Read 03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding Online

Authors: Peter David - (ebook by Undead)

03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding (9 page)

“Well, I appreciate that dazzling bit of character analysis,” Baltar said
sarcastically. “But I’ll have you know I’m not evil.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” said Baltar, “I’ve done nothing wrong.” This time Number Six was
doubled over in laughter. He forced himself to ignore it.

“Neither has Sharon. At least, the Sharon who’s locked up. I just wanted to—”

“You know what?” Baltar snapped. “You’ll understand when you’re grown up.” He
knew it wasn’t true, of course. The only thing growing up guaranteed was that
parts of you were going to start hurting that had never hurt before. Other than
that, nothing else was assured.

“Grown up.” Boxey laughed bitterly.

“What’s so funny?”

He fixed Baltar with a gaze and said, “Doctor… almost everybody is dead.
Dead. And we’re being chased by killer robots, and some of them can look so much
like us that we can’t tell them apart without blood tests.” And he indicated the
vial. “Grow up? You really, really think I’m going to get to grow up? Part of me
thinks I won’t even live to see my next birthday.”

Baltar was about to make a sarcastic reply, but then he saw the quiet
certainty in the boy’s face. At first he didn’t know what to say. Then he heard
himself replying, “That’s no way for someone your age to be thinking. You should
be thinking about meeting girls and going to parties and your first kiss and the
curve of a girl’s neck and what your profession is going to be and all sorts of
things, none of which have a damned thing to do with dying. Youth is always the
hope for the future. Always. If young people believe that they have no future,
then what’s the point of any of this?”

Boxey considered that a moment and then said, “Survival?”

“There’s more to life than survival. There has to be. There’s the quality of
the life you’re surviving for.”

“I… I guess…”

“Don’t guess,” Baltar told him firmly. “Guessing is an appalling habit. It
shows laziness of mind. One either knows or doesn’t know. If you know, speak of
a certainty. If you don’t know, be man enough to say you don’t know, and then
research the question until you do know. Anything else is unacceptable.
Understand?”

“I gue—” He caught himself and then nodded. “Yes. I understand.”

“Good. Now go out to the nice Colonial marine and tell him I’ll have the
results to him in a day or so.”

“A day…?”

“It’s a very complicated test and takes a good long while to administer. Plus
it’s not as if guaranteeing the fleet’s safety from you is the only thing I have
on my docket. It will be finished when it’s finished.”

“Okay.” Boxey started to head for the door, then paused and said, “Doctor…
?”

“Yes?” Baltar said, trying to keep the impatience from his voice and not
entirely succeeding.

“Sorry about the whole thing about saying you’re twitchy and jumpy. I know
you’re not evil.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Baltar said with a graciousness he
didn’t feel.

Boxey left the lab, and Baltar sat there and stared at the blood sample. When
Number Six rested her hands on his shoulders and her chin atop his head, he
didn’t react. “Pity your test doesn’t really work. That you’ve told everyone you
can distinguish human from Cylon when you, in fact, cannot.”

“Yes. A terrible pity.”

“You know what you should do…”

There was a mischief in her voice that he really didn’t like. Nevertheless he
asked out of morbid curiosity, “What should I do?”

“You should tell them that his test came back positive. That he’s a Cylon.”

The very notion was appalling to him. “Why in the name of the gods would I
want to do that?”

“Do you know what they’d do to him if you said that?”

“I honestly don’t, no.”

“Well then,” she said challengingly, “isn’t that all the reason you need to
do it? You said it yourself: If you don’t know something, you find out. It would
be an interesting test of just how much veracity you have, and how willing they are to believe what you say Oh,
come on, Gaius,” she prompted when he still seemed reluctant. “Don’t you want to
watch them eat their young?”

“Why did you laugh before?”

“Before?” She was walking around the lab, her long legs in a sure, measured
stride. “When did I laugh before?”

“When I said that he was no more a Cylon than I was. What are you hiding?”

