01 - Battlestar Galactica (28 page)

Port Hangar Deck

Kara Thrace sat in the cockpit of the Viper, completing the pre-launch
checklist. The Viper she’d flown last was still undergoing major repairs; this
one was still shiny and clean from the museum floor. It too bore the call-sign
“Raygun” on its cockpit. But it would be flying as “Starbuck” this trip.

It was going to be a very short trip.

“You understand the mission?” Lee Adama asked, walking up beside the cockpit.

Of course, you dipstick! We just went over it about five times!
Grinning
to conceal her irritation, she signed the checklist, handed it to the deck hand
on the other side of the cockpit, and recited to Lee, “Put my head outside the
storm, look around, listen for wireless traffic, come home.”

“No heroics. This is strictly recon. Look, listen, return.”

She rubbed her eyebrow. “You don’t have to worry about me. My taste for
heroics vanished about the time I engaged that first Cylon fighter.” She looked over at Lee and met his gaze straight on.

Lee nodded and turned away. On the other side of the craft, the deck crew
removed the access ladder. Kara straightened in her seat, ready to close the
canopy. Suddenly it just came out; she wasn’t planning to say it, but she
couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Lee—” Still staring straight ahead, she waited
until he turned. “Zak failed basic flight.”

Lee came back to stand under the cockpit. “What?” he asked, incredulous.

“Or at least he should have. But he didn’t.” Kara finally turned her head to
look at him.
Why are you telling him this now? Now, of all times?
“Because I passed him,” she continued. “His technique was sloppy, and he had no
feel for flying, but I passed him. Because he and I… because
I
felt
something, and I let that get in the way of doing my job. And I
couldn’t fail
him.”
This was so hard to say, but not as hard as it had been to keep it
inside all these years.

Lee gazed at her in stunned disbelief. “Why are you telling me this? Why…
why now?”

She stared at him as long as she could, until finally she could meet his eyes
no longer. “It’s the end of the world, Lee,” she said, in a hard-edged tone that
was intended to be sardonic, to mask how much it had been weighing on her. “I
thought I should confess my sins.”

Before he could think of anything to say—indeed, he was speechless—she
clamped her helmet down over her head and secured it. “Set!” she yelled angrily
over the wireless to the controller. As Lee continued to try to absorb that
bombshell, she grabbed the canopy and slid it back into the shut position.

Lee had no choice but to step back out of the way, as the crew began to move
her into launch position.

* * *

Deck B Passageway

The armed security team marched quickly down the passageway, automatic rifles
at the ready. Captain Kelly was in command. The order had just come, straight
from Colonel Tigh, and they’d been told to be fast about it.

Their quarry was supposed to be somewhere in this corridor. And there he was,
coming around the bend. Aaron Doral looked bewildered as he saw the team coming
his way—with weapons pointed straight at his heart.

“Halt!” Kelly shouted. “No sudden moves!”

Doral extended his hands. “Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Guys, what—?”

Captain Kelly, while his men fanned out around Doral, leveled a Previn
handgun at the suspect and shouted, “Get down on your knees and cross your
ankles—
now!”

Doral raised his hands and began to sink toward the deck, stammering in
fright. “Just, just—wait a minute! What? Wh—what do you want?”

“Hands behind your head.”

Doral complied, and the men moved in with handcuffs. And with that, the first
suspected Cylon was in custody.

In the brig, manacled to the bars, Doral could only fume helplessly as Tigh
and Baltar conferred over his case, just a few meters away.

“If he’s really a Cylon, why hasn’t the storm radiation made him sick by
now?” Tigh asked, hands behind his back.

Baltar hesitated, knowing that the explanation he was about to give would
have a short shelf life. He would have to come up with something better,
quickly. “Well, I can only theorize that it takes a while for the storm’s effects to become really apparent on Cylon
physiology. By the time you encountered Leoben, he’d been here a lot longer—”

“I don’t suppose it matters to you that I am
not a Cylon?”
Doral
shouted from his cell.

“The smartest thing you could do right now would be to
shut your mouth,”
Tigh growled. After glaring at Doral for a few seconds longer, he turned
back to Baltar. “Are you sure?”

