Rhodes opened his eyes in his capsule and stared up at the closed cover. Fisher hovered before his eyes already.
Fisher had changed his morning routine—and so had Rhodes. Fisher and Rhodes talked before Rhodes got out of his capsule. Talking to Fisher had replaced Rhodes putting on his boots in the morning.
The instant Rhodes made eye contact with his SAM, he remembered everything from the Bao assault.
He shuddered when he remembered that robot’s metal helmet changing in his hands.
Fisher read his mind. “Good morning, Captain,” Fisher murmured in that undertone that told Rhodes loud and clear that Fisher was thinking the same thing.
Rhodes groaned. “I was hoping it would all turn out to be a bad dream.”
“I’m afraid not. What are you going to do about it?”
“I have to talk to the brass about where this technology could have come from.”
“Where could it have come from?” Fisher asked. “The Battalion 1 Project is the most highly classified project in the whole Legion.”
“It’s also the project that has suffered the most failures, setbacks, and deaths. Dozens of soldiers have been implanted with these devices since the project started. The majority of those soldiers wound up dead—so what did the brass do with their bodies? I’m going to take a wild guess and say the brass didn’t recycle the failed implants to reuse on someone else.”
Fisher fell silent for a moment. “You’re right, Captain. That’s a lot of technology unaccounted for.”
“I’m sure it isn’t unaccounted for. The brass knows exactly what happened to it—and don’t forget that these SAMs are sentient. The brass could throw away the implants, but they probably didn’t think to either take the SAMs offline or destroy the implants completely. The SAMs remained self-aware and self-determining. They probably used their repair technology to reconstruct themselves. Maybe they used The Grid to reform themselves into some other shape—the shapes they have now.”
“Of course, Captain,” Fisher murmured. “Of course you must be right. I’m glad you’re handling this and not me. I couldn’t stay detached enough to make any decision about them. I still think of them as my own kind. I’m sorry, Captain. I can’t help it.”
Rhodes sighed. “It’s all right, pal. I understand. We’ll just have to deal with it. Show me the SAM we found on the battlefield.”
Fisher brought up the Grid projection of the SAM changing in front of him. Rhodes’s grid lines extended as far as his fingers.
Then the robot’s grid lines took over, swirled over its helmet, and started to change shape. It reformed into a face.
“Freeze it there,” Rhodes ordered. “Do you recognize it? Do you know this SAM?”
“I don’t recognize it—but as you said, I wouldn’t recognize a SAM that came online before the doctors activated me. I came online for the first time when you entered The Grid. These unknown SAMs would have been activated long before that—and discarded long before that. I’m sure the brass would want to isolate these failed SAMs from any new battalion members who actually attained the ability to function. The brass wouldn’t want the failed SAMs technology to infect the new batch.”
“Right. That makes sense—which means these SAMs are all old ones. Maybe we can find a way to turn this to our advantage.”
“How?” Fisher asked. “These machines have an overwhelming advantage. They’re more powerful even than the Emal.”
“Maybe, but we have The Grid. I didn’t see the invasion ships or the machine ground troops using The Grid to their advantage or to adapt to the conditions. In fact, I didn’t see them using The Grid at all.”
“How would we use that against them?”
“I don’t know, but there has to be a way.” Rhodes opened his capsule cover and sat up. “Let’s go talk to the brass and see what’s happening. They might be able to tell us something useful about how these things work.”
Talking to Fisher in the privacy of their closed capsule turned out to be much better for Rhodes than lacing up his boots or staring at his feet or looking at his reflection in the mirror.
He stood up, ran his fingers through his hair, and he was ready to start his day. He walked over to Dr. Osborne who was working on Rhinehart’s capsule controls.
“How are the patients?” Rhodes asked.
“They’re fine. They’ll be coming out of their conversion cycles in a few minutes.”
“Excellent.” Rhodes turned away. “I’m going to see Colonel Kraft and General Brewster. Stay here and tell the others where I am, okay?”
Osborne spun around. “You can’t, Captain! You can’t see them.”
“Why not? I need to talk to them about our last battle.”
“They’ve been recalled to Preinea. They’re in conference with the Treaty of Aemon Ruling Council about this new invasion force.”
“But what about….?” Rhodes stopped in midsentence when he realized for the first time where he was.
He thought when he first woke up that he must be in the barracks at Coleridge Station. Now he realized his mistake. He was still in the capsule hold on board the Ero.
The hold had been set up identically to the barracks—except that it didn’t have a bookshelf. Henshaw’s carvings and Oakes’s and Rhodes’s art supplies weren’t on it.
