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“I got nothing here.” Dr. Cottle removed the cigarette from his mouth and used it to gesture at the readout. The smell of smoke awoke tobacco cravings in Kara and she longed for a cigar, the one she had been looking forward to before Peter’s pod showed up. Behind them, Peter Attis himself lay on a table, his head and upper body beneath an overhanging shelf that scanned him repeatedly while he remained perfectly still. “You can see for yourself. No tracers, no chips, no implants, no Cylonitis. If the Cylons sent him here so they could somehow use him to track the Fleet, they didn’t do a very good job.”

  “He says the Cylons had him in a medical facility for a while,” Lee said. “Anything to indicate what they might have done to him?”

  “Nothing I can see,” Cottle said. “Soft-tissue injuries won’t show, though. He broke his left humerus some time ago—”

  “I fell off a horse,” Peter said.

  “He was twelve,” Kara added.

  “I’m not sure we should ask how you know that,” Baltar said.

  “Right.” Cottle took a heavy drag from his cigarette. “Anyway, the break’s long since healed. I don’t see any metabolic problems and he’s not carrying any weird viruses or bacteria. There’s more I could probably tell you about him, but it gets a little personal.”

  “Spare us, then,” Lee muttered.

  “So I pass?” Peter asked from the table.

  “You’re done, kid,” Cottle said to Peter. “Get the hell out of my sickbay so I can attend to some real patients.”

  “Gladly.” Peter rolled off the examination table, careful to avoid cracking his head on the scanner. Chloe Eseas, a medical technician, helped him up. Sickbay, like most of Galactica, was cluttered and clunky, with pieces of medical equipment crammed into corners and odd places. Lighting alternated between too dim and too bright, and the place never seemed completely clean, for all that it was the closest thing to a hospital the Fleet had.

  “So you’re really Peter Attis?” Chloe said.

  “That’s me,” he said, getting to his feet. He wore a sickbay gown that closed—more or less—in the back.

  “Wow. I have all your songs. Or I did until the Cylons attacked. What was it like singing a duet with Penelope Troy?”

  “She was great,” Peter said vaguely. “Really talented. Are my clothes somewhere nearby?”

  While Peter dressed behind a screen, Cottle ground out the remains of his current cigarette and tapped another on the back of his hand. Kara was half ready to ask him for one, though she didn’t really do cigarettes and preferred to save her cigars for special occasions, like card games or post-mission gloating.

  “How’s the harvest coming along, Captain?” Cottle asked as he shut down the scanner. “Are we going to abandon Planet Goop? The Cylons know we’re here now, unless you managed to kill them before they transmitted a signal to wherever the hell it is they transmit to.”

  “I have no idea, doc,” Lee said. “You’ll probably find out when I do.”

  “We need the meds that goop can make for us,” Cottle said. He nodded toward a glass-doored cabinet. There was space for several hundred drug ampules, but Kara counted fewer than ten. “That’s my entire store of radiation meds, Captain. Once that goes, your DNA is on its own. We might even be able to synthesize some more antibiotics, too, but—”

  “But not if we leave Planet Goop,” Lee finished.

  “Don’t interrupt your elders, son,” Cottle growled around his cigarette. “It ain’t polite. Even when they’re stating the obvious.”

  Commander William Adama stood in the center of a whirlwind. People hustled around the CIC, checking printouts, making urgent calls, and tapping keyboards. The Dradis continued its low, metallic growl as it scanned in all directions for Cylons. A dozen monitors flickered with graphics, videos, and data readouts. Saul Tigh sometimes stood behind Adama and sometimes lurked around the workstations. It made the crew nervous to have Tigh suddenly pop up behind one of them to bark a question or an order, but Adama had given up trying to get him to stop. Commanding a fleet was a lot like juggling cats in a rainstorm—sometimes you had to let the small stuff slide because something big with claws was waiting to drop on your head.

  “Update on the evacuation, Lieutenant?” Adama asked.

  “Half done, sir,” Tactical Officer Anastasia Dualla reported from her station. She wore a headset that covered one ear and slung a microphone across her mouth. “The Monarch should be ready for takeoff in under half an hour.”

