Chapter 4: Thirty-Three — Part 2
The Olympic Carrier dropped off DRADIS on jump two hundred and thirty-seven.
I counted the jumps. Everyone did — it was the only way to measure time anymore, since clocks had become meaningless and calendars had died with the colonies. Two hundred and thirty-seven jumps. Five days of thirty-three-minute intervals. Five days of no sleep, no rest, no silence.
And now the Olympic Carrier was gone.
The repeater screen in Cargo Bay Three showed the fleet's formation — tiny green dots in a black field, each one a ship, each ship a few hundred or a few thousand people clinging to survival. One of those dots had blinked out. Thirteen hundred souls, vanished between one jump and the next.
They're not gone. Not yet.
I leaned against a cargo container, data pad forgotten in my hands, and stared at the screen. Around me, the Cybele's cargo bay hummed with exhausted activity. Refugees had given up trying to sleep in shifts and now existed in a grey zone between consciousness and collapse — bodies moving, eyes vacant, hands performing tasks that muscle memory could handle while higher brain functions shut down.
My brain couldn't shut down. It was burning too hot, cycling through a problem that had no clean answer.
The Olympic Carrier would come back. I knew this the way I knew the sky was black and the stars were cold — because I'd watched the episode, curled on a couch in a world that might as well be a hallucination. In the show, the Olympic Carrier reappeared after the fleet finally got a break from the thirty-three-minute cycle. It approached the fleet with its transponder active, claiming engine trouble. But it was a trap — nuclear warhead aboard, Cylon-directed, aimed at the civilian fleet.
Apollo shot it down. Thirteen hundred people. Or maybe not — the show never confirmed whether the passengers were alive or dead when the missiles hit. That ambiguity had been good television. It was going to be something else entirely when it happened in real life.
You could warn someone.
The thought had been circling for hours, a vulture over a body that wasn't quite dead.
Warn them how? Walk up to Galactica's CIC and say, 'Excuse me, Commander Adama, the Olympic Carrier is going to come back with a nuke because I watched the episode'?
The system flickered in my peripheral vision. Dim blue, patient, unhelpful.
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: OLYMPIC CARRIER]
[STATUS: INSUFFICIENT DATA — NO DIRECT OBSERVATION]
[RECOMMENDATION: GATHER CORROBORATING EVIDENCE]
Corroborating evidence. Sure. Let me just pull up the Netflix episode guide and—
I stopped. Pushed the sarcasm down. Sarcasm was a luxury I couldn't afford.
Think like Cole. Think like a logistics officer.
Logistics officers notice patterns. Fuel consumption, supply manifests, cargo weight distributions — the invisible mathematics that kept a fleet alive. If I wanted to flag the Olympic Carrier as suspicious, I needed a logistics reason to do it.
I pulled up the data pad and started digging.
The fleet's communication logs were fragmented but accessible — civilian ships shared basic telemetry during jumps, a survival protocol that predated the attack. Fuel reports. Jump coordinates. System status updates. The Olympic Carrier had filed its last telemetry burst three jumps before it vanished.
There. Fuel consumption figures. The Olympic Carrier was a mid-size passenger liner, rated for six hundred thousand clicks of fuel per standard load. According to its last report, it was burning fourteen percent above standard consumption rates.
That was wrong. Not impossible — ships running hard in emergency conditions burned hotter — but fourteen percent was the kind of number that made a logistics officer's eye twitch. Passenger liners didn't have military-grade drives. They didn't push their reactors the way combat ships did. A fourteen percent burn rate meant either the ship was carrying significantly more mass than reported, or something was wrong with its reactor containment.
Or someone had modified its drive systems.
It's thin. It's circumstantial. But it's something a logistics officer might notice.
I needed someone with a communications channel to Galactica. Someone who would pass along a concern without asking too many questions.
Communications Officer Hale operated from a closet-sized relay station two decks above the cargo bay. She was a middle-aged woman with circles under her eyes dark enough to look like bruises, and she'd been awake as long as the rest of us — which meant her capacity for skepticism was running on fumes.
I climbed the ladder to deck three, each rung sending a pulse of pain through my chest. The shrapnel wounds had scabbed and crusted under Yusuf's bandages, but exertion still punished them. By the time I reached the relay station, I was breathing hard and my uniform was damp with sweat.
Hale glanced up from her console.
"Cole. You look terrible."
"Everybody looks terrible." I leaned against her doorframe. Casual. Concerned colleague, not desperate conspirator.
"I was reviewing fleet telemetry. Before the jumps started eating my life."
"And?"
"Olympic Carrier's last fuel report. Fourteen percent above standard burn rate for a ship its class."
Hale blinked. Tiredness warred with professional instinct.
"So? Half the fleet's running hot. Emergency protocols, overloaded systems—"
"Passenger liners don't run hot. Not like that. Their reactors aren't rated for it." I tapped my data pad, showing her the numbers. "Either they were carrying undeclared mass, or their drive was modified. Before the attack."
The word before landed where I needed it to. Hale's exhaustion-slackened face tightened.
