CHAPTER

12

 

 

Lee Adama arrived in the rec room just before the fight started. He was winding his way through the section of the Galactica that housed the marines. The entire area smelled of sweat, gun-metal, and old blankets. Corridors were narrow, and the rooms were lined with bunks and lockers. A song echoed through the hallways. Lee paused to listen, tracking the source. It came from the rec room a ways down the hall, and the song in question was the revolution song Peter had broadcast over the radio. An angry rumbling sound provided a background. Lee tensed and hurried his steps.

He didn’t need this. He still had a throbbing headache from getting clocked in sickbay. It pierced his skull like a lead stiletto. And a desperate worry twisted his insides so tight, his bones felt as if they would break under the pressure. Kara had been snatched straight out of sickbay a few hours ago and seemed to be in the hands of a religious nutcase. Every detail of the events in sickbay was branded into his brain—Peter’s howling, Kara’s annoyed expression, the scarlet masks of the Unity kidnappers. He hated to admit it, but those masks had really creeped him out. He couldn’t explain why, even to himself. Masks always creeped him out. Once, when they were kids, his brother Zak had found a full-face mask made of translucent plastic. It gave the appearance of a perfectly smooth face with human flesh tones. Zak had jumped around a corner with it on and made ghost noises. Lee couldn’t comprehend what he was looking at, this blank-faced thing menacing him just outside his own bedroom. Utter terror had made his bladder let go. Zak had laughed at Lee and Dad had thrashed Zak for it.

And then had come the robotic Cylons.

The Unity were only people, Lee told himself, not inhumanly mechanical Cylons. But you could see robotic Cylons for what they were, and you could identify the human ones once you knew what their faces looked like. They shouldn’t be any more frightening than any other enemies Lee had faced. But the masks were still creepy. And he was still worried about Kara. What the hell were they doing to her? She would be both scared and pissed off. A part of Lee smiled at the thought of Kara held prisoner by religious fanatics. Why rescue her? Who cared what happened to the kidnappers?

But Lee continued to worry.

It seemed he worried a lot about Kara Thrace. More than he should. After all, she was just a friend. A close friend. Who was seeing someone else. A religious someone else. Lee’s head throbbed again. He had seen the picture of Kara kissing Peter in Person to Person. He had closed the magazine carefully, as if it might sprout teeth and snap off his fingers. Then he had pointedly put it out of his mind. No point in thinking about it. Kara didn’t matter to him in that way. She was more like a cousin or sister.

Definitely. A sister. Lee shook his aching head, trying without success to convince himself the lie—no, the statement—was true and that he wasn’t jealous over Peter Attis. He couldn’t be. He loved Kara, yes. But he wasn’t in love with her.

Sure. Of course not.

A few more steps down the corridor, and Lee entered the rec room. The place was crowded with off-duty personnel. A group of eight marines was pounding the table and singing Peter’s revolution song. Another group was half shouting at them to knock it off.

“Kill that shit,” one of the dissenters barked. “You want to preach blasphemy, do it in vacuum.”

“Frak off,” snarled one of the singers, advancing on the dissenter with clenched fists. “If you can’t handle the truth, get the frak off Galactica. The Unifier lives!”

Lee felt his mouth fall open and he halted dead. Unity factions among the marines? That was something he hadn’t even considered. Obviously the Unity was spreading farther and faster than anyone had anticipated. Before he could say anything, the dissenter rose to his feet and snapped a punch at the singer’s jaw. Taken by surprise, the singer dropped to the floor. There was a tiny moment of silence as everyone stared at everyone else, and then the room erupted into chaos. Fists and feet punched and kicked. Tables and chairs scattered and flew. Lee snatched a phone off the wall.

“This is Captain Adama in rec room seven,” he barked. “I need peacekeepers down here. Now!”

The brawl continued. The dull smack of flesh punching flesh thumped through the room, punctuated by grunts of pain and howls of outrage. Furniture crashed against walls and floor. Lee stood in the doorway, unable to halt the fracas by himself. Helpless anger suffused him. He could bark an order for everyone to freeze, but he doubted anyone would hear him, and being ignored like that would undermine his authority. He ground his teeth. The Cylon plague was succeeding in ways no one had anticipated.

“Holy frak! Look!” someone shouted.

