The Last Iteration: All This Has Happened Before … Chapter 27
The Last Iteration: All This Has Happened Before …
Chapter 27: Prophet and Loss: Spiralling Towards Destiny
Word Count: 3,150 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 27: Prophet and Loss: Spiralling Towards Destiny
“And they were talking just like that in the open?” Gaius Baltar said incredulously as he studied the young man, whose handsome, chiselled features were marred by an ever-present and petulant scowl.
Peter Amiet grabbed the bowl of algae mash from the woman serving him. Hunger is a great leveller of people, Baltar thought as the son of the former Quorum Deligate from Arelon attacked the food ravenously. Alexander Amiet hadn’t made it off New Caprica during the Second Exodus, and these days, no one cared how rich and powerful one’s father used to be. So with no useful skill other than his pretty face, eighteen-year-old Peter had ended up in Galactica’s “Dogstown”, before throwing in his lot with these women.
Baltar glanced ruefully at the gaudily decorated shrine that the women had built. When he’d first seen what they’d done with his old presidential picture, festooned with garlands and set aglow with colourful mini-lights often used for Winter Solstice celebrations, he’d literally wanted to throw up. But he quickly realised it was simply a means to an end, like the religion he preached and they soaked up like desert sand. It scared him, but Six had helped him recognise immediately that if he played it correctly, it would give him a power-base that even Roslin would find difficult to counter.
“Nobody cares about what a dogsbody sees or hears down on the deck,” Peter said, clearly angry with the vulgar plebeians who had the unmitigated gall to treat him as anything less than their better. “We’re nothing-for all Tyrol’s dreck about keeping it classless and everyone pulling their weight, the pilots and the officers still rule the flight deck; they still get the best of everything. Even the deckhands treat us like we’re dirt beneath their feet-after all, that’s what we do; sweep the deck, pick-up their garbage, clean their stinking toilets-”
“But you’re sure this Tom Paris said that they don’t have jump technology?” Baltar interjected quickly before the young man launched into a litany of complaints he was familiar enough with-even after a ... God, has it been less than a single frakking day?-from listening to the other young men in the group who’d run afoul of Galactica’s security and wound up with sentences that had them pressed into what was essentially latrine duty instead of throwing them into the brig. It was a practise that Baltar could see Roslin believing in as a good alternative to incarceration, but it was one solution that was guaranteed to foster even more hard feelings and resentment against the military ... Adama ... and Roslin.
Of course, Baltar forebore any mention of the complete irony and hypocrisy of the young men’s hatred … their resentment against the very people fighting-and dying-to protect them. They wanted to be safe, but they just didn’t want to lift a hand to help ensure that safety. Apparently, Peter’s gang had been caught vandalising a set of officers’ lockers.
“They use something called warp space technology,” he replied around a mouthful of food. “It ripples space to create waves that push the ship along-sounded something like a damned sailing ship, if you could sail a ship in space. But although they can move fairly fast in normal space, they can’t jump the distances even the worst of our ships can,” he continued contemptuously.
“But it’s all over the ship,” one of the women said anxiously, “that they had really advanced technology … weapons-one that could kill a Cylon basestar with a single shot!”
“Yeah,” Peter sneered. “Well after they called down to say that Voyager was going to stay and help protect the fleet, I heard the other guy, Ayala, tell Cally Tyrol that they were the only ship of their kind, and it’s a pretty small ship too with a crew of about one hundred and fifty,” he continued. “Everybody is watching it from the Observation Deck. I snuck in after my shift. It’s parked next to Colonial One and it’s barely twice as big-if that-but I heard some officer say that even though its armour stood up to a couple of nukes, the Cylons could still get it if they overwhelm it with nukes and that they wouldn’t be able to jump away because they couldn’t. Some people think that they simply got off a lucky shot when they killed the basestar.”
“Now isn’t that interesting,” purred a soft, familiar voice in his ear. Baltar glanced around to meet the sparkling eyes of his personal angel/daemon.
