Aftermath: The Daughter of Clotho - Part 1
Aftermath: The Daughter of Clotho - Part 1
Ensign Darius Sanchez stared at his console, trying desperately not to show how mind-numbingly bored he was with his assignment to the junior communications slot barely halfway through his three week rotation at that station. He’d been so excited when, after seven months on board and serving in three different departments, his bridge rotation finally came up that he’d hardly slept the night before his first shift. Now he’d be happy to return to the bowels of Drive Maintenance; at least things happened there. Here, all he had to do was manually run through endless frequency channels for comm. chatter-something a simple string could be written to do.
But Excalibur was a training ship-an ancient, centuries-old battlecruiser-so everything was done the old fashioned way … laboriously and by hand. And even after millennia of space travel, the Terran Confederacy Space Navy still believed that the best way to train newbie officers and ship crews was the old fashioned way.
He glanced at fellow greenhorn, Rena Holcomb, running simulator drills at the junior navigation station under the watchful eye of Lieutenant Tyler Cooke. Beyond Holcomb, his friend Jason Styles was busy cataloguing space dust. The only problem was that Styles actually liked cataloguing space dust out here at the ass-end of nowhere. Darius turned his attention back to his console as he moved in sequence to the next range of frequencies-frequencies so obsolete, no one but a few devolved worlds used them anymore.
“Krypter! Krypter! Krypter!”
The female voice burst over his earpiece so unexpectedly, it made him jump and as he scrambled to isolate and document the transmission, he accidentally put it through to the bridge speakers.
“Krypter! Krypter! Krypter!” the strangely accented voice repeated. “Galactica-Starbuck … looks like I’ve exited the maelstrom … must have passed out or something for a while there.”
Darius made to cut off the bridge speakers, but Lieutenant Commander Murdock stayed his hand. Looking up at the senior communications officer, Darius was surprised to see him nod at Captain Suzuki’s silent order.
“I’ll get right on it, Ma’am,” Murdock said briskly as he swivelled back to concentrate on his console.
“Galactica? Is anybody out there?” the voice called, fear shredding that simple sentence. “Starbuck to Galactica … Starbuck to any Colonial unit … I say again, this is Captain Kara Thrace, Viper 8737 from the battlestar Galactica to any Colonial units… I’ve got bingo fuel … ohhh frak!” The voice gave a hysterical little laugh and spoke in the low tones of the damned. “Looks like I’ve got bingo air as well. Please render assistance. According to my gauges, I’ve been in that storm vortex thing for nearly forty-eight hours, so I’ve got less than ten minutes of air left.”
“Mr. Murdock?” Suzuki called a shade impatiently.
“We’ve got her, Ma’am,” he replied, bringing up the location in the main 3-D holotank. “About half an hour ago, Scan registered a small spike of six point eight Radaks approximately three light seconds away-barely above background level of normal space noise. Hyper profile suggests an extremely constricted Type Four hyper-tunnel-even so, the ship she’s in must be awfully small.”
“That could explain why she only has forty-eight hours worth of air-use of the term Viper suggests a fighter like our Blackhawks,” Suzuki said thoughtfully. “Relay the co-ordinates to the helm.”
“Co-ordinates locked and plotted,” Chief McDougall replied.
“Then take her in, Chief,” she replied.
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
#
Starbuck forced herself to continue breathing in steady, even breaths … but with each breath, the air grew noticeably thinner. Stars like diamond dust glittered in the velvet black, mocking her. She laughed softly; her famous “Starbuck” luck had finally given out. There were no planetary systems near by, so she didn’t even have a hope of finding a conveniently habitable world.
She remembered Apollo’s frantic voice calling to her, telling her to pull up … that she would hit the hard deck, but locked in her vision-with a hallucination of that frakker Leoben of all people as some sort of spiritual guide to her destiny following an equally hallucinatory Cylon heavy raider-she’d dove into that strange storm vortex in the atmosphere of the gas giant. And now she was here. Where? She hadn’t a clue.
“Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer,” she whispered through shallow, gasping breaths. “It’s me, your daughter Kara Thrace. I promise, Lords, if I get out of this one alive, I’ll never pull such a crazy-assed stunt again.”
She gave another hysterical little giggle. Her head felt stuffed with cotton wool and it became impossible to concentrate. Anoxia … oxygen starvation, she thought distantly and there was nothing to do but sit back and slip deeper into eternal sleep.
Her head lolled to the side and she watched as a great black creature devoured the stars.
“Ohhh, frakkk me!” she gasped as the creature resolved into a recognizable ship.
“Sorry doll,” a strange male voice chuckled in her ear, “but you’re not my type, if that means what I think it means.”
A sleek, black fighter appeared beside her and a grinning blond-haired young man waved impudently at her.
“All right boys and girls,” he said, “let’s round up our star buck and herd her into the coral.”
Starbuck felt her Viper vibrate violently, and then the black swallowed her up.
#
“Dr. Zhang, you said that you had something to report?”
Captain Theodora Suzuki swept into the medbay like a self-contained hurricane; something Commander James Bryson was used to from the fighter jock once known as “Ball Lightning”. She was tiny, only about one hundred and fifty-five centimetres tall, but Bryson knew more than one ensign who’d actually publicly blurted out-much to the greenhorn’s horror-that he hadn’t realised how short his captain was.
Dr. Zhang Xue looked up from her display and smiled at Suzuki as Major Harry Christos, head of Excalibur’s Marine contingent entered.
“Ah, we’re all here,” she said. “Excellent!”
“Have you determined which neobarb world she’s from, doctor?” Christos goaded.
Zhang’s smile widened to a predator’s grin. Her clashes against Christos’ ingrained sense of superiority-a condition endemic to many from the motherworld and her oldest daughter colonies-were infamous.
Bryson got the feeling that she was about to take a sizeable chunk out of the good major’s ass.
“As a matter of fact, yes,” she replied in a deceptively quiet voice. “She’s from that barbaric old world called … Earth.”
They stared at her in shock. “What?” shouted Christos.
“Doctor, please explain,” Suzuki said regaining her composure quickly. “That’s certainly no Terran fighter down on my flight deck.”
“In fact it looks like one of those old jet fighters they use on Madrigal,” Bryson said thoughtfully. “But those are strictly atmospheric-like planes from pre-space Earth-and this bird was able to withstand passage through a tunnel, not to mention it uses a type of fuel Major Moran and an entire engineering team are still trying to characterise.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Zhang replied dismissively. “But during our examination, Dr. Alowolo found that this young woman has a third-generation Rossacher neural implant-damaged, but still unmistakeable.”
“She has an interface?” Christos asked; his brows drew together in a scowl marring his singularly handsome face.
“Nketchi?” Zhang said to the beautiful, cocoa-skinned woman.
The young doctor took a deep breath and met her captain’s enquiring gaze.
“As Dr. Zhang indicated, the patient has a non-functional neural implant, a juvenile series Rossacher III, consistent with those typically implanted in children between the ages of three months and five years of age,” she reported. “This primary juvenile series implant was used mostly for identification on Confederacy worlds starting three hundred and seventy years ago until approximately thirty years ago, when it was supplanted by the current Rossacher V series. It has basic medical interface and diagnostic functions as well as a locator beacon.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Zhang said with a dramatic flourish at the young, blonde woman lying unconscious on the bed. “Meet Miss Sheba Kathleen Stewart, daughter of Captain Kathleen Mary Davidson and famed historian Dr. Dimitri Miles Stewart … and,” she continued, enjoying their confusion, “granddaughter of Admiral Raymond Connor Stewart.”
Bryson couldn’t help the gasp that escaped him. “The sector commander? That Admiral Stewart?”
“The very same,” Suzuki said quietly.
