No one said anything when Reuel left and it finally occurred to Danika that it might be more than just the fact that they were considering what he'd said. As far as they were concerned, she was a deserter and traitor and she doubted they trusted her enough to speak freely around her.
"I'll leave so that you can discuss this among yourselves."
"Corporal Hart."
Danika stopped and turned, hesitating, but there didn't seem to be any point in not making it clear where she stood and, in fact, it seemed important that she remove all doubt or they'd decide, later, that she'd been deliberately misleading them. "Captain, now, in the army of the cyborg people."
That seemed to take all of them aback. Sgt. Whitaker, who'd stopped her, now seemed reluctant to continue.
"You had something to say?" Danika prompted her. "Something you wanted to ask?"
Sheila frowned. "You know they're ... defective, right? Machines suffering the delusion that they're real?"
Danika blinked at her, honestly shocked. "Actually, I don't know that. In fact, I know that isn't true."
"Because they told you?" one of the other women asked, Corporal Mary Rawlins, Danika thought.
Danika shook her head. "They didn't have to. All you have to do is look in their eyes."
"It isn't possible!" another woman exclaimed.
Danika shrugged. "Look! I don't claim to know all of the answers. I'm no scientist, but I trust what I can see, hear, smell, and feel. They may have started out as machines. No doubt in my mind they weren'tsupposedto be anything else. But there's also no doubt in my mind that they have become living, breathing, thinking--feelingbeings. They changed and they're ... evolving. Seth seemed to think it might be the nanos. He said they were already more than half biological and he thought the nanos finished what hadn't been finished since they were designed to repair to start with."
"Less than half," Sheila disputed. "It's against the law to create a machine in the lab using even fifty percent biological materials."
Danika rolled her eyes. "Even I'm not naive enough to believe the company worried about that! The bottom line is all that concerns them--the profit margin. And if it was cheaper to 'cheat' a little, then there's no doubt they did. It doesn't really matter, though.Somethinghappened. They aren'tjustmachines anymore."
"They were not only programmed to interact with humans and mimic human behavior, they were equipped with AI to learn. Maybe you want to believe they're real. Maybe they think they are, but they're still just machines mimicking humans."
Danika shrugged, angry but determined not to show it. "Believe what you will. It doesn't matter to me. Was that all you wanted to talk about?"
Sheila didn't look like she wanted to give up the debate but after a moment she changed the subject. "What you told me ... about Master Sgt. Felton .... That's the truth?"
"Which part?"
"All of it."
"It was too hard to see once the entrance started to collapse to be absolutely certain and I wasn't looking that way anyway when it happened, but I know what I heard. I know the lieutenant didn't leap under the debris. As for the other--Felton as much as admitted it--not only that it was going on but that it was under his orders. He told me to keep my mouth shut and sent me under escort to make sure I didn't say anything.
"Considering that I strongly suspected he'd just gotten rid of the lieutenant because he considered him a dangerous liability, I didn't think he would hesitate to get rid of anybody else he saw as a problem.
"I ran because I didn't think I had an alternative if I wanted to stay alive. And I didn't know about the base Reuel and his men had captured at that time. I figured I didn't have much chance if I ran, but I had some as opposed to none."
She hesitated. "So if any of you are thinking about going back, you should do your best to forget this conversation. Felton plans on surviving by any means necessary and I doubt he's the only one.
"And don't eat any meat unless you're there when it's killed and butchered and you know what it is."
She turned to leave again.
"Corporal ... Danika."
She saw when she turned that it was Jane Fletcher. She didn't know the woman that well, but they'd both been conscripted on Juno, her home world. She lifted her brows questioningly.
The woman cleared her throat and glanced nervously at the other women. "Do you think we're safer with the cyborgs?"
It was a question she'd asked herself a lot since she'd run, but for her there weren't any options. "There is no 'safe'. It's more a matter of chances of survival, if that's what you're asking. In that sense, yes, I think I'm safer with them. If you mean safe in the sense 'should we fear them?' .... At this point, they haven't evolved much past the machines that were programmed to protect us and not harm us and, honestly, I don't think they're going to change in that way. Reuel seems to have evolved the most and he still seems far more inclined to protect humans even though he believes they are a threat to his own survival.
"If you mean safe from the military--I don't know. I think Reuel's right and they're going to come after the cyborgs with a vengeance. On the other hand, they were built to be fighting machines. I can't think of anybody I'd rather have at my back than my squad." She hesitated and then added, "If anybody has the idea of staying in order to betray them, I wouldn't advise that at all. I don't think it would be safe at all to get on their bad side."
