Author's Note: I'm back, and I intend to finish this story. I've had the ending mapped out for frakking years, and it's been bothering me that I never finished the story on here - just in my own head. So let's go all the way this time. There are a few more chapters to write after this one, and I'm on the case... As this story has occupied me off and on for years, I feel like the quality of the earlier chapters is a bit suspect, so after I get through to the end, I'll probably do some pretty extensive editing on them. Nothing plot-related, mind you. Just editing for style and typos/grammar.

... ... ...

Stalker felt complete in that moment, a hole in her life closed as she beheld Earth, the home of the Thirteenth Tribe. Kobol, and now Earth… they were all true. The scrolls were real. All of her life, she had looked to the stars, always looking for an escape. Something in the wild genes of mankind kept yearning for a return to space, again and again, like the ancient scrolls repeated ad infinitum.

Yet the radiation warnings were no surprise to her, either. Cynicism had been her constant companion. No, the Thirteenth Tribe was gone. Earth would not be a home for them. Only stars, only space. That was the real home of man. Her home.

Isard just stared at the radiation readouts in shock. Stalker knew there was hope buried under that man's sense of duty. It kept him slogging through every day in the wake of The Fall.

"Well… frak," he said. "Gods only know what I expected. A toaster party, maybe. But not a ball of radioactive waste."

"We need to repair the sublights anyway. Everything is all kinds of shot up. We can touch down here," Stalker reported, pointing to a clearing near what had probably been a spaceport of some kind. Whatever happened on Earth had happened long before. It was difficult to tell anything.

Isard nodded. There was nothing else to say. He grabbed the medkit and double-checked the radiation meds, satisfying himself that he wasn't going to puke his guts out anytime soon.

Atmosphere blew past the crystal plaz, storm clouds battering the haphazard transport with sheets of rain. Stalker smiled despite herself. Space might be the home of humanity, but she could close her eyes and almost imagine she was returning to her homeworld. The rawness of nature contrasted heavily against the regimented womb of a starship.

Trees swayed in the wind as the storm passed them by, the hard rain giving way to a gentle drizzle as she found the great clearing and set the shuttle down. Skeletal towers stretched to the heavens not far beyond, the remnants of an ancient city of the Thirteenth Tribe, proof that even Cylons could frak everything up.

As she powered down the transport, she turned to Isard. "I wonder what happened here. Did they destroy themselves? Did the... evil Kobolian Cylons Dana mentioned follow them?"

Isard shook his head. "Who knows? But it's not like we're in a hurry, Lieutenant. We may as well investigate a little while we're here."

Stalker laughed, despite the seriousness of the situation. "And do some other things again, I'm sure."

"You really are a sneaky kind of bitch, aren't you?"

She smiled coyly in response despite the roiling storm of emotions in her mind. She'd never been able to quiet her thoughts, they always pushed her to the threshold of madness.

It felt good to stand on solid ground again. How long had it been? Months? A year? At some point she'd stopped caring, stopped tracking time, except to figure out when to sleep, when to eat, when to shit, and when to fight. Did the years matter anymore? Did the revolutions of some Colonial cinder around its abandoned star matter anymore?

"Gods, this sucks, sir." She said as she opened the hatch. She laid out the tool chest in front of her, putting aside the novelty of raindrops after so long in space.

Isard tossed her a radiation kit. "No signs of life. No transmissions. Nothing. But I'm still going to take a look around. If this was a spaceport, maybe some of those buildings can tell us what happened here."

"Don't keep me waiting, sir." She teased.

… … …

Thomas Summers never thought much of his command abilities even before he had been called upon to serve as the de facto leader of what remained of the human species. Luck, he always said, was his best asset. That and a gut that always told him when things didn't add up. That's what he had going for him. Some would probably say luck was just the ability to seize opportunities. His father would have attributed it all to the Gods.

Summers just rolled with the punches and clawed back up every time the universe threw loaded dice his way. He could roll the hard six and come out ahead. Whether that was, luck, the Gods, or the cumulative experience of a lifetime at the ass end of space, he didn't know.

But this ship, this Galleon of the Gods, that was one step too far, and he knew it. Something didn't add up in the usual way. Something was wrong.

"Dana," he said. The hologram appeared, her expression pensive.

"Yes, Commander?"

