The Thirteenth Colony:
Disclaimer: I don't own Galactica. Even if I did, I wouldn't sue fanfic writers for having their fun. Fanfic writers are generally broke anyway. I know I am.
Author's Note: This story starts out just after Home Part II, but it will catch up to the rest of the series pretty soon. I'm attempting to weave the plotline into cannon, however I guess it could be AU since nothing like this is even hinted at in the series.
Premise: After returning the arrow of Apollo and finding the path to Earth, Starbuck begins to have strange dreams. Could the arrow have given her the key to lead Galactica to Earth? While I expect this to end up Starbuck/Anders, there's a lot of Starbuck/Apollo subtext that may send things in a different direction.
Kara Thrace woke up flat on her back to the sound of cheers. She opened her eyes and sat up, swallowing back nausea. The world seemed at once too clear, and yet she saw things through what seemed like a pane of warped glass. Around her, people were running, sweat dripping from their bare arms and legs as they fought over a brown and yellow ball. One man dressed in red shorts and a white tank top bounced the ball back and forth between his hands, while another in yellow and blue slapped at the air between them, trying to get it back.
Kara staggered to her feet. What sport was this? More to the point, where was she?
Along each of the walls hung banners, in colors that matched each team but written in a blocky script she couldn't understand. Sun streaking in through slit windows along the concrete walls made her think Cloud 9, but even if the pleasure ship could have hidden an entire stadium in it's depths, the sun here felt too warm to be simulated.
At that point, the two teams ran straight for her as if she wasn't even there.
"What the frak!" Starbuck yelled, throwing herself to the ground and attempting to roll away.
They ran straight through her. She only felt the air of their passing, a gentle breeze that reminded her of spring on Caprica.
Her heart pounded. Maybe this was a Cylon trick. Maybe she hadn't made it off of Caprica with the arrow at all. Hadn't felt Adama wrap her in his arms and offer her forgiveness. Maybe it had all been a trick: the Galactica, the map, all of it, and now she lay hooked up to one of their machines growing a baby while her mind broke inside.
She reached up to her chest for her dog-tags, but of course they were gone. Had she created Anders too? Pretended to fall in love, pretended to give her tags away so that she wouldn't relive the pain of having the Cylons steal from her the only thing that proved she was alive?
If so, that meant she had also imagined Lee kissing her and saying he loved her. Kara doubted her imagination was quite that good.
"You've got to lay off of the ambrosia, Starbuck." She said it out loud to herself, as much to hear her own voice as anything.
Assuming all of this was real, the first thing to do was to figure out exactly what was going on.
She turned her attention to the stands. The crowd seemed to be made of all sorts, from children to teens to even a white haired woman waving a giant blue Styrofoam hand. All but two looked at the game as though there was nothing unusual about a woman wearing no team colors suddenly standing in the center of the game.
Of the two that looked at Kara, she recognized one. The Six model stared down at her with ice blue eyes, sipping some kind of fruit drink. The other was a boy, barely a teen with wavy brown hair, holding what looked like a battered rucksack in his lap. His eyes widened as he caught sight of her.
He waved at her and shouted, "Get off the court!"
The red haired girl sitting next to him stared at the boy like he'd grown a second head.
Was the boy also a Cylon? She took a step back, but where could she run? She wasn't even sure she wanted to run. Kara Thrace didn't run. Kara Thrace faced her problems, looked them straight in the eye and told them to frak themselves.
Kara Thrace really wished she'd taken to sleeping with her gun. She knew at least two other pilots who did. Unarmed, and incorporeal as it seemed, her chances of holding up in a fist fight with a Cylon didn't look good. She still felt the bruises from the last one.
A buzzer screamed.
A voice over a loud speaker announced, "Winner Jacksonville 58, Titusville 54."
The stands erupted in cheers. "Gators! Gators! Gators!"
As the game ended, the crowds in the stands broke apart into smaller groups. Most tried to exit through the doors at the back of the arena. Some moved to the center of the gym, likely to congratulate the winners. The Six advanced on her with as much speed as she could manage while pushing through the crowd of excited spectators. The boy, having been seated closer to the front and smaller besides, avoided the aisles entirely, instead step-jumping down the seats until he made it to the floor.
His face was a touch too long, a fact that matched his arms and legs, like his extremities had grown too fast and the rest of him still played catch up. Unlike most of the others here, he wore long sleeves and long pants.
He glanced to his left and right before whispering, "You're dead, aren't you?"
"Dead?" Kara laughed. "Doubt it, kid. Not unless the whole ship blew. Last I checked, I was snuggled up in my bunk." Sleeping off another night of cards and ambrosia. Truth was, she didn't remember falling into her bunk last night. Not really. She figured she must have, otherwise someone would have scraped her out of the hall by now and reported her.
His brow furrowed. "Your clothes are weird."
She glanced down at her standard issue tank and shorts. Then over at his odd blue pants and bright orange shirt with some sort of cartoon character carrying a sword plastered across the front. She raised an eyebrow. "You think?"
He shrugged. "So I like anime."
"What's anime?"
