CHAPTER

17

 

 

Boxey had been going to the Midguardian sanctum on a regular basis since returning to the Bifrost with Freya. The sanctum had been unlike any other place of worship that he had ever attended. There were no symbols or testaments to the many gods worshipped by the Twelve Colonies. Instead there was a large upright symbol of a hammer hanging at the far end of the sanctum, right above a large double-doored cabinet wherein, Boxey had been told, the “original” Edda resided. It was securely locked in there, and although Boxey was tempted to try and crack the lock to check it out, he had resisted the impulse to do so. It didn’t seem right, somehow… an abuse of the trust that Freya had placed upon him.

There were also no standard rows of pews as he’d seen in other temples. Instead there were long tables, rows and rows of them, and benches on either side of each table. The tables were lined with heavy mugs that appeared to be made of iron or some other heavy metal. That was because the Midguardians were big believers in drinking during services; most of their invocations of their deities consisted of raising mugs in their names and knocking back doses of alcohol.

This had become a bit more problematic since they’d been on the run from the Cylons. Alcohol wasn’t in as plentiful supply as it used to be. Fortunately enough the Midguardians had considerable stores of various worshipful beverages aboard the ship and it was continuing to last them. Their attempts at building distilleries so they could produce their own home-grown booze had been uneven. Wolf had been one of the leaders in the attempt and continued to be the only one capable of swallowing and then keeping down the brew that his machine produced. Freya and other Midguardians had pronounced it fit for scrubbing down the engine coils and not much else.

The unlikely savior on that score, as it turned out, was Boxey. Several of the pilots that Boxey had been hanging out with back on Galactica were quite ingenious when it came to constructing such devices, and Boxey had picked up not a little knowledge from watching them at their endeavors. So Boxey had been able to spot a few flaws in Wolf’s still, and Wolf was in the process of producing new batches that had been tentatively pronounced as “quite nearly potable” by his reluctant but pleasantly surprised test subjects.

The problem for Boxey was that actively participating in the salvaging of Wolf’s still had only saddened him because it made him think of his friends back on Galactica. Or, as Freya had put it, the people who had led him to believe that they were his friends.

There was no one in the sanctum now, for it was not a prescribed time of worship. Boxey had not been allowed to participate in services since, as Freya had delicately put it, he was not quite “officially one of them.” She didn’t rule out the possibility that that might change in the future. In fact, she was very encouraging of it, saying it was a “definite likelihood.”

Boxey stared at the hammer which, he’d been told, represented a god of thunder, and then he said softly, “Are you guys there? Are you listening to me?” He didn’t receive a response, nor was he truly expecting one. Nevertheless he eased himself down onto the nearest bench and said, “That’s okay. ’Cause, frankly… I’m not sure any of the gods are listening to me. Or to any of us. With everything that’s been going on…” He shook his head, discouraged.

“Why did you let it happen?” he asked finally. “I mean… honestly? My family dead. Millions… billions of people dead. I just… I don’t get it.” He stood and went to the cabinet in which the Edda was secured. “Are the answers in here?” he asked. He placed his hand against the door. “If I looked in this, and had a dictionary to help me understand it… would it tell me what’s going on? Okay, actually, I know what. But why is it going on? It’s almost like… like the gods are totally behind the Cylons. Why? Why would they be? Are the Cylons right about… about I don’t know what. About everything? And which gods are behind them? Are any behind us? Are we alone? Really… alone?”

“Be kind of a shame if you were alone. Can I be alone with you?”

Startled by the unexpected voice behind him, Boxey jumped slightly as he turned and gasped in astonishment. “Starbuck!” he cried out joyously.

She stood in the doorway, grinning in that lopsided fashion she had, and Boxey was even more stunned to see that Helo was right behind her. Without hesitation he ran to Starbuck and threw his arms around her. “What are you doing here! I didn’t think—! And Helo—! This is so—!”

“I know, I know,” grinned Kara Thrace, and she riffled his hair. She glanced around the sanctum and whistled. “Well, this is… interesting. You a Midguardian now? Sick of the old gods?”

