Through the Startled Sky (The Flip Side Remix), Part II
Yet at the end of these dark days
May prospering weal return at length.
-Aeschylus
---
It was less than a week later, on a day of rain and clouds and no shortage of tears, that Laura insisted upon surveying the exodus of every last citizen from the planet, and refused to board a Raptor until the very last person had been dispatched from the surface.
When Bill finally coaxed her aboard one of his birds, with Starbuck at her side and Lee -- terse and awkward -- piloting the whole troupe, he breathed a sigh of relief. One more trial behind them.
This was how the Colonies left New Caprica.
---
“You’re taking this remarkably well.”
With the first series of jumps behind them, the Fleet was regrouping and civilians reorganizing. Remarkably enough, it seemed the vast majority of the population was so happy to be moving on that incidents and physical altercations were at a minimum. It was hardly business as usual, but so far the re-settlement process of individuals and families throughout the Fleet had not been nearly the chaos Bill expected. All was going well so far.
Bill looked up from the open file to where Laura sat upon the couch, her legs tucked under her as she stared down at her very rounded belly. She’d insisted on helping Kara and Hera get settled in their quarters, and would not be moved from her task, only returning once Kara had wandered off to the mess, searching out something for Hera. Finally afforded a moment of true privacy, it was apparent that she wanted a better sense of how he was handling such extraordinary news.
He gave her a look. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I’m not sure I’m taking it particularly well some days, and I’ve had over eight months to come to terms. I very nearly had a panic attack in Jack’s office when he told me.” She paused. “You don’t find it bizarre? Sort of…unnatural?”
“Nothing bizarre about hving children. Biological imperative, in fact,” he said, rising from the table and coming to sit beside and behind her so she could lean back against him.
She snorted. “Yes, and that’s all well and good when one is twenty-five and supposed to be having children. It’s all a bit more perverted at my age. I doubt Lee will ever recover from the shock.” A chuckle rumbled out of him as he recalled the look on Lee’s face when he had first caught sight of Laura’s new predicament. She glanced down at her stomach again, expression fond, though marred by a crease in her forehead. “It’s...very confusing.”
Bill kissed the junction of her neck and shoulder, laying hands on her hips and pressing his thumbs into the small of her back.“Children are a blessing. Always.” Laura groaned in pleasure at his ministrations.
“A blessing? High praise indeed coming from an atheist,” she snorted at his words, dropping her head back against his shoulder.
“You only get my highest praises.” She hummed as he continued kneading the muscles in her lower back. “Do you know the sex?”
“No,” Laura answered, shaking her head. “I didn’t...The odds seemed far-fetched, given the insurrection, disease, my age,” She swallowed heavily. “I didn’t want to know in the event it...didn’t work out.”
I’m sorry, Laura, he wanted to say for the thousandth time, but held his tongue. “Okay.”
“The night before the conference, I wrote you a letter. I was so sure -- so sure, Bill -- that I was going to die in there, and if I was lucky enough to make it through with my life, then it would be at a cost.”
Bill had been upset, but not terribly surprised, by Laura’s role in aiding the insurrection. Even knowing the outcome, he found himself fiercely unnerved by the lengths she had gone to assist the human rebellion, and was torn between the pride and the anger toward her that he felt in equal measure for risking her life and the life of her child.
“Here,” she said.
She laid his hand firmly upon her abdomen, where little Baby Roslin-Adama kicked fiercely. Demanding attention already, and he or she was yet to be born, Bill chuckled. Their son or daughter would have a formidable set of characteristics to contend with. He could hardly wait till said child entered its teenage years, if only to see how Laura went up against someone who’d inherited even half of her obstinance.
“Thank the gods it didn’t come to that. Though I would like to register my complaints, and insist that you not go about risking your life, limb, and progeny for the sake of humankind again, alright?” Wisely, Bill knew that any actual attempt to chew Laura out for her actions would likely result a row of epic proportions (outdone, perhaps, only by the brig incident, which, even now, he would not joke about) where she would certainly point out how the hypocrisy of his feelings when he had jumped back to the planet with the very same intentions -- to fight off the Cylons and risk his life in the process.