Baltar tried to sound reassuring, while acknowledging the natural fallibility
of his remarkable findings. “One can never be a hundred percent sure. But the
evidence…” And here he stuttered a little, glancing at Doral, conveying as
profoundly as he could his deep humility in the face of pure scientific
evidence. “The evidence seems conclusive. Basic—uh, basically what I did was, I
expanded on—on your doctor’s analysis of Leoben’s corpse.” He nodded briskly,
trying not to appear hyper and nervous. “I then went around the
CIC—discreetly!—taking random hair samples of people who’ve been working there,
and subjected them to a special form of spectral analysis that I’ve been
experimenting with for quite some time now, and…”

As Tigh fidgeted, glancing over at Doral, Baltar thought to himself,
My
God, could I possible lay this on any frakking heavier?
Nevertheless, he
continued, “I then wrote a clinical computer subroutine to screen that for
synthetic chemical combinations.” He handed the computer printout to Tigh, who
was scowling in obvious incomprehension. “His ones—his samples”—and he pointed
directly at the appalled-looking Doral—“were the only ones to register as
synthetic.”

Tigh looked briefly at the printout with raised eyebrows, then handed it back
to Baltar. “I’ll take your word for it.”

At that moment, Six, still dressed to kill, sashayed into view and murmured
in a sultry voice that only he could hear, “And just… like… that, Doctor Baltar invents the amazing Cylon detector.” She
touched his chin, caressed his cheek. Whether the gesture was admiring or
teasing was hard to tell.

“Look, gentlemen,” Doral protested, from behind the bars. “I understand your
concerns here. This is a very difficult situation.” His words started to speed
up, as he became more and more frantic. “But I think you need to take a step
back, take a deep breath, and
really look at what you’re doing here!”

Tigh stared darkly at the prisoner. To Baltar, he said, “I want everyone
aboard this ship screened. No exceptions.”

Baltar acknowledged with a nod.

Doral stood up, pleading, raising his hands, which were manacled on the
outside of the bars. As he did so, the guards stationed across from him raised
their weapons and took aim. “Whoa.
Whoa!
I, I—I don’t know about anybody
else, but I can tell you that I’m—I’m human.” His voice became more and more
desperate. “I’m from Moasis—you know, it’s a hamlet a couple of stops outside of
Caprica City. I grew up on the south side. I went to the Kobol colleges on
Geminon, I studied
public relations!”

Baltar had started to leave in the middle of Doral’s plea, but then he swung
back, attempting to be casual. “Oh—by the way, I—I don’t know if this is
important—might be important, might not be important—but earlier, when I was in
the CIC, I noticed that Mr. Doral seemed to be doing, um—” As he talked, Six
cozied up to him, putting an arm around him from behind. “Well, I’m not exactly
sure what it was he was doing, but he seemed very interested in this odd-looking
device on the bottom of the… overhead dradis console.”

“What?”
Doral burst out.

Baltar looked at him and nodded vigorously. “Yeah.”

As he did so, Six was nuzzling him from behind, stroking his temple. “We should really make a copy of your brain patterns at some point.”
She nibbled his ear.

“What device? What are you talking about?”
Doral was on the verge of
becoming incoherent with rage. He pointed at Baltar. “He’s lying! He is
frakking lying!”

Baltar looked sad, aggrieved.

Tigh was on the phone already. “Combat, this is Tigh. Isolate the dradis
console—”

“Don’t listen to him!” Doral shouted.

“Nobody comes near it until I get up there,” Tigh said. He hung up the phone
and headed for the door.

“No, Lords of Kobol, this isn’t happening to me!” Doral pleaded.

Captain Kelly called out to Tigh, “Colonel, your orders, sir?”

Tigh answered over his shoulder, “If he moves, take him out.”

Doral was practically in tears as he shouted, “You mixed the samples up!
I’m human!”

But no one was listening.

Combat Information Center

Colonel Tigh watched as Petty Officer Dualla probed the mysterious device
with a rad counter. “It’s not hot, sir,” she reported.

“Very well, remove it,” Tigh ordered.

Lieutenant Gaeta was studying some papers on a clipboard. “I don’t see
anything in the maintenance records, sir. But I’m pretty sure I first noticed it
about a week ago.”

