02 - The Cylon Death Machine Read online

  A deep faraway rumble seemed to shake the walls of the chamber.

  “Can’t you hear that?” Starbuck said. “That’s the gun. It’s firing automatically! A random shot could destroy the Galactica, even while the position of the ship is unknown. Once the Galactica’s position is discovered, one shot will take it out. Don’t you understand? The Galactica is the last colonial battlestar. It has to survive. The fate of an entire race depends upon it.”

  “Perhaps. But we don’t know your people. All we do know is that you are willing to sacrifice us for yourselves. Why should we care about you, then, if you don’t care about us? You are not our concern…”

  “But, Ser 7-12, they are mine,” the older man announced, limping forward. Ser 7-12 and the others seemed astonished at the man’s interference. “I am a member of that race that is fleeing from Cylon tyranny.”

  “Father-creator,” Ser 7-12 said, frightened. So that’s who the old man is, thought Starbuck, the notorious Dr. Ravashol. “Their battle isn’t ours, sir. We must protect ourselves. We will not be subjugated again. We are not perfect, but—”

  “But you are human,” Ravashol said, reaching up to put a small hand on Ser 7-12’s massive shoulders. “More human than I could have imagined.” He laughed wryly. “I must review my notes to see where I went wrong.”

  Ravashol stepped back from the clone leader and addressed the entire group:

  “Those are your brothers in trouble in space. In an odd mythic sense, they are your genuine ancestors, the race whose cells provided the raw materials for the creation of the series of what I so confidently thought were more perfect versions of a humankind I had hated too long and too bitterly. I see now that what I may have hated was not my fellow humans, but myself. And you, all of you, are the manifestations of that hatred. Well, I was wrong. We have to help them. Allow the pulsaric unit to be destroyed and”—Ravashol paused as he examined the puzzled faces staring at him—“and I will protect you.” The clones did not seem quite yet willing to accept that comforting statement, in spite of the man it originated from. “Trust me, my children.”

  Starbuck advanced toward Ser 7-12 and said firmly:

  “We’re out of time. We go now or not at all.”

  Ser 7-12’s answer came back just as firmly:

  “We’re with you.”

  As Ser 7-12 began assembling his troops, gathering them into squads and platoons, Boomer whispered to Starbuck:

  “You give any thought to what we would have done if they’d said they wouldn’t go?”

  “Don’t scare me with logic.”

  Starbuck avoided Boomer’s next question by going to Ravashol and saying softly to the old man:

  “Either that was some fine con or you’ve got something up your sleeve, doctor. How are you going to protect them?”

  Ravashol’s grimness dropped away like a mask, and he smiled.

  “I’m not exactly the quivering traitor that you people think. I did not give the Cylons all my creations. Perhaps I knew there’d be a time when someone like your Captain Apollo would arrive here and challenge me out of my self-induced trance, I don’t know. Anyway, do not fear. We will be safe.”

  Starbuck matched Ravashol’s smile.

  “Yeah, I got a feeling you will. Some people’d envy you.”

  “Oh? Why is that?”

  “Well, your godlike sway over these creations of yours is the kind of thing that fulfills some people’s fantasies.”

  Ravashol stopped smiling abruptly, narrowed his eyes.

  “Godlike, eh? I suppose you’re right. Father-creator and all that inanity. I shouldn’t have allowed it. It was merely convenient. More than that, it just froze my creations into attitudes of mindless duty. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “Why thank me?”

  “You’ve made me realize I may have to do strenuous battle… with a false god.”

  Starbuck felt the need to say something comforting, but couldn’t think of anything. Just as well, he thought. What do you say to comfort a fallen god?

  Ser 7-12 had his troops all organized and moving out of the chamber. With a casual salute Starbuck backed away from Ravashol and joined Boomer.

  “We’re gonna have to move fast,” Boomer said. “I wish I knew how the captain and the others’re doing. We might just liberate that elevator and find Cylons coming out at us when the doors open.”

  “True. With Croft and that gang of his with Apollo, they—God, I wish I’d talked Apollo into letting me go.”

  “Well, one thing at a time I guess. Let’s go.”

