CHAPTER 11

A MATTER OF LOYALTY

When Bierns landed his Raptor on the Galactica, his craft was quickly lowered to the hangar bay, and was soon parked in its usual remote corner of the deck. Adama had tasked two reliable marines, Sergeant Brandy Harder and Corporal Andrew DiCordova, to await the spook's return with his new Cylon prize. Bierns respected them both, and had specifically requested that Harder be given day to day responsibility for Cylon security. Harder and DiCordova were true professionals. Whatever their personal doubts about allowing Shelly and Lydia to wander the decks, they would suppress them and do their level best to protect their charges at all times.

Because he did not want to send any mixed signals, Bierns released the Six before he opened the Raptor's hatch. She had offered no resistance on the Express, and had remained completely passive during the short flight back to the battlestar. She seemed willing to trust him so the spook in turn felt compelled to give her the benefit of the doubt.

The major was surprised to learn that there was a conference already under way in the War Room. The commander, Harder explained, had brought in Boomer, Starbuck, and Apollo in addition to Gaeta and Tigh. The sergeant was certain, however, that Shelly Godfrey was to be the star of this particular show. Bierns had no idea what the meeting was about, but he thought it a very good sign that Adama was putting Shelly into circulation so quickly. He wished that he could have been there to gauge Shelly's initial reaction to Boomer—and even more importantly, Sharon's reaction to the Six. This would have told him something about the depth of her conditioning. The thought of Shelly and Kara in the same chamber, however, tied his stomach in knots. To make matters worse, Harder was under orders to escort Bierns and the Six to the War Room ASAP. The last thing on Caprica that Bierns wanted was to have another Cylon see Shelly and Starbuck standing side by side. He could only hope that Boomer's presence would deflect her attention.

. . .

The briefing appeared to be well advanced when Lydia and Bierns arrived. Star charts were scattered all over the large planning table, and Shelly was clearly walking the assembled colonials through a highly technical discussion of Cylon tactics and technology. She was tapping one particular chart for emphasis.

"I would avoid these pulsar pointers because of DRADIS interference. If I was going to plan an ambush, I'd do it there. You should also know …"

Shelly looked up, and stopped in mid-sentence. Her eyes tracked from John to Lydia, and her face lit up with surprise. No one had told her that her sister would be attending this strategy session. The two Sixes had never met before, and their shared memories went back to a download that was now months in the past. For all intents and purposes, they were two strangers meeting for the first time.

"I'm sorry that we're late," Bierns said. "Lydia, allow me to introduce Commander William Adama, Colonel Saul Tigh, Captain Lee Adama, and lieutenants Valerii, Thrace and Gaeta." Lydia flinched when he introduced Boomer; it was slight, but it was also unmistakable. "Oh, and this is Miss Shelly Godfrey. Have the two of you met before?"

"No," the two women said, more or less simultaneously.

The commander nodded to the two new arrivals, then turned his attention back to Shelly. "Please continue, Miss Godfrey."

"Certainly," Shelly said. "Where was I? Oh, yes, pulsars. You should also think about what an EMP burst will do to cylon operating systems on the one hand, and to computers across this fleet on the other. Cylon baseships are heavily shielded against electromagnetic interference. At a guess, I would say that a pulse capable of shutting down all of your systems would have little if any effect on the Cylon network. There are real advantages to amalgamating organic and synthetic components. Specifically, their navigation and fire control systems would still be up and running after Galactica's have shut down. You would be completely at their mercy, and I don't have to tell you that they have none. So, I would give pulsars a very wide berth. If you approach too close, they will try and drive you closer. The outcome would be a slaughter, not a battle."

"What about nebular interference," Gaeta asked. "The soup doesn't take our DRADIS off line, but we get so many echoes that the readings are unreliable. Does Cylon DRADIS work any better, or are they as blind as we are inside a nebula?"

"If I may," Bierns interrupted, "would you allow Lydia to attempt that question?"

