Thirteen

Chapter Eighty-Eight

Coming Home

Eight years.

Eight years since she was last here. Back then, she had come back to find her lover, Samuel Anders, and bring him and the rest of the resistance movement back to Galactica. Now, they were coming back, to reclaim their home from the machines.

The Cylons had decided to make Aerelon and Caprica their last stands. Apollo was leading the attack on Aerelon as Starbuck's fleet was jumping into orbit of her former homeworld. The Cylons had jumped in two-dozen basestars in a last ditch effort to hold on against the rising tide of defeat.

Thousands upon thousands of fighters were launched by the basestars, heading towards the approaching allied fleet. Starbuck had been expecting this and gave the command to launch fighters. Thunderbolts, Vipers, and fighters from the Minbari, Narn, and Centauri ships flew out of their capital ship homes and raced towards the approaching enemy.

Starbuck looked impassive as she watched all of this going on, but inside her mind, thoughts churned like clothes in a washer. She couldn't get her mind off her friend Sue-Shaun being hooked up to one of those egg-harvesting machines in one of those Cylon farms. Having seen those farms on some of the other Colonial worlds only added fuel to the fires of righteous rage inside her, and she wanted to beat the Cylons ever the more since her own eggs had been taken from her.

In the eight years since she'd last been there, she'd changed a lot, grown a lot, and learned a lot. When she went to Caprica to retrieve the Arrow of Apollo, she didn't care if she lived or died. Frankly, she didn't care about much of anything. She'd been betrayed by the only person that really mattered her when she found out that then-Commander Adama had lied about knowing where Earth was. She didn't really care if she got the arrow or not, because she knew she'd probably get killed anyway.

The farms began the change. She'd been shot during an ambush from the Cylons and taken to one of the farms with the intent of getting her pregnant with a Cylon child. She had managed to escape, but not before her left ovary was taken from her. Even now, she wondered if anything became of those eggs.

She wasn't thinking of that at this moment, because missiles were being launched by the basestars and they were setting off the radioactive alarms on the ship. Before she could even give the order, David Sheridan targeted the incoming missiles with their forward beam weapons and destroyed the ones heading to them. The other ships in the fleet followed suit and soon all the nukes were taken out, never getting close enough to go off.

The basestars launched heavy raiders, and Starbuck guessed that this next tactic was an attempt to board the allied ships and use their Centurions to thwart the attack. They may have had the sheer numbers, but energy weapons tended to take away that advantage. Soon enough, the boarding parties were no more, reduced to floating chunks of debris in the vacuum of space.

Starbuck's mouth stretched to a predatory grin as she watched the basestar that was growing bigger in her sights with every second. When David Sheridan coolly said that they were within range, Starbuck took pleasure at ordering him to open fire on it. The powerful beams shot out of the four turrets on the bow of the ship and slammed into the basestar, cutting open a sizeable tear into it and exposing the interior to space. That wouldn't matter to the machines, though, but it did mean that fuel and power lines inside the massive ship were being severed.

Other ships surrounded the basestar and began attacking it like wasps going after a large dog, with the old Whitestars flying around and hammering away at it from angles that the bigger destroyers couldn't get to. The basestar's fighters tried to double back and fight off the fleet, but they were taken out from the rear by the allied fighters and from the front by the rear batteries of the larger ships.

The reactor was breached and the ships moved away to a safe distance before the basestar blew up. The Cylon raiders kept on fighting after their base ship was knocked out of the fight, but they didn't last long in the wake of being overmatched by the Thunderbolts and the Mark X Vipers.

The twenty-four basestars lasted a good hour in the fight before the last one was reduced to a floating hulk in space. The reactor was still going, but the machine was a useless piece of junk. Starbuck's fleet had suffered hardly a scratch, but the news of losing a dozen Thunderbolts and fifteen Vipers sobered her up. At heart, she was still a fighter pilot, and she still felt the sting of seeing a fellow pilot getting killed by the enemy.

Once orbital superiority had been achieved, the next phase of the operation was about to take place. The landings were to take place in three days time, with Thunderbolts and Vipers making sorties down onto the planet for reconnaissance and to launch attacks on specific targets. Whitestars were sent in when a large target needed to be taken out on the surface.

Helo's Whitestar plunged down into the atmosphere of the planet and struck the main spaceport near Caprica City, the de facto capital of the Colonies. The Cylons had plenty of heavy raiders at the military base adjacent to the spaceport, and looked to be preparing to load Centurions onto them for the invasion. Despite the anti-aircraft fire being directed at his ship, Helo and his crew took out each one of the heavy raiders as well as the raiders not already in the sky. The ones that were, and subsequently attacking his ship, he left for the fighters that had followed him down.

The landing site that Starbuck's forces would be using to mount their assault was a familiar one to her: Delphi Union High School. It was located in the suburbs of Delphi City, and had been overrun by Centurions before the special ops team took them out and established a perimeter around it. Anders' Whitestar had already landed there and his crew, along with the Earthforce Marines assigned to them, had deployed to set up the base where they would conduct their operations.

Starbuck would go down to the planet on board Helo's Whitestar, which was the old reliable 525, the one that they had trained on eight years before. It had been through a lot ever since it was first used in the Shadow War almost thirty years before, but it still was a fine fighting vessel that the Cylons had no way of defending against.

She left David Sheridan in charge of the Neroon and piloted the shuttle over to Helo's ship. After landing in the Whitestar's flight bay, Starbuck was met by Helo and Boomer in the airlock. Their son was back on Minbar, and the seven year old was developing quite normally according to the doctors, which relieved his mom and dad to no end.

"We're ready when you are, Starbuck! The Marines on board are chomping at the bit to get at the enemy, and so are we!" Helo said as he hugged Starbuck.

"Good! I've been ready for this for a long time! Everyone who survived the holocaust has been ready for this! Eight fraking years and now we get ours back!" Starbuck said resolutely.

Boomer added, "I just hope we can free some more people from those farms. To think that my kind is responsible for that…" She shook her head.

"Don't worry about it, Boomer! It's not your fault! It's those damned machine's fault! They were the ones who created you!" Starbuck said in an attempt to reassure her friend.

"Like the humans who created the original Cylons?" Boomer asked.

Starbuck and Helo looked at each other uncomfortably, but Starbuck had a thought and voiced it. "Maybe we are no better than the Cylons, but we can at least atone for our sins by helping free your people and take out the machines that created you. It's the best we can do in an imperfect universe."

Boomer thought it over, then nodded, adding, "You're right, Starbuck."

"There's no one here with hands clean, Sharon. None of us. All we can do is win this war and then move on from there, which is hopefully towards a better future for my people and yours." Starbuck said, then burst out laughing, "Can you imagine the old me hearing this? She'd probably shoot my fraking brains out with all this deep talk!"

Boomer and Helo laughed with her and turned the conversation back to the business at hand. When the time came, they descended through the atmosphere and landed a short way from the high school. Several more Whitestars landed as well as Mark X Vipers and Thunderbolts, so the place was intensely abuzz with activity.

Other landing sites were seeing similar activity around the planet, despite the best efforts of the Centurions. The enemy launched an offensive ten minutes after Starbuck, Helo, and Boomer landed. Almost a hundred Centurions tried to overrun the camp, but they were gunned down with ruthless efficiency by the ground pounders, using the defensive weapons they deployed all around the high school.

Two days later, Starbuck, Anders, Helo, and Boomer, along with their troops, began to march away from the high school and on their way into the heart of Delphi City. The real battle for Caprica was about to begin.