Chapter 4
After leaving his father, Lee made his way down to the hanger bay to complete the pre-flight checks on the raptor he was taking to Kobol. Until they knew whether the Cylons were still there, they didn't want to jump the Galactica to the planet, so a raptor, with its FTL capability, was the only option. He'd feel a hell of a lot more comfortable in a viper with its guns at the ready, but he had no choice.
Helo was already there. Lee had decided that the best thing that he could do for Helo was to get him back into a plane and back to some sort of normality as soon as possible, so he was taking him as his ECO. The young lieutenant seemed inordinately grateful and was diligently ploughing through all of the pre-flight checklists.
Whilst he was doing his tour of the outside of the plane, Lee glanced across at Kara's raider and the small transport Helo and the new Boomer had returned in. He would have to get the whole story at some point, but now wasn't the time. As if reading his thoughts, Kara appeared beside him.
"Captain Adama, sir. What's all this crap I hear about you grounding me, sir?"
"It's not crap Lieutenant. You're grounded until the docs and I clear you for flight duty," he replied in a clipped voice. He avoided looking at her and appeared to study the checklist in his hand.
"You're so full of bullshit, Apollo. You need me on this mission, you know you do."
"No, lieutenant, I don't." Lee finally looked at her, his eyes sparkling like hard flint. "What I need is pilots who play by the rules and work for the good of the team, not for their own personal agendas."
It was as if he had slapped her. So far her return to Galactica had not been as bad as she had anticipated. Sure, bad things had obviously happened whilst she had been away, but she had made peace with the commander, Tigh seemed minded to ignore her and the president was jubilant that she had retrieved the arrow. It was obvious, however, that Lee neither forgave her for the indiscretion with Baltar, nor could forget the humiliation of having her bug out on him with no warning in the middle of an exercise.
"Look Lee, I know you're frakked off with me, but I'm not going to do anything stupid again."
"So, you're admitting that what you did was stupid?"
"No…you're putting words in my mouth. All I'm saying is that you can trust me in the air, just like you've always been able to in the past."
"Well, that's the crux of the matter isn't it Kara? I don't trust you at the moment, in the air or out of it, and until I do you're not getting near this mission or any other. You can't just frak off back to Caprica and come back expecting everyone to welcome you with open arms just because you've brought back some rusty old relic. I want proof that you want to be part of this team, Kara, not just the high value player that gets all the glory."
With that he turned sharply on his heal and climbed in to the raptor.
