The Lawgivers: Gabriel Read online

  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 fire fight 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 laugh. 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. “Because this is 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 vehicle.”

  Under the circumstances, Danika 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 that 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 the only officer 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.”

  Their wounds, or damage, was going to slow them, too, but she doubted even though they’d sustained more damage than she had that they would be as handicapped as she was. She was running on adrenaline and she knew it, but not only did she realize she couldn’t afford to lay around to recover, there was no place to lay around and no actual medics. “I feel like shit, but I can make it. I’ll feel a hell of a lot better when I have some ammo—and enough rations to carry me through a couple of weeks.”

  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 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 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 hav
e 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?

  Explore Kaitlyn O’Connor’s darker side ….

  ***warning! Bondage & forced seduction

  WHEN NIGHT FALLS

  K. O’Connor

  Chapter One

  The planet below them looked surprisingly beautiful considering that it was a dead world. Dr. Tessa Bergin studied its surface with a mixture of frustration and disgust. Strictly speaking, it was not actually dead, but the civilization they had traveled so far to contact was.

  Two years ago, when they had left Earth, she had been filled with excitement to be a part of the mission that would contact the advanced civilization their deep space probes had discovered. From all indications, it was at least their equal, and very likely even more medically and technologically advanced. She had expected to learn so much from them! She had been so thrilled to escape the abject boredom of the museum she worked in and the endless rounds of restoring and studying the same stale artifacts that never seemed to actually lead anywhere.

  Finally, she would get the chance to discover things on her own! Finally, she would not have to do the drudge work of the more experienced scientists!

  Half way out, they had woken from their fourth deep sleep cycle to the discovery that something had gone terribly wrong. While they had slept, an entire world of people had died, taking their civilization with them.

  Instead of setting down and negotiating a working relationship with another race, they would be studying the remains of the civilization that had vanished, virtually overnight.

  She would be fortunate if they even allowed her to set foot on the planet! Anthropology was her field, but there was certainly no urgency to study the civilization now--dead was dead. She could only dig and speculate and try to figure out what sort of civilization had been there, if she was allowed to go. She wouldn’t get the chance to study a working, vital, social structure that was completely different from their own.

  Tessa frowned. Whatever it was that had devastated this world, it did not seem to have been war--which certainly supported the theory of an advanced race. They had not found traces of a geological disaster, either natural or the result of poor conservation. The atmosphere was clear--amazingly so actually considering the estimated size of the population that had once inhabited the world. But then, they had calculated that at least ten years and possibly as much as fifteen to twenty, Earth time, had passed since the disaster. If the devastation was the result of a global cataclysm, there had been plenty of time for the planet to stabilize.

  It was the one thing about deep space travel that had unnerved her about volunteering to make the trip--the effect space travel had on time. Not that it made that much difference to her, she supposed. She’d left no one behind--no one on the mission had. It was one of the requisites, that they have no close family ties, and probably the only reason she’d been allowed to fill a slot. It was just too traumatic for those who took the deep space missions to return and discover so many years had passed in their absence, that their children had grown up, their parents died, their spouse had grown old--two years out and already ten to twenty years had passed on Earth, despite the speed they were traveling. By the time they got back, most everyone they’d known and worked with would have died.

  Her irritation resurfaced. She’d given up the world she’d known just for the chance of discovery, and now it seemed she’d given it up for nothing!

  She pushed the thought aside as Dr. Boyd came to stand beside her. He was a tall man but bent slightly now with age. Despite that, he had a kindly look about him and he wasn’t nearly as testy as most of his colleagues. “Were you picked for the first landing?”

  “No,” she said, trying not to sound sullen even though his obvious excitement exacerbated her feelings of ill usage.

  He scrubbed his hands together almost gleefully. “I’ll be going.”

  Tessa resisted the urge to roll her eyes. As if she couldn’t have guessed! “No! Really? Well, congratulations, Dr. Boyd.”

  He turned to grin at her, as excited as a kid, although he was probably sixty if he was a day, maybe older. He joined them from the CDC--his job, naturally enough, to make certain they didn’t pick up any deadly diseases to take home with them.

  In fact, except for herself and Dr. Layla Lehman (or Lay-Leh as most everybody called her), who was only four years her senior, the majority of the scientists aboard the Meadowlark were middle aged or older.

  It was one of the reasons, she knew, that her opinion wasn’t precisely respected, despite her degree, despite the years she’d spent paying her ‘dues’--she was still under thirty and not seasoned enough.

  The other, of course, was because she hadn’t done any field work.

  It began to seem unlikely that this was going to be her chance for it.

  Shaking her irritation, Tessa left Dr. Boyd at the observation window and made her way down to the lab to study the read outs from the probes. The atmosphere was a reassuring balance of oxygen, hydrogen, etc., etc.--probably better than the air they breathed on Earth despite the numerous scrubbers that had been built to help to purify Earth’s air. She couldn’t see that the planet, dubbed PIM9162 after their probes had discovered it in the Claxton Galaxy--a galaxy previous believed to have no livable planets--had changed radically from the pre-disaster period.

  The bacteria identified through earlier probes had not changed significantly either--certainly not enough to indicate that it might have had anything to do with the devastation, but, as far as they’d been able to determine, something had reduced the dominant species on the planet by approximately ninety percent ten to fifteen planet years earlier.

  There were survivors, or at least there had been as far as they could tell, but very likely finding the scattered remains of the race would prove to be difficult, and what were the odds that, even if they did, it would turn out to be scientists?

  She wasn’t interested in the mathematical probability anyway.

  Despite her disappointment, and her envy of those who would be allowed to be among the first to land on the surface of the planet, Tessa found she couldn’t resist going down to the docking bay to see the landing crew off when they began preparing for the first launch.

  Lay-Leh was among those who would be going down. The two of them had become friends since they’d left Earth, despite the fact that they actually had very little in common. Lay-Leh was a linguist. As intelligent as she was, she had the sort of sparkling personality that made her seem more of a social butterfly than a serious scientist--and it was that that had initially put Tessa off--that and the fact that she had a rapier wit and a tongue to match and could run circles around pretty much anyone who was unwise enough to match ‘swords’ with her--especially Tessa, who was more inclined to spill her guts the moment a thought occurred to her than to consider before she spoke.

  She liked Lay-Leh best when she was giving one of the other scientists onboard a hard time.

  “Tessa!”

  Tessa smiled as Lay-Leh danced over to her and gave her a hug. Lay-Leh ’s eyes were twinkling when she pulled away. “I thought sure you’d be in your cabin enjoying your misery and refuse to see me off.”

  Tessa’s smile turned wry. “That
obvious, huh?”

  Lay-Leh chuckled. “Don’t worry. Only to me. The others are like kids at Christmas ... and not terribly observant of others at the best of times.” She sighed. “Self absorbed doesn’t even begin to describe this bunch. If it wasn’t ingrained habit with them to dress when they got out of bed, I suspect half of them would be walking around in the buff most of the time.”

  Tessa gave her a searching look. “You’re not … the least bit anxious?”

  Lay-Leh bit her lip wryly. “Scared shitless! But I’m excited, too. Of course fate--or the law of averages--being what it is, the chances are my services won’t even be necessary and I’ll be stuck watching the lander, or something equally boring, while everyone else runs around making exciting discoveries.”