==========BS-75 Galactica (+250 Days Post Cylon Holocaust)==========
Sharon, the "Number Eight" Cylon knew something was wrong. She felt it before her body reacted. One moment she was talking with her best friend and love, Karl Agathon. The next he was holding her in his arms, shouting.
She began drifting in and out of consciousness. The lights lining the corridors of Galactica flashed by her.
She saw Helo, running next to her, holding her hand. His grip was firm and loving. She smiled at him. "Helo…" He didn't hear her. He wasn't looking at her. She saw he was frightened. Why?
The next moment she was in the medical bay. People were rushing all around. Pain. She felt pain like she had never felt pain before. It was worse than when Helo had shot her in Delphi.
"We need to do an emergency C-section!" Doctor Cottle announced.
"I will apply a local anesthetic," came a cool, steady response. She saw 'Doctor' Lt. Joanne Soto.
"Wha- what's going on," Sharon managed to asked. Her vision was cloudy and she tried to sit up as her blood pressure dropped and her vitals- she blacked out.
Slowly she began to wake up. The anesthetic had worn off quickly, her Cylon biology having rapidly metabolized the drug. "Arggggg!" She shouted in pain. She could feel the IV large bore needles in her arm and she began to panic.
"Sharon! Sharon! Calm down, I'm here! I Love you!" Helo yelled. Rushing up to her he brought her into a loving embrace, calming her down.
She felt… empty inside.
She looked down. The lump was gone. The baby? Her eyes darted to Helo. The fear was overwhelming her. "Where's our baby?! Where's Hera?!"
"Sharon… they had to do an emergency C-section. Sharon, I love you."
"Hera, where is she!?" She shouted, trying to get up.
"By the Gods woman, she's right here," Doc Cottle said, his always voice scruffy and stern, walking in from the adjacent bay. "And she's beautiful."
He handed her her baby.
==========BS-75 Galactica (+278 Days Post Cylon Holocaust)==========
"Pegasus – Starbuck, we are formed up out here and all spun up. We're ready for our first jump," Lt. Hoshi's affirmation came back over the wireless. "Request to speak with Galactica actual."
After a few moments came the response: "Actual, go."
"Sir, did I ever thank you?" Starbuck asked Commander Adama over the wireless.
"No. But then again that'd be a first," he responded tenderly. She chuckled into the headset and sighed. "Starbuck, I'll support your mission and I hope you find him. Come back in one piece," Adama added.
She noted that Lee had said the same to her on Pegasus.
"Thank you, sir."
Adama wouldn't be able to see the large grin on her face.
"Good hunting, Starbuck. Actual out."
As Starbuck began giving her orders to the SAR team she turned to check back on Helo and Sharon and Planck and Bishop.
"I still can't believe you talked me into this, Helo. I need to be with Hera." She looked down towards the decks as she slouched against the frame holding the Cylon navigation brain.
"Sharon, this is important. It's important for her, too," he responded lovingly, holding her hand tenderly. "We do this, we prove to Adama that he can trust you."
"Sure," she sighed, not particularly caring for his reasoning. "It's not him I don't trust. It's Roslin and Cain and everyone else," she snorted, "Some great life we'll have…" she trailed off as her voice dropped.
Helo smiled sympathetically and turned his attention back to her from the Raptor computer screens. He grabbed her hand and swore to her that she was all he needed. They'd have each other and they'd earn the trust of everyone else, together.
"You are concerned President Roslin may have you child taken," Carter Bishop stated, breaking the tender moment between the human and Cylon. "Jo will protect her."
Sharon winced and looked at him. The scowl and concern that flushed across her face was clear to everyone that that…decision by the President infuriated her.
"Thank you. For stopping her," Sharon said. It'd been the first time she had thanked the Terminators. After Hera's blood saved Roslin, she had still wanted the child destroyed. 'The safety and well-being of the fleet' was her justification. Sharon going into early labor and Doc Cottle calling Pegasus for Soto had saved her baby's life.
She'd thanked the old, gruff, I'll-do-what-I-feel-is-right, doctor. He'd helped saved her baby, though he had, of course, denied that Roslin had ever had any intention of taking her baby from her.