  “I’ll have Jump coordinates ready for them by then, sir,” put in Felix Gaeta. “We should be all right.”

  “If the frakking Cylons don’t pop up again,” Tigh growled. “And they will. Mark it.”

  “How much more food are they estimating we’ll be able to extract from the algae?” Adama asked.

  “It’s hard to give anything beyond a rough estimate, sir,” Gaeta hedged.

  “Just answer the damn question, Lieutenant,” Tigh ordered.

  Gaeta pursed his lips and kept his eyes on Adama, who was also ignoring Tigh. “We might get an extra week out of what we have so far. Ten days at most.”

  “A week?” Tigh shouted. “That’s nothing! They were down there for four days. What the hell were they doing?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question, sir, or do you want an answer?” Gaeta asked with utter politeness.

  “It’s not damned rhetorical,” Tigh snapped. “What have they been doing down there?”

  “The Monarch is a mining ship,” Gaeta replied. “It took time to adapt its operations from digging to scooping. Also, Planet Goop has an atmosphere but it isn’t breathable. Putting everyone in breathing masks makes everything harder to see and slows down operations. We also have to rotate the crew because of the radiation levels, and the workers can only take so much radiation exposure. Suppiles of anti-radiation meds are limited. That slows things down as well.”

  “Sounds like a lot of excuses to me,” Tigh said. “You need to—”

  “Sir, with respect, I’m just the messenger. May I suggest that you address your … concerns to the captain of the Monarch? She’s the head of the harvest operation, not me.”

  “I think I’ll do just that. Dualla, get me Renee Demeter on the line. Now!”

  This caught Adama’s attention. Tigh was clearly in the wrong, bent on solving impossible problems by shouting at subordinates, as if yelling would make them suddenly able to work miracles. But now Gaeta had managed to point him in another direction, toward the Monarch. Renee Demeter was captain of her own ship. She answered to no one but Adama, and then only in matters that concerned her ship’s role in the Fleet. On the Monarch, she was sovereign, and Tigh had no authority over her. If Tigh started shouting at her and calling her incompetent in public, she would answer in kind and he would come across looking like an idiot. Adama shot Gaeta a hard look. Had he set Tigh up on purpose? Adama wouldn’t put it past him. Gaeta had a subtle touch when it came to handling conflict. But Gaeta’s expression was bland as a sand dune.

  “Belay that order, Dee,” Adama said. “I think Captain Demeter has enough to worry about right now. Getting those people off the planet before another wave of Cylons shows up is more important.”

  For a moment Tigh looked ready to challenge Adama’s order. Adama looked at him, bland as Gaeta. Then Tigh straightened his uniform and turned to look at the video feeds. Adama closed his eyes. Another cat successfully juggled. What was next?

  “Sir,” Dualla said. She was a dark-skinned woman with surpring hazel eyes. “President Roslin is on the line for you.”

  I had to ask, he thought, and picked up a receiver from the central station. It had a cord attached to it. Adama remembered the days of cellular communication, computer networks, and wireless everything. The Cylons, however, had taken to networks like lions to antelope. The frakking things could infect and wipe out a network in seconds, fatally crippling whatever systems the network ran. So the Colonies had tossed digital out the window and stampeded to bring back ana
log. It made hell out of computing an FTL Jump when your drive computer couldn’t talk to your helm computer, but it sure beat the Cylons twitching your network from a distance and making you land in the heart of star. Later, after everyone thought the Cylons were gone for good, the military had cautiously returned to networking its computers. Adama, however, had refused to allow it on the Galactica, and thank the Lords of Kobol for that. Far as he knew, every other Battlestar had fallen victim to Cylon viruses. The Galactica alone had not.

  “Madam President,” Adama said, resisting an urge to play with the phone cord. “A pleasure.”

  “Commander.” Laura Roslin’s voice was warm as always, but Adama’s practiced ear caught the undercurrent of pain and fatigue. Roslin was suffering, in every sense of the word, from terminal breast cancer. She had kept it a secret for months, using experimental treatments to force pain and weakness to stay at arm’s length, but lately the malignant tissue had made terrible encroachments into her body. Within the month, she would be dead. Adama refused to let himself think about this—he was juggling cats, after all—but the small part of his mind that never quite did what it was told feared that the grief from her loss would devastate him. Only the thought that Gaius Baltar would become president in her stead frightened him more.

