He stared at her, no longer laughing. “You want me to get more sleep and then you tell me something guaranteed to keep me awake all night? Besides, Doctor Baltar’s Cylon detection test confirmed I was human. Unless,” he suddenly said, “Doctor Bal-tar is also a Cylon, or under Cylon influence, in which case—”
Laura sighed. “Good night, Billy. Get more sleep and stop worrying about me. That’s a presidential directive.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, Madame President.” He bowed ever so slightly, which naturally wasn’t remotely necessary but he likely couldn’t help it, and started to exit her chambers. Then he paused, turned and asked, “By the way… why did you scream, Madame President?”
“Nothing. It was nothing. I had a bad dream.”
“About what?”
“About this conversation and its refusal to end. Good night, William,” she said with a touch of pointed formality.
Taking the hint, Billy said, “Good night, ma’am,” and exited, closing the door behind himself.
Shaking her head, Laura sent the lights back from dim to darkness, removed her robe, and climbed back into bed.
And there she lay, for hour after hour, her mind suddenly alive with concerns. Concerns over the dream, concerns over everyone and his brother being a Cylon. She remembered a conversation she’d once had with Adama in which she’d said, “If you’re a Cylon, I’d like to know.” To which Adama had quite accurately replied, “If I’m a Cylon, you’re really screwed.”
She was convinced by now that Adama was not a Cylon.
But as she recalled the bleeding archer, the precursor of their own colony of Sagittaron—and the subsequent collapsing of all the obelisks, which had a symbolism that even a blind man could have seen—she wasn’t entirely convinced that they weren’t still really screwed.
CHAPTER
2
In the Viper pilots’ lounge, Kara Thrace threw down her cards as her lips twisted in disgust. She fixed her opponent with a fearsome stare and said far more loudly than was necessary, to everyone who was seated at the table, “Who told this bum he could sit in? Huh?”
“You did,” Gaius Baltar reminded her coolly.
Kara glanced around the table and saw an array of heads bobbing in agreement. “And you people let me? Knowing what you know about me? Knowing what an idiot I am, you were that dumb as to listen to me? Okay, fine.” She tilted back in her chair and took a deep swallow of her drink, which sent a pleasant burning sensation down her throat. “In that case, I wash my hands of you. You brought it on yourselves.”
Deckhand Callista Henderson, nicknamed Cally, cast a weary yow-talk-to-her glance at Viper Pilot Lee Adama. Lee, however, refused to rise to it, and instead simply shook his head in resignation.
Meanwhile the target of Kara’s ire was leaning forward and raking in his chips. “It’s no big deal, Kara. It was just luck,” said Boxey, who had to stand on his toes to reach the pot.
“Kara. He’s calling me Kara, like we’re… like we’re friends or something,” Kara said in mock indignation. “Punk kid! Remember who the grown-ups are around here.”
“Admittedly, it’s not always easy to tell,” Baltar said pointedly.
“A little respect, is all I’m asking.”
Lee Adama leaned forward and told the boy, “Personally, I’d give her as little as possible.” Kara reached over and thumped Lee in the upper arm, which garnered a laugh followed by a loud “Ow!” as the pain caught up with him.
“How about Starbuck. Should I just call you Starbuck?” asked Boxey.
“Yeah, whatever,” said Kara, who was accustomed to responding to the name that was her call handle. Sometimes she even wondered whether Starbuck was her real name, and Kara Thrace was simply this nice, good-girl name that she put on to hide her true persona.
“Are you really upset with me?” The thirteen-year-old boy looked genuinely concerned. “For winning so much money, I mean.”
Kara, who was feeling a little bleary-minded with the combination of the lateness of the hour and the alcohol she’d consumed, smiled wanly and chucked Boxey under the chin. “Nah. Not really. You shouldn’t worry about my feelings.”
“I wasn’t,” Boxey replied. “I just wanted to figure out if you were gonna jump me once the game was over and try to get the money back.”
This prompted guffaws from everyone else, and an archly fierce scowl from Kara.
