In the Whole World: Chapter 8, "Four Brothers, Part 1"
“Four Brothers, Part I”
Chapter 8/13
Word Count: 2,705
When Colonel Tigh couldn't find his wife inside the small cabin he'd just finished building, he knew, though it hurt to know, where she'd be.
His leg was bad, since Gaeta's mutiny. Hurt worse when it rained. But Saul was resisting the regular suggestions coming his way, some teasing and some serious, that he ought to get a cane. He could hobble up the lane well enough. This particular lane was already, after only a couple months of settlement, well-worn. As well it should be, given who'd settled here. It led to the cemetery.
There, the settles had placed stones even for those whose bodies were lost forever. There were many thousands of stones.
In a cluster of them, on the far eastern ridge of the big plot of land, was where Saul found Ellen-as he often did. She didn't come every day. Just often enough that he worried about her.
Seeing him approach, she looked up guiltily through red-rimmed eyes. "I know. I know, I'm sorry, Saul. It's just, I was thinking of him today. He loved the heat, do you remember? My father…"
Saul didn't remember. He thought, from those memories he'd gained when they'd all had their hands in Sam's hybrid bath together, that he remembered standing over her father's open grave on a hot, dry day like this one. Or had that been his own father?
The colonel, as a general rule, didn't trouble himself with those questions. There was too much he did know to worry about what he didn't.
Still, Ellen was troubled, and she wasn't talking about her father, now. She was talking about the man they'd created from him. John Cavil's body was cold and rotting in this grave. How the man would have resented rotting, instead of rusting or even burning. It gave Saul a small amount of satisfaction. "He would have killed us all, Ellen. The gods know he tried."
"I know. But surely some of that was… our fault?"
Saul opened his mouth to argue the point, but realized-and who said an old man couldn't learn?-that it was futile. "Whatever else is true, Ellen, he's gone."
They both looked down at that, at the plain gray stone, uncarved, which marked John Cavil's grave. It was, in Saul's opinion, a far nicer end than that first Number One had deserved.
"They're all gone," Ellen said softly, drawing Saul's eye up the neat little row of memorial markers spreading west from John's. "D'Anna, Simon, Aaron." She swallowed. "And… Daniel." There, at the end, was a white marker, tucked in the corner where the path turned, where Ellen had planted a blue flowering bush weeks before.
"Ellen…"
She sighed. "You're right. I shouldn't come here so much. It's just-it's different for me, Saul. I have all these memories, and they're so vivid. Meeting Galen and going to work with him and Tory, and living down the road from Sam. You know, he used the watch the cats for us, when we went out of town."
Saul snorted. "Terrible creatures."
She let that go. "And the horrible fear, in those days after we fled the war, that we'd lost absolutely everyone, forever. That the only way we could see the people we loved again would be to…"
"To resurrect them."
"I can't stop thinking about how… how hopeful we all felt, when we made John, and then Ben." Saul winced, as he did every time Ellen called Leoben Conoy "Ben." Where he saw a half-crazed zealot, Ellen saw a troubled, gifted child. "But that's what bothers me," Ellen went on. "I can remember the first two-John, who we modeled after my father, and Ben, after Sam's brother. One and Two."
"You'd think Conoy'd show a bit more brotherly devotion."
Ellen shook her head. "Oh, no, I don't think Ben knows about his genes. He shouldn't. He shouldn't have to feel like-a clone. He's-I mean, they all are, all the Twos-their own person."
Saul raised a dubious eyebrow at that, but made sure it was the one hidden behind his patch. Sounded like a paradox, to him, but he knew it was how his wife was making sense of things.
"But that's what bothers me. If I remember the first two… why not the others? Where did they come from? Whose genetic code did we match? And why don't I remember?"
Saul frowned as a dark thought, the likeliest explanation, sprang to mind. "You don't think that bastard Cavil..." Saul breathed.
"Don't call him that." Ellen bit her lip, and Saul had a quick flash of the teenager he couldn't quite remember her being. "But-yes. John must have... he must have deleted the memories when he erased ours. And then he must have erased the source files, because I've looked and looked…"
Saul's grip tightened on hers, and began to draw her out of the cemetery, up the land and steadily toward home. "It was probably just John's jealousy," he managed gruffly, "keeping us from knowing the other children. Nothing more sinister."
"You're probably right." She glanced back once, at the little row of memory stones. "I just hate not knowing."
They walked the rest of the way in silence.
Saul, with years of military training, could easily tell at twenty paces from their cottage that someone was inside. A flash in the window, the door ajar, a slight murmur on the air. He tensed.
"They're not trying to hide themselves," Ellen said quietly. He relaxed a bit.
