Chapter 3: The Convoy
The universe snapped back into place with a gut-deep shudder. Stars, cold and distant and utterly indifferent, resolved from streaks into fixed points of light. The Viper hung in perfect, awful silence.
Emma’s hands were still clamped on the controls. She forced them open, finger by finger. A tremor ran through them. She stared at them as if they belonged to someone else. Then the smells hit her: ionized ozone, the sharp tang of overheated circuitry, and underneath it all, the coppery scent of her own fear-sweat.
She was alive.
The thought was an accusation.
She unsealed her helmet with a hiss, the sudden rush of canned, recycled air cold on her face. She breathed in. Out. The mechanical rhythm of her lungs felt like the only real thing in the void. Her console flickered, systems rebooting after the jump. Green status lights glowed beside a dozen amber warnings. Minor shield fluctuations. Heat sink overload. The nuke’s proximity burst had rattled her, but the prototype had held. It was pristine.
They were all ash, and her fighter didn’t have a scratch.
A sound tore from her throat—half a laugh, half a sob. It echoed in the small space, ugly and raw. She slapped a hand over her mouth, pressing hard until her teeth ached. The Commander. The best pilot in the fleet. Huddled in her cockpit, choking on silence.
She made herself move. She ran system diagnostics, her eyes scanning data without seeing it. Fuel: 87%. Core stable. Weapons charged. FTL drive cycling, thirty minutes to next potential jump. It was all numbers. Meaningless numbers. She had no orders. No destination. No fleet.
“Picon Headquarters, this is Viper Mark IX, callsign Aphrodite. Does anyone copy?” Her voice, usually so sweet and melodic, was a dry rasp. She cleared her throat, tried again. “Any Colonial station, any military or civilian traffic, this is Commander Kent. Please respond.”
Static. The hollow, hissing silence of a dead frequency.
She cycled through every encrypted channel, every public band. Nothing. The entire spectrum of human communication had been reduced to white noise. It was as if the colonies had never existed. As if she had dreamed them.
“Okay,” she whispered to herself, the word a lifeline. “Okay, think.”
Caprica. If anywhere had survived, it would be Caprica. The planetary defenses were strongest there, the fleet headquarters a fortress. She could warn them. She could tell them what happened, the disabling signal, the coordinated strike. They’d court-martial her for abandoning her post, and she’d thank them for it. Just to hear another human voice.
She began plotting a jump, her fingers flying over the nav computer. The star charts were familiar, comforting in their logic. She could be there in three short hops, conserving fuel. A plan. Purpose. It was a thin thread, but she clung to it.
A proximity alert chimed, soft and insistent.
Her head snapped up. A ship had just tumbled out of FTL a few thousand kilometers off her port bow. It was a civilian liner, a big, bulbous passenger transport called the Starwander. Its hull was scorched. One of its engine pods was dark, trailing a mist of coolant. Life signs bloomed across her screen—hundreds of them, a seething mass of panic made manifest.
A burst transmission screamed across the open channel, overriding all others.
“—ANYONE! Gods, please, is anyone out there? This is the luxury liner Starwander. We are under attack! We have wounded! Our FTL is failing! If any Colonial military vessel can hear this, we are under—”
Emma keyed her mic, cutting in. “Starwander, this is Colonial Viper Mark Nine. I read you. What is your status? Report.”
A wave of overlapping voices flooded back, a chaotic tide of terror.
“—they came out of nowhere! Our navigation just died—”
“—the whole sky over Caprica lit up—”
“—Basestars, dozens of them! They’re shooting everything that moves!”
“Quiet! All of you, quiet!” A new voice, older, authoritative, fought through the noise. “Viper, this is Captain Reyes of the Starwander. Who am I speaking to?”
“Commander Emma Kent, Colonial Fleet.”
A pause. When Reyes spoke again, the desperation was laced with a horrible, dawning recognition. “Kent? Aphrodite? Gods… you’re… you’re alive? We heard Picon was gone. We heard the whole Guard was wiped out.”
