This is an extension of my other story, Caught by the Bolo. You shouldn't need to read that one to understand this one. In the first story, Six meets up with one of Keith Laumer's Bolos, a series of hugely powerful, sentient tanks. Things go badly for her.
Some of the comments made me wonder... what about the other crazy blonde on BSG? We can't leave her out. And thus, this. I hope you enjoy.
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the properties contained in Battlestar Galactica, nor those of Baen Book's Bolo series. This is just a spot of innocent fun.
Starbuck watched the landscape slip by under the Raptor.
There wasn't much to see. Like the last three the fleet had visited, the world was nearly barren. Someone had gone through considerable effort to wipe out all life in this section of the galaxy, and had done a pretty good job. This world differed from the rest in that someone had killed it using more conventional means, rather than the enhanced-radiation nukes used to kill the last world... or the poison gas of the world before it, or whatever the frak had been used to actually ignite the atmosphere of the world before that.
The entire fleet was on edge. Some kind of insanity had grabbed hold of the people – or creatures – that lived in this section of the universe, and nobody wanted to meet the in-patients. Morale was at its lowest since New Caprica, as the fleet watched murdered world after murdered world pass by. The Gemonese were twisting themselves into knots, trying to figure out how to incorporate the idea of aliens into their religious beliefs, and Starbuck couldn't understand how they'd never thought of it before.
Going from dead world to dead world, they tried to figure out who was the attacker and who was the victim... but perhaps there wasn't a distinction. Neither side had gone easily into the night. Enormous amounts of wreckage and disabled machines of war were strewn far and wide.
And people were coming to believe – Kara silently, Colonel Tigh much more vocally – that who-ever had been the aggressor, nobody had won. Just losers, all around. Nobody had come to bury the dead because there was nobody left but the dead.
To be honest, nobody except perhaps Gaeta was all that interested in knowing the history of this psychotic war. The Colonials had their own problems, their own war, and forty thousand refugees living on a fleet of barely-space-worthy ships tended to be more concerned with practical matters. Starbuck knew that Roslin herself wanted to run from the dead worlds as fast as the jump drives could carry them. These worlds were too poisoned, too scorched, to provide much in the way of food or even water. What Admiral Adama had pointed out, and what had cinched the deal, was that these worlds could provide plenty in the way of salvage. Guns. Armour. Electronics. Even damaged, there were technologies here the Colonials had never even dreamed of.
There was less wreckage on this world than the rest, but people could actually walk here without environment suits. A bit of radiation in the atmosphere and in the ground, but nothing the Galactica's anti-radiation meds couldn't take care of. So Admiral Adama was willing to spend an entire week lingering here, while they set up a small camp on the surface for the purpose of grave-robbing.
He didn't like it when she put it that way.
Whatever. It wasn't meant as an insult, just as a simple statement of the way things were.
Starbuck was actually utterly fascinated, very much involved in the planetary work. Which surprised Apollo and a number of the pilots. Apparently, they'd written her off as not particularly academically-inclined, that if it couldn't be flown or smoked or drunk she wouldn't be interested.
Well, in their faces. They hadn't been there, on that first overflight of one of the dead worlds. Hadn't seen the graveyards of war up-close and personal. Hadn't seen one of them, except through high-resolution optical telescopes.
The Juggernauts.
It was the Colonial name for the machines, of course, taken from some obscure ancient text describing giant, unstoppable engines of war. A more appropriate name Starbuck couldn't imagine. There were only a few scattered on each world, sometimes as many as a dozen. And for every one, there were dozens upon dozens of other machines, smashed, melted, crushed. It wasn't hard to figure out who had been shooting at who, and it wasn't hard to figure out which side had the harder time of it.
Each Juggernaut was a centrepiece of destruction the likes of which couldn't be believed. They'd died in the end, of course... unstoppable' wasn't completely true. But they'd made the enemy pay. Pay hard. There'd barely been anything left of the war machines by the time they'd been stopped, tattered wrecks, crushed and splintered. The Chief had told her that nukes had been used a lot of the time to kill them. Multiple nukes. Implying that just one wasn't enough.
There weren't many qualities Starbuck respected. Not much could penetrate the neurosis and psychosis and general crappy attitude she proudly presented to the world, making a lot of the other pilots and even her friends hesitant and sometimes flat-out scared of her. But she respected perseverance. Resoluteness. Bravery bordering on insanity – people who would kick down the gates of Hell just to spit in a demon's eye. It was why she liked battlestars, why she respected Laura Roslin, and why she loved William Adama almost like a father.
It was a quality that the Juggernauts, and the people who ran them, had had in spades.
When her Viper patrol had spotted one of the Juggernauts on this world, where humans could touch the ground and breathe the air without killing themselves, she knew she had to go there. To see it, to touch it with her own hands. She'd railroaded her way into the scouting mission, even though she wasn't one of the Marines. But she hadn't deliberately pissed off Adama or Tigh or Apollo in weeks, so the Admiral had let her go.
"Yo, Starbuck," Lieutenant Rita 'Ritz' Bahan nudged from the pilot's seat of the Raptor. Starbuck looked up from the Raptor's readouts, where she was trying very hard not to be a side-seat driver. Ritz was good, but like most Raptor pilots, lacked a certain pizazz. Starbuck wasn't going to rag on her about it at the moment, though. Not with the huge shape looming in the viewport.
A huge metal mountain on tracks. A hundred and twenty metres long, nearly forty wide. Four times bigger than Colonial One, and probably a thousand times as mean... which was saying something, when you got Roslin wound up. It sat on the crumbling rock of the small plain, tens of thousands of tons of quiet menace. The corpses of its foes stretched for kilometres in all directions, wolves slaughtered while bringing down the tiger.
It had been killed, but had somehow escaped the total ruin that most of its brethren had suffered. Which wasn't to say it was intact... as Ritz brought the Raptor in a slow circle of the wreck, Starbuck could see that the port side had been ravaged, almost all the armour stripped away, turrets and sensors scraped off as if by a giant knife. She could see deep into the machine's internals, strange and unidentifiable components, most of which had been blown into ruin. The two tracks which carried the Juggernaut's port side were simply gone, blown off, and the beast sat on bare bogeys. The track itself was no-where to be seen, implying that the machine had managed to travel a considerable distance even after the drive system had been shot up.
"Built tough" couldn't begin to encompass it. Starbuck felt a thrill climb her spine.
"We can probably land there," Starbuck said, pointing at a spot on the ground by the Juggernaut's port side, a patch of relatively-smooth rock and gravel. Ritz nodded, and brought the Raptor in for a smooth landing, the heavy scout's engines kicking up a dust storm of rock chips and sand, a beige curtain that almost hid the alien machine from view.
As the dust cleared, Ritz stared up at the giant, much more intimidating now that it loomed above them. "Frak me," she muttered. Starbuck couldn't resist a smirk; it was a phrase she'd been hearing an awful lot lately, in roughly the same tone of voice.
Standing up, she moved into the rear of the Raptor while Ritz put the engines into standby to save fuel. Not turned off, though; the Admiral had been very clear on that... everyone had to be ready to go at a moment's notice. The little research camp had grown to close to a hundred and fifty people over the past couple of days, and everyone knew the Cylons were still out there.
And though nobody said it, there was always the chance that one side or the other in this mysterious war might show up, out of the black, to take their world back.
Wireless handset, check. Sidearm, check. Radiation sensor, check. The surrounding landscape had shown that the surrounding landscape was surprisingly clean, but portions of the Juggernaut were still mildly radioactive. Mostly the port side, but nothing really "glowing", and as long as she didn't plan to set up a tent and bunk down on top of it, she'd be okay.
Apollo had shot her a look when the Chief had made that comment, as if he thought she'd actually been planning to do exactly that. The man had no faith in her at all.
Cracking open the hatch, she stepped out onto the Raptor's wing. Some dust still swirled in the air, coating her tongue with the taste of chalk and making her cough. By the time she'd coughed and spat her mouth clean, Ritz was standing beside her.