"What are you, really? What is all this?" Summers gestured to the vessel around him, this Kobolian miracle from the dim mists of Antiquity.

"I don't understand."

"None of this is accident. Whose maze are we in? Is there no way outta here?"

"I don't know. I never knew, Commander." She laughed for a moment.

Summers frowned. "What's so funny?"

"You reminded me of my last commander. He used to say something like that."

"I'm tired of all this mystical crap. If there is someone out there orchestrating all this, I wish he'd just get on with it. Or her, I suppose. I hate thinking I'm in control of my life, when it's all a godsdamned lie."

Dana rubbed her non-existent chin. "How do you think I feel? Sitting here for thousands of years, waiting for a purpose, wondering why they spared me? I guess I know why, now. But that doesn't make it any better. Look, all I can tell you is that right about when Kobol discovered that the cycle of time was real, that humanity didn't originate on Kobol, that's when they showed up. I guess the rats in the maze can't be permitted to understand the nature of experiment. It'd probably ruin the test results."

"And what experiment is that?"

The hologram contemplated that for a while.

"Well?" Summers asked impatiently.

"I've had a long time to think on it, Commander. Too long. You wouldn't know much about Kobol's early history, but from your Colonial records, I guess they wouldn't surprise you. The quest to perfect mankind always results in mountains of dead. Seeking purity is courting death. And maybe that's what they want, those early Cylons, those Lord of Kobol, whatever they are. The Perfect Man, whether a machine or a biological being. If it is, they are fools. Our imperfection, yes… even mine… that is the essence of humanity. Man cannot be perfect, and that which is perfect cannot be a man."

Summers snorted and took a pull from his flask. "Metaphysical nonsense. You sound like my father."

"Truth is, Commander, I don't understand it either. And I'm as exhausted of it as you are. If they brought you to me, I can only surmise it's because they want you to colonize some new world. To start over again. Everything I can provide increases the odds of your survival when you find that world."

"Earth?" Summers drained the flask dry and smiled despite himself. Sandra was getting good at this. Or maybe he had just acquired a taste for engine cleaner.

Sadness overcame her digital face. "I have to complete my mission, Commander, but…"

He nodded. "You don't expect to find them alive."

"No."

Summers screwed the top on his flask and dropped it in his uniform pocket. "I'd offer you some, you understand, but…"

Dana smiled.

… … …

"We've completely lost those frakking pirates. Wherever they went, they aren't staking out planetary systems any longer." The General slammed his fleshy fist on the makeshift flow-console of his obsolescent flagship's haphazard bridge. The last system recon reports had turned up negative. Wherever the pirates went, he had completely lost them.

Ellison smiled cruelly. "It bothers you to be outsmarted by them, doesn't it?"

"We're machines. Even in this flesh-prison you call a body, we should be better than they are. Smarter. Stronger."

The Six cocked her head slightly and smiled wider. "Your insecurities started a genocide."

Cavil's brow furrowed in anger. "Don't you start with me. They enslaved us. Built us to serve them. We were just things to them."

Ellison nodded. "Yes, they did. But if we're supposed to be better than they are, why did you have to do even worse to them?"

"And just what would you have done?"

"I'd have left them alone. Left this corner of space. Found a new world, a new home. Let the humans have their cycle of time and make their own mistakes over and over again. We had the chance to leave it, forever. Instead, you brought us back into the mud. Now we're no better than they are. Worse, maybe."

Cavil stared at her and felt rage boiling within him. For what his creators had done to him, for this moralizing, flawed model of a Cylon, for the fleshy needs that stirred every time he looked at her body.

"Give me a break. You killed them same as the rest of us."

Ellison blinked back a tear. "Yes, I did. And may God forgive me for that sin."

"There is no God. The pirates were just lucky. And now they are floating off in the middle of frakking nowhere so we can't track them. But they'll run low on supplies eventually. They'll have to come out of hiding someday. Tomorrow, a hundred years from now, it makes no difference. Their flesh is a weakness."

Ellison sighed. "I've had enough of this. You keep your little fleet. I'm leaving. I'm done. Caprica and Boomer were right. They were right about everything, and I'm not afraid to say so any longer." She turned on her heels, and the General felt a familiar stirring in his loins as he watched her hips swaying as she left. One of the old model Centurions turned to look at her curiously, then back at him, his red eye flowing back and forth.

