Oakes and Rhodes sat at the table in their barracks and worked on their drawings. Covering one page after another with drawings was practically the only thing they did all day.
The two men occasionally took walks around the station, but seeing other members of the station staff robbed the experience of its former pleasure.
Being around normal people spoiled the experience. Taking a walk around the station no longer provided the relief and solitude the men craved. Taking a walk around the station only made the alienation and despair worse.
Rhodes pointed his pencil at Oakes’s drawing. He was drawing a picture of a little girl swinging on a swing under a big sprawling tree.
“Try tightening up your lines there,” Rhodes told him. “Your trunk is too wide. It’s taking up too much of the negative space.”
Oakes darkened the line of the trunk and glanced over at Rhodes’s page. Rhodes was drawing a view of the barracks in front of him.
Oakes’s expression changed when he saw what Rhodes was working on. Rhodes never drew anything that might remind him of his past.
Despite Oakes’s assurance that he didn’t want to check the terminal to see what his family was doing, he always ended up drawing domestic scenes of children playing or otherwise enjoying their lives.
Neither of the two men commented on this, but Rhodes caught Oakes’s expression changing a lot when he saw Rhodes’s art.
He always drew scenes from the present—either people or SAMs in the battalion, views from different parts of Coleridge Station, or sketches of equipment, ships, or landscapes he’d seen on deployment.
He and Oakes stayed interfaced with each other the way they did before the Sulia campaign. Rhodes had changed his opinion on himself and the other members of the battalion needing privacy.
He didn’t want privacy. It somehow seemed rude to try to hide anything from people whose very lives depended on how stable his mental state might be at any given moment.
His mental state, Fisher’s mental state, and how well both of them were functioning at any given time—all of that was as much Oakes’s business as Rhodes’s own. Oakes had a right to know at any moment of the day how well Rhodes and Fisher were functioning.
Rhodes would have gotten very suspicious and nervous if Oakes suddenly decided to stop interfacing with Rhodes and Fisher. Rhodes would have immediately suspected that something was wrong.
Rhodes didn’t want Oakes thinking that about him. Rhodes wanted Oakes to know everything. Rhodes wanted Oakes to be the first to know in case something went wrong.
Then Oakes might actually be able to do something about it—like maybe put Rhodes down before he killed someone else.
He didn’t feel guilty about killing Dr. Irvine. He just wanted to take every possible step to make sure it never happened again.
Oakes and Rhodes spent all their time together. What one did, the other did. If one of them took a walk around the station, the other went with him just because.
They hardly ever talked, though. There didn’t seem to be much to say anymore.
Dash and Fisher didn’t talk much, either. They just hovered there in The Grid watching whatever Rhodes and Oakes were doing.
Rhodes didn’t discuss Dr. Irvine’s death with Fisher again. Rhodes kept an eye on Fisher for any sign that Fisher still blamed himself for Rhodes’s rampage.
Fisher never showed any emotional reaction to anything—not anymore. He might have been hiding it or the doctors might really have corrected whatever caused him to take control of Rhodes in the first place.
Rhodes didn’t believe anymore that Fisher would have been able to hide anything from him. Rhodes would have known the instant anything went wrong with Fisher.
They’d become linked in a whole new way since Dr. Irvine’s death. Fisher no longer showed any surprise or even any aversion to the idea of Rhodes or one of the other battalion members taking their own lives. Fisher had finally gotten the message.
Rhodes lost track of time these last few weeks. Time lost all meaning without meals, activities, and social interactions to break up the day.
The hours between conversion cycles blurred into one continuous blank space. Rhodes felt nothing, experienced nothing, said nothing, did nothing—was nothing. His life was over.
He remained suspended in this kind of purgatory. The doctors might as well take him offline. He was as good as dead anyway without something to do.
He pushed away his drawing of the barracks and pulled a blank piece of paper toward himself. Now he had to decide what to draw next.
He tried not to notice Oakes lingering over his picture of the girl on the swing. He always did this when he got closer to completing one of his drawings.
He passed his pencil over the lines he’d already drawn. He pretended to strengthen and darken them to adjust certain parts of the image, but he didn’t really change anything.
He almost stroked the image with his pencil. That was his way of touching the subject without actually touching them. He sat there staring at the children in his drawings for much longer than he needed to.
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Rhodes pretended not to see that and concentrated on his own paper. His pencil hovered over the sheet, but right then, the barracks door opened and Henshaw walked in.
Rhodes nearly tripped over the bench trying to stand up too fast. “Georgie! You’re back.”
She made a face somewhere between a smile and a grimace. “They just let me out. I just woke up from stasis.”
He hustled over to greet her. Oakes left his drawing and crossed the room, too.
Henshaw entered and then Rhinehart, Lauer, Coulter, Dietz, and Thackery walked in behind Henshaw.
Rhodes devoured each of them with his eyes. “Are you all okay? Did they fix whatever malfunctions you had?”
Coulter shrugged. “Who the hell knows what they did? I guess we just have to wait and see how it all works out—until it all goes to shit again.”
Oakes surveyed the group. “Rudy isn’t here.”
“He might not come back,” Rhodes told the others. “The brass is considering taking him permanently offline.”
“I hope they do,” Thackery muttered. “That guy is the last thing we need around here.”
“You can’t blame him for malfunctioning,” Henshaw pointed out.
“He didn’t malfunction,” Rhodes replied. “That’s why he isn’t here. The doctors can’t find anything wrong with him. He was reacting normally to his circumstances. I’m sure we’ve all thought about doing the same thing.”
