CHAPTER THREE

 

 

When the Galactica withdrew from battle, Starbuck almost fell out of his cockpit in anger.

“What’s going on?” he radioed Boomer.

“Don’t ask me. Commander’s calling the shots.”

There was an edge of sarcasm in Boomer’s voice, the tone of the hard-bitten pilot who knows full well you cannot trust anybody in power.

“But he can’t leave us hanging out here like—”

“Hey you guys,” Greenbean’s voice broke into the transmission. “What’s up? The Galactica’s pulling out.”

“You noticed!” Starbuck said. “I don’t… it must… there’s gotta be a good reason.”

“Sure there is,” Boomer said. “It’s dangerous around here. A guy could get—heads up, Greenbean, you’ve got a pair on your tail.”

“Pull up yourself, Boomer,” Jolly’s voice cut in. “You’re in somebody’s sights yourself. I’ll try to get ’em off.”

As Starbuck zeroed in on the sinister fighters pouncing on Boomer, he looked back at the departing Galactica and muttered more to himself than to anybody who might be listening.

“There’s gotta be a good reason.”

He had scant time to be introspective about the mystery of his parent ship’s hasty departure as scores of Cylon fighters impolitely demanded his attention. Several times he was nearly trapped in one of their insidious and dreaded pinwheel attacks, in which a dozen Cylon vehicles surrounded their target and each, in a complex, intricate sequence of arclike sweeps, bore down on the human flyers. A pinwheel was a particularly tough style of attack to evade, but Starbuck had been up against every deceptive tactic known to the vicious, iniquitous Cylons and could time his own moves to match theirs—and wipe out many of them in the bargain.

Time and the fact that the Cylons greatly outnumbered the humans took their toll. Soon Starbuck discovered that his weapons charge had diminished to a dangerously low level. With no Galactica around to return to for recharging, he could become a sitting duck for even the greenest of Cylon warriors. He searched the sky for another battlestar, where he could make an emergency landing for new fuel and new armament charges. He found the Solaria, but it was under fierce attack by a Cylon warship. Starbuck could see, through its portals, the flickering of hundreds of fires inside the battlestar. He directed his own fighter toward the besieged Solaria.

“I’m with you,” said a voice in his ear. Boomer, streaking by just above him. The Cylon pilots hadn’t seen either of them yet. They zeroed in on the target.

“I got him on the left,” Boomer said.

“And me on the right,” Starbuck said.

Boomer and Starbuck released their laser torpedoes synchronously. A second later the Cylon ship exploded, leaving thousands of lazily floating metallic traces in its sector of space. Another Cylon fighter emerged from the far side of the Solaria, took aim at the battlestar, fired a massive charge, and hit it amidships. Starbuck could see the Solaria begin to split in half as the Cylon fighter pulled away. Cursing venomously, he bore down on the enemy and, relishing vengeance, sent the ship to smithereens with what seemed to be the last good shot he had left.

“Nice shooting,” Boomer said.

“Yeah, but a little late,” Starbuck snarled, as he watched the final stages of the Solaria’s disintegration.

He located another Cylon fighter in the distance and started toward it. But his common sense took over from his rage. Testing the firing button on his steering column, he heard the faint whine that told him that the weapons charge was now below efficiency level. He veered his own ship to the right, to escape any attack the Cylon craft might attempt. However, to his amazement, the several enemy ships he could discern now all went into an abrupt arcing turn and headed away from the human forces.

“What’s up?” Starbuck said.

“Total defeat is what’s up,” Boomer said. “The Solaria was our last battlestar. Minus the Galactica, of course, which seemed to find it militarily necessary to turn tail and—”

“Stow that, Boomer. We don’t know what happened yet.”

“Okay, okay. Whatever, they’ve destroyed the fleet, the slimy louses, and there’s no use hanging around.”

Jolly’s voice cut in.

“They’re turning tail. Let’s go get ’em!”

“No,” Starbuck cautioned. “We’ve got barely enough reserve fuel as it is.”

“To do what?” Boomer said. “To joyride around this sector? Where do you propose we land, Lieutenant Starbuck? There’s nothing left for—”

“The Galactica has left,” Starbuck said. “I suggest we try to find it.”

“Right,” said Jolly, “and when we do—”

“We shoot it down,” said Boomer.

“Tone it down, Boomer,” Starbuck said. “Let’s take time to hear their side. They must’ve had a good reason to pull out when they did.”

