Battlestar galactica 02.., p.15
Battlestar Galactica 02 - Warhawk - Richard Hatch, page 15
Boomer scowled now. "I'll shoot you if you don't put out that fumarello," he said. "You're on duty now."
"Yes, sir, Major, sir!" Starbuck said mockingly, but he extinguished the smoke all the same as he continued studying the controls.
Apollo watched him patiently, trying hard not to smile. Despite the gravity of the situation, he never failed to find his friend's banter amusing. Even Boomer, who sometimes claimed to have no sense of humor, had fallen easily into the role of straight man for Starbuck's japes. The three of them, along with Gar'Tokk, sat in the cockpit of the Starlight, a small battle cruiser that was part of Cain's new fleet. A shuttlecraft had ferried them to the shipyard in orbit around Poseidon after Cain had placed the cruiser at their disposal for the diplomatic mission.
"Status," Apollo said, prompting Starbuck.
"Everyone wants to pull rank, that's the status," his friend responded.
"Ship status," Apollo amended.
"Oh," Starbuck said. "Good. Cain's people do good work. I still don't see why we're taking this boat, though, instead of one of our own." Apollo shook his head. "Cain got us into this, so we'll risk his assets. Plus, this vessel will seem less of a threat than a quartet of Vipers, even though it's got more firepower."
Starbuck looked at him with an expression of disbelief. "Am I to believe," he said, "that you don't view me as an asset to the fleet? Is that why I'm here?"
Apollo sighed. "No more joking, Starbuck," he said. "You're here because you're the best pilot I have."
"Hmph." Starbuck powered up his helm and grunted in satisfaction as its energy field winked into being.
Apollo glanced at each of his companions in turn. "And all of you are here because there is no one in the entire fleet I would rather have at my side in a battle," he continued, and thought he saw the edges of Gar'Tokk's lips curl up slightly, tempting a smile.
"We're playing for big stakes here," Apollo continued. "This mission may explain the fate of the first colony on Poseidon. It will determine the fate of the current one, and whether any of us can find new homes there."
"These Chitain are tough," Starbuck said, "but they're no Cylons."
"They don't have to be," Boomer said. "This is their home ground, remember? And besides, we don't need any new enemies."
Chapter Nine
I'M GLAD YOU CONVINCED ME to come down to the ODOC," Athena said, and took a long draught from her tankard of ale.
Cassiopeia smiled. "I know you. I'm sure you don't want to leave the bridge for a micron, not with all that's happening now. But if you don't get some rest, you're not going to be much use to anyone." Athena nodded ponderously. She let out a long breath. Cassie was right about that, no question. She'd been on duty nearly two full cycles already, and with Apollo off trying to keep the Chitain from obliterating the fleet—a feat they seemed fully capable of achieving— Athena was practically buzzing with adrenaline. She didn't want to just leave the bridge in Omega's hands only, competent as they were.
On the other hand, it would be nice to be somewhere the members of the Council would leave her alone for a few centons.
"You're right," Athena confirmed. "But I wouldn't have been able to get any sleep at all if I had just gone straight to my quarters." There was a brief silence between the two women then. Each was alone with her thoughts, and that was all right with Athena. There were many reasons they should not be friends, but over time, those reasons had seemed less and less important. Now they were very comfortable with one another.
As long as Starbuck wasn't around.
"I hope they're all right," Cassiopeia said, almost to herself. Athena looked at her in surprise. Of course Athena herself was concerned for the members of the embassy that had been sent to the Chitain homeworld. Her brother was among them, and her lover as well. Boomer had been her friend and loyal to her family since Apollo and Starbuck's Academy days. Gar'Tokk she wasn't at all concerned about—he lived to die on the field of battle.
Yet, though Athena worried, she didn't dwell on it. These were Colonial Warriors. They knew what they were doing. If a crisis arose, she would deal with it in turn. It was a waste of time to fret about what might happen when there was enough to occupy their time in the here and now. Preparing the fleet to fight the Chitain—if it came to that—was foremost on her mind at the moment.
