CHAPTER

3

 

 

The marines dragged Peter away. An expression of terror twisted his handsome face and he was shouting incoherently, struggling against his bonds.

“Commander, please!” Kara and Baltar said simultaneously. Their words tumbled out in an overlapping rush.

“You’re making a terrible mistake! Who knows what he might know? There’s no proof he’s a Cylon. You could be executing an innocent man. How could it hurt to put him in the brig? We’ve had Sharon on board for weeks, and she’s only helped us. Peter might be able to tell us about the Cylons, things we’d never find out on our own.”

Adama remained silent.

“I’ll interrogate him myself, Commander,” Kara added. “If there’s any hint that he’s a Cylon, I’ll space him myself. Please.”

“Yes, please,” Baltar added.

Adama looked at them both for a long moment. Kara held her breath. It seemed like she could already hear Peter’s silent scream as his tortured body floated through harsh vacuum. When she was drawing hearts and combining names in her school notebook, she had never thought she might be involved in trying to save Peter’s life. His music had gotten her through some tough times. When she was young, the bouncy pop rhythms created a safe space far away from her father, and she fantasized that Peter might sweep into her life and take her to safety. As she grew older, Peter’s music changed. His brief grunge phase had produced two albums that had spoken to Kara at a time when her emotions had been as thick and black as the music Peter produced. The albums he had done in adulthood hadn’t grabbed her as much, but she still remembered how his voice had reflected her own mood and the sympathy she had found there.

“All right,” Adama said at last. “Take him to the brig. I want both of you to interrogate him. Have Lee there, too.”

“Thank you, sir!” Kara said over her shoulder. She was already sprinting after the marines. She didn’t see Lee watching her with an odd look on his face.

 

Peter sat, pale and stunned, behind a table bolted to the floor in the brig. He had already thrown up twice, but he had assured Kara that the nausea had passed. She hoped so. The sour smell of vomit wasn’t something she enjoyed, especially when it was someone else’s.

The brig interrogation room was chilly. Bare blue walls, a single metal door with a thick glass window, and a set of chairs bolted to the floor were all that greeted “visitors.” Kara faced Peter with Baltar beside her and Lee standing behind. Peter was still in chains. He also looked… different to Kara. It was subtle, but noticeable. His hair was disheveled, and he needed a shave. Fine lines radiated away from his eyes, lines that didn’t belong on a man barely over thirty. His lips were thin with fear. The Peter who appeared on vids and posters and album covers was smooth and perfect—handsome, but in a plastic sort of way. This Peter was real, a man who breathed and sweated and chewed his nails. And he was all the more attractive for it. As a child, she’d had a crush on dream. As an adult, she wanted something more solid, and this Peter looked pretty solid.

Kara gave a slight shake of her head. This was weird. She was actually sitting across a table from Peter Attis. Okay, so her teenage fantasies hadn’t involved handcuffs and leg irons—those came when she was rather older—but still.

“I wanted to say thanks,” Peter said hoarsely. “For saving my life.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Kara said. “If you can’t convince Lee and Baltar here that you aren’t a toaster, they’ll still space you, and I promised to hit the big red button.”

“So you don’t think I’m a Cylon,” Peter said.

“I doubt you are,” Kara told him carefully, “but I can’t say I know for sure.”

“I don’t know how I can convince you,” Peter said. He tried to spread his hands, but the shackles prevented him. “They look just like us. Or some of them do.”

“Tell us what happened to you,” Baltar said.

“Yeah,” Lee said. His arms were folded across his chest. “Do tell.”

“Uh… I’m from Libron,” Peter replied. His voice was smooth and arresting, almost hypnotic. “My band and I were on tour, and we were giving a concert on a cruise ship. That was when the Cylons attacked. It was… everyone was panicking. Alarms were going off, lights flashing. My bodyguards disappeared, but no one seemed to care who I was anyway Something blew up and threw us all to the floor. I found out later that half the ship had been destroyed and we—those of us who survived—were trapped on the other half. Radiation alarms kept blaring that rad levels were ‘unacceptably high’. A bunch of us made it to an escape pod. We crowded inside. More people tried to push their way in, but there just wasn’t room. I remember how we… we slammed the door in their faces.” Peter’s voice was shaking now. “The last person I saw was a little boy, maybe eight years old. He knew he was going to die, you could see it in his eyes.”