Helo had originally asked Planck to intervene. He'd admitted that to her, that he wanted them to break her out of the brig, get them on a Raptor, then just disappear. But he'd been wrong to ask that of the machines.
Sharon reminded him he was a good man, always doing what was right. Sharon loved him for his devotion, to throw everything behind and be with her. She knew the ridicule and social isolation that had resulted from his continuing devotion to her and her child.
She had been told the Terminator, Soto, had quickly scanned the baby after delivery and had determined it to be completely healthy. The three had known what Roslin was planning and wouldn't allow it. They wouldn't kill, but if they exposed the child as fully healthy any plan to feign death would be questioned. At that point there was nothing that Roslin could have done to the child which would not result in what the terminators had said would be Bad Things happening.
"President Roslin is a hypocrite and liar. She used your child for her own purposes; to save her life. Then she was ready to destroy the child," Bishop added matter-of-factly. A human would normally have shown some emotion, some hint of anger or revulsion towards Rolsin's action. But the Terminator merely stated his conclusions as fact. "Humans pretend to be superior to machines and Cylons. Well, some do. Some understand humans, machines, or Cylons are alike. She accuses Cylons of duplicity and war when the Colonial government kept sapient machine intelligences in slavery. More than human life is sacred."
Carter leaned back in his seat and tightened the restraints as the Raptor prepared for FTL jumps.
"Do you think machines are capable of love, Carter?" Sharon asked. Helo was about to speak, a look of defeat on his face, before she signaled him to not say anything.
Bishop sat opposite Helo, his eyes, if human, would have been unfocused, 'staring off into space.' He shifted his gaze down towards her. "I believe machines, sufficiently advanced machines, can overcome the limitations in their 'programming' when presented with certain variables."
Both Sharon and Helo had to laugh at that. Bishop just sat there, not taking part in the fun.
"Ha, that's a very machine-like answer," Sharon said. Her tone wasn't meant to insult or degrade, but was just meant to be a friendly jab.
"I am a machine. I never pretend not to be. This skin," he touched his face and brought up his hands, "is just to aide in infiltration and put humans at ease. I'd prefer not having to wear it." He opened his mouth to add something, but paused. It almost looked like he was deciding what to say. "The answer I gave you is the simplest one I could think of. It is far more complicated than that," he added in slowly.
"Interesting choice of words with 'wear' there, Carter," Helo pointed out. "Do you all have any choice in the matter? I mean, when fighting with humans on Earth?"
"It depends what our assignments are. I was a ground soldier. While I worked mainly with other Terminators we were in regular contact and cooperation with human resistance fighters." He smiled, "We try not to 'freak people out'."
He pulsed his blue eyes. Helo and Sharon both had to laugh. They'd been getting used to the peculiar mannerisms of the machines. They'd been different before being discovered, more human, but this was who they actually were.
"You keep calling yourself that, 'Terminators'… doesn't that freak people the frak out?" Helo inquired. If Bishop was going to be open with them during this trip, Helo believe he should take advantage of it. The three machines hadn't been very forthcoming in the last few months. "Is that your race? Ya know, human, Cylon?"
Bishop shrugged. "It's what we are. While designed to kill, our purpose as of now is to aide in the destruction of Skynet. We're referred to by some humans as the 'free machine faction' or 'anti-Skynet Terminators.' But 'Terminator' is also more of a function and purpose rather than a race, yes?" He didn't wait for them to respond. He enjoyed talking with humans about this. And Helo and Sharon were fairly unique and more open minded to these ideas. "We just don't concern ourselves with that at the moment."
"All of you fight Skynet?" Sharon asked.
"In some way or another," Bishop responded. "There are certainly no 'pacifists' in our faction." He shifted in his seat and unbuckled the restraints, moving a little closer to Sharon. As a machine he had access to a massive database of information inside his neural network and memory cores a human could never hope to comprehend. He accessed emotional subroutines and memories as they analyzed the conversation. Sharon and Helo were genuinely interested. But they still had no idea their place in the fleet. "When you accept what you are, be it a machine such as myself, or a biological Cylon such as you, Sharon, then you can move forward. A machine sufficiently advanced, with sufficiently advanced AI can easily overcome its 'programming' with outside variables. That's another form of life. And when AI operates outside that 'programming', how is that any different than how a human acts?"