Laura groaned. “Yes, yes, yes. Can’t we leave that to another time? I’ve already had to put up with enough complaints today.”
“Like what?”
“In the middle of passing out housing assignments and helping some of the elderly groups to a shuttle to the Rising Star, Tom ran my ear off about all the reasons why I should think twice about resuming the presidency. How I was creating a new class-based system of peasants and bourgeoisie, controlled by aristocratic rule, and that I was too close to the military to make objective decisions. Oh, and how are you, by the way? Wouldn’t want to be up and about too long, you know.”
Bill smirked. As much as Zarek annoyed the living daylights out of him, somehow in the time since he had discovered Laura was pregnant with his child, watching her fend off Tom’s pitiful flirtations had become exceedingly amusing.
Laura’s lips pursed. “Stop smirking.”
“Can’t help it.” He really couldn’t.
“I know what you’re thinking, Bill Adama.”
He down at her, hoping for his best, most impassive expression.
Laura was not put off by his feigned innocence. “Asserting your manhood is the last thing I need right now. If you want to get in a pissing contest with Zarek, go take it up with him.” With that she moved, and he helped her stand, making his way back to the table and his reports.
“Your wish is my command, my queen.”
Laura glared at him. “That’s not funny.”
“Of course not, Your Majesty,” he said, shuffling his papers into neat, orderly piles.
“I dare you to keep calling me that. You’ll only encourage Tom and the press will have a field day if they overhear you saying --” she paused mid-sentence, her thought hanging unfinished. “Is there even a press corps anymore?”
“Yeah,” he answered, “but they’re still figuring out where to set up show and what the distribution model is going to be. Wireless is being repaired and we don’t exactly have a bevy of printing presses available. So, for the meantime, I think you’re in the clear.”
“Bill?”
He glanced up, and was promptly hit in the face with a crumpled up copy of the speech she’d given earlier over the half-functional wireless.
“And make sure to recycle that, will you?”
His glare was met by a insolent smirk.
---
Less than twenty-four hours after their jump, Laura went into labor, and not an easy one at that.
Vitality was not a substitute for youth, and despite Cottle’s assurances, as he milled about the sick bay Bill could not help but fret over her. It had not been long ago, after all, when she had been dying of cancer, then resigned to a too-cold, too-damp prison for the vast majority of her pregnancy. He would never go so far as to describe her as weak (he knew that much about women, and about Laura Roslin in particular) but the truth was plain: she had been sick, malnourished, overworked and sleep-deprived.
The fact that she alternated between gut-wrenching sobs and near-volatile bouts of rage did not comfort him, either.
But then, he had not been present for either birth of his sons, rather remarkably making it until this, the arrival of his third child, without ever having had the pleasure of caring for a woman in childbirth. Given his first wife’s rancor, he was rather glad of it.
“I’m too old for this,” Laura sobbed.
It had been well over half a day since she’d gone into labor, at which point a cycle of pacing, sobbing, raging at him, the gods, or Cottle (depending on whomever was closest) had begun.
And though Bill had not been present for Lee or Zak’s birth, he was smart enough not to give any sign he was near to losing his patience (a point which, he could not deny, was approaching), or that Laura might be slightly over dramatizing it (women had been doing this for thousands upon thousands of years hadn’t they? Surely she was not the oldest woman -- however improbably -- to bear a child.)
However, Bill was wise enough to bite his tongue for the meantime, trusting in one of the higher powers Laura trusted to guide her fate that they would both emerge from this difficulty together, as they had done so many times before, and that Laura did not truly mean to stand by her vow to never let him touch her ever again.
His darling wife (well, almost-wife; his soon-to-be-wife, anyway) was doing very little to help prop this optimism up, at the moment, though.
“Oh, get off,” she snapped, shoving his arm off of her shoulders and continuing to pace the Life Station unsupported.
Bill dutifully trailed behind, hands clasped behind his back. Ishay, who was taking inventory of shelves near the dialysis equipment, shot him a sympathetic half-smile, her expression silently communicating a look that said hang in there, it can’t be much longer...can it?
He rather hoped not.
