Battlestar Galactica 4 - The Young Warriors Read online

  "Felgercarb?"

  "Ummm. Technical term, don't worry about it. Anyway, short of becoming an ambrosa addict, I didn't know how I was going to work all this out. I read about therapy rooms in an old dusty manual and consulted the ship's computer to find my way here. So, the ball's in your third of the triad court, so to speak. What do you think?"

  What am I thinking, asking advice from a bunch of circuits and wires? Starbuck thought.

  The machine said nothing for a moment, although he thought he could hear a series of clicks within the walls of the room.

  "It is difficult to diagnose from a single session," the voice finally said. "As preliminary comment, I would say that you do seem to have a case of disorientation, or perhaps dissociation, which leads to an identity crisis that is quite normal for a man in your position and in your time of life."

  "My time of life? You make me sound like—"

  "Your role as a fighter pilot and your feelings as a human being do not exactly mesh, causing the symptoms you have described. At this time you are responding more to your feelings and there is an imbalance in your perception of yourself. It is very possible that we must treat that imbalance, try to place your professional life and your interior life on the same kind of par that had existed before the crisis began. I suggest an imagery session to see if we can further define your problems and arrive at a course of treatment, a workable therapy."

  "Imagery session? What in Kobol is that?"

  "An adaptation of fantasy-interplay technology which allows you to place your areas of psychological difficulty into perspective by seeing them in different contexts, a displacement through imagery that—"

  "Hey, hold up a minute! Fantasy-interplay? Displacement? I came here for help, not to play games. Think I'll check out right—"

  "Be calm, lieutenant. These will not be games, as you'll see. Perhaps it would be better to begin the first session immediately."

  "We don't have to. I'll come back later, I—"

  New clicks echoed all around Starbuck as strange devices began emerging from the walls. Some of these devices looked like long glowing sticks; others appeared to be levers, doorknobs, Ovion cabbages . . .

  "What kind of a madhouse is this?" Starbuck muttered.

  "Not a madhouse at all. Quite the contrary."

  "Stow that, will you? I don't think I really want to—I'm getting out of here."

  But, as steel-studded belts slid out of the velvet couch and embraced him tightly, he found that he could not move.

  "This is crazy. Let me go."

  "I have chosen animal imagery for you. A very common starting point, lieutenant. I have had significant success with using animal imagery to treat battle fatigue."

  "Battle fatigue? I don't have—"

  "Let me handle diagnostic matters, please. Listen, you are riding through a forest. Think of a forest, see a forest."

  Trees seemed to form suddenly all around him and, just as suddenly, he was no longer bound. He even realized he was sitting up on the couch, in spite of the fact he could no longer see the couch. He felt free, even exuberant, riding along through a very green dense forest. Red, purple, and blue flowers lined the riding path.

  "Your animal, lieutenant. Think of the animal you are riding on, see it."

  Immediately the animal began to take shape. It was a strongly-muscled horse, a black horse with a white mane, galloping along rapidly, fiercely, its nostrils snorting, the suggestion of thin red flames coming out of them.

  "A fairly conventional horse image," the voice said. "A handsome strong steed. But so dark in color, lieutenant. Is it your dark thoughts made manifest? Give him a good ride, feel the warm wind!"

  Starbuck, who had never been much of a rider—who, in fact, would not even approach a horse except to flirt with a horsewoman—leaned forward like a jockey and urged the black horse forward, patting the amazingly soft hairs of its clean white mane. He lost a clear perspective on the surrounding forest. Colors blended into each other, trees blurred together.

  "Watch out ahead, lieutenant."

  In front of him, blocking his path, was a red knight on an auburn horse. He held a lance out in front of him, a lance whose sharp point appeared to be speckled with dried blood. The lance was aimed right at Starbuck's throat. Starbuck leaned far to his left and pulled hard on his black steed's reins. The red knight was not able to move his lance quickly enough to aim another blow at Starbuck, who sped past, then gradually eased his horse to a whirling stop.

  "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Simply respond to the situation. Remember it is not real."

