“Are you hit?” Seth demanded, examining her with his hands.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. We have to get out of here, though. They’ll come after us.” Struggling to catch her breath, she got to her feet and looked at her squad. “Any of you hit?”
“It is nothing ….”
Seth cut Niles off. “We have to keep moving. It will not take them long to scale the cliff by way of the pass we cut.”
“And nothing to hide behind. No place to go. Shit!” Danika said in consternation. “You guys should have stayed out of it. They’ll be after you now, too.”
“We are a team,” Dane said tightly.
“This way. Talk later,” Seth said sharply, catching her arm and leading her away from the cliff edge.
He was right and Danika didn’t think it was the best time to point out that she was team leader. In any case, she didn’t think the direction mattered. They were fucked anyway they cut it. She had her weapon—thankfully Felton hadn't thought to order Clancy to disarm her!—and Seth, Dane, and Niles had theirs, but they had very little ammo and no supplies.
When they finally stopped to rest, Seth sent Dane back to see if they were being followed and to cover their back trail. Danika was too tired to protest even if she could’ve thought of a reason to counter the order.
When she’d managed to regulate her breathing somewhat, it occurred to her that Seth hadn’t asked her what had happened. She discovered when she sent him a speculative glance that he was studying her. “You know what happened.”
Seth’s lips tightened, but he said nothing.
“You didn’t just happen to arrive back at camp in time to rescue me,” she prodded.
Seth seemed to wrestle with himself for a moment. “No. We came back in time to discover the humans had found a new use for us,” he ground out bitterly.
Danika just managed to lift her face shield before she threw up.
* * * *
Danika tried her best to dismiss the sense that she was a prisoner rather than a comrade in arms, but it was as hard to push Seth’s comment from her mind as it was to reconcile what she’d seen on the base with the men she’d formed the blood bond of battle with.
Beforethey’d been dropped on Xeno-12, she hadn’t thought about them as anything beyond weapons at her disposal—more tools of the soldier trade. Sure they looked human, but she’d never been able to set aside the fact that they weren’t when every interaction emphasized the fact that they were walking, talking weapons of destruction. Almost from the instant they’d first encountered resistance from the enemy, though, they’d become a team and the firefight had formed the soldier blood bond between them—at least in her viewpoint—that only men and women forced to depend on one another for survival really understood or felt. She depended on them to help her stay alive. She’d done her best to uphold her end of that contract.
And then Seth had saidhumans—like a racial slur.
Did he think of her as an enemy as he seemed to considerallhumans? Or as a team mate?
She could see his point in a way. She didn’t think they could possibly be unaware of the fact that they’d been excluded when the chips were down and they were running out of food. It wasn’t as if they were stupid. If anything, they were far more intelligent than humans since they had computers for brains.
But could theythinklike humans? Were they capable of getting down and dirty nasty like humans were?
She didn’t think they were capable of that or Reuel wouldn’t have been taken off-guard when he was accused of treachery.
Actually,shehad been taken off-guard!
She dismissed the thoughts after a while. She simply didn’t have the energy to spare. It took every ounce of focus just to keep going. Seth hauled her up when she finally fell flat and couldn’t summon the energy to get up again.
She didn’t think it mattered—really. They had nowhere to go.
“Just leave me. You’ll make better time without me,” she said tiredly.
Ignoring her command, he swung her up into his arms. “It is not much further.”
Danika knew she should have objected, but she just couldn’t summon the will.Whatwasn’t much further, she wondered?
Heaven, she discovered when she finally came to.
Chapter Seven
