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Revelations
Every time Gaeta manages to process the latest piece of scuttlebutt, another rushes forward to break like a tsunami. The Admiral's returned, but Roslin hasn't; D'Anna's been unboxed; four of the Final Five have been hiding in the fleet this whole time, like Boomer, like D'Anna herself all those years back.
Tigh relieves himself of duty to go speak to the Admiral. The next thing Gaeta hears, their XO is standing in an airlock.
Saul Tigh is one of the Five. Gaeta can't catch his breath after he hears, and this time, he can't blame it on exhaustion or his leg or his meds. Before he's even finished getting air into his lungs, two more blows: Tyrol. Anders. Both detained by Marines, both joining Tigh in the launch tube.
(Motherfrakker. Anders. This whole time -- all the things he said to Gaeta about his past, his childhood on Picon, all of it, what the frak --
It takes a long, long time for the next wave of phantom pain to recede.)
The standoff escalates, nukes from the baseship going hot as D'Anna moves on from merely executing one human at a time. Gaeta can barely look away from the DRADIS screen, hearing Louis relay commands back and forth from the CIC to the launch tube. How many times has he thought it over the years? This time, we won't pull through. The brief reprieve their fifty thousand received -- thirty-nine thousand, now -- has to run out sometime. Maybe the ending will finally come today.
Thin prickles of something very much like panic race over his skin. Not even the morpha can quell it. His eyes dart to the clock in the corner of his screen, as if he can read his final seconds etched there.
And then --
Lee, stop!
-- it's over, in a way nobody expects.
Those three frakking Cylons just gave us Earth.
She can't be serious. After two months on the Demetrius, nobody can expect Kara Thrace to be serious about Earth anymore, least of all Gaeta. And yet, when she relays her request up to the CIC:
"There's no interference I can detect on that channel," he says faintly. In his ears, the Colonial emergency beacon she's instructed them to listen for ticks on: beep-beep-beep-beep, beep, beep, beep-beep. "Nobody's ever used it until now. It's clear except for that signal."
The sound could mean a trillion different things, starting with equipment malfunction and working its way down. 'A route to Earth' ranks pretty godsdamn close to the bottom.
And yet.
Between him and Louis, it takes no time at all to extract a set of coordinates from the needle-thin wafer of noise.
One by one, Cylon and Colonial both, the ships flicker in: jump complete. jump complete.
"DRADIS is clear, Fleet is checking in."
"Nav," says the Admiral.
"Confirming position." Gaeta can't let the tension go. Think. Think. If there is one moment he cannot afford to frak up, it's this one, with a planet hanging below them that he already swears he knows. He barely hears the Admiral's reassurance to take his time, nor Louis' mention that the Fleet is all present and accounted for.
His fingers skim the keyboard in time with the scan. Across the screen, stars rotate into position. Gaeta stares.
The moment hangs suspended. In that time, he feels a curious pressure of isolation he hasn't felt in three years, when he looked down at a report from Fleet HQ and thought, I'm the only one who knows. He blinks, hard, and turns around, slowly taking in the entire CIC: seeing the hope and disbelief he feels mirrored across every face.
No, he thinks. Not isolated at all.
"Visible constellations are a match," he breathes, eyes as bright as clear sky.
The old man's announcement echoes through every ship: Crew of Galactica. People of the Fleet. This is Admiral Adama.
Three years ago I promised to lead you to a new home. We've endured a difficult journey. We've all lost; we've all suffered. And the truth is, I questioned whether this day would ever come. But today, our journey is at an end.
We have arrived at Earth.
The CIC explodes into wild cheers and applause the instant Adama's comm clicks off. Some have their hands pressed to their mouths, crying; others grab each other into fierce embraces of joy. Louis is already crossing to Gaeta's side, beaming, one hand outstretched for a professional handshake.
Frak professionalism. (Besides, everybody's too distracted by Lee whooping and jumping on top of the command table.) As soon as their hands connect, Gaeta yanks him into a hug, laughing and weeping. Half a second later he pulls back to take Louis' face in his hands and kiss him hard, right in the middle of the CIC.
Oh, gods. They're home. They did it.
They've found an ending after all.
It's not until everyone's quieted down, and the environmental scans commence, that a different sort of noise becomes audible.
Tickticktickticktickticktick. The background radiation isn't just background. It's too solid; too constant.