  "Respond with what?"

  "Any weapon you desire."

  The red knight had turned his horse and, head bent, was rushing toward Starbuck, again with his lance held straight out.

  "Okay, since it isn't real, let's not fool around here. Give me a laser pistol. Quick!"

  The pistol appeared in his hand and, an instant later, he fired it. Its beam seemed to travel along the lance in bright even arcs before penetrating the red knight's chest. The knight fell gracelessly backward, his body striking the ground with a hollow clunking sound. His lance flew into the trees and caught on a branch, sending tremulous vibrations through the leaves. The auburn horse galloped riderless past Starbuck. When the lieutenant turned around to watch its flight, he saw that it had disappeared from the fantasy landscape. Obviously the animal was no longer required for this particular adventure. Looking back to the front, he saw that the red knight was not sprawled on the ground any more, although there was a very realistic plot of scarred ground where the body had been. The lance was still shaking in the tree above him.

  "What was that bloody game all about?" Starbuck shouted.

  The therapy room voice seemed to emerge from vents in the trunks of several trees:

  "You tell me. Interpret your own dream."

  "How do you expect me to—wait. These things mean something, right?"

  "Perhaps."

  "My horse is dark, pitch-black, snorting fire, galloping furiously, carrying me along with a purpose. The blackness and the fire—well, they mean something about the war, don't they? You called them my dark thoughts before. The evil of war, its violence. The red knight—well, the enemy, I suppose. Why red? Wait, I can guess. The Cylons have that stupid red light going back and forth on the rim of their helmets. Red knight, red light. And the red knight appeared suddenly, just the way Cylons seem to, out of ambush. But why a knight? Why not a monster or a real Cylon? Let's work on it. All right, a knight's encased in heavy armor, its reality hidden from the enemy by all that metal. Same with a Cylon. Cylons are a terrifying awesome mystery inside their fighting outfits, underneath those red-light helmets. It's like, well, they're not real, like they're some sort of machines—killing machines that come at you relentlessly, ready to slice you in half without warning. We've never really been able to find out much about Cylons, you know, at least not as a race of sentient beings. When we deal with them directly, they're always masked by the uniforms, and we can't make much out of a dead Cylon. I mean, they're definitely alien, sort of lizardish skin yet on a vaguely insectoid head and a rather humanoid body, but when they're killed more than half their internal organs turn to dust, maybe they even self-destruct, and our medical people have never been able to come to many sensible conclusions about what's left. They've even found a second brain in some Cylons, always in the ugly heads of officers of the elite class, the ones with the dark bands of honor on their uniforms. Anyway, the reason for the knight as imagery for Cylons might simply be the bulky armor hiding the essential humanity of the knight, just as the Cylons' uniform hides an alienness that is equally mystifying for us. Say, am I on a roll, or doesn't any of this make sense?"

  "It might. Why do you think you shot your opponent down with a laser pistol rather than battling him on his own terms?"

  "Why not? It worked better than a lance or sword, didn't it? Or are you talking about some kind of killer instinct? A kni
ght has codes and I don't, is that what you're saying? That his codes make him better than me?"

  "I'm saying nothing. I'm not programmed for verbal deception."

  "Yeah, you're just a nice straightforward machine. I'd like to kick you in your most sensitive circuits. Okay, so I beamed the knight. I knew he wasn't real anyway, and I gunned him down just to get the charade over with. Nothing wrong with that. No, I'm wrong, there is something. It was callous. I should have at least played out the game, joined the fantasy. But I couldn't. I felt too much anger, something like the hatred I feel for the Cylons when I fire at them. But is that bad? I mean, the Cylon I take out with my pistol or my viper's laser cannon is out to get me, after all. The Cylon forces are out to destroy us, to wipe out the remnants of the human race. We can't have that, can we? Can we?"

  "I am not programmed for that sort of moral judgment."

  Starbuck sighed.

