Fic: BSG/Aliens Fusion AU, Xenophobic Agenda, R, Kara/Sam (1/2)
Disclaimer: Not mine
Fandom: This is a BSG/Aliens fusion/Alternate Universe. It doesn't follow the plot of either universe particularly well, though the latter has more say in the formation and proceedings. The aliens, otoh, look more like the Brood from Marvel's X-Men.
Pairings: Kara Thrace/Sam Anders, implied Sharon Valerii/Karl Agathon
Characters: Kara Thrace, Sam Anders, Sharon Valerii, Karl Agathon, Maggie Edmonson, a few others who don't really have large parts.
Rating: R, violence, language, adult situations, death, destruction, etc.
Genre: Action/Adventure, Explosions Are Cool
Length: 18,000 words
Notes: I started this as a ficlet for the bsg_epics ship war. And at about 3,000 words, I was cranky, but amused that at least I was writing something kinda long. I stopped thinking it would end around 10,000 words. *shrugs* This is not particularly romantic, either.
Summary: Kara Thrace's crew crash-land on a bug-infested asteroid and all hell breaks loose.
Xenophobic Agenda
by ALC Punk!
The whole thing started out as just another challenge for Kara Thrace and her squad of marines. Go to an asteroid where colonists were terra-forming, find out why they'd lost contact. Listen to the battle stories of a civilian who claimed the asteroid contained 'aliens'. The problems started when the electro-magnetics in the atmosphere knocked their troop carrier for a loop and sent them plummeting to the surface.
And then worse: the aliens were real, and they were salivating bug-like things. Two scouts had rushed back with the report, the whites of their eyes showing as they huddled into their seats.
Kara had snapped a series of orders after that, trying to prepare them for what might be an attack.
"We've got incoming!" The alarms started to go, and Kara lost the sound of her voice echoing in the troop carrier. Her squad quickly started gearing up, rifles and automatics at the ready within seconds. She felt a little pride over their quick response.
The lights flickered, and Kara felt the sweat on her back freeze in dread as the emergencies came on a second after the main battery failed.
"It's them." The civilian consultant had been saying all sorts of shit, and this seemed to be no exception. "They cut the power. We are so frakked."
Kara didn't like believing that aliens would be that intelligent, but she couldn't deny that it was easier to believe than that state-of-the-art equipment just happened to malfunction after she and her team crash-landed on the asteroid.
"I've got movement!" Maggie Edmonson sang out from her position by the radar equipment that had hastily been turned into more useful sensors while they waited for pickup from the Galactica (Kara had declared the mission scrubbed until the atmospheric interference was sorted out). "Ten meters and closing!"
"Shit." Moving up to Kara's side, Sam Anders shoved a hand through his hair. He was almost built enough to be one of Kara's troops, but he'd gone for work in the shipyards and dock crews, back on Caprica Station. Still, she had to admit he had nice lines on him. "We should be able to see them by now."
"Yeah?"
"Six meters!"
Now they should definitely be able to see and hear them, even with only the emergency lighting. There should be bugs climbing in through the still-closed hatch. Kara pulled in a breath, and then froze. There was the faintest sound of something moving. Slowly, she tracked the sound with her eyes, staring up above them, at the metal that was their only protection from the wind that ravaged the asteroid.
"Shit." Grabbing for a flashlight, Kara pointed at Sam. "Give me a boost up to the maintenance hatch."
He did as he was told, hands lacing together as he bent just enough for her to place her foot in them. Then he was pushing upwards and she was shoving--Sharon Valerii smacked into her back, giving her more momentum, and then Kara was close enough to the hatch to dog it open, light in one hand, hatch in the other.
For a moment, she couldn't make sense of what she was seeing. Then the images resolved: it was hard to tell how many of them there were, giant, cockroach-like things all swarming around the hull as far as the eye could see.
"Oh, gods," she gasped, yanking the hatch closed and locking it. "They're all over us."
Anders pulled her back down to the ground, his hands still on her waist when he asked, "Are there any weak-points?"
"No--yes--I don't know." She wanted to bat his hands away, but she couldn't deny that they were a welcome distraction from her coming death at the pincers of giant bugs. She swore again and pulled free of his hold. "Maggie, get on the horn to Galactica again, tell them to hurry their asses into picking us up!"
"We're dead in here," Anders said, his voice fierce. "If we get out of here, make a run for the colony buildings--"
His suggestion was lost in the sound of a machine gun firing, and Kara tracked it to Agathon, who'd been closest to where the bugs were climbing on the outside of the ship. They'd gotten in, somehow, and they shrieked as they died.
"Maggie, grab the transmitter, and get the frak out the emergency hatch--" Kara grabbed Valerii, "Go with her, we'll be right behind you."
There was no way to defend themselves inside a giant tin can. They were sitting ducks, and if she'd been thinking, she would have evacuated long ago. But she'd thought they'd get a faster pick-up, out here. She hadn't quite believed that there was danger from giant-ass bugs. Turned out, she was wrong.
"Anders, you go, too." Raising her voice, she shouted, "Agathon, we're getting out of here, move your ass!"
Easier said than done--now that they were running, the alien bugs seemed determined to stop them. Kara opened fire on two, then grabbed for the back of Karl Agathon's shirt and pulled.
He fired twice more, then ran, as Kara took up a stance to cover him.
To her right, someone screamed, and Kara glanced over to find that one of the bugs had snuck by and had its pincers clamped around the leg of one of the non-coms. Jammer, she thought. She shot through its carapace, and he screamed again, going down as another one flung itself onto the wounded man. Probably trying for an easy meal.
"Shit--" Another one of her people went down, and Kara turned back to shoot at the corner where they were getting in.
"Thrace, Thrace, we have to go--they're starting to get behind us."
Anders. Kara shot him a glare over his shoulder, "I told you to go!"
"Not without--Kara!" He fired over her head, then wrapped an arm around her waist and began backing towards where Valerii was laying down covering fire to the right and left in quick, jerky movements. "Keep them off our front."
She didn't need his suggestion, of course. She'd picked off three of them before he'd finished his words.
Then Valerii was diving out the hatch, and Anders was pulling the pin from a grenade and lobbing it forward.
With an ease she would berate him for later, he turned and shoved her ahead of himself, clearing the hatch as the grenade bounced once, twice, and then exploded. The shockwave knocked them to the ground, Sam landing half-on her, half-off.
Kara struggled free and got to her knees, eyes trying to track every movement as Valerii dragged Anders to his feet, then took off at Kara's growl.
On her own feet, Kara shoved Anders ahead of her and joined the flight. In the distance, through the wind, Kara could see Agathon aiming his machine gun at their back trail.
He didn't open fire until they were past them, and Kara turned to watch with satisfaction as he ripped the few remaining bugs to shreds.
-
"Maggie, you looked over the schematics of these buildings. Are there any defensible rooms, or are we frakked?" Things had settled down a little, with Ishay moving among them to patch any injuries. Agathon was taking a survey of their ammunition and guns left, and Anders and Valerii were keeping an eye on the field where the still-smoking carcass of the transport was.
"One level up--there's roof access, but if we put someone on the roof, we should be fine."
For what definition of 'fine', Kara didn't bother to ask. She ordered Maggie into the lead and stationed herself and Anders at the back.
"Tell me about these aliens, Anders." Be useful, her tone said.
He scowled, "If you'd listened to me on the journey out--"
"Get your panties flattened, mister," she snapped. "None of my people have ever seen anything like this, and your fairy stories were useless without seeing the reality."
"I suppose it is believing," he muttered, fists clenched. "The Company didn't believe me, either."
"Yeah? We get outta this, I'll show the Company any proof they need. With this, if I have to." She patted the gun in her arms. Many things could be solved if you just shot them enough.
He snorted, but gave her a look before glancing over his shoulder to check behind them. Then he quietly explained his earlier encounter with the creatures. One of them had wiped out his whole crew and almost gotten him. Kara wasn't entirely sure she believed everything he said, but she'd seen the things in action now, so she thought most of what he said was true.
And she was a little impressed that he'd survived.
She shot a glance at him again, wondering why he'd never thought to join the military after his experience, then realized that with losing his ship and crew on his record no good mercenary group would have touched him, and the Company had put enough black marks on their own ledger to make sure that he had no recourse but the shipyards.
The scrape of metal against metal made her look over her shoulder, but there wasn't anything to see. Then the sound came again, and she spotted the cause. Down at floor-level, there was a small hatch, probably leading into the ventilation system.
"Anders. They small enough to get through something like that?" She pointed, eyes scanning the rest of the walkway behind them for movement.
Nothing.
"Don't think so." He moved and crouched down, pushing at the flap and frowning. "I thought you said all the colonists were dead?"
"They are."
Anders looked up at her with a half-grin on his face, and then he ducked and dove through the flap. It was just barely large enough for him to wriggle through, and Kara dropped to her knees to grab his ankle before he could completely disappear, "What the frak are you doing?"
The boot in her hand tugged free, and then Anders began wiggling his way backwards. When his head finally appeared, Kara could see that his arms were extended, hands holding onto a kid.
When they were both out of the duct-work, Kara raised her eyebrows at him. "I guess they're not all dead. Now, c'mon before the rest of them get too far ahead of us."
-
Once cleaned up a little, the kid turned out to be a little girl. She refused to answer any and all questions, but Kara had never had much of a way with kids and even less interest in them. Ishay said the kid seemed healthy--if a little vitamin-deficient. Since he was the civilian, she left Anders to deal with her, and went to help Valerii start welding things closed.
"They tried this before." Sharon's voice was low as she waited for Kara to tug a panel closed. "You can see the markings, where they broke through it."
"We only have to be here long enough for the pick-up." Not that Kara found that reassuring. So much had gone wrong already, that she was pretty sure 'reassuring' was no longer in her personal lexicon. "And we're better at this than some soft colonists."
"Are we?" The look Valerii shot her wasn't polite. "Two of our troop are already dead, ma'am."
"Wanna make it three, you keep right on spouting that bullshit," Kara suggested.
Valerii glared at her, but shut her mouth on whatever else she was going to say, and they finished their task in silence.
Wanting to keep Valerii's opinions out of the general crew, Kara positioned her with Agathon up on the roof. The room they were in had some sort of skylight, with a ladder built into the wall underneath it. If worse came to worse, Kara planned for them all to evacuate that way.
"I figure they're based here," Maggie told her, gesturing at the colony maps she'd scrounged. Paper maps felt a little wrong in this day and age, but Kara could go with it, since there wasn't any power for the computers anyway.
Kara traced a finger over the reactors that the colony had installed, and considered what she knew of bugs. Then she decided that smashing the occasional roach in her apartment wasn't the same thing. "Anders, get over here, I need your opinion on something."
He brought the kid with him and bent over the table, listening to Maggie's statements before he shrugged. "Could be."
"Would they be attracted to the heat and electrical fields?" Kara asked him, absently noticing that the kid was listening to them with scorn in her gaze.
"Yes. When the eggs were found--the last time I encountered these things--they were in the drive unit of the crashed ship." He frowned and tapped a finger over the terra-forming plant. "I bet they've got eggs laid all through this area."
