Laura wasn't sure how long they had been running when Bill finally deemed it safe to slow down, but her legs felt weak and sore and it was a struggle to regain her breath. She felt a strange sense of satisfaction when she noticed that Bill seemed to be faring equally badly. They stood in the darkness gulping air and Laura made to sit down, but Bill put a hand on her arm to restrain her.
"Better not to stop completely. It'll just make it harder when we get going again."
Looking from Bill to the extraordinarily inviting seeming ground and back again, Laura sighed and straightened her legs. "Where are we going, anyway?"
"There should be a cave system in the mountains north of here. We'll be safe there while we figure out how to get to the rendezvous point." He slowly began pacing back and forth again, keeping his legs moving.
"And how do you know where north is, on this strange planet in the dark?" she asked, matching his stride.
"Ah, well." Bill held up a hand as if he were about to disclose some great military secret. "That is all due to this ingenious little device strapped to my sleeve. It's called a compass."
Laura grinned, which was quickly followed by a wince as the dried blood on her face cracked and re-opened the long cut down her cheek.
"You want me to take a look at that?" Bill asked, pausing in his pacing to step closer to her.
"No, I'm fine," Laura assured him quickly. "Besides, you wouldn't be able to see much in this light."
She thought she saw him nod. "Alright," he said. "You ready to go on?"
"As I'll ever be," she replied, trying and failing not to wonder exactly how far she would be required to go on. She lifted her bag back onto her shoulder and took Bill's arm, letting him lead her at a brisk walk through the barely illuminated woods. Her other hand renewed its grip on her gun, which was growing slick with nervous sweat.
"Is it safe to talk or might there be Cylons close by?" she asked after a moment.
"If they were close enough to hear us right now they'd be close enough to detect our heat signatures and pick us off with a sniper," Bill said almost casually.
"Right." Laura couldn't help but smile. "Isn't that a cheery thought."
Bill let out a grunt which sounded like it might be amused. "Did you have a topic of conversation in mind?"
"Yes, actually." Laura asked the question which had been on her mind for a while now. "What are you doing here, Bill? Shouldn't you be up there on your ship, overseeing things?"
"Technically yes," he admitted, in a tone of voice which reminded her of a student trying to come up with an excuse for not doing an assignment. "But we were short a Raptor pilot, and we couldn't rework the plan to use one less."
"So you got back in the pilot's seat." Laura was more amused than anything.
"Yes, I did."
She let some of the humor drain from her voice. "And then your plan failed anyway, I'm assuming?"
"Well yes, but that was just plan A." Bill didn't sound too perturbed about it. "We do have a plan B."
"And if that fails too?"
"Then we still have chance and blind luck to fall back on."
Laura laughed. "Well, I suppose that's worked for us before."
"Exactly." The light tone of Bill's voice matched her own, masking the underlying seriousness of the conversation. "Why change a winning strategy."
"Why, indeed." Laura squeezed his arm amiably. "It's good to see you, Bill."
"You too, Laura." He turned his face toward her but she couldn't read it in the darkness. Still, by his voice she took it that he was smiling.
By the same token she was sure he was no longer smiling when a bullet ricocheted off the tree his head had been in front of just moments before.
"Is this that sniper fire you mentioned?" Laura managed after he had thrown her to the ground beneath him and knocked most of the breath from her lungs.
"It would appear so." Bill reached for his gun and fired blindly in the direction the bullet had come from. The only result was more gunfire, bullets flying by so close overhead that Laura could almost feel them brushing past her hair.
She held up her own gun and studied it uncertainly. Her fingers felt stiff from clutching it too hard, so much so that she wasn't sure she'd be able to pull the trigger.
"You'll have to turn the safety off if you're gonna use that," Bill said, not looking away from his intense study of the woods in front of them.
"Right…" Laura muttered, doing as he said. She tried to turn in the direction of the gunfire, but something at the corner of her eye caught her attention. Sending up a silent prayer, she pointed the gun and pulled the trigger.
The gun recoiled violently in her hands as a cry came from behind a tree far closer than Laura had expected, and one of the Cylons who looked like the reporter fell out from behind it, clutching her leg. Bill put a bullet through her head before she could regain focus and reach for her gun.
"We've got to move," Bill declared, pulling Laura up by her arm with one hand whilst firing more shots off into the wilderness with the other. "I'll lay down cover fire. You stay in front of me, move as fast as you can and stay low as much as possible. And be careful where you point that thing!" he admonished, tilting his head at the gun she now realized she was holding rather dangerously close to his chest.
"Right." Laura risked a glance back at Bill and ran again, trying to ignore her painfully protesting muscles and just keep moving, until the guns were out of earshot and Bill once again let them stop, panting and wheezing, with their mountainous destination looming close and the pre-dawn light just starting to turn the black world into gray.
This time he let her sit down without argument.
