Read Recon Marines III: The Marine's Doctor for Free Online

thing.”
    Despite her words, Mak suspected she
wasn’t really agreeing with him. He stepped out of the doorway,
centering himself so the doctor wouldn’t be exposed. The overgrown
path to the landing pad was empty. He found fresh scuffle marks in
the old leaves to the left of the path. The creature had run into
the trees, his strides almost twelve feet each. He could easily be
more than a mile away by now. Mak couldn’t track him with the
doctor on his heels.
    “ I didn’t see any blood so
I assume Andy missed him. Are we going after him?”
    Mak started back through the hall.
“You’re going back to the ship. Gather your people and what you
want to take along.”
    She hurried after him. “We need more
time in that operating room. I’ll tell the others what to do and
you and I will go after that one.”
    “ Why?” He stopped and
faced her. “Why go after it?”
    He couldn’t interpret the expression
crossing her face. “Because we need to learn about it. See if there
are more of them. Did you see how confused he was? We need to help
him.”
    Mak searched his experiences for a way
to interpret her expression or her words. “Help him
how?”
    Her mouth turned down into a frown and
she shrugged.
    Mak continued to the operating room,
nodding to Pender who stood alertly by the door. The other two
doctors had continued their work on the cadaver. About half a dozen
little jars filled with samples lined the head of the metal
table.
    Corporal Box searched through the
metal cabinets along the back wall. He avoided looking at Mak
though he glanced toward Dr. Drant. Mak wondered at the best way to
discipline him. Sending him back to base would be inconvenient and
leave them short a crew member.
    “ You have thirty minutes
to collect what you need. We’ll stay on planet for twenty-four
hours in case you need to return for more samples.” The three
doctors frowned at him but Mak ignored them. He crawled beneath the
desk he’d been searching earlier. The previous occupants had
thought they’d stripped the lab of anything that might give away
their plans, but like many civilians and even some soldiers, they’d
forgotten to take the galactic security chip affixed directly to
the batteries of the communication equipment. The emergency memory
unit’s existence wasn’t widely known but it stored all
communications of any unit using military grade devices. Admiral
Ben Lester should have known better.
    The doctors spoke quietly amongst
themselves, all of them glancing now and then at Mak. Whatever they
discussed, Dr. Drant ended it with a firm order. “Get what we can
now, and we’ll catalogue it back on the ship.”
    Mak put Pender at rear guard on the
return trip, trusting the young man to obey orders and stay alert.
He kept the corporal at his side. The sun greeted them when they
cleared the trees. Once they started through the grasses, Mak
switched with Pender and took up the rear position himself. Though
he heard and saw nothing, Mak knew something watched them from the
shadows. More than one thing.
    Every instinct warned him to flush out
their stalkers. But if they all moved as fast as the interloper
into the lab, Mak could only stop them by shooting them. The
thought of killing them sickened him. How much choice had they had
in what they’d become? Perhaps no more than Mak had had in his own
creation. He watched the tree line thinking he might have more in
common with the humanoid creatures lurking there than the people
walking in front of him.
    ****
    Molly gasped at the readings from the
tissue sample. The levels of testosterone alone would have driven
the man insane. The invasions into the frontal cortex had completed
the erasure of their humanity. Hector searched for DNA
manipulations in the bone samples they’d collected while Helen used
her AI device to enter the data they’d recorded on bone size and
density.
    Had the people perpetrating these
treatments called themselves medical doctors? Molly didn’t