Here's part two, in which things get a little different and we finally see some familiar faces from Galactica. Read and enjoy!

The Thirteenth Sign

By Lola Ravenhill

Part Two: '"But when worlds collide," said George Pal to his bride, "I'm gonna give you some terrible thrills…"'

There was another flash of light.

When they blinked away the blindness, Lee was more than a little unnerved to see that his father, the president, and Billy had gone, leaving he and Starbuck in the middle of a field that looked drastically different than it had a moment ago.

"What the frak was that?" Kara muttered, clutching her gun tighter and hauling it up to attention again.

"No idea," he replied, turning in a slow circle to take in what changes had occurred. Instead of the overgrown grass it was now neatly shorn, a soft carpet under their feet. It was still night, but now the glittering stars seemed farther away, mere pinpricks in the sky rather than the beacons of before. The biggest changes were in the stones. The jewels had gone, and the remaining stones—where there had been twelve there now only looked like four—were slightly crumbling and weathered with age. They were still as imposing as before. Maybe even more, these stones spoke of having lasted for centuries and were not intimidated by the thought of standing watch for a few more. "I don't think we're on Kobol anymore," Lee breathed.

"You think?" she fired back, a slight nervous edge in her voice. Kara squinted up at the stars, biting her lip in concentration. "Look, there's Cancer, and over there Aquarius. And I think that's Gemini that way." She sighed, and lowered the gun slightly. "I think we're still on Earth."

Lee turned his eyes towards the stones, taking a few hesitant steps closer. "Yeah. Look at the top of the stones, you can still see the impressions of the constellations there. The jewels look long gone though."

"Lee…" she trailed off, at a rare total loss for words.

There was a crisp breeze coming from somewhere, a novel feeling for those stuck on a Battlestar for so long. There was no time to enjoy any such simple pleasures while on Kobol. The breeze carried the scent of the sea with it, of salt and fish and something entirely foreign to their noses. Maybe it was something distinctly Earthly. Lee breathed in deeply, feeling the air fill his lungs. At first he had thought that they were in some sort of holographic representation of Earth, gods only knew what sort of technology the Lords of Kobol had come up with in their day. Now, however, he was suspecting that it was something far beyond what he had previously thought. He walked over to the stones slowly and laid a palm on it. He let out an incredulous and breathy laugh. "They're still warm."

Kara followed him over, and when she came up to his side he grabbed her hand and pressed it flat against the stone. "It's still warm, as if it's been soaking up the sun all day," he whispered.

"Where the frak are we?" Kara muttered, looking over at Lee. There was a tinge of worry in her eyes, something he rarely saw there. A smile then suddenly spread across her face. "Maybe this is what Earth really looks like, rather than just the map's representation."

"Maybe." He looked around the remains of the circle, finally spotting something a short distance away. "Maybe we could ask them."

A little bit beyond the stones, further inland, was a tent set up on the grassy plain. There was a small fire in front of it, giving some more light to the scene. Most importantly though were the three people around it. A fair haired man sat opposite a blonde woman, and both were staring at their other companion: a black-haired woman who kept placing papers on the ground and holding them down with loose rocks. All three were dressed in what looked like appropriate outdoor gear, warm fleeces and sturdy hiking boots.

Kara shot Lee a look, and in one fluid motion they tucked their weapons under their arms and started to make their way over to the trio. However they didn't get far, as they slammed into some sort of barrier right in front of them. "Oww." Kara rubbed at her nose as Lee stretched out a hand and felt it.

"It almost feels like foam or something."

"Except for that we wouldn't know it was there until we smacked face first into it." She winced again and prodded at her nose.

"I can't think of any technology on any of the Colonies that could come up with a force field this undetectable. Maybe Earth's got better capabilities than we do," Lee said.

"Maybe it's the magic of the Gods," Kara grinned. "After all, if one little arrow could send us all this way, who only knows what else they could do." The grin got wider. "It's amazing, the force behind that arrow of Apollo."

"Funny, real funny."

"All right!" A voice suddenly clearly carried across to them. The two looked over to see the black-haired woman standing up, her arms spread wide. "I think I've got it." She spoke with a strange accent, although Kara could hear some similarities to the Aerilon accent in the way she talked.

