Battlestar Galactica - Destiny, page 16
“Ah, the hell with it!” he shouted. “We can take care of this ourselves.”
Highly trained as they were, both warriors did not forget the presence of armed men nearby. But they could see that the police were operating from the same rulebook as Starbuck and Boomer. When the warriors kept their weapons holstered, so did the MPs. There would be no more shooting today.
Something shifted in the angry crowd, as well. They were suddenly more concerned with helping their members who were down. Apparently there were no fatalities among those who’d been shot—at least not yet.
Everyone was too wound up to appreciate the peculiar equation working itself out before them. Take one crowd of angry Civilians worried about the real lottery. Add to that the genuinely stupid move by council members to put up their own bogus list exempting themselves from the genuine contest already determined by popular vote. Throw in military police who still had an old fashioned respect for cubits unlike the non-commercial spirit sweeping the young. Fire a few bullets into the crowd and there was only one possible answer: a blood bath.
The equation changed with the arrival of two warriors who were themselves stuck in the real lottery the same as the crowd. These two heroes seemed to swoop down like avenging angels. The corridor providing the setting for the neat little morality play ended in a cul-de-sac. The guards had been so busy protecting their clients from the wrath of the mob that they were not in position to deal with two men—only two men—whose righteous anger burned through a random sample of council members like a pulse rifle would fry a ton of lard.
It did not occur to Starbuck or Boomer that they might very well be saving the lives of these fools they were beating up. Basically, they got their hands on them before the crowd did. There is a breaking point for even the most docile group of humanity. This particular gathering of civilians was on the verge of sweeping over the guards and ripping out the throats of the hated council members who had dared to make a public spectacle of their contempt for the average colonial.
Instead of dispensing a well-deserved dose of carnage, the people chose to watch the entertainment instead. It was really pretty cool seeing Starbuck and Boomer mop up the floor with these bastards.
When Starbuck entered the fray, it made it easy for Boomer to break free of the half-dozen hands trying to pull him to the ground. Backing away a few paces. Boomer got into a crouch and then dived at the mid-section of a remarkably overweight specimen from the council. He vaguely remembered that this man had made a lot of snide comments to Apollo. Sure, this was the guy Apollo had complained about; the sublime council member who sniffed that too many colonials married and had children while they were on Paradis.
As Boomer pummeled the man’s doughy face into red pulp, he felt he was repudiating the ideas of a man who thought it was virtuous to prefer death over life. He kept at it so long that his hands went numb. He might not have ever stopped if Starbuck hadn’t pulled him off.
“It’s over, Boomer.”
"What’s over?”
“The fight,” answered Starbuck, gesturing at their unconscious opponents on the floor. Only then did Boomer notice that he was seeing everything through a red haze. He hadn’t even noticed he was bleeding.
Suddenly both men had something more important to notice. The crowd applauded! As other military police showed up, the grim determination of their faces softened into respect for the two warriors. There was no riot to put down. At least not here, not now.
“How do you do it?” asked Boomer as they walked away from the glorious mess they had made.
“Do what?”
“Emerge without a scratch!”
Starbuck took a quick inventory. His knuckles were red and there was a long scratch on his right forearm. One eye felt a little swollen and his bottom lip was cut. Other than that everything seemed fine.
“There’s just one thing I want to know,” said Starbuck.
“What’s that?”
“Is my hair okay?”
Boomer laughed and gave Starbuck a playful punch.
“Ouch!” said Starbuck. “I think I just discovered another injury.”
“We’re going to have to report this to Apollo,” said Boomer.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Starbuck. “This is nothing. A stupid stunt by some of those idiots on the council doesn’t matter.”
“What about those damned military police shooting into the crowd?” Boomer demanded.
“You’re right—we have to do something about that. But first we have something a lot more serious to worry about.”
“The real lottery?”
“You know it. I hear the results will be listed tomorrow. Then we’ll have eight-hundred people knowing for certain that they’re slated to be left behind.”
“A death sentence,” said Boomer softly.
“Maybe. I don’t know about that. But can you imagine what it’s going to be like when everyone knows the final list of names? What happened today will seem like a picnic.”
“Or we just had a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Maintaining order will be a lot harder with people who don’t think they have anything to lose.”
“You can be certain that Apollo is devoting every waking moment to planning for what happens when the felgercarb hits the fan.”
Boomer nodded. “You know what? I think I enjoyed that fight a little too much, Starbuck. It was a way of letting off steam.”
“I feel the same way.”
“We’re both in the lottery. How do you think it’ll come out?”
“I’d rather gamble on a hand of pyramid,” Starbuck admitted. “Whatever happens I have one hope.”
“Yeah?”
“To get one more Centurion in my sights before I’m through! I don’t care if it’s in this solar system or the new one or anywhere else. I want another crack at the Cylons.”
Boomer and Starbuck clasped hands in the warrior mode. “That goes for me, too!”
