Chapter 17, "The Sevens"
Chapter 17: The Sevens
In the Whole World (WIP)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: ~5,400
A/N: The first mysteries of Petra-and how Kara fits into it-revealed. It's fun to write Lee when he's figuring out how to play emotional offense. Next chapter should be following soon. (Ugh, I can't believe this one took me so long to post. I need to quit my day job, obviously.)
On the far side of Earth's moon, Sharon had been refereeing debates about the location of the new settlement for hours.
"Freshwater lakes! Five of them, larger than any in the Twelve Colonies!" Catman was insisting. "Far enough inland that we don't have to worry about them chasing us across the ocean-even if they could manage to build the ships without us."
There was a round of scoffing, at that. Most of what was left of Galactica's crew was here in the Hitei Kan's "observation deck"-loftily named, given that it had no windows and had been in use as a storage facility for broken machinery for almost the whole exodus from the Twelve Colonies to Earth.
Those who had agreed to this second exodus on the Hitei Kan had little in common except for a sharp contempt for the people they'd fled hours before. Sharon didn't know if it would be enough to hold them together. Military, Cylons, civilians of conscience or who were obscurely chasing fortune… It seemed like it had to crumble. Particularly given how little credible authority was left, here.
She looked around the room for the dozenth time, hoping to see something, some vital spark in someone's eyes. Seelix and Redwing had mutinied with Felix Gaeta, so Sharon knew that, amnesty or not, she'd never trust them again, and they knew they'd burned a lot of bridges, so they were deferential to the point of obsequy. Hex and Hotdog were men you wanted beside you in a trench, not back at headquarters, devising your battle plan. Doc Cottle was uncomfortable with power of any kind, and had refused it in no uncertain terms.
But there could be leadership in this room, couldn't there? Showboat? Hoshi? Romo Lampkin? Someone whose eyes were a little less sharp…
It was, of all people, Daniel "Bulldog" Novacek who stepped in, now. "The reports say the winters around those lakes is probably subzero," he put in. "One bad harvest and the winter'll kill us off."
Sharon looked at him consideringly. Maybe. We're desperate enough.
Two of the three Sixes present were growing as irritated by the impractical plan-making as she was. The third, however, was practically in Redwing's lap, though for mischief or for pleasure, Sharon had no idea. One of the others called for the motion that had been tabled two hours before to be brought to the floor.
Athena agreed. "Look, let's take the three viable locations we've scouted and put them up to a vote," Sharon was shocked by how weary her voice sounded. "Hitei Kan doesn't have capacity for all of us. There's no time to waste."
Surprisingly, there were murmurs of agreement from around the room, and Hoshi swiftly asked the handful of clarifying questions he'd need to draw up and distribute ballots. The meeting adjourned.
Sharon stayed sitting at her corner table. She knew she should go to Hera-in a moment, she would-but for the first time, she was facing what the fleet would look like, if nothing in their situation changed. No Admiral, whose voice alone had stopped more than one riot, and whose license to send in guns had stopped dozens more. Not even Saul Tigh, with his steady insistence on order and duty, or Starbuck and Apollo, with their obscene wealth of talent and luck. None of Dr. Baltar's capacity for turning shit to gold. The president, for all her tyrant's edicts, all her smug composure, would have been a welcome sight today, as would a hell of a lot of other people who were dead, gone, missing.
And Karl. If Karl were here, he would have been able to end the meeting two hours ago just because everyone liked him.
"Thinking about your husband?" That was Bulldog, who'd quietly stayed behind with her.
"I don't think everyone's realized just how bad the tylium shortage is," Sharon said quietly. "We're going to have one, maybe two chances to fly a Raptor back here, pick up the Colonel and his wife, the admiral, Dr. Baltar…"
"Your husband, the Chief, Apollo… They'll have a hell of a hard time finding us. If they ever make it back to Earth at all."
Sharon swallowed. "Yeah."
"We've been through worse." His back straightened at that reminder, as if he'd reenlisted even as he said it.