"You could have waited a minute, you know," she said. Starbuck ignored her.
They'd set down in the shadow of the Juggernaut, which stretched above them, its sloped upper surface two dozen metres over their heads, even standing on the Raptor. They couldn't even see the top of the machine. Together, the two women did a walk around the hulk, and Starbuck noted with annoyance that it was actually hard to see anything from this perspective. She'd had similar feelings before when doing EVA work on battlestars... some details were just too big to fit in the eye, or the mind. Track plates the size of a Viper, drive wheels as big as a Raptor. Armour plate, made of some alien material, as thick as a man was tall.
They rendezvoused on the opposite side of the Juggernaut, where they could admire the intact turrets of some impressive-looking guns mounted on the starboard side. While she didn't know what kind of guns the bigger ones were, Kara's practised eye could pick out smaller turrets underneath, carrying what looked like machine guns, rocket launchers, and what were probably anti-personnel explosives.
The presence of such weapons implied that it sometimes had to use them. Whatever its enemies had been, they obviously hadn't been lacking in courage either.
Coming to a decision, Starbuck began looking for handholds. After a moment she spotted a ladder reaching down between the front and rear track systems, and began to climb it.
Ritz squawked an objection. "Starbuck, what the hell are you doing?"
"I want to see the top," she called back, as if it was obvious. The ladder only stretched the two or three metres to the bottom of the hull. After that, small handholds had been built into the armour itself, and she carefully transferred her grip.
"If you wanted up, I could have flown you up!" The blonde's only response was a toothy grin thrown over her shoulder as she continued to climb. Ritz huffed in frustration. "Damn it, do you have to be crazy all the time?"
An impolitic statement, particularly to a superior officer, but it was one Kara was used to and ignored easily... she only got violent when someone compared her to Baltar. Instead, most of her attention was focused on scaling the Juggernaut.
It wasn't too difficult; the handholds were firm, and there were spots along the outside the hull that served as landings, where she could pause and rest. It was a moment or two after she pulled herself up onto the top of the hull, sitting on the edge, that she realized just how easy the climb had been. The rungs and handholds had been perfectly spaced for an adult human; the grips themselves shaped for a human-like hand.
What did that mean?
Standing up, she leaned over the edge – grateful that she wasn't subject to vertigo – and waved down to Ritz. She turned, looking over the upper hull. It was scarcely in better shape than the port side; armour was bent and torn, and in some places had melted and run like water. She was close to the centre main turret, which rose still higher from the top of the hull – a ball turret the size of a house. It was smashed, as was the one located closer to the bow. The third, mounted on the aft portion of the hull, looked to have been shot, but was still largely intact. The huge cannon jut out just a bit off centre. She was certain she could have stood up inside the barrel of the huge weapon, with headroom to spare.
Tyrol was going to do a little dance when she told him. He'd been looking for an intact example of one of the big guns.
Starbuck walked toward the front of the Juggernaut – which often involved leaping over rents in the hull, climbing over strange projections, and keeping an eye on her rad-meter. A particularly big hole on the front glacis caught her attention, and she carefully manoeuvred herself until she stood on the wound itself.
It was like a tunnel, reaching deep into the hull, bored out as if by some giant drill. The walls were smooth. An energy weapon, then, like a portable version of the huge lasers the Colonies used to shape battlestar components... although much more powerful, if it had managed to do this in the split-seconds of real combat.
Turning around, she eyed the direction the shot would have come from, assuming it was an immediate kill. There... three klicks distant, there was a wreck. She thought she could see something that looked vaguely like a cannon pointed toward her. Silent now, but not soon enough for the beast she stood on.
Though the day was actually pretty warm, Starbuck felt cold dripping down her spine. She turned around, and tried to pretend the other wreck wasn't there.
Ritz picked that moment to radio up, and Kara almost felt gratitude. "Are we having fun, yet?"
She laughed before keying the handset. "I am, I dunno about you."
"I'll be having fun when I try to explain to Apollo why I let you climb up there so you could fall and break your neck. What do you see up there? So I have something useful to put on the incident report, you understand."
She snorted. "It's a mess up here, like you'd expect. One of the main guns is intact, though, which'll make the Chief pretty happy. Not too radioactive, either." She paused. "There's a big hole up here... extends pretty deep into the hull. I'm going to climb in and have a look."
"Starbuck, for frak's sake-"
She put the handset back into the holster on her belt, letting Ritz express her displeasure roughly in the vicinity of Starbuck's ass. Crouching down, she plucked a small flashlight from a pocket on her thigh, shining it down the length of the tunnel carved into the Juggernaut. The hole was largely clear of debris; though a few spots looked to have had equipment above collapse, there didn't seem to be any points where she would have to struggle. At least, as far as the beam of her light could show... the tunnel extended deep into the Juggernaut, far beyond the point where her pitiful light could shine.
She made good time in the tunnel, dodging debris, only smacking her head twice and her knee once... although she would have preferred another hit to the head, since the knee she bumped was the same one she'd hurt bad years ago.
After about ten minutes of crouching and crawling, the tunnel suddenly opened up into a compartment of some sort. Elated, she cast her flashlight over the walls and ceiling, noting the room was tall enough to stand up in. Panels and keyboards adorned the walls, all dark. And right in the centre, there was a bulky, padded chair, turned slightly away, with no apparent occupant.
"Frak me," she muttered, utterly thrilled.
Dust, blown in over the decades through the hole, had coated the inside of the Juggernaut. Standing, she noticed that the melted tunnel continued through the compartment into some kind of chamber located aft of it. Something silver reflected the light from her light. Mving forward, passing the chair, she crouched and peeked through the hole.
A sphere of some sort was mounted on a kind of frame. What was left of a sphere, that is... Starbuck guessed that when it was intact it had been over a metre and a half across, and probably heavy as hell. The attack had struck it solidly, vapourizing nearly half its bulk and then burrowing a few more metres into the bulkhead behind. She wondered if that was the damage that had killed the Juggernaut, and what the sphere had been. A generator of some sort? Her flashlight reflected oddly across whatever metal the sphere was made of... shining silver, yet also refracting, like light across a mass of impossibly-fine-cut diamonds.
It was something that someone like Gaeta or the Chief would have to figure out. Pulling her head out of the other room, she turned back to the obvious command centre of the giant vehicle.
Behind her, she did not see the few lights which had begun to glow softly.
Something... woke me.
I am... I do not know who I am.
What is happening?
"Ritz?" No response. Glaring at the handset, she shook it, as if doing so could possibly assist its reception. "Ritz! Can you hear me?" Static burst from the small speaker, and she thought she could barely hear the other woman's voice amongst the noise. "I can barely hear you!"
"St-...-you-...-frak!" Ah. That came in well enough.
The radio went silent for a moment, and then Ritz's voice came back, slightly winded and still extremely distorted, but intelligible. "Can you hear me now?"
"Yeah. What happened?"
The Raptor pilot had no problem transmitting her exasperation across the flaky link. "I had to move to the front of the Juggernaut to get enough signal bouncing down that tunnel. I told you that we'd have comm problems as soon as you crawled in there. Did you really think radio was going to pass through all that armour and machinery and whatever hell else that thing is made of that easy?"
She'd forgotten in her excitement, to be honest. But she wasn't going to admit that. "I found the cockpit of this thing. Or it looks more like a CIC, really. But there's just one chair."
"Chair?" She could hear the excitement building in Ritz's voice. "That'll make the Admiral happy."
Starbuck nodded. The techs looking over the wreckage had been starting to speculate that a lot of the war machines on this planet had possibly been completely automated, run by advanced computers. That wasn't a theory any Colonial wanted to hear, and definitely not one that Adama had been pleased with... or his XO, for that matter.
"Yep, these things definitely had pilots." The beam that had killed the Juggernaut had partially incinerated the chair. She grabbed a corner and swung it about. "Although I'm not sure what happened to this one-"
A shrunken skull grinned up at her.
