The Last Iteration: All This Has Happened Before … Chapter 25
The Last Iteration: All This Has Happened Before …
Chapter 25: Getting to know you, getting to know all about me
Word Count: 2,675 words
Rating: T (PG-13)
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my craziness in this nBSG/Voyager crossover story. Battlestar Galactica belongs to Glen A. Larson, Ron D. Moore, David Eick, the Sci-Fi Channel, various and sundry companies and whoever owns them. Star Trek: Voyager belongs to Gene Roddenberry, Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor, Paramount Studios, UPN, Viacom and whoever else owns pieces of the Star Trek franchise.
Spoilers: For nBSG - to Crossroads Part 2; for ST:V - to Endgame. Everything beyond is definitely alternate universe and a fairly cracked one at that!
Summary: The survivors of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and the crew of the intrepid starship Voyager must find a way to break the cycle …
The Last Iteration: All This Has Happened Before …
Chapter 25: Getting to know you, getting to know all about me
It was as if a decade melted away from Laura’s face, Bill thought as the medication took effect rapidly. She looked at him with startlingly clear green eyes, and then stared at Janeway as if seeing her for the first time.
“Thank you, Captain Janeway,” she husked gratefully.
“You’re most welcome,” Voyager’s captain replied. “Samantha will leave you a hypospray and enough pre-loaded doses of each medicine to get you through the next couple of days, but we really should take care of it as soon as possible.”
Cottle cleared his throat. “Actually, Captain, I have another terminal cancer patient,” he said, “as well as a fairly substantial number of other very sick patients both here on Galactica and out in the Fleet-”
Janeway nodded. “With the Admiral’s permission, Lieutenant Wildman can accompany you to your sickbay and make an assessment of your immediate and most pressing needs, Dr. Cottle,” she said and Adama nodded. “My doctor and other personnel are on standby, and if you can give us samples, or describe the conditions you need to treat, we can begin producing the medications you’re in most urgent need of within the next few hours, and begin large-scale production of nutritional supplements for fleet-wide distribution within forty-eight hours.”
As she spoke, Cottle’s expression went from dumbfounded to downright worshipful of Janeway; Bill marvelled at the change of demeanour in the irascible old doctor.
“Thank you, it would be greatly appreciated,” Cottle replied.
“Can your people handle all that, Captain Janeway?” Sharon asked curiously. “You said that you only have a crew of one hundred and fifty, and from what I could see, Voyager is a fairly small ship.”
The Federation woman grinned. “Actually, we were just about to get to that,” she replied. “We’ll be manufacturing the medicine that same way that we propose to manufacture food for you until we can find a secure planet for us to forage on-build back up your stores and restore your agricultural capacity.”
“Manufacture food?” Bill asked in surprise. “How? From what?”
“From any sort of matter you can spare,” she replied. “Even waste matter-the things you’d normally throw away-can be used, and I’d imagine that a fleet this size would produce a lot of waste matter.” Bill nodded, but couldn’t imagine what she was getting at as she continued. “We have a technology called matter replicators-”
“Matter replicators?” Laura repeated confusion plain on her face.
“Yes,” Janeway said. “They are machines consisting of a very powerful computer, a matter storage module and a matter generator module. Basically, an object-from a sheet of paper,” she said removing the top sheet from Cottle’s file on the table in front of Bill before pointing to her foot, “to someone’s boots, is scanned at the molecular level and the pattern stored in the computer’s memory. Then any sort of matter can then fed into the matter storage module, where it’s broken down into its constituent atoms and held until needed. After that it’s a simple matter of asking the replicator to give you a sheet of paper or a new pair of boots and the computer will look up the pattern matrix in its memory and the generator module will produce it for you.”
“So it’s like a matter photocopy machine,” Helo said in awe, “but I don’t see how you can produce food or medicine, unless you put waste food or medicine into it.”
“No you don’t, because it’s not a simple photocopier, Helo,” Gaeta said excitedly. “Remember, the captain said that they store the matter as constituent atoms! Don’t you see? They simply rearrange the atoms so that waste paper or an old boot can become a fillet of Virgon sweetfish, or a cup of wild rice, provided that there’s a molecular pattern for sweetfish or wild rice scanned into the computer! It’s completely ingenious!” he said laughing.
