In the Whole World: Chapter 15, "The Cry of the Horn"
Chapter 15: "And the Whole World Shall Dissolve With the Cry of the Horn…"
Word count: ~3,500
A/N: Just a timely reminder that there is an Act II, and that nobody needs to panic yet.
Also, I posted two chapters at once. If you haven’t read Chapter 14, go there first.
Lee and Kara were covered in dirt as they crawled through the hatch into Galactica's tylium reserve tanks. They were mostly empty, now. The room was cold, when it used to be too hot to enter. It was strange to think that it'd be cold, forever, now.
Lee and Kara exchanged a brief glance, which said silently, Which way? The route back past the ventral main batteries and up onto C-level would be fastest, but it would take them perilously close to the flight deck, where they might be seen and forced to answer questions, or worse, conscripted for another mission. The route forward, through the FTLs and up into the brig, would be much slower.
"Sam said he’s ahead of us. Speed is the key."
Lee reluctantly agreed. But he never got a chance to see how that plan would have worked; they were halfway up the ladder when the man who was ahead of them came over the intercom. They both recognized him instantaneously. And they both froze as it became clear that Leoben Conoy had hijacked Galactica's communication system.
"Kara Thrace. Please be advised that I'm on the external launch pad in a Viper. Come out of hiding, Kara, and bring the Horn with you. If you need inducement…" the radio crackled, "I'm prepared to fire on one civilian building every quarter hour until you meet me and tell me where it is. And God bless you, Kara."
They were still for a long, shocked second. "He went through the frakking flight deck and no one stopped him?" Lee's tone was disbelieving. "Where the frak is everyone?"
He hopped off the ladder, even as Kara began to frantically scramble up it before his incredulous eyes.
"Kara-wait. You can't seriously intend to go after him."
"I have to. He'll do what he said. I know it. And I'm overdue for shooting that bastard out of the frakking sky."
"It's a trick. He knows something-he'll say something, mess with you-"
"I know. But I can't let him kill anyone else. And-it's time I knew what he knows." She gripped the rungs tightly, as if to stop herself from climbing. "And you have to go get the Horn, if it's still here, if he doesn't have it already."
She was like a coiled spring, and the weight that was actually holding her in place was in the heavy censure, and the sadness, emanating from his eyes. He held her there. "Is this it, Kara?"
"I don't know.” She didn’t, but she also didn’t want to know. No goodbyes, please. “Lee, I have to go."
"And that's all you're gonna say."
She thought of what there was left to say, felt regrets tumble like laundry in her head. I'm sorry. I love you. Don't forget me. I'm sorry. Let me go. Be happy. I'm sorry. But not too happy… "If you could manage to blow up that frakking statue-once I'm gone-"
He swung away. "Got it. Good hunting, Lieutenant."
"Good-good hunting, Apollo." And then she was scrambling up the ladder, not letting herself look back, and he was darting back through the FTLs.
As she passed through the battery chamber, Kara let herself regret not having gotten a last look at his face.
Emerging from the Cylon base star with new knowledge that made sense of a few of his nightmares, Galen Tyrol happened to glance at the sky.
It was the third time this evening that he'd seen a Raider flicker across it and disappear.
I'm so sick of frakking signs, Kara had screamed at him, months ago, receiving the one that had led her to build the temple. He'd laughed.
He was starting to get a solid sense of how she'd felt.
Lee didn't see anyone on his way into the pilots' quarters, though he'd had to duck out of sight more than once. When he got to the locker room, he was simultaneously annoyed and relieved to see it.
In Sam Anders' backpack, between two clean sets of tanks and under a half-full canteen of water, was the artifact Sam had claimed was the Horn of Cronus.
It looked like shit, Lee thought: green with age, worn on the underside. And it was tiny, too, no larger than two or three pyramid balls, one of which would be just a little too large to fit into its mouth.
He emptied most of the contents of the pack back into the locker-how had Sam had so many Leonid cigars four, almost five frakking years after the destruction of the colonies?-but slid the Horn itself back in and threw it over his shoulder.
And that was when he was caught.
"Apollo. Thank gods," Hotdog almost tripped over himself coming into the locker room. "Where have you been? Our evacuation plan's been shot to hell-your old man's AWOL, Helo's disappeared, and the Colonel's in the CIC losing his mind."
