In Cheyenne Mountain's former stockade and now makeshift quarantine unit, Grae could see that the older man in the containment unit before them was completely insensate, his mouth open, drool trailing down his cheek. He was in four point restraints, for no apparently good reason considering his lack of consciousness, and his skin was already discolouring from a vivid bruise coming up on his jaw. In the unit beside him, the Polynesian-looking man was sitting on his bunk, staring at his counterpart as if in some kind of trance. He barely looked up at their arrival, trembling slightly when he did notice them and wrapping his arms around himself almost fearfully. It made the WASA astronaut feel sick.
Grae had strained to hear the conversation going on ahead of him between General Roach, the base commander and the Director of National Intelligence when they had walked through the base, but, not surprisingly, he was kept just far enough behind them that he had been out of earshot. What exactly hewas doing here, he wasn't sure. From the way Roach was studying him, he was getting the idea that the general was waiting for some kind of reaction.
"Who are . . ." Grae started to ask, before the colonel broke in.
"What happened here?" Bradshaw demanded of the guards.
"Weekly labs and swabs, Colonel," one soldier explained, still at attention. "It isn't the first time he's become violent when we need to re-swab him. We had to sedate him."
"Swab? What the hell with? A baseball bat?"
"He was . . . uncooperative, sir."
"Really?" Bradshaw looked at both guards and shook his head. Obviously, they liked aspects of their work a bit too much. Too much power often wasn't a good thing. A taste could be even worse, in the right circumstances.
"The soldiers he attacked are in the infirmary. The medical officer just left," the other added, eyes forward, back ramrod straight. It was plain they both thought the treatment had been justified.
"What's this about a swab?" General Roach asked, frowning.
"They get swabbed weekly to check for microorganisms," Bradshaw explained.
"What exactly do you swab?" Grae asked, drawing in a deep breath and realizing abruptly that these were the two men who had been piloting the shuttle that WASA had been trying to confirm the existence of for the last two months. The one that WASA had deduced had to be the Endeavour. He could feel the pounding of his heart against his chest. The Polynesian man made no sense to him whatsoever, but as to the other, if he looked beyond the mostly grey hair, the now slack features, the lines that came naturally with age . . .
"Orifices, Major," Bradshaw replied. "It's purely precautionary and part of the quarantine protocol."
"Swab my orifices, and I might react the same . . . Jaysus Murphy. . ." Grae muttered, pasting himself against the thick plastic barrier between himself and the older man. He could feel his face lose its colour as he realized who was lying there before him. "That's . . . that's . . ." He shook his head in disbelief, realizing he was sounding like a complete and utter idiot. Immediately, Jess leapt to mind, since she'd be the first to tell him so if given the opportunity. If she only knew . . . How long had they waited for answers? How long had gut feeling done battle with circumstantial evidence? "Dickins! That's . . ." He panted like a man who had run a marathon, so overwhelmed was he. "Captain Richard Dickins! Isn't it?" he demanded, turning abruptly to face the general. "Isn't it?"
Roach narrowed his eyes, crossing his arms over his chest. "You tell me, Major Ryan. Is it Dickins? If anyone here would know for sure, it would be Dr. Patrick Ryan's son."
xxxxx
According to his readouts, flat, brown desert steppes stretched out below his ship as Starbuck followed the Venture towards the WASA Space Station in the landlocked country that the Earthlings called Kazakhstan. It made him curious to see it with the naked eye and he briefly regretted the occlusive canopy and interactive helmet that dictated he navigate strictly by scanner array. How anybody could launch an offensive on this enormous base, even in the dark, without anybody noticing it ahead of time, made him wonder if eyes had been purposely averted. Or closed.
He still hadn't had any luck with re-establishing long-range communications and had not only failed to notify the Endeavourthat he'd left three inert Cylon Raiders in Earth's orbit, but also that he was about to land in what was increasingly looking like a hostile situation. He could only hope that either Lu would pick up the Cylons on one of her sweeps or that one of the Endeavour's advance patrols would. A light flashed and he touched his control panel, his brow furrowing as the life support seemed to revert to some kind of master program, the oxygen concentration dropping in reaction. Try as he might, he couldn't adjust it. It was as though it was locked by the initial program. The air would soon be getting dangerously thin in here, even by Paradeen standards, just perfect for Espridians. Frack!
"Starbuck, are your people familiar with decontamination procedures?" Jess' voice suddenly came across the line from the Venture.
"Yes," he replied, still trying to manipulate his systems. "It's part of our basic training. Why?"
"Well, I just want to warn you that you're going to be subjected to going through decon." She paused for a moment."It's just procedure and nothing to be alarmed about."
"O-kay," he replied haltingly as they drew closer to the base. He was picking up a landing field with an increasing influx of people and vehicles either already situated there or heading towards it. "So how long does that take? Five centons or so?"
"Cen-tons?"
"Minutes," he corrected himself. Damn!Earth had such strange time units and he honestly had a hard time keeping them straight.
"It could take hours, Starbuck, depending on how thorough they are."
"Come again?" he asked, getting an uneasy feeling. "Hours? How could it take so long?"
"If you cooperate fully, it will make it easier," she replied evasively.
"Cooperate fully? What the frack does that mean, Dayton?" he snapped, really not liking the sound of it. He began to feel short of breath as his anxiety climbed. Again, he checked his readouts. Oxygen was staying stubbornly low.
"Don't give them any excuses to get rough, Starbuck," she warned him.
"Listen, sweet lady, in a few centars when your people are looking between my toes for hidden enemies, those Cylon Raiders are going to be reinitialising their systems! I need to get a message back to the Endeavour! We honestly don't have time for this!" He puffed as though he had just sprinted here from the Endeavour, his head feeling light in reaction to his outburst. The thinner air would give him more time in theory, making the remaining oxygen last longer, but if he didn't adjust to it adequately, he'd black out.
"Call me 'sweet lady' again, Starbuck, and I'll make sure they probe further than between your toes!" Jess abruptly retorted before gasping aloud as she absorbed his message. "Whoa, now! Do you mean you didn't permanently disable those monsters?"
"That's exactly what I mean," he huffed, feeling sweat trailing down his back. "Hopefully, they'll get pulled down by gravity and burn up in the atmosphere first. If not . . . Well, trust me on this, Cylons wake up cranky!"
"This is Baikonur Control. No more chatter. We have you on approach.Venture, you are approved for immediate landing on Runway Three. Strike Captain Starbucks, you are approved for immediate landing on Runway Four. Your escorts will guide you in. If either of you deviate, you will be fired on. Do you understand?"
"Roger, Baikonur," the Venture's pilot confirmed.
"Do you understand, Strike Captain Starbucks?" the voice again demanded.
As the fighters closed in around him, Starbuck glanced at his life support, briefly considering firing up his electronic countermeasures and hitting the turbos, rather than subjecting himself to whatever unpleasant decontamination procedure Jess Dayton had warned him about. Instinct told him that the Wraith could scramble their targeting system enough that he could get away, even though two of their birds had a lock on him. But even if he did manage to get away, he'd still have to land in the next ten centons or he'd black out from the lack of air, and crash. Ten to one, he'd never escape on foot across the barren landscape below him, even if it wasn't the swamps of Atilla with a whole Cylon garrison after him. He'd only be delaying the inevitable unpleasantness.
"Acknowledged," he agreed reluctantly. The ground was less than twenty metrons under him now and he dropped his gear. "And it's Starbuck, not Starbucks. I'm one of a kind."