This week on The Thirteenth Tribe, Words! Sentences! Paragraphs!
Interlude: Survival
The Battlestar
Galactica was falling.
Given that she was a spacecraft which usually spent time in perpetual freefall around a planet, this would not normally be an issue. This case was different however.
She was falling into Terra’s upper atmosphere. Her engines were offline, in fact the two ventral engine pods had been completely destroyed, gutted by a lucky Cylon nuclear strike as the ship fought her desperate action to prevent a massive Cylon bombardment of the surface.
The rest of the ship also showed signs of extreme damage. The forward hull showed a huge chunk missing from the port bow; another Cylon missile had punched through her failing shields and blasted away a large chunk of hull, spaceframe and compartments, extending laterally as far as her centreline and a similar distance towards her aft. If an outside observer had seen the damage but not what caused it, they would be forgiven for thinking some vast life form had taken a bite out of the ship.
The midships section too was battered – the starboard flight pod had been blown in half by yet another strike that had hit just forward of the after pylon attaching the massive hanger deck to the main hull. The rear two-thirds of the pod were completely gone, while the remaining section remained stubbornly attached – though bent a good twenty degrees from where it ought to be.
Within the ship, numerous fires raged. Many of the engineering spaces were virtually awash with fire as fuel and oxygen stores vented their combustible contents into the already raging inferno. In the bow similar fires burned in those compartments and areas that were not open to vacuum; they were spreading as the ship’s overtaxed damage control parties desperately tried to prevent the fires reaching the forward magazines.
In CIC, chaos reigned. Or rather, that is how it would appear to someone not familiar with this ship and this crew. There was frantic activity certainly; repeated alarms and sirens came from the damage control board, at the Nav table Felix Gaeta was trying to plot an FTL jump under intense pressure and rocked by turbulence as the ship began her atmospheric entry. The fact that he had a broken arm certainly didn’t help either.
At the centre of it all was Admiral William Adama, standing with a remarkable serenity at the plot table, while the XO Colonel Tigh was manning the DC station, facing an eerie repeat of their first action of this war; raging fires, trapped crew, the ship under extreme threat, and
him having to make brutally hard calls.
“No! Pull everyone back behind frame 30 and prepare for vent action! They’ve got 30 seconds then we seal the bulkheads!”
It was a measure of how serious the current situation was that, unlike the previous battle, no-one questioned him on this call. The orders were given; those men and women that could get out of the condemned compartments did so. Those that couldn’t frantically sealed their DC suits and prayed.
The time passed. The bulkheads were sealed. The order was given. The main vent hatches opened and the fires in the forward area were extinguished. More than one body was vented as well.
There were plenty of people aboard who knew this hard call was pointless unless they could somehow jump the ship. With barely four minutes to impact, Gaeta was nearing completion of the jump plot. There would be no time to double check his calculations, so he had picked a random point a million kilometres from Terra; if his numbers were off there was ample empty space to emerge in and crucially; no large bodies the ship might collide with before they could be rescued.
If it worked of course.
Adama was still standing with an outward expression of professional calm. Inside however, he was raging. This was
his ship, she had served them so well in the last months. Her going down in battle he could have accepted – it was a fitting end for a warship after all and certainly a far less ignominious fate than being hauled to the breakers as so many of her sister ships had been.
But
Galactica being destroyed by falling out of orbit after being disabled was far too similar to the fate of many Battlestars during the Fall of the Colonies. Adama was furious at the idea. Finally, with three minutes to impact, his calm demeanour snapped.
“Where’s my FTL jump?”
Gaeta had just finished entering the coordinates. “Ready sir!”
“Time to impact?” Adama asked, once more the calm spacefarer.
“Three minutes five seconds sir.”
Adama nodded: “Start the clock, ten seconds!”
Gaeta had just turned the FTL key when the ship rocked even harder than before. The jump clock was running but Tigh was able to turn and shout at the Admiral: “Starboard pylon’s given out, the whole frakking pod is gone!”
Before Adama could reply, or even begin to think of a reply, the clock reached zero and the ship jumped. The universe was pulled inside out for a moment. From the outside, there was a flash of light and an inrushing of air to fill the new vacuum.
A million kilometres out, the ruined Battlestar reappeared. But the structural damage, the repeated
impacts and the reduced effect from jumping with only one FTL drive extracted a final terrible toll on the ship.
