The mention of Athena's name caused Starbuck to sigh involuntarily. After the debacle in the med-lab Starbuck had had a run-in with Athena that he'd be just as happy if Apollo never found out about. It was bad enough that he had been chewed out by Cassie after Apollo was through with him. It had been on the bridge of the battlestar…
Seeing Athena in her command position was somehow reassuring. He didn't mind her being in command when she was in uniform and doing her job so splendidly. The problem was when she was in command over Starbuck's personal life.
Without even looking up from the console, she'd said through the side of her mouth, "I heard about you kissing Cassie."
He couldn't believe how completely he'd blown it. Did everybody know? Would Baltar lecture him next? If the Cylons ever found them again, would they berate him about the kiss?
He couldn't defend himself. He didn't even want to. But neither did he want the words that launched out of his mouth like some crazy suicide mission.
"I'm sick and tired of all this," he said.
"What?" She straightened up from her work and looked him straight in the eye.
He was glad that they were alone on the bridge. It made it easier for him to get a heavy lode off his chest. "You heard me. I'm not frackin' perfect. I've never wanted to be. You need to back off."
"Back off?" She couldn't believe what she was hearing. She almost felt that she should move away from him and hated herself for even that brief micron of weakness. "You've got a lot of nerve."
"And you're giving me a severe pain in the fundament!" he shot back. "You want to talk about nerves! You're a wonderful lover, Athena. But I can only take so much. You don't own me."
He had conquered most of the beautiful women in the fleet. In many ways Athena was his ultimate conquest. But her need to always be in control gave him pause. Maybe the price was too high.
He'd stalked off that day as she'd slammed her fist into the wall and collapsed into her command chair. There were some things in the universe that not even Athena could command.
Now Starbuck watched Apollo call Athena on his communicator. His instincts told him they were about to go into crisis mode. With the Gamon outside the city and the paranoid staff around Ryis, the only outcome had to be trouble. Personal problems all seemed so small at times like this. But it had been that way for so many yahren that the Galacticans had no choice. If they were to live and love, they couldn't defer things in hopes of an impossible security.
As Apollo contacted Athena, he also had a recent memory. It was one thing to confront Starbuck when he caught him in the act with Cassie in the med-lab. But the conversation he'd had with his sister shortly after her confrontation with his old friend was too private to drag up later and shove in Starbuck's face.
There had to be some way to reach Starbuck other than constant lectures or an occasional fist to the jaw. In the midst of all that was happening on Paradis there was still room for the most easily forgotten truth. It mattered how people treated each other.
The last time Apollo had spoken to Athena over the comline, the subject had been Starbuck right after he'd stalked off.
"I keep warning you about him, Athena," he said. "Starbuck is just not going to lay down for you. He's his own man and he plays by his own rules."
"That's why I'm attracted to him," she admitted. "And I'm tired of being alone."
"I know."
"I've always wanted to settle down with someone who's my equal; someone strong enough not to be threatened by who I am!"
He'd been through this sort of thing with his sister before but this time he hoped he could finally break through and make her see herself. "Athena, your idea of equality is someone who is willing to stand and walk just a little behind you. There is nothing more difficult than real equality in a relationship. You are intelligent and strong. You are beautiful. You have earned every molecule of your rank. But my darling sister, you can't give Starbuck the one thing he needs most."
"What's that?" she asked, her lips quivering.
"To be let alone when he needs to be alone."
The silence between them was as deep as any point in space. She finally let out her breath in a long sigh and told Apollo all the truth that was in her.
"I know. I admit everything. But what can I do? I'm attracted to men who challenge me but I refuse to give in to that kind of man."
"Athena, you still won't see it completely, will you? You simply don't trust men."
As he'd watched her face over the screen it was as if he was standing right next to her. He could almost hear the wheels turning in her head.
"I've never met a man who didn't let me down."
He let the other boot drop before she did it herself. "Athena, you know what I think? I think you may be in love for the first time in your life, and that man is Starbuck."
That was too much for her. She switched the topic back to the business at hand. They spent the rest of that discussion on the topic of how Ryis was commandeering as many construction crews and supplies as he could take away from the fleet and devote to New Caprica City.
He hadn't talked to her since then. And now as he called her up it was definitely a matter of business, still the same business. Their personal lives would again take a back seat for purposes of the greater good.
The comscreen came on. Athena saw that Starbuck was with Apollo. It didn't matter to any of them now.
"We have a problem," Apollo began. He filled her in and instructed that she send down special equipment.
"I see you have Gar'Tokk with you," she said.
"He's invaluable," Apollo agreed, resisting the impulse to pat the Noman on the shoulder. "We must do everything in our power to communicate with the Gamon."
"As opposed to Ryis," she said.
"You've got that right!" volunteered Boomer. "There's no point talking to someone who won't listen."
"You'll have the equipment," she concluded, "but I don't know what good it will do if the other instruments are dysfunctional."
Apollo had a ready answer. "We need to cross check with as many different kinds of measuring devices and with the widest band of settings. Before we can deal with the problems down here we need some solid facts. I'm tired of playing guessing games."
