Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003
From: Kythe <zortified@highstream.net>

Title: Cages
Author: James
Email: zortified@highstream.net
Rating: G
Genre: character sketch
Disclaimer: not mine, no profit made
Summary: Starbuck's perception of being on a battlestar

Cages

     There's something about being on a starship that makes most people
feel trapped. Closed in by metal walls they can't escape -- it's no
wonder the vices are running rampant throughout the fleet. No wonder that
so many pilots take patrols in lieu of R&R.
     There's a painter on the Horizon's Quarry who is rumored to be the 
highest paid civilian in the fleet. He's a muralist, with a keen eye  for
landscapes of their home worlds.
     He spends all his time painting. There is an entire crew of twenty 
whose job it is to create new paint for him. When the Council had to 
vote on starship repair budgets, they removed all allowance for paint. 
No one cares what the outsides look like; too many people are  hungering,
desperate for the sensation that they are home. Planetside. Anywhere but
here.
     Starbuck has never felt that way. On the over-crowded civilian
ships, on the lavishly over-decorated R&R ships, on the Galactica -- he's
always felt at home with metal plating beneath his boots. With cold,
smooth metal on all sides, no more than an arm's span away. Better still
is the cramped cockpit of his viper, sitting in the launch bay. Closed in
two times over, he feels comforted by the lack of freedom.
     He's been on planets before. Too many times, though he knows better
than to say so where anyone can hear him. He's stood on vast plains,
climbed hills and walked through forests and breathed more unrecycled air
than perhaps anyone else in the fleet, since the destruction.
     He's always been relieved to get home. To tuck himself into the
cocoon that he lives in.
     He knows he's unusual. But he isn't the only one. He's seen a few 
others, sit in the corners of rooms, holding onto the railings of their
bunks as though to pull them closer. He's met the gaze of more than one
person when they cram onto a lift and stand perhaps too close together.
There's something they recognize in each other.
     Most of the others are older, men and women who served for so long
that the ships have grown into their blood and now it keeps them tethered
like mother's milk. Starbuck knows he'll be one of those, the old
warriors who could never retire because they could not leave the confines
of their ships.
     Retirement has never been a problem, anyway. Starbuck never really
thinks he'll last that long.
     But if he does, he knows he will be here. The long, narrow corridors
of the Galactica, or maybe her daughter if they ever find a place to
build one. If they find a place to land, and live, and re-create
everything they've lost.
     They're all dreams. There is no planet waiting for them. There is no
reprieve, no salvation. But Starbuck doesn't mind, as long as he is here.
     Surrounded by the starship, hemmed in by metal and cables and the
artificial lighting that seems more natural to him than sunlight ever
did. He's content to never leave, content to never find the end of their
journey.
     As he walks down the corridors, he feels the humming in his bones of
the ship's engines. His heartbeat has grown accustomed to it, and he
thinks it could not continue without it.

the end