Captain Corban Rhodes dragged his vision into focus just enough to see his Striker plunging through the destroyed buildings of a crumbling city.

Massive laser shots struck the few remaining buildings still standing. They pulverized in front of his eyes.

His Striker had to weave back and forth to avoid sprays of falling rubble and pinwheeling wall sections blown out of place.

Rhodes tried to take the controls—but this ship didn’t have any controls. Grid lines surrounded his cockpit, covered the ship, and the same grid lines covered him, too.

Two faces hovered in front of his eyes. A bird-like composite of human, animal, and some cartoonish monster hung off on the right side. It talked rapidly to a round, cheery face in the center of Rhodes’s view.

“The 249th Platoon is taking up a position between the central business district and the botanical gardens,” the first face announced. “Watch out, Rio! You’re going to fly into the Dusters!”

“I see them,” Rio replied. “Interface with the Ero and tell them we’re coming in fast.”

“The Ero already knows we’re coming! Oakes is in trouble! He’s cut off by laser fire!”

Rhodes summoned all his strength to get his voice working. “Fisher……”

The bird face turned toward him. “You’re losing blood, Captain. I’m accessing The Grid to slow it down, but I can’t alter your basic organics. We just have to get through the battle and rendezvous with the Ero.”

“Don’t leave without Oakes,” Rhodes husked. “Don’t leave anyone behind.”

“Hold on!” Rio yelled and swerved to dodge another exploding building.

His grid lines stretched and morphed into different shapes, took the form of a many-legged spider monster, and he bounded off the ground.

He flattened dozens of aliens underfoot, launched himself at another building, vaulted off its side wall, and headed north.

“You can’t get to the Ero that way, Rio!” Fisher snapped.

“I’m not going to the Ero! I’m trying to help Oakes.”

“Where are the others?” Rhodes asked.

Fisher adjusted The Grid so Rhodes could see everything more clearly. He should have been the one flying this ship, but he was too injured even to raise his arms.

The Grid pivoted and angled downward to give Rhodes an aerial view of the city of Thaklia.

The Emal had penetrated the city from the east, spread through the streets, and worked building by building to hunt down any Aemon Legion platoons still fighting out there.

The soldiers didn’t try anymore to hold the city against the Emal invasion. That would be impossible.

The soldiers just focused on defending themselves while they retreated westward in the direction from which they’d come.

They had their work cut out for them avoiding massive concussions coming from Emal base ships parked on the planes east of town.

The Grid showed Rhodes eight other Strikers zooming through the wrecked landscape. Each ship carried a member of Battalion 1.

Rhodes interfaced with their SAMs. Everyone in the battalion was as injured as he was—or worse.

None of them flew their own ships. The SAMs did everything trying their damnedest to fly the group to safety.

Rio picked up speed trying to intercept Lieutenant Ted Oakes. His Striker Enoch had gotten hit by base gunfire, knocked down, and the Emal swarmed all over the ship.

Enoch’s grid lines changed rapidly from one shape to another trying to fight off all the Emal, but they overran him.

He changed into another spider creature like the one Elio used to break into the Emal base ship to rescue the battalion.

Enoch snatched Emal bodies away, sent them twirling off into the mayhem, and weapons erupted from all his limbs, but the Emal still got the better of him.

The aliens climbed on top of him and fired their lasers into his outer housing to cut him to pieces. He changed into a giant spraying lasers from all sides.

All his efforts only seemed to draw more Emal to pull him down. He even tried to fire his boosters to launch away from the planet’s surface.

The base ships instantly turned their guns on him, blasted out another building right on top of him, and rock and deadly shards hammered Enoch from above.

The explosion hit plenty of Emal, too, but they didn’t seem to care. They stepped on their dead and wounded comrades and used the piles of bodies to climb on top of him.

Rio interfaced with Enoch. The SAM’s rugged bear face kept morphing, stretching, and undulating as The Grid changed around him.

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The Grid formed the bear’s body, but that kept changing every few seconds, too, each time Enoch tried a different shape to overcome the Emal.

“We’re coming for you, Enoch!” Rio told him. “We’re on our way!”

Enoch roared in fury. Oakes didn’t respond at all. He slumped in his cockpit resting his chin on his chest. He had his eyes closed.

Blood saturated his hair and ran down his neck. Seeing Oakes and Enoch in danger snapped Rhodes back to his senses. He had to do something, but Rio was already doing it fast enough for both of them.

The grid lines surrounding the ship morphed again. The Emal must have detected Rio getting closer. The base ships swiveled their laser bombardment in his direction.

Another building evaporated in smoke and dust to Rio’s left. He bounded off the ground and soared away to another launch point, only for the base ships to hit a different building right in front of him.

This one blocked Rio’s path to catch up with Enoch. Rio would have had to fly around this building to help Enoch. The building detonated in a whizzing fireball of outward pelting shards and debris.

Rio changed his grid lines again, sprang down onto the ground on bouncy cat legs, morphed into another armored vehicle, smashed straight into the wreckage, plowed through it, and burst out on the other side next to Enoch.

The Grid in front of Rhodes’s eyes showed him Battalion 1’s other Strikers converging on the spot from all over Thaklia. They would get here any second.

Each ship changed shape at blinding speed. Their grid lines morphed and adapted in seconds.

Each Striker extended their wings to soar over obstacles, collapsed into wingless missiles, stretched, compressed, grew different kinds of limbs, changed their weapons configurations, and went through a dozen other transformations with every phase of the battle.

