04 - Unity

by Steven Harper - (ebook by Undead)

  He reached for the phone. “I’ll tell the Commander about this. We can Jump to a new location.”

  “And how will you explain the source of this information, Gaius?” Six purred. “A hotline to the Cylons?”

  That stopped him. He paused, confused.

  “Besides, Gaius,” she continued, “if you check with the Commander, you’ll find that more and more of the crew are speaking in tongues. You’re short-staffed. Performing a Jump now would be difficult at best. Some ships have no one well enough to calculate a Jump. Another person’s hand might shake at the wrong time and…” She made a puffing noise and flicked her fingers to indicate an explosion. Gaius felt his stomach knot like tense tree roots.

  “So what do you want me to do about it?” he said at last.

  “Stop ignoring what’s important, Gaius.”

  “And what might that be?” he said, giving the video screen a curt gesture. “This prion is all that’s standing between us and extinction, and I’m trying to give it my full attention. Hell, I don’t even know if this cure will work. The prion is more complicated than I thought.”

  Sudden anger twisted Six’s mouth into a red sneer. “You think that’s what this is about? You think this is about your microscopic problems?”

  “Then what is it about?” Gaius raged, thankful he was alone in the lab with the door locked. “Tell me! You’ve been lording it over me for days now. Just spit it out.”

  Six grabbed his tie and pulled his face close to hers. He smelled warm, minty breath. “You’re ignoring the One,” she hissed. “And he’s pissed off.”

  Gaius’ mind seized up. For a long moment he couldn’t do anything at all except stare into Number Six’s face. Was this one of her tests of faith? Six liked to spring these little surprises on him, forcing him to admit to a spirituality that made him feel uncomfortable. She had once threatened to allow the President to learn of his connection to the Cylon attack if he didn’t admit to a belief in her version of god, and he had admitted to it. More than once since then, in fact.

  At last, his mouth started to work again. “Are you testing my faith again?”

  “I’m not. God is. Or the One.”

  “The One? The One has taken notice of me?”

  “Oh, Gaius. Think, for once. You’ve seen what a terrible thing it is to be ignored. The One doesn’t like it any more than you do.”

  “You engineered everything that’s been going on so I could see what it was like to be ignored?” he said in disbelief.

  “Peter brought you a message of faith, and you’ve been ignoring it all this time—and ignoring the One. Now you have the chance to ensure that everyone in the Fleet listens to his message.”

  “What message?”

  “That Gaius Baltar cannot be ignored.”

  Gaius felt his ego rise to the bait and he struggled to keep it in check. “I didn’t catch that part in Peter’s song lyrics.”

  “Because no one else is listening, either. But now you have the chance to make them listen.”

  “By curing the plague?”

  “Oh, Gaius. You think too simplistically I’m telling you not to cure it.”

  “That’s insane! If I don’t cure it, everyone will die except me and Peter Attis. Wouldn’t we make a fine couple, floating alone through space? Or perhaps you’d care to join us in a ménage a trois.”

  “Perhaps you should take some time out and pray instead,” Six said.

  “I’ll pray while I work, thanks. Even though it slows me down.”

  “And what will you pray for?”

  “That I find the frakking cure before your people show up to attack,” he growled. “It’s harder than I thought, and frankly, I’m not sure I can do it in time for it to do any good. Now if you aren’t going to help, kindly disappear.”

  “I’m helping more than you know, Gaius. But right now, I need to tell you a little secret.”

  “Oh goody. And what might that be?”

  Six leaned into his ear and lowered her voice to a whisper. “There is no attack.”

  He stiffened in shock and outrage. “What? Then why did you tell me—?”

  “It was a test of faith, Gaius,” she said patiently. “You should have seen that. God wants you alive. Why would he allow anyone to destroy the Fleet unless you were saved first?”

  “That’s outrageous!” Gaius sputtered. “You think you can just toy with me whenever you—”

  “If you like,” she interrupted, “think of it as God answering your prayer. Or half of it, anyway. Now”—she spun him around and pushed his face back into the microscope—“get to work. And pray as you go.”

