04 - Unity

by Steven Harper - (ebook by Undead)

  “It’s a miracle!” Louann clasped her hands together. “The miracle of tongues! It’s proof that Peter is here to save us!” She dropped to her knees and raised her hands high above her head. Most of the dinner crowd did the same. The salads sat on the table, half-eaten and ignored.

  “Oh mighty One!” Louann shouted.

  “Oh mighty One!” the kneeling crowd echoed.

  “You who are all in one!”

  “You who are all in one!”

  Louann’s eyes were shut, and she swayed like a willow in a wind storm. The crowd followed her movements as if tied to her. Alexander continued to writhe and babble.

  “We thank you for this miracle!” Louann said.

  “We thank you for this miracle!”

  Kara’s skin crawled. She ignored the people as best she could and tried to straighten Alexander’s limbs to keep him from hurting himself. He seemed unaware of her presence. His eyes stared at nothing, and he continued to spout nonsense, just as Kat and Hot Dog had. Kara couldn’t see Peter.

  “Call a team!” she shouted again, hoping someone would do something. “Peter!”

  “Blasphemy!” Sarah hooted.

  The door exploded open and a platoon of marines poured into the room.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Howls of indignation echoed through sickbay. Peter Attis shouted and bellowed and wrenched at his restraints. Kara stood next to his bed, feeling uncertain. One bed over, Alexander twitched quietly in medicated sleep. Dr. Baltar stood to one side, watching with a look of vague distraction. He kept turning his head, as if someone were standing beside him.

  “Hold still,” Cottle barked. “You’d think I was pulling out your fingernails.”

  “Let me go!” Peter snarled. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I just want to draw some blood.” Cottle held up the empty syringe. “See? Simple blood. Just hold still.”

  “This was a trick, wasn’t it?” Peter said, eyes wild. “You’re all Cylons. You just made me think I’d escaped, and now you’re playing with me some more.”

  “Shut up, Pete,” Kara snapped. “And dump the martyr pose. It doesn’t look good on you.”

  He stopped struggling and stared at her. Cottle used the moment to insert the syringe and start drawing blood. Peter winced. “Ow! What the frak—?”

  “Peter,” Kara said. “You need to listen to what the doctor is saying. They’ve found a disease that attacks your brain. It makes you babble and shake, and then it puts you in a coma. It started just after you arrived, which probably means you have something to do with it.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong! I didn’t make anyone sick!”

  “Not on purpose,” Baltar said from his corner.

  “Not on purpose,” Kara agreed, resisting the urge to stroke Peter’s forehead like a concerned wife or mother. She didn’t like seeing him tied down, knew it upset him more than it would most people. “But it’s happening anyway.”

  Peter slumped back against the thin mattress of his sickbay bed. Other patients groaned in other beds. A few babbled nonsense. Peter took a deep breath, visibly trying to calm himself.

  “The people will recover eventually,” he said.

  “What makes you say that?” Cottle asked sharply.

  “Because I did. I shook and babbled in a Cylon lab for hours, but I recovered. I told Kara—Lieutenant Thrace—about it. It’s not a disease. It’s a miracle.”

  “You’ll pardon me if I don’t completely take your word for that,” Cottle said.

  “You’re just prejudiced,” Peter shot back. “Anything that differs from your point of view must be evil or blasphemous.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you believe, kid,” Cottle told him. “I believe my tests and my microscope. If they tell me it’s a disease, it’s a disease.”

  “Then why am I not sick?” Peter asked pointedly.

  “It’s possible,” Baltar put in, “that the Cylons used you to infect the Fleet. You said you spent considerable time in a laboratory, after all. If they wanted you to carry a disease, they would almost certainly want you to be immune so you could spread it as far as possible. Say, for example, by putting on a rock concert?”

  And then everything clicked at once. Kara stared down at Peter as the pieces came together, creating a terrible picture she wanted to deny but couldn’t. It was like staring at a picture of a beautiful young woman and abruptly seeing an ugly old crone occupying the same space. “That’s what happened, isn’t it?” she said. “Frak, we should have seen it.”

  “Seen what?” Peter asked. The fight seemed to have gone out of him.