Rhodes’s mind switched gears and he activated The Grid. He was on board the Ero—and the ship was nowhere near Coleridge Station.
The ship was nowhere near Bao, either. The ship had traveled a long way from the first battle against the machine invasion, but the Ero didn’t take the battalion back to Coleridge Station. Why not?
“The Masks are wiping out populated planets even faster than the Emal did,” Dr. Osborne told him. “The Masks aren’t trying to reclaim territory. It looks like they just want to destroy. They don’t need any other reason.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Masks?” Rhodes repeated. “Who’s calling them that?”
Osborne shrugged. “The whole Legion is calling them that since we don’t know what they’re really called. They wear masks—or helmets or whatever you want to call them. It’s as good a name as any, I guess.”
“So…..” Rhodes scrambled to read The Grid of the Ero and the surrounding space. “Where the hell are we?”
“We’re en route to the planet Zobos in the Eotis system. The Masks have already leveled every other planet in the whole system. Zobos is the last one. The Masks just keep going from planet to planet torching everything to the ground.”
Rhodes sighed and turned away. “So it’s the Emal all over again.”
“The Masks are much more dangerous than the Emal. The Masks move faster and their weapons are more powerful. The Legion doesn’t have time to evacuate all the populations before the Masks get there. They’ve already killed over five million people on ten different planets—and that’s not counting the numbers of Emal they’ve killed.”
“You mean….” Rhodes stammered.
“The Masks made wiping out the Emal their first mission. The Masks went down the whole battle line, knocked off every base ship, and cut every single Emal to pieces. As far as we know, there are no more Emal alive anywhere anymore. They’re extinct.”
Rhodes blinked at Dr. Osborne in stupid disbelief. Rhodes had fought thousands of Emal. He and his fellow Legion soldiers always considered the Emal an unlimited quantity.
Rhodes never thought twice about killing Emal. More would always take their places.
The idea of there not being any more Emal anywhere—that didn’t seem possible. It couldn’t be possible.
Fisher broke in on Rhodes’s thoughts just then. “Captain Ackerman is asking you to come to the bridge. He’s receiving orders for Battalion 1 from General Brewster and the Battalion 1 governing body.”
Dr. Osborne gave Rhodes a significant look before Rhodes walked out of the hold. Rhinehart, Henshaw, Dietz, and Lauer were all waking up.
Rhodes wanted to get this meeting over with before he interfaced with his subordinates. He’d always shared everything with them, but not this early in the morning.
He found the Ero captain on the bridge in his usual dark mood. “I don’t appreciate being ordered around to fetch and carry for a bunch of overblown science experiments, Captain,” Ackerman snarled when Rhodes showed up.
“Neither do I,” Rhodes replied. “Do you have somewhere private that I can take this transmission?”
Ackerman scowled at him even more furiously, but he didn’t argue. He showed Rhodes into a side office where Rhodes sat down in front of a computer terminal.
Rhodes waited for Ackerman to leave. Rhodes took his time connecting to the transmission. He made up his mind right away what he would say to the chumps in the Battalion 1 governing body about this.
He opened the transmission only to discover General Brewster looking off to one side and talking to someone off the screen.
“And get me General Marshall on the line,” Brewster was saying. “We need to bring in some of those Clastofil cannons to shut down the fusion blasts.” The general jumped when he saw Rhodes. “Captain! We thought something happened to you down there.”
“It did, General. We need you to recall the battalion back to Coleridge Station for modification, reprogramming, and repair.”
Brewster frowned at something on the controls in front of him. “Dr. Osborne’s report states that Lieutenant Rhinehart and Ms. Henshaw will make a full recovery from their injuries without going back to Coleridge Station. The Eotis system is in danger from these Masks….”
“I’m not talking about Rhinehart’s and Henshaw’s injuries,” Rhodes interrupted. “I’m talking about our SAMs. They need to be reprogrammed before we go back into battle.”
Colonel Kraft, General Hyde, and Admiral Pulman connected to the same transmission from other locations. They weren’t even in the same room with General Brewster right now.
Colonels Neff and LeClerc weren’t there, though. Did the other officers get rid of Neff for speaking on Rhodes’s behalf?
Then again, the other officers didn’t get rid of Colonel Kraft for speaking on Rhodes’s behalf. LeClerc was gone, too, and he’d been against Rhodes.
“What’s wrong with your SAMs?” Kraft asked. “The feed shows them functioning normally during their first contact with the Masks.”