“Picon is gone,” Emma said, the words like stones in her mouth. “The fleet is gone. What happened at Caprica?”
Reyes’s voice broke. “It was a slaughter. Our systems shut down—communications, navigation, weapons. Everything just… stopped. Then the Raiders came. They ignored the military targets at first. They went for the civilian orbital platforms, the spaceports, the transit hubs.” He took a shuddering breath. “We were in high orbit for a pleasure cruise. We saw the Battlestar Valkyrie take a direct hit amidships. She broke in half. They were shooting life pods, Viper. They were shooting the life pods.”
The cold in Emma’s veins wasn’t from the recycled air. It was the cold of deep space. A coordinated attack. Not just on Picon. On everything. Every world. Every ship.
“How did you get out?” she asked, her voice hollow.
“Old tech,” Reyes said, a hint of bleak pride there. “My chief engineer is a fossil. Kept a secondary navigational computer, fully analog, offline as a museum piece. No wireless. No network. When everything died, he hardwired it in. We blind-jumped the second we had power. No idea where we are.”
Emma looked at her own ship. It was purely new technology. The opposite of analog backups, physical switches, and manual readouts. The Viper was too advanced, too new for even the Cylons to hack.
“It was a backdoor,” she said, more to herself than to him. “They hacked our entire fleet. Told us to stand down and then butchered us.”
“You’re the first military asset we’ve seen,” Reyes said, the hope in his voice a fragile, painful thing. “What are your orders, Commander?”
Orders. The word hung in the static. She had none. She commanded a single fighter and a ship full of refugees in a dead sky.
Her console beeped. A new signal, weak and encrypted, bleeding across an old, rarely-used logistical frequency. A repeating automated message.
She amplified it, her heart hammering against her ribs.
A voice, crisp and familiar despite the distortion, filled her cockpit.
“…to all Colonial units… this is Commander William Adama of the Battlestar Galactica… We are broadcasting on all surviving channels… The Cylons have attacked the Colonies… Our communications are compromised, our weapons are gone… Do not use networked systems… Repeat, do not use networked systems…”
Adama. The old man. He’d always been a paranoid fossil, preaching about analog backups and closed systems. They’d laughed at him. Called him a dinosaur.
They weren’t laughing now.
“…We are assembling surviving fleet units at rendezvous point Alpha… Coordinates follow… Use old-style DRADIS for verification… Gods help us all… Galactica out.”
A string of numbers scrolled across her screen. A location. A waypoint in the empty deep.
Emma felt something unlock in her chest. It wasn’t hope, not yet. It was direction. A point to aim for.
“Starwander,” she said, her voice finding its strength again. “Did you copy that transmission?”
“We copied it,” Reyes replied, urgency crackling in his tone. “Our FTL is shot. We can’t make that jump. Not in one go. And the Cylons… they’ll be hunting for signatures like ours.”
Emma looked from her fuel readout to the damaged, bleeding liner. They were sitting ducks. She was a Viper, built for speed and attack, not for escort. Every instinct screamed at her to jump, now, to save herself and carry the warning.
But the silence after Picon echoed in her skull.
“I’m reading your vector,” she said, her decision solidifying as she spoke. “Your functional engine can get you moving. I’ll fly point. Your engineer needs to get that FTL spooled, even if it’s a short hop. We go in stages. We stay quiet. We run dark.”
“You’d escort us?” Reyes asked, disbelief and raw gratitude mixing.
“I’m not leaving you,” Emma said, and it was the first true thing she’d felt since the stars came back. “Now get your people ready. We’re not done yet.”
She fed the Galactica’s coordinates into her offline system. The numbers glowed on the screen, a tiny, defiant star in the darkness. She pushed the throttle forward, her Viper pivoting to lead the way.
“Starwander, follow my mark. Next jump in twenty minutes. Let’s go find our fleet.”