Rhodes and Rhinehart kept driving their arrow formation deeper into the Emal position. The aliens had no choice but to fall away on either side as the arrow stabbed through their ranks.

The platoons fired between the shields laying down a carpet of dead bodies, but more Emal crowded in from both sides.

The more they crowded and the more the arrow penetrated the enemy position, the more the Emal drew away from the ridge. The pressure relieved….and then all that pressure fell on the battalion.

The crush of Emal stopped Rhodes from going any further. He crouched there holding onto Rhinehart on one side and Lauer on the other.

Rhodes concentrated all his might on just taking one laser hit after another. Every hit he took was one less hit that would take down the platoon soldiers.

The Emal barrage escalated. Thousands of aliens jammed against Rhodes’s shield. The enemy didn’t need to use their weapons. The aliens would crush him and the soldiers inside the arrow.

“The 217th and the 235th are bombarding the Emal from the flanks!” Fisher bellowed over the noise. “They should be relieving some of the pressure on the battalion, but it isn’t working!”

A scream from the back of the formation drew Rhodes’s attention to The Grid. The arrow had penetrated deeply enough into the Emal side. Now the Emal closed the battalion from behind.

The pressure on Dietz and Henshaw built to the breaking point. Too many Emal crowded against them. The widest rear flare of the arrow collapsed in on itself.

Dietz and Henshaw pivoted inward to close the back of the arrow. They stayed linked with Coulter and Thackery until all four of them adjusted the arrow into a diamond instead.

Now the Emal surrounded the battalion from all sides. The 249th platoon got caught in the center with no way out.

Thousands of Emal circled the battalion crushing inward with unstoppable force. Laser fire smashed Rhodes’s grid lines.

He heard Fisher yelling at him, but Rhodes couldn’t hear over the noise. He had to do something to break this stalemate.

He almost gave the order to dissolve the formation when a catastrophic blast of laser cannon fire struck the arrow somewhere farther down the line.

Rhodes didn’t see where it hit. Murphy vanished off the interface and someone screamed again.

The next instant, another four brutal shots pounded the platoon inside the arrow. Rhinehart broke contact with Rhodes and the Emal swarmed in to overrun the battalion.

Rhodes saw it all going down the drain in a big hurry. He braced himself to change back into his normal shape, dive over to Rhinehart, and lift him off before ordering the whole battalion to retreat.

Rhodes hated to leave the 249th in such dire straits, but what choice did he have? If he didn’t get the battalion out now, they would all die here.

He cast one glance northward. The base ships kept unloading one shot after another at the battalion’s position. Only the Emal’s sheer numbers prevented the base ships from targeting accurately enough to wipe out the whole battalion.

Rhodes brought up The Grid to show him exactly how far away he was from Rhinehart. Oakes had already changed back into his normal shape.

He struggled through the horde of Emal trying to get closer to Coulter’s unconscious body.

Another deafening explosion of cannon fire detonated right next to Rhodes’s head, and at that moment, a lightning strike forked out of the atmosphere.

It lit up the whole ghastly landscape, struck three base ships at once, and pulverized them.

Rhodes’s head shot up. He thought at first that Fuentes must have pulled out some miracle surprise attack.

Fuentes was nowhere near the base ships in question. He was still working his way overland trying to get near them.

These strikes came from orbit—or they seemed to. Another jet of white fire blasted out of the sky, wiped five more base ships off the map, and then another dancing array of electric forks blasted through the Emal ranks.

Rhodes actually stopped fighting to stare at The Grid as a completely different fleet of ships descended through the atmosphere. These didn’t belong to the Aemon Legion nor did they belong to the Emal.

Rhodes didn’t recognize these new ships’ make. The energy shots flashing all over the planet looked strangely similar to Legion fusion charges, but they weren’t the same.

These strange ships were ten times the Ravagers’ size with a spiky, disjointed configuration. They had a modular, disconnected look as if someone had merged multiple ships into each one.

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Rhodes only snatched the most fleeting glimpse of these ships as they broke through the atmosphere. That one glance showed him that none of the ships had the same shape. Each one was unique in a jumbled, mismatched, almost trashy kind of way.

These were a thousand times more powerful than anything the Emal or the Legion could throw at them. The strange ships dropped in low, swooped over the Emal ranks, and cut down thousands of Emal in seconds.

All the Emal stopped attacking Rhodes and his battalion. The aliens turned their laser rifles on the incoming attackers, but nothing made a dent in their hulls.

The remaining base ships did, though. They wheeled their cannons at the invaders. Four base ships unloaded on one of the invading vessels and blasted it out of the sky.

It exploded and split into three pieces. Each one crashed among the Emal horde, but more of those strange ships kept descending all over the place.

“Who the hell are they?!” Oakes bellowed.

“Who the hell cares?!” Lauer yelled back. “We gotta get out of here before they come after us next!”

Rhodes already knew that, but he didn’t dare to launch with those ships laying waste to everything in sight.

“Rudy!” Rhodes hollered. “Come back here now! We gotta fall back!”

