Section 1.8 : Molecay

39 Quartus 6490, 12.47 - 14.30 Colonial Time
Molecay

"You fucking bastard!"

Apollo flinched, tearing his gaze from the girl's wasted face.

Van Trion was shaking as badly as if she had convulsions, her hands balled into fists. "You bastard! You knew!"

"This is not the time," Apollo snapped back, sharpening his tone to acid. "Get a grip! We have a job to do."

She choked, disbelieving, but he didn't give her the chance to come back.

"You or Haydn?"

"What?"

"In here. You or Haydn?"

Van's hands were curling and uncurling with agitation. Over by the door Haydn was coughing and swearing, his hand over his mouth and his shoulders heaving. Apollo had found something to disturb the Sergeant at last, then.

"Me," she said, terse and angry.

"Then get him out there, overseeing the checks being made on the prisoners. I'm not calling those transports down until I'm sure what we're taking back." He softened his tone very slightly, not so much that she thought he was ceding control, but trying to find some way back from the hostility. "Someone I trust has to do that."

The need to act steadied her. "If I'd had any sense, I'd have brought Khal, after all."

"And if I'd had any, I'd have insisted on another Shield ship coming along in the first place, but there's no point in worrying now. Get him out there. And tell him to keep his mouth shut."

"You can trust him."

"Fine." Apollo kept his tone business-like, not letting the tempo slide. "Send him on his way, and move Danzer up to the doorway. She can stand watch from outside while she collects the nodes for me. The only thing I want coming through that door are the explosives and body bags."

She wavered, eyes drawn again to the pods.

"Now, Van! Don't look. Ignore everything."

She shot him a nasty glance, but did as he ordered. While she talked briefly to Haydn, Apollo shrugged out of his backpack and left it propped up against the deactivated IL Cylon. He didn't need anything in there yet.

Instead, he took a moment to study the pod.

It looked curiously organic, as if it had grown there, thrumming with power and alight with diodes and incomprehensible dials and monitor screens. The bottom half flowed up from the floor – implying that there was more machinery beneath his feet – growing into a long bench or table on which the girl lay. A dark metal stalactite came down from the ceiling, touching the clear cover dead centre, and then splitting into four long, sinuous arms that streamed down over the cover to merge seamlessly into each corner of the pod itself, holding the cover securely in place. Fibre optic lines pulsed in the stalactite, glowing faintly blue and, occasionally, sea-green. He glanced up, but the roof was a dim mass of mechanical shapes and equipment, difficult to make out; a myriad of machines or units making up one single machine? He couldn't tell, he didn't have enough technical knowledge to know. He was the wrong man for this job. Felix should have been here, instead. Felix had a better chance of working out what this installation was doing or manufacturing.

Van was back. She had taken his advice, if something so brusquely barked at her could be deemed advice, and was carefully avoiding looking into the pods. She looked a lot steadier, anger getting the better of horror. "What now?"

"I don't think there's anything else moving in this place but we need to do a quick recce, and check for any signs that there are lower levels. We'll talk when that's done. You take that side." He waved his laser to his left. "Stay in synch with me. Okay?"

"Okay."

They split up, working their way down the row of pods until they each reached a wall. In the dim light, he could barely see her, the all-black fatigues fading almost into invisibility and only the faint impression of movement betraying where she was, a shadow moving among shadows. She would be able to see no more of him as he moved quickly along the wall towards the back of the building, checking visually down each aisle as he crossed the end of each row of pods, checking the pods and checking that Van was there and okay. Once or twice he saw the pale oval blotch that had to be her face, turning to make the same visual checks he was: checking the pods, checking on him.

No indication that there was anything beyond the single story building, no access points to other levels. True, nothing had shown up on the preliminary scans, but Apollo was too cautious to take that on trust. There may be no real need for verification, but he wasn't going to have a platoon of centurions come at him from somewhere below just because he was stupid enough not to be careful. But so far, this seemed to be exactly what the scans had suggested: one single-story unit with a considerable amount of high-energy-using machinery. No other doors, no elevator to lower levels and nothing in the roof other than machinery.

Ten rows of ten pods… but the last two rows weren't the same as the others. No pods, just long low tables, waist high, and the figures lying on them were too thin and attenuated for humanity.

Assured that this single unit building—single machine?—was all he had to worry about, Apollo walked slowly down the last row to meet Van, looking curiously at the things on the table. The metal bodies were on the same general construction as the centurions that he was more used to, but built on a reduced scale. Centurions were the drones, the work-horses in the Cylon world, bottom of the pile. They were built for bulk and strength and unquestioning obedience; the small organic node, all a centurion rated, was insufficient to give them individuality. Centurions were cogs in the machine. Even the Gold Commanders had little real sentience.

The Strategy Unit had long suspected that the IL Cylons were the next stage up: a bigger organic neural node, smaller bodies that weren't built to work but to command and exact that absolute obedience from the centurions below them, IL series Cylons were, in all probability, the executive strand in Cylon 'society'. The Imperious Leader made the decisions, the ILs made sure they were carried out. That accounted for the smaller, more slender body and the all but useless hands on the one Haydn had got earlier. These were the brains, not brawn.

None of the constructs on the tables had nodes yet, but the machines surrounding them were quiet and idle, powered down. It looked like actual mechanical production had halted. Nothing he or the Dhow people had done, he thought. It was more likely that the IL carcasses were ready for their implants and the Cylons were waiting for the human hosts to ripen before harvesting the growing nodes and putting them into place behind those childish clown's faces. He glanced at the rows of pods. There were four times as many humans as there were IL series bodies. That implied one hell of an attrition rate, a significant failure in the implant process. Maybe they hadn't perfected this process yet.

