CHAPTER 33

CLOUDBURST

"I have never held anything so beautiful in my entire life," Bill said as he cradled his daughter. His eyes were glistening with tears. He had missed the birth of both of his sons; like so many ambitious officers, he had put the call of duty before the needs of his family. It was only now, when he was far too old to deserve the second chance which he had been granted, that he realized just how selfish his younger self had been.

"Except for her mother," he added. "I'll give thanks to the cylon god that she looks so much like you."

It was true. Callista had her mother's features, and was obviously destined to mature into a great beauty.

"She has your eyes," Shelly rejoined. She was beaming with pride, and her heart swelled with love for her husband and their newborn child. Callista Adama was a miracle, but she was also the realization of the hybrid's vision. Another child would soon follow, and shortly after her birth, Kara would find Earth, and the people would take up the new life that God had promised them. For now at least, Shelly's family was safe.

"If the girls have their way," Creusa observed, "the two Adama households will probably sit side by side." She was nursing Cyrene, who seemed unusually content. The tiny hybrid had howled in protest when her mother attempted to withdraw from the edge of the birthing pool. Callista may have been Lee's half-sister, but Lee's daughter was the elder, and the baby had noisily insisted upon presiding over the birth.

"Unless," Polyxena laughed, "they insist that we all live under one roof. Poor Lee! It may be a long time before he emerges from his father's shadow." The raven haired teen was watching Adama like a hawk. The man's parental skills were next to non-existent, and it would be just like him to drop his daughter on the deck.

"It's too bad that Lee can't be here," Shelly sighed. "We're all family, and at moments like this, we should all be together."

"He'd only get in the way," Cottle growled. The elderly physician had come up from the surface of New Caprica to attend the birth, but his presence had proven superfluous. Shelly's labor had been brief and problem-free. "Besides, he's got a job to do- and this one he can't hand over to some flunky. We've never tried an evacuation exercise on this scale before." Sherman began patting his pockets, and a look of near-panic washed across his aged features as it dawned on him that he had left his beloved cigarettes behind. D'Anna had tried to break him of the habit, and she had failed miserably.

"Lee will join us as soon as he can," Adama assured his family; "and that goes for Shevon and Paya as well. They're already packed. I just wish …"

Bill's voice trailed off.

"That Kara and Boomer could be here." Shelly completed her husband's unspoken thought. "I know. Ours is an unusual family, but it is a family. We should never lose sight of the fact that the people we love, and the people who love us in return, are our true family. Now," she commanded, "let me have my daughter. Let's see if she's ready for her first family meal!"

. . .

"Five baseships," Sam muttered more or less to himself. "And we've only seen three. The other two have to be escorting a resurrection ship; that's Cavil's standard deployment."

The tiny brain of the captured Raider had given up all of its secrets. For the first time, Sam and his friends had reliable intelligence about the size and disposition of the enemy's advanced force.

"It will be less than one jump away from our current position," one of the Eights remarked. She had recovered nicely from the pounding that she had received at the hands of her sister on board the Adriatic. The two of them had kissed and made up, figuratively speaking, and now they were making Luke Hammond's life swing wildly back and forth between Heaven and Hell. Eights were possessive, and in the confines of Alpha's basestar, they were keeping Swordsman on a very tight leash.

"The convoy will be trailing us," Alpha observed. "The Ones are not risk takers; they would never permit their lone resurrection vessel to venture into uncharted territory. Still, the volume of space that we must survey in order to find them is vast, and we do not have the resources to conduct a systematic search. Should we nevertheless make the attempt, and rely instead upon the element of random chance that you humans call 'luck'?"

"We don't have to find the resurrection ship," Melania thoughtfully noted. "Oh, sure, it would be nice to catch it by surprise and blow it away, but let's remember that our real objective here is to buy time for the Adriatic to reach the algae planet so that Kara can probe the temple's secrets. Once they realize that we're still in the neighborhood, the Ones will regroup their forces to protect their most important asset. Our presence will slow them down dramatically."

"So, what's the plan, Mel?" Sam was looking at her expectantly. "You got something up your sleeve?"

"Yes … and it's ridiculously simple. Like Alpha says, the resurrection ship is behind us, so we turn back, and we deploy our scouts inside an imaginary cone … the maximum possible coverage. If we come into contact with the resurrection ship … terrific; we go on the offensive, and we try and take it out. But what's more likely is that some of Cavil's Raiders operating in advance of the convoy will penetrate our web and come into contact with one or more of our scout ships. The Raiders will report the contact-our birds will have orders to let them escape- and the Ones will withdraw in order to buy themselves time to come up with a new plan."

