Rhodes stood back across the room and watched the doctors wake up the next three recruits. He didn’t hold out much hope that this batch would play out any differently than the first three.

He didn’t voice his worst fears to anyone, not even Fisher. Even so, Rhodes sensed the underlying unspoken subtext.

If this didn’t work, if the doctors didn’t succeed in waking up anyone else, Rhodes would be the only person alive with these implants. He would be one of a kind.

The Legion brass would probably decide he was too valuable to send into battle after all. He might get trapped at Coleridge Station for the rest of eternity—or however long he lived before he decided to end his own misery.

The doctors woke up Lieutenant Heath Lauer, Corporal Rudy Fuentes, and Alyssa Thackery next. They went through the same process of groaning, opening their eyes, and discovering their implants.

Rhodes didn’t get involved when the doctors explained everything.

Thackery stood up right away. She kept raising her hands, turning them in all directions, and moving her limbs in amazement.

“This is great!” she exclaimed. “I feel wonderful. I’ve never felt this good.”

“Do you feel any disorientation or confusion?” Dr. Neiland asked.

“No, I feel fantastic!” Thackery grinned. “I should have signed up for this years ago.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Fisher asked. “Why isn’t she disoriented?”

Rhodes didn’t answer. No one outside his own head could hear Fisher. It usually disturbed people to hear Rhodes talking to someone no one else could see.

Thackery had a tight, muscular body like she worked out a lot before this. She had a springy quality that made Rhodes think she actually might be a soldier after all even though she wasn’t.

Fuentes sat up more slowly. He couldn’t be more than twenty-one with a dull, slack expression.

He looked around him blinking in a daze for a long time. “Do you remember where you were before you woke up here?” Dr. Irvine asked him.

“Um….I think…..I was on a ship….” Fuentes stammered.

“Do you remember your own name?”

“Um…..Rudy…..”

Dr. Irvine motioned for Rhodes to come over. “This is Captain Corban Rhodes. He’ll be your commanding officer from now on.” Dr. Irvine murmured in Rhodes’s ear. “Ask him some questions while I check his brainwave readings.”

“Do you understand where you are, Corporal?” Rhodes asked. “Did you hear the doctor tell you just now where you are?”

“Yes, Sir,” Fuentes replied in the same numb tone.

“What did he say? Where did the doctor say you are?”

“Um…..I think it was…..something about Cole something Station.”

“Do you remember why the doctor said the Legion brought you here?” Rhodes asked.

“Yes, Sir. He said….I got hurt…and they brought me here….to fix me…..”

Rhodes picked up Fuentes’s arm. “Do you know what this is, Corporal?”

“Um…..my arm, Sir?”

Rhodes glanced at Dr. Irvine. “What’s wrong? Is his brain shutting down?”

“All his brainwaves are reading as normal. His service record says he had an IQ of ninety before this, so maybe he was like this before.”

Rhodes turned back to Fuentes. “Do you know why you’re here, Corporal? Do you know why the doctors replaced your limbs and organs with these machines?”

“To fight the war, Sir?”

Rhodes glanced at Irvine again, but Irvine just shrugged. “I can’t find anything wrong with him. As long as he doesn’t suffer from any disorientation, he should be fine.”

Rhodes left it at that and turned to the last of the three new recruits. Lauer sat on his bed glaring at everyone. He had longish, messy black hair, a thick, messy black beard, and hard black eyes.

He had a big, burly, dangerously powerful frame. He looked like he could get violent given the right provocation.

He answered Dr. Montague in gruff, one-word grunts.

“This is Captain Corban Rhodes,” Dr. Montague told Lauer. “He’ll be in command of your unit as soon as you orient to your new implants.”

Lauer glared at Rhodes, dipped his chin once, and clipped, “Sir.”

“Can you remember where you were before you woke up here, Lieutenant?” Rhodes asked.

“Yes, Sir,” Lauer snapped.

Rhodes waited for him to say something else. “Are you aware of why you’re here and what Battalion 1’s mission is?”

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“Yes, Sir.”

Rhodes gave it up. He decided to wait and see just how disoriented Lauer turned out to be.

At least he didn’t attack himself and tear his implants out. Anything less than that would be a win—that and not dying of convulsions or going brain-dead in his capsule.

None of the three recruits seemed to suffer from any disorientation at all—not on the surface. Thackery couldn’t have been more delighted with her new circumstances. Fuentes didn’t respond to anyone with any more emotion than before.

Lauer kept glaring at everyone and refused to say a word other than, “Yes, Sir,” and “No, Sir.”

Once the doctors assured themselves that none of the three recruits was going down in flames, the doctors left the three recruits with Rhodes.

He took them back to the barracks and explained the capsules to them.

“This is awesome!” Thackery exclaimed and then went over to the computer terminal. “I always wanted time to study all this stuff.”

“I don’t know how much free time we’ll have,” Rhodes told her. “As soon as the battalion finishes training, the Legion will deploy us back on the battlefield.”

Fuentes headed for the terminal, too. “I want to call my mother. I want to tell her I’m okay. She’s probably wondering where I am.”

“You can’t, Corporal,” Rhodes told him. “I’m sorry, but all your families have been notified that you died in the accidents that brought you here. You can’t go home and you can’t talk to your families. I’m sorry.”

Fuentes’s features screwed up in knots. “But…..I have to! My family is all I have! I can’t lose them!”

“I’m sorry, Corporal. The same thing happened to me and most of the staff here. We all lost people we love.”

“But….I have to!” Fuentes’s voice spiked. “You can’t stop me! I have to….and I’m going to!”