Something, Gaeta realizes dimly -- long before the reports from those on the scouting mission arrive -- has gone terribly wrong.
Tigh relieves himself of duty to go speak to the Admiral. The next thing Gaeta hears, their XO is standing in an airlock.
Saul Tigh is one of the Five. Gaeta can't catch his breath after he hears, and this time, he can't blame it on exhaustion or his leg or his meds. Before he's even finished getting air into his lungs, two more blows: Tyrol. Anders. Both detained by Marines, both joining Tigh in the launch tube.
(Motherfrakker. Anders. This whole time -- all the things he said to Gaeta about his past, his childhood on Picon, all of it, what the frak --
It takes a long, long time for the next wave of phantom pain to recede.)
The standoff escalates, nukes from the baseship going hot as D'Anna moves on from merely executing one human at a time. Gaeta can barely look away from the DRADIS screen, hearing Louis relay commands back and forth from the CIC to the launch tube. How many times has he thought it over the years? This time, we won't pull through. The brief reprieve their fifty thousand received -- thirty-nine thousand, now -- has to run out sometime. Maybe the ending will finally come today.
Thin prickles of something very much like panic race over his skin. Not even the morpha can quell it. His eyes dart to the clock in the corner of his screen, as if he can read his final seconds etched there.
And then --
Lee, stop!
-- it's over, in a way nobody expects.
Those three frakking Cylons just gave us Earth.
She can't be serious. After two months on the Demetrius, nobody can expect Kara Thrace to be serious about Earth anymore, least of all Gaeta. And yet, when she relays her request up to the CIC:
"There's no interference I can detect on that channel," he says faintly. In his ears, the Colonial emergency beacon she's instructed them to listen for ticks on: beep-beep-beep-beep, beep, beep, beep-beep. "Nobody's ever used it until now. It's clear except for that signal."
The sound could mean a trillion different things, starting with equipment malfunction and working its way down. 'A route to Earth' ranks pretty godsdamn close to the bottom.
And yet.
Between him and Louis, it takes no time at all to extract a set of coordinates from the needle-thin wafer of noise.
One by one, Cylon and Colonial both, the ships flicker in: jump complete. jump complete.
"DRADIS is clear, Fleet is checking in."
"Nav," says the Admiral.
"Confirming position." Gaeta can't let the tension go. Think. Think. If there is one moment he cannot afford to frak up, it's this one, with a planet hanging below them that he already swears he knows. He barely hears the Admiral's reassurance to take his time, nor Louis' mention that the Fleet is all present and accounted for.
His fingers skim the keyboard in time with the scan. Across the screen, stars rotate into position. Gaeta stares.
The moment hangs suspended. In that time, he feels a curious pressure of isolation he hasn't felt in three years, when he looked down at a report from Fleet HQ and thought, I'm the only one who knows. He blinks, hard, and turns around, slowly taking in the entire CIC: seeing the hope and disbelief he feels mirrored across every face.
No, he thinks. Not isolated at all.
"Visible constellations are a match," he breathes, eyes as bright as clear sky.
The old man's announcement echoes through every ship: Crew of Galactica. People of the Fleet. This is Admiral Adama.
Three years ago I promised to lead you to a new home. We've endured a difficult journey. We've all lost; we've all suffered. And the truth is, I questioned whether this day would ever come. But today, our journey is at an end.
We have arrived at Earth.
The CIC explodes into wild cheers and applause the instant Adama's comm clicks off. Some have their hands pressed to their mouths, crying; others grab each other into fierce embraces of joy. Louis is already crossing to Gaeta's side, beaming, one hand outstretched for a professional handshake.
Frak professionalism. (Besides, everybody's too distracted by Lee whooping and jumping on top of the command table.) As soon as their hands connect, Gaeta yanks him into a hug, laughing and weeping. Half a second later he pulls back to take Louis' face in his hands and kiss him hard, right in the middle of the CIC.
Oh, gods. They're home. They did it.
They've found an ending after all.
It's not until everyone's quieted down, and the environmental scans commence, that a different sort of noise becomes audible.
Tickticktickticktickticktick. The background radiation isn't just background. It's too solid; too constant.
