Here we are at chapter three. I'm not totally sure it's ready, but I'm going away, so figure I might as well post it before I leave.

Hope you enjoy it. Please, drop a line either way to give me your thoughts...

Disclaimer: I still own nothing ...

Too High A Cost
By: Mariel

-xxxxxxxxx-

Chapter 3

Resolve...

The mission had failed. Bill heard it all as he sat in his quarters listening to the wireless. He'd heard the reports about their being fired upon after they'd entered the planet's atmosphere, had heard Kara's "Oh frak," when their raptor had been hit, and had heard Lee begin his last report before exiting the damaged vessel.

"I think we've been spotted. They-"

The radio had then gone silent.

When he heard Gaeta say transmissions were being jammed, he reached over and turned off the radio.

Kara and Lee's fate had been sealed the moment Roslin had presented them with her plan. He grimaced. On a fundamental, instinctive level, he'd known that any plan to return to Kobol would be a mistake. He'd seen the blood that planet exacted for visiting its surface, and though not a religious man, he held a warrior's respect for the evidence. When he'd discovered Roslin had chosen Lee and Kara to carry out her crazy, needless mission, he'd clenched his hands and wanted to break something. The old Adama would have done so, and then used calm logic to persuade everyone to take a second look at the feasiblity and necessity of the plan. Or he'd have searched for and found a compromise, so that everyone was reasonable satisfied.

The new William Adama had done none of those things. Instead, he had sat wordlessly and done nothing... Except quietly and methodically formulate a plan of his own, in case one were needed. Unless a miracle occurred, he was pretty certain there would be a mess to clean up - and, this one last time, he'd need to be prepared to do it.

He looked at the now-quiet wireless set and sighed. As expected, no miracle had brought the mission success. Now, with Kara and Lee's last words still ringing in his ears, he turned his attention to the maps in front of him. It was time to do what he had known from the beginning he would have to do.

He rose tiredly. He could hear the muted sounds of his name being urgently broadcast in the corridor outside. The the phone on his desk began to ring insistently. Knowing it was CIC requesting his presence to deal with this latest fiasco, he ignored it. Looking around his quarters, he said a silent goodbye and headed towards the door.

-xxx-

Tigh had barely finished asking Dualla to try to locate the Admiral again when a signal on her board caught her attention. Examining it, she announced in a surprised voice, "A raptor is leaving the landing pod, sir."

She paused, and then added with a frown, "Its call numbers are odd...I don't recognise them..." She looked up. "Its flight plan indicates it's headed for Kobol."

Tigh turned sharply. "What do you mean 'odd'? And who the hell okayed someone to leave?" he demanded. "The orders were that no one else goes down there."

Her fingers flew over her console. Looking at her screen, she frowned. "Admiral Adama, sir."

"What?"

She continued to concentrate, her dark features eerily lit by the display in front of her. "Admiral Adama approved it, sir. It's his personal code. He authorised the flight plan."

"Put me through to whoever's flying her," he growled.

She contacted the ship, then paused when she heard the pilot's voice. Looking up, her eyes huge, she said, "It's the Admiral, sir."

The Colonel's eyes narrowed and he reached for the phone receiver. "Like I said," he ordered curtly. "Put me through."

"Admiral?" he said as soon as he heard the familiar sound of an open line.

"Saul," Adama's gravelly voice replied.

Frowning at the use of his first name, Tigh straightened as worry ran down his spine.

"What the hell are you doing?" he asked.

"What does it look like?"

Tigh's frown deepened as he reined in a desire to curse. "Don't play games. We need you here on the ship."

"I'm getting them back."

"Of course. We need to get a team together and-"

Bill cut into his words. "No. No team. There have been too many deaths already, and this is something I have to do. I'll make sure they get back." He paused a moment, then said in a quieter tone, "I'm going to need your help on this one, Saul."

Saul closed his eyes. Bill taking this approach was a sure sign that whatever he wanted wasn't going to be something he liked - and would be impossible for him to refuse. After all these months of stony reserve, this offer of Bill's trust would be impossible not to accept.

"Talk to me," he said in a gruff tone.

"I need you to promise that no matter what happens, you won't send any more of my people down onto Kobol. That's a direct order, but I want you to promise, too. I told you: there've been too many deaths. It has to stop here."

He waited, and when Tigh said nothing, prompted, "Saul?"

"I hear you," he replied tensely. Knowing he could refuse Bill nothing, he cursed under his breath, then, inhaling deeply, said, "Agreed. I promise."

There was relief in Adama's voice when he continued, "Good. Now, I need you to move the fleet. The cylons know we're here, and it'll only be a while before there's more of them flying around this planet than we can handle. I don't want the Galactica or any of the fleet here when they arrive."

Bill stopped talking for a moment and Saul could picture him making control adjustments in the raptor. Adama soon resumed his instructions.

