Chapter 18:

Raptor 261, En Route to Starship Naxos, somewhere within the Asteroid Belt of Star XCP-2938, Unknown Space

Day 49, 11:46 PFT

It was with time spent in a Raptor that made Emily wish the CIC had windows. One of the reasons she had joined the Colonial Fleet in the first place was to "see the stars" as the recruiting posters told her, yet she never really got the chance within an almost entirely encased Battlestar. That was a practicality of course, she knew that. Other than the couple of observation rooms at the bow of the ship, there was no way to see space around her other than when on a shuttle of some sort. That's one of the reasons she treasured trips across the fleet now, a chance to not only see the stars she had gazed up at as a girl on Leonis, but to see the Hyperion and the rest of the fleet in all its glory.Hyp

The last couple of days had been messy, to say the least. She was glad she was the Tactical Officer, rather than having to deal with communications solely like Hermes had to. While the news had broken without their knowledge initially, Emily and Major Halway had been able to convince the Admiral to at least put out a press release for the fleet giving official answers, much to the Admiral's protest. Commander Virgon and Hermes had spent that night drafting such a release, giving an overview of what had happened since leaving the Colonies, and what they were searching for. It seemed, from reports they had received from the civilian ship captains, that that had not gone down too well. Better though – Emily supposed – than they would've done if they had mentioned that there was no exact map to Kobol.

Regardless of their reassurances, the people hadn't been too happy. Most people seemed to think that this was folly, that Kobol was a children's story and even the most religious among the passengers who did believe in Kobol, believed returning to be a bad idea. There had been protests and many, many calls from Captains with questions over the last few days, which is why Emily was headed to the Naxos, the biggest civilian ship in their convoy, to meet with representatives from each of the civilian ships.

Emily clambered to the back of the Raptor away from the front viewport as it began its docking checks. Originally it was going to be Commander Virgon, as XO of Hyperion who would be making this trip, but as he needed to share command of Hyperion with the Admiral on the rota, Emily had been chosen to go instead. She was much of public speaker really, but she was hoping she would just be able to at least collect feedback to bring back to Hyperion for the Admiral to consider. Fortunately, she was not alone. Captain 'Hera' Gemini had been relieved from her spot on Hyperion's flight rota to come and support her. Emily was especially grateful to have her, not only as a friendly face, but as someone who is used to standing at the front of rowdy briefing rooms, just usually in front of pilots rather than all these civilians.

"It's weird seeing you nervous," Hera said, reclined back in her seat, putting across a vision of relaxation.

"What do you mean?" Emily asked. "I get nervous sometimes, I'm human like the rest of us."

"Or are you?" Hera raised her eyebrows in an obvious attempt at sarcasm, but Emily really wasn't in the mood to be accused of being a Cylon.

"Please, we haven't even told them everything about the Cylons yet."

"Who?"

"The civilians. The Admiral said it would cause panic and suspicion, which I can't say I actually think he is wrong about," Emily explained. Hera sat up, a grin on her face.

"So you think he's wrong about something else?" She asked, hoping she'd caught Emily out.

"No it's not… well," Emily stammered for a diplomatic answer. "I'm just not sure if we should've hidden information for so long."

"It wasn't you that leaked it to the press, was it?"

"Never, that was highly irresponsible, definitely against orders, and not something I'd do."

"Yet," Hera seemed to be enjoying grilling Emily far too much. "You didn't do anything to get the Admiral to release information before it was leaked?"

She had Emily there. She wasn't expecting such a grilling from a Viper pilot, not that she didn't respect them or anything, she just assumed they were more interested in discussing their best kills than psychoanalysing a superior officer. "I didn't, I guess I thought it wasn't my place." Hera didn't say anything but nodded and sat back, right as the Raptor prepared for docking. "I wouldn't get too comfortable there if I were you," Emily said to Hera, trying to take back control of the conversation. "We'll be off in a minute."

Starship Naxos Conference Room, somewhere within the Asteroid Belt of Star XCP-2938, Unknown Space

Day 49, 12:00 PFT

Emily fidgeted at the podium as the room filled up. A diverse mix of people, from all different cultures and careers from all over the colonies, each looking as tired, confused and fed up as everyone she had encountered on the military ships over the last few weeks. She had prepared a list of answers she would likely be needing from the questions that would probably be asked, but she began to wonder if any of these answers would be enough. The Admiral had sworn her to confidentiality on many topics, almost too many for her to be able to give any concrete answers at all.

As her audience settled, she reached out for the small microphone attached to the podium and prepared to speak, but before she could do so, a hand shot up in the front row. "Yes?" She asked the man with his hand raised, who was dressed in a crumpled and dirty suit.

"Is Admiral Jenkins not coming?" He asked, a murmur that sounded like agreement went around the packed auditorium.

"Um, no, he will not. We're on a tight rota at the moment and so he couldn't be spared," Emily explained. "I am Lieutenant Colonel Jartell, Tactical Officer on the Battlestar Hyperion. I assure you, any questions that you have I will be able to answer as well as him."

