Battlestar Galactica-03-Resurrection Page 11

Apollo again turned his attention to Segis, who stood waiting patiently, her smile undimmed.

  "Where will we find you?" the commander asked.

  Segis laughed, softly. It was a laugh Apollo knew, somewhere, somehow, a laugh that set off tripwires and alarms.

  "The coordinates have already been forwarded to your bridge's computers, to be input to your docking shuttles," Segis explained. She raised her arms from her sides, her robes unfolding, spreading, and, for a moment, Apollo was reminded of angel wings… or the wings of some noble hunting avion. She gestured warmly, and said, "If you please. I know you have many, many questions, and I shall endeavor to answer them all, once you join us on the surface."

  "Us?"

  "Of course, Commander Apollo," Segis answered, coyly. "Did you think I was alone?"

  For the travelers, returning to Kobol was a bittersweet experience. As the shuttle descended through the cloud cover shrouding the planet, they felt a sense of connection, of belonging to a place once again after so many yahren of living a forced, nomadic existence. But as they drew closer, and the irregular shapes of color resolved themselves into the ruins of a once-proud civilization, that sense of home became a sense of loss, a reminder of how much had been taken away. If they feared that they had doubled back through time as well as space, one look at the ruined surface of the planet quickly disabused them of that fanciful belief.

  The rusted wreckage of long-ago downed Viper fighters lay scattered around and through the cracked and broken city streets; great weeds and vegetation thrust their way up, nature's reclamation of a planet mankind arrogantly believed it possessed.

  The canopy of one of the fighters had been shorn away, and the pilot's skeleton still sat at the controls, fleshless fingers locked about the navi-hilt, faithful to his duty unto death, and beyond. The cage of his ribs provided a home to a murder of small avions. Nothing was wasted in nature; from endings grew new beginnings.

  Shattered buildings canted against those still upright, leaning like a drinking buddy who needed a little help. In the doorways of the buildings, Apollo imagined the bodies of those who had huddled there in a foolish, desperate attempt to avoid Cylon laser fire or falling debris. It was there they had huddled, and there they had died.

  The great presidium, buckled and tossed in crazy, ragged angles, still bore a faint message someone had painted there: "PEACE!" It had been an entreaty to the Cylon juggernaut, and Apollo recalled a similar presidium on Caprica, bearing the same hopeful message. Serina had been broadcasting live from the Caprican presidium, where the peace ceremonies with the Cylons were to have begun; instead, she had broadcast betrayal and the death of hope.

  Another message, written over the single word, was equally chilling: GODS HAVE MERCY ON US. As if the Lords of Kobol could see that message when the prayers of countless dying could not be heard.

  How could the gods not have heard those last, weeping prayers? Apollo could hear them, still.

  Apollo looked away from the shuttle's flatscreen to observe Cain's stern profile. The old man stood with his hands behind his back, one hand tightly gripping the other. To the casual observer, he looked unmoved and impassive, but Apollo saw, on closer examination, the slight quiver in Cain's lower lip. He felt it, too.

  This was a hallowed place, and haunted, if there was any such thing.

  And then the ruins fell away, slipping into the distance behind them, and the ancient pyramids grew up out of the wilderness. The vegetation dropped away, leaving only rock and stone and sand.

  Even the pyramids had not escaped the relentless brunt of the Cylon attack; great, broken stones lay thrown about everywhere, like playthings that had fallen out of favor with some monstrous, angry child.

  Their destination seemed to be a large pyramid, ringed by several smaller ones, all of them heavily damaged and jutting up like rotten teeth, and the shuttlecraft began a long, easy descent toward this site. It felt funny, to think of this landscape as a limitless vista, when the travelers roamed all of space, but there, it was as little more than prisoners inside flying metal boxes. Here, with the land rolling away in all directions, beneath a cloud-filled sky of blue that snuggled the world in its embrace, in this place that was ancient beyond imagining, this place that was the cradle of life, they felt small, and humble.

  "I've been here before," Apollo reminisced, softly. "With Father."

  "What's that?" Cain asked.

  Apollo shook his head. "Nothing."

