We used to wait. (Chapter 26/?)
title: We used to wait. (Chapter 26/?)
author:
apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 8,513
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
This chapter has absolutely everything in it. Fluff! Plot! Angst! Drama! Humans! Cylons! Answers! Questions! Enjoy.
Galactica and the rest of the civilian fleet trailing behind her jumped into orbit surrounding the planet informally known as Earth. After Lee and Kara returned to the Demetrius in their Raptor with the news of what awaited them, the sewage ship had double timed it back to the rendezvous coordinates with the fleet, only stopping to prevent FTL damage. The mood on the Demetrius had reached a level not seen before, not even when they’d found New Caprica or subsequently saved the people from that very planet over a year later. This was the end of their journey, they were sure of it. For once, no one thought about what would happen when the cylons found them, or if they even would. Even from space, New Caprica had looked like a dreary planet. Earth had at least looked full of life.
That enthusiasm spread quickly through the rest of the fleet once Demetrius had made contact with Galactica and forwarded the photographs to the CIC even before they were able to dock and deliver the accounts of what had been witnessed to the Admiral in person. The worries about the Final Five ceased to exist as everyone became preoccupied with what life would be like back on soil again. Families could be planned. Children could grow up with their skin turning golden brown from the sun instead of laying out under artificial lights to prevent jaundice at a young age. They could grow crops and further breed what animals they did have. Perhaps there would even be new animals on the planet, or the same ones they had come to know back in the Colonies. This was it, this was the end.
Kara stood between both Admiral and Captain Adama, never feeling more at home than she did right there, shoulder to shoulder with the two most important men in her life. There had been no dampening her mood since they’d returned and she swore even her cheeks ached from the feel of her muscles constantly holding her lips upturned. It had taken a couple days to coordinate the ships and make all the jumps necessary to Earth, but they had been easily the happiest and most peaceful days in the fleet’s history, and possibly even her entire life. Even algae had tasted good to her, knowing soon it would be the last of it she’d ever have to swallow down. The crew had drank the finest of the alcohol they were able to brew on their own, and at night and even the middle of the afternoon, Kara had retreated to the privacy of her billet to spend her time with Lee. Beside her, the man in question slipped his hand around hers slyly, smiling just as bright as he looked at her.
She laid across the length of their bunk, undressed and mostly exposed, save for the slightest fold of a sheet that barely caressed the flat of her stomach. Her breathing made an attempt at falling back into pace, but the tremor of her orgasm had only just started to fade. Her hand drawn to her mouth, she nipped affectionately at her own finger, feeling every ounce of tension abandon her body. With her eyes shut, she could still sense Lee where he was, further down the bed and between her thighs. Though she already reached her peak, he hadn’t been able to tear himself away, instead allowing his once busy mouth to slow down with soft kisses to the insides of her thighs. He was at that favorite freckle of his again, she knew, and let out a soft giggle at the slightest tickle she felt. “Either you get up here or start all over again, Apollo,” she delivered, the words rolling off her tongue with the kind of silkiness she felt over inch of her.
The rumble of his own laughter was felt in her own body, his hot breath quickly leaving him and warming her even further between her thighs. With one of her legs resting over his shoulder, she rubbed her calf along his back, heel of her foot soothing into his muscle there as well. She opened her eyes to look down to him, one hand folding up to slip beneath the pillow her head rested on. Her knee gently brushed against his cheek as he lifted his head up to watch her as well, the widest smile she’d ever seen on his face at that moment. The last few days had been a dream to the two of them, one that neither ever planned to wake up from. If things could be even a fraction of this good forever, they would never have a worry again.
“I could stay down here forever,” Lee replied, his hand rubbing along the outer thigh of the leg over his shoulder. His cheek further pressed into the skin of her knee and thigh, kissing against the pale flesh there.
She smiled, and part of it was actually shy, a quality Kara had forgotten she could even have. Her cheeks, already tinged pink from the release she’d gotten, warmed a little hotter at his words. “I’ll let you,” said Kara. She reached the hand that wasn’t beneath her pillow down to him, fingers grazing over the light stubble of his cheek.
“I don’t tell you enough, but you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” He wasn’t sure if he’d ever actually expressed that sentiment to her in a manner so directly, as it wasn’t Starbuck’s nature to accept words like that, but he was sure she wouldn’t tease or reject him for saying them now. If ever there was a time to say it, now was it.
Kara continued to smile, her head shaking in something of a denial of his words, though she never verbally shot him down. “You’re just saying that because I’m naked right now.”
“Mmhmm,” Lee nodded enthusiastically and leaned up just barely to kiss the skin beneath her naval as her leg slid off of him, his head coming to rest there on its side while he continued to look up at her. Her hand never stopped the soft touches she gave him, instead shifting to push through his hair.
“Do you know where you want to live yet?” Kara asked, in reference to the comment she’d made to him weeks ago when they’d finished their quick frak barely hidden in a corner of the deck.
“Close to the water,” he convincingly said. Though they hadn’t talked about it since then, he really had spent much of his time thinking it over. “Maybe not right on it, close enough so we can get a good view, but not somewhere warm year round. I want snow in the winter. We never saw much of it on Caprica.”
“Good idea,” she agreed with a nod of her head. “How many kids am I supposed to have for you in this dream of yours?”
He laughed again, kissing against her stomach as he hid his face away from her for only a moment. “A few,” Lee admitted with his own rosy hue on his cheeks.
“Ambiguous.” She’d never seen herself as a mother, not even with Zak all those years ago, but now she had a hard time denying the urge inside of her that perhaps could allow herself to begin wanting that kind of life. “What if I can’t?” Kara asked him.
His head shook against her as he lifted it and then subsequently scooted the rest of himself towards her, crawling up along the bed until they were even, his head on the pillow next to hers. “You don’t know.”
“You know I lost that ovary. And everything else-the radiation, whatever happened to me over those months I was gone.” Tears shone in her eyes in a moment of weakness very unlike the woman she always tried to be.
“Then we don’t know if I can either.” It was the truth of the matter. They and the rest of the pilots had endured huge doses of the radiation when navigating all of the civilian ships down to the algae planet. They’d been promised they would be safe, at least when it came to developing radiation poisoning, but no one had mentioned what it meant for them in cases of reproduction. Perhaps they’d chosen not to talk about it on purpose. “We’ll deal with it when we get there. For now, we can have whatever we want.”
“I want you,” Kara confessed and leaned in to kiss him, barely tasting herself on his tongue and his lips.
“You’ve got me.”
In Kara’s eyes, Lee could see that exact moment from earlier that morning as well. They would absolutely have it all. He held her hand tight, fingers laced through hers, as the rest of the officers in the CIC began to narrate around them.
“Confirming what Starbuck and Apollo brought back, Admiral,” Gaeta said from his seat. “Water covered planet. Atmosphere is reading about 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen. Carbon dioxide in amounts low enough.”
“Dee, are you picking up any signals from Earth?” Adama asked. They had long hoped to be greeted by familiar faces of the Thirteenth Tribe, but if they for some reason weren’t there, there would be no complaints made in taking the planet as it was.
She shook her head even before she spoke. “None, sir.”
Kara squeezed Lee’s hand and he returned it for the reassurance they both needed.
Laura, standing at the head of the plotting table, turned to the Admiral. “Are we going down?”
He nodded. “We’ve got Raptors standing by.”
-
As the team of Raptors settled down on Earth’s surface, the mood had changed far from how it had started that very morning. The closer each of the small ships got to the planet, the more details came into view. While there was vegetation, it hadn’t been as lush as they expected it. In fact, it was hardly even a fraction of what they imagined from the battlestar. What was the most alarming of it all, though, was the fact that each of the Raptors was picking up on the slightest amount of radiation. The ships weren’t equipped with the tools to be able to accurately pick up trace amounts, but the fact that their radiological alarms reacted at all set a kind of nausea in everyone’s stomachs. Immediately, the Admiral was glad they hadn’t allowed the civilian ships to come down to the planet right away.
The outer door of the Raptor rose, Kara stepping out first to view the planet from the ground. She’d only caught glimpses from the window of the bird, since she and Lee chose not to fly down personally, instead sitting as passengers with the Admiral and the President. This wasn’t what she hoped for. This wasn’t the Earth they’d all prayed for over the years they fled the cylons. Her greatest success had yet again become her greatest failure. Lee approached her side, but wisely said nothing and made no move to touch her, instead allowing both of them to stew in the results of all their work. They had nothing to show for it.
Hours later, with more Raptors planet side, some landing down on the main site while others skimmed over the rest of Earth looking for signs of life, the reality of the situation became even more stark. The handheld radiation detectors brought down from Galactica registered radiation levels nearly two thousand years old and still too high for the human population to settle down upon the bleak landscape without serious worry for their immediate health. Reports came in from all over of the same kind of devastation. There was nothing left. The water wasn’t even able to be filtered and used on board the ships and what little food that grew wildly would undoubtedly have caused illness among the fleet.
Though it wasn’t apparent right away, they soon realized they were standing on the ruins of a past civilization. Uncovered under layers of soil were remains of what they were sure had once been buildings. Homes, factories, playgrounds, markets. There were children’s toys, some made of metal and other materials still managing to be preserved despite how much time had passed. Not only that, but there were bones as well, and perhaps that had been the most haunting of it all. They were standing on the graves to countless lives. It was an unwelcome reminder that in a couple hundred years, this is what their past homes in the Colonies would soon begin to look like should anyone else come across it. Tombs to billions.
