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ishafelSummary: Lee falls for Kara while she's still engaged to Zak, and it changes everything. AU, pre-series/ S1.
His cellmate was older, in his fifties, and familiar looking. Lee thought at first that he must be someone from Fleet, someone who'd served with his father, maybe, but the man had a Sagittaron accent and Fleet officers in general and Viper pilots in particular were almost always Caprican. Still, there was something about him that made Lee think of the Academy.
“Tom,” he said finally. “Tom...Zarek?” As soon as he'd said it, he knew it was true. He could remember that face, now, printed in black and white on the back of a book. “I read your book in college,” he added. “After it was banned.” Which was an asinine thing for a man convicted of murder to say to a man convicted of terrorism.
He had read it, though, his first year at the Academy; Zarek wrote better than he talked, sharp sentences filled with important words like freedom and conscience, and not honor and duty. It had stayed with him while he swore his oath to the Fleet, while Zarek bombed the government building and was arrested and tried and convicted and pardoned, and refused to recant and appealed and lost and appealed again. Zarek had his own war, and he had dedicated himself to it as fiercely as anyone Lee had ever met.
“Yes?” Zarek said, raising an eyebrow. He looked amused, and maybe he was. Maybe he got recognized all the time. “And you are?”
Lee Adama, he almost said, but it wasn't true any longer, if it ever had been. “Apollo,” he said instead. “I go by Apollo.”
“The son of Zeus?” Zarek asked. “The god of reason? The oracle of Delphi?”
He knew, of course. He'd known from the beginning, who Lee Adama was and what he'd done. Lee suspected there was not very much Zarek didn't know, even if he had been on Gemenon three years.
“Just Apollo,” he said, and hoped Zarek would understand what it was he wasn't saying.
It seemed that Zarek did. “Fair enough, Apollo,” he said, and put out his hand. “Everyone here has secrets, even from themselves. Why should you be any different?”
Lee took it. It was calloused, hard, with big knuckles: a laborer's hand, or a boxer's, not a philosopher's. Despite himself he liked Zarek's crooked, knowing grin. This was a man he couldn't trust, but at least Zarek was upfront about that much.
“Explain the system here to me,” he said. “How do things here work?”
Zarek shrugged. “There isn't much to explain,” he said ruefully. “We're contract labor. We do whatever needs doing. With the stipulation, of course, that it's something that requires no skill whatsoever, something a machine could do better and faster. In exchange we're given food and shelter and not much else. You might not have noticed, but we're in the middle of a desert, and there's no natural source of water on this side of the mountains. It keeps us honest. If you're looking to appeal, the C.C.L.U. provides free legal counsel. The guards can get you anything else you need, for a price. My advice is, keep your head down. Every once in a while they let some of the lifers out on parole.”
“Yeah,” Lee said. “I'm guessing I won't be one of them. I'm not sure how I missed being lynched the first time around.”
“My guess is, you can thank Zeus for that,” Zarek said, and Lee wasn't sure whether he was kidding or not.
Zarek was right about the mindlessness of the work. Lee didn't actually make license plates or dig ditches, but crushing rock to make road base wasn't much more exciting. Zarek was right, too, that it would have been cheaper to do it all with automated labor. He wasn't sure whether employing prisoners was a deliberate insult or paranoia on someone's part.
In a lot of ways, it was like being back at the Academy. He worked fourteen-hour shifts, and in his free time he ran, played Pyramid, learned to make ambrosia out of tylium and machine oil, read over and over the few ragged books in the prison library: poetry and law and the history of the Colonies, and drafts of Zarek's, smuggled out by the guards and published in underground newspapers on Sagittaron, where half the population was illiterate.
Zarek's contacts in the S.F.M. were good for cigarettes and pornography and months-old tabloids. His mother wrote to him every month. She was divorcing his father, and to Lee's surprise she sounded almost cheerful about it. But what Lee missed was news of his father, of Kara, of the Atlantia, his friends. And as much as he liked Zarek—and in some ways, Zarek was like another father—Zarek hadn't known Zak, and he didn't understand, and Lee couldn't bring himself to talk about it.
He became someone else on Gemenon. He had always been a good officer, but Zarek taught him that rules could be bent as well as broken, that politics was more complex and more interesting than it appeared, that leadership was not only a responsibility but a gift. Between them, he and Lee ran the prison, and they were good at it. The guards were overarmed and undereducated, Gemenese natives trapped in dead end jobs on a dead end planet. They were in awe of Tom Zarek and afraid of Apollo, and both Zarek and Lee knew it and took advantage of it.
It was nothing Lee'd ever expected, and despite that or because of it he enjoyed it immensely. It felt like a game, a game with no consequences, where everything he'd done before had been in deadly earnest. After all, he had lost his freedom, his family, and his future. The only thing he had left was his life.
He spent two years on Gemenon before he was granted a second trial. He would have been sorry to go, if Zarek had not been up for parole, and thus going too. But he had no particular hope that this time would be different, even though now he had Zarek's political connections and the weight of the C.C.L.U. behind him, and a lawyer who specialized in civil rights cases defending him. When he boarded the Astral Queen, his arms cuffed behind him and his legs in irons, it was not at all like going home.
