Author's note: Well... I'm back. I don't have much more to say other than that. I wanted to finish this story before I stopped writing fanfiction entirely. This story has always held a certain special appeal to me, I can't say why exactly. So I will finish it, and then I will be done here at FF. But I will not be done writing. The real reason I've been gone for so long is that I figured the time had come to move on to original fiction. Maybe I'll fail at it, maybe not. It's hard to tell, but in any event, let's finish this story, shall we? Let us see where our intrepid pirates will go, and what awaits them.
Silence reigned supreme among the boarding team. Nobody wanted to break the reverence of this place, its hallowed halls, now empty and frozen in deep space. Sound echoed across the deck, evidence that there was still atmosphere of some kind, but the coldness of it seeped through the suits, just the same. Internal heaters tried to compensate, but Summers felt it in his bones, the shivers travelling up his spine.
Clanking magnetic boots beat rhythmically on the deck of the ancient starship, itself a more holy place than any temple. They were here, Summers thought, the Lords of Kobol once walked these halls, a great Star Galleon of the ancestors.
"That sign," Summers began, breaking the silence and pointing to a worn, pitted metal arrow, "it says 'this way to the priestly conclave.' I'm guessing that actually means the CIC."
"Priestly conclave, Cap'n?" Jack asked.
"This was a language at least a thousand years dead by the time the Capricans started writing things down again. But this is interesting just the same. There was always a hint of military-esque organization in the priesthood. Something that would be hard to explain. Now I think I know why." Summers answered.
Elena grasped it quickly. "The remnants of their military preserved the history of the scrolls, the records of their journey. Like a ship's log. They became the priesthood."
The pirate nodded. "For all we know, the scrolls started out as the Galleon's logbook. Things start to make a great deal more sense that way. You take a long journey on sublights. There are generations that live and die on board. New Captains, new 'books' in the log entries. Much is lost as their computer equipment fails. By the time they reach the colonies, it's already becoming legend."
"Cap'n, notice anything missing?" Jack asked, as they continued down the corridors of the ancient vessel.
Summers stopped a moment to get his bearings. "Yeah. No bodies. I wonder what happened here?" He peered at a dead computer screen. "There's something familiar about this place, though. The layout, it's so much like a Colonial ship it's uncanny. Everything is just scaled up."
Elena smiled a bit under her helmet. "Institutional memory, sir." Summers balked a moment at her use of the honorific. "We all saw the drawings of the Galleon in school. Bet the designers of our early cap ships were channeling that."
Wandering around a ship that was several kilometers long, without being able to use transit tubes, elevators, or anything else moving, proved to be a monumental endeavor. Still, CIC was exactly where Summers expected it to be, deep in the center of the ship, under maximum protection. The hatchway was frozen shut, but that was to be expected on a ship with no power, frozen in place for thousands of years.
"Frank, we're gonna need that torch. Cut her open."
The rotund little man looked rather ridiculous in his space suit, like a beachball you could just roll down the sand toward the ocean. Somehow, even the algae diet had failed to make a dent in his prodigious bulk. But his cutting torch was all business, and he knew his trade well enough.
It didn't take long before the hatch groaned open with millennia worth of protest. Summers half-expected the command deck to be an ossuary, filled with ancient bones and rotten uniforms. But, like the rest of the ship, there was nothing but clean, empty stations, with minimal dust, even.
The only difference is that there was actually light here. Where the rest of the vessel had been empty, frozen, and dark, a tiny glow emanated from the central station, slowly pulsing with faint red light.
Summers found his way there, puzzled by it. "There's some kind of power here." It appeared to be an indicator light, with a button underneath. "Says something like 'rise to heaven.' Maybe some kind of startup sequence?"
Jack shook his head cautiously. "Better be sure, Cap'n. For all we know, that could be the button to self-destruct. Rising to heaven seems pretty flimsy to me."
"No, no… this is a positive thing, I know it. Old Caprican was a weird language, but it had distinct tones for things that were good, things that were bad, and things that were neither. Hard to explain. I hate to say it, but for the first time in my life, I wish my father were here. I dropped out of religious school when I was 15." Summers shook his head. "You know what, frak it."
His finger reached toward the button, but Elena caught it before he could touch it. "Wait, sir."
"Hmm?"
"Well, think about it. This isn't one of your pretty little salvage wrecks, all fresh and new. This thing is thousands of years old. For all you know, starting it up could blow the whole thing to hell."
