"Hey, hey, hey!" Starbuck said. "It's against regulations to hug a junior officer . . . unless you really mean it."
There was a hint of tears in Apollo's eyes.
"We all thought you were dead."
"Yeah, well, what's a little base-star to an old war jock like me?"
Apollo frowned.
"Base-star," he said, "you mean there's a base-star coming—"
"Not coming, waiting for orders! Say, didn't Baltar show? He's the one that got me free, he—what's the matter, Apollo?"
"Baltar again!" he muttered. "What is Baltar up to? What—"
"He's come to offer peace. That's what he told me."
"Yeah, he's already tried that here."
"You don't believe him?"
"Nope."
"Didn't think you would. I had a hard time faking belief back on the base-star. What should we do?"
"I think we better get off this dying planet before Baltar's troops get here."
"Just what I was going to say, Captain."
"Starbuck, you start breaking camp."
Apollo turned abruptly and ran out of the tent, Starbuck hard on his heels.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SERINA: My head is spinning; so much has happened. I'm huddling now in a cold dark corner of an underground passageway in the tomb. Rubble has blocked off the corridor we used to descend into the pyramid; Adama and Apollo are looking for another way out. I chose to stay here, to be the focal point in their search. In the distance I can hear Baltar still screaming. In spite of what he is, I want to try to go back, make one more try at helping him. Listen to those explosions—and the noise of battle in the skies above Kobol. I wish we knew what was happening out there. We may already be defeated. The Cylons may just be mopping up. Our camp may be in flames. All of our friends, our wingmates, our colleagues, they may all be dead. Athena, Dietra, Starbuck—could we have just gotten Starbuck back only in time for him to die with the rest of us? I don't know what to do, what even to say into this recorder. My hands trembled as I inserted the crystal into the 'corder. Where did I leave off on the last crystal? I can't remember. We were on the surface. Let me think back . . .
I remember the last pleasant moment. We were sitting, Apollo and I, on an intact bench beside the colonnade, gazing up at the pyramid. He held me close, and frequently kissed me. I didn't want the night to end, I felt so—so relaxed and so happy and so much in love. Near us, many of our friends huddled together and sang old songs, their faces marvelously lit by the glow of several carefully arranged electric torches.
But the mood was too good—it couldn't last. Gradually I saw the worry in Apollo's eyes. He was still disturbed about his father's frantic desire to scour the old tomb for the truth about the thirteenth tribe. I was about to try to comfort him with a soothing word, when suddenly there was a great hubbub in the camp. Gemi came running up to us with the news that Starbuck had materialized in camp as if out of nowhere. I had never seen the small, often morose Gemi so bubbly with excitement.
Apollo ran off to his tent, where he happily greeted Starbuck. The next time I saw him he was running again, this time toward Baltar's hastily improvised half-domed shelter. I caught up with him. Without breaking stride, he told me we were in grave danger of a Cylon attack. Baltar confronted us with the usual sneer curling his fleshy lips. He was quite pleased that Starbuck had finally arrived. "Doesn't that show I'm telling the truth," he said.
Apollo asked how he happened to command a Cylon base-star, to come and go as he pleased. Baltar neatly avoided an answer and strode haughtily to a group of our warriors, who had gathered to watch the bitter exchange with intense interest. Baltar said, "Don't you think your honorable option, now that Starbuck has returned to verify my sincerity, is to present my offer to your—" then he corrected himself in an unctuous voice, "—our people?" Some warriors nodded at Baltar's words and a couple obviously did believe him. Even more were swayed by him as he glibly began to outline his peace proposal.
Apollo interrupted Baltar before he could try to persuade the crowd further. All decisions are up to the commander, Apollo announced, and then ordered Baltar to come with him to Adama. A guard stationed at the foot of the pyramid said Adama had descended again into the structure. We found him in the burial chamber, pacing around the room. Standing in the entranceway, we watched him study a slanted aperture in one wall. It looked out upon a narrow slice of empty night sky. Then he walked to the pedestal that dominated the center of the room and inspected it again, trying to find the secret of the large alabaster block, the secret that would cause it to open and reveal a sarcophagus.