  “The Cylons created this disease and infected you with it,” Kara said. “Then they showed up at Planet Goop and attacked us with a half-assed force. They wanted to lose—it was the only way to make sure you’d end up here. When I was flying that Cylon raider with the nuke back to the basestar, it sent a signal. We thought it was warning the basestar not to fire on me because that would set off the nuke and destroy the basestar, but that wasn’t it. The raider was telling the basestar to get ready for a big kaboom and make sure that you were on the escape pod. Frak, the Cylons knew from the beginning exactly what was going to happen. Otherwise you and your Mistress Eight wouldn’t have been able to make it to the pod in time. Hell, she must have hit the engines a few minutes before the explosion. Otherwise you’d have been too close to survive.”

  “I… no,” Peter said. “That can’t be. Why would they kill hundreds—thousands—of their own kind on purpose, even to destroy the Fleet?”

  “Cylons don’t exactly die,” Baltar said. “When one… expires, its consciousness is downloaded into a new body. So sacrificing an entire basestar full of them is more like wrecking a car than killing people. And the Cylons have wonderful auto insurance.”

  “It also explains why they didn’t come back to Planet Goop,” Kara said. “At least, not at first. They needed to give the plague time to spread. And then when they did show up, it was with a tiny force. They weren’t playing to win—they were playing to see how well we could hold the game. Kat and Hot Dog broke down in the middle of the fight, which told them the plague was working, so they left. Now all they have to do is sit back and wait for us to die.”

  “So why aren’t you sick?” Peter asked. “You’re one of the first people I ran into.” Then he added quickly, “I’ll tell you why you aren’t sick. It’s because the One hasn’t chosen you to see the truth yet.”

  “A more scientific way to put it,” Baltar said, “is that the disease’s course runs differently in different people. It’s the nature of such brain disorders. One person succumbs quickly, another goes unscathed for weeks or, in some cases, months. It seems Lieutenant Thrace is one of the lucky ones.”

  Cold water seemed to trickle over Kara’s skin. With all that had happened in the last few days, it had never occurred to her that she might be infected.

  “Do you think I have it?” she forced herself to ask.

  “Almost assuredly,” Baltar said wryly. “And it’s likely I do, too, and Dr. Cottle, and everyone else in the Fleet. Why do you think we haven’t bothered with quarantine protocols, Lieutenant?” His voice took on a shrill note. “Mr. Attis’ concert—and there’s no doubt in my mind that the Cylons chose him because they knew he’d give one—would have spread the disease to thousands of people. We’ve learned that Mr. Hyksos over there was on the third or fourth tier, and he caught it. Perhaps he even caught it from you, Lieutenant Thrace, during your excursion into—what’s it called? Crowd surfing?”

  Kara’s mind fled back to the night she and Peter had shared, to the number of times they had kissed. Her insides shrank from sudden, cold fear. You couldn’t fight a disease. It got into your blood, hooked your cells with tiny, invisible claws, and tore you to bits from the inside out like a rabid dog in a henhouse.

  “Dr. Cottle said I was free of bacteria and viruses,” Peter pointed out. “So it can’t be a disease. I
t’s a miracle, like I told you.”

  “Actually it seems to be a prion,” Baltar said. “A protein fragment that in some ways acts like a virus but doesn’t look like one. That’s the theory, anyway.”

  Cottle held up the scarlet vial. “Then let’s test it.”

  Gaius Baltar pushed himself away from the microscope and almost backed into Number Six. He shot her an annoyed look, then ignored her. She ignored him, just as she had been doing from the moment of her appearance. Yet, she remained, perched on one of the work tables like a slighted cat. She looked at the ceiling, she looked at the equipment, she looked at Cottle. She never looked at him. Gaius shook his head. It made him nervous, but he really didn’t have time to ponder Six’s strange behavior. His work was vitally important to the safety of the Fleet. There were other considerations as well. A trickle of sweat skimmed along his hairline, and his mouth was dry. A few minutes ago, he had slipped a sample of his own blood under a microscanner and set it to search for the prion he had found in Hyksos’ blood. Now that he knew what he was looking for, the test was easy.

  And it had come back positive.