The blonde woman stood up and walked over to her. "This better be worth it, Suze. I could be sleeping in a warm bed right now rather than an open field in the middle of an island too close to the Arctic Circle for my comfort."

"I promise you, McKinney, this will be so absolutely worth it."

"Think we should get comfortable and enjoy the show?" Kara murmured.

"Sounds like a very good idea." The two sat down on the ground, Lee idly wishing he had some snacks. "Do you think they can hear us?" he asked.

"Probably not. It's quiet out here, they would have definitely heard us smack into the force field." Kara stared around, glancing up at the stones, then coming back to the dark haired woman—Suze, she recalled—tying a bandanna around her head to keep her hair back.

"Okay, class," Suze hollered with a grin. "Sit down and get comfortable." Her two companions shared an amused look and complied with her directions. The man in particular propped himself up against a backpack and clutched a decidedly alcoholic looking bottle.

"My kingdom for some ambrosia," he heard Kara mutter.

"Thank you," Suze continued. "Now, McKinney, Ade, may I present to you, to paraphrase a very famous man, The History of the Earth. Part One."

"Oh, Lord," the man Ade said in an accent surprisingly similar to Dr. Baltar's, swiftly uncapping the bottle and taking a swig. Lee didn't notice this immediately as he was too busy trying to scoop up his gun again from where he'd dropped it in surprise.

"The history of the Earth?" he said, turning to Kara wide-eyed.

"Why does that seem a little too coincidental for me?"

"Well I don't like it. Let's just try and find a way out of this crazy place." He started to stand up, but Kara's hand shot out like a snake and grabbed onto his jacket.

"Maybe that's why we're still here. Because we're the ones who have to hear the story of the place we're going to end up eventually," Kara said, her eyes trained on the trio.

"That's…frankly, that seems like a load of b.s.," Lee said, but he sat back down again next to her.

Kara shrugged. "Who knows. Can't explain it, really. Call it a gut feeling."

"Woman's intuition?" She shrugged again.

"So," Suze's voice echoed over the field. "Let's start all the way at the beginning. Big Bang, universe expands, giant lava pit becomes Earth as we know it."

"That's quite succinct. I think you skipped a few steps in there though," Ade pointed out, and Suze threw a handful of grass at him. He just laughed and took another swig from the bottle.

"It's not the important part of the story, anyway. I'll move on to where things get juicy—the Humans."

"The true stars of the show," McKinney chimed in.

"Exactly. Now, the absolute earliest humans, Homo Habilis, popped up slightly over 2 million years ago. From there we move on through the different species and subspecies, Homo Erectus, the Neanderthal man, etcetera. Finally, however, about 200,000 years ago we get humans as we know them today—Homo Sapiens."

"The wise man," Ade said.

"Yeah. Our own species."

"That's impossible," Kara whispered. "Man only arrived on Earth 2,000 years ago from Kobol."

"That's not what the Earthlings think, apparently," Lee said. "Come on, tell us more about this little planet," he muttered.

"And now we take another jump forward in time. About, say, 12,000 years ago we start to see the development of agriculture. And as everyone has been taught in history classes, when people start to farm, they settle down, and cities rise." Suze moved over to look down at another piece of paper. "Around 5500 years ago, 3500 B.C.E., we start to see the first civilizations rise in the Mesopotamian area. Egypt followed quickly after, along with the Indus Valley civilizations. They came up with sciences, languages, art, religions. When the Cretan and Greek civilizations arose, these were amplified even further. We still talk about their legends, Theseus and the Minotaur, the labyrinth, the voyage home of Odysseus. We're still reading Homer, retelling the stories of the gods Zeus and Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, Apollo and Artemis, and my personal favorite Dionysus."

"That hasn't changed since college," McKinney said. "Always about the blood, sex, and booze."

"Oh, bite me. Anyway, Crete fell to the Myceneans, Greece rose to prominence then their entire culture was appropriated by the Romans, who got whipped by the Goths, leading into the Dark Ages and a massive step backwards scientifically, artistically, religion…ally…okay, everything went backwards until we come to the Renaissance in 1300 which finally pulls them out of the miserable pit of the Middle ages…fast forward to today."

"Suzanne?"

"Yes?"

"That has to be one of the more impressive run-on sentences I've ever heard," Ade smirked.

