The Lawgivers: Gabriel (36 page)

“Mobility impaired,” Dane replied.
“Extensive damage to pneumatic knee joint. Nanos affecting repairs.
Estimated repair time six hours. Minor damage to biological
sheathing in three locations—right knee, right calf, right
arm—estimated repair time 45 minutes, 13 seconds.”

“Fuck!” Danika exclaimed. “Patch the
suits! We’re on the dark side and looking at well below zero
temperatures. Can you make the jump, Niles?”

“Affirmative—disregarding more damage
prior to reaching the jump altitude.”

Since several more missiles had
exploded in close proximity to the drop ship during the course of
the systems checks, Seth thought the probability of more damage was
high. He considered pointing that out until it occurred to him that
Danika hadn’t requested the information. That realization sent him
into even more confusion. Unable to dismiss the suspicion that he
had sustained some sort of damage, he ran another systems check.
Again, his systems report was negative. Unconvinced despite that,
he lifted one hand and examined his head, wondering if a
microscopic fragment had penetrated his skull and damaged his
CPU.

His squad leader noticed the movement
and the examination. “Is there a problem, Seth?”

The odd fluctuation of hot and cold
flooded him again. “Negative.” The realization that he had just
lied struck Seth forcefully. He had informed his squad leader that
he was fully functional and could detect no damage when in fact he
suspected that his entire system was malfunctioning.

He was no longer recording internal and
external events, he realized after considering the problem for some
moments. He was … feeling.

That discovery … unnerved him. He could
not think of another way to describe the strange hot/cold
fluctuation, the tightening sensation in his gut, or the erratic
rhythm of his heart. He dismissed that possibility and examined the
events he had noted since the drop and determined that he could
track the anomaly back to the precise instant the exploding missile
had ruptured the hull of their drop ship—or rather an instant prior
to that. There had been a roaring sound, like the rush of air,
almost as if he had anticipated the rupture of the hull.

He had not heard the sound with his
ears, though. It had been inside his brain—the biological part—not
the CPU.

Anger swept through him—not the
perception of an event that might cause anger or the reaction he
had been programmed to exhibit upon such an occurrence. He felt
it.

The biological brain he had been given
was defective!

“Bail out! Bail! Bail! Bail!” the
co-pilot, a human, abruptly roared over the com-unit.

Niles and even Dane had thrown off
their safety harnesses and were on their feet before the human had
issued the order the second time. Brought abruptly from his
internal examination, Seth was still a few seconds behind them due
his preoccupation.

Danika, he discovered, was still trying
to free herself from her safety harness. He reached down, pushed
her hands aside, and depressed the lock release. She flicked a look
of surprise at him and then glared. Shoving his hands away, she
tossed the harness off and stood with an effort.

Then promptly fell back into her
seat.

Grasping a handful of her suit, Seth
hauled her to her feet again, trying to help her steady herself on
the rolling, bucking deck.

“Line up to bail!” she
bellowed.

He obeyed, hauling her around until she
was in front of him, wedged between his belly and Dane’s back. They
shuffled toward the gaping maw of the drop ramp that had been
opened, fighting the rocking of the ship and the buffeting
wind.

“Oh my god!” Danika exclaimed. “What
the fuck are they thinking? I can’t make this jump!”

The wind whipped her voice away, but
Seth had gotten close enough to gauge the distance to the ground,
as well, and his calculations substantiated hers. The drop was too
far for a human to manage without sustaining debilitating damage.
He wrapped an arm around Danika and stepped off of the platform,
allowing his legs to absorb the shock as they landed.

He discovered he had miscalculated
having had insufficient data to correctly assess the snow pack. His
considerable weight and the distance, combined with Danika’s added
weight, resulted in him landing with sufficient force that he was
driven waist deep into the ice below. He released her as he felt
himself sinking and she landed on the softer pack of the surface
with a grunt as the air was forced from her lungs.

A projectile struck Seth in the
shoulder while he was assessing the situation and calculating the
best way to free himself. A dozen more peppered the ground around
Seth and Danika, throwing up fountains of snow as they
furrowed.

Dimly, Seth was aware of alarm at the
danger Danika was in, fully exposed and lying on the top of the
soft pack, snow camo or not. Peripherally, he was aware that the
entire battalion was taking heavy fire from nearly every direction.
He was mostly focused, however, on the pain that had exploded in
his shoulder and filled his mind as the projectile tore through the
biological sheathing of his shoulder.

He had never experienced pain before.
He was so stunned by the reaction, in point of fact, that it took
him many moments to comprehend what it was. There should have been
nothing more than an alert of damage—followed by a damage
report!

The second projectile that cut a
burning path along the same arm finally shook him from his
preoccupation with the intense new sensations and forced him to
focus on avoiding more pain. After pushing ineffectually against
the shifting snow for a few moments, he finally pushed the upper
portion of his body downward since he couldn’t pull his knees up
and used the force to propel himself upward.

He landed face down near his squad
leader. Crawling forward, he managed to form a protective shield on
one side. “Dane! Niles! To the squad leader! Form a
barrier.”

He discovered Danika was gaping at him
when he focused on her, trying to assess damage—or if she had
damage.

“Getting my squad shot all to shit
isn’t going to help me!” she growled.

Their com units squawked. “Forward
squads! Lay down a suppressing fire. Rear squads fall
back!”

“Shit!” Danika responded to the abrupt
command that squawked over their com units. “We were last to drop.
That makes us forward, damn it. Get your weapons up, squad! Fire!
Fire! Fire!”

Reflecting that he could still shield
her with his body facing away from her, Seth rolled away from her
and unshouldered his weapon. To his relief, his malfunction didn’t
seem to extend to his ability to calculate the trajectory of the
projectiles flying at them. Unfortunately, also by his
calculations, his own weapon range fell short of the enemy’s.
Ignoring the lack of logic in firing on an enemy he could not hit
in favor of the orders given, he zeroed in on a target and
fired.

“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.