Kara found tears pricking at the corners of her own eyes. She forced them back and told herself this could be nothing more than a story told by a Cylon desperate to convince her that he was human. Just because he was handsome and famous didn’t mean he wasn’t a liar. The tears ebbed.

“Then what?” Lee asked.

“Someone hit the release and the pod pushed off.” Peter’s eyes hardened. “That was when the Cylons grabbed us. They hauled the pod onto one of their ships. We all thought we were dead. Later, we just wished we were. Or I did, anyway.”

“What happened?” Baltar said, exuding empathy.

“All of us were split up. You’re the first humans I’ve seen since then.” His voice was flat, without emotion. “They brought me to a laboratory and… here it gets a little hazy. I think I was drugged a lot of the time. I remember… I remember pain. A lot of needles. Bright light. I remember lying in bed, shaking and convulsing like a beheaded snake. A voice was babbling nonsense, and it took me a while to realize it was my own. I couldn’t stop babbling. And I remember some strange robots looking down at me, doing things that hurt. And I remember a woman with blond hair. She was there a lot.”

A strange expression crossed Baltar’s face and almost instantly vanished. Kara wondered what that was about.

“And then one day a woman—a different woman—came to my bed at the lab. I was pretty zoned out. She said that they were all done with me. I thought they were going to kill me then, and I was glad. It would stop hurting. But the woman didn’t kill me. She took me out of the bed, gave me some clothes—I was naked—and took me… 1 think she took me home with her. I mean, it was kind of like an apartment, but it was dark and damp all the time. The woman told me to call her Mistress Eight. I asked her what happened to the others in the pod and she said they all had died. She said it like you might say a houseplant or pet rat had died. I asked why I hadn’t been killed. She just smiled and said the others hadn’t been killed—they had died, and there was a difference. She wouldn’t tell me any more than that. Maybe she was lying. I don’t know.”

A flicker of movement caught Kara’s eye. She glanced at the window set into the door and saw the faces of two female crew. Both of them were staring. One of them said something to the other, and Kara saw her mouth “Peter Attis” with an excited look on her face. She glared at them. They gave sheepish smiles and vanished. Kara turned her attention back to Peter.

“Why did she bring you to her… apartment?” she asked. It seemed strange, the idea that Cylons would have places to live. What did robots need with a bed and a bathroom?

Here Peter’s jaw trembled. “She kept me as a pet. Put a collar on me. Showed me off to her friends.”

“Showed you off?” Lee asked.

“Mostly she made me sing for them, like a trained songbird or something,” Peter said bitterly. “She kept me in a little cage most of the time. Sometimes she made me wait on her like a servant.”

“Or a slave,” Kara said without thinking.

“Yeah.”

“So how did you get on the escape pod?” Lee demanded. His tone was belligerent.

“I’m not completely sure,” Peter admitted. “Mistress Eight pulled me out of my cage and made me follow her at a run. Alarms were going off all over the place. We got into the escape pod—I hadn’t seen it in weeks—and she shoved it off. Then everything was exploding and bouncing around and everything. Was that you guys? Did you destroy their ship?”

“How did you know it was a ship?” Lee asked.

Peter shrugged. “That’s what they called it. I never really thought about it. I… tried not to think at all.”

“What’s your favorite color?” Kara asked abruptly.

“What? Uh, blue.”

“What’s your favorite food?”

“Red beans and rice. Why? What does—”

“Who was the drummer for ‘My Heart Has Eyes for Only You’?”

“Peter Deimos. It caused all kinds of confusion, so we all called him Deimos. He hated that.”

“Who was your first real girlfriend?”

“Pamela Gallic. We were twelve. What’s this all about?”

Kara sat back, arms folded. “He’s genuine.”

“Why?” Baltar said. “Because he can answer questions of the sort you find in Teen Tiger magazine?”

“How do you know what’s in Teen Tiger?” Kara countered.