“Then that means that her brother is Vice Admiral Miles Connor Stewart, in command of the Sixteenth Fleet,” Bryson continued as information regarding the Stewarts and their immediate family flowed through his implant’s link.
“Exactly,” Zhang replied. “Once we had her genetic profile, discovering her identity was fairly simple.”
“Almost forty-two years ago, Captain Davidson disappeared with her husband, three year-old daughter and all hands aboard the science explorer Morning Star,” Suzuki said. “This young woman will be able to tell us where they disappeared to.”
Zhang’s smile faltered for the first time. “Well, wherever it was, it wasn’t necessarily a good place,” she said grimly.
“Doctor?” the captain queried in concern.
Zhang turned the diagnostic monitor towards them. “Her scans show that she sustained severe head trauma when she was approximately five years old, which is probably how the implant was damaged,” she said quietly. “In addition to the head trauma, she shows signs of rather extreme juvenile abuse well into her adolescence, including having every finger broken on both hands.”
“Gods!” The epithet escaped Bryson before he could consciously screen it.
“More recently,” the doctor continued grimly, “she’s torn up her right knee and been beaten within an inch of her life several times, judging by the broken nose, ribs, various healed-over bone fractures and lingering deep muscle trauma.” They gaped at her, appalled at the abuse the doctor had catalogued.
“She’s malnourished, has had both hands severely burned recently and suffered an old-fashioned, chemically propelled bullet to the gut,” Zhang said holding Suzuki’s gaze. “And to top it all off, at about the same time as the surgery to repair that wound, some butcher hacked off half of her left ovary for no sane reason I can detect.”
#
Theodora Suzuki studied the impenetrable mask that solidified on the face of her old mentor beneath his shock of white hair as he absorbed Zhang’s report. She knew why Raymond Stewart chose to bury himself all the way out here on the fringe of nowhere when he could have had his pick of any assignment anywhere in the Confederacy.
“Are you sure, Teddy?” he asked hoarsely, eyes flint-hard now where there had been so much jubilation only moments ago at the news that his granddaughter was still alive. Theodora Suzuki could hear the deep sorrow in his voice and the even deeper fury at the catalogue of abuse the girl had suffered.
“Yes, sir,” she replied quietly.
His eyes flicked away from her face and he nodded to someone out of pick-up range before focusing on her again. “I’ll be leaving Sector HQ within the hour and rendezvous with you at Avalon Station within twelve hours,” he said. “Connor’s task force will be there in twenty-two hours.”
“Understood, sir,” Suzuki replied. “Excalibur will get to Avalon in three hours, but Dr. Zhang reports that your granddaughter will awaken naturally in about fifty minutes.”
“You have authorization to stream Warrior’s Dawn as soon as she begins to wake up,” he said-and she also heard what he didn’t say, and damn the regulations against frivolously tying up relay bandwidth so that an old admiral can watch his precious granddaughter wake up for the first time in over forty years.
“Understood, sir,” she replied gently. “Sir, one other thing-it’s in my report with the recordings of our first contact, but she may not remember you, sir, or anything to do with the Confederacy. In her mayday, presumably to her fleet, she refers to herself as “Starbuck” and “Captain Kara Thrace”. Now, “Starbuck” was emblazoned on a plaque affixed to her craft, and is probably her callsign-”
“I know what a callsign is, Captain,” Stewart said impatiently.
“Yes, sir,” she replied smiling ruefully, but quickly sobered as she continued. “But the fact that she calls herself “Kara Thrace”, and prays to some deities called the “Lords of Kobol”, suggests that her parents or the survivors from the expedition had no choice but to socialise her as one of these “Colonials”-”
“Which means they would have followed SOP and buried her real identity and memories when they destroyed their ship and went to ground,” he finished grimly.
“That’s our guess, sir,” Suzuki said, “and it also means we’ll have to handle her situation very carefully. Like most of these cases, she’s probably not going to handle us turning her worldview upside down very well.”
“But it has to be done.”
“Yes sir.”
#
To Part 2