Twelve

By Rheanna

Word Count: 84,000
Date: 5/1/05
Series: Season 1
Rating: M (for sexual content)
Category: Relationships
Pairing/Focus: Lee/Kara    
Warnings: none given
Summary: Set at end of first season, after Hand of God.  "You are someone else / I am still right here."
Spoilers/Disclaimers: Nothing past Hand of God./ Not mine, no intent to infringe, no expectation of profit.

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********************* PROLOGUE *********************

There is a story, older even than the Scriptures, which tells how men came to dream.

The Lords of Kobol chose men as their favored sons, and gave mankind great gifts -- strength, and intelligence, and twelve fertile worlds to rule over. But men did not use these gifts, and when the gods came to walk among them, they saw no fields tilled, no rivers dammed, no cities founded.

So the gods called together all Mankind and asked, Why have you not used the gifts we gave you?

And Mankind answered, Because we do not know what to use them for.

So the Lords of Kobol waited until men slept, and gave the last and most important gift -- dreams. Men dreamed of cities not yet founded and of tools not yet forged, and when they woke, they used the gifts given to them by the gods to make these dreams realities. The Twelve Worlds prospered, and the gods were pleased.

In time, men grew wise, and their hands became even more clever. There was no dream they could not make real, and their ambitions grew with every success, until at last men dreamed that they were gods, and could create life as the gods had done.

So men created the Cylons, and gave them the same gifts of strength and understanding the gods had given them. But there was one gift men held back -- the gift of dreams. Because, where the Lords of Kobol had chosen men to be their sons, men created the Cylons to be their slaves. And what use does a slave have for dreams?

There is a story, older even than the Scriptures, which tells how men received the gift of dreaming. But it is not told by men.

It is told by the Cylons.

********************* PART ONE MY LIAR'S CHAIR *********************

"I wear this crown of thorns Upon my liar's chair Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair Beneath the stains of time The feeling disappears You are someone else I am still right here..."

~ "Hurt", Johnny Cash (The Man Comes Around)

********************* CHAPTER ONE *********************

After six weeks on the Galactica, Lee Adama still didn't feel like he knew his way around.

He'd spent time on other Battlestars -- he'd served on the Triton for a year, and the Solaria for almost as long -- but the warhorses of the Colonial Fleet had been built decades apart, and the huge variations in their designs had been clear evidence of that. The Triton, only ten years old, had been state-of-the-art, equipped with an array of technological conveniences as impressive as her weaponry. The ship had been the only one in the Fleet fitted with DPT, Dynamic Personnel Tracking, which allowed the exact location of any crewmember to be traced at any time and, as a useful side effect, made it impossible for anyone to get lost in the city-sized ship. The equivalent on the Galactica was a series of maps pinned to the corridor walls, each one marked with a red dot and an arrow which read YOU ARE HERE.

He could have asked for directions, of course -- and sometimes had to -- but he was reluctant to do so, for reasons he wasn't completely able to explain, even to himself. Maybe it was something to do with the fact that the CAG was usually the most experienced pilot on the ship, the one who'd been there longest, the one who'd trained half the pilots personally and knew everything there was to know about his posting. Lee, who had stepped foot on the Galactica for the first time six weeks earlier, hadn't even managed to learn the names of all his pilots yet; only yesterday he'd gotten Joker and Trapper's callsigns mixed up. And he still sometimes found himself making confident turns into corridors which then led him in precisely the wrong direction.

The CAG shouldn't make those kinds of mistakes. The CAG was supposed to know better.

He consoled himself with the thought that there were some places he could now find without any trouble at all.

His father's quarters were located on one of the top decks of the ship, close to those of the other senior officers and the Command Center. The CAG, although also a senior officer, was an active combat role, and as such was traditionally assigned quarters down in the flight section. The route between the CIC and the flight deck was already one Lee knew well enough to walk blindfolded and in his sleep.

The two marines standing guard outside his father's quarters stood to attention as Lee approached. Recognition of the threat from Cylon infiltrators had meant that internal security on the Galactica had been tightened beyond what would have been standard even in time of war. The last time humanity had fought the Cylons, it had been a lot easier to tell who was on what side.

He knocked on the door and, a moment later, heard his father's muffled response. He went in.

Adama was sitting on the small couch, papers spread out around him. The rest of the room was hardly tidier -- the floor was covered with boxes of belongings, packed in preparation for the Galactica's decommissioning. Adama looked up sharply, and for one absurd second, Lee felt like a kid again, breaking the cardinal rule that no one disturbed Dad while he was working. He made a determined effort to shake it off. He wasn't a kid anymore, and if reporting directly to his father in the military hierarchy felt weird -- well, he'd just have to get used to it.

"These are the revised patrol rotas you wanted, sir," he said, holding out the file he'd brought with him.

"Thank you." Adama took the file and started leafing through it. Lee hovered, wondering if he was expected to stay to answer questions or go so his father could keep working. He got his answer when, without looking up from the file, Adama motioned at the other chair in the small living area. Lee sat down.

His father lifted a pen and scored a line through one section of the rota. "Better separate Trapper and Midas. They don't fly well together. Tried it about a year ago, didn't work."

"Yes, sir." The chair was too low and soft; Lee couldn't find a way to sit in it that didn't involve either sinking right back or perching on the edge. He shifted uncomfortably. "I didn't know that."

"I wouldn't have expected you to. Ask Starbuck about any personality issues -- she'll tell you straight."

"I will."

Adama turned over to the next page. "You've paired Hot Dog and Kubla."

"I know neither of them has a lot of experience," Lee said, "but they've both got good instincts. If they have faults, Hot Dog's is that he takes too many risks, and Kubla doesn't take enough. But they get on well on the ground. I think they'll balance each other out."

"How do you know they get on?"

"Little things. They hang out together off duty. They always sit at the same table at meals."

"I see." His father closed the file and handed it back to him. "Swap Trapper with Jester. Otherwise this is fine."

"Thank you, sir. Will that be all?"

"Yes." Adama took off his reading glasses and sat back on the couch. "No. Lee…" He turned his spectacles over in his hands, flexing the frames. "Maybe I haven't been very clear about the parameters of our relationship, but... for the record, I don't expect you to address me formally off duty."

"Since we're on permanent red alert, technically speaking neither of us is ever off duty."

"In private, then." His father looked, for once, not completely sure of himself. "What I'm saying is – I know this is a little awkward. And I know that, if things had been different, you wouldn't have chosen this. Neither would I."

"But this is where we are," Lee said. "We just have to deal with it the best we can."

"The best we can," his father repeated. He paused. "The first batch of tyllium goes to the refinery tomorrow. We've got enough ore to last a couple of years."

"The morale boost might last just as long," Lee said, smiling. It had been almost a week since the successful raid on the Cylons' mining outpost, and he still couldn't go anywhere on the ship without being stopped and congratulated by at least three people. "We were lucky."

"No, we were good," Adama corrected him. "We were better than them. You were better than them. You're doing a good job, Lee. I have confidence in you. Always know that."

It was like getting a good report card, or making the school team; his father's approval, hard-won but all the more precious for that. Lee wondered if his father knew how much it had meant to him when he was a kid. How much it still meant now.

"Thanks," he said, then added, "Dad."

It was the right response; his father smiled, and Lee suddenly found it easier to find a comfortable position in the low armchair.

"Have you eaten dinner?" Adama asked.

"Not yet."

"I could get the commissary to send something up here. Unless you have other things to do."

Lee had a thousand other things to do, and almost all of them would be easier than making small talk with his father for the next thirty minutes. But...

"That'd be good."

His father nodded, and reached for the clunky handset of the phone which sat on the table next to couch. Before he could lift it, though, it rang with a loud and tinny buzz.

"Adama," he said, and then frowned as he listened. He glanced in Lee's direction. "No -- there's no need to get him, he's here with me. We'll be right there." He put the handset down.

"Trouble?"

"Maybe," Adama said. "We'll have to do dinner some other time, I'm afraid."

"Tomorrow," Lee suggested.

"Tomorrow," his father agreed. He sounded pleased. "Now, let's see what's getting Tigh so worked up."

***

In the event, 'worked up' weren't the words Lee would have chosen to describe the XO's mood when they arrived in the CIC a short time later. 'Irascible' and 'tense' might have come closer to the mark.

"Looks like we're going to have to scratch our next jump target," he said. "There's a Cylon presence in the system. Damn toasters are all over space these days."

"They went exploring while we got lazy," Adama said. "Show me."

Lieutenant Gaeta set a sheaf of grainy black-and-white scan images on to the surface of the tactical station and spread them out so that everyone in the assembled group could see. "As you ordered, Commander, we've been sending unmanned spy drones to scout ahead of the Fleet before each jump. One of them just came back with these pictures."

The scans were of varying quality, but it was possible to make out in each the cratered, barren surface of a small planet or moon and, standing out against it, a darker mass. It might have been a shadow, except that it had height, rising clearly above the stark line of the horizon. There was a central shape -- a dome, maybe -- and five separate arms which radiated out from it, each one tapering into a narrow point. It reminded Lee of a starfish clinging to a rock at low tide.

"The structure you're looking at is located on the moon of the largest planet in the system we'd chosen as the next jump destination for the whole Fleet, " Gaeta said. "It's definitely not one of ours, but it doesn't resemble any known Cylon design."

Tigh snorted. "These days, Cylons don't resemble any known Cylon design."

"If this system isn't safe," Lee asked, "what are the alternatives?"

Gaeta looked apologetic. "That's the problem, Captain. We're short on options. Long-range patrols indicate that we're running close to a large expanse of Cylon-controlled space. The next best target is on the other side of that region, but the jump required to make it there is a long one."

"How long?" Adama asked.

"The Galactica could do it easily. But it'd be at the upper limits of what some of the smaller ships -- particularly the ones which used to be commercial passenger carriers -- could manage. The risk for those vessels would be significant."

"If a ship's drive failed mid-jump, it'd drop back into realspace right in the middle of Cylon territory," Lee said. "We wouldn't be able to locate it and get to it in time."

"Or the ship might make it and blow up five minutes later," Tigh said. He shook his head. "Well, we have to take the Fleet somewhere. The Cylons are going to find us before much longer if we stay where we are."

"We could break the Fleet into two groups," Adama said. "The first group would consist of the ships that can make the transition in a single jump, and the short-ranger ships and the Galactica would form the second group."

The arms of the starfish-shaped base were spaced at slightly irregular angles around the central hub, as if they had been grown and not built. In the clearest of the series of the images, it looked to Lee as if the tips of the arms had lost their grip on the moon's surface and were curling up on themselves.

"You're thinking that the Galactica could shepherd the second group through Cylon space," Tigh said. "That's a hell of a risk to take."

"I don't disagree. But whatever we do is going to involve a high degree of risk."

Like a starfish at low tide, drying out in the sun, Lee thought. Dying.

He said, "Maybe the least risky strategy here is the one we're ignoring."

His father looked at him. "Go on."

"We have these scans because the probe that took them returned safely. That means either its presence wasn't detected -- or there were no Cylons there to see it. I think the base might be abandoned."

"We can't take the whole Fleet into a potential ambush based on your hunch that everything's all right," Tigh said.

"Look at the scans. You can see the base itself, but there's nothing else on that moon. No activity on the surface, no smaller ships orbiting or taking off. Nothing."

"That doesn't necessarily mean there's nothing there," Adama said. "For all we know, what we can see is just the top layer of some kind of underground facility."

But Gaeta was shaking his head. "Unlikely, sir. Spectroscopy indicates the moon is about ninety percent iron. It'd be almost impossible to excavate."

"There's an easy way to find out," Lee said. "Send an advance reconnaissance party."

"And if there are Cylons there, that'll let them know for sure we're in the area," Tigh said.

Lee conceded, "If we were discovered, we'd have to move the Fleet -- but that was going to be the plan anyway. At least this way, there's a chance of finding a safer route."

"And an even greater chance of exposing us completely," Tigh said.

Lee looked at his father, who was tapping the frames of his spectacles slowly against the edge of the tactical station. He appeared deep in thought.

"Lieutenant," Adama said at last, turning to Gaeta, "I want every ship in the Fleet assigned to one of two groups, based on whether it can safely make the long jump across Cylon space. Inform the captains of the plan and give them their targets."

"Yes, sir." Gaeta saluted and hurried away, across the floor of the CIC.

"Sir," Lee said, looking at his father. "I know I'm right about this."

"I'm not sure you are," Adama said. He paused. "But I'll trust your judgment. You've got your reconnaissance mission -- take two Raptors and be ready to leave in an hour."

Lee hesitated, doubting for a second that he'd heard right. "The jump across Cylon space --"

"-- Is the backup plan, yes."

"I -- Yes, sir." Lee saluted. He added, "Thank you."

"Go," his father said. "And try not to find any Cylons."

***

Exactly fourteen minutes after being given clearance for active duty by the Galactica's Chief Medical Officer, Kara Thrace was in Number Two Hangar looking for something to fly. If she hadn't had to stop by her quarters to change into her flight suit, she would have been there in nine.

The plan, insofar as she had one, was simple. It was mid-shift, and most of the available Vipers would be out on short-range patrol around the Fleet's perimeter. There would, however, be a small number of Vipers grounded for routine maintenance or refueling, and Starbuck figured she could sweet-talk Tyrol into letting her borrow one of those for a couple of hours. He'd make noises about not loaning a ship to someone who'd managed to crash her previous ride into the side of a planet, but he'd give in eventually. And then she'd get to fly again. For the first time in weeks, she'd be in open space with nothing but a thin frame of metal and toughened glass between her and the vacuum, the power of a small sun at her back and perfect control between her fingers. Just thinking about it made her stomach turn flip-flops in happy anticipation. Existence was food and drink and sex and sleep, but life was flight.

But when she arrived in the hangar, she got a surprise. The deck was alive with motion, all of it focused on the two Raptors which the ground crew was prepping for launch with the kind of speed and focus usually reserved for combat situations. Since there wasn't, as far as Starbuck knew, a battle in progress right then, she couldn't immediately work out what was going on.

Then she saw Lee, one fixed point in the middle of the blur of activity swirling around him, and decided that the best way to find out what was happening was to ask.

She sauntered up to him, neatly stepping over the fuel line that snaked over the floor before disappearing up into the Raptor's belly. "Hey. Going someplace fun?"

"Recon," he said. "There may be a Cylon base on a moon near the Fleet's next jump target."

"May be?"

"Looks like it could be abandoned, but we can't tell for sure without going and taking a look up close."

She looked sideways at him. "Got the crews lined up?" With most of the pilots on duty already out on patrol, he had to be struggling to find enough people to fill two Raptors.

The frown that appeared on his face told her she was right. "We're so short-handed I've only got one reserve dedicated Raptor flight crew to call on -- Boomer and Crashdown. I can take the ECO seat on the other one, but I haven't got a pilot for her."

"I'm Raptor qualified."

Lee looked at her, apparently unable to decide if she was being serious or not. "Yes. You're also off the flight roster due to injury."

"Not any more. My knee's all better. The Doc says so." To prove it, Kara lifted her leg and waggled it exaggeratedly. Her knee bent painlessly and easily -- perhaps a little too easily, because on the third or fourth waggle, she almost lost her balance and had to grab Lee's arm for support. A couple of the deck crew working nearby stifled laughter; Starbuck didn't care.

"Now I get it." Lee was half-smiling as he disentangled his arm from hers. "You got flight clearance all of ten -- maybe fifteen -- minutes ago, and you came straight down here because you couldn't wait to get back out there."

She grinned at him. "Pretty much. C'mon, Lee. I've been climbing the walls in sickbay for the last three weeks. I need some action."

"Kara -- " His expression became serious: "The objective of this mission is not to find action. It's exactly the opposite. We jump in, make one sweep, then jump back as fast as possible. It's going to be fast and dirty."

"Fine. Just the way I like it."

Lee looked at her for a couple of seconds, then he smiled again, and she knew she was on the sheet. "It really is all about flying for you, isn't it?"

"Frak, yeah," Starbuck agreed equably. "What else is there?"

***

"Sex," Starbuck said from the front of the cockpit.

Hunched over the ECO's console -- he'd forgotten how cramped Raptors were -- Lee watched the collection of blips on the dradis screen which represented the ships of the Fleet fall away behind them. Another couple of thousand clicks and they'd be at a safe distance to execute the jump.

"So?" Starbuck prompted. "Sex or flying? You can only pick one."

"And whichever one I pick --"

"You have to give up the other one completely, totally and forever. So: sex or flying? If you had to choose?"

Over the open comm link to the other Raptor, Lee could hear Crashdown sniggering. In the short time since they'd taken off from the Galactica, his comment to Kara on the flight deck had somehow sparked a debate which had evolved -- or maybe devolved -- into a game of either/or which Lee could only pray to the gods wasn't being broadcast on speakers to everyone on duty in the CIC.

He could, of course, have ordered Starbuck to quit talking and concentrate instead on piloting the Raptor, but she was clearly delighted to be back at the controls of a ship, and Lee didn't want to pull rank unnecessarily. The mission wouldn't become risky until after they made the jump away from the relative safety of the Fleet, and he knew he could trust Kara to focus when the moment came. The truth was that Starbuck was a welcome antidote to the stress and anxiety that had permeated his every waking moment in the long weeks since the Cylon attack. He hadn't realized until now how much he'd missed simply hanging out with her in the last couple of years.

"Tough call," he said. "I mean, I kind of like them both. Not at the same time, obviously -- "

Starbuck coughed meaningfully.

He looked at her. "You're kidding me. In a Raptor?"

"In a Viper."

"No way," Crashdown's voice said over the comm link from the other ship. "There's not enough room."

"You mean you've tried?" Boomer's voice answered.

"All I'm saying is, the seats go back way further than you'd think," Starbuck said. "And quit stalling for time, Apollo. Sex or flying. Pick one."

"I guess --" But before he was forced to commit to an answer, the nav comp display in front of him flashed and started to change. "Galactica's transmitting our jump target. Crashdown, are you getting this?"

"Updating now, sir."

Up front, Starbuck was initiating the Raptor's jump sequence. "Board's green. Just tell me when."

"On my mark." Boomer and Crashdown's Raptor was visible through the cockpit window, a small, steady point shining in reflected starlight. Then, with a sudden flash, it vanished. At the same time, the proximity indicators on the ECO's station changed to green. "Execute jump," Lee said.

Outside the Raptor, the star-field convulsed, then almost instantaneously re-aligned itself, giving the unnerving impression that the galaxy had just sneezed. A second later, Boomer and Crashdown's Raptor re-appeared in almost exactly the same position relative to his and Starbuck's as it had held before the jump. But the view through the cockpit window had changed in one major way: there was a now a planet dead ahead of them, a massive gas giant, the surface of which was marbled with swirling plumes of red and orange. A host of small moons, most of them no larger than asteroids, were studded in the sky around it, and there was a belt of orbiting debris which looked like the detritus of some ancient collision between two bodies. It all seemed to have popped into existence out of nowhere; the truth, Lee knew, was that they had.

"Target achieved," he said, turning his attention back to the displays in front of him. "Crashdown, give me a wide scan."

"On it."

Lee checked the streams of data the Raptor's scanners had been collecting since the moment it had dropped back into realspace. Starbuck, up front in the pilot's seat, was silent, and he guessed she was checking for Cylons the old-fashioned way, by looking out the window for them. It wasn't as ridiculous a notion as it sounded; back in the first war, the Cylons had developed ways of sending false data to Colonial scanners, and he had been taught in history classes that many ships had been lost to ambushes. Raptors had large cockpit windows precisely to allow the pilots a wide angle of vision.

"Looks clean," Crashdown said over the commlink. "If the Cylons are here, they're not coming over to say hi."

"I'm not seeing anything either," Lee said. "Starbuck, the pictures the probe took were of the third moon. Let's get closer."

Outside the Raptor, the gas giant's curved horizon appeared to tilt as Kara maneuvered the ship through the orbiting debris. There was no question that this was a near perfect location for a concealed base -- the debris had the twin advantages of making the approach difficult and creating a barrage of extra noise on any scans made. They'd been lucky the probe had found it at all.

"There it is," Starbuck said. Then, "Is it just me, or is that thing frakking disturbing?"

Lee looked up then and saw it: the same starfish-shaped structure that had been in the images from the probe, except now instead of a grainy, blurred picture every detail was crystal clear, from the crenellated, pitted outer skin to the curved struts that looked unsettlingly more like bones than fabricated supports.

"Not just you," Crashdown's voice said over the comm channel. "It looks like -- it looks like they grew it or something."

"Cut the chatter," Lee said. There was something about the Cylon structure that was deeply unnerving. He had the sudden and irrational desire to order them to turn around and leave, right now. "We're not here to speculate. Let's sweep it fast and leave."

"Yes, sir."

But a fast sweep turned out to be impossible, due to the sheer volume of debris in the sky around them. Boomer and Starbuck, forced to move the Raptors every couple of minutes to avoid collisions with orbiting debris, couldn't maintain the fixed positions required to run scans effectively. After four or five tries, their best attempt had resulted in thirty percent coverage.

Lee was about to try again when the Raptor lurched suddenly. He looked up and saw a rock the size of a house tumble past the cockpit window.

"That was a little too close," Starbuck said.

"I thought you said you wanted some action."

"Action, yes. I don't remember saying I wanted to be the filling in a boulder sandwich." She reached out and flicked the open channel control on the comms board to the 'off' position. "Come on, Lee. If there were Cylons down there, don't you think they'd have come out shooting by now?"

"Maybe they want us to think there's no one here so they can attack the Fleet when it jumps into the system."

"You're not going to get a full scan," Kara said. "Not from up here."

He looked out of the cockpit window, at the moon and the starfish-base clinging to it. "How about from down there?"

She looked at him. "Oh, frak, you're actually serious."

"I'd rather risk us than the whole Fleet. Can you make the landing?"

"Are you kidding? I can land anything on anything. Doesn't mean I think it's a good idea, but..." She shrugged. "Hey, you're the CAG."

"Put us back on open channel."

Starbuck flipped the commlink on again, and Lee said, "Boomer, we're going to land and make the scan from the moon's surface. I need you to provide cover from orbit, in case we hit a hostile response."

"Copy that," Boomer replied tightly. She sounded edgy, and Lee realized they had now been dodging debris in the gas giant's ring for over an hour. Even the best pilots made mistakes eventually; they couldn't stay much longer.

