Rhodes did his best to push the conversation out of his mind. He couldn’t think right now about the machine invaders being SAMs. They weren’t SAMs. They were just another enemy for him to fight.
He blundered over mountains of dead Emal to where Rhinehart lay half-buried under another mountain of dismembered alien gore.
Rhodes rolled Rhinehart over. Dark purple bruises covered the organic side of his face. His implants appeared undamaged.
“Rhinehart!” Rhodes murmured. “Lieutenant….”
Rhinehart tried to open his one good eye, but it had swollen shut. “Captain….” Rhinehart husked.
“Can you interface with us?” Rhodes asked. “You don’t have to get up. Just let me see you in the interface.”
Rhinehart lay still for a second. “I don’t think he can, Captain,” Rocky replied. “I’m afraid I’ll have to do it for you.”
“It doesn’t matter. Just monitor him until we can bring the Ero back.”
“What are we going to do about the other SAMs?” Dash asked.
“They aren’t SAMs!” Oakes snapped. “Stop calling them that. They aren’t your friends and you aren’t under any obligation to defend them.”
“But what about…..?”
“SHUT UP, DASH!!” Oakes roared and glanced over at Rhodes. Oakes shut his own mouth and fought himself down.
Just then, Coulter sat up, rubbed his head, and finally got to his feet. He groaned and wrinkled his nose at the surroundings. “Spectacular. This is just perfect.”
Rhodes made a command decision. He didn’t trust Fisher to do anything right now. “Wild—interface with the Ero and see when the ship will be able to come and get us.”
“Of course, Captain,” Wild replied.
“Rudy—come back here and rejoin the rest of the battalion,” Rhodes ordered.
“Yes, Sir.” Fuentes changed back into whatever burrowing form he’d been using before. He could travel through the ground much faster than walking or even using his boosters to fly.
Rhodes used his grid lines to change himself into one of the jointed spider shapes. He moved Henshaw’s body over next to Rhinehart. Now he had his two wounded in one place.
Doing something took his mind off the machines, but as soon as he finished, all those questions came rushing back.
The machines using SAMs technology didn’t bother him nearly as much as Fisher’s and Dash’s reaction. This was going to cause serious problems. Rhodes sensed that even now.
Fisher didn’t speak again after Rhodes’s outburst. Oakes’s outburst silenced Dash, but they kept hovering there watching everything. They didn’t change their opinion.
Rhodes dreaded going back into combat with either of them—not against this enemy—not until he got them back to the Legion and got them reprogrammed to fight these machines.
He checked The Grid and confirmed his worst fears. Fourteen of the robot invasion ships broke away from the Legion fleet.
Rhodes couldn’t tell from here whether the invaders wanted something special about this particular planet.
He tried not to think about the most obvious explanation. If these machines were an entire army of SAMs the way Fisher said, then the machines obviously wanted to reclaim their own—the battalion.
None of that mattered right now. “They’re coming back!” Rhodes called out. He spun around and pointed at everyone near him, including the men of the 249th. “The invaders are coming back! Arm up and prepare to defend yourselves!”
“You have to help us!” Upshaw insisted.
“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do, Justin?!” Rhodes roared and turned the other way to swipe his forefinger at his people. “Bring Rhinehart and Henshaw over here. Stand by to put up our shields again. We’ll have to concentrate all our energy on covering them and the platoons.”
“What about shooting down their ships?” Thackery asked.
“Shoot them down with what?” Lauer asked. “The whole Legion fleet couldn’t defeat those things. We don’t have a prayer.”
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“Get into position!” Rhodes ordered. “We won’t have time to argue about it.”
He helped Dietz bring Henshaw and Rhinehart closer to the platoons. The soldiers hunkered down in a much tighter formation than last time.
The group was much better prepared to defend itself this time, but that still didn’t give Rhodes any more optimistic feeling about their chances.
He, Lauer, Oakes, Dietz, Thackery, Fuentes, and Coulter surrounded the platoon waiting for the enemy to enter the atmosphere.
Rhodes tried to ignore the fact that the enemy invasion ships were heading straight for the battalion. Whoever these machines were, they recognized their own.
“Stand by!” he yelled over the platoon. “They’re using fusion weapons, so we can deflect them and shoot back with thermals. That will block their shots from hitting us.”
“Got it,” Lauer replied.
“I can’t let you do this, Captain,” Fisher interrupted.
“You don’t let me do anything, pal,” Rhodes snapped. “Shut the fuck up and don’t talk to me again.”
“I can’t let you shoot at them,” Fisher repeated. “They’re SAMs. They’re our…..”
“If you interfere with this battle in any way, I’ll make sure the doctors take you offline as soon as we get back on board the Ero,” Rhodes snapped. “Is that clear? Don’t say another word to me about them being….”