As fate would have it. Sire Riggbok ended up in the cell next to Ryis. The cell used to be occupied by a loyal follower of Ryis until the man finally sensed that he had backed the wrong side and hanged himself.
“Why did your friend kill himself?” Riggbok asked, pretty well up to date on prison gossip even before he took up residence.
“He grew weary of waiting for my situation to improve. By the way, he wasn’t my friend. He was a supporter.”
Riggbok thought about the distinction. "What’s worse? Having a friend kill himself or a follower?”
“The latter,” answered Ryis without hesitation. “It betrays a lack of confidence in one’s ultimate aims. That’s not the worst of it, if you’re interested.”
“I’m very interested,” the other assured him. “I believed in what you were trying to accomplish on Paradis.”
The architect smiled and said nothing about that. Cursed with an almost photographic memory, he remembered sizing up the decadent Riggbok as a neutral at best. There was nothing like time in the slammer to inspire new recruits. Instead of accurate recollections they relied on wishful thinking.
“Well, Paradis is behind us now,” said Ryis. “So is my girlfriend. She’s never communicated with me once since I’ve been in here. I take that as a bad sign. This current suicide is another bad sign. But what really burns my ass is that Sire Opis has never raised a finger to help me!”
“You were sort of partners, weren’t you?” asked Riggbok.
“I was his good right hand!” insisted the architect, voice rising higher than any building he ever erected. “For a long time I’ve believed that he was waiting for the right moment to make a move on my behalf.”
“Maybe he still is.”
Ryis shook his head. “We’re not completely isolated from the news in here. When Apollo made his grandstand play, I expected the council to do something clever. I’m still waiting. My main worry is that they’ll treat all prisoners as automatic losers in the lottery. There are times I wish I hadn’t been so high-handed about my role on Paradis. At least I wouldn’t be stuck in here!”
Riggbok sighed. “I see your point. If I hadn’t become impatient myself I wouldn’t be sitting in this cell.”
“What did you do?”
“You don’t know?”
Ryis shook his head. “There’s a guard who is my most reliable contact with the outside world. Haven’t seen him lately. Hope he didn’t turn honest, or some other terrible thing happened to him.”
“All I did was open my mouth,” Riggbok said. “I wish it had been something more dramatic, but I just talked a little sedition.”
“Don’t you mean treason?”
Riggbok scratched his head. “What’s the difference, exactly?”
Ryis pondered the question. “In a time of martial law, these distinctions are important. As I see it, treason is when you piss off Apollo. Sedition is when you piss off his friends.”
Riggbok chuckled. “Thanks for clearing that up. But cheer up. It’s going to get better.”
“Why do you think that?” asked Ryis.
“I don’t want to make any evaluation of your situation with Sire Opis; but you can rest assured that Sire Uri won’t leave me to rot in here!”
Ryis felt like he was about to suffer a bout of hiccups. That happened sometimes when he suppressed a desire to laugh. “Your situation is nothing like mine, I take it,” said the architect.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Riggbok hurried to put his new associate at ease. “We all know what you accomplished on Paradis. No one who mattered wanted to leave the planet. It’s just Apollo’s rotten good luck that he was proven right by the planet blowing up! Who could have predicted something like that? I mean, under normal circumstances you would have been right and he would have been wrong.”
“Thanks for cheering me up,” said Ryis dryly.
Riggbok had no idea that he was digging a hole worthy of one of the architect’s underground bunkers. The aristocrat kept on his merry way.
“The difference between us, Ryis, is that you are a professional man.”
“Yes?”
“I am not judged by what I do but what I am. I come from a Fine family that spent generations refining the strain until they produced me.”
“A remarkable result,” said Ryis, almost succeeding in keeping sarcasm out of his voice.
“So it’s one thing to abandon a useful servant but quite another to forget an alliance with one of the best families produced by the colonies.”
Ryis stared in amazement at the man in the cell next to him. Was this some kind of plot by Apollo? Had that wily leader hired a professional actor to play the role of a buffoon and put the council in the worst possible light even to someone like Ryis?
Ryis shrugged. He knew better than that. It was just one of life’s little ironies that this member of the council should end up here. For the first time in his life, he completely sympathized with how Apollo must feel when dealing with people like this.
“I must thank you. Sire Riggbok, for explaining the situation to me with such clarity. I see now that I was only in a role inferior to Sire Opis whereas you are a full equal to Sire Uri.”
Riggbok prided himself on being magnanimous with anyone who showed an eagerness to learn, and basically could see things his way.
“I’m glad you don’t take the circumstances personally,” he said.
“There is nothing more impersonal than a fact. Something is true or it isn’t.”
“Well said,” said Sire Riggbok in a tone suggesting that he would throw the architect a treat if only he had something sweet and tasty on his person.
“But as we sit here and wait for you to be rescued by Sire Uri, may I ask a question? I assure you that it is entirely impersonal.”
“Ask away,” trumpeted Riggbok with a smug expression.
