Chapter 2

By the Numbers

Thirty-two, or thirty-four. Nineteen. Three. Six. One hundred forty-nine. Numbers mean different things to different people, but there's no escaping them. You can ignore them, but not escape them.

One hundred forty-nine days since the Cylons had destroyed our way of life, and every day after that they'd been working on annihilating us. They didn't seem to have unlimited numbers of skin jobs and tin cans, but they didn't seem like they were in a big rush to finish us off, either. They were just—methodical. Relentless, like one of those big mining machines that crept forward at a walking pace, but nothing could stop it.

We knew who they were, the skin jobs. The generic male brown haired one, a female with dirty-blonde hair, a gorgeous female blonde who looked like a model, a dark-haired female who was also a knock-out, a dark-skinned male, and another male who looked sort of punk-ish.

Six of them altogether, but there was plenty of debate if there were any more. Gerry, one of our team who'd been a high school chemistry teacher, always had his still going; late at night, after everyone had too much to drink, the discussions could get pretty heated. Sam didn't let it happen very often, people getting wasted. A couple weeks after I'd started using the sniper rifle he'd caught me nearly falling-down drunk… he'd yanked me away, practically carried me, and stuck his finger down my throat to make me throw up. He didn't say much then, but the next morning he was furious at me.

"What the frak were you thinking?" he demanded, his voice low and hard.

I didn't really have an excuse, and I had a rotten hangover and couldn't really think clearly anyway. "I, uh, I was just--"

"Just!" he interrupted scathingly. "Dammit, Dan, you're our number one shooter! If I needed you to go out now, do you think you could do a proper job of it?"

I didn't look at him, shaking my head gingerly. I felt horrible physically, and also that I'd let him down. "Sorry," I said in a low voice.

I heard him take in a deep breath and let it out. "Don't ever do that again," he said, his voice softening a little.

"Yessir," I muttered.

Then, with humor, he said, "Anyhow, that rot-gut will stunt your growth. Look what it did to me."

I glanced up at him, startled. "But—," I began, then realized he was joking. He was not a small guy. I relaxed and rubbed my forehead. "Ain't worth it, anyway," I said. 'Rot-gut' was a good description of how I felt at the moment.

"Frakkin-A," he nodded. Later I heard him cussing out Gerry more than he'd cussed out me.

It was just a couple days after that we had to bug out from our base at the high school. Sam had sentries posted all around, and the Cylons were getting closer. We hadn't had electricity for awhile, but otherwise it had been a nice place to 'camp'. The second camp was completely living off the land, shelters made of branches and tarps, and a few tents. I was used to it, but some of our team had a hard time, especially a couple of the older people. Sam could see it wasn't good for morale as well as not being ideal for long-term, and he sent out scouting parties to find us a better place.

Three base camps. The third place, the place that the scouts found, seemed ideal. It had been some sort of summer camp, with a collection of small cabins spread out over a couple acres, a large covered pavilion at the center. On one side of the pavilion was a kitchen designed to cook and feed over a hundred campers; ideal for our group. The tree cover was thick enough to hide us from the air, but it was old growth, pretty clear underneath so we could see if the Cylons were getting near.

I went out on missions, sometimes to cover for a raiding party, sometimes alone just to up the casualty count. After we'd found out they could download, I'd wondered about the logic behind repeatedly killing them, but Sam believed that if they died, over and over, eventually they'd get tired of it, and leave. Jean gave me a more practical reason—we were depleting their supplies.

"They can't have an unlimited supply of replacement bodies," she told me in her dry, factual way. "They might have a great number of them, but every one we kill makes them expend energy and resources to bring the new one on-line. As long as we can disrupt their supply line, we're hurting them."

Jean. Jean Barolay. She was one of Sam's top people. I think she did have some sort of military experience, although I never found out what it was. She was a redhead, hard and ruthless when it came to the enemy, only slightly more lenient on us. Sam and his Buccaneers had kept up with a fitness routine, but Jean turned it into a military workout for anyone who went on the raids, even those of us who weren't Buccaneers.

The workouts were hard, but I didn't care. I'd try to stay near the front when we ran, where I could see her. I wanted to feel that fiery hair, run my fingers over that creamy skin… yeah, I had the hots for her. She was about ten years older than me, though, and never looked at me like I was anything more than another soldier, a player in our war game. I'd heard that redheads were supposed to have tempers to match their hair, but she was always cool and in control.

I watched as she talked to Sam, on the other side of the pavilion, not eating the food in front of me. The food was actually pretty good, we had team members who knew how to cook. I watched Sam and Jean, though, because they were looking at a map and I could tell they were planning. They came to some sort of agreement, and they both looked over at me.