"Can we take the fight to them?" Kara had never much liked the idea of hiding from her enemies. "Look, if they're in the power station, that's all one gigantic bomb just waiting for a trigger."
"Are you crazy?" From the other side of the table, their token Company rep, a Tom Zarek, glared at them. "You can't just destroy Company property like that. This will be a viable colony, once the infestation has been wiped out. And that power station is worth millions."
Kara smiled at him, "Do I look like I give a frak about the Company's profits, Mr. Zarek?"
Having the Company man with them hadn't been her idea, either. At least Anders had his uses. Mr. Zarek just seemed worried about profits and loss.
"No, Captain," he said, his tone dry. "I'm aware of your opinion. But you can't expect me to sit quietly while you plan to destroy this facility."
"Then stand there quietly," Kara snapped. She turned to Maggie. "Do we have enough explosives to get a chain reaction started?"
She frowned, looking over the list Agathon had compiled. "I don't know. Maybe."
Next to Kara, Anders shifted, as though he wanted to say something. She shot him a glance with her eyebrows raised, but he shook his head. Still working on whatever he was thinkin' of, then. She turned back to the others. "Right. here's what we're going to do. Agathon and I are heading down to the reactors--there are enough back corridors to give us access without encountering the bugs. Maggie, you and Valerii are staying here with the civvies and Ishay--keep signaling Galactica for that pick up."
"That's suicide." Maggie said, her tone flat.
"You know Agathon and I have gotten out of worse trouble," Kara reminded her.
"But not like this!"
"And what if the aliens come here while you're gone, Captain? Where will we go next?" There was something smug in Zarek's question, and he leaned against the table with a patronizing smile on his face. "Just stay here, and we'll all get off this rock together."
"I'll go," Anders said quietly.
Kara ignored him to point at Maggie, "I'm putting the Lieutenant in charge. She's as good as--if not better than--I am at this shit. We'll keep in contact with you via comms, but if the shuttle can't wait, you all get the frak out of here."
"There's an escape shuttle on the schematics--"
"You can't do this, Captain--"
"Suicide missions are against the code--"
Their voices were raising, and Kara held up a hand to stop them. Next to her, Anders took the opportunity to insert his own words into the proceedings, "I'll go, Captain. Leave Agathon here on guard."
At least it was a useful suggestion. Kara gave him a look, sizing him up again and remembering that he hadn't been too bad with a gun. "What about the kid?"
"She stays here," he said, sounding amused. "Not like I'm attached at the hip to her. Right, kid?"
The kid made a sound that might have been a snort, but didn't say anything.
"Fine." Kara glared around the room at everyone as they all opened their mouths to continue the argument. "Maggie, when is the Galactica transport getting here?"
"Their last eta was four hours from now." It was nice to hear someone being professional. Maggie made a notation on the map, then added, "I estimate it should take you that long to get there, set the charges, and get back--with any added complications on the way."
"Right. Let's get the gear and get the frak out of here."
-
It wasn't that Kara trusted Sam Anders to watch her back. It was that he seemed competent enough to be easily sacrificed if they were gonna end up dead on the mission. That's what she told herself as they went back out through the door and into the corridor, watching every shadow. Frak-up should already go on her tombstone, and she'd be all right with adding another entry to that ledger. But that didn't mean she was gonna go down easy, and if the difference between failure and success was Sam Anders dying on her watch--well, she wasn't going to think about that.
The air out in the corridors was colder, and she shivered a little, wishing that the bugs hadn't killed the colony's life support so thoroughly out here.
Kara wasn't much for being a colonist, but she wondered how the people living here had been able to stand the endless dark-brown of the corridor walls. It must be some industrial color that came cheap, but it looked like really ugly mud and didn't do much to endear her to the place.
"Do they go in for murals? Colors?" She found herself muttering as they came across the room designated for the schooling of young minds. It was the same ugly brown, without any of the ornamentation that Kara vaguely remembered from her own childhood. No alphabet decorating the upper walls, no pictures of animals or abstract impressions of the atom. Just unrelenting brown.
"Too expensive. Company probably arranges for 'essentials', but murals and colored paint?" Anders shrugged and pointed through the classroom to the door on the other side. "That should get us to that back corridor Maggie was talking about."
"Right."
With one last disdainful look at the walls, Kara led the way through the room, keeping to one side and leaving the desks alone. As much as a childish part of her wanted to knock over the still-orderly rows, she simply couldn't do it. Sound might attract the bugs.
She had almost reached the door, when Sam hissed a warning. Turning, she tracked her gun through the room, trying to find whatever he'd seen. A skittering noise reached her ears, and she shot a glance upwards, grateful that no looming cockroaches were waiting to drop down on them. "What?"
"Don't move," he growled.
"I--" Kara choked off the sound, finally seeing what he had. A cluster of smaller bugs, just under one of the desks. Perhaps they were playing or stalking, or just waiting. It didn't matter. They were between the two of them and either door, and there was no way she would get her gun around in time to fire.
But her body was blocking their view of Anders (she thought wildly that bugs didn't have eyes, did they?), and the gun in his hands brushed against her side before he opened fire.
The short spurt of bullets shredded the insects, and Kara turned away from them, running for the door and really hoping that the corridor beyond was clear.
It was, and Anders slammed the door shut to stop any pursuit. She could hear that skittering, ticking noise that the bugs made as they clustered on the other side or went for reinforcements. She wasn't entirely sure what they were doing, and she didn't think she cared.
-
They had to back-track twice to avoid more infestations (shooting things might have been therapeutic, but a waste of ammunition they couldn't replace), but eventually, Kara could feel the air getting warmer. The reactors put off heat with most of the systems down. She didn't think it was enough to cause them to explode on their own. As much as she hated the idea of intelligent bugs, these ones might be smart enough not to wreck all of the control systems. She shot a glance at her watch and swore softly. Already over time for the outward-bound journey.
Anders was in the lead, map in one hand, gun in the other. It gave Kara an unrestricted view of his ass, and she firmly told herself that she should be concentrating on other things. Didn't stop her from looking, though.
A skittering noise came from the corridor they were crossing, and Kara put on a burst of speed to narrow the gap between them.
The walls were beginning to look different, coated in some slimy substance and what looked like dead bug carapaces. Eyes narrowing, Kara studied one of them for a minute before deciding that it was truly dead.
"One more crossing and then we need to get down a few levels to be under the reactors," Anders murmured, his voice breaking the waiting stillness of the corridor.
"Fine."
With the crossing came more of the bugs on the walls, and a damp humidity that crept close to their skin and held on tenaciously. Kara wiped the sweat out of her eyes and checked behind them again. Nothing. No sign of movement, no skittering, creeping bugs. She wanted to feel relieved about that, but the hair on the back of her neck was standing at attention and her gut was pinging off like a fire alarm.
Turning back, she found Anders stopping at a railing and just staring out. She joined him, trying to take in the scale of the place. In front of them, the building opened up, gantries criss-crossing over a vast room. From their vantage, they could stare down at the reactors and the floor even further below them.
For a moment, Kara's eyes didn't want to work. The low level of light from the emergency circuits bathed everything in red, and it was hard to tell where the carapace and slime-covered walls, and the cocoon-like structures began. It was the colonists, all strung along like peas in a pod, and Kara found her hand gripping the railing with too much force. Her fingers hurt when she pulled them off.
"Good Gods," she hissed.
"Shit, those are eggs." Anders pointed. There were nodules scattered all over the floor down there, some of them already open and hollow.
Before she could answer him, he was already moving, heading towards the stairs that led downwards. Kara shot the horrible sight one more look, then joined him in getting down to that level as fast as they could.
As she ran down the stairs, she wondered if the bugs would be stirred by their presence, then decided there was no point on betting on a sure thing.
The image was worse when it was close-up, and Kara picked her way through the eggs on the floor until she was able to reach up and check one of the bodies. The man jerked, and his eyes flickered open. "Help me," he whispered weakly, his eyes rolling and searching, as though he wasn't entirely aware of her.
"Please," murmured another voice, "Please kill us."
For just a moment, Kara entertained the idea of freeing these people. Of bringing them back and saving their lives. But the cold reality was that some of them were probably already infested, and she couldn't chance it. It didn't matter that it was murder to leave them, she couldn't risk letting any of the bugs escape the asteroid. That was the whole reason they were going to blow up the reactors.
"I'm sorry," she murmured, turning away.
One of the eggs suddenly burst open, spewing a thing that Kara would have nightmares about for the rest of her life. It oozed and wriggled, aiming blindly for her, and she shot it with a wild feeling of escaping a horrible fate. But then another and another of the eggs burst, and she swore.
"Here, Captain--" Anders tossed her one of the grenades and gestured.
Kara pulled the pin and handed it to the woman who had begged. Then she ran, dodging more than one bursting egg to get back to Anders. They both ducked around the side of one of the pillars as the grenade exploded behind them. Fire and destruction shot upwards and outwards.
The whole complex shook for a moment, and Kara grabbed for Anders' arm to steady herself.
"We have to get the charges set--" she swore as bugs began appearing, crawling out of ragged tears in the walls, like ants whose hill had been kicked. "Shit--"
"C'mon!"
They ran, dodging and firing, breaking free of their pursuit long enough to duck under the reactors themselves. Kara found the coolant pipes, then grabbed a fire axe and thrust it at Anders. "Hit all of those!"
Ignoring the signs that warned about coolant leaks, Anders did as she'd ordered, breaking into the pipes while she knelt under the power feeds and began building their bomb from the fragmentation grenades. It was a complicated process, removing the detonators and slaving them all together, but she'd done it under fire before. Not an experience she'd ever wanted to repeat, but that didn't matter.
"What next?"
"The--" she held her breath to remove the last detonator, then exhaled and pointed. "Those. And then get the frak out of here."
With the detonators slaved, Kara attached a part from her watch and one of the switches from her radio (Maggie could complain about not being able to contact them later), then shoved the entire apparatus into one of the broken coolant pipes while trying not to breathe.
Bad enough she'd been breathing the stuff already, she'd just have to hope she hadn't killed herself before time.
The mixture of coolant and atmospheric gases would build up under the reactors (hopefully killing the bugs just with their lethality), and the grenades would detonate and light the fuse. Without the coolant, the reactors would be pushed into going critical by the other explosion. Or at least, that's what Kara's chemistry classes had taught her (and what Maggie, their explosives expert, had confirmed).
It was just going to take time--about twenty minutes--for everything to build to the right pressures.
Kara staggered out of the mist of coolant and gas, and found Anders waiting. He took her arm, dragging her to the stairwell and up one level before the bugs began to swarm them again.
"We can't fire in here anymore!" She shouted before coughing and gagging on the stench from the earlier explosion.
"This way--" Anders grabbed her arm again, pulling her with him as he ran straight towards one of the smaller swarms. They managed, barely, to kick and bash their way past to get out into the corridor beyond.
With her lungs on fire, Kara didn't have the energy to object to his methods.
Besides, he was saving her life.