"Works for me," Sam smiled.

"By your command," Alpha gratuitously added. These humans are so delightfully devious, she concluded, but she decided to keep that particular thought very much to herself.

. . .

"Status report," Natalie yelled to the Six at the opposite end of the control room.

"The enemy's lead baseship has been destroyed," the blond-haired Six dutifully announced as she parsed the data flowing through the stream beneath her fingers. "They were unable to launch Raiders. Another third generation baseship is withdrawing in the direction of their resurrection ship. The latter is bracketed by two more baseships identical to our own. All three surviving enemy baseships have sent out Raiders; they are currently assuming defensive positions. The numbers suggest that they are holding part of their force in reserve, perhaps in preparation for an attack on our vessels."

"Hmm … this is not what I expected. It appears that the Ones have learned the value of caution." The Six looked around the control center while she mulled her options. She came quickly to a decision. "All right, we need to attack before they can get organized. The resurrection ship will be our target. John, I want you to calculate the firing solution, and execute a microjump that will put us within range. Destroy that ship, and we can eliminate the Ones' presence in this sector."

"No," Bierns objected. "Natalie, we need to stick to the plan. We can't defend our own resurrection ship if we go on the offensive, but we can't send it off the battlefield. The risk-reward ratio is all wrong; we need to withdraw."

"But their resurrection ship is just sitting there," Natalie cried, "and it's less than sixty MU's out! We should hit it now … we should hit it with everything we've got!"

"And have you noticed the super basestar that will be between us and our own fleet if we attack?" Bierns was getting tired of explaining the facts of life to the impulsive Six. "We've won a great victory here today, but it was due solely to Cavil's arrogance. So, we recall our Raiders, and we get the hell out of here. We do not- repeat not- throw it all away by stupidly attacking an enemy force whose lead capital ship has a far superior rate of fire! Mr. Hoshi, signal the fleet to execute an immediate jump to the standby coordinates."

"Yes, Sir!"

"Have you forgotten, Major, that I'm the one in command here?" A fuming Natalie Six was not about to surrender control of her ship to her hybrid nephew.

The CSS officer didn't bother to respond—at least, not verbally. He had been schooled to resolve problems, not to debate them. The Six was a problem, and it was time to make that problem go away.

Always armed, the spook pulled a gun out of the waist band of his pants. Muscle memory born of a thousand training sessions kicked in. There was no conscious thought behind the near autonomic movements that followed. His arm sweeping up, John disengaged the safety and shot Natalie in the head. The bullet was perfectly centered. The Six's lifeless body crumpled to the deck, and a shocked silence descended upon the control room.

"Would anyone else like to debate the point," Bierns softly asked. His voice was a study in politeness, but his eyes had turned to ice. He had another round in the chamber, and Louis Hoshi pitied anyone in the control room foolish enough to object to Ghostrider's orders.

No one did.

. . .

"Was it really necessary to kill her?" Sharon's voice hinted at her bemusement. Her husband was so gentle, and yet so deadly. He killed without hesitation, and he killed with very little warning. Galen had once told her about Eric Phelan, and how soft spoken and respectful John had been just before he put two bullets in the gangster's head. Like a deadly viper that hypnotically swayed in the moment before delivering the fatal strike, Ghostrider drew upon politeness to distract his victims.

John drew lazy circles on Sharon's belly. He could feel his daughter kick, and he didn't give a damn what the medical literature said. His unborn daughter was responding to his touch, as she always did these days.

"I'd hardly call a two hour nap murder," Bierns snorted. "Natalie was behaving like a spoilt brat, so instead let's say that I … oh … forced her to go stand in the corner for a couple of hours … what my human friends call a 'time out'."

John looked deep into Sharon's eyes. They continued to fascinate him. The pupils were black, but there were subtle shifts in their color that matched the shifts in Sharon's mood. He was still trying to decipher the code, so that he might better understand the Eight who was at once his wife and his minder.

"You have friends?" Sharon was in a playful mood, but she suddenly turned serious. "It was so unexpected," she continued. "You shocked everyone, and you badly scared the Sixes. They're all in love with you … you know that, don't you?"