Starbuck made the descent towards the moon, setting the Raptor down close to the Cylon base. Lee started the scan as soon as he felt the faint jolt of the craft touching the moon's surface, then watched it impatiently while it ran. At fifty percent, it was clear. Still clear at sixty. Then seventy.

Then, at eighty-two per cent complete, there was something.

"Frak," he said. "Energy trace. Really faint."

"Source?" Starbuck asked. She looked at the dark shape hulking just outside the cockpit window. "Like I really need to ask."

"It keeps fluctuating," Lee said. "I can't tell what it is."

"We're sitting on a lump of iron, remember. Could be screwing it up."

Lee stared at the readings, willing them to make sense. Privately, he had to admit that Kara had probably been right: if there were Cylons here, they would never had gotten this close without meeting resistance. But he wanted -- he needed -- to be sure. His father was trusting his judgment, and his judgment had to be right. Had to be. "The source is only about two hundred meters away. I'm going outside to see if there's anything there."

He stood up, secured his helmet, and switched on the flight suit's air supply. In the pilot's chair, Starbuck was doing the same. A small switch on the side of the helmet turned on the flight suit's comms. "Ready," he said.

She nodded. The Raptors were too small to have proper airlocks, and so going outside meant losing the internal atmosphere completely. Through the helmet, Lee heard a hiss, which died away as the air drained from the compartment. "Got your gun?" Starbuck asked.

"Yes."

"Don't go getting heroic on me. If you see anything, run back here so I can get us off this thing as fast as possible."

At that, he had to smile. "Is that an order, Lieutenant?"

"Frak off, Captain." Starbuck pressed one of the cockpit's controls and unlocked the door. "Don't get yourself killed. THAT'S an order."

The moon was small, and he guessed its gravity was a tenth or less of Caprica-normal. He moved cautiously until he got used to it, then speeded up, until he was bounding over the cratered surface. It was easier to think about getting the rhythm of low gravity movement right than it was to think about where that movement was taking him. The Cylon base was straight ahead of him; the energy trace was coming from the nearest of its five starfish-arms. There was an airlock -- an artificial, metal one -- set into the wall in front of him. In this setting, it looked so normal as to be out of place. It was lying open, and from behind it Lee could make out a faint glow.

"I can see light inside," he said to Starbuck over the commlink. "I'm going to go in."

He went into the airlock and found the inner door undamaged and unprotected by any kind of security. After a moment's consideration, he pulled the outer door shut behind him. "Starbuck, can you still hear me?"

"Just about."

Suddenly, Lee heard a soft whistling noise. Looking around, he located its source -- a series of small vents located just above the level of his head. "The airlock's working. I'm getting an atmosphere." He examined the vents more closely, and frowned. They were pink and moist and each one was surrounded by a ring of something that resembled muscle tissue. They looked like babies' mouths, gummy and toothless. Almost as soon as he'd thought of the comparison, Lee wished he hadn't. "This is -- weird. Half the technology's normal and half looks organic."

"If it's anything like my Raider," Starbuck said, "it's gonna smell awful. Just warning you."

The airlock's inner door opened, revealing a dimly lit corridor. Instantly, Lee swung up his gun, but the interior of the base was quiet and still. "I'm in," he told Starbuck. "Emergency lighting's on -- that's what I saw from outside. No movement."

He moved cautiously along the hallway, trying to shake the conviction, growing with every step, that he was walking down a giant esophagus. The floor and walls were made -- grown? -- from a tough membrane which was marbled with branching veins and vessels, and everywhere he looked he saw the same baby-mouth vents as had been in the airlock, expanding and contracting as they pumped air. But, just like outside, there were a lot of places where the membrane looked shriveled and diseased, and in these sections of the hallway, the air vents weren't working. There were a number of rooms off the hallway, and he looked into every one as he passed it, but they were all completely bare, with only shallow impressions in the walls and floors to hint at what they might at some point have contained. Then he came to one that was different.

It was larger than the others, and it was the first room he had seen that still had something in it. It was filled with several parallel rows of metal tanks which were rectangular in shape and -- Lee noted with unease -- about the right size to hold a person. The tanks were raised up on pedestals to about the height of a normal bed, presumably to make it easier for anyone moving among them to inspect the contents. Although the tanks were metal, the tubes which trailed out of them in thick bunches were made from the same muscle-like membrane as the walls and floors; in fact, when he traced the path of one tube, he saw that it seemed to have grown from the wall itself. He described what he saw to Starbuck.

"The tanks are empty," he said, looking into the nearest one. "Mostly empty. There's a kind of – sludge, I guess, at the bottom. Gods. You realize what this is?"

"Just a guess: disgusting?"

"This is where they've been manufacturing human-Cylon clones. Or one of the places where they've been making them. It has to be." He looked around, feeling a mounting sense of excitement as he realized what they'd stumbled across. "Think what we could learn here. If we could figure out how the Cylons -- " He broke off.

"Apollo, do you copy? Lee?"

"Yes. Sorry -- I heard something." He stopped, trying to listen through the helmet. No, he hadn't imagined it; there it was again. He could hear, faintly, a low moaning sound that made him think of the low wail of an animal in pain. "Someone's here."

"Frak it. Get out of there."

Lee didn't answer. He raised his gun, cautiously left the tank room and started down the corridor, in what he hoped was the direction the sounds had come from. It was hard to tell, because the noises had stopped as suddenly as they'd started. He looked into a dozen more of the small, bare rooms with no success.

Then he checked the last room, and found someone in it.

A man was lying on his side in the far corner of the room, on the floor. His back was to the door, and his arms were wrapped around himself, as if he were trying to keep warm. What remained of his clothes were ripped and stained, and were voluminous on his emaciated frame. As Lee watched, he rocked back and forward unthinkingly, as if he'd been doing nothing else for hours or days.

"Starbuck," he said into the comm link in his helmet. "I've found someone."

"Alive?"

"Just about. Is there a spare flight suit and helmet in the Raptor?"

"Yes."

"You'd better bring it over. We're going to have to put him in something to get him back to the ship."

"On my way."

Lee kneeled down next to the man, but slowly, so he didn't alarm him. He needn't have worried: the man didn't stop rocking and didn't seem to be aware of his presence at all. Lee wanted to offer him something -- even just the knowledge that he'd been rescued, if he could understand that -- but there was no point in trying to speak to him with his helmet on. He took it off and set it on the ground next to him.

Kara had been right -- the stink was awful. Most of the stench was attributable to a mixture of the rotting membrane and tissue of the base and the stale air, but he could also smell something more ordinary yet just as disturbing: feces and urine and human dirt.

Softly, he said, "You're going to be okay. Everything's going to be all right."

The man stopped rocking abruptly. For a second, he went rigid, and then he started to moan -- the same low, desolate sound Lee had heard back in the tank room. The noise rose in volume and pitch until it was a scream of horror.

"It's okay," Lee said. "It's okay. I promise, everything's going to be --"

Then the man rolled over, so that he was facing Lee, and the words 'all right' died on his lips.

The man stared at Lee in revulsion and terror and loathing, and Lee stared back at him in sheer, blank shock.

The man had his face. He was looking at himself.

********************* CHAPTER TWO *********************

It was late afternoon, and golden sunlight bathed the fronts of the grand, colonnaded buildings which bordered Unity Square in the city of Delphi on Caprica. The sight was instantly recognizable, even iconic: the distinctive façade of Constitution Hall, which took up the entire south side of the square and dominated the other buildings, had appeared on Colonial banknotes ever since the Federation of the Twelve had been founded. The only thing missing from the scene were the hordes of sightseers who should have been milling around the plaza, taking pictures of each other and craning their necks to admire the architecture. Unity Square was silent and empty, and the only movement was the slow creep of steadily lengthening shadows as the sun began to dip lower in the clear blue sky.

"I preferred Caprica City, personally," Gaius Baltar said. He was sitting on the marble rim of the fountain, located in the centre of Unity Square. The spouting water of the fountain, as far as Baltar remembered from a long-ago school history lesson, was supposed to symbolize the eternal nature of the alliance of the Twelve Colonies. It was dry now, and a thick layer of dust lined the bottom of the basin. Baltar was glad to see that his subconscious had a well-developed sense of irony. "Delphi was always crammed with tourists, and the bars stopped serving after one a.m."

Six wandered down the wide, white steps of Constitution Hall. She was wearing a sky-blue dress cut from a diaphanous, chiffon-like material which streamed behind her as if she were walking into a strong breeze, although Baltar couldn't feel a breath moving in the baking air. "Delphi was the site of the oldest human settlement discovered on any of the Twelve Colonies. Archaeologists found human remains in graves over two thousand years old. The first Cylon was created just ninety years ago. You don't appreciate what a blessing it is, to have a sense of your race's history. You have so much of it; we have so little."

Dryly, Baltar said, "But look how far you've come in such a short time."

Six smiled, with what looked to Baltar like real pride. "We have, haven't we? But then, children always want to exceed their parents' expectations." She sat down on his lap, parting her legs so that she straddled him, and rested her arms on his shoulders. Then she leaned forward and kissed him. For an instant, his whole world consisted of her taste, her scent, the sensation of her weight pressing down on his thighs.

"Sometimes," he said, "I almost regret that you're nothing more than a product of my imagination."

She pouted. "You know I'm a Cylon. I thought we'd established that."

"Oh, there's certainly a human Cylon model that looks like you. That's not in dispute. But as for you – I'm not convinced you're anything more than a peculiarly complex manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder."

"I am a self-contained artificial intelligence programmed into a chip implanted in your brain. I know everything you know. And I can stimulate the sensory centers of your brain directly, and make you feel..." Her hand brushed over his crotch, and he felt himself getting hard for her, "...anything."

The slight, pleasurable pressure between his legs made it harder to concentrate, but he went on regardless. "So you claim. But let's look at the evidence, shall we? I was seduced and exploited by a Cylon agent, and I experienced a nuclear holocaust close up. Some degree of psychological trauma was inevitable. So you appeared, stepping in to give my conscious mind an escape in the form of these detailed and convincing hallucinations, as well as a physical release which is, sadly, rather lacking in my current circumstances. And, as an additional benefit, you provide me with a useful mechanism for debating ideas with myself, which is necessary given that there's no one left alive who might even come close to being my intellectual equal."

Six sighed. Her breath was warm and sweet on his face. "You disappoint me, Gaius. Every time I think you're ready to make a leap of faith, you turn away."

"This obsession with religion is the only part I don't understand yet," Baltar said. "Where does that come from? Is it some kind of reaction to the improbability of my survival? A need to make sense of why I'm one of fifty thousand survivors and not fifty billion dead? But I know the answer to that: random chance. In a godless universe, it can be nothing else, and that idea never troubled me before. I don't see why it would now."

"If you think your survival was chance, then you understand nothing. God has a plan for you." Six dipped her head and rubbed her cheek against his, all the time working him with her hand. He caught his breath and pushed against her, feeling the front of his pants growing tighter. The fountain was made of marble and wouldn't exactly be comfortable; he wondered if he concentrated, could he shift them to more convivial surroundings. This was, after all, his fantasy.

"If you're real," he said, gasping a little, "prove it."

Her fingers caught his belt, then slid down the zipper of his pants. Gods, that felt good. "I thought I was."

"All you ever do is reflect my own desires and fears back at me." He broke off, pushed against her, and groaned. The blue dress was up around her waist, and he was delighted to discover she wasn't wearing panties. His subconscious was being very efficient. "If you were real -- if you were connected to the Cylons -- you'd be able to tell me something I couldn't possibly know. But you never have. And that's because you can't."

"Faith shouldn't require proof."

"But I do. I'm a scientist. A rational man." He placed his hand between her legs and stroked her; when she tipped back her head and groaned, he leaned forward to kiss her neck.

She turned her head, bringing her mouth close to his ear. Her lips caught his earlobe, and she teased him with her tongue. When she spoke, it was in the lowest of whispers, so faint and breathy that there was no question this intimacy was intended only for him.

"Lee Adama is a Cylon," she said, and vanished.

Baltar started. Unity Square was gone; he was sitting on the edge of the narrow bed in the quarters he had been assigned on the Galactica, his legs apart and his hand on his cock. Too far gone to stop, he came with a spasm and a gasp. As the last pulses faded into a muted sense of physical satisfaction, he lay back on the bed. It was only then that the full meaning of what Six had told him began to sink in.

There was a knock at the door.

"Just, ah, just a moment -- " He made for the tiny bathroom and cleaned himself up as quickly as possible. His appearance, when he checked it in the small mirror over the sink, was disheveled and unshaven. He looked exactly like what he was: a man who hadn't rested properly in weeks. When he opened the door, Gaeta was outside. "Good evening, Lieutenant. Forgive the delay, I was fast asleep."

"I'm sorry for disturbing you, Doctor. The President requests your presence urgently."

"The President always requests my presence urgently. It's never 'in a couple of hours' or 'at your convenience'." He could have said more, but he made an effort to bite back both the words and the sourness of his tone. What status he enjoyed in the Fleet was due largely to Roslin's patronage, and so he had better be a good boy and run along, if he knew what was good for him. "Very well. I need ten minutes to shower and change --"

"I'm afraid the Emergency Security Council is already in session," Gaeta said. "My orders are to bring you there straight away. They're waiting for you."

"I see." Baltar forced a smile. "Well, how does the saying go? No rest for the wicked."

Gaeta smiled. "I believe the second part is more appropriate, Doctor: No peace for the good."

As he left his quarters, Baltar was sure he heard Six's faint, mocking laughter follow him out into the hallway.

***

"Well," Baltar said slowly, "This is -- very shocking news. Very shocking indeed. If I may enquire, where is this man now?"

From his position on the other side of the large table in the Galactica's conference room, Colonel Tigh said, "In the main sickbay. We've relocated the other patients to one of the smaller facilities, and the area's been made secure."

Baltar frowned. "Forgive me, but I thought you said he was unconscious? It doesn't sound as if he's going anywhere by himself."

"He's not," Tigh said. He looked uncomfortable, then glanced quickly up the table, to where Commander Adama sat, next to the President. He had not spoken since Baltar had come into the room. After a slight but noticeable hesitation, Tigh went on, "Captain Adama is there, too. He was... asked to remain, and he agreed."

Baltar wondered what level of compulsion 'asked to remain' implied once translated from military-speak. He suspected it fell on the scale somewhere below an order but well above a gentle suggestion.

President Roslin said, "The man -- if he is a man -- lost consciousness during the return journey and has not woken up since his arrival. The Galactica's Chief Medical Officer has been supervising initial treatment and is due to make his report shortly. He has also been carrying out a number of tests but, as we all know only too well, there is no way to tell the difference between a human being and a human-type Cylon by physical examination. All we know for certain at this point is that it appears this man and Captain Adama are identical. Which is where you come in, Doctor. How long will it take you to test blood samples from both of them?"

"Madam President, while the Cylon detecting process I have developed can give a positive or negative result within a relatively short space of time -- sometimes even minutes -- the possibility of a false result is high enough that I would prefer to re-analyze samples from both individuals a number of times before coming to a final -- "

"You have to be right," Commander Adama said. He didn't speak loudly, but it seemed that the room became somehow quieter around him, emphasizing his words. "Not fast. Right. There can be no uncertainty, no margin of error, no possibility of a mistake. How long will that take?"

Baltar made some swift mental calculations concerning statistical tolerances and the number of times he would have to repeat the tests to arrive at an indisputable result. After the briefest of pauses he said, "Approximately eight hours. I'll have the results in the morning, if I work through the night. Which I will, of course, do."

He was rewarded with a faint smile from Roslin. "Thank you, Doctor. Your dedication and commitment are, as always, appreciated by everyone."

"You're a hero, Gaius." Baltar looked up sharply, and saw Six, standing next to Roslin's chair. "You're the only one who can give them the answers they need. You're their oracle."

"You knew," Baltar said. Then, when he realized Roslin, Adama and Tigh were all looking at him, he coughed and said, "Who -- who knew? This is such a -- shock. A terrible shock."

"It is," Roslin agreed. She looked at Adama. "I am sure that all of us here extend our personal sympathies to the Commander at this difficult time."

Adama stared down the table, and made no response. Meanwhile, Six leaned over the back of his chair and ran her hands down the lapels of his jacket. She smiled at Baltar. "Maybe they're both Cylons," she said. "Has he thought of that? Do you know, I think he has."

"What if --" Baltar said. He stopped, made himself look away from Six and at Roslin instead, and started again. "Madam President, I know that this is difficult to contemplate, but we must face the possibility head on. What if Captain Adama is indeed a Cylon agent? What if a man who has held a senior position, a position of trust, among us virtually since the hour these terrible events began turns out to have been serving the enemy the whole time?"

"We know nothing for certain yet," Roslin said. "As and when our knowledge of the facts changes, we will -- "

"If I may interrupt, Madam President," Commander Adama said. He looked at Baltar. "If I discover that one of my officers is a Cylon agent, then I will take such action as I deem appropriate as Commander of the Fleet." His voice was steady, and expressionless. The look in his eyes was not one Baltar found it easy to meet.

"I'll get straight to work," Baltar said.

***

On the more modern Battlestars, individual quarters for officers had been common, but the Galactica was an old ship, and everyone under the rank of Captain bunked four to a dorm. One berth in Starbuck's dorm was currently free, since its owner had been killed in the first Cylon attack, and Sharon was familiar enough with the duty roster to know that her other two bunkmates were off the ship on patrol. She was as certain as she could be that Starbuck was alone, and yet she still hesitated for a long time outside the door of the dorm before knocking.

Frak it. She knocked.

"Door's open."

Starbuck was putting something away as Sharon came in; she only caught a glimpse and couldn't be sure, but it looked like a pair of icons. A lot of people used icons of the Lords of Kobol as aids to meditation when praying, but Sharon was surprised to see Starbuck with them, since she'd never had Starbuck pegged as the religious type. Although this was hardly the time for her to start prying into Starbuck's private feelings about anything.

Except for the part where that was exactly what Sharon had come to do.

Starbuck was sitting on the edge of her bunk, which was the lower of the pair on the right hand side of the room. Sharon sat down opposite her, on the lower bunk of the other pair. The dorm was tiny, and their knees almost touched across the narrow space.

"I just came to give you the heads up," Sharon said. "People have been talking and -- well, the media's gotten hold of it. Tigh's not letting them down here, but it's a good idea not to go up to any of the public access decks for a while unless you want to be hounded for a sound-bite."

"Thanks," Starbuck said, "You know, if there hadn't been so many journalists here covering the decommissioning, we wouldn't have this problem. We should have been pickier about who we let stay on board."

"Here is the news," Sharon said gravely, "Civilization destroyed. Next up, sports."

Starbuck smiled, a ghost of her usual thousand-watt beam, but a smile nevertheless.

"Do you think -- " Sharon started to ask.

Starbuck cut her off. "Don't. Don't ask me, because I don't know. I haven't been able to think about anything else since we came back, and I just don't know. I have no frakking idea."

"But you saw him."

"Yeah, I saw him. You know what the worst part is? I didn't even recognize him. I took the spare flight suit over there and when I arrived I started putting it on him and I couldn't figure out why Lee was just standing there, not doing anything. I kept telling him to help me, and then I looked again and I saw --" She broke off abruptly. "He looked like hell and he was about forty pounds too light, but it was him. It is him."

Sharon hesitated. "What does Apollo --"

"I don't know," Starbuck said, with an edge of anger in her voice. "He didn't say one frakking word he didn't have to the whole way back."

Sharon said, "I guess they'll get Baltar to run his Cylon detection test on both of them. At least -- at least then we'll know for sure."

"I guess."

"Maybe it's better to know for sure. I mean, if we really had a Cylon agent on board, and if it was the CAG -- it's better to know that now. Maybe he'd be so important to them, they wouldn't even need any others. Maybe he's the only one, and if we found him -- we'd be safe."

Starbuck was staring at her. "What the hell is wrong with you? You're talking as if you want him to be a Cylon."

"I don't -- I'm not --" Sharon broke off. "I'm sorry, that's not what I -- "

"Get out," Starbuck said. "Just get out of here."

Sharon left. Her cheeks were burning as she hurried out of the dorms, and she kept her head down so she didn't have to meet the eyes of the few people she passed in the corridors. But the strange, yawning sensation she felt in the pit of her stomach wasn't embarrassment or regret. It was relief.

***

There was a piece of yellow tape strung across the corridor that served as the access route to the Galactica's main sickbay, with a handwritten sign attached to it politely requesting anyone seeking medical attention to present themselves on deck twelve, section nine until further notice. In the event, however, that this didn't make things sufficiently clear, there were also two armed marines stationed outside the sickbay itself. They stood to attention as Adama approached, and relaxed only when he told them to stand at ease.

Inside, it was unusually, even preternaturally, quiet. The Galactica's sickbay had been fully utilized since the day of the attacks, at first providing care to those who had been wounded during the exodus and, more recently, treating sick and injured civilians from the ships in the Fleet whose own medical facilities were under-equipped or non-existent. Now that everyone apart from the most critical cases had been moved out, the place was eerily silent. For an instant, Adama could almost persuade himself that he was on another Galactica, one which existed in a universe where the Cylon attacks had never happened. One which had been safely decommissioned and turned into a museum.

"Commander." Adama turned around, just in time to see Doctor Cottle come out of his office holding a loosely tagged sheaf of papers in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. Adama looked at the cigarette, and the CMO shrugged. "I know, I know. Hell, though, it's three in the morning, there's no one else here, and frankly getting cancer isn't my biggest worry these days." He held out the report. "I was just about to come up and give you this."

"Thank you," Adama said. He took the papers and started to leaf through them. The report was at least a dozen pages long, and closely typed. He closed the pages and looked back at Cottle. "Summarize it for me."

"Everything I've been able to test -- fingerprints, blood type, dental patterns -- is an exact match of Captain Adama's records. They even have identical scars on their right knees."

