Chapter 7
Kara realised that she was in trouble from the first moment of re-entering the storm field. When she had first left it, all those hours ago, she had been so busy trying to hold the ship together through the asteroids that she hadn't been able to take a position reading. Now she had no idea where she had originally come out of the field. Having dodged her way through the asteroids, she made a best guess and ploughed in. The familiar grey-white fog enveloped her. This time it was even more difficult to see, with her iced up and cracked canopy, but she was determined to get through it and make it back to the Galactica.
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She was about six hours in and still no sign of any of her markers. An almost overwhelming panic started to well up inside of her, as for the first time she allowed herself to think that she might actually die here. For all she knew she could be flying around in circles; there was no way of telling. Both her fuel and her oxygen stocks were getting low. She took a deep breath and tried to pull herself together; it was time for serious decisions not pathetically morbid worrying. She decided to adjust her course in the hope that she might find her trail of silver balls.
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More hours had gone by, but she was starting to loose the ability to keep track. The headache that had never quite gone away since she had hit her head had now notched up in intensity. The mind-numbing cold was also making her struggle to keep awake more difficult, yet she couldn't afford to waste fuel by turning on the heating system. She felt like shit. Her eyes were playing tricks with her, stars and lights dancing across her clouded vision. For a second she thought that the flash from the fog was just more of these tricks, but she couldn't be sure. She dragged against her lethargy and scraped a bigger, clearer view hole in the canopy. Sure enough, another flash of silver: she had found one of her markers. Her spirits immediately rose, but which one was it? She could be close to escaping or still seven hours away. If it was seven hours she'd never have enough fuel or oxygen. She slotted in her second emergency oxygen bottle, used the marker to set a straight course and started to pray.
She spotted the second marker an hour and twenty minutes later. Did that mean it was one of her two hourly points or had an hour one drifted? She hoped fervently that it was the latter and pushed on.
Now she had another problem; her fuel was getting really low. More serious decisions required when her brain didn't really want to work anymore. If she reduced her speed to save on fuel she may not have enough oxygen to last the journey. If she carried on at her current speed she could run out of fuel before she reached the other side. She decided to cut one of the engines, the port side one as she had more confidence that she would be able to get that one started again than the damaged starboard engine. This reduced her speed somewhat but significantly cut her fuel consumption. She reached down into her survival bag and pulled out her third and last bottle of emergency O2.
"Buy two get one free!" she murmured to herself. After her last experience of crash landing she had slipped another one into the bag at the last minute "just in case". She hadn't wanted to rely on finding another conveniently downed Cylon raider this time and now she was very grateful that she had put it in.
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Kara was beyond tired now. The need to close her eyes and sleep was overwhelming. She could feel herself slipping into unconsciousness, but she had no energy or spirit left to fight the pain and fog in her mind any longer. She heard the second engine start to cough and splutter as the fuel gauge reached zero, but before it died completely she caught a glimpse of another marker and the appearance of stars as the storm field started to thin. She eased her foot off the throttle pedal to coax the last possible effort from the engine and slowly drifted into clear space.
And that was the sight that greeted her: clear space. No fleet, no Galactica. She had no fuel and barely any oxygen and no home. It may only have been a huge chunk of rusty old metal but the Galactica was her home because the people most important to her, her family, were all there, and it was gone. With the last ounce of her energy she flicked the switch for her comms: nothing. She flicked a couple of other switches with no response. Her ship was entirely dead, just floating in cold space. For the first time since this mission had begun almost two and a half days ago she let the tears flow down her cheeks as she criedand then thedarkness flowed through her brain and subsumed her.