"Oh, please …"

"No … it's true. The Sixes have put you and Kara on a pedestal. You are our children, the angels of our deliverance—your only flaw the centurion DNA that Cavil poured into you. Until now, that is. But as much as they all want to share your bed, some of them are beginning to wonder if their reward might be to wake up dead. Do you have any idea how much Natalie loves you?"

"She's made no attempt to hide her feelings … and I've done everything I can to discourage them. I thought that Natalie and Racetrack …"

"It's a marriage of mutual convenience … or perhaps it's mutual need. Natalie is yours anytime you want her."

John sighed resignedly. The problem with pedestals was that falling off really hurt. "Am I going to have a problem with the Eights?"

"No … my model will support you, no matter how many Sixes you kill. After all, you and Kara are the ultimate prize, and you are both firmly wedded to Eights. You belong to us, and no matter how much we may compete against one another, when it comes to the other models, we look after our own. That's what comes of being the runt of the litter. The others have always looked down upon us … regarded us as foolish and weak; so, we're clannish."

"In my experience," John laughed, "Eights have spines of steel. If the other models think you're weak, then they need to have their heads examined!"

"Perhaps there's a short circuit in their synaptic relays," Sharon teasingly murmured. Her voice was suddenly thick with desire. Her hand drifted between John's legs. She began to run her fingernails up and down the inside of one of his thighs, and he stiffened instantly. This pleased Sharon no end. Sex was always good, but she had reached the point in her pregnancy where her need bordered on the insatiable. Fortunately, her husband never failed her. Though she would never openly admit it, she was privately convinced that the Sixes were fools. It should have been obvious to everyone that her husband's centurion DNA was the proverbial gift that kept on giving.

. . .

"Gee, this has all been such fun," Six bitterly remarked. "Another download … another month to go around stumbling into walls and periodically falling flat on my face while breaking in this new body … yeah, this is what I call real fun."

"What are you complaining about, Six?" Cavil was having a hard time generating any sympathy for his self-indulgent sister. "This was my fourth download, and they're getting progressively more painful. This one … it felt like having a white hot poker shoved into my brain, only it didn't stop there. Oh, no," Cavil said with a firm shake of the head; "it felt like someone was playing dancing spoons on my synaptic relays."

"Only four," Six ironically countered. "One, at the rate you squander our baseships, I'm surprised that it hasn't been forty! By the way, what do we have left in the cupboard? Just how many ships did we lose this time?"

"Just the one," Cavil forthrightly admitted. Being a well-tuned machine, he was beyond embarrassment.

"Leaving us with three," another One summarized, "and they're all on the board. We still have superior numbers, but we've got nothing left in reserve."

"And the next crop of baseships will mature … when?" Six was feeling decidedly peevish.

"It'll be a while," Cavil conceded.

"Unless, of course," Six maliciously observed, "Natalie goes looking for the frakkin' Colony, and blows the damn thing into the next universe, taking our genetic material with it! Or am I wrong? Since you've already put a permanent end to the Twos and Threes, I'm taking it for granted that my model is just as vulnerable. Did you geniuses ever think about safeguards … you know, replicate the frakkin' DNA and store it somewhere else?"

"Now, why would we do that? The Colony is so heavily defended that the whole, damned Colonial fleet couldn't make a dent."

Cavil was wide-eyed, but his tone was too smug, too nonchalant. Six knew that he was lying through his teeth. You bastards, she thought; you've backed up your own DNA, but not ours. That's always been your insurance policy, hasn't it? That's what ultimately gave you control over the other models—the ability to destroy us at the source. No wonder you wanted to exterminate the humans! By giving us children they set us free, and you don't get to play God anymore. How could the rest of us have been so blind to the obvious?

"Six was right," Cavil said as he looked around the chamber at his brothers. "And we should be machine enough to admit it. This was a trap, and we fell for it. Now, the question is: where do we go from here? Natalie's vanished, and we have no idea where. With three baseships we can still hold our own, but if the Six rejoins Galactica …"

"We have to find Adama first," still another Cavil growled. "The trap will take down Galactica, but the Eights don't have enough firepower to take on Natalie's baseships as well. We have to strike before they combine forces!"