"Jump to the first set of emergency co-ordinates," he continued. "Gaeta has the next three jumps after that plotted already. In five days time, I want you at the second set. You can jump around more, if you need to, but no matter what, be sure to be at that second set of coordinates in five day's time. If there's no one there to meet you already, hang around for forty-eight hours. If no one shows in that time, it means you'll have to make way for Earth without them. You'll find charts on my desk that use the information we gathered when we were in the Tomb of Athena." There was a deep pause, then Bill added in a quieter tone, "I'm relying on you, Saul. This is the last blood we're going to be forced to shed here. Make sure you never come back."

The connection severed and Tigh blinked. This was not the action of the man he knew - not even in his younger, more wild days would Bill have pulled a stunt like this.What was his friend thinking? His features hardened. But his commanding officer had given him orders - and his friend had asked for his help...

Pulling himself together, he turned towards Dualla and barked, "You record that?"

She nodded. She hadn't heard the other side of the conversation, but the expression on the Colonel's face frightened her.

"Good. Send it to the President. Then tell her I want her here ASAP." He turned, then remembered one of her earlier comments. Looking back at her again, he ordered, "And get Tyrol up here. I want to know why we don't recognise those call numbers."

-xxx-

Striding towards Bill's quarters, Tigh cursed under his breath. Tyrol's news that Adama had had him working on a sheilded raptor built along the lines of the viper they'd named 'Laura' filled him with anger. Bill had kept his project secret - yet another sign of the man's new propensity for not sharing anything with anyone.

"He said he wanted something that would carry a number of people safely, should the need arise," Tyrol said. "It sounded like a good idea, to me. And when he ordered me to keep it quiet, I did."

Tigh nodded. He'd wondered why Bill had kept Saunders on as Chief after Tyrol had returned, but had known better than to ask; now he knew. He took a moment to wish he'd spent as much time with the grease monkeys as Bill had always done. Perhaps he'd have known a lot sooner. He'd certainly have noticed Tyrol's absense from the floor, and asked what was up.

Not much he could do about that now, though.

When told that the Admiral was on his way to Kobol in the newly finished vessel, Tyrol had frowned, and explained his worry that the sheilding that made it invisible to DRADIS might not withstand the heat of entry into the planet's atmosphere - and that even if it did, the re-entry into space might destroy it.

"This is a new science," he'd said. "We haven't experimented with that sort of thing. There hasn't been time."

So there was the chance that, although the raptor would have been undetectable while it waited for the Galactica at the emergency co-ordinates, the ship might not even make it to Kobol in one piece...

"This sheilding of yours - if it survives the entry, will it make the raptor undetectable to DRADIS in the planet's atmosphere?"

Tyrol shrugged. "I don't know. It definitely won't keep it from being seen by the naked eye."

"This thing been flight tested at all yet?" Tigh asked.

Tyrol shook his head. "Like I said; no time, sir. I barely got things finished before he told me he was taking it. If I'd known he was going to try to enter the planet's atmosphere, I'd have tried to talk him out of it. I don't really think it's a good idea."

Tigh grunted. That told him why Adama hadn't offered the raptor to Lee and Kara. No way in hell would he have endangered them by testing something like that for one of Roslin's escapades.

And now Tigh was on his way to Bill's quarters to meet with Roslin, his anger building with each step. The location of their meeting had been chosen to give particular emphasis to Bill's absence, though gods knew if the President would have enough sense to realise the gesture...

-xxx-

Roslin looked up at Colonel Tigh with a shocked expression.

He glared at her.

After forcing her to listen to the transmission again, he demanded, "You know what that is, don't you?"

Feeling sick to her stomach, she nodded.

He ignored her nod and explained anyway: "That's his exit line. He's not coming back. He's going out to correct your mistake and figures he's going to die doing it."

She looked away, quoting in a whispered voice, "The planet exacts its price in blood upon those who return to it."

Tigh snorted. "Something you were more than aware of when you asked the two most important people to him in the universe to go down onto it for a stupid, frakking, pie-in-the-sky chance to find lost scrolls you couldn't even come up with a decent, frakking reason for wanting," he said, his angry words rushing one over the other.

"They might hold information on how to get to Earth," she said, defending her actions.

"If they even exist! You based this whole operation on a whim, on the memory of an off-the-cuff comment Elosha made about wishing they'd drawn a map and left it for us. There is nothing to indicate that what she said was anything more than just wishful thinking."

What he said was true, but she had hoped that perhaps...

"I believed-" she began.

Tigh growled in anger. Frustrated beyond belief, he said, "Madame President, I'm not concerned about what you believed. I need to deal with what we know, and what we know is that William Adama has just set himself up for what amounts to a suicide run at that frakking planet to save two people who should never have been sent there in the first place! All this time we could have been heading towards Earth, and you-" He stopped abruptly, knowing there was little point in rehashing his previous arguments.

"I thought-" she began.

He waved an angry hand. "Gods, I don't have time for your thoughts right now, either. We're beginning procedures for an emergency jump. The cylons are going to be here any time. We can't fight them, and the Admiral wants the fleet safe - so we're going to do exactly what he's asked, and we're going to hightail it to our next co-ordinates."