"You're saying—"
"I'm not saying anything. I'm flagging an anomaly. That's what we logistics people do." I shrugged — carefully, because my shoulder wound hated the motion. "Maybe it's nothing. Maybe someone should check. Especially now that they've gone missing."
Hale stared at the numbers on my data pad. Chewed her lower lip. Then she turned to her console and started composing a message.
"I'll flag it to fleet command. Low priority — they've got bigger problems — but I'll flag it."
"That's all I'm asking."
I left the relay station with my hands in my pockets and my pulse hammering in my throat. It might not be enough. Fleet command was drowning in data, in crises, in the unrelenting grind of thirty-three-minute survival. One flagged fuel anomaly from a civilian cargo ship's logistics officer could easily die in someone's inbox.
But it was what I had. One small nudge, wrapped in plausible observation.
[Cargo Bay Three — 14 Hours Later]
The fleet didn't jump.
I sat against a cargo crate and watched the jump clock tick past thirty-three minutes. Past thirty-four. Past thirty-five. The number climbed with the slow grace of a miracle — forty minutes, fifty, sixty — and around me, the Cybele's crew began to understand what was happening.
The Cylons hadn't come.
Someone laughed. Then someone else. Then a woman started crying — great, heaving sobs that she couldn't stop, because the body only knows how to release five days of terror one way. A family near bulkhead four held each other in a tight knot, and I watched a man kiss his daughter's forehead and whisper something I couldn't hear.
The intercom crackled.
"All hands, this is Captain Vasquez. Fleet command reports Cylon pursuit has ceased. We are standing down from emergency jump protocol. All departments, begin recovery operations. Vasquez out."
Recovery operations. As if you could recover from this. As if five days of being hunted like prey across the stars was something you shook off with a good night's sleep and a hot meal.
I closed my eyes. The repeater screen was behind me, but I didn't need to see it. I knew what had happened. Somewhere out there, the Olympic Carrier had reappeared on DRADIS. Galactica's combat air patrol had intercepted. Questions were asked, answers were unsatisfying, and someone — Apollo, Lee Adama, a man carrying his father's expectations and his own conscience — had pulled the trigger.
Did the observation help? Did Hale's flag reach someone who mattered? Did it speed the decision by one minute, two minutes, five?
I'd never know. And that uncertainty — that gap between what I'd done and what it meant — was going to be the shape of my life from now on. Nudging. Hoping. Never knowing if the nudge mattered.
Thirteen hundred people. Maybe alive when the missiles hit. Maybe already dead, converted, replaced. The show had left it ambiguous. Reality didn't offer that comfort.
My stomach rolled. I stood, fast enough that the cargo bay tilted, and made it to the maintenance closet on the bay's port side with three seconds to spare. The door sealed behind me, and I vomited into a recycling bin — bile and water, because I hadn't eaten in eighteen hours. My hands gripped the bin's edges, white-knuckled, while my chest burned and my eyes watered.
Thirteen hundred people.
The door opened. Alec Marsh stood in the frame, a tool kit in one hand and an expression of alarmed concern behind those wire-rimmed glasses.
"Cole? You okay?"
I spat. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
"Five days without real sleep. Caught up with me." I straightened. Forced my face into something approximating composure. "I'm fine."
Marsh didn't look convinced, but he was too polite — or too grateful from the loader incident — to press. He handed me a water pouch from his kit.
"There's a rumor they're going to let people sleep for real. Full eight hours, no jump alarms."
"That would be something."
"It would be a frakking miracle."
I drank the water. It tasted like recycled plastic and salvation.
The fleet held position. No jumps. No alarms. No Cylons on DRADIS. Around me, five hundred and eighteen people began the slow, trembling process of believing they might survive another day.
I sat against the cargo crate, eyes closed, and let the silence settle into my bones. Five minutes. Ten. An hour. The Cybele's crew wept, laughed, slept where they stood — releasing five days of compressed terror in whatever way their bodies demanded.
Behind my eyelids, blue text flickered:
[33-MINUTE CRISIS: CONCLUDED]
[EXPERIENCE GAINED: +150 XP]
[CRISIS MANAGEMENT BONUS: +50 XP]
[SYSTEM LEVEL: 1 → 2]
[PERSONNEL ACQUISITION MATRIX: LEVEL 1 — UNLOCKING]
[NEW CAPABILITY: PASSIVE PERSONNEL SCANNING — ACTIVE]
[NEW CAPABILITY: BASIC THREAT ASSESSMENT — ACTIVE]
[NEW CAPABILITY: COMPATIBILITY RATING — BASIC]
My eyes opened. The blue text faded, but the knowledge of it stayed — lodged in the back of my skull like a new tooth breaking through the gum. The system had leveled up. Whatever I'd done during the thirty-three — surviving, intervening, managing the loader crisis, flagging the Olympic Carrier — had been enough to push past whatever threshold the damaged prototype needed to unlock its first real tools.
Personnel scanning. Threat assessment. Compatibility ratings.
Tools for building something. Tools for finding the right people.
Tools for making sure the next time fifty billion people burned, there would be someone ready.
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