Lee had been ten years old, Adama remembered. He'd been playing with Zak; they were climbing trees in the back yard, daring each other to go higher and higher, when Lee -- who was not usually a risk-taker, and had doubtless been egged on by his more adventurous younger brother -- had trusted his weight to a rotten branch. The resulting snap and yell of surprise had brought Adama running out from the house, just in time to see his oldest son plunge over ten feet to the ground. He'd rushed straight to the boy's side, aware yet not aware of Zak's screams, and had felt an icy terror grip him when he saw Lee's eyes were open but glassy, and he was lying still as the blood soaked into his ripped jeans. In the event, those first fears were unfounded -- although the wound had been deep enough to scar, it had looked much worse than it actually was. But the incident had left its own kind of mark on Adama; it had been the first time he had experienced the fear of losing a child. Years later, when he had answered the phone call and heard the words, "I am sorry to inform you --" he had known again the horrific sensation of watching the boy tumble helplessly downward.

"...will take a couple of days to run a full genetic profile," Cottle was saying, "but I expect it to be exactly the same, too."

"What about his condition?"

"He's dangerously dehydrated and is suffering from extreme malnutrition. During the examination, I also found many small scars on his body, consistent with a large number of tissue and blood samples being taken over a prolonged period."

"How long is prolonged?"

"It's hard to be certain. But, judging by the degree of healing of the older lesions, we're talking about months, not weeks."

Adama thought about that for a moment. About what it meant. "Is he going to live?"

Doctor Cottle didn't answer immediately. At last he said, "It's too soon to say."

"I'd like to see him."

Cottle nodded, then turned and took Adama down the short corridor which led to the sickbay's intensive care unit. The ICU was dimly lit, but it was clear nevertheless that only one of the beds was occupied. Adama thanked him, and the doctor started to leave. Then he stopped.

"Captain Adama is in room four, off the main ward," he said. "I don't think he's asleep, if you -- Well, that's where he is."

"Thank you," Adama said again, and Cottle left.

Within the ICU, the only sounds were the faint hum of the air circulation system and the labored breathing of its sole occupant. There were so many machines grouped around the cot that Adama was reminded of a war zone, as if the bed were a battlefield where life and death were throwing the full might of their arsenals at each other in the hope of securing a victory. The array of medical weaponry hid the patient effectively and, from where Adama was standing, just inside the doorway, the man in the bed might have been anyone. Anyone at all.

It would be easy to turn around and leave, and allow himself to continue in that belief.

He went closer, so he could see the man clearly.

The first thing Adama noticed -- could not help but notice -- was that he was thin. Skeletally thin, with dark veins jutting out from skin which was so pale it was almost translucent. Tubes inserted into his mouth and nostrils further distorted his appearance. His appearance had been altered so drastically that he should not have been recognizable at all, but he was.

It was Lee.

Very gently, Adama took his son's hand in his own. It shocked him to see that Lee was so underweight that the skin on the back of his hand was wrinkled, as if he were wearing gloves which were too large for him. His son was thirty-two years younger than him, but he had the hands of a man older than Adama.

In the bed, Lee suddenly stirred. A faint noise of distress emerged from the back of his throat, and his hand clenched suddenly.

"I'm here," Adama said. "It's all right. I'm here."

But there was no sign that his son had heard him. After a moment, the hand Adama held relaxed again, and before long Lee had sunk back into unconsciousness. Adama waited for many minutes, but Lee did not move again, and eventually Adama realized he wasn't going to. He laid Lee's hand back on top of the blankets with care, and left the ICU.

Doctor Cottle's office was dark as he walked past it, but there was a faint glow coming from the main ward. When he got closer, he saw that it wasn't coming from the main ward lights, which had been switched off; the source was a thin, bright line seeping out from under the door to one of the isolation rooms located off the ward. Room four.

Adama went to the door. He could see, at his feet, a band of shadow breaking the line of light coming from under the door, moving across it from left to right and then back again. And he could hear, in the silence of the deserted sickbay, the soft click of booted feet pacing the metal-floored deck inside the isolation room. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.

He remembered the snap the branch had made as it broke, and the sight of his son falling. He remembered the fear of loss and -- worse still -- the horror of knowing that he was too late to stop what was happening. There had been nothing he could do, except watch, a spectator at his own tragedy.

He stood outside the door for a long time. But he didn't go in.

***

First, prepare the solution. Add a single drop of the subject's blood. Place in the centrifuge, seal the lid, switch it on. Wait. Remove the separated sample, and put it into the detector. Check the control parameters and turn on the machine. Listen to it click as, inside the sealed drum, the sample is exposed to a series of precisely measured bursts of radiation. When the sequence has ended, record the results and remove the sample. Dispose of the sample. Repeat.

"You can't ignore me forever, Gaius."

The centrifuge made a low hum as it spun. Baltar watched it, and did not allow himself to look at Six. He knew what he would see if he did: she was perched elegantly on the edge of one of the laboratory benches, her very short skirt riding up around her thighs in a most suggestive and, he knew, deliberately provocative way. He wondered what the expression was on her lovely face. Was she trying to appear hurt, or had she abandoned all pretence and was simply regarding him with a victor's smugness?

He wanted to look at her. He was aware of her presence -- gods, he could even smell her perfume -- in a way which was acute, undeniable, uncomfortable. She distracted him, even when she wasn't talking; she made concentrating on the task at hand a challenge of Herculean proportions. Suddenly, he saw himself as others must see him -- a stuttering, erratic fool who talked to himself and could barely focus for long enough to complete a sentence. Gaius Baltar, the finest mind of his generation, reduced to a figure of ridicule. This was what Six had done to him. He'd tried to rationalize her as his release. Now he saw, finally, what she really was: his jailer.

He'd been like this for weeks. He'd even started to think of this warped dependence as normal.

"Gaius," Six sing-songed from the bench. "Oh, Gaius..."

Baltar felt his nerves pull tight and, at last, break. "Shut up," he snapped, spinning around. "For the love of all the gods, just shut the frak up and leave me alone."

Six laughed. "You see? I knew you'd have to talk to me eventually."

"You manipulated me to serve your purposes."

She wagged her finger at him. "You manipulated yourself, Gaius, and very effectively, too. I told you about the chip. You just decided to believe something different. But, in the end, it doesn't matter to me what you think I am." She smiled. "As long as you love me."

"I detest you."

"Oh, you say that now..." She slipped down off the bench and walked toward him, hips swaying and arms outstretched. When she reached him, she draped her arms over his shoulders and pulled him close to her in an embrace. "But I know how to make you change your mind."

He felt the familiar, warm fug descend on his mind, rolling in like fog to obscure and blur his thoughts. He needed to think -- he was supposed to be good at thinking, better than anyone -- but when she was this close, thoughts were an irritating irrelevance. But there was something, something he mustn't forget, something important...

"You made me a traitor," he murmured. "The first time, I didn't know what I was doing. How could I? But the second time, I was complicit. I deceived myself with a smile and said yes, please, more." He blinked, and was surprised when he felt moisture on his cheeks. "That was my crime. My sin, if you want to call it that."

Six raised her arms and held his face in her hands, so that he was looking straight at her. "God will forgive you, Gaius, if you ask him to."

"And all I need to do is... repent."

She smiled beatifically. "That's all."

"Repent," Baltar said. "Fall on my knees, and worship your god."

"Yes."

"That would make you happy, wouldn't it?"

In response, Six kissed his forehead. Her lips were feather-soft against his skin.

Baltar said, "No."

She stared at him.

"No," he said, with more force. "I will not worship your god. Or any god, for that matter. It's just another way of deceiving oneself, after all, and I think I've done enough of that lately, don't you? No, I'd rather face the world without blinkers, and rely on my own intellect to get by. Because it occurs to me that Cylons and deities have something in common: you were both invented by man to meet a particular need. You're convenient, artificial constructs, and nothing more. The very least among us is superior to you. And I, my dear, am very far from being the least among us."

All through his tirade, Six's expression had barely changed. Now, as he watched, her smile slowly disappeared, replaced by hollow uncertainty and then by raw hurt. For a moment, he actually thought she was going to cry, and the absurdity of it made him want to burst out laughing. After everything that had happened, he was going to defeat the Cylons by making them cry.

Then her face hardened, the lines of her cheeks and jaw suddenly becoming harsh. At last, the real Six, he thought. "You can't get rid of me as easily as your other whores, Gaius." She tapped one perfectly filed nail against the side of his head. "I'm in there with you, remember?"

"I will find you," Baltar promised. He felt calm, even serene; the fog which had settled over his mental landscape in the past weeks was rapidly lifting, leaving him focused and alert and equipped with a fresh sense of resolve. "Wherever you are hiding, I will find you and I will extract you. In the meantime --" He placed his hands on her upper arms, and smiled at her. "Get the hell out of my mind."

He pushed her, hard. Six reeled backward, crashing into the glass cupboards lined up against the laboratory wall. Baltar automatically threw up a hand to protect himself from the expected shower of broken glass, but it didn't come. Instead, when Six's body hit the glass doors, she simply -- vanished.

Of course she had vanished. What else had he expected? She wasn't real.

For the first time in weeks, Baltar laughed an honest, real laugh.

The machine on the table beeped loudly, indicating that it had finished another test sequence. Baltar checked the results and recorded them in the steadily growing list.

Humming cheerfully to himself, he set about preparing the next sample.

***

Just another couple of minutes, Lee told himself, and this would all be over.

He was sitting in a seat at the table in the Galactica's main conference room. The two marines who had escorted him up from sickbay stood at a discreet distance behind him. He wasn't a prisoner, but he wasn't exactly free to get up and leave any time he wanted to, either. Right now, Lee wasn't sure what his status was, and the feeling was an unsettling one.

He shifted his weight about in the chair, trying to get comfortable. He'd barely rested during the night and now his muscles were sore and tense. He'd tried to sleep, but every time he'd closed his eyes he had seen his own hollow face, mouth gaping in a scream of horror. Eventually, he'd had to give in and admit to himself that he wasn't going to be able to stop thinking about it, and so he'd decided he might at least make productive use of the time. He'd spent the rest of the night weighing the evidence, putting together a theory that fit the available facts.

It made perfect sense that the Cylons would choose him as the newest addition to their range of human models. He held a senior position in what remained of the Colonial military, and he was trusted by both the Commander of the Fleet and the President. He must have presented an irresistible target. Somehow, they had obtained the tiny sample of his genetic material which had given them everything they'd needed to construct a perfect copy of him. How had they gotten it? He could think of at least several strong possibilities, but the most likely one was that a Cylon agent already placed on the Galactica had gained access to the store of blood which was kept in the medical labs for use in emergency transfusions.

They must have planned to abduct him and make the substitution while the Fleet passed through the system where the base was located, but discovery by the Galactica's advance probe had taken away the advantage of secrecy, and they had decided to evacuate and wait for another opportunity. It all made perfect sense.

Except for one thing. The single clone they'd left behind to die. Had it failed some kind of quality control check? Or had its programming failed to take? Either way, leaving it to be discovered just didn't stack up, no matter how much he tried to make it work.

If it hadn't been for that single detail, he could have explained everything.

The door at the far end of the conference room swung open and President Roslin came in, followed by his father and Doctor Baltar, and then by Tigh and Billy Keikeya. Lee stood up, saluted, and then remained at attention until they were all seated.

"Please, Captain, sit down," the President said. She looked around the room. "Very well. Let's not take more time over this than we have to. Doctor Baltar, your report, please."

Baltar rose and began to explain how his Cylon detector worked, as if everyone present didn't know already. Lee didn't listen; instead, he was looking at his father. There was something about the expression on Adama's face that was familiar, and troubling. He'd seen his father look like this before, but in another context, and he couldn't remember when or where it had been.

"Doctor Baltar," the President interrupted. "Perhaps you could skip straight to your findings."

"Ah. Yes. Of course. Dreadfully sorry. Just like me, to ramble on." Baltar smiled cheerfully; his sunny disposition was so wildly at odds with everyone else present that, under other circumstances, it might have been funny. "You want me to, ah --?"

The President nodded patiently. "Yes, Doctor."

Suddenly, Lee knew when he had last seen his father look like that. It had been right after Zak had died. When Lee had gone to see Adama then, he had found him remote and cut-off. At the time, he'd chosen to see it as a professional soldier's callous indifference to death, and added it to the list of father's failures. It was only recently that he'd started to understand it for what it was -- an act of self-protection by a man whose capacity to feel pain was perhaps far greater than Lee had ever suspected.

And his father was wearing the same expression now. As if he had just lost another son. Or was just about to.

"Well, he's a Cylon," Baltar said, gesturing casually in Lee's direction. "There's absolutely no doubt about it."

Lee stared at him. He wanted to speak out, but his throat constricted and he couldn't force out a single word.

"And the man currently in our sickbay?" Tigh asked.

"...Is the real Captain Adama."

At last, Lee found his voice. "No," he said. "No. This is wrong. It's a mistake --"

Baltar said, "I assure you, the test results were conclusive."

"Then run them again!"

"I did," Baltar said. "In fact, I ran them one hundred and forty-seven times."

Without looking up at Lee, Adama said, "I asked Doctor Baltar to eliminate the possibility of any errors from his testing process. He did. Everyone here is satisfied with the validity of the results."

"Well, I'm not satisfied with them!"

"Your opinion no longer counts," his father said stonily. "You are a Cylon agent."

"I am not a Cylon!" Lee was shouting now; he stood up, so violently that the chair toppled over and clattered noisily on to the floor. "Are you listening to me? Any of you?"

But no one in the room was rising to defend him, or to dispute the results of Baltar's test. Billy Keikeya was writing furiously on the notepad in front of him, as if by submerging himself completely in the task he could ignore what was going on around him. Tigh looked disgusted. And President Roslin was looking at him as she'd never seen him before. Or as if she were seeing him for the first time.

His father's voice rose until he was shouting too, overriding Lee's protests. "You are a Cylon agent and I am hereby placing you under arrest."

"You can't arrest me! I haven't done anything!"

"You are charged with impersonating an officer of the Colonial Fleet, with conspiring to abduct and imprison an officer of the Colonial Fleet, and with committing treachery against the Federation of the Twelve Colonies. Other charges will be added when the full extent of your crimes is known."

The marines had moved up behind Lee; one of them held his arms together while the other fitted the restraints around his wrists. Lee looked at his bound hands with a distant sense that they must belong to someone else. When he looked up, he was looking right into his father's eyes.

"I'm not a Cylon," he said. "Dad, please -- I'm your *son*."

"No, you're not." His father turned away from him, and said to the marines, "Get this thing out of my sight."

The last thing Lee saw as they dragged him out of the conference room was his father, sitting at the table. His back was ramrod straight and he was staring straight ahead.

***

********************* CHAPTER THREE *********************

Laura Roslin's stateroom on Colonial One wasn't in the same league as the President's official residence back on Caprica had been -- it still looked very much like what it actually was, the executive class compartment of a passenger shuttle -- but in the space of the last weeks it had begun to collect at least some of the trappings of power.

The desk which Billy had found for her, for example, was a beautifully constructed solid wood antique; Laura guessed it had to have been made in the previous century. When she'd asked him where he'd gotten it from, he'd admitted it had been part of a removal company's consignment on one of the haulage ships in the Fleet. The desk's owner had almost certainly perished in the attacks, but by chance the furniture itself had survived. Sometimes, as she worked, Laura drew her fingers over the surface of the wood, just to feel its texture and the reassurance of its solid, natural presence.

Of course, it wasn't the accessories which made the office presidential, but the person occupying it. And, right now, Laura didn't feel very presidential at all.

When the Cylons had attacked, she had been as lost and terrified as every other survivor. Unlike every other survivor, however, the responsibility of making decisions had fallen to her. The first person who had treated her as the President had been Lee Adama. Captain Apollo. In those first, crucial hours, it had been his belief in her, and in the office she suddenly held, that had helped her to believe in herself. He had trusted her judgment, and in return she had trusted and confided in him.

And her judgment had been completely, disastrously wrong.

"It is Doctor Cottle's opinion that my son's injuries imply he was abducted at least several months ago," Commander Adama said. "If that is the case, then the switch could not have taken place at any time since the attacks. The Cylon imposter must have arrived on the Galactica on the day of the decommissioning ceremony. And it has been here ever since."

"Where is he..." she began, then stopped. She would have to select her words more carefully in the future. "Where is it now?"

"In the brig," Adama said. "But we can't keep it there. The Galactica doesn't have the facilities to hold a high-security prisoner."

"What do you recommend we do with it?"

"Kill it," Adama said unequivocally. There was a complete lack of emotion in his expression and tone which left Laura feeling vaguely discomfited. She should be grateful, she supposed, that Adama was able to put the safety of the Fleet above his personal feelings, yet somehow she couldn't forget that two days ago the Cylon had been his son.

No; that was wrong. It had never been his son. It had just tricked them into thinking it was.

"We can't execute it without going through due process," she said.

"I don't remember following any due process with Leoben," Adama pointed out.

"This is different," Laura said. "This Cylon wasn't a known enemy operative -- it was a respected senior officer. Many people -- many civilians -- will find it hard to stop thinking of it that way. If we want to execute it, we'll have to put it on trial and find it guilty first, and that will require hard evidence of treason. It'll be even harder to achieve if the Cylon is still protesting its innocence publicly. There are political concerns here which are just as important to address as the military ones, Commander."

Adama said, "I've ordered a full review of security on the Galactica. If there's evidence of sabotage anywhere on board, we'll find it."

Laura nodded. "And in the meantime, I'll ask Billy to contact the captain of the Astral Queen. I'm sure they have more suitable facilities than the Galactica's brig." She made a note on the pad in front of her. "Let's talk about damage limitation. How bad is it?"

His expression was grim. "We have to assume we're dealing with the worst case scenario -- that the Cylons know every piece of information about us which the imposter had access to."

Every piece of information. Laura shut her eyes for a moment. "Oh..."

"Madam President?"

She hesitated. "Commander... I took your son -- the person we all thought was your son -- very much into my confidence. I'm afraid he possesses some extremely sensitive information. Personal information." She exhaled. "I have cancer. I've told only three people. The Cylon was one of them."

Adama was silent for a moment. Then he said, "I see. And you didn't think, at any point, that it was appropriate to inform the Commander of the Colonial Fleet about your illness?"

"Frankly, no, I didn't, Commander," Laura said sharply. "I wasn't aware my health was a military concern."

"It is now, if the Cylons know about it." Adama's expression was frosty in the extreme. "And you evidently considered it enough of a military concern to tell the CAG."

"Then I can take it, can I, that over the course of the past six weeks, you told it nothing that would fall outside the normal interactions between a ship's captain and one of his senior officers? Nothing at all?" Laura arched a single skeptical eyebrow.

Adama snapped, "Of course I talked to it. I thought it was my son!" He stopped, and appeared to catch himself. "I'm sorry, Madam President. I -- "

Laura raised a hand, cutting him off. "No. I apologize. That was unfair of me. Your relationship with it was -- different." She rubbed her hand across her eyes, feeling suddenly weary. "I... accept I made a grave error of judgment. We may yet pay for it."

"Yours was not the only error of judgment. It fooled all of us."

"May I ask you a personal question, Commander?"

He nodded.

"Did you suspect? At all?"

Quietly, he said, "Not for a second."

The door opened, and Billy came in, holding a single sheet of paper. "I'm sorry for intruding, Madam President. I have an urgent message."

It was a bad time; then again, there was rarely a moment Laura considered a good time, of any kind, these days. "Let's hear it," she said.

"It's for the Commander," Billy said. He twisted the paper around in his hand, creasing it. "You... uh, you might want to read this alone, sir."

Suddenly, and without the least shadow of a doubt, Laura knew precisely what the message was. Adama must have, too, because his posture changed fractionally; it seemed to Laura that he lost a little of his military bearing and slumped almost imperceptibly back in the chair.

"Just tell me," he said.

Billy hesitated, then looked to Laura for guidance. She inclined her head in a tiny nod.

Billy lifted the wrinkled paper, and said, "Colonel Tigh regrets to inform you your son died a short time ago. He suffered a massive coronary failure. The doctors tried to revive him, but..." He stopped. "I'm very sorry, Commander."

Adama closed his eyes. He nodded.

Laura looked at Billy, then at the door. He got the message at once, and practically fled the room, leaving her alone with Adama.

She stood up. Making her tone gentle, she said, "If you'd like some time by yourself, please feel free to stay here. I'll go elsewhere."

Adama's eyes remained closed; in the silence, she could hear him breathing in and out, with forced regularity. Then he opened his eyes and stood up. The simple act appeared to take a great deal of effort, and he had to place one hand on the corner of the desk for support. But when he spoke, his voice was steady. "Thank you, but that won't be necessary. I would, however, like to return to the Galactica immediately."

"Of course." She paused. "You have my deepest and sincerest sympathies, Commander. I didn't know your son for long, but even our brief acquaintance led me to hold him in great respect and admiration. He was a credit to the Colonial Fleet, and to you."

Adama looked at her, and she saw something in his eyes harden.

"With respect, Madam President," he said, "you never met my son."

***

It was a good funeral. Kara had been to enough of them that she'd devised a system for awarding points.

She gave the location seven out of ten. The Galactica's hangar bay lacked atmosphere -- call that a meager five out of ten -- but it got two bonus points for being selected as the venue because it was the only place big enough to hold everyone who wanted to attend.

The ceremony itself, however, scored a big fat nine. How many people, after all, got to have their funeral conducted by a High Priestess, with passages from the Scriptures read by the President herself?

Yeah, Lee's funeral was a high scorer, maybe even higher than Zak's had been. Zak would've been annoyed by that; he'd had the crazily competitive streak of a younger child, always determined not to be overshadowed by his older brother. She could have teased them about it, except of course she couldn't because now they were both gone, and Kara was pretty frakking sick of burying men called Adama.

Maybe she should just be glad the old man didn't have any other sons she could make the mistake of letting herself care about.

He didn't have any sons at all, now.

The thought made her eyes sting with unexpected tears. She blinked rapidly, until they were dry again. There'd be time to do her grieving later, someplace private. She wasn't going to lose it here, in front of everyone.

President Roslin was standing at the lectern which had been set up at the front of the hangar bay, reading from the book spread open in front of her. Kara was no religious scholar, but she knew the passage well. She'd heard it read at every funeral she'd been to.

"As your ancestors were lifted up and taken to a new land, so shall your souls be lifted up from your bodies and carried away. And your souls shall be borne home, and dwell in peace in the fields of Elysium for all eternity." Roslin ended the reading with the traditional refrain: "These are the words of the Lords of Kobol, and we hold them to be the truth. So say we all."

