She thought that fact made the situation worse, though, not better.
Their accommodations were crude to say the least. They were crowded in the cavern. It was warm enough to keep everyone from freezing to death but not nearly warm enough to encourage them to run around without their hab-suits or to utilize the bathing facilities, which consisted of a frigid pool of melted ice at the far back of the cavern next to the pool that supplied them with drinking water.
Even the women who were involved with another enlisted weren’t keen on skimming out of their clothing to accommodate their men, particularly when there was no privacy and no sexual encounter went unnoticed. That meant that the ‘haves’ weren’t any happier than the ‘have nots’, but the ‘have nots’ far outnumbered the ‘haves’ and they were getting seriously pissed off about being left out.
All of that completely coalesced in her mind when she finally decided she could stand bathing in frigid water better than she could stand smelling her own stench any longer and headed for the bathing pool with the intention of at least doing what she could to minimize her discomfort—in that area. She’d made certain to fully charge her hab-suit before tackling the icy water, knowing she’d need the heat afterwards. No one, except the cyborgs, had really been enthusiastic about the bathing facilities—well, she didn’t suppose they were either, but the non-coms had ordered the men to make use of the bathing facilities they had and the cyborgs had done so without complaint. And she’d spent their bathing time outside charging her suit, partly because she wanted to have the heat to warm up afterwards and partly because she’d never been particularly comfortable about bathing with the men--and she was far less comfortable with the notion given the way the men had begun to stare at her.
There was a group that still lingered near the pool when she started toward it, but she didn’t think she’d have any problem ignoring the handful of men and she figured they were busy enough trying to dry off and get back into their hab-suits to ignore her. In any case, she’d noticed her own squad was there and she felt safe enough to continue rather than retreat.
Unfortunately, she glanced in their direction. She thought it was mostly to assure herself that they still had her back. She wasn’t certain afterwards, though, because as soon as she glanced at the mountains of flesh that constituted Seth, Dane, and Niles, her mind went perfectly blank. In point of fact, absolutely everything shut down, though she didn’t realize until voices finally penetrated her absorption that she’d simply frozen stock still to gape at ‘her’ squad in absolute awe.
Or maybe it was the motion?
Because one of the human men who’d noticed her was waving his dick at her.
As that finally penetrated, Danika emerged with a jolt from her absorption, blinking rapidly to get her mind in gear.
“I got some meat here if you’re looking for action, Pussycat.”
The men with him seemed to find that uproariously funny. They began to wag their dicks at her and utter cat calls.
Danika narrowed her eyes at the man that had instigated the heckling but before she could think of anything to say, a fist landed in the middle of his smirking face, which seemed to explode like an overripe tomato. Shocked, Danika swung her gaze to the owner of the fist and discovered that Seth was standing over the man, who was lying flat of his back now.
Consternation filled her, particularly when she discovered that Dane and Niles had ranged themselves beside Seth. “Shit! Stand down!” she hissed, throwing an anxious glance toward the forward section of the cavern before she rushed toward them.
It was too much to hope the incident had gone unnoticed given the fact that most of the soldiers spent most of their time inside the cavern struggling with boredom and looking for any kind of entertainment. Apparently the heckling had drawn their attention even before Seth had taken it upon himself to defend her. If it had been a fight between two humans, everyone would already have rushed to the scene to get a better look and urge the men to give them a better performance. As it was, they looked undecided as to whether to surge toward the altercation or vacate the cavern.
The non-coms weren’t as easily intimidated. Danika had barely managed to reach her squad when all three of the sergeants arrived. Making no distinction between cyborg and human, they ordered all of the men outside for punishment. Danika didn’t know if it was because they were too angry to make a distinction or if they thought it best for the sake of order and morale not to make a distinction.
Sergeant Whitaker studied her in tightlipped silence for several moments and finally suggested they take a walk outside.
“You want to explain what just happened?”
Danika stared at her uncomfortably. “I’m not entirely sure, Sergeant.”
Whitaker’s expression was frankly disbelieving.
Danika shrugged. “I needed a bath and headed over to the facilities, such as they are. The next thing I knew the guys started making suggestive comments.”
“I’m fairly certain everybody saw and heard all of that,” Sheila retorted tartly. “I was referring to the assault on Private Smith.”
Danika chewed her lip. “I think Seth assessed the situation and decided there was a threat. They’re programmed to protect me.” She tried not to sound defensive about it, but shefeltdefensive—and guilty as if she’d done something that had instigated the altercation even though she knew damned well she hadn’t.
Unless the men had been encouraged to make the suggestive remarks because she was gawking at her squad mates vacuously?
Sheila studied her for a long moment and finally looked away. She expelled a pent up breath. “You think that’s all it was?”
It flickered through Danika’s mind that she’d been given the opportunity to discuss her anxieties about the strange change that seemed to have come over the cyborgs but guilt smote her the moment the thought congealed in her mind. What if itwasall imagination? Would the sergeant see it as a threat and take action? “It seemed that way to me,” she finally hedged.
Sheila’s lips tightened with irritation. She seemed to wrestle with her thoughts a moment. “You haven’t noticed anything … unusual about the cyborgs?”
Aside from the fact that they were superhuman in pretty much every sense of the word? It was odd, and damned inconvenient timing, that she’d been around the cyborgs for nearly a year and never really noticed anything about them beyond the fact that they were scary-big for autonomous machines. Maybe it wasn’t the cyborgs at all, she thought abruptly? Maybe it was only her own perceptions that had changed? Because there was no getting around the fact that ‘machine’ hadn’t entered her mind when she’d caught a glimpse of those gorgeous, muscle-bound bodies!
Granted, in the course of months of training together and the months it had taken for the trip out she’d managed to get used to them enough to stop thinking of them as merely scary-big machines. They had personality—programmed, of course, but still enough personality that it had gotten easier to think of them as fellow soldiers rather than ‘just’ machines. But there hadn’t been any point in time, that she was aware of, when she’d managed to put ‘cyborg’ so far from her mind as to be able to admire them lustfully as if they were flesh and blood men.
At least, not until she’d encountered them fresh from the bath and as naked as … well, they hadn’tbeenborn, she reminded herself with a mental slap. “No,” Danika said flatly before she could even consider how she ought to answer the point blank question.
The response had been impulse and she realized uneasily that that urge had been spawned by the will to protect them, an unconsciousneedto. She didn’t know why when she’d been so anxious before about the changes she thought she’d noticed, but she discovered that, when faced with the possibility of action against them she felt … disloyal to consider outing them.
