Boxey, surprised at the attention from this stranger, started to hide behind Apollo’s legs.
“Well, Dr. Wilker, I haven’t had time to fully discuss the project with him. It’s our hope he’ll accept.”
Boxey pulled on Apollo’s leg. Apollo looked down at the befuddled young boy.
“I want to go back,” Boxey whispered.
“Boxey, this is a military order. We have at least to hear the doctor out. Tell us more about the project, doctor.”
Dr. Wilker assumed a professorial manner and addressed most of his next speech to Boxey.
“Well, you see, we’ll soon be landing on various alien planets, no telling what we’ll find there. It’s important that we be safe. Ordinarily, we’d have trained daggits to stand watch at night when our people are asleep in their encampments, but we don’t have any daggits. So, we’ve had to see what we could come up with. We’ll call the first one, Muffit Two.”
Boxey looked sideways at Apollo.
“What’d he say?”
Apollo shrugged.
“I didn’t really get it all, Dr. Wilker. Maybe you’d better show us.”
“Right. Oh, Lanzer.”
The call to his assistant was as exaggerated a cue as any found in ancient melodrama. Lanzer, a young, bespectacled man, held what appeared to be a small bundle of fur in his arms. Apollo knew the short-haired fur was fake, implanted on the droid body, but he would have taken the construct for a real daggit if he hadn’t known better. Lanzer put the daggit-droid down on the floor, and it immediately began to bark in a high-pitched, compellingly friendly tone. Moving to Boxey, it stuck out its tongue and began to pant. The wagging of its tail was natural and convincing, unless you looked up close and could see that the tail protruded through a square hole at the back of the droid.
“Naturally,” Dr. Wilker said, “the first one will have to be looked after very carefully.”
Boxey, incredulous, backed a couple of steps away from the eager daggit droid.
“That’s not Muffit,” Boxey said. “It’s not even a real daggit.”
“No,” said Wilker softly, “but it can learn to be like a real one. It’s very smart. If you’d help us, he’ll even be smarter.”
Boxey couldn’t take his eyes off the daggit. The panting replica of an animal seemed to have a similar fascination for the boy. With the first hint of a smile in several days, Boxey took several careful steps backward from the daggit, who stopped panting and looked up quizzically. The boy started to turn and the daggit ran toward him. Looking back over his shoulder, Boxey started to cross the room. The droid, appearing quite content, stayed at the boy’s heels.
“We used the image of Boxey you gave us to train the droid to respond to him,” Wilker whispered to Apollo and Serina.
Boxey stopped walking and turned to look down at the daggit. Slowly he opened his arms. The droid moved forward, sat up on its hind legs and put its paws on the boy’s chest. The trying-out period was over. Boxey hugged the daggit and smiled back at the three watching adults.
Apollo smiled toward Wilker, and said, “That’s one I owe you, Doc.”
“Any time,” Wilker said.
As they followed Boxey and his new pet into the corridor, Serina whispered to Apollo:
“That’s one I owe you, Apollo.”
“Any time.”
“You look quite smug, you know that?”
“If you say so.”
“But I’ll kiss you anyway.”
FROM THE ADAMA JOURNALS:
One day, when there was a lull in the war and we were off doing convoy duty for some ships carrying supplies to a fueling station under construction, I noticed Starbuck running down a corridor, muttering to himself and making furious entries in a little notebook. Now, when it came to military matters, Starbuck was the proverbial innocent ensign—if you could take a peep at them, you’d’ve expected his diapers to be as green as he was. But, when it came to money matters, especially when the money could be wagered, Starbuck had been born adult. In his first week on the Galactica he had maneuvered so many people into so many corners that everybody was walking around round-shouldered. By this particular time I thought I was on to the shrewd young man, so I decided to see what he was up to. I figured if I could catch him in the act of some illegal enterprise, I could apply a little discipline and get him to confine his sinning to the proper designated areas.