Chapter Nine
Personal problems were always more important to an individual than burning issues of the moment. For Baltar, the severity of his headaches and the ever more surreal dreams became more important with each passing day. Soon he would not care about anything that did not exactly impinge on the volcano erupting inside his cranium.
Every night he put off going to sleep a little longer. No matter how exhausted he became, the dreams were waiting for him. One time a glowing Cylon head grew electric spider legs and sliced off his head before devouring every tasty morsel. Another night the corpses of Caprica rose from dusty oblivion to pursue him to the edge of a cliff where his awaiting fate was a spindly creature intent on* sucking out the marrow of his bones. There were other dreams so terrible that he could no longer remember the details.
Perversely, the only thing that gave spice and savor to his life was the class he'd been so reluctant at first to teach. Some of the students seemed to have developed a certain solicitude toward their eccentric professor.
The blonde girl who'd arrested the attention of the class with her suggestion of purchasing test answers was the first to observe the deep circles under Baltar's eyes and his pale expression.
He was no longer sarcastic with her. Instead, he appreciated the concern of the class, to his great surprise.
Even more remarkable was that five students produced adequate answers to his question about why the Galacticans didn't produce an artificial space habitat of any desired size and be done with planet-hopping once and for all. There was no one correct answers to the thought exercise. But there were several plausible scenarios and a handful of his students had come up with them.
Mainly, the space habitat would be a more attractive
target to the Cylons than humanity spread out on a planet with a presence in space for purposes of defense. And then, too, there was the religious impulse that drove so many to find the holy soil of the home world and fulfill the destiny promised by Adama.
If satisfaction in one's work were a sufficient tonic to drive away demons of the night, then Professor Baltar's students offered him the cure. Alas, happy waking moments did nothing to deaden the pain of the incessant headaches. And the nightmares persisted.
One evening he tried to get stinking drunk. In his sleeping mind he thought he'd beaten his personal demons because he didn't seem to be having a nightmare. At least it wasn't a bad dream about himself.
He had a surprise in store. He was dreaming a dark dream, all right, but it wasn't about himself. Instead, it was about Cassiopeia.
He'd been keeping up with her condition, of course. He'd never forget the expression on Apollo's face when Baltar first suggested the unique parentage of her child. Recently he'd learned that she was finally beginning to show, rather late in the pregnancy. She had that wonderful kind of body that other women would kill for.
The interesting news was that she had accepted the arcane services of a Gamon midwife. That was definitely not something Baltar would have expected.
Nor would he have expected that she would play the protagonist in one of his nightmares, and he the disinterested spectator. In a way there was a relief in someone else being victimized. Maybe he would have his first good night's sleep in a long, long time.
As he watched, she suddenly became very pregnant and a glowing fetus erupted from her belly. There was a spurt of blood and for a moment he thought that Cassie had died within his dream. But no sooner had the thought crossed his somnambulant mind than she was on her feet, hale and hearty, and chasing the glowing fetus across the surface of a barren moon.
And then Baltar became a participant in the dream. He wanted to cry out in protest that he wanted to be a voyeur, only a voyeur, and stay out of the action this time. But there was no sound in the dream.
Then came the worst part. He had to chase her. Cassie was running from Baltar as she chased her floating baby. There didn't seem to be any erotic element in his pursuit of this particular beautiful woman.
Finally, there was a sound—a pounding, beating, insistent rhythm. Was it the beating of his heart or hers? Was it the drum beat of their footsteps as they scurried across a vast wasteland? The answer was neither.
So he was in another nightmare, after all. With his last ounce of will power he swore that he would not look over his shoulder. Nothing but nothing could make him turn around. Because if but for one trivial micron he dared to look around, he would see the thing that was making the pounding noise.
The thing that was chasing Baltar chasing Cassie chasing her baby.
The thing that was so ponderous and overwhelming that it made a sound of thunder in an otherwise silent dream in the empty vacuum of a dead moon.
So terrible that nothing could silence it, not even the laws of physics.
He looked over his shoulder.
He saw everything.
It was the worst vision yet. The giant figure chasing them, reaching hundreds of feet into the black sky, was the human form of Count Iblis.
He wore an expression of ultimate cosmic hatred that could rip the fabric of time and space.
That night, Baltar woke up screaming. He also had a dangerously high fever. He could not go on like this. He would have to find some way to give up sleep. That was the only possible remedy to this shrieking, howling madness.
He stayed home from school that day.
Something scuttled in the dark. Boomer caught the shape in the light he carried and then flashed the beam somewhere else. As the creature was moving away from them, up a wall, he didn't care to observe it any longer. It seemed a bit too large to crawl on the wall of the tunnel—as far as Boomer was concerned.
"The universe is full of little surprises, isn't it?" asked Starbuck with a smile.
"How long did it take to dig this tunnel?" Koren asked Apollo.
His foster father shook his head. "No time at all. With our technology, a mining tunnel is child's play."
"I wish these instruments worked as well," said the mining foreman who volunteered to lead the small party of investigators.
"Take some additional readings on this mountain. Something must be blocking the signals and disrupting the equipment. We have to find the cause."