The flight between Caprica and Gemenon was three days going out and five coming back. Lee slept for most of the first two, played three-handed Triad with Zarek and Benedict Mason, Zarek's old S.F.M. contact, also up for parole. Unlike Zarek and Mason, he didn't feel any particular urgency about his upcoming hearing; what he felt, more than anything, was depressed, flat, and tired. He tried, half-heartedly, to hide it, but he knew that Zarek, at least, saw through it.
What that meant was, he was asleep when disaster struck. They were in Colonial space, still, when Zarek's voice woke him, somewhere in the endless, almost untraveled distance between worlds. Lee knew, even before he opened his eyes, that something was wrong. It took him a minute to work out what. No one on Gemenon had called him anything but Apollo, even officially, but Zarek had said, “Adama. Get up, now,” like it was an order. And Lee rolled to his feet like he was a private caught napping on sentry duty.
“What's going on?” Lee demanded, rubbing his eyes. “You and Mason staging a prison break?”
“No,” Zarek said, watching him thoughtfully. “A mutiny. The Cylons are bombing Caprica, Apollo. We're at war. And I'd feel better if someone in the cockpit knew what they were doing.”
“We're what?” Lee asked stupidly. “Tom--.”
Zarek's eyes were steady, meeting Lee's. “The details don't really matter, do they? The how and the why? You're the only one with anything like the necessary training.”
“Except that was two years ago, before I was dishonorably discharged and convicted of murder,” Lee said. “This isn't Gemenon, Zarek, they aren't going to let me fly the transport just because you asked them to.”
“But you could,” Zarek said, watching him. It was not a question. “Couldn't you?”
Lee sighed and thought about it. “I'm not rated for it,” he said finally. “But yeah, probably. The controls can't be much different than they are on a Raptor, and I was combat-certified to fly them, once upon a time. But what--?”
There wasn't time. The guard was coming back. And he had a set of cuffs in his hand. “Hands against the wall,” he said, and Lee turned and stood with his back to the door, arms straight out to either side, while the guard came in and cuffed his wrists behind his back. “My orders are just to bring you up the bridge,” he said gruffly, and Lee realized the man was terrified. “Keep your mouth shut unless they ask you a question, then you can answer it.”
Lee's father had spent a couple of years on a freighter, and Lee had visited him once. That was the only time he'd ever been on a civilian ship. This one was similarly put together, an old troop transport, retrofitted--and probably similar to fly. But it was clear there was no military discipline here, no ship so tight as the one William Adama had run. The pilot was an old woman, and her hands shook; the captain was a drunk. They didn't want Lee's advice, they didn't even want Lee's help. They wanted a frakking miracle.
Lee listened to them explaining the situation, listened to the dead air coming over the comm unit, and wondered what to do. He was all out of miracles. “We need to get to Caprica,” he said finally, “and see what the frak is going on. This ship is FTL capable, isn't it, Captain?”
“Yes,” the man said, after a long pause. “But we can't--.”
“I'll calculate it,” Lee said firmly, with more confidence than he felt. “You and your pilot prepare the ship and crew for a jump.”
The captain looked at Lee for the first time, and then abruptly came to attention and saluted sharply. Lee almost turned around to see if his father was behind him. He couldn't return the salute with his hands behind his back. Instead he said, “Have them bring me paper and a pencil, please. And strike these irons.”
He knew how to do this. He'd done it dozens of times; it was just that none of them had been for real. Now there were hundreds of lives riding on the numbers he'd worked out. It had been a long time since he'd done something that mattered, and he wasn't sure he liked the feeling.
When he was finished he handed it over to the guard. “Tell the Captain to be prepared for anything,” he said bluntly. “Gods know what will be waiting for us after we jump.”
To his surprise, the woman hesitated. “What is it?” Lee asked impatiently, realizing as he did so that he was treating her like a very junior officer. He'd slipped into the habit on Gemenon, and Zarek had encouraged him in it, but there was no reason that these guards should be tolerating it.
“Sir, is it true that you're not actually a prisoner?” she asked. “That you're an undercover Colonial agent?”
That was Zarek, of course; Lee bit his lip to keep from grinning. Good old Tom, who never told the truth when a lie would do just as well. In another lifetime it might have bothered Lee: the practiced ease of the deception, or the surety that they were going to be caught and punished. It might have bothered Lee, but Apollo thought it was funny. “Don't blow my cover,” he said, and she nodded to him, eyes wide, before she left.
After a moment the alarms sounded, signaling that the ship was on full alert. Lee waited, chained to the desk in the captain's bunk. When he closed his eyes he could see the numbers he'd written. If he was wrong, if he was even one number off, if he wasn't wrong but there was something new occupying the space he'd chosen—the consequences were unthinkable.
The guard came back. “Captain wants you at the controls,” she said, like this was some kind of miracle, something he'd made happen. His wrists were free already, and she undid his leg irons, too.
Lee followed her back to the bridge. The pilot started to stand up, pushing her chair back, but Lee shook his head. “She's your bird,” he said. “Jump on my mark.” He counted her down from five, and on “One,” he braced himself and closed his eyes, and they jumped.
