01 - Battlestar Galactica Read online

  “How have you been trying to help me, huh? How are you trying to do that?”

  She draped her arms around his shoulders seductively. Then her grip tightened, and turning his head by his chin, she forced him to look straight ahead over the top of the console, toward the center of the CIC. “Do you see anything there that looks familiar?”

  He gazed, and saw Billy standing with a cup of coffee, near Dualla, who was working at a console. And above Dualla’s head, that big ceiling-mounted, six-way rack of dradis monitors. “No. Should I?” She didn’t answer, but waited for him to look harder. In the middle of that rack, between the monitors, there was a small, pale blue object, shaped a little like the separated hemispheres of the human brain, but much flatter, and smooth.

  “Well, now you mention it… I’ve seen something like it… somewhere before.”

  She was breathing close to his face now, brushing back strands of his hair. “Yes?”

  It came back to him. “In your briefcase.” He could picture it now, her silver metal briefcase, and always inside it she carried an object that looked very much like—no, exactly like—that thing up on the monitor mounting. “You used to carry it around with you. You said it was an electronic organizer.” He looked up at her momentarily, then back at the distant object.

  “That would be a lie,” she murmured.

  “Then it’s… it’s a Cylon device.”

  She circled around to perch in front of him again. “That would follow.”

  Breathlessly, he began, “Did you—?”

  “No.” She twisted around to look back at the thing. “Not my job.”

  “Then that means—”

  She smiled. “Say it.”

  “There’s another Cylon aboard this ship.”

  Almost imperceptibly, she nodded.

  CHAPTER

  41

  Ragnar Station Passageway

  William Adama forced himself to keep walking through the blinding pain. He was probably about halfway back to the armory now. It hurt to walk—he must have cracked or bruised a rib when that damned machine hit him—but it would hurt a lot more not to get back to his ship. Blood and sweat kept running into his left eye, and he repeatedly wiped his forehead as carefully as he could with his left sleeve. He was pretty sure he had Leoben’s blood as well as his own on his face, and he didn’t want any of that frakking Cylon blood in his wound. How did it ever come to this? he thought. How did it ever come to this?

  Was that another directory plaque at the next intersection? He stopped to check it, squinting to make out the engraved map. Good thing—he’d been about to take the wrong route. These frakking passageways all looked the same. Time was fleeing, and he damned well didn’t want his crew delaying departure while they went out looking for him. He pushed himself to move faster. Screw the pain.

  His lungs were burning by the time he gasped against a heavy hatch, pushed it open, and staggered out into a much wider corridor. There was noise here, men moving pallets of explosives toward the airlock. He swung around, trying to find the chief—and sagged against the wall just as someone bellowed, “Commander Adama! It’s Commander Adama!”

  Galactica, Combat Information Center

  Baltar walked around the center of the CIC, glancing casually this way and that, trying not to be conspicuous as he peered up at the Cylon device attached behind the monitors. He was thinking frantically, trying to figure out what to do about the damn thing now that he knew of it.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Lieutenant Gaeta walking past. “Everything okay there, Doc?”

  “Oh yeah, fine,” he said nervously, but getting his facade of confidence back up quickly. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ve just finished erasing the program from the backup memory. I’m just going to check it one more time, from here.”

  Gaeta nodded and moved on, and he took that as his cue to get back to something that at least looked like work. He took a chair in front of a secondary computer console. But before he could so much as pull himself up to the console, Six had reappeared. She came from behind, circled around him, and nestled easily into his lap. He shut his eyes. I do not believe this. What is happening to me? He blinked them open to see Six smiling at him. She was fingering his collar, and shifting her weight provocatively on his lap. In frustration, he murmured, trying to keep his voice low, “You’re not helping.”

  Six stopped what she was doing and looked hurt. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking away from him. “How can I help?”

  “Well, for a start, you can tell me what that is.” He nodded toward the device.