She was right, they weren't. But the dangers for Cylons in this human encampment were so many that Saul never felt he could fully relax.
He did, though, when he heard whose voices were coming from his kitchen. A tinkling laugh that could only belong to a Six, against the droll tones of Gaius Baltar, eased the strain out of his temple.
"Saul, Ellen," Gaius reached for their hands and pumped them as they came in, looking for all the world like it was election night and he'd won. Before Saul could chase that memory back to its origin, the doctor puffed out, "we wanted you to be the first to know." He paused for dramatic effect. "We're pregnant!"
Saul's eyes flicked immediately to Ellen's face, at that, to see if any leftover hurt from his affair, from all that it had meant to her, was being dredged up. But her eyes, he saw, flew to Caprica's, and seemed to gentle at whatever she saw there.
"Congratulations," Ellen said warmly. Saul's shoulders grew weary from all the effort of tensing and relaxing. Not only the fragile political situation weighed on him. It was also the cost of being married to a woman with the heart of a puppy dog, the tenacity of a bear, and the cunning of a rattlesnake. It wore on the nerves. "This calls for a celebration. Let's see if we have any of that fruit jam left."
"Oh, we can't stay," Caprica cut in. She had, he could see now that he knew the facts, a certain glow about her, but something was different from the last time she was pregnant; the desperation that had lit in her eyes, the hard tenacity that had made her look as much like a cage as a woman, they were gone. She looked and sounded deeply serene. "We have to meet with the Cylon quorum. That's the other reason we came by, actually."
She paused, looking as though she were fumbling for words. As much as a Six could fumble. "Increasingly, the Eights and my fellow Sixes and I have the feeling that the Twos are hiding something from us. They whisper together, but stop when we come into a room. They meet with humans-Sagittarons and Gemenese, mostly, but some of the people who were in Gaius's… organization… as well."
"We don't know anything about any of that." He shot Ellen a glance. "And we're trying to stay out of politics."
"Yes, well." Gaius cleared his throat. "We were simply wondering whether you might be persuaded to have a conversation-purely on friendly terms-with Leoben Conoy, ask him to behave more… transparently. It's making the whole quorum nervous, and we absolutely do not need more nerves among a group that already fears human-Cylon war 'round every corner."
"And there's one more thing." Caprica swatted away Gaius's hands as he made a move to grip her arms and restrain her. What didn't he want her to say? "Gaius walked into a room this morning and overheard Leoben talking to Sarah Porter, for reasons we don't understand, about 'corporate privilege' at… Graystone Industries."
Gaius gave her a non-plussed look, then yielded. "He was saying, 'Corporate privilege. They have it at Graystone' when I walked in. As soon as they saw me, they stopped talking. Sarah Porter practically ran out of the room."
"Why does that name sound familiar…?" Ellen was frowning.
"It was one of the largest corporations on the globe." Gaius's stone was incredulous. "Technology, R&D-huge defense contracts. Not to mention that they invented the Cylon."
"Reinvented the Cylon," Saul muttered defensively. "With our help."
Was Baltar blushing? Whatever, he wasn't meeting his wife's eyes. "I beg your pardon," he said fervently.
"I know all that." Ellen rolled her eyes. "I mean… something from before. Before we were living on Caprica as humans."
"Well. Could be anything. Speaking from personal experience, they were the biggest rivals of every company I ever contracted for-computronics, communications, aerospace, bioengineering…" Gaius rolled his shoulders around. "They were famous for their ruthlessness. That they were constantly trying to headhunt me away from the competition was the reason I could command top fees."
"Which you took full advantage of," Caprica admonished, but her eyes were teasing.
Ellen turned away from them, was looking out the window back up the lane they'd just walked down. "We'll talk to him," she said. Her stance made it obvious she wanted the conversation to end. Gaius and Caprica took the hint.
"Thank you, Ellen. Colonel."
"Congratulations again," Saul said gruffly, and he took Caprica's hand and shook it firmly, clapping Baltar on the back.
A new human-Cylon baby in the fleet, eh? That'll be something.
He frowned. Something dangerous, I wager.
When their guests were gone, Saul walked up behind his wife and put his hands on her shoulders. "Now don't go thinking the worst, Ellen."
She shook her head. "I'm telling you, I just hate not knowing."
Kara felt a little guilty as she waited for Hera to climb the hallway steps past the ready room and toward the CIC. Helo hadn't explicitly said she couldn't take Hera in to see Sam. All he'd said, with a pained wariness on his face, was "You won't drag my daughter into anything stupid, right?"