-
"We already came this way," Kara said, then coughed again. It was getting better, but her lungs were still not as good as they should be. They were out of ammunition, but there were still bugs stalking them. Stopping was not an option.
"I know."
She grabbed for his wrist and read his watch, then groaned, "We don't have time to waste, Anders. The pick-up shuttle is almost here. And the charges--"
A mirthless laugh escaped him. "Did you really expect us to make it, Captain?"
That silenced her and they went through several corridors before she replied. There was a cold knowledge in her gut, a certainty that she had faced so many times before and escaped. This time, though... "I didn't, Sam. I'm sorry."
His hand grabbed hers, "Be sorry after we're off this rock."
It was the eternal optimism of the man--Kara shoved him forwards, getting him moving again before the bugs caught up. She might die in this place, but she was frakked if she was going to die by pincer. Going out with a bang was far more her style, and she felt a wild grin touch her mouth. "Let's get to the roof, you asshole."
He grinned briefly, and then dragged her onwards.
The emergency lights were beginning to be affected by the reactor's imminent meltdown, and Kara began to see more shapes in the dark than there should be. She wondered what the Company would think of her solution, then decided that maybe she didn't want to know. Anders had said that the Company had wanted his crew to bring the bugs back for study. As what, weapons? They sure as frak weren't good for medical science, unless you wanted to know how best to burn someone with acid. Or glue them to a wall.
An elevator appeared on the left, and Kara pointed at it. "Roof access?"
"Maybe."
With effort, they got the doors open, and Kara shone her light up, then down. No sign of bugs, and the car was somewhere below them. But the shaft was intact, and it went up at least four more levels. "It's a death-trap," she murmured.
"It'll be faster than finding another set of stairs."
She nodded and tucked the light into her gear again, then reached out for the first rungs of the ladder and began climbing. Below her, Sam waited just long enough for her to get above him, then joined her.
The climb went quickly, and Kara pulled her light out before they reached the top to double-check their safety and figure out where to go. A trap-door led up into the workings of the elevator, and she let Sam take the lead again, with his map as he tried to orient where they were to where they should be on the pieces of paper.
"Here--" Having to bend almost double, Anders hurried along until they reached another trap-door. "This should be the roof."
Kara nodded, and then clicked off her light, listening. The roar of the wind was easy to hear, as was the distant sound of the ticking of bug feet. In the dark, it was hard to tell where the latter sound came from, but it echoed. "They're in the shaft."
"What've we got to lose?"
Together, they pushed the door upwards, letting it drop flat on the roof while Kara scrambled out and stood there, covering them with her empty pistol. The wind battered her, but it was a welcome relief from the dark and humid interior.
Even better, she could now see--though not hear--the descending form of the troop carrier. "Shit. We'll be late--"
"No we won't." He finished climbing out and gestured for her to help him. Together, they slammed the trap-door closed and ran for where the others were gathered in a huddle.
"Glad you could make it!" Maggie shouted as they got closer. But then her expression changed, and she turned and snapped. "Agathon, cover fire!"
Kara glanced back to find the bugs boiling out of the door behind them. "Shit--"
With a surge, Anders pulled her forwards and they reached the others and dropped down as Agathon and Valerii opened fire. The sound was too loud, washing away the wind and the engine noise from the troop carrier. Kara rolled back to her feet and watched the carrier struggle to land with the wind buffeting it every which way. At least they'd figured out how to shield the electronics from magnetic interference.
It managed to land, but barely, and Kara was already shoving Anders and the kid (who'd grabbed onto him immediately) towards the dropping ramp even before Maggie gave the order to board.
One of the bugs managed to break past Agathon and Maggie turned and shot it, shattering the carapace and spraying everyone in the vicinity with acid. Both Valerii and Agathon shrieked, but stayed on their feet. Kara had time to notice that Zarek was already aboard the transport before she turned back and shouted. "Agathon, Valerii, fall back. Now!"
Agathon got in another burst of fire, then turned and ran past Kara as Valerii covered him. Then Valerii turned and ran as well, leaving Kara as the last one to board.
She jumped for the already-rising transport and Anders' hands grabbed hers, dragging her inside while the bugs tried to execute the same maneuver and fell back to the roof.
Then the door was closed, and they were strapping in. Agathon was whining about his injuries and Maggie was telling him to shut up.
Kara glanced at the flight clock and then turned to Anders, still standing too close to her for comfort. "Shall we?"
"Captain, I forbid you to do this, it's an act of treason against the company--"
"Mister Zarek," Kara interrupted him, "We can still put you back down on that rock. So I suggest you shut up and sit down. Sam?"
She held out her radio and he smiled grimly before closing his fingers over hers.
The explosion rocked the entire complex below them, sending shockwaves through the air and causing the transport to veer dangerously before the cursing pilot got it back under control.
Kara strapped herself in, unsurprised when Anders took the seat next to hers, the kid still attached to him.
"Get some rest," she suggested quietly. "I think the storm is yet to come."
-
Her crew got out of the situation slightly damaged, but alive, though they had to go back into cryo-sleep for the trip back to Caprica Station. Agathon and Valerii were already comparing their burn scars and trying to decide who was the most bad-ass when they docked. That just left the Company to deal with, and Kara found that she had her hands full with the kind of political and economical mess she had never wanted.
"The Company will not tolerate this sort of--"
"Bite me," Kara suggested, interrupting the esteemed chairperson with a wave of her hand. "My people were in danger."
"That does not justify destroying Company property, as I'm sure Mr. Zarek made you fully aware" the man snapped, staring down his nose at her.
"It does in my book. Look, you're the people who sent those colonists out there. You had Anders' report, and you knew what was there. Just because I cleaned up your mess for you--" she snorted, "Well, I don't think that would look too good on your public records, now would it?"
The threat made the man narrow his eyes even further. Mister William Cavil was not the easiest of men to understand, but he knew how to play the stock market and parlay anything into getting himself and the Company ahead. That Kara would dare threaten either made her a liability, and she knew that. But she also knew that it would be harder to silence Anders and the rest of her team if he did something to her.
She smiled at him. "If it helps, mister chairperson, I will resign my commission with the company. But don't expect me to roll over and take whatever shit you try to hand me afterwards."
For a moment, he was silent. Then he smiled, though it didn't reach his eyes. Those orbs remained as cold and calculating as before. "Very well. Tender your resignation and see that you do not return to Caprica Station without the Company's consent or request. You will not be charged for your dereliction of duty."
Better than she'd hoped for, even if she could hear the 'for now'. By the time that 'for now' came around, she expected to have enough on Chairperson Cavil to topple his little empire. And if she didn't? Well, she had lived on the fringes before enlisting, and she could do it again. "Have a good day, ma'am."
"And you, Miss Thrace."
Neither of them meant it.
-
Kara saw Maggie and the others before she turned in her id and side-arm. They didn't want her to leave, though Maggie and Agathon understood her reasons. "Captain, you'd better raise hell out there," Valerii told her. The others didn't offer much in the way of goodbyes, but Kara hadn't known them very well. She and Agathon had come up the ranks together, Valerii and Maggie had joined them on more than one sortie before this. It was why she'd tapped them for her squad when she got her shiny new captaincy.
"I'll miss you assholes," she said affectionately before she turned and left the only life she'd known since she'd reached the age of sixteen.
Put like that, it was devastating and wrong. Wholly astounding in how it seemed to change who she was. Fundamentally, Kara reflected, she was the same person. Wasn't she? She had always put her ass on the line for her people, and now she'd gone one step too far in doing so. The Company wouldn't forgive her the destruction of the gear on the asteroid, and Kara wasn't sure it mattered if they did or not.
She knew their dirty little secret.
A check at the shuttle bays told her there was a transport off-station leaving the next morning. She scheduled herself to be on it, pleased to see that the Company hadn't ruined her account as well as her job. There was no reason for her to stay on the station now, and even less reason to stay within reach of the Company's goons.
Then she headed for a bar.
It was time to get incredibly drunk, give herself one last send-off before kissing the Company goodbye.
With her credit still good, she took a stool in the first one and ordered a round of shots guaranteed to start her on a long journey into being drunk off her ass.
-
Taking a transit cubicle to sleep her drunk off had seemed like a good idea at the time, but Kara managed to sleep through the alarm and miss her shuttle flight, which left her with too much time on her hands. She showered and dressed again, then packed up and made her way down to check the schedules.
Luckily, she hadn't been penalized for missing her flight and was able to book passage on the evening shuttle. Which still left her with hours to kill.
Kara decided that food was in order, followed by another dip into the bars. Being drunk on the shuttle was probably frowned upon, but she didn't care. Noon meal easily found and eaten, she cracked her knuckles and began walking through the causeway, looking for a different bar to drown her sorrows in.
Before she could start her plan for the afternoon, she ran into a small child. The kid leapt out at her as she passed a junction, and it was a good thing Kara could see she was a kid, otherwise there might have been violence. "The frak?"
"He's in trouble," the kid hissed and Kara recognized the little girl from the colony.
"Who is?"
"Sam!" The kid replied, as though that were obvious. She grabbed at Kara's hand and succeeded in dragging her into the corridor that she'd sprung from.
The kid, if Kara remembered correctly, was named Kassandra. She hadn't paid too much attention to her details, leaving that to Anders. He was a civilian, he'd know what to do with her. With a sigh, she knelt and looked the kid in the eye. "Look, Kassandra--"
"Kacey," snapped Kassandra, rolling her eyes. "It's Kacey. And I'm not looking at anything. Sam's in trouble, and I need your help!"
"Fine. Kacey. What's the problem?"
Grabbing Kara's shoulder, Kacey shoved at her, "On your feet, soldier, and follow me."
Actually amused at the order coming from someone who was barely big enough to hold a machine gun let alone fire it, Kara got to her feet and did as she was told.
The kid moved quick when she wanted to, and Kara was hard-pressed to keep up, though she began to frown as she realized they were getting deeper and deeper into the station's core. The Company owned everything here, and she really shouldn't be there anymore. But Kacey wasn't going to slow down and listen to Kara explain that she had blackmailed herself out of a truly horrendous fine and ended up without a job.
But maybe she should have, Kara thought a little bit later, as she realized they were in the medical wing. The experimental one, where she'd never been and hadn't ever wanted to go. A few marines might have used the 'enhancements' on offer, but they just seemed like a bad idea. As for the rest of what went on there, she knew just enough to know that whatever went on there was something she didn't want to know about.
Kacey slowed and tugged Kara to one side of the corridor where there was a small alcove. "He's in there," she pointed at a door further down the corridor. "You have to save him."
"Look, I--"
A shout ripped through the air, the sound muffled by the door, but recognizable. It was full of terror and anger, and Kara knew it was Anders. She didn't know what was going on, but there wasn't really time. "Kace--see these keys?" Kara pointed at the power controls that were housed in the alcove. "I want you to count to sixty, and then hit them in this order."
The kid watched intently, then nodded.
"Right." Tust a kid to save their asses? What was she thinking? Kara licked her lips and eyed the door down the corridor, hoping that this section of the station used the same power configurations as the troop decks. "Ready?"