Something, Gaeta realizes dimly -- long before the reports from those on the scouting mission arrive -- has gone terribly wrong.
no subject
For as long as he can remember, he's been a target. When he played pro ball he was the go-to guy for opposing teams to take down. When the colonies got nuked — when he headed the resistance — he was on the Cylons' radar.
That was before he knew. Before they knew.
For a blessed year on New Caprica, he was only the target of Kara's affection. But once the planet was discovered and Leoben stole away his wife, it was back to the whole resistance business.
Today and from now on, he's a different sort of target. The kind people will be wanting to eliminate and for the first time he resents his height, his inability to be part of the crowd, to... to blend in. He might as well be wearing a FINAL FIVE t-shirt, the kind that glows in the dark. Instead, he's in his flight suit with his Colonial Fleet dogtags around his neck, jacket keeping out the harsh radioactive wind blowing in off the harsh radioactive sea water.
He can't really even remember the day in order. What he remembers most are two things: the looks on Chief's face when the Marines came to the hangar to haul the two of them off to the airlock — that look of complete and utter resignation — and on Kara's face, his wife's face, when the Marines told her he and Chief were Cylons. Gods, he's never going to be able to not see that mixture of hatred and disbelief and hurt now, every time he closes his eyes.
And he remembers standing in the airlock, hands cuffed behind his back, thinking so this is how it ends. Hurry up, godsdammit. Do it, Lee. Do it.
He wishes this whole frakked-up Final Five thing came with some sudden knowledge, some revelation about what they were doing or what they were supposed to be doing. Some godsdamn clue or at least a hint. But he doesn't know any more than he did before, except that he'd better frakking watch his back if he wants to stay alive. He's not even sure death isn't the much better alternative.
The smell of salt blowing in off the ocean is cold and strong and pungent. It reminds him of Picon, where he grew up. No, where he thought he grew up: what percentage of those memories is a lie, run by some switch somewhere in his brain? Cylons aren't born, they're made. He's a machine (no, he's so much more than a machine). Isn't he? Maybe he has no frakking idea what it's like not to be one, and all the things he's ever thought or felt, all the things he mistook for genuine emotion, they're just some series of binary digits being translated by something somewhere, something buried deep inside.
But how can that be? When he played ball he was examined by dozens of doctors. Every single time he had an ache or sprain or strain or broken bone, he was scanned and analyzed and poked and prodded and not once did anybody say hey, look, machine parts. And he knows he played ball and so does everyone else. So what's the truth and what's fantasy? What's a lie? What's reality? What the frak is this planet, this nuked-out shell of a place? Why does it seem both familiar and completely unfamiliar? It's... gods, it's way too frakking much and when Tory comes over and tries to take his arm, looking for... for frak knows what — solace or companionship or validation — he shrugs her off and moves away. He can't. He can't be anything for anyone. He can't even be anything for himself.
Kara, she's hardly looked at him. He loves her and can't stop circling back to her side, and she's hardly even looked at him.
Those three frakking Cylons just gave us Earth.
So that's how she sees him now. Not as Sam, not as her husband, not as her lover, not as the only motherfrakker dumb enough and safe enough and easy enough and pathetic enough to stand by her while she was crazy on the Demetrius. No, she only sees him as one of those three frakking Cylons.
She might as well shoot him right through the heart. He wishes she would. If she doesn't, odds are someone else will the first time the opportunity arises.
Frakking Cylons. He's pretty sure he doesn't believe in them any more than he believes in the promise of Earth. Not after today.
*
This, he realizes as he finds himself alone, is not the first time he's watched his wife
(gods, that pang in his heart)
willingly leave with a Two. The first time was on the baseship. He didn't want to stop her then because he was like a child suddenly aware of his surroundings and wanted to... to feel it all, take it all in, know what it meant to be one of them. If he could just connect to the data stream. If he could just see the way they saw. If he could just understand what any of it meant.
But there was no epiphany, no singular moment of clarity, and he doesn't want to stop her now. There's too much confusion. Around him, the wind picks up and the stinging of the sand on nuked-out husks of buildings howls.
No.
No.
All this has happened before. This will all happen again. It's so familiar, just out of reach. Like that frakking song.
Like some sort of dream.
In the sand, his foot meets something; he bends to pick it up. Like the kid he used to think he was on Picon, he examines this remnant like a prize: it's the broken neck of... of a guitar and automatically his fingers find their place on the frets and despite everything, despite all the skepticism he feels, despite the fact he doesn't have a musical bone in his body and never has, against all odds, he can feel himself smiling as that song, that frakking song, it floods his memories.
