Out of the Black- Chapter 7/9
Title: Out of the Black
Rating: PG
Chapter: 7/9
Characters in order of Appearance: Kara, Lee, Dee, Roslin, Gaeta, Hoshi, Adama, Helo, and .....?
Words this chapter: ~2480
Kara sat with her feet propped up on the unoccupied co-pilot chair. The hatch to the main room hung open. Lee, Dee, and Roslin had made short work of getting comfortable, even in the sparse space. With her in the bridge, Gaeta and Hoshi sat by a console off the to the side of the cockpit, furiously working out the details of the jump together. Adama and Helo were nowhere to be seen, but Kara assumed they were above still looking at the staterooms. As she listened to the voices floating in from the other room, a thought dawned on her. This felt more like home than her apartment on Beaumonde ever did.
---
In the next room, Lee paced the floor, reading over the scribbled note for the thirtieth time. He glanced over at Dee and Laura who had made themselves comfortable; having dragged a mattress down from one of the staterooms that no one claimed and laid it out on the floor. “What does it mean that the Centurions are out of commission?”
“Probably exactly what it sounds like,” Dee commented, leaning back against the wall. “Shut down. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Alliance found a way to override the programming and just turn them all off.”
Laura rose to join Lee in his pacing. “Without the Centurions, especially in light of the fact that their resurrection capabilities have been taken away, they are technically defenseless.”
Dee’s eyebrows furrowed. “You can’t be suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”
“We can’t just leave them there,” Laura replied as she sat back down on the mattress beside her.
“Even if they were or are our enemies, the fact of the matter is that even if they escape, they will be too busy looking over their shoulders to see if the Alliance is coming for them to cause any real damage.” Lee ran a hand through his hair, letting out a breath he had been holding in too long.
“So, what?” Dee rolled over onto her stomach; her tone of voice was not antagonistic, just genuinely curious. “We bring them on the ship with us?”
Lee scratched his head for a moment before motioning for her to scoot, so he could join them. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s an Alliance ship that they could hijack. We have our mysterious benefactor working for them, maybe we can get a leg up that way.”
Laura’s mind had apparently left the Cylon conversation, but it seemed his recent statement had synced up perfectly with where her thoughts had wandered. “I can’t help wondering who it is.”
Lee cast a confused look in her direction.
“Our man on the inside,” she clarified. “I don’t know if it was foresight on their part or just sheer luck on ours. I feel like I shouldn’t be looking a gift horse in the mouth this way.”
---
Through the conversation, Kara heard the soft thunk of feet on metal as someone descended the stairs from the passenger’s quarters. She turned in time to see Adama appear by the hatch. She took a moment to take him in. “You know, I didn’t mention it earlier, but the button-down and vest combo looks really… really… you,” she said with as much sarcasm as she could muster while choking back a laugh.
She swung her legs off the chair, allowing Adama to take a seat. “I thought that my uniform might attract some unwanted attention.” He leaned forward resting his elbows on his knees. “How are you holding up?”
“Trying to distract myself from thoughts about my husband being experimented on with thoughts of how I’m probably leading my loved ones into a death trap.” She could hear the sharp edge in her own voice, cutting herself just a little bit more. “I just yanked everyone out of their lives and into this mess.”
“We all have a stake in this,” his voice comforted her just as much as the gentle hand on her knee. “As far as messes go, I think we’ve faced worse.”
He was right; but rather than acknowledging it, Kara turned her gaze out into the vast blackness, speckled with the twinkling of stars; billions upon billions of them, burning away at the farthest reaches of the ‘verse. “We’re eight people trying to sneak into a heavily guarded government facility; seven if you take into account the fact that Felix here is staying on the ship.” She jerked her finger towards where he was working; he wore a bit of a grimace at the notion.
“Eight again if you count our benefactor, and that’s only on the way in. We will have at least a half dozen more allies on the way out.” Adama rose from his seat. “Kara, you are in charge of this mission; and if anything is going to get us all killed, it’s this kind of thinking. We all came here by choice.”