"Go."
Kara went, walking slowly down the hall until she was at the door. A glance through the window showed her a scene from nightmare: Sam was shackled to the wall, and in front of him wriggled bug larva, intent on infestation. To one side of the room, Kara could see there were people watching through a large window. Scientists from the Company, most likely. So. They had gotten eggs out somehow.
Perhaps on Anders' capsule when he was lost in space. Perhaps from Galactica. There was no way of telling, but they had to be stopped.
The count in her head reached sixty and the lights flickered and died. Emergency lighting snapped on and Kara shoved the door open, grateful to find the lock dead with the power out.
There was no time for finesse, she grabbed the chair she'd seen and swung it up and down, crushing the larva before they could reach Anders. In the flickering yellow light, she could see surprise on his face, but didn't have time to deal with it.
Instead, she turned and looked at the scientists who were frantically scrambling with their consoles. She smiled and swung the chair into the glass of the window, shattering it with her second swing. "Unlock his cuffs or so help me gods, I'll--"
"No, no, here--" one of the men stabbed into the panel and Kara heard Anders heave a sigh of relief.
"Good boys." Kara stepped back and swung again, the chair smashing into one of the consoles when she released it. She blew them a kiss and turned to grab Anders' hand.
They ran out the door to the alcove where Anders looked entirely unsurprised to finger her as he scooped up Kacey, tucking her against his side. "Thanks."
"Later," she suggested before she led the way out of the Company's high-security medical sector. With the power out, there was just a chance that they'd make it out before marines who weren't loyal to her would show up to arrest them. She hoped.
-
"So."
Kara looked up from the jammer she was wiring together to find Anders watching her intently. Curled against his side, Kacey appeared to be asleep. They'd gone to ground near the shipyards, and Kara was pretty sure it wouldn't be long till the Company searched for them there. So far, they'd managed to avoid getting caught, but with the plan she had in mind, she knew they were going to need an edge. "Hrm?"
"How did you find me?"
"The kid." Kara twisted another connection together, stuck the battery in and grinned as the led lit. "I hope you don't have anything in your quarters that you can't live without."
"Not really, no."
"Good. 'Cause we're gonna have to steal a ship to get out of here, and it's gonna have to be now--before they expect us to do it." That wasn't entirely true. But letting him know that their odds of getting out of this alive were slim to none wouldn't really make him happier. She had to admit it was a little sad that she'd had a better chance of escaping the bug-infested asteroid.
"Can we do that?"
"Son," Kara said, her tone dry, "I can fly anything. I just don't get much chance to."
"I'll take your word for it. But I don't like leaving. If they have more eggs in their lab..."
She sighed. "I know. But there's no way to do anything about it. They'll find us, sooner or later. And I bet this isn't the only facility the Company has for processing them. Do you know what they want them for?"
"Weapons."
That made a sort of horrific sense: the bugs had all sorts of improvements on human biology that the Company would be able to exploit as weaponry and defense. Still didn't make it right. "You think they sent the colonists on purpose?"
"I'm certain of it now."
Kara turned the jammer over in her hands and nodded, "So'm I."
"We can't leave."
A snort escaped her, "I hate to tell you this, Anders, but if you don't leave, we're both toast."
He crossed his arms and glared at her. "But if we leave--what if those things get out? What then? This entire station is at risk. It could become the breeding ground for a whole new generation."
That caused a shudder to go through her, but she shook her head. "We have no weapons, Sam. They're looking for us."
Something nearby made a noise, and they both fell silent as booted feet walked by overhead. Kara kept her face down, not wanting anyone to look through the grating and spot the three people hiding underneath it. She might have saved herself the trouble.
"Thought you'd be here."
Kara's head snapped up, and she found Agathon staring down at her. Valerii was next to him, and she thought Maggie was just beyond. "Get the frak out of here, you idiots."
"Captain, you ain't in charge of us no more." Faintly disapproving, Agathon knelt and waggled a finger at her. "'Sides, we got worse trouble than you running out on us."
"I didn't--"
"Just tell her, Karl," Valerii hissed in annoyance.
"Company's sending us to Kobol, Captain."
Kobol was possibly the most dangerous of the colonies, full of unrest and constantly having uprisings. Once or twice, Kara had joked about leading her marines into the cities and quelling everything, but she wasn't stupid enough to think it would be that simple. The Company was sending her squad out there to die.
"Well, shit," she said. "What the hell do you want me to do about it?"
Valerii snickered, "Aw, Captain. And here we thought you'd miss us."
"You didn't hear what they're sending us out with." Agathon was practically grinning his face off. He glanced around to make sure no one had noticed their odd little discussion and lowered his voice. "Dr. Robert and a whole passel of those egg things."
"Should you be tellin' me this?" Kara demanded.
"No. But, Captain--" and here, Valerii seemed to be at a loss as to how to finish her statement.
"It's evidence." Maggie was finally joining the conversation, nudging Agathon to his feet while she directed her voice down into the grating. "Evidence of the company attempting something horrific."
Kara looked at Anders, who looked up through the grate at her marines. Decommissioned or not, they were still her people. She almost felt proud of that. But that didn't change the fact that she and Anders were in deep shit, and if the marines got involved, it might not go so well for them. On the other hand, if the Company was determined to send them to Kobol with Robert and his eggs...
"Would it be enough for the Council?" Kara asked Anders, her voice low. She knew something of the politics of the Colonial governing body, but not enough to guess with something like this.
"Maybe."
"Even if it isn't enough, we can't let those things get out, Captain." It was odd. Maggie had never seemed the crusading type before, but maybe she'd always had hidden depths. "Colonists don't deserve that shit happening to them."
Kara frowned, but not at Maggie. Then she looked up. "Is he taking all of the eggs with him?"
"Yeah." Agathon was back in the conversation. "Heard one of his flunkies complaining that you'd busted up all the spares they had, so they were gonna rely on the few left to 'deal with things' on Kobol."
The Company had vested interests in Kobol, so it didn't surprise Kara that they were being cold-blooded about stopping the unrest. That didn't make it all right, though. As for the shortage of eggs, well that was a relief--at least there weren't another hundred of the damned things to deal with. Kara wasn't so worried about a few. Then again, she shot a glance at Anders, remembering his story. Maybe only one egg would be one too many. "What ship are you going out on?"
"Pegasus." Maggie didn't sound impressed, despite the fact that the newest battlestar in the fleet was going to be ferrying her to her new post.
"Only the best for our funeral pyres," joked Agathon.
It wouldn't be easy to sneak onto Pegasus, but Kara was willing to do it. It was probably a better bet than trying to steal something and just follow behind. "Right. You three get the frak out of here."
"Shit, I don't miss you at all, Captain," muttered Valerii.
But they went without any complaints other than the usual grumbling. When they were gone, Kara rubbed a hand over her face. "We're going to have to get on that ship, and I don't want them implicated if we're caught," she said, then wondered why she was explaining herself to a civilian.
Anders nodded, "Figured." He looked down at Kacey and sighed, "I don't want to take her, but I don't think I can leave her here. The Company will just throw her into the system, and she'll be even worse off."
Nice guy, Kara decided. She wondered how the hell he'd become caught up in all this shit. His old ship had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, she couldn't worry about that now. There was a battlestar to get on board and a mission to frak up.
-
Sneaking aboard the Pegasus was complicated and meant hiding in some pretty tight spaces. Kara started getting used to the flare of awareness in her body as she pressed up against Anders in yet another storage locker while the kid scouted ahead to make sure it was clear. It was the kid doing the scouting, as she was the one who could hide most easily. Most marines weren't gonna look down first on hearing a noise. They were gonna look up and out. Kacey could take advantage of that a lot more easily than Kara could.
Though she'd argued about it at first, she was mostly resigned to it now. Ever since she'd woken, the kid had been determined to pull her own weight in their operation.
A soft patter of feet told Kara she could pull away from Anders, but she was sort of liking the whole pressed-up-against-him thing, and seriously remonstrating with herself about getting distracted from the mission.
"Hey," Kacey hissed, her hand smacking Kara's leg. "Let's go, you two."
Like she was the one in charge. Kara was beginning to regret not arguing more. With a sound she hoped didn't sound as disappointed aloud as it did in her head, Kara pulled free of Anders and stepped out into the corridor. She strode ahead of the other two until she came to the junction Kacey had scouted for them and peered around it quickly.
Deserted. Good. She glanced back and waved a hand at them before moving around the corner and heading for the hatch. It was the last doorway they would have to pass through for a while.
All battlestars were riddled with extra crawl-spaces and slim hallways for the maintenance crews to use to access places of the ship that weren't easy to get to. Kara was betting that with their departure time being soon that most of the crews had already run checks. If they could get into the hallways and bunk down in an out-of-the-way space, they'd be home-free for the time being.
They'd have to worry about things like food later on.
Kara tapped the unlock sequence into the panel on the hatch and watched it slide open. The slim hallway beyond was silent, empty and dark. Well, hopefully no one was afraid of the dark. "In here. Fast."
In sixty seconds, the hatch would close again and their entry would be erased from the computer logs.
Pushing Kacey ahead of him, Anders quickly walked into the hallway. Kara followed and was pleased to hear the hatch close with a soft snick, the lock clicking back on.
A light flicked on, and Anders handed it down to Kacey, who used it to find herself a spot to sit.
"We should be able to talk now. But quietly," Kara murmured as she moved down the hallway to check the panel at the other end. Locked. Good. She'd be able to over-ride both hatches whenever they needed to.
Anders grunted, then sat down near Kacey. "Where are we?"
"Near auxiliary control--" she flashed him a smile in the dimness, "I like to keep my options open."
"So I've noticed."
Not sure whether to take that as a compliment or not, Kara shrugged and sat down next to him. It might get cold, and he was the nearest source of warmth. Kacey shot her a look that might have been a warning, but only wriggled closer to Anders' other side with a soft sigh. He wrapped his arm around the kid without really seeming to notice what he was doing, and Kara wondered who he had been before getting lost in space.
She also sort of wished the kid weren't there.
In the normal course of things, given the state of her love-life (lack of one), she would probably have already tried to bed Anders. He was easy on the eyes, tall and well-built. He wasn't stupid, and he wasn't willing to stand by and let innocents be killed. That went a long way, in her book.
But there was Kacey. And Kara had a strict policy about kids: she didn't want them, and didn't have any interest in dealing with them.
Which made Sam Anders, with his gorgeous body, intense blue eyes, and wide smile, entirely off-limits.
It truly was a pity.
"We should get some rest," Anders murmured, turning off Kacey's light. He reached out and touched her shoulder. "C'mon, Captain, you should sleep first as thank you for all you've done for us."
"You're the one who was strapped to a wall. I'll take first watch."
He chuckled softly, then said, "Don't forget to wake me. You need your beauty sleep, too."
She snorted.
Pulling his hand away from her shoulder, she heard him shifting before apparently closing his eyes and falling almost immediately to sleep. As his breathing evened out, she considered moving closer to him, then opted against it. Any comfort and warmth might make her resolve about kids weaken. It might also put her to sleep.