“Bravo again, Mr. Gaeta!” Janeway said approvingly as the Colonials all stared at the young man in complete shock. “It’s a bit more complicated, but that’s it basically in a nutshell. Currently, we have spare computer modules that can be used to build three industrial grade replicators for you, but until we can get the other components assembled-which should take about five to seven days-we can supply you with needed medicine as well as vitamin and nutritional supplements from Voyager’s integrated replicators.
“However, besides matter for the storage modules,” she continued, “The limiting factor on the replicators is the energy to power them. Normally, we wouldn’t be able to produce such quantities of replicated material because having enough fuel and energy reserves is generally an issue with such a small ship. In fact, for the last seven years, we’ve been on an extended deep-space voyage and I’ve had to maintain quite a strict system of replicator rationing on Voyager and use our dedicated industrial replicators mostly for repairs. But since we came here, we’ve been able to replenish our supplies and are now fairly well stocked. We can even provide your agro ships with some plants from our airponics garden and a few specimens of Klingon and other alien livestock we took on recently.”
“Gods,” Cottle said, breaking the incredulous silence that filled the room. “I keep waiting for someone to wake me up and it’ll all have been a frakking dream. Are you sure we’re not the ones who’ve taken leave of our reality?”
Janeway laughed. “Quite sure, doctor,” she said, eyes twinkling. “But I do know how you feel.”
“Thank you,” Laura said hoarsely again and Bill got the feeling they were going to be thanking Janeway a lot. “I don’t know how we’ll ever be able to repay you.”
Voyager’s captain and personnel looked genuinely startled at the suggestion.
“No repayment will ever be necessary, Madam President,” Janeway said after a moment of silence. “Please understand that now. This is simply a matter of mutual co-operation and humanitarian aid-it’s among the founding principles of the Federation; principles we all pledged to uphold when we took our oath. We’re just a small group of people who know what it’s like to be torn from everything we hold dear, with no hope-”
Janeway’s voice broke, and Adama heard the unspoken devastation in that breaking; they had no hope of seeing home again. Janeway rose and walked away from the table, arms wrapped about her as if to keep herself from flying apart.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve been lost, Madam President, Admiral Adama,” Tuvok said gravely.
“But at least the last time, we stayed in our own galaxy-our own reality,” Torres said, her eyes glued to her captain’s rigid back in concern.
“An alien superbeing kidnapped Voyager seven years ago and transported us to the other side of the galaxy, seventy thousand light years away-that was the extended voyage the Captain was speaking about,” Kim continued, his youthful face open and honest, even with the unbelievable story coming from his mouth. “This being was looking for a compatible species to care for a fragile, emergent species, the Ocampa. Generations ago, the Caretaker was responsible for accidentally destroying the Ocampa homeworld’s biosphere and had built an underground enclave for them to live in, but it was dying and could no longer take care of them. None of the species on Voyager were compatible. Therefore, before it died, it sealed the Ocampa into their underground city and set its space station array to self-destruct, but a warlike species, the Kazon, managed to damage the self-destruct mechanism. We could have used the array’s technology to return home to the Federation, but we couldn’t guarantee that it would be destroyed after we left-that it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Kazon, who would use it to destroy the Ocampa and anyone else who got in their way.”
“So the Captain destroyed the Caretaker’s array and we were stranded, facing a seventy-year journey,” Torres said holding Bill’s gaze and he felt compelled to listen. “Since then, we’ve been trying to get home, travelling through unknown and often hostile territories. We’ve developed new technologies that took decades off our travel time, used alien technologies and natural phenomena-such as wormholes-to get us across vast stretches of space. Just before we ended up here, we came across a Borg transwarp hub-basically a great network of artificial tunnels or conduits through space, giving the Borg access to the far reaches of the galaxy. One of those conduits led to our Earth’s backyard.”
