02 - The Cylons' Secret Read online

  Now that the Cylons were gone, the Colonies had to create a whole new human underclass. Jobs once performed by machines, menial jobs, the lowest of the low, were given to people displaced by the Cylon War, citizens of other Colonies who lacked the means to return to their homes.

  The good citizens of the Colonies would take advantage of other, less fortunate individuals. The wealthy would always look the other way But when the common people were looking to rise from their stations and share in the wealth, Zarek sensed the possibility of real change.

  He had dropped out of school and stopped talking to his family, feeling it was somehow far nobler to join the underclass. But it wasn’t very long until he found out how little money the work would give him.

  His new scuffling life gave him a little freedom, but Tom Zarek had discovered a little freedom wasn’t enough. He wanted to change his life. And if he had to change the world to do it, so be it. But before you changed anything, you needed money.

  That was when he had learned about the scavenger ships. It was dangerous work, but your employers didn’t ask too many questions. And the money they promised was very good. Money to do whatever he really wanted, when he wanted. He hadn’t looked too closely at the details before he had shipped out. Now he was a part of this, until the year was up. There was no walking away from a ship in space.

  Some of the other crew joked that, once they had the money, they’d never think about the cruiser Lightning again. First there was the crazy captain and a job that was boring for weeks on end. But the job could then turn around and kill you in a dozen creative ways, from using the Lightning’s unsafe equipment to running into something explosive left over from the war. Zarek could see their point. Tom hoped he could forget a few of the things he’d heard about already. He had plans for what he’d do when he got back to the Colonies. Plans that would more than make up for whatever happened on the scavenger ship.

  “Heads up!” The shout came down the corridor. A clanging followed—the call to attention. Scag and Eddie pulled apart to listen to the message.

  “We’ve got something big, boyos!” Griff’s voice boomed throughout the ship. “The captain requests your presence on the bridge.” Griff cackled as if he’d made a joke. “Now!”

  Tom Zarek left the bunkroom to quick-march down the corridor on the heels of Scag and Eddie. That was the Lightning’s first rule. If you disobeyed one of the captain’s requests, you’d get an invitation that would put you straight out of the airlock. He stood in line to climb the ladder that led to the main deck.

  The deck could be reached from four separate hatchways, two leading down to the crew’s quarters, two leading up to the storage and launch bays. The crew piled through every entry, gathering at the edges of the three consoles that made up the command center. The five women and eleven men, Zarek included, that made up the common crew, along with the three men they referred to as their officers, Captain Nadu, Comm Officer Griff, and Engine Officer Robbin. Zarek quickly counted his fellows. They were one shy of twenty in the large room—everyone on board.

  “Crew present and accounted for!” Griff bawled as the last of their mates crowded around.

  “Aye, sir!” the crew shouted more or less together. It was as close as they ever came to real discipline.

  Captain Nadu smiled. His face was never a pretty sight, but it looked far worse when he grinned. One cheekbone and most of his forehead was lost to scar tissue, and a single bone-white line crossed his nose and the less-damaged cheek. When Zarek had first met the captain, Nadu had referred to them as his “war wounds,” and told Zarek and the other new recruits to never mention them in his presence again.

  Which meant that the crew had discussed his face in some detail behind his back. Griff said that some of the damage had come from an engine-room accident a decade ago. Some of the other crewmembers said half of Nadu’s scars had been self-inflicted, often after the death of a member of his crew. The wounds would be deeper, the others added, if Nadu had been the one to order the crewmember’s death.

  Officer Robbin was a thin, tall man who rarely spoke. Zarek hadn’t even thought the man had a voice, until one day when Zarek was running an errand in the bowels of the ship and heard a constant chattering coming from the engine room, and realized it was Robbin in conversation with his beloved machines.

  Griff did the talking for the other two. He was a large man with thinning red hair atop his head and a very full beard. The net effect was that he looked like his hair was escaping from the top of his head to lodge on his chin. His booming voice always seemed to fill the ship around him, as it did now.