As soon as she appeared in the characteristic flash of light, she
twisted. Her ventral hull armour cracked wide open amidships as the entire stern section was bent away from its intended position. From outside, it looked as if the ship had been bent by ten degrees at her centre. The port pod, still extended and so close to the edge of the jump field, had all of its external hull plating ripped away. Dozens of compartments, fortunately evacuated by the Admiral’s order, were opened to space. The ship’s keel was broken, her structural members finally succumbing.
For the crew aboard the ship, it was a colossal shock. Crewmen were thrown about, either to the deck or to the bulkheads, causing yet more injuries for the overtaxed medics to eventually deal with. Main power failed as the safety overrides kicked in, shutting down the primary generators, plunging them into a stygian darkness, which was replaced moments later by the dim red emergency lights which gave every corridor and compartment a blood-red aspect. The ship herself was bleeding as atmosphere and water from breached compartments and storage tanks flashed out into the cold vacuum of space.
Within the hull, the shaking finally ceased. There followed an ominous silence as everything was still. For nearly a full minute, no-one moved and there was dead quiet aboard. Even the omnipresent noises of the ship had ceased; the distant rumble of her huge sublight drives was gone, as was the higher-pitched whirr of the air circulators and oxygen scrubbers.
For an impartial observer, either out in space or within the ship’s corridors, it would appear that the ship and all aboard were dead. But this was not the case. After those first moments of silence, officers and enlisted alike began picking themselves up off the decks to return to their posts, or rather what was left of them.
CIC was a typical example of this. Adama hauled himself upright leaning heavily against the plot table, already certain that his leg was broken. Tigh came up on his knees, looked around and then instinctively reached down to check for a pulse on the crewman lying beside him, even though it was obvious from the angle of the poor boy’s head that his neck was broken. The young man had had the misfortune of being flung over the railing of the CIC’s upper gallery before hitting the deck.
Adama looked around through eyes blurred from blood coming from a cut on his forehead. His experienced ears noted the absence of engine noises, or indeed
any noses from his beloved ship except for the low moans of the injured around him. He looked upwards at the DRADIS display, only to find that one of the screens had broken free and the others were offline. He noted that a few consoles were flickering back into life. He spotted Gaeta and Tigh among those who were awake.
“Saul, Gaeta, get me a damage report.”
The order, given in a quiet but firm voice, had a galvanising effect on many of the CIC crew. They threw off the shock and went to work, collecting reports and trying to contact other parts of the ship. Fortunately, the Battlestar still had sound-powered phones to supplement her internal comms system, making this task much easier than it would have been on a newer ship.
Slowly, agonisingly, the CIC crew sounded off the grim news. Tigh went first:
“We’ve got red lights on every structural member. Her back’s broken. Starboard pod is totally gone, everything forward of frame 44 and portside from the centreline is gone, likewise the two ventral drive pods. Every compartment on the outer edge of the port pod has decompressed. Massive hull breaches on her ventral side amidships.”
The helmsman spoke up next: “Main drives offline, manoeuvring thrusters offline, we’re in an uncontrolled lateral spin to starboard.”
Gaeta was next: “FTL drives destroyed, main power offline, secondary power offline…we’re down to the batteries sir. Sensors and comms are down as well.”
Adama absorbed all this, his heart breaking with each word, although he did not show it. “Fires?”
Tigh shook his head. “We lucked out on that, any fires were in areas that have decompressed.”
“Casualties?”
“Everyone in the starboard pod, everyone in the port bow, anyone who couldn’t get far enough inside in time…” Tigh trailed off at the thought of so many dead. “We’re dead in space Bill.”
The Admiral nodded grimly before pressing a bandage against his forehead. He noticed Gaeta’s arm hanging limply at his side, the fact that Tigh was leaning against a bulkhead keeping weight off his leg, and countless other injuries. The assigned CIC corpsman was working frantically on one of the more serious cases by the Weapons Control section. Those with serious but not life-threatening injuries simply had to wait.
Adama looked at his officers. “Gaeta…” he paused, sighed, then spoke again. ”Felix, Saul, get started on repairs. DRADIS and comms are top priority, life support next. We’ve got enough air for about twelve hours as it is. Try and get the transponders up first, we need to let the fleet know we’re here.”