“The Borg have tried to invade the Federation space three times,” Annika Hansen said, “and three times Starfleet has barely held them off-the hub had to be destroyed. It was a chance to cripple the Borg’s capacity to strike at the Federation and other areas of space at least for a generation. Together with an … ally, we managed to destroy the hub, but we also thought that if we could manage to stay ahead of the shockwave from our transphasic torpedoes, we could use the conduit that led to the Federation in order to get there.”
“It was a gamble I lost,” Janeway said turning to face them again. Though Bill could see the sorrow in her blue eyes, there were no tears.
“It was a gamble we lost, Captain,” Tuvok corrected her firmly. “It was a course of action we all agreed upon.”
“Which is how we ended up here,” Torres continued. “Even when you know what you’re doing, subspace isn’t something to be trifled with-it can be unpredictable. And if the Captain hadn’t turned us into the shockwave when she realised we weren’t going to be able to out-run it, we’d be dead.”
Harry Kim grinned. “The train jumped tracks, but we all survived and that’s the important thing,” he said.
After a moment, Janeway smiled fondly at the young man. “Yes, Harry, that’s the important thing,” she replied. Turning her attention back to Bill and Laura, she continued. “Anyway, we’ll have to work out some sort of schedule for all this as quickly as possible. To that end, perhaps you can recommend someone, Admiral Adama, Madam President, to work with my first officer, Commander Chakotay, overseeing the logistics of things such as equitable meal distribution. It should be someone who knows the ins and outs of your Fleet, but also has a fairly good technical knowledge and is comfortable with technology. The replicators are very energy intensive, so only the largest ships-the ones with the most powerful engines-will have energy to spare in order to run them. The food would then have to be distributed from those nodal points.”
“As it is,” Torres said, “we’re going to have to fit the replicators with power converters to make them compatible with with your unique power source and assure maximum efficiency in their output. However, at least for the first while, they’ll be very limited in the choices programmed into them.”
“To go from algae to any choice at all would be a vast improvement, Commander Torres,” Cottle said.
“What about Zarek?” Bill suggested; Laura looked thoughtful as she tried to digest their remarks.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’ll need him to keep the Quorum in line-twist a few arms, but those criminals of his should be able to keep the supply lines open.” She grinned as Voyager’s people stared at her in surprise. “Our Vice President, Tom Zarek, is rather a shady character-when the Colonies were destroyed, he was on his way to his parole hearing. About twenty years ago, a group of radicals he led, bombed a government building in protest over conditions on Saggitaron. He’s always insisted that they thought it was empty, but a number of people died and he went to prison. Naturally, he further developed his leadership skills while in prison.”
“All right,” Janeway replied slowly, after a moment of silence. “If not Mr. Zarek, then who would you suggest, Madam President?”
Laura turned to Bill, a gentle smile playing on her lips. “Actually, I was thinking of Lee,” she said. He gaped at her, shocked-after what Lee had done to her on the stand during Baltar’s trial, he was the last person Bill expected her to suggest.
“He resigned,” he said unhappily.
“He resigned from the military, Bill,” she countered. “But he did help organise the initial evacuation, performing the assessments of the ships and their drives-and he was the one who brought those Black Market thugs to heel in order to get medicine distributed throughout the fleet. If anyone can figure out who the players in the shakedown rackets aboard the ships are apt to be, it’s Captain Apollo.”
“I hate to say it, Old Man,” Tigh chimed in, “but she’s right about that.”
“Wasn’t Apollo the call-sign of the pilot who greeted Starbuck?” Harry Kim asked. “The pilot who shot down one of the nuclear missiles the Cylons targeted Galactica with?”
“Yes, he’s the one,” Laura replied smiling. “I guess at the moment the alert sounded, he forgot that he wasn’t a Viper pilot anymore. Apollo is Lee Adama, the Admiral’s son.”
“I see,” Janeway said; her shrewd blue eyes were filled with understanding, and Bill got the feeling that she truly did see. “If you think that he’s up for the challenge, then we’d love to have him. He certainly sounds qualified.”
“I’ll speak to him,” Bill said gruffly. But inside his chest he felt the tight band-which had formed around his heart when Lee threw his pilot’s wings at him-loosen just a bit.
