03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding (6 page)

“Pegasus hasn’t stopped yet! She’s coming right at us!”
Gaeta called out.

“Cut thrusters! Brace for impact!”
shouted Adama. He gripped the nearest
railings. He saw others closing their eyes involuntarily, although not looking
at the screens certainly wasn’t going to ward off disaster.

The
Pegasus
was approaching them like some vast harbinger of doom, and
suddenly they saw the vehicle cutting hard to port. It was going to be an
unspeakably near thing.

“Come on, come on, turn,” growled Tigh.

And then, as if in response to Tigh’s imploring, the vast battleship moved
sharply to port even as
Galactica’s
own reverse thrusters hauled them
away. The nose of the ship angled downward in relation to the
Galactica,
and even as the
Pegasus
seemed gargantuan in their screens, it then
dropped straight down and away from them. Adama could have sworn he’d seen the terrified faces of
people on the
Pegasus,
their faces pressed against viewing ports,
watching the two behemoths narrowly avoid each other.

A long, tense silence filled the CIC, punctuated only by the many sounds that
the various instruments in the command center routinely made. And then Adama
turned to Gaeta, who looked as if all the blood had drained from his face and
was somewhere down around his shoes, and said as calmly as could be, “You trying
to make things exciting, Lieutenant?”

“Not that exciting, no sir,” Gaeta said, and there was a slight gasp in his
voice indicating he’d been holding his breath… a tendency Adama could
certainly relate to.

“Well… if they say any landing you can walk away from is a good one, the
same can be said of a light-speed Jump. Well done, Mr. Gaeta.”

“Thank you sir,” sighed Gaeta, and there was ragged clapping and cheers from
the others in the CIC.

But it was quickly silenced by a look from Adama. “Now that we narrowly
survived, we need to give top priority to figuring out how the Cylons knew where
we were going to be leaping to. If we have a bug or virus in our computer… if
we have a security leak… we need to find it and plug it.”

“Aye, sir, I’m on it,” Gaeta said firmly.

Adama nodded and turned away, mostly so that no one else would see the
visible relief flooding through him. Tigh stepped in close to him and said,
“Good instincts on your decision, Admiral. About suspecting it might be a trap.”

“It doesn’t make sense, though,” said Adama. “Even if they were trying to get
us to leap into an ambush… why shoot wide of our people? All it did was raise
our suspicions. They could just have easily engaged us for real, we activate the
FTL engines with the coordinates they already know, and bam, we’re in their trap. Why
alert us to the possibility…?”

“Perhaps the Cylons aren’t as clever as we give them credit for,” suggested
Tigh.

Adama glanced sidelong at him. “If I’m given a choice between overestimating
an enemy or underestimating… I’ll go with the former.”

“Me, I’m just glad the
Pegasus
was only a near miss instead of a
disaster.”

Smiling ever so slightly in amusement, Adama noted, “People always say that.
A ‘near miss’. It wasn’t a near miss. It was a complete miss. It was a near
hit.”

“As long as we didn’t take it up the aft, I’m satisfied with whatever it
was.”

Adama nodded wearily at that.

Tigh turned away, intending to go and hover nearby Gaeta as he began running
checks on his navigation system. But he paused long enough to say, “It never
gets easier, does it.”

Staring at him blandly, Adama let the statement hang there for what seemed
like forever, and then said, “I hadn’t noticed.”

On
Colonial One,
Laura Roslin was receiving an update from Adama over
the phone of what had transpired. Her blood chilled as he described to her the
horrific ambush that would have been awaiting them if they had been foolish
enough to go leaping through space to the planned coordinates.

“Well done, Admiral,” Roslin commended him. “In this day and age, when it’s
so easy to second-guess every decision people make about everything, it’s nice
to know that this decision of yours was completely valid. No ‘down side’, as it
were.”