“Cottle ran some tests on the bones,” Helo said, having finally come down form Galactica. The Admiral and President looked towards him. “He says they’re not human.”
From a few feet away, Kara turned around towards the conversation and closed the distance between her and them. “Meaning what?”
“He said they’re cylon.”
Roslin covered her mouth and stared blankly over the grey landscape that reminded her too much of New Caprica. “The Thirteenth Tribe were cylons.”
“It’s not just that, but whatever he got off of them reads closer to whatever type of cylon the other five are, rather than the Sharons…Leobens,” said Karl.
“Have the five sent down here,” Adama said. “And D’Anna and Leoben. I want to see what they make of this.”
-
Galen stood nearby one of the few remaining pieces of structure, looking to the shadow of a man permanently burned into the jagged wall. “That was me,” he said aloud to those nearby.
“You remember?” Sam asked.
Tyrol nodded and reached out to touch it, trying to reconnect with what he was sure was a past part of his life. “Not that much. But there was a market here. I remember I went out that morning and then a bomb hit and… that’s it. This is where I was.” He turned to look back at Sam. “Do you remember anything?”
“Nothing like that, but I know I’ve been here before. This is where we’re from. Earth.”
A few miles away, Saul and Ellen were having a similar experience, chillingly recalling the crush of a building around them in their own final moments on this very planet.
-
Kara started up one of the Raptors and climbed back into the main cabin to sit at the ECO station, scanning the nearby area once again for anything of significance. From the open door, the figure of a man approached behind her, slowly climbing up the wing of the ship.
“What do you want?” Kara asked, already knowing who it was. She tried to fight off the flashes of the last time the two of them had been in a Raptor like this. At the time, she had been in extreme pain and mourning the death of her friend when Leoben had wandered upon her, hauling her off to find that temple.
“Where are you going?” As usual, he avoided answering questions and asked his own.
“To find some frakking answers, Leoben.”
“You never came to see me since God returned you to us,” he seemed almost sad and hurt by it.
“Should I have?” Her tone was light, but both knew what she meant. She owed him nothing, at least as far as she was concerned.
“I see you as an angel now, Kara. An angel blazing with the light of God. You’ve allowed us to find the Thirteenth Tribe.” He made no move to move inward of the cabin and closer to her.
She swiveled her seat around, looking towards him. “Just stop. Why would the Gods have brought us here? For what? To find out that not only were the Thirteenth Tribe cylons, but that they exterminated themselves two thousand years ago anyway? To find out that we really are going to die out here in space, whether your people find us and kill us first or we all starve to death slowly?”
“You’re not yet done, K-” he was cut off and tumbled backwards and it took a second for Kara to see what, or rather who, had caused the cylon to fall off balance. It had been Lee. Loyal, protective, dependable Lee, who now stood over the cylon’s body in the dirt, booted foot to Leoben’s throat.
“Stay the frak away from her,” he warned.
“Lee-” she said as she stood in the opened doorway of the Raptor.
He looked up and over towards her, attention no longer on the man beneath his boot’s sole.
“Let him go.”
“Are you kidding me, after everything-”
“What’s he going to do? Things can’t get any worse than they are right now, Lee,” she said and could no longer even remember the happy girl she’d been that morning lying beside him in their bed.
Though he didn’t agree, he removed his foot, stepping away from the cylon though he kept his eye on him. “Where are you going?”
She moved back inside the ship. “I’ve got this feeling… I know something’s here.”
He sighed aloud, hands on his hips while he watched Leoben from the corner of his eye as the other man stood up and dusted the dirt off of himself. “You were just going to what, disappear?”
“I’d come back.”
Lee huffed, not exactly believing her. “Let me come with you.”
“Do whatever you feel, Lee,” she said as she brushed him off and sat down in one of the pilots’ seats.
The ship creaked as Leoben climbed back on, determined to come along for the ride.
“No, you’re out of your frakking mind if you think you’re coming with us,” Lee bit out as he inched away from the number two model. What he didn’t expect to hear was Kara’s defense of him from a few feet away.
“He can do what he wants. Now sit down so I can close the door.”
“You’re kid-”
“Apollo!” She shouted as the door of the Raptor closed and the ship vibrated as it came alive. “I don’t need a protector, so if you aren’t happy with my decisions, then you can leave.” She had tunnel vision suddenly, not wanting to deal with the arguments between the two men with similar names who both felt they had claims to her.
His complaints quit, knowing he wouldn’t ever win with her in such a mood, but also realizing he couldn’t leave her alone with him. No, he couldn’t ever allow that again. Lee sat beside her upfront while Leoben kept to the back of the ship, wisely. The Raptor lifted off the ground, immediately speeding through the air with the kind of precision only Starbuck ever had. She didn’t lift the bird up too high, just enough to get proper altitude and to avoid hitting any of the trees and high rising building fragments. She had no real chosen direction, that much was clear, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t looking for something just the same.
They proceeded that way in silence for near a half hour before Kara finally found a clearing in nearby trees. Without a word, she landed the Raptor, powering the ship down before she evacuated it, leaving the other two men behind without a word. Lee followed behind, jogging to try to catch up to her, and the snapping of twigs and the crunch of leaves from the direction they came told him Leoben wasn’t far off either.
Kara stopped abruptly, eyes focused down on the ground in front of her. While around them there was low vegetation and dry dirt, before her was the smooth expanse of metal, colored to look similar to the surrounding materials. From the air, it would be easy to overlook, and probably explained why no one else had spotted such a thing. That, or they’d simply dismissed it as more of the remaining destruction from whatever had occurred here millenia earlier. She followed the edge of the metal, brushing aside leaves with her foot as she followed it around. Lee and Leoben began to automatically do the same, clearing debris away to help her along. Only did she stop when she spotted something like a handle, or a latch, on one end.
Lee stepped over to her, helping her lift the thick sheet of metal upwards, letting it fall backwards to leave the pit below exposed. There was a set of stairs made of stone that led from where they stood to down below, and before he could even say something, Kara was making her way down them, flashlight withdrawn from her pocket to guide the way. Lee traded a look with Leoben and followed her in.
As it turned out, the steps didn’t lead that far down, just deep enough so a low ceiling entryway existed. Kara held the flashlight up as they continued to walk, the light from outside lessening with each step inwards. Lee felt himself starting to grow claustrophobic when Kara finally stopped, hitting a dead end. She lifted the flashlight to the wall in front of them, though it appeared to match the walls around them in color. A thin seam ran down the center of it and Kara traced her fingers along it, feeling the minuscule gap that existed between the two halves. She ran her hand across the smooth surface of one side and only then did a small rectangle illuminate itself, appearing to be an integral part of whatever it was in front of them. Technology like this existed back on Caprica, though only to those who could afford it.
“What is it? Lee asked.
Leoben raised his hand to it, the braver of the trio, and pressed his palm to the center of the glowing shape. There was no sound to indicate a reaction, but the background of the surface he’d touched flared white, which told them enough. Lee wiped his palm off on the fatigues he’d changed into before initially coming down to the planet that morning, when their future seemed far different. He mimicked Leoben’s action once the rectangle faded back to nothing, only the outline of the space showing signs of life. The reaction was the same this time, a white glowing that faded away after the removal of Lee’s hand.
Kara passed the flashlight over to Lee, and with great hesitation raised her palm to press into the wall. If this didn’t work, they were indeed at the end of the line with no idea of how to further proceed. Her hand hovered barely an inch away and more than anything, Kara feared what would happen when she made contact with it. She had been pulled here to this very space by a feeling in her gut, a sense of deja vu that told her she’d been here before. While she remembered being in orbit of the planet in her Viper, she didn’t recall ever setting foot on Earth itself. She couldn’t have been here before. Swallowing hard, Kara took the plunge and roughly forced her palm and spread fingers against the same spot the other men had touched moments before.
This time, the rectangle glowed a deep red and the entirety of the illuminated portion sunk into the wall no more than a few inches. Steadfast, Kara continued to hold her hand still in fear that this was their one and only chance to get it right. With her wrist sunk into the wall, she felt a waterfall of warm fluid rinse over her hand.
“The stream,” Leoben said, eyes enthralled as he watched. It reminded him of the similar object on their own basestars that allowed them to tap into the networked systems.
Lee kept his eyes on her hand, not exactly trusting whatever technology they’d wandered upon to be harmless. “The what?”
Just as the cylon was about to answer, the light around her hand shut abruptly off and Kara pulled her hand back, shaking off the excess liquid in the air and drying it against her shirt. There was the low rumble that reminded her suspiciously of the locking mechanisms on the hatch doors of Galactica, though rather than it lasting only a second or two, it persisted for something close to half a minute. Where she had previously traced her fingers along the line down the center of the wall, it now split, each half pulling apart to expose how very thick the wall had been just beyond them. Incorrectly, she’d assumed it to be the same kind of concrete or stone that the walls of the tunnel had been composed of, but as she stepped on past, her two companions following her, she now saw that it was rather a series of locked doorways, one on top of the other. The kind of security she’d never even dreamed of.
The space provided beyond the doors was not much larger than the hallway they came from, and by time they all turned around in the confined space of what resembled an elevator, the doors sealed behind them. The biggest difference though, was the fact that there were lights, bright and harsh to their eyes after coming from the near darkness. The elevator shifted downward and Lee’s eyes flickered over to hers.
“We should have told someone where we were going at least… We don’t know what’s down here, Kara.”
Not bothering to look back to him, Kara spoke. “Doesn’t matter anymore.”
