02 - The Cylon Death Machine Read online

  I can’t do it. I must be too deep under. Can’t do it. Must keep trying. Keep trying until I die. It’s that simple. Death, simple when you get the hang of it. Keep the arms going, thrusting upward, reaching for life, reaching for anything I can grab, reaching. My hand breaks the surface. I make my arms work even harder. My head doesn’t seem able to get there. It should be there by now, should break clear. Why isn’t it breaking clear?

  Suddenly I realize I have broken the surface, perhaps for some time, and I take a breath.

  Everything around me is still; then the sky lights up with another pulse from the laser gun. Now at least I’m oriented. I haven’t fallen far. I’m lucky. I should be halfway down the mountain.

  “Croft!”

  That’s Apollo’s voice. Where is he? By the light of another pulse I see that he’s a short distance above me, descending by rope from the ledge I fell from.

  Working my legs slowly and steadily, I pull my whole body to the snow surface. Apollo, belayed by Leda back on the ledge, is laboriously making his way toward me, testing the surface in front of him with touches of his ice-ax. I pull myself into a semi-crouch, enough to dig my crampons into the loose surface. God, how I wish now this planet had some kind of sun. It’d be wonderful to feel the brittle kind of surface that comes from a sun melting ice and the ice then reforming. More friction for the crampons. Still I make my way toward Apollo. He reaches a gloved hand toward me. Reaching up, I can just about touch him. One more tough step, then… Got him! With a fierce jerk of his arm he pulls me toward him, and I grab onto the rope. My eyes search the line of rope all the way up to Leda’s belay. It looks all right.

  “Slack,” I holler up to Leda. She lets out more rope.

  “You all right?” I ask Apollo.

  “Was about to ask you the same thing.”

  “I’m fine. I’m surprised you came down to get me. What’ll this do to the timing of the mission?”

  Apollo smiles.

  “We need you to lay the explosives, Croft. Had to come get you.”

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to take a cheap shot at you. You’re doing all right, Apollo. That was quick thinking back there, cutting the rope. You might’ve all been dragged down with me.”

  “Just did what you taught me.”

  “Well, it was good. You probably should’ve left me under the snow, but thanks.”

  “Just get that gun for me, okay?”

  For a moment, I’m amused by the moral ambiguity of my position. I’ve told Wolfe and Leda I’m with them in their escape plan, even if I didn’t know for sure whether I was. Now I tell Apollo I’ll get the damn gun, even though I’m still inclined to take off with Wolfe and Leda. When we get to the top of Hekla, if we get to the top of Hekla, I may even be surprised by my own decision. Pulling at the rope, I yell up to Leda:

  “Climbing!”

  “Climb!” Leda yells back. And slowly Apollo and I ascend to the ledge.

  Ser 5-9 and Tenna seem glad to see me alive. Wolfe’s not so sure, I think. Leda’s eyes are as blank as Thane’s ever were. Does she really mean it when she hints we can get back together? Or is that just a ploy to gain my help? Ploy or not, Leda can be depended on to fulfill her promises. Should I care whether or not she does it willingly or just to complete a bargain? It would be easier if I didn’t care, but—unfortunately—I do.

  The rest of the climb presents few problems. The avalanche seems to have made it easier. There are hundreds of small ledges, footholds and handholds, that allow us to make it to the level of the gun emplacement in free climbing. Intermittently, the gun fires and its light shows us the route ahead. In a sense, the pulses from the gun are helping us to make up the time we lost, aiding us in its own destruction.

  In the last stages, as if driven toward it, Wolfe and Leda lead the way to the gun emplacement itself. Then they turn, their figures ill-defined in the shadows. It is a moment before I realize that Wolfe has his laser drawn and is pointing it at the rest of us.

  “If we go,” he says to Leda, “it has to be now.”

  “I’m with you,” she says, moving to his side and staring at me, looking for my response. I stop climbing and Apollo passes me as if he doesn’t know there’s a laser pistol pointed at his head. Pulling himself up to the level of the gun emplacement and standing up a short distance away from Wolfe, Apollo says:

  “There’s nowhere you can go, Wolfe.”

  “You didn’t look careful enough, Captain, or you would’ve seen the Cylon ship anchored just over there.”

  He gestures to the left. Sure enough, the ship rests there, held down by electronic anchoring rays that give off occasional sparkles in the dim mountain light. I start climbing directly at Wolfe.