“You mean like a bluff?” he squawked inelegantly, forgetting-in his surprise at her sudden appearance-that only he could see her. Turning back to his corporeal audience, he stuttered. “You-you m-m-mean Galactica’s officers think that this Janeway, Voyager’s captain, was bluffing the Cylons.”
The boy nodded. “That officer, he came from Pegasus-graduated from Caprica City University with a degree in astrophysics before joining up,” he said. “I heard him say that the anti-matter weapons they claimed to have used were a complete impossibility. Colonial scientists showed years ago that you’d need a containment apparatus the size of Galactica to hold even a few particles of anti-matter and some kind of powerful electro-magnetic barrier to keep it from interacting with normal matter and blowing everything up.”
“That’s right,” Baltar said authoritatively as his mind dredged up the old arguments that had led to the virtual dismantling of all anti-matter research in the Colonies beyond theoretical speculation. He had already streamed heavily into computer science to pay much attention to the controversy, but he still remembered why the scientific establishment had been willing to drop a promising source of energy so quickly-not to mention the weaponization potential.
“We determined nearly a decade ago that anti-matter was not only dangerous for the people working at such a facility, and not to mention the entire planet if there was any sort of accident, but that it would be extremely dangerous to the very fabric of space itself-and could even collapse it, potentially causing all sorts of perturbations in our solar system.
“And what do you think the Cylons will do when they figure out this bluff, Gaius?” Six’s voice echoed in his inner ear as her hands wound sinuously about him.
“They’ll be back in full force!” Baltar gasped in horrified comprehension.
“Gaius?” Tracey Anne, his most recent bedmate said in concern.
“My God, what the frak does Roslin and Adama think they’re playing at getting involved with these people?” he said as his analysis of the situation took him to its logical end.
“What do you mean?” an older woman asked. “I imagine they’re glad to have another ship to help defend the Fleet.”
“Oh?” Baltar retorted. “And what happens when the Cylons get over the panic caused by that one lucky shot that destroyed the basestar, and figure out that Voyager’s advanced technology is nothing but a bluff? What happens when they figure out the frakking ship can’t jump?”
“They’ll take her out and come after us with an even greater vengeance than before!” Tracey Anne cried out. “They’ll be even angrier! They’ll hunt us down and never give up!”
All around him, women and children began to weep and moan, hysteria feeding hysteria as they all looked to him with frightened, beseeching eyes.
“And don’t forget Kara Thrace is back,” Peter said with an incongruously smug smile, “crowing at the top of her lungs that she’s been to Earth and that she was going to lead us there!”
“Do you know if this Voyager is also from Earth?” Baltar asked urgently.
“No one’s said anything,” the younger man replied. “But you can hear everybody thinking it. After all, most of the Voyager crew is human and they showed up at the exact same time as Thrace-you do the math, Doc,” he said flippantly.
“What do you mean most are human?”
The boy’s sly smile widened to a grin. “Well, they came on board with a couple of deformed-looking people they claimed were aliens,” he said, pausing for effect, and obviously enjoying the fact that every eye in the suddenly silent room was on him as he dropped his bombshell. “Two were really big guys they called Kling-ons, who looked like someone had taken the Delphi Mountain Range and plopped it down on their frakking foreheads. They claimed that this other black guy with pointed ears was something called-get this ... a Vulcan-”
“As in the God Hephaistos’ other name?” said the old woman, who looked thoroughly appalled.
Peter nodded. “But Janeway explained that it’s apparently only what humans call them because their real name is just too frakking complicated for us to say.” Another sly look ghosted through his eyes again as he held Gaius’ gaze. “But that’s not the half of it-the other Klingon-looking alien they brought was a woman they claimed was hybrid between a Klingon mother and a human father. If they’re telling the truth, then apparently these Earth humans will frak practically anything,” he said in disgust. “They were talking about how in their Federation, which includes these aliens, it doesn’t matter who you frak-you should have seen that Cylon bitch Adama keeps in uniform literally go into heat. I’m surprised there wasn’t a giant wet spot on the front of her flight suit; she was so honeyed over it.”