And a hole opened up in the middle of the brawl. Two marines lay on the floor, twisting and convulsing. Nonsense fell from their mouths in a stream of babble. The fighting slowed and stopped as people turned to look.

“It’s a miracle!” said the singer. “The Unifier’s touch brings a blessing.”

“It’s a disease,” shouted someone else. “It’s not a blessing. The Lords of Kobol have cursed us for blasphemy.”

The two marines continued to babble. One was frothing at the mouth.

“You can’t call a miracle blasphemy,” the singer said, clenching his fists again. Blood flowed from a split lip. “You can’t—”

“Quiet!” Lee bellowed, taking advantage of the semi-calm. “That’s an order!”

Everyone in the room turned to look in surprise, noticing Lee for the first time. The afflicted marines convulsed and jabbered, lost in their own private, painful worlds.

“I should have everyone in this room arrested for conduct unbecoming,” Lee boomed. “Line up at attention!”

Several of the marines looked defiant and Lee wondered if they would actually disobey orders. What the hell would he do then? But the defiance lasted only a moment. They lined up just as a group of MPs burst into the room. They took in the situation quickly, and the sergeant turned to Lee.

“Sir?” he asked.

“I think we’re calmed down,” Lee said. “But those men need medical attention. Get them to sickbay. The rest of you need to remain here and make sure the situation stays calm.”

The marines stayed at attention while the MPs hauled the two babblers out of the room. Lee walked up and down the row of marines, the broken furniture forming a strange backdrop behind him.

“Hold out your hands, palm down,” Lee ordered.

The marines looked mystified but obeyed. Lee watched. Twenty marines held out forty hands, palm down. Two shook noticeably. Another five trembled, and three more started to shake a few seconds after Lee gave the order. Lee kept his own shaky hands behind his back.

“The Unifier’s touch,” said the singer in awe. He was one of the tremblers.

“No,” Lee said. “It’s a prion, a disease that Peter Attis is spreading.” He pointed at the ten marines whose hands weren’t shaking. “Report to the briefing room in ten minutes. The rest of you report to sickbay.”

 

“He’s so handsome, Gaius,” Number Six murmured. “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be that good-looking?”

“No,” growled Gaius. “It’s not an issue with me.”

“And he’s talented. When he speaks or sings, everyone listens. Even Laura Roslin.”

The words popped out of Gaius’ mouth before he could stop them. “I’m her vice president,” he snapped. “She should listen to me.”

“What’s that?” Cottle asked from the other side of the lab. “Nothing,” Gaius said quickly. “Just thinking out loud.” Cottle gave him an odd look, then turned back to his instruments. Gaius shot Number Six a harsh glare. She was sitting upright on one of the tables, one knee drawn up, a lot of smooth leg showing under a red dress.

“It must be difficult to be pushed into the background,” Six said in a low, silky voice. “It’s not fair of them to ignore you, Gaius. You’re worth more than that.”

“Frak you,” he muttered, and managed to wrench his attention back to the protein scanner. So far it was showing very few similarities between Prions T and H and Prion C. He was hoping for something, some kind of link between the three. Prion H, the harmless prion, linked with Prion T, the transformational prion, and became the deadly prion. Their link was well established. But what was the third prion for? Gaius knew it was artificial—there was nothing like it in any of the databases, and it was present only in Peter’s blood. He hadn’t found it in any of the other random samples he had taken from other crewmembers, which also meant the prion wasn’t communicable. It was, in fact, rather fragile. Once removed from its host plasma, it fell apart. The samples of Peter’s blood and plasma, in fact, had to be kept at body temperature and in near darkness, or the mysterious prion simply melted away. But what did it do? It had to be connected to Prion T and Prion H somehow, though it shared no structural similarities. Prions T and H had several similarities that let them hook together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle so Prion T could unfold Prion H into its deadly form. But if Gaius was reading the scans right—and he was—the mysterious prion had a single marker in common with Prion H, which meant they might hook together in one spot. Gaius furrowed his brow. If that happened, and Prion H linked with the mystery prion, they would form an enormous, ungainly macromolecule. And that would mean…

And then Gaius had it. It was so simple, so obvious. Quickly, he assembled slides filled with Peter’s plasma. He had to be careful—Cottle had only extracted a few hundred cc’s of plasma before Peter’s kidnapping. Escape. Whatever you wanted to call it. And some of the vials had shattered on the floor when Lee Adama dropped them. Fortunately, two had remained intact. Now the entire supply rested in a pitifully small collection of sealed test tubes kept in a warmer set at precisely thirty-seven degrees—human body temperature. Gaius took care to return the tubes before the fragile mystery prion could be exposed to temperatures outside its viability range. He would have to hurry in fact, because the prions he took out of the plasma would only survive a few minutes.