  “We’re getting off this piece of ice, Captain,” Wolfe says, “and flying right out of—”

  “There isn’t time,” Apollo says. “Don’t you understand”—he points to his chronometer—“the Galactica is passing through the quadrant right now. We’ve got to silence that gun.”

  “You got a one-track mind, Captain.” Wolfe’s smile is grim, sinister. “You think I care about what happens to the Galactica?”

  Apollo takes a step toward Wolfe. I keep climbing, my eye on Wolfe.

  “The Galactica is the only ship that can protect you. All of you.” He looks desperately at Wolfe and Leda, squints down at me. “Without us, you’re finished.”

  Leda smiles. In the dim light, there’s a lot of evil in that smile.

  “You don’t seem to realize who is finished here, Captain,” she says. “Your mission. Your battlestar. Yourself.”

  I keep climbing.

  “The Cylons won’t rest until every one of us is put to death,” Apollo says. “Every one of you.”

  “Don’t worry about us,” Wolfe says. “We’re going to make it. We’ve been through just as tough. We’ll make it.”

  “To where?”

  Wolfe’s voice drops, is just barely audible:

  “Well, now, that isn’t really going to matter a whole lot to you.”

  I’m up to the ledge now. I pull myself onto it, next to Leda, on the other side of Wolfe and Apollo.

  “The Ice Gang’s together again,” Leda mutters. “What’s left of it, anyway.”

  I nod.

  “Glad you’re with us, Croft. I wanted you back on my side.”

  When she says this, I am so tempted to be with Leda again that I almost grab the gun from Wolfe to shoot down Apollo myself. Apollo is clearly shocked seeing me stand up with my former gang.

  “I should’ve expected this from you, Croft,” he says. Looking down at Ser 5-9 and Tenna, who are still on the mountainside but slowly ascending, he says, “Stay back.”

  “Should I drop him, Croft?” Wolfe says, aiming his pistol toward Apollo’s chest. I am surprised. It’s been a long time since Wolfe last treated me as a leader. I almost like it.

  “No,” I say to Wolfe. “Give these people a fair chance. We’ll just get to the Cylon ship and—”

  “Fair chance?” Leda says. “That’s still your trouble, isn’t it, Croft? Always the humanitarian. Okay, so be it, let’s—”

  Above us, the pulsar gun roars. The sound is thunderous, feels like it’s loud enough to kill. The vibration makes Wolfe lose footing for a brief moment, and he steadies himself by holding onto the emplacement wall with his free hand. It’s my chance. I jump at Wolfe, getting a boot behind one of his stubby legs and tripping him up. He falls to the ground next to me. Inadvertently he fires the pistol, and its ray goes upward, looking strangely feeble against the bright light of the pulse shooting toward the cloud cover. I slam his arm against the emplacement wall. The pistol goes flying. Apollo picks it up. Knowing I’m at a disadvantage in fighting Wolfe, I spring away from him, go to Apollo’s side.

  “Your play, Captain,” I say.

  “For a moment there, Croft, I believed you.”

  “Believed myself. For a moment.”

  Apollo smiles.

  “Eve
n after all that, I still don’t know whether or not to trust you.”

  “Better for you if you don’t, Captain. I wouldn’t.”

  Wolfe pulls himself up slowly, glaring at me. His hatred of me seems to have doubled, if that’s possible. I’d hate to have to compute the degree to which Leda’s hatred has grown.

  “Croft!” she says. “That was our chance! We had to take it! And you, you—”

  “Leda,” I say, “I don’t know how to make you understand. You can blame it on humanitarianism if you like, although I doubt if most straights’d care to call me that. But, look, we’re here on a mission. When I accepted the mission, and you came with me, you were accepting it, too. I don’t know what’s got into you, but think: this is a mission to save what’s left of the human race, what’s left of a civilization that prospered for millennia on the twelve worlds. We can’t let the remnants of the race die for our own selfish goals. So we’re going to do this. You understand that, both of you? This mission is going through! And the two of you are going to help, understand?”

  “A pretty speech, Croft,” Leda says, “but I’m sitting here and watching. You can’t make me do any—”

  “All right. We’re not a team anymore, Leda, okay. I guess the break in that came long ago, and it was probably my fault. All right. Deals. Both of you understand deals. Once we get the explosives planted, the timer set, and the Cylons effectively out of action, you two can have that ship, go anywhere you want, be free.”

  “Croft, I don’t—” Apollo says.