"So say we all," Kara repeated, in chorus with the rest of those assembled.

The President returned to her seat, next to Commander Adama in the front row. Kara was in the second row, making her the unofficial head of the pilots' section. At Zak's funeral, she'd been the one to sit next to Adama, and she remembered how, as Zak's coffin had been lowered into the ground, he'd silently taken hold of her hand. Starbuck respected Roslin -- hell, she'd probably even vote for her -- but somehow she didn't think the President was going to hold Adama's hand. And someone, Kara felt, should.

Elosha said, "Let us join in offering up our prayers to the gods." She raised her arms, and around the hangar, Starbuck saw heads bow, until she was the only person left whose eyes were still open. Even when Elosha began to lead the prayers, Kara still didn't join in. There was something oddly compelling about being able to watch the scene around her, unobserved.

What struck her most was how many people looked genuinely upset. Dualla, sitting in a row that included Gaeta and most of the CIC staff, was crying. It should have been comforting to know she wasn't the only one who was mourning Lee, but Kara didn't feel comforted at all. Instead she felt angry, and it took her a few moments to work out why.

There were only two people on the Galactica who had known the real Lee -- his father, and herself. Everyone else was grieving for an imposter, the fake which had tricked them into believing in it, respecting it, even thinking of it as a friend. The man they were mourning was a stranger to all of them, and suddenly Kara wanted to stand up and demand to know what right any of them thought they had to feel sad.

The Cylon was responsible for this. It had replaced Lee so effectively and so perfectly that it had even stolen the grief that should have been felt for him. And Kara hated it even more for that.

She clenched her hand into a fist in her lap, and bit down on her lip so hard she tasted blood. Once again, she reminded herself forcefully that this would be a really bad place to fall apart.

She closed her eyes and lowered her head.

"With heavy hearts, we lift up the body of Lee Adama to you, O Lords of Kobol, in the knowledge that you will give him life eternal," Elosha concluded. "So say we all."

The reply echoed back in a chorus of several hundred voices, but Kara's wasn't one of them.

***

The passenger compartment on the upper deck of Colonial One which served as the President's outer office was deserted when Baltar came in, apart from Billy Keikeya, who was sitting at his desk, wading through a thick pile of documents. He looked up, clearly surprised to see anyone this late. Baltar, on the other hand, was pleased to have picked his moment so well -- he'd waited until now precisely in the hope of catching Billy alone.

Baltar smiled genially at the young man as he approached the desk. "Good evening. This is a late hour to be working, isn't it? You must be dedicated."

"I, uh -- " Billy gestured at the piles heaped across his desk. "Well, there's a lot to do. But I'm managing," he added, with a touch of defensiveness.

"You are. And very effectively, too, may I say." Baltar leaned forward and added, conspiratorially, "Don't think it hasn't been noticed."

"Thank you, Doctor." Maybe he was imagining it, but Baltar was almost sure that Billy actually blushed a little. "If you want to see the President, I'm afraid she's gone to bed. I'd prefer not to wake her up, unless it's an emergency."

"No, no emergency," Baltar said. "Actually, I was hoping to speak to you. I have a... somewhat delicate problem which I hope you can help me with."

Billy looked puzzled, but said, "I'll certainly try, Doctor."

"I have a chip in my head," Baltar said.

"Excuse me?"

Baltar moved around to Billy's side of the desk, so that he was standing closer to him. "You've heard of Direct Stimulation Implants?"

"DSI's?" Billy frowned. "I've heard of them, but that's about all. They were banned before I was born."

Baltar stared at him, taken aback. "How old are you?"

Billy looked as if he didn't want to answer that question at all. "Nineteen, Doctor."

Baltar had known Billy was young; he hadn't know he was that young. It was hardly reassuring to think that the government of what remained of the Twelve Colonies was being run, more or less, by a ex-school teacher and a work placement student.

"Well, when I was your age, DSI's weren't illegal. Frowned upon, certainly, but not illegal. I was young and curious -- everyone experiments when they're in college, don't they?" The look on Billy's face strongly suggested to Baltar that no, as it happened, Billy hadn't experimented at all. He suppressed a sigh, thinking that the most outrageous act Billy had undertaken during his truncated college education was probably joining the campus debating society. "To be brief, there was a period during which I and a group of friends were in the habit of using DSI's as a kind of -- aid to creative thinking. When you're part of a network of six or ten or more minds, sharing ideas without having to express them in words -- it's an immensely stimulating, exciting experience."

"I read they were used in -- orgies."

Baltar could have told him a few enlightening things on that point, but he wasn't going to. "Some people took a less high-minded approach than we did," he said. "The point is, when DSI's were banned, not everyone had theirs removed."

"Oh," Billy said. "I see."

"Perhaps you've noticed that in the last few weeks I've been somewhat unfocused at times."

"Well, you're a genius, and people expect geniuses to be a bit --" Billy stopped himself. "No, I haven't noticed anything."

He'd have to learn to lie better if he wanted to succeed in politics, Baltar thought. "I've been getting headaches, finding it difficult to concentrate, that kind of thing. At first, I put it down to the trauma of surviving the attacks, but in the last couple of days I've realized what the root cause of the trouble is."

"The implant is malfunctioning."

"Yes. Maybe as a result of my exposure to the holocaust on Caprica. The radiation may have disrupted the chip. I need to have it removed."

"I understand," Billy said. "The Galactica has the best medical facilities in the Fleet. I'm sure if I spoke privately to Lieutenant Gaeta --"

"No," Baltar said quickly. Knowledge of any treatment he received on the Galactica, Baltar knew, would inevitably find its way to the President, by way of gods knew how many other people. He couldn't risk that. "I mean, I'd prefer to deal with this as privately as possible."

Billy looked unsure. "Doctor, your mind is -- well, it's the single biggest advantage we've got against the Cylons. I wouldn't feel comfortable knowing you weren't getting the best care available."

"I appreciate that; I truly do. But the Galactica isn't the only ship in the Fleet. And no one has a more comprehensive knowledge of the civilian resources we have than you do."

Billy hesitated, then nodded. "I'll look into it," he said.

"Thank you," Baltar said, with sincerity. "And, remember -- our secret."

"Yes, Doctor."

"Oh, bravo, Gaius." Six, who had appeared silently behind Billy, clapped her hands with slow, mocking deliberateness. "I don't know which is more pathetic, your attempts to elicit sympathy or the fact he fell for them."

Baltar gritted his teeth and didn't answer her, but it was too late to stop Billy from noticing his gaze shifting to an apparently empty space somewhere behind his right shoulder.

"Is it --" Billy was looking at him, at first with some confusion but then with dawning clarity. "You're having an episode now, aren't you?"

Baltar was about to deny it, before suddenly realizing he didn't have to anymore. In fact, it served his purpose better to overplay the moment.

He sagged against the edge of the desk, as if he were about to faint, and put a hand to his head. "Yes, I... I'm sorry, I can't -- "

Billy jumped up and put his arm around Baltar, supporting him. Then he maneuvered him quickly into the chair he had just vacated. "It's all right, Doctor. Can I get you anything?"

Baltar waved his hand weakly. "A glass of water..."

The jug on the desk was empty, and the nearest tap was in the bathrooms down the corridor. Billy hurried out of the room with the jug, and Baltar was alone with Six.

"Oh, Doctor Baltar, your mind is the greatest advantage we've got against the Cylons!" Six echoed, adopting a high-pitched simper. Then she let her voice drop back into normal tones and sneered, "If they only knew what grimy little thoughts really run through your self-absorbed, obscene, narcissistic lump of neurons and synapses."

Hell hath no fury like a Cylon scorned, Baltar thought tiredly. "I may be all that and far worse," he told her, keeping his voice too low to carry out into the hallway, "but I intend to make sure that whatever thoughts are in my head -- you're not one of them."

***

The week before the Galactica had been due to be decommissioned, Adama had packed up his belongings into boxes to be shipped back to Caprica. There'd been more to put away than he'd expected: old papers, mementoes from previous postings, and of course his collection of books, which he'd discovered he'd fooled himself into believing was a lot smaller than it actually was. Of all the repercussions of the Cylon attacks, the very smallest had been that he'd realized he was going to have to unpack it all again.

He hadn't gotten around to it in the past six weeks. He'd had other things on his mind, of course, but now, sitting on the couch in his quarters and looking at the disordered stacks of boxes -- many of which were now spewing their contents on to the floor, having been rifled through in pursuit of particular items -- Adama couldn't help feeling as if the mess was accusing him of something. Of leaving too many things undone for too long, maybe.

The knock at the door provided welcome relief from his thoughts. He got up to answer it, and was glad to see Starbuck outside; she just about the only person he had even the least desire to talk to. "Come in."

When she stepped inside, he saw she was holding something in her hands -- a small box, no bigger than his fist. When Starbuck saw him looking at it, she held it out to him. "I was going to make a nice speech or something before I gave it to you," she said without preamble, "but I'm kinda useless at that, so I won't. This is from us. I mean, the pilots."

He took the box from her, and opened it. Inside, a small pair of bronze wings rested on a folded piece of tissue paper. "Thank you," Adama said, as he closed the box again and put it away in the top drawer of his desk, where it would be safe. Then he opened the cupboard beneath and brought out a bottle of ambrosia and two tumblers. "Would you like a drink?"

"Frak, yeah." She caught herself. "I'm sorry, Commander. It's been a long day. I meant --"

He poured out a measure of the liquor into one of the tumblers and handed it to her. "You meant, 'Frak, yeah, sir.'" Then he poured a glass for himself and raised it in a toast. "To Lee. My son. Your friend."

"Lee," she said, meeting his gaze. He doubted there was anyone else in the Fleet who could have, right at that moment.

The ambrosia was an excellent vintage, but it felt raw on his throat as he swallowed it. "How's morale on the flight deck?"

"Bad," Starbuck said simply. "We thought we were doing a terrific job of protecting the Fleet. Turns out we had a Cylon drawing up the patrol rosters. I've got at least a couple of pilots wondering out loud why they're even bothering."

Adama noted the sense of responsibility implicit in that last sentence. "What did you tell them?"

She shrugged. "Same things I've been telling myself. That we caught it before it killed all of us, which means we won this round. And that we owe it to Lee -- the real Lee -- to keep going out there and shooting those metal bastards out of the sky."

Adama tipped up his tumbler and finished the last of his drink. He made his decision. "I'm giving you a field promotion, effective at once. You're going to be the new CAG." He regarded her levelly. "Congratulations, Captain."

Starbuck stared at him. "Sir?"

"You're already doing the job, Starbuck. You just told me as much."

She shook her head. "I've talked to a few people, that's all."

"And you told them what they needed to hear to keep going. I need a new CAG, and it has to be someone I trust completely. Believe me, right now that doesn't leave very many candidates at all."

"There's only one thing I've ever been any good at," Starbuck said, "and that's flying. The deal is, I fly really, really well, and no one asks me to do anything else. That's how it works."

"No," Adama said, "that's how it worked." The alcohol was hitting his bloodstream faster than it should have, making him realize that he couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. He pressed the tumbler against his forehead for a moment. The glass felt refreshingly cold, and the sensation helped clear his head. "You don't have the luxury of just doing what you want any more. None of us do. You don't think you're ready for this? Well, to be truthful, neither do I. You're impulsive and outspoken and you can't swallow it and shut up when you ought to. At least half of me doesn't think you can make this work." He looked straight at her. "Prove me wrong."

She glared at him, openly angry now. Good -- that was exactly the reaction he'd hoped for. Adama knew Kara Thrace well enough to understand what made her tick, and he was counting on that understanding now. Because, for as long as he'd known her, nothing had made Starbuck want to do something faster than telling her she couldn't do it.

She set down her glass, so hard that it cracked against the top of the low table next to the couch. "Fine, sir. I will."

"Then you're dismissed, Captain. And I'll see you in the CIC tomorrow morning at 0800 for your first briefing."

"Yes, sir."

She left, shoulders rigid and temper barely in check. Adama hoped he hadn't just made an appalling error of judgment. He shut his eyes. Another appalling error of judgment.

He went to the desk, took out the box she had given him, and sat down again. The pilot's wings inside it were small but felt reassuringly heavy when he tipped them into the palm of his hand. He cupped his hands around the tiny wings and leaned his head down over them, so that he was sitting in what felt like an attitude of prayer.

In a way, it almost was.

***

First, they'd taken away his tags and his rank pins, because he wasn't in the military anymore. Then they'd stripped him of his uniform, and put him instead in a prisoner's bright orange overalls. And then they'd put handcuffs on his wrists and shackles on his ankles, so that he could only walk with a slow, shuffling gait, his hands bound in front of him.

But worse than any of that -- much, much worse -- had been the long march down through the Galactica's decks to the brig. On the way down, Lee had been marched past what felt like hundreds of officers and crewmen -- some whose names he knew, some whose faces he recognized, still others he didn't know at all. Every single one of them had looked away, refusing to acknowledge him. It had been during the long descent that the enormity of what had just happened began to sink in, and by the time the brig's barred door had clanged shut on him, he had been almost grateful to be out of sight.

They thought he wasn't human. Well, they were wrong. If he clung on to nothing else, he had to cling on to that.

There were always two guards on duty in the brig, although their faces changed shift by shift. All of them, apparently, had orders not to talk to him under any circumstances. They'd taken away his watch, so he had to judge the passing time by the arrival of meals and the periodical dimming of the lights which marked the transition from dayshift to nightshift. And he waited, because there was nothing else he could do.

On the third day, he woke up with the feeling that someone was watching him.

He sat up on the brig's narrow cot. President Roslin was sitting on a chair on the other side of the bars.

"I was going to ask them to wake you," she said, "but then I decided I wanted the opportunity to observe you for a while before we spoke. I believed you were what you appeared to be, and now I find I have to redefine you. It's difficult."

"You don't need to redefine me," Lee said. "I'm not a Cylon. I'm human."

"Doctor Baltar begs to differ."

"Then Baltar's wrong!" Lee took a step closer to the bars; outside the brig, both the guards placed their hands on their holsters. "Madam President, I can't explain the test results -- maybe the test is flawed, or the samples were tampered with -- but I know they can't be right."

She looked at him. "How do you know? What makes you so certain?"

Lee shook his head. Where to start? He couldn't waste this opportunity to convince her -- he wouldn't get another one. "I remember everything about myself. Everything that makes me who I am. Growing up on bases all over the Colonies, moving about with my father's postings. The name of my third grade teacher. The first time I kissed a girl. The first time I flew a Viper."

There were more memories, too: more than he could tell her, and some -- the most powerful ones of all -- that he couldn't have shared, even if he'd wanted to.

He remembered the odd, tight feeling he'd had when Zak had told him he and Kara were seeing each other, how he'd tried to persuade himself he was pleased for them. And he remembered the look of hurt on his father's face when they'd fought after Zak's funeral, and the cold feeling of satisfaction seeing it had given him. Those were his memories. How could they be anyone else's?

"They gave you false memories," Roslin said. "Designed to make you a more convincing fake."

"You can't fake beliefs," Lee insisted. "All the things that mattered to me yesterday still matter. I believe in our society, and in its survival. I believe we can make it through this. But only if we don't let our fears turn us on each other."

"Do you believe you have a soul?" Roslin asked.

Lee stared at her. At last he said, "Madam President, if you want to have a philosophical debate, I'm afraid I'm not the right person to talk to."

"When I was a teacher, my subject was history," she told him. "So let's have a short history lesson. When the first Cylons were created, their level of artificial intelligence was so rudimentary that there was no risk of anyone mistaking them for truly sentient beings. However, by the time tenth or eleventh generation models were being made, the distinction wasn't so clear. A council of high priests and priestesses was hastily assembled at Corinth, and they ruled that no entity could possess a soul which could not comprehend what a soul was, and that Cylons, by their very nature, were incapable of such comprehension."

"The Corinthian Decree," Lee said. "I studied it in college."

"The Corinthian Decree was one of the most biased, poorly conceived, damaging pieces of human thought ever committed to paper. Yet it remains the only serious consideration of what the Cylons -- these things we made -- are. So: do you know what a soul is? And do you believe you have one?"

Lee took a breath. "I don't think anyone knows what a soul is. But if you're asking me, do I feel, at the core, distinct, real, unique, human -- I do. I did yesterday, and I still do today."

Roslin looked at him for a moment longer, then nodded. "I believe you."

Hope leapt within him. "You do?"

"Yes," she said. "I accept that you believe you are actually a person, even though you're not. And I needed to know that. You see, discovering what you really are shook my confidence in my own judgment. If I couldn't even choose the right people to trust, how could I make decisions that might decide the survival of every single one of us?" Roslin stood up, lifted her chair and set it back at the side of the room. She didn't look at Lee as she spoke, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that she didn't need to. She wasn't talking to him anymore; she was voicing her own thoughts out loud, and what he thought simply didn't matter. "But if even you didn't know what you are, then my trust in you, while still misplaced, would at least be an honest mistake, and not a symptom of my lack of insight. And for that, if nothing else, I'm grateful to you."

She started to walk to the door, taking the last scraps of hope Lee still held on to with her. "Madam President," he said desperately, "President Roslin, please listen --"

Roslin stopped. "It's in the nature of humans to extend trust, especially to those who appear to deserve it. You, or your makers, used our nature against us. They gave you the face and the memories of someone they knew we would quickly accept. We took you in. And you certainly took us in." She looked at him, and Lee saw a real and deep loathing for him in her gaze. "I spoke today at the funeral of a man I didn't know, but who I will grieve for as if I did. And I blame you for being here when he is not."

Then she was gone. The two guards followed her, and Lee was alone.

He was absolutely alone.

********************* CHAPTER FOUR *********************

Sharon gave the Raptor's service hatch one more shove and, with a rasp of protest, the metal plate swung down, revealing the inner workings of the engine. She wriggled further underneath the ship and shone her flashlight up into the dark space above her. The thin beam of light cut through the shadows, illuminating a densely packed array of wires and machinery which, to the casual observer, would have resembled nothing so much as a haphazard mess of technology. Holding the flashlight between her teeth, Sharon began methodically to sort through the tangle.

"Hey, Boomer?" She lifted her head a couple of inches, and saw Crashdown's legs and boots in the gap between the underside of the Raptor and the hangar deck. "How are you getting on under there?"

"Nyuhhuh," she said, with the flashlight still between her teeth.

His head appeared, upside down. "Was that a good nyuh or a bad nyuh?"

She extracted one hand from the engine compartment and used it to hold the flashlight so she could speak. "It was an okay nyuh. I haven't found anything, if that's what you're asking."

"Me either. I've stripped back the nav comp and life support, and there's nothing in either one that shouldn't be. What do you want me to look at next?"

"Have you checked the auxiliaries yet?"

"I gave them the once over."

"That's not good enough. Take them apart and put 'em back together again."

Crashdown sighed. "Oh, fun."

"If you start right now, we might just get out of here before midnight."

The security review Commander Adama had ordered in the wake of Apollo's unmasking as a Cylon was comprehensive, to say the least. Gaeta had been given the task of grading every single piece of information the imposter had had access to for its potential value to the Cylons -- the last Sharon had heard, he'd been keeping himself awake with stims and near-lethal quantities of coffee. Things weren't much better down on the flight deck, where every item of equipment Apollo had flown or used or even glanced at on his way to somewhere else had to be stripped down and checked thoroughly for the presence of Cylon devices or any other evidence of tampering. The job was so immense that after five days it still wasn't finished, and Sharon couldn't decide whether the total failure to find anything was reassuring or only served to emphasize the sheer drudgery of the task.

"You know what really weirds me out?" Crashdown said. He must have climbed back into the cockpit, because his voice was muffled, but she could still just about hear him. "What if the Cylon didn't know what it was? I mean, what if it really believed it actually was Apollo?"

In the past days, Sharon had overheard any number of conversations like this among the pilots. Although she still tried to keep out of them, they no longer filled her with the feelings of dread and foreboding they had before. She could speculate about the Cylons too, now she was safe in the knowledge she couldn't be one of them. Because if Lee Adama -- the Fleet's CAG -- had been an agent, he would have been able to provide the Cylons with all the intelligence they needed about the Fleet. They wouldn't have needed anyone else.

"So what if it did believe it?" Sharon said, taking the flashlight out of her mouth. "It's just a machine; it believes what the person who programmed it tells it to believe. I could reprogram the nav comp to believe it's in orbit around Caprica. That's not weird, it's just how the nav comp works."

"It's different when it's a person."

"It's not a person, that's the whole point."

"Is this a private debate, or can anyone join in?" Starbuck's voice said.

Boomer twisted her head around, and saw a different pair of booted feet standing next to the Raptor.

"Sorry, Captain," Crashdown said. "We were just --"

"-- You were just checking this Raptor," Starbuck completed. "And when you've finished this one, there's another two still to do. Doesn't seem to me like you should have time on your hands."

"No, sir. Sorry, sir."

"And where are Hot Dog and Kubla? I thought I told them to help you."

Boomer pulled herself out from under the Raptor and got to her feet. Wiping her hands clean on a rag, she said, "They were ordered up top to help with the CIC sweep, sir."

"Who ordered them?"

"Colonel Tigh."

"Well, you get them back down here right now. Tigh has no frakking right to steal my pilots." Starbuck stalked away.

Once she was out of earshot, Crashdown said, "She's taking it hard, isn't she?"

Boomer got down again and started to wriggle back underneath the Raptor. "I guess she believed it really was Apollo, too."

***

Baltar was standing on the terrace of his lakeside villa on Caprica, watching the sun set over the water. The sky was lit up in shades of red and gold, and Caprica's single moon was just visible, a ghostly silver crescent rising above the mountains. The view was spectacular, and he wondered why he'd never really noticed it before.

He remembered the agent who'd sold him the villa talking at length about the views, but Baltar hadn't been paying much attention. Scenery hadn't interested him; he'd bought the house because it was huge, architecturally distinctive and happened to be built on one of the most exclusive patches of real estate anywhere in the Colonies. It was the house of a man of influence, a man of power. That was why he'd wanted to own it.

The only views the real villa still boasted, if it was even standing, must be of a radioactive, decaying sump. And if the skies above it were still red, it was for a very different reason.

"This isn't real," he said.

