Chapter 17: The Invitation
The shuttle from Cybele to Galactica took fourteen minutes.
Fourteen minutes of vacuum between the world I'd built and the world I needed to enter. I sat in the cargo section of a fleet transport — one of the battered short-range vessels that ferried supplies and personnel between ships — with a data pad on my lap and a heart rate that the system was actively trying to suppress.
[HOST STRESS INDICATORS: ELEVATED]
[HEART RATE: 94 BPM — ABOVE BASELINE]
[RECOMMENDATION: CONTROLLED BREATHING — 4-COUNT INHALE, 6-COUNT EXHALE]
I ignored the recommendation and stared at the approaching silhouette of Galactica through the shuttle's scratched viewport. The battlestar filled the frame — grey hull plating scored by decades of service, gun batteries bristling along dorsal ridges, the flight pods extended like arms reaching into the void. At this distance, every rivet was a story. Every scorch mark was a battle. The ship had been headed for a museum when the Cylons attacked, and instead of retirement she'd become the last wall between humanity and extinction.
I watched you on a screen. Now I'm boarding you. The difference is everything.
The shuttle banked into the port landing bay. Magnetic grapples caught the hull with a clunk that vibrated through the deck plates, and the pressure equalization sequence hissed into the cabin like a mechanical exhale.
"Attention passengers, we have arrived at Battlestar Galactica. Please disembark through the forward hatch. Welcome aboard."
The forward hatch opened. The smell hit first — recycled air, yes, but different from Cybele's. Older. Denser. Carrying traces of hydraulic fluid, weapons oil, the burnt-ozone tang of electronics running beyond their rated lifetimes, and underneath it all, the accumulated musk of thousands of people living in a space that hadn't been properly ventilated in decades.
Galactica smelled like war.
I stepped onto the hangar deck and the system activated with a hunger I hadn't expected.
[ENVIRONMENT: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA — HANGAR BAY]
[PASSIVE SCAN: ACTIVATING — 47 PERSONNEL IN RANGE]
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: LOW — MILITARY ENVIRONMENT, STANDARD SECURITY]
[SCANNING...]
Names and data flickered in my peripheral vision as I walked — crew members passing through the hangar, deck hands working on Vipers, a maintenance crew wrestling with a Raptor's landing strut. The system catalogued each one: basic profiles, emotional states, threat levels. None registered as notable. But the sheer volume of data — forty-seven people within scan range, more arriving every second — was a feast for a system that had been starved of new inputs.
[SYSTEM ENERGY: 80 → 76/100 — ELEVATED DRAIN FROM PASSIVE SCANNING]
Pace yourself. You're here for a meeting, not a census.
A petty officer met me at the hangar deck checkpoint. Young, efficient, the kind of sailor who'd been running errands for officers since before the world ended.
"Lieutenant Cole? I'm PO Laird. Lieutenant Dualla asked me to escort you to the briefing room."
Laird. The requisitions handler. The man whose desk connected civilian supply chains to CIC operations. I'd been planning to approach him through careful, multi-step networking, and instead he was walking me to my meeting like a tour guide.
Sometimes the path opens when you stop pushing.
We walked through Galactica's corridors, and every step was an education. The ship's bones showed through its skin — conduit bundles running exposed along ceiling junctions, deck plates worn smooth by decades of boot traffic, emergency lighting strips that cast amber pools between sections. Memorial photographs lined one corridor wall — faces of the dead, arranged in rows, some with flowers or personal objects left at their bases.
I stopped.
The memorial wall stretched twenty meters. Hundreds of photographs. Pilot wings pinned to paper. A child's drawing tucked between two portraits. A pair of dog tags hanging from a nail.
These are real people. Were real people. Not characters, not extras, not names in a credits sequence. Every face on this wall had a life, a story, a moment when they stopped existing.
The weight of it pressed down on my chest — not the old shrapnel pain, but something deeper. The same weight I'd carried since Day Zero, since I'd woken in a dead man's body with the knowledge of a genocide and the inability to prevent it. Fifty billion people. And here on this wall, a few hundred faces standing in for all of them.
"Lieutenant?"
Laird was waiting. Patient, practiced — he'd seen other visitors stop at the wall.
"Coming."
[Galactica — Briefing Room 2, Day 39]
Lieutenant Anastasia Dualla was shorter than I expected. Five-foot-four, immaculate uniform, dark hair pulled back in regulation style. Her face was composed with the particular discipline of someone who spent her days managing communications between a fleet in crisis and a commander who didn't tolerate inefficiency.
"Lieutenant Cole."
"Lieutenant Dualla."