  “I hear the Monarch is pulling up stakes,” she said.

  “That’s true.”

  “The latest projections tell me we’ve only harvested eight days worth of food material, and that’s if we refine none of it for anti-radiation meds and antibiotics.”

  Apparently Roslin had access to better information than Adama did. It didn’t really surprise him. “That’s close to what I’ve heard, yes.”

  “Are you sure we need to evacuate right now, Bill?” she said. “You know your job and I realize you’re keeping our safety in mind, but we also really need that algae. It’s not just the food. Medicinal supplies are at an all-time low. The Lesbos is dealing with an outbreak of strep that’s eating up antibiotics. We’ve tried to make the adults suffer through it on their own and reserve the remaining meds for the children, but that only means the adults reinfect the kids.”

  Adama nodded, though Roslin couldn’t see him. “I know, Madam President.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to call her “Laura” when other people were within earshot. “But the Cylons must know we’re here, and it’s only a matter of time before they send another basestar or a flock of Raiders.”

  Roslin sighed heavily. “I trust you to know what’s best when it comes to Fleet security. I’m also worried about the food and meds. Bill, is there any compromise on this? It’s been over an hour since the Cylon attack. Maybe they aren’t coming back for a while.”

  Adama tightened his lips. He knew the food and medicine supplies were tight—they had been since the first day after the attack. Now it seemed as if the Lords of Kobol had handed them a bounteous harvest only to have the Cylons chase them away like lions chasing a herd away from the watering hole.

  “They always come back,” he said. “But I wonder …”

  “Yes, Bill?”

  He sighed. There were risks, and there were risks. The lack of food and medicine would kill them just as surely, if not as quickly, as the Cylons. “Maybe we can evacuate the planet and wait a day or so. If the Cylons show up, we can Jump away. If they don’t, we can resume the harvest.”

  “Sounds like a plan,″ Roslin said, relief temporarily overcoming the fatigue in her voice. Adama could almost see her behind her desk on the Colonial One, stray tendrils of her glossy auburn hair getting caught in her glasses while she flipped through reports and signed papers. Billy Keikeya, her chief aide, would be hovering near her elbow with more bulletins and paperwork.

  Adama grimaced and banished the image. Roslin, he happened to know, spent most of her time these days propped up on a couch next to her desk. Her hair had become lackluster and brittle, her skin pasty, her face drawn with pain. He wondered if the real reason he was allowing the Fleet to remain in orbit around Planet Goop was that it would make Laura Roslin happy and bring some small relief to her stress and suffering.

  “I’ll expect to see you over a dinner of fresh algae salad when this is over, Madam President,” he said, as if Roslin had never heard the word “cancer.”

  “Count on it, Commander,” she said, and rang off.

  Karl “Helo” Agathon checked his watch and lengthened his stride. He was a tall man, almost rangy, with close-cropped dark hair and a narrow face. He was also late for his appointment in the brig.

  Helo trotted around and through the groups of people who kept getting in his way. Familiar ship sounds echoed around him—the slight hiss of carbon dioxide scrubbers, the tromp of soldier boots, the cricket creak of a hatch opening or closing. Sharon had so little to look forward to, so little to do. He knew his daily visits were the high point—hell, the only point—of her day. He hated seeing her in the brig, locked behind steel mesh and unyielding Plexiglas. He couldn’t even hear her voice except through a telephone line, let alone touch her face or hold her hand. It wasn’t fair. Sharon—this copy of her—hadn’t done anything to anyone. It was the frakking opposite, in fact. She had saved Helo’s life on Caprica numerous times, helped Starbuck retrieve the Arrow of Apollo, and just a couple days ago had single-handedly destroyed an entire fleet of Cylon raiders. And now she was carrying Helo’s child.

  He dodged around an ensign who was half-hidden behind a stack of papers. Yeah, some people insisted that Sharon was only frakking with him, that she had tricked him into falling in love because the Cylons were desperate to conceive children of their own, and Cylon women could only get pregnant if love was involved.