Lee felt the weight of the Lords of Kobol in the pack on his back. What the frak am I supposed to do with the damn thing, anyway? Fly it back to Athena's tomb and shove it in Cronus's hands?
What are you gonna do now? Kara had asked him earlier.
Whatever I can to help the most people, he'd said.
You get off on that stuff.
She’d been right, and so he let Hotdog lead him away from Kara and the flight deck, and toward Saul Tigh and the CIC, and ignored the feeling that somewhere out there, Kara Thrace was laughing at him, laughing under sad, old eyes.
A hundred yards from the temple, Helo and Sharon drew up short, four dozen Eights and Sixes grouping behind them.
"Is that… what it looks like?" Karl whispered.
Between each column of the temple stood a Centurion, gleaming in the starlight, guns extended and at the ready. They didn't look like a welcome party.
"Who the frak sent the Centurions here?" Sharon was incredulous. A horrified murmur was springing up behind them.
"They might have sent themselves." Helo bent to one knee and lifted his binoculars to get a steady reading on them. That they hadn’t already opened fire was the only hopeful sign.
"The temple’s our only avenue of escape! How are we supposed to meet the Raptors? How are we going to get to Galactica? To Hera? What the frak are we supposed to do, now?"
Helo glanced behind him. They weren't being followed; the civilian militia seemed to have no organized plan for the Cylons, as of yet, except to hold a line between them and the battlestar. A handful of Gemenese, unarmed, had been trailing them for sometime, but Helo didn’t worry about what couldn’t kill him.
Still, with armed civilians behind them, and rebel Centurions guarding the temple in front of them, there wasn't much to say except, "We're out of options. We should probably think about which of them we ought to surrender to."
Sharon's wide, horrified eyes followed him as he sat down on the ground and let his eyes scan the sky-where Hitei Kan and Greenleaf were looking and lurking.
And there it was. Damn. The plan he should of thought of hours before.
Fortunately for Karl Agathon, Lee Adama was devising that same plan, even now. "The Centurions guarding the temple give us no options. We have to seize one of them. Probably the Hitei Kan because its carrying capacity is higher."
Saul was grateful for Lee's preoccupation with fleet specs-a hangover, he suspected, from his experience with the Ocean Carrier.
"Spell it out, son. What do we do with it once we've got it?"
Lee's gaze was clear. "We evacuate the Cylon resisters, and anyone who wants to avoid the theocracy. We resettle. On another continent. They won't have the tylium to come after us more than once, if they even try at all."
"We held the fleet together through five years of hell-"
"We had an external enemy and it still almost fell apart a dozen times. Now, we're turning on each other. An old story, Colonel, but you know that." Lee's tone was pointed, and the direction in which it was pointed was the ruins of the old Earth. "This is it. This is the only way we save our people."
Saul leaned forward on the table. "And what about the ones we can't find-Baltar and Caprica, Helo… your old man?"
That gave Lee pause. "You're right. We need a contingency plan." He thought fast. "So we take 'em both, the Greenleaf, too. They're almost defenseless, except for their FTLs. We leave the Greenleaf here to give us a chance to make contact with stragglers and collect them."
Lee let his eyes travel around the room he was in, felt his heart constrict at the idea of leaving Galactica forever-and that was before he remembered his house, up in the hills, the one Kara had built for him that he would probably never see again.
"The old girl's served us well.” Saul Tigh had been watching him. "But we don't need her any more, Lee. We're right to leave her."
You left me a hundred times over, Kara was repeating her earlier point in his head. You left me, you left me, you left me…
He knew Saul was wrong about what he needed. But Lee Adama thought, as ever, about what the fleet needed, and shoved that feeling aside.
"Right. I'll coordinate the strike…"
A blonde young man, sturdy but not tall, attractive enough but not exactly handsome, spun around the center of the temple, looking with satisfaction at the Centurions' backs ringing around him, enclosing this space. He kept his eyes resolutely away from the statue looming over his head, because the statue-what it tried to mean-made him too angry. He leaned back against his Raider, stroking it absently as he turned to stare at the dead man, collapsed in the tub in front of him.
He sighed heavily. He'd meant to save these people, not destroy them, but then he'd always been too reckless by half. So Ellen used to tell him. And she might’ve been right, because he’d never intended this. But hell, it was impossible to control every contingency, as Lee Adama had taught him over a year ago.