  "Of course not. Neither am I. I'm like you, a machine. Difference is, I'm just programmed to be a functioning war machine. A robot with a laser pistol out to get the enemy constructs whose weapons are aimed at me. That's what's wrong. I really feel that way now. My body might as well be hollowed out and replaced with machinery. Reprogrammed. I'm not human any more. That's what's coming through in my dreams, that's what's keeping me awake the other times. Even with my friends, the people I love, I can't seem to connect. Sometimes they seem like machines to me, too. Athena and Cassiopeia are like mechanical toys, just like when I was a child—I move them around this game board called romance, place them on the spaces most convenient for myself. God, what a creep! At least they're people, game pieces don't talk back, and both Athena and Cassiopeia are extremely skilled at verbal violence. Ah, I'm just babbling on. We're getting nowhere."

  "Hmmm, quite the contrary. See how much you are learning about yourself. Tick off the points. Your feeling of futility about the war. Your deep hatred of the enemy, a hatred that troubles you. Your tendency toward antagonism. Your ability to hide your fears in a joking remark. Your inhuman treatment of other humans. Your inhuman feelings about yourself. No, I would say that we are getting somewhere. Now relax, let me try another approach."

  Starbuck started to protest, tried to say he didn't feel satisfied by a few glib summaries about his personality, but the new fantasy began materializing around him. Again, it was a forest, but there was a softer, pastel-like quality to the colors of the trees. The dirt on the path was a lighter brown and looked sandier in texture. There were even more flowers, growing more abundantly, with more variations in their colors. He was riding again, but this time the animal beneath him was white, except for a horn on its head, a tricolored horn—white at the base, purple at the top, black in the middle—that was nearly two feet long and came to a curved point. This was not a horse, although in many respects it resembled one. Of course. It was a unicorn. He had never seen a unicorn before. Some people believed they did not exist, had never existed; others insisted they had once been plentiful on the planets Aquarus and Virgon. He had never really believed in them himself, certainly never expected to see one. Wait, he really wasn't seeing one. This was just as much a therapeutic fantasy as was the red knight adventure. But a much more agreeable one. He relaxed, sitting back on the unicorn's haunches, his left leg slightly pulled up onto the beautiful white animal's back. Riding into a glade, a high waterfall sliding down at a cliffside in the distance, he saw a small village along the banks of a slowmoving stream. None of the villagers, people dressed primitively in animal skins, seemed to notice him. They were all busy at tasks, some tending to gardens, others building structures, still others engaged in cleaning or landscaping. Some young people frolicked romantically in a glen outside the village. A few even younger children played games in a field. Starbuck could almost recall, from watching the patterns of their play, the names of their various games. They were not warlike games, they were the other kinds of play that he'd nearly forgotten about.

  "I feel like joining them," he said aloud.

  "Why don't you?"

  "I don't know, I couldn't. I have too many duties to return to. I don't have time for useless activity."

  "Useless? Is it useless to tend the soil, make a community, bring up children in a family, play freely, maintain a steady peace?"

  "Well, I guess useless isn't the word. Within their own limits, or borders, I suppose a great deal of useful work is being performed. But it ignores the larger events. It's an escape really. It ignores the very real evil in the universe, evil like the Cylons and their masterplan to wipe us out."

  "But the Cylons are not coming here. This is, if you will, a little backwater settlement on a little backwater planet. There is nothing here that the Cylons can use. These people can exist in peace, till their soil, enjoy their leisure, raise generations without worry of sudden ambush or despoilment by your so-called evil race of Cylons."

  "I'll ignore that so-called. Anyway, I'll admit this is all very attractive. Supremely attractive. Every warrior who's ever tasted blood has dreamed of this kind of escape, someplace safe to retreat to, a haven where worries disappear."

  "There are many such places on many worlds. Why don't you find one and settle down?"

  Starbuck started to give the machine the book answer, the one about the weight of duty and the necessity for honor, the responsibilities toward your troubled fellow man, but he found that the words would not come easily to him. Somehow his trouble with those words was connected to these current personal problems. Duty and honor did not have much meaning for him. These days they seemed inflated from overuse. He understood what they were supposed to mean, and he had observed many of his companions give more than lip service to them, but he no longer felt a compulsion to commit to the concepts they stood for. The survivors of the destroyed twelve worlds had such a desperate need for heroes that they misused the heroic words.