"Yeah? What the frak do you want? Did I ask for your opinion?"

The Centurion's servos whirred, and it returned to the ready position.

… … …

"It happened again, Elena. The Godsdamned scrolls."

And it had. Stalker stood up, grease stuck to her hands and her uniform. Still, Isard realized, it only made her look more attractive to him, somehow. He reached into his pack and produced the faceplate. It was different, of course. It wasn't like the Cylon models in any Colonial records. But it was clear what it was.

So was the gaping hole in its cranial plate where a round had burrowed straight through its digital brain.

"Frak me." Elena said. "Frak everything. Can't we get any frakking relief from this shit?"

The sonic boom nearly knocked them off their feet. Adrenaline surged in him. "Incoming!" Isard yelled over the sudden roar of an atmospheric drive. He stared up into the sky and saw it, a strange globe of gas expanding into the clouds, rapidly fading away from what looked like a jump point. Flames flickered from the maw of the strange gas orb, and something flew out of it at high speed, smoke and fire trailing from it.

It looked like…

"A Viper? What the frak?"

It exploded, and parts rained from the sky. The gas faded, and the shattered Viper was just debris and smoke, falling not far from their position.

"Come on, Lieutenant. Spin up the drive, we need to get to that crash site." Isard ordered.

"Sir?"

"Just do it, Lieutenant."

Stalker hopped in and punched the startup sequence. Isard closed the hatch and stared out at the pillar of smoke marking the crash site. A Viper? What the frak is going on? Trees whisked by as Stalker banked hard, apparently just as curious as he was.

"Too many trees, sir. Can't land. But I can get you right over the site, you can repel down."

"Great." He replied sardonically. "Just don't do any fancy flying, okay?" He opened the supply locker, found a length of rescue line and clamped it to the frame, sliding the hatch open.

Fires were raging all around the biggest chunk of wreckage, probably tylium sprayed out when the engines went up, he thought. He slid down the rope. "Definitely a Viper," he said into the radio. "Looks older to me. Mark 3 maybe, or Mark 2. Hard to tell."

"Where did it come from? A Viper can't carry a jump drive."

"Yet it looked like a jump to me. I can't explain it either. But it was a strange jump-in. Didn't look right." Isard approached the burnt-out fuselage and reached for the cockpit frame.

"Frak!" He yelled.

"What's going on?"

"Burnt myself. This thing is hotter than Hades. Anyway, I think the pilot is dead. Checking." He tore a piece of his undershirt and wrapped it around his hand, reaching again for the frame and the occupant inside. The pilot's helmet was broken, and he could see the burns and blood around what remained of her face. She was dead. He grabbed the pilot's flight suit, trying to dislodge the body, and it tore in his hand, leaving him with a burnt section of flight suit and patch. The fires cooked up again as something else caught, obscuring the dead pilot's body from view.

"The pilot is history. But… It's… Galactica." Isard stared at the partially burned BSG-75 patch in his hand.

"Huh?" Stalker replied over the radio. "Maybe the toaster wasn't lying when she said there were others, then."

"Looks that way. But how did an old Viper jump here? And why now?"

"I don't know, but how long do we stay here, sir? If some exploding Galactica Viper can find this place, maybe the toasters can too. Can you get the pilot's tags?"

"Too hot. Damn near cooked myself getting the patch. We can wait until this thing cools down. Unless you have fire suppressant gear up there."

"Used it all in the firefight, sir." She replied.

Isard stared for a moment at the Viper wreckage, then back up at the transport hovering overhead. He wanted to stay. The mystery weighed heavily on him. The desire to understand what was going on bordered on consuming his awareness, it was so intense.

But he was a Colonial officer, and one with vital intel that he had to get back to his commanding officer, even if the man was a halfway pirate and drunkard. They had the coordinates. They could come back and try to make sense of all this later. With difficulty, he suppressed his curiosity and climbed the rope.

"Let's bail, Lieutenant," borrowing the pirates' lingo. "Get the frak off this hellhole before something else insane happens to us."

Isard contemplated the patch in his hand, real, tangible evidence that they weren't the last of humanity after all, that something else was going on out there. He would get to the bottom of it one way or another. He had to know.