"Maybe." And hers straightened, too. She saw him notice it. He was looking at her so gravely. When he began to speak again, she figured out why.
"You know, there was a time, oh, a year or so into my captivity with the Cylons, when I felt my mind starting to go. They wouldn't let me kill myself-I'd've killed myself long before then, if I could-but, I don't know how to put this… it was like my brain was melting, all my thoughts fusing together, so I couldn't distinguish shapes from colors, my name from other names, could feel words themselves starting to slip away."
Sharon nodded. She'd known about Novacek, known they'd captured a human across the armistice line. Godsdamned sure had noticed his name.
"We should have killed you," she said softly. "We killed the others who crossed."
He nodded. She hadn't surprised him, with either her prior knowledge of his captivity or the fact that there'd been others. That surprised her. "But you didn't," he smiled a little. "Cold, cruel Cylons. Because of something as silly and sentimental as my name."
Her eyes clouded. Not with her own memory, but Boomer's, the words that had caused Sharon Valerii to be dispatched as a sleeper agent on one of the less important battlestars, Galactica. Standing next to Bulldog's prison, she'd tugged on Cavil's sleeve, pleading with him, a Two's hand on her shoulder as she did it. "Not Daniel. We can't kill him. I can't go through it again. Please." Cavil had laughed in their faces at the irrationality of it.
"You knew about him? About Daniel?"
Bulldog nodded. "He came to me, once." The words were casual, but they slid into Sharon's heart like a fistful of needle-sized icicles.
"He…" She thought about what the Chief had told her earlier, what she thought she'd seen, herself, on top of the temple, tonight. "He came to you."
Bulldog nodded. "I was never completely sure he was real, but I saw him again last night. Through binoculars. I was watching the Admiral's house, on Colonel Tigh's orders. He was up on the roof." He shook his head. "Damnedest thing, because I swear the man who came to me was twenty years older than this one. Still, I'd recognize him anywhere. He saved my life."
Sharon wanted arms around her, hard and tight. She wanted to burst into tears. "What'd he do?" she managed.
"First, he reconfigured the monitors so that they-I don't know how he did it-but they couldn't read my brainwaves, after that, couldn't figure out what I was thinking. So I could be myself, with no one watching." He let out a sigh. "Like a human being. Just a little bit free."
Sharon nodded. She'd longed for that freedom even before she'd set eyes on Karl Agathon, not that she could have named it.
"And he said, 'Don't worry, Bulldog. You'll make it to Earth. Listen to me, you're one of the luckiest people alive. All because you have my goddamned name.' And I don't know why, but… I believed him. And so I just choked out the only words I had left-I said, 'Thank you, thank you.'" He shrugged. "And then he said, 'Just don't forget how to fly, once you're there.' And he left."
Sharon shook her head. "It's not possible."
He laughed a little, at that, because of course it wasn't. "Which part of it?"
"None of it."
"How do you figure?" He was smiling broadly, now, and why not? He'd been failing to reason his way out of this memory for years.
She blew out another breath. "Because I killed him myself, Bulldog, decades ago, with a couple feet of razor wire. And John Cavil made sure he could never be resurrected."
That killed the grin on his face, too.
Lee was sprawled on his back in his bunk, a cigar clenched in his teeth. The cigar had been manufactured back at the settlement by some of the former crew of the Zephyr from a wild crop they'd stumbled on. It tasted, to Lee, like Earth: fresh and full and sensual. Like spring. It was earthy, he decided.
He was surprised to find that he missed Earth. It had snuck up on him, had become home, as much as Galactica.
Now, in his bunk on the Greenleaf halfway between Earth and Caprica, there was a binder at his feet. Eighteen pages inside of it-hardly needed a staple, let alone a binder-eighteen pages that were, Galen Tyrol had told him, all the official information about the Petra Project that had survived the exodus from the Twelve Colonies.
It was all anyone knew, and it was all a lie.