“Yeah,” said Jolly, “they’re cowards.”

Starbuck heard Boomer’s soft malicious laughter in tacit agreement with Jolly’s accusation.

“How do we propose we get to the Galactica, flyboy?” Boomer said. “You gonna take us all by the hand and guide us home?”

“We’ll find it, don’t worry. First, we’ve gotta make it to one of the fueling space stations or we’re not gonna get off the pot.”

“What makes you think the Cylons didn’t take out all the fueling stations?” Boomer asked. “I mean the question with all courtesy, of course, skyrider.”

“We’ll just have to find out, won’t we, Boomer?”

“You say so.”

Boomer’s plane banked and swept off from Starbuck’s portside wing. Jolly followed suit. After a moment of hesitation, so did Starbuck.

Fortunately the fueling stations, which were hidden from Cylon view by camouflaging force fields, were all intact, and the squadrons were able to refuel. With the scanner transmission no longer jammed, they worked out the coordinates for the Galactica right away. Starbuck was puzzled by the fact that the battlestar was in the region of their home planet. That location only seemed to support Boomer and Jolly’s accusation that Adama had taken the Galactica away from the fray for cowardly reasons. During the long trek back, as they made two more hops to fueling stations, Starbuck convinced Boomer, Jolly, and the other fuming pilots of the need for caution—not only to wait to find out what had happened, but to save themselves and their planes. Still, he could feel his own rage build to a boiling point.

As they neared the Galactica, Starbuck ordered the flight patterns set on a direct line to the battlestar’s landing deck. When he pushed his own course button, however, sparks from the control panel flew suddenly all over the cockpit. At the same moment a piece of the instrument panel popped out and dangled from its moorings. The ship started to waver from the dictated flight path. Trying to keep it straight manually, Starbuck had to deal with the electrical shorting directly. His mind telling him to work slowly, he forced his fingers to keep wires apart and try to sort out the problem.

“Reading you, Red leader one,” said a voice on the communicator. “From here something appears to be wrong with your craft.”

“Damn right something’s wrong. In trouble, in trouble.”

Tigh’s voice cut in.

“We read you, Red leader. How can we assist?”

Starbuck tested his portside stabilizing rocket. Normally its thrust could be controlled by a lever on the instrument panel. But this time, pressing the lever, he found it wouldn’t respond to his touch. Instead, it coughed and swung about in an erratic rhythm.

“Battle damage,” Starbuck reported. “Stabilizer won’t keep steady thrust. Put a systems analyst on the line.”

“On the line,” said a voice immediately. Starbuck recognized it as Athena’s. He glanced quickly at the small, round picture of her he had pasted as a souvenir at the top of the scanner panel, and could see her in his mind scowling over the gadgetry of the guidance system. “What’s your condition, Starbuck?”

“This is no time for trainees, Athena. I’m in real trouble.”

“I’m the best you’ve got right now, pilot. You’ll stay in trouble if you keep talking like that. What’s your fuel?”

He glanced at the gauge.

“Low.”

“All right. Run the check with me. Alpha circuit, close and alternating to left servo circuit….”

Reaching deftly past the sparking circuit board dangling from beneath his instrument panel, he closed off a circuit switch.

“Alpha circuit closed and alternating,” he said, “to left servo circuit.”

He checked the stabilizer, which was now dead, not responding a bit to his touch on the lever.

“No response.”

“Omega C circuit,” Athena said. Her voice was calm, aloof, sounding much like it did in response to his sly proposals in the ready room. “Closed and alternating to servo support circuit….”

“Alternating to servo support circuit.”

He felt the sweat becoming roaring cataracts down his brow. The stabilizer was still not responding.

“Does not respond.”

A small choking sound—the engine beginning to misfire.

“Fuel zeroing out,” he said.

Tigh’s voice cut in again, addressing Athena.

“Bring him at zero thrust, with all stabilizers cut off. There’s no choice.”

“Wait,” she said. “One last check. Is your right stabilizer steady?”

“Right stabilizer steady.”

“Cross patch right servo to left.”

“Cross patching right servo to left.”

Working as patiently as possible, Starbuck made the cross-connections on the panel. He looked out again at the stabilizer. It teetered limply, stone cold.

“No luck,” he said. “I can’t reverse thrust. Get everyone out of the way, I’m coming in hot.”

There was a pause before Athena’s answer came.