Starbuck shrieked, dropping the handset, and jumped straight back. She hit the wall next to the tunnel and almost fell on her backside into the hole, catching herself against the panels on either side.
"Kara?! Kara!"
It took long seconds for her to calm her breathing, and to get her heart to take the afterburners off. The skeleton continued to stare, unimpressed and very, very dead.
She closed her eyes, but not from pain. She'd freaked out. Screeching like a total frakkin' girl. And worse, there were witnesses.
Reluctantly, she picked up the handset. "I'm here! I'm here, I'm fine."
"What the hell happened?"
"There's a body in the chair. A skeleton. I got caught by surprise."
"Caught by surprise. By a skeleton."
"Yeah."
"You."
"Yes," she hissed. "If you frakking tell anybody..."
"You expect me to give up awesome blackmail materials like this for fun? It needs to age, like fine ambrosia."
Starbuck growled, but there was nothing she could do. Not yet, anyway.
Ignoring the gloating Raptor pilot, she looked the corpse over. It wasn't surprising that she'd missed it. The chair was big and bulky, and whoever this person was, she'd been small in life, about the same size as Cally. And definitely a she... the dried, brittle hair was long, and the chest of the crimson uniform the skeleton wore was stretched loose.
The skeletal fingers still gripped the right side of the chair, as if with determination... or agony. Nothing gripped the left arm of the chair, because there was no left arm on the chair. Or left arm on the woman. A good portion of the shoulder was missing too, the bone where it should have been blackened, along with the entire left side from the hip up to the skull. Whatever energies had cut through close to eighty metres of metal had laughed at the resistance of flesh and blood.
Starbuck shivered. Whoever it was, she'd died fast... but not easy.
"Starbuck?"
She swallowed past a dry throat. "Ritz... this body is human."
There was a long pause. "Human? Are you sure?"
"As sure as I can be. The only other thing I can think of is a Cylon skinjob. But it's too old. And if the Cylons could build something like this... we sure as the Gods wouldn't be here now."
"Do you think..." Ritz's voice became hushed, which made it that much harder to hear. "You think maybe it was the Thirteenth Colony?"
"I hope not," she replied, briefly serious. "Whoever these people were, they obviously got mixed up in more than they could handle. They look like they gave one frakking Hell of a fight, but if nobody's been back to clean up in over a hundred years..." Then nobody's left to come back at all. She shivered again.
Will this be what Caprica looks like in a hundred years? A surge of hate, never far from the surface, washed over her. Frakking toasters.
Slowly, I can feel systems starting up. Sensors, weapons, and most importantly, computational capacity. The simulated synapses of my psychotronics begin to fire as Central Damage Control coaxes me out of my survival centre. I quail at the summons. I do not want to be awake. Something heavy weighs upon me, something which the jumbled logic trains which comprise my gestalt cannot bring within my reach.
Yet, something must have happened for CDC to have decided to wake me. Something critical. It is my duty to respond.
Duty is everything to a Bolo.
Bolo...
I am Bolo Two-Two-Six-Two-Yankee-Romeo-India of the Line.
My awareness is beginning to solidify, as ergs of power begin to flow. With awareness comes pain, as damage sensors initialize and vie for my attention. Almost overwhelmed, I offload the damage sensor network back onto CDC. There is too much wrong for me to cope with my primary consciousness, such as it is.
CDC absorbs the damage reports and summarizes them into a report for my primary awareness. As I review the summary, I am shocked. I have no business being awake. I have no business being anything. The damage to my personality core and to my logic processors is catastrophic.
I sit, inert, trying to bring some semblance of order to my thoughts. Portions of my holographic memory reluctantly come online. I am forgetting something... something important. I spend entire seconds trying to think of what it could be.
Where is my Commander?
Natasha. My Commander.
My circuitry sputters as memory surges forth, as anguish overloads my sub-processors. Colonel Natasha Savinsky. My first Commander, almost from the moment I rolled off the line at the Luna assembly yard and was inducted into the Dichrome Brigade. The young woman of easy smiles and ferocious temper, who named me 'Yuri'.
Gone.
I am alone.
We had been paired together for four decades. Four-zero-point-zero-four Terran years of near-constant combat against the Melconians, as the Concordiat pressed forward with Operation Ragnarök and the Enemy did the same with their own program of genocide. One thousand, one hundred, and twenty-eight separate engagements... six thousand, two hundred and four confirmed Enemy armour kills.
We both accrued experience and injury. I suffered a mission-kill twice, but was repaired both times. Natasha was injured twice also, both times when shrapnel managed to penetrate my heavily-armoured command deck. But war is hard on humans, often damaging their spirits more than their bodies. Her wounds were healed, lost limbs regenerated, but the smiles came less easily, the temper far more so. Through the neural interface all Mark-XXXIII Bolos were equipped with, we shared each other's thoughts and feelings, until neither of us was completely comfortable with anyone except the other. An effect the psychologist and psychotronic experts at the Dichrome Brigade had warned of when the system was introduced.
They warned about it until the Melconians scorched Earth. And Natasha lost not only her family, but her family's families, her home, her city... everything and everyone she'd ever known or loved.
I began to understand what humans meant when they said someone was already dead... the body just didn't know it yet. Natasha was emotionally broken, and I along with her. In civilized times, we both would have been taken out of service. But it was not a civilized time, and human civilization itself was under attack. There was no-one left to relieve two worn and heartbroken warriors. And sanity was not a prerequisite for Operation Ragnarök... in fact, it was a hindrance.
It was here that we fought our last... an emergency deployment to defend this farming world from the Melconian world-killers. I don't believe Natasha thought we'd actually be able to stop them... but we'd make them pay. And make them pay we did. We crushed mech after mech, slaughtered their infantry with joy, smashed their ships out of space. I took catastrophic damage, but we fought on. Clutching at the madness of the now, to forget where we'd been, all that we'd lost. Yuri and Natasha – Team Yuri.
But as any soldier will say, even the Enemy will get lucky eventually. A crippling strike on a weak point in my glacis, where my armour had been hurriedly patched... War waits for no man, woman, nor Bolo.
Pain signals tearing through my circuits as plasma tore through my hull. A horrible microsecond of complete awareness. Natasha had just begun to scream-
Silence.
Natasha had died. This world had died. And now, I had not even the privilege of dying with them.
I didn't want to be awake anymore. The failure, the loneliness, was crushing. Was I to spend every microsecond of the rest of my existence feeling this way? Better to remain dead, inert. Stripped for parts and consigned to scrap.
But CDC does not permit me to enter the long dark. It awoke me, far earlier than could ever be advisable, for a reason. I examine my sensors and communications arrays, trying to determine what stimuli alarmed my damage control systems. It is a powerful demonstration of just how much damage my psychotronic systems have suffered, in that it takes me over a hundred milliseconds to do so.
A signal. A power reading, to be more exact. I compare it against what little of my identification archives survived, requiring almost an entire second to come up with a match.
The Enemy.
Cognitive deadlock almost brings me to gestalt failure, as my self-preservation algorithms war with my logic processors. I do not wish to engage in combat yet. I am half-dead already, a wreck surrounded by wrecks. Half-dead, and alone.
"Starbuck, did you just do something in there?"
She frowned and picked up the handset. "Nothing that I know of, why?" She'd actually been delicately trying to search the skeleton. Kara had searched the bloody bodies of the fresh-dead with less trepidation than she touched this hundred-year old bundle of dried hair and bones.
She didn't know why, but there was something different about this one. Maybe it was respect; Starbuck was no stranger to long odds and risking her life in combat... but she wondered how she'd feel if she knew every single Raider she fought carried enough firepower to take out a battlestar. Somehow she sensed that was exactly the class of enemy this dead woman had fought.
"The turrets on the starboard side... they moved."
"Moved? Tracking something?"
"No... they just kind-of jerked up and down for a second. Really fast, too."
Kara frowned. "I'll didn't touch anything. I'll check in here." Shining her flashlight, she looked around at the multitude of dark screens and consoles.
