and starred his canopy, and the young Warrior had to throw it open to see where he was going.
Behind him, the Raider disappeared in the avalanche of falling debris.
"Eat that!" Trays shouted with a maniacal laugh.
Trays brought his fighter in for a rough landing in the middle of the avenue, and sat quietly a few moments, unable to force his fingers to relinquish their grip on the navi-hilt, trying to bring his heart rate and breathing back to normal. When he thought his legs would support him, Trays swung down out of his Viper and looked down the length of the street, his heart thudding in his chest at what he saw. The Cylon had survived the collapsing building, even if his Raider had not, and now stalked after Trays, pulse rifle drawn.
"Ohhh, frack," Trays said. He had not worn his own sidearm because he was called off the bench at the last moment, and now, that was about to cost him.
The Cylon was badly injured, his left leg shattered and dragging behind him, his armor dented in a dozen places, his helmet smashed and part of his brain laid open, more dead than alive, but on and on he came. Trays looked around, trying to find a weapon, someplace to take refuge, but he didn't think he could get far before the pulse rifle burned a hold through his body between his shoulder blades.
Trays jumped out of the way as the first blast came, leaping up onto the ring of his Viper and into the cockpit. There was no weapon but the Viper itself; the turbolasers were facing forward, away from the staggering Cylon, but the pulsars… Trays' hand slammed down on the controls, firing the pulsars to life. The thrusters flared out in a long, deadly tail, striking the Cylon, the enormous heat of the thrusters melting his armor, gobbets of it flying backward, carried by the force of the pulsar like silvery rain. A moment later, the Cylon reached its vapor point, and turned into a bipedal stack of ashes, then, scattered on the winds.
Trays had forgotten, in the rush of the moment, that Cylons traveled in pairs, and now its companion Centurion climbed from the wreckage, clearly in better shape than the first mech soldier. This one came charging across the broken terrain, hellishly fast. It didn't have a weapon, but Trays suspected that wasn't going to make much difference.
Its armor, he had time to observe, was sleeker, more streamlined, and the red, pulsing light in its visor burned with a greater intensity. Trays couldn't know it, but the brighter light signified more brain activity in the new and evolved Centurions. Trays looked about the landscape for a weapon, something with which he might at least inflict some damage upon the Cylon, but there was only rubble, too large for him to lift and hurl. He would simply have to make an accounting of himself with his bare hands, and even as he raised his fisted hands, Trays had a ludicrous image of what he must look like, and how sad and futile a gesture it was, trying to bare-knuckle box with an armored killer. As it turned out, he didn't have to worry about it, because the Centurion suddenly, inexplicably staggered forward, its arms thrown in the air, and Trays sidestepped its tumbling body as it fell to the ground. Trays was ready to bash its head in, but the massive scorched and smoking patch on the Cylon's back told him that wasn't going to be necessary.
Someone had shot the Centurion in the back, and Trays looked up to see Bo jay's Viper coming in for a landing near him.
The cockpit popped open. "You the fella that called for a ride?" he asked, gesturing for Trays to hurry up and get in. Trays pelted across the cracked, uneven ground, leaped up onto the wing of Bo jay's fighter and slipped into the cockpit behind him. It was a cramped fit, but better than trying to walk.
"I saw you break away from the group," Bo jay said, letting his Viper taxi down the uneven street. There wasn't much room to get up a good start, so he had to jerk back hard on the navi-hilt and almost climb the face of a shattered structure at the end of his makeshift runway. Trays grimaced, half convinced this madman would do the job the Cylon couldn't, but Bo jay banked and brought the Viper around and angled it toward wide-open spaces. "I saw the Cylon on your butt, but I had some company of my own that refused to leave. Sorry I didn't get here earlier."
"As long as you got here in time," Trays said. "And… thanks. For everything."
The Pegasus was dying.
Apollo and all the pilots could see the old battlestar burning brighter, faster, out of control, falling toward the planet in a slow, slow, graceful descent.
Cain had managed to get his comm-lines functioning once more, at least for the few moments he would need them. His image appeared on the screens of the other battlestars, the movements herky-jerky, as the digital imager shorted and lost power from centon to centon.
Cassiopeia had come to the bridge of the Galactica and watched Cain's final transmission. His face was painted in bold red strokes by the countless fires that raged around him, and he coughed as much from the suffocating smoke in the air as from the massive internal trauma he had suffered from the Cylon's barrage. But he stood upright and proud, and only those who knew him well would know the enormous pain he was in.
"Cassie," he said, his voice like stones grinding together, "I'll always love you. And tell Sheba I have always been proud to be her father."
Athena had patched the transmission through to the Vipers, and Sheba heard her father's words, like a deathbed confessional. She looked back, away from the battle, and saw for the first time just how terrible and overwhelming was the damage the Pegasus had suffered. Her heart broke, as if the indignities heaped upon the battlestar had been done to her father, and, in a way, she supposed that was true. He and his old warstar were one.
She broke out of formation and punched her Viper, heading back for the Pegasus, screaming at the top of her lungs for her father to hang on just another micron.
