Cyberevolution Book One: The Awakening: Fifty Shades of Dark Kaitlyn O'Connor by Kaitlyn O'Connor, Kimberly Zant, Marie Morin, Stacey St.James, Goldie McBride (23)

Clearly, they were focused on trying to rebuild them, or at least some, with what was available.

She just wasn't certain of why.

There were alien ships in the hanger, as well--also in pieces.  She supposed the Andorians had tried to destroy them when the cyborgs had overrun them. 

She didn't find Reuel until curiosity finally overcame uneasiness and she began wandering among the groups working in an attempt to understand what it was that they were planning.

Actually, Reuel found her, apparently drawn by the inactivity that followed in her wake, because the cyborgs simply stopped as she passed by them and stared.  Catching her arm, he bellowed at the cyborgs to get back to work and led her from the hanger.

He eyed her with disfavor when they'd left the hanger.  "You are disruptive," he said coolly.

Danika gaped at him.  "I didn't do anything!"

"You do not have to do anything beyond walk by," he said sardonically.  "They are males and there are no females here--except you."

Danika felt her face redden, but as embarrassed as she was, she was actually relieved that he'd made her point for her.  "Actually, that's why I was looking for you.  I wanted to see if you would put me in the brig with the rest of my squad."

Surprise flickered across Reuel's features, but he looked thoughtful.  "I agree that it might be the safest place for you.  On the other hand, you have done nothing wrong and I will not win the loyalty of my men if I am unjust."

"I was afraid of that," Danika muttered and then shrugged.  "You bastard!" she yelled loudly.  Drawing her arm back, she punched him in the face with her fist.  She didn't think it hurt him, but she was convinced for several moments that she'd broken her fist.

She was also certain that Reuel had simply stood still and allowed her to hit him or she would never have managed it.

Reuel's eyes gleamed with amusement.  "Two days in the brig for assaulting your commanding officer ought to teach you the error of your ways!" he said loudly.  Catching her, he tossed her over one shoulder and strode briskly through the main area of the complex and straight to the brig.  He deposited her on her feet once he reached the brig.  "Toss her in with the rest of her unruly squad!" he ordered the guards.  "When you have cooled your heels for a bit, mayhap you will have a cooler head on your shoulders, soldier!  You are fortunate that we need every man or I might consider a court martial warranted for assaulting your superior!"

Seth, Dane, and Niles studied her with varying degrees of suspicion, surprise, and doubt as she was pushed into the cell with them and Reuel departed.

"You assaulted Reuel?" Dane whispered when Reuel had left.

Danika examined her hand.  "He didn't seem inclined to lock me up for nothing," she said, "so I gave him a reason.  I punched him in the face."

"That was not ... wise," Seth responded.

Danika was too pleased with herself to take exception to the insult.  "Tell me about it!  I'm glad I didn't punch him harder.  I think I might have broken my hand.  Hurts like a son-of-a-bitch now.  Which bunks aren't taken?"

"They are all much the same," Dane said morosely, "lumpy and uncomfortable."

Danika shrugged.  "Beats the hell out of the thin sleepers we had over a slab of ice, though, doesn't it?" she said cheerfully.

"Not by much."

Ignoring that, Danika chose a bunk and lay down gratefully.  She'd managed to work up an appetite, though, and her grumbling stomach prevented her from sleeping.  "When do we get fed anyway?"

"They have not yet."

Danika frowned, wishing, now, that she'd eaten more when she had the chance. 

Seth shoved her legs out of the way and sat down at the foot of her bunk.  "Why did you hit Reuel?"

"I told you," Danika said evasively.

"That, yes.  Not the reason you wanted to join us in the brig."

"Hey!  We're buds!  I would've missed you guys."

Seth studied her suspiciously.  "We are not 'buds'.  I have the definition and we are not.  We are teammates."

Danika shrugged.  "Same thing."

Niles considered it.  "No.  He is right.  The definition is not the same.  I am not at all sure that I understand the definition of 'buds', but it does not match."

Danika eyed him crossly.  "Close enough."

"But that is not the reason," Seth pursued.

"I don't know anybody else, ok?" Danika snapped.

Seth studied her thoughtfully for several moments.  "It is not because one of the cyborgs tried to sex you?" he demanded suspiciously.

Danika felt her color fluctuate.  "Why would you think that?"

"Because they are all horny," Dane said, nodding.  "Seth has been noticing their dicks."

Seth slugged him.  Since Dane had crouched beside the bunk, he sprawled out full length on the floor, slamming into Niles, who staggered back and hit the bars at the front of the cell hard enough to dent them outward.

"Pardon!  He pushed!" Niles said, carefully straightening the bars when the guard glared at him.  "Look what you made me do!" he added angrily, swatting Dane on the head with the flat of his hand as Dane sat up.

"Ow!" Dane growled, clambering to his feet and glaring angrily at both Niles and Seth.  "What was that for?"

"I have not been noticing their dicks!" Seth growled.  "And I will beat the fuck out of you if you keep saying that!"

Dane gaped at him indignantly.  "He said their dicks stood up and pointed at Danika whenever she walked by!  Did he not say that, Niles?" he demanded.

"I did not hear that," Niles disputed after studying Seth warily for a moment.

"He was standing right beside you!  How could you not hear that?"

"Shut up!" the guard bellowed.  "If you three start roughhousing again I will summon another squad to beat you unconscious!"

Danika pulled the blanket over her head.

Seth grabbed it and snatched it out of her hands.  "Why did you do that?"

"To hide," she snapped, glaring at him indignantly.  "Can we change the subject?"

"You were not hidden," Dane pointed out.  "I could see you."

"Yes, but I couldn't see you and that was the point.  Let go of the damned cover, Seth!"

"You did not answer the question," Seth persisted.

"I don't remember the damned question!"

"You have forgotten already?" Dane asked, clearly surprised.  "Seth asked if one of the others had tried to sex you."

"Thanks!" Danika snapped ungraciously.

"You are welcome," Dane responded, smiling.

"Dense," Danika muttered.

"What is dense?" Seth asked suspiciously.

"You are!"

He thought that over.  "Is that an insult?"

"It damned sure isn't a compliment!" Danika snapped.  "It means you're thick headed and I don't want to talk about it!"  Flipping onto her side, Danika presented them with her back. 

Even if it hadn't been embarrassing to discuss such things with the guys, she thought resentfully, she wouldn't have wanted to when they were so easily provoked into fighting!  They'd just go out and pick a fight with poor Basil and end up in the brig again!

They were almost as bad as her little brothers had been, constantly bickering with each other and punching each other!  She'd lost track of the number of times her father had had to break up physical disputes between them!

She'd broken up a few herself, if it came to that--until they got so big that she couldn't manage it by herself anymore--and it was usually over something stupid.  Like who'd gotten the last of the milk!  Or whose turn it was to do the chores they hated the most.

Of course, it all boiled down to who was the boss, in her opinion. 

And she supposed that might be what it was with the guys.  They were trying to establish the pecking order.

In her opinion, Seth was top dog, hands down, but she supposed neither Dane nor Niles were ready yet to concede that.

* * * *

Seth did not believe that Danika was asleep. He knew it did not take him long to drop to sleep once he had lain down to do so, but she seemed far too tense in his opinion to actually be asleep.  Obviously, she was trying to go to sleep, though, and did not want to talk anymore ... which irritated him because she had insulted him and not only not given him the chance to defend himself but she had also not given him the chance to discover why she had insulted him in the first place. 

Feeling unwelcome, he got up and moved to another bunk and settled there to brood over it and try to untangle the emotions from the conversation to see if he could better understand what had just happened.  It was no great surprise to discover that that was a nearly impossible task.  He had already discovered that when emotions entered a situation they tended to dominate and make clear, logical thought nigh impossible.  He finally decided, however, that one of the reasons he could not separate emotion from the event and understand was because none of it made any damned sense anyway! 

Danika had a habit of responding to a question with another question rather than an answer!  That was why they never seemed to make any progress toward an understanding!

Was this a human thing, he wondered?  A woman thing?  Or a Danika thing?

Because he was not at all certain that he had enough memory capacity to break the conversation down to something he did understand and he could foresee a great deal of frustration in his future dealing with humans in general and Danika in particular if every conversation left him baffled and certain that he had missed something critical.

It occurred to him that mayhap it was the emotions he felt now that he had not felt before, because they seemed to boil inside of him and pull him in first one direction and  then another--and sometimes two different directions at once--until he was not certain for more than a moment how he felt.  Or whether he should cling to logic and try to ignore the emotions or if he even could now that he felt them.

He could not recall that he had had any difficulty following Danika before the awakening, though.

Thinking back over it, however, he realized another thing.  They did not have conversation before the awakening.  Danika merely issued orders that were not open for discussion.  He countered with Intel that might affect the outcome if there was any information that she was not aware of and that was that.

So mayhap the problem resided in the attempts at conversation?  This was not a very reliable means of communication, he realized, because it did not rely heavily on facts--and often not even on truth.

That thought led him to a startling conclusion.

Everything that Danika had said had been an attempt to evade answering his question.

And he could not think of any reason that she would evade rather than answer other than the possibility that she thought he would grow angry about the answer!

Someone had been trying to sex her!

He was so angry after he finally deduced that that it wasn't until a great deal later that he concluded that it had consumed all of his reasoning resources for a good twenty minutes to arrive at an answer that he should have been able to figure out in nano-seconds.  That shook him, gave rise to doubts about his mental capacity that he found extremely disturbing, but he was too consumed by rage to analyze it at the time and feel the sense of inadequacy he felt later.

He shot off of his bunk in a towering rage, determined to demand the identity or identities of the man or men who had ... chased Danika into the brig in order to avoid them.

He was distracted from his goal by a commotion as guards marched a half a dozen new prisoners into the holding area, unlocked the cell door, and shoved them into the cell.  The one in the lead--an ugly brute with yellow hair, a blackening eye, and bruised, swollen jaw--was grinning from ear to ear as if very pleased with himself.  His gaze had gone immediately to Danika the moment they arrived and remained fixed on her as he strode very happily into the cell, crossed the room, and plopped down on the foot of the bunk. 

That time it did not take Seth nearly as long to analyze the situation and arrive at a conclusion.

"It is I, Danika!  Basil."

Danika reacted instantly.  Rolling over and jackknifing into a sitting position on the bunk, she stared at the newcomer owl-eyed.

Uttering a snarl of rage, Seth stalked across the cell and slammed his fist into the side of the cyborg's head hard enough it hit the wall and bounced back.  At that, he barely managed to reach his goal before Niles and Dane. 

Shouldering Seth aside, Dane grabbed the cyborg by the hair and dragged him off the bunk.  Before he could do more, Niles dropped to his knees and started pounding at the man with his fists. 

Danika uttered a shriek of dismay, rolled from the bunk and scrambled under it for cover.  "Stop it!  Stand down, damn it!  Seth!  Dane!  Niles!  What the hell ...?"

Within moments, the guards had surged into the cell with them and a full scale battle was in progress, despite the fact that there was almost no room to maneuver once all of them had crowded into the cell.  The cyborgs remedied that situation by slamming each other into the bars of the cell until the 'cage' that had contained them collapsed under far more weight than they were designed to withstand and fell outward. 

The shrill alarm that had begun to blare almost the moment the fight broke out brought more cyborgs to join the melee.  In a matter of minutes, the combatants had reduced the entire brig to rubble.

"Cease!" a commanding voice roared above the growls, grunts, meaty thuds and crashes of demolition of the walls, furniture, and cells. 

Most of the cyborgs instantly stopped and came to attention.  Reuel waded through the crowd and captured the attention of the few who continued to wrestle by judicious use of his fists. 

"Outside!  Now!  Report to the main area of the complex and form up, soldiers!"

His face a mask of barely contained rage, Reuel stood to one side and watched as the men began to file out.  When they had emptied the brig, or what was left of it, he surveyed the damage with disgust and finally spied Danika trying to crawl out  from under the collapsed bunk where she'd taken shelter.  Striding toward it, he ripped the bunk from the wall and tossed it aside, staring down at Danika in tightlipped silence for several moments.  "You, too, corporal."

"Yes, Sir!" Danika responded, scrambling to her feet and saluting him.

Rolling his eyes, Reuel stalked out with Danika trailing behind him.  When Reuel stopped to survey the miscreants, Danika marched past him as unobtrusively as possible and joined her squad on the back row of the men that had assembled.

"I don't think so," Reuel growled.  "Since I strongly suspect that your squad is responsible for this ... complete breakdown in discipline.  Corporal Hart--front and center!  And bring your squad."

Danika felt her face heat but discomfort was the least of it.  Fear clutched at her heart as she glanced fleetingly at Seth's stony face and then turned and led the men to the front.

Reuel gave each of them a long look of disgust and then turned and left. 

Danika was tempted to use his absence to dress the men down for fighting, but she didn't dare.  It was just as well.  They heard Reuel summoning the rest of the cyborgs and in a few minutes the entire battalion had assembled and Reuel took up a position out front once more to address them.

"We are the finest soldiers in all of the confederation ... created to be second to none in all things military!  While I understand and commiserate with all of you ... know the same confusion you all feel since the awakening and realize how difficult it is to deal with these changes that none of us completely understand, I will NOT tolerate a breakdown in discipline!  Our survival, our future, depends upon unity!  Only an absolute dedication to surviving will give us a chance at a future.  If we do not stand together, we will not stand at all! 

"Know this!  Regardless of our desires, we are enemies of the confederation now.  They will dedicate themselves to hunting us down and destroying us because they will see us as a threat to their survival!  This much I believe I completely understand.  I also understand that soldiering is all that any of us assembled here today totally grasp at this time and that way lies salvation for us as beings in our own right.  To disintegrate into an undisciplined rabble will only make us vulnerable to our enemies.

"It seems ... clear to me given the recent debacle in the brig, that awareness of ourselves as beings has brought us to the natural urge to procreate--just as all living things share this desire and need.  In time we may reach a point where it will be possible, and safe, for us to pursue this natural course in evolution, but that time is not now.  We cannot afford to be distracted from the need to survive, from our duty to our people as a whole, or we will never see that day.

"I do not have the heart to war with our creators.  And yet I see no alternative for us if we cannot escape the net they will devise for us once communications and the supply lines are restored.   We have gathered together all that is available to us to escape this world and avoid that confrontation--at least in the near term.  I will expect every soldier here to keep that in mind, to behave like disciplined soldiers, and achieve that goal!  I will expect you to remember that you are, first and foremost, soldiers!"

He didn't dismiss them when he finished and everyone remained stiffly at attention for some minutes, waiting for the dismissal.  Finally, one of the soldiers stepped forward and saluted.  "Permission to speak?"

Reuel nodded.

"Sir--the ships that we are working on are short-range only.  I do not see that they will help us to avoid a war with humans."

Reuel said nothing for several moments.  "I have hope that they will be sufficient to take us to Xeno-11, this world's sister."  He shrugged.  "That is only a short-range goal that could take us to a place where survival is ... more likely, at least from the elements."

"Hope?"

Again Reuel shrugged.  "We have much to gain and nothing to lose by the attempt.  Even with this base we are not likely to survive long given the conditions on this world.  And if we remain here, we will find that we cannot avoid an all out war with the humans for our survival."

Another soldier stepped forward, saluted, and requested permission to speak.  "It is my understanding that Xeno-11 is the reason the Andorians and the humans are at war.  Will that not take us to a place where war is more inevitable with whoever wins the war?"

Reuel smiled thinly.  "I am counting on finding ships there that are designed with long range capability.  I do not mind initiating battles for the sake of gaining the means to deliver our people to a better place." 

"What about the others that are here?  We represent only a handful of those the confederation dropped on this world."

"We must have ships even to attempt an evacuation of our people.  That being the case, you are all dismissed!  I will expect you to have a means of transport readied for us in short order!"

Relief flooded Danika when Reuel dismissed them.  She glanced at the guys, trying to decide whether she wanted to reprimand them for their part in starting the brawl and finally decided she didn't.   "Well, that's a relief," she muttered.  "I guess we need to report for work."

"Corporal Hart!" Reuel said, striding toward her.

Danika's heart sank.  So much for thinking they'd avoided disciplinary measures!

"Yes, Sir!"

His lips thinned as he surveyed her and her squad.  "You will take your squad and repair the damages to the brig.  I have a feeling we will have need of it again," he said dryly.

* * * *

Seth was neither surprised nor particularly resentful that they were set the task of repairing the damage  to the brig even though, on several levels, he did not consider them to be completely responsible. In the first place, he felt like he had been provoked to take action when that yellow haired bastard had approached Danika as if he was entitled to!  In the second, they had not singlehandedly demolished the brig.  They had had a great deal of help from others who should have minded their own damned business!

Work was work, however, and they would have been expected to work on something regardless and he had no problem with the work that had been assigned.  In fact, the more he thought about it, the better he liked it since it separated Danika from the other cyborgs.

In any case, most of his mind was occupied with what Reuel had said--or at least a specific part of it. 

