The Lawgivers: Gabriel Read online

  Fully expecting to be crushed, Danika was too stunned to move for several moments after Seth stopped rolling, waiting in vain for the pain of crushed and mangled body to reach the nerve centers in her brain, regardless of the fact that she was sprawled on top of Seth when he finally stopped rolling.

  Realizing after a few moments that she wasn’t dead or dying, she lifted her head and stared at his face. He was staring up at the sky above them and she felt a jolt run through her. “Seth?”

  He blinked and shifted his gaze to her face. For a long moment, their gazes seemed locked and in that moment Danika saw, or thought she saw, something she should not have seen in the eyes of a cyborg—pain and relief.

  “Damage report,” she said finally, pushing herself off of him with an effort and looking around for her other team mates. Niles, she saw, was crouched beside them, firing toward the enemy line. Dane was nowhere in sight and she recalled abruptly that his mobility had been impaired when the drop ship had been damaged. Scrambling toward the edge of precipice, she looked down. She had a split second to register the disaster below and discover that Dane was dangling by one arm from the side of the ice cliff and then a hand curled around one of her ankles and she felt herself dragged backwards.

  Twisting her head, she saw it was Seth who had hold of her ankle.

  He was glaring at her. “You will get your head shot off!”

  Stunned at the display of anger, Danika blinked several times, gaping at him. She was far more preoccupied with the scene her mind had captured, however. It looked like fully half of their force was trapped below—maimed, wounded, or already dead, and the enemy was advancing and systematically executing anybody who hadn’t managed to escape the trap. She barely noticed when he released his hold and crawled to the edge of the precipice to look down as she had.

  “Can you climb?”

  “The mobility of my left arm is compromised. I will try.”

  “Niles and I will try to cover you,” Seth responded, turning to summon Niles with a hand motion.

  Indignation flickered through Danika, piercing her shock. She was the squad leader, damn it! She was supposed to be leading the team! She was obliged to admit after a very little thought, though, that she couldn’t think of anything better to try. It wasn’t as if they could haul Dane’s heavy ass up the cliff!

  Well, she supposed Seth and Niles could … if they had a rope of some kind, which she knew damned well she didn’t have in her pack. He was going to have to make it on his own—or not. Gritting her teeth against the pain from her wound, she crawled to the edge again on her belly. Seth stopped firing long enough to plant a hand on the top of her helmet and shove her back. “Stay!” he growled.

  Danika sloughed the snow off her face shield and glared at him with a mixture of disbelief and anger. Before she could think of how to respond to his order, however, she saw a hand appear above the rim. Seth put his weapon down and grasped the hand, hauling Dane over the edge.

  No one, Danika realized, had given her a damage report!

  Granted, they’d been busy, but they were cyborgs! It wasn’t as if they weren’t capable of handling multiple tasks!

  “Disengage the enemy and fall back to secure weapons and supply drop, coordinates 3 degrees 47 minutes North West; 14 degrees South ….”

  Danika listened while the orders were repeated through the GO—general orders—channel. “How far is that, Seth?”

  “Thirty clicks.”

  “Shit! Damage report.”

  Before any of her teammates could respond, they heard an exchange between a junior officer on the ground and the command center. “Acknowledge receipt. The Lieutenant Colonel and staff all dead or missing. We’ve sustained heavy casualties. We need an immediate evac. That’s a no go on reaching the supply drop at coordinates ….”

  “Who the hell are you, you idiot?” someone roared, cutting the speaker off before he could finish. “Use the CO channel!”

  “Somebody just got busted,” Danika muttered. Clearly she wasn’t the only one that had just had her first taste of the real thing and was having problems remembering training—Not that she was rattled enough to forget that that sort of information shouldn’t be passed through anything but the CO—command operations—channel! They were going to be damned lucky if the enemy hadn’t picked up that damaging intel! “Not that it looks like he’s going to have to worry about it. I doubt there’s going to be an evac and I’m guessing you guys saw what I did at the base of the cliff. The enemy is advancing and it doesn’t look like they plan to take prisoners. You guys think you can make it to the drop?” She asked when she’d done a visual and discovered that the cyborgs had taken far more damage than she had.