  Boomer looked back at Ravashol.

  “Funny,” he said.

  “You find something amusing in all this?”

  “No. But look at him. He looks so small, so solitary, left behind there.”

  “Yeah, but I think he’s thinking about five steps ahead of any of us, Boomer.”

  “Maybe.”

  Turning around, the two Galactica officers rushed out the doorway of the meeting chamber.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Croft:

  I swear this mountain’s living. It’s out to get us. You can’t go two steps without being enshrouded by blowing snow. Hard, icy snow looking to rip slices in your clothing. Every six or eight steps I have to tap ice off my crampons with my ax. Takes all my concentration to maintain friction on this jagged approach slope. Apollo keeps slipping and sliding. My legs aching already, I move up beside him, holler in his ear:

  “Walk up straight!”

  Some defiance in his eyes. He still doesn’t like to take orders from me.

  “Up straight! Try to keep the whole sole of your boot against the surface. You don’t get good friction, you’re going to collapse from exhaustion before we get anywhere near the top.”

  He nods. I demonstrate a couple of steps. He picks it up from me. At least he’s a good learner.

  The two clones really know their way up the mountain, although they don’t climb with much style. I always said style meant nothing on the side of an icy mountain anyway. I’d rather have a clumsy person who knows the terrain than a stylist who thinks he can get by on good moves alone.

  Wolfe and Leda keep exchanging meaningful glances with me. I don’t know how they interpret the blank looks I return to them. Even if we do make it to Hekla’s summit, I don’t know how we’re going to survive Wolfe and Leda.

  The climb’s getting more treacherous now. We’re off the easy slopes. Up ahead I can see dim outlines of what we have to face. The castlelike configurations of such a mountain are even more pronounced from this vantage point. It seems a huge pile of battlements, turrets, steep walls that suggest hiding demons ready to push away ladders. I holler at Apollo:

  “We need a rest, Captain!”

  “There’s not enough time. We can’t rest now, not when—”

  “Rest, hell, we need a bivouac. I know how much time we got and I know we can’t rest long, but each moment of rest is worth several microns on the mountain. Sir.”

  “Croft, I—”

  “Captain Apollo, a mountain’s got to be climbed slow and steady. Out here, haste is the same word as death. Look, it’s not just the danger of exhaustion I’m talking about. The atmosphere’s getting thinner. You try to go up too fast, it’s like getting the bends under water. Your internal organs are affected by height and rarefied atmosphere. Your perception of objects can go haywire, all your senses get dulled. You can easily reach a point where death seems better than taking another step. Believe me, Captain, going slow is going to save your precious fleet more than vain heroics.”

  Apollo glares at me for a moment, then reluctantly agrees. We choose a fairly level spot just ahead. I go up first, try to do a little site gardening to smooth it out, but it’s no use—everything’s solid and covered with ice. We fall into comfortable resting positions. Wolfe and Leda seem to purposely separate themselves from me. Apollo pulls himself beside me and asks:

  “Any more advice?”

  I am almost too
surprised to answer. There’s no sarcasm in his voice. He really wants to know. Perhaps we can pull together as a team, all of us. With the tenacity of the clones, the impulse toward escape of Wolfe and Leda, the willingness of Apollo to listen to reason—perhaps I can pull all this together, use their divergent motives to create the illusion of a team. Just for long enough to get us up to the gun emplacement. Then Wolfe and Leda will make their play, and I’ll have to see where I stand—but no sense in worrying about that now.

  “Advice, huh?” I say to Apollo. “Right now I couldn’t give you the standard lecture. Either your instincts take hold or they don’t. Just remember it’s more important to climb with your feet and not with your hands. Hands are for leverage, for position, for balance, for keeping you on the side of the mountain. But you don’t get a good hold, all the arm-strength you can summon isn’t going to be much help in keeping you from falling and maybe taking the rest of us with you. Solid anchors, good holds, and remembering to keep your feet the best place you can, or the second-best place, or third, or any damn place that’ll keep you steady—that’s the most I can tell you right now, Captain.”

