Everyone in the barracks saw Fuentes at the same moment Rhodes saw him. Everyone turned around very slowly to look in Fuentes’s direction. He wasn’t supposed to come back until tomorrow.
Rhodes sat frozen to his bench. No one else in the room made a sound.
Fuentes took one step across the threshold, but he didn’t enter—not yet. Whatever mental distress he’d been going through before definitely wasn’t there anymore. He didn’t tremble or grimace or spasm in agony anymore.
Now he was definitely in a different kind of mental distress. The expression on his face struck terror into Rhodes’s heart even more than the way Fuentes had been before he left. This was far worse.
Fuentes glared at his comrades through narrowed eyes. He clamped his lips tight shut and he kept clenching his jaw in barely suppressed fury.
No one moved or even breathed. He didn’t enter the barracks to rejoin the battalion. He just stood there seething and glaring at everyone and everything.
Rhodes went through a series of rapid decisions about how to deal with Fuentes. Should Rhodes go over there and talk to him? Should Rhodes welcome Fuentes back with open arms?
The murderous scowl written all over Fuentes’s face told Rhodes all he needed to know. Fuentes was no happier about coming back than the rest of the battalion was to get him back.
Rhodes considered just going back to his drawing and his conversation as if Fuentes wasn’t here at all.
Maybe that would be for the best—just to treat Fuentes as if his suicide attempt never happened in the first place—as if he hadn’t been gone all these weeks.
Did the doctors and the brass decide to send Fuentes back now to screw with the battalion’s heads again?
Rhodes knew better than that. They were all too incompetent to think that far in advance. They never planned or foresaw anything.
It probably never once occurred to General Brewster or his pals in the Battalion 1 governing body that it might matter to the battalion when Fuentes came back—or that the battalion might benefit from some advanced warning that Fuentes was coming back early.
Fisher snapped Rhodes out of his thoughts. “Aren’t you going to talk to him, Captain?”
Rhodes didn’t realize until that moment that he had to talk to Fuentes. That was Rhodes’s job. He couldn’t just ignore Fuentes.
Rhodes really hadn’t been sure right up until that moment if he should. Now he stood up and crossed the barracks.
Everyone present watched him in breathless silence when he came to a stop in front of Fuentes. “Welcome back, Rudy,” Rhodes began in as calm a tone as he could muster. “It’s good to have you back.”
Fuentes dipped his chin once and clipped, “Sir,” exactly the way Lauer did when he woke up from stasis. Fuentes didn’t stop glaring at everything. Now he glared at Rhodes worst of all.
Rhodes shuddered at the expression on Fuentes’s face. He’d never glared or scowled or fumed like this before.
All his distress had switched to pure, volcanic rage. He simmered with it. The tension vibrating off him threatened to explode at the slightest provocation.
This was so much worse than Rhodes feared. He would gladly have dealt with the fallout of Fuentes coming back suicidal. This was far, far more dangerous to everyone else in the battalion.
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Rhodes couldn’t exactly send Fuentes away, though. The only alternative was to put Fuentes down right here and now.
Rhodes couldn’t even do that—not without releasing this deadly beast lying right underneath Fuentes’s skin.
Fuentes would defend himself. Whatever he might have been when he left was long gone. The mild-mannered, less-than-intelligent kid he was no longer existed.
This monster would anticipate someone on the battalion doing something to eliminate the threat. Fuentes’s hard, sharp dark eyes flicked from one person to the next around the room.
He measured them the way a warrior measures his enemies—or potential enemies. He would anticipate someone turning against him—and he would respond in kind.
Rhodes took the only course he could think of to cool the tension. He waved behind him. “Come on in. We’re all thrilled to have you back. Come sit down. We were just talking the way we used to. Come on.”
Rhodes turned away still gesturing toward the table. He backed into the room to lead Fuentes over there.
