With the Weapons of a Woman
by Soledad
For disclaimer, rating, etc. see the Introduction.
Author's notes: According to Glen A. Larsen's novelization to the pilot episode, Boxey wasn't originally supposed to be Serina's own child. Serina was at first called Lyra – a name I gave her mother in this story – and meant to be older and politically more active than she turned out in the actual pilot. I kept some of these traits, in order to make her more than just a pretty face Apollo could fall for… and also a much more ambivalent character than in canon.
Also, we don't know how long it took for the Galactica to reach Caprica after leaving the Fleet. I just assumed for reality's sake that it would take at least two weeks or so. Time enough for the planet to turn into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The various ship classes mentioned in this chapter are from the BSG Technical Manual website.
Chapter 02 – Escape
But the Fleet did not come in the next sectare, or in the sectare after that. In fact, there never came a reply to the distress call, and people in the shelter were becoming more and more desperate. Some of them had been injured during the Cylon attack; others were getting ill due to the polluted air and malnutrition. The shelter had been built for half as many people as there were crowded in right now, and resources were beginning to run out.
"We have to do something," Serina said to Sire Antipas, whose small private room she was sharing. Including his bed. There was a price for taking her and her supposed child in, after all – not that she'd mind much. He was not a demanding patron – mostly, he just wanted some human warmth.
"And what?" Antipas asked listlessly. His injured arm had gotten infected, and as they had no medic with them and running low on medication, too, there was a real danger that he'd lose it… unless he died from blood poisoning first.
"I don't know!" Serina replied in frustration. "Something. Anything. There must be medicine depots and food storehouses in the city. You're a councillor; you can get into the databases of the City Council easily and find out where they are!"
"The computer network's collapsed," Antipas reminded her. "And even if I could locate the storages, how would we get there and back with food and medicine unharmed? You've heard those who'd dare to scout out the neighbourhood: there are roaming mobs all over the city. Whom would you trust? Me? Or yourself? I'm a crippled man who can barely take care of himself, and you… do you truly believe that you, as a woman, and such a tempting one at that, would have a chance against the pillaging bands? Have you any idea what they'd do with you?"
"They'd use me to their pleasure, just as you're doing," Serina replied coolly. "I'm not stupid, Sire Antipas. I'm well aware of the risks. But I also know that if we don't find food and medicine, soon, people will start dying within days – either from starvation or from their wounds and illnesses. We can't hold out another sectare here; not without restocking our resources."
"Fine," Antipas shrugged, returning to his comm unit to keep trying to make contact with someone – anyone – from the Fleet who might be listening. "Be a fool. Go; look for food and medicine, if you can find other fools who're willing to go with you. I'm not going."
Serina wasn't even listening to him anymore. During her stay in the shelter, she'd come to know most of her fellow refugees, so she knew well enough who'd be willing to go with her. The majority of them had belonged to the one or other patrician household as servants, guard, grooms, cooks, gardeners… whatever. They were more practical-minded than their masters and not willing to give up just yet.
She went straight to the cubicle shared by Bengun, a middle-aged Taurean agrist and his two wives. Bengun had worked in the hothouses of the city for the last ten yahrens or so, but in his youth he'd served as an infantry sergeant, until suffering a serious leg wound and got sorted out of service. He still considered himself as a veteran, though, and his son, Kreon, served aboard one of the Battlestars – Serina couldn't remember which one – as a computer specialist.
"Bengun, we need to go out and find some food, medicine and other things," she told him without preamble. "I know it can be dangerous, but we have no other choice. We have almost no resources left – either we take the risk or we'll all die."
The hard-faced man, whose rustic dialect concealed a remarkably shrewd mind, nodded in agreement.
"We've already talked about it, me and some of the others," he said. "We just ain't sure where to go."
"Well, we're on the outskirts of what used to be the quarter for the patrician townhouses," Serina said. "They ought to have ample resources."
"Yeah, but those have already been plundered, methinks," Lea, Bengun's senior wife said pessimistically. A troika, a traditional threesome Taurean marriage unit, either consisted of a husband and two wives, or a wife and two husbands. Theirs was the one-man-two-women sort.
"Some of them probably have," Serina agreed, "but not all of them. There used to be dozens of mansions, with extensive outbuildings, and only two sectares since the Destruction. They couldn't have pillaged all of them – not yet. Besides, what do we have to lose?"
"Our lives, if we run into the mob," Twilly, the junior wife, said darkly. Serina shrugged.