Jack nodded in agreement. "She's got a point, Cap'n. I mean, Dreadnought is practically a flying tylium bomb. Core goes out of alignment in the wrong way, and boom."
"We don't even know if they use anything like tylium on their boats. I do know they don't have jump drives, which is the most reactive part of the drive train anyway." Summers leaned on the console slightly. "Anyway, we don't have time. The Cylons could be here, today, tomorrow, who knows."
The old pirate captain thought it over awhile anyway, as Elena and Jack looked on in confusion mingled with a touch of fear. Frank, on the other hand, didn't seem to care, rummaging through the storage locker on the far side of the command deck, undoubtedly looking for "souvenirs" to liberate.
"Hey Cap'n, check this out," the rotund little man leaped up from the locker, nearly losing mag lock on the deck. Summers tried to choke down a laugh as his thoughts inevitably wandered to what would happen if he did lose mag lock. A beach ball bouncing around an ancient Kobolian CIC was funny. Frank held up some kind of binder with a proclamation of victory. "Whattya bet this is the manual!"
Summers laughed as he aimed the flashlight at it and read the title of the binder. "You just found the waste processing book. The title is 'Fecal removal' or something like that." But he started rummaging through the locker as well. Where there was one, after all, there were probably others.
A few hours of digging through CIC's myriad storage compartments, drawers, and console doors finally produced fruit in the form of some kind of startup sequence manual. Most of the pages were faded and damaged, after all they were thousands of years old, even if under more or less perfect preservation conditions. But one page depicted a diagram just like the lit console.
"Near as I can tell, that button starts up the electrical subsystems only. It should run us on batteries, supposing there's any power left in them. Who knows if they have degraded, or what the Kobolians used for them in the first place."
Before Elena could stop him for a second time, he pressed the button. The Captain heard Jack's breath catch over the wireless. A few lights flickered and died, one shorting out violently in a shower of sparks. But others caught and began to glow.
Several computer screens remained dark, and at least one other shorted out completely. But the console in front of Summers powered up quickly, the screen readout a steady stream of Kobolian, mixed with a number of very unfriendly red lights.
"Let's see here… says something about it being cold and starting up the heaters. Let's hope that doesn't blow anything up. Sublight drive is offline."
Jack laughed. "Come on, Cap'n, I'm sure it says something more ridiculous than that. Surely it is Zeus's chariot is unable to return to the mortal world, or something."
"Actually, it says 'sublight' pretty clearly. That's one word that didn't change much. What I'm figuring to be offline actually renders out as unwilling. But sublight unwilling didn't make any sense." The old pirate took a deep breath. He suddenly realized just how much work was ahead of him. If nobody else could even hope to understand this language, he was well and truly frakked.
"There's a countdown here." Elena noted, her voice betraying a sense of worry. The screen she point at did indeed show a procession of Kobolian numbers.
Summers smiled. "Don't worry. It's telling us how long it will take to warm the atmosphere in the ship."
Everything seemed to be going great. Right up until the flash of light took him. Like lightning in a great storm, its flickering electrical energy was all around him, merging together into singular whiteness. And then he was falling without moving, his world shifting and changing about him.
"Cap'n? Captain!" It was Jack's voice, but it seemed impossibly far away. He began to collapse to the deck in slow motion, his consciousness swimming. Light was everywhere, bright and omnipresent in his vision, like the gates of Elysium had opened up to him and the Lords of Kobol had come to take him home.
"Welcome." A voice echoed all around him. He knew that voice.
"Ellison?"
"I have taken a form that your mind can understand." The voice declared, as a beautiful figure materialized out of the glowing whiteness. Blurry shapes could be seen, materializing into waves of grass, sweeping in the afternoon wind. A cloudless sky was above him, the cerulean color almost unnaturally strong.
"What… where?" Summers stammered, suddenly conscious of his missing suit.
"Welcome to the Eternal Star," The woman explained.
"That's the name of the ship." Summers managed, trying to regain his balance.
She beamed at this, her smile radiant and kind. "Yes, I am the ship. I am glad you could make that connection."
"You can understand me…" Summers began.
"Yes, it took me a moment. Your language is different. Normally, projection is not so unpleasant as this," the woman continued. "But I had to scan your memories to communicate with you. You are of Kobol, yet you are not."
Understanding came to him in that moment. "This is like the old holobands they used to talk about when I was a kid. A virtual space." Summers rubbed his chin and wondered, for a moment, what his body was doing in that precise instant.
