It would have been lethal, except that Adama managed to duck out of the way. The force of the swing brought Leoben staggering into range, and Adama still had the lantern in his right hand. He brought it around in a sharp uppercut to the jaw. This time it connected perfectly, and Leoben staggered back. Adama was on him in a flash, with two more solid blows.
Shaken, Leoben stepped backward, to the stove with the broken pipe jetting steam. Adama forced him backward over the stove, until Leoben’s back was pressed directly over the steam jet. Leoben cried out, losing strength. He managed to break away from the steam—but not from Adama, who came at him again and again, swinging the heavy lantern in savage punches.
Leoben staggered and went down, and still Adama rained blows onto him. Blood was spattering now from the blows, but if anything that only increased Adama’s fury as he brought down on Leoben his vengeance for his son, and the millions of people killed, for the treachery, the death of everything he’d held dear …
Some time after Leoben had ceased moving, Adama finally stopped hitting him, and simply crouched over the body, glaring through the blood that spattered his face and eyes. And he rubbed his blood-slicked fingers together, shocked to realize that these twisted machines, these Cylons, didn’t just look like humans. They bled real, red blood, just like his.
CHAPTER 40
GALACTICA, COMBAT INFORMATION CENTER
Baltar had at last found himself in a place where he might actually be able to do some good—at the nav station on Galactica’s bridge, where he could try to make a start at finding out just what went wrong with the programming. Or rather, what Natas—Number Six—had done to make his code so vulnerable. At the moment, however, Lieutenant Gaeta, who seemed to be his liaison here with the bridge crew, was being rather chatty.
“So let me get this straight,” Gaeta said, leaning over the nav console from its back side. “You’re saying that the Cylons found a way to use your navigation program to disable our ships?”
Baltar winced, and tried not to show it. “Essentially, yes,” he said, not really wanting to talk about it. “I think they’re using the CNP to infect your ships with some kind of computer virus, which makes them susceptible to Cylon commands.”
Gaeta pressed his hand to the stack of printouts he had placed here for Baltar’s reference. “Well, you can see we do have your CNP navigation program here on Galactica, but … our computers aren’t networked, so it’s never been loaded into primary memory or even test run.”
“Good,” Baltar said automatically, not really paying that much attention. Then he realized what Gaeta had just told him. “That’s good. Well, you shouldn’t have any problems, then.” He thought for a moment. “Still—I should purge all remaining references to it if they’re on your memory tapes.”
Gaeta nodded. “Right. I should probably retrofit the newer Vipers, as well—not that we have many left. Oh—here’s the checklist for the CIC computer.” He lifted an open notebook across the console and handed it to Baltar.
“Ah. Thank you.” Baltar began flipping through it, as Gaeta walked away.
After a moment, he realized Gaeta was still there, looking back at him uncertainly. Gaeta finally spoke. “It must be hard for you.”
Baltar looked up from the notebook, trying to shift gears. “What do you mean?”
Gaeta said softly, “Just having something you created twisted and used like this must be … horrible.” As Baltar stared at him, he continued, “The guilt …”
Baltar blinked. He sensed movement to his right, and there was Number—Natasi—Six—leaning in to speak softly to him. “I remember you telling me once that guilt is something small people feel when they run out of excuses for their behavior.”
“It is,” he said, trying to answer Gaeta, “hard. I feel … responsible … in a way …” Gaeta was nodding, his head bobbing up and down with understanding. Baltar was struggling to string words together: “ … for what happened …”
“But you don’t,” Six said, right beside him. “That’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you. You have a clarity of spirit …”
Baltar was going mad trying to maintain a conversation with Gaeta, with Six whispering in his ear like this. Gaeta obviously couldn’t see or hear her—no one else could—and her words didn’t even seem to be taking any time; Gaeta was still nodding like one of those dolls with a bobbing head.
“ … not burdened by conscience, or guilt, or regret …”
“I bet,” Gaeta said, leaning a little farther toward him. “But … try to remember, it’s not really your fault. I mean—you didn’t mean for any of this to happen. It’s not like you knew what they were going to do.”
Baltar was shaking his head now, sweating. He felt like a little boy, hauled on the carpet for doing something very bad, and he knew they were going to find out just how bad, soon. In the face of Gaeta’s earnestness, he tried to ignore Six, who was leaning in close to his ear in that low-cut red gown, whispering, “It’s not like you knew you were lying, not like you were breaking the law.” She straightened up and spoke louder. “Not like you cheat on women. Not like the world’s coming apart …” She turned and sat on the nav desk right in front of him and leaned into him again. “ … and all you can think about is Gaius Baltar.”
His voice was shaky as he said to Gaeta, looking past Six and her dramatic cleavage. “No. No, I know … exactly what you’re saying. I do know.”
Gaeta seemed to accept that. “Right. Uh, just let me know if you need anything.” He nodded and this time when he turned away he actually left.
Baltar watched him go, waiting for his heart rate to subside. Unfortunately, Six was still right there with him.
“You know … I really do hope we make it out of here alive.” She gave him a warm, sexy smile and said in that husky voice of hers, “I think we could have a real future together.”
