01 - Battlestar Galactica

For Julia and Alexandra,
hot on my heels and gaining fast

The Cylons were created by Man. Created to make life easier on the Twelve
Colonies. They began as simple robots—toys for the amusement of the
wealthy and the young—but it was not long before they became useful, and
then indispensable, workers. As their sophistication grew, the Cylons were used
for the difficult and dangerous work that humans preferred to avoid: mining,
heavy industry, deep space construction.

And finally, perhaps inevitably, they were used for war. Not against enemies
from without, but by human against human, as the Twelve Colonies found reason to
wage war against one another. The Cylons were the greatest soldiers in the
history of warfare. They were smart, fast, and deadly. Successive models had
become increasingly independent, capable of making decisions without human
orders. And they were utterly without conscience. Killing, to the Cylons, was
simply one of the functions for which they had been superbly designed.

In hindsight, perhaps it should not have been a surprise that the day would
come when the Cylons decided to kill their masters. And when that day came, the
horror of war was unleashed upon all twelve of the Colonies of Man. For ten long
and bloody years, humanity fought—not just for freedom, but for survival.
The Twelve Colonies, facing a common, implacable foe, at last came together and joined as one. Many fought, and
many died, in the effort to destroy the mechanized race that humanity itself had
conceived and brought into being.

There would be no victory. But through valiant fighting, and with the
mobilization of every available resource throughout the human sphere, the Cylons
were gradually driven from the immediate part of space occupied by humanity. In
the end, an armistice was declared. Humanity would live in peace, while the
Cylons left to find another world to call their own. Live and let live was the
philosophy… if “live” was a term that could be applied to the existence of
the robots. No one knew the location of the Cylon world. But to maintain the
peace, a remote space station was built in the dark emptiness between the stars,
to be a place where Cylon and human would meet and maintain diplomatic
relations.

Once a year, every year, the Colonials sent an officer for the scheduled
meeting. After the first year, the Cylons sent no one. No one had seen or heard
from the Cylons in over forty years.

That was about to change.

Armistice Station

The diplomatic spaceship emerged from its Jump with a momentary flash of
light. Its prior inertia carried it like a boat on a river toward its
destination. The only propulsion required was braking thrust.

The spidery space station hung silent in the darkness, billions of miles from
the nearest inhabited world. A row of navigational marker lights winked along
its vertical spine, barely illuminating its outline. The approaching spaceship,
an ungainly white transport, pierced the darkness with tiny flares of its
maneuvering jets as it slowed. Nearing the docking section, it rotated and
pitched upward to align itself with the station. Practice made the intricate
ballet of the docking maneuver seem casual; the pilots had performed it so many
times it was an automatic movement, like a hand slipping into a glove.

The thrusters brought the ship to a halt a hundred meters from the station. A
telescoping passageway emerged from the side of the station’s docking port and
stretched out, crossing the gap with a single gliding movement. It drew up into place against the ship’s
airlock, and with a series of thunks, the mag-locks made it fast.

Another scheduled meeting was about to begin. In theory.

The intercom crackled to life, and the pilot’s voice filled the departure
lock.
“Colonel Wakefield, we are docked. You may enter Armistice Station at
your discretion. If you need anything, we’ll be here. I hope you don’t get too
lonely over there.”

The colonel pressed the talk button on the intercom. “Don’t worry about me,
Captain. I’m used to it by now. I’ll be back soon enough, no doubt with nothing
to show for it.” With the sigh of someone who had done this job many times
already, he drew himself up straight and stepped to the airlock hatch. The latch
mechanism stuck for a moment, then swung open, revealing the interior of the
passageway. Picking up his briefcase, the colonel stepped across the threshold
and began the long, deliberate walk down the passageway and into the station’s
interior.

There was an unavoidable grimness to the job, but he vowed not to give in to
a sense of futility. If the Cylons did not show up—and he fully expected that
they would not—he would not let that reflect on his own performance.

His footsteps echoed in the silence of the station as he left the passageway
and airlock and passed through the long corridor leading to the meeting chamber.
He shivered a little, and wrinkled his nose at the musty smell of the place.
There was dust in the air—the filters must be in need of replacement—and a
patina of grime everywhere. The maintenance robots must be breaking down, he
thought. They were Cylon-built machines, of course—humans no longer had
robots—but really, the wonder was that they still functioned at all. He doubted
they’d been serviced since the station was built. What did that say about the endurance of the
Cylon technology? The thought caused him a little shudder, which he did not
allow to the surface.

Only once a year was there any official activity in the station. And that
activity consisted of the colonel arriving, waiting three days for his Cylon
counterpart to show up, and then leaving. Not once in the last thirty-nine years
had a Cylon representative appeared, to meet with him or with any other member
of the Colonial delegation. The colonel often wondered why they bothered. But he
knew the reason: Even if the Cylons did not honor their commitment to the
armistice terms, at least the Colonials were keeping up their end of the
agreement. And how else could they maintain vigilance, since they did not even
know in what direction to look for the Cylon world, or even if it really
existed?