Bill looked inquiringly at the second Cylon, and gestured vaguely toward the chart spread out in front of him. "We would appreciate your help, Miss." The commander's tone was a study in politeness.

Lydia stepped up to the table, and examined the star chart. She nodded her head emphatically. "I agree with my sister; pulsars are death traps. You should avoid them at all costs. As for nebulae, Cylon DRADIS is as vulnerable to ghosts as your own. They would have to be right on top of you to get a target lock. The real question, then, is whether you can accurately plot a jump from inside a nebula. Nebulae are safe havens only if you can jump safely from within. If you have to leave the nebula to take bearings, then the Cylons won't even have to come in after you. They can just wait for you to come out to them."

Shelly nodded in agreement. "And how long could you stay inside a nebula before the stellar dust began to take its toll on your engines? Bill, it's been a long, long time since Galactica went in for a refit, and some of the civilian ships may have been out here even longer. A nebula is definitely a two-edged sword." Shelly blushed. Belatedly, she realized that she had just addressed the commander by his first name. She had never done that before, and she had no idea how he would react to such familiarity.

But Adama didn't even notice: he was engrossed in thought. "How about binaries? Their systems tend to be asteroid rich, with lots of usable resources. But the gravity well is a bitch. It takes a lot of tylium to climb down through two colliding solar gravitational wells to reach the asteroids, and even more energy to climb from the plane of the ecliptic to the pole, but that's often the only way to get free of the tides. Shelly, does Cavil bother with these systems, or does he just pass them by?"

Lydia and Shelly looked at each other, and then both turned to face the commander. "Bill," Shelly responded, "at bottom, Cavil is a coward. He will try and avoid taking a baseship inside a binary system because, with all that solar drift, it's hard to get a reliable FTL lock. A man who expects to live forever would have to be desperate to risk a jump that could send him into the heart of the nearest star because that may well be the one place where resurrection would fail." Shelly looked expectantly at her sister, willing her to add something more.

Lydia unconsciously tapped her fingers on the chart. She was trying to recall the data on binaries that she had seen in the stream. "I think that Cavil would be willing to risk a few Raiders. He'd send them into the system to scout for you. But they'll seek you out only along the ecliptic. You can avoid the Raiders, and reduce your tylium consumption, if you concentrate on asteroids and comets that are misaligned. The ones that are not in the plane of the ecliptic are much fewer in number but just as resource rich. It's a lot easier to match orbits, and it doesn't take much energy to escape their micro-gravity wells. Personally, I'd avoid planets and planetoids that are close to the solar equator. That's exactly where Cavil will expect to find you. And please get us off the galactic plane! Every time I was in the control room on the Express, I expected to see a baseship coasting along to port or starboard. Commander, you don't seem fully to appreciate just how dangerous it is to stay on this bearing." The two Cylons both trained wide eyes on Adama, willing him to understand that he was placing them all in great peril.

Adama pondered their remarks. Navigation was not his strong suit; he was, at the end of the day, just another old Viper jock. He had always relied upon others to get him there, and to bring him home. "Well, Lydia, what would you recommend?"

"North or south, it doesn't really matter," Lydia replied. "The important thing is to take us off a course that Cavil has intercepted … what … hundreds of times? The farther out we go, the harder we make it for the Cylons to find us."

"Funny," Apollo cut in. "I would have thought that you would be delighted to have Cavil find us. Every ship that he blows up brings you just that much closer to total victory. Genocide: isn't that your goal?" The CAG looked at the young Cylon with obvious distaste.

