03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding (4 page)

It was odd. He didn’t know whether to feel relief… or unease. He stood,
smoothing down his shirt. “Yeah. It’s me,” he said uncertainly.

Sharon let out a sigh of relief and sagged back against the cell wall.
“I
can barely hear…” Then she stopped and pointed at a phone situated on the
outside of the cell, matching up with an identical phone on the inside. Boxey
went to it, picked it up, and put it to his ear as Sharon did the same on the
inside. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her voice coming through loud and clear over
the receiver. Then she seemed to get more tense again. “What
are
you
doing here? Who sent you?”

“Nobody sent me,” he said. “I just… I wanted to see you. I wanted to see
if…” His voice trailed off.

“See if what?” she asked.

“If you remembered me.”

“Of course I remember you. Why wouldn’t I…”

“Because they say it wasn’t you.”

It was her turn to become quiet. “Oh. Right. Of course.” She gave a short,
bitter laugh. “Because the Sharon Valerii who rescued you from Caprica… the
Sharon who you used to hang out here with, share meals with, the one who called
you her unofficial little brother…”

“She’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“Because she shot Commander Adama, and so Cally shot her.”

“How is Cally?” Sharon asked with a trace of humor.

Boxey shrugged. “She’s okay. I just beat her ass at cards.”

“Good. Good for you.”

There was another prolonged silence, and then Boxey said, “So… are you
her? The one who died?”

“It’s… complicated.”

“That’s what everybody keeps saying. I dunno. Sounds like a simple enough
question to me.”

“It is. It’s the answer that’s compli…” She sighed. “It comes down to this:
I have… echoes… of you. Not the actual memories. Those will go to
another… me. To me, you’re like… a vague dream.” She smiled and added, “But
a nice dream, I assure you.”

“Okay.” He hesitated, and then said, “Did she know… did you know… that you were a Cylon when you took me off Caprica?”

“No.”

“Because it…” He cleared his throat, betraying yet again his nervousness.
“I just get worried that maybe the whole thing was… you know…”

“A Cylon plot?” she asked. “You want to know if my taking you off Caprica is
somehow related to a vast Cylon conspiracy?” Despite the seriousness of the
situation, there was a hint of humor in her voice. “Boxey, don’t take this
wrong, but in the grand scheme of things, you’re not that important.”

“My father was.”

That brought her up short. She looked down, unwilling to meet his eyes. “Yes.
He was.”

“He was assigned to the Armistice Station,” Boxey continued, and there was
growing anger in his voice. “He got sent there every year to meet with one of
the Cylons, except they never came. And then one of them, or more of them, I
guess, showed up, and they blew up the station, and they blew up him. My dad.
The first one to die in the new war.”

“Yes, he was,” Sharon said again, tonelessly, as if she were reciting a
particularly unmemorable verse of poetry.

“Were you there for that, too? Did you kill him, like you tried to kill
Commander Adama?”

“No, I wasn’t. That wasn’t my… my model. That wasn’t me.”

“But if you’d been ordered to do it, you’d have done it, ’cause you’re a
machine.”

“But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. And being a machine has nothing to do with it,”
she said, sounding a little heated. “Plenty of perfectly human soldiers are
given orders they don’t like, but they go out and get the job done. That’s their responsibility. It’s…” She
stopped, took a deep breath as if trying to calm herself. Then, her gaze fixed
on Boxey, she said, “You know what no one considers, kid? That there’s as many
similarities between our two sides as differences.”

“We’re not machines.”

“Of course you are,” Sharon said reasonably. “What else is a human body
but
a machine? You have moving parts… you require fuel… you break
down and need to be repaired by someone—call them ‘doctor’ or ‘mechanic’, it’s
the same thing—and eventually when the machine gets hopelessly broken, it’s
junked. The only difference is that when our bodies get broken, we live on. Face
it, kiddo… you don’t hate us because we’re machines. You hate us because
we’re better machines than you are.”

“We hate you because you’re trying to wipe us out,” Boxey replied icily.

“Considering humanity’s history of war, it’s perfectly possible that—left to
your own devices—you might well have wiped yourselves out. Personally, I think
it’s fairly likely.”

