Kara Thrace trotted into the CIC, carefully covering the amusement she felt as several of the CIC people openly glared at her. The whole situation was unpleasant. She had never seen hostility so high on board the Galactica. She felt badly about the fight, but she thought Dualla was being paranoid about the whole thing. Smash had been punished, recycled to the next nugget class, and doing janitorial duty to learn a lesson while he sweated out his time in the brig. She personally had punched the daylight out of him, and the nuggets had been doubly harsh. Yes, in a better world, in the old world, trash like Smash would have been tossed out, and good riddance. The problem was that even a poor Viper pilot was better than none at all. Lee had sternly lectured all of the pilots on the importance of not hitting the staff with chairs when there were losses at card games, and she knew for a fact that all of the pilots had been scrupulously polite and respectful.

Bad enough that Gaeta looked like everyone's bright eyed earnest little brother with the personality to match. Worse that he not only looked terrible, but he had not insisted on throwing the book at Smash. So the more Smash pissed and moaned about it, the more saintly Gaeta came off. She didn't like that Smash wouldn't shut up about Gaeta being a Cylon, but no one really thought that about him. Dualla and the rest of the CIC enlisted people, was just adding fuel to the fire by insisting that someone escort Gaeta from place to place. She had intentionally asked Dualla to be added to the list, partly to show some air wing support and partly to talk to Gaeta about having the whole business stopped. It wasn't helping mend the rift, and it was a rift that the air wing didn't want.

" Hey," she said pleasantly as she stepped up to Gaeta's station. " According to the schedule, I am supposed to be escorting you down to sick bay. Almost done?"

He held up his hand, gesturing for her to be silent. Looking at the screen he was working on, she realized he was plotting a lengthy FTL jump, the sort that the commander tried to plan well in advance. It was safer. Errors were deadly with jumps. It was better to carefully plan them. She could, in a pinch, plot her own jumps in something the size of the Cylon Raider or a Raptor, but moving multiple ships in formation took a great deal of care and skill. Finally Gaeta looked up. " Jump coordinates entered. Lt. Algee, you have the deck. Make sure to run the second pass over the coordinates." He stepped away from the console.

Algee cheerfully took his place. " Don't let her talk you into any card games," Algee warned, his deep voice rolling with humor.

" Don't worry," Kara said loudly enough for all of the people watching to hear, " I'm just here to protect and serve." She waited until they had left the CIC before she giggled. " You know how I know you are better? I can actually see both of your eyes roll. You look better by the way." It was true. Gaeta's face had resumed its normal shape, and the swelling around his right eye had gone down. He did still look like someone had pounded him into a pulp.

" It would be hard to look worse." Gaeta said quietly. He seemed embarrassed.

Kara wondered if he was embarrassed by the attention or by the fact that he had gotten cold cocked by Smash. " Too bad you didn't get cut."

Gaeta sighed. " Yes, I know. Women like scars. Dr. Cottle mentioned my misfortune in that respect."

Kara laughed. " Cottle has his moments." She waited for a laugh, or a chuckle, or even a smirk, but Gaeta was silent. " Something wrong?"

" I'm tired. My head hurts. Someone keeps painting the word "Cylon" on my door. I think it's that frakking idiot Smash. It has been a rotten couple of days. Most of my friends are worried that the second I go to the head by myself, I'm going to be killed. Dr. Baltar is mad that I am not allowed to help him, the colonel's wife keeps trying to sneak into my bed, and nothing seems to be getting better. Everyone is angry, and thinking about it makes my head hurt even more." Gaeta said it all in a rush, as if spitting out poison.

Kara grabbed him by the arm. " Gaeta… Smash isn't going to come after you. If he fraks up one more time, he will get kicked out, no matter how badly we need pilots." She wasn't entirely sure she believed that, but she knew better than to say anything else. Gaeta was a man, just like Lee and Helo and countless others she had known, and men didn't like to look weak. Even in a fight that didn't involve blindsiding an opponent with a chair, she didn't think Gaeta had the internal fire needed to best a larger opponent. " The problem is that this isn't going to calm down as long as the CIC people keep acting like we're all trying to kill them."

" I know," Gaeta said heavily. " It's a problem."

" It is. Why don't you ask Dualla to back off a little on this mission she's on to protect you?" Kara was pleased with herself. She knew that she wasn't good at solving problems by talking about them, but it seemed like it was going to work.

Until Gaeta started laughing. " Are you kidding? You have no idea what this is about, do you?"

Kara's eyes narrowed. Something about his tone told her that the smart mouthed asshole that Gaeta usually kept under wraps had suddenly slipped from his cage. " Why don't you tell me?"

He smirked at her. " You're a Viper pilot. You might as well be a god on this ship. Pilots always come first and none of you ever think that things are different for the rest of us. Don't you wonder why none of us ever come down to play cards any more? Why no one drinks or hangs out? We're working all of the time."

