Rhodes woke up lying on his back in some dark, shadowy chamber. Distant slams echoed in the darkness.
He made the mistake at first of thinking he was waking up after a long conversion cycle. He tried to raise his arm, but he couldn’t move.
The feeling of being restrained sent him into another wave of panic. He struggled against whatever was holding him down, but he couldn’t lift his arms, his legs, or even his head. He could turn his head, but he couldn’t pick it up off the surface beneath him.
He looked around in frantic desperation—and saw the rest of the battalion lying on tables. They formed a line on either side of him….and then Rhodes saw a bunch of Emal wandering around.
They passed back and forth between the tables doing something or other. The aliens murmured to each other in their own language. Their eyes gleamed out of the darkness when they turned in Rhodes’s direction.
The rest of Rhodes’s companions turned their heads to look at him. They were all awake now, including Lauer and Henshaw.
Wires still hung out of the open ragged hole of Lauer’s mechanical eye socket. The other side of his face—the human side of his face—registered all the panic Rhodes felt right now.
Rhinehart struggled the most, but not even he could break whatever invisible force held him down.
Fisher and the other SAMs were all back to full functioning. “What the hell happened?” Rhodes husked.
“The Emal captured us,” Fisher replied. “They used some kind of electric discharge to ground Rio and the other Strikers.”
“Are they okay? Are the SAMs okay?”
“I don’t know,” Fisher murmured. “I can’t interface with them. I don’t know what happened to them. We hit the ground and the interface failed. I came back online here. You and the rest of the battalion were already here, restrained.”
“We gotta get out of here….”
“We don’t even know where we are,” Fisher pointed out.
“We must still be on Sulia. We must be on one of the Emal’s base ships.”
“I assumed that, but we can’t be sure. I can’t use The Grid outside this room.”
Rhodes tried to use The Grid, too, and ran into the same problem. “What do the Emal want from us?”
“Based on the way they were acting during the first battle, I’d say they’re interested in your implants. Here they come. I think we’re about to find out.”
A few Emal came over to Rhodes, discussed something amongst themselves, and then one of them fingered the implants on his face.
He jerked away from their touch, but the other two Emal seized his head and held him still while that one alien explored the implant all the way to the edge of his skin.
He struggled, but the Emal turned out to be a lot stronger than they looked. He couldn’t put up much resistance lying flat on his back. They held his head easily.
“Leave him alone!” Rhinehart bellowed. “Get away from him!”
His outburst drew the Emal’s attention to him. They turned away from Rhodes and surrounded Rhinehart’s bed instead.
He panicked for real when they started touching him. “GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME, YOU STINKING BASTARDS!!” he roared. “GET AWAY FROM ME!!”
They ignored him, held him down, and he burst into high-pitched, broken screams when they touched his implants.
“Lieutenant!” Rhodes called out. “Lieutenant—look at me!”
Rhinehart couldn’t look with the Emal holding his head straight.
“I’m here, Lieutenant!” Rhodes yelled. “I’m here!” He turned to Rocky in the interface. “You have to calm him down! His adrenaline levels could cause another malfunction.”
Rocky was already trying to reassure Rhinehart, but it all went south when the Emal stepped back, held another murmured discussion, and then bent over Rhinehart again.
This time, they tried to wedge their fingers under his implants and pry them out of his skin. He screeched in pain and then burst into mindless, wordless roaring.
One Emal leaned directly over his head trying to dig its fingernails under the implant. Rhinehart fought back as best he could. The aliens completely ignored his screams.
Thackery compressed her lips to stop them from trembling and turned her head away gulping down sobs.
Henshaw lost it completely, burst into tears, and she started screaming, too, just from the sight of what they were doing to Rhinehart.
Rocky kept trying to talk to Rhinehart, but not even Rhodes could hear Rocky over the noise.
The Emal failed to get the implant off. That one alien stood back and held another long, detailed conversation with his colleagues.
Rhinehart collapsed on the table and broke down in sobs. Blood trickled from his implant and ran down both sides of his face.
“I’m here with you, Lieutenant,” Rhodes choked. “We’re all here with you. You aren’t alone.”
Rhodes didn’t know what else to say, but he had to say something. If the Emal really wanted to take the battalion’s implants, Rhodes wouldn’t be able to do a thing to stop it.
He couldn’t let this happen. He had to do something.
“You gotta help me, Fisher,” Rhodes husked.
“What would you like me to do?” Fisher murmured back.
“We have to get out of here. You said you couldn’t use The Grid outside this room. See if you can figure out how they’re restraining us.”