  Now every tiny tremor, every slip of the tongue made him break into a cold sweat. He was infected with a deadly scrap of protein, and he was going to die. He, Gaius Baltar. Struck down in his prime by a terrible disease. It wasn’t fair. After everything he had done to save humanity from the Cylons, he was now going to die in a Cylon plague. Fear knotted his stomach and made his hands shake. Or maybe it was the prions already He had been one of the first people to examine Peter Attis. Hell, he had helped persuade Adama not to space the man. Well, that had clearly been a mistake.

  This was all Kara Thrace’s fault. If she had just kept her mouth shut, Adama wouldn’t have changed his mind and Peter Attis and his stupid prions would be floating in space, freeze dried for all eternity.

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Cottle asked from his own microscanner. Gaius came to himself, realizing he had been staring at a computer screen without reading it.

  “What are you seeing?” he asked.

  “Peter’s blood,” Cottle said, “has three different prions.”

  “All right, we’re listening,” Adama said.

  Gaius stood at the front of the conference table with a pointer in his hand. An overhead projector cast a harsh square of light onto the screen. At the long conference table sat Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, President Roslin, Captain Adama, and Dr. Cottle. With a small start, Gaius realized he had never learned the doctor’s first name. By now there was no way to ask it without being socially awkward. He cleared his throat.

  “Dr. Cottle and I have run extensive tests,” Gaius said. “And this is what we’ve found.”

  He slid the first transparency onto the overhead, which cast the picture of a prion onto the screen. It looked similar to the infectious one, except its ribbons were wrapped tightly around a body that was now slightly curved. Strange that it should look so innocent and pretty like a tangle of bright ribbons on the dresser of a young girl.

  “This is a prion, which is short for ‘proteinaceous infectious particle’,” Gaius said in his Lecture Voice, the one he would have used if it hadn’t been for Peter Attis. Peter Attis—the source of this plague and of Gaius’ public humiliation. Anger rose up and threatened to burn away Gaius’ fear like a forest fire swallowing a firebreak. He let it happen—anger was always better than fear. “A prion, if you haven’t heard yet, is a long, complicated protein which isn’t quite a virus. We’ve named this one Prion H, for ‘harmless’. This prion is actually inert. Your body ignores it, and it ignores your body. This is the natural state for most prions, or PrPs. They’re everywhere in animal tissue, to tell you the truth, and it’s likely that this particular one was with us long before Peter Attis showed up on our doorstep.”

  The people at the table sat in rapt attention. A bit of pride gave Gaius’ movements a bit of snap. They were enthralled, just as the audience at his ruined lecture would have been. Gaius was in charge of the room, and he liked that. He removed the first transparency and flipped a second onto the overhead’s glass platen. Another protein molecule came up on the screen, this one a bit smaller and less complicated.

  “This is another prion,” Baltar explained. “We call it Prion T, for transformational. It’s the one that’s causing problems. It gets into your neural tissue and creates a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.”

  “Could we have that in English, Doctor?” Tigh asked.

  “Sorry,” he said. “The prions attach themselves to a patient’s brain cells and interfere with brain function. Eventually, the prions begin to actually destroy the tissue—encephalopathy. This opens up thousands of tiny holes, and after a while the brain takes on the form of a sponge—spongiform. And the condition is transmissible from one person to another. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.”

  He paused to take a drink of water. No one moved or spoke. “There’s a theory called the Protein X hypothesis. It says that harmless prions like Prion H are transformed into their dangerous form by yet another prion. In other words, Prion H meets with Prion T and the two combine to form—” He twitched a third transparency onto the overhead. This one was the prion he and Cottle had seen in the lab before, its ribbons twisting about it in all directions, like strands of bright taffy on a bender. “—this prion. It’s still Prion H, but this one interacts with brain tissue. It’s deadly.”

  “So the Cylons created this Prion T, and it changes Prion H, which we already have in us, into a deadly form,” Roslin said. “Is that it?”

  Gaius nodded. “Yes. Prion T is designed to replicate itself in the human body, and your immune system ignores it. Prion T is hardy, and easy to transmit. A triumph of biological engineering, really, if you don’t mind that it kills you.”

  “What are the symptoms, exactly?” Roslin asked.

