The Lawgivers: Gabriel (38 page)

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 her, 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.