He moved fast and I had a hard time tailing him, since it’s hard to be a very good shadow when you’re the ship’s commander, but I could soon see he was making for the medical section. Sure enough, when I caught up with him, he was in an empty ward. A bunch of the medics were gathered around him, hollering dates at him, and passing him little slips of paper along with what appeared to be a good amount of money. Starbuck was very busy, somehow managing to write things in the notebook and take the money and the slips.
“What’s going on here, ensign?” I hollered in my best authoritarian voice. “Some off-hours gambling?”
Starbuck began to look very sheepish, very much the green ensign.
“I’m sorry, skipper,” he said in a soft voice. The diabolical louse knew I hated to be called skipper, but I ignored that.
“And what’s the subject of your little swindle this time, Starbuck?”
All the medics began to look apprehensive and I thought Ensign Starbuck might sink through the metal floor.
“Well, sir, we’re betting on—uh, we’re betting on—”
“Out with it, ensign. I want to know what this is all about before I confiscate everything for the ship’s pension fund.”
“Sir, we’re getting together this little bet on, well, on the day you’ll die, sir.”
I have to admit I was taken aback by that reply, and couldn’t speak for a moment.
“You’re—you’re all betting on—on the date of my death?” He nodded. I sputtered a bit more on the subject, then demanded that Starbuck turn over the betting money to me. It began to dawn on me that the money in his hand was fake, the kind of lead cubit used by non-bettors in card games.
“Just as well I got caught,” Starbuck said to the medics. “Skip’s right; it’s a swindle. The fix was in.”
I felt a little unsettled in my stomach.
“Fix?” I said, choking a bit on the word.
“Yes,” Starbuck smiled. “I was gonna win. No doubt.”
“You were going to win? You know the date of my death?”
“Yep.”
As he stood before me and smiled smugly, I felt like strangling him.
“All right, Starbuck. Tell me your winning bet. I’m especially interested in the part about the fix. When am I going to die?”
Smiling, he handed me a betting slip that he’d been holding.
“My prediction,” he announced.
I opened it up. It said, “Never.” Then Starbuck started laughing and handed me a neat pile of fake cubits.
“Never,” he said.
I’d been suckered. Standing in the middle of an enormous empty sickbay ward, I was backed into a corner. I joined in the laughter and ignored the insubordinate character of the whole episode. Starbuck showed me all the slips. They all said, never. I never tried to catch Starbuck out again.
CHAPTER SIX
Starbuck stole a cigar from Boomer and slipped away from the work party to his special hideaway—by his ship in the Galactica’s launching bay. Fitting himself into a dark wall niche, he lit the cigar and leaned his head back against the metal wall. Almost immediately he felt himself dozing off and a cautious part of his mind wondered if he should do something about the cigar. Then he couldn’t think straight. What cigar? he almost said aloud. Visions of a starving mob coming in and out of light initiated a dream that never developed into a full-fledged nightmare because the sound of Cassiopeia’s voice startled him awake.
“Starbuck,” she said, “what’re you doing, crouched in that hole?”
He realized that the cigar was about to fall
out of his hand, and he tightened his grip on it. Moving out of the niche, he put the cigar to his mouth and took a long puff. The smoke that lingered in his nostrils had a faintly narcotic feeling to it, the result no doubt of one of Boomer’s extra special blends. Cassiopeia had bathed and put on fresh clothes—a one-piece clinging outfit that threatened to become transparent in the right light—since Starbuck had left her at the nurses’ quarters. By all conventional measurements of beauty, she was quite stunning now, but Starbuck briefly wondered if he did not prefer the look of her in her previous smudged and disheveled state. There’d been a vulnerability about her then, a need to be helped that he had enjoyed responding to. Now she stood before him, tall and attractive and strong. Another strong woman, like Athena. He always found himself attracted to strong women, but there were times—moments of false nostalgia—when he almost wished for one of the weak, submissive maidens of intergalactic legend. A foolish thought, maybe—he knew he would be bored by such a maiden in less than a day, and the only real benefit obtained for someone like Starbuck would be a much needed rest.