"So let us not talk falsely now," he tells the radioactive sand around him, "'cause the hour is getting late."
Gods. Gods, suddenly... suddenly he remembers. Not a lot but enough, and like it's made of poison or... as if holding on to it for too long will cause irreparable damage, he drops the guitar neck and runs toward where he thinks Galen went. Maybe if he tells him, he'll...
(He'll what, Sam, he asks himself, understand? Explain? he doesn't know a godsdamn thing either.)
He finds Chief hovering with his back to a piece of wall, shivering in the breeze.
"You remember something?"
Galen's every bit as droll as he was earlier when the Marines cuffed them and dragged them off to the airlock. He nods up to the wall, that same resigned smile on his face. "Yeah, I used to live here."
"Me too." 'Cause just like that, it works. It makes sense, and the memories gnawing at the back of his thoughts break through for one shining moment, just one, and he gets a snippet of a scene clear as day. "That song that switched us on? I played it for a woman I loved."
"I remember." It's Tory, appearing like some ghost, some shadowy smooth Earth-bound ghost.
"You do?" His memory didn't include her.
"You played it for all of us."
She's as matter-of-fact as Galen, who points to a shadow on the wall behind him. "That was me. We died in a holocaust."
His memory didn't include that either, but Galen, man, he doesn't frak around. His words have the hollow ring of probability to them, and who the frak is he to say it didn't happen that way? But if it did... if they frakking died in a holocaust...
"Then why are we still alive? That happened 2000 years ago. How did we get to the Colonies? Come to think we were human?" It's a question none of them can answer, not that he was expecting the gift of more sudden insight. None of them know.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate.
Ultimately, there's only one truth he cares to put voice to. "Two thousand years is a long time to forget."
There's no answer to that. Not from any of them, and nothing to do but try to grasp these fleeting hints of memories. Just a little more, he begs no one, give me just a little more.
The wind picks up again, relentless and unforgiving.
no subject
Choked it down.
Feels it weighing down her stomach until she's not sure she won't be sick.
She wants to shut her eyes tight and then open them again to discover this is all just a stupid frakking dream. She is not really married to a Cylon. She hasn't really been taking orders from a Cylon. Her ship hasn't been repaired over and over again by a Cylon. There is not a Cylon assisting the President. Earth is not a radioactive post-apocalyptic mess.
But it is. And those shouts of joy she heard coming from the CIC earlier seem so distant now.
This was what she fought so hard to find? This cold frakking wasteland? This ruined shoreline?
It was beautiful from space. For the first time in a very long time she can't bring herself to meet anyone's eyes. She catches herself with one hand balled into a tight useless fist, her own short nails biting unhappily into her palm. Lords of Kobol, she thinks, almost sending up a prayer, but the thought trails off, too aimless. Too angry.
She spots Helo and Athena numbly walking past her; the old man and the President looking like the ground's just dropped from beneath their feet; Lee not far from them, staring off into the distance.
Sam looking around in disbelief. Sam, who might've been on a secret mission all this time. Programmed to want her, to deal with her bullshit because it was all part of some grand Cylon scheme. She looks away. Her left arm almost itches, almost burns, almost wants her to dig the ink right out of her pores.
Her eyes close, and for a moment she doesn't move at all, rooted stiffly to the ground.
When she opens them again nothing's changed. Out of the corner of one eye she sees Leoben and turns toward him. So much for her being an angel blazing with the light of God; he's much less enthusiastic now, his mouth a grim line.
(You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace.)
Maybe the hybrid was right. This place is death.
Leoben doesn't stay away once their eyes meet.
"Did you see this?"
His voice is almost as quiet. "Kara--"
She cuts him off with level look and half a shake of her head. "Don't." There's a gun on her hip, bundled under her coat, and she could pull it out and blow him away. One less Leoben, permanently this time. For the space of a heartbeat -- two -- she wants him to say he saw this, he knew this would happen. She wants him to egg her on, to give her a frakking excuse.
But she won't do it. Not without a good reason. There's an uneasy peace with these Cylons, and part of it's her doing. She won't -- can't -- let this get the better of her.
(You will lead them all to their end.)