  The shuttle gently touched down, its cushion of air kicking up a spume of dirt and dust. The hatch irised open and Cain swung down out of the ship, his sharp eyes surveying their surroundings for potential danger or hidden traps. Seeing nothing, he drew a deep breath, filling his lungs with the air of a dead world. It was heady and intoxicating; it was pure and unspoiled, and had been so for a thousand yahren. Gar'Tokk followed Cain, and also sniffed the air, but not for the simple pleasure of breathing unrecycled oxygen for a change; he was sniffing for danger.

  Apollo swung out next, helping Athena down. All around them, stones as big as the shuttle that had brought them here lay scattered, and a vagrant wind wandered aimlessly through the debris and between the stones like an unquiet spirit. Athena looked up at the towering pyramids, feeling the enormous weight of their antiquity pressing down upon them. Even GarTokk, who guarded his thoughts like a treasure, and who cared not a whit for humans or their history, was visibly awed.

  "It's…" Athena began, and stopped. It was many things, and all of them too large for simple words to contain.

  "Yes," Apollo agreed. Once again he knew what she meant. "It is."

  "We're about to meet our hosts," GarTokk observed, pointing through the field of stones. He had caught glimpses of them as they wove their way through the labyrinth of stone blocks, but had not caught scent of them. His eyes narrowed; something was wrong, but he couldn't say just what. Cain stood with his hand resting casually on his hip, but it was anything but casual: from his hip, it was a quick, fluid motion to draw his laser, if circumstance demanded.

  Apollo and Athena looked to where the Noman had pointed, and the robed figures, led by a woman, emerged from the stone passageway. They all wore the same humble clothes, for they were all equal, their faces concealed by the shadows cast by their cowls. And yet, her cowl did nothing to conceal the eyes of radiant green that stared at Apollo, and he felt his breath catch. There was something about her that put him at ease, something as familiar as home.

  "My name is Talen," she said, and smiled, and her voice was like a snatch of song Apollo had once heard, long ago, and could not quite place. "Welcome, all."

  Commander Cain surprised them all, taking Talen's hand gently in his and kissing the back of it—he was as much schooled to be a gentleman as he was a commander. "On behalf of my fellow officers and the entire colonial fleet, we are grateful for your hospitality," he said.

  "So charming," Talen said, and laughed delicately. Cain was a decorated hero, but he was also prey to the same feminine flattery all men, great or humble, find irresistible.

  "We were under the impression Kobol had not been home to humans for millennia," Athena said bluntly.

  Talen nodded. "Not home as you may know it," she answered; Talen was already proving to be as enigmatic as Segis.

  Gar'Tokk stood quietly, nostrils widened as he again tried to catch some manner of identifying scent from the robed figures and the one who called herself Talen, but the only trace aroma he could detect was like burning ozone. He frowned and grunted. It was not danger, not precisely, but neither was it particularly reassuring. This would bear watching.

  "Is Segis with you?" Apollo asked.

  Talen turned again to look at Apollo and favored him with a smile. It was a smile that seemed as familiar to him as Segis's laugh had. But this sense of deja vu, at least, did not alarm him. Rather, it made him feel… whole. "Segis awaits," she said, and placed her palm flat against one of the featureless stones that formed the base of the largest pyramid
.

  The entire stone recessed quietly into the ziggurat, but all the travelers could see of the pyramid's interior was darkness, as if these ancient cairns were built as nothing more than a place to store shadows. Without waiting to see if the travelers would follow, Talen entered the tomb and, after a moment, as she knew they would, the travelers followed.

  Eerie light flooded up from the floor of the pyramid, and as their eyes adjusted to the change in brightness, the colonial party could see a stone staircase that wound down and down into the earth, seeming to spiral tighter and tighter in upon itself as it descended, reminding Apollo of a conch shell, or the whorls of human DNA he had seen in the science lab. There were patterns everywhere, echoes within other echoes. It was the universe speaking in subtext, trying to assure her children that nothing is ever gone, nothing ever dies. It all goes on, somewhere, in some fashion.

