02 - The Cylon Death Machine Read online

  The boy returned his attention to Muffit.

  “Hey, you daggit. I said twenty figure-eights. Stop shirking!”

  Apollo was amused by the authoritative tone in the boy’s voice as he barked commands at the droid. The boy was always saying how he planned to be a colonial warrior, a fighter pilot like his dad, and it had become part of his play. Well, he certainly looked to be starfleet material, even at the age of six. He’d already shown an unusual bravery so many times in the—

  Apollo’s thoughts were interrupted by the blaring of the alert claxons. As he leaped toward the door, saying a quick good-bye to Boxey, he heard Adama’s voice echoing from many speakers:

  “Battle stations!”

  Hurrying onto the bridge, Apollo was quickly briefed by one of the officers. He rushed to his father’s side.

  “Fighter control reporting,” he said. “All squadrons standing by.”

  Adama nodded, clapped a hand on his son’s shoulder.

  “Starbuck’s probe ran into something,” he told Apollo. “He’s lost a ship.” He turned to Tigh, asked: “Situation?”

  Tigh leaned in toward the telecom screen, flipped a switch.

  “Starbuck,” he said. “Report in.”

  Sounding out of breath, Starbuck’s voice came on the line. On the small screen, his face looked worried even in the telecom’s unsure resolution.

  “It came from the asteroid, somewhere in the upper quadrant. A high-energy beam of coherent light. Massive, very intense, blinding… we think it’s some sort of laser weaponry, the kind with the pulsar effect—but this time, believe me, it must be a giant pulsar weapon. Tigh, it’s—”

  “Starbuck,” Boomer’s voice cut in, “we’ve lost contact with Cree. Visual and scanner.”

  “Stand by, Colonel. We’re missing another ship.”

  “And Shields now!” Boomer yelled. “I’ve got no contact with Shields either!”

  “Breaking transmission, Galactica,” Starbuck cried. “Back with you in a flash.”

  As Starbuck’s voice faded, Apollo turned to Adama.

  “Father,” he said, “let me take my squadron out after them, to protect them from—”

  “No, not yet,” Adama said softly. “Not till we know more. But put your squadron on alert, Captain Apollo!”

  Apollo rushed off the bridge, grabbing a flight jacket held out by an aide just before he leaped through the hatchway to the corridor.

  * * *

  Starbuck frantically racked through all communication channels, trying to find a sound-trace of the missing cadets. “Cree! Come in! Shields! Where are you?”

  “Got them!” Boomer shouted. “They’re just inside critical gravitational pull.”

  Boomer flashed Starbuck the coordinates identifying the location of the two ships. The static on the commline faded, and the cadets’ hysterical voices replaced the firelike crackle.

  “Cree! Shields!” Starbuck cried. “Come back! You can’t go down there!”

  Cree’s response was strident:

  “I saw where it came from! I’m going after it!”

  “Turn back!” Starbuck said. “Do not enter the atmosphere. I repeat, for both of you, do not—”

  “Bow was my roommate!” Shields gasped, tears in his voice.

  “That’s an order! Both of you turn back!”

  Starbuck’s control panel scanner showed the two cadet ships not veering a millimeter from course.

  “I’m locked on target,” Shields said, his voice cooler now.

  “Right behind you,” Cree said.

  Starbuck set his viper downward, toward the asteroid cloud cover.

  “Boomer,” he said, “we can’t let them go down alone!”

  “Maybe we can’t, but we have to! Starbuck, pull out!”

  “No, you know me better, Boomer. Join me or return to command ship.”

  A pause before Boomer answered:

  “I never know whether you really mean that option. I’m just behind you, bucko.”

  The two vipers zoomed toward the cloud cover. Boomer’s level voice came over the commline:

  “They’re in the clouds. We’ll never get a visual on them.”

  “Record their short-range telemetry. Maybe we can get a fix.”

  Involuntarily, Starbuck sucked in his breath as his ship penetrated the gray, almost black cloud cover, and he felt himself enveloped in a nightmarish darkness.

