04 - Unity

by Steven Harper - (ebook by Undead)

  An urge to punch the jerk in the face made Tyrol’s hands into shaky fists. Blasphemous nonsense—and hurtful. Cally wasn’t in a divine state. She was sick, and this frakking bastard had the nerve to tell Tyrol he should be happy about it. But he kept his hands to himself and pointedly turned his attention back to Cally. The look she gave him was uncomprehending. She didn’t even know he was there. Tyrol pushed down more panic. He liked Cally—as a friend. As someone who worked under his command. Nothing more than that. But the intensity of the distress he felt at her pain startled him. He was the guy everyone came to when something needed fixing. Vipers, Raptors, conveyer belts. Hell, once he’d even fixed a sewing machine. This, however, he couldn’t fix.

  Abruptly, he got up and strode away. The only solution was to keep busy. Or try to. There wasn’t much to do, wasn’t much he could do with his hands the way they were. Only five pilots hadn’t been grounded, but it was only a matter of time. Emergency flights were the only ones running. It meant that the repair crews didn’t have much to do, but that didn’t matter—with no ships out, Tyrol didn’t have much to repair. If the Cylons found and attacked them now, they’d be dead.

  Of course, even if the Cylons didn’t find them, they were dead. No matter what, the Cylons won. Frak.

  The escape pod caught his eye, and his feet took him toward it. His footsteps echoed, mingling with the babbling behind him. A little itch at the back of his mind nagged at him every time he looked at it, but he hadn’t had the time to examine it much. Until now. Figuring out what was bugging him about it might take his mind off his own impending death—and Cally’s.

  First he made a circuit of the outside, walking around it and examining every centimeter. It was the standard gray ceramic, no major cracks or visible blemishes. Some scorching from the explosion that had destroyed the basestar. A few scratches, either from the explosion or the landing.

  He cranked the door down—it took a while with his hands shaking as they were—and inspected the inside. Nothing had changed. The basic control panel was still there, the porthole was still there, the CO2 scrubber was—

  Tyrol put a quivering hand on his chin, then pulled a measuring tape from his tool belt. He tried to extend it, but his hands shook too much. Frustrated, he flung it against the bulkhead. It hit with a loud clang. His body was breaking down, becoming undependable. Then he set his jaw. He hadn’t lost everything yet. He put his arms out like a tightrope walker and paced from one end of the pod to the other, going heel to toe. His body made an adequate measuring tool, and no disease could change that. Tyrol counted fifteen of his own feet. After that, he went outside, started at one corner, and measured off the outside.

  Eighteen feet.

  Ah ha! Excited, Tyrol went back inside. Even assuming the thickness of the bulkheads added up to one of his feet, that left two of his feet unaccounted for. He retrieved his measuring tape and used it to tap on the bulkheads, something even his shaky hands could handle. The bulkhead opposite the door, the one with the scrubber hanging on it, had a hollow ring. Carefully Tyrol examined the scrubber. On the underside, his palsied hands found a switch. He flipped it.

  Near the floor, a rectangular section of the rear wall a meter high and two meters long moved inward slightly. Cautiously, Tyrol pressed on it. It gave way, sliding inward and revealing a long, low chamber with a light set into the ceiling. A blanket and pillow lay on the floor. Tyrol’s mouth set into a pale, hard line. Someone besides Peter and the dead Cylon had stowed away on the pod.

  “I don’t know what the hell happened, Commander,” Cottle said in the conference room. “All I know is that the temperature in the incubator fell to twenty-eight degrees and all our samples of Prion C fell apart.”

  Commander Adama’s face remained as impassive as rusty iron. “So you’re telling me that we have no samples of Peter’s blood to work with.”

  “Yeah.” Cottle lit a cigarette with a practiced flick of his lighter. “Frak. I put the samples in the incubator myself, and I’m sure I set the temperature right. But I may have misread the dials. Or maybe the dial snagged on my sleeve and I didn’t notice. Hell, I don’t know.”

