They hadn't advanced more than a few yards from the base camp perimeter when they heard the blood curdling screams the natives emitted when they attacked. Her and her squad froze in place, listening, struggling with the order to hold their position against the urge to run toward the fight in progress--or away from it. The hair on the back of Danika's neck prickled the moment the screams erupted, her heart picking up its pace.
A half a dozen laser blasts answered the screams and then an eerie stillness settled once more. Danika glanced at her men and then dragged in a shaky breath, wiped the sweat from her palms, and resumed the slow advance. The world around them lightened until Danika could see well enough to discern individual plants from clumps of shadow. The tension began to make itself felt in whining muscles.
Off to their left, they heard another attack--screams followed by laser blasts. That time there was enough visibility to see some of the action, although it was distant enough they could only guess at the number of natives by the number of shots.
When Danika glanced at the men again, she discovered they'd moved closer. She was tempted to ignore it. She knew damned well, though, that they hadn't begun trying to bunch up because they were unnerved by the attacks--at least not in the sense that they were worried about their own hides. "Don't bunch up!" she said, keeping her voice low. "We don't want to leave a gap wide enough for the bastards to slip through and come up behind us."
Dane and Niles glanced at Seth and then obeyed his unspoken command and began to put a little more distance between them. By that time, the line had moved far enough into the jungle that, even with a couple of yards between each member of her own squad, they had twice that between their squad and the nearest member of the squads on either side of them. By Danika's reckoning they'd covered a half to three quarters of a mile, however, and Reuel had only ordered a one mile perimeter sweep.
Feeling the beginnings of relief, Danika was able to focus for the first time on an overall survey of her surroundings. She realized then that they were close to the spot where she'd been attacked the day before.
Chapter Fourteen
It wasn't a comforting discovery, but it transpired to be fortuitous that Danika noticed it at just that moment. If she'd been acting on logic she would very likely have dismissed the probability of another attack in virtually the same place as too astronomical to concern herself with. The attack leapt into her mind, though, and she reacted instinctively. She glanced upward. When she did, she caught movement in the trees a split second before the native screamed his war cry. She brought her weapon up at the same moment and fired even as he opened his mouth. Her shot cut his scream off mid war cry. Catching him in the upper left quadrant of his chest, the shot itself wouldn't necessarily have been fatal, but the impact knocked him off his perch. The scream he uttered on his way down was a different pitch altogether and the soggy splat he made on impact was sickening.
Danika only registered it peripherally, however. When she'd scanned the branches of the trees overhead, she'd glimpsed what could have been dozens of armed warriors. Before she could call out to the squads on either side of them to lend a hand, several things happened almost simultaneous and barely a split second after she'd fired the shot that knocked her target from the tree.
The warriors above them uttered their war whoops and attacked, sending a volley of stone and bone tipped projectiles raining down on the forest floor. Something smacked Danika in the back hard enough it knocked the breath from her and pancaked her against the ground. Seth, Dane, and Niles let out challenging roars that nearly deafened her and drowned out the war cries of the natives. Laser fire erupted from seemingly every direction at once, and leaves, branches and natives began raining down on the forest floor almost before the projectiles they'd launched hit the ground.
"Protect Danika!" Seth roared, several moments after the fact, as it happened.
As stunned as Danika was by the blow, she realized that it was Dane who'd tackled her at right about the same time she heard Seth roar the order.
At least some of the projectiles found their mark. She felt every impact travel through Dane and into her, heard his grunts of pain. She managed to get her head up just high enough to see Seth and Niles, racing so fast across the ground that most of the missiles missed them completely and then both of them shot upwards as if they'd been fired from a cannon.
The looks on the faces of the natives as the two giants shot toward them might have been hilarious at any other time. As it was, all Danika could think about was that they were outnumbered.
Dane planted a hand on the back of her head and shoved her face into the dirt.
"Gods damn it, Dane! Let go and get off!" Danika growled, shoving at him in an effort to dislodge him, wondering if he justfeltlike dead weight crushing her or if hewasdead.
"I am shielding you," Dane said in a pained voice.
"Well cut it out and get off!" Danika snarled. "You're crushing me."
She thought it was the last comment rather than the order that convinced Dane to move. He rolled to his side so that the ground was partially supporting his weight. Danika seized the opportunity, or tried to, to scramble to her feet. Dane caught her around the waist and dragged her back. She managed to at least roll into a position to use her weapon, however.
Unfortunately, she discovered she couldn't get a clear shot by that time. Niles and Seth had landed on the branches and were engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the warriors. It wasn't much of a contest. Having seized the warrior closest when they landed, they were using them as bats, knocking two or three from their perch at a time, wading through the warriors as if they'd been nothing but children.
Unwilling to risk shooting Seth or Niles by accident, she focused on targeting the natives that decided to retreat by way of the vines. She managed to pick off three more, but they were scattering in every direction. Within a matter of minutes the survivors had disappeared into the trees.
Seth and Niles dropped to the ground when they ran out of opponents. Moving from one to another, they coolly and systematically dispatched any of them that were still moving. Leaving the clean up to them, Danika convinced Dane to let go of her and got up to examine him. She thought she was going to puke for several moments when she had. Anger drove the nausea back, however. He was peppered with the damned things like a 'porkey', critters from her world that closely resembled the porcupines of earth. Four with short, thin shafts were buried deep enough in his back and buttocks that nothing more than the shaft was visible. One of the larger shafted missiles was embedded in his right thigh and a second one in his shoulder. He'd made a perfect target for the bastards sprawled unmoving in the grass without any cover whatsoever.
Because he was shielding her!
"Damn it, Dane! What were you thinking?" she muttered, struggling with the urge to burst into tears. "You're bleeding all over the place."
Dane managed to lift his head and stared at her a little drunkenly. "The nanos will close the wounds. You do not have them. I had to protect you. I was closest."
Heartened by that reminder that they had a built-in repair system, Danika examined the wounds more closely, but she couldn't see that the bleeding looked like it would stop. "Can they close the wounds with these things in there?" she asked doubtfully when Seth and Niles finally arrived and crouched beside Dane.
Seth's expression was grim. "No. We must pull them out."
"Oh my god!" Danika responded. "In the field? Wouldn't it be better to get him back to the medics so they could cut them out? Won't it cause more damage to just yank them out?"
Seth lifted his head and looked around, obviously calculating the situation. "We must finish the sweep. We cannot fall back or we will leave a gap they might use to slip through. We are a man down. It will be best to leave him here, complete the sweep, and return for him."
Danika gaped at him. "Like hell!" she growled. "What if some of the bastards already slipped through? He isn't in any condition to defend himself! And wedon'tleave a man down!"