Count Iblis could taste victory.
Aboard the big Cylon mothership, he watched it all, and laughed at the futility of the colonials' struggles. He hadn't been lying when he said the Cylons wanted to take some humans alive, but then, their experiments with DNA would work just as well using the genes from the recently dead. It was all the same at the end of the day, and the sun was rapidly setting on the colonials.
Lucifer, whose basestar was the nearer of the two motherships to the battlestars, listened to Iblis's command to prepare to launch everything they had at the fleet. Apollo's desperate assault had damaged a few of the basestar's plasma cannons, but there was still enough firepower to finish the job.
It was a moment Lucifer had long awaited, had imagined, as much as Cylons imagine anything, and he made the mistake of savoring it.
Before he could give the order to fire, Lucifer stopped, agh
ast at the sight that filled his monitors: the Pegasus, burning out of control, long tongues of flame licking the sky behind it, was rising at full-speed, heading straight for the mothership.
Sheba pushed her Viper flat-out, but she knew she was too late the moment Cain made his farewell speech. There was nothing she could do to change his mind, once he had made it up, but still, she had to try. Her Viper managed to get within range of the battlestar's landing bay, but the apertures refused to iris open for her. Wherever Cain was going, he was not going to allow her to join him.
"Father!" she cried, the tears tracking in slow rivulets down her cheeks. "No!"
"Sheba?" Cain's voice came back, weak, breaking up, as if beamed from some faraway land. "Sheba, I—" and the rest of it was lost in a hiss of static.
The Pegasus was breaking up; hull plates, twisted by the explosions and warped by the staggering heat of the fires, popped rivets and flew off like projectiles. Parts of the superstructure cried in a voice of tortured steel and ripped away, tumbling back to the surface of the planet, kicking up great spumes of dust where they struck. Sheba had to get away or risk perishing herself, and forcing her hand to turn the navi-hilt on her Viper and her back on her father was the hardest thing she had ever had to do.
All around him, the bodies of the wounded, the dying, and the dead. Pools of liquid collected on the deck, and fires raged crazily.
There were no lights upon the bridge, only the illumination the flames provided. All power had been diverted to the battlestar's propulsion system. That was really all Cain needed.
He forced himself to stand tall, gripping the back of his command chair to remain upright as the ship climbed at an ever-steeper angle. His eyes were ablaze with a light the reflection of the fire wasn't wholly responsible for; it was the light of faraway places, the humble light of home, the fire of courage and duty that few men ever quite see so clearly. It was the light, quite simply, by which he had always guided his life.
"Take this, you gull-mongering black devil!" Cain cried, and guided the Pegasus straight into the heart of the monstrous basestar. He was laughing, and he had never felt more alive than in the moment before impact.
The battlestar's prow pierced the basestar's heart, slamming through the hull, explosions hopping and ripping through the mothership like chain lightning. And still the Pegasus drove forward, as if it were some arrow fired from a giant's bow, burying itself deep within its target. It seemed as if the battlestar would continue traveling and erupt from the mothership's other side, but its fiery corpse breached the Tylium fuel cells of the basestar and both ships exploded in a blinding flash. The terrific Shockwave that rippled out before the flaming petals slapped and buffeted the Vipers, making the pilots grip the navi-hilt with both hands and struggle wildly to remain airborne.
The Galactica and the Daedelus also suffered the concussive impact, yawing and pitching, threatening to spin out of control and crash to the ground. Athena gripped the arms of her command chair and braced herself, while the bridge crews tried to stabilize the ship's course.
The fireball that was once the basestar and the Pegasus was as bright as any sun that had been torn from the heavens and flung to earth, and only slightly less hot. The light of the explosion lit the landscape of Kobol for many metrons, turning the shadows of falling dusk into high noon. Huge, flaming spikes of twisted steel spun slowly, gracefully, through the night-turned-daylight sky, driving themselves through the sides of buildings in the ancient city like straws shoved through trees by a hurricane. Wreckage whirled and whipped through the air in all directions, like anchor spikes fired from a numon, impaling Cylon pilots in the seats of their Raiders, decapitating Chitain warriors in their Stingers.
"We have to get out of here!" the bridge officer warned Athena.
"We have to stay right where we are," she snapped back. "Those Vipers won't stand a chance in that firestorm unless they have a landing bay to shelter in!"
The officer looked at her as if she were quite mad, but said, "Yes, Sir." Athena smiled. She'd earned that Sir.
"Stay ahead of it!" Apollo shouted over his comm-line to the other Vipers in the squadron. They were surfing on the very periphery of the fiery wave, streaking back to the Galactica's landing bay. If they were caught by the fire, their Vipers would be atomized at once.
The apertures irised open, and the Vipers bulleted into their berths. Tongues of flame followed them through the recovery tubes, and it seemed fiery death would not be cheated, but at last the flames fell back, retreated, and the Vipers sped down the tubes to their docking bays.
