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.“He might have—”Roslin held up a hand.“This is immaterial, and it doesn’t answer my initial question.Is there a cure?”Everyone turned to look at Gaius, who hesitated a tiny moment.“No,” he said.The word landed on the table like a lead paperweight.A long silence followed.No one seemed willing to speak, as if more words might make the situation worse.Gaius waited.“So we’re all dead?” Lee Adama said at last.“Not necessarily,” he said, relishing the relief, however small, that came over their faces.It swelled him, made him feel important the way they turned to him for answers.“No one’s ever cured a spongiform encephalopathy, but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.Peter has clearly been carrying both the T and the H prions for quite some time, but he shows no symptoms.He claims to have had the disease and recovered from it, despite the fact that no human being has ever successfully fought off a spongiform encephalopathy.Peter did say that all the other humans who had been captured with him had died somehow.Perhaps they were test cases.In any case, Dr.Cottle and I are operating on the assumption that the Cylons infected Peter, then somehow cured him and made him immune.”“Don’t want to kill the carrier too fast,” Adama observed.Gaius nodded.“Exactly.Peter’s blood contains a third prion.If it has a function, we haven’t figured it out yet, but it may be the key.Dr.Cottle and I have made this matter our top priority.”“So,” Roslin said, “the fact remains that we have a deadly disease that masquerades as a religious plague along with the other touchy situation on our hands.”“What touchy situation?” Commander Adama asked, clearly concerned.Roslin gave a wan smile.“There’s an entire auditorium full of people who are expecting Peter to sing, but he’s obviously not going to.”“Heaven forbid,” Gaius muttered.“We should initiate quarantine protocols,” Tigh said.“Stop all ship-to-ship traffic and confine civilians to their quarters until we can spread the cure around.”“Not much point in that,” Cottle said from his end of the table.“The prion’s widespread by now.Might just as well shut the coop after the chickens get out.”“Are we all infected, Dr.Cottle?” Lee Adama asked.Cottle shrugged.“Probably.You’ve all had close contact with Peter or with someone who did.Prion T was created to be easy to transmit.Breathing the same air will do it, really.”Another long silence fell across the room.Gaius felt his own heart beating heavy, pumping the prion to every part of his body.It seemed like he could feel them sliding through his endothelial cells, permeating his brain.Utter nonsense, of course, but emotions didn’t listen to logic.“So we’re all dead, then,” Tigh said into the silence.“Is that what you’re saying?”Alarms blared.Everyone jumped, including Gaius.Every time that damned alarm went off, it took five years off his life.Sometimes he felt two hundred years old.“This is Lieutenant Gaeta,” crackled the PA.“Set Condition One throughout the Fleet.Repeat, set Condition One.Commander Adama, please come to CIC.”“From one thing or another,” Adama said, “we’re all dead.”Kara Thrace’s pulse pounded in her body while her legs pounded down the corridor.She’d been cooped up in the Galactica for two days now, and she was still feeling a little pissed off at Peter for the dinner—or lack of one.She also wanted to throw him down on the floor and get a good, solid frakking out of him.And she wanted him to hold her for a long time and stroke her hair.And she wanted to crack him across the jaw for probably infecting her with some weirdo disease that was going to dissolve her brain into gelatinous goo, even if the cure—maybe—was right around the corner.Peter filled her with dichotomies thick as mud, and Kara didn’t like dichotomies.They reminded her too much of life at home with her parents, of her father in particular.She unconsciously flexed her fingers, the ones Dad had broken.Over years, he’d broken all of them.“You’re a little frak-head.A worthless little slut, you got that? Gods, you can’t do anything right!”“Daddy! Please.Please…”“I’ll show you what it means to frak up.I’ll show you.Go get the hammer.”“Daddy, please.I won’t do it again.Please.”“I said, go get the frakking hammer, you little brat.Now!”Kara stumbled slightly.Her feet wanted to drag.She tried to banish the memory, but it wouldn’t go.For a moment, she could only see her father’s face.Love and loathing both tried to take command of her heart, and neither would give in.She wanted him to say, just once, that he was proud of her, that she wasn’t a frak-up.She also wanted him to beg for mercy, to plead for her to stop the pain she was inflicting on him.It was unfair, and it was wrong that her dad was both father and foe to her, but that’s the way it was.Kara set her jaw and quickened her pace toward deck five.Dichotomies.The solution was simple enough.Out there, in her Viper, she was free.Out there, everything was black and white.Everything she encountered was either a friend or an enemy.No one was both [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]