Chapter 34

Leaving Caprica

The Sergeant on the supply ship Russell Berkeley came to attention as Kara handed her orders to him. He was short and on the round side and had the unlit stub of a cigar clamped in his teeth.

He looked over the papers and took the cigar out of his mouth. "Hitching a ride to the Galactica, sir? You know there's a regular personnel transport early next week."

"I didn't want to wait that long."

He pointed the cigar stub toward the other side of the ship. "You'll want to take a jump seat on that side of the cargo hold. They're better over there. And," he indicated her carryon bag, "you'll have to stow that in the locker next to the seats. AG has been acting up lately and we're not scheduled for repairs for a couple of weeks. You'll also need to stay strapped in your seat the entire trip just in case."

"Wait a minute. You're saying your Artificial Gravity is down?"

"Not down, just flakey. Once we're out of the planet's gravitational field, one minute you're standing on the deck and the next you're floating."

Kara grinned, "Sounds like fun."

"Ain't fun when you're twenty-eight feet up in the air and it kicks in again."

Kara nodded. "I get your point. So I'll stay strapped in. Why don't you just shut it off completely?"

"This is an old ship. It's tied in with some other systems that can't be shut off. Sorry, lieutenant, you'll just have to put up with it. Sure you don't want to wait on that transport next week?"

Kara shook her head. "I can deal with weightless for a couple of hours if I have to."

Forty-five minutes later they had cleared Caprica's atmosphere and as the gravitational pull of the planet lessened she felt her body rise gently against the mesh harness across her. The AG wasn't working. The Sergeant had already started to doze.

Kara put her head back and closed her eyes. She could have waited until the following Monday and taken a regular personnel transport to the Galactica, but she didn't want to wait that long. She had said her goodbyes to everyone who mattered to her already, and she just wanted to be gone from Caprica.

Being back on a battlestar was going to be different and a challenge for her. She hoped she hadn't made a mistake. She hoped that serving under Commander Adama wouldn't cause either one of them grief because the bond they shared was Zak and Zak was gone. Then again how often did a Viper pilot even see the commander of the battlestar?

Plus she was going to be with Karl Agathon again. Her best friend, someone she had missed a great deal, someone who understood her, someone who knew her secrets.

But there was one secret she would never be able to share with Karl and that was Lee, what he meant to her and what they had done the night of Zak's funeral. That secret was hers and hers alone.

Kara remembered her posting to the Triton. How she'd fallen into some bad habits, the drinking, the card playing, and worst of all, the arrogance that had crept in as she realized she was a far better Viper pilot than anybody else on board.

But all of that would have been overlooked if she hadn't gotten into it with another Viper pilot. And not just any Viper pilot. About ten months into her assignment on the Triton they got a transfer from the Solaria. Rumor had it that this was his fourth transfer in three years and Kara knew that meant either or both of two things. The guy was the son or brother or nephew of someone very important or he was an asshole. Commanders kept transferring him so they wouldn't have to deal with him.

It took her three hours to confirm his connection. He was the son of the Colonial Governor of Tauron. It took her fifteen seconds to confirm he was an asshole. Lieutenant Ivan Brindle, call sign Horse, had the same swagger and attitude as her former drill instructor Captain Reider.

On his second day aboard, he was waiting in the hangar bay when she brought her Viper in from a routine patrol.

"I hear you're the Triton's resident Top Gun," he said by way of greeting her.

Kara was busy with her post-flight checklist and ignored him until she finished.

Finally she handed the clipboard to one of the deck crew. "Sorry, I didn't catch that comment, lieutenant. Welcome to the Triton by the way. We've got a good crew here. Good pilots, good deck crew, good officers. Everybody works together as a team."

"Everybody except you. I hear you're not much of a team player."

"Don't believe everything you hear," Kara said and started to walk off.

"Hey, Starbuck," he said. "Just letting you know you're going to have to settle for second best for a while."

Mind games. This jerk was playing frakking mind games with her. "Right," she said and looked him up and down. What an asshole.

"Like what you see?"

"Nope. Just trying to figure out how an ego that big fits into a Viper cockpit."

"You ought to know."

Kara laughed and kept on walking. What an asshole.

Several days after that she was in the hangar bay and heard two female Raptor pilots talking. The pretty brunette whose call sign was Hopscotch was telling her friend Jigsaw that Lieutenant Brindle had offered to show her how he got his call sign.

"Ugh," she said and made a sound like she was gagging. "He said he was called Horse because he was the best ride in and out of the cockpit."

Jigsaw, also a brunette but not nearly as attractive as Hopscotch, shook her head, "I heard it was because he was captain of the equestrian team at the Academy on Picon. He won a bunch of medals for them in competitions."

"What difference does it make? He's a jerk." The derision in Hopscotch's voice was clear.

"I don't know. I think he's good looking."

"Why don't you just saddle up? I'll try to find you some spurs and a riding crop." Hopscotch's tone had changed and was edged with sarcasm, maybe something else. Hurt?

