"I'm about to jump into an inferno and you want to talk to me about Cain? That's just great."
"You don't understand," she said, grabbing his arm to restrain him. "Cain isn't planning on coming back."
"Starbuck!" Apollo called him from the shuttle's hatch. "Come on, let's move!"
"Look, Cassi," Starbuck said, disengaging himself and walking quickly toward the shuttle, "Cain's a survivor. He'll be back, if that's what's worrying you."
Cassiopeia kept pace with him.
"If Cain was expecting to come back, he would have let me come aboard the Pegasus," she said.
Sheba threw her gear bag into the shuttle and turned at the sound of their approach. "What are you talking about?" she said, having heard Cassiopeia's last comment.
"Nothing," said Apollo. "We're all in the same fix. The odds are against us, but we'll get through. We have to."
"No," said Sheba. "She's right. If my father left her off his ship, he has to be planning something crazy. I've got to get back to the Pegasus."
Apollo held her back.
"Sorry. You're with us, for better or for worse. Your father's orders, remember?"
"I lied," she said. "He doesn't know anything about it. It was my own idea."
"I'll take her place," said Cassiopeia.
"Are you crazy?" Starbuck said.
Apollo's reaction was more to the point. "You can't get us to our objective on the Gomoray ground base," he said. "She can."
"What about your medical tech?" said Cassiopeia. "I don't see one."
"We don't have one."
"You do now." She pushed past him and entered the shuttle.
"Cassiopeia . . . Oh, for—"
"Apollo," said Boomer, "come on. We're microns from launch."
Cassiopeia sat down in the shuttle next to Starbuck.
"Where do you think you're going?" he said.
"On the mission."
"Dressed like that? This is a jump."
She pointed to the equipment bag she had placed in the shuttle moments before the others had arrived at the landing bay.
"Everything I need is right here." She opened the bag, pulled out a jump suit and started to get into it.
"No way," said Sheba. "I'm not going to allow her to come along. I don't even want her on the same shuttle with me."
"It's too late," said Apollo. "We're about to launch. Besides, it's not up to you. She's one of us."
"Nice tight-knit team we have here," grumbled Boomer.
"Yeah," Starbuck replied. "With support troops like this, who needs Cylons?"
"Shuttle stand by to launch." Tigh's voice came over the comcircuit.
In the background they could hear Adama's voice, not quite out of mike range, giving the order to launch. Tigh repeated it and, as they left the Galactica's landing bay, they heard Adama's voice again, just off mike.
"May the Lord be with you," Adama said.
Lucifer glided up to the clear doors of the throne room of the Cylon flagship. His red glowing optical sensors picked up the shape of Baltar, sitting on the throne and brooding. Lucifer could have opened the doors by reaching out and pressing the plate set into the wall, but it was easier and quicker to use his remote tie-in to the ship's computer, an extension of his extremely complex brain. The doors slid open and Lucifer rolled forward on his silent tracks, stopping just in front of the throne.
"Baltar . . ."
The human turned around to face him. He was angry at being disturbed.
"What is it?"
"We must talk," said Lucifer, adjusting his vocal mechanisms to produce a subtle, deferential tone.
"Not now."
"Time is of the essence, Baltar. I am sorry that your victory did not work out quite the way you planned—"
"Get out of here!"
"Baltar, even the Imperious Leader in one of his most difficult moods could hardly blame you for running from two battlestars."
"I did not run," said Baltar through gritted teeth. "I executed a tactical retreat, you imbecile."
"There is no reason to be abusive," said Lucifer, anxious to reason with his superior. "You forget, I am on your side. I have placed my fate into your hands. My rise to a position of supremacy over my fellow I.L. series Cylons is completely dependent on your success. Or lack thereof."
"Spare me," said Baltar wearily. "What is the latest intelligence? As if I should put any faith in scanners that cannot report the presence of two battlestars rather than one."
"It is the consensus of the commanders aboard the two supporting base ships that we should summon aid from the base at Gomoray at once," said Lucifer.
"Oh, it is, is it?"
