Kendra Shaw: Cain's executive officer aboard Pegasus

Major Kendra Shaw was an officer of the Colonial Fleet who survived the Fall of the Twelve Colonies aboard the battlestar Pegasus. She reported aboard the Mercury-class warship as a newly commissioned lieutenant while it lay at the Scorpion Fleet Shipyards for refit, and her first days of service coincided with the annihilation of the Colonies. Under Rear Admiral Helena Cain she uncovered the sabotage buried inside the Command Navigation Program, unmasked the Cylon agent Gina Inviere, and took part in the stripping of a civilian flotilla that ended in murder. She rose through the ship's thinned officer corps to become its executive officer under Commander Lee Adama, and was killed during the assault on the Guardian basestar.

A commission timed to the end of the world#

Shaw graduated from Officer Candidate School in 0 BCH and was posted almost immediately to Pegasus, one of the most advanced capital ships in Colonial service. The battlestar was not on a war footing when she joined it. Pegasus had docked at the Scorpion Fleet Shipyards for an extensive overhaul, its Command Navigation Program had been taken offline as part of the work, and nonessential crew had been released on a shore leave expected to run three months.

The refit saved the ship and doomed almost everything around it. A heavily armed Cylon squadron jumped into range of the shipyards and fired nuclear missiles at the yards and the vessels docked there, destroying two battlestars and three other ships within minutes. Cain reached the Combat Information Center, ordered an immediate decoupling and a blind jump, and Pegasus emerged past the red line, four or five jumps from where it had been. A shipwide assessment counted some 723 crew dead, twelve Vipers destroyed outright, two Raptors lost and seventeen further craft beyond repair. Shaw had been aboard for a matter of days.

The backdoor in the Command Navigation Program#

Two days after the escape, Shaw established why Pegasus was still flying when so much of the Fleet was not. The Command Navigation Program, the networked system designed by Gaius Baltar and installed across Colonial military craft, contained a backdoor protocol that allowed the Cylons to upload viruses into any ship running it. The technique was not new. Cylon penetration of networked Colonial computers had been a commonplace of the Cylon War, which was precisely why networking had been restricted afterwards. Because the program had been shut down for the refit, Pegasus had been deaf to the signal that crippled the rest of the fleet at Virgon and over the Colonies.

The finding shaped everything Pegasus did afterwards. Cain committed the battlestar to a campaign of hit and run strikes, jumping to wherever Cylon forces were massing, engaging, and abandoning the area before a counterattack could form. Shaw's work also made her one of the few officers with authority over the ship's compromised systems, and that authority became the lever an enemy used against her.

Gina Inviere and the relay#

Gina Inviere had planned the overhaul of Pegasus for months in the employ of a defence contractor, and she had grown close to Cain in the process. After the attack she continued working aboard as an informal conscript, repairing networked computers, and in that role she obtained Shaw's access codes. The codes gave her free movement through systems no contractor should have touched.

Cain had been steered towards a target she believed was a lightly defended Cylon communications relay. When Pegasus jumped in and launched Blue Squadron, fifteen squadrons of Raiders jumped into firing range and the installation revealed itself as a staging ground. Colonels Fisk and Belzen recommended immediate recovery and withdrawal. Cain instead ordered the reserve Vipers launched, and when Belzen refused she took his sidearm and shot him with it.

Inviere used Shaw's codes to take the weapons grid offline from the Combat Information Center, allowing two Heavy Raiders to put a Centurion boarding party into the port landing alcove. Shaw was investigating the collapse of the grid when she saw a Number Six moving with the boarding party at Airlock 4. She pulled a rifle from the hands of a dead marine, shot the Cylon dead, and returned to the Combat Information Center, where she displayed the security feed of the body and named Inviere as an enemy agent. Inviere broke a marine's neck, took his sidearm and shot another, then hesitated with the weapon trained on Cain. Shaw put her down with the butt of the rifle. Pegasus escaped with 32 Vipers destroyed and 61 damaged beyond the ship's ability to repair them all.

The flotilla#

Not long after, Pegasus found a group of fifteen civilian transports that had escaped the Colonies on their own faster than light drives. Cain judged the ships a tactical liability and ordered them cannibalised, their useful components transferred to the battlestar and their skilled personnel impressed under threat that marines would kill their families. Fisk boarded one of the transports personally to oversee the work. When the civilians began to resist, Shaw shot a woman dead to frighten the rest into compliance. Fisk approved, and so did Cain. The stripped ships, among them the freighter Scylla, were left behind without the means to run, and the people still aboard them were abandoned to the Cylons.

Executive officer#

Shaw was promoted repeatedly across the months that followed, an ascent made possible by a shattered officer corps and by Cain's confidence in her. Pegasus made contact with Galactica and its civilian convoy, feuded with it, fought beside it against a Resurrection Ship, and passed through the deaths of Cain, of Commander Fisk and of Commander Barry Garner in the space of a few months. By the time Lee Adama took command of the battlestar, Shaw held the rank of major and the post of executive officer.

The Guardian basestar#

Pegasus was sent to recover a missing Raptor science team and came under attack from fighters of Cylon War vintage, flown by a faction the Colonials came to know as the Guardians. Their warship was a Type-C basestar, an older and more industrial design than the modern vessels and the first known to be run by a Hybrid rather than conventional systems. Intelligence gathered from Galactica's Cylon prisoner and from the First Hybrid itself identified what the Colonials were facing, and Admiral William Adama accompanied Pegasus on the rescue operation.

The boarding action recovered the captured Raptor crew from a laboratory aboard the basestar. In the firefight with Guardian Centurions that followed, the marine Dasilva was wounded and about to be taken prisoner. Shaw, expecting he would be subjected to the same experiments as the crew they had just pulled out, shot him in the head as he was dragged away. The operation succeeded. The Guardian basestar and the First Hybrid were destroyed, and Major Kendra Shaw was killed.