The lift came to a stop and the same sound of each set of doors unlocking resounded before the path was finally clear. What was before them, though, wasn’t something any of them had been expecting. The environment was as close to sterile as anyone had seen in years. It was just as bright as the elevator had been and it was vast. Kara was the first one to step out and into the space, head turning to take everything in. Along one wall were what could only be described as computers, though they appeared to be powered down with the exception of one solitary unit. She nearly jogged to it, looking for some kind of keyboard or mouse, but found nothing. Kara went off her next assumption and drew her fingers to the screen, relieved when the gentle prod activated the sensors and responded.
Leoben was content to wander the nearby area, instead moving to investigate the series of machines that filled the rest of the large warehouse of a room, while Lee joined her at her side.
“Resurrection number fifteen thousand, seven hundred eighty one,” he said aloud, though his eyes were reading far faster than his mouth.
“Attempt three. Completed eighty-four days ago,” said Kara. She scrolled through the page that seemed to show the most recent information about the facility’s usage. “Attempt two, aborted. Attempt one, aborted.”
“So someone was here two and a half months ago?” Lee questioned.
She didn’t answer him, instead trying to search out any other relevant information. Kara didn’t know it outright yet, but she was searching for something. The sound of rapid footsteps from behind alarmed both of them, and Kara gave up her investigation prematurely to look towards where Leoben was retreating away from. “What did you find?”
His eyes were open wide as he looked at her, his face abnormally pale as if the blood had been sucked out of him. He suddenly backed away, his head shaking. “You aren’t what I thought you were.”
“What?” Her hand dropped from the computer screen and she started to head in the direction he’d come from.
“God didn’t send you.”
Her pulse beat heavy and quick, so loud she could hear it thumping in her ears. She didn’t even stop to look at anything she passed on by, so consumed in finding the abnormality in the pristine environment that had affected the cylon to his very core. Leoben had never shown fear like that before, and that alone terrified her.
Kara stopped as she rounded the next corner, unable to move from where she stood. It was as if she’d been frozen in time like that, preserved for eternity as a statute of herself. Lee increased his pace to join her, hoping to console her about whatever had shaken her up so much, but what he saw when he got there, was something he had never imagined, even in the darkest, deepest recesses of his brain.
Before them both sat three of what they could only describe as high walled bathtubs. They had passed rows of them on their way to this very spot, but when empty, neither Kara nor Lee had been able to see their true purpose. Leoben, on the other hand, had been drawn to them because he knew exactly what they were. He’d woken up in a similarly designed container many times before. Filled with fluid, there was no question about what they were though, and the three in question were filled almost to the brim with a milky, nearly opaque viscous liquid. The fact that they were filled wasn’t the alarming part, however, but what sat immersed in it.
Staring back at Kara was her very own face, twofold. The eyes were dead and vacant, hauntingly reminding her of Kat’s eyes when her body was freshly dead and still warm in the tomb of her Raptor on the algae planet. These bodies weren’t dead, though, she knew that much innately. They had never been alive in the first place. Her ability to move returned to her and she stepped towards the series of tubs, each foot placed shakily in front of the other. Upon reaching the side of the nearest one, Kara tentatively extended her hand forward, letting it come in contact with the cheek-her cheek. The body was cold, disturbingly so, but Kara didn’t draw her hand back. She couldn’t. She let her fingers dip down into the murky water, following her shoulder down. Kara lifted the lifeless arm out of the water as much as possible, the black of ink coming into view as the flesh was exposed to her air. That was the tattoo. Her marriage tattoo she shared with Anders.
All of a sudden, she released the hold she had on the arm before her. For the moment in time she had interacted with the copy of herself, the emotional part of her brain had turned itself off, perhaps with the intention of protecting her psyche from further harm. It hadn’t lasted though, and while she had been deceptively calm since the approach to the two bodies, each in their own tub, she now began to shake. She turned back to Lee sharply, tears falling down her cheeks. “What am I?” She yelled, already knowing the answer. “If that’s me, then what am I?”
He had never heard her voice like that before, despite all the things they’d endured together. It was raw and harsh, a woman who had given up everything and was allowing herself to drown. Lee wanted to comfort her, but his eyes were stuck on what existed just beyond her, the two other copies of her body, naked and swimming in that fluid. “Kara, I don’t-”
“Am I a cylon?” She asked, her voice shaking as she spoke. Her head turned back to look at both versions of herself before her. It was the third tank that drew her in this time, and she moved past the two failed copies of her to the vacant tub, still filled with the fluid but lacking a body inhabiting it. Across the side of the box, a small digital screen acted as a label. Resurrection 15,781. Attempt 3: Completed.
As the words sank in, she screamed, the sound of her voice echoing around them. Her hands beat into the metal sides of the tub, serving no purpose other than to cause the skin to split and begin to bleed. She fell to the floor, her body a wreck as she sobbed miserably.
It was only this complete despair that called Lee over, and he made his way to her without allowing his vision to fall onto what looked like a pair of corpses wearing her face. He kneeled beside her, his arms pulling her against him despite the very real threat that she would strike out in response. For a moment, Kara allowed herself to be held, but she then reacted predictably, pushing him away with great force.
“Just leave me!” She collapsed inward on herself again, arms drawn to her face as she continued to suffer the mental break. “Don’t you understand?” Her words were shouted, her voice already hoarse. One hand pulled away from herself to hit into the side of the tank. “This was me. I’m attempt three, Lee.”
He looked up towards the top lip of the tub, eyes glued to the digital screen that had sent Kara over the edge. Resurrection 15,781. Attempt 3: Completed. He tried to understand everything they’d learned only over the last few minutes, from what they’d seen back on the computer screen to what the appearance of the pair of bodies identical to her own meant. Lee had seen the ink marring the skin of one of the copies when she’d lifted the arm out, the tattoo that still marked itself across her left upper arm. The fact that Kara had returned from the dead with all her old wounds and tattoos in place had been a reason to believe she was human. Cylons didn’t make copies, they just were copies. When he’d flown the blackbird back in the battle against the resurrection ship, he remembered seeing the lifeless faces of all the copies of cylon bodies waiting for a consciousness to download. They were identical every time, made from a mold.
That tattoo though, Kara hadn’t always had that. Did that mean they’d made a copy of her later on? And who had made the copy? There wasn’t a single life on the planet, at least not that they’d seen. There certainly wasn’t anyone else down here with them either. And Cottle’s test, he thought, it had come back negative. She wasn’t a cylon, so what did all of this mean? His attention turned back to Kara, still the sobbing mess of a broken woman. Woman, or machine, he told himself, but quickly pushed the idea and derogatory connotation away with it. No, she was Kara Thrace. Whatever she was deep down, she was always Kara Thrace. “Kara,” he whispered and wrapped his arms back around her again.
She let him hold her, too weak to fight him anymore, though her hands gripped into the collar of his shirt. Red eyed and cheeks tear stained, she looked to him, only speaking when their eyes connected. “Shut the computer off, Lee,” she hiccuped as she spoke. “Go shut it off and kill me. Please.”
He nearly let her go, shocked at the request she was making. How could she ask that of him? Lee’s own tears found his eyes instantly and he didn’t bother to hold them back. “No,” he said sternly.
“Kill me,” she begged as she continued to cry, unable to look at him any longer because she could see the betrayal he felt in his eyes. “I told you I wasn’t sure if I could live with myself if this is what I was. Now we know, and I can’t. I just can’t.”
Lee shook her for no more than a second and a half, trying to force some kind of sense into her. “You can’t ask me to do that!” He shouted, letting his temper go. “You said you wouldn’t leave me again, Kara.” He was pleading not only for her, but himself. No matter what she turned out to be, he couldn’t survive a life without her again.
“I’m a machine! Save everyone the pain and kill me. Leave me here. Don’t tell them what I was.” When she spoke, she mostly thought of Bill Adama. The last thing she wanted to do was to let him know the woman he’d taken in as a daughter had been his enemy the entire time. “This is where I was for two months! The Gods didn’t send me back to you to fulfill my purpose, some frakking computer did. It made me here because I died. I died, Lee!”
“Listen to me. Gods damn it, Kara! Listen to me.” His hands went to her cheeks, directing her to look up at him. “It doesn’t matter. I told you a million times that nothing else matters and it doesn’t. Whatever these are, whatever this place is, whatever you are, Kara, it doesn’t matter. This has always been you and I don’t even care. Gods help me, I don’t give a flying frak about anything else. You can’t ask me to kill you, I won’t do it. I won’t leave you behind here. If you want to die, if you want to kill yourself, then fine, Kara. Do it yourself but don’t be a coward and ask me to do it for you.” His eyes dropped from hers for a moment to consider her taking her own life. Blue eyes returned to hers a second later. “But if you do it, you take me with you. This, you,” One hand dropped from her to wave between them. “Us, is all I have. And I’m happy for it.”
Her head shook back and forth, wiping away her tears on her sleeves though it did little good. “I can’t go back knowing there’s two more of me sitting right here, knowing that I’m not the only version of myself out there.”
“Then we get rid of them,” Lee said as he nodded to her, a plan already forming in his head. He looked back towards where he knew Leoben still was, out of sight and waiting for them to be ready to leave. “Leoben!” He shouted as loud as his lungs would go, not wanting to leave Kara’s side to find him, afraid of what she would do right now if she was left to her self. The cylon found them a minute later, though he stayed at a distance from the copies of Kara.