Tyrol's story had come out in long hours over cups of what passed for coffee these days. (Lee swore to the gods that when they got to Caprica, the first thing he was doing was ransacking every fallout shelter on the damned planet for coffee beans, which he would never, ever share, for any reason.) The story had come in fits and starts, with big holes which Sharon's memories, through Olivia, and Ellen's, through the Chief, hadn't been able to fill.
There were some questions that Lee suspected only one man alive could answer.
Because so much of the story was so devastating to the women Lee and Helo loved, the Chief and Olivia had kept shooting them apologetic glances, or stopping and saving the hardest explanations for when they were ready with their next barrage of questions.
"You think it'll change anything for her? If she's still… alive?"
That was Karl, in the bunk across the room. The ship was big enough they could've all had their own frakking suites-the Centurions didn't sleep, and preferred to simply power down when they weren't engaged in another task. But the four of them, military bred, had agreed to share a bunk room.
"What, for Kara?"
"Yeah."
Lee thought about it. "No."
"But I mean… if he didn't leave her…."
"He wasn't there. She got hit. The reasons don't matter a damn, not anymore."
Karl sighed, a long-suffering sigh that Lee supposed was a hangover from having conversations like these too many times with Kara herself. "Yeah, but didn't you feel better-when you forgave your old man?"
Lee blew a mouthful of smoke at the ceiling. "It's not forgiveness." He'd been around this point in his head often enough to be sure of that. Kara got it. You didn't stay broke-at least, Lee hadn't-well, he mostly hadn't. But forgiveness just wouldn't be right. "It's understanding."
The Chief was on watch, now, with Olivia. And a good thing, because Helo and Apollo were reeling.
The story that those two had told them had been shocking.
"Forty-one personnel," Karl said now. He nodded at the binder by Lee's feet. "That thing says… forty-one personnel. He could be there."
Lee said nothing, to that. He was so tired of hoping, of seizing reasons for hoping. Anyway, all his hope could only go one direction, right now, and it was one already stretched too thin.
The whole thing smelled wrong, besides, but Helo must know that as well as he did.
He closed his eyes, put his mind to work ordering the images, the flashes of story that the Chief and Olivia had given them. "Can we go through the timeline?"
"I don't know if I can handle it yet, Apollo."
"Just… make sure we have it all straight."
"Fine." Karl stubbed out his own cigar and flopped over onto his stomach. "It begins when the illustrious Final Five arrive in the Twelve Colonies. Middle of the First Cylon War. They go to Virgon, fake their papers. Use some shiny inventions from back home to get hired on at Greystone Labs. They have a big problem." Karl sighed. "They miss the folks back home."
Armistice Day, 34 Years Earlier
"What have we done?" Tory hissed at Galen Tyrol.
"Am I crazy, or was this your idea?" the Chief shot back.
"They're gonna come back," Sam said dully. "They're gonna want us to make more of them."
Ellen clutched Saul's arm. "More than that. They're going to turn John against us. Have you seen the way he looks at the Centurions? Half like they're his brothers, half like they're his servants. And he's been whispering with Leoben…"
She and Tory-the only ones among them with well-developed political instincts-shuddered.
"We ended the war," Saul reminded her, "and we bought some time." They'd learned enough from war to know they didn't want to take a side in this one. "That has to be good enough, for now. We bought peace."
Peace, and time to reconstruct more of their long-lost friends and loved ones.
"I think we should quit," Tory whispered. "Ellen, I've seen what John is doing to you. He's not your father, honey. We can't get them back. And Sam, Leoben's not Ben. He never could be."
Sam slumped, but Ellen's spine stiffened. "You're wrong, Tory. So what if we can't implant memories and personalities of people whose memories we never stored? Just to see them, people who look like them, to have our families back, just that much…."
Sam shook his head. "Tory's right, Ellen. We're fooling ourselves."
"They're going to make fools out of all of us," Saul interjected. At Greystone's insistence, he'd enlisted in the colonial fleet to integrate some of the war technology they were developing. He'd been fighting the Centurions for months before they'd brokered this deal. His eyes, and his greying hair, said that the whole business had taken a toll.