Gaeta nodded. “Wherever “here” is. Aye sir.” He moved off to his usual console. Tigh limped across to his usual position opposite Bill.
“How do you think the fight is going?”
“Our missile strike got the last of the Basestars firing on the surface, hopefully Lee, Jellicoe and the rest can handle the main body.”
Tigh nodded. “And if they can’t?”
The Admiral looked his old comrade squarely in the eyes: “Then we’re dead, along with Terra and everyone else.”
Nothing more needed to be said after that. The crew worked away. Contact was re-established with the engineering spaces, or rather what was left of them, along with sickbay and the other areas the crew had taken shelter in. Casualty reports began to trickle in.
Those were particularly grim. When
Galactica had started the battle, she had carried just over three thousand crew, including her air wing. These were a mix of the veteran crew who had manned the ship during the Fall and the subsequent exodus, a handful of extra personnel transferred from
Pegasus or
Warspite to help fill in the gaps, and a large body of Terrans who had come aboard to bring her up to her full complement, most of whom had been posted in the restored starboard flight pod.
Now, the battered wreck of a Battlestar had barely eighteen hundred survivors. Everyone in the starboard pod was dead, either killed in the initial devastating hit or when the remains of the structure broke free to impact on Terra’s surface. A hundred more had perished in the bow areas blasted away by enemy fire, and most of the rest had died when the engineering spaces had been turned into an inferno.
Over twelve hundred dead, plus however many Viper or Raptor pilots had fallen. Despite his long experience and service in the first war, Adama had only once seen worse losses, when he had witnessed the complete destruction of the
Columbia at the very end of the war. He could mentally add to that tally the losses he already knew about in the rest of the Fleet: the
Barham, abandoned and destroyed, the
Valkyrie, the
Vendetta, the
Defiant, the
Stalwart, the
Champion…the list seemed endless. He began wondering if this would be nothing more than a pyrrhic victory for the combined fleet.
Slowly, tantalisingly, things were brought under control. Adama was surprised when the whirr of the air circulators and oxygen scrubbers started up again, making everyone in CIC breathe a little easier. Gaeta, his arm now in a rudimentary splint and sling made from a torn uniform and some pieces of the broken DRADIS display, triumphantly declared that the Terran-designed sensors had been restored.
The Admiral could only nod in acknowledgement; he was feeling the pain from his wounded leg, even though that too had been patched up as well as the frazzled corpsman could manage. He looked at the display screen, surprised that so few contacts were shown. His heart eased its frantic rhythm when the
Pegasus appeared to be intact. The Cylon fleet, in contrast, had been shattered.
The technicians continued to work on the comm systems even as Bill and Saul watched the last stages of the Battle of Terra, the appearance of not one but
two unknown contacts within a few minutes. The battle, it seemed, was over. Gaeta managed to get the ship’s transponders working again, and several destroyers promptly jumped out to the Battlestar’s position to render assistance.
Bill Adama leaned against the plot table and breathed deeply, letting go of the stress and adrenaline from the largest and most arduous battle had ever witnessed, let alone fought in. He looked around at his shattered CIC and knew deep in his heart that the Grey Lady, as she had been fondly known by her crews in the First War, was finished as a fighting ship.
Normally that would be a sad thought, but Bill refused to feel that way.
Galactica may never fire her guns in anger again, may never jump between the stars or hurl Vipers from her decks, but he knew she had done more,
given more than any warship he had ever been aboard. More, perhaps, than any warship ever had. And through it all, some of her crew survived. Some, many, would live to remember their time aboard her and this day with pride.
A message came in, commanding the senior surviving officers to report to Olympus Base to meet the new arrivals. Bill called across to Saul, and the two old friends left the ruins of CIC, possibly for the last time as officers in command, with their heads held high despite their wounds.
Galactica would meet her final fate with pride. The odds had been suicidal, the damage crippling, the casualties severe, but despite it all, the Grey Lady and her master had stood between Death and the innocent.
And she had not been moved.
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Now, who was that saying I was harsh on canon characters? See, Bill, Saul and Felix all lived through that, as did (most of) the crew. So there!
And if anyone is wondering about the last two paragraphs, I seem to have a knack writing eulogies for warships, just ask Steve about the eulogy for CRS
Warrior in his Rule the Waves playthrough.
