Dr. Osborne strolled down the line of capsules in the Ero’s hold. “The ship will stay in orbit unless you call us down. If you need medical attention or if you need to go into conversion cycles, you only have to give the word. We’ll be monitoring your SAMs through The Grid. We’ll be in constant contact the whole time you’re on the planet.”
Rhodes frowned at him and then at the capsules. “Who are you and what have you done with the real Dr. Osborne?”
Dr. Osborne laughed. “You probably don’t want to believe this, but the brass is committed to preventing the malfunctions and problems the battalion faced during your last campaign.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Rhodes muttered.
“This is the first stage in that process. The Ero will be on call to support the battalion whenever you need anything. You only have to call us and we’ll come down and get you. You shouldn’t have to wait for hours for the ship to lift you off.”
“Too bad the Legion doesn’t give the rest of the platoons the same consideration.”
Osborne shrugged. “I don’t have anything to say about that. I only know I have my orders and so does Captain Ackerman. The Ero is assigned to Battalion 1 from now on. Our only mission is to provide you with the support you need while you’re on the planet.”
Rhodes resisted the urge to repeat that he didn’t believe it. He didn’t believe the Legion supported Battalion 1 at all. He wouldn’t be here right now if it did.
He didn’t say that out loud, though. He would have liked to study Osborne a little more closely, but Rhodes didn’t want to make him uncomfortable.
How much of this was Osborne’s doing? So much had changed since he and Trudeau took over as Battalion 1’s primary medical team.
The two men actually cared about the battalion. They actually did their best to make sure the battalion got the modifications and corrections they needed to go into battle.
Battalion 1 was as good as it possibly could be under the circumstances—which admittedly wasn’t very good.
Fuentes still refused to have anything to do with his comrades. He refused to say a single word to his SAM. Van kept being as polite and helpful to everyone else as she possibly could be.
Fuentes never interfered with the interface, either. He didn’t try to stop anyone from seeing anything he did—because he never did anything he needed to hide.
No one watching from the outside would have been able to find anything wrong with his behavior. The Legion brass put the battalion through five more training sessions before they deployed back to the Emal wars.
Fuentes conducted himself as well in all of them as he did in the first one. He distinguished himself by acting bravely, protecting his comrades, and even listening to Van’s instructions when she warned him about unforeseen dangers.
He didn’t talk back to her, but at least he listened and followed her recommendations.
He spent the rest of his free time working on the computer terminal in the barracks. He didn’t talk or even look at his comrades. Apart from that, no one could fault him for anything.
He still glared at people when he bothered to look at them at all. Rhodes had to admit that Fuentes’s behavior was much better and even exemplary compared to some Legion soldiers Rhodes had known in his career.
Fuentes never put anyone in danger, but that somehow made everyone even more watchful of him. How long could he keep behaving himself like this before he snapped?
The battalion was about to find out. Osborne and Rhodes got to the end of the line of capsules. The battalion was scheduled to deploy in fifteen minutes.
The Legion didn’t send Battalion 1 back to Sulia. That planet was already too far gone to save. The Ero waited in orbit over the planet Bao in the Lumova system.
Rhodes rounded up his subordinates and the battalion headed down to the landing bay. The battalion had the Ero to itself now. No other Legion soldiers crowded the bay waiting to land on the new planet.
Rhodes used The Grid to watch the Ero descend through the atmosphere toward the surface. The rest of the battalion shared the interface with him.
“What’s the point?” Thackery asked when they saw the wasteland of bombed-out buildings and mountains of trash glued together with dead bodies. “Why are we even here?”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Welcome to the front lines,” Lauer growled. “Maybe the Treaty of Aemon Cluster has too many people in it and this is the brass’s way of reducing the population.”
“That isn’t funny,” Henshaw snapped.
“Do I look like I’m joking?” Lauer countered. “Does any of this look like a joke to you?”
“I’m sure Dr. Watson could find something funny about it,” Rhinehart muttered, but no one took the joke, not even himself.
Rhodes pointed at the front line. “The platoons are falling back to here—the Kuestrian Ridge. There are five more cities on the Trar continent the Emal haven’t taken yet. If we fortify the ridge, we might be able to slow them down long enough for the Ravagers to evacuate the cities before the Emal get close enough to bombard them.”
“The Legion should have already evacuated the cities long ago,” Coulter muttered. “The Legion should have evacuated the whole planet the minute the Emal made landfall. Why are there even still any civilians on this planet?”
“We don’t make those decisions,” Rhodes replied. “The Ravagers are already in orbit ready to begin the evacuation.”
“They should already be on the ground,” Coulter pointed out.
