Jump.)

ANCIENT GRUDGE TO NEW MUTINY

Twinset grins, in the Hybrid Chamber. "I think we're going towards the Resurrection Hub. I think the mission is still on." Laura's glad. I don't even know that they're wrong. It's not hugely different from a genocidal virus, really. "We already fucked you over with Gaius Baltar six times, sex and morality and individuality and love and magical mystery babies. Why not take of this fruit, and eat?" Absent the whole, you know, genocide and holocaust and work camp thing, we've pretty much been Prime Directiving all over their faces since day one. This is why I like Diane Duane so much. Have you read High Wizardry? I'm convinced I would not have survived past third grade without that book because I'm such a meddler. That's how you deal with some robot motherfuckers.

Helo sits alone with Twinset Eight on that Command & Control bridge they always show when it's culturally significant, when there's voting or screaming or threesomes to be dealt with. They talk about how who knows when this ends; the Hub jumps and thus the Hybrid jumps, "Sometimes... six hours after it's moved on, sometimes like six minutes," because she makes her own decisions. (You know Cavil's like, "I did this with Captain Quantum like a bajillion times and every jump might be the jump home and guess what, it's not.") But so easy, after a season on Caprica with Athena and years in the air commanding the Fleet over NC, Helo slips in. Easy as a fish in a stream. He's getting better at this, less and less we need it.

"And one time it'll be within one jump-length and we'll catch it." Yeah, but we don't know when. "They're gonna read our heat signatures the second we fire up the first Viper," he figures. "Hell, they'll read our electronics." She nods, like his teammate. Like his first teammate, his only girl. Like Kara in Delphi, doubled, like Sharon in the wind and the rain, she speaks his other thoughts. There are people, you know, that slip right in. You are a team, faster than you've met and learned each other's names. She doesn't even have a name, this Twinset Eight, this copy. And he's slipping in from the first second, now that Natalie's gone, now that Twinset's the only one who knows what's going on, now that it's her birthday. He slips right in.

"Yeah," she sighs, swimming in the stream, "If we could only mask that." He looks at her; this is how it is. Her tactical and secretive logic, abutting his intuition, his hope. Their expertise, Raptor pilot and ECO, wife and husband, mother and father. This is how they operate. He's homesick. "...Go in cold! No electronics at all." She nods, like Sharon. Like a Sharon. "Send the Vipers out dead? Towed by Cylon birds, they'll never see it coming." Vipers pulled along by Heavy Raiders; Colonials pulling and pulled by the Cylon, that's his life. "Take out the Hub's jump drive, then settle in for the long fight. Yeah, good, okay, okay." Just like a marriage. This isn't a love story: He's homesick. "But you and me, we've got to get onto the Hub in the middle of that mess and try to find D'Anna." She is worried, he is worried; his worry makes her steel. It's what Sharon would do.