There was no response to his call for aid and Seth glanced around with a mixture of fear and anger. He discovered that they were surrounded by wounded—and damaged cyborgs struggling to function despite the damage they’d sustained.
“We will be outflanked and surrounded, by my calculations, within twenty minutes –earth time.”
His voice sounded strange—strained, and that was almost as odd as his unnecessary reference to earth time since they were all programmed to earth time measurement, but although Seth noticed, he was too intent on pulling up data to attend Danika’s wound to analyze it. “I need to close this wound and patch Danika’s suit.” Widening the hole in her suit, he reset his weapon, pinched the wound closed and used the laser to cauterize the flesh, gritting his teeth when she screamed in pain and the sound seemed to cut through him like a knife. He dragged a patch from his supplies when he’d closed the wound, slapped it over the damaged suit, and held it until the nanos in the material bonded, ignoring Danika’s groans and her attempts to shove his hand away.
The chatter flowing through the com units that Seth listened to as he attended Danika was not good. Interspersed with dozens of calls for medics and groans and screams from human throats, there were more disastrous observations.
“We’re cut off!”
“Boxed in!”
“Oh my god! I’m shot all to shit! I need a medic-borg!”
“They’re going to outflank us!”
“It’ll be like shooting fish in a fucking barrel!”
Abruptly a voice—cool and forceful—cut through the confusion. “Cyborgs! Leap to the summit of the ridge! Carry the humans!”
The sudden, forceful command silenced all other chatter. It did not come from the command center—the channel was local. It also did not come from a human, but everyone knew they were running out of time to act and no one questioned the command.
The cyborgs not too damaged to act on the command lifted their human squad leaders and leapt toward the ridge above them.
“Who issued that command?”
That demand came from their commanding officer aboard the mother ship.
There was a significant pause. “Reuel CO469.”
* * * *
Despite the intensive conditioning she’d been subjected to when she’d been shipped to combat training, Cpl. Danika Hart was unable to convince herself that she was just experiencing more of the same as the ground to air missile ripped a hole in the drop ship she was in just as it entered the target planet’s atmosphere. She tried to. She thought she just might be able to conduct herself in a manner befitting a soldier of the confederation and not shame her native world if she could. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to if she couldn’t because she was as terrified as she’d ever been in her life.
She hadn’t expected to be thrown immediately into combat, though. She’d expected to have more time to adjust to being shot at.
Everyone knew the conditions on Xeno-12 were horrific. It was a frozen world, just too far from its sun to ever thaw out completely—livable, as long as one was fully prepared for the cold—with a breathable atmosphere, but uninhabited, so she hadn’t been unduly worried. They would have everything they needed to deal with the deep freeze and her own native world was at the outer habitable zone of its sun. She was used to dealing with dangerously cold temperatures.
They were to land, set up a forward base as a buffer against the enemy encroachment and protect the true prize, Xeno-12’s sister world.
She’d thought the war might well come to Xeno-12’s doorstep eventually, but she’d also thought there was a better than even chance that the war would be fought and won far, far from her station.
She was pretty sure she wasn’t the only who’d thought that.
The bombardment had deprived her of that illusion. The bucking ship had shaken her, but she’d convinced herself that it was just rough air—nothing to worry about! The troop carriers weren’t designed for comfort but rather durability and efficiency—right up until the hole appeared in the side of the ship and shrapnel peppered the troops inside. She might have nursed her illusions a little longer, despite the disaster and the horror of watching three troopers sucked out, except that she could see flashes through the hole that lit up the sky and knew the entire battalion was under attack. She saw at least two of the drop ships take direct hits and disintegrate into fiery trails of debris. It was enough to make her imagination leap to the possibility that they’d reach the ground and discover themselves alone—if they reached it at all.
They’d already taken losses in the hundreds, maybe thousands, and they hadn’t even reached the planet’s surface yet! It was almost beyond comprehension—far easier to think in terms of numbers than soldiers.
Were the other battalions being dropped around the planet taking similar fire, she wondered fearfully? Or weretheythe unlucky ones being dropped right in the lap of a nest of enemy troops?
And which was worse? Being the target? Or discovering the armada had been destroyed and they had ended up marooned on the hellish planet?
“Danika! Are you alright? Were you hit?”
The sound of her name penetrated Danika’s shock. She blinked as if coming awake and searched for the origin, the person who’d spoken, and stared at Seth blankly—Seth CO1543. He was a cyborg, she thought, struggling to figure out what it was about him that didn’t seem right. Why was he asking her if she was alright? Why would itoccurto him to ask? And shouldn’t he have asked for a damage report even if his programming had prompted him to ask?
He looked human—all of the latest cyborgs did—and small wonder when they were constructed of almost fifty percent biological materials. They looked so human that it would’ve been hard getting used to the idea that they weren’t except they still didn’t behave like humans. They didn’t speak like humans. Not only did they have no accents like most humans did that pegged them to various regions, but they used none of the abbreviated speech patterns common to humans, none of the slang or colloquialisms, and they didn’t make idle chatter. In fact nothing that came out of their mouths bore more than a passing resemblance to conversation. They responded when spoken to—when a response was needed. They issued warnings when they detected anything they needed to warn humans of, and otherwise they said nothing at all.
The early autonomous robots, particularly the ones used in warfare, just looked like machines—some roughly humanoid in that they had a head and torso, two arms, two legs, etc. and others more like tanks with heads—but the ‘bare bones’ unclad chassis had design defects. Two much of their critical mechanics was vulnerable. The enemy could simply aim for exposed pneumatic tubes or motors and incapacitate them. Thin armor sheathing came next. Not only did that create a serious weight issue, though, it gave the human troops the creeps. They wouldn’t have had a problem if the units weren’t autonomous, but being surrounded by steel monsters that seemed capable of anything—including acting on their own—was too distracting and demoralizing for the human troops. It had the same effect on the enemy, of course, but since the human ground troops were there to make sure the robots didn’t destroy property that didn’t need to be destroyed or gun down innocent civilians—or go berserk and destroy everything and everyone in sight—the government decided they needed an army that looked more human and could be more easily accepted by their human counterparts.