  Commander William Adama looked down at his left hand. It lay palm down on the light table, fingers splayed. Motionless. He stared at it for a long moment. Then a little tremor ran through it. Just a small one. No more than a one on the palsic scale. But it was enough.

  “I saw that,” Saul Tigh murmured.

  Adama carefully and deliberately put his hand behind his back. “Keep it to yourself.”

  “Keep what?”

  Adama gave him a tight smile and Tigh moved on. Then Adama decided to do a quick circuit of CIC. Many of his people were tired, he knew. So many crewmen and officers had come down with the plague of tongues that the unaffected people had to pull double shifts. Dualla had bags under bloodshot eyes, and when Adama wandered by her station, she hid her right hand, but not before he caught the tremor. Dammit! He should send her off duty.

  On the other hand, so to speak, he should also remove himself from command. He gave Dualla a nod and continued on his way as if he had seen nothing. As long as she was able to function, he would let her remain at her station. There wasn’t anyone to take her place. He thought about calling down to Baltar’s lab for an update, then decided against it. Baltar would find a cure or he wouldn’t, and interrupting him for a status update wouldn’t do anything except delay the man.

  Baltar. Adama passed by Gaeta’s station with a nod and a hidden grimace. He hated the thought that everyone’s health might well rest in the hands of a crackpot who kept up conversations with himself. Adama knew very well that about half the population talked to itself. Adama was in the half that didn’t, but he had caught Lee at it numerous times over the years and knew what it sounded like. Baltar, however, didn’t simply vocalize internal conversations—he held raging debates that involved full-blown body language. It was as if he were caught up in a child’s game of cops and robbers, getting pushed around by imaginary enemies. Baltar probably thought he was hiding it, but Adama had seen him. So had many others. But with quarters so tight and cramped in the Fleet, a new sort of privacy law had evolved. If it didn’t involve you directly, you pretended not to notice it. Adama suspected that if they stayed out here long enough, people would go from pretending not to notice to actually not noticing, the way people did in societies that had little or no physical privacy. According to anthropological texts Adama had read, the tribes of the Numinol Islands on Caprica had once lived in large caves with nothing but lines of pebbles to indicate where one family’s living space ended and another’s began, and the inhabitants of such caves lived, ate, fought, and frakked with each other in full view of their fellow tribesmen, but only those within the stone boundaries saw or heard a thing. Adama wondered how long it would take before the current tiny handful of human survivors got to that point.

  Adama didn’t like Baltar’s obvious instability and would normally have tossed the man from any discussion group or advisory board, but he couldn’t deny that Baltar’s knowledge and contributions could be—had been—helpful, even necessary. So Adama went for a middle ground. He ignored Baltar when he could and used him when he had to.

  Adama realized he was standing at his light table in the middle of CIC again. He looked up at a monitor that showed a computer image of all the ships in the Fleet. The symbol for the Monarch was outlined in red. Lee and his force of marines were burning through the hull even as Adama waited. They were
keeping radio silence, which aided secrecy but kept Adama in the dark about the team’s progress. He looked down at his slightly shaky hand again and for a moment he was seized with an overwhelming urge to whine. He wanted to whine that the prion infection was unfair, that his only surviving son’s life was in danger again, that the only person who could assemble a cure for this disease was a frakking lunatic, that the only other source of a cure was about to be attacked by a military force, that everyone expected him to have answers and solutions to everything when he didn’t. For an unsettling moment, he imagined himself with his head in Laura Roslin’s lap while she stroked his hair and told him, in his first wife’s voice, that everything would be all right. He banished the image.

  “Dee,” he said, “any way to get an update on Captain Adama’s team?”

  She shook her head. “Negative, sir. They’re still keeping strict radio silence.”

  “All right,” he sighed, “maybe we can—”

  Galen Tyrol stumbled into CIC. His gait was uncertain and his eyes were wild. His hands were shaking like butterflies in a windstorm. Everyone, including Adama, turned to stare at him. He tripped and almost fell against Tigh and Adama, who helped him back to his feet. Adama tensed. Tyrol only rarely came to CIC, and never for anything less than a full-blown emergency.