Apollo cleared his throat. Adama glanced up and his face lined with anger as he realized Baltar stood in the entranceway with us.
"I thought I ordered him removed to the Galactica," he said.
Apollo walked to his father and whispered to him, saying that he didn't choose to send Baltar back to the mother ship. Already the new warriors were responding to his insidious message, ignoring that it came from a suspected traitor.
"We don't dare expose Baltar to the Council," Apollo said, "not with their record of waffling on every important issue."
"I can handle the Council," Adama replied.
Then Baltar started in. We must follow his plan. We could drift forever looking for Earth, a planet that might after all just be the myth of half-drunken star voyagers. We should be aggressive—attack the Cylon capitol and seize power.
Adama scoffed, said Baltar couldn't be trusted, not any more. Realizing he was getting nowhere shouting at the commander's back, Baltar whined to us all that there was little time left.
I was so intent on all this that at first I didn't notice the change in the room. Light was beginning to flow into it. Apollo looked toward the slanted window and said that the star was pulsing again, glowing with more than double its ordinary light.
Because the aperture was so narrow, the new light seemed thick and sharply delineated. Adama, with a start, tersely muttered, "The light, that's it!" He strode to the other side of the chamber. Standing on a bench, he turned toward the window. Gradually the beam of light, which had been above his head, descended until it shined on his face, then his throat, then his chest. "It's true, I'm sure of it," Adama said. "That window was placed precisely where it is for a reason . . ."
Then the miracle happened. The light struck the medallion on Adama's chest. Immediately two different beams of light veered from its beveled surface toward the far corners of the room. Each bounced off the chests of two corner statues—tall statues of men dressed elaborately as sentinels—and rejoined in a splendid arc across the opposite wall, forming a blinding, dazzling light-triangle. A rumble vibrated the floor beneath us. My attention returned to the central pedestal, which Baltar pointed at wordlessly, his mouth hanging open.
Slowly, the top of the pedestal slid toward us. Cautiously we moved around the opening and found ourselves peering down long, steep stairs. Baltar leaped onto the stairway. Adama, stepping down from the bench, hollered at him to wait, but Baltar had disappeared into the darkness.
We followed.
The room below was richer and more decorated than the others. Each surface was delicately wrought in jewels. I had never seen such an array of gems and stones. Even in our dim torchlight, shimmering reflections bounced off them. There were deep red sapphires, the greenest emeralds I'd ever seen, diamonds. The room was positively cluttered with relics fashioned from gold, alabaster, pearls, lapis lazuli, faience, diorite. Layers of schist had broken away from the base of a statue and I tiptoed around them, afraid of splitting them further.
In the center of the room stood a massive sarcophagus. Bas-reliefs decorated its sides, depicting scenes of royal ceremony and noble domestic bliss. The oppressive smell that dominated the chamber seemed to waft out from it. I choked, longing for a breath of air that hadn't been sealed in a chamber for thousands of years.
"This must be it," Adama muttered. "The final resting place of K
obol's last Lord."
Baltar, jumping up from the other side of the sarcophagus, began struggling with its lid. Apollo grabbed at him, trying to break his grip, but Baltar succeeded in pushing aside the heavy stone slab with strength I would not have suspected, perhaps the strength of avarice. His eyes popped in wonder as he looked down into the sarcophagus. Apollo inhaled sharply. Adama, joining the two of them, examined the sarcophagus interior with tears welling in his eyes.
The last Lord lay in regal splendor, bright cerements in blue, red, and gold threads wrapped around him. If the mask that covered his shrouded head portrayed the last Lord, he must have been a handsome and impressive man in life. High-browed and slightly slant-eyed, with a thin nose and full lips, the mask suggested nobility, intelligence, and high purpose. In his right hand he held a scepter, the symbol of his power, no doubt. Embedded in the scepter's surface were large and glittering jewels.