"What's going on here?" Van came to join him. She looked a little better, less pallid and she'd stopped shaking.

"I'm not sure." Apollo looked round at the two rows of IL Cylons, eight rows of mutilated humans. He was lying. He was sure. He started back down the row, heading for the pod where he'd left the completed IL Cylon with what he suspected was its humanly-grown brain.

"Apollo?" She didn't believe him.

He stopped by the dead Cylon and the staring, once-pretty girl. He poked the IL with his foot, but it remained limp, its head unlit. Dead... no. It was off-line, deactivated. It was easier not to think of them as living beings, even with what they most probably had inside their heads.

"They're using the humans to grow the brain node for Cylons like this one," he said. "At least, I think that's what they're doing."

Van looked from him to the girl in the pod, eyes widening. He nodded, certain that he was right.

The fireflies danced on, indifferent.

"Oh God," said Van, and turned away to be copiously sick.

She flung off the hand that Apollo stretched out to touch her arm, and bent almost double as she retched and retched, gasping miserably between each jarring heave. He watched helplessly for a micron before turning away to give her a little privacy.

He'd stopped feeling sick himself after those first few microns of hesitation at the door, before he and Haydn had been distracted by the IL Cylon. He didn't actually feel anything at all, he realised, a little astonished. He could look at the dreadful thing inside the pod and think about the pretty girl it must have once been and the terrible use she had been put to, but the horror and disgust affecting Van and that had even shaken the Sergeant, didn't affect him. Such feelings were so far away, so remote, that they belonged to someone else. They didn't belong to him. Maybe, he thought, they belonged to the girl in the pod.

He picked up the backpack and walked slowly down the aisle, looking carefully at each pod he passed. There was no pattern to the people in the pods, at least not one he could discern. Male and female, young and old, black and white: the Cylons appeared to be indiscriminate in the way they'd chosen the people for this... this process. The only thing that the people had in common were the fireflies flickering inside their trepanned heads.

He stopped beside one pod. The occupant in it was young, very young. He wouldn't think about how young, his thoughts involuntarily going back to Telnos and his few sectons of surrogate fatherhood when Luke's small hand had been put, trustingly, into his. That trust he had managed not to betray and his last news of Luke from the welfare authorities was that the child was well and strong and happy. But here—

He turned his back, quickly, and instead he watched the lights in the head of the man in the next pod, looking for patterns there. Red, green, blue… the pinpoint lights were flashing in what seemed like random patterns. He couldn't see if there were sequences hidden within the apparent chaos, and really, he didn't have time to spend in speculation. Instead, he rested the pack on the pod so it covered the man's face and he didn't have to look at it. He took out both cameras.

He kept his back to the dead child behind him.

Van joined him, and when he turned, she was wiping her mouth. She looked past him to what he couldn't look at himself, and her already wet eyes widened and filled with tears. She dashed them away angrily, brushing at her eyes with hands that were shaking again. "Fuck, Apollo, what did you know about this?"

"A little," he said. The secrecy that Supreme Commander Jak had insisted on was so irrelevant now that he could have laughed.

"Oh, you bastard," she said, but there was no energy in it.

"I knew a little," he repeated. It wasn't worth defending himself, but he did say, almost to himself: "I prayed I was wrong."

It was enough to stop her. She paused, eyed him uncertainly, her hands slowly clenching and unclenching again – with anger, he thought. "When you arrived on Dhow, you said it was horrible."

"Yes."

"How long have you known?"

Apollo took out the Link and checked on it, getting it ready. It sat in the protective padding of its case, a dozen data crystals lined up beside it, lighting up the instant he touched the power button.

"Since Decimus. I spent a lot of time, last yahren, going over the stuff I brought back from T18. I kept finding references to this place. They weren't easy to decipher and it took a while for me to guess at what it all might mean." He put the Link to one side and started readying the cameras to function in the dim lighting. His right hand ached with tension, and he had to pause, copying her own gesture of clenching and unclenching his hand until the nerves eased. He was a little more careful, when he returned to readying the cameras. He couldn't afford to drop one. "We weren't certain, Van. I only suspected that the Cylons were using the humans for something to do with their own production. How, we couldn't be sure. Not until we came to look."

"Are you sure that's what's going on here?" She took the camera he offered, watching as he prepared the other.

Apollo indicated the rows of pods. "The Cylons back there are all IL series. Have you come across them before?"

She shook her head. "I've heard of them, but I've never seen one. A Gold Commander, yes, but not one of those things."

"We've only ever captured a handful of them. Less than a handful, and most of what we have is back in storage in the labs in the Strategy Unit and it's old stuff, really old; hundreds of yahrens old. I've never seen a whole one, just body parts." He looked back towards the end of the room, where the Cylon metallic bodies were being put together. "Until we got the T18 material, we could only guess at how they make Cylons. I mean, apart from knowing that there's that little node of organic matter inside each of them, we had no data on how it got there. I'm still not sure how they grow that stuff."

Van looked pointedly at the pods.

"No. These are not usual, Van. Whatever is going on here is something outside their normal production methods."

"You're sure of that?"

He nodded. "All the data points to this being an experimental station. I don't think they can normally use humans as incubators for the organic material, but I'm pretty certain that's what they're doing here. The whole set-up here, what they're doing to the prisoners, the way that there's all those empty IL cases there, ready... it can't just be coincidence that the one Haydn downed had the same lights in its head as these people do."

Hybrid organic material, the thing he'd feared the most. At least, it was being implanted in the Cylons, not in humans. Then he thought about the pens full of people outside and wondered.