“Then Earth and this Federation of theirs must be close,” Baltar said thoughtfully, trying to ignore the expressions of repugnance on the faces of his followers.
“If anyone’s said, I didn’t hear,” Peter replied.
“Well it only stands to reason,” Baltar said with some asperity at the young man’s complete obtuseness. “Their ship can’t jump and even with this warp FTL, I doubt they could have come very far in the two months Thrace has been gone in order to rendezvous with the fleet at this nebula. It’s simple, elementary physics.”
“And they probably sent their best ship with Thrace to meet us,” someone else said.
“Well, if that’s their best and they can’t even jump, then they’re frakked and so are we when the Cylons come back,” Peter snarled. “Although, just before my shift finished, I heard that they’re planning to upgrade Galactica and the Raptors with some of Voyager’s cast-off tech.”
“Why won’t the Cylons just leave us alone?” Jeanne whimpered, tears shining in her eyes. “They’ve already destroyed or taken everything from us! My little boy is dying-so many of our children are dead! Why can’t they just let us be?”
“Because humans have stolen the one thing the Cylons were promised by God,” Six murmured in his ear.
“Hera,” Baltar breathed.
“The hybrid child?” the old woman asked.
Baltar nodded, cursing himself for saying that aloud. “Yes, the Cylons believe that she’s a miracle promised to them by God,” he replied. “They believe that Hera is their saviour, the one that will bring them closer to God.”
“And as long as the brat’s in the Fleet, they’ll never let us go!” Peter said angrily.
“But they also want Earth,” the old woman said studying him shrewdly.
“It’s a big galaxy out there, Gaius,” Six purred seductively as she drapped her arms about his shoulder and nuzzled his neck. “One small ship can go for light years without ever encountering the Cylons again.”
“And who says we have to go to Earth?” he countered. “A mouldy old prophecy thousands of years old, supposedly bestowed on our people by a bunch of capricious and frankly imaginary gods? The egotism of a megalomaniac on mind-altering drugs who believes that she-and she alone-is the culmination of that prophecy? It’s a big frakking galaxy out there with billions and billions of stars and I have no doubt that we could have found a new home ... a good home, long ago, if it hadn’t been for Roslin and Adama’s insistence that we find Earth! There are a lot of places a ship can go without ever encountering the Cylons again.”
“Like New Caprica?” Peter sneered.
There was dead silence in the room. Baltar forced himself to swallow his anger. “I admit it,” he said in a quiet, reasonable voice. “New Caprica was a mistake-and do you know why?” he asked rhetorically. “Because it was right there in the middle of the frakking Path to Earth! A path littered with clues and landmarks that Adama and Roslin have been following since leaving the Twelve Colonies ... clues left by the Thirteenth Tribe.”
“Not to mention the nuclear bomb Gina set off ... the bomb you gave her.”
He ignored Six as he watched the realisation finally hit them, and moved quickly to press his advantage.
“Do you really think that the Cylons couldn’t find those same clues? After all they had full access to the Colonial Scriptures-same as we did. Do you really think it was a co-incidence that they showed up at the Eye of Jupiter planet the exact same time the Fleet did? After all, they found frakking Kobol before we did! Believe me, they knew exactly where the Fleet’s been and where it was going. And I guarantee you that if they capture this Voyager, any of her crew, or even just search this area, they will find Earth. Is that where you really want to be when they show up?”
“Frak!” the young man muttered angrily.
“What can we do, Gaius?” a chorus of voices asked, all looking to him for guidance. “Tell us!”
“Yes, tell them, Gaius,” Six said and he suddenly found himself in his old lake house on Caprica. As usual the water sparkled in the afternoon sun.
“Tell them what?” he asked, panicked as his mind blanked of any ideas.
“What to do,” she replied, threading her arms around him from behind to caress his chest. He whimpered inarticulately. “Tell them where to go.”
“Where to go?” he demanded hysterically. “There is nowhere to go-no one wants us!”