Ellen… he wondered where she was, if she'd made it through the labyrinth of song and story and fire by which he'd led all these others to Earth. He'd missed the old broad.
He had a duty, here, though, and thought it was fitting that he would be the one who'd carry it out. He fell to his knees next to Sam Anders.
"God of all things, hear my prayer." One of the Centurions' swiveled his head over his shoulder, at that, and the man noticed, cocked his head at it. He was glad he'd finally arrived to remove those enslavement belts from them. "Come on then." The Centurion came, watched a long moment, then cautiously knelt beside him. "Commend the soul of your son-one of my fathers-to heaven this day…"
The blonde man-whom Sam Anders had known, once, as Daniel-reached his hands into the water and placed his hands on Sam's shoulders. And then pressed him slowly down into the water, to be baptized in the wake of his death.
Lee was using his Viper's sights to scan the air and ground as he flew, only half-conscious that what he was looking for was any trace, any trace whatsoever of Kara. She gotten into a Viper to pursue Leoben Conoy, and no one had seen either of them since.
There. On top of the temple, at the rendezvous point. Galactica's rolling high beams had illuminated, for just a second, what looked like a flash of blonde hair. The someone who was standing there, all alone, was neither tall nor willowy enough to be a Six.
Lee immediately pulled out of formation, and switched his headset channel.
"Blue Squadron, proceed to Hitei Kan. I'm investigating a civilian rescue situation on top of the temple. You have your orders." Lee deeply believed that they could manage to commandeer Hitei Kan without firing a single shot. He hoped they didn’t prove him wrong.
"Roger that, Major," crackled Hotdog's voice across the radio.
In the darkness, he could scarcely make out the shape of the person he'd seen so clearly from above. He set his Viper down carefully, felt his front pouch to ensure the Horn was still securely on his person, and opened the hatch.
"Ah, Lee Adama, as promised." A voice he didn't recognize-a man's voice-rippled through the night.
And that was when Lee saw her, up in the sky. There were two Vipers, one chasing the other, tearing across the sky overhead. He saw the back one try to swing in front of the other and cut it off, saw it angrily fire across the bow of the other with reckless precision.
He would have known it was Kara if he’d last seen her 50 years, instead of 50 minutes, ago.
"Aha, and there they are," the man echoed his thoughts. "The stage is set." He sighed, sounding genuinely regretful, and then gestured to Lee with one hand. Lee felt a chill as he saw the glint of gunmetal grey flash in the night. "I'm very sorry to have to do this, Major Adama. You know that I feel a kind of-kinship-with you. But a prophecy, however poorly prophesied, carries with it certain obligations." The man’s mouth turned down at the corners as he shrugged, lifted both hands, and fired.
The bullet hit Lee squarely in the shoulder-opposite of where Kara's bullet had, not so many years before, and mercifully higher. He fell back, his vision washing white with shock. When it came back, he saw the front Viper-Leoben-take a sudden nosedive for the ground, and watched Kara follow.
Oh, gods, no, oh, please gods, no. It had never occurred to him that he might actually have to watch her die.
Again.
Both pulled up from the field at the last moment. Their chase continued. Lee concentrated hard, and managed to flick on his radio.
"If you'll take me to the Horn, Kara, you can end this now," Conoy was telling her calmly, despite the rate at which he was repeatedly confronting the likelihood of his own death.
"It's… here," Lee croaked into his radio, but he wasn't close enough to it that it could pick up his voice. He turned to the man who’d shot him, whose motives he didn’t understand, whom his instincts, not that he’d ever paid them any mind, felt was somehow on his side. “Tell them it’s here.”
"Frak you," Kara was saying to Leoben. "Tell me why you want it. Tell me how you even know it's here."
"You know that already. I see patterns. What has already happened, could never have happened, without the Horn. And it needs to happen again. I should have realized it as soon as I saw that wreck, on the Cylon Earth. There are missing pieces. We have to find them. Together. Have I ever led you astray?"
"Heard that line before," the man next to Lee murmured. He reached, an apologetic expression on his fact, into Lee's front pouch to pull out the Horn of Cronus. “I’m not sure you would have given it to me any other way, Major. That must be why this happened.” He pulled the Arrow of Apollo from the bag he'd had hidden behind him, and tossed it onto Lee's chest. "Although I can offer this in exchange."
"Who…the frak… are you?" Lee demanded, trying to hold onto consciousness.