  She didn’t think they had time to wait for them to make any sort of repairs. She didn’t think it was pure luck that the enemy had pounded the hell out of them and driven them back against a wall. Their objective might have been to outflank them and close the fist, but she thought there was a good chance that they’d known about the ridge to start with and the confederation forces had reacted just as the enemy had hoped. That might also mean that the enemy knew of a route up the escarpment or had forces closing on them now from the rear.

  From the chatter on the local communications channel, she thought most everyone that had survived—so far—was beginning to get the picture.

  “We can’t just leave our people down there!”

  “We can’t do anything else. If we don’t get to that supply drop before the enemy we’re going to be in the same shape they are!”

  “Where’s air support?”

  “Where are the med-evacs?”

  “You’re saying you think they’re tied up in another battle?”

  “What the hell kind of intel is that? There wasn’t supposed to be any resistance here!”

  They complained and speculated for the first half hour while the remnants of the companies that made up their battalion struggled through almost knee deep snow, but they discovered they’d walked right into a blinding snow storm and nobody had the energy to waste on talking anymore after the storm hit them.

  They were about half way between the ridge Danika was beginning to think of as slaughter ridge and the drop site when a series of massive explosions prompted them to hit the ground. It only took them a few moments to realize that the bombardment wasn’t close enough to be an immediate threat.

  Long term was another matter.

  “Oh my god! We are so fucked! That was the supplies that just went up in smoke!”

  “Would you just shut the fuck up!”

  “I don’t know which one of you stupid fucks gave the coordinates away, but you’re going to be a dead mother fucker if I get my hands on you!”

  “Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?” Danika yelled angrily. “He didn’t get the chance to give away the exact coordinates. My guess is that either none of the channels are as secure as we thought or they didn’t need the coordinates. It sure as hell didn’t take them long to get there.”

  “Hey! We don’t know that it was our supplies! Could be another group taking a pounding.”

  Danika glanced at her team questioningly, feeling a ray of hope. It died when Seth shook his head. “That is the coordinates we were given.”

  “I guess we’d better hump it, then,” she said tiredly, “and see what we can salvage. I have a bad feeling we’re going to need anything we can find.”

  There wasn’t much to salvage. It looked as if the bombardment had been a long range effort, however, and when they’d rested briefly and began to sort through the debris that had cooled enough to allow for a search, they began to find a few useable supplies. Danika supposed they should just be grateful that the enemy didn’t seem to have the technical capabilities of the confederation or they would’ve been completely screwed.

  Or maybe it was more a matter of being spread too thin and not having the munitions they needed to totally annihilate the confederation troops?

  By h
er, admittedly, rough calculations, the armada that had brought them had been carrying a force of nearly a half a million—counting cyborgs—which she’d considered actually counted as more than a single soldier since they were many times stronger than their human counterparts. That was the main reason she hadn’t been unduly nervous about the mission. As far as anyone knew—or at least had been told—there weren’t any enemy bases on Xeno-12.

  Clearly, the confederation thought they’d been clever in not declaring war until they’d nearly reached the planet they planned to take and hold since it offered the most strategic advantage in protecting the confederation’s interests in this system.

  Either they hadn’t been clever enough, though, or the enemy was smarter than they’d given them credit for.

  Or the grunts like her just hadn’t been important enough to get the memo. The only warning they’d had was to expect the possibility of pockets of resistance. They sure as hell hadn’t expected such a ferocious, focused attack that they wouldn’t even be able to organize a counter strike once they got on the ground.

  They hadn’t been able to pull themselves together at all! It had been a total rout!

  She had a bad feeling, though, that the lack of action by the fleet meant that the disaster her battalion had experienced on landing wasn’t isolated. The only explanation that she could think of for the lack of air support, med-evac, or complete evacuation was that the entire force was under attack and unable to lend support.

  So maybe it hadn’t been a brilliant military tactic to spread their own forces so thin? Granted it was a big planet and she could see why they wanted to be sure they had enough forces on the ground globally to repel any attempts by the enemy to sneak in the backdoor, but they shouldn’t have just assumed they’d beat the enemy to the planet to start with.

  Arrogance, she thought angrily as she scratched through a pile of debris! The arrogant bastards had been so damned sure they were infinitely superior to the enemy that they were going to be lucky if they didn’t lose the war in this one theater.

  “We have managed to locate six habitats that are relatively intact.”