  "Well, I'm just not the settling kind," he finally said, reverting to the old fighter pilot cliche in order to avoid the issue. "Anyway, I'd always remember what's out beyond the village. I'd know that I'd turned coward."

  "Is it cowardly to arrange your own life according to your emotional needs?"

  "It is when your buddies, the buddies you left behind, are getting their vipertails shot off because you aren't there to protect them."

  "Duty means more to you then."

  "Not duty even. Just doing what's right."

  "And that isn't duty?"

  "Not always."

  "I do not easily respond to cryptic utterances."

  "Well, you join this village and stick your head in a mudhole."

  "But you do admit that this life appeals to you, that you'd like, for a short while at least, to lose yourself in an idyllic setting performing useful acts of a limited nature?"

  "Look, I don't even—"

  Starbuck was interrupted by the low hum of the sigmawave bridge signaller that he carried in the pocket of his buckskin jacket. Its steady rhythm signified that Starbuck was ordered to the bridge on the double. Something doing.

  "Well sorry, pal. Duty, acceptable or otherwise, calls. This has been fun but—"

  "I will send you notice of an appointment for another session with me through the regular channels."

  "Don't bother. I feel better already."

  "Ah, but one session is never sufficient. We have just begun."

  "You may have, but I think I've had enough."

  "Nonsense. Problems like yours just don't vanish with a flippant remark from your ready tongue. Think it over. You will return to me."

  "Oh, yeah? Just like your regular clientele that's keeping you so busy these days,"

  Starbuck fled the therapy room before the voice could produce a suitable response. As he passed through the doorway, he heard a series of small noises that sounded like mechanisms being shut off.

  The corridor outside seemed even darker than before. Going along it was liking walking through the mist at the beginning of one his nightmares. He almost jumped out
of his skin when a figure leaped out of the shadows and blocked his path.

  "Who the hell are you?" Starbuck shouted, afraid that this individual was merely another fantasy supplied by the therapy room device, perhaps a nurse or guard whose job it was to force him back to the room. A closer view showed that the man looked to be even more of an apparition than Starbuck had first thought. He was an old man, with a dirty gray beard, wearing clothes so ancient they belonged in a museum. As he moved nearer to Starbuck, the lieutenant detected a distinct odor of ambrosa, years of it apparently, on the man's breath and mingled with the rags he wore.

  "Never usually see anybody down here," the man muttered. "Most people I know are afraid to even come into these corridors."

  "Who are you?"

  "I'm nobody in particular. I was an engineer once, an engineer on this very ship. Before your time no doubt. And even if you were aboard during my years of duty you wouldn't have known me. Damn officers never come belowdecks, what do you care about us? I see you're a skypilot. Special person, eh?"

  "Oldtimer, I have nothing against you."

  "Nothing for me either. Bridge crew, pilots, technicians, you all leave engineers alone. How many times you spent your liberty with engineers, lieutenant?"

  "Matter of fact, often. Engineers are the riskiest gamblers, and I gamble, sir. I like to play with engineers. The games become more exciting."

  "Well, you're the exception then. I'll take your word for it. You look like a nice fellow, like you can handle yourself in a pinch. But what in Kobol are you doing down here, youngster? Don't you know this is the devil's pit?"

  "Devil's pit? What does that mean?"

  The old man's face seemed to get even older as he furrowed his brow in puzzlement. He leaned in toward Starbuck and the stale ambrosa odor became more pronounced, even muskier.

  "Devil's pit. Engineers gave this place the name. See, right above us is where our fuel is stored in allegedly shatterproof containers. Could blow at any time, we all know that. Above that is the gigantic machinery that powers this glorified barge. There ain't much below this level, storage holds, little more. This is as deep as most people can go in the Galactica, but most people are smart and they avoid it."