"IL Cylons are only just below the Imperious Leader in their power structure." Apollo rubbed at his temples as he tried to puzzle it all out. "I wasn't expecting this. I mean, I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't IL Cylons. I thought they'd use centurions. I didn't think they'd put hybrid tissue into ILs."

"Why not? We don't know that much about the things, do we?"

"These are the cadre from which the next Imperious Leader is chosen. It makes more sense to me that the Cylons would want to manufacture the ILs back on their home planet and only from the purest of pure components. Their whole ethos is about Cylon perfection. Can you see them risking having an Imperious Leader with alien, human tissue in its make-up?"

Van grimaced. "No, you're right there."

"The real IL series is most likely created on Cylon itself. These have to be some variant bred for a purpose, experimental... I don't know, I haven't had a chance to think about it… they must be put together like this, with human tissue, deliberately, for a reason. I just don't know what it is." He stopped and shrugged, rubbing fretfully at his temple again, trying to rub away the incipient headache. He thought back to the discussion with Cain in Jak's office, a lifetime ago. They wanted something of us that they didn't have themselves, he'd theorised, and now he wondered just what this variant on the IL series would turn out to be. He was sorry, now, that Haydn had had to down the only live one.

"What about the people out there? Are they safe to take back?" She wasn't stupid. She was making the connexions.

Apollo shrugged again. "The scanners are checking that the people out there aren't carrying any Cylon hardware. That's the best we can do."

She twitched visibly.

"What's their condition, the prisoners? Did you talk to any of them?"

"I tried." Her tone was grim. "They aren't normal. I don't suppose I would be, either, in the circumstances but they're reacting very oddly. They're barely reacting at all. They're passive, almost indifferent. Even those who came out of their huts to see what the noise was all about are hard to talk to. They're struggling to talk. A word or two, that's all, and mostly disconnected, like they can't find the words they want. Maybe they're too traumatised."

"Or maybe they're drugged. Possible, do you think?"

"They grow most of their own food. I could see the fields as we came in. I suppose it could be adulterated with something. Or maybe the tinheads are adding something to the water to keep their lab rats tamed."

"There are paramedics on the transport ships who should have a better idea than us about what's causing it. We'll know if it's drugs if they start coming out of it on the way home."

"They'll be docile enough, anyway," she said, dryly. "What about these people, the ones in here?"

Apollo felt his shoulders sag with something that was very near despair. "They're dead already."

"But you wanted body bags - "

"For one of them, or two, if I can work out how to get them out of the pods. And for that Cylon. If I can freeze it in time, we can get it back before its node decomposes."

"You're just going to leave them?"

Anger flashed through him. He caught her by the shoulders and forced her around to face the child that might have been Luke, if things had turned out differently on Telnos. She gasped and protested but he was stronger than her and he wouldn't let her go.

"Look at him, Van! He's dead. I can't see him breathing, can you? And even if he is alive, if I open the pod and try to take him out, how long would he live with the top of his head cut off like that and his brain full of Cylon cells and technology? He's dead, God help him and us. He's dead." He released her so suddenly that she stumbled, bringing up against the pod and making it shake. She recoiled as if it burned her, springing back. "They're all dead. There's nothing we can do for them."

He let his hands drop to his sides. "We have to get back with whatever we can carry and destroy the rest. When we blow this place to hell they won't feel anything." He stared, unwillingly, into the child's brown eyes. Luke's eyes had been as brown, but Luke had been full of life and happiness, even on Telnos. Please God, they still were. "But they'll be clean and free again."

She made a sound that may have been a sob.

"I'm sorry, Van," he said. "I know it's horrible. I've had longer than you to get used to the idea and it's still horrible. I'm sorry."

"Sorry!" She shook her head, and levered herself upright again, taking a step away from him. "My sister's boy's about that age. Is that all you'd be able to say to her, that you're sorry?"

"Did you ever hear about Telnos?"

Startled, she looked at him rather than at the horror in the pod. "What the fuck has that got to do with anything?"

"I got left behind there, me and some others. We collected together the surviving settlers. One of them was a seven-yahren old orphan who stuck to me like a leech for sectons. When we got back, his aunt took him, adopted him. She wouldn't let me see him." Apollo shrugged. He looked at the dead child and away again quickly, unable to meet the wide brown eyes, and his voice trembled slightly with the slight stammer that always afflicted him when he was angry or afraid. "Well, who c-could blame her? He n-needed to settle with her, and I was only in the way and I was still with Joss... I've not seen Lukey since. He's the n-nearest I'll ever g-get to a kid of my own." He grimaced, controlled the stammer ruthlessly, angry with himself for letting her provoke him. "He'd be this kid's age by now. You have no idea how sorry I am."

After a short silence, Van said, quietly, "What will they do with the ones you do take back?"

"These people here, or the ones out there?"

"Both."

"The live prisoners will be taken to a holding centre, well away from the main colonies. It'll be a long time before we're sure that they aren't carrying Cylon components."

"You said the scanners would detect them."

"Hard components, yes. We can't detect biological tissue."

"Then what you mean is that they'll be taking their prison with them. Poor bastards."

"Yes. Poor bastards." He glanced around at the pods. "As for these, if I can get a couple back, they'll go straight to the Unit's laboratory along with the IL Cylon. We need to know what the Cylons are doing here, Van. Then we've got a better chance of dealing with it before it deals with us."

"And the rest?"

"I'll be putting one helluva lot of explosive in here."

"Rather you than me."

"It will be me. I won't ask anyone else to do this." He left her to think about it for a centon, turning back to the camera. He put a couple of extra memory crystals into his pocket, keeping a couple aside for her.

After another thoughtful silence, Van sighed. "What do you want me to do now?"

"Take as many holopics as you can get. I'm sorry, but it means taking pictures of these people here. Get as much as you can of the pods, the machinery... everything." He glanced at her, assessing the strain she was under. "Start with the Cylons at the back."

