Rhodes cut his boosters and his feet touched the floor in the Ero’s landing bay. Hundreds of Legion soldiers had to crowd to one side to make room for him and the battalion to land.
Dietz, Lauer, Oakes, and Henshaw landed their Strikers, powered down their engines, and opened their cockpits to let Rhinehart, Coulter, Thackery, and Fuentes disembark.
Rhodes went over to them to make sure everyone was okay, but he already knew they were. He had been interfacing with them all the way back to the Ero from Ohait.
“Are your four Strikers fully operational?” he asked. “No problems?”
“No, nothing,” Henshaw replied. “Titan had some problems interfacing with Zion and Teo. Then they shut down completely and that was the end of it. Titan didn’t detect what the problem was—just that something was blocking the interface.”
“That’s weird. What about your SAMs?” Rhodes looked from one person to another. Then he used to interface to check their SAMs himself.
“Everything seems to be working the way it should, Sir,” Lauer remarked.
“It obviously isn’t if our SAMs shut down in the middle of a battle,” Rhinehart countered. “The captain is right. We should have gone through a lot more training before we came out here.”
“I don’t like this at all,” Rhodes muttered. “There has to be a better way.”
“You mean like not sending highly experimental robotically modified soldiers into battle with equipment that no one has fully tested yet?” Oakes asked.
Rhodes snorted, but just then, a few soldiers standing nearest them jostled Dietz. He whipped around fast. “Hey—watch it!”
Rhodes put out his hand to intervene. “Cool it, Sergeant. It was an accident. There are too many people in here.”
The soldiers who bumped Dietz turned around. Their expressions changed when they saw the battalion. “What the hell are you supposed to be?” a tall red-haired guy asked.
“I’m the guy who’s gonna cut you in half if you don’t keep your mouth shut,” Dietz fired back. “Watch where you’re going next time.”
“You think so?” The red-haired guy barged up to Dietz and chest-bumped him. “You think I’d let a freak like you push me around?”
Rhodes stepped between them and pushed the soldier away. “Put a sock in it, Luntz. Don’t make me call in Lieutenant Upshaw to smack you back down to private where you belong.”
Luntz spun around to talk back….and froze when he realized who he was talking to. “Captain….Rhodes?”
“That’s right. We’re all uncomfortable here, so cool your jets and do your best to get along with everybody.”
“But you’re…..” Luntz’s eyes swiveled to the rest of the battalion, back to Rhodes, and down to his implants. “You’re one of them?”
“We’re the people who got you off that shelf alive, asshole,” Lauer growled.
Rhodes waved his hand again. “Everybody pipe down. This is getting us nowhere.”
Just then, Lieutenant Upshaw shouldered his way through the crowd. He couldn’t have seen the confrontation with so many other soldiers blocking his way.
He stiffened when he found Luntz and a bunch of other soldiers from the 278th squaring up to Dietz, Rhodes, and the battalion.
“Is there a problem here, Captain?” Upshaw asked in his frostiest tone.
“The only problem is that we’re short on space,” Rhodes replied.
At that moment, Fisher interrupted. “Captain Ackerman is asking to speak to you, Captain. He just sent orders down to Captain Vernick, but Vernick doesn’t know where to find you.”
Rhodes made a strategic decision not to answer in front of Upshaw, Luntz, and the other Legion soldiers. Rhodes just said, “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” and started working his way through the crowd toward the Ravager’s internal elevator.
The rest of the battalion went with him. The surrounding soldiers drew back and stared as the battalion passed. None of the soldiers came forward to thank Battalion 1 for saving their lives—again.
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“I swear to Christ, if one of them tries to mouth off to me again, I’m gonna snap,” Dietz muttered. “The cocksuckers.”
“Just don’t talk to them at all,” Rhodes replied. “Stay away from them entirely.”
“How are we supposed to do that when we’re locked up in the same landing bay with them?” Thackery asked.
“We won’t be because we’re back on the Ero. As soon as I talk to the captain, we’ll go back to our own hold and go into conversion cycles for the rest of the trip. We never have to see these people again.”
The elevator opened and Rhodes stepped out onto the Ravager’s command concourse. Offices, communications relay stations, weapons terminals, the pilot’s helm station, and scanning terminals lined the concourse.
Rhodes climbed up to the top level where he found Captain Ackerman waiting for him.
Fisher had shown Rhodes a picture of Ackerman from the Ero captain’s Legion service record. Rhodes didn’t know Ackerman personally, but Rhodes knew what to expect.
“Your presence on this ship is already causing disruption,” Ackerman snapped. “I ask you for the sake of our safety on the return trip to confine yourselves to your own hold quarters.”