“Take off your jacket,” Lee ordered as he peeled off his own coat and stood up. He laid it on the floor beside the first tank. “Place it there,” he motioned towards the second tub and the second failed copy. “Now come here and help me.” Leoben obeyed like the machines that his ancestors had been, happy to take orders. Lee rounded the back of the tank towards where the head of one of the Kara’s was and slipped his arms into the fluid, hooking them beneath the copy’s armpits. “I’ll pull her out a little, you grab her legs when you can.” On the count of three, Lee put all of his effort into tugging the dead weight of the body up and out of the tank at an angle. Leoben slid his own arms into the liquid, noting the identical consistency it had to what was used in their own resurrection tanks, and lifted at her legs until the two men working together had the soaking wet Kara copy lying on the floor upon Lee’s jacket.
Lee was quick to kneel beside the body, moving to draw the two sides of the coat together to zip it shut, providing the nonliving and living Kara with a sense of dignity. Before he did so, however, he noticed the matching set of scars on the left side of her abdomen, and all he could think about was how he’d kissed that very spot on her that morning in their bed. But his Kara had been very much alive, stroking her fingers over his scalp, while this one had never even taken a breath. He paused in his movements once she was covered up, unable to take his eyes off of the body’s face. It was Kara’s, no question about it, and his tears returned despite how take charge he had been a second before. When he looked at it, at her, he didn’t merely see a cylon copy of the woman he loved. No, he saw her very corpse. What it would be like to lose her all over again and to have to bury her or send her out into space.
With the back of his hand, he wiped his tears away and stood up, motioning over to the second tank where they repeated the process of lifting the other body out onto the waiting coat, this one Leoben’s. He zipped it just the same, cocooning her naked flesh away, a flare of jealousy inside of him, not wanting the other man to lay his eyes upon Kara, even though he logically knew that this body wasn’t the one that belonged to the woman he loved.
Lee looked up to see Kara standing still by the third tank, her eyes having watched the entire scene before her of Lee and his determination to bring her to some kind of peace if he could. It was horrifying to her, to force him to go through what she was sure was absolutely sickening for him, handling what amounted to her dead body… twice. For a flash of a moment, she feared that whenever he touched her again, all he would see was her cold dead eyes and the way her body had limply hung without the spark of life. Then she remembered what she actually was, and reminded herself that she would never again know the feel of him against her. Lee was holding himself together now, but she had no doubt that when they returned to Galactica, if she even returned, he would never want to see her again. She wanted to laugh at herself for her thoughts. She’d just found a nuclear wasteland of Earth, a secret underground facility used for cylon resurrection, and two copies of herself, and she was most concerned for her relationship. Gods, she really had lost her mind.
“You get the second one, I’ll get the first,” Lee said to Leoben, not caring if the cylon suddenly had a problem with handling the inanimate body. He’d been directly responsible for the death of billions, he could deal with this for now. Lee bent down to the first corpse, grabbing her by the arms as he sat her up and pushed her over one shoulder, then maneuvered her further into place so she extended across both of his shoulders, his hands holding onto her legs on one side, her arms on the other. Leoben did the same and both men started heading back towards the entrance. “Kara, let’s go,” he ordered, knowing she needed to be told to move.
When the three of them, now weighed down with the two extra bodies, made it back to where the computers and elevator were, Lee jerked his head towards the one screen that remained working and on. “Figure out a way to shut it down,” he told Kara.
Her crying had stopped since she’d watched Lee dip his arms into the bath and pull at her own copy, having been stunned into silence and disbelief. When ordered again, she wasted no time, listening to him since he was the one person who seemed to have any kind of idea what to do. It was his military training coming out now, so ingrained into his mind that even under the most stressful of situations, he could revert back to it as a type of emergency back up. The human brain could be very much like a computer in that way. At the screen, she cycled through page after page until she found what seemed to be the the basic interface. From there, she commanded the computer to shut itself down, and once the process had begun, Kara followed Leoben and Lee into the elevator. The doors shut automatically with her inside and it began the ascent back to the surface.
Once outside, Lee and Leoben laid their respective copies down in the middle of the clearing and began to gather dried brush and sticks from the forest that surrounded them. They created a messy pile of tinder and kindling and when they deemed it was enough for the job, Lee returned to the Raptor to get matches from the emergency kit on board. They placed the bodies side by side on top of the pile and this time Kara helped with the struggle. Lee went to strike the first match and Kara stopped him, instead stepping back up to the barely covered bodies of her sisters, of herself, extending her hand to help close their eyelids. They deserved that much at least. She returned to Lee’s side and took the matches from him, rubbing the head of the match against the sandpaper like material on the outside of the plastic tube. Crouching down beside the nest of twigs, she held the match there until they caught fire and repeated the process a few more times on all sides. Content with the progress the fire was making, Kara stepped back and stood beside Lee and Leoben as they watched her bodies burn. No one said anything.
-
Though they meant to return to the base camp, the voice from CIC on the wireless informed them that they were abandoning Earth to return to the stars as soon as possible, and all birds should head home. Apollo flew this time, guiding the Raptor out of the atmosphere and back towards the battlestar. Still, no one made any unnecessary sounds, other than Lee checking in to make sure they were cleared to land.
In the hangar deck, they were greeted by his father, his own Raptor having landed just prior to Lee’s and he chose to wait to see his son and daughter since they’d disappeared hours earlier.
“Where’d you disappear to?” Adama questioned, not able to ignore the way Kara didn’t even attempt to meet his eyes.
“Sight-seeing,” Lee lied with a forced smile.
The Admiral’s brows rose in doubt, but he didn’t fight it. Even the Old Man knew this wasn’t something to push right now. His gaze shifted to the Leoben model coming down off the Raptor and he motioned to some nearby marines. “Take him back to the brig.”
Leoben didn’t resist, going willingly, though not before trade a look with Apollo on his way out.
“What was that about, Lee?” His father asked.
Lee chose not to answer, instead let his hand reach for Kara’s, beginning to walk away with her. “We’re going to get some rest.”
They made it to their quarters eventually and Lee sealed the hatch up behind them, finally able to take any kind of real breath after everything they’d seen that day. Kara slowly moved around the room, stripping down and out of her clothes, needing to get the smell of her corpses away as quickly as possible. Lee followed her example and did the same, but when he turned back around to her after pulling on a new pair of underwear, Kara was already shoving most of her belongings into the small duffel bag she owned.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” she said with the kind of attitude he was used to from her.
He pulled another pair of tanks on, these ones fresh and clean, afraid she would burst out of their quarters and he would have to go chasing after her. “Why are you going?” He tried instead.
Kara’s lips pursed and she simply shook her head. “You deserve more than this. You deserve someone who’s real.” The amount of self-loathing she felt was hardly able to be expressed in her words alone.
“Isn’t it my choice?”
“No.” She continued to pack, shoving each item into what empty space the bag had.
Lee approached, his hand folding over her own fist that held onto the handles of the duffel bag. “Please. You said you stopped running.”
“This changes everything, Lee, don’t you understand? I’m not human. I’m… I don’t know what I am.” Her head lowered, hair falling to block his view of some of her face. “Let me go.”
Those three words were the absolute worst thing she could have said to him, her pleas from months ago in her Viper just before her death echoing inside of him. “I can’t.”
Kara’s lips parted to speak, but she was interrupted by the harsh ringing of Galactica’s alarms. Gaeta’s voice filled the air a moment later. “Set condition one throughout the ship. This is not a drill.”
Lee and Kara shared a look between them and at the same exact second, both ran towards the hatch door, forcing it open. This time, they didn’t head towards the hangar deck as their pilots’ instincts would have suggested they do, but instead headed for the heart of the battlestar, for the CIC.
They arrived not even a minute later, their bodies pushed to the limits as they ran the whole way there. Lee was shocked to see Tigh back in uniform, standing across from his father. Apparently some things had changed in those hours they were gone.
“Admiral, I’m not getting Colonial or cylon recognition codes from the ship,” Dee said from her station.
“Just the one ship?” Tigh asked, and it was like no time had passed since he’d last stood as the acting XO.
“Yes, sir. DRADIS is saying it’s small. Not a basestar, but way too big for even a Heavy Raider.”
With his eyes raised to his DRADIS screen, Adama directed his order towards Tigh. “Hold the alert fighters, but get the fleet prepared to jump on my mark to the emergency coordinates.”
Lee joined Kara at his father’s side, both sets of their eyes looking heavenward at the screen as well. “What is it?”
Bill shook his head.
“Admiral, Sir!” Dee announced loudly. “I’m getting a signal from the ship.”
“Put it through.”
Everyone in the room held their breath, awaiting the voice that would be on the other end.
“This is the Meridian, looking to speak with whomever is in charge of your fleet of ships.” The unfamiliar voice sounded out.
Adama went for his personal comm, raising it to his mouth. “Meridian, Galactica Actual. You’re speaking to the Admiral of the Colonial Fleet. My name is William Adama.”
The line crackled before the voice came over again. “Colonial Fleet? From the Twelve Colonies?”
“That is correct. Identify yourself further, Meridian, or we are prepared to use nuclear weapons in self defense.”
“How many of there are you?” The man asked, his voice full of hope.
“I won’t warn you again,” Adama bit out. “Identify yourself further or I’ll order my ships to jump away and we will attack.”
