03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding (12 page)

But Adama didn’t seem the least bit daunted in his apparent conviction that there was something Baltar wasn’t telling him. Baltar
couldn’t help but wonder what the hell Roslin had said to him… and it had to
have come from Roslin. He was certain of that, although he wasn’t quite sure
why.

“Thank you,” Adama said levelly, “for your efforts in clearing the boy…
and for saving Laura Roslin. In appreciation of that, I will give you advance
warning: I’m watching you.”

“I don’t blame you,” Baltar replied. “I hear there’s so little on broadcast
these days that’s remotely interesting. Find your entertainment where you can,
Admiral, by all means.”

Adama said nothing at that, but instead turned and walked out of the lab. The
moment he was gone, Baltar let out a long sigh and shriveled like a balloon.

“I’m impressed, Gaius,” said Number Six. “I’ve never seen such a simultaneous
display of sheer nerve and sheer stupidity.”

“Glad I could accommodate you.”

“Don’t be.”

He closed his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and opened his eyes again.
Number Six was gone. Baltar couldn’t recall the last time he’d been quite that
glad not to see her someplace.

Boxey had had no idea what to think when Corporal Venner had shown up at the
secure area where he was being held. He was slightly more buoyed, however, when
he saw that Kara Thrace was with him. Boxey was relieved to see the friendly
face, although he wasn’t certain exactly what to expect from it.

She winked at him. “You’re sprung, kid.”

He let out a huge sigh and sagged back in the chair he’d been seated on.
“That’s a relief,” he admitted.

Venner, eyes narrowed in suspicion, was quick to pounce.

“Why? Were you worried that the results were going to prove you’re a Cylon?”

“Well… sure,” said Boxey.

This prompted a startled reaction from both Venner and Kara. “You were?” she
asked.

“Isn’t that the whole thing with Cylons who look like people? That sometimes
they don’t know? Sharon didn’t know, right? I mean, that’s what you guys told
me.”

Kara looked at Venner and shrugged. “He’s right. We were all talking about
that. How Sharon—the one who shot the admiral—that she said she didn’t know.
That she didn’t know it before and she didn’t know she was going to shoot the
Old Man, and even after, she didn’t remember it.”

“Oh, of course,” Venner said sarcastically. “And naturally you’re gonna
believe everything that a Cylon says.”

“Because humans are so much more trustworthy,” shot back Kara. “Gods, when I
think of the number of guys who told me they loved me just to get a piece of…”
She stopped and glanced back at Boxey, and then cleared her throat and forced a
smile. “You, uh… you didn’t hear that.”

“Hear what?” asked Boxey, who really hadn’t heard it because Kara had been
saying it so fast.

“Good lad,” Kara replied in approval, leaving Boxey no more clear on what was
being discussed than before, but at least Starbuck was happy with him.

Boxey’s spirits were rising for the first time in what seemed like ages. “So
what’re we up to, huh? Another poker game? Just hanging out in the—?”

“Boxey,” Kara interrupted him, and she looked a bit pained when she spoke.
“You’re, uh… well, you’re going back to the
Peacemaker,
actually.”

“But I thought that—”

“No buts, kid,” Venner said.

Kara rounded on him with obvious annoyance. “Do you think that maybe, just
maybe, you could give us some frakking space, huh? In fact, I have a better
idea. I’ll take it from here. You can go on about your duties.”

“I have my orders…”

“Awww,” said Kara, “and what a pity I don’t outrank you… oh! Wait! I do!
Now scram!”

Venner drew himself up and said darkly, “I’ll be forced to report this to
Colonel Tigh.”

“Yeah, you do that, because the threat of being reported to Colonel Tigh is
really gonna leave me trembling.”

Scowling once more, Venner walked away, although he kept glancing over his
shoulder as if he thought that Boxey was going to produce a gun from within his
mouth and open fire.

Kara strolled over to a bench, sat, and patted the empty space next to her.
Boxey sat where she indicated. “Look,” she said, “you just need to keep your
distance for a little while until things cool down.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong!”

“You snuck into the brig and spoke at length with an enemy of the Colonies,”
she reminded him. “If we were going by the book, then you’d be guilty of
consorting with the enemy and that carries with it a year’s sentence. You’d have
plenty of time to chat with Sharon Valerii if you were in a cell next to her,
wouldn’t’cha.”

He suddenly became very interested in the tops of his shoes. “I guess,” he
muttered.

“You guess.” She chuckled despite the seriousness of the situation. “Bottom
line, Boxey, you have no idea how damned lucky you are. You really could wind up
doing serious jail time. You are clueless as to how seriously things get taken
around here. This is a military vessel, for gods’ sake. It’s not a playground.”

“I wasn’t playing…”

“You sure as hell were,” Kara told him firmly in a no-nonsense voice. “You
sure treated it like a game. Showing off just so everybody could know how clever
you were.”

“What, and you never do that?”

“All the time.”

“Then what’s the difference?”

“The difference is, I blow Cylons out of space better than any other
motherfrakker in the fleet, that’s what,” Kara said, making no attempt to hide
her sense of smug accomplishment. “And that includes the CAG. So when trouble
hits, they don’t want my ass in a cell; they want it in a Viper where it
belongs. And even with that going for me,” she added, shaking her head, “I have
no doubt that if Tigh could find a way to put me away for good, he wouldn’t
hesitate. And he’s the one pushing to get you off
Galactica.
Venner and
the other marines did a full write-up on you, and Tigh’s whole thing is
security. He sees you as a risk that has no business being on a military vessel,
no matter how much we may like you.”

“So…” Boxey felt a girlish urge to cry, and managed through sheer force of
will to keep the tears from welling in his eyes. “So I can’t come here and hang
out with you guys anymore?”

“‘Anymore’ is a long time. Just until things cool down, at least. Give it
some time, and then I’ll work the circuit: I’ll talk to the CAG, and he’ll talk
to the Old Man, and the Old Man will lean on Tigh, and we’ll have you back here.
But there’s one thing you’ve got to understand,” and her voice dropped to a
severe tone that fully commanded his attention. “You’ve got to keep your lip
zipped about the Cylon we have locked up here. Do you get that? You can’t just go running around, telling the other kids about what
goes on here.”

“I haven’t,” Boxey protested. “You told me not to, weeks ago. I knew it was
important then…”

“Yeah, but now it’s even more important. The admiral, Tigh… they’re
worried that if word gets out to the fleet, all hell is going to break loose.
That people won’t understand that she’s… that it’s…” She corrected
herself, scowling. “A military asset. There’s a lot of jumpy people out there
who never, ever expected to find themselves in the middle of a space-going war
zone, and they don’t know how to take it. They’d kill the Cylon as soon as look
at it, and gods only know what they would do in order to make that happen. We’d
rather not find out. You get what I’m saying, Boxey? This isn’t just me talking.
This is coming straight from the admiral, and if I’m not convinced that you
understand it, then things could get nasty. So I’ve got to know that you do
understand.”

“I understand.”

“Say it again.” And her gaze was like a laser penetrating his mind.

“I. Understand,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster.

She studied him for a time, and he felt as if the admiral were looking at him
through her eyes. Then she finally relaxed slightly and said, “Good. Plus,
hey… remember… once we find Earth, we’ll all be together on the same planet
anyway.” She ruffled his hair. “That’ll be our happily ever after. Won’t that be
great?”

“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. 1
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.