  “Commander,” Tyrol said in a hoarse voice. “Commander, I found a lost ocean breeze in the tropics for—”

  Tigh slapped his face hard. Tyrol stopped babbling and stared at the colonel with startled brown eyes.

  “Calm yourself, Chief,” Tigh snapped. “Concentrate. What’s so damned important?”

  Tyrol’s expression shifted from dislike to a look of concentration. “I f-found… found a peanut in the… no. I found… in the pod of peas…dammit!”

  “Can you write it down?” Adama asked in a moment of inspiration.

  Tyrol wordlessly held up trembling hands and shook his head. “I was looking in the pod people of Caprican gardens who—frak! It’s important to tell the audience that we can’t fin mey beldin trassinell—”

  Tigh slapped him again. Tyrol slammed a fist into Tigh’s gut, then backed away with a look of horror on his face. Tigh bent over the light table, then dropped into a chair, gasping.

  “I’m s-sorry,” Tyrol stammered. “I’m s-so frakked in the bedroom with Dina melsh zaraform.” He shook his head.

  “It’s… it’s a-about the Cy—the Cylon. There’s someone else cooking my mother’s yudin asp terring…”

  He crashed to the floor, twisting and babbling. Gaeta rushed over and tried to help Tyrol to his feet, but the convulsions were too much for him. He lowered Tyrol back to the floor and picked up a phone to summon a medical team—if one was to be had. Colonel Tigh sat in his chair, still panting for breath.

  “What… the hell… was he saying?” Tigh gasped.

  “I wish I knew,” Adama replied, and steadfastly turned back to his light table.

  “Passive!” Peter boomed. “Your resistance must be passive! Go limp. Block the way. Get underfoot. It will take two of them to drag one of you aside. But don’t make any aggressive moves. Don’t make a fist or reach for a weapon or even put your hand in your pocket. Don’t speak, either. Sing, if you want. Let your faith give you strength. The One will protect us because our faith is true!”

  Peter raised a fist, and the people cheered.

  “Our love for the One is strong!”

  Another cheer.

  “We are the Chosen few!”

  A third cheer. Peter started to sing his revolution song again. Kara had heard it so many times she was sick of it, but the crowd of thirty-odd swayed in time with the music and sang along. About a third of them wore red masks. How many people were on this frakking ship, anyway? This was the third group of Unity followers Peter was sending out to fight—or resist—the marines. Kara had overheard one of the Unity women mention that this was the Monarch, so she knew where she was, though she hadn’t been able to escape. She couldn’t imagine that the Old Man hadn’t quarantined the ship before sending over the marines, and there was no way all these people were part of the Monarch crew. So where were they coming from?

  The answer, when it came, was obvious. The plague of tongues was no doubt grounding military personnel left and right. Kara suspected few pilots remained steady enough to climb into a cockpit, let alone pilot a Viper on patrol.

  Kara scanned the group as they boiled out of the room, and her stomach knotted. Some of these people had brought children with them. The kids sang with their parents. Kara watched, her shaking hands still bound behind her. As the song progressed, a sense of determination filled the room. Kara knew the feeling—it filled her every time she went out to fight Cylon raiders. And she was forced to admit that Peter was doing a good job stirring them up.

  “How’s it going?” Sharon asked in a patently false chipper tone.

  Kara refused to answer. Pent-up words boiled around inside her, pressing against her pursed lips like a riot pressed against a police barricade. Once the torrent started, she didn’t think it would ever stop. And Peter—the frakking idiot. He seemed to have forgotten all about her. Gods, what had she ever seen in him? The thought of listening to another Peter Attis song made her stomach ooze with nausea.

  “Yeah,” Sharon said, as if Kara had answered. “Getting hard to hold it in, isn’t it?”

  Kara couldn’t stand it anymore. “Why… are… you keeping the barn door open for… keeping me here?” she said with aching slowness and deliberation.

  “Because Peter loves you, stupid,” Sharon said. She was sitting beside Kara, her knees up, wrists resting on them. Between her feet sat the duffel bag and its explosive contents. “Or lusts you, anyway.”