“Can’t say I blame you,” Karl Agathon, a.k.a. Helo, put in, his arms folded across his broad chest. “Between you and me, I been thinking maybe these Midguard types are smarter than we are.”

“Helo!” said Kara with mock horror.

“Well, frak, Starbuck, we keep worshipping them and they let us get kicked in the teeth by the Cylons. Maybe we should start looking around for something better, is all I’m saying,” and he nodded toward the large hammer that was erected at the front of the sanctum. “Make the old gods stop taking us for granted.”

“Aw, shut up,” snapped Kara and she thumped him on the chest as if he was speaking blasphemy… which, technically, he was. Although she was making a great fuss of being offended by Helo’s comments, Boxey had a clear recollection that Kara herself had gotten fairly liquored up on one occasion and made some rather choice comments about the gods herself. To say the least, they were disparaging. To say the most, they seemed to indicate that she had some serious doubts—either about the existence of the gods, or that they had any generous intentions toward the remnants of humanity.

“You haven’t told me! What are you guys doing here?” said Boxey.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Kara told him, looking surprised that he would even have to ask. “We’re bringing you home.”

“Home?” Boxey was amazed. “What do you mean, home?” Then his expression fell. “You mean back to Peacekeeper? But… but I didn’t want to go back there. Freya said I could stay here…”

Helo shook his head. “She’s not talking about Peacekeeper, sport. She’s talking about Galactica.”

He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Galactica? But… I thought… you said…”

“We had a talk with the Old Man,” Kara told him. “We got him to change his mind; and he went to Tigh, and that was that.”

“Change his mind?” Boxey sat on one of the benches, astounded. “You got him to change his mind?”

“That’s right, kid,” Helo said, drawing up one of the benches opposite him. “You should have seen her go. She was a dynamo. She pleaded your case and got him to realize that you should be able to come over to Galactica whenever you wanted to.”

“Really?”

“Really,” said Kara, and she looked him right in the eye and repeated, “Really.”

And there was something there…

… something that didn’t seem right…

… something that didn’t altogether make sense.

Boxey’s impulse was to trust Kara Thrace. And Helo… hell, he had seen Helo’s bravery close-up and first-hand, when the valiant lieutenant had given up his seat on the rescue raptor to Gaius Baltar in the firm belief that Baltar was more important than a lowly raptor pilot. Kara was his friend, Helo was a hero, and friends didn’t lie to you and heroes were better than other people. So every instinct of his told him that there was no reason he shouldn’t just march right back to Galactica…

Except…

Except he had seen Kara’s eyes when she had told him that he had to leave. He had seen the frustration and, most of all, the uncertainty there. She had come across as extremely sympathetic, but there had still been something there in the way she looked at him that suggested she thought maybe…

… possibly…

… that he could be one of…

… them.

Well, that was the problem with suspicion, wasn’t it? Once it took hold in one’s imaginings, it was difficult to blast it loose. Starbuck had been suspicious that Boxey was a Cylon, and even though he’d been cleared of it, it was always going to be in the back of her mind.

And suspicion went two ways. Just as doubts about Boxey had been planted in Kara Thrace’s mind, so too was he now starting to harbor doubts about her. Not that she wasn’t human; oddly, the thought that she was anything other than flesh and blood, normal, one hundred percent a spawn of humanity never entered Boxey’s mind. But the notion that her intentions toward him might be something other than she was saying… well, now that was coming straight to the forefront of his concerns. Because as he gazed into her eyes, he was seeing some of that same concern, and that didn’t seem right to him. She should be overjoyed that he was going to be coming back with her. She should be smugly triumphant that she had managed to achieve the damned-near impossible: to get Adama and Tigh to change their minds on a matter of security. None of that was present in her expression, and when Boxey shifted his gaze to Helo, he wasn’t seeing it there either. Instead he saw that same kind of guarded look that roused his suspicions and made him wonder just what the hell was going on.

He glanced at the mighty hammer emblem on the wall and surprised even himself when he mentally directed a plea toward it of Give me strength.