  * * *

  First Centurion Vulpa, Warrior of the Elite Class, sat regally in his command chair and gruffly barked orders at his first-brained subalterns. Some kind of intruder had been discovered above the clouds of Tairac. A beam from the laser cannon atop Mount Hekla had struck and destroyed a ship. Subsequent activity of other ships had been detected.

  Vulpa felt uncharacteristically nervous. Cylons rarely felt agitation of any sort. But then, Vulpa was not a characteristic Cylon. When he had been a first-brain fighter pilot, he had had occasional glimmerings that there was something special about him. And he faintly perceived that his specialness had little to do with his spectacular abilities to maneuver a Cylon fighter and destroy hundreds of enemy spacecraft. No, the qualities he felt had more to do with the way he could perceive the universe, the way he could make simple mental connections that seemed impossible for other first-brain Cylons. In some combat instances he had been able to execute strategy that he knew was the equal of anything a second-brain officer might have done. When he had tried to express these strange feelings to other warriors, they had not been able to comprehend. A number of times his conversations were reported to superiors, and he had been called in for discipline. Thus he had learned to conceal his awareness of his own select rank among his fellows. His inner isolation had also brought him feelings of loneliness, another emotion not usually felt by Cylons.

  After the ceremony in which he had been awarded his second brain, his perception of himself increased more than twofold. He had been right, there was for him the potential for a special destiny. He knew immediately that he was one of the few second-brain Cylons whose intricate body mechanisms would not reject the implantation of a third brain at a later evolved stage of his life. Most Cylons could not survive one more brain implantation, and therefore only few were ever scanned as eligible to be raised to Imperious Leader status. Of those few, many were simply not suited for overall command level because they were not qualified in other physical, mental, or emotional aspects. Vulpa discovered later that his own eligibility was endangered because of his tendency toward forthright commentary, a pronounced arrogance in his manner, and a need to bully other officers into agreement with him. The present Imperious Leader had cautioned him several times about these traits, saying that if he did achieve third-brain status, he would comprehend at once the reasons why such traits could, from an overall objective view, be regarded as deficiencies.

  Nevertheless, Imperious Leader had admitted, Vulpa’s assertive tendencies might just be overlooked, since in certain situations they resolved themselves into ingenious positive actions. Vulpa tried to obey Imperious Leader’s admonitions, as any good Cylon must. His ambition increased, soared higher than any hopes ever displayed by his fellow executive officers, who could just barely express ideas of ambition, who perhaps were not in fact ambitious. That knowledge made him feel lonelier than he had ever felt in the days when he had had only a single brain.

  In spite of his own cautiousness, Vulpa encountered situations in which his negative traits came to the fore, and he cursed himself for his loss of control. He did not want to fall off the thin line he was treading, since it led directly to the monstrously high pedestal on which the Imperious Leader throne rested, and Vulpa needed desperately to continue along that line. His last outburst had nearly finished him, and had resulted in the disciplinary assignment to this frigid, distant, appropriately lonely outpost. Although there was considerable honor in being assigned command of the most massive weapon ever devised for Cylon use, Vulpa nevertheless felt the shame of the disciplin
e deeply. He vowed to perform actions here so heroic that Imperious Leader would have to call him back to the command base star. There he would prove himself worthy of the throne until the time came when he would actually ascend to it.

  The time when a new Imperious Leader would be chosen seemed frustratingly a long time away, but Vulpa would have to endure it. Anyway, it might not be so long. If the present Imperious Leader continued his obsessive quest to destroy all fleeing humans, to exterminate the grubby little race in fact, there were all sorts of openings, all sorts of possibilities that the Leader would tumble from his throne ahead of his time or even be destroyed by one of those crafty little human pests. It was doubtful, but an ambitious being tended to contemplate lines toward the future with an un-Cylon-like eagerness.