"Yes, you could almost forget that we also studied English Lit in college," McKinney said with a similar grin.

"Can I please get back to the story!" Suze growled.

"Yes ma'am," they chimed in unison.

"Thank you. Now, in the context of this story, the run-on sentence isn't the important stuff. That's all been established and proven tons of times. We need to go back in time oh, say, at least 4000 years ago to get to the stuff that could change what we already know."

"Back to Atlantis," Ade said with a knowing look in his eyes. Suze nodded, and bent down to take the bottle of alcohol from him, taking a long swig.

"Back to Atlantis," she echoed, "That mythical continent that up until two years ago remained the domain of classical writers and new age crackpots. We don't know when the continent was first inhabited, and we don't know what disaster eventually occurred to sink the place in its entirety into the ocean, but we know that it can be physically dated to 3800 years ago at the very latest."

"So most likely it was sometime around then that the Atlanteans were killed," McKinney said. Suze and Ade traded a look.

"Or pulled their E.T. move," Suze said.

"Either way, it seems safe to say that by 1500 B.C.E. that what was once known as Atlantis didn't exist anymore," McKinney nodded.

"Exactly. But from what we've found on the island, traces of their civilization exist to this day." She scuttled around and picked up another paper. "We know from the cuneiforms on the Zodiac Temple that they knew about Delphi in Greece."

"It was pretty specific to the place as well, if I remember what the translators said correctly," Ade said, standing up and coming to look at the paper over Suze's shoulder. "A place of prophecy, with the Pythian Sybil sitting over a crack in the ground emitting hallucinogenic fumes, and all dedicated to the god Apollo? It can only be one place."

Lee steadfastly ignored the insane grin Kara was sending his way.

McKinney got up and started pacing. "Okay, what else did the Atlanteans do? I've been trapped running PR for the past couple of months, I've missed out on all of the real fun discoveries."

"I think you know the basics already. They had an advanced alphabet, worshipped Gods and Goddesses quite similar to the ones the Greeks did, knew their astronomy frighteningly well, were very technologically advanced—maybe even more than we are now, but there's no evidence left aside from the writing on the wall, literally." Suze shrugged. "There's so much more out there that we don't know about them. We know about festival dates and rituals to appease the gods, but we haven't found anything that talks about their daily lives. We've not found any ruins of homes of the average people; we've only found the ruins of what seems like the major religious and cultural centers."

"Don't forget the most important part," Ade said softly.

"Right. It also looks like that 4000 years before we were able to make even the short hop to the moon, the Atlanteans had the capabilities of massive long distance space travel."

"I knew that," McKinney said, joining the other two. The bottle was passed around once more.

"If the writing on the wall was correct, a portion of the Atlanteans were headed for what they believed was heaven—Kobol, in their tongue. From what the translators are saying, this Kobol wasn't like the Judeo-Christian idea of heaven, a place to go after death, but a real, physical place in the stars."

Lee felt Kara jolt in her seat next to him. Their legs were touching, and he reached out to place a calming hand on her knee.

"Another planet."

"Yup. And you can only guess how the investors took that."

"What did they call you this time?"

Ade snorted. "Dragged out the Monty Python quotes this time."

"Better than being called a stupid cunt," Suze smirked. "Ooh, I've got some more stuff stashed in the tent. Let's get all of these papers gathered up and I'll show you what else I've got."

"But you just set all of them up!" Ade said, staring incredulously as she began to scurry around.

McKinney just patted his back. "She's been like this as long as I've known her. You get used to it." Within a couple of quick minutes the three adjourned to their tent, leaving a bewildered Lee and Kara behind.

"Okay…" Kara trailed off. "So, if I heard them right, in some backwards sort of Earth-type way, they're saying that people went from Earth to Kobol, rather than the other way around."

"We don't know though that the Kobol they're referring to is the same one as our Kobol. What are the chances that the planet the Earthlings took off for all those years ago is the same one as the one we're on right now?" He sighed and dropped his head into his hands. "Something's telling me it's a strong chance," he muttered.

"If anyone finds out about this, it'll either be dismissed as a load of total crap…or it'll shake the fleet to its core," Kara said, twirling a piece of grass in her fingers.