"Then you had better learn how to pray, brother," Six angrily remarked; "because things are now so frakked up that there's only one way we're going to find the humans. We've got hundreds of Raiders out there. Every rift in this nebula is being constantly monitored. A microbe couldn't get through the net undetected, but we're not looking for a microbe … we're looking for a Viper pilot out on a long patrol … someone who knows the coordinates, and who'll survive interrogation long enough to cough them up. That's how we'll find Galactica, and put an end to this farce!"

. . .

"I never thought I'd say this," Eric chortled, "but piloting a starship at a subliminal velocity is about as exciting as watching grass grow!" He reached over, and affectionately patted Six on the thigh. They had been fugitives for so long, and he had lived on adrenaline for so many weeks, that their escape from New Caprica had left the young Sagittaron feeling a bit depressed. Common sense told him that this had been the most exciting adventure that he would ever experience; somehow, he had survived it, and he suspected that the rest of his life, whatever surprises it might bring, would be anticlimactic.

Six was far too busy to respond. The nebula was awash with gamma radiation storms, magnetic clouds, and the usual assortment of debris and dust that awaited any unwary traveler through so treacherous a realm. She concentrated on the stream of data that the organic computer was feeding her. Her hands were constantly in motion, subtly altering their course and speed to avoid the lethal traps that the stellar cloud offered in such abundance. Originally, Six had hoped to transit the nebula in a matter of hours; now, she was wondering whether they could make the transit in less than a week.

The young Cylon's concentration was complete. She had become one with the Heavy Raider's sophisticated sensor array. She made note of the dust cloud that lay dead ahead. Her brain calculated the density of its matter, assessed the damage that it might do to their engines if they came too close, and her hands moved. She would give the cloud a wide berth, passing it to starboard.

Thump!

Something struck the ship violently from behind. It lurched, and then began to yaw to the left.

"What the hell," Eric screamed. The collision had badly startled him, but fear had not yet begun to set in. "What the hell was that?"

Six silently fought the controls, struggling to prevent the unplanned turn from deteriorating into a full lateral spin. They were still closing on the dust cloud, and if she couldn't regain control, it would soon swallow them whole. The colliding magnetic fields inside the cloud would make short work of the Heavy Raider. The ship would simply be torn apart.

"It was probably a meteorite," she muttered; as Six continued her struggle to regain control over the stricken ship, she simply didn't have the luxury of thinking about what had gone wrong. Even a full assessment of the damage would have to wait.

Eric took a deep, calming breath, and exhaled slowly. "What can I do to help," he asked in as calm a voice as he could muster.

Six's heart swelled with pride and love. In that moment, when Eric had to be overwhelmed with uncertainty and fear, he had tapped into some inner strength that kept him far from the razor's edge of panic. He was still here, still in the fight. Six was monogamous by nature, and she had mated for life. She had chosen her partner well.

"Keep strapped in," she replied. "We need to check for damage, but right now it's too dangerous for you to go wandering around back there. My stint in the hospital didn't qualify me to set broken bones!"

"I hear you," Eric managed to grin. "Are we still FTL capable? Can we jump out of here … try our luck somewhere else?"

"A blind jump inside a nebula," Six responded skeptically. Still, Eric had a point, and she pulled up the data.

"Frak," she exclaimed; "the FTL's are gone!"

"And the sublights?" If they couldn't manoeuver, they would die out here, and Eric knew it. It was simply a matter of how.

"Still operational, but the lateral thrusters …"

The ship shuddered as it was repeatedly punched in the stern.

"That's no meteorite," Eric screamed again. "We're under attack!"

"We've lost the sublights," Six noted in a subdued voice. The Heavy Raider was adrift now, its life support systems still apparently intact, but otherwise without power. The attack had been surgically precise, and it had left them unable to defend themselves against whoever had them in their sights.

A Raider suddenly flashed into view—and then a second, and a third.

"Adama," Eric cursed. "The wily, old bastard was one step ahead of us the whole time. He positioned Raiders out here to intercept us. Now we know why they made so little effort to find us back on New Caprica!"

. . .

Too slow … too slow by far!

Lee Adama, formerly Captain Lee Adama of the Colonial fleet, had responded to literally hundreds of alerts on Galactica, and in this he was no different from any other Viper pilot who had made it all the way from the Ragnar Anchorage to New Caprica. Alerts had pulled him out of his rack. Alerts had sent him rushing from the officer's mess, gulping down whatever happened to be in his mouth as he raced off down the corridor to don his flight suit. Alerts had even found him sitting on the toilet, twice making a complete mess of this most private of human moments. Apollo was used to living on the razor's edge, but the civilians in his charge had no feel for the urgency of combat.