Ellen ignored her husband, knowing she could bring him around any time. "Do you want to box the Twos, then, Sam?"
"No! No, of course not. God."
"That's enough, Ellen," Saul said firmly, but his wife paid him no heed, as usual.
"And Tory, do you really want to call off the plans for Model Five?" Galen's hand slid up to her shoulder. The Five was modeled on the cousin she'd been raised with, whose parents had raised her. Adam, her best friend.
Tory buried her face for a moment in Galen's neck, and then lifted her head. "No. No more than Galen wants to call off making the Three."
Galen Tyrol sighed, and met Saul Tigh's eyes in rapprochement. He avoided looking at Sam. "You were right. We bought some time."
"But Sam's right, too. They'll be back," Tory said darkly. "We'd better be ready."
"So the Final Five make the first five humanoid models. And they realize-what did the Chief say?" Lee frowned in concentration. "'They were family, but they didn't make up for the family we lost.' "
"Yeah," Karl reached over, grabbed the binder off of Lee's bed as though there were answers in it. "I can see why they tried, though."
Lee was still puffing on his cigar, but the taste was beginning to go stale. "Really? You'd do it?"
"Try to bring my sister, my parents, back to life if I could? Yeah, of course."
"Even if you knew they wouldn't look quite the same, or have any of the memories, or the personality-"
"You wouldn't really believe it was impossible. I don't believe it, even now. If you handed me a red button that'd bring my sister back genetically, I'd press it and hope for someone who looked just a little like her, you know? To have her back, just a little."
"Yeah." But Lee was thinking, no way. He didn't know if he'd bring back Zak, or his mother, or Gianne, or Matt Imolan, his best friend from childhood-any of them, so readily. He wanted to think it was wisdom; he wanted to think that he'd've known all along that the Final Five's experiment would only end up making them more lonely.
But maybe it was just guilt.
Karl was ticking off a second finger, now, though. "So they make a plan to hide their research from the Centurions' spies. Greystone Industries buys Petra from the government. It had been an all-purpose bunker-built during the war to protect the president and the Quorum indefinitely, in case of an all-out nuclear holocaust." Karl shook his head. "Can you even imagine what kinds of other facilities the government must have built if that one went up for auction?"
"All the government bunkers would've been found when the Cylons hacked the defense grid." Lee was glad his voice sounded pitiless; the idea of Cylons hauling people out of those shelters in the weeks after the attacks and slaughtering them still had the power to shake him. "Anybody who took refuge in them is long dead."
Karl blew out a breath, and Lee remembered he'd seen some of those piles of bodies personally, during his time in the resistance. "So anyway, they experiment with making a sixth model, talk about offering her-just her-to the Centurions, as a weapon."
Lee swallowed. "And it's around that time that Anders meets Dreilide Thrace."
"Hey, man, great song," Sam managed. He was swaying on his feet, had started drinking almost seven hours before. The bar was closing, so he'd only just stopped. "It's just," haunting, he was thinking, but he said, "…great. What's it called?"
A small smile flitted over the face of the young man at the keyboard. He'd played out this scene with other drunken strangers, on other nights. "It's called 'Conception'," he said easily.
"Conception? You a father?" Sam asked, sinking without being invited onto the bench next to him.
"I will be soon," the man said, a ghost of tension flitting across his vision. He got to his feet, started pulling apart the wires that had amped his array of instruments, this evening. How did he play so many, so well, without networking them and playing them all through a computer? "You?"
Sam thought about Julia, lost to the genocide back on the planet he'd abandoned, remembering she'd wanted to try for kids. All his talk of resurrection hadn't swayed her. Then there was Leoben, emerging from his genetic bath with features so exactly like Sam's little brother, Ben, that sometimes he could hardly bear it. "No," he said, "I don't think I'd be a very good father."
The man's smile was grim, now. "Me, neither," he said. "But I'm gonna give it a try."
Sam took in his ring, blurry as his vision was. "You married?"
