The word landed on the table like a lead paperweight. A long silence followed. No one seemed willing to speak, as if more words might make the situation worse. Gaius waited.
“So we’re all dead?” Lee Adama said at last.
“Not necessarily,” he said, relishing the relief, however small, that came over their faces. It swelled him, made him feel important the way they turned to him for answers. “No one’s ever cured a spongiform encephalopathy, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Peter has clearly been carrying both the T and the H prions for quite some time, but he shows no symptoms. He claims to have had the disease and recovered from it, despite the fact that no human being has ever successfully fought off a spongiform encephalopathy. Peter did say that all the other humans who had been captured with him had died somehow. Perhaps they were test cases. In any case, Dr. Cottle and I are operating on the assumption that the Cylons infected Peter, then somehow cured him and made him immune.”
“Don’t want to kill the carrier too fast,” Adama observed.
Gaius nodded. “Exactly. Peter’s blood contains a third prion. If it has a function, we haven’t figured it out yet, but it may be the key. Dr. Cottle and I have made this matter our top priority.”
“So,” Roslin said, “the fact remains that we have a deadly disease that masquerades as a religious plague along with the other touchy situation on our hands.”
“What touchy situation?” Commander Adama asked, clearly concerned.
Roslin gave a wan smile. “There’s an entire auditorium full of people who are expecting Peter to sing, but he’s obviously not going to.”
“Heaven forbid,” Gaius muttered.
“We should initiate quarantine protocols,” Tigh said. “Stop all ship-to-ship traffic and confine civilians to their quarters until we can spread the cure around.”
“Not much point in that,” Cottle said from his end of the table. “The prion’s widespread by now. Might just as well shut the coop after the chickens get out.”
“Are we all infected, Dr. Cottle?” Lee Adama asked.
Cottle shrugged. ″Probably. You’ve all had close contact with Peter or with someone who did. Prion T was created to be easy to transmit. Breathing the same air will do it, really.”
Another long silence fell across the room. Gaius felt his own heart beating heavy, pumping the prion to every part of his body. It seemed like he could feel them sliding through his endothelial cells, permeating his brain. Utter nonsense, of course, but emotions didn’t listen to logic.
“So we’re all dead, then,” Tigh said into the silence. “Is that what you’re saying?”
Alarms blared. Everyone jumped, including Gaius. Every time that damned alarm went off, it took five years off his life. Sometimes he felt two hundred years old.
“This is Lieutenant Gaeta,” crackled the PA. “Set Condition One throughout the Fleet. Repeat, set Condition One. Commander Adama, please come to CIC.”
“From one thing or another,” Adama said, “we’re all dead.”
Kara Thrace’s pulse pounded in her body while her legs pounded down the corridor. She’d been cooped up in the Galactica for two days now, and she was still feeling a little pissed off at Peter for the dinner—or lack of one. She also wanted to throw him down on the floor and get a good, solid frakking out of him. And she wanted him to hold her for a long time and stroke her hair. And she wanted to crack him across the jaw for probably infecting her with some weirdo disease that was going to dissolve her brain into gelatinous goo, even if the cure—maybe—was right around the corner. Peter filled her with dichotomies thick as mud, and Kara didn’t like dichotomies. They reminded her too much of life at home with her parents, of her father in particular. She unconsciously flexed her fingers, the ones Dad had broken. Over years, he’d broken all of them.
“You′re a little frak-head. A worthless little slut, you got that? Gods, you can’t do anything right!”
“Daddy! Please. Please …”
″I′ll show you what it means to frak up. I′ll show you. Go get the hammer.”
“Daddy, please. I won’t do it again. Please.”
“I said, go get the frakking hammer, you little brat. Now!”
Kara stumbled slightly. Her feet wanted to drag. She tried to banish the memory, but it wouldn’t go. For a moment, she could only see her father’s face. Love and loathing both tried to take command of her heart, and neither would give in. She wanted him to say, just once, that he was proud of her, that she wasn’t a frak-up. She also wanted him to beg for mercy, to plead for her to stop the pain she was inflicting on him. It was unfair, and it was wrong that her dad was both father and foe to her, but that’s the way it was. Kara set her jaw and quickened her pace toward deck five. Dichotomies.
