Rhodes walked into the lab and stopped on the threshold to stare at the line of twelve capsules in front of him.

The twelve new members of Battalion 1 lay asleep inside their capsules the way they had been when Rhodes first woke up.

Dr. Neiland, Dr. Irvine, Dr. Montague, General Brewster, and Colonel Kraft waited in the room for Rhodes to show up.

He barely looked at them. His attention fixated on the people sleeping inside the capsules.

Dr. Irvine and Dr. Neiland tapped away on two of the capsules’ control panels. “We’ll wake them up three at a time,” Dr. Irvine announced. “You can explain everything to them better than we can, Captain.”

“Leave me alone with them,” Rhodes told him.

General Brewster and Dr. Montague both spun around to stare at him. “That would not be advisable,” Dr. Montague replied.

“Then what the hell am I doing here?” Rhodes fired back. “Waking up to you idiots was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Do what you have to do to bring them out of stasis and then make yourselves scarce. I can explain it all much better if you aren’t here.”

General Brewster started to say, “You don’t make the rules here, Captain….”

Kraft stopped him by laying a hand on Brewster’s arm. Kraft gave the general a significant look and jerked his head toward the door.

Brewster’s expression changed. “I guess it won’t do any harm,” he grumbled.

The three doctors kept casting furtive glances back and forth between Brewster and Rhodes. The doctors didn’t stop working on the three capsules in question.

Kraft finally dragged Brewster out of the lab. Brewster gave orders to the doctors to do it Rhodes’s way and then the doctors left, too.

The three capsules opened, but the people inside didn’t stir. Rhodes stood over them staring down at them.

So many conflicting emotions wrestled in his chest. He actually considered for a minute if it wouldn’t be better just to kill these people now. That would spare them the trouble of trying to orient to this nightmare.

His own words came back to haunt him. These people might not suffer any disorientation at all. They might be delighted with their new circumstances. Who was he to make that decision for them?

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Fisher asked.

“None of this is a good idea. This whole project is a bad idea from start to finish. What the hell difference does it make if I’m here or someone else is?”

“You would know that better than I would, Captain.”

“That’s kinda the point, isn’t it? I’m the only person alive who knows anything about this.”

They had to cut their conversation short when the three recruits stirred. The doctors had woken up Sergeant David Cope, Corporal Bobby Poole, and Corporal Liam Taylor first. They groaned and twisted in bed.

“Their SAMs aren’t activated yet, are they?” Rhodes asked Fisher.

“Not yet. They have to go through at least two days of orientation before the doctors introduce the new recruits to The Grid and their SAMs.”

“Do you know anything about their SAMs?” Rhodes asked.

“No one knows anything about their SAMs,” Fisher replied. “Each recruit gets a brand-new SAM that has never been brought online before. No one knows what a SAM will be or who or what its personality will be like before the doctors activate it.”

Rhodes ran his hand across his eyes. “This really is the most incompetent military operation I ever heard of.”

“I don’t understand the problem, Captain. How can anyone know what a SAM will be before it comes online?”

Rhodes didn’t have time to explain before the three recruits started to open their eyes. Cope opened his first.

He had sandy blonde hair, blue eyes, and fine, delicate features. He would have been a real lady killer in any other walk of life.

“Where am I?” he croaked.

“You’re at Coleridge Station. It’s a military base on the Fringes.”

Cope groaned again and raised his hand to rub his eyes. That’s when he touched his face. He looked down at his hand and blinked.

“You got injured on the battlefield,” Rhodes explained. “You would have died. The Legion brought you here and repaired your limbs and organs by replacing them with these robotic implants. See? They did the same thing to me. Soldier! Look at me!”

Cope’s eyes shot up to meet Rhodes, but Cope didn’t seem to understand what he was seeing.

His one blue eye stared at Rhodes extra hard, but Cope didn’t react at all.

“My name is Captain Corban Rhodes of the 249th Platoon. I got injured on the battlefield and I woke up here the same way you are now. Look at me, Sergeant!”

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Cope blinked his one eye, but he still didn’t respond. Just then, Poole raised his head and opened his eye.

He had a thick mop of dark brown hair that needed a trim. A scruff of black bristles covered the bottom half of his face. “Where am I?” he groaned in a deep, growly voice.

“You’re at Coleridge Station on the Fringes. You got injured on the battlefield. You’re in the hospital.”

“I feel like shit,” Poole grumbled.

“You’re disoriented from being asleep for so long.”

Rhodes had to turn his attention to Taylor. He kept trying to raise his arm to touch his own face, but he couldn’t lift it. He groaned once…and then again.

Cope still stared at nothing. No one seemed to be home at all.

Rhodes went from one man to another trying to explain everything to them. “The weakness and nausea will pass. You’ll feel better in a few minutes. Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine.”

Poole blinked his one good eye a little harder and raised his hand in front of his face. He moved his fingers and rotated his wrist in deep concentration when he saw his robotic hand. “What…..the….hell……?”

“You almost died on the battlefield. The Legion replaced your injured limbs and damaged organs with these implants. They did the same thing to me.”

Taylor groaned again. He still didn’t open his eye.

Cope stared into space. He didn’t move except to blink a few times.

Rhodes went back to Taylor’s bed and checked the control panel. “Something’s wrong,” Rhodes told Fisher. “He should have woken up by now. Can you tell what the readings say about it?”

Poole looked up at him. “Huh?”