"Our lives will be over – and more certainly so – if we just sit here and wait for the food to run out," she pointed out logically.
"She's right," Bengun said. "We'd have to do it sooner or later anyway. It's better we do it now, while we're still strong enough to defend ourselves against the pillaging bands. Better than starving slowly, at least in my books."
"Can you find a dozen or so people to come with us?" Serina asked.
Bengun nodded with easy confidence. People knew he was an ex-soldier and trusted him to know what to do – more than they'd trust their clearly frightened masters.
"That and more, if I have to," he said. "You sure you wanna come with us?"
"Yes," Serina said firmly. "I need to see with my own eyes what's out there… and if we find a working computer network or a comm station somewhere, I might be able to find more resources… or even help from the outside."
"Very well," Bengun said. "Meet us in a centare at the security entrance. I'll have enough men to come with us."
As promised, less than a centare later Bengun had a group of twenty people ready to go. Mostly men, but also a handful of determined women, young and older alike, who refused to be left behind to wait for the inevitable quietly. Bengun's wives were not among them, but they'd offered to take Boxey as long as Serina was gone. Their own children were already grown – or dead, in Twilly's case – so they were more than happy to have a young child to pamper again… as far as pampering would be possible, under the circumstances.
The group armed themselves as well as they could. The shelter's limited security forces refused to hand over their blasters to a ragtag band of civilians, and none of them owned a pistol of his or her own, but the ruins lying all around them offered heavy iron bars and the likes, broken free from the collapsed buildings. They even managed to fabricate some torches, from broken logs and spilt industrial oil, used in better times to keep machine parts running smoothly. There were mechanics among them who knew what to look for – even though, sadly, none of what they found proved edible.
Serina was asked to show them the way, as she – due to her yahrens as Sire Patroclus' maitresse – had known this neighbourhood reasonably well. She'd never been invited to any of these houses, of course. They belonged to the oldest, most influential patrician families of Caprica – but she knew whose they had been, and she was familiar with the general layout of such mansions.
There was a bitter irony in the fact that she'd now help rob the very houses in which she'd never been welcome, due to her scandalous origins and because her mother had been cast out of these circles. Had she not been so desperate, she might have appreciated the irony.
The ruined houses stood on low, gentle hills, each a small world of its own, surrounded by lush, green gardens and high stone walls, to protect the inhabitants' privacy. Or so it had been once, not so long ago. Right now, the scorched line of a hideous battle scar ran in a deep rut across the entire area, as if the land had been ploughed by some enormous, white-hot piece of ploughing iron. The line seemed to go off infinitely, or at least to the base of a row of fires that raged at the edge of the crumbling city.
It seemed unbelievable that after two sectares, the city would still be burning. Yet, if the smoking ruins were any indication, some parts of it must still have been ablaze.
Heading towards the nearest hill, with an ancient, beautifully-built mansion upon it, they could see that the house, too, was sliced down the middle by the straight-line scar of battle. On one side of the line much of the dwelling still stood, but the other half was nothing but charred rubble.
"I know this house," Serina murmured. "It used to belong to Sire Adama… the commanding officer of the Battlestar Galactica."
"Yeah," Bengun replied grimly, "and it seems someone managed to get back, after all… even though apparently too late."
Following his gaze, Serina's heart jumped to her throat at once. Near the damaged house, the sleek, pointy-nosed outline of a Viper could be seen among the dust and the smoke, like that of a silver-scaled ship in muddy water. A Viper has landed on Caprica! Then the rest of the Fleet couldn't be far, either.
Without needing an order, the group moved on like one man, surging towards the ruined mansion and that symbol of hope beyond it.
As they were getting close, they could see that the front door hung uncertainly from a single hinge. The scanning device, that would under normal circumstances have stopped their progress, had been reduced to a knobbly lump of debris and dangled by a wire from a jagged hole in the wall. They could get close enough without getting spotted by those who were moving around within the house.
Because there definitely was someone there, walking around aimlessly in the ruined half of the building, looking for survivors perhaps, or merely for some personal memento of a life that had been and would never bee again. And there was another one standing in the doorway: a young man, wearing the beige-and-brown uniform of a Viper pilot.