“And so you’re just getting the job done for us?”

She shrugged. “That’s one way to look at it, I guess.”

“What other way is there?”

“There’s always other ways, Boxey,” Sharon told him. “You’d be amazed. You’d
be stunned, how a thousand people can look at the exact same event and come away
with a thousand different interpretations.”

“I’m an orphan because of your race. How many ways can
that
be
interpreted?”

She tried to respond to that, but instead she lowered her eyes, as if she
were suddenly ashamed. “Why are you here, Boxey? Really? I mean, are you here to yell at me? Because if that’s what you
want, go ahead. I could just hang up the phone and turn my back, but you’ll
still have all this anger and no one to unload it on. So you might as well
unload it on me, the face of the enemy.”

“Don’t you do that,” he said heatedly. “Don’t you start being nice and
sacrificing and all that stuff now.”

“What do you want me to be? Do you have
any
clue?”

He was about to snap off an answer, but then he paused and realized that he
didn’t have one.

“I’m sorry if you hate me,” she said.

“I don’t hate you.”

Now she looked up, and there was bemusement on her face. “You don’t. Well,
you could have fooled me. Actually, strike that: You did fool me. If you don’t
hate me, then what
…?”

“I miss you. Okay?” he admitted. “I miss hanging out with you. I miss knowing
that you were my friend. I miss having the world be nice and easy and black and
white, where you knew who was the good guy and who was the bad guy and
everything was simple.”

Despite the tension of the situation, Sharon couldn’t help but smile.
“Boxey,” she said with great sadness, “I really hate to break it to you… but
the world was never like that. Not ever. The best spouse in the world can still
cheat on their mate, and the worst villain in the world is still capable of
pulling a small child out of the way of a speeding car. There’s no absolute
heroes and no absolute villains. Everything is shades of gray. By the time you
were an adult, you’d probably have figured that out. Unfortunately, you learned
the lesson earlier than you should have.”

“Because of you.”

“Because of the Cylons, yes,” she told him. “But not me. It may be hard for
you to believe or understand… but I’ve never hurt anybody in my life.”

“In this life.”

“Yes,” she admitted. “In a manner of speaking, yes. In this life.”

“Hey!”

Boxey was startled by the angry shout, and turned to see that one of the
guards from outside was standing in the doorway, glaring at him. “What the frak
are you doing in here?”

“We were just talking…”

“And how do we know that?” demanded the guard as he stalked quickly across
the room. “For all I know, you were taking orders from her.”

“What?”
The startled exclamation came from both Boxey and Sharon, the
latter hearing the guard’s muted voice through the phone.

“She’s a Cylon and you sneak in here to have private time with her. She may
be giving you instructions for a new plan to sabotage us. You could be a Cylon,
just like her.”

“That’s stupid!” Boxey protested. “A Cylon just like her…? That’s nuts!”

“And why do you say that?” demanded the guard.

“Because… well…” He gestured haplessly at her. “For starters, she’s a
girl. How can I be just like that?”

“That’s it,” said the marine, and he grabbed Boxey by the back of the shirt
and hauled him away. The receiver slipped out of Boxey’s grasp, swung down on
the cord, and smacked up against the side of the cell.

Curiously, Sharon stood there long after Boxey was gone, the phone still in
her hand even though there was no one on the other end. Then, very slowly, she
hung up the phone, settled down on her cot, and rubbed her stomach absently.

It never gets easier.

Admiral William Adama and Colonel Saul Tigh were polar opposites whenever the
Galactica
was under assault. Tigh, the executive officer, prowled the
CIC, studying the screens from every possible angle, moving from station to
station like a panther stalking its prey. Adama, by contrast, usually remained
immobile unless he was directly summoned by one of his officers. A calm and cool
eye to Tigh’s hurricane, Adama watched the battle unfold, taking in reports that
came at him fast and furious from all directions. His expression typically could
have been carved from stone as he assessed the inevitable see-sawing nature of
any battle.

It never gets easier.

