Rhodes tilted Rio down toward the ground, picked up speed, and let gravity take over.

The Emal base ships saw the Striker group moving in. Sure enough, the Emal turned their lasers on the incoming battalion, but that only played into Rhodes’s hands.

He compressed his grid lines into another long, thin, snake, stabbed into the ground at blinding speed, and set off twisting, coiling, and writhing through the soil heading for the nearest base ship.

The battalion scattered in a fan of similar whip lines. They tunneled underground with each Striker heading for a different base ship.

The base ships cut their fire when the Strikers disappeared. The Emal must not understand what the battalion was trying to do.

The Emal turned their bombardment back on Thaklia. That gave Rhodes and his people a clear run straight to their target ships—and under them.

“Keep going!” Rhodes ordered. “Don’t slow down! Fire your Vipers and get clear of the blast!”

He said those words just as he chewed his way under the first base ship. He didn’t slow down at all. In fact, he tried to speed up. He had to get away from the ship before it detonated.

He took a split second to fire his Vipers straight up into the ship’s underside. He barely made it clear in time before the ship exploded in an almighty thump.

The concussion hit the ground right on top of Rio. The blast knocked the Striker off course, but he and Rhodes were already burrowing farther away.

The base ship erupted in a rippling fireball. More explosions went off all over the planes as each member of the battalion fired underneath their target ships.

The surviving ships wheeled their laser cannons backward trying to defend themselves, but they couldn’t see their enemy.

The Ero and the other surviving Ravagers gunned their engines and launched into orbit to rejoin the Legion fleet waiting there.

Rhodes didn’t give himself a chance to check the position or status of the stranded platoons. He couldn’t help them.

This was turning into an exact repeat of every other planet the Legion tried to defend against Emal invasion.

Every one of those battles ended the same way—with dozens of Legion soldiers trapped, stranded, and dying on the ground with no hope of rescue.

Rhodes couldn’t stop that now. He might be able to slow it down a little bit.

Then again, he might not be able to slow it down at all. In fact, he became more certain with every passing minute that he couldn’t.

These implants didn’t change the outcome of the entire war. Nothing could change that. What was the point of all this anyway?

He circled back and locked his sights on the next base ship in line. This was all he could do and he would damn well do it.

He finished off another base ship and turned to the last one in line. The rest of the battalion was busy detonating the others in rapid succession.

The last five rotated their laser cannons in all directions trying to target something—anything.

The Emal finally must have figured out that these burrowing objects under the ground were causing all the explosions.

Rhodes and his people had pulled that trick one too many times. Now the Emal got wise to the game.

Rhodes raced through the topsoil heading for the last ship. The few remaining Emal vessels fired into the ground. Their lasers traced back and forth burning deep fissures in the sod.

They tried their best to track the battalion, but each Striker kept dodging underneath another base ship where the cannons couldn’t hit them.

A laser scorched Rio in the tail. Rhodes tried to pick up speed and dove under the last ship. It protected him, but that on its own presented a problem.

He couldn’t shoot into this ship’s underside or blow it up as long as he was using it to hide. He had to go out into the open as soon as he unloaded on it.

He fired his Vipers, dove out into the fields, and ran into four more lasers skating all over the place. One of them sliced across the sod right above his head and then the base ship exploded.

Rio screamed out as the heat burned him. “Pull out!’ Rhodes ordered. “Everybody out!”

He launched Rio into the air, changed back into a Striker, and put on speed gaining altitude.

He made it thirty feet off the ground before he saw the battle. He’d gotten so distracted by destroying the base ships that he didn’t see the situation in Thaklia until now. He didn’t see anything beyond the few inches of Grid right in front of his nose.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

The Ero and the other Ravagers made it off the planet just fine. They hovered in orbit with the rest of the Aemon Legion fleet. None of those ships came down to the ground. They stayed out of Emal weapons range.

That left the grounded platoons completely cut off. None of the Ravagers descended even to offer the platoons any support. Forget about evacuating. The Legion really planned to leave these soldiers here to die.

The battalion burst out of the ground heading for the clouds. Rio and the other Strikers could rendezvous with the Ero. Rhodes and his people could go into their conversion cycles and forget all about the Sulia campaign.

A smart man would have done exactly that. Rhodes got a hundred feet off the ground and his vision widened to take in the rest of The Grid—the parts he ignored while he attacked the base ships.

The battalion took out the base ships. They no longer bombarded the city from afar, but they’d already done untold damage.

Only a few charred hulks remained standing in a landscape of rubble, smoking, twisted embers, and crushed bodies.

The base ships left plenty of Emal swarming all over the city. The 249th, 278th, and 217th Platoons fell back before the alien onslaught.

The platoons leap-frogged one painstaking mile after another trying to get back to the western side of town.

None of the commanders in charge of those platoons realized the awful truth yet. The Ravagers weren’t waiting for them there to save these platoons.