Fuentes turned around and put on speed trying to burrow his way back to the battalion’s position.

The Emal didn’t make it easy. They stampeded toward their base ships trying to escape only for the ships to blow up in their faces as soon as the aliens got near them.

More of the strange invaders soared across the landscape swiping massive cuts of their energy weapon through the Emal on the ground. Bodies fell in waves.

Rhodes turned back to try to rescue Rhinehart. Rhodes collided with Sergeant Stillwell coming the other way. “We’re all gonna die out here! You have to help us!”

Rhodes opened his mouth to say he couldn’t help anyone, not even himself.

He broke off when he saw one of the dark invaders gunning straight for his location.

“Cover the platoons!” he ordered. “Form a shield over the platoons! They’re defenseless!”

He barely expanded his grid lines in time, flung himself as wide as he could go over the 249th, and clamped his eyes shut before the enemy unloaded on the whole area.

Oakes, Lauer, Dietz, and Thackery did the same thing. The invaders bombarded the five of them with crushing fire. The impact squashed the soldiers underneath them.

Rhodes lost sight of Rhinehart, Fuentes, Coulter, and Henshaw in the chaos. He couldn’t even raise his head to try to see where they were.

Too many Emal crowded The Grid for him to pick up any trace of his four subordinates. A teeming carpet of life signs covered the planet and then all those Emal rushed inward on the space where the platoons had been standing.

The Emal fled from the invaders and ran in all directions, but nothing could escape the invaders’ devastating weapons.

The Emal surged toward the center and wound up clambering on top of the shields the battalion used to protect the platoons cowering underneath.

Rhodes heard men yelling all around him. The weight of hundreds of Emal crushed him down on top of the platoons, but that weight offered the best protection from the enemy assault.

The strange ships came wheeling back and leveled Emal all over the field. Their bodies mounded on top of the battalion with the platoons trapped underneath.

Rhodes clamped his eyes shut to block out the horror, but The Grid didn’t go away even then. The strange ships made pass after pass over the battlefield.

Just when the situation couldn’t get any worse, a dozen of those strange invasion vessels landed on the dark planes farther north. They released another massive tide of ground troops, but these weren’t aliens.

The Grid registered countless individuals advancing on the ridgeline, but The Grid didn’t return any life signs. The line of dots on The Grid in front of Rhodes’s eyes showed up in blue. They were machines.

“Who are they?!” Rhodes roared.

“They don’t show up on any known Legion database!” Fisher called back. “We’ve never seen them before!”

“How the hell did they get this deep into the Treaty of Aemon Cluster?!” Oakes demanded. “There are hundreds of Legion ships in the atmosphere right now! They should have engaged with these fools and stopped them from landing.”

Dash turned right and left in front of Oakes and adjusted The Grid. “The invaders are engaged with the Legion, but these machines still shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on the planet. There’s no explanation for it—not yet.”

“Who cares about that?!” Lauer fired back. “How the hell do we get out of here?”

“Stay put!” Rhodes ordered. “We’re safer here than we would be out there.”

“How long do we have to stay here?” Lieutenant Turley asked from ten feet away from Rhodes.

Rhodes didn’t realize he’d gotten trapped with his old friends from the 249th. He hadn’t been thinking about anything other than keeping out of these invaders’ path.

He only had to take one look at The Grid to make up his mind. The invading ground troops advanced south toward the ridgeline coming closer to the battalion’s position.

The ground troops spread out in a thin line one individual deep. They walked upright on two legs and held their fusion rifles in two arms.

They had a strangely humanoid appearance and wore heavy armor and iron masks with one single extended ocular piece where the eyes should be.

Light shone through this slit as the machines scanned the area for anyone moving. The machines gunned down every Emal in sight and kept heading south toward the ridge.

The Legion force that had just been fighting the Emal opened fire on these machines. Fusion charges pelted back and forth.

The Ravagers in the atmosphere unloaded their seekers on the machine invaders now. Explosions thumped the planet under Rhodes’s body.

The impact vibrated through the trapped platoons. Each of those concussions made everyone huddle lower—as if they could get any lower. No way would Rhodes let any of these people go out there now.

A few surviving Emal base ships opened fire on the invading vessels. Then the base ships turned their cannons on the ground troops.

Their thin advanced line made them nearly impossible to target. The base ships’ cannon fire pounded the battlefield all over the place. Only a few stray shots hit the ground troops.

The ground troops passed their fusion rifles back and forth across the battlefield carving a path through any Emal still moving around out there.

The Emal lost the advantage of their numbers and fell before the enemy. The machine troops kept marching against all odds toward the ridge.

They inevitably ran into pockets of Emal with enough people to slow the machines’ advance. The Emal unloaded their laser rifles on the machines and cut down dozens of them.

Individual machines fell on top of the mountain of Emal bodies pinning down Rhodes, the battalion, and the platoons. The machines’ signals vanished off The Grid.

The machines showed no more concern for their fallen comrades than the Emal did. The machines only tightened their formation to close any gaps between them.

They kept moving south no matter what. The Emal had to retreat up the slopes getting closer to the Legion position.