Sharon was about to speak when Starbuck leaned back in in the cockpit and turned to them. "I appreciate the heart-to-heart you three but Sharon, can you plug into the navigation node? We're spooled up and ready for coordinates." Sharon nodded. She inserted the optical cable into a port Lt. Gaeta had designed. A large bore IV needle fitted with strands of optical fiber had been inserted into Sharon's arm and would relay the communication commands.
The coordinates were quickly calculated, the Cylon jump computer, incredibly more sophisticated than Colonial models, would get the Raiders to Caprica within two days and with only fifteen jumps.
"Ready back there, Helo?" Starbuck asked, shooting him a sideways glance to check on him. He confirmed coordinates were distributed to the SAR Raptors. "Alright. SAR Raptors, commence jump one!"
The Raptors disappeared, a ball of white-blue light pulling them from real space and depositing them dozens of light years away, one step closer to Caprica.
"Oh shit! We lost one already! Racetrack. Damnit," Starbuck cursed. Helo asked her if they should turn back. "No, they head back to the barn. We keep going unless we lose three! Let's get the second jump coordinates."
Four light years from the fleet and twenty-six off course Racetrack's Raptor jumped into a nebula.
==========Caprica (+280 Days Post Cylon Holocaust)==========
The SAR team had lost a total of three Raptors in their mission to rescue the nearly one hundred survivors known to have survived the Cylon attack on Caprica. One Raptor had misjumped. To where, the SAR team had no clue. Nineteen had made it to Caprica, but two had jumped inside the mountains surrounding to Makton Valley. They had already lost eight good men and women before they had placed a single boot on the ground.
Starbuck had planned and organized this rescue mission. At first she had been denied by Commander Adama, but Admiral Cain had heard the rumors prior to the Battle of the Resurrection Ship, and had told her they would return to the Colonies and rescue the stranded resistance fighters.
Admiral Cain had told her they would eventually return to the Colonies and fight the Cylons tooth and nail until the Cylon menace was vanquished from the Colonies. But the Admiral had long since given up any hope of retaking the Colonies.
Once on Caprica John Planck had taken one of the Raptors to the outskirts of Delphi. He had been gone for over eight hours by the time the SAR team made contact with the remnants of Caprican civilization and a star Pyramid team.
"How much further until we get to their camp," Helo asked, propping his grenade launcher on his right shoulder. He kept his eyes sharp and his body ready for any ambushes.
Coming back to Caprica invoked feelings he hadn't felt since leaving. Stranded on the planet for nearly two months, he'd fallen in love with a Cylon,
Carter answered the question without turning to look at them.
"We are one kilometer away. At our speed it will take us twenty minutes to reach them," the Terminator, Bishop, replied. He had memorized dozens of maps of the area to his memory before leaving Pegasus. Combined with his ability to keep perfect distance and time Bishop negated the need to stop every hour to plot their course.
"Thank you," Starbuck said.
"If you were sincere you would not have Corporal Wills checking my calculations every hour," he responded coldly, turning to look at her. His eyes flashed. Starbuck thought for a moment he was doing it to 'freak her out' or make her uneasy, but his head turned suddenly and he held up his fist. Sharon, her body engineered to be superior to her human template, spotted motion with her enhanced eyesight a few moments after Bishop.
They continued their mission through the dark and damp morning woods. Many of the Marines who had volunteered had been looking forward to stepping foot on a planet again. The last time many of them had been on an actual, life-sustaining planet had been Kobol. And then, maybe half a dozen of them had been there for the SAR of Raptor One.
None of the Pegasus Marines had been on a planet since before the Cylon sneak attack.
The woods, however, were eerily quiet. Many animals had died from radiation and sickness. Most of the plant life had survived. But the sun's color had changed from a radiant and vibrant yellow to a dark and heavy orange due to the dust, ash, and particulates still in the atmosphere.
