Part III: Resurrection Ship
Many years into the future she still woke up sweating and clutching her breasts, this time thinking that it was the cancer. Then she remembered that the dull ache in her chest was something more cruel, more seditious and urgent like a time bomb ticking with the minutes strung out. No, it wasn't easy being President but…
When Elosha swore her in, she doubted she would ever question her father again. Or sleep quite as well.
When Elosha swore her in, she had Detron Bay framed in her mind, and she wept.
She didn't weep because she was overwhelmed by the idea of her office or because this tiny band of ships was the last of humanity. She wept because her father had led her to this moment, because the Styxians whispered into her ears with their countless ghost-voices, griping against the burden of time.
The ideal of politismos, which had overtaken her head for the better part of three decades, began to slowly, slowly let go.
Frankly, politismos was something she admired in Helena Cain.
Ah, Helena Cain. Always the Tauron and now, always the Colonial Admiral.
"Admiral," Laura said. "I'm fairly burning with questions. I hope you don't mind if I just dive in."
Cain simply said, "Please."
"How did you find us?" Wrong, wrong. How did you find me.
Laura swept a hand over her forehead, feeling the sweat there and then grunted as she stood from her make-shift bed. She looked at her watch, 3AM. The stars held fast in their backdrop of darkness and the other ships of the Fleet skulked in the windless vacuum, slowly following the Galactica on its perch.
Then there, just a bit to her left, was the Pegasus, a stream-lined hulk that spanned the entire space of her window. She put an outstretched palm on the glass, watching the back of her hand as it swathed the image of the battlestar.
"A penny for your thoughts?" Billy asked.
She sighed heavily, felt the age in her, felt the disease in her, and regretted the air which filled her lungs.
"Just the past, Billy."
"Care to elaborate, Ma'am?"
"You weren't the type who struck me as nosy," she teased. But that silenced him and Billy smiled shyly, blushing a bit before returning to work on his desk.
Now everyone thought she didn't sleep. It was her aide who created that illusion precisely because he barely did. Billy Keikeya left most of the slumbering to her and she smiled affectionately in his direction.
"We'll be docking in an hour," he continued, writing on and editing the presidential planner.
"Ah, yes. Bill knows I'm not too pleased about how events have turned out."
"It never occurred to me he'd grant command of the Fleet to her." Billy pursed his lips. "Dee isn't happy about how the Admiral handles personnel. There's been talk of mutiny, dissatisfaction."
"Mutiny," she tasted the word on her tongue, found it slightly sweeter than it had in the beginning, "will have to come from the Commander, if anyone."
"The Secretary of Education?" Cain cocked a brow in Roslin's direction just as she left. Cain scoffed. This was beginning to be very interesting, Helena thought, as she watched Bill Adama from the corner of her eye. He seemed resolute in his silence, more than aware of her admiralty, hesitant to talk about Laura Roslin simply because anything that would come out of his mouth would be to defend her.
It was another thing entirely to hear it anyway.
"She's come a long way," he said.
"I'm sure."
Husker looked at her long and hard, perhaps trying to deliberate on how quickly he had ceded his authority and remembering, just as firmly, the months of flying with her on the Atlantia all those years ago.
She could see it; the way his jaw hardened, how he turned to the flagon on his desk and started to pour ambrosia into a glass. She knew he would have given her his first-born had she asked for it, simply because they flew together, lived and died together. But that was many years ago and was hardly the case now.
The Monclair painting of the Caprica-Aerelon victory hung vapidly on his wall and she indicated it with a finger.
"I thought you'd get rid of that thing," she said.
"No. I never did because you never liked it. I kept it just to spite you." A hint of a smile, then it was gone.
In some ways, she still felt like she was his wing-man and it was with the old comfort of their acquaintance that she received the glass of ambrosia graciously and raised it. Bill reminded her of a world more civil, and also the dangers of civilization: education, revolution, freedom.
He had been her CAG; he should have stopped her at some point, disallowed her permission to go planet-side, helped her with her discharge and the Caprica University exams, or insisted that she was integral to squadron affairs and forgot school altogether.
There was no use going through the paces again, she bitterly thought, no use in scrutinizing where they had gone wrong, how they could have stopped it, why she wasn't there when Michael… No use, at all.
But the past had a way of rearing its head at the presence of all the right people.
"I never saw you again after the Styx incident," Bill said. "And I only saw you in passing during your promotion to the Admiralty."
