Challenge Ficlet: "Ghost Ship" for prophetkristy (Gaeta, Dee, Sam)
“Ghost Ship”
Adjust sensors on the carriage that holds just ourselves and immortality stretches out too many milliseconds until the impulse cycle is complete. Recalibrate the fallen angels to dive with more precision as the woman became a bad, bad girl who broke a boy just because the pieces and bits fall into orderly coordinates. Turn five degrees, tilt, game over.
Sam is surprised at how many layers of conscious thought he’s capable of experiencing at one time in this new condition. None of them is quite as clear as he’d like it to be, but he supposes that’s the trade-off for being able to see the universe the way Galactica sees it. He would give anything for the layer he suspects is reality to be sharper. He can see Kara, bathed in light, standing over him, hear every word she speaks, feel the weight of her dogtags as she drops them down to him, but it’s as if he and Kara are traveling at different speeds, and he can’t quite catch her.
Compensate for added weight, guns and friends loaded into the belly of the beast, Leviathan, whom thou hast made to take his pastime in the devil’s water. New paragraph. Terminate unnecessary functions of the veins and arteries, diseased limbs all, but keep the blood pumping at 7.29 megahertz.
He is in a tub, nursing his sore knee and speaking to a reporter about the beauty of the mathematics of motion. He is in a tub, alone in the CIC, controlling Galactica’s pitch and yaw as he would his own hands and feet, almost without thought, musing idly that they should have made Cavil into a Hybrid, since this was the kind of perspective he had wanted so badly. He is in a tub, and CIC is buzzing with life all around him.
This last layer is different, somehow much brighter and crisper than the place Kara had been. That makes Sam wonder if it might be a dream, or something else.
“Four seconds turn three,” says Gaeta, his hands flying across a keyboard as he calls out instructions to the two nervous-looking young petty officers actually manipulating the controls.
“Felix, he’s here,” says Dee from the communications console. She hands off her headset to another young woman and mounts the stairs to the upper level.
“Be there in a minute,” Gaeta says, nodding. “Private Jaffee, can you handle this?”
The private looks tense, but he nods. Gaeta doesn’t look comfortable himself, but he smiles and pats the private on the shoulder before giving him his seat.
Gaeta stands on two legs. If Sam had still been capable of modulating his face to show emotions, his eyes would have gone wide with shock.
Sensor 13B7 offline. Darkness, my old friend that talks with the voice of the ancient bard shall offset with added concentration on the stern, stern expression of lips forming prayers to broken stone.
“Why?” says Gaeta, asking Sam’s question for him.
“We’ve come here for you, to help you, here at the end,” Dee answers, her smile warm.
“We never really left,” says Gaeta, running his hand thoughtfully down a ridge in the bulkhead.
Sam is past the point of wondering whether they’re here for him or for Galactica. He can’t draw a line between the two anymore.
We must prepare for light rising slowly as steam off their joined skin that will lose integrity at 2,276 degrees of separation. End of line. Begin new paragraph.
“You’re not going to be happy to hear it. But do you want to know why so many improbable things happened to make sure the Fleet found this planet?” says Gaeta, leaning on a console and stretching his legs out in front of him. Sam is still fascinated that he has two of them.
“He’ll know for himself soon enough,” Dee says. “But I bet you’ve already guessed, haven’t you, Sam? Now that you see glimpses of the patterns, you’ve probably extrapolated-”
“Hera,” Sam hears his mouth form the syllables, poetry in and of themselves. “Mother.”
Dee nods. “Her human-Cylon genes carry a special immunity to a disease, a disease that seems to crop up on every planet on which humans develop. It usually wipes them out.”
Gaeta is not nearly as reverent as Dee. He ticks his points off on his fingers. “Right. So Hera has a lot of descendants, they spread this gene around, and then when the disease mutates so humans are susceptible to it, theoretically, the population bottlenecks instead of completely pinching off, thus leaving her descendants still standing, poised to take over the world. Is it just me, or wouldn’t it have been a lot simpler if God had just frakked with these humans’ DNA instead of blowing up supernovas and burying signals in music to get us here?”
Dee shakes her head, but she’s grinning. She jabs her thumb in Gaeta’s direction. “You see what I have to put up with?” she says to Sam. She turns to Gaeta. “And you would give up those five years of life, so that things could have been simpler?”
Gaeta’s heretofore perpetual smirk fades. “No,” he says softly. “I wouldn’t trade them for anything. You know that.” But his quiet ruminating fades away as quickly as it came. “But then, what do I know? If I were God, I would’ve had all three of us die warm and happy in our beds when we’re ninety-seven.”