“Really,” he echoed once more. Boxey had long ago acquired the habit of thinking quickly and his mind was racing faster than even Kara Thrace would have suspected or been able to adjust to. “Y’know what? How about this? How about you stay for dinner tonight. I’m eating with Freya, and she’s not here right now ’cause she was heading over to Galactica to talk with Sharon again.” He watched carefully and saw Starbuck flinch just a bit when he mentioned Sharon’s name. “But I bet she’d have no problem with you guys as guests.”

“I don’t know that we’d be her favorite people right now, sport,” Helo said. His legs were outstretched and he crossed them at the ankle. He looked casual and comfortable. Except not exactly: Instead it looked like he was trying his damnedest to look as casual and comfortable as possible, which suggested to Boxey that maybe he was neither. “This whole thing with her representing Sharon… I think she’d be worried about… you know… talking to us. And things she might say…” He looked to Starbuck and there was a flash of desperation in his eyes as if he needed her to bail him out.

Starbuck quickly stepped in. “She’d probably be worried that she might say something she shouldn’t and violate the whole, you know, client/patient confidentiality thing.”

“Sharon isn’t her patient.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Not completely, no,” said Boxey, which was true enough.

“I’m just thinking,” Kara said, and she patted him on the shoulder, “that we should head back to Galactica now. Because… you know…”

“The surprise,” said Helo.

She glanced at him and made a show (too big a show, as far as Boxey was concerned) of looking annoyed with him. “You’re supposed to keep that to yourself,” she said. Heaving an annoyed sigh, she said to Boxey, “The guys were making a surprise party for you coming back, and big-mouth here tipped it off. Don’t let on that you know, okay?”

On the surface of it, it all seemed perfectly harmless. Boxey wanted to believe her. He didn’t want to overcomplicate this. She had come to him, and really he’d been dreaming that she would. He’d dreamt that exactly this moment would arrive and now that it had… it didn’t feel right, smell right, sound right.

He remembered playing cards with Starbuck and the others, and he suddenly remembered one simple fact about her that had played to his advantage that evening when he’d thrashed her to within an inch of her chip stack: Starbuck was a lousy liar. She just stank at it. She was a little better at it when she’d had too much to drink, which was probably more often than she should have. But she wasn’t much better sober, and generally speaking she was woefully deficient at it. It went against the grain, because Starbuck was much more someone who not only excelled at saying precisely what was on her mind, but reveled in whatever trouble might arise when she did so.

She wasn’t telling the truth now. Or at least she was withholding part of it. So why was Helo there? Because she knew perfectly well that she stank at it and might well have been afraid that, left to her own devices, she wouldn’t carry it off sufficiently to achieve her goal. So he was there to help.

But what was her goal?

The tumblers clicked with ruthless efficiency through Boxey’s mind and unlocked the obvious answer. They wanted Boxey back at Galactica. That much was the truth, which was why she might have thought she could carry this thing through. But it wasn’t for the reason she was telling Boxey now. He was almost positive of it.

There was one way to know for sure, though.

Boxey leaned back on the bench and draped his arms on the table. He looked extremely casual, maintaining the illusion that this was just a group of friends chatting away with one another.

“How about tomorrow?” he said.

“Tomorrow?” Kara looked surprised and puzzled. “Why, uh… why wait until tomorrow?”

“Is there any reason I can’t?” He was speaking very carefully, his voice remaining noncommittal, as if he had no suspicions at all that something might be wrong.

“No,” Kara said quickly, and she looked up at Agathon, who barely shrugged. “No, no reason not, except… y’know… the surprise thing…”

“They can do it tomorrow, right? Or next week?”

“Next week?” she repeated.

“Yeah, it’s just that…” He thought fast. “This week is a Midguardian holiday.”

“All week?”

“Yeah, all week. They do a lot of praying and celebrating and… stuff. And I… well, I kind of promised Freya that I’d be here for it. So I really feel like I should be. So maybe next week. That works better for me. Does that work for you?”