“These tables emit some kind of electromagnetic field. The power source is under the floor and enters the table from underneath, so there are no exposed wires or anything like that.”
“Then we have to defeat this field. Can you locate the power source?”
“It isn’t in this room. I’m sorry, Captain. I’ll do what I can to….”
He broke off when a different group of Emal came over back to Rhodes. His stomach turned when one of the aliens laid out a bunch of shiny metal tools on a tray next to his head.
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Oakes turned his head in Rhodes’s direction and strained his neck like Oakes was trying to get up. He barely had time to say, “Captain….” before the Emal bent over Rhodes, grabbed their tools, and wedged them between his chest implant and the organic flesh of his lower rib cage.
He roared in pain and then just let himself scream as they pried, cut, and dug into his flesh and bones trying to unseat the implants from his body.
He felt himself starting to break down. He couldn’t take this.
He heard Fisher trying to talk to him in the distance, but Rhodes couldn’t hear Fisher over his own screams. Ripping pain spiked through Rhodes’s body.
He had a flashback of Poole’s death. Rhodes actually envied Poole then. What a fool Rhodes had been even to think that.
Without warning, another brutal crack of electricity went off somewhere. It hit Rhodes in the head exactly the way it did when Fisher shut down Fuentes, but it didn’t knock Rhodes out.
The Emal standing over him folded right there and hit the floor, unconscious. Their tools fell out of their hands and clattered on the hard stone floor.
Rhodes collapsed back gasping and groaning in agony. His body writhed in torment. He couldn’t move even to roll onto his side. He just had to take it.
“Captain!” Fisher yelled in his ear. “Captain—can you hear me?”
Rhodes couldn’t answer right away. He blinked stars out of his eyes while he struggled to catch his breath. Searing pain kept spiking across his ribs every time he inhaled. He didn’t dare to use The Grid to check how bad the damage was.
A bunch of other Emal came over, bent over their fallen comrades, and murmured to each other. They gestured at Rhodes and then at their unconscious friends.
Rhodes heard his people yelling at him and demanding to know if he was okay. The SAMs did the same thing.
He caught his breath while the Emal carried their friends away. “What did you do, Fisher?” Wild asked.
“I set off an electric discharge from the captain’s fusion generator. I electrocuted the Emal. You should do the same thing. If they try to remove anyone’s implants, electrocute the Emal to protect yourselves. We can’t let these aliens even try to remove anyone’s implants.”
“I should have thought of that,” Rocky murmured.
Fisher interfaced with Rocky. “I’m not detecting any permanent damage to Rhinehart’s implants. The wounds around his eye implant will heal, but the captain is right. We have to get out of here.”
“How?” Oakes asked.
Fisher turned back to Rhodes. “The captain’s injuries are much more severe.”
No one asked for a more detailed explanation. Neither did Rhodes.
“Could we use a discharge from our fusion generators to short-circuit these tables?” Coulter asked.
“I don’t think these tables are conductive enough for that,” Fisher replied.
“We could try it,” Henshaw suggested.
“I already checked when I set off this charge just now,” Fisher told her. “The current doesn’t pass through the table.”
“How does the field hold us down?” Thackery asked. “What’s emitting the field?”
“I don’t understand it. Believe me. I’m as anxious to get the battalion out of here as you are.”
“If we’re on one of the base ships, then we’re close enough to the Legion,” Lauer pointed out. “We can get off this ship and get across the planes to Thaklia. That’s all we have to do.”
“The problem is getting off the ship,” Thackery replied. “Assuming we’re on a base ship on the same planet.”
Rhodes pulled himself together as well as he could. “If we keep electrocuting the Emal, they’ll either leave us here or try to kill us to get rid of us. They only captured us for our implants.”
The rest of his people turned to look at him. He read in their faces how bad his injuries must be. He might not survive long enough to get off this ship—if the battalion was even on a ship.
“We need to come up with another plan,” he told Fisher. “Something other than electrocuting all the Emal.”
“Why not electrocute them all?” Coulter suggested. “Then we’d be alone on this ship. At least we would be safe and they wouldn’t try to….”
He trailed off when more Emal came back—a lot more Emal. They surrounded every table.
Rhodes panicked again when four of them leaned over his head. He saw their tools moving toward his facial implants and screams echoed down the line of tables.
Fisher let off another agonizing thump of electricity. The Emal standing closest to Rhodes fell to the floor, but just as fast, another group of Emal moved in to take their places.
These aliens wore some kind of protective suits. The suits covered the aliens’ arms, bodies, and feet. The suits insulated them.
