(no subject)
Author: pennyante
Word Count: 2,049
Chapter: 1/14 (in Act I)
A/N: One of the first images when I started thinking about maybe-kind-of-possibly writing the story was Galactica, resting massively and forever on the surface of Earth. So here is where it begins.
Chapter 1: Signs
Strange as it was to simply step off a grassy plain, walk up some steps and open a door to get inside Galactica, the flickering fluorescence in its hallways nonetheless felt peaceful and normal to Kara. In the two weeks since they'd arrived, it had become routine for her to report to the CIC every morning directly after breakfast. Not under orders; the crew of Galactica, mostly charged with maintaining peace between wary Cylons and the fractious civilian fleet, didn't meet here anymore. Maybe Lee and his captains’ quorum did. She didn't know.
She'd been avoiding learning where they met. She'd been avoiding Lee altogether. Too risky.
In the air around her, she knew, was a desire for newness, to start everything all over-new jobs to do, new people to drink with, new flora and fauna and starlight. A new history to imagine. Kara could see it, had seen it in the faces along the makeshift bar in the center of camp last night and the shouts of children she'd heard as she'd crossed from her tent to the battlestar this morning. She even envied it.
But she didn't feel it. She couldn't let go of all that had gone before. The stares she got as she walked around camp-that she'd ignored even as she walked here this morning-weren't helping. The stares marked her as something other than human, and even if that something was more, living with it meant living with less. It was like how they'd looked at the Cylons, when they'd first begun to merge with the Twos and Sixes and Eights.
But with still more fear, even when her name rose up in a cheer for bringing them all home.
Each morning, she ignored the whispers and stares and came inside Galactica to visit her Cylon husband. Today, walking down a hallway that the constant light of the sun had reminded her was glaring but nonetheless dim, she set her jaw determinedly. Today. She'd work out a plan for rehabilitating Sam today. She had to; she didn't know how much time she had left, but she could still feel a clock ticking in the part of her heart that had been counting down from the moment she'd returned to the fleet with the directions to earth. For everyone else, their lives were stretching out at their feet, around them. Kara was a dog at the end of a chain, and somewhere, someone was tugging on it. Calling her back.
She quickened her steps. It was all the more reason to hurry.
Gods, but if Athena and Helo don't find any tylium on their patrol, how long before these lights go out? And will Sam go with them?
She knew that most people were beginning to figure out that this planet wasn't the solution to every last problem they'd brought with them.
Gods, this planet. It had never occurred to Kara that the coordinates she'd programmed into the FTL for a last desperate jump across space would land the battlestar directly on a planet, and it still, these two weeks later, made her shiver to think how precisely that song had mapped human destiny. For that jump to have been so dangerously exact, the coordinates in the song had been timed to the planet's orbit and rotation-to the season and the time of day. The images of it coming in from space, as the rest of the fleet had jumped to safer distances, showed that this new Earth was mostly water. It was a miracle they hadn't landed in the ocean. Or a few miles up in the air, only to freefall through the atmosphere to the ground.
Which means they knew the second of the day, month, and year that I would program the jump. They must have.
And who the hell are "they," anyway, Kara? The gods? Why'd they choose you? And why are you still here?
She scowled.
One answer at a time. Concentrate on Sam.
"Morning, Chief," she called upward from the CIC floor, unsurprised that he'd beaten her to Sam's side this morning. Unlike Kara, however, Galen Tyrol didn't simply sit by his old friend-she supposed they were old friends, or something like it-and talk. The Chief, spectroscope in hand, was on his hands and knees on the floor, the outer wall of the basin Sam was lying in open beside him, a haphazard handful of wires spilling on the floor. "Any change?"
"He keeps mentioning an agreement." The Chief glanced up only briefly. "Reintegration, defragmentation. Something about a pressure valve."
She sighed, nodded, pulled her notebook out of her cargo pocket. She'd been jotting down notes, tracking his rambles and commands and odd little fits of poetry. The Chief didn't think they were relevant-at least not medically, or mechanically, or however he thought of the problem with Sam's body. "Like static on a radio," he'd said last week. As he'd said it, his now-permanent grimace had grown deeper. After a lifetime as a machinist-and, of course, as a machine-he was finding simple mechanics impossible to bear.
He might be right.
She sank into the chair, her chair, now permanently stationed next to Sam's tub. "Morning, Sam." She reached into the water, clasped his hand. "Did you have sweet dreams?"
No response. "So, umm, Hoshi's team found two new kinds of fruit trees yesterday. One was amazing-the fruit tastes like a Picon fig but it comes in pods, not peels. The other was stranger, like a bluenut but red and full of bitter seeds. Baltar thinks they'll kill you if you eat 'em before they're ripe."
Sam's stare was unnerving. Kara could never decide if it was worse when he went for a long time without blinking, or when he began to blink rapidly, as though trying to speak with his eyelids.
The Chief grunted softly to himself as he clipped one of the wires that connected to the tubing at the base of Sam's skull and reattached another.
