Sagittarius Is Bleeding: Battlestar Galactica 3

by Peter David

  “Yeah. Great,” Boxey said hollowly.

  Kara tried to jolly Boxey out of his doldrums over being exiled from the Galactica, but ultimately there wasn’t much that she could do. The boy dragged his heels all the way over to the transport dock, where one of the frequent shuttle vessels that moved constantly from one ship to the next picked him up for passage back to the Peacemaker. He never once looked away as he watched the Galactica dwindle in the aft viewing window. The battle vessel remained huge; it wasn’t as if Boxey was going all that far. Nevertheless, it was far enough to make him feel very distanced and very much alone.

  When he disembarked at the Peacemaker, he was surprised to find that a familiar face was waiting for him. Yet somehow he wasn’t actually all that surprised. Upon reflection, it seemed quite inevitable.

  “How did you know?” he asked.

  “I didn’t,” replied Freya Gunnerson. “I’ve just been checking in on any ship making a run from Galactica. I figured that, sooner or later, you’d be on it. You were making me nervous, though. Where’ve you been?” Teasingly she added, “Minerva Greenwald’s been asking about you, you little heartbreaker.”

  He started walking and she fell into step alongside him. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

  She laughed at that. “You know what I’ve learned? That people who say they don’t want to talk about something usually do. Come on, Boxey.” And she nudged him in the shoulder. “You’re my unofficial kid brother. You know I’ve liked you ever since we met, when I was put in charge of finding shelter for orphaned refugees. Haven’t I said so?”

  “Yeah, well . . . adults are really good at saying things and not so good at seeing ’em through.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Boxey didn’t want to tell her. Everything that Starbuck had said weighed heavily upon him.

  Then again, he’d insisted that he hadn’t told any other kids, and he hadn’t. But Freya was different. She was the best adult friend he had outside of people on Galactica. And even more than the others, she’d always had a ready ear for him and whatever problems he had at any given time. Still . . .

  “I can’t,” he said. “It’s . . . it’s secret . . .”

  “So what?” said Freya. “Boxey, I’m a lawyer. That’s all we do, is keep secrets.”

  He looked at her with interest. “Really?”

  “Really. It’s part of our job. It’s drilled into us. In fact, any lawyer who blabs a secret winds up losing her job because of it. That’s how seriously we take it. So anything you tell me goes no further. Guaranteed.”

  That seemed more than reasonable to Boxey, who was chafing under the yoke of torn loyalties. This was a way to balance both. It all came spilling out of him. Freya listened, her eyes widening as he finished bringing her up to date on everything that had happened to him.

  “That’s just wrong,” she finally said. They had stopped walking, having arrived in a central mall area where residents of the Peacemaker were interacting in a casual social setting. There were a few small trees that someone had uprooted while they were fleeing their home world; it’s amazing what some people will risk their lives for. The trees had now become the centerpiece of the mall, with special lights arranged to simulate the long-lost sunlight that the trees might never experience again. They sat under the trees and Freya continued, “They shouldn’t have held you like that. You should have contacted me.”

  “I didn’t think about it. I was kind of embarrassed about the whole thing. I thought you might be mad at me.”

  “Why in the world would I be mad at you?”

  “Kara was,” Boxey said. “And I bet the others were, too. I mean, she didn’t shout at me or anything. But she said I shouldn’t really have been on Galactica in the first place, and that I couldn’t go back there for a long time.” Boxey knew he wasn’t being entirely fair in his description of the way Starbuck had interacted with him. But he was frustrated and vulnerable, and at that moment felt as if he’d lost an entire coterie of friends that had been his only constant since the Cylon attack. He was loath to risk losing any more, and if it meant slightly exaggerating the way of things to Freya, well, he was willing to do that. “Plus, I was kind of scared. I mean . . . what if I was a Cylon?”

  “Even if you were, that doesn’t mean you automatically have no rights.”

  He looked at her in confusion. “I thought it kind of does.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Boxey snorted in disbelief. “Well, Sharon Valerii sure has no rights. They keep her locked up in that cell.”

  “For how long?”

  He shrugged. “Forever, I guess. She’s pregnant and everything, and they keep her caged in there like an animal.”

  Freya leaned back, stroking her chin thoughtfully. It was a mannerism she’d unconsciously picked up from her father; the absence of beard didn’t deter her. “Pregnant and everything. Caged up.” She shook her head. “Yes, they certainly are treating her as if she has no rights. But treating someone that way doesn’t automatically make it so. I think we may have to do something about that.”

  “We?”

  She had been looking inward, but now she turned her attention to Boxey. “Boxey . . . do you like it here? I mean, really like it here on the Peacemaker?”

  “It’s . . .” He was noncommittal. “It’s okay, I guess. I like hanging out with Minerva . . .”

  “Okay you guess. See, I happen to think that people are entitled to a lifestyle that’s slightly better than ‘Okay you guess.’ How would you like to come and live on the Bifrost?”

  “What’s there?” Although Boxey was very fond of Freya, he didn’t know all that much about her background or anything about where she resided when she wasn’t working with the homeless.