  Gaius studied both Cottle and Adama’s faces, but neither of them seemed to suspect the incident with the blood was anything but an accident. “It could have happened to anyone,” he said magnanimously. “However, we do have computer mock-ups of all the prions. I’m sure, given time and supplies, I could come up with—”

  “Let me get this straight,” Adama interrupted. “With the samples destroyed, the only source of the cure is Peter himself?”

  “That’s pretty much the situation,” Cottle said.

  “Though I’m quite positive I can recreate Prion C,” Gaius said. “It’ll take a little time, but—”

  “Time,” Adama interrupted, snatching up a telephone, “is in short supply. Dualla,” he said in the receiver, “get Captain Adama on the line.”

  A few moments later, Adama said, “It’s me. I need an update on the strike force and you need an update on the prion situation. In the conference room.”

  Cottle excused himself and left. Gaius knew he should follow suit and get into the lab, but he was feeling an utter lack of urgency. If Adama wasn’t all that interested in Gaius creating a cure, then Gaius could just trundle along at whatever pace he liked. He was already immune, and his fear of the disease had evaporated. Besides, he wanted to know what was going to happen between captain and commander, so he pulled out a small notebook and sketched amino acids instead. Adama seemed too preoccupied to notice. Ignoring him. Lee Adama arrived after a few minutes and took the chair Adama indicated. Gaius stopped sketching.

  “I haven’t even been able to round up a dozen people who aren’t shaking,” Lee said. “And I’m running into… other factors.”

  Adama removed his glasses and polished them with a white handkerchief. In that moment, he looked more like an exasperated grandfather than the commander of a military fleet, though he looked nothing like Gaius Baltar’s grandfather. The vain, randy old bastard wouldn’t have worn glasses in public if you’d paid him. Gaius wondered what it would have been like to have a grandfather that soaked up the sun in a rocking chair and carved charming little toys out of wood instead of jetting about the world attending conferences and seducing anything that walked on two legs. One of Gaius’ earliest memories didn’t involve walking in on his parents. It involved walking in on his grandfather and three of his bedmates.

  “What other factors, Captain?” Adama asked quietly.

  Lee grimaced. “The quarantine of the Monarch started up the food shortage again, which is making people unhappy. Everyone in the Fleet seems to be singing Peter’s revolution song now, and lots of them seem to think that you’re a… a tyrant who’s trying to step on Peter’s civil rights—and on the Unity’s. It’s making people remember the—uh, the ‘incident’ on the Gideon again.”

  Gaius added another amino acid to his sketch without comment. It was a challenge, sketching a three-dimensional molecule in two dimensions. The “incident,” as Lee put it, had happened while Commander Adama lay in a coma, recovering from the near-deadly wounds Sharon had dealt him. Saul Tigh had taken over Adama’s command, and he had sent armed marines to “liberate” food supplies from the recalcitrant ship Gideon. An unruly mob had greeted the marines, and the situation quickly devolved into a riot. One marine had panicked and opened fire. Four civilians had died. For days, the media had shown videos of a little girl crying over the bloody corpse of her father. Gaius mentally shook his head. Saul Tigh was crafty in some ways and stunningly stupid in others.

  “And I’m learning the Unity has more sympathizers than I knew,” Lee finished. “They see Peter as a savior.”

  “Savior from what?” Adama said in a dead-even voice.

  “The Cylons.” Lee cleared his throat. “The Cylons seem to have a monotheistic system of belief, and they won the war. Peter is preaching monotheism, and a chunk of the listeners are thinking that
our situation would improve if we had the same belief system. It’s just as he said on the radio, with the added ‘fact’ that his touch makes people speak in tongues, and that only makes him more believable.”

  “I don’t give a damn one way or the other about the civil rights of Attis or his followers,” Adama snapped. “He has the cure for this prion disease, and that’s why I need him in sickbay, whole and unharmed.”

  “But a growing number of people see the disease as a blessing,” Lee countered. “Cure not desired or required. They think they’ll recover and be blessed somehow.”

  “We’ll worry about the Unity’s attitude toward the plague of tongues after we extract enough blood from Peter to cure it,” Adama said. “Get back to assembling the strike force, Captain. Bring Peter Attis back to Galactica.”