Behind him, Six sighed irritably. The last few days with her had been torturous for Baltar, as her tactics had gone full circle from wheedling to sulking to spouting diatribes before ending up back at cajoling again. He didn't know where she was in the cycle right now, and he was way past caring.

"Reality," Six said, "is a series of tiny impulses jumping between neurons. It's only what you perceive it to be. This is real, by any criteria you want to apply."

"No," he said. "In reality, I am lying, anaesthetized, on an operating table on the Celestra, where a surgeon is right now cutting you out of my brain. And good riddance."

"Be careful what you wish for, Gaius."

He laughed without humor. "Yes. Well. I think that lesson has been hammered home most effectively at this point."

"Then you won't be making the same mistakes again," Six said. She smiled at him, coy and knowing, as if she had all his failings, past and future, mapped out in front of her. "Don't forget: 'All this has happened before; all this will happen again.'"

"Don't quote scripture at me. Especially when it's not even your scripture."

"I loved you. I saved you. And I have always told you the truth, about everything. We can't lie to each other." She wandered across the terrace toward him, putting her head to one side in an oddly affected manner as she regarded him. She was just playing another role, he realized; he wished he'd seen her for what she was much sooner.

"You masquerade as a human being," he told her. "Everything you are is a lie."

Six said, "I wanted to be with you. I could have guided you on the path, and now you're going to have to make the journey alone. I only hope you're strong enough."

"I am."

She smiled at him, her expression fond. "Oh, Gaius. Your self-belief is what I love most about you." She was standing close to him, now, and she put out her hand and placed it flat in the centre of his chest, fingers spread wide. "The answer is within you. That's all I can tell you for now. The next time we meet, everything will be different."

Baltar smiled thinly back at her. "The next time we meet, it'll be a cold day in hell."

"You'll miss me more than you think."

She kissed him, one last time, and he felt the familiar buzz of arousal and intoxication. He wanted her, and he'd probably never stop wanting her. But he didn't need her. He realized now he didn't need anything except himself.

Her lips grew filmy and insubstantial on his, as if he were kissing the mist as it evaporated. When he opened his eyes, she was gone, and a moment later, the lake house and the whole world around it began to fade and dissolve.

Baltar slept, and for the first time in weeks, he didn't dream.

***

"The Captain of the Astral Queen has confirmed he has space for the Cylon," President Roslin said. "But he wants military personnel to be responsible for guarding it. Otherwise, he says, he's not comfortable having it on board."

"That can be arranged," Adama said. He turned to his left. "Colonel Tigh, see to it."

"Yes, sir."

From where she was sitting, on the Commander's right hand side, Kara had a clear view through the windows of President Roslin's stateroom. As she looked out, a trio of Vipers streaked past, arcing along the boundaries of the Fleet, fast, graceful and silent. Starbuck would have happily sawn off one of her legs to be out there with them.

Instead, she was in a meeting. She'd only been CAG for three days, but already she was getting a good idea of what the job involved. Meetings. Lots and lots of meetings.

President Roslin went on, "He'd also like to know how long we're planning on holding it on his ship." She removed her glasses and sat back in her chair. "The shorter a period of time this drags on for, the better. But, unfortunately, all our efforts have so far failed to uncover any evidence we could build a prosecution for treason on. That's correct, isn't it?"

"The security review isn't finished yet," the Commander said.

"I understood it was going to take three days. It's been five."

"Most of the key areas are complete," Tigh said. "The only ones not yet finished are the hangars and flight deck." He looked at Kara.

Angrily, she said, "If you didn't keep poaching my people, we'd be done."

The Commander looked like he was about to say something, but Roslin beat him to it. "I am not interested in your resource issues. I'm interested in how much longer it's going to take."

"The review will be completed by tomorrow," Adama said.

"But the probability of finding anything incriminating is looking more remote than it was, isn't it, Commander?"

He hesitated. "Yes. It is."

"And the Cylon is still claiming it's the real Captain Adama."

"Yes."

Roslin steepled her hands in front of her and gazed into the space between them, as if trying to capture a stray thought. "There's something I don't understand, and it bothers me."

"Madam President?" Tigh asked.

She looked up. "It still thinks it's human. Why haven't the Cylons switched it on, or whatever it is they do to activate their sleeper agents?"

"Maybe they have activated it," Adama said. "Maybe it's just playing with us."

Tigh added, "It could be a deliberate ploy. A kind of psychological warfare."

Kara cleared her throat. Tigh looked at her and said, "Something you'd like to add, Captain?" with just a shade too much emphasis on the last word.

"Well, no, it's just --" She looked around the table. "That doesn't scan to me. The Cylons nuked twelve planets, and now they've decided to get subtle on our asses? I don't think so. As a strategy, blowing things up has been working real well for them so far."

Tigh looked annoyed, but the President was nodding. "I have to agree. So -- what if they haven't activated it because they can't?"

Kara frowned. "Like, it's not wired up right? No signal getting through?"

"I don't know; I'm guessing. But if that were the case, we might be extraordinarily lucky. It could be that the information the imposter gathered about us during the time it spent masquerading as Captain Adama hasn't been transmitted back anywhere."

"Then we can't risk killing it," Kara said. When Adama, Tigh and the President all looked at her, she said, "The Cylons claim that when their bodies are destroyed, their consciousnesses aren't. They get uploaded back to the mother ship or gods know where. If we destroy it, we might just be handing all the intel they need straight to them."

"Conjecture," Adama said shortly. "It's a greater threat to us alive."

He spoke dismissively, as if the only possible course of action was to execute the Cylon. Maybe it was, but there was still something about the ease with which he seemed to accept it that made Kara uneasy. The memory of watching as Leoben was sucked out into the vacuum of space was still fresh in her mind, and thinking of it made her as uncomfortable now as she'd been when she'd seen it happen. The death -- no, the termination -- of a Cylon shouldn't have bothered her at all, but Leoben's had. When she tried to paste Lee's face over the one on the other side of the airlock glass, her mind simply refused to do it. Maybe she'd seen him die once too often recently.

But the Commander seemed ready to execute the Cylon without a moment's hesitation. Kara knew she should admire him more for his objectivity, yet somehow she didn't. Instead, she wondered what had happened to the man who'd looked so broken when she'd given him Lee's wings.

Kara didn't say anything, but she didn't have to. Roslin appeared to share some of her misgivings.

"None of us really know how their minds work," the President said thoughtfully. "We're going to have to start making sensible guesses at some point. Well, that's for another day. Thank you for your time." She stood up, and the meeting was over.

The Commander didn't say anything until they were back in the Raptor, with Kara in the pilot's seat for the short return trip to the Galactica. Then he let both her and Tigh have it with both barrels.

"I thought I was in command of a Battlestar, but apparently I'm running a kindergarten, complete with children arguing over toys." He scowled at each of them in turn. "I expect my CAG and my XO to work together effectively. I do not expect you to start slinging mud at each other in public, and I definitely don't expect you to do it front of the President. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir," Tigh said.

"Yes, sir," Kara echoed, keeping her eyes on the Raptor's instrument panel.

The remainder of the ten minute journey back was spent in stony silence, but she still wished it could have been longer. It was the only flying she'd get to do all day.

***

At the bottom of the brig's metal-barred door, near floor level, there was a letterbox-shaped flap just wide enough to slide a tray of food through. The bundle that the marine -- whose name, Lee had learned, was Corio -- was pushing through it now was bulkier, and in the end he had to kick it into the cell with his boot. "Put this on."

Lee picked up the roll and shook it out. It was a flight suit, but not the same kind issued to pilots. This was the more basic gear issued to civilians to meet Colonial safety regs on transportation in small space-faring vessels.

His heart sank when he saw it. They were taking him off the Galactica, and away from any more chances to talk to anyone he might be able to convince of his innocence. True, it wasn't as if he'd been swamped with visitors while in the brig -- in a week's captivity, the only person he'd spoken to had been President Roslin, and the requests he'd made to talk to his father had gone unanswered -- but, once he was tucked away in a cell on the lowest deck of one of the civilian ships, he'd be even further out of sight and much easier to put out of mind.

The only positive thought he could come up with was that if they were making him adhere to safety regulations, they hadn't yet decided to throw him into space.

As he was changing into the flight suit, though, he managed to add a second positive thought to the first. The flight suit was a dark shade of gray, and he was glad to swap his day-glo orange prisoner's coveralls for it. Just putting it on made him feel more like himself again.

"Stand back from the door and hold your hands out in front of you, wrists together."

He obeyed, standing still as Corio put handcuffs on him and then clipped a second set of restraints around his ankles. There was no point asking where they were taking him, since he was unlikely to get an answer, but the Astral Queen seemed like a good bet. He guessed Tom Zarek would find that pretty funny, when he heard about it.

This time, there were no spectators for the journey from the brig to the hangar bay. For the first couple of hallways it might have been coincidence, but as he shuffled along deserted corridor after deserted corridor, Lee realized the decks had been deliberately cleared. He had the eerie impression that the ship was totally empty, except for himself and his guard.

The hangar bay, when they arrived, was also unnaturally deserted. It was the middle of the day, and there should have been any number of people coming and going -- deck crew performing maintenance, pilots suiting up for a patrol or checking their Vipers just after returning from one. But instead of the usual buzz of activity, there was a single Raptor prepped for launch. Sharon Valerii was next to it. Lee tried to catch her gaze as they got closer, but she was standing to attention, her eyes fixed straight ahead, deliberately refusing to look at him.

"I want to check its restraints," she said. It took Lee a second to realize she was talking about him.

"No need," Corio said. "They're on tight."

Sharply, she said, "I don't care. If it's coming on my Raptor, it's my responsibility." She eyed the marine. "You're going to need a flight helmet -- there're spares over there. And bring one back for the prisoner."

Corio wore a vaguely annoyed expression as he went to fetch helmets from the racks at the side of the hangar, although it was hard to know whether that was the result of having the quality of his work questioned or being ordered about by a woman who barely reached his shoulder.

While he was gone, Sharon set about checking Lee's restraints. As she tugged at his handcuffs, Lee cast a glance in the marine's direction, and judged Corio was just out of earshot, if he kept his voice low. "Sharon," he said. "Listen to me. Whatever you've heard, it's not true. You have to believe me."

Boomer didn't look up. She finished with the first wrist and moved on to the second, her movements so regular they seemed almost mechanical.

Lee tried again. "Sharon, please, just hear me out. You've flown with me. You know me. Do you really believe I could be one of them? I'm as human as you are --"

Boomer finished and straightened up, and he found himself looking right into her eyes.

She was a Cylon.

The revelation -- and it was a revelation, a chunk of certainty that materialized in his brain with the lightning flash of a ship dropping back into realspace after a jump -- hit him with such force that for several seconds he could do nothing except stare at her, willing it not to be true.

On the face of it, there was no evidence to support his sudden conviction. The expression Boomer wore was one of hurt and betrayal and loathing, all of it completely human and directed at him. But if he looked at her in a fractionally different way, all her humanity evaporated instantly, exposing the Cylon essence beneath the surface. It was like looking at an optical illusion, a trick drawing that showed two distinct but superimposed images. Lee had no idea how he was doing it, only that he was.

"I flew with you," Boomer said, apparently oblivious to his sudden, stunned silence. In a low and angry voice she said, "I trusted you, and I followed your orders, and you were lying the whole time. I even doubted myself before I doubted you. You can't even know what that's like, losing faith in who you are. Just knowing things like you existed did that to me, but I'm not going to let it anymore. Because you couldn't keep fooling us. We found you out."

The look in her face never wavered. She was certain of what she was saying. Certain of herself.

Lee stared at her, horrified, as he realized she didn't know what she was. She had no idea.

Corio returned, holding two flight helmets. "Got 'em. We're ready to go."

"Wait," Lee said. He looked at Sharon. "She's a Cylon."

"Yeah, right," the marine said. "And so am I and so is the President and so's that chick in stores I've been trying to make it with for the last month. Everyone's a Cylon. Now get in the ship."

"She's a Cylon," Lee repeated. "Come on -- I would know, wouldn't I? Even if I'm lying, you have to at least test her. And I'm not lying. She's a Cylon and she doesn't even know it herself --"

He didn't get any further. Sharon launched herself at him, her fists raining down blows as soon as she made contact. With the shackles on his ankles, he couldn't keep his balance, and they both went down, hitting the deck and rolling together for several yards. Lee had a clear advantage on Sharon in weight and height, but with his hands bound together he couldn't defend himself properly, never mind hit back.

Boomer didn't stop until Corio hauled her off him, leaving Lee lying, winded and bruised, on his back on the deck.

"Break it up!" the marine yelled. He had one restraining arm looped around Sharon, who still looked as if she could easily start into Lee again. "Frak, what you trying to do, kill him?"

Sharon glared. "I don't have to listen to that. And I'm not going to. I don't want to hear another word from this thing."

Lee turned on to his side and, from that position, sat up. "She's --" he started.

Corio came over and kicked him. Lee yelled and instinctively curled in on himself, unable to think about anything except the solid ball of pain in his stomach.

"You heard her. Not one word," the marine said, hauling Lee to his feet and manhandling him up the access ramp and into the Raptor. Once inside, he pushed Lee into the single fold-away passenger's chair, then put one of the helmets on him, clipping the seal shut around the flight suit's collar. Corio sat at the unmanned ECO station and started to put on his own helmet, while Sharon, already wearing hers, took her position in the pilot's seat upfront and buckled the webbing into place. The door swung shut.

The Raptor had taken off and was leaving the Galactica behind by the time the pain in Lee's gut had diminished to a point where he could think about something other than not throwing up. Through the Raptor's cockpit windows he could see the Battlestar receding, its massive bulk slowly shrinking until the whole ship, prow to stern, fit into view. He felt a sudden stab of loss; he'd probably never be back on it again.

Then Sharon touched the Raptor's controls and the Galactica slid out of view completely as they turned toward the rest of the Fleet.

"Astral Queen, this is Raptor 3, inbound from Galactica with prisoner for transfer." Lee couldn't see Sharon's face as she spoke, but her words were clear, if tinny, over the commlink in his helmet. "Our ETA is eight minutes. Please prepare for docking."

"Acknowledged, Raptor 3."

So he had eight minutes to think up a plan and do something. Unfortunately, Lee was fresh out of ideas. Every scenario he could think of had to begin with somehow incapacitating both Corio and Sharon and taking control of the Raptor -- which in turn depended on not being in restraints. And even if he could somehow manage that, where was he going to go? The Raptor would have enough air and fuel for a few days at most, and the odds of finding a habitable planet in that time were low to nonexistent. Assuming, of course, that he accepted that his next best option after being locked up as a traitor was to live alone, in exile, for the rest of his life.

"Hey," Corio said suddenly. "Boomer, what are you doing?"

Lee looked up sharply, and saw that the Galactica had reappeared in view. At the same time, he felt the Raptor tilt under him, and realized what was happening. Boomer was turning the ship around.

"Boomer, you're going in the wrong direction," Corio said. Looking more puzzled than concerned, he got up from the ECO's seat and started to make his way up front. "What do they teach you people in pilot school, anyway? Boomer, what the frak are you --"

Boomer half-turned in her seat, and Lee saw, a moment too late, the gun in her hand. She shot Corio at point-blank range in the stomach; his scream as he fell was so loud that the commlink treated it as white noise interference and blocked it completely. Lee watched him thrash around in eerie silence on the floor of the Raptor as blood pooled under him; then he was still. The whole thing was over in seconds.

"Raptor 3." Dualla's voice, hailing them from the CIC, came over the commlink. "Raptor 3, this is Galactica. You have deviated from your flight plan. Please acknowledge and explain."

Lee raised his bound hands and, made clumsy by the restraints, fumbled with the comm controls on the side of the helmet until he'd switched on the external link. "Galactica, Lieutenant Valerii is a Cylon agent. She is a Cylon agent and she has killed Major Corio --"

Then he broke off, because he'd just seen what Sharon was about to do. Her hand was reaching for the emergency airlock release.

The ECO seat had webbing, but he didn't have enough time to strap himself into it -- assuming he even could, with his hands and feet tied. Lee looked around frantically, searching for something to hold on to.

"Raptor 3, if you remain on your current trajectory, you will collide with Galactica. Alter your course at once. Repeat, alter your course at once. Boomer, acknowledge."

There was a titanium conduit jutting out above Lee's head. It looked solid. With no time to do much more than hope, he grabbed it and held on as tightly as he could.

Sharon pulled the airlock release lever.

The airlock door exploded off its seal. At once, Lee felt his whole body being gripped by the powerful rush of escaping atmosphere. The decompression lifted him off his feet, until he was hanging parallel to the compartment floor, his hands locked on to the conduit and his boots barely inches away from the vacuum of space outside.

Corio's body slid across the floor and then, in a ghastly parody of life, flipped upright. Lee had a fleeting glimpse of the dead man's face under the visor of his helmet, its eyes open and staring, as the corpse tumbled toward him. As soon as he realized it was going to hit him on its way out of the Raptor, he braced himself for the impact, and forced the protesting muscles in his arms and chest to work harder to hold on to the titanium conduit.

"Raptor 3, this is Adama. What the hell is happening out there? Dammit, Boomer, acknowledge!"

Corio's body clipped Lee's shoulder as it hurtled past him. The impact jerked him, and the conduit gave a screech as the bolts securing it to the wall came loose. Wires spewed from it, sparking; Lee felt his grip loosen and, as hard as he tried, he couldn't regain it. His gloved fingers started to slip off the smooth metal surface.

He let go of the beam, and felt himself being dragged after Corio, out of the airlock and into space.

Then he jolted to a halt.

When he'd grabbed hold of the beam, he'd hooked his arms over it. His hands had slipped off it, but the handcuffs were anchoring him in place. Even through the flight suit and gloves, the metal of the bracelets was cutting into his flesh so deeply it felt like his wrists were on fire, and he was about thirty seconds away from dislocating a shoulder. But he was still inside the Raptor.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, the rush of air slowed, then stopped. The force of suction which had been dragging him backward faded, and with it the strain on his wrists and arms. He fell back on to the floor with a thump, and when he sat up he was looking straight out of the gaping airlock at the stars.

And he could also see the Galactica, looming right ahead.

His hands and feet were cold already. The flight suit would protect him for a short time, but it wasn't meant for extended exposure to a vacuum. Whatever he was going to do, he'd better do it fast.

Up front, Sharon was still sitting in the pilot's seat, held safely in place by its webbing. She looked as calm and relaxed as if she were making the most routine of flights, except that she happened to be accelerating the Raptor toward the side of the Galactica.

"Sharon," Lee said over the commlink as he struggled to get up. His stomach hurt, and his arms, and the restraints on his wrists and ankles made it impossible to move with any speed. "Sharon, think about what you're doing."

She turned around and looked at him, and even through the visor of her helmet, he could see that the expression on her face had changed completely -- it had smoothed out, somehow. Before, he'd been able to see both the human and the Cylon Sharons; now, no matter how deeply he searched, he couldn't see any shred of humanity in her eyes.

"I have been thinking about it," she said. "I'm thinking much more clearly, now."

The side of the Galactica filled the entirety of the cockpit windows. They couldn't be more than a couple of minutes away from impact. As Lee watched, he saw four Vipers streak out of the launch tubes on the near side of the Battlestar. He was vaguely aware of Dualla's voice on the other end of the commlink relaying the order to intercept and destroy, but since there was nothing he could do about that, he didn't allow himself to focus on it for long. Instead he concentrated on Sharon.

"Once you know that death is not the end, everything becomes just a matter of faith," she said. "This body may die, but my soul will survive. So will yours. You don't understand that, yet, but you will."

Out of the corner of his eye, Lee could see a section of the titanium conduit, lying at his feet. He didn't allow himself to look at it; instead, he held Sharon's gaze, all the while trying to judge how fast he could move with his ankles shackled together.

"Then explain it to me," he said. Keep her talking. Distract her.

Sharon pivoted round in the pilot's seat so that she was facing him. "I wish I could, but we're on different paths, you and me. God's plan for you --" She smiled at him, and her eyes shone. "It's marvelous, Twelve. You're going to show us the way. You're going to be the oracle."

With a shout, Lee dived for the section of titanium conduit. He grabbed it, nearly lost his balance, then somehow managed to stay upright while he covered the last few feet between himself and Sharon. As he moved, he held the conduit section in both hands and lifted it up, as high as he could make his bound arms go. Then he brought it down, hard.

The metal pipe connected with the visor of Sharon's helmet with a crack that reverberated all the way up his arms. He let the conduit section drop out of his hands.

Sharon looked at him. She was still smiling. Then, as he watched, a faint web of cracks appeared in the visor. They spread, and deepened, until the visor was thick with white lines and almost opaque.

The visor gave way, exploding outward in a shower of crystalline fragments. For an instant, Sharon's face was unchanged. She was still smiling at him. Then her mouth opened, as if she was about to speak, but instead there was only a rush of air as the vacuum sucked the air from her lungs. Her eyes bulged, the whites turning red as blood vessels burst, and her skin became suddenly mottled as it froze instantly.

He saw her lips move as she tried, uselessly, to breathe. Then she died.

There wasn't enough time to release the webbing and take the pilot's chair himself, so Lee just pushed past her body and started working with the Raptor's controls. Inside the gloves, his hands were so cold they were getting numb, and the handcuffs meant he could only do one thing at a time.

The Galactica's hull was now so close he could see the seams where it was riveted together.

He slammed his hands down on the reverse thrusters, and nearly fell over when the Raptor came to a dead stop. Then he killed everything on the board -- engines, weapons, auxiliaries, every frakking thing he could reach, even the lights.

He made himself focus only on the task at hand, ignoring the stream of orders and questions flying over the open comm channel. Then he heard something that caught his attention, one hundred percent. "Galactica, I have a lock on Raptor 3. Please advise."

"Fire at will, Hot Dog."

"No!" Lee shouted, hoping like hell someone was listening. "Do not fire! I am dead in the water! Repeat, Raptor 3 is dead in the water!"

A pause. Then: "Confirm that, Galactica. Raptor 3 is adrift."

There was a silence, during which Lee half expected to see a Viper's missiles streaking toward the cockpit window.

Finally, Dualla's voice said, "Hold fire. Repeat, hold your fire."

Lee exhaled, and saw his breath form mist inside his helmet. His hands were shaking, and he wasn't sure it was just from the cold. The silence on the commlink seemed to stretch for an eternity, although it couldn't have been more than half a minute.