She shot him a look that he couldn't quite decipher, and walked away, quickly. He waited for a micron, looking down at the camera in his hands before slinging the strap over one shoulder and picking up the Link, fitting five of the little data crystals into the ports on the Link's side. He had seen a recognisable computer terminal near the door and it took only microns to locate the right slot and slide the Link into place. While it negotiated access with the Cylon machine—a faster process than T18, he noted, thinking that in only three yahrens they'd learned so much—he reached up to switch on his com unit. The microphone dropped down into place.

The answer was immediate, brusque and the man himself. "Cain."

"Code Chimnera, sir."

Confirmation that they'd found what they were looking for, what he'd dreaded they'd find: irrefutable proof of Cylon-human hybridisation.

There was a minor burst of static, giving Cain a respite before he had to reply. When he did, he was calm enough. "Yes, I see. You're certain?"

"Absolutely."

"Very well. Recommendation, Captain?"

"We're scanning the live prisoners now, sir. I've got—" his eyes found the child's face again and he turned away abruptly "—samples to collect, both theirs and ours. I'll call the transports in when I'm sure and the sample collection is underway."

Cain grunted.

"How is it up there, sir?"

"Invigorating. We're clearing up the stragglers. There's been an energy surge from the nearest base. They're probably on their way."

"We still have a few centars, sir. Could you let me know when you're in geo-stationary orbit?"

"Of course."

"Thank you, sir. I'd better get on with it, down here."

Cain wished him luck and cut the connexion. Apollo hefted the camera in his hands and started work.




Danzer called him from the doorway, fifteen centons later.

"This thing is full, sir." She showed him the case of centurion nodes. "The Sarge is here and wants a word, and I've half a dozen body bags here for you. Want me to bring them inside?"

"No, I'll pick them up in a micron. You guard that case with your life. Van!"

She was already moving towards him. He slid out through the door, Van at his heels. Van closed the door behind her, carefully and pointedly. Danzer, looking disappointed, moved back out of the way. Apollo was surprised at how dark it was getting. The sun had been setting when they'd arrived, and the dusk was giving way now to true night.

Haydn was imperturbable again, overseeing the monitoring of the prisoners all that he had needed to calm himself. "We've finished all the monitoring tests, sir. I had them run everybody through twice to be sure." Haydn, too, was putting the pieces of the puzzle together. An intelligent man, this. "Nothing. The scanners all came up clean."

Apollo wasn't as delighted about that as he'd first thought he would be. Not after seeing what were in the pods back in the building behind him. But it was still good news. His problem was that what Haydn had to report was only partial good news.

"I don't suppose we can do any more with them, down here," said Van.

"No, not really." Apollo sighed, rubbing at his forehead. "The Cylons?"

"We're still doing a count. We got them all, sir."

"Just centurions?"

Haydn nodded. "One Gold Commander, but the rest are centurions."

It was a shame there wasn't another IL-Cylon. "Fine. Danzer, send one of your people to get the Gold Commander's head and take the node. Dump one of the ordinary nodes and make sure that you mark the jar you put the Gold one into."

"Sir," said Danzer.

Apollo glanced at Van. "Well, let's go take a look at them. Lead the way, would you, Sergeant? Danzer, no-one's to go in or out of that building."

Danzer grimaced slightly. "Yes sir."

Van went with him, Haydn a yard or so behind them. "I wish I could have had the medics I wanted, to check them over," he said to her.

"What stopped you?"

"You met what stopped me in the Supreme Commander's office, dressed in a lot gold braid. He wasn't keen on expanding the circle of people who knew about this place."

"What's his reasoning? They'll have to have medics on the holding base you mentioned. All the base personnel will have to know."

"True. Eventually, when the base is fully operational. But they'll be about as able to leave the place as the returned prisoners will be. The Official Secrets Act will see to that."

"Great. Not much of an inducement to take the job."

"I don't think they'll be volunteers." Apollo looked over the patch of ground where the prisoners all sat quietly under the watchful eyes of a dozen Shield warriors. Even the children were quiet and still, unnaturally patient. He'd have given anything for them to be normal kids, running around and screaming and generally being childishly loud and obnoxious. "They're quiet."

"They're like sheep, sir," said Haydn. "They've not given us a mite of trouble."

Apollo watched them for a few centons. One or two noticed him and for an instant they struggled with the idea that something out of the ordinary was happening to them, Apollo could see it on their faces, but whatever impulse they felt to try and react died away. Van was right about their tractability. Apollo was more certain than ever that these people were being kept docile through some chemical means. He could see the attraction from the Cylon point of view if it meant that the prisoners wouldn't fight back when they became raw parts in the production process.

"How many of them?"

"Hundred and thirty-two, sir. About half of them are kids."

With the eighty back in the factory, that tallied pretty well with Van's estimates and his own. "Have you talked with any of them?"

"They don't talk, sir. They understand Standard and they can follow orders. They did what they're told when we moved them out here, but none of them talked to us. Or to each other."

Apollo moved closer to the prisoners, looking for – well, he didn't know what. Shaved heads and surgical scars, maybe? But there was nothing like that to see, not on a casual visual inspection. No shaven heads showing surgical scarring, just tangled, dirty hair that in some cases may never have been cleaned. No outward sign of any sort of surgical intervention, although there were signs in plenty of deprivation and mistreatment and neglect. They were scantily dressed and dirty, and even here out in the open he could smell unwashed bodies and sweat and urine and shit. Dulled eyes looked back at him as he walked amongst the crowd, pupils dilated, making the eyes dark holes in the blank faces. He was reminded of the childish look to the ILs' faces, the same holes for eyes and the same empty expressions.