"I'm sure they'll be all right," Athena said, almost dismissively, though she didn't want to insult Cassie. "They always are."
"Which means their odds of continued success are going down," Cassiopeia said, narrowing her eyes as she looked speculatively at Athena.
"You're not worried about them at all? About your brother? About…about Starbuck?"
Athena shook her head and ran her right hand through her dark hair. It was a gesture she often made when frustrated, and all those close to her could identify the emotion in it.
"What?" Cassie asked.
With a small laugh, Athena stared at her. "I try not to think about it, Cassiopeia. Thanks for pushing the issue."
Cassie grimaced. "Sorry. I guess I just wanted someone to share my fears with."
"Do you know what bothers me the most?" Athena asked. "That they shouldn't even be there. If Cain had a single diplomatic bone in his body, he would have resolved this relationship with the Chitain yahren ago. But it wasn't enough to have peace with them, he needed them as allies in war against the Cylons. And then, of course, he was duplicitous enough to try to keep Poseidon's situation secret in order to boost his own population with the fleet's civilians.
"I have to say, I blame him for anything that happens to Starbuck and Apollo. Not to mention that he doesn't seem very upset that Sheba is probably dead. You'd think his own daughter…"
Athena saw the flush of Cassie's cheeks and the angry slits that were her eyes, and let her words trail off. The two women stared at one another.
"What?" Athena asked at length.
"First of all, you shouldn't presume to understand how Cain feels about his daughter. People grieve in their own ways, Athena, as I would think you'd know. Simply because Cain has a more militaristic attitude… Maybe he's right—have you ever considered that?"
Now Cassie got to her feet, leaned in toward Athena.
"Maybe the Cylons will never stop," Cassiopeia said, her features grim.
"Maybe they'll keep coming and coming, no matter how long it takes. Maybe there's nowhere to hide in the whole galaxy. That's what Cain believes, Athena, and maybe he's right."
Cassiopeia began to turn her back on Athena, but the colonel wasn't about to let her leave on that note.
"You really buy into that line of feldergarb? Are you out of your fracking mind?" Athena snapped.
She glanced around, suddenly aware of the hush in the ODOC. The bartender was staring at her but quickly looked away. A pair of servitors whispered to one another in the far corner. There were very few patrons in the room, she saw with some relief.
When Athena spoke again, she had lowered her voice considerably, but she had not failed to notice the smoldering fury her words had stoked in Cassie's eyes.
"Cain wants revenge," Athena whispered harshly. "Pure and simple. His hatred of the Cylons taints his judgment. That much is obvious. I understand his feelings. But I would not endanger what little remains of the human race for the sake of my own fragile ego!"
Cassiopeia glared at her. "You don't know him," she said evenly, her voice loud but not a shout. "You don't know anything about him. Not really."
"I think I know him well enough," Athena replied coldly. "I know that his twisted logic has sent the people closest to me into a high-risk situation that could have been avoided. The entire fleet is at risk because of him.
"Maybe it's you who doesn't care?" Athena suggested. "If your feelings for Cain blind you to the danger of the man's obsession, I can almost understand that. But what about Starbuck? He's father to your daughter, for the Lords' sake. No matter what's happened with the three of us, he's loved you—at least with the other half of his heart, the half that I can never touch—since the day he first laid eyes on you. Don't you care what happens to him?"
Cassie shot Athena a final, withering look and snarled, "He chose you, Athena. In the end, he always chose you. I guess that means it's up to you to worry about him."
Cassiopeia turned and stormed from the club.
"Wonderful," Athena whispered to herself. "Now I'm never going to get to sleep."
As she rode the ascensior that would take her to the level of her lab and her quarters, Cassiopeia began to weep in silence. There was a horrible tightness in her chest, a cold in her gut that was almost too much to bear. She did care, and that was the hell of it.
Most of what Athena had said was probably true. She didn't know anymore. Cain had been a joyful part of a past Cassie wasn't very proud of. He was a sweet memory. But at a time when day-to-day life consisted of hard work and desperate hopes for the future, there were too few sweet memories to cling to. And even fewer joys in her life: her work, and the pride she took in it. And her daughter, of course. Dalton was everything to her.