The solution was simple enough. Out there, in her Viper, she was free. Out there, everything was black and white. Everything she encountered was either a friend or an enemy. No one was both. The certainty and security of that fact brought a rush of exhilaration that not even fear of death could dampen.
A hand grabbed her arm from behind. She wrenched around and found herself looking into Lee Adama’s blue eyes. Other Galactica personnel rushed and bustled around them, intent on their own Condition One errands.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Lee demanded.
She stared, honestly confused. “To kill a bunch of Cylons. You know—bang, bang, kaboom?”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Lee said. “You’re grounded.”
“What?” Kara barely kept her voice below a shriek. “For what reason?”
“You were one of the first people to encounter Peter. And you’ve been … close to him.”
“You mean I frakked him.”
Lee flushed slightly, then got angry. “Yeah. You frakked him. That means that he probably injected you with his little prion.”
“It wasn’t that little,” Kara said with a deliberate smirk.
“Get your head on your job, Lieutenant,” he snapped, stung. Kara was a little surprised to find she felt a little bad about making the remark. “You’ve had this prion longer than most of the people on this ship, which means it isn′t safe to put you in a cockpit.”
“I haven’t shown any symptoms,” she said sharply, denying a chilly tinge of fear. “Nothing’s wrong with me.”
“Yeah? Hold out your hands.”
She did. After a moment, the left one trembled just a bit. Kara stared at it. Her entire world shrank to that one tiny tremor. “No.”
“I noticed it in the conference room,” Lee said gently. He held up his own hand. It trembled ever so slightly. “We can’t fly, Kara. Not until Baltar or Cottle finds a cure. Simes is CAG until then.”
Without a word, Kara spun on her heel and stomped away. Lee, caught off guard, ran to catch up.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To CIC so I can see how the fight goes,” she said. “And then I’m going to sickbay.”
CIC was busy, hushed, and tense. The steady growl of the dradis undercut every quiet comment. Kara shot the readout a glance. A handful of Cylon raiders was sliding toward a flock of Vipers. Distorted radio chatter filled the silent spaces. Adama and Tigh stood at the light table in the center of CIC, their eyes also on the dradis.
“Why don’t we just Jump?” Lee asked.
“Colonial One’s Jump computer crashed,” his father replied shortly. “They have to reboot and recalculate. It’ll take almost half an hour.”
“Frak.” Lee pursed his lips. “Was it a Cylon virus?”
“Sharon,” Kara said without thinking. “She got over there somehow and did it.”
“For once, we can’t blame the Cylons,” Tigh said. “It seems to be an ordinary old computer crash.″
“Galactica Actual, this is Lieutenant Simes. We are about to engage the enemy.”
The voice was distorted by distance. Kara watched the display as the Vipers closed in on the Cylon raiders. She found herself le
aning this way and that, trying to make the Vipers fly in the direction she wanted, like a Pyramid fan trying to get the ball to move a particular way.
“Only six raiders?” she said. “They’re just testing us again.”
“Which means you didn’t need to be out there,” Lee said.
She shot him an acid look. He was trying to be nice to her, she knew, but that only pissed her off. Lee was the CAG—or had been until now. He wasn’t supposed to be nice to his pilots. He was supposed to give an order and watch it carried out. Niceness, however, seemed to be hard-wired into him. It was too bad some of Tigh’s bitter acid couldn’t mix with Lee’s milky niceness. Between them, they might make a fine commander.
The Vipers crawled across the screen until they were nose-tonose with the raiders. Kara found she was holding her breath.
“Watch your flank, Mack,” Simes said.
″I see it.”
The soft thump of weapon fire came over the radio, and one of the raiders vanished from the readout.
“Nice one, Mack!”
“Thanks! It was my first piggy bank withdrawal from fighting with a bloody—”
“Shit,” Tigh breathed.
“Mack! Return to Galactica immediately!”
“Immediately now once upon a time is flying.” On the display, one of the Vipers weaved erratically. A raider dove at it. Kara leaned forward and put out a hand, as if she were one of the Lords of Kobol, able to cup the Viper in her hands and protect it from a distance. Her jaw was tight, and she felt helpless, completely impotent. All she could do was watch. Was this how Adama felt all the time? Her hand was shaking again. The Cylon on the screen dove.
“Mack!”
