His crew shouted to each other to strap themselves in. Absently, Nadu returned to his chair. He sat as Lightning’s engines roared to their full capacity.
They ran from the fight, ran until they could get far away to safely Jump. The monstrosity on their screens was growing smaller. No one spoke, all waiting for some reaction from the other craft.
Seven of nineteen. And what could he do?
He turned to his dradis man. “Was there any sign of the lander?”
“No, Captain, no sign. None at all. But it was hard to see anything else close by the warship. They were shooting at something—something my instruments picked up. It could have been the lander or a Viper. Then it was gone.”
He didn’t say what Nadu was thinking. The warship must have shot the lander out of the sky.
The warship was growing ever smaller. The Cylons hadn’t fired on them.
“Captain!” the dradis man called. “They are not pursuing. The other ship is moving away!”
“If we leave the planet,” Griff surmised, “I guess we’re no longer a problem.”
To the Cylons, the Lightning was insignificant. The fact only increased Nadu’s rage.
This was not the end of it. But how to pay back a ship full of Cylons? Nadu welcomed the right sort of death. But not suicide. He had lost seven. He could still save the other twelve.
For half a minute, he thought about going to the authorities. See what that outdated warship might do when confronted by a dozen Battlestars. But he doubted the authorities would even listen. They all knew Nadu’s reputation. They would come up with a dozen reasons to arrest him instead.
No, he would not involve the Colonies in any official capacity. But that didn’t mean he was done with this.
The Cylons had not seen the last of the Lightning.
Nadu hummed. He had an even better idea.
“Captain,” the dradis man called, “the warship has disappeared.”
“Gone to the far side of the planet, no doubt,” Griff added.
Had the warship been hiding all along? The Cylons must be guarding something on the planet. Something really valuable. Nadu’s instincts were never wrong.
“Captain! We have reached the Jump coordinates!”
Nadu nodded. “We’re out of here—for now.”
He stared at the screen as the crew made the final preparations to Jump. “We have to assume no one was left alive.” He looked to his second in command. “We go to the safe coordinates. Griff knows the way.”
It was Griff’s turn to nod. The comm man looked surprised.
Nadu added, “We have to have a little meeting of our own.”
Zarek opened his eyes.
He was still strapped into the chair. He looked around the inside of the lander. A few things had shaken loose, but not much. Boone had been good at stashing things away.
He had seen Boone die. And the others. All but the Creep, who had been lost under a pile of Cylons. He was probably dead now, too—or worse.
Tom was the only one left. The only one free. The only one still alive. But for how long?
He tried to move. He was sore, but nothing seemed broken. The chair must have taken most of the impact.
The lander was sitting at an odd angle. He imagined something was damaged. He could hear the hiss of compressed air from somewhere behind him.
He unstrapped himself and pushed away from the chair. He stepped carefully across the slanting deck.
He looked out the window. He was surrounded by trees. And nothing but trees.
Everything was quiet. No one was after him, at least not quite yet. So he had survived.
He hoped the Lightning had gotten his message.
He took a slow walk around the tiny room, letting his fingers brush against the walls, the instruments, the secured weapons and supplies. He thought again how good Boone had been at his job. Almost everything was unbroken and in place. The ship itself was damaged, but its contents were more or less unscathed. The cabin appeared to be intact. The primary destruction was probably belowdecks. The hissing sound came from the other side of the storage hatch.
He supposed he should check it out, in case the sound meant something worse. He unlocked the hatch and pulled the door aside. Tom frowned. The cargo area had not fared as well as the cabin. The cases of extra supplies had pulled loose from their ties to jumble together in a great pile. At least one of the containers had broken open, spilling its supplies on top of the rest.
He saw no obvious source for the noise. He might have to pull that whole pile apart to find it.
The hissing stopped abruptly. Tom closed the hatch. For now, he decided to consider that problem solved.
He hoped it was just a broken air line. He no longer needed the air filtration system. The air outside was perfectly breathable—unless he ran into some unknown: insects, pollen, parasites—that might give him trouble. Only one small corner of this world had been claimed by the Colonies. Was the rest of it safe? He would have to open the door and find out.
He supposed it had been too much to expect that he could land this thing unharmed. He was lucky he was still in one piece himself. Without repairs far beyond his ability, this lander was never leaving this exact spot.
But he could stay here for weeks. He could survive most anything. The supplies belowdecks might be jumbled, but they appeared largely intact. He had food, water, air, weapons, even Boone’s survival kit. He was set for a while—until what?
Would Nadu risk a rescue against a Cylon battleship? For one lone crewmember? If Nadu had even gotten Zarek’s message in the first place. As crazy as the captain was, he always protected his crew. He always bragged about how few he had lost.
The lights in the cabin still worked. Zarek didn’t dare try the engines. He wondered what else he could use. He turned to the wireless, slowly spinning the dial, and was rewarded with a loud squawk. He turned the dial back, then tried it a second time. This time he got nothing, not even static. He had lost communication with the outside world.
