Battalion 1

Rhodes woke up, sat on the edge of his capsule, and stared at his robotic feet.

All Rhinehart’s questions from yesterday came back to haunt Rhodes now—as if Rhodes needed reminding.

How did Rhodes know he was human? What possible evidence could he point to that justified believing he was?

The sight and sound of the other soldiers waking up and leaving their capsules somehow reinforced how hopelessly alien their situation was.

Waking up from sleep—it was such a human experience—so familiar, so mundane, so ordinary.

It felt so human to sit up in bed, put his feet on the floor, and stare at something while his brain kicked back into gear.

He’d been waking up in barracks around other soldiers for years. The sounds lulled him into a false sense of the familiar.

The sight of his own feet shattered the illusion. He didn’t even have feet anymore. He didn’t have boots to put on or laces to tie.

He went through this sequence of thoughts every morning. Talking to Rhinehart about it didn’t change that.

Rhodes stood up and headed for the washroom to look at his reflection in the mirror.

Rhinehart was back. He had been gone all evening last night. He had still been gone when Rhodes started his conversion cycle.

Rhodes really wouldn’t have begrudged Rhinehart for taking his own life. Rhodes envied anyone who did it.

Rhinehart sat up in bed, ran his fingers through his hair, and stood up to start his day. He acted the same way everyone else in the battalion acted.

The minute Rhodes got to his feet, he heard loud thumping noises coming from the washroom followed by the smash of breaking glass.

Everyone jumped and looked over their shoulders in that direction, but no one went to see what the problem was.

Rhodes strode over there and then charged into the washroom when he saw Coulter.

Coulter stood in front of the mirror, but he didn’t look at his reflection. He lunged for the mirror and smashed his forehead into it with all his might.

The glass shattered and part of it hit the floor, but Coulter didn’t pay any attention to that. He grimaced through bared, clenched teeth and howled with pain and fury each time he slammed his head into the glass.

He smashed out the mirror, but he didn’t notice that, either. He kept diving headfirst again and again to pulverize his head on the concrete wall behind the mirror.

Rhodes grabbed him to pull him away, but Coulter only shook Rhodes off and smashed his head against the wall a second time. He left bloody patches on the concrete and blood oozed from around his implants.

“Hey—Corporal!” Rhodes hollered.

Coulter ignored him and fought Rhodes trying to get to the wall again.

“Coulter!” Rhodes roared. “Eddie—stop!”

Coulter bellowed again and thrashed in Rhodes’s arms. “It hurts!” Coulter roared. “IT HURTS!!”

“What hurts, Corporal?!” Rhodes yelled. “EDDIE!! WHAT HURTS?!!”

Coulter let out another feral bellow, charged hard enough to break Rhodes’s grip, and ran headfirst into the wall.

“Get the medical team down here, Fisher!” Rhodes ordered.

He had to dive for Coulter to stop him from hitting himself again. “IT HURTS!!” Coulter roared. “IT HURTS!!”

The rest of the battalion clustered in the doorway watching. Lauer and Rhinehart finally forced their way between the others and came to Rhodes’s assistance.

It took all three men to wrestle Coulter away from that wall. He kept struggling against their grip and howling in pain. “IT HURTS!!” he bellowed. “IT HURTS!!”

Rhodes, Lauer, and Rhinehart held onto him until he lost his balance. The three men rode him to the floor and pinned him there to stop him from hurting himself again.

Rhodes tried one last time. “What hurts, Eddie?!!”

Coulter was too out of his mind to answer. In his last act of desperation, Rhodes interfaced with Murphy. The dog face appeared in front of Rhodes right next to Fisher.

“What the hell is wrong with him?!” Rhodes hollered.

“He appears to be suffering from some malfunction in his cerebral implants,” Murphy replied. “It’s causing a physical pain response in his head. I’m detecting intracranial pressure….”

“Well, why the hell didn’t you report it?!” Rhodes snapped. “How long has he been like this?”

“About four hours…..”

“Four hours?!” Rhodes countered. “You’re supposed to help him! If he had a problem, you should have alerted the medical team….or me….or someone!”

Just then, the medical team rolled up. Rhodes, Lauer, and Rhinehart had to let go of Coulter so the medical team could get near him.

He lashed out immediately and decked one of the nurses in the face. He threw an elbow at Dr. Irvine and knocked the doctor out cold on the washroom floor.

Rhodes, Lauer, and Rhinehart dove back in and grabbed Coulter to hold him down. “Take him to his capsule!” Rhodes ordered. “Lock him in a conversion cycle until the doctors figure out what’s wrong with him.”

Rhinehart glanced over his shoulder. “How do we get him there?”

Oakes and Fuentes came out of the woodwork to help. Even then, it took them, Dietz, and Thackery all working together to haul Coulter kicking, screaming, and spitting back to his capsule.

“Lift!” Rhodes ordered and they all hefted him onto the mattress. They had to lean all their weight on top of him to make him lie still until the prongs inserted and he went limp.

The whole battalion staggered back gasping, panting, and shaking. “This is not good,” Fisher murmured.

Rhodes shot upright and spun around to confront Dr. Neiland. “You need to go through all our SAMs and check them for malfunctions. We aren’t going anywhere until you do—not even into another training session.”

She consulted her device. “I’m not detecting any malfunctions from any of your SAMs.”

“Then why didn’t Murphy report that Coulter was suffering from intracranial pressure? He could have killed himself just now. He had pain in his head bad enough to smash his head against a wall. Murphy said it started four hours ago and Murphy didn’t report it at all—not even after Coulter hurt himself. It’s a miracle we got to him in time.”

She frowned. “Hmm. That is a problem.”

“Problem!” Rhodes snapped. “You’re playing games with our lives and you call it a problem?!”

“We have to take Coulter back to the lab while we reconfigure his SAM and repair the damage to his implants,” Dr. Montague chimed in.

“Just keep him sedated,” Rhodes snapped. “Don’t wake him up until you’re certain he’s pain free.”

“How would we do that?” Dr. Neiland asked. “We won’t know if he’s pain free unless we wake him up.”

“I don’t care how the hell you do it! Just do it! You’re the ones responsible for this. What the hell good are these SAMs if they don’t report an obvious malfunction like that?”

Henshaw spoke up from across the room. “Maybe the malfunction interfered with Murphy’s programming. Maybe that’s why he didn’t report it—because he was malfunctioning, too.”

“Obviously he was malfunctioning, too,” Rhodes snapped. “He didn’t report it at all ever. It never crossed his mind to report it.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to report it because you were in a conversion cycle,” Lauer pointed out. “Maybe something in Murphy’s programming told him not to wake you up.”

“Then that needs to change, doesn’t it? If one of you is malfunctioning that badly, then I need your SAM to wake me up so we can deal with it. All our SAMs should be reprogrammed for that.”

The doctors took Coulter away to their lab. The medical team took Dr. Irvine to the station hospital.

Rhodes couldn’t tell if Dr. Neiland and Dr. Montague even understood why he was so worked up about this.

The rest of the battalion milled around the barracks for a while. No one spoke above a murmur.

Rhodes wanted to storm down to Neiland’s lab and stand over the doctors day and night. He wanted to make sure they fixed whatever was wrong with Coulter.

Hell, they might not even know what was wrong with Coulter. If they did, they might not be able to fix it.

Rhodes’s fury toward these people was really starting to get the better of him.

These problems would spread through the whole battalion. They wouldn’t spare anyone. He knew that now.

End of Chapter 19.