These people didn't react much to him or the other warriors. They would shrink away from him if he got too close, but their faces remained expressionless. It was difficult to tell if that was a lack of real awareness or a learned reaction, an extra layer of protection. When he bent down over one of those who'd shown a little more awareness and tilted the man's head up, the eyes focused on him briefly before clouding over and sliding away again. He really couldn't tell if the man had registered him. He thought the man had seen something, tried to connect, but it had been too fleeting to be sure.

Apollo stepped back. He noticed that they clustered together in little knots, often an adult with children huddled up against them. As he came closer, a woman, indescribably dirty and ragged, avoided his gaze but tightened her protective grip on the child in her lap. A little reaction, then. She wasn't a complete tabula rasa, empty of all feeling. There may well be something salvageable in these poor people. He felt a flare of something that may have been compassion. Or hope, maybe. Even here, some tiny scrap of humanity and human feeling remained. The Cylons hadn't been able to destroy it altogether.

He walked back to where Haydn and Van Trion waited. "It's getting cold, now the sun's going down, Sergeant. See if you can find some blankets or something, especially for the kids. It'll be a centar at least before the transports get here." He nodded at Haydn's acknowledgement. "And get the markers out for the transport landing field."

"Done, sir."

"Thanks." Apollo beckoned to Van to follow him. Once they stood a little apart, he brought the comlink back on line.

"Illych," said the Hertford's captain, immediately, in response. He must have been crouched over the comms desk, waiting.

"We're ready, Captain. I need transports for just over a hundred and thirty. The markers are out and our passengers are ready."

"On their way. ETA: one centar, twenty."

"Thank you. Keep me posted if there's any change. Apollo out." Apollo switched frequencies. "Commander Cain?"

A shrill burst of static made him wince. There was no answer.

"Commander?" A pause. Still nothing. "Commander?"

"Shouldn't he be in orbit by now?" asked Van.

"He should be." Apollo took of the headset and examined it. "Looks okay." He switched frequencies again and put it back on. "Captain Illych?"

"Here."

"I'm having trouble raising the Pegasus. Can you try?" He waited until Illych reported failure, a few centons later. "Can you see her?"

"I've got this dust bowl of a planet between me and him," said Illych. "If you want me to take a look, it'll take me about twenty centons to get out of orbit and into position to make a sensor sweep of Molecay."

"Take a look, please."

"I'll get back to you."

"Thanks. I'll keep the Pegasus frequency open in case it's just a fault and he gets back to me. Please switch to frequency 38.05."

"Done. Hertford out."

"See if you can raise the Dhow, Van." He switched to the Dhow's assigned frequency.

"No problem," she said after a centon. "Khal, where are you in relation to the base?"

"Not quite at the apogee, boss, but not far off. Problem?"

It was where Dhow was supposed to be, out of Pegasus's way and watching the other side of the system for hostiles, until they were ready to call the Lieutenant back to retrieve the Shield Warriors.

"Move him closer," said Apollo. "Bring him close up and ask him to keep his eyes peeled and tell us if he sees anything out of the ordinary."

"But not tell him Pegasus isn't answering?"

"Not yet. Tell him I'm getting nervous and want him ready to move in at speed."

She obeyed, trying to allay Khal's natural apprehension at the unexpected change by getting in a sly dig at their 'Major's' inability to keep to his own plan.

"I am listening in," Apollo pointed out to the pair of them, but it had the effect Van wanted. Khal sounded unfazed at the change.

"He won't get into position for a centar, at least," she said, after agreeing with Khal where he'd position the Dhow and sit it in geo-stationary orbit close by, and closing down the link.

"I know."

"I don't like this."

Apollo nodded, uncertain. Hopefully it was nothing more than a brief communications blackout.

Van added, "Although I guess it's not likely something's happened to them."

"No," agreed Apollo, slowly. "When I spoke to him, he said he was just clearing up the last of the Raiders."

"Well, it'd take more than a few Raiders to take out a battlestar."

"I suppose. Maybe he saw something that needed checking out." In which case, why hadn't Cain used the com-link to tell him? He glanced, uselessly, at the sky. Nothing to see, nothing to be done. "Come on. We might as well get on with what we have to do in there, and just wait for the Juggernaut to saunter into position in his own good time."

Danzer was sitting in a pool of light from a portable searchlight, when they got back to her. She had a Gold Commander's head on her lap and was just sealing the node into a jar marked with a big star on the label. The discarded centurion node was lying in the bottom of the refrigerated case. She shut the case with a snap and grinned up at them.

"Do I get to keep this one for a souvenir?" she asked, stroking the gold head.

"If you want," said Apollo.

"It'll make a nice lamp base."

She had half-dozen body bags waiting. Although the military still used the term indiscriminately, what Danzer had with her were the rigid capsules specifically designed for taking bodies home, not the zip-up bags used to bury the dead planet-side. Fitted with anti-gravity suspensors and freezing units, the capsules were long, black, featureless ovoids that reminded Apollo all too closely of the pods.

Danzer had the explosive, too. Apollo assessed the amount. "Not enough. Double that amount, Corporal, and start setting it for me. I want at least thirty 150-gram bundles and detonators."

Danzer blinked. "Thirty. Yes, sir." She glanced at the building. "There won't be anything left."

"That's right," said Apollo. He nodded his thanks and with Van's help he took three of the body bags into the building he was beginning to refer to as the factory. He wasn't sure they could manage more than three, given that he still had to work out how to get the mutilated humans out of the pods.

