Rhodes floundered back to consciousness and heard Fisher yelling from a long way off. “Captain! Are you injured? I can’t tell! The interface is blurry.”

Rhodes pushed himself up on his arms. He had trouble seeing and hearing Fisher and everything else around him.

He felt alien hands grasping at him. His vision cleared just enough to see an Emal leaning over him. The creature’s eyes glazed over and the cilia around its mouth came disgustingly close to Rhodes’s face.

He jolted to get away from it, but the creature held him down and stuck a laser rifle in his face.

He snapped to high alert and discovered dozens more Emal surrounding him on all sides. They all aimed their guns at him, but they didn’t shoot. One of them touched his face and its spindly fingers traced the outline of his implants.

That touch sent him into a panic. He reared off the ground, tried to push the Emal away, and then remembered all his weaponry. He raised his arm and fired his scourge gun, but nothing happened. The weapon failed.

He scrambled to think and fired his thermal cannon, his lasers, and again tried his scourge gun. None of them worked.

Terror seized him. He shot to his feet and tried to activate his boosters. They didn’t work, either. He was stranded here surrounded by hundreds of aliens all armed with lasers that could cut him to pieces—again.

The memory of his arm getting cut off blasted him out of his mind. He swung his arms to strike at the aliens, but too many of them packed around him. He could barely move.

Another Emal raised its hand and touched his face again. Alien hands groped him all over. He couldn’t let this happen.

He punched and threw elbows at the aliens nearest him. He wasn’t that far away from the city when the Emal shot him down, but he couldn’t even see the edge of the horde to figure out how to get away from them.

Their bodies squashed him between them. A few of them pushed against his back. Others in front of him parted to let him through. Dozens of aliens prodded and propelled him.

He got caught in the tide of arms and hands. They were steering him away—where they wanted him to go. Were they trying to capture him?

That thought pushed him over the edge. He spun around and flailed to get through the mob heading the other way. He had to get out of here at all costs.

At that moment, a fast-moving fighter craft blasted over his head. He didn’t have time to see what it was. It was flying too fast—faster than a Legion Predator.

Something snatched him away from the Emal crowd. It yanked him up into the sky by the arm and his mind cleared. The fast-moving fighter craft was actually Lauer.

He zoomed high over the alien horde, banked right and left to avoid their laser shots, and pelted westward across the landscape heading toward the city.

The aliens, the battle, and all the danger moved farther away. The Legion platoons had set up a fortified position on the city’s eastern fringes. Lauer rocketed toward them carrying Rhodes with him.

His fear and panic faded and Fisher’s voice switched back on.

Rhodes didn’t realize until that moment that there had been something wrong with Fisher. The image of his face had been glitching and he stuttered back and forth the way he did at Coleridge Station.

Now his image stabilized. Rhodes could see Fisher clearly, but Fisher didn’t see him.

Fisher faced sideways and talked rapidly to someone Rhodes couldn’t see. “I’m trying to get through to him, but he doesn’t respond! There’s something wrong with the interface! I don’t know what caused it! He was fine and then he got shot down!”

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“Did the laser damage him?” Wild’s voice asked through the interface.

“No, he was fine right up until he woke up on the ground. That’s when the interface started cutting out.”

“I’m okay now, Fisher,” Rhodes gasped. “I can hear you.”

“Captain!” Fisher exclaimed. He turned slightly to make eye contact with Rhodes. “I thought we’d lost you.”

“I’m okay now, pal. I just….those aliens…..”

“Did they damage you?” Fisher cocked his head to one side. “I’m not detecting any malfunction—not anymore.”

“The same thing happened to Thackery,” Koenig interrupted. “She got surrounded by Emal and her adrenaline levels went off the charts. That’s when the interface failed.”

Fisher inclined his head the other way. “Captain Rhodes’s adrenaline levels were elevated, too.”

“They were more than elevated,” Rhodes added. “They were through the roof.”

Fisher frowned, and in that moment, the interface between Rhodes and the other SAMs reconnected.

The interface picked up Fuentes, Rhinehart, and Coulter all still on the ground in the middle of the alien horde. Thackery, Dietz, and Henshaw had all retreated to rejoin the platoons closer to the city.