  During the Cylon invasion, Sharon, a pilot, had left Helo on Caprica when Helo had given up his seat on her Raptor to a refugee. Helo had then gone on the run from Cylon troops, certain they would eventually catch up with him. And then Sharon showed up again, almost out of nowhere. Together they ran a harrowing journey across Caprica to a spaceport, where they stole a ship to rendezvous with Galactica. Along the way, they had fallen in love and accidentally conceived a child. Or Helo had thought the child was accidental. Only later had he learned that his lover was a different Sharon, that this Sharon had been assigned to make him fall in love with her to see if she could conceive. The flaw was that Sharon had fallen in love with Helo as well, and instead of turning Helo over to the other Cylons after the conception, she had helped him escape and fled with him to the Galactica.

  Now she spent her days in the brig, mistrusted and hated by the few crewmembers who knew about her. It made Helo’s blood boil to think about it. Keeping a pregnant woman in the brig—how humane was that? But Adama remained firm. Caprica Sharon, as she was sometimes called, would stay in the brig for the foreseeable future. As a prisoner of war, there would be no trial, no lawyer, no judge. Just Adama.

  Helo realized his footsteps were pounding angrily on the deck plates, as if he could punch holes through them like an angry giant. He forced himself to calm down. Sharon was under enough stress. She didn’t need his tension adding to hers.

  Helo took the familiar staircase down to the brig and headed up the side corridor to the cell block specially designed to hold a Cylon. He emerged in a dimly lit open space. Sharon’s cell was ahead of him, but the two marines assigned to guard her day and night were nowhere to be seen. It took Helo a startled second to realize that the marines were both sprawled motionless on the floor. The door to Sharon’s cell stood quietly open. The interior was empty. Helo froze. A thousand different thoughts flicked through his head. Part of him exulted. Another part of him worried. Yet another felt a pang of fear. Indecision held him motionless. Should he raise the alarm first or check the marines? Maybe he should just … leave. Let someone else find the scene, give Sharon a good head start to wherever she was going. Or maybe he should—

  Someone tapped his shoulder from behind. His heart jerked and Helo whirled. He got a tiny glimpse of the snarl that twisted Sharon�
��s beautiful face just before her fist caught him under the jaw.

  CHAPTER 4

  “So what does everyone do for fun around here?” Peter asked.

  “Uh, well … not a lot,” Kara admitted. “I mean, some of us play cards and grab a drink. Sometimes you can get into a pickup game of Pyramid. Help me out here, Lee.”

  Lee Adama raised his hands. “You brought him down here.”

  They were sitting around a small table in the pilots’ quarters. Bunks and metal lockers lined the walls and the air carried the stale smells of old sweat and cigar smoke. Baltar had cited urgent vice presidential business and excused himself, though he said he would want to talk to Peter later about what it had been like to live among Cylons.

  “What do the kids do?” Peter asked. “On the other ships, I mean.”

  Kara shrugged. “I never really thought about it. They must do something, go to some kind of school. My life’s pretty straight-ahead. The alarm goes off, I jump in my Viper, I wipe out more Cylons, I come back, I play cards, I drink. Sometimes I’ll catch an episode of The Colonial Gang. It’s pretty boring, even for a talk show, but there isn’t much else on, you know?”

  “What a life.” Peter gave the back of Kara’s hand a brief touch, and Kara felt it all the way up to her eyes and down to her toes. “It must be hard.”

  “It pays the bills,” she said with a flip smile. “Except there aren’t any.”

  Lee remained stonily silent, but his resentment filled the room with icy water. Kara gave him a sidelong glance. What was up with him? There was nothing between them. Lee Adama had no official hold on her, no deep emotional link. And she didn’t want one, either. The more she thought about it, the more she decided Lee Adama could frak himself.

  “Maybe I could do a—” Peter began, but was interrupted by a knock on the doorframe. Kara looked up, surprised. No one knocked at the pilots’ quarters.

  Billy Keikeya stood in the entrance, his blue suit and black tie looking too tidy and out of place in the battered military quarters. His curly, ash-blond hair and enormous blue eyes made him look about fifteen—okay, sixteen—though as Laura Roslin’s chief aide, Kara figured he had to be somewhere in his twenties at least.