  Apollo nods and looks up the mountain. You can’t see the top. All you can see are vague shadowy shapes, the snow plumes rising regularly from ridges—a sure sign of strong-wind areas—a low-hanging band of clouds in the distance. Even in the darkness of this ice asteroid, the suggestion of color in the surface of the mountain is impressive to me. Far away the ice veneer is a shadowy gray; closer there are streaks and blots of blue; nearby, in the meager light of our lanterns, I can make out a faint crystalline suggestion of purple, the same near-purple I’ve seen on the ice mountains of Caprica.

  “What’re the chances of avalanche?” Apollo asks suddenly.

  “From what I can tell, no worse than usual. No guarantees I know of that they won’t happen. Still, this mountain’s less likely than some.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  “Well, this is a dark planet. No sun to screw things up—melting surfaces, altering terrain so that weight pressures change and cause the kind of shifts that result in avalanches. Everything stays cold at about the same temperature, so there’s no shifts of climate to get an icefall started. Terrain and climate here should combine to make the mountain relatively stable. But God, man, you never know. And there’s always a good chance of a loose-snow avalanche, if there’s any disturbance or one of us sets up a chain reaction that jars some snow away from someplace higher up and it starts charging down at us, gathering more snow to it. Creating an avalanche with a snowball effect, see? But, I were you, I wouldn’t spend much time worrying about avalanches. There’s lots more out there to get us. And we’ve had enough rest. It’s time to move out, Captain.”

  I whisper the last as a hint so that the others can’t hear. It’s important to Apollo that he appear to be in control of the expedition. Any takeover from me would just cause resentment all around. I have to control this little foray with subtlety. Always good to employ subtlety on your superior officer if you want to get anything done.

  The next stage of climbing is easier than I’d expected. In spite of the rough appearance of the terrain, there are plenty of holds. Ser 5-9, with his knowledge of the mountain, has saved us a great deal of time. We’re able to cover a significant amount of distance just using pull holds to move our bodies up, and there’s a good deal of friction to create an anchoring counterforce. Watching Apollo frequently check his chronometer, its faint illumination sending evil-looking shadows into his face, I begin to get hopeful. Maybe Hekla is one of those mountains that look rough but prove to be no real challenge to a good set of climbers.

  Suddenly things get tougher, as we reach a glacial formation. Apollo wants to head straight up, but I counsel traversing the glacier as the best strategy. Ser 5-9 agrees. I take the lead, setting a slow pace, tapping and puncturing the snow-covered ground ahead of me with the point of my ax. It’s important here to maintain the slow pace. Any point ahead of us can turn out to be a crevasse and plunge us all to sudden death.

  Coming upon a wide crevasse, we cross over a snow bridge, each climber taking it alone and slowly. On the other side of the bridge, Apollo keeps peeking at that chronometer. He’s obviously getting twitchy, but I refuse his suggestion that we cross the snow bridge in pairs. This is the wrong time to take that kind of chance.

  Reaching a steep icefall, Ser 5-9 signals that it’s the best and most direct way up. I agree. Using some of its jagged points to make my way a short distance upward, I start bringing out the pitons, which till now I’ve hoarded. They’re in short supply and had to be saved for a difficult part of the ascent. I’m glad that they’re molecular-binding, since I am afraid of excessive sound in this area of the mountain. One good solid echo, and who knows what’s going to fall on you. I push the setting on the outer edge of the piton to ice, and push it in. It goes in with a sound that rises in pitch. A good sign. Whether hammer-driven or molecular-binding, the piton whose sound descends in pitch signifies that it is insecurely anchored. Being able to interpret the song of the piton is a lifesaving technique. Quickly the piton’s shaft works its way all the way in, and only the oval eye at its end is visible. There’s not enough time to loop ropes through the pitons, so we’ll have to use them simply for direct-aid climbing.

  Not thinking about our goals or the complications to them, I work slowly, pushing in one piton after another and forming a zigzag ladder up the icefall. I can sense the others climbing up behind me, but do not look down. I try never to look down. On a mountain there’s no place you’ve been to that you are eager to see again right away. I just concentrate on setting the pitons in the right places and listening to the monotonous but comforting sound of their song.