They packed the IL Cylon first, both of them taking the opportunity to examine it more closely. Van remarked that it was pretty much the same as the ones she'd been photographing: the production process really was coming to an end. Apollo logged all the details in his head. Under the iridescent robes, the body was the same metallic construction as a centurion, although scaled down into something more slender and more human, less massy. The hands were useless, mere paddle shapes at the end of arms that seemed to have no mechanics in them whatsoever, just there for show. He was intrigued to see that the thing's feet were fitted with what looked like small suspensor units, similar to those on the body-bags, probably meaning that it could glide, as well as walk. Depended on the terrain, he supposed.

It was heavier than it looked and they spent several centons in an intense effort to get the long body into the capsule, bending the legs to fit. Sweating and cursing, Apollo closed the capsule down and set the controls. Almost instantly, condensation formed on the matt-black outer surface as the temperature inside plunged down to zero. When he touched the surface a micron or two later, he could feel the frost. He pulled his fingers away quickly before they could stick, hoping that he'd judged the temperature right. He had to have the thing chilled to prevent decomposition setting in quickly, the temperature at just a fraction above freezing point. Anything more and Felix, not to mention the Supreme Commander, would kill him if the organic tissue was too damaged by ice crystals to be useful. It looked right.

Van pushed back her helmet and rubbed a hand across her temple, loosening the hair that was sticking to her forehead. "If I had any sense at all, I'd be out there doing the easy stuff herding those sheep, and Haydn would be in here using his brawn."

"I could do with some brawn myself," muttered Apollo. He wasn't scrawny by any means but he didn't have Haydn's bulk, and brute strength had been needed to get the IL into the capsule, nothing more. He straightened up and looked about him. "I guess we try to work out how to open one of these things."

He let Van float the IL's capsule over to the door while he looked again at the nearest pod, the one with the young girl in it, and tried to work out how to open it. He couldn't see any sort of catch that would open the cover, nor anything that looked like it might cause the top mechanism to retract and allow the cover to be moved. He couldn't feel anything, either as he moved slowly around the pod, allowing his hands to feel the seal between table and cover.

"I'm beginning to think that Felix is right," he said when Van rejoined him. "Historians are not best qualified for this kind of thing. I have no idea how to open it."

Van moved to the head of the pod, where the main control panel was situated—if that, indeed, was what it was—and touched one of the incomprehensible displays. "You think he'd know any more than you what all this stuff means?"

"He's the tech, not me. He'd make a better guess at it than I could. I don't know where to start. There's no catch or switch along the cover seam that I could feel, and the Lords alone know what would happen if you pressed any of those controls." He ran his left hand along one of the mechanical arms holding the cover in place. The fibre-optics cables vibrated gently under his fingers, the lines of blue light pulsing down from the machines in the ceiling. When a sapphire sparkle came, the vibration increased momentarily before falling back.

"I don't see how you can open the cover with all that equipment there," said Van, doubtfully.

Apollo took his hand away. "Something must make this whole thing retract up into the ceiling and take the cover with it."

"We could just press something and see what happens."

Apollo grinned at her. "Choose a button. Any button."

She put her hands behind her back, quickly. "Oh no! You choose. This is your baby, not mine."

Apollo came to join her at the control panel. "I don't know," he said, after a few centons of uncomprehending study. "It could be doing anything at all."

"And how do we get them out, anyway?" asked Van. "You can see quite clearly from this angle that there's all sorts of wiring going into their heads."

"I know." He'd photographed enough of them. "No matter what I do, the scientists will tell me I've got it all wrong. Ideally we should take a whole pod back."

"Not a chance. They weigh a ton, and—" Van hesitated.

"The bodies would decompose before we could get them home," finished Apollo, calmly. "I know. Okay, let's try this one."

He pressed a button at random. Nothing seemed to happen, other than the pulsing dull blue lights in the machine became a pulsing dull red. He and Van waited, then she looked at him and shrugged. Apollo tried another control. Again nothing.

"Shit, we could be here all night at this rate," he said. He took out his laser. "There's only one way to do this."

He set it to concentrated beam, rather than pulse. If the laser could cut through the canopy, and if he was careful enough, he could slice through the cover down the edges where the mechanical arms flowed down to each corner, taking out a big triangular piece that would allow them—him, he thought, seeing how Van was reacting—allow him to slide the girl out and into a body bag. It would be awkward, but he could do it.

The laser sparked as it cut through, making him blink.

"Clear tylinium," said Van, sounding surprised.

"They use it a lot, same way as us." Apollo put away his laser and carefully pried away the covering.

There was the slight hiss of air, and the girl's body jerked slightly. Her mouth dropped open.

"Ch-aaaaaaah."

"Shit!" Van leapt to one side, out of the way. "Shit! I thought they were dead!"

Apollo, his hands trembling more than he liked, put his fingers against the girl's neck. Her skin was clammy, cold under his hand, unpleasant. "I think she is. It may be just some gas escaping, or something."

"Fuck! I'm not touching that, Apollo!"

Apollo withdrew his hand. "I'll do it. Get back to taking more holopics, as many as you can get." He glanced at her, briefly. "As far away as you like."

"I can manage," she snapped back, and turned her back on him.

He waited until she was a few yards away, a shadowy figure in the poor light. Crouching by the head of the pod, he put his hand against the girl's neck again, inching his fingers past the obscenity that was her head, dreading having to touch that.

He couldn't be sure. That was the bottom line. He couldn't be sure, and the only scanner he had on him was a Felix special that would take too long to recalibrate, even if he had the tools and know-how to do it. He pressed his fingers into the cold skin and waited. If it was a pulse, and it was an enormously big 'if', it was impossibly slow. She had to be dead.

He couldn't be sure.

He sat back on his heels. She had to be dead. She just had to be. And what he had to do was insurance, a confirmation of an existing fact. That was all. Just confirmation.