“Wait-wait! Please, I need to know first. Do you have Kara Thrace on board?”
author:
apodixis
spoilers: Through all seasons, though this takes place in an AU starting at the very end of season 2.
pairings: kara/lee, kara/sam
overall fic rating: R/NC-17
word count: 8,513
notes: See http://apodixis.livejournal.com/685.html for more information.
summary: If God isn't leading the fleet to Earth, can they ever find it?
This chapter has absolutely everything in it. Fluff! Plot! Angst! Drama! Humans! Cylons! Answers! Questions! Enjoy.
Galactica and the rest of the civilian fleet trailing behind her jumped into orbit surrounding the planet informally known as Earth. After Lee and Kara returned to the Demetrius in their Raptor with the news of what awaited them, the sewage ship had double timed it back to the rendezvous coordinates with the fleet, only stopping to prevent FTL damage. The mood on the Demetrius had reached a level not seen before, not even when they’d found New Caprica or subsequently saved the people from that very planet over a year later. This was the end of their journey, they were sure of it. For once, no one thought about what would happen when the cylons found them, or if they even would. Even from space, New Caprica had looked like a dreary planet. Earth had at least looked full of life.
That enthusiasm spread quickly through the rest of the fleet once Demetrius had made contact with Galactica and forwarded the photographs to the CIC even before they were able to dock and deliver the accounts of what had been witnessed to the Admiral in person. The worries about the Final Five ceased to exist as everyone became preoccupied with what life would be like back on soil again. Families could be planned. Children could grow up with their skin turning golden brown from the sun instead of laying out under artificial lights to prevent jaundice at a young age. They could grow crops and further breed what animals they did have. Perhaps there would even be new animals on the planet, or the same ones they had come to know back in the Colonies. This was it, this was the end.
Kara stood between both Admiral and Captain Adama, never feeling more at home than she did right there, shoulder to shoulder with the two most important men in her life. There had been no dampening her mood since they’d returned and she swore even her cheeks ached from the feel of her muscles constantly holding her lips upturned. It had taken a couple days to coordinate the ships and make all the jumps necessary to Earth, but they had been easily the happiest and most peaceful days in the fleet’s history, and possibly even her entire life. Even algae had tasted good to her, knowing soon it would be the last of it she’d ever have to swallow down. The crew had drank the finest of the alcohol they were able to brew on their own, and at night and even the middle of the afternoon, Kara had retreated to the privacy of her billet to spend her time with Lee. Beside her, the man in question slipped his hand around hers slyly, smiling just as bright as he looked at her.
She laid across the length of their bunk, undressed and mostly exposed, save for the slightest fold of a sheet that barely caressed the flat of her stomach. Her breathing made an attempt at falling back into pace, but the tremor of her orgasm had only just started to fade. Her hand drawn to her mouth, she nipped affectionately at her own finger, feeling every ounce of tension abandon her body. With her eyes shut, she could still sense Lee where he was, further down the bed and between her thighs. Though she already reached her peak, he hadn’t been able to tear himself away, instead allowing his once busy mouth to slow down with soft kisses to the insides of her thighs. He was at that favorite freckle of his again, she knew, and let out a soft giggle at the slightest tickle she felt. “Either you get up here or start all over again, Apollo,” she delivered, the words rolling off her tongue with the kind of silkiness she felt over inch of her.
The rumble of his own laughter was felt in her own body, his hot breath quickly leaving him and warming her even further between her thighs. With one of her legs resting over his shoulder, she rubbed her calf along his back, heel of her foot soothing into his muscle there as well. She opened her eyes to look down to him, one hand folding up to slip beneath the pillow her head rested on. Her knee gently brushed against his cheek as he lifted his head up to watch her as well, the widest smile she’d ever seen on his face at that moment. The last few days had been a dream to the two of them, one that neither ever planned to wake up from. If things could be even a fraction of this good forever, they would never have a worry again.
“I could stay down here forever,” Lee replied, his hand rubbing along the outer thigh of the leg over his shoulder. His cheek further pressed into the skin of her knee and thigh, kissing against the pale flesh there.
She smiled, and part of it was actually shy, a quality Kara had forgotten she could even have. Her cheeks, already tinged pink from the release she’d gotten, warmed a little hotter at his words. “I’ll let you,” said Kara. She reached the hand that wasn’t beneath her pillow down to him, fingers grazing over the light stubble of his cheek.
“I don’t tell you enough, but you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” He wasn’t sure if he’d ever actually expressed that sentiment to her in a manner so directly, as it wasn’t Starbuck’s nature to accept words like that, but he was sure she wouldn’t tease or reject him for saying them now. If ever there was a time to say it, now was it.
Kara continued to smile, her head shaking in something of a denial of his words, though she never verbally shot him down. “You’re just saying that because I’m naked right now.”
“Mmhmm,” Lee nodded enthusiastically and leaned up just barely to kiss the skin beneath her naval as her leg slid off of him, his head coming to rest there on its side while he continued to look up at her. Her hand never stopped the soft touches she gave him, instead shifting to push through his hair.
“Do you know where you want to live yet?” Kara asked, in reference to the comment she’d made to him weeks ago when they’d finished their quick frak barely hidden in a corner of the deck.
“Close to the water,” he convincingly said. Though they hadn’t talked about it since then, he really had spent much of his time thinking it over. “Maybe not right on it, close enough so we can get a good view, but not somewhere warm year round. I want snow in the winter. We never saw much of it on Caprica.”
“Good idea,” she agreed with a nod of her head. “How many kids am I supposed to have for you in this dream of yours?”
He laughed again, kissing against her stomach as he hid his face away from her for only a moment. “A few,” Lee admitted with his own rosy hue on his cheeks.
“Ambiguous.” She’d never seen herself as a mother, not even with Zak all those years ago, but now she had a hard time denying the urge inside of her that perhaps could allow herself to begin wanting that kind of life. “What if I can’t?” Kara asked him.
His head shook against her as he lifted it and then subsequently scooted the rest of himself towards her, crawling up along the bed until they were even, his head on the pillow next to hers. “You don’t know.”
“You know I lost that ovary. And everything else-the radiation, whatever happened to me over those months I was gone.” Tears shone in her eyes in a moment of weakness very unlike the woman she always tried to be.
“Then we don’t know if I can either.” It was the truth of the matter. They and the rest of the pilots had endured huge doses of the radiation when navigating all of the civilian ships down to the algae planet. They’d been promised they would be safe, at least when it came to developing radiation poisoning, but no one had mentioned what it meant for them in cases of reproduction. Perhaps they’d chosen not to talk about it on purpose. “We’ll deal with it when we get there. For now, we can have whatever we want.”
“I want you,” Kara confessed and leaned in to kiss him, barely tasting herself on his tongue and his lips.
“You’ve got me.”
In Kara’s eyes, Lee could see that exact moment from earlier that morning as well. They would absolutely have it all. He held her hand tight, fingers laced through hers, as the rest of the officers in the CIC began to narrate around them.
“Confirming what Starbuck and Apollo brought back, Admiral,” Gaeta said from his seat. “Water covered planet. Atmosphere is reading about 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen. Carbon dioxide in amounts low enough.”
“Dee, are you picking up any signals from Earth?” Adama asked. They had long hoped to be greeted by familiar faces of the Thirteenth Tribe, but if they for some reason weren’t there, there would be no complaints made in taking the planet as it was.
She shook her head even before she spoke. “None, sir.”
Kara squeezed Lee’s hand and he returned it for the reassurance they both needed.
Laura, standing at the head of the plotting table, turned to the Admiral. “Are we going down?”
He nodded. “We’ve got Raptors standing by.”
-
As the team of Raptors settled down on Earth’s surface, the mood had changed far from how it had started that very morning. The closer each of the small ships got to the planet, the more details came into view. While there was vegetation, it hadn’t been as lush as they expected it. In fact, it was hardly even a fraction of what they imagined from the battlestar. What was the most alarming of it all, though, was the fact that each of the Raptors was picking up on the slightest amount of radiation. The ships weren’t equipped with the tools to be able to accurately pick up trace amounts, but the fact that their radiological alarms reacted at all set a kind of nausea in everyone’s stomachs. Immediately, the Admiral was glad they hadn’t allowed the civilian ships to come down to the planet right away.
The outer door of the Raptor rose, Kara stepping out first to view the planet from the ground. She’d only caught glimpses from the window of the bird, since she and Lee chose not to fly down personally, instead sitting as passengers with the Admiral and the President. This wasn’t what she hoped for. This wasn’t the Earth they’d all prayed for over the years they fled the cylons. Her greatest success had yet again become her greatest failure. Lee approached her side, but wisely said nothing and made no move to touch her, instead allowing both of them to stew in the results of all their work. They had nothing to show for it.
Hours later, with more Raptors planet side, some landing down on the main site while others skimmed over the rest of Earth looking for signs of life, the reality of the situation became even more stark. The handheld radiation detectors brought down from Galactica registered radiation levels nearly two thousand years old and still too high for the human population to settle down upon the bleak landscape without serious worry for their immediate health. Reports came in from all over of the same kind of devastation. There was nothing left. The water wasn’t even able to be filtered and used on board the ships and what little food that grew wildly would undoubtedly have caused illness among the fleet.
Though it wasn’t apparent right away, they soon realized they were standing on the ruins of a past civilization. Uncovered under layers of soil were remains of what they were sure had once been buildings. Homes, factories, playgrounds, markets. There were children’s toys, some made of metal and other materials still managing to be preserved despite how much time had passed. Not only that, but there were bones as well, and perhaps that had been the most haunting of it all. They were standing on the graves to countless lives. It was an unwelcome reminder that in a couple hundred years, this is what their past homes in the Colonies would soon begin to look like should anyone else come across it. Tombs to billions.