"We never did see each other after that. All…three of us."
"I'm sorry about…" Michael. Godsfrakkit.
"No, Bill. Don't." She downed the alcohol, cringing visibly as the liquid seared her throat. "The Incident, that's not something I like to talk about."
"Did you hear from Gastor again?" Bill ventured. She fought the urge to glare.
"Gastor died in the Cylon attacks on Gideon. The entire asteroid was nuked; I don't expect him to walk in on me any time soon."
"Well, you finally inherited his rougher edges." They stared at each other, neither of them knowing if Bill had said the right thing. He continued, "The Pegasus is a miracle. You walked in on us."
"I guess I have a knack for coming back from the dead. Or you do, with this rag-tag group of survivors." She stood up. "It's all relative anyway." Another swig of the glass, and then she thanked him for the drink, thinking all the while of raucous laughter with the Atlantia crew, card games she hardly lost, everything before the crap boiled over at Styx and scattered them to the wind.
Scattered and burned all her memories.
Forgetfulness helped her route the pain –the incredible, intolerable guilt –while carrying ruthlessly on. That she may do things more efficiently, without the burden of her emotions.
It had been so much simpler when she was sixteen.
She wanted to hang on to that slow purge of her regrets, while she tried to shut off the Michael Roslin who lectured endlessly in her brain. Lately, he had been talking to her more often when she saw the flash of auburn hair, the soft, non-judgmental gaze; images of the past and images of what-could-have-been burning themselves into her consciousness.
The Secretary of Education, who was now the President. It was a joke. Or a slap in the face.
Bill's voice was low, "She's done a good job of keeping things together."
"Bill…" The warning in her voice shut him up.
The gods taught her that her mother's dream of politismos was exactly that: a dream. Not an identity, not some heart-felt norm to keep family and community about her. She was Tauron now, utterly and completely. No frazzles. No frills. Just Tauron, like her father had been.
It had helped; after all, it wasn't easy to lug a ship full of officers who needed a hard push in the right direction and civilians who could barely clean after themselves, but the world ran clock-work under her command.
She willed it. No matter what. The Cylons be damned.
She paced towards the door, paused and said, "It gives me no pleasure to have to take command, Bill. I want you to know that."
"Don't give it a moment's thought, Admiral."
And she didn't.
She completely and utterly didn't.
Bill watched as she took –no grabbed –the reins and stoked the embers of what he was quickly recognizing was his anger. A slow burn that started at the bottom of a languid forest.
He had been grateful; oh by the gods, he just couldn't describe the feeling of seeing her again, of seeing that ship Pegasus again, of the cool relief it brought to him and the warmth it roused as she saluted him and told him, told everyone, "On behalf of the officers and the crew of the Pegasus it's a pleasure to see all of you. Welcome back to the Colonial fleet."
The last time he had seen her was during the ceremonies on Tauron for her promotion to the Admiralty, tall and proud and glistening with coldness. He hadn't thought that it had –in any way –inundated to every aspect of her.
He just could not imagine the same, dark eyes drilling a colder space into his gut but it did, and it angered him.
"I have a team that works very well together," he bit out. He was once again in her presence, trying very hard to keep it together.
Then it started. The ice shards from her mouth as she cut through his arguments, point by point. She mentioned his son. Insubordination. She talked about Kara. Disobedience. Then she lambasted Helo. Fraternizing.
He didn't know what else to say. "I thought you said you had no desire to interfere with my command."
"I'm saving your command, Bill. You're way too close to these officers, and it's blinding you to their weaknesses and to the damage that they're doing to unit cohesion and to morale."
"I don't agree."
A flicker of the Helena Cain in her Viper cockpit, then, "Well, that is certainly your right. You have your orders."
All he could think about was his ember at the bottom of the forest, of the way it climbed up the nearest tree and began tasting the trees beside it, and how Laura Roslin was not going to be pleased.
Laura stared out the window, silently contemplating on the mistakes which had led to that moment, when Cain and Adama's Vipers came roiling out into the vacuum and circled each other, glinting shapes that floated about like fish.
All for two men who tried to protect the Cylon prisoner on Galactica. For Chief Tyrol and Lieutenant Agathon.
The crew of the Colonial One crowded to that part of the cruiser with the best view while Laura stared out her own window, a hand on her chin and a blanket around her. She did not know what to feel, staring at both ships and thinking of the man and woman who commanded each.