The backpack was only a few feet away and took only microns to collect it and bring it back to where she was. Felix's hypos were ready, slender little darts in their case. Felix had known as well as he had that he couldn't leave the prisoners to die in the explosions and fire, to die in agony. Of course, the girl wasn't in that category. She was already dead. All of the people in the pods were already dead. This was just insurance, confirmation.

His hands shook as he readied a hypo. The fingers of his right hand tingled, a sudden onset of pins and needles that distracted him for a centon. Stress. The damaged nerves would always react this way when his body was pumping with adrenalin, he realised. But he was alive, she was dead.

He pressed one of the hypos against the cold neck before his courage failed him entirely. Again he felt for a pulse. Nothing. Definitely nothing.

The little lights in her head winked out, one by one.

He dropped the hypo back into the pack and rested his forehead against the edge of the pod, closing his eyes. He would take her home, this poor nameless little girl who might once have caught Zac's eye, but he wouldn't let Zac see her. She wouldn't want Zac to see her now.

He got up. Off to his left, he could see the flashes of light as Van resumed taking pictures of a pod from every possible angle. Time to get on with it. His hands had stopped shaking by the time he took out the second toolkit, the mirror of the one he'd given Danzer. There were a myriad of fine wires and needle-thin fibre optics cables going into the girl's exposed brain. He snipped carefully through them all.

The girl didn't react. No more escape of gas or air from lungs that were stilled, no pulse from a heart that was silenced. Nothing. She was dead, no doubt about it.

He had a body-bag ready. She didn't weigh much, but it was a dead weight, inert and heavy. He had to slide his hands under her arms and pull her out, head first, hoping to God that everything inside her head stayed where it should be, holding her against his chest to brace her. Her whole body was cold and clammy, dead flesh and bone. It was awkward, without someone to help, but he managed it, easing her out of the pod and into his arms in a disgusting parody of a loving embrace, before lowering her into the waiting body bag.

Everything stayed in place.

He closed the lid down with a sigh and set the refrigeration unit going. He felt a little ashamed, rubbing his hands down his jacket to get the feel of her off them. He felt that it was a little disrespectful, somehow, to feel repulsed. He couldn't help it.

His com unit bleeped at him. It was Illych. "Captain Apollo?"

"Here."

Illych's tone was grim. "That's more than the Pegasus is. No sign of her. She's not in geo-stationary orbit, her Vipers are not at the rendezvous point to escort in the shuttles, and she's nowhere on my scanners. She may be masked by Molecay itself, but I can't see her."

Stunned, Apollo stood silent. He wasn't surprised, he realised, and that's what stunned him. He wasn't surprised. He wasn't angry, yet, either, because how could he be angry about something he'd half-known already, something that even the Supreme Commander had suspected: that Cain was not to be trusted.

"Apollo?"

Van drew closer, echoing Illych. "Apollo? What's wrong."

"Are you sure?" asked Apollo, knowing it was stupid.

"I'm sure. Not an atom is showing up on the sensors."

Van touched his arm, making him jump. "Pegasus?"

"Yes. Or rather, no. No Pegasus. She's not there."

"What do we do?"

Apollo shook his head, looking around him at what Cain had left him to deal with. He'd told Cain. Code Chimera, he'd said, and Cain hadn't misunderstood and still the man had gone. For a moment he was dizzy with it, his head spinning, then his training kicked in. No time to agonise over it, no time to worry. Just time to act. "Cain said that the local base showed some activity and may be sending out ships."

"He may have gone to intercept them, do you think?" asked Illych.

"We don't have time to speculate." Apollo thought it through again, and nodded. "Illych, you'll need to move in to take the Pegasus's place. Hertford just about has the firepower to hit this place with laser pulsars from orbit, and I want the base molten slag by the time we leave. You'll have to get your Vipers to bring the shuttles all the way in, and bring the two transports into orbit with you. Without Pegasus and her Vipers to act as escort, I want to reduce the risks as much as possible. We can't leave them unprotected behind the second planet. We'll have to do everything differently."

"What about the Pegasus?" asked Van, listening in.

"I don't know and right now I don't care. Except... Illych, keep on with the sensor sweeps and make sure that you record and store them. I'll look at them later and we may need them."

For the official inquiry. If they got out of there alive without the Pegasus to help, they'd all face an official inquiry.

Illych sounded stunned, his voice slow, as if he were operating on auto-pilot. "I'll be there as fast as I can move those two transports along. They'll want explanations."

"Just tell them to do what they're told. We'll explain later."

Van cut in. "If they get stroppy, you might tell them he's been brevetted Major for this. I think that puts him in command now Cain's gone."

"And that'll go down well. I can't believe this! What in hell does the Commander think he's doing?"

Apollo disregarded Illych's note of betrayal. A memory surfaced, a memory of their arrival on the Pegasus and Cain buzzing with excitement and an almost childlike delight. What was it the man had said to his executive officer and the Strike Captain who'd been so amused by Apollo; amused by Apollo's naiveté, as Apollo saw it now, amused by his ignorance of their plans.

Cain had said something about not many people on the Pegasus having families back home. And he'd said to Tolen and Kit, while they were laughing in their sleeves at Apollo: We've got the best opportunity that I've seen in yahrens to get out there and strike a blow before they strike us. This is going to be such a chance to do those tinhead bastards some real damage . He had been revelling in the prospect. But not, Apollo thought now, the prospect of following the plan Apollo and Felix had put together. Oh no. Cain had had his own plan. And he had said more, he'd said something even more significant. We're taking the war to them.

But not the war that Apollo was fighting, or Illych or Van Trion; not the war that Supreme Commander Jak was directing. This had to be personal. Cain had his own war to fight, and be damned to the Colonies or anything else.

