Helena Cain

Helena Cain was a Rear Admiral in the Colonial Fleet and the commanding officer of the Mercury-class battlestar Pegasus, one of only two Colonial capital ships to survive the Fall of the Twelve Colonies. A hard and uncompromising officer, she led Pegasus on a relentless guerrilla campaign against the Cylons, stripping a civilian refugee fleet for parts and executing those who defied her, before her command collided with that of William Adama and ended in her assassination.

The Fall and the blind jump#

In the years before the Fall, Cain commanded Pegasus, with Galen Tyrol serving aboard as a deckhand. When the Cylon attack came, the battlestar was docked at the Scorpia Fleet Shipyards for a refit, its Command Navigation Program disabled and nonessential crew released on an extended shore leave. A heavily armed Cylon squadron jumped into range and fired nuclear missiles at the yards, destroying two battlestars and three other ships in the opening minutes. Cain rushed to the CIC and ordered an immediate decoupling and a blind jump to escape the combat area. The maneuver carried Pegasus far past the red line, four or five jumps from its last position. A ship-wide assessment afterward counted some 723 crew dead.

A relentless campaign#

When a Raptor reconnaissance mission confirmed the destruction of the Colonies, Cain turned Pegasus to a series of guerrilla attacks, jumping wherever Cylon forces were massing, engaging them, and abandoning the area before they could regroup. Unknown to her, the Cylon agent Gina Inviere had become close to her during the refit and now manipulated her into jumping the ship into the vicinity of a Cylon staging post disguised as a lightly defended communications relay. Pegasus was overwhelmed by fifteen squadrons of Raiders and suffered severe casualties. When her executive officer, Colonel Belzen, refused an order to launch the reserve Vipers, protesting it as a suicide run, Cain had him executed on the spot and made Colonel Jack Fisk her new second.

Soon after, Pegasus detected a small refugee fleet of civilian craft. Seeing the civilians as a tactical liability, Cain had their ships cannibalized for spare parts and their engineers impressed into service under threat of their families' murder. The stripped vessels, fifteen in all, were abandoned without the means to escape.

Conflict with Adama#

Several months after the Fall, Pegasus prepared to ambush a Cylon fleet it had been shadowing and instead made contact with Galactica and the civilian fleet it protected. The initial relief at the larger ship's arrival quickly curdled. To the anger of President Laura Roslin and the civilian population, Cain repeatedly refused to send equipment to the civilian ships, resupplying only Galactica. She and William Adama came into conflict over her reassignment of his senior officers and his comparatively lenient command style.

The breach widened when crew transferred from Pegasus were revealed to have taken part in the systematic torture of Gina, and when a Pegasus officer was killed by Karl Agathon and Galen Tyrol as he prepared to assault a Cylon prisoner aboard Galactica. Cain sentenced the two men to death, and Adama scrambled his pilots to rescue them, bringing the two ships to the edge of open battle. The stand-off broke when Kara Thrace returned from an unauthorized recon flight with photographs of a mysterious Cylon ship guarded by two Basestars, later identified as a Resurrection Ship. Cain and Adama declared an uneasy truce to attack it while secretly planning to assassinate one another.

Death#

The mutual assassination plans never materialized. After the Resurrection Ship was destroyed, Gina escaped her cell and killed Cain in revenge for her captivity and abuse. In the aftermath, Adama was promoted to Admiral by President Roslin, and Fisk was given command of Pegasus.