Rhinehart grabbed Rhodes’s arm and pulled him to his feet. “Are you okay, Sir?”

Rhodes shook himself. “I’m fine, Lieutenant. Did we accomplish the objective? Did the Ravagers lift off?”

“The Ravagers made it out,” Fisher replied. “That’s what ended the training session. It just cost all your lives in the process. If this had been real, only Coulter and Thackery would have survived.”

Rhodes glanced around the circle. Thackery, Lauer, Coulter, and Rhinehart all appeared unharmed. “Are all of you okay?”

“I came back here,” Thackery replied. “Eddie said I got hit, but I don’t think I did. I think The Grid took me out of the session and replaced me with something else—something that made you think I got hurt.”

Rhodes confronted her and Coulter. “What the hell were you two thinking? You agreed to work with your SAMs. You can’t go questioning everything they tell you in the middle of a battle.”

“Koenig was wrong about the first channel,” Thackery argued. “I couldn’t let him lead us into a trap.”

“I couldn’t let her fall to her death,” Coulter pointed out. “She would have died from that fall if that battle had been real.”

“You could have died,” Rhodes countered. “You should have listened to Murphy.”

“His job is to protect me, but he would have put another battalion member in danger by doing it.” Coulter shrugged. “Anyway, I made it.”

“You both agreed that you would work with your SAMs,” Rhodes went on. “None of us can afford for you to get taken out because you don’t listen to your SAMs’ information.”

“We agreed to work with them,” Coulter returned. “We told you we wouldn’t trust them.”

“Then what’s the point of going into battle with them at all? Just make them invisible and silent if you aren’t going to listen to their recommendations.”

“What are we supposed to do—obey them blindly and never question their judgment?” Thackery fired back. “We’ve already seen that they can’t be trusted.”

“If you really want to hear my opinion, then yes, I say you should obey them blindly and never question their judgment,” Rhodes replied. “That’s what I’m doing.”

“You do?” Lauer asked. “You obey all Fisher’s recommendations and never question him—ever?”

“Not in a combat situation—no, I don’t. Are you crazy? He told me to fly up along the hillsides and he was right. He can process information in The Grid a lot faster than I can. I don’t have time to run through hours and hours of battle data the way he can. He can do it in a split second. If he tells me to fly somewhere to stay away from laser cannons, that’s what I’m going to do. I would be stupid not to.”

“What if he gives you a questionable order?” Coulter asked. “Would you obey him then?”

“Do you mean an order like, say, ‘Don’t fly into enemy laser cannons?’ Is that the kind of questionable order you mean?”

“You can’t expect us to believe that Fisher has never done anything questionable,” Thackery interjected.

“We know he has,” Oakes chimed in.

“I never said he hasn’t,” Rhodes replied. “I know he has, but the middle of a battle isn’t the time to start questioning his every word. I won’t question him at all unless I have some reason to think he might be malfunctioning. Neither Murphy nor Koenig was malfunctioning when they made those recommendations.”

“But Koenig was wrong about that first channel,” Thackery pointed out.

“That isn’t why you ignored his recommendation,” Rhodes countered. “You ignored his recommendation because you resent having a SAM. If your positions were reversed and he was the one telling you the channel was unsafe because the Emal had planted laser cannons there, you would have rejected his recommendation and flown straight into that channel. You would have gone out of your way to do the opposite of whatever he suggested.”

Rhodes turned to launch into a similar reprimand of Coulter. Rhodes saw himself reprimanding them in front of the whole battalion.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Rhodes intended to do exactly that. He had to make an example of these two.

“This whole session proves my point—just in case any of you haven’t already gotten the memo,” he went on. “We all have to make a choice—live with the SAMs or not. I’ve already made my choice. I won’t give up Fisher. Hell no.”

Thackery looked away.

“I don’t see anything wrong with Murphy or Koenig,” Rhodes told them. “As far as I’m concerned, you two were the ones who stepped out of line. I don’t see anything wrong with either recommendation that either SAM made during the training session.”

“You don’t see anything wrong with Koenig telling us to fly into enemy laser cannons?” Thackery countered.

“So Koenig made a mistake based on incomplete information. So what? A mistake like that could happen to anyone.”

“Murphy would have let her die,” Coulter argued. “I couldn’t let that happen.”