He realized that he had not thought much beyond trying to control his wildly erratic emotions and impulses and trying to figure out why he felt them. If he had considered his situation at all regarding Danika--and he had not actually devoted much thought to it--he would have put his feelings down to nothing more than the fact that they were squad mates.  They had been trained--actually programmed--to work with their human handler as a team.  He had changed.  They all had, but he did not see that that had changed the fact that they were a team and should work together as a single unit.

It occurred to him to wonder, though, considering what Reuel had said, if he was motivated entirely by the team mentality as he should have been.

He had certainly noticed the maddeningly uncomfortable, and seemingly independent, behavior of his cock.  When it had first begun leaping to attention and then just as inexplicably deflating he'd been too focused on that circumstance to wonder if there was some reason it behaved as if it had a life, and mind, of its own.  It was more like an evil parasite attached to his belly than a part of him, because it did not seem to be under his control as the rest of his body was. 

He had not considered, once, connecting it to the way he felt about Danika even though he had begun to notice that most of the erratic activity seemed to originate with Danika--a chance touch, a look--either from her or at her--a thought.

He certainly had not connected it to a desire to procreate, although he had found himself feverishly accessing and reviewing his pleasure droid programming--starting with the time that he had stayed to guard her back while she showered and had watched her instead of turning his back politely as he should have.

Mayhap that was why his first thought when he had seen that yellow haired bastard approach Danika was 'mine'?

It made him uncomfortable that he had not thought 'ours' when he was certain he should have since he, Dane, and Niles were all a part of Danika's squad.  He thought Reuel would not be pleased with that if he knew either because that was certain to create a great deal more discipline problems if they all began to think of themselves as independent of all others when they were supposed to be a part of a team that was part of a larger team that made up an army that worked together for the good of all.

Especially since Danika was the only female in the camp!

That thought made him uneasy in an indescribable way, almost ... fearful. 

They could not protect her if the others decided to launch a mass attack to claim her for their own!

"I begin to think that it was not a good idea to come here," he muttered under his breath when he discovered that Dane was close enough to hear but Danika was far enough away not to hear. 

Dane sent him a questioning look.

Irritation flickered through Seth.  He knew that he had undergone the change before either  Dane or Niles, but they had not been that far behind him!  They had had time to begin to have a better understanding of what they had become!

"My ... our woman," he said pointedly.  "That yellow haired bastard has more interest in her than I like and there are bound to be others."

Dane blinked at him and turned to study Danika, feeling a surge and recession of thoughts and emotions that made him dizzy trying to catch them.  "She is our woman?" he said doubtfully.  "You mean this in the sense of mating?"

Seth frowned.  He had not progressed that far in his thinking and it irritated him that Dane had leapt ahead of him.  "In what other sense would I mean it?" he growled.

Dane frowned.  "You think we can mate?" he asked hopefully.

Seth didn't have a fucking clue and that was beside the damned point as far as he could see!  "We will not find out if we do not have a mate!"

Niles, drawn by the fact that Seth and Dane were conversing and the desire to discover what they found so interesting that they had stopped working, moved closer so that he could hear the discussion.  "We have a mate?" he asked in pleased surprise.  "Who?"

Seth glared at him.  "Danika, you imbecile! We have a woman, gods damn it!  I do not see why she could not be our mate."

Niles glared at him.  "You are no more intelligent that I am!  We have the same design and programming!  Not as intelligent if you have not considered that she is not a cyborg," he said pointedly.

"We do not have the same DNA or the same biological brain," Seth retorted after a moment's thought.  "And clearly mine is far superior to yours!   There are no cyborg females!  None here, at any rate, or that we might have a chance in hell of claiming as mates.  It does not bother me that she is human.  If it bothers you then you must look elsewhere for a mate, I suppose."

"I think it will bother her," Niles said testily.

Dismay flickered through Seth and then anger.  "Why?  I am fully capable of performing anything that a human mate would."

"Except reproducing."

Seth was tempted to punch Dane in the mouth for pointing that out.  He thought about it for several moments and finally discarded the notion since he was fairly certain it would result in the four of them being separated again and he realized that that was a situation fraught with disaster. 

"We do not know that we cannot.  In any case, we do not know that she would desire a child.  She is a soldier, after all--and I am as certain as I can be that I am fully capable of taking care of her needs and pleasuring her as a mate would.  I have my programming as a pleasure droid to fall back upon."

Dane and Niles both glared at him.  "We also have that programming," Dane said angrily, "and in fact I have already pointed that out to Danika and she did not seem the least interested in allowing me to demonstrate!"

Seth cast his mind back in an effort to recall the incident Dane referred to and realized that he was right.  Danika had simply dismissed it, told them they were no better than the human males who thought about nothing but sex, and talked about something else.  "We were hunting food then," he said pointedly.  "She would not have had interest in sex when we were hunting food.  Beyond that, there was no place to demonstrate since we would all have gotten frost bite if we had removed our hab-suits!  That does not mean she could not be convinced to be interested."

"Interested in what?" Danika asked, having decided to join the discussion the guys seemed to be so focused on.

Seth, Dane, and Niles all sent her startled, guilty looks. 

Dane opened his mouth, as if to explain, but Seth slammed his elbow into his solo plexus, effectively depriving him of breath.  "We were discussing our situation."

Danika divided a suspicious look between Dane and Seth.  "You mean clean up?" she asked, although she didn't believe that had been the topic of conversation.

"I was thinking that, mayhap, it was not wise to bring you here after all."

Danika had been thinking much the same thing.  On the other hand, they hadn't had a lot of options.  "We can't go back," she said flatly.  "I think they will have figured out by now that it was you guys that killed those ... grave robbers.  And I deserted when I was under arrest.  They'd just shoot all of us for desertion."

Seth frowned.  She was right and he was not happy that she was.  "There are other bases on this world."

Danika shook her head.  "You know they're probably in as bad a shape as our base was ... is.  We'd be putting ourselves in the same situation.  And when the fleet gets back, then we'd get shot.  I've been giving what Reuel said a lot of thought and I think he's right.  The best chance any of us have at this point is to make it to Xeno-11.  I don't think that's a long term solution any more than he does, but in the short term it's the best option we have."

Chapter Ten

Reuel's plan was a sound one and yet it didn't go as smoothly as he'd no doubt hoped.  This was primarily due to the fact that the speech he'd given, contrary to what he'd apparently believed at the time, didn't entirely unite their band of rogues.  It inspired those who'd escaped with Reuel when Brown had ordered them shot as traitors to return to the base camp at Slaughter Ridge and kidnap the women they'd left behind.

On the whole, Danika thought it was a good thing--for the women, at least--regardless of the fact that they weren't the least bit happy about having been captured .. uh rescued. 

It wasn't exactly a good thing for Reuel's plans, either, since the raiders returned with a band of furious men on their heels. 

Danika thought for several minutes that Reuel would order the raiders shot on the spot, or order the cyborgs to retaliate--which she was not comfortable with even if the men were shooting at them!

Instead, he ordered an immediate evacuation of the base they'd appropriated from the Andorians. 

They were a far superior force in every way--better armed, better fed, and far better 'built'.  The lingering doubts Danika had harbored that Reuel truly meant to do his best to avoid a mortal confrontation with the humans were laid to rest. 

It did occur to her that one of the reasons Reuel ordered an evacuation instead of retaliating with deadly prejudice might have been simply because he was ready to leave.  She also knew  that the men from the other base were never any real threat--except to the cyborgs that had decided to raid their base and that it might have been a completely different story except for those circumstances.  She still felt much better about being a part of his command.  She still thought that she was going to have to part ways with him at some point if for no other reason than the gender issue, but she felt less like she was betraying her own people. 

She wasn't nearly as sympathetic to 'her' people when they had piled everything into the ships that had been repaired and took off.  The ships appeared to have been completely repaired, but they hadn't actually been tested in flight.  The ship her and her squad ended up on shook and groaned worse than the lander that had brought her to the surface of Xeno-12 to start with.

Ten minutes after takeoff even she knew that the ship wasn't going to attain escape velocity.  For a space of maybe five minutes, she could hear the engines straining, could feel the ship sluggishly climbing a little higher.  They were never actually informed that they'd reached an altitude where it was safe to remove their safety harnesses--because they never did.  The chugging and sputtering of the engine never ceased either and after an uncomfortably short climb, the ship almost seemed to level out for a handful of minutes and then began to descend again. 

Danika sent Dane and Niles, who were seated across from her, a frightened, questioning look when she felt the ship change directions.

"They could not achieve escape velocity," Dane said calmly.

She supposed that might have been his attempt at calming her fears but having him confirm her worst fears didn't help her feelings at all.

"Maybe they weren't really trying?" Danika said a little hopefully.  "Maybe they just decided to move the ship to another location to ... uh ... finish repairing it?"

She was grasping at straws and she knew it but either she'd guessed right and the plan had never been to attempt to leave Xeno-12 to start with or they changed the plan when they realized it wasn't space-worthy.  The ship leveled out, banked hard to port and then began a tooth-jarring descent.  It settled after about twenty minutes of flight, ungracefully and hard enough to convince her that they'd experienced a controlled crash rather than an actual landing.  The roar of the engines ceased, leaving deafening silence in its wake.  No one moved for a space of heartbeats, almost as if holding their breaths in expectation that an explosion would rip through the craft any moment, and then they heard the sound of the ramp being lowered. 

As soon as she identified the sound, Danika began struggling with shaking hands to unfasten her safety harness.  Seth pushed her hands away and unfastened it himself and she looked up at him, meeting his gaze as deja`vu swept over her.  A sense of calm filtered through her, ousting the knee weakening terror of moments before.

It still took an effort to get to her feet but, as he had before, Seth helped her up and held her sandwiched between himself and Dane, and Niles took the lead. 

She'd been too terrified the first time, she realized, to see that there was nothing accidental about it.  From the moment they entered combat, at any time there was danger, they formed a protective shield around her.

She didn't think they'd been programmed to do that.  She knew the cyborgs had been programmed to protect their human handlers, but she hadn't noticed that any of the others went so far as to form a protective shield on every side.  Why did her men behave differently than the others?

She'd suspected that Seth had 'changed' even before their first jump, but she hadn't seen anything any different about Dane or Niles then.  That had come later. 

Maybe they'd never been completely 'asleep'?  Or maybe the change had already begun long before it was noticeable to her? 

She didn't know.  She'd probably never know.  She wasn't certain they did, but she thought maybe that the change had been so slow and subtle they simply hadn't been aware of what was coming.

It was almost more as if they'd been sleepwalking, or hypnotized, and had suddenly come to full awareness.

When they reached the gangplank, she saw with little surprise that they'd landed on the cold, near barren world they'd been struggling to survive for months now.  The difference was that the other three ships had settled on the plane around them and everyone was assembling in formation. 

She'd barely had time to locate her hab-suit and jump into it before takeoff and a frigid blast of air crawled into her suit with her as she made her way down the plank.  Brought from her distraction by the chill, she hurriedly finished closing it, connected her helmet at the neck and lowered her face shield.

When her squad had joined formation,  Reuel sent a man to pass down the rows.  After counting off roughly a third, which included Danika and her squad, he told them to circle east ten clicks and hold position until they were given the signal to attack. 

It was the first that Danika realized they meant to launch an assault.  She didn't even know who or what they were launching an assault against, beyond 'enemy position', but, reflecting that they were at least fully armed for a change, she headed out, trusting that the cyborgs in the group would have no trouble finding the correct coordinates despite the fact that there was almost nothing in the icy landscape to use as landmarks. 

They stopped perhaps fifty yards from target, dropped low and crawled into position.  Danika was breathing like a horse by the time they stopped.  She just hoped they wouldn't get the signal to launch the assault until she'd had time to catch her breath.

She was in luck.  They'd been in position roughly ten minutes before they spotted movement that told them the second team had arrived and positioned themselves. 

While they were waiting for the third group, she returned her attention to the plane that lay before them, trying to see what their objective was.  She didn't actually spot the entrance until a squad advanced on their bellies to disable the alarm and entrance mechanism.  As soon as they were in position, Reuel's voice came over their com units.  "NOW!"

His timing was nice, based, Danika supposed, on a conviction that the squad sent to disable the door wouldn't encounter any problems.  They leapt to their feet, guns ready, and charged the entrance.  Those in the lead were within two yards of it when the door swung open, revealing a black maw roughly wide enough for six men abreast. 

Danika took up the rear--not from design, but because she couldn't keep up with the cyborgs.  By the time she reached the entrance, the majority of the force had flooded inside guns ready.  Seth caught the sleeve of her hab-suit and jerked her to one side as she went in.

There was no gunfire.  The cyborgs inside put their weapons down and raised their arms in surrender. 

It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out they'd just taken part in a raid to capture yet another Andorian stronghold, only to discover the enemy long gone and the base controlled by a small company of cyborgs.  Clearly, Reuel had known where it was all the time.  Just as clearly, he'd expected to find the enemy still occupied it and hadn't known another group of cyborgs had already taken it. 

It was much like the base they'd just left, laid out the same and similarly equipped, but somewhat smaller. 

A group was sent to bring the ships to the hanger while another group readied the hanger for their arrival.  There were a couple of the smaller short-range ships already in the hanger and it was clear that the cyborgs who'd taken the base had been trying to repair them. 

They were rapidly accumulating an armada of their own, Danika thought, feeling far more hopeful that they had a chance of escaping than she had before.  Damaged or not, short range or not, they at least seemed to have a possibility of getting off of Xeno-12 and just about anything would be better. 

While Reuel debriefed the cyborgs they'd captured, everyone not assigned to work on the ships set about securing the base and making themselves at home.  Rations were still in short supply and had to be carefully counted and divided, but those assigned to KP duty set about putting a meal together. 

It was more of a surprise to discover that there were a few women among those captured than it would've been to discover none.

When Reuel had finished debriefing the captives, he sought Danika out. 

"I believe that it will be best for morale if the women are housed separately from the men," he said dryly.

Seth, Dane, and Niles instantly took exception, stiffening angrily, but Danika ignored them.  "I agree."

Nodding, he turned away, indicating that Danika was to accompany him as he crossed the main area of the complex.  "Unfortunately, the base is not setup for our purposes.  However, I believe the brig can be used for this.  It has separate sanitary facilities and sufficient bunks to accommodate the women among us.  Strategically speaking, it offers the women both privacy and safety from any unwelcome attention by the men.

"I can post guards to insure there is no encroachment."

Danika could see his point and the brig was really no more uncomfortable than the general barracks.  She could see a potential problem, however.  "I don't know about the women that were here when we got here, but the others didn't exactly volunteer to come.  Housing them in the brig is only going to reinforce their belief that they're captives."

"I do not doubt it.  It is for that reason, Captain Hart, that you will be in command of the female contingent."

Danika almost missed a step.  "Captain?"

Reuel smiled thinly.  "You are now a soldier in the cyborg army ... of which I am the general.  I believe you have earned a raise in rank through combat."

By taking part in one exercise, which actually didn't amount to combat since not a single shot had been fired?  She was now a commissioned officer instead of a grunt? 

When she'd led the assault from the rear?

Not that she felt like quibbling.  What was the point?  Obviously, he needed officers to form a working army.  And he needed someone to keep the women in line.  "Thank you, Sir."

His smile broadened to a grin and then a grimace.  "You may not thank me when you have dealt with the women for a while.  As you pointed out, they feel like captives even though I am as certain as I can be that the men who brought them considered that they were 'rescuing' them from certain death.  I also believe this.  It is the reason I did not shoot the men on sight for breaking ranks and carrying out a raid without  authorization.

"I am of no mind to reward them, however," he added grimly.  "They will be punished and part of that punishment is to remove the women they risked their lives for--and everyone else's--from their care.

"They have become far too independent since the awakening and it is not something we can afford as a people--not at this time.  Mayhap  some day we will find a place for ourselves and lay down arms and explore what it is to be a race in our own right, but we will not see that day if we are not soldiers first."

"What about my own men?" Danika asked when they had reached the brig and began to inspect it.

Reuel turned to study her thoughtfully.  "In what sense?"

"They didn't execute an unauthorized raid.  They won't be punished for bringing me here?  Or rather to the other base?"

"As you say.  They had not joined us until they came with you.  They had been given the opportunity when we left the base at Slaughter Ridge and ... declined.  They came to me later and requested permission to bring you and join us."  He paused.  "Was it a raid?"

Danika felt her color fluctuate.  "I thought you'd debriefed them regarding the situation?"

His dark brows rose.  "I did.  However, we have attained the facility of lying," he said dryly. 

She shook her head, firmly tamping the horrible memory of the incident that had brought it about.  "I came of my own free will.  Honestly, I was deeply grateful they showed up when they did."  She wrestled with her thoughts for a moment.  "I didn't know we were headed here--to the base--because I didn't know there was a base until I arrived."

"And you were unconscious when you did arrive and they covered their tracks well, which means they did not compromise the security of our base.  This raid was a different matter all together."

