Rhodes and his people stepped out of the Ero’s landing bay and crossed the loading dock at Coleridge Station.

The Ero crew started unloading the battalion’s conversion capsules. Rhodes and his people had been asleep for another eight weeks on the trip back here.

The group returned to the barracks and sat around shooting the breeze for a while. Rhodes didn’t know what to expect from coming back here.

He expected to sit around a lot while the doctors and technicians tried to figure out why the Strikers and the battalion’s boosters shut down during the Ohait campaign. Most of that work would be done on the Strikers themselves, not on Rhodes and his people.

He got a surprise when Dr. Neiland came to see them. “If you’ll all come with me, we need to put you all through some basic testing to troubleshoot your malfunctions.”

“What malfunctions?” Coulter countered. “None of us malfunctioned.”

“Your interfaces malfunctioned and some of your power systems failed. We need to troubleshoot all of you to find the source of the problem.”

“Why don’t you troubleshoot our Strikers?” Rhodes asked. “They were the ones that malfunctioned.”

“We are troubleshooting them. The Ero brought Zion, Teo, Stone, Rio, and Aries back from Ohait. We’re going through the SAMs’ programming now. Follow me and we’ll start the testing.”

Rhodes and his people exchanged glances, but how else were the doctors and technicians supposed to find out what went wrong?

Rhodes followed Neiland out of the barracks. The rest of the battalion dragged their heels, but they finally came, too.

Neiland led Rhodes to the original lab where he’d woken up the first time. “You’re in here with me, Captain. The rest of you will spread out through the rest of the lab. Other technicians will test you and we’ll collate the results after we finish.”

Rhodes narrowed his eyes. “Why are you separating us?”

“I just told you. I couldn’t test all of you at the same time. A different technician will test each of you. It will save time if we get the results simultaneously.”

He entered the lab, but he didn’t stop scowling at her. Something about this didn’t make sense.

“Sit down here, Captain,” Neiland indicated a stool next to the lab’s central stack of computer equipment.

“I didn’t malfunction,” he insisted. “Rio got shot down and crashed. I never malfunctioned and neither did either of my SAMs.”

She only smiled at him. “This testing is routine procedure. We want to make sure you don’t suffer from the same problems the others did.”

“I’m not suffering from the same problems. You can see that for yourself.”

“I still have to test you.”

She picked up what looked like an electrode and stepped behind his stool. He really wished he could see what she was doing, but he just had to sit here and accept it.

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She touched the electrodes to the side of his cranial implant behind his ear. A flood of memories from his past exploded in his head.

He saw his parents, his brothers and sisters, and a thousand images from his childhood.

Smells from the house he grew up in, the sound of his father’s car starting in the driveway, Rhodes’s sisters laughing in another room, the family dog jumping onto Rhodes’s bed to wake him up in the morning—it all hit him like a freight train too fast for him to stop it.

A rush of agony and overwhelming emotion crushed him under the weight of years. He gasped and barely fought himself under control to stop himself from breaking down in front of Dr. Neiland.

She tapped her electrodes to a different part of his head and another torturous explosion of uncontrollable emotions shook him to his core.

Overwhelming, volcanic fury tore him apart. All the rage of every battle he’d ever fought burst out of him. The insane, destructive rage of his first weeks at Coleridge Station overflowed his best efforts to hold it back.

It brought a devastating wave of grief with it. He buckled under the strain, but that grief only ignited another murderous surge of fury. He wanted to kill someone for making him feel this way.

The only person available to kill was Dr. Neiland. He barely wrestled himself under control to stop himself from going into a blood frenzy right now.

She took her electrodes off his head, but the cascade of emotions and memories didn’t stop. He saw his fellow soldiers torn apart in front of his eyes. He felt again the brutal sensation of an Emal laser cutting his arm off and slicing into his chest.

He even felt the weight of that Duster falling on top of him. It crushed the life out of him.

Life-destroying emotion overwhelmed him when he relived that moment—that moment when he knew with absolutely no doubt that he would never see his family or his home on Preinea again.

Dr. Neiland walked around him and stood in front of him tapping on her equipment doing something. She didn’t notice anything different about him.

He wanted to tear her limb from limb for doing this to him. It took every ounce of his willpower to stay glued to his stool. He couldn’t show anything on the outside to indicate the turmoil ripping him apart on the inside.

Fisher’s face juddered back and forth in front of Rhodes’s eyes. Fisher jerked right and left in shaky, flickering movements. Something was definitely wrong with him. He kept opening and closing his mouth, but no sound came out.

Rhodes had to summon all his resolve to keep his voice steady. “Something’s wrong with Fisher,” Rhodes snarled through gritted teeth. “He was fine before. Whatever you did caused him to malfunction.”

Dr. Neiland raised her eyebrows. “Are you sure? I’m not detecting anything….”

“Are you calling me a liar?” Rhodes snapped. “I’m telling you something’s wrong with him. He was fine before you did whatever you just did to me. I wasn’t malfunctioning before, but I am now. Whatever you did, correct it and put it back to the way it was before.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do, Captain….” She turned aside and picked up her electrode again.

He saw her coming toward him with the electrode again. He couldn’t stand that.

He shot off his stool and batted her hands away. “Just leave me alone. You’ve done enough damage already.”

He stormed out of the lab seething with fury….and everything else boiling inside him right now. He had to fix this. He had to put it back to the way it was before. He just didn’t know how to.

Fisher kept jittering back and forth and trying to talk. Panic seized Rhodes by the guts.

He wasn’t thinking clearly. Neiland did something to him that threw him off balance. He knew that.

Whatever she did, she could put right—or someone could. Rhodes didn’t trust her to do it. He didn’t know who to trust.

He’d come to depend on Fisher for….well, everything. How would Rhodes function without Fisher?

Fisher needed Rhodes right now. Rhodes didn’t know what to do, so he went back to the barracks and lay down in his capsule.

He didn’t think the conversion cycle would fix what was wrong with Fisher and Rhodes turned out to be right about that.

The prongs locked with his back and head. Nothing happened. The overwhelming surge of emotion and desperate fury only seemed to escalate.

He sat up. He was the only person in here. Everyone else was still in the lab.

What if the doctors and technicians did to the rest of the battalion what Neiland did to him?

None of them would be able to function. Then this whole insane project would be dead in the water.

Maybe that was for the best, but Rhodes had to correct himself—and fast.

End of Chapter 31.