She let him go and he turned to face her. She was smiling that beatific smile that made her look even more like an angel. “No, no one wants you, Gaius,” she said.
“No one wants me,” he repeated as the beach house faded and he was back in the cramped, stale-smelling compartment on Galactica.
“We want you, Gaius,” Tracey Anne said fervently and a chorus of voices reinforced hers.
Baltar smiled gratefully at them. “Thank you,” he said, “but what I meant is that no other ship wanted me, although Paulla told me that the Icarus was willing to take you all, as long as it didn’t include me.”
“That’s right,” Paulla confirmed. “Captain Black has no love for Adama or Roslin-especially Roslin-and he doesn’t care what religion we practice. But we wouldn’t want to go anywhere without you, Gaius.”
“But it may not be safe for you to remain on the Galactica much longer, especially if the Cylons come back,” he pointed out. “And I wouldn’t be much of a leader if I allowed you all to stay in danger-because as long as that child remains on Galactica you’re all in danger.”
“And if she’s no longer on Galactica?” Paulla asked shrewdly.
“Then it wouldn’t be safe for the person who took her,” he replied. “And it wouldn’t be safe for anyone involved with that person.”
“But even if we could get to the child,” Jeanne said quietly, “how would we contact the Cylons to let them know we had her, and that we would be willing to give her to them in exchange for our freedom?”
“Not to mention persuading Captain Black to leave the Fleet,” the old woman said.
“That won’t be much of a problem,” Paulla said. “Black and quite a few of the other captains already feel that Adama is allowing Roslin to lead us to our destruction. We’re short on food and we’re almost out of fuel reserves-a lot of ships will be running on fumes soon and there’s talk of scuttling more ships ... crowding everyone together even tighter to conserve tylium. And guess whose ship is one of those Roslin proposes to scuttle?”
“But all it does is creates bigger targets,” Baltar said, “so instead of losing maybe a thousand people if the Cylons take out a ship, we lose five thousand. Does that make any sense?”
Again the silence was oppressive as his words sank in.
“And a lot of people don’t like the fact that Adama’s made such public pets of Agathon and his frakking Toaster,” Paulla spat. “But that still leaves the problem of contacting the Cylons.”
“Six,” Baltar said and they looked at him in confusion. “The Six in the brig,” he explained quietly. “She would know how to find, or at least contact, the Cylon fleet-I’m sure of it. The only question is how to get to her?”
“Benton Tregar,” Peter Amiet said suddenly after a long silence. “He’s a friend from school. They’ve stuck him with the scut-work down in the section that includes the brig cell they’re holding her in. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind some help or me taking over for him one day when he’s-shall we say sick?”
“Provided we can break her out,” Baltar said, considering for the first time that this wasn’t just a lot of crazy talk and feldercarb, as his farmer father used to put it. “Then all we need is a way to get her off the ship.”
Again, Peter provided the answer. “Tyrol has a team doing some of the Raptor repairs over on the starboard flight deck on the opposite side from Joe’s Bar. We’d just have to find one that’s been repaired, but they haven’t had time to move to the port flight deck yet-and I remember Cally saying that one of the starboard lifts was working, but the bulkhead was damaged during an attack. They’re afraid that if they try to launch a Raptor from there, it might cause depressurisation or even a breach. But even if you could launch from there, who is going to fly the frakking thing?”
“Leave that to me,” Baltar said with a reassuring smile. “I’ve had some flight training-I’ve even flown a Raptor.”
“Once, to a dying basestar, with the co-ordinates already plugged in for you,” his invisible companion said mockingly.
“And this time I’ll have Caprica to do it,” he replied silently. “Now shut up, you’re distracting me.” He saw her eyes narrow at his order, but she said nothing-just folded her arms across her chest and moved to stand a little way off to the side.
As he turned his attention back to his people, listening to their plans for evacuating to the Icarus, he found himself truly believing for the first time what the Six in his head had been telling him since the destruction of the Colonies; that he had a destiny.