  “I think I’ll need two forces, sir,” Lee said. “And I’m afraid I’m going to have to use personnel outside the marines. Too many of them are down.”

  “Whatever you think is necessary, Captain,” Adama said. Lee left, and to Gaius’ surprise, Adama turned to him.

  “You should work on creating that cure, Doctor,” he said. “In case we can’t find Peter—or in case something happens to him.”

  Ah. So he wasn’t worthy of being ignored after all. “Of course, Commander.” Gaius gathered his sketches and rose to go. It hadn’t escaped his notice that neither commander nor captain had mentioned Kara Thrace in their final exchange, but it was equally obvious to him that both had been thinking about her.

  The group of Unity people ended the final verse of Peter’s song just as three of them landed on the floor, twitching like half-dead fish. Those who remained standing cheered and clapped each other on the back. Peter stood on his packing crate, lapping up the attention like a starving cat left overnight in a milkhouse. Several Unity members helped the fallen ones to a place near a bulkhead where ten others squirmed and babbled. Kara watched with a mixture of fear and bafflement. How could these people believe this was anything except a curse? They’d have to be desperate, clutching at straws made of starlight.

  She sighed inwardly. How many times had she been just as desperate? No, it was all too understandable.

  Her hands, still tied behind her, were shaking even worse now, and she caught one of her legs beginning to tremble. Fear made her mouth dry. The disease was taking the slower course with her, but it still was progressing. How much time left?

  “Left and right of way for fifteen dozen eggs came first—”

  Who the frak was talking? No new people were twisting on the floor. It took a moment to realize that the nonsense words were pouring from her own mouth.

  “—second in line for muffins and butter with apple pie in the kitchen—” Kara clamped her mouth shut and managed to stop the flow of words. Her heart pounded faster under a fresh spurt of adrenaline. It was happening. It was happening to her.

  Not yet, she prayed. Just let me hold out a little longer.

  Peter was talking to individual members of the Unity crowd now. This was the fourth set that had come in. Tom Zarek, the bastard, remained standing near the walk-in, smug in the knowledge that he had fomented this chaos.

  Where the frak was the cavalry? The military knew Kara was missing. Lee had been standing right there when the Unity had kidnapped her. So why hadn’t they tracked her down? Kara “Starbuck” Thrace set her jaw. She was tired, so frakking tired of having to rescue herself—and everyone else—from everything. It would be nice if once, just once, someone would ride to her rescue. Lee, for example. The stupid frak-head was ignoring her, leaving her to face the wolves alone.

  Kara pursed her lips and shook her head. Time to get a grip. No one had forgotten her. Least of all Lee Adama and his father the commander. When her Viper had come up missing, Commander Adama had put the entire Fleet in danger by refusing Jump to a safer location until Kara was found. Lee—or someone—would come. In the meantime, it would be better if she were in a position to help whoever showed up. Once again she pulled and twisted at the bonds that held her hands captive. Hot pain made raw ropes around her wrists, and her hands were shaking so much that she couldn’t tell if her bonds were getting looser or not.

  “Not on a good day for fishing in the watering hole back on—” Kara shut her mouth hard and stopped the flow. How much longer before it became uncontrollable?

  Sharon, still clad in her jumpsuit, abruptly knelt down in front of Kara, blocking her view of the goings-on. “I heard that,” she said. “Sounds like your mouth has a case of the runs.”

  “Frak you very much to my own—” Kara clapped her teeth so hard together she was sure she had cracked one.

  “Yeah.” Sharon reached over and pulled the duffel bag closer to her. The missile ordnance peeped out from the interior in a deadly game of peekaboo. “Now that you’ve joined the Chosen and are babbling like a lunatic, I think it’s safe to let you in on a secret.”

  “Secret lies within the fallen angels of—”

  Sharon pressed a cold finger to Kara’s lips. “Shush. Here’s the deal.” She leaned closer and whispered, “I lied. I don’t have the ordnance access code.”

  Tom Zarek fished a wireless communicator out of his pocket. He listened, then dashed over to Peter and said something to him. Peter stiffened, then disentangled himself from his Unity groupies and got back up on the crate.

  “My friends,” he said, “I have disturbing news.”