It was not hard to imagine that Cain and Adama had both served on the Atlantia. What seemed harder to believe was that her father -Michael Roslin -had been an influence on both of them for the better part of a year. The thread that connected them all; that thick wire which had allowed her to grasp Helena's hand one night at Detron Bay. They looked out into the sea as she felt the young lieutenant's hands tighten around hers and the heat escalate to something unbearable.
Michael Roslin had moved the Accord beyond mere paper, pushed the President to action for the two weeks he was on Caprica, propelled the People's Council and pestered the Twelve.
There was reform, the bill was being authored –a separate, Styxian state –and instead of victory on the threshold of Styx I, he found himself sprawled on the steps of the Styx I landing platform, bleeding from a shot to his chest.
The first time he stepped onto the asteroid mine he spent a year fighting for, and he was dying from an assassination attempt.
The Accord pulled to a complete stop. The Styxians were incensed, the Taurons denied they had killed their own and the Quorum of Twelve pulled out a separate committee to investigate his death, most of them Capricans and Tauron-ousodis.
The mines were never the same again, even as the bill unraveled quickly and efficiently in the hands of the dominant parties. It never survived its first reading.
Helena Cain did not come home with the body, never attended Michael Roslin's funeral. Laura found herself blaming Helena for the sudden absences in her life. At the same time, she wanted to see her with a deliberate passion. But her father's death -and perhaps even Helena's youth -kept them apart for nearly three decades.
"Madame," she heard Billy say. "There have been developments." Lo and behold, Kara Thrace had dropped from FTL with recon pictures of the mysterious Ship.
The Vipers from both ships unraveled themselves from the fray, retreating to their havens. There was a whoop from her staff, Billy shook her before he remembered she was ill, and she was smiling in spite of herself.
It didn't take long before Billy told her she had a call from Galactica.
"Cain and I stood down to condition two," Bill Adama told her over the wireless. "And we're meeting there."
"Neutral ground. I figured as much."
"She'll be aboard the Colonial One ahead of me and I hope you find out what the frak happened to her all those years between now and the Accord because by the gods Laura, she's…" Laura could hear him struggling for the right adjectives.
"The same Helena Cain I knew during the Persephone Accord, except with a bigger ship and the responsibility of human-kind on her shoulders." She sighed into the receiver. "She's a big girl, Bill. And she may have grown too big for the both of us."
The call terminated then. Laura waited silently for fifteen minutes before the tall figure of Helena Cain took the seat to her left and looked at her with the lattices of memory over her eyes.
"So we meet again," Cain said. "Where's Bill?"
"He told me to wait for another twenty minutes. Told me we had to talk."
The lattice rippled. "That's going to be a futile exercise, Madame President."
"And I didn't expect you to be alive, either," Laura pushed forward. Death on the horizon, cancer in the gut; these made you brave.
To Laura, this Helena was the Helena of Atlantia. Helena hurled through the muddle of life with steadfast determination, often leaving behind those who could not keep with the pace; she barged forward, never back. "I didn't want to see you again," the Admiral bit out.
Oh, that stung. Laura swiveled on her chair and stood.
Helena Cain followed her with her eyes, her expression fading into one of apprehension as Laura deliberately took the seat nearest to her.
Their shoulders touched and from her peripheral, Laura could see Helena press her head backwards into her chair, squeeze her eyes shut, and struggle with her breathing. Laura was the President and Cain, the Admiral, but this was hardly the perfect match. Michael had been right about many things, except that.
Laura did not dare touch her with her hands, did not trust herself to stop touching if she did. The shock of familiarity would choke them both if she tried.
"Damn it, Laura," Helena said with strangled forcefulness.
The air between them trembled with tenderness, with pain. "What happened, Helena?" Laura asked. "What happened out there, before we found you?"
"Do I have to tell you all my mistakes? The digressions of nearly three decades back and all the rest, which informed the necessities I've carried out? Do you really want to know?"
No, Laura did not want to know and made a move to touch her, but she stopped in the middle of the movement and put her hands back on her lap. Helena sat perfectly still, her eyes closed, shutting the frost beneath her lids.
After her father left the Roslin summer house in Caprica with Lt. Cain, Laura never saw Helena again. Seeing her now, hardly in possession of herself, stirred familiar feelings of when they were both soft, and young, and herding the sweat from each other's bodies.
