03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding (13 page)

“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.”

“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 president 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.

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.

But why Sagittaron? Or Sagittarius, as the ancient name was phrased. Why did
that figure so prominently? And Sharon Valerii?

Well, Valerii was obvious, of course. She represented the face of the
enemy… and yet she was also responsible, however indirectly, for Laura’s new
lease on life. So naturally she would feel conflicted about Valerii… about
it… and that was what dreams were, after all. A place for the mind to work out
conflicts.

As for Sagittaron… well, that was where Tom Zarek hailed from. Laura was
of the firm conviction that, short of the Cylons, Tom Zarek continued to
represent the single greatest threat to humanity’s continued existence. It was
the nature of those such as Zarek to instigate unrest, to foment hostility by
attempting to change the status quo—not through diplomacy or thought or
consideration—but through violent action. There was enough violence
threatening humankind from without; they certainly didn’t need it from within.

Perhaps that was where the image of blood was coming from as well. Blood was
life. Blood was cleansing. She was charged with maintaining the very life blood
of humans, to keep it flowing in a cold and uncaring galaxy against an
implacable foe that sought to annihilate them.

Symbolism. That’s what dreams were all about. The more she thought about it,
the less daunted by the dreams she was becoming. If she only thought of them as
a barrage of frightening images, then it was no wonder she would feel
overwhelmed by what was going on inside her skull. But if she broke them down to
individual concepts and did all she could to understand what they symbolized,
why… it wasn’t a problem at all.

Knowledge was the key to understanding. Knowledge—as Laura Roslin the teacher knew very well—was power. To have knowledge of what
her dreams meant gave her the power to be undaunted by them.

At that moment, her alarm clock went off. Laura was slightly jolted by the
noise, and it was just enough to make her realize that she had indeed drifted
off to sleep at some point in her musings. But it had been a peaceful, dreamless
sleep—the first one in an age, it felt like. That knowledge buoyed her spirits.
She felt as if she were on the mend, as if she had taken the first step on a
road back to recapturing her equilibrium.