-
Cut for length, continued in this post
Fandom: This is a BSG/Aliens fusion/Alternate Universe. It doesn't follow the plot of either universe particularly well, though the latter has more say in the formation and proceedings. The aliens, otoh, look more like the Brood from Marvel's X-Men.
Pairings: Kara Thrace/Sam Anders, implied Sharon Valerii/Karl Agathon
Characters: Kara Thrace, Sam Anders, Sharon Valerii, Karl Agathon, Maggie Edmonson, a few others who don't really have large parts.
Rating: R, violence, language, adult situations, death, destruction, etc.
Genre: Action/Adventure, Explosions Are Cool
Length: 18,000 words
Notes: I started this as a ficlet for the bsg_epics ship war. And at about 3,000 words, I was cranky, but amused that at least I was writing something kinda long. I stopped thinking it would end around 10,000 words. *shrugs* This is not particularly romantic, either.
Summary: Kara Thrace's crew crash-land on a bug-infested asteroid and all hell breaks loose.
Xenophobic Agenda
by ALC Punk!
The whole thing started out as just another challenge for Kara Thrace and her squad of marines. Go to an asteroid where colonists were terra-forming, find out why they'd lost contact. Listen to the battle stories of a civilian who claimed the asteroid contained 'aliens'. The problems started when the electro-magnetics in the atmosphere knocked their troop carrier for a loop and sent them plummeting to the surface.
And then worse: the aliens were real, and they were salivating bug-like things. Two scouts had rushed back with the report, the whites of their eyes showing as they huddled into their seats.
Kara had snapped a series of orders after that, trying to prepare them for what might be an attack.
"We've got incoming!" The alarms started to go, and Kara lost the sound of her voice echoing in the troop carrier. Her squad quickly started gearing up, rifles and automatics at the ready within seconds. She felt a little pride over their quick response.
The lights flickered, and Kara felt the sweat on her back freeze in dread as the emergencies came on a second after the main battery failed.
"It's them." The civilian consultant had been saying all sorts of shit, and this seemed to be no exception. "They cut the power. We are so frakked."
Kara didn't like believing that aliens would be that intelligent, but she couldn't deny that it was easier to believe than that state-of-the-art equipment just happened to malfunction after she and her team crash-landed on the asteroid.
"I've got movement!" Maggie Edmonson sang out from her position by the radar equipment that had hastily been turned into more useful sensors while they waited for pickup from the Galactica (Kara had declared the mission scrubbed until the atmospheric interference was sorted out). "Ten meters and closing!"
"Shit." Moving up to Kara's side, Sam Anders shoved a hand through his hair. He was almost built enough to be one of Kara's troops, but he'd gone for work in the shipyards and dock crews, back on Caprica Station. Still, she had to admit he had nice lines on him. "We should be able to see them by now."
"Yeah?"
"Six meters!"
Now they should definitely be able to see and hear them, even with only the emergency lighting. There should be bugs climbing in through the still-closed hatch. Kara pulled in a breath, and then froze. There was the faintest sound of something moving. Slowly, she tracked the sound with her eyes, staring up above them, at the metal that was their only protection from the wind that ravaged the asteroid.
"Shit." Grabbing for a flashlight, Kara pointed at Sam. "Give me a boost up to the maintenance hatch."
He did as he was told, hands lacing together as he bent just enough for her to place her foot in them. Then he was pushing upwards and she was shoving--Sharon Valerii smacked into her back, giving her more momentum, and then Kara was close enough to the hatch to dog it open, light in one hand, hatch in the other.
For a moment, she couldn't make sense of what she was seeing. Then the images resolved: it was hard to tell how many of them there were, giant, cockroach-like things all swarming around the hull as far as the eye could see.
"Oh, gods," she gasped, yanking the hatch closed and locking it. "They're all over us."
Anders pulled her back down to the ground, his hands still on her waist when he asked, "Are there any weak-points?"
"No--yes--I don't know." She wanted to bat his hands away, but she couldn't deny that they were a welcome distraction from her coming death at the pincers of giant bugs. She swore again and pulled free of his hold. "Maggie, get on the horn to Galactica again, tell them to hurry their asses into picking us up!"
"We're dead in here," Anders said, his voice fierce. "If we get out of here, make a run for the colony buildings--"
His suggestion was lost in the sound of a machine gun firing, and Kara tracked it to Agathon, who'd been closest to where the bugs were climbing on the outside of the ship. They'd gotten in, somehow, and they shrieked as they died.
"Maggie, grab the transmitter, and get the frak out the emergency hatch--" Kara grabbed Valerii, "Go with her, we'll be right behind you."
There was no way to defend themselves inside a giant tin can. They were sitting ducks, and if she'd been thinking, she would have evacuated long ago. But she'd thought they'd get a faster pick-up, out here. She hadn't quite believed that there was danger from giant-ass bugs. Turned out, she was wrong.
"Anders, you go, too." Raising her voice, she shouted, "Agathon, we're getting out of here, move your ass!"
Easier said than done--now that they were running, the alien bugs seemed determined to stop them. Kara opened fire on two, then grabbed for the back of Karl Agathon's shirt and pulled.
He fired twice more, then ran, as Kara took up a stance to cover him.
To her right, someone screamed, and Kara glanced over to find that one of the bugs had snuck by and had its pincers clamped around the leg of one of the non-coms. Jammer, she thought. She shot through its carapace, and he screamed again, going down as another one flung itself onto the wounded man. Probably trying for an easy meal.
"Shit--" Another one of her people went down, and Kara turned back to shoot at the corner where they were getting in.
"Thrace, Thrace, we have to go--they're starting to get behind us."
Anders. Kara shot him a glare over his shoulder, "I told you to go!"
"Not without--Kara!" He fired over her head, then wrapped an arm around her waist and began backing towards where Valerii was laying down covering fire to the right and left in quick, jerky movements. "Keep them off our front."
She didn't need his suggestion, of course. She'd picked off three of them before he'd finished his words.
Then Valerii was diving out the hatch, and Anders was pulling the pin from a grenade and lobbing it forward.
With an ease she would berate him for later, he turned and shoved her ahead of himself, clearing the hatch as the grenade bounced once, twice, and then exploded. The shockwave knocked them to the ground, Sam landing half-on her, half-off.
Kara struggled free and got to her knees, eyes trying to track every movement as Valerii dragged Anders to his feet, then took off at Kara's growl.
On her own feet, Kara shoved Anders ahead of her and joined the flight. In the distance, through the wind, Kara could see Agathon aiming his machine gun at their back trail.
He didn't open fire until they were past them, and Kara turned to watch with satisfaction as he ripped the few remaining bugs to shreds.
-
"Maggie, you looked over the schematics of these buildings. Are there any defensible rooms, or are we frakked?" Things had settled down a little, with Ishay moving among them to patch any injuries. Agathon was taking a survey of their ammunition and guns left, and Anders and Valerii were keeping an eye on the field where the still-smoking carcass of the transport was.
"One level up--there's roof access, but if we put someone on the roof, we should be fine."
For what definition of 'fine', Kara didn't bother to ask. She ordered Maggie into the lead and stationed herself and Anders at the back.
"Tell me about these aliens, Anders." Be useful, her tone said.
He scowled, "If you'd listened to me on the journey out--"
"Get your panties flattened, mister," she snapped. "None of my people have ever seen anything like this, and your fairy stories were useless without seeing the reality."
"I suppose it is believing," he muttered, fists clenched. "The Company didn't believe me, either."
"Yeah? We get outta this, I'll show the Company any proof they need. With this, if I have to." She patted the gun in her arms. Many things could be solved if you just shot them enough.
He snorted, but gave her a look before glancing over his shoulder to check behind them. Then he quietly explained his earlier encounter with the creatures. One of them had wiped out his whole crew and almost gotten him. Kara wasn't entirely sure she believed everything he said, but she'd seen the things in action now, so she thought most of what he said was true.
And she was a little impressed that he'd survived.
She shot a glance at him again, wondering why he'd never thought to join the military after his experience, then realized that with losing his ship and crew on his record no good mercenary group would have touched him, and the Company had put enough black marks on their own ledger to make sure that he had no recourse but the shipyards.
The scrape of metal against metal made her look over her shoulder, but there wasn't anything to see. Then the sound came again, and she spotted the cause. Down at floor-level, there was a small hatch, probably leading into the ventilation system.
"Anders. They small enough to get through something like that?" She pointed, eyes scanning the rest of the walkway behind them for movement.
Nothing.
"Don't think so." He moved and crouched down, pushing at the flap and frowning. "I thought you said all the colonists were dead?"
"They are."
Anders looked up at her with a half-grin on his face, and then he ducked and dove through the flap. It was just barely large enough for him to wriggle through, and Kara dropped to her knees to grab his ankle before he could completely disappear, "What the frak are you doing?"
The boot in her hand tugged free, and then Anders began wiggling his way backwards. When his head finally appeared, Kara could see that his arms were extended, hands holding onto a kid.
When they were both out of the duct-work, Kara raised her eyebrows at him. "I guess they're not all dead. Now, c'mon before the rest of them get too far ahead of us."
-
Once cleaned up a little, the kid turned out to be a little girl. She refused to answer any and all questions, but Kara had never had much of a way with kids and even less interest in them. Ishay said the kid seemed healthy--if a little vitamin-deficient. Since he was the civilian, she left Anders to deal with her, and went to help Valerii start welding things closed.
"They tried this before." Sharon's voice was low as she waited for Kara to tug a panel closed. "You can see the markings, where they broke through it."
"We only have to be here long enough for the pick-up." Not that Kara found that reassuring. So much had gone wrong already, that she was pretty sure 'reassuring' was no longer in her personal lexicon. "And we're better at this than some soft colonists."
"Are we?" The look Valerii shot her wasn't polite. "Two of our troop are already dead, ma'am."
"Wanna make it three, you keep right on spouting that bullshit," Kara suggested.
Valerii glared at her, but shut her mouth on whatever else she was going to say, and they finished their task in silence.
Wanting to keep Valerii's opinions out of the general crew, Kara positioned her with Agathon up on the roof. The room they were in had some sort of skylight, with a ladder built into the wall underneath it. If worse came to worse, Kara planned for them all to evacuate that way.
"I figure they're based here," Maggie told her, gesturing at the colony maps she'd scrounged. Paper maps felt a little wrong in this day and age, but Kara could go with it, since there wasn't any power for the computers anyway.
Kara traced a finger over the reactors that the colony had installed, and considered what she knew of bugs. Then she decided that smashing the occasional roach in her apartment wasn't the same thing. "Anders, get over here, I need your opinion on something."
He brought the kid with him and bent over the table, listening to Maggie's statements before he shrugged. "Could be."
"Would they be attracted to the heat and electrical fields?" Kara asked him, absently noticing that the kid was listening to them with scorn in her gaze.
"Yes. When the eggs were found--the last time I encountered these things--they were in the drive unit of the crashed ship." He frowned and tapped a finger over the terra-forming plant. "I bet they've got eggs laid all through this area."