“All facets of human nature fascinate me,” Baltar said airily.

Three more faces appeared at the interrogation room window, all female. Their eyes went round when they saw Peter. Lee made an impatient gesture, and they fled.

“Look,” Kara said, “I admit it. I am—was—a huge Peter Attis fan when I was a kid. If he’s a sleeper agent for the Cylons, he’s been one since he was a teenager. How likely is that?”

“He could be a construct with the memories of Peter Attis,” Lee said.

“That would be a first,” Baltar said. “The Cylons have never done such a thing before.”

“I’m sitting right here,” Peter reminded them. “Shackled and chained, but sitting right here. I’m not a dog or a lamp.”

“Shut up,” Lee said. “We’ll the ask the questions.”

“This is how the Cylons treated me,” Peter said softly.

Baltar suddenly twisted in his chair, as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder or whispered in his ear. “Well, that’s—” Then he cut himself off, blinked rapidly, and added, “—that’s… very interesting.”

“What is?” Lee asked.

Baltar looked nonplused. “That’s very interesting… how… how he—I mean, Peter—how he thinks… of us.” He cleared his throat and loosened his tie. Kara noticed he was looking a little flushed. His right arm twitched. Kara tried to edge away from him, no mean feat in a chair that was bolted to the floor. Baltar had a weird reputation around the Fleet, for all that he was vice president. He had a penchant for talking and gesturing to himself in public, as if he were holding a private argument. And some of his other behavior was definitely off. Kara had once walked into his lab and found him leaning over a table in a very strange position. His fly had been down and the tail of his shirt was sticking out of it. Kara didn’t press for details. Most people passed this off as a side effect of genius, but Kara was beginning to wonder if Gaius Baltar might simply be a frakking lunatic.

“I mean,” Baltar continued, “that Peter here may be right. After all, we can’t be suspicious of every little thing every person does. The Cylons would love to know that we’re at each other’s throats.” His left hand suddenly leaped up and clutched at his right shoulder. He changed the gesture into a scratching motion, as if he’d had a sudden itch.

“We have to tell the Commander something,” Lee said. “I doubt he’ll accept interviews from Teen Tiger as evidence that he’s not a spy.”

“Proving something doesn’t exist is almost impossible,” Kara pointed out. “I mean, how do you prove someone can’t fly? Shove them off a building and see what happens?”

“Fortunately,” Baltar said, “we have a less drastic method.”

 

“Peter Attis!”

Kara watched as Peter stared at the woman on the other side of the mesh-reinforced Plexiglas. He was still in shackles, and two armed marines stood on either side of him. His face remained stony and expressionless, but Kara thought she detected a slight tremor in his body. The woman in the cell had almond eyes, black hair, full lips, and a slender build, though if you looked carefully, you could see a slight rounding to her stomach—an encroaching sign of pregnancy. She also wore a look of utter surprise.

“So you know who he is,” Lee said into the telephone receiver.

“Don’t you?” she countered into her own telephone. Lee held his receiver out so everyone could hear her voice, faint and tinny. “Look, my memories of being a teenager may be implanted and fake, but they feel real to me. I remember having a crush on him and wishing I could see him at a live concert.”

“Is he a Cylon?”

“What are you, stupid? They don’t make copies of real people, and even if they did, they wouldn’t use someone famous as a sleeper agent. They use someone … someone like me. No one could verify my past because the Troy colony was destroyed in a mining accident and no records survived. That’s not the case with someone like Peter Attis. He’s too public, too well-known.”

The use of “they” instead of “we” didn’t go past Kara unnoticed. Sharon Valerii was a Cylon, but she believed—or acted like she believed—her own people to be the enemy. Just a few days ago, she had defeated a Cylon computer virus that had invaded Galactica’s systems and sent the Cylons a virus of her own. She had helped Kara complete her mission on Caprica. But every time she looked at Sharon, Kara saw the traitor who had pulled out a pistol and shot Commander Adama in the stomach. Kara knew that killer Sharon’s body currently lay in the morgue and that this version of Sharon had done nothing but help Galactica. This didn’t matter to Kara in the slightest. Every time she saw the woman—Cylon—Kara felt an animalistic urge to wrap her fingers around Sharon’s throat and squeeze.