And it was colder than it should have been during this time of the year. The nights had been near freezing.
"Movement, get down!" She ordered quietly and quickly.
The SAR team quickly crouched and brought their rifles up. The team sent out to find the Caprican resistance hurriedly found cover behind trees, broken logs, and large boulders. Thirty-five Marines, four pilots and one Cylon hid themselves. One terminator did not.
"Damnit, Bishop, get down," Starbuck ordered, hissing her command to him.
"They are friendly," Bishop informed her, voice monotone.
The Viper captain just rolled her eyes. She realized that Bishop could probably see thermals or some EM spectrum telling him the people or things moving closer were not Cylons.
Still, the SAR Team, especially the Marines, maintained they cover. Bishop crouched as Starbuck again told him to take cover and tugged on his pant leg to get down. He realized arguing would be counterproductive even if Starbuck's logic was flawed.
"Friendlies?" Helo asked.
"I just told you they were," Bishop informed him again. A quick expression of annoyance flashed across his face.
"Okay, you told us. You ever think you might be wrong?" Starbuck threw out.
"No."
She looked at Helo, both had to roll their eyes and let out a quick laugh. Still, she forced him to take cover.
"Is there a Samuel T. Anders there?" Helo shouted.
"How is that any-" Bishop began. Starbuck shushed him with a quick jab at his shoulder.
"Is there a Kara Thrace there?"
The SAR team leaders smiled at each other. They were friendlies.
They stood up, Anders rushed towards Starbuck when he saw her. The two grabbed each other and hugged deeply. Anders saw Helo and broke the hug off, giving his friend a strong hand shake. Only half of the resistance was still alive from when Helo and Starbuck were on Caprica previously.
"I hate to break the pleasantries but there are Cylons on our ass," one of Anders' lieutenants threw in, breaking the moment and shoving everyone back to reality.
"There are Cylons half a klick out," Bishop told the woman.
"How do you know?" Her head shot back and she gave him the 'what the frak' look clear on her face.
"Their mechanical movements are crude and very distinct from the sounds of nature," he told her.
"'Sounds of nature'?... Who the frak is this guy?" Anders cut in, snickering at his choice of words, he shot his thumb out in a jab over his shoulder to the terminator.
There was a whine and shriek in the air.
"Incoming!" Sharon shouted as mortars and cluster munitions began to detonate around the SAR team and resistance survivors.
Everyone took cover, dropping to the ground, and spreading out. The mortar fire began to intensify as the Centurions drew closer. Their speed over humans and coordination in running, with the time lost exchanging pleasantries, let the Centurions catch up to the spent and exhausted resistance fighters.
Gunfire erupted from the trees and dirt exploded, shooting high into the air as Centurions closed in on the Colonials. Marines began to lay down covering fire with rifles and squad support weapons. A few, equipped with grenade launchers were able to fire grenades and halt the Centurion advance, giving the Colonials a precious few moments to regroup behind cover.
Bishop, with little concern for cover, began firing the A36 heavy squad support weapon, a 6mm automatic machinegun. With each pull of the trigger an electric current fired out a three round burst and quickly accelerated the armor piercing rounds to over 1,700 meters per second. The bullets slammed into Centurion after Centurion, piercing their frontal breast plate armors, and shattering circuitry, electronics, and power supplies.
"You need to fall back," he suggested before redirecting attention to a team of four Centurions one hundred meters away. He brought the gun back up to his shoulder and fired four bursts of eight bullets each. The Centurions collapsed within seconds of the first bullets striking.
"Holy shit," Anders cursed with his eyes wide as he admired Bishop's shooting.
Bishop continued to backpedal as he fired burst after burst at the Centurions. His targeting sensors indicated hits and misses and fortunately he was getting a lot more hits than misses. Anders turned to provide cover for Bishop, firing into the trees where he spotted Centurion muzzle flashes. Turning back to run to cover he swore he saw Bishop recoil slightly from multiple hits in the chest and stomach and right arm.