While the men worried over their dials and needles and readouts, Koren marveled at the handiwork of the mining tunnel. It was so perfect. The walls were always the same distance apart, allowing them to walk four abreast if they chose. The roof of the tunnel was twelve feet above the floor.
Their echoing footsteps seemed to speak to him. Technology was wonderful. Power and science and knowledge were the true gods of the universe. What could ever be more powerful? Human reason could overcome any obstacle. His new father would solve the problems of the inconsistent readings.
"We're definitely going to find something," Apollo reassured them.
"That intuitive flash-from-the-blue thing again, huh?" Boomer volunteered.
"Yeah," Apollo nodded. "It bugs the frack out of me. I wish I could turn it off sometimes."
Starbuck was never comfortable when Apollo discussed his visions. He changed the subject.
"Nothing bugs anyone as badly as that bug got to Boomer!" he teased his friend.
Boomer was unfazed. "Hey, you saw that thing run up the wall! You're not going to tell me you liked it any better."
"Maybe we could make a pet out of it," suggested Koren. They all laughed.
"We had a lot of those things come in here when we first blasted the tunnel," said the foreman. "After we moved heavy equipment into the cave and started working, most of them left. Don't think they liked the noise."
"How much further to the cave?" Apollo wanted to know.
"We're almost there," said the foreman.
In another moment they reached the end of the line and the readings went crazy. "That's loud!" Koren stated the obvious as they heard the high frequency squeal.
"I wish I'd left you outside," said Apollo.
"I'm glad you didn't," said Koren.
The foreman wrinkled his brow in concentration over the readings. "We're picking up a very high frequency signal, which is almost undetectable. We thought it was just the planet's resonance, but it now appears to have some coherency to it."
"Check it out," ordered Apollo.
The foreman scratched his head and then outlined the options. "We can either block it or locate the cause and see if we can remove it."
Apollo made his position clear. "Don't do anything until you report back to me. You got that?"
The foreman shrugged then caught the expression of the commander. He nodded and said, "Yes, sir."
Apollo gestured for the others in his immediate group to follow and they continued their explorations.
Boomer sidled up and asked, "What are you picking up back there?"
Apollo frowned. "Something's very strange. I don't know what it is yet but I'm beginning to feel that this mountain is a lot more than a Gamon sacred site."
Underground was not the ideal place for warriors. If they could not navigate the spaceways, then the atmosphere of a planet was the next best thing. They did not really belong on the ground or under it. To hang suspended in nothing was to be alive. Only then were they a world unto themselves, a Viper alone and proud in the firmament.
Dalton, Trays and Troy were on patrol. The new cadet joined them, the one whose name the boss in charge of the ocean installation had never managed to pick up. Her name was Rhaya.
The veterans always enjoyed instructing a newcomer to their ranks.
They played with the new flyers. Out of play comes the best fighters. Civilians who hated and mistrusted playfulness could never be heroes. They were as dead to that part of life as the Cylons' Imperious Leader. The only differe
nce was that Imperious Leader understood that something was missing in himself and that enraged all the mental energy in his three-lobed brain.
Today was Dalton's day. She felt as if she might be one of the graceful birds in the lovely skies of Paradis. The skill required for atmospheric flight was significantly different from space flight. But proficiency in one provided a foundation to learn the other.
In the course of their exodus across the stars, the best Viper pilots acquired both skills. Quite naturally, cadets first learned to maneuver in space. There was such a greater need. But the exodus of humanity brought them in contact with many planets where the other skill was needed.
Now that a serious commitment had been made to Paradis, it was time to polish the skills of sky-flying. In space, the whole trick to winning a battle was in positioning your craft. Viper pilots became masters of acceleration and deceleration. Pursuit of an enemy craft required a grasp of mathematics equal to the grip on the turbo stick. Patience was also key.
Atmospheric flight required a different set of instincts. Everything happened faster. You had to bank and glide. You had to allow for gusts of wind. There was more to do.
As Dalton and the other three pilots danced through the clouds and over the valleys of Paradis, she kept up a steady chatter for the others. "Watch out for updrafts!" she said more than once.
There are no updrafts in space. Viper pilots can forget about those if they don't rack up enough hours flying in an atmosphere.
As they chased each other, the new cadet proved herself equal to her bravado. The new ones always boasted and were willing to take a dare. It was part and parcel of the ritual.
Only after she'd seen Rhaya's ability demonstrated repeatedly did Dalton decide to challenge the new girl. Nothing wrong with demonstrating who was the better pilot!
"Maybe that's not such a good idea," said Troy.
"Is that a command?" Dalton wanted to know as she went into a dead-stick glide.
Before Troy could issue an actual command, the new cadet dropped like a rock in pursuit of Dalton. Troy silently cursed, ticked off at the idea he was probably the cause of this extra competitiveness between the two women. He made a mental note to ask Dr. Wilker why testosterone was supposed to cause more competitive behavior than estrogen. Both hormones seemed as volatile as rocket fuel!
Battlestar Galactica-05-Paradis Page 9