The others shuffled their feet. Rhodes studied each face in the group. Each of them looked haggard, drained, and depressed—even more than they should have been after getting out of a long conversion cycle.
Few of the group would hold eye contact. When they did, they only did it for a few seconds before they looked away.
“How do you all feel about interfacing with each other?” he asked. “Oakes and I have been interfacing with each other—just to keep an eye on things. How do you all feel about doing the same thing?”
Thackery nodded. “I’m in. I don’t want to be alone anymore.”
“Definitely,” Rhinehart replied. “It’s the safest way for all of us.”
Rhodes surveyed the others. Coulter nodded and Lauer said, “Yeah, let’s do it.”
Rhodes interfaced with all of them and they all established connections with each other.
Their joint interface connected to The Grid. Rhodes checked each of their SAMs. They looked and acted the way they should. Everything seemed to be working properly.
All the fight seemed to have gone out of each of them. None of them showed much spark about doing anything, not even Dietz.
The SAMs didn’t jump into conversation, either. No one spoke unless they absolutely had to.
Coulter, Lauer, and Rhinehart accompanied Rhodes and Oakes back to the table. The five men sat down and the new arrivals complimented Oakes’s artistic development.
Dietz went over to the computer terminal. Henshaw and Thackery meandered around the half-empty barracks. “Where are our capsules?” Thackery asked. “I want to lie down. Where are we supposed to go through conversion cycles without capsules?”
“I’m sure the brass will send some down for you, now that you’re out of the lab,” Rhodes replied. “You can use mine in the meantime if you want to. I’m sure it will work just as well for you.”
Someone would have turned this into a joke in the past, but no one said anything about it now. No one made any noise about Thackery using Rhodes’s capsule.
Only a few moments of silence passed before the technicians came in wheeling a bunch of new capsules for the rest of the battalion.
Thackery and Henshaw stood off to one side watching the technicians hook the new capsules up to the wall.
Thackery waited until the technicians left and Dr. Osborne came in to adjust the controls on all the capsules.
She got into her capsule right away, lay down, and went into a conversion cycle even before he finished fine-tuning it.
He kept working on her capsule for a long time before he moved on to the others.
Henshaw hung back watching every move he made. Dark circles surrounded her one eye. Her cheek looked sunken. Everyone in the battalion looked that way.
Rhodes had been checking his reflection in the washroom mirror every morning as usual. He didn’t notice himself looking so worn out, but maybe he wouldn’t notice it in himself.
He didn’t notice Oakes looking different, either, but maybe Rhodes got used to that the way he got used to them not talking.
If Oakes looked drawn and bowed down by his circumstances, Rhodes would have considered that normal considering everything that happened. Rhodes would have considered that normal for himself, too.
He didn’t really know what to think about any of this anymore. He’d given up trying to figure it out.
Rhinehart and Coulter asked him about what the brass planned to do with the battalion. Rhodes repeated the discussion that happened at his last meeting with the governing body.
Dietz and Henshaw listened from a distance, but they didn’t get involved. No one acted at all surprised by any of this, not even Rhodes’s suggestion to take Fuentes offline.
“They’ll send us back into combat,” Rhinehart murmured under his breath. “The Legion has invested too much in us to just let us sit here doing nothing.”
“The only question is if they’ll send us before or after they work out these malfunctions,” Rhodes replied. “They said the counteroffensive was starting in three weeks and that was two weeks ago. If you all come back to full functioning, the brass might decide to deploy us pretty soon.”
Coulter sighed. “This is a really bad idea. So they corrected the malfunctions. That doesn’t mean we won’t suffer new ones once we get out there.”
“There’s no way to test us under battlefield conditions without sending us into battlefield conditions,” Lauer pointed out. “Training sessions don’t mean a thing.”
“If they reactivate our weapons for training, will they leave our weapons active afterward?” Oakes asked.
Rhinehart glanced over at the soldiers. They never left the barracks. “How much longer will the brass keep us under guard like this? Are we prisoners here or what?”
“We always have been,” Wild muttered through the interface. “We aren’t any more prisoners now than we were before.”
That killed the conversation again. Rhinehart, Lauer, and Coulter started playing The Ship, The Captain, and The Crew, but they didn’t talk trash to each other or laugh or joke around. They hardly talked at all, not even to tally their scores.
They passed the dice around the circle in a dull trance. Henshaw fidgeted in a corner of the room and then, after fifteen minutes, she went into a conversion cycle, too.
The four men stayed awake a little longer before they did the same thing. Would they feel better after their cycles?
Rhodes couldn’t bring himself even to care about that. He was finally adjusting his own sense of reality to this new horror. None of these people would ever recover or go back to normal. Normal didn’t exist for them anymore.
This brooding, depressed silence actually felt more normal than the easy comradery the battalion enjoyed before. This dark, distant silence somehow matched the circumstances better.
The rest of Rhodes’s people were finally responding appropriately to their situation. They were settling into it for the long haul—for as long as it lasted.
They conserved their energy for the ordeal ahead. Making light of it or trying to find some enjoyment in it—none of those things were possible any longer.
Even the SAMs fell into this gloomy stupor of just trying to survive this in any way possible. That was the best anyone could hope for now.
The four men entered their conversion cycles. Rhodes and Oakes were alone again the way they were before. They didn’t talk. Nothing ever changed. It never would change ever again.
End of Chapter 12.