  “The captain’s got most excellent news!”

  The captain nodded. “We have a signal.”

  “And even better?” Griff prompted.

  That smile again. “They tried to hide it from us.”

  Some of the crew laughed at that.

  “You don’t hide something that isn’t valuable,” Griff explained to the rest of them. “We’ve been getting hints of this for the last couple days. Our readings fade in and out. At first we thought it was some kind of echo effect.” He chuckled. “But even an echo has to come from somewhere.”

  Griff waved at their engineer. “Our good Robbin is something of an expert at cutting through noise. Between us, we were able to triangulate the source—found a good strong energy signature. Machines, my lads! And then—poof—gone again!”

  “Some kind of masking technology,” Robbin allowed in his deep voice. “Sophisticated, too.”

  “But we think it’s breaking down. Otherwise we might never have found the place. But with that kind of protection, we think we’ve got a prize!”

  “A real prize,” the captain agreed. “The sort of thing we haven’t seen in a long time.”

  “Here’s the icing on the cake.” Griff turned to the communications console by his side. “As soon as we located our energy source and plotted our course, we got a message.”

  He punched a button. A soft male voice spoke through a crackle of static.

  “Warning! Do not approach! We are under quarantine! Disobeying this command will result in serious consequences! Per order of the Colonial Science Protectorate! Warning! Do not approach! We are—”

  Griff cut the signal. “It’s a loop. Just repeats over and over. But it’s a very old loop. For those youngsters among us, the Colonial Science Protectorate hasn’t existed since the Cylons rebelled!”

  “Meaning we’ve found something untouched by the Cylon War,” the captain interjected. “With any luck, we can pick this place clean and retire.”

  The crew was quiet. Zarek could sense they didn’t share the officers’ enthusiasm. A quarantine? Why? Certainly, if the recording was a quarter of a century out of date, they might not have anything to worry about—if there had been some illness, everyone would most likely be long dead. But what if it was some other sort of disaster?

  “Well, enough of this chitchat! It’s time to get to work! Eddie! Scag! You’re out first!”

  The two pilots looked at each other for a moment. Apparently that word quarantine had penetrated even their thick skulls.

  The captain grinned. “Whatever you find on your first recon, I’ll give you double shares.”

  Scag laughed at that. “We’re gone, Captain.”

  The two headed for their Vipers.

  Zarek watched them go. He was doubly glad right now that they were the danger boys. And who knew? Maybe Nadu and Griff were right, and they’d all be rolling in riches.

  “Zarek!” Griff called as the crewman turned back toward the ladder. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll need you to back me up here.” Zarek spun about again, and headed for the second seat at the comm console.

  Griff slapped him on the back. “Cheer up, son! Things are about to get interesting!”

  CHAPTER

  5

  BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

  Tara sent a single burst from the nose of her Viper, killing her forward momentum and stopping t
he small craft dead in space. She stared at the pale object straight ahead—the burned-out hulk that had once been a spacecraft. It had looked quite whole from a distance, but up close it was a dark, fat metal cylinder, pockmarked with meteorite strikes, with holes in the sides where metal plating had been removed. From its bulky, oval shape she could tell it had been a freighter, used to haul cargo from the Colonies to the new settlements. Hanging motionless in the total quiet out here beyond the Battlestar, it looked a bit like an enormous broken egg from which a giant bird had flown. The wreck didn’t look dangerous at all. But the readings from the CIC told another story.

  Skeeter, the backup pilot on this mission, coasted in beside her. He waved a skinny arm from inside his Viper’s cockpit. Junior showed up on her other side a moment later.

  “So what do we do with it?” she called back to base.

  “Keep your pants on, Athena,” Chief Purdy’s voice shot back. “I’m asking the higher-ups.”

  She grinned at the image. The mighty Athena wearing pants, rather than her ceremonial robes.