  The crowd fell silent except for the quiet babbling of those caught in the throes of the plague of tongues. Words bubbled up inside Kara, and she bit her lip to stop herself from joining the babblers.

  “I’ve received word,” Peter said, “that a group of marines is burning its way through the hull of this ship.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  Gaius Baltar worked quickly in his lab, his movements swift and firm. No sign of the shakes, no desire to spout nonsense. Just him and a pile of amino acids. It was only a matter of putting them in the right sequence, snapping them together like pieces in a very tiny puzzle. It should have been a fine thing to be in control again, should have felt like he was master of his own world. Instead, he was beginning to fear he had bitten off more than he could chew. The prion was far more complicated than he had originally thought. Oh, he could put one together, that was certain. But a mounting alarm was saying it would take days instead of hours, and he was filled with a growing certainty that he would perfect the curative prion only after everyone else was dead.

  A computer monitor showed a growing Prion C blown up to the size of a multi-colored octopus. Gaius manipulated sensitive controls, and a microprobe nudged an amino acid closer to the proper position. It touched the prion and attached itself. It seemed to Gaius that he heard a click, though the idea was preposterous. He allowed himself a small sigh of relief, then checked his prion against the computer mockup of Prion C and nodded. Perfect so far. He wiped some sweat off his forehead, then dipped the microprobe into a different amino-acid bath, brought out a few samples of the next sequence he needed, and transferred them into the medium that contained his slowly evolving prion.

  “Better hurry, Gaius,” Number Six said behind him.

  Startled, Gaius jerked his hands. The probe skittered sideways and sheared off several amino acids from his prion. They floated off into the liquid medium like fish frightened by a shark. A slow smile slid across Six’s face.

  “Dammit, that’s not funny,” Gaius snapped without looking around. “Look what you made me do. That’s two hours’ work right there.”

  A hard pair of hands grabbed him from behind and spun him around. “Don’t ignore me, Gaius. You know what a terrible thing that can be.”

  And Gaius lost it. Six had been yammering at him non-stop about being ignored, interrupting him, embarrassing him, slowing or stopping his work. Days of constrained frustration exploded like a cracked pressure cooker.

  “Shut up!” he snarled. “Just shut the frak up! I’ve had it with your petty complai
nts, your sly comments. If you aren’t going to say anything useful, get the hell out of my lab.”

  Six didn’t seem the least bit fazed by this outburst. Her impossibly beautiful face remained impassive, her platinum-blond hair hung in perfect tendrils, her scarlet dress flowed around the perfect lines of her body. At times like this, she looked like a robot, or maybe a mannequin. But even here, with him angry and her robotic, he found himself attracted to her. A part of him wanted to fling her to the lab floor and tear the clingy dress away. Sometimes he hated that part of himself. Now, for example.

  “I’m not being helpful when I tell you that you’re being tracked?” she said. “That within four hours, a Cylon basestar will jump into this sector and wipe all of you out?”

  The anger drained from Gaius like blood from a felled ox. “What are you talking about?”

  “Someone on board the Fleet is transmitting a signal, Gaius. Once your position is pinpointed, you’ll be so very vulnerable. Think of it—an entire Fleet of humans too paralyzed by prions to fight back. The slaughter will have its own scarlet beauty, wouldn’t you say? We’ll wash away your sins in your own blood.”

  Gaius stared at her, a cold chill washing over him. He had no idea where Six got her information, but it was always accurate. Back when he thought he had a chip embedded in his head, he had assumed the Cylons were transmitting Six’s image straight into his brain, making him think he saw and heard and touched a woman. Since then, he’d learned he had no chip in his head and he had assumed that Six was some strange facet of his own subconscious, a weird waking dream brought on by the trauma of the first Cylon attack on Caprica. It made perverted sense—his conscious mind was so much stronger than a normal person’s, so it followed that his subconscious would be equally powerful. That didn’t explain the source of Six’s information, however. It was possible his own subconscious was figuring out things his conscious mind couldn’t and was using Six as a messenger to feed him information that would keep him alive and well. In the end, he supposed, it didn’t matter. Six often gave him information he could use. What difference would knowing the source make?