Thankfully, he merely nodded and followed her when she shrugged her weapon from her shoulder and started out of camp. The throbbing from her wound began to intensify almost immediately and she paused after a little bit and checked her med-kit, counting the painkillers. She had three doses. She decided to take half a dose to dull the pain. If she took a full dosage, she wasn’t going to be very alert. Besides, she might need the painkiller worse later on. “I don’t suppose you guys were issued painkillers?” she asked, only half joking because she was hopeful they might have something.
“No,” Seth responded.
“Want one of mine?”
Seth sent her a sharp look. “Thank you. I do not need it.”
She didn’t believe him. He looked like he was in pain, but she didn’t push it. Shrugging, she put the kit up. “More for me.”
“Yes.”
Thank you for pointing that out, she thought irritably. She didn’t think it was a good thing that the cyborgs knew the humans among them were far weaker than they were.
They’d only been trudging through knee deep snow for an hour when they found their first corpse. Danika discovered it by stubbing her toe on it and falling over it. The fall set her wound to throbbing hard enough it might have taken her a while to get up if Seth hadn’t hauled her upright.
She thought she’d tripped on a rock, but she’d managed to clear enough loose snow away when she’d sprawled out to identify the object that she’d fallen over.
“He is dead.”
Danika flicked a sharp glance at Seth, met his gaze for a moment, and looked away. Until he’d said that, she’d convinced herself that it was a cyborg. In that state, he certainly didn’t look human. She swallowed a little sickly and knelt beside the corpse.
“I will do it,” Niles said.
When Danika glanced toward him, he lifted his head, looked her directly in the eyes, and she saw there the same change that she’d seen in Seth. Caught between horror at the task she’d volunteered for and shock that whatever it was affecting Seth seemed to be spreading, she couldn’t think of a response for several moments. “It has to be done. I might as well get used to it,” she finally responded.
“You do not have to grow accustomed now. I will … search this one for supplies.”
She decided not to argue with him. For one, she didn’t think she could manage the ‘job’ without puking. For another, arguing with a machine that could rip her apart as easily as tearing paper if he took the notion seemed like a really stupid idea.
Seth gripped her arm and hauled her to her feet again as if the matter was settled and she sent him an uneasy look.
Seth hesitated, but he didn’t like the look in her eyes. “No one here will harm you. We are programmed to protect our team leader, Danika.”
It was almost an admission that he’d changed—drastically—and it didn’t comfort her as it had no doubt been meant to. How much of their programming, she wondered, had been corrupted by whatever had brought about the change she’d noticed?
Chapter Three
Danika had expected to find virtually the same thing when they finally reached Slaughter Ridge as they’d already found—multiplied many times. What they did find rattled her as that wouldn’t have.
In the course of their trek, they’d discovered many of the missing and unaccounted for, both human soldiers and cyborgs buried where they fell by the blizzard, frozen, beyond help. Snow was mounded over the bodies, marking their locations on the otherwise almost featureless landscape so that it looked like what it was—a newly formed cemetery. They paused at each one to collect the supplies that soldier would no longer need, identify the remains and add the names to the growing list of known dead or, in the case of the cyborgs, destroyed property of the confederation.
They approached the ridge cautiously, despite the fact that they expected to find nothing they hadn’t already seen, the enemy long since departed, and those abandoned to their mercies and the fury of the storm beyond help. Instead, when they’d crawled up to the ridge on their bellies and looked down, they spied soldiers moving about the plain below collecting and sorting. Danika’s throat instantly leapt into her throat, but Seth stayed her hand as she tried to move her weapon into position.
“They are ours.”
Danika narrowed her eyes. “You’re certain?” she asked, stunned.
“Yes.”
Relief was slow to kick in. “How?” she wondered aloud. The enemy had been advancing on them when they’d retreated to the ridge. It didn’t seem likely that they’d simply turned around and left when they saw that the troops they’d expected to box in and finish off had slipped the noose they’d fashioned for them.
“I will go down and discover what I can.”
Instantly certain that there was something about the scene below that she’d missed, Danika frowned at Seth. “If it’s our people …?”
“They are wearing the uniform of the confederation. It does not seem strange to you that there are so many survivors?”
As a matter of fact it did—damned strange.