“Cottle ran some tests on the bones,” Helo said, having finally come down form Galactica. The Admiral and President looked towards him. “He says they’re not human.”
From a few feet away, Kara turned around towards the conversation and closed the distance between her and them. “Meaning what?”
“He said they’re cylon.”
Roslin covered her mouth and stared blankly over the grey landscape that reminded her too much of New Caprica. “The Thirteenth Tribe were cylons.”
“It’s not just that, but whatever he got off of them reads closer to whatever type of cylon the other five are, rather than the Sharons…Leobens,” said Karl.
“Have the five sent down here,” Adama said. “And D’Anna and Leoben. I want to see what they make of this.”
-
Galen stood nearby one of the few remaining pieces of structure, looking to the shadow of a man permanently burned into the jagged wall. “That was me,” he said aloud to those nearby.
“You remember?” Sam asked.
Tyrol nodded and reached out to touch it, trying to reconnect with what he was sure was a past part of his life. “Not that much. But there was a market here. I remember I went out that morning and then a bomb hit and… that’s it. This is where I was.” He turned to look back at Sam. “Do you remember anything?”
“Nothing like that, but I know I’ve been here before. This is where we’re from. Earth.”
A few miles away, Saul and Ellen were having a similar experience, chillingly recalling the crush of a building around them in their own final moments on this very planet.
-
Kara started up one of the Raptors and climbed back into the main cabin to sit at the ECO station, scanning the nearby area once again for anything of significance. From the open door, the figure of a man approached behind her, slowly climbing up the wing of the ship.
“What do you want?” Kara asked, already knowing who it was. She tried to fight off the flashes of the last time the two of them had been in a Raptor like this. At the time, she had been in extreme pain and mourning the death of her friend when Leoben had wandered upon her, hauling her off to find that temple.
“Where are you going?” As usual, he avoided answering questions and asked his own.
“To find some frakking answers, Leoben.”
“You never came to see me since God returned you to us,” he seemed almost sad and hurt by it.
“Should I have?” Her tone was light, but both knew what she meant. She owed him nothing, at least as far as she was concerned.
“I see you as an angel now, Kara. An angel blazing with the light of God. You’ve allowed us to find the Thirteenth Tribe.” He made no move to move inward of the cabin and closer to her.
She swiveled her seat around, looking towards him. “Just stop. Why would the Gods have brought us here? For what? To find out that not only were the Thirteenth Tribe cylons, but that they exterminated themselves two thousand years ago anyway? To find out that we really are going to die out here in space, whether your people find us and kill us first or we all starve to death slowly?”
“You’re not yet done, K-” he was cut off and tumbled backwards and it took a second for Kara to see what, or rather who, had caused the cylon to fall off balance. It had been Lee. Loyal, protective, dependable Lee, who now stood over the cylon’s body in the dirt, booted foot to Leoben’s throat.
“Stay the frak away from her,” he warned.
“Lee-” she said as she stood in the opened doorway of the Raptor.
He looked up and over towards her, attention no longer on the man beneath his boot’s sole.
“Let him go.”
“Are you kidding me, after everything-”
“What’s he going to do? Things can’t get any worse than they are right now, Lee,” she said and could no longer even remember the happy girl she’d been that morning lying beside him in their bed.
Though he didn’t agree, he removed his foot, stepping away from the cylon though he kept his eye on him. “Where are you going?”
She moved back inside the ship. “I’ve got this feeling… I know something’s here.”
He sighed aloud, hands on his hips while he watched Leoben from the corner of his eye as the other man stood up and dusted the dirt off of himself. “You were just going to what, disappear?”
“I’d come back.”
Lee huffed, not exactly believing her. “Let me come with you.”
“Do whatever you feel, Lee,” she said as she brushed him off and sat down in one of the pilots’ seats.
The ship creaked as Leoben climbed back on, determined to come along for the ride.
“No, you’re out of your frakking mind if you think you’re coming with us,” Lee bit out as he inched away from the number two model. What he didn’t expect to hear was Kara’s defense of him from a few feet away.
“He can do what he wants. Now sit down so I can close the door.”
“You’re kid-”
“Apollo!” She shouted as the door of the Raptor closed and the ship vibrated as it came alive. “I don’t need a protector, so if you aren’t happy with my decisions, then you can leave.” She had tunnel vision suddenly, not wanting to deal with the arguments between the two men with similar names who both felt they had claims to her.
His complaints quit, knowing he wouldn’t ever win with her in such a mood, but also realizing he couldn’t leave her alone with him. No, he couldn’t ever allow that again. Lee sat beside her upfront while Leoben kept to the back of the ship, wisely. The Raptor lifted off the ground, immediately speeding through the air with the kind of precision only Starbuck ever had. She didn’t lift the bird up too high, just enough to get proper altitude and to avoid hitting any of the trees and high rising building fragments. She had no real chosen direction, that much was clear, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t looking for something just the same.
They proceeded that way in silence for near a half hour before Kara finally found a clearing in nearby trees. Without a word, she landed the Raptor, powering the ship down before she evacuated it, leaving the other two men behind without a word. Lee followed behind, jogging to try to catch up to her, and the snapping of twigs and the crunch of leaves from the direction they came told him Leoben wasn’t far off either.
Kara stopped abruptly, eyes focused down on the ground in front of her. While around them there was low vegetation and dry dirt, before her was the smooth expanse of metal, colored to look similar to the surrounding materials. From the air, it would be easy to overlook, and probably explained why no one else had spotted such a thing. That, or they’d simply dismissed it as more of the remaining destruction from whatever had occurred here millenia earlier. She followed the edge of the metal, brushing aside leaves with her foot as she followed it around. Lee and Leoben began to automatically do the same, clearing debris away to help her along. Only did she stop when she spotted something like a handle, or a latch, on one end.
Lee stepped over to her, helping her lift the thick sheet of metal upwards, letting it fall backwards to leave the pit below exposed. There was a set of stairs made of stone that led from where they stood to down below, and before he could even say something, Kara was making her way down them, flashlight withdrawn from her pocket to guide the way. Lee traded a look with Leoben and followed her in.
As it turned out, the steps didn’t lead that far down, just deep enough so a low ceiling entryway existed. Kara held the flashlight up as they continued to walk, the light from outside lessening with each step inwards. Lee felt himself starting to grow claustrophobic when Kara finally stopped, hitting a dead end. She lifted the flashlight to the wall in front of them, though it appeared to match the walls around them in color. A thin seam ran down the center of it and Kara traced her fingers along it, feeling the minuscule gap that existed between the two halves. She ran her hand across the smooth surface of one side and only then did a small rectangle illuminate itself, appearing to be an integral part of whatever it was in front of them. Technology like this existed back on Caprica, though only to those who could afford it.
“What is it? Lee asked.
Leoben raised his hand to it, the braver of the trio, and pressed his palm to the center of the glowing shape. There was no sound to indicate a reaction, but the background of the surface he’d touched flared white, which told them enough. Lee wiped his palm off on the fatigues he’d changed into before initially coming down to the planet that morning, when their future seemed far different. He mimicked Leoben’s action once the rectangle faded back to nothing, only the outline of the space showing signs of life. The reaction was the same this time, a white glowing that faded away after the removal of Lee’s hand.
Kara passed the flashlight over to Lee, and with great hesitation raised her palm to press into the wall. If this didn’t work, they were indeed at the end of the line with no idea of how to further proceed. Her hand hovered barely an inch away and more than anything, Kara feared what would happen when she made contact with it. She had been pulled here to this very space by a feeling in her gut, a sense of deja vu that told her she’d been here before. While she remembered being in orbit of the planet in her Viper, she didn’t recall ever setting foot on Earth itself. She couldn’t have been here before. Swallowing hard, Kara took the plunge and roughly forced her palm and spread fingers against the same spot the other men had touched moments before.
This time, the rectangle glowed a deep red and the entirety of the illuminated portion sunk into the wall no more than a few inches. Steadfast, Kara continued to hold her hand still in fear that this was their one and only chance to get it right. With her wrist sunk into the wall, she felt a waterfall of warm fluid rinse over her hand.
“The stream,” Leoben said, eyes enthralled as he watched. It reminded him of the similar object on their own basestars that allowed them to tap into the networked systems.
Lee kept his eyes on her hand, not exactly trusting whatever technology they’d wandered upon to be harmless. “The what?”
Just as the cylon was about to answer, the light around her hand shut abruptly off and Kara pulled her hand back, shaking off the excess liquid in the air and drying it against her shirt. There was the low rumble that reminded her suspiciously of the locking mechanisms on the hatch doors of Galactica, though rather than it lasting only a second or two, it persisted for something close to half a minute. Where she had previously traced her fingers along the line down the center of the wall, it now split, each half pulling apart to expose how very thick the wall had been just beyond them. Incorrectly, she’d assumed it to be the same kind of concrete or stone that the walls of the tunnel had been composed of, but as she stepped on past, her two companions following her, she now saw that it was rather a series of locked doorways, one on top of the other. The kind of security she’d never even dreamed of.
The space provided beyond the doors was not much larger than the hallway they came from, and by time they all turned around in the confined space of what resembled an elevator, the doors sealed behind them. The biggest difference though, was the fact that there were lights, bright and harsh to their eyes after coming from the near darkness. The elevator shifted downward and Lee’s eyes flickered over to hers.