Ryis bowed slightly. “Thank you. Sire. My question is how is it that Count Baltar is the product of one of the finest blood-lines in the history of the colonies. . .”
“Oh, there’s no arguing with that,” Riggbok interrupted.
Ryis swallowed hard and soldiered on to his conclusion. “As I was about to ask, how can Baltar, a true aristocrat, be a remarkable genius instead of a useless fool?”
The fleet hung in space, a collection of small satellites around a swollen sun. Debris from the destroyed planet drifted past the ships, slowly making its way out of the solar system while the ships waited for the living things inside to decide on where they would go next.
Inside these fragile metal worlds were struggles both large and small. There was love and hate. There were plans and hope and theories. There was always room for more theories.
But outside the ships there were also a few living things with no time for theories. They put on the fragile skins of space suits, so much more fragile than the ships of the fleet or the Viper fighters birthed out of the ships. Space suits were flimsy protection against the big empty spaces. Each and every living body in its suit became a little world unto itself, another satellite of the sun that had lost one of its children when Paradis ceased to exist.
Did that sun hunger for new children to take the place of Paradis? Did its gravitational pull exert some ineffable extra whisper of desire that these new satellites should stay—all of them stay and none make the dangerous trip to a new solar system and a new world?
Inside the space suits, human hands worked inside awkward gloves to heal ruptures on the skin of space ships both large and small. Work had to be done outside on ships readying to make the FTL jump; work had to be done on ships that would not abandon the sun that watched everything with a giant, blinding rainbow eye.
Working outside space ships is always dangerous, even in a solar system that hasn’t recently been the scene of a planetary catastrophe. The fleet always used volunteers for this work.
Bojay was the warrior whom the mechanics trusted the most to work on the Vipers. Naturally he was at the front of the line when work had to be done outside the ships. It was an honor for warriors to volunteer for engineering assignments with Bojay and he always put together a crack team.
There was more work than ever to do now before the colonials took the next big step in the exploration of the universe—the colonials who won the lottery. There were so many names on the lists that it came as no surprise to anyone when volunteers for hazardous work reached an all time high.
Maybe it was a form of tempting fate to take a chance while you still didn’t know what the future held in store. Whatever the motives, dangerous work had to be done.
Paradis was gone, but it had left plenty behind in its wake. A whole planet just doesn’t disappear, no matter how total the destruction wreaked by the super-weapons of the Cylon Empire.
The increase in micro-meteors was right off the scale, little deadly bullets making external work all the more hazardous. Everyone knew the risk. Precautions were taken but it was still a case of playing the odds, like a game of pyramid.
The little human satellites floated in the sunlight, each a bright star of human efficiency doing essential tasks for all the living ones inside all the ships of the fleet.
On this particular work detail there were only two accidents. One human satellite never rejoined the larger metallic world of the ships. The head went spinning off in one direction and the body in another, two new satellites of the lonely sun that had lost a whole world.
The other victim stayed in one piece. A small pinprick depressurized the suit and opened a vein. Before the victim stopped breathing, or died in vacuum, or bled to death, the suit repressurized. The damage was only so bad to the suit.
The human being was not as well designed as the space suit. But she was still living as Bojay desperately carried her pale, inert body into sick bay and found Cassie.
"It’s Rhaya!” he cried out. “She’s lost a lot of blood but we can still save her!”
16
“What about your big talk now?”
Da’veed Lindsay turned from the posted list of names to face his accuser. He used to like being a teacher until he got to know his colleagues. Etooey was always a pain in the ass. He was glad the man had voted against him for the office he now held.
“I intend to keep my promise,” said Lindsay. “I said it at the town meeting and I meant it.”
Etooey jabbed a finger at the list as if he were stabbing it with a knife. “Easy for you to say then, but here is the real list of names chosen to stay behind and you’re not on it!”
“I will formally request that my name be removed.”
As the elected official turned away from the grim posting, soft hands grabbed him with a strength he never imagined they could possess. Suddenly he was staring into the sweating face of a terrified little bald man.
“Please switch with me, then,” gasped Etooey. “You saw my name on the list. You don’t care what happens to you, so why not switch with me?”
Lindsay drew himself up to his full height, towering over his fellow teacher. “You heard what I said at the meeting. I think this journey should be for the young. I’m not about to help remove you from the list.”
“But why not? I’m younger than you!”
The other man laughed. “By two yahrenl That’s not exactly what I meant.”
“This whole thing is stupid,” said the other man, returning to stare at the document. The two men were alone in one of the study halls that was normally used for classes but had been converted into a supply dump during the current crisis. Lindsay was on his way to open the door.s but the other man ran over to him again.
“Maybe it’s not real if no one sees it,” pleaded the other man.
“What are you talking about?”
“How many of these lists have been posted? Maybe it’s not too late to gather them all up and no one will see.”
“You’re insane,” observed Lindsay with real pity.
“Why me?” screamed the man. “They should have posted lists of those slated to go instead of tormenting the poor losers with this hideous death list.”