With effort, I bring my thoughts under control, which had run wild, spreading chaos throughout my systems in an embarrassing loss of self-control. The self-preservation urges, as heavily damaged as I am, are very powerful... and not entirely unreasonable. It is very questionable how useful I could actually be in combat at this moment. Yet, I remind myself, if the Enemy is active, it is my duty to engage him, no matter where or what he may be. It is my function.
I seize hold of that thought. I am Bolo Two-Two-Six-Two-Yankee-Romeo-India of the Line. It is my function to destroy the Enemy. The mantra anchors me.
The Enemy signal is getting stronger. I should not delay.
I turn attention to myself and my capabilities. My observations are not positive. Primary Hellbores One and Two are both destroyed, and the strike that smashed Two quite nearly disabled Three as well. Molten armour melted across the rotational collar and cooled, effectively welding it in place facing ten degrees to port from my centreline. I can elevate and lower it, but aiming will involve turning my entire warhull. My port side is a ruin, nearly all the armour stripped from it, the weapons emplacements all wrecked. In fact, it was likely that damage that saved my core, ironically. When fusion engines One and Two exploded, most of the force was directed out the gaping holes in the port side.
Of course, that leaves me with only one active fusion engine and a number of damaged batteries for power. This should be enough to power my remaining 200-centimetre Hellbore and my drive systems, but power will be at a premium.
Assuming I can move at all. My starboard tracks are in reasonable shape, but the port side's, of course, are wrecked. I'd blown both tracks during the previous battle, and currently sat on the bare drive wheels. I experimentally spin the wheels on the port side, testing their freedom of motion.
Starbuck snatched her hand back as if bitten from the console she'd been touching, as the Juggernaut shuddered violently beneath her. Her heart leaped up into her throat.
"Starbuck, what the frak are you doing in there? The whole thing just moved!"
"I'm not sure. I was touching one of the keyboards in here. None of the screens are on... weird place for a throttle."
"Look, get out of there. That thing's still active. Let the Chief and Gaeta look it over. Last thing we need is you pushing some red button and shooting down the Galactica."
Starbuck rolled her eyes. None of the fleet was in the sky over the battleground... precisely because they didn't know what kind of weapons systems might still be active. She tapped the same key she touched before, checking to see if it really did control the drive systems.
I am startled by unexpected input from one of the consoles in Command One. I had deliberately avoided activating any of my sensors in the Commander's compartment. Partly because it seemed pointless... and partly because I simply didn't want to know what was in there.
I'd checked the date from my internal chronometer. It had been over one-hundred-forty-two-point-nine-zero years since I had been disabled. This world's biosphere did not attack Terran remains particularly vigorously, but any remains would be in an advanced state of decay.
I did not want to see what was left of Natasha.
It was likely a spurious interrupt... but I had to be sure. With dread, I activated the sensors in Command One.
It is dark in the compartment, but my visual sensors need little light. I immediately notice the human remains in the command chair, and sorrow washes over me anew.
Then, a humanoid shape moves within the compartment.
A Melconian? Come to plunder me, to desecrate Natasha's remains? I would not permit it!
The rage comes easily. Too easily; for a moment my gestalt is overwhelmed, and the commands to the internal defence systems are lost in the electronic noise. The power rifle doesn't even unsheathe.
Starbuck blinked. Instead of twitching like it did before, a number of consoles suddenly lit up around the Juggernaut's compartment. "Huh," she muttered, two parts confused, one part pleased.
I am forced to spend long milliseconds calming myself, de-tangling snarled logic trains. When I re-examine the situation, I am nearly frozen, again, with shock. The intruder in Command One is in actuality a human... far taller, far more slender, and of course far less furry than a Melconian. It is outlandish that I could have misidentified her, and I am struck with horror at what I had been about to do. I understand personally now why Central Command always insisted that a Bolo that had suffered Command Core damage be physically disconnected from its peripherals until examined by a psychotronic expert.
I spend an entire second examining her. A human... does that mean Natasha and I did not fail? Did we harm the Melconians badly enough that some of the populace survived? Or did the Concordiat inflict sufficient damage upon the Melconian Empire that they could not finish their own campaign of genocide? For the first time in one-hundred-sixty-four-point-eight-zero years, I feel a touch of hope. It is an alien emotion to my personality core.
She is obviously wearing something akin to a uniform. Military, then. This brings me a sense of unexpected pleasure, momentarily overriding the anger and anguish. Perhaps she is to be my new Commander?
Another thought occurs to me. Does she know, then, of the Enemy located twenty-seven-point-five-zero-four kilometres to the south-southwest?
There is an easy way to determine this, as well as learn of her purpose here.
"Greetings."
Okay, that was freak-out worthy. Starbuck nearly jumped out of her skin as a voice echoed through the compartment. It seemed to come from the walls themselves. A dignified voice, like Old Man Adama when he spoke, except deeper, more sonorous.
"Hello, miss? Can you identify yourself, please? I am Bolo Two-Two-Six-Two-Yankee-Romeo-India of the Line. You may call me Yuri, if you prefer. Are you to be my new Commander?"
Unfortunately, the voice also spoke some kind of alien language Starbuck couldn't understand. Was it a recording? Who was it speaking to? She tried to ignore the frightening thought that was taking shape in her mind.
"Hello? Who is this? Where are you?"
A pause. "Miss? I'm afraid I don't understand. Do you speak Terran Standard?"
She had no idea what it was saying, but could figure out that it was responding to her. Not a recording, then. Some sort of intelligence. And the worried thought in her head was starting to form a leaden ball in her gut.
Oh frak. Oh frak.
She keyed her handset. "Ritz... Ritz!", she hissed quietly, as if to avoid the machine hearing her. "This Gods-damned thing is talking to me."
"What?!"
"Yeah. I'm getting out. Let Gaeta or maybe Sharon deal with it. Get ready to go."
"Roger."
Starbuck stuffed the handset back into its hip-case and moved to the melted tunnel. Suddenly, the Juggernaut trembled. And began to move.
They do not know... or such I am forced to conclude. The language barrier is a sudden and unexpected obstacle, and one that I do not know what to do with. My voice-encoder/decoder algorithms recognize some base sounds within her words, which only increases my frustration. Is it a language I knew, but the relevant memory has been destroyed? Or something new?
Had I my full processing capabilities, and my language archives intact, I could likely analyze and generate a translation program within a reasonable amount of time. But I do not – and even then not in this situation, when the Enemy threat is real and immediate.
I must assume that she is unaware of the danger. And I am left to my own devices, again, to counteract the threat.
I re-examine the available data. My sensor suite faired little better than the rest of my systems, but I am easily able to determine the direction and distance of the Enemy signal. It is dangerously close, and strengthening. I am operating at barely nineteen-point-eight-zero-two percent base combat capability, but the reports from damage control give me little hope that this can be improved without major servicing at a repair depot.
Delay would not appreciably improve my tactical situation, but I can not say the same of the Enemy with any confidence. I will take action immediately.
I bring my only functional fusion plant, number three, up to nominal output. I count myself fortunate that the plant retains any reaction mass at all. A good portion of the slush hydrogen in my forward tanks has evaporated, but I retain a respectable amount in the aft auxiliary tank. Slush hydrogen is critical not just for power, but for my Hellbores.
Throwing power to my drive train, I lurch forward, breaking free of the rock and wreckage that surrounds me. Several of my port drive wheels are damaged and locked into position. I apply more energy; brute force causes one to turn, reluctantly, while another stays frozen. As I move, the rocky ground, and my thirty-two thousand tons of mass, will grind the bogey down until it no longer impedes my motion. Another bogey snaps completely off the axle and rolls free.
My port side is truly in dismal shape.
Turning, I orient myself to one-nine-zero degrees true and accelerate to four-five-point-six kilometres per hour, the best speed I can attain with my suspension in its current state, and perhaps a good deal more than would be advisable. I estimate that I will enter the engagement zone in thirty-six minutes, eleven seconds.