Lee got to his feet, eyes darting to the unfamiliar Earth sky once more. Their moon was starting to rise in the sky, a glowing white half circle. "First we need to get back to Kobol—our Kobol," he said, helping Kara to her feet.

"Let's just hope the Gods created a way out of this contraption and didn't leave it a one way map," Kara said, dusting off the seat of her flight suit. Lee nodded in wholehearted agreement.

It was the strange shimmery feeling that skated across her skin that roused Kara awake. She sighed deeply when she opened her eyes—they were still stuck in the circle. The two of them had scoured every bit they could reach inside the force field to find a way out, but to no avail. They were trapped in there until, as Kara began to think, the Gods decided it was time for them to leave. Eventually they'd fallen asleep propped up against one of the stones, with Lee's arm wrapped around her shoulders and her head drooping on his chest.

She looked around the remains of the circle again, sitting up a bit straighter when she saw that Suze was walking around a short distance away—almost tracing out where the rest of the stones would have been, Kara thought. She stood up, shrugging Lee's arm to the side, and walked to the center, close enough to hear the words she was muttering.

"So Libra would have been here…" A few more steps along… "then Scorpio." Suze bent down, tracing her fingers around the edge of an indentation in the ground. "Placing Sagittarius right here." Kara watched her as she looked up at the next physical stone in the circle. "Making that Aquarius," she pointed at the stone, then jumped to her feet. She placed her finger tips on the stone after Aquarius's. "Capricorn." She then walked out to the center of the larger gap between the stones (and held her breath, Lee was still sleeping propped up against the next stone in the pattern). "And ending with Pisces right here."

Kara's breath caught again when Suze began walking out towards the center of the circle, stopping only a couple of feet to the left of her. Close enough to touch, really. She heard Suze sigh, saw her chest heave up and down with the force of it. "But where's the space for the thirteenth sign?" she said.

"What thirteenth sign?" Kara couldn't help but ask. Thankfully it didn't seem that Suze had heard her. It was a bit of a surprise though. They had twelve their twelve colonies with corresponding signs, but the only thirteenth colony she could have thought of was…

"Come on girl, think. We know the ancients knew about Ophiuchus. It was included in their solar zodiac; it was my modern people that forgot about it." Kara began to think that one of Suze's ways of figuring things out was to talk about it, even if there was no one there to listen. "The serpent-bearer, Ophiuchus. Serpent…" Suddenly she burst out into giggles. "That good old serpent, keeps rearing its head." She collapsed to the ground, her dark hair slipping out of the bandanna and falling around her face as the laugh got louder. "We're on it!" she choked out between giggles, patting the grass beneath her hands. "Ophiuchus is represented by the Earth!"

A shiver raced down Kara's back at hearing her own words echoed back to her in such a strange fashion. It made sense though that Earth had its own sign, one that was forgotten in the many years from when they departed from Kobol (or the opposite order, she mentally conceded). And even stranger, the ideas of the importance of snakes were echoed in some of the things every Colonial kid had read at one time or another. "I think I read something similar in the Pythian Prophecies," she murmured.

"That's impossible, the Pythias at Delphi never left any written record of their prophecies, at least nothing we've found," Suze replied. All of a sudden her face froze, her eyebrows scrunched, and she looked up, her eyes locking onto Kara's. "Who are you?" she asked in a matter-of-fact voice. "And how did you get out here?"

"I'm Kara Thrace." The true surrealness of the situation made her a bit more willing to share information with the Earthling, for some reason. And if it was really a dream, it couldn't hurt. "As for the how I got here…well, that's a whole different story."

"Suzanne Ludwig," she introduced herself. "You a ghost? You look a bit translucent." Kara looked down at her hands, noting they looked a bit pale, but definitely not see-through. Suze clutched convulsively at a pocket and pulled out a packet of reddish-brown cigarettes.

"D'you mind if I…?" Kara reached out a hand to the pack. Suze stood up and held it out, watching as Kara's only slightly paler than normal hand quite easily pulled one from the pack. Suze tossed the lighter to her after she lit her own. Kara inhaled with unholy pleasure. "Oh, it's been far too long."

"You know, I've seen a lot of things, but I've never seen a ghost steal one of my cloves," Suzanne said pensively.

"That's because I'm not a ghost."