“Is a great big flying fishbowl full of milk for the cats …”
The Viper vanished from the display.
“Frak!”
Kara looked at Lee for a long moment, then turned and fled CIC. She didn’t let herself run, quite, but she didn’t let anything get in her way, either. People moved out of her way instinctively, like schools of fish scattering before a shark. She refused to let herself think; she just reacted. In a few minutes, she was at Peter’s bedside down in sickbay. Restraints still held him down. Kara had mixed feelings about this, too, and she refused to examine them. She was sick of being mixed around like a frakking martini.
A red tube ran from Peter’s left arm to a machine. The tube emerged from other side of the machine and ran down to Peter’s right arm. Red liquid flowed sluggishly through both tubes. Dr. Cottle stood at the machine, adjusting dials and checking readouts. He and Peter looked at Kara when she came in.
“What are you doing to him?” she asked without preamble.
“Hi,” Peter said from the bed. “Nice to see you, too.”
“We’re taking some blood and plasma,” Cottle said. “We won’t take too much, and we’ll return a chunk of the red blood cells to his body.”
“How soon before you find a cure?” she asked.
Cottle blinked at her. “Not right this instant. We’re barely—″
“Sure is nice to be treated like a human being instead of a science experiment,” Peter put in. “I never realized how much I missed being on the Cylon ship until now. Maybe this is another test of my faith. ‘And the Unifier shall walk among the Enemy, and He shall return both changed and unharmed.′ ″
“Shut up,” Kara snapped.
“Kara!” Lee stood framed by the curtains that separated the sections of sickbay. “Are you all right? You took off like—″
“I’ll be fine, Lee,” she snarled. “Just as soon as the good doctor finds a frakking cure, I’ll be even better.”
“I told you it’ll take a while,” Cottle said. He took a drag from his cigarette and tweaked one of the dials. Blood filled four vials. He capped them and picked them up like a bouquet of scarlet glass flowers. “And that′s assuming there’s even a cure to find.”
“That makes me feel so much better.” Kara said.
“Will you people quit talking about me as if I wasn’t here?” Peter demanded, trying unsuccessfully to sit up. “I’m the frakking Unifier, after all.”
“Shut up,” Lee said, and Peter sank back into his bed, a defiant look on his face. “Kara,” Lee continued, “I wanted to tell you—the Cylons jumped away again. Looks like it was another test. All the pilots are returning.”
“Except Mack,” Kara pointed out. “If I’d been out there, he wouldn’t have died.”
“You would both have died,” Lee said. “Your hand is getting worse. I can see it from here.”
Kara put both hands behind her back like a small child in a glassware store. She could feel one of them shaking, defying all commands for it to stop. How much longer before she lay writhing on the floor babbling junk and nonsense? Anger flared. Peter had done this to her. She knew he hadn’t done it on purpose, that he would have stopped it if he could, but that didn’t make her feel any less angry. She wished she had just blown the rescue pod to dust. The old saying was true—no good deed went unpunished.
″I′ll be able to get out there once I get the cure,” Kara said, gesturing at Peter. “If the Doc here would just get off his ass and do some work.”
“Stop ignoring me!” Peter howled. “I’m not a thing!”
The sickbay curtains burst aside and the alcove was suddenly full of people. Kara found herself staring down the barrel of a pistol. Lee was doing the same. Cottle’s cigarette fell from his lips, and he took a step back from his machine, a startled and frightened look on his face. Kara noted in a flash that the assailants—there were seven of them—all carried service revolvers. Two carried pulse rifles. And all of them wore red masks that covered their faces and hair but left their eyes exposed.
“What the frak?” Lee said.
Cottle moved with astonishing speed. He thrust the blood vials into Lee’s startled hands and interposed himself between the intruders and Peter, his patient. “What the hell are you doing? Get out of my sickbay!”
“Freeze, Dr. Asshole!” one of the intruders barked. It was a woman’s voice, muffled by her mask.
“Look, I don’t care who you are,” Cottle said, “but you can′t—″
The woman swept him aside with easy strength. Cottle fell heavily against a medicine cabinet. It tipped over backward with Cottle on top of it and crashed to the floor.
“Hurry, now!” the woman said. ″Let′s do it!”
“What’s going on?” Peter asked, pulling at his restraints again. “Frak! Let me go!”