  “That’s the way we’ll do it, Apollo. You get your gun blown up, Leda and Wolfe get the ship. It’s the only way everybody gets what they want. You can forget about the warbook fighting codes up here.”

  “And you, Croft,” Leda says, stepping forward. “Where do you go? What do you do? What do you get?”

  I want to tell her that I want her, but it’s no good. You can’t get Leda to give herself, no matter what deal you offer. She needs to be free, all right, I’ll give her that.

  “I stay with Apollo, with him and Ser 5-9 and Tenna. We’ll take the elevator out of there. While we’re on the way down, you two’ll have plenty of time to take off and go… go wherever you can find that pleases you.”

  I look away from her piercing gaze and survey the panorama below us. There is nothing exceptional to see, nothing worth climbing this mountain for. Under normal conditions, with ample time for planning, it’s an easy mountain, an easy climb, not worth the effort. The ice planet itself is ugly. Nothing on it is as beautiful as where we stand now, at the top of the mountain, next to an awesome weapon which we plan to blow to pieces moments from now.

  “Come with us,” Leda says, her voice offering nothing more than the trip.

  I almost throw out all my fancy reasons and say yes anyway.

  “Nope, Leda.”

  “Why not, Croft?”

  “Can’t say. Something about being responsible. Something about knocking out this weapon for whatever you want to call it, the common good or the salvation of—”

  “Shut up, Croft. You just want to play hero, be he-man, copy this scanner-screen image of a warrior here…” She points to Apollo, who shows no reaction. “Well, okay. Just don’t give me any of your he-man speeches. We do the job because we’re professionals; don’t mouth off about anything else. We do it because we’re the ones who can do it. You can have the glory of humankind and sprinkle it on your crops as fertilizer. We accept your deal. Okay, Wolfe?”

  Wolfe sullenly agrees.

  “All right, then,” Leda says. “Let’s get to it.”

  Apollo steps forward, says:

  “The Galactica’s time is running out.”

  As if to punctuate his remark, another pulse—perhaps the one destined to turn the Galactica into space ash—is emitted from the bore of the laser cannon.

  “Get the explosives together,” I say. “Then we get moving.”

  Apollo—who, after all, has taken a lot of bilge from me in the past few moments—hesitates, then nods.

  “Okay,” he says. “You’re in charge, Croft. Get us into that pulsar station.”

  “You got it, Captain.”

  Working silently, we get the stuff together, each taking his assigned load, Leda and I splitting what Thane would have carried. Thane. I’d almost forgotten about him. What difference would it have made to the cause of Leda and Wolfe if he’d been there? What difference would it have made for my own decision? I had always really been afraid of Thane. One thing sure. Thane wouldn’t have listened to reason, and he would have given the Ice Gang the edge they needed to succeed in their escape. Perhaps I couldn’t have so easily stood on this godforsaken ledge and made my noble speeches and swung them to Apollo’s side. If Thane had been there, perhaps I’d have gone with them. Well, no use worrying about that now, not with the job waiting to be done.

  Circling around the emplacement, we arrive at the entrance to the intake tube. It opens onto a dark tunnel.

  “This intake tube opens into the cooling system,” I say to the rest. “The laser is inside. We’ve got to place the solenite just right. Our supply’s a bit depleted, my fault. I let some of it go, sorry. Back in the avalanche when I released my pack. Matter of priorities. I put saving myself over preserving the solenite.”

  “You’re prone to mistakes like that,” Leda says, with the first smile I’ve seen from her in some time.

  “According to Ravashol’s geogram,” Apollo says, “the key element is the energy-exchange pump. If we can wreck it, the cannon will overload and blow itself up.”

  “Sounds good to me. You and Wolfe and the clones hold off the Cylons, and Leda and I can lay the wire, set the timer. Let’s take a look.”

  We crawl inside the intake-tube tunnel. It’s narrow and we have to crouch down. I feel like an insect eating my way through insulation. Suddenly the walls of the tunnel begin to tremble as the laser sweep of the gun gathers intensity.

  “Hang on!” Apollo shouts. “They’re using the intake.”

  As the wind pulls through the tunnel, it’s like being outside in a mountain blizzard. Holding onto the side walls, we are able to continue on. A sweep of vapor passes us, and I hold my breath, not knowing what it’s composed of. When the laser emits its next pulse, the sound seems to reverberate in the tunnel for an eternity, threatening to diminish only when deafness has set in. But it stops after the firing.