---
The hours blurred together, marked by a pattern in Laura’s emotional state that followed a near-mathematical progression. Pacing followed by crying, crying followed by rage, rage followed by tenderness. Then she’d have a contraction and the whole thing would begin again. It was an exhausting experience, which, of course, was scarcely comparable to what Laura was going through. He was very near to pulling his “Admiral of the Fleet” card and calling in the infantry (Starbuck, naturally) to replace him a for a few moments, when Cottle declared it time she start to push.
Well, Bill reasoned, at least things are starting to get interesting.
It was, by no means, a speedy delivery, but Bill found all his annoyances, fears and frustrations slip away when, at half-past midnight, three days into their course to the Ionian nebula, the final child of his elder years was born: a girl.
He had a daughter. Laura had a daughter. Impossibly enough, Lee had a half-sister.
Staring down at the infant’s blue eyes, filled with curiosity, Bill Adama had to admit: the universe was a strange and wondrous place. Cruel and fickle, yes, but also miraculously kind, as well as doubtlessly insane.
Ishay handed the baby to Laura, who looked at her offspring with the most wonderful look of joyful confusion on her face. Oh. Hello there. It’s nice to finally meet you? her expression seemed to say, before she started crying again, anyway. But she was laughing, too, and the whole sweet madness of it made Bill want to step outside of the moment and trap it forever. He would, if possible, have bottled it up, like one of his smaller model ships, corked it and placed it on the mantle where it could be admired always for the small miracle it was.
Surveying his seven-pound, ten-ounce handiwork, Cottle made a flippant comment about expecting a boy, and having lost a bit of money on the bet, but Bill couldn’t be moved to care.
“What will we call her?” He asked Laura.
Still staring in shock, Laura opened her mouth to speak, but made no sound and and closed it again. Bill did not bother attempting to suppress his grin, although he did refrain from commenting that all it took was the loss of an election, conceiving a miracle child by him, a second Cylon invasion, throwing off said Cylon tyrants, and, finally, giving birth to miracle baby in order to render her speechless.
It was, he mused privately, a thought best kept to himself for the time being
“Clotho,” Laura breathed, still staring at her daughter’s furrowed brow. Both mother and daughter held each other’s eyes, Laura’s red-rimmed and teary ones locked on newly-named Clotho’s serious blue gaze. “Clotho Hestia Adama,” she said definitely.
“Well named,” Bill agreed, and kissed her brow.
---
Laura did, finally, marry him after all.
It was a very simple service, held in the observation deck, with only a smattering of attendees. The uncontested chief witness sat regally to the side, very much approving the match, if her good behavior was any indication.
Tory politely held Clotho, as Lee was best man and Kara Laura’s honor maid. At the brash pilot’s unchecked grin, Bill hearkened back to something Laura had mentioned to him once, how much Starbuck had come to feel like a younger, wilder sister.
Lee wore his dress greys, and, once his duties were fulfilled, sat amicably beside Anastasia Dualla, despite their recent plans for divorce. But both smiled brightly as the vows were exchanged, and as Bill looked around from Saul and Ellen to Cottle and the Tyrols to the looks passing between Lee and Kara, one thing above all else came to mind.
What a strange and remarkable family they made.
---
Lo, I desert thee never: to the end,
Hard at thy side as now, or sundered far,
I am thy guard...
-Aeschylus
---
The night Kara delivered her child -- another girl with wide, pale eyes she called Ismene -- Laura confessed she’d been having troubling dreams since the Cylons had departed. Dreams that Kara shared. Dreams that, maybe, were not.
It was all very troubling.
For reasons beyond his or any cosmic understanding, Laura wandered halls he could not enter. That she was a terror was something he had never reversed his position on: first in her capacity as the calm, contrary Cabinet Secretary, and later as President-cum-lover. He both feared her (wrath, distance, will) and feared for her (mind, health, soul). That Laura could be a holy terror to match...Well, it was divine cheek, indeed.
As her sleep was so precious and his hours often fickle, Bill appointed himself commander-in-chief of Clotho’s late night feedings and fussing, and rose quickly when he heard her fussing.