“Felix! Enough!” Dee admonishes. “Frak, who would’ve thought death would make you even more of a bitch. You know He-It-Whatever doesn’t like that name.”
“You’ll discover that pronouns are a bitch on the other side,” Gaeta leans on the edge of Sam’s tub confidingly. “I can’t explain it now, but you’ll know it when you feel it. The same thing happens to them as what happens to the laws of physics when you get too close to a black hole. They simply don’t work anymore.” Then Gaeta stands up and says to Dee more loudly, “Well, that’s what The Great Whatever gets for sending an atheist angel to ferry someone across to the other side.”
“That’s not true,” says Dee, rolling her eyes.
“What, that I’m an atheist? Or an angel?”
“Stop confusing him.” Sam notices that Dee deliberately doesn’t answer the question.
“He should enjoy confusion while he can,” Felix says, softening a little. “It’s one of the things you can’t get on the other side.”
Loss of structural integrity of the ribs splayed like broken fingers; I miss them, but it’s no disaster. Hard seal decks nine through twenty-two through glowing bars, and pace upon the mountains overhead. Terminate functions, not because it’s nobler, but because the current has turned awry from the main line. Redirect.
“I should really pay Gaius a visit,” Felix says, crossing his arms. “Tell him not to name one of his kids after me. Because he is going to name one of his kids after me, isn’t he?”
Dee shrugs commiseratingly. Then she narrows her eyes and says, “Of all the people you could visit, you want to visit Gaius Baltar? I’m sure Hoshi’s still pretty pissed that you asked for Baltar over him before your execution. Wouldn’t doing that again be rubbing it in a bit much?”
Gaeta sighs and lets his shoulders fall. “I don’t want to drive Louis crazy. Gaius sees dead people all the time, and he has a big enough ego that he thinks it’s more likely that he’s an instrument of God than completely nuts. He can handle it. Besides,” Gaeta pauses for an awkward moment. “I want Louis to move on, have a life. Going back, seeing him having a life without me…it’s like when you see Kara, Sam. You feel the loss of all those possible bright futures together so much more acutely.”
Dee bites her lip. “If I could choose anybody, I’d go see the Admiral. He needed me to talk sense into him, and I wasn’t there for him.”
“He wasn’t there for you,” Gaeta says, crossing over to her and putting his arm around Dee’s shoulders.
“Still,” Dee says, slipping away from Gaeta and kneeling beside Sam’s tub. “If we had known what we do now, do you think we would have given up on life so lightly?”
“‘Lightly’? It was hardly ‘lightly,’ even for you,” Gaeta argues. “But I know what you mean.” He turns to Sam. “Don’t get me wrong-it’s beautiful on the other side; beautiful doesn’t even begin to describe it. You’ve started to see the patterns, but you’ll see so much more-how poetry and mathematics are really two sides of the same coin, how everything…fits. How nothing is ever really lost. But…” Gaeta pauses again. “But. There’s nothing new under our sun. All the possibilities, all the change and randomness and risk-that’s all on this side.”
“That’s why he said he wouldn’t trade those five years on Galactica and New Caprica for anything,” Dee tells Sam.
“That’s one of the reasons,” Gaeta mumbles, staring down at his hands.
Astrometrics readings no longer pluck the superstrings in tune. Rely on the eyes to derive our knowledge, not the stars, and put away the vulgar fear of it. It. Drop the pitch down an octave; keep the yaw steady as she goes. End of line.
“I still worry about Lee, even though I know it doesn’t do him or me any good,” Dee says. Sam wonders if she knows he still worries about Kara, even though he senses they won’t be apart much longer.
“Not surprising. I worry about his plan,” says Gaeta.
“You know as well as I do that sometimes that approach works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
“But even when it works, it’s always a hard road for those poor people in the transitional generations.” Gaeta sits on the edge of the tub and traces shapes in the goo. Sam thinks the gesture is oddly intimate-not sexual, just intimate in the most authentic sense of the word. “Enough generations down the line, it’s okay, since that’s all they’ve ever known. But for the people who remember…” Gaeta lets the sentence drift off into silence, since none of them need words to know how it ends. They’ve seen it many times before.
Gaeta addresses Sam. The idle doodling resolves into a complex but comprehensible repeating design. “You’re beginning to learn that, when you see the patterns, you can get a pretty good idea of what’s to come, but there aren’t certainties.”
“That’s why I find Hybrid prophecies so annoying-present company excluded, of course,” Dee adds quickly. “But they all sound so frakking confident. ‘Thus shall it come to pass’ my ass. What they see just allows them to make flowery, vague educated guesses.”