But Kara also looked at Sharon and saw a friend, a fellow pilot, and someone who had saved her life. The conflicting emotions made Kara uncertain and uncomfortable, which was why she avoided the brig as much as possible.

“Look, he’s not a Cylon,” Sharon said. “If he were, I’d tell you. If the Cylons sent another agent here to destroy the Galactica, I’d die along with everyone else, and so would my baby.” She unconsciously ran a hand over her stomach, a completely human gesture that made Kara want to hit her and give her a hug at the same time.

“Bitch!” Peter yelled. He smashed at the Plexiglas with his shackled wrists. They left a slight scratch. “Frakking bitch!”

Kara jumped, adrenaline zinging through her. Lee, also startled, dropped the phone as the marines instantly moved in to haul Peter back. He clawed and snarled at the Plexiglas. Sharon shrank away from him.

“I frakking hate you!” Peter snarled, fighting unsuccessfully to free himself from the grip of two powerful marines. “If they can’t kill you, I will!”

Kara got in front of him, blocking his view of Sharon. “Peter!” she said in a calm, firm voice. “Peter, listen to me! That is not your Mistress Eight. It’s not her.” Without knowing why, she reached out and took his face between her two hands. His skin was warm on hers. She moved in close and looked straight into his blue eyes. Their foreheads touched, and her breath mingled with his. He was real. He was solid. “Peter, it’s not her. Your… ‘mistress’ is dead. You saw them shoot her down in front of the pod. That’s not her.”

“Why is she there?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper. “Gods, what’s going on?”

Kara continued to meet his eyes, forcing him by strength of will to lock his gaze with hers. “You said your mistress made you sing for her friends. Didn’t any of her friends look alike?”

“A couple,” he said. “I thought they were twins or something.”

“There are many copies of each different type of Cylon,” Kara said. “This one is a copy of your mistress, but she’s our prisoner. She didn’t do anything to you, and she can’t hurt you. Do you understand?”

He looked long and hard into Kara’s eyes. A little thrill traveled over her skin. She wondered what it would be like to pull him closer, hold him, kiss him. It felt like his gaze was going through her, touching something deep inside her that she didn’t want touched. She was about to pull away when she caught Lee Adama looking her, at them. He looked almost… angry. A flash of her own anger rose to the occasion. What right did he have to be angry at her? He had no hold on her. Just to show him that, she turned her full attention back to Peter. Tears welled in his eyes.

“It’s all right,” she said. “You’ve been places where none of us have gone. But you’re home now, with us. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said in a small voice. “Thank you.”

Kara hugged him. It was a one-way embrace—Peter was still shackled, and the marines hadn’t released their hold on his arms. But Peter gave a heavy sigh and Kara felt his breath warm the collar of her shirt. After a moment, she released him and reached for the phone near Sharon’s cell. Sharon herself had retreated to her bed, removing herself from Peter’s line of sight. Kara punched buttons. After a moment, Dualla came on the line and transferred her to Commander Adama.

“We’ve interrogated Peter Attis,” Kara said, “and we’re convinced he isn’t a Cylon.”

“All three of you?” Adama asked.

“Yeah—me, Lee, and Doctor Baltar. We all agree.” She shot Baltar and Lee a hard glare that dared either of them to say different. They remained silent. Lee raised his hands in mock defeat.

“Then release him,” Adama said.

“Thank you, sir.” Kara hung up. “Sergeant, unshackle Mister Attis. He’s not a Cylon and doesn’t belong in chains or a cage.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kara stood carefully between Peter and Sharon’s cell so he wouldn’t have to see her as the shackles fell away with clatters and clanks. “Let’s go, okay? I’ll show you around Galactica and we’ll find you a place to stay.”

“A place to stay,” he echoed. “You mean, I can’t go home?”

Kara lead him firmly away from the brig. Lee and Baltar followed a little uncertainly. The battered metal corridors and walkways that made up Galactica’s innards snaked ahead of them in a dizzying array of directions. The Battlestar Galactica

was the size of a skyscraper turned sideways, and even the engineering crews got lost if they left their own section. People in a variety of uniforms rushed about on errands only they understood, and the PA system crackled with orders and announcements almost continuously. Several crewmembers stared as Peter passed them by.