Yes, thank you, that is precisely what I needed, Clotho gurgled cheerfully, latching onto her bottle with the same enthusiastic sparkle that her mother had for exhibited for skipping Quorum meetings. He sat with her on the couch, quietly whispering stories about her brother and something-aunt’s evolving romance.
“Still happy you knocked me up, Admiral?” He looked up to find Laura studying him appreciatively as she leaned against the jamb of the diving wall between the private and lounge area of his quarters. Her hair was mussed and she looked half a blink from sleep, but smiled, folding her arms across her chest.
“My intention all along,” Bill remarked, eyes dropping to Clotho.
“Was it? Biological imperative and all?” She chortled, and came to sit by his side, snuggling against his shoulder and stroking the baby’s head with the tip of her left index finger.
“It was your mandate, I need not remind you.” It was, perhaps, the fiftieth time he’d mentioned it, and had yet to tire of doing so.
Laura snorted indelicately. “No, I’ll never have the luxury of forgetting that particular conversation.”
“‘Make babies,’ your mother said,” he told Clotho, who he could already tell was a very attentive listener. Laura rolled her eyes, smirking as he went on. “Years from now, the scholars will look back on those early days and write long-winded historical analyses about it. I have no doubt they’ll all be on my side. I’m usually right about these things.”
“Ohh, brotherrr,” Laura drawled, either her amusement or still half-asleep brain drawing out odd bits of the word.
Bill found himself smiling. Years of knowing her and he was still pleasantly surprised by her odd cadence, drawing out words in strange, breezy ways and skipping merrily at double-time through others. She had no patterns that he was thus far aware of; the same “Sssself-righteous jackass” could be “self-righteous Tommmm Zarek” the next week. He imagined the lesser angels of Laura’s nature (which Bill was rather well acquainted with, by now) bitterly attempting to squash the offending terrorist under a pointed heel for the duration whatever protracted syllable she had conjured him during. It never failed to amuse him.
“What?” She asked as he failed to suppress his grin.
“You.”
“Me.” She smirked and raised a brow as she plucked his glasses from his nose and set them on the coffee table, a question in her voice that asked no questions at all. Quite the opposite, in fact, declaring her own amusement at having inspired such mirth. A declaration in her own design.
“You believe this?” He asked, to which she produced that particular hum that charmed him so. What he had meant was, You believe we produced such a mild-mannered infant? but Laura interpreted him differently. A clouded expression came over her face, and her eyes darkened.
“No.” She shifted closer against him, laying her cheek against his shoulder so that her forehead was nearly touching Clotho’s. With his right hand, he gently lifted hers from Clotho’s delicate skull and kissed her knuckles.
“Sometimes, when I dream, I expect the Six to tell me the reality is the basestar, and this is all some drug-induced prison in my mind, or worse, an endless projection that will one day collapse. That there’s no you, no Clotho or Lee or Kara. We’re all just trapped back in the cold mud, never to leave.”
“Don’t worry, Laura” he said gravely. Bill pressed another kiss to her forehead. “There’s always dirty diapers to bring you back to reality,” he quipped.
She swatted his arm, but by the sparkle in her eye when he looked down at her again, Bill felt relatively confident that his deadpan sense of humor had grown on her. Laura proved his hypothesis once Clotho was laid back down in her cradle, and both her parents were kept awake the rest of the night for a very different (though not entirely unrelated) reason than usual.
---
His next attempt at humor was less appreciated the next morning.
“You want to try for another?” Bill asked as he finished dressing. He was joking, of course, but only by half. Really he’d have been more than happy to try for a whole Pyramid team, were Laura willing. Which, by the look on her face when she emerged from the head, she was not.
Laura turned toward him, face very carefully composed but for one arched brow. It was a look that said Are you frakking kidding me?
She reached for her blazer as she spoke. “Assuming -- and that is a big assumption -- that I were able to have another child...Bill, I have lived through an apocalypse, cancer, losing an election to Gaius Baltar, a Cylon occupation and a second exodus now,” she declared, punctuating each item on her list with a poke to his chest. “And I can safely say that however much I adore our child, giving birth is an experience I am loathe to go through again.”
He opened his mouth to play Hades’ advocate but Laura held up a hand.