“Onto something, Gaius?” Six asked archly. He ignored her. Cottle shuffled papers from the work area he had carved out of Gaius’ lab.

Without bothering to take proper notes or make proper documentation—no time—Gaius dropped samples of Prion T and Prion H into a single slide. Then he slid them under a microscope and watched. It didn’t take long for the copies of Prion T to find partners among the Prion H samples. They clicked together like little magnets, and the tightly-wound Ts unraveled, just as Gaius had seen them do a thousand times. His skin crawled with cold worms, and it seemed as if he could feel the same unraveling process happening in his own body. All his life, Gaius had been blessed with a whipcord body that required little maintenance and which held a certain amount of charm, if he said so himself. But in the end, his body was merely a home for his mind. It was his mind that had made him into a celebrity, his great intelligence that had elevated him above other humans. Having such a mind was a terrible and heavy responsibility, and it was his duty to preserve his mind so that the rest of humanity could benefit from it. And now that mind was under attack by a rogue bit of protein that would eat holes in it until it looked like a lumpy gray sponge. It would leave nothing of Gaius Baltar but a babbling, incoherent fool, and the thought filled him with a cold terror that twisted his gut like a snake.

“All right, you little bugger,” he whispered to himself, “let’s see what happens when I do this.”

With careful fingers, he introduced the mystery prion to the mix and watched carefully. At first nothing happened. The mystery prion floated in the thin plasma, bobbing about the white blood cells, water, and other flotsam like a complicated beach ball floating among the detritus of an ocean shipwreck. Then a mystery prion intersected an unfolded Prion H. Instantly, it linked ribbons with its deadly cousin, forming as Gaius had predicted, a long, lumpy macromolecule of protein. The moment that happened, a nearby white blood cell engulfed the molecule. In a few moments, the macromolecule fell completely apart. The component amino acids drifted harmlessly away.

Exultation swelled in Gaius Baltar, banishing the fear. The mystery prion was the cure to the plague of tongues and he, Gaius Baltar, had discovered it. Pride inflated his chest, and he felt strong enough to punch through a metal bulkhead. See if anyone would avoid his lectures now!

“Are you finding what I’m finding?” Cottle said behind him.

Gaius jumped and jerked away from the microscope. “Gods, you scared the bleeding shit out of me.”

“Sorry.” Cottle exhaled a stream of smoke. “Just wanted to see what you got.”

“The third prion is the key to Peter’s immunity,” Gaius said triumphantly. “It bonds with the deadly prion and turns it into a form that the body’s immune system recognizes as a threat. I just observed a macrophage consume and destroy an unfolded Prion H.”

“Interesting,” Cottle said. “I just finished examining a bunch of Peter’s B cells. B cells produce antibodies, right?”

“I know what B cells do,” Gaius said shortly, annoyed that Cottle hadn’t acknowledged his breakthrough with appropriate fanfare.

“Just setting the stage,” Cottle said, unruffled. “Peter’s B cells produce antibodies, but currently they’re also producing—”

“The mystery prion,” Gaius finished.

“Brilliant,” Six commented dryly from the table. Didn’t she get cramped from sitting in one position for so long? “Too bad you have to share this discovery with the good doctor, Gaius. The credit should go to you.”

Gaius didn’t like Number Six very much at that moment, but he had to admit she was right. Cottle might grab credit that belonged to Gaius Baltar.

“So in summary,” Cottle said, “if you inject someone with the mystery prion—let’s call it Prion C for ‘cure’—it bonds with Prion H and changes it into a form your white blood cells crunch down like potato chips. Prion C also convinces your B cells to make antibodies against the transformed Prion H, which further boosts your immunity. You continue to carry the prions, but they don’t bother you.”

Gaius ran a hand over his face, feeling suddenly tired. “Except our only reliable supply of Prion C was kidnapped by a bunch of religious fanatics. Every time we find a solution, it only reveals another problem.”

“Then we’d better get back to work,” Cottle said, turning back to his own instruments. “Before we start shaking in our own booties.”

