Chapter 2: Borrowed Skin
"—saying you should be dead, Lieutenant."
Dr. Yusuf had his penlight in my eye. I held still while he checked pupil response, my jaw clenched against the urge to push his hand away. Four hours since the attack. Four hours of chaos, triage, and the Cybele running hard for coordinates that would put us under Galactica's guns.
"Shrapnel missed your heart by a centimeter. Internal bleeding should have killed you before I got to you." He clicked the light off. "And now you're sitting up asking for a duty assignment."
"Fleet needs bodies that can work," I said. Cole's voice was getting easier. Lower than mine had been, a roughness to it. "I can work."
"You can barely breathe."
"I can breathe enough."
Yusuf studied me with the particular suspicion of a man who understood medicine and didn't trust miracles. Behind him, the medical bay had settled into grim routine — the screaming had stopped, replaced by the quiet industry of triage. The dead had been moved. The living were being managed.
"Twelve hours of bedrest," he said. "Then light duty. And I mean light, Cole. You tear those wounds open and I'm sedating you."
"Understood."
He moved on. I had maybe sixty seconds alone.
System. What can you give me on Marcus Cole?
The blue interface stuttered to life — dim, corrupted, running on whatever scraps of energy were keeping me alive. Text crawled across my vision in fragmented bursts:
[PERSONNEL FILE — COLE, MARCUS A.]
[RANK: LIEUTENANT — COLONIAL FLEET RESERVE]
[ASSIGNMENT: LOGISTICS OFFICER, TRANSPORT CYBELE]
[AGE: 29 — ORIGIN: PICON]
[FAMILY: MOTHER (DEC██SED — PICON) — NO SPOUSE — NO CHILDREN]
[SERVICE RECORD: COMPETENT — UNREMARKABLE — LOW SOCIAL PROFILE]
[NOTE: SUBJECT MAINTAINED MINIMAL PERSONAL CONNECTIONS]
[FILE INTEGRITY: 34% — ADDITIONAL DATA CORRUPTED]
Thirty-four percent. Enough for the basics. Cole had been a quiet professional — did his job, kept his head down, didn't make enemies or friends. No one on this ship would look at me and see a stranger wearing their buddy's face. They'd see the same unremarkable logistics officer they'd always half-ignored.
Perfect.
I spent the next hour memorizing what the system could reconstruct. Cole's posting history. His work patterns. Which mess hall he used, which corridor he walked to reach the cargo holds. Small details that could betray me if I got them wrong.
The system flickered warnings between data dumps:
[SYSTEM ENERGY: 12/100 — CRITICAL]
[REGENERATION RATE: 0.3/HOUR — IMPAIRED BY INJURIES]
[RECOMMENDATION: MINIMIZE SYSTEM USE — PRIORITIZE REST]
I ignored the recommendation and kept reading.
[Cargo Hold B — 6 Hours Post-Attack]
The Cybele's main cargo hold had been converted into a refugee processing center. Families sat in clusters between shipping containers. Children slept on emergency blankets spread over steel decking. The air was thick with body heat, recycled oxygen, and the sour tang of unwashed fear.
A woman stood at the center of the organized chaos like a traffic controller at the world's worst intersection. Mid-thirties, square shoulders, dark hair pulled into a knot that looked military even without a uniform. She directed refugees with sharp gestures — you there, you here, families against the port bulkhead, singles along starboard — and the crowd obeyed because her voice carried the particular authority of someone who would not ask twice.
Petra Dunn, cargo master.
The system pulsed, unbidden:
[PERSONNEL SCAN: DUNN, PETRA]
[COMPATIBILITY: 73%]
[ADDITIONAL DATA: LOCKED — SYSTEM ENERGY INSUFFICIENT]
Seventy-three percent compatibility. Whatever that meant. I filed it and approached.
Dunn spotted me at ten meters. Her eyes did a fast inventory — bandaged chest under a uniform jacket I'd buttoned crooked, pale skin, the careful walk of a man whose insides were held together with medical tape and alien technology.
"Cole." Flat voice. Professional. "You look like someone ran you through a hull breach."
"Close enough."
"Yusuf cleared you?"
"Light duty."
She looked me up and down again. Made a decision.
"Inventory manifest's behind on bay three. Refugees have been grabbing supplies without logging. I need a count before Captain Vasquez asks for numbers I don't have."
She handed me a data pad. It was heavier than it should have been. My hands trembled around the edges. I tightened my grip until the tremor disappeared.
"I'll have it by end of shift."
Dunn was already turning away.
"Cole."
"Yeah?"
"Don't pass out in my cargo hold. The paperwork's worse than the medical bills."
She walked off. No warmth, no sympathy, no concern. Just pragmatic efficiency applied to a dying civilization's supply chain.
I like her.
I found bay three and started counting.
[Cole's Quarters — 10 Hours Post-Attack]
The intercom crackled while I worked.
"All hands, this is Captain Vasquez." A woman's voice, hoarse with exhaustion, steady with the particular discipline of someone who'd been trained not to crack on an open channel. "We have joined a convoy of sixty-three civilian vessels under the protection of Battlestar Galactica. FTL jump coordinates are being synchronized fleet-wide. We will jump together."
I put down the data pad and moved to the nearest porthole.
Outside, the stars were wrong — too many ships breaking up the familiar nothing of space. I counted what I could see from this angle. Cargo haulers, passenger liners, mining ships, a botanical cruiser trailing green light from observation decks. Humanity's remnant, gathered together in the dark.
Forty-nine thousand, give or take. Everyone who's left.
"FTL jump in thirty seconds. All hands, brace for transit."
The familiar thrum — Cole's memory supplied the physical vocabulary — built through the deck plates. A vibration in my teeth, in my bones, in the held-together wreckage of my chest. Then the universe folded, and the Cybele jumped.
Stars blurred. Vanished. Returned in different positions. My stomach turned, but Cole's body knew this feeling. Muscle memory that didn't belong to me kept my balance while my inner ear screamed.
The fleet had jumped. Together. Away from the burning colonies, away from fifty billion ghosts, into whatever came next.
I found Cole's quarters twenty minutes later. A small cabin, officer-grade — which meant a bunk, a desk, a locker, and enough floor space to stand without touching all four walls. Cole's personal effects were sparse. A shaving kit. Two spare uniforms. A book — Colonial Engineering Standards, Volume IV — with a bookmark at page 212.
And a photograph, pinned to the wall above the desk. An older woman with Cole's jaw and someone else's kind eyes. A single word written on the back in neat cursive: Mom.
I sat on the bunk. Stared at the photograph. The woman was dead. Everyone she'd known was dead. The son she'd raised was dead too — his body kept walking, but the mind inside it belonged to a stranger from a universe where she'd never existed at all.
I turned the photograph face-down on the desk.
The system display flickered in my peripheral vision, dim and patient. I pulled up the Cybele's crew manifest — a list of names, ranks, assignments. One hundred and twelve crew members. Four hundred and six refugees as of last count.
Five hundred and eighteen people on this ship. And not one of them knows the Cylons are going to find us again.
My hands trembled. I pressed them together, interlaced the fingers until the knuckles went white.
Learn the ship. Map the resources. Map the people. Stay invisible.
I started reading. Name by name, bunk assignment by bunk assignment, skill set by skill set. Committing the Cybele's entire population to a memory that hadn't existed twelve hours ago.
The jump clock on the wall ticked forward. Somewhere in the fleet, a DRADIS screen was clean. For now.
Thirty-three minutes later, that screen would start screaming.
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