Baltar put both of his hands upon the scepter and pulled at it roughly. He twisted it hard, apparently trying to break off the Lord's mummified hand at the wrist in order to get it.
"You dare to defy the holy crypt!" Adama shouted, as he seized Baltar by the shoulders and wrenched him backwards.
"Do you think I believe in all of that primitive superstition?" Baltar said, an ugly smile on his face.
I think Adama would have killed Baltar if the explosion that rocked the chamber hadn't sent us all crashing pell-mell to the floor. I fell beneath a tall, heavy statue of a queen or concubine. It rocked on its pedestal, as if to fall right on me, and I screamed. Apollo crawled over to me and pulled me out of range, but the statue did not fall.
I tried to ask Apollo what had happened but my voice was drowned out by another mighty rumble. This time a statue on the other side of the room did fall, remaining miraculously intact as it hit the stone flooring.
Gathering our wits together, we rushed up the stairs. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Baltar momentarily lagging behind, his head turned back toward the resplendent sarcophagus.
I reached the top of the stairs just behind Apollo. The explosion had rocked the slab cover back into place, and Adama heaved against it with his shoulders and back. Apollo joined him, but their combined strength couldn't budge the slab.
Baltar scrambled by, pushing me aside with his hand, ramming me against the stairwell wall. He screamed that he wanted out, and ordered Adama and Apollo to stand aside. Shoving past Apollo, he started scratching at the underside of the slab, muttering that he had meant no harm. Apparently he believed the explosion was divine retribution, a result of his defiling the Lord's crypt. For the moment, that seemed a very real possibility. Baltar fell to his knees on a step. He implored Adama to help him to use the power in the medallion to get us all out. Adama merely shook his head and said quietly there was nothing he could do. Turning to Apollo, Adama asked him what he thought had happened.
"No question about it," Apollo said, bitterly. "The Cylons are attacking us out there, dropping heavy bombloads on our camp. And we're stuck in here—"
"Attack?" Baltar said. "Military attack? Then it's not the wrath of the—not the—punishing me."
He muttered incoherently for some time, while the rest of us tried to figure out what to do next. Adama and Apollo kept trying to move the stone slab. Perspiration streamed from their bodies. But the slab remained immobile. Finally, Apollo slumped to a sitting position on a stair, saying it was no use.
Baltar mumbled that he wanted nothing more in the universe than to get his hands on Lucifer. I asked him who Lucifer was, and why was he bringing him up now. Baltar ignored me and screamed at Adama to do something, save us. Another loud explosion made the entire tomb tremble. We scampered back to the burial chamber, expecting safety there. Sand sifted through cracks in the ceiling and walls. I moved into Apollo's arms.
Adama's eyes widened as he glimpsed something on a wall near the sarcophagus. He told Apollo to bring a torch closer. Its light fell on another stele, previously hidden by the now-fallen statue. In raised glyphs another message in the ancient language appeared.
Adama crouched by the lettering, oblivious to the frightening sounds of battle outside and threatening rumbles inside the tomb. He touched some of the symbols, saying they were familiar, but he couldn't translate the entire message. Apollo said there wasn't time for working out the meaning, we had to find a way out. His father merely knelt by the stele, puzzling over its words. More sand poured from the ceiling as the tomb seemingly took salvo after salvo from the attacking Cylons. Pieces of the wall fell away, crashed to the floor. Then Adama shouted victoriously:
"I've got it! That's it! Apollo, Serina, it's here, what we came for."
We peered over his shoulder. His face was so close to the stone stele that his head obscured its small glyphs. He pointed to a ribboned section at the bottom of the record. He said it was a record of the latter days, the final time on Kobol. It said something about the thirteenth tribe. The symbol for that tribe appeared throughout.
"We'll have to get a research team in here immediately," he shouted. "Experts who can discern the answers."
"Father, we have no time for that. We've got to get out of here!"
"But we must find out where they went."
The loudest explosion yet rocked the chamber. Cracks appeared in the wall above the stele. Another explosion and the cracks widened. The wall began to split apart and crumble. We reeled back and watched the stele bearing the message dissolve into fragments and fall to the floor, a collection of jagged shards. Adama rushed to them, picked up a couple of pieces as if he could put them together like a puzzle.