The fear took hold of Gaius again. He couldn’t afford to get sick—he had to finish his work here or thousands of others would die along with him. A small sob tried to escape and he choked it back. It was so unfair!

“Have you examined your own blood lately, Gaius?” asked Number Six.

“Not half an hour ago,” Gaius muttered, wishing she would go the hell away and leave him to his fear and misery.

“Check it again, Gaius.”

“What for? Nothing’s changed.”

“You never know.” A small smile tugged at the corners of her red lips. “Not until you look.”

Gaius looked at her, but her face remained a beautiful mystery. “Fine,” he snapped as loud as he dared. “But it’s a waste of time.”

He glanced at Cottle to make sure the man was occupied, then pricked a fingertip and dripped several scarlet drops onto a slide. He capped the sample and slid it under a microscope.

“What am I looking for?” he whispered. “What do you think I’m going to find?”

“It’s what you don’t find that’s important, Gaius,” Six said from her table. “Go ahead.”

He looked. It was a perfectly normal blood sample. Erythrocytes, thrombocytes, lymphocytes, leukocytes. All to be expected.

“What am I… not looking for?” he asked.

“Keep looking. Focus closer.”

A suspicion crawled over him, and he adjusted the focus on the microscope. He spent considerable time searching, and found… nothing. He backed away from the microscope, feeling abruptly weak and wrung out.

“No prions,” he said in a hushed voice. “I don’t have the prion.”

“You’re observant, Gaius,” Six said.

He turned to face her. “But how? No, scratch that. It’s obvious how.” He started to pace, oblivious to whether Cottle was paying attention to him or not. “In any case of infection, there’s always a certain percentage of the population who is naturally immune. I’m simply one of those cases.”

“Poor Gaius.” Six slid off the table and sauntered toward him. “You still don’t believe, do you?”

“Believe what?”

“In miracles.” She put his arms around him, breathing her breath into his mouth. “Isn’t it clear? God wants you alive for a purpose, Gaius. He took the prion from your blood so you can fulfill your purpose.”

Gaius felt a strange combination of uncertainty and gratification. This wasn’t the first time Number Six had told him he was special, that his destiny was for something more than puttering around a laboratory and signing paperwork. It was immensely gratifying to hear this. To a certain extent it was a relief, further proof that his own estimation was right—that his innate intelligence and talent made him more valuable, more important than the masses of humanity who scurried through their ordinary corridors living their quiet, desperate lives. On the other hand, it was a little unnerving to think that a Cylon deity—assuming such a being really existed—had its eye on him.

“What purpose am I supposed to fulfill?” he murmured.

“That will come clear in time, Gaius,” Six said, backing away. “And in less time than you think.”

“Oh, that’s helpful,” Gaius complained. “Why is it the people who hand out predictions never say exactly what is going to happen? It would be nice, for once, to hear something like ‘You’ll find an inhabitable planet in a few weeks, so don’t worry.’, or ‘Run for president and you’ll win.’”

“Just concentrate on the cure, Gaius,” Six said. “It’s in the blood.”

Gaius was about to argue when a thought crossed his mind. He turned to Cottle, who was still bent over his own instruments and appeared to have noticed nothing. “Peter’s blood type is O negative, right?” Gaius asked.

“Yeah,” Cottle said. “We caught a break there. O negative is rare, but it’s the universal donor. Anyone can receive his blood—and the cure. We’re just stuck with the fact that we don’t even have two hundred cc’s of Peter’s blood left.”

“We can create more Prion C,” Gaius said. “We have the samples. We just need to use the right incubation methods, feed Prion C the appropriate nutrients in the right medium. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours. A half-trained beagle could do it. What do you think?”

“That had occurred to me. But I think we need to do more tests first.”

“Dammit, we don’t have time for that!” Gaius smacked a tabletop in a melodramatic gesture. “Let’s just get to work, shall we? You know I’m right.”

Cottle looked at him, then shrugged and started pulling petri dishes from a shelf. Gaius was a little surprised he had given in so fast and with so little argument.

“It’s funny, when you think about it,” Cottle said.

“What’s that?” Gaius crossed his arms as he stood next to the plasma warmer.