“Knowing Apollo, since you banned him from Starbuck’s cell, he’s probably down on the flight deck trying to glean as much as he can about Captain Janeway’s shuttle and people,” Tigh said quietly.
“And knowing my Flyboy, Tom’s probably telling your Apollo and everyone else anything they want to know,” Torres laughed.
“Your Flyboy?” Sharon asked curiously.
“Why?” Gaeta asked almost in unison.
Torres held up her hand with its gleaming gold ring, wiggling her fingers. “One: marriage and a two-month-old baby girl. Family-the whole enchilada,” she replied with an impudent grin that softened her alien features. “And two: allies and all that. The Captain figured that we’d probably hitch our wagon to your train-what with you being human and the first sign of a space-faring culture we could find. We need your people to become familiar with our technology. Fast.”
“Paris and Ayala are under orders to answer any questions in layman’s terms,” Janeway continued as Bill stared in shock, marvelling at this woman’s uncanny ability to read the situation. However, he wasn’t sure how he felt about that and about her assumptions. “If we couldn’t be allies and you had asked us to leave, we would have left-and perhaps we would have left you with a few ideas how better to protect yourself.”
“Where would you have gone, sir?” Gaeta asked curiously.
“Earth, but there were many worlds in our Federation, Lieutenant,” Janeway replied, “and although the majority of my crew is human, I have members of nine different species onboard. Voyager was constructed with humanoid species like ours in mind. All are anxious to find out the fates of their homeworlds in this universe, and all are from worlds on which humans can survive. We also have the locations of uninhabited worlds that were ideal for colonisation if it isn’t feasible for us to settle on Earth or among any of those species.”
“All right,” Laura said, taking control of the conversation again. “We need to get Lee up to speed as quickly as possible, as well as question Kara again, and locate Zarek immediately.”
“I’m surprised the old terrorist hasn’t shown up yet,” Tigh said.
Laura shot him a frown of annoyance. “Tory, check with the Rising Star and see if they know his whereabouts,” she ordered her aide.
“Yes Ma’am,” Tory said briskly.
#
Chapter 26
Chapter 25: Getting to know you, getting to know all about me
Word Count: 2,675 words
Rating: T (PG-13)
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my craziness in this nBSG/Voyager crossover story. Battlestar Galactica belongs to Glen A. Larson, Ron D. Moore, David Eick, the Sci-Fi Channel, various and sundry companies and whoever owns them. Star Trek: Voyager belongs to Gene Roddenberry, Rick Berman, Michael Piller, Jeri Taylor, Paramount Studios, UPN, Viacom and whoever else owns pieces of the Star Trek franchise.
Spoilers: For nBSG - to Crossroads Part 2; for ST:V - to Endgame. Everything beyond is definitely alternate universe and a fairly cracked one at that!
Summary: The survivors of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and the crew of the intrepid starship Voyager must find a way to break the cycle …
The Last Iteration: All This Has Happened Before …
Chapter 25: Getting to know you, getting to know all about me
It was as if a decade melted away from Laura’s face, Bill thought as the medication took effect rapidly. She looked at him with startlingly clear green eyes, and then stared at Janeway as if seeing her for the first time.
“Thank you, Captain Janeway,” she husked gratefully.
“You’re most welcome,” Voyager’s captain replied. “Samantha will leave you a hypospray and enough pre-loaded doses of each medicine to get you through the next couple of days, but we really should take care of it as soon as possible.”
Cottle cleared his throat. “Actually, Captain, I have another terminal cancer patient,” he said, “as well as a fairly substantial number of other very sick patients both here on Galactica and out in the Fleet-”
Janeway nodded. “With the Admiral’s permission, Lieutenant Wildman can accompany you to your sickbay and make an assessment of your immediate and most pressing needs, Dr. Cottle,” she said and Adama nodded. “My doctor and other personnel are on standby, and if you can give us samples, or describe the conditions you need to treat, we can begin producing the medications you’re in most urgent need of within the next few hours, and begin large-scale production of nutritional supplements for fleet-wide distribution within forty-eight hours.”