  They followed Talen as she descended the stone stairs, worn by millennia of use. Her tread was silent, while the footfalls of the others echoed and re-echoed off the narrow walls. The stairs continued to circle downward, as if they were following the teeth of some giant auger, screwing itself into the heart of the world.

  Gar'Tokk, more attuned to these things than his companions, could feel the air becoming heavier, and he knew they were deep beneath the surface of Kobol. He hated the feeling of claustrophobia this elicited in him, and would have gladly left this place never to return, but Apollo was here, and his duty was to Apollo.

  "Is this what you meant before, when you asked me if I'd follow you into a suicidal situation?" Gar'Tokk muttered to Apollo.

  Even in the diffuse light that spilled up from somewhere below, Apollo could tell Gar'Tokk was in great discomfit and realized this was especially difficult for someone who lived so close to his animal instincts. "Do you want to return to the surface?"

  Gar'Tokk scowled, as if the suggestion were the worst insult Apollo could fling at him, and the commander again felt guilt at stealing away the noble creature's pride, and knew he had to restore it, somehow.

  The stairs finally came to a halt in a cave that opened out into a larger cavern, and as they approached this larger chamber the light grew brighter, and there was a low, almost sub-aural sigh, like the sound of some restless, mighty sea. The susurrus grew louder as they walked down the low, arched corridor, like a million voices all talking at once, finally becoming a roar as they stepped through the arched doorway of the passageway and into the gigantic chamber.

  Whatever the travelers were expecting, it could certainly not have been this: they emerged into the main cavern and were instantly awed by what they beheld. A city, a smaller, mirror image of the one that once stood above them over a thousand yahren ago, spread and sprawled outward and spiraled upward, with soaring towers and crenellated structures. The roof of the cavern itself was almost lost in the distance, and the walls and ceiling glowed with an eerie phosphorescence, as if some mineral or naturally-occurring moss gave out a vaguely-green, diffuse light.

  "This is what Kobol must have looked like, before…" Athena said, her voice breaking with emotion. She wanted to run through the city streets and see the places she had only heard about in stories passed down generationally, this place she knew so well already and yet had never seen.

  Cain nodded, although he barely registered what Athena had said. His mind was already thinking ahead, wondering how well this city could be defended against attack, whether Cylon or Chitain.

  "It is exactly what Kobol looked like," Talen confirmed Athena's observation. "The old city plans were followed precisely."

  "Followed by whom? No on survived," Apollo said. "Not on Kobol, anyway. The Cylons saw to that."

  Talen raised an eyebrow and her eyes locked with Apollo's. He couldn't explain it, but he felt something powerful passing between them, an ember, a current, a raging flame. Who was she, to hold so much power over him? It was as if he had known her all his life, and in a lifetime before that. "Then, how do you explain this, Commander Apollo?" she chided, gently. "Are we ghosts?"

  "I can't explain it," he said. "I'm hoping you will." And I'm also hoping you'll explain why I feel this way about you, he thought.

  Talen smiled, a trifle coyly, Apollo thought, and continued leading the little group through the mirror city. If there were any answers to be had here, they would not come from Talen. And yet, Apollo felt as if the answers would only raise even more questions. Into the heart of the city they walked, the buildings seeming to grow taller around them, and then they were standing in the recessed well of the presidium. Arborial growths flourished in stone pots and in terraced steps in a graceful hemisphere embracing the presidium.

  In this clearing stood Segis, one hand behind her back, the other lightly holding the stem of a blossoming flower, inhaling its intoxicating fragrance. She heard the echo of the group's footfalls but pretended not to until they were mere feet from her. Then she appeared to notice, and turned to face them, greeting them with a slight and dignified bow, so slight as to almost not be there.

  "Greetings, children of Kobol," she said, her tones mellifluous and purring. "Welcome home."

  Segis studied the travelers with dark, penetrating eyes, stopping momentarily on Apollo, then slipping away to settle on Commander Cain. Apollo didn't know why, but he felt this was more than a simple slight; there was something else at work here. "Your returning has been prophesied, in the ancient writings in the temple above us. The way has been prepared. Once you determined to take the journey through quantum space, we were able to remotely input the coordinates that brought you here, rather than your originally-intended destination."

