Thirteen

Chapter Twenty-Four

In Politics, There Is No Sportsmanship

Tom Zarek knew the time was ripe to go up against Laura Roslin. Since she had been cured of her terminal cancer, her spiritual role among the Colonials had receded, and Zarek could sense that there was unrest and discontent among the populace on Babylon 5. His followers from the Astral Queen were no longer prisoners, and had begun to come back over to Zarek's side after a brief spiritual connection to Roslin.

He had conferred with his allies among the Quorum of Twelve, and found that he had the support of roughly half of them. He smiled at the thought of giving Roslin and her administration fits leading up to the election. Zarek remembered those years being imprisoned for the bombing of a government building on Sagittaron twenty years before, knowing that he hadn't been involved with the plotting of the explosion.

Zarek had a political activist for three decades, fighting against the inequalities he saw in Colonial society. The Articles of Colonization had been ratified only twenty-two years before, yet it never had redressed the grievances that citizens of his homeworld had with the other eleven colonies. For generations, Sagittaron had been held in virtual slavery because of the rich mining deposits on the planet, as well as the lush farmlands that became known as the breadbasket of the Colonies.

Zarek hadn't wanted to use violent means to get his point across, and neither had most in the political movement known as Freedom for Sagittaron, but the local government had gone out of their way to suppress their movement. Things came to a head twenty years before when some of the leaders were arrested on trumped-up charges and were set to be put on trial. The raids by the Sagittaron military had netted most of the moderate leadership, leaving a vacuum in which the hotheads and radicals filled and began to advocate violent resistance.

Zarek knew they were asking for trouble with all their plotting, which went so far as advocating nuking Sagittaron City. He managed, through sheer force of will, to tone it down for a while, but knew that he couldn't keep the lid on this pressure cooker for much longer.

When the central government building went up on a cloudy, overcast day that spring, he had been lecturing at a college on the other side of the planet. The student movement at Thermopolis University had wanted to assist Zarek in hiding out, but he knew that if he ran, the populace would go gunning for the rest of the movement. So he allowed himself to be arrested and charged with plotting the bombing.

Miraculously, only eighty-four people had been killed and two hundred wounded in the attacks. The radicals hadn't known of the local replay of a Colonial Cup fieldball final between Sagittaron and Picon at Sagittarius Stadium, and many of the government employees had called in sick that day to snatch up tickets before the 91,231 seats were sold out. The bombing had occurred in the first half, with Picon leading 31-21, and the telecast of the event showed the venue shaking from the sheer force of the explosion. The replay was abandoned and the crowd told to leave in fears that a bomb might have also been planted in the stadium.

The government building managed to not collapse for hours, giving rescuers valuable time to bring out those not killed in the initial blast. When the building finally did collapse in upon itself, everyone who could be rescued had already been pulled from the rubble. Zarek thanked the Gods in which he may have believed one day in four for the limited loss of life, but the firestorm in the attack's aftermath was just beginning to form.

He had been the man that the media and prosecutors focused on, holding him responsible for the attacks. Zarek had figured himself to be a dead man, so he decided that if the movement needed a martyr, then he would be it. The trial had been a horribly lopsided affair, so much so that some of those initially angry with Zarek's movement became more upset at the obvious railroad job taking place. The prosecution's case was shoddy at best, as they never could find substantial evidence linking Zarek to the bombing, but kept going because of the demands of the Colonial government. The jury had been stacked against Zarek, so he knew what the verdict would be even before opening arguments commenced.

When the lengthy trial came to its inevitable conclusion, it shockingly took three weeks to reach a verdict. Rumor had it that several jurors were threatened if they didn't vote the government's way, while other rumors circulated about bribes being paid to the jurors. Zarek paid little attention to all of this, as he had long accepted that he was a doomed man.

When the verdict came down, he walked into the courtroom with his lawyers, going through the gauntlet of media and citizens for and against his cause. Riot police were a common fixture at the trial, which was televised live through the Colonies on the various news networks. During the time between his arrest and the verdict, he had written a book, "Change for a Clearer Conscience", which was summarily banned and quickly became a hit on the black market. The victim's families decried it as treasonous propaganda, but student movements all over the colonies rallied in protest against the book's banishment.

He took his seat between his two lawyers, Shannon Braird and Donovan Paxton, who were well known supporters of liberal and radical causes. They had taken his case pro bono, which helped a lot because Zarek hardly had any money as it was. The judge came in and the jury followed in shortly thereafter. The judge asked them if they had reached a verdict, and the jury forewoman said that they had, passing a document to the bailiff, who presented it to the judge.