  They called her Athena, but her name was Tara Tanada. She still wasn’t used to her nickname. It was a badge of honor, and a Battlestar tradition, earned when she had scored top marks in her class at the Academy. They named the best pilots after the ancient stories. And then they expected you to live up to your legend.

  She had people who looked up to her now, a fact that surprised her almost as much as her nickname.

  This was her second tour, both on the Galactica, and her second year in the service. She actually had seniority over the green pilots that made up most of the Viper crews. Oh, Captain Tigh was the official flight trainer, in charge of them all. But Tara and another pair of senior pilots led most of the missions and exercises. She took a small squad out most every day They called these trips “explorations,” but they were training missions, really, designed to get the greenhorns ready for real conflict. Right now, she had a couple of newbies on her tail, waiting patiently for her orders.

  They only had so long to prove themselves.

  The government could change—the Twelve Colonies always had an uneasy truce—and their funding could dry up all over again. After that great battle with the Cylons, who would ever want another war?

  There had already been skirmishes between the Colonies. She had heard rumors of small private armies and navies—always called something else, of course—being amassed in one corner or another of the civilized worlds.

  She was glad to be beyond all that tired politics. This wasn’t an ending. It was a new beginning.

  She liked to think the Colonies were growing up. A new generation wanted to see what their parents had left behind. They all knew they had a lot riding on what happened out here, far away from their Colonial homes. This was the most important mission the Battlestars had had since the Cylon War—a war that was over before Tara had been born.

  They had to prove they had a purpose out in space. Every Colony had a long list of problems planetside, a dozen priorities to eliminate the return to space.

  She had always thought the Colonies were scared to go back out there. It seemed to her as if their confrontation with the Cylons had soured them on the idea of leaving their safe Colonial homes.

  But no one had heard from the Cylons in years. With any luck, they were far, far away Now, the Colonies could once again claim the resources of all these planets and moons. This time, though, they would depend on themselves.

  And so they were out here in the middle of nowhere. It was safer out here in a way. Here, no matter which of the twelve Colonies they hailed from, everybody was in it together.

  Things like this might really start to count.

  Tara looked down at her instrument panel. Even at this distance, the radiation dial was going wild. They had screwed with the engine—that was what Captain Tigh had said. The plating was gone—maybe those were the holes she had seen in the sides of the ship.

  They seemed to have turned a dying ship into a sort of bomb.

  But why plant a bomb?

  Tara knew there were all kinds of crazies out here. The recovery ships, as they liked to be called, had been known to fire on lone ships, especially when pursuing something a little bit outside their charters.

  They obviously weren’t expecting the Galactica. No one in their right mind wanted to get into a fight with a Battlestar.

  She wondered if there might be any way to identify the crew that had left this little gift. She knew she had been instructed to send a close-up visual feed of this hulk, probably for that exact purpose. Perhaps there was some way their specialists could determine the hulk’s origins, give them an idea of just who they were looking for.

  But Tara would rather keep a respectful distance.

  A voice spoke in her ear.

  “Athena? Let’s do it.”

  * * *

  Nik Mino—Skeeter to his friends—never felt like he was really alone. When it got too quiet, too empty, he always heard his grandmother’s voice.

  Be very quiet!

  He was six weeks away from base, six weeks into his real training as a Viper pilot. He wasn’t used to this yet, not at all. The vacuum of space was far too dark and still.

  The Cylons will get you.

  Skeeter hovered to the left of Athena, waiting for orders from the Galactica. It was just his luck—Tara got the nickname of an ancient hero, he got named after a bug. It was still an honor in its half-baked way. He knew how to get in close to his targets. He’d buzz his Viper right in your ear. And, well, maybe early on he was a little heavy on the joystick. Quick in, quick out, the others said. That’s our Skeeter. Once you got a name like that, it stuck for good.