“I definitely took Murphy’s side on this one. That fall wouldn’t have killed Thackery—not even if the battle had been real instead of a Grid training session. You alive and helping the battalion against the Emal would have been much more useful to accomplishing the objective than you crashing and burning along with her. Murphy did his job by protecting you. You were the one in the wrong here—not Murphy.”

The Grid vanished around them at that moment. The lines vanished and the battalion wound up in the plain white training room.

General Brewster and Colonel Kraft stood there waiting. General Brewster scowled at Rhodes and his people.

This was the first time Rhodes had ever seen General Brewster scowl at anyone. He always presented such a bubbly, overly enthusiastic expression. Scowling made him look idiotic.

“That training session could have gone better, Captain,” he muttered.

“We accomplished the objective,” Rhodes replied. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? We saved the platoons.”

“You cost six battalion lives in the process. I don’t call that a victory.”

“The point of this was to check our SAMs for malfunctions. We did that. As far as I’m concerned, that training session was a success.”

“So….are any of you malfunctioning?” Brewster asked.

Rhodes stopped himself from glancing at Coulter and Thackery. “No, none of us are malfunctioning.”

Brewster’s expression cleared immediately. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Excellent! Then we can start planning to deploy the battalion back to the Emal wars.”

“Just hold your horses right there, pal,” Rhinehart interrupted. “We still haven’t gotten Rudy back. We have to train with him. Then—maybe—we’ll see if this battalion is in any condition to go anywhere.”

Brewster narrowed his eyes at Rhinehart. “You’re out of line, soldier. You’re still expected to address your superior officers with the appropriate degree of respect.”

“Superior?” Rhinehart snorted. “There is not one of you jokers who is superior to me and I am definitely addressing you with the appropriate degree of respect—which is none.”

Rhodes raised his hand. “That’s enough. We finished the session. That’s all that matters. If you gentlemen don’t have anything else….”

“You finished the session with more than two-thirds of your personnel dead including yourself,” Brewster countered. “This is exactly the kind of setback that could lead the governing body to decide to shut down this whole project. There would be no Battalion 1 if this happened in real life.”

“I really hope they do shut down the project,” Rhodes replied. “I pray for the day. Excuse me, gentlemen. We’re going back to the barracks.”

He pushed between them just to make his point. He was really starting to agree with Rhinehart. These fools didn’t deserve his respect or even the time out of his day.

“You can go back to the barracks now, Captain, but this isn’t finished,” Brewster called after him. “I’m ordering psych evaluations on all of you later this afternoon. We need to establish if any of you might be too dangerously unstable to go back into combat.”

“I already told you we were,” Rhodes replied over his shoulder.

“Are you ordering psych evaluations on our SAMs, too?” Thackery asked.

Brewster frowned. “Psych evaluations on your SAMs? Why would we order that? The SAMs don’t have psychology that needs to be evaluated.”

No one answered him. Rhodes and the rest of the battalion left the training room. They reopened the interface on their way back to the barracks.

No one said anything until they reentered the familiar room. “Psych evaluations,” Lauer snarled. “I never could stand those.”

“Who the hell cares?” Oakes countered. “It doesn’t matter what they find out. They’ll send us into combat either way.”

“The captain is right,” Henshaw murmured. “We’re all too dangerously unstable to go into combat.”

“There is no such thing as too dangerously unstable to go into combat,” Rhinehart told her. “Dangerously unstable is what going into combat is all about.”

“Even if being dangerously unstable puts your comrades and other Legion soldiers in danger?” she asked. “Isn’t that the problem—that we would be too dangerously unstable to tell who we should shoot at?”

“It doesn’t matter because any malfunction could cause us to shoot at the wrong target,” Oakes replied. “These doctors will be evaluating us in our normal state—not in a malfunctioning state. Whatever they find out won’t mean squat once the lead starts flying.”

“Nothing these people do makes any sense.” Rhodes sat down at the table and picked up his pencil. “I agree with Oakes. The brass will send us out regardless of what they find in these evaluations. This is just Brewster’s way of showing the governing body that he can jump through hoops as well as they want him to. After that, we’ll go into battle either way.”

“Of course we will,” Lauer growled. “The Legion can’t fight this war without us.”

“The Legion can’t fight the war with us,” Rhinehart pointed out. “One of these days, the Emal will realize they don’t have to stop with their own territory. They can take the whole Treaty of Aemon Cluster and then we’ll all be in big trouble.”

End of Chapter 16.