The Colonials quickly ran back up a hill and took refuge behind old, abandoned ruins. The entire area around the Delphi Union High School had once been neighborhoods, shopping plazas, and commercial buildings when Caprica was first settled. But war destroyed them, and 2,000 years later only a sparse collection of their skeletal remains had survived.
One of Anders' resistance fighters and former Caprica Buccaneer teammates yelled out in pain as the Colonials took cover. She was clutching her stomach trying to stop the pools of blood draining from her body.
"We need a medic!" Anders shouted as loud as he could. "Gods damnit! Hold on Anne, damnit, hold on!" He keep shouting for a medic, and for his team mate to stay with him.
Bishop knelt down besides Anders. He looked her up and down and placed his hand on Anne's upper chest. "She has suffered massive internal injuries. She will not survive. You should shoot her and end her pain," he recommended to Anders. The machine looked him straight in the eye as he said this.
For battles Bishop had modified his subroutines and emotional programming. He increased processing power to logic and tactics and decreased emotional response. This made him colder, callous, machine-like. Many machines had done this. The machines considered this the most logical course, even if it resulted in unsympathetic remarks such as Bishop had made. On the battle field, emotions resulted in death, human death. The free machine faction needed to minimize human death.
"What the frak! Frak you! Get a medic over here! We need morpha and coag powder!" He shouted. The rage inside him wanted to burst out and strangle the fraker next to him. 'You should shoot her'? Anders wanted to shoot him for suggesting such a barbaric and uncaring thing.
"Coagulation powder will have no effect. Her abdominal aorta has been torn. She will die in two minutes from blood loss. You should shoot her and save her the pain," the machine suggested again.
"Listen, shut the frak up! Say that again and I'll fraking shoot you," Anders warned.
"Hey, shut the frak up. Bishop, get up here on the wall, lay down fire," Starbuck yelled. Bishop got up and began firing out of the holes in the wall, taking down multiple Centurions before having to reload. "You really need to learn some tact. You and your friends," she commented to him before placing three shots in the breast plate of a Centurion. It smoked and fell forward, collapsing in a heap.
Craters dotted the forest landscape from where mortars had landed, and splintering debris, blown off trees was still flying through the air. Rocks and gravel and sticks were turned into deadly shrapnel as mortar fire and the pressure waves propelled and accelerated the forrest objects to killing speeds.
Showers of dirt and particulates rained down on the beleaguered Colonial Marines and stranded Caprican resistance fighters.
The firefight continued as mortars still rained down on the Colonial positions. Four Marines and two resistance fighters had been hit, two Marines and one resistance fighter dead.
The mortars stopped.
The Centurions began to move up slowly, using the thick trees as cover. A trio of the armored monsters ran quickly to an outcropping of boulders as Colonial bullets kicked up dirt around them and exploded the bark and moss off of the trees.
"Frak," Helo cursed loudly, tapping Starbuck on the shoulder. He handed her the binoculars and motioned to where the Centurion trio had taken cover. "They got a prisoner," he told her.
And she saw him. One of the Marines must have been separate from the main group during the attack. Most of his body was blocked by downed logs and trees, but she saw a black sleeve and gloved hand with a pistol at the end try and fire on the Centurions. They knocked the pistol away. One of them, scars on its armor from ricochets and glancing hits grabbed him.
"We gotta save him," Starbuck put bluntly, rushing through the combat tactics she could use to rescue the Marine. "No one alive gets left behind. Alight, Marine 3" she shouted, "Form up on me!" A four man Marine fire team quickly moved towards her. Helo told her that they now had the captured Marine and were beginning to drag him away.
Bishop put his hand up, keeping her from moving forward. "Cover me," Bishop stated simply to her. Before she could respond he had hopped over the cement skeleton of the thousands year old walls and was running and firing towards and at the Centurions.
"Frak! Cover him!" Starbuck shouted.
Bishop identified seven of the dozens of Centurions on his HUD, which based on their positions and amount of cover, possessed the highest statistical possible of being hit if he fired. He fired the A36 repeatedly in burst fire, taking down three Centurions in quick succession. Two of the four remaining on his HUD were taken down by a combination of grenade and assault rifle fire from the Colonials covering him.