  “No way for bright red robins to—” Kara bit back the words, took a breath, and tried again. “No. You… know I won’t… give up the fight for freedom that we’ve—no! I won’t give you… the access codes. You can… torture me, but I’ll… I’ll be…”

  “Dead before I can torture you enough to get them out of you?” Sharon finished. Then she laughed. “Don’t be stupid, Kara. Peter wouldn’t let me torture you. Not that he could stop me. It’s just I know an easier way to get the codes.”

  Kara didn’t answer. She had a terrible feeling she knew.

  Sharon put an arm around Kara’s shoulders, drew her close, and gave her a sisterly kiss on the temple. Kara cringed at her touch. Her whole skin tried to crawl away from it. Sharon brought her lips so close to Kara’s ear that she could feel Sharon’s warm breath.

  “What’s the access code for missile ordnance?” she asked.

  The answer popped into Kara’s mind and rushed toward her mouth. She clenched her jaw, but she found the treacherous words spilling out. “Five six eight—no!” Kara clamped her lips shut.

  “Five six eight,” Sharon prompted.

  “Eight chi frak you in the—”

  “Now, now,” Sharon interrupted. “Try again.”

  “Eight chi…”

  Sweat broke out on Kara’s face and she bit her tongue until it bled, but the words still came. “Omega two four six eight ten twelve fourteen—”

  “Nice try,” Sharon said. “But ordnance has only six code words. The four-six-eight thing was a silly try at fooling me.”

  Kara slumped back against the cold wall. Her legs were shaking now and exhaustion pulled her muscles into limp rubber bands. To her horror, she felt tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. Dammit, she wasn’t going to cry. Not in front of a frakking Cylon.

  “Are those cuffs painful?” Sharon asked like a nurse in a doctor’s office. “Make you weepy? Let’s see what we can do.”

  Kara braced herself, expecting a devastating blow to go with the sarcasm. Instead, Sharon reached behind Kara and, with a flick of her fingers, released Kara’s hands. Instant anger seized her. She whipped her fists around and smashed them both into Sharon’s smiling face.

  Or tried to. Her hands and arms wouldn’t obey. S
he managed to get her hands around in front of her, but they only lay in her lap, twisting and flopping like half-dead fish. Her legs joined in the terrible dance. Kara stared down at them in disbelief. She could almost hear her father’s voice echo inside her head.

  Little slut! That’s what you get for frakking around.

  “See?” Sharon said. She rose to her feet, the better to loom over Kara. “You’re perfectly safe to keep around now. No chance for betrayal. Even if you tell anyone my secret, they’ll put it down to babbling.”

  Meanwhile, Peter’s followers finished the revolution song. “Go!” Peter said. “Show them your faith!”

  The crowd marched out of the room, many of them still humming. Several people dragged the forms of those who had fallen victim to the plague of tongues. Some were comatose, others squirmed and shook, but all of them would serve to bolster the human barricade. The other people chatted and laughed, as if they were on their way to a picnic. Then the crowd abruptly spread apart, creating a hole around a young woman who was writhing and babbling on the floor. With a cheer that set Kara’s teeth on edge, they helped her up and streamed for the door again, taking her with them. Kara was left alone with Peter, Sharon, and Tom Zarek.

  “Idiots,” Sharon murmured. “They mistake conviction for faith.” She took a step away from the duffel, then another. Kara’s eyes were drawn to it. Marines might be burning their way into the ship, but the Monarch was a big place, and there was no easy way for them to find her unless she could shout for help. And the ordnance might just be the key.

  Sometimes missiles overshot their targets, either because the target dodged or the missile’s guidance system failed. In either case, there was a small chance that it might hit something else, which meant unexploded ordnance had to be recovered. Or it did in the days before the Cylon attack. Nobody much cared now. Despite this, missile ordnance still carried a homing signal that allowed it to be tracked. It was activated automatically after the missile launched, but there was a manual switch as well. Now that Sharon had untied her, Kara might be able to activate the thing.