As she spoke, Cottle’s expression went from dumbfounded to downright worshipful of Janeway; Bill marvelled at the change of demeanour in the irascible old doctor.
“Thank you, it would be greatly appreciated,” Cottle replied.
“Can your people handle all that, Captain Janeway?” Sharon asked curiously. “You said that you only have a crew of one hundred and fifty, and from what I could see, Voyager is a fairly small ship.”
The Federation woman grinned. “Actually, we were just about to get to that,” she replied. “We’ll be manufacturing the medicine that same way that we propose to manufacture food for you until we can find a secure planet for us to forage on-build back up your stores and restore your agricultural capacity.”
“Manufacture food?” Bill asked in surprise. “How? From what?”
“From any sort of matter you can spare,” she replied. “Even waste matter-the things you’d normally throw away-can be used, and I’d imagine that a fleet this size would produce a lot of waste matter.” Bill nodded, but couldn’t imagine what she was getting at as she continued. “We have a technology called matter replicators-”
“Matter replicators?” Laura repeated confusion plain on her face.
“Yes,” Janeway said. “They are machines consisting of a very powerful computer, a matter storage module and a matter generator module. Basically, an object-from a sheet of paper,” she said removing the top sheet from Cottle’s file on the table in front of Bill before pointing to her foot, “to someone’s boots, is scanned at the molecular level and the pattern stored in the computer’s memory. Then any sort of matter can then fed into the matter storage module, where it’s broken down into its constituent atoms and held until needed. After that it’s a simple matter of asking the replicator to give you a sheet of paper or a new pair of boots and the computer will look up the pattern matrix in its memory and the generator module will produce it for you.”
“So it’s like a matter photocopy machine,” Helo said in awe, “but I don’t see how you can produce food or medicine, unless you put waste food or medicine into it.”
“No you don’t, because it’s not a simple photocopier, Helo,” Gaeta said excitedly. “Remember, the captain said that they store the matter as constituent atoms! Don’t you see? They simply rearrange the atoms so that waste paper or an old boot can become a fillet of Virgon sweetfish, or a cup of wild rice, provided that there’s a molecular pattern for sweetfish or wild rice scanned into the computer! It’s completely ingenious!” he said laughing.
“Bravo again, Mr. Gaeta!” Janeway said approvingly as the Colonials all stared at the young man in complete shock. “It’s a bit more complicated, but that’s it basically in a nutshell. Currently, we have spare computer modules that can be used to build three industrial grade replicators for you, but until we can get the other components assembled-which should take about five to seven days-we can supply you with needed medicine as well as vitamin and nutritional supplements from Voyager’s integrated replicators.
“However, besides matter for the storage modules,” she continued, “The limiting factor on the replicators is the energy to power them. Normally, we wouldn’t be able to produce such quantities of replicated material because having enough fuel and energy reserves is generally an issue with such a small ship. In fact, for the last seven years, we’ve been on an extended deep-space voyage and I’ve had to maintain quite a strict system of replicator rationing on Voyager and use our dedicated industrial replicators mostly for repairs. But since we came here, we’ve been able to replenish our supplies and are now fairly well stocked. We can even provide your agro ships with some plants from our airponics garden and a few specimens of Klingon and other alien livestock we took on recently.”
“Gods,” Cottle said, breaking the incredulous silence that filled the room. “I keep waiting for someone to wake me up and it’ll all have been a frakking dream. Are you sure we’re not the ones who’ve taken leave of our reality?”
Janeway laughed. “Quite sure, doctor,” she said, eyes twinkling. “But I do know how you feel.”
“Thank you,” Laura said hoarsely again and Bill got the feeling they were going to be thanking Janeway a lot. “I don’t know how we’ll ever be able to repay you.”
Voyager’s captain and personnel looked genuinely startled at the suggestion.
“No repayment will ever be necessary, Madam President,” Janeway said after a moment of silence. “Please understand that now. This is simply a matter of mutual co-operation and humanitarian aid-it’s among the founding principles of the Federation; principles we all pledged to uphold when we took our oath. We’re just a small group of people who know what it’s like to be torn from everything we hold dear, with no hope-”
Janeway’s voice broke, and Adama heard the unspoken devastation in that breaking; they had no hope of seeing home again. Janeway rose and walked away from the table, arms wrapped about her as if to keep herself from flying apart.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve been lost, Madam President, Admiral Adama,” Tuvok said gravely.