Lee leaned forward and said, “If you ask me…”
“Which nobody did,” Kara quickly told him.
“…you’ve gotten a lot better at your game, kid. You been taking lessons? Hanging out with a bad crowd?”
“Worse than this one?” asked Baltar. “The mind positively boggles.”
“I’ve met some guys, yeah,” Boxey said guardedly.
He paused, and the adults looked at each other with knowing smiles. Cally poked him in the ribs and said in a sing-song voice, “There’s a girrrrrrrrl…”
“Is not!”
“Is too.”
“Is not!”
“Is too.”
“I can feel my IQ spiraling into the abyss the longer this conversation continues,” said Baltar. “Is anyone planning to deal a new hand so I can win some money back from the human chip-vacuum over here?”
“Not happening anytime soon, Mr. Vice President,” Boxey assured him.
“Oh, great! He gets Mr. Vice President, I get Kara! Why is that?”
“Just a thought,” suggested Baltar, “but could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that your name is Kara and mine isn’t?”
“Frak you,” said Kara.
“Been there, done that,” Lee muttered a bit too loudly, which drew him a lethal glance from Starbuck.
Boxey looked up in confusion. “What?”
“Nothing,” every adult at the table echoed.
With that bewildering consensus, another round of play passed, and once again, Boxey won. By this point everyone was throwing down their cards in disgust. “I want to meet this girl,” Cally said loudly as she watched the last of her chips get swept away into Boxey’s pile. “Whoever she is. I want to see what she’s been teaching you.”
“Just how to be a better card player,” Boxey said defensively.
“No one’s this good a card player.”
“I am,” Baltar pointed out.
“Couldn’t tell it from what we’re seeing here.”
“Everyone has an off night.”
“Well,” Cally continued, “like I said, I want to meet her. You ask me, she’s probably not even human if she taught you to play that well. Probably a Cylon.”
“That’s not funny!”
Boxey’s outburst was so unexpected that the adults were startled into silence. Immediately chagrined at his reaction, Boxey looked down and said sullenly, “Sorry. I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry.”
“No, I am,” said Cally, and she reached over and placed a hand atop his. “I mean, you lost your whole family to the Cylon attack on Caprica. I should have…”
“It’s not that.”
Kara raised an eyebrow in mild surprise. “It’s not?”
“Well, it is a little,” Boxey corrected himself. “But I’m not the only one. Millions and millions of people died, and the ones who didn’t, almost no whole families made it. So I’ve got lots of, you know, company in trying to deal with all that.”
“Then what…?” Kara was still confused, and then she saw Lee mouth a name to her that she instantly recognized. “Oh.”
Baltar had also worked it out, but he was less subtle than Lee. “You’re referring to Sharon Valerii,” he said.
Boxey nodded. “Do you ever get creeped out about it?” he asked Baltar.
“‘Creeped out’?”
“Well, she piloted the ship that brought the both of us off Caprica.”
“Ah, yes. You know… since then, there’s been so much going on, I haven’t had the opportunity to give it much thought.”
“Wish
I could say that,” said Boxey. He had completely forgotten about the deck that was in front of him, even though it was his turn to shuffle. “Sometimes I have dreams about her. I see her there, and she’s at the helm of the ship, and suddenly she goes nuts like she did on Adama. Except in my dream, she doesn’t shoot anyone. Instead she pilots the ship down, straight into the planet. And we die. Or at least we’re going to die, except I wake up at the last second.”
“Oh, thank the gods for that. Can we play cards?” Baltar said irritably.
Starbuck said, “Shut up, Gaius,” silencing the vice president. “Boxey, you’ve got to remember something: The Sharon Valerii who flew that ship from Caprica and saved you, the one who shot Adama… she’s gone.”
“I know. She was shot and killed. Except she’s in a cell, isn’t she?”
“Well… yes.”
“See, that’s the thing I don’t understand.”