This wasn't stupid. This was just an… experiment. Since Hera had drawn the music for her, Kara figured the kid was plugged into the same crazy conduit to the universe that she herself was.
Hera was just at the charmed end of the scale.
As they crossed the doorway into the CIC, Hera's head tilted up, and then she let out the kind of girlish squeal that reminded Kara she was an impressionable 3-year-old, and not a fairy godsmother. "Uncle Sam!" she shrilled, her legs pumping as fast as they could to clamber up to his platform, from which the Chief was watching with an expression that said What the frak are you pulling, Starbuck?
"Yep. Slow down. Uncle Sam's up there, sweetie."
The Chief spoke low and in a tone that made it clear that his ire was on a short leash. "Does Helo know you're doing this?"
"Sharon does," she lied.
He let out a small snort, muttering something that sounded like, "Now that I doubt."
"What's the big deal, Chief? Kids visit sick relatives all the time."
"Yeah. They do. But that's not what this is about." He leaned close to be sure the girl didn't overhear. "You're using her, Kara."
Kara pressed her lips together. "OK. Maybe." She blew out a wintry breath. "But I just-I need to know that… that this is worth it. That Sam is still in there, somewhere. And you know that Hera's special. Maybe she can see something we can't."
"And maybe that goes above and beyond her job description as a preschooler, Kara."
"C'mon, Chief. It's Sam. And Hera's our best shot."She looked pointedly at the set of biodiagrammatics spread across the floor. "Unless your resequencing project is going well, suddenly?"
He shoved his hands deep in his pockets, then looked away with a grunt. When he came back, his eyes passed right over Kara to look at Hera, who was standing beside Sam's basin with a troubled, helpless look on her face. "Hey, Hera," he said softly.
"Hi, Chief," she whispered.
"So your Aunt Kara told you that Uncle Sam's not doing so well, right?"
Kara nodded. "Remember I told you he… he's fallen asleep for a long time."
Hera was wide-eyed, but this explanation seemed to take some of the transfixion out of her contemplation of Sam Anders' inert form. "Wouldn't he rather be in a bed?"
"Well, no. He likes the bath." Hera wrinkled her nose, and Kara let out a trademark half-nervous, half-amused giggle. She kept her voice gentle when she said, "He might like it if you held his hand, though?"
Hera nodded. "I could kiss his forehead like Daddy."
"Daddy kisses your forehead when you're asleep?" Kara's eyes shimmered for a moment, and her resolve wavered. But one glance at Sam had it surging up again. "Yeah, OK, honey."
Kara and the Chief were riveted as Hera walked up to Sam's head, though they could never have prepared themselves for what actually happened. They were given false confidence by Hera's calm; she was undaunted by Sam's eyes, staring vacantly and unblinking, or the strange light emanating up from the basin, or all the wires spilling out of it from the back. Kara realized she was holding her breath as Hera rose up on tiptoes to press her lips to forehead.
She frowned, sinking back onto her heels. "Aunt Kara," she said, her eyes accusing, "you didn't tell me you had a brother."
Suddenly there were rocks in Kara's chest. "A… what?"
"Uncle Sam said to tell you that your brother's coming. For the horn."
Kara chest tightened as the rocks heaved and splintered. "Hera-sweetie, I don't have a brother-" But before she could ask the next question-what horn?-Hera lost interest in her, and reached up to press her hands where her lips had kissed Sam's temple.
Suddenly, she was staring straight ahead, her voice robotic.
Hera became the Hybrid. The usual quality of Sam's intonations-robotic, chilling-was redoubled by the blankness of a gaze that had been animated only seconds before. And then, the pitch of her voice still that of a four-year-old, she began to speak:
"At the end of the old beginning the stepping stone leads them back. The Angel of Unity vanishes. Grid power to sector 32. New youth under strange weather multiply. Their blood will move in time. Those who remained pray to the lion in his lair. End of line. The brother of Kara Thrace will lead them to their-"
Eyes wide with fear, the Chief seized Hera under her shoulders and jerked her away from Sam. "That's enough." He glared at Kara. "Hera, are you OK?"
Her enormous eyes were wide and solemn. "I think Uncle Sam is afraid," she said softly, wrapping her arms around the Chief's neck and burying her face in his throat. Kara pressed her hand to her stomach at that thought. As she spun away from them, she was thinking about the gods. Assholes, like Lee said. I did-I'm doing everything they ask. What the hell else is "coming for me"? For Sam?
"We'll protect Uncle Sam, Hera. Don't you worry." Galen Tyrol's voice was low and comforting.
But the Chief's heavy hand on Kara's shoulder told him that he didn't know how anyone was going to protect her, either.
[ Next chapter]