He was a handsome man, Serina found, about her own age, and with collar-length hair such a dark brown that it almost seemed black as it framed his pale face. Within all this black-and-white, his green eyes seemed surprisingly vivid, perhaps due to the contrast, perhaps on their own; it was hard to tell. His angular cheekbones looked as if they'd been shaped by a skilled diamond cutter, and that made him familiar somehow; she'd definitely seen cheekbones like those before, she just couldn't remember at the moment where… and the sharpness of his features was even more emphasized by dark, expressive eyebrows and a strong mouth.
The whole face was very youthful, surprisingly so, given the rank pins of a captain adorning the stand-up collar of his brown flight jacket – until one saw his eyes. Because those eyes looked like they'd seen a lot. This man had definitely earned his rank the hard way.
"Look, we should move on," he was saying, just as Serina and the others reached the house… or what was left of it. "There are crowds coming. They probably saw our ship land."
So, they hadn't reached the estate quite as unnoticed as they'd thought. Of course, a warrior was trained to notice any potential danger approaching, and Serina couldn't quite deny that their group might prove dangerous.
An elderly, grief-sickened, yet still powerful voice answered from within. "I'm not worried about them. I'll be a few more centons here, if you don't mind."
Clearly, the decision was against the young warrior's better judgement, but he didn't argue, just nodded stiffly and started to leave. In the last micron, though, he turned back in the doorway, saying:
"Maybe she wasn't here. Maybe…"
"She was here," the older voice said with finality. "She was here."
Serina could feel the anger within her group rise steadily all around her. The others, too, have spotted the landed Viper and its pilot, and suddenly the whole crowd surged on towards the little ship. Serina prayed that they wouldn't do anything stupid – they needed the help of the military to get away from here – but she couldn't be sure. Desperate people could become violent without a sound reason sometimes. She'd seen it often enough while visiting the outer colonies with her mother.
Fortunately, Bengun seemed capable of controlling his people… for the time being anyway. He made them stop some fifty metrons from the ship, and while everyone was growling and muttering, they behaved themselves for now.
The young pilot walked forward to meet them. He was clearly someone used to deal with obnoxious crowds – he had an air of command about him. He glared at the unblinkingly, perhaps trying to gauge the depth of their enmity and the potential danger they might represent for him and for the older man within the house.
"Yes, can I do something for you?" he asked icily. It was a tone that probably made undisciplined warriors shake in their boots with terror.
Unfortunately for him, he wasn't dealing with a group of his errant pilots here. Bengun was about to answer him, but one of the men cut into his word.
"Where are they, the rest of your fancy pilots?" he demanded, shaking his fist.
Another man, pushing forward from behind the speaker, shouted. "Where were you when they were killing everyone? What were you doing?"
As Serina had feared, hostility within the group was rising with alarming speed. A few men and one of the women – a dishevelled old hag who'd lost her whole family in the bombing, Serina remembered – separated from the majority of the group and edged towards the young warrior. They seemed angry enough to tear him – to tear anyone they could lay hand on – apart and spread the pieces from here to the still burning city, just to find an outlet for their pent-up fear, grief and frustration.
Something needed to be done, and it needed to be done now, because otherwise something really ugly – not to mention irreversible – was going to happen.
"Wait!" Serina called out, running to Bengun who was still standing at the front of the crowd. The front ranks parted for her. People had already grown used to listen to her. "Let him talk!" she added and walked up until she could almost touch the young captain.
'Before they jump at your throat," she enunciated precisely, with the well-trained theatrical projection of a newswoman interviewing some important person, "I'd like to know a few things. Where you were. For that matter, where was everybody, the entire military force?" for better effect, she allowed her eyes to fill with tears, without actually shedding any. It was a very useful tool when dealing with men. "Where were all of you?" she repeated. "Even after the battle had begun, we prayed for relief, but you never came."
His eyes were fixed on her dishevelled figure, his look cool and suspicious. She was playing him, and he knew it. He also seemed to realize that she could be a real danger for him. Military personnel were trained in tactics to handle the mob; but an intelligent person could combat such tactics easily. Fortunately for him, she didn't want him to get killed, and he apparently understood that.
"Most of us are dead," he answered matter-of-factly. That quieted the crowd for the moment. "We were ambushed. There is no more Fleet."
There was a collective gasp from the group; then one of the women started crying, quietly, barely audible above the confused murmurs of the men. Serina felt numb. Absolutely numb. This could not have happened. It simply couldn't. It was beyond her worst fears. Beyond her wildest imagination.
"But…" she was trying to get a hold on the possible ramifications – and failed. "But how... I mean you are here. Where did you come, then?"
"From the Battlestar Galactica," the pilot answered.