He smacked Rhodes’s hands away and then charged past him to the terminal. Rhodes lunged for him to stop him.

“He can’t, Captain,” Fisher murmured. “These terminals don’t connect to any outside communications system.”

Rhodes stopped there across the room. Fuentes raced to the terminal. Thackery sidestepped to get out of the way to give him space to get near it.

Fuentes threw himself down at the desk and scrambled on the terminal pushing a million buttons.

He kept muttering to himself, “I have to! I have to!”

Rhodes watched him for a while before he crossed to Fuentes’s side. Rhodes laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You can’t, man. I’m sorry.”

Fuentes blasted out of the chair, tried to knock Rhodes aside a second time, and then collapsed on his knees. He sprawled across the desk, extended his arms over his head, and burst into loud, agonized sobs.

“NO!!” he howled. “NO!!”

Lauer turned his head all the way away and glared at the wall. Thackery blinked at Fuentes in disbelief.

Rhodes took a few steps toward the boy, but Rhodes hesitated to intervene.

“It looks like he was disoriented after all,” Fisher murmured.

Rhodes didn’t answer that time, either. He was beginning to see a trend here.

This so-called disorientation was bound to reveal itself in all kinds of ways. It definitely wouldn’t go away anytime soon.

He took hold of Fuentes’s shoulders and pulled him off the desk. “Come here, Corporal. Sit down over here.”

He steered Fuentes to a nearby bench at the table. Fuentes stayed crumpled over shaking with pitiful sobs, but he didn’t resist.

Rhodes sat down next to him and patted Fuentes on the back. “I’m sorry, man. The same thing happened to me.”

Fuentes doubled over crying even harder and buried his face in Rhodes’s chest.

Rhodes froze when Fuentes wrapped his arms around Rhodes’s rib cage. Fuentes held on way too tightly and completely broke down like a child.

Rhodes hesitated again. Then he threw caution to the wind, laid his arm over Fuentes’s shoulders, and held him.

Nothing would make this better. Holding Fuentes wouldn’t make it better, but just one person trying to care made a big difference.

Rhodes learned that the hard way. He learned that from Fisher.

“They’re all I have!” Fuentes howled. “My family is all I have!”

“I know,” Rhodes murmured. “The same thing happened to me.”

Thackery stood there staring at them for a long time. Lauer kept his head turned and refused to look at anyone.

Fuentes didn’t show any sign of letting up. After half an hour of straight crying, Rhodes couldn’t take it anymore.

He dragged Fuentes to his feet, but Fuentes refused to unwrap his arms from around Rhodes’s body.

Rhodes staggered across the barracks to the capsule assigned to Fuentes. Rhodes had to use force to pry the kid off.

“Lie down here, Rudy,” Rhodes ordered. “Lie down and try to get some sleep. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”

Fuentes obeyed. He might not be the sharpest tack in the box, but he knew an order when he heard one.

Rhodes manually straightened out Fuentes’s limbs, positioned him in the right place, and stood up. “Stay there and don’t move until you wake up,” Rhodes told him. “That’s an order.”

Fuentes sniffed, “Yes, Sir,” and lay still.

Rhodes closed the capsule cover and Fuentes’s body jolted when the prongs locked him into place. Rhodes checked that the conversion cycle was beginning normally.

Silence fell over the barracks. Thackery sat back down at the terminal and started working on it in Fuentes’s place. Lauer didn’t move to look at anyone.

Rhodes left them there. He needed to be alone.

He went out to the loading dock, but he didn’t sit down. He leaned against the wall and watched the ships coming in and going out.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Fisher murmured in an undertone.

“Why are you sorry? You didn’t do any of this.”

“I’m sorry for your loss. I didn’t realize until now how deep your distress must have been. I underestimated the pain your distress must be causing you.”

“I would appreciate it if you didn’t try to get inside my head, pal,” Rhodes snapped. “What I think and what I feel is my business, not yours.”

“I can’t help it, Captain. I am inside your head.”

“That doesn’t mean you can help yourself to my thoughts and feelings.”

Fisher shut his mouth. His silence made Rhodes feel worse.

“Look, what I think and feel is for me to process, not you,” he told Fisher. “It doesn’t help me to have you talking about it all the time.”

“I thought you wanted to talk about it.”

“Well, I don’t. Talking about it just brings up the pain all over again.”

“But the pain is already up, as you say,” Fisher pointed out. “It doesn’t go away. It appears that you are not disoriented at all. It appears to me as if this pain is simply your default neural state now.”

“Well, what the hell did you expect?!” Rhodes heard his voice rising again. “You can’t just tear a man away from his family and everything he knows and holds dear and not have it affect him! What did you think? That isn’t disorientation. I’m perfectly oriented. I understand perfectly the situation I’m in. That’s exactly the problem! You can’t fix it just by getting used to it. It just becomes more galling with every passing day. That isn’t fixing the problem. That is the problem! Don’t you get it?”

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Fisher murmured. “I didn’t get it before, but I do now. I don’t know how to help you. That’s all I want to do.”

“You can help me by not bringing it up again—ever. Bringing it up only throws it in my face that nothing can ever fix it. Just drop it and let me deal with the situation at hand. That’s all I’m asking.”

“But isn’t this the situation at hand? Isn’t this the situation with Fuentes? What if the other recruits suffer the same distress? That will affect you, too. It will bring it up again and you will have to think about your own loss. How will it ever go away?”

Rhodes covered his eyes. He already knew that.

He wouldn’t be able to get out of this probably ever. His subordinates’ distress would only make his distress more obvious and more excruciating.

He would never escape it because there was no escape. This was his life now.

End of Chapter 11.