“That’s what we planned to do,” Rhodes replied. “We just landed. I was checking that none of my people were injured. We didn’t have a chance to go to our own quarters, but we were on our way there. Believe me, none of us wants to interact with the crew or the platoons.”
This answer apparently displeased Ackerman even more. He narrowed his eyes and scowled at Rhodes from under thick, bushy eyebrows. “I don’t approve of whatever project you people belong to. This is not the way to run a military outfit.”
“I don’t approve of it, either,” Rhodes replied.
Ackerman only glared at him. “Then we have nothing more to say. You can go to your quarters. I’ll take you back to Coleridge Station and you can go back to being someone else’s problem.”
Rhodes turned away to leave the concourse. “Aren’t you going to ask him about our Strikers?” Rhinehart hissed in Rhodes’s ear. “We can’t just leave them down there.”
“I suggest you take it up with General Brewster once we get back to Coleridge Station,” Rhodes replied out the side of his mouth. “None of these people will help us and we can’t go back to Ohait on our own. If we’re lucky, Brewster and the brass will be as anxious to get our Strikers back as we are. Brewster might have already lifted them off. We won’t know until we get back to Coleridge Station. Now all of you come with me. We’re overdue for a conversion cycle.”
He set off through the ship’s many corridors.
“The interface between us is degrading, Captain,” Fisher told him on the way. “This must be one of the side effects of delaying the conversion cycle.”
“I’m as enthusiastic to go into a conversion cycle as you are, pal,” Rhodes replied. “I’m as enthusiastic to go into a conversion cycle as I possibly can be. I’m counting down the minutes until I can put this whole campaign behind me.”
“Why do you think we’re being recalled to Coleridge Station?” Fisher asked.
“You would know that better than I would. Brewster, Neiland, and all their genius cronies probably realize how woefully unprepared you SAMs are to deal with real battlefield conditions. Maybe someone in this whole daffy project will get the brilliant idea to take the battalion off the field at least until the doctors and technicians work out more of the bugs.”
“Do you really think so? Do you really think that’s why we’re being recalled?”
“Of course not. Thinking that would be foolish.”
“I’m detecting a stress response in you, Captain,” Fisher observed. “You’re showing signs of battle fatigue. You need a conversion cycle to rest.”
Rhodes snorted. The only surprise in all this was that he was showing some stress response more detectable now than he had been for the last three weeks.
He didn’t feel any more annoyed, frustrated, angry, or desperate about his situation now than he did before he left Coleridge Station—or when he first woke up.
He didn’t see much difference at all. It all blended together into one continuous horror show.
He really needed a conversion cycle. He needed to sleep.
Right then, he turned the corner into another corridor. Rhodes stiffened when he saw Lieutenant Upshaw coming toward him.
“What the hell does he want?” Lauer snarled.
Upshaw would have had to be blind not to see the rest of the battalion glaring at him. He stopped in front of Rhodes. Upshaw’s eyes skipped from one face to another before he came back to lock on Rhodes.
“Do you want something, Lieutenant?” Rhodes asked.
“Yeah,” Upshaw replied, but he didn’t say right away what it was he wanted. He glanced at the rest of the battalion….and then stuck out his hand to Rhodes. “Thank you—for everything. The other guys might not say it, so let me say it for them. Thank you—all of you.”
Rhodes sighed in relief and shook Upshaw’s hand. “You’re welcome. We’re just doing our jobs. Now, if you don’t mind, we’re all exhausted as I’m sure your men are, too. We all need some sleep. If we meet on the battlefield again, maybe we can do it as friends next time.”
“Of course,” Upshaw agreed. “I’ll let you go, then. Welcome back, Captain.”
“Thank you,” Rhodes replied and walked off.
The rest of the battalion followed him in silence. No one said anything until they got back to the hold with all their capsules in it.
Rhodes slumped on his mattress and stretched out to close his eyes.
“That was nice of him to say,” Fisher remarked. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“We can expect more problems in the future,” Rhodes replied. “Three officers won’t make any difference.”
“Four if you count Colonel Jenner.”
Rhodes didn’t answer. Four didn’t make any more difference than three. The soldiers’ prejudice against the battalion wouldn’t go away no matter how many times the battalion saved everybody’s asses.
If anything, saving their asses would make the soldiers resent the battalion more.
This whole experience reinforced in everyone’s minds, just in case they needed it reinforced, that Rhodes and his people weren’t human anymore. They were something else.
They were fodder the Legion could throw in front of a cannon to save the soldiers’ asses. That would be Battalion 1’s function from now on.
End of Chapter 30.