He could sense something changing in the room. Although Helo and Starbuck didn’t exchange words, the tension level increased unspoken, and Boxey intuited exactly why that was. It was because he wasn’t just marching back to Galactica with them.

“Boxey,” Starbuck began, still clutching onto her shroud of affability with both hands. Then she hesitated, and then she grunted to herself, giving Boxey the impression that she had just hit the wall in terms of what she was going to be able to accomplish through simple, casual chitchat. “That… would work for me, but… look, I don’t know that Admiral Adama would be okay with that…”

“Why not?”

Starbuck looked to Helo in what was, as far as Boxey was concerned, a silent plea for aid because she was running out of things to say.

“It’s going to make us look bad,” Helo said quickly. He wasn’t looking casual anymore. Now he was sitting upright, his legs no longer crossed at the ankle.

“Look bad how?”

“Because we did a major selling job to the Admiral to enable you to return,” said Helo. “The whole thing hinged on how important it was for you to come back. How much you meant to all of us… and us to you. If we go back to the Old Man now and say that you basically blew us off…”

“I’m not doing that.”

“You pretty much are,” spoke up Starbuck. “Adama didn’t change his mind lightly. It’s like Helo says. We go back now and tell him you just said you’d see us when you got around to it, Adama might just go back on his word again.”

“Well, if that happens,” Boxey said confidently, “then you can probably talk him right back again. You’re good at that, Starbuck. I believe in you.”

“Boxey,” she began.

“I’m not going back now, Starbuck,” Boxey informed her. “You’re welcome to stay here with me. Or go and tell the admiral I appreciate his changing his mind, and I’d like to take up the invitation at some future date. You can tell him that, can’t you?” The problem was that he already knew the answer to it.

And Starbuck didn’t disappoint him. “Yeah. I could tell him that,” she said slowly. “But…”

It was obvious she didn’t know what to say, so Helo quickly stepped in. “He’d be insulted.”

“Yes,” Starbuck said urgently. “He’d be incredibly insulted and, you know, we wouldn’t want to do that…”

Boxey drew himself up. “Maybe some other time.” And suddenly he was out the door before Starbuck and Helo could even react.

 

* * *

 

“Frak!” snarled Kara Thrace as she and Helo leaped up in pursuit of Boxey.

The entire thing had gone exactly according to the worst-case scenario she’d conjured in her head. The “turnaround” on Adama’s part had been too abrupt. She’d done far too good a job selling Boxey on the idea that he was going to be persona non grata on Galactica for the indefinite future. So now, when she’d shown up in his new backyard and started making nice to him, it was only natural that it would arouse his suspicions.

His reactions aroused her suspicions as well. He was acting like someone who thought they might be on to him. On to him as what? As a Cylon, of course. It could well have been that they’d all been right to be suspicious of him, and now he was just trying to keep the hell away from them lest his true nature be found out.

On the other hand, he could just be a scared kid who didn’t want to find himself stuck back in a cell while a mad scientist—who also happened to be the vice president—poked and prodded him and pronounced him to be an enemy of all mankind.

Either explanation made sense. The problem was that she didn’t have the slightest inkling which was the right one.

She charged out of the sanctum, Helo right on her heels, and then Kara slammed into what appeared to be a bulkhead, but turned out to be a man. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been expected that she would head one way and he the other. Instead it was solely Kara who ricocheted backward and stumbled into Helo. It was a small miracle that Helo managed to catch himself and not tumble over, righting the two of them. The man she’d collided with, in the meantime, hadn’t budged from the spot at all. He’d tilted slightly but otherwise held his footing, and was now staring at the two of them with a combination of confusion and suspicion. “Who are you?” he demanded. “What were you doing in there?”

“Sir, this is military business,” Kara said quickly.

“And this is my ship, making it my business.”

She could have stayed to try and explain things, but Boxey had already whipped around a corridor and they were in danger of losing him. So Kara made as if she were about to stand and address the man’s concerns, and suddenly she bolted right, ducking just under his outstretched arm. It was just enough distraction that Helo was able to get around him on the other side, and seconds later they were both pounding down the corridor after Boxey.