"I'm going to find the signal." It'll take a minute to get the equipment from the Raptor, but it's definitely time to get some answers. She needs to know what guided them here.
She doesn't know whether to take stubborn comfort in or be chilled by the uncertainty in his eyes. All the Leobens she's known have always been so frakking sure of themselves and what they believe. Never a doubt, never a perhaps, never a hesitation. When he says he'll go with her, she doesn't answer, punched in the gut too many times today to care whether he goes along or stays behind.
Let him see whatever this was all for.
Wielding the locator from her Viper, she wanders away from the group with him as her only company. The signal they're following is so weak now that the battery must not have much juice left. It's relief when she finally zeroes in on it.
And a surprise to find wreckage she can recognize as the guts of a Colonial ship, part of the inertial nav system. Wonderingly, she turns as Leoben's voice comes from behind her. He holds up a flat piece of metal with numbers on it. 757-NC, he reads aloud.
That's impossible.
"The number on my ship is 8757-NC." This can't be. Turning away from him, she moves forward to hunt for more clues. "If my Viper splattered all over the planet, then who flew it here? And what the hell did I fly back to Galactica?"
He's a few steps behind her, no longer matching her pace. "Maybe you're better off not knowing."
Coming from him, that's frakking rich. "You're always telling me to face the truth and not run from it. Why the sudden change of heart?"
"I've got a feeling you might not like what you find," he says slowly.
She turns to give him a look. She hasn't liked anything she's discovered today. "Me or you?"
Finally there's a larger piece of the ship. Leoben's hand closes on her arm, but she wrenches away. When he helps her flip the wreckage over she recognizes it as well as she would her own reflection. It's the cockpit of a Viper, home away from home, and it's not empty. She stares for a moment at the helmeted corpse inside, suddenly feeling like she's been exposed to a rush of cold air, and her body switches to autopilot: reaching down, as cautious as she's ever been, and nudges the helmeted head back to reveal blonde hair.
She has to cover her mouth and swallowswallowswallow against the rising bile.
The body's more than dead enough for her nose to pick up on it, but it's blonde and in her Viper -- her Viper -- and her chest feels tight because she can't seem to make herself breathe the way she should. Reaching in again, she shoves her hand into the pilot's flight suit and wrenches off its dog tags. There's only one tag, and a thin silver band is looped on the chain.
Zak's ring. The same one partnered with the tag around her neck right now.
Though the tag itself is bloodied the letters are legible: K. Thrace
Leoben looks over her shoulder at it and immediately backs up like a man near a sudden blaze.
Her voice doesn't want to stay steady. "If you've got an explanation for this, now's the time."
"I don't-- I don't have one." He opens his mouth again and can't seem to find words he wants to use. "I was wrong. About Earth."
Her heart is a lump of lead in her chest. "Your hybrid told me something." He must've heard it that day. "Said that I was the harbinger of death. That I would lead us all to our end."
"She said that," he says dully, keeping his distance, and she can't tell whether it's a question or not.
"Is it true?"
He backs away.
"If that's me lying there, then what am I?"
For the first time ever, he can't seem to get away from her fast enough.
For the first time ever, the sight of his retreating form almost leaves her in tears. "What am I?"
All that talk to Sam of feeling so detached from herself, feeling like she's frakking with her winter coat on or watching battles play out from somewhere overhead. It all seems so stupid now. But since he's one of the Final Five he would know if she's one, right? D'Anna, the three, would've known. Leoben wouldn't be running from one of his own.
Or maybe they're all full of shit. Sam with his if you're a Cylon you've been one from the beginning. Leoben, the hybrid, D'Anna. Roslin. Pythia. The only thing she knows for sure is that humans don't frakking die in Viper crashes and then magically come back. Humans die for good, no takebacks.
She sucks in a trembling breath, head tilted up to the sky, trying her hardest not to scream. Behind her eyelids there's a prickle that starts to burn, and she bites her lip until the tang of copper hits her tongue.
There's only one thing she can do right now. As the setting sun bruises the sky, she gathers all the good dry wood she can find and builds a pyre, then drags the pilot's body to it. The night is inky black by the time she has a fire going, but it grows fast, crackling and licking at the darkness.