“Peter’s turning out to be the savior he’s been claiming to be all along. His blood is going to cure everyone.” Cottle set the stack of dishes on a work table and ground out the stub of his cigarette in one of them. “We’re going to do all the work, but you know how it always goes. Peter Attis will be famous for saving us while we toil in foggy obscurity.”

Gaius felt his jaw slowly drop as Cottle laid out the dishes in preparation for the incubation medium. Number Six’s soft hands slid over his shoulders, and her warm breath moved against his ear.

“He’s right, Gaius,” she said wetly. “You and Cottle will labor here in this dim, cramped lab while Peter Attis, handsome Peter Attis, rakes in the glory. If only you could find a cure completely on your own. It isn’t fair or right.”

The thought made his jaw go from slack to tense. It was unfair. How many times had he labored to save the Fleet, and how many times had his hard work gone unnoticed? Once he had spent hours working up calculations on how much food and water the Fleet would use on a weekly basis, and when he had presented Commander Adama with the information at a meeting, Adama had stared at the startlingly high figures for a moment, then turned to discuss the matter with Saul Tigh and Laura Roslin, as if Gaius were a child who had brought home average marks on a report card. As vice president, he had been saddled with idiotic paperwork and given lectures no one attended while people like Kara Thrace appeared in full-color magazines because she kissed a rock star in public. Fury clenched his fists.

“I could do it,” he said softly. “A prion is just a protein, and I have a model to work from. Reverse engineering is much easier than creating something from scratch. I know my way around a molecule. It wouldn’t take that long to create my own Prion C.”

“Except you don’t need to,” Six pointed out. “Peter’s prion will replicate itself in his rare, heroic blood. As long as his material exists, the world doesn’t need you, Gaius.”

Gaius stared down at the little plasma warmer. It was the size and shape of a microwave oven. The temperature readout on the front indicated that the internal temperature was a precise thirty-seven degrees. A few degrees too hot or too cold, and Prion C would disintegrate. Cottle, meanwhile, was pouring careful amounts of liquid nutrient medium into the Petri dishes. In a few hours, the cure would be ready. The dial that controlled the warmer’s temperature seemed to stare at Gaius, daring him.

“Do it, Gaius,” Six goaded. “It’s the right idea.”

“No,” he whispered. “People might die in the time it takes me to replicate the original. One person already has.”

“Do it,” she said firmly. “It’s your destiny!” She took his hand and pulled it toward the dial. He resisted, hand trembling, but she was strong, stronger than he had ever been. His fingers found the ribbed surface of the dial. It would be so easy. One little twist, and his position in history would be assured while Peter Attis was forgotten.

“No,” he whispered again.

“Yes,” Six said, and twisted his hand. The dial slowly clicked counter-clockwise, and the readout indicated a falling temperature. Thirty-six degrees. Thirty-four. Thirty-one. No! This was wrong. Gaius reached out to turn the dial back, but Six’s hand snaked out and grabbed his. She wrenched it aside, and he gasped with pain.

“Leave it!” she barked. “Be a man, Gaius! Grab the opportunities God and I send you!”

He stared at her, comprehension dawning. “Did you… did you arrange this, somehow? Start this plague of tongues so I could cure it?” His back was now to Cottle, who was still engrossed with the Petri dishes.

“Think, Gaius,” Six snarled. “Does anything in the universe happen by accident? Do you think I’m here, with you, by random chance? I’ve told you before, Gaius—you have a destiny, and you can’t ignore it. God cured you for a reason. Fulfill your purpose!”

“I… I can’t…” he whispered. But he made no move to turn the dial again, and the temperature continued to fall.

 

Galen Tyrol held up his hands. Both were shaking. His mouth went dry and fear squeezed his heart, but he didn’t panic. Not yet. That would come later, when he was lying in his bunk with the curtain drawn and his trembling hands crammed against his mouth so no one would hear him whimpering in the dark against an enemy he couldn’t see, hear, or touch but was coming to kill him nonetheless.

Lined up on the floor in front of him were dozens of people. Deck five—Tyrol’s deck—had been turned into an impromptu sickbay because sickbay itself was full. The people lay on stretchers, blankets, towels, and hard, bare floor. Some twitched and writhed and babbled, others lay perfectly still. Two harried-looking medical technicians did their best to tend them, but there wasn’t much they could do except try to keep everyone comfortable. Half the Viper pilots were among the patients, as were several of Tyol’s people, Galactica’s “knuckle draggers.” Tyrol squatted next to Cally who lay on an old rug Tyrol had scrounged for her. She twisted like a dancer whose tendons had been halfway cut, and long strings of nonsense syllables fell from her mouth. He took her cool, squirming hand in his shaking one. The air around her was tainted with the sour smell of sickness.