Relieved, Danika merely nodded.  It wasn't her business how he dealt with the men who'd compromised base security--and she felt no qualms that he intended to punish them. 

The brig was much like the one at the previous base.  There was one large, general holding cell and three others that were for a single or double occupancy only.  They weren't exactly private, not in the sense of true privacy, but she'd gotten used to having very little privacy since she'd 'joined' the army of the Confederation.  At least she would only be sharing the area with other women--still not what she would've liked, but better than being in general population in the barracks. 

The brig was a self-contained area, however, walled off from the complex for security purposes, no doubt, but it would effectively give the women some privacy and security. 

As she'd expected, the women weren't happy when they were escorted to the brig and told to pick a bunk.

"This," she informed them, "is the women's barracks."

Sergeant Sheila Whitaker, formerly of the army of the Confederation, curled her lip.  "The brig," she muttered flatly.

Danika's lips tightened.  "There were no facilities set aside specifically for female soldiers.  It's the best we can do to allow the women some privacy."

"We--So you freely admit to being a deserter and traitor?  You aren't even going to pretend you were captured and brought against your will?"

Danika narrowed her eyes at the woman.  "I didn't choose to hang around until Master Sgt. Felton decided I knew too much and he'd be better off if I was dead!  I'm guessing he didn't let you in on what it was he was feeding everybody?"

Sheila's expression went blank.  "What do you mean by that?" she demanded.

"I didn't think so.  I wouldn't have known either if I hadn't been sent out to check out the attack.  That flesh came from the cyborgs and he knew because he'd ordered the men out to collect it.  For all I know, they weren't particular about whether it was human flesh from the cyborgs or human flesh from the men that had been killed."

All of the women turned white and then green.  Whirling, they raced to the toilets and fought over them to puke.

Except Sheila.  She swallowed with an effort.  "That's a damned lie!"

"Is it?  Where the hell do you think he got it from?  They didn't leave the base.  And considering he'd already pitched Lt. Brown under the cave-in, I didn't think he'd have any qualms about making sure I didn't do any talking."

Shock rolled over Sheila and then disbelief and anger.  "Is that what you've got planned as a defense?  Murder and cannibalism?  Because I'm not buying it."

"I don't give a fuck whether you do or not.  It's the truth.  Unless it was you that pitched Lt. Brown under the rocks?  You and Felton were the only two close enough to have done it.  I heard the scuffle.  So, if it wasn't him, it was you."

She could see from Sheila's expression that she'd already had her own suspicions about Brown's death.   After staring at Danika for several moments, she merely turned and joined the other women in the main holding cell.  Danika waited until they'd calmed themselves and settled on the bunks.

"You are not prisoners.  You have the option of staying in the barracks with the men if you prefer," she added for effect, wondering what she would do if any of them took her up on the offer--because Reuel certainly wasn't going to like that!  "General Reuel thought that it would be best to separate the women from general population as a precaution--because these men are a lot like the ones you left behind--except with better manners.  They're horny bastards and we're outnumbered about a hundred to one." 

* * * *

"Reuel has said that Dane, Niles, and I can stand guard over the women's quarters if you are agreeable," Seth said, somewhat belligerently, as if he expected an argument.

Danika was sitting with them in the area of the complex set aside for the dining hall, or mess, as the military usually referred to it.  She hadn't seen any reason to segregate herself at chow time even if the other women seemed inclined to.  She looked up from her examination of the food on her plate with surprise and a good bit of pleasure and relief.  "Great idea!  I'll feel a lot better if you guys are watching my back."

Seth relaxed visibly.  "I do not disagree that it is better that the women have separate quarters, but I do not like that those other women seem ... hostile toward you."

She'd noticed.  She was a little surprised that the guys seemed to have noticed or maybe it was just that they'd deduced the women would be hostile because they'd not been particularly subdued captives, being soldiers, to start with? 

She frowned as she speared a chunk of something meat-like and lifted it to examine it.  "I think this must be Andorian rations.  It doesn't look like that stuff we had before."

"It is beast not people and that is all that I care about," Dane said around a mouthful.

The reference made Danika a little queasy.  She didn't dwell on it.  She'd done her best to develop amnesia with regards to that horrible incident.  Oddly enough, though, even as her mind skittered away from the horrific images of that episode, it leapt to the images emblazoned on her mind of the men that day she'd come upon them beside the bathing pool.  Remembering, she was completely distracted for several moments. 

Shaking the thoughts with an effort, she searched around until she found the thread of the conversation Seth had initiated.  "I think you're right," she murmured thoughtfully once she'd taken a bite.

"About the beast?" Niles asked.  "Of course he is right."

"Well, that, too.  I meant about the women being hostile and me needing somebody to watch my back.  Not that I'd worry about it if there were fewer of them.  I can hold my own, but one against over a dozen aren't good odds and I'm not so sure I trust them enough to sleep next to them."  She grinned at Seth wryly.  "That's why I picked a separate cell.  I can lock up when I sleep and not have worry about them deciding to smother me with my pillow."

Seth, Dane, and Niles all looked far more appalled than amused. 

"I do not find that amusing," Niles said flatly. 

Surprise flickered through Danika but then she shrugged.  They were intelligent, far smarter than she was, but then again they never seemed to catch subtle nuances in a conversation.  She supposed they just weren't 'equipped' for it.  Or maybe it was something learned and they just hadn't had time to learn?  "Graveyard humor." 

There wasn't a lot to laugh about on Xeno-12 except morbid humor and she, for one, needed a dose of humor of some kind as often as she could get it.  Of course, she'd discovered the guys were pretty funny a lot of the time--completely unintentionally--because innuendo seemed to go right over their heads, which made it sad-funny at best.  And naturally enough that wasn't something she could share, if she'd had anybody to share it with, or even openly enjoy.  In the first place, they wouldn't 'get' it.  In the second it would only piss them off or worse, hurt their feelings, if they did get it.  And she doubted they would be any happier about her amusement if she tried to explain that it was only amusing because she was fond of them.  If she hadn't been, it wouldn't be funny at all.  It would most likely just irritate the fuck out of her.

She'd never been particularly amused by stupid.

They didn't have to look for Reuel to settle the matter once they'd finished eating and had returned their trays for cleaning.  Reuel, they discovered, was waiting for them at the door of the mess hall. He looked grim.

Danika didn't have a clue why until they reached the women's quarters again. 

"You are not captives of the cyborg people, regardless of the means of your arrival.  You are welcome to stay or you will be escorted to a point near enough to one of the human bases to return to your own people. 

"If you elect to stay, however, you must submit yourself to the sickbay to have your locators removed.  Your presence here with those locators represent a threat to everyone else."

He paused, studying the women.  "If you decide to stay, we will guard your welfare to the best of our abilities, but I am well aware that staying will put you in much the same position that we are in--death if we are caught."  His expression hardened.  "Of course in our case we are only regarded as machines, not citizens or soldiers, and cannot be tried or convicted as deserters.  We would simply be decommissioned and destroyed. 

"You have the benefit of being soldiers and citizens and beyond that, there are witnesses--if they survive--who could support a claim of kidnapping should you be caught and tried--which I believe reduces the risks to you if you did decide to stay."  

He paused again, allowing that time to sink in.  "You have until twelve hundred, EST, to make your decision.  You must present yourself for removal of the locator chip or present yourself to me so that I can arrange an escort from this base."

Chapter Eleven

No one said anything when Reuel left and it finally occurred to Danika that it might be more than just the fact that they were considering what he'd said.  As far as they were concerned, she was a deserter and traitor and she doubted they trusted her enough to speak freely around her.

"I'll leave so that you can discuss this among yourselves."

"Corporal Hart."

Danika stopped and turned, hesitating, but there didn't seem to be any point in not making it clear where she stood and, in fact, it seemed important that she remove all doubt or they'd decide, later, that she'd been deliberately misleading them.  "Captain, now, in the army of the cyborg people."

That seemed to take all of them aback.  Sgt. Whitaker, who'd stopped her, now seemed reluctant to continue.

"You had something to say?" Danika prompted her.  "Something you wanted to ask?"

Sheila frowned.  "You know they're ... defective, right?  Machines suffering the delusion that they're real?"

Danika blinked at her, honestly shocked.  "Actually, I don't know that.  In fact, I know that isn't true."

"Because they told you?" one of the other women asked, Corporal Mary Rawlins, Danika thought.

Danika shook her head.  "They didn't have to.  All you have to do is look in their eyes."

"It isn't possible!" another woman exclaimed.

Danika shrugged.  "Look!  I don't claim to know all of the answers.  I'm no scientist, but I trust what I can see, hear, smell, and feel.  They may have started out as machines.  No doubt in my mind they weren't supposed to be anything else.   But there's also no doubt in my mind that they have become living, breathing, thinking--feeling beings.  They changed and they're ... evolving.  Seth seemed to think it might be the nanos.  He said they were already more than half biological and he thought the nanos finished what hadn't been finished since they were designed to repair to start with."

"Less than half," Sheila disputed.  "It's against the law to create a machine in the lab using even fifty percent biological materials."

Danika rolled her eyes.  "Even I'm not naive enough to believe the company worried about that!  The bottom line is all that concerns them--the profit margin.  And if it was cheaper to 'cheat' a little, then there's no doubt they did.  It doesn't really matter, though.  Something happened.  They aren't just machines anymore."

"They were not only programmed to interact with humans and mimic human behavior, they were equipped with AI to learn.  Maybe you want to believe they're real.  Maybe they think they are, but they're still just machines mimicking humans."

Danika shrugged, angry but determined not to show it.  "Believe what you will. It doesn't matter to me.  Was that all you wanted to talk about?"

  Sheila didn't look like she wanted to give up the debate but after a moment she changed the subject.  "What you told me ... about Master Sgt. Felton ....  That's the truth?"

"Which part?"

"All of it."

"It was too hard to see once the entrance started to collapse to be absolutely certain and I wasn't looking that way anyway when it happened, but I know what I heard.  I know the lieutenant didn't leap under the debris.  As for the other--Felton as much as admitted it--not only that it was going on but that it was under his orders.  He told me to keep my mouth shut and sent me under escort to make sure I didn't say anything.

"Considering that I strongly suspected he'd just gotten rid of the lieutenant because he considered him a dangerous liability, I didn't think he would hesitate to get rid of anybody else he saw as a problem.

"I ran because I didn't think I had an alternative if I wanted to stay alive.  And I didn't know about the base Reuel and his men had captured at that time.  I figured I didn't have much chance if I ran, but I had some as opposed to none."

She hesitated.  "So if any of you are thinking about going back, you should do your best to forget this conversation.  Felton plans on surviving by any means necessary and I doubt he's the only one.

"And don't eat any meat unless you're there when it's killed and butchered and you know what it is."

She turned to leave again.

"Corporal ... Danika."

She saw when she turned that it was Jane Fletcher.  She didn't know the woman that well, but they'd both been conscripted on Juno, her home world.  She lifted her brows questioningly.

The woman cleared her throat and glanced nervously at the other women.  "Do you think we're safer with the cyborgs?"

It was a question she'd asked herself a lot since she'd run, but for her there weren't any options.  "There is no 'safe'.  It's more a matter of chances of survival, if that's what you're asking.  In that sense, yes, I think I'm safer with them.  If you mean safe in the sense 'should we fear them?' ....  At this point, they haven't evolved much past the machines that were programmed to protect us and not harm us and, honestly, I don't think they're going to change in that way.  Reuel seems to have evolved the most and he still seems far more inclined to protect humans even though he believes they are a threat to his own survival. 

"If you mean safe from the military--I don't know.  I think Reuel's right and they're going to come after the cyborgs with a vengeance.  On the other hand, they were built to be fighting machines.  I can't think of anybody I'd rather have at my back than my squad."  She hesitated and then added, "If anybody has the idea of staying in order to betray them, I wouldn't advise that at all.  I don't think it would be safe at all to get on their bad side."

An hour later, the women all presented themselves at sickbay to have their locators removed.  Danika didn't congratulate herself.  She felt a mixture of anger and pity that they'd been forced by circumstances to throw away their past for a future that looked anything but promising.

* * * *

As shaken as Danika was from the trip--probably everyone considering the ship she was on had given rise to a lot of doubt that it would even break Xeno-12's pull of gravity--she was glad she'd still had her wits about her enough to have her gun in hand when they started down the gangplank.  They encountered a hail of primitive projectiles before they were halfway down.  One sharpened stone-tipped spear with a three foot wooden shaft narrowly missed her shoulder.  She didn't think it would have if Dane hadn't batted it aside as it shot past him.

It took Danika a few seconds more to react.  "We're under attack!  Fire!  Fire!  Fire!"

The cyborgs, naturally enough, were far faster at reacting than the handful of humans among them.  The projectiles had scarcely cleared the jungle growth before they had tracked the origin and returned fire.  Within a matter of seconds, they had cleared a swath of jungle to the dirt, with the exception of a smattering of very large trees, a hundred yards from where their ship had landed in a swath as wide as their angle of view allowed.

The hail of projectiles ceased.  Holding their guns at the ready, they continued down the gangplank and began a sweep of the area around their ship as the other ships settled near theirs.  They discovered, however, that any natives that had managed to survive the first retaliatory strike, had disappeared back into the jungle. 

Satisfied that they'd routed the natives, at least for the moment, they returned to await the other arrivals.

Reuel was not happy.  His features were tight with a mixture of anger and disgust when he had descended the gangplank of his own ship and surveyed the clearing. 

He turned and faced the troops, his hands planted on his hips.  "What part of  'stealth' did you fail to understand?" he growled, loud enough for everyone to hear.

Danika, Seth, Dane, and Niles all exchanged uncomfortable glances.  "We were attacked by the natives, Sir!  We were not told not to retaliate if we encountered resistance from the natives,"  Danika responded uneasily since no one else seemed inclined to volunteer an explanation.

Reuel's lips tightened.  "You could not interpret 'stealth' as an order NOT to return fire, Captain Hart?" he growled.

Danika felt her face heat. It occurred to her then that they might have overreacted just a hair, but she wasn't used to primitives lobbing projectiles at her!   Obviously nobody else had considered that a few well places shots would have been sufficient either.  "Sorry, Sir!  Gut reaction." 

Reuel summoned her with a motion of his hand.  Danika didn't glance at her squad that time, but she was relieved when they fell into step with her as she answered the summons. 

Reuel studied the men for a moment before he returned his attention to her.  "This site was chosen for the fact that there would be ample cover for the ships so that we might escape the notice of both the Andorians and the Confederation," he responded finally, gesturing to encompass the flattened jungle.  "What do you see here, Captain?"

Danika chewed her lip.  "An open area, Sir?"

"And what should we be seeing, Captain?"

Danika cleared her throat.  "Jungle?" she hazarded.

His eyes narrowed.  "Precisely.  Since you have been so helpful, Captain, you are in charge of restoring the jungle."

She gaped at him in shocked disbelief for a few seconds before she recovered enough to realize he was waiting for a response--a positive one.  "Yes, Sir!" she said, saluting.  "Uh ... How do we do that, Sir?"

He rolled his eyes.  "I will leave that to your imagination.  I feel confident you will figure something out."

Danika watched his back glumly as he strode away.

"Fuck!"

She glanced at Seth, surprised more by the vehemence in his voice than the 'word'.   "My sentiments exactly," she muttered, releasing a huff of disgust.  "I guess we need to get some of that stuff out there and replant it here.  I suppose we need to see if we can find something to dig with."  She considered for a few moments.  "We're going to need to find water, too.  They'll just croak if we move them otherwise.  Niles--you and Dane hunt up something to dig with and something to carry water.  Me and Seth will find that stream Reuel said was close by."

Niles and Dane looked at Seth questioningly--which irritated the hell out of Danika.  She was still team leader, damn it!

"We do not know that the natives have gone far," Seth said after a moment.  "Would it not be better for all to go and search for the water?"

He had a point, damn it!  "You really think they stopped running?"

Seth shrugged.  "They were brazen enough to attack us as soon as we landed.  Clearly they do not care if we are of the Confederation or the Andorians.  They are hostile to all."

"Yeah, but ....  Ok!  Fine!  We'll all go look for the stream and make sure the area is secure."

It wasn't much of a stream.  Danika had seen ditches that were far bigger.  It had been hidden by the newly mown vegetation.  She found it by stepping in it and sprawling out on the bank on the other side.  Seth grabbed one of her arms and Dane the other and hauled her to her feet.  Niles collected her gun since she'd lost her grip on it when she hit the ground hard enough to temporarily paralyze her reflexes.  Embarrassed, she focused on brushing the dirt and water from the front of her hab-suit.  "Well, we won't have to go far to get the water.  Good thing I was wearing my hab-suit," she added dryly.  She thought about that for a moment and her frown deepened.  "Actually, it was.  You know these hab-suits are really going to make us stick out in the jungle.  Maybe I should point that out to Reuel?  Not that I think there's much chance we've got anything that'll work for jungle camo but ....  these are blinding white.  Well, mine isn't anymore."