The colonel came to the massive closed doors of the meeting chamber and
pulled them open. The sound reverberated in the room as the doors slammed closed
behind him. He strode forward, heels clicking on the broad-tiled deck. The
chamber was itself practically a hallway—long, widening slightly toward the
center, with outward-canted walls and steel support beams arcing low across the
room in closely spaced rows. It was a spare space, devoid of decoration or
color, lit along the edges of the floor and by widely spaced ceiling lights. Its
very shape seemed to suggest the meeting of adversaries: long, to permit ample
time to view the approaching opposite, and barren, as if to deny any possibility
of emotion or warmth.

A narrow table stretched most of the way across the center of the room, a
single chair on either side. The Colonial flag hung at rest on its pole at the
left end of the table; there was no flag for the Cylons. The colonel sat down in
the chair and snapped open his briefcase. With efficient care, he removed two
framed photos from the briefcase—one of his son, and one of his wife—and placed them at his left hand on the table. He gazed at them for a moment,
allowing himself the reminder of home, of what he was here to protect—before
firmly assuming again an attitude of detachment. Then he took out a sheaf of
papers and began leafing through them: briefing documents on the Cylons, as they
had last been seen, forty years ago. He knew the documents by heart, but he
reviewed them nevertheless, with the steady weariness of someone who has done
the same thing over and over, year after year, for a very long time.

Nothing had changed, he thought, except him. A year older, a year closer to
retirement, a year wearier of this charade. The Cylons would never come. For all
he knew, for all
anyone
knew, they were extinct. Maybe they had turned on
each other and annihilated their entire mechanical civilization. Wouldn’t that
be justice. Or maybe they had set off across the galaxy in search of new realms
to conquer. But how would the Colonials ever know? When the robots departed the
star system forty years ago, they hadn’t left a forwarding address.

The colonel sighed and closed his eyes, resting his head against the seat
back. It was silent here, but he was used to the silence. It was restful, in a
way. Later, when the wait got to be too long, he would catch up on some reading.
Or return to the transport ship for rest and relaxation. But for now, he would
just sit here as a representative of his worlds, and soak in the solitude.

It wasn’t long before he caught himself nodding off, and he drew himself up
with a deep breath. It wouldn’t do to nap. He was on watch—even if he was here
as a diplomat, and even if he passed the three days alone.

He glanced at the photos of his wife and son, and then looked over the Cylon
briefing sheets once more. After a few minutes more, he closed his eyes again.

He jerked awake. Maybe he
was
getting old. It used to be he could stay alert on marathon watches with the best of them. He blinked and
stretched his mouth in a yawn, shifted uncomfortably in the chair. Gradually he
closed his eyes once more. And began to dream of a place, more than a light-year
behind him, where the sun streamed down onto a beach on Caprica, where he and
his wife, both younger then, had played with their two-year-old son. That had
been a happier time, perhaps the happiest of his life. That was before the
stresses of parenthood, and those of the military and diplomatic life, had
combined to take their toll. He loved his wife and his son, of course. But
still, there were times in his dreams when…

Boom.

The colonel started awake again.
What was that?

He jerked up straight. The doors in front of him, at the Cylon end of the
hall, were swinging open, splitting to reveal a blaze of light. Sweet Lords of
Kobol. It couldn’t be…

The sounds of footsteps were soft, but unmistakably metal on tile. Two huge
chrome robots marched in through the open doors, then stepped to either side as
guards.
Cylon Centurions. Modified, but clearly recognizable.
The colonel
blinked, every sense afire now. The robots raised their arms, which appeared to
end with the barrels of built-in weapons; the weapons folded back suddenly,
revealing long, talonlike fingers that flipped forward to form something like
hands.

The colonel stared at them, pulling momentarily at his collar before catching
himself. The robots stood utterly impassive. Each had a single crimson eye that
slid back and forth across the angular brow, scanning, scanning.

Something else was coming; the colonel could hear the footsteps. Another
robot, he assumed. The two standing guard did not move an inch. The colonel licked his lips nervously, waiting.

A shadow moved in the light, a figure coming toward him. Walking. Emerging
from the light…

It was a blonde woman, dressed in a crimson jacket and skirt, and elegant
boots that came nearly to her knees. She was stunningly beautiful. She walked
toward him with a precise, confident stride, one foot in front of the other. The
closer she came, the more unnervingly beautiful she looked. She exuded
sensuality. Her hair fell in loose waves and curls to her shoulders; her figure
was riveting, her eyes sharp and probing. He drew a hoarse breath, only
half-believing what he was seeing. But what he was thinking was,
A hostage of
some kind. They’re releasing a hostage.

But why? Why would they do that? And why now?

The woman walked directly to the table, then came around the end, without a
word. She leaned against the edge of the table, directly in front of him.
Can’t get much more direct than that.
She might as well have been in his
lap. His heart began pounding.

On her face was a hint of a smile, rather pensive. She cocked her head and
listened, or perhaps was waiting for the colonel to say something. She leaned
forward, bringing her face close to his. And she spoke the first words the
colonel had heard since leaving his ship. In a low, sultry voice, she asked,
“Are you alive?”

The words went through him like electricity. He stammered, trying to reply,
and finally managed, “Yes.”

One hand on his shoulder now, she leaned closer still. He could feel her
breath, warm and sweet on his face.
So beautiful, so…
Before he could
complete the thought, she said, just a little more forcefully, “Prove it.” And
then, in an exquisite torture of slow motion, she moved her hand to the back of
his neck, drew him to her and kissed him.