“As it were,” agreed Adama. He was willing to admit to himself that there had been a time when he literally couldn’t stand the sound
of Roslin’s voice. He had been certain she was using the cloak of government to
thrust humans into situations where their very existence was jeopardized. But
over the past weeks, be it because of receiving deft and canny political advice
from Roslin, or because of working with Baltar and that damned Cylon Sharon of
all people (he’d been convinced he’d had a knife in his stomach the entire time
he was speaking with her, due to the extreme belly aches he’d been enduring),
he’d come to respect Laura Roslin greatly. Perhaps even… feel more than just
respect. Not that this was something he intended to bring up to her, or even
completely acknowledge himself. They both simply had too many responsibilities
to risk entanglements of any sort. At least, that was what he kept telling
himself.

“And you’re trying to determine how the Cylons knew where we were going to
Jump to?”

“It’s being investigated even as we speak.”

“That’s a relief. The last thing we need is them working their way into our
systems once more.” She added thoughtfully, “What about the
Pegasus?
My
understanding is that their computer system would be far more susceptible to
Cylon tinkering, since all their computers are linked.” The fact that
Galactica’s
computers were not linked one to another had been the ship’s
salvation, since it meant that the Cylons could not readily infiltrate the
computer network.

“You’re absolutely right, Madame President,” Adama agreed. “That is being
investigated as well.”

“Good. Please keep close tabs on that, Admiral. I’m not entirely sure I trust
Chief Garner to get the job done… or trust him at all, really.”

This comment surprised Adama. “Why not, Madame President? Do you have
information I’m lacking? Is there reason to doubt his capability as an officer?”

“No to both,” she admitted. “But considering that we wound up almost
assassinating Commander Cain, and considering Commander Fisk was fronting a
black market operation, you’ll understand if I don’t exactly have the highest
hopes for the
Pegasus
command squad.”

“Understood.”

She imagined that Adama was smiling as he said that. He had the loveliest
smile.

Then an image hammered its way back into her memory. She jumped into the
pause that had crept into their conversation to ask, “Admiral… I have a rather
odd question for you.”

“It’s been an odd day, so it fits right in.”

“If I told you that Sagittarius was bleeding, what would that suggest to
you?”

He didn’t reply immediately, except to laugh low in his throat and say,
“Well, the question certainly lived up to the advance billing.” He considered it
for a short time, and then said, “Given that Sagittarius is the ancient name for
the colony Sagittaron…”

“Yes?”

“I’d say if anyone was going to cause any sort of bleeding in connection with
Sagittaron, I’d probably look no further than Tom Zarek to be the cause.”

Laura Roslin could have hit herself in the side of the head in frustration.
“Of course,” she said. “After all, he’s the representative to the Quorum of
Twelve for Sagittaron, gods know why.”

“I’m only wondering why it is that we’re talking in symbolism and metaphor.”

“It…” She waited a moment, not wanting simply to spill everything that was
going through her mind at Adama’s feet. She had her own problems, and she had to
deal with them. “I was just… wondering… what the image might suggest. That’s all.”

“That’s
all?”

“Yes, Admiral,” she said calmly, almost with an air of indifference. “That’s
all.”

She could picture him shrugging as he said, “Very well. That’s all, then.
Galactica
actual over and out.”

There was a click as he hung up the phone, and yet Laura Roslin stared at the
disconnected receiver for a good long time, wondering if Adama had a point and
Tom Zarek was somehow up to trouble again.

Tom Zarek—freedom fighter, untrustworthy schemer, hero, villain, all
depending upon whom one talked to—had continued to make his home on the
Astral Queen,
despite the fact that as the representative of the Quorum of
Twelve, he was entitled to far more luxurious accommodations. He chose not to
avail himself of them, for he felt it vital to keep as much of his connection to
the “common man” as he possibly could.

On the other hand, he wasn’t stupid. He had far outgrown the small, confined
cell that had been his home ever since he had been elevated from mere prisoner
to his colony’s (or, more correctly, what remained of his colony’s) most
prominent figure. So he had taken for his office and quarters what had been the
lodgings of the warden/captain of the
Astral Queen.
Since the events of
the prisoner uprising, the administrators had decided that the best idea would
be for them to make themselves as scarce as possible.