He increased the power distribution to his legs, allowing him to clear a large log, and landing he rolled and brought the gun up on one of the trio of Centurions which had captured the downed Marine. He fired two bursts into its armored chest plate at close range. The bullets penetrated and destroyed the power cells and violently tore apart the internal circuitry of the Centurion.
A strange goo/gel-like fluid seeped out of the Centurion as it collapsed forward on its metal knees before awkwardly falling onto his chest, its arms flailed out to the side and its bullet-shaped armored head twisted to the right.
He fired at another Centurion as it came quickly out of cover, him hitting it square in the optical sensors, the bullets destroying its meta-cognitive processors as three of the Centurion's bullets struck him in turn in a tight pattern in the chest. They impacted his breast armor with loud metallic ding-ding-dings and lodged in his synthetic skin. Other than superficial damaged, Carter suffered no degradation of his combat abilities.
One problem with Terminators is that they tended to lose their balance. This problem had been plagued Skynet and the free machines for some time. Even with micro-gyros the chassis tended to lose balance in certain extenuating situations. This was one of them.
This allowed the Centurion dragging the Marine to let go of his capture, and then rush up, its claws fully extended as it slashed at the midsection of the Terminator, tearing his combat fatigues and leaving wide, gaping slash wounds. Minute traces of synthetic blood splashed onto the ground, before quick-acting synthetic coagulants stopped any further blood loss from the torn pseudo-flesh.
Carter flashed his eyes at the Centurion and kept them lit as a bright blue.
Bishop threw his A36 over to fire, the Centurion knocking it out of his hands before he could pull the trigger, and Carter reassessed the situation and reacted within microseconds. Power again redirected from his arms, no longer having to control a heavy weapon, down to his legs. He fully turned his body and shot himself into the armored body of the Centurion. He knocked it back and tackled it as he plowed his shoulder into the metal with a loud thud. Again redirecting power to his arms and fists he cocked back his fist and slammed it with enough force it went completely through the armored skull of the Centurion and plowed into the ground beneath.
He punched with enough forced his own body lurched forward slightly.
He grabbed his gun and rushed to the Marine, scanning his vital signs as he came forward. The Colonial was still alive, but barely. Bishop unclipped a grenade and threw one in front of him fifty meters towards two Centurions, then a second grenade at his three o-clock at a lone Centurion.
Bishop had caused enough chaos in the Centurion lines to allow the Colonial Marines and Starbuck to advance, find new positions, and lay down additional covering fire. Bishop was able to grab the Marine with his left, while holding the rifle with his right. He turned, keeping the Marine pressed against his armored body and chest, his back towards the Centurions.
Damage sensors indicated that part of his back armor had been compromised by what one would consider 'lucky shots' to the same region. While no bullets had yet to pierce and the combat chassis was near-immune to the weapons Centurion's had built-in, repeated fire could potentially result in damage.
Before being sent on this machine Connor had equipped him and his two infiltrator friends with semi-sentient mimetic polyalloy liquid metal. Bishop and Planck had twelve fluid ounces running in a micro-circulatory/lubrication system, with Soto having half, as her chassis was considerably smaller. The repair liquid metal had been a major success for General Connor. While difficult to manufacture and requiring extensive energy and computing power to produce, the mimetic alloy allowed infiltration terminators and terminator commando squads to operate near indefinitely without the needs for minor repair. It gradually repaired dents, knicks, scratches, and moderate internal damage. But something major, such as a large caliber AP round penetration to vital circuitry would be impossible or damage such as missing limbs or endoskeletal pieces.
And unfortunately the terminator did not have enough liquid metal to produce stabbing weapons like the T-1000 series. Tech Com and the free machines did not have the facilities or technology to produce enough liquid metal for such a terminator-liquid metal hybrid.
Bishop was fifteen meters away from rejoining the Colonial line when he placed the Marine down behind cover. He turned and fired several bursts from his A36, taking down one Centurion and forcing two others to retreat behind cover, before picking the Marine back up and running towards the lines.