When he opened his eyes they were inside Caprica's atmosphere, and the Cylon ships on the DRADIS were disappearing like snowflakes. “Stand by to fire,” Lee said, when it was obvious the captain wasn't going to.
The comm unit suddenly blared to life. “This is Colonial Heavy 798,” a man's voice said, “to the Colonial ship signing herself as Astral Queen. Astral Queen do you read?”
Lee leaned over and took the headset from the pilot and slipped it on. “Colonial Heavy 798, acknowledge. This is Astral Queen. What the frak is going on?” Looking at the DRADIS, he picked out 798, too close for comfort. They'd damn near jumped in on top of her.
798's pilot said, “I don't know. We're just a transport carrying civilians. This was a routine trip until the Cylons showed up. I was just docked on a battlestar. And where the frak did you come from, if you don't mind me asking?”
“We jumped in about thirty seconds ago,” Lee answered. “Just wanted to see what was happening. What's your name, 798?”
“Michael,” the other pilot said, and there was a definite edge of hysteria to his voice, now. “My name is Michael. We picked up an incomplete transmission—I think they nuked Caprica. We had a Viper pilot escorting us, and they shot him down. There was a basestar locked in on us when you showed up. You saved us. You broke their missile lock.”
“Great,” Lee said. “Michael, my name is Apollo--.”
“Is this the Astral Queen?” a woman's voice interrupted. “Captain Apollo, my name is Laura Roslin. I'm the Minister for Education. Captain, I'm afraid that Michael hasn't been entirely honest with you. We got more than one transmission. It seems that the Cylons bombed all of the Colonies. President Adar surrendered unconditionally just before Caprica was hit. Captain, this war, or whatever it is—it's over.”
“Yes, ma'am,” Lee said automatically. “Sir. Is Adar still alive?”
There was the slightest of pauses. “No. We haven't received any transmissions from Caprica in some time, but it seems—it seems that I am the new president of the Colonies.”
“Yes, sir,” Lee said. Half an hour ago his biggest worry had been losing an imaginary fortune to Zarek at Triad. He wondered what Laura Roslin's had been. “There haven't been any further transmissions?”
There was a sigh, over the comm unit. Lee looked up, but the faces of the Astral Queen's crew were frozen, rapt. “No. Captain Apollo, I think we need to get out of here before the Cylons remember we're here. And I think we should round up any civilian ships we can find, and take them with us.”
Lee thought about it, took a deep breath, let it out. “Madame President. Wherever we go, we're going to need to jump. That's the only way we can keep the Cylons from following us. That means that any civilian ships that come along need to be FTL-capable. I'm going to try to work out a safe place for us to jump. You evacuate as many of the non-FTL civilian ships as you can. We'll jump in sixty minutes, no matter what.”
798's pilot came back on. “Any other advice, Captain?”
“Lay low,” Lee said. “Very low. We're armed, but we're no match for a basestar. If the Cylons close in, run for it. And Michael?”
“Yes?”
“You're no longer Colonial Heavy 798. Your new designation is Colonial One.
The captain of the Astral Queen turned and walked away, closing the door of his cabin behind him. “He's going to get drunk,” the pilot said scornfully, “that's what he always does in a crisis.” She smiled at Lee for the first time. “What should we do?”
“Monitor the comm unit,” Lee said. “Make sure we're ready to jump. Keep the ship on full alert. Actually—there's a man in the cells named Tom Zarek. This sort of thing is his specialty. Have him brought up and let him take over the communications. Ask him for his parole, and he'll give it.”
He started to work on the jump coordinates. The guards brought Zarek up, and he went straight to the comm unit, thumping Lee's shoulder as he passed. He didn't ask useless questions, and he didn't panic, and Lee, half listening, thought that he was very, very good at what he did. Laura Roslin could do worse, if she was looking for aides. But even if it was the end of the world, Zarek was still a convicted terrorist, the old president's worst enemy. Better not to mention that.
He was nearly done when his father's voice suddenly came through, overriding Zarek and Roslin. “This is Commander Adama, of the BattlestarGalactica. I'm taking control of the Fleet.” Lee was on his feet, reaching for the microphone, before he knew he'd moved. But Roslin got in before him. Lee listened to her argue about refugees and salvage operations and revenge, and wondered if he was glad or sorry that his father was alive.
From the look on Zarek's face, he was wondering the same thing. He didn't say it, at least. He knew the exact second when his father broke, when it was clear that however much he protested he was going to do exactly what Roslin asked. “The Fleet will jump to the Ragnar Anchorage,” Roslin said, “as soon as we finish evacuating the civilian ships. Thank you, gentlemen.”
“She's good,” Zarek said, grinning. “A natural. Gods, to have had her with me ten years ago.”
“She doesn't know who you are,” Lee pointed out. “Once she does, she'll hate you.”
“You're so young, Apollo, so naive--.”