He lifted his head and met her gaze across the room. She smiled.
#
Chapter 28
Chapter 27: Prophet and Loss: Spiralling Towards Destiny
Word Count: 3,150 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 27: Prophet and Loss: Spiralling Towards Destiny
“And they were talking just like that in the open?” Gaius Baltar said incredulously as he studied the young man, whose handsome, chiselled features were marred by an ever-present and petulant scowl.
Peter Amiet grabbed the bowl of algae mash from the woman serving him. Hunger is a great leveller of people, Baltar thought as the son of the former Quorum Deligate from Arelon attacked the food ravenously. Alexander Amiet hadn’t made it off New Caprica during the Second Exodus, and these days, no one cared how rich and powerful one’s father used to be. So with no useful skill other than his pretty face, eighteen-year-old Peter had ended up in Galactica’s “Dogstown”, before throwing in his lot with these women.
Baltar glanced ruefully at the gaudily decorated shrine that the women had built. When he’d first seen what they’d done with his old presidential picture, festooned with garlands and set aglow with colourful mini-lights often used for Winter Solstice celebrations, he’d literally wanted to throw up. But he quickly realised it was simply a means to an end, like the religion he preached and they soaked up like desert sand. It scared him, but Six had helped him recognise immediately that if he played it correctly, it would give him a power-base that even Roslin would find difficult to counter.
“Nobody cares about what a dogsbody sees or hears down on the deck,” Peter said, clearly angry with the vulgar plebeians who had the unmitigated gall to treat him as anything less than their better. “We’re nothing-for all Tyrol’s dreck about keeping it classless and everyone pulling their weight, the pilots and the officers still rule the flight deck; they still get the best of everything. Even the deckhands treat us like we’re dirt beneath their feet-after all, that’s what we do; sweep the deck, pick-up their garbage, clean their stinking toilets-”
“But you’re sure this Tom Paris said that they don’t have jump technology?” Baltar interjected quickly before the young man launched into a litany of complaints he was familiar enough with-even after a ... God, has it been less than a single frakking day?-from listening to the other young men in the group who’d run afoul of Galactica’s security and wound up with sentences that had them pressed into what was essentially latrine duty instead of throwing them into the brig. It was a practise that Baltar could see Roslin believing in as a good alternative to incarceration, but it was one solution that was guaranteed to foster even more hard feelings and resentment against the military ... Adama ... and Roslin.
Of course, Baltar forebore any mention of the complete irony and hypocrisy of the young men’s hatred … their resentment against the very people fighting-and dying-to protect them. They wanted to be safe, but they just didn’t want to lift a hand to help ensure that safety. Apparently, Peter’s gang had been caught vandalising a set of officers’ lockers.
“They use something called warp space technology,” he replied around a mouthful of food. “It ripples space to create waves that push the ship along-sounded something like a damned sailing ship, if you could sail a ship in space. But although they can move fairly fast in normal space, they can’t jump the distances even the worst of our ships can,” he continued contemptuously.
“But it’s all over the ship,” one of the women said anxiously, “that they had really advanced technology … weapons-one that could kill a Cylon basestar with a single shot!”
“Yeah,” Peter sneered. “Well after they called down to say that Voyager was going to stay and help protect the fleet, I heard the other guy, Ayala, tell Cally Tyrol that they were the only ship of their kind, and it’s a pretty small ship too with a crew of about one hundred and fifty,” he continued. “Everybody is watching it from the Observation Deck. I snuck in after my shift. It’s parked next to Colonial One and it’s barely twice as big-if that-but I heard some officer say that even though its armour stood up to a couple of nukes, the Cylons could still get it if they overwhelm it with nukes and that they wouldn’t be able to jump away because they couldn’t. Some people think that they simply got off a lucky shot when they killed the basestar.”
“Now isn’t that interesting,” purred a soft, familiar voice in his ear. Baltar glanced around to meet the sparkling eyes of his personal angel/daemon.