Lydia looked directly at Lee Adama, although she was speaking to all of them. "Captain, I am a Cylon, and I would prefer to do nothing that would harm my people. But as hard as it might be for you to accept, I am much more than a programmed machine. I am fully sentient, which means that I am eminently capable of thinking for myself, and drawing my own conclusions. I have feelings, and I am not afraid to embrace them. I do not want this fleet to be destroyed, and I do not want to watch humanity die. This war is an obscenity—the whole of it. You were wrong to create and then try to destroy my forebears, but paying you back cruelty for cruelty and death for death is no less wrong. We are all behaving like a bunch of spoilt children … all of us." Lydia snorted. "We may well be the only two intelligent life forms in this entire galaxy, and look at us. Just look at us. What a vast disappointment we must be in the eyes of our Cylon god, and your human gods. Perhaps we deserve each other."

How did we ever get to the point, Bill thought, where I find myself agreeing with Cylons more than with my own son? The commander cleared his throat. "Thank you, Lydia." Bill looked around the room before his eyes settled once more on the Cylon. When he spoke, there was evident respect in his tone. "Every now and again, we all need to be reminded that we've been behaving like a bunch of two year olds…. But let's get back to the business at hand. Mr. Gaeta, I'd like to hear what you have to say about departing the plane."

Felix took a moment to gather his thoughts. "Sir, as long as we stay near the equator, Astrometrics can take multiple fixes along both the X and Y axes to establish our position, and give us a true bearing for our next jump. The farther we travel above or below the plane, the more difficult it becomes to get an accurate fix. We would have to rely on computations along the Z axis to give us our heading, and the margin for error is substantially greater."

Shelly was listening to Felix Gaeta with one part of her mind, nodding in agreement, but another part of her mind was once again rapidly running calculations. She was looking down at the charts, but not really seeing them. "We could really stretch the red line," Shelly murmured without even being aware that she was talking out loud. "No more dark matter to contend with, no chance of jumping into the middle of a gamma radiation storm. The worm hole problem would go away—it would be so much easier to isolate the gravimetric fluctuations without all of that stellar activity interfering." Shelly curled her hand into a fist, and softly pounded on the table, two times … three. She looked up at the young officer. "Felix, I think I know a way to beat the navigational problem," she said. "Let's reverse engineer it, and use the Raptors to fix our position in the dark. Instead of taking the fleet out an arbitrary distance, we use the Raptor's more limited jump range to establish and maintain our relative position. We pick a number … four jumps … six jumps. We sight on the galactic center to take our bearings, and we try and remain the same number of Raptor jumps out at all times relative to the primary clusters. If we drift too far out, or come in too close, the Raptors can correct our position for us."

Lieutenant Gaeta ran the problem through his head. "That might work," he said with growing excitement—or at least as much excitement as Felix Gaeta could muster.

"Sir, that's what worries me the most," Boomer broke in. "The only way that our pilots would be able to find their way home would be on a reciprocal heading. Every time that we sent Raptors out to explore, the fleet would have to go dead in space. If you were forced to jump, the Raptors would be lost. The pilots would never be able to find you."

"And that's a risk I'm not willing to run," Adama said. He had already sent far too many people to their deaths … often their best and brightest.

"Then we'll just have to make sure that we can find them," Starbuck interjected. Now it was her turn to look around the room. "Right now, we're playing the Cylons' game. We're like rats in a maze, and they're slowly grinding us down. The pilots badly need rest, and we need to take a lot of the Vipers off line and give them a thorough overhaul. We can't do that with frakkin' baseships jumping down our ass three times a day!" Starbuck slammed her hand down on the table to emphasize her point: no one had ever accused Kara Thrace of being a gentle soul. "We build a big margin of safety into the Raptor fuel loads—enough not only to get them back to Galactica but also to get them back to whatever system we're exploring a second time. That becomes the new operational protocol. If the fleet has to jump, the Raptors return to the systems in question, and they wait there for us to come pick them up. We maximize their air supply, food, water, the lot!"

Adama liked what he was hearing. ''All right, then, here's the plan. "Shelly, I want you to work with Lieutenant Gaeta. Start plotting jumps that move us farther and farther away from the equator. Lydia, I want you, Apollo, Boomer, and Starbuck to put your heads together and finds ways to extend the range of our Raptors. Air looks to be the limiting factor, so see if you can find a way to cheat. But build a large margin of error into your calculations, and then compensate for it. I don't want to lose a pilot to asphyxiation because we got there an hour too late. Thank you, everybody, now let's get to work!"

