Part 5 Battlestar Galactica: Back To The Colonies: Homecomings

Chapter 6

VI

Nick Bond was in bad shape. An infection was forming where the shrapnel had hit him in his butt and it was becoming more painful and more infected each day. His crudely-set arm ached almost just as bad. After nine days on the run, he was out of rations and down to very little water. When healthy, his six-foot frame normally carried about two hundred and five pounds. Now, he knew he was below one-eighty.

He needed to be rescued or he was going to die out here.

In the last three days, he had only moved about a thousand yards. He just physically couldn't do much more. He tried to eat berries, bugs and the occasional small animal, but as his wounds worsened he was being sapped of energy.

It was the middle of the night, the one time of day when he tried to move further west. It was close to pitch black that night, and he felt a sense of protection. But he still moved cautiously.

He had been going for no more than thirty minutes when he heard a loud commotion almost directly to his North, and it sounded like it was getting closer. The closer it got, the louder it got. Nick slid a little further West. To his left, he heard even more of what were clearly voices. They were boisterous voices and that told him they weren't UED forces.

He scanned the area, looking for some cover. Even though he had used charcoal to hide his face and his camouflage uniform would blend him in, this sounded like a large group coming from two different directions, and he didn't want to take a chance.

To his left, he saw what looked like a small opening about ten yards away but couldn't see any further away than that and headed that direction. He took a chance and turned his flashlight on its lowest brightness for a quick look in the tunneled opening. Nothing was in there.

Captain Bond crawled in feet-first, with his weapon on the ground in front of him. Like before the was some verge near the opening, and he quickly tried to mask the opening to make it blend in. The voices were getting closer. He could tell there were at least forty or fifty people headed this way. He saw the first glimpses of lights being carried by the strangers, but not the strangers themselves.

Fifteen minutes went by. He peaked out through the grass, leaves, and twigs he had built up in front of the entrance and could see at least fifty different flashlights being held, from about three hundred yards to his west and about the same distance to his east. This was definitely a hunting party. And they weren't looking for critters.

The voices became clearer and were in Caprican. "How the frack do the Bosses think we can find one measly person in this blackness?", one of them complained.

"Scout, stop your bellyaching", another said. "Orders are orders. We're here to find this guy and take him prisoner if we can, and kill 'em if we can't."

As was often the case, Nick had tried to stay near small breaks in the forest that stretched on this part of the mountain. The human shapes became visible as they approached the tree line opposite him. He was about one hundred yards inside the Southern tree line.

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"Command, Raptor 389, I see movement in front of me, about three miles, a bunch of people with flashlights. Guarantee you those aren't our troops."

Back at the Command Post, Colonel Heinrich Otter had the night watch. There was a picket line of Special Ops forces traveling West-to-East in the mountains for interdiction, but somehow there was a gap. That could mean other troops had been taken out or the line had been broken for some other reasons. A group this large shouldn't have been able to get south of the demarcation line.