  Now, perhaps, his chance had come. As soon as the message that the escaping human fleet was being maneuvered toward his sector arrived, informing him that it might be necessary to engage the immense firepower of the laser cannon, Vulpa had put his garrison on alert. Destroying the remnants of the human race might just put Vulpa into the strategic position he had hoped for. It would draw Imperious Leader’s approval and definitely put Vulpa in the forefront of all Cylon executive officers. It would—

  A technician interrupted the first centurion’s reverie:

  “Two fightercraft. Colonial. Entering defense perimeter.”

  Rising, Vulpa examined the hexagonal screens for himself. Good. This confirmed the previous reports of anomalies, and verified that the destroyed ship had also been colonial in origin. The two ships now onscreen had cleared the dense cloud cover and were skimming along the vast gray underlayers, seemingly flying with purpose toward an objective. The foolish filthy little creatures! They were planning an assault on Mount Hekla and the laser cannon. Vulpa might have laughed aloud, if such laughter were not regarded with such suspicion among Cylons.

  “I want one of them alive,” he said to his subalterns.

  Starbuck’s ship cleared the clouds, with Boomer following a moment later. The asteroid’s surface was nearly as dark as the interior of the cloud cover. The only discernible lights were a fairly bright spherical glow in the foothills of a dimly outlined mountain that ascended to the clouds, and the contrails from the ships of the two cadets far ahead of them.

  “I got ’em, Boomer.”

  As they closed in on the slower vipers of the two cadets, Starbuck punched up a general terrain scan. He was immediately impressed with the mountain. Although the great ranges of Caprica had contained mountains more awesome than this one, here on this small asteroid, rising up from a relative flatland, it was an awe-inspiring sight. Its ragged outlines and glacial surface suggested quite a challenge even to an experienced mountaineer.

  And the vipers of the two cadets were heading right for it!

  That’s the last thing I need right now, Starbuck thought, to crash-land on a mountain like that chasing two brainless kiddie-pilots. I never planned on getting any mountaineering time into my files and records.

  He punched up a closer scan of the mountain. As the screen displayed the summit, some ungeological formations were indicated. The information at the bottom of the scanner screen made Starbuck inhale sharply.

  “What is it?” Boomer said.

  “On the top of that mountain, it’s a gun emplacement. Huge. It’s like it’s carved out of the ice and rock. The weapon itself’s in a… in what appears to be a steelcrete bastion. And, Boomer, if my figures are correct, it’s every bit as massive as we suspected. And, look, it’s moving now. As big as it is, it ain’t stationary—it’s as maneuverable as… as a telescope in an observatory. I mean, the scale shows it as enormous, maybe the largest laser-style cannon anywhere, Boomer. It’s bigger than—oh my God!”

  The vipers of Cree and Shields were now slipping upward, zeroing in on the weapon itself. At the same time the barrel of the cannon swung slowly around, pointed in their direction but just above them. Starbuck bellowed a curse as Shields’ ship eased into the weapon’s lower range. Suddenly an uncanny, luminescently bright beam of light pulsed out of the cannon’s barrel, lighting up the skies and causing thousands of glittering rays to form a maze-like network across the immediate icy surfaces of the planet. It enveloped Shields’ viper, which seemed to remain in shadow outline for a brief moment, then disintegrated into a blazing fireball. The beam passed to the left of Starbuck’s and Boomer’s ships, continuing to illuminate the surface of the planet in a daylike brightness, then entered the clouds, briefly lighting them in a red-streaked but quite peaceful-looking aspect that reminded Starbuck of the kind of fluffy clouds that had sailed over Caprica on a warm summer day.

  “Shields!” Starbuck screamed, even though he knew the cadet was dead.

  “Too late,” Boomer said, “he’s gone. I’ve lost Cree’s signal too.”

  “It’s there. I saw him. But it’s being jammed. They know we’re here, too, Boomer. Stay low, that cannon can’t reach us down here.”

  “Right, bucko!”

  Starbuck’s scanner showed a trio of what were clearly Cylon fighters rising from an area beyond the weapon. From the first shots they fired, at a target near the left side of the mountain, Starbuck knew immediately where Cree was.

