Thirteen

Chapter Sixty-Two

Poised With The Master Strike

Galen looked out at the combined Cylon/Drakh fleet as it headed towards Earth through hyperspace and grunted, not happy with what he was seeing. "I think the old saying 'not having all your eggs in one basket' comes to mind right about now." Galen said grimly.

Matthew Gideon watched as well and his expression was a mirror of his longtime friend's. "I think you're right. They have more ships than we expected them to have. This is going to make things even more difficult."

Cylon basestars were all around them, as far as they could make out in hyperspace. Mixed in among them were hundreds of Drakh ships, with motherships numbering easily in the double digits. Drakh cruisers and carriers rounded out the fleet, and seemed just as numerous as the basestars were.

"Yeah, it's bad all right." Matthew said as he headed back to his quarters, where his wife Elizabeth was sleeping. Galen knew he should get some sleep as well, but he could help but stick to staring at the fleet. His own love, Dureena, was sleeping as well in their quarters, and part of him wanted to join her and get some rest, but the other part knew he would only stay awake with worry.

Galen wondered why he felt this way. For so long, he kept his emotions in tight control, never letting them out because he knew what would happen if they did. Over time, though, he learned how to 'free' the tech from the need for his control, and it began a long road to where he was able to deal with the demons from his past and the destructive force that he was.

Now, he was a much calmer person. Yes, he still felt the pain of the loss of his first love, Isabelle, but it had been abated by his second love, Dureena. It had caught him by surprise when they began to fall for each other, but they had grown out of their teacher/student relationship and were now, more or less, equals.

He finally decided to head to bed, knowing that if anything major were to happen, the ship would alert him. Galen walked into his quarters and saw Dureena lying there on their bed, fast asleep. Her hair had some gray in it these days, but her chestnut brown was still predominant. Galen smiled when he remembered how she would do anything to help him and Matthew Gideon out when they were aboard the Excalibur during the Drakh plague. She would crawl, climb, swim, and do just about anything else to aid the cause. These days, though, she was more content to use her mind than her muscles, because, like the rest of them, she was getting older.

Galen was closing in on fifty himself, and, while he knew that technomages could live much longer than regular humans could, he had a feeling that he had fewer years ahead of him and more behind him these days. The same held true for all the others: Sheridan, Ivanova, Garibaldi, Franklin, the Gideons, and the rest. More and more, Galen felt the changing of the guard was approaching, and that this war was the last hurrah of a golden era.

It had started a quarter century ago with the founding of Babylon 5, and the galaxy hadn't been the same since. It was designed to be the last, best hope for peace, but it had morphed into the main command center during the Shadow War, then the Earth civil war when the Shadow war had been won. The station then hosted the newly born Interstellar Alliance for a year until the new headquarters were ready on Tuzinor. When the ISA moved to its new home, the station began a slow decline towards its own demise.

The telepath war and the Drakh plague had reenergized the place, but when those conflicts ended, the station began to once again submerge into being a backwater. The station's population dropped under two hundred thousand a year after the end of the Drakh plague, then under one hundred thousand a couple of years later. That's when the movement to shut down the station began.

Even the re-emergence of the Drakh threat on Centauri Prime wasn't enough to quell the calls to shut down the station. President Hollifield had done what he could to keep it alive, but he was fully aware he was fighting a losing battle. Strangely enough, the Colonials arriving were a blessing for the station, because it served as a safe haven when the survivors of the Cylon attacks on the homeworlds needed one the most.

Galen knew that it was only a temporary matter, as there were calls inside Earthdome to move the Colonists to Earth and to shut down the station. Senator Clarissa Cally, in her role as likely challenger to President Hollifield in the next election, was leading the fight to bring the Colonists to Earth, disregarding the argument that bringing them to what they called the thirteenth colony might destroy their culture one and for all.

His woolgathering was interrupted when an arm slid over his left shoulder. Dureena had awakened early and had managed to sneak up on him, which made him realize just how distracted he had made himself with his thoughts. "What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"The past, the present, and the future." Galen said.

Dureena snorted and said, "You could be more specific for your love, you know?"

Galen turned around and looked at her, then raised his hand and gently brushed her cheek. "It seems like this is the end of an era."

Dureena raised an eyebrow and said, "Nostalgic? You?" She laughed and said, "You're full of surprises, even after all of these years!"

Galen said, "Even I surprise myself these days. For example, I never imagined that I would ever fall in love again."

Dureena smiled and replied, "If I had told you when we first met that you would fall for me…"

Galen interrupted and said, "…I would have locked you away for your own safety, because you'd have been clearly delusional."

They both laughed at that, and Dureena said, "We've changed a lot over the years."

"Yes, and much for the better." Galen replied.

Dureena said, "Come on! Lay down with me for a while. You need the rest, my love!"

Galen nodded and lay back beside Dureena, who cuddled up beside him. Whereas before he would have eschewed close human contact, these days he didn't mind the closeness one bit.

They continued their tracking of the fleet as it headed towards Earth. Galen and Alwyn conversed with Andromeda, who was in Earthdome with the president these days, working on something that kept Alwyn and Galen guessing. All they knew was that it had something to do with the human Cylons, and that they didn't want the mechanical Cylons or anyone else catching wind of it. They had their ideas, but didn't know for sure.

The fleet was now two days away from Earth. The Colonial battlestars assigned to Earth had arrived, as well as all the ships that would be defending the planet from the enemy. The defense grid was on high alert and fully powered to deal with anything that came along. They were as ready as they could be for the coming storm, but, as Galen knew from stories of Hurricane Katrina from the early twenty-first century as well as many other catastrophes involving weather, no matter how well you battened down the hatches, you could still get your home smashed into pieces.