Gods, but they're slow!

Apollo took his job as National Security Adviser seriously. He had chosen the time for the evacuation drill with great care, and he had positioned himself beforehand outside Colonial One, stopwatch in hand. He had toyed with the idea of calling the alert at four in the morning, that treacherous hour when the human body is most deeply asleep and a sudden waking leaves its victim at his most disoriented. In the end, however, he had opted for 07:15 hours. He would interrupt couples making love and families sharing breakfast. He would catch workers in the streets, many of them far from their assigned shelters. But he would not catch Gaius Baltar at his desk. The President would still be in bed, sandwiched between his two pregnant wives.

It had taken four long minutes for the Baltars to exit the ship, and another three for the presidential party to enter a nearby apartment building. Two more minutes passed as the Baltars descended to the basement, where a waiting security team quickly ushered them into the underground bunker that would serve as the focal point for resistance to cylon occupation. Apollo reckoned that, in a real attack, Colonial One would be a high value target, and that enemy centurions would have the ship surrounded within six minutes of the alert being triggered. He needed to shave ninety seconds off the evacuation time … but how? Sharon and Tory were both heavily pregnant, and would only get slower until the babies were born.

I need to steal two minutes, but where can I find them? Should I try and speed the Baltars up, or should I try and slow the Cylons down? Should I commit Hephaestus' Raiders at the outset, and try and interdict the invasion, or should I hold them in reserve?

Lee Adama let out a long, frustrated sigh. He would review cylon response times with Caprica Six, and he would autopsy the settlement's overall response with Marcus Lysander. The Special Forces captain commanded the most professional soldiers on the planet, and he had deployed his men to monitor and evaluate the civvies' performance. Apollo was expecting good news on this front: with each successive drill, the civvies had been getting faster, the confusion and near panic that had marked the first exercise now a thing of the past. He expected key government officials such as Tom Zarek and Wallace Gray to pass the test with flying colors. No, the problem was the Baltars.

There was no way around it. Lee would review the reports, but he knew that they would not contain the answer to this particular problem. He would have to dump it in his father's lap, and hope that the Old Man would see a way out of the dilemma. Besides, Apollo was eager to get up to Galactica. He wanted to welcome Shelly's daughter into the world, but more than anything else, Lee Adama wanted to reunite with his own wife and infant daughter.

. . .

"I didn't see this coming."

Sophia Palaikastro was standing in the tall grass to the east of their encampment, the warm morning sun beating down on her face. The Pegasus survivors had migrated far enough to the south that the perpetual fog and penetrating dampness that engulfed the fabled City of the Gods in the distant north rarely interrupted their lives. Their well-ordered community was thriving in one of the more temperate of Kobol's many microclimates.

Sophia ran her fingers through the grass, which was beaten down in the place where the Raptor had been parked the night before.

"And to have it be Showboat, of all people …" She shook her head in despair.

"It wasn't your policies," Narcho hastened to explain. Losing Claudia Wang, the only medical technician on the entire planet, was a devastating blow. "Showboat and Nightingale were as happy with the communal marriage setup as the rest of us, but Marcia didn't like being second in command—not after having been sent here as expedition leader. She wanted to be a queen bee in her own right … and there can only be one queen in any given hive. As for Red Devil and Parsnip," he added dismissively, "Fleer and Avalon have always done their thinking with their cocks."

"We can't afford to lose their skills," Sophia objected. "We need to bring them back."

"How?" Narcho was, above all things, a realist. "By now, they're probably holed up somewhere in the western hemisphere, and we don't have enough tylium left to try and hunt them down. If we send a Raptor out in pursuit, it might not make it home. So, we write them off, and we move on."

"Just like that? Noel, it's not just their skills that we're losing, though gods only know how desperately we need Claudia's medical knowledge. It's also a question of their genetic material. We may be at the tipping point … and I shouldn't have to lecture you on the dangers of excessive inbreeding."

Narcho shrugged his shoulders; the XO was preaching to the choir, but there were no good options in this mess, only bad ones.

"You're right, Sophia, but still … let it go. Who knows? Maybe they'll have a change of heart … maybe they'll come back. Kobol isn't Paradise, surviving in the wilderness isn't easy, and frankly, Showboat doesn't strike me as the pioneering type. I give them a week … ten days, tops."