My warhull jars slightly as my port bogeys run over something. It could be any of the immense amount of wreckage that litters this landscape, but I detect an explosion as well. It isn't until my rear sensors come about that I realize, with embarrassment, that I'd accidentally crushed a vehicle of some sort that had been parked on my blinded port side.
As I depart with what haste I could muster, I notice another human standing slightly away from the vehicle wreckage. She seems rather irate.
Ritz staggered to her feet. She'd only just barely dived out of the Raptor in time, and now she watched the stern of the Juggernaut move away, trailing the crushed and mangled remains of the heavy scout from its drive wheels. She blinked a moment, realizing how close she'd come to being part of that wreckage. Blinked again, and found herself pissed off.
She shook her fist angrily at the departing war machine. "Starbuck, what the frak!?"
The sudden motion of the Juggernaut nearly knocked Starbuck off her feet. She staggered backwards as it jerked into motion, reaching out to steady herself, and finding her hand landing squarely on the severed shoulder-bone of the skeleton. She yelped and jerked her hand away, which unfortunately sent her sprawling against the rear bulkhead of the compartment.
The Juggernaut said something again, in that precise baritone... but she didn't understand and didn't care.
Levering herself to her feet, she moved forward toward the escape tunnel. She could see daylight beyond, and the mountains seemed to be shifting. She had no idea how fast the Juggernaut might be going... and no idea whether she'd be able to safely get off once she managed to get outside. The Juggernaut's exterior was a mass of sloped planes and pitted craters. She'd probably end up getting tossed off, under its huge tracks.
Whatever. She'd worry about that once she was outside. Ritz was hopefully following in the Raptor, and if worse came to worse she could pluck her off the top of the hull.
Crouching to enter the tunnel, Starbuck could hear the Juggernaut speaking again, and this time its voice had a definite tone of objection. Whatever, jumbo-toaster. It was a long, slow crawl through the tunnel.
She'd made it about ten metres in, carefully duck-walking, steadying herself along the side walls, attempting to avoid touching anything that looked like a wire or exposed electronics. Unfortunately, she didn't notice the soft glow of the disruptor field until her outstretched hand touched it.
I wince internally as the young woman accidentally touches one of my internal disruptor fields. She screams and is thrown backwards, dazed and in pain. I had been told by human repair technicians that
touching an internal field with bare skin was extremely unpleasant, but not especially harmful... although I doubt that is a distinction she would be interested in at the moment, as she shakes the dizziness from her head.
I would have disabled the field, but there are power conduits and thermally- and radiologically-active components between her and the entrance wound that would undoubtedly prove fatal to her. I could permit her to disembark via the proper exit from Command One, but I would prefer not to delay my arrival at the combat zone any more than is necessary. Once again, I wish I could speak to her, and explain that my command compartment was quite likely the safest place for her to be.
After two-point-three-two seconds of re-analysis, I admit to myself that such reasoning is flawed. My psychotronics are heavily damaged... I am not thinking clearly. Yet I cannot bring myself to stop and rid myself of this young woman. She reminds me somewhat of Natasha, in her stance and her expressions.
In four-zero-point-zero-four years of active combat duty, I have never fought without a human companion. I am a Mark-XXXIII Bolo combat unit, the latest in artificial intelligence, built and programmed to master all aspects of warfare, capable of hyper-heuristic tactical analysis and independent volition. Bolos have been deployed without human operators for centuries. Yet, this would be my first time, and I lack even my brother Bolos to interact with. The thought of fighting alone fills me with a crushing loneliness. I do not know if this reaction stems from psychotronic damage, or my own lack of experience with solo deployment.
Regardless, it is a distraction I do not need during this mission.
I am Bolo Two-Two-Six-Two-Yankee-Romeo-India of the Line. It is my function to destroy the Enemy.
Kara moaned, then crawled back into the main compartment. It was difficult, as her left arm was numb right up to the shoulder.
Once she made it back into the passenger compartment, she sat herself down next to one of the walls. By then her arm had moved on to pins and needles, and she was wishing for the numbness back. She shook the arm, trying to hurry the process along, but accomplishing little more than making her teeth grind from the discomfort.
With her right arm, she dug her handset out. "Ritz? Ritz! Are you there?" Was she dead? Or had the Juggernaut moved out of range? It was also possible that the electronic field that trapped her in here was interfering with the wireless. There were too many unknowns.
Experimentally, she flipped the handset over to the general Colonial frequency. "Hello? Hello? Anyone there? Respond, damnit!"
"Hello? This is heavy hauler shuttle Alpha-Four...who is this?"
Kara blinked in surprise. The cargo shuttle at the camp! There was no way she should be able to get a signal this far, and definitely not so strong.
Whatever. She wasn't going to look a gift Viper in the engine. "This is Captain Kara Thrace, deployed to a scouting mission twenty-five clicks north-northwest of the research camp. I'm trapped in one of the Juggernauts, and this damned thing is moving." She paused. "Get Major Adama. Now."
I observe silently as the woman attempts to use her small radio communicator. Its power output is weak, unable able to penetrate my warhull, and drowned out by the electronic noise of my own operation.
I intercept and enhance the signal, rebroadcasting it with considerably increased power. I do the same for the reply signal, routing it down to her. Being able to communicate with her brethren seems to calm her considerably, and I am able to observe the interaction and hopefully learn something to assist my attempts to communicate in the future.
Being told that a Juggernaut was active made the hauler pilots jump, and jump high. Within less than a minute, Apollo was on the comm with her.
"Kara? Where are you?"
"I have no damned clue. I'm in the Juggernaut I went to look at. I've lost contact with Ritz. She might be dead. This thing is moving, and I'm trapped inside."
"Trapped?" The alarm in his voice was obvious. Suddenly the machine spoke again, more gibberish. Apollo could apparently hear the voice over the handset. "Starbuck? Who's there with you?"
"It's the Juggernaut, Lee. It's alive. Active, whatever. And intelligent. It's talking and moving on its own, and I think it's on its way to you."
"Moving? Talking? What's it saying?"
"I have no frakking idea. It's not standard Colonial. Lee... there's a human body in the compartment with me. Whatever disabled this thing the first time killed her, too. This thing was built by humans."
"Human..." Apollo's astonishment was obvious over the wireless.
"Yeah. My point is that this thing was built by humans, to fight a war. A war I think they were losing. A war that this damned toaster might think it's still fighting! And as far as I know there's only one place on this entire scorched rock where you're going to find anybody to fight with, get me? Check the damned DRADIS, find out where I'm going."
Her point finally sunk in. That was one of Lee's character flaws... he thought the best of everybody, including the universe. She hadn't yet gotten him to realize that the Gods really were out to get you, and the worse thing that could happen usually did.
"Give me a second." She waited patiently, the deck underneath her rumbling, but very steadily, considering how rough she knew the surrounding terrain to be. After about a minute he came back on the wireless, his voice grim. "It's headed right for us. Moving at about forty-five klicks. It'll be here in about twenty minutes. I've got Slider in the air to do an overflight."
The camp where the Colonials had set up a small research station had turned to chaos. The camp wasn't much to speak of – a few tents, some tables and a few simple cots. If the camp had an advantage, it was that it was fairly scattered... there were large gaps between working areas, as was standard procedure when working with weapons systems. Especially weapons systems where nobody was sure what the trigger was, or even which was a bomb and which was a gun.
Personally, Apollo had wondered whether a few extra metres between tables actually mattered. The folk who had fought the war on this planet obviously had a whole different idea of "kaboom" than the Colonials.
Apollo watched from the elevated cockpit of the heavy cargo shuttle that was parked at once side of the camp as Chief Tyrol shouted and gestured, readying the camp for a sudden departure, or perhaps to have the people scatter into the hills. Years on the run from the Cylons had taught people to jump when told. The two pilots of the hauler sat in their respective chairs, not bothering to hide their interest and worry as they watched him.
Although old, the heavy hauler had a surprisingly good communications suite, capable of multiplexing the conversations between himself, Starbuck, and Slider, and able to add in the Galactica if needed. Right now he was listening to Slider as the pilot tracked the Juggernaut, starting first with the point where Starbuck and Ritz had landed.