Gaeta looked up from his work and turned his chair to face them. “I know that some of us don’t have the same kind of stake in this that you do; none of our loved ones were taken. But we have been in hiding for the past year; these aren’t lives we chose to live. Back on the Colonies we chose to enlist in the military… this is what we do,” he said, pounding his fist against the wall for emphasis. With a slight wince, he shook it out and went back about his work.
Adama placed a firm hand on her shoulder. “Everyone aboard Galactica was a family, and you never leave family behind.”
She wasn’t quite sure what happened in the seconds in between but the next thing she knew, she had her arms around his shoulders in a deep hug, and she was sighing out every last drop of anxiety from her body. With a smirk on her lips, she decided to ruin the moment. “You almost left me on that moon,” she said as she stepped backwards away from him.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” He smiled. “Quit complaining.” She watched him turn to join the ongoing debate in the other room, before he abruptly spun on his heel to face her. “By the way, you never told us her name.”
Kara tucked a lock of hair behind her ear as she glanced around the bridge. “Her name is Kobol.”
“Good name,” he said before exiting the room, closing the hatch door behind him.
Kara took up her seat once again, staring back into the black. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed before she heard a triumphant whoop coming from the tactical officers. “There’s a lot of rocks and satellites between here and there, but we’ve got our jump.”
---
Dark was never really a word Kara would have associated with Galactica. Empty was another one. She was full, alive, busy, bright- even when she was about to be decommissioned. Now, standing in the hangar deck, illuminated only by 4 flashlights, the old girl felt dead.
Four space suits were all she had on board. Back when Kara’d been prepping the ship for a possible life aboard it, she hadn’t considered the possibility of needing to stage a weapons heist from Galactica; surely if the thought had crossed her mind she would have staged ahead. With the ship powered down and no light nor oxygen, they might as well be out there on the bare moon. The other thing they shouldn’t have had was the artificial gravity, but she felt it weighing on them, heavier than it ought to be by the moon’s gravity alone. “Hang on a sec,” she said, fishing out her oh-two indicator and saw the green stripe that meant they, in point of fact, did have oxygen.
“That is too weird,” she muttered as she snapped off her helmet and took a deep breath. “I thought we powered down everything before we left.” Her words were lost on the others who were too caught up in their own observations.
“This is so creepy,” Dee commented, her light sweeping arcs around the deck illuminating sending small circles of light flashing over glimpses of the past. She noted Lee' s flashlight, which followed Helo as he broke off from the group, making his way to one of the old raptors, which hadn’t seen the sky in months and probably never would again. With great care he singled out one Raptor in particular and traced his fingers purposefully over the contours.
Reverie didn’t last long. Nostalgia didn’t have a place in today’s mission. The game was arm up and get out and their target was the small arms locker right off the hangar deck. It was in the middle of the third trip between Kobol and the locker that Kara saw Dee’s flashlight, frantically scanning the deck.
“What’s wrong?” Lee asked, directing his course towards her, away from the weapons storage.
“I thought… I thought I heard something,” she said shaking her head, before rejoining the others in the stockpiling of weapons. “It’s a shame the gravity is on, it’d be a lot easier to carry all this stuff if it wasn’t.”
“We have an incoming wave here,” Hoshi’s voice came over the comm from the ship, his voice was ringing with excitement. “We’ve got our coordinates.”
“Thank the gods,” Kara said. “Alright guys, one more trip and then let’s get the frak out of here.”
As Helo walked out into the hangar bay for the last trip, he noticed one circle of light focused out into the depths of the hangar. “What’s going on?”
“This time I know I heard something,” Dee replied, voice full of firm conviction. As Helo turned his flashlight to illuminate her, well Kara wasn’t sure what had happened, but she heard Dee’s scream loud and clear.