They got around the corner just in time to see Boxey vanish overhead.

It wasn’t that he had disappeared into thin air. Rather he had leaped straight upward, torn off a metal grating accessing an air circulation shaft, bounded upward once more and slithered away into the narrow confines of the shaft.

“Frak!” shouted Kara. Helo took two steps in front of her, cupped his hands, and Kara propelled herself upward and into the shaft. Or at least she attempted to do so; her head, outstretched arms and shoulders made it through, but that was as far as she got. She let out a yelp of pain.

“What’s wrong?!” said Helo. “Is he hurting you?!”

“No, you muttonhead! I don’t fit!”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, I would if I had no breasts and no hips!” her irritated voice echoed from above.

“You take a look in the mirror lately?”

Now it was Helo’s turn to shout in pain as Starbuck slammed one of her feet down on the top of his head.

He stepped back, rubbing where she’d kicked him, and Starbuck dropped back down to the floor. “We gotta find him.”

“And do what?” demanded an irritated Helo. “It’s not like we can stuff him in a sack and sling him over our shoulders.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“He’s a kid, Starbuck!”

“In case you’re not paying attention, that’s what we don’t know for certa—”

“Don’t move!”

Kara froze in place as she saw the large man they’d darted past standing a few feet away He was aiming a gun at them. It looked tiny in his oversized hand, but that didn’t make it any less threatening. And there were a couple of men behind him who were also holding weapons aimed straight at them.

Her peripheral vision told her that there were more men at the other end of the corridor. Starbuck and Helo had been outflanked, encircled from either side.

“What do we do now?” muttered Helo out the side of his mouth.

“For starters, we don’t move.” She paused and then said, in as authoritative a tone as she could muster, “This is military business!”

“And this is me not caring very much,” said the large man. The business end of the gun never wavered. “I assume you have weapons on you. Now would be the time to produce them very slowly and lay them down equally slowly on the floor.”

Their guns were hanging on the backs of their belts, covered by their jackets. Neither Helo nor Starbuck had been armed in the expectation that they would have to shoot Boxey or something like that. It was simply standard operating procedure for them to go armed into any situation that was not merely a social one. One never knew when one was going to stumble over a known Cylon operative, and on such occasions, Adama never wanted his people caught unprepared.

But just because they had weapons didn’t mean it was always a good idea to use them. And somehow the prospect of getting into a firefight with a group of civilians didn’t seem like the wisest course of action. Although it had been some time ago, feelings in the fleet were still raw over the notorious shooting incident during the period when Tigh had declared martial law. The last thing they needed to do was exacerbate matters by having anything resembling a repeat of the incident, even though the circumstances were extremely different.

Helo and Starbuck exchanged looks and then—slowly, as instructed—they reached out and removed their respective weapons. “You’re making a mistake,” Helo said evenly.

The big man gestured for the men on either side of him to approach and take the extended guns. “Not as big a mistake as you would have made if you’d taken a shot at any of my people.”

“One of your ‘people’ might not be a person at all,” Kara informed him, making no attempt to keep the annoyance from her voice. “That’s why we’re here. You may have a Cylon infiltrator.”

“And would he be the one who stole our most precious possession?”

The angry question puzzled Kara. “What are you talking about?”

He took a step toward her and seemed to loom even larger than he had before. “Don’t play games with me. Where is it?”

“Where… is what?”

“The Edda. I looked in the sanctum after you and your associate ran out of there and it was gone. Our holy book, missing. What did you do with it?”

“Us? Nothing! Boxey must have taken it.”

“The boy?” growled the big man. “You would blame something like this on the boy? Why would he do such a thing?”

“Because we think he may be a Cylon, and he’s trying to distract us or maybe just stir things up. Set us against each other.”

He barked a skeptical laugh. “I find that… doubtful.”

“She’s telling the truth,” Helo said.

“And I’m supposed to just take her word for it?” He looked hard at them. “The word of a military that’s more interested in guarding its secrets than the balance of humanity. You keep information from us until someone else finds out about it, at which point you reluctantly admit it. You cause disharmony and discord.”

