03 - Sagittarius is Bleeding by Peter David - (ebook by Undead) Page B

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