CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Croft:

After what I’ve been through, the bridge of the Galactica seems incredibly claustrophobic, even though it’s an immense chamber. But I can’t stop my shoulders from contracting at the box that I feel enclosed in. Boxes, prisons, cells. That’s my life. Maybe I should have taken the opportunity to escape with Wolfe and Leda. They might be still alive and I might not feel so trapped. Still, as I look around at the joyful crowd gathered on the bridge, I can’t help but feel that their lives were traded for the lives of all around me, all personnel and passengers on the many ships of the fleet. Perhaps it was the proper trade.

Adama is in his commander mood and praising Apollo and the expedition for the successful completion of the mission. He tosses a couple of bouquets to Athena and Apollo for their flying skills. I try to feel a part of it all emotionally, but all I can feel is that it was just a job I did. I wouldn’t downplay my part in it, especially the rope-swinging act I did with the kid, but I still don’t feel that I belong here, drinking in the rhetoric of praise. They used me because they had to. Otherwise, they would have left me in my stinking hole. The hole they’re going to send me back to.

Adama has moved to Cree and is eulogizing on how brave the young cadet was. Well, that’s true enough. I’d rather have been hanging on that rope and falling in that avalanche than be subjected to Cylon torture. Good work, Cree, you deserve the praise.

Suddenly Adama is standing in front of me. I try to straighten up into some semblance of attention, a reflex from the old days, but my bones are so much in pain I can hardly move them.

“And Croft,” Adama says in his resonant voice.

“I guess it’s back to the old grid-barge,” I say, and try to smile as if I don’t mind.

Adama smiles back. The monster, smiling about sending me back.

“No,” he says after a pause. “I think you worked out the rest of your time down on that ice planet. You’re needed on the Galactica, Commander.”

I almost don’t hear him say the last word. Commander. Reinstatement in rank. If only Leda were here, she might just—I’ve got to stop thinking of her now. Anyway, she’d only have said that reinstatement in rank was just so much bilge.

Adama grips my shoulder for a moment, then moves on. Now he faces the kid and his daggit pet, which is doing a good mechanical version of a happy drool.

“Boxey,” Adama says, “if anyone should be sent to the grid-barge for disobeying orders…”

The kid looks scared. I almost want to protect him. The daggit squeals.

Maybe a good scare’ll cure the kid of sticking his nose into dangerous places.

But I doubt it.