“How’d you find me?” he asked.
“Followed you partway. Lost you here, then I saw the light of that sweet-smelling cigar. Can I have a puff?”
“Sure.”
She took a heavy drag on the slim cigar and appeared to savor its taste.
“Ooooh, thank you! That joystick’s been efficiently doctored.”
“My friend’s an expert at the chemical alteration of cell composition.”
“My compliments to the botanist, then.”
She took a couple of steps backward and looked up at Starbuck’s ship. Jenny and the rest of Starbuck’s flight crew had done an excellent job of repair work on it, replacing the parts that had been destroyed by his crash landing and generally tuning up all its systems. As always, they had superbly polished its surface and the pinpoints of light that seemed to spring out from its high gloss gave the impression that the viper ship was performing its own strange abstract little dance. Cassiopeia stared at it a long time before speaking again.
“It’s somehow beautiful, suspended up there like it’s in permanent flight. A perfect machine, born to dance with joy, curve in and out of constellations….”
“Nice way of putting it,” Starbuck said, biting down on the cigar.
Cassiopeia’s eyebrows raised.
“But you don’t buy it?”
“Too poetic, leaves out the way the metal stinks when there’s a fuel foulup, the pain all over your skin when something shorts and starts sending sparks up your sleeves. Still, I get your drift, lady. I’d rather be in the cockpit of that junkheap and flying some boring duty than any other job I can think of.”
A headache was developing in what felt like spreading lines behind Starbuck’s right eye. He squinted his eye and rubbed at his right temple.
“You look overworked,” Cassiopeia said, sympathetically.
“Me overworked? Nah. I overwork myself just to get away from overwork. Still, it’s been something of a strain these last few days, the work and the starving people and….”
“And Captain Apollo? I noticed he’s been pushing you guys like a martinet. I almost expected some kind of mutiny.”
Starbuck laughed.
“Mutiny? I doubt that. Not against the captain anyway. Too much trouble around anyway without playing revolution. No, I feel for Apollo. He’s going through hell.”
“Well, you’re all suffering, I don’t see why he should be singled out for—”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Didn’t mean just the ordinary misery that’s facing everybody. Apollo lost his brother in the Cylon attack and he’s pretty broken up about it. That’s where his irritability comes from.”
“Oh, I didn’t know….”
“Certain kinds of scuttlebutt we don’t allow to filter down to the civilian levels.”
“You guys protect each other. I like that. Back home, we always felt that spacer pilots thought too much of themselves, I’m glad to see—”
“Yeah? Well, it’s no big deal—protecting each other, like you say. Protecting each other’s part of the job. You got to protect a piece of a guy’s private life just like he’s gonna protect you when you got a pair of Cylon fighters blasting at your tail. Same thing really.”
“Would you like to make love to me?”
The abruptness of the question startled Starbuck. He did want to make love to her, but he didn’t want her to ask the question.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“Is that the way a socialator goes about it, changing the subject and aiming right at the old target?”
“No, it isn’t. If we were back on my planet, and you were accepted by the proper segment of our society, and you had given me the signal that you wanted me, even then I would not be able to ask the question. I don’t want to make love to you as a socialator. I’m not one anymore, not really. I think the job’s just a part of history now, I’m unemployed. I want to make love to you. That’s all it is. Not as a socialator, not as a refugee. Just as me, okay?”
“I’ll think about it.”
They stood and stared at each other for a very long time. Finally, Cassiopeia said, “Have you thought about it?”
“I’m inclined favorably—”
“Do you ever take that smoldering weed out of your mouth?”
He removed the cigar and tossed it onto the launching bay floor. It landed lit-end first and sent sparks flying.
After they had kissed, Starbuck said, “If I’da known that was the prize, I’da prepared a speech.”
“I’ve heard all the speeches.”
“Would you mind if we didn’t spend much more time in this launching bay?”
“Can you think of anyplace more private?”
“Come to think of it, I can’t think of anyplace private in this whole damn fleet.”
“What’s in there?”
“That’s the launching tube. You don’t want to go in there. It’s dark and it’s—”
Cassiopeia had already crawled into the tube through a circular side opening. From out of the darkness her hand gestured toward him. He looked all around the launching bay, even up at the ceiling.
“Lord,” he said, “I’ll do anything you ask tomorrow. Just don’t call an alert tonight.”
He followed her into the launching tube. Reaching out, he came into contact with an area of her skin. He felt excited and happy, working out which part of her now completely naked body it belonged to.
Athena had a strong hunch something was wrong.
Starbuck had not been where he was supposed to be. When Starbuck was not in the proper place, he was up to something. That was an axiom among everyone who knew the brash young lieutenant. She had glimpsed him earlier, giving more than the usual attention to a bedraggled woman who, from a distance, appeared to be quite sexy in spite of her scraggly condition. As she strolled onto the bridge of the Galactica and saw that it was deserted except for the ever vigilant Colonel Tigh, she wondered if her weariness were not just making her overly suspicious of Starbuck.
“You seem tired,” Tigh said. “Why don’t you steal a nap?”
“There’s just so much to do, preparing for this hyperspace jump, educating the people. Some of them think we’re just skipping out—”
“No way you can help that, Athena. They won’t really believe us until we bring them back the fuel and supplies.”
“You’re more confident than I feel.”
“No point in not being confident, I always say.”
“Have you seen Lieutenant Starbuck?”
“You always take a while getting to what’s really on your mind.”
“Have you seen him, damn it!”
“No. I don’t think I—wait, I did see him on one of the monitors earlier, just before we shut down the flight deck. He was near his viper. I think he was checking it out.”
“That’d make sense, I guess.”
“That was a while ag
o. I’m sure he’s long gone by now. Getting a good night’s sleep before the jump. Like I say, you should do the same. There’ll be enough work from now on for all of us.”
She nodded. Touching her briefly on the arm, he said goodbye and left the bridge. As soon as he had disappeared out the hatchway, Athena strode to the launch control console and stared for a long time at its monitor screens. Then, with an almost casual movement of her hand, she reached down and flipped a switch. On one of the monitor screens, she watched lights go on all over the fighter bay. No people were in evidence anywhere. Her finger eased over to another switch marked “launch tubes”. As the monitor lit up, Athena’s face flushed crimson with anger as she recognized Starbuck and the tall woman she’d seen him with earlier, each engaged in caressing the other’s body vigorously.
Caressing their naked bodies….
“That little snake,” she said aloud. Her finger quickly proceeded to another button. This one was marked, “STEAM PURGE”.
She tried to laugh but could not as she watched the monitor screen in which the two lovers writhed amidst a rising cloud of steam. Starbuck screamed and, flinging the woman before him, vacated the launch tube in all expedient speed.
Athena switched the monitor off quickly, but sat staring at it for a long time. When she ran a check on the launching bay later, neither Starbuck or the woman was in evidence. In her mind she made promises which, even though she might never keep them, were delightful to contemplate.
When Marron had developed her interstellar drive centuries ago, replacing the earlier more cumbersome systems, there had been more than enough Tylium available on the discovered planets to keep all of the human spacecraft going, and the expense of extracting the fuel from its geological sources to convert it into its volatile liquid form seemed quite economical. However, human colony expansion followed by the thousand-year war had depleted the supply of the only fuel source that could power the highly complicated Marron drive. In the time preceding the Cylon ambush, the price of Tylium had skyrocketed to new levels due to the controls exerted by war profiteers like Count Baltar (who, Adama had perceived, always seemed to have sufficient amounts of the fuel to fulfill any request). There had been a question whether the Fleet might have to cut down severely on its Tylium use. In fact, Adama felt, the Tylium crisis had been at least partially responsible for the fussy politicians, anxious to cut a budget wherever even a small rip could be detected along a margin, rushing so eagerly into the Cylon peace trap.
[Battlestar Galactica Classic] - Battlestar Galactica Page 13