  She shrugged innocently. “Honestly, I don’t know.”

  “Well, it hasn’t exploded.”

  “Yet?” she said. He looked up at her in consternation, and she turned back to smile mischievously at him. “I’m just guessing.”

  Feeling an increasing pressure in his chest, Baltar nodded. “I have to warn them.”

  Six laughed. “How do you propose to do that?” Her voice shifted to mimicry, without losing its husky sensuality. “‘Oh look—a Cylon device!’ ‘Really? Well, how do you know what a Cylon device looks like, Doctor?’ ‘Oh—I forgot to mention—I’m familiar with their technology because I’ve been having sex with a Cylon for the last two years now.’”

  “I’ll come up with something,” he whispered.

  She leaned inward as if to kiss him. “I love surprises.” Nuzzling him, she continued, “Speaking of sex…” She reached surreptitiously down between their bodies and began stroking him.

  He gasped. With difficulty, he managed, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, really… really.” He was trembling now.

  “Why not?” she murmured. “No one will know. It’ll be our little secret.”

  He couldn’t help himself, or dredge up the willpower to make her stop touching him. As she nuzzled his neck, he began to breathe faster, to moan with pleasure. He let his head fall back in the chair. “Ahh-h-h… ahh-h-h …”

  “Doctor,” he heard in a sharp voice, by his right shoulder.

  He straightened with a jerk, trying to get control of himself. “Y-yes.” He blinked, slowly regaining his composure.

  It was that public relations man, Aaron Doral. Doral handed him a three-ring binder. “You asked for a report on how many civilian ships had your CNP program?”

  Baltar stared at him, trying to process what the man had just said. Report. Civilian ships. CNP. “Right. Thank you,” he said at last.

  “Are you all right?” Doral asked. “You look a little flushed.”

  Baltar jerked his gaze back up at the man. “I’m fine. Thank you very much,” he said sharply.

  Doral looked slightly taken aback. “Okay.” But as he left, he glanced back at Baltar, as though uncertain whether to believe Baltar’s assurance.

  Baltar was watching Doral, as well. And he was getting an idea. “What are you thinking?” asked Six, back in his lap as though she had never left.

  Baltar felt his own voice become very hard. “I’m thinking someone else might need to be implicated as a Cylon agent.”

  Six gazed out over the center of the CIC, where Doral was now talking to Dualla. “He doesn’t seem the part,” she said, her voice softening with mock earnestness. “And I don’t remember seeing him at any of the Cylon parties.”

  “Funny,” he said, raising his eyes to her as she chuckled. He focused again on Doral, his resolve hardening. “He’s a civilian. He’s an outsider. And he’s been aboard this ship for weeks with virtually unlimited access to this very room.” He nodded to himself, then hesitated. “There is one problem, though.”

  Six laughed quietly. “Morally?”

  He glared at her. “Practically.” He frowned in thought. “And that’s that so far, aboard this ship, no one even suspects that the Cylons look like us now.” He gazed back at Six, but if she had an answer to his dilemma, she was keeping it to herself.

  Galactica, Deck E, Near the Airlock

&nbs
p; Commander Adama winced as the medical corpsman tightened the last stitch on the wound near his left eye. He saw movement to the right of the corpsman and turned his head to look—causing another sharp twinge, as he pulled on the untrimmed suture. “Hold still, Commander, please,” said the corpsman, reaching to cut the suture thread. Adama grunted. It was worth the pain. He had just seen Leoben’s body being carried past on a litter. Good. The men had been able to follow his directions, and they’d recovered the body in half the time he’d expected.

  “This just gets worse and worse,” Colonel Tigh growled, standing off to one side of the corpsman, and also watching the body being carried past. “Now the Cylons look just like us?”

  “Down to our blood,” Adama said. Though his face and hands had been scrubbed with antiseptic wipes, he still felt the slickness of the Cylon’s blood on his hands; he wondered if he would always feel it. The corpsman pressed a piece of gauze to his forehead, and Adama held it in place with two fingers of his left hand. With his other hand, he wiped again at his right eye with a small towel.