"Then what are you?"

"You wouldn't believe me."

"Try me. Like I've said, I've seen many a strange thing. The least of which is a semi-ghost enjoying one of my smokes," Suzanne arched a black eyebrow at Kara, who just grinned.

"You asked for it. What if I told you I come from a planet a long ways away called Caprica? And what if I said this planet and most of my people were destroyed by beings we created, leaving only a small handful of us to search through the galaxy for a new home. Legend has it the planet we're looking for is called Earth." Kara watched Suzanne's impassive face with a slight smirk on her lips. Ten to one she'd be called insane and dismissed outright. It's what she would have done a few months ago when they were back on Caprica and things were still normal.

"I'd say it sounds like a TV show I used to watch when I was a kid, frankly," Suzanne said. "However, you are most certainly on Earth, so I'll give you that."

"I'm still trying to figure out how we got here," Kara muttered. "Last I knew we were in a cave on Kobol. Now somehow we're stuck on Earth."

"Well, it's not a bad place to live," Suzanne mused. "I've grown quite used to it over the years," she winked. "It may not be all you expect it to be, especially if you arrive in a manner worthy of a summer blockbuster movie, but we rather like it."

Kara shrugged. "As long as people aren't trying to annihilate the crap out of us, it'll be fine with me." To her surprise, a worried look came over Suzanne's face.

"I'll give you a word of advice, Kara—tread carefully. We're not exactly used to otherworldly beings here; we've not managed to get humans past the moon yet. If you're not careful with how you approach, I've no doubt that a few 'well-meaning' governments will blast you out of the sky without hesitating."

"Thanks for the tip." Kara sighed again and looked up at the sky, gaze tracking from one end of the horizon to the other. "Although right now I'd give anything to get back to Kobol and get on with this mission."

"Kobol…paradise?"

"Not quite. It's where we, the Colonists and you Earthlings as a matter of fact, came from originally. They left a map there, looks kind of like what this would have looked like before all of the rocks fell down. Somehow though, we ended up here." Kara twisted her lips in a smirk. "Why do things like this always happen to me?" she said sarcastically.

"Hmm," Suzanne hummed, raising the clove to her lips. "Maybe they created the map there to correspond to this site, so that if they wanted to, they could find their way home." She cast a sidelong look at Starbuck. "How convinced are you that us Earthlings came from Kobol originally?"

"The scrolls of Pythia say that your tribe left Kobol at the same time the rest of ours did, about two thousand years ago. Twelve tribes headed for the colonies, and yours headed towards Earth."

Suzanne laughed, not the politest of laughs, and wandered a few steps away, an awkward dance in hiking boots and leggings. "I didn't ask what your scrolls said, I want to know what you believe. Just because I'm a devoted Catholic," she held up the gold charm hanging from her neck—two small bars of metal intersecting, with the horizontal piece up towards the top of the vertical one, "doesn't mean I take every word the Bible says as literal gospel."

That was the crux of things, wasn't it? Kara didn't have a clue what being 'Catholic' meant, but she knew her own beliefs were a closely held secret, a small treasure to drag out and hold onto in times of great need. She knew others would be surprised to see the idols she kept in her locker, especially Lee, claiming that the Gods were a load of bunk and weren't going to get them out of their current mess. But she also knew that a little faith could go a long way, and they could use everything they could find right now. "I…I want to believe. I want to believe that everything I was taught is true. However, I think I'm open-minded enough to take whatever the Gods throw at me."

Suzanne grinned again, a true smile this time. "Now you really sound like a TV show I watched as an impressionable teenager. I'll tell you this about Earth: regardless of what your scriptures say, us Earthlings can trace our civilizations back through writings and other facts a good six thousand years, and far longer than that undocumented."

"You mentioned something like that in your little presentation before, didn't you?" Kara leaned against one of the smaller rocks in the center, propping her rifle up next to her.

"You saw that? I admit, I went a little overboard with the papers, but when things start to fall together I can't help myself. Unless it's in front of a lot of people," she winced. "Stage fright sucks. Anyway, yes I did mention it, because it's the truth, one of the rare things at least our multitudes of religions here and our science can agree on. At least that six thousand years number. Beyond that we get into murky territory that we can't agree on, but that's besides the point. The point I'm trying to make is, us Earthlings, all humans by nature, really, are an extremely stubborn breed. You come here and start telling that creation myth, they'll think you're crazy."

