Rapidly the computer sorted out the names of people whose qualifications fit the assignment as entered in the program. Athena ripped out the readout copy and said:
"Five specialists. Three support."
Adama nodded.
"Lock it in," he said.
"Here's the roster," Athena said, handing her father the paper. He examined it briefly, then thrust it at Starbuck.
"This is the team, Starbuck. You and Boomer go get them. They might be a trifle recalcitrant. Give them a good pep talk, okay?"
As Starbuck started to leave the bridge, he glanced at the list. He stopped abruptly and whirled on Adama.
"Commander, there must be some mistake."
Adama raised his eyebrows, looking as if he had no suspicion of what the lieutenant meant. Starbuck moved closer to him and whispered:
"These are—they're criminals. They're aboard the grid barge."
A hint of a smile from the commander before he whispered back:
"You have the authority to collect them, Lieutenant."
"Yes sir, I know, but—"
"You have your orders, Lieutenant."
"Aye-aye, sir."
A worried look on his face, Starbuck gestured to Boomer to follow him. Prisoners? he thought. Why in the twelve worlds of blessed memory would the computer come up with a list of prisoners? Grid-rats. Barge-lice. Is this the tribute we're giving to those three doomed cadets, sending a bunch of criminal misfits on a mission of grave importance? Starbuck shook his head from side to side, wondering if the computer was suddenly under enemy control, and if this was a part of the trap that the commander had earlier spoken of.
"What's the matter?" Boomer muttered as they strode down the corridor. "Something serious?"
"No, we're just handing the safety of the fleet over to a bunch of murderers and cutthroats."
Boomer scowled.
"Well," he said, "as long as it isn't serious."
CHAPTER FOUR
Croft:
In my dream I seem to separate from my body and drift upward, through the walls of this lousy cell, through the superstructure of the prison barge itself. For a while I float above the ship, looking down on its dim gray exterior, its battered sections of unpolished uncaring metal—seeing simultaneously, it seems, the hundreds of poor wretches who are squirming within the squares of her grids, each prisoner trying to find one comfortable spot in which to rest. A con's greatest goal is the search for a comfortable area to rest in. You never find it, but you keep looking. You're like a rat searching for an enclosed safe niche and settling for a scratchy rope being blown from side to side in a stiff wind.
I can't stand staring at the barge any longer and I seem to catch a magical air current that has mysteriously snaked its way through the vacuum of space, just to find me and help me to escape. Escape, of course, escape. The only real dream a prisoner can have, no matter in what form his dreaming mind disguises it, is escape. He may escape from his body, as I do, or find himself in dreamland of sweet pulpy food, beautiful people, and complete luxury.
I slide off into empty space, leaving the fleet behind me. Looking back over my shoulder I watch the ships turn into slowly flying insects, gradually diminishing to speck and disappearing. The Galactica is last to disappear; it i the largest insect of all. As I look forward again, I know that ahead is either the good dream or the nightmare. Ii the good dream I land at the summit of a mountain, alone and enjoying my aloneness. In full gear, my ham delighting in the feel of the sturdy ice-ax through the thickness of my gloves, my feet shifting about and digging hard-metal crampons more firmly into the summit's icy surface, the hood of my parka enveloping my head so that only a narrow view of the great craggy vistas is allowed, a monstrously fierce wind blowing into my face in spite of the narrow parka opening. And, unless the dream includes the climb or the descent (rappeling in an unlikely slow-motion slide), that's all there is to the good dream. It's good simply because I feel so good. I have been pardoned, redeemed, allowed to resume the only kind of life I've ever loved.
The nightmare is nearly identical to the good dream. Except the wind is hurtling at me in hurricane force, my parka is ripped to shreds, my ice-ax is tumbling away from me down the mountainside, my feet are beginning to slide out from under me. And Leda is there.
Leda is there, reaching for me. I don't know if she is trying to save me or trying to kill me. And that dilemma is the essence of the nightmare.