The man ignored that question, as if it were absurd. "Don't forget that you have certain obligations, too, Major. You made a promise. And even our supplies won't last forever."
He picked up the radio. "It's me, Leoben. I have the Horn."
The radio went silent.
Then the blonde man lifted it to his lips, and, holding the radio in front of it, blew the Horn of Cronus.
Its high, sweet sound filled the air with music that Lee felt as if something inside him were making it, something pure and perfect, like the expectation he'd had when he was young of one day looking back fondly on his own life. It was as if he were doing just that, to hear the Horn. So when tears sprang to his eyes, he wasn't sure if it was the sound or the pain in this throbbing shoulder that put them there.
His eyes found the two Vipers, in the sky. Kara seemed about to overtake Leoben again. And her voice came through the radio. He strained to hear it. "…swear I’ll see… by the… other… Apollo…"
Her voice, one last time.
And then Kara Thrace, for the first time in her godsdamned life, did exactly what she'd promised she would do: she simply disappeared, Viper and all.
Leoben Conoy and the man with the Horn went with her.
All the fanfare of a whisper in an empty forest, Lee thought. He couldn't make sense of it, couldn't begin to try, although parts of it were nagging at him... He let the Arrow of Apollo fall to the floor of his Viper heedlessly as he laboriously rolled himself onto the stone beneath his vehicle.
He wasn't sure which part of him hurt the most as he struggled for the steps, pressing his hand to his bleeding shoulder. He stumbled down to the central chamber, not exactly sure how it was that the clock was still moving forward, how he still had choices he had to make. But since he did, there was one in particular that was of pressing importance.
Lee didn't know whether he was about to die-he didn't know anything, the world had fallen apart at least four times today-but he had an idea that he would never have let himself pursue, if he weren't losing so much blood, if she hadn't just disappeared with Leoben and a stranger and the Horn of Cronus, if he weren't pretty sure that he would never see or touch just about anything she'd ever seen or touched, ever again, even if he lived, because he was leading a large-scale retreat to another continent, and she’d never find him there, even if she were ever coming back, which didn't seem very likely.
But he had a thought, and he let himself think it, now, and the thought was that, if he were dying, he wanted to see her face again.
He got to the main crossing in the center of the temple.
There was the group of Centurions, no longer on guard. They were huddled together now, a few yards to the south of the temple, staring up at the sky overhead much as Lee had been doing, moments before.
There were Helo and-was that Sharon?-and a host of Sixes and Eights, crowded behind the Centurions, looking uncertainly away from the temple, at the people coming up in crowds behind them.
There was Sam, lifeless underwater in his bath.
And there was that godsdamned statue of Kara Thrace, flames ringing her temple, that fake Arrow of Apollo in her hands, the Earth at her sandaled feet, with what looked to him, now, like scorn in her eyes.
If you could manage to blow up that frakking statue-once I'm gone-
With his good arm, Lee drew out his sidearm. He shot her right between the eyes, eight, ten, twelve times, until the bullets were gone, and he kept firing as he fell down to the ground.
"Gods damn you, Kara Thrace!" He didn't even hear himself. He was screaming what he was thinking. It hadn't happened to him in years. Since New Caprica. These were words he'd normally screen, but that, too, was beyond him, just now. So he screamed them again.
That was why he also barely heard it when the Legion members, a Two, two Gemenese women approached him from behind. They floated in his vision.
He understood that they were new emissaries from Sarah Porter's government in the moment that they slammed handcuffs on his wrists.
"Lee Adama," one of the women said evenly, "you're under arrest for conspiracy to kidnap Sarah Porter. For the murder of Samuel T. Anders. For high treason against the democratic colonial government. And for blasphemy against the savior of humanity-may the gods bring her soul to rest-Kara Thrace."
Kara would have thought that-all of that-was really frakking funny, Lee thought, and he almost let himself laugh. But then he remembered: the man. The horn and the arrow. Hera. Kara's brother? Sam was dead. His father, where was his father? Hitei Kan and Greenleaf. The election.
The pear tree.
"I need morpha," he said. He took his hand off his shoulder and let it bleed, then staggered with the new jolt of pain. Cuffed hands in no position to catch him, Lee Adama fell flat on his face.
And everything went mercifully black, the world having ended for the fifth time that day, as he damned Kara with his last conscious thought.
(End of Act I)
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( Next: Begin Act II)