"I remember that when you and I used to imagine finding Earth, we mostly talked about eating real food again-fruits and vegetables and steak. But you know, it never occurred to me that they wouldn't be the same foods from back home. I'd dream about landing on a world filled with coneberries, and tackapples, and good Aerelon sweet yellow squash. The steak would be crusted in Spartan pepper, with a side of maize and mash, all just the same as if we were at the Colonial Day fair in Delphi." She closed her eyes a moment, let her mind go back, even though it was dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. "The food's not bad here, but it's not the same. Let me tell ya, I don't have much that I wouldn't give if I could miraculously find a tackapple grove somewhere in this valley."
Chief tugged on a cord extending from Sam's skull to a place under the basin she couldn't see, and she heard him muttering to himself: "Frak. How am I going to get a light ether transfusion on this godsforsaken planet?"
"The gods brought us here, Chief," Kara said quietly. They did. Or I did. She gritted her teeth.
Sam's eyes flared open at that, and he replied as if he heard what she thought as much what she said. "You have brought humanity to its end, Kara Thrace. Proceed with amputation. A diaspora has no ending. Arrival is in motion and not in space. Pause defragmentation."
Kara scribbled frantically, trying to keep up. With her free hand, she clutched his, down in the cold water, so tightly her knuckles turned white. She asked him the question she asked every day. "Sam. Sam, when will you come back? How do I bring you back?"
"Destiny collapses in the pyramid. New command. Build the cathedral of union for lymphatic integrity. End of line. Resume defragmentation."
Galen had slid back from the basin, was exuding wariness. His brooding eyes had turned inward.
"In the pyramid… does he mean the game? Does he need exercise?" Kara's eyes were frantically scanning what she'd just written down, cursing again her own sloppy handwriting, ruthlessly shoving down her mother's voice inside her head doing the same. "The cathedral of union. Does that mean anything to you, Chief?"
He set down the spectroscope carefully. "There's… actually, there is something. You remember when we landed on the algae planet-when I was trying to decode the symbols around Temple of the-the Temple of Hopes?"
Kara's face stilled. She had lost some of her mind near the Temple of the Five; it had been the site of her affair with Lee, where she'd somehow let herself believe she could have some of him and not all without going crazy. That place had been an island of recklessness in her stupid, reckless life. She'd nearly destroyed everyone she'd been trying to protect-Sam. Lee. Her own equanimity. She'd thought she could survive the poison. What had she said, to push him away? She'd believed it, whatever it was.
Oh, yes. Marriage is a sacrament. It's not a pyramid game. You don't-you don't get do-overs, Lee.
She bent her head, reminded herself she still believed that. That actually, you didn't get do-overs even in pyramid games.
"Yeah. I remember. That temple," She cleared her throat, "almost got me killed."She closed her eyes and let Dee's even features prick behind her eyelids.
"Well. There was a script-an ancient language-around the central pillar, and all over the walls. I couldn't read it, then-just felt like I should be able to. The part of me that was locked up-the, well…"
"The Cylon part."
"Yeah. I think it could read it all along. And I can remember now, what most of it said-even if some of it seems wrong, somehow. But, well, but the things Sam was just saying, some of it was there. 'The Temple of Union shall herald the end of the diaspora.'" The Chief's hand floated up to his throat, fell. "But I'm not sure that makes any sense."
"Why not?"
"It's just that Sam was right, what he said before. Diasporas don't have endings. They end in living in permanent exile. Everyone knows that. You'll never eat another tackapple. Even if you went back to Caprica and found one in some bunker, it wouldn't taste the same after you've spent so much time longing for it. We're adrift forever. We found a refuge. For our great-grandchildren-maybe-this planet will become home. But for us?" He shook his head. "We're building on top of the ruins of everything we've lost, and we've lost about everything. This isn't paradise for us. It's the gods' reparations." He cleared his throat, remembered who he was. A different side of who he was, one which required a different grammar. "God's reparations."
Kara eyes turned liquid with pity and fear as she listened to him. Reparations? But-weren't we the sinners-the Cylons and the humans, both? Or was it all just a game, planned out by the lords of Kobol-by some gods, somewhere-for ends we'll never understand? Will we ever know why any of this happened? Why I had to die-
With the ease of long practice, she cut off that thought at the pass. Then:
"Oh, lords. Frak me!" She jerked her hand out of the water and surged to her feet, her notebook sliding to her feet as she did.
"What's the matter, Kara?"
Kara stared at the notebook like it might erupt in magma, and rubbed her soaking hand, the one that had been holding Samuel T. Anders', against her pants leg. All at once, she'd noticed two things:
That Sam's right hand had tightened on her left one the whole time the Chief was talking.
And that, while she wasn't looking, her right hand had meticulously drawn the outline of a temple on the pad in front of her.
She leaned back her head and screamed. "I am frakking sick of signs!"
The Chief picked up her notebook, and for the first time in as long as about anyone could remember, he started to laugh.
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