“What the frak is going on?” Kara shouted, sprinting as best she could in the heavy suit towards them. She couldn’t make it out in the darkness but she heard a slew of cursing and several gunshots before her flashlight finally caught… They were faces, vaguely human, but mutilated beyond belief. Flesh stripped away, teeth filed to points, and she was fairly certain she counted extraneous body parts hanging off their clothing. The one closest to her was holding a strangely shaped knife, dripping red. “What are these things?”
“I don’t know,” she heard Lee over the comm, “But they’re trying to get aboard. Where the frak did these things come from?!”
Kara’s head spun. “Shit. Okay, seal off the airlock, don’t let them get aboard, we’ll figure it out, from here!” she shouted, firing off a few bullets as another one of those things raced towards her. The bullet went straight through it’s skull and it dropped dead just at her feet.
“Kara, we need to get back on the ship,” Helo barked. Kara turned to see him, kneeling on the floor, holding Dee who seemed to be out cold. “She’s losing blood.”
“Any grenades left in the arms locker?” Kara asked, mind racing as she took aim to ward off the other encroaching creatures.
The split second it took Helo to think felt like a lifetime. “No, I think they’re all on board, already.”
“Frak that,” she growled. “And frak this, they’re coming this way.” She fired off another bullet but the chamber clicked as empty. “Okay Lords,” she muttered, “Need a little help down here, anything you can do to help us out?”
For a moment she thought it was some divine white light, the second after that she realized it was a blast from a rather large gun taking out the cadre of creatures that were charging from Kobol towards them. She shone her light in the direction of the blast to see Jayne triumphantly carrying Vera out in front of him, hollering like a loud ape, as he fired shots into the darkness past the three colonials.
“Well, I suppose that’s one definition of help,” she muttered to herself. The path to the ship now cleared, she helped Helo hoist Dee up and carried her towards the ship. As they neared the landing bay, Kara could clearly see Serenity docked along side Kobol; she could also see Dr. Tam, by their airlock, motioning to bring the wounded girl to him. Helo took Dee’s weight onto his shoulders and carried her towards their allies.
Home clear was not really the situation. Thundering footsteps approaching roared through the hangar deck, feral growls rushed like wind in her ears. “Get down!” Lee’s voice was all Kara heard from the open hatch before she dropped to the floor. There was the clang of metal behind her, followed shortly by the scorching blast of the grenade and deafening screams of its victims.
---
“Reavers,” Mal explained over the telephonix system once they were a few clicks out from Galactica. “Men that were just like us; went out to the furthest reaches of space, saw a big nothing and went feng le.” He tapped his forefinger against the side of his head to emphasize the point. “Must’ve found the abandoned ship and figg’red it would be a good place to set up camp.” The prospect shattered Adama’s heart, and Mal could see it all over his face, even through the video screen. The ship was no longer theirs; that life was no longer theirs; Mal remembered the same pain from long ago.
Kara was the one to press the conversation forward. “How’d you know we’d be out there?”
“Galen picked up your signals, about 14 hours ago. Reckoned y’all’d be comin’ out here for supplies and he and Kaylee threatened to mess up the engines somethin’ fierce if we didn’t jump on out here,” Mal deadpanned, but he couldn’t keep a straight face for long, not with the look Kara was giving him. “And a chance to take the Alliance down a notch doesn’t sound like a bad day, neither. Besides, we never leave a man behind, as far as I’m concerned y’all are honorary crew members.”
“Speaking of,” Kara said, her tone now more serious. “How is Dee holding up?”
“Doc said some kind of medical mumbo jumbo that I mostly tuned out on, but I reckon the gist of it was she’s probably more frightened than injured. He gave her a weave and she’ll be up and about shortly, not exactly in condition to go raiding an Alliance cruiser though.”
“Well, since it looks like we may be down another person, got any spare hands you’d care to share on this mission?”
“I think we’ve got a boatful,” he replied with a grin.
