Chapter 14: Litmus — Part 1
The explosion reached the Cybele as a rumor before it reached us as fact.
Three days after Starbuck's return, the fleet was still riding the high of her survival when the wireless went cold. Military channels locked. Civilian frequencies dropped to carrier static. The sudden silence hit harder than any alarm — because silence from Galactica meant something had gone wrong that command didn't want to discuss.
Montoya brought the first intelligence. His contact chain — the fragile web of retired educators and former Quorum aides — carried whispers faster than official channels.
"Explosion on Galactica. Hangar deck, port side. Casualties confirmed. Sabotage suspected."
I was in the cargo office with Dunn. The word sabotage hung in the recycled air like smoke.
Doral. Aaron Doral, Number Five model. He walked onto Galactica with a bomb and detonated himself in the hangar bay. And now Specialist Hadrian is going to launch an investigation that turns into a witch hunt.
"Source?" Dunn asked Montoya.
"Yari Demos on the Rising Star. She has contacts in the Colonial government staff. The information is third-hand but consistent across two separate chains."
"Reliable?"
"Reliable enough to act on. Not reliable enough to quote."
Dunn turned to me. Her expression held the particular tension of a woman who'd learned to read my face when crises hit — the micro-pause before I spoke, the way my jaw set when meta-knowledge was fighting to get out.
"What are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking that a sabotage investigation on Galactica is going to spill into the civilian fleet within forty-eight hours. Cylon paranoia is a virus — it spreads through fear, and fear doesn't respect ship boundaries."
"And?"
"And we need to secure our operational materials before someone with a clipboard and a mandate starts searching civilian compartments."
The words landed in the room like a dropped tool. Marsh, who'd been replacing a circuit board on the comm relay in the corner, looked up from his soldering iron.
"Searching for what?"
"Anything unusual. Unauthorized communications equipment." I glanced at the three short-range comm units sitting openly on the workstation. "Private channel encryption protocols. Organizational documents that could be interpreted as... concerning."
Marsh set down the soldering iron. Removed his glasses. Put them back on.
"The comm relays I built. The encryption keys. Your planning notes."
"All of it. We need a secure location that won't be found in a standard compartment search."
"The engineering crawlspace below Deck Four." Marsh was already calculating. "Section twelve has a false panel I installed to access the emergency conduit junction. Space behind it is big enough for a standard cargo case. Nobody's accessed that section since before the attack."
"How long to relocate?"
"Twenty minutes if we move now."
"Move."
Marsh gathered the comm units, the encryption keys, and the two data pads containing organizational notes. I watched him work — precise, unhurried despite the urgency, the careful hands of a man who treated every piece of equipment like a patient. He was out the door in three minutes.
Dunn hadn't moved from her workstation.
"What about the mundane stuff? The efficiency proposals, the trade agreements, the housing reconciliation data?"
"Those stay. They're legitimate logistics work under Vasquez's authorization. Anyone who finds them sees a cargo master and her staff doing their jobs."
"And if they dig deeper?"
"The deeper material is in the crawlspace. The surface material tells a consistent story. We're clean."
Dunn's mouth pressed into a line. She pulled up the Cybele's internal security protocols on her data pad and started reviewing them — preparing, as she always did, for the shape of the problem before it arrived.
"One more thing," I said.
"What?"
"Cole's personal effects. In my quarters."
My voice didn't change. The words came out flat, professional, stripped of whatever they cost me. Dunn looked up from her data pad.
"What about them?"
"There's a photograph. An older woman. Cole's mother." I paused. "If someone asks me about it — about her — I need to have answers I don't have. Cole's file is only thirty-four percent recovered. I don't know her name, where she lived specifically, what she did for a living. If someone who knew the real Marcus Cole asks about his mother..."
I left the sentence unfinished. Dunn understood.
"Destroy it?"
The word sat between us. Destroy it. A photograph of a woman who'd loved the man whose body I was wearing. A woman who'd been vaporized with fifty billion others when the Cylons decided that peace was a strategy and genocide was a solution.
"Yes."
Dunn held my gaze for a moment. Then she nodded and went back to her data pad. She didn't offer comfort. She didn't acknowledge what it cost. That was why she was my operations chief — she understood that some decisions were made in silence and grieved the same way.
I went to Cole's quarters. The photograph was where I'd left it — face-down on the desk, a rectangle of paper and memory that I'd been unable to look at since Day Zero.
I turned it over. Kind eyes. Cole's jaw. Mom in neat cursive.
I held it for ten seconds. Then I tore it into strips, fed the strips into the waste recycler, and watched them disappear into the ship's digestive system.
I'm sorry. I never knew you. Your son was dead before I arrived, and the only thing I can do for his memory is live it better than he might have.
The recycler hummed. The photograph was gone.
I sealed Cole's locker, verified that nothing else in the quarters could raise questions, and walked back to the cargo office with my hands steady and my chest tight.
[Cybele Cargo Bay — Day 25, 0900]
The searches came on schedule.
Captain Vasquez, responding to fleet-wide directives from Colonial One, ordered random compartment inspections across the Cybele. Two marine reservists — civilian crew members pressed into security roles — worked through the refugee sections with the particular blend of authority and discomfort that marked people who'd been given uniforms without training.
Kwan shadowed them. Not obviously — he handled it with the quiet instinct of a man who'd done physical security before the world ended. He carried a supply inventory clipboard, looked busy, and positioned himself near every inspection point in our section.
"Sections 7-A through 7-K clear," he reported through the earpiece. "They opened Marsh's Compartment 7-F recycler housing. Looked inside, didn't understand what they were seeing, moved on."
"Cargo office?"
"Inspected at 0845. Found logistics documents, trade agreements, and Captain Vasquez's signature on every one. They didn't open a single file."
Because the surface tells a consistent story. That's the lesson — the best security isn't hiding things. It's making the visible story so boring that nobody looks deeper.
The searches continued for two days. Nothing found on the Cybele. Nothing found on any civilian ship, as far as our network could determine. The real action was on Galactica — where Specialist Hadrian's tribunal was turning a sabotage investigation into a inquisition.
Marsh's hidden crawlspace held. The organization's sensitive materials sat behind a false panel in Section Twelve, untouched, while above them the ship went about its business of keeping five hundred people fed and breathing.
The system tracked the crisis:
[THREAT ASSESSMENT: LITMUS INVESTIGATION]
[FLEET-WIDE PARANOIA: ELEVATED]
[ORGANIZATION EXPOSURE RISK: LOW (MATERIALS SECURED)]
[RECOMMENDATION: MAINTAIN PASSIVE POSTURE UNTIL INVESTIGATION CONCLUDES]
Passive posture. The system's diplomatic way of saying sit down and shut up. For once, I agreed with it.
Dunn reported from the mess hall that evening, the sound of utensils and conversation filling the background.
"Vasquez is taking credit for the 'clean inspection.' She told the XO that her 'efficiency improvements' demonstrated strong organizational governance."
"Good. Let her."
"You're remarkably calm about a woman stealing your life's work."
"The day she stops taking credit is the day she starts asking questions. I'll pay that price."
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