Lee, looking over his shoulder, saw it happen. Two basestars, where there had been empty air, and Raiders pouring out of them. He grabbed for the mic. “This is Astral Queen to the ships identifying themselves as the Colonial Fleet. I'm broadcasting the coordinates for Ragnar Anchorage. Commence jump prep now. We jump on my mark.”
Laura Roslin came on immediately. “Captain, we need another half an hour at least, to finish the evacuation.”
“It doesn't matter,” Lee said, hoping she could hear the urgency in his voice. “If we stay here, we all die together. Jump in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, jump.” He could hear the civilians arguing, begging, offering money, as if there were going to be any need for currency in this strange place their world had become. The last thing he heard before they jumped was a woman screaming, and for a moment it was like being back in Delphi.
His eyes were on the command console; when he looked up the Galactica filled the viewscreen. His father's ship, rusty, dented, antiquated: a flying anachronism, just like his father. If he'd had anything like the necessary weaponry, he would have shot them both out of the sky. Around him, the other ships, the end of humanity, glided into place. There were almost fifty of them, and one of them was Colonial One.
Lee was glad of that, that Roslin, who was nothing more to him than voice in the blackness, was still alive. For the first time he had the leisure to think about all those who probably were not: his mother, Starbuck, the men and women he'd gone to the Academy and War College with, served with on Atlantia, the first girl he'd ever frakked, everyone in the labor camp on Gemenon. Everyone but his father, the ultimate survivor. And Galactica, his mother's greatest rival, which had not only won in the end, but had survived his mother as well.
Two years ago, his father had wanted Lee dead. Now he must believe that Lee was, that both of his sons were. Lee hoped he frakking choked on it.
The pilot was beginning to sag with exhaustion, and Lee sent her away to rest while the commander and the president fought over the future. He would have liked for Roslin to tell the Commander to go to hell, would have liked even more to board the Galactica and wrest her from his father's hands. It could be done, he thought, if they hacked into the computers. He could do it, with Zarek and Mason and a team handpicked from the prison cells of the Queen. He did not do it.
Not because he loved his father, but because he thought that they might need him. Eventually Roslin came back on over the comm unit and told them all to jump, and jump, and jump. The first time Lee was terrified; despite what he'd told Zarek, he wasn't really qualified to fly a ship of this class, and it had been a long time since he'd held the controls of anything bigger than a Viper. But after a while terror subsided into boredom, and then into a struggle to stay awake.
The captain never came out of his cabin. Lee sent the pilot in after him, before the fifth jump. There were two gunshots, and Lee and Zarek went in, reluctantly, to see what had happened. He'd shot them both with his sidearm, her in the chest, himself in the head. He was still alive, but he died during the next jump. Lee had never even known their names.
Lee threw up, afterward, when they'd thrown the bodies out of the airlock into unmarked, unclaimed space. He had been trained to be a soldier, but he didn't feel like one. His only consolation was that Zarek looked just as sick. “I don't think I want to do this anymore,” he muttered.
Zarek was trying to scrub the blood off his prison-issue jumpsuit. He snorted. “It could be worse,” he said. “You could be out there piloting a Viper on the Gods-damned front lines, you know. How would you like to fly for your old man?”
“I'd rather have been shot for murder back on Caprica,” Lee said, and meant it. “I'd rather be interrogated by the Cylon High Command. I'd rather--.”
“Six minutes until the next jump,” Zarek interrupted. “Apollo, what the frak do we do now?”
“I was waiting for you to tell me,” Lee said tiredly. “Tom--.”
Zarek looked up, grinning tiredly at him. “Yeah?”
“My guess is, we can carry on this way indefinitely,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “Until things slow down no one is going to ask questions. And it's possible the Cylons will kill us, or I'll slip up, or the FTL drive will fail.”
“What a cheerful person you are,” Zarek said, sounding exasperated.
“So what you're asking is, what do we do if we survive,” Lee continued. “At some point they'll ask for passenger manifests.” He checked the clock. Four minutes. “We have a couple choices at that point. We can doctor them, make me the pilot and you the captain, and hope the guards are okay with that. We can doctor them, and throw the guards out the airlock, and promote Mason and a couple of the others to take their places. We can throw the guards out the airlock and pretend this wasn't a prison ship.”
Two minutes. “We can change our names, you and I, and hope no one recognizes our faces, down the line. It'll be a smaller world, though, wherever we end up.” Thirty seconds. “We can tell the truth, and hope my father doesn't shoot me out of hand and Roslin doesn't shoot you. Jump.
“I hate you,” Zarek said, out the other side. “Those are the worst choices I've ever heard.”
“Yeah,” Lee agreed. “Also, I figure you thought of them already, probably three jumps ago, and this was your way of sounding me out.”
“Maybe,” Zarek said, which mean yes. “I'll be frakked if I can see where we'd get away with any of them. I guess we tell the truth and throw ourselves on their mercy.”
“I guess,” Lee said, without conviction.
His cellmate was older, in his fifties, and familiar looking. Lee thought at first that he must be someone from Fleet, someone who'd served with his father, maybe, but the man had a Sagittaron accent and Fleet officers in general and Viper pilots in particular were almost always Caprican. Still, there was something about him that made Lee think of the Academy.
