Rhodes stepped into Colonel Paxton Kraft’s office. General Kenneth Brewster, Colonel Kraft, General Hyde, Colonels LeClerc and Neff, and Admiral Pulman were already there.

They stood around the central table waiting for Rhodes to show up. He halted in the doorway and didn’t approach.

“Come on in, Captain,” Admiral Pulman called. “We’re all anxious to debrief you about the Sulia campaign.”

Rhodes stiffened. “Why do you want to debrief me about it? You can see everything that happened on our SAMs’ feed.”

“We still need to discuss it with you,” General Hyde replied. “We need to evaluate what went wrong, what went right, and how we can learn from this to do better next time.”

“Everything went wrong,” Rhodes replied. “The only thing you can learn to do better next time is not to throw good platoons in front of the Emal—but you’ll never learn that. You would have learned it a long time ago if you were going to learn it at all.”

“We aren’t here to talk about what the Legion does with the regular platoons,” General Brewster told him. “We’re only here to talk about how things worked out with Battalion 1.”

“You know how things worked out with Battalion 1,” Rhodes repeated. “You can see the way things worked out. We’re having all these malfunctions now because of what happened during the Sulia campaign. Don’t you get that?”

“Explain it to us anyway,” General Hyde urged and waved at the table. “Please come in. We’re all anxious to hear your report.”

Rhodes still took at least a minute to make up his mind to walk into the room. He probably wouldn’t have entered it at all if Colonel Kraft hadn’t been present.

Rhodes couldn’t forestall the inevitable, though. Talking to these people was the best way to make sure it never happened again—if that was even possible.

He stopped next to Colonel Kraft. Kraft never talked to Rhodes in the presence of these much more senior officers. Kraft kept quiet the way Kraft always did.

His presence steadied Rhodes. He could tolerate this because Kraft was here.

“Now please tell us what happened,” General Hyde went on. “We understand you coordinated with one of the platoon captains and formulated a plan to defend the eastern side of the city while the platoons traveled through Thaklia from the Ero landing site.”

“So what if I did?” Rhodes asked.

“You weren’t under orders to coordinate with the platoon captains.”

“I wasn’t under any orders at all. No one informed me about what the battalion was supposed to do. I talked to him and he told me he was supposed to take the platoons all the way through the city and defend the eastern side. I offered to go ahead of him and hold the enemy there until he established fortifications for his platoons.”

“You weren’t authorized to make that call,” Admiral Pulman interjected.

Rhodes rounded on him. “I don’t give a shit if I was authorized to do it or not.”

“Your insubordination is unacceptable, Captain,” the admiral growled. “You’re still subject to military protocol. You still have to follow the chain of command.”

“What chain of command?” Rhodes fired back. “I just told you I didn’t receive any orders—from anyone. We were deployed on Sulia to defend Thaklia from the Emal and that’s what we did. So that makes me insubordinate? What are you going to do—strip me of my command? Go right ahead. Do I look like I care?”

“Battalion 1 still needs to function as a military unit,” General Hyde cut in. “The Emal are becoming more entrenched on Sulia. The Legion is mounting another campaign to reclaim the planet…..”

“Reclaim the planet!” Rhodes blurted out. “Are you insane?! Sulia is gone. Just give it back. You’ll never reclaim it. The Emal are unstoppable. Surely even a bunch of dunces like you can see that.”

“As General Brewster said, we don’t make decisions for the wider Legion,” Admiral Pulman replied. “The Legion will mount another campaign to retake Sulia and Battalion 1 will support the platoons….”

“No, we won’t,” Rhodes snapped. “Battalion 1 isn’t going anywhere.”

Admiral Pulman’s head whipped around real fast. “You’re flatly refusing to deploy?”

“Under the circumstances? Absolutely I’m refusing to deploy. My people can’t even walk down the goddamn corridor without malfunctioning. One of my guys just attempted suicide—again—and the rest are either murderously violent, emotionally unstable, or their SAMs are out of control. No way would I let you send any of us into combat like this—much less on a suicide mission back to Sulia. You’re out of your flippin’ minds if you think I’d agree to that.”