“I’m not sure any of us understands it any better, except perhaps for Doctor Baltar,” said Lee, indicating the vice president. “He’s as close as we have to an expert on Cylons.”
“I suppose that much is true,” Baltar said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. “Even so, there’s still a good deal about them that we don’t understand.”
“Okay, well… Boomer’s locked up in a cell right now, right?”
Kara winced slightly at the familiar call name being used to refer to the thing in the brig. “That’s right.”
“But she’s not the one who shot the commander… I mean, the admiral,” he amended, acknowledging Adama’s recent promotion.
“No, she’s not,” Baltar confirmed.
“So… what did she do that was wrong? I mean, if you get locked in the brig, it’s because you’re being punished for something. So what did she do?”
Now it was Lee’s turn to look uncomfortable. “Specifically… nothing. She herself has done nothing wrong. But the other Sharon shot my father, so…”
“So it has to do with that Admiral Adama is your father?”
“No, it has to do with that the Sharon who is in the cell is just like the Sharon who tried to kill the admiral. If one Sharon did that, then this one might try it.”
“But she might not try anything.”
“There… is that possibility, yes.”
“And she hasn’t so far.”
“Again, yes, but—”
“Here’s what I don’t get,” said Boxey. “If you,” and he pointed at Kara, “had a twin sister, and she did something really, really wrong, and you hadn’t done anything, and they told you they were going to lock you in a cell because you might do something even though you hadn’t yet… would that be, y’know… fair?”
“No, that wouldn’t be fair,” said Kara as she took back the card deck and started shuffling. “But it’s not the same thing.”
“How come?”
“Because it’s not.”
“But I don’t see why…”
“Because she’s not human!” Kara said. “Okay? She’s a machine. She’s a toaster. If I had a twin sister, she’d be human like me. But Sharon isn’t human and she never was. She’s… a frakking… toaster. Understand?” She started riffling the cards from one hand to the other.
“I guess.”
“Good.”
He paused, frowning, and then asked, “I just never saw a toaster that could get pregnant.”
The cards flew out of Kara’s hands, spraying all over the table.
“Yeah, that was a new one on us,” Lee deadpanned.
Suddenly an alarm slammed through the ready room. Kara Thrace, who had been slightly wobbly from her alcohol intake, was immediately on her feet. So were Lee and Cally, all of them scrambling toward the flight deck, leaving Baltar and Boxey staring at each other.
“Cylons,” said Lee with certainty as they ran.
“Good,” Kara said. “With a choice of robots trying to kill me or this conversation, I’ll take the robots.”
Seconds after the pilots had left the table, one of Baltar’s personal guards—tasked with attending to the safety of the vice president—came in and took Baltar firmly by the arm, pulling him to his feet before Baltar could even react. “Come sir,” he said, “we’re under attack. Regulations state that I have to get you to a secure location.”
“Well, thank the gods,” said Baltar. “And just where would be ‘secure’ exactly? I thought our entire problem was that no place was secure.”
“Sir, we’re under attack. Regulations state—”
“Yes, yes, yes.” Baltar turned and tried to scoop up the remains of his chips, but the agent wouldn’t be delayed any longer. As he pulled Baltar away, the vice president called to Boxey, “Don’t you dare touch my stack!”
Boxey watched him go, then walked over to Baltar’s unimpressively small stack of chips and touched them repeatedly in a mutinous display of defiance that no one saw.
Then he sank back into his chair and thought about Sharon Valerii, who had saved his life, sitting alone and scared in a cell, except it wasn’t her, except it was.
He wondered if she remembered him, or even had the slightest idea who he was.
Baltar hurried down the hallways, the agent making sure to keep him moving quickly. His mind was an enforced blank, as it always was at such times when his life was at risk. Suddenly a familiar voice said to him low, suggestively, almost right in his ear, “Where are you running to, Gaius?”