This time it seems to be the good dream. Or is that Leda below me, hauling her tall form and considerable but well-structured weight over an impossibly difficult cornice?
I never find out, for the next thing I'm aware of, Jester, the turnkey with the permanent sneer, is shaking me awake. It seems as if he's simultaneously trying to bash in my skull on the metal flooring.
"Stop it, Jester!" I cry. "I'm awake. I'm awake. See my eyes. Open, right? Awake. Open means awake."
Finally, reluctantly, he stops shaking me, mutters in that voice that sounds like scree underfoot:
"You're wanted."
"Wanted?"
"Get up. Colonial warriors here to see you."
"Tell 'em I only receive visitors at teatime."
He pulls me to my feet and pushes me out of the cell. As we stroll down the free-channel, between the rows of grid-cells, I hear the various dream noises of those other prisoners who are in their cells and not on some laborious work detail somewhere. The moans and grunts seem to blend into a chant of hatred and despair.
Jester takes me, surprisingly, to a briefing room in the barge's executive quarters. The place is well laid out. Plush chairs, posh tables, decorated mirrors, bad but colorful paintings on the walls—the kind of paintings that provide the approved reality for idiots who don't know a painting from a picture.
Standing on one side of the room, as if they're disdaining the use of the luxurious furniture, are two tall colonial warriors—one white, one black, both formidable-looking. The black is clearly bright, he has the kind of questing eyes that tell you he hasn't learned it all yet and neither have you. The white's a handsome guy, clearly a ladies' man, yet tough, the kind on whom a dress-uniform cape looks molded. His body is strong and muscular, I can tell he's from the best breed of pilots. But his eyes, his eyes are deceptive. They say he can bluff and he knows how to call a bluff. There's a little bit of con man in them, a little bit of fool, a little bit of hero. Take your pick. I think I'd kind of like him, like both of them in fact, if they weren't rotten colonial warriors.
Well, they might not want to take advantage of the soft furniture, but I might not see anything like one of these overstuffed conference chairs again, not for a long time. Ignoring Jester, I stride to the seat that obviously belongs to the head of the table during meetings, plop down on it and put my legs up, like I'm ready to call the meeting to order and am merely waiting for the yes-man to quit shuffling his notes. Neither of the warriors shows much reaction to my audacity, but Jester, rushing toward me, is clearly furious. Before he can get to me, though, the black waves him away.
The white begins to speak, addressing his remarks to his companion, talking of me in the third person in that bureaucratic way I'm always encountering and always despising.
"Croft," he says, reading the information off the screen of a mini-computer he holds in his hand. "Commander of the Snow Garrison on the ice planet Kalpa. He and his gang raided a Cylon outpost."
"Nothing illegal about that," the other man says, a smidgen of irony in his voice. Sharp guy, like I thought.
"Not a military operation," the white says. "Armed robbery. They plundered a Cylon platinum mine. Wouldn't surrender the bounty to their colonial commander."
Just like all the others, this one's treating our escapade like an act of piracy. It didn't feel like that at the time. Took me a long while to assemble just the right team to join me and Leda. Besides Wolfe and Thane, there were the four others, the ones whose names I can't remember anymore. Their deaths have interfered with my ab
ility to remember what they were called.
And it was no picnic stealing into that Cylon sector undetected, climbing the steep north face of the mountain overlooking the Cylon encampment and the mine, trying to hammer pitons into rotten rock that would not accept them, losing two men while attempting the traverse across the verglas-surfaced slope just because Thane had been too late in shifting into the boot-ax belay that might have saved them. And then there was the rope descent to the encampment in the dead of night after glissading down half of the gradual-sloped south face of the mountain. Our ropes were securely anchored in a saddle, but we knew there was danger always present. Especially since the Cylon guns could pick us off at will if they spotted us. But they didn't spot us. We sneaked into the encampment, slaughtered all the Cylon warriors, lost two more of our own team. The rest of the Cylons, the workers, capitulated to us easily, and we got out with all the platinum we could store inside the Cytan freighter whose controls Wolfe knew as well as those in a viper cockpit. After all that, that smug colonial commander, with his aristocratic overbearing manner, tried to force us to heave to (who were the pirates, them or us?) and surrender the bounty. What right did he have to it?