Jigsaw started giggling as Kara walked away. Gods, there was no accounting for taste. Besides, she didn't think anything would ever come of it because she had always thought that Jigsaw and Hopscotch were into each other more than they were into guys.

Less than a week later, though, on her first day off-duty since Brindle came on board, she slept in about an hour and got to the showers after almost everybody else was gone. Ricochet, a nice-looking Viper pilot, stood at one of the sinks. He had just started shaving.

They greeted each other with nods as she walked in and headed toward the showers around the corner on the right side of the room. Kara looked at his towel-wrapped ass as she walked past. It never hurt to look when it was that nice.

"Starbuck, you might want to use the other showers," he pointed his razor toward the left side of the room.

"Are these broke?"

"Nope. Horse and Jigsaw are having their own private rodeo back there. Yee-ha." He grinned at her, tilted his head and looked cross-eyed.

"Thanks." She couldn't handle that this soon after getting up. But it proved she had been wrong about one thing. If Jigsaw was frakking Horse back there in the shower, then Jigsaw was definitely into guys.

She mostly tried to ignore Brindle's bragging and the way he was always trying to push her buttons. In his own way he got her hackles up as much as Reider had, but luckily Brindle had no authority over her. And Brindle knew better than to come on to her in a sexual way. She was sure he valued those organs that made him a male too much. So he settled for giving her grief about her flying and she could handle that all day long. She was much better in a Viper than he was. And they both knew it.

Kara was concentrating right now on helping Lieutenant Ryan Ridley, call sign Tripper. A month out of Flight School and a bit of a klutz, he had good technical skills, but he lacked confidence. Kara felt that all it would take was some mentoring and experience and he would blossom. Without making a big deal of it, she began to watch him and make suggestions. She started feeling good about what she was doing. The rookie was getting better every time he went out.

She wasn't sure why she had taken Tripper under her wing. Maybe it was because he reminded her of Karl when she first got to know him, before he grew a couple of feet taller. Or maybe it was because Tripper didn't have that arrogance yet of many of the Viper pilots she knew. There wasn't anything romantic in her feelings or even sexual. She just wanted this quiet, likable kid to have a chance at becoming the pilot she knew he could be. And Tripper was making real progress.

Until the obstacle course and Brindle's stupid frakking challenge.

Once a year each battlestar got a chance for its pilots to run the obstacle course above Gemenon's smallest moon. The buoys that they pitted their skills against floated about twenty-five thousand feet above the surface of the moon, held there by some amazing anti-gravity technology.

Twenty-eight buoys in all were deployed based on a computer program running in a station housed on the moon's surface. Signals sent from the battlestar to the surface computer changed the buoys according to the kind of craft flying the course. The point was to get from start to finish, passing each buoy on the right, left, top, or bottom depending on which way the LED arrows were pointing. And to do it as fast as possible...all without hitting a buoy. Hits automatically deducted points from the score.

The course was to teach skills in maneuverability and quick decision-making. Not combat skills, but the basis of combat skills. Though what they would ever need combat skills for was debatable. Forty years of peace had elapsed since anyone had heard from a Cylon.

In the squadron ready room on the morning before their first run, the CAG wrote the numbers 5.26 and 7.34 on the board. "The times to beat," he said. Captain Carlo's best Viper time from last year and Lieutenant Dover's Raptor time. Carlo grinned and playfully raised his fist to the catcalls of his fellow Viper pilots as they ribbed him.

Three days later, when they had all completed the obstacle course, the CAG wrote again. This time the numbers were 4.49 and 7.21.

"No frakking way somebody broke five minutes," one of the pilots said. "Way to go Carlo," another one said.

The CAG looked out over the group. "Lieutenant Dover continues to improve his Raptor time, but we've got a new Viper record," he said, "and a new Viper record holder. Lieutenant Kara Thrace."

Kara had known her time was good, but not that good. The catcalls poured in, the loudest from Carlo, and she raised her fist, thumb extended. They might as well start getting used to it. She glanced over at Tripper and saw the pride in his eyes. Past him she saw Horse glaring at her.

Tripper's times had been slower than they should have been, and the CAG asked her to watch him and see if she could spot a problem. That's what they had been getting ready to do the next day when Horse made his challenge to race through the course. It had been made to her, but Tripper misunderstood and thought it was to him.

"You're on," he said suddenly and was off.

"Tripper, stop, no. Horse, don't be an idiot."

Her words fell on deaf ears. Kara could do nothing but follow them. This was going to end badly. She knew it.

It did. Tripper hit the sixth buoy. The buoys were made of a resilient material and weren't heavy enough to cause damage to a ship, but Tripper overcorrected and came within a few feet of hitting Horse's Viper. He overcorrected again, was unable to straighten up and was quickly spinning out of control. Kara saw first one engine and then the others flame out as he started a flat spin down toward the surface of the moon.