"Can we take the fight to them?" Kara had never much liked the idea of hiding from her enemies. "Look, if they're in the power station, that's all one gigantic bomb just waiting for a trigger."
"Are you crazy?" From the other side of the table, their token Company rep, a Tom Zarek, glared at them. "You can't just destroy Company property like that. This will be a viable colony, once the infestation has been wiped out. And that power station is worth millions."
Kara smiled at him, "Do I look like I give a frak about the Company's profits, Mr. Zarek?"
Having the Company man with them hadn't been her idea, either. At least Anders had his uses. Mr. Zarek just seemed worried about profits and loss.
"No, Captain," he said, his tone dry. "I'm aware of your opinion. But you can't expect me to sit quietly while you plan to destroy this facility."
"Then stand there quietly," Kara snapped. She turned to Maggie. "Do we have enough explosives to get a chain reaction started?"
She frowned, looking over the list Agathon had compiled. "I don't know. Maybe."
Next to Kara, Anders shifted, as though he wanted to say something. She shot him a glance with her eyebrows raised, but he shook his head. Still working on whatever he was thinkin' of, then. She turned back to the others. "Right. here's what we're going to do. Agathon and I are heading down to the reactors--there are enough back corridors to give us access without encountering the bugs. Maggie, you and Valerii are staying here with the civvies and Ishay--keep signaling Galactica for that pick up."
"That's suicide." Maggie said, her tone flat.
"You know Agathon and I have gotten out of worse trouble," Kara reminded her.
"But not like this!"
"And what if the aliens come here while you're gone, Captain? Where will we go next?" There was something smug in Zarek's question, and he leaned against the table with a patronizing smile on his face. "Just stay here, and we'll all get off this rock together."
"I'll go," Anders said quietly.
Kara ignored him to point at Maggie, "I'm putting the Lieutenant in charge. She's as good as--if not better than--I am at this shit. We'll keep in contact with you via comms, but if the shuttle can't wait, you all get the frak out of here."
"There's an escape shuttle on the schematics--"
"You can't do this, Captain--"
"Suicide missions are against the code--"
Their voices were raising, and Kara held up a hand to stop them. Next to her, Anders took the opportunity to insert his own words into the proceedings, "I'll go, Captain. Leave Agathon here on guard."
At least it was a useful suggestion. Kara gave him a look, sizing him up again and remembering that he hadn't been too bad with a gun. "What about the kid?"
"She stays here," he said, sounding amused. "Not like I'm attached at the hip to her. Right, kid?"
The kid made a sound that might have been a snort, but didn't say anything.
"Fine." Kara glared around the room at everyone as they all opened their mouths to continue the argument. "Maggie, when is the Galactica transport getting here?"
"Their last eta was four hours from now." It was nice to hear someone being professional. Maggie made a notation on the map, then added, "I estimate it should take you that long to get there, set the charges, and get back--with any added complications on the way."
"Right. Let's get the gear and get the frak out of here."
-
It wasn't that Kara trusted Sam Anders to watch her back. It was that he seemed competent enough to be easily sacrificed if they were gonna end up dead on the mission. That's what she told herself as they went back out through the door and into the corridor, watching every shadow. Frak-up should already go on her tombstone, and she'd be all right with adding another entry to that ledger. But that didn't mean she was gonna go down easy, and if the difference between failure and success was Sam Anders dying on her watch--well, she wasn't going to think about that.
The air out in the corridors was colder, and she shivered a little, wishing that the bugs hadn't killed the colony's life support so thoroughly out here.
Kara wasn't much for being a colonist, but she wondered how the people living here had been able to stand the endless dark-brown of the corridor walls. It must be some industrial color that came cheap, but it looked like really ugly mud and didn't do much to endear her to the place.
"Do they go in for murals? Colors?" She found herself muttering as they came across the room designated for the schooling of young minds. It was the same ugly brown, without any of the ornamentation that Kara vaguely remembered from her own childhood. No alphabet decorating the upper walls, no pictures of animals or abstract impressions of the atom. Just unrelenting brown.
"Too expensive. Company probably arranges for 'essentials', but murals and colored paint?" Anders shrugged and pointed through the classroom to the door on the other side. "That should get us to that back corridor Maggie was talking about."
"Right."
With one last disdainful look at the walls, Kara led the way through the room, keeping to one side and leaving the desks alone. As much as a childish part of her wanted to knock over the still-orderly rows, she simply couldn't do it. Sound might attract the bugs.
She had almost reached the door, when Sam hissed a warning. Turning, she tracked her gun through the room, trying to find whatever he'd seen. A skittering noise reached her ears, and she shot a glance upwards, grateful that no looming cockroaches were waiting to drop down on them. "What?"
"Don't move," he growled.
"I--" Kara choked off the sound, finally seeing what he had. A cluster of smaller bugs, just under one of the desks. Perhaps they were playing or stalking, or just waiting. It didn't matter. They were between the two of them and either door, and there was no way she would get her gun around in time to fire.
But her body was blocking their view of Anders (she thought wildly that bugs didn't have eyes, did they?), and the gun in his hands brushed against her side before he opened fire.
The short spurt of bullets shredded the insects, and Kara turned away from them, running for the door and really hoping that the corridor beyond was clear.
It was, and Anders slammed the door shut to stop any pursuit. She could hear that skittering, ticking noise that the bugs made as they clustered on the other side or went for reinforcements. She wasn't entirely sure what they were doing, and she didn't think she cared.
-
They had to back-track twice to avoid more infestations (shooting things might have been therapeutic, but a waste of ammunition they couldn't replace), but eventually, Kara could feel the air getting warmer. The reactors put off heat with most of the systems down. She didn't think it was enough to cause them to explode on their own. As much as she hated the idea of intelligent bugs, these ones might be smart enough not to wreck all of the control systems. She shot a glance at her watch and swore softly. Already over time for the outward-bound journey.
Anders was in the lead, map in one hand, gun in the other. It gave Kara an unrestricted view of his ass, and she firmly told herself that she should be concentrating on other things. Didn't stop her from looking, though.
A skittering noise came from the corridor they were crossing, and Kara put on a burst of speed to narrow the gap between them.
The walls were beginning to look different, coated in some slimy substance and what looked like dead bug carapaces. Eyes narrowing, Kara studied one of them for a minute before deciding that it was truly dead.
"One more crossing and then we need to get down a few levels to be under the reactors," Anders murmured, his voice breaking the waiting stillness of the corridor.
"Fine."
With the crossing came more of the bugs on the walls, and a damp humidity that crept close to their skin and held on tenaciously. Kara wiped the sweat out of her eyes and checked behind them again. Nothing. No sign of movement, no skittering, creeping bugs. She wanted to feel relieved about that, but the hair on the back of her neck was standing at attention and her gut was pinging off like a fire alarm.
Turning back, she found Anders stopping at a railing and just staring out. She joined him, trying to take in the scale of the place. In front of them, the building opened up, gantries criss-crossing over a vast room. From their vantage, they could stare down at the reactors and the floor even further below them.
For a moment, Kara's eyes didn't want to work. The low level of light from the emergency circuits bathed everything in red, and it was hard to tell where the carapace and slime-covered walls, and the cocoon-like structures began. It was the colonists, all strung along like peas in a pod, and Kara found her hand gripping the railing with too much force. Her fingers hurt when she pulled them off.
"Good Gods," she hissed.
"Shit, those are eggs." Anders pointed. There were nodules scattered all over the floor down there, some of them already open and hollow.
Before she could answer him, he was already moving, heading towards the stairs that led downwards. Kara shot the horrible sight one more look, then joined him in getting down to that level as fast as they could.
As she ran down the stairs, she wondered if the bugs would be stirred by their presence, then decided there was no point on betting on a sure thing.
The image was worse when it was close-up, and Kara picked her way through the eggs on the floor until she was able to reach up and check one of the bodies. The man jerked, and his eyes flickered open. "Help me," he whispered weakly, his eyes rolling and searching, as though he wasn't entirely aware of her.
"Please," murmured another voice, "Please kill us."
For just a moment, Kara entertained the idea of freeing these people. Of bringing them back and saving their lives. But the cold reality was that some of them were probably already infested, and she couldn't chance it. It didn't matter that it was murder to leave them, she couldn't risk letting any of the bugs escape the asteroid. That was the whole reason they were going to blow up the reactors.
"I'm sorry," she murmured, turning away.
One of the eggs suddenly burst open, spewing a thing that Kara would have nightmares about for the rest of her life. It oozed and wriggled, aiming blindly for her, and she shot it with a wild feeling of escaping a horrible fate. But then another and another of the eggs burst, and she swore.
"Here, Captain--" Anders tossed her one of the grenades and gestured.
Kara pulled the pin and handed it to the woman who had begged. Then she ran, dodging more than one bursting egg to get back to Anders. They both ducked around the side of one of the pillars as the grenade exploded behind them. Fire and destruction shot upwards and outwards.
The whole complex shook for a moment, and Kara grabbed for Anders' arm to steady herself.
"We have to get the charges set--" she swore as bugs began appearing, crawling out of ragged tears in the walls, like ants whose hill had been kicked. "Shit--"
"C'mon!"
They ran, dodging and firing, breaking free of their pursuit long enough to duck under the reactors themselves. Kara found the coolant pipes, then grabbed a fire axe and thrust it at Anders. "Hit all of those!"
Ignoring the signs that warned about coolant leaks, Anders did as she'd ordered, breaking into the pipes while she knelt under the power feeds and began building their bomb from the fragmentation grenades. It was a complicated process, removing the detonators and slaving them all together, but she'd done it under fire before. Not an experience she'd ever wanted to repeat, but that didn't matter.
"What next?"
"The--" she held her breath to remove the last detonator, then exhaled and pointed. "Those. And then get the frak out of here."
With the detonators slaved, Kara attached a part from her watch and one of the switches from her radio (Maggie could complain about not being able to contact them later), then shoved the entire apparatus into one of the broken coolant pipes while trying not to breathe.
Bad enough she'd been breathing the stuff already, she'd just have to hope she hadn't killed herself before time.
The mixture of coolant and atmospheric gases would build up under the reactors (hopefully killing the bugs just with their lethality), and the grenades would detonate and light the fuse. Without the coolant, the reactors would be pushed into going critical by the other explosion. Or at least, that's what Kara's chemistry classes had taught her (and what Maggie, their explosives expert, had confirmed).
It was just going to take time--about twenty minutes--for everything to build to the right pressures.
Kara staggered out of the mist of coolant and gas, and found Anders waiting. He took her arm, dragging her to the stairwell and up one level before the bugs began to swarm them again.
"We can't fire in here anymore!" She shouted before coughing and gagging on the stench from the earlier explosion.
"This way--" Anders grabbed her arm again, pulling her with him as he ran straight towards one of the smaller swarms. They managed, barely, to kick and bash their way past to get out into the corridor beyond.
With her lungs on fire, Kara didn't have the energy to object to his methods.
Besides, he was saving her life.