  “My people. The Midguardians.”

  “You have your own ship?”

  She nodded. “We do. Because we knew that the human race was going to be assaulted. We knew that end times would come, and these are them. And we prepared for it. If you’d like, you can live with us, and you can study our ancient writings, and you’ll know things that are happening, too. You’ll be prepared, as we were.”

  “If my father had been one of you . . . would he have known about what the Cylons were going to do? Would he . . .” He hesitated, the wound still fresh in his heart even after all these weeks. “Would he still be alive?”

  Freya looked at him tenderly. “I won’t lie to you, Boxey. I don’t know for sure. It’s not as if we have a day-by-day calendar. But I’ll tell you this: He certainly would have had a better chance if he had attended to the prophecies of the Edda than depending on the Lords of Kobol to protect him. They didn’t do an especially good job, did they.”

  “No. They sure didn’t.” He took a deep breath, then let it out. “Sure. Why not? Let’s go to your ship.”

  “Excellent,” she said, patting him on the back as they both rose. “We’ll get you over there . . . we’ll get you settled in . . . and then,” she added with determination, “we’ll see what we can do about Sharon Valerii.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  “Nothing?”

  William Adama was in his quarters, staring at Saul Tigh with a combination of incredulity and frustration. These weren’t emotions that he relished having there. His quarters were traditionally his place of retreat from the day-to-day, and even night-to-night, stress of commanding the Galactica and feeling the weight of humanity’s survival on his shoulders. Everything there was designed to be as soothing and supportive as possible. It was his “womb,” his comfort zone. Whenever Tigh came there to talk about something, Adama inevitably braced himself mentally, knowing that it was probably going to be disruptive of his hard-fought-for stability. This evening was obviously not going to be an exception. “The investigation’s turned up nothing?”

  “Not so far,” Tigh admitted. He had loosened his jacket, which he routinely did when he was off duty. He sat across from Adama and shook his head,
looking discouraged. “Gaeta seems ready to tear his hair out. It’s certainly giving him a nervous condition; poor bastard keeps scratching the back of his hand like he wants to peel the skin off. He’s practically taken apart the entire CNP and Dradis piece by piece and put it back together again, and can’t find a damned thing to indicate how the Cylons could possibly have tapped into it to determine where we were going to be Jumping to.”

  “So what are you saying?” asked Adama. “That we’re completely screwed? That we live with the idea of blind Jumps for the rest of our lives?”

  “I sure as hell hope not,” Tigh said grimly. “Because frankly, I’m not sure how long those lives will be. Our luck is going to run out sooner or later, and I’m betting sooner.”

  “As am I.” Adama leaned back in his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I was less than candid with you earlier, by the way.”

  Tigh raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “I have noticed: It’s not getting easier.”

  Tigh laughed at that, a moment of needed levity. Then he added, “By the way, the business with the boy has been sorted out.”

  “The boy?” Adama wasn’t following at first, but then he remembered. “Oh, the youngster. Boxey. We really thought he might be a Cylon?” Adama sounded openly skeptical.

  Tigh shrugged in a what-can-you-do? manner. “We can’t be too careful,” he said.

  “Historically, I think it’s been proven that we can,” replied Adama. Tigh naturally knew to what he was referring: the time that a simple military tribunal had gotten completely out of hand, casting suspicion on everyone and anyone until Adama had been forced to shut the thing down.

  “Maybe so,” Tigh agreed reluctantly, “but that still leaves us with the same problem. Gaeta and his best people are still looking into the matter, but it might be that we have to look in a different direction.”

  Adama looked as if he were studying the words that Tigh had just spoken, hanging there in the air. “Are you suggesting . . . ?”

  “I’m suggesting,” said Tigh, leaping into it since he had put it out there, “that we may have a Cylon operative in the CIC. Someone right under our very noses.”

  “You really think that one of our own people . . .”

  “I’m trying not to think, frankly.” And then he hastened to add, “And please, no comments about how I must have a lot of practice at that.”

  “Wasn’t even considering it,” said Adama, who had indeed been considering it and had simply thought better of it.

  “What I mean is, if you start to think too hard about things like this, you eliminate possibilities because . . . well . . .”

  “They’re unthinkable.”

  “Right. And we can’t afford to do that.”

  “So what’s the solution?”

  Tigh leaned forward, his fingers interlaced and hands resting on Adama’s desk. “Listening devices.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean listening devices. We bug the quarters of everyone in CIC.”

  “Without their knowledge.”

  “Well, that’s certainly the only way it would yield us any information,” Tigh said reasonably.

  Adama felt as if he were lost in a vast morass of impenetrable moral conundrums. His face, as always, displayed no sign of his inner frustration. “You’re suggesting we bug our own people. Listen in on their private lives, even though they’re not actually suspects of any crime.”

  “Of course they’re suspects, Bill, and don’t make me out to be the bad guy here,” said Tigh, sounding defensive.

  “It’s completely contrary to military protocol . . .”

