Battalion 1

Rhodes threw Lauer and Oakes down behind a low rise and jumped down there after them. “You’re still an alien, Captain,” Fisher told him. “Turn yourself back into your normal shape.”

Rhodes had to think about it before he remembered. He transformed back into his normal shape just as Dietz and Rhinehart showed up with Fuentes, Henshaw, and Thackery.

All of them had taken hits from the base ships’ laser cannons. Henshaw was completely unconscious with part of her ribs blasted out.

A wicked slash carved through Thackery’s skull implant. Rhodes didn’t see any severe external damage, but her behavior told him something serious must have gone badly wrong.

She jerked her head to the left again and again. She didn’t blink. She kept opening and closing her mouth again and again without making a sound.

Fuentes’s mechanical right arm had been torn off by some force. Wires and broken mechanical rods hung from the joint.

Rhinehart carried the arm in one hand. Dietz appeared uninjured again, but Rhodes decided to give Dietz another pass for getting Thackery and Fuentes out of danger.

“Where’s Coulter?” Rhodes asked.

“No idea,” Rhinehart replied. “I didn’t see him—and he isn’t on The Grid, either. Neither is Murphy.”

Rhodes could see that they weren’t on The Grid. “Can you access any of their SAMs?” he asked Fisher.

“I’m trying to. Van is still there. She’s hiding from us.”

“Get her back out here. We need to deal with all these injuries and malfunctions.”

Rhodes turned to Lauer. He was still out cold, too. Wild kept repeating over and over that the Emal were flanking from the south—which they weren’t. They never had been.

Rhinehart squatted down in front of Fuentes and moved Fuentes’s severed arm closer to him. Rhinehart put it on the ground nearby.

Rhodes didn’t see what the group could possibly do with it, but Fisher intervened. “Hold the arm close to his shoulder. It will reattach by itself.”

Rhinehart frowned at it. “How will it do that?”

“Just hold it up. Put the wires and rods together.”

Rhinehart positioned the arm where it was supposed to be. The wires snaked out of the gaping hole in Fuentes’s shoulder and the rods extended until their fragmented ends touched.

They rejoined and the arm thumped into its socket. It repaired itself, but that didn’t help Fuentes. He glanced around the group and out into the darkness.

Rhodes got in front of Fuentes’s eyes. “You okay, Rudy? Are you in pain anywhere?”

Fuentes didn’t make eye contact. “She’s gone. She’s gone,” he husked. “She’s gone.”

“Who’s gone?”

“I think he means Van,” Fisher explained.

“Where is she? Bring her back.”

“I’m trying to,” Fisher replied. “She won’t come.”

“Are you saying she can’t or she won’t?”

“I’m not detecting any malfunction,” Fisher replied. “There’s nothing wrong with the interface.”

“There must be or she would be here right now.”

“She’s gone,” Fuentes panted again. “She’s gone.”

“She isn’t gone!” Rhodes snapped way too loudly.

He tore his attention away from Fuentes. He wasn’t injured enough for Rhodes to spend any more time on him.

The damage to Lauer’s face didn’t repair itself. Rhodes checked on Oakes. Rhodes rolled him over, but Rhodes didn’t find any damage to Oakes, either.

There was definitely something wrong with him, though. He huddled in a ball with his chin tucked all the way down on his chest.

“Look at me, Lieutenant,” Rhodes ordered.

Oakes’s eyes swiveled up, but he didn’t raise his head enough to make eye contact.

“What’s wrong, Lieutenant?” Rhodes asked. “Oakes—look at me!”

Rhodes tried to pull Oakes up and force Oakes to sit up straight, but Oakes didn’t uncurl from his fetal ball. He twisted away from Rhodes and faced the hillside.

Dash hovered off to one side. The SAM turned right and left, too, but he didn’t stutter or glitch. His wild eyes darted across the landscape without seeing anything.

He grimaced in terror and his lips shivered with every rapid, panting breath.

“Dash!” Rhodes snapped. “What’s wrong with Oakes?’

“They’re coming!” Dash whimpered. “They’re coming!”

“Dash!” Rhodes barked a little louder. “Did Oakes get hurt?”

“They’re coming!” Dash moaned. “They’re coming for us all!”