  Vulpa ordered the launch of three fighters to make the remaining enemy pilot crash-land. The command pilot of the lead Cylon fighter carefully sent a shot across the viper’s bow. In the gelid atmosphere, the streaks of laser fire had the look of fiery icicles.

  “Invader,” the Cylon flight commander said, “release control of your ship to us.”

  The human’s answer was to open fire. Vulpa ordered his flight commander:

  “Force him down!”

  The three Cylon ships converged on their common enemy.

  Starbuck and Boomer had to watch the Cylon ships force Cree down. Cree’s pitiful voice came through an interruption in the jamming crackle of static:

  “Starbuck! I’m surrounded!”

  “Hang on,” Starbuck replied, even though he suspected the poor cadet couldn’t hear him. “We’re coming, kid.”

  “Starbuck,” Boomer pleaded, “forget it. It’s too late now to do anything for Cree. By the time we get there, he’s either dead or taken by those Cylon creeps.”

  “But—”

  “No buts about it. We have to get back and warn the Galactica. This weapon’s like nothing in any of our warbooks. They’ve gotta know!”

  “I’ve lost two men. I’m not going to lose Cree.”

  “Forget it, Starbuck. We don’t stand a chance against that weapon. We have to get to the Galactica. One life against thousands! Starbuck…”

  For a moment Starbuck, furious, was tempted to disregard Boomer’s cautions. But, knowing that his wingmate was right, he muttered another dark curse and, following Boomer, swung his viper around.

  Seeing that the human enemy had been effectively trapped and captured, Vulpa returned to his command chair. One of the monitoring centurions announced:

  “Two more fightercraft approaching, flying low.”

  “Destroy them as they come into range,” Vulpa said.

  The monitoring personnel kept close watch on the two new ships, then saw them swing around and slip over the near horizon.

  “Fightercraft retreating,” the technician said.

  “That may be to our advantage. If we can use them to locate their command ship.”

  “Sir, that will be impossible. They have already managed to elude our instrumentation.”

  Vulpa nodded. The red streak of light moving back and forth across his helmet slowed, almost stopped.

  “Bring me the captive,” he ordered.

  Imperious Leader turned to the simulation of Starbuck, which now seemed to lounge insultingly in its chair, an ugly stick humans called a cigar clenched between its teeth.

  “Well, Lieutenant,” Imperious Leader said, “your compatriots suspect nothing. They seem to have fallen blithely into my trap.”

  The Starbuc
k took the cigar out of its mouth, flicked ashes from it as if the cigar had real substance, and said:

  “You got ’em in your slimy little claws?”

  “No, but we will have them at any—”

  “Then you ain’t trapped ’em, bug-eyes.”

  “You are not programmed to insult me, Lieutenant.”

  “Sorry. Oversight. Sometimes even illusions can’t help expressing the obvious.”

  Imperious Leader’s hands gripped the sides of his throne more tightly, trying not to show anger at this unusually autonomous simulation.

  “I would like to speak to you about your commander,” he said.

  The Starbuck’s eyes lit up and he broke into that annoying smile.

  “Ah. You mean, old Ironhull Adama.”

  “I do not understand. Hull made out of iron. I had never understood that he wore metallic battlesuits, as we Cylons do. There is nothing on record to suggest that.”

  The Starbuck’s irritating smile broadened.

  “Ironhull is a figure of speech. Do you Cylons have figures of speech?”

  “We employ such in our poetry, but not ordinarily in our normal speech.”

  “You guys write poetry?”

  The Starbuck seemed amazed. Imperious Leader was impressed by how sharply outlined this simulation was, as if one could reach out and actually touch it. He almost wished to make the test, but knew his hand would go right through Starbuck’s incorporeal form.

  “We have a faction of our society who use figures of speech in the poetry they chant. It is never written down. Cylon law does not allow that. But much of it is, I understand, preserved orally.”

  “But Cylons do have a written language?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Why don’t you let the poets write their work down?”