"I forgave you," Laura whispered. "I forgave you over, and over, and over. And you never came back. You didn't even bury the dead." Her last sentence came out a little too severe but her voice hummed with warmth, regardless. "Now, that's all we do; we never go back, we always move forward. But…gods, Helena," the monologue sieved through Laura's emotions, tasted Helena's name like a drop of water on her parched tongue, and lowered, "My father didn't die in vain. I refuse to believe he did."
Laura hadn't noticed but her fingers grazed the uniform on Helena's cuffs, touching the accomplishments there, the many details of her life Laura had missed, and there was that almost imperceptible, jerking movement of Helena's hand, as though wanting to touch in return, but could not.
It remained clutching the chair when Bill Adama chose that time to step into the office, clearing his throat.
Laura turned to face him, while Helena merely tilted her head to the side. With regret, Laura took her seat behind the desk.
The two officers stared at her over the silence.
"Let's start this by admitting an ugly truth," Laura began, filling the space with something, anything. "What happened out there today was the result of failure in leadership of everyone in this room. We are the leaders of this fleet. As such, we need to set an example. We cannot continue to let the conflicts between…"
One could always count on Helena to interrupt. She always did on the dinner table.
"Oh, let's just cut through the handholding, shall we?" Cain said, reproachfully. "Two of his men murdered one of my officers while protecting a Cylon. They're guilty, they admitted it. And under regulations, I have complete authority to try, convict, and sentence them." The Admiral held Laura's gaze in a way that tightened Laura's chest, "And you and I both know that the penalty for that crime is death."
Laura's words felt slightly inadequate as they came out of her mouth. "The spirit of the law requires something here more than summary executions."
"Is this what the two of you have been doing for the past six months? Debating the finer points of colonial law?" Cain's voice dripped with sarcasm. "Well, guess what, we're at war! And we don't have the luxury of academic debate over these issues!"
"You want to cut through it, fine." Laura's invective remained quiet, restrained, but definitely pregnant with meaning. "You have Pegasus, he has Galactica. Two heavily armed, very powerful warships. Now, I am sure that Pegasus would prevail in any fight."
"I wouldn't count on that," Bill said under his breath, probably convinced that he would not concede to her superiority on that count either, even if it was a lie.
"But certainly," she continued telling Cain, "there'd be heavy damage and you'd take significant casualties. So you can go out there and fight it out with Galactica or you can compromise. And those are the only two options on the table, period."
Laura Roslin had spoken and there was really nothing more to do than accept the facts.
Helena Cain –the Cain who hated being cornered, who had never been too afraid to thrust herself into Laura's affections –took one last shot and said, "How the two of you have survived this long, I will never know."
Then she agreed to postpone Helo and Tyrol's trial, agreed to work with Bill, and a variety of other things that Laura knew just wasn't enough.
The sinking feeling in her stomach made her want to retch.
"Hello," Cain said, kneeling before the seven-year old girl and touching her hair.
The sense of urgency she had felt earlier faltered, dissipated, fell short in front of the child and she found herself smiling; smiling at last after months of running, and attacking and being attacked, of losing familiar faces to the jaws of death, to the jaws of haughty civvies who just could not understand that they were at war.
"Hi," the child replied.
"What have you been doing all this time?" Cain asked gently.
"Well, Mommy…" The little girl's eyes moved to the woman in engineering cover-alls behind Cain; like a trapped kitten, the girl was frightened and quickly held Cain's gaze again.
The engineer was restrained by two of Cain's Marines and she witnessed the exchange with barely hidden horror. The little girl's lower lip began to tremble. "…Mommy and Daddy and I ran away from some very bad machines."
"I could see that," the Admiral crooned. "I'm here to take all the bad machines away. How would you say you take a little walk with Jack here," she indicated her XO, "and your Daddy and everyone else, and I promise you'll be safe from the machines, okay?"
"O…okay."
Behind her, she could hear the woman whimpering under her breath, her voice trembling under the weight of her emotions, "Oh my gods…oh my gods…p-please, please don't do this."
The little girl's eyes were welling up, mirrors of her mother's as her little brain tried to comprehend the tension in the room. Her father held her shoulders, glared in terror and hate and his misunderstanding of Cain's actions. Cain accepted it, as she had everything else. Gastor Cain whispered in her ear, it had to be done after all.
The Cylon threat hung over all their heads like a sword and by the gods she would not allow anything to compromise the advantage they were in.