Serina felt new hope stir in her heart. "The Galactica? She survived?"
"Yes…" at first, it seemed as if the warrior wanted to add something, but then he changed his mind and fell silent.
"What of President Adar?" Serina demanded. "What about the Quorum of Twelve?"
"And the other colonies?" Bengun added, worried about his own homeworld. "Surely we can fight back!"
The warrior didn't answer, just shook his head in defeat.
"That's impossible!" Serina said. "We're united, all twelve colonies, after hundreds of yahrens of the Separation. Our combined strength, it can't possibly be defeated… Wasn't this what we were all taught, what we all learned from the cradle?"
"Our unity, our strength came about too late," an elderly voice answered, and a tall, silver-haired man with his back slightly bent under the weight of high age came forth from behind the wing of the landed Viper.
Although he was wearing a somewhat battered uniform in command blue, he had a marked likeness to the young pilot: the same angular cheekbones and strong mouth; and the same cold, penetrating eyes that could have frightened an entire battle group of rowdy pilots into obedience within microns. Only that the old man's eyes were dark brown to the young captain's vivid green ones. Serina glanced at the rank pins on the collar of the midnight blue tunic and recognition dawned on her.
"Commander Adama," she said with a respectful bow.
She wasn't certain he'd recognize her. Most aristocrats hadn't after her mother's death, even if she'd visited their homes before. As if she'd become empty air for them without Lyra's presence. But the patriarch of the Adamans (called so after a similarly-named ancestor) was clearly cut from different wood.
"Serina," he said simply. "We've received your transmission aboard the Galactica… what terrible tidings to share! I thank the Lords of Kobol that you've made it out of the attack."
His words were gentle, but his voice full of sorrow and nearly broken. His mere presence, though, spoke more than any words could have spoken. It brought home to Serina – and to the others who'd come with her – the true impact and extent of their defeat.
"It's true then?" Serina asked, and the tears filling her ears were spontaneous and honest this time, full of despair. "Have they beaten us for good? Are we doomed?"
"It seems so, doesn't it?" Bengun murmured. "Hard to believe, though, ain't it? A thousand yahrens the war had gone on… we were so used to it that we all expected it to go on forever. But now… now it's over, right? We can't fight no more, can we?"
"We have to!" Serina insisted desperately. "Commander," she turned to Adama, "we're going to have to keep fighting! We can't… we can't simply give up!"
Adama walked slowly up the hill and turned his attention towards the still burning city. His look was stern, magisterial… but he seemed to look past them, past everything and everyone present, right into the future. A future only he could see yet.
"We're not giving up; we'll never give up," he finally said. "But we can't fight any more; not here, not now. Not in the colonies, not even in this star system. The colonies have fallen; every single planet is in flames. We need to find a new path to follow."
"What are you speaking of, sir?" Bengun asked in confusion.
The old man gave him a compassionate look, as if he were about to ask him – to ask them all – something very hard and painful to do.
"We must gather together as many survivors as we can, from each of the Twelve Worlds," he said. "We must get word to them to board any vehicle that'll carry them, no matter what its state." He turned that far-away look of his to Bengun and the rest of the group. "The possibility of a defeat of such magnitude was already taken into consideration by the leaders of old. There have always been evacuation plans for each colony… although we never believed that we might have to evacuate all of them at once."
"And therein lies the problem," the young warrior pointed out soberly. "There isn't time, not enough time to arrange provisions. I'm certain that the Cylons will be sending landing parties to eradicate the survivors, and that soon. What we should do… I mean if we could just send in our remaining fighters…"
"No," the old commander interrupted. "Too many of them, too few of us. There will be a time of fight, but not now. Our first priority should be to get as many people off-world as we can, before the Cylon clean-up forces arrive."
"But… but there's no way to put up the entire population on the Galactica, and we have no troop carriers any more," the young captain protested.
"We have agroships, mining ships, electronic ships, foundry ships – some of them were built for industrial production in space and can house hundreds of persons if necessary," Commander Adama reminded him.
"Whose potential for conversion to hyperspace capability is marginal at best," retorted the young pilot. "Are you truly hoping to outrun the Cylons with such a ragtag fleet, Father?"
Father? Serina repeated mentally. So, this battle-hardened young warrior was one of Adama's sons, then. Apollo, most likely; his firstborn. The other one was said to have just graduated from the Flight Academy… and didn't he have a daughter in Fleet service, too?