"Everybody works." Kara said easily. " There is the whole holocaust, end of the world, fugitive fleet thing happening you know." Somehow though she had a bad feeling that Gaeta was making a fair point.

" You work pilot hours, Starbuck. You fly a eight hour CAP, two hours of prep and two of post flight maintenance. Then you're off. After three days of that, you get two days of flight deck duty, that you all complain about, and the sixth day you get assigned to supervise a squad doing ship maintenance and trust me, you all complain about that too. Then you get a day off." Gaeta took a breath. " The only day I've had off was because of a concussion. Ever since the Cylon attack, I've been working twelve hour shifts at the minimum, usually more and even though I'm not a pilot, I don't get to ignore the general quarters call if there's an attack. You have to fly, but we all man battle stations to make sure we don't all get killed. That's just how it is in the CIC. There's not enough of us to cover normal shifts, and until we have enough pilots trained, that's just how it has to be."

" Pilots can die at any time," Kara shot back. " You go down the launch tube thinking it's the last time. It's stressful. You make a mistake and you're dead" She was angry, but she did see his point. The ship hadn't been fully staffed and between casualties and attacks, filling the pilot spots had been the priority, that and keeping the pilots in good health.

"Yes, if you make a mistake, you're dead. If I make a mistake, or Dee, or anyone in the CIC, everybody's dead. Mistakes simply can not happen at our jobs." Gaeta paced around her. " Every time we do an FTL jump, we are risking every life in the fleet on my ability to do math." He paused. " I can barely eat or sleep anymore. I started smoking just so I don't drink myself to death. Some people chew their nails until their fingers bleed. One guy was pulling his hair out until Cottle got him to shave his head. There's a petty officer, a woman, who can't stop stuttering, another one that can't stop shaking once she's off shift. Nobody quits, nobody complains, nobody minds that the only person who ever says thank you to us is the commander. We all do our jobs and work without even a chance of a break, and we do it because if we don't, then everybody dies."

Kara hesitated before she spoke. She knew what he was talking about. There were people having breakdowns left and right on the Galactica, and more in the regular fleet. " I hadn't noticed any real problems." Not like what happened down in the pilot barracks, with the day long crying jags or excessive promiscuous sex.

Gaeta rolled his eyes. " Of course you don't." He also hesitated, clearly searching for words. " You've heard the commander call the crew a family, right?" She nodded. " He's right about that, but he sees us all as his children, and that's not really how it is. Each area, the CIC people, the airwing, the deck crew, is its own family. We're all related, like cousins, but you're always closer to your immediate family than you are to your cousins. You never want your cousins to see how bad things might be at home, so you always put on a good show. We don't want to know what problems are happening in the air wing, it just makes us more nervous when we have to monitor the fight. We never let on what our problems are, because you have enough to worry about already. Everyone knows that there are problems, but no one wants to have them brought up in public, because it is family. And it's all falling apart."

" Because?"

" Respect," Gaeta said simply. " I know I will never save this ship by flying a Viper into battle, but that doesn't mean I am a useless piece of garbage in comparison to a Viper pilot. In fact, I have saved this ship and this fleet a few times, a few times more than Smash, and I did it from a console in the CIC. The people in the CIC? My friends? Like Dualla? They know that, just like I know that every one of them has saved this fleet few times. I am not going to tell Dualla, who may be overreacting a little bit, that I don't respect her concern, because she is my friend, and more importantly the only family I have left. You would be doing the same as her if this situation were reversed, except that the commander would have thrown the book at a tactical officer that hit a Viper pilot in the head with a chair. And you know that, but you don't know how that feels. No one is safe, and the air wing can do whatever the hell it wants without any real fear of punishment."

Kara opened her mouth to disagree. And then stopped. Gaeta was right, at least in theory. There was at least one member of the CIC staff that would get a wrist slap in a similar situation, and she was looking right at him. But he had a point. Almost anyone else hitting a Viper pilot would have been court martialed. He was right, and she understood suddenly that the problem wasn't going to away even if Gaeta was willing to ask Dualla to call off the escort service. Trust had been broken. Respect had been lost. " All right, how do we fix this?"

Gaeta shrugged. " I don't know, but something has to give."

They both jumped as the alert claxon blared. Kara immediately began running. " Can't stay to chat!" Gaeta followed her, but they were both halted seconds later as a metallic wall slammed down across the corridor. " What the frak is this?"

" It's a security precaution," Gaeta said after a moment. " We installed them after the Cylons boarded us. We must be near the life support controls." He paused. " We better find a phone and report in. We're not getting out until the commander calls the all clear."

" We're locked in this corridor?" Kara began to seethe.

" In the area surrounding life support yes. If the Cylons board again, it is supposed to make it harder for them to gain access, slow them up." Gaeta said. " I thought I saw a phone back this way."

" You did," a new voice chuckled. Kara and Gaeta turned, and saw Smash, dressed like one of the janitorial staff, holding the handset he had obviously torn from the wall in one hand.