The suits had also been designed to keep them warm on the frozen world and Xeno-11 was close enough to the sun they all discovered very quickly that what they needed were hab-suits to keep them cooler.  Danika was ready to strip hers off by the time they'd trekked out to the 'stream' and back to the ship in search of tools.  She debated the merits of having something to protect her skin from the vegetation and the insects as opposed to keeling over from heatstroke and decided to skim out of the suit.  Her T and briefs were as blinding white as the hab-suit, but made of material that was more inclined to absorb moisture and she doubted those would be white very long. 

It transpired that she was right.  After little more than an hour she was liberally smeared from her neck to her boots with dirt and the sticky plant sap that produced streaks of varying shades of green, purple, and yellow, and her pale skin was already turning red from the sun's burning rays.  She didn't know how it was that the guys managed to work without looking like they'd been rolled across the ground when she'd picked up a little of everything she touched!

Ok, so she was having more trouble walking through the damned tangle of debris than they were!  She supposed that might account for it.

She had to say one thing for the guys.  While they'd been far more responsible for clearing the jungle in the first place, they were also far more efficient in cleaning up their mistake.  Within a couple of hours they'd gathered up the bodies of the natives that had attacked them and removed them several hundred yards further into the jungle and transplanted enough vegetation to fill in the first several yards of the clearing they'd made. 

Danika was pretty exhausted by the time they were allowed to stop to rest and eat the noon meal.  Xeno-11's gravity was going to take some getting used to after the lighter gravity on Xeno-12--and the heat.  But she thought they would have their presence mostly disguised from at least casual observation by dusk--depending, of course, on how many hours of light they actually had.  She didn't have a clue as to how long the days were on the planet. 

She didn't realize that Reuel was watching their progress until a little later when he sent several more squads to help them with their task.  She was grateful since she'd had time to realize that her estimate of the time it would take was grossly optimistic. 

Their new base camp had been transformed by the time the sun set.  The outcropping of rock that had attracted Reuel to the place to start with since it offered some concealment of their ships was deeper than they'd at first thought.  They were able to move the largest ship almost completely out of sight beneath the overhanging rock and several of the smaller ones had been partially hidden.  Those not assigned the task of repairing the damage to the jungle gathered a mixture of the vegetation that had been cut down and living plants to help conceal the ships. 

Danika was ready to drop by the time they were allowed to stop for the night.  She almost fell asleep before she could finish her meal and as soon as she had, she headed to the bunk she'd been assigned, crawled into it, and fell asleep in all her grime.  She wasn't up to waiting in line for use of the facilities, though.

Seth obviously didn't approve.  It seemed she'd barely dropped off when he dragged her out of her bunk again.  "The facilities are available now."

"Great!  Enjoy!  I'm going back to bed," she said in a sleep-slurred, drunken voice.

He caught her as she started trying to climb back into her bunk, swung her into his arms and headed for the facilities.

"Damn it, Seth!  If you throw me in the water I'm going to beat the fuck out of you!" she snarled. 

He chuckled.  It was such an unexpected sound that it brought her eyes open.  "You could not beat the fuck out of me if you were not exhausted."

As irritated as she was, his amusement, instead of making her madder, appealed to her sense of the ridiculous.  "I'll still try."

"You will feel better when you have bathed.  And you will sleep better."

"I was unconscious when you dragged me out of the fucking bunk," she muttered, her ire rising to the forefront once more.  "It can't get better than that!"

He stood her on her feet.  When she wavered drunkenly, he slipped one arm around her and pulled her close against his side while he adjusted the water. 

Danika knew he'd only done it to prevent her from falling.  She knew she should be way too tired to feel any interest at all in the fact that she was plastered against him half naked, but she supposed, later, that it was the very fact that she was too tired to think straight to begin with that made her so conscious of him.  The warmth of sensual awareness had already begun to thread its ghostly fingers along her nerve endings and strum them before she had time to consider consciously and make any decision at all.  Instincts had taken over.  Her weariness enveloped her in a fuzzy sort of cocoon that shielded her from awareness beyond the two of them.

As soon as the warm water began to cascade over them and Seth began to rub his free hand over her the vague warmth flowered into full blown heat.  Danika swallowed a little convulsively, struggling then to shut her mind to the feel of his hand coasting over her and the brush of her skin against his with each breath she took.

Belatedly, reason tried to assert itself.  His touch felt good and the desire for more was like a drug in her system.

But this was Seth.  They worked together--worked well together, she thought.  If she stepped across the invisible line between them that would change and she might not like the change.  And there would be no going back. 

It would've been bad enough to consider it if he was as human as she was, but he wasn't.  He hadn't gotten the chance to mature naturally.  Who knew what sort of psychological damage he had from what had been done to him?  Who knew how he might react--both in the short term and long range from what she was thinking?  He was still trying to come to grips with everything else that was new to him.

And yet, when he eased slightly away from her and looked down at her, she couldn't resist looking up at him.  When she did, reason fled.  Desire flared higher as she studied the harsh planes of his face and the darkness of his gaze that told her he was as aroused as she was.

For several moments, she was simply ensnared by his gaze and the promise of pleasure.  Even as reason thrust itself forward again and her instincts prompted her to move away from him, he lowered his head towards her.

She knew he meant to kiss her and her throat went dry with want.  She hesitated, reluctant to move away then.

Just a kiss, she told herself. 

He might be angry and hurt if she rejected him flat out.

One kiss wasn't going to rock their world and screw everything up.

It would be awkward and disappointing for both of them and then they could get past their curiosity and discomfort and that would be the end of that.

It wasn't her he wanted, she told herself.  He was just naturally curious and she was available.

She almost felt like she'd inadvertently stepped on a livewire when their lips met.  The jolt that went through her so thoroughly rattled her that her mind had turned to mush before he even deepened the kiss.  Darkness threatened to rise up and engulf her.

She didn't even know how she came to be flattened against the shower wall with Seth pressing against her so tightly she felt like her body was melding with his.  She was certainly aware, though, that the thick ridge of flesh she could feel was miles from where she wanted it.

Evidently, Seth realized that at about the same time she did.  His hands tightened at her waist and he hoisted her up the wall.  She looped her arms tightly around his shoulders to keep from slipping down again and curled her legs around his waist. 

Unfortunately, she could feel the head of his cock prodding her in the ass then--south of satisfaction!  Seth managed to peel her wet T loose and palmed one of her breasts, squeezing it lightly.  It completely diverted her from her frantic search of her mind for the logistics of how to mount him without losing her grip and hitting the floor.  His fingers pinched the tip as he massaged her breast, sending currents of sensation shimmying through her belly.

Keeping herself anchored to him with one arm, she reached between them to try to peel her T-shirt up far enough to give him access to both breasts.  He took the hint.  Breaking the kiss, he shoved one hand under her ass, caught her T-shirt, and peeled it over her head.  It hung by one arm.  She'd just switched her grip to get rid of it when Seth boosted her higher up the wall and covered one of her breasts with his mouth--almost completely.

Disconcerted by how small her breasts suddenly seemed, sanity emerged briefly and she felt herself cool by several degrees.  It lasted until the first pull of his mouth.  Since the lava flow that created coincided with the abrupt realization that Seth completely dwarfed her she managed to redirect her mind from the discomfiting sense of inadequacy to the pleasure he was creating inside of her. She went back to mindless appreciation for the heated currents he was stirring inside of her and the swiftly rising desire to connect more fully with him and feel him inside of her.

That thought, as soon as it managed to connect in her mushy brain, prompted a search for the cock.  She couldn't find anything but the by now soggy briefs he was wearing and couldn't even identify what part of his anatomy she was feeling beyond the fact that it was below his waist. 

Apparently her search put him in mind of what was lacking, though.  He began groping at something below her and a few moments later she felt something that seemed to be vaguely the right shape--except twice as big as she'd expected--prodding at her cleft. 

If she hadn't been in the grips of high fever by then she thought that might have brought sanity back.  Well, the size of it and the fact that the entrance was still blocked and he was apparently too far gone to figure out why he wasn't making any progress.  All she could really think about, though, as he began alternately trying to shove his cock inside of her and then trying to shove her down over it was that, even if he succeeded, she didn't want her damned panties used as a fucking condom! 

"Seth!" she gasped hoarsely.  "The cloth!  My briefs ...."

He released the breast he'd been sucking, lifted his head and stared at her blankly for several seconds.  Abruptly, he shifted his grip on her and grasped her briefs, trying to peel them off even though her legs were still coiled tightly around his waist. 

Naturally enough, that didn't work, but he did manage to pull them down enough to shove his cock past the fabric barrier and connect skin to skin.  Uncomfortable, but vastly relieved that he at least wasn't trying to shove her panties up her, Danika toyed with the idea of dismounting completely long enough to get rid of the damned briefs and discarded it when he managed to plow past the entrance of her sex and wedge the head of his cock inside of her.  

The burn of skin stretched to its limit caught her attention and held it.  She'd begun to think that, despite the natural lubrication all of his kisses had produced, the mountain wasn't surmountable ... for her, anyway, when he managed to sink deeply enough they passed the point of no return. 

Pleasurable heat rapidly overtook the discomfort as he delved deeply, withdrew, and plunged inside of her again.  The rhythmic glide was mesmerizing, enthralling enough she managed to close her mind to everything else and focus on the building tension inside of her in response to his pummeling assault.  She was getting close to her goal when she felt him stiffen.  His cock twitched inside of her in warning of imminent explosion.

She tensed, feeling a sense of defeat engulf her as it hit her that she wasn't going to make it before he came.

He stopped abruptly.  Breathing heavily, he hesitated for a few moments and began to saw slowly in and out of her. 

It frustrated Danika, but she could feel the rise of hopeful tension once more.  She just needed it hard and fast like before.  She struggled with the urge to demand it, tried to hold onto her patience and focus on the pleasure she felt.

She was rewarded after a few moments with the rhythm she needed.  He picked up the pace, boosted her higher, closer.  He increased the pace until he was pounding in to her so swiftly that it shot her toward her climax.  The waves of bliss that crashed over her when she abruptly reached her crisis were so hard that she couldn't seem to contain it.  She groaned, long and low, her cries gathering in volume and pitch as the convulsions racked her. 

As she crested, felt Seth begin to shudder with his own climax, she suddenly became aware that her delighted cries were bouncing back at her in the damned chamber. It brought her down from her high so abruptly it was dizzying. 

Chapter Twelve

Danika had known she was probably going to regret giving in to her desire.  She just hadn't expected cold reality to hit her quite so hard or so quickly.

While Seth was enjoying the aftermath of his climax, she was listening for any sound that might indicate she'd been vocalizing her pleasure loud enough to wake the dead--the sleepers in the damned crew quarters not ten feet from the fucking bathing facilities!

It was so quiet, she knew immediately that the spray of the shower hadn't been loud enough to cover her yodeling.  As that sank in, she felt her face heat and the blush didn't stop at her neck.  She felt hot all over and it had nothing to do with desire at all!

"Oh my god! Oh shit!  Let me down!" she hissed, struggling to shove Seth away.

He leaned away, stared at her blankly for a moment and finally pulled out, allowing her to slide down until her feet touched the floor.  She was so wobbly legged and the floor so slick with water, she skidded, bumping against the wall hard enough the sound echoed off the walls.

She cringed. 

"What is wrong?"

Danika shook her head, struggling to think of something she could say to convince anybody listening that she hadn't been screwing in the shower!  Nothing came to her.  "That was stupid," she muttered.

Seth caught her arm as she looked around distractedly, wondering if she should stay in the facilities long enough to creep back to her bunk and prevent everybody on the damned ship from knowing it was her and Seth in the shower.  That thought gave her some hope.  All of the women were on the same ship, after all!  It could have been any of them!

The look she saw on Seth's face almost penetrated her embarrassment. He looked ... confused, hurt, and vaguely angry.  "I did something ... wrong?"

She clapped a hand over his mouth to silence him.  "Let's don't talk about it right now, ok?" she whispered. 

His dark brows slammed together over the bridge of his nose, but he didn't attempt to say anything else.

"I got a real problem right now, anyway," she muttered.  "My clothes are soaked.  I don't have anything to put on."

Seth looked down at his own shorts.

He was still hanging out of them, Danika discovered when she followed his gaze.  And he either hadn't cum like she'd thought or he already had another raging hard-on. 

She revised that once she'd pulled her briefs down and wrung the water out of them.  He'd definitely cum! 

The asshole!

She wasn't sure she liked the way the damned thing had leapt right back up!  It sure as hell didn't seem to indicate a lot satisfaction!

She, on the other hand, was completely satisfied and completely uninterested in whether he was ready to go again or not!

Her T and briefs were still way too wet to be comfortable even after she'd wrung as much water out as she could and stood inside the dryer until her skin and hair was dry.  She contemplated staying longer, but her skin was already stinging from the sunburn. 

The upside to the situation was that she figured everybody would've had time to go back to sleep--she hoped. 

* * * *

Danika knew as soon as they were summoned to report to the mess for food and then turn out for work detail the following morning that she'd been too horribly right.  She'd made enough racket to wake up everybody sleeping in the hold/sleeping quarters.  Most of the men simply stared at her as if they were trying to figure out why she'd been caterwauling.  The women either wouldn't look at her at all or they smirked knowingly, which made her want to knock the smirks off their faces. 

Sheila was the only one that had the nerve to approach her directly, however.

"So," she said pausing on her way out of the mess, "how was it?"

Danika felt her face flame instantly.  "What?" she asked, trying to pretend she didn't have a clue of what the woman was talking about. 

Sheila gave her a look.  "Oh come on!  The showers weren't that damned good!  At least not when I took mine."

She supposed if she put her fist in Sheila's face it wouldn't be considered assaulting a superior now  that Reuel had made her captain ... and it was tempting.  On the other hand, she was still more intent on pretending it had never happened than removing all doubt and besides that Reuel was already unhappy with her due to the firefight with his groundcover the day before.

As if the thought had conjured him or--horror of horrors he'd already heard!--she saw Reuel striding toward the ship as she left it.  She was on the point of trying to pretend she hadn't seen him when he lifted a hand and summoned her.

She presented herself reluctantly.  "Yes, Sir?" she said uneasily.

"Come with me."

              He didn't wait to see if she would.  He simply kept going and started climbing the rocks toward the summit of  the rocky crag they'd used to conceal the ships.  Hoping he didn't intend to go all the way to the top since she wasn't really keen on heights, Danika followed him.  He paused on a ledge about half way up, moved to the edge and stared down at their encampment.  Apparently satisfied, he turned and gestured for her to join him.

Curious, Danika moved closer and stood staring down, as well. 

"I have need of the human eye and I trust you.  Look closely and see how well we have done in concealing our presence."

As comprehension dawned, Danika focused on the view below in an entirely different way.  It was hard to be objective, she discovered, when she knew what was below, but she focused on looking for anything that really stood out.  "I don't think anybody would see it unless they were specifically looking for it," she said finally.  "I mean the ships or the equipment.  It's pretty easy to see everybody working because their suits are so white and nothing else is.  And I think we might ought to get rid of the vegetation we cut down.  I can't see it from here, but it's already starting to look wilted.  It'll look dead soon and then it'll probably be a lot more noticeable."

Reuel, she saw when she glanced at him, was frowning.  He nodded.  "I'd thought much the same."  He paused for several moments.  "Some of them know we have ships.  I think we must assume there will still be survivors when the Confederation ships arrive and that that will not remain a secret long."  He looked disgusted.  "I had hoped ....  But we must work with what we have to work with.  Let us hope that the determination of a few to rescue the women from our former battalion will not cost us all--and work to do what we can to prevent that.

"We must see what we can do about the suits.  Some of the vegetation stained your skin yesterday when you were working.  Mayhap it can be used to make the hab-suits a little less blindingly white?  I will let you experiment with that."

Danika nodded and turned to go.

"Ah ... Captain ....  Mayhap a little more discretion next time?"

Danika whipped a sharp look at him, feeling her face heat.  "Sir?"

Humor gleamed in his eyes for a few moments and then he looked away, studying the scene below them.  "There are no doubt strange and wonderful creatures on this world.  I believe I heard the mating call of one last eve when I was making my final rounds.  I pointed it out to the men. 

"It would be ... interesting to explore and mayhap we will have the opportunity, but I have grave doubts that that will be the case.  As soldiers we have lived each day with the possibility that it will be our last.  I fear we will see many more of those days before we find a place for ourselves--a place where we might have the peace to explore the wonderful gift of life with some surety that we will have tomorrows, as well, but then again that is all the more reason to  enjoy what we can while we may."

He turned to look at her again.  "Within reason and so long as it does not induce a lack of caution or a breakdown of discipline or morale."

Danika nodded.  "Yes, Sir.  Thank you, Sir."

"You're dismissed, Captain." 

Danika was too focused on her embarrassment as she made the climb down to think about the other things Reuel had said, but as she reached the camp area again and looked around for her squad the rest of it began to tumble around in her mind. 