“All right, you’re cleared to come in.”

Her voice sounded apprehensive.

“You’ll be coming in like a missile,” she said. “The deck is cleared for an emergency.”

“Thanks for the comforting thoughts.”

“Don’t mention it. See you on deck.”

“That’s a date.”

Boomer’s voice cut in.

“Would you listen to this guy? He loses one lousy stabilizer and he’s gotta have all the ladies out to watch him ventilate the flight deck. If the ladies’d only—”

Jolly’s voice interrupted.

“Good luck, Starbuck.”

“Thanks, Jolly. Red leader to flight deck. I’m coming in hot, ready or not. I hope you guys aren’t counting off for neatness.”

His sweat felt like a raging sea in a torrential storm. The deck swung out from the Galactica way before he was ready. He knew the deck hands inside the battlestar were in readiness for disaster, ready to mop up his blood if that turned out to be the necessary duty.

He could lose this one. Well, the famous Starbuck luck had to run out some time. He engaged all the devices on his instrument panel that still functioned. His ship careened down to the deck. He could feel himself on the verge of blacking out as he made his descent, and he shook his head to clear it. Just before landing, he was able to turn the viper to something resembling the correct entry altitude. He knocked out a series of landing strobes as the viper touched the deck. Sparks flew in all directions. As his ship shuddered into the entry port and hit the emergency force cushion, he did black out….

 

…When he came to, after only a few seconds of darkness, he saw the small emergency vehicles racing out of pockets in the walls toward the crashed viper.

Everything was okay. He was in terrible pain, but everything was okay. The Starbuck luck was still as good as gold. He headed through the airlock.

“Starbuck, are you all right?” Athena cried, as she ran up to him and into his arms. He hugged her perfunctorily, released her abruptly, and started walking toward the elevators.

“For a guy who just had a whole fleet shot out from under him, I’m fine,” he said. “No thanks to your father.”

Athena hurried after him.

“What are you saying about my father?” she said. “Do you realize what we’ve been through?”

“Yeah? You should’ve seen how we spent our day. Joyriding, just joyriding. Keeping the Cylons off our necks while you took off on a pleasant little cruise away from—”

Athena stopped him in front of the elevator.

“Starbuck,” she said, “don’t you know what’s happened?”

He guided her into the elevator, a bit roughly.

“Bet your life I know what’s happened, little darling. You should get a scan of what this baby looks like from out in space when she quietly catfoots away from the scene of battle. A beautiful sight, serene—unless of course she happens to be your base ship picking up and sneaking away, leaving you high and dry like a—”

“Stop it! Listen! The colonies, Starbuck, they’re all gone. All of them. Wiped out by those Cylon—”

“Wait, what are you talking about? Destroyed? How’s that—”

The elevator door opened, and the raucous noise of the bridge drowned out the remainder of Starbuck’s question. Angry, he stormed into the room. Nobody noticed him. The voice of one of the bridge officers rose over the clamor.

“Fighter ships coming in on both decks, sir.”

Tigh moved toward the officer and said:

“Give me a full report. What’s the count?”

Tigh? Starbuck thought. What’s he doing giving the orders? Where’s Adama? There can’t be anything wrong with Adama! He felt disoriented, thrust into some alternate world where Adama no longer existed and the terrible cowardice of removing the Galactica from her proper place had somehow been transformed into heroism.

“Sixty-seven fighters in all, sir, twenty-five of our own.”

“How many battlestars?�

The officer paused before revealing the information.

“None.”

“What?!”

“We’re the only surviving battlestar.”

“My God.” Tigh looked shocked. When he spoke again, it was in a choked voice: “Make the pilots from the other ships as welcome as you can.”

Starbuck strode up behind him and said:

“Little late for that, Colonel.”

He heard Athena, keeping pace with him, whisper:

“No, Starbuck, not—”

He could sense all the bridge officers staring at him, as Tigh turned toward him.

“For some of those guys you want to welcome,” Starbuck said, “it was a tossup to them whether to land here or blow the Galactica to pieces with a bellyful of torpedoes. Maybe they got talked out of it, or maybe nobody had any left, but—”

“What’s the meaning of this insubordination, Lieutenant?” Tigh barked.

“He doesn’t realize what’s happened yet,” Athena interjected. “I told him some of it, but it doesn’t seem to be sinking in. I don’t think any of them really know.”