“Not exactly,” Kara said. “The Cylons… they kind of took over the Colonies. Destroyed them.”

Peter’s knees buckled and Kara grabbed him before he fell. “All twelve?”

“Yeah. Sorry to be the one to tell you.” Kara planted herself until Peter could regain his feet. “The Cylons somehow managed to breach the defenses. We still don’t know exactly how, but when they show up and start shooting, you don’t stop to ask questions, you know? Some traitor seems to have given them the codes.”

Now Baltar stumbled, and Lee caught his shoulder to keep him from falling. Kara mentally rolled her eyes. The man was supposed to be brilliant, but he had the coordination of newborn kitten.

“A bunch of ships managed to escape together,” Lee said. “Including the Galactica here. There are still a few in hiding back on the Colonies, but as far as we know, most of the humans left in the universe are here in the Fleet.”

“So how many people are left?” Peter asked. He was walking on his own again, but his face was pale.

“Something around forty-seven thousand,” Kara told him. They turned a corner and went down a staircase. “President Roslin keeps an exact tally, but—”

“President Roslin? Isn’t she the Secretary of Welfare or something?”

“Education,” Lee said. “But now she’s president.”

“And I’m vice president,” Baltar put in quickly.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Kara said, clapping Peter on the shoulder, “and I’ll fill you in. Then you can fill me in.”

Peter gave her a long look. Kara looked back. For once, she didn’t feel thirteen. The moment stretched long, though it couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds.

“Fill you in?” Peter said at last.

Lee coughed hard. Kara ignored him. “About what happened to you with the Cylons.”

“Ah.”

“Before we do that,” Lee said, “I think we should take our guest to sickbay.”

“What for?” Kara asked.

“A thorough physical,” Lee replied grimly.

 

“I got nothing here.” Dr. Cottle removed the cigarette from his mouth and used it to gesture at the readout. The smell of smoke awoke tobacco cravings in Kara and she longed for a cigar, the one she had been looking forward to before Peter’s pod showed up. Behind them, Peter Attis himself lay on a table, his head and upper body beneath an overhanging shelf that scanned him repeatedly while he remained perfectly still. “You can see for yourself. No tracers, no chips, no implants, no Cylonitis. If the Cylons sent him here so they could somehow use him to track the Fleet, they didn’t do a very good job.”

“He says the Cylons had him in a medical facility for a while,” Lee said. “Anything to indicate what they might have done to him?”

“Nothing I can see,” Cottle said. “Soft-tissue injuries won’t show, though. He broke his left humerus some time ago—”

“I fell off a horse,” Peter said.

“He was twelve,” Kara added.

“I’m not sure we should ask how you know that,” Baltar said.

“Right.” Cottle took a heavy drag from his cigarette. “Anyway, the break’s long since healed. I don’t see any metabolic problems and he’s not carrying any weird viruses or bacteria. There’s more I could probably tell you about him, but it gets a little personal.”

“Spare us, then,” Lee muttered.

“So I pass?” Peter asked from the table.

“You’re done, kid,” Cottle said to Peter. “Get the hell out of my sickbay so I can attend to some real patients.”

“Gladly.” Peter rolled off the examination table, careful to avoid cracking his head on the scanner. Chloe Eseas, a medical technician, helped him up. Sickbay, like most of Galactica, was cluttered and clunky, with pieces of medical equipment crammed into corners and odd places. Lighting alternated between too dim and too bright, and the place never seemed completely clean, for all that it was the closest thing to a hospital the Fleet had.

“So you’re really Peter Attis?” Chloe said.

“That’s me,” he said, getting to his feet. He wore a sickbay gown that closed—more or less—in the back.

“Wow. I have all your songs. Or I did until the Cylons attacked. What was it like singing a duet with Penelope Troy?”

“She was great,” Peter said vaguely. “Really talented. Are my clothes somewhere nearby?”