He almost skidded to a halt as he looked to his right and saw, no longer the agent, but the statuesque blond Cylon that he’d come to know as Number Six. Even as he nearly stopped, though, Number Six pulled him forward so that he continued to move. He tried to respond, but his voice was paralyzed in his throat. She was right there… right there. The woman who had been his lover, his salvation, who had given him something other than machinery and research to live for and had horrifically turned it into a means of destroying the human race. What the hell kind of man was he, that he could only have happiness at the cost of genocide?
He swore he could smell her perfect scent, and his heart raced—not from fear, but from hopeless longing for a woman, a time, an innocence and naiveté long gone.
“I don’t know,” said Baltar, and he was speaking of so much that he didn’t know—his destination, what would happen next, whether they would survive another minute, why he even deserved to live considering so many people had died because of his stupidity—that the three simple words spoke volumes of his character.
They meant nothing, however, to the agent, who simply replied, “There’s nothing you need to know right now, sir, except that you need to keep moving.” The agent’s voice snapped Baltar back to reality and he struggled to keep up with him while, at the same time, he swore he could hear the faint, mocking laughter of Number Six in his head.
Boxey had been modest when he spoke of how he had picked up tips on quality card playing since making some new acquaintances. He had, in fact, acquired—in a remarkably short time—some other skills as well.
Actually, “acquired” might not have been the best way to put it. “Honed” would be more accurate. Boxey had always been an exceptional hide-and-seek player in his youth. Many was the time that his parents recounted incidents where Boxey seemed to have literally disappeared into thin air. They would enter his room, calling his name, and there would be no sign of him. With weary cries of “Not again!” they would wind up tearing the house apart before Boxey was inevitably betrayed by his laughing—no, chortling—with glee that he had driven his parents crazy once more.
All of that was long ago and far away, or at least so it seemed. Boxey’s tendency to laugh aloud at his own cleverness was gone. So was the life. It seemed to Boxey that the memories he had might as well have come from someone else entirely, for all the relevance they had to his current life.
Nevertheless, one of the skills that had not disappeared with his aging into adolescence had been the ability to be sneaky. To make himself not be seen, to blend in
to the background. He had said nothing to Starbuck or Apollo or any of the others about it, but he had acquired quite the nimble set of fingers. It had been more out of profound boredom than anything else that he had taken up petty thievery on the Peacemaker, the civilian transport ship to which he’d been assigned. It was one of the larger transports, and it was extremely easy to slip into and out of the throngs of people who seemed constantly to be milling about in the corridors, looking for something to do to occupy their time. The truth of the matter was that they were as bored as he was; he was just being aggressive about killing the boredom.
It was after he had lifted the wallet of one particularly officious gentleman that he had turned around, prepared to blend in with the shadows, only to discover himself face to face with a smiling red-haired girl. She had freckles, which initially struck Boxey as odd until he remembered that, yes, not all that long ago, the sun had shone on people’s faces and done things to their skin. Freckles were gradually beginning to disappear these days, as were all hints of tans, but this girl still sported them. Her face was round, and she had deep brown eyes and small ears that poked out from copious straight hair that hung down to her shoulders.
Boxey braced himself, waiting for her to sound the alarm. Instead all she did was say, “You call that blending in with the shadows?” and she rolled her eyes in impatience over this Obviously Dumb Boy’s ham-handed attempt at thievery.
Her name was Minerva, Minerva Greenwald, and as she gave Boxey handy hints in making himself scarce, his young heart thudded with the poundings of his first crush.
Boxey still continued to make his way over to the Galactica every chance he got, snagging a ride on any shuttle that was going from the Peacemaker to the Galactica for some reason or other. All the pilots knew Boxey by that point, and were perfectly happy to bring him over with a nod and a wink to the regulations that said they weren’t supposed to give anybody lifts. Boxey, nimble-fingered as he was, had also become deft at acquiring hard-to-come-by items from the black market. No one questioned too closely when Boxey was able to provide some particularly rare fruit, or a cigar, or a bottle of fine brandy. Boxey didn’t believe in buying friendship, but there was nothing wrong with renting it or bribing it into existence for periods of time.
03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding Page 2