As the officers began to file out of the room, Bierns asked for a few more minutes of his time. He indicated that he wanted to discuss living arrangements for Lydia, but in reality he wanted to find out if the two Cylons were prepared to give up Sharon Valerii.

The commander preempted him. Adama turned to Lydia, and extended his hand in friendship. The Cylon looked at the commander for a very long moment before taking his hand in her own. "Young lady," Adama said, "I want to thank you very much for your candor. The older I get, the harder it becomes for me to see things in the black and white terms of my youth. John keeps reminding me that it is not a crime to be a Cylon, and of course he's right. I'm prepared to accept that there are good and bad in both of our species, and I'm ready to take a chance on you. I hope that you'll work to build bridges between us, and never do anything to abuse my trust. I would hate to have people accuse me of being an old fool."

Lydia and Shelly looked at one another, neither of them sure how to proceed. "Commander," Lydia finally said, "this is very hard. I don't know any easy way to tell you, but you have to know." Lydia took a deep breath. "Commander Adama, one of your officers is a Cylon."

Adama went very, very still.

"The sleeper agent … the Eight who sabotaged the water supply," Shelly interjected, "is Lieutenant Valerii."

Bill sagged … there was no other word for it. John Bierns thought that the man looked crushed; if it was possible to age ten years in one second, he had just done so. The spook had to feign shock at this revelation, but there was nothing manufactured about his sympathy for the commander. He knew how much Boomer meant to the older man. "Bill," Bierns said, "I'm sorry … I'm so very, very sorry."

Seeing Lydia's confusion, he turned to the Cylon and quietly explained. "Sharon means the world to the commander. She's like a daughter to him … he loves her." Bierns didn't know what else to say.

Shelly Godfrey would never have believed that a Cylon's heart could break … until that moment. She looked at William Adama, and what she saw … it felt as if someone had taken an ax and cleaved her heart in two. She stepped toward the commander, and placed her arm around his shoulders. "Bill … we'll get through this. We will. Please…. Don't shut us out. Don't try and carry this burden by yourself."

Bill offered Shelly a wan smile as he fought to regain his composure. He reached up, and gently caressed her arm. "It doesn't matter," he said, his voice cracking, "it really doesn't matter. I don't care if she's a Cylon … I just don't care. It doesn't change how I feel about her … it doesn't change anything. I will not abandon her! I'm just so tired of losing the people I love…. I swear to the gods, I am not going to lose her!"

Bill and Shelly stared at one another, each of them in pain—pain that, this time, did spring from a common source. Shelly wanted nothing more than to take Bill Adama in her arms, and somehow make the pain go away. It wasn't right that he should suffer so badly for the sake of a Cylon … truly, this wasn't fair. It came to Shelly that, behind the high walls that William Adama had so carefully erected to hide his feelings, there stood a man with an infinite capacity for kindness and compassion. She wondered if there was a man to equal him in the entire universe. More than that, she wondered if all the pain and pride clashing inside of her was what humans meant when they talked about love. Love hurts. How many songs talked about how much love hurts? Shelly didn't know … all she knew was that William Adama was in terrible, terrible pain because he loved a Cylon and he refused to let go. She marveled at his absolute determination to love someone he was supposed to hate. And now she was hurting, and for one reason and one reason only: she couldn't let go. Shelly Godfrey couldn't turn away from William Adama, and she didn't even want to try. She wanted to comfort him, and if she couldn't end his suffering, at least she could share it. Was she falling in love? Had she already fallen? The answers eluded her, but she didn't care. She clung tenaciously to one central truth: there was a path, and it led to a distant and uncertain future—but never again would Shelly Godfrey or William Adama of necessity have to walk it alone.