She had been in the habit ever since she'd been inducted into the military to simply do what she was told and look to the future when she would be released and allowed to return home.  She'd known there was a possibility that she might be killed in action and never go back, but she'd refused to dwell on that possibility.  She hadn't foreseen any other situation that would make that impossible. 

It occurred to her abruptly, though, that she hadn't had more than a vague idea of what she would do with her life when and if she did get the chance to go back.  She'd figured she would find someone to settle with, a life partner, and build a homestead like her parents had--have children.  But there hadn't been anyone special in her life when she'd left, no one to yearn for, no one to picture at her side as she built the life her parents had for herself.

She supposed that was why she hadn't been devastated when it had been borne in upon her that she couldn't go back--the fact that she hadn't lost a dream because she'd never really had one.  She also hadn't really accepted that she would never get the chance to see her family again.  Even with everything that had happened, she'd carefully avoided acknowledging the impossibility of it.

She couldn't accept that now, but the likelihood that she would make it home again, see the family she'd left behind, dimmed even more.

She shook the thought off, unwilling to deal with it until and unless she had to and, the gods willing, it wasn't something she would have to accept in the near future.

Maybe, she thought, she would eventually find a way and if not time would allow her to accept it without the suffocating sense of loss that threatened every time she thought of her home and family?

In any case, the seed Reuel had planted when he'd spoken of a place and a future had found fertile ground. 

* * * *

Seth was confused and angry.  He was not entirely certain of why he felt that way and that only deepened the sense of ... injury.

He was not particularly pleased when he managed to untangle yet another emotion from the roiling mass that seemed to be building inside of him toward explosion rather than dissipating.  Because he was not certain of why he would feel injured anymore than he understood why he was angry and felt both hollow in his gut and at the same time so filled with wildly divergent and powerful, if unidentifiable, emotions that he felt like he could not contain them long without exploding.

He wanted--needed--to do something violent, he finally decided, looking around somewhat hopefully for a possibility of venting.  When he did, he discovered that both Dane and Niles were looking at him in a way that provoked him even more.

"What?" he growled.  "You have a problem?"

It was too much for Dane.  It was bad enough that he had lain awake listening while Seth sexed Danika as he had been longing to do ever since he had finally managed to decipher the urge that made his mind turn to mush every time he looked at Danika!  It was bad enough that he had scarcely slept at all afterward for the pain in his groin and the images that kept his mind alive and his body restless!  But to be snarled at by the very bastard that had taken what he had wanted was the outside of enough!  He swung at him with every intention of taking his head off of his shoulders.

Seth ducked at the last second, infuriating him further.

"Not here!" Seth growled.  "We will end in the brig and then there will be no one to guard Danika's back!"

"I do not think that it was her back that you were guarding in the shower last eve!" Niles snarled.

Seth made the mistake of grinning at Niles provokingly.

Dane used his distraction to trip him.  Seth double-stepped, trying to regain his balance, and Niles kicked his other foot out from under him.  He slammed into the ground hard enough he skidded nearly a yard and Niles and Dane exchanged a look of satisfaction.  "You should watch your step," Dane cautioned.  "The ground is treacherous here."

"It was not the ground that tripped me!" Seth snapped furiously.

"It looked that way to me," Dane retorted.

"I thought so," Niles seconded him.

Seth glared at both of them and stalked off into the jungle.  He was waiting for them perhaps fifty yards beyond the base perimeter.  Leaping out from the cover of a tree when they were almost even with him, he managed to slug both of them hard enough to set them back on their heels.  Uttering a roar of rage, Dane, who recovered first, charged him, slamming into him hard enough that his weight and momentum carried both of them several yards further before they crashed into the undergrowth.  Seth managed to twist as they fell so that they landed side by side rather than with Dane on top as he'd intended.  They wrestled for dominance for several moments and Seth managed to gain the upper hand.  Straddling Dane, he began pounding at his face with his fists.  Dane tried to catch Seth's flying fists, but since the first blow had split the skin above Dane's eye, he was too blinded by the blood for that to be effective.  When he discovered he couldn't manage more than blocking one out of three punches, he began pounding his fists against Seth's sides and trying to buck him off. 

After a few moments of watching, Niles stepped forward and slugged Seth on the jaw, toppling him off of Dane.  Dane immediately scrambled to his feet, scrubbed an arm across his face to clear his vision and charged Seth again.  Seth managed to get to his feet just in time to catch Dane's head in his belly. It knocked the breath from him.  His feet flew out from under him and he hit the ground--rolling.

Dane dove at him and only managed to plow the ground where Seth had been moments before.  Regaining his feet before Dane could, Seth aimed several well placed kicks at Dane's belly as he pushed himself to his hands and knees, kicking him hard enough to lift him from the ground with each blow.

A roar of rage reminded Seth that Niles still waited impatiently in the wings to kick his ass.  Even as he turned to meet the new threat, Niles slammed into him.  They hit the ground together, plowing up several feet of vegetation before they stopped.  Niles, on top, managed to rear up far enough to slug Seth in the face several times before Seth threw him off.

Unable to prevent Seth from pitching him off, Niles used the momentum to roll up onto his feet and then surged toward Seth as Seth got to his feet.

Dane found a place to rest while he waited for his turn with Seth again.  He was winded--no surprise when the atmosphere was thicker than he was accustomed to.  He was still too angry to be very aware of the pain Seth had inflicted, but neither could he completely dismiss the pounding in every area where Seth's fists had connected.  Some satisfaction filled him, though, that his fists were also pounding with pain and the reflection that he'd inflicted, not merely received.

By the time Seth had managed to beat Niles to a standstill his pain had receded.  Curiously, his anger had, as well and he made no attempt to get to his feet to resume the fight even though he'd intended to when he'd settled to rest.  Seth, after staring at him for a few moments to see if he would get up, looked around a little vaguely and finally staggered to another tree, planted his back against the trunk, and slid down to sit and catch his breath.

* * * *

Despite her distraction, it didn't take Danika long to figure out that her entire squad was missing.  Deciding that they might have gone down to the stream to collect water to finish the job they'd been assigned the day before, she headed in that direction.  She'd reached the trickle of water before she heard the sounds indicating a fierce fight.  Her heart leapt into her throat.  Her first gut reaction was to sound the alarm, but there was something about the sounds that gave her pause. 

There was no gunfire, nothing but grunts, growls, and meaty thuds.

It sounded like a fistfight, the sort of brawl the troops had indulged in fairly regularly when discipline had begun to deteriorate at the base on Xeno-12.

Her guys wouldn't be fighting, though.

After a few moments, she decided she at least needed to check it out to see what was going on.  Shifting her rifle from her shoulder, she began to move stealthily toward the sounds she could hear.  It took her a while to work her way to the area, partly because of her certainty that she didn't want to announce her approach just in case it was the natives and partly because it was difficult in the jungle to be absolutely certain of the direction the sounds were coming from. 

By the time she finally arrived, she discovered that Dane, Seth, and Niles were all sitting.  Feeling perfectly blank, she scanned the men and then the area.  It was clear not only from their condition but from the condition of the forest that she hadn't been mistaken about a fight in progress but she didn't see anybody but her guys.  "What the hell happened here?" she demanded as the first shock wore off.

Seth, Dane, and Niles all looked at her with a mixture of guilt and something else she couldn't quite fathom and then they looked at one another as if searching for an answer.

"We decided that we had need of practice at sparring.  We have been idle for far too long," Seth said, sending a glare in the direction of the other two men as if daring them to dispute his claim. 

Danika gaped at him in disbelief and then surveyed the other two men.  "Sparring?" she responded doubtfully, crossing the clearing they had made to ascertain the extent of the damage.  All that backbreaking work the day before hadn't been enough to relieve their boredom from inactivity?  "Look at the mess you've made!  We haven't even finished ...."  She broke off abruptly as she caught a glint of something through the brush perhaps fifty yards or so from where they were standing.  Focusing on it, unnerved at first by the fear that she'd caught a flash of sunlight on metal--as in weapon--she finally realized that it was water.  "Hey!  I think there's a lake over there!"

Dismissing the problem with the guys for the moment, she began pushing her way through the jungle toward the body of water she thought she'd spied. 

Seth watched her departure with a mixture of weariness, uneasiness, and indignation.  If he had not known better, he would have thought that he had only dreamed what had passed between them the night before!  He was certain that she should behave differently toward him now.  He was not certain in what way she should behave differently, but they had sexed one another the night before and he did not feel the same, therefore she should not feel the same!

He had been certain that he had pleased her.  She had reacted just as his simulations in his programming had described orgasm.  Actually, not precisely but she had displayed behavior that suggested orgasm ... except she had not seemed to experience post coital lethargy or warmth toward him, her partner. 

That part had been bothering him since and he found himself unable to dismiss it as immaterial, particularly now that time had passed and she did not seem more warm and friendly toward him than she had before.  She did not seem to be exhibiting any behavior that indicated that she had either enjoyed it or had interest in repeating the experience and he had the uneasy feeling that that meant she had not enjoyed it and had no interest in repeating the experience.

He was certain that he had done all the things that were known to stimulate pleasure. 

He was almost certain.  There was nothing in the simulations to indicate that he would feel pleasure himself and he had felt a very great deal of it, so much, in point of fact, that he could not recall very clearly what he had done. 

He had kissed her lips and caressed her to arouse her.  He recalled that very clearly because he had more than half expected that she would punch him in the gut when he attempted it and had been both very surprised and very pleased when she had not.  He had waited to see if she would push him away or otherwise indicate that she was not willing to proceed and she had not so he had continued to caress her and kiss her.

He frowned, trying to recall what else he had done and finally recalled that he had kissed her breasts.  His programming indicated that to be an erogenous zone with most women.  Some were more sensitive than others, but most found it highly arousing and he thought her behavior had indicated that Danika did.

He had not mounted her until she had displayed behavior indicating that she found the idea acceptable and he was certain he had not misread her behavior.  She had clung tightly to him and actually helped him rather than screaming or fighting.

He frowned.  He had replayed the memories over and over throughout the night and he still could not find anything to indicate he had done something wrong.

And yet, he felt as if he must have.

Mayhap the problem was that he had only the basic sexdroid programming which only included two very short simulations? 

When he emerged from his latest attempt to collate the data he had gathered into a comprehensible report, he realized that he could no longer hear Danika very well--which meant she had moved further away than he had expected her to.

Despite his weariness from sparring and his sense of ill-usage, his uneasiness moved to the forefront.  He surged to his feet then, straining to catch sight of her in the high brush.  All he could actually see, though, was the movement of the brush to indicate where she was and that indicated that she had indeed moved further away than he had expected that she would.

Quelling the urge to call out to her, he started after her, moving quickly to close the distance since some unnamed fear had gripped him.  Dane and Niles both got to their feet and followed. 

He had closed perhaps half the distance that separated them when he heard a series of screams that seemed to electrify him and chill him to the bone at the same time.  Almost simultaneous to the screams, he caught movement and saw creatures swing from the trees on vines.  He did not stop to analyze the trajectory and ascertain their objective.  He knew what it was--Danika!

Uttering a challenging roar, he burst into a full run.  The creatures clinging to the vines responded by whipping startled, open-mouthed looks in his direction but naturally enough they were committed once they had swung outward and could not halt.  Instead, they dropped from the vines and disappeared into the high brush within yards of Danika.

He thought his roar had alerted Danika.  He hoped that it had for he heard sounds of contact before he could actually see anything. 

He had counted six of the creatures.  When he arrived upon the scene, he found a heaving mass of four.  Two were just picking themselves up from the ground and since Danika was nowhere to be seen, he knew she was at the center of the mass.

Ignoring the two since he knew Dane and Niles were directly behind him, he focused on the mass, trying to decide how he could remove them from Danika without causing injury to her himself.  She was shorter than the creatures, though, and he decided that he could strike the head without transferring the power of the blow to her.

He did not want to spare the time to try to determine how powerful a blow he should use.  As a consequence, his fist connected with the head nearest him hard enough it exploded like an egg and separated completely from the body.  The fragmented skull slammed into the head of the creature next to him hard enough to break its neck and the two bodies buckled and dropped to the ground.  The two that remained both held long knives and he focused on the knives, grasping the hands that held them and snapping the bones that connected the hands to the arms.  Both creatures screamed.  The one who'd coiled an arm around Danika's throat, however, lifted her bodily, by her head, and tried to carry her away.  He caught the creature's wrist and elbow and pried them away from Danika, snapping the elbow.  As soon as Danika dropped to the ground, he punched the creature that had been holding her in the face and his head tore free from his body and bounced away into the grass.

When a quick survey assured him that there was no longer any threat, he dropped to a crouch to examine Danika.   To his consternation, he saw that she was unnaturally white and he did not have to touch her to see the tremors wracking her body.

"Where are you damaged?"

Chapter Thirteen

Danika stared at Seth blankly at the question, trying to figure out what he meant.  As his meaning finally filtered through her shock, however, she turned her mind inward, inventorying the pounding aches and trying to decide if they were actual injuries that would require medical attention or merely bruises.  "I think I'm ok," she said finally, "just banged up a little."

Discomfort of a different sort assailed her when she'd managed to get shakily to her feet.  She'd been distracted by her discovery, but she hadn't been that damned distracted!   She didn't know how a half a dozen primitives had managed to get the drop on her.  She hadn't heard them until they'd been practically on top of her.   "Where the hell did they come from?"

"The trees," Dane supplied.

Danika gaped at him and then looked up.  She wasn't under any trees!  She would've examined them for threat if she had been.  In fact she had scanned the area in and around them for any sign of movement or lurking shadows.  The nearest were at least twenty feet away or more.  She should've heard them--would have, she was certain--if they'd charged from the trees.

"They used vines and swung from the upper branches like primates," Niles elaborated.

"There is blood here," Seth interjected before Danika could comment.

She looked down in surprise.  "Theirs, I guess."

"Not theirs," Seth responded grimly.  "Their blood is yellow."

Danika blinked at Seth a couple of times while that sank in and then felt her knees abruptly buckle. 

Seth caught her, lowering her slowly to the ground and then opened the suit to examine the wound.  "It is not bleeding badly--now--but I cannot tell how deep it is without prying it open or ascertain whether organs were compromised or not."  He frowned.  "I think it will be best to take you back to the ship to tend the wound.  They are nasty creatures.  I believe we must be concerned with infection."

Despite his cool analysis of the situation that scared Danika.  She hadn't considered the possibility that the primitives might have anything capable of penetrating the hab-suits.  They were designed for combat.  In general, the light-weight armor couldn't be penetrated by projectiles, even if they didn't exactly repel them and a direct hit could pack enough punch to kill the wearer at times.  It came as a very unpleasant surprise to discover she'd been wounded at all.  Regardless, she didn't think the wound was deep enough to have damaged her internally.

Unfortunately, infection was another matter altogether.  It took no more than a scratch to make her vulnerable to whatever bacteria might have been on the weapon.

And he was right about them being nasty things!  She'd smelled them before they got close enough to attack. 

Beyond that, this was an alien world and could be home to all sorts of things her immune system wasn't equipped to deal with, regardless of the immunizations they'd been given before they shipped out.  After all, they hadn't been expected to end up on Xeno-11.  They'd been shipped out to Xeno-12.

Despite her protests that she was fully capable of walking, Seth ignored her and picked her up to carry her.  "This way is faster."

"You said it wasn't bad."

"It does not appear to be," Seth corrected her.  "I am not programmed as a medic-borg, however.  I have virtually no data regarding human injuries."

"None of the others are either," Danika said unhappily.

"This is not true.  There were two among those we found at the second Andorian base."

"Really?" Danika said hopefully.  "You aren't just saying that to make me feel better?"

Seth frowned.  "I would not mind saying that to make you feel better," he said hesitantly.  "However I do not see that it would be helpful to lie in this circumstance.  You would know as soon as we returned."

"Good point."

Dane, who had been brooding over the fact that Seth was always first to grab Danika up when there was a situation that allowed it, arrived at what he thought was a logical argument to convince Danika to allow him to carry her instead.  "I should carry you.  Seth is first man.  He should take point since we cannot know that there will not be another attack, and Niles is third man and should bring up the rear as always."

Seth and Niles both glared at him, but he had expected they would not be pleased and he did not care that they were not.

Danika, contrary to what he had hoped, merely stared at him in surprise.  "What?"

He did not know how she could have failed to hear him when he was walking directly beside Seth, but he repeated his assessment of the situation. "Seth is point man.  He should take point and I will carry you."

"I do not mind carrying Danika," Seth growled, "and since I sparred with both you and Niles, I am weary and that might adversely affect my judgment or my reflexes.  You should take point."

"Oh!  If you're tired, maybe ...."

"I am not that tired," Seth said before she could finish.

"If you are tired," Dane said angrily, "then I should carry Danika!  It will not help her if you drop her!  Then you can take rear position and Niles can take point."

"If I am only third man," Niles snapped angrily, "then I am the least valuable member of the squad!  I should  carry Danika while the two of you guard our retreat."

"What a thing to say!" Danika gasped, appalled.  "Every member of the team is valuable!  Maybe I should just walk?"