“She will have Hera, Ismene, both the Tyrol boys, and all manner of children to grow up with. She’d have even more if that son of yours would get moving...”
“My son,” Bill shot back, “your military advisor.’
Laura rolled her eyes as she slipped into her heels next to Clothos cradle. “Funny man.”
“Clotho likes my jokes,” he said, arms coming around her.
“Oh, I’m sure. Clotho also likes Tory’s jokes.”
“Lies. All lies. Tory wouldn’t know a joke if she polled one.”
She sighed, placing her hands over his where they fit across her now-flat midsection. They both looked down at the cooing child, who was utterly fascinated by the mobile of paper Vipers one of Laura’s former students had made. “Isn’t one miracle enough for you, Admiral?”
He caught her chin and tuned her face to his. “I used to think so. But in the last few weeks I’ve gotten used to having the pair of you around.”
She kissed him sweetly and leaned her forehead against his. “Okay. One miracle baby it is,” Bill relented, and she kissed him again as a concession.
Bill only had one other question. “The labor was really the worst?”
Laura tipped her head and thought about it. “Fine. Losing to Baltar was worse. But only just.”
---
PART THREE
---
He who learns must suffer, and,
even in our sleep,
pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart
-Aeschylus
---
Years passed and the Cylons followed them through the stars.
Bill was at once grateful for the strange connection that Laura and Kara seemed to share with the Six, as, over the years, they slowly gleaned information about fuel reserves and places where they could find water and edible food sources. But it was still something that was deeply discomforting, made more so by the fact that the Six seemed very interested in the children of the Fleet.
The year Hera turned thirteen, a remarkable thing happened. Three basestars appeared on DRADIS, but rather than launch Raiders, a hail was sent requesting a meeting.
The Cylons wanted an alliance.
Not all Cylons, of course, but a group of Sixes, Eights, and Fours, mostly, though there were a number of Twos among them as well as the odd Five. Cavil’s philosophies, a Six named Natalie told them, had polarized their race, creating an ideological chasm that could not be bridged. Cavil wanted so eliminate what small number of humans there were left. The others longed for peace, for rest, and for a future that could be lived on solid ground. Remarkable, the dreams they shared.
It was an issue that brought the Fleet to blows.
Laura, who had long since abdicated the seat of the Presidency by then, but served still as Chairwoman of the Quorum in her capacity as representative from Caprica, feared it would cause mutiny. As usual, she was right.
Dozens of Marines and hundreds of civilians rioted, very nearly taking control of Galactica until their leadership was taken out. Something in Bill had broken the day so many of his crew stood against him, a hurt that went so deep that no amount of Laura’s kisses or the love of his children and grandchildren could mask the pain. It was a separate thing entirely.
In the end, the Fleet had no choice but to accept the olive branch offered by the rebel Cylons. There was only so far they could go on recycled supplied, fuel, food, air...The fact was, they needed the Cylons far more than the Cylons needed them. Kara and Laura had no idea if their Six, who was a fickle, frustrating unit, flirting with malice and dangling threats from a spiders web, but one who so far had only seemed to help them, was among them. They did not, could not, find reason to object.
Thus, an uneasy friendship had been born.
---
One evening not two weeks before her daughter reached her majority, Starbuck fell asleep on the Adama’s couch and could not be woken up. On a very good day, this would have been highly disconcerting to Bill, as he had loved Kara Thrace as a daughter long before she married Lee. But Bill Adama had not had a very good day in some time, and his fear for the woman he never stopped seeing as a girl was outdone only by the terror stemming from fact that the same mysterious fate had befallen his wife.
It had happened a night when he was on shift, attending to the many repairs and demands that Galactica required. It had been almost twenty years since she had been decommissioned, and now his girl was breaking in ways that no Cylon resin or patchwork of treatments could ever completely heal. There was no mistaking it: His first love was dying.
When Clotho discovered her mother and sister-in-law unconscious, she’d gone into battle mode, summoning the considerable force of her will to commission a small army of marine and medical personnel to attend to them, though once in Life Station, she trusted only Layne Ishay and her young apprentice provide immediate care. Ishay was at a loss for what strange malady was to blame for their condition. Nothing seemed to match -- Kara burned with fever while Laura shivered violently, cold as ice.
