A couple mornings later, after Lee finished the early shift pilot briefing, Kara came into the briefing room to start his training. Sharon was on a Raptor patrol, so she'd managed to recruit Boxey to be her assistant. And she knew it was going to be an entertaining morning.

"It's kinda nice, me being up here, you being down there," she told Lee with a grin as she took a seat at the podium. Her sunglasses were perched atop her head, and she would have brought a stogie if she wasn't already running low on them.

"You're enjoying this far too much, Lieutenant."

"There's no such thing as too much, Sir. Remember all those little jokes you were cracking in the Life Station? Payback is a close and personal friend of mine." She nodded to Boxey, and he stepped forward to hand Lee a clipboard. "What you are holding is a schematic of the power system for my little souvenir, and a revised edition of my notes for power-up. As you can see, it's nothing like a Viper. Power-up seems to be the thing that's given everyone else so much trouble, so we'll spend today on that. Although I hear Tyrol got her started yesterday." She turned to Boxey. "What's Sharon told you about the hangar deck?"

"That it's off limits." Kara smiled.

"Good. Then we'll just have to make sure you don't actually step foot on deck."

The deck crew had been trying to install hardware in the Raider that could be used for tracking and communications. Command wanted to make sure that Dradis and the Vipers could tell their Raider apart from other Raiders if they all wound up in a combat situation. While the crewmen cleared out to allow Kara and Lee their training time, she looked up to make sure that Boxey was where she wanted him. She had told the boy to be her eyes and ears outside of the Raider, which could now fit two people, so he was seated on the edge of a walkway on the second level of the hangar deck. She could appreciate the look of wonder in his eyes as he watched everything going on down below him – growing up with them, the kid was destined to become a pilot.

"She's all yours," she told Lee, and watched as he climbed up into the Raider. She tried to push away the memory that popped up in her mind of the last time she'd watched Zak get into a Viper. She'd never get anything accomplished if she started thinking about the past.

Climbing in behind Lee, she left the hatch open so that she could leave her bum leg straightened out and dangling through it. He was checking out the controls, carefully looking over her notes. There was no doubt in Kara's mind that he was just as good of a pilot as she was. The only difference was, for her it came naturally and for him it took work.

"Got everything figured out?" she asked him. He slid backwards slightly, making sure his feet were in the rear controls while still having a comfortable grip on the forward ones.

"I think so."

"Run through the sequence with me first, then you can actually do it."

A couple minutes later, Boxey grinned as he heard the engines ignite and saw the Raider begin to strain against the metal structure that kept it from leaping into the air. He'd already decided that the hangar was his favorite place on the ship.

The Galactica was a big ship, but it suddenly seemed very small when the rumor mill got working. By the following afternoon, there were stories going around the squad and deck crew as to what their CAG and squadron leader were really doing inside that fighter. Lee and Adama's desperate search for Kara was still fresh on everyone's minds, and only added more fuel to the fire.

"Just ignore it," Lee told Kara one night as they took a walk down the corridor to let her temper cool off. He'd just barely gotten to the bunkroom in time to keep her from pummeling one of the pilots that had decided it would be in his best interest to make a smart-ass comment about the pilot's position in the Raider. "If that's the best they can come up with to entertain themselves, then just let them. I thought you were going to make your trips to the brig less frequent."

"This is less frequent," she shot back.

"You should hear some of the other stuff that's been said."

Kara raised an eyebrow. "Are we part of the grapevine often?"

"Yeah. Usually I just make sure you don't get wind of it because I don't need half my pilots winding up in the Life Station with broken jaws."

"How'd you get so good at ignoring ship gossip?" she asked.

"I don't know. Sometimes they really do go too far, but I know it's not true, and I know you're the best friend I've got left in the universe, and that's all that matters." Kara smiled. "Now, can you go back to your rack without punching anyone?"

"I make no promises."

The next day was the first space test of the Raider since Kara had brought it to the ship. She was up in the CIC, with Adama and Tigh. There were three ships already out on CAP, and Lee would have another Viper and Raptor as escorts during the test. Boomer and Crashdown where in the Raptor, and Kat was in the Viper.

"Viper one away," Gaeta reported to Adama. "Viper two away." The Raider obviously couldn't use the launch tubes, and instead had to take off from the flight deck. It took a few moments longer for, "Raider away."

The first objective was just to get a feel for the flight controls. After that, he could try maneuvers. "I never thought I'd admit this," Lee's voice came over the wireless, "But this thing's actually more maneuverable than a Viper. Not a Mark VII, but it definitely puts the Mark IIs to shame."

"Watch yourself, Apollo," Boomer told him with a smile. "Your Viper might take offense."

He laughed. "Kara, I will say it again: when you take a souvenir, you really don't screw around." She caught the hint of a smile that Adama gave her.

"You still maintaining pressurization?" Kat asked Lee.

"Yeah, everything looks good so far." And then came the words that they all dreaded.

"Dradis contact!" Everyone in the CIC whipped around to look at Gaeta. "It's a Cylon Basestar!"

TBC...