Sanctuary (Part 1 of 7)
A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.
-The Sound and the Fury
Fourteen people disappeared as a result of the Circle. Thirteen vanished out an airlock.
Felix Gaeta curled up in a storage closet behind a crate full of paper. The pain from Starbuck’s kick to his ribs was already ebbing away, but it still felt as if the plastic cuffs were biting into his wrists. He hugged his knees to his chest, unconsciously arranging his hands as if they were still bound. Felix concentrated on his breathing, forcing it to slow down and hoping his wildly beating heart would follow.
But every time he closed his eyes, he could see the launch tube hatch closing in front of him. Seelix and Tyrol turned their backs, Starbuck snarled, and Colonel Tigh’s one eye bored through him as the teeth-shaped ridges of the upper and lower parts of the inner airlock clenched shut. He felt the rush of air and sound past his ears as the outer airlock opened, his legs yanked out from under him, and there was nothing for him to grab hold of. And then, for a few horrifying moments, he was drowning in nothingness, the cold stars that he’d missed so much on New Caprica the only witnesses to his last panicked struggles.
And the worst of it was, a part of Felix knew that that fate was more right than where he was now, hiding in the bowels of Galactica from a ship full of people he could never face again. People he’d fought beside and joked with and annoyed and helped and hated and loved so fiercely. People he’d said he’d die for.
People he should have died for, one way or another.
He pulled himself to standing and noticed his ribs still hurt when he moved. There will be a bruise, he thought detachedly, as if it wasn’t his body he was contemplating at all.
He opened the crate of paper and hunted for a pen. Dee, Louis, and maybe the Admiral were the only ones who might care. If nothing else, professional courtesy demanded it.
After a few minutes, though, he gave up, deciding it was best not to leave anything behind anyway. Dee and Louis had glared at him so coldly while he’d helped them fix the comm station, as if they’d known what he was capable of all along. And the Admiral...if what happened in the airlock ever reached his ears-and from the horrified look Felix had seen on Tyrol’s face as he’d stumbled past him out the airlock, Felix had little doubt that Tyrol would confess to someone-the fact that it was Starbuck and the Colonel, the Old Man’s daughter and brother in every way that mattered.... The Admiral would never be able to look Felix in the eye again without seeing their pain and rage and shortcomings, which meant he would never look him in the eye again.
And so, after a brief detour to collect the few possessions he’d kept in storage, Felix Gaeta lost himself in a crowd of civilian refugees on the hangar deck, all waiting to be taken to their new homes on some of the emptier ships in the Fleet. He let the sea of bodies carry him along until he found himself quietly huddled in the corner of a large shuttle on its way to the Prometheus, the best place in the Fleet to disappear.
~~**~~**~~
Felix was honestly surprised that he was alive a week later. He had figured someone from New Caprica would recognize him, and an angry mob would form and-what, stone him to death? There were no stones on the Prometheus, though there was everything else, for a price: fresh food, clothing, jewelry, medicine, drugs, and even a few live pets for sale. He looked for Jake but never found him.
He’d figured they’d beat him to death, then, Felix thought. But apparently, no one was paying him that much attention. Yes, he caught the occasional person doing a double-take, or screwing up their brows in a look of where do I know you from, but mostly, Felix found himself anonymous, carried along on unending waves of people bustling intently to nowhere.
The Prometheus was an odd ship. Originally, it had essentially been a gigantic hangar bay, used to haul large space station modules out to the edges of explored space. After the exodus from the Colonies, the civilians had ripped apart the modules being transported and used the materials to construct buildings inside the ship, creating more privacy and vertical space.
Even with its seedy reputation, the Prometheus had always been one of Felix’s favorite ships when the Fleet was grounded on New Caprica. The ship’s residents had made the most of New Caprica’s resources, adding to and refurbishing the original modules with hewn stone and plaster and even a little precious wood. With the giant stern hangar door open to the air, it reminded Felix of ancient Piconian cliff dwellings built into shelves of rock, protected from the elements on all sides but one.
Living on the Prometheus in space wasn’t nearly as romantic. “Outside” was the same as “inside,” except outside was almost twice as crowded after the exodus as it had ever been before, and noisy, and smelly, and was lit with harsh lights like those on Galactica’s hangar deck.
Felix’s luck at being alive-good or bad luck, he wasn’t quite sure-suddenly made sense when he picked up a discarded copy of what passed for a newspaper these days. Below the fold, there was a photograph of himself from his personnel file. The story below it spoke of his work as the mole in Baltar’s puppet government. The reporter got a few details wrong but generally painted him in a positive light. Apparently what had happened the day before the exodus wasn’t common knowledge, then. He didn’t know why he thought it would be. There was no reason anyone would know, or at least that any humans would know-
Felix shook his head and tried to forget. He read the rest of the article. The last line at the very bottom of the page read: “At this time, Gaeta is-STORY CONTINUED ON PAGE 3.” The copy Felix had found was only the first two pages. He smirked ruefully. Fitting. He wondered if the reporter had a better idea of where he was than Felix himself did.
But it was the picture that truly shed light on his present situation. He barely recognized himself in it: hair neatly trimmed to military standards, uniform pressed, sash straight, buttons polished to gleaming, mouth held in a firm line but eyes shining with the proud, hope-filled smile he had been fighting so hard to contain.