“Yeah, that would be special,” he said brusquely, turning his head away. Whether she was a chip in his brain or a psychotic hallucination, his only defense seemed to be to ignore her.
Her expression darkened. “You don’t have to be sarcastic. Especially when I’m trying to help you.” She got up and walked around behind him.
“How have you been trying to help me, huh? How are you trying to do that?”
She draped her arms around his shoulders seductively. Then her grip tightened, and turning his head by his chin, she forced him to look straight ahead over the top of the console, toward the center of the CIC. “Do you see anything there that looks familiar?”
He gazed, and saw Billy standing with a cup of coffee, near Dualla, who was working at a console. And above Dualla’s head, that big ceiling-mounted, sixway rack of dradis monitors. “No. Should I?” She didn’t answer, but waited for him to look harder. In the middle of that rack, between the monitors, there was a small, pale blue object, shaped a little like the separated hemispheres of the human brain, but much flatter, and smooth.
“Well, now you mention it … I’ve seen something like it … somewhere before.”
She was breathing close to his face now, brushing back strands of his hair. “Yes?”
It came back to him. “In your briefcase.” He could picture it now, her silver metal briefcase, and always inside it she carried an object that looked very much like—no, exactly like—that thing up on the monitor mounting. “You used to carry it around with you. You said it was an electronic organizer.” He looked up at her momentarily, then back at the distant object.
“That would be a lie,” she murmured.
“Then it’s … it’s a Cylon device.”
She circled around to perch in front of him again. “That would follow.”
Breathlessly, he began, “Did you—?”
“No.” She twisted around to look back at the thing. “Not my job.”
“Then that means—”
She smiled. “Say it.”
“There’s another Cylon aboard this ship.”
Almost
imperceptibly, she nodded.
CHAPTER 41
RAGNAR STATION PASSAGEWAY
William Adama forced himself to keep walking through the blinding pain. He was probably about halfway back to the armory now. It hurt to walk—he must have cracked or bruised a rib when that damned machine hit him—but it would hurt a lot more not to get back to his ship. Blood and sweat kept running into his left eye, and he repeatedly wiped his forehead as carefully as he could with his left sleeve. He was pretty sure he had Leoben’s blood as well as his own on his face, and he didn’t want any of that frakking Cylon blood in his wound. How did it ever come to this? he thought. How did it ever come to this?
Was that another directory plaque at the next intersection? He stopped to check it, squinting to make out the engraved map. Good thing—he’d been about to take the wrong route. These frakking passageways all looked the same. Time was fleeing, and he damned well didn’t want his crew delaying departure while they went out looking for him. He pushed himself to move faster. Screw the pain.
His lungs were burning by the time he gasped against a heavy hatch, pushed it open, and staggered out into a much wider corridor. There was noise here, men moving pallets of explosives toward the airlock. He swung around, trying to find the chief—and sagged against the wall just as someone bellowed, “Commander Adama! It’s Commander Adama!”
GALACTICA, COMBAT INFORMATION CENTER
Baltar walked around the center of the CIC, glancing casually this way and that, trying not to be conspicuous as he peered up at the Cylon device attached behind the monitors. He was thinking frantically, trying to figure out what to do about the damn thing now that he knew of it.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Lieutenant Gaeta walking past. “Everything okay there, Doc?”
“Oh yeah, fine,” he said nervously, but getting his façade of confidence back up quickly. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ve just finished erasing the program from the backup memory. I’m just going to check it one more time, from here.”
Gaeta nodded and moved on, and he took that as his cue to get back to something that at least looked like work. He took a chair in front of a secondary computer console. But before he could so much as pull himself up to the console, Six had reappeared. She came from behind, circled around him, and nestled easily into his lap. He shut his eyes. I do not believe this. What is happening to me? He blinked them open to see Six smiling at him. She was fingering his collar, and shifting her weight provocatively on his lap. In frustration, he murmured, trying to keep his voice low, “You’re not helping.”
Six stopped what she was doing and looked hurt. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking away from him. “How can I help?”
“Well, for a start, you can tell me what that is.” He nodded toward the device.
She shrugged innocently. “Honestly, I don’t know.”
“Well, it hasn’t exploded.”
“Yet?” she said. He looked up at her in consternation, and she turned back to smile mischievously at him. “I’m just guessing.”
Feeling an increasing pressure in his chest, Baltar nodded. “I have to warn them.”
Six laughed. “How do you propose to do that?” Her voice shifted to mimicry, without losing its husky sensuality. “‘Oh look—a Cylon device!’ ‘Really? Well, how do you know what a Cylon device looks like, Doctor?’ ‘Oh—I forgot to mention—I’m familiar with their technology because I’ve been having sex with a Cylon for the last two years now.’”
“I’ll come up with something,” he whispered.
She leaned inward as if to kiss him. “I love surprises.” Nuzzling him, she continued, “Speaking of sex …” She reached surreptitiously down between their bodies and began stroking him.
He gasped. With difficulty, he managed, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, really … really.” He was trembling now.
