“Your child?” Dalia echoed, feeling dread seep into her.
His lips twisted. “Mine. If you had cared anything about it at all, you would not have joined the battle, without even a means of protecting yourself.”
“I saved your life!” Dalia exclaimed, too stunned that he was attacking her even to feel any indignation.
Something flickered in his eyes, but his anger didn’t abate. “Yourisked my life! You distracted me in the heat of battle. If you had done as I asked, if you’d done as you had given me your word you would, you wouldn’t have been there to start with.
“Have you no conception of how fragile the life is that you carry? Or does it simply not matter to you?”
Dalia stared at him, feeling horror wash over her in a cold tide as a dozen images flickered through her mind of past battles she’d engaged in, the blows she’d taken, the wounds. Almost any one of those could have meant the death of her baby.
As badly as she wanted to dispute his hurtful remarks, she couldn’t. He was right. She hadn’t thought about the baby. She had acted, just as she had always acted, as if she was no more than a mindless machine behaving as programmed, without any ability to make her own judgments, her own decisions.
And not once had she thought about the tiny life inside of her. What kind of mother would she be if she thoughtlessly endangered the life of her child?
She should have done what he’d said she must do, or at least stayed as far away from the fighting, and danger, as she possibly could. She hadn’t given him her word. She’d been too worried about him even then to consider what he was saying, but it hardly mattered. The baby was completely and utterly dependent upon her now merely to sustain life. If she’d sustained a mortal blow, it, too, would have died.
He was right about the other, as well, she realized. Shehaddistracted him. He’d asked her to promise she would protect the child and then she’d joined the battle, distracted him, and almost gotten him killed.
Guilt fell over her shoulders, crushing the air from her lungs. She found she couldn’t sustain the look in his eyes any longer and dropped her gaze to her hands. He grasped her chin, forcing her to look at him. “Is that your answer? Nothing?”
What was she supposed to say? It did matter, but how could she argue that it did after what she’d done? Or should she just agree that her actions were sufficient in themselves to prove that, whatever else she felt about it, she was too used to thinking only of herself, and for herself, to consider the possible consequences? “I can’t see that there’s anything to say,” she managed finally.
If anything, it seemed her response only made him angrier. Grasping her arm, he walked her across the compound to the group of cyborgs that was rounding up the hunters. “Put her with the rest of them. When you have secured them in the hold, look for survivors. The craft went down slow enough some of them might have bailed.”
The cyborg he’d spoken to took her arm, glancing from her to Reuel with a puzzled frown. “You are going after the other craft?”
Reuel nodded grimly. “We cannot afford to let them get back to the company. If we are not back by the time you have finished here, leave. We will see you when we get back to Mordal.”
Although Dalia nerved herself to look at him, hoping that his anger had abated, he didn’t so much as glance at her before he left. She supposed she should’ve been relieved that he hadn’t looked at her again considering the look in his eyes before. Instead, it only made the guilt weigh more heavily upon her.
After a few moments, the cyborg led her toward an enormous cargo ship that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Surprise briefly filtered through her misery, but it dimmed almost as quickly. Obviously the whole compound had been nothing more than a stage above the real compound. She’d been carefully placed far enough from where they were making their preparations to keep her from seeing what they were doing, to keep her from knowing that the handful of cyborgs she’d seen were only a fraction of the number actually here.
It seemed indisputable that Reuel had not only known she had another locator, but he’d believed she was a part of the company’s plan to discover the rebel compound. Otherwise there would have been no reason to make sure she didn’t know what the plan was.
She frowned at that, wondering when the company had decided she would be more useful in leading them to the rebels than dead. She didn’t believe that the attempt on her life had been faked, but it was possible it had. The company was devious if nothing else and Reuel said they had discovered his plant weeks before they discovered that she’d conceived.
It made sense now that she considered all the pieces. Whether they managed to get any information out of the cyborg they’d caught or not, they had to know something was up and that it involved her. Once they had discovered that she had been successfully impregnated, they’d have to know that that made her invaluable to the cyborgs. All they had to do was make her run for her life, make sure it was on all the open channels that they were hunting her down to kill her and wait for the cyborgs to pick her up and take her back to the colony.
Somewhere in the rounds, they’d taken the extra precaution, she supposed, of implanting another locator, one she had no knowledge of. Or, maybe, considering the way the company operated, it had been there all along?
They had underestimated Reuel. He’d been two steps ahead of them all the way, waltzing his pieces across the chessboard as if he were clairvoyant and knew everything they would do before they did it.
The company’s determination to wipe the cyborgs out had given the cyborgs the opportunity to ‘free’ the hunters from the company’s control and nix any further attacks, for the foreseeable future anyway.
Of course, she supposed complete victory hinged on Reuel managing to catch the last ship before they managed to get away.
The cyborg led her up the gangplank and down a long corridor. Once inside, she saw it was a lab. She was stripped and ordered to lie down on a table. She did as she was told, without questioning it. Ignoring the tech, who moved around her extracting blood and checking the fetus’ vital signs, she studied the ceiling lights and finally turned to look around the room. She saw then that there was a row of similar tables all the way to the far wall, separated only by a narrow strip of sheeting hung from hooks on the ceiling. A hunter was strapped to each, some being treated for wounds, others merely being examined.
Finally, she was rolled onto her stomach and the tech extracted the ‘hidden’ locator that had been attached to her spine.
When they’d finished, a flimsy gown was handed to her that tied around the neck and overlapped in the back to tie around her waist. Then she was escorted from the lab, along the corridor and down a flight of stairs. The compartment she found herself in was lined with cots. Hers was in one corner. She made her way to it and sat down, staring at nothing in particular, feeling curiously numb.
They hadn’t even told her if the baby was all right. She was tempted to access her inboard computer to assess it, but it occurred to her that it really didn’t have enough data to tell her anything more than whether or not the baby was still alive and growing.
She decided she didn’t want to know.
“Dalia?”