“You don’t have to agree,” Colonel LeClerc chimed in. “We can send you without your consent.”

“You can’t send us anywhere if we’re all dead or permanently in stasis,” Rhodes spat back.

General Brewster interjected just then with his usual brainless optimism. “The important thing is that the battalion is ready to deploy when you’re needed. I’m sure the doctors will correct any malfunctions…..”

“What could possibly lead you to that conclusion?” Rhodes countered. “Fuentes has been in stasis for over three weeks since his suicide attempt. If the doctors were capable of correcting his malfunction, they would have done it by now.”

The senior officers confirmed Rhodes’s worst fears by exchanging glances with each other. So that’s how it was. The doctors couldn’t correct Fuentes’s malfunction—probably because he wasn’t malfunctioning.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

He was having a normal human emotional reaction to a life-destroying event. He lost everything, including his humanity, and he couldn’t live with it. Now he wanted to end it. Rhodes couldn’t blame him.

“Unfortunately, the doctors can’t find any malfunction in Fuentes to correct,” Colonel Neff murmured. “That’s why the doctors weren’t working on him when he fled the barracks. All their readings on him were coming back normal. They didn’t consider him critical—unlike the others.”

“Then that goes to show how much the doctors know,” Rhodes replied. “Fuentes was in serious emotional distress before he fled the barracks. He was barely hanging on.”

“His responses and stress levels were reading the same before he fled the barracks, while he was on the loading dock, and the readings are still the same now when he’s in stasis. The doctors can’t correct a problem they can’t detect.”

Rhodes waited for someone else to say something. “So what are you telling me for? It isn’t like I can fix whatever is wrong with him.”

“We ask you to try,” Colonel LeClerc replied. “We ask you to try to convince him to return to the battalion as a contributing member of the team.”

Rhodes waited again, but no one said anything else. “You’re the man who just said you would deploy me against my will to carry out a suicide mission. Give me one reason why I should cooperate with you.”

“The only other options are that we either leave Fuentes in stasis indefinitely or take him offline for good,” General Hyde replied. “I’m sure you wouldn’t want that.”

“Why in the name of God would I want him back in the battalion? He wants to die. Just take him offline.”

“We can’t waste a good soldier,” General Brewster replied. “We’ve lost too many in this project already. One soldier who wakes up and can function in The Grid is too valuable to waste.”

“Function?” Rhodes snorted. “You actually call what Fuentes is doing functioning? Are you stupid?”

“So you won’t even try?” Colonel LeClerc asked. “We expected better of you, Captain.”

“You obviously haven’t even looked at the feeds from Sulia,” Rhodes countered. “You obviously don’t know the first thing about how or why we malfunctioned down there—or what we went through as a result. The Emal tried to rip our implants out.”

Every officer at the table squirmed. “We know that,” General Hyde murmured.

“So I won’t let you send us back to Sulia to let it happen again—not unless you can come up with some convincing way to make sure it doesn’t happen again. You’ll have to come up with some way to make sure none of it happens again—and that includes all the malfunctions. The SAMs shut down from elevated adrenaline levels—which were normal for battlefield conditions.”

Admiral Pulman bent over his device and tapped on it. “Yes, about that….”

“Then the SAMs malfunctioned again when my people got injured. Some of the SAMs refused to function at all because they became pathologically afraid of their hosts’ injuries.”

“That may be because their hosts had no direct combat experience before this campaign,” General Hyde suggested.

“That just goes to show how little you know what you’re talking about, lady,” Rhodes snapped. “It happened to experienced, trained Legion soldiers with plenty of combat experience—and it didn’t happen to experienced, trained Legion soldiers with plenty of combat experience. How much combat experience the host had didn’t have anything to do with how the SAMs reacted. This project is a massive exercise in incompetence.”

“Then how do you suggest we deal with Fuentes and the others?” Admiral Pulman asked.

“I just told you how to deal with Fuentes.”

“You can’t seriously expect us to just take him offline,” General Brewster exclaimed. “Do you have any idea how much we’ve already invested in each of you—both monetarily and in other resources?”