"He didn't go in under the Cylon guns," I say to the two men, "so he didn't deserve any part of it. Who are you? I like to know the bilge rats I'm dealing with."
Both men stand tall and exchange a puzzled glance before replying.
"Starbuck," says the white man. "Viper pilot. Blue Squadron, Battlestar Galactica."
"Boomer. Commander Adama's Strike Wing."
Adama, eh? I should have known his ugly puss was involved in this somehow. Adama was the colonial commander who'd tried to appropriate my bounty from me. His angular face with those icy but penetrating eyes appears before me. I almost want to tell Starbuck and Boomer to find a quick black hole and jump in, but I decide to play a waiting game, see what they're up to. Anything to stay out of that cell for a while.
"What's the drill?" I ask.
"You'll find out soon enough," Starbuck replies, then motions toward the door. I look in the direction of his gesture. Wolfe is now standing there, his bullish body nearly filling the entranceway. Well, the lower half of the entranceway anyhow. Wolfe's not very tall, but it doesn't matter much, the way his body—with its low center of gravity and muscular broad shoulders—is constructed. His hair is as shaggy as ever, Wolfe and combs are natural enemies, and his deepset eyes smolder with the usual rage, some of it probably deriving from the sight of me sitting comfortably in my plush briefing-room chair.
A guard pushes him forward into the room, and the chains which are always required on a rebellious bull like Wolfe clank against the metal flooring. Wolfe looks back at his guard as if he'd take the man out right now if the chains didn't inhibit his movements so much.
Starbuck mutters to Boomer, but loud enough so I can hear: "That computer sure knows how to pick 'em." He looks down at the mini-computer screen. "Wolfe. Climber. Muscle man. Snow Garrison. A one-man task force."
Wolfe says nothing, just stares with his rheumy hate-filled eyes. There are bruises all over his face. His jailers are using psychological methods to keep him in line, I see. A wisecrack comes to my lips but before I can send it in Wolfe's direction, my attention is diverted toward the doorway again. It's dark, but I know what's coming. I can always sense Thane when he's within a kilometer of me. Sure enough, his lean, graceful snow leopard of a body eases itself into the room as if there were no turnkey guiding his way. A chill runs up and down my spine, freezes all my vertebrae. Thane always strikes me this way. His colorless eyes remind me of ice, or perhaps verglas might be the better description. Verglas—the brittle thin covering of ice on a rock, a shiny and slippery veneer, dangerous. His hair, in direct contrast to Wolfe's, is close-cut, its ivory-white color almost invisible against the whiteness of his scalp and the prison pallor of his face. I wonder if he still hates me, still resents me as a figure of authority, however much my leadership qualifications have been diminished by my hitch in this stinking prison.
"Thane," Starbuck says, staring at the screen, "demolitions expert and specialist in alien environments."
Thane steps forward and speaks. His voice is as quiet as his movements—and, in a way, just as graceful.
"When people talk about me, I like to see their eyes."
Starbuck glances up from the mini-computer. Interpreting their look at each other is a job for an expert in facial language. What with the trickiness in Starbuck's active eyes and the distance in Thane's placid eyes, there seems no possible meeting ground for communication between the two. Ever.
"I work with breathing gear," Thane says, his voice as gentle as powdery snow. "Rare gases, chemical blends. I can take you through land, air, fire, and water."
"It says you're in for murder," Starbuck says.
"That, too," says Thane, mysteriously smiling.
Murder. I'd forgotten that. After our capture Thane had gotten into a brawl with the arresting officers. He knocked four of them down. Two never got up. I shouldn't have been surprised. When we met, rumors of past killings performed skillfully by Thane had preceded him.