Cassiopeia worried, not merely for Starbuck and her daughter, but for them all—the entire fleet, and the human colony on Poseidon. The future had never seemed so nebulous. In truth, their chances of having any future at all were in jeopardy.
Which was part of the reason Cassiopeia was so torn. Athena had been right, to a point. Cain's obsession could be the death of the human race…
Or its salvation.
Starbuck stood at the top of the Starlight's drop-ramp and looked around with an odd combination of anxiety and wonder. They had set down at an external landing field, not far from where their Chitain escort had landed, that looked like nothing so much as a desert. As he had stepped out of the battle-cruiser into the dim sunlight, Starbuck had been frozen in place for a moment, just staring at the majesty of the Chitain homeworld.
Strangely angled spires gleamed darkly, reflective as black glass, as they stabbed, ridged, and twisted toward the green-hued sky. Starbuck had always been a ladies' man, but he was hardly a romantic. Yet the Chitain city that stretched out before them all was disturbingly beautiful, rising up, as it did, from the endless sands of the planetary surface. But Starbuck's appreciation of the city's aesthetics lasted mere microns. His attention was quickly torn from the surrounding city and focused instead on the landing area around the Starlight. His stomach lurched. The hair on the back of his neck prickled and a chill ran through Starbuck as he scanned the welcoming committee the Chitain had put together.
There were thousands of them. So many that at first it was difficult for him to focus on those Chitain warriors closest to the cruiser. They seemed to glide toward the ship as the backdraft from its engines finally died down. Their bodies twisted, slithering across the sand with a hideous whisper, a rasp of thick scales.
The Chitain closed in quickly, moving with lightning speed, surrounding the Starlight with a wall of armor and flesh and long, thin spiked weapons that Starbuck didn't even want to look at too closely. They stood well over two metrons tall. It was impossible, at first glance, to tell if there were two genders represented. Each warrior's torso was plated with what appeared to be natural armor, like the thick shell of a tortoise, but of a much darker color, a gray-green so deep it was nearly black. Each Chitain had four appendages each, a pair of upper arms that ended in three sharp, slender digits closer to talons than fingers, and a lower pair of thick, enormous pincers that Starbuck knew his subconscious mind would transform into the stuff of nightmares next light cycle.
The arms were a dark, bloody crimson, the color of the rarest gems, as was the lower portion of each Chitain warrior's body. Below the torso, the Chitain were serpentine. They stood upright, of course, but Starbuck had no idea as to the trick of it. It seemed an impossible thing to him, that these creatures should be able to hold themselves up like a humanoid on what was fundamentally a serpent's body, but on a much larger scale. It was that lower trunk that made them seem to glide along on the sand, as they slithered forward much like serpents.
The lower trunk ended in a tail, upraised and equipped with a nasty looking, needle-sharp spine that liked like a scorpion's stinger. Like their ships, Starbuck realized. Propulsion on a Chitain vessel came from the engine strands that emerged from the front of each ship and curved around to the sides, while their weapons' systems emerged from a long
"tail" that hung from the back of the vessel.
Another stinger.
It had taken several microns for Starbuck to look one of the Chitain in the face. Not because he feared them, though he would have to be an absolute mindwipe not to. No, he hadn't looked one of them in the face because it didn't look like much of a face at first.
Though their armor was obviously natural, he had assumed that the featureless shell that seemed almost tucked down between broad shoulders was a helmet of some sort. But no—the flat, wide shell Starbuck was staring at had four thin, slitted eyes, and, at the very bottom of its head, a wide mouth whose teeth flashed menacingly.
Starbuck stared at them, calculating the odds of getting off this rock alive.
"Whose idea was this trip?" he asked aloud, glaring at Apollo, who stood just ahead of him with Gar'Tokk.
At his side, Boomer leaned over slightly and whispered, "I think it was ours," then tilted his head to indicate the Chitain. "From where I stand, they don't seem all that enthused about our arrival."