"Yeah. I am." The man snapped a lid shut on his lute case. "You need a ride home, man?"
"Nah, I live… too far. Up past Blackmun's Roost."
"That's where I'm heading."
Next thing Sam knew, the man was shaking his shoulder. "Hey. Man. You gotta wake up, tell me where to take you."
Sam groaned.
"C'mon. Where's home, buddy?"
"Earth," Sam managed.
"Right. And mine's Kobol. I'm saying, where d'you sleep at night?"
"Petra," Sam opened his eyes, squinted at the intersection. "I'll just get out here."
If he'd been sober, Sam would have been impressed with the man's swift reaction; he maneuvered the car to the side of the street and stepped on the brakes before Sam tipped himself out of the passenger side. And ran around the truck and caught him before he hit the ground. Quick brain, quick hands.
"It's just this way," Sam muttered, comforted by the arm over his shoulders.
"There's not much out here," the man said doubtfully. "Unless you live in that warehouse."
"'S'not a warehouse."
The guard at the door was blonde and towering. The darkness, and her uniform, did little to disguise her astonishing beauty. "Hello, Dr. Anders. May I see your friend's ID?" she asked the other man briskly.
The man fished out his wallet.
"Crew Sergeant Dreilide Thrace, retired active duty, current army reserves," she muttered. "You don't have clearance."
"He's with me," Sam said.
"Dr. Tigh asked that I maintain the clearance list," the guard said. Dreilide was a little confused; where was the list? How had she known he wasn't on it without looking at it?
"Dr. Tigh is not any more in charge here than I am." Sam drew himself up to his full height, and spoke almost without slurring. "He's with me."
The guard relented, her mouth turning down at the sides as she did. "On your authority, Dr. Anders," she said, and stepped aside.
It didn't look like a warehouse, inside. "Dr. Anders?" Dreilide Thrace asked. "What kind of doctor?"
"The drunk kind," Sam said, and he entered a fourteen-digit code so swiftly that Dreilide had to doubt it. When an elevator door opened, Dreilide hesitated, but eventually stepped inside.
"Who was that woman?" Dreilide breathed. "What is this place, that she's a guard?"
"Oh, her?" Anders was indifferent. "She's one of the Sixes. Right, you probably recognize her because we modeled them on Bera Bowman, the old film star." He fell back against the elevator wall, as the thing seemed to pick up speed as it burrowed down into the ground. "Don't get attached, friend. We're giving all the Sixes to the Centurions, to stave off the next war."
Dreilide backed up against the elevator wall. But his racing heart was a little comforted by the tear tracks he saw marking Sam Anders' cheeks.
"Where are you taking me?" he asked softly, and sank to the floor of the elevator next to the drunken stranger.
"They hired him on as a guard, leaned on his army qualifications. Let him play the guitar, write music at work. So he could support a family."
Lee nodded thoughtfully. He knew perfectly well that the military didn't pay NCOs worth a frak. Nor did piano bars. A low-risk, well-paying job in the private sector would have seemed like manna from Elysium. He could be home for dinner, go out at night and play a gig. "What I don't get…" Lee shook his head. "I mean, he knew they were Cylons. He knew for months before-what they did for Kara. How did he justify it, to himself?"
Karl shot him a look that said I thought we were past this. "They were his friends," he reminded Lee. "He knew they weren't out to start a war. They worked for frakking Greystone Industries, for frak's sake." His tone said: Dreilide Thrace knew the world was morally complicated, Lee. He didn't see the world in Adamavision, black and white. It wasn't all A Cylon is A Cylon is A Cylon.
"Yeah, that bastion of colonial patriotism, Greystone Industries." Lee rolled his eyes. Military contractors were the only people he'd wanted to work for less than the military.
"The point is that he knew them. And he knew the first five, too. Knew they weren't-monsters."
"Weren't they? After the first five, they made the Six to give her to the Centurions." The story had been riddled with little monstrosities, like that one.
Karl sighed. "It was a hard choice. They thought it might serve a greater good."