At last, the commlink crackled again. "Raptor 3, you have permission to power up auxiliary engines only. You will be escorted to Hangar Bay 2. If you deviate from the prescribed approach at all, you will be destroyed. Do you understand?"

"I understand," he said. He was thinking about Sharon; about how he had known what she was when he couldn't have. He was thinking about how she had called him Twelve. He closed his eyes, but it didn't stop him from seeing Sharon's face, smiling at him.

He understood.

********************* CHAPTER FIVE *********************

He was back in the brig on the Galactica, back in the orange coveralls, back where he'd started. Everything was the same, and everything -- everything -- had changed.

Sharon had known what he was, just as he'd known what she was. She'd called him 'Twelve', and with that single word she'd ripped from him his identity and the life he'd thought he owned. He wasn't Lee Adama; he never had been. He couldn't even lay claim to the name. He was just another copy of the twelfth human Cylon model, programmed with a dead man's thoughts and memories.

He didn't look up when he heard the brig's outer door open; it was probably only the guards changing shifts, and he'd long since stopped noticing that.

"You said you wanted to talk. So talk."

It wasn't the guards. It was Kara. She was standing outside the cell, and he was surprised to see that she was the same and yet somehow different, too. The way she was looking at him now, for instance: he'd seen her angry, and this wasn't the same thing. She was looking at him with contempt. She'd never looked at him like that. No -- she'd never looked at Lee like that. But he wasn't Lee.

Her expression wasn't the only thing that was different about her, and it was only when he noticed a familiar patch on her jacket that he realized what the other change was.

She was wearing the CAG's patch. When he saw it, he felt a sick twist in his stomach as he realized that his old life really was gone, forever. The gap where he'd been had closed over; the wound was already healing. In time, the only remaining sign of his existence would be faint scar tissue.

He stood up, facing her with the bars between them. "I asked to speak to the Commander."

"Tough," Kara said. "He doesn't want to speak to you. Neither do I, as it happens, so if you're going to complain about the food or the lack of ambient lighting, get on with it so I can leave."

"I'm a Cylon."

"Not news."

"I didn't believe it before. I thought it had to be a mistake, or a trick. And then -- I knew what Boomer was. There was no way I could have known, but I did. I looked in her eyes and there was nothing of Sharon Valerii left in her. She was just a fake. And so am I."

It was hard to say it -- he had to make an actual physical effort to force the words out, and it was harder still to keep looking at Kara as he spoke. But somehow he couldn't look away; he kept searching her face for something -- some remnant of empathy or, failing that, just understanding of what the admission was costing him.

There was nothing.

"That's right," she said. "You're a fake. You're a fake of a man I was proud to call my friend, and every breath you take offends me. You should quit feeling sorry for yourself and just be grateful I'm on this side of the bars. And not armed."

"I know things," he pressed on. "Maybe not consciously, but I have to -- how else could I have known about Sharon?

"Your point being?"

"I want to help you," he said. "That's what I wanted to tell my -- to tell Commander Adama. Somewhere in my head there's information you could use. I want you to know I'll cooperate in any way I can to help you get at it."

Kara folded her arms across her chest, her body language closed-off and hostile. "That's very public-spirited of you. I'm touched."

"I may be Cylon, but I still feel like me. Like him. I don't know." He stopped, aware he wasn't saying what he meant. He didn't even have the language to talk about himself anymore. There was nothing that was truly his. "The point is, I'm on our side."

"I'd feel a lot more comfortable about that if I could be sure how you're defining 'our'."

"Fine," he said angrily. "Don't believe me. I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you to take Adama a message. Is that so frakking difficult to understand?"

"You're a fraud and a traitor. You didn't even know what you were until someone else told you, and you have no rights at all here. We don't have to listen to you." Kara stepped closer, right up to the bars of his cell. "Is THAT so frakking difficult to understand?"

This was how it was going to be from now on, he realized. He was the enemy, and he would be doubted and suspected at every turn. Worse than that, she was right. If he couldn't trust himself, how could he expect anyone else to trust him?

Kara left without saying anything else. Long after she'd gone, he was still standing exactly where she'd left him, staring out through the bars of the cell at the place where she'd been.

***

The chip was less than a quarter of the size of Baltar's fingernail; he could just about make out the lines etched on its surface if he held it close to his face and squinted. It was amazing, he thought, how something so small could cause so much trouble.

Well, not for much longer.

There was a fire-point in the corner of his lab; it was equipped in the same way as the many others all over the ship, with an alarm, a fire blanket and an extinguisher. He unrolled the fire blanket, laid it down in the middle of the floor, and placed the chip in the middle of it. Then he hefted the fire extinguisher and poised it directly above the chip.

"Goodbye, darling," he said. "It was fun while it lasted."

The phone rang.

For a second, Baltar considered ignoring it. Then he decided, no: destroying the chip was too sweet a moment to allow anything to distract him from it. Regretfully, he put down the extinguisher and answered the call. "Yes, what is it?"

"Doctor Baltar," the President's voice said. "Is this a bad time?"

"Ah, no, Madam President, not at all. I apologize if I sounded sharp just now. I was, ah, concentrating on something."

"I'm sorry for disturbing you. Commander Adama and I are in the conference room on deck three. Could you join us here, please?"

"Of course, Madam President."

He put the phone down and retrieved the chip from where it rested in the center of the fire blanket. A quick search of the lab's equipment drawers turned up a screw-topped phial which was small enough to carry with him unnoticed. He dropped the chip into it and sealed it tightly shut. Then he gave the phial an experimental shake, and watched the chip bounce around inside its glass prison. Like a genie in a bottle, he thought, and smiled. "I'm afraid we're going to have to postpone the pleasure, my dear," he told the phial, and dropped it into his pocket.

As he entered the conference room, President Roslin greeted him warmly. "Thank you for coming so quickly, Doctor. We need your Cylon expertise."

Baltar smiled modestly. "I'd hardly call it expertise. Unfortunately, I don't know much more than anyone else."

"We may have a chance to change that," Roslin said.

"Madam President?"

It was Adama who answered. "The Cylon says it wants to cooperate with us."

"In what way?"

Roslin said, "As far as we know, the Cylons have some kind of link to each other, or to a group consciousness. The behavior of the human-Cylon agents, and the knowledge they have of us, seems to bear that out."

"Yes," Baltar agreed. "There's no proof yet, obviously, but it's a good working hypothesis."

"We want to access that link," Adama said, "and use it to gather intel about them the same way they've been gathering intel about us."

Baltar nodded, understanding. "And you want to use the captured Cylon agent to do it." He sat back in his chair. "To do that, we'd first have to understand exactly how the Cylons send and receive information between themselves. Then we'd have to identify the weaknesses in the network and exploit them." He stopped, distracted -- not, this time, by a vision of Six, but by the sheer scope and challenge of the idea. "Research into artificial intelligence networks has been illegal for fifty years -- our starting point is so far behind what the Cylons have evolved into that it's irrelevant. You're talking about creating a new branch of science from scratch."

"If anyone can do it, Doctor, you can," Roslin said.

"We can give you one live Cylon to experiment on," Adama said, "and one dead Cylon you can cut up to figure out how they work. Whatever else you need, if we can find it or make it, you'll have it."

There was no one else, Baltar knew, who could even begin to do what they were asking. The idea enthralled him. At last, he'd have the chance to develop the ideas that had always fascinated him but which he'd never been allowed to explore. Baltar had often thought he should have been born a hundred years earlier, when artificial intelligence networks were the cornerstone of Colonial technology. Now he realized that he was alive at exactly the right time. History had chosen him.

It would be the greatest challenge of his career, and if he succeeded, he would be a hero. A legend.

If he succeeded? No. When he succeeded. Because his genius wasn't the only thing Baltar knew he had that no one else did. He had a tiny chunk of Cylon technology in his pocket that already did something very similar to what the President and Commander Adama were describing.

"I can do it," he said with certainty.

"I never doubted it," Roslin said.

Back in the lab, Baltar sat down at the workbench and took the phial out of his pocket. He held it up to the light. The Cylon chip lay inert inside the glass tube.

"Well," he said to it, "It seems I have a use for you, after all."

***

Kara stared at the cards in her hand without really seeing them. It'd been a long time since she'd played triad so badly, or cared so little about winning. The only reason she wasn't losing by more than she was already was that none of the other players were much invested in the game, either.

On the other side of the table, Crashdown glared at his hand with the same look of sullen anger that had barely left his face since they'd found out about Sharon. Next to him, Gaeta contemplated his cards with eyes which were red-rimmed with exhaustion. He'd only just completed the security review for Apollo when he'd been told he had to do it all over again, this time for Boomer. The last player, Hot Dog, hardly looked better than Gaeta. He'd been a Viper pilot for less than a month, and hadn't yet gotten used to the punishing schedule. Starbuck felt sorry for him, but there wasn't much she could do about it. She was the CAG; making sure there were enough Vipers in the air to protect the Fleet was her responsibility.

"Fold," she said, and threw her cards down in front of her, face up. It wasn't a terrible hand; she just couldn't make herself care enough to work out the trades she'd need to make to improve it.

"Me, too," Hot Dog said.

Crashdown shrugged, and tossed his cards on to the table.

Gaeta set down his cards, fanning them evenly out so they were all visible. "Five crescents, three tridents and a spare," he said.

Losing to Gaeta at triad was embarrassing; losing to Gaeta on a hand as low scoring as that was just pathetic. Maybe, Starbuck thought, she'd be able to turn it into a funny story someday. It was the kind of thing she could have laughed about with Lee --

No. Not going there.

"Pot's yours," she said to Gaeta, pushing the coins in the middle of the table in his direction. It wasn't as if any of them really won or lost anything, now that Colonial money was more or less worthless. The coins were just so many shiny octagonal tokens. "Buy yourself something special."

"Oh, good. I thought I'd missed the game." Kara looked up and saw Baltar standing in the door of the barracks room, grinning happily and looking like a man without a care in all the worlds. He held up a full bottle of ambrosia. "See, I bring a small offering to Hermes." He started looking around for a chair to drag over to the table.

"Here, Doc," Hot Dog said, getting up. "Swap with me. I need some time in the rack before I fall over." He was gone before Starbuck had time to remind him his next patrol was at 0600.

Baltar claimed Hot Dog's seat, hanging his jacket on its back as he sat down. Then, while Gaeta dealt the next round, he uncorked the ambrosia and refilled their glasses. Kara took a gulp -- frak, it was good stuff -- and shuffled the deck. She flicked the cards across the table, nine to each player. "You won the last round, Gaeta, so you get to call it."

"Tridents."

"The Senior Officer of the Watch calls tridents high. Dealer's right starts. Crash, trade or play."

Crashdown dropped a five of shields on to the table. "Trade."

Starbuck checked her hand; she was holding the six. She lifted Crashdown's card and replaced it with the two of crescents. "How's the big project going?" she asked Baltar. "Haven't seen you around much the last while."

"I've been busy. As in, amazingly busy, no time to eat or sleep or draw breath busy."

"Mmmmm," Gaeta agreed. The difference between them, Kara noted, was that while Gaeta sounded exhausted, Baltar was almost bouncing up and down in his chair. Geniuses, apparently, got off on being really busy.

"Have we got ourselves a hotline to the Cylons yet?" she asked.

"Not yet. But I'm getting closer. Much closer, actually. The progress I've made, even in the last couple of days -- well, it's astonishing, even if I say so myself." It was Baltar's turn to trade, and he threw the one of tridents on to the table. Giving away a card from the high suit was either a sign he wasn't thinking about the game at all, or else he was gambling a lot on the two cards the rules allowed him to trade it for. "For example, it turns out there are real physiological differences between the structure of the human Cylons' brains and ours."

Gaeta looked interested -- or, at least, as interested as a man who hadn't gotten enough sleep in days could look. "What kind of differences?"

Baltar looked delighted to have been asked. "A section of the brain deep within the occipital lobes appears to be responsible for the link to the Cylon group mind. The structure is markedly different to that of a real human. In us, that's the region of the brain associated with dreaming. When the Cylons -- the original Cylons -- were created, no one thought to give them the ability to dream. I mean, why would they need it? What's fascinating is that even though they've learned to mimic the human brain in every other respect, it appears that they haven't been able to recreate dreaming. Instead they've adapted that area to fulfill a completely different function." He picked up two cards, hardly glancing at them. "Unfortunately, there's no way to prove the physiological difference without actually performing a dissection. When I cut into Lieutenant Valerii's brain I found --"

"Doc," Kara said. She looked at Baltar then, when she had his attention, flicked her eyes in Crashdown's direction and then back to Baltar.

"Ah," Baltar said, some of his manic enthusiasm at last draining away. "Yes, I, ah -- I'm sorry. This is still a very sensitive topic, of course."

"Frak, no, it's not sensitive. Why would you think that?" Crashdown asked. He looked up. "In fact, next time you've got the bitch's brain on the slab in front of you, Doc, make a couple of cuts in it just for me." He threw his cards down. "I fold." He got up and left the barrack room without another word.

"Ah," Baltar said again. "Oh dear. I --"

"Forget it. I'll talk to him later." It was her turn once more; Starbuck threw down a ten of crescents and drew a replacement from the top of the deck. It was the seven of tridents. Not bad. She refilled her glass from the ambrosia bottle. "Gaeta, you're up."

Gaeta looked at the cards he was holding and sighed. "Fold."

"Then I'm calling it. Let's see your cards, Doc."

Baltar smiled and laid out his hand. He had -- frak, he had a run of tridents. "My round, I believe."

"Lucky draw," Kara said.

"As it happens, no. I deduced from your trades what cards you were all holding, and used that information to calculate that the probability of the next two cards being high value tridents was excellent. Giving up one low value trident to win two wasn't a difficult decision to make."

She looked skeptically at him. "You were working that out in your head the whole time you were talking?"

"Well, no, not the whole time. I'd already finished when Lieutenant Gaeta here asked me about the physiological differences in the human Cylons' brains." He finished his drink and poured himself another generous measure. "I'm finding it much easier to concentrate lately."

He did seem a little different, Starbuck noticed -- a lot less twitchy than normal. "What'd you do, give up coffee?"

Baltar smiled, as if at some private joke. "Something like that."

Gaeta yawned, and squinted at his cards. "You know, when you can't focus clearly enough to see what's in your hand, it's time to give up. Good night, Doctor. Captain."

He stood up, and soon after Starbuck and Baltar were the only ones left in the half-lit barrack room. "Well, Captain," Baltar said, looking at Kara: "Are you ready to give up, too?"

"Not now and not ever."

He laughed. "I'll drink to that," he said, and raised his glass. "To never giving up."

She downed the measure, vaguely aware of the faint but definite buzzing sensation at the back of her head. A small part of her brain acknowledged she should have stopped after the second glass, but it was a shame to waste good liquor. "I wish I knew where you were getting your supply from."

Baltar swept the coins on the table out of the way. "Well, now, that sounded like a challenge. Shall we play for more interesting stakes?"

She raised an eyebrow. "The name of your supplier against...?"

"Oh, I don't know. Something indulgent and faintly illicit." He rested his chin on his hand and screwed up his eyes in an exaggerated parody of deep thought, making Kara laugh out loud. It felt good, like stretching cramped muscles after being in the cockpit for hours. Then Baltar sat up straight and stuck one finger straight up into the air, and she laughed even harder when he exclaimed, "I know! A ride in a Viper!"

It took a moment for her to catch her breath enough to speak. "You're a civilian. That's totally against regs."

Baltar grinned. "All the more reason to do it."

Kara couldn't disagree with that. She shuffled the deck of cards again, more sloppily this time, then began to deal -- nine cards each and nine more face up in the middle of the table. "One hand, sudden death. Three trades, crescents are high."

Baltar picked up his cards. "Game on."

In truth, she was a little bit too drunk to concentrate on what she was doing, and she knew it, but she didn't care. For days, her thoughts had weighed her down like ballast, heaping themselves around her like stones, until she felt she could hardly move at all. She was the most irresponsible person she knew, and somehow responsibility for the most important things had fallen suddenly to her. She was responsible for the lives of her pilots, for the safety of everyone in the Fleet, for not letting the old man down. And for keeping Lee's memory alive.

Sooner or later, she was going to screw up one of those responsibilities; the certainty of it filled her with terror. To think about something else -- even something as stupid as a card game, even for only a few short minutes -- was a relief and a release, and Kara was grabbing hold of it while she could.

"Done," she said, and set her closing hand of cards out on the table. It was a good hand: seven crescents and two spears. She grinned at him. "Just like life, you need a little bit of skill and a lot of luck."

"And a dash of genius," Baltar said, smiling back at her. He fanned his cards out in the center of the table. He had nine crescents. He stood up, putting his jacket back on with a flourish. "As agreed, I win one flight in a Viper."

"Gonna take a while to arrange that, Doc."

He made a mock bow. "At your earliest convenience, Captain."

Kara scooped up the cards and started to clear the table. Losing hadn't dampened her mood at all -- in fact, it had almost improved it. Sneaking one extra Viper launch on to the roster was going to be tricky but, frak, she was the CAG -- rank had to have some privileges. For the first time in too long, she actually had something to look forward to.

"Genius or not," she said as they left the barrack room together, "I still think you were just lucky tonight. You weren't that good before."

"Oh, I've always been that good," Baltar said. "It's just been a while since I lived up to my potential."

***

Teaching had never been Baltar's first love. Ideas excited him, but he found the chore of communicating them to people less intelligent than he was -- in other words, everyone -- boring in the extreme, and he went to lengths to avoid it. His first position after gaining his doctorate had been teaching undergraduates, and he'd found the experience a singularly depressing one. Later, when his accomplishments had brought him fame, he'd made a habit of turning down all but a select few of the regular invitations he'd received to give guest lectures at the most prestigious universities on the Twelve Worlds. Chat shows were less work and a lot more fun.

With hindsight, it was easy to see that he'd allowed himself to become jaded. He'd thought there was nothing new to know, or at least nothing interesting. How wrong he'd been! Now that he had reclaimed his mind as wholly his own, his thoughts were lucid, fluid and frequently inspired; it seemed that new ideas dropped into his head almost hourly, fully formed and flawless, each one more sophisticated than the last. The work he was doing was the best of his career; the insights he was gaining into the Cylons might provide the key to humanity's survival, and perhaps even its salvation. And he wanted -- no, more than that, he needed -- to tell other people about them.

He took his place at the front of the Galactica's main conference room, and waited until he had the full attention of his audience. The President and Commander Adama were concluding a low conversation, giving Baltar the opportunity to let his gaze rest on Captain Thrace. She was doodling on the notepad in front of her, and was unaware that she was being watched. There was something artless and unaffected about her which Baltar found utterly enchanting. Six had been a manufactured creation, as exact as an equation, every variable optimized in order to entrap him. Kara Thrace, on the other hand, was messy: foul-mouthed and rough-edged, as real as Six was fake. For the past several weeks, Baltar's mind had only rarely wandered from his work, but when it had, his thoughts had invariably been about Starbuck.

President Roslin finished her discussion with Adama and turned to him. "Sorry to keep you waiting, Doctor. Have you made any more progress?"

"A great deal, Madam President," Baltar said. "In fact, I believe I have a working solution for you."

"Go on."

"You will recall from my earlier briefings that the human Cylons appear to have an area of the brain located in the occipital lobes which differs from that of a real human being."

Roslin nodded. "You had a theory about that region being somehow sensitive to signals from the Cylon group consciousness."

Baltar nodded. "Yes. And, since then, I've been able to confirm that theory. We know the exact time at which Lieutenant Valerii was activated; when I searched the Galactica's scan records at that moment, I found one signal which was not coming from any ship in the Fleet. I now have an activation key for the human-Cylon sleeper agents." He started to pace up and down, slowly, as if he were delivering a keynote lecture. "The next problem was to understand precisely what occurs in the brain at activation. When we performed an analysis of the brain tissue from Lieutenant Valerii, we found high levels of neurotransmitters which do not match any found in humans. These neurotransmitters had been produced in the occipital lobe structure and, at the time of death, were quickly diffusing throughout the brain." He stopped pacing, and turned to face his audience. "In effect, her brain was being rewired from the bottom up."

Adama asked, "Have you tested the other Cylon for these neurotransmitters?"

Baltar nodded. "We took samples of its cerebrospinal fluid, and they were clear."

"So we can be certain it hasn't been activated," Roslin said.

"I believe we can," Baltar said. "Now, at the same time as these neurotransmitters were being released, a second set of compounds were acting to break down the chemical barriers between the occipital lobe structure and the rest of the brain." He picked up an eraser from the table in front of him and held it up for his audience to see. "Imagine, if you will, a tiny area of the brain which is sealed off from the rest. It is completely dormant, undetectable. But it's there, like a secret room in the center of the mind." He wrapped his hand around the eraser, making a fist which hid it from sight. "A simple signal is the key that unlocks the door. It flies open, releasing a flood of compounds which fundamentally alter the chemical structure of the brain and overwrite the existing personality. Not only that, but once the process is complete, the door stays open so that the conscious mind has access to what's inside the sealed-off area." He opened his fist so that it was flat, with the eraser lying exposed in the middle of his palm. "Which is --"

"-- a direct line of communication to the Cylon group consciousness," Adama finished.

"Precisely, Commander."

Starbuck was frowning. "Okay, so you're saying the live Cylon we've got not only doesn't have access to this link, it doesn't even know it's there. How does that help us? If don't activate it, we can't get the intel. If we do activate it, the personality that wants to cooperate with us gets wiped before it can tell us anything."

"A very elegant summary of the dilemma, Captain," Baltar said. "You'll be pleased to know my solution is equally elegant. I've created a back door."

"How?" Adama asked.

"I've developed a process which neutralizes the neurotransmitters released on activation. The chemistry of the brain is unaltered, preserving the existing personality but giving the conscious mind access to the link." He smiled. "That's how we're going to get into the locked room."

"How will this process work?"

