[Battlestar Galactica Reimagined 03] - Sagittarius is Bleeding

by Peter David - (ebook by Undead)

  It still didn’t answer the issue of Boxey, but her priority at that point was ending the immediate situation without bloodshed. That was especially important to her. She knew to what extent Adama was willing to ensure the safety of his people. Furthermore, although she knew Adama didn’t place higher priorities on some lives than others, she was aware that there was a particular bond between Adama and Kara Thrace. If anything happened to her while she was in the hands of the Midguardians, Roslin didn’t even want to think what the ramifications might be. She was reasonably sure that Adama wouldn’t simply turn the big guns of the Galactica on the Bifrost and blast it to pieces… but on the other hand, she wasn’t interested in finding out.

  “Very well. I will see you shortly. Colonial One out.” She hung up the phone, looked over to Billy and said, “Send a copy of that recording to Admiral Adama immediately.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Billy headed out, and Tom Zarek was promptly on his feet. “Madame President… we’ve had our differences… but I just want to say, I thought you handled that quite well.”

  “Tell me, Councilman,” Roslin said, “in your honest opinion… what chance do you think there is that the Quorum will vote to give the Midguardians a seat on the Council?”

  “There’s always the chance that—”

  “Honest. Opinion.”

  He hesitated and then admitted, “Very slim. Almost negligible.”

  “Yes. I agree. And do you think that Wolf Gunnerson knows that?”

  “I think he’s hoping otherwise, but I think he knows that, yes.”

  “Then why risk his personal liberty to pursue such a hopeless cause?”

  “There are some people,” said Zarek, “who consider the hopeless causes the only ones worth pursuing.”

  “Hmm. Yes,” replied Roslin, sounding distant. “At the same time, pursuing a hopeless cause can mean someone feels they have nothing to lose. And people who have nothing to lose can be very…” She turned her attention back to Zarek.

  He was bleeding out his eyeballs again.

  “…dangerous,” she sighed.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Saul Tigh had commandeered a private room and sat there for hours upon hours, listening to the tapes that had been made by the recording devices he’d implanted in various rooms. Aside from the matter involving President Roslin that he had brought to Adama’s attention, he had absolutely nothing to show for the hours of time invested. Not only that, but he had come to a depressing realization: Most people, when left to their own devices, were astoundingly boring. The amount of time they spent discussing completely trite and trivial subjects—it boggled the imagination.

  It almost made him wonder what it would be like to bug get-togethers of Cylon agents. Did they spend it discussing far-reaching plans of galactic domination? Or did they just hang out discussing fashion, hair styles, and gossip? He was starting to think that scientists were wrong, and hydrogen was not in fact the most common element in the universe. No. It was banality.

  The only one who seemed to spend any time at all concentrating on important matters was Mr. Gaeta, which was ironic considering he was one of the key people under suspicion. He didn’t seem to have any social life at all. Instead he spent his off-duty hours in his quarters, going over calculations, making new ones, planning, always planning. He’d spend hours muttering to himself while he worked things out. Tigh might have been inclined to think that Gaeta was actually conversing with other Cylons, except that he was alone in his room. His room could have had a Cylon listening device in it, but Tigh—as he had done with every other room—had already swept it to make sure it was clean of bugs before he had placed his own in.

  Tigh leaned back in his chair and removed the headset he’d been wearing to listen to the recordings. He rubbed his eyes, feeling the fatigue.

  The pressure was getting to him. In trying to track down Cylons, he was starting to feel as if there were no safe haven. Cylons were invading peoples’ lives, their very minds.

  It made him start to wonder about…

  “Anything?”

  Tigh started slightly and looked up to see Adama standing in the doorway. He shook his head. “Nothing. Not since the earlier things we discussed.”

  Adama pulled up a chair and sat. “Getting to you, isn’t it.”

  “I think it’s getting to all of us.” He rubbed his eyes. “If Roslin thinks she hasn’t been sleeping well, she should get a load of me. How about you?”

  “I sleep like a rock.”

  He opened his eyes narrowly and stared at Adama. “Technically, rocks don’t sleep.”

  “There you go.”

  Tigh chuckled, but then grew serious. “What if…”

  “What if what?”

  “What if we find Earth… and it really isn’t a safe haven? What if the Cylons track us there? Hell, what if the Cylons are waiting for us? What the hell is our Plan B, Bill?”

  “Finding Earth is Plan B,” said Adama. “Plan A is keeping humanity alive. Everything else is open to negotiation.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing.”

  “Believe me, I know.”

  Tigh wrapped the wire around the headset and placed it in a drawer, along with the recorder he’d been using to listen to the recordings that were stacked neatly on the table. “Speaking of negotiations… what’s happening with our people on the Bifrost?”

  Adama told him what Laura Roslin had just relayed to him. Tigh’s eyes widened as he heard about Gunnerson’s heading over to Colonial One. “In fact,” said Adama, glancing at his watch, “he’s probably already over there.”

  “My gods, what are we waiting for?” Tigh demanded. “Let’s go get him. Let’s take charge of the bastard and start issuing some ultimatums of our own.”

  “Not yet,” Adama said coolly. “We’re going to see how it plays out on both ends.”

  “Both ends? What are you…?” But then he understood. “Oh. You mean the Cylon and the lawyer.” He shook his head, a grim smile on his face. “There’s poetic justice in that, you know. A Cylon and a lawyer in a cell together. I’ve dealt with a lawyer or two in my time. Hard-pressed to see the difference.”

  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.

&
nbsp; 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 h
er 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.”