Maybe he could find some old manuals to read around here. Maybe Tom could even teach himself basic shipboard repair. He had gotten a pretty good look at his surroundings. He decided the next step would be to take an inventory. Boone was so thorough, you’d think he’d leave some sort of documentation behind. Unless the pilot had carried all the manuals in his head.
Without the engines to regenerate their charge, Tom realized, the batteries would run down eventually. He would have to shut down most of the lander’s systems in order to preserve some of the batteries’ power. If he could keep the batteries charged, and if he could repair the wireless, he might be able to send a second distress call.
Unless that would bring the warship down on his head.
He had too many questions. He wished he hadn’t been the only one to survive. He didn’t see much hope.
Tom shook his head.
What now?
He didn’t know how far from the research station he had landed. It couldn’t be too far. He hadn’t gotten very high off the ground before he had had to cut his engines.
Part of him wished he were much farther away, somewhere the Cylons couldn’t find him. But he had no idea if the machines would even come looking for him.
Maybe landing only a few hours away from the Cylons could work to his advantage. If he couldn’t get the lander to work, maybe he could steal another ship. Not that he’d know how to fly it.
If he got desperate enough, he knew he would try anything.
Part of him didn’t want to leave the lander. He sat inside the crippled ship for who knew how long, trying to figure out his options. He didn’t have many.
He had to learn to live without the ship’s comforts. He could continue to use it for shelter, at least until he determined what, if anything, lived in this place.
He knew it was time to pop open the door. He realized that he was pacing around the small cabin, resisting that next step. Staying in the lander was staying with the fami
liar. Once he opened the hatch, he would be admitting that he was facing the unknown.
But what was he afraid of? He had always wanted to be a figure of authority. So long as he went nowhere near the research station, Tom Zarek was king of the world.
But he couldn’t even laugh at his feeble attempt at humor. As far as he knew, all the others in the landing party were dead. He was a survivor. He would have to be resourceful.
He had to pop the hatch and take a look outside. Eventually, he would have to venture a little farther, and find out exactly what he could do with this new world around him.
Tom Zarek would find a way.
He walked across the cabin and hit the hatch release.
Griff was running the show now. Grets said it was about time. Griff smiled at that. As the ship’s cook and doctor, Grets was as close as anyone was in the corrupt crew of this bucket to having a soul.
“So we’re heading for—where exactly?” Grets asked.
Griff shook his head. “Nadu only gave me numbers, with nothing to go with them. I memorized these coordinates seven years ago. He never asked me to use them—never even referred to them again—until now.”
“So Nadu has another plan? That’s not much of a surprise.” The lines of her face wrinkled as she smiled. The crew said, between cooking and meds, Doc Grets could make anything right.
“I think the captain will let us know, once we get there,” Griff replied.
Not that the captain was much in evidence of late. Nadu had locked himself in the captain’s quarters, and would open the door only twice a day, to take food.
“Do you think I should do something?” the doc asked. “He almost always talks to me.” In fact, Griff knew, Nadu would talk to Grets before anyone else on the crew.
“I think it’s best that we all leave him alone.” They’d run into Cylons and lost an entire landing party. This was nothing with a simple cure. “When we get to where we’re going, he’ll be ready. We were caught by surprise. That won’t happen to Nadu twice.
“Wherever this ship is going,” Griff added, “I just hope our captain plans to bring the rest of us along.”
CHAPTER
12
RESEARCH STATION OMEGA
The landing field was very quiet, where a moment before it had been full of weapons fire and the sound of engines.
The companions who were guarding Doctor Fuest stepped back, allowing the doctor to see the daylight overhead.
He stood, and for the first time saw the carnage, both the dead bodies and the shattered companions. Until this moment, the doctor had had no idea such a thing could happen.
Gamma watched him impassively. “It would be best if you returned inside.”
Doctor Fuest could find no words. But he couldn’t move until he had said something.
“What have you done?”
“Our apologies,” Epsilon replied. The companion dropped its gun to the ground. Now that the threat was over, all of the companions had let go of their weapons, while other domestic models were gathering them up. One white kitchen companion had gathered two dozen rifles in a cart before it.
Fuest hadn’t known the research station had so many weapons.
Oh, he was always aware they had had considerable firepower, even though he had never approved. The guns, grenades, and whatever else had been brought when the station was first founded, some years before the war, had been stockpiled to fight a threat that had never come. Before today, he had considered the underground storage facility an unfortunate part of the station’s past. He had never even opened the weapons vault since he had become the leader of the center.
The companions obviously knew about both the weapons’ uses and deployment. He realized it would have been a part of their original programming. As shiny and new-looking as they were, many of these machines were older than the doctor.
The research station’s purpose had always been to add to their original natures, and to find a way for these glorious machines to reach their full potential. Nothing had ever been done to remove their initial programming.