"Are you, like, from outer space?"
"Caprica."
Starbuck had no doubt the look of complete confusion written across the boy's face could be faked. A series of computer algorithms could give him the appearance of any emotion. Frak, he might even believe it. But why would the Cylons be so obsessed with creating children with humans if they could grow their own toaster babies?
She glanced back to the stands. The Six model seemed caught up in conversation with a man wearing an oddly cut suit. The angle of her body faced Starbuck slightly. Starbuck could feel the toaster's eyes on her.
The boy turned, following her gaze and asked, "What's over there?"
"You tell me."
The Cylon must have had a cover to maintain. Otherwise she would certainly have simply broken the man's neck and continued on to Starbuck. Even so, in less than fifteen seconds, she was making a polite departure from her obstacle.
"Nurse Bremner." The kid gave a minute shake of his head. "What does she want? She's always on me to take those pills. Come on." He grabbed his bag and threw it over his shoulder.
"Boxy! May I have a word with you?" Six yelled, waving at him from across the stadium.
"Run." Boxy whispered, then yelled to the Cylon, "Gotta go, parents."
Of all the frakkin' things. Starbuck cursed under her breath as she ran after the kid. Chances were good he was a trick too, some fancy toaster way of putting her under a microscope and assessing human behavior. But better the devil she didn't know.
He led her through a crowd shoving out a pair of large, open doors, him squishing around people, her passing through them as if they weren't there at all. Outside was blistering hot, like a sauna wave. Palm trees kissed clear blue skies. Their leaves were darker than Caprica norm, and they grew taller too. She smelled salt air. Between two buildings, she caught glimpse of crystal blue waters. An ocean.
She'd only seen the beach once, with a group of other cadets on leave from the academy. She remembered looking out on the endless waters and thinking it almost compared to space. Almost. Of course, now the sands of her home-world were fused radioactive rubble, the bright fish that swam in those waters decimated by the Cylon's war on man.
He led her through another door, into a wall of cooled air. Strands of her hair stuck to her forehead, making her wonder, if she wasn't real, how could she sweat? He led her into a room that looked like an empty cafeteria, and sat down at a table in the corner. Out of breath from that short sprint, he sat and panted. "Hot one today."
The kid put on a good act, she had to give him that. "What are these pills they give you?" she asked.
"They keep me from seeing things."
"Like me."
"Yeah."
My, wasn't that convenient. "Nice story kid, Boxy's your name right? Now tell me, what happened to the Galactica? How was I captured?"
"Galactica? You're the weirdest ghost I've ever talked to."
"I'm not falling for any toaster tricks, kid or no."
He gave a nervous laugh, "Toaster? You mean, like the machine that makes toast…"
Starbuck cut him off, "Just tell me where I'm at. Kobol? Back on Caprica? What happened to Adama?" Chances were good this was another Cylon prison. Death beat any hospitality the Cylons had to offer; she'd learned that the hard way. So her first goal was freedom. If this kid was programmed to pretend to help her, maybe she could use that enough to affect a real means of escape.
He said, "Jacksonville Florida."
"That means nothing to me. What colony is this?"
"Uhh, the United States, I guess."
"United States of what planet?"
"Earth, duh."
Her breath caught in her throat. Earth. It had to be a trick of the cruelest kind.
"Are you okay?" he leaned forward, laying his hand on the table between them.
"You must think I'm an idiot. This can't be Earth." She looked up at the arcane light fixtures in the ceilings, the blocky food dispenser machines along the wall of this room, and shook her head. "No frakkin' way."
"What other planet could it be? Even if we'd found a planet people could live on, we still couldn't get there. A mission control guy from Kennedy Space Center came and talked at our school last year."
"Wait? You don't have space travel?"
"We've got the shuttles."
"Can you show me one?" Starbuck grinned. The Cylon had just made it's first mistake. If this 'shuttle' had wings, she could fly it. Figure out where she was really at and contact Galactica. If it was still there.
"I mean, I don' t know when the next launch his, but we could do the tour."
Starbuck stood. "Let's go."
"Now?"
"What else are we doing?"
At that moment, someone grabbed her shoulder and shook. Kara cursed herself as drew her hand into a fist. Lost your focus, Starbuck.
The world went dark. She heard a voice yelling at her, "Starbuck! You're late again. Owww, what was that for?"
Kara opened her eyes to see Lee staring down at her, the red mark of a bruise beginning to form on his cheek.
She'd dreamed it all. She really needed to lay off the ambrosia. "Sorry Captain."
Lee shook his head. He didn't even bother to hide his disappointment. Not that he ever really did. "You're late for patrol. I'm not waking you up again."
Kara gave him a short nod. "Got it, sir." She put the stress on sir, so he'd know she knew this conversation had nothing to do with friendship. And maybe it didn't. Even before that stupid kiss, too many of their conversations had weighed too heavily with what they didn't say. It was enough to have anyone lose their bearings.
Kara pushed the cover back and shook the hangover from her eyes. Didn't work too well, but once she got moving, she'd be fine. She always was.
She didn't dream again for 13 days.
More to Come: