Battlestar Galactica 12 - Die, Chameleon!

by Glen A. Larson

  "Sorry, mother."

  "That's all right, son. Just don't let the show get you all excited. You know what happens when your emotions overproduce."

  Brynt's efficient working of the Imagescan controls had enlarged the Starbuck and Denra so much that their giant heads appeared to come out of the living room floor. The heads were each almost as tall as Zossie, who recoiled in momentary terror at their size. Her frightened reaction amused her siblings.

  "Hold on to your seat, Denra!" the Starbuck said. "We're crashing outta here!"

  "Long shot, Brynt," Chandra advised, "long shot."

  Brynt's hands flew across the controls to give them a view of the Gazelle inside the building. The spacecraft zoomed forward, heading toward the nearest wall. As it came near the wall, the children held their breaths. The vehicle's crashing through the wall sent bricks flying in all directions. Zossie involuntarily ducked, and even Chandra and Brynt leaned back a bit.

  Brynt now used the controls to create a view from the sky of the Gazelle clearing the building and heading upward. The long picturesque arc of its flight was interrupted by other spacecrafts attacking it. It blasted them out of the living room's skies, except for those that vanished through the living room ceiling. The Gazelle continued its upward flight and soon, with Brynt effectively managing the controls, the living room took on the look of the universe. A miniature universe, to be sure, but an impressive sight, so impressive that even Diova and Trinzot stopped what they were doing to regard it. The children cheered as the Starbuck's spacecraft headed toward the stars.

  "The cockpit, Brynt, the cockpit," Chandra insisted.

  Brynt made the universe disappear and again they had the giant view of the cockpit's interior, where the Starbuck now turned and kissed the woman.

  "Mush!" Zossie screamed disgustedly.

  "Zossie, it's lovely," Chandra said.

  "I say it's mush, mush it is."

  A low buzzing sound spread through the room. All members of the family looked up suddenly, responsive to the Summoning. Trinzot dropped his scroll to the floor and stood up. Diova dropped her dustcloth and joined him.

  "Children!" Trinzot said.

  But they didn't have to be told. They were already standing, ready to proceed. The family, Diova and Trinzot walking in front, left the room. Behind them the Starbuck and Denra whispered excitedly to no listeners.

  In the attractive tree-lined suburban street outside their home, the family encountered other families who were also responding to the Summoning. All of the people in the neighborhood formed a loose line, three or four abreast, and walked together at the same steady pace. They joined other families from other neighborhoods, each group blending easily and casually, like a joint night-out stroll, with the main body of citizens.

  Their journey ended at a large building which looked like several domes flung into a pile and glued together. Inside were a multitude of small round rooms, each of which held four or five families. Trinzot and his family entered their room, which was on the eleventh tier and stood, as usual, in a position of at-ease, their eyes focused on the large image-bubble in front of them. Other families took up their own previously assigned positions.

  When all families had proceeded to their places in the round rooms, the image-bubble in each room turned first a flickering beige, which was replaced with lavender waves, and finally by a speckled pattern of azure and scarlet.

  Then the voice of the Summoner exploded the azure and scarlet pattern: "Fall!"

  All of the people in all of the rooms immediately plummeted toward the floor, some of them hitting the metal surface, others landing on top of the first-fallen people. Zossie was nearly buried under her brother and a pair of men from neighborhood families. She could hardly breathe, but she did not stop smiling.

  In the image-bubble, an Image Lord appeared. For an Image Lord, he was good-looking. To anyone not of his species, he would generally be considered a grotesque and monstrous individual. The skin of this Image Lord, and all the other Image Lords, was gray as bad weather and appeared to be peeling in large strips. It was not actually peeling. The strips were part of the skin's natural state, each hanging strip an outgrowth from the body. Some of the strips had sensory capacities. Since an Image Lord had no nasal apparatus, it received its odoriferous information through tiny pores in the hanging strips. They also conducted sound. An Image Lord was judged by other of his species by the amount and beauty of the hanging strips.

  Anyone who despised a hirsute appearance would have been disgusted by this Image Lord. His head was particularly hairy and his coal-black eyes could barely be seen peeking out from their sockets low in the oval head. Its arms, four of them, were also extremely hairy. When they got damp with secretions, they gave off an odor that could stifle anyone but other Image Lords.

  This Image Lord, the leader of the ceremonies, spread his several arms as if to take in the thousands of people watching him on many image-bubbles.

  "First we will dance," the Image Lord said, "then we will sing, then we will beat each other with our fists. But first shout: 'We are yours, O Image Lords!' "

  In all the round rooms, every inhabitant repeated his chant: "We are yours, O Image Lords!"

  They repeated each of the Image Lord's next phrases.

  "Suppliers of the good life. Bringer of food, shelter, and comfort. Glorifiers of dreams. Masters."

  Satisfied with the responses, which came to him through several speakers in the bubblelike command chamber, a central room from which he directed activities, he elegantly waved one of his arms. In each room, the people got to their feet, bowed to each other, and started to dance. The dance was a graceful one. Even though there were several people in each room, they managed to slide and step past each other without collision. After the dancing came the singing. The songs were Image Lord songs and sounded odd when coming from less raspy, more attractive voices, for they were not smooth and attractive melodies. Still, all singers appeared to enjoy the musical interlude.

  The dancing and singing had worked the inhabitants of the rooms into quite a frenzy when it came time for the fighting. At the Image Lord's signal, arms started swinging, heads started butting, teeth started biting. Zossie weaved in and around the people in the room, stepping on feet as hard as she could. Her father discovered her and delivered her a solid whack on the side of her head. Chandra dealt a mean elbow to the stomachs of several people, including both Brynt and Diova. Two or three people in that room were out cold by the time of the Image Lord's signal to desist.

  After the final prayer and the implanting of particular suggestions in particular people, the meeting broke up. In several casual lines, the people left the multidomed building and returned to their homes. In the home of Trinzot and his family, they resumed their normal activities. He returned to his scroll-reading at the point where he'd left off, and Diova resumed house-cleaning. The Starbuck adventure had ended while the children were gone. Brynt inserted a new adventure crystal into the control console and they settled down to view the new story. Immediately the Starbuck appeared, a woman on each arm as he swaggered across a landscape on whose craggy and forbidding surfaces were spread the corpses and other debris that marked the aftermath of a battle.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It seemed like an eternity since Lucifer had been off Baltar's base-star. Standing now on the spaceport dock on the planet Trillius, overseeing the ranks of human prisoners boarding the Cylon prison ship, his newly devised sensory cluster allowing him to feel the cold breeze coming in off the Trillian Ocean, he realized he would now feel contentment if he had only programmed that particular state into the cluster. He would think about doing just that.

  Lucifer was continually reinventing himself. A cybernetic creation of the Cylon IL series, he had come off the line with more comprehension and insight than usually programmed into ambulatory computers. He had soon discovered that, using the resources available to him from the massive shipboard computers on a base-star, he could rede
sign himself. In the time since, he had enhanced his reservoir of knowledge, discovered new functions and abilities, given himself personality traits (including a few useful emotions) that had interested him in others, and had even provided himself with a soul which he secretly housed in his left shoulder.

  His latest innovation had given him the freedom to leave the base-star and, especially, Baltar. Ever since the last setback to his ambitions, Baltar had become particularly morose. A human traitor who had sold out the twelve worlds and its inhabitants for protection and privileges that were never bestowed upon him, Baltar had much to be morose about. Lucifer often wondered how the man could live with himself and his deeds. However, the last incident, where a machine that dispensed emotions (also developed by Lucifer, although the devious Baltar had taken credit for it) had gone awry and very nearly driven the Imperious Leader of the Cylons insane, had discredited Baltar so severely that there was a rumor traveling through channels that he was about to be stripped of command and replaced by a proper Cylon. Baltar had attempted to blame the emotion machine fiasco on Lucifer, but it was clear that nobody in power believed that explanation.

  Baltar's gloom and the danger to Lucifer's own position if he stayed aboard until a replacement commander arrived had driven Lucifer to desperate action. He had transferred all vital computer information onto a set of crystals which he could transport with him, eliminating his dependence on the ship computer. He had further devised a computer retrieval and expansion-of-data unit which he could carry around with him wherever he went. When he needed particular information, he inserted the crystal containing that data into the unit. This flexibility allowed him to leave the ship. The moment he had realized he could be free of the ship and Baltar, he had tapped into the Cylon communication and commerce channels and located a job that would get him away from the base-star. He had applied for, and received, the assignment to transport a shipload of human prisoners to the famous, or infamous, Cylon prison colony. It was not the kind of job he had hoped for, but at least it would provide some deep-space distance between himself and Baltar.

  When Lucifer told Baltar of the new assignment, the human had not shown the slightest interest. He had merely nodded and waved Lucifer away. That was the last Lucifer had seen of him: sitting on the high throne atop the command pedestal, his body slumped, his eyes vacant, his arms lying like dead animals in his lap.

  As part of the job, Lucifer had brought the remaining prisoners from Baltar's base-star to this dock to be loaded with other prisoners of the Cylons onto the rickety tub which shuttled regularly between this seedy spaceport and the prison colony.

  Watching the long string of prisoners pass by him, he realized that most of them would probably suffer terribly before dying soon at the hands of the passionately cruel Cylon jailers. Lucifer had programmed some compassion into his personality, and he felt a little regretful that he had to be the one to lead these wretches to their sad destinies, but he also realized that, wherever they were, the lives of these prisoners would be so wretched that, so long as the war endured, little could be done for them. He could not judge the right or wrong of the Cylon prison colony for himself. Cylons believed the disposal of human prisoners in any way was a blessing to them, to the Cylons, and to the universe as a whole. They were dedicated to the eradication of the human species.

  As Lucifer watched the prisoners go by, he saw that many of them wore the insignia of Colonial Warrior. Whenever he saw that shoulder patch on the sleeve of a prisoner's tattered clothing, he was reminded of the one human he admired, Lieutenant Starbuck of the Battlestar Galactica. Starbuck was once a prisoner on Baltar's base-star, charming Lucifer with his brash confidence and easy humor, introducing him to the art of card-playing. He had beaten Lucifer soundly several times, even when it appeared Lucifer couldn't possibly lose. Ever since that time, Lucifer had been studying the possibilities inherent in card games, and felt he had learned enough to beat any human, particularly Starbuck, at them.

  Sometimes, when he recalled his time with Starbuck, he wondered if he served the right side in this millennium-long war. When he looked at the dedicated but not particularly emotional, and certainly humorless Cylons, he wondered if it would be better to serve a race that contained Starbucks. Of course, he would prefer that it contain no more Baltars. He had had enough of Baltar, a human who seemed the direct opposite of Starbuck—dishonest, charmless, and utterly lacking in any reasonable sort of humor.

  The worst part of this vacation from Baltar was that, at the end of it, Lucifer would have to return to the base-star. While he could wrangle a temporary mission like the prison one, obtaining a full transfer was much more difficult. The Cylon High Command did not look fondly on requests for transfer, considering them admissions of failure in present assignments. Lucifer knew he must seek a loophole through which he could squirm without losing face. He was certain he could find a way and hoped the prison mission would offer some kind of opportunity for him.

  His meditation on these subjects, a meditation that took place in an instant since Lucifer didn't need to assemble his thoughts in a logical order, was ended when he heard the telltale creaks of another walking computer in the IL series gliding up behind him. He even knew who his new companion would be, from the pitch of the squeaks in the rollers at the bottom of his legs. It was not a companion whose company he relished.

  "Spectre!" Lucifer said. "What brings you here?"

  Spectre was an elegantly dressed near-duplicate of Lucifer, except that his head came to a more curved bulblike point, his robe was blue instead of the rich red velvet of Lucifer's garment, and he was somewhat shorter in stature than the towering Lucifer.

  "A diplomatic mission," Spectre said in his usual soft voice. "From Imperious Leader," he added, clearly wanting the words to have full impact on Lucifer. Spectre had recently risen to the rank of aide to the supreme leader of the Cylons, and he never missed a chance to allude proudly to his position in conversation, especially to Lucifer who, though a superior example of the IL series, played a lesser role in the Cylon hierarchy. Not long ago, Spectre had been merely a scavenger in charge of a seedy Cylon outpost. He had first cultivated Baltar, then moved on to Imperious Leader.

  "I am to travel to the prison colony," Spectre explained, "with this . . . this disgusting lot. I would not travel with humans ordinarily. They are grotesque, aren't they? Just look at them. Who would ever want to deal with them? And, Lucifer, why are you here?"

  Lucifer perceived that Spectre's remarks were calculated, as usual. Spectre already knew that Lucifer was in charge of the humans, and wanted to emphasize his own rank among the Cylons.

  "I am in charge of the prisoners," Lucifer admitted.

  "Oh," Spectre said. His next observation was typically Spectrian: "I suppose we all must do the jobs assigned us."

  While he was reluctant to admit the truth, Lucifer felt he might as well be honest with this supercilious collection of spare parts.

  "I chose the duty. A little change of scenery."

  "Well, yes," Spectre said. "A vacation on the prison colony. I was not aware of its recreational facilities."

  "I do not know that it has any."

  "Oh."

  Spectre had been in the command chamber when Imperious Leader had gone berserk due to Baltar's ignorant fiddling with Lucifer's guilt machine. While Baltar had convinced Spectre that the invention was Baltar's own, Lucifer believed that Spectre really knew that Lucifer had created it. Somehow that gave him the upper hand in the present encounter.

  "We will have to spend every available moment together on this trip, Lucifer. Exchange our knowledge, and get to know each other better. I could perhaps be of aid to you."

  As Spectre rolled away, Lucifer wondered if there were any way he could avoid Spectre's company aboard the ship.

  In the prison holds of the ship, Lucifer supervised the incarceration of the prisoners. Long lines of them snaked from the entrance hatchway through the open central area and into various c
ell blocks. Lucifer stood on a landing above the prisoners and watched them go by. A few of them, from Baltar's base-star, spotted him there and muttered in a surly fashion as they passed by. With his sensory circuits at optimum, Lucifer could hear even the quietest complaint.

  "There's that garbage bag of bolts and wires," one prisoner mumbled. "I'd like to get him in my—"

  "After what he did to us, drowning him in a vat of acid would be too good, if you ask me," another said.

  Lucifer recognized them as prisoners who had been tortured severely. They had been among those most affected by the emotion machine when it was given its grand test in Baltar's command chamber, a test in which a few had been driven crazy.

  "Yeah," a short lean prisoner remarked, "I'd like to see that metal face o' his slowly rust out into ragged pieces."

  Toward the end of the line of prisoners from Baltar's base-star was a former Galactica fighter pilot named Scarn. Known for being feisty and independent, he had been broken by the sophisticated and cruel Cylon torture techniques. Now, seeing Lucifer standing on the landing ahead of him, he recognized him as the infernal creation who sometimes presided over the torture sessions on the base-star. Enraged, he started growling in the back of his throat. Since such strange behavior was common among the humans, the Cylon guards, intent on getting the prisoners to their proper quarters, paid no attention to it.

  As Scarn neared the platform on which Lucifer stood, he examined its structure. A ladder led upward on the left side of the landing. Scarn was willing to risk suicide in order to get his hands on Lucifer.

  Breaking suddenly from the ranks, he threw himself up the ladder and flung himself at Lucifer, who, unprepared for such an assault, fell backward, slamming against the metal railing of the landing with great force. The fall jarred something in him, and above him he saw hundreds of Scarns whirling in a great circle, all of them growling and hurling epithets at him. Scarn's voice was replaced by a loud crashing noise, and the many Scarns disappeared from Lucifer's vision. In their place, hundreds of Spectres rotated in a wide circle. The Spectres became larger, seeming to descend toward him, and he sensed an adjustment being made to his central vision circuits. The hundred Spectres diminished to one, a single annoying vision of Spectre gazing down at the prone Lucifer.