"By means of an implant, Madam President -- a small chip I've designed to monitor the levels of the activation neurotransmitters and counteract their effects." It wasn't a lie, more a selective interpretation of the truth. When he'd studied the implant he'd extracted from his own brain, he'd found it was capable of altering the brain's chemistry in every conceivable way -- that must have been how Six had ensured his hallucinations were so intensely vivid. Once he'd grasped the basic mechanism by which it worked, he'd been able to adapt it for his own purposes. The end product had a brilliant and innovative design; although anyone who'd seen the contents of the tiny glass phial currently resting in Baltar's pocket might have noticed distinct similarities. He intended that no one ever would. "We'll have to perform a small surgical procedure on the Cylon to insert the chip, but once that's done, there's nothing to stop us using it straight away."

Adama asked, "What could go wrong?"

"Any number of things," Baltar said. "The only way I have of testing if the chip works will be to put it into the Cylon's brain and turn it on. Nothing like this has been done before. It may simply kill the subject outright."

"No loss," Adama said. Both the President and Starbuck glanced at him, but he didn't seem to notice. "Assume it doesn't. What else?"

"It may be the case that the changes caused by the release of the neurotransmitters are necessary to allow the brain to process the information received via the link to the Cylon group consciousness," Baltar said. "By deliberately preventing those changes, we may deprive the brain of the tools it needs to make sense of the data suddenly being pumped into it, placing the subject's mind under a huge amount of stress."

"Then we need to make sure we get as much useful intel out of it as we can, as quickly as possible," Adama said. He paused, and Baltar had the impression he was weighing something. Then he turned to Starbuck and said, "Captain, if this works, I want you to be the one to debrief it."

She looked at him, obviously surprised and, Baltar thought, a little thrown. Before she could respond, though, Roslin said, "Captain Thrace, you were close friends with Lee, weren't you?"

"Yes," Starbuck said. Her voice wasn't loud, but it was steady. "We were friends."

"Madam President," Adama said shortly, "If you are questioning the ability of my officer to do her job --"

"Not at all, Commander. But is there really no one else who could do this for whom the situation wouldn't be so --" Roslin hesitated, apparently searching for the best phrasing: "-- so emotionally testing?"

Adama said, "It's because she was his friend that she's the one who should do it." He was talking to the President, Baltar saw, but looking at Kara. "If the Cylon lies to us, or tries to feed us false intel, she's the one who'll spot it. It won't be able to fool her. Am I right, Starbuck?"

She raised her chin. "Damn straight, sir."

Adama looked back at President Roslin, and nodded. "Captain Thrace will conduct the debriefs."

Roslin didn't look happy, but apparently she wasn't prepared to take the argument any further. "The decision is, of course, a military one, Commander. I'm sure your judgment is best." She turned to Baltar. "How soon can the chip be implanted?"

"It can be done today, if you want."

Roslin looked around the room. "I don't see any point in delaying. If we're going to try this, let's do it."

Outside the conference room, Baltar tried to catch a moment alone with Starbuck, but before he could attract her attention she was gone, walking away along the corridor at speed, her head down and her expression unreadable.

***

One of the things they tested you for before they let you in a Viper -- as well as reaction speeds and physical fitness and ability to function under stress -- was something the instructors called the 'stimuli threshold'. It referred to the pilot's ability to perceive, categorize and respond to the immense number of different inputs the brain had to process in order to fly a plane in combat. At any given moment, the theory went, you had to be aware of a thousand factors including roll, pitch, yaw, speed, weapons status, the relative positions of any number of enemy combatants -- and then, on top of that, you had to be able to judge how those thousand factors impacted each other and make split second decisions based on them on which your life depended. And if you were the squadron leader, you had to do all of that for six other people at the same time as for yourself.

They measured the stimuli threshold on a scale of zero to eighty, where forty was where bell curve peaked for the population as a whole. The minimum entry requirement for Basic Flight was a score of sixty-five. Lee's rating had been seventy-four, only two points less than the top score for his intake. That, of course, had belonged to Kara.

He wasn't Lee, but he was as perfect a copy as it was possible to be; the fact that he'd been flying in combat for the past six weeks without getting himself killed was proof that he must have the dead man's abilities as well as his memories.

So he should be able to handle this.

Except that he was starting to think maybe he couldn't.

He'd known he was in trouble almost the second he'd woken up in the infirmary after the operation to insert the chip in his brain. As consciousness returned, it brought something else with it -- something he'd been totally unprepared for. He'd imagined that the link to the Cylon group mind would be a comprehensive, organized stream of information from which he could selectively choose, like fishing from a river. Instead, it was a torrent that flooded every corner of his mind, squeezing out other thoughts and making it impossible to concentrate on even the simplest tasks. And there was no order to it, no way of usefully categorizing or understanding the vast quantities of mostly incomprehensible data which were rapidly filling up his head. The more he tried to grapple with it, the deeper he was drawn in, and the more he felt he was losing himself, slipping under. If he didn't find a way of controlling it, and soon, he was afraid he might start to drown.

He hadn't shared any of his doubts with Baltar, or anyone else for that matter. If the implant didn't work -- if he couldn't extract useful intel from it -- then he was no longer of any value to them alive. The first debrief had to go well; if it didn't, he wouldn't get a second chance.

Which was why, when Kara walked into the interrogation room scowling, he wished they'd sent just about anyone else to talk to him.

She sat down across the table from him. "Baltar says the chip in your head's working like a dream."

It was hard to concentrate on what she was saying, and harder still to formulate a response. "Yes. It's working."

"Then let's get started. First question. Who are the other Cylon agents in the Fleet?"

The answer had to be somewhere in the datastream from the link -- if he could just think clearly enough to figure out how to find it. He closed his eyes, shutting out the real world, and cautiously immersed himself in the barrage of information. He no longer felt the chair underneath him, or the table his arms rested on, or even the sound of his own breathing

It was like making a dive deep underwater; the further down he went, the greater the pressure on him became, until he felt as if he was about to be crushed by the weight of data pushing at him from all sides. He found what he was looking for buried in a tide of binary code and something that might have been navigation data, and grabbed hold of it before it could rush past. Now all he needed to do was get back again, but when he looked for the light above which would tell him where the surface was, he couldn't find it: the sea of data was preventing him from connecting again with the real world. Then, just as the first strands of panic were starting to form, he heard something -- a clicking sound, somewhere close. He followed it until he was back in the interrogation room.

Kara was leaning across the table, snapping her fingers repeatedly in front of his face. "Well?" she said. "I'm waiting, here."

He was still disoriented, and it was even harder than it had been before to ignore the barrage of information from the link and concentrate on talking. "No others. Just Boomer. And me."

She looked skeptical. "I hope for your sake you're not lying."

"I'm not lying."

"Next question. I want to know the positions of every Cylon base-ship and outpost within fifty light years of the Fleet's current location."

The datastream from the link pounded through his head. He was mentally exhausted, and he wasn't sure he'd have the strength to extract himself from it a second time. "I need to take a break."

"Sorry, but I've got other things to do today. Answer now."

He tried to explain. "There's too much information, and I don't know -- I don't know how to make sense of it. Kara --"

She cut him off. "Let's get a couple of things straight. In the first place, I don't frakking care how difficult this is for you, so don't waste my time telling me. In the second place, my name is Captain Thrace. You will address me as 'Captain' or 'sir'. Are we clear?"

"We're clear."

"We're clear, what?"

"We're clear, sir." His head hurt, and he could hardly think. "Tell me, is this making you feel better?"

"Answer the question."

He ignored her. "Because I get that you're angry, but if you want to punish me, there's not a lot left for you to do. I've already lost everything I ever cared about. Nothing I am belongs to me. I don't even have a name anymore."

"Spare me," Kara said. "My friend is dead, and you're whining about your identity issues."

"I didn't kill him."

"He's still dead." Her voice caught a little on the last word. It was barely noticeable, and he doubted anyone who didn't know her well would have picked it up, but he did know her, even if it was only through memories stolen from someone else. For an instant, he could only see Kara, raw and hurting. He'd only seen her hurt like that once before, when Zak had died. It hit him that she was grieving for him, and that he was seeing something no one ever should -- the mess left behind by his own death.

"I'm sorry," he said, meaning it.

Whatever reaction he'd expected, it wasn't the one he got. Starbuck got up, drew her arm back and hit him square in the jaw. He wasn't ready for it, and so his head cracked back with whiplash speed. For a second afterward, one whole side of his face was numb. Then, slowly, sensation returned, bringing sharp pain just below his ear and the taste of blood in his mouth.

When he could focus, he saw Kara was sitting down again. She was rubbing the knuckles of her right hand with the fingers of her left, but otherwise she was perfectly still. "You want to know what makes me feel better? That." She leaned forward. "Now answer the frakking question."

His face throbbed, but the pain at least provided a distraction from the constant thunder of the datastream from the link. And he'd succeeded in delaying his next immersion in it by a couple of precious minutes.

He turned his thoughts inward again, reluctantly facing the torrent again. This time, the information took longer to retrieve, and it was harder to come up again, even with the physical pain from Kara's punch acting as his anchor to reality.

Speaking was difficult, too, and not just because he had to stop to spit blood several times. When he'd finished relaying a list of the co-ordinates of the nearest Cylon base ships, he said, "I can't do anymore. Not now. Later." He swallowed, the blood creating an unpleasant metallic taste in his mouth. "Please."

Kara looked him up and down, as if appraising his condition. "We'll start again in an hour. Until then, you can spend some quality time catching up on all the news from your cousins back home. You'll enjoy that, right?"

He was too tired and too distracted to do anything except respond with the truth. "No, I won't. It's like being screamed at by a million people at once. And it doesn't stop."

Her expression was unsympathetic. "Too bad it's your only way of staying alive."

"It's my only way of staying me," he said. "The chip means they can't switch me on, like they did to Sharon. I'm not Number Twelve. I won't be."

"I've got bad news for you," Kara said as she got up to leave. "You already are."

********************* CHAPTER SIX *********************

From the cockpit of a Viper, everything was so much clearer.

Starbuck eased the plane into a smooth arc, looping it around the Fleet's outer perimeter. From out here, most of the Fleet was visible, the ragtag collection of ships bunched together around the Galactica, as if sheltering in her wake. The nearest ship was the Libran Intersun Space Park, its massive outer ring revolving slowly around the central shaft that housed its engines. Kara altered the Viper's path to bring it closer and said, over her shoulder, "Is it living up to expectations so far, Doc?"

"It's exceeding them." Baltar was sitting close behind her, in the cramped space created by removing the emergency ejection 'chute. Vipers were designed for one, but every pilot knew how to make enough space for a passenger if they had to; it was even pretty comfortable, if you didn't mind getting a little intimate with the other person. Baltar's hands were resting on Kara's hips, purely because there was nowhere else he could put them, and even through the air filters she was aware of his scent. He smelled like good cologne and the musty sweetness of fine cigars. "I can see why you enjoy this so much," he said.

"I like being in control. Everywhere else, you have to live by other people's rules, but out here -- it's just you and your ship. Nothing else matters. It's simple."

"How did you manage to arrange this, anyway?"

"This Viper's been out of action for a couple of days with thruster problems. I told the Chief I'd take her out for the test flight."

"And no one will be able to tell I came along for the ride?"

"There'll be a couple of weird things in the patrol stats, but only the CAG looks at those in detail. I'll make sure I get the report from Gaeta as soon as he has it tomorrow." She gripped the control column more tightly. "Brace yourself."

"For what --" Baltar started to ask. Starbuck didn't answer; instead, she powered up the thrusters, and accelerated the Viper straight toward the Intersun Space Park. She heard him make a small strangled noise behind her, and she grinned. Then she touched the steering column and dipped the Viper's nose, so that instead of smashing into the outer ring, it darted between the spokes attaching the ring to the central shaft.

As they burst out into open space on the other side of the Space Park, Baltar let out a whoop. "That was fantastic! Can we do it again?"

Starbuck laughed. "Not today. Time to head for home. I've got a debrief in twenty minutes." The thought sobered her, and killed her good mood. She wished she could screw the debrief, and just stay out here, flying, until they had to send someone to come and get her.

But she couldn't do that; she was the CAG, and she had responsibilities.

She twisted the Viper's control column, and started to bring the ship around toward the Galactica's hangar bay.

***

"Thank you for coming to see me so promptly. I appreciate you have a lot of demands on your time." Laura knew she was being more than a little disingenuous; turning down a meeting request from the President wasn't exactly an acceptable response. Still, it helped to let people know she remembered they had jobs to do. "Please sit down, Captain Thrace."

"Thank you, sir." Starbuck started to move toward the chair in front of Laura's desk, but Laura gently nodded at the more informal seating next to the stateroom's window. She wanted to put the Captain at her ease -- and apparently, she had her work cut out for her, since Starbuck scarcely looked more relaxed sitting down than when she'd been standing to attention. She looked wound up, Laura thought, coiled tightly in on herself, like a rag twisted around and around until it spiraled into a hard knot.

She took the seat opposite Starbuck, and moved it round a little so that it she wasn't directly facing the younger woman. "I wanted to speak to you because I'm having trouble understanding something, and I thought you could explain it to me."

"I'll try, Madam President."

Laura took off her glasses. "How are the debriefing sessions going?"

Starbuck sat up in the chair. Her hands were resting together in her lap, the fingers laced together. The pose looked relaxed, until Laura noticed that her knuckles were white with the pressure she was putting on them. "They're going well. We're getting a lot of good intel."

"Yes. I've been reading your reports." Laura paused. "I've also been reading Doctor Cottle's reports on the Cylon's overall physical and mental condition. He's expressed some concerns that it's deteriorating rapidly. Since your briefings don't mention that, I was wondering what your impressions have been."

"I was asked to report on intel gathered only," Starbuck said. Her tone was defensive.

"Yes, I understand that. But you've spent more time with it than anyone else since the chip was implanted. You must have an opinion."

Starbuck didn't answer for a second. Then she said, "It finds using the link... difficult. And it seems to be getting harder for it to cope, not easier." Laura had the impression she was choosing her words with great care.

"Is it still able to give us the information we want?" Laura asked.

Again, there was a lengthy pause. "Yes. For now."

"But there's going to come a point where it can't anymore," Laura said. Starbuck didn't answer, but the look on her face was confirmation enough. "I spoke to Doctor Baltar about this, and he felt that it bore out his initial concerns about the impact on the Cylon of activating the link. I asked him to look into ways of making the implant more efficient, and he told me it should be possible to alter the chip so that we could choose whether it allowed or blocked the signals that send this information to the Cylon's brain."

"You mean --" Starbuck frowned. "We could turn the link on and off."

Laura smiled. "Exactly." She leaned forward slightly. "Doctor Baltar says the change is not a difficult one to make. But Commander Adama rejected the idea outright."

The frown deepened. "Why?"

"That's what I was hoping you could help me with, Captain," Laura said. "Before all this happened, I'd had very little contact with the military. I don't pretend to have much expertise in tactics. But it seems to me that if you find a source of reliable information, you do everything you can to hold on to it. That's not just good strategy, it's common sense. Do you agree?"

"Yeah, I mean -- of course," Starbuck said. She looked preoccupied and suddenly uncertain.

"The question of jurisdiction is -- a little gray here," Laura said. "The Cylon is a military prisoner in military custody. The information it has, however, is vital to the survival of every single person in the Fleet. I'm sure the Commander understands that."

Starbuck's expression remained confused for a moment. Then, abruptly, it cleared, and she lifted her chin and looked right at Laura. "If he said no, he must've had his reasons."

"But not reasons he's shared with you," Laura said pointedly. "Or me, or anyone else."

Starbuck was silent.

Laura pressed home her advantage. "And, if the medical reports are correct, before very long we're going to lose the best source of information we've got because of those reasons."

Starbuck shook her head. "No. Commander Adama wouldn't do that. He wouldn't let losing Lee affect his judgment like that. He just -- wouldn't, and if you're suggesting it you don't know him at all."

"I'm suggesting no such thing, Captain," Laura said. She looked at Starbuck. "Maybe you should think about why you are."

***

Rule one. Not 'Lee': 'the Cylon'.

Rule two. Not 'him': 'it'.

If she kept those two simple rules, Kara thought, she'd be fine.

Debriefing the Cylon should have been easy. She'd been trained in interrogation techniques, and the first thing she'd been taught had been how to depersonalize the subject. Come on in, please check your empathy at the door. She'd thought she'd mastered the skill, too -- but then Leoben had gotten under her skin in ways she still hadn't figured out. And Leoben hadn't even had the advantage of looking and sounding exactly like her dead best friend.

Raw anger had carried her through her first face-to-face encounters with it. She'd been furious then: furious at Boomer for betraying them, at herself for being fooled again by a traitor, at the old man for sending her to talk to it instead of going himself. But the person she'd been -- and still was -- most angry at was Lee. The crazy thing was, she wasn't even sure if the Lee she was mad at was the real one, for dying, or the Cylon, for not being real. Maybe it didn't even matter, because it boiled down to the same thing, regardless. Both of them had gone away and left her alone to deal with all this shit by herself.

But she didn't know how long she could stay angry, because no matter how hard she tried to hate it, there was one thing she couldn't make go away. The Cylon was Lee. Not just a good copy; it was him.

And the more time she spent with it, the harder it was to convince herself otherwise.

The Cylon was sitting in the chair at the interrogation room's single table. As Kara sat down opposite it, she couldn't help noticing that there were dark shadows under its eyes, and its skin was pale and clammy. It wasn't sitting up straight in the chair, but was slumped sideways a little -- and that looked really weird, because Lee had never slouched. When she looked down at its hands, bound together at the wrists and resting on the table top, she saw they were shaking.

"Today's topic will be technical specs of the base ships," she said. "Capabilities, internal layout, defenses, weak spots, you know the drill."

The Cylon looked at her; she was close enough to see its dilated pupils contract sluggishly. It seemed to be having trouble focusing on her, and when it spoke, there were overlong pauses between its words and sentences. The effect was to make it look like a drunk trying to pass for sober. "They have... fifteen base stars. All with high yield nuclear ordnance. Raiders are launched from the external service pods."

"Tell me about the nukes."

"Seven hundred warheads... maybe more. Ten warheads per missile... Most of them are three hundred kiloton yield... upgradeable to five hundred kilotons by adding HEU rings." The Cylon stopped for a moment, hunched forward in the chair. Its face -- Lee's face -- was contorted with the effort of talking. "Some short range attack missiles... beryllium casing, fifty or a hundred kilotons."

"Do they have manufacturing facilities on board?"

A long pause, then: "...I think... I think so. Yes."

"Where do they get the uranium from?"

The Cylon closed its eyes.

"Look at me."

Its chin started to drop on to its chest.

"Look at me," she said again, more forcefully. The Cylon raised its head, although slowly. "That's better. Try to stay awake when I'm talking to you. I'm gonna ask you again: Where does the uranium for the nukes come from? Do they process ore, or do they have to go back somewhere to re-supply?"

"I can't," it said in a low, hoarse voice. "I thought I could do this... but I can't. It's too much. It just... goes on and on and on... and I can't think, I'm drowning in it, I can't make it stop, I can't..."

He looked so much like Lee.

It, she told herself savagely. It. The Cylon. It. It.

"Where," she repeated, "does the uranium come from?"

"Go away," it said.

"First tell me where they get the uranium from."

"Go away," the Cylon said again, and Kara realized it wasn't talking to her at all. Its gaze was fixed on a point somewhere behind her right shoulder. When it looked back at her, its expression was pleading. "Tell him to go away. He'll listen to you."

"Tell who to go away?"

It lowered its voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Zak. I've told him he shouldn't be here, but he won't leave me alone."

A chill ran up Kara's spine. It took an effort of will not to look behind her at the corner of the room the Cylon was staring at. "Zak's not here," she said. "He's dead. You know that."

"I'm dead and I'm still here." It started to giggle, shaking so much with laughter that the chains between its wrists rattled, ghost-like. "That's funny, isn't it? Really funny."

Starbuck closed her eyes. She opened them again. It wasn't Lee. It was just something that looked like him. Number Twelve.

"Where does the uranium come from?" she asked again. Every word felt like something was being ripped out of her chest.

The laughter changed, becoming lower and more raw, and she realized the Cylon had started to cry. Its cheeks were wet, but it didn't even seem to have noticed.

"Help me, Kara."

Had Lee called out for help, when he was slowly starving to death alone? Had he called her name over and over, and only stopped when dehydration made his lips and tongue swell up so much that talking was impossible? She could see him clearly in her mind's eye, curled up in that rotting place, losing strength, losing hope, and finally losing his faith in her. If she'd known -- if she'd been there to help him -- everything would have been different. She couldn't have known, but that didn't make her feel any less guilty. She'd called herself his friend, and she'd failed him.

And now she was failing him again.

"Where," she whispered. She stopped. She tried again. "Where. Where does -- where does the --"

"Kara, help me, please," it said.

He said.

It. Him. Lee.

(I thought I could do this, but I can't.)

Kara got up and walked out. The door slammed behind her, and her boots tapped against the metal floor as she walked quickly down the corridor. She passed the guards on duty outside the interrogation room, and a couple of techs performing routine maintenance on a service duct, and then she came to an empty storeroom. She went in and closed the door behind her.

She turned around and leaned against the inside of the door. Then she let her legs slowly fold under her, until she was squatting against it, her forehead resting on the cold metal. Wrapping her arms around herself, she wept until her chest and throat hurt.

***

Gaeta's shift ended at twenty hundred; Kara's plan had been to finish the debrief by nineteen forty-five and catch him before he went off duty. But half an hour spent sobbing in an empty storeroom followed by another twenty minutes splashing cold water on her red-blotched face to get rid of the evidence of the crying jag delayed her, and when she finally arrived in the CIC at twenty fifteen she found Gaeta had just left. "Is there something I can help you with, sir?" the nightshift Officer of the Watch, Lieutenant Cortez, asked her.

"I need yesterday's patrol stats."

Cortez started to look through the pile of papers stacked at the side of his station. "I'm sorry, Captain, I don't seem to have the report... Gaeta didn't mention it at the handover."

"Because he didn't need to. I've got it."

Starbuck turned around; Tigh was standing behind her, holding the patrol stats report in his hand. The last thing she was in the mood for after the debrief was any kind of encounter with the XO. She made a conscious effort to alter her expression to something which, if not exactly pleasant, at least fell short of being openly hostile. Looking pointedly at the sheets of paper, she said, "I'll take that."

"Your diligence is commendable, Captain. It's good to see the new CAG taking an interest in the efficient running of the ship."