And Apollo was left to pick up the pieces.




In the end, it went smoothly. As smoothly as anything could go when he'd come out there to rescue some tortured human prisoners and lost the Colonies a battlestar in the process.

Apollo sent Van out to get the prisoners ready to move while he took a middle-aged black man out of the pod next to the girl's, first ensuring, as with the girl, that the man really was dead. He emptied the backpack's deadly cargo into the space where the man's destroyed head had lain for the Lords alone knew how long. It seemed... fitting, somehow. He didn't want to see the case of hypos ever again and he didn't want them polluting what he did have to take back. He packed the cameras and the Link and the precious data crystals away. They were all he wanted to carry and they were appalling enough.

He sealed each of the three closed body bags before putting them into Danzer's care. He was making more changes to the plan as he went along. He no longer had any trust in Fleet or in the Transport ships: he would only put his faith in Shield. Danzer and her unit were going back with those bodies to the Hertford, he told her, and they would be guarding the body-bags around the clock. The only orders she would take would be from him, no-one else.

"Good," said Van, when he told her he was taking Danzer. She had returned to help him bring out the bags and had found the plastic tags to seal the black capsules in her Tech Corporal's pack of equipment. "I don't want these things on my ship."

And she didn't want him on her ship, either, although she didn't say so in so many words. He knew, though. She was perfectly co-operative, still, but what she'd seen in the factory behind them stood between them. It stood between Apollo and normality like a wall; and Van and everything human was on the other side of it. He didn't have time to worry about it now, but he was, briefly, regretful. Dhow had been a powerful memory of home, but now even that was denied him.

"I'll set the explosive here," he said. "What's our progress on mining the rest of the base?"

"Haydn has it all in hand."

"Thanks," said Apollo, and meant it. He watched Danzer arrange her unit around the three body bags and the refrigerated case full of Cylon nodes. "Shoot anyone who comes within five yards of them. Anyone who isn't me, that is."

"Sir." Danzer had evidently decided that she really did not want to know what was going on and the best course of action was to play it, and him, by the book. She was on the other side of the wall as well. She gave him back his knife and handed over the prepared explosive. "Enough, sir?"

It was more than enough. After changing the full data crystals on the Link for the next set, he spent the next centar setting explosive in the factory, interrupted only by Van when the transport shuttles arrived and again when they'd gone again with their docile human cargo. He spread the prepared solenite charges evenly around the building, tucking the charges against walls and underneath pods. When it went up, there would be nothing left but a hole in the ground.

Nor was there.

He sat in his Viper, holding it on a weaving figure-of-eight pattern, and watched as the solenite did its work. He couldn't hear the explosion, not from where he was, but it looked absolutely magnificent against the night sky, lighting up the terrain for dozens of square miles, making it briefly as bright as day. He fancied he could even see the river boiling with the heat, sending spumes of steam up into the atmosphere. He most definitely felt the blast, the air currents around his ship making it judder and shake until he was fighting to keep the Viper on an even keel; and when it was over and the explosions had stopped, he made one low pass over the base. Over the smoking crater in the ground where the base had once been.

Back to the figure-of-eight, but further off, and acting as gunnery spotter for the Hertford, watching this time as the laser torpedoes blasted down out of the sky to reduce the area to molten lava. The river did boil this time, no question, and when he sent his Viper up to join Hertford's shuttle, the shuttle that held Danzer and her dead charges, he was as content as he could ever be that the abomination that the Cylons had created on Molecay was no more.




Illych was waiting for him on the other side of Hertford's decontamination chamber.

Apollo had had time to make the arrangements with him in advance. As Danzer and her unit brought through the body bags, they were escorted straight to a nearby compartment. Apollo waited only to settle the Shield Warriors into the compartment and set the first armed watch, before he went with Illych to the Hertford's bridge. He ignored Illych's open, if unspoken, curiosity.

They were already racing full-tilt for home, the two transports tucked up in Hertford's wake, all of Hertford's thirty Vipers roaming a tightly-defined perimeter around the three ships. Dhow was staying in closer than originally planned, just a few hundred miles ahead of the little flotilla. If it came to trouble, they'd need Van Trion's guns and Raptors.

The bridge was smaller than a battlestar's, but big enough so that Illych had a decent-sized office carved out of the back of it. The monitor was already running when they got there.

"Here" Illych brought up an image on the monitor screen. "This is what we saw."

Apollo traced it with his finger, the faintest of ion trails, disappearing out of the Molecay system and heading towards the main Cylon base in that sector.

"He did go after whatever was coming at us out of the base," said Illych. "Shouldn't we wait for him?"

Apollo traced the ion trail again, checking the readout, the energy signature that identified the trail as coming from a Colonial ship.

"No," he said, at last. He touched the storage pocket on his belt, where he'd secured the Link's data crystals. "We don't wait. What we've got is too important to risk. We don't wait."

"But... but it's Cain!"

"Yeah. Exactly. It's Cain." Apollo stood up and stretched, rotating his shoulders to ease the tension in his aching neck, wishing he could relax enough to sleep.

"You can't just leave him!"

Apollo shook his head. "We're not leaving him."

Illych spluttered something, and waved a hand at the record on the screen. Apollo managed a faint smile, wondering how, even after this desertion, Cain inspired such loyalty in those who'd followed him. Illych was shocked and grieving. Apollo wasn't even surprised.

He came to the conclusion that he infinitely preferred solid worth, and just for a micron, he'd have given half the universe to have his father there to depend upon. But Adama was far away and it was up to Apollo to adjust some of the Hertford captain's thinking.

"We're not leaving Cain," he said again. "He left us."