"You're thinking logically," Adama said to his son, and his face was soft and strangely vulnerable at this moment. "But this isn't the time for logical thinking. We'll use what we still do have. Every intercolony passenger liner, freighter, tanker… anything that can carry our people into the stars."
"And when they've gathered in the stars?" Serina asked softly. "What then?"
"We'll lead them," Adama replied simply. "And protect them until they're strong enough."
The old man's eyes glowed with powerful confidence, and for a moment Serina wondered whether she was listening to some charismatic leader, capable of leading his followers through fire unharmed… or to someone who'd already gone mad with grief over his tragic losses. From the confused looks Bengun and his people were exchanging, they clearly weren't sure, either.
But it didn't really matter. They had at least to try something – anything. Sitting on their burning planets, waiting for the Cylons to wipe out what was left of mankind simply wasn't an option.
Bengun was the first to ask the question they were all wondering about.
"How should we send word to anyone?" he asked. "The planetary networks have collapsed, and the intercolonial ones haven't worked since before the first attack. Nothing works anymore."
"There are ways known only to the highest ranks of the military and the Quorum of Twelve," Adama replied. "Emergency networks hidden deep underground; relay stations camouflaged on seemingly deserted moons and asteroids. Even if everything else has collapsed, those will work."
"In that case, we should hurry up, Father," Captain Apollo said. "You're the last surviving member of the Quorum, and the commander of the only surviving Battlestar. Should anything happen to you, all those precautions would have been for nothing."
The old man sighed. "You're right, of course," he said. "There's nothing left for me anyway. Like everyone else, I, too, must turn my back to the past and look towards the future," he glanced around. "Return to your hideouts," he said to the gathered crowd. "Spread the word to others to get to a rallying point and salvage every ship with sufficient thrust to reach the coordinates you'll be given."
"Won't there be Cylon patrols?" Bengun asked doubtfully.
"Of course there will," Adama replied. "They'll be scouring the ground and weaving webs in the sky sooner than you'd think. You'll have to sneak around, above and beneath them to reach our designated assembling point."
"Which would be… where exactly?" Bengun asked.
"Let that be the concern of the pilots," Adama said. "It's been the best-kept secret of the military for the last two hundred yahrens or so. A coded message will be sent to every colonial ship as soon as they've left the atmosphere of a planet… or rather a series of coded messages, so that they wouldn't unknowingly lead the Cylons to the rest of us."
"And the pilots would know what to do?" Bengun asked doubtfully.
The old man gave him a tired half-smile. "They won't have to. Every colonial craft capable of interplanetary travel has been built to react to such messages for the two hundred yahrens. Each message will guide them to the next orientation point only, just in case…"
"Just in case the Cylons would spot them," Bengun finished grimly. "In which case they'd be simply left behind."
Adama nodded slowly. "I'm afraid so, yes. It's either that, or risking sacrificing every single survivor for the sake of a few."
"A grim choice to make, it is," Bengun said.
"Which is why I'll be the one to make it," Adama replied. "Or, should I be dead or otherwise hindered, Commander Kronus. No-one else of us is left."
Bengun thought about that for a moment, and then he made an abrupt nod.
"Very well, Commander," he said. "I for my part am willing to trust you; and will try to persuade others to do the same. But Captain Apollo was right: we must be quick. If I know the tinheads, and I served as an infantry sergeant long enough to know them, they'll be all over us in no time."
"Unfortunately, that's very true," Adama said with a sigh. "Go and speak to the people, then. Captain Apollo will take me to the secret headquarters, from where I can activate the emergency network without any further delay."
"Unless that, too, has been bombed to Hades," Bengun said pessimistically.
Adama shook his head. "Unlikely. It's well-hidden in an area where's nothing to catch the Cylons' interests; and it's well-protected, too. It will work, and people will be given the location of the rallying points as soon as I get there. All you have to do is to spread the word and prepare them for departure."
"I'll do what I can," Bengun promised, although he seemed to think it wouldn't be just that simple.
Within two centares, the emergency network came online indeed, and word went out over all the secret channels, established for exactly such system-wide emergencies two hundred yahrens previous. The evacuation point coordinates appeared on the screens of every household, and people set off to go to their pre-assigned gathering points with renewed hope, desperate to find a means to leave their home planets and get onto one of the great ships waiting for them.