“You mean like a bluff?” he squawked inelegantly, forgetting-in his surprise at her sudden appearance-that only he could see her. Turning back to his corporeal audience, he stuttered. “You-you m-m-mean Galactica’s officers think that this Janeway, Voyager’s captain, was bluffing the Cylons.”
The boy nodded. “That officer, he came from Pegasus-graduated from Caprica City University with a degree in astrophysics before joining up,” he said. “I heard him say that the anti-matter weapons they claimed to have used were a complete impossibility. Colonial scientists showed years ago that you’d need a containment apparatus the size of Galactica to hold even a few particles of anti-matter and some kind of powerful electro-magnetic barrier to keep it from interacting with normal matter and blowing everything up.”
“That’s right,” Baltar said authoritatively as his mind dredged up the old arguments that had led to the virtual dismantling of all anti-matter research in the Colonies beyond theoretical speculation. He had already streamed heavily into computer science to pay much attention to the controversy, but he still remembered why the scientific establishment had been willing to drop a promising source of energy so quickly-not to mention the weaponization potential.
“We determined nearly a decade ago that anti-matter was not only dangerous for the people working at such a facility, and not to mention the entire planet if there was any sort of accident, but that it would be extremely dangerous to the very fabric of space itself-and could even collapse it, potentially causing all sorts of perturbations in our solar system.
“And what do you think the Cylons will do when they figure out this bluff, Gaius?” Six’s voice echoed in his inner ear as her hands wound sinuously about him.
“They’ll be back in full force!” Baltar gasped in horrified comprehension.
“Gaius?” Tracey Anne, his most recent bedmate said in concern.
“My God, what the frak does Roslin and Adama think they’re playing at getting involved with these people?” he said as his analysis of the situation took him to its logical end.
“What do you mean?” an older woman asked. “I imagine they’re glad to have another ship to help defend the Fleet.”
“Oh?” Baltar retorted. “And what happens when the Cylons get over the panic caused by that one lucky shot that destroyed the basestar, and figure out that Voyager’s advanced technology is nothing but a bluff? What happens when they figure out the frakking ship can’t jump?”
“They’ll take her out and come after us with an even greater vengeance than before!” Tracey Anne cried out. “They’ll be even angrier! They’ll hunt us down and never give up!”
All around him, women and children began to weep and moan, hysteria feeding hysteria as they all looked to him with frightened, beseeching eyes.
“And don’t forget Kara Thrace is back,” Peter said with an incongruously smug smile, “crowing at the top of her lungs that she’s been to Earth and that she was going to lead us there!”
“Do you know if this Voyager is also from Earth?” Baltar asked urgently.
“No one’s said anything,” the younger man replied. “But you can hear everybody thinking it. After all, most of the Voyager crew is human and they showed up at the exact same time as Thrace-you do the math, Doc,” he said flippantly.
“What do you mean most are human?”
The boy’s sly smile widened to a grin. “Well, they came on board with a couple of deformed-looking people they claimed were aliens,” he said, pausing for effect, and obviously enjoying the fact that every eye in the suddenly silent room was on him as he dropped his bombshell. “Two were really big guys they called Kling-ons, who looked like someone had taken the Delphi Mountain Range and plopped it down on their frakking foreheads. They claimed that this other black guy with pointed ears was something called-get this ... a Vulcan-”
“As in the God Hephaistos’ other name?” said the old woman, who looked thoroughly appalled.
Peter nodded. “But Janeway explained that it’s apparently only what humans call them because their real name is just too frakking complicated for us to say.” Another sly look ghosted through his eyes again as he held Gaius’ gaze. “But that’s not the half of it-the other Klingon-looking alien they brought was a woman they claimed was hybrid between a Klingon mother and a human father. If they’re telling the truth, then apparently these Earth humans will frak practically anything,” he said in disgust. “They were talking about how in their Federation, which includes these aliens, it doesn’t matter who you frak-you should have seen that Cylon bitch Adama keeps in uniform literally go into heat. I’m surprised there wasn’t a giant wet spot on the front of her flight suit; she was so honeyed over it.”