  “They vary in degree and intensity,” Gaius said. “Early on, the prions are only interfering with the brain and not destroying it. Symptoms include light palsy that eventually becomes full-fledged tonic-clonic seizures. Some people show strange slips of the tongue. Their brain-to-mouth filter malfunctions, and they start saying whatever occurs to them, rather like a bad stream-of-consciousness novel. Others sprinkle nonsense words into otherwise normal sentences. And still others will do both. These speech symptoms eventually worsen into an inability to say anything that makes sense—once the language centers start breaking down, the only thing the patient can produce is mindless babble. For some people, the progression is slow. For others, it’s quick. Eventually, the patient lapses into a coma and dies.” He cleared his throat. “We know this because the first patient we diagnosed—Mr. Hyksos—died a few minutes ago.”

  The room fell silent. No one present had known Hyksos personally, but so few humans were left that even the death of a stranger was reason for a twinge of fear. Gaius more than anyone knew the difficulties and dangers of a small gene pool, and he didn’t like the way the odds were shrinking every day.

  “So what’s the good news?” Lee Adama asked at last.

  “I’m afraid there isn’t any right now,” Gaius told him. “Unless you count the fact that we have Peter Attis so we can study him.”

  “Where is Attis now?” Adama asked.

  “In sickbay,” Kara said. Her voice was quiet, completely unlike her usual brassy self.

  Laura Roslin raised a finger in a tired gesture. Even in the semi-darkness of the room, Gaius could see that her face was pale. “Is there a cure or treatment for—what is the condition called, anyway?”

  “I gave you the proper name,” Gaius said. Didn’t these people pay attention? “It’s a transmissible spongiform encephal—”

  “Everyone else calls it the plague of tongues,” Cottle interrupted with a wave of his cigarette.

  “Oh, frak me,” Kara muttered.

  “Seizures and babbling,” Tigh observed sourly. “Shit.”

  “It’s taken on a reli
gious connotation?” Roslin asked.

  “Sounds that way,” Commander Adama said. “This could cause a problem.”

  “Aproblem?” Tigh said. “It’s a frakking disaster.”

  “I never thought I’d say this,” Kara said, “but I agree with Colonel Tigh.”

  A startled look crossed Tigh’s face, but he hid it quickly. “It’s because I’m right.”

  Kara looked ready to snap at him, then seemed to change her mind. “Look, I’ve seen some of these people. They think that Peter’s a savior. Hell, he thinks he’s a savior.” And she gave a short description of the events at the restaurant. “When the marines broke in and hauled Peter away, his… his followers reacted as if the marines had shot him.” She gave Saul Tigh a hard look. “With all due respect, Colonel, it might have been better if you—if the marines—had been more subtle.”

  “We had to get him fast, Lieutenant,” Tigh replied. “No time to pussyfoot around just because he’s a prettyboy who can wiggle around on a stage. He’s a danger to the Fleet.”

  “Not his fault,” Kara said with cold calm. “He didn’t ask to be infected.”

  “How do you know?” Gaius interjected. “The Cylons might have agreed to send him back to his own kind provided he carried this prion.”

  “So he would be the only living human on the entire Fleet?” Kara scoffed. “Not likely.”

  “He may not have known the prion was deadly,” Gaius pointed out. “He might have—”

  Roslin held up a hand. “This is immaterial, and it doesn’t answer my initial question. Is there a cure?”

  Everyone turned to look at Gaius, who hesitated a tiny moment. “No,” he said.

  The word landed on the table like a lead paperweight. A long silence followed. No one seemed willing to speak, as if more words might make the situation worse. Gaius waited.

  “So we’re all dead?” Lee Adama said at last.

  “Not necessarily,” he said, relishing the relief, however small, that came over their faces. It swelled him, made him feel important the way they turned to him for answers. “No one’s ever cured a spongiform encephalopathy, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Peter has clearly been carrying both the T and the H prions for quite some time, but he shows no symptoms. He claims to have had the disease and recovered from it, despite the fact that no human being has ever successfully fought off a spongiform encephalopathy. Peter did say that all the other humans who had been captured with him had died somehow. Perhaps they were test cases. In any case, Dr. Cottle and I are operating on the assumption that the Cylons infected Peter, then somehow cured him and made him immune.”