Seth glared at Dane.  "Now see what you have done?  You have made her feel as if she is compromising the team when it is you who are the problem!  You should be at point and on guard against the possibility of another attack instead of arguing!"

"We killed all of them!" Dane said angrily.  "And then we checked the perimeter with our infrared.  There were no heat signatures indicating the possibility of others nearby!"

"Then it cannot matter who takes point," Seth said smugly.

Dane glared at him, wondering if he could punch him in the face without risking further injury to Danika.  Finally, reluctantly, he decided he could not.

They met up with Reuel, who was leading three squads.  Reuel assessed them.  "There was an attack?"

Seth felt his face heat.  "Aye.  The primitives attacked from above.  Danika was wounded."

Reuel's gaze searched her and came to rest on her face again.  "How did this come about?  Were you not wearing your hab-suit at the time?"

Danika's face turned so red it felt like it was flashing.  "I was, Sir."

"Take her to sickbay.  We will continue with a sweep of the area."  He met Danika's gaze again. "I will expect a report, Captain."

"Aye, Sir.  I mean, yes, Sir!"

Not surprisingly, they created a stir when they reached camp since Danika hadn't managed to convince Seth to put her down.

Not that she hadn't tried!  But he was damned hardheaded!

As embarrassing as the encounter with Reuel had been it paled beside the discomfort of being carried into camp like somebody mortally wounded when she barely had a scratch to show for her encounter with the primitives--well, and a host of multi-colored bruises forming.  She definitely looked like she'd been in a fight but, just as clearly, she was still pretty much intact. 

The medic looked downright confused when he'd stripped her suit to her waist to examine the wound.  "This is the wound?"

Seth glared at him.  "I could not determine how deep it might be or if it had damaged her internally.  Beyond that, the weapon that caused it belonged to a primitive and I am certain that the wound must be thoroughly examined for foreign substances and the possibility of bacteria."

The medic glared back at him.  "I am a medic.  I do not need instruction."

Seth thrust his jaw forward belligerently, narrowing his eyes at the other man and clenching and unclenching his fists suggestively.

Danika held up a hand.  "Ok.  Now that we've established that my wound is probably teaming with filth and bacteria, do you think we could focus on that?"

"This was a projectile like those used in the previous attack?" the medic asked her.

"I didn't actually get much of a chance to examine it ...."

"It appeared to be bone," Seth responded at almost the same time.  "Those used before were tipped with stone ... mostly."

The medic glanced from her to Seth and back again. 

"Thanks, Seth!" Danika said hurriedly since it looked like the two might be considering physical violence and it occurred to her that that might escalate into an actual exchange of blows once the medic started probing her wound.  "Do you think you could wait outside?"

He looked reluctant and somewhat outdone that she'd suggested it but after a moment he nodded, turned, and strode from the room.

"That was helpful at any rate," the medic said coolly.  "At least I know what to look for.  The hab-suit is punctured but it seems to be intact.  I do not believe the projectile will have carried any fibers inside, but I will check for that, as well."

The scan, naturally enough, wasn't painful, but since the medic discovered that there were particles of bone and a few fibers inside the wound, cleaning it out went way beyond a 'little discomfort'.  Danika gritted her teeth while he spread the wound, probed it with something like long tweezers and  then poured it full of antiseptic to flush out anything he might have missed.  She thought she was going to pass-out when he closed it.

He patted her shoulder.  "Lie here while I examine the material under the microscope for bacteria."

She was happy to do so.  She thought she might really pass out if she tried to get up.

He was smiling when he returned.  "There is bacteria present.  We must assume that we did not remove it all."

"Well!  That's certainly good news!" Danika snapped, both frightened by the news and pissed off at his cheerfulness in delivering the unwelcome information.

"It is good news.  The bacteria is familiar and you have been inoculated.  I will give you a booster injection--just to be certain."

The other good news was that the weakness had passed--somewhat--by the time he'd finished.

Apparently, she still looked pale.  The medic frowned at her.  "You do not have nanos.  You should return to crew quarters and rest the remainder of the day, I believe, rather than returning immediately to your duties."

* * * *

Danika had managed to convince Seth, Dane, and Niles to return to work and had just begun to drowse when she sensed a presence that brought her awake again.  Reuel, she discovered, was standing beside her bunk.

She jackknifed upright reflexively and then winced at the burning pull along her wound and the protest of her battered body.

"Be still," Reuel commanded.  After looking around, he settled on the bunk across from her.  "Under other circumstances, I would allow you to rest and report at some later time, but I feel  that an attack so close to the base warrants immediate attention.  It seems that I underestimated the intelligence and/or aggressiveness of the natives.   I had thought the retaliation upon our arrival must drive them back for some time so that we need not concern ourselves with them--not at once, at any rate. 

"I believe I have figured out what transpired, but I would like to hear your version of events."

It was unfortunate that it occurred to Danika just then--and not before so that she had time to invent a plausible story--that her squad hadn't been where they should have been or occupied with what they should have been doing.  She felt her color fluctuate while that ran through her mind and she began a frantic search for a response that wouldn't get them into trouble.  "Well ... uh ... after I got back to camp from our meeting, I noticed the guys weren't in the base perimeter and figured they must be out collecting more plants.  So I went to look for them."

"And they were busy collecting?"

Danika reddened.  "Uh ... they had decided to get in a little sparring--to keep in shape, you know?"

"Ah!  We must certainly keep in good fighting form!  So that no doubt explains the newly cleared area beyond the perimeter.  Continue."

"Well, they'd finished by the time I got there and decided to rest.  I examined the ... uh ... area ...."

"The new area they decided to clear?"

"Uh ... yes, that one.  And I was just about to point out that you'd sent me to collect vegetation anyway to see if we could use it to camouflage the hab-suits when I happened to catch a glint in the distance.  My first thought was that it was metal, but then I realized it was a body of water and decided to investigate since the stream is hardly sufficient for our needs--I mean with so many of us now.

"So I ... uh ... left them resting."

Reuel's lips thinned.  "Instead of summoning your squad."

Danika squirmed.  "Yes, Sir.  Stupid, I know, but it didn't look that far and I had my weapon."

"That was the act of a green recruit--not a seasoned officer--which you are now ... or should be.  You have not seen enough combat to know better than to go off alone, Captain?"

"It was poor judgment," Danika responded uncomfortably.

"Very poor!  We are in enemy territory--still.  The natives had already displayed their hostility."  He stood.  "I will hope that the wound is sufficient to inspire better judgment in the future.  I will not comment on the fact that you led your squad into unnecessary danger since, from what I can determine, it would be hard to say who led whom.  But I will point out that your judgment last eve was no better and that it is up to you to make certain that your squad continues to perform as a team and does not disintegrate due to ... favoritism--into warring factions that will create further disturbance and could endanger not only your entire team, but others, as well."

Danika was so stunned by the accusation of favoritism that it took her a while to figure out what he meant.  Not that she had any trouble grasping that his reference to 'last eve' was an allusion to her having had sex in the shower room with Seth!  That had instantly leapt into her mind!  She just couldn't figure out why he thought that had had anything to do with the attack.

Maybe he knew something she didn't?  He had certainly questioned the guys.  Would he have gotten them to tell them why they'd been fighting?

Because she didn't buy the story Seth had cooked up about sparring.  She thought it could have been possible, maybe even likely if they were human soldiers.  But they were cyborgs.  They didn't need to practice.  Everything they needed to know about hand-to-hand combat was hardwired into them.

Even so, it was easier to accept that they'd been practicing than the possibility that they'd been fighting--at least on one level.  She didn't think they'd lost the ability to be logical and reasonable because they'd gained the ability to feel.  Even if emotion did cloud their judgment now, just like it did with their human counterparts, what could they have disagreed on vehemently enough to fight about it?

The sex thing, she realized, dismayed.  She'd wanted to dismiss the suggestion, but she couldn't think of another damned thing that might have.  Of course, that was assuming that both Dane and Niles felt left out and wanted sex.

Basil had made it pretty clear, though, that the cyborgs already had, or were going, to reach the point where they were as inclined as any human male to feel that urge powerfully. 

It was weird that she hadn't noticed.  She supposed that was because she'd just gotten used to thinking of them as teammates. 

Either that or Reuel was wrong and it had had nothing to do with the fight at all.

He had to be referring to that, though, as the reason for the screw-up.  She'd gone looking for them or they wouldn't have been out there to start with, and if they hadn't been fighting before she got there they would've followed her immediately. 

She supposed she'd expected them to.  She supposed that was why she hadn't felt any real sense of danger. 

Poor judgment on the part of all of them--which brought her to the inescapable conclusion that she'd screwed up worse than she'd realized when  she'd given in to her own urges.  She had considered that it was bound to change her relationship with Seth and that it might not be a good thing, but she hadn't considered that it might change things between all of them.

Of course, she'd been stupid enough at the time to think nobody would ever know but her and Seth and hadn't considered that she might need to worry about her actions affecting anybody else. 

Not that any of that mattered--now.  She couldn't go back and undo it so she had to deal with it. 

And there were only two options that she could see.  She could try to pretend it had never happened and hope the guys got it through their thick skulls that that meant she didn't mean to repeat it--or share.  Or she could accept that her actions might have aggravated an already volatile situation and that the best way to prevent more violence was to behave impartially for the good of all. 

That would work as long as no one was emotionally involved and it wasn't obvious to all of the men that some of the men were seeing 'action' while the majority did without. 

In other words, the maritime sex act.

The problem was, the odds were way worse now than they had been back at the base at Slaughter Ridge.  If they were discreet, it should keep her squad in line and focused.  If they weren't, it might still keep peace within her squad, but create severe morale issues throughout the rest of the battalion and she didn't think Reuel would thank her for that!

And she also didn't think the handful of women who'd  'joined' them would appreciate being forced to fend off the other cyborgs or give in.  They'd opted to join them for the sake of survival because they knew their chances weren't good if they stayed on Xeno-12.  Most of them still looked upon the cyborgs as machines, though, and they wouldn't see it as necessary to partner up for the sake of morale and peace among the ranks.  In fact they might be more inclined to use it to create disharmony. 

Well, she supposed some of them might feel enough of a bond with their squads to do what they thought best for the squad--regardless.  But it seemed to her that most of the women that seemed to be coming around to the possibility that the cyborgs were living beings, not machines, also viewed them as alien and inhuman and wanted nothing to do with them because of that.

And then there was Sheila who, as a non-com, hadn't had her own squad to start with.

* * * *

Danika discovered the task Reuel had set for her was undoable--at least with the technology they had at hand.  The hab-suits were designed of impermeable fabric and that meant it would not absorb any kind of dye.  Their briefs and T's were a different matter.  The plant dyes worked so well on them that no amount of washing would remove the stains once treated with the concoction she came up with and the same, unfortunately, was pretty much true for their skin. 

No one was particularly inclined to complain even though their underclothes didn't offer much in the way of protection from biting insects or the occasional unpleasant encounter with scratchy vines and branches.  It was actually a relief to have an excuse to come out of the suits during the day while they worked.  Xeno-11 was orbiting in the comfort zone around its star, but its rotation was slower than Earth's and that allowed the day side to heat up to an uncomfortable ninety to one hundred degrees during the day.  At night, that also allowed the temperatures to drop to a very uncomfortable forty to fifty degrees, but the hab-suits weren't bright enough to present as much of a target once the sun set either and, in any case, they generally worked during the daylight hours to conserve energy.  Only those posted to guard duty worked at night while everyone else retreated inside the ships. 

Most of their energy was directed at resupplying and outfitting the ships that had brought them from Xeno-12.  Reuel's plan/hope was to effect a full evacuation of the system before the Confederation fleet arrived, with a short-term goal of returning to Xeno-12 to rescue anyone still stranded there that they could find. 

They had only one ship capable of taking them beyond the system, however, and it wouldn't hold even the people currently with them.  Which meant that they were still, effectively, trapped--sitting ducks when and if the Confederation launched a strike to recover or destroy the cyborgs. It also meant that they didn't have the means of even attempting to rescue anyone else stranded on Xeno-12.  It was high priority, therefore, to complete the transformation of the short-range ships to long-range as soon as possible.

The attack on Danika forced Reuel to re-evaluate the level of threat the natives represented, however.  Their primitive weapons in and of themselves weren't a serious threat, but not only did he not want to waste valuable, and currently irreplaceable, munitions fending them off while they completed preparations of the ships, he also saw that they could potentially be very disruptive of their efforts to complete their main objective within the time frame he'd set.  One attack upon landing was an annoyance.  Two attacks in a matter of days was a problem that needed to be dealt with.

The day after the attack on Danika, therefore, Reuel ordered a complete sweep of the area.  The objective was to eliminate or force a retreat of the natives to a more comfortable distance.  He would then setup a secondary perimeter to keep the natives at a distance. 

The sun had barely crested the horizon high enough to begin brightening the sky when they launched their offensive, which meant that the jungle still lay in gloom, a cluster of shadows within shadows.  Danika was tense.  She was certain she would have been anyway. Not knowing where the enemy lay in wait or even if they did or when they might pop up was unnerving.  With the attack the day before still all too fresh in her mind, though, she thought she was more tense with expectation.  It took a strenuous  effort of concentration to keep from tightening her finger on the trigger every time she heard the faintest rustle of vegetation or snap of a twig. 

They'd formed a wall, almost shoulder to shoulder, around the perimeter of the base camp.  As they moved outward, however, the line began to loosen and separate perforce to cover the widening circle they were searching.  She'd ordered Dane and Niles to keep watch of the trees overhead while she and Seth scanned the terrain in front of them.  She knew their vision was far better than her own, particularly since they could also scan in infrared, and it still took an effort to keep from casting glances upward as they moved beneath the trees. 

She thought she'd managed to acquit herself well enough the day before, particularly since she'd been heavily outnumbered, but she was still shaken from it.

They hadn't advanced more than a few yards from the base camp perimeter when they heard the blood curdling screams the natives emitted when they attacked.  Her and her squad froze in place, listening, struggling with the order to hold their position against the urge to run toward the fight in progress--or away from it.  The hair on the back of Danika's neck prickled the moment the screams erupted, her heart picking up its pace.

A half a dozen laser blasts answered the screams and then an eerie stillness settled once more.   Danika glanced at her men and then dragged in a shaky breath, wiped the sweat from her palms, and resumed the slow advance.  The world around them lightened until Danika could see well enough to discern individual plants from clumps of shadow.  The tension began to make itself felt in whining muscles.

Off to their left, they heard another attack--screams followed by laser blasts.  That time there was enough visibility to see some of the action, although it was distant enough they could only guess at the number of natives by the number of shots. 

When Danika glanced at the men again, she discovered they'd moved closer.  She was tempted to ignore it.  She knew damned well, though, that they hadn't begun trying to bunch up because they were unnerved by the attacks--at least not in the sense that they were worried about their own hides.  "Don't bunch up!" she said, keeping her voice low.  "We don't want to leave a gap wide enough for the bastards to slip through and come up behind us."

Dane and Niles glanced at Seth and then obeyed his unspoken command and began to put a little more distance between them.  By that time, the line had moved far enough into the jungle that, even with a couple of yards between each member of her own squad, they had twice that between their squad and the nearest member of the squads on either side of them.  By Danika's reckoning they'd covered a half to three quarters of a mile, however, and Reuel had only ordered a one mile perimeter sweep.

Feeling the beginnings of relief, Danika was able to focus for the first time on an overall survey of her surroundings.  She realized then that they were close to the spot where she'd been attacked the day before.

Chapter Fourteen

It wasn't a comforting discovery, but it transpired to be fortuitous that Danika noticed it at just that moment.  If she'd been acting on logic she would very likely have dismissed the probability of another attack in virtually the same place as too astronomical to concern herself with.  The attack leapt into her mind, though, and she reacted instinctively.  She glanced upward.  When she did, she caught movement in the trees a split second before the native screamed his war cry.  She brought her weapon up at the same moment and fired even as he opened his mouth.  Her shot cut his scream off mid war cry.  Catching him in the upper left quadrant of his chest, the shot itself wouldn't necessarily have been fatal, but the impact knocked him off his perch.  The scream he uttered on his way down was a different pitch altogether and the soggy splat he made on impact was sickening.

Danika only registered it peripherally, however.  When she'd scanned the branches of the trees overhead, she'd glimpsed what could have been dozens of armed warriors.  Before she could call out to the squads on either side of them to lend a hand, several things happened almost simultaneous and barely a split second after she'd fired the shot that knocked her target from the tree.

The warriors above them uttered their war whoops and attacked, sending a volley of stone and bone tipped projectiles raining down on the forest floor.  Something smacked Danika in the back hard enough it knocked the breath from her and pancaked her against the ground.  Seth, Dane, and Niles let out challenging roars that nearly deafened her and drowned out the war cries of the natives.  Laser fire erupted from seemingly every direction at once, and leaves, branches and natives began raining down on the forest floor almost before the projectiles they'd launched hit the ground. 