“Then Earth and this Federation of theirs must be close,” Baltar said thoughtfully, trying to ignore the expressions of repugnance on the faces of his followers.
“If anyone’s said, I didn’t hear,” Peter replied.
“Well it only stands to reason,” Baltar said with some asperity at the young man’s complete obtuseness. “Their ship can’t jump and even with this warp FTL, I doubt they could have come very far in the two months Thrace has been gone in order to rendezvous with the fleet at this nebula. It’s simple, elementary physics.”
“And they probably sent their best ship with Thrace to meet us,” someone else said.
“Well, if that’s their best and they can’t even jump, then they’re frakked and so are we when the Cylons come back,” Peter snarled. “Although, just before my shift finished, I heard that they’re planning to upgrade Galactica and the Raptors with some of Voyager’s cast-off tech.”
“Why won’t the Cylons just leave us alone?” Jeanne whimpered, tears shining in her eyes. “They’ve already destroyed or taken everything from us! My little boy is dying-so many of our children are dead! Why can’t they just let us be?”
“Because humans have stolen the one thing the Cylons were promised by God,” Six murmured in his ear.
“Hera,” Baltar breathed.
“The hybrid child?” the old woman asked.
Baltar nodded, cursing himself for saying that aloud. “Yes, the Cylons believe that she’s a miracle promised to them by God,” he replied. “They believe that Hera is their saviour, the one that will bring them closer to God.”
“And as long as the brat’s in the Fleet, they’ll never let us go!” Peter said angrily.
“But they also want Earth,” the old woman said studying him shrewdly.
“It’s a big galaxy out there, Gaius,” Six purred seductively as she drapped her arms about his shoulder and nuzzled his neck. “One small ship can go for light years without ever encountering the Cylons again.”
“And who says we have to go to Earth?” he countered. “A mouldy old prophecy thousands of years old, supposedly bestowed on our people by a bunch of capricious and frankly imaginary gods? The egotism of a megalomaniac on mind-altering drugs who believes that she-and she alone-is the culmination of that prophecy? It’s a big frakking galaxy out there with billions and billions of stars and I have no doubt that we could have found a new home ... a good home, long ago, if it hadn’t been for Roslin and Adama’s insistence that we find Earth! There are a lot of places a ship can go without ever encountering the Cylons again.”
“Like New Caprica?” Peter sneered.
There was dead silence in the room. Baltar forced himself to swallow his anger. “I admit it,” he said in a quiet, reasonable voice. “New Caprica was a mistake-and do you know why?” he asked rhetorically. “Because it was right there in the middle of the frakking Path to Earth! A path littered with clues and landmarks that Adama and Roslin have been following since leaving the Twelve Colonies ... clues left by the Thirteenth Tribe.”
“Not to mention the nuclear bomb Gina set off ... the bomb you gave her.”
He ignored Six as he watched the realisation finally hit them, and moved quickly to press his advantage.
“Do you really think that the Cylons couldn’t find those same clues? After all they had full access to the Colonial Scriptures-same as we did. Do you really think it was a co-incidence that they showed up at the Eye of Jupiter planet the exact same time the Fleet did? After all, they found frakking Kobol before we did! Believe me, they knew exactly where the Fleet’s been and where it was going. And I guarantee you that if they capture this Voyager, any of her crew, or even just search this area, they will find Earth. Is that where you really want to be when they show up?”
“Frak!” the young man muttered angrily.
“What can we do, Gaius?” a chorus of voices asked, all looking to him for guidance. “Tell us!”
“Yes, tell them, Gaius,” Six said and he suddenly found himself in his old lake house on Caprica. As usual the water sparkled in the afternoon sun.
“Tell them what?” he asked, panicked as his mind blanked of any ideas.
“What to do,” she replied, threading her arms around him from behind to caress his chest. He whimpered inarticulately. “Tell them where to go.”
“Where to go?” he demanded hysterically. “There is nowhere to go-no one wants us!”