Rating: PG
Chapter: 7/9
Characters in order of Appearance: Kara, Lee, Dee, Roslin, Gaeta, Hoshi, Adama, Helo, and .....?
Words this chapter: ~2480
Kara sat with her feet propped up on the unoccupied co-pilot chair. The hatch to the main room hung open. Lee, Dee, and Roslin had made short work of getting comfortable, even in the sparse space. With her in the bridge, Gaeta and Hoshi sat by a console off the to the side of the cockpit, furiously working out the details of the jump together. Adama and Helo were nowhere to be seen, but Kara assumed they were above still looking at the staterooms. As she listened to the voices floating in from the other room, a thought dawned on her. This felt more like home than her apartment on Beaumonde ever did.
---
In the next room, Lee paced the floor, reading over the scribbled note for the thirtieth time. He glanced over at Dee and Laura who had made themselves comfortable; having dragged a mattress down from one of the staterooms that no one claimed and laid it out on the floor. “What does it mean that the Centurions are out of commission?”
“Probably exactly what it sounds like,” Dee commented, leaning back against the wall. “Shut down. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Alliance found a way to override the programming and just turn them all off.”
Laura rose to join Lee in his pacing. “Without the Centurions, especially in light of the fact that their resurrection capabilities have been taken away, they are technically defenseless.”
Dee’s eyebrows furrowed. “You can’t be suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”
“We can’t just leave them there,” Laura replied as she sat back down on the mattress beside her.
“Even if they were or are our enemies, the fact of the matter is that even if they escape, they will be too busy looking over their shoulders to see if the Alliance is coming for them to cause any real damage.” Lee ran a hand through his hair, letting out a breath he had been holding in too long.
“So, what?” Dee rolled over onto her stomach; her tone of voice was not antagonistic, just genuinely curious. “We bring them on the ship with us?”
Lee scratched his head for a moment before motioning for her to scoot, so he could join them. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s an Alliance ship that they could hijack. We have our mysterious benefactor working for them, maybe we can get a leg up that way.”
Laura’s mind had apparently left the Cylon conversation, but it seemed his recent statement had synced up perfectly with where her thoughts had wandered. “I can’t help wondering who it is.”
Lee cast a confused look in her direction.
“Our man on the inside,” she clarified. “I don’t know if it was foresight on their part or just sheer luck on ours. I feel like I shouldn’t be looking a gift horse in the mouth this way.”
---
Through the conversation, Kara heard the soft thunk of feet on metal as someone descended the stairs from the passenger’s quarters. She turned in time to see Adama appear by the hatch. She took a moment to take him in. “You know, I didn’t mention it earlier, but the button-down and vest combo looks really… really… you,” she said with as much sarcasm as she could muster while choking back a laugh.
She swung her legs off the chair, allowing Adama to take a seat. “I thought that my uniform might attract some unwanted attention.” He leaned forward resting his elbows on his knees. “How are you holding up?”
“Trying to distract myself from thoughts about my husband being experimented on with thoughts of how I’m probably leading my loved ones into a death trap.” She could hear the sharp edge in her own voice, cutting herself just a little bit more. “I just yanked everyone out of their lives and into this mess.”
“We all have a stake in this,” his voice comforted her just as much as the gentle hand on her knee. “As far as messes go, I think we’ve faced worse.”
He was right; but rather than acknowledging it, Kara turned her gaze out into the vast blackness, speckled with the twinkling of stars; billions upon billions of them, burning away at the farthest reaches of the ‘verse. “We’re eight people trying to sneak into a heavily guarded government facility; seven if you take into account the fact that Felix here is staying on the ship.” She jerked her finger towards where he was working; he wore a bit of a grimace at the notion.
“Eight again if you count our benefactor, and that’s only on the way in. We will have at least a half dozen more allies on the way out.” Adama rose from his seat. “Kara, you are in charge of this mission; and if anything is going to get us all killed, it’s this kind of thinking. We all came here by choice.”
