by Peter David
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?”
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.
CHAPTER
3
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.