While Peter dressed behind a screen, Cottle ground out the remains of his current cigarette and tapped another on the back of his hand. Kara was half ready to ask him for one, though she didn’t really do cigarettes and preferred to save her cigars for special occasions, like card games or post-mission gloating.

“How’s the harvest coming along, Captain?” Cottle asked as he shut down the scanner. “Are we going to abandon Planet Goop? The Cylons know we’re here now, unless you managed to kill them before they transmitted a signal to wherever the hell it is they transmit to.”

“I have no idea, doc,” Lee said. “You’ll probably find out when I do.”

“We need the meds that goop can make for us,” Cottle said. He nodded toward a glass-doored cabinet. There was space for several hundred drug ampules, but Kara counted fewer than ten. “That’s my entire store of radiation meds, Captain. Once that goes, your DNA is on its own. We might even be able to synthesize some more antibiotics, too, but—”

“But not if we leave Planet Goop,” Lee finished.

“Don’t interrupt your elders, son,” Cottle growled around his cigarette. “It ain’t polite. Even when they’re stating the obvious.”

 

Commander William Adama stood in the center of a whirlwind. People hustled around the CIC, checking printouts, making urgent calls, and tapping keyboards. The Dradis continued its low, metallic growl as it scanned in all directions for Cylons. A dozen monitors flickered with graphics, videos, and data readouts. Saul Tigh sometimes stood behind Adama and sometimes lurked around the workstations. It made the crew nervous to have Tigh suddenly pop up behind one of them to bark a question or an order, but Adama had given up trying to get him to stop. Commanding a fleet was a lot like juggling cats in a rainstorm—sometimes you had to let the small stuff slide because something big with claws was waiting to drop on your head.

“Update on the evacuation, Lieutenant?” Adama asked.

“Half done, sir,” Tactical Officer Anastasia Dualla reported from her station. She wore a headset that covered one ear and slung a microphone across her mouth. “The Monarch should be ready for takeoff in under half an hour.”

“I’ll have Jump coordinates ready for them by then, sir,” put in Felix Gaeta. “We should be all right.”

“If the frakking Cylons don’t pop up again,” Tigh growled. “And they will. Mark it.”

“How much more food are they estimating we’ll be able to extract from the algae?” Adama asked.

“It’s hard to give anything beyond a rough estimate, sir,” Gaeta hedged.

“Just answer the damn question, Lieutenant,” Tigh ordered.

Gaeta pursed his lips and kept his eyes on Adama, who was also ignoring Tigh. “We might get an extra week out of what we have so far. Ten days at most.”

“A week?” Tigh shouted. “That’s nothing! They were down there for four days. What the hell were they doing?”

“Is that a rhetorical question, sir, or do you want an answer?” Gaeta asked with utter politeness.

“It’s not damned rhetorical,” Tigh snapped. “What have they been doing down there?”

“The Monarch is a mining ship,” Gaeta replied. “It took time to adapt its operations from digging to scooping. Also, Planet Goop has an atmosphere but it isn’t breathable. Putting everyone in breathing masks makes everything harder to see and slows down operations. We also have to rotate the crew because of the radiation levels, and the workers can only take so much radiation exposure. Supplies of anti-radiation meds are limited. That slows things down as well.”

“Sounds like a lot of excuses to me,” Tigh said. “You need to—”

“Sir, with respect, I’m just the messenger. May I suggest that you address your… concerns to the captain of the Monarch? She’s the head of the harvest operation, not me.”

“I think I’ll do just that. Dualla, get me Renee Demeter on the line. Now!”

This caught Adama’s attention. Tigh was clearly in the wrong, bent on solving impossible problems by shouting at subordinates, as if yelling would make them suddenly able to work miracles. But now Gaeta had managed to point him in another direction, toward the Monarch. Renee Demeter was captain of her own ship. She answered to no one but Adama, and then only in matters that concerned her ship’s role in the Fleet. On the Monarch, she was sovereign, and Tigh had no authority over her. If Tigh started shouting at her and calling her incompetent in public, she would answer in kind and he would come across looking like an idiot. Adama shot Gaeta a hard look. Had he set Tigh up on purpose? Adama wouldn’t put it past him. Gaeta had a subtle touch when it came to handling conflict. But Gaeta’s expression was bland as a sand dune.