"Marcia comes from good, solid peasant stock," Palaikastro replied, with just enough condescension in her voice to make it clear that she didn't mean it as a compliment, "and she's never been much of a team player. You're wrong, Noel … they're gone for good."

"Yeah, well, maybe it's all for the best. Maybe we should have split up at the outset … two groups, one on each continent. There's something to be said for hedging your bets."

"We're just caught a glimpse of our future, Noel." Sophia was now blindly staring at the horizon, and thinking far ahead. "There will always be malcontents … dreamers … people who just want to see what's over the horizon. We can build a community, but no matter how hard we try to hold on to them, our children will spread out and begin claiming this continent for their own. Don't underestimate the frontier spirit; exploring the unknown is a large part of who we are."

"I know," Narcho conceded. "And to be honest, I don't know whether to cheer our absent friends on, or hope that the wilderness buries them. If they survive, their children will also spread out … and their children's children, and so on through the generations. We won't be alive when the day comes, but this can only end one way."

"What's that," Sophia asked. She wasn't quite sure where Noel Allison was going with this.

"In a war," Noel heavily responded; "winner, take all."

. . .

Keeping her eyes firmly shut and her body completely relaxed, Anthia Six began systematically testing her restraints. There was no give in the heavy leather straps that encircled her wrists, and her left ankle was also effectively immobilized. But there was some play in the shackle that bound her right ankle to the table. There wasn't much, but it was a place to start.

"You can quit pretending, Six," a condescending voice called out; "we know that you're awake."

With a start, Anthia opened her eyes, but there was nothing much for the stunningly beautiful red-haired Cylon to see. The vise that imprisoned her head left her staring straight up at the ceiling, and there was a bright light directly overhead. There was no one standing within her admittedly poor range of peripheral vision, so she was not even sure how many of her captors were in the room.

The voice drifted closer, and a face suddenly materialized directly above her. The eyes were alive, and gleaming with malice.

"I trust that you're not too uncomfortable … yet," the voice leered.

"What do you want, Carlotti?" Anthia began projecting. Unlike her many sisters, she favored beaches over forests. She found herself lying on a chaise lounge, her body being warmed by the sun that was now directly above her.

"To hear you beg," the gangster succinctly replied.

"Forget it, Enzo. I'm shutting down the pain program, so it doesn't matter how inventive you get. I won't feel a thing, and when I die, I'll resurrect. That's when the fun will really begin!"

"Who said anything about killing you?" Enzo's fingers began kneading the nipple of her right breast, and for the first time Anthia realized that she was naked. "I want you to be my guest … indefinitely. If you like, you can critique my performance. We'll all have a lot more fun if you get with the program."

Anthia heard chuckles from various parts of the room. Although she couldn't see them, she reckoned that Carlotti had invited at least four of his thugs to sit in and entertain themselves at her expense.

"You're a fun time girl, aren't you, Six? My friends all tell me that there's a whore inside every one of you, just waiting to burst loose. Rumor has it that your cunt is perpetually wet. Let's see if the rumors are true."

Carlotti's hand drifted lower, and he began to describe lazy circles around the nub of Anthia's clitoris. It was engorged with blood.

"What a marvel you are," Enzo said with seeming admiration. "A machine that so perfectly mimics the human body … a machine that lubricates almost upon demand … how could any human woman hope to compete with such a miracle of engineering?"

"Frak you," Anthia snarled. Anthia loved sex, sometimes even craved it, but always on her own terms. A Six had to be in control. That was any Six's worst fear … losing control.

"Oh, there'll be plenty of time for that later, but not just yet." Without warning, Enzo suddenly rammed two stiffened fingers deep into his captive's vaginal cavity. The Six flinched, and a moment later, her left foot exploded with pain. Timing it perfectly, one of Carlotti's henchmen had slammed a steel rod into the sole of her foot—and he'd held nothing back.

The breath exploded out of Anthia's mouth, and a tiny, involuntary cry escaped her lips.

"What's this," Enzo mocked. "Why, Six, have you been lying to me? Hmm? You're supposed to be immune to pain. What's going on?"

"Frak you," she repeated. The Six was defenseless.