“Tom,” he said finally. “Tom...Zarek?” As soon as he'd said it, he knew it was true. He could remember that face, now, printed in black and white on the back of a book. “I read your book in college,” he added. “After it was banned.” Which was an asinine thing for a man convicted of murder to say to a man convicted of terrorism.
He had read it, though, his first year at the Academy; Zarek wrote better than he talked, sharp sentences filled with important words like freedom and conscience, and not honor and duty. It had stayed with him while he swore his oath to the Fleet, while Zarek bombed the government building and was arrested and tried and convicted and pardoned, and refused to recant and appealed and lost and appealed again. Zarek had his own war, and he had dedicated himself to it as fiercely as anyone Lee had ever met.
“Yes?” Zarek said, raising an eyebrow. He looked amused, and maybe he was. Maybe he got recognized all the time. “And you are?”
Lee Adama, he almost said, but it wasn't true any longer, if it ever had been. “Apollo,” he said instead. “I go by Apollo.”
“The son of Zeus?” Zarek asked. “The god of reason? The oracle of Delphi?”
He knew, of course. He'd known from the beginning, who Lee Adama was and what he'd done. Lee suspected there was not very much Zarek didn't know, even if he had been on Gemenon three years.
“Just Apollo,” he said, and hoped Zarek would understand what it was he wasn't saying.
It seemed that Zarek did. “Fair enough, Apollo,” he said, and put out his hand. “Everyone here has secrets, even from themselves. Why should you be any different?”
Lee took it. It was calloused, hard, with big knuckles: a laborer's hand, or a boxer's, not a philosopher's. Despite himself he liked Zarek's crooked, knowing grin. This was a man he couldn't trust, but at least Zarek was upfront about that much.
“Explain the system here to me,” he said. “How do things here work?”
Zarek shrugged. “There isn't much to explain,” he said ruefully. “We're contract labor. We do whatever needs doing. With the stipulation, of course, that it's something that requires no skill whatsoever, something a machine could do better and faster. In exchange we're given food and shelter and not much else. You might not have noticed, but we're in the middle of a desert, and there's no natural source of water on this side of the mountains. It keeps us honest. If you're looking to appeal, the C.C.L.U. provides free legal counsel. The guards can get you anything else you need, for a price. My advice is, keep your head down. Every once in a while they let some of the lifers out on parole.”
“Yeah,” Lee said. “I'm guessing I won't be one of them. I'm not sure how I missed being lynched the first time around.”
“My guess is, you can thank Zeus for that,” Zarek said, and Lee wasn't sure whether he was kidding or not.
Zarek was right about the mindlessness of the work. Lee didn't actually make license plates or dig ditches, but crushing rock to make road base wasn't much more exciting. Zarek was right, too, that it would have been cheaper to do it all with automated labor. He wasn't sure whether employing prisoners was a deliberate insult or paranoia on someone's part.
In a lot of ways, it was like being back at the Academy. He worked fourteen-hour shifts, and in his free time he ran, played Pyramid, learned to make ambrosia out of tylium and machine oil, read over and over the few ragged books in the prison library: poetry and law and the history of the Colonies, and drafts of Zarek's, smuggled out by the guards and published in underground newspapers on Sagittaron, where half the population was illiterate.
Zarek's contacts in the S.F.M. were good for cigarettes and pornography and months-old tabloids. His mother wrote to him every month. She was divorcing his father, and to Lee's surprise she sounded almost cheerful about it. But what Lee missed was news of his father, of Kara, of the Atlantia, his friends. And as much as he liked Zarek—and in some ways, Zarek was like another father—Zarek hadn't known Zak, and he didn't understand, and Lee couldn't bring himself to talk about it.
He became someone else on Gemenon. He had always been a good officer, but Zarek taught him that rules could be bent as well as broken, that politics was more complex and more interesting than it appeared, that leadership was not only a responsibility but a gift. Between them, he and Lee ran the prison, and they were good at it. The guards were overarmed and undereducated, Gemenese natives trapped in dead end jobs on a dead end planet. They were in awe of Tom Zarek and afraid of Apollo, and both Zarek and Lee knew it and took advantage of it.
It was nothing Lee'd ever expected, and despite that or because of it he enjoyed it immensely. It felt like a game, a game with no consequences, where everything he'd done before had been in deadly earnest. After all, he had lost his freedom, his family, and his future. The only thing he had left was his life.
He spent two years on Gemenon before he was granted a second trial. He would have been sorry to go, if Zarek had not been up for parole, and thus going too. But he had no particular hope that this time would be different, even though now he had Zarek's political connections and the weight of the C.C.L.U. behind him, and a lawyer who specialized in civil rights cases defending him. When he boarded the Astral Queen, his arms cuffed behind him and his legs in irons, it was not at all like going home.
The flight between Caprica and Gemenon was three days going out and five coming back. Lee slept for most of the first two, played three-handed Triad with Zarek and Benedict Mason, Zarek's old S.F.M. contact, also up for parole. Unlike Zarek and Mason, he didn't feel any particular urgency about his upcoming hearing; what he felt, more than anything, was depressed, flat, and tired. He tried, half-heartedly, to hide it, but he knew that Zarek, at least, saw through it.
