Part 5 Battlestar Galactica: Back To The Colonies: Homecomings

Chapter 7

VII

The fever that was consuming Captain Nicholas Bond was increasing. He had surmised that a piece of the composite metal must still be in his rear-end, and it was festering the wound. His arm would make it, he knew, but it was getting harder and harder to stand up and walk, as the effects of the wound in his butt had spread down his leg.

He had gone over the scene where the Raptors had blown so many of these men, and a few women, to Kingdom Come. Their shotguns wouldn't do him much good, but some of them had sidearms, and he had found loads of ammo for the make of weapon and had added that to his arsenal, taking two of the weapons with him.

He was moving almost exclusively during the night hours, which, in fact, only lasted about four hours this time of year. With the fever and the injury, it was slow going, but he kept his thoughts on Natalie and his family to keep going.

His big worry is that the fever and the infection probably would affect his sense of judgment and direction before too long, and that frightened him. He needed to either find his way out of the mountains, or be rescued, and soon. He was about a mile or so West of where the firefight had taken place, and he had no idea that the Western edge of the Spec Ops team was back there. He had never thought about turning eastward. He kept moving toward his own lines.

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Lee and Kara went to see Doctor Patel when she announced she was finished with her autopsy on the two men who had been brought aboard.

"Admirals, thank you for coming so quickly", she said in a businesslike tone, taking them towards the autopsy room.

The bodies were already on ice in the freezers, but the Doctor had two bullets from one of their bodies. She began her brief.

"As was mentioned by our forces, these two were shot center-mass, classic military style for engaging an enemy", she said, looking up from her notes. "We didn't find any of the shell casings or rounds on the ground-whoever shot them probably confiscated them."

"Conclusion on the weapon used?" Kara was first to speak.

"The bullets are UED issue, sirs", she said with a smile coming across her face.

Kara knew it wasn't a time to celebrate, but she made a small jump and smiled despite the tenseness of the last twelve days. "Lee, he could still be alive out there", and her demeanor broke for a moment, tears in her eyes.

"That's what we're going on, Admiral", Lee smiled back and looked at Starbuck. "You go tell your family about this. I need to go to CIC and tell the Spec Ops team to double-time down that slope."

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The nickname for his creation was The Kingdom, as he ruled like a King of old over his followers. His name was unknown to most of them. He had grand plans for the Twelve Colonies if he could ever get to the other planets, but for the time being, he enjoyed his reign in the Caprican Mountain Range.

He went by the name The Crown.

His followers numbered approximately twenty-five thousand, men, women, and children. That didn't include the "guest workers" that he had acquired through threat and occasional violence to serve his followers. Most of those he had enslaved were men, but a few women had been acquired as well. As had been the case throughout The Colonies after the Cylons came, more than a few had gone sterile. He had plenty of women who could conceive, but he, and most of his loyal subjects had gone sterile after the radiation fell.

He did have a name. He had once gone by the name of Clevin Monteith. He was in his early sixties, as people on Earth would count. He had been a nobody on the day of the attack-just a grunt assigned as a crewman to a Marine transport, but circumstances that still burned within him today compelled him to be a somebody afterward.