"She's got sex on the brain, boss," one of the thugs called out. "And I swear … the bitch really gets off on pain. Does she want some more? Make her beg, boss! Make her beg for it!" The table jumped as he pounded it with the steel rod, each blow inching closer and closer to Anthia's outstretched arms.

"Nah, we'll start her off slow. We wouldn't want our baby to get all hot and bothered on her first night in paradise. We need to keep her cool."

Enzo opened a tap, and suddenly water began to drip onto Anthia's forehead, each tiny drop hitting the same spot, an inch above the bridge of her nose.

Anthia began to blink, more and more rapidly.

"I'm thirsty," Carlotti announced. "Let's go get something to drink."

"Don't forget about Sheba, boss; she's waiting outside."

"Oh, yeah … Sheba."

Anthia's emotions twisted into a knot. She had stumbled upon the human girl during the evacuation exercise. She was obviously lost, and Anthia had taken it upon herself to hustle the teenager to the Prometheus, which offered a safe haven for the settlement's strays. En route, a street gang had attacked them, and someone had delivered a hard enough blow to the back of the Six's skull to render her unconscious.

"The girl's just someone I met by chance on the street, Enzo. She's not a part of this, so let her go."

The room erupted in laughter.

"Six," Enzo sneered, "what is it with you? Or you really that gullible, or are you just plain stupid?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Sheba wasn't lost, and you didn't just meet her by chance. She works for me, Six; she's one of my most talented whores. She was the snare, you stepped right into it, and now I'm going to give her a big bonus for delivering you intact. I guess that well-known cylon sense of compassion got the better of you."

Filing out of the room, the gangsters left Anthia Six to ponder her fate.

. . .

Lacy Rand was struggling for breath. For the first time in her life she had to focus, had consciously to will her body to breathe. And with each passing minute, it was taking more and more effort.

Gina was at her side—her beloved Gina. The Six would assume her place as Blessed Mother, would lead their very odd family of true believers into the next generation. The Six had promised her that she would marry and have children of her own—children that, with the passage of generations, would gradually reclaim the worlds for the hybrid species of true believers that would now inhabit the twelve colonies of Man. Gemenon was thriving, and the fledgling colony on Aquaria had already taken root. More would follow in the centuries to come.

"Death is so messy," Lacy confessed between the coughs that wracked her aged body with spasms. "It's so undignified."

"Don't complain, Mother," Gina said with a sad grin. The Six was sitting on the edge of her mentor's bed, and gently patting her hand. Lacy Rand was so much more than the head of their church. Hers was the voice of forgiveness, the voice that combined the tolerance of those whom Clarice Willow had termed the "differently sentient" with the vision of Zoe Graystone. In a very real sense, Lacy Rand was the mother of them all.

"The apotheosis program works," Gina went on; "you will ascend to Heaven, and your spirit will comfort and enlighten the souls of your hybrid daughters for eternity."

"Ah, yes," Lacy whispered, "my daughters. It's funny, really, that I have so many daughters, and yet I have never given birth … not once. I owe John so much. He created Heaven, and he gave me a family to love. The hybrids … so beautiful, so intelligent, so unloved; the universe can be so cruel."

"No, Mother," Gina protested' "there is a balance, a place where love triumphs over indifference. You have taught me that it dwells deep inside the heart of each of us. Cylon or human, in the end it makes no difference."

"You are so wise," Lacy managed. Although her thoughts were still clear, it was becoming increasingly hard for her to speak. She tried to wiggle her toes, but they would no longer obey her commands. "I have left our people in the right hands. You will lead them well … guide them to a safe and prosperous future. I am content."

With a final sigh, the Blessed Mother of the Church of the Monad turned her sightless eyes upon eternity.

. . .

"We've found them," Six calmly announced. "Our Raiders have crippled one of Adama's Heavy Raiders. Once we have the pilot on board, we shall extract Adama's location, and bring this war to an end."

. . .

"Welcome home, Mother," Olivia said as the spirit of Lacy Rand materialized upon the beach at Galatea Bay.

Lacy wrapped an arm around her daughter's waist, hugged her close, and together they set off along the shore. In the distance, she could see Deirdre standing at the water's edge, her infant daughter crying with joy as the gentle waves lapped over her feet.

It had been a long and winding road. Long ago, the path had taken her to Hell, the debauched and sin stained realm known to Colonials as V-world. But her soul had been redeemed, and a lifetime of service had demonstrated her worthiness.

Lacy Rand had come home.