Tigh shook his head, pacing with his hands clasped behind his back. “And you
didn’t say anything? Didn’t investigate a new piece of equipment that just
appeared in CIC?”

“No, sir,” Gaeta answered somberly. “I… just assumed it was part of the… museum.” As he spoke, Dualla removed the device from overhead and turned it
over in her hands, before placing it into a metal carry case. “I’m sorry, sir,”
Gaeta continued. “There’s… no excuse.”

Tigh grumbled in a low voice. “You’re not alone, Lieutenant! Any one of us
should have seen the perfectly obvious, staring us in the face.” His voice
dropped still lower. “Especially the ship’s XO.”

Dualla locked the carry case. “What should I do with it, sir?”

“Take it to Doctor Baltar. I’ve given him clearance. He’s become our resident
Cylon expert. Have him take it to the lab, figure out whether it’s a
bug,
or
whatever
the hell it is.” He stopped pacing and fixed his gaze on
Lieutenant Gaeta. “In the meantime, I want this ship searched for any other
pieces of equipment that just ‘appeared’ in the last week….”

Viper,
Outbound from
Galactica

The Viper streaked upward through the billowing green clouds of Ragnar,
through the layers of turbulence and lightning and fuming, toward the calm
blackness of space. The real calm, Star-buck knew, would come only after she
rocketed out of the uppermost layers of atmosphere. Until then, she had to hold
onto her ass and fly with care. It was a complex passage, out from Ragnar
Anchorage.

“Starbuck,
Galactica.
You should be approaching turn eight.”
The
reassuring voice of control in her headset was becoming more and more frakked
with static as she penetrated the upper clouds.

“Copy,” she replied. “Starting to lose wireless contact.” As if on cue, a flash of lightning crossed her path. Ball lightning danced along
the trailing edges of her wings.

The next transmission from
Galactica
was indecipherable.

She called her report anyway. “Making the final turn now.” And ahead of her,
she saw the wonderful dark of space. She was almost out.
“Galactica,
Starbuck. I’ve reached the threshold.” After a moment, she called,
“Galactica,
do you read me?” Pause.
“Galactica,
do you read me?” No
answer, only static.

Never mind.
She focused her attention on the task at hand. Make a good
thorough sweep of the area, and verify that they had not been followed by the
Cylons.

The first scan looked good. Or did it? Squinting at the dradis screen in
front of her, she felt a sudden chill. The rotating hoop of the scanning sensor
had been showing no contact of any sort. But now, there was a flickering of
something there. Not clear, but…

“That can’t be right,” she muttered.
It should be clear.

But it wasn’t.

The dradis screen was coming into sharper focus now—and what it showed was a
blizzard of small contacts, and a strange shading behind them. Looking up
through the canopy over her head, Starbuck saw the last of the clouds dissipate.
She cut her engines to idle. She would coast in a suborbital trajectory while
she checked the situation.

“Oh frak!” she yelled, looking up and left and right.

She had emerged just below a huge swarm of Cylon raiders. “Lords of Kobol,”
she breathed, trying to get a rough count. It was impossible; they were
everywhere. Instinctively, she flicked on her weapons systems. Then, upon
deliberation, she shut them down again. She wasn’t here to take on a flock of
raiders; she was here to discover and report.

As she looked up again, she realized she had not seen the worst of it—not by
far. Shockingly close, so close overhead that she’d almost missed it, was the
vast, menacing, starfish shape of the worst enemy she could imagine: a Cylon
base star. Not just an almost invulnerable dreadnought, which it most certainly
was, but the mother ship to hundreds of raiders.

Frak, frak, frak…

There was only one reason that base star would be here. It was lying in wait
for its prey to emerge. It was lying in wait for
Galactica.

Galactica,
Conference Room B

Commander Adama strode toward the conference room door. The two armed guards
saluted. “As you were,” he said. One of the guards pulled the hatch door open,
and Adama stepped over the lip of the coaming and into the room President Roslin
and her aide had set up as a temporary office. Colonel Tigh had practically made
this a prison for them, but Adama had loosened the restrictions and allowed her
to conduct business here.