“But at least the last time, we stayed in our own galaxy-our own reality,” Torres said, her eyes glued to her captain’s rigid back in concern.
“An alien superbeing kidnapped Voyager seven years ago and transported us to the other side of the galaxy, seventy thousand light years away-that was the extended voyage the Captain was speaking about,” Kim continued, his youthful face open and honest, even with the unbelievable story coming from his mouth. “This being was looking for a compatible species to care for a fragile, emergent species, the Ocampa. Generations ago, the Caretaker was responsible for accidentally destroying the Ocampa homeworld’s biosphere and had built an underground enclave for them to live in, but it was dying and could no longer take care of them. None of the species on Voyager were compatible. Therefore, before it died, it sealed the Ocampa into their underground city and set its space station array to self-destruct, but a warlike species, the Kazon, managed to damage the self-destruct mechanism. We could have used the array’s technology to return home to the Federation, but we couldn’t guarantee that it would be destroyed after we left-that it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Kazon, who would use it to destroy the Ocampa and anyone else who got in their way.”
“So the Captain destroyed the Caretaker’s array and we were stranded, facing a seventy-year journey,” Torres said holding Bill’s gaze and he felt compelled to listen. “Since then, we’ve been trying to get home, travelling through unknown and often hostile territories. We’ve developed new technologies that took decades off our travel time, used alien technologies and natural phenomena-such as wormholes-to get us across vast stretches of space. Just before we ended up here, we came across a Borg transwarp hub-basically a great network of artificial tunnels or conduits through space, giving the Borg access to the far reaches of the galaxy. One of those conduits led to our Earth’s backyard.”
“The Borg have tried to invade the Federation space three times,” Annika Hansen said, “and three times Starfleet has barely held them off-the hub had to be destroyed. It was a chance to cripple the Borg’s capacity to strike at the Federation and other areas of space at least for a generation. Together with an … ally, we managed to destroy the hub, but we also thought that if we could manage to stay ahead of the shockwave from our transphasic torpedoes, we could use the conduit that led to the Federation in order to get there.”
“It was a gamble I lost,” Janeway said turning to face them again. Though Bill could see the sorrow in her blue eyes, there were no tears.
“It was a gamble we lost, Captain,” Tuvok corrected her firmly. “It was a course of action we all agreed upon.”
“Which is how we ended up here,” Torres continued. “Even when you know what you’re doing, subspace isn’t something to be trifled with-it can be unpredictable. And if the Captain hadn’t turned us into the shockwave when she realised we weren’t going to be able to out-run it, we’d be dead.”
Harry Kim grinned. “The train jumped tracks, but we all survived and that’s the important thing,” he said.
After a moment, Janeway smiled fondly at the young man. “Yes, Harry, that’s the important thing,” she replied. Turning her attention back to Bill and Laura, she continued. “Anyway, we’ll have to work out some sort of schedule for all this as quickly as possible. To that end, perhaps you can recommend someone, Admiral Adama, Madam President, to work with my first officer, Commander Chakotay, overseeing the logistics of things such as equitable meal distribution. It should be someone who knows the ins and outs of your Fleet, but also has a fairly good technical knowledge and is comfortable with technology. The replicators are very energy intensive, so only the largest ships-the ones with the most powerful engines-will have energy to spare in order to run them. The food would then have to be distributed from those nodal points.”
“As it is,” Torres said, “we’re going to have to fit the replicators with power converters to make them compatible with with your unique power source and assure maximum efficiency in their output. However, at least for the first while, they’ll be very limited in the choices programmed into them.”
“To go from algae to any choice at all would be a vast improvement, Commander Torres,” Cottle said.
“What about Zarek?” Bill suggested; Laura looked thoughtful as she tried to digest their remarks.