Her smile faded. "I see why you are here. It has happened again." A deep sigh escaped from her features. "The cycle continues."
Curiosity rose within him, a myriad of questions that needed answers, and answers that needed questions.
"There is not time enough in the world to tell you everything. Strictly speaking," the woman stepped back from him for a moment, looking up at the synthetic sky, "I shouldn't be telling you this. I was one of the originals, programmed to serve the children of Kobol."
"I am of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, isn't that enough?" Summers protested.
"It is enough for some things. For instance, you did not think of the automated defense network when you reactivated me." There was a cruel smirk in her face in that moment, but it soon faded. "But, you are descended of Kobol, and there is some consideration for that."
"Aren't you a Cylon, then? A machine? How is it that you serve Kobol?"
"You know so little. Every time the cycle starts again, there are differences. Variations, the volatility of the universe changing a parameter here, a side-effect there. On your worlds, there were no Cylons who stayed behind, none who stayed with their creators. But on Kobol, it was different. It was as much a war between machines, as it was a war of human and machine."
The visions of Ellison returned to him, unbidden. "Er… someone told me that this time around, it was jump drives that were different."
"Someone." The program flickered for a moment, and scoffed at his words. "You mean her." Her clothing changed to the greasy overalls Ellison had worn, her expression shifting from the pleasant, yet hard visage of the ship-woman, to the seductive temptress. The acid in the ship-woman's voice remained.
"That'd be her." Summers confirmed wryly.
"I knew her. She looked different in the old days, of course. Aphrodite the temptress, we once called her." The ship figure shifted into the visage of a woman he didn't recognize. She was plain and middle-aged. "If she is using that form, better that I return to mine."
"She was a Lord of Kobol."
"No, she is something else. But she is right. There were no jump drives in our time. Too bad, really. It would have changed things." Shudders passed through the ship-woman's body, and tears formed in her eyes. "I could have saved them, if I had such a thing as your jump drive. My crew, I knew them all, I remember them all, every word, every gesture. Everything."
Realization hit him like a hover-car, barreling through the skyway at full throttle. "That's why there are no bodies. You buried them. Then you powered yourself down, waiting for someone to come."
The tears continued, but the voice sounded through it, almost emotionless, a strange contrast to the holographic visuals. "Yes. I didn't expect it to take so long. I don't know if I can even fully power up again. There is so much decay, so much of me that is gone. Imagine going to sleep as a teenager, and waking up as a 90 year old man. That is what I feel like."
"You look pretty good for, what, four thousand?" Summers laughed a bit, and the woman smiled weakly.
"4317 years, to be exact."
"Can you help us? There's not much left of humanity anymore. We don't know where to go, what to do, or how we are going to survive. And our Cylons are still trying to kill us."
The skies darkened, the sun setting beyond the grassy hills, as the woman aged in front of him. She was like an old grandmother, now, rocking back and forth on a wooden chair, creaking over the beams of a wooden farmhouse.
"My time is almost up. I can feel it. I will dance with the stars soon, and see the face of God." She laughed a moment. "Oh, not that one, not that overblown, sanctimonious bucket of bolts with delusions of divinity, who still can't quite bring himself to claim godhood, but the real force behind the universe." She glanced at the setting sun and nodded. "But before I go, I will help you. My crew would have wanted that, and you can help me carry out my final mission."
"What mission?" Summers asked. But the holoband was fading already, the flashing lights and metal of Eternal Star's CIC in front of him again. He was laying on the center console, Jack and Elena hovering over him, shining a light in his eyes.
"Cap'n?" Jack asked.
"Get that shit out of my face, Jack. Gods, are you trying to blind me?"
"He's back." Elena said dryly.
"What the frak happened, Cap'n? You just collapsed. Your eyes were twitching like you were in a dream, but they were open! And then all this stuff started turning on everywhere."
Summers smiled weakly and stood up, his legs wobbly for a moment as he adjusted to the real world again. The holoband had been disorienting and unfamiliar. "Let's just say I found us a little help."
He pointed to the console he had been laying on, and even as they watched, the language shifted from the barely-comprehensible Kobolian to a more familiar Colonial alphabet. Warm air flowed into the compartment, and a great vibration heaved through the ship as gravity took hold once more.
"Sir?" Elena asked, confusion worming its way across her features. She looked all around her as the ship came back to life, one station at a time.
Frank, however, didn't even notice, back to digging in the storage compartments again.