Chapter 5: Galactica Actual
The corridors of Galactica were a maze of grays and urgent sounds. The deck plates thrummed with a deep, industrial heartbeat, and the air tasted of recycled oxygen and desperation. Crew members, their uniforms smudged with grease and sweat, moved with a brittle purposefulness. They glanced at her—a stranger in a pristine flight suit, her hair a bright shock against the drab bulkheads—but their eyes didn’t linger. There was no room for curiosity anymore, only function.
A young ensign, looking about eighteen and trying to hide his terror behind a rigid posture, led her to a heavy blast door. “CIC,” he said, his voice cracking on the acronym. He slapped the access panel.
The door slid open with a hiss, and the Combat Information Center unfolded before her.
It was older than she’d imagined. Holographic displays flickered with a faint static, their blue light bleeding into the warm amber of older, physical monitors. The star map was a bulky projection, not the seamless interface of Picon HQ. The air was cooler here, smelling of ozone and overheated circuitry, and beneath that, the sour tang of unwashed bodies and spent adrenaline.
Men and women hunched over consoles, their voices low, tense reports bleeding into a constant electronic hum. In the center of it all, leaning over the main plotting table, was a man whose silhouette seemed carved from the same steel as the ship itself.
Commander William Adama turned. He wasn’t a large man, but he held the space like a gravity well. His face was a landscape of fatigue, etched with lines that spoke of decades of command and, now, of apocalypse. His eyes, however, were alive, sharp, absorbing every detail of her in a single glance.
“Commander Kent,” he said. His voice was the one from the radio, gravel worn smooth by use.
“Commander Adama.” She approached, offering her hand. His grip was firm, dry, and brief. A formality. There was no warmth in it, but there was an acknowledgement. They were the same rank, in a world where rank had just been obliterated.
“Your signal was the first military contact we’ve had in twelve hours that wasn’t a distress call followed by static,” he stated, cutting straight to the bone. “Picon?”
Emma shook her head, the motion feeling too small for the truth it carried. “Gone. The orbital defense grid was compromised. The Cylons… they didn’t just attack. They switched everything off. My Mark IX was unaffacted, completely isolated from the network. By the time I punched a hole through the first wave, the basestars were already burning the planet. The sky was…” She stopped, finding the words ash in her mouth. “It was falling.”
A muscle in Adama’s jaw tightened. He didn’t look away. “The Starwander?”
“Blind-jumped with me. Their FTL took a hit from debris. They’ve got about fifty souls on board, mostly civilians. Low on fuel, lower on hope.”
“We’ll integrate them.” He said it like it was simple arithmetic. Another problem in a column of thousands. His eyes drifted past her, as if he could see through the bulkhead to her fighter in the landing bay. “Your bird. A Mark Nine. We only had blueprints.”
“Only one was built. A full-system prototype. Nuclear turbine, not a tylium reactor. Independent power grid, hardened against any external electronic warfare. It can’t be… shut off.” She met his gaze. “Its weaponry is particle-based. No ballistic rounds to reload. And it has its own FTL drive, short-range but instantaneous spool-up.”
A quiet had spread through CIC. The officers were pretending not to listen, but the cadence of their reports had slowed.
Adama absorbed the information without a flicker of surprise. “A ship that can’t be crippled by their tricks, with infinite ammunition and its own jump capability.” He finally showed a hint of something—not a smile, but a grim crystallization of thought. “They built you a god-killer just in time for the end of the world.”
“It’s just one fighter,” Emma said, the flirty, charismatic mask she usually wore completely absent. Here, it would have been obscene.
“Out there,” Adama said, gesturing vaguely towards the viewport showing the huddled civilian ships, “I have forty-three Mark Two Vipers, most flown by kids who graduated flight school three months ago, and a handful of Raptors that are better at running than fighting. You’re not just ‘one fighter.’ You’re a tactical event.” He leaned on the table, the star map casting sharp shadows across his face. “I need you in the air. Not under my command—you answer to a ghost now—but with us. You’ll have a wide berth. Independent patrols. Scout ahead. Hit hard where you can. Do a lot of good, Commander. We have precious little of that left.”
Emma felt the weight of it settle on her. Not the weight of command, but of being a symbol. A relic of a future that would never be, now the sharpest tool in a toolbox full of rusted nails. “Where do we go?” she asked. “We can’t just drift.”
Adama straightened, his decision clearly made long before she arrived. “We need munitions. Tylium. Medical supplies. Everything. Ragnar Anchorage.”
Emma knew it. A remote resupply station, buried in a toxic nebula. A place designed for secrecy, for weathering a storm. “It’s a ghost town. Decommissioned after the first war.”
“Which means its location isn’t in the current Colonial databases. The Cylons might not know about it. It’s stocked for a battalion. It’s our only chance to re-arm, to get these people breathing for more than another day.”
He turned to a man with fierce eyes at the tactical station. “Colonel Tigh, plot the jump to Ragnar. Use random coordinates within a one-light-year margin. We can’t afford a straight line.” He looked back at Emma. “Your Viper’s jump computer. Is it synced to our navigational data?”
“It can be.”
“Do it. You’ll jump with the fleet. Then I want you to go in first. A quick reconnaissance pop-in, pop-out. See if the Cylons beat us there. Your bird’s the only one that can do that quietly and come back to tell the tale.”
It was a good plan. The only plan. Emma nodded. “Understood.”
“Get your coordinates from Lieutenant Gaeta here.” Adama indicated a pale, focused young officer at the navigation console. “Then get some rack time. You look like hell.”
It was the closest thing to kindness she’d heard since Picon died.
Adama returned to the star map, his attention already gone, consumed by the logistics of moving fifty thousand survivors across the void. The conversation was over.
A staff officer—a different one, a woman with a severe bun and tired eyes—touched Emma’s elbow. “This way, Commander. I’ll show you to your quarters.”
Emma followed her out of CIC, the muffled sounds of the bridge dying behind the sealing blast door. The corridor seemed quieter now, the hum of the ship more pronounced.
“The Commander’s put you in Officer Country,” the woman said, not looking back. “Small cabin, but it’s private. We had… vacancies.”
They walked in silence for a minute. Then the officer stopped at a nondescript door, keying it open. The room inside was a steel cell. A bunk, a small desk, a locker. A viewport showing the unmoving stars. It was monastic. It was perfect.
“Head’s down the hall. Mess is on Deck 12. Your fighter’s being refueled with our remaining nuclear feedstock. The Chief says it’s… an interesting beast.”
“Thank you,” Emma said, stepping inside.
The officer lingered for a second, her professional mask slipping. She looked at Emma, really looked at her—the famous beauty, the pilot from a storybook future, now standing in this tomb of a room. There was no lust in her gaze, just a hollow sort of wonder. “Is it true?” she whispered. “About all of it? Everything’s just… gone?”
Emma met her eyes and gave the slightest, most painful nod.
The officer’s face tightened. She gave a sharp, almost imperceptible nod back. “Get some sleep, ma’am.” She turned and walked away, her footsteps echoing in the hollow hall.
Emma closed the door. The sudden silence was absolute. She leaned back against the cold metal, sliding down until she sat on the floor, her knees pulled to her chest. She stared at the impersonal stars outside her viewport.
In her head, she replayed the scream of Picon’s atmosphere boiling away. She saw the elegant, murderous curve of a Basestar. She saw the two young Viper pilots giving her a thumbs-up.
She didn’t cry. There wasn’t time. There was only Ragnar, and the jump, and the need to be sharp. She rested her forehead on her knees, and in the quiet of her steel coffin, she waited for the thrum of the FTL drive to kick in, and for the war to find them again.