Where Horse went after that she didn't know, probably high-tailed it back to the Triton, but she pointed her Viper down and followed Tripper, talking to him the whole way.

"You've got to go through engine restart, Tripper, listen to me. Are you listening?"

Kara heard his panicked voice, "Computer's not starting the engines, computer's not starting the engines, computer's not..."

"We're going to do it manually Tripper, listen to me, do exactly as I say."

She attempted to step him through the restart and hoped he heard her, hoped he could follow her instructions, hoped he wasn't getting sick as he spun dizzily toward the surface of the moon."

"Eject," she heard him say once.

"No, you can do this, we've got time. Do not eject." And she started the steps again.

Finally less than two thousand feet from the surface, maybe twenty seconds from impact, five seconds before she would have told him to eject, she saw the engines flare to life one after the other. "You did it," she shouted, unable to keep the emotion out of her voice, "You did it, Tripper, you did it. Now pull back on the stick, get your nose up."

He did. Gods, she didn't know how managed as dizzy as he must have been by then, but she saw the nose of his Viper come up and the ship level out and then begin to climb.

She flew up beside him. "Great job. Come on Tripper, we're going home. We've had enough fun for today." He gave her a weak thumb's up.

Understandably he had some difficulty with his landing, but she followed him into the landing bay despite the LSO's orders to waive off. She saw Tripper safely down before she made a loop and put her own ship down.

She was out of her Viper the minute the ladder was put up. Pushing past the crewman with the post-flight checklist, she ran to Tripper's Viper. One of the crew was at the top of the ladder. Tripper was still sitting in the cockpit.

The crewman looked down at her. "He won't get out, sir."

She motioned to the crewman to come down the ladder and she went up. "Hey, Trip, that was some damned fancy flying. Damned fancy. I couldn't have done it better myself."

His expression was so pained that she had a hard time looking at him. He whispered something too softly for her to hear over the noise of the hangar bay. "What's that?" She leaned down.

"I pissed my flight suit," he said with tears in his eyes.

She leaned nearer. "Hey, Tripper, all of us have pissed our flight suits at one time or another." Just because she hadn't done it yet didn't mean she wouldn't some day. "Come on down. After what you just went through, a little pee in a flight suit is to be expected. Come on. Give me your helmet."

He did and she tossed it down to a crewman. By now several more had gathered around the Viper. They knew something had happened out there.

Kara steadied him as he got out. His hand was as cold as ice.

Tripper made it almost down the ladder before he sat down on the next to the bottom step.

"I don't feel so good," he said.

He was shaking and his face was chalky white and Kara finally realized that he was probably going into shock.

She turned to one of the crew. "Get the medics down here on the double. He needs to go to Sick Bay." When the guy hesitated, she barked, "Now! And get me a blanket."

A young female crewmember brought her a blanket and she draped it around his shoulders. "Come on, Tripper. Look at me. Talk to me. We got help coming."

He shook his head slightly. His eyes were glassy but he managed to focus on her, and then his gaze shifted from her to someone behind her.

Brindle drawled, "Tripper, boy, it looks like we're going to have to put some training wheels on your Viper."

Kara came up from squatting beside Tripper, her right hand in a tight fist, and with all the force of her rise and turn behind the blow, she hit Lieutenant Brindle in the jaw. He never uttered a sound, just went down and lay on the deck without moving.

For about thirty seconds the pain in her hand was so intense that she thought she was going to throw up. The medics arrived a minute later and by then, somebody had called the CAG and the XO, and all she would tell them was to take care of Tripper.

She was escorted to the brig about five minutes after that.

It took six hours for them to review the digital images from the buoys, listen to all three cockpit voice recorders and talk to Tripper. During the first hour she lay on a bunk in the brig with a wet towel wrapped around her throbbing hand. She asked the MP on duty for some ice, and she said she'd see what she could do, but Kara never heard her make a call. After another hour she was at least able to move all of her fingers and open and close her fist slightly. She didn't think anything was broken, but it still hurt like hell. It was worth it, though.

She had given up on the ice when she was aware that someone was outside of her cell. Hopscotch stood there with a plastic bag full of crushed ice. Without speaking she extended her arm through the bars.

Kara got up, went over and took the bag with her left hand. "Thanks."

She saw a ghost of a smile on Hopscotch's lips. "You broke his jaw in two places. Sucker is wired shut for a while. Guess who won't be running his mouth for a while...or doing anything else with it. And Tripper's okay. Doc's keeping him in Sick Bay overnight, but he's fine." She turned to go and then turned back around. "Good luck."

"Right. Thanks again."

Kara knew there would be consequences. There were. A reprimand in her record. And a commendation. And a new assignment. Flight Instructor at the Air Base on Caprica.

...

The Sergeant's voice roused her from her reverie. "Lieutenant Thrace, we're on final approach to the Galactica."

Kara opened her eyes. The weightless feeling was gone. Fifteen minutes later she exited the Russell Berkeley into the battlestar's cargo hold. In some ways she felt like she was coming home.

TBC…