So I was going to be in on this one. I picked up my fork and pushed food around, waiting as Jean came over. Even though I saw her coming, I still jumped when she sat next to me.

"Hey, Jean," I replied, glancing at her. It was hard to look at her like it was normal… I wanted to stare, and then I found myself not looking at her enough.

"Are you okay, Dan?" she asked.

"Huh?" I said, puzzled. "I'm fine."

"You're not eating," she commented.

"Oh, uh… I'm not really hungry," I told her.

"Are you sure you're all right? You look tired," she said. Was her voice a little softer than usual?

I looked around at the others in the pavilion, and said with irony, "Who doesn't look tired?"

She didn't speak, and I was compelled to tell her the truth, "I have a killer headache…"

"You haven't been drinking Gerry's poison again have you?" she asked sharply.

I shook my head and hid my wince. "Frak, no, Sam would flatten me if I did."

She snorted softly. "Not if I flatten you first."

I had to chuckle, and looked at her again. Was she concerned about me, Dan, or just concerned because I was a soldier and she had a mission for me? I couldn't tell. "What do you have for me, Jean?" I asked.

"We found another of the farms," she told me, smoothing the map over the table next to my plate.

I nodded, looking at it. I'd never been in a 'farm', but knew it was a building where the Cylons were experimenting with women, our women, because they couldn't get pregnant themselves. I couldn't understand why they'd want to, when they could make as many bodies as they needed, but I didn't understand much about the Cylons. I knew about shooting them, though.

"We can't risk blowing the building up, we're getting short on medical supplies," she went on.

I knew that; the last time I'd had a headache, our 'doc' didn't have anything for it. I hadn't even bothered to ask her this time.

"The site is ideal to drive a lot of them outside…" Jean said. "Main doors, a clear plaza in front of the building…"

I nodded again. Outside, where I'd have a clear shot at them.

"Tonight, we're going to put a gas grenade on the roof by the intake vent… tomorrow you need to shoot it to set it off, then target as many as you can that come outside," she told me more details of the mission, but once she showed me where it was on the map, I was concentrating on where would be the best place to shoot from.

We knew the skin jobs were susceptible to the gas grenades. I'd shot at gas grenades before, as well as power grid boxes and vehicles and satellite dishes.

"Tin cans?" I asked her. Everyone else called the Centurions 'bullet heads', but I called them tin cans, like the cans my dad would set up for me to shoot at, when I was a kid. Metal targets.

"Two that we've seen," she said. Tin cans weren't susceptible to the gas, so I'd have to get them down first.

"It will take me most of the night to get in place," I mused.

"It's going to take Sam most of the night to get that gas grenade up on the roof," she replied.

I put my hand around my rifle, about to get up, but Jean put her hand on my arm. "You need to eat, Dan," she said evenly.

"I'm not hungry," I said irritably.

She didn't reply, just kept her hand on my arm. I breathed in and out. The headache made my stomach queasy, but I nodded and leaned the barrel of the rifle against the front of my shoulder again, picking up the fork.

She took her hand off my arm, but didn't move, sitting next to me while I ate. "You and that rifle," she murmured.

I carried it with me everywhere, but that wasn't unusual. A lot of us carried a weapon with us all the time; Jean herself had a handgun holstered on her belt. I'd named my rifle, which I'd thought was a bit weird, but once, under the influence of Gerry's 'poison', I'd admitted it, and found out that others also named their guns.

Nemesis. The goddess of vengeance and justice.

"Get some sleep before you head out, Dan," Jean said when I was done eating. She stood, and I got up also, holding the rifle. I felt naked when I didn't have it with me.

"Yeah," I said.

She looked at me steadily for a moment, then smiled slightly and nodded, turning and walking away.

I managed to get a couple hours of uninterrupted sleep with the memory of that smile in my mind, and after nightfall set out on my slow, deliberate journey to get in position.

After daybreak, I saw Sam's signal that the rest of them were in place and ready. I double-checked the dialed-in settings on my scope, double-checked the wind, double-checked everything. Then I fired and set off the gas grenade.

I didn't pay any attention to what my teammates were doing. I waited until there were a good number of the skin jobs outside, and started firing.

The impact of a round doesn't throw a body back, like they show in movies, but the target moves once you hit it, making it hard for anyone else to tell what direction the shots are coming from. My rifle was camouflaged as well as I was, and I got quite a few before I ran out of targets. Most of them were the dark-skinned males, but there were some of the others, too.

There's no escaping numbers. With this day's count, I'd destroyed nineteen of the tin cans, killed thirty-two skin jobs. Or thirty-four, if you count those first two blonde ones.