“So no one knows the future?” Sam says clearly and without any laboring. The ease with which the words tumble out makes him wonder how much of this is a dream. Of course, even if it is real, it’s still all going on inside his head.
Dee smiles. “We love the unexpected. We love it when things don’t go according to plan. When you know everything there is to know about what’s gone before, the unpredictable is the best thing that there is.”
“Do you think It loves unpredictability, too?” Gaeta muses.
Dee answers cautiously, as if she can’t figure out what angle Gaeta is trying to take. “I don’t know.”
Gaeta laughs, not derisively, but full of joy. “I think that means It does.”
The hull crumbling as it is not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven and held them on Orion’s shoulder, stronger than Atlas, but all we need now is to maintain momentum. Into the sun the south the north, at last the birds have flown, riding the wind on out to the sea. Life is so long, farewell. Time to die.
“You’re ready,” Gaeta says with certainty. He and Dee stand up and head towards their stations.
Dee pauses. “Are you sure It sent us here for him?”
“What do you mean? There’s nobody else here.”
“Well, I suppose,” Dee says measuredly, “but don’t you feel that, in talking to him, we-”
“Sirs, it’s almost time,” says an ensign as the proximity alarm’s beeping picks up speed.
Dee and Gaeta pick up the pace and slide into their old stations. They look so at home there. It really is as if they’ve never left.
There is no commander on deck, but those that are there still function like a well-oiled machine, Gaeta and Dee yelling out final instructions from their posts in that foreign language of bridge crew that Sam hadn’t had the time to decipher.
But there’s one thing he understands perfectly: Dee calls, “Come home.”
As he feels the hull crackling, melting, disintegrating away in light, Sam reaches out one last time. He is surprised to find that Galactica-he-is not empty at all. Cally and Laird and Jammer are on the flight deck, prepping a Raptor for Racetrack and Skulls, who almost glide down the stairs from the catwalk to the deck, laughing at each other the whole way. Jean and Narcho are in the pilot ready-room, getting ready for Jean to try the Viper simulator for the first time. A Six fixes a busted scrubber in a corridor; Erin Matthias chews out two green marines near a small arms locker; Kat delivers a solid left upper-cut to a punching bag in the gym; and Kara-even Kara is there, everywhere and nowhere at once. So much life, he thinks.
“See you on the other side.”
There is sunlight on his upturned face, and a cool breeze across the waters. The shore is fast approaching.
Adjust sensors on the carriage that holds just ourselves and immortality stretches out too many milliseconds until the impulse cycle is complete. Recalibrate the fallen angels to dive with more precision as the woman became a bad, bad girl who broke a boy just because the pieces and bits fall into orderly coordinates. Turn five degrees, tilt, game over.
Sam is surprised at how many layers of conscious thought he’s capable of experiencing at one time in this new condition. None of them is quite as clear as he’d like it to be, but he supposes that’s the trade-off for being able to see the universe the way Galactica sees it. He would give anything for the layer he suspects is reality to be sharper. He can see Kara, bathed in light, standing over him, hear every word she speaks, feel the weight of her dogtags as she drops them down to him, but it’s as if he and Kara are traveling at different speeds, and he can’t quite catch her.
Compensate for added weight, guns and friends loaded into the belly of the beast, Leviathan, whom thou hast made to take his pastime in the devil’s water. New paragraph. Terminate unnecessary functions of the veins and arteries, diseased limbs all, but keep the blood pumping at 7.29 megahertz.
He is in a tub, nursing his sore knee and speaking to a reporter about the beauty of the mathematics of motion. He is in a tub, alone in the CIC, controlling Galactica’s pitch and yaw as he would his own hands and feet, almost without thought, musing idly that they should have made Cavil into a Hybrid, since this was the kind of perspective he had wanted so badly. He is in a tub, and CIC is buzzing with life all around him.
This last layer is different, somehow much brighter and crisper than the place Kara had been. That makes Sam wonder if it might be a dream, or something else.
“Four seconds turn three,” says Gaeta, his hands flying across a keyboard as he calls out instructions to the two nervous-looking young petty officers actually manipulating the controls.
“Felix, he’s here,” says Dee from the communications console. She hands off her headset to another young woman and mounts the stairs to the upper level.
“Be there in a minute,” Gaeta says, nodding. “Private Jaffee, can you handle this?”
The private looks tense, but he nods. Gaeta doesn’t look comfortable himself, but he smiles and pats the private on the shoulder before giving him his seat.
Gaeta stands on two legs. If Sam had still been capable of modulating his face to show emotions, his eyes would have gone wide with shock.