What that meant was, he was asleep when disaster struck. They were in Colonial space, still, when Zarek's voice woke him, somewhere in the endless, almost untraveled distance between worlds. Lee knew, even before he opened his eyes, that something was wrong. It took him a minute to work out what. No one on Gemenon had called him anything but Apollo, even officially, but Zarek had said, “Adama. Get up, now,” like it was an order. And Lee rolled to his feet like he was a private caught napping on sentry duty.
“What's going on?” Lee demanded, rubbing his eyes. “You and Mason staging a prison break?”
“No,” Zarek said, watching him thoughtfully. “A mutiny. The Cylons are bombing Caprica, Apollo. We're at war. And I'd feel better if someone in the cockpit knew what they were doing.”
“We're what?” Lee asked stupidly. “Tom--.”
Zarek's eyes were steady, meeting Lee's. “The details don't really matter, do they? The how and the why? You're the only one with anything like the necessary training.”
“Except that was two years ago, before I was dishonorably discharged and convicted of murder,” Lee said. “This isn't Gemenon, Zarek, they aren't going to let me fly the transport just because you asked them to.”
“But you could,” Zarek said, watching him. It was not a question. “Couldn't you?”
Lee sighed and thought about it. “I'm not rated for it,” he said finally. “But yeah, probably. The controls can't be much different than they are on a Raptor, and I was combat-certified to fly them, once upon a time. But what--?”
There wasn't time. The guard was coming back. And he had a set of cuffs in his hand. “Hands against the wall,” he said, and Lee turned and stood with his back to the door, arms straight out to either side, while the guard came in and cuffed his wrists behind his back. “My orders are just to bring you up the bridge,” he said gruffly, and Lee realized the man was terrified. “Keep your mouth shut unless they ask you a question, then you can answer it.”
Lee's father had spent a couple of years on a freighter, and Lee had visited him once. That was the only time he'd ever been on a civilian ship. This one was similarly put together, an old troop transport, retrofitted--and probably similar to fly. But it was clear there was no military discipline here, no ship so tight as the one William Adama had run. The pilot was an old woman, and her hands shook; the captain was a drunk. They didn't want Lee's advice, they didn't even want Lee's help. They wanted a frakking miracle.
Lee listened to them explaining the situation, listened to the dead air coming over the comm unit, and wondered what to do. He was all out of miracles. “We need to get to Caprica,” he said finally, “and see what the frak is going on. This ship is FTL capable, isn't it, Captain?”
“Yes,” the man said, after a long pause. “But we can't--.”
“I'll calculate it,” Lee said firmly, with more confidence than he felt. “You and your pilot prepare the ship and crew for a jump.”
The captain looked at Lee for the first time, and then abruptly came to attention and saluted sharply. Lee almost turned around to see if his father was behind him. He couldn't return the salute with his hands behind his back. Instead he said, “Have them bring me paper and a pencil, please. And strike these irons.”
He knew how to do this. He'd done it dozens of times; it was just that none of them had been for real. Now there were hundreds of lives riding on the numbers he'd worked out. It had been a long time since he'd done something that mattered, and he wasn't sure he liked the feeling.
When he was finished he handed it over to the guard. “Tell the Captain to be prepared for anything,” he said bluntly. “Gods know what will be waiting for us after we jump.”
To his surprise, the woman hesitated. “What is it?” Lee asked impatiently, realizing as he did so that he was treating her like a very junior officer. He'd slipped into the habit on Gemenon, and Zarek had encouraged him in it, but there was no reason that these guards should be tolerating it.
“Sir, is it true that you're not actually a prisoner?” she asked. “That you're an undercover Colonial agent?”
That was Zarek, of course; Lee bit his lip to keep from grinning. Good old Tom, who never told the truth when a lie would do just as well. In another lifetime it might have bothered Lee: the practiced ease of the deception, or the surety that they were going to be caught and punished. It might have bothered Lee, but Apollo thought it was funny. “Don't blow my cover,” he said, and she nodded to him, eyes wide, before she left.
After a moment the alarms sounded, signaling that the ship was on full alert. Lee waited, chained to the desk in the captain's bunk. When he closed his eyes he could see the numbers he'd written. If he was wrong, if he was even one number off, if he wasn't wrong but there was something new occupying the space he'd chosen—the consequences were unthinkable.
The guard came back. “Captain wants you at the controls,” she said, like this was some kind of miracle, something he'd made happen. His wrists were free already, and she undid his leg irons, too.
Lee followed her back to the bridge. The pilot started to stand up, pushing her chair back, but Lee shook his head. “She's your bird,” he said. “Jump on my mark.” He counted her down from five, and on “One,” he braced himself and closed his eyes, and they jumped.
When he opened his eyes they were inside Caprica's atmosphere, and the Cylon ships on the DRADIS were disappearing like snowflakes. “Stand by to fire,” Lee said, when it was obvious the captain wasn't going to.