"Is this meeting not important enough for him then? Are the people not important enough?" The scruffy man shouted again. Another murmur followed and Emily began to nervously check through her notes. From her side, Hera stepped over and grabbed the microphone from in front of her.

"Listen up, all of you. We're engaged in a highly time consuming and time sensitive operation, and both of us have taken time out of that to speak to you. Please treat Colonel Jartell with respect," Hera said, using her best 'pilot scalding' voice.

"And who are you to be telling us what to do?" Someone cried out.

"I'm Captain Gemini, a Viper squadron leader on Hyperion. I've probably saved most of your ships from a Cylon missile or two already, so I'd like it if you acted a bit more gratefully!"

Emily leaned over and whispered to Hera as the crowd started to air their frustrations as one. "That may not be helping Harriet. I've got this."

"By all means sir," Hera said, stepping back from the podium and letting Emily take the microphone once again.

"I'm sorry everyone, we've got a lot to get through and not much time to get through it in. Could I have my first question?" Emily said, raising her voice to get it heard over the chattering and bickering crowd. The crowd began to fall silent again as a few hands rose up. A younger woman with fading dyed red hair caught Emily's eye and she pointed down to her.

"Admiral Jenkins stated that the objective of the search the military are conducting currently is in search of Kobol. What evidence do you have that that is even real, and not a search for somewhere from a child's bedtime story?" the reporter asked. This question sent a wave of murmurings again through the crowd, this time with a few offended shouts from some.

"When I first heard about the Admiral's plan I did think similarly," Emily began. "However, this plan was first revealed to me upon the arrival of the Battlestar Draconis and her fleet, who had been on this very hunt for the last few months."

"And yet had still not found anything?" The woman asked. Behind her, the shabby man pushed through.

"If they had been, how come we didn't go straight there after we met them?" He shouted. Again, more sounds of agreement from the crowd.

"While Draconis had made good progress in their hunt, no exact location had been found. But please remember, they were operating under a strict non-detection mandate. They were operating well beyond Colonial controlled space, and couldn't risk an encounter with enemy forces that could risk conflict," Emily explained.

"Are they the reason why the Cylons attacked us then?" Someone from the back shouted.

"No, they never made any hostile contact with the Cylons," Emily was starting to wish she'd stayed on the ship. She had thought there would be more issues the civilians would want to discuss than finding who to blame for the Cylon's genocide of humanity.

"Why was the Draconis searching for Kobol prior to the fall of the Colonies in the first place?" The first woman asked.

"Well," Emily wasn't sure how much the Admiral was allowing her to share. "The taskforce led by the Battlestar Hyperion was preparing for a confidential mission to colonise Kobol as an addition to the Twelve Colonies themselves. One of the reasons we survived is because we had been preparing for the crews of our Battlestar Group and their families and close friends to be taken with them to Kobol."

"Why was this mission confidential? Were the future colonists aware of their involvement?"

"No. This mission was of the highest confidentiality that only the Admiral and Hyperion's Executive Officer were aware of its existence."

"Then how were colonists supposed to join the expedition when it started?" Someone asked. Emily was spending so long staring down at her notes at this point, trying to sound as clear and professional as possible that she had long since lost track of who was asking what. Still, she thought was holding out surprisingly well, given how none of her answers were seeming to be popular.

"I'm afraid I have not been made aware of all the specifics, but I believe they were to be summoned when the time came," She answered. At this point, it seemed that there wasn't a single person in the room not saying something to someone, except perhaps for Hera beside her, standing stoically watching the crowd at attention in a blues uniform.

"So essentially the plan was to kidnap… how many people?"

"My figures point to somewhere over a million," Emily again fell back on her notes, which she was choosing to round to potentially soothe the situation. It did not.

"Over a million people were set to be forcefully taken from their homes to a colony dozen, if not hundreds, of lightyears away?" One woman, a different one from the first, said, taking the microphone set up for the reporters at the front.

"That seems extreme for peacetime?" A man next to the mic said.

"It does. Although these preparations allowed for many of you survivors to be brought with us and away from the danger of the Colonies," Emily said, trying to take control again.

"Just how many of these million do you think are on this fleet? Given that most estimates of civilian populations generally total at around nine thousand?"

"We are not sure of exact numbers at this time, we do not expect that number to be high," Emily was hoping to avoid this question, but she had prepared for it. The Admiral had told them after leaving the colonies that many of their family and friends had a real chance of joining them. This had not turned out to be the case. This question was one that made Hera bristle beside Emily as she had courtly responded. While the Admiral had been successful at giving them the hope to carry on in the moment, it has just delayed the inevitable realisation they each made individually; that no news in this case definitely meant no good news. A few lucky soles had a relative or an old acquaintance eventually make contact, but that had been more common between the military ships than it had been between them and the civilian fleet.

"Is it true that Admiral Jenkins lied to his crew that their families were all safe shortly after the attack on the Colonies, despite such low numbers of actual survivors?" Another voice shouted, this time from somewhere in the middle. Emily didn't respond immediately, instead glancing over at Hera who gave her a look back.