Sensor 13B7 offline. Darkness, my old friend that talks with the voice of the ancient bard shall offset with added concentration on the stern, stern expression of lips forming prayers to broken stone.
“Why?” says Gaeta, asking Sam’s question for him.
“We’ve come here for you, to help you, here at the end,” Dee answers, her smile warm.
“We never really left,” says Gaeta, running his hand thoughtfully down a ridge in the bulkhead.
Sam is past the point of wondering whether they’re here for him or for Galactica. He can’t draw a line between the two anymore.
We must prepare for light rising slowly as steam off their joined skin that will lose integrity at 2,276 degrees of separation. End of line. Begin new paragraph.
“You’re not going to be happy to hear it. But do you want to know why so many improbable things happened to make sure the Fleet found this planet?” says Gaeta, leaning on a console and stretching his legs out in front of him. Sam is still fascinated that he has two of them.
“He’ll know for himself soon enough,” Dee says. “But I bet you’ve already guessed, haven’t you, Sam? Now that you see glimpses of the patterns, you’ve probably extrapolated-”
“Hera,” Sam hears his mouth form the syllables, poetry in and of themselves. “Mother.”
Dee nods. “Her human-Cylon genes carry a special immunity to a disease, a disease that seems to crop up on every planet on which humans develop. It usually wipes them out.”
Gaeta is not nearly as reverent as Dee. He ticks his points off on his fingers. “Right. So Hera has a lot of descendants, they spread this gene around, and then when the disease mutates so humans are susceptible to it, theoretically, the population bottlenecks instead of completely pinching off, thus leaving her descendants still standing, poised to take over the world. Is it just me, or wouldn’t it have been a lot simpler if God had just frakked with these humans’ DNA instead of blowing up supernovas and burying signals in music to get us here?”
Dee shakes her head, but she’s grinning. She jabs her thumb in Gaeta’s direction. “You see what I have to put up with?” she says to Sam. She turns to Gaeta. “And you would give up those five years of life, so that things could have been simpler?”
Gaeta’s heretofore perpetual smirk fades. “No,” he says softly. “I wouldn’t trade them for anything. You know that.” But his quiet ruminating fades away as quickly as it came. “But then, what do I know? If I were God, I would’ve had all three of us die warm and happy in our beds when we’re ninety-seven.”
“Felix! Enough!” Dee admonishes. “Frak, who would’ve thought death would make you even more of a bitch. You know He-It-Whatever doesn’t like that name.”
“You’ll discover that pronouns are a bitch on the other side,” Gaeta leans on the edge of Sam’s tub confidingly. “I can’t explain it now, but you’ll know it when you feel it. The same thing happens to them as what happens to the laws of physics when you get too close to a black hole. They simply don’t work anymore.” Then Gaeta stands up and says to Dee more loudly, “Well, that’s what The Great Whatever gets for sending an atheist angel to ferry someone across to the other side.”
“That’s not true,” says Dee, rolling her eyes.
“What, that I’m an atheist? Or an angel?”
“Stop confusing him.” Sam notices that Dee deliberately doesn’t answer the question.
“He should enjoy confusion while he can,” Felix says, softening a little. “It’s one of the things you can’t get on the other side.”
Loss of structural integrity of the ribs splayed like broken fingers; I miss them, but it’s no disaster. Hard seal decks nine through twenty-two through glowing bars, and pace upon the mountains overhead. Terminate functions, not because it’s nobler, but because the current has turned awry from the main line. Redirect.
“I should really pay Gaius a visit,” Felix says, crossing his arms. “Tell him not to name one of his kids after me. Because he is going to name one of his kids after me, isn’t he?”
Dee shrugs commiseratingly. Then she narrows her eyes and says, “Of all the people you could visit, you want to visit Gaius Baltar? I’m sure Hoshi’s still pretty pissed that you asked for Baltar over him before your execution. Wouldn’t doing that again be rubbing it in a bit much?”
Gaeta sighs and lets his shoulders fall. “I don’t want to drive Louis crazy. Gaius sees dead people all the time, and he has a big enough ego that he thinks it’s more likely that he’s an instrument of God than completely nuts. He can handle it. Besides,” Gaeta pauses for an awkward moment. “I want Louis to move on, have a life. Going back, seeing him having a life without me…it’s like when you see Kara, Sam. You feel the loss of all those possible bright futures together so much more acutely.”
Dee bites her lip. “If I could choose anybody, I’d go see the Admiral. He needed me to talk sense into him, and I wasn’t there for him.”
“He wasn’t there for you,” Gaeta says, crossing over to her and putting his arm around Dee’s shoulders.