  "You brought us here?" Apollo asked. Far from putting him at ease, this new information only troubled him more. Collusion between Baltar and Segis had yet to be proven, but then, it wasn't as if either of them would admit to it, if it were there.

  "Of course, Commander," Segis answered. "The timing seemed quite expeditious, as you would have found your original destination a rather inhospitable place, overrun by Cylons."

  "Thank you," Cain said, stepping forward and bowing with a military stiffness and precision. "We are honored to be here."

  "It is you who honor us, Commander," Segis said, humbly, and then smiled disarmingly. "I am sure you have many questions, and I shall endeavor to answer them. We," she said, and spread her robed arms expansively, and again Apollo thought of wings, "are the caretakers of this city. We and our offspring have been living here for succeeding generations since the last humans left for the stars, many millennia ago.

  "We know of the Cylons, of course," she continued ruefully; "but the Cylons have no way of detecting our presence here due to the unique protective shield that surrounds us."

  "But our ships—" Apollo interjected.

  Segis smiled and shook her head. "Screened from detection by the same protective energy that surrounds us," she explained.

  She began walking, Talen falling into step two paces behind her, as if she were not of an equal station, but rather Segis's servant. Cain and Tigh walked next to Segis, while Apollo found himself walking beside Talen, Athena on his other side. Apollo caught himself stealing surreptitious glances at Talen, as if he were some infatuated adolescent smitten with the prettiest female in his class. It was foolish, he knew it, and yet that was exactly how he felt.

  Several times she glanced his way, too, but whether that was because she felt his eyes upon her or because she felt as he did, Apollo could not guess.

  "You say this was all prophesied," Cain began, breaking the silence.

  "Many millennia ago," Segis nodded, "yes."

  "Then you won't mind, showing us these ancient writings?" Apollo asked what he was sure was on Cain's mind; the same thing that was on his. "We mean you no offense, but this is all a little hard to take in—"

  "Not at all," Segis agreed, and Talen, Apollo thought, smiled a little more brightly at him.

  "The ancient writings also prophesied a great commander would lead the h
umans into final battle with the Cylons, and reclaim the colonies."

  This time, Apollo saw Talen look down, averting her eyes from his, but he thought, just before she did, the smile on her face vanished.

  The city was as ancient as the great one that lay in ruins, but was nevertheless extremely sophisticated; safely away from the elements, this mirror city showed none of the signs of antiquity. The buildings, Apollo realized, were also made of the same light-emitting stone as the cavern walls, as were the stones that paved the streets. Gleaming white obelisks jutted up at the four corners of the tallest buildings, as straight as soldiers on review.

  Trees and close-cropped shrubbery lined the sides of the long, shallow reflecting pool of clear water that shimmered in the refracted light of the mirror city.

  Everything is a reflection, Apollo mused. Avions, nestled in the trees and perching on window sills and rooftops, sang to one another, and Apollo wondered how long it had been since he had heard such music, such unfettered, unconditional happiness. But that wasn't entirely accurate and he knew it. It had always been there; he had just not paid it much attention since Serina had left this life. She had taken with her much of the light from his world.

  "You still haven't said who built this city," Apollo reminded Segis.

  Segis glanced back over her shoulder, and offered the commander a warm smile. "Your ancestors did, Apollo," she said. "The ancient Kobollians built this city to house the last generation of its people and preserve their sacred records. All of the information and wisdom of the ancients is to be found here."

  "What manner of information?" Cain asked.

  Segis made a small, shrugging gesture with her hands. "I could not say, Commander Cain. It is not our place to examine these ancient texts. We are merely the caretakers."

  "Are you Kobollian?" Tigh asked the question they were all thinking.

  "All humanoid races come from Kobollian blood," Segis answered. "The Kobollians long ago seeded the stars. We are merely a… shall we say, distant branch of your race."

  Apollo let his mind open, like the petals of a flower unfolding, and tried to slip into Segis's subconscious; if the caretaker really was of Kobollian stock, Apollo reasoned he should be able to pick up her thoughts, or at least her emotional state and whether she was what she claimed to be.