She let him go and he turned to face her. She was smiling that beatific smile that made her look even more like an angel. “No, no one wants you, Gaius,” she said.
“No one wants me,” he repeated as the beach house faded and he was back in the cramped, stale-smelling compartment on Galactica.
“We want you, Gaius,” Tracey Anne said fervently and a chorus of voices reinforced hers.
Baltar smiled gratefully at them. “Thank you,” he said, “but what I meant is that no other ship wanted me, although Paulla told me that the Icarus was willing to take you all, as long as it didn’t include me.”
“That’s right,” Paulla confirmed. “Captain Black has no love for Adama or Roslin-especially Roslin-and he doesn’t care what religion we practice. But we wouldn’t want to go anywhere without you, Gaius.”
“But it may not be safe for you to remain on the Galactica much longer, especially if the Cylons come back,” he pointed out. “And I wouldn’t be much of a leader if I allowed you all to stay in danger-because as long as that child remains on Galactica you’re all in danger.”
“And if she’s no longer on Galactica?” Paulla asked shrewdly.
“Then it wouldn’t be safe for the person who took her,” he replied. “And it wouldn’t be safe for anyone involved with that person.”
“But even if we could get to the child,” Jeanne said quietly, “how would we contact the Cylons to let them know we had her, and that we would be willing to give her to them in exchange for our freedom?”
“Not to mention persuading Captain Black to leave the Fleet,” the old woman said.
“That won’t be much of a problem,” Paulla said. “Black and quite a few of the other captains already feel that Adama is allowing Roslin to lead us to our destruction. We’re short on food and we’re almost out of fuel reserves-a lot of ships will be running on fumes soon and there’s talk of scuttling more ships ... crowding everyone together even tighter to conserve tylium. And guess whose ship is one of those Roslin proposes to scuttle?”
“But all it does is creates bigger targets,” Baltar said, “so instead of losing maybe a thousand people if the Cylons take out a ship, we lose five thousand. Does that make any sense?”
Again the silence was oppressive as his words sank in.
“And a lot of people don’t like the fact that Adama’s made such public pets of Agathon and his frakking Toaster,” Paulla spat. “But that still leaves the problem of contacting the Cylons.”
“Six,” Baltar said and they looked at him in confusion. “The Six in the brig,” he explained quietly. “She would know how to find, or at least contact, the Cylon fleet-I’m sure of it. The only question is how to get to her?”
“Benton Tregar,” Peter Amiet said suddenly after a long silence. “He’s a friend from school. They’ve stuck him with the scut-work down in the section that includes the brig cell they’re holding her in. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind some help or me taking over for him one day when he’s-shall we say sick?”
“Provided we can break her out,” Baltar said, considering for the first time that this wasn’t just a lot of crazy talk and feldercarb, as his farmer father used to put it. “Then all we need is a way to get her off the ship.”
Again, Peter provided the answer. “Tyrol has a team doing some of the Raptor repairs over on the starboard flight deck on the opposite side from Joe’s Bar. We’d just have to find one that’s been repaired, but they haven’t had time to move to the port flight deck yet-and I remember Cally saying that one of the starboard lifts was working, but the bulkhead was damaged during an attack. They’re afraid that if they try to launch a Raptor from there, it might cause depressurisation or even a breach. But even if you could launch from there, who is going to fly the frakking thing?”
“Leave that to me,” Baltar said with a reassuring smile. “I’ve had some flight training-I’ve even flown a Raptor.”
“Once, to a dying basestar, with the co-ordinates already plugged in for you,” his invisible companion said mockingly.
“And this time I’ll have Caprica to do it,” he replied silently. “Now shut up, you’re distracting me.” He saw her eyes narrow at his order, but she said nothing-just folded her arms across her chest and moved to stand a little way off to the side.
As he turned his attention back to his people, listening to their plans for evacuating to the Icarus, he found himself truly believing for the first time what the Six in his head had been telling him since the destruction of the Colonies; that he had a destiny.
He lifted his head and met her gaze across the room. She smiled.
#
Chapter 28