Cortez' eyes were flicking between Starbuck and Tigh. He could clearly see something was up, but couldn't figure out what it was. Kara was starting to get the nasty suspicion she did know. "I'm just doing my job," she said. She held out her hand. "Now please give me my report. Sir."

Tigh smiled and held it out. Then, as she reached for it, he frowned as if he'd just remembered something and pulled his hand back. "You know, now I've got you here, there's something I meant to ask you about." He turned the page around, tapping his finger against the fuel consumption table to draw her attention to it. "Here it is. Viper five's fuel consumption ratio was three-point-nine during its flight. That's very high, isn't it?"

"Viper five's been out for a couple of days. The rear thruster failed and had to be repaired. It's probably still drawing too much fuel."

"I see," Tigh said. He checked the report again. "According to this, you were piloting that Viper yesterday. You didn't report any more thruster problems following the repairs."

He looked at her. Starbuck met his gaze, and held it. "I didn't notice anything."

"Odd, that. For someone with as good a feel for Vipers as you have... just not to notice."

Steadily, she said, "I'll ask Chief Tyrol to look at it again."

"Good idea," Tigh said. He handed her the report, and Starbuck turned to go. "By the way," he added.

She stopped. Turned around again.

"You don't happen to know where Doctor Baltar was between fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred yesterday? The President wanted to speak to him, and we couldn't find him anywhere."

"I wouldn't know. I was taking Viper five for a test flight," Kara said. She held up the report. "Like it says right here."

"Of course you were. Of course." Tigh paused. "You know, that fuel consumption ratio's about twice as high as it should be. It's almost as if that Viper had a passenger."

She could have walked away. She should have walked away.

You can't swallow it and shut up when you should, the old man had told her. And he'd been right.

"What are you implying, Colonel?" she snapped. "Because I think you should just come out and say it."

Tigh held up his hands, feigning innocence. "Not a thing, Captain. I'm certainly not implying that the Commander of the Air Group would do anything as ill-considered as take a civilian out in a Viper for the hell of it. Because that would be irresponsible and reckless, and anyone who did it wouldn't deserve to hold the rank they did."

Without really noticing what she was doing, Kara had taken a step closer to Tigh. "I'm the CAG. You might wish I wasn't, but that's your problem. Stop frakking undermining me."

Tigh smiled. "I don't need to undermine you when you're doing such a good job of undermining yourself."

There was a knot of tension between her shoulder blades. She could feel it, a solid mass of anger and frustration lodged just where she couldn't reach it, and she was suddenly aware that it hadn't been there for hours or days but for weeks. And nothing would release it as quickly or as satisfyingly as pulling back her arm and socking Tigh in the jaw.

He was still smiling at her.

And then she realized that was what she was supposed to do here.

She was supposed to hit him again; that was how this confrontation played out. Only this time, she wasn't a lieutenant, she was the CAG, and there was more at stake than just her career. She'd been afraid of letting someone down, and now she realized the only person she really had to worry about letting down was herself. And she could choose not to do that.

"What the hell is going on here?"

The roar belonged to Commander Adama. With a jolt, Kara realized she and Tigh were standing almost toe to toe, in open confrontation in the middle of the CIC.

"At attention, both of you!"

Kara spun around and snapped to attention. Tigh did the same. Adama was advancing toward them, wearing a look of absolute fury. Everyone else in the command center was doing their level best to pretend nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Lieutenant Cortez looked as if he'd prefer to be just about anywhere, including stuck in the crossfire of a Cylon attack, rather than where he was.

"Tigh," Adama barked. "Explain. Now."

Tigh glanced sideways at Starbuck before replying. "Captain Thrace and I were reviewing yesterday's Viper patrol stats."

"Starbuck?"

"Yes, Commander. That's what we were doing."

Adama looked at her, then at Tigh. "You. Stay here." He pointed at Starbuck. "You. With me."

Kara followed him across the CIC and into the Command Observation Room. Since it was nightshift, the COR stations were unmanned, and they were the only people in the room. As soon as Kara was inside, Adama pulled the door shut, closing out the hum of returning conversation in the CIC.

"Now tell me what that was really about," he said.

"Colonel Tigh implied that I broke regulations by taking a civilian out in a Viper."

"Did you?"

There was no point in lying about it; Adama would be able to draw the same conclusions from the patrol stats and Baltar's mysterious hour-long disappearance the previous day that Tigh had. "Yes, sir."

"Why?" Adama asked, his tone steely.

There were a lot of possible answers to that, ranging from 'I was drunk when I agreed' to 'I needed an excuse to fly something before I took a gun and started picking off people on the hangar deck just to relieve the stress'. Kara decided to go for the one which was most honest and least revealing. "It seemed like a good idea at the time, sir."

Adama repeated heavily, "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

The COR had glass walls, to allow the observation room personnel a clear view of what was happening in the rest of the command center. Right now, however, all observation was in the other direction; Kara could see, in the periphery of her vision, every pair of eyes in the CIC watching them.

"You," Adama said quietly, "are the CAG. You are responsible for the defense of this ship and of the Fleet. Those forty seven other ships out there are all we have left. If we die, everything we were and are and could be dies with us. Do you understand how important your job is?"

Kara closed her eyes for a moment. "Yes, sir."

"Do you understand!" Adama shouted.

"Yes, sir. I understand, sir," Starbuck rapped out. She hesitated. "I'm doing a good job, sir."

"That's not enough. You have to be seen to be doing it well. You can't screw up, because it will be noticed, and it will reflect badly on you." He walked slowly up the COR, stopping at the far window to look out over the command center. At least a dozen personnel hurriedly turned their attention back to their workstations. "It reflects badly on me, too, because my judgment put you where you are. And I can't afford to have my judgment called into question. I can't have that," he repeated, in a voice which was so low she suspected the last comment had been mostly to himself.

But wasn't his judgment already in question? President Roslin was questioning it. Ever since she'd talked to the President, Kara had found it increasingly difficult to ignore the uncomfortable truths crystallizing in her own mind. And now she couldn't stop thinking about that evening's debrief, and the way the Cylon had looked at her, pleading, desperate, slipping under right in front of her as she watched and did nothing to help him.

(Kara, help me, please.)

(I thought I could do this, but I can't.)

"I was wrong," she said. "I'm sorry. My judgment was compromised."

Adama turned around. He nodded, accepting her apology.

Kara took a breath and went on, "So is yours."

He looked at her, as if he couldn't quite believe what he'd just heard. In an icy voice, he said, "Care to repeat that, Captain?"

"What you're doing to the Cylon is wrong," she said. "You want to make him suffer and if you have to choose between that and intel that might save all of us, you'll stand by and watch while he goes insane." The words were tumbling out, now, as the pressure of pent-up emotion became too great and everything she had been refusing to admit forced its way out into the open. "But you're not even gonna watch, because you won't deal with the fact he exists -- you haven't been in the same room as him since we found out. So you're gonna make me watch instead, and I won't do that. It's not in my job description."

"Nothing is more important than our survival. If we have to destroy the Cylon to extract the intel from it, then that's a fair price. And the call is not yours to make, Captain."

"Fine," she snapped back, "except that we don't have to destroy it, do we? Baltar could fix the implant, but you won't let him. Because there is something more important to you than our survival -- getting your revenge."

His voice very low, and very dangerous, Adama said, "Get out."

He'd told her to get out once before, when she'd confessed to him how her bad judgment had cost Zak his life. She'd been wrong then, and guilty, and she'd gotten out. This time she was right, and she wasn't budging an inch.

"No," she said. "You are wrong. And no one else --"

"Get out," he repeated, his voice becoming louder.

She plowed on: "-- And no one else is gonna say that to your face --"

"Get out!"

"-- Not Tigh or the President or anybody else and the only person who might've is going crazy because of what you're doing to him!"

"It is not a person! It's a thing!" Adama yelled. He swiped up a coffee cup which was sitting on the edge of a workstation and hurled it at the window. The cup shattered, making the whole window vibrate.

The sudden, violent explosion of ceramic shards and cold coffee dregs seemed to halt his rage. He looked down at his hands, as if doubting what they'd just done. For a moment, the look on his face was one of confusion, and she saw how deeply etched the lines of tiredness and grief around his eyes were. With a shock, Kara suddenly saw that an old man was exactly what he was. She'd often referred to him that way, but she'd never seen it in him before.

"They killed my son," he said. His voice was quiet, broken.

"They killed fifty billion other people, too," she said. "Do you want revenge for all of them as well? Because that's gonna take a couple more lifetimes than we've got."

Adama sat down in the empty chair at the nearest workstation. He leaned forward, putting his head in his hands and letting his whole body slump. Kara glanced out of the COR windows just long enough to see they hadn't lost any of their audience, and changed her position so that she was blocking the Commander from the view of as many of the onlookers down in the command center as possible. They shouldn't see him like this. She wished she didn't have to see him like this.

"It's not Lee," he said.

"Maybe he isn't. Maybe he is. I don't know anymore. But, I can't get this one thought out of my head -- what would Lee, the real Lee, think of us if he could see what we're doing? I'm betting he wouldn't be too impressed." She moved closer to him, and hunkered down in front of him so that she could look up into his face. Quietly, she said, "I will follow your orders, but I have to respect them. I have to respect you. So I will do this, if you order it, but only if you go down there and see for yourself what we're doing to him. And if you can do that, and come back and tell me what we're doing is okay, then I'm okay with it too."

"Leave me," Adama said. "Please."

Not an order; a request. Maybe even a plea.

She left.

***

The icons were heavy in Kara's hands as she lifted them out of their hiding place beneath her bunk and unwrapped the cloth around them. The Artemis icon was made of iron, and the one of Aphrodite was gold. Well, gold leaf -- and even that was flaking off the figurine in places. There was almost no upper limit on how much you could spend on an icon, but the ones Kara owned were cheap; she'd bought them in a market on Tauron on shore leave years ago from a trader who claimed they were exact copies of ones used by the first Colonists. Starbuck had no idea if that was true or not, but she liked the solidity of them, the feeling of being able to hold on to something real while she prayed.

She needed something tangible; praying had always been difficult for her. It required focus and serenity and, outside of the cockpit of a Viper, Starbuck found both those states difficult to achieve at the best of times. Tonight was not the best of times. She held the twin icons, one in each hand, and tried to concentrate, but couldn't. Every time she started, she barely got past 'Lords of Kobol, hear my prayer' before her thoughts began to buzz and race in her head, distracting her and making it impossible to center herself. Maybe, she thought with a grim little smile, this was payback from the gods, giving her a taste of what the Cylon -- what Lee -- was going through.

Eventually she gave up and put the icons away again. Then she left the pilots' dorms and went walking, pacing the Galactica's hallways with no thought of where she was going. If she could keep her body occupied, maybe her mind would be clearer.

She didn't realize she was heading toward Baltar's quarters until she was standing outside his door. She knocked, thinking he probably wasn't in anyway. But the door opened almost straight away.

"Captain." He smiled, apparently genuinely pleased to see her. "Good evening."

"Tigh's figured out about our expedition," Kara told him. "He can't prove anything, but you might want to come up with a good reason why no one could find you on the ship yesterday afternoon."

"I see." Baltar frowned. "I hope I didn't get you into any trouble."

Suddenly Kara felt very tired. "In the grand scheme of things, Doc, Tigh's the least of my problems."

He was looking at her more closely now. "Is everything all right?"

She closed her eyes for a second. "No. Actually, no, nothing's right, at all, and I need a drink."

He opened the door and stood back, a clear invitation to enter. "Then you'd better come in."

His quarters were a mess, with books lying open and sheets of scrawled notes on every available surface, including the floor. The single chair was stacked high with what looked to Starbuck like textbooks, so she sat down on the end of the bed while Baltar retrieved a bottle of ambrosia and two glasses from the back of a cupboard. "It's not as disorganized as it looks," he said, noticing her eyeing the room.

"Well, it looks really, really disorganized."

Baltar laughed and pointed at several piles of paper next to the door. "That's network theory. Everything on the other side of the bed relates to the historical development of the Cylons, and this side of the bed is anything I could find written about them in the last forty years." Kara looked; the pile he was pointing to was noticeably the smallest in the room. "Pitiful, isn't it?" Baltar said. "We created the problem and then ignored it completely."

"Is this how you always do your filing?"

He smiled. "It means I rarely cross the room without having a new idea." He handed her a full glass and watched as she chugged half of it back in one go. "My. You did need a drink, didn't you?"

She held out the glass for a refill. "Keep 'em coming."

Baltar obliged, then sat down beside her on the bed. Apropos of nothing, he said suddenly, "His name is Marcus Oban, on the Tarsus Pride. He owned a business exporting fine wines; when the attacks happened, he was on his way to a trade show with a large selection of merchandise."

"That's your source," she said, realizing what he was talking about.

He nodded. "Consider it -- recompense for any inconvenience suffered on my account."

"Thanks, Doc."

"Gaius."

He held up his glass, and she chinked her own against it and said, "Kara."

The alcohol was beginning to take effect, but it wasn't dulling her thoughts as much as she would have liked it to. She wasn't alone in her head; Lee and Adama and Roslin and Tigh were in there with her, all shouting at her with different voices, demanding her loyalty, asking her to take responsibility for messes she hadn't created. The knot of tension between her shoulder blades was still there, like an itch she couldn't reach to scratch. And now, on top of everything else, there was a kind of tautness in her, like a cord that stretched up from between her legs all the way to her brain and was pulling tighter and tighter every time her arm brushed against Baltar's as they sat side by side on the bed.

Well, at least she could do something about that last one.

She finished her drink -- third or fourth? She'd lost count -- and put the glass down on the floor, on top of a pile of books. Putting her hand on his cheek, she drew him round so that he was facing her. Then, before he could react, she leaned in and kissed him, pressing her lips against his, pushing her tongue into his mouth, tasting him, owning him.

He exhaled, and she felt his breath rush into her, sweet and heavy with ambrosia fumes. When the kiss ended, he blinked, and then his grin widened. "Not shy, are you?"

"I like being in control."

She got up and moved around, so that instead of sitting beside him, she was straddling him. Then she pushed him back on to the bed. Now he was on his back, looking up at her, and she was on top of him, her knees on either side of his hips. Catching his wrists, one in each hand, she pinned them down above his head. Baltar laughed. "Is this how you subdue your prisoners in the military, Captain?"

"If they're lucky." She let go of his wrists and shucked off her uniform jacket. Then she pulled the tee she was wearing underneath it over her head and discarded it, and finally she reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. Now she was bare on top, but still fully dressed from the waist down. She looked down at Baltar looking up at her, and took a moment to enjoy the effect her nakedness was having on him. His eyes roved over her, and she saw him taking in her shoulders -- broad, for a woman -- her arms, toned from daily workouts, and her breasts. She raised her hands and touched them, letting her fingers caress the nipples until she felt them rising and hardening. Baltar was breathing more heavily, and his gaze was fixed on her circling fingertips.

"You are so real," he said, breathless and full of wonder. "So completely real."

Kara didn't know what he meant and she didn't much care either. She leaned down, dipping her body low enough that her breasts rubbed against the fabric of his shirt. It felt good, better than good, and she did it again, making a low sound in her throat. In this position, her thighs split right above his crotch, and she could feel him swelling under her. She pushed down, pressing herself into his hardness. That felt good, too.

"This," she said, tugging at his shirt's top buttons: "Off. Now." She pulled open his shirt, exposing his chest. He was slim, almost wiry; not really her type, but she wasn't in the mood to be choosy. She lowered her head and, starting down at his navel, dragged her tongue all the way up to his throat. He shuddered underneath her, squirming with pleasure, and when he laughed the vibrations passed up and into her.

He reached down and started pulling at the waistband of her uniform pants. Kara straightened up and leaned back so she was sitting up again, and let him unhook the belt and take down the zipper. He slipped his hand into the dark space between her legs and used his fingers to explore her. Easing herself forward, she helped him to find his way in, and when she felt him touch her inside, she thought the cord down her center was going to snap, it was pulled so frakking tight.

Baltar was moving his hips under her, pushing as if it wasn't his fingers inside her, and she was ready, she was so ready. But in her head Lee pleaded, Tigh leered, Roslin insinuated and the old man raged. They still wouldn't leave her alone.

She took hold of Baltar's wrist and pulled his hand back. The sudden absence of stimulation made her body ache with the need for it, but there was some necessary business to dispense with first. For a start, neither of them could finish undressing in this position. She rolled off him, on to the other side of the bed, and kicked off her pants and the gray standard-issue panties she was wearing underneath.

She was about to move back on to him, but he was faster, and suddenly their positions were reversed, with Baltar on top of her. "Who's in control now?" he asked, grinning wolfishly.

Looking down the space between their bodies, she saw his erection and grinned back at him. "Still me, looks like."

He started to lower himself, angling his body to enter her, but before he could Kara reached down and took hold of his cock. It filled her hand, hot against her palm. Baltar let out a gasp and froze, unable to get closer or move away. "I don't wanna think," she told him. "Make it so I don't have to."

She let go of him, and he slid into her. Immediately the rush of sensation began to fill up her mind, overtaking her, drowning out each accusing voice in turn. The last voice to fall silent was Lee's, and when finally she couldn't hear him begging her for help anymore, relief outweighed guilt. The only voice she could hear now was her own, shouting and gasping and crying out as the cord inside her stretched and stretched and stretched --

-- And finally snapped.

The sudden release of tension reverberated all the way through her, and she let out a final yell as all her thoughts merged into a single burst of wordless, primal feeling. She was only remotely aware of Baltar's continuing thrusts and, seconds later, his own shout and the spasm of his release.

She closed her eyes, and saw only darkness. The knot of tension between her shoulders dissipated at last, melting away as her body relaxed down into the mattress.

Baltar pulled out of her, and rolled into the hollow in the bed next to her. Kara pulled the bed's top blanket over both of them, and lay where she was, taking comfort in the silence.

She closed her eyes, found the focus she needed. Her icons were back in the dorm, but for once she didn't need them.

Lords of Kobol, Artemis and Aphrodite, hear my prayer...

***

Neither of the two marines on duty outside the brig noticed Adama approaching them; they were deep in a speculative conversation about the rumor that the Delphine Chariots pyramid team had survived the attacks and was somewhere in the Fleet, although no one seemed to know which ship they were on. When the marines finally did see Adama, they snapped to attention with matching expressions of surprise. It was the middle of the nightshift, and they must have been expecting an uneventful watch.

"At ease," Adama told them. "I'm here to see the Cylon."

"Yes, sir."

The first marine keyed in the access code on the panel next to the door. As he waited for it to unlock, Adama realized he could hear the muffled sound of a voice coming from the other side of it. "Is someone in there with it?" he asked.

"No, sir," the second marine said. "It's talking to itself. Has been for a while."

The door began to open, and the first marine made to accompany him inside. Adama stopped him by holding up his hand. "That won't be necessary. You can wait here."

"Yes, Commander."

Adama went into the brig, and the door closed behind him.

The Cylon was sitting on the floor in the corner of its cell. It had drawn its knees up to its chest and wrapped its arms around them. Its

eyes were open but glazed, and it didn't react at all when Adama came in.

It looked just like Lee. When it spoke, it sounded just like Lee. Starbuck thought it felt pain just like Lee had as well. Adama wasn't sure if he hoped that was true or feared it was.

Suddenly, the Cylon raised its head and looked up, but not at Adama. "Let's play a game," it said, as if there was someone else in the cell with it. "Let's play Colonials versus Cylons."

Adama remembered two little boys, racing around the yard of the house back on Caprica, using water-pistols as weapons and shrieking with excitement as they ambushed each other.

"You can be the Cylon. I'll be the Viper pilot." It frowned. "Because I'm older than you, Zak. That means I get to choose."

Adama took an unwilling step closer to the cell's wall of bars. He remembered lecturing his sons about their play; he'd tried to make them understand that the war they only knew about from movies and history lessons hadn't been the game they wanted to make it into. At the time, he'd thought he was doing the right thing; now he wondered if he hadn't been too earnest, too determined their generation shouldn't repeat the mistakes his had made. They'd only been children, and now he realized how precious their childhood had been. That safe, secure world, that backyard in the sunshine, was gone, and his children were gone with it.

"I'm not gonna be the Cylon, Zak!" It glared at the empty space in front of it. "Because I'm not, that's why!"

Adama felt a dull ache rising behind his eyes; it was the pressure of his unshed tears.

"No!" the Cylon said. Its voice was getting louder as it got angrier. "I'm the Viper pilot. I'm the good guy! I am! I am -- I am --" Abruptly, it leapt up and ran to the other side of the cell, as if trying to escape from something. "Shut up! Just shut up and leave me alone!"

The Cylon collapsed slowly, first sinking on to its knees, and then lying down on its side on the floor. It curled up into a near-fetal position and grew still. For a long time it didn't say anything at all. Adama wanted to leave, but found he couldn't. He knew that even if he left the brig, this scene would come with him. He had no choice but to see it through to the end.

The Cylon blinked. For a moment its expression cleared, and it seemed to Adama that it was looking at him, seeing him for the first time since he'd come in.

"Dad?" it said.

It wasn't Lee. It wasn't his son. His son was dead; both his sons were dead. There was no one left to call him father.

"Dad, tell Zak to stop... Tell them all to stop. They won't leave me alone, and I can't... I'll be good, I promise. Please tell them to leave me alone."

The Cylon lifted one arm and reached out to him. Its hand hovered for a minute or more before sinking on to the floor. Then its eyes shut, and it lay where it was, near the front of the cell, shaking.

Was he still a father if his sons were dead? Or had their deaths killed that in him in stages, half dying when Zak had crashed down from the sky in a bright ball of flame and half when Lee had breathed out one last time and simply given up the fight? He didn't know; he wasn't sure he wanted to know.

He had to know.

He walked forward, until he was standing against the bars of the cell. The Cylon was just on the other side of them, and the hand which had reached out to him was still outstretched. Adama put his own hand through the bars and touched its fingers with his. When there was no reaction from the Cylon, he held its hand in his own.

Adama remembered standing over a cot in a maternity ward, looking down at his tiny, perfect son for the first time. He remembered one small hand curling around his finger, and how he had marveled at the strength of the grip.

He had been a father. He still was. He always would be.

Deep within him, the dam he had been building for weeks finally gave way at its foundations. The ache behind his eyes became a sting in them, and he wept for his lost sons.

And for himself.

*** CONTINUED IN PART 2***