He broke off as the howl of engines blasted through the atmosphere coming closer. His attention riveted on The Grid.
The invasion ships dropped out of the clouds and picked up speed heading for the battalion’s location.
“Shield the platoons!” Rhodes ordered.
He stretched his grid lines over the platoon. The lines joined up with more lines coming from each of his subordinates. Their Grids linked into a solid wall.
The invasion ships opened fire, but The Grid held. The enemy swooped lower to come in for another pass.
The battalion opened fire with their thermals, but the invaders’ firepower overcame the thermals. The battalion’s thermal cannons didn’t neutralize the invaders’ fusion fire—not enough.
The soldiers aimed their Jackhammers through The Grid and returned fire to drive the invaders off, but the invasion ships were too powerful.
Rhodes opened one of the squares in his Grid—just enough to fire a Viper through it to hit one of those ships as it soared overhead.
He double-checked and triple-checked that Fisher didn’t do anything to stop Rhodes from firing on these things.
Fisher didn’t do anything. He remained silent and passive through the whole battle, but at the last possible second before Rhodes released his Viper, something else flashed on The Grid in front of his eyes.
His Viper launcher shut down, and the next time he fired his thermal cannon, nothing happened.
“They’re shutting us down!” Coulter hollered. “They’re doing something to switch off our weapons systems!”
“They’re using a Legion transponder code,” Fisher called out. “They’re signaling that they’re a friendly force to stop us from shooting at them.”
“Can you override it?” Rhodes asked.
“I’m trying!” Fisher countered. “The code acts on our base programming. We can’t do anything about it. It’s written into our neural core.”
Rhodes tried to unleash his Vipers again…..and again. Nothing worked.
The rest of the battalion experienced the same malfunction—except that it wasn’t a malfunction. The SAMs all responded to the transponder code exactly the way they’d been programmed to.
Rhodes didn’t think before he did it. He didn’t even know he could do it until it happened.
He dropped into The Grid. The battle vanished for a second—or at least it receded to the limits of his awareness.
He entered The Grid—the black landscape marked with green lines the way he’d seen it before each training session.
Fisher’s face floated in front of Rhodes’s eyes. He couldn’t see any other SAM or his subordinates even though he remained interfaced with them.
“What are you doing, Captain?” Fisher asked.
Rhodes didn’t answer. He dove for Fisher, extended his grid lines, and plunged headfirst straight through the image of Fisher’s face.
The grid lines merged—Rhodes’s grid lines and the lines that made up Fisher’s base matrix. Rhodes didn’t understand what he was doing or how this was even possible. He just did it.
The grid lines tangled for a minute and then he submerged deeper into a world of millions of grid lines forming miles upon miles of Grid landscape.
This looked like the simulated world of the training sessions but with no color or texture. Green lines and black squares made up every shape imaginable.
Mountains, valleys, buildings, towns, vehicles, animals, people—this landscape contained everything the real world contained—except color and substance.
Fisher’s face lost all color, too. As soon as Rhodes entered that world, he attacked Fisher with all his might. Rhodes wrapped his grid lines around Fisher’s lines and tore them apart.
Some other part of Rhodes’s mind took over. He punched through the grid outline of Fisher’s face and broke into a deeper, more complicated Grid world of bizarre shapes all melting and changing before his eyes.
A complicated tangle of grid lines morphed and twisted at the very center of the outer cage of lines that made up Fisher’s image.
Rhodes didn’t understand how he recognized that tangle, but he did recognize it. It was the transponder code.
He fired his scourge gun at it and it shattered into a million much smaller fragments of grid lines. They scattered outward to join with the lines all around them.
The instant he hit that tangle, the whole Grid world evaporated and he found himself back on the battlefield under heavy bombardment from the invasion ships.
Their constant gunfire weakened the field the battalion used to protect the platoons.
He unleashed ten Vipers in rapid succession, targeted them together, and detonated three of the incoming enemy vessels.
Grid lines materialized on the invading ships’ outer hulls, but they didn’t change shape.
Rhodes’s brain kicked into high gear. That destroyed machine changed its grid lines, but only after it ceased to function normally.
The machine ground troops that wiped out the Emal didn’t change their shape, either. They didn’t alter The Grid to make themselves more adaptable or to avoid enemy gunfire.
Rhodes’s made another snap decision. “Break the shield and attack!” he roared. “Battalion 1—separate! Use The Grid and attack!”
He leapt out of position, took control of The Grid, and changed his shape into a giant mechanized fighting machine.
His arms and hands morphed into windmills of lasers whipping in all directions. He swelled to five times his size and slashed his lasers at another five ships in the sky.
Another half dozen invasion ships landed not far away and unloaded more ground troops, but they didn’t use The Grid, either. Could they even use The Grid at all?
End of Chapter 26.