Battlestar Galactica
Page 27
In two weeks, he’d be Captain Saul Tigh, serving on a Battlestar.
Now Saul was convinced Bill really could do anything.
He had been back in the service now for a little over two months. He had been surprised at how easily he had slipped back into the military routine, how natural the rhythms of a ship seemed, even though he had been away from them for close to twenty years.
Before that? Well, maybe that was better forgotten. For years he had tried to forget what had happened in the war. Why not forget his own little war with the bottle?
He was a captain now, assigned to train all the new pilots who shipped on board the last time they stopped on Caprica. Twenty-three pilots, nineteen of them green recruits—nineteen youngsters who would learn to eat, drink, and sleep with their Vipers before he was done.
They were a good bunch of kids. He just hoped they never had to be tested in battle.
The Cylons had almost broken humanity. Humanity would never allow anything like that to happen again.
Tigh sighed and hauled himself off his bunk. Enough of the introspection. The last time he had gotten this deep in thought, he’d ended up looking to light himself on fire.
He was on duty in twenty minutes. He’d stroll up to CIC, see if anything was happening, before he chewed out the troops. These days, he liked to get out and stretch his legs. Saul just wanted to walk down the corridors of the Battlestar—his Battlestar.
He looked up at the sound of Klaxons. A voice came over the shipboard wireless, instructing all senior staff to report to Combat Information Center at once.
That meant they’d found something—something serious.
Well, so much for the stroll. He shut the door behind him and quick-marched down the corridor.
It was time to do his job.
Today he had a purpose. Today somebody else could look over the edge.
Colonel William Adama looked up from the star charts spread before him. A dozen others busied themselves in other parts of the CIC, the huge, central space that served as the beating heart of the Battlestar. He was surrounded by stations that handled navigation, communication, air filtration, artificial gravity, and every conceivable line of supply, both for ship functions and the needs of the crew—every piece of that complicated equation that kept a starship alive and running. Each of the many tasks was overseen by a member of the operations crew, working with their own individual computer designed to perform that specific assignment. Before the war, they had networked the computers together to run all the ship’s functions. But the Cylons had learned to subvert those networks and turn them against their human crews, shutting down life support, exploding fuel tanks, even plunging whole spacecraft into the nearest stars.
The CIC was still filled with gray metal panels and a thousand blinking lights. But each panel had a living counterpart, men and women who specialized in each individual task and shared their knowledge with those around them. Rather than let the machines do their work, they were forced to network the old fashioned way, as human beings.
And all of those specialists reported to Bill Adama.
Adama looked quickly about the room before glancing back at his map. He allowed himself the slightest of smiles. Everyone around him seemed engrossed in his or her different job, a dozen different pieces of the great human machine that ran this ship.
He was still trying on the fit of his new executive officer position. In the two months he had held this position, the Battlestar had certainly run well enough, even though, on some days, he didn’t feel quite up to speed.
“Sir!” the dradis operator called. “We have a large ship, just within range, moving erratically!”
Adama turned to the comm operator who controlled the ship-to-ship wireless. “See if you can raise them.”
“Aye, sir!”
Some days, the XO position came with a few surprises.
These last two months, Galactica had been exploring the edges of what they called “known space,” hopping from one solar system to the next, looking for worlds, moons, even asteroids where humans had been before. Until now, they hadn’t found much at all.
Before the Cylon rebellion, humanity had spread far and wide, each of the Colonies claiming their own little corner of space and defending those claims against all others. Some of those territorial disputes were what had brought on the inter-Colony wars of a century past—battles that had also led to the invention of the original war machines, the Cylons.
Back before the Cylon conflict, humanity had lived under an uneasy truce. Every Colony pushed at the limits imposed on them. Some built secret installations to give them an advantage over their Colonial foes. Some secrets were so deep, even the Colonies’ own citizens knew nothing about them—hidden installations run by a few individuals in government or the military; it varied from world to world.
And then the Cylon War came to dwarf all their petty disputes—a war that almost killed them all.
“Any luck with that comm?” Adama asked.
“No sir. No response at all.”
They hadn’t found much of anything at all this far out—until now.
“Let’s take the Galactica in a little closer. See if we can find out anything else about this ship.”
Maybe they had really found something this time.
With the Cylon conflict fresh in their minds, the Twelve Colonies had been eager to cooperate, and the Battlestars had been able to repair much of the immediate damage from the war, cleaning up asteroid fields that had been littered with mines, reopening supply stations and mining operations, even relocating survivors. But years had gone by now since the Cylons had disappeared. A whole new generation was growing up—a generation which had never seen a Cylon.
They were lucky to have the Battlestars out here at all. Sometimes, Adama wondered how long the Colonial alliance would really hold. The Cylons, after all, had never really been defeated. The Colonies had to stay united. But the politicians, eager for the approval of each separate world, already seemed to have forgotten. If the Battlestars wanted to keep exploring the edges of space, they needed to find results. This exploration of the outer reaches, delayed though it was, was the last piece of putting all the far-flung pieces of the Colonies back together.