As much as Felix had always felt he had the word “TRAITOR” painted on his forehead whenever he walked the streets of New Caprica, a lot of people probably never connected the name of the President’s Chief of Staff to a face. He didn’t know why he’d never thought of that before. Minoa, the town he’d grown up in, had been about the same size as New Caprica City, and Felix couldn’t have picked the mayor’s chief aide out of a lineup. The resemblance between the man in the paper and himself was distant enough that the article wouldn’t make him stand out to most people now.
And yet, if someone did remember him well enough to recognize him as the former Chief of Staff, there was still enough similarity that those people would connect him to the story in the paper. It didn’t surprise Felix that no one had thanked him. He didn’t really want gratitude, either. It was more than enough that the article allayed their hatred into indifference, allowing him to fade into obscurity.
On top of that, the article above the fold captured everyone’s attention in a much more visceral way. The government’s ration distribution program, which daily doled out enough food for people to live on as they tried to create lives for themselves on the ships, was ending in two days. It would continue in a limited capacity on some of the ships that had little for the civilians to do to earn their keep, like Galactica and Colonial One, but on the more industrious ships, residents were soon to be on their own.
Felix hadn’t thought that far ahead as to what he’d do with the rest of his life when he walked away from his old one. He knew he could easily get a job on the bridge of any civilian ship. Most captains would kill for someone with his skill set. But they read the papers, and they would ask questions, and they would look at him with enough focus and concentration to fit together the pieces of who he was. He had been pardoned-more than pardoned, he’d been touted a hero-but he couldn’t bear going back to being Felix Gaeta.
He worked in a bar for a few days. The owner was a woman Felix suspected was a major player in the black market, who made most of her money from whatever went on in the room in back rather than in the barroom out front. She had been looking for an entertainer of some sort. Felix had noticed they had a piano that no one played. After the inevitable shocked look he knew he would get when she saw his hands-they didn’t even really hurt anymore, but his fingernails looked almost like he’d been tortured-and a quick audition to prove that the damage was superficial, she’d handed him an employee ID and a tip jar.
He could have offered himself up as a singer, but he knew he was too good at that to be safe. He’d develop a reputation, maybe even a following, and eventually, inevitably, someone would drag him into being Felix Gaeta again. He was just a passable pianist, though, so he and his sad ballads and love songs became merely a part of the background, fading into the smoke and the stale smell of spilled liquor. The tips he made at the piano were barely enough to pay for the little bit of food he bought, the cigarettes he smoked with a new fervor, and the dingy room he rented whose only virtue over what passed for streets on the Prometheus was that it had a lock.
Felix had always thought that piano players in bars were half-entertainers, half-amateur counselors, but he was pleasantly surprised that very few people tried to talk to him. In fact, only two ever struck up anything like real conversations. The first was a man, maybe ten years older than him, who started out by chatting about nothing much but was doing something like flirting but not quite by the end. Felix understood when the man put far too much money in his tip jar and looked meaningfully towards the restroom. Felix colored and gave him the entire “tip” back, and the man left, just as abashed as Felix.
The second was a young woman, maybe about twenty. She said her name was Portia. She started out flirting rather blatantly, then eased off when she apparently realized that Felix’s return banter had no greater ulterior motive than to keep a friendly conversation going.
“You’re lonely, aren’t you?” Portia had said, stirring the drink she’d been nursing for hours. “Everybody here’s lonely, but you’re different.”
“Am I?” Felix answered, pretending he needed to concentrate as he segued from one song to another.
Portia nodded. She rolled a paper cubit in her hands tightly, then dropped it into his tip jar. “I get the feeling I’m not what you’re looking for, but at least tell ‘em that Portia sent you, all right?”
She picked up her drink and walked over to the bar to chat with a trio of men before Felix had the chance to ask what she was talking about.
Once the bouncers dragged out the hangers-on after last call, Felix emptied his jar and unfurled the cubit the young woman had left. Rolled up inside of it was an ad for the Rising Sun. Felix almost laughed when he realized how frakked up he must be, that the first thing he noticed was how rare it was to see a printed advertisement with pictures on it nowadays, long before it registered that all the people in the photos were naked, or nearly so, and what they were doing.
Then one night when Felix was walking home from work, a group of thugs waylaid him and left him bloodied and battered in a lonely alley, not because of New Caprica but because of the handful of cubits jangling in his pocket. That meant he only had enough money for the cigarettes now. Two days later, he went to work only to find the bar closed indefinitely, the door broken and the glassless windows boarded up.
He wandered what he wanted to believe was aimlessly for hours afterward. In a world where there was no real law except for what the powerful chose to enforce against the weak, being a complete loner wasn’t a viable option. He hadn’t realized how vital it was when he’d had it on Galactica, but he’d quickly learned that what he needed far more than money was somebody who would watch his back.
There might be a thousand different kinds of work in the Fleet, but there weren’t too many that came with anything close to security. He’d just let go of one on the Galactica, or rather, it had let go of him. He smirked ruefully when it dawned on him what the next best option was.
Fitting, he thought, remembering all the words Connor and some others had used to describe his relationship with President Baltar and the Cylons.
Felix stubbed out his last cigarette on the doorstep of the House of the Rising Sun.
CONTINUE TO CHAPTER TWO