“I doubt even Cottle would have known what to do,” she admitted of Galactica’s last official CMO. “Except to conjure a smoke and grumble about the damned intangible medical mysteries that surround your wife.”
Viruses were slowly eliminated as the culprit, along with bacteria, genetic disease, blood disorders (a grim reminder of how deep the bond between Hera and Laura ran), degenerative illness, even cancer could not explain the alarming medical state both women had reached. To which Hera rather cryptically said, “Perhaps the problem isn’t medical,” but would say no more.
Most disconcerting of all, however, were the findings they were able to turn up. Every picture of either Laura or Starbuck’s brain revealed precisely the same thing -- in all the time they’d been unconscious, neither had been asleep. Though their eyes remained closed, in all the time since they’d fallen into their fugue, both had been, for all intents and purposes, very much awake. Active, even.
And it was killing them.
---
“Blood pressure is too high, glucose isn’t breaking down, brain scans are irregular and varied...” Layne Ishay folded her hands together. “Admiral, I’m afraid there is little we can do, at this point.”
Bill nodded, hearing her words but unable to grasp their meaning. Unwilling, more like. Ishay stepped away, charts in hand, off to check her other patients. Turning his head towards the cramped corner of the Life Station that had functioned as the ICU since Zero Hour, Bill watched Ismene Anders check her mother’s vitals, then Laura’s.
For eleven days and nights, Ismene had stayed by their sides, placing cool compresses to Kara’s sweaty brow and extra blankets on Laura.
Bill had to marvel at his daughter’s best friend and almost-sister. For all of the pale skin and hair she’d gotten from her mother, Ismene’s quiet demeanor and studious nature was something beyond either her parents. She was entirely her own. She was also a natural caretaker, who, shortly after her thirteenth birthday, had apprenticed herself to Ishay. Her deft fingers could tap a vein as gently as threading a needle, her calm temperament unflappable in a crisis. While many of the Fleet’s health professionals were still wary of treating Cylons, Ismene sought them out, refusing to judge them for events that had happened before her birth, and as such had begun to amass a block of knowledge that was as unique as it was extraordinary. She was in many ways, the Fleet’s first equal-opportunity health professional.
She had even volunteered to attend to former President Baltar, who had been lost to the vast recesses of his own mind (and madness) since the human rebellion in the amphitheater, far back on New Caprica. Which, in Bill’s book, put her close to sainthood.
Clotho, he grieved to admit, was the complete opposite. Ever tempestuous, she could hardly bear to keep still, was restless and irritable. She flitted in and out of Life Station like a menacing butterfly, angry and lost. The children in the Fleet had grown up fast, but few were well-adjusted. At eighteen, Clotho already had a small child of her own, who cried for her in her long absences, and Nicky Tyrol’s attentiveness could not assuage baby Kore (who was, after all, part Roslin, and thus tended towards indomitable).
For all her mother’s force-of-nature tenacity, Clotho had so too grown to inherit many of both he and Laura’s less becoming qualities. Laura’s stubbornness, for one, and her vacillating temperament that could go from bemused to irate faster than a Viper could hit mach 10. Bill had passed on many of his own tendencies toward self-directed anger and recrimination in Clotho, although there was small mercy in the fact that she’d avoided picking up Lee’s emotional eating or Kara’s occasional prerogative to drink, fight or frak herself blind.
Instead of watching over Kara and her mother, Clotho threw herself into work, repairing fried communication boards and patching wireless signals until redundancy after redundancy was in place aboard the ship and many others. Another habit she’d learned at her mother’s knee -- to effectively run from all her grief. Lee visited regularly, but he had more responsibiltities now that he was short an XO and raising two small boys on his own. So it was that Bill often found himself alone in Life Station, a book in hand, and reading aloud to them both.
“Any change?” He asked Ismene, feeling the age of the universe in his bones.
Ismene shook her head. “No. I’m sorry to say there’s been none. Almost two weeks now. At least we know we’re not making them worse.”
“Whatever else happens, thank you, Ismene,” Bill said, grasping her shoulder. “You’ve given us something to be proud of.”