“Sir, I’m getting some strange readings here.”
Adama looked over at the technician. “Explain, Lieutenant.”
“I’m seeing bursts of radiation out of this new ship. I think their engines have been breached. We’ve got a very unstable situation on our hands.”
“Sound the alarm,” Adama said. “Let’s get the senior staff up here.”
The Klaxons rang out around the room.
The first thing they had found out here was about to blow up in their faces.
Saul Tigh showed up first. The ship’s doctor and head engineer were right behind him.
“I was on my way to the morning briefing. What have we got?”
“Admiral on deck!” The shout rang out before Adama could even begin to explain. The crew snapped to attention.
“At ease!” Admiral Sing announced as he strode into the room, then stopped to return their salute. He was a compact man with skin that looked like aging parchment. But while the admiral might look ready for retirement, Adama often thought his superior’s energy rivaled that of a raw recruit.
“Colonel Adama, please report.”
“We’ve picked up the signal of an unknown ship, a potential hazard. It seems to be leaking radiation, sir.”
“Are there any signs of life on board?” Sing asked.
“We’ve attempted to establish contact, but we’ve gotten no response.
“We’re close enough to get a visual, sir,” one of the techs called.
“Put it up on the forward screen,” Sing ordered.
“It’s an old B-class freighter,” Tigh said with surprise in his voice. “Bill—Colonel Adama—and I shipped out on one of those when we first met. Just looks sort of dead in space.”
Sing frowned at the still image in front of them. “Could the ship have been damaged in a fight?”
“It doesn’t look like it has a scratch,” Tigh replied.
“And it’s leaking radiation?”
“Intermittently.” The tech checked the dials before her. “Sometimes, there’s hardly any reading. At others, the sensors are going wild.”
“Captain Frayn.” Sing addressed the ship’s engineer. “What could cause those sort of readings?”
“It has to be the engines. They must have been stripped of most of their shielding. That sort of damage had to have been done internally.”
“Sabotage,” Adama added. “They wanted to blow up the next people to board her.”
“Quite possible,” Frayn agreed. “Without getting close enough to get blown up, I think it’s a reasonable assumption.”
“This isn’t the friendliest of gestures,” Sing remarked. “Who do we think is responsible?”
“We’ve been trailing scavengers for some time,” Adama replied. “I’ve mentioned it in my reports.”
The few abandoned Colonial sites they had managed to find had been well picked-over.
“I recall,” Sing replied. “Seems our scavengers don’t like being followed.”
“They’re probably trying to cut out the competition,” Frayn ventured.
“Won’t they be surprised when they find their competition is a Battlestar?” Tigh asked with a smile.
“And I think we need to find these folks before they leave any more gifts.” The admiral looked to Tigh. “Let’s get some pilots out there to take care of this, shall we?”
“Yes, sir!” Tigh saluted and left for the flight deck.
“Colonel Adama, you believe the scavengers are exploring the same area we are?”
“The evidence suggests that we’ve crossed paths half a dozen times. I’m guessing they have the same intel that we have.”
“Knowing how difficult it was for us to get the intel out of the Colonies, they may have more.” Sing shook his head in disgust. “Let’s increase our speed, do a sweep of the area. Maybe we can pick these characters up.”
“And if we find them, sir?” Adama asked.
“A bunch of crazy scavengers who leave bombs behind as gifts? We may just have to blow them out of the sky.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey A. Carver is the author of fifteen popular science fiction novels, including The Infinity Link and The Rapture Effect. His books combine hard-SF concepts, deeply humanistic concerns, and a sense of humor. His last novel, Eternity’s End, was a finalist for the Nebula Award. He is currently completing Sunborn, the long-awaited fourth volume of The Chaos Chronicles, a cosmic-scope series inspired by the science of chaos.
Carver has taught science-fiction writing to young authors both as an educational television host and as the author of Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, an online guide to the craft of storytelling and writing. The guide is now available online, free, at www.writesf.com.
A native of Huron, Ohio, Carver graduated from Brown University with a degree in English. He has been a high-school wrestler, a scuba-diving instructor, a quahog diver, a UPS sorter, a private pilot, and a stay-at-home dad. He lives with his family in the Boston area.
Discover more at www.starrigger.net.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Copyright © 2006 by Universal Studios Licensing LLLP Battlestar Galactica © USA Cable Entertainment LLC. Licensed by Universal Studios Licensing LLLP. Teaser copyright © 2006 by Universal Studios Licensing LLLP.
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Edited by James Frenkel
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eISBN 9781429910972
First eBook Edition : February 2011
First edition: January 2006
First mass market edition: July 2006