"The writings," he said, "we must preserve them."
"Father," Apollo said, gazing past Adama. "Look out there, beyond where the wall was."
We all looked. On the other side of the destroyed wall was a passageway, reaching toward darkness and shadow.
"Let's get out of here," Apollo begged, "while we've got the chance."
Adama didn't move an inch toward the new opening. I put a hand on his shouder and said quietly it was too late to recover the writings. They were gone, disintegrated, but in their destruction they'd provided a way out. The message had saved us.
Adama stood up and started toward the hole in the wall. Baltar's weak voice called to us from a debris-ridden corner of the room. He was pinned beneath a pair of fallen pillars.
Adama took charge and directed us as we alternatively tried to pull Baltar out from under the pillars. But we couldn't free him. The pillars were just too massive. Baltar was heavily pinioned.
"Our only chance, father," Apollo said, "is to leave him here now and send a team back for him. If there's time."
"If there's time?!" Baltar shouted, his voice sending echoes bouncing off every surface of the vast chamber. "You can't leave me here."
Adama stared at him and quietly replied there was no other choice. He promised Baltar to send the rescue team. Not satisfied with a promise, Baltar hurled curses first at Adama, then at all of us.
As we left the room and entered the dark, forbidding passageway, he started screaming about this Lucifer again, the most vile oaths and threats, saying he would tear Lucifer apart limb from limb, circuit by circuit, so help him. Circuit?, I thought, and made a mental note to investigate that matter further. If we ever get out of here. His last message to us was that we had not yet heard the last of Baltar. Adama whispered that the man would twist rhetoric until the very end of his life.
So—we've been exploring that passageway and others it led to. The battle, or whatever it is, continues outside the tomb, sending one loud rumble after another to shake the walls around us. This may be my last recording. I'm beginning to doubt we'll ever get out of here.
Apollo listened to the silence following the last part of the report on this crystal. Finally he realized there was nothing more recorded on it and, pressing a button, ejected it into his hand. He set it beside the other crystals he had played. They were lined up in a neat row on a writi
ng table. There were no more. He rubbed his forehead, tried to think. What to do now? He returned to the drawer where he had originally found the recording crystals, rummaged around in it for a long time, hoping—praying to find one more there. But he knew there were no more.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
First the Kobol star briefly flared, then a wall of Cylon fighters obscured the momentary brightness. For a long moment they hovered there, as if advertising the enormous dimensions of their threat, then they began peeling off from the dense formation. In graceful, menacing sweeps and arcs they began forming into the pinwheel assault.
Starbuck realized they would break away from the pinwheel to initiate strafing and bombing runs. There was no time to lose. Ordering one group of warriors back to the shuttle on the double, he started running down the dead city's stone causeway, shouting Apollo's name. Cylon fighters started sweeping down on the camp, laying down a steady line of laser fire. A couple of bombs hit tents dead center and flames ripped them open. Another contingent of attackers swept down and more tents burst into flame.
Athena, closely followed by Gemi, raced up to him. Their bodies were darkly outlined in shadow by the bright fires burning out of control behind them.
"Where's Apollo and Serina?" he shouted to her. "Where's the Commander?"
"Last I saw, they were taking Baltar into the tomb."
He looked toward the pyramid just in time to see a Cylon ship aim a bomb at its northern face. The drop was a shade off target and only sent an eruption of stone chips into the air. Smoke from a direct hit curled up from a far face of the pyramid.
"Better get back to your viper, Lieutenant," Athena hollered.
Starbuck hesitated, wanting to run to the pyramid, look for Apollo and the others.
"But—we can't leave them. We've got to—I mean, they'll blow that thing to pieces."
"It'd waste time to go look for them. We've got to knock those dirty creeps out of the sky—now! But do what you want, I'm going to—"
Battlestar Galactica 3 - The Tombs Of Kobol Page 15
