She had lost control of the situation.

Kara Thrace was willing to concede that point, if only it would get her a little closer to her extraction from this clusterfrak. So far, she'd ripped up her back, rubbed her hands raw and torn off at least two fingernails trying to maneuver through the wreckage. And then sometime in the last few minutes, her left wrist had suddenly quit working. It might have had something to do with said hand slipping off the block she had been using for leverage and slamming into a slab of something hard and unforgiving, but she wasn't sure. All she knew was that the light at the end of the tunnel -- both the proverbial and the literal illumination she could actually see -- seemed too great a distance away.

This was why she hated being on ships instead of in a cockpit. It meant surrendering the element of control she needed to have in her life. Unless you were flying in a ship -- actually holding the controls and making her respond in the exact manner you wanted -- you weren't in control. It was why she fought to spend every frakking minute she could in a Viper.

Kara pulled herself another inch or two forward, then winced when another shard of metal ripped through her flight suit and put another gash in her back. She wasn't sure how much of the wetness on her back was sweat and how much was blood, but at the moment, it really didn't matter. All that mattered right now was getting enough control back to get herself the frak out of here.

Because somewhere in the last few minutes, she'd started hearing sounds. Lightweight popping noises, followed by somewhat more ominous creaks compounded by the groan of metal. Every pilot -- from the greenest rook in a Raptor to the commanders of star fleets -- knew what metal fatigue was, and what it sounded like. They had to know for their own survival.

And it was exactly what she was hearing. Regularly, and without any signs of easing. The meaning behind that noise was unmistakeable.

She was running out of time.

Everything was going too frakking fast, and he was losing his grip on the situation.

Galen Tyrol swallowed hard, and corrected his last mental statement. He HAD lost control of the situation. Or rather, it had never been his to begin with. As soon as that explosion had ripped through this ship, he'd merely been along for the ride, trying to keep pace with the changes from moment to moment.

But everything was happening too fast, and he was rapidly running out of options. He knew ships better than anyone else on his deck – It was his job to know them. He'd been in and out of all manner of vessels since he had turned six years old and his dad had smuggled him onto an old shipping freighter and taken him for a ride through the upper atmosphere of Picon.

He couldn't have cared less about the flight. He wanted to know everything about the ship he was on, and why it flew. And since that age, he'd learned everything he could about every ship he worked with – and more than a few he hadn't.

So he felt pretty safe in his current assumption, and it frustrated him to no end that he could do nothing to prevent its approach.

Around him, voices piled upon voices, gradually rising in volume as one tried to be heard over the other. A growing group of people surrounded him, each one trying to tell him something he needed to know.

"There's too much debris in the-"

"The fractures in the hull are-"

"We don't know how many more trips we'll-"

"What about the shuttle fuel-"

"Do we remove the ship's essential-"

He couldn't comprehend a single word. He tried to follow one single voice, and let it complete a thought, and then another cut it off. Finally, Tyrol's last nerve snapped, and he closed his eyes.

"Would everyone please shut THE FRAK UP before I space all of you!"

Immediately, there was silence. It was total, and gratifying. He opened his eyes to find each of the dozens of people surrounding him -- down to and including a humbled Captain Moore -- staring at him in stunned disbelief. He noticed with satisfaction that no one seemed willing to break the silence without further command.

Gritting his teeth, he spat out a simple command.

"One. At. A. Time."

Saul Tigh listened silently to Chief Tyrol, swallowed hard, and came to the abrupt conclusion that this day never should have even gotten started.

Either that, or Will had been tempting the hell out of the fates this morning. Saul dug his hands into the Dradis Console, relishing the bite of the edges into his palms. The pain helped him focus and kept him in the present. Right now, he didn't want to even think about drifting into the past.

It's happening again. I've lost control, we've all lost control, and I'm going to be the son of a bitch who –

"Sir?" Tyrol's voice came across the line. "Sir, did you copy?"

Tigh closed his eyes and swore softly under his breath.

"Yes, Chief, I copied you, and I understand." And the Lords of Kobol forgive me for what I have to do. "You have the timeframe you asked for, Chief, and that's it. No questions, no waiting, no 'just one minute.' Understood?"

Across the silence, Tigh could practically hear Tyrol's disgust. He latched onto it with both hands, both glad to know he wasn't alone in his feelings – and hoping like hell the chief wouldn't fight him on this.

Finally, Tyrol spoke.

"Yes, sir. I understand." Tigh could hear the choke of defeat in Tyrol's voice, echoing his own desperation.

"We're out of time."

Laura Roslin chuckled, shaking her head gently. William Adama found a smile of his own creep across his face, the first real smile

"Excuse me, commander, but really...you want me to believe that your Commander of Air Group was once rebellious enough to stand in your face and tell you to ..." Roslin paused and let her face become the sort of impassive mask Will knew his son had mastered from his father. " 'Frak your beliefs and frak your military. I want to be a race pilot. Sir.' "

It sounded absurd, and Will knew it. But it was also the absolute truth.

"He wasn't the CAG then. As I recall, he was a rather impulsive 12-year-old." Will's smile grew a little wry. "I had also recently given him a lecture on standing up for what he wanted. I suppose you can I say I asked for it."

Roslin let loose with a peal of delighted laughter.

"Somehow, I can just see your son adding the 'sir.'"