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’ll need him to keep the Quorum in line-twist a few arms, but those criminals of his should be able to keep the supply lines open.” She grinned as Voyager’s people stared at her in surprise. “Our Vice President, Tom Zarek, is rather a shady character-when the Colonies were destroyed, he was on his way to his parole hearing. About twenty years ago, a group of radicals he led, bombed a government building in protest over conditions on Saggitaron. He’s always insisted that they thought it was empty, but a number of people died and he went to prison. Naturally, he further developed his leadership skills while in prison.”
“All right,” Janeway replied slowly, after a moment of silence. “If not Mr. Zarek, then who would you suggest, Madam President?”
Laura turned to Bill, a gentle smile playing on her lips. “Actually, I was thinking of Lee,” she said. He gaped at her, shocked-after what Lee had done to her on the stand during Baltar’s trial, he was the last person Bill expected her to suggest.
“He resigned,” he said unhappily.
“He resigned from the military, Bill,” she countered. “But he did help organise the initial evacuation, performing the assessments of the ships and their drives-and he was the one who brought those Black Market thugs to heel in order to get medicine distributed throughout the fleet. If anyone can figure out who the players in the shakedown rackets aboard the ships are apt to be, it’s Captain Apollo.”
“I hate to say it, Old Man,” Tigh chimed in, “but she’s right about that.”
“Wasn’t Apollo the call-sign of the pilot who greeted Starbuck?” Harry Kim asked. “The pilot who shot down one of the nuclear missiles the Cylons targeted Galactica with?”
“Yes, he’s the one,” Laura replied smiling. “I guess at the moment the alert sounded, he forgot that he wasn’t a Viper pilot anymore. Apollo is Lee Adama, the Admiral’s son.”
“I see,” Janeway said; her shrewd blue eyes were filled with understanding, and Bill got the feeling that she truly did see. “If you think that he’s up for the challenge, then we’d love to have him. He certainly sounds qualified.”
“I’ll speak to him,” Bill said gruffly. But inside his chest he felt the tight band-which had formed around his heart when Lee threw his pilot’s wings at him-loosen just a bit.
“Knowing Apollo, since you banned him from Starbuck’s cell, he’s probably down on the flight deck trying to glean as much as he can about Captain Janeway’s shuttle and people,” Tigh said quietly.
“And knowing my Flyboy, Tom’s probably telling your Apollo and everyone else anything they want to know,” Torres laughed.
“Your Flyboy?” Sharon asked curiously.
“Why?” Gaeta asked almost in unison.
Torres held up her hand with its gleaming gold ring, wiggling her fingers. “One: marriage and a two-month-old baby girl. Family-the whole enchilada,” she replied with an impudent grin that softened her alien features. “And two: allies and all that. The Captain figured that we’d probably hitch our wagon to your train-what with you being human and the first sign of a space-faring culture we could find. We need your people to become familiar with our technology. Fast.”
“Paris and Ayala are under orders to answer any questions in layman’s terms,” Janeway continued as Bill stared in shock, marvelling at this woman’s uncanny ability to read the situation. However, he wasn’t sure how he felt about that and about her assumptions. “If we couldn’t be allies and you had asked us to leave, we would have left-and perhaps we would have left you with a few ideas how better to protect yourself.”
“Where would you have gone, sir?” Gaeta asked curiously.
“Earth, but there were many worlds in our Federation, Lieutenant,” Janeway replied, “and although the majority of my crew is human, I have members of nine different species onboard. Voyager was constructed with humanoid species like ours in mind. All are anxious to find out the fates of their homeworlds in this universe, and all are from worlds on which humans can survive. We also have the locations of uninhabited worlds that were ideal for colonisation if it isn’t feasible for us to settle on Earth or among any of those species.”
“All right,” Laura said, taking control of the conversation again. “We need to get Lee up to speed as quickly as possible, as well as question Kara again, and locate Zarek immediately.”
“I’m surprised the old terrorist hasn’t shown up yet,” Tigh said.
Laura shot him a frown of annoyance. “Tory, check with the Rising Star and see if they know his whereabouts,” she ordered her aide.
“Yes Ma’am,” Tory said briskly.
#
Chapter 26