Battalion 1

Rhodes grabbed his Striker controls and hit the throttle—except that the ship didn’t have a throttle. It responded to his thoughts—or maybe not even his thoughts. His instincts made the ship move without him doing anything.

He lifted off, leaned forward, and the ship took off across the bay. He didn’t see at first where he was going.

Then The Grid around him changed to reveal the bay walls. He picked up speed. Rio overlaid the map of Coleridge Station on the grid lines around Rhodes’s ship.

He saw everything in multiple dimensions simultaneously. He knew exactly where he was going—and then the ship punched out of the bay into the training hall.

It didn’t look like a hall. It looked like The Grid at first. Then it changed into a vast stretch of space dotted with burning ships in battle and gunfire pelting all over the place.

Adrenaline pumped into his veins and his instincts blocked out everything else. He completely forgot that he was flying a strange ship. He completely forgot that he was in a training simulation at all.

He dropped the throttle all the way to the wall and his ship plunged into the battle gunning for doomsday.

Rio kept changing the Grid layout of the battlefield to feed Rhodes information faster than thought. Rhodes didn’t have time even to register the information before his instincts reacted to it.

He veered between attacking ships and opened fire. Fusion charges, thermal cannons, lasers, and scourge guns erupted from his ship’s fuselage and pounded enemy targets all over the field.

He didn’t see at first which side of the battle he was supposed to be on or if this battle even had sides. He couldn’t tell anything about the ships around him. None of them belonged to the Legion.

More ships exploded all around Rhodes’s vessel. He pulled away, and without thinking about it first, his ship changed shape.

The grid lines morphed the fuselage with him still inside it. The shape he’d seen in the landing bay disappeared and the grid lines twisted into a sphere.

The sphere solidified, tumbled over itself, and sprayed lasers and Viper missiles from its round surface.

The Vipers bombarded another two alien vessels coming from Rhodes’s left. One attacker exploded from the assault.

The other staggered across Rhodes’s path. Before he could think, the Striker changed shape again, sprouted a million jointed legs, hit the enemy ship, and used all its legs to vault away into space.

“The Zalvox are launching drone mines!” Rio reported.

“I don’t know what that means!” Rhodes hollered back.

“They’re launching from the planet Alxull—that green one on your left. Watch out!”

Rhodes barely had time to yank his ship out of the way before a swarm of spherical projectiles whizzed past his hull. This jointed-legged shape didn’t do him any good now.

He activated The Grid just enough to modify the lines and stretch them into a net. The ship was still hurtling way too fast through the battlefield.

Rhodes widened the grid lines as far as they would go, slammed into as many of those airborne spheres as possible, and twenty of them detonated.

He changed the ship again in a split second, contracted the grid lines to a long, thin missile, and raced between the explosions to the other side.

“The objective is down that plasma vein!” Fisher brought up another Grid map showing the route laid out on it. “The Zalvox have forty defense posts stationed along the route.”

Rhodes didn’t have time to think about that before a different flock of ships hammered him from the right.

These were much larger battleships carrying plenty of fusion weapons. They thundered onto the field bombarding everything in their path.

Rhinehart streaked past Rhodes on a dead sprint for the plasma vein. Rhodes heard Rhinehart yelling at one of his SAMs, but Rhodes couldn’t tell which one it was.

Rhodes caught a fleeting glimpse of Rocky’s horse head at his normal size in the corner of Rhinehart’s view. The other SAM looked like a blurred, abstract canopy of tree branches flickering with green leaves.

The next instant, Rhinehart’s ship vanished. Grid lines covered it and reformed into a long, thin, snakelike whip coiling through the battlefield.

The whip cracked here and there unleashing thermal cannon fire, lasers, and Viper missiles to target the enemy.

Rhodes didn’t even really know who the enemy was anymore. He just had to get to the objective somehow—whatever that was.

In that moment, he completely forgot he was flying a ship at all. He became this collection of lines he could manipulate any way he wanted.

He changed rapidly from a ball to a single line to another jointed creature. He bounded from one enemy vessel to another, delivered multiple strikes to each, and sprang off somewhere else.

His mind went into some kind of altered state. He didn’t have a shape until a split second before he made contact with his enemies.

He measured each one in a blink. Some other force outside himself decided which shape to take. The grid lines and squares morphed, warped, and skewed to match whatever he needed them to be.