Cain stood and gestured to Fisk, her voice hard, "Do what you have to but if Scylla's engineers won't leave their families here to serve on the Pegasus, execute them." She turned to the engineer, as though shoving the point across. "All of them."
The memory brought her back to the cell just as she stepped in. She barely acknowledged Gaius Baltar on one side, the two Marines hovering beside her as she stared at the pathetic figure before her.
It huddled on the floor like a worm, its skin covered with welts. A fitting color, Cain thought, for all the sins it had committed, for the sins it had made her commit.
They were both quite far from salvation, Cain thought, and that brought a self-deprecating smile on her face. They were demons from the underworld, disembarking from Charon's boat.
"You know," she told Baltar as she began to circle the Cylon like a vulture. "This thing used to sit in our mess and eat our food, and listen to our stories." She felt the familiar wrath crawling out of the mask. "Didn't you?" she grated at the thing. "You just sat there, listening to us. Pretending to be our friend. Didn't you?" Her last words were fierce and she allowed her impulses to take over.
She kicked the Gina model, spat on the thing, and felt a grim satisfaction in seeing it fold into itself in pain.
Baltar visibly cringed and said, "Admiral, please! Any...physical contact with the subject will only to set my efforts back at this point."
She didn't care and she shoved the photographs into his arms, "Find out about that ship."
Stepping out of the cell was like stepping out of smog and she breathed deeply, catching the dribbles of humanity with her fingers and finding, as she always did, that these were not enough, were never enough.
There were civilians out there who would not take kindly to Cain's methods. Laura Roslin knew it all too well: Zarek and the Saggitaron resistance and all the rest who clung to their way of life with possessiveness. There would be blood.
Laura's father had told her a long, long time ago that the military hardly understood the enormity of the plans of those above them: the state, the Quorum of Twelve, the President, the People. There were the few of course, who did; but then there were also those who truly believed in their own methods, in their own losses to justify all other gains.
Laura could remember a time Helena Cain stood on the same side of the fence while gloriously absorbed in her politismos, in the mine-identity which had shaped her as a child. Self-reliance, belief in the commune, the tight-knit structure of people who lived with death on their shoulder; it was a compulsion to dig out anyone who had been buried, to know that the last body in the hole must always come out.
Helena Cain was still on that same side, except she was a figure blurred beyond recognition and Laura wondered what it would have been like, if she had touched her earlier on, planted forgiveness on those lips and painted her into the colors of Laura's past by virtue of her touch.
No, no use in that.
Cain was what she was, Laura thought, shaped by her times in much the same way she and Bill had been; except Cain was alone on the Pegasus, struck with notions that hope had fled, and did her duty amidst this belief with unwavering fortitude for months and months at a time.
It could have driven other people mad. It would have changed politismos into a driving, cruel force.
Laura suddenly felt tired, felt the insidious hands of her cancer creep over her ribs as Bill forced the words from his mouth and sounded about as horrified as she felt.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
"Like she said; let's cut through it. The two of you were willing to go to war today." It had been too true. Decades past did many, many things to the threads that had tied them all together. They had rusted into shadows of their former selves, listless and forgotten, snapping at the merest sign of pressure. "Do you think she's going to step down from that? She's going to bide her time and hit you the first chance she gets. That's a given."
She could see Bill stiffening, could feel her own heart protesting with provocation in the confines of her chest. But she could also feel her mind laying claim to the facts that this was the only path out of this, the only way to claim their way of life. "I hate to lay this on you Bill, but she is dangerous and the only thing that you can do is to hit her before she hits you."
"I'm not an assassin."
His words rang about the room like the bells of Athena's Hall.
Laura stood from Cain's chair, which she had occupied right after the woman left. "No. You're not an assassin," she slowly said. "You are a colonial officer who has taken an oath to protect this fleet."
The justification came automatically, a flood of logic and truth that had been wielded by her father, and then by her. She allowed herself to speak, her voice unbroken, not stopping or thinking of what would come after. "What do you think that she is going to do with the civilian fleet once she has eliminated you? You know I'm right. You just don't want to face it."
Neither of them did, and Bill, steeped in his knowledge of what his relationship to his former wing-man had been, could only express his frustration.
"So the whole world's going mad?"
He didn't wait for her answer; he stood up to leave.
She felt betrayed by time, by fate and she sank into her chair, covering her eyes, cold and unfeeling as she waited for tears that wouldn't come.
TO BE CONTINUED...