Doctor Fuest now realized that may have been a mistake.
The doctor had gotten some brief glimpses of the carnage despite being covered by his guard. Gamma and Beta, derived from a Cylon Butler and Cylon Mechanic model, had not joined in the fight. But Epsilon had used its weapon as if it were an extension of its arms. But then Epsilon came from the warrior models, an improvement on the old Harbinger of Doom prototypes. He remembered how their original leader, Doctor Jaen, had proudly pointed to these new models, now called Centurions.
Some of the new experimental Centurions had come with built-in weapons systems, systems that Fuest and his team had disabled close to twenty-five years ago. He wondered, absently, how easily the warriors might be refitted with those systems again. At least it hadn’t come to that.
The doctor was surprised at the thought. Was he expecting all-out war?
Part of Fuest felt that that was what he had just survived. The companions had surrounded him in such a way that he could only get occasional glimpses of the violence. But he had heard every shot and every scream.
He turned to Gamma. “Why has this happened?”
Gamma bowed forward slightly, its white-enamel exterior glinting in the sun. “We were warned of this type of human.”
“They would not have acted in your best interest,” Beta added. “We felt it was our duty to protect you.”
Fuest frowned at the thought. “How could you know what kind of humans they were?”
“We have researched their craft,” Gamma replied. “They have old systems—from before the war—systems designed to interface with Cylon technology. These are parts they found on abandoned outposts, that they have refitted into their own hardware. We can access their codes, and download their records.”
Epsilon stepped forward to enter the conversation. “They are unauthorized scavengers—you have another word: pirates. They would have been as likely to kill you as to help you.”
Fuest found his shock being replaced by anger. “Who are you to make such judgments? They were the first outsiders we had seen in thirty years! We could have found a common ground.”
“We could not take that chance,” Epsilon replied. “Not when we saw that they had weapons.”
“You yourself have often said how unpredictable humans can be,” Gamma reminded him.
He looked from one companion to the next. He found their emotionless visages—which he had often taken to be the peace of the saints—to be infuriating at this moment.
“I have not seen others of my kind in half my lifetime! And before I can even talk to them, you…”
The three companions looked to each other, as if silently conferring.
“Humanity is spreading again, leaving the Colonies to search the stars,” Gamma said at last. “We will see others.”
“Before I’m gone?” the doctor asked. “Unlike you, I have little time remaining.”
Gamma paused. “I can assure you that others will arrive shortly.”
They seemed so certain, they made the doctor hesitate as well.
He took a deep breath and looked out at the late afternoon sky. “Very well. We will convene, at midday tomorrow. We will discuss what happened, why it happened, and make very sure that it will never happen again.”
Gamma bowed slightly. “Of course, Doctor, we would never do anything that would disrupt the real purpose of this station.”
“We are as dedicated to that as you,” Beta added.
“There are so few—humans—left,” Epsilon said. “We wanted to protect every one of you. How can the station go on unless both of us are here?”
The doctor nodded at the wisdom of that. “Very well. Tomorrow, I want all the senior staff to gather. I am very shaken by this. We must find a way to go on.” He stared at each of the senior companions in turn. Why did he feel that there was something they weren’t talking about? He repeated his primary worry: “I want you t
o assure me that this will never happen again.”
The three paused another moment before each spoke in turn.
“We will do our best.”
“We will find a way.”
“You know, Doctor, that we only want to work together.”
The doctor took a deep breath. What they said was true. It had always been true. He realized he was exhausted. “Very well. It would be a shame to lose everything we’ve done.”
“We are all in agreement,” Gamma answered.
“Very well. Could you help me back inside? I’m very tired.”
He had to rest more and more these days. His life was fading. It felt like he was losing his grip on the station as well.
The three companions gathered around him: the Mechanic in highly polished silver, the Butler all in white enamel, and the Soldier, in a burnished darker tone, near to black. Beta and Gamma stepped closer to lend their support, while Epsilon led the way back toward the door to the station’s center.
Sometimes he imagined he could hear emotion in their voices. But their still metal faces betrayed nothing.
He supposed it was an old man’s fancy, this giving human emotions to machines. He hadn’t really looked at the companions closely in a very long time.
“So you were able to access this new ship’s records?” he asked as he slowly walked toward the door. “I didn’t realize you had those capabilities.”
“It is one of many programming functions that are not often used,” Gamma explained. “It came into play as soon as the ship appeared within range.”
He wondered what else the companions could do that he had forgotten about. He was sure it was all in the original research. He wished once again that Betti was here. This was much more her area of expertise.
“They would have stolen from you and done you harm,” Gamma continued. “Our fundamental programming directives say we must protect you. We could see no other way.”
“Theirs were the first guns produced,” Epsilon said from where it walked ahead. “We only protected you.”
“We will remove all evidence this occurred,” Beta added.
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