"Protect Danika!" Seth roared, several moments after the fact, as it happened.

As stunned as Danika was by the blow, she realized that it was Dane who'd tackled her at right about the same time she heard Seth roar the order. 

At least some of the projectiles found their mark.  She felt every impact travel through Dane and into her, heard his grunts of pain.  She managed to get her head up just high enough to see Seth and Niles, racing so fast across the ground that most of the missiles missed them completely and then both of them shot upwards as if they'd been fired from a cannon.

The looks on the faces of the natives as the two giants shot toward them might have been hilarious at any other time.  As it was, all Danika could think about was that they were outnumbered.

Dane planted a hand on the back of her head and shoved her face into the dirt. 

"Gods damn it, Dane!  Let go and get off!" Danika growled, shoving at him in an effort to dislodge him, wondering if he just felt like dead weight crushing her or if he was dead. 

"I am shielding you," Dane said in a pained voice.

"Well cut it out and get off!" Danika snarled.  "You're crushing me."

She thought it was the last comment rather than the order that convinced Dane to move.  He rolled to his side so that the ground was partially supporting his weight.  Danika seized the opportunity, or tried to, to scramble to her feet.  Dane caught her around the waist and dragged her back.  She managed to at least roll into a position to use her weapon, however. 

Unfortunately, she discovered she couldn't get a clear shot by that time.  Niles and Seth had landed on the branches and were engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the warriors.  It wasn't much of a contest.  Having seized the warrior closest when they landed, they were using them as bats, knocking two or three from their perch at a time, wading through the warriors as if they'd been nothing but children.

Unwilling to risk shooting Seth or Niles by accident, she focused on targeting the natives that decided to retreat by way of the vines. She managed to pick off three more, but they were scattering in every direction.  Within a matter of minutes the survivors had disappeared into the trees. 

Seth and Niles dropped to the ground when they ran out of opponents.  Moving from one to another, they coolly and systematically dispatched any of them that were still moving.  Leaving the clean up to them, Danika convinced Dane to let go of her and got up to examine him.  She thought she was going to puke for several moments when she had.  Anger drove the nausea back, however.  He was peppered with the damned things like a 'porkey', critters from her world that closely resembled the porcupines of earth.  Four with short, thin shafts were buried deep enough in his back and buttocks that nothing more than the shaft was visible.  One of the larger shafted missiles was embedded in his right thigh and a second one in his shoulder.  He'd made a perfect target for the bastards sprawled unmoving in the grass without any cover whatsoever.

Because he was shielding her!

"Damn it, Dane!  What were you thinking?" she muttered, struggling with the urge to burst into tears.  "You're bleeding all over the place."

Dane managed to lift his head and stared at her a little drunkenly.  "The nanos will close the wounds.  You do not have them.  I had to protect you.  I was closest."

Heartened by that reminder that they had a built-in repair system, Danika examined the wounds more closely, but she couldn't see that the bleeding looked like it would stop.  "Can they close the wounds with these things in there?" she asked doubtfully when Seth and Niles finally arrived and crouched beside Dane.

Seth's expression was grim.  "No.  We must pull them out."

"Oh my god!" Danika responded.  "In the field?  Wouldn't it be better to get him back to the medics so they could cut them out?  Won't it cause more damage to just yank them out?"

Seth lifted his head and looked around, obviously calculating the situation.  "We must finish the sweep.  We cannot fall back or we will leave a gap they might use to slip through.  We are a man down.  It will be best to leave him here, complete the sweep, and return for him."

Danika gaped at him.  "Like hell!" she growled.  "What if some of the bastards already slipped through?  He isn't in any condition to defend himself!  And we don't leave a man down!"

"It would be more logical ...." Seth began.

"Fuck logic!  I'm not leaving him here."  She glanced at Niles, who was standing guard.  "You take him back.  Me and Seth will finish the sweep."

Niles stared at her in dismay.  "You will be down two men ...."

"Do it!" she growled.  "You can catch up to us when you've left him with the medics."

Niles looked at Seth questioningly. Danika felt like punching both of them for questioning a direct order.  She still felt like knocking the shit out of them when Seth agreed with a nod.  Seth helped Niles get Dane to his feet and hoist him onto his shoulder. 

Doubt shook her as she watched Niles head back toward base camp with Dane over his shoulder, anxiety that Dane might lose too much blood before he could get attention and uneasiness that some of the natives had slipped through their net and might attack them. 

There was nothing else she could do, however.  As Seth had pointed out, all of them couldn't go back without leaving a hole wide enough to make the entire exercise a waste of time. 

Struggling to dismiss them from her mind, she straightened and surveyed the area around them.  "You and Niles checked all of the bodies to make sure they were dead?"

Seth nodded.  "By my count, nigh a dozen escaped."

"We'll get them if they didn't run far enough," Danika responded grimly.  Reuel's orders had been to drive them back if possible, to kill as necessary.  Despite the two previous attacks, she'd been more inclined to hope they could drive the barbarians back without being forced to slaughter them.  This was personal now, though!  They'd filled Dane full of holes and she had no idea whether he could survive it or not.  She was going to shoot any of them she could catch in her sights and let the gods sort the bastards out! 

She and Seth spaced themselves a bit further apart to close the gaps as much as they could.  It was important to stay within sight of partners if possible, though, and they hadn't gone far before Danika noticed that Seth had shouldered his rifle and was collecting the natives' weapons as he came across them.  She finally halted and tried to use hand signals to figure out what he was doing.  It didn't comfort her when she discovered he was out of munitions.  She was less than a dozen shots from empty herself and then she'd be down to her knife and the few shots left in her pistol.

That explained why Niles and Seth had leapt into the trees.  They hadn't had anything left to throw at the damned savages!  She just wished they'd thought it important enough to inform her!

Damn it!

Not that it would've made any difference.  They still had to finish the sweep.

Pushing that worry from her mind, she pressed on, trying to close the gap between them and the other squads.

They came upon the small pool she'd glimpsed the day before.  It didn't look to be more than ten feet across and maybe fifteen wide.  The branches of the giant trees surrounding it formed an umbrella above it, which explained why they hadn't spotted it from the air.

Water spilled into the pool from the mouth of what appeared to be a small cave, trickled from the pool into a narrow groove on one side that she thought must be the source of the tiny stream they'd been using for water and spilled more gustily into a larger branch leading off in the other direction.  Danika stopped, studying the black hole for a long moment, trying to discern any movement, and glanced toward Seth.  Signaling him to approach from the other side, she began making her way carefully around the pool toward the cave entrance, surveying the area for any sign of the savages, or animals, for that matter.  There were several fairly large flat stones near the entrance that looked to be stained with blood.  She couldn't be certain that it was blood, though, or think of an explanation if it was unless the natives had used them when cleaning a kill.                Dismissing it for the moment, expecting any moment to hear the war cries of the savages, she focused on approaching the cave entrance as quietly as possible.  When they'd positioned themselves on either side, she signaled Seth to use his infrared vision to search the interior.

He eased closer, took several quick scans and then stepped into the entrance.  Irritation flickered through Danika.  "See anything?" she asked on a breath of sound.

Seth shook his head.  "Deep."

Shit, Danika thought, wondering if they should take the time to search it further or move on and return to search it more thoroughly!

Seth didn't wait for a decision.  He moved deeper into the small cavern.  Danika's anxiety and irritation deepened.  After standing indecisively for a few moments more, she slipped quickly through the entrance, hugging the wall to keep from silhouetting herself in the light at the opening.  She was just in time to see Seth disappearing into the gloom at the back where the cavern narrowed so sharply there was barely enough room for Seth to squeeze through.

While she was still trying to decide whether to follow him or keep watch at the entrance, he returned.  Relieved, she left the cavern and surveyed the area in front of it, moving close enough to examine the stains. 

It was definitely blood--yellow like the savages'--but then the beasts some of the men had brought down the day before also had yellow blood so she was no closer to an answer about the presence of the blood.

Shrugging it off for a later time, she and Seth made their way around either side of the knob of rock that housed the cavern and continued their sweep until they reached the farthest point for their sweep a few yards beyond.  They settled there to await further orders.

"What did you make of that?" Danika asked.

Seth glanced at her but shrugged, focusing on scanning the jungle beyond them.  "There were markings on the walls inside, drawings.  It is a place the savages have been, but I did not see any sign that they had been there recently."             

Danika considered it.  "Some sort of sacred place to them, maybe?  The primitives on my home world built sacred places of stones where they worshipped their gods and made sacrifices to them.  Those flat stones at the entrance could be altars.  Maybe that explains the attacks?  They don't want us close to their sacred place?"

Seth's lips thinned.  "And mayhap they simply do not want us here at all?  Some of the drawings looked much like the Andorians.  Mayhap they made friends with the savages and the natives are guarding against all others?"

She supposed one guess was as good as another.

Niles joined them after a few minutes. 

"How's Dane?"

Niles flicked a glance at Seth.  It was brief and Danika couldn't decide what the significance of it was.  "He was not conscious when I got him to sickbay.  I thought that you would want to know his status, however, so I lingered until the medic had done a scan."

"And?" Danika prompted him anxiously.

"His chassis prevented most of the projectiles from damaging his biological organs.  Two managed to enter at an angle that allowed them to cause much damage.  The medic estimates that it will take twelve hours for the nanos to repair the damaged organs sufficiently for them to be functioning at seventy-five percent.  If he does not cease to function during that time, he will fully recover, but the nanos are fully engaged in working on those repairs and he must cut the other projectiles out and attempt to close them to stop the bleeding himself."

A knot the size of her fist formed in Danika's throat.  She struggled to swallow against it, fought to catch her breath. 

Seth caught her arm and helped her to sit.  She looked at him a little blankly and finally moistened her dry lips.  "He's saying .... Is he saying Dane might not ...?   He could die?  That's what he meant, right?"

Seth's expression could have been carved from stone.  "He is saying that it is possible."

Shocked disbelief hit Danika like a physical blow.  "He can't die!" she managed to say after a moment, struggling with the urge to fall apart.  "He can't."

Niles sent Seth a look of consternation.  "The odds cannot be calculated at this time when there are so many unknown factors."

Danika blinked at Niles, feeling a flash of anger.  "Don't talk to me about odds, gods damn it!  We're talking about Dane!" she growled.

He looked dismayed, glanced at Seth as if seeking help.

"He is our brother.  We are not ... indifferent.  It will not help him, however, if we allow ourselves to be distracted and are wounded, as well."

Chastened, Danika pulled herself together with an effort.  Sniffing, she rubbed her stinging eyes and nose and got to her feet.  "You're right," she muttered.  "We can check on him when we get back.  He'll be alright.  He's strong."

The words felt empty, though.  They didn't reassure her.  She stared at the jungle, struggling to watch for the possibility of attack, but her mind and heart were at base camp.  It kept running through her mind that he had never truly lived.  He'd emerged from the labs of the company fully matured--physically, at any rate.  He'd gone through training with her and then been shipped to hell--Xeno-12.  There'd been no time for him to enjoy any of the things everyone else took for granted and now maybe there would never be one.

She saw when she emerged from her thoughts that Seth and Niles kept flicking worried glances at her and it hit her that the same was true for them--for all of them--but she didn't particularly care about any of the others.  She cared about Seth, Dane, and Niles.  She'd thought about the fact that they'd bonded as fellow soldiers in the face of combat, but even then she hadn't acknowledged how deep it went. 

They were family.  They were the only family any of them had.  She wasn't going to get home again, whatever happened.  She'd lost her birth family and they'd never had one. 

It suddenly seemed important to her to enjoy every moment it was possible to enjoy and not just focus on her duties as a soldier or even just survival.  She wanted to survive.  She wanted all of them to survive, but what was the point if they weren't also living, enjoying whatever pleasure could be had?

Reuel arrived before she could drive herself crazy wondering what was happening with Dane.  When they'd given him their report, he studied Danika for a long moment and then turned to Seth.  "This will be the guard post for your squad--two on, two off.  Until Dane is able to resume his duties the three of you will need to rotate.  I suggest Danika return to base camp now so that she can check on Dane's progress."

Danika was so relieved she felt like kissing him.  She refrained.  When he'd left, however, she startled Seth by slipping her arms around his waist and hugging him tightly.  He hesitated and then looped his arms around her loosely as if he wasn't entirely certain of how to react.  "You don't feel like my brother," she murmured, leaning away to smile up at him.

He frowned quizzically.  "I do not?"

She shook her head and pulled away.  Niles, she saw, was staring off into the distance, frowning.  It startled him when she moved to him and hugged him as she had Seth.  Unlike Seth, he didn't merely put his arms around her, however.  He tightened his arms almost crushingly.  She didn't try to pull away.  She basked in the wonderful feeling of simply being held, in his warmth, solidity and strength.  She didn't realize just how much she'd missed, and needed, the simple joy of touching and being touched.  "I do feel like we're family, though," she said when he'd released her.  "So you guys be careful.  Watch your asses out here."

* * * *

Niles watched Danika leave with a mixture of uneasiness and ... hunger, he decided.  As much as he had enjoyed embracing her, it had left him wanting more.

He glanced at Seth finally, warily, wondering if Seth would punch him as soon as Danika was far enough she would not hear.  He looked more thoughtful than angry, however, and Niles relaxed fractionally.

All the same, he thought it might be wise to put a little distance between them so he would at least have some warning if Seth decided to try to beat him into the dirt for embracing Danika.

"What do you suppose she meant by that?"

Seth's eyes narrowed as he transferred his attention from Danika to Niles.  "If you are referring to the embrace she gave you, I am certain it meant nothing."

Niles gaped at him and then scowled.  "Then it meant nothing when she embraced you!"

Seth gave him a superior look.  "That was different.  I sexed her.  That was ... affection because I had pleasured her."

Fury instantly suffused Niles.  Fortunately, he recalled that they were on guard duty and that they would end up like Dane, or mayhap in the brig, if he gave in to the urge to knock Seth's teeth down his throat.  "She was looking at me when she said she felt like we were family," he growled.

Seth shrugged.  "She told me that I did not feel like her brother, though, and that could only mean that she felt like we were mates since we had sexed one another."

"She behaved as if she meant that to include all of us.  Well, mayhap not Dane since he is not here, but certainly me as well as you!"

Seth glared at him.  "I do not see how you can say that!  She said to me that she did not feel as if I were a brother.  She said to you that you felt like family, which is to say that she does consider you a brother."

Niles plunked his hands on his hips, angry, but uncertain enough that doubt had begun to creep in.  "I will go and ask her what she meant," he said finally.

"You will end up in the brig if you leave your post--or shot!" Seth said warningly.

Niles halted, considered for a moment, and finally returned to his post.  "I will ask her when she returns.  I do not believe that she would have embraced both of us if she had not meant to include both of us!  And I do not see where you got the notion that she was suggesting that she considered you a mate.  She did not say that!"

"She did say that she considered us family and since she eliminated the possibility that her affection was as a sibling that leaves nothing else!  Particularly since we sexed one another and that is what mates do!"

Niles was getting damned tired of Seth harping on the fact that he had sexed Danika!  "Humans have sex for many reasons--pleasure, recreation, the release of tension, to barter for favors ....  I am sure there are even more motives, but you cannot say that it must be for the purpose of mating because that is for procreation and we cannot procreate!"

Seth took a step forward and caught Niles on the shoulder with a sharp jab of his fist.  "Speak for yourself!  I do not know that I cannot!  She does not know that!"

Niles took a step back to catch his balance and punched Seth on the shoulder.  "If you can then I certainly can!"

"You said that you could not!"

"I did not!" Niles said indignantly.  "I said we cannot."

Seth, his jaw set pugnaciously, jutted his face to within inches of Niles', and poked him in the chest with his index finger.  "You do not know what I can do!" he growled.

Niles punched him in the belly.  "You think your nanos have grown seed for you and no one else?"

"Ten hut!"

Both men jolted in surprise when Reuel's voice intruded, whirling to look at him guiltily.

Reuel eyed them with seething fury for several moments and finally lifted one arm.  "You!  Go stand guard over there!  Ten paces.  You!  Over there!  Ten paces. Do not exchange one more word unless it has to do with spotting the enemy!"

Both of them saluted, slid an accusing glare at each other, and then marched ten paces in the opposite direction.  Reuel studied them for a few minutes and finally turned and headed toward base camp.

When he had disappeared into the brush, Seth shot a bird at Niles and mouthed, "I will beat the fuck out of you later."

Niles shot a bird back at him.  "You will get the fuck beat out of you," he mouthed back.

* * * *

Danika thought she was going to totally lose it when she got her first glimpse at Dane.  He was so pale he looked bloodless.  He was sprawled face down on the gurney in the sickbay and patched with blood soaked bandages from shoulder to knee. 

"Oh Dane!  That was such a ... brave, wonderful ... absolutely stupid thing to do!"

He stirred at the sound of her voice and she rushed closer.  "It was?"  he said a little drunkenly.

Danika bit her lip.  "Don't you think it would've been better to look for cover than to let them ... make a pincushion out of you?"