Puzzled, Starbuck looked around him. He noticed Boomer and Jolly, looking just as furious and frustrated as Starbuck felt, just arriving on one of the elevators.

“Realize what?” Starbuck said. “That the old man turned tail and ran, leaving all our ships to run out of fuel, making—”

Tigh’s angry gesture compelled Starbuck to stop in the middle of his sentence. The Colonel nodded toward one of the officers.

“Put the tapes of the transmissions we monitored back on the scanners. For our young patriots here.”

Starbuck started to complain further, but the pictures that came abruptly onto four of the screens on the console effectively silenced him. The pain of watching the disaster on a single screen was stretched to unbearability when multiplied by four. Starbuck’s fists clenched in frustration as he became aware that there was no chance he could climb back into his cockpit and battle these Cylon warships that had worked their grisly havoc hours before.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “sorry.”

Behind him he heard Boomer and Jolly, muttering sadly, joining him in his remorse.

 

Adama stood on the old familiar hill, inspecting the line of the new, unfamiliar battle scar that ran in a deep rut across his land. The line seemed to go off to infinity, or at least to the base of the row of fires that raged at the edge of the crumbling, far-off city. Every building there must be ablaze by now.

He headed down the hill, unaware of Apollo following close. A faraway sound of many voices was growing rapidly louder. Glancing over his shoulder, Adama could see the flickering of a dozen torches beyond Apollo’s viper. Roaming mobs already. Well, he would deal with them when they reached him. Unless they had some kind of fanatical, wild-eyed leader, he believed he could handle any mob.

He turned back and resumed his walk down the path, the one he had so carefully laid, stone by stone, in the first year of his marriage to Ila. The broad, deep battle scar cut across it, too, running all the way toward his home. He kept his eyes away from the house for as long as he could, but finally he had to look. Once an attractive series of living units—he had laid out its interlinking half-circles himself, as diligently as he had put down the stones in the path—it too was now sliced down the middle by the straight-line scar of battle. On one side of the line much of the dwelling still stood, but the other half, the half containing Ila’s sitting room, was now charred rubble. All lingering hope of Ila’s survival left him as he stared at the damaged structure. There was little chance Ila had wandered off by herself. She knew his first impulse when free would be to return to her here, and she would wait. If she were here now, she would have run out of the house into his arms. What was her schedule for the time of day when the attack had occurred? Late afternoon. That was the time she usually took a nap. She had probably been asleep then, or been awakened by the shrill squeals of diving Cylon fighters. He did not like to think of her in terror. It was unlikely anyway. In recent years Ila had become slightly hard of hearing, although she didn’t like to admit it. Anyway, she could sleep through anything, no matter how loud. She had probably stayed asleep.

Stop this rambling! he thought. She’s dead! Admit it to yourself. She has to be dead! There’s no other possibility.

Adama felt the tears well up in his eyes. Walking into the house, he didn’t have to stop for the scanning device, which had been reduced to a knobby lump of debris and dangled by a wire from a jagged hole in the wall. The front door hung uncertainly from a single hinge. He went directly to the living room, to the row of holographic photographs that had been implanted into a wall years ago. There was a single source of light in the room, a rectangular candle with each of its twelve permanent wicks ablaze. Each flame represented one of the twelve worlds, and Adama felt a momentary odd surge of joy when he saw they all still burned, as if the candle were saying to him that the colonies must, and will, survive.

He remembered the pleasure Ila had found in that candle when she had discovered it in a nearby town bazaar. She always delighted in searching for bargains, and would often go too many uneconomical miles out of her way and come back arguing that her latest purchase was especially economical. The flickering light from this special candle cast strange auras on the series of pictures she had so carefully selected before arranging for the laser procedure that made them part of the wall. There were photographs of the entire family, he and Ila, Athena and Apollo and Zac. Zac. He could not bear now to look upon the eager hopeful smile of Zac, nor could he examine the chronological half-circle of photos that traced Zac from child to adult.

Adama recalled a recent conversation with his youngest son, one of the last talks they had had. Zac, somewhat drunk from a glass of the unusually potent Libran wine which always tasted so mild but provided such a heady kick, had revealed to his father his intention to eclipse Apollo. He said his whole life was directed toward bettering his brother’s achievements. When Adama had begun to provide soothing fatherly advice, Zac had interrupted him by telling him he simply didn’t understand.

