Z-minus 8 months: Part Three

"I can't believe we're actually having this conversation," Tyrol exclaimed. He, Lee, Tigh, Cottle, and Adama were in the Commander's office, trying to figure out what exactly they were supposed to do now. "Sharon's not a Cylon! You have the results from the detection tests that were done months ago – it came out green!"

"It's entirely possible that those tests were wrong," Tigh pointed out. "Perhaps Baltar really didn't know what he was doing."

"Oh, and I suppose you're going to start calling him a Cylon next," Tyrol angrily spat.

"Whether or not you want to believe it," Adama told him, "Do you have a better explanation?"

Tyrol looked away, a broken man. "She just…she…It's Sharon! We all know her. That…thing down in the brig isn't her!"

"She could have been a sleeper agent," Lee pointed out. "There have been rumors about them." Tyrol still wasn't buying it.

"This is insane! She's pregnant, with our child – how the frak would that be possible of she was a Cylon?"

"Watch yourself, Chief," Tigh told him. Tyrol tried to reign his anger back in.

"That I honestly don't know," Cottle replied. "I have a team trying to go through Dr. Baltar's research on the detector, discover why it failed."

Adama nodded. "Let me know as soon as you have anything."

"Yes, Sir."

"May I make a request, Sir?" Tyrol asked Adama. He nodded. "I'd like free access to Sharon."

"Chief – "

"Cylon or not, sleeper agent or not…She's my wife. And I believe that the woman I know is still inside of her somewhere. I can't give up on her, not yet."

Adama sighed. "Permission granted. But Chief?"

"Yes, Sir?"

"Be careful."


The walk down to the brig was possibly the longest that Tyrol had ever taken. He nodded a greeting to the officer posted inside, then entered and made his way towards Sharon's cell. She was sitting on the floor, her back to the bars, and while she'd undoubtedly heard him coming, she didn't move.

"Sharon?" Nothing. "Sharon, look at me." Slowly, with a fluidic grace that couldn't be human, she stood and turned around.

"Hey, there, Galen," she replied, a nasty little grin on her face. "What, no kiss hello?"

"I don't want to talk to you; I want to talk to Sharon. I want to talk to my wife."

She held her arms out with a laugh. "She's standing right here, Gay."

"You're not Sharon. You're not my wife; you're not the woman I created a child with." Her eyes lost focus for a minute, but were softer when they looked back to him. Were familiar.

"Galen?"

He smiled. "Yeah. I knew you were in there." Tears were welling in her eyes.

"I didn't mean to hurt anyone, Galen, I swear. I just…can't keep control."

He'd had his fears, his doubts over the years, but they'd eventually all faded in favor of the fact that he loved her. And as much as he wanted to hate her now, he couldn't. "You're going to have to explain some of this to me," he told her.

Sharon sighed, sitting down and putting her head in her hands. It was taking all her energy to keep the Cylon in her suppressed. "I don't know how long it's been with me; I wasn't supposed to know…But all the weird things that have happened, the explosives, the open hatch, it was all this thing. I'm a person, Gay; I had a life on the colonies, and on this ship, and years of memories!"

"I know. No one's sure what's going on."

"They're going to kill me," Sharon stated.

"No."

"I'm a danger to the fleet."

"You're pregnant with a human child."

"You can only guarantee that it's half human…and that's what this thing wants," she realized.

"What?"

"It wants this baby…Gay, they have to kill us."

"I'm not going to let that happen!"

"It's the only way to make sure the Cylons don't get this child!"

"We're not going to start killing people at random out of paranoia, Sharon. We'd be no better than the Cylons at that point!" A sly smile appeared on her face, and he knew she'd lost her battle to stay in control.

"You honestly still think you're better than us?" the thing occupying her body asked, her voice like honey. "You really are pathetic." Tyrol didn't even know what to say, so he just turned and left. He didn't think he could look at her for another minute without being sick.


News traveled around Galactica fast, especially among the pilots when it concerned one of their own. "What are we going to do with her?" Kara asked Lee that night as they both got ready for bed. He sighed.

"I have no idea. I don't even think my dad knows. According to Tyrol, the whole point of this thing being here was to have a child."

"If the Cylon detector wasn't really working, then that means we're back to square one. We can't trust anyone, and you know how bad the paranoia was on this ship the first time around."

"Yeah, I know. They're supposedly trying to figure out what went wrong, and then test all over again. Who knows what the Cylons will have messed with in the meantime, though?"

"So we start finding these hidden Cylons, and then what? Shove them out the airlock one by one? Sharon had a life, a family – Gods, 'Sharon' never really existed, did she?"

"I don't know. I don't think anything's going to be done now. They want to see if they can get any useful information about the Cylons out of her. If she and this baby are so valuable to the Cylons, then they're even more valuable to us."

"And in eight months?"

"In eight months, your guess is as good as mine."


Tyrol sat in his quarters, staring at the picture in his hands. It had been taken a few months earlier, when they'd celebrated Boxey's twelfth birthday. He, Sharon, and Boxey were smiling for the camera – he couldn't figure out how they'd gotten from there to where they currently were.

He looked up at the sound of Boxey's door opening, and the boy left his room, rubbing at his eyes. "What's the matter, Boxey?"

"Where's Sharon?"

Tyrol sighed. "She's not here tonight."

"She's not supposed to be working," Boxey pointed out.

"Yeah, I know…Come here, kiddo." He sat down with his guardian. "See, something happened today…Sharon's not who we thought she was." Boxey frowned.

"What are you talking about?"

"There's a part of her…she's a Cylon, Boxey."

His eyes went wild with surprise. "No, she's not! She…she saved me from the Cylons!"

"She didn't know; none of us did. She was what's called a sleeper agent. Part of her…part of her is still the person that we knew, but the other part is no different from the Cylons that destroyed the Colonies."

"You're lying!" the boy yelled, starting to cry. "She's not like them, she can't be!"

"Boxey – "

"I want to see her. Where is she?"

"Boxey, you can't see her."

"She's my mom! I want to see her!"

"She's in the brig, to make sure that she can't hurt anyone, and I can't let you go down there…I'm sorry, but I'm trying to protect you. You don't need to see her like this."

"When can she come home?"

"I don't know…I don't know if she's going to," Tyrol admitted. Boxey was quiet for a long moment.

"She said she loved me," he finally whispered. "Was that a lie?"

"She said she loved me, too, Boxey. And…I've gotta believe that for the Sharon we knew, it was true."

The boy slowly nodded. "Then I believe it, too."


TBC...