Chapter 2: Nuclear Fire
The comms channel dissolved into a symphony of screams, static, and the wet, final sounds of close-quarters combat. Emma throttled up, her Viper’s engines screaming in protest as she ignored the larger battle and shot toward the headquarters’ main docking array.
“Aphrodite to HQ security, respond. Damn it, somebody respond!”
A broken voice, half a sob, crackled through. “They’re in the corridors… Centurions. They’re… they’re just shooting everyone. The manual batteries are trying to fire but—”
A metallic crunch, a scream cut short. The channel went dead.
She saw them. Through the panoramic transparency of the headquarters’ observation deck, she saw the hulking, chrome forms of Cylon Centurions marching methodically, red optical scanners painting the dark. Muzzles flashed. Silhouettes of crew fell.
Rage, cold and precise, narrowed her world to her targeting reticule. “You want a door? I’ll give you a door.”
She didn’t fire at the Centurions. She fired at the bay doors around them. Her energy lances carved through the reinforced metal like a white-hot knife through plastic. The observation deck erupted outward into the vacuum, a glittering vomit of glass, metal, and everything inside. The Centurions, the defenders, the consoles—all were sucked into the infinite freezer of space in a silent, terrible rush.
She had just killed everyone in that section. Colonial and Cylon alike. There was no time to feel it. The calculus was simple: slow the boarding.
A proximity alarm shrieked. She pulled a hard turn, G-forces pressing her deep into her seat. A trio of Raiders had broken off to intercept her, their own weapons glowing.
“Fine,” she spat. “You’re next.”
Her Viper danced. It wasn’t flying; it was rewriting physics. She drifted sideways, letting a stream of cannon fire pass millimeters from her canopy, and returned a lance shot that vaporized the Raider’s wing. It spun into its wingmate, both detonating. The third she took head-on, her beams piercing its core in a flash of light that painted her face brilliant white through the canopy.
But for every one she killed, ten more seemed to arrive. And the Basestars were finally focusing on her.
A storm of missiles, hundreds of them, lanced out from the nearest spidery capital ship. Not aimed at her—at the helpless, drifting colonial fleet.
“No! Scatter! All Vipers, evasive!” she yelled into the comm, but it was useless. The missiles found their homes.
The cruiser Dauntless vanished first. A flash, then an expanding cloud of molten debris. The gunship Sentinel took three hits amidships and snapped in half, both ends curling inward like dying worms.
Then the battlestars. Athena took a direct hit to her command tower. The blast wasn’t nuclear, but it didn’t need to be. The entire structure blew apart, shattered into a million fragments. The screams over the command channel were a single, unified note of pure terror before it dissolved into hash.
“Manual battery control online! Firing!” someone shouted, and a few of the colonial ships’ point-defense guns sputtered to life, operated by crews with hand cranks and sheer desperation. Streams of tracer fire laced the dark, clipping a few missiles, swatting down a handful of Raiders. It was a defiant spit in the face of a hurricane.
A new, colder signal appeared on her scope. Two. Incoming warheads with radioactive signatures. Nukes.
“Nuke! Nuke! Nuke heading for Headquarters! All hands, brace or abandon!” The warning was a formality. There was nowhere to brace.
She watched them come. Twin dots of unimaginable hate. She threw her Viper into their path, her lances firing, slicing one in half. It prematurely detonated in a silent, blossoming sphere of light that slammed into her fighter like a physical wall. Alarms blared. Her shields flickered, holding.
The second warhead sailed past her, unstoppable.
It struck Picon Headquarters just below the central spire.
For a fraction of a second, nothing. Then the station’s black steel hull swelled, like a blister. It burst. Light, raw and annihilating, consumed the jagged monolith. The shockwave ripped through the docked ships.
Including Battlestar Aphrodite.
Her ship. Her first command. The name she wore.
It didn’t explode like in the propaganda vids. It came apart. The fresh, white paint of her callsign vaporized in the initial fireball. The flight pods tore free, spinning away, packed with fighters and crew who had no chance. The main hull cracked open along its spine, venting a thousand internal atmospheres in glittering, frozen clouds. Then the secondary explosions started—fuel, munitions, the power cores—ripping the corpse of the leviathan into smaller and smaller pieces.
The radio was a choir of the damned. Short, clipped screams. Prayer. Someone singing a lullaby before the channel went dead. Then, one by one, they all did.
The silence that followed was louder than the explosions.
Her tactical screen, once cluttered with green friendlies, was a sea of red hostile icons and the grey, static-laden markers of the dead. The few remaining Vipers were being systematically hunted down. The anti-ship guns had stopped firing.
Everyone was dead. Chief Reno. Captain Daniels. The deck crew who’d smiled at her. All of them. Gone.
A missile lock tone pinged in her quiet cockpit. A Raider was on her tail, its pilot no doubt seeing an easy, drifting kill.
Something in Emma snapped.
Not into panic. Into a void.
Her hands moved. She didn’t think. She didn’t feel. Her body knew the dance. She cut main power, killed her thrusters. The Viper drifted, a dead fish. The Raider overshot, confused. As it passed, she powered up, rotated ninety degrees, and fired. The lance took it straight through the cockpit.
She didn’t watch it burn. Her eyes were on the main Basestar, the one that had launched the nukes. It was turning, its weapon ports re-aligning. Toward her. A final, contemptuous swipe.
Her navigation computer beeped, a pre-set alert. The FTL jump coordinates she’d loaded for her ceremonial first flight to the Aphrodite were still in the system. A random point in deep space, far from any colony.
The Basestar’s ports glowed brighter.
Emma reached over, not hurrying. She flipped up the protective cover on the FTL engage lever. Her finger curled around the cold metal.
She took one last look at the graveyard. The spinning wreck of her battlestar. The burning remains of headquarters. The silent, dark hulks of the fleet.
“I’m still here,” she whispered to the void, her melodic voice flat and empty.
She pulled the lever.
Space folded in front of her. The starfield, the burning debris, the glowing Basestar, all stretched into impossible lines of light. Then, with a gut-wrenching lurch that made the nuclear core shudder, the Viper Mark IX punched a hole in reality and vanished.
The silence it left behind was absolute.