“Father, all the time I was growing up, it was Apollo this and Apollo that, every second thing I heard about was some big heroic Apollo exploit. Well, okay, don’t get me wrong, I’m just as proud of him as you and Mom are, as Athena is, but don’t you see we all have somebody we have to beat. Sometimes it’s just some idealized role model, sometimes it’s somebody real. With me, it’s Apollo. I love him, but I’ve got to beat him.”

Adama had tried to convince Zac that there was more to life than a stratified sense of competitiveness, but the boy wouldn’t listen. He had left his son that night feeling a vague sense of failure. Had he invested his children with a distorted ambition to succeed? Or was it the war that fired up his heroic ambitions? Perhaps Adama had devoted so much of his life to the war, hardly taking note of his own considerable achievements in it, that he had failed to give his progeny a proper perspective on life. Perhaps he had made Zac and Apollo, even Athena, pale copies of himself. All of them were geared to perform heroic acts, make important decisions, assume leadership as naturally as others went about daily tasks. Years ago Adama himself had accepted such responsibilities as natural consequences of being his own father’s son. Was it possible that the cracks in a life devoted so completely to military matters would start emerging in the third generation? No—he was being too hard on himself. Zac may have been unreasonably ambitious, but he was also young. Adama suspected that at the age of twenty-three he might have been similarly oriented toward success and just as energetic in talking about his future hopes. And his other children, Apollo and Athena, showed no signs of personal or psychological problems. Apollo, combining bravery with intelligence, was a fine fighter pilot, one of the best, and Athena’s sharp-witted ability to synthesize information in order to come to a quick decision seemed to destine her for a command post.

As he looked away from the pictures of his children, Adama realized that he was exaggerating Zac’s slightly besotted declarations because of his own deep sorrow. Zac had just shown a natural, youthful desire to flee from the nest. But even as he told himself that Zac’s aspirations were not his fault as a parent, Adama could not quite rid himself of the nagging thought that perhaps they were.

For a moment he wished that all these pictures were not embedded so firmly in the wall. He would have liked to turn them around, face them toward the wall, as angry people did in the ancient novels he often scan-read during recreation periods.

Finally, he had to look at the pictures of Ila.

The poses in the neat circle depicted her at several ages from seventeen to fifty. The most recent photo showed her smiling broadly at her fiftieth birthday party the previous year. In the background he and the three children stood, their figures dimly lit, perhaps put in shadow by the glow of her pride. He reached out to touch the figure in the foreground of the picture, was surprised at the framing glass which blocked his hand from the three-dimensional figures inside.

He and Ila had both drunk a bit too much wine the night of that birthday and had foolishly speculated on the far-off future—on the day when Adama would have come to the end of his usefulness to the Colonial Fleet and could pension himself off to his home on Caprica. Even as they had spoken, they knew how absurd their hopeful speculations were. As long as the war continued, Adama would have refused retirement and pension, and was likely to serve in at least an advisory capacity after he became too feeble to command. In Ila’s last letter, which arrived just before the beginning of the peace conference, she had written that if the conference was successful then perhaps their absurd hopes for the future might be realized after all. He had enjoyed a moment of hope—but just a moment. That was all the Cylons allowed, one moment.

He looked at the youngest Ila, the oldest photograph, taken just before their marriage. Memories of that time came back to him in a flood. When he met her, Ila had been a dedicated career woman, determined to become one of the Quorum of the Twelve. At the age of seventeen she had run for, and won, a seat on the local council. Her radical ideas had already drawn attention to her, especially her plan to reduce her city’s contribution to the overall Caprican military budgets. Because she was gleaning some support from the populace, themselves tired of the war which was then almost a thousand years old, certain military and political circles concluded that she should be investigated. Adama, then a young ensign on TDY to the Caprican training base, was dispatched to check out the mild agitation in the boondocks, and see what he could do to smoothe it over. Caprican law would not allow Ila’s right of free speech to be interfered with, but there was nothing in the books that said a handsome young ensign couldn’t positively influence a beautiful young agitator. The insight of the military higher-ups in this matter proved to be extremely prescient. Not only had Ila been positively influenced by the ensign, he had fallen head over heels in love with her, from the first moment he saw her making an impassioned speech to her council. He had always preferred women with strength of character, and Ila turned out to be one of the strongest women he had ever met. Her inner strength had saved him time and time again during the course of their marriage, especially during those moments when he had to be told no as he leaned toward some ridiculous course of action.