Fuentes advanced a few steps and halted by the table glaring at the men sitting there. Rhodes stepped over the bench, sat down opposite Oakes, and pulled his drawing toward him.
Fuentes’s presence unnerved everyone. Oakes, Lauer, and Rhinehart all turned back to the center and pretended Fuentes wasn’t there.
Oakes started sketching on his picture again and Rhodes did the same thing, but the conversation didn’t restart.
A dangerous silence fell over the room. Coulter, Henshaw, Dietz, and Thackery all watched from the periphery.
Not even the SAMs made a sound even though Fuentes couldn’t have heard them. He didn’t interface with the rest of the battalion.
He stood there boiling with barely concealed rage while Rhodes and Oakes went on drawing. Their pencils scratching across the paper made the only sound in the room.
No one else moved for a second before Fuentes clenched his jaw again, tightened his lips, and marched around the table to the terminal desk.
He towered over Dietz, pointed to the machine, and then swiped his finger sideways. “Are you using this or what?”
Dietz fell over himself trying to stand up too fast. “Naw, man. You go ahead and use it.”
He kicked the desk a few times getting as far away from Fuentes as he could as fast as he could. He scrambled over to the table and sat down on the bench next to Lauer.
Lauer and Oakes both scooted down the bench to give Dietz space to sit down. Fuentes glared at all of them, gritted his teeth a few more times, and then sat down at the desk in Dietz’s place.
Fuentes started working on the terminal. Rhodes made one moment of eye contact with Dietz before Rhodes went back to his sketch.
No one said anything else. Rhodes and Oakes kept working on their drawings. Dietz, Lauer, and Rhinehart clustered around the table where they had been before, but they didn’t talk.
Rhodes got a flash of what the five men must look like to Fuentes. Rhodes and his comrades looked like they were huddling for protection from Fuentes.
Coulter went back to studying the mortar between the wall blocks. Thackery watched from the next table.
Henshaw gathered up her scraps of wood and her unfinished carvings, put them on the bookshelf with the other finished ones, and sat down on the edge of her capsule.
She kept her back to the table for a few minutes before she stretched out on the mattress, locked into her prongs, and started her conversion cycle early. Then Thackery did the same thing.
One person at a time split away. Rhinehart left the table next and Coulter took his place. Then Fuentes entered his conversion cycle, too.
A palpable wave of relief went through the rest of the battalion as soon as his capsule cover closed.
“Jesus Christ!” Oakes muttered. “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into?”
“I guess we don’t have to worry about him killing himself now,” Lauer murmured under his breath.
“No, we just have to worry about him killing one of us instead,” Coulter added.
“We don’t know that,” Rhodes pointed out. “We don’t know what he’s thinking or feeling.”
“You should talk to him and find out, Sir,” Lauer suggested. “You’re the only one of us who can.”
Rhodes sighed. “I guess I’ll have to.”
“Wouldn’t you rather know what he’s thinking and feeling than not?” Oakes asked. “I wish he’d interface with us. Then we wouldn’t have to wonder what he’s thinking or if he’s planning on going on a murderous rampage to kill us all.”
“I’ll have to ask him to interface with us,” Rhodes replied. “Don’t ask me what I’ll do if he refuses.”
“He’ll have to interface with us on the battlefield,” Thackery chimed in from the next table. “It wouldn’t work if we couldn’t communicate with him and anticipate what he was about to do. We’ll need to see his Grid and our SAMs will have to coordinate with his SAM.”
“Yeah, all that, but I won’t do it tonight—obviously.” Rhodes pushed his drawing away. “I’m going to sleep. I’ll see all of you tomorrow.”
He crossed the room to his capsule, but he stopped next to Fuentes’s capsule on the way there. Fuentes looked like his old self, now that he had his eyes closed.
His features softened in sleep. He didn’t glare or scowl. He looked calm and peaceful, but that was all an illusion now. He would never be calm or peaceful again—ever.
End of Chapter 19.