"Wouldn't the whole alien visitors thing do that anyway?"

"Hmm, true." The breeze picked up, dancing around Suze and Kara. Suze looked up at the sky thoughtfully. "'Oh, star of wonder, star of light, star with royal beauty bright, westward leading, still proceeding, guide us to thy perfect light.'" Suze sung in a low voice, wrapping her arms around herself.

"What does that mean?" She understood the words, but there was quite obviously a deeper meaning to the song than just the lyrics.

Suzanne smiled slightly. "The absurdity of singing Christmas songs in September."

"Huh?"

"Never mind. It's a...well, kind of an Earth thing, at least for some of us. Anyway, the song is about these three wise men who are following a star in the sky. The star is said to lead them to the birthplace of the savior of the world." She shrugged. "It's nothing, sometimes I sing when I'm thinking."

"It makes sense though. Every culture out there's got some sort of hero or savior that people are begging and pleading to save them." Kara thought back to what Lee had told her about how President Roslin was being looked at by some of the people following her views rather than the military arm of the fleet. Lee thought it was a load of shit, but beneath the sarcasm she could tell that she was being held up as the savior of the Prophecies—the one to lead them to Earth.

"People need heroes. Whether they're mighty or meek, we're always looking for someone to save us." Suzanne shrugged. "I guess what it comes down to is that no matter where we claim our origins, Kobol, Earth, Reticula, or wherever, underneath all of the trappings we're all human. And maybe that common point will save us on the end." She shook her head briskly, as if trying to shake something out of her hair. She turned to Kara and smiled. "Hey, if you ever do make it to Earth, Kara Thrace, be sure to look me up. I just might be the only one who believes you." She held out her hand for a shake, something that was apparently more universal than either woman had thought.

Kara smiled back. "Will do, Suzanne." She stuck out her hand and shook back, feeling palm press against palm. Something thin and papery was quickly slid beneath the cuff of her jacket, lodging beneath the elastic wristband.

And the world suddenly faded to black.

Kara's eyes snapped open to see the President's worried face standing over her. Her eyes darted around, seeing that they were back in the Tomb of Athena. "Are you all right, Lieutenant Thrace?" President Roslin asked, stretching a hand out to help her to her feet.

"Yeah, I'm okay," Kara said, rubbing her forehead once she was upright. A glance to the side showed Lee being helped to his feet by Commander Adama and Billy. He looked like she felt at that moment—as if they'd been beaten about the head by a bludgeon in the form of a theory.

"We couldn't find you there for a moment," Roslin said, watching Kara check to see if her gun was still in working order. "It took a minute after the hologram ended to find you and Captain Adama behind the statue of Sagittaron, both unconscious."

Kara shook her head. "I don't remember getting knocked out…" She remembered just about everything that had happened in the past few…minutes? Hours? Great. A head full of brand new ideas and a screwed up sense of time. Not what she'd expected to leave 'Earth' with.

However, she once read a book as a child, an old fantasy story that was probably nothing more than a pile of ash now, and it said in there that the true sign of having traveled to other worlds is by making the claim that no time at all had passed, even though years could have been spent in the other place. While they couldn't claim years they did have hours, the memory of the wind in their faces, the feel of the stones, and that smell of the sea. That was a little too detailed and realistic than the dreams she usually had (these days they were of what had been—Zak, Caprica, her father, and so many other things that no longer existed). She shrugged. "Must have just been disoriented when the program ended and tripped," she rationalized to Roslin.

The President had a wary look in her eye, but nodded anyway. "Must have been," she smiled slightly, and walked over to where Lee was blinking and rubbing at his own head. Kara exhaled, and felt the small piece of paper that had been pushed up into her jacket sleeve right before things went black. She slipped out the thick paper, palmed it, and stared at the writing on it.

"Dr. Suzanne Ludwig, Professor of Archaeology, Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts," she murmured to herself. "Definitely not a dream." Kara looked up and managed to catch Lee's eyes. A slight shrug showed that she was just as confused by what had happened as he was. No matter what, they had a lot to think about. Earth was beginning to look like it could be a very strange place.

One part to go...