03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding (34 page)

Adama didn’t share the amusement. Although he addressed Tigh, he seemed as if
he were looking inward. “It’s an evil thing I’ve done, Saul. Tossing Freya
Gunnerson in with Sharon and looking the other way. Gunnerson is right. She
broke no laws.”

“She’s up to something,” Tigh said darkly. “Something about her interest in the Cylon stinks to high heaven, and we both know it.”

“So she deserves what she gets?”

“ Abso-frakking-lutely.”

“I wish I were as sure as you.”

“You could be,” said Tigh. “You just choose not to be.”

“And you don’t let yourself get dragged down by uncertainty?”

“I try not to.”

“You know something, Saul?” said Adama after giving him a long look. “You are
more full of crap than any man I’ve ever met.”

Tigh looked stunned a moment, as if he were wounded by the comment. But then
he put his head back and laughed. Adama didn’t join him, but he did allow a
smile to play on his lips.

There was no hint of amusement, or annoyance, or pleasure, or any expression
vaguely human on Sharon Valerii’s lips. Her mouth was drawn back in a tight,
tense manner, as if she were doing heavy exercise and was trying to focus.

Freya Gunnerson was lying on the floor. Sharon was standing over her,
straddling her, a leg on either side. Freya was curled up in a ball, her arms
encircling her head. She was whimpering, her body trembling.

There was not a mark on her body. Not anywhere.

A professional torturer would have been astounded at the quality of the job
Sharon had done on Freya. To simply pound information out of people was…
well, it was ugly It was inelegant. It also presented the problem of being
counterproductive, especially if the subject died from the questioning.

Sharon had not resorted to that. She hadn’t needed to.

The truth was that she had not realized what she was capable of until she had
started. It was as if she possessed certain capabilities, but hadn’t accessed
them until now because she simply hadn’t needed them. Now that she did, though,
they had come to her with as much ease as if she were to climb upon a bicycle
after many years of not doing so and pedal away.

She knew every joint, every muscle, every pressure point in a human being’s
body. She knew just what to do with each of them, just how to play them against
one another to induce mind-numbing agony. With absolute facility and efficiency,
she could do something as simple as pop the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles in
the calf, causing a small contusion inside. It didn’t sound like much, but the
agony that resulted in the recipient of the treatment was just overwhelming.

She was capable of inflicting agonizing little scenarios like that all over
Freya’s body. And she had been doing so.

And Freya had been screaming. Screaming and writhing and begging for mercy
that seemed as if it would never come. Whenever it did—whenever Sharon appeared
to be letting up—it was simply because she was working out some new thing to do
to her.

Part of Sharon was repulsed by what she was doing. But another part of her
was simply able to shut herself off, disconnect from it altogether. She found it
vaguely disturbing that she was able to do that, but tried not to dwell on it.

She had taken a break, shaking out her hands, loosening up the fingers before
she went back to work. Freya continued to lie sobbing upon the floor. Finally
she managed to gasp out, “Okay.”

Sharon had become so engrossed in her endeavors that she didn’t have the slightest idea what Freya was saying okay to at first. Her
eyebrows knit. “Okay… what?”

“Okay… I’ll… I’ll tell you,” Freya managed to say. “I’ll tell you what
I did. I’ll tell you everything. I’ll do anything you want. Just stop, please…” She choked on the tears that ran into her mouth. “Stop… please…”

“All right,” Sharon said dispassionately. “Tell me…”

“No,” Freya was suddenly vehement, motivated by anger and fear and unbridled
loathing. “I want Adama here.”

“Why?” Then she answered her own question before Freya could. “Because you’re
concerned that, once you’ve told me what I want to know, I’ll kill you. So you
want someone here to ‘save’ you from me.”

Freya said nothing, but merely glowered instead.

She raised her voice slightly and called to whomever she knew was watching or
listening in, “Please send Admiral Adama down. Thank you.” Then she stepped back
and settled down onto her bunk, her hands resting on her legs. She sat perfectly
upright.

Freya managed to look up at her with pure hatred. “You’re… you’re not
human.”

