“Out of range,” Niles responded.
“Fire, damn it! They don’t know that!” Danika hesitated as she fired off several rounds, and then muttered, “Unless they have cyborgs, too.”
“Unlikely,” Seth responded. “There was nothing in intel to suggest it.”
“Like they’ve never gotten anything wrong!” Danika snarled, glancing quickly to right and left. “They’ve damned well got night vision and they’re closing.”
“They are also flanking our position,” Dane reported.
“Shit! They’re going to cut us off! What’s it looking like behind us?”
Seth scanned the ridge to the rear with his night vision and then the thermal imaging, discovering neither worked worth a damn under the current conditions. “The rearward troops have made it to the ridge. They’ve formed another line to our rear … fifteen meters.”
“Good!” Danika said. “Our turn to fall back! Move it!”
She leapt to her feet almost before she finished speaking and immediately caught a projectile that spun her around and threw her face down in the snow. “Niles! Dane!” Seth bellowed, surging to his feet and scooping Danika up with one arm. “Cover our retreat!”
Niles and Dane formed a body shield, jogging backwards and firing.
Seth caught a projectile in his thigh that brought him to his knees—from the front. ‘Friendly’ fire—human, he thought, knowing the cyborgs would have known not to fire on them—unless the enemy had already managed to flank them.
Trying to close his mind to the fresh pain, he struggled to his feet again with Danika and charged toward the line of troops. He managed to make it through the line without catching another round. Depositing Danika on the ground, he scanned her to locate the wound. “Medic! Human wounded!”
There was no response to his call for aid and Seth glanced around. 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. 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!”
“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, Danika 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.
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 globe taking similar fire? Or were they the unlucky ones being dropped right in the lap of a nest of enemy troops?
“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?
He looked human—all of the latest cyborgs did—and small wonder when they were constructed of almost 50% 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, but not only did that create a serious weight
issue, but 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.
Synthetic human-like sheathing came next—which opened up a whole new market for the manufacturer—who’d already produced way more robots than they could sell to the government and were looking at a sharp decline of their profits if not total disaster. The civilian population suddenly saw a need for companions, nannies—entertainment. The synthetic sheathing just wasn’t quite close enough to human flesh and skin. Happily, that desire for human flesh coincided nicely with the advances in growing human skin cells—muscles, internal organs—the whole works. It had actually become far cheaper to use the ‘real’ thing than synthetics and since the cyborgs couldn’t object to and weren’t terrified of nanos like the rest of the population was, they could introduce nanos into the cyborgs to affect repairs.
Not that they would have objected to making more money off of the government in repairing damaged equipment, but they’d done such an excellent job of convincing the government that their cyborgs were virtually indestructible that the government had demanded a guarantee on the product before they would sign off on the multi-trillion dollar contact.
It wasn’t just the fact that Seth had asked her if she was alright, though, she realized abruptly.
One the things that had always unnerved her about working with the cyborgs was the eyes. They had cold, dead, emotionless eyes. They managed to replicate some emotion through programming that kept them from being quite so stilted in their interactions. They looked and felt human. As long as they didn’t talk, or confined themselves to one or two word responses and she didn’t look them directly in the eyes, she could pretend her team was just a bunch of recruits just like she was—really big, brawny recruits—but as human as she was, not titanium monsters that could squash her like a bug if their programming was faulty in any way and the notion struck them.
And yet when she’d met Seth’s gaze, she’d seen everything reflected in them that she was feeling in those moments herself—fear of pain and death.
But maybe that was it? Nothing but a reflection of her own fears? Projected onto him?
She wasn’t entirely convinced, but the realization that she’d been frozen with shock and fear shook her. She couldn’t afford to let those emotions take the upper hand or she wasn’t going to get out of this alive!
Considering the bombardment, she didn’t know if they were even going to make it to the ground, but she needed to act when and if they did!
She got her second jolt when they were ordered out and she finally made it to the off ramp—only to discover that they were still a very long way from the ground, not on it, as she’d expected. Instantly visions of being mangled like a squashed spider when she hit the ground leapt into her mind. Before she could force her way out of the line or demand to be taken lower, Seth, who was behind her, tightened his grip around her torso and stepped off the damned plank into thin air—really thin air!