The comm unit suddenly blared to life. “This is Colonial Heavy 798,” a man's voice said, “to the Colonial ship signing herself as Astral Queen. Astral Queen do you read?”
Lee leaned over and took the headset from the pilot and slipped it on. “Colonial Heavy 798, acknowledge. This is Astral Queen. What the frak is going on?” Looking at the DRADIS, he picked out 798, too close for comfort. They'd damn near jumped in on top of her.
798's pilot said, “I don't know. We're just a transport carrying civilians. This was a routine trip until the Cylons showed up. I was just docked on a battlestar. And where the frak did you come from, if you don't mind me asking?”
“We jumped in about thirty seconds ago,” Lee answered. “Just wanted to see what was happening. What's your name, 798?”
“Michael,” the other pilot said, and there was a definite edge of hysteria to his voice, now. “My name is Michael. We picked up an incomplete transmission—I think they nuked Caprica. We had a Viper pilot escorting us, and they shot him down. There was a basestar locked in on us when you showed up. You saved us. You broke their missile lock.”
“Great,” Lee said. “Michael, my name is Apollo--.”
“Is this the Astral Queen?” a woman's voice interrupted. “Captain Apollo, my name is Laura Roslin. I'm the Minister for Education. Captain, I'm afraid that Michael hasn't been entirely honest with you. We got more than one transmission. It seems that the Cylons bombed all of the Colonies. President Adar surrendered unconditionally just before Caprica was hit. Captain, this war, or whatever it is—it's over.”
“Yes, ma'am,” Lee said automatically. “Sir. Is Adar still alive?”
There was the slightest of pauses. “No. We haven't received any transmissions from Caprica in some time, but it seems—it seems that I am the new president of the Colonies.”
“Yes, sir,” Lee said. Half an hour ago his biggest worry had been losing an imaginary fortune to Zarek at Triad. He wondered what Laura Roslin's had been. “There haven't been any further transmissions?”
There was a sigh, over the comm unit. Lee looked up, but the faces of the Astral Queen's crew were frozen, rapt. “No. Captain Apollo, I think we need to get out of here before the Cylons remember we're here. And I think we should round up any civilian ships we can find, and take them with us.”
Lee thought about it, took a deep breath, let it out. “Madame President. Wherever we go, we're going to need to jump. That's the only way we can keep the Cylons from following us. That means that any civilian ships that come along need to be FTL-capable. I'm going to try to work out a safe place for us to jump. You evacuate as many of the non-FTL civilian ships as you can. We'll jump in sixty minutes, no matter what.”
798's pilot came back on. “Any other advice, Captain?”
“Lay low,” Lee said. “Very low. We're armed, but we're no match for a basestar. If the Cylons close in, run for it. And Michael?”
“Yes?”
“You're no longer Colonial Heavy 798. Your new designation is Colonial One.
The captain of the Astral Queen turned and walked away, closing the door of his cabin behind him. “He's going to get drunk,” the pilot said scornfully, “that's what he always does in a crisis.” She smiled at Lee for the first time. “What should we do?”
“Monitor the comm unit,” Lee said. “Make sure we're ready to jump. Keep the ship on full alert. Actually—there's a man in the cells named Tom Zarek. This sort of thing is his specialty. Have him brought up and let him take over the communications. Ask him for his parole, and he'll give it.”
He started to work on the jump coordinates. The guards brought Zarek up, and he went straight to the comm unit, thumping Lee's shoulder as he passed. He didn't ask useless questions, and he didn't panic, and Lee, half listening, thought that he was very, very good at what he did. Laura Roslin could do worse, if she was looking for aides. But even if it was the end of the world, Zarek was still a convicted terrorist, the old president's worst enemy. Better not to mention that.
He was nearly done when his father's voice suddenly came through, overriding Zarek and Roslin. “This is Commander Adama, of the BattlestarGalactica. I'm taking control of the Fleet.” Lee was on his feet, reaching for the microphone, before he knew he'd moved. But Roslin got in before him. Lee listened to her argue about refugees and salvage operations and revenge, and wondered if he was glad or sorry that his father was alive.
From the look on Zarek's face, he was wondering the same thing. He didn't say it, at least. He knew the exact second when his father broke, when it was clear that however much he protested he was going to do exactly what Roslin asked. “The Fleet will jump to the Ragnar Anchorage,” Roslin said, “as soon as we finish evacuating the civilian ships. Thank you, gentlemen.”
“She's good,” Zarek said, grinning. “A natural. Gods, to have had her with me ten years ago.”
“She doesn't know who you are,” Lee pointed out. “Once she does, she'll hate you.”
“You're so young, Apollo, so naive--.”
Lee, looking over his shoulder, saw it happen. Two basestars, where there had been empty air, and Raiders pouring out of them. He grabbed for the mic. “This is Astral Queen to the ships identifying themselves as the Colonial Fleet. I'm broadcasting the coordinates for Ragnar Anchorage. Commence jump prep now. We jump on my mark.”
Laura Roslin came on immediately. “Captain, we need another half an hour at least, to finish the evacuation.”