  “You realize what this means?” Tigh muttered. “They could be anywhere. Anyone.” He began pacing.

  “I’ve had time to think about it,” Adama said.

  “So what do we do?”

  “I don’t know.” He’d had time to think, but he hadn’t come up with any answers. Bowing his head, he changed the subject. “How are we doing on the warheads?”

  Tigh sounded a little more upbeat. “Magazine two secured. Magazines three and four within the hour.” He thought a moment. “Something else…”

  Adama waited.

  Tigh finally let it out. “Lee… is alive.”

  The commander’s cabin seemed enormous, vacant, sullen as Lee walked through it, looking around. “Commander?” he called again. His father wasn’t here. Lee turned to leave; then something caught his eye. It was a framed octagonal picture, taken probably twenty years ago, standing prominently on his father’s table. It was a photo of his mother with him and Zak, taken when they were maybe eight and ten years old. He and Zak were smiling, full of life and hope, and his mother was… beautiful. He hadn’t seen this particular photo in a long time. He stared at it, lost in thought.

  Funny, as a boy he had never thought of his mother as being beautiful or not beautiful; she was just his mom, his and Zak’s. She was loving and dependable, but wasn’t that what mothers were? He’d never really even thought of her as being his father’s wife—not until the divorce, when she wasn’t anymore. But she was still Mom, of course. Zak’s death had hit her hard, very hard. He knew that since then, she worried twice as much about him as she had before. There were so many ways a fighter pilot—test pilot—could wind up at the wrong end of a funeral.

  He’d worried about her happiness, about her impending remarriage, about which he’d felt relief and contentment, glad to see an end to her loneliness. But while she had always worried about him dying in the service, he’d never imagined that she would be the one to die in a war, with thermonuclear bombs raining down on her world. She was almost certainly dead now—though he would probably never know for sure. He’d been so busy since the attack, he’d hardly slept. And he hadn’t had time to think much about those he had left behind.

  His father was the only family he had left. And his father… His stomach started knotting, just thinking about his father. So maybe it was better that he didn’t. Put the picture down and leave.

  That was when he noticed the movement to his right. His father had quietly walked into his quarters, and before Lee could even react, was standing at his side. His face was a mess, scraped and with a blood-soaked bandage taped over his left temple; that must have been some fight he’d been in. He didn’t say anything to Lee right away, just looked at him, and looked down at the picture Lee was still holding, a hint of a smile on his face.

  Lee dropped his gaze back to the photo, and had to work to bottle up his feelings again. There would be another time to mourn his mother’s death.

  “I’m sorry,” his father said, as though reading his mind.

  Lee nodded. He placed the photo carefully back down on the table. “I, uh—gotta go,” he muttered, and turned away.

  As he walked past his father, the commander’s arm shot out and caught his, stopping his movement. Lee turned, surprised, not knowing what to say. Or what his father wanted to say. For a moment they both stood there, looking at each other in a kind of arrested shock. The air was heavy with things they might say to each other, things neither one of them was likely to say.

  As suddenly as the last movement, his father stunned him again by pulling him into an awkward hug. Lee resisted at first. How long had it been since he had last hugged his father, or wanted to? As his father’s arms tightened around him, Lee stood rigidly at attention, fighting the emotions. But the feelings were deeper and stronger than his resolve: the pain and loneliness breaking out of their prison and bubbling up. Feelings he didn’t want to admit to: longing for forgiveness; love for his father, buried almost beyond retrieval… but not quite.

  Almost against his will, he brought his own arms up to return the embrace, pressing his hands against his father’s back. He could feel the contortions in his own face; he knew there were tears somewhere down there, wanting to get out. That wasn’t going to happen, he was too strong for that—wasn’t he?—but something was breaking down on the inside, because he felt a strange sense of gladness and release… a letting go. But of what? The years of anger? The walls he had struggled, labored to maintain? It was so hard to keep those walls up. Maybe he didn’t have to do that. Wouldn’t Zak have wanted it this way? Wouldn’t his mother?