Her head snapped up at his words. Rising to her feet quickly, she said, "What? No! We can't leave him! I won't-"

He heard desperation in her voice, and the look of horror on her face gave him reason to pause. Noting it had been Bill who was her first worry, he scrutinised her, his brows drawn together. Thinking quickly, he made a calculated guess that seemed to fit, and his faced hardened.

Breaking into her protests, he said, "Madame President, I think it would be fair to say you left him a long time ago - and with this mission, you took the people he cared about most. Now, gods help him, he's ordering the rest of us away, too. I'm going to follow his orders. To the letter. They make sense, and he deserves at least that."

Roslin seemed to deflate in front of his eyes. Her face took on a stricken expression, and she appeared small and powerless and broken enough that something in him might have felt sorry for her if he hadn't known that she had designed this whole frakking mess. If she'd just approached Bill, had just asked him to explore possibilities and then listened to whatever he'd said...but no - she'd done what she always did - decided what she wanted to do and went ahead without any thought of the consequences to others.

As he watched her, however, her expression changed and her shoulders straightened.

She was silent a moment, then she asked in a quiet tone, "Did he order that none of his people follow him down?"

"Yes," he responded curtly. She'd heard the tape; she already knew that.

"And you have every intention of following that order, of course," she stated calmly.

He looked at her with open irritation. As though he'd do anything else. Bill had been betrayed often enough. He'd promised. He wouldn't break that promise.

She inhaled deeply. "Fine, then: I want a raptor and two men. Civilians. You must have a list somewhere of people who can fly. He can't do whatever he's got planned alone. I'm going after him."

The Colonel's eyes opened in astonishment. "You will do no such thing," he barked. "You'll stay right here, where you can't undo whatever it is he's going to attempt in order to save his son and Thrace. How the hell do you think having both the Admiral of the Fleet and the President of the Twelve Colonies down on that frakking planet will help anything?"

Bill would kill him if he let Roslin follow and frak things up.

Laura Roslin stood. Drawing herself to her full height, she inhaled deeply. "Colonel Tigh," she said firmly, "as President of the Twelve Colonies, I order you to assemble a raptor and two civilians to take me to the planet."

Tigh did not respond, but he felt a horrible, sick sense of déjà vu when she continued in a low voice, "I've got to go, Colonel. This is between him and me. I've got to go get him. We're not going anywhere without him."

Saul closed his eyes. It hadn't been as eloquently spoken, but it amounted to the same damned thing Adama had said when he'd gone off in search of her and the arrow.

It had all happened before; it would all happen again.

He grimaced. He'd always hated that frakking part of the scriptures.

And hated it even more when it snuck up and bit him in the ass.

Seeing him waver, Roslin pushed, "You won't be disobeying his orders. This is all on my shoulders. He said he didn't want his people sent. I'm not asking for any of his people. All I want is a raptor, a civilian pilot, and one other person. Preferably someone who can read a map."

Semantics. It was all semantics, but still...Slowly, Tigh allowed the tension in his shoulders to ease. Opening his eyes, he looked at the President and felt some of Bill's lost hope stir in his chest. Miracles did happen. Perhaps she would bring him back.

And if things went wrong, at least maybe it would mean that Laura Frakking Roslin wouldn't be around to screw things up any more.

"Fine," he said grudgingly. "You have about sixty minutes to get yourself ready. I'll get a team put together." Turning, he left the President alone in the Admiral's softly lit quarters.

Laura looked around her. An hour was far more than she needed to prepare for the planet. A fear she couldn't identify swept over her, and she fought down a sense of panic. Feeling lost, she rose and walked to Bill's rack area. Without thinking, she crawled onto his bed and rested her head on his pillow. As longing overwhelmed her, she closed her eyes and curled up into a tight ball.

-xxx-

An hour later, dressed in canvas pants, a military-issue jacket, and sturdy boots, Roslin walked into the hangar and saw that Saul Tigh had been as good as his word. Her eyes widened when she saw who he had chosen.

She turned to look at the Colonel in surprise.

"Well?" he growled before she could speak, "What did you expect? That I'd send people with you who wouldn't be any help? If you want to do this, I'm going to do everything I can to help you succeed. Hell, this is the first fra-" He caught himself, and began again, "This is the first time you've ever decided to do something I think is worthwhile."

"But-"

She gestured towards the man standing by the raptor's entry hatch.

"Dishonourable discharge," Tigh said gruffly. "Insubordination; failure to comply with a direct order. The list goes on. He asked for it."

"Thank you," she said simply.

Tigh grunted. "Just find him and bring him home. I don't want this damned job. My sense of direction is lousy and Earth's too far away."

He looked at the man he'd chosen to accompany Roslin and the young woman who stood by his side. "We need him back," he said pointedly. "We need them all back." Then, after nodding a farewell to them all, he turned on his heel and left.

Roslin watched his retreating back, then turned towards the two who stood waiting.

"Lieutenant Agerthon, Sharon, thank you."

Helo nodded. "It's a pleasure, Madame President."

Sharon regarded her silently.

End
Chapter 3
Too High a Cost