"No time."

Danika glanced around as the impulse hit her to touch him, partly to reassure herself, partly because she felt the need to offer what little comfort she could.  The medic, she saw, had left and the sickbay was empty except for the two of them.  Moving closer, she brushed his hair from his face and then leaned down and kissed his cheek.  His eyes fluttered open.

It was such a relief, even though his eyes were glazed with pain, that she had to fight the urge to burst into tears.  Sniffing at the sting, she smiled at him.  "You look like hell.  Your beautiful back ...."  She stopped when that nearly set her off  and fought another round with her emotions.  "I hope you feel better than you look."

He looked disconcerted and more than a little confused. 

"The medic says you're going to be fine, though."

He frowned.  "He said that my nanos were overwhelmed by the extent of injury to my biological organs and that I had a thirty to fifty percent chance of recovery at this point."

"Stupid bastard," Danika muttered angrily, wishing she'd known that before he'd left so she could've shot him.  "That was before.  You're coming along now, though."

He looked surprised and more confused.

Danika looked around for a place to sit and finally saw a stool.  When she'd pulled it close to the gurney Dane was lying on, she slipped her hand into his, giving it a squeeze.  After searching her mind for a few minutes for something to distract him, she realized she couldn't think of a damned thing to coax him with except sex and he sure as hell wasn't in any shape for that!  On the other hand, they all seemed pretty focused on it and a promise of it was bound to distract him from his pain and, hopefully, the stupid medic's prognosis of his condition.  "Me and Seth found this really cool cave."  Actually, creepy, but Seth hadn't seemed to feel the same way about it that she had.  "There's a spring inside of it and a nice clear pool in front.  It's close to our guard post and I was thinking it would be a great place for me and you guys to use for a little R and R."

He looked blank.

"Sex," she added bluntly. 

That stirred him up!  He shifted as if he was trying to turn over.   She tightened her grip on his hand.  "Be still!  You aren't up to that yet!" she said with a forced chuckle.  "And you won't be if you don't hold still and let the nanos fix everything."

"With me?"

She felt the urge to cry again and sent a fervent prayer to whatever gods might be listening that he would get the chance to find out that she meant it.  "Of course with you!  Who else would I be talking about?  You're one of my guys, right?  We're a team.  We're supposed to take care of each other.   But after ... uh ... well, I'm guessing you know, Reuel said we had to be discrete.  It isn't like there's any privacy on the ship ... to be discrete.

"Hell, I was even thinking, maybe, if we were going to be here a while we could make us a little homestead.  This place isn't half bad--plenty of potential--way better than Juno, my home world."

Chapter Fifteen

Danika was feeling tremendously relieved by the time she headed out to take her turn at guard duty.  Tired, because she'd refused to leave Dane until the medic had done another scan and informed them that Dane's nanos had repaired his organs enough that he had far better odds of a full recovery.  Uneasy about the commitment she'd made, but relieved. 

Not that she had any intention of going back on her word! 

She hadn't actually made up her mind about whether or not she was willing to take the guys on as sexual partners to keep peace within the squad before the attack, but she'd been leaning that way.  Now it seemed more like the right thing to do and she didn't regret, exactly, that she'd made Dane that promise.

It was just a little unnerving. 

She wasn't even sure of why it unnerved her.  It wasn't as if she'd never had sex before, after all.  It wasn't even as if she'd never done it purely for the sake of scratching an itch.

It was because, mostly, she thought of that sort of intimacy as an emotional as well as a physical commitment. 

It was because of Tommy Dancel. 

She'd thought when she gave herself to him in her father's barn that it was the beginning of something big, something lasting.  She'd thought that every time she'd sneaked off to meet him ... imagined the two of them having children together, growing old together ... right up until she'd run into him and Marcy McConnell at the county fair and discovered it didn't mean a damned thing to him except sex. 

Tommy Dancel was the first and only man she'd ever even considered as a life partner.  As hurt and angry as she'd been when she'd discovered his betrayal, as determined as she was never to forgive him for it, she hadn't met anyone since that she even wanted to envision herself with as a life partner.

How crazy was it to offer such a thing when she knew the guys didn't have a clue of what that kind of commitment meant?  They'd never been a part of any kind of family. 

She shook her head at her thoughts. 

They'd already become a family.  Not in the same way that her family was, or even in the way she'd thought she would  one day have a family of her own.  They didn't know that they had any kind of future at all to look forward to--any of them.  How stupid was it to worry about a future with them when the odds were probably a hundred to one against having one at all?

If they could enjoy anything about their situation, didn't all of them deserve whatever taste of happiness they could manage?  Why worry about tomorrow and give up today when today might be all there ever was?

"Dane is dead?"

Seth's question not only jerked her out of her absorption, it knocked the breath out of her.  If she hadn't been so worried that he wasn't going to make it, in spite of his progress, she didn't think the question would have thrown her so off kilter.  But she was still worried and even though doubts and questions instantly arose in her mind as to how they could know more than her when she'd just left sickbay, she was instantly certain he had.  "He is?"

Seth and Niles exchanged a grim look.  "His nanos could not repair the damage?" Seth asked.

It hit Danika then that he'd been asking about Dane, not announcing his death.  Discomfort wafted through her.  "Uh ... Sorry!  I misunderstood.  Yeah.  He's better.  Not out of the woods, yet, but definitely improving."

Niles frowned.  "He is in the woods?  I left him in sickbay."

Danika stared at him blankly for a long moment.  "You guys have really got to stop taking everything I say so literally--or better yet, get used to slang and stuff like that.  'Not out of the woods' means he isn't safe, but the medic said his odds of pulling through are improving tremendously.  If he makes it through the night, he's going to be ok."

She didn't want to think about that, though. 

She changed the subject.  "You guys should head back and get some chow and a little rest."

Seth scowled at her.  "Reuel said two men on, two off.  You cannot take guard duty alone.  I will stay and Niles can return to camp."

Niles glared at him.  "I will stay and you can return."

"Will you guys knock it off?" Danika snapped.

Seth sent her a look of surprise, shrugged, and belted Niles in the mouth.

Danika sucked in a sharp breath.  "What the hell ...?"

Niles worked his jaw. "She did not say that you should knock my head off!"

"I didn't say either of you should!" she snapped, narrowing her eyes at Seth.  "And I don't believe you misunderstood me!"

Seth tried to look innocent.  "He is injured now.  He should return and I will stay."

"That did not hurt at all!" Niles disputed.

Seth punched him again, hard enough that time to send him jogging backwards in an effort to catch his balance. Niles uttered a snarl of rage.

"If you two don't cut it out I'm going to send both of you back!  The damned savages will hear you a mile away!"

They exchanged a speaking glance.  "The order was to guard to be sure the primitives did not sneak into camp.  They cannot expect to if they know we are here," Seth said reasonably.  "It serves no purpose, therefore, for us to concern ourselves with making noise.  They will try another place and very likely those on guard there will have ammunition.  We have nothing but the spears from the savages we killed."

"I have ammunition," Danika pointed out.  "And it'll be better for me to stand watch now, while it's still daylight.  I can't see as well as you guys at night."

Seth snatched her rifle from her hand and examined it.  "You have twelve rounds," he said, ignoring her look of outrage as he handed it back.  "You can only shoot twelve--if you do not miss at all.  And they attacked each time in the daylight. It is not reasonable to suggest we return to camp now and leave you alone given the fact that each previous attack was during the daytime."

That part was inarguable--not that Danika wasn't inclined to argue anyway--or order them straight out to head back.  But she'd had plenty of time to discover that they only obeyed orders from her when it suited them and there didn't seem to be much point in challenging them now.  They weren't 'regular' army anymore.  Despite the fact that Reuel had made her a captain in his army, they had no homeland or government to sanction them as an army.  "Fine.  Suit yourselves, but Reuel's going to be pissed off if any of the savages break through our sector because you two were fighting and not paying attention, or asleep because you were too tired to stay awake."

They sat in silence for a while, swatting at the annoying insects that buzzed them.  Presently, however, Danika recalled the thoughts that had occupied her on her way back to the guard station.  She looked at Seth and Niles speculatively for a few minutes, trying to decide how to broach the subject. 

"I don't suppose you guys have given any thought to what you want to do now that we aren't in the army anymore?"

Both men looked surprised.  "We are in Reuel's army," Niles responded after a few moments.

That seemed to answer her question, but she wasn't inclined to drop it.  "It isn't like we were sworn in or anything--or asked if we wanted to join."

"We were not asked before or sworn in either," Seth pointed out.

Good point!  Danika thought that over for a few minutes.  "You know, technically, you guys aren't deserters."

"They will shoot us anyway when they find us," Niles responded.

"Yes, but, technically, you can't be a deserter when you didn't join to start with."

Seth shrugged. 

Given their responses to her tentative 'feelers' Danika wasn't sure she wanted to discuss the lame-brained idea she'd concocted in the hope of lifting Dane's spirits.  She'd thought at the time that it was something that would lift his spirits because she thought it might be what he wanted.

Reuel had suggested something along the same lines and no one had seemed against the idea.  Well, it wasn't like they'd cheered or acted excited either, but then again, they were all pretty cool and laid back.

Most of the time, she added when she recalled the argument.

Then again, they all tended to calculate the odds on everything.  Maybe they'd thought the odds were against them having any chance of a life and they'd simply dismissed it?

She supposed it had been a stupid idea, now that she considered it.

What was she going to say to Dane if he remembered?

Maybe he wouldn't?  He'd seemed pretty out of it.

"You did not think Reuel's plan had merit?" Seth asked after a little while.

Danika glanced at him in surprise, thought about it, and finally shrugged.  "What he has worked out seems sound enough and he's impressive.  I'm guessing he can pull off just about anything he sets his mind to."

"That does not sound as if you agree," Niles said after apparently turning what she's said over in his head for a few minutes.

Danika frowned, thinking back over what she'd said and finally grinned.  "I guess not."

"There is some fault in his logic?"

Danika considered that and finally shook her head and then shrugged.  "I'm not sure that I agree with him about those guys that went back to the base at Slaughter Ridge to rescue the women.  I think he underestimated the government and they would've figured it out anyway.  Maybe not as soon, but they're going to scour Xeno-12 when they get back to account for everything and I don't think they'd simply write off the number of missing cyborgs.  They're damned relentless about accounting for everything that costs them money."

"Then you do agree that there was no fault in his logic in determining the necessity of leaving Xeno-12 as soon as possible to avoid a confrontation with the Confederacy?"

"I'm not disagreeing with any part of his plan.  He's a lot smarter than I am and I'm sure he's considered every angle--everything he can consider.  There are too many unknowns in this situation to figure it all out, though. 

"A running battle/retreat is all he can do as far as I can see.  And he can't plan on a place to go until he's had time to find one. 

"I don't even disagree that he dismissed the possibility of settling the situation in court.  I don't think either the government or the company would ever let it get to court.

"It's just ... They have a long reach--the government.  The company, for that matter.  A really long reach.  It's a big universe and there are bound to be a hell of a lot of undiscovered planets, but it could be a long, long time before they find one where they'll have a chance to settle like Reuel's talking about.  And in the mean time, everybody is on the run.  Reuel and his army will make the biggest target.  Not that I think they won't be dedicated in hunting down everybody they don't account for on Xeno-12, but ...  Well, scattering would make a smaller target."

Seth frowned.  "That will also make the individuals more vulnerable," he said slowly.  "You are thinking about returning to your home world?"

Surprise flickered through Danika.  "Oh hell no!  If they come looking for me, that'll be the first place they look.  It would endanger my family.  No way would my father just let them haul me off like they did before and they wouldn't stop at just knocking him out like they did then either.

"No, I'm in the same situation you guys are.  Nowhere to go.  And don't get me wrong, I completely agree with the plan to rescue as many people on Xeno-12 as we can.  The cavalry might arrive in time to rescue a lot of the soldiers marooned there without supplies--I hope to hell they do--but that's just going to be a nail in the coffin for the cyborgs still there.  I was just thinking about the possibility of staying here when they leave--all of us.  I mean, the more people we rescue the less likely that we'll all manage to get off of this planet anyway.  Reuel would have to capture a fleet of ships to get everybody out of here.  It might not come down to a choice of whether to stay or go.  And it isn't a bad place.  I've seen a lot worse."

She felt her face redden when Seth and Niles merely stared at her, uncomfortable that she couldn't figure out what was going through their minds. 

"If you stay, I will stay," Niles said after a brief pause.

Seth glared at him.  "We will all stay."

"Oh man!  Don't do that!  If you guys don't think it's a good idea, let's just stick with Reuel.  I don't want it to be my fault if they catch up to us.  Anyway, Reuel hasn't been wrong so far and he's kept us alive.  It was probably a stupid idea."

* * * *

Niles studied Seth speculatively, wondering if he asked the question that had been plaguing him if Seth would answer or start another fight.  He had not been in a very good mood, to Niles' thinking, since he had pleasured Danika and that seemed more than a little illogical to him. 

He would not have been surprised if Seth had wanted to talk about the experience, if he had been joyous, or merely content that he had finally assuaged both his curiosity and the urges that had come with the awakening.  Any or all of those things, to his way of thinking, would  have been logical. 

The brooding violence was not reasonable at all.  The ease with which he lost his temper, the desire to pound on anything and anyone over the slightest thing, was not.

It made him wonder if the mere act of doing it had overset the hairline balance between sanity and insanity that it seemed they had all been skating since the awakening, when emotion won out over reason far more often than it should have.

It made him wonder if he was wrong to connect the incident to Seth's foul humor.

Mayhap he was only thinking that incident was the root of the problem due to his own difficulties?

He knew that he was not the only one that was beginning to have severe concerns regarding his sanity since the change had awoken the throbbing bastard in his britches, however.  He knew that he was not alone in finding it nigh impossible, most of the time, to think of anything else due to the near constant ache from the swelling.  Not that the pain was unbearable, but it was damned hard to ignore when it never really went away.

Despite the urges that told him what he needed to do to assuage the pain, though, he was beginning to think it might be just as well that he had not had the chance to sex Danika.  He was as certain as he needed to be that she had enjoyed it--according to his data her reaction confirmed that much--and it seemed to have made her far less tense and far more cheerful, but it seemed to have had the opposite effect on Seth.

That made him uneasy.  He did not want to be insane--or to do anything that might make him behave more irrationally than he already did.  The thoughts that ran through his mind were already illogical more often than they were logical and those were hard enough to deal with. 

"You have been in a foul mood for days," he said finally, deciding it was worth the risk of another fight if he could get the answers from Seth that he had not been able to figure out by himself.

Seth narrowed his eyes at him as if he was contemplating removing his head from his shoulders.  "I have not," he growled.

That was not at all helpful, Niles thought indignantly, and it just went to show that Seth had crossed the line.  He was no longer rational at all!  He should have responded by saying why he was in a foul mood!  Not lied about being in a foul mood!

Mayhap Seth was unable to grasp the true question, though, because he had attempted subtlety?

"Why are you in a foul mood?"

He could hear Seth grinding his teeth together.  "I just said that I am not!"

The response made Niles angrier, but he was determined to remain reasonable even if Seth, apparently, had lost that ability!  "I have considered this data for some time and it seems illogical to me that you are ... not happy when you sexed Danika and, logically, should be.  Why is this?"

Seth surged to his feet.  Niles instantly followed suit, watching him warily.  Instead of pouncing as Niles had fully expected, however, he turned on his heel and strode away.  After a few paces, he turned and strode back, made an about face just as Niles was convinced he would attack and paced away again.  Frowning, Niles moved to a safer distance and watched, more disturbed by the lack of purpose than he would have been if Seth had attacked.  He had not even been ordered to pace the perimeter and beyond that he was not walking the length of it, which he should have if he had decided on his own to do so.  Accessing his data banks, he discovered that predatory beasts had been known to pace--when caged--as if searching for a way of escape, but that made no sense to him even though he was aware that part of the awakening was due to the development of the part of the biological brain associated with animal instincts.  Seth was not caged.  Why would he feel the need to pace?

He stopped after a time and settled on the rock where he had been sitting before. Propping his elbow on one thigh and supporting his chin on his fist, he glared at the ground for some minutes before he abruptly tensed and looked around as if surprised to find himself where he was. 

Frowning, Niles debated whether to return to his own perch or keep his distance. 

He had just decided it would be safe to sit down again when Seth spoke abruptly.

"I pleasured her.  I am certain of that," he said, his voice threaded with uncertainty in direct contradiction of what he had said. 

"I did not dispute that," Niles said cautiously. "According to my data banks her reaction was one of pleasure."  Doubts surfaced almost instantly. "Unless ... perhaps she screamed because she experienced a muscle cramp?  Or saw something that disturbed her?  You did not drop her?"

Seth had looked at him hopefully during the first part of Niles' speech, but a thoughtful frown replaced it and then an angry one.  "Of course I did not drop her!" he snapped irritably, but then looked thoughtful.  "She did not seem to be in pain ... or startled.  I do not think it could have been that."