The line of knives and scalpels and saws and things seem endless. Felix asks Cottle not to put him under -- as you would normally do, um, when cutting off somebody's fucking leg -- and Cottle calls him son. "Just do it... I don't want to wake up with my leg gone." Too much like every day in the Fleet; every day on New Caprica. To wake up to a new day only to find something precious is gone. Too much like walking down the Hall of Remembrance and seeing all the goodbyes you never made. Too much, to feel the ache of something that's not there anymore.

Cottle marks the incision. Sam stands behind a screen as Felix shudders in fear. The saw wakes up, whirring and spinning horribly. Felix stares past it, then shuts his eyes just as Sam turns away. He never even knew he was there.

A DARK & LAUGHING RAIN
(LII: The Keeping Still.)

The Fleet jumps in, all around the Basestar, like a backwards homecoming. It dwarfs them. In Bill's office, Helo explains the op. "If we go in on our own horse, we won't last five minutes. But we go in with that Baseship parked out there, nobody's gonna notice us for awhile." Tigh notes that their Raiders are frakked, but Helo tells him to commit Vipers. Half the wing. Bill's surprised, but like, think about it, Bill. You won't need half the Vipers if you wipe out 90% of them in one blow. "Yeah. We'll sneak them in on the rebel Baseship. Hoshi did some calculations from Racetrack's photos. We take out the FTL, and the Hub's stranded." Vipers on an alien deck. Did you ever think you'd see that?

"We blow the Hub... billions of skin jobs lose their bath privileges," Tigh grits. Laura muses on it, like this is English class: "Mortal enemies." Helo reminds them they need a separate team for unboxing the Threes, and Saul points out that actually, they don't: "Maybe we just forget the Godsdamn boxing facility." Bill's grossed out. Trust starts somewhere, but Tigh's in a club he doesn't know about. He's not asking the right questions. "Well? They're lying to us. The skin jobs said their Raiders won't fight because the Final Five is here? We tangled with those slit-eyed black bastards for three years now, and they haven't turned back before. Why now?" (I guess we should be grateful that he didn't throw some gun/cannon relation to "limp-wristed" in there with the rest of those slurs, but whatev. I never expected Saul to be the one most likely to get all chrome-closet self-hater about this whole thing.) "What if they're telling the truth? What if the Final Five are here?" Tigh hasn't got an answer for that one. Or if he does, it involves an even less clever way of being offensive so he lets it slide.