“Nothing, Gaius, I swear. I was just amused by the—”

“By the what? By the suggestion of my not being a Cylon? Is there…” He
gulped. He was having trouble catching his breath, as if it had become far too
hot in there. “Is there something I should know?”

“I just find it interesting that you’ve dismissed the idea out of hand,” she
said. “After all, back on Caprica you crouched behind me and thus survived a
nuclear explosion. That doesn’t strike you as odd? Your house blew apart around
you. I was destroyed right in front of you. Yet you survived? Isn’t it far more
likely that we were both destroyed, and your memories were simply transferred to
a new body?”

Baltar felt as if he’d been hit in the face by a crossbeam. The fact that her
casual explanation of his survival… or perhaps nonsurvival… made perfect
sense wasn’t what horrified him. Or, more correctly, it wasn’t what horrified
him the most. What horrified him the most was that it hadn’t occurred to him
before. He was a man of science, and as such it was part of his very nature to
question, to probe, to seek answers not only for questions that already existed,
but questions that others hadn’t thought to ask. For someone of that mindset
never to consider something as possible as that… it was such a shocking
omission that it almost made him wonder if…

What?

He’d been designed never to wonder about it? Preprogrammed?

Baltar shook his head, his mouth moving but no words emerging.

Number Six walked over to him and, extending a finger, ran it along the line
of his jaw. “Poor Gaius,” she sighed. “You know so much about so many things.
The resident expert on Cylons. And yet you don’t even know yourself.”

“It… makes no sense,” he said sharply, rallying against the unthinkable.
“If I were a… what you say… you wouldn’t have had to seduce me and
trick me into betraying humanity. I would have just done it.”

She kissed his cheek. “Tell them the test has come back positive. Tell them
the boy is one of us. For that matter, how do you know he’s not? Maybe I’m
trying to help you out.”

“Why…” He paused, trying to gather his scattered thoughts. “Why would you
do that? What possible reason would you have for turning over one of your own?”

“Perhaps I’m feeling generous. Or perhaps—since our god made us in his own
image—perhaps we, like He does, move in mysterious ways.”

“You weren’t made by any deities. You were made by humans. Humans are not
gods by any stretch of the imagination.”

“And perhaps, ultimately, that’s the difference between us. You can never be
any more than you already are. Our possibilities are unlimited.”

“Is that why you try to destroy us?” he asked grimly. “Because in the event
of your ‘ascent’ to divinity, you want to make certain that no one exists who
remembers you when you were nothing but pretentious vacuum cleaners?”

She blew softly in his ear and, despite himself, he shuddered. “You keep right on doing that, Gaius. Keep right on asking questions.
You do it so well. It’s the main reason that I love you so much.”

He closed his eyes, giving in to the pleasure of her touch. He moaned softly,
and then he looked around. There was no sign of Number Six. She had vanished
back into the recesses of his lust, or his guilt, or his programming, or
wherever it was she came from.

Baltar turned and stared at the tube of blood that he had just drawn, and
wondered what to do.

 

 
CHAPTER
6

 

 

Laura Roslin never would have imagined that she would be able to handle press
conferences. One would have thought that, given her history as a teacher, she
would have had no trepidation about getting up in front of crowds and fielding
questions. To a degree, that was true… when it was a roomful of students who,
more often than not, were perfectly happy to accept whatever she said as a
given. That was a far cry from dealing with a roomful of hard-nosed reporters
who challenged her on everything she said, and would come back with question
upon question upon question. The way in which they regarded her shifted so
frequently that she often found it difficult to get herself on any sort of firm
footing with them… which, for all Laura knew, was exactly the way they
preferred it.

When she had first been thrust into the position of president… an
eventuality that someone as low in the pecking order as Secretary of Education
could not have considered a possibility… the press had been all over her. She
was an un-proven commodity, thrust to the forefront of leadership in a time of
war. How in the gods’ name could someone who was often dismissed out of hand as “the schoolteacher” (a nickname she suspected had
originated with Adama, not her biggest fan at the time) be expected to enable
the remnants of mankind to survive? Some of the reporters had adopted a
wait-and-see attitude, and a few supported her out of a sense of obligation: If
people didn’t rally around their president, whoever that might be, then surely
all was lost. But others had been merciless: She had been described as Laura the
Lame, Laura the Borer, President Laura the Last. Contempt practically oozed from
the screens and write-ups.