The 249th took shelter behind a debris mound, fired at the advancing Emal, and held the aliens down while the 278th and the 217th retreated behind the 249th.

Then the 217th found a line of fortifications where a tall building had toppled onto its side. Its few remaining walls offered enough protection for the platoon to set up another defense point there.

They opened fire on the Emal and gave the 249th cover to retreat. The three platoons jumped each other’s position one after another, but nothing they did stopped the Emal. Nothing could.

Rhodes reacted without thinking. Captain Ackerman made a big noise about Rhodes and the battalion leaving these platoons stranded. Now Ackerman was the one doing it.

Rhodes twisted the grid lines into another many-jointed bounding spider, sprang off the ground, and vaulted straight into the city.

This form could cover the distance almost as fast as an airborne Striker. He leapt off walls, buildings, and over the rubble piles. He sailed from one mound to another barely touched the ground.

The battalion charged in behind him. He didn’t take the time to check their vital signs. He already knew it was bad, but it wouldn’t get any better by running away. What difference did eight weeks matter either way?

He adjusted his weapons configuration and extended his lasers, thermal cannons, scourge guns, and seeker missiles—one weapon from each of his multiple limbs.

He charged up behind the Emal and opened fire on them. Other monsters in different forms fanned down the Emal line carving a path through them.

“Get Ackerman down here NOW!!” Rhodes called to Fisher. “Tell him the base ships are gone. Now’s his chance to do the right thing by lifting off these crews!”

“You heard what Wild said!” Fisher hollered back. “The Legion doesn’t want to pull out just yet.”

“Tell him to get down here or General Brewster will hear about Ackerman abandoning our battalion down here without evacuation,” Rhodes fired back.

None of the SAMs said anything else to protest. Rhodes and his people were too busy mowing down Emal as fast as they could go.

The Emal turned back to defend themselves. That gave the platoons the time they needed to stream through the streets. The platoons didn’t have to slow down to find sheltered points.

The soldiers picked up speed and eventually took off running. They stopped and looked around in despair when they saw the hulks of dozens of burned-out Ravagers waiting for them.

The soldiers floundered in confusion for a minute. Some of them even looked behind them into the city, but the Emal were too busy fighting the battalion.

Rhodes crawled closer behind the Emal’s position. He savored the feeling of using his lasers to carve these aliens to pieces the way they carved him to pieces.

He shouldn’t have thought of the Emal like that. They weren’t evil. They just wanted their territory back—territory the Treaty of Aemon Cluster stole from them. He couldn’t blame the Emal for that.

His feelings got away from him. These were the cocksuckers who tried to tear his implants out. They would have killed him to take the implants’ technology.

The Emal didn’t even know how to use the implants’ technology. They probably just wanted to study it.

How much differently would the Emal act if they knew these nine individuals were the only ones of their kind in the whole Legion?

How much more dangerous would the Emal become to Battalion 1 once the Emal figured out these nine were the only ones out there?

The Legion pinned all its hopes on Battalion 1. The Emal could eliminate the Legion’s most powerful weapons by killing these nine soldiers.

The Emal wouldn’t care about stealing the implant technology then. The Emal probably wouldn’t have wasted their time and effort capturing the battalion. The aliens would have killed Rhodes and his people on the spot.

Thinking that made him attach the Emal twice as hard, but he still couldn’t defeat them by slicing down hundreds of the aliens in front of him.

More would come. The Emal could always send more…..and more…..and more.

Bodies and flying limbs soared out of the mass of aliens in front of him. Blood and gore soaked the ground under his feet, but he still couldn’t see the end of the swarm.

The Emal abandoned the platoons and surged back on the battalion. The Emal already knew the platoons were helpless, trapped, and powerless to defend themselves.

The Emal could cut down Legion platoons any time they wanted to. The Emal did it all the time. They’d been doing it one planet after another ever since they first invaded.

Rhodes advanced a little further. His fury and adrenaline pushed him to the breaking point, but he couldn’t keep this up forever. He already sensed his energy fading. He used his last shred of strength to save these soldiers.

At that moment, the Ero plummeted out of orbit coming in fast. The platoons erupted in cheers and charged out onto the western planes to race on board the ship.

Rhodes couldn’t stop shooting at the Emal—not that he tried too hard. His brain refused to shut down.

He didn’t think he could even concentrate well enough to adjust the grid lines to change himself back into a Striker.

He was already entering an altered state of consciousness—if he hadn’t been in one all along.

The edges of his vision contracted a little more. His awareness of the wider battle shrank. Was he about to pass out right now?

Rio took over, flexed his jointed legs, and rocketed out of the battle heading for orbit. The rest of the battalion did the same thing.

The SAMs transformed back into Strikers burning a vapor trail away from Sulia to rejoin the Legion fleet.

End of Chapter 3.