Rhodes’s interface picked up spikes of terror and desperate battle fury coming from the three soldiers on the ground. None of their SAMs could contact them or help them in any way.

Fuentes and Coulter suffered the worst. Rhinehart did his best to fight his way to Fuentes’s position, but too many Emal crowded around Rhinehart, too.

“Let me go!” Rhodes called to Lauer. “We gotta get them out! You go after Coulter. I’ll get Rudy!”

Lauer let go of Rhodes’s arm and Rhodes fired his boosters. They worked fine now.

He swooped over the Emal and unloaded his scourge guns, but they couldn’t clear a path fast enough.

He fired Vipers in a ring around Fuentes’s position. Fuentes fought with all his might, but his weapons systems kept shutting down at the worst possible times.

Rhodes’s senses kicked into high gear now that the interface was back online. The Emal were just as fascinated with Fuentes’s implants as the aliens had been by Rhodes.

Fuentes would have been dead by now if the Emal really wanted to kill him. They tried to push him to the rear, too. They must want to keep and study these strange creatures that just happened to land in their midst.

The idea of getting captured by the Emal almost drove Rhodes out of his mind again, but he had to keep his head this time. He had to get his three subordinates out of danger.

Fuentes’s lasers came back online for a split second. He swung around and carved himself a few feet of space—just enough to hold the Emal at arm’s length.

Rhodes plunged in at that moment and grabbed Fuentes by the arm. Rhodes launched into the sky taking Fuentes with him just as Lauer launched with Coulter. That left Rhinehart.

Seeing Fuentes safe flooded Rhinehart with relief and all his systems roared back to life. He blasted his boosters and torched a dozen Emal on his way out of the horde. The battalion converged on the eastern fringes, but not soon enough to save the city.

Buildings kept detonating behind the Legion line. The platoons set up fortifications there, but Henshaw was right. The Legion would never be able to save this city. The aliens destroyed half of it before they even invaded.

Rhodes set Fuentes down next to Henshaw and Thackery. “Sir…..” Fuentes gasped. “Sir….the interface….my weapons……”

“Did all of you suffer interface failures?” Rhodes asked.

“I didn’t,” Dietz replied.

Rhodes ignored him. “What happened to you, Georgie?”

“I got overrun and my weapons started shutting down, but they didn’t shut down completely. The Grid stayed up long enough for me to see where I was. I rolled out of the horde and made it back here. I didn’t need to shoot. Then, once I got clear, my weapons came back online.”

“Our adrenaline levels must be what caused the malfunction,” Lauer pointed out.

“How are we supposed to keep our adrenaline levels down when we’re in battle?” Oakes asked. “Of course our adrenaline levels are higher now than they were in the training sessions. This is real.”

Rhodes turned back to the SAMs. “Can you adjust your sensors so the system isn’t as sensitive to our adrenaline levels?”

“We can try,” Fisher replied. “We won’t know if it will work until we actually go back into battle.”

“The interface doesn’t shut down from all adrenaline,” Thackery pointed out. “We all experienced plenty of adrenaline during training sessions. There were plenty of times in training when I completely forgot we were even in The Grid. It must be just levels that are too high that interfere with the interface.”

“So what are you saying—that we go into a calm, meditative state when we’re in the middle of a battle?” Lauer growled. “That would definitely keep our adrenaline levels down.”

“I’m saying maybe it just takes the SAMs some time to get used to battle conditions. None of them has ever been in a real battle before except on Ohait. Georgie and I haven’t been in a real battle before Ohait, either.”

“At least the SAMs can think clearly,” Rhinehart pointed out. “At least none of them malfunctioned enough to interfere with our thinking.”

“Don’t say that,” Coulter told him. “You’ll jinx us.”

“He already said it, dumbass,” Oakes interrupted. “Anyway, if this battle is any indication, we just have to make sure some of us stay out of the line of fire long enough to get the others clear—if it happens again, I mean.”

“We’re in a war zone,” Henshaw remarked. “Keeping some of us out of the line of fire might not be possible. In fact, I’m certain it won’t be.”

End of Chapter 40.