Apollo barely waited for his Viper to come to a halt before he popped the canopy and leaped out, hitting the deck running. The pain of his broken leg, numbed and sleeping, woke up with a scream as soon as he put his weight upon it. He hissed through gritted teeth, and hop-skipped as fast as he could for the ascensior to the bridge.
Athena was shouting at him through their telepathic link, asking him for the rest of the coordinates, reminding him they'd accomplished nothing if they couldn't get out of Kobol's vicinity before it self-destructed.
But the musical language he had heard in his head had left him with an unfinished symphony.
# # #
Count Iblis watched the brutally spectacular destruction of the lead mothership and laughed. He knew the cogitator calling himself Lucifer had been planning to usurp Iblis's place in the Cylon empire, and this fortuitous turn of events spared Iblis the bother of ridding himself of a nettlesome situation. Better still, the fleet had lost a battlestar and was doubtless demoralized by the violent death of Commander Cain. He ordered the second basestar, the one in which he stood, to move into position to attack the colonials.
The plasma cannons whined up through the octaves as they charged with deadly power. Iblis was going to enjoy this. He promised himself he'd save the Galactica for the last, and deal with Apollo, personally. "Your laughable heroics will win you nothing this time, Adama-son," Iblis said.
Apollo played the incomplete melody over and over in his head, hoping the rest of it would follow as naturally as the next breath, but it was a song that refused to come. He rode the ascensior up to the bridge, leaning against the wall, trying to keep the weight off his bad leg as much as possible, praying for understanding, asking the spirit of Adama for his aid, but the song remained the same.
Apollo, please, the coordinates…
I know, Athena, I know.
They were close, he felt that. But he was beginning to think they weren't close enough.
The basestar had moved into position, sailing through the thick, black cloud that still filled the air to mark the tremendous, explosive end the mother ship and the battlestar. Metrons-high columns of flame rose from the tangled, twisted wreckage that dotted the surface of Kobol. To those watching from the fleet, the basestar looked like something rising from the fiery pits of hell, and that might not have been too far wrong, for the creature at the command post of the mothership was surely the personification of evil.
Iblis smiled and trained the plasma cannons on the Daedelus. "Your sister dies first, Apollo," he said. "But, don't worry; you won't have to live with the guilt for long."
Apollo! I know the coordinates! I know the rest of the coordinates!
Apollo hit the bridge running, ordering the navigators to stand by to receive coordinates. . Athena, how—?
Speaking with you, telepathically… The information came to me in a musical language… Apollo, I understand! Here, let me tell you…
And she played for him the musical language she had heard, and trusted her inner vision to understand. Apollo heard her memory of it in his mind, nodded as he received the notes. He knew they fit together with the notes he had received, and also knew he and Athena had both been touched by the hand of Fate.
"That's it!" he shouted, his heart so light he thought it would fly away. "Program the coordinates immediately!"
"On my command," Iblis said, savoring the moment, "fire!" The Ce
nturion's hands danced over the weapons keypad.
Zero.
Apollo looked away, knowing Kobol's time had run out. He just hoped theirs hadn't vanished with it. Far below, the surface of the planet seemed to shudder, and ripple, and begin to jump and spasm. The skin of the planet jerked wildly, and then collapsed inward upon itself, as the incredible network of underground caverns and passageways crumbled.
Kobol was in its death throes and it did not plan on dying easily.
The buildings on the surface screamed and twisted as their bedrock vanished from beneath them. Huge volcanoes thrust themselves up through the face of Kobol, while tectonic plates screamed the agony of their death throes. A fissure as large as the city itself opened, and swallowed all that remained, like the slavering maw of some ravenous creature. The pyramids flung themselves apart, layer by layer of terraced stone, exposing their ancient secrets for anyone who had an eye to see them. And then, they, too, were swallowed by the greedy planet.
Count Iblis's laugh turned into a long, high, shriek of thwarted rage and fury.
"Damn you, Adama-son!" he thundered, and the air around him seemed to roil and seethe as his shadow form seeped poison into the atmosphere. The Cylons, dreamless, unimaginative drones that they were, could not help but shudder with sick terror at the hideous, primordial race memories Iblis stirred in them. The weaponeer looked dumbly at the Count, the staggeringly frightful images freezing him in his seat. These emotions, fear, especially, were new and overwhelming to him, having known only hatred before this moment, and he was facing a psychic overload. Iblis cursed, threw the paralyzed Cylon out of his seat, and finished the weapons firing sequence on the keypad.
The plasma cannons whined, grew brighter, and spat out their deadly charge.
One moment, Athena was watching death bullet its way across space toward her, and the next she was suddenly staring at the shifting view of hyperspace. When she realized what had happened, that they had cheated death one more time, she laughed. And then, she sat quietly in the command chair, bowed her head, and gave silent thanks to the Lords of Kobol. Apollo watched the destruction of Kobol, and whispered one word: "Serina." Cassiopeia was near enough to hear the sound of his whispered farewell, and thought it was the sound a man might make when he lays down a heavy burden he has carried for far too long. She touched him lightly on his back, but he didn't look up. There were tears in his eyes.
Battlestar Galactica-03-Resurrection Page 27