“I wish I could help,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“She doesn’t need help,” said a man Tyrol didn’t recognize. He was similarly holding the hand of a male patient who was babbling just like Cally. “None of them do. They’ve been touched by the Unifier. When they awaken, they’ll have seen the face of God. You should be happy for her.”

An urge to punch the jerk in the face made Tyrol’s hands into shaky fists. Blasphemous nonsense—and hurtful. Cally wasn’t in a divine state. She was sick, and this frakking bastard had the nerve to tell Tyrol he should be happy about it. But he kept his hands to himself and pointedly turned his attention back to Cally. The look she gave him was uncomprehending. She didn’t even know he was there. Tyrol pushed down more panic. He liked Cally—as a friend. As someone who worked under his command. Nothing more than that. But the intensity of the distress he felt at her pain startled him. He was the guy everyone came to when something needed fixing. Vipers, Raptors, conveyer belts. Hell, once he’d even fixed a sewing machine. This, however, he couldn’t fix.

Abruptly, he got up and strode away. The only solution was to keep busy. Or try to. There wasn’t much to do, wasn’t much he could do with his hands the way they were. Only five pilots hadn’t been grounded, but it was only a matter of time. Emergency flights were the only ones running. It meant that the repair crews didn’t have much to do, but that didn’t matter—with no ships out, Tyrol didn’t have much to repair. If the Cylons found and attacked them now, they’d be dead.

Of course, even if the Cylons didn’t find them, they were dead. No matter what, the Cylons won. Frak.

The escape pod caught his eye, and his feet took him toward it. His footsteps echoed, mingling with the babbling behind him. A little itch at the back of his mind nagged at him every time he looked at it, but he hadn’t had the time to examine it much. Until now. Figuring out what was bugging him about it might take his mind off his own impending death—and Cally’s.

First he made a circuit of the outside, walking around it and examining every centimeter. It was the standard gray ceramic, no major cracks or visible blemishes. Some scorching from the explosion that had destroyed the basestar. A few scratches, either from the explosion or the landing.

He cranked the door down—it took a while with his hands shaking as they were—and inspected the inside. Nothing had changed. The basic control panel was still there, the porthole was still there, the CO2 scrubber was—

Tyrol put a quivering hand on his chin, then pulled a measuring tape from his tool belt. He tried to extend it, but his hands shook too much. Frustrated, he flung it against the bulkhead. It hit with a loud clang. His body was breaking down, becoming undependable. Then he set his jaw. He hadn’t lost everything yet. He put his arms out like a tightrope walker and paced from one end of the pod to the other, going heel to toe. His body made an adequate measuring tool, and no disease could change that. Tyrol counted fifteen of his own feet. After that, he went outside, started at one corner, and measured off the outside.

Eighteen feet.

Ah ha! Excited, Tyrol went back inside. Even assuming the thickness of the bulkheads added up to one of his feet, that left two of his feet unaccounted for. He retrieved his measuring tape and used it to tap on the bulkheads, something even his shaky hands could handle. The bulkhead opposite the door, the one with the scrubber hanging on it, had a hollow ring. Carefully Tyrol examined the scrubber. On the underside, his palsied hands found a switch. He flipped it.

Near the floor, a rectangular section of the rear wall a meter high and two meters long moved inward slightly. Cautiously, Tyrol pressed on it. It gave way, sliding inward and revealing a long, low chamber with a light set into the ceiling. A blanket and pillow lay on the floor. Tyrol’s mouth set into a pale, hard line. Someone besides Peter and the dead Cylon had stowed away on the pod.

 

“I don’t know what the hell happened, Commander,” Cottle said in the conference room. “All I know is that the temperature in the incubator fell to twenty-eight degrees and all our samples of Prion C fell apart.”

Commander Adama’s face remained as impassive as rusty iron. “So you’re telling me that we have no samples of Peter’s blood to work with.”

“Yeah.” Cottle lit a cigarette with a practiced flick of his lighter. “Frak. I put the samples in the incubator myself, and I’m sure I set the temperature right. But I may have misread the dials. Or maybe the dial snagged on my sleeve and I didn’t notice. Hell, I don’t know.”

