ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

PART SIX

The only incident of the inbound voyage occurred on the fourth day out, when some of Blue squadron’s pilots ran head-on into Commander Aeneas’ policy on alcohol. Apollo had to be summoned from sleep period; he arrived in the Columbia’s officer’s club looking unamused. “What,” he asked, “is going on?”
Colonel Akamas had arrived from the bridge a few centons earlier and had already conferred with the senior Security guard present. He said, “Evidently your pilots took exception to one of our standing orders.”
“Which is?”
“No alcohol within 12 centares of a duty period. Your pilots are scheduled to be on morning duty in nine centares. As you know, ship commanders are given considerable latitude in such matters, and our crew has never found it to be a problem,” Akamas concluded in a faintly superior fashion.
His attitude so irritated Apollo that he turned from the exec to Boomer, who was lurking inconspicuously in the background, having been present but apparently uninvolved. “What happened?”
“Four of our guys came in, found out they couldn’t have a drink…and got a little upset,” Boomer explained.
“How upset?”
“They jumped the barkeep,” Akamas provided.
Apollo groaned inwardly. I don’t need this. I have enough problems with Miriam. “I don’t believe anyone informed my pilots of this policy. Certainly no one told me.”
“You should have checked,” Akamas replied evenly. Apollo winced. He’s right, I should have. The exec continued, “The ship’s standing orders are posted, among other places, in the pilot’s quarters.”
“In Sagitaran,” Boomer pointed out deferentially, adding, “Sir.”
“Surely some of your men speak Sagitaran,” Akamas said, in a tone that indicated that all truly civilized beings did.
Looking at the four Blue squadron pilots being held by Columbia security guards, Giles and Jolly prominent among them, Apollo said, “None of them do. If any of the others do, I don’t know of it. All of my pilots are Caprican except for two Gemons and a Virgon.”
Akamas took that into consideration, then he said, “In that case, I suppose an exception can be made. This time. Security, turn these men over to Captain Apollo. You may discipline them or not at your discretion, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir. They will be disciplined.”
Akamas nodded and left, followed by a knot of rather disappointed-looking Security guards.
“What are you going to do, sir?” Boomer asked Apollo.
“Get someone to translate the standing orders. Next, I want you to see that that bunch reports to Life Station for a checkout, and then to the brig. Two days each.”
“Yes, sir. Only two days?” The normal sentence for such an infraction aboard the Galactica would have been a secton.
“I want them out by the time we get where we’re going. We may need them, Boomer. I hope not, but we may.”
Boomer lowered his voice and said, “With all due respect and everything, some of the crew aboard this ship have an attitude problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“They seem to think they’re better than we are.”
“I doubt they really think that,” Apollo said, in spite of occasional personal thoughts to the contrary. “They do know they’re different and they’re proud of it. They’re no worse in that way than the Scorpians, but don’t tell them that. Scorpians and Sagitarans don’t get on at all.”
“Sometimes I wonder how all the different tribes and societies in the Colonies hold together.”
“Two reasons. We’re all equally afraid of the Cylons and secondly, we have more in common than otherwise. It’s just some tribes don’t like to admit it.”

Two days later the Columbia arrived within the region of space that Aeneas suspected might contain a hidden Cylon base. The area he intended to explore was a cube a little less than a parsec on each side, containing a total of four star systems. As the Columbia arrived in the first system, both of the ship’s warp scouts and several strikers were launched to hunt out any other warp gates the system might contain and look for any Cylon installations.
It was well known that with few exceptions the Cylons liked to establish their bases on planets with breathable atmospheres, just as they kept their ships pressurized when it was not necessary for them. The Cylons, after all, were robots. It was generally suspected that the Cylons continued to live primarily on habitable worlds and provide a breathable atmosphere on their ships less as a memory of their reptilian forebears than to ensure the health and well being of organic prisoners and slave laborers. But that was conjecture, as all too much about the Cylons had to be.
The first star system they entered proved to have two more or less habitable planets. Commander Aeneas cautiously dispatched drone probes to provide close scans.
The reports the probes returned were disappointing. Both planets were devoid of life, apparently the result of a catastrophic solar upheaval within the past few millennia. Thus it was easy for the probes to see that there were no sign of untoward activity on either planet, nor did there appear to ever have been any.
The next star system they visited had one habitable world, and it was, by contrast, teeming with lower life forms. It also proved to contain the remains of a fairly advanced civilization that, it seemed likely, had been an early offshoot from the Twelve Colonies or possibly a lost colony of the mother world Kobol. There were many such lost outposts in the nearby regions of the galaxy, often founded and forgotten before the Thousand Yahren War. This particular civilization had been destroyed some seven hundred yahrens previously and although the ruins were eroded and overgrown, Aeneas suspected that this was a world laid waste by the Cylons. But if it indeed had been the Cylons that had destroyed it, they had not lingered afterwards.
The other two systems had no habitable planets at all; one lacked anything larger in orbit around it than a small astralon, while the other had possessed several gas giants and one or two small rocky worlds that lacked atmospheres. Each system was raked over carefully. It took about a secton.
“Damn,” Aeneas said softly, pouring over the data from the last of the probes.
“Nothing?” Colonel Akamas asked.
“Not a Sagan-be-damned thing. Just a nasty silence everywhere.”
“Commander, I’ve looked at your information, studied your conclusions…you can’t be wrong. There has to be something here, or very near here. Perhaps if we were to expand the search area….”
“We don’t have time. We’ve already been here as long as I intended. I promised Adama it would be fast.”
“My lord…have you considered that possibly this base isn’t on a planet, or near a star?”
“Warp portals are near stars. It would be uneconomical to have a base too far from one. But it is possible,” Aeneas said, “and it’s also our last hope. Have Colonel Klymene plot a course that will give us the opportunity to scan a wider area around the four stars in detail, using the ship, drones, and our strike fighters. Execute immediately when the course is set.”
“Right away, my lord.”

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