Rhodes opened his mouth to explain that he wasn’t talking to Poole, but just then, the door burst open. The three doctors and the two officers charged into the room.

Dr. Neiland raced over to the panel attached to Taylor’s bed. She started tapping frantically at the controls. “Something’s wrong.”

“I know,” Rhodes told her. “I was just asking Fisher if he could figure it out.”

Dr. Irvine approached Taylor’s bed from the other side, leaned over the man, and pried back one of his eyelids to check his one good eye. “His pupils aren’t reacting.”

“His brainwaves are all normal,” Dr. Neiland muttered. “So are his vital signs. I can’t find anything wrong with him.”

Poole turned to stare at them. “What’s going on?”

Everyone ignored him. “His brainwaves are becoming erratic!” Dr. Neiland warned. “We have to intervene to stop the…..”

She barely got the words out before Taylor convulsed on the bed. He spasmed once, lay still, and then jerked again.

“What’s wrong with him?” General Brewster asked.

“Maybe he’s only had half his body parts replaced by robotics and now his whole system is rejecting the implants,” Rhodes snapped over his shoulder.

He shouldn’t have used that moment to make his point, but Taylor made it for him.

The three doctors raced around the bed pushing every button they could find. “His brainwaves are entering an Epsilon state!” Dr. Neiland yelled. “He’s going into cardiac arrest!”

“Defibrillate him!” Dr. Montague ordered.

“What’s the point if his brain is gone?” Dr. Neiland countered. “We can’t stop the cascade! It’s already past the point of no return.”

Taylor jolted again, and this time, the convulsions didn’t stop. He jerked back and forth so violently that he bounced on the mattress.

Dr. Irvine dove for him to hold him down. “For God’s sake, do something, Veronica!”

“I can’t!” Dr. Neiland countered. “The implants are reacting to the cascade! They’re attacking the base tissue layer.”

Rhodes stood back watching in horror as the flesh around the implants turned black. It peeled away from the implants to expose bone, muscle, and bloody connective tissue.

The skin around Taylor’s face curled away to reveal sections of skull. The eyelid of his one remaining eye shriveled, turned black, and rolled upward inside the socket.

The lid left one brown eyeball exposed for a second before the eye turned black and crumbled inward in a rotten, sunken mass.

The three doctors straightened up and stared down at the destroyed corpse. Only the implants looked intact. The cascade completely demolished the rest of Taylor’s body.

“There must be some way to stop it,” Dr. Irvine murmured.

“We’ve tried everything,” Dr. Neiland choked.

“Well, we can’t keep losing people like this,” Dr. Irvine countered. “This is the tenth one we’ve lost.”

Rhodes opened his mouth to suggest maybe they ought to consider not implanting these devices in any more unwilling soldiers, but a strangled scream cut him off.

Everyone turned around to see Poole sitting up on the edge of his capsule.

Rhodes realized too late that Poole was sitting in exactly the right position to see everything that happened to Taylor. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time or in a worse place.

Poole let out one broken roar of agony and horror, shot off his bed, and raised both hands to his face.

He bared his teeth in a hideous grimace of pain and fury, dug his fingers into his forehead, and sank them into the skin around his facial implants.

Dr. Irvine and Dr. Montague stood on that side of Taylor’s bed. They lunged for Poole trying to wrench his arms down.

“NO!!” Dr. Montague yelled,

No one could fight Poole’s strength. He took his hands away from his face just long enough to swing his robotic arms.

He clubbed both doctors away and attacked his own head even harder. He clawed at his forehead and succeeded in tearing the implants out of the bone.

He roared in pain, but that only drove him farther into insanity. He yanked his facial implant away and blood spurted from the open wounds. It flooded into his one remaining eye.

He gave one almighty heave and ripped the implant the rest of the way off. It tore out of his implanted eye socket and a long cable of bloody electronic fibers snaked out of his skull.

He screamed in continuous bellows of dying fury, but nothing stopped him from tearing the rest of his implants off his head.

He used his left arm to rip his right arm off. It tore out of the shoulder socket and he used his one remaining arm to tear the rest of the implants away from his chest.

Blood poured down his body from all those wounds. Wires, cables, and artificial metal joints came away along with the components.

He threw them on the floor and finally, last of all, he tore out his own rib cage when he ripped the plate off his chest.

He buckled onto his knees strangling on his own blood. He eventually collapsed across the floor in a pool of his own blood.

Everyone stared at him in horror. Rhodes felt sick, but he had to watch to the very end.

Dr. Neiland sobbed quietly in a corner. The other two doctors stared down at Poole’s body in stunned disbelief. Neither of the two officers moved a muscle.

After what seemed like hours, Dr. Irvine turned to Cope. He didn’t move through the whole process. He lay on his mattress staring up with the same blank expression he gave Rhodes when Cope first woke up.

Dr. Irvine checked the readings on Cope’s capsule. “He’s gone, too. His brainwaves are negligible. He should have come out of the disorientation by now. His whole system shut down. He’s gone.”

Rhodes couldn’t watch this anymore. He cut a wide circle around Poole’s body and left the lab for the other side of the station. These three recruits were someone else’s problem. The people who did this could clean up their own mess.

Rhodes went back to the loading dock. It was the only place in this nuthouse where he could be alone and think.

“I’m sorry you had to see that, Captain,” Fisher murmured after a while.

“I’m not,” Rhodes replied. “That was nothing I haven’t thought about doing a million times myself. It actually makes me feel better. Now I know I’m not the only one.”

End of Chapter 10.