Adama had gotten very, very skilled at making it look easy. One would have
thought that he was sending strangers into combat. One would further have
thought that there was no doubt in his mind that they would all make it back to
the barn without a scratch, as if their lives were charmed and the notion that they might not return in one piece—or at all—was simply too laughable to
contemplate.

Except he did contemplate it. Every single damned time that the Vipers
launched into combat, there went Lee Adama, Apollo, his son. There went Kara
Thrace, Starbuck, who had been the true love of his late son, Zack, and was like
a daughter to him. Every single one of the other pilots, even though he didn’t
have the same depth of emotional bond to them, were members of his extended
family. Adama lived and died with each encounter and every shot from a Cylon
raider that came flying their way.

Each time his Vipers flew into combat, he waited for it to get easier. He
waited for some sort of distance to creep into his heart that would enable him
to endure this with less effort.

But it never happened. In fact, it seemed to him that during battles, he
literally forgot to breathe. That it wasn’t until they were safely away from the
latest Cylon assault that he would exhale a breath he didn’t even realize he was
holding. He was surprised by it every single time.

It never gets easier.

The truth of that continued to echo through his brain, and he did what he
always did in these situations: He compartmentalized his mind. The concerns that
if he had to mourn the loss of his remaining son, he might crack completely… the notion that, sooner or later, Apollo and Starbuck’s luck would have to run
out, they simply could not go on beating the odds forever… all of this he
tucked away in one little chamber of his brain, a small compartment with a door
on it that he would slam, turn the key in, lock, and then go on about his
business. His fears and terrors could make as much noise from within their
imprisonment as they wanted, but it was all muffled and meaningless. And his
face never reflected an instant of it.

“Lieutenant Gaeta, ETA on the Jump, please,” called out Adama.

Felix Gaeta scanned the readouts as he worked on programming the next Jump
into the ship’s computer. It wasn’t as if he had to do the Faster Than Light
calculations from scratch every time. He routinely updated them so that he would
be ready to Jump the fleet to a safe location as quickly as possible.
Nevertheless, there had to be systems, procedures followed and double-checks
made, lest a miscalculation send the
Galactica,
the
Pegasus,
and
the entire civilian fleet leaping directly into a planetary body. Certainly that
would solve the problem of constantly being pursued by the Cylons, but it was an
unacceptably terminal means of addressing it. “Three minutes, twenty seconds,
Admiral,” Gaeta called out, his voice calm and level and not sounding the least
bit rushed despite the fact that a fleet of robots was trying to kill them. He
realized he was scratching his right hand and forced himself to stop. It was a
nervous condition he’d recently developed, a response to the constant stress. It
was starting to give him a rash, so he was forcing himself to deal with it.

“See if you can shave a few seconds off that,” Tigh said, stepping around to
Gaeta’s station. “Every single one counts.”

Adama winced a bit inwardly. He knew it was Tigh’s way to be brusque, to
demand the best and more than the best from his officers. But he didn’t feel
there was anything remotely constructive in what Tigh had just said. Certainly
Gaeta knew that every second counted. This wasn’t a news flash or an observation
that had just come to Tigh’s attention. However he wasn’t about to remonstrate
his XO in the midst of a battle situation. The depressing thing was that he knew
that, even if he scolded Tigh about it in the privacy of his quarters, it still
wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference. Tigh would either apologize and say he
would try to do better, or he would say that Gaeta had in fact looked at him sideways two days earlier and he was letting him know who was boss. Either
way, nothing was going to change anytime soon. Adama was beginning to think that
he had seen it all.

“Never seen that before,” Starbuck muttered.

Her words, even though they were spoken to herself, sounded in the ear piece
of Lee Adama, who was in the midst of engaging a Cylon raider that was coming
right at him. “Starbuck, this is Apollo, I didn’t copy that!” he said, firing
at the raider that deftly angled away from him.

Starbuck didn’t answer immediately She was studying the battlefield before
her. At least there were fewer raiders this time. The number of Cylons assailing
them seemed to have dwindled since they had blown up the
Resurrection
ship, the vessel that had functioned to “resurrect” Cylon agents after they were
killed. She strongly suspected there was a connection, although she wasn’t sure
what it was…