“Belay that order, Dee,” Adama said. “I think Captain Demeter has enough to worry about right now. Getting those people off the planet before another wave of Cylons shows up is more important.”

For a moment Tigh looked ready to challenge Adama’s order. Adama looked at him, bland as Gaeta. Then Tigh straightened his uniform and turned to look at the video feeds. Adama closed his eyes. Another cat successfully juggled. What was next?

“Sir,” Dualla said. She was a dark-skinned woman with surprising hazel eyes. “President Roslin is on the line for you.”

I had to ask, he thought, and picked up a receiver from the central station. It had a cord attached to it. Adama remembered the days of cellular communication, computer networks, and wireless everything. The Cylons, however, had taken to networks like lions to antelope. The frakking things could infect and wipe out a network in seconds, fatally crippling whatever systems the network ran. So the Colonies had tossed digital out the window and stampeded to bring back analog. It made hell out of computing an FTL Jump when your drive computer couldn’t talk to your helm computer, but it sure beat the Cylons twitching your network from a distance and making you land in the heart of star. Later, after everyone thought the Cylons were gone for good, the military had cautiously returned to networking its computers. Adama, however, had refused to allow it on the Galactica, and thank the Lords of Kobol for that. Far as he knew, every other Battlestar had fallen victim to Cylon viruses. The Galactica alone had not.

“Madam President,” Adama said, resisting an urge to play with the phone cord. “A pleasure.”

“Commander.” Laura Roslin’s voice was warm as always, but Adama’s practiced ear caught the undercurrent of pain and fatigue. Roslin was suffering, in every sense of the word, from terminal breast cancer. She had kept it a secret for months, using experimental treatments to force pain and weakness to stay at arm’s length, but lately the malignant tissue had made terrible encroachments into her body. Within the month, she would be dead. Adama refused to let himself think about this—he was juggling cats, after all—but the small part of his mind that never quite did what it was told feared that the grief from her loss would devastate him. Only the thought that Gaius Baltar would become president in her stead frightened him more.

“I hear the Monarch is pulling up stakes,” she said.

“That’s true.”

“The latest projections tell me we’ve only harvested eight days worth of food material, and that’s if we refine none of it for anti-radiation meds and antibiotics.”

Apparently Roslin had access to better information than Adama did. It didn’t really surprise him. “That’s close to what I’ve heard, yes.”

“Are you sure we need to evacuate right now, Bill?” she said. “You know your job and I realize you’re keeping our safety in mind, but we also really need that algae. It’s not just the food. Medicinal supplies are at an all-time low. The Lesbos is dealing with an outbreak of strep that’s eating up antibiotics. We’ve tried to make the adults suffer through it on their own and reserve the remaining meds for the children, but that only means the adults reinfect the kids.”

Adama nodded, though Roslin couldn’t see him. “I know, Madam President.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to call her “Laura” when other people were within earshot. “But the Cylons must know we’re here, and it’s only a matter of time before they send another basestar or a flock of Raiders.”

Roslin sighed heavily. �I trust you to know what�s best when it comes to Fleet security. I�m also worried about the food and meds. Bill, is there any compromise on this? It�s been over an hour since the Cylon attack. Maybe they aren’t coming back for a while.”

Adama tightened his lips. He knew the food and medicine supplies were tight—they had been since the first day after the attack. Now it seemed as if the Lords of Kobol had handed them a bounteous harvest only to have the Cylons chase them away like lions chasing a herd away from the watering hole.

“They always come back,” he said. “But I wonder…”

“Yes, Bill?”

He sighed. There were risks, and there were risks. The lack of food and medicine would kill them just as surely, if not as quickly, as the Cylons. “Maybe we can evacuate the planet and wait a day or so. If the Cylons show up, we can Jump away. If they don’t, we can resume the harvest.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Roslin said, relief temporarily overcoming the fatigue in her voice. Adama could almost see her behind her desk on the Colonial One, stray tendrils of her glossy auburn hair getting caught in her glasses while she flipped through reports and signed papers. Billy Keikeya, her chief aide, would be hovering near her elbow with more bulletins and paperwork.