"It would seem to be a prudent idea," Lucifer said. "Had you something else in mind?"
Baltar grimaced. "I somehow find the idea of some base commander on Gomoray taking credit for destroying the Galactica slightly annoying. Especially since we've come so far and are now poised for the kill."
"We already had one opportunity to destroy the fleet of the escaping humans and we did not do so well," said Lucifer.
Baltar slammed his fist down onto the arm of his throne.
"We were taken by surprise! Thanks to your so-called intelligence reports. How many squadrons are based on Gomoray? Or is the Cylon strength in the area also a mystery to you?"
"I can tell you precisely what we can expect in the way of support from Gomoray," said Lucifer. "Four full squadrons. The equivalent of a base ship."
"In other words, we have the firepower of four base ships at our disposal?"
"Exactly."
"How long would it take to bring them into action? In an emergency?"
"It would depend to a great extent upon their battle readiness and the efficiency of the base personnel and their commander," Lucifer replied. "I would not advise waiting too long."
Baltar considered the suggestion. "If we caught the Galactica and her support ship between the two forces, there would be no question of victory."
"That is the opinion of our support commanders."
"Very well," said Baltar. "Prepare our ships for another attack."
"Notify all ship captains that the Galactica and Pegasus are moving off, leaving them temporarily unguarded," said Adama, the battlestar prepared to get under way.
"That's not going to make them happy," Tigh said. "Do we tell them any more than that?"
Adama shook his head. "I don't think that will be necessary. If we stay here and those two forces hit us, we won't be any help to them. I think they realize that. But use code. Let's not tell the Cylons that we're coming. Helm, make ready to get under way. Flank speed, fuel be damned. If those base ships launch a new attack, we're not going to need it anyway. We won't be going anywhere."
Aboard the bridge of the Pegasus, Tolen kept Cain posted on the progress of the other elements of their mission.
"The shuttle with the ground force has reached Gomoray air space," he said. "The Galactica is under way."
"Then this is it," said Cain. "All warriors to battle stations."
The klaxon sounded red alert over the p.a. system of the Pegasus.
"Helm, full speed for those base ships."
"Yes, sir," Tolen replied nervously. Cain had never let them down before, but then he had never set off against three Cylon base ships singlehanded.
"Pegasus is under way," Athena said from the command console on the bridge of the Galactica.
Adama took a deep breath. "My heart is with those four young warriors over Gomoray," he said. "They've got the roughest part of it. And if they fail, then it's all over—for them and for us."
"They should be nearing their drop zone about now," said Tigh.
"Yes. A drop right into the heart of a Cylon capital. How did we ever get this desperate?"
Aboard the shuttle, as it neared the drop point, the cockpits lights shifted from a dim white to red and a small buzzer began to sound intermittently.
"This is it," Apollo said.
Th
ey stood and moved toward the hatch, awaiting the command of their shuttle pilot. Omega glanced back at them.
"Stand by," he said.
Apollo gave last-minute directions. "Sheba, Bojay, we'll all home in on you, since you have the best chance of spotting the Cylon base center. Don't worry about us—you two just concentrate on the drop target."
"If anybody ever told me I'd deliberately jump out of a ship into a Cylon base," said Bojay, "I'd—" He never had the chance to finish. The buzzer shifted from its intermittent pattern to a steady, keening wail.
"That's it," said Starbuck. "Good luck, everybody."
"Go!" said Omega and opened the shuttle bay. One by one they dropped into space.
CHAPTER NINE
The Cylon flagship bearing Imperious Leader entered a parking orbit over Gomoray and a shuttle descended toward the ground base. Aboard the shuttle, the supreme Cylon relaxed in a private cabin. With the Delphians totally wiped out, yet another less than perfect race had been eradicated and Gomoray had become a Cylon outpost.