The laughter eased the tightness in Adama's chest. The worry still clung to him like sweat on a Caprican summer morning, refusing to let him claw free of the panic-ridden images of the morning. In his mind's eye, he could still see his son's face, absurdly purple and filled with the kind of fear he'd hoped his son would never face in his lifetime.

"Dad, please..."

But he was also starting to regain some of the inner calm he normally maintained. The panic was still there, along with the fear he would lose his only remaining child. It was, however, coming into perspective with the rest of the situation. Medtechs were moving around sickbay, but so far, only the critical patients had been brought in. Adama knew there were more injured, and could only guess that Saul had succeeded in confining all of the Hephaestus' crew and passengers on the hangar deck. That meant that the Galactica – at least temporarily, he hoped – would be considered secure.

" – one?"

He snapped back to present time to see the president waiting for an answer. He raised an eyebrow, and started to ask her to repeat the question, but President Roslin raised her hand to quiet him.

"I asked if your son ever got into – "

She never got a chance to finish her sentence. In the midst of the chaos surrounding him, one medtech had come to a stop directly in front of them, wearing a somber expression.

"Sir, we have Colonel Tigh on the line. He's asking to speak with you and the president. He says it's urgent."

Will was on his feet before the medtech had even finished the sentence. He could hear the click of the president's heels following him, and wondered how he had missed her coming up on him earlier. If anything, it was noisier in sickbay now than it had been before.

As soon as he reached the desk, another medtech handed him the comm. Will wondered briefly if it had been switched to the speaker setting, and then saw the tech hand Roslin a headpiece. As soon as it was secured, he opened the mike.

"This is Adama. President Roslin is also on the line." He heard the formality in his voice and found it ridiculous under the circumstances, but unavoidable with the president on the line. "Colonel Tigh?"

"Sir, we are dead in the water here." Saul cut right to the point without wasting a moment. "Chief Tyrol says the metal fatigue has worsened to the point where we're talking minutes now, not hours."

"Then tell them to come on home. Immediately."

"Sir..." Adama could hear the frustration bleeding through Saul's voice. "All the shuttles and Raptors got stacked up on this end on a refueling run. We're going to send one back, but we don't know if it will get there before the structure collapses in on itself. In any case, we're going to be lucky if we get Captain Moore and our crew back off the ship."

Our crew. Adama immediately noticed what had been omitted, and felt a cold chill creep down his back.

"What about Lieutenant Thrace?" He couldn't bring himself to break the formality now. His emotions would overtake him if he did.

There was silence for a moment, and then Tigh's voice came back across the line.

"There's still no sign of her. It's possible that she came over and we missed her among the critically injured, or that she just didn't catch up with our personnel – "

Adama caught himself almost wanting to laugh – a grim, hopeless bark near to escaping.

"Saul, this is Starbuck we're talking about." Will closed his eyes. "We would have seen her."

"I know." Adama closed his eyes for a moment as Saul spoke again. "I'm sorry, Will. Either she's dead or she's trapped in the wreckage, but we can't wait for her. If we do--"

"We lose more people. I understand." And the saddest part of it all was that the commander in him did. The good of the many outweighed the good of the few. Or the single pilot he was forced to leave behind.

I'm going to lose them both. And for a moment, it was everything Will could do not to scream. His emotions felt ready to run out of control, to take over everything he was doing.

Instead, he swallowed hard and forced his voice to some small level of professionalism.

"Get back to work, Colonel. Let me know what you find."

There was a brief acknowledgement, and then the line went dead. Adama carefully placed the comm back on the desk, and looked back up to find the president staring at him. He had forgotten she was even listening.

"We're going to lose the ship, and everyone else left on board. Do we even have any idea how many we've gotten off?" For perhaps the first time since he'd know her, the president looked confused and out of sorts.

Adama didn't care. His mind was somewhere else entirely. Saul had presented the facts, and they had to be accepted.

All of them.

I've lost them all now. There must have been something he could have done. For Kara. For Zak. Even for Lee, who had resisted his intrusion every step of the way.

"Commander? Who is Lieutenant Thrace?" The president's words snapped him out of his reverie. Will stared at her for a long moment, completely disbelieving. And then it dawned on him that she knew about his sons, but not their history - or that of Starbuck. For all the president knew, Lieutenant Thrace was another nameless pilot, another member of military personnel that until last week she had never deemed important.

She hadn't known Kara, or about her and Zak, or how those two and Lee had formed a center of friendship that had been the foundation of their very lives.

And now she wouldn't get the chance.

"Not now, Madame President." He turned away from her on his heel, deliberately cutting off the conversation as efficiently as possible. He heard her sputter a few half-formed questions and then fall silent. He could not bear to hear an offer of sympathy – or an expression of outrage at the military – at this moment. It would push him over the edge, and he wasn't sure whether he could deal with what he would find on the other side.

And as he turned, he spotted one of the medics that had brought his son into sickbay over an hour ago. She had come out of the operating area, expressionless under the mask on her face.

He veered over to the medic, and grabbed her by the shoulder. She stopped immediately, and almost came to attention when she realized who had stopped her.

I didn't need to know then. But I do now. Kara was outside of his control now, perhaps beyond all of their control. And there was nothing to be done about the situation on the Hephaestus. But he could find out about Lee.

"Ma'am, I need you to find out about my son." Will carefully kept every trace of emotion out of his voice, laying instead the seeds of command. "And I need you to find out now."