“We should have told someone where we were going at least… We don’t know what’s down here, Kara.”
Not bothering to look back to him, Kara spoke. “Doesn’t matter anymore.”
The lift came to a stop and the same sound of each set of doors unlocking resounded before the path was finally clear. What was before them, though, wasn’t something any of them had been expecting. The environment was as close to sterile as anyone had seen in years. It was just as bright as the elevator had been and it was vast. Kara was the first one to step out and into the space, head turning to take everything in. Along one wall were what could only be described as computers, though they appeared to be powered down with the exception of one solitary unit. She nearly jogged to it, looking for some kind of keyboard or mouse, but found nothing. Kara went off her next assumption and drew her fingers to the screen, relieved when the gentle prod activated the sensors and responded.
Leoben was content to wander the nearby area, instead moving to investigate the series of machines that filled the rest of the large warehouse of a room, while Lee joined her at her side.
“Resurrection number fifteen thousand, seven hundred eighty one,” he said aloud, though his eyes were reading far faster than his mouth.
“Attempt three. Completed eighty-four days ago,” said Kara. She scrolled through the page that seemed to show the most recent information about the facility’s usage. “Attempt two, aborted. Attempt one, aborted.”
“So someone was here two and a half months ago?” Lee questioned.
She didn’t answer him, instead trying to search out any other relevant information. Kara didn’t know it outright yet, but she was searching for something. The sound of rapid footsteps from behind alarmed both of them, and Kara gave up her investigation prematurely to look towards where Leoben was retreating away from. “What did you find?”
His eyes were open wide as he looked at her, his face abnormally pale as if the blood had been sucked out of him. He suddenly backed away, his head shaking. “You aren’t what I thought you were.”
“What?” Her hand dropped from the computer screen and she started to head in the direction he’d come from.
“God didn’t send you.”
Her pulse beat heavy and quick, so loud she could hear it thumping in her ears. She didn’t even stop to look at anything she passed on by, so consumed in finding the abnormality in the pristine environment that had affected the cylon to his very core. Leoben had never shown fear like that before, and that alone terrified her.
Kara stopped as she rounded the next corner, unable to move from where she stood. It was as if she’d been frozen in time like that, preserved for eternity as a statute of herself. Lee increased his pace to join her, hoping to console her about whatever had shaken her up so much, but what he saw when he got there, was something he had never imagined, even in the darkest, deepest recesses of his brain.
Before them both sat three of what they could only describe as high walled bathtubs. They had passed rows of them on their way to this very spot, but when empty, neither Kara nor Lee had been able to see their true purpose. Leoben, on the other hand, had been drawn to them because he knew exactly what they were. He’d woken up in a similarly designed container many times before. Filled with fluid, there was no question about what they were though, and the three in question were filled almost to the brim with a milky, nearly opaque viscous liquid. The fact that they were filled wasn’t the alarming part, however, but what sat immersed in it.
Staring back at Kara was her very own face, twofold. The eyes were dead and vacant, hauntingly reminding her of Kat’s eyes when her body was freshly dead and still warm in the tomb of her Raptor on the algae planet. These bodies weren’t dead, though, she knew that much innately. They had never been alive in the first place. Her ability to move returned to her and she stepped towards the series of tubs, each foot placed shakily in front of the other. Upon reaching the side of the nearest one, Kara tentatively extended her hand forward, letting it come in contact with the cheek-her cheek. The body was cold, disturbingly so, but Kara didn’t draw her hand back. She couldn’t. She let her fingers dip down into the murky water, following her shoulder down. Kara lifted the lifeless arm out of the water as much as possible, the black of ink coming into view as the flesh was exposed to her air. That was the tattoo. Her marriage tattoo she shared with Anders.
All of a sudden, she released the hold she had on the arm before her. For the moment in time she had interacted with the copy of herself, the emotional part of her brain had turned itself off, perhaps with the intention of protecting her psyche from further harm. It hadn’t lasted though, and while she had been deceptively calm since the approach to the two bodies, each in their own tub, she now began to shake. She turned back to Lee sharply, tears falling down her cheeks. “What am I?” She yelled, already knowing the answer. “If that’s me, then what am I?”
He had never heard her voice like that before, despite all the things they’d endured together. It was raw and harsh, a woman who had given up everything and was allowing herself to drown. Lee wanted to comfort her, but his eyes were stuck on what existed just beyond her, the two other copies of her body, naked and swimming in that fluid. “Kara, I don’t-”
“Am I a cylon?” She asked, her voice shaking as she spoke. Her head turned back to look at both versions of herself before her. It was the third tank that drew her in this time, and she moved past the two failed copies of her to the vacant tub, still filled with the fluid but lacking a body inhabiting it. Across the side of the box, a small digital screen acted as a label. Resurrection 15,781. Attempt 3: Completed.
As the words sank in, she screamed, the sound of her voice echoing around them. Her hands beat into the metal sides of the tub, serving no purpose other than to cause the skin to split and begin to bleed. She fell to the floor, her body a wreck as she sobbed miserably.
It was only this complete despair that called Lee over, and he made his way to her without allowing his vision to fall onto what looked like a pair of corpses wearing her face. He kneeled beside her, his arms pulling her against him despite the very real threat that she would strike out in response. For a moment, Kara allowed herself to be held, but she then reacted predictably, pushing him away with great force.
“Just leave me!” She collapsed inward on herself again, arms drawn to her face as she continued to suffer the mental break. “Don’t you understand?” Her words were shouted, her voice already hoarse. One hand pulled away from herself to hit into the side of the tank. “This was me. I’m attempt three, Lee.”
He looked up towards the top lip of the tub, eyes glued to the digital screen that had sent Kara over the edge. Resurrection 15,781. Attempt 3: Completed. He tried to understand everything they’d learned only over the last few minutes, from what they’d seen back on the computer screen to what the appearance of the pair of bodies identical to her own meant. Lee had seen the ink marring the skin of one of the copies when she’d lifted the arm out, the tattoo that still marked itself across her left upper arm. The fact that Kara had returned from the dead with all her old wounds and tattoos in place had been a reason to believe she was human. Cylons didn’t make copies, they just were copies. When he’d flown the blackbird back in the battle against the resurrection ship, he remembered seeing the lifeless faces of all the copies of cylon bodies waiting for a consciousness to download. They were identical every time, made from a mold.
That tattoo though, Kara hadn’t always had that. Did that mean they’d made a copy of her later on? And who had made the copy? There wasn’t a single life on the planet, at least not that they’d seen. There certainly wasn’t anyone else down here with them either. And Cottle’s test, he thought, it had come back negative. She wasn’t a cylon, so what did all of this mean? His attention turned back to Kara, still the sobbing mess of a broken woman. Woman, or machine, he told himself, but quickly pushed the idea and derogatory connotation away with it. No, she was Kara Thrace. Whatever she was deep down, she was always Kara Thrace. “Kara,” he whispered and wrapped his arms back around her again.
She let him hold her, too weak to fight him anymore, though her hands gripped into the collar of his shirt. Red eyed and cheeks tear stained, she looked to him, only speaking when their eyes connected. “Shut the computer off, Lee,” she hiccuped as she spoke. “Go shut it off and kill me. Please.”
He nearly let her go, shocked at the request she was making. How could she ask that of him? Lee’s own tears found his eyes instantly and he didn’t bother to hold them back. “No,” he said sternly.
“Kill me,” she begged as she continued to cry, unable to look at him any longer because she could see the betrayal he felt in his eyes. “I told you I wasn’t sure if I could live with myself if this is what I was. Now we know, and I can’t. I just can’t.”
Lee shook her for no more than a second and a half, trying to force some kind of sense into her. “You can’t ask me to do that!” He shouted, letting his temper go. “You said you wouldn’t leave me again, Kara.” He was pleading not only for her, but himself. No matter what she turned out to be, he couldn’t survive a life without her again.
“I’m a machine! Save everyone the pain and kill me. Leave me here. Don’t tell them what I was.” When she spoke, she mostly thought of Bill Adama. The last thing she wanted to do was to let him know the woman he’d taken in as a daughter had been his enemy the entire time. “This is where I was for two months! The Gods didn’t send me back to you to fulfill my purpose, some frakking computer did. It made me here because I died. I died, Lee!”
“Listen to me. Gods damn it, Kara! Listen to me.” His hands went to her cheeks, directing her to look up at him. “It doesn’t matter. I told you a million times that nothing else matters and it doesn’t. Whatever these are, whatever this place is, whatever you are, Kara, it doesn’t matter. This has always been you and I don’t even care. Gods help me, I don’t give a flying frak about anything else. You can’t ask me to kill you, I won’t do it. I won’t leave you behind here. If you want to die, if you want to kill yourself, then fine, Kara. Do it yourself but don’t be a coward and ask me to do it for you.” His eyes dropped from hers for a moment to consider her taking her own life. Blue eyes returned to hers a second later. “But if you do it, you take me with you. This, you,” One hand dropped from her to wave between them. “Us, is all I have. And I’m happy for it.”
Her head shook back and forth, wiping away her tears on her sleeves though it did little good. “I can’t go back knowing there’s two more of me sitting right here, knowing that I’m not the only version of myself out there.”
“Then we get rid of them,” Lee said as he nodded to her, a plan already forming in his head. He looked back towards where he knew Leoben still was, out of sight and waiting for them to be ready to leave. “Leoben!” He shouted as loud as his lungs would go, not wanting to leave Kara’s side to find him, afraid of what she would do right now if she was left to her self. The cylon found them a minute later, though he stayed at a distance from the copies of Kara.