  He had to move quickly. He’d get the enemy before they could even think about getting him.

  They go after noisy boys. Bad boys. Boys who won’t go to bed.

  Skeeter took a deep breath. The derelict was too still out there. He wouldn’t be surprised if a Cylon came peeking out of the wreckage.

  Turn out the light or they’ll get you!

  But that was why he was here, light-years from home, staring at a dead-white ship. To face his fears. To get past them, and be a man.

  He saw Cylons everywhere. They had never really gone away. His grandmother’s voice never left him. He became a Viper pilot to conquer his fear.

  His father had died when he was quite young, killed in an industrial accident where more fragile humans had taken over for the near-indestructible Cylons. His mother had never seemed able to cope after that, and her mother, Skeeter’s grandmother, had come to rule the household.

  And his grandmother did not like small children underfoot. So the stories began.

  She held the house together with the firmest of grips. No doubt she had many good qualities, but compassion was not among them. She wanted him out and away, too scared to be underfoot.

  She took her little stories and carried them far beyond reason. Maybe the old woman had channeled all her own fears into her imaginary monsters.

  He still expected a Cylon behind every moon. The higher-ups said this ship had been left by scavengers.

  How did they know it wasn’t Cylons?

  The Cylons were gone by the time he was a boy, but he had seen pictures of the warriors with their powerful bodies and snakelike arms ready to grab you, their glowing red eyes that could see anything you did. They had shown him pictures and news footage in his history classes. And his grandmother had had a few pictures of her own.

  If you don’t do your best, the Cylons will snatch you from your bed.

  That’s what his grandmother always said.

  Maybe she thought she was teaching him a lesson. It scared the life out of him still.

  If you don’t go right to sleep.

  If you don’t eat all your vegetables.

  If you’re not the best of little boys…

  Athena’s voice shook him out of his thoughts.

  “Skeeter! Junior! I need you to fall bac
k.” New coordinates appeared on the screen before him.

  “Roger that, Team Leader.” Skeeter’s voice seemed to echo as the third member of the team repeated the exact words a fraction of a second after they came out of his mouth.

  “Do you need further support?” Junior asked in Skeeter’s ear.

  “I think I can handle this one. I have orders to detonate. Boys, we’re just going to make the sky a little brighter.”

  He flew his Viper halfway back to the Galactica, with Junior Stith’s Viper flying at his side. Athena followed for a bit, then spun her craft around and shot a single, fine-tuned blast at the deadly derelict. Her aim was perfect, as usual. And she had the wisdom to use it. Why else would they call her Athena?

  Skeeter darkened the cockpit visor and watched the exploding freighter light up the sky.

  CHAPTER

  6

  FREE CRUISER LIGHTNING

  The cruiser Lightning vibrated with the sound of running feet. It was a warm sound, a sound of good fortune for Captain Nadu. He could always feel it when wealth was near.

  He hummed in that tuneless way he had, a sign that the energy was building inside him. What would his pilots bring? The quickness within his soul did not care. Any kind of riches would calm the light within.

  Griff called to say the two Vipes were away. Nadu’s humming grew louder. Whatever this was, the light inside him knew it would be extraordinary He could no longer contain the energy. Nadu opened his mouth and turned the humming into a wordless song, his baritone shifting up and down and up again, the notes pouring from his mouth in a pattern even beyond his own understanding.

  The crew wisely kept their distance when he sang, busying themselves at their stations around the control room. Griff grinned, tapping the board in front of him in time. Nadu’s second in command also knew what the songs could bring.

  Nadu’s mind held the music of the Outer Reaches. That music was why he had survived when so many other raiders had failed. He always picked the right people and the right destinations. Every member of the crew had to fit just so. From his right-hand man Griff to that new kid, Zarek, he knew every one had secrets, and every one had special abilities, but all of them were in harmony with his song. They could all be quite valuable when they were properly used. And Nadu knew how to use them to keep his music alive.