The Strikers’ presence electrified the Emal. Thousands of aliens all over the city stopped hunting down the Legion platoons and came after the battalion instead.

The Grid flashed alerts as mobs of Emal flooded to the spot. “We have to get out of here, Rio,” Rhodes husked. “We can’t let the Emal recapture us.”

“I know, Captain!” Rio called over the noise. “I’m working on it.”

“Let me help you. I can help you.”

“I’m sorry, Captain, but you can’t do anything,” Fisher interrupted. “We can’t risk your injuries causing Rio to malfunction. Just hold on a little longer. We’ll get you out. We’ll get everyone out.”

Rhodes didn’t want to just sit here doing nothing, but of course his SAMs were right. The battalion’s injuries caused the SAMs to malfunction earlier. None of them could risk it happening again.

The SAMs fought the battle just fine on their own. Rio blasted through the building’s eastern wall, twisted back into a Striker, and whizzed over the Emal’s heads. He laid down a carpet of scourge gun fire, but he couldn’t hit so many teeming aliens.

He didn’t try to hit them. His arrival distracted them away from Enoch and left a tiny space between Enoch and the building behind him.

“Get out, Enoch!” Rio called. “Fall back to the Ero!”

Enoch bellowed again, flailed his grid lines in all directions, and changed them into whipping lasers to slash the Emal away.

He cut bodies to pieces and sent them flying to free himself from the hordes clambering all over him.

As soon as he cleared them off, he rocketed into the air, changed himself into a Viper missile, and shrieked high into the atmosphere carrying Oakes with him.

The rest of the battalion converged on the spot, but once they got there, the gunfire got too thick.

“Everybody get out and scatter!” Fisher ordered. “We’re drawing too many Emal. They know about us. We need to separate so they don’t target any of us.”

The other SAMs launched into the high cloud and left the city behind, but that only gave everyone a view of the bloodbath going on in the streets.

The Grid showed up perfectly the Emal maneuvering Legion platoons into bottlenecks where the platoons couldn’t escape.

The Emal carried out a systematic campaign to hunt down every platoon and eliminate the soldiers with deadly accuracy.

The base ships out on the planes turned their fire back on the streets. The Emal bombarded the platoons one after another and flattened every building to deprive the platoons of any cover.

The platoons retreated from one building to another. The platoons held each line of defense for a few minutes. That was the best they could do before the base ships’ bombardment and the steady advance of Emal ground troops drove the Legion farther back.

The base ships stayed where they were on the planes. They didn’t need to advance any further to wreak as much destruction as they needed to.

Now the alien hordes moved in to sweep the city clear of any last Legion stragglers. Explosions burst in the dark sky where Emal lasers detonated Legion Dusters and Predators fighter craft.

Those explosions cast a ghostly light over the landscape crumbling to ruin as far as the eye could see. Bodies of Legion soldiers got trapped in the rubble.

The Grid highlighted their failing life signs in ways Rhodes never got to see on the ground. Some of those soldiers were still alive. No one would ever rescue them the way the Battalion 1 project rescued him.

The Strikers blasted skyward and left the battle behind, but only for a minute. The Strikers had to descend to rendezvous with the Ero and the other Ravagers parked west of the city.

Rio, Elio, Enoch, Titan, Zion, Stone, Aries, and Teo slowed there in the high atmosphere. Each Striker used his Grid to change back into a ship.

Dozens of Legion vessels surrounded the planet Sulia to carry out the campaign of defending this planet against the Emal invasion.

The SAMs interfaced with each other. The Grid showed Rhodes more than he wanted to know about the injuries each of his people suffered as Emal prisoners.

Lieutenant Dane Rhinehart spoke the words they were all thinking. “We can’t just leave them down there. We have to help them retreat out of danger.”

“We can’t help them,” Wild rasped. “Every Emal battle zone turns into this. They’re all the same on every planet where the Legion tries to resist the Emal invasion.”

“We’re supposed to help the Legion,” Rhinehart pointed out. “We can’t just run away to save our own necks. Only cowards do that.”

“We can’t even save ourselves,” Alyssa Thackery told him. “We barely made it out alive. If we don’t go now, we could all die. Then we won’t be able to help anyone.”

“I’m with Rhinehart on this,” Rhodes chimed in. “We’re already here. The nine of us might not be good for much, but our Strikers can still fight back. Come on. We gotta do something.”

“What did you have in mind, Captain?” Fisher asked.

“The Emal are fascinated by us. They want more than anything to recapture us. We can make them fall back to try to get us—or at least get them to divert away from the platoons while the soldiers retreat the rest of the way to the Ravagers.”

“That won’t work, Captain,” Rocky interjected. “The Legion has never pulled the platoons from a planet this quickly, not even in the face overwhelming Emal numbers. A diversion like that might give the platoons a chance to retreat, but the Legion won’t evacuate them off the surface. The Legion will set up here to fight the Emal and try to retake the city. The Legion never gives up on a planet until they’ve spent at least a month trying to retake it.”

Rhodes sighed. He already knew all that. He’d been involved in too many campaigns against the Emal before.

He glanced over at Rhinehart through the interface. Rhinehart glanced at Rhodes at the same time. Rhodes read the same truth in Rhinehart’s twisted expression.

Every member of the battalion was bleeding. Oakes and Lauer were barely hanging onto life.

In that moment, Rhodes’s adrenaline faded enough for him to feel the sickening pain in his chest. He shivered and then started trembling.

Rio must have detected the same thing. He said, “Let’s go,” and turned away.

End of Chapter 1.