"They sure are ugly little mugjapes, aren't they?" Starbuck asked in a voice close to a whisper. He didn't think the Chitain spoke Kobollian, but he didn't want to start an intergalactic incident either.
As they walked in formation down the ramp, Gar'Tokk glanced over his shoulder and down at Starbuck.
"I'm certain they feel the same way about you, Captain," the Noman said coolly.
"Me?" Starbuck asked incredulously. "Nah. Have you seen these dimples?"
Apollo was aware of Starbuck's carping. That is to say, he heard it, but he paid no attention to it whatsoever. Instead, he concentrated on the emotional groundswell that was building on the surface of the Chitain world. These creatures, horrid though they appeared, were extremely intelligent and advanced. They looked upon the arrival of the human embassy with a mixture of amusement, disdain, and fascination. It was, after all, a visit from a heretofore unknown alien race.
There was also, he did not fail to notice, a strong current of hostility coming from the Chitain. It came as no surprise to him, however. They were, by the briefest observation, quite obviously an inherently warlike race.
A good thing, then, that Cain was not a part of this diplomatic mission. He and the Chitain were too much alike to do more than try to kill each other.
Apollo's eyes ticked from one Chitain warrior to the next as he and the rest of the diplomatic party reached the bottom of the drop-ramp. He tried to find one who stood out among them as the obvious leader, or to whom they deferred, but there didn't seem to be any particular spokesperson for the aliens.
Then he realized that he had been analyzing them through the lens of human expectations. The Chitain did not wear clothing of any kind, so there were none of the accoutrements that might have accompanied rank in human society. Observing more closely, he noticed a much subtler form of differentiation. Several, actually.
First and foremost, the Chitain were not of one, uniform color. Their armored torsos varied in shade and striation. But more interestingly, they seemed to indulge in some kind of ritual scarring—the number and style of the scars symbolic of something, certainly.
The desert wind whipped past his face, kicking up sand that grated at his flesh and made Apollo squint against the sun and grit. It was warm on the planet, but with none of the humidity of Poseidon.
Finally, his eyes focused on the small group of Chitain who seemed to have separated themselves from the gathered army. Five of them, standing—if their erect position could truly be called standing—in a semi-circle around the bottom of the drop-ramp. One by one, Apollo studied their faces, glancing quickly at the armored chest of each warrior. One had significantly more scarring than the others, and some of those scars seemed to be almost…artistic. As if they had been added for aesthetic purposes. Apollo might not have believed the Chitain capable of appreciating aesthetics if not for the beauty of their architecture. It was to this Chitain warrior that Apollo bowed his head as his feet touched the sand. The alien stood more than a foot taller than Apollo, and another man might have remained on the ramp to keep himself at eye level with the leader of the opposition. Apollo had no such concerns.
"I am Commander Apollo of the Battlestar Galactica, here representing the human colony of Poseidon," he began, and then proceeded to introduce the others.
The Chitain officers barely noticed Boomer and Starbuck, keeping their eyes on Apollo except for that briefest of moments when they all glanced at Gar'Tokk. Their faces were, to Apollo's eyes, expressionless, but he did note the tiniest bit of mental wariness. Perhaps they recognized Gar'Tokk as a kindred spirit, he thought. Or a threat.
Apollo looked expectantly at the warrior he believed to be the Chitain leader. Looked, and waited. Half a centari seemed to tick past as he waited patiently, unmoved and unfrightened by the other's silence. Though Gar'Tokk stood calmly at his side, Apollo could sense Boomer and Starbuck moving restlessly behind him. He didn't know if Starbuck was completely aware of the gravity of their situation, and he didn't want to take any chances. Apollo turned, hoping the Chitain leader did not take offense at the motion, and glared at Starbuck for a micron, silently communicating without any need for telepathy exactly how important his friend's silence was at that moment.
There were four of them, and thousands of Chitain warriors—warriors whose weapons showed how much they relished killing.
When Apollo returned his attention to the Chitain leader, squinting again, he saw that a new warrior had taken up position beside the leader. The armored chest of this new arrival had a greenish tint to it, and though there were only three jagged lines carved into that shell, there were also several more creative designs.