She screamed all the way down. Fortunately, the landing was enough of a jolt to knock the panic out of her when it deprived her of breath. Reason reared its head as the snow pack around her was peppered with shots from what seemed every direction. Her conditioning took over—thankfully.
The landscape was so starkly white with ice and snow that it almost seemed to glow in the moonlight that bathed it. As she rolled over and scanned her surroundings in one swift, sweep, she saw that the virtually flat plane she’d landed on was littered with black dots of all shapes and sizes—burning debris from the landers that didn’t make it to the drop in one piece, and bodies, some moving, some eerily still. A black bowl of sky capped the nearly featureless landscape.
She couldn’t tell where the enemy position was!
It didn’t help that she couldn’t see a damned thing once her team decided to form a wall around her—to protect her! What were they thinking? They were supposed to be shooting at the damned enemy!
Fight or die, she told herself! The enemy had them pinned down. What to do? Retreat?
Not unless ordered.
Thankfully, the thought had no sooner entered her mind than she heard the command.
Except she was at the front and supposed to lay down fire for those in the back to drop back.
Fight or die!
She finally managed to spot a flash that gave away an enemy position. Once she began returning fire, she was able to focus on trying to eliminate everyone firing at her. She didn’t realize how anxious she was for her turn to drop back until the moment she’d been waiting for came. A new line had been formed and her team could drop back and take up a position a little further from the enemy.
Yelling for her team to drop back, she leapt to her feet—stupid move! The projectile that slammed into her and smacked her down again drove that home! Blackness swarmed over her. She was in so much pain it took her a few minutes to figure out what had happened. By the time she did, Seth had scooped her up under one arm and was racing across the plane. The jarring raised her pain level until oblivion claimed her. When she came to, she felt hands tugging at her suit. Her mind struggled for a moment to make sense of what was happening and finally produced the conviction that she was being attended by a medic.
Thank god! She wasn’t going to die—yet.
Needing assurance, she opened her eyes with an effort, managed to focus—and then got the shock of her life. Seth was manhandling her—not a medic-borg!
She didn’t even manage to say no before he set her on fire with the damned laser! And she was in too much pain after that to berate him.
She needed to get up and fight. She was aware enough of her surroundings to realize the fire fight had intensified, could hear the sounds of battle through the open channel that provided communications for the force on the ground and the dull, muted sounds of intense fighting that penetrated her protective helmet. With a supreme effort of will, she managed to move her arms and hands—or the uninjured one anyway—in a blind search for her weapon. She didn’t find it and the fear of discovering she was unarmed sent a torrent of adrenaline through her that was powerful enough to enable her to roll onto her stomach and perform a wider search. “My weapon. Where’s my weapon?”
“I have it.”
It was Niles who responded—she thought. “Well give it to me, damn it!”
“You have sustained damage, squad leader, Danika.”
“Like I don’t fucking know that when my whole right side is on fire! Give me the damned thing!”
“Time to fall back again,” Seth responded, scooping her up and launching into another bone shaking run that made her pass out again.
When Danika regained consciousness again, she found herself staring up at a sheer, white wall of ice. She stared at it blankly, trying to figure out where it had come from when she certainly hadn’t noticed it earlier when she’d surveyed the plane they’d landed on.
Apparently, no one else had noticed it either when they’d been given the order to fall back—except the enemy, because they’d driven them back against a wall of ice they had no hope of scaling. They weren’t equipped for climbing.
They were all going to die—right in this godforsaken spot!
Strategically speaking, they were fucked!
Danika roused herself to make another demand for her weapon just as she heard the command—directed at the cyborgs.
Seth scooped her up and tilted his head back to gauge the distance.
Not that she didn’t think it was a da
mned good idea for him to make some calculations before he attempted it, but he made one hell of a target! Miraculously, although projectiles whizzed past them, none made their target … until the very moment Seth crouched to launch the two of them. As he sprang up again, shooting them skyward, she heard him grunt and felt him jerk with an impact.
They weren’t going to make it, she thought in dismay! It was further, she was sure, than the drop from the ship had been and she’d been convinced he couldn’t make that leap and remain operational.
Chapter Two
Seth more or less fell over the top of the precipice. Barely clearing the edge, he pitched himself forward in a roll.
The Lawgivers: Gabriel Page 28