Ismene’s eyes softened. “I wish there was more...” But she shook her head, grief shoved aside behind a mask of professionalism. “I’ll be back later with Will and Joey,” she whispered and left for the Pegasus to check on her younger brothers, her eyes full of unshed tears.
He sat down in his chair, the familiar heartbreak washing over him. The monitor beeped at a regular interval, but there was no denying it: Laura was dying, just as Galactica was dying, as Kara was dying. He was losing his family and it was the ends of the worlds all over again.
---
The sirens rang out just after midnight on the twelfth day. Bill awoke instantly, his decades-old military instincts taking over. He paused only to press a kiss to Laura and then Kara’s forehead before making for the CIC.
“Sitrep!” He bellowed, eyes searching the DRADIS screen. The menacing red dots flickered into view, soon surrounded by a dozen smaller blips, indicating Raiders. Then another dozen, and another, and another...
“It’s the Cylon Fleet, sir!” Helo answered.
Bill turned to Tigh. “Get on the horn, I want every bird in the air inside of three minutes,” he growled. “That goes for our Cylon allies, as well.
The chatter went up as pilots took to the skies around them. Gunfire crackled over the comm units, met by static, screams, confusion. It was mayhem.
Bill ordered the signal with emergency jump coordinates sent out, though he knew it was of little use. The FTL drives needed time to spin up, being years and years in continuous use. Even the Pegasus had grown slow without dry dock repairs every eighteen months.
A long stretch of time passed, though it may only have been moments. His only barometer was the number of pilots shot down, and as relativity demanded, time seemed to become horrifically slow as the it escalated.
Until a series of nukes hit.
“Red, red, red!” A mechanical specialist called out. “We’ve got structural damage in the red across the boards!”
Bill’s eyes closed in defeat. That kind of damage had been a long time coming. At best, Galactica had only one jump left in her. Any more and her back would be broken.
Suddenly, his reverie was broken by a familiar voice, strangled, rasping, and shouting to be heard.
“I know the way!” Kara exclaimed, stumbling into the CIC. “I know! I know the way to Earth!”
Her appearance shocked him. The gray hospital gown hung like a sack off of her. Eyes wild, her hair clung to her sunken cheeks, falling over hollow eyes as she struggled to stand. She hunched over the main console, surrounded by the battle that -- for once -- she appeared to have no interest in joining. Bill he barely had time to open his mouth before another nuke hit the hull.
“Starbuck?” Helo hollered, wild-eyed with concern. “What are you doing?”
“The Six told me,” Kara insisted desperately. She held Bill’s gaze, imploring him to understand. “After the rebel Cylons broke away, the Six said they found Earth. Cavil wanted to raze it, bomb everything, any evidence of the Thirteen Tribe, any hope we had of survival. But a Three disagreed with him, and he had her model destroyed. Not just boxed, but destroyed. Every one. More Cylons rebelled. Our Six was one of them. Cavil won.”
Her fingers clutched his uniform, nails digging into the thin, worn fabric so hard that he feared it would tear. Bill reached for his hands.
“What are you saying, Kara?” They flew backwards, slamming into the DRADIS screen as another bomb rocked the hull.
“The Six is dying! He killed them all, or tried to,” Kara shouted over the fracas. “She’s dying and she hates him and wants to give us Earth! She gave me the coordinates!”
“It doesn’t matter!” Bill shouted. “If the Ones know where it is, they’ll just follow us there!”
Kara jumped to her feet, stumbling to the navigational computer. “Starbuck! Captain!” He shouted again, but it was of no use. Over the comm, Lee’s voice rang out.
“Krypter! Krypter! We have incoming fire! Two minutes to impact!”
Bill shoved himself to his feet. Tigh was doing his best to direct the Viper and Raptor traffic, while Helo shouted commands over the ship-wide comm to the flight deck, arsenals, and engine room.
“She has a plan. She told me her plan -- she’s going to take out the Resurrection Hub the Ones have, sir. Please! You have to listen. Why won’t you listen!”