Her handshake was firm, brief, professional. The system pulsed:
[ACTIVE SCAN: DUALLA, ANASTASIA]
[SE COST: 10 — REMAINING: 66/100]
[AGE: 26 — ORIGIN: SAGITTARON]
[COMMAND: 48/100 | COGNITION: 72/100 | CONSTITUTION: 55/100]
[CHARISMA: 61/100 | CUNNING: 43/100 | CONVICTION: 68/100]
[TOP SKILLS: COMMUNICATIONS 8/10, PROTOCOL MANAGEMENT 7/10]
[COMPATIBILITY: 58%]
[CYLON PROBABILITY: 1.1% (±30%) — LOW]
Not a recruitment target — not yet, not at fifty-eight percent compatibility. But a gateway. Her skills were communications and protocol, which meant she was Galactica's information switchboard. Everything flowed through her.
The briefing was professional and productive. Dualla laid out the logistics coordination program: standardized supply manifests, emergency distribution templates, cross-fleet inventory tracking. Legitimate work that would improve fleet operations. I contributed genuine expertise — the rotation optimization framework, the housing protocol, the water recycler maintenance program. No pretense. No secrets. Just competence on display.
And while I talked, the system scanned every person who walked past the briefing room's open door.
Deck crew. Marines. Officers. Each one a flickering data point — name, rank, emotional state, threat level. Most were unremarkable. A few triggered elevated readings. And one — brief, passing, a figure in a blue uniform moving through the corridor with the focused stride of someone late for his shift — triggered a cascade of system alerts.
[PERSONNEL SCAN: GAETA, FELIX]
[SE COST: 10 — REMAINING: 56/100]
[COGNITION: 89/100 | COMMAND: 52/100 | CONVICTION: 74/100]
[TOP SKILLS: TACTICAL ANALYSIS 9/10, DATA SYSTEMS 8/10]
[COMPATIBILITY: 81%]
[CYLON PROBABILITY: 1.8% (±30%) — LOW]
[RECRUITMENT VIABILITY: HIGH]
[NOTE: INSTITUTIONAL FRUSTRATION INDEX — ELEVATED]
Eighty-one percent compatibility. Tactical analysis at nine out of ten. And an institutional frustration index that the system flagged without me asking.
I lost him in two seconds — he passed the doorway, turned a corner, and was gone. But the scan data burned in my memory like a brand.
There you are.
"Lieutenant Cole?"
Dualla was watching me. I'd paused mid-sentence.
"Sorry — your corridor layout reminded me of a distribution bottleneck I've been working on. The physical distance between supply depots and consumption points." Smooth recovery. Plausible redirect. "I'll include the analysis in my follow-up report."
"I look forward to it." Dualla made a note on her data pad. "For the record, your methodology has already been cited in the Admiral's efficiency review. The Admiral doesn't praise civilian operations often. Consider it noted."
"I appreciate the feedback."
The meeting concluded. Laird escorted me back to the hangar deck, and I spent the walk memorizing every corridor junction, every doorway, every sightline. The system compiled a layout map in real-time, storing it in a format I could access later — Galactica's internal geography, rendered in blue wireframe behind my eyes.
The shuttle ride back to Cybele felt shorter than the journey there. I sat in the cargo section with my data pad open and drew Galactica's deck layout from memory — corridors, briefing rooms, the CIC entrance I'd glimpsed through an open hatch, the memorial wall, the hangar bay's maintenance bays. Every detail committed to paper in the disciplined shorthand of a man who'd just completed his first reconnaissance of the most important ship in the fleet.
Dunn was waiting at the Cybele's landing bay. She read my face before I spoke.
"It worked."
"It worked. And I saw Gaeta."
Her eyebrows rose. "Scanned?"
"Eighty-one percent compatibility. Cognition at eighty-nine. He's everything the estimates suggested and more."
"Distance to contact?"
"Still too far for direct approach. But I'm inside now, Petra. I have a legitimate reason to return. The coordination program gives me cover for regular visits."
Dunn absorbed this. Her expression shifted through calculation into something that resembled — cautiously, provisionally — satisfaction.
"I have news too. One of Kira's refugee contacts — a woman named Demos, used to work in Galactica's mess hall before reassignment. She knows Gaeta. Personally."
The corridor around us was empty. Third shift, skeleton crew, the quiet hours when information moved most safely.
"How personally?"
"They eat lunch together twice a week. Old routine from before the attack. She says he's..." Dunn checked her data pad. "Quote: 'Brilliant, lonely, and tired of being the smartest person in a room that doesn't listen.' End quote."
That's not a description. That's a recruitment profile.
"Set up a meeting. Me and Demos. Casual — information exchange about fleet conditions, nothing operational. I want to hear everything she knows about Gaeta's daily life, frustrations, patterns."
"Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow."
Dunn turned toward the cargo office, then paused.
"Cole. One thing."
"What?"
"When you were on Galactica. The memorial wall. How long did you stop?"
The question caught me unguarded.
"A few seconds."
"Laird told our shuttle liaison you stood there for almost a minute. He said you looked..." She searched for the word. "Affected."
"I was looking at dead people, Petra. It's an affecting experience."
She held my gaze for one beat longer than professional, then nodded and walked away.
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