-
"We already came this way," Kara said, then coughed again. It was getting better, but her lungs were still not as good as they should be. They were out of ammunition, but there were still bugs stalking them. Stopping was not an option.
"I know."
She grabbed for his wrist and read his watch, then groaned, "We don't have time to waste, Anders. The pick-up shuttle is almost here. And the charges--"
A mirthless laugh escaped him. "Did you really expect us to make it, Captain?"
That silenced her and they went through several corridors before she replied. There was a cold knowledge in her gut, a certainty that she had faced so many times before and escaped. This time, though... "I didn't, Sam. I'm sorry."
His hand grabbed hers, "Be sorry after we're off this rock."
It was the eternal optimism of the man--Kara shoved him forwards, getting him moving again before the bugs caught up. She might die in this place, but she was frakked if she was going to die by pincer. Going out with a bang was far more her style, and she felt a wild grin touch her mouth. "Let's get to the roof, you asshole."
He grinned briefly, and then dragged her onwards.
The emergency lights were beginning to be affected by the reactor's imminent meltdown, and Kara began to see more shapes in the dark than there should be. She wondered what the Company would think of her solution, then decided that maybe she didn't want to know. Anders had said that the Company had wanted his crew to bring the bugs back for study. As what, weapons? They sure as frak weren't good for medical science, unless you wanted to know how best to burn someone with acid. Or glue them to a wall.
An elevator appeared on the left, and Kara pointed at it. "Roof access?"
"Maybe."
With effort, they got the doors open, and Kara shone her light up, then down. No sign of bugs, and the car was somewhere below them. But the shaft was intact, and it went up at least four more levels. "It's a death-trap," she murmured.
"It'll be faster than finding another set of stairs."
She nodded and tucked the light into her gear again, then reached out for the first rungs of the ladder and began climbing. Below her, Sam waited just long enough for her to get above him, then joined her.
The climb went quickly, and Kara pulled her light out before they reached the top to double-check their safety and figure out where to go. A trap-door led up into the workings of the elevator, and she let Sam take the lead again, with his map as he tried to orient where they were to where they should be on the pieces of paper.
"Here--" Having to bend almost double, Anders hurried along until they reached another trap-door. "This should be the roof."
Kara nodded, and then clicked off her light, listening. The roar of the wind was easy to hear, as was the distant sound of the ticking of bug feet. In the dark, it was hard to tell where the latter sound came from, but it echoed. "They're in the shaft."
"What've we got to lose?"
Together, they pushed the door upwards, letting it drop flat on the roof while Kara scrambled out and stood there, covering them with her empty pistol. The wind battered her, but it was a welcome relief from the dark and humid interior.
Even better, she could now see--though not hear--the descending form of the troop carrier. "Shit. We'll be late--"
"No we won't." He finished climbing out and gestured for her to help him. Together, they slammed the trap-door closed and ran for where the others were gathered in a huddle.
"Glad you could make it!" Maggie shouted as they got closer. But then her expression changed, and she turned and snapped. "Agathon, cover fire!"
Kara glanced back to find the bugs boiling out of the door behind them. "Shit--"
With a surge, Anders pulled her forwards and they reached the others and dropped down as Agathon and Valerii opened fire. The sound was too loud, washing away the wind and the engine noise from the troop carrier. Kara rolled back to her feet and watched the carrier struggle to land with the wind buffeting it every which way. At least they'd figured out how to shield the electronics from magnetic interference.
It managed to land, but barely, and Kara was already shoving Anders and the kid (who'd grabbed onto him immediately) towards the dropping ramp even before Maggie gave the order to board.
One of the bugs managed to break past Agathon and Maggie turned and shot it, shattering the carapace and spraying everyone in the vicinity with acid. Both Valerii and Agathon shrieked, but stayed on their feet. Kara had time to notice that Zarek was already aboard the transport before she turned back and shouted. "Agathon, Valerii, fall back. Now!"
Agathon got in another burst of fire, then turned and ran past Kara as Valerii covered him. Then Valerii turned and ran as well, leaving Kara as the last one to board.
She jumped for the already-rising transport and Anders' hands grabbed hers, dragging her inside while the bugs tried to execute the same maneuver and fell back to the roof.
Then the door was closed, and they were strapping in. Agathon was whining about his injuries and Maggie was telling him to shut up.
Kara glanced at the flight clock and then turned to Anders, still standing too close to her for comfort. "Shall we?"
"Captain, I forbid you to do this, it's an act of treason against the company--"
"Mister Zarek," Kara interrupted him, "We can still put you back down on that rock. So I suggest you shut up and sit down. Sam?"
She held out her radio and he smiled grimly before closing his fingers over hers.
The explosion rocked the entire complex below them, sending shockwaves through the air and causing the transport to veer dangerously before the cursing pilot got it back under control.
Kara strapped herself in, unsurprised when Anders took the seat next to hers, the kid still attached to him.
"Get some rest," she suggested quietly. "I think the storm is yet to come."
-
Her crew got out of the situation slightly damaged, but alive, though they had to go back into cryo-sleep for the trip back to Caprica Station. Agathon and Valerii were already comparing their burn scars and trying to decide who was the most bad-ass when they docked. That just left the Company to deal with, and Kara found that she had her hands full with the kind of political and economical mess she had never wanted.
"The Company will not tolerate this sort of--"
"Bite me," Kara suggested, interrupting the esteemed chairperson with a wave of her hand. "My people were in danger."
"That does not justify destroying Company property, as I'm sure Mr. Zarek made you fully aware" the man snapped, staring down his nose at her.
"It does in my book. Look, you're the people who sent those colonists out there. You had Anders' report, and you knew what was there. Just because I cleaned up your mess for you--" she snorted, "Well, I don't think that would look too good on your public records, now would it?"
The threat made the man narrow his eyes even further. Mister William Cavil was not the easiest of men to understand, but he knew how to play the stock market and parlay anything into getting himself and the Company ahead. That Kara would dare threaten either made her a liability, and she knew that. But she also knew that it would be harder to silence Anders and the rest of her team if he did something to her.
She smiled at him. "If it helps, mister chairperson, I will resign my commission with the company. But don't expect me to roll over and take whatever shit you try to hand me afterwards."
For a moment, he was silent. Then he smiled, though it didn't reach his eyes. Those orbs remained as cold and calculating as before. "Very well. Tender your resignation and see that you do not return to Caprica Station without the Company's consent or request. You will not be charged for your dereliction of duty."
Better than she'd hoped for, even if she could hear the 'for now'. By the time that 'for now' came around, she expected to have enough on Chairperson Cavil to topple his little empire. And if she didn't? Well, she had lived on the fringes before enlisting, and she could do it again. "Have a good day, ma'am."
"And you, Miss Thrace."
Neither of them meant it.
-
Kara saw Maggie and the others before she turned in her id and side-arm. They didn't want her to leave, though Maggie and Agathon understood her reasons. "Captain, you'd better raise hell out there," Valerii told her. The others didn't offer much in the way of goodbyes, but Kara hadn't known them very well. She and Agathon had come up the ranks together, Valerii and Maggie had joined them on more than one sortie before this. It was why she'd tapped them for her squad when she got her shiny new captaincy.
"I'll miss you assholes," she said affectionately before she turned and left the only life she'd known since she'd reached the age of sixteen.
Put like that, it was devastating and wrong. Wholly astounding in how it seemed to change who she was. Fundamentally, Kara reflected, she was the same person. Wasn't she? She had always put her ass on the line for her people, and now she'd gone one step too far in doing so. The Company wouldn't forgive her the destruction of the gear on the asteroid, and Kara wasn't sure it mattered if they did or not.
She knew their dirty little secret.
A check at the shuttle bays told her there was a transport off-station leaving the next morning. She scheduled herself to be on it, pleased to see that the Company hadn't ruined her account as well as her job. There was no reason for her to stay on the station now, and even less reason to stay within reach of the Company's goons.
Then she headed for a bar.
It was time to get incredibly drunk, give herself one last send-off before kissing the Company goodbye.
With her credit still good, she took a stool in the first one and ordered a round of shots guaranteed to start her on a long journey into being drunk off her ass.
-
Taking a transit cubicle to sleep her drunk off had seemed like a good idea at the time, but Kara managed to sleep through the alarm and miss her shuttle flight, which left her with too much time on her hands. She showered and dressed again, then packed up and made her way down to check the schedules.
Luckily, she hadn't been penalized for missing her flight and was able to book passage on the evening shuttle. Which still left her with hours to kill.
Kara decided that food was in order, followed by another dip into the bars. Being drunk on the shuttle was probably frowned upon, but she didn't care. Noon meal easily found and eaten, she cracked her knuckles and began walking through the causeway, looking for a different bar to drown her sorrows in.
Before she could start her plan for the afternoon, she ran into a small child. The kid leapt out at her as she passed a junction, and it was a good thing Kara could see she was a kid, otherwise there might have been violence. "The frak?"
"He's in trouble," the kid hissed and Kara recognized the little girl from the colony.
"Who is?"
"Sam!" The kid replied, as though that were obvious. She grabbed at Kara's hand and succeeded in dragging her into the corridor that she'd sprung from.
The kid, if Kara remembered correctly, was named Kassandra. She hadn't paid too much attention to her details, leaving that to Anders. He was a civilian, he'd know what to do with her. With a sigh, she knelt and looked the kid in the eye. "Look, Kassandra--"
"Kacey," snapped Kassandra, rolling her eyes. "It's Kacey. And I'm not looking at anything. Sam's in trouble, and I need your help!"
"Fine. Kacey. What's the problem?"
Grabbing Kara's shoulder, Kacey shoved at her, "On your feet, soldier, and follow me."
Actually amused at the order coming from someone who was barely big enough to hold a machine gun let alone fire it, Kara got to her feet and did as she was told.
The kid moved quick when she wanted to, and Kara was hard-pressed to keep up, though she began to frown as she realized they were getting deeper and deeper into the station's core. The Company owned everything here, and she really shouldn't be there anymore. But Kacey wasn't going to slow down and listen to Kara explain that she had blackmailed herself out of a truly horrendous fine and ended up without a job.
But maybe she should have, Kara thought a little bit later, as she realized they were in the medical wing. The experimental one, where she'd never been and hadn't ever wanted to go. A few marines might have used the 'enhancements' on offer, but they just seemed like a bad idea. As for the rest of what went on there, she knew just enough to know that whatever went on there was something she didn't want to know about.
Kacey slowed and tugged Kara to one side of the corridor where there was a small alcove. "He's in there," she pointed at a door further down the corridor. "You have to save him."
"Look, I--"
A shout ripped through the air, the sound muffled by the door, but recognizable. It was full of terror and anger, and Kara knew it was Anders. She didn't know what was going on, but there wasn't really time. "Kace--see these keys?" Kara pointed at the power controls that were housed in the alcove. "I want you to count to sixty, and then hit them in this order."
The kid watched intently, then nodded.
"Right." Tust a kid to save their asses? What was she thinking? Kara licked her lips and eyed the door down the corridor, hoping that this section of the station used the same power configurations as the troop decks. "Ready?"
"Go."