In that moment, Kara looked more like a caged animal than a person, like a creature that would not hesitate to kill anything that got in its way. But looking in her eyes, he saw the woman both his sons had loved. The pilot who had been through hell and back a thousand times in her life. Kara Thrace should never have lived this long, and yet, like all the women in his family, she had frakked the odds and made her own way.
Only one choice. Sometimes you had to roll the hard six.
He seized the navigation key in hand. “What’re the jump coordinates, Starbuck?”
“Four, eight, one, five, one, six,” Kara said, moving to the far side of the console and looking down as he punched it in.
“Two more!” he called. “What are the last two numbers!”
Kara clenched her eyes shut, pulling at the hair of her temples. “I--I don’t remember! It’s so close, I can see it but I can’t!” Chaos continued on around them, the squawk of the Vipers and Raptors and Alliance Raiders, but every person in the CIC had their eyes trained on Kara Thrace. “I can’t! I’m losing it!”
“Four, two.” All heads spun as a hoarse but well-known voice called out. At the edge of the room, Clotho helped support her mother, weak and leaning heavily into her daughter, as Laura called out again, stronger this time. “The last digits are four and two.”
“Transmit and punch it, Starbuck!” He nodded as Kara sent the signal to every ship in the Fleet.
We go together, he told her silently. She nodded. All the way to the end.
“Three, two, one...”
Jump.
---
O holy Aether, and swift-winged Winds,
And River-wells, and laughter innumerous
Of yon Sea-waves! Earth, mother of us all...
-Aeschylus
---
The blue planet was a green world. Rich with life, the recons showed.
A yellow sun, single moon. Breathable oxygen.
Earth.
---
Ever blunt, Kara asked, “But...how/ What does it mean?”
Perched on the edge of the couch in their quarters, Laura simply shook her head. “I don’t know what it means.”
The last seventy-two hours had restored both of them to strength, aided even more so by the supply of fruits, vegetables, and fresh water that had been dispersed throughout the Fleet that morning. Bill had never felt so close to composing an epic ode to apples as he had that day.
Now, as groups of civilians were being shuttled to the surface, they sat trying to piece together the last shards of their shared mystery.
“In my dream, Six showed me to the Hybrid’s chamber. She spoke to me,” Laura said.
Kara nodded. “Me too. She grabbed my hand. She looked right at me, like she could see my thoughts. ‘A leader to pass, a mother to teach, a child becomes the inevitable.”
“I don’t understand,” Kara said, running her hands though her hair. “We’re both mothers. But you’re also my elder, and who is the daughter? All those years, with Six taunting us about prophecy and clouds and stars and three prophesied women. Why couldn’t she just have said what she frakking meant?”
After Kara stalked off to pack, Bill tucked Laura’s arm in his own and lead her from their quarters.
“What are your theories?” He asked, curious.
Laura hummed, thoughtful. “I have some ideas, but they’re all just half. Misty.” Stepping through a hatch, the observation deck stretched out before them. Empty. Beyond, a small white moon circled the world below, where another shuttle entered the atmosphere.
Laura shook her head. “‘A child becomes the inevitable?’”
In his mind, Bill saw Hera as a toddler, the first human-Cylon hybrid. It seemed obvious. And yet...something made him think of Ismene Anders, who looked past the differences of blood and chrome. Change was inevitable. Perhaps tolerance was as well.
“And the elder? I take offense on your behalf if that’s supposed to be your part in this cosmic trickery.”
Laura giggled, and, a moment later, moved behind him. She wrapped her arms around his middle, resting her cheek against his shoulder. “I wonder...” she started to say. He could feel her hair tickling his collar, her breath warm against his neck, like wind. “Who knows? Maybe the elder and the Dying Leader were one and the same.”
Within the week, Galactica would be emptied, abandoned. Of the once-mighty Colonial Fleet, only the Pegasus was left to defend the skies above Earth, joined by the three basestars. Recon of the battle site had revealed that the Six’s plan had been successful -- the debris field showed evidence of the Hub’s destruction and some number of basestars.
For now, it seemed they were safe.
“She saved us, Bill. She brought us home.”
Whatever her meaning, Kara, Galactica, or something else entirely, Bill nodded his assent as he turned and pulled Laura into his arms.
“So say we all.”
---