“That’s what everyone else was saying,” Sharon reminded her. “Why didn’t you
listen?”

“Because I thought I… I could make a better life for you. Because I thought
an injustice was being done, and I tried to fix it.”

“And now?” asked Sharon, interested in spite of herself. “What do you think
now?”

“I think,” and a cold fury grew in her voice, “I think I wish… that you
had a soul… because then it could burn in hell.”

“How do you know I don’t have one? How do you know it won’t go to hell… or
even heaven? Or maybe there’s a different version of heaven that only allows
Cylons?”

“There’s not.”

“You don’t know that.”

“There’s not,” Freya repeated, and suddenly, totally unexpectedly, she lunged
at Sharon. Sharon’s arm immediately crossed her belly to protect her unborn
child as she lashed out with a boot, slamming Freya right between the eyes.
Freya stumbled backwards, blood covering the lower half of her face. She fell
heavily. Sharon continued to look down at her without the slightest change in
expression as Freya lay there, clutching her nose, trying to stop the bleeding.
After a moment, Sharon removed the flimsy pillow case from the pillow and tossed
it down to Freya. It draped itself over her head. She snatched it off and
applied it to her face, pressing against the bleeding, and moaning as she did
so.

“That’s going to leave a mark,” said Sharon.

“Frak you,” grunted her erstwhile attorney.

They remained that way, neither addressing the other, until Adama arrived in
response to the summons. Two marines accompanied him as they came around to the
door of the cell and opened it wide. The marines kept their weapons fixed on
Sharon. It would have seemed ludicrous to any unknowing onlooker to see burly,
heavily armed combat men aiming at the placid pregnant woman who was sitting
empty-handed and seemingly harmless on her cot. What possible threat could she
have posed? The problem was that they didn’t really have an answer to that
question, and thus they were determined to be safe rather than sorry.

Adama stared down at the woman on the floor who had previously been the
arrogant, self-confident attorney. She looked like she had been through a horrible ordeal that transcended the
injury to her face. She was sitting up, her back propped against the wall of the
jail cell. There was a stark contrast between what she had been and what she was
now. Adama hadn’t especially liked her. She’d been a damned irritant and
nuisance and too smugly superior by half. But he wouldn’t have wished this on
her.

You are so full of crap,
he told himself.
You damned well wished this
on her. You consigned her to this for convenience’s sake. Don’t pretend that you
didn’t want this. You knew this was inevitable. If you’re going to walk a path,
don’t kid yourself that you stumbled down it by accident.

He restrained himself from asking if she was all right because he knew he
would simply get a sarcastic answer to the effect that he didn’t care. That
wasn’t entirely true, but he wasn’t about to put some sort of gloss on things.
Instead, as curt and down-to-business as he could be, he said, “Well?”

Freya glared at him for a moment and then said, “I took it.”

“It?”

“The Edda.” She wiped blood from her nose and mouth and only succeeded in
smearing it around her face. “What my father is looking for.”

“Why?”

“Because,” she said tersely, “I’m not stupid.”

Adama waited, saying nothing.

“One of my responsibilities on my father’s ship is traffic. I get the flight
manifests of who’s coming and who’s going. The moment
Galactica
filed a
flight manifest stating that two of Boxey’s former cronies were coming over, I
knew something was up.”

“How did you know something was up?”

“Because you’re a bastard,” she snapped. “Because you wanted ties cut between Boxey and your precious pilots. So if they were
heading to our ship, then that meant one of two things: Either you had decided
that Boxey wasn’t a threat, which meant you had changed your mind, which I
assumed you hadn’t since—”

“I’m a bastard,” he said without inflection.

“—or you had decided he
was
a threat. If we’d refused entrance to
them, that could have resulted in a direct attack from
Galactica
which we
weren’t prepared to repel. So I figured if the Edda disappeared while they were
on the ship, suspicion would fall on them.”

“So you took it upon yourself to try and frame my people. Show it to me.”

“It’s in my case. I have to take it out of there.”

“Do so.” And then, in acknowledgment of the marines standing near him, he
added, “Slowly.”