  The top of the icefall is narrow and slightly sloped but secure. Above it is an overhang that could give us trouble. Twisting the tricked-up rope so that it’s slack, I sling it over the overhang. The other end floats down. Ser 5-9 and Wolfe each take an end of the rope and pull at it to make sure the rope is anchored and in a secure place. Then I twist the rope in the other direction, making it hard and stiff as a cable. Climbing quickly hand over hand, I make my way to the edge of the overhang, then laboriously pull myself onto it. Up farther is a more secure ledge. Telling Ser 5-9 and Wolfe to let go of the rope ends, I climb to the ledge, where I drive the shaft of my ax into the hard snow as far as I can. Far enough to serve as an anchor for a belay. The ice-ax shaft belay is the safest for the situation. I brace my right leg by kicking out a large step below the ax and setting my foot firmly into it. Supporting the ax with the upper knee of my left leg, I set the belay rope slack and feed it around the shaft of the ax with one hand in a round turn, low on the ax shaft, while holding onto the ax head with my other hand. Because of the slope, I also run the rope around the small of my back for further anchorage, then throw it back down to the others. Jerking on the rope, I alert them to finish their climb to this ledge. Gradually I watch each of them, Ser 5-9 and Tenna first, then Apollo, Leda, and Wolfe, come over the ledge.

  At Ser 5-9’s suggestion we rope together and work our way along the ledge, sometimes holding close to the wall of ice at spots where the ledge narrows, sometimes crunching down to creep beneath low-hanging cornices. We reach a point where a fairly gentle slope eases away from us to our left. I signal the others to hold back while I take a look, and edge myself forward gradually along the edge toward the slope. As I look up, some clouds above me part briefly and I think I see the outline of the gun emplacement, dark against darkness, not far above us. I turn to tell Apollo, but before I can say anything, there is a great shuddering explosion above me and the sky is briefly lit up brilliantly by a pulse from the gun. It’s firing now. Maybe the Galactica is within range. The sound of the weapon is deafening. The mountain seems to shake. The thunder of the gun is joined by a rumble that seems to emanate from deep within the mountain. I look up. A huge crest of snow is coming down at me. I have just enough time to shout:

&nbs
p; “Avalanche!”

  Then the snow reaches me, and the ledge beneath me breaks off in a falling chunk. There is a brief jerk on my rope, then an abrupt sense of free fall. Apollo has acted quickly and sensibly. He’s cut the rope to save the rest of the team. My face is briefly in the air outside, then I am completely enveloped by the snow. I seem to be falling more deeply into it, like a swimmer being pulled along by an unexpected fierce underwater current.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Landing his ship on the narrow airfield atop the mountain, Vulpa released it from the control of the guidance personnel, while a ground crew slung cables around it to secure it against the high winds. Snakelike, a tunnel emerged from the side of the gun-emplacement building and attached itself to the ship’s exit hatch. Inside the tunnel, a gunnery master joined Vulpa and a moving runway carried them into Summit Station. The gun took up most of the space within the emplacement. It looked like a massive chunk of gray metal cut out of the mountain itself.

  “Are you ready?” Vulpa asked the gunnery master, who turned to the chief gunner and said:

  “Lens system aligned?”

  “Aligned,” the gunner replied.

  “Pump system to speed?”

  “Speed.”

  The master turned to Vulpa and announced:

  “Ready.”

  Vulpa, feeling a moment’s glow of satisfaction, ordered:

  “Commence automatic fire.”

  The master pressed a button and the weapon shuddered into action. Vulpa could sense the energy gathering within the bore of the gun as it quickly built up the power to generate its pulses. The first pulse seemed to burst from the gun unexpectedly. As it blasted upward, the sky was briefly filled with a flaring light. For a very short time the asteroid seemed lighted by a returning sun; then the beam entered the cloud cover and darkness came back abruptly. Beneath them, the mountain seemed to shake, the usual reaction. Vulpa heard the sound of a small avalanche developing. Even though the foundation of the emplacement went deeply into the mountain, Vulpa sometimes worried that the entire structure could tumble from the mountain as the result of a massive avalanche. But the gun rumbled again and another sky-lighting flare burst forth from the mouth of the cannon.