  At last, he and his father stepped apart. His father nodded in obvious gratitude, but still couldn’t quite look him in the eye. And he knew then that his father was struggling as much as he was.

  Neither of them spoke as Lee left the cabin. But something had changed, and there would be no going back from it.

  CHAPTER

  42

  Galactica, Conference Room B

  Billy Keikeya looked up from the notes he was organizing, as President Roslin paced the room. Since they’d moved the two disaster pods off Galactica and onto a small transport assigned the task of distributing the supplies (damned meager supplies!) to the rest of the fleet, President Roslin had been acting like a caged cat. And in fact, they were caged; there were two armed guards outside the room, by Colonel Tigh’s orders. Theoretically they were there to ensure the president’s safety. But it was perfectly clear that they were there to contain the president, to keep her from wandering the ship or making any further demands.

  At least they had been permitted to stay on board for a while. Tigh had rescinded his order that they get off the ship at once—probably thanks to Adama’s intervention, though Billy wasn’t sure which Adama.

  President Roslin paused to peer out the door of the meeting room. “What’s wrong with these people, Billy? Are they so afraid to give up any power?” She turned and kept pacing.

  Billy hesitated to speak, but this very question had been weighing on him. He drew a breath. “With all due respect, Madame President… I think you may have overplayed your hand with Colonel Tigh.”

  President Roslin turned toward him in surprise. “Excuse me?”

  Now he was in it. But though his face burned, he plunged ahead. “Well—when you tried to give Colonel Tigh a direct order—you know, telling him that he had to help us—”

  “I haven’t forgotten what I said,” she answered dryly, and with some impatience.

  “Right. Of course.” Billy was starting to get a little flustered now, but he forced himself to finish what he had to say. “The point is, he’s second in command on this ship—and the ship’s in danger—and you suddenly forced him to make a choice between you and his commanding officer. He doesn’t even know you. He’s not going to—”

  “Obey me,” President Roslin finished. “No… of course not.” She turned around, pressing
her palms together in front of her face. “Of course he wouldn’t,” she repeated. “Which I should have realized at the time.” She suddenly looked strangely at Billy. “Have you been this smart all along, and I just never noticed?”

  Billy flushed, not knowing what to say.

  “I mean it,” she said, rubbing her shoulder absently under the collar of her blouse. “Did I hire you because you were really smart?”

  “Well, I—” he stammered. “I did assume you’d read my resume—so you would have known the work I—my background.” He looked down at his hands, completely embarrassed now.

  “Well, I’m sure I did. But I have a confession to make. I was so overwhelmed, and there were so many applicants, that I let Personnel make the pick.” She chuckled. “Is that so—wait a minute!” She stabbed a finger in the air. “Are you the kid who won a Siltzer Prize for writing a paper on—on—?” She snapped her fingers, trying to remember.

  He finally broke down and grinned. “Diplomacy and Leadership Models. Yes.”

  “And you’ve kept your mouth shut all this time?” She was laughing and shaking her head at the same time.

  “Well… you didn’t ask. And there were a lot of other things to think about—”

  “Well, I’m asking now. You just became my most trusted advisor.” President Roslin suddenly became serious. It was amazing; she was such a nice lady, just like his mother. But she could be tough as a street cop. “What do you think I should do with these people? These… leaders.”

  Billy drew himself up and unconsciously straightened his tie, even though it was loosened around his neck. He knew exactly what he wanted to say; he’d been biting his tongue not to say it for hours. “Well—these are military people. Things like tradition, duty, honor—they’re not just words to them, they’re a way of life. You want them to accept your authority as President, you’re going to have to make them see things in those terms.”