Each separate likeness of Ila he looked at started similar waves of memory. He saw her beauty in all its stages, could remember his love growing through all the years. Suddenly he broke down, began to cry.

“I’m sorry, Ila,” he sobbed. “I was never there when it mattered. Never there when—”

Inevitably, he thought of all they might still have accomplished together, all they might have done in the past. The pain became too much to bear. He willed the tears to stop, willed himself to turn away from the wall of photographs. When he looked up, he saw Apollo standing in the doorway. Obviously he had been there watching for a long time. Adama had forgotten that Apollo was with him; he was disoriented for a minute. With his fingertips, he brushed away some of the remaining tears and struggled to control his voice as he addressed his son.

“I didn’t—didn’t hear you come in.”

“Forgive me, Father,” Apollo said. “I should have gone away, left you….”

“No, no, that’s all right. I was… was just gathering a few remembrances.”

There were some non-holographic photos spread on the mantle below the arranged pictures. He picked one up, offered it to Apollo.

“You want this likeness of you and Zac?”

Apollo drew back. When he spoke there was a clear edge of bitterness in his voice.

“No,” he said. “Look, there are crowds coming. They probably saw our ship land.”

“I’m not worried about them. I’ll be a few more minutes here….”

Clearly the decision was against Apollo’s best judgment, but he nodded stiffly and started to leave. In a second he was back in the doorway, saying.

“Maybe she wasn’t here, maybe—”

“She was here,” Adama said with finality. “She was here.”

Apollo muttered, “Yes, of course,” and left.

 

* * *

 

Standing by his ship, Apollo watched the angry crowd of people approach. They moved like a mob, disorganized, with a lot of arm waving and jostling. Their voices, pitched high and shrill, made their hostility clear. Apollo wondered if his father had judged correctly in staying around. A mob like this one might kill the both of them, and what good would that do? Perhaps he should have insisted more strenuously, rushed the old man back to the plane and taken off before the crowd’s arrival.

Adama might, after all, be too overwrought right now to make a decision wisely. It certainly didn’t seem rational to Apollo for the old man to mourn quietly before a bunch of old photographs. Apollo didn’t like photographs. They were just ice sculptures that would melt away if you refused to look at them, and the last thing Apollo wanted was to look at pictures of Mom and Zac. He had refused his father’s offer of the photo from the mantel—and that picture had once been his favorite—because he couldn’t bear to look at it, to see Zac’s smiling face and their arms around each other’s shoulders. If he kept that picture, it would definitely call up the memory forever of their last battle together, definitely force him to speculate about his possible error in leaving Zac out there all alone. The kid wasn’t ready to be left on his own and, in spite of the fact that all military wisdom dictated that Apollo return post-haste to the Fleet with his information, he would always wonder whether or not he should have turned and flown back to Zac, helped the kid out when he really needed it. With the present desolate condition of the war, it was a memory he could not afford.

The mob stopped about fifty yards from the ship. Some of them pointed toward it angrily. Apollo walked forward, trying to gauge the depth of their enmity. Some of the people who were doing the pointing turned to point toward him. Gradually the entire mob took notice of Apollo coming out to meet them. A man came forward, shaking his fist, shouting.

“Where are they, the rest of your fancy pilots?”

Another man, just behind the first speaker, hollered:

“Where were you, lad, when they were killing everyone? What were you doing?”

Other men and women separated from the crowd and edged toward Apollo. They were angry, as if they would like to tear him apart and spread the pieces from here to the burning city.

“Wait,” called out a woman who was running to the front of the crowd. The front ranks parted and she stepped forward, leading a small boy by the hand. “Let him talk.” She turned to Apollo, and walked a couple of tentative steps toward him. Apollo was struck by her beauty, which shone through the dirt marks on her face and the dishevelment of her hair and clothing. “Before they jump at your throat, I’d like to know a few things. Where you were. For that matter, where was everybody, the entire military force? Where were all of you? Even after the battle had begun, we prayed for relief, but you never came.”

Her words were enunciated precisely, with a theatrical projection. This lovely woman could be the real danger to him, Apollo thought. The mob he could handle by tactics learned in training, but one intelligent person could combat such tactics easily. To give himself a moment to think, he looked down at the boy beside her. The child’s face almost couldn’t be discerned through all the dirt on it, but his innocent eyes were clear as they stared upward at him.