Lee had done the moral calculus here, already, and wasn't impressed by the results. So he was hardly listening to Karl now. "The Seven, they made to save Kara Thrace's godsdamned life." His fingers clenched around his cigar.
"And the Eight," Karl's face went bleak, "to get rid of the Sevens."
"So I bring you the umbilical cord blood," Dreilide repeated dully, "and you can make bone marrow in…how long?"
Outside the doorway of his daughter's intensive care unit, he was leaning on the wall, eyes rimmed red, looking as though he'd been tortured.
Inside, his wife was sitting with their newborn daughter. The silence inside was heavy like thunder.
"A few months," Galen Tyrol clapped a hand on his friend's shoulder. "It'll be dicey. I saw her file. The doctors aren't sure she'll hold on that long. But we'll work as fast as we can."
"Is it… legal? I thought stem cell research was prohibited?"
Galen Tyrol bit his tongue to stop himself from asking what he thought they'd been doing, down here. "You know we can't clone the tissue by itself," was all he said. "She doesn't have enough healthy tissue for us to start from."
"So you're going to make another person. A twin."
"Yeah. She won't be exactly identical in appearance; the genes, as we receive them from humans," he ignored Dreilide's wince, "allow for some variation. But she'll be a genetic twin, yes."
He gripped Galen's shoulder. "You won't… do to her twin what you did to the Sixes?"
Tyrol's mouth dropped open. He hadn't realized that Dreilide had ever even heard of a Six; they'd dispatched all of them past the Armistice Line before Dreilide had started working here.
"No. She'll be part of our family," he said firmly.
"OK." Galen Tyrol had been through this grief and fear-and the loss that followed it-several times over. So Dreilide Thrace looked impossibly young to him, at this moment. "OK. I'll bring the blood tonight."
"We'll be ready."
"Along comes Ellen," Lee almost smiled, at this, because he had a lawyer's appreciation of a story that made sense, "and she's jealous of Three, she'd been jealous of Six. She thinks the colonel's cheating on her."
Karl snorted. "Irony, thy name is Ellen Tigh."
"She doesn't want any more lady Cylons running about. So she gets into the DNA code, gets a little help from some of the first five. Tweaks it so that Kara's twin is, effectively, fraternal. Is male."
"Is Daniel." Karl shrugged. "But Starbuck gets her clean blood and marrow."
"They only make seven Sevens. Once Ellen changed the code, that's how many they needed to be sure one of them was a match. Statistically, Chief said. Daniel, Gabriel, Uriel, Galadriel…"
"Nathaniel, Ezekiel and…" Karl struggled. "Asriel."
"A couple of years go by. By then, Cavil's spilled so many of their secrets to the Centurions that there's almost nothing left. He's jealous of the Sevens-they're frakking prodigies, especially Gabriel-but the real problem is that he thinks that they're onto him. He wants to show up Daniel almost as much as he wants to get rid of him. So he builds the first Eight with no genetic model, all from scratch. No one had ever done that before."
Karl was grimmer about this feat. "And encodes her to be an assassin."
"There's no other way to save them-save all of them," the Chief cut past Tory's objection, "except to make John think they're already dead."
"We can't save all of them," Tory looked haggard. They all did. "He's already killed three Sevens, Galen! I'm sorry, Ellen. But we need to box John's whole line. There's just no other way to end this."
"Boxing a whole line is mass murder," Sam said. He drew a breath. "But maybe we need to make an example of one of the Ones-"
"Murder is murder," Ellen interrupted firmly.
"Yes!" Tory exclaimed. "It is! And if you'd been the one to discover Galadriel face down in the photo baths this morning, you'd know it as well as I do!"
"We don't know that John is responsible for what… that Eight is doing," Saul interrupted. "Leoben seems to be helping."
"Leoben?" Galen shook his head, not entertaining the idea. "He'd betray God and all of us before Daniel. He made that promise before God and all of us, actually."
Tory agreed. "We know it was John who created the Eight. It's not Leoben. It's John."