“I don’t detect any damage to Oakes’s body or his systems,” Fisher remarked. “He seems to be functioning normally.”

“What’s wrong with them, then?”

“I’d say they’re afraid, Captain,” Fisher murmured. “They’ve never gotten injured before.”

“Can you find Van at all?”

“She’s there. She’s a pinprick. She won’t come out. She’s terrified.”

Rhodes gritted his teeth. Now wasn’t the time for the SAMs to curl up and die because they were afraid.

He turned his attention to Henshaw and Thackery. “The damage to Thackery’s head is minimal,” Fisher reported. “Koenig is causing her to malfunction the same way Dash is causing Oakes to malfunction.”

Rhodes made a strategic decision not to try to get through to Koenig. Rhodes turned to Henshaw and checked her side.

The housing of her chest implants was already starting to close up by itself. Keon was still offline, though.

At that moment, a piercing scream echoed out of the darkness to the east. It didn’t come from the battle. It came from where the battalion had just been carrying out their distraction.

Rhinehart shot up and looked in that direction. “Coulter is out there! He could be scared, too. He could be injured or lost in the dark.” He hunkered down behind the hill and turned to Rhodes. “Let me go out and get him, Sir.”

Rhodes checked The Grid and interfaced with Rhinehart. He was right. Coulter had taken refuge behind another swell farther southeast.

“All right. You can go,” Rhodes decided. “Just be careful and stay interfaced with the rest of us. Don’t take any unnecessary risks and make sure you make it back in one piece even if it means you have to leave Coulter behind. We can’t afford to lose anyone else tonight.”

Rhinehart dipped his chin once. “Yes, Sir. I’ll be careful.”

He changed himself back into one of those slithering snakes, coiled out of the hollow, and vanished into the night.

Rhodes turned back to the people in front of him. He had to take a few seconds to decide which of them to deal with first.

He decided to tackle Dash. “Dash—look at me!” Rhodes snapped. “Dash!!”

Dash’s eyes barely grazed Rhodes’s face. Rhodes would have liked to grab the SAM and shake him, but Rhodes couldn’t do that.

“Listen to me, Dash. Oakes is in danger. You’re the only person who can get him to safety. Listen to me, Dash! You have to snap out of it. I know you’re scared, but Oakes is in trouble. You want to help Oakes, don’t you?”

Dash barely nodded before he went back to scanning the darkness and panting in terror.

“You have to get Oakes out of here. Understand?” Rhodes went on. “Can you do that? I need you to push through this fear and get Oakes back to the Legion. That’s all you have to do. The Emal are all over there fighting the platoons. You can do this, Dash. I know it’s scary, but I believe in you.”

Dash nodded again. His eyes traced north toward the Legion position. He didn’t come out of his terrified trance, but at least he heard and understood.

Rhodes turned to Oakes next. “Listen to me, soldier,” Rhodes murmured in his ear. “I know you’re scared right now, but this is just a malfunction. You’re feeling your SAM’s fear. This isn’t you. You’re a fighter. You can pull out of this. You can get yourself to safety. You can fight back. You’ve done it before. You can do it now.”

Rhodes looked around to see Dietz and Fuentes listening. Fuentes screwed up his face in an agony of determination, but plenty of the old anguish came through anyway.

“Van is making you more afraid than you should be,” Rhodes told him. “Try to put your fear aside just long enough to get back to the Legion position. Understand?”

Fuentes nodded down at the ground. That left Thackery.

Koenig was making himself invisible, too. Thackery didn’t respond at all when Rhodes tried to talk to her.

“There has to be a way to hack these SAMs and straighten them out,” Rhodes muttered.

“I could try to shut them down the way I shut down Fuentes,” Fisher suggested. “It would affect all of you and it might even make the problem worse. I could wind up knocking them all out. Then we’d be stranded here.”

“We can’t risk that.”

A deep boom of gunfire and explosions made Rhodes glance over the hilltop toward the battle. The Emal were starting to push the Legion platoons into the city.

Dusters burned back and forth across the battle unleashing seekers and breaker bombs on the Emal. This was turning into another nightmare horrorscape exactly like Luluna.

End of Chapter 42.