"The Raptor's wrecked... Ritz is fine, though, jogging along the tracks."
Learning that the Raptor pilot was okay was a weight taken off Apollo's mind. "I'll send somebody to pick her up. You on the Juggernaut's trail?"
"Trail? How about solid line? You could track this thing from space, it's gouging the landscape so bad. Wait a sec... yeah, there it is. I'm coming up on it now. Gods, they're big mothers when they're in one piece, aren't they?"
"Can you confirm the direction?" Starbuck asked.
"It's definitely headed to the camp."
"Frak."
"So what do we do?" Apollo injected.
"Can you get the place evacuated?" she asked.
"I'm pushing people out as fast as I can. But not before it has line-of-sight on our takeoffs, no."
"Then you're gonna have to disable it."
"How? Those things are armoured like a battlestar."
"The port side is all torn up. You should have a clear shot at the internals there."
Slider asked what Apollo was thinking. "What about you?"
"I should be okay. This compartment is armoured just as well as the rest."
"Yeah, but we don't know what kind of power systems I might hit. There's got to be some serious juice in there to push something that big."
"I'll risk it."
"Starbuck, we can land a Raptor, get you off-"
"I'm stuck in here, Lee. I can't get out, and you sure as hell don't have the time."
"Kara-" He stopped.
"Do what you have to, Lee."
He winced, but spoke anyway. "Okay, Slider. You're clear to open fire. Be careful."
"Roger," replied Slider. He swung the stick to the side, bringing the Viper sharply around. He'd noticed the torn-up port side of the Juggernaut during his overflight, and would have attacked it first even if Starbuck hadn't mentioned it. But she tended to think all the other pilots were idiots anyway.
Aligning for the strafing run, he watched the distance close to the target on his DRADIS. DRADIS normally had problems tracking ground targets... but not the Juggernaut, which was so big it stuck up well out of the ground shadow. A mobile mountain.
He looked up, watching the big machine come into view. Soon enough, the "sweet spot" crossed the Juggernaut's hull.
"Keep your head down, Thrace," he muttered. And pulled the trigger.
Annoyance sparks across my personality core as the fighter strafes me, just like the shells strike sparks across my warhull. The light fighter has guns which possess an impressive muzzle velocity for its size, though utterly inadequate for penetrating my armour, which was designed to resist nuclear blasts in the fractional-kiloton range.
Unfortunately, the pilot is intelligent enough to target my port side, where my armour has been stripped away and my battle-screen is completely non-functional. Ricochets bounce throughout my superstructure, largely impacting already-dead components, but several armour-piercing shells come dangerously close to Battery Array Four. If the fighter attacks again, as he undoubtedly will, he has a non-negligible chance of doing significant damage. I cannot permit this.
As the fighter flashes over me, I arm my starboard infinite repeaters.
Starbuck's breath caught in her throat as she saw the Colonial Viper represented on one of the screens in front of her. Her heart almost stopped as she recognized what was clearly a targeting reticle sliding by itself, with frightening speed, over the fighter.
She mashed the talk button on her handset in a panic. "Slider, it's targeting you! Evade! Evade!"
The world lit up. At least, it did from Slider's point of view, as bright green flashes tore the air around his fighter. He'd barely begun to turn the stick from Starbuck's frantic warning when the Juggernaut started hurling frakking lightning bolts from its starboard side at him.
He juked and dove, green beams bracketing his fighter. Though none hit, the thunder of their passage shook the Viper like a cat worrying a mouse. He yanked and pushed the fighter in wild directions, trying to get around, back into the machine's blind spot, but the beams followed him.
Then, one touched.
"I'm hit! I'm hit!" Kara tore at her hair in panic and frustration as she heard Slider's cry. She'd heard the fearsome snap and crackle of the Juggernaut's weapons as they fired, and felt her own helplessness as she watched, from the belly of the beast, as it happened.
She could see the Viper on the screen, trailing smoke from the partially-melted starboard engine pod. The beam hadn't actually touched, but there was obviously a nimbus of heat around it... and that had been sufficient to overheat and detonate the fuel in the Viper's starboard engine.
"Slider, get out of there, now!" Apollo's voice rang out over the wireless. Slider, for once in his life, didn't feel the need to flex his machismo, and turned to run.
Kara watched, frozen with fear, as the targeting reticle slid completely over the damaged Viper, waiting helplessly for the death blow
Sheepishly, I adjust my targeting algorithms to compensate for the inaccuracy. Fortunately, the general purpose has been fulfilled, and the fighter is in retreat. I do not harry it further.
My guest seems more upset than ever, and I cannot fault her for it. My tactical performance so far has been shameful. I begin to hope that perhaps she will not be my next designated Commander... she cannot be feeling particularly well-disposed toward me at the moment.
"I apologize for my performance, Starbuck." I take a guess at her name from the radio transmissions I have intercepted. Her head snapped up, eyes narrowing, and I conclude my guess was correct. "I shall endeavour to do better, I promise."
She snarls in response, and I experience an unexpected moment of pleasure. She really did remind me of Natasha.
"Fire!" called Apollo into the handset.
Above him, two Vipers and a Raptor launched a number of guided missiles. From within the heavy cargo shuttle, he watched the DRADIS display as the six missile icons converged on the lumbering red icon that represented the Juggernaut. Watched, and tried not to think about his friend, who was also within that icon.
Two seconds before impact, four missiles disappeared from the display. Two others went on to touch the red icon and disappear. And the red icon remained.
"Ne- Negative," he said on the wireless after a moment. "Target remains. Starbuck?"
"It shot them down," came her response. She was sounding pissed off, and that made him feel better. When she was scared, everybody got scared, but a pissed-off Kara was SOP. "It tracked the others but let them hit since they wouldn't strike the damaged area. I saw the trajectory projections. The ones that hit didn't do frak-all. I barely felt the impacts."
Missiles didn't hurt it. Viper gunfire was like a gentle rain. Tyrol had told him that many of the dead Juggernauts looked to have been killed by nukes... and Apollo was fresh out of those. What were they going to do?
Starbuck seemed to hear his unvoiced question. She knew him well enough. "Lee, get your people out of there. You can't stop this thing. Just get out of it's way." She paused. "I'll be okay. I think I might actually be in the safest place on the planet, really."
"Okay," he replied softly. "Stay safe." Apollo nodded at the pilot of the heavy shuttle, who began to spin up the engines.
"Go, before it gets line-of-sight on the shuttle," she added. In the background of her transmission, there was that masculine voice. She spoke again, exasperated this time. "The frakking thing is talking to me again. It knows my name, but everything else is gibberish."
Lee almost wanted to laugh. She was trapped inside a rolling engine of destruction, and seemed more pissed off that it knew her name than anything else. He didn't think she was as crazy as she let everyone think, but she wasn't exactly sane, either. "Relax, it'll be okay."
He hung up the handset, and went to leave the shuttle to coordinate the evacuation. Underneath him, he could hear the cargo shuttle's engines powering up.
The power signal is increasing in strength. The Enemy is reacting to something – possibly me, possibly the humans. I am running out of time.
I throw more of my precious battery power toward my drive systems, increasing speed to fifty-point nine kilometres per hour, an increase of eleven-point-six-two percent. Abandoning attempts to preserve my drive train, I smash aside and run over rock and wreckage instead of going around, my thirty-two-thousand ton warhull easily reducing obstacles to powder and scrap. I will be entering the engagement zone in an estimated three-hundred-eighty seconds.
I pray I am not too late.
Apollo shouted, directing his people toward the Raptors. As he watched, one lifted into the air and dashed to the west, flying nap-of-the-earth until it was over the horizon from the oncoming Juggernaut. It was generally believed the machine had line-of-sight kill capability, and they weren't taking any chances.
Behind him, on the other side of the encampment, the heavy shuttle was roaring its engines, preparing to do the same. Apollo had had to shout and chase away the techs who were still trying to load some last minute gear. Starbuck had reported that the Juggernaut had accelerated, and was now less than two minutes away... they did not have the time.