This left something of a power void in the day-to-day affairs of the
prisoners themselves. Naturally they had turned to Zarek to make certain that
some degree of order was kept in their existence, and Zarek had obliged them.
Much of his time was spent on overseeing disputes. Not as a judge, certainly: Zarek was far too
rebellious by nature to allow himself to become so authoritarian. He was,
instead, a mediator. He always managed to find a common ground, and his method
of bargaining was rapidly become legendary. If one of the parties didn’t like
the compromise that Zarek proposed, then his sergeant-at-arms would break the
complainer’s kneecaps. If they both complained, both parties got their kneecaps
broken. Zarek had announced this policy and, at first, the prisoners had thought
he was joking. They were disabused of that notion the first time two moaning
disputees were seen crawling out Zarek’s door. Their agony drove home the point
with far greater force than anything Zarek could have said.

There was some minor rumbling about trying to take down Zarek rather than
submit to such a means of oversight. But that notion went away once the
residents of the
Astral Queen
came to the realization that Zarek’s death
would create a power vacuum, and if that happened, the bodies would start
stacking up like cordwood in the subsequent struggle for dominance. One might
despise the way a dam is constructed, but no one is stupid enough to shoot the
guy who’s got his finger in it preventing the water from flooding through.

So it was that Zarek’s position and status were perfectly safe by dint of the
fact that, although they didn’t one hundred percent trust him, they distrusted
each other far more.

At least, that was the status until the day that the civilian fleet had yet
another narrow escape from the Cylons.

Although the ships were spread out, it was still hard to keep secrets,
especially when something unusual happened. And certainly the
Galactica
nearly plunging into the heart of a star fell into the category of “unusual.”
The fact that the civilians had come extremely close to losing their best means
of protection against an implacable enemy had not gone unnoticed, and a number of Zarek’s
“constituents” were demanding to know just what the frak had happened.

Zarek was moving quickly down a corridor, accompanied by Cortez, his sergeant
at arms, and a handful of petty functionaries. This, in and of itself, was not
unusual. There were several people following Zarek as well, constituents
peppering him with their concerns. This was also not unusual. What was unusual
was the volume and vociferousness with which they were speaking.

The largest and loudest of them was a man Zarek had known for some time, a
bear of a man named Luther Paine, who seemed bound and determined to live up to
his last name. Zarek kept walking, since it had been his experience that—if he
stopped—it made it much harder for him to extricate himself. So he was walking
and talking at the same time. “I hear what you’re saying, Luther.”

“I don’t give a damn that you’re hearing what I’m saying,” Paine told him
sharply. “I want you to listen to what I’m saying! I want you to find out what
in the name of the gods happened with this latest invasion!”

“I already know what happened, and so do you,” Zarek said. “We were attacked,
we escaped. End of story.”

“End of story! We almost saw the
Galactica
go up in a ball of flame,
and then the
Pegasus
almost collided!”

Violating his own determination to keep moving in the face of hostility,
Zarek turned and faced Paine. He wanted to try and end this quickly, before it
began to spiral out of control. Paine was someone to whom the prisoners
listened, and he didn’t need this idiot running all over the place, stirring
things up. “The key word there is ‘almost’. Almost doesn’t mean a thing.

It’s results that count, and the result was that we got away. If you don’t
like the way we did it, feel free to pop over to the
Galactica
and tell
Adama yourself.”

“I shouldn’t have to! You’re our frakking representative! You should be the
one who tells him! Or are you afraid to?”

This last comment riled Cortez, and he took a step forward with his fists
tightly clenched. The two men were built about the same, and it was anybody’s
guess who would come out on top if they came to blows. Zarek put a hand out in
either direction, wanting to keep the men apart. “I’m not afraid of Adama. You
know that,” he said tightly to Paine.

“Oh yeah? And how, ’zactly, am I supposed to know that?” Paine’s tone
remained defiant, and he kept tossing glances at Cortez as if to verify just
where Cortez was in relation to himself.