Kara went, walking slowly down the hall until she was at the door. A glance through the window showed her a scene from nightmare: Sam was shackled to the wall, and in front of him wriggled bug larva, intent on infestation. To one side of the room, Kara could see there were people watching through a large window. Scientists from the Company, most likely. So. They had gotten eggs out somehow.
Perhaps on Anders' capsule when he was lost in space. Perhaps from Galactica. There was no way of telling, but they had to be stopped.
The count in her head reached sixty and the lights flickered and died. Emergency lighting snapped on and Kara shoved the door open, grateful to find the lock dead with the power out.
There was no time for finesse, she grabbed the chair she'd seen and swung it up and down, crushing the larva before they could reach Anders. In the flickering yellow light, she could see surprise on his face, but didn't have time to deal with it.
Instead, she turned and looked at the scientists who were frantically scrambling with their consoles. She smiled and swung the chair into the glass of the window, shattering it with her second swing. "Unlock his cuffs or so help me gods, I'll--"
"No, no, here--" one of the men stabbed into the panel and Kara heard Anders heave a sigh of relief.
"Good boys." Kara stepped back and swung again, the chair smashing into one of the consoles when she released it. She blew them a kiss and turned to grab Anders' hand.
They ran out the door to the alcove where Anders looked entirely unsurprised to finger her as he scooped up Kacey, tucking her against his side. "Thanks."
"Later," she suggested before she led the way out of the Company's high-security medical sector. With the power out, there was just a chance that they'd make it out before marines who weren't loyal to her would show up to arrest them. She hoped.
-
"So."
Kara looked up from the jammer she was wiring together to find Anders watching her intently. Curled against his side, Kacey appeared to be asleep. They'd gone to ground near the shipyards, and Kara was pretty sure it wouldn't be long till the Company searched for them there. So far, they'd managed to avoid getting caught, but with the plan she had in mind, she knew they were going to need an edge. "Hrm?"
"How did you find me?"
"The kid." Kara twisted another connection together, stuck the battery in and grinned as the led lit. "I hope you don't have anything in your quarters that you can't live without."
"Not really, no."
"Good. 'Cause we're gonna have to steal a ship to get out of here, and it's gonna have to be now--before they expect us to do it." That wasn't entirely true. But letting him know that their odds of getting out of this alive were slim to none wouldn't really make him happier. She had to admit it was a little sad that she'd had a better chance of escaping the bug-infested asteroid.
"Can we do that?"
"Son," Kara said, her tone dry, "I can fly anything. I just don't get much chance to."
"I'll take your word for it. But I don't like leaving. If they have more eggs in their lab..."
She sighed. "I know. But there's no way to do anything about it. They'll find us, sooner or later. And I bet this isn't the only facility the Company has for processing them. Do you know what they want them for?"
"Weapons."
That made a sort of horrific sense: the bugs had all sorts of improvements on human biology that the Company would be able to exploit as weaponry and defense. Still didn't make it right. "You think they sent the colonists on purpose?"
"I'm certain of it now."
Kara turned the jammer over in her hands and nodded, "So'm I."
"We can't leave."
A snort escaped her, "I hate to tell you this, Anders, but if you don't leave, we're both toast."
He crossed his arms and glared at her. "But if we leave--what if those things get out? What then? This entire station is at risk. It could become the breeding ground for a whole new generation."
That caused a shudder to go through her, but she shook her head. "We have no weapons, Sam. They're looking for us."
Something nearby made a noise, and they both fell silent as booted feet walked by overhead. Kara kept her face down, not wanting anyone to look through the grating and spot the three people hiding underneath it. She might have saved herself the trouble.
"Thought you'd be here."
Kara's head snapped up, and she found Agathon staring down at her. Valerii was next to him, and she thought Maggie was just beyond. "Get the frak out of here, you idiots."
"Captain, you ain't in charge of us no more." Faintly disapproving, Agathon knelt and waggled a finger at her. "'Sides, we got worse trouble than you running out on us."
"I didn't--"
"Just tell her, Karl," Valerii hissed in annoyance.
"Company's sending us to Kobol, Captain."
Kobol was possibly the most dangerous of the colonies, full of unrest and constantly having uprisings. Once or twice, Kara had joked about leading her marines into the cities and quelling everything, but she wasn't stupid enough to think it would be that simple. The Company was sending her squad out there to die.
"Well, shit," she said. "What the hell do you want me to do about it?"
Valerii snickered, "Aw, Captain. And here we thought you'd miss us."
"You didn't hear what they're sending us out with." Agathon was practically grinning his face off. He glanced around to make sure no one had noticed their odd little discussion and lowered his voice. "Dr. Robert and a whole passel of those egg things."
"Should you be tellin' me this?" Kara demanded.
"No. But, Captain--" and here, Valerii seemed to be at a loss as to how to finish her statement.
"It's evidence." Maggie was finally joining the conversation, nudging Agathon to his feet while she directed her voice down into the grating. "Evidence of the company attempting something horrific."
Kara looked at Anders, who looked up through the grate at her marines. Decommissioned or not, they were still her people. She almost felt proud of that. But that didn't change the fact that she and Anders were in deep shit, and if the marines got involved, it might not go so well for them. On the other hand, if the Company was determined to send them to Kobol with Robert and his eggs...
"Would it be enough for the Council?" Kara asked Anders, her voice low. She knew something of the politics of the Colonial governing body, but not enough to guess with something like this.
"Maybe."
"Even if it isn't enough, we can't let those things get out, Captain." It was odd. Maggie had never seemed the crusading type before, but maybe she'd always had hidden depths. "Colonists don't deserve that shit happening to them."
Kara frowned, but not at Maggie. Then she looked up. "Is he taking all of the eggs with him?"
"Yeah." Agathon was back in the conversation. "Heard one of his flunkies complaining that you'd busted up all the spares they had, so they were gonna rely on the few left to 'deal with things' on Kobol."
The Company had vested interests in Kobol, so it didn't surprise Kara that they were being cold-blooded about stopping the unrest. That didn't make it all right, though. As for the shortage of eggs, well that was a relief--at least there weren't another hundred of the damned things to deal with. Kara wasn't so worried about a few. Then again, she shot a glance at Anders, remembering his story. Maybe only one egg would be one too many. "What ship are you going out on?"
"Pegasus." Maggie didn't sound impressed, despite the fact that the newest battlestar in the fleet was going to be ferrying her to her new post.
"Only the best for our funeral pyres," joked Agathon.
It wouldn't be easy to sneak onto Pegasus, but Kara was willing to do it. It was probably a better bet than trying to steal something and just follow behind. "Right. You three get the frak out of here."
"Shit, I don't miss you at all, Captain," muttered Valerii.
But they went without any complaints other than the usual grumbling. When they were gone, Kara rubbed a hand over her face. "We're going to have to get on that ship, and I don't want them implicated if we're caught," she said, then wondered why she was explaining herself to a civilian.
Anders nodded, "Figured." He looked down at Kacey and sighed, "I don't want to take her, but I don't think I can leave her here. The Company will just throw her into the system, and she'll be even worse off."
Nice guy, Kara decided. She wondered how the hell he'd become caught up in all this shit. His old ship had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, she couldn't worry about that now. There was a battlestar to get on board and a mission to frak up.
-
Sneaking aboard the Pegasus was complicated and meant hiding in some pretty tight spaces. Kara started getting used to the flare of awareness in her body as she pressed up against Anders in yet another storage locker while the kid scouted ahead to make sure it was clear. It was the kid doing the scouting, as she was the one who could hide most easily. Most marines weren't gonna look down first on hearing a noise. They were gonna look up and out. Kacey could take advantage of that a lot more easily than Kara could.
Though she'd argued about it at first, she was mostly resigned to it now. Ever since she'd woken, the kid had been determined to pull her own weight in their operation.
A soft patter of feet told Kara she could pull away from Anders, but she was sort of liking the whole pressed-up-against-him thing, and seriously remonstrating with herself about getting distracted from the mission.
"Hey," Kacey hissed, her hand smacking Kara's leg. "Let's go, you two."
Like she was the one in charge. Kara was beginning to regret not arguing more. With a sound she hoped didn't sound as disappointed aloud as it did in her head, Kara pulled free of Anders and stepped out into the corridor. She strode ahead of the other two until she came to the junction Kacey had scouted for them and peered around it quickly.
Deserted. Good. She glanced back and waved a hand at them before moving around the corner and heading for the hatch. It was the last doorway they would have to pass through for a while.
All battlestars were riddled with extra crawl-spaces and slim hallways for the maintenance crews to use to access places of the ship that weren't easy to get to. Kara was betting that with their departure time being soon that most of the crews had already run checks. If they could get into the hallways and bunk down in an out-of-the-way space, they'd be home-free for the time being.
They'd have to worry about things like food later on.
Kara tapped the unlock sequence into the panel on the hatch and watched it slide open. The slim hallway beyond was silent, empty and dark. Well, hopefully no one was afraid of the dark. "In here. Fast."
In sixty seconds, the hatch would close again and their entry would be erased from the computer logs.
Pushing Kacey ahead of him, Anders quickly walked into the hallway. Kara followed and was pleased to hear the hatch close with a soft snick, the lock clicking back on.
A light flicked on, and Anders handed it down to Kacey, who used it to find herself a spot to sit.
"We should be able to talk now. But quietly," Kara murmured as she moved down the hallway to check the panel at the other end. Locked. Good. She'd be able to over-ride both hatches whenever they needed to.
Anders grunted, then sat down near Kacey. "Where are we?"
"Near auxiliary control--" she flashed him a smile in the dimness, "I like to keep my options open."
"So I've noticed."
Not sure whether to take that as a compliment or not, Kara shrugged and sat down next to him. It might get cold, and he was the nearest source of warmth. Kacey shot her a look that might have been a warning, but only wriggled closer to Anders' other side with a soft sigh. He wrapped his arm around the kid without really seeming to notice what he was doing, and Kara wondered who he had been before getting lost in space.
She also sort of wished the kid weren't there.
In the normal course of things, given the state of her love-life (lack of one), she would probably have already tried to bed Anders. He was easy on the eyes, tall and well-built. He wasn't stupid, and he wasn't willing to stand by and let innocents be killed. That went a long way, in her book.
But there was Kacey. And Kara had a strict policy about kids: she didn't want them, and didn't have any interest in dealing with them.
Which made Sam Anders, with his gorgeous body, intense blue eyes, and wide smile, entirely off-limits.
It truly was a pity.
"We should get some rest," Anders murmured, turning off Kacey's light. He reached out and touched her shoulder. "C'mon, Captain, you should sleep first as thank you for all you've done for us."
"You're the one who was strapped to a wall. I'll take first watch."
He chuckled softly, then said, "Don't forget to wake me. You need your beauty sleep, too."
She snorted.
Pulling his hand away from her shoulder, she heard him shifting before apparently closing his eyes and falling almost immediately to sleep. As his breathing evened out, she considered moving closer to him, then opted against it. Any comfort and warmth might make her resolve about kids weaken. It might also put her to sleep.
-
Cut for length, continued in this post