Two of the masked figures holstered their pistols and snatched long knives from their belts. They moved toward the bed, blades glinting in the fluorescent light. Kara’s heart jerked and a new fear trilled through her. Her hand continued to shake even as she held it up. The pistol that kept her in place hadn’t moved. Peter stared at the blades like a bird hypnotized by a snake.
“You don’t need to do this,” Kara said evenly. Adrenaline zinged through her like the blade of a hot knife. “Leave him alone.”
“I’m afraid we can’t, Lieutenant.” The leader woman snapped her fingers. The blades flipped down. Peter gasped as they slashed his restraints open. Then he sat up, rubbing his wrists. The two masks helped him off the bed, and Peter pulled the tubes from his arms. A grimace crossed his handsome face, and a thin line of blood trickled down the inside of both elbows.
“Let’s go,” the leader said.
“You can’t take him,” Cottle said. “We need him to—″
“Shut up!” said the mask holding the pistol on Kara. “We’re the Unity and he’s the Unifier. He doesn’t belong in a prison. He belongs with his people.”
“Listen to me,” Lee said in a reasonable voice, his hands in the air, still holding the vials Cottle had given him. “Peter’s important to the entire Fleet, not just to you.”
The eyes above the mask holding the pistol on Kara flicked toward Lee. Kara took advantage and moved. She swept the pistol out of her assailant’s grip and punche
d him under the chin with the heel of her hand. She felt his teeth crash together, and he staggered backward. Lee dropped the vials—glass shattered on the floor—and grabbed his own attacker by the wrist. In a quick, practiced move, he disarmed his opponent and twisted the man around in front of him, turning him into a human shield. The pair with pulse rifles were fumbling them into firing position, and Kara mentally marked them civilian. They were probably more dangerous to themselves than to the people they aimed the rifles at. The remaining two stood next to Peter, apparently unwilling to leave his side. Their pistols were still holstered. Cottle had fled, and he would doubtless raise the alarm, evening the odds considerably.
Kara was reaching down to snatch up her opponent’s dropped pistol when Lee stiffened and released his prisoner. The prisoner stumbled away and Lee, looking vaguely surprised, dropped unconscious to the floor. The leader was standing behind him. How the hell had she done that? No time to think about it. Kara’s hand closed on the pistol—
—and a heavy foot came down hard on it. Kara stared stupidly down at it even as crushing pain made her cry out. She looked up. The leader’s masked face met her gaze with hard brown eyes.
“Don’t even,” the leader said.
Kara, who was still kneeling, yanked her hand back, feeling the scrape of skin on metal and hard rubber. She tried to punch upward, but the leader caught her hand in a cruel grip.
“Not worth it,” the leader said.
″Don′t hurt her,” Peter gasped.
“We need to go,” said another mask. “Now!”
Kara whipped her free hand up and managed to snag the leader’s mask just under the eyes. The fabric was soft and stretchy. She yanked downward even as the leader caught Kara’s other wrist with terrible strength. The mask snapped back into place. Kara caught only a glimpse of the leader’s face, but it was enough.
“Satisfied?” asked Sharon Valerii.
CHAPTER 11
A flash of pain hit the back of Kara’s head, and the world sagged. Her muscles went limp as old molasses. She was vaguely aware of her own feet stumbling beneath her as someone half dragged her down an endless series of wavering corridors. Twice she heard gunfire and Peter’s voice, and the hand that gripped her arm left bruises that her father would have been proud of. A hatchway closed, and she realized she was on a shuttle. It was small, and red-masked people crowded in tight on the deck plates. The grip on Kara’s arm relaxed, and she was allowed to slump to the floor. Her head ached, but at least the world wasn’t moving. The deck plates thrummed and sudden motion threw Kara off balance again. She caught a glimpse of blurred whiteness through the canopy up front. Then the view abruptly shifted to a blackness studded with bright stars. They had left the Galactica. Kara tried to take in her surroundings despite her wooziness. The shuttle seemed to be a civilian vessel, not military, and it was apparently used for cargo instead of passengers—the only seats were for the pilot and copilot. The back was a large empty space where the red-maskers, Peter, and Kara squatted or sat. Another wave of pain washed over Kara’s head, and she had to stop thinking for a while.
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