The Delphians, like the pestilential humans, had been of no concern to the Cylon race until they had developed the potential for space travel. Then it had become necessary to watch them very closely. There could be only one race of beings in stewardship over the universe. Order had to be maintained, and the Delphians, like the accursed humans, had threatened that order. It had happened before and it would happen again. The moment some sentient race discovered space travel, they began to act as if the universe existed solely to be exploited by them. In the past, it had been necessary for the Cylons to neutralize the threat of other races who thought nothing of ravaging worlds for their natural resources, irreparably damaging their ecosystems. In several cases they had come across beings who thought nothing of dismantling entire planets for their raw materials. It was intolerable. The humans had posed such a threat. They had spread through space with unbelievable rapidity, establishing colonies on other worlds, exploring planets where their presence disturbed the natural order of things. They had been stopped, finally, after a war that had lasted longer than any other conflict in the history of the Cylon race. Yet there were survivors. Unfortunately, thought Imperious Leader, they had been unable to wipe out the humans as thoroughly as they had the Delphians. An extinct race was no threat, but where there were survivors, there was always a chance that the race would grow and spread again. It was particularly so with humans. It was like pulling a weed out of the ground, but failing to get the root. The plant would only flourish once again, in time.
The human survivors were constantly on the mind of Imperious Leader. What would have been a monomania in a human was nothing more than a constant awareness in Imperious Leader, whose three brains enabled him to deal with a staggering amount of information at the same time. He was a product of Cylon genius, a living testimony to the perfection of his race. He had been bred to be the supreme leader, a product of highly specialized training and biological engineering. When he had received his third brain, with its storehouse of all the accumulated information gathered by the Cylon culture, he had been appalled to learn how human society functioned. It was at that point that he determined that they must be wiped out completely, for if the Cylon culture was an ordered one, theirs was one of total anarchy.
The humans seemed to exercise virtually no control over themselves. Their leaders, rather than having been born, bred, and engineered to fulfill their roles, were actually selected by a vote of the lesser members of their society. How could those who were to be ruled choose those who would rule them? It defied all logic. Their mating patterns were nothing more than random selection. In the Cylon culture, breeding was controlled solely by the geneticists, mating patterns arranged such that the offspring would be the desirable type any time a particular breed of Cylon was needed by the society. Workers, warriors, leaders, all were bred as products of sophisticated genetic engineering. The mating habits of the humans were, in comparison, as haphazard as those of animals. With the humans, the main criterion for mating was something they called "love," an abstract concept that made no sense whatsoever. The average Cylon would have no idea what to make of it, and even Imperious Leader, with his third brain, was able to arrive at no definition closer than an approximation, something that seemed to be a blend of physical attraction and perhaps a system of shared values. He knew it was more complex than that, and it galled him that he could not fully understand it, for the humans were his enemies and the best way to defeat your enemy is to know him.
There was much about the humans that Imperious Leader did not understand. It puzzled him greatly that they had managed to accomplish so much in spite of the fact that they had exercised so little control over their own destiny.
If the Cylons had acted as the humans, they would have remained essentially unchanged for thousands of years. Evolution was a slow process, and the results achieved by nature, when not guided by rational thought, were not always desirable. The Cylons had taken a direct hand in their own development. It had been their destiny to be the supreme race in all the universe, and to that end the Cylon scientists had labored to achieve the totally superior being. Humans, with the exception of a variance in superficial physical characteristics, were virtually indistinguishable from one another. Not so the Cylons, who had achieved a level of diversity not to be found elsewhere in the universe.
The Cylon leaders, such as Imperious Leader, were complex, biologically engineered organisms, their three brains capable of simultaneously receiving and evaluating an almost limitless amount of information and sensory input, their multiple eyes able to observe and keep track of many things at once, their highly developed auditory systems acting as multiple channels and receivers on a sophisticated communications console. Even as he rested in his cabin aboard the shuttle, Imperious Leader was able, through augmentation of his physical senses by his communications helmet, to keep track of all major Cylon activity back on the home world. The helmet enabled him to tie into the communications network aboard his flagship and thereby receive intelligence and dispatch orders throughout the Cylon system. He was not omniscient, but he was as close to that state as it was possible to be. In light of this, the surviving humans' ability to constantly elude all efforts to eradicate them was an unceasing irritant. They were hopelessly inferior and yet they persisted in thwarting all attempts to wipe them out. It was a wonder that they had managed to survive so long.