But then came the military coup that had thrown her out of office, and as one
the press rallied behind her. It was self-serving, to be sure. The thinking was
simple: If Commander Adama could sweep in and oust the representative of the
people, certainly there was nothing to stop him from annihilating freedom of the
press for all time. He had the military might: He could round up every single
journalist, stick them on a freighter and shoot them off in the opposite
direction from whichever way the fleet was going. It wasn’t widely believed that
he would, but it wasn’t widely believed that he would not. Laura Roslin was
transformed overnight into a martyr, a political prisoner in the hands of an
out-of-control military.

Then came her escape, her quest to the Temple of Athena… a quest that had
been predicted in ancient writings, which she fulfilled, giving them a guide
toward Earth… and just like that, she was a religious symbol. A savior.
Gods above, they were actually worshipping her. (And the wag who had dubbed her
“Laura the Borer” had now renamed her, after her determined expedition to the
Temple of Athena, “Laura the Explorer.”)

And then she almost succumbed to breast cancer, a disease so pernicious and
so far gone that it would have claimed anyone else. Except an amazing discovery had been handed her in the form of fetal
blood from the unborn child of Sharon Valerii… or the creature passing for
human that called itself Sharon Valerii… a discovery that had cured her. But
the press and general public hadn’t known about Sharon. So instead, the attitude
was behold, she was risen: Laura Roslin, the walking miracle.

As she prepared for her morning press conference, finishing up in the
bathroom and checking her makeup before going out to face the cameras and
reporters, Laura wondered when in hell she was going to be regarded simply as
Laura Roslin, the woman. That was all. A woman, no more and no less than any
other woman, trying to overcome odds that more generous gods would never have
thought to heap upon her. No matter her outward appearance, no matter what the
facade she displayed for the world and what the world chose to call her in turn,
inwardly she was still simply Laura Roslin. Laura Roslin, with all the fears and
uncertainties and frailties that the human condition was heir to. Yet she gamely
soldiered forward, trying to be all things to all people, and often felt as if
she were being torn in a dozen directions at once.

Her people needed her. They needed her to be whatever it was they were
describing her as this week. There were times when she absolutely detested them
for it, and wanted to go off into a corner, clap her hands over her ears, and
make them all vanish. And when those times arose, she would just sit down
somewhere, preferably in a darkened room, lower her head and take a series of
long, cleansing breaths until it all went away.

She straightened her back, forced a smile onto her face, and walked into the
press room.

They were waiting for her, just as she knew they would be. The moment she set
foot in the room, she sensed that something was wrong, but she couldn’t tell for
certain what it was. She saw that Admiral William Adama was standing nearby the podium. He’d been speaking
to the press, but the moment she entered the room, he immediately fell silent.
He appeared to toss a conspiratorial glance toward the press, and even more
strangely, they nodded almost as one. It was as if there had been some sort of
mutual decision made between Adama and the reporters, and Laura didn’t have any
idea what that decision might be.

She chose not to press the matter. Instead she moved to the podium, nodded
quickly to acknowledge the reporters, and said, “Very briefly: Admiral Adama has
been investigating the circumstances under which the Cylons apparently knew
exactly where we were going to Jump to, and were lying in wait to ambush us.
Admiral Adama, would you care to…?” She gestured to the podium and the
assorted microphones that were poised on the edge of it, like metal flowers.

Adama smiled, stepped forward, and said into the microphone, “I’ve got
nothing.” He turned, bobbed his head to her as if this were a wholly
satisfactory way of handling the matter, and stepped back.

Laura Roslin stared at him, and had to make a specific effort to close her
mouth again rather than leaving it dangling open in astonishment. “Yes, well,”
she said cheerily, “if there are any questions, now would be an excellent time
to put them forward.”

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