Gaius studied both Cottle and Adama’s faces, but neither of them seemed to suspect the incident with the blood was anything but an accident. “It could have happened to anyone,” he said magnanimously. “However, we do have computer mock-ups of all the prions. I’m sure, given time and supplies, I could come up with—”

“Let me get this straight,” Adama interrupted. “With the samples destroyed, the only source of the cure is Peter himself?”

“That’s pretty much the situation,” Cottle said.

“Though I’m quite positive I can recreate Prion C,” Gaius said. “It’ll take a little time, but—”

“Time,” Adama interrupted, snatching up a telephone, “is in short supply. Dualla,” he said in the receiver, “get Captain Adama on the line.”

A few moments later, Adama said, “It’s me. I need an update on the strike force and you need an update on the prion situation. In the conference room.”

Cottle excused himself and left. Gaius knew he should follow suit and get into the lab, but he was feeling an utter lack of urgency. If Adama wasn’t all that interested in Gaius creating a cure, then Gaius could just trundle along at whatever pace he liked. He was already immune, and his fear of the disease had evaporated. Besides, he wanted to know what was going to happen between captain and commander, so he pulled out a small notebook and sketched amino acids instead. Adama seemed too preoccupied to notice. Ignoring him. Lee Adama arrived after a few minutes and took the chair Adama indicated. Gaius stopped sketching.

“I haven’t even been able to round up a dozen people who aren’t shaking,” Lee said. “And I’m running into… other factors.”

Adama removed his glasses and polished them with a white handkerchief. In that moment, he looked more like an exasperated grandfather than the commander of a military fleet, though he looked nothing like Gaius Baltar’s grandfather. The vain, randy old bastard wouldn’t have worn glasses in public if you’d paid him. Gaius wondered what it would have been like to have a grandfather that soaked up the sun in a rocking chair and carved charming little toys out of wood instead of jetting about the world attending conferences and seducing anything that walked on two legs. One of Gaius’ earliest memories didn’t involve walking in on his parents. It involved walking in on his grandfather and three of his bedmates.

“What other factors, Captain?” Adama asked quietly.

Lee grimaced. “The quarantine of the Monarch started up the food shortage again, which is making people unhappy. Everyone in the Fleet seems to be singing Peter’s revolution song now, and lots of them seem to think that you’re a… a tyrant who’s trying to step on Peter’s civil rights—and on the Unity’s. It’s making people remember the—uh, the ‘incident’ on the Gideon again.”

Gaius added another amino acid to his sketch without comment. It was a challenge, sketching a three-dimensional molecule in two dimensions. The “incident,” as Lee put it, had happened while Commander Adama lay in a coma, recovering from the near-deadly wounds Sharon had dealt him. Saul Tigh had taken over Adama’s command, and he had sent armed marines to “liberate” food supplies from the recalcitrant ship Gideon. An unruly mob had greeted the marines, and the situation quickly devolved into a riot. One marine had panicked and opened fire. Four civilians had died. For days, the media had shown videos of a little girl crying over the bloody corpse of her father. Gaius mentally shook his head. Saul Tigh was crafty in some ways and stunningly stupid in others.

“And I’m learning the Unity has more sympathizers than I knew,” Lee finished. “They see Peter as a savior.”

“Savior from what?” Adama said in a dead-even voice.

“The Cylons.” Lee cleared his throat. “The Cylons seem to have a monotheistic system of belief, and they won the war. Peter is preaching monotheism, and a chunk of the listeners are thinking that our situation would improve if we had the same belief system. It’s just as he said on the radio, with the added ‘fact’ that his touch makes people speak in tongues, and that only makes him more believable.”

“I don’t give a damn one way or the other about the civil rights of Attis or his followers,” Adama snapped. “He has the cure for this prion disease, and that’s why I need him in sickbay, whole and unharmed.”

“But a growing number of people see the disease as a blessing,” Lee countered. “Cure not desired or required. They think they’ll recover and be blessed somehow.”

“We’ll worry about the Unity’s attitude toward the plague of tongues after we extract enough blood from Peter to cure it,” Adama said. “Get back to assembling the strike force, Captain. Bring Peter Attis back to Galactica.”