"Don't you see? We created John, Galen." Ellen's voice had a keen edge of franticness to it. "We can't just kill him because we don't like what he's doing. We need to reason with him."
"The first priority is that we need to save the Sevens who are left," Sam submitted. "That's why Galen's suggestion is the best one. John'll think they're already dead."
"But… close Petra?" Ellen's voice was faint. "It's home."
"Not to John."
"We'll come back for everyone inside in a few weeks, Ellen," Saul reasoned with her. "They could survive for decades down there, with the hydroponics and the planetary core reactor. We have to convince John it's destroyed."
Tory blew out her breath, beginning already to plan. "Right. We just need to lure John-and his Eight-away from there. Keep Nate, Zeke, Uri, and Gabe safe."
"Her name is Sharon," Ellen said finally.
"Who?" Tory frowned. "The Eight?"
"Yes. We should know her name. She's the one who has Daniel's blood all over her hands." She turned to Tory. "And I did find his body, so I think I'm qualified to talk about what murder looks like." She shuddered. "We assembled them ourselves. And still, I've never seen so much blood…"
"And that's how we got that binder. 'List of Government Resources Destroyed in the Recent Fire at Petra Research Facility Division of Greystone Laboratories', dated twenty-three years ago." Lee kicked the binder to the floor, now.
"Except there was no fire."
"No. They staged a simulation of collapse, showed John the evidence. The government was told there was a fire as a cover-up. The Chief shut down all routes of exit to save the Sevens from the Ones."
"And he and Sam and Tory, the Colonel and Ellen-they never made it back. Cavil wiped their memories and sent them out into the wide world as humans."
They laid back in the bunks, each imagining what it might be like to spend several decades underground. Lee grabbed the binder by his foot, opened it again, read the list of words yet another time. "Haladroscopes, water filtration systems, dozens of experimental imagers, sorters, colliders…"
There was one item that Helo didn't need to review. "And forty-one civilian personnel. Trapped underground."
"Including," Lee looked up, because of course this information wasn't listed on the page, "four Sevens."
"And the Chief thinks one of the forty-one is Dreilide Thrace, who left for work one morning and got trapped there past the end of the worlds." Helo started to laugh, now.
"What the hell is so funny?"
Helo was laughing too hard to speak, for a moment. He put his hand over the back of his mouth. "I was just thinking," he managed, "about how many weeks you're going to have to work for Dreilide Thrace if you want to marry Kara."
Lee frowned. There was an old custom that bridegrooms had to work for their parents-in-law for the number of weeks that their courtship lasted in months. It had been meant, in other centuries, to dissuade young lovers from courting behind their parents' backs.
The familiar ache at the pit of his stomach, a kind of urgent burning that sometimes sputtered but never went away, flared for a moment, thinking about all of that. It was too far away, looked too much like the kind of future he and Kara had long since agreed they wouldn't hope for.
"Marry Kara Thrace, and her dad's gonna be the least of your problems," he deflected. Gods, but Lee didn't want to talk about Kara-about his feelings for Kara-with anyone, even Helo. Not right now, while so much was so uncertain. It was like sitting near a teacher watching them grade your final exam.
Luckily, Karl didn't press. He had problems of his own. "Wonder how much I'd owe John Cavil, if I ran into him," Helo mused under his breath, his mirth gone as suddenly as it had come.
"He's not Sharon's father," Lee said flatly. "And she's not a killer. It's a trick. She's the victim of a genetic trick."
"They both are," said Karl, and Lee knew he meant Kara, too. "And so are we."
Now Lee started to laugh as the whole insanity of the situation dawned on him. "Lords, it's all we need. Kara's got a twin."
"Four of 'em, actually." Helo grunted a laugh. "Might be doing the worlds a favor to leave 'em buried."
"Exactly what I was thinking."
But he was really thinking about what the frak he was going to do if those Sevens were dead. They have to be alive. They have to know how one of them came for Kara and Leoben and the Horn, on top of that temple.
Otherwise he'd be looking for her for the rest of his life.
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