By ChaosEternus
Thanks to LONA of the BSGWS for Beta'ing this fic for me.
Chapter 13The first clue I had that something was wrong was the blaring of alert claxons across the ship, usually a dead give away that something wasn't kosher, followed by the rather shocking shout of "Intruder Alert," an intruder in the repair bay to be specific, the very same bay that Tempest was stored in.
It didn't take a genius to do the maths on that one. No sign of intruders in the bays for months and yet as soon as the Colonials discover something really valuable is aboard our shuttle, we get an intruder alert.
I quirked an eyebrow at Donally as he wryly commented, "Fifty quid says Tempest's the target of the intruder"
I rolled off the bed, reaching swiftly for the colonial uniform I had been loaned whilst mine was being cleaned, "I don't take sucker bets"
I noticed Donally palming a small handgun as we hurriedly dressed, and I shrugged and did the same.
After all, we needed something just in case and Command back home had seen fit to provide us a safe containing four standard pistols and four trank guns but I would be really surprised if they had ever envisaged this scenario when they had snorted at international opinion and put the damned things aboard.
Tigh at least had seen us remove the things from the safe, and hadn't commented, but then he would be used to pilots going everywhere with a gun in the holster. After all, all their pilots went on missions with them, and as we had seen, a lot never took them off.
By now we were racing through the corridors, scattering ship's crew like skittles as we shouted for them to 'make a hole'. After all that was our bird in danger and we wanted to get there fast, sod the fact that only fighter pilots and ship ' s security were supposed to have priority like that.
Racing around a corner, I abruptly found myself flying backwards through the air, landing flat on my arse with Boomer ' s face just inches from my own.
Boomer's very blank face.
Boomer's very injured shoulder too, with what appeared to be a bullet hole in her uniform.
A voice at the back of my head was just screaming for attention at this point but it hadn't quite registered what it was shouting about. The rather hate-filled expression that suddenly covered the normal nice and friendly face of Sharon Valerii got my attention though, as did the knife that appeared in her hand.
It seems I had literally run into one of the ship's Cylon sleepers, beautiful.
Now, I was no expert with knives but I had gone through basic therefore I had some idea of how to fight. My first response was rather knee-jerk in more ways than one and to a male, would have been rather painful. It distracted Boomer, or whatever was in control of Boomer's body for about half a second, before she smirked and tried to stab me. By this time however my hands were very firmly clenched around the knife and Donally was swinging his pistol with rather more force than was strictly necessary.
The last thing I saw before Boomer's face crashed into my own was the hate vanish to be replaced by a very confused and above all else human expression.
Then her skull bounced off my own, and I knew no more.
I awoke with not just the mummy, but the granddaddy of all headaches as well.
It was like an artillery range had been set up in my head, like a hundred pneumatic drills were being used to repave my synapses.
Needless to say, my first response to waking up was a not very intelligible groan. It got the Doctor's attention though…
"Ahh you're awake, good."
Good? It sure as hell didn't feel that way at the time.
The day from that point was pain-filled blur. It seemed that not only had Boomer's skull bounced off my own, knocking me out and giving me a concussion, but the weight of her body falling on mine had forced the knife in between my ribs and into my left lung.
And they couldn't do much about the lung whilst I had concussion, the explanation passing right over my head, even at the best of times my medical knowledge barely managed a first aid certificate but with a fifty gun salute sounding in my head, forget it!
The next day passed in less of a blur, they managed to do whatever it was they needed to do to my lung, the fifty gun salute got downgraded to a five gun and Dafydd got the chore of telling me the Tempest's workstations had had a coronary and needed my delicate touch to get them working again.
That I shrugged off. So long as there was no physical damage all that would be lost would be anything we had written onto the computers since the mission started.
And since the brown and sticky stuff had hit the rotary impacting device before we had even left Earth's atmosphere, well nothing new had been written onto the hard disks.
This meant I could restore from the images I had stored on DVD with no worries… when I could get at the dammed things that is.
Still, no one was telling me what exactly had happened to Boomer.
Hey, I liked her and still did, despite the fact that there was a bloody chip in her head. She didn't have any choice in that matter after all.
Eventually, they gave up and told me.
She was in solitary, which was understandable. No one was allowed within arm's reach of her, less so and she was being denied any kind of medical treatment.
Which wasn't understandable, not to me.
Can't risk one of their few Doctors was what their words said, but their tones said clearly, we've written her off.
Fuck that, you never ever write off one of your own, not unless they go genuinely traitor and Boomer wasn't a traitor, just the thing within her.
The only reason they hadn't 'dealt' with her was they hoped there was something on Tempest's computers that could be used to access the information stored in Boomer's mind, or devise a defence against them.
Fine, I would get the computers online when the Doc cleared me, but I wouldn't be looking for that.
I would be looking for a cure.