Gaeta looked up from his work and turned his chair to face them. “I know that some of us don’t have the same kind of stake in this that you do; none of our loved ones were taken. But we have been in hiding for the past year; these aren’t lives we chose to live. Back on the Colonies we chose to enlist in the military… this is what we do,” he said, pounding his fist against the wall for emphasis. With a slight wince, he shook it out and went back about his work.
Adama placed a firm hand on her shoulder. “Everyone aboard Galactica was a family, and you never leave family behind.”
She wasn’t quite sure what happened in the seconds in between but the next thing she knew, she had her arms around his shoulders in a deep hug, and she was sighing out every last drop of anxiety from her body. With a smirk on her lips, she decided to ruin the moment. “You almost left me on that moon,” she said as she stepped backwards away from him.
“You’re here, aren’t you?” He smiled. “Quit complaining.” She watched him turn to join the ongoing debate in the other room, before he abruptly spun on his heel to face her. “By the way, you never told us her name.”
Kara tucked a lock of hair behind her ear as she glanced around the bridge. “Her name is Kobol.”
“Good name,” he said before exiting the room, closing the hatch door behind him.
Kara took up her seat once again, staring back into the black. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed before she heard a triumphant whoop coming from the tactical officers. “There’s a lot of rocks and satellites between here and there, but we’ve got our jump.”
---
Dark was never really a word Kara would have associated with Galactica. Empty was another one. She was full, alive, busy, bright- even when she was about to be decommissioned. Now, standing in the hangar deck, illuminated only by 4 flashlights, the old girl felt dead.
Four space suits were all she had on board. Back when Kara’d been prepping the ship for a possible life aboard it, she hadn’t considered the possibility of needing to stage a weapons heist from Galactica; surely if the thought had crossed her mind she would have staged ahead. With the ship powered down and no light nor oxygen, they might as well be out there on the bare moon. The other thing they shouldn’t have had was the artificial gravity, but she felt it weighing on them, heavier than it ought to be by the moon’s gravity alone. “Hang on a sec,” she said, fishing out her oh-two indicator and saw the green stripe that meant they, in point of fact, did have oxygen.
“That is too weird,” she muttered as she snapped off her helmet and took a deep breath. “I thought we powered down everything before we left.” Her words were lost on the others who were too caught up in their own observations.
“This is so creepy,” Dee commented, her light sweeping arcs around the deck illuminating sending small circles of light flashing over glimpses of the past. She noted Lee' s flashlight, which followed Helo as he broke off from the group, making his way to one of the old raptors, which hadn’t seen the sky in months and probably never would again. With great care he singled out one Raptor in particular and traced his fingers purposefully over the contours.
Reverie didn’t last long. Nostalgia didn’t have a place in today’s mission. The game was arm up and get out and their target was the small arms locker right off the hangar deck. It was in the middle of the third trip between Kobol and the locker that Kara saw Dee’s flashlight, frantically scanning the deck.
“What’s wrong?” Lee asked, directing his course towards her, away from the weapons storage.
“I thought… I thought I heard something,” she said shaking her head, before rejoining the others in the stockpiling of weapons. “It’s a shame the gravity is on, it’d be a lot easier to carry all this stuff if it wasn’t.”
“We have an incoming wave here,” Hoshi’s voice came over the comm from the ship, his voice was ringing with excitement. “We’ve got our coordinates.”
“Thank the gods,” Kara said. “Alright guys, one more trip and then let’s get the frak out of here.”
As Helo walked out into the hangar bay for the last trip, he noticed one circle of light focused out into the depths of the hangar. “What’s going on?”
“This time I know I heard something,” Dee replied, voice full of firm conviction. As Helo turned his flashlight to illuminate her, well Kara wasn’t sure what had happened, but she heard Dee’s scream loud and clear.