“Why not?” she murmured. “No one will know. It’ll be our little secret.”
He couldn’t help himself, or dredge up the willpower to make her stop touching him. As she nuzzled his neck, he began to breathe faster, to moan with pleasure. He let his head fall back in the chair. “Ahh-h-h … ahh-h-h …”
“Doctor,” he heard in a sharp voice, by his right shoulder.
He straightened with a jerk, trying to get control of himself. “Y-yes.” He blinked, slowly regaining his composure.
It was that public relations man, Aaron Doral. Doral handed him a three-ring binder. “You asked for a report on how many civilian ships had your CNP program?”
Baltar stared at him, trying to process what the man had just said. Report. Civilian ships. CNP. “Right. Thank you,” he said at last.
“Are you all right?” Doral asked. “You look a little flushed.”
Baltar jerked his gaze back up at the man. “I’m fine. Thank you very much,” he said sharply.
Doral looked slightly taken aback. “Okay.” But as he left, he glanced back at Baltar, as though uncertain whether to believe Baltar’s assurance.
Baltar was watching Doral, as well. And he was getting an idea. “What are you thinking?” asked Six, back in his lap as though she had never left.
Baltar felt his own voice become very hard. “I’m thinking someone else might need to be implicated as a Cylon agent.”
Six gazed out over the center of the CIC, where Doral was now talking to Dualla. “He doesn’t seem the part,” she said, her voice softening with mock earnestness. “And I don’t remember seeing him at any of the Cylon parties.”
“Funny,” he said, raising his eyes to her as she chuckled. He focused again on Doral, his resolve hardening. “He’s a civilian. He’s an outsider. And he’s been aboard this ship for weeks with virtually unlimited access to this very room.” He nodded to himself, then hesitated. “There is one problem, though.”
Six laughed quietly. “Morally?”
He glared at her. “Practically.” He frowned in thought. “And that’s that so far, aboard this ship, no one even suspects that the Cylons look like us now.” He gazed back at Six, but if she had an answer to his dilemma, she was keeping it to herself.
GALACTICA, DECK E, NEAR THE AIRLOCK
Commander Adama winced as the medical corpsman tightened the last stitch on the wound near his left eye. He saw movement to the right of the corpsman and turned his head to look—causing another sharp twinge, as he pulled on the untrimmed suture. “Hold still, Commander, please,” said the corpsman, reaching to cut the suture thread. Adama grunted. It was worth the pain. He had just seen Leoben’s body being carried past on a litter. Good. The men had been able to follow his directions, and they’d recovered the body in half the time he’d expected.
“This just gets worse and worse,” Colonel Tigh growled, standing off to one side of the corpsman, and also watching the body being carried past. “Now the Cylons look just like us?”
“Down to our blood,” Adama said. Though his face and hands had been scrubbed with antiseptic wipes, he still felt the slickness of the Cylon’s blood on his hands; he wondered if he would always feel it. The corpsman pressed a piece of gauze to his forehead, and Adama held it in place with two fingers of his left hand. With his other hand, he wiped again at his right eye with a small towel.
“You realize what this means?” Tigh muttered. “They could be anywhere. Anyone.” He began pacing.
“I’ve had time to think about it,” Adama said.
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know.” He’d had time to think, but he hadn’t come up with any answers. Bowing his head, he changed the subject. “How are we doing on the warheads?”
Tigh sounded a little more upbeat. “Magazine two secured. Magazines three and four within the hour.” He thought a moment. “Something else …”
Adama waited.
Tigh finally let it out. “Lee … is alive.”
The commander’s cabin seemed enormous, vacant, sullen as Lee walked through it, looking around. “Commander?�
�� he called again. His father wasn’t here. Lee turned to leave; then something caught his eye. It was a framed octagonal picture, taken probably twenty years ago, standing prominently on his father’s table. It was a photo of his mother with him and Zak, taken when they were maybe eight and ten years old. He and Zak were smiling, full of life and hope, and his mother was … beautiful. He hadn’t seen this particular photo in a long time. He stared at it, lost in thought.
Funny, as a boy he had never thought of his mother as being beautiful or not beautiful; she was just his mom, his and Zak’s. She was loving and dependable, but wasn’t that what mothers were? He’d never really even thought of her as being his father’s wife—not until the divorce, when she wasn’t anymore. But she was still Mom, of course. Zak’s death had hit her hard, very hard. He knew that since then, she worried twice as much about him as she had before. There were so many ways a fighter pilot—test pilot—could wind up at the wrong end of a funeral.
He’d worried about her happiness, about her impending remarriage, about which he’d felt relief and contentment, glad to see an end to her loneliness. But while she had always worried about him dying in the service, he’d never imagined that she would be the one to die in a war, with thermonuclear bombs raining down on her world. She was almost certainly dead now—though he would probably never know for sure. He’d been so busy since the attack, he’d hardly slept. And he hadn’t had time to think much about those he had left behind.
His father was the only family he had left. And his father … His stomach started knotting, just thinking about his father. So maybe it was better that he didn’t. Put the picture down and leave.
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