03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding (3 page)

“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 into 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.

With all of those questionable talents at Boxey’s command, it was small
wonder that, while everyone was scrambling to the flight deck and leaping into
their Vipers, and the ship was in a state of high alert, Boxey was able to slip
into the brig. There were guards at the front, yes, but they were busy talking
to each other, speculating about how the frakking Cylons had found them yet
again,
and when the hell was this going to let up already, and what if it
never did, and what if sooner or later the luck of the last remains of humanity
finally gave out. With all of that going on, it was not all that much trouble
for Boxey to secure himself in a corner, wait until the proper moment presented
itself, and ease himself behind the guards and through the main door without
their even noticing he was there.

The cell area was cramped, as was pretty much everything else on
Galactica.
It wasn’t particularly surprising; it was a battleship, after
all. There was very little in the military mindset that made room for comfort. Functionality was valued above everything, and if
the designers of
Galactica
didn’t hesitate to cram the ship’s military
personnel into as incommodious quarters as possible, certainly they weren’t
going to go out of their way to provide luxurious accommodations for prisoners.

It was darker in the cell area than outside, and Boxey paused a few moments
to let his eyes adjust.

He spotted her at the far end of the brig. Her cell didn’t look to be much
bigger than five by ten feet, and Boxey tried to imagine what it would be like
to have his entire life confined to such a narrow area. The brig didn’t have
bars the way that other cells did. Instead it had walls that consisted of metal
grid screens which appeared to be welded tightly together, reinforced by
Plexiglas.

Sharon was in her cot, lying on her back, her arms flopped over her head. It
was difficult for Boxey to determine if she was awake or not, although the
steadiness of her breathing seemed to indicate that she was asleep. He also
couldn’t help but notice the developing bulge in her stomach. It wasn’t
especially large, but it bore the distinctive shape that separated the belly of
a pregnant woman from one who was just getting fat… a distinction that Boxey
had learned, but not before inadvertently insulting quite a few overweight
women.

He approached her slowly, moving on the balls of his feet, applying
everything he had ever known or had come to know about the art of stealth. She
continued not to move. He couldn’t see her face clearly, and for some reason
that brought him a measure of comfort. He knew Sharon Valerii’s face as well as
he knew his own, if not better. He had stared at her the entire time that she
had flown him from beleaguered Caprica to the relative safety of
Galactica.
So as long as he didn’t see Boomer sitting in that cell, well, then…
somehow the entire business of her being connected to the Cylons—of her being a Cylon herself—was far more ephemeral
and easy to deny.

And then, while Boxey was still a short distance away, Sharon abruptly sat
up.

Boxey was crouched low and she didn’t see him at first, but the sharp intake
of his breath—involuntary since he was startled—seemed to make her ears prick
up. He suspected she hadn’t heard him so much as just sensed that someone had
entered. “Who’s here?” she demanded, looking concerned. Her voice was muffled by
the thickness of the walls; Boxey had to strain to hear her. Her hand drifted
toward her stomach in a gesture that could only be considered protective. What a
human thing for her to do, to react in such an instinctive manner when she
thought her unborn child might be threatened. She glanced around suspiciously,
undoubtedly nervous but trying valiantly not to look it. “I said who’s here? If
you’re going to try and attack me, I’m warning you… I’ll defend myself.”

He hesitated, briefly considering the idea of scooting back out the way he’d
come and abandoning this entire ill-conceived notion. But then he called to her,
as softly as he could so as not to make her even more skittish than she was,
“It’s me.”

“Me?” Her brow furrowed, as she clearly recognized the voice, but wasn’t sure
from where. Then something clicked in her mind. “Boxey?” she called. “Is that
you?”