“I think I’ll need two forces, sir,” Lee said. “And I’m afraid I’m going to have to use personnel outside the marines. Too many of them are down.”

“Whatever you think is necessary, Captain,” Adama said. Lee left, and to Gaius’ surprise, Adama turned to him.

“You should work on creating that cure, Doctor,” he said. “In case we can’t find Peter—or in case something happens to him.”

Ah. So he wasn’t worthy of being ignored after all. “Of course, Commander.” Gaius gathered his sketches and rose to go. It hadn’t escaped his notice that neither commander nor captain had mentioned Kara Thrace in their final exchange, but it was equally obvious to him that both had been thinking about her.

 

The group of Unity people ended the final verse of Peter’s song just as three of them landed on the floor, twitching like half-dead fish. Those who remained standing cheered and clapped each other on the back. Peter stood on his packing crate, lapping up the attention like a starving cat left overnight in a milkhouse. Several Unity members helped the fallen ones to a place near a bulkhead where ten others squirmed and babbled. Kara watched with a mixture of fear and bafflement. How could these people believe this was anything except a curse? They’d have to be desperate, clutching at straws made of starlight.

She sighed inwardly. How many times had she been just as desperate? No, it was all too understandable.

Her hands, still tied behind her, were shaking even worse now, and she caught one of her legs beginning to tremble. Fear made her mouth dry. The disease was taking the slower course with her, but it still was progressing. How much time left?

“Left and right of way for fifteen dozen eggs came first—”

Who the frak was talking? No new people were twisting on the floor. It took a moment to realize that the nonsense words were pouring from her own mouth.

“—second in line for muffins and butter with apple pie in the kitchen—” Kara clamped her mouth shut and managed to stop the flow of words. Her heart pounded faster under a fresh spurt of adrenaline. It was happening. It was happening to her.

Not yet, she prayed. Just let me hold out a little longer.

Peter was talking to individual members of the Unity crowd now. This was the fourth set that had come in. Tom Zarek, the bastard, remained standing near the walk-in, smug in the knowledge that he had fomented this chaos.

Where the frak was the cavalry? The military knew Kara was missing. Lee had been standing right there when the Unity had kidnapped her. So why hadn’t they tracked her down? Kara “Starbuck” Thrace set her jaw. She was tired, so frakking tired of having to rescue herself—and everyone else—from everything. It would be nice if once, just once, someone would ride to her rescue. Lee, for example. The stupid frak-head was ignoring her, leaving her to face the wolves alone.

Kara pursed her lips and shook her head. Time to get a grip. No one had forgotten her. Least of all Lee Adama and his father the commander. When her Viper had come up missing, Commander Adama had put the entire Fleet in danger by refusing Jump to a safer location until Kara was found. Lee—or someone—would come. In the meantime, it would be better if she were in a position to help whoever showed up. Once again she pulled and twisted at the bonds that held her hands captive. Hot pain made raw ropes around her wrists, and her hands were shaking so much that she couldn’t tell if her bonds were getting looser or not.

“Not on a good day for fishing in the watering hole back on—” Kara shut her mouth hard and stopped the flow. How much longer before it became uncontrollable?

Sharon, still clad in her jumpsuit, abruptly knelt down in front of Kara, blocking her view of the goings-on. “I heard that,” she said. “Sounds like your mouth has a case of the runs.”

“Frak you very much to my own—” Kara clapped her teeth so hard together she was sure she had cracked one.

“Yeah.” Sharon reached over and pulled the duffel bag closer to her. The missile ordnance peeped out from the interior in a deadly game of peekaboo. “Now that you’ve joined the Chosen and are babbling like a lunatic, I think it’s safe to let you in on a secret.”

“Secret lies within the fallen angels of—”

Sharon pressed a cold finger to Kara’s lips. “Shush. Here’s the deal.” She leaned closer and whispered, “I lied. I don’t have the ordnance access code.”

Tom Zarek fished a wireless communicator out of his pocket. He listened, then dashed over to Peter and said something to him. Peter stiffened, then disentangled himself from his Unity groupies and got back up on the crate.

“My friends,” he said, “I have disturbing news.”

The crowd fell silent except for the quiet babbling of those caught in the throes of the plague of tongues. Words bubbled up inside Kara, and she bit her lip to stop herself from joining the babblers.

“I’ve received word,” Peter said, “that a group of marines is burning its way through the hull of this ship.”