Adama grimaced and banished the image. Roslin, he happened to know, spent most of her time these days propped up on a couch next to her desk. Her hair had become lackluster and brittle, her skin pasty, her face drawn with pain. He wondered if the real reason he was allowing the Fleet to remain in orbit around Planet Goop was that it would make Laura Roslin happy and bring some small relief to her stress and suffering.

“I’ll expect to see you over a dinner of fresh algae salad when this is over, Madam President,” he said, as if Roslin had never heard the word “cancer.”

“Count on it, Commander,” she said, and rang off.

 

Karl “Helo” Agathon checked his watch and lengthened his stride. He was a tall man, almost rangy, with close-cropped dark hair and a narrow face. He was also late for his appointment in the brig.

Helo trotted around and through the groups of people who kept getting in his way. Familiar ship sounds echoed around him—the slight hiss of carbon dioxide scrubbers, the tromp of soldier boots, the cricket creak of a hatch opening or closing. Sharon had so little to look forward to, so little to do. He knew his daily visits were the high point—hell, the only point—of her day. He hated seeing her in the brig, locked behind steel mesh and unyielding Plexiglas. He couldn’t even hear her voice except through a telephone line, let alone touch her face or hold her hand. It wasn’t fair. Sharon—this copy of her—hadn’t done anything to anyone. It was the frakking opposite, in fact. She had saved Helo’s life on Caprica numerous times, helped Star-buck retrieve the Arrow of Apollo, and just a couple days ago had single-handedly destroyed an entire fleet of Cylon raiders. And now she was carrying Helo’s child.

He dodged around an ensign who was half-hidden behind a stack of papers. Yeah, some people insisted that Sharon was only frakking with him, that she had tricked him into falling in love because the Cylons were desperate to conceive children of their own, and Cylon women could only get pregnant if love was involved.

During the Cylon invasion, Sharon, a pilot, had left Helo on Caprica when Helo had given up his seat on her Raptor to a refugee. Helo had then gone on the run from Cylon troops, certain they would eventually catch up with him. And then Sharon showed up again, almost out of nowhere. Together they ran a harrowing journey across Caprica to a spaceport, where they stole a ship to rendezvous with Galactica. Along the way, they had fallen in love and accidentally conceived a child. Or Helo had thought the child was accidental. Only later had he learned that his lover was a different Sharon, that this Sharon had been assigned to make him fall in love with her to see if she could conceive. The flaw was that Sharon had fallen in love with Helo as well, and instead of turning Helo over to the other Cylons after the conception, she had helped him escape and fled with him to the Galactica.

Now she spent her days in the brig, mistrusted and hated by the few crewmembers who knew about her. It made Helo’s blood boil to think about it. Keeping a pregnant woman in the brig—how humane was that? But Adama remained firm. Caprica Sharon, as she was sometimes called, would stay in the brig for the foreseeable future. As a prisoner of war, there would be no trial, no lawyer, no judge. Just Adama.

Helo realized his footsteps were pounding angrily on the deck plates, as if he could punch holes through them like an angry giant. He forced himself to calm down. Sharon was under enough stress. She didn’t need his tension adding to hers.

Helo took the familiar staircase down to the brig and headed up the side corridor to the cell block specially designed to hold a Cylon. He emerged in a dimly lit open space. Sharon’s cell was ahead of him, but the two marines assigned to guard her day and night were nowhere to be seen. It took Helo a startled second to realize that the marines were both sprawled motionless on the floor. The door to Sharon’s cell stood quietly open. The interior was empty. Helo froze. A thousand different thoughts flicked through his head. Part of him exulted. Another part of him worried. Yet another felt a pang of fear. Indecision held him motionless. Should he raise the alarm first or check the marines? Maybe he should just… leave. Let someone else find the scene, give Sharon a good head start to wherever she was going. Or maybe he should—

Someone tapped his shoulder from behind. His heart jerked and Helo whirled. He got a tiny glimpse of the snarl that twisted Sharon’s beautiful face just before her fist caught him under the jaw.