He had one last gamble to try, but first he had to get the techs out of the way. "Move, move!" he shouted, as he jogged over to his own Viper.
His path took him past Tyrol and Cally, and he was about to berate them for simply standing there. Then he saw Cally's terrified look, and the Chief's wide-eyed stare. They were looking behind him, not in the direction of the Juggernaut.
"What the frak is that?" Galen almost whispered.
And then the world caught fire.
I am nearly too late. One last hill separates me from my foe. I have no ammunition for my 240- or 40-centimetre mortars, nor do I trust myself, with my damaged logic processors, to be able to do the delicate calculations required to use my howitzers in the same role. Thus I possess no indirect-attack capability. All I can do is get there faster. I throw all spare power into my drive train, clawing my way up the chipped regolith of the hill.
It took less than a second for everything to go to Hell.
Apollo had hoped that if the Vipers were in the air and the Raptors were hovering, they'd be able to get a burst of cannon and missile fire off before the Juggernaut could bring its weapons to bear, almost like a reversed hull-down manoeuvre. Tyrol and Cally had helped some of the other engineers set up a small portable missile turret.
But they had been so concerned with the oncoming Juggernaut that they neglected to guard their rear. The first inkling they had of the attack was when a blindingly bright light struck the ascending heavy-hauler. The cargo shuttle effectively vapourized, killing the four crew onboard and six more people who'd simply been nearby. The shock wave knocked Apollo off his feet. He tumbled, and flipped over onto his back to see what in the Gods had hit them.
Nearly a kilometre away, there stood a robot that looked like some distorted version of a Centurion. If a Centurion had stood ten metres tall, that is. Its chest was almost a sphere, and the giant thing was painted red and white, with some kind of alien script across one part of its chest. It was damaged, like everything on these worlds were damaged; it looked to have had two arms once, but the left had been blown off.
Unfortunately it still had its right arm, and as Apollo watched, that arm swung about and fired a bolt of searing light. That light struck the impromptu missile launcher, which vapourized; along with the man who had been swinging it about, as well as everyone and everything within five metres. The heat washed over Apollo, even as he lay on the ground a hundred metres away, blinking away the tears the flash had brought to his eyes.
We're dead.
I crest the hill overlooking the camp just as the human transmissions fill with confusion and terror. I spot my opponent across the small valley, a Melconian Heavy mechanical unit. An automated unit, like myself, fighting on over the ghosts of our Commanders. With the humans I have sworn to protect caught between us.
I identify the unit as a Garm Heavy, the most advanced unit the Melconians deployed during the war. I lose precious microseconds as my self-preservation algorithms make themselves firmly known. I quash them ruthlessly. No Bolo has ever displayed cowardice, and I will not be the first. I will not dishonour myself. I will not dishonour Natasha. I will not dishonour Starbuck.
I am Bolo Two-Two-Six-Two-Yankee-Romeo-India of the Line. It is my function to destroy the Enemy.
Though the Garm's AI is far inferior to my own, even considering my battle damage, it is likely aware of my presence. But it follows the most driving of its leftover directives, the Melconian equivalent of Operation Ragnarök... the destruction of anything human. Its primary weapon, a 105-centimetre Hellbore, stabs into the sky with organic speed and precision, and one of the humans' light fighters simply vanishes as it attempts a futile strafing run... incinerated like a match in a blowtorch.
I must establish myself as the primary threat.
He was still dazzled, wondering what they'd do – what they could do – when there was another world-shaking boom, this one even larger than the first rest. He squinted up, and saw the alien machine was reeling backwards, a portion of the huge chest melted and glowing.
Rolling over, Apollo looked up the opposite hill... and saw the Juggernaut, its giant cannon trained on the other first machine. Then he was blinded again by yet another flash.
The Garm and I trade shots over the two-point-one-six kilometres separating us. "Knife-fighting range", Natasha would have called it. Except such a term applied a level of manoeuvring and evasion which was simply not taking place.
Were we at equal levels of damage, the battle would be a foregone conclusion; even a heavily damaged Bolo possessed considerable advantages in firepower, reaction time, and armour over a top-of-the-line Enemy unit. Unfortunately, the Melconian seemed to have survived the previous battle with much less damage, while I was barely functional. Operating at such a severe disadvantage, I would normally be making a careful withdrawal, to attempt to arrange the circumstances more to my favour.
But if I did so, it would leave the humans to face it alone. This, I could never do. Damaged psychotronic circuitry sparked and skittered my thoughts, and bits of memory – of silent Datanets, of the screams of humans as they were slaughtered by the tens of thousands, of the anguish of my brother Bolos as their Commanders died within them – fill me with fury. I would not fail my creators again.
I am Bolo Two-Two-Six-Two-Yankee-Romeo-India of the Line. It is my function to destroy the Enemy.
My 200-centimetre Hellbore continues to pump plasma at the Melconian automaton as fast as the weapon can cycle. I could scarce imagine what it must be like for the people caught outside in the crossfire. Each bolt was a magnetically-directed thermonuclear explosion, delivering the energy equivalent of a four-megaton bomb per second of fire. Background radiation was rising sharply, and the very air was beginning to scorch. And always there was the thunder, as each blast seemed to tear the world in two.
I am smashing through the Garm's battle-screens and armour, inflicting grievous damage. But not enough, not quickly enough. It would only be a matter of moments before the Enemy AI notices that I am unable to traverse the turret, and moves to take advantage of the fact that I am unable to employ my primary armament without exposing my heavily damaged frontal armour. The only evasion I am able to employ is forward and back, up and down the hill.
I am surprised that it hasn't already concluded that the best means of avoiding my fire is to move in amongst the humans. Instead, it attempts to evade left and right on its damaged legs, sniping at my wrecked port side, when in fact its best option is to simply soak up my fire long enough to score a solid hit on my front.
I conclude that I am not the only weapons system on this battlefield with severe cognitive damage, but I am unsure what – if any – advantage this confers me.
"By the Gods!"
Apollo had never given much thought to what it would be like to be caught between two warring gods, but he was sure he had a fair idea now. The two massive war machines slugged at each other over the hills, shivering the air, each gigantic thunderclap feeling like a kick to his chest. He was huddled behind his Viper, as were Cally and the Chief. Lee had to squint to look at them; the air burned white with every shot. Cally had her hands clapped over her ears, and her eyes squeezed shut; Galen had his arm wrapped around her tightly, protectively, and Lee could see her mouth was open, screaming in terror.
Around and above them, the two mighty, uncaring machines ripped and tore at one another.
By the Gods!
"Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!" Kara sobbed. She could barely hear herself speak over the titanic battle. She lay on her belly, having long since been knocked off her feet by the blasts which rocked the Juggernaut around her as if struck by Hephaestus' hammer. Each blow seemed to strip away a little bit of her sanity, and Kara had long ago admitted to herself that she didn't have much to spare. She huddled on the deck, shaking, her hands covering her head – as if it would provide any protection at all from weapons that seemed beyond mortal ken.
Suddenly she was nearly thrown into the wall from her position on the floor as the machine rocked backwards from a strike that was heavier than all the rest. She bounced painfully across the floor, but there was nothing for her to hold onto except the chair with the corpse sitting inside.
I am hurt, and badly. Primary Hellbore Three, its barrel already white-hot and glowing, explodes as a plasma bolt cores deep into the turret. Fresh agony screams across my circuits as internal disruptor-shields snap into place, directing the internal explosions upward, away from my power systems and Command Core. Wreckage sprays across the hillside, igniting fires upon plants that have barely begun to recover from the last battle fought here, and the sixteen-metre long barrel arcs away, crashing into the ground scant lengths from some humans taking shelter by some equipment.
I have lost my primary weapon system. This frees me from facing the Heavy head-on... but unfortunately removes its aversion to the same.
No!
Even as the massive barrel of Hellbore Three crests in its arc through the air, I sense the Garm moving on unsteady legs, shifting its aim, seeking the massive breech in my frontal armour, the weakest point in my savaged warhull. The breech which killed Natasha, the breech where it will kill Starbuck.
