Chapter Text
Chief of Staff to the President and what was he doing? Watching the DRADIS screen. 'The more things change, the more they stay the same,' thought Felix, as he stared at the haze of Colonial One's DRADIS. He should have been looking over the plans for the school building, it was laying there on his lap, but he really wasn't in the mood at the moment. He knew it wasn't going to get built anyway.
All of a sudden, there were a lot more dots on the DRADIS screen than there should have been. "What the frak?" Felix hit the screen to see if it was just a glitch. The dots didn't go anywhere. In fact, even more of them showed up. "Frak. No. This isn't happening. Frak." Felix hit the screen, over and over, willing the dots to disappear. He knew it wasn't a glitch, that those really were ships, but he didn't want to believe it. He kept hitting, so many times he thought he might destroy it, until some of the dots did disappear. Just not the ones he was hoping for.
Felix's eyes went wide. "Oh no."
"Mr. President! Mr. President!" Felix exclaimed as he sprinted into the room. He hoped to the gods Baltar wasn't drunk again.
"Don't you knock?" Gaius whined. He was lying on the couch with two of his 'interns', very clearly not sober. Had it been any other time, he would've been furious. But right now, he was simply too shocked to feel anything else. And if what he had seen on DRADIS didn't sober Gaius up, he didn't know what would.
"Gaius. Gaius!" Felix didn't want to test his own patience now, not at a time like this.
"Yea, what is it?" Baltar asked nonchalantly, not even bothering to get up.
"The cylons just jumped into orbit." Felix paused to catch his breath. And to brace himself to say what he feared wasn't actually true. "And the fleet's jumped away."
As if some sort of poetic injustice, the moment he'd said it, he heard the sound of cylon raiders flying overhead. Gaius looked out the window to catch a view of them. Felix bit his nails and debated running to the head to puke his guts out. Gaius certainly wasn't paying attention to him now. He stood there for what may have been seconds or may have been hours, listening to the growing sounds of more and more raiders flying overhead. This wasn't happening, this couldn't be happening. And Galactica…
Felix ran and found the first toilet he could find.
All of Baltar's staff had gathered in Baltar's office. Most of them had said the same thing when Felix had gone to find them: they wanted witness this to know how to prepare for the future. Whatever President Baltar did when the cylons walked in would determine the fate of the entire settlement for the rest of their lives. There wasn't much anything any of them could do to influence him, they'd all learned that by now, but they needed to know what they had to look forward to. Felix found himself wishing for the thousandth time that he had never pointed out the rigged election. He knew how Roslin would react to this. Gaius he wasn't so sure about.
Felix clenched his fists as the cylons opened to the door. It took all he had not to want to jump forward and start beating the crap out of whoever walked in that door. But he knew better than that. Let Baltar do the talking. Work from there. Beating up a cylon now would only get him shot, and he wouldn't have accomplished anything besides releasing his anger. There were much more effective ways to get back at the cylons.
Four shadows walked through the door before it closed behind them. He identified them as they came out of single file and into view. The first was Doral, the PR manager and suicide bomber, one of the first cylons the fleet had known about. The second, Sharon, the most widely known cylon in the fleet. The third, Shelley Godfrey, the model who'd fingered Gaius for the attacks and had been kept prisoner on Pegasus. The fourth…no.
No.
It wasn't possible.