Not at all intimidated by the fact that he could likely break her in half, Kara snapped back, “We’ve saved this fleet more times than I can count. When the Cylons come swooping down on us, you’re safe and snug here second-guessing everything we do while it’s my ass out in a Viper that’s fighting to keep us alive for another day. And that’s what we’re trying to do now, and if you don’t like it, then frak you, so get the frak out of my face, you got that?”

He glared at her, and then—to her surprise—the look he was giving her melted ever so slightly into amusement. He took a step back. “Yes, ma’am,” he said coolly, and then turned to his people. “Take them to a private room. Search them thoroughly. See if they have the Edda on them. Find Boxey. I very much doubt their claims that he’s a Cylon operative, but we should at least talk to him.”

“He went up there,” Helo said, pointing overhead. “If you’ve got someone small and skinny, you may want to send them up there, because if he took your Edda thing, he could stash it anywhere in there.”

“I don’t need your advice, thank you,” said the big man. Then he paused and muttered to his nearest lieutenant, “Do as he says. Find someone. Now.” The lieutenant nodded and went off as the big man turned his attention back to Helo and Starbuck. “I am Wolf Gunnerson. As I said, this is my ship. You will be my guests here until we get matters sorted out and the Edda is recovered.”

“You’ll search us and find we don’t have it,” Kara said.

“You might have hidden it somewhere. You might have an accomplice somewhere in this ship. I try never to underestimate the ability of the military to be deceitful.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Starbuck said sourly. “Look, Mr. Gunnerson, there’s something here you have to understand…”

“You’re here on military business.”

“That’s right. And you’re interfering with it. That is not going to be looked upon favorably by my CO or the president. Furthermore you’re holding us against our will. That’s going to be viewed by some as a hostage situation. The action of terrorists. I don’t think you really want that. I don’t think you want a squad of heavily armed marines crashing in here.”

Wolf leaned in toward her again. His breath alone was powerful enough to rock her back on her feet. “And I think that you don’t have the slightest idea of what I want. A hostage situation? Fine. So be it. I have no problem with that. You show up here, you’ve got concealed weapons, you threaten a boy and try to drag him back to your ship against his will, tossing around accusations that he’s a machine without the slightest shred of proof, and oh, by the way, our sacred book vanishes shortly after you arrive and you’re seen coming out of our sanctum. And you accuse me of terrorist activities?”

“Admiral Adama is going to want us back, with the boy,” Helo said.

“You throw that name around as if it’s supposed to intimidate me. If he wants you back, I’ll be more than happy to throw you out an airlock and you can walk back to Galactica. How does that sound?” When Helo made no answer, Wolf Gunnerson made a slight gesture with his head, signaling his men. They came in from all sides and took Starbuck and Helo firmly by the wrists and arms. “Be careful, men. They’re colonial warriors. They likely bruise easily.”

“You’re going to regret this!” Starbuck called defiantly as they were led away.

“I really don’t think so,” replied Wolf, who really didn’t.

He stood there and watched them go. And then, after a long moment, a door to the side opened and a figure emerged. “I told you that was exactly the attitude you could expect from them.”

“Indeed you did. It’s fortunate you happened to be by, Councilman.”

Tom Zarek nodded thoughtfully and said, “She’s right about one thing, though. Adama isn’t going to take this well at all. He’s going to want his people back, and he could make it very difficult for you if you refuse to cooperate.”

“I’m sure he could. And I could make things very difficult for him.”

“He has the Galactica, Wolf. Face facts: You can’t possibly go up against him. Meantime your bid to be part of the Quorum of Twelve could be seriously hurt by this.”

“I have no trouble with being both feared in my wrath… and admired in my generosity.”

Zarek eyed him suspiciously. “Meaning…?”

“Meaning the day is young.” And he clapped Zarek on the back in a manner that was gentle for him and, even so, nearly dislocated Zarek’s shoulder. “And I am thirsty Let’s quench that thirst together and we’ll wait for matters to play out to our advantage.”