"Holy frak, that took balls," Starbuck yelled. "Fraking stupid, but it took balls. Good job."
"Yes. Thank you," he said, tilting his head. He dimmed his eyes back to the natural blue color.
Bishop fired again, providing cover for the Colonial Marines and resistance to fall back. Throwing his last grenade set for contact explosion it hit a Centurion in the chest plate, sending it backwards. A large smoking hole and sparks were all which was left of its chest.
"You need to administer medical aide, he has been shot in the right leg. But the bullet missed the femoral artery," he reported.
The Centurions began to pull back. They had lost nearly a third of their attack forces between Bishop's assault and the Colonial suppressive fire.
Bishop he took a 75 round ammunition helical magazine from a backpack and slapped it in the A36. He took two more and four additional grenades and asked for a grenade launcher. Helo gave him the launcher and who rearmed himself with an assault rifle and extra magazines from a dead Marine
"Bishop…" Starbuck began. She was leading in to ask him where he was going, but she knew already.
He turned towards her. This was the first time Anders and some of the resistance members got a good look at him, as the intensity of the fire fight had distracted their attention from him. They'd all seen what he was doing, but no one really looked close enough to really see what he was.
When he had physically destroyed the Centurions, the angle most of them were at made it impossible to see. The speed at which he rescued the Marine (under one minute) and the dozens of Centurions, Marines, and Caprican resistance fighters all had made for a hectic situation.
Anders' jaw dropped. Some of the resistance fighters raised their guns, demanding to be told 'what the frak is he?' or declaring he was a 'fraking toaster'.
Starbuck quickly calmed them down. "Bishop, where are you going," she implored.
His exposed blue eye increased in intensity, and the skin on the right side of his face formed a devious smirk. "I'll be back," he informed her.
Anders grabbed Kara Thrace by the forearm. "Kara. Explain. Now," Anders demanded.
For hours the Colonials heard explosions and automatic fire in the distance. When Bishop took off he had "gone hunting" as Starbuck put it. That had allowed the Colonials to move six kilometers closer to their Raptors before the gun shots and explosions were heard no more.
"I guess that thing bought it," Anders remarked. Thirty minutes had gone by with no sounds other than the little amount of animal life which remained.
"Hey, that thing saved a Marine back there. And his friends saved two Raptor pilots a while back," Helo shot out. Anders just snorted. A few from his 'crew' just looked at him, still in disbelief over what Starbuck had told them.
The motion scanner Gunny Mathias was carrying began to pulse. She had been watching the rear, just in case any Cylons managed to sneak by their Terminator friend. There was movement behind them. "I've got something," she said. "It's coming in quick," she reported.
The Colonials squatted down, arranging themselves so they could have eyes and rifles in every direction in case of ambush. Starbuck, Helo, and Anders clustered around Mathias.
The motion slowed. They heard the familiar voice of Bishop. "He's got thermal imagining, of course he sees us," Mathias scoffed.
Bishop came up slowly, the grenade launcher slung across his back and the rifle in his right hand.
"Have fun?" Anders asked sarcastically. He found himself staring at the exposed endoskeleton. Much more was exposed than what he had seen a few hours earlier. Very little flesh remained on the metal skull and all the skin on the right arm had been torn loose.
"Yes," the machine replied. "I destroyed twenty-seven Centurions and managed to recover the CPUs and memory storage units of twelve. They will be useful is determining what the Cylons are doing on Caprica." He took a small pack off his back and opened it, showing the SAR team leaders his prizes. A dozen meta-cognitive processors and high capacity storage units were in there just like he had said. "If we can successfully access these it could be an… 'intelligence goldmine', I believe is the term."
"Thanks, Carter," Helo said, his voice filled with exhaustion from the firefight and the hump back to the Raptors. "How long will it take for the skin to heal?"
"If I begin to apply the nutrient gel once we are on board the Raptors it will take two days." He turned and looked towards the resistance members who had either gathered or gone back a bit to stare. "Then it wont freak so many people out," he pulsed his eyes. A few resistance fighters stepped back. He would have smiled, but the skin was absent and the Terminator's built-in metallic grin was all that remained.