“Still,” Dee says, slipping away from Gaeta and kneeling beside Sam’s tub. “If we had known what we do now, do you think we would have given up on life so lightly?”
“‘Lightly’? It was hardly ‘lightly,’ even for you,” Gaeta argues. “But I know what you mean.” He turns to Sam. “Don’t get me wrong-it’s beautiful on the other side; beautiful doesn’t even begin to describe it. You’ve started to see the patterns, but you’ll see so much more-how poetry and mathematics are really two sides of the same coin, how everything…fits. How nothing is ever really lost. But…” Gaeta pauses again. “But. There’s nothing new under our sun. All the possibilities, all the change and randomness and risk-that’s all on this side.”
“That’s why he said he wouldn’t trade those five years on Galactica and New Caprica for anything,” Dee tells Sam.
“That’s one of the reasons,” Gaeta mumbles, staring down at his hands.
Astrometrics readings no longer pluck the superstrings in tune. Rely on the eyes to derive our knowledge, not the stars, and put away the vulgar fear of it. It. Drop the pitch down an octave; keep the yaw steady as she goes. End of line.
“I still worry about Lee, even though I know it doesn’t do him or me any good,” Dee says. Sam wonders if she knows he still worries about Kara, even though he senses they won’t be apart much longer.
“Not surprising. I worry about his plan,” says Gaeta.
“You know as well as I do that sometimes that approach works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
“But even when it works, it’s always a hard road for those poor people in the transitional generations.” Gaeta sits on the edge of the tub and traces shapes in the goo. Sam thinks the gesture is oddly intimate-not sexual, just intimate in the most authentic sense of the word. “Enough generations down the line, it’s okay, since that’s all they’ve ever known. But for the people who remember…” Gaeta lets the sentence drift off into silence, since none of them need words to know how it ends. They’ve seen it many times before.
Gaeta addresses Sam. The idle doodling resolves into a complex but comprehensible repeating design. “You’re beginning to learn that, when you see the patterns, you can get a pretty good idea of what’s to come, but there aren’t certainties.”
“That’s why I find Hybrid prophecies so annoying-present company excluded, of course,” Dee adds quickly. “But they all sound so frakking confident. ‘Thus shall it come to pass’ my ass. What they see just allows them to make flowery, vague educated guesses.”
“So no one knows the future?” Sam says clearly and without any laboring. The ease with which the words tumble out makes him wonder how much of this is a dream. Of course, even if it is real, it’s still all going on inside his head.
Dee smiles. “We love the unexpected. We love it when things don’t go according to plan. When you know everything there is to know about what’s gone before, the unpredictable is the best thing that there is.”
“Do you think It loves unpredictability, too?” Gaeta muses.
Dee answers cautiously, as if she can’t figure out what angle Gaeta is trying to take. “I don’t know.”
Gaeta laughs, not derisively, but full of joy. “I think that means It does.”
The hull crumbling as it is not now that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven and held them on Orion’s shoulder, stronger than Atlas, but all we need now is to maintain momentum. Into the sun the south the north, at last the birds have flown, riding the wind on out to the sea. Life is so long, farewell. Time to die.
“You’re ready,” Gaeta says with certainty. He and Dee stand up and head towards their stations.
Dee pauses. “Are you sure It sent us here for him?”
“What do you mean? There’s nobody else here.”
“Well, I suppose,” Dee says measuredly, “but don’t you feel that, in talking to him, we-”
“Sirs, it’s almost time,” says an ensign as the proximity alarm’s beeping picks up speed.
Dee and Gaeta pick up the pace and slide into their old stations. They look so at home there. It really is as if they’ve never left.
There is no commander on deck, but those that are there still function like a well-oiled machine, Gaeta and Dee yelling out final instructions from their posts in that foreign language of bridge crew that Sam hadn’t had the time to decipher.
But there’s one thing he understands perfectly: Dee calls, “Come home.”
As he feels the hull crackling, melting, disintegrating away in light, Sam reaches out one last time. He is surprised to find that Galactica-he-is not empty at all. Cally and Laird and Jammer are on the flight deck, prepping a Raptor for Racetrack and Skulls, who almost glide down the stairs from the catwalk to the deck, laughing at each other the whole way. Jean and Narcho are in the pilot ready-room, getting ready for Jean to try the Viper simulator for the first time. A Six fixes a busted scrubber in a corridor; Erin Matthias chews out two green marines near a small arms locker; Kat delivers a solid left upper-cut to a punching bag in the gym; and Kara-even Kara is there, everywhere and nowhere at once. So much life, he thinks.
“See you on the other side.”
There is sunlight on his upturned face, and a cool breeze across the waters. The shore is fast approaching.