Excerpt: The Last, Best Hope of Earth

All Laura Roslin could see with her eyes was a barren, deserted wasteland. When she arrived at Earth a week ago, along with the ragtag fleet from the Colonies, she thought that the three year odyssey of fleeing the Cylon destruction of the twelve planets was finally at an end. Seeing what had happened to Earth broke her heart, and serious thoughts of suicide raced through her mind.

How can I go on? How can we all go on? Those questions dominated her mind as she dealt with the panicky members of the Quorum of Twelve as well as the captains and leaders on board the other ships of the fleet. The emotions of the last week, indeed the last three years, had taken their toll on her, and it didn’t help that she was stricken with terminal breast cancer.

Still, there were rocks underneath her feet in this ordeal. The man she loved, Admiral William Adama, still remained strong despite the proverbial blow to the gut seeing Earth in her radioactive reality. Lee Adama, the man who defied her on the stand at Gaius Baltar’s trial and whom while she was still angry about that still admired him for the priciple for which he took the stand, was doing an outstanding job of organizing the fleet and keeping things calm. Kara Thrace, the hotshot pilot who seemingly died only to fly back to the fleet months ago saying she’d found a way to Earth, was helping Lee despite the doubts that crept into her head that she may have been wrong.

And then there were the people on board this ship, who had lived on Earth, only to take a year-long journey and find that, at its end, it had been all for naught. Still, the crew of the Yamato carried on despite their broken hearts, and as she lay in their infirmary, she was ever so glad to meet them. In this darkest hour, it gave her some hope that the human race may actually survive.

Doctor Sakezo Sane had dealt with terminal cancer before. In fact, he had vainly treated the former commanding officer of the Yamato, Captain Abraham Avatar, who had led the voyage to another galaxy to find a cure to the radiation that was killing off life on Earth. They had stopped the reason for the radiation, taking out the planet bomb launcher as well as the entire Gamilon base on the distant planet Pluto. When the crew of the Yamato, dubbed the “Star Force”, left communicative range of Earth, the people seemed like they still had hope.

They had no idea that two months after the final message, a virus began to sweep through the whole of humanity and wiped it out in short order. It had not been a biogenetic weapon unleashed by those alien Gamilons, but a combination of cold and flu viruses that had been mutated by the ever encroaching radiation in the underground cities where the people of Earth had fled the bombings. The virus spread like wildfire, and the already swamped medical community never had a chance to combat the affliction. By the time the Star Force left the distant planet Iscandar, the last of humanity was on its final legs.

Roslin lay on a bed inside Dr. Sane’s infirmary, enduring the first round of what he called “chemotherapy” treatments. To her, it felt the same way that the dioloxin treatments had, and she’d soon get radiation treatments as well, which seemed to her to be odd, but the short, fat, bald doctor had said that it would be effective in prolonging her life.

“Now you just lay there and rest, Madame President, and I’ll finish things up after today’s treatment has been completed.” Dr. Sane told Roslin.

“Ask you a question?” said Roslin.

“Sure. What would you like to know?” replied Dr. Sane as he poured out food for his pet cat, Mimi.

“What went wrong with the…what did he call it…Cosmo DNA machine? I was talking to your engineer and he said that you had tried it to bring back life on the planet, but the machine didn’t quite work right.”

Dr. Sane sighed as he put away the bag of food, wondering how much longer he could keep feeding his beloved cat before addressing Roslin’s question. “When we came back, we were so devastated by what we had seen that we figured ‘why not try it and see’! In our minds, even if it worked, it wouldn’t bring those lost back, but in our hearts, we had to at least try it and hope for a miracle!”