He was lying, Danika realized, feeling an abrupt shift of her consciousness from Seth to the bedraggled encampment surrounding the two of them. He’d said that there were thirty six humans that had survived the drop and made it to the encampment. That was roughly a quarter of the squad leaders—all human like herself—who’d made it out of the nearly 1200 man unit that had been dropped at these coordinates. Probably three quarters of the cyborgs that were part of their unit had made it.
How many of those, she wondered, had experienced the same sort of bizarre malfunction that she saw in Seth? All of them? Half?
Because, instead of convincing herself that it was all in her mind, she’d become more and more certain that itwasn’tin her mind at all. Seth had … changed. He was different—more human than cyborg. She felt it in every fiber of her being.
Because touching him didn’t feelanythinglike touching a machine and it should have. She should have felt as completely detached about grasping his wrist as she would have in grasping the handle of a door.
She would’ve liked to have convinced herself that Seth was the only one—because she hadn’t noticed anything strange about either Dane or Niles—but she abruptly recalled that it had been a cyborg who’d taken charge and issued orders—to the cyborgs—when they’d been boxed in at the ridge.
How much danger did these … rogues represent?
It was a chilling thought and one that had plagued Danika since she’d discovered that seventy five to eighty percent of the army the government had put together was cyborg. Humans were only there as ‘handlers’—truthfully only there to prevent the mass hysteria that probably would’ve resulted in the discovery by the civilian population that the government had put together a massive army of autonomous steel monsters—which was probablyalsothe reason the government had insisted that they look human.
She cleared her throat nervously. “Run a systems check and see if you can detect any … uh … programming or mechanical anomalies.”
“What irregularities should I search for?”
Danika forced a tight smile. “Anything. We’ve lost enough men already. We need to be sure everyone is in peak operating condition for the next attack.”
They found Lieutenant Brown in one of the habitats. When Seth had left, she asked for permission to enter. After a fairly prolonged wait, when she was just about to ask again, permission was granted and she went inside. Brown looked pale, shaken, and distracted, but Danika couldn’t detect any patches on his hab-suit to indicate that he’d been wounded. She was no medic, but he looked like he had a bad case of shellshock. She saluted. “Sir! I’ve been informed by one of my squad members that there aren’t enough habs to house all of the men. I wanted to put in a request for a hab for my own squad and ask when we might expect more supplies. We used most of our munitions last night in the firefight and we only have enough rations in our packs for a few days.”
He stared at her blankly for several moments and then made a sound that might have been a giggle. When she gaped at him he seemed to pull himself together. He gestured wide with his hands. “What you see here, corporal, is what we have.”
Danika’s mind immediately conjured an image of the piles of charred debris outside the hab. An icy fist seemed to close around her heart. “Sir, we haven’t recovered much—so far.”
“Well you’d better look harder!” he said angrily. “Becausethisis our supply drop. Command informed me that they’d disbursed supplies on hand. We’ll have to make do until another supply ship arrives unless we can get another unit to share and the closest is five hundred miles to the south of us. And we’ve been ordered to maintain radio silence. And we don’t have a working transport.”
Under the circumstances, Danika abruptly dismissed the idea she’d had of informing her superior of her suspicions regarding the cyborgs. That had never been a good idea, she reflected, since she was a female and her vague intuition would’ve been discounted as hysteria or, at the very least, overactive imagination. Considering their situation and the condition of their highest ranking officer it seemed like the worst idea she’d ever had.
In any case, the biggest problem at the moment was the scarcity of supplies. If Brown knew what he was talking about, and he seemed to, they could be looking at a long, long stretch before a supply ship arrived. Food didn’t loom as her biggest worry. Shelter was a high priority. The suits could extract energy from the sun, but this world wasn’t a place where one could count on a lot of solar radiation. One of the problems was its distance from its sun and the other was the storms.
More importantly even than that, to her mind, was the dangerously low munitions.
That thought instantly conjured an image of the men lying at the base of the ridge. Revulsion washed over her in a wave, but they were going to be casualties of war themselves if they didn’t have anything to throw at the enemy when they attacked again.
And, newbie or not, she knew they’d be expected to act, not to simply sit tight and hope the enemy didn’t come to them. They’d been dropped to secure the planet as a forward base of operations. They were going to have to figure out a way to do that with what they had—or die trying.
“Sir! Permission to take a detail to the ridge and collect whatever supplies we can find and bury the dead?”
He stared at her as if she’d grown two heads. “And leave the base vulnerable to another attack? We don’t have the manpower, soldier!”
“Begging pardon, Sir! But we’re going to be screwed if we don’t find supplies somewhere!”
“What makes you think they haven’t already been picked clean?”
“I don’t know that they haven’t. But we also don’t know that they have. We have to account for the dead and missing anyway, if possible. You could spare my squad, at least. There are only four of us. And it’s likely that those who got lost in the storm last night will make it into camp. Or at least possible,” she added when he looked skeptical.
She thought he would dismiss her suggestion out of hand but after a moment, he seemed to steady himself. “That suggestion has some merit,” he murmured, turning it over. “Permission granted. Take your men and hump it over to Slaughter Ridge, collect whatever munitions and supplies you can, and get back here by dark.”
Danika frowned. That seemed a tall order even for three cyborgs. She didn’t see any possibility of giving the dead a decent burial and collecting supplies and hauling them all back in the space of a day. “The burials?”
“We can’t spare the men for a burial detail right now. They’re on ice. They’ll keep. And if the snow doesn’t bury them, we will when we can. Just scan their IDs.”
It sounded callous, but she knew he was right—on all counts. It actually heartened her that he seemed more collected. If they were going to survive at all they needed a leader that had his head on straight—and he wasn’t just the highest ranking officer, he was theonlyofficer at the moment.
When she left his hab, she saw that her squad was waiting nearby. She met Seth’s gaze briefly and then studied the faces of the other two as she approached them. Relieved when she saw that neither Dane nor Niles seemed to be affected by whatever had brought about the change in Seth, she felt some of her uneasiness evaporate. “We’re to return to the ridge to see what we can collect in the way of supplies and munitions. We’re going to have to hump it, though. The lieutenant said to be back by dark.”
Seth’s gaze flickered over her. “Your wound will slow you. It would be better if we went and you stayed in the camp.”