"I, well," Emily stumbled for words. "The Cylon attack affected us all differently. At the time the Admiral had hope that the plans he and the Admiralty had laid would lead to the survival of more civilians connected with his crew."

"He made a mistake, like all of us do," Hera added defensively, although her voice betrayed the beginnings of an anger that Emily didn't think was directed towards the questioner.

"Was it not irresponsible for him to over promise? Is there not a chance he is doing so about the search for Kobol to us all right now?"

Emily stopped again. She didn't have a good answer because there wasn't one beyond blind faith. "I can only assure you of the facts that I have seen myself, and that is that we have made good progress on the search so far, and once we have found our destination you will all be made promptly aware. Does anyone have any other questions?"

Hands shot up again across the floor and Emily pointed towards a woman wearing a deep blue robe, speckled with gold and silver patterns that somehow still seemed intact even after weeks aboard the fleet. "According to the Scriptures," the woman began in a slow, melodic voice that – despite the hubbub of the crowd – generated a silence among its listeners that allowed it to cut crisply. "Any return to Kobol will be met with blood. Does Admiral Jenkins believe that returning to Kobol is even a good idea."

Suddenly she was back in school listening to the Sister teach scriptures. The memories of that, of school, of late evenings in the park with her friends, her sister, mother, early morning dog walks, all came streaming through Emily and for a moment she had to stop and brace herself against the podium. Her whole body suddenly felt under pressure from every direction and her vision was clouding up, every sound becoming distant and muffled. She tried to focus her thoughts on her friends on the fleet, on their successes of the last few weeks, of their future, on a beautiful, untouched Kobol.

Such mental spirals had been common for her and for many of the crew she had spoken to in the last few weeks. How does your brain truly process everyone you've ever met being gone in an instant? For Emily, she hoped keeping her mind on the things she was doing, the people who were still around her helped pull her back, and this time it did so again.

"Yes, my apologies," Emily quickly said as the world returned to her, conscious that she had no idea if she was out for two seconds or two minutes. "The Admiral is confident we will be able to overcome any challenges, and that this remains our best hope for not only survival but for a new life. Next question?"

Raptor 261, En Route to Battlestar Hyperion, somewhere within the Asteroid Belt of Star XCP-2938, Unknown Space

Day 49, 13:38 PFT

"I must say I'm impressed," Hera said as she relaxed back in the same Raptor seat she'd taken on the way over to the Naxos. Emily sat opposite her, bent over and looking much tenser. "That wasn't a complete disaster."

"Thanks for your faith, Hera," Emily snapped back, sitting now more upright.

"Look, that was an impossible situation. Spinner and I have both given briefings like that, when your audience won't like what you have to say regardless of what it is."

"I don't think we've gained anything from this," Emily turned her head away from Hera and towards the small viewports in the Raptor's gullwing side door to look out to space. "There's such a strong distrust of us with the civilians. And if you'd been hunkered up on a ship with no idea what's going on for a month, you wouldn't be happy either."

"I may be a Captain, but I struggle to know what's going on," Hera confessed, fiddling through her pockets absent-mindedly as she spoke. "Sometimes it's easier to fly when you don't know everything. You just have one mission at a time to deal with. One recon, one hit and run, a sortie protecting some civilian ship. As soon as you put stuff into the bigger picture everything becomes more pressured and it's easier to make mistakes. The Admiral was a pilot too, that's probably why he chose to not tell people everything."

"I'm sure that's true, but if you can't get out there and get your hands dirty, and you're just stuck on your ship, you need something to think about, don't you?" Emily said, choosing to stare out at the civilian ships as they passed rather than look directly at Hera. "If I couldn't help, and I was still just as in danger as everyone else, I'd want to know how safe I am."

"Even if there are Cylons that could be the person next to you, putting you in even more danger?"

"But they don't know that." Hera peered up at Emily knowingly and she trailed off.

"Yet," Hera said. Emily gave up her point and huffed. She never did well talking to pilots anyway.

"You're free to head to the bunks once we land, I'll sort out the report for the Admiral myself," Emily said eventually. Hera nodded for a second before responding.

"Wilco. I'll be up in 3 anyway for next recon," She checked the watch down on her wrist. It was still set to Gemenon time, unhelpful for keeping time with the Fleet's new clock time, but it was a last fragment of home. No one had noticed it so far anyway. "I know I said I don't want to know what's going on more than I have to," she started. This got Emily's attention and they shuffled closer to each other. "But between us. How much longer have me and my pilots got to keep this up? We're losing them, people missing flights, having to cancel. It's not good for them… or for me."

"All I can say is soon. We've mapped the majority of what we need," Emily said, as convincingly as she could muster. Not that what she was saying wasn't true, but she knew it probably didn't sound the most reassuring. "As soon as I have more info, I'll send it down to you."

Hera leaned back and nodded, still fiddling with the watch on her wrist somewhat anxiously. Emily stood to get a better look out at Hyperion as they swung up below it. She was looking like she could do with a new coat of paint – or two – but it would be worth it soon. The Admiral said they were almost there, and Emily believed him. What choice did she have?yHyp