She nodded, understanding why it would be wise for her to exercise caution at
every moment. Under the circumstances, any sudden motion could get her shot. The
case, as it so happened, had slid under Sharon’s bunk. She gestured for Sharon
to give it over to her. Hooking the handle with her toe, Sharon slid it over to
Freya, who flipped the snaps and—very carefully—opened it. She removed several
folders filled with papers, set them aside, and then removed a false bottom to
the case. Lifting it out, she was aware that the marines were watching her with
fearsome intensity. Her hand trembled slightly and she didn’t make another move
until she was able to will it to stop. Then she lifted a small but thick volume
from the briefcase and extended it toward Adama. Adama gestured for one of the
marines to retrieve it. He did so, then stepped back and handed it to the
admiral.

The book smelled of age, and there was an inscription on the cover in letters
that Adama couldn’t read. Opening it carefully, lest any of the pages fall out, he turned the pages carefully. The
letters were incomprehensible, written in a language he hadn’t the slightest
familiarity with.

A snorted laugh from Freya caught his attention. He peered over the top of
the book at her. “Do you find something amusing?”

“Other than that you’re holding it upside down, you mean?”

Adama didn’t bother to turn the book over. It wasn’t as if it would suddenly
have made sense if he had done so. Instead he closed it and then, in a
calculatedly cavalier fashion, tossed it to her. She let out a gasp and lunged
at it, snagging it before it hit the floor. Clearly shaken by her holy book
nearly striking the ground, she clutched it to her, and then looked daggers up
at Adama.

He wasn’t inclined to give a damn. “Odd how you care so much about the rules
of law… until they’re inconvenient for you.”

“The fleet still doesn’t entirely trust you, no matter how much reporters
from Fleet News Service sing your praises,” said Freya. “I played on that in the
name of protecting an innocent young boy from your investigations. I didn’t want
to see him treated the way you treated her…” and she glared at Sharon,
“…although I admit at this point I don’t give a damn what you do to that…creature.”

“You decided you could use my people as a bargaining chip.”

“Yes.”

He took a step toward her, lancing her with a glare. The sheer hypocrisy of
one who purported to be so morally superior to him, using his people in a game
as if they were poker chips… it infuriated him. With a stoic demeanor born of
long practice, he said, “It may interest you to know that your father is, as we
speak, en route to
Colonial One.
He’s presenting himself as a bargaining
chip in order to make up for what turns out to be his daughter’s subterfuge.”

Her eyes widened. “He did that…?”

“Yes, Miss Gunnerson. He did exactly that. Perhaps the next time you play
games with people’s lives, you’ll want to make certain that all the pieces are
in their correct place.”

She didn’t respond. Instead her head sank back and she closed her eyes. She
had put her hand against her nose to stop the bleeding and she had more or less
succeeded.

The marines were clearly waiting for their instructions. Adama didn’t waste
any time. “I’m going to send advance word back to your vessel that you have your
book, along with a recording of this session so they’ll know precisely what you
did. Then marines will escort you back to your vessel. I want you off my ship.”

Sharon looked up for the first time and registered surprise. “Off…?”

“You heard me.”

“But…”

She began to stand and the marines instantly tensed. Sharon froze in a half
crouch and then, very slowly, sat down on the cot once more. “With all due
respect, Admiral… are you sure that’s wise?”

No. It may be unspeakably stupid. But President Roslin is trying to defuse a
delicate situation, and I want the meeting with the Quorum to have as few
distractions as possible. So even though I may be throwing in a bargaining chip
that I could have made good use of, I’m going to send her back to her ship with
her tail between her legs in order to make sure that Wolf Gunnerson doesn’t go
off the deep end because his daughter’s in the hands of the military.

He made no answer. Instead he made a curt gesture with his head to the
marines. They slammed the door to Sharon’s cell shut with a resounding clang,
and led Freya out at gunpoint. As they headed for the exit from the brig area,
Sharon suddenly lumbered to her feet, cupped her hands around her mouth, and
shouted, “Who’s the bigger bastard, Admiral! You or me? Especially considering
that I—as I’m always being reminded—am not human! We had a deal, Admiral! We had
a frakking deal! And you’d better come through on your end or…”