These huge carriers – mostly Gemini freighters or crafts of the Colonial Movers, but also agroships that had been built to provide generation ships on their way to new colonies with food, mining ships looking for Tylium deposits and other valuable ores for the industry of the colonies, foundry ships designed to mine and process ores, but also luxury liners that could be found and confiscated for the rescue of the survivors – could take in a great many people or huge amounts of provisions, or some of both.
They had taken up stationary positions under the protection of hastily established camouflage energy fields that made them invisible to the many Cylon search patrols that passed near them, within the asteroid field on the border of their star system. From there on, they would go to the final assembling point, far away, deep in interstellar space. But getting there in the first place proved hard enough. Military shuttlecrafts, civilian space shuttles, small freighters, landrams, sorted-out, old-fashioned freighters that flew on one wing, even intracolony air busses and rental shuttlepods were used for the desperate task of getting people off the planets and onto the great ships.
Yet even so, there weren't enough vehicles by far to evacuate all the survivors who'd do anything to get off, knowing that being left behind was a death sentence, executed sooner or later but without doubt by the Cylon patrols. Getting onto one of the evacuation shuttles wasn't an easy task, particularly not for such a minor celebrity as Serina… especially not with a small child. She might be as ruthless and determined as she wanted – and she wasn't very shy in her efforts – but she simply didn't have the physical strength to push herself – and Boxey – through the desperate crowd.
Several times they had to retreat, lest they wanted to be trampled to death by the masses. Boxey began to cry after his daggit again, making people around them even more irritated and annoyed with his presence. Serina, although not one to give up easily, was getting worried that – unless she'd find help, soon – they'd be left behind to die here, among the smouldering ruins of what once used to be the capital of the Twelve Words.
And help wasn't easily found here. They'd gotten separated from Bengun and his family right at the beginning of the evacuation, and she hadn't seen Sire Antipas since they'd left the shelter, either. Not that there would be any guarantees that he could – or even wanted – to help them. Yes, he had been generous so far, but he was every bit as concerned with his own survival as everyone else.
Serina was just about to start panicking in earnest when she spotted a familiar, tall, dark-haired figure, wearing the customary white tunic and breeches of a doctor, coming out of a nearby collapsed building that once used to be a small hospital. That long, pale, chiselled face, those dark Aquarian eyes… Patroclus!
"Dr. Paye!" she called out, as Patroclus, like all aristocrats in public service, didn't use his true name outside the social circle of his fellow nobles; only the Admanas did so. "Dr. Paye, over here!"
Patroclus looked around, spotted her and hurried over to her. He looked tired and sleep-deprived but otherwise unhurt.
"Serina," he said, clearly delighted to see her alive and relatively well. He must have helped with the evacuation, because his face and his medical garb were smudged with soot, blood and dust. "I'm glad to see you've survived. And who's this?" he asked, looking at Boxey with interest.
"My son," Serina lied. "Boreas, his father, died during the attack, or so I believe; I couldn't find him. So we ran."
She knew she couldn't fool Patroclus, who was well aware of the actual age of her little Maboc, but there were people carrying boxes out of the now ruined hospital into a civilian space shuttle parked only a few metrons away, who had no business knowing that Boxey wasn't her son. Since Patroclus made no attempts to unveil the lie, she went on with a little more courage.
"We've been trying to get evacuated ever since Commander Adama sent the word, but without a protector…" again, she allowed the tears to fill her eyes. "Please, doctor, can't you help us? I don't want to die here, not after we've made it this far!"
"It would be a crying shame indeed," Patroclus admitted. "You deserve better. But I've no influence that would get you onto any of the evac shuttles. The military is calling the shots, and private ships have their own priorities… not always ones I would agree with, but I have no authority to tell them to ask differently."
"Please," Serina begged, the tears washing twin paths through the dirt covering her face. "I'll do anything to save my son!" And she meant it. Boxey might not be Maboc, but Maboc was dead, and she would not let the boy the Lords of Kobol had so unexpectedly given her die, as long as she could do anything to save him.
"Anything?" Patroclus repeated with emphasis. "Well, perhaps I can do something for you, after all. I'm here with one of the passenger shuttles of the Rising Star, to secure medical supplies, while the other shuttles are looking for provisions. I could justify taking you with me as my dependant – we used to be a well-known item, so people would remember – but that would mean leaving behind supplies that would be desperately needed later."
"Please," Serina begged again. "I'll make it worth your effort. You know I can!"
"It's not me you need to persuade," Patroclus replied. "it's Sire Uri. But since he used to be your patron, we might give it a try. Come with me… and bring the child, too."
~TBC~