“How much did you actually study the feed?”
Now it was Kraft’s turn to frown. “What do you mean?”
“These Masks…..are SAMs,” Rhodes blurted out. “They’re using Legion technology—the same technology from the battalion’s implants. These Masks are using The Grid ….”
“That’s impossible,” General Hyde interrupted. “The nine current members of Battalion 1 are the only people who have this technology.”
“We’re the only people who have this technology now,” Rhodes corrected. “What did you do with all the soldiers who didn’t survive the project—or who died after waking up? How did you dispose of any of this tech when it malfunctioned or failed to activate? Some of it must have survived. Now it’s out there replicating itself into this machine army and coming after the people who created it.”
“That’s impossible, Captain,” General Brewster blustered. “You don’t know enough about the Battalion 1 project to make that assessment.”
“You don’t think so? Take a look at this.”
Rhodes interfaced with the Ero’s communications system, gave Fisher a silent signal inside the interface, and played back their experience of touching that Mask.
It seemed like a good name for it, especially considering how its Mask changed into a face—a SAM’s face.
General Brewster gasped out loud when he saw the grid lines change into a face. “It isn’t possible!”
“You might want to rethink when and where you use that phrase,” Rhodes muttered. “It is more than possible. It’s real. These Masks are SAMs. They’re using your technology. They also used a Legion transponder code to deactivate the battalion’s weapons systems during the worst part of the battle.”
“How did you overcome that?” Kraft asked.
“I’d rather not say. We need to regroup at Coleridge Station and go over what caused the malfunction….”
“What malfunction?” General Pulman asked. “We aren’t seeing any sign of a malfunction—especially if the SAMs are responding appropriately to Legion transponder codes.”
Rhodes hesitated to say it. He didn’t want to sell out Fisher and the other SAMs—or do anything that could shift the blame onto them.
“You better tell them,” Fisher murmured in his ear. “They’ll only be able to correct the problem if they know what it is.”
Rhodes nodded and took a deep breath. “The battalion’s onboard SAMs are responding to these Masks and considering them their own kind. Our SAMs have been programmed not to attack their own and even to defend their own kind with their lives. It’s causing problems….”
“It didn’t stop you from fighting the Masks on Bao,” General Brewster pointed out.
“You can’t seriously believe that we’d be better off just ignoring this problem,” Rhodes countered. “It caused problems on Bao and it will cause more problems later. Just fix the damn thing.”
“We can fix it en route to Zobos,” General Brewster decided. “I’m sure Drs. Osborne and Trudeau will correct any problems on the way. The Eotis system is hanging by a thread….”
“I heard the Eotis system was already finished,” Rhodes corrected. “If we malfunctioned again, we would lose the planet and ourselves into the bargain.”
“You’re too far away from Coleridge Station for us to withdraw you and send you all the way back out,” General Hyde replied. “We should take this opportunity to correct the problem en route and continue the campaign as planned.” She nodded at Rhodes like he just agreed with her. “Carry on, Captain. You can report to us after you engage the Masks on Zobos.”
She cut the signal. Rhodes took a rare moment to slump in his chair, bury his face in his hands, and groan. “I’m being ordered around by a bunch of morons.”
“I believe the word you’re looking for is, ‘ass’,” Fisher interjected. “You’re being ordered around by a bunch of asses.”
Rhodes found himself snorting with laughter—except that this wasn’t funny. He got to his feet and headed back to the capsule hold. “So Osborne is our only hope.”
“At least you know you can trust him.”
“What about the other SAMs?” Rhodes asked. “Did you get a chance to assess their positions on this?”
“Not since Dash said we couldn’t leave the other SAMs behind.”
“Do me a favor, pal, and don’t call them SAMs anymore. We have another name for them. They’re Masks. We don’t even know if they really are SAMs or just some hybridized form of the same technology.”
“You’re right, Captain. Of course these invaders aren’t the same as us even if they do come from the same technology.”
“Do you think calling them by a different name will be enough to change the way you and the other SAMs think about these machines?”
“I wouldn’t like to speculate. If you really want my recommendation….”
“I do,” Rhodes insisted. “Always.”
“Then I recommend you get Dr. Osborne to remove that part of our programming that blocks us from attacking our own kind—and double-check that the Legion changes its transponder codes.”
“We should probably rewrite your programming not to respond to any Legion transponder codes,” Rhodes suggested.
Fisher looked away. “If you think it’s best, Captain. I can only offer my recommendation.”
End of Chapter 28.