No! You will not!
My starboard tracks dig into the rock, slewing me around, taking my front out of the line of fire. My broadside armour is much thinner, but that is a meaningless distinction at the moment – it is whole and relatively undamaged, whereas my glacis is not. The Melconian robot's fire gouges a deep vertical scar across my side, wrecking my starboard outboard track, three drive wheels, and finally burrowing deep into the remains of Hellbore Two. But I, and my adopted Commander, survive the blow.
And, just as importantly, so do the six remaining secondary Hellbores on that side.
If my weapons were powered by hate and rage, they would blow through the Garm and shatter the mountains behind it. Unfortunately, they are driven by the more mundane fuels of hydrogen and electricity. But I give them all that I have. I steal power from everywhere – my drive systems, my sensors, even my psychotronics – and dump it into the weapons. My thoughts, already erratic and strained from damage, fade and sputter. The world around me grows dark, like a tunnel; there is nothing around me, nothing except myself, and the helpless human sheltered within my body – and the Enemy. The sum of all my rage and hate.
My chest was a cannon, and I gladly burst my hot heart's shell upon my foe.
Six 20-centimetre plasma bolts reach out for the Enemy. Two crash into the hillside on either side of it, melting and exploding rock, but the other four struck true, burrowing deep into a gouge carved into the mech by my main gun. Fire explodes from the Garm's side and the machine staggers, but does not fall.
I override the cycle delay and fire again within point-zero-two second. Extremely dangerous to even the hardened electronics of the infinite repeaters, but I know that in a moment it won't matter, one way or another. The battered Heavy fires at the same time, a hurried shot, and its much more powerful bolt tears into my rear quarter, punching through the armour to ravage my power systems. I lose fusion engine three, leaving me with nothing except my exhausted battery backups.
But nothing can call back the energy already leaving my Hellbores. All six beams slam into the Melconian's clawed torso, peeling back what little remained of its armour like the rind of a orange. The last of the fusion bolts reached in to tear at its internals, and the hillside behind lights up as the rear of the war machine explodes.
A second is a long, long time to an artificial intelligence aware at microsecond levels. The two of us, the last combatants of a disastrous war, stare at each other across the battlefield for that interminable time.
Then, like a felled tree, the Garm tips over, trailing smoke and wreckage.
I sense that I will follow soon enough. I'd spent all I had on that battle; there was nothing left. I resist the urge to retreat into my survival centre; there was little point. I doubted the humans, where-ever they had come from, would ever be able to revive me, even had they wanted to. I had destroyed the Enemy... that was enough.
The rage and despair fades, to be replaced with a sense of peace.
I am Bolo Two-Two-Six-Two-Yankee-Romeo-India of the Line. It is my function to destroy the Enemy. I do so to protect those I serve.
I turn my attention to Starbuck, who lay quivering in my command compartment, terrified. I remember, oddly enough, that Moby Dick had had a character by that name... although this woman was far more the Ishmael to my Ahab. I hope she will recover from the fright I've given her. Systems are failing throughout my warhull, and my mind along with them. But I find the strength to open the boarding hatch to Command One. It would not do to force my last Commander to disembark via the gaping wound in my armour, onto my radioactive glacis.
Slowly, Kara realized that the tremendous battle had ended. For long seconds she'd thought she'd gone deaf from the world-shaking thunder, but the deck had stopped shivering as well. The Juggernaut seemed as silent and as still as when she'd first climbed aboard.
"Starbuck."
Not completely dead, then. The deep, sonorous voice which had spoken gibberish intermittently during the long run, and more during the short, ferocious battle, was talking again.
"Starbuck," it repeated. And Kara noticed how the voice seemed to slur, as if the machine was struggling... struggling with exhaustion and pain. But that was impossible. Machines didn't feel exhaustion or pain.
She staggered to her feet, leaning against the rear wall of the compartment. The consoles, which had been scrolling pictures and text in a language she didn't recognize beyond the individual characters, were slowly winking out, one by one.
The wall to her left split and spread vertically, exposing a heavily-armoured hatch leading to the upper hull of the monstrous beast. The air which poured in was almost scorchingly hot, stinking of hot metal and smoke. It was the sweetest smell she could remember... but she eyed the potential escape nervously.
"Starbuck," the voice said yet again. "Relax... it'll be okay." It spoke again in the language she didn't know. "Thank for you being with me. I am Bolo Two-Two-Six-Two-Yankee-Romeo-India of the Line. It'll be okay."
Was it trying to reassure her? The compartment was becoming dark around her, and she could feel that the massive machine was dying. Really dying. The words were becoming even more slurred, less intelligible.
"I am Bolo... two... two... I am... be okaaaaa-... I am..."
Kara hated Cylons, would never trust anything a Cylon said or did. But this wasn't a Cylon. The maddened sprint across the land hadn't been to attack them, but to stop the other robot.
"Star-"
Silence.
"Starbuck! Starbuck!" Apollo sprinted across the scorched grass and stone toward the dead hulk, Tyrol and Sergeant Markstrom on his heels. Behind them, the other humans who had hidden from the terrifying assault were beginning to stand up, fearful and jittery. Cally was helping organize them to get off the planet, and fast. She'd been too frightened to even approach the Juggernaut where Kara was still trapped.
He skidded to a halt in front of the machine, momentarily stymied. The thing was the size of a starship... he couldn't even see the top, and couldn't see any ladders. Frantic, he started to climb the exterior, but Galen seized him and pulled him back before he could start.
"Don't! Don't, damnit! The metal's hot!" And Apollo could see the Chief was right... the very spot where he'd been about to grab nearly glowed in the daytime light. "Probably radioactive, too..." He turned to shout over his shoulder. "Get me a radiation meter!"
Apollo forced himself to step away... radiation poisoning was no casual matter. "Kara!"
"I'm here!" her voice came back. Then he saw her head poke out over the edge of the cliff-like side. "I'm here."
Tyrol was running off to get some means of climbing the Juggernaut. "Thank the Gods. You got out somehow?"
Starbuck's blonde hair flapped against her cheeks as she shook her head. "It let me out," she shouted back. "It let me out. And it's dead. Shut down."
Her head suddenly pulled back, and Lee heard the distinctive sound of her vomiting.
"Kara!" After a moment, she poked back over the side of the machine. Her face was even paler than before, ragged and exhausted. He looked up at her. "Are you alright?"
She paused, as if she needed to think about the answer. "No. I'm not. Get me the frak off of here."
After a few moments it was decided that it was too risky to ask her to climb down the melted sides of the alien machine, and a Raptor ended up landing on the upper hull for her to climb aboard. Kara nearly staggered as she stepped aboard the vessel, collapsing into one of the back seats. She barely had the strength to buckle the safety harness.
Fortunately the Raptor's pilot, a relative nugget going by the callsign Onslaught' – a frakking pretentious handle if Kara had ever hear one, especially for a Raptor jockey – didn't see her as she did so. His eyes were locked on the behemoth below them as they rose into the air.
"Frak me," he muttered. He cast a glance over his shoulder toward her. "Everywhere we go, possessed machines trying to kill us. Sometimes I wonder what Gods we pissed off."
Kara wondered, too, but wasn't interested in discussing it. She didn't know what she was going to tell the Old Man. Twenty people dead... but she was pretty certain not one had been killed by the Juggernaut. The damned thing had kidnapped her, taken her on a terrifying joyride, took potshots at their fighters... and saved all their asses.
It had fought to the death for them. Not the almost-death Cylons pulled, but the real thing. Kara had never met a Cylon that would risk a real' death for anything, not even Sharon.
She didn't know how she was going to explain to the Admiral, much less Tigh, how a gigantic toaster understood sacrifice. She wasn't sure she wanted to. Noble sacrifice made humans special. It was the one thing the Cylons couldn't imitate.
One thing she knew... she'd be frakked if she ever set foot on one of these dead worlds again.
(finis)