  Up ahead is a grid that must be used as an entrance for maintenance purposes. We crawl to it and Apollo pushes it open. On the other side we can see the immensity of the laser station’s interior. The weapon, a mammoth dark gray cylinder, dominates the center of the chamber. Spreading down from its base is a central control shaft around which several Cylons are working. Huge pillars support domes in which the energy sources are apparently collected. In the Cylon manner of illumination, lights along the high castlelike walls shift irregularly in intensity. It looks like a room in which nightmares are stored.

  A group of officers gather around some kind of console, directing the action of the gun. Beyond them is another officer, looking very much like them, except he’s got a lot more bands of black decorating his silver-metallic uniform. The decoration, if I remember correctly, identifies him as a first centurion. He’s the chief honcho, then, the one especially to watch out for. Apollo leans toward me and whispers:

  “The firing station in the center…”

  “Yeah.”

  “It controls the energy pump.”

  “That’s our target, then,” Leda says grimly.

  “Right,” Apollo says.

  “If I get you right, Apollo,” I say, “we blow that and the whole system overloads. I don’t know if you realize it, but it’s also going to tear off the top of the mountain. Before I set the timer, you better have that escape elevator secured. I don’t want to have to wait for it to arrive from the first floor, buddy.”

  Apollo closes the grid and gawks at his ever-present timepiece. The wrist device glow
s in the dark, and flickers a bit as its coordinates change.

  “Three centons,” he whispers. “I hope Starbuck and Boomer are at the elevator by now, or else we’ll have to take the fighter.”

  “Listen, Apollo, I promised the ship to Wolfe and—”

  “If it means survival, all promises are off. Don’t worry. I’ll let your friends have the ship as soon as we’re off the mountain. What’s the matter?”

  “I been worrying about how much trust you can have in me. I forgot to worry about whether or not I could trust you.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I realize that now. You make a good member of the Ice Gang, Apollo.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  The chief honcho barks something in that typical Cylon voice that sounds like a series of electric shorts. The other officers react and work some devices in their respective equipment. A surge of power resounds through the room.

  “They’re stepping up the rate of pulses,” Apollo whispers. “They must know the Galactica’s entered the quadrant, maybe even know its coordinates.”

  “We’re ready when you are, Captain.”

  Gently Apollo lifts the grid. Gesturing to Wolfe, Ser 5-9, and Tenna to follow him, he slips out the opening. Wolfe pushes Ser 5-9 aside. Once the combat’s begun, Wolfe’s always extra-eager to get into the fray, no matter whose side he thinks he’s on. The two clones follow Wolfe out, and for a moment Leda and I are alone. Leda is carefully not looking at me. She adjusts her grip on the coil of solenite wire and waits, like me, for the shooting to start. I lean toward her and whisper:

  “I’d go with you, Leda, but—”

  “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  And that about defines our relationship at the moment. This is the point toward which the years of love and working together were heading. It all comes to this. I want to say it, and you don’t want to hear it. If you wanted to hear it, I wouldn’t have to say it.

  With a series of sudden hisses, the shooting begins in the emplacement-gun chamber. I jump through the grid opening, Leda right behind me. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Apollo blasting away from behind one of the pillars. He drops a couple of Cylons with a pair of perfect shots. Although I can’t see them, I can figure where the others are by the three pillars from which the other laser fire is coming. The Cylon gunners and warriors guarding them are trying to assemble into some order. Staying close to the wall, Leda and I seem to have escaped their notice. A communications device near us suddenly explodes from being hit by a stray Cylon shot, and Leda and I dive to the floor. Leda crawls by me, directly to the base of the energy-exchange pump. Efficiently, without a look at the battle raging around her, she begins to lay the wire. I scamper to the other side of the pump and begin putting down my wire, but I sense a movement to my right. Glancing up, I see a Cylon coming at me, his weapon drawn. Twisting around slightly, I bring out my laser pistol and drop him. Like most Cylons, he falls with a clumsy-sounding thump. No other Cylon seems to have detected my presence. Good. I can’t allow them to have too much time while we’re escaping. Solenite wire sticks to the side of the metal without even a loop of air showing in it, and it’s virtually uncuttable by normal means—but I don’t know what equipment these creeps might have. If they’re able to disconnect the wires, or enough of them, the gun won’t go up. But if we can hold them off until the timer’s set, then it’s unlikely they’ll be able to move fast enough to save the gun.