In the Whole World: Chapter 18, "Contact"
Chapter 18: Contact
Word Count: ~2,400
Rating: PG-13
A/N: This is my favorite chapter in a while. (It's been pretty grim, hasn't it?) Also, huge thanks to everyone who's commented-I never realized how much it really makes a huge difference in writing when you feel like you're talking to someone. Y'all have been great someones.
"How long before we can make contact?" Olivia wiped the sweat off her brow with a cloth that had probably been clean, this morning. The odd jet streams around Caprica had ensured that the continent, six years on, wasn't experiencing a nuclear winter, but a perpetual nuclear summer.
Neither she nor the Chief was sure whether the sweat was sun or radiation-induced, or whether the radiation injections worked as well for them as for humans. She wore the radiation suit-more like a leotard-around her major organs, and a helmet on her head. Those things were more like superstition than protection. And took comfort from the fact that the humans, Helo and Apollo, were sweating, too.
"Another three weeks, at least. We're only just over halfway down. Obviously, it'd be easier if there were more of us." He handed her his water bottle and, without thinking about it, moved between her and the sun, to block some of it with his body.
She noticed, but determined not to read too much into it. "If it weren't for the Centurions…"
He nodded. "Exactly. It'd be months."
That the Centurions were willing to follow his orders surprised him. Olivia could tell. Galen Tyrol was still a man growing into his own authority, still probing cautiously into the pockets of scientific and mechanical knowledge that had been encrypted in his brain for decades. He was finding his new self. That was why she didn't pay much attention to the way he looked at her, these days.
It wasn't a man looking at her. It was a liminal being, between three points on a triangle: the humanoid Cylon who'd come to Caprica, the deck chief who'd been Sharon Valerii's lover and Cally Henderson's husband, and the man he was about to become. Just a being undergoing metamorphosis.
God, but she was beginning to want that liminal man, though.
Olivia stepped out of his shadow and hoisted herself back up into the backhoe she'd been operating. There was no silly temptation in digging. Just dirt. Plain, straightforward, irradiated Caprican dirt.
Galen leaned into the side of her machine before she turned it back on, seeming not to want to let her go yet. Temptation. He nodded, now, in Lee Adama's direction. Lee was drilling communication wire into the ground, so they could find out if anyone was down there sooner rather than later. He was working alone, methodically. He took breaks half as often as the rest of them, showed up earlier than they did, left only when darkness made progress prohibitive. He was driven. "Where do you think he goes at night?"
"I asked him." Olivia shrugged. "He says he goes home. His mom's place, where he grew up. That the rats aren't too bad, out a few miles into the country."
Galen shook his head. "Poor bastard," he muttered. He hopped down. "Alright. Back to work."
Back to work. Boomer's memories flowed over her, suddenly. He was the deck chief, again.
And she was, any way she played it, a traitor.
She went back to work.
Lee was hungry and tired in a way that he hadn't been since Galactica had crashed into Earth. There was a way in which it felt good to work all hours again, to be keenly aware of his own prospects for survival. The feeling felt like home.
Cap City been at the center of more than one nuclear blast. The Petra lab, well north of the center city, had immediately felt the effects of fallout, and of the systematic hunt that the Cylons had undertaken to weed out survivors. Lee wouldn't have wanted to try to go downtown; the burnt-out rubble, the stench of the tens of thousands of corpses buried there… Even here, rodents were thriving, and occasionally larger game wandered down from the Corinthian Forest, which they'd been shocked to see from space was still green.
Caprica was uninhabitable, but not for everything that had once lived here: a fraction of what had been, remained. Mostly, there was death everywhere, and where you couldn't see death, the stench of it.
And that was what Lee was thinking when he cut the lock to Pyrrh's River Cemetery-that death was a comfort here. The lock was strange, though. It had been midday when Caprica was attacked. Strange that no one had unlocked this gate before it happened.
He was surprised not to have the constant feeling that he was being watched by the millions of invisible dead. It actually wasn't frightening, this place. He knew the planet was empty, down to his bones. When he'd first opened the door to his mother's house, no part of him had expected her to be home.
That was a kind of peace.
He made his way to the corner of the field with the elongated square tombstones, reserved for military veterans killed in action. "Zak," he muttered to himself, "I'm sorry it took me so long to get here."
In fact, Lee hadn't been back to visit Zak's grave since the funeral. He'd stood across his brother's coffin from Kara, right here. That day, he'd thought he'd never see her again. Part of him had never wanted to see her again. This grave, Zak's body-there'd been no possibility of recovering from their betrayal, from what it told him about himself. He hadn't wanted to face what a terrible person, brother, friend, that Kara Thrace had shown him he was. He hadn't wanted to see himself as he knew she must see him.
Gods, but he'd been young then.
He remembered that his father had shown him a picture of this grave only a few weeks before, reminding him of the poem on it. That poem had meant less to him, then. And when you sing anew, although you mourn / I am the cry of Cronus's horn…
He shoved his hands in his pockets as he rounded the corner to what he thought was the right row, steeling himself for the onslaught of this place.
He was thinking that it would have been easier if Zak had died in the genocide. At least that way, his death wouldn't be so… singular.
Then he saw it.
"Gods." Lee glanced up to the heavens, half expecting to see Kara's viper strafing the cemetery. "You've gotta be frakking kidding me." He looked around in every direction, suddenly sure someone was watching him. This is what people mean when they say they feel someone walking on their grave. I feel-gods, the irony-I feel lost in time.
He made himself approach it, even though his instinct was to turn and run. Made himself bend and pick it up.
There, leaning against his tombstone like a ceremonial wreath, was the godsdamned Horn of Cronus. In its spout, a note, folded in plastic.