“You go get yourself elected to the Treaty of Aemon Ruling Council. Then you can get it changed. Until then, we’re moving out and reinforcing the platoons on that ridge.”
“They’re the 249th again, Sir,” Oakes pointed out. “And the 217th and the 278th.”
“I can read it as well as you can, Lieutenant.” Rhodes immediately changed his tone. “Let’s go.”
The group moved closer to the launch doors. The warning lights flashed and the alarms started going off, but Rhodes only saw The Grid.
He didn’t see anything much different about this planet from Luluna, Sulia, Ohait, and a hundred others just like them.
The battalion’s involvement in this operation only seemed to seal the planet’s fate even more than it already was sealed.
The battalion was supposed to tip the advantage in the Legion’s favor. The battalion wound up doing the opposite.
Rhodes couldn’t be the only person who saw the battalion’s arrival as an omen of doom.
He didn’t say that out loud, though. He kept comments like that to himself.
They didn’t make any difference in the end, either. Nothing could. He just had to do the job in front of him for as long as he survived.
Each planet—each battle—each catastrophe brought him closer to the inevitable conclusion. One of these days, the battalion would come up against a situation that would take them all out.
Everyone in the battalion hung by the slimmest thread. Fuentes was only the most noticeable example.
Everyone in the battalion teetered on the brink of some irreparable disaster. The tiniest problem could tip them all over the edge.
Once they fell, there would be no coming back. None of them had even the smallest margin for error, either mentally or physically. They hung over an abyss with no safety net.
The calm before the launch doors opened gave him a few seconds to survey the landscape all the way to the edge of the sector. He could see the whole Treaty of Aemon Cluster from here.
He could see the Preinean home planet, the wider perimeter under threat from other alien invasions, the Coleridge Station staff—this moment gave him a few seconds of perspective and clarity before he flew into another shit storm.
Fisher didn’t try to talk to Rhodes anymore, either. They exchanged only the most necessary information about whatever task Rhodes faced in any given moment.
Fisher already knew the worst about Rhodes’s mental state. Fisher never brought it up again nor did Fisher try to improve it. It couldn’t be improved. Fisher understood that only too well now.
Fisher didn’t express it in words, but the expression on his face had changed from when Rhodes first met his SAM.
Fisher studied Rhodes with eyes full of sympathetic understanding. Rhodes often caught Fisher staring at him for no apparent reason.
Rhodes’s brief conversation with Van about Fuentes had solidified so many things in Rhodes’s mind.
He was already giving Fisher a priceless gift just by suffering through each excruciating day. Rhodes gave Fisher life every single day that Rhodes kept waking up in the morning.
Fisher understood better than anyone what it cost Rhodes to keep doing that. Staying alive meant a hell of a lot more to Fisher than it did to Rhodes.
These last few weeks at Coleridge Station changed things between them. Rhodes no longer got out of bed every day for his subordinates, himself, or even his family on Preinea.
He did it for Fisher—so Fisher could keep surviving. If life meant enough for Fisher to want to live, Rhodes couldn’t bring himself to put that at risk.
The whole battalion lived in the interface now. Rhodes would have heard his subordinates talking to their SAMs about this, but they didn’t talk about it.
All the SAMs had changed both their tone and their facial expressions. They spoke much less than they used to.
When they did, they used the same compassionate undertone of deep, heartfelt understanding for the real sacrifice each person was making to keep their SAM alive.
Everyone relaxed much more around Fuentes, too. Rhodes couldn’t keep the kid under constant watch and he didn’t need to.
Everyone treated Fuentes’s silence and hostility as normal now. It was simply his way of coping with his own inner pain. No one begrudged him that as long as he kept doing the job—which he did.
It was too late for Rhodes to do anything about it now. The launch doors opened, he fired his boosters, and soared out over the destroyed landscape.
The battalion had spent so many training sessions in Emal battles. The setting didn’t cause any emotional reaction at all anymore.
The brass should have put the battalion through this level of training before sending the battalion into combat the first time, but that was all water under the bridge now.
Rhodes measured The Grid in all directions as he approached the Kuestrian Ridge. The command dome perched on another hillside well out of the danger zone.
The platoons reinforced the ridge as well as they could against successive Emal assaults.
The aliens hammered the ridge both with laser rifle fire and base ship bombardments from deeper inside the Trar continent.
Some genius finally, finally got the brilliant idea to bomb the Emal from orbit. Seeker missiles kept dropping out of the dense clouds and detonating inside the Emal horde.
The strikes wiped out countless Emal. They couldn’t shoot back. They had no defense against this, but that didn’t slow down their numbers—not one bit. Nothing could.
End of Chapter 22.