“Take off your jacket,” Lee ordered as he peeled off his own coat and stood up. He laid it on the floor beside the first tank. “Place it there,” he motioned towards the second tub and the second failed copy. “Now come here and help me.” Leoben obeyed like the machines that his ancestors had been, happy to take orders. Lee rounded the back of the tank towards where the head of one of the Kara’s was and slipped his arms into the fluid, hooking them beneath the copy’s armpits. “I’ll pull her out a little, you grab her legs when you can.” On the count of three, Lee put all of his effort into tugging the dead weight of the body up and out of the tank at an angle. Leoben slid his own arms into the liquid, noting the identical consistency it had to what was used in their own resurrection tanks, and lifted at her legs until the two men working together had the soaking wet Kara copy lying on the floor upon Lee’s jacket.
Lee was quick to kneel beside the body, moving to draw the two sides of the coat together to zip it shut, providing the nonliving and living Kara with a sense of dignity. Before he did so, however, he noticed the matching set of scars on the left side of her abdomen, and all he could think about was how he’d kissed that very spot on her that morning in their bed. But his Kara had been very much alive, stroking her fingers over his scalp, while this one had never even taken a breath. He paused in his movements once she was covered up, unable to take his eyes off of the body’s face. It was Kara’s, no question about it, and his tears returned despite how take charge he had been a second before. When he looked at it, at her, he didn’t merely see a cylon copy of the woman he loved. No, he saw her very corpse. What it would be like to lose her all over again and to have to bury her or send her out into space.
With the back of his hand, he wiped his tears away and stood up, motioning over to the second tank where they repeated the process of lifting the other body out onto the waiting coat, this one Leoben’s. He zipped it just the same, cocooning her naked flesh away, a flare of jealousy inside of him, not wanting the other man to lay his eyes upon Kara, even though he logically knew that this body wasn’t the one that belonged to the woman he loved.
Lee looked up to see Kara standing still by the third tank, her eyes having watched the entire scene before her of Lee and his determination to bring her to some kind of peace if he could. It was horrifying to her, to force him to go through what she was sure was absolutely sickening for him, handling what amounted to her dead body… twice. For a flash of a moment, she feared that whenever he touched her again, all he would see was her cold dead eyes and the way her body had limply hung without the spark of life. Then she remembered what she actually was, and reminded herself that she would never again know the feel of him against her. Lee was holding himself together now, but she had no doubt that when they returned to Galactica, if she even returned, he would never want to see her again. She wanted to laugh at herself for her thoughts. She’d just found a nuclear wasteland of Earth, a secret underground facility used for cylon resurrection, and two copies of herself, and she was most concerned for her relationship. Gods, she really had lost her mind.
“You get the second one, I’ll get the first,” Lee said to Leoben, not caring if the cylon suddenly had a problem with handling the inanimate body. He’d been directly responsible for the death of billions, he could deal with this for now. Lee bent down to the first corpse, grabbing her by the arms as he sat her up and pushed her over one shoulder, then maneuvered her further into place so she extended across both of his shoulders, his hands holding onto her legs on one side, her arms on the other. Leoben did the same and both men started heading back towards the entrance. “Kara, let’s go,” he ordered, knowing she needed to be told to move.
When the three of them, now weighed down with the two extra bodies, made it back to where the computers and elevator were, Lee jerked his head towards the one screen that remained working and on. “Figure out a way to shut it down,” he told Kara.
Her crying had stopped since she’d watched Lee dip his arms into the bath and pull at her own copy, having been stunned into silence and disbelief. When ordered again, she wasted no time, listening to him since he was the one person who seemed to have any kind of idea what to do. It was his military training coming out now, so ingrained into his mind that even under the most stressful of situations, he could revert back to it as a type of emergency back up. The human brain could be very much like a computer in that way. At the screen, she cycled through page after page until she found what seemed to be the the basic interface. From there, she commanded the computer to shut itself down, and once the process had begun, Kara followed Leoben and Lee into the elevator. The doors shut automatically with her inside and it began the ascent back to the surface.
Once outside, Lee and Leoben laid their respective copies down in the middle of the clearing and began to gather dried brush and sticks from the forest that surrounded them. They created a messy pile of tinder and kindling and when they deemed it was enough for the job, Lee returned to the Raptor to get matches from the emergency kit on board. They placed the bodies side by side on top of the pile and this time Kara helped with the struggle. Lee went to strike the first match and Kara stopped him, instead stepping back up to the barely covered bodies of her sisters, of herself, extending her hand to help close their eyelids. They deserved that much at least. She returned to Lee’s side and took the matches from him, rubbing the head of the match against the sandpaper like material on the outside of the plastic tube. Crouching down beside the nest of twigs, she held the match there until they caught fire and repeated the process a few more times on all sides. Content with the progress the fire was making, Kara stepped back and stood beside Lee and Leoben as they watched her bodies burn. No one said anything.
-
Though they meant to return to the base camp, the voice from CIC on the wireless informed them that they were abandoning Earth to return to the stars as soon as possible, and all birds should head home. Apollo flew this time, guiding the Raptor out of the atmosphere and back towards the battlestar. Still, no one made any unnecessary sounds, other than Lee checking in to make sure they were cleared to land.
In the hangar deck, they were greeted by his father, his own Raptor having landed just prior to Lee’s and he chose to wait to see his son and daughter since they’d disappeared hours earlier.
“Where’d you disappear to?” Adama questioned, not able to ignore the way Kara didn’t even attempt to meet his eyes.
“Sight-seeing,” Lee lied with a forced smile.
The Admiral’s brows rose in doubt, but he didn’t fight it. Even the Old Man knew this wasn’t something to push right now. His gaze shifted to the Leoben model coming down off the Raptor and he motioned to some nearby marines. “Take him back to the brig.”
Leoben didn’t resist, going willingly, though not before trade a look with Apollo on his way out.
“What was that about, Lee?” His father asked.
Lee chose not to answer, instead let his hand reach for Kara’s, beginning to walk away with her. “We’re going to get some rest.”
They made it to their quarters eventually and Lee sealed the hatch up behind them, finally able to take any kind of real breath after everything they’d seen that day. Kara slowly moved around the room, stripping down and out of her clothes, needing to get the smell of her corpses away as quickly as possible. Lee followed her example and did the same, but when he turned back around to her after pulling on a new pair of underwear, Kara was already shoving most of her belongings into the small duffel bag she owned.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” she said with the kind of attitude he was used to from her.
He pulled another pair of tanks on, these ones fresh and clean, afraid she would burst out of their quarters and he would have to go chasing after her. “Why are you going?” He tried instead.
Kara’s lips pursed and she simply shook her head. “You deserve more than this. You deserve someone who’s real.” The amount of self-loathing she felt was hardly able to be expressed in her words alone.
“Isn’t it my choice?”
“No.” She continued to pack, shoving each item into what empty space the bag had.
Lee approached, his hand folding over her own fist that held onto the handles of the duffel bag. “Please. You said you stopped running.”
“This changes everything, Lee, don’t you understand? I’m not human. I’m… I don’t know what I am.” Her head lowered, hair falling to block his view of some of her face. “Let me go.”
Those three words were the absolute worst thing she could have said to him, her pleas from months ago in her Viper just before her death echoing inside of him. “I can’t.”
Kara’s lips parted to speak, but she was interrupted by the harsh ringing of Galactica’s alarms. Gaeta’s voice filled the air a moment later. “Set condition one throughout the ship. This is not a drill.”
Lee and Kara shared a look between them and at the same exact second, both ran towards the hatch door, forcing it open. This time, they didn’t head towards the hangar deck as their pilots’ instincts would have suggested they do, but instead headed for the heart of the battlestar, for the CIC.
They arrived not even a minute later, their bodies pushed to the limits as they ran the whole way there. Lee was shocked to see Tigh back in uniform, standing across from his father. Apparently some things had changed in those hours they were gone.
“Admiral, I’m not getting Colonial or cylon recognition codes from the ship,” Dee said from her station.
“Just the one ship?” Tigh asked, and it was like no time had passed since he’d last stood as the acting XO.
“Yes, sir. DRADIS is saying it’s small. Not a basestar, but way too big for even a Heavy Raider.”
With his eyes raised to his DRADIS screen, Adama directed his order towards Tigh. “Hold the alert fighters, but get the fleet prepared to jump on my mark to the emergency coordinates.”
Lee joined Kara at his father’s side, both sets of their eyes looking heavenward at the screen as well. “What is it?”
Bill shook his head.
“Admiral, Sir!” Dee announced loudly. “I’m getting a signal from the ship.”
“Put it through.”
Everyone in the room held their breath, awaiting the voice that would be on the other end.
“This is the Meridian, looking to speak with whomever is in charge of your fleet of ships.” The unfamiliar voice sounded out.
Adama went for his personal comm, raising it to his mouth. “Meridian, Galactica Actual. You’re speaking to the Admiral of the Colonial Fleet. My name is William Adama.”
The line crackled before the voice came over again. “Colonial Fleet? From the Twelve Colonies?”
“That is correct. Identify yourself further, Meridian, or we are prepared to use nuclear weapons in self defense.”
“How many of there are you?” The man asked, his voice full of hope.
“I won’t warn you again,” Adama bit out. “Identify yourself further or I’ll order my ships to jump away and we will attack.”
“Wait-wait! Please, I need to know first. Do you have Kara Thrace on board?”