She doesn't know if she feels the need to give the body a proper send-off or if she's just trying to burn evidence, but she plants herself several feet away to watch in silence. She won't go back to Galactica until she's seen the entire thing go up in flames.
no subject
"Go down to the nearest ocean. Straight to the shore, and right into the water... what about you?"
"Climb a tree. Closest one to wherever we land."
The hardest thing, Hoshi finds, isn't that there aren't any trees in sight for Felix to climb. There isn't anything growing at all; nothing but twisted wreckage, the fallen bare bones of the long-ago civilization they've come so far to find.
No, the hardest thing for him is how much the rocky shore looks like Aquaria.
Step by careful step, Hoshi makes his way slowly past the others, barely noticing when he moves away from the rest. He follows the rough outcroppings of shale and stone along a ridge, all the way down to the edge of the poisoned sea. He turns into the salt breeze, lifting his face to the gray storm-threat of the sky above, and looks out across the wind-tossed waves.
He'd used to stand like this on a rocky outcropping back home, outside one of the more distant research outposts or another, waiting for the test comms signals he'd sent to bounce back from the far station and confirm that the lines he'd run back to Heim were good, that the researchers working in their isolated sites weren't left out there alone.
As hard as he listens now, he can't hear anything but the wind, and he's not even aware when the moisture from the salt spray on his face begins to mix with his tears.
no subject
It seems no one had bothered to keep any record in the Scrolls of what they now know to have happened sixteen hundred years after that.
If she closes her eyes, she can see the way Elosha's face had looked when the priest had first told her about the prophecy of the dying leader, the way shock had given way to a sudden blaze of hope anchored in faith -- faith in the Scrolls, and faith in her.
And the Lords anointed a leader to guide the caravan of the heavens to their new homeland....
Roslin doesn't close her eyes.
Beside her, Bill goes down on one knee and grasps a handful of dirt. I want to see you pick up that first fistful of dirt, she'd told him, there on Galactica mere hours ago as he sat in his quarters crushed by the weight of discovering Tigh was a Cylon. She'd coaxed him from despair there while his son watched, reminding him of the promise of the planet that lay ahead of them, on the brink of just one final jump, hope for them all after so long. This is it, she'd told them. This is everything we've been working for.
How many times had she asked for his trust? For all their trust?
And he'd believed her. They all had.
Madam President. Without you, we wouldn't have made it. Give the order.
Take us to Earth.
Someone holds a radiation scanner out, pointing it at the crumbled wreckage of soil in Bill's hand. As it crackles its deadly news, he flings the fistful of dirt back to the ground and stands up beside Roslin. Together, with their people and the Cylons together milling around them, they look out over the blasted landscape.
Roslin confirms the death of all their hopes with a single word.
"Earth."
The news continues to come in slow, rolling waves. Somewhere behind her, she hears Helo telling Bill and D'Anna that the scouts are reporting the same findings from all over the planet - destruction everywhere, everything dead, and no signs of life. D'Anna confirms it's what the Cylons are finding as well.
Roslin doesn't turn around.
On the ground in front of her there's a single speck of bright green - one small shoot from some plant she's never seen before, clinging to life beside the brittle ash of its brethren. She goes down on her knees and carefully unearths it with her fingers, cradling it in her hands as she gets unsteadily to her feet. She closes her eyes, rubbing the leaves between finger and thumb, smelling the sharp verdant scent, feeling the texture. As long as she does, she can imagine there's more than this. Surely there has to be more than this, somewhere, somehow--
"-- it's everywhere. Throughout the food chain." She doesn't have to open her eyes to recognize Baltar's voice, telling someone what his analysis shows. No matter what else he's done, there's no denying his scientific acumen; there never has been, which only makes it worse. "Low-level radiation. Tell everyone not to eat or drink anything while we're down here."
"So that's it." Bill's voice is as rough as the gravel underfoot. "We're too late. This planet was nuked two thousand years ago."
"It's perfect." She can hear the sharp edge of unravelling control lurking beneath her own words, see the alarm in the others' faces as they turn to her. She doesn't care. "We've traded one nuked civilization for another."
"Let’s get out of here," Bill orders, and everyone begins to move, packing up to return to the ships waiting patiently at the edge of the atmosphere above.
Roslin lets the little plant fall from her hands back to the ground below, there to live or die as it would have without her in the first place. It doesn't matter. She has nothing to offer, to it or to anyone else.
Earth is lost.
There's nowhere left to go.