“It doesn't matter,” Lee said, hoping she could hear the urgency in his voice. “If we stay here, we all die together. Jump in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, jump.” He could hear the civilians arguing, begging, offering money, as if there were going to be any need for currency in this strange place their world had become. The last thing he heard before they jumped was a woman screaming, and for a moment it was like being back in Delphi.
His eyes were on the command console; when he looked up the Galactica filled the viewscreen. His father's ship, rusty, dented, antiquated: a flying anachronism, just like his father. If he'd had anything like the necessary weaponry, he would have shot them both out of the sky. Around him, the other ships, the end of humanity, glided into place. There were almost fifty of them, and one of them was Colonial One.
Lee was glad of that, that Roslin, who was nothing more to him than voice in the blackness, was still alive. For the first time he had the leisure to think about all those who probably were not: his mother, Starbuck, the men and women he'd gone to the Academy and War College with, served with on Atlantia, the first girl he'd ever frakked, everyone in the labor camp on Gemenon. Everyone but his father, the ultimate survivor. And Galactica, his mother's greatest rival, which had not only won in the end, but had survived his mother as well.
Two years ago, his father had wanted Lee dead. Now he must believe that Lee was, that both of his sons were. Lee hoped he frakking choked on it.
The pilot was beginning to sag with exhaustion, and Lee sent her away to rest while the commander and the president fought over the future. He would have liked for Roslin to tell the Commander to go to hell, would have liked even more to board the Galactica and wrest her from his father's hands. It could be done, he thought, if they hacked into the computers. He could do it, with Zarek and Mason and a team handpicked from the prison cells of the Queen. He did not do it.
Not because he loved his father, but because he thought that they might need him. Eventually Roslin came back on over the comm unit and told them all to jump, and jump, and jump. The first time Lee was terrified; despite what he'd told Zarek, he wasn't really qualified to fly a ship of this class, and it had been a long time since he'd held the controls of anything bigger than a Viper. But after a while terror subsided into boredom, and then into a struggle to stay awake.
The captain never came out of his cabin. Lee sent the pilot in after him, before the fifth jump. There were two gunshots, and Lee and Zarek went in, reluctantly, to see what had happened. He'd shot them both with his sidearm, her in the chest, himself in the head. He was still alive, but he died during the next jump. Lee had never even known their names.
Lee threw up, afterward, when they'd thrown the bodies out of the airlock into unmarked, unclaimed space. He had been trained to be a soldier, but he didn't feel like one. His only consolation was that Zarek looked just as sick. “I don't think I want to do this anymore,” he muttered.
Zarek was trying to scrub the blood off his prison-issue jumpsuit. He snorted. “It could be worse,” he said. “You could be out there piloting a Viper on the Gods-damned front lines, you know. How would you like to fly for your old man?”
“I'd rather have been shot for murder back on Caprica,” Lee said, and meant it. “I'd rather be interrogated by the Cylon High Command. I'd rather--.”
“Six minutes until the next jump,” Zarek interrupted. “Apollo, what the frak do we do now?”
“I was waiting for you to tell me,” Lee said tiredly. “Tom--.”
Zarek looked up, grinning tiredly at him. “Yeah?”
“My guess is, we can carry on this way indefinitely,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “Until things slow down no one is going to ask questions. And it's possible the Cylons will kill us, or I'll slip up, or the FTL drive will fail.”
“What a cheerful person you are,” Zarek said, sounding exasperated.
“So what you're asking is, what do we do if we survive,” Lee continued. “At some point they'll ask for passenger manifests.” He checked the clock. Four minutes. “We have a couple choices at that point. We can doctor them, make me the pilot and you the captain, and hope the guards are okay with that. We can doctor them, and throw the guards out the airlock, and promote Mason and a couple of the others to take their places. We can throw the guards out the airlock and pretend this wasn't a prison ship.”
Two minutes. “We can change our names, you and I, and hope no one recognizes our faces, down the line. It'll be a smaller world, though, wherever we end up.” Thirty seconds. “We can tell the truth, and hope my father doesn't shoot me out of hand and Roslin doesn't shoot you. Jump.
“I hate you,” Zarek said, out the other side. “Those are the worst choices I've ever heard.”
“Yeah,” Lee agreed. “Also, I figure you thought of them already, probably three jumps ago, and this was your way of sounding me out.”
“Maybe,” Zarek said, which mean yes. “I'll be frakked if I can see where we'd get away with any of them. I guess we tell the truth and throw ourselves on their mercy.”
“I guess,” Lee said, without conviction.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-16 12:46 am (UTC)I am desperate to read the rest now.
*drums fingers*
Oh, and friending you back, too, because I don't want to miss any of that ficcing of yours...
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Date: 2008-01-21 01:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-16 12:48 am (UTC)Yeah, ok, tired and going to bed. G'night...
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Date: 2008-01-16 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-08 11:57 pm (UTC)Lee feels like another person in your story but after everything that has happened to him it's totally believable.
Two years ago, his father had wanted Lee dead. Now he must believe that Lee was, that both of his sons were. Lee hoped he frakking choked on it.
Really liked that sentence and the whole part about how Adama and the Galactica even survived Lee's mother ....
Am looking forward to the next parts!