I stare at Wolfe and Thane, wondering what to say to them, or if I should remain mute in order to scout out the general terrain. I am about to make the mountaineering hand signal that means all's well, but a voice from the doorway nearly knocks me right out of my seat:
"Hello, Croft, you miserable scabby insect."
I don't want to look. With Wolfe and Thane already here, I should have expected Leda would be next. I don't want to look. I look.
I'm not surprised at what I see. There's no way these abominable jailers could subdue her spirit. She still looks stunning. A big-boned woman, she's a shade taller than me and, in my present debilitated condition, I'm sure she appears more powerful. She's cut her hair short, though it's not as close-cropped as Thane's—its reddish color still brings out the keenness of her lynx-eyed look. Her high cheekbones add to her slightly alien appearance. She hates me. I want, this moment, to take her in my arms and beg her to love me again.
It's hard to remember when things were good for us. We met so long ago, before the platinum-mine raid, before Kalpa—on our mutual home-world of Scorpia. I vaguely recall a time when we were so young that we romped and frolicked, when our love was predominant, more important than the petty drives that impelled us later. After the platinum raid, she blamed me for the deaths of the four men and women, but the real split between us had formed much earlier. The last happy time I can clearly recall was a mountain-climbing expedition in the difficult Caprican range. We were both on extended furlough, with added time for injuries resulting from some acts of combat that the military chose to deem heroic, and we climbed those mountains alone, refusing even to take communicators along so that the safety-conscious Mountain Control Squad could know our whereabouts. We could easily have been lost forever, crushed in the white death of an avalanche, dropped down into a crevasse. But we not only survived our foolhardy adventure, we conquered five summits, one of them previously unclimbed.
What forced us apart after that is a series of little mysteries. An argument over a matter of battle strategy resulted in a small rift—in the terms of mountaineering, a crack in otherwise sturdy rock. A petty domestic harangue perhaps increased the crack to a roughed-out hollow. More disagreements, more dissatisfactions, more suppressing of real emotion, led to the hollow becoming part of a gully, the gully growing into a ravine, the ravine finally—with the tragic end of the raid—becoming a deep crevasse separating us forever. Even now, the moraine, the rock and glacial debris, of our lives seems to lie around us. Well, I carry the comparison too far. Leda would say I carry everything too far.
"She looks like she could take us all on," Boomer whispers to Starbuck, clearly impressed by Leda's formidable appearance. "With or without chains. She'd beat us all."
"Leda," Starbuck says, consulting his computer again. "Medic first class. Expert in laser wounds. A
nd arctic experienced. She's—
"What's the mission?" Leda interrupts sharply.
"Commander Adama'll be briefing you," Boomer says.
Leda glances my way.
"Adama, huh? You buddy-buddy with Adama now, Croft?"
I laugh.
"Just like a carabiner snaplocked to a piton," I say.
Leda scoffs at the joke, then addresses Starbuck and Boomer:
"To have Croft and myself in the same place at the same time invites disaster. I suggest you return me to my cell. I'm better off with the rot there than with the likes of Croft."
Starbuck smiles. What in blazes is he so pleased about?
"I take it you don't like him," he says to Leda.
Leda smiles broadly, displaying her white even teeth.
"I'm married to him," she says. The smile goes away as quickly as it came, and she speaks more softly: "And no, I don't like him."
"Hello, Leda," I say. "You're still prettier than a Libran—
"Shut up, Croft!" she says loudly. "I'm not taking any more of your birdlime. None of us are."
Boomer examines the four of us, the old team now in irrevocable rift, and mutters to Starbuck:
"Cozy little group. This is one mission, Starbuck, I know you're not going to volunteer for."
I feel for you, Boomer, but I'll never be able to reach you.
"Let's get these... these gentlemen and lady out of here, Boomer," Starbuck says, as he folds up his minicomputer and slips it into a pocket of his flight jacket.
Boomer looks very disturbed as he orders Leda and Wolfe unchained and then herds us all out of the briefing room. I'm going to miss that chair, and I figure it's going to be a long time before I ease myself into one like it again.
The Cylon Death Machine Page 6