The humans were inferior even to the lowliest Cylon drone, the basest of organic Cylon life. Cylon executive officers, with their two brains, were the superiors of humans. Cylon warriors, cybernetic organisms that were part product of genetics and part technological achievement, possessed only their first brains, yet still should have been capable of outperforming humans on all levels. Cylon citizens, who possessed first brains but lacked inorganic augmentation, had reached a higher level of evolution than had the human barbarians. The Cylon drones, whose achievements or, rather, lack of them qualified them for nothing more than the rudimentary brains that had trained and educated them in their early years, performed only the basest tasks in Cylon society. Still, they performed their tasks flawlessly, incapable of being distracted from their concentration as the humans were. Even the inorganic Cylons, I.L. series computers such as Lucifer and cybernaut Cylon warriors, robots used to augment Cylon attack forces, mystified the humans. Imperious Leader knew that the humans had several times managed to obtain damaged cybernaut warriors and that they must have had yahrens in which to study them, in spite of which they had learned almost nothing. The droids fashioned by the humans were pathetically primitive. Why then was it so difficult to terminate a handful of the survivors of the human colony worlds, beings so primitive that their annihilation should have posed no greater problem than that of the Delphians? Imperious Leader was anxious to resolve this problem, for he had many other matters to attend to and did not like to leave tasks uncompleted. He had tried to learn how to think like a human and, although he was able to come closer to
achieving that goal than any other Cylon, still he was not human and their thought processes remained, by and large, a mystery to him. They were simply incomprehensible, lacking any semblance of logic or order. So, to facilitate the completion of the task, Imperious Leader had chosen Baltar. Set a human to catch a human.
Baltar was yet another example of human incomprehensibility. A traitor to his own race. It would be impossible for a Cylon to do what Baltar had done. Bargaining to save himself at the expense of countless lives, Baltar had volunteered to act as go-between for the Cylon nation. It was with Baltar's help that the Cylons had engineered the plot that resulted in the destruction of the human colony worlds. He had convinced the human leaders that the Cylons were weary of the war and were anxious to sue for peace. It was through Baltar's efforts that a peace conference had been arranged. It was because of Baltar that the war-weary humans had dropped their guard, foolishly believing that the Cylons would ever allow them to coexist with them. The man had hoped that in return for his treacherous actions, the Cylons would spare his world and set him up as their puppet ruler there. Imperious Leader had agreed to the "bargain," as if there could ever be an equal exchange between members of unequal races. He had used Baltar as a tool and then discarded him, thinking that the tool had served its purpose. It was Lucifer who had convinced him that killing Baltar would constitute a waste of a valuable resource.
Imperious Leader valued Lucifer very highly. The most advanced of the Cylon I.L. series, the self-aware computer had an advantage in dealing with humans that Imperious Leader did not possess. In spite of his three brains, Imperious Leader was incapable of purely objective analysis, as was Lucifer. All of his perceptions were colored by his experience, the fact that he was a Cylon, the supreme Cylon. His reasoning was Cylon reasoning, whereas Lucifer, although a product of Cylon technology, was capable of purely objective reasoning, untainted by any prejudice or preconceptions. Lucifer had been built by machines and, as he amassed more knowledge, he had redesigned himself, building in improvements until he had achieved sentience. Lucifer was the ultimate product of Cylon machine evolution and, as such, he had not reacted to Baltar with the same feelings of disgust as had Imperious Leader. Lucifer was capable of having "feelings," after a fashion, but he functioned only by evaluating information, rather than reacting to it emotionally. Even though Lucifer had countermanded Baltar's death warrant, Imperious Leader had forgiven him. It had not been an act of mutiny. Lucifer had merely pointed out that though Baltar had been used, he had not yet been used up. It was valid reasoning. Thanks to Lucifer, Imperious Leader had learned how to take advantage of a human weakness of which he had not been aware. Vanity.
Battlestar Galactica 6 - The Living Legend Page 9