  Danika jumped when the voice abruptly broke into her thoughts, whipping her head around to look for Seth since she recognized his voice. It sent a jolt through her to discover that he was standing within a yard of her.

  They’d decided that it wasn’t safe to risk any communications via the com units unless they were absolutely necessary. They didn’t know that the enemy had managed to break security and had listened to everything they’d said, but if they hadn’t they were damned good at guessing.

  It was still a mystery, supposing they had, as to how the enemy had managed to break the codes so quickly, but Danika was putting her money on a traitor or traitors among them. Nothing else made sense, to her thinking—including the fact that the enemy seemed to be waiting for them when they made the landing.

  In any case, the enemy had been pretty damned thorough in demolishing their supplies and, since the sun had risen and with it the temperatures to a balmy zero degrees, they’d decided to conserve what they could of their hab-suits’ built-in supplies—most notably the heater fuel cells.

  “Only six?” Danika echoed, dismayed when she’d done a quick mental calculation of their numbers. “That’s only enough room for ….”

  “The humans.”

  Danika gaped at him. “But … there’s only maybe fifty humans left! At thirty to a barracks ….”

  “Thirty six … at the moment. Seventy five made it to the ridge. Mayhap a quarter were lost in the blizzard on the way or died from their wounds. Probably no more than a dozen by night fall. However, the habitats are not barracks. They are for squads … and they are damaged. I did not count the ones we found that could not be patched.”

  Stunned disbelief held Danika for several moments before rage took its place. “In other words, we wouldn’t have had housing for all of the troops even if those bastards hadn’t beat us here and blown our supplies all to hell?”

  “There will be room for the remaining humans.”

  Danika’s lips tightened. “That isn’t good enough, damn it!” The bulk of their force might be cyborgs, but the cyborgs were part biological and the cold would inhibit their ability to fight—and they damned sure needed everybody, cyborg and human, that they had left. “Who’s in command?”

  “Second Lieutenant Murphy Brown.”

  “Oh my god!” It struck her that, in all likelihood, it had been Second Lieutenant Murphy Brown who’d screwed up so royalty in his communications the night before if he was the only officer they had left—and as green as she was, no doubt! “Where is he?”

  “I will escort you.”

  She didn’t need an escort! Instead of arguing, however, she fell into step beside him. “Have your … uh … nanaos repaired the damages?”

  Seth sent her a sharp glance, briefly both surprised and alarmed until he realized she was not referring to his malfunctioning behavioral programming but rather the status of his combat readiness. “The damage to my systems was minimal … primarily superficial damage to my biological sheathing. I am currently at 90%.”

  She frowned. “You don’t … feel any pain when you’re wounded?”

  Seth’s uneasiness returned. The truth was that he was one hundred percent certain that he should not have felt any pain, but he not only had felt it—a great deal of it—he still felt pain and it was difficult to behave as if he did not. He should not, in point of fact, have felt anything at all. He had been programmed to mimic emotions. He knew the mechanics of displaying emotion and what each gesture and facial expression denoted so that he could recognize emotions in humans and react to them. He had not been designed or programmed to feel them, because not only was that not possible. It was not desirable. No matter how many systems checks he had run, however, he had discovered nothing to account for the emotions that seemed to be clogging his objectivity.

  The only thing that he had been able to ascertain with certainty was that he was feeling and reacting on a purely animal level to his environment and everything that his body and mind sensed and perceive which completely defied logic.

  He did not understand and that was almost frightening. It was certainly disturbing, but all he could think to do was to attempt to hide his disability until his nanos repaired whatever had caused the problem or he understood it well enough to prevent it from affecting him.

  He was still reluctant to lie … to Danika. He did not think he would have a problem lying if anyone else had asked, but she was his squad leader. “I was not designed to feel, only to record.”

  She stopped, grasping his wrist in a gesture to stop that he could not ignore, although he wanted to. He hesitated and then yielded to the silent demand. He discovered that she was studying his face.

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  “I beg pardon. I thought that I had responded to your question.”

  “I don’t think you thought anything of the kind. You evaded the question.”

  He frowned. “I am … confused.”

  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 it wasn’t in her mind at all. Seth had … changed.

  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 rec
alled 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 75% to 80% 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 probably also the 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.”