Justice Talman Zalcott took a long time looking over the verdict, so much so that the audience in the courtroom became impatient and he had to bang his gavel down several times to bring them to order. Zarek whispered over to Braird, "No matter what they do, they'll be blood in the streets tonight. I wished now I'd just plead guilty and let them be done with me!"

Braird ran a hand through her graying red hair and whispered a reply, "Maybe that's what's needed to get through to the people that the Colonial government is unjust! This whole event has been nothing but a show trial!" She was about to continue, but Justice Zalcott ordered Zarek to rise and hear the verdict.

The verdict was a lengthy one, and it shocked both sides of the courtroom. On the charges of organizing and plotting the bombing, he had been found not guilty, which angered the victim's families and supporters of the government. However, on charges of conspiracy and sedition, he had been found guilty, which angered Zarek's supporters and other liberals. Zalcott could have sent Zarek to the gallows, but he decided to be lenient and sentence him to the minimum of twenty to twenty-five years in prison. When the sentence was handed down, the only person who seemed satisfied with it was Zarek. The courtroom exploded as both sides of the aisle began to attack each other, and the convict and his lawyers, along with the judge, prosecutors, and jurors were rushed out of the room by court security.

For the next two weeks, riots rocked Sagittaron, as well as many urban areas of the other Colonial worlds. Zarek was sent to a medium security prison on Caprica, where political prisoners were held, and settled in to prison life, still agitating for change through a variety of visitors who came to see him. In the two decades after the show trial, the government had done more for his cause than he ever could.

And then the Cylons attacked, which turned his life completely upside down and inside out. He was on board the Astral Queen, under consideration for parole when the attacks took place. President Adar had offered him a conditional pardon, with the condition being a renouncement of violence and a public apology for the bombings. Zarek had declined, knowing full well that the reason why Adar even considered the pardon was he was losing the presidential election in the polls, and had hoped that a Zarek pardon would gain him enough support of liberals to fend off the challenge from the right.

In the months since then, he had leveraged himself from almost being killed off with all the other prisoners on board the prison ship to being part of the Quorum of Twelve. He had managed to gain political power through gaining goodwill throughout the fleet, which included physical support for other ships of the fleet. Marshall Bagott was on a ship in which Zarek's people had helped repair the air filtration systems, and, being a politician representing Virgon, had come to support Zarek's initial bid for the vice-presidency. While that failed in the end, Bagott became a key supporter of Zarek in the Quorum of Twelve.

Bagott's support paid off in the end, as Zarek named him his vice-presidential running mate in a press conference held in the old Babylon 5 Advisory Council headquarters. Roslin could only watch as four other members of the Quorum joined him at the announcement.

However, Roslin had some surprises of her own. She already had the support of Robin Wenutu, the Quorum member from Canceron, as well as that of Safiya Sanne of Picon (who had briefly also represented Leonis when their representative fell seriously ill for a brief period of time). Sanne had originally backed Zarek, but had jumped ship again when Roslin came through on Kobol.

But the surprising supporter of Roslin was her former political foe, Sarah Porter. Despite being cured of cancer, Roslin still had her support, and they had forged a strong bond of friendship in the time after finding the Earth Alliance. Porter herself was a cancer survivor, and that link with the president had helped bridge the initial gap between them, and had helped Roslin to strengthen her resolve to make a big for re-election.

A day after Zarek made his announcement; Roslin assembled the media in the same room, and announced her bid for re-election. The big surprise, however, was that she had been asked by Dr. Gaius Baltar to drop him from consideration for the vice-presidency. That was the opportunity Roslin had needed, as she named Sarah Porter as her running mate. As her supporters clapped and the media threw questions out at her, John Sheridan and Michael Garibaldi sat to the side looking on.

"This is gonna be fun!" Sheridan said, meaning the exact opposite.

"Yeah, sure! Like it's a blast when you get a root canal at the dentist. If it's all the same to you, John, I'd rather face a Shadow fleet than what's heading for us right now. This election's gonna be a rough one. I can feel it."

"I know, and we can't tip our hand either way, or the other side has an advantage over us if they win. I do like your idea, though."

"Of sponsoring the debates? Sounds like a good idea to maintain neutrality to me. I contacted Jim Bitterbane. You know, the guy who used to host ISN's Night Side before he retired years ago. I filled him in on what's going on and what I needed of him, and he agreed to moderate the debates. I also contacted Maggie Egan, who used to be the lead ISN anchor as well as Vimi Mani, who retired from ISN shortly after we freed Earth from Clark's regime."

Sheridan looked at his old friend with surprise and asked him, "How did you get them to agree to come?"

Garibaldi smiled and said, "Two words: book deal. Simple as that!" Sheridan shook his head as they watched Roslin and Porter take questions from the assembled reporters, wondering just how wild this campaign was going to get.