Rhodes only shrugged. “We’re already dead, so it doesn’t really concern us. Fuentes will never be fit for deployment—not ever. You never should have entered him into this program, but it’s too late to go back on that now. The only solution is to cut your losses and take him offline now before he causes even more problems for the rest of us later.”

“So you won’t even try?” LeClerc demanded. “You won’t even try to convince him?”

“Nope,” Rhodes replied. “If you put me in the same room with him, I’ll tell him that, as soon as you activate his weapons to go into battle, to use them to end his life. That’s the best thing for him now.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this!” Brewster muttered.

“I already said the same thing to Rhinehart, Coulter, and Fisher,” Rhodes replied. “I’ll say it to the rest of them the very first chance I get.”

“Who’s Fisher?” Colonel LeClerc asked.

Rhodes inhaled to read this jackass the riot act for making decisions about a battalion he knew absolutely nothing about it, but right then, Colonel Neff interrupted.

“Actually, I agree with Captain Rhodes on this one,” he breezed.

Everyone at the table spun around to stare at Neff. “You do?” Rhodes gasped.

“Not about taking Fuentes offline,” Colonel Neff explained. “I agree with you about not sending the battalion back to Sulia—not under the circumstances. I agree with you about not sending the battalion anywhere under the circumstances—not until we establish with a wide degree of certainty that these malfunctions are contained and unlikely to happen again.”

“I agree,” Colonel Kraft added. “We took the battalion’s success in the training sessions for granted. We were bound to run into unforeseen problems on the battlefield and that’s what happened. That’s why we decided to deploy the battalion against the Emal in the first place—to test this technology against a real enemy. We got lucky that we retrieved the whole battalion alive. It could have been a lot worse. It’s thanks to the battalion’s cohesion as a team and Captain Rhodes’s leadership that we even have a battalion to continue working with.”

Rhodes stared at Kraft in stunned disbelief. Someone was actually sticking up for Rhodes and the battalion.

“Of course we can’t send the battalion back into combat until we work out all the malfunctions,” Colonel Neff went on. “That would be unthinkable.”

“But what about the Sulia counteroffensive?!” General Pulman exclaimed. “We can’t just leave the platoons without help.”

“The platoons would be just as defenseless if we sent Battalion 1 back to Sulia the way they are,” Colonel Neff pointed out.

“But we’re no closer to solving these malfunctions,” General Hyde pointed out. “The counteroffensive is scheduled for three weeks from now. We would have to arrange training sessions to test the adjustments….”

“Then you obviously have a lot of work to do. You don’t need me for that.” Rhodes turned away. “I won’t do anything, plan anything, or accept any orders until I start seeing my people back in the barracks with smiles on their faces. Until then, this battalion is dead in the water.”

He walked out of the office. He actually enjoyed being as rude as possible to these morons. They deserved a lot worse. Battalion 1 was dead in the water before it even got started.

Going on another campaign sounded like Rhodes’s idea of Hell. It would be his worst nightmare.

The officers wouldn’t take Fuentes offline. Rhodes already knew that. They would manipulate his SAM and Fuentes’s neural systems.

Then they would send him back to the battalion where he would become Rhodes’s problem again. What would Rhodes do then?

Fuentes turning his weapons on himself would be by far the best outcome Rhodes could hope for.

It beat the hell out of Fuentes turning his weapons on his comrades, other Legion soldiers, or maybe the station staff. Rhodes could just imagine the fallout from that.

Rhodes returned to the barracks where he found Oakes waiting for him. The soldiers still stood guard over the two men even though nothing had happened in three weeks.

Oakes took one look at Rhodes’s face and snorted. “I thought so.”

Rhodes collapsed at the table. Oakes’s artwork had been steadily improving under Rhodes’s instruction these last three weeks. “They’re out of their natural minds.”

“And this is news?” Oakes sneered. “I mean…look at us, man. This is some psycho’s bad dream.”

“They want to send Fuentes back to the battalion,” Rhodes told him.

Oakes sniffed at nothing. “I’ll make sure to keep my weapons charged just in case he tries something else.”

End of Chapter 11.