  “That’s true. Here’s the thing: All the guys who wrote the rules of military protocol? They’re all dead. They were blown to bits by the Cylons, and now we’re out here trying to hold things together through events that the framers of those protocols could never have conceived. Bill . . . we’re dealing with an enemy who looks just like us.”

  “It’s been my experience,” Adama said slowly, “that the enemy usually looks like us. Most of the time . . . the enemy is us.”

  “Fair enough. But—”

  “What are you proposing, Saul? We listen in on anything and everything for an indefinite period of time? What right do we have to spy on our own people?”

  “The right to do everything in our power to keep them safe. Let’s be reasonable, Bill: If the Cylons are talking to any humans, I want to know about it. And I very much suspect you want to as well.”

  Adama didn’t say anything for a time, drumming his fingers on the desk. “The whole thing stinks,” he said finally.

  “No argument on that, Admiral,” replied Tigh, his face set and determined. “But I’ve waded through so much crap in my life that my nostrils died ages ago. Which is why I’m offering to attend to this so that you don’t have to know anything about it.”

  “You’re concerned about my sense of smell.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Are you going to bug yourself? And me?”

  Tigh blinked at that. “I . . . don’t see the point. We know we’re not Cylons. And since we’d know about the bugs, we wouldn’t say or do anything incriminating anyway.”

  “What about your wife?”

  The colonel clearly couldn’t quite believe what he was saying. “My wife? Ellen?”

  “Do you have more than one wife?”

  “No . . .”

  “Then that would be her.”

  “You’re inferring she’s a Cylon . . . ?”

  “No,” corrected Adama, “I’m implying she could be. That is what the whole purpose of this eavesdropping plan is, isn’t it? To weed out possible agents in command positions?”

  “She’s not in a command position!”

  “She sleeps next to my first officer. Have you never considered the dangers of pillow talk? For that matter, what if you’re muttering classified information in your sleep and she’s sitting there jotting down notes?”

  “That’s absolutely ridiculous!”

  “Ridiculous it may be,” Adama said with no hint of rancor. “But absolutely? I don’t think so.”

  “She’s my wife!”

  “Does that make her above suspicion?”

  “You bet it . . .” And then Tigh stopped, and Adama could see that Tigh was really starting to think about it. Adama had long ago realized that this was Tigh’s way: to react to something with pure gut instinct. Given time, he would often consider the consequences of what he was saying and doing. The problem was that, if he didn’t have the time, the decision he went with wasn’t always the most prudent. Adama didn’t hold it against him; everyone had their failings. Still, it was something that was never far from his thoughts. Tigh lowered his gaze and continued reluctantly, “It . . . doesn’t make her above suspicion.”

  “No. It doesn’t. I figured the way to make you understand the enormity of what you’re proposing is to make it hit closer to home.”

  “Understood.” Tigh rose. “I apologize for suggesting the—”

  “Do you have the know-how to do it?”

  This brought Tigh up short. He blinked repeatedly, as if someone were shining a flashlight directly in his face. “Pardon?”

  “Do you personally have the know-how to install the sort of bugs we’re talking about?”

  “Well . . . yes. I did some surveillance work early in my career. We have the necessary equipment in ship’s stores . . .”

  “Do it,” Adama said quietly. “It stays between you and me. And this is not a fishing expedition. If we hear two officers conspiring to assemble a still or find out that someone likes to spend their free time reciting lewd poetry with our names in it . . . we don’t give a damn about it. No recriminations, no black marks. We’re looking for evidence of Cylons or Cylon allies only. Is that understood?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Oh, and Saul . . .” Adama paused and then continued, “If you can manage it . . . monitor the vice preside
nt as well.”

  Tigh nodded.

  Adama sat and stared at nothing for a long time after Tigh left. He despised the notion of being in a situation that seemed to have no graceful way out. It wasn’t just the prospect of eavesdropping on his own people. It was that he was combating potential spying with actual spying. He had thought that the most cataclysmic problem he was ever going to have to deal with was that the Cylons were becoming indistinguishable from humans. What worried him far more was the possibility that humans were—not all at once, because these things don’t happen overnight, but very slowly—becoming indistinguishable from Cylons.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Laura Roslin had become an enforced insomniac.

  Prophetic dreams were nothing new for her. She had had them enough times while she’d been under the influence of the cancer medication, extract of Chamalla. But they had seemed helpful to her. Prophetic, guiding dreams that were admittedly sometimes violent. But they ultimately had a purpose, and that purpose appeared to be to help her in particular and humanity in general. No matter what she had experienced, she had never felt threatened by them.

  But this was a very different circumstance. As she lay in her bed and stared up at the ceiling, she felt as if she were under constant threat. As if something had just crawled into her mind and was lying there, festering and trying to undermine her belief in herself and her strength of character.

  She’s being paranoid. There is no one out to get her. All right, that isn’t true: There’s an entire mechanized race that’s out to get her. Her and everyone else. But that has nothing to do with what’s going on in her head. This is all just spillover from dodging death. That’s all. All the things that prey on her during the day are haunting her at night. And since she knows that’s what was happening she can control it. She is stronger than simple night terrors. Stronger and better.