He spotted a massive battleship ahead. It dwarfed his Striker by a mile and barricaded the route to the objective. None of the shapes he’d been using so far would work against a ship that big.

The enemy vessel turned its fusion charges on him. He changed back into a coiled line of square blocks linked by couplings, but that made him too big a target.

He collapsed into a ball and tumbled headfirst toward the enemy ship. He didn’t know what he would do until he got there.

Some other part of his mind spotted Henshaw coming in fast on his right. She’d transformed into a cat-like creature leaping from ship to ship.

Explosions went off every time her paws touched an enemy hull. She sprang away before the explosions could damage her.

Her interface linked with Rhodes for a single instant before they both closed on the alien battleship. Rhodes let his grid lines take over and he hit the enemy ship full force.

The lines consolidated at the last instant and turned him into a round monster with no arms or legs. He didn’t need weapons to destroy this thing.

A giant mouth full of razor-sharp teeth opened on the Striker’s front end. He started devouring his way through the ship’s hull.

His interface with the rest of the battalion fed him truckloads of information about where they were and what they were doing.

Henshaw, Oakes, and Dietz chewed their way into the same battleship from multiple sides. The four Strikers would converge in a matter of seconds.

Rhodes couldn’t hear a thing over the deafening chomp of his Striker’s jaws. Fisher flashed a different Grid layout in front of Rhodes’s eyes. The layout showed him the ship’s reactor core buried at the ship’s very center.

Rhodes adjusted his course and interfaced with the other three to converge on the reactor core. They mauled their way through hundreds of decks. The battalion swallowed alien fighters who brought out their weapons to stop the assault.

The interface also showed Rhodes the rest of his people making a run for the plasma vein.

Thackery, Rhinehart, and Fuentes dove through curtains of gunfire, sprinted into the vein, and Coulter and Lauer dropped back to cover their final sprint to the objective.

Rhodes got to the reactor core first and dove for it. He gobbled it in one giant mouthful and it exploded in his mouth.

The grid lines burst outward on all sides and all that energy dumped out through his weapons ports to blast the battleship apart.

Henshaw, Oakes, and Dietz caught up with him a second later. He didn’t see what they could accomplish here, but they collided with him from three directions, widened their grid lines, and grabbed him.

The blast would have torn him apart, but their grid lines interfaced with his. They transformed him before he had a chance to decide to do it himself.

All four merged into a web of lines. The alien vessel burst in a catastrophic boom that flung all those grid lines outward.

The Grid stretched and bounced to its widest limit. The lines swooped away until Rhodes couldn’t see their edges anymore.

Then they all came springing back toward the center, smashed inward into a tight ball, and reformed at their normal size before they transformed back into ships.

Rhodes glanced around. He was somewhere outside the plasma vein, but he didn’t see any other enemy ships around.

They all streaked into the vein trying to catch up with Thackery, Rhinehart, and Fuentes, but the battalion was too far away.

Thackery and Rhinehart split formation, flanked Fuentes on both wings, and fired outward to bombard the enemy defenses.

Thackery and Rhinehart blasted the alien positions with Viper missiles. Fuentes never slowed down. He didn’t have to. He didn’t have to transform. He didn’t even try to shoot.

Thackery and Rhinehart accompanied him to the very center of the plasma vein. The defenses ended at the edge of a deep, lightless hole in space. Rhodes couldn’t detect anything inside it.

Thackery and Rhinehart turned backward to face all the incoming enemy fighters.

Coulter and Lauer flew in the center of the horde shooting in all directions. The enemy pounded them with gunfire and then turned their weapons on Thackery and Rhinehart.

Rhodes, Henshaw, Oakes, and Dietz stayed where they were. They wouldn’t be able to catch up in time to change the outcome, but it was already over.

Thackery, Rhinehart, Coulter, and Lauer plunged into the enemy grouping taking countless shots from all sides.

Rhodes couldn’t see Fuentes anymore, but the aliens couldn’t break through the defenders to catch up with him.

The hole collapsed in on itself without a sound. It imploded and vanished out of sight. It left only the plasma vein gleaming orange and yellow in the blackness of space. There was no sign of Fuentes.

“Let’s get out of here,” Rhodes murmured. “We’re done. We achieved the objective.”

He turned his ship back the way he came and the other pilots followed him. They flew out of the training hall, back into the landing bay, and touched down on the floor where they found Fuentes waiting for them.

End of Chapter 21.