“What the frak is going on?” Kara shouted, sprinting as best she could in the heavy suit towards them. She couldn’t make it out in the darkness but she heard a slew of cursing and several gunshots before her flashlight finally caught… They were faces, vaguely human, but mutilated beyond belief. Flesh stripped away, teeth filed to points, and she was fairly certain she counted extraneous body parts hanging off their clothing. The one closest to her was holding a strangely shaped knife, dripping red. “What are these things?”
“I don’t know,” she heard Lee over the comm, “But they’re trying to get aboard. Where the frak did these things come from?!”
Kara’s head spun. “Shit. Okay, seal off the airlock, don’t let them get aboard, we’ll figure it out, from here!” she shouted, firing off a few bullets as another one of those things raced towards her. The bullet went straight through it’s skull and it dropped dead just at her feet.
“Kara, we need to get back on the ship,” Helo barked. Kara turned to see him, kneeling on the floor, holding Dee who seemed to be out cold. “She’s losing blood.”
“Any grenades left in the arms locker?” Kara asked, mind racing as she took aim to ward off the other encroaching creatures.
The split second it took Helo to think felt like a lifetime. “No, I think they’re all on board, already.”
“Frak that,” she growled. “And frak this, they’re coming this way.” She fired off another bullet but the chamber clicked as empty. “Okay Lords,” she muttered, “Need a little help down here, anything you can do to help us out?”
For a moment she thought it was some divine white light, the second after that she realized it was a blast from a rather large gun taking out the cadre of creatures that were charging from Kobol towards them. She shone her light in the direction of the blast to see Jayne triumphantly carrying Vera out in front of him, hollering like a loud ape, as he fired shots into the darkness past the three colonials.
“Well, I suppose that’s one definition of help,” she muttered to herself. The path to the ship now cleared, she helped Helo hoist Dee up and carried her towards the ship. As they neared the landing bay, Kara could clearly see Serenity docked along side Kobol; she could also see Dr. Tam, by their airlock, motioning to bring the wounded girl to him. Helo took Dee’s weight onto his shoulders and carried her towards their allies.
Home clear was not really the situation. Thundering footsteps approaching roared through the hangar deck, feral growls rushed like wind in her ears. “Get down!” Lee’s voice was all Kara heard from the open hatch before she dropped to the floor. There was the clang of metal behind her, followed shortly by the scorching blast of the grenade and deafening screams of its victims.
---
“Reavers,” Mal explained over the telephonix system once they were a few clicks out from Galactica. “Men that were just like us; went out to the furthest reaches of space, saw a big nothing and went feng le.” He tapped his forefinger against the side of his head to emphasize the point. “Must’ve found the abandoned ship and figg’red it would be a good place to set up camp.” The prospect shattered Adama’s heart, and Mal could see it all over his face, even through the video screen. The ship was no longer theirs; that life was no longer theirs; Mal remembered the same pain from long ago.
Kara was the one to press the conversation forward. “How’d you know we’d be out there?”
“Galen picked up your signals, about 14 hours ago. Reckoned y’all’d be comin’ out here for supplies and he and Kaylee threatened to mess up the engines somethin’ fierce if we didn’t jump on out here,” Mal deadpanned, but he couldn’t keep a straight face for long, not with the look Kara was giving him. “And a chance to take the Alliance down a notch doesn’t sound like a bad day, neither. Besides, we never leave a man behind, as far as I’m concerned y’all are honorary crew members.”
“Speaking of,” Kara said, her tone now more serious. “How is Dee holding up?”
“Doc said some kind of medical mumbo jumbo that I mostly tuned out on, but I reckon the gist of it was she’s probably more frightened than injured. He gave her a weave and she’ll be up and about shortly, not exactly in condition to go raiding an Alliance cruiser though.”
“Well, since it looks like we may be down another person, got any spare hands you’d care to share on this mission?”
“I think we’ve got a boatful,” he replied with a grin.