Fisher tried one last time to electrocute them, but nothing happened this time. Two Emal bent over Rhodes’s face and wedged their tools between his eye implant and his nose.
He screamed himself hoarse. So did everyone else. Pain flooded him and he spiraled out of his mind. He couldn’t think about what the Emal were doing to him and his people.
His eye implant started to pull away from his skull. He thrashed in brutal agony even though he knew it wouldn’t do any good.
At that moment, a ray of blinding sunshine shafted through the ceiling directly above his head. It split the shadows and all the Emal looked up.
At that moment, Rio appeared on the interface in front of Rhodes’s eyes. “Hold on, Captain! We’re getting you out of here!”
Rhodes was too out of his mind with pain to answer. Another slash of sunshine split the ceiling open and then a huge section of it peeled back to reveal the broad sky outside.
The Emal panicked, spun away from all the prisoners, and tried to race out of the room. None of the aliens were armed.
Rhodes caught one glimpse of the battalion’s Strikers swooping back and forth across the sky out there. They unleashed lasers and thermal cannons on the ceiling to carve it to pieces.
Without warning, some bizarre shape like a giant spider dropped out of nowhere, slammed into the ceiling, and used its many jointed legs to rip torn hull sections out of the way.
Rhodes realized in some distant part of his mind that he really was on some kind of ship. He was on the planet Sulia—right outside Thaklia where the Emal captured the battalion in the first place.
The spider thing ripped the whole ceiling off and daylight blasted into the chamber. The Emal located their laser rifles somewhere and opened fire on the creature.
The monster’s many arms sprouted weapons and fired into the chamber to gun the Emal down.
Rhodes experienced another wave of panic when the creature leapt right down inside the ship.
Rio read his mind. “It’s Elio, Captain! He’s going to get you all out. Just hold on!”
The monster stormed through the chamber hunting down all the Emal. Something wasn’t working right inside Rhodes’s head. The Emal trying to tear his facial implant off must have damaged him. He was malfunctioning again.
“Hold on, Captain!” Fisher told him. “We’re going to take you to the Ero. The crew will be able to give you medical treatment.”
Rhodes didn’t want to believe that. He couldn’t cope with any more disasters today.
He couldn’t tell which of these sensations were caused by his pain or which might be his implants malfunctioning. Nothing made sense even though he could understand everything going on around him.
The alien monster came back on all its legs and stopped next to Lauer’s table. Grid lines covered the monster, but it didn’t change into a person or a ship. It was neither.
Lauer bellowed in pain when the monster tried to lift off the table. Elio couldn’t dislodge Lauer from the table no matter how hard Elio tried.
“Pull back!” Rio ordered. “Bombard the base ship from the outside! Elio—you have to find some controls to release the field.”
Elio stormed through the chamber doing something Rhodes couldn’t see. He heard crashes out of sight and then, like some kind of miracle, the field holding him down evaporated.
He tried to sit up, but he couldn’t move. Groaning and sobbing sounds drifted down the line of tables.
Elio came back, planted himself next to Lauer’s table, and picked up Lauer’s body in the monster’s many jointed arms.
Lauer hung limp and bleeding while Elio vaulted through the hole, perched there on the ragged edge of torn metal, and changed back into a ship, but with multiple arms still cradling Lauer.
Elio lowered him into the cockpit. The cover closed and Rhodes lost sight of Lauer.
The other Strikers came down to land one after another. Elio’s Grid turned him back into the same monster.
He sprang down into the chamber again and again, lifted each member of the battalion out of the base ship, and deposited each person into their own Striker cockpits.
“I’m coming to get you, Captain!” Rio told him. “We’re getting you out of here.”
Rhodes couldn’t move. He was too grateful and relieved to see all his people leave one after another.
Elio delivered Rhinehart to Zion and then Rio landed on the base ship’s upper hull. Elio jumped down and scooped up Rhodes in his arms.
Rhodes finally relaxed. He was almost free. He didn’t even have to fly the damn ship. Rio would do it for him.
Rio would take Rhodes back to the Ero. Rhodes really didn’t care anymore what happened after that.
Elio sprang out of the hole. Rhodes was the last member of the battalion to escape.
Elio put him in the cockpit and the prongs locked onto Rhodes’s back and head. He dropped into The Grid and saw the whole battle in every gruesome detail.
The Emal had invaded Thaklia. The ragged dregs of the surviving platoons fought street to street, but they couldn’t slow the aliens’ advance.
The next instant, Rio launched into the sky and took off with Rhodes on board. The Strikers left the battle behind and rocketed away westward to where the Ero sat waiting for them.
End of Book 1. Book 2 starts on Friday. Keep reading!