“Most of us are dead,” Apollo said, trying to speak as matter-of-factly as possible. The crowd quieted down. “We were ambushed. There is no more fleet.”

First there was a collective gasp in the crowd, then individual reactions of anguished crying and angry despair. The woman looked around at the mournful people, her face showing the confusion she felt.

“But,” she said, “but why—I mean, you’re here. Where did you come from?”

“The battlestar Galactica.”

“Survived….”

“Yes….”

“Well, what of the president, what about the Quorum of the Twelve? And the other colonies. We can fight back surely. We’re united, all twelve colonies, after hundreds of years. Our combined strength, it can’t possibly be defeated, that’s what we were all taught, what we learned from the cradle.”

Adama, standing by the wing of Apollo’s craft, moved into the flickering light and spoke.

“Our unity, our strength, came about too late.”

The woman clearly recognized Adama, and her head made an automatic bow.

“Commander Adama!” she shouted.

Others in the crowd reacted to the name.

“Serina,” Adama said.

His mere appearance seemed to bring home to Serina and the crowd the impact and scope of their defeat.

“Then it’s true. They’ve beaten us. We’re doomed.”

Adama’s look was stern, magisterial. Apollo turned away from it and looked down at the boy who was, inexplicably, smiling as he looked up at Apollo with admiration.

“Can I ride in your ship, mister?” the boy said.

Apollo bent down and picked the boy up. The child was lighter than he looked. As he replied to the boy, he thought of Zac and he had to look at his father as he spoke.

“Fighter ships are no place for boys.”

Adama must have understood the meaning of his son’s glance, for he looked away, some hurt in his eyes.

“They’re going to have to be if our people are going to survive,” Serina said.

Adama walked slowly up the hill and turned his attention toward the burning cities. Serina moved up behind him. Apollo followed, still holding the boy in his arms.

“Commander,” Serina said, “we’re going to have to fight back. We can’t—can’t simply give up.”

A long silence followed. Both Serina and Apollo stared at the commander, searching for signs of decision. When Adama looked their way again he seemed to look past them.

“Yes,” he whispered, “we’re going to fight back.”

Those in the crowd who could hear his declaration told those closest to them. Word spread quickly. As the knowledge was shared, the crowd reacted variously, with cries of satisfaction, frustration, vented anger.

Adama took a couple of steps toward Apollo before speaking again. When he talked to his son, it was as if the crowd beyond them didn’t exist. The intimacy was a combination of father speaking to son and commander addressing captain.

“But we can’t fight back here, and not now. And not in the colonies, not even in this star system. We must gather together every survivor from each of the twelve worlds, every man, woman, and child who’s survived this infamy. We must get word to them to set sail at once, in any vehicle that’ll carry them, no matter what its state.”

“Father,” Apollo said, “there isn’t time, not enough time to arrange provisions. I’m sure the Cylons will be sending landing parties to eradicate the survivors. What we should do—if we could just send in our remaining fighters—”

“No! Too many of them, too few of us. There’s a time to fight, but not now. We must withdraw, fight another day, it’s only—”

“But—but there’s no way to board the entire population on the Galactica, and we have no troop carriers anymore. Those vehicles—they’d be, well, just a ragtag fleet. Their potential for conversion to hyperspace capability is marginal at best.”

“You’re thinking logically, yes, but this isn’t the time for logical thinking. We’ll use what we do have. Every intercolony passenger liner, freighter, tanker, even intra-colony buses, air taxis, anything that’ll carry our people into the stars.”

“And when they’ve gathered in the stars?” Serina asked softly.

“We will lead them. And protect them until they are strong again.”

Adama’s eyes glowed with such powerful confidence that, for a moment, Apollo couldn’t be sure whether he was facing a madman or a savior. From the confused face of Serina and the curious looks emanating from the mob, it was clear that they weren’t sure either.

Apollo tried to picture what his father proposed. All manner of ships rising from planets in flame—as he had called it, a ragtag fleet. The survivors of all the colonies, the Aeries from Aeriana, the Gemons from Gemini, the Virgos from Virgon, the Scorpios, the Leos, the Picons, the Sagitarians. It just didn’t seem possible. But judging from the determination displayed on Adama’s face, Apollo wasn’t going to pull forth any doubting auguries.

Apollo nodded, said they had to try it. Serina agreed. Soon the mood of the crowd had changed from puzzlement to a confidence as they cheered their leader.