Kara's handwriting.
He shuddered.
Don't blow me yet.
His hands were shaking. But he smirked at the line. And if that wasn't a vintage Starbuck experience…
He sat down on the ground and leaned against his brother's headstone and wrapped his arms around the Horn.
She'd been here.
He was on track. She was somewhere. He was going to find her.
Lee was glad there were so few other people on the planet when he put his head between his knees and gasped for air.
Gaius Baltar always landed on his feet. Now, as chief resource advisor to the president of the colonies, who'd taken up residence in the impressive house that had been seized from Bill Adama when he'd been arrested, was no exception.
His wife, however, was. One of the Cylon rebels, she hadn't landed on her feet so much as beneath his, in hiding in the cellar. Any second, his son would start crying, and the president and her staff…
"No, no, I agree he should be charged, Madame President." Gaius Baltar tried to contain his dread. "It's only that I'm not sure that treason is quite-"
"You think that interfering with a fair election, holding me hostage, conspiring with the rebels who abandoned the colony-that all that can be described any other way? Dr. Baltar, I assure you-William Adama is guilty of treason."
Gaius swallowed. He'd once been on the wrong end of a treason charge. They had stopped calling him "doctor" in those days, just as they were no longer referring to the admiral by any military title at all.
Just as well, since there was no military left here, to speak of. It was gone, gone with much of the colony's working class, and all the Cylons.
All except Caprica.
"It's only that I'm not sure that there are any rebel forces left to quell, Madame President," he submitted more quietly.
She raised a brow. "There'd better not be, Dr. Baltar. If I find that you've maintained communication with-"
"I can assure you that I haven't." Not that he hadn't been trying, for several weeks, to contact the missing rebels. Desperately.
He had contacted someone though. There were at least a handful of allies in hiding inside Galactica. President Porter's government had cut a hole in the hull on the same day the rebels had escaped and begun systematically stripping the place, but so far they hadn't found the Tighs or Kara Thrace.
"You will contact them, though. They can't be allowed to escape."
He swallowed. "I'll make every effort, Madame President," he said sincerely. He thought he heard a keening cry beneath his feet, but it was clear it was in his head. No one else reacted. "Anything else, Madame?"
She squinted at him, as if trying to peer inside. Many had tried. She failed, and turned away without a word, her advisors on her heels.
Gaius Baltar sank onto Bill Adama's armchair and tried to muster the courage to call for his wife.
When the communicator drill made it through the second wall of the bunker, Helo read it on the gauge in front of him more than felt it.
"We're go for contact," Helo signaled the Chief, who was standing by with the radio in hand.
"Attention, residents of the Petra Laboratory." Helo saw the Chief swallow, imagined he was considering whether or not to tell them that Galen Tyrol had returned, wondering how much of a lie that would be. "We are a… rescue team come to oversee your evacuation. Please advise as to how many souls are in the bunker and what medical attention is needed."
There was a long burst of static, and then a short silence, before a thin, male voice came over the radio in the Chief's hand. Helo heard it in his knees.
"…Petra here… thirty-seven souls. No shortage of medical supplies. Rescue, could you please tell us whether a Major Lee Adama is with you?"
Helo saw the Chief's jaw drop open, and knew the expression was mirrored on his own face. "Major Adama is currently off-site," he managed. How did they know…?
"Tell him we have his orders." The Chief was staring at the wireless set, frowning at it fiercely, swallowing hard. The voice on the other end grew impatient. "Rescue, do you copy?"
"Copy that." The Chief paused. "Copy that, Gabriel."
"Dr. Tyrol." There was a brief crackle on the line, and then what sounded like a short laugh. "It's about time. Mind telling us how long before you get us out of here?"
Lee was lying on his back on the couch in his mother's house-the couch smelled musty, now, and he guessed it would forever-when he heard the beep of his long-range wireless. It was four a.m. He knew he should be on his feet and marching down to Petra, but somehow laying here with Kara's note in his hands and the Horn on the floor beside him had taken all the energy he had.
He picked up the handset. "Apollo here," he said.
"Apollo, it's Helo. We need you on-site ASAP."
"Roger that. Can I get a sitrep?"
"...made contact... bunker. There are…" The radio crackled, and Lee lost more words. "…and people down there." A long pause. "And Apollo-they're… they're asking for you."
The hand holding the note went cold. "I'm on my way."
He slid the Horn into a canvas bag, and the note into the knee pocket of his fatigues. He looked around his mother's house, its furniture that would rot here, its plates with familiar patterns that would sink into the soil and stay there for a thousand years. Should he take anything with him? Would it make it easier to go?
No. He'd made it this far without any of it.
He was out the door before he knew he couldn't resist the chance to carry something away, even if it was something that had been gone long before it had been irradiated, and something he was carrying already, in any case.
He ventured down into the permanent darkness of the den by memory, ripped an old family photograph off the side table, where it had sat since shortly after it was taken, in another universe populated so differently from this one he wasn't sure, just now, that it wasn't a dream. There it was. The four of them, on the beach at Persepolis, Zak yelling from his dad's shoulder's, Lee building sand towns at his mother's feet. They were all smiling. He didn't remember that day, but he remembered the photograph. Remembered wondering why his mother had left it there, so long after the divorce.
It went in the pocket of the bag, near the Horn.
On the front walk, in his haste, he tripped over one of the stepping stones that had come dislodged in the last few years, probably by the weather. "Godsdamnit! What the frak is that doing-"
And before he could think about why, it was in his